Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema [1 ed.] 9781443878548, 9781443898874

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Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema

Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema Edited by

Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Michel Naumann

Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema Edited by Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Michel Naumann This book first published 2017 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 © 2017 by Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Michel Naumann 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): 1-4438-9887-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9887-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................... ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................ xi INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... xiii LITERATURE CHAPTER ONE .............................................................................................. 3 THREE GENERATIONS OF MIGRANCY IN KIRAN DESAI’S THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS: THE FOCUS ON MATERIAL THINGS CELIA WALLHEAD CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................... 19 COMMUNITY RUPTURES: INDIVIDUAL REFASHIONINGS OF POSTCOLONIAL DIASPORIC LIFE IN HANIF KUREISHI’S SOMETHING TO TELL YOU MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................ 33 A SHAMEFUL AND DEADLY LEGACY: RAPE, INCEST AND PARRICIDE IN ACHMAT DANGOR'S BITTER FRUIT AND SHANI MOOTOO’S CEREUS BLOOMS AT NIGHT TINA HARPIN CHAPTER FOUR .......................................................................................... 59 ‘WHO SHALL INHERIT BENGAL?’ A READING OF ANURADHA ROY’S AN ATLAS OF IMPOSSIBLE LONGING EVELYNE HANQUART-TURNER CHAPTER FIVE............................................................................................ 67 TRANSCENDING THE DUAL HERITAGE OF EXILE IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S FICTION: THE IMPERIOUS DESIRE FOR A CHOSEN REALM AHMED MULLA

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CHAPTER SIX.............................................................................................. 77 FAMILY, GEOGRAPHY, AND IDEOLOGY IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE LOWLAND GEETHA GANAPATHY-DORÉ CHAPTER SEVEN ........................................................................................ 89 COOPERATION OF OPPOSITES: THE HOME AND THE FOREIGN IN R. K. NARAYAN’S NOVELS LUDMILA VOLNÁ CHAPTER EIGHT ....................................................................................... 101 THE RUPTURE WITHIN: MANIMEKALAI’S POLEMICS WITH BUDDHISM R. AZHAGARASAN CULTURE CHAPTER NINE ......................................................................................... 123 THE LEGACY OF THE HASTINGS CIRCLE: HERITAGE OR RUPTURE? MADHU JAIN BENOIT CHAPTER TEN .......................................................................................... 139 SIR SAYYID AHMAD KHAN’S NEW APPROACH TO THE MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN RELATIONSHIP IN THE CONTEXT OF BRITISH INDIA: A RUPTURE WITH OLD PRACTICES? BELKACEM BELMEKKI CHAPTER ELEVEN .................................................................................... 149 RUPTURED HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN MYANMAR SHRUTI DAS CINEMA CHAPTER TWELVE.................................................................................... 165 HERITAGE AND RUPTURES: THE HERO’S IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS IN THE CINEMATIC ADAPTATIONS OF DEVDAS JITKA DE PRÉVAL CHAPTER THIRTEEN ................................................................................. 183 HERITAGE OR RUPTURE IN TWO BRITISH ASIAN FILMS: EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST CAROLINE TRECH

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THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS CHAPTER FOURTEEN ................................................................................ 197 HERITAGE AND RUPTURES: A FINE BALANCE DIFFICULT TO OBTAIN (AND SOME QUESTIONS AROUND GENDER) RADA IVEKOVIC NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ....................................................................... 217 ABSTRACTS .............................................................................................. 225 NOTICES BIOGRAPHIQUES DES AUTEURS .................................................. 233 RESUMES DES ARTICLES ........................................................................... 241 INDEX ....................................................................................................... 249

LIST OF FIGURES

1. The Devadasis of Coromandel............................................................. 125 2. Frontispiece of John Dryden’s play, Aureng-Zebe .............................. 126 3. K.L. Saigal playing Devdas ................................................................. 168 4. Dilip Kumar playing Devdas ............................................................... 169 5. Shah Rukh Khan playing Devdas ........................................................ 169 6. Abhay Deol playing Devdas ................................................................ 170 7. Ella and her children rising against George East is East ..................... 185 8. Sajid in West is West on the way to school with his father George ..... 187 9. Last picture of Sajid back in England in West is West ......................... 193 The illustrations in this book are used for academic purposes and are cited in accordance with the fair use clause of copyright regulations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank the following institutions: The Regional Council of Île de France. The Embassy of India. The Centre for Research on English Studies (CREA) of the University of Paris West Nanterre and the Centre for Research on Space/Writing (CREE) of the University of Paris West Nanterre. The Research Commission of the University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité. The Faculty of Law, Social and Political Sciences and the Centre for Studies and Research in Administrative and Political Sciences (CERAP), University of Paris Sorbonne Paris Cité. The Society for Activities and Research on the Indian world (SARI) for their generous support for this project.

INTRODUCTION

In the postcolonial theoretical framework, the study of heritage and ruptures is a rather familiar paradigm. But it is not a depleted one. Given the millennial history of the Indian subcontinent and the plurality of its culture, the way its languages, literatures and arts appropriate the past, grasp the present and envisage the future remains a relevant object of inquiry. While a patrimonial and conservative perspective, with its backwardlooking cult of heritage, views heritage as pertaining to affiliation, preservation, enrichment, claiming and transmission, the logic of capitalism requires the commoditized availability of the vestiges of a heritage. Such a yearning, at the heart of conservative nostalgia, has given rise to a “sentimental” form of capitalism in which dispossession is masked as urban revitalization. 1 The alternative logic of “creativedestruction” is involved in the process of liquidating it. As early as 1921 T.S. Eliot warned that tradition did not boil down to “following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes” and that it was, in fact, a “matter of much wider significance” because it “involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.” He wanted us to accept the idea that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” 2 Jacques Derrida taught us in 1993 that inheritance might also be taken to include not only what it means in an unequivocal way but also what it “enjoins, in a way that is contradictory and contradictorily binding.” He contended that heritage is an active and selective affirmation that can sometimes be revived and reasserted much more by illegitimate heirs than by legitimate ones. If Derrida’s conceptualization bears the imprint of Marxism, the question he raised “How to respond to, how to feel

1 Dia Da Costa, “Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art, Heritage and Development in Ahmedabad, Gujarat,” Antipode 47-1 (2015): 74-97. 2 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 1920 essay reproduced in http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237868, Consulted January 29, 2016.

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Introduction

responsible for a heritage that hands you down contradictory orders?” 3 can nevertheless be transposed to the postcolonial situation and studied in the light of new vistas thus opened. From the crossroads of diachronicity and synchronicity, tradition and modernity, singularity and solidarity, here and elsewhere, repetition and reinvention, the fourteen articles presented in the volume show how multiple heritages are and were negotiated in the Indian subcontinent. Modernism is a key concept that runs through many of them. With regard to the Indian novel in English, the locus, at least initially, of the tension between modernism, perceived as a Eurocentric enterprise, and tradition, preserved as a repository of immutable cultural heritage, was not the city, but rather the small town, emblematized by Malgudi, the cultural space imagined by R.K. Narayan. Ludmila Volná's study of four novels of R.K. Narayan (Chapter 7) brings this out in very clear terms. Rada Ivekoviü's theoretical considerations (Chapter 14) stem from a broader scope, as she retraces the quarrel between the ancient and the modern from a historical and international perspective to show how gender becomes an incontrovertible operator in the negotiation between heritage and rupture. The interconnection and interdependence between the two concepts are such that it is difficult to obtain a fine balance between them. In other words, finding the centre, to borrow an image from V.S. Naipaul, is one of the existential preoccupations of the postcolonial. R. Azhagarasan's reading of the Tamil Buddhist epic Manimekalai (Chapter 8) confirms Rada Ivekovic's findings about gender, in the sense that it argues that the author Cattanar used the courtesan's female voice to develop a polemic within Buddhism. Writing from the cross-roads of literature and culture, R. Azhagarasan recalls the debate between Buddhist heterodoxy and Brahmin orthodoxy in Tamil Nadu (from 3d to 19th Centuries AD) and throws light on the contemporary debate on the situation of the Dalits through this return to the classical but neglected epic. The appropriation of Indian heritage by the Hastings circle in the form of Orientalism is studied by Madhu Jain Benoit (Chapter 9). She argues that while enabling India to lay claims to her ancient past by breaking down Western neo-classical paradigms, the Hastings circle put India in a time warp, owing to the colonial constructs which were emerging at that time. Belkacem Belmekki highlights Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's endeavours to promote peaceful relations between Hindus and Christians after the Sepoy 3

Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 219.

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Mutiny in 1858 by invoking their common theological roots. Because he was intimately convinced that such a rapprochement was indeed a political necessity for the survival of the Muslims, Khan strove to make the common heritage a shared one (Chapter 10). Shruti Das also refers to colonial history in order to explain linguistic regionalism in contemporary Myanmar. Hers is a short introduction to Myanmarese literature in English and Myanmarese Literature translated into English (Chapter 11). A number of articles in the volume focus on Bengal. Evelyne Hanquart Turner's reading of the Forsterian intertext of Howards End in Anuradha Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing (Chapter 4) transposes Wilfred Stone's question to the Bengali context: "Who shall inherit Bengal?" The fact that a homeless orphan with tribal roots ends up as the beneficiary of two estates in two opposite parts of Bengal at the conclusion of the novel illustrates how the miracle of love makes justice prevail in a world of capitalist greed. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré's exploration of family, geography and ideology in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Low Land (Chapter 6) straddles the Bengal of the 1970s when the Naxalbari revolt was challenging the postcolonial government and the postideological America of the 1990s. She identifies the moment of the transmission of property, whole or divided, to be a crucial one which tests the endurance of family bonds. Her article emphasizes the necessity of transgenerational solidarity for transnational families to stand. Jitka de Préval takes up a classic of Indian cinema based on Sarath Chandra Chatterjee's Bengali novel, i.e., Devas and interprets the metamorphosis of the visual depiction of his character by different directors as a reflection of the reshaping of the Indian man through the pressures of colonization, independence, and globalization. Devdas thus becomes a sign recording the progressive transformation of the Bengali into the globalized Indian, in her view (Chapter 12). The question of heritage and rupture is more acutely felt in diasporic contexts. While the migrants try to retrieve the heritage through the revival of certain cultural practices or the reconstruction of ethnoscapes and by returning to their origins, their children are lost between the culture inherited from their parents and the culture of the host country in which they are born and raised. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru sees a parallel between the Kureishian hero's trajectory of healing and the liminal multicultural space that London has become (Chapter 2). Celia Wallhead adopts an object-oriented analysis of Kiran Desai's An Inheritance of Loss, taking her clue from Henry James's idea of the solidity of specification, Baudrillard's object systems and Bill Brown's thing theory (Chapter 1). Ahmed Mulla examines the problematic of dual heritage in Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake and her short story “Hema and Kaushik”

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(Chapter 5). Lahiri's female protagonists are not passive receivers of an inherited culture or puzzled onlookers of a foreign culture. They are, he claims, better regarded as discerning and critical negotiators. He sees a sense of mutuality at work in their cultural choices. Caroline Trech analyzes the politics and aesthetics of British Asian heritage in two films written by Ayub-Khan-Din East is East and West is West, directed respectively by Damien O'Donnell and Andy De Emmony (Chapter 13). Heritages are not always glorious. Is it possible to escape a shameful and deadly legacy such as rape and incest? Does rupture in the form of parricide mean definitive escape? Tina Harpin's comparative study (Chapter 3) of Bitter Fruit, the novel of the South African writer Achmat Dangor, and Cereus Blooms at Night by the Caribbean writer Shani Mootoo shows how “transmission is complicated in a world of willing or unwilling encounters and migrations.” 4 The plant metaphors employed by the authors in the titles leaves room to place one’s hopes for a possible future in creolization, she concludes. As Eugène Ionesco put it, … in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a ‘will to renewal.’ This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of ‘crises’, of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrification and death. 5

Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Michel Naumann Paris, 2016.

4

Tina Harpin, supra, 71. Carol A. Dingle ed., Memorable Quotations: Jewish Writers of the Past (New York: iUniverse Ink, 2003), unpaginated.

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LITERATURE

CHAPTER ONE THREE GENERATIONS OF MIGRANCY IN KIRAN DESAI’S THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS: THE FOCUS ON MATERIAL THINGS CELIA WALLHEAD

On inheritance The Inheritance of Loss (2006),1 Kiran Desai’s second novel, won the Man Booker Prize for that year, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. Set in 1986 in Kalimpong, “high in the northeastern Himalayas” (9), its central character is a seventeen-year-old Indian girl, Sai, who has been orphaned and has gone to live with her maternal grandfather, a retired judge. Taking her out of her mission school, the judge struggles to complete her education in English, and her family and social life turns around the locals - middle-class Anglo-Indians like her grandfather. But she spends much of her time with, or thinking about, Gyan, her young tutor in maths and science, and talks most familiarly with the cook, whose name we never learn – his son Biju addresses him as Pitaji. The cook got his position working for the judge through false papers his father bought for him (63), and his greatest interest in life is to receive letters from his son, who has emigrated to the United States and has to move from job to job as he has no papers at all (3). Yet there is a rupture between Sai and the cook, and it is not only a question of class: He was ill at ease and so was she, something about their closeness being exposed in the end as fake, their friendship composed of shallow things conducted in a broken language, for she was an English-speaker and he

1

All the quotations of Kiran Desai's novel are from the Penguin edition published in 2006.

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Chapter One was a Hindu-speaker. The brokenness made it easier never to go deep [...]” (19)

We see the importance of having identification papers and personal and professional references both in India and the United States; they are so important that they can make the difference between abject poverty, survival, and “getting on in the world”. Such papers can even be inherited, as we learn that the cook “even had a rival for the position, a man who appeared with tattered recommendations inherited from his father and grandfather to indicate a lineage of honesty and good service” (63). That these papers were by now tattered, had served three generations, and may even have been falsified or bought, as with the cook himself, does not say much for the true honesty and reliability of he who has inherited them. But then the concept of inheritance is questionable and ironic anyway. The irony is evident from the beginning of the story in the title. Normally, we inherit something of worth, not a loss of something. But as the generations go by, that desirable commodity or set of values or piece of wisdom (as it need not be material) may have got lost, and that loss may be perpetuated and still felt. The desirable thing is remembered. Thus the importance of memory cannot be undervalued. That is what museums are for: to conserve material things reminiscent of worthy (or deemed interesting, if unworthy) aspects of the past. An important example in the novel is the conquest of Mt. Everest in 1953. In the Darjeeling Museum, which Sai and Gyan visit, they see the material possessions of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, they constitute his legacy: “his hat, ice pick, rucksack, samples of dehydrated foods that he might have taken along, Horlicks, torches [...]” (154). The material things (note the English Horlicks drink, brought to India by the British Army after the First World War) are part of his identity, his memory; these real, material things “authenticate” the fictional ones. The underside of his legacy is the unjust part, in that he was “merely” the Sherpa who carried the bags of Sir Edmund Hillary, the world-acclaimed conqueror of Everest. Without Tenzing, the NewZealander would never have made it to the top, so he is the unsung hero. He was not knighted, made a “Sir” as the others were. The added irony and injustice is that of the “colonial enterprise of sticking your flag on what was not yours.” (155)

First, Second, and Third Spaces The omniscient narrator takes us into the mind of Sai at the beginning of the story as she contemplates the negativity of her own solitude as an

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orphan, taken out of the school, the only “home” she knew: “Could fulfilment ever be felt as deeply as loss?” (2) This may appear to be a rhetorical question, but it is really a very serious philosophical hypothesis that Desai would like us to contemplate, though in the end it may be impossible to make generalisations, and the answer may lie in the individual and his or her experience. In the novel, she offers the reader some examples that can be compared and contrasted. The polyphonic multicultural diversity of Desai’s story is built upon binary opposites: West and East, the local resident and the migrant, wealth and poverty, fulfilment and loss (and the power play is usually weighted in this order), but the binaries are not stable. Sai is neither fully Indian nor British, and both the school and her grandfather’s house are ambivalent sites. There is poverty too in the West; the migrant does not usually find an El Dorado. When “Jemu,” the young law student, went to Cambridge, as he looks for cheap lodgings offered by someone who will take on an Indian: “It took him by surprise because he’d expected only grandness, hadn’t realized that here, too, people could be poor and live unaesthetic lives” (38). It is in these interstices that Desai manifests the complications inherent in any identity, not only that of a migrant, and the error of taking a simplistic view. In his article “‘Solid Knowledge’ and Contradictions in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,”2 David Wallace Spielman argues that in the novel the author “shows us a radical postcolonial subjectivity in which flexibility, assimilation, and multiculturalism are preferable to maintaining difference. The characters who cling to ‘solid knowledge’ come to bad ends, while those more comfortable with cultural contradictions tend to fare better.”3 The judge and Biju, his cook’s son, would fall into the first category, where with their “solid knowledge”, a term Wallace points to throughout the novel, they suppress contradictions, while Sai and her tutor Gyan have a better future through their flexibility or ambivalence in the face of alternative choices.4 He concludes that Desai “sees both assimilation and determination to preserve cultural authenticity as attempts to produce solid knowledge, and hence ultimately as exercises in self-delusion.”5

2

David Wallace Spielman, “‘Solid Knowledge’ and Contradictions in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,” Critique 51 (2010): 74–89. 3 Ibid., 74. 4 Ibid., 75. 5 Ibid., 89.

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Chapter One

In her realization of the complexity of the context we may find ourselves in, the place in which we live in relation to who we are, Desai follows the ideas on space and place set out by Homi Bhabha, among others. It was Benedict Anderson, of course, who first explained how nations are “imagined communities,” because people “imagine” they share general beliefs and attitudes. They cannot know all the people in their nation, but they recognize a collective national populace as sharing opinions and sentiments. The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.6 The word elastic is important, but still, some scholars contend that Anderson’s analyses assume too much homogeneity across certain regions. And India, in all its diversity, would be one such region. Homi K. Bhabha was born in 1949 into an English and Gujarati speaking Parsi family in the newly independent India: Parsis, a minority of Persian descent, were instrumental in the emergence of an urban middle class in nineteenth-century Imperial India and, in this capacity, often functioned as mediators between the Indians and the British. Because of their dispersion, Parsis live in small clusters in a number of different host cultures, they derive their cultural cohesion partly from their Zoroastrian faith and partly from a negotiation of their host cultures’ traits. Thus, Parsis offer a striking example of the hybridised, cosmopolitan minorities at the centre of Bhabha’s work; indeed, Bhabha has often linked his intellectual preoccupations to the specificity of his origins.7

As Constantina Papoulias explains: Bhabha’s early essays [...] contained a double challenge to the understanding of colonial identity formations. On the one hand, they involved the claim that Western discourses of Othering inevitably become fractured and split at the point of their application, and that it is precisely these applications that enabled the resistance of the colonised. [...] If the coloniser becomes a split, ambivalent figure, then so does the colonised:

6

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, revised edition 2006), 7 (emphasis in the original). 7 Constantina Papoulias, “Homi K. Bhabha” in Key Thinkers on Space and Place, ed. Phil Hubbard & Rob Kitchin (London, Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 69.

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the latter possesses no authentic self beneath the mask of mimicry bequeathed by the coloniser. Therefore, any political resistance to colonial rule has to be understood not as the oppressed population’s straightforward rejection of the coloniser’s legacy, but rather as a much more ambiguous process in which that legacy is both refused and desired.8

Thus, Bhabha rejected binary thinking, arguing that the dual category paradigm did not accommodate the complex dynamics of negotiation “through which displaced populations make sense of their lives across contesting cultural values and traditions.”9 Bhabha came up with the term “third space,” by which he refers to locations where people share practices but a single culture does not dominate. He proposed that “identities are inevitably hybridised, because the spaces of social life are formed through a rupturing of boundaries and through flows of illicit border traffic.”10 In her article “Disjuncture and Diaspora in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,” Oana Sabo has this to say about diaspora in the novel: Recent uses of the term, however, have moved from the notion of diaspora as an alternative paradigm for the nation, and from a preoccupation with the construction of diasporic identities as culturally hybrid, to the idea that diaspora entails lived and embodied experiences of diasporic subjects and communities, which are predicted on factors such as class, race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexuality. Kiran Desai extends this model of diaspora by exploring the material conditions that have given rise to transnational flows of people, as well as the ways in which diasporic identities are lived and experienced in the context of global capitalism.11

An example of this Third Space in Desai’s novel that involves illegal flows of diasporic individuals that form both heterogenic and homogenic communities is the literal space beneath the Gandhi Café in New York, where Biju goes to live in order to be with other Hindus and to not have to sell beef burgers. The proprietor, his employer, like so many unassimilated migrants, lives a divided life: Harish-Harry –the two names, Biju was learning, indicated a deep rift that he hadn’t suspected when he first walked in and found him, a

8

Ibid., 71. Ibid. 10 Ibid., 72, emphasis in the text. 11 Oana, Sabo, “Disjuncture and Diaspora in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss,” The Journal of Commonwealth Studies 47.3 (2012): 376. 9

8

Chapter One manifestation of that clarity of principle which Biju was seeking. That support for a cow shelter was in case the Hindu version of the afterlife turned out to be true and that, when he died, he was put through the Hindu machinations of the beyond. What, though, if other gods sat upon the throne? He tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was the authentic one, if any. (147–8)

As she depicts Third Spaces, whether they are in New York or Moscow, or even within parts of India, Desai quite often focuses upon details, material things, that a person cherishes or misses if he or she loses them, for they are part of their sense of being. In the epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges’s poem “Boast of Quietness”, at the beginning, there are a few very significant lines: My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. They speak of homeland. My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword [...] Time is living me. [...] My name is someone and anyone.

Borges is speaking for all of us and saying our identity is built up over time, accumulating memories through our senses, sight, touch, and hearing in particular. The identity of the migrant is contained in memories that are centred upon our cultural heritage (here, the guitar), our family, our ancestors, through portraits or photographs, and certain fairly arbitrary material things that happen to have come down us, here, the old sword. In fact, in the novel, there is much emphasis on the other two senses, those of smell and taste, not surprisingly, since Desai has chosen to focus upon members of the underclass who happen to be cooks, the cook and his son in America. There is much contrast of food in the different places. But in this study, I want to concentrate on those material objects that make up the identities of the main characters. In his critical piece “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James spoke of the importance of the “solidity of specification” or the evocation of the concrete: The air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel—the merit on which all its other merits (including the conscious moral purpose [...]) helplessly and submissively depend. (1884).12 12

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” Longman’s Magazine 4 September 1884. Reprinted in Partial Portraits (London: MacMillan, 1888). Accessed March 8,

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James also remarked upon an occasional excess of information, an over-abundance of things specified, which attracts attention and prompts the reader to wonder why so many items are named and to what purpose. He is referring to the faithfulness to life in realist fiction, and one of the main aspects of this faithfulness to life is its use as a tool in the creation of convincing characters with an identity of their own. In her introduction to The Oxford Book of English Short Stories A.S. Byatt also speaks of the excess of information as a tool for attracting the curiosity of the reader13 and indicates how “solidity of specification” (xix) contributes to the success of a given story: “the drama depends on the thinginess of things.”14 It is not surprising that she chose Virginia Woolf’s “Solid Objects” to be part of the collection, and indeed, Bill Brown has written on the Modernists’ fixation with material objects and kitsch in his “The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism” (1999), pointing out that this culture of material things and commodities of the first decades of the twentieth century was “reinvigorated”15at the end of the century.

The first generation: the judge Born into a poor family in Piphit in Gujarat, Jemubhai Patel won a scholarship to Cambridge, just as Kiran Desai’s grandfather had done. After he retired from the judiciary back in India, in which he had often been itinerant, he settled in Kalimpong, buying a house, Cho Oyu, which had been built by a Scotsman and named after the nearby mountain, meaning “Turkish Goddess” in Tibetan (and apparently based on a mansion owned in Kalimpong by Desai’s aunt). The great variety of languages and cultures in India, as well as his acculturation in England, make him feel out of place in his own country, though it was decades since he had had a place he could call home: “The judge could live here, in this shell, this skull, with the solace of being a foreigner in his own country, for this time he would not learn the language.” (29). Neither did he have a family, since he lost both his wife and his daughter, and his granddaughter 2015 at: www.public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html. (Library of America ed.). 13 A.S. Byatt, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xviii. 14 Ibid. 15 Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism,” Modernism and Modernity 6 (1999): 13.

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Chapter One

was being educated in a Catholic boarding school, where the sisters believed “English was better than Hindi.” (30) He wants to appear whiter: “His face seemed distanced by what looked like white powder over dark skin” (33). He disowns what he is and this is insisted upon, as the young tutor Gyan says: How glad he would be if he could get a proper job and leave that fussy pair, Sai and her grandfather with the fake English accent and the face powdered pink and white over dark brown. [...] he leaped smoothly to a description of the house, the guns on the wall, and a certificate from Cambridge that they didn’t even know to be ashamed of. (176)

His nearest neighbours are Uncle Potty, “a gentleman farmer” and Father Booty of the Swiss dairy, as well as two sisters, Noni and Lola, whose daughter Pixie is a BBC reporter. None of them identify themselves, their interests, or their desires, with India. Noni and Lola are only satisfied if they have to hand their English products: But Lola was too dizzy to listen. Her suitcases were stuffed with Marmite, Oxo bouillon cubes, Knorr soup packets, After Eights, daffodil bulbs, and renewed supplies of Boots cucumber lotion and Marks and Spencer underwear –the essence, quintessence, of Englishness as she understood it. Surely the queen donned this superior hosiery [...] (46-47).

Noni and Lola are protected at night by Budhoo, a Nepalese-Indian retired army man, and hearing about the theft of the judge’s guns, Lola fears that if they upset Budhoo, he might run off with “her BBC radio and her silver cake knife” (127), so they could no longer listen to To the Manor Born and Yes, Minister (45), their favourite English series. Not surprisingly, the people of Kalimpong were rather upset by the negative view of the place given by Desai, especially the Nepalese-Indians. Desai uses the phrase “superior hosiery” to point to Noni and Lola’s snobbery. While one doubts whether Queen Elizabeth wears Marks and Spencer’s knickers, they consider them not so much as value for money, as most people do, but as worthy of posh ladies, and can imagine the Queen wearing them, and thus, they adore them. This weighted attitude towards material things, this relation of affect between a person and a thing instead of a mere treatment of the thing as endowed with no more than its empirical function, was explained by Jean Baudrillard in the 1960s. His work on the consumer society was set out in his 1966 doctoral thesis “Le Système des objets,” under the direction of Henri Lefebvre, and further developed in his 1972 book Pour une critique de l’économie

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politique du signe.16 His main thesis is that the new base for the social order is consumption rather than production. Drawing upon the Structuralist ideas on the Theory of the Sign of Saussure and Roland Barthes, Baudrillard showed how the consumer is driven more by the sign than by the object itself, that is, what the object signifies to him or her and how they interpret that object and what relation they have to it. An object may have a collective significance involving one or more of the following endowments or accruals: prestige, economic opulence, being fashionable, belonging to a certain social group, among others. Thus, Noni and Lola feel almost on a par with the Queen when they wear Marks and Spencer’s underwear, or at least, superior to the other women in the town.

The second generation: the astronaut’s wife The judge’s daughter, a Hindu college student, whom we only know as “Mrs. Mistry,” falls in love and elopes with a Zoroastrian orphan (28) who joins the Indian Air Force, and who, in the Cold War entente between India and Russia, is selected to go to Moscow for training as a potential astronaut (27). Although his daughter has every hope of getting on in life, the judge disowns her. She and her astronaut husband, with a great life ahead of them, have that life cut short and are killed in an arbitrary traffic accident. They are literally crushed to death by something as earthly and mundane as dolls: Just as Mr. Mistry was confessing to his wife his certainty that he would be chosen over his colleagues to become the very first Indian beyond the control of gravity, the fates decided otherwise, and instead of blasting through the stratosphere, in this life, in this skin, to see the world as the gods might, he was delivered to another vision of the beyond when he and his wife were crushed by local bus wheels, weighted by thirty indomitable ladies from the provinces who had speeded two days to barter and sell their wares in the market. Thus they had died under the wheels of foreigners, amid crates of babushka nesting dolls. If their last thoughts were of their daughter in St. Augustine’s, she would never know. (27)

So his daughter literally fails to survive the rupture of leaving home, and she is killed by the host nation, one might say, as the babushka dolls 16 Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).

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represent Russia; also, ironically, they should represent the domestic, protective side of matriarchy, as contained in the word “nesting.” A political reading would point at the dangerous attractions of Communism to India.

The third generation: the granddaughter, the young Nepalese-Indian freedom fighters, and the cook’s son All their daughter Sai has to inherit, then, after her mother’s disinheritance, is loss. Even if she inherits her grandfather’s assets, she will not be rich, as the judge has come down in the world. The austerity of the house, Cho Oyu, and its contents, is literally laid bare when the young Indian-Nepalese freedom fighters come to requisition his hunting rifles. But even his battered furniture is the height of luxury compared to the hut where his cook lives, lacking the basic necessities, let alone any dignity.

The freedom fighters Wealth, dignity and power, all based upon freedom, are what these young men are angry about, in that they have not inherited them when they believe that they should have: It was the Indian-Nepalese this time, fed up with being treated like the minority in a place where they were the majority. They wanted their own country, or at least their own state, in which to manage their own affairs. Here, where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim, and the army did pullups and push-ups, maintaining their tanks with khaki paint in case the Chinese grew hungry for more territory than Tibet, it had always been a messy map [...] making ridiculous the drawing of borders. (9)

What they have inherited is hate: The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable. And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright; it could take them so high; it was a drug. (161)

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The cook’s son The letters from Biju to his father, the cook, like most letters, are meant to communicate, but they bear no message, like the thwarted telephone conversation (230–2). In any case, had they reached their destination, and had the rain not washed away the message, that message would be a falsehood. Biju is not doing well in New York, but is being pushed from job to clandestine job whenever there is an inspection of papers and enquiries about green cards. He too has inherited a loss, in that his father lost a court case fought with his brother over five mango trees (13). His material possessions come down to “one bag [...] and his mattress –a rectangle of foam with egg crate marking rolled into a bundle and tied with string.” (146)

Special significance of certain things Looking more closely at Borges’s old sword, we realise that there is a world of difference between a new sword and an old one. Their purposes and functions differ, for whereas a new sword is intended to kill people, normally, an old one is no longer employed in such an enterprise, it has become at most a sentimental reminder of the past, with or without value and honour, and at the least, a mere ornament on the wall. There is also the question of obsolescence, as Bill Brown explains: While the ‘timeless’ objects [...] have gone limp, this abandoned object attains a new stature precisely because it has no life outside the boundary of art –no life, that is, within our everyday lives.17

In his work on objects and things, Bill Brown drew upon Baudrillard, and at the beginning of his article “Thing Theory” in a special issue of Critical Inquiry of 2001, from which we have just quoted, he refers to A.S. Byatt’s novel The Biographer’s Tale (2000),18 where the protagonist Phineas demands material things instead of abstract theories in order to feel more sure of himself. But perhaps things (meaning specific things, not things in general) are not as straightforward as we think, says Brown. First of all, we must distinguish between objects and things, and should be

17 18

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 15. A.S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 1.

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aware that we tend to take things for granted and only notice them when they let us down: We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.19

Through this explanation, we can see the extra significance of certain things in The Inheritance of Loss. For example, the judge’s attitude towards –his reliance upon– his powder puff is heightened when it is stolen by his wife. He can no longer powder his face in order to appear whiter than he really is, thus he is affected in his very identity and the selfimage he wishes to project to those around him. The thing in itself is comic on account of its gender relation, in that it is a device usually used by women and it ends up between a woman’s breasts. It also has tragic connotations in that his wife would have liked it for herself, and what few material possessions she is allowed in her short life are begrudged. Her sad life of rejection is contrasted with that of the judge’s neighbours Noni and Lola, who are not oppressed by the patriarchal society and can indulge themselves. Brown also references Henry James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton (1896)20 in his discussion of the added and heightened connotations certain things can come to acquire: And, yet, the word things holds within it a more audacious ambiguity. It denotes a massive generality, as well as particularities, even your particularly prized possessions: “‘Things’ were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china.”21

Although Baudrillard and Brown worked on elaborating their theories on things relatively recently, Brown recognises that even though such a theory had not been elucidated in the nineteenth century, James and others 19

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (New York: Penguin, reprinted 1987). 21 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4, emphasis in the text and reference to The Spoils of Poynton 1896. 20

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were well aware of the significance of certain things. In his note he again quotes from James’s novel: “James plays with a full range of the word’s denotations (for example: ‘The thing is to lodge somewhere, at the heart of one’s complexity an irrepressible appreciation’)”22. Mrs Gereth can afford luxuries and will not be content with less than expensive antiques; by comparison, Noni and Loli in Desai’s version of colonial India can only afford a much reduced version of luxury, and, ironically, in addition, these items have postcolonial connotations in the sense of possible mimicry of the coloniser by the colonised. A further level of significance in an object-oriented ontology is that of fetishization. As Brown puts it: You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.23

In such cases, the object is always more than itself: “the thing seems to name the object just as it is, even as it names something else” says Brown.24 Thus, Lola’s silver cake knife is endowed with emotion. It is not just an instrument for cutting a cake, but a symbol of her status, or desired status, like an English lady, to be brought out ostentatiously before visitors. Thus, Desai employs such a thing as a strategy in her characterisation, and is able to imply much more than the words “silver cake knife” might at first suggest.

A climax and a conclusion The losses at the end of the novel are equally ironic. The judge loses his beloved dog Mutt (chapter 46), and it devastates him, making him feel murderous. Brown references Jonathan Lamb enquiring about “sympathizing with animals and artefacts” (7), thus here we have a sort of “flat ontology” within the object-oriented ontology, whereby humans and animals become equal. The judge feels the loss of the animal much more acutely than the loss of his wife years earlier; indeed, he had wanted to kill her (305) and no doubt contributed to her death by repudiating her, as she finally died in an “accidental” fire at her brother22

Ibid., 31, emphasis in the text. Ibid., 5. 24 Ibid., emphasis in the text. 23

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in-law’s house, like so many unwanted women in India. She committed two unforgivable acts: the first was to “steal” his powder puff and hide it between her breasts (166), and the second was, albeit unwittingly, to attend the welcoming celebration for Nehru (304), thus incurring the wrath of his masters, the British. Sai’s loss is that of her tutor-boyfriend, Gyan, who “defects” to the insurgents. Her unforgivable acts were to defend Christmas and to witness the dire poverty of his family. In the end, her “foreignness” in her own country and her frivolity and selfishness drive Gyan to look for more responsible, grown-up pursuits. However, the young male, Gyan, is replaced by another young male at the end, as Biju returns. One man’s loss is another man’s gain: the judge almost killed the cook over the loss of the dog and now the cook is rewarded for all his travails and humiliations, in the restoration of his son. Biju himself, ironically, must undergo a sort of rite of purification, a stripping down (literally to his underpants) of all his material things bought in America before he can start again as an authentic Indian. To return to his First Space, he must remove everything he accrued in those Second and Third Spaces he inhabited in New York. The “I love NY” Tshirts and other commodities he bought to take back (listed on p. 270) are all stolen from him (317). The loss is not great—although monetarily it was to him at the time—for when one buys a thing like a T-shirt to take back home, if it is destined for someone else there is a sort of bitterness in that the receiver himself did not go to New York or wherever, and in this case, if Biju were thinking of keeping one for himself, it is not likely to bring back happy memories. He is relieved even of his shoes, which contained his savings hidden in the sole, by the “GNLF men”, the insurgents. He is then dressed in a woman’s nightgown and laughed at and attacked by dogs: “without his baggage, without his savings, worst of all, without his pride. Back from America with far less than he’d ever had.” (ibid.) Thus, he has fewer material things –none to speak of– so he is unburdened by this unpleasant part of his past, but he has learnt much, just as Gyan is learning the hard way to grow up in a harsh and unfair world. Knowledge, experience, and values prove to be worth more than certain material things which –like the judge’s powder puff and the babushka dolls– may do more harm than good. But even they need protecting, and are probably harder to protect than concrete things.

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Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983, 1991. Revised ed., London: Verso, 2006. Baudrillard, Jean. Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe. 1972. Reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. Brown, Bill. “The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism.” Modernism and Modernity 6 (1999): 1–28. —. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–22. Byatt, A.S. The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. —. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. London: Penguin, 2006. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Magazine 4 September. Reprinted in Partial Portraits. London: MacMillan, 1888. Accessed March 8, 2015. www.public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html. (Library of America ed.). —. The Spoils of Poynton. 1896. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1987. Papoulias, Constantina. “Homi K. Bhabha.” Key Thinkers on Space and Place, edited by Phil Hubbard & Rob Kitchin, 69-75. 2004. Reprint, London, Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. Sabo, Oana. “Disjuncture and Diaspora in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” The Journal of Commonwealth Studies 47.3 (2012): 375–392. Wallace Spielman, David. “‘Solid Knowledge’ and Contradictions in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” Critique 51 (2010): 74–89.

CHAPTER TWO COMMUNITY RUPTURES: INDIVIDUAL REFASHIONINGS OF POSTCOLONIAL DIASPORIC LIFE IN HANIF KUREISHI’S SOMETHING TO TELL YOU MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU

This article sets off from the observation that after the nineteennineties, when postcolonialism became part of the academic canon, there have been tendencies in postcolonial discourse and literatures, and also more generally in global literatures, to shift the emphasis from rewriting the history of a group to the challenge of illustrating it in the lives of individuals who are part of the particular group. Concepts such as Avtar Brah’s “technologies of autobiographics,”1 prompting a focus on personal experience as a more accurate lens for diasporic life, Stephen Frosh’s “postmodern states of mind” and their relation to identity crisis in situations of dislocation,2 and Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, as a bridge and filter between personal and group experiences,3 have become more and more relevant to an increasingly visible body of contemporary postcolonial writing, which no longer capitalises on the story of the 1

Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996). Subsequent references will be to this edition. 2 Stephen Frosh, Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self (London: Macmillan; New York: Routledge, 1991). Subsequent references will be to this edition. 3 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). Subsequent references will be to this edition.

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displaced community, but rather on the individual stories of those who compose it. I will examine the changes from community focus to individual focus in the writings of Hanif Kureishi, who, since the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia in 1990, has been considered the classic author of postcolonial British Asian London. Almost two decades later, in his 2009 novel Something to Tell You,4 Kureishi uses talk therapy (through the protagonist, who is a psychotherapist) as a technique of integration and minority resistance to the politics of normalisation expected to go hand in hand with such integration. I will aim to show that, in the evolution of the Kureishian hero from the former novel to the latter—or from Karim Amir to Jamal Khan—the protagonist’s “healing” from his guilt and lost love parallels a process of coming of age in the handling of interracial relationships in multicultural London, as the personal stories of some of the secondary characters of various European and non-European ethnic backgrounds also suggest. I will argue that, through the talk therapy trope, the novel negotiates Jamal’s individual experiences, in conjunction with those of his group of close friends (Valentin, Wolf and Ajita), so as to endow them with an emblematic status regarding the experiences of the migrant groups to which they belong, in a London which has itself become liminal (both European and non-European at the same time). The protagonist, Jamal, a psychotherapist of South Asian origin, reimagines his own personal trajectory through a long process of analysis of self and other, which leads to an understanding of various forms of dislocation and relocation as deeply individual, personal processes. In Cartographies of Diaspora, Brah points out the necessary redefinition of the concept of “home” in today’s world, where relocation, whether permanent or temporary, has become very common: What does it mean to think about the politics of diaspora in the present historical moment? Reflecting on this question made me acutely aware how my whole life has been marked by diasporic inscriptions. I have had ‘homes’ in four of the five continents—Asia, Africa, America, and now Europe. When does a place of residence become ‘home’? This is something with which those for whom travel constitutes a form of migrancy are inevitably confronted at some stage in their lives. And it is a

4 Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You (London: Faber & Faber, 2008). Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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question that is almost always enmeshed with politics, in the widest sense of the term.5

Migration as a one-way move across borders is, therefore, no longer a category that defines relocation, but has been outdated as the act of bordercrossing has been redefined as a predominantly repetitive one, as determined by new understandings of the politics of location and identity. With respect to this intricate and confusing issue of redefining home as a category of diasporic or even nomadic life, Brah sees only one way to avoid sweeping generalizations: talking about one’s own experience, not in an essentialist sense that would involve seeing it as reproducing group experience, but in full awareness of the fact that knowledge of individual experience is the only experience one truly has access to, and, therefore, can talk about “authentically”. Brah calls this inductive approach to migration “the technologies of autobiographics”: My use of the technologies of autobiographics in this introduction exposes the contradictions embodied in the production of identity. Throughout, I speak with the authority of “I” and “Me” as if “I” am a pre-given “reality,” when the discussion shows how “I” and “Me” have been changing all the time. On the other hand, my signature is possible precisely because there is a changing core that I recognise as me. I interrogate my own political biography also because it is so closely tied up with my intellectual labour. I do this especially as a means of highlighting the collective struggles that articulate the social movements of which I have been a part.6

Brah’s “technologies of autobiographics” represent a technique of processing the events of personal life into theory, based on the fact that this particular kind of individual narrative—related to migration and subjecting the individual to group-applied categories—is relevant to many people who have undergone a similar experience. This group-emblematic value of the individual experience of relocation is the result of an act of “interpretive retelling” that relies on the fact that literature—fiction in particular—provides (like psychoanalysis, which is also narrativeoriented) a space for reflection on life: The autobiographical mode is useful here as a disruptive device that reveals my narrative as an interpretive retelling, vulnerable to challenge from other interpretations as the vagaries of self-representations of an 5 6

Brah, op.cit., 1. Ibid., 9-10.

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Chapter Two individual. But the credibility of this narrative of political moments and events is dependent far less upon the scribbling of an “individual”; the “individual” narrator does not unfold but is produced in the process of narration. Rather, the deeply invested self that speaks the events relies heavily upon the hope that its version will resonate with the meaning constructed by my various “imagined communities”. My individual narration is meaningful primarily as collective re-memory.7

This process of collective re-memory becomes activated particularly in situations where migration is not a directly lived experience, but has been inherited from parents who relocated in the past and have transmitted their experience to their children, but in an indirect way. Thus, to the Black British community of which Kureishi’s protagonist Jamal in Something to Tell You is part, the memory of dislocation is transmitted as a remote, partly unexplainable experience, inherited from parents who lived it directly. As this process of secondary remembrance is highly ambiguous for the children’s generation, it transmits to them as an instance of personal trauma, which can be related to personal events of various kinds and does not need to be directly related to spatial relocation. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory—“the response of the second generation to the trauma of the first”8—emphasises the post-factum nature of this particular kind of memory: generated in the minds of people who were not present in the event that is remembered, postmemory is a traumatic form of remembrance, a lot of which remains forever unexplainable, even though the subject continually strives to explain it. This is why the post-migration second generation born in the country of adoption may inherit the first generation’s dislocation trauma, but may project the traumatic perception onto personal events that are somehow associated with blurred memories coming from a past that is difficult to attribute to one generation or another. In Kureishi’s Something to Tell You, this kind of confusion leads to further confusion in the present, with the protagonist finding it so hard to discriminate between his own insecurities and those of his troubled, sexually abused girlfriend Ajita that he is led to consequences as extreme as murder. Hanif Kureishi’s discourse relies on the bridging of gaps between different forms of psychoses inherent in modernity (crises of the classic malady of urban modernity, loneliness in the middle of the crowd) and 7

Ibid., 10. Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 8.

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contemporary migration, which involves similar dislocations in a more concrete, geographical (but also psychological) sense. His reputation in the world of letters is as the main literary authority of postcolonial London. Yet the London he depicts is no longer the classical metropolis, capital of a former colonial empire, but a city on the move, in perpetual change, as groups of immigrants keep coming in and the ones who have already settled move between the social and ethnicity strata—a new London, belonging to a global world in a never-ending process of becoming: And so, for me, London became a kind of inferno of pleasure and madness. Particularly as when I first became aware of it was the sixties. And I had an uncle who had a flat on the King’s Road. And so I would go up to the King’s Road and just see these incredible people, and the shops, and all of that. And just think, and think; you know, I just want to be here with these people. And then, at the end of the day, you’d have to go home, and it was rather disappointing. So London was always a place that I had imagined. And I think that all the places that I write about, the Bradford in My Son the Fanatic, or I’ve written a play which is set in the country, at the moment—I mean, in a sense they’re all in my head—in the writer’s head – they’re imaginary places. Whenever I write about a place, I don’t think ‘Would this happen in it?’ I make this place up and whatever I want can happen in it. So, you know, my London isn’t going to be like anybody else’s London. It’s a playground, it’s a place where I can imagine, where I can play.9

Kureishi’s London is not an easy place to be. His characters live their lives by playing various parts that may or may not be true to who they really are. In The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Karim’s acting career debut has him cast as Mowgli in The Jungle Books, a part for which he was chosen for being “authentic,” not for the sake of his experience as an actor. In Something to Tell You, Karim, who has trouble telling himself the story of his life with any degree of cause-effect coherence, seeks a response and solace in literature by working as a librarian for a while, then becomes a psychoanalyst in order to allow himself to learn from other people’s traumatic past. Kureishi’s preoccupation with the reciprocal mirroring relationship between individual stories and the story of the community increases in his 9

Hanif Kureishi, “Hanif Kureishi on London,” interview with Colin McCabe, Critical Quarterly 41.3 (1999): 31.

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recent work, but an interest in this is visible in earlier stages. Karim’s exploration of the issues surrounding his identity crisis as a teenager belonging to an ethnic community, who believes it is his birth right to be identified as English, is at the same time well-tuned to the enfant-terrible ethos of the seventies: My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored.10

For him, conquering London is a lifetime dream: In bed before I went to sleep I fantasized about London and what I’d do there when the city belonged to me. There was a sound that London had. It was, I’m afraid, people in Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors’s ‘Light My Fire’. There were kids dressed in velvet coats who lived free lives; there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn’t feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where girls and boys you didn’t know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn’t ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing. But at least my goals were clear and I knew what I wanted. I was twenty. I was ready for anything. (Kureishi, The Buddha, 121)

This early instance of the Kureishian hero presents a teenage determination that will, later on, be shaken as the issues of integration diversify for the London-born second generation. By the time of Something to Tell You, London has been conquered; yet now it actually seems that the trouble is no longer the need for the postcolonial outsider to integrate in the metropolis but that, on the contrary, he is now too integrated and is, therefore, bored, anxious and, once again (even though for different reasons) insecure. The issues Jamal faces no longer have 10 Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 3. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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anything to do with group exclusion, but with the personal difficulty of adapting and with the unsorted personal memories that mix with those of other people whom he meets, as they go through circumstances that appear, in various ways, to be similar to his: I don’t think I’ve ever stopped seeing London like a small boy. The London I liked was the city of exiles, refugees, and immigrants, those for whom the metropolis was extraterrestrial and the English codes unbreakable, people who didn’t have a place and didn’t know who they were. The city from the point of view of my father. My best friend Valentin was Bulgarian and his other best mate, Wolf, was German. Neither of them resembled the average student; they weren’t overgrown public school boys. (…) Valentin and I would sit on benches outside the pub opposite and laugh as Wolf trounced someone. He didn’t find himself, or the rest of the world, absurd and risible, as Valentin and I did. It would have been too much, had we all been like that.11

The “small boy” perspective betrays two contradictory feelings: on the one hand, there is the child’s capacity to wonder before the grandeur of the metropolis which had previously fascinated his migrant parents; on the other hand, the intimidating power this metropolis exercises on him, which his two non-British friends share. The association of adolescence with insecurity and a sense of inadaptation, as experienced in conditions which are marked by ethnic difference, dates back to The Buddha of Suburbia. But in Something to Tell You the complexity increases, as the condition is placed under an almost scientific scrutiny by Jamal’s self-analyzing psychoanalytic eye. Kureishi’s protagonist thus remains, surprisingly, the same, as individual trauma approached through talk-therapy is nothing but a disguise of the old group issue diagnosed in The Buddha of Suburbia. Something to Tell You announces its double focus as early as its title: on the difficulty of having to live with a secret, a condition which, in different ways, is common to many of the characters, and on the psychoanalytic talking cure as a way to deal with this difficulty. At the beginning of the novel, Jamal Khan, the protagonist, is a psychotherapist who struggles to heal his own troubled past. Not very successful in his 11

Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You (London: Faber & Faber, (2008) 2009), 41. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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relationships – having lost Ajita, the love of his life, and, more recently, having become estranged from his wife Josephine – Jamal works through his own personal trauma while finding connections between it and that of his patients. His closest people are his eccentric sister Miriam and her lover Henry, Jamal’s friend and a famous theatre director. While not as central as in The Buddha of Suburbia, the metaphor of the theatre—which for Karim was the strategy of choice in reaching his dream of inhabiting, even conquering, London—is here a signal for Kureishi readers that this is a similar story about overcoming personal insecurities through forging a successful personal and professional mask that will empower the protagonist to overcome various forms of inadaptation, whatever the reasons behind them may be. In fact, in Something to Tell You, psychoanalysis plays an identity-supporting function similar to the theatre in The Buddha of Suburbia. If acting provided Karim with strategies enabling him to project a more successful image of himself in a notalways-friendly white society, psychoanalysis is for Jamal a way of distancing himself from community predicament by practising a job that is exceptionally focused on individuals: Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do we want to fail? Why is pleasure so hard to bear? (...) I am a psychoanalyst. In other words, a reader of minds and signs. Sometimes I am called a shrinkster, healer, detective, opener of doors, dirt digger or plain charlatan or fraud. Like a car mechanic on his back, I work with the underneath or understory: fantasies, wishes, lies, dreams, nightmares – the world beneath the world, the true words beneath the false. The weirdest intangible stuff I take seriously; I’m into places where language can’t go, or where it stops – the “indescribable” – and early in the morning too. (Kureishi, Something, 3)

Kureishi’s almost mystical description of the detective work psychoanalysis does through Jamal’s voice invites a reading of his choice in direct connection with his need to decipher the reasons behind his own secret and to find ways of bringing it to the surface in an undamaging way. This does not really happen, and his re-encounter with Ajita years later is hardly a successful one, as both have been changed by the experience and by its aftermath. What Jamal does manage to accomplish through psychoanalysis is to come to terms with himself and to fully inhabit his

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own life, free from the impact of the “understory” that used to control it, and consequently free from all other forms of conditioning traumatic rememories. If trauma, in its capacity as both an individual experience and a group one, lends itself so well to being approached through talk therapy, this is because, as Cathy Caruth points out, trauma—which in Greek means “wound” (a forever open wound, which keeps crying out)—is “a disruption in the phenomenal self-representation of language.”12 Trauma involves a literal registration of the traumatic event which, in the absence (or blockage) of normal mental cognitive processes, cannot be represented in a coherent discourse, but keeps coming back with the violence of an experience that is not yet owned in the form of repetitive phenomena such as “flashbacks” or nightmares.13 The mysterious insolvability of trauma comes from the fact that the flashback or traumatic re-enactment conveys both the truth of an event and the truth of its incomprehensibility. Talk therapy, a dialogue that imposes narrative rules upon disorderly events, actually forces the traumatic events and the repetitive chain of posttraumatic stress disorder into containment in language. It therefore explains the past events, accepting one’s inability to change them, bringing to the surface the repetitive process, and healing it through narrative representation. Following Freud, when the traumatic event becomes a story with an internal causality (and not just a literal recording with no meaning attached, emphasises Caruth), the patient is close to healing.14 Despite his flashingly displayed confidence, Karim wants to conquer London in the hope that he will become an Englishman, thus forgetting that his skin colour will never cease to display his otherness. Jamal, whose job is to cure his patients, actually learns from them more things about himself than he could ever teach them: As a therapist, what sort of knowledge do I have? What I do is oldfashioned, almost quaint, compared to the technological and scientific medicine now available. Though I do no examination and offer no drugs, I am like a traditional doctor in that I treat the whole person rather than only the illness. Indeed, I am the drug, and part of the cure. Not that most people want to be cured. Their illness provides them with more satisfaction 12

Caruth, op.cit., 87. Ibid., 152. 14 Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (London: Penguin, (1910) 1995), 8-9. 13

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Chapter Two than they can bear. Patients are unconscious artists of their own misery, and what they call their symptom is, in fact, their life, and they’d better love it! (Kureishi, Something, 53)

The novel abounds in third-person narrative projections of Jamal’s personal trauma, which resonates in the traumatic experiences his patients and friends go or have gone through. With his friends Valentin and Wolf, multicultural London diversifies its understanding of otherness, as immigrants are no longer predominantly from the former colonies of the British Empire, but are also European, and particularly Eastern European. Such is Jamal’s close friend Valentin: Valentin was Bulgarian. Often I asked him to describe his escape from Bulgaria, and he would tell me more details each time. I’d heard no other “real life” story as exciting. He’d done National Service, and been in the Olympic cycling team; he could fence and box too. He’d conformed so well that he was able to become an air steward, one of the few jobs in the Eastern Bloc in which ordinary people were allowed to travel. He’d worked for the airline for a year, telling no one of his plans to escape. But someone had become suspicious. Intending to flee to America, his last trip was to be to London. As he and the rest of the crew were boarding the plane to Sofia, he turned and fled, running wildly through the airport until he found a policeman. Various Refugee organizations helped him. A woman who worked for one of these organizations was married to a philosophy professor to whose house he went, which was how he turned up in my college class. Valentin could never return home, could never see his parents, siblings, or friends again. The trauma rendered him incapable of the success he could have had. In England, where he was supposed to be studying, he was just hanging around, mostly with me and our German pal, Wolf, all of us trying to get into interesting trouble. (Kureishi, Something, 33)

Valentin’s life story widens the space of postcolonial London—already increasingly diverse, as Jamal notices at the beginning of the novel (“that wide West London street where the shops were Caribbean, Polish, Kashmiri, Somali,” Something, 14) to Europe’s then socialist other. Even though he is a student of philosophy, Valentin’s status as an immigrant (of the recent kind, the “newly arrived immigrants” who “often slept in the park”, Something, 14) places him in a position which is inferior to Jamal’s, who, just like Karim in The Buddha of Suburbia, and like Kureishi himself, is “an Englishman born and bred, almost” (The Buddha, 3). Multicultural London in Something to Tell You, which has become more

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complex, echoes Karim’s ambitions in The Buddha of Suburbia, the more so as the crucial events in the two novels are set more or less at the same time (the late nineteen-seventies and the early eighties). Cherishing one’s suffering is a symptom that Jamal also manifests. As he has never told anybody about the secret he shares with his friends Valentin and Wolf (with the exception of Tahir, his own psychoanalyst), Jamal lives with the internal wound of having caused unbearable pain to Ajita, the human being he loved the most, even though, paradoxically, his intention hadn’t been to kill her father, but merely to protect her. The tragedy of personal intentions going astray is something that puzzles Jamal for years, affecting his relationships and making him cling to his pain, just as he sees his patients clinging to theirs. Not wanting to be cured of his illness –in fact, of his love for Ajita– Jamal is fully aware that his interest in psychoanalysis was triggered by his becoming, almost unintentionally, a murderer (“my work began with a murder,” Something, 3). Paradoxically, it is this lingering wound which makes him, by way of his own direct experience, a good, empathic therapist: In the end, what qualifies someone for analysis? Ultimately it is the most human thing, the recognition of inexplicable pain and some curiosity about one’s inner life. How could analysis not be difficult? To have lived in a particular way for years, decades even, and then to try to undo it through talking, is significant labour. Not that it always works; there is no guarantee, nor should there be. There is always risk. (Kureishi, Something, 53-54)

Jamal’s own risk-taking experience, which ended in failure as his attempt at justice had led to death, is not a positive one. However in time, the memory of the murder turns into a symbolic killing of the father, which finally liberates him from various forms of cultural conditionings which had weighed down on him. His escape from what could have been his legal punishment allows him to detach himself from all forms of community determinism and, even though he manages to integrate within the very same community, he does so according to his own terms. This process of integration is based on his own working through of his guilt complex, which enables him to forge an identity that can function (as he does as a psychotherapist) within that very community. It is in this sense that what Brah calls the “changing core that I recognize as me,” of which identity is made, is based on the “interpretive retelling” of one’s story, which must “resonate with the meaning constructed by my various

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‘imagined communities.’”15 Jamal’s learning to interpret his own story enables him to come to terms with his therapist Tahir’s symbolical forgiveness of him (under the assumption that some deaths are deserved). Irrespective of whether her father’s sexual abuse of Ajita would have constituted an extenuating circumstance before the law or not, the fact that he is never discovered allows Jamal to atone for the murder through a lifelong process of soul searching. This turns him into a successful practitioner of a line of trade that helps other people (many of whom, as he does, belong to the same, rather large family of people who are ethnically different) to adapt to circumstances which in their difficulty are similar to those which he himself had to face, learning to accept themselves as who they really are. For someone coming from an immigrant background, such a predicament means overcoming the inferiority complexes triggered by the awareness of being “almost” English, but never English enough: Alas, to the surprise of many, psychoanalysis doesn’t make people behave better, nor does it make them morally good. It may well make them more of a nuisance, more argumentative, more demanding, more aware of their desire, and less likely to accept the domination of others. In that sense it is subversive and emancipatory. But then there are few people who, when they are old, wish they’d lived a more virtuous life. From what I hear in my room, most people wish they’d sinned more. They also wish they’d taken better care of their teeth. (Kureishi, Something, 54)

Thus, if we read Something to Tell You by way of Brah’s categories (as a novel about the ways in which one’s individual story is emblematic of the story of one’s imagined communities), then Jamal’s coming to terms with himself, which also follows his professional success, ultimately leads to a feeling of fully belonging, despite his individual loneliness. This is Jamal’s version of Karim’s conquest of London. It is, however, a conquest achieved in the guise of a sadder, more mature postlapsarian story than that which Karim’s, in its younger, more naïve innocence, had epitomized. Jamal’s ability to attach a meaning to his life, despite its failures, is also based on the “subversive and emancipatory” ability of psychoanalysis. As it enables people to demand their rights and resist the domination of others, psychoanalysis erases differences between categories of people – be they of a social, ethnic, religious, gender, or race nature – and regards them all as individuals. It also leads Jamal (just as he leads his patients) to live his life more boldly, rather than to expect approval from any kind of 15

Brah, op.cit., 10.

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superior instance, as Karim (both younger as a character and earlier in Kureishi’s career as a writer of fiction) did in his desire to become fully English.

Works Cited Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. —, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. London: Grove Press, 1967. Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. 1910. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1995. Frosh, Stephen. Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self. London: Macmillan, 1991. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 537. Kureishi, Hanif. Something to Tell You. 2008. Reprint, London: Faber & Faber, 2009. —. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. —. “Hanif Kureishi on London.” Interview with Colin McCabe, Critical Quarterly 41.3 (1999): 37-56.

CHAPTER THREE A SHAMEFUL AND DEADLY LEGACY: RAPE, INCEST AND PARRICIDE IN ACHMAT DANGOR’S BITTER FRUIT AND SHANI MOOTOO’S CEREUS BLOOMS AT NIGHT TINA HARPIN

In the West-Indies and Southern Africa, authors of Indian origin grapple in their writings with the question of mixed identities and the issue of transmission. Shani Mootoo, who emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to Canada, and Achmat Dangor, who returned to South Africa after a long exile in Europe and the United States, are both interested in complex cultural legacies and unspoken truths. They have Indian ancestors in their families and grew up in two former British colonies. Colonized at first by the Dutch, South Africa was a British dominion until the proclamation of the South African Republic in 1961. The islands of Trinidad and Tobago were taken from the Spanish by the British at the end of the eighteenth century before they became an independent Republic in 1962. In these two areas, Indian immigration was historically tied to the system of indentured labour organized after the British abolition of slavery. Indentured workers arrived in Trinidad in 1845 and in South Africa in the 1860s, especially in the Kwazulu-Natal region. But the reality is more complicated, since there were other types of Indian migrations in these countries and different migratory flows, before and after the indentured labour period. In South Africa, “the myth of the 1860 settlers”1 tends to erase the fact that at the 1

Suleman Essop Dangor, “The Myth of the 1860 Settlers,” Africa Quarterly, 32 (1993): 73-80, quoted by Loren Kruger, “Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat

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beginning of the Dutch colonization in Western Cape, Indians were brought as slaves through the trade of populations from Goa, Kerala and Bengal.2 Indians also arrived as “passenger Indians,” a term that refers to men and women who had paid for their trip to establish themselves in South Africa for business purposes.3 In Trinidad as well as in South Africa, the word “diaspora” is itself problematic,4 and people of Indian origin do not necessarily define themselves as part of the Indian diaspora. Achmat Dangor himself wonders what the expression “Indian Diaspora” might mean and, according to Loren Kruger, he is too often “(mis)-represented as an Indian poet.”5 In the case of a painful legacy and shameful feelings about the Dangor and Others,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100-1 (2001): 135. In her article, Loren Kruger remarks that: “South African accounts of slavery - fictional, autobiographical, and otherwise - are few” (Ibid., 112). 2 The former President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Frederik de Klerk revealed in his autobiography The Last Trek - A New Beginning (London: Macmillan, 1998) that he had an Indian ancestor, called Diana of Bengal. This Indian origin was not told to him and he had admitted that part of his genealogy was not spoken of and he did not know of it, when he was a child. This lack of transmission and the acceptance of mixed identity are at the core of several post-apartheid South African novels. 3 When Mahatma Gandhi landed as a young lawyer in South Africa in 1893, he was shocked by the hostility surrounding the successful Indian diaspora in the British dominion. He fought against discrimination suffered by Indians until 1914, and he used to quote Queen Victoria’s declaration of 1858 to remind the South African authorities that Indians from the British Empire had the same rights as the other subjects of Her Majesty. 4 The theoretical bibliography on the diaspora issues is too long to be listed here, but for an accurate insight on this matter, see Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Dominique Schnapper, Diasporas et nations (Paris: O. Jacob, 2006), see also works in the Diaspora, Cultures of Mobilities collection edited by Judith MisrahiBarak & Claudine Raynaud for the Centre d’études et de recherches sur les pays du Commonwealth, Montpellier: “Race,” texts collected by Rita Christian & Judith Misrahi-Barak (Centre d’études et de recherches sur les pays du Commonwealth, Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2014) and “India and the Diasporic Imagination,” texts collected by Claudine Raynaud & Judith MisrahiBarak (Centre d’études et de recherches sur les pays du Commonwealth, Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011). 5 Achmat Dangor “The Indian Diaspora: a myth” (paper presented at Relocating Literature: Africa and India, Conference at the university of Witwatersrand, September 11, 1999) quoted by Loren Kruger, op.cit., 137. Unfortunately I was not able to trace Dangor’s research paper. Loren Kruger underlines this work because

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origin, the problem of assuming a “born-abroad-Indian” identity is all the more complex. When authors dare to write about it, their stories are not meant to provide answers, but are rather intended to reveal significant thoughts about how breaches (ruptures as well as violations) can be overcome, and how legacies can be passed on without necessarily being turned into a deadly heritage. This article examines the ways in which Shani Mootoo and Achmat Dangor meditate on heritage and ruptures in their novels Cereus Blooms at Night and Bitter Fruit. What their heroes have in common is the fact of being “bastards of history,” born out of exile and mixing. They are both haunted by the colonial past and by family stories of suffering and violated taboos. In the post-apartheid novel written by Achmat Dangor and published in 2001, the year of the 9/11 attacks, the protagonist, Mikey Ali, is the son of former political activists, who finds out the identity of his real father. The young man lets himself be seduced by terrorist action, apparently to take revenge on crimes of rape and incest. He commits what could be called a “double parricide.” Achmat Dangor is indeed subverting racist story lines about sexual violence and narratives of violent justice. In Shani Mootoo’s novel, published in 1996, the young male-nurse Tyler investigates Mala Ramchandin’s life story. The old lady was released from court and locked up in the hospital of Lantanacamara after the parricide she committed was disclosed. No serious proof was held against her—the murder was perpetrated a long time ago—which prompts Tyler to delve into the past in order to understand what exactly happened. By tackling two strong taboos, incest and parricide, in their respective novels, Shani Mootoo and Achmat Dangor strive to deconstruct what are paradoxically Manichean representations of identity. Their novels intend to reveal secrets as much as to underline the complex process of alienation endured by characters who are misled by a rigid and closed conception of identity and who suffer from not knowing their origins. The void that haunts Mala, and her parents, their lack of transmitted roots, love, stories, memory and imagination, causes shame and a deadly heritage. It is intimately linked in the plot to the motifs of incest and parricide.

of the obsession with black and white antagonism during apartheid; writers such as Achmat Dangor were not sufficiently taken into account. She notices for example that he is not mentioned in Michael Chapman’s Southern African Literature (1996) except in a footnote dedicated to “Muslim writers.”

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Bitter Fruit: Punishing the alien father and thinking of the repeated rapes of history Achmat Dangor’s novel stages incest and parricide through a labyrinthine story line and a multiple character focus. Although the omniscient narrator gives us the point of view of the different members of the Ali family, there is a particular focusing on the thoughts of the young terrorist-to-be Michael.6 Short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2004, Bitter Fruit is a realistic novel whose plot is not intended to be representative of a general situation. Achmat Dangor explains that he refuses to present the Ali family as a metaphor of South Africa because, according to him, “[t]his family goes in different directions, so perhaps they demonstrate the diversity of our country. Let us accept that we are not going to be the homogenous, ‘utopian’ society that some of us want to be.”7 His novel rather develops a kind of experimentation, which skims on the surface of the complacent attitude of the New South Africa, viewed as “the Rainbow Nation.” The author does not hide the critical purpose of the novel when he contends that “characters in Bitter Fruit are rising up against the general passivity of the South African elite” and that his book is “a kind of protest against the simplistic way in which problems were solved in South Africa.” He adds: “With the TRC [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission],8 the enemies were led to forgive to each other their sins. But the underlying issues are not arisen.”9 This last sentence has to be kept in mind when exploring why the novel delves into the matter of lost origins through the taboos of rape, incest, and parricide in order to question issues of heritage and rupture. 6

Mikey wants everyone to call him Michael at this point of the novel and is called that way in the narrative. 7 Stacey Knetch, “Interview Achmat Dangor,” The Ledge, March 2005, < http://www.the ledge.com/HTML/conversation.php?ID=57&lan=n > Consulted on January 12, 2015. 8 Virtually imagined in the 1993 Provisional Constitution, the TRC was set up during the democratic transition made by law no. 34 of July 1995, the “Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act.” 9 Stephanie Nieuwoudt, “Bitter vrug: 'n nuwe soort protes-Ietterkunde,” in Die Burger, November 1st, 2001. Original quote in afrikaans [my translation]: “Die karakters in Bitter Fruit kom in opstand teen die gelatenheid van die SuidAfrikaanse elite. […] Die boek is ook 'n soort protes teen die Simplistiese manier waarop Suid-Afrika probleme oplos. Met die WVK is die vyande byeengebring om mekaar se sondes vergewe. Maar aan die onderliggende kwessies is nooit aandag gegee nie.”

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Bitter Fruit is divided into three parts, Memory, Confession, and Retribution, which ironically echo the TRC’s objectives: to disclose the truth through confessions and make national reconciliation possible. In 1998, the TRC members gave their first five-volume report to President Nelson Mandela. The brief of the commission for amnesty was however extended, because there were too many demands to handle. This fact is very important in the novel, whose action takes place precisely in 1998 in Johannesburg where the South African Constitutional Court is sitting. Silas Ali, an ex-freedom fighter, works as a lawyer for the government. His life turns upside down the day he sees François Du Boise, his former aggressor and the rapist of his wife, Lydia, at the mall. When he tells his wife about it, their family life and their couple are definitely disrupted. Silas warns Lydia that Du Boise has applied for amnesty for rape and assault against women and that her name appears in the files, but he recognizes that there is nothing he can do about it. At the same time, their son, Mikey Ali, discovers his real origin by secretly reading his mother’s diary: he is a bitter fruit, a “child of rape.”10 Consequently, when François Du Boise is killed by Mikey at the end of the book, it would seem perfectly clear that his biological father stands as the alien and the enemy. This is indeed the case, but the narrative shows at the same time the limits of this view. Parricide is the means through which Mikey tries to punish the perpetrator of abuse against women and could thus be linked to political protest in the novel. In fact, Bitter Fruit refuses any simplistic scenario of that sort, first of all because rape does not stand for historical and political violence in this fiction: rape is political and historical violence, or at least, part of it. For sure, the novel discloses the taboo surrounding rape committed during the apartheid regime. Achmat Dangor notices the fact that this kind of violence was often dismissed in public discourses linked to the TRC and takes his inspiration from real stories, in particular from what happened to one of his close friends whose marriage was broken because of such events.11 The writer is thus perfectly aware of the 10

Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001. First American Reprint, New York: Black Cat, 2001), 126. Quoted later as BF in the article. 11 Achmat Dangor. Interview with Audrey Brown, Insig, January/February 2002, 70, quoted by Graham, Lucy Valerie, State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 158. Another personal reason that would explain why Achmat Dangor probably had been all the more concerned by these issues is that his sister, Jessie Duarte, played a significant role in denouncing abuse against women during the TRC process (see Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation

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historical and political aspects of rape and the “taboo barrier,” as he calls it, when he remarks: The rapes began because there was the opportunity. It then became systematic. […] Men are funny. I know, I’m a man myself, but we’re funny. We can talk about all kinds of things, like murder, robbery, our exploits, but did you ever hear a man say to you, “I raped a woman”? Or “I abused a child”? That’s the kind of confession that I think is the taboo barrier – not only in our society, but elsewhere.12

Bitter Fruit invites the reader to think of the consequences of the “taboo barrier” regarding the disrupted transmission as well as the violent damages it implies. Lorna Milne is accurate when she underlines that “the metaphor of rape draws heavily on connotations of spoliation, theft, and perverseness, all notions which readily feed into any critique of colonialism” in postcolonial writings. Nevertheless, we would be wrong to read rape in Achmat Dangor’s fiction as a “metaphor.” The fiction intends simply to describe reality: under the apartheid regime, policemen13 were involved in vicious crimes against the so-called “terrorists” (men but also women and children suspected of acting against the regime) and François Du Boise’s misdeeds belong to this violence-based system. A section of the narrative makes us understand how common Lydia’s rape was supposed to be (BF, 128): Afterwards, the casual talk among the other cops, an ordinary, everyday event. How one of them told her to be glad they had no time for a ‘tournament’, calls were coming in from all over the townships, they had to go, the ‘fucken [sic] youth are going wild.’ He hoped that ‘this’ would teach her a lesson.

This part in free indirect speech introduces us at the same time to the Commission, A submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, University of Witwatersrand, Political Sciences and Gender Studies Department, May 1996, Consulted on January 12, 2015. 12 Stacey Knetch, “Interview Achmat Dangor.” 13 The most sadly famous among them is Eugene de Kock, nicknamed “Prime Evil.” He was condemned to two life sentences for six murders plus 212-years for other charges in 1994 despite his several applications for amnesty, his collaboration with the TRC and his calls for forgiveness. In January 2015, he was released as a parolee because of his medical condition.

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voices of Mikey and of Lydia, because the son is reading his mother’s diary and his thought embraces his mother’s written remarks. This choice of point of view reveals how paradoxically remote and vivid the memory of the crime is, and of course, how inhuman it was. That the damage imposed by rape upon individuals and families is profound is demonstrated throughout the novel. Incest does not unfold in the novel as a metaphor. However the main protagonist, Mikey, intends to read it metaphorically, mainly due to the lack of transmission of family stories. When he tries to decipher his origins, he is tempted to see rape as a common fate endured by the women of his community. If shame spreads to the whole family despite the secret, it is because the history of violence and humiliation is somehow passed on to Mikey, even though Silas and Lydia had not told their story to their son. Mikey lacks information about his real father, but also about his Indian origins, even if this issue is not the main one in a fiction focusing on political and sexual violence. For Mikey, discovering rape paradoxically equals unveiling the truth about his origins. He belongs to the “Coloureds,” a group discriminated against like other non-White populations, although it was due to a different political agenda.14The label “Coloured” and the category of people designated as such have a long history.15 This community is indeed mixed; it is composed of people of Asian, Indian, White and Khoisan descent. But this “mixed-race” aspect is not sufficient to describe this nonhomogeneous group. As Loren Kruger puts it, this “syncretic South African identity” is “masked as well as marked by the name coloured.”16 Achmat Dangor, who is from this community, willingly evokes his Muslim education and his great-grandfather who was an Indian 14 Two years after the National Party (NP) won the elections in 1948 and Daniel F. Malan became Prime Minister, the Population Registration Act was voted to compel everyone to identify him/herself racially as “White”, “Black”/“Bantu” or “Coloured”. But the Group Areas Acts in 1950, as Loren Kruger recalls, “mandated the separation of ‘Malay’ and ‘Other Coloureds’ from ‘Indian’” (op.cit., 3). “Coloured” people had limited representation at the Parliament until the 1960s before a new constitution in 1984 gave them and Asians limited rights. 15 The term “Coloured” was not created by apartheid propagandists. Since the early twentieth century, the census used to distinguish between “White”, “Bantu” and “Coloured” (Constant-Martin, Denis. “Le poids du nom. Culture populaire et constructions identitaires chez les “Metis” du Cap”. Critique internationale 1-1 (1998): 81. The highly complex history of the word makes it difficult to translate. In French for example, the term “métis” is not accurate and “Coloured” is generally left untranslated. 16 Kruger, Ibid., 115.

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Muslim married to a white Afrikaner woman, but he does not want to lock himself up in a “Coloured” or an Indian identity, whatever that means. He distances himself from any restless identity quest.17 In contrast, his hero is the victim of a delusional quest for a fixed and clear identity. In fact, Mikey, like Samad in Waiting for Leila, is “an anti-Odysseus cast”18 who ends as a murderer. When he shoots dead his biological father François Du Boise, it is as if he was killing a stranger and taking revenge on all the repeated rapes perpetrated in history by the powerful. The parricide is thus intertwined with the execution of an enemy, a stranger from another community. Here the idea of parricide itself seems to be blurred: genealogical ties are cut at different levels in the Ali family and this second of two murders committed by Mikey enacts a long history of dramatic ruptures. Mikey’s questioning is linked to family secrets and the break with India where his ancestor Ali Ali comes from. The young man born from a rape is, on his non-biological father’s side, the descendant of an illegitimate union. Silas Ali is a natural child of an honourable imam, the father of another family whose story Mikey looks for, even if he knows he cannot count on reliable testimonies. He distrusts Imam Ismael, whom he consults, and according to whom Ali Ali would have fled India and established himself as an imam in South Africa because his sister might have been raped by a British officer, a lieutenant, during the First World War. The imam’s tale is made of suggestions and ellipses. Therefore, despite its apparent logic of cause and consequence, nothing is sure about the facts alleged: neither Hajera’s rape by the soldier, nor Ali Ali’s murder of the latter. Mikey distances himself from this story and seems all the more disoriented, which probably makes him decide to go to India to study religion and incites him to commit violent actions before his departure. The omniscient narrator refuses to make it perfectly clear, but it is obvious 17

See Dangor Achmat, interviewed by Jean Meiring, “Tasting the sweet fruit of literary success,” Thisday, 21 October. http://www.oulitnet.co.za/nosecret/achmat_dangor.asp > Consulted on 12 January 2015. 18 Achmat Dangor, Waiting for Leila, Johannesburg: Pavan, 1981. Quoted by Loreen Rugger, Ibid., 140. The Odyssey intertext is a recurrent one in Achmat Dangor’s writings. Mikey had to read for school “a prose translation of Homer's Odyssey” that he did not like (Bitter Fruit, 124). In part I of Strange Pilgrimages entitled “Africans Abroad,” the narrator of the short story “Goodbye, Goodnight” names his dog ironically after Odysseus (Strange Pilgrimages, (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2013), 66).

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that Mikey is ready to follow a fundamentalist training in the ranks of extremist Muslims. By killing Du Boise, is Mikey following his grandfather’s alleged model of justice? Is he coming closer to the violence perpetrated by his own biological father? Or is he alienating himself? The novel does not allow the reader to exclude any of these interpretations, it does, however, compel him or her to hold all of them together. In Bitter Fruit, when the father is like an alien or a total foreigner, his son also feels like a foreign being, alien to himself and to others. Mikey changes his name “Mikey” into “Michael,” and his mother thinks it is an “aloof name for an aloof person” (BF, 167). It is not a coincidence that the young man, who also steals precious books, takes away from a bourgeois house a rare copy of Albert Camus’s famous novel, The Outsider19 (BF, 245). Is his gesture at the moment when he shoots dead his biological father as absurd as Meursault’s killing of the Arab? There is actually an important difference between the two novels: the Arab is innocent whereas François Du Boise is not. But does Mikey’s act make sense because of this main difference? At first, the idea of justice is pushed forward by the narrator’s allusion to a “ceremonial execution”: It is as if Michael has been given a signal, as if this is a ceremonial execution and the condemned man has had his blindfold fixed. Michael raises the gun, sees the fleeting horror in Du Boise’s eyes, then the sudden look of acknowledgement. He has been waiting for such a moment for a long time now. Du Boise seems unafraid, a smile begins to form on his thin mouth. (BF, 276)

Despite the scenario of revenge, the moment of the murder is not only an encounter between a righter of wrongs and a foreign enemy. It is also a moment of problematic recognition: Du Boise seems to recognize Mikey’s 19 The outsider is an important figure in Achmat Dangor’s works. In his interview with Stacey Ketch, he reminds us that Salad in his first novel Waiting for Leila, was like Mikey, an “outsider.” The main characters of his book of short stories Strange Pilgrimages, can also be perceived as “outsiders.” In his interview with Michèle Alexander, Achmat Dangor has commented on the strong effect Camus's novel had upon him: “After reading Albert Camus’s book The Outsider, it struck me that most human beings have to deal with alienation. Where I grew up, I experienced alienation every day” and he added: “When I moved to Fordsburg, we were still outsiders because we were not ‘real Indians.” See “Promoting Madiba’s legacy. A Leadership exclusive on Achmat Dangor.” http://www.powerfulperceptions.co.za/documents/2011_07_15.pdf, Consulted January 12, 2016.

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fatal judgement because he knows he is guilty, but the words employed do not blur the idea of parricide as such, because the other recognition at stake is the recognition within the family. The ambiguity of François Du Boise’s murder is due to the family recognition at play in that scene. At first, Mikey does not want to believe his mother: He feels immersed in his family, these are his people, these dark-faced, hook-nosed hybrids; he longs to go and look in a mirror, seek confirmation of his desire to belong. Lydia must be wrong! How can Du Boise be his biological father? (BF, 189).

When he perpetrates the murder, oddly, he recognizes himself for the first time as the son of Du Boise. Before the encounter, he realizes that he has a half-brother and a half-sister (BF, 275). Then, even if he is struck by the “unnaturally white” colour of François Du Boise, who is sick because of a cancer, he sees him as a double of himself and shoots: “That could be my face one day, my thin body […]. My heritage, he says in a whisper, unwanted, imposed, my history and my beginning” (BF, 276). Mikey fires—twice—directly into Du Boise’s face. This tragic encounter between father and son through parricide becomes a moment of recognition through the act of murdering. Mikey accepts his heritage when he kills his father, as if he were enacting some tragic and romantic idea of the “call of blood,” despite himself. Contrary to appearances, Mikey’s parricide is not merely a moment of execution of the enemy caused by an initial rape; it is a tragic father-son reunion, which makes the whole gesture more complex. Mikey becomes guilty and alien when he tries to “obliterate Du Boise’s face” (BF, 276). As this hero, closer to the “anti-hero” than ever, endeavours to solve the problem of his origins, the reader cannot help wondering: who is the alien?20 Mikey or his father? Would History itself be the alien because of all these unspoken truths? Is Mikey trying to handle some historical destiny through his violent action? These are the questions raised when Achmat Dangor rewrites the old motif of “the call of blood” through parricide in a post-authoritarian and segregate state. The phrase “call of blood” refers to the idea that blood has its own mysterious logic that cannot be stopped, that is to say, that people are linked by blood and meant 20 In Meursault, Contre-enquête (Paris: Actes Sud, 2014), Kamel Daoud gives voice to the fictitious brother of the murdered Arab of the novel The Outsider and investigates the matters of guilt and strangeness from this unheard point of view.

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to meet, under whatever circumstances. This motif can indeed be intertwined, for example, with incest. This conception is influential in any literature and society that deals with family lies and family secrets provoked by a problematic and harsh political situation.21 The rewriting of the call of blood motif contributes to the resurfacing of the underlying issues to surface, but so does the rewriting of what Lucy Graham names, after Sol Plaatje, the “white peril narrative.”22 Through parricide, Achmat Dangor transposes and renews the call of blood motif, while helping us to recall white peril narratives. The obsession with family and intimate issues, readable through the motif of parricide and the motif of incest, resists any simplistic interpretations and ambitious general allegories. A striking feature in Bitter Fruit is the fact that the (anti-)hero commits two murders linked to rapes, and that these two crimes are like a double parricide. The first crime committed by Mikey is the assassination of his girlfriend Vinu Viljoen’s father, for she confesses she has an incestuous relationship with her father, an Afrikaner named Johan Viljoen. Mikey kills Vinu’s father before he kills his own biological father. Thus, this first homicide is tied up to another “foreign” paternal figure and to a “white peril” scenario, through this time, to a case of father-daughter incest. Incestuous white fathers who abuse their mixed-race daughters constitute a topos of the abolitionist literature, but not only that.23 Bitter Fruit’s strength is due to its art of complexity: Vinu does not see herself as a victim even if she is one, her 21The Literature of the South of the United States is much concerned by this theme because of the taboo of “miscegenation” and segregative laws. For an illustration of the importance of this motif in William Faulkner’s novels see Tina Harpin, “Inceste, race et histoire: fictions et contre-fictions de pouvoir dans les romans sud-africains et états-uniens des XXème et XXIème siècles” [Incest, Race, and History: Fictions and Counter-fictions of Power in Twentieth and EleventhCenturies Novels from South Africa and the United States], Ph.D. Thesis in Comparative Literature, 2013, University of Paris 13. To grasp how this idea is still surviving elsewhere in the world, one can read with interest Ari Gandsman’s article about the “mandato of sangrey” (the law of blood) in Argentina, “‘L’appel du sang’ : le débat sur la restitution des enfants de disparus en Argentine postdictatoriale,” Anthropologie et Sociétés 33-1 (2009): 31-48. 22 White peril narratives stage white men who do not control their sexual impulses and cause consequently the destruction of their own “race”, especially through “miscegenation.” Graham, Lucy Valerie, State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 69. 23 See Tina Harpin's Ph.D. Thesis.

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father does not appear as a bestial alien, but as a kind of romantic foreign lover, so if rape keeps on returning in the plot as an interracial assault it cannot be summed up in one unequivocal meaning. Mikey’s reading of history is itself uncertain. He is conscious, for example, that non-white people can also be rapists (BF, 131) and is dubious when Imam Ismael lectures him by saying that “You conquer a nation by bastardizing their children” (BF, 204). When he thinks of himself as “Michael the Avenger” he comments that this expression is “a ludicrous concept, a comic-book idea” (BF, 240). He wonders: “why am I doing this? Not to avenge Vinu. Killing her father will not eradicate his sin or her complicity, willing or unwilling” (BF, 242). The incest motif, instead of securing a white peril reading of the whole fiction, enables the author to paradoxically disturb it by offering a too easy reading of history through interracial rape. Mikey is about to think that Johan Viljoen cannot resist raping his own daughter because of the long story of interracial abuse that exists between the two “races.” But he is honest enough to confess to himself that it is not true. The novel makes it clear that sexual attraction goes on in other families too, since Mikey was almost seduced by his own mother and had a peculiar story with an aunt of the same age, Mireille, who was sent away by their family after they were caught by surprise naked on the bed, “playing Gandhi” (BF, 36). The game refers to the alleged ascetic habit of Gandhi, who would ask young virgins to undress and lay on his bed so that he could put his morality to test. This irreverent allusion to a connexion of the young boy with India underlines all the complexity of his cultural and familial surrounding, and avoids reducing incest to the act of rape in the novel. Incest hangs over the rape motif and complicates it. Indeed, while “[r]ape instantiates normative forms of sexual organizations and polarized conceptions of identity”24 as Pamela Barnett observes, on the contrary, the incest motif in fiction compels the reader to confront an abyss of confusion that destabilizes meaning, as would any of them deeply connected to the register of the grotesque.25 If the drama of shameful heritage and deadly rupture is set up in Bitter Fruit through incest and parricide, the strength of the novel rests on its refusal of any simplistic interpretation, thanks to the experimental ground 24 Pamela E. Barnett, Dangerous Desire: Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties (New York; London: Routledge, 2004), xxi. 25 On the matter of the meaning of grotesque and its implications as “regime of impossible,” see Rémi Astruc, Le renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle : essai d'anthropologie littéraire (Paris: Ed. Classiques Garnier, 2010).

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offered by fiction. Mikey’s quest is not meant to be read as an allegory of a national destiny, because Achmat Dangor underlines that his (anti-)hero is not a symbol: I never intended to create any kind of representation here. Michael is an extreme example of the questioning that is taking place among young people nowadays. For me personally, he is an experiment in a different kind of characterization.26

The writer is close to André Brink’s position when he asserts that: Without the attempt to grasp, with the creative imagination, the past and its silences, South African society as a whole may get bogged down in mere materialities, sterile rationalizations, and the narrow mechanics of retribution or amnesty.27

Achmat Dangor’s work can also be compared with J. M. Coetzee’s effort to sustain an ethical thinking through writing. As Derek Attridge comments, in J. M. Coetzee’s work, allegory: deals with the already known, whereas literature opens a space for the other. Allegory announces a moral code, literature invites an ethical response.28

Mikey, an “extreme example” of the questions raised by the youth in South Africa, invites an “ethical response” or at least an ethical debate, and joins the fictional characters that in the world of literature compel us to think about heritage and rupture.

Cereus Blooms at Night: from Gothic Horror to Queer and Creole Renaissance Shani Mootoo’s fictional characters also have the power of calling to mind the complexity of deadly heritage and the lures of a too easily 26

Knetch, “Interview Achmat Dangor.” André Brink, “Interrogating silence: new possibilities faced by South African literature,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 19701995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24. 28 Derek Attridge. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, Literature in the Event (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005), 64. 27

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defined identity. The protagonists of her first novel strive to find their place in the world and to overcome a difficult past. Through the depiction of two generations of the Ramchandin family, Shani Mootoo puts forward a fruitful reflection about the dead ends of closed identities and closed spaces. Born in Dublin and raised in Trinidad, she personally led a life of exile and includes the multiple faces of diaspora in her writing. As a painter and a filmmaker, she also crosses artistic spaces. She confesses that she writes visually, starting with a “picture in [her] head.”29 The author of six long novels and several books of short stories, she has written poetry collections which are widely appreciated. She is also well known for having addressed the question of non-heteronormative sexualities and gender through her creative work. As a lesbian, she says she “finds Canada a more congenial space to express herself”30 compared to the island of Trinidad where homophobia and heteronormative patterns are more common. Cereus Blooms at night31 struck the international public because of its violence but, despite its crude and harsh depiction of incest and murder, it provides hope. The Times’ review of this “stunning first novel” specifies that: It covers the whole range of human motivation, from abject cowardice to self-sacrificing bravery, and shows the humble triumph of goodness.32

In fact, the choice of outsider characters and the gothic reconstitution of incest and murder scenes operate to ensure a certain kind of transmission and some sort of renaissance. While the novel incorporates the voices of different characters, the main narrator is Tyler. He is the one who opens the book and leads the narrative. His first words claim the power of culture and writing: “By sitting this story down, I, Tyler ... am placing trust in the power of the printed word to reach many people.” Contrarily to Achmat Dangor's characters, who are absorbed in literature, who read and write but cannot 29

Shani Mootoo interviewed by Lydia Peroviü, Brian Francis and Rose Cullis, Brockton Writers Series, 10 July 2013, Toronto. https://brocktonwritersseries.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/bws-10-07-13-shanimootoo/. Consulted April 14, 2014. 30 Krishna Sarbadhikary, Surviving the Fracture Writers of the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora (New Delhi: Creative Books, 2007), xxiii. 31 Cereus Blooms at Night (New York, Grove Press, (1996) 2009); later quoted as CBN in the article. 32 Ibid., praise quoted in the cover blurb.

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really heal their wounds through these intellectual activities, Tyler demonstrates a refreshing optimism. This young male-nurse has recently returned from exile in the small island of Lantanacamara, which appears to be the fictional double of Trinidad. As a former exile, a male-nurse and a homosexual, he fulfils the role of the perfect outsider. In the town ironically named “Paradise,” he tries to fit into a distrustful society where an old woman called Mala Ramchandin is unanimously rejected. When she arrives at the hospital after her case for murder has been dismissed, Tyler tries to stick the pieces of her story back together. The reader is reminded of William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust33 while reading the beginning of Cereus Blooms at Night: the comical tone which Faulkner uses to evoke the dismissed trial of Lucas Beauchamp finds a resonance in this début novel. The opposition between fragile protagonists and the village or the crowd can also be found in Shani Mootoo’s novel, but in this case, the marginal characters are not the old woman, the child, and the black man, but the mad woman Mala, the homosexual Tyler, and his auxiliary in the story, the transsexual Otoh. Tyler feels closer to Mala Ramchandin because of their common outsider position: “Miss Ramchandin and I … had a camaraderie: we had found our own ways and fortified ourselves against the rest of the world” (CBN, 48). They both involuntarily test out “a shared queerness” in society. It is also this “queerness” that bonds Tyler to Otoh in an unconventional couple who can ironically pass off as a “normal” and “heteronormative” from the outside. In Lantanamacara, Paradise is not Hell, through a simplistic inversion of values and symbols, but it is indeed filled by men and women who are guilty of breaking with the weak and the marginal. What Mala Ramchandin suffers from is less open violence and intolerance than the coward stigmatization associated with the abandonment of the weakest. As a little girl, she was abandoned by her mother, who left with her girlfriend and lover without having time to take her children with her. Interestingly, Mala is mocked much more because she was abandoned by her mother than because of her mother’s homosexuality. She becomes a punching bag at school, also because she is already abused by her father and stands as a perfect victim. Another character in the novel indicates that society attacks only the weakest. Otoh, a young woman who lives as a boy, and who is accepted as such by her parents, is not mocked by anyone, and she lies about her identity without much bothering: she is stronger and less 33 William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust. New York: Random House, reprinted 1991 (1948).

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exposed to abuse than Mala, thanks to the protection of her family. There is a lot of nastiness in Lantanacamara, but there is also decency and redemption. The judge who dismisses Mala Ramchandin’s trial had been her former persecutor when they were children: he seems to realize the wrongs he had done to Mala. The novel, therefore, denounces social violence that is mostly linked to ignorance, fear, and cowardliness, except for Mala’s father who stands as real evil and represents what should be absolutely avoided, and if that cannot be, what should be truly “killed” in society. Shani Mootoo inscribes herself in a tradition of fictional incest writings which tend to reveal how society lets down victims confronted with evil.34 Her choice of an outsider narrator favours this point of view. Like Toni Morrison’s narrator in the Bluest Eye, Tyler is conscious of the role played by society in abandoning people in need. Claudia in Toni Morrison’s novel tells us how Pecola Breedlove turned mad because of her miserable life and her father’s abuse. She declares, ashamed at the end of the story: We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went near. Not because she was absurd, or repulsive, or because we were frightened but because we had failed her.35

In that novel, Toni Morrison chose a young black girl to tell the whole traumatic story of the Breedloves, to avoid putting any further pressure on them: by choosing this outsider point of view, she wanted to let us hear the voice of an innocent child spared from violence and misery. Like Shani Mootoo almost thirty years later, Toni Morrison did not want to betray the victim’s voice, and wrote with a view to letting us hear, at the centre of her plot, the silence she said she wanted to “shape without breaking it.”36 It is also significant that Shani Mootoo, like several other authors of incest fiction, uses natural images to express how life can be disrupted by 34 In The Woman in the Red Dress, Gender, Space and Reading (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2002), Minrose Gwin devotes a whole chapter to “Nonfelicitous Space and Survivor Discourse: Reading Father-Daughter Incest.” She underlines accurately this idea when she notes about Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina that this novel “denounces the enclosure of a southern ‘white-trash’ girl within a disdainful, insensitive, health care and social services system,” 104. 35 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. With a foreword by the author, New York: Vintage International Edition, 998. Reprint 2007 (1970). 36 Morrison, Ibid., xiii (foreword).

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intrafamilial sexual abuse. Claudia in the Bluest Eye blames herself for not having planted the marigold seeds deeply enough, because the year Pecola had a baby by her father they did not bloom. Contrary to the tragic tone in Toni Morrison’s novel, Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how life can be reborn after the entry of death. The cereus is a plant that blooms only once a year, and gives to Mala Ramchandin’s garden the aura of a special and mysterious place. It is also the symbol of the eternal cycle of life and death and the image of hybridity, desire, and love, because its “life [was] refusing to end. It was the aroma of transformation” (CBN, 128). If Mala’s father’s corpse stays in the house, like the mother’s corpse of the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1960 movie Psycho, it is because it represents the impossible renaissance and the dreadful legacy he imposes on his daughter. Nature, on the contrary, is the symbol of possible renaissance, if men and women accept its power and hybridity, that is to say, the game of queer gendering and sexual attraction that is not seen as “perverse”—like incest. Shani Mootoo has affirmed that she writes without any preconceived plan or identified objective: “Whenever I approach a work with an agenda—political, personal, activist—the work inevitably fails, falls flat,”37 she said. Nevertheless, by showing protagonists and a leader narrator who unquestionably are outsiders, she gives her novel a political significance. Besides, this first novel was encouraged and requested by the most known feminist and militant editing house Press Gang Publishers, in Vancouver. Shani Mootoo was consequently free and even encouraged to write about unspoken truths and taboo issues. The confidence in the power of writing, shown off by Tyler at the beginning of the book, is probably emblematic of its own political reach, which is another point in common with other incest novels of the late twentieth century. If writing is represented as an important activity in the novel, tragic loss is another central theme. It is evident that the two are indeed linked. Many characters disappear around Mala: she loses her mother, then her sister Aha, who sends letters to her but without them ever reaching her. As in the Color Purple by Alice Walker, the victim of incest remains isolated in a home that is comparable to a jail, and she ends by being cut off from the entire world. Celie loses contact with her sister Nettie, because her husband (a substitute of her former abusive father) hides the letters she sends to her. The end of the novel allows Celie to discover these letters and see again her sister, at the same time that she recovers a liking for life. Cereus 37

Shani Mootoo’s interview for the Brockton Writers Series.

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Blooms at Night duly records the traumatic separation within Ramchandin’s family and Mala is, in any case, too far gone to be reunited with her sister. But Tyler discovers the letters that are reproduced in one of the last sections of the book, and he dedicates his story not only to the absent sister and parents, but to the whole world. Asha’s absence underscores the problem of transmission and solidarity. It also interrogates the meaning of being “at home.” When one is not happy at one’s home, should one leave it or not? Mala ignores her father’s traumatic history of displacement, but the questions of migration and heritage are put forward by Tyler, just returned from exile. When he addresses his story to Asha, he wonders: How many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, either end up running far away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble than the other. They are merely different ways of coping, and we each must cope as best as we can. You see Asha, I must rationalize your leaving and her staying and,—as many see it—going mad. Otherwise, I must admit to feeling of anger that you left your sister behind. (CBN, 90)

Tyler does not ignore his feelings (anger for example), but he is wise enough to avoid judging people through pure emotion. The journey has been made from anger, and the resulting madness it entails, to reach this wise position. This evolution was made possible in the plot not only by reading the past, but also by rejecting the idea of fixed identities and obvious value judgements. Parricide, in that scheme, does not punish perpetrators but expels evil by ending the cycle of violence. Paula Morgan explains that: Mootoo buys into the postmodern play of identities, signs and subjectivities [...] Mootoo’s characters will never be able to answer decisively the question “Who am I?” Instead, the writer produces a highly self-conscious, fictive labyrinth, a hyperrepresentation that preserves the fiction of identity formation.38

In fact, Shani Mootoo herself recognizes: I often begin writing with a very small idea—a picture in my head, or 38

Paula Morgan “Fashioning Women for a Brave new World: Gender, Ethnicity and Literary Representation,” in Feminist Africa, 7 December 2006, issue on Diaspora Voices, 101-102 (Cape Town: Africa Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2006).

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something that is nagging me, that isn’t yet in formed sentences. Something that is puzzling me. Something I don’t know, but want to find out. [...] I don’t start, I mean to say, with an already developed sense of an identity to be performed in the work and for which I must find a vehicle to show this identity off.39

It seems that incest and parricide themes are woven into the novel precisely to demonstrate the terrible consequences of believing in false fixed identities. The drama of Mala’s father, Chandin Ramchandin, was to think that because he was raised as a young white man, he could pretend to marry a white woman from the “Shivering Northern Lands.” Raised by the Thouroughlys to be a clergyman, he falls in love with their daughter who is almost his age. But Lavinia Thoroughly is supposed to be his sister, even if he cannot believe this hypocritical kinship. His demand is thus rejected, and he accepts, with bitterness, to marry a woman of his kind, that is to say, of Indian origin, Sarah. In fact, Lavinia and Sarah are in love and they soon leave him in despair: this is how Mala’s story of abuse begins officially. The incest motif is therefore used twice in the plot: first under the story of the platonic love felt by a man for his so-called sister who is not his true sister, then through the harsh depiction of rape and the mistreatment committed by a father against his own daughter. The first “incest” is not truly incest, since Chandin does not have the real position of a son inside the Thoroughly family. His desire betrays the family romance of colonisation. In psychoanalytical thought, “family romance” refers to an idea that germinates in the minds of children: they think their parents are not actually their true family. The colonial family romance that Chandin reveals is of another kind: it comes from the ruling parents (colonizers), who pretend that all children (the nation’s children) are like their own, while imposing a difference in treatment. The first “incest” disrupts this colonial family novel by being an attempt to cross the colour line: Chandin Ramchandin is guilty of a racial transgression that is disguised as incest. A long time after the characters of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! disclosed the secrets of the taboo of miscegenation in the South of the United States,40 Shani Mootoo reveals that the Caribbean has a similar

39

Shani Mootoo’s interview for the Brockton Writers Series. Shreve and Quentin Compson imagine the mysterious story of the Sutpen family and presume that Charles Bon who wanted to marry his half-sister Judith, might have said once to his brother Henry Sutpen: “So it’s the miscegenation, not the 40

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history of taboos, despite its image of creole syncretism and mixing. This is the reason why incest highlights the problem of deadly heritage and untold truths. The second incest is the tragic reversal of the first one: it is not about loving nor about desiring, as in the Adelphic attraction felt by Chandin for Lavinia, but all about doing wrong, hurting, humiliating and hating. The incest perpetrated by Chandin with Mala is the ultimate step in self-hatred and self-degradation. The story makes it clear that weakened first by cultural alienation, then by frustrated love, Chandin’s life is destroyed by his wife’s love affair with Lavinia. His violence against Mala is a pathetic and revolting act of release for all his frustrations and losses. In that regard, Shani Mootoo’s fiction carries on the association between incest and cultural trauma and alienation, initiated by Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.41 Shani Mootoo has confessed that she has been “constantly battling with the deeply inscribed memory in [her] body of umpteen generations of gendering.”42 Deconstructing heteronormative ideas about gender seems to be another way of deconstructing myths of identity in Cereus Blooms at Night. As Tejaswini Niranjana43 notes in her article about the chutney-soca dance in the Indian diaspora of Trinidad, there is frequently a taboo about homosexual attraction in nationalist claims of identity, diasporic spheres included. She underlines that accepting chutney-soca dance, which is performed by women with women, when it is not perceived as a “foreign” custom, could “reterritorialize the home by transforming it into a site where non-heteronormative desires and practices are articulated and performed.”44 The successful practice of “reterritorialization” through open desires which are not heteronormatively coded is the unreachable horizon that incest, which you can’t bear” (William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, (1936) 1990), 285). 41 For a deeper reflection about the historical implications and impact of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in the literary history of incest writings, see Tina Harpin's Ph.D. thesis. 42 Shani Mootoo, interview with Richard Rung, “Dear Shani, Hiya Richard... ,” in Felix, A Journal of Media Arts and Communication, Ed. Juan Downey, New York, 2-1 (1995). http://www.e-felix.org/issue4/shani.html, Consulted January 12, 2015. 43 Tejaswini Niranjana “‘Left to the Imagination’: Indian nationalisms and female sexuality” in Janaki Nair & Mary E. John ed, A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (London: Zed Books, 2000), 111-138. 44 Ibid., 131.

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Lavinia and Sarah are giving up by fleeing the island and its false “paradise.” Other characters succeed nevertheless to open up without running away: notably Otoh and Tyler, whose love affair was born because they refuse to enclose themselves in preconceived and fixed identities. Shani Mootoo, despite her crude depiction of incest and parricide, lets us think that love and politics are not compelled to transmit a deadly heritage and its constraints. In her poem “Point of convergence”, she claims: “Where neither Nepalese great grand-mother nor mother/ lover, government,/ define I/ nor am/ I/ mindless of these.”45 In fact, it is really the outside and open space of exile (from home and the nation) that provides shelter for undefined and alive identities: that is why, in Lantanacamara, gardens are so important for the reconstruction of social links and encounters. At first, Mala hides herself in her gothic garden, but at the end of the novel, thanks to Tyler and Otoh, gardens regain the positive function of a place for social gathering. This passage from gothic horror to creole and queer renaissance is possible only because the corpse of the murdered father is discovered in Mala’s house. Krishna Sarbadhikary notes that: Landscape for Mootoo [...] becomes a place for re-inventing and imagining. Refusing to remain inside the structure of ‘gendering’, it is the outside that becomes for her a place of refuge and escape.46

Jameela Dallis also underlines this journey that turns Mala Ramchandin into an atypical gothic heroine figure and remarks that: “In a way, Mala is like the cereus, a plant that must rest for a season, and sometimes for many years, before it will bloom again.”47 In fact, this ending is emblematic of incest stories defending representations of “survivors” instead of mere tragic victims. Mala’s revival, through her contact with nature, also rewrites a long story of lost battles against the hostile nature of the Caribbean, figuring the complex and maybe impossible anchoring in a

45

Shani Mootoo, The Predicament of Or (Vancouver: Polestar Book Publishers 2001) 240. 46 Sarbadhikary, op.cit., 245. 47 Jameela F. Dallis, “‘Life Refusing to End’: The Transformative Gothic in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” in Eric Gary Anderson and Taylor Haggood ed, Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (Southern Literary Studies, Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 234.

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single simple identity in these islands.48 Shani Mootoo has affirmed that her debut novel “has outed [her] beyond any safe place”49: for sure, it questions, as many incest stories do, what “home” means. We could say that the novel also defends a small scale of what Pecic Zoran calls the “tactical diaspora” through the space of the garden: the garden could be the mirror of the nexus of complex relationships between death and life, between past and present, between heritage and creation. According to Pecic Zoran, “queer diaspora blasphemizes the purity of place.”50 It seems that even if they are close to the place of incest and parricide, queer gardens too blasphemize the purity of place, indicating a potential future in creolization. Sarah Phillips Casteel explains that the garden: is not easily assimilable to a postmodern reading of space, for in contrast to ‘non-places’ such as airport lounges and theme parks [...] suggests fullness and density, foundations and origins. Unlike the borderland, another favourite of recent criticism, the garden points towards interiority and enclosure as well as towards edges and margins.51

Her analysis of Shani Mootoo’s novel and of Gisèle Pineau’s La grande drive des esprits shows that “the garden is the place where exile comes to an end”, even if paradoxically it “itself becomes the signifier of exile and displacement.”52 In my reading of Shani Mootoo’s novel, the garden is also the place where the gothic horror of lost home, abuse, and traumatic history, is rewritten into a new narrative of open identities and love. It is indeed Otoh and Tyler’s attraction that gives the novel its special touch of hope at the end, showing that a deadly legacy can be buried and that an 48

Refer to the beautiful pages of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (New York, Paperback, (1966) reprinted 1992) which describe the heroine's husband's rejection of the Caribbean nature. Also refer to the depiction of the unfriendly Martinican garden where Rehvana goes to feel pain and to feel more truly a “West-Indian” woman, in Suzanne Dracius’s L'autre qui danse (Paris: éditions du Rocher, (1989) 2007). 49 Shani Mootoo, “Photo-Parentheses” in Lorna Crozier ed, Desire in Seven Voices, Vancouver, Douglas and McIntyre, 1999, 105-124; p.122. 50 Pecic Zoran, Queer narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora Exploring Tactics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 15. 51 Sarah Phillips Casteel, “New World Pastoral: the Caribbean Garden and Emplacement in G. Pineau and S. Mootoo.” Interventions 5-1 (2003): 12-28; pp. 13-14, quoted by Pecic Zoran 2013, 50. 52 Casteel, Ibid., 25.

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unexpected garden can grow on it.

Conclusion Salman Rushdie is known for having claimed that: It may be that the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world finds he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.53

The novels I have scrutinized are not essentially about India, nor are they written by Indian authors. Therefore, when Salman Rushdie asks: “What does it mean to be ‘Indian’ outside India? How can culture be preserved without becoming ossified?”54, the question that is raised in these novels is “What does it mean to be ‘of Indian origin’ outside of India?” How can a painful heritage be passed on without becoming a deadly legacy? By evoking taboos such as incest and parricide, Shani Mootoo and Achmat Dangor choose to reject any idealization of what transmission is about, in groups of people that sometimes called themselves “diasporas.” Dangor and Mootoo’s readers are compelled to think instead of how difficult it is to overcome deadly and shameful legacies, thanks to fictional stories that link intimate narratives and memories to Big History. The metaphor of natural outgrowth (the bitter fruit, the cereus ...) is at the core of the two novels, and suggests how plants tend to emblematize the idea of hybrid identities. Bitter Fruit and Cereus Blooms at Night share stories of transplantation and grafts, but also of mutilations, putrefaction, and death. Mikey Ali and Mala Ramchandin, trapped in incest and driven to parricide, are descendants who embody the complex issues of Indian heritage and, beyond that particularity, they are universal characters who show how transmission is complicated in a world of willing or unwilling encounters and migrations. If Achmat Dangor’s novel invites us to think of the dark consequences of “identités meurtrières,”55 Shani Mootoo’s narrative spares some hope by defending freedom and love as ways to fight exclusion and alienation, as if trying to spread the mantra-like formula “hoping for love, always hoping.”56 53

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991) 10-11. 54 Ibid., 20. 55 Amin Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières (Paris: B. Grasset, 1998). 56 Shani Mootoo, The Predicament of Or, 54.

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Works Cited Astruc, Rémi. Le renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle : essai d’anthropologie littéraire. Paris: Ed. Classiques Garnier, 2010. Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, Literature in the Event. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005. Barnett, Pamela E. Dangerous Desire: Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties. New York; London: Routledge, 2004. Brink, André. “Interrogating silence: new possibilities faced by South African literature.” In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970-1995, edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 14-28. London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Casteel, Sarah Phillips. “New World Pastoral: the Caribbean Garden and Emplacement in G. Pineau and S. Mootoo.” Interventions 5.1 (2003): 12-28. Quoted by Pecic Zoran, Queer narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora. Exploring Tactics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 50. Constant-Martin, Denis. “Le poids du nom. Culture populaire et constructions identitaires chez les “Métis” du Cap.” Critique internationale 1.1 (1998): 73-100. Dallis, Jameela F. “‘Life Refusing to End’: The Transformative Gothic in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” In Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture edited by Eric Gary Anderson and Taylor Haggood, 224-235. Southern Literary Studies, Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit. Cape Town: Kwela, 2001. First American Reprint, New York: Black Cat, 2001. —. Interviewed by Audrey Brown. Insig, January/February 2002, 70. Quoted by Lucy Valerie Graham, State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 158. —. Interviewed by Jean Meiring. “Tasting the sweet fruit of literary success.” Thisday, 21 October 2004. Accessed January 12, 2015. http://www.oulitnet.co.za/nosecret/achmat_dangor.asp —. Strange Pilgrimages. Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2013. —. “The Indian Diaspora: a myth” (paper presented at Relocating Literature: Africa and India, Conference at the university of Witwatersrand, 11 September 1999). Quoted by Loren Kruger. “Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001): 137.

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—. Waiting for Leila. Johannesburg, 1981. Quoted by Loren Kruger. “Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001): 140. Dangor, Suleman Essop Dangor. “The Myth of the 1860 Settlers.” Africa Quarterly 32 (1993): 73-80. Quoted by Loren Kruger. “Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001): 135. Daoud, Kamel. Meursault, Contre-enquête. Paris: Actes Sud, 2014. De Klerk, Frederik. The Last Trek - A New Beginning. London: Macmillan, 1998. Dracius, Suzanne. L’autre qui danse. 1989. Reprint, Paris: éditions du Rocher, 2007. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. Reprint, New York: Random House, 1990. —. Intruder in the Dust. 1948. Reprint, New York: Random House, 1991. Gandsman, Ari. “‘L’appel du sang’ : le débat sur la restitution des enfants de disparus en Argentine post-dictatoriale.” Anthropologie et Sociétés 33-1 (2009): 31-48. Goldblatt, Beth and Sheila Meintjes. Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, A submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. University of Witwatersrand, Political Sciences and Gender Studies Departement, May 1996. Accessed January 12, 2015. http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/submit/gender.htm. Gwin, Minrose. The Woman in the Red Dress, Gender, Space and Reading. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2002. Kruger, Loren. “Black Atlantics, White Indians, and Jews: Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and Others.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001): 111-143. Maalouf, Amin. Les identités meurtrières. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1998. Morgan, Paula. “Fashioning Women for a Brave new World: Gender, Ethnicity and Literary Representation.” Feminist Africa 7 (2006): 101102. Mootoo, Shani. Interviewed by Lydia Peroviü, Brian Francis and Rose Cullis. Brockton Writers Series, 10 July 2013, Toronto. Accessed April 14, 2014. https://brocktonwritersseries.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/bws-10-0713-shani-mootoo/. —. Interviewed by Richard Rung. “Dear Shani, Hiya Richard ... .” Felix, A

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Journal of Media Arts and Communication, 2-1 (1995). Accessed January 12, 2016. http://www.e-felix.org/issue4/shani.html. —. “Photo-Parentheses.” In Desire in Seven Voices, edited by Lorna Crozier, 105-124. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1999. —. The Predicament of Or. Vancouver: Polestar Book Publishers, 2001. —. Cereus Blooms at Night. 1996. Reprint New York, Grove Press, 2009. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. With a foreword by the author. 1970, 1998. Reprint, New York: Vintage International Edition, 2007. Nieuwoudt, Stephanie. “Bitter vrug: 'n nuwe soort protes-Ietterkunde.” Die Burger, 1 November 2001. Niranjana, Tejaswini. “‘Left to the Imagination’: Indian nationalisms and female sexuality.” In A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, edited by Janaki Nair & Mary E. John, 111-138. London: Zed Books, 2000. Pineau, Gisèle. La grande drive des esprits. Paris: Le serpent à plumes, 1993. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 19811991. London: Granta Books, 1991. Sarbadhikary, Krishna. Surviving the Fracture Writers of the IndoCaribbean Diaspora. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2007, xxiii. Zoran, Pecic. Queer narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora. Exploring Tactics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

CHAPTER FOUR ‘WHO SHALL INHERIT BENGAL?’ A READING OF ANURADHA ROY’S AN ATLAS OF IMPOSSIBLE LONGING EVELYNE HANQUART-TURNER

Anuradha Roy’s first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, came out in England in 2008. It immediately received much critical attention there and on its publication in the United States. Many reviews appeared in a variety of newspapers and journals. Interestingly enough, the critics focused on different aspects of the novel, some commenting on the « Indianness » of the book, its anchoring in the country’s history and/or geography, some on its ecofeminism, others on the fluidity of Roy’s style, and others again on her connection to English and American literature from Jane Austen to Dreiser or T.S. Eliot.1 To my surprise, none mentioned what struck me as obvious, its connection with E.M. Forster’s Howards End. All these aspects are obviously relevant to the scope of this rich and luscious novel. However, in this article, I shall particularly focus on the treatment of the theme of heritance in the novel, and try to delineate what it owes to Forster’s narrative and why it breaks away from it. An Atlas of Impossible Longing is structured in three parts, each of which is somehow self-contained though sequentially related and narrated 1

See f.i . respectively, Michael Gorra, The New York Times, 24 June 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-an-atlas-ofimpossible-longing-by-anuradha-roy.html?_r=0, consulted December 15, 2015; Marie Arana, The Washington Post, 25 April 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-an-atlas-ofimpossible-longing/2011/04/11/AFE4tbkE_story.html, consulted December 15, 2015; and Shirley Chew. The Independent, 4 July 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/an-atlas-ofimpossible-longing-by-anuradha-roy-859390.html, consulted December 15, 2015.

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from a different character’s, and a different generation’s, point of view. Indeed, the novel can be read as a family saga extending over three generations from the year 1907 when Amulya, breaking away from Calcutta, builds his house in Songarh, a little town in the hills of Western Bengal, perceived by his wife and relatives as the wild West, to the 1950s and 60s when Mukunda participates in the real estate boom of postPartition India. These two landmarks are to be noted in the architecture and the time frame of the whole novel, as houses have a life span extending beyond human life, which probably led Shirley Chew to emphasize their symbolic and central role in the lives of the main characters, quoting T.S. Eliot: "In succession/Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,/ Are removed, destroyed, restored."2 If part I relates the life of Amulya and his family in Songarh, stressing the two meanings of “house” both as building and dynasty and giving an insight into the evanescent relationships between ordinary educated Bengalis and the colonial British on one hand and, more importantly, with the tribal people in the wilderness nearby on the other, it also stresses the unhappy and secluded life of the lady of the house Kananbala, whose very seclusion leads to depression and a mild form of madness, thus reinforcing her imprisonment in her own house on Amulya’s orders. Part II focuses on the second generation’s life in Songarh when Amulya’s two sons, in their very different ways, claim their inheritance, Kamal as his father’s successor in the family business of manufacturing medicines and cosmetics from the local plants thanks to the age-old knowledge of the tribals that had been transmitted to his father, and Nirmal as an archeologist bent on unearthing the ancient Indian past in the wake of Mohenjodaro and Harappa excavations, the political impact of which on Indians’ perception of their past is well documented in Nehru’s The Discovery of India.3 When Kamal and his wife stick to Songarh, Nirmal, a desperate young widower, travels far and wide in the India of the last decades of the British Raj. If his passion for re-appropriating the Indian past leads him back to Songarh, the novel, however, returns to the fate of women in the 1930s, and more specifically to the prejudices attached to widowhood when young widows were still victims of traditional vexations and deprivations, and their lives in little provincial places like Songarh 2

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “East Coker,”179-182. The ancient sites were rediscovered in the early 1920s, though some traces at Harappa had been sighted as early as the mid-19th century. See J. Nehru The Discovery of India (Oxford: University Press, 1946). 3

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were stunted by constraints inherited from a distant past, despite their inherent potential in modern India. So far, the novel has been centred around the house in Songarh where Amulya had established his family, so far the plot has indeed evolved along the lines of a family saga strongly rooted in the wildest parts of West Bengal, where the century-old continuity of life has been symbolically illustrated by the tribals, their culture, and the ruins of ancient civilizations, all parts of the characters’ inheritance modelling their present day existence. So far, the narration has been taken on by an omniscient narrator, thus giving the narrative the form of a generational story with a loosely defined plot line, despite some crises, domestic or otherwise. Hence the reader’s surprise at the opening of part III, roughly in the middle of the novel, which starts in the first person. From now on, the story is autobiographical and the narrator is Mukunda, the orphan, the bastard born of a tribal woman and an unknown Hindu father, probably one of Amulya’s factory workers, whom the patriarch and then Nirmal have taken charge of and educated first in the local orphanage, then at home with Bakul, Nirmal’s motherless daughter. When Mukunda picks up the narration, he is a grown-up married man, working in real estate in post-Partition Calcutta, and the story of his life, as he tells it, rambles through episodes of his past to the present when he picks up the narrative to take us into this future when his “impossible longing” seems to be on the verge of realization, when the novel closes with an open ending. As nobody’s son, Mukunda, by definition as it were, is not meant to inherit any material property. His job - though he works for a sharkish developer and aspires at becoming an entrepreneur himself - makes him, in a sense, a dispenser of houses and properties to strangers in and around Calcutta, the big city in full swing and expansion due to the migrations induced by Partition and the new economy born after Independence. Chance and friendship and the vagaries of history make of him first the guardian, then, as years go by, the tacit inheritor of an exiled Muslim’s house in working class Calcutta where he can, in his turn, create his own family and start a new, promising life. As he turns back to his childhood and adolescence in Songarh, bitterness and rancour exude from his memories, since he does not understand why he was suddenly excluded from family life, from the magic circle created by his intense friendship with Bakul, and sent away to Calcutta on what appeared to him the pretext of education. His resentment had been so deep that he decided to cut off all links with his adoptive family after graduating. And now Mukunda learns that Kamal’s swindling of his brother’s inheritance is going to make

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Nirmal, and above all, Bakul, homeless, and that the Songarh house is to be destroyed by developers. Selling the Calcutta house that he thinks of as his by default to buy the Songarh house and thus more or less consciously laying claims to some sort of inheritance, Mukunda destroys his own marriage in fact and loses his only son, while re-establishing his link with the only family he had as a child and thereby, his childhood home. Somehow, as there is no male heir in this generation, Mukunda, the family’s protégé, has become the protector and the lawful recipient of the family’s ancestral home. In a sense he becomes, to Nirmal at least, the son he never had. In that respect, inheritance and the quest for identity are closely linked. The house becomes the symbol and embodiment of identity and filiation, a symbol of the roots inherited by any individual from the past. In this case, Mukunda’s acquisition of Amulya Babu’s property is both an inheritance as it integrates him more completely into the family, reestablishing his claim of ownership of the land as a tribal, and a rupture, as the bloodline and filiation that generally legitimizes property is broken in favour of Mukunda rather than Bakul, and as the estate is actually sold. The house that Amulya built in Songarh, however, for all its characterlike importance in the story, is not the only one to play such a role. In the extremely short prologue, an anonymous first person narrator describes to the reader an old sepia photograph of another house, mysteriously compared to the sinking Atlantis, fallen prey to the vagaries of the changing river bed and the monsoon rains, located in another part of Bengal, in the deltaic region. This ancient, open, elegant, aristocratic mansion geographically and architecturally contrasts with Songarh. It is the home of Nirmal’s wife, where she was born and where she died giving birth to Bakul. The decadence of the Manoharpur house, its exposure to elemental dangers and its contrast with Songarh are subthemes looming through the novel in preparation for the climax of part III, when Mukunda, having saved the Songarh house, is now called upon to rescue the Manoharpur mansion, which is Bakul’s inheritance, threatened this time by the greed and corruption of developers and false friends. The love story between Mukunda and Bakul having also evolved to fruition, Mukunda’s success in the rescue of Manoharpur makes it clear that from then on the couple will benefit from two ancestral homes, one legally acquired by Mukunda, the other Bakul’s heirloom. The homeless orphan bastard ends up as the beneficiary of two estates in two opposite parts of Bengal. If the palm of his hand was the atlas in which Mukunda’s impossible longing could be read, destiny and his life-long love of Bakul seem to have enabled his fulfilment. No longer dispossessed nor beyond the pale, he

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does belong; his tribal roots have again found their ground in the whole of Bengal from the west to the coast. Indeed, if Lionel Trilling saw in Howards End the novel about “Who shall inherit England,”4 Anuradha Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing, written a century later, is certainly that of “who shall inherit Bengal”, in both cases the house standing as a metonymy for the country. Ownership of houses is at the core of the plot development and the emotions, actions, aspirations, and achievements of the characters that draw more or less distant orbits around these houses, which anchor them in the traditions and the society of the country. The comparisons and contrasts that can be drawn between the two novels tellingly highlight the theme of inheritance and rupture we are addressing today. Many of the tropes and motifs in the Indian novel echo those developed in its English counterpart as they reverberate in the plot which, however, expanding more generously in time and space, is quite distinct from Forster’s own. A first interesting parallel is to be found in the identity of the heir to the various properties. Leonard Bast and the young son he had with Helen, just like Mukunda, carry the motive of illegitimacy, and in both cases, the open ending of the novels clearly points to them as the future heirs to the estate. Leonard comes from the solid rural stock of British peasantry, which is destroyed by the blemish of urbanization, just as Mukunda comes from the tribal population of Bengal, which is contaminated by his life in Calcutta. Indeed, the invasive progressions of urbanization and the values, or lack of values, associated with its modernity, are, in India as well as England, threatening the natural life of the countryside. The fight between Nature whose original beauty is spoilt, whether it be by London’s pollution preventing Leonard from seeing the stars or the Songarh forest progressively eaten up by mining, not to mention the all pervasive pollution of Calcutta, and human agency stunting life all around, is one of the motifs colouring the background of the two plots. Urban development is the enemy for many of the characters and the others - those like Kamal the businessman or Aangti Babu the developer - have been corrupted by its materialistic atmosphere, just like Mr. Wilcox and his sons. The blow thus stricken at human decency also translates into a very practical, financial onslaught on the houses themselves. If Margaret Schlegel was to lose her London home to developers, thus leading Mrs. Wilcox to the donation of Howards End, Bakul’s two homes are threatened in the very 4

Lionel Trilling, E.M. Forster (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions. The Makers of Modern Literature, 1943).

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same way, leading Mukunda to reconsider his initial aspiration at emulating Aangti Babu and thus to save his soul as well as Bakul from homelessness and the loss of inheritance. Despoilment of the intended heir is in both novels a crux to the plot. Just like the Wilcoxes have managed to persuade themselves that Mrs. Wilcox could not possibly have meant what she wrote, Kamal as the elder brother has convinced himself that he is the sole heir to the Songrah house when he sells it to Aangti Babu, and Rathin Mullik pretends the Manoharpur house is legally his in repayment of the monies and gifts extended by his family to Bakul’s grandfather. The destruction of the wills and papers establishing who is to inherit is, in both the cases, the necessary twist in the plot for the intended despoilment of a more or less isolated female character who ultimately, by a fortuitous intervention in Howards End or planned action in An Atlas, will recover her property and thus provide the moral ending of the novels. In both works the intimation of a future in which the inheritance will be handed over to a further generation is more or less clearly perceptible. In Howards End, Helen’s son is indeed present in the final view of the house. In An Atlas, it is less clear, but its romantic ending that sees the lovers reunited together with the sight of children on the further bank of the river suggests that Mukunda and Bakul will have offspring. “Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants” as the saying goes. The intertextual connections thus established between Forster's novel and Roy's account clearly enable the reader to find echoes not merely in the interplay of themes, but in the very act of writing the notion of inheritance. The plots, however, differ in scope and evolve along very distinct lines. An Atlas is definitely a postmodern novel, and it explores a diversity of routes and plot lines in its different parts, the thread linking them being the character of Mukunda, peripheral at first and nearing the centre as the novel moves on from the life story of Amulya and Kananbala to that of the next generation before reaching Mukunda’s autobiographical narrative, so that at first, rather disconcertingly, the plot appears to relate the story of a married couple and the sad fate imposed on the woman by her patriarchal spouse, her involvement in the unsolved mystery of a murder, a plot line from which the second part breaks away to concentrate no longer on the foundation of a house and a dynasty but on the value of the distant past inherited by an emerging nation and the role played by ancestral traditions interfering within the love story of two widowed people. The third part breaks even further away from what precedes insofar as the narrative mode completely changes, and the plot evolves in the mode of a novel of apprenticeship as Mukunda’s life matures and the character becomes increasingly aware of his real self and his fundamental

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aim, that is his acceptance of the past which reunites him with Bakul. If, in a sense, the separate plot lines evolving in the three parts, are characterized by ruptures and could lead to somehow considering the novel as three different ones, albeit extremely short, in a series like, say The Forsyte Saga,5 the more subterranean theme and plot line of Bengal’s history gives its profound unity to the work. In each part the major male characters— Amulya, Nirmal, and Mukunda—all contribute to the making, or the making aware of, the history and identity of their country and of its continuity in the present for the future, aware of the inheritance that grows thanks to the work of men, and which has to be passed on to the next generation. The whole of Bengal in its diversity, from the hills to the delta, from the wilderness of its countryside to that of its megalopolis, is to be preserved and transmitted as the heirloom of all its inhabitants, whether tribals, Hindus or Muslims, whether well-born like Bakul or illegitimate like Mukunda, whether rich or poor. So that to the question “Who shall inherit Bengal?” the answer is, of course, Mukunda and people like him, because his obscure roots and complicated life-story make of him the very epitome of the Bengal population in its diversity. And he is to inherit the whole of Bengal in its diversity, even if the country has been mutilated by Partition and the exclusion or marginalization of the Muslim community, as shown in his relationship with Suleiman Chacha. To conclude, one can indeed widen the scope of the initial question, and just like the house was a metonymy for Bengal, Bengal itself can be seen as a metonymy for the whole of India. Indeed, if the literary Songarh and Manoharpur are deeply anchored in the hills or the riverbanks of Bengal, and firmly defined in the geography of the novel, the real-life models of these fictional cities lie outside Bengal. Songarh, with its ancient fort and modern quarries that recall the mica and coal mines of the story is actually located in Gujarat, whereas Manoharpur and its mighty river are in Jharkhand. Hence, if the answer to the question remains the same, Anuradha Roy’s novel actually asks even more perturbingly “Who shall inherit India?” As Pearl Doherty comments in The Financial Times, “An Atlas of Impossible Longing is a love letter to India’s past […]. Poetic and evocative, Roy’s writing is a joy”6 as it opens up perspectives into the future.

5 6

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (London: William Heinemann, 1922). Pearl Doherty, The Financial Times, 28 June 2008.

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Works Cited Arana, Marie. “Book review: An Atlas of Impossible Longing.” The Washington Post, 25 April 2011. Accessed December 15, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-reviewan-atlas-of-impossible-longing/2011/04/11/AFE4tbkE_story.html. Chew, Shirley. “An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy.” The Independent, 4 July 2008. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/anatlas-of-impossible-longing-by-anuradha-roy-859390.html. Doherty, Pearl. “An Atlas of Impossible Longing. Review.” The Financial Times, 28 June 2008. Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. “East Coker.” 179-182. Galsworthy, John. The Forsyte Saga. London: William Heinemann, 1922. Gorra, Michael. “Love and Real Estate in South Asia.” The New York Times, 24 June 2011. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-anatlas-of-impossible-longing-by-anuradha-roy.html?_r=0, Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Oxford: University Press, 1946. Trilling, Lionel. E.M. Forster. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions. The Makers of Modern Literature, 1943.

CHAPTER FIVE TRANSCENDING THE DUAL HERITAGE OF EXILE IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S FICTION: THE IMPERIOUS DESIRE FOR A CHOSEN REALM AHMED MULLA

Traditional societies wish to view their cultures as monolithic and immutable. Obsessed with the notion of purity,1 they revise and rewrite their histories in order to erase traces of foreign influences. As a consequence, these societies value what they perceive to be their authentic heritage as a perfect system and a sacred organization that should in no case allow further alterations. This way of thinking attributes a tremendous import to the contribution of men of the past, implying thereby the uselessness of people of the present and the death of social and cultural invention and progress. In these organizations, priority is given to culture over individuals, for culture is to be preserved in a continuum and, with this aim in mind, transmitted from generation to generation. Men are mere holders of this heritage; as such, these individuals bear a responsibility toward preceding and succeeding generations, and also toward the cultural legacy they have to pass on. And if foreign influences are eradicated from the past, they are also kept at bay in the present. In his short story entitled “The Great Wall,” the Albanian writer Ismaïl Kadaré has suggested that the Great Wall of .

1 Bernard Henri-Lévy, “L’intégrisme ou l’épuration sans fin,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 22-28 septembre 1994, 8.

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China was not only meant to protect the Chinese Empire from military offensives, but also from cultural invasions.2 The same attitude can be found at the time of globalization. Even though many physical and political borders have been abolished, an insidious strengthening of psychological frontiers seems evident. When boundaries collapse, people fear that their cultures will vanish; as a reaction, they try to give more importance to some salient aspects of their heritage. In the same way, people who migrate to culturally alien societies feel the need to preserve their customs from an inexorable death. Even more than others, they worry about transmitting a heritage that is authentic and faithful to their origins. This anguish forms the crux of Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction. In the works of this contemporary Indo-American novelist and short story writer, children of immigrants find themselves in between their parents’ legacy, on the one hand, and the influence of the society in which they are born, on the other. It can then be of interest to observe how these children of diaspora and citizens of globalization deal with such a dual heritage, and examine how the process of identity building finds untrodden paths in this context. This article attempts to study the treatment of dual heritage in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake3 and her short story “Hema and Kaushik”4 published in 2004 and 2008 respectively. Those who are born within a diaspora have a complex heritage to live with. First of all, they are permanently associated with the country of their ancestors, a remote land that has no real value for them, since it is now their parents’ “imaginary homeland.”5 However, and to a large extent, the latter’s influence is often disproportionately overpowering—at least during the early stages of childhood—for culture starts at home. And for many children of immigrants living in the United States, the mother tongue is not North American English. For instance, the character of Moushumi in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake occasionally uses the Bengali she had been taught in her early years, even later on in her adult life. (The Namesake, 211). This language resurfaces when this young woman meets Gogol, the main protagonist of the novel, at a time when she resigns 2

Ismail Kadare, Agamemnon's Daughter, David Bellos translator (New York: Aracade Publishing, 2006), 191-233. 3 Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (London: Harper Perennial, 2004). 4 In Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (New Delhi: Random House India, 2008), 223-333. All subsequent references are to this edition. 5 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, (London: Granta Books, Penguin Books, 1992), 10.

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herself to reconcile with the Indian side of her identity. The persistence of this linguistic knowledge, which is ingrained since it can be reactivated at will, testifies to the efficiency of the education provided by her mother. In truth, studies tend to demonstrate that, within expatriate South Asian communities, mothers are under social pressure when the preservation of the vernacular culture is concerned. According to Sundari Balan, there is indeed a strong “moral responsibility for transmission of cultural values.”6 The newborn is almost immediately taken care of by his mother, who is only an instrument of the group, in order to guarantee his/her assimilation within his/her community of origin. In this sense, heritage can rather be viewed as a relationship that binds the individual to his community in a bond of submission. However, if Moushumi may give the impression that she has more or less adopted her mother tongue, there is little doubt about her opinion on the other aspects of the cultural legacy she has received. Together with Gogol, she laments on the unending months she has to spend with her parents when they go back to Calcutta, long stays that make her feel “plucked out of [her] American [life]” (The Namesake, 212). Though she believes her “roots” are uniquely American, her parents’ regular trips to Calcutta have the purpose of making her aware of her link to their motherland. Their ultimate aim is to make her remain within their cultural universe and, more importantly, within their community. They do so by multiplying her encounters with potential grooms (The Namesake, 213). As a young American, sensible to her environment and influenced by the ways of her fellow citizens, Moushumi is inevitably inclined toward considering those practices as inappropriate and awkward. The teenager feels entrapped in social interactions that make her ill-at-ease. Moreover, Moushumi is given strict instructions on matters of the heart: She had always been admonished not to marry an American, as had [Gogol], but he gathers that in her case these warnings had been relentless, and had therefore plagued her far more than they had him. (ibid.)

Exogenous weddings constitute the ultimate transgression in traditional Indian societies. Parents fear such an eventuality and they do their best to 6

Sundari Balan, Ph.D. thesis entitled Being Asians, good “moms,” and great workers: Investigating the psychological contours of Asian Indian Immigrant Women’s “Model Minority” experience, submitted to the University of Michigan, 2009, 18.

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prohibit what might turn out to be the cause of their social ruin. That is the reason why they have recourse to a form of extreme psychological pressure bordering on violence. In such conditions, it is unlikely that the young girl considers her parents’ legacy as favourable to her blossoming. When the transmission of culture is accompanied by an authoritarian attitude, the child cannot see the legacy under a positive light. What is perhaps “given” with the best of intentions can only be perceived as something “imposed.” Parental endeavours are therefore destined to fail, because, as suggested by Bernard Lahire and Albert Bandura, transmission should never be imposed.7 From then on, Moushumi commits herself to a process of permanent resistance, and her protest takes many forms. Unsatisfied by her life prospects, this teenager sets in motion psychological strategies to fashion an alternative identity. Her years in college provide her with the ideal ground for the pursuit of her emancipation. “At Brown her rebellion had been academic ... Without telling [her parents], she’d pursued a double major in French” (The Namesake, 214). Unlike many children of immigrants and most of the Lahirian characters who in this case identify themselves with their Western environment to the detriment of their Indian roots, Moushumi chooses to transcend the binary option inherent to her situation: Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind (ibid.).

By displacing herself mentally, Moushumi yearns for what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space,” a space where resistance is broken and where spontaneous affinities create a receptive identity. Instead of anchoring the individual in an imposed heritage, the chosen “Third Space” provides the advantage of generating flexibility as it “initiates new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation.”8 The alternative culture Moushumi enters enables her to move away from what she sees as a static heritage towards a dynamic and fulfilling space, where

7

Sylvie Octobre et al., “La diversification des formes de la transmission culturelle: quelques éléments de réflexion à partir d’une enquête longitudinale sur les pratiques culturelles des adolescents,” Recherches Familiales 1.8 (2011): 71-80. p. 74. 8 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, 36.

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she can embrace new cultural items without the feeling of betraying her true self and her innermost aspirations. At first, Moushumi moves through the French language and culture in a detached spirit. We can notice that in this choice there is something akin to what is at stake in the paradoxical title of Milan Kundera’s novel: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.9 “It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her, in favour of one that had no claim whatsoever” (ibid.). Moushumi aspires to this lightness of being; but at the same time, she encounters the toxic effect of discovery. At once, an entire world opens up for her, a world in which she is finally able to experience a relative degree of freedom. When she gets the opportunity to move to the centre of her third culture, that is to say, Paris, Moushumi gives free rein to her sexual life. The once repressed girl multiplies affairs with all types of men. Suddenly it was easy ... [S]uddenly, in that new city, she was transformed into the kind of girl she had once envied, had believed she would never become (The Namesake, 215).

Moushumi’s own exile allows her to start anew, beyond the despair that stemmed from her moral heritage. “She gave herself openly, completely, not caring about the consequences” (ibid.). Moushumi’s hedonistic quest abolishes her whole past and anchors her in the present, a present in which nothing apart from the fulfilment of her desire matters, not even her. She is ready to suffer the consequences of her acts, ready to be hurt; but she is not the least eager to renounce the intensity of her present. Moushumi seems to admit that her metamorphosis would not have been possible without her stay in Paris and her familiarity with French culture. Apart from the four years of study at college (The Namesake, 214), the first-hand experience she gets during her stay in Paris (The Namesake, 215) allows her to be “fluent” in this domain (The Namesake, 198). Moushumi’s endeavour is a conscious move towards the building of a new identity. And the knowledge she acquires is not for a temporary purpose. For many months, Moushumi is completely cut off from her personal American and Indian backgrounds; she is on her own. Her identity is temporarily undefined, on the move. But she gets anchored within the 9 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (London: Harper Perennial, (1984) 2005).

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third culture she has chosen. And within less than a year, “[s]he found a job working for an agency, helping American businesspeople learn conversational French” (The Namesake, 215). In that respect, Moushumi has acquired a certain degree of mastery over the French language that is considerable enough to allow her to become a transmitter of this means of communication. Similarly, it is through knowledge that Hema, another Lahirian character, who appears in the triptych of stories entitled “Hema and Kaushik,” enters a realm that is completely foreign to her background. In fact, when some acquaintances talk about the city of Rome and its monuments, Hema, who is still in her early adolescence, is aware that her parents do not know: What the Pantheon was. I knew.— I was, in fact, in the middle of learning about ancient Rome in my Latin class, writing a long report about its art and architecture ... ” (Unaccustomed Earth, 233).

The American school and the knowledge she acquires there give Hema an indisputable advantage over her parents. In truth, there is always a discrepancy between the universe of school and the education provided by immigrant parents in the minds of their children. For these youngsters, the choice is easy to make between uninitiated parents and the mainstream. According to Sayad, children often perceive their parents as “individuals of the past.”10 It is then all the more easy for Moushumi and Hema to dismiss their heritage, because in their eyes their parents are disconnected from the present, and are therefore unable to provide them with appropriate cultural tools to help them survive in contemporary society. Those parents are considered useless in a world where, as Camilleri argues, every individual defines himself according to the host country.11 Truly, Hema is impressed by the civilization she “discovers”, not only thanks to her teacher, but also through her own research, since she has to write a detailed report. Her enthusiasm gives way to an intimacy with this culture.

10

A. Sayad, “Le mode de génération des générations immigrées”, in MigrantsFormation, 98 (1994): 6-20, p. 14 (my translation). 11 Azzam Amin, “Stratégies identitaires et stratégies d’acculturation: deux modèles complémentaires,” Alterstice -- Revue Internationale de la Recherche Interculturelle 2.2 (2012): 104.

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Since eighth grade, reading Latin had been an addiction, every line a puzzle to coax into meaning. The knowledge she’d slowly accumulated, the ancient words and declensions and syntax that dwelled in her brain, felt sacred, enabling her to bring a dead world to life (Unaccustomed Earth, 299).

Hema’s exploration of the ancient civilization of Rome is a way to find a substitute for her missing past. A “libido sciendi” seems to be at work here, to use a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu in reference to the yearning for erudition.12 In the same way, an archeological pleasure is manifest in extracting an extinct knowledge that no longer has face value in the world she inhabits, a gratification in believing that she is bringing that forgotten tongue to life, activities that provide her with a sense of agency: Hema is not simply a receiver of culture, but rather someone who selects her heritage and who maintains an active relationship with it. While Moushumi invests the present, Hema is more interested in the past, a past that is so important in the establishment of Western cultural supremacy. However, the uneasiness with identity encountered by these women stems from the past since both of them shun their parents’ legacy. Their attitude is similar to what is expressed by the British writer Tariq Ali when he admits his preference for “affiliations” over “filiations.”13 Actually, Moushumi and Hema see themselves as cultural hostages. The word “hostage” comes from the noun “host” which defines the individual who welcomes the other, the guest, in a spirit of hospitality. However, the word “hostage” has a negative connotation, since it is used to designate someone who is under detention against his will. The ambiguity of this association has been noted by Jacques Derrida for whom both host and guest are in the end the hostages of the other.14 Here, both protagonists see their horizons considerably limited. This is what finally explains their imperious need to move beyond the cultural boundaries imposed on them. However, Moushumi and Hema do not become refugees in an opposite camp, nor do they behave as tourists in Paris or Rome. Their ambition is to get accustomed to these places and civilizations to the point that they feel at home in these worlds. As a matter of fact, both women emblematically 12

Pierre Bourdieu, Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 172. 13 Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2006), 120. 14 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 125.

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end up as university scholars, and they choose the cultures that have constituted their centres of interest as the fields of their academic investigations. For these protagonists, academia is not just an occupation; the research they undertake has an ontological function since they tend to build their new identities around the discoveries they make along their paths, while they concomitantly contribute to the field of knowledge. These women are not passive receivers or spectators of foreign and dead civilizations; they take part in the critical exploration of these universes, they produce discourses that give them authority on their subjects. In truth, studies on cultural transmission have demonstrated that what parents try to pass on is inevitably “transformed” by inheritors.15 Even at the horizontal level, encounters between different cultural spheres introduce “mutability.”16 In the same vein, François de Singly observes that parents and children usually cooperate in what he calls the “coproduction” of identities.17 However, those who are born in a country that is by far different from the one their parents come from have the tendency to see themselves in opposition to those parents and to their culture. As a consequence, they wish to ignore the fact that they share, even in a limited way, a common legacy. There is, then, no yearning on their part to cooperate with their parents, or to carry on a “mutation” of their ancestors’ culture. Turning one’s back to one’s original heritage is possible in the global world, since the latter offers a wide range of cultural patterns one is free to adopt and appropriate. Cultures are no longer the property of one community or the other. They are at anyone’s disposal in a spirit of shared wealth, in a “sense of mutuality.”18 As a matter of fact, Jhumpa Lahiri’s protagonists find themselves with a wider choice of models to define their identities that are undoubtedly in progress. Citizens of the multicultural world are inevitably subject to what Bishnupriya Ghosh defines as “the entanglements, crossings, and seepage accompanying global exchanges.”19 One cannot remain immune from the cultural waves that rhythm the world; but there is no denying that some of Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters are selective in their affiliations, resenting what they receive from their parents, and longing for what appear to be universal cultural references. 15

Octobre et al., op.cit., 77. Breckenridge et al., “Introduction,” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 578. 17 Octobre et al., op.cit., 74. 18 Breckenridge et al., op.cit., 578. 19 Bishnupriya Ghosh, “Once There Was Cosmopolitanism: Enchanted Pasts as Global History in the Contemporary Novel,” Ariel 42.1 (2011): 19. 16

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Contrarily to contemporary trends that celebrate cosmopolitans and citizens of the world, these women refuse to be stuck in the situation of those who are neither here nor there. They definitely have a desire to be rooted. But it is possible to ask ourselves whether an identity that scorns its heritage, that is chosen, is not finally doomed to remain a whimsical identity.

Works Cited Ali, Tariq. Conversations with Edward Said. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2006. Amin, Azzam. “Stratégies identitaires et stratégies d’acculturation: deux modèles complémentaires.” Alterstice - Revue Internationale de la Recherche Interculturelle, 2.2 (2012): 103-116. Balan, Sundari. Being Asians, good “moms,” and great workers: Investigating the psychological contours of Asian Indian Immigrant Women’s “Model Minority” experience. Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Michigan, 2009. Bandura, Albert. L’apprentissage social. Bruxelles: Mardaga, 1980. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Brekenridge, Carol & Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty. “Introduction.” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 577-89. Camilleri, Carmel. “Stratégies identitaires: les voies de la complexification.” In Identité collective et altérité, edited by M.A. Hily and M.L. Lebfevre, 197-211. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. De Singly, François. Les adonaissants. Paris: Armand Colin, 2006. Ghosh, Bishnupriya. “Once There Was Cosmopolitanism: Enchanted Pasts as Global History in the Contemporary Novel.” Ariel 42.1 (2011): 1134. Kadare, Ismaïl. “The Great Wall.” Agamemnon’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 1984. Reprint, London: Harper Perennial, 2005. Lahire, Bernard. “Héritages sexués et incorporation des habitudes et des croyances.” In La dialectique des rapports hommes-femmes edited by Thierry Bloss, 9-25. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. London: Harper Perennial, 2004.

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—. Unaccustomed Earth. New Delhi: Random House India. 2008. Lévy, Bernard-Henri. “L’intégrisme ou l’épuration sans fin.” Le Nouvel Observateur, 22-28 September 1994, 8. Octobre, Sylvie & Christine Détrez, Pierre Merckle, Nathalie Berthomier. “La diversification des formes de la transmission culturelle: quelques éléments de réflexion à partir d’une enquête longitudinale sur les pratiques culturelles des adolescents.” Recherches Familiales, 1.8 (2011): 71-80. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991. London: Granta Books, Penguin Books, 1992. Sayad, A. “Le mode de génération des générations immigrées.” MigrantsFormation 98 (1994): 6-20.

CHAPTER SIX FAMILY, GEOGRAPHY, AND IDEOLOGY IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE LOWLAND GEETHA GANAPATHY-DORÉ

Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel, The Lowland, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013, resonates with her earlier fiction about Indian immigrants in the US, their dreams and disappointments, but at the same time embeds the history of the Naxalite movement in Bengal in the vast background of the history of the world from 1785 to 2010. It has been quite logically qualified as an end of the era novel by Esha Shah.1 Lahiri’s text is to be read in the light of Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Literature:2 Literature labours to develop the landscape of the visible, the modes of deciphering that landscape and the diagnosis about what individuals and collectives do there and can do there.

Written in a natural realistic style, Lahiri’s slow-paced narrative spans five generations and stages the drama of individuation of two codependent brothers from a middle class family in Kolkata. The elder brother Udayan Mitra becomes a Naxalite and is killed by the police, and the younger brother Subhash Mitra migrates to the US and becomes an academic. These disjoined destinies, re-enacting the partition of Bengal and epitomizing the ideological choice that postcolonial India has had to make between liberalism and communism, are determined by the geography of the eponymous lowland, the locus of both engenderment and death in the novel: 1

Esha Shah, “The Self and the Political: A Reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Low Land,” The Economic and Political Weekly 2014 (XLIX.4): 30. 2 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, (original French version 2006) 2011), 26.

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The widowed and pregnant Gauri, who accepts a levirate marriage in order to escape an oppressive present and offer a bright future to the fatherless child, provides the connecting link between them. In her earlier novel The Namesake, Lahiri had likened the visually marked and uneasy condition of the migrant to that of a pregnant woman. In this novel, she has gone one step further and made the pregnant migrant woman a central figure. Gauri’s daughter Bela, the inheritor of the troubled family legacy, surprises the reader with her capacity to break with tradition and invent a new life by having a child whose father’s name and origin are known only to her, and by marrying an American, while her own daughter Meghna emblematizes the hope of reconciliation. This simple outline of the novel suffices to identify its several purposes. Rather than encapsulating what Pankaj Mishra calls the “consumable otherness” in the guise of a global novel,3 Jhumpa Lahiri follows the tradition of subaltern history in the wake of scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty4 and Gayatri Spivak,5 by depicting the peasant revolt in Naxalbari to which urban students had rallied, and a Bengali woman’s rebellion. Her novel has affiliations with Bengali literature like Mahasweta Devi’s 1972 novel Hajar Churashir Ma (The Mother of Prisoner No. 1084) and Sunil Gangopadhyaya’s 1989 novel Purbo, which both evoke characters and events in the history of the Naxalite movement that are echoed in The Lowland.6 Though there are explicit allusions to Satyajit 3

Pankaj Mishra, “Beyond the global novel,” Financial Times, 27 September 2013. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6e00ad86-26a2-11e3-9dc0-00144feab7de.html, consulted October 17, 2015. 4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” Nepantla: Views from South 1.1 (2000): 9-32. http://libcom.org.libcom.org/files/subaltern.pdf, consulted October 17, 2015. 5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, Basingstroke: MacMillan, 1988, 271-313. http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf, consulted October 17, 2015. 6 Salil Tripathy, “At Home Abroad, Jhumpa Lahiri turns her gaze to history,” The Caravan, 1 November 2013, http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/homeabroad#sthash.Od6Wi2Fj.dpuf, consulted October 17, 2015.

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Ray (11) and Mrinal Sen (63) in the novel, Lahiri’s avowed models are William Trevor for his compassion, Mavis Gallant for her wild leaps and turns, and Flannery O’Connor for her dialogue, gravity, and action pace.7 Indeed in an interview granted to the Irish Times, Lahiri has admitted: This novel, The Lowland, looks closely to Trevor’s novel Fools of Fortune – you know, in the way an act of violence determines it. I have been writing this book for 10 years – no, longer, 16 years – since I was told about an execution that took place. It stayed with me, that and the Trevor book.8

Lahiri’s novel has been criticized for its descriptive style and diagrammatic plot. Such a criticism shows some condescendence on the part of some European and Commonwealth critics for her realistic style. They put a premium on linguistic invention and do not take well the fact that Jhumpa Lahiri had taken creative writing courses at Boston University. Indeed another Bengali writer Neel Mukherjee published a gripping account of the Naxalite moment in 2014 entitled The Lives of Others.9 Writer Kunal Basu, who was a left wing activist in his student days and whose novel Kalkatta gives a voice to the dispossessed of the city and refers to the troubled 70s, is said to be planning to write a novel in Bengali about the Naxalite movement.10 Gauri is a study in female agency pushed to its limits. Flouting convention she marries a communist rebel in a registrar’s office. She accepts a remarriage while her husband’s comrades look upon it as an act of betrayal of the memory of Udayan. While in America, Gauri impulsively breaks away from her bonds as wife and mother, gets involved in a fleeting lesbian relationship, and pursues a stranger to 7

Ibid. Eileen Battersby, “Jhumpa Lahiri: A serious voice that comes from nowhere,” The Irish Times, 11 October 2013. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/jhumpa-lahiri-a-serious-voice-thatcomes-from-nowhere-1.1554066, , consulted October 17, 2015. 9 Nina Martyris, “The Naxal Novel,” Dissent, Fall 2014. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-naxal-novel, consulted October 17, 2015. 10 Priyanka Dasgupta, “Naxalites hold centre stage in Kunal Basu’s first Bangla novel,” Times of India, 28 April 2015. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Naxalites-hold-centre-stage-inKunal-Basus-first-Bangla-novel/articleshow/47077331.cms, consulted October 17, 2015. 8

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fathom her own desire. The major ethical concern that towers above the economic, social, and ecological issues dealt with in the novel harks back to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Who is guilty? Udayan who kills the police man out of allegiance to the cause of insurgency, or Gauri who has been a mere accomplice out of love for her husband, and spied for him? What is the punishment – the killing of Udayan or his absent presence that haunts the family and perpetuates the tradition of adoptive fathers? We seem to have here an illustrative case of what the French psychologist Anne Ancelin-Schützenberger calls psychogenealogy.11 This article attempts to explore the weight of ideology in the postcolonial world, the impact of the geography of Bengal on the complexity of the characters, the notions of filiation and affiliation with regard to family, and finally the mediating potential of grandchildren to repair the adult’s ruptured bonds with one’s self and others, as depicted in the novel. Through the involvement in the Naxalite cause of Udayan, the narrator is able to retrace the history of communism in India, with occasional references to Che Guevara thrown in. The Communist Party of India was formed by a group of Indians that included M.N. Roy in 1920, though the Party claims that the 1925 Kanpur conference was the starting point. But after the Sino-Indian war in 1962, the left wing of the party set up a separate Communist Party of India (Marxist). Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, the two revolutionary leaders of the Naxalite movement, started a new current in 1969 - the Communist Party of India, Marxist Leninist. Charu Majumdar died in police custody in 1972, and Sanyal committed suicide in 2010. Parallel to what is happening in India, the novel alludes to the antiracist civil rights movement and the contestation of the Vietnam War in the US. Subhash’s roommate Richard is a peacenik. In an episode which is a mise en abîme of the novel, one of her former students doing research on the Naxalites in the US asks Gauri to contribute a paper. She immediately turns it down, afraid that her past might catch up with her making a break. The narrative subtly assesses the heritage of Nehruvism in India and the Cold War in the US, and describes the advent of a third way – ecology and sustainable development, looping the loop with the Boston Brahmins. Ideological allegiance makes individuals metamorphose, families implode, regions explode, and nations go to war. But Lahiri’s narrative is not only about the dialectic struggle between the self and the 11 Anne Ancelin-Schützenberger, Aïe, mes aïeux ! (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, (2002) 2007).

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political, resulting in the emergence of the hyperindividualistic self in the postcommunist era as Esha Shah argues in The Economic and Political Weekly.12 Lahiri enables the readers to have a glimpse of and progressively grasp the quest for egalitarian structures in postcolonial societies once independence has been achieved, just as Udayan and Subhash are able to only peep and sneak into the forbidden Tollygunge Club’s golf course, while Bela right royally celebrates her birthday there. Geography as an aspect of space is deconstructed in the novel into natural or man-made forms of reality such as land, river, sea, bay, coast, shore, jungle, marsh, pond, village, city, farm, home, room, balcony, place, location, spot, etc. Jhumpa Lahiri does tarry on these solid and liquid configurations of space inhabited by animals and human beings. However, from the magisterial opening page onwards, we could see that, when Lahiri talks about geography, she uses it as an inseparable dimension of time with regard to migrant energy. Seasons and cycles of birth, death, and displacements in space in the form of migratory birds’ journeys or the trek of refugees after partition punctuate her novel. When Gauri travels for the first time to the US, it is “time not space that she is aware of travelling through” (125). Indeed as a student of philosophy, Gauri is extremely interested in the meaning of time. “Did it exist independently in the physical world or in the mind’s apprehension?” (151). According to Hindu philosophy, the three tenses existed simultaneously in God. Descartes held in his Third Meditation that God recreated the body at each successive moment. Therefore, time was sustenance. While Newton considered time to be an absolute entity, Einstein held that time and space are intertwined. These reflections lead Gauri to write her doctoral dissertation on the “Epistemology of Expectation in Schopenhauer” (234). Jhumpa Lahiri uses historical events such as the night of Indian independence, man’s landing on the moon, the Bangladesh war, and the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, as pointillist touches to colour the narrative canvas. Delphine Munos has posited13 that Lahiri has recourse to geography and the aesthetics of displacement to expose the blind spots in history. Indeed, the exclusive Tollygunge Club House embodies colonial hierarchies. The used balls that Udayan and Subhash play with symbolize 12

Esha Shah, op.cit. “Du Bengale à la Nouvelle Angleterre (en passant par l’Inde): Trajectoires transnationales et mémoires transrégionales dans “The Lowland de Jhumpa Lahiri,” Séminaire transfrontalier Esthétique et spiritualité, January 2014. Louvain la Neuve. http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/163624, consulted October 17, 2015.

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the phase of development in postcolonial history when the West was recycling its obsolete technologies in the East. As for the lowland, its frontiers are blurred during the monsoon, metaphorically facilitating transgression. As in Amitav Ghosh’s Hungry Tide, the ecology of Bengal becomes a structural element in Lahiri’s The Lowland. The tresses of water hyacinth and its violet flowers giving a deceptive sense of solidity to the flooded plain are not only visually depicted, but temporally translated and transposed in the text of the novel in the form of pauses in prose, sentence and chapter lengths like the Morse code that Udayan and Subhash playfully practice (15). This semiosis gives a sense of unreal calm to the writing, as if the mutation induced by migration implies a certain muteness when combining the material substance of languages. This is the silence of polyglots that Kristeva talks about,14 enhanced by time rendered palpable as in Proust. The analogies that Subhash establishes between his native Calcutta and his adopted Rhode Island bridge the gap between homeland and the host land. Certain physical aspects of Rhode Island corresponded roughly to those of Calcutta […] Both were close to sea level with estuaries where fresh and saltwater combined. As Tollygunge, in a previous era, had been flooded by the sea, all of Rhode Island, he learned, had once been covered with sheets of glass. (34)

This unobtrusive picture of climate change gives the time scale in terms of earth’s existence in the universe. Subhash transmits his sense of belonging to Rhode Island to his adopted daughter Bela, even if he takes her to visit her grandmother in Calcutta. Bela returns to Rhode Island to give birth to her own child. But she calls her daughter Meghna after a river in Bengal. Geography thus meets culture in the significant act of naming, a recurring theme in Jhumpa Lahiri. She uses naming as a strategy for building cultural bridges. The return of the exile is frought with tragedy as the incipit to the novel from Giorgio Bassani’s “Saluta a Roma” suggests: “Let me return to my hometown entombed in grass as in a warm and high sea.” The concept of heritage foregrounds humanity at large, but also nation, culture, and family. Lahiri’s novels picture the breaking of traditional joint families into cellular, single, recomposed or transnational families as a result of ideological change. What is transmitted—genealogy, family 14

Julia Kristeva, “Le silence des polygottes,” in Etrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 26-29.

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secrets, culture, property, things—is as important as the way in which and the purpose for which they are bequeathed or rejected. In The Namesake as well as in her short story “Only Goodness” in Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri explores the relationship between brother and sister. In The Lowland the siblings are of the same gender. Though they are not twins as in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, they are twinned by the author. Subhash wants to go and study in the United States in the secret hope of finding a distinct identity. While living in the US, he develops an intimate relationship with an older woman, Holly, but Holly makes up with her husband for the sake of their son, putting the family above her self. Subhash’s brother Udayan lives in two dimensions as an idealistic rebel and an ardent lover. He marries Gauri, who had been herself separated from her sick mother and brought up by her grandmother in a joint family. Though he wants to set up a cellular family, he cannot afford it, and brings his wife to live with his parents. Udayan’s love marriage is perceived by his parents as a breach of tradition. They expect Subhash to behave differently and go by the family rules. Virilocal marriages sever a woman’s physical nearness to her family and insert her in a new set of circumstances. This transplantation, which amounts to an internal migration, is smoothened by the performance of rites of passage. When Udayan brings his bride home, his mother performs the welcoming rite (289). When Udayan dies, though they are not able to retrieve his body from the police, they perform the funeral rite and ask Gauri to wear white saris as a sign of widowhood (108-109). The therapeutic value of these Hindu rites does not help Gauri overcome her shock and trauma. The narrator also depicts the funeral ceremony for Subhash’s roommate, Richard Grifalconi, held in Rhode Island (246-247). Religious and secular rites of passage serve as basic markers of personal history and transition between generations in the novel. When Subhash marries his brother’s wife, Gauri is able to travel to the US and taste freedom and educate herself. It is like a rebirth. Nevertheless, their recomposed family in Rhode Island becomes dysfunctional when Gauri progressively emancipates herself and grows apart. Subhash realizes that they have become a “family of solitaries” (262.) Bela is so distraught when her mother abandons her and when her adoptive father tells the truth about her biological father that she has to find a way to start her existence anew. This she does by marking her body–getting tattooed, wearing a nose ring, and colouring her hair, preferring manual labour to academic success, defending Mother Earth and becoming a single mother. She leans on the reliable and devoted Subhash, just as her mother once did, to take roots in

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America. Subhash’s voice may be a mark of Mitra family genetics. But his consistent kindness stands out as an acquired individual trait. When Bela visits her grandmother in Calcutta, she is shown a photograph of Udayan as a young boy and told that it was her father’s photo. Subhash explains it away as a slip of memory on the part of an old person. Yet when the truth is revealed after many years in America, Bela immediately runs away. However, she reaffirms her filial bond with Subhash just by calling him “Baba” over the telephone. The willing utterance of this one word smoothes the disruption that has occurred in their relationship of many years. However, she denies such a filiation to Gauri, her biological mother. By telling Meghna that her grandmother is dead while Gauri is standing right in front of her, she cuts her off from the lineage. Nevertheless, she leaves the door open for affiliation by designating Gauri as an aunt and not as a stranger. Meghna herself is adopted by Drew when he becomes a partner of Bela. The novel thus places social affiliation over biological filiation. The story that binds the family is the death of Udayan and the subsequent and legally surreptitious adoption of Gauri. Though the reader and the adults know this family secret, Bela gets to know about it only at the end because Subhash has asked Gauri not to tell her this particular story, and tell it only when time is ripe and when they are together. While this postponement contributes to the driving of the plot, it portrays the dilemma of adoptive parents anywhere in the world torn between “the need to tell and the duty to keep quiet.”15 As Anita Vangelisti16 explains: Family secrets fall into three categories: taboos, rule violations and conventional secrets. Functions of secrets involve bonding, evaluation, maintenance, privacy, defense or communication problems.

Prompted by their wish to preserve their own security and preoccupied with the necessity to avoid identity confusion in the child, they ask themselves whether or not to tell a child that she has been adopted, when to tell her, and how. It is generally assumed that the older generation hands down cultural values to the younger generation. This is illustrated in the novel when Subhash’s American friend chooses to become a teacher in order to 15

Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain, (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 252. 16 Anita L. Vangelisti, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 11.1 (1994): 113-135.

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transmit knowledge. Subhash makes a point of taking Bela to visit her grandmother so that the connection between generations is established. However, Bela is able to instil the values of sustainable development in Subhash. Her truly American ability to bounce back has an obvious effect on him, by enabling him to choose an American partner after turning sixty. This indeed is a case of reverse transmission. The handing down of property, whole or divided, is a moment that tests the endurance of family bonds. When Subhash is away, his parents enlarge their house in the anticipation that he would come back, get married, and live with them. Such a thought and action shows transgenerational solidarity. But the death of Udayan changes the course, leaving the mother alone in the property where the servant maid installs a chain to prevent the bereaved old woman from leaving the premises. This episode incidentally gives us a glimpse into the lonely ageing and mourning at distance that occurs due to migration. After her death, the property is not sold but rented, in the hope of Subhash’s eventual return. Subhash asks for divorce from Gauri in order to assume full ownership of his house in Rhode Island, with a view to bequeathing it to Bela. A responsible father, he might be said to have inherited a sense of providence from New England and a thought for the future. In Boston, Subhash remembers to buy Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, because Udayan had asked for it as a gift for Gauri. In Calcutta, he buys a gift for his mother and a turquoise shawl for Gauri. This gift holds a bright promise. Even after the divorce, Gauri keeps this token, which shows her respect for his gesture. But during the second trip, Subhash’s mother refuses the gift of photographs, while Subhash and Bela buy not one but two pairs of red leather shoes to take away as preferred gifts for Gauri. The giving, taking, and refusal of gifts function like touchstones to reveal smooth and repaired continuities and ruptures in family connections. By leaving the door open for a later acceptance of her grandmother Gauri by her infant daughter Meghna, Bela performs a pure act of pardon, forgiving the unforgivable to quote Derrida.17 The novel thus affirms the child’s freedom from any guilt, and its potential to repair Gauri’s ruptured bond with herself and others. The dual Indo-American heritage of Meghna means that she can alter, reshape, and improve her inheritance. Herbert Marcuse’s one-dimensional man of the advanced industrial society has 17

Jacques Derrida, “Le siècle et le pardon,” Le monde des débats, Décembre 1999. http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/siecle.html, consulted October 17, 2015.

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somehow made way for Lahiri’s two-dimensional women of globalized mobility. The slow and complex transition of humanity from labour rights to women, children, and earth’s rights represents the ecological turn that the postcolonial novel has taken. Some theoreticians argue, however, that such a third way may not represent post-ideological peace, but paradoxically reinforce neoliberalism.18

Works Cited Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography.” Nepantla: Views from South 1.1 (2000): 9-32. Accessed October 17, 2015. http://libcom.org.libcom.org/files/subaltern.pdf. Basu, Kunal. Kalkatta. New Delhi, Pan Macmillan India, 2015. Battersby, Eileen. “Jhumpa Lahiri: A serious voice that comes from nowhere.” The Irish Times, 11 October 2013. Accessed October 17, 2015. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/jhumpa-lahiri-a-seriousvoice-that-comes-from-nowhere-1.1554066. Cohen, Deborah. Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dasgupta, Priyanka. “Naxalites hold centre stage in Kunal Basu’s first Bangla novel.” Times of India, 28 April 2015. Accessed October 17, 2015. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Naxalites-hold-centrestage-in-Kunal-Basus-first-Bangla-novel/articleshow/47077331.cms. Derrida, Jacques. “Le siècle et le pardon.” Le monde des débats, Décembre 1999. Accessed October 17, 2015. http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/siecle.html. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. “Le silence des polygottes.” In Etrangers à nous-mêmes, 25-29, Paris: Fayard, 1988. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. —. The Lowland. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013. Martyris, Nina. “The Naxal Novel.” Dissent, Fall 2014. Accessed October 17, 2015. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-naxal-novel. 18 Rafal Soborski, Ideology in a Global Age: Continuity and Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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Mishra, Pankaj. “Beyond the global novel.” Financial Times, 27 September 2013. Accessed October 17, 2015. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6e00ad86-26a2-11e3-9dc000144feab7de.html. Mukherjee, Neel. The Lives of Others. London: Chatto & Windus, 2014. Munos, Delphine. “Du Bengale à la Nouvelle Angleterre (en passant par l’Inde): Trajectoires transnationales et mémoires transrégionales dans The Lowland de Jhumpa Lahiri,” Séminaire transfrontalier Esthétique et spiritualité, Janaury 2014. Louvain la Neuve. Accessed October 17, 2015. http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/163624. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Literature. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge, Polity Press, (original French version 2006) 2011. Ancelin-Schützenberger, Anne. Aïe, mes aïeux ! 2002. Reprint, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2007. Shah, Esha. “The Self and the Political: A Reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Low Land.” The Economic and Political Weekly XLIX.4 (2014): 30. Soborski, Rafal. Ideology in a Global Age: Continuity and Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the subaltern speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271-313. Basingstroke: MacMillan, 1988. Accessed October 17, 2015. http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclawdiscourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf. Trevor, William. Fools of Fortune. London: The Bodley Head. 1983. Tripathy, Salil. “At Home Abroad, Jhumpa Lahiri turns her gaze to history.” The Caravan, 1 November 2013, Accessed October 17, 2015. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/homeabroad#sthash.Od6Wi2Fj.dpuf. Vangelisti, Anita L. “Family Secrets: Forms, Functions and Correlates.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 11.1 (1994): 113-135.

CHAPTER SEVEN COOPERATION OF OPPOSITES: THE HOME AND THE FOREIGN IN R.K. NARAYAN’S NOVELS LUDMILA VOLNÁ

Throughout history, the cultural space of the Indian subcontinent has been continuously redefined. One of the most influential impacts was the arrival of the Europeans and the issuing colonization that brought into India what is called modernity, an essentially European creation. Production and development, efficiency and scientific approach that started to be pursued in the post-medieval Europe are at the origin of profound sociocultural changes. The new ethos gave rise to the democratization of society, a tendency towards a secular perception of life and reality, emphasis on individual, freedom, and equality, to which rationalization together with capitalism and market economy became closely related. The character of the cultural space of India in that period becomes thus challenged by the culture of the invader: modernity, as related to colonization, can clearly be perceived as a tool of domination, a Eurocentric enterprise. The incoming European perception does not correspond to the cultural-social patterns established in India and in many instances even goes against the fundamental pillars of Indian culture, i.e. against its knowledge systems, cultural traditions and customs, and collective memories,1 for example relativization of everyday reality based on the cosmological views and the issuing perception of life, emphasis on the millennia-long tradition with its cosmologico-philosophical corpus, literature and story-telling, heterogeneity of tradition, rigidity of the social 1 Avijit Pathak, Indian Modernity: Contradictions, Paradoxes and Possibilities (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1998), 10.

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aspect of the tradition (marriage-making, joint family hierarchy and associated values, entering a profession), flexibility of doctrinal aspects in religion, and acts as a disruptive force. Questions arise, such as what precisely happens when these two cultural patterns meet? What happens to the Indian tradition when it is confronted with the challenges of modernization, scientific methods, the so-called rationality, democratization of the society, or secular views on life and reality brought by the West? Is the Indian tradition compatible with at least some of the incoming practices or streams of thought, will it survive at all, or will the clash generate another structure?2 While no culture can be claimed a static, immovable, or permanently fixed entity, Indian cultural tradition, with Hinduism as its most influential thought stream, is still quite specific in this respect. Because if Hinduism is a socio-religious system with an emphasis on its social component, its multilayered stream of the theoretical, doctrino-philosophical background is responsible for a relative flexibility when responding to new impulses. An impact or influence thus coming from the outside can be reasonably incorporated into the system when it is a matter of idea or theory. It would, nevertheless, be much more difficult to accept paradigms of social perception or practices. It is also necessary to take into account that, on the individual level, the thinking and patterns of social behaviour are interrelated, even though the latter may often be considered as given, because they are firmly rooted as determined by birth and upbringing. R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), an Indian author writing in English, is best known for the creation of an imaginary south-Indian town called Malgudi, a community which, according to Meenakshi Mukherjee represents “the quintessential Indianness”, and as such has “a metonymic relation with India as a whole.”3 Portrayed in fourteen novels and a number of short stories written during more than fifty years, Malgudi and its characters progress in time, experience both colonization and postcoloniality, are defined and redefined. Even though, as Jhumpa Lahiri notes, Narayan is sometimes criticized for the creation of a place “sheltered from the greater forces of the world,” which gains it a certain “timeless quality,” in fact, “nothing is fixed […] 2

Volná Ludmila, “Toward Indian Modernity and the Birth of Indian Writing in English: The Case of Rammohan Ray,” in Literature and the Long Modernity, 345-354, Mihaela Irimia and Andreea Paris ed (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 346; Pathak op.cit., loc.cit. 3 Meenakshi Mukherjee Meenakshi, The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (New Delhi: OUP: (2000) 2002), 170-174.

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no one is protected […] life is always changing”4. It is the “subjectivity of the characters” which “is in transit,”5 while they and their town are coping with the impact of European modernity, which can be read as a metonymic interaction of India itself with new influences and phenomena, ideas, values, theories, and modes of individual and social behaviour. This often happens while “[e]vents [are] quickly unfolding and lives radically changing in paragraphs that can be numbered on two hands.”6 While analyzing the traditional as affronting the new, i. e. the ways in which the characters live in accordance with, keep and protect the heritage of their home tradition when the foreign forces its way into India (as represented by Malgudi), this paper will focus on four of Narayan’s novels in which this interaction becomes the most significant: The English Teacher (1945), Mr Sampath - the Printer of Malgudi (1948), The Guide (1958) and The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961). As philosopher Jan Patoþka claims: “Home is a place at our disposal,” and the home that is supposed to be or to become a place of profound security, certainty, and understanding is attainable only through a selfknowledge based on social reflection.7 Thus, the home is the interior condition of an individual that he or she acquires when attuned to and living in accordance with his or her desires, profound feelings and needs, while being a part of such a cultural situation in which he or she can purposefully relate to his or her environment. In Narayan’s work, this environment is the world of Malgudi, the known. The known is affronted by the foreign, the unknown, that comes from outside. The inner harmony of the individual becomes thus destabilized.8 Space and objects play a major role in Narayan’s novels: first, we can speak of Malgudi and a space outside Malgudi, the latter more often than not opening a different perspective to the Malgudians than that immediately accessible, no matter how disturbing this can be; no less disconcerting for the Malgudi characters are people coming to the town from outside, bearers of foreign influences. The geography of Malgudi is 4

Jhumpa Lahiri, “Introduction.” (2006) R. K. Narayan. Malgudi Days (New York: Penguin Books, (1972) 1982): viii-xv. The quotation is from xii. 5 John Thieme, R.K. Narayan (Manchester: Mancherster UP, 2007), 15. 6 Lahiri, op.cit., ix. 7 Jan, Patoþka, PĜirozený svČt jako filosofický problem (Praha: ýeský spisovatel, 1992), 12-13. 8 Ibid., 119-125; Petr Špecián, “PromČny pĜirozeného svČta: Husserl, Patoþka a dál?” in E-Logos, Electronic Journal for Philosophy, 12/2009, 13. Consulted April 4, 2015.

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often depicted to the smallest detail, and changing with each new novel, which metaphorically reflects the changing environment as well as the specificities of the characters’ unease and/or progress. There is a clear-cut distinction between the part of the town built still under colonial rule and what has been constructed in the postcolonial period. Objects and, at times, institutions, are emblematic of the cultural heritage and related values, as well as of the stability of tradition: time passes while they are still there. The English Teacher (1945) is Narayan’s third novel and the final novel of the free sequel of three (out of four) first novels, Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher, where the main protagonists, respectively the boy Swaminathan, the young man Chandran, and a slightly older young man Krishnan, can be considered the same person at different stages of life. Written before 1947 the plot of the three works is set in the Malgudi still under British rule, metaphorically represented by the Albert Mission School, the educational institution where Swami and Chandran are students and Krishnan a teacher of English. While being referred to in Narayan’s later novels, Albert Mission School is mentioned in the three novels under scrutiny in the article, and incarnates the controversial interaction of the oppressive foreignness of the invader and the home environment. The boy Swami has to cope with the superior air of the scripture teacher who offends the Hindu gods, and Swami thus revolts; the student Chandran’s passage to adulthood is marked by an unsuitable falling in love and rejection, a successful attempt to cope with it by wandering around for some time as a sanyasi, and a consequent arranged marriage which becomes a love match. The incompatibility between the home culture and the foreign influences that painfully interfere with the lives and development of the Malgudi characters gets even sharper in Krishnan’s conflict with the institution of the Albert Mission School. Narayan lets this character narrate his story in the first person singular in order to better express his thoughts and deeper feelings. There is a clearly defined sphere of his unconscious from which a sense of discomfort emanates and urges him to do something about it while he is incapable of immediately specifying or defining the cause or source of this unease: “The urge had been upon me for some days past to take myself in hand. What was wrong with me? I couldn’t say, some sort of vague disaffection,

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a self-rebellion I might call it. [...] all done to perfection, I was sure, but always leaving behind a sense of something missing.” 9

Through descriptions of his daily routine and environment at work, the character of the distress can be progressively disentangled. The situation of colonized India is reflected in the power paradigm established at Krishnan’s workplace. An Englishman of the name Brown is the principal of the college, the name disguising his true identity: arrogant and harassing both the staff and students, he is obsessed with the “importance of the English language, and the need for preserving its purity,”10an attitude leaving Krishnan, who is fond of literature studies based on creativity and imagination, “angry and insulted”11. Krishnan experiences a family tragedy: his beloved wife Susila dies of typhoid, which is the last impetus for him, while taking care of their daughter Leela, to decide to set on a journey of spiritual progress. When trying to get in touch with his deceased wife, he gets closer to nature and phenomena related to it, and ultimately recognizes the instinctive-affective sphere of his own self. He is indeed reaching his interior home when, at last, he identifies with the instruction lines of his daughter’s school, a place where all creatures are loved, their freedom and independence respected, and creativity and imagination encouraged, a place embraced by “Mother Earth.” Krishnan thus, following “our own roots,”12the traditional Indian way of instruction, becomes a teacher there and finally, “in a moment of illumination, an experience of absolute openness, presence and communion,” in William Walsh’s words,13 finds the inner peace and fulfilment, his home: this is not without his realization of the true character of the power-based foreign structures and their rejection. Inner conflict and confusion, indeed an identity crisis, is what bothers Srinivas too, one of the two main characters of Mr Sampath - the Printer of Malgudi (1948), which is suggested by a space metaphor right at the beginning of the novel: “The Market Road was the life-line of Malgudi, but it had a tendency to take abrupt turns and disrupt itself into side-

9

R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher, (Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, (1945) 1973), 1; emphasis added. 10 Ibid., 2. 11 Ibid., 3. 12 Ibid., 206. 13 William Wash, R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 58.

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streets, which wove a network of crazy lanes behind the façade of buildings on the main road.14 To reach the final destination, the offices of Srinivas’s journal The Banner, supposedly the seat of “truth and vision,” an “expert knowledge”15 is necessary, which Srinivas attempts to gain by relying on the traditional learning of his culture, by reading the Upanishads, and, first of all, by cherishing a statuette of Nataraja, inherited from the ancestors, to the point of identifying with it. Nataraja is a representation, common in southern India, of the god Shiva pressing a demon under his feet, while immersed in a cosmic dance. This represents the infinite process of creation, maintenance and destruction of the universe, and thus a cosmic creative activity. Praying to Nataraja, Srinivas asks for illumination and a proper life rhythm.16 Repeatedly asking himself “who I am,” Srinivas tries hard to settle down with his family and do good work as editor of his journal, and let his employee, a printer, be of help and advice. Nevertheless, once Srinivas perceives a certain “lack of balance,” the printer’s help is revealed as nothing else than manipulation and power-ambition, and the latter brings the journal to an end. Only then is the printer’s name, i.e. his true identity, revealed in the novel: Sampath. Srinivas and Sampath as closely interacting characters represent two contradictory but cooperating forces, reminding us of the two such all-pervading forces depicted in the Hindu cosmology, “two contradictory, incompatible aspects of the one essence [...] the fundamental unity of everything in God.”17 No harmonious unity can be attained yet, as Sampath, newly the director of production in a film studio, engages Srinivas to write scenarios. While Srinivas always has people’s welfare on his mind when writing, Sampath becomes more and more involved in the deceitful ways of the show business in order to obtain more and more credit, success, and money, and finally falls into the trap of a destructive love affair. In the end, he becomes a representation of destruction, being left without family, a job, friends, or a home. On the other hand, the end finds Srinivas preserving the values of the tradition while having resisted the temptation of a corrupted life: he abandons the film studio and renews his journal. This act is an expression of assertion, the full awareness and respect of 14

Narayan, Mr Sampath - the Printer of Malgudi, 5. Ibid. 16 Ibid., 19. 17 Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 46. 15

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traditionally conceived values that are devoid of any destructive forces, and a consequence of the reconstruction, or rather creation of Srinivas’s true self. As the symbolism of the god Nataraja’s cosmic dance indicates, the highly disturbing and destructive demonic forces are brought to extinction, and harmony is established. Significantly, Srinivas, while seeing the homeless Sampath for the last time, “raised his hand, flourished a final farewell, and set his face homeward.”18 For Raju, the protagonist of Narayan’s The Guide, different space settings become the identitary markers of his different life stages. Viney Kirpal argues that the pattern of Raju’s progress in life responds to the Hindu developmental theory of ashramadharma.19As Raju tells his life story to Velan, the particularities of his apprenticeship (brahmacharya), householdership (garhasthya), withdrawal (vanaprastha), and renunciation (sannyasa) are progressively unveiled. The boy Raju avoids going to school, but nevertheless as he has “learned much from scrap,”20 he takes up a job as a tourist guide. The guiding in whatever representation becomes a significant trait of his character as he projects himself into control and manipulation for his own profit: when helping Rosie to develop her talent for dance, a young woman with whom he starts an intimate relationship, as a sycophant in prison, and finally as a temple saint giving advice to the villagers in exchange for food. Raju’s conflict is again an interior one, nevertheless for him, a prisoner of his own deceitful ways, the foreign opposing the home is inside while his personal gratification and self-fulfillment are blocked. The utmost is reached when Raju, afraid to lose his luxurious life of a parasite on Rosie’s success, commits a forgery, after which he is literally imprisoned, prison thus being emblematic of his inner condition. It is only when forced to starve as a self-proclaimed sanyasi that “for the first time he was doing a thing in which he was not personally interested”21that he gains liberation, but only on the point of dying and after having gone through all the life stages. Rosie, Raju’s female counterpart, does not, on the other hand, get corrupted by her fame and wealth, which she considers just by-products on her way to professional progress and fulfilment, i.e., her projection into 18

Narayan, Mr Sampath - the Printer of Malgudi, 219. Viney Kirpal, “Moksha for Raju: The Archetypal Four-stage journey,” World Literature Written in English, 28.2 (1988): 356-63. 20 Narayan, The Guide, 42. 21 Ibid., 212. 19

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what she passionately loves to do as a job. This accomplishment is a source of inner peace for her. However, in order to be able to proceed with her personal growth, she has to overcome forces foreign to both her human and woman’s self, the stereotyped patriarchal views of those around her, of the society, of her own husband whom she will leave, and eventually also of Raju’s attitude, who treats her as an object of his own ambition while exploiting and subjugating her: “I was puffed up with the thought of how I had made her.”22That Rosie chooses her name herself is yet another indication of her determination to be a master of her fate and identity. Rosie’s character and her progress is foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel by a conflict Raju, as sanyasi, is asked to resolve. Velan, a villager who confides in Raju, takes care of his young sister and, in his own words, has “given her every comfort at home, provided her with all the jewellery and clothes a girl needs, but…”23 she runs away to avoid an arranged marriage. Both Velan and Raju conclude she “shows no gratitude” and the girl’s attempt to assert free choice ends by her subjugation and acceptance of the marriage. It is in The Man-eater of Malgudi (1961) that Narayan makes the interaction of conflicting forces of the home and the foreign, presented by two counterpart characters, the most palpable. Nataraj, a printer, can be considered a representative of traditional values, symbolized by his ancestors and the family heritage: the ancestral house and especially a harmonium acquired by the grandfather. The grandmother as a unifying factor clearly represents Mother India. Nataraj keeps at his press parlour not only Indian furniture but also a “Queen Ann chair,” does his printing on a Heidelberg press, and his son attends the Albert Mission School. He is perfectly at ease with these representations of the colonial heritage. His is not the colonial period that Krishnan the teacher of English experienced and had difficulties with. Nataraj lives a peaceful and happy life with his family, staff and neighbours, until something happens that will challenge the mildheartedness and “a good-humoured inertia and a casual tolerance,” defined as “the quintessential Indianness” by Mukherjee and “recognized by every Indian as familiar.”24 Nataraj’s clients and visitors always find a light and talkative environment at his press, the passage of time or the work

22

Narayan, The Guide, 161. Ibid., 12. 24 Mukherjee, op.cit., 170, 171. 23

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deadlines are not of primordial importance, while the word ‘no’ cannot be found in Nataraj’s vocabulary. Thus, Nataraj finds it extremely difficult to cope with the presence of a person coming from outside, thus a foreigner to Malgudi, a person called Vasu, whose every action is an affront to the values the Malgudians cherish. Vasu’s entrée is already a violent intrusion: without any hesitation he enters a space at Nataraj’s press that is considered sacred, a space symbolically representing the foundations of the Hindu tradition, Vasu’s physical appearance thus only underlining his behaviour: “He came forward, practically tearing aside the curtain, an act which violated the sacred traditions of my press [...] He was a huge man, about six feet tall [...] his bull-neck and hammer-fist revealed his true stature.”25 Contrary to Nataraj and his friends’ high esteem for life, Vasu, as a taxidermist, has no respect for human or animal lives, kills animals for profit and shows an utter contempt also for the Malgudians’ other values, their rights, free will, and their way of life, while advocating a purely capitalist perception and a so-called ‘scientific approach.’ Nataraj, a favourite target of Vasu’s endeavour, in spite of all his despise, dread and unease towards the latter, and quite in accordance with the law of the cooperation of antagonistic forces, does not nevertheless succeed to cut off all contact. Finally though, Nataraj decides to step courageously against Vasu’s ultimate endeavour, i.e. the killing of a sacred elephant, with Nataraj feeling, as John Thieme aptly puts it, “that he may have to act, in direct opposition to Vasu’s view of preservation, as a Vishnu-like preserver of life.”26 The end finds Vasu dead accidentally by his own hand, which is explained as an inevitable fate of demons rakshasas. Nataraj, on the other hand, while still faithfully clinging to the traditional values, adopts now “a scientific approach,” “an anticlimax that superseded a climax.”27 To conclude, “home” values, as we have seen, are not compromised in the four novels discussed. Disturbing foreign forces that appear to be rejected serve nevertheless as modifiers of traditional values and, as such, can be considered, to a smaller or greater extent, and due to the flexible character of the theoretical foundations of Indian culture, accepted and absorbed. Avijit Pathak has it that: 25

Narayan, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (London: Penguin, 1983), 15. Thieme, “The Double Making of R. K. Narayan,” in Critical Spectrum: Essays in Literary Culture in Honour of Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah, ed C. D. Narasimhaiah and Satish C. Aikant (New Delhi: Pencraft, 2004), 182. 27 Ibid., 181, 182. 26

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We see an urge to transcend the logic of both ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ and create a new space - a spiritual space - conducive to equality, reciprocity, dialogicity and plurality.28

This new space is a result the cooperating opposites create. At the same time, in Pathak’s words: “Tradition is also a living experience and the lifeaffirming possibilities in it [that] can fight the pathologies of modernity,” (Pathak 12) a claim that is attuned to Narayan’s acute awareness of the cosmological concepts, myths and symbols of the home tradition that he and the Malgudians share.

Works Cited Kirpal, Viney. “Moksha for Raju: The Archetypal Four-stage journey.” World Literature Written in English 28.2 (1988): 356-63. Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Introduction.” R. K. Narayan. Malgudi Days. 1972. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1982, viii-xv. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “The Anxiety of Indianness.” Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. 2000. New Delhi: OUP, 2002. Narayan, R. K. The English Teacher. 1945. Reprint, Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1973. —. Mr Sampath - the Printer of Malgudi. 1948. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2000. —. The Guide. 1958. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1988. —. The Man-Eater of Malgudi. 1961. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1983. Pathak, Avijit. Indian Modernity: Contradictions, Paradoxes and Possibilities. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1998. Patoþka, Jan. PĜirozený svČt jako filosofický problém. Praha: ýeský spisovatel, 1992. Špecián, Petr. “PromČny pĜirozeného svČta: Husserl, Patoþka a dál?” ELogos, Electronic Journal for Philosophy. 12/2009. Prague. Accessed April 22, 2015. http://nb.vse.cz/kfil/elogos/student/specian09.pdf. Thieme, John. “The Double Making of R. K. Narayan.” In Critical Spectrum: Essays in Literary Culture in Honour of Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah, edited by C. D. Narasimhaiah and Satish C. Aikant, 172-91. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2004. 28

Pathak, op.cit., 12.

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—. R. K. Narayan. Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007. Volná, Ludmila. “Toward Indian Modernity and the Birth of Indian Writing in English: The Case of Rammohan Ray.” In Literature and the Long Modernity, edited by Mihaela Irimia and Andreea Paris, 345354. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014. Walsh, William. R.K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Zimmer Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE RUPTURE WITHIN: MANIMEKALAI'S POLEMICS WITH BUDDHISM R. AZHAGARASAN

The forms of Buddhism must change so that the essence remains unchanged —Thich Nhat Hanh What do you assume of any essence, here in this cemetery grower, filled with corpses, this body destined to break up? What do you see when you look at me, You who are out of your mind? —Subha Jivakambavanika (From Therigatha)

The present revival of Classical Tamil studies has opened up new possibilities for the reading and understanding of classical Tamil poetry and poetics. Such readings of the “classical” from a theoretically-informed cultural perspective seem to offer fresh insights into the issues of the “contemporary” as well. This paper focuses on the significance of the Tamil twin epics – Cilapathikaram and Manimekalai – (belonging roughly to the period between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD). Through a reading of Manimekalai in particular, it tries to show how, in the context of Tamil Buddhism, rupture co-existed with heritage and tradition. This is contrary to the general assumption that rupture is to be apprehended as a component of modernity. The co-existence of tradition/rupture could be found in the Buddhist epics of the 3rd -5th centuries AD, in the Buddhist revival during the Kalapirar period in Tamil history (9th-10th centuries AD) and during the nineteenth century, through the Buddhist revivalism of Pundit Iyothee Thass. Our intention is therefore to argue here that the labelling of Manimekalai as a “Buddhist narrative”, whether by native scholars or by non-native (Western and Asian) scholars involves an evasion of two important features: a) the fact that the narrative also develops a polemic within Buddhism by invoking the voice of a passionate

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courtesan’s daughter, Manimekalai; b) that the Buddhist teaching/practice highlighted in the text engages a dialogue with its ‘form,’ distancing itself from the conventions of the puranic (epic) tradition in Tamil literary history. This paper therefore locates itself within the contemporary debate about the exclusion of Tamil Buddhism in Dravidian discourse. It tries to raise the question as to why the Dravidian movement in the twentieth century appropriated Cilapathikaram for the establishment of a Dravidian/Tamil identity, while entirely neglecting its companion piece, Manimekalai. The movement of the depressed class, at the turn of the 19th20th century, did however make extensive use of Manimekalai (while drawing lightly on the Buddhist portions in Cilapathikaram) in order to reclaim a Buddhist past and construct a “Tamil Buddhism”. The difference in the reception of these two twin kavyas demonstrates two different ways of seeing and conceptualizing the “Dravidian identity.” One of these (focusing on Cilapathikaram) is secular-political-cultural and has led to the (re)-construction of a non-Aryan past and to the establishment of the Dravidian movement (of the non-Brahmin and non-Dalit castes), and thus to its capture of power.1 The other (focusing on Manimekalai) is religiouscultural-political (an invention of the so-called “untouchables”), and has involved the revival of the Buddhist traces of early Tamils. Its fate was to be suppressed by the secular-political interests of the Dravidian movement.

One Myth, Two (Twin) Kavyas, and the Ambiguity of the Dravidian Ilanko Adikal’s Cilapathikaram tells the story of a merchant, Kovalan, who marries another, Kannagi, the daughter of another merchant. Fate and moral flaw lead to his untimely death, making the epic a classical tragedy, on a par with Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. The story thereby testifies to the prevalence of a rich mercantile economy during the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. While participating in the Indra villa, Kovalan becomes attracted and drawn to Madavi, a courtesan, and is separated from his wife, Kannagi. On listening to the praises of a male persona in Madavi’s song, Kovalan suspects her and goes back to his wife, after losing his wealth. On his return, Kannagi offers her anklet, her only remaining wealth. They 1 Stalin Rajangam, Dravida Iyakkathinasrin Panuvalakka Veliyil Cilappathikaram, M.Phil. thesis submitted to Madurai Kamarajar University, 2004.

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leave for Madurai in the hope of starting a fresh life with the money they could get by selling the anklet. Saint Kaunti Adikal guides them. Fate has him sell the anklet to an artisan who had stolen the queen’s anklet and who therefore decides to put the blame on Kovalan. The king believes the story and orders Kovalan’s execution. On learning of her husband’s execution, Kannagi goes with her other anklet and proves that the king has erred in his judgement. As a result of this, the king dies and the queen subsequently dies of grief. The aggrieved Kannagi burns the city of Madurai by cutting off one of her breasts, while the disconsolate Madavi turns to the Buddhist path. Cilapathikaram ends here. Kannagi worship is still prevalent in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The image of Kannagi figures prominently in school textbooks; the statue of an aggressive Kannagi occupies public places and she has become an archetype of chastity in Tamil culture. Cattanar’s Manimekalai starts with Madavi’s rendering of the fate of Kovalan and Kannagi to her friend. On overhearing this, her daughter Manimekalai is saddened and decides to follow the Buddhist faith, along with her mother. The Goddess Manimekala takes her to an island, where she gets to know about her marriage with Iralan in her former birth and about his untimely death. Shocked to hear about Manimekalai’s decision to lead an ascetic life, Madavi’s mother, Chitrapati, resolves to preserve the tradition of the courtesan. She asks King Udayakumaran, who had been Manimekalai’s husband (Iralan) in a former birth, to chase and marry her. He is not willing to listen to the account of Manimekalai’s decision or to the explanation. She therefore transforms herself into Kayasandigai, the wife of Kancannan. Manimekalai had earlier taken her out of her plight of unrepited hunger by giving her food from the mysterious bowl, amudasurabi, which she uses to feed the poor. Udayakumaran mistakes her for Manimekalai and chases her, but gets killed by Kancannan. Udayakumaran’s father imprisons Manimekalai, but later sets her free on knowing the truth of her previous birth and her present birth as a bikhuni. On her supplication, the prison is converted into a house of charity. She then meets various religious sects, engages in debate with them about their paths, and finally becomes convinced of the validity of the Buddhist path. This is the point that the editors/translators of the text find obscure and difficult to handle. A cursory glance at the stories of these kavyas shows the continuity of the myth and the two different visions of early Tamil society which are encapsulated through the myth. Cilapathikaram was celebrated for its aesthetic merits (by scholars like Cilampoli Chellappan and The. Po. Meenakshi Sundaranar) and Manimekalai was celebrated as Buddhist

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propagandist kavya (by S. N. Kandasamy and a few others). It is interesting to note that though it was Kovalan’s extra-marital affair with Madhavi that was responsible for the tragic end of the story, Madhavi was not degraded in Cilapathikaram. Instead, her love was valorized. In stark contrast to this, Madhavi’s life as a courtesan was ridiculed in the Buddhist narrative, Manimekalai. The Kannagi myth is to be found in Sangam literature (Nattrinai 216, which sings of a one-breasted woman),2 in folklore (as Kovilan Kathai) and in folk worship (through Kannagi worship in Tamil Nadu and Kodungalur, Kerala). It is this circulation of the Kannagi myth and Kannagi worship that was appropriated in the Dravidian movement in order to construct a Tamil identity. Films on the Kannagi myth—Kannagi (1942), Poompukar (1964), Cilambu (1990)—are part of the history of Tamil cinema. Besides these, there are a number of other movies, such as Kodungalluramma (1968) in Malayalam and Rattha Kanneer (1954) which invoke the Kovalan-Madhavi relationship and its consequences. Unlike the Kannagi myth, the story of Manimekalai was ignored and did not figure in popular culture. Except for the movie Manimekalai (1940), the character does not appear in modern-day mass media. It was the Marxist critics who demonstrated a continuing interest in Manimekalai, as they saw Buddhism as a non-Vedic Indian philosophy. The only non-Marxist interested in Manimekalai was pundit Iyothee Thass, the Buddhist revivalist of the late nineteenth century. For him, Manimekalai stemmed from a neglected tradition of Tamil Buddhism, the study of which could highlight the history of casteless Dravidians. Focus on such political uses of the myth is something that would seem to complicate the existing notions of Dravidian identity. It is against this backdrop that this paper tries to look into the theme and the characterization of Manimekalai, at the language and form of 2

Mayilai Seeni Venkatasamy dismisses such scholarly attempts to trace the story of Kannagi in Sangam literary sources. According to him, such references merely refer to the recurrent theme of a woman whose husband gets killed. He also dismisses the reference to the one-breasted woman in Sangam literature and to Kannagi’s burning of Madurai by throwing off her breast as an imaginative attribution of power to unfed breasts. He argues that the expression thiruma unni refers to women who could not enjoy their conjugal rights, due to their abandonment by their husbands in the early period of their marital life. In the light of his argument, scholarly reflections on the Kannagi myth remain nonpolitical, though the Dravidian movement had laid the grounds for the appropriation of this tradition in order to establish a distinct Tamil political identity.

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Manimekalai in order to reflect on the developments that have occurred in various fields of inquiry in recent years. Our analysis here thus seeks to highlight Cattanar’s unique treatment of/polemics with Buddhism through the perspective of a courtesan woman’s daughter, Manimekalai, suggesting that it has serious implications for Dravidian Discourse.

Constructing Dravidian Discourse The idea of ‘Dravidian’ was identified, invoked, debated and appropriated during the 19th and the 20th centuries, in the following fields: 1. The idea was first mooted by Ellis and subsequently by William Caldwell, in order to refer to the family of Dravidian languages. This idea aimed at challenging the Orientalists of the Calcutta-based Asiatic Society, such as William Jones, who had insisted that Sanskrit was the mother of all Indian languages. On the contrary, scholars belonging to the Chennai Kalvi Sangam argued that South Indian languages belong to a different family, which can be regarded as ‘Dravidian’, and which differs from the Indo-European family of languages.3 The debate developed into a hypothesis of racial conflict between Aryan and Dravidian races, hinting at the differences between the two, in terms of ritual practices and belief systems.4 2. A non-Brahmin and non-Vedic tradition was invoked by native scholars, partly inspired by the Orientalists’ debate and partly by the European movements of rationalism and egalitarianism. This paved the way for social movements inspired by Western rationalist and liberal ideas. These became reflected in the history of magazines such as Suryothayam, Thathuva Vesini and Tamilan (to name a few) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The category of non-Brahmin later became a political-cultural identity, in the magazines of the Dravidian movement such as Dravidan, Justice, and Kudiarasu in the mid-twentieth century. All these magazines shared the idea of ‘Dravidian’ as being distinct from Aryan/Brahmin and as having developed a non-Brahmin and anti-Brahmin ideology. It was here that the idea of Tamil as a Dravidian identity 3

Thomas R. Trautmann, The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2009. 4 Ulrike Schröder, “No Religion, but Ritual? Robert Caldwell and Tinnevelly Shanars,” in Ritual, Caste and Religion in Colonial South India, ed. Michael Bergunder, Heiko Frese, and Ulrike Schröder (Halle: Verlag Der Franckeschen Stiftugen zu Halle, 2010), 131-160.

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evolved.5 The comprehension of Tamil in terms of its Saivite and Buddhist identities was also constructed during this period.6 3. In parallel to these sociocultural movements, the recovery and publication in the early twentieth century (by scholars such as C.V. Dhamodharan Pillai, U. Ve. Swaminantha Iyer) of ancient Tamil literature recorded in palm-leaf manuscripts, inspired and encouraged the establishment of a strong and unique Tamil literary tradition. Scholars in the Dravidian movement drew on these texts of classical Tamil to construct Tamil identity. They focused on Sangam texts and Cilapathikaram in order to establish a heroic (masculine) Tamil self.7 4. In the last four decades, archeological and epigraphic studies, carried out by scholars such as Asko Parpola and Iravadam Mahadevan, have established that Tamil Brahmi script was different from Asoka Brahmi script of early India. They established a possible link between this inscriptional evidence and the ancient Indus valley civilization. They disagreed with the racial theory of Aryan vs Dravidian, arguing that the differences between the two were purely linguistic. This further helped strengthen the debates regarding a unique Tamil tradition, if not identity.8 It is interesting to note that, in all these four fields, Buddhism was either underplayed or silenced, and that the intellectual history of ‘Pariahs’ was also silenced. These two issues are intertwined, as we can see from the work of the nineteenth century Buddhist scholar, Iyothee Thass, whose writings were taken up again in 2000. As a scholar in Sanskrit, Pali, and Tamil, Iyothee Thass argued, drawing on substantial evidence, that the cultural practices of the early Tamils were Buddhist, contrary to the view of scholars that they were Jain. He proposed the idea of ‘Tamil Buddhism,’ which combines Jainism in the Tamil context. By ‘Tamil Buddhism,’ he meant the reception of Buddhism and the notoriety of Buddhism in Tamil culture. In addressing the issue of the annihilation of Buddhism in Tamil land, he viewed 5

V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millenium- From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998). 6 Ravi Vaitheespara, “Forging a Tamil Caste: Marimalai Adigal (1876-1950) and the discourse of caste and ritual in colonial Tamil Nadu,” in Ritual, Caste and Religion in Colonial South India, 89-105. 7 G. Sujatha, Gendered Passion to Language/Culture: Reading Anti-Hindi Protests in Tamil Nadu, Ph.D. thesis submitted to University of Madras, 2015. 8 Iravadam Mahadevan, “Dravidian Proof of the Indus Script via The Rig Veda: A Case Study.” Paper presented at Roja Muthiah Research Library, 14 November 2014.

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people’s attraction to Vedic religions, such as Saivism and Vaishnavism, as being comparable to conversions to Christianity and Islam. They are, he said, like the child searching for the mother, without remembering the colour, the body and the house of the mother. Instead of which, they only developed contempt for their ancestral, mother religion, Buddhism. This, he said, had led to the annihilation of Buddhism in its own native land. Hinting at the contempt for Buddhism, and the strategic annihilation of Buddhism by Hinduism, he argued that the pariahs were once Buddhists and that the issue of untouchability arose out of a hatred for Buddhists. This could easily be corroborated by the contempt for Buddhists to be found in medieval Bakhti literature. Mayilai. Seeni. Venkatasamy, in his book Bouthamum Tamilum (Buddhism and Tamil: 1940), and Jambulingam in his Ph.D. thesis on Buddhism in the Chola Country (submitted to Tanjavur Tamil University: 1999), discussed this issue in detail, with substantial evidence. In the present-day Tamil context, the idea of ‘Tamil Buddhism’ remains merely a part of Buddhist revivalism within the Dalit movement.

Iyothee Thass and Tamil Buddhism Iyothee Thass’s interest in Buddhism was not rooted in the canonical Buddhist scriptural texts and was rather based on Tamil literary sources and Buddhist practices among the people. This also helped him to reflect upon the causes of the discrimination of underprivileged social groups following different religious practices, which were Buddhist in nature.9 An educated Brahmin, M.A.A. Sivarama Sastry of Congress Council, responded to his humble plea that the temples should be made open to lower castes, by reminding him, “You have village gods like Muni, Pidari and Kaatteri.”10 Iyothee Thass then replied, saying that if entry to temples is not possible, schools should be opened for these children (1892). He gave serious thought to this exchange, which had led to his discovery that contempt for Buddhists was the source for the practice of untouchability and was the source for his identification of “Dravidians” as casteless 9

The personal collections of T.P. Kamalanathan, son of Periyasamy pulavar - a close associate of pundit Iyothee Thass – in Roja Muthaiah Research Library testify to the vibrant Buddhist revivalism that was alive until the late 1940s, even after the death of Iyothee Thass in 1914. 10 See Iyothee Thass, Iyothee Thassar Cinthanaikal (Palayankottai: Folklore Research Centre, 1999), Volume I, 80.

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Tamils. He proved this by citing the etymology of the names of local gods like Muni, Saathan, and Saamban as names of Buddha. The palm-leaf manuscript, Narathiya Sangai Thelivu, thus became the evidence through which to prove and expose the widespread contempt manifested for those practising a Buddhist tradition. Pundit Iyothee Thass’s identification of Tamils as “casteless Dravidians” of Buddhist faith takes on significance for three reasons: i) It is inter-lingual, as it involves transaction of knowledge systems between Tamil, Pali, and Sanskrit. ii) It addresses non-Vedic Jain-Buddhist religious practices and throws light on the borrowing of Jain-Buddhist concepts by Hinduism. It thereby identifies the practices of Brahminical Hinduism, differentiating between Vedic Brahmin, understood as “fake Brahmin,” and the non-Vedic Buddhist, regarded as “real and culturally-rooted Brahmin.” The argument is substantiated through the invocation of Manimekalai and other early Tamil texts. iii) Unlike other discussions of Dravidian/Tamil identity, which excluded the untouchables (dalit intellectuals hinted at how the concept of ‘nonBrahmin’ frequently excludes the untouchables), Iyothee Thass’s discussion of Dravidians as “casteless Tamils” includes untouchables and avoids endorsing the category of “Brahmin.” The word “Dravidian” thus remains a linguistic-racial term and is not therefore a term referring to ‘non-brahmin’: a caste category. Iyothee Thass’s Tamil Buddhism decastizes Dravidian identity and nativizes Buddhism, distancing Tamil Buddhism from canonical Buddhism. For this, he relied heavily on Manimekalai and other examples of ancient ethical literature in Tamil. He identified passages of Manimekalai which did not appear in the Manimekalai edited by U. Ve. Saminatha Iyer. He also gave a Buddhist interpretation to popular festivals, rituals of the Tamils, citing literary sources. By highlighting these passages and by saying that his father once gave the palm-leaf manuscripts of Tirukurral to the British officer Ellis and had it published, he tried to suggest that the ancient Tamil texts were available for people of different classes. In this way, he validated Tamil Buddhism as a religious practice of the common people. His turn to the folklore and his attempt to textualize/sacralize people’s local cultural practices [as can be seen from his Buddharadu Adivedam (which invoke the history of Buddha’s life as recorded in ancient Tamil literary texts) and Indirar Desa Carithiram (which deals with the annihilation of Buddhist kings and invokes the history of India as a Buddhist nation)] also consolidated his approach to these issues. Iyothee Thass resorted to canonical Buddhism in his later work, writing

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Buddharadu Aadhi Vedam (on the pre-Vedic doctrines of Buddha) with a view to securing a religious identity for the “untouchables” in the census records of the colonial government. However, in all his writings he made extensive use of Manimekalai, along with other unprinted literary sources to establish the Buddhist lineage of Tamil tradition. For him, Manimekalai is not just a character in the Kannagi myth. She represents the presence of a tradition of Bikhunis in Tamil culture, while the text of Manimekalai represented a major source through which to trace the existence of Buddhism in Tamil culture.11

Manimekalai - Production and Reception The early editors of Manimekalai confessed their inability to handle cantos 27-30, which extol Buddhist logic in a discourse unfamiliar to the Tamil scholars. Even U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer, who edited most of the early Sangam texts and kavyas, found the text extremely difficult and obscure. He also recorded his inability to handle the text in his autobiography En Sarithiram: Initially, I did not know the religion the text professed. It was the college professor, Malar Rangachariyar, who told me that it belonged to Buddhism. When I expressed my lack of knowledge about it, he said: “You don’t have to worry. There are hundreds of books on Buddhism in the English language. The whites have done thorough research on that. I have read that. I shall read all the rest and explain them to you.” I held him firmly for my study of Manimekalai. (565)

The editors of Manimekalai, and Western scholars who worked on Tamil Buddhism, invariably regarded it as a North Indian religious philosophy which had come down to Tamil Nadu. Pundit Iyothee Thass, who was aware of this major lacuna, continuously insisted on the unique nature of Tamil Buddhism and also of Manimekalai. He treated Tamil Buddhism as being on a par with Tibetan Buddhism, which has unique features. He was therefore profoundly contemptuous of those who relied on the English translations of Buddha’s teachings.12

11

P. Marudhanayagam, Oru Poorva Pouthanin Catchiyam: Iytheetasarin Coladal (Testimony of a Native Buddhist: Iyothee Thass’s Discourse), (Tirunelveli: Kallaththi publications, 2006). 12 Ravi Vaitheespara, op.cit.

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Iyothee Thass, who developed the idea of a native Tamil Buddhism, focussing on Manimekalai, criticized U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer’s dependence on the English translations of canonical Buddhist texts by Western writers. The uniqueness of Manimekalai, according to Iyothee Thass, lies in its mixture of the idioms of different religious and linguistic traditions. Those who pay attention only to the philosophically-loaded last four sections fail to see how they remain integral to the overall narrative. The issues regarding Manimekalai’s form and its faith tend to remain unconnected in the critical literature on Manimekalai. Western scholars, particularly Paula Richmann and Anne Monius, try to mediate this gap. However they either trace the source of its frame to the puranic narrative, thereby fixing the Buddhist text within a Hindu form, or read Manimekalai within the Buddhist canon. It is interesting to note that while scholars interested in Dravidian history/culture focused on Cilapathikaram, Manimekalai attracted a wide range of Western scholars. To name a few, Peter Schalk of Uppsala University devoted his entire career to the study of Buddhism in Tamil Nadu. He was solely responsible for the organization of three conferences on Tamil Buddhism,13 of which one was devoted to Manimekalai, the conferences being attended by both western as well as native scholars. Paula Richman of the University of Chicago, who worked for her doctoral study on Manimekalai, significantly contributed to the development of Tamil Buddhism, focusing on the formulation of Buddhist logic in Cattanar’s narrative. Shu Hikosaka, from Tokyo, established Buddhism as the source of ancient Tamil literature, and identified the rich Buddhist tradition in the southernmost part of the Tamil region. Anne Monius, from the Harvard Divinity School, took into account all these earlier studies and reflected upon Manimakalai in comparison with an eleventh century 13 The three following conferences - 1. Conference on Buddhism in Tamil Nadu, Indian Institute of Asian Studies, May 25-31, 1992; 2. Conference on A Buddhist Woman’s Path to Enlightenment: Workshop on the Tamil Narrative Manimekalai. Uppsala University, May 25-29, 1995; 3. Conference on Buddhism Among the Tamils, Bangkok, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Historia Religionum. Jan 8-13, 2012 - were conducted with the initiation and efforts of Peter Schalk of Uppsala University. While he proposed ‘Tamil Buddhism’ merely as an idea in the Chennai conference, it became the central thrust in the Bangkok conference. Unfortunately, he does not seem to have known Iyothee Thass’s writings, though he makes a reference to him in the introduction to the Bangkok conference. His idea of ‘Tamil Buddhism’ remains part of his larger interest in tracing the Buddhist history of the Eelam region of Sri Lanka, challenging Singhalese Buddhism.

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treatise on grammar and poetics, Viracoliyam, in order to highlight a continuing Buddhist tradition. In addition to these, there are a few other scholars, such as Ruth Walden and David Shulman, who worked on Manimekalai, while there are nine other English translations which are unlike the five routine English versions of Cilapathikaram. Unable to grapple with the uniqueness of Tamil Buddhism, these critics and translators regarded Manimekalai and her courtesan family as “prostitutes,” the amudhasurabi as a “magic bowl”, and they tended to neglect or repress the story as a text promoting canonical Buddhist doctrines. However native scholars have always confessed to their difficulty in handling the complexity of the text. The fact that the Western scholars come from departments of religion is indicative of their Orientalist assumptions. Native scholars who reflect on Manimekalai invariably come from a Marxist background. This may be because of its explicit non-Vedic content, and its seemingly materialistic concepts. It is this explicitly materialistic and non-Vedic nature of Buddhism that drove Dr. Ambedkar to write a remarkable piece comparing “Buddha and Karl Marx.” A whole history of the non-Vedic tradition and its difference from the Vedic tradition was highlighted in the last four cantos, which elaborate Manimekalai’s dialogue/debate with other philosophical systems, such as Vaisesika, Jain, Ajivaka, and the Vedic (Saivite and Vaishnavite) traditions. The best example of this could be seen in the idea of “rebirth,” figured in a manner that differs from the Hinduistic idea of reincarnation. Here the idea of rebirth remains integral to the structure of the branch stories. In other words, the ‘self’ functions as a non-self, a “story of one’s birth,” hinting at the cause and effect of one’s word/deed. It is in this manner that philosophical concepts combine with the narrative structure of Manimekalai. The modern Tamil play, Manimekalai, written by the poet Inkulab and staged by Mangai—both Marxists—viewed her as a feminist. In the entire oeuvre on Manimekalai, it is the only text that invokes a different Manimekalai, caught between her desire and her will to renounce, thus moving away from the canonical Buddhist reading of the text.

Reading Manimekalai The history of the production and reception of Manimekalai may help us to grasp the complexities involved in three issues: 1) Tamil identity; 2) Buddhism in Tamil country; 3) our reading of Manimekalai as a propagandist narrative. According to pundit Iyothee Thass, in Manimekalai, Buddhism was represented not as a philosophy but as a

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religious practice of the Tamils. Tracing its source to Theravada Buddhism seems very useful in this respect, if we are to understand the uniqueness of the text. But it does not help identify how Tamil Buddhism (through its ritualistic, tantric practice among the people) functions as a subversive strategy, developing a polemic with Buddhism. Anyone who regards Manimekalai as a text propagating canonical Buddhism thus does an injustice to its narrative and its aesthetics, which “opens” Buddhism to a larger sphere of culture. Such readings fail to notice how the text subsumes philosophy in literature and how, in this context, the literary remains part of the religious-cultural practice. Such a reading can be of great benefit to us in our present (theoretical) engagement with the question of the discursive relations between literature and philosophy. The very theme of Manimekalai’s renunciation and her entry into the monastery is integral to the story, and it propels the narrative. Her mother, Madhavi, had already chosen the Buddhist path. She chooses to follow her, only when she overhears the ill-fated story of her father, Kovalan, and his wife, Kannagi. While the famous mustard-seed story, as Paula Richman says, does indeed play a crucial role in Manimekalai’s central logic, the story also quarrels with Buddhism. While the canonical mustardseed story of Gowthami is concerned with the ‘untimely death’ of the son through snake-bite, the question that arises in Manimekali is that of the ‘murder’ of the titular character’s father, Kovalan. Manimekalai seems to be disturbed not just about the death of her father, she is also concerned with the difference between death and murder. More than the death, it is the politics of death and the power of evil that drive her to renounce her life as a courtesan. Here Cattanar moves towards the ethico-political, anticipating a Foucauldian concern. This is what Iyothee Thass meant when he pointed out that the aram (ethics) in the ancient Tamil tradition should not be seen as giving away food and helping others, as scholars often interpret it, but that the term should refer to codes of conduct and duties of social institutions.14 To prove his point, he cited the expressions used in literature to designate 14 This is a good example for an understanding of the methodology through which Iyothee Thass propounded ‘Tamil Buddhism.’ Instead of translating the term “aram” as dharma, he turned to the expression used by the common people and in literary sources. He further elaborated on this by focusing on the etymology of such usages, folk practices, and the literary-cultural implications of word usages. While the dalit writer Ravikumar developed a cultural history of the Tamils that was focused on the multiple dimensions of Iyothee Thass’s Tamil Buddhism, the folklore scholar, Dharmarajan, highlighted its methodological challenges.

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various kinds of ethics, such as “domestic ethics,” “monastery ethics,” “good/bad ethics” and so on. This is also very clear in the narrative of Manimekalai. It is the politics/ethics nexus in the killing of her father which causes her renunciation. Ironically, Manimekalai becomes the cause of another murder – the killing of Udayakumaran, husband of her former life, who passionately chases her. To escape his eyes, she takes the form of Kayasandigai and hides herself inside a temple. Not knowing this, the husband of Kayasandigai—Kancannan—takes Udayakumaran to task for chasing “his” wife and kills him. While Manimekalai is pained by his death/killing (she even cries), she does not feel guilty, as she focuses her mind on the ethics of the monastery.

Cattanar and his Rupture of Tradition Focusing on a woman, a courtesan, who becomes a bikhuni, the text seems to pose the following challenges: 1. By identifying “desire” as the root of pain, Buddhism fails to recognize the problem of a woman for whom the root of pain is the desire of the other for her. The irony is that she has to face this (the other’s desire for her), even after she renounces her desire and becomes a bikhuni. This is a recurrent theme of women’s voices in Buddhist literature and in the Therigatha.15 The song of Subha Jivakambavanika in the Therigatha invokes a similar situation: What wrong have I done you That you stand in my way? It’s not proper, my friend, That a man should touch A woman gone forth. I respect the Master’s message, The training pointed out by the one well-gone. I am pure, without blemish: Why do you stand in my way?

This song is perfectly appropriate to the situation faced by Manimekalai. Refusing to listen to the words of Manimekalai, Udayakumaran chases her, knowing that she had become a bikhuni. This amounts to the suggestion that Manimekalai invokes the voice of a woman that circulated 15

Buddhist Verses of the Elder Nuns dating back to sixth century BC.

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in the literature of Buddhist women. Hence Manimekalai need not strictly be seen as a continuation of Cilapathikaram and the poet Cattanar may have merely linked the latter to the popular Kovalan-Kannagi story. This hypothesis becomes stronger, if we focus on the ambiguity of Manimekalai’s feeling for Udhayakumaran. The fact that she has become a Bikhuni does not guarantee an escape from feelings altogether. Her feeling for Udayakumaran remains ambiguous and she says: In spite of rejecting him as the One who spoke contemptuously My heart went with this stranger! Is this the nature of love? If so, let its might perish. (44-45)

However she does not feel guilty for this passion and for its being a cause for his killing. Udayakumaran’s father arrests her for being the cause of the murder, but his mother—the queen—gives orders for the seduction of Manimekalai, a bikhuni: “The queen next bribed an uneducated youth/ to seduce her and then to make wild false propaganda” (208). Even after these humiliations she has to face as a woman, Manimekalai shows respect for the queen, saying: “thou were my husband’s mother!”(211). Here Cattanar continues to play on the paradoxical nature of woman’s renunciation. In her own family, Manimekalai has to face opposition to her decision. Her grandmother Chitrapati expresses scorn over her decision to follow the Buddhist path. She regards it as a violation of the tradition of courtesans, who have their own codes. She says: We are not the chaste woman who suffer calamity when their husbands die! We have the right to live receiving sustenance from many! We are like bees leaving a flower sucked dry! (154)

If a bikhuni is also seen as an object of attraction, how can a woman of everyday life hope for renunciation and entry into the monastery? This is the question that Cattanar seems to pose through Manimekalai. And this is why Aravan Adikal suggests, at the end of the story, that she may attain salvation in her future births and that the kapiyam remains incomplete. Thus Manimekalai clearly ceases to be a propagandist narrative of canonical Buddhism. 2. By locating the philosophical debate as a part of the narrative in cantos 27-30, Manimekalai ceases to be a Buddhist religious narrative and thus

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presents itself as a text that upholds literature over philosophy. In this case, the literary—with its focus on folklore and cultural practice—seems to subvert the status of philosophy and the nativized practice, canonical Buddhism. While looking at how the narrative approximates itself to the Buddhist canon, we risk failing to see how the narrative is self-conscious of its limitations, even as it justifies these limitations from a courtesan’s point of view. Manimekalai is, therefore, a Buddhist narrative, though in a different sense. Apart from its philosophical engagement, the narrative also maintains a difference from the puranic tradition. It is not just the theme of the narrative, but its very form that distances itself from the puranic narrative. It is non-Vedic and Buddhist, as it is modelled upon the frame of Jataka tales which are fragmentary. Even in places where it accommodates the branch stories or characters of the Mahabharata, it does not subscribe to its values. A failure to identify this would only lead the reader to see this frame as being modelled upon Mahabharata, following the reading of Paula Richmann. In his review of Paula Richman’s study, Frank J. Korom pointed out that it was the Jataka frame which constituted the source of Manimekalai. However he fails to see Cattanar’s polemic with the puranic tradition/form other than by way of the latter’s departure from canonical Buddhism. If, as Frank J. Korom cites, we merely accept the narrative of Manimekalai by relying only on the frame of Jataka tales, how do we account for the “theme of rebirth” and the references to puranic stories in Manimekalai? It is here that we must look into the function of the theme of rebirth. Unlike the Hinduistic notion of rebirth, in Buddhism, “rebirth” does not presuppose the soul as a separate entity. Manimekalai’s love for Udayakumaran in her previous birth and the recollection of their early life by a few other characters in the narrative such as Aabuthiran, in fact have a different function. They operate as part of the narrative strategy of Cattanar, who sees the “self as a potential carrier of stories.” This helps him to develop a polemic with the notion of rebirth in puranic tradition. To understand this polemic, let us turn towards the generic nature of the epic. The epic past is called the “absolute past,” for good reason: it is both monochromic and valorized (hierarchical). It lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions which might connect it with the present. It is absolutely walled off from all subsequent times and, above all, from those times in which the singer and his listeners are located. Consequently, this boundary is immanent to the form of the epic itself and is felt and heard in its every word.

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To destroy this boundary is to destroy the form of the epic as a genre.16 While sharing the features of epic/purana - other space, other time Manimekalai also engages in a polemic with the puranic/epic form by remaining a vaadha kappiam (debating narrative), creating as it does a dialogue among various schools of philosophy, and by accommodating various forms (both classical and folk). Above all, the narrative deals with ‘this-worldly’ matter of human desire v. evil. It thereby offers the possibility of suggesting that owing to its anti-hierarchical nature, Buddhism is inconsistent with the epic form itself. In the context of Buddhism, at least in the case of Tamil Buddhism, the rupture does not come from outside. Various Buddhist practices rupture the tradition, and the indigenization of Buddhism ruptures Buddhism within itself, always demanding a dialogue between the Buddhist canon and the native/narrative traditions.

Conclusion Oriental responses to Tamil Buddhism and Manimekalai see only one side of this rupture—the rupture it creates in the Hinduistic tradition— while failing to see the rupture within itself. Is it this rupture which might have attracted Foucault, Derrida and Bakhtin towards Buddhism? It is very sad that contemporary philosophers/theorists, while they turn to Buddhist philosophy and practice, ignore Buddhist literature. From the perspective of Buddhist literature, the classical Cattanar looks modern and comes very close to us, through his choice of the woman courtesan’s perspective on Buddhism.17 Such a contrapuntal reading of Manimekalai seems to broaden our limited vision of Dravidian identity found in contemporary debates, offering a new unexplored Buddhist route for Dravidian discourse.

16

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays 3-40, Michael Holquist ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 16. 17 Comparable to what we have in the works of modern and male Tamil writers. Cf. Pudumai Pithan's “Ponnagaram,” G. Nataraj’s “Kurathi Mudukku” and Imayam's Cedal.

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Works Cited Ambedkar, B.R. “Buddha or Karl Marx.” In The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, edited by Valerian Rodrigues, 173-190. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2004. Anne E.Monius. Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in a Tamil Speaking South India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, Delhi: Navayana, 2011. Azhagarasan, R. “Manimekalai and Tamil Buddhism Among English Intellectuals.” In Manimekalaiyil Camayamum Meiyiyalum, (Religion and Metaphysics in Manimekalai), edited by R. Srinivasan and Kamarasan, 281-294. Chennai: Tamil Nadu Buddha Sangam & Meththaa publications, 2014. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Epic and the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 3-40, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Dharmarajan, T. “Iyothee Thass: Beyond Centre and Margin.” In No Alphabet in Sight, edited by Susie Tharu and Satyanarayana, translated by Madhava Prasad, 121-128. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. Geetha, V. and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millenium- From Iyothee Thass to Periyar. Calcutta: Samya, 1998. Hikosaka, Shu. Buddhism in Tamil Nadu: A New Perspective. Madras: Institute of Asian Studies, 1989. Inkulab. Manimekalai: A Drama. Chennai: Kumaran Publications, 2005. Iravadam Mahadevan. “Dravidian Proof of the Indus Script via The Rig Veda: A Case Study.” Paper presented at Roja Muthiah Research Library, 14 November 2014. Iyothee Thass. Iyothee Thassar Cinthanaikal. Palayankottai: Folklore Research Centre, 1999. —. Tamilan, 31 May 1911. Iyothee Thassarum, Singaravelarum Naveena Poutha Marumalarchi Iyakkam: Velivaraatha Vivathangal, edited by Stalin Rajangam (Iyothee Thass and Singaravelar - Buddhist Revival Movement: Unpublished Debates). Chennai: Kayal Kavin publications, 2010. Jambulingam, B. Buddhism in Chola Country. Ph.D. thesis, Tamil University, Thanjavur, 1999. Maatruveli (Tamil Journal - Special Issue on Caldwell), November 2010. Manimekalai. Pandiyan trans. Madras, The South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society, 1989.

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Manimekhalai: The Dancer with the Magic Bowl by Sattan. Translated by Alain Danielou, Kenneth F. Hurry and T.V. Gopal Iyer. New York: New Directions, 1989. Reprinted by Penguin Books, 1993. Marudhanayagam, P. Oru Poorva Pouthanin Catchiyam: Iytheetasarin Coladal (Testimony of a Native Buddhist: Iyothee Thass’s Discourse). Tirunelveli: Kallaththi publications, 2006. Mayilai. Seeni. Venkatasamy. Pouthamum Tamilum (Buddhism and Tamil), 1940. Chennai: Poompukar Publications, 2007. —. Mayilai. Seeni. Venkatasamy Aaivuk Katturaikal. Edited by Me. Tu. Raasukumar & Saravanan, Volume 5. Chennai: Makkal Veliyeedu, 2002. Ravikumar. Meelum Varalaaru: Ariyap Padaatha Nandan Varalaaru (History Revived: The Unknown History of Saint Nandan). Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies, 2009. Richman, Paula. “Framed Narrative and Dramatised Audience in a Tamil Buddhist Epic.” Asian Folklore Studies 44 (1985): 81-103. —. “Cosmology as Rhetoric.” In Buddhism in Tamil Nadu, edited by R.S. Murthy and M.S. Nagarajan, 301- 328. Chennai: IIAS, 1998. —. Women, Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil Buddhist Text. Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1988. Vaitheespara, Ravi. “Forging a Tamil Caste: Marimalai Adigal (18761950) and the discourse of caste and ritual in colonial Tamil Nadu.” In Ritual, Caste and Religion in Colonial South India, edited by Michael Bergunder, Heiko Frese, and Ulrike Schröder, 89-105. Halle: Verlag Der Franckeschen Stiftugen zu Halle, 2010. Wallden, Ruth. “Presentation of Samkhya in Manimekalai.” In Kalyanamitraraganam: Essays in Honour of Nils Simonson, edited by Elvind Kahrs, 303-312. Oslo: Norwegian UP, 1986. —. “Notes on Some Dates of the Buddha in the Manimekalai.” Die Datierung des historischen Buddha [The Dating of the Historical Buddha], Symposium zur Buddhismusforschung, vol.4, no. 2, Heinz Bechert ed. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1992, 200-207. Schröder, Ulrike. “No Religion, but Ritual? Robert Caldwell and Tinnevelly Shanars.” In Ritual, Caste and Religion in Colonial South India, edited by Michael Bergunder, Heiko Frese, and Ulrike Schröder, 131-160. Halle: Verlag Der Franckeschen Stiftugen zu Halle, 2010. Stalin, Rajangam. Dravida Iyakkathinasrin Panuvalakka Veliyil Cilappathikaram. M.Phil. thesis submitted to Madurai Kamarajar University, 2004.

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Sujatha. G. Gendered Passion to Language/Culture: Reading Anti-Hindi Protests in Tamil Nadu. Ph.D. thesis submitted to University of Madras, 2015. Trautmann, Thomas R. The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India. New Delhi: OUP, 2009. T. P. Meenakshi Sundaram, Kudimakkal Kappiyam (Epic of the Native People), 1972. Chennai: Paavai Publications, 2010. Therigatha: Verses of the Elder Nuns, Translations from Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Accessed June 30, 2015. www.accesstoinsight.org. U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer. Manimekalai. 1898. Chennai: U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer Library, 9th Edition, 2013. —. 1950. En Sarithiram (My History). Chennai: U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer Library, 8th Edition, 2013. Young, Serenity. Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconography and Ritual, London: Routledge, 2004.

CULTURE

CHAPTER NINE THE LEGACY OF THE HASTINGS CIRCLE: HERITAGE OR RUPTURE? MADHU JAIN-BENOIT

On 12 August, the Mughal Emperor appointed the East India Company his Diwan for the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, thus transforming the Company’s role from Merchant to Sovereign and changing the political and cultural profile of India forever. How did the new rulers view their acquisition? The Company tacitly acknowledged its new responsibilities in the choice of the first governor-general, Warren Hastings, an intellectual, rather than a trader or soldier. This paper proposes to explore the heritage of the “Hastings era.” Warren Hastings’s cultural policy, coming just after the rapacious ‘Clive Era’, set a new course for Britain’s relationship with India. A highly cultured man, proficient in Bengali, Urdu, and Persian, Hastings was responsible for the birth of the famous Orientalist movement. It was his credo that “to rule effectively, one must love India; to love India, one must communicate with her people; and to communicate with her people, one must learn her languages.”1 The various artists and men of letters who clustered around Hastings, following in his footsteps, learnt the languages of India, studied her culture, and shared their discoveries with the rest of Europe. They did not hesitate to claim that Indian literature, architecture, and art were on par with ancient Greece, a claim which both astonished and fascinated European intellectuals. The early Orientalists, children of the enlightenment, followed Voltaire in the belief that no one religion or 1

David Kopf, “The Historiography of British Orientalism 1772-1992,” in Objects of Enquiry, The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (17461794) 141-160, Cannon, Garland and Kevin B. Brine ed. (New York: New York UP, 1995).

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civilisation could claim to monopolise the truth. There can be no doubt that the syncretic vision of the Hastings era played a vital role in breaking down cultural paradigms established in Neo-classical Europe. In this paper, I would like to discuss the long-term legacy of the ‘Hastings Circle’. I consider this important, as over the centuries, their vision of India has weighed heavily on the way Europe sees India, and, perhaps, more importantly, on the way India sees herself. This is partly because their work belongs to the formative period of the Raj, a period which was to create the administrative structures which survived, little modified, until the end of the colonial period, thus deeply influencing contemporary India. I propose to begin by discussing the achievements of the Hastings circle, which established India’s claim to her ancient cultural heritage in European eyes, and then to analyze the darker side of their legacy, in an attempt to understand how India got caught in a cultural time warp, or ‘rupture’ because of the colonial constructs built at the time.

The Birth of Orientalism Let me begin by a few words on the pre-Hastings period, when India was virtually a ‘Terre Incognita’ for Europe, before describing the ‘new climate’ created by the first Governor-General, as the publications of the intellectual adventures of the Hastings Circle transformed India from an imaginary space of fantasy into Europe’s cultural/cum/intellectual other half.

The ‘terra incognita’ Fantasy tends to dominate early accounts of India – the early travellers rarely spoke indigenous languages, and frequently embellished fact with fantasy. Take one of the earliest travel narratives by Megasthenes, which dates after Alexander’s death. William Robertson, the British historian notes: “Unfortunately, Megasthenes was so fond of the marvellous, that he mingled with the truths that he related many extravagant fictions; and to him may be traced up the fabulous tales of men with ears so large that they could wrap themselves up in them, of others with a single eye, without mouths, without noses, with long feet, and toes turned backwards, of people only three spans in height, of wild men with heads in the shape of a wedge, of ants as large as foxes that dug up gold, and many other things

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no less wonderful.”2 Representations, or rather, ‘mis’-representations of India by early writers like Megasthenes are echoed in the early pictorial representations of India. Consider one of the earliest European pictures of an Indian religious scene, “The Devadasis of Coromandel.”

The Devadasis of Coromandel

The Devadasis are transformed into European nuns and the Goddess, the Devi - into a dark-complexioned Mother Mary. This illustration is taken from The Travels of Marco Polo, a thirteenth-century travelogue, and presumably corresponds to Marco Polo’s descriptions of the consecrated Indian maidens of the Coromandel Coast, but only the caption brings India to mind. It suffices to compare the illustration with any Indian sculpture of a Devadasi to appreciate the absurdity. Similarly, India represented in British theatre does not bear comparison with reality, as can be seen from the frontispiece of John Dryden’s play, Aureng-Zebe, written in 1735.

2

William Robertson, An historical disquisition concerning the knowledge that the ancients had of India: and the progress of trade with that country prior to the discovery of the passage to it by the Cape of Good Hope. With an appendix, containing observations on the civil policy, the laws and judicial proceedings, the Arts, the Sciences, and Religious Institutions of the Indians. Published by A. Strahan, and T. Cadell, 1792 Original from the New York Public Library Pre-1801 Imprint Collection (Library of Congress) Digitized 10 Oct 2007, 34.

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Frontispiece of John Dryden’s play, Aureng-Zebe

The scene depicted on the frontispiece is taken from Act iv, sc i, and depicts Murad, Aurengzebe and the Empress Nur Mahal. The Mughal Empress is wearing a low-cut Restoration gown, while the princes are in Roman apparel. Not to mention the complete absence of the strict Mughal Purdah. Textual representations are equally misinformed. Let us also take a look at a typical passage on Indian religions from Robert Orme’s History, published in 1763: The history of these gods is a heap of the greatest absurdities. Is Eswara twisting off the neck of Bram; it is the Sun, who gets his teeth knocked out, and the Moon, who had her face beat black and blue at a feast… They say that the Sun and the Moon carry in their faces to this day the marks of this broil. (Robert Orme History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 1763)

Hardly edifying. Compare Orme’s style to William Jones’s remarks in his last presidential discourse (1794), in which he celebrates a doctrine of the fundamental unity of all sublime religions: If the conversion (...) of the Pandits and Maulavis in this country shall ever be attempted by protestant missionaries, they must beware of asserting, while they teach the gospel of truth, what those Pandits and Maulavis would know to be false: the former would cite the beautiful Arya couplet, (...) which pronounces the duty of a good man, even in the moment of his destruction, to consist not only in forgiving, but even in a desire of benefiting, his destroyer, as the Sandal-tree, in the instant of its overthrow, sheds perfume on the axe, which fells it; and the latter would triumph in repeating the verse of SADI, who represents a return of good for good as a

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slight reciprocity but says to the virtuous man, ‘Confer benefits on him who has injured thee.”3

This essentially syncretic approach of the Hastings group to religion is perfectly illustrated in Hastings’s preface to Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagawad Gita, putting the Gita on par with the Iliad, Odyssey, and Milton: I hesitate not to pronounce the Geeta a performance of great originality; of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction, almost unequalled; (...) of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian dispensation, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrines.4

The careful scholarship of the Hastings circle is clear when one looks at the works of John Zephaniah Holwell, whose attempts to present the philosophy of the Hindus are full of suppositions and errors. I quote Peter Marshall: Holwell reproduced long extracts from what he called ‘the Shastah’, based on manuscripts which he had lost in the sack of Calcutta in 1756. He believed that his ‘Shastah’ was the oldest and purest source of Hinduism; he had been told that it was at least 4,866 years old and he accepted that it was the most ancient statement of religious belief in the world.5

Obviously, that would have been impossible. Nor does Holwell seem to have realized that ‘Shastra’ is merely the generic word for ‘book’. Holwell did not speak Sanskrit, and his book is simply a theological dissertation given to him by a brahman – and has no documentary value. This sort of slipshod work disappears with the work of the early Orientalists. Careful scholarship combined with a syncretic approach to religion, becomes the new order.

The new climate Warren Hastings chose to privilege this approach as he felt that British administrators and merchants in India were not sufficiently responsive to 3

William Jones, The Collected Works of William Jones, Garland Cannon ed. (New York: New York University Press, (1799) 1993), 13 vols. 3: 239-244. 4 P.J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970), 187. 5 Ibid., 18.

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Indian languages and Indian traditions. Orientalism was adopted as the official policy because Hastings believed that an efficient Indian administration rested on an understanding of ‘Indian culture.’ He considered it the only way to bridge the gulf between ruler and ruled.6 Hastings’s own administration was distinguished by a tolerance for the native customs and by a cultural empathy unusual for the time. Hastings proposed the required study of Persian and Sanskrit for all Company cadets, and encouraged English artists of the calibre of William Hodges and Johan Zoffany to travel and work in India, even arranging company subsidies for the former. These men break with the traditional neoclassical tendency to consider Greek and Latin culture as the acme of universal human experiences, Hodges even proposed that “the motifs found in ancient Indian monuments may well have preceded, or even been the source for the celebrated architecture of Greece and Rome.”7 The intellectual elite handpicked by Warren Hastings includes Nathaniel Halhed, who published Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778); he translated the Hindu legal code in 1776, Gentoo Code, Charles Wilkins, translator of the Bhagavad Gita (1784) and the Hitopadesha (a version of Panchatantra, 1787). The group also included John Shore - later Lord Teignmouth, William Jones’s first biographer, Francis Gladwin author of Institutes of the Emperor Akbar (an abridged version of Abul Fazl’s work), Jonathan Duncan and William Chambers. Undoubtedly the star of the group was William Jones, the first European who drew the world’s attention to the beauty of Indian poetry through his translations of Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntala (1789) and Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda (1799). Sakuntala was received with such critical acclaim by its nineteenth-century audience that it engendered forty-six translations in twelve different languages. Orientalism as a scientific study was launched. India had come a long way from the ‘Devadasis of Coromandel’ picture discussed above. Imagination gave way to scientific observation in travel narratives as well. George Forster’s Sketches of the Mythology and Customs of the Hindoos published in 1785, is a seriously documented narrative, quite shorn of the fantasy seen earlier. In keeping with the new intellectual climate, Forster spoke the Maharatta language, and a little 6 Gauri Visvanathan, Masks of Conquest – Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), 27-28. 7 Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin. Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India. 1950 (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005), 122.

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Sanskrit. Forster follows Wilkins, Halhed, and Hodges in his genuine respect of indigenous cultures and languages. It is difficult to convey the feelings of excitement and discovery which reigned during this period, but there is no doubt that the flora and fauna of the country, the languages, culture and religions of the unknown ‘space’ fascinated these early Orientalists. They made exciting discovery after discovery, all of which were duly recorded in Asiatique Researches and shipped off to a waiting Europe. They charted new seas, constantly challenging received ideas about India and the Orient in every field imaginable, from astronomy and politics to literature and law. Nothing was too distant, too small, too large, or too unimportant. From the tiny flowers of the druva grass to the zodiac itself, everything was going to be observed, examined, and discovered. They learnt the languages, travelled widely, read, translated, and conversed with learned men, discussed their findings with one another and shared them with Europe. Nor were their explorations limited to the contemporary scene. For the first time, the cultural treasure trove of Ancient India was revealed, as Warren Hastings, and following closely in his wake, Wilkins and Jones, coaxed the learned Brahmans to accept and collaborate with them, becoming the first Europeans to learn the sacred language, Sanskrit.8 Jones electrified Europe with his discovery of common roots for Sanskrit and Latin: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists ... Third Discourse, ‘On the Hindus’, 02.02.1786 9

However, this quest for the intellectual pot of gold was not an adventure shared by all the British in India—most Europeans were engaged in 8

There were of course some exceptions, for example, Roberto di Nobili, a Jesuit missionary, mastered Sanskrit, and wrote the L’Ezour Vedam, (taken erroneously for an ancient learned text by Voltaire), and which is but a clever forgery of the Vedas in which he extols the virtues of Christianity; but this is the first time Sanskrit studies were undertaken so scientifically, and on such a large scale. 9 The collected Works of William Jones 3: 34.

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amassing wealth by corruption, presents and inflated contracts or whatever means presented themselves. Seen in this context, the intellectual adventure of the Hastings circle was all the more unique, as they were determined to break through colonial mental barriers, and walk on the other side of the magic looking glass. This in turn led to a breakthrough in European mentalities in the home country, when their discoveries were published. Now we will turn to the darker side of this brilliant picture, in an attempt to understand how India got caught in a cultural time warp because of the colonial constructs built at the time.

The Time Warp Genuinely committed to the East, the Hastings Circle transformed the image of Eastern culture and science in the eyes of the world. No small feat. On the other hand, their equally genuine commitment to Empire led them to build various questionable colonial constructs. Take, for example, the glorification of the ‘Golden Age of the Hindus’. There are several problems with this. To begin with, the new representation of Ancient India as a space of high culture and civilisation did little to increase respect for contemporary Indian culture. On the contrary, contemporary India was presented as degenerate and needed British encouragement to reconstruct her glorious past, thus rescuing her from the pernicious effects of despotic Muslim regimes. But this was ignoring the fact that Muslim regimes had been in place now for nearly eight hundred years, and that the ‘invaders’ in question had long since integrated Hindustan, or the land of the Hindus. This limited vision of India has underpinned all future representations of India to the present day. This ‘mummified’ representation of India was not in itself fortuitous, but on the contrary, an inevitable part of the imperial process. I’m not implying that the early Orientalists had a pre-prepared plan in mind, aimed at enabling a smooth political and cultural transition from the dying Mughal Empire to the future Raj. It was more a question of the historical process to which they belonged. The early Orientalists were employees of the East India Company, and their work required a “specialized knowledge of Indian law, politics, society, and religion, which inevitably led them to the literature in Sanskrit and Persian. Thus, scholarly and administrative interests coalesced.”10 10

Romila Thapar, Interpreting Early India (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1992), 2.

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Their study of India corresponded to the Company’s needs and the need to apply a codifying grid to complex social structures for administrative purposes led to simplifications, which did not necessarily reflect the reality of the country they were administering, but rather, their requirements for administering it. All scholarly/scientific observations were made through the prism of the coloniser, which magnified the past, while diminishing the present. In this part of the paper, I would like to discuss two aspects of this colonial ‘codifying grid’: the rewriting of India’s legal systems, and the reduction of the plurality of her religions. Then I propose analyzing the consequences.

Rewriting India’s legal systems In the chaos following the Clive administration, breakdown of indigenous legal systems led to the East India Company assuming direct responsibility for the administration of civil justice in Bengal (1772). Europeans were frequently called upon to act as judges in cases to be decided according to Hindu law. For this reason, Hastings hoped to provide a corpus of law which would replace conflicting sources. His Plan for the Administration of Justice of 1772 listed the civil cases which would fall under Muslim or Hindu law and eleven pandits were set to work. The result, the vivadarnava-bhanjana (1775) was translated into Persian, and then into English by Halhed (1776) - A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits. Halhed’s Code was “a somewhat qualified success”, as the court still remained dependent on pandits. William Jones, who distrusted the pandits, was determined to replace Halhed’s Code with something that would enable English judges to dispense with them – something comparable to Justinian’s Corpus Juris.11 Therefore he undertook the immense task of translating the Manavdharmashastra, the ancient code of law of the Hindus into English. Unfortunately, the assumptions on which Jones based his translation were not correct. Firstly, legal historians agree that Jones’s mistrust of the Pandits was not founded. His second premise, that Hindu law could be fixed for once and all was equally erroneous, since the Shastras were never meant to be taken literally; they were meant to be

11

Jones refers to himself as ‘the Justinian of India’ in a letter to Sir John Macpherson on 6.5.1786 (Letters II: 699)

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interpreted, and more importantly, to be contextualized by legal pandits.12 But the Hastings/Jones approach did not take this into account when working out British application of the Shastra laws. Perhaps the most important problem was that they did not take into account the Arthasastra, a more secular text, which differs from the Manavdharmashastra on many points. The historian A.L. Basham insists that the two must be compared to have a correct view of ancient Hindu law.13 Therefore the Manavdharmashastra should never have been taken as the main legal reference to begin with. Jones’s work was interrupted by his early death, and completed by H. T. Colebrooke, whose Digest of Hindu Law (1798), commanded the development of Hindu law as we know it. The British definition of Muslim and Hindu codes of law reduced the power of the pandits and the Maulvis, and by the third decade of the nineteenth century, as the courts relied more on translated ancient works, the dharmasastra ceased to exist as a living and responsible science.14 The mummification of India had begun. The other major problem of defining Indian law and traditions as per the Manavdharmashastra was that scholars like Jones derived their material from the Brahminical centres of learning in Tanjore, Benares, and Nadia. These centres lay emphasis on Brahmanism as the religion of India, which was not at all the case. Thomas Metcalf, in his Ideologies of the Raj, considers the Hastings generation responsible for construction of a religion ‘Hinduism’ based on ancient Sanskrit sacred texts. Let me try to explain this.

Redefining Indian religions Texts, like the Manavdharmashastra, which Hastings and Jones saw as the embodiment of a ‘pure’ and ‘primeval’ religion setting out the divine laws of the Hindus, were privileged, and almost considered as a blueprint for Hindu society. Whereas the Manavdharmashastra was written by

12

Derret, J. Duncan M. Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 95-162. 13 Basham, A.L. The Wonder That was India (Delhi: Fontana Books, 1954), 112114. 14 Derret, J. Duncan M. Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber and Fabler, 1968), 250.

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Brahmans, with a clear Brahmanical orientation. And this Brahmanical text provides the fourfold Varna (caste) system with divine sanction. Nor does the unified harmonious idealised Brahmanic pre-Islamic society so admired by the early Orientalists seem to have existed. Rather than a single religious community built around the Varna system, and characterized by Brahmanical Hinduism, there seem to have been multiple communities, with beliefs ranging from atheism to animism and a variety of religious organisations identifying themselves by location, language, or profession. Brahmanism was only one of these groups, and it was not even the dominant group. The picture that emerges of religion in ancient India from contemporary historical sources is quite different. There were two distinctly different prevalent religious groups, Brahmanism and Sramanism. They are organizationally separate, had different sets of beliefs and rituals, and often disagreed on social norms. Patanjali the grammarian refers to the hostility between Brahmanism and Sramanism as innate as is that between the snake and the mongoose. Sramanism, a term covering a variety of Buddhist, Jaina, Ajivika and other sects, denied the fundamentals of Brahmanism such as Vedic sruti and smrti, and did not recognize the Manavdharmashastra. Sramanism is characterized by a doctrine that does not believe in caste, although social hierarchy is accepted. Therefore Sramanism accepts conversion, whereas one must be born a Brahman. Thus it can be observed that Indian religions were marked by a far larger plurality of belief than came to be supposed. Rather than one great mythic ancient Hindu race, there were multiple communities identified by locality, languages, caste, occupation and sect. What appears to have been absent was the notion of a uniform, religious community identifiable as Hindu. This is surprising, and even disconcerting, nullifying the notion of a ‘golden age of the Hindus’–in fact Hindu means ‘the other’ in Arabic’ (Al-Hind).15 Therefore the modern view of one basic all-inclusive umbrella religion called ‘Hinduism’ would seem to be a construct of the early Orientalists. When Warren Hastings and Jones decided to apply the Manavdharmashastra to eighteenth century India, they were ignoring the reality of the contemporary social scene, substituting it with their own construct of a society dominated by “Brahmanical Hinduism.”

15 I owe my remarks on Ancient India to Romila Thapar’s study: Interpreting Early India.

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This was representing eighteenth century Indian society as more rigid than it actually was. C.A. Bayly describes, on the contrary, a far more fluid and mobile society. He notes the clear existence of alternate movements that refused Brahmanical rites and above all, the four Varna caste system, like the devotional or bhakti cults, and other alternate movements which rejected caste – like the Sikhs and the Jains.16

Analyzing the consequences: Indian realities and colonial constructs When Hastings began elaborating a view of Hindus as a people who ‘had been in possession of laws which continued unchanged from remotest antiquity’, he set into motion a movement which was to dominate the construction of the country’s identity during colonial rule. India’s ‘ancient constitution,’ he insisted, was very much intact. What the British must do, if they were successfully to govern India, was to master these laws, and the Sanskrit language in which they were contained, and more generally, to respect the customs of their new subjects.”17 This was the guideline for the early Orientalists – and accounts for the positive and negative aspect of their work, for though they uncovered fabulous ancient literary treasures, following Hastings, they considered them to be appropriate texts for British administrators dealing with eighteenth century India some two thousand years later. The ‘heirs’ of the early Orientalists in India, the East India Company servants who considered William Jones as their model - the Metcalfes, Bayleys, and Martins - followed this line of thought. They advocated social and cultural change for India, but believed that England should first help Asians rediscover the lost roots of their own civilisations. They argued that Asian civilisations were truly healthy and vigorous in ancient times, but that they had somehow degenerated. Like Hastings, Charles Metcalfe cast India in a timeless mould. His romantic and unrealistic view of villages led to a fossilization of Indian villages despite himself. Similarly, Thomas Munroe stuck in his vision of India caught in some kind of time warp simply failed to grasp the currents

16

C.A. Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India - Indian society and the making of the British Empire. II.1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 11-12. 17 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj - The New Cambridge History of India. III. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 9-10.

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of change that were sweeping over the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They identified India with Hinduism and regarded the Muslims as intruders. For these men, India was Europe’s past, as, following the theories of the early Orientalists, both civilizations shared Aryan institutions. The problem was that such a theory automatically implied that India had had no history since the time of the early Aryan invasions, and since this was obviously not the case with Britain, this theory also automatically implied a resultant dichotomy between India’s static society and England’s progress.18 While it is not my intention to demean their achievements, the fact remains that in their desire to revive the ‘golden age’ of the Hindus, they followed the Colonial constructs in viewing contemporary Indian culture as ‘degenerate’ on the one hand, and more importantly, ignoring the reality of a Hindu/Muslim syncretic culture on the other. There was a constant refusal to consider Indians as anything but Hindus, which again, is curiously a-historical, as pre-Islamic India stops at the beginning of the eleventh century. The Orientalists were ignoring the living reality of a Hindu/Muslim cultural syncreticism which existed during the 17th and 18th centuries–a form of syncretic high culture shared by many elitist Hindus and Muslims. Paul Brass notes: A Hindu-Muslim ruling class was created by the Muhgal emperors, with common interest in polo, elephant fighting, common modes of dress, and a lingua franca, Urdu, combining Hindi grammar with a largely Arabic and Persian vocabulary, the study of each other’s culture, the syncretist religions of Kabir and Guru Nanak, and so forth. There were significant areas of religious and cultural sharing.19

In Bengal a Persianized cultural pattern was pervading the arts, literature and etiquette, and contributing to a syncretic high culture shared by many elitist Hindus and Muslims. Many Hindus wore Persian dress, and spoke and wrote Persian as well as any educated Muslim. Ignoring this syncretic movement, for it was a movement–a beginning– was to have serious consequences on the Indian psyche. The beginning 18

Ibid., 69. Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1974. An Author's Guild Backinprint.com edition, Lincoln, NE, 2005), 123.

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turned into a closure. Obviously the British are not responsible for communal differences, but the Hindu/Muslim divide was fostered by the refusal of the early Orientalists to acknowledge India’s dual cultural heritage. The codification grids inevitably led to Indians defining themselves by religion, rather than locality, language, or profession. Warren Hastings himself was perfectly conscious that a need to stabilize the new colonial structure dictated his policies. His much quoted statement is: Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of humanity.20

This reveals the thinly veiled implacable imperialism behind his orientalism policy. Hastings’s statement makes the Foucauldian link between knowledge and power clear; a link that underpins the Orientalist mission to revitalize Indian culture and learning. In conclusion, I will remark that in the final analysis, the dice were loaded from the start. When colonization began in earnest, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Europe was convinced of its intellectual superiority, and the need for its “civilizing mission.” The Hastings Circle was exceptional in its recognition of the richness of an alien civilization. But this recognition stopped short of putting into question the imperial project. The early Orientalists made the best of the paradox they encountered –‘civilising’ a civilization – the greatness of which they were the first to recognize. It is hardly surprising that they chose to privilege an artificial construct that suited the Imperial project at the expense of reality. However, in the process of discovering her glorious past, India found itself locked, as it were, in a time warp. Indians themselves accepted this artificial version of their own history, forgetting the great syncretic movements of the eighteenth century. I think only now, thanks to the work of contemporary historians, have the true facts in all their complexity come to light, beginning with the myth of the Aryan Race which is now being seriously questioned. The true story of India, corresponding to the entirety of its unique historical experience, has yet to be written.

20

P.J. Marshall, op.cit., 189.

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Works Cited Jones, William, The Collected Works of Sir William Jones. 1799, edited by Garland Cannon. New York: New York University Press, 1993. 13 vols. —. The Letters of Sir William Jones, edited by Garland Cannon. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970. 2 vols. Almeida de, Hermione and Gilpin H, George. Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India. 1950. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005. Basham, A.L. The Wonder That was India. Delhi: Fontana Books, 1954, 112-115. Bayly, C.A. The New Cambridge History of India - Indian society and the making of the British Empire. II.1 Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Brass Paul, R. Language, Religion and Politics in North India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1974. An Author's Guild Backinprint.com edition, Lincoln, NE, 2005. Derret, J. Duncan M. Religion, Law and the State in India. London: Faber and Fabler, 1968. Kopf, David. “The Historiography of British Orientalism, 1772-1992. In Objects of Enquiry, The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), edited by Garland Cannon and Kevin B. Brine, 141-160. New York: New York UP, 1995. Marshall. P.J. The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. Metcalf, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj - The New Cambridge History of India. III. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Orme, Robert. A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan: From the Year MDCCXLV. To Which is Prefixed a Dissertation on the Establishments Made by Mohomedan Conquerors in Indostan. London: J. Nourse, 1763. On-line version. Roberstson, William. An historical disquisition concerning the knowledge which the ancients had of India: and the progress of trade with that country prior to the discovery of the passage to it by the cape of Good Hope. With an appendix, containing observations on the civil policy, the laws and judicial proceedings, the Arts, the Sciences, and Religious Institutions of the Indians. Published by A. Strahan, and T. Cadell, 1792 Original from the New York Public Library Pre-1801 Imprint Collection (Library of Congress) Digitized 10 October 2007. Thapar, Romila. Interpreting Early India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1992.

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Visvanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest – Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

CHAPTER TEN SIR SAYYID AHMAD KHAN’S NEW APPROACH TO THE MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN RELATIONSHIP IN THE CONTEXT OF BRITISH INDIA: A RUPTURE WITH OLD PRACTICES? BELKACEM BELMEKKI

In the wake of the unsuccessful uprising of 1857 in British India, the Muslim community there plunged into a sense of hopelessness and destitution. This was further exacerbated by the fact that the British decided to point an accusing finger at the Muslims as being the only bona fide fomenters behind the outbreak of this event. It was against this gloomy backdrop that Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, a nineteenth-century Indian Muslim leader and theologian, made his appearance on the Indian stage. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan believed that the only panacea for the Muslim predicament lay in a normalization of relations between his coreligionists and the Christian rulers, the British. This made him come up with a fresh orientation whereby he aimed at revolutionizing ChristianMuslim interrelations in the Indian Subcontinent so as to build bridges for mutual understanding and religious tolerance. As part of this, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan exhorted his co-religionists to look at the British rulers as friends rather than as foes, despite the fact that they (i.e. the British) had unseated them (i.e. the Mughals as former rulers) from power in the Subcontinent. In other words, for this Muslim intellectual, it was essential for the Muslims of India to come to terms with the fact that Muslim hegemony there had become part of a bygone era and that the British were now the de facto rulers. Indeed, his gauging of the post-Revolt context in which the Muslims of India were living made him realize the urgent need for them to let bygones be bygones and adopt a positive attitude towards the British masters to whom, in his view, they should pledge allegiance.

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As a matter of fact, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s philosophy of loyalism to the British Government sprang from his conviction that it was a political necessity and a matter of survival for the Muslims of India to be loyal, and that they could not expect any betterment without the blessing of the invincible British; all the more that all signs indicated that the latter would not cease to be the masters of India, at least, in the foreseeable future. Hence, in the light of these new conditions in the Subcontinent which were not in favour of the Muslims, some sort of readjustment had to be made by them which would involve befriending the British who were, in the words of Jim Masselos, “the patrons par excellence,” and who “were responsible for distributing the limited quantity of ‘loaves and fishes’ available.”1 But first, Sayyid Ahmad Khan considered that it was more than necessary to defuse the state of tension and misunderstanding that characterized relations between the Muslims of India and the British, especially in the aftermath of 1857. Towards this end, he wrote a pamphlet entitled The Loyal Muhammadans of India, in which he sought to “wipe off the stigma of Muslim instigation of the mutiny.”2 In this work, he highlighted the services that many Muslims had rendered to the British at the height of the Great Revolt and even declared that the Muslim community was worthy of praise for its support to the British; as he put it: It is to the Mohammedans alone that the credit belongs of having stood staunch and unshaken friends of the Government amidst that fearful tornado that devastated the country and shook the Empire to its core.3

Therefore, Sayyid Ahmad Khan pleaded with the British officials not to lump together all the members of his community and attempted to convince them of their firm loyalty, hence, no need to look at them with suspicious eyes. Nevertheless, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s pro-British position was not only for practical and strategic reasons but was rather, and mostly, the result of a careful examination of the issue of Muslim-Christian relations from a religious standpoint. Basing his arguments on the Quran and the Hadith, i.e. the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, this Muslim theologian wanted 1

Jim Masselos, Indian Nationalism: An History (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1996) 120. 2 K.K. Aziz, The Making of Pakistan: A Study in Nationalism (London: Chattos & Windus, 1967), 19. 3 Quoted in Shun Muhammad, The Aligarh Movement: Basic Documents: 18641898 (Meerut: Meenakshi Prakashan. 1978), xi.

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to prove to his co-religionists, and in particular to those who raised their eyebrows over his new approach, that loyalty to the British Government did not conflict with the Islamic faith. After all, Sayyid Ahmad Khan wondered, was Islam not closer to Christianity than any other religion in the world?4 This prompted him to embark on the task of delineating the many similarities between both religions. In this respect, he put stress on the premise that both religions were monolithic creeds which had originated from the same source and had more convergences that united them than divergences that divided them. This was corroborated by Percival Spear who pointed out that Sayyid Ahmad Khan stressed the resemblance of “fundamental Islamic and Christian ideas with their common Judaic heritage.”5 Thus, Sayyid Ahmad Khan wrote a book in 1862 entitled Tabiyn alKalam Fi Tafsir al-Tawrat wa al-Injyl Ala Millat al-Islam (The Mahomedan Commentary on the Holy Bible), whose publication he paid for using his own savings.6 Through this daring work on the Old and New Testaments, which was the first of its kind to ever be written by a Muslim scholar, given the sensitive nature of its topic at the time,7 Sayyid Ahmad Khan wanted to delve deep and bring up proofs that could vindicate his claims of the closeness of both Abrahamic religions. To put it differently, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s main objective was to explore areas of harmony and to foster sympathetic understanding of Christianity among the Muslims, as well as to prove that these two monolithic religions had never been opposed to each other.8 As he put it: No religion upon earth was more friendly to Christianity than Islam; and the latter had been more beneficial and advantageous to Christianity … Islam fought against Judaism in favour of Christianity, and openly and manly did it declare that the mission of … Jesus Christ was unquestionably ‘the Word of God’ and ‘the Spirit of God.’9

Then, he added: 4

Aziz, op.cit., 70. Percival Spear, A History of India: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1990), 225. 6 Hafeez Malik, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muslim Modernization in India and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 83-84 7 Ibid., 84. 8 Muhammad, op.cit, xi. 9 Quoted in Muhammad, Ibid., xi-xii 5

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Chapter Ten Mohammedans as all people guided by a sacred Book believe in the necessity of the coming of Prophets to save mankind and have faith in these books. Mohammedans have full faith in the divine nature of the Christian Gospels.10

In a word, Sayyid Ahmad Khan argued in his book that the message received from God by the Prophet Mohammed was the same message received previously by Jesus Christ.11 While on the subject, it is worthwhile to refer to the fact that many Western intellectuals, past and present, have lent support to Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s idea of Muslim-Christian resemblances, by stressing the fact that both Islam and Christianity represent two creeds that have common theological roots and share almost identical characteristics and principles. One of these was Sir William Baker, a nineteenth-century British writer, who insisted on the close affinity between both religions where worshippers believe in the same God.12 The same author went further in pointing out that “the Muslim among all oriental races is the nearest to what a Protestant terms Christianity.”13 Again in this regard, Richard Fletcher, a contemporary British historian and islamologist, wrote: There was so much that Muslims believed, or did, that was familiar to Christians. They believed in one God. They revered patriarchs, prophets and kings of the Old Testament—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Elijah, David, Solomon. They venerated the Virgin Mary, to whom indeed one of the chapters or suras of the Koran is devoted (Sura 19). Respectful references to Jesus and his teachings occur repeatedly in the Koran. Like Christians they prayed and fasted, gave alms and went on pilgrimage.14

Again along the same line of thought, Chris Corrie and Peter Chippindale, lending support to the idea of close affinities between Islam and Christianity, claimed that in spite of their errors (in the eyes of Muslims), Christians are believed to be closer to Islam than to any other

10 Quoted in Tariq Hasan, The Aligarh Movement and the Making of the Indian Muslim Mind: 1857-2002 (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006), 54. 11 M.A. Karandikar, Islam in India’s Transition to Modernity (Karachi: Eastern Publishers, Karachi, 1968), 140. 12 Aziz, op.cit., 71. 13 Ibid. 14 Richard Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation (London: Viking, 2003), 18.

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religion in the world.15 To substantiate their claim, they quoted a passage from the Quran, the Chapter of “Al Maidah” (The Table), in which God, addressing Muslims, says: And you will certainly find the nearest in friendship to those who believe to be those who say: We are Christians … And when they hear what has been revealed to the apostle (Muhammad), you will see their eyes overflowing with tears on account of the truth that they recognise; they say: Our Lord! We believe, so write us down with the witnesses. (The Quran, the Chapter of Al Maidah “The Table,” verse: 83)

On the other hand, in urging his co-religionists to refrain from regarding the British as their enemies, but rather, as friends, Sayyid Ahmad Khan brought forth many arguments from his religious study and social experiences.16 According to Khursheed K. Aziz, Sayyid Ahmad Khan wanted to convince the Muslims of India of the fact that Islam was nearer to Christianity than any other religion in the world, and that it had more in common with the monotheism of Christianity than the polytheism of Hinduism (70).17 With regard to Hinduism, Syed M. Taha and Nasreen Afzal noted that its relationship with Islam was characterized by marked differences in the belief-system. As an example, both authors observed that whereas Islam, as a monotheistic and iconoclastic religion, believed in conversion through preaching, Hinduism did not, as it might adversely affect the caste-based society nurtured on inequality.18 Sayyid Ahmad Khan further claimed that Christians were referred to in the Quran as Ahl al-Kitab, i.e. ‘People of the Book,’ and that Muslims should respect them.19 On this point, Richard Fletcher confirmed that the 15 Chris Horrie and Peter Chippendale, What is Islam?: A Comprehensive Introduction. (London: Virgin Books, 2003), 11. 16 Aziz, op.cit., 70. 17 Ibid., loc.cit., The stressing of this point marked the beginning of an era of strained relations and alienation between the Muslims and Hindus, and a huge wedge being driven between both communities which would change the course of events in the Indian Subcontinent in the following decades. In the process, the British officials there made the most of this situation to ensure the continuity of the Raj. 18 M. Syed Taha and Nasreen Afzal, “Separation or Separate Nations: TwoNationTheory Reconsidered,” Historicus: Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, Ansar Zahid Khan ed. L.1 (2002): 95-111, Quotation from pp. 100–101. 19 Aziz, op.cit., 70.

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Quran made it clear that it is incumbent upon every Muslim to respect the Ahl al-Kitab,20 and to back up his statement, Fletcher cited the following passage from the Chapter of Al’Ankabut (The Spider) from the Quran: Dispute not with the People of the Book save in the fairer manner, except for those of them that do wrong; and say, ‘We believe in what has been sent down to us, and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is One, and to Him we have surrendered. (The Quran, the Chapter of Al’Ankabut “the Spider,” verse: 46)

In the meantime, Sayyid Ahmad Khan drew an analogy between both faiths in the social sphere to show to the members of his community that they shared many common ideals and practices with Christians, unlike the Hindus.21 For that purpose, he wrote another pamphlet, entitled Tuaam Ahl-e-Kitab, in which he urged his co-religionists to get rid of their prejudices which prevented them from socializing with Christians (Muhammad xii). In his opinion, socializing with the British was an essential ingredient that would create friendly feelings with them, whereas aloofness would only lead to more misunderstanding.22 Therefore, he encouraged the members of his community to dine with Christians “at the same table with spoon, knife and fork.”23 Actually, eating with foreigners, or non-Muslims, was often considered un-Islamic behaviour among the Muslim community in the Subcontinent. This, according to the Pakistani scholar Masood A. Raja, could be attributed to the strong influence of the Hindu culture on Indian Muslims.24 Besides, Masood A. Raja pointed out that Sir Sayyid Ahmad wanted to free his co-religionists from this prejudice by arguing that: … As British were people of the book, breaking bread with them could not be considered a contaminating experience. [...] this practice of not sharing food with non-Muslims was strictly un-Islamic and was caused by Hinduization of Indian Islam. (163)

20

Quoted in Fletcher, op.cit., 20. Aziz, op.cit., 70. 22 Ibid., 74. 23 Muhammad, op.cit., xii. 24 Masood A. Raja, Texts of a Nation: The Cultural, Political, and Religious Imaginary of Pakistan (Florida: Florida State University, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2006), 163. 21

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To put it differently, Sayyid Ahmad Khan was of the view that in dayto-day life Indian Muslims were closer to Christians than to the (in his own words) “idol-worshipping” Hindus. As K.K. Aziz put it: In social matters … the Muslim found himself in more congenial company among the British. The two could, and did, intermarry and intermix in society without disagreeable taboos. With the Hindu, one was always on one’s guard against breaking some caste restriction or polluting a Brahmin household.25

It should be noted that Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s statement regarding intermixing with the British in social matters, such as dining and marriage, brought him a lot of anger and criticism from the orthodox ulama (a group of learned people in Islamic religious affairs). Yet, in facing such opposition, he often quoted the Quran and the Hadith of the Prophet, and relied on some distinguished scholars of Sharia (the path to be followed in Islam) such as Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmizi, and many others, in order to prove that there was no restriction in Islam on such social intermixing with Christians.26 In the meantime, Sir Sayyid Ahmad’s determination to give a religious sanction to the concept of loyalism among his co-religionists led him to the extent of renouncing “jihad” against the British Colonial Government.27 In fact, in clear defiance of those radical members who called for a holy war against the non-Muslim rulers, Sir Sayyid advised his community to shy away from any such attempt since “jihad,” as a religious obligation, was not incumbent upon Muslims in a country where they were offered protection (62).28 Moreover, he asserted that “God has made them (the British) rulers over us,” and that the Prophet Mohammed said that if “God place over you a black negro slave as a ruler you must obey him,” hence, the Indian Muslims should be pleased with the will of God.29 In this respect, K.K. Aziz observed that in the Islamic tradition, “disobedience to those in authority is not permitted unless the ruler 25

Aziz, op.cit., 74. Muhammad, op.cit., xii. 27 Muhammad Yusuf Abbasi, The Genesis of Muslim Fundamentalism in British India (New Delhi: Eastern Book Corporation, 1987), 23. 28 According to Muhammad Yusuf Abbasi, Sir Sayyid Ahmad did not consider the Great Revolt of 1857 as a “jihad”. Ibid., 61. 29 S. R. Mehrotra, India and the Commonwealth: 1885-1929 (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1965), 180. 26

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interferes with the religious rites of the Muslims.”30 Thus, for Sir Sayyid Ahmad, that was not the case in the Indian Subcontinent, since the Muslim community there “enjoyed all protection—religious and otherwise.”31 Further than that, Sir Sayyid Ahmad wanted to clarify the meaning of “jihad,” a hitherto very controversial subject, which was often referred to in the Anglo-Indian press as a serious threat emanating from the Muslim community in South Asia (xii). In reality, the aim behind Sir Sayyid’s attempt to elucidate the concept of “jihad” was twofold: on the one hand, he wanted to clear the minds of the British officials in Calcutta and London, as well as the public opinion in Britain, of the false assumption that “jihad” was “a duty of Muslims against Christians,” and on the other hand, he wanted to explain to his co-religionists the circumstances in which Muslims could have recourse to “jihad” (xii). In order to substantiate his claims, Sir Sayyid Ahmad made use of many fatwas, i.e., legal pronouncements or clerical verdicts, issued by the Hanafi, Shafi‘i and Maliki muftis (i.e. religious scholars) based in Mecca,32 in response to a question regarding the legitimacy of “jihad” in the context of British India. According to M.Y. Abbasi, these muftis explicitly declared that India could not be regarded as Dar-ul-Harb, or country of war, in which case “jihad” is a duty for every Muslim. Rather, it should be considered as Dar-ul-Islam, or country of Islam or safety, and that the ruler should be obeyed.33 As a result of his religious liberalism, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan became subject to severe opprobrium from the most orthodox members of his community and particularly the traditional “Ulama”, as well as from abroad. Probably the most scathing criticism came from the foreign intellectual Jamal al-din al-Afghani (1838-1897), who once stated in an article published on 28 August 1884 in his journal al-Urwal al-Wuthqa (Paris): “Ahmad Khan écrivit un commentaire du Coran; il intervertit les mots et falsifia ce que Dieu avait révélé.”34

30

Aziz, op.cit., 75. Muhammad, op.cit., xii. 32 These were three of the four classical schools of Islamic law (the fourth being the Hanbali school), named after the four learned religious men who were commissioned by the early Abbasid emperors to elucidate and write down Islamic law (Horrie and Chippendale, op.cit., 130). 33 Abbasi, op.cit., 22. 34 Ahmad, op.cit. 56. 31

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Works Cited Abbasi, Muhammad Yusuf. The Genesis of Muslim Fundamentalism in British India. New Delhi: Eastern Book Corporation, 1987. Ahmad, A. “Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Jamal al-din al-Afghani and Muslim India.” Studia Islamica 13 (1960): 55-78. Aziz, K. K. The Making of Pakistan: A Study in Nationalism, London: Chattos & Windus, 1967. Fletcher, Richard. The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation. London: Viking, 2003. Hassan. Tariq, The Aligarh Movement and the Making of the Indian Muslim Mind: 1857-2002. New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006. Horrie, Chris and Peter Chippendale. What is Islam?: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Virgin Books, 2003. Karandikar, M.A. Islam in India’s Transition to Modernity. Karachi: Eastern Publishers, Karachi, 1968. Malik, Hafeez. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muslim Modernization in India and Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Masood A. Raja. Texts of a Nation: The Cultural, Political, and Religious Imaginary of Pakistan. Florida: Florida State University, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2006. Masselos, Jim. Indian Nationalism: An History. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1996. Mehrotra, S. R. India and the Commonwealth: 1885-1929. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1965. Muhammad, Shun ed. The Aligarh Movement: Basic Documents: 18641898. Meerut: Meenakshi Prakashan. 1978. Spear, Percival. A History of India: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1990. Taha Syed M. and Nasreen Afsal. “Separation or Separate Nations: TwoNation Theory Reconsidered.” Historicus: Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, Ansar Zahid Khan (ed.). L.1 (2002): 95-111.

Website http://quran.com/

CHAPTER ELEVEN RUPTURED HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN MYANMAR SHRUTI DAS

The history of a nation is a narrative of its people. The present article focuses on Myanmar, a nation built upon a patchwork of diverse ethnic cultures. Any national history involves a contradiction, insofar as it invokes the antiquity of the supposed (or imagined) origins of the nation in service of the novelty of the nation-state, which is thus meant to rest securely on this foundational postulate. The nation-state is a modern political form. The cultural and political act of conferring ancient origins upon this modern social institution thus seems an implausible one. It is, however, a procedure resorted to out of the need to aggregate the diverse groups which are present inside a single boundary, thus enabling the construction of the nation-state. The projection of a unitary national origin becomes a process which is logically plausible, supportive of the ideology of the nation-state, giving meaning to the physical boundary of the Nation. According to Christopher Hill: For national history ... the problem of heterogeneity must be solved in epistemological terms. The diverse, sedimented forms of identity, community, and social practice that exist in the early period of formation of nation-states and the new possibilities that appear in the interstices of the nationalized society, all of which expose the contingent face of the nation form, must be unrecognizable as such.1

From this predicament there derives, in the interest of the political ideology of the nation-state, the harnessing of the national past to the 1 Christopher Hill, National History and the World of Nations (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008), 156.

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immediate political needs of the national present. The national history of Myanmar is not a linear story. It is a complex narratology, exhibiting multiple political ruptures which together play a crucial role in the process of nation-building. In a situation where diversity and dissent can create an atmosphere of repression, the reference to a shared language and race are factors contributing to a sense of common identity among people who do not even know each other. Linguistic homogeneity motivates patriotism and is thus a pivotal factor of national mobilization. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Laureate, says that: The greatest threats to global security today come not from the economic deficiencies of the poorest nations but from religious, racial (or tribal) and political dissensions raging in those regions where principles and practices which could reconcile the diverse instincts and aspirations of mankind have been ignored, repressed or distorted [...] Diversity and dissent need not inhibit the emergence of strong, stable societies, but inflexibility, narrowness and unadulterated materialism can prevent healthy growth. 19 May 1993.2

Suu Kyi’s statement is indeed in keeping with Christopher Hill’s idea that fractured identity is prenational and that it, therefore, constitutes an impediment to the emergence of a conscious, collective sense of shared nationhood. Once the diversity of historical experiences is taken into account and recognised, the ruptured nature of historical experience comes to be regarded as an important component of political agency, by way of its contribution to the construction or invention of an integrated national history. The concept of nationhood and the question of nationality thus cannot be addressed in isolation. They have to take into account the question of boundaries and of the language that is particular to a given location of culture. The general feature at the heart of the universal principles of nationalism thus involves an assertion of the primacy of national identity over the claims of class, religion, or indeed of humanity in general. The globalization and economic development of a country depends on its potential for overall progress and inclusiveness, which in turn is dependent 2

Aung San Suu Kyi, “Towards A True Refuge,” The Joyce Pearce Memorial Lecture, 19 May 1993, Refugee Studies Programme, University of Oxford. http://www.birmaniademocratica.org/ViewDocument.aspx?lang=it&docid=d04324 57635a4287a672bc7df729613c. Consulted December 15, 2015.

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on factors pertaining to the communication and transaction between the people living in the specific place. The economic dimension of progress involves the belief that the ownership and control of important resources should be maintained firmly within the nation itself. The political application involves the principle of self-determination, in accordance with the concept of a sovereign entity dominated by a single nation. One advantage of the nation-state is that its authority, conceived of as a natural embodiment of the identity and will of the citizens, establishes a firm base for legitimate government. People who are secure, economically and culturally, behind their own borders, can negotiate fairly and amicably with each other. However, the populations of the world are not distributed on clear-cut national territories. It follows that there are always minorities whose presence in the national state poses a difficulty, insofar as it is potentially disruptive to the ideals or matrix of nationalism. Asia, which prides itself on its diversity, is now facing a challenge regarding its development, due to its variegated linguistic diversity. The linguistic reality of South Asia is anchored in the multicultural and pluralistic society of the region. As such it constitutes a challenge to the one nation phenomenon and to globalization. Our focus here will be on the South Asian country of Myanmar, characterised by its fragmented national past, its linguistic diversity, its age-old tradition, and its resistance to the implementation of a unitary national history and to the form of institutionalised English, which has acquired currency in academies, and which is gradually inching towards a more pervasive social penetration. Martin Smith, in his report on Burma/Myanmar and its ethnicity and development, has noted that: Burma throughout is a rich but complex tapestry of peoples. Most estimates put the majority “Burman” population at around 30 million, or two-thirds of the total. But these estimates are based on primary usage of the Burmese language, and it is incorrect to describe all such speakers as one homogenous group. Indigenous speakers of closely-related dialects, such as the Rakhine in the north-west and Tavoyan in the south, claim a separate nationality; in other areas sub-groups, such as the Danu and Intha, still survive. Furthermore, many Burmese speakers in Lower Burma are assimilated Mons or Karens.3

3

Martin Smith, Ethnic Groups in Burma: Development, Democracy and Human Rights (London: Anti-Slavery International, 1994), 35.

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He further notes that the ethnic Burman and Buddhist history, culture, and language are the predominant social influences on the national life of Myanmarese people. People have been subjected to political repression and human rights abuses for decades. In this respect, it is the ethnic minority groups which have generally been the worst victims. Since the 1962 coup, many ethnic minorities believe that there has been an underlying, though unacknowledged, policy of “Burmanisation,” which initially appeared to accelerate after the events of 1988. Thus, in presenting their cases today, many ethnic minority leaders claim that they are starting at a huge disadvantage.4

Minority groups have indeed been profoundly marginalised as a consequence of political and economic neglect since independence. In every field, whether in relation to language, culture, education or development, the ethnic minorities of Myanmar have found themselves relegated to a second-class position. In this context, it is relevant to discuss the similar plight of AfricanAmericans, who are seeking to merge into the mainstream of American national life. The Oxford Companion to US Military History5 gives a comprehensive depiction of Nationalism in America. It points out that African-Americans have tried to invoke their active participation in the country’s major wars in order to win acceptance of their membership in the national community, while the white Americans who founded and sustained that community have tried to exclude them and marginalise them, restricting their participation and their capacity to reap the fruits of their inclusion in the “core” community of the nation. Interestingly, certain white reformers were trying to turn Indians into American citizens precisely at a time when the majority of Indians preferred to be left alone, to be granted recognition as distinct peoples, disposing of sufficient land to enable them to sustain their ancestral and traditional ways. While the American quest for national identity has, over time, demonstrated a pattern toward greater inclusiveness, the stages of that struggle have been marked by some of the most violent confrontations in the history of the country. Similarly, in

4

Ibid. John Whiteclay Chambers II ed, The Oxford Companion to US Military History (Oxford: OUP, 1999).

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the great age of European nationalism from the French Revolution to World War II, peoples who spoke the same language or shared a common ethnicity fought to build their own nationǦstates. The unification of Germany and Italy, and later the achievement of independence by Poland and other East European states, also meant the weakening and eventual destruction of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires.6

The United States of America claimed its independence from the British. It thus emerged as a separate nation, before its citizens had acquired any firm sense of their having a distinct national identity. In England’s mainland colonies in the seventeenth century, most settlers had assumed that they belonged to the English “nation,” the first European society to define itself in these terms. After decolonization, because of the region’s plentiful natural resources and its potential markets, social changes occurring in South Asia came under the spotlight, in a context marked by the development of the global economy. During the 1980s, the extremely rapid process of industrialization in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand introduced a new set of economic and social dichotomies into the region. The process polarized the region, dividing South Asia into rich and poor economies. In this context, the poverty of countries like Indochina and Myanmar was starkly evident. In his book, Burma: The State of Myanmar, David Steinberg observes that race is an unavoidable factor in the region, one which looms large within the spectrum of issues confronting the state.7 The importance of ethnicity had, for about three decades, been denied by the military regime of Myanmar. Within the framework of the more recent, changed scenario, it had to bring forward the old colonial calculation of the total number of ethnic groups in Myanmar, estimated to amount to some 135 linguistically differing ethnic groups. It has been understood that these various groups must be consulted in the formation of any new constitution intended for the institutional functioning of the nation-state. Myanmar, as a unitary nation, could only be plausible if the question of linguistic plurality could be resolved and if one language came to be adapted in order to meet the needs of education and development. In this respect, Myanmar had to conform to the model which prevailed in other South Asian countries.

6

Ibid., 465. David Steinberg, Burma: The State of Myanmar (Washington, D.C: Georgetown UP, 2001). 7

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After their independence from the British, South Asian governments sought to maintain the same linguistic policy that had prevailed during the imperial era, the aim being to dissolve or to assimilate fully the indigenous culture of South Asia, thus duplicating the power relations that had characterised colonial times. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the decolonised nations of the British Empire called themselves a ‘commonwealth’, harbouring 54 nations under its umbrella, including the countries of the Indian subcontinent. And it should also be noted that by 1960 the category of Commonwealth literature had come to refer to literature in English, or translated into English, written by writers of The Commonwealth. This has brought about a crisis of identity in South Asian literature and culture, insofar as it is fundamentally different from Commonwealth literature, the latter category privileging the moment of colonial contact, prolonging and consolidating its enduring, postindependence impact through the predominance of English as the medium of expression. In South Asia, there are several languages, which can draw on indigenous literary traditions, clamouring to be recognised, but which are denied their rightful place due to the dominance and hegemony of English, its status as the language of literature which had already come to be established in university departments. While several languages boasting some degree of literary tradition have indeed co-existed, none of them could claim a distinct dominance or even precedence over English. Such a situation is found in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and other South Asian countries. The predicament has given rise to what amounts to: intense antagonism on the language issue. […] Language is thus not only a primary element in nationality formation but remains a significant issue even in the process of nation building.8

Faced with the tensions and conflicts of linguistic politics, the question of regional language and literature, therefore, took on a central importance. The issue became a critical one in the anticolonial struggles of the South Asian nations, taking on the status of “a symbol of identity and distinction which in turn provided access to their own cultural tradition.”9 The role of the language introduced by the colonial masters, that is, 8

M.L. Karna, “Language, Region and National Identity,” in Nation and National Identity in South Asia, ed. S.L. Sharma and T.K. Oommen (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000), 84. 9 Ibid.

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English, along with the deliberate standardization of the major vernacular languages, led to a crisis of identity, and called into question the very survival of the vernacular literatures. Literature has always been a vehicle of culture. Syed Mohammed Amir rightly observes that social, political, and economic activities affect the human mind and society. Related events and activities change the course of history and cultural evolution, as is evident from the aftermath of every foreign invasion that history has witnessed, from the Aryan invasion in Harappa to the British invasion in India.10 Culture, as we all know, is easy to describe but difficult to define. Man emerged as the result of the actions of, and the social and cultural reactions to, the material world. The material world shaped both culture and civilization. Religious ideology and practices, myths and rituals, owe their origin to the material and social environment which they subserve and perpetuate. Any change in this will, therefore, affects the civilization and culture of the society. Dilip Chakrabarty observes that: Culture is profound insight man acquired through processes and practices which started with his first appearance as Homo erectus millions of years ago. Advancement of culture requires exchange of ideas, knowledge, thoughts, doctrines, observations, growing intercourse, regular exchange of consumables and commodities.11

My intention here is to reflect on the literary history of Myanmar and on the critical position that English, as the medium of literature, has come to acquire in the face of such typical instances of anticolonial linguistic antagonism and cultural revivalism which can be observed in nations such as Myanmar. A website entitled ‘Education in Burma’ comments on the lack of political will to take up the challenge of educating the masses and of teaching English to the people. The government tends to fan the anticolonial sentiments of the people, thereby promoting a linguistic antagonism towards the English language. Education, which is regarded as an indispensable human right, tends to be marginalised, remaining inaccessible for most citizens in Myanmar. The ruling elite understands that education means emancipation and that it thus constitutes a danger to their preservation of power and control. When people are educated they 10

Ibid., 50 Dilip K. Chakrabarty, “Glimpses of Cultural Evolution,” in SAARC Culture, Vol. 3: 2012: 30. http://saarcculture.org/old-site/images/stories/pdf/journal_vol3_2012_3rd.pdf, consulted December 15, 2015. 11

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tend to question the government and to demand their rights. Young people from Burma often move to Thailand or other neighbouring countries in order to attend school and university, so that they can challenge the oppression and injustice of the government and thus contribute to the promotion of democracy, human rights, and development in Burma. Many international NGOs and charities specialising in education are based along the Thai-Burmese border, teaching English and human rights to these young Burmese students. The literary richness of the people of Myanmar, despite their linguistic diversity, is self-evident if we look at the country’s history. The culture and literature of Myanmar are deeply influenced by religion. Since the Myanmar language itself is now almost more than 1,000 years old, whereas English is only about 400 years old, Myanmar literature can be expected to demonstrate a far greater richness than that of most western languages. On the website Myanmartravel.org, the earliest Myanmar literature is described as being primarily of a religious nature. Literature rooted in the ancient period was mainly concerned with the Jataka tales, which were told by the Buddha to his disciples in answer to certain questions. It was a literature which took the form of drama and epistles or missives, written in verse. Works on law and history were written in prose. Many dramas were written during the period from the 16th to 18th centuries, while in the nineteenth century, poems, drama, and chronicles were produced. According to an article on “Modern Burmese Literature” written by U on Pe:12 We find the earliest examples of literature in the Burmese language in hundreds of inscriptions carved on stone which still survive from the kingdom of Pagan dating back to the eleventh century. Next we have books written on dried palm leaves, such as the Maniratanapum, a fifteenth-century collection of ancient traditions, or Bhikkhu Ratthasara’s Hatthipala Pyo, a long poem based on Jataka stories of the lives of the Buddha.

Nawadegyi and Natshinnaung, great poets of the Toungoo dynasties, and the pandit Binnyadala, have handed down a prose chronicle of the long struggle played out between the Burmese King of Ava and the Mon King 12

U On Pe, “Modern Burmese Literature. Its Background in the Independence Movement,” in The Atlantic, February 1958 issue reproduced in http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1958/02/modern-burmeseliterature/306830/, Consulted December 15, 2015.

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of Pegu. It is said that much of Myanmarese history comes down from the Egyins, from the historical ballads that were sung in regional languages at the cradle ceremony of a new-born prince or princess. Drama flourished at the courts of Ava and Shwebo in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, with the themes for poetic plays drawn both from the Jatakas and from Hindu sources such as the Ramayana. The website recounts the impressive literary history of Myanmar. It informs us that the last Burmese dynasty had its court at Mandalay (1857-1885), hosting a number of poets, dramatists, and writers of chronicle. Their works were inscribed on heavy paper folios, folded in pleats, called parabaiks, and which were often very beautifully illustrated in vivid colour. U On Pe remarks: If Burma today has a socialist philosophy of government, it may well be because, in the 1930s, so many of our students read the books which came out to us from Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in London. The ideas of Marx reached Burma not from Russia but by way of England, so that we think in terms of a social welfare democracy, not of a totalitarian dictatorship. One of these young intellectuals at the University of Rangoon, who was then known simply as Ko Nu (later to become Thakin Nu, the Resistance leader, and now Prime Minister U Nu of the Union of Burma), hit upon the idea of starting a Burmese book club along the lines of the Left Book Club. Thus the Nagani (Red Dragon) Book Club was born. It translated into Burmese the leftist books of John Strachey and others, and also encouraged our own writers to turn their attention to social problems and the struggle against colonialism.13

The British colonization of Burma helped the country’s literature to reflect the impact of a Western culture. The arrival of the printing press also influenced literature, making it widely available to the public, whereas previously it had been written for a much smaller audience. Plays that had been written for the court became widely available. From now on, these plays were no longer performed on the stage. They were now intended to be read privately. The British annexation of Burma in 1885 introduced new forces, which changed the patterns of Burmese writing, with the advent of the printing press and the influence of Western education and literature. The classical dramas in court style gave way to plays intended for a less refined audience. And these, in turn, gave way to popular novels based on Western models. The Japanese invasion and the 13

Ibid.

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subsequent accession to national independence gave rise to a literature focusing on war and survival. Novels were a later development. The first Myanmar novel was an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, rewritten and transferred to a Myanmar setting. Modern Myanmar literature can be said to have had its beginnings in the 1930s, when the University of Yangon was founded and the Department of Myanmar Studies was established. Vernacular literature was fuelled during the movement for independence. Theippan Maung Wa, Hmawbi Saya Thein, and Thein Pei Myint were original and innovative writers from the colonial period. Thakin Kodaw Hmaing was, however, the leading figure in anticolonial literature in Myanmar. He was the instigator of the powerful leigyo gyi and htika verses, famous for their patriotic and satirical content. Literature in Myanmar after independence in the 1950s exhibited a western style of writing which had been adopted from the British. However, in the 1960s, with the rule of Ne Win, a strict government censorship of the literature of the region became commonplace. The Khit san movement14 was not, however, completely dead, and the voice of the female writer Gya Ne Kyaw Ma Ma Lei came to be distinctly heard in the postcolonial period. The politically-oriented novels and plays of Prime Minister U Nu, particularly his book, Yet-set Pabe Kwai (Man, the Wolf of Man),15 and novels about inmates in U Nu era jails and volumes of ethnic minority folk tales written by Ludu U Hla had become popular. However, the Myanmarese tradition remains weak in fiction. It is believed that Buddhist conservatism has significantly influenced writers, with the result that they regard fictions as unreal and made-up stories, which are, therefore, to be regarded as lies. In orthodox Buddhist teaching, the practice of making up lies is regarded as a serious sin, and is something that is strictly prohibited. This delayed the birth of the first fiction novel in Myanmar language until the early 1900s. Before then, most artistic work and literature had always been somehow related to religion. It had tended to focus on the last ten lives, or on the last five hundred and fifty lives, of Buddha.16 Myanmar’s literature of that period displays a tendency to reflect local folklore and culture. In contemporary times, where the parameters of development are globalization and communication in English, writers like Nu Nu Yi and 14

A literary movement that emerged in the 1930s and was heavily influenced by modern English literature. 15 See Richard Butwell, U Nu of Burma (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1963). 16 In other words, the Jatakas.

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Ma Thanegi express their frustration that Myanmar literature fails to command an international audience, even today. In an article in Myanmar Times, writers Thae Thae Htwe and Zon Pann Pwint voice the frustration which they and their peers can feel: When well-known writer Nu Nu Yi visited Blackwell’s Books in Oxford, England, in 1998, she searched for the section where English-language translations of Myanmar authors might be kept. Aside from Aung San Suu Kyi’s Letters from Burma, there was no trace of Myanmar literature amid stacks of translated works by Thai writers. Nu Nu Yi said that as she stood in the bookstore, her eyes filled with tears over the realisation that there was no international audience for authors from her home country.17

In the article, Nu Nu Yi, who was unable to find a copy of her book Smile as They Bow,18 laments the lack of English translations of original texts from Myanmar, a situation which keeps the international audience in the dark about a country’s culture and society and its way of life. Between 1993 and 2013, a few books, written by a very small number of writers, came to be published in English. These were mostly books on politics, history, poetry, and short stories. Oxford University Press has published the adaptations of Burmese Folktales by the Rector of Rangoon University, Dr. Htin Aung, and his study of Burmese Drama, which provides sample translations.19 The poet, musicologist, and story writer U Khin Zaw, or "K", as he is known, has published a book that is half personal reminiscence, half informal history, entitled Burma in My Lifetime.20 It was serialized in The Guardian, an English-language magazine published in Rangoon. The editor of The Guardian, Dr. Maung Maung, is the author of Burma in the Family of Nations, published in

17

Thae Thae Htwe and Zon Pann Pwint, “Myanmar Literature Lost in Translation,” in Myanmar Times. 16 May 2011. http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/lifestyle/2989-myanmar-literature-lost-intranslation.html, consulted December 15, 2015. 18 Nu Nu Yi, Smile as They Bow (New York: Hyperion Books, 2008). 19 Maung Htin Aung, Burmese Drama: a Study, with Translations, of Burmese Plays (Oxford: OUP, 1957); Burmese Folktales (Oxford: OUP, 1959). 20 This work originally published in 1956 is available at https://itunes.apple.com/fr/book/myanmar-in-my-life-time/id1045348216?mt=11, consulted December 15, 2015.

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English in Holland.21 He is also the author of a series of profiles of prominent living Burmese for his magazine, which is a forum for the best creative writing being done in English in Burma today. U Mya Sein and U Win Pe, two talented poets and short story writers, feature among its contributors. Yet important writers such as U On Pe nevertheless opine that: There is no longer any need for our authors to take up English unless they wish to reach an audience abroad. The future of our literature will lie with the writers who use Burmese. But some of our most talented writers were educated in English, and have written interesting books in English through which American readers can learn much about Burma and her culture.22

Although English has been adopted by the Myanmarese Government, which has adopted a single language policy for purposes of integration and to promote commerce as a catalyst of economic development, the writers and cultural historians nevertheless tend to look down upon the English language, considering it to be useful only for the propagation of the history and culture of the country in the Western world, especially in America. Linguistic regionalism is an important facet of Myanmar, a feature characteristic of the literary scene of the country, caught as it is between the currents of modernization and the counter-currents of conservatism. Debate on the implications of a policy of national linguistic pluralism is also to be regarded as evidence of the political and historical ruptures that are in fact indicative of a national awakening. Myanmar is a narrative of parallel allegories, by way of its linguistic diversity. These allegories present parallel factors that are contributing to the emergence of a developing self-consciousness, a process which in turn is contributing to a growing sense of integrated nationhood.

Works Cited Amir, Said Mod. “Cultural Identities and Regional Cooperation in South Asia: ‘Consciousness and Construction.’’ SAARC Culture 3: (2012): 49-81. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://saarcculture.org/old-site/images/stories/pdf/journal_vol3_2012_ 3rd.pdf.

21 22

Maung Maung, Burma in the Family of Nations (Amsterdam: Djambatan 1957). U on Pe, op.cit.

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Aung, Maung Htin. Burmese Drama: a Study, with Translations, of Burmese Plays. Oxford: OUP, 1957. —. Burmese Folktales. Oxford: OUP, 1959. Butwell, Richard. U Nu of Burma. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1963. Chambers II, John Whiteclay. The Oxford Companion to US Military History. Oxford: OUP, 1999. Chakrabarty, Dilip K. “Glimpses of Cultural Evolution.” SAARC Culture 3 (2012): 3-48. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://saarcculture.org/oldsite/images/stories/pdf/journal_vol3_2012_3r d.pdf. Education in Burma – Oxford Burma Alliance. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.oxfordburmaalliance.org/education-in-burma.html. Hill, Christopher L. National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics and Society) Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Htwe, Thae Thae and Zon Pann Pwint. “Myanmar Literature Lost in Translation.” Myanmar Times, 16 May 2011. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/lifestyle/2989-myanmarliterature-lost-in-translation.html. Karna, M.L. “Language, Region and National Identity.” In Nation and National Identity in South Asia, edited by S.L. Sharma and T.K. Oommen, 75-96. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000. Kyi, Aung San Suu. Letters from Burma. London: Penguin Books, 2010 reprint. —. “Towards A True Refuge.” The Joyce Pearce Memorial Lecture, 19 May 1993, Refugee Studies Programme, University of Oxford. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.birmaniademocratica.org/ViewDocument.aspx?lang=it&do cid=d0432457635a4287a672bc7df729613c. Maung Maung. Burma in the Family of Nations. Amsterdam: Djambatan 1957. Myanmar Literature. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://myanmartravel.org/arts/literature.html. Silva, Kalinga Tudor. “Caste, Ethnicity and National Identity in Sri Lanka.” In Nation and National Identity in South Asia., edited by S.L.Sharma and T.K. Oommen, 201-125. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000.

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Smith, Martin. Ethnic Groups in Burma: Development, Democracy and Human Rights. London: Anti-Slavery International, 1994. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs3/Ethnic_Groups_in_Burma-ocr.pdf. Steinberg, David I. Burma: The State of Myanmar. Washington D.C.: Georgetown UP, 2001. U On Pe. “Modern Burmese Literature: Its Background in the Independence Movement. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1958/02/modernburmese-literature/306830/. YI, Nu Nu. Smile as They Bow (New York: Hyperion Books, 2008).

CINEMA

CHAPTER TWELVE HERITAGE AND RUPTURES: IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS OF THE HERO IN THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC ADAPTATIONS OF DEVDAS JITKA DE PRÉVAL

There are few figures in world cinema which the filmmakers return to as often as Devdas. Born at the beginning of the last century in the pen of the Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chatterjee,1 this story of a tragic love triangle has had a singular destiny. The popular success of the novel, translated upon its release in almost all of the Indian languages, has been expanding rapidly across the country thanks to many film adaptations.2 This story of unrequited love has been assimilated with popular mythology in the collective consciousness of Indians. In a century, “Devdas” has become a generic term for a specific character: a lovesick, passive and indecisive rich man sinking in alcohol to death. The identity of the character, created and recreated by successive adaptations, seems to convey values that enable the Indian public to project itself in it without 1

The writer's full name is Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (1876-1938), which is a shortened version proposed by the colonial administration of the Bengali name Chattopadhyay. 2 There exist at least fifteen versions of Devdas in different Indian languages: Naresh Mitra (1928); P.C. Barua (Bengali, 1935); P.C. Barua (Hindi, 1936); P.V. Rao (Tamil, 1936); P.C. Barua (Assami, 1937); V. Raghavaiah (Tamil and Telugu, 1953); Bimal Roy (Hindi, 1955); Vijayanirmala (Telugu, 1974); D.N. Rao (Telugu, 1978); Dilip Roy (Bengali, 1979); O. Mani (Malayalam, 1989); S. L. Bhansali (Hindi, 2002); S. Samanta (Bengali, 2002); A. Kashyap (Hindi, 2009); Iqbal Kashmiri (Pakistani, 2010); Chashi Nazrul Islam (Bangladeshi, 2013); new adaptation programme under way: Sudhir Mishra (Hindi), with Kareena Kapoor as heroine (since 2010).

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ever being able to solve the mystery of his unease and sense of resignation. In this article, I propose to revisit the figure of “Devdas” and compare its identity construction through four major adaptations, that of P.C. Barua (1935)3, Bimal Roy (1955), Sanjay Leela Bhansali (2002), and Anurag Kashyap (2009). Alongside cinema, a large number of books deal with identity construction in Devdas. Among those that helped circumscribe the identity of the character, I will use the thoughts of Gayatri Chatterjee, Poonam Arora, and Corey K. Creekmur. Let us consider Barua’s 1935-1936 Devdas in Hindi4 as cultural legacy which “incorporates the past to the present and the binds the present to the future.”5 If Baruva’s Devdas is a “legacy” inherited from the colonial context, subsequent versions produced after the independence of India (in 1955, 2002, 2009) bear witness to the evolution marked by ruptures or rejection of traditional values, while remaining paradoxically attached to the latter. Each version, although more or less identical to the original model, contains new “elements of reality” involved in the transformation of the archetypes installed by Sarat Chandra.6 Only the version of Kashyap throws new light on the history of Devdas by placing it in the context of the India of the 2000s. Thus, the change brought to the traditional configuration by this film allows us to fathom how the Devdas phenomenon operates in a different environment, outside the purview of historical fiction. If the term identity is borrowed from Latin identitas “quality of that which is the same,”7 Voltaire proposes a definition that specifically identifies the individual and his “being” or his “me.” 3

Fragments of the Bengali version of P.C. Barua are said to be present in the national cinema archives of Dacca. Only its Hindi print is safeguarded in the National Film Archives of India in Pune and visible at www.indiancine@ma 4 The “novel like” life of Barua had seeped into the film as much as the story of Devdas had impacted the image of the director. Cf. Ashish Nandy “Invitation to the Antic Death: The Journey of Pramathes Barua as the Origin of the Terribly Effeminate, Maudlin, Self-destructive Heroes of Indian Cinema,” in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney ed, The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139-161 or Shoma Chatterji's Pramathesh Chandra Barua: the crownless prince, the eternal Devdas (New Delhi: Wisdom Tree, 2008). 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 450. My translation. 6 Marc Ferro, Cinéma et Histoire (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Histoire, 1993), 75. 7 Voltaire, Loi naturelle, 1756. The note is from Littré. The idea of the “conscience of persistence of the self” has been reused in psychology.

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According to him, identity is “what is permanent” and also an “awareness of the persistence of me”. Madame de Staël highlights the existence of the “sense of our identity” we always have despite “continuous changes in us.” She puts this rhetorical question: “What is it that attests this identity, if it is not me who is always the same?”8 Jean-Luc Nancy in his book Identity: Fragments, Frankness, written following the controversy surrounding the creation of the Ministry of National Identity in France,9 says that: An identity is not something one enters, nor is it something one dresses oneself in, and one cannot identify with one (assuming that there is any sense in treating it as an entity or figure) without at the same time modifying it, modalizing it, perhaps transforming it. Identities are never purely stable nor simply plastic. They are always metastable.10

Psychology pays particular attention to the case of loss of the sense of our identity, of “self-identity.” This negative feeling is related to the loss of belonging, uprooting, being wrenched apart from a foundation. The pathological case of the loss of identity is amnesia or partial or total loss of memory.11 While the loss of identity because of love could be viewed in the West as a positive fact12 because love can help to forget the “self,” losing identity is the subject of various Indian schools of philosophy (that of Sankara, for example) that, in short, propose abandonment, detachment and dissolution of the “self” in order to the search for unity with the absolute, non-duality, the advaita.13 8

Madame de Stael, Tome quatrième, 1810, 173. Jean-Luc Nancy, the concept of identity, too complex to be dealt with by civil servants, falls within the ambit of philosophic, psychoanalytical, ethnological, sociological, and political questionings, Jean-Luc Nancy, Identité, fragments, franchises, François Raffoul translator (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), originally published in French as Identités, fragments, franchises (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2010). 10 Ibid., 10-11 (English version). 11 In this regard, please see Aki Kaurismäki's The Man without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002). 12 “The one who loves has lost his identity. Who “else” has been able to prevent me from being obsessed with “myself”? (Marcel Jouhandeau, M. Godeau intime (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 80. 13 See Michel Hulin's Samkhya literature (Chicago: Harrassowitz, 1978), 3 wherein he develops the theory of aesthetic experience and disindividualization from a discussion on Abhinavagupta's Abhinavabharati: “Saying 'I' signifies one knows 9 For

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Each work has its own identity made up of a multitude of elements. Films are collective works. Each speaker in the creation of the work (director, writer, director of photography, sound recorder, editor, composers, actors, etc.) brings his own personality that blends into the whole and determines the identity of the film. Although film adaptations follow the model of the literary character created by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, we find not only the story, but also the figure of Devdas, transformed. This figure evolves, adapts to new contexts and metamorphoses, on the surface and, perhaps, in depth. The visible transformation of each Devdas occurs during his extended stay in the city (Calcutta for versions 1935 and 1955, in London for recent versions). Barua’s Devdas,14 under pressure from his friend Chunilal, adopts an outfit that is deliberately inspired by the British model: a wellcut jacket, collared shirt, a colonial hat (the ostentatious sign of authority in place) sports shoes and a cane [Fig. 1]. When he returns to the village in this new gear, Parvati remarks that he looks like a “foreigner.”

K.L. Saigal playing Devdas

Although Bimal Roy’s version remains true to its predecessor’s version of which he was the director of photography, his 1955 version abandons the colonial hat for obvious reasons. Without specifying the historical period in which he places his film adaptation and discarding colonial accessories, he gives a timeless touch to the film. His Devdas (Dilip Kumar) is partially Westernized [Fig. 2]. He wears a light jacket on a pair of traditional pants and a long shirt with an Italian collar. His outer one's self as well as one is radically different from other people, as a unique and incomparable individual. We thus touch upon the psychological and moral register, that of everyday, or rather its reflection in literature (poetry, tale, epic narrative, theatre etc.).” 14 Devdas was interpreted in Bengali by Barua, in Hindi by Kundal Lal Saigal, a famous actor and singer belonging to New Theatres.

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transformation is announced by Manorama to her friend Parvati before Devdas appears. She describes in detail Devdas’s dress change: “I saw with my own eyes. A cane in his hand, a wristwatch, buttons, and gold chain. He has become a true gentleman!” Then we learn from her that: “Before he came every year for the holidays, and then only once every two or three years.”

Dilip Kumar playing Devdas

The 2002 version, transforming the story of Devdas into a great poetic show, puts particular emphasis on Devdas’s sartorial habits on his return from London. Indeed he returns dressed as a Western dandy of undetermined time. His outfit accentuates the difference between the two cultures at the risk of veering into caricature: a felt hat, a collared shirt and a red bow tie with white polka dots, a three-piece suit, a rain coat, twotone shoes, a cane, and an ivory cigarette holder. Timeless western attire not suitable for the supposed climate of Bengal. One detail draws our attention. The western clothes Bhansali’s Devdas wears are cut too big. The character “floats” in his shirts with sleeves that are too long and trousers that are too wide. Obviously, the director creates the image of a hero who is too small and unsuited to his clothes and therefore to Western culture. The return of Devdas—too late alas—to traditional male clothing (kurta/dhoti) symbolizes the attempt to return to the roots [Fig. 3].

Shah Rukh Khan playing Devdas

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The initial images of Dev. D (Abhay Deol) that we discover at the beginning of the film, alternating with flashbacks of his childhood, set up a series of signs relating to the character: he is dressed in western clothes with glaringly bad taste. If his body does not correspond to his outfit (a cap, smoke lens sunglasses, an open collared shirt, a scarf, a knitted jacket and a beige coat lined with brown, brown pants and double-colour sneakers), the body-play amplifies the image of a rude, boorish and unsympathetic person. Would it be an anti-hero or a villain? Visible signs indicate a rather negative character preventing a priori any identification or empathy with him [Fig. 4].

Abhay Deol playing Devdas

The mutation of the appearances of Devdas is dependent on the historical context in which the films were made. The most spectacular visual transformation of the hero appears in the version of Barua’s Devdas. Parvati is shocked by his disguise as a “foreigner” with attributes that do not lie: they belong to the ruling class, concentrated mainly in the cities.15 In Roy’s film, made in independent India, this transformation is 15

Sarat Chandra's Devdas was born at the beginning of the last century and bears the imprint of Bengal renaissance. If the dress code traditionally signified belonging to a particular caste or social class, during this period, it also carries a political dimension. The adapations which interest us here seem to ignore the fact that Sarat Chandra's Devdas had been transformed into a city dweller who not only wears foreign dress and is interested in hunting and fishing (Western pastimes), but also discusses society, politics, meetings, and cricket, or even football. Like Tagore's Gora, Devdas belongs to the generation of young Bengali artists torn between the attraction to and the rejection of Western culture. Unlike Gora (hero of

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seen as a positive development. The villagers (Manorama and Parvati) find that the hero looks like a “gentleman.” His new appearance is not prejudicial to him. Instead, it adds to his charm. It is his detachment from rural areas that makes Roy’s Devdas a different person. Bhansali’s Devdas, made in a changing world of India, which is open to foreign influences, returns to London in a hybrid disguise to entice foreign audiences and Indians living abroad. However, it means that this disguise is not suitable for the character. As for Dev, he abandons his disguises donned during the journey very quickly, and dresses in the same way as the boys of his age living his village do. During his absence, India had been transformed, the difference between “there” and “here” had faded. Dev is neither the melancholic hero played by K. L. Saigal and Dilip Kumar, nor the narcissistic and vain version played by Shah Rukh Khan.16 He is a cynical and depraved egotist.

I am not what I am Barua’s Devdas, in a moment of despair, points out that these disguises are part of the comedy he must perform to meet the expectations of society: Where did I come from? I also started playing the comedy of my life to tell people that I am not what I am. What I am not is what I am actually, a matvala.17

The result of this masquerade18 is that he loses his bearings, his “sameness”, and the only way he finds to get out of this situation is to forget by drowning himself in alcohol. Who is Devdas? At first sight, although he occupies the place of the hero, he does not represent any heroic quality in the original sense of the the eponymous novel), Devdas does not get integrated in a group either in Calcutta or elsewhere. 16 Corey K. Creekmur, Creekmur, Corey, “Remembering, repeating, and working through Devdas,” in Indian Literature and Popular Cinema, Recasting classics, ed. Heidi R.M. Pauvels (London: Routledge, 2007), 186. 17A madman, a drunkard. See the scene in Chandramukhi (01:03:48) at https://indiancine.ma/BQL/player/01:03:48.411 (consulted on September 11, 2015) 18 Cf. Sumitra S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 19471987 (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1993). In the chapter entitled “Masculinity and Masquerade,” she discusses the enigma of masculine identity (199-206).

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word for a “man of great value.” He does not demonstrate any exceptional conduct, nor is he endowed with a talent or a special quality. According to Edgard Morin, “it is necessary that the heroes are endowed with eminently sympathetic qualities,” to bring about “attachment, love, tenderness ... to become idealized alter-egos of the reader or viewer.”19 Rather, Devdas is often disrespectful and arrogant towards his elders, especially to his mother. Moreover, in contradiction with the dominant convention in popular cinema that favours the happy end, he dies at the end of the film. Yet the Indian public is attached to this complex character despite its tragic fate. But as Morin recalls “the tragic death of a hero integrates into the aesthetic relationship [...] the virtues of one of the most archaic and universal of rites: sacrifice.”20 If the sacrifice doubled by renunciation that Devdas accomplishes in spite of himself can explain the identification and commitment of the Indian public to this complex character, it is the indecisive character of Devdas and his non-membership in an entity that seems to dominate all the film versions.

“The hero is the man who is devoutly submissive. But to what?"21 We find the emphasis on Devdas’s submission when confronted with destiny in Bimal Roy’s film, who is the only one to introduce a sequence where the hero is in a situation where he could control and change the course of his destiny: stop the break-up letter mailed to Parvati before it reaches her. Instead, as if in a trance, Devdas watches the postman hand over his break-up letter to Parvati while he hurried to reach Calcutta before the arrival of the postman. The sequence unfolds slowly to lengthen the time needed to act. Devdas remains a stationary viewer, however. He yields to the decision of his father just like one of the most popular heroes in India – Ram, a god who is only “sweetness, submission, and resignation.”22 According to Baldcon Dhindra:

19

Edgard Morin, Esprit du temps (Paris: Éditions Grasset Fasquelle, 1962), 92-94. My translation. 20 Ibid. My translation. 21 Joseph Campbell, Le Héros aux mille et un visages, H. Crès trans. (Paris: Éditions Oxus, “J’ai lu” series, 2010), 31. 22 Baldcon Dhindra, Indian Cinema and Indian Civilization, report drafted for UNESCO in 1963, 15.

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No other person, except Krishna, has exerted such a great and lasting influence on such a large number of Indians. […] His heroism [that of Ram] is in his resigned submission to an unfair decision.23

The impassivity of the character is rendered particularly sensitive in the version of Barua who favours long shots, staged with two framed characters facing the camera, instead of using the shot/reverse shot technique. These “iconic images”24 or two-shot compositions, filmed mostly with a fixed camera, slow down the course of exchanges between characters whose gazes rarely meet. Apart from the non-responsiveness of Devdas, iconic images create a visual identity of the hero who is not complete without his heroine, or, rather, without his heroines. Bimal Roy comes back a few times to the staging of iconic images. But contemporary versions, dependent on fast editing, adopt the shot/reverse shot techniques. The hero’s inaction, highlighted in the various adaptations of Devdas, appears as a constant. Similarly, 2009 Dev is often faced with the possibility of reversing history. One word from Devdas would suffice for Parvati to reconsider her decision to marry another suitor. He prefers to be silent, to not react. He refuses to reach out to a happiness that is within his reach. This trait of the hero seems to fascinate the Indian viewer. Is it in the indecision and resignation when facing destiny that the Indian public recognizes itself? Or is it the sense of not-belonging and poor integration into any (rural or urban) communities that raises the public’s interest? The belonging to one form or another of community (whatever one puts under that name), perhaps even the simultaneous belonging to several communities, is indeed given with birth, which does not mean that there is a mere unchanging constraint.25

23

Baldcon Dhindra incorporates in his report a quotation by Vinobha Bhave, a sage of contemporary India, according to Dhindra. In 1957, Vinoba Bhave pleaded against the lethargy of the Indian people by encouraging them to spread the cult of Hanuman (Rama's disciple in the form of a monkey) who personifies vitality and elementary energy (p.16). 24 See Gayatri Chatterjee “Icons and Events: Reinventing Visual Construction in Cinema in India” in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha ed. Bollyword, Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (London: Sage, 2009), 90-117. Iconic images have been identified as such by Geeta Kapur in her article “Mythical Material" published in 1987 in the Journal of Arts & Ideas, 14. 25 Nancy, op.cit, p.22 (English version).

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If, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, “we fall” in our milieu by virtue of our birth, in all the film versions we are concerned with, the parents wish to move Devdas away from his rural context and provide him with a city education. This happens at the time of adolescence. While in adaptations that faithfully follow the literary model that desire results in the transformation of Devdas into a gentleman, a babu26, the vestige of the social model of babu also persists in postcolonial versions. The parents, at the same time, organize a break with his childhood friend Parvati. Only Bimal Roy in his version devotes a part of the film to the adolescence of Devdas and his relationship with Parvati, insisting on the idyllic side of childhood. Later versions evoke, through flashbacks of some plans, the children’s pain of separation and the detachment of Devdas from his family environment. According to Elisabeth Badinter, the “universal sexual segregation of children” would be common to all human societies. Because, she says, there always comes a moment “when the male and female children separate to form single-sex groups.”27 This distancing shatters not only the relation of the boy with the girl, but worse still, with his mother, who is an important component in the formation of the young man. The father, in conflict with his son, fears that Devdas will become unruly and soft. According to Poonam Arora, in breaking Devdas’s habit of spending time in the company of women, “there is an indirect suggestion that Devdas needs to be in the company of other young men. Indeed, an important part of the educational project in Calcutta is the father’s plan that Devdas join the company of other aristocratic young men.”28 The habit of sending children to boarding schools in adolescence was a common practice in preindustrial Western societies. Badinter adds: “In Anglo-American countries, more obsessed

26

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Calcutta is divided into two sectors: one rich (British) and the other poor (Indian). This separation between British and Indian cultures resulted in the appearance of a new social class, the Babus, Anglophone Indian bureaucrats. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Leçons indiennes, Itinéraire d’un historien, Delhi, Lisbonne, Paris, Los Angeles (Paris: Alma éditeur, 2015), 190. 27 Élisabeth Badinter, XY De l’identité masculine (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, Le Livre de Poche, 1992, 99. 28 Poonam Arora, “Devdas: India's Emasculated Hero, Sado-Masochism and Colonialism,” in Jouvert, Journal of Post Colonial Studies 1.1 (1997), paragraph 36. http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/DEVDAS.HTM, consulted September 11, 2015.

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with virility, masculinization rites have survived longer.”29 The distance, in the case of Devdas, results in the loss of references and roots. Lived not as a punishment but as a promotional act administered by his father, the boy accumulates frustrations and disappointments during his long stay in town. His submission to the parental decision concerning the prohibition to marry Parvati can be understood as a sign of cowardice, but also as a need to please his parents in order to be recognized and appreciated by them. The need to regain his place within the traditional social space from where he was chased away as a teenager. The removal from the family home of the hero remains an abstract but important fact to understand the identity problems which the hero suffers from. As in all the versions true to the literary model, Devdas discovers alcohol and succumbs to its effects because of the sorrow of parting, the 2009 Dev comes back from the West with a displayed penchant for alcohol.30 Drinking beer and alcohol is part of his transformation, his new identity. The stay in the West degrades him; he becomes depraved, disrespectful, and immoral. This is not the first time an Indian film uses Western culture as an evil reference. Rosie Thomas recalls that the concept of the elements of the “universal moral ideal,” which has boosted the cinema of Bombay from 1950, were gradually redefined in favour of the westernized figure of evil: The ideal moral universe of Bombay cinema revolved around the archetypal figures of the Mother and the Villain, a good-evil opposition in which good was subtly conflated with the “traditional”, or that which is Indian; bad with the “non-traditional” and the “non-Indian”. Through this moral universe, the films constructed an Other – a cold, calculating, rapacious, but exotic West/outsider – which had implications for the construction of the notion of modern Indianness. The narrative function of

29

Badinter, op.cit., 118-120. to Nicholas Deakin and Dinesh Bhugra: “Rates of alcohol consumption and abuse are going up in India as a result of the increasing middle class and as a result of the impact of industrialization and globalization.” (“Families in Bollywood cinema: changes and context,” in International review of psychiatry 24 (2): 166-72. 2012, 170). If each version of Devdas targets a new generation, as Deakin and Bhugra put it, we have to mirror the society and its vices which change in the course of globobalization.

30According

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If in Dev. D, the hero conserves traits similar to those of previous versions of Devdas, the real break has to do with the processing of female characters who lose their purity (maintained in previous versions) and become corrupted, westernized. The distribution of good and evil—the Manichean concept of the classic versions—is turned upside down in Kashyap’s film. In this version, we observe that the abandonment of traditional values has the effect of exploding the family structure, and amplifying the individualization of characters. While in the versions of Barua, Roy and Bhansali, the hero keeps in touch with his family environment through his faithful servant, a substitute for the missing mother and father figures, in Dev. D, this character disappears and Dev finds himself alone in the urban jungle.

Latent Violence The character of Devdas was created in the early twentieth century.32 At that time, the city of Calcutta, founded in 1690 by an Englishman named Job Charnock, was considered the intellectual and political capital of India (until 1911). The settlers hold administrative control over it. Only the sphere of social and religious life of Indians is supposed to be preserved by the British, claiming to practice a policy of “noninterference.” Non-interference does not prevent the British from imposing laws to improve the status of women and protect them from the grip of tradition: in 1829, it was the abolition of Sati (the obligation of the widow to immolate herself on the pyre of her dead husband), followed in 1856 by the legalization of the marriage of widows, and in 1891 the “Consent Act” legislated upon the age of child marriage (which was raised to 12 years).33 This progress in favour of women, especially the “Consent Act,”

31 Rosy Thomas, Bollywood before Bollywood, Film City Fantasies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 174. 32 The novel was written in 1901, published in 1917 then quickly translated into the major languages of India. 33 Sarda Act 1956 fixed the age of marriage at 15 years for girls and 18 years for boys. See Liliane Jenkins, Mâ, l'Inde au féminin (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 122.

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becomes, despite the liberal and humanitarian discourse, the expression of colonial contempt for the masculinity of Bengali men finger pointing all their attempts to claim it.34

Given the historical and political context of colonial India, the character of Devdas, hailing from a wealthy provincial bourgeoisie, undergoes multiple pressures. A taking into account of these pressures helps us understand his attitude towards his social space, his anxiety that compels him to repress his virility. Devdas as a “colonial subject” has to repel the woman who loves him and offers herself more than once to him, to contradict the image the British give of Indians: decadent and degenerate, slaves of their desires. He does this “despite himself,” with a restrained and controlled violence, turned against himself. He repels Parvati and despite the affection and friendship that binds him to Chandramukhi refuses sexual contact with her. He thereby rebuilds, according to Arora, “his own space of masculinity and honour.”35 While Arora sees in the attitude of Devdas the reconstruction of his identity space, Gayatri Chatterjee evokes the loss of identity, deconstruction of identity.36 Devdas’s malaise against the power of the establishment is such that it makes him lose his means and his identity to a sense of alienation “that makes him a self-destroyer and destroyer of others around him,”37 says Chatterjee. Devdas’s violence seems to be directed more towards the representation of femininity than to a particular woman. Chatterjee explains these reactions as a “symptom” of the era that the cinema conveys by subverting it into elements of pleasure, knowing full well that they hide a crisis from which we can get out only through social change. The fact that the discomfort of the character resonates within the society and affects

34

Poonam Arora in her essay “Devdas: India’s Emasculated Hero, SadoMasochism and Colonialism,” devotes attention to the influence of the colonial framework on the behaviour of the masculine gender in Bengal at the beginning of the twentieth century: “Despite its liberal and humanitarian rhetoric, it became the focus of the colonial disdain of Bengali masculinity and of Bengali male’s attempt to reclaim his masculinity” (op.cit., paragraph 32).. 35 “… and despite his deep friendship with a prostitute, deny himself any sexual gratification with her. In doing so, Devdas establishes his manhood and his honour.” Ibid., paragraph 44. 36 Gayatri Chatterjee, Awaara (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003). 37 op.cit., p. 65.

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the public which identifies with him seems to suggest that this “symptom" that hides an unresolved crisis is still relevant.38 By transforming the discomfort39 of the male character in terms of quality, translated by relationships of chastity between him, the heroine and the courtesan, Sarat Chandra adds an unusual dimension to the story, which raises Devdas to the level of mythical heroes. His Devdas becomes a tragic hero. However, Kashyap addresses this dimension of the character by demystifying Devdas and stripping him of his aura of renunciation, unworthy of so depraved a character that is plagued by evil. In all the versions, Devdas loses control of himself when Parvati boasts of her social promotion she will acquire through arranged marriage. Devdas hits Parvati on the face, leaving an indelible mark on her forehead, in memory of their love, he says. Kashyap moves Dev’s violence to a different target: he does not hit Paro, but her alleged lover. If this sequence can be read as an act of jealousy, Dev’s behaviour indicates that it is more an inner conflict than a settling of accounts between two suitors. We find that Dev, after returning to his village after many years in the West, is uprooted and lost. He discovers a changed India. His country has been modernized, taboos have fallen and traditional ties have been trampled. He strikes neither the woman nor the image of women like his predecessors. His gesture aims at the image of himself that the boy - the symbol of India he does not recognize - returns to him. The character of Kashyap’s Dev, although it is built on the same model as traditional Devdases, is different and suffers for other reasons. The father figure without authority is one of them. His permissiveness and laxity replace the stereotype of the authoritarian and cruel fathers of previous Devdases. The father even wishes that Dev would marry Paro, although she is the daughter of his employee. If the cause of suffering— the impossibility of a marriage outside the cast—is ruled out, Dev’s discomfort persists. It seems that the fewer the limits imposed by his father, the further he goes in his cynicism and aggressiveness. Kashyap pushes the feature of “self-destruction and destruction of others around,” inherent to his character, to homicide. If Kashyap’s version reconfigures the hierarchy of relationships between characters, turns the traditional course of the Devdas myth and 38

Ibid. the text Devdas, after returning from his education in Calcutta, does not freely express his sentiments and respond to the explicit advances of Parvati (cf. the famous sequence in which Parvati comes to Devdas's room in the night). For the same reasons, he repels the body of the courtesan. 39 In

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changes the spaces, what is left of the literary model, characters, and myth? It should be noted that despite all the apparent changes, Kashyap’s approach only confirms the conventions of popular cinema. His proposals do not go beyond the traditional framework of the film. The changes that contextualize the story of Devdas, bring the characters closer to reality, denote changes in Indian society and adapt spaces to those of “real” life occur only at the surface level. His film keeps so many fantastic and improbable times typical for a popular Hindi film. The happy ending40 is one of those improbable but admissible moments in Bollywood fiction. The fact that he introduces musical intervals in his movie anchors his version of Devdas in the Indian cinematic tradition. By reorganizing the filmic space, the film opens the way for an updating of the traditional popular cinema by proposing a new aesthetic.

Dev. D - a hero without identity It [identity] qualifies all determinations that fall to as being "its own". This does not mean that they belong to it, but they find themselves in relation to the "idem" of the identical, to its sameness.41

If Kashyap’s hero always identifies himself through the same components - indecision, immobility, depression, isolation - his uprooting, the internal pressure (moral and emotional), but above all his individualism and nonmembership to any group, make him a man without existence and without identity. His moral distress is exacerbated by the violence of his social environment. If this is not the first time an Indian film uses the influence of Western mores as a reference to evil, in Dev. D, it is represented as a generalized gangrene that attacks the urban space and eats away the rural India. The image of contemporary India in the films of Kashyap and Dev. D in particular upsets traditional representations. The author does not just move the action of the peaceful Bengali village Talsônapour to a rapidly changing place without identity (an industrialized town in the heart of 40 In postcolonial films called “law dramas” (Andaz, Awaara, Phir Subah Hogi,) heroes who have committed crimes must undergo a punishment, minimal though it may be, as a way to restore dharma, according to Michael H. Hoffheimer, “Awaara and the post-colonial origins of the Hindi Law Drama,” in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26-3 (August 2006): 341–359. Dev. D, even though he had committed a homicide under the influence of drugs, is released on bail instead of being sent to prison. 41 Nancy, op.cit, 19 (English version).

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Punjabi countryside near the Chandigarh airport)42. Having located the classic story in the current context, Kashyap subtly transposes the relationships of the characters in similar situations, but not quite the same, and builds, through a process of deconstruction, a new identity not only of Devdas but also the main female characters, Parvati and Chandramukhi. Thus, one might conclude, borrowing the phrase from Jean-Luc Nancy, that: accomplishes the eternal return of the same of which Nietzsche spoke: a return that is not a reprise, a reiteration, but an infinite return to the absolutely different whose sameness is made up of this absolute difference.43

Works Cited Arora, Poonam. “Devdas: India’s Emasculated Hero, Sado-Masochism and Colonialism.” Jouvert, Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1-1 (1997): 1-19. Accessed January 10, 2015. http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/Devdas.htm. Badinter, Élisabeth. XY De l’identité masculine. Paris: éditions Odile Jacob, Le Livre de Poche, 1992. Campbell, Joseph. Le Héros aux mille et un visages. H. Crès. Trans. Paris: éditions Oxus, J’ai lu series, 2010. Chakravarty, Sumita S. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 19471987. Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1993. Chatterjee, Gayatri. Awaara. 1992. Reprint, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003. —. “Icons and Events: Reinventing Visual Construction in Cinema in India.” In Bollyworld, Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, 90-117. London: Sage, 2009. Chatterjee/Chattopadhyay, Saratchandra. Devdas. Amarnath Dutta trans. La voix de l’Inde series. Paris: Éditions Belles Lettres, 2006 Chatterji, Shoma A. Pramathesh Chandra Barua: the crownless prince, the eternal Devdas. New Delhi: Wisdom Tree, 2008. Creekmur, Corey. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working through Devdas.” In Indian Literature and Popular Cinema, Recasting 42 In Dev. D, the hero does not seek refuge in the anonymity of Calcutta but that of Delhi. 43 Nancy, op.cit., 20 (English version).

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classics, edited by Heidi R.M. Pauwels, 173-190. London: Routledge 2007. Deakin, Nicholas and Dinesh Bhugra. “Families in Bollywood cinema: changes and context.” International Review of Psychiatry 24-2 (2012): 166-172. Dhindra, Baldcon. “Cinéma indien et la Civilisation indienne.” Paris: UNESCO, 27 December 1963, 34 pages. Ferro, Marc. Cinéma et Histoire. 1977, 1987. Reprint, Paris: Gallimard, Folio Histoire, 1993. Hoffheimer, Michael H. “Awaara and the Post-Colonial Origins of the Hindi Law Drama.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 26-3 (August 2006): 341–359. Jenkins, Liliane. Mâ, l’Inde au féminin. Paris: Mercure de France, 1986 Jouhandeau, Marcel. M. Godeau intime. Paris: Gallimard, 1926. Kabir, Nasreen Munni. The Dialogue of Devdas, Bimal Roy’s Immortal Classic. New Delhi: Om books International films, 2012. Majumdar, Rochona. “Silent No Longer.” India Today, 26 October 2007. Accessed January 10, 2015. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/Silent+no+longer/1/1659.html. Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. 1945. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Identity: Fragments, Frankness. François Raffoul translator (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), originally published in French as Identités, fragments, franchises; Paris: Editions Galilée, 2010. Nandy, Ashish. “Invitation to the Antic Death: The Journey of Pramathes Barua as the Origin of the Terribly Effeminate, Maudlin, Selfdestructive Heroes of Indian Cinema.” 139-161. the History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, Rachel Dwyer and in Christopher Pinney ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Thomas, Rosie. Bollywood before Bollywood, Film City Fantasies, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. Sardar, Ziauddin. “Dilip Kumar Made Me Do It.” The Secret Politics of our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, Ashish Nandy ed. Delhi: OUP, 1998, 19-91. Subrahmanyam Sanjay. Leçons indiennes, Itinéraire d’un historien, Delhi, Lisbonne, Paris, Los Angeles. Paris: Alma éditeur, 2015 Tagore, Rabindranath. Gora. New Delhi, Penguin Books India, 2009 reprint.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN HERITAGE OR RUPTURE IN TWO BRITISH-ASIAN FILMS: EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST CAROLINE TRECH

British-Asian cinema initially stemmed from black cinema. According to the British Film Institute: British Asian filmmaking has its roots in the “Black” politics of the 1960s and 70s, as two distinct communities, Asians and African-Caribbeans were melded together through their common experiences as racial minorities within the UK, often living under the threat of poverty and social exclusion.1

Like black cinema, British-Asian cinema challenges non-white representations, but since the 1990s, it has been considered as part of British mainstream cinema.2 It examines the situation of South-Asian communities in Britain, very often focusing on the second generation growing up with both cultures. In the 1990s, the British film industry was ready to give more credit to ethnic minorities in Britain, and financed many black and British-Asian films. Moreover, the British-Asian author 1

Definition from the British Film Institute. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/475617/index.html, consulted January 10, 2016. 2 Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s (New-York: Rodopi, 2004). Korte and Sternberg demonstrate how British-Asian cinema became part of mainstream cinema thanks mostly to the financial help from the British government, Channel 4, and the fact that Tony Blair wanted to make ethnic minorities more visible in the media, arts and cinema.

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Hanif Kureishi particularly contributed to the success of many films adapted from his novels or screenplays, such as My Beautiful Launderette (1986), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), and My Son the Fanatic (1997).3 Meanwhile, film director Gurinder Chadha chose to digress from social realism cinema and made comedies such as Bhaji on the Beach (1993) or Bend it like Beckham (2002), which were very successful. From My Beautiful Launderette to Bend it like Beckham,4 British-Asian cinema has always tackled sensitive subjects and has managed to grow in popularity. Therefore, British-Asian movies seem appropriate as a field of inquiry to consider the question of “heritage and rupture” because, on the one hand, they create a link with South Asian heritage and, on the other, remain separate from it. The protagonists have to face the dilemma of dual identity, South Asian and British. Indeed, young people born in Britain from Indian parents, for example, maintain a link with the culture of their parents, but live as British. In most British-Asian movies, young characters must make a choice: emphasize either their identity and British heritage or the culture of their parents. While functioning as a way to create links with Indian identity and cultural heritage, these movies are very British in their outlook. This article analyzes the phenomenon of heritage and identity rupture in two very popular British-Asian movies: East is East and its sequel West is West.5 Both have the distinction of staging an interesting turnaround situation. In the first film, heritage is initially rejected, leading to a family breakdown. The characters have a dual identity; they attempt to create a new hybrid identity. They break away from the traditions and culture of their parents to create new ones. In the film, West is West, everything changes during a trip to Pakistan where the rupture leaves a little more space for parental cultural heritage and identity. The Khan family, being part of the Pakistani diaspora, has the distinction of not just making a oneway trip to England, but a return trip in order to create a hybrid identity. The trip to the East, as far as the West is concerned, is essential to finding 3

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, directed by Stephen Frears in 1987, The Buddha of Suburbia, series from the BBC in 1993 and My Son the Fanatic, directed by Udayan Prasad in 1997. Bhaji on the Beach, directed by Gurinder Chadha in 1993. 4 My Beautiful Launderette, directed by Stephen Frears in 1986 was about male homosexuality and Bend it Like Beckham, directed by Gurinder Chadha in 2002 was about the bending of rules and feminism. 5 East is East, directed by Damien O’Donnell in 1999 and West is West, directed by Andy De Emmony in 2011.

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a balance between heritage and rupture. We will focus on two iconic characters of the two films: George Khan and his youngest son Sajid. They have the particularity of having opposite stories but claiming the same hybrid identity. The title of the film East is East was taken from Kipling’s adage in his short story The Ballads of East and West, namely, “East is east, west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” This title announces, at the outset, the separation between the Pakistani traditionalist father, on the one hand, and the English mother and her westernized children, on the other. The main purpose of British-Asian films is to stage the relationships between the British and the British-Asian people. But it is only in East is East that the daily life of a couple and their hybrid children is depicted. In this film, more than any other, the characters actually oscillate between two identities and two cultures. Such a dilemma allows British-Asian duality to surface because the children of George and Ella are biologically half British and half Pakistani.

Screen shot from East is East, Ella and her children rising against George .

The film is set in 1971 in Salford near Manchester. George, of Pakistani Muslim origin, played by Om Puri, has a fish and chip shop. He worries about the war between Pakistan and India and keeps his small family under close control. He makes things more difficult for his wife Ella, who is English, and his six sons and one daughter. It is a real tyrant who shouts and gives orders to his children in broken English and does not hesitate to use force to be respected. If his wife and children do not obey his orders, he threatens to bring his first Pakistani wife to England. He is determined to raise his children according to Pakistani traditions and Islam, but his children do not agree with him. We can take the example of George to understand how his dual identity is represented. He was born in Pakistan, but has lived in England

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for thirty years where he has built his life with his English wife. Thus, one might think that George is integrated into British culture, but he is not. From his point of view, he is still a Pakistani, and cannot be regarded as English or even Anglo-Pakistani. He cultivates his difference by speaking English with a heavy Pakistani accent and by trying to raise his children in the Pakistani way. He regrets not having been able to convince his wife to go and live in Bradford, where the Pakistani community is more important than in Manchester. The recurring symbol of George’s identity crisis is certainly his desire to offer his wife half a cup of tea. He agrees to drink tea, which is the English drink par excellence, but only half a cup. It may be noted that while talking about a Victorian tea set, the current director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, had once remarked: “What could be more British and less British than tea?”6 Tea embodies the British-Asian paradox, since it often comes from India, but Britain has taken it and made it the national drink. The choice of George to drink only half a cup of tea reveals his dual identity. This could mean that it is half-built, he living with his Pakistani traditions but on English soil and being neither totally Pakistani nor totally English. Nothing belongs entirely to him; he can control only half the things that surround him. George is a paradoxical character since he chooses to come to England to marry an English woman and to open a fish and chips shop named “The English Chippy,” but refuses to be considered English by not adopting the habits and customs of his host country. The fact that the family business is owned by his wife Ella, who is English, may explain this, but, as we know, it is very common to find takeaways serving curry or tikka masala in England. In East is East, George could have been tempted to add Pakistani dishes to the menu, but he does not. Moreover, we can note that George has the same name as the patron saint of England. Is it necessary to recall that George is a Royal name and that many British monarchs have borne it? In fact, his real name is Jahangir (which means “conqueror of the world” in Persian), but he prefers to anglicize it. However, despite few integration efforts, it is very clear that, in East is East, George is a Pakistani living in England, and he does not consider himself English or even British-Asian. It is also interesting to look at the very special case of Sajid, the alter ego of the author and screenwriter of both films Ayub Khan Din. Sajid is 6 Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 19.

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the youngest son of George, yet he does not consider himself Pakistani at all. Nevertheless, some words betray his childish mind, for example, when he discovers Bradford and sees all this concentration of Pakistani people and says: “There are hundreds of them.” The use of the third person pronoun “them” instead of the first person pronoun in the objective case “us,” clearly indicates that he does not include himself in this group. Similarly, when the Shah family comes to introduce the prospect of two daughters marrying his brothers, he shouts to his mother when he sees them: “Mum, the Pakis are here!” These are certainly the most representative lines of the boy in East is East. He is not very talkative and hides his head under a huge hood that he never leaves, not even for family pictures.

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Sajid in West is West on the way to school with his father George

However, his classmates, who bully him because he is different, frown upon Sajid. In the sequel of East is East, West is West, Sajid is reluctant to go to school because he is the victim of Paki-bashing. Indeed, the West is West film opens with a scene in which Sajid is chased by classmates. How ironic, when we know that Sajid is perhaps the most English of the young people in his neighbourhood. He has a very strong accent from Manchester and uses a very modern English dialect. Besides, his school uniform suits him well; only his skin colour reveals his Pakistani origins. Conversely, the school headmaster seems to enjoy the former British colony and quotes Kipling, showing the cover of Kim to Sajid. Paradoxically, this Englishman tries to point out to the young boy that he is missing out on his cultural and literary heritage by ignoring his Pakistani roots. In a short scene in West is West, the headmaster of the school speaks to him in Urdu, but Sajid does not understand. He asks the boy: “You do not

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speak Urdu?” and Sajid replies “No, I’m English, Sir.” When the headmaster asks him to point out Pakistan on a map, Sajid is totally lost, and points to European countries. Worried about this lack of consideration for the Pakistani culture, his father decides to take Sajid on a trip because “he does not know who he is.” Sajid’s character was inspired by the experience that the author and screenwriter Ayub Khan Din had known when he had been sent to Pakistan at age twelve. He remembers he had the same anti-Pakistani behaviour as Sajid. The author says that the character of Sajid is not exaggerated at all and that he had experienced the same suffering and the same identity crisis. Naively, Sajid follows his father to Pakistan, believing he is going on holiday, which is actually his father’s ruse to force him to accompany him. The cultural gap leads to comical scenes where the young Sajid seems to be completely out of touch with Pakistan and uncomfortable. The cultural shock is well-expressed in West is West since there is no real transition from Sajid’s departure from England to his arrival in Pakistan. In fact, we go from one country to another without any explanation to accentuate the abrupt change. As soon as Sajid arrives in Pakistan, he meets his whole family right away. The poor boy did not know he had so many uncles and cousins and does not seem to feel very comfortable with this new big family. The cultural shock is huge for the boy, who expresses his discomfort awkwardly. He is even rude to everyone; for example, he calls a young Pakistani boy “Mowgli”, and has no respect for the rest of the village. Moreover, he refuses to take his school uniform off to wear the local clothes, and cannot adapt to the precarious living conditions that are proposed. Nevertheless, gradually, but reluctantly, Sajid comes to understand the Pakistani culture he previously rejected. This is certainly due to his spiritual guide, in the guise of a wise old man, who plans his discovery of Pakistan. In an interview with Jagtar, Om Puri (George) and Aquib Khan (Sajid) talk about the movie and their characters. The young Aquib Khan, who plays Sajid, says: In the film, Sajid resents his father, he thinks he is English, he doesn’t know anything about the Pakistani culture, whereas his father wants him to be the same. If you go to a different country, don’t expect it to be the same. That is what George learns and that is what Sajid learns. He realises that being half-Pakistani and half-English is what defines him as a person.

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It is true that an Indian or Pakistani person who returns to his homeland after a long stay in the West might make us think of Devdas.7 Thanks to the novel and the different film adaptations, Devdas has become a key character and an icon of Indian cinema. Poonam Arora explains that: Not only has the narrative become a mythological reference point for Hindi melodrama, but the Devdas persona has become incorporated into the various Indian languages, and therefore has become an integral part of South Asian culture.8

In fact, Devdas’s journey from his rural village to the city of Calcutta finds a parallel in Sajid’s journey. Often, British-Asian people have become so British that Indian or Pakistani education is often imposed on them by their parents so that they learn about their origins. That is what happens to Sajid, who makes the opposite journey that Devdas makes, starting from a “civilized” industrial England to find a rural and “archaic” education in Pakistan. Nevertheless, the comparison with another iconic literature character seems to be more appropriate here. Indeed, Sajid, being torn between two identities, is associated with Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, based on the eponymous novel written in 1901. Hence, the novel is mentioned several times in the film by various characters and by Sajid himself, both in England and Pakistan. The screenwriter Ayub Khan Din recognizes that, like Sajid, he read Kim when he was young, and that it certainly helped him to understand that he had to accept his Pakistani origins. This is 7

Devdas is a novel written by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, published in 1917. See Caroline Trech, “Devdas et anti Devdas,” Rencontre avec l’Inde 42-1 (2013): 7885. Devdas, in order to receive a taleem (Arabic word for education), travels from his rural village to Calcutta, the cultural capital of British India. When he comes back to his village, the transformation of his identity is so obvious that his friend Parvati says “you have become one of them.” In that paper I argue that Sajid in West is West performs a reverse journey compared to that of Devdas, that is to say, he travels from his English city of Manchester to a rural village in Pakistan. Contrary to Devdas, Sajid discovers the country of his father to become a Pakistani man and little by little loses his English features. 8 Poonam Arora, “Devdas: India’s Emasculated Hero, Sado-Masochism and Colonialism,” in Jouvert, Journal of Post Colonial Studies 1-1 (1997), paragraph 1. http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/DEVDAS.HTM, consulted September 11, 2015. The author argues that because of British colonialism, Devdas underplays his Indian education and desires to ultimately lose the features of Indian masculinity.

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probably why he chose to quote key passages from Kim in the film based on his autobiographical story and journey to Pakistan. It seems relevant to remember that the young Kim was the son of a former Irish soldier in the service of the English crown. As an orphan, Kim explores the streets of Lahore in Pakistan. The boy wanders in search of his identity, like Sajid. Kim, as well as Sajid, gets to know a spiritual guide or teacher. This is Pir Nasreem for Sajid, and a Tibetan Lama for Kim. The novel describes a multicultural India in which the Anglo-Indian Kipling had grown up. Kim and Sajid are the synthesis of East and West in all their cultural diversity. The boys will both conduct their initiation quest in British India9, because they must know their heritage in order to know where they come from. The incipit of Kim is a recurrent quotation in the film: He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Am Amah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaid Gheríthe Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who Hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘firebreathing dragon’ hold the Punjab,10 for the great green-bronze pieces is always first of the conqueror’s loot.

In fact, Kipling’s novel is a true cultural and literary heritage for Sajid. At first, Sajid does not want to read this novel given by his teacher in England, but gradually the boy notices he has things in common with the main character. He identifies with Kim and ends up disclaiming loudly “Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab.” This may mean that he identifies with English settlers, but also embraces their land and culture as much as the land of his birth. Punjab acts as an ethnoscape11 here, where Sajid’s hybrid identity can express itself and make sense. A balance seems to be found between two different cultural heritages. 9

At the time Kim was written, Pakistan did not exist and was called British India. Punjab was formerly a province in North West British India, divided between India and Pakistan in 1947. 11 Ethnoscape is a term coined by Arjun Appadurai in his essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 295-310. One of five such terms, ethnoscape is defined as “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” (p. 297). 10

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Sajid discovers his heritage by being totally immersed in a very historically rich space. With Hughsy, whom he nicknames Mowgli12 because of his wild and sloppy appearance, he discovers the ruins of temples and Mughal tombs. In the film West is West, a scene is particularly explicit with regard to the discovery of Pakistani heritage. We witness the transformation of Sajid from ignorance to acceptance. At last, Sajid agrees to wear the local outfit, and Pir Naseem asks him “how does it feel?” to which he answers “comfortable.” By putting on the local Pakistani outfit, Sajid blends with his surroundings and even seems to feel at ease with it. Later that night, Pir Naseem reads Kim by the fire and is offended by the term “native” used by Kipling to describe Pakistani people, and denounces an unbearable imperialist attitude. Surprisingly, Sajid asks him to carry on the reading and not to pay attention to this. The term “native” does not seem to bother Sajid, because he may have the same point of view as the author, that of an Englishman to be more precise. Suddenly, George’s voice echoes through the night, calling Sajid. The boy is torn between his desire to learn and his duty as a son. He complains to Pir Naseem that his father always asks him to be more inclined to Pakistani traditions. The Sufi Pir Naseem replies “You think you can move to another country and come back and find everything the same?” Using parables, he tries to explain to Sajid that he must adapt to both cultures in order to live his life with confidence. He tells him: I walk to my hut every night by the same path. Now if a cobra decides to sit in the middle of that path, do I go on and get bitten or do I take another path and live? We have to adapt to the situations and the world we find ourselves in.

The next day Sajid plays in the river by riding buffalos, imitating Kim sitting on the canon, and proudly quotes the opening words of the novel again. Later, Sajid, dressed in Pakistani clothes and looking confused, tells his guide “I do not know who I am supposed to be,” and the old man replies “Who changes? The boy or the world around him?” He wants to explain to the boy that he indeed remains himself, yet he needs to adapt to his environment. This trip to Pakistan seems to have been beneficial for Sajid but what effect does it have on George? He is seen as a Pakistani immigrant in the eyes of his son, who even calls him “Paki bastard.” In his native country, 12

After the famous protagonist of Kipling’s Jungle Book, published in 1894.

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George then hopes to show his son that he is highly respected by his family members he had left behind. In fact, George, so proud of his Pakistani identity, is left behind by his family and friends, who look upon him as a former Pakistani, having lived thirty years in England. For example, George sends one of his sons to Pakistan to find a wife in vain. So he decides to meet an old friend to marry his daughter to Maneer, but he is not well received by this old friend, who refuses to marry his daughter to Maneer because his life is “too different in England.” George does not understand because many Pakistani people living in England marry Pakistani women and take them to live with them. Seeing his father flabbergasted, Maneer explains to him that he was wrong to believe he was returning to Pakistan as a saviour, saying “Khan, the King of England returned.” It hurts George’s feelings and he slaps Maneer, but his son replies “It’s not me your friends won’t let their daughters marry, it’s you.” This confrontation is rather unexpected since Maneer is the most obedient son George has. Consequently, Maneer’s rebellion is very significant. It is him who his brothers mock by calling him Gandhi; he is so respectful of his father, wisely following his Pakistani and Muslim guidelines. He finally expresses his own thought. George is also in a ruptured relationship with his first wife. He has abandoned her for thirty years with their two daughters and when he returns he is greeted as a stranger in his own land. Nobody wants him back in Pakistan. His wife tells him that the Pakistani Jahangir does not exist anymore for her. George is unable to accomplish his father’s and his landowner’s tasks. He does not know how to handle the plough anymore and cannot plough his own fields. He must face the truth: he is in rupture with his country of origin. Screenwriter Ayub Khan Din says in an interview that can be found in the DVD of the film West is West “What George discovers is the life he’s trying to teach Sajid about doesn’t exist anymore.” He adds that “It’s him who has to start learning about the life he left in Pakistan.” Thus, George is forced to admit that he is rejected by other Pakistani people and he is no longer considered as such, but as an Englishman or a foreigner. Of course, his homecoming after thirty years of absence emphasizes his Englishness. He is therefore considered as a Pakistani man in England and as an Englishman in Pakistan, condemned to be an outsider in both the countries. Once back in England in his shop, it is interesting to notice that George finally offers kebabs to his customers, but it is an English friend who prepares them and explains to customers, who are very fond of them, that

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“it’s an old family recipe.” All the duality of this family is visible here,

where a Pakistani immigrant, who served fish and chips his whole life, now starts offering oriental dishes to his English customers. But when Ella asks George if he wants tea, he still replies, as in the first film, “I’ll have half a cup.” The last West is West movie scene illustrates this fragile balance between heritage and rupture. Sajid is seen sitting on the roof of his house in his native district near Manchester, playing the flute. He wears a duffle coat and tartan pants, and plays music with the flute given to him by Pir Naseem. This image is a fine representation of the identity of Sajid, that is to say, truly English but no longer ignorant of his origins. The fact that music is the way Sufis speak to God could mean that the teenager has become more spiritual. His guide has somehow helped him to get rid of his demons. The film West is West suggests to us that the identity of George and Sajid has been revealed. George agrees to reconcile his Pakistani identity and Englishness, and Sajid now leaves a little space for his Pakistani origins.

Last picture of Sajid back in England in West is West where he combines his two identities

The films East is East, and West is West present characters that break with their cultural heritage and their new country. A Pakistani man in rupture with England and an English boy who breaks away from his Pakistani father coexist within the same family. After a trip to Pakistan, a sort of homecoming for one and an initiating journey for the other, the father and son find a balance between their two cultures. Jahangir becomes George, and Sajid is more aware of his Pakistani heritage. Eventually, after this trip to Pakistan, they have reconciled both facets of their hybrid identity.

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Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 295-310. Arora, Poonam. Poonam Arora, “Devdas: India’s Emasculated Hero, Sado-Masochism and Colonialism.” Jouvert, Journal of Post Colonial Studies 1.1 (1997). Accessed September 11, 2015. http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/DEVDAS.HTM. Chatterjee, Sarat Chandra. Devdas. Calcutta, 1917. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2011. —. The Ballad of East and West. Bombay, 1889. Accessed September 11, 2015. http://www.bartleby.com/246/1129.html. —. The Jungle Books. 1894. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, reprinted 2013. Korte, Barbara and Claudia Sternberg. Bidding for the mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s. New York: Rodopi, 2004. MacGregor, Neil. A History of the World in 100 Objects. London: Allen Lane, 2010. Trech, Caroline. “Devdas et anti Devdas.” Rencontre avec l’Inde (New Delhi: Conseil indien pour les relations culturelles) 42.1 (2013): 78-85. —. British Identity in British-Asian Films, 1997-2007. Doctoral thesis submitted to Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, 2012.

Filmography East is East, directed by Damien O’Donnell in 1999. West is West, directed by Andy De Emmony in 2011. Bend it Like Beckham, directed by Gurinder Chadha in 2002. My Son the Fanatic, directed by Udayan Prasad in 1997. Bhaji on the Beach, directed by Gurinder Chadha in 1993. The Buddha of Suburbia, series from the BBC in 1993. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, directed by Stephen Frears in 1987. My Beautiful Launderette, directed by Stephen Frears in 1986.

Website http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/475617/index.html

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN HERITAGE AND RUPTURES: A FINE BALANCE DIFFICULT TO OBTAIN (AND SOME QUESTIONS AROUND GENDER) RADA IVEKOVIû

In this paper, I1 will be taking issue from (rather than with) three extremely interesting papers presented at a workshop2 in Singapore National University. All three papers dealt with not only gender relations, but also urban modernity in the peripheries of great Indian cities, or in shantytowns. Indirectly and maybe involuntarily, they also engaged with heritage and rupture. And, i want to add, considering the paradoxical relation between heritage and rupture, it somehow always seems to call for gender as an operator and put in motion various mechanisms and degrees of immunization against the other.

1

Punctuation: The author uses capital I only in quotations and at the beginning of a sentence. 2 The title of the workshop that was held on May 6-7, 2013 in the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of Singapore National University, involving papers that triggered my thoughts on the matter, was “Violence, Insurgencies, Deceptions: Conceptualizing Urban Life in South Asia,” and the three scholars whose experimental and inspiring presentations I was discussing and have been referring to and reflecting upon afterwards are: Tarini Bedi (“Shiv Sena Women, Political Brokerage and the Violent Politics of Peri-urban in Western India”), Ayona Datta (“Violence in/of Home: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement”), and Akanksha Mehta (“Cultural Nationalism, Public Spaces, and the Violent ‘Feminine’: Identity, Agency, and Politics of Hindu Right Wing Women in India”). I am not retelling the papers here, just drawing on them. I thank the authors as well as the SARI conference for the opportunity they kindly gave me to explore the issue.

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*** Heritage and rupture as part and parcel of one and the same system can be viewed as a coming together that forms a seam. Indian philosophies have an important advaita (non-duality) tradition, bridging the gap between the great divides such as subject-object, life-death, and universalparticular. To this endless list could be added modernity-tradition, heritage-rupture, as well as many others. What I may discuss or disagree about, would not be the principle of the interconnection between heritage and rupture, but the proportion, the extent to which the two are interrelated, interdependent, and complementary. How much continuity is there in discontinuity? How much oblivion in memory? How much past is there in the present, and how much present in the past? How much should one let go? Is there a recipe? It may bother us to note that there is none in a definitive sense. And how “traditional” is… tradition? Is “tradition” any good, and who decides what tradition is? Certainly, the linkage to the means of production is most important. We know that appropriative moods, appropriative knowledge for example, are decisive when it comes to evaluating the proportion. Where knowledge is in the service of appropriation, “heritage” will be valued under the guise (or in the shape) of possession provided that the politics of knowledge ushers us into a corresponding class configuration. But imagine for a while that rupture is a valuable possession too (it will depend on the cognitive politics adopted). In that case, the rupture with old patterns will allow appropriation, and either it itself will be declared heritage, or else “heritage” will be seen as waste. Neither way can we move without being clear about the concrete cognitive politics adopted. And let us add right away that cognitive politics are not usually disclosed, but they exist and they are extremely efficient, all the more so if they are not revealed. This is the reason why the epistemological construct of a situation, an event, a condition needs always to be analyzed, deconstructed, and disclosed. This is not usually done. On the other hand, is knowledge imaginable that is not appropriative and, had we access to it (depending on the cognitive politics we deploy), what would change with regard to the relation between heritage and rupture? The two are an example of a binary, in the way NƗgƗrjuna3 enumerates these: as soon as you have (or imagine) one, you have (or imagine) the 3

NƗgƗrjuna, MƗdhyamakaĞƗstram or Madhyamakakarikas; original with a good French translation: NƗgƗrjuna, Stances du milieu par excellence, Guy Bugault

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other. They come in pairs. NƗgƗrjuna doesn’t indulge in or care about their proportion. In his dialectics, they reciprocally disqualify one another. The scene (level) is then shifted and an attempt is displayed that aims at solving the paradox of the relation on that other plane. But in vain, since there is here a regressus ad infinitum condemned by NƗgƗrjuna, or seen by him as the mechanism that prevents us from getting out of the system we pretend to judge. The solution for NƗgƗrjuna (in agreement with what Buddha’s early philosophical speeches say) would be stepping aside, exiting the system to some “elsewhere” (another dimension) and “otherwise” where the verb “to be” does not apply. The Buddha’s as well as NƗgƗrjuna’s is the “middle way”. Neither heritage (we would add today: because it is appropriative), nor rupture (we could add, but the Buddhists too: because it doesn’t take causality, pratƯtya-samutpƗda; asmin sati, idam bhavati4, into consideration), neither both, nor none of them. The question that remains to be asked is: what then? What is there then, or is there anything? It is difficult to answer a question with the verb to be… an ontological question. Buddha discarded and avoided such questions. If an answer were possible in the Buddhist vein, it would be “nothing”: but “nothing” is not an answer because, as an answer, it would require an assertion: that assertion is impossible, or rather, no assertion is possible. Asserting would take a stable and secure subject speaking from a clear and well established, recognized, position of at least some ontological substantiality. Early philosophical Buddhism does not recognize it. Assertion would certify an “I” that has no excuse, no reason, and above all no support. No support whether in history, in ontology, in a verb “to be”. It would be an unsustainable ontological, metaphysical but also political position which would, moreover, privilege a form of life— anthropocentric—that is not defendable. With Buddhism (early and NƗgƗrjuna), we are not in any kind of anthropocentrism: all forms of life are equivalent, in addition to our not being able to say anything about them. Thus, between heritage and rupture, there is nothing to conclude or transl. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). N.B.: NƗgƗrjuna lived in the 2nd-1st century before the common era. 4 pratƯtya-samutpƗda (Sanskrit) is the formula of “dependent becoming, dependent origination” or of general causality in different possible sequences that exemplify individual life within the cycle of life-and-death; asmin sati, idam bhavati (Sanskrit) is a saying meaning “when this happens, that occurs” describing general causality and the permanent transformation and instability of the world and things. Both belong to basic Buddhist knowledge.

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know for sure, but there is always a politics of that relation that we can adopt, depending on the values and rapport we wish to construct. Even then, it is undeniable that there is a paradox underlying the relation between rupture and heritage. And, while early Buddhist ontological and metaphysical agnosticism (and general agnosticism) does not at all imply or require inactivity, it perfectly tolerates paradoxes of all kinds. The clearest expression of a paradox is the one just mentioned—neither the one, nor the other, nor the two, nor none of them: all four statements are proffered (one cannot say—asserted) together. They are not an either-or construction; they are a neither, neither, neither etc. construct with opposite terms, which makes them, when taken simultaneously, paradoxical to say the least. This paradox is certainly both epistemic and existential. Indeed, it is what life consists of. With regard to humans, the paradox consists in the fact that we are both finite (as individuals) and continuous (as a species). With regard to language, the paradox regards the fact that, while we try to say “everything” (and never manage to), language will not let us spell out all because it is part of that “all” (of the whole). With such luggage in the epistemological sphere, we humans, whose form of life should be divested of all its presumption and privileges, should take a more modest stand. It is probable that it would help us understand the intricacies of the complex and somewhat erratic rapport between rupture and heritage more readily, without, however, releasing us from the responsibility to deal with them. But that responsibility has directly to do with the politics of difference that we adopt/ed in given conditions. Contradiction, far from repelling, can bind opposites in complex and partly non-transparent relations. These take time and a graduality, processuality that may, because of the duration or the course of action, reconcile the opposites.5 *** The topic of “heritage and rupture”, “tradition and innovation” is a recurrent figure in human cultures, I would say, practically universally: it appears in all civilizations, in all literatures, philosophies, languages, at all times. When it (occasionally) comes to the fore as an important cultural 5

This is visible even in such one-sided authors who, like V.S. Naipaul, tend towards fusing opposites quite beyond their own staunch beliefs. V.S.Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York-London: Viking, 1987). See Berna González Harbour s interview of Naipaul, “Por qué llora V.S. Naipaul,” Babelia (El País), 13 June 2015, 2-3.

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and social issue, but a political one too by implication, it regularly marks an important threshold around which there is much debate and discord. There are many such thresholds in history, and one of them (western) Modernity, keeps coming back in many of its forms, origins, claims, and denials. The famous French “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,” by the end of the seventeenth century and from then on, displayed one such “heritage versus rupture” split, especially in literature and at the French Academy, a highly normative state and national institution. A comparable European “Quarrel” raised by the Renaissance preceded it, celebrating modern-time inventions: the printing press, firearms, the nautical compass, great geographical conquests and “discoveries.” These paved the way for colonization and ushered in a strong current of ideology propagating the superiority of the Modern and its split from the Ancient. While the “Ancients” (also called “Classiques”) pleaded for direct continuity with Greek Antiquity, thus inventing the very pattern and self-justification of (western) Modernity,6 the Modern pleaded for rupture (coming apart from the previous) and innovation. Both found ways of supporting colonial conquests and ideologies as something extraordinarily positive from the point of view of Europe. The quarrel actually often dealt with political issues beyond mere culture, although this was not necessarily acknowledged. The concepts of Progress, of Modernity itself, and several others were raised, questioning authority, religion, and politics. Merit was attributed to one or the other orientation, which also expanded to the field of painting, writing, and research, as well as to most other fields7. But there has actually always been a to-and-fro between the two European modern orientations. On the other hand, had not already Hellenistic Rome been negotiating its proportion of “heritage and rupture” with regard to Ancient Greece? Persisting through time and undergoing transformations, such disputes never reached any definitive and universal position where the one could be separated from the other for good. It was like a pendulum. That pendulum is still swinging. 6

In that way they linked Greek antiquity directly to “Universal” Modern times, thus denying other continents and civilizational connections to their own antiquities – if they wanted to be “Modern”. Renaissance and Humanism as a cultural epoch come from there. But there would follow infinite quarrels within quarrels. Also, the “quarrel” would become more complex and would spread all over Europe taking different shapes. 7 Laura J. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder. Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).

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At the end of the seventeenth century, there appeared the modern opposition of the French painter Poussin (1594-1665) to the Flemish painter Rubens (1577-1640)–a heated debate about heritage and rupture after a long squabble at the French Academy as to which of the two was more important. It was finally and perhaps surprisingly Rubens’s palette, thick paint over layers of rosy feminine flesh (among other things he painted; battles, portraits…) within a patriarchal setting that, in the end, won the cultural dispensation over Poussin’s idealized nature (in spite of the latter’s nationalism…) as a framework for mythical references to ancient paradises in a larger European context. Such was the time of Rococo, where not only local heritage, but any contribution from anywhere, would be recycled in an incredibly eclectic, witty and endless exuberance of shapes, colours, quotes, leads, mixtures, and kitsch products for any purpose. It was a blend of popular culture, imported decorative motives and techniques from over half of the world, architectural knowhow, all of it in much excess and as a reaction as well as in opposition to too much formalism, institutionalization, normativity, academy, classicism, engineering imperialism, and stately grandeur. Compared with the earlier period of Baroque, Rococo had more liberal features to it, also reflected in looser gender relations which, in the France of the eighteenth century, were much more relaxed compared to a subsequent stricter French nineteenth century that submitted women again to a harsher patriarchy of the new bourgeois class. At this point in time (Rubens rather than Poussin; Rococo rather than monotheistic church Baroque), the pendulum swung in favour of a gentler and playful gender relation, confusing the aforementioned dichotomy: “heritage” would be one of many origins, “rupture” will be with regard to the social, artistic and cultural constraint of the previous period. Continuity between the two, as well as between the many heritages, would be put together for a century of lightness rather than of restriction. Elsewhere, there have been other heritages and ruptures confronting each other, whose tensions were solved in different ways. Great Asian philosophical systems in general8 cultivated continuities over ruptures, and generally made the latter appear as aspects of heritage. Immanence was preferred when there was a choice. It has been the rule in these philosophical systems and Weltanschauungen, sometimes translated into 8

Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and, to a lesser degree, Brahmanism; Islam is left out of the picture here, as it is a monotheism and therefore, in many aspects, more akin to the Western linear traditions pursued from Christianity on.

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political arrangements, to prefer harmony and continuity to disruption and discontinuity. With regard to some of the binaries that have been very strictly split in Western philosophies, Asians have opted against the divide. Where, as in Europe and the West, the whole philosophical construction and political deduction from it are based on separating subject from object, Asian philosophies of becoming do not endorse the split. They do not even construct the concept of a subject, and have not suffered from its absence: nothing is missing in a non-anthropocentric world.9 The verb “to be”, referring to immobility and staticity, does not apply to such situations. It is inadequate to describe a relationship; the four-fangled negation does apply in early Buddhism: It neither is; neither is not; it neither is, and is not; it neither – is, nor is it not.

In Brahmanism (in the Upanišads), similarly, only neti, neti applies: “(it is) not that, (it is) not that.” Furthermore, early Buddhism does not engage in ontological or metaphysical speculation. It avoids any “to be” questions10. It is advaita, “non dualist”. There is no absolute, and there is no absolute exclusion either. No absolute “otherness.” No heritage that should be taken without probing. No rupture that could be definitive. No guarantee for the Buddha’s saying. Being and non-being belong to the same universe. Difference, distance, separation are only relative, they denote a relation. Nothing is static. Rupture leads to a new and provisory stableness that will soon look like “heritage,” but will then be disrupted in its turn: nothing stays as it was, according to the Buddhist or Heraclitan philosophy, everything moves on. Gender more than anything, since it is mere relationship and nothing else: the two extreme terms in a binary are not, but the relationship is. Even in modern times, the same pattern is repeated. The Chinese May 4th movement (or the “New Culture Movement”, in 1919) as an introduction to Chinese Modernity, to take one example, was constructed in the same way. It was all about the relationship between “tradition” and 9

Alas its not being anthropocentric does not prevent it from being, in its own way, quite androcentric. 10 Rada Ivekoviü, L’éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi (Paris: Klincksieck, 2014).

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“newness,” or “rupture,” where both of these are taken in their paradoxical and double bind sense. The proportion between the two can never be calculated or taken for granted. But it gives the relationship its distinct shape. The insurgent students of the May 4th movement protested against the way the western “international community” and Japan had dissected China, distributing its pieces among themselves. They protested, in the name of national heritage and as nationalists, against the Chinese government accepting all the humiliating conditions imposed upon the country. They saw it as treason and as a breaking up of the country, a rupture. They proposed another rupture to counter that one, i.e., going back to forgotten national interests and heritage. It was one heritage against another, one rupture against another: you could see in these matters as in others, rupture as heritage and heritage as rupture. The stakes were many, complex and international, and they were liable to different interpretations. Custodians of national heritage, the students, the intellectuals and artists who now turned to politics, proposed to rescue and restore heritage through… yet another rupture. It was a matter of perspective. The same could be said of the bloody Cultural Revolution a few decades later (1966-1976). Assessments and reinterpretations happen and will continue to happen. Again, both the May 4th Movement and the Cultural Revolution are examples of those important historic thresholds that bring change in great upsurges, and then settle down for a period of peace, healing or restoration, or alternatively for a freeze. Western Modernity has been one such threshold. From then on, countries lying outside Europe were invited by the hegemon (Europe and then the West) to link up with Greek antiquity (supposed to be the source of European and therefore universal Modernity). Greek antiquity was considered as the only antiquity in the world supposed to give direct access to Modernity for everyone. The Western character of Modernity was not questioned or even noticed by hegemonic (western) cultures and political configurations. It was only when Subalternist scholars claimed alternative and multiple Modernities or when some of them asserted that Modernity was a specifically western historic event and not African or Asian, that the problem of interpreting the relationship between heritage and rupture in world history was noticed, taken into account, and theorized by post-colonial scholars. The rupture of western Modernity (and it was not the same rupture for Asia and for Europe) suddenly appeared as an

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abyssal line11 a line not to be crossed. Conditions were completely different on the two sides, depending on whether you were colonizing or colonized, whether your perspective was (dis)rupture of the continuity of heritage. What was life to some meant death for others. *** I am starting from those three papers i mentioned, taking them only as a pretext to reflect on heritage and rupture, especially when it comes to gender. The three presentations are not in themselves the objects of my study. But gender is tricky, because besides being a “thing,” a topic, a subject matter, it is also and first of all a major political operator. It, therefore, appears in every other matter, should one care to see it. This is why so much brokerage goes through and about gender. While negotiating heritages and ruptures, gender is permanently being renegotiated, and its tension is never resolved anywhere. Gender is actually the basic form of the political. It is also a relation and a norm, a pattern that is consensual, unequal, and instrumental in building inequalities, possibly a source of conflict in different patterns of demarcation. Gender is not about women only; it is about society, communities, about how the state or the nation is constructed, about how values are shaped and transmitted. Two of the papers, Tarini Bedi’s (“Shiv Sena Women…”) and Akanksha Mehta’s (“…Politics of Hindu Right Wing Women…”) dealt with the Hindu right wing, BJP or Shiv Sena12 women in India – Tarini’s more in detail in the field, Akankhsa’s more generally. The third paper, Ayona Datta’s (“Violence in/of Home…”), referred to fieldwork in a Delhi “camp” or squatter settlement and about how public space (bahri) and private space (ghar) are regulated through competing gender norms. But in all three examples, we saw that women do not readily accept the subordination that is proposed to or, more often, imposed on them. They rather negotiate and try to get extra guarantees and win new spaces of 11

Boaventura De Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledge,” Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2007-06-29santos-en.pdf, consulted September 14, 2014. 12 BJP: Bharatiya Janata Party (previously: Bharatiya Jana Sangh) is a large rightwing party that has historically prevailed over the Indian National Congress, the party that had led India to independence and ruled for decades thereafter through the Nehru dynasty. Shiv-Sena (“Shiva’s army”) is a far right regional (Maharashtra) Hindu nationalist party that originated as a formation of associations of “civil society”. It is close to the BJP. Its members are referred to as Shiv-sainiks.

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freedom within the given framework, sometimes with apparently transgressive performances. What they negotiate is, among other things, heritage and rupture, or tradition and modernity etc., the relationship between which greatly affects their lives. This evidence is corroborated in all three papers mentioned, and is one of the most important points. I know this from other terrains too: there are times, situations or opportunities for negotiation and brokerage, not only and not always within a given framework, but also sometimes extending beyond it. Negotiation and acquisition of new rights within patriarchy or between competing patriarchies happen in extraordinary situations of social or communal tension, violence, civil war, mass movements and panic, rising nationalisms. That is why it is important for those women to keep the tension high and make a lot of noise. Exaggeration and excess are efficient tools for them. Women are squeezed between at least two if not more gender orders or patriarchies and are trying to make the most of the confusion. In this they are acting eminently politically. It so happens that in times of peace and order it may be much more difficult to negotiate anything extra from within the scale of extremes, but with the rise of hindutvƗ (Hindu nationalism) and in general of nationalisms that normally threaten their autonomy, women are able to snatch those extras in the name of their narrow relation both to the nation and their political community. Indeed, women are the stake as well as the instrument of nationalism. Being the stake gives them some unsuspected points. And social hierarchies as well as the gender regime are upheld through their subordinate inclusion. An important notion appears in Ayona Datta’s paper. I would like to underscore the notion of “camp” or circumscribed area, as she uses the term to denote the slum or the jhuggi jhopDŽi. It is important because a “camp” implies an exception (shown by the blanks in the map of the area the speaker shows) – to sovereignty and to the state; an exception to organized space. But at the same time it is a constitutive exception appearing as a paradoxical rupture paradoxically guaranteeing continuity, a constitutive other, an inner otherhood, the very condition of existence for the state or for the nation. Philosophically, this is a very important frame because it shows the scope and the limits of sovereignty (both of the state and of the women concerned), and therefore also a frame for the freedom of individuals. But the state is constructed similarly, or on the pattern of the nation. Or it is indeed supported by the nation. Interestingly Ayona Datta shows the functioning of split knowledge between home and public space, between some kind of heritage and some kind of rupture, however distorted each of them may be. In any case, both

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home (“heritage”) and public space (“rupture”) are gendered, and reproduce the dichotomy and the gap. The question would then be (but we could ask the same question as Partha Chatterjee13), are we sure this division holds at all? Or, does not heritage presuppose rupture and viceversa? Partha Chatterjee reproduces the same pattern in his famous distinction between civil society and political society – which really continues being philosophically problematic, though conceptually productive. Civil society (in the west) was once considered political, it was considered as opening public and political space. But in the colonies, it denoted something else, namely, local elites, and politics was elsewhere, with the people (nowhere to be seen in the dominant sphere). Therefore, Chatterjee uses the term of political society to show this shift and denote the rupture introduced by political society, by politics. The same would hold for Ernesto Laclau’s concept of “populism” (which represents the political that is not recognized, but is there).14 Politics, as we know, functions through tensions and ruptures. But today the political society itself is being gradually depoliticized. This, put together with rupture turning into some kind of heritage, the passage from civil to political society looks, more than anything else, like a shifting of labels. KuanHshing Chen has a good critique of P. Chatterjee on that issue in his book Asia as Method.15 The same could be said of the distinction between public and private and some such other divisions. In many ways we see that for south Asian women, and especially women from the elite, but also in quite another way, for working women, there was much less of a problem to step out into the public space than in the West. Women have always been bordercrossers, borderdwellers. Women have also been made the custodians of heritage and patriarchal values, while at the same time enabled to disrupt these by their very “nature” and through the fact that they eternally represent the “other”. As for the camp (juggi-jhopDŽi) and its illegality (or its quality of “rupture”), they are produced by the state in its inertia (“heritage” of some kind), as its flipside and as the other side of law.16 The orderly city 13

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Post-Colonial Democracy (New York: Columbia UP, 2011). 14 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2006). 15 Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Civil Society and Min-Jian: on Political Society and Popular Democracy,” in Cultural Studies 17-6 (2003): 876–896, p. 883; Asia as Method. Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke UP, 2010). 16 Frederic Neyrat, Atopies. Manifeste pour la philosophie (Caen: Nous, 2014).

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produces its necessary other - disorder in the slum. A good example today in France is “la jungle” (the jungle), the name spontaneously given to areas of decay, often in the woods, where undocumented foreign migrants or even local nomadic populations gather to escape enclosure (various “detention” and, worse, “retention” areas) and the manhunt by the police supposed to introduce order by detaining or dispersing these people. Like colonies in the past, such French (and generally western) “jungles” are defacto extra-constitutional and extra-juridical, in that their existence is officially not even acknowledged, although they support the sociopolitical construction. With regard to our topic, women’s condition, masculinity as order (not masculinity as such, but social masculinity or masculinity’s universalization) produces women as their other, and besieges them. The stake remains invisible. We have interesting examples of right-wing women allowed to take part in the politics of their party: it is worthwhile noting that the resistance of women to both family and state, i.e., two patriarchies, involves selfharm. But a more active negotiation of a role in partaking political power involves violence toward others (in the examples given, towards Muslims, the “state”, non-shiv-sainiks etc.) as a third party. Yet in either case, there is no challenge, no direct violence on the side of women directed against men of the same community. As if the two extreme positions were not really opposed, but rather represented some sort of compromised gradualism. Men of the same group are addressed indirectly, and demands to them have to go through women’s assertion in service to the community or the political cause (rupture at the service of continuity). They have to earn it! I suggest that this is a typical situation of subalternity through which i would also question the scope of the (ac)claimed autonomy of Shiv-Sena women, which is often exaggeratedly admired by anthropologists. The reason is simple: the universalized (in this case, men) easily associate themselves with domination where they are automatically represented and supported by history. They can claim heritage. Those whose stories are not easily seen as universal (such as women and various subaltern groups), who remain seen as representing a particular case as rupture – can only hope for a smaller share, but cannot master the whole range of domination or hegemony. The paradox is that the dominant group may also claim rupture when it is useful for them. Two of the papers, Tarini Bedi’s and Ayona Datta’s, dealt with periurban areas, neither city nor village, spaces of exception: since they are not built in a definitive way and in hard and definitive material, they are subject to changes and all kinds of negotiations. But much of the change is happening now in conditions of newfangled governance - a somewhat

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displaced gaze from sovereignty, often with a view limited to the megalopolis, a whole world in itself. We have bulging, rising sovereignties in Asia at this time, but at the same time more and more “governance” everywhere, i.e. more local administration and more direct management without politics (that is the depoliticization we were talking about), in spite of demands that come up through citizens. Governance is a relatively new concept within the framework of post-1989 globalization and a new reality that has come to inhabit the somewhat abstract state sovereignties. It happens at levels lower than the state, quite beside it, and helps us avoid dealing with questions of political representation. Namely, political representation, or should we say—“heritage”?—is not trusted any more, and nor is parliamentary democracy. So “governance” represents the figure of continuity, the heritage-cum-rupture that makes everyone “happy” in a depoliticized world. The concept of governance (how to “directly” rule without having to refer to the cumbersome democratic procedure or apparatus, and without the people and its representatives) has also contaminated that of governmentality (more Foucauldian: this is about how to concretely exercise state power) and has entered everyday parlance and journalistic language as a self-fulfilled prophecy. There is not much political representation in governance; on the one hand, there is no need for it on that level, and on the other hand, political representation— although it formally functions to gather the “greatest democracy in the world” (India), actually does not produce much equality or progress in social matters.17 The subaltern or diversely subordinate groups need to act through their appeal both to the particular and the universal (universal rights, formal and declared equality), whatever formal guarantees they may have and whatever responsibilities they may claim are generally located at the higher level (state) (but are, therefore, abstract and more than often unfulfilled). But it is important to be able to invoke them when claiming rights. Whatever can be claimed at local and intermediary levels is randomly uncertain and has less support in institutions and therefore in longer-standing achievements. In both cases, whatever women win at any level, is never won historically and for good, but can be lost at the next turn. Women are safe with neither heritage nor rupture, but should be able to claim both. In the same sense in which they must claim both universality and particularity. This is valid for any other subalternized groups as well. 17

See Perry Anderson, Indian Ideology (Gurgaon: The Three Essays Collective, 2012).

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From the accounts on right-wing women (by Bedi & by Mehta) one has the feeling that there is a lot of self-referential self-sociologisation in Shiv-Sena, a lot of narratives and self narratives too, self-fulfilling selfstory-telling. I would relativize agency and empowerment in cases as those of Shiv-Sena or BJP women in India, since their autonomy is very limited and circumscribed by the place, calculated and allotted to them by the right-wing males. But most of all, we could remark that the negotiations of Shiv Sena women are unoriginal and are the very same ones that we find in any staunch nationalism, perhaps with some variations. So Shiv-Sena itself may rather not be the panacea for women. Women, like everyone else, tend to fill in niches once these are open in language (named) and thus they are ushered into politics: so we do have Shiv-Sena women now, but they confirm the rule as the exception. Women are generally not welcome in politics, with the exception of very few movements or parties worldwide. But in the examples of such right wing parties and movements as Shiv-Sena they are exceptionally given a niche, provided they can play a specific and useful role within it, useful to the party. The would-be rupture confirms the heritage. And vice-versa. Deconstructing identity politics is rather easy. The question is what do we want to achieve with it? In order to know it, we need to question the concepts and have a cognitive project. Much of what is described in the examples looks like a post-political or perhaps “peri-political” condition, depoliticized through the narrow or near-by gaze, through attention to small segments without a general view of the political context. Klaus Theweleit, Masculine fantasies18is a work to turn to. The broader picture from reading him shows that Nazism and fascism are not the only previous or exceptional examples of conditions resembling the ones exemplified in the cases under review of extreme right-wing movements, nor are the latter a pattern in any way. Nicole Loraux, an extremely important author, wrote about ancient Greece with respect to the issue of heritage and rupture.19 There is a linkage between heritage and hegemony: the hegemonically “consensual” (which means accepted and/or imposed) heritage in patriarchy is historically and systemically masculine and masculinist. Any departure from it would be seen as rupture, as

18

Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien I-IV (Masculine fantasies) (Frankfurt am Main/Basel: Strœmfeld-Roter Stern 1976). 19 Nicole Loraux, Les enfants d’Athéna (Paris: Seuil, 1990); La cite divisée : L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes (Paris: Payot 1997).

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threatening the mainstream consensus of the established domination, and would be attributed to the minority. Under such circumstances, it is better to discuss than to take for granted concepts like democracy, nation, governance, religion (religion is extremely important when it comes to gender: it segregates women from men and subordinates them). When discussing the partition of India, Urvashi Butalia, as well as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin in their books (The Other Side of Silence and Borders and Boundaries20 respectively) have shown how, when religion appears in the sphere of politics, it blurs and jeopardizes women’s civic rights, even when these are formally declared equal. Although the law declared that each adult citizen could pick their state at the time of partition between Pakistan and India, it was religion that prohibited women from doing so and assigned them “their” side according to the religion they were born into. This did not apply to men. Again, “heritage” would prevail over “rupture,” and women who infringed this patriarchal, sexist, and racist “rule” were treated as criminals and traitors. For patriarchies, it was easier to negotiate an accord between nationalists on opposite sides (who otherwise disagreed on every other point by the way), than to treat women as equals. Beyond individual beliefs of individual men, which could vary although most were mainstream patriarchal by far, patriarchy was supported by the system, by the state, by international relations, by history, by party politics and by what was believed to be “heritage.” Regarding the construction of knowledge, we must be very careful and think twice. It should by now be clear that, in order to shape knowledge, we must partake of both heritage and rupture, but also, that no permanent, reliable and guaranteed proportion can be given in advance for the relationship. In this regard, no theory will hold, and we should be wary of… theory. The relation between heritage and rupture is exactly like the relationship between theory and practice. To say that we “combine” empirical research with theoretical framework is philosophically speaking somewhat problematic. It is not deconstructing. On the contrary, it means sealing a modern and western division that is completely colonial, imperial and capitalist. Political regimes have their own epistemological order. We cannot get hold of anything new while digging deeper the historic gap between theory and practice, which also shows the epistemological 20 Urvashi Butalia The Other Side of Silence (New Delhi: Viking, 1998); Ritu Memon & Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries. Women in the Partition of India (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

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impasse and failure we are in. That gap is due to appropriative and powergrasping knowledge, suitable for late cognitive capitalism and for governance. What is the nation and why is it linked to women? The term “nation” comes from nascere (lat.), to be born and it designates those who are of the same origin or birth. In that sense, the nation is first of all a community and a hierarchy, not readily a society of free association. It is an attribution, an ascription, and practically an allegation. To make community into a society takes time, takes politics, takes “civilizing violence” (as Étienne Balibar would say21), and takes a significant shift in the position of women (who are otherwise subordinated). To make a community into a society takes a smart and sagacious relation between heritage and rupture, a measured dose of both: neither too much nor too little of the one or the other, but no one can say in advance how much… It will be case by case, and has to be evaluated a posteriori. Somehow, heritage and rupture, in their paradoxical and usually also gendered (or “peppered by gender”) relation, usually come to the fore in the form of a question, of a political problem, of an “unpredictable” occurrence, of an exploding paradox, with big historic events and thresholds of distinct historic periods. They irrupt into the public sphere as something that was unthought-of or unthinkable (impensé) within the existing epistemic (and political) order. Once the irruption has occurred, if there is a beginning of an answer to the questions they raise, the epistemic order and the political order, the public scene, the atmosphere will have changed thoroughly. Once unthought-of, they now can be thought of, changing all the existing parameters under a new politics of seeing them and of dealing with them. It can be a war, the end of a war, the end of the Cold War, the beginning of a new sequence in globalization. It can be the occurrence, as we have it now, of mass migrations, or climate change, of the anthropocene etc. Anything can trigger the change. But today we can probably suppose that migrants don’t transmit and maintain “ethnoscapes” unchanged. On the contrary, in their very existence of becoming (as they are rather in becoming than in being), migrants are the most open to change among any population. Apart from many of them being women and girls, migrants also share some features with women in general, the human “other”. In their case, as “missing 21

Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: And Other Essays on Political Philosophy (The Wellek Library Lectures), James Swenson trans. (New York: Columbia UP, 2009).

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citizens,” migrants are the others of citizens. We can credit them for that. In spite of wars that have been imposed on many of them, in spite of manmade climate and economic disasters some of them are fleeing (much of which originally caused by the west), migrants are those who need to be open to the other per definitionem (the women are, too) if they are to undertake their hazardous journeys. It is their principled openness to others–other ways of life, other countries, peoples, cultures–that launches them on the journey and represents the hope of humankind. They may not always know it, but they do it for us and for themselves: they introduce change, a change in the rapport between heritage and rupture. One of sharing, partage. It is they, out of their fragility, impermanence, out of their apparent “weakness” that traverse crossroads in unexpected directions, that cross the tightest of borders, that conjugate together diachronicity and synchronicity while overcoming them thanks to the paradox of which they have become the major carriers at this time. Migrants indeed have become the main figure of the human. They represent rupture, but they also represent a struggle to maintain life, culture, heritage, to transpose it (recreating “home” elsewhere and in new ways unheard of), to travel with and through it. They represent partage in the double (French) sense of the word of both dividing and sharing. *** This paper is not intended to plead for heritage or for rupture, for conservation or for revolution, for one or the other. I was intrigued by the challenge of the interconnection and interdependence of the twin elements, including the paradox and the contradictory but also the powerfully creative bearing of their relation. Conflicting, yet usually innovative in some sense that may be indirect, even unwanted or intruding. What does it take to interrupt, to break away, or on the other hand, to maintain? What brings rupture or continuity? I did not construct any east-west differences in relating to those terms (heritage and rupture) and would shun from them, although I did give some Asian and European examples22. But i did analyse the role of gender played in the tension of the relationship, and gender’s role as a political operator whose services are called by the

22 For a good antidote against such constructions, see Georges Corm, OrientOccident. La fracture imaginaire (Paris, La Découverte, 2005). (Expanded volume with an added preface by the author, first published in 2002).

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oxymoronic rapport of the two concepts in a fine balance23 difficult to obtain. With the leading topic of gender, which commands all other relations, i introduced (whether we shall dwell on it or not; I did not) the important matter of immunity. Some amount of immunity is necessary for survival. An overdose is suicidal—first of all because it is murderous.24 A right proportion of immunity against the other is found in the pregnant woman who, though immunized against foreign bodies, does receive and nurture the other body in hers.

Works Cited Anderson, Perry. Indian Ideology. Gurgaon: The Three Essays Collective, 2012. Balibar, Étienne. Violence and Civility: And Other Essays on Political Philosophy (The Wellek Library Lectures). Translated by James Swenson. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence. New Delhi: Viking, 1998. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. “Civil Society and Min-Jian: on Political Society and Popular Democracy.” Cultural Studies 17-6 (2003): 876–896. —. Asia as Method. Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Corm, Georges. Orient-Occident. La fracture imaginaire. Paris: La Découverte, 2005 (Expanded volume with a preface b the author, first published in.2002). González Harbour, Berna. “Por qué llora V.S. Naipaul.” Babelia (El País) 13 June 2015, 2-3. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledge.” Eurozine website. Accessed September 14, 2014. http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2007-06-29-santos-en.pdf. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. —. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Post-Colonial Democracy. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. 23

Rohinton Mistry, A fine Balance (New York, Random House, Vintage, 2001). Rada Ivekoviü, “The Immunity Paradigm’s Contradictory/Complementary Facets,” in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 40.2 (2014): 55-82; “The watershed of Modernity: translation and the epistemological revolution,” in InterAsia Cultural Studies II-1 (2010): 45-63; Roberto Esposito, Immunitas. Protezione e Negazione Della Vita (Turin: Einaudi 2002).

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Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas. Protezione e Negazione Della Vita. Turin: Einaudi 2002. Ivekovic, Rada. “The watershed of Modernity: translation and the epistemological revolution.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies II-1 (2010): 45-63. —. “The Immunity Paradigm’s Contradictory/Complementary Facets.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 40.2 (2014): 55-82. —. L’éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi. Paris: Klincksieck, 2014. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2006. Loraux, Nicole. Les enfants d’Athéna. Paris: Seuil, 1990. —. La cite divisée : L'oubli dans la mémoire d'Athènes. Paris: Payot 1997. Menon, Ritu & Kamla Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries. Women in the Partition of India. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Mistry, Rohinton. A fine Balance. New York: Random House, 2001. NƗgƗrjuna. Stances du milieu par excellence. Guy Bugault transl. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Naipaul, V.S. The Enigma of Arrival. New York-London: Viking, 1987. Neyrat, Frederic. Atopies. Manifeste pour la philosophie. Caen: Nous, 2014. Snyder, Laura J. Eye of the Beholder. Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Theweleit, Klaus. Männerphantasien I-IV (Masculine fantasies). Frankfurt am Main/Basel: Strœmfeld-Roter Stern, 1976.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

R. AZHAGARASAN R. Azhagarasan holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Tamil-EnglishFolklore) and teaches at the Department of English, University of Madras. He has published articles on issues of cultural politics in national and international journals both in Tamil and English. He has written about the Tamil Translations of Alice in Wonderland for the 150th year celebration of the novel, Alice. He has translated (from Tamil to English) a collection of the Critical writings of a Dalit activist, Ravikumar, as Venomous Touch, published in Calcutta: Samya, 2009. He co-edited with Ravikumar, The Oxford Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. He has translated Catherine Belsey’s Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP) into Tamil (for Adayalam publishers in 2009). He has edited an anthology on the concept of ‘Bakthi’ in Tamil. BELKACEM BELMEKKI Belkacem Belmekki is Professor of British and Commonwealth Studies at the University of Oran. His research focuses mostly on the Muslim community in British India in the nineteenth century. He is currently director of the ‘Laboratoire de Langues, Littérature et Civilisation/Histoire en Afrique,’ which is a partner of the SARI. CORNELIUS CROWLEY Cornelius Crowley is Professor of British Studies at Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, France, where he is also the Director of both the Doctoral School for Literature, Language and Theatre and the Centre for Research into the Anglophone World. His most recent research has focused on the question of British Euroscepticism in relation to the current state of a British “Anglosphere” post-imperial geopolitics. SHRUTI DAS Shruti Das is Associate Professor in the P.G. Department of English, Berhampur University in Odisha, India. She is a creative writer, with poetry published nationally and internationally, a reputed literary critic and public speaker, bilingually - in English and her native tongue Odia. She has participated in many national and international seminars on

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English language literature and communication skills in India and abroad. She has distinct positions in the editorial and advisory boards of various Indian and international literary journals. She is the Editor of Literary Oracle, a peer-reviewed journal of Literature, Language, and Culture. She has written three books - From Margin to the Centre: A Toni Morrison Reader (2009), Contemporary Communicative English (2nd Edition published in 2015) and A Daughter Speaks (2013), which is her first collection of poems. She has been published in anthologies like The Scaling Heights from India, The Inspired Heart 2 & Inspired Heart 3 from Canada, Syndic Literary Journal, Young Men’s Perspective from the US, Life as a Human online Journal to name a few. Many of her poems have been translated into Sinhala and have been appreciated in Sri Lanka. Her poems cover various areas of contemporary culture stressing upon a cosmopolitan need for global fraternity, while honouring the beauty of indigenous cultures. Her first collection of poems has been cited in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2014 alongside masters of contemporary Commonwealth literature. Her second volume of poetry Lidless Eyes is being published shortly by Partridge India, A Penguin Random House Company. She is sensitive to social issues, loves to travel and to dream. She loves animals. Her CV is available at www.buodisha.edu.in. MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU Maria Sabina Draga Alexandru is Reader/Associate Professor in English at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She has published articles on contemporary literatures in English, mainly women’s literature, race studies and postcolonialism, a book entitled Conditia postmoderna: spre o estetica a identitatilor culturale (The Postmodern Condition: Towards an Aesthetic of Cultural Identities, Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2003) and has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Women’s Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (vol. I, Rewriting Histories and vol. II, Bodies and Representations, Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2005 and 2006). She has recently completed a second Ph.D. on contemporary Indian fiction in English at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. She is currently researching the area of intersection between diasporic postcolonial and postcommunist women’s literatures and will soon start editing a third volume of the “Women’s Voices” collection (whose provisional title is “Women in Performance”).

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GEETHA GANAPATHY-DORÉ Geetha Ganapathy-Doré is a Research Accredited Associate Professor of English at the Faculty of Law, Political and Social Sciences, University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité. She is the author of The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English (2011). She has edited and coedited several books among which On the Move, The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in English (2012) and Images of Decolonization (2013). Her recent research revolves around India-EU relations, Human Rights issues, Sustainable Development and Postcolonial cinema. She has translated a few Tamil short stories and poems into French. A former book reviews editor for Postcolonial Text, she now serves on the board of Atlantis, the Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. She is the current President of SARI. http://www.reseau-terra.eu/auteur234.html EVELYNE HANQUART-TURNER Evelyne Hanquart-Turner is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Paris-Est Créteil and Member of Darwin College, Cambridge. She studied and taught at the Sorbonne and Cambridge before her election to a chair at the University of Paris-Est Créteil where she founded and directed the Research Institute IMAGER (E.A. 3958). She has published extensively in French and in English on E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, the British Raj, and contemporary Indian writers such as Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Nair, Shashi Tharoor and Amitav Ghosh. She is the author of La Voix anglophone du roman indien. De l’Empire à la diaspora (L’Harmattan, 2013) and is currently working on translations of Indian short stories into French and on a book on corruption, violence and terrorism in twenty-first century Indo-English fiction. Email: [email protected] TINA HARPIN A former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Tina Harpin holds an agrégation and a doctorate in comparative literature. She is currently Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of French Guiana. Her thesis revolves around fictional writings representing incest and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century novels from South Africa and the United States. Her research focuses mainly on the history of racism and the problematic relationships between family, community and nation, in French, Francophone and Anglophone writings from America, Africa, and the Caribbean. She has written several articles and reviews and contributed to edited volumes such as Écritures du corps – Nouvelles perspectives, published by Classiques Garnier or

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Dictionnaire universel des femmes créatrices, published by Éditions des femmes. In 2013, she co-edited, under the behest of the Write Back Group, the book Postcolonial Studies: modes d’emploi, published by Presses Universitaires de Lyon. RADA IVEKOVIû Rada Ivekoviü, philosopher, writer, feminist was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1945. Programme Director at the Collège international de philosophie, Paris (2004-2010), she taught at different universities in Yugoslavia, the USA, India, France and elsewhere. She taught at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Paris-8 (Vincennes à SaintDenis) and, previously, at the University of Zagreb. She obtained her Ph.D. from Delhi University in the early seventies, in Buddhist studies. Frech web page and links to some texts drafted in English: www.reseau-terra.eu/auteur22.html Two latest books in French: -Les citoyens manquants, 2015: http://al-dante.org/nouveautes/ -L’éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi, 2014: http://www.klincksieck.com/livre/?GCOI=22520100070010 A book in English online: -A Politics of Philosophy / A Politics of Reason (in 6 chapters), 2009: http://radaivekovicunblogfr.unblog.fr/2009/10/30/a-politics-ofphilosophy-a-presentation-for-publishers Some papers in English: -“The Politics of philosophy,” http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/fr/articles/113 -“On permanent translations,” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0606/ivekovic/en -“Translation and national sovereignty. The fragility and bias of theory,” Translation, n°4, 2014: http://translation.fusp.it/issues/issue-4 MADHU JAIN BENOIT Madhu Benoit is Professor of British Civilization/History of ideas at Stendhal-Grenoble 3 University, where she teaches history and translation. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Shelley, Prophet of Non-violence’ analyses the political aspect of the poet’s work. Her fields of research are Romanticism

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and post-colonial studies, with a focus on India. Among her recent works are a book on the life and writings of Sir William Jones: Sir William Jones et la representation de l’Inde (2011); and several articles including “Translating Classics, Cultures” in Muse India, (Hyderabad Literary Festival 2012) and “Transparent Peaks – Shelley’s Imperialism” in Transparence romantique (2014), Presses universitaires de Limoges. AHMED MULLA Ahmed MULLA had been a Research Associate at the Université de La Réunion (France). He is now a certified English teacher and a member of the Société d’Activités et de Recherches sur le monde Indien (SARI). He defended his doctoral thesis based on the theme of identity conflicts in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction in February 2012. His research interests include the different concepts of heritage, culture and identity in diasporic contexts, most particularly in the works of Caribbean and American authors of Indian origin. http://oracle-reunion.pagesperso-orange.fr/amulla.html MICHEL NAUMANN Prof. Emeritus Michel Naumann, from Cergy University, is a specialist in African literature and history of ideas in India. He has worked in France (Universities of Metz, Tours, Paris12 and Cergy) and Africa (Congo, Cameroun, Universities of Niamey and Kano) and published works on the History of the Commonwealth, M.N. Roy, British political life and decolonization and African literature. He was among the founders of SARI and for some time its President. JIDKA DE PRÉVAL Jidka de Préval is a Ph.D. student at the Research Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual (IRCAV), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 and a member of the Research Group on Indian Cinematic, Visual and Audio Media: Les Cinémas Indiens - IRCAV and co-founder of the association Kinétraces (www.kinetraces.fr) of which she is the treasurer. Her thesis, which she started in November 2012 under the joint guidance of Laurent Veray and Teresa Falcon, is entitled “RK Films & Studios (India), History, Creation and Circulation of Aesthetic Forms (1948-1988).” Recent publications include: “The mysteries of the negative of a Bengali film in France,” “Bioscope India” (in progress), and “Raj Kapoor and Filmfare: Complicity or Mutual Dependence? A Case Study in Indian Press” in Kinétraces, Issue no. 1, “Aag (Fire), an aesthetic manifesto?” in Gerflint Synégies Inde (in progress), and “The role of Indian cinema in the

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promotion of a “secular space” in Secularism and in Education, African and Asian Perspectives, ed. Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Ludmila Volna, L’Harmattan, 2013. CAROLINE TRECH Caroline Trech is a holder of a Ph.D. in English and a qualified Assistant Professor of English. She wrote her doctoral thesis on “British Identity in British-Asian films, 1997-2007.” She is currently teaching English, British civilization and cinema at the University of Rouen. Caroline Trech taught and studied in Universities in France, U.S.A and England such as: ULCO, Paris X, University of Keele, University of Charlotte in North Carolina and the University of Tampa in Florida. She is also the Secretary of SARI (since 2013). The main areas of her research interests are: British civilization, the South-Asian diaspora, British cinema, British-Asian and Indian cinemas. https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00914627/file/TRECH.pdf LUDMILA VOLNÁ Ludmila Volná teaches courses on Indian writing in English at Charles University, Prague. Her research interests include the Indian novel in English, Indian culture and civilization, and also Czech culture. She has two (co-)edited volumes to her credit, Children of Midnight:Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Pencraft International 2012) and Education et Sécularisme: Perspectives africaines et asiatiques (L’Harmattan Paris 2013), as well as a number of papers published in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals, such as Archiv Orientální (Praha), CLCWeb (Purdue University Press), or Editions A3 (Paris). Ludmila Volná has also presented her results in a number of invited lectures and conference papers in different countries of Europe, Asia and America. She conducts her research at IMAGER Université Paris XII, at ERIAC Université de Rouen and at SARI (Paris), and is a member of several academic associations, i.e. IACLALS (Delhi), where she is also a representative for non-Indian memberships. She is also active on editorial and advisory boards of academic journals. http://ualk.ff.cuni.cz/staff/ludmila-volna http://imager.u-pec.fr/membres/enseignants-chercheurs/volna-ludmila-473519.kjsp http://eriac.univ-rouen.fr/author/ludmila-volna/

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CELIA WALLHEAD Celia Wallhead holds a BA in Spanish and French from the University of Birmingham and Ph.Ds in Spanish and English from the Universities of London and Granada respectively. She taught Spanish at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. She worked at the British Council in Granada, Spain, then, since 1990, she has taught English language and literature at the University of Granada. She has written and edited books on themes related to Spain, such as the Spanish Civil War or Washington Irving, and also books and articles on several postmodern and postcolonial writers, specialising in A.S. Byatt, Thomas Pynchon, and Salman Rushdie.

ABSTRACTS

R. AZHAGARASAN: “The Rupture Within: Manimekalai’s Polemics with Buddhism.” The present revival of classical Tamil studies has opened new possibilities of reading and understanding classical Tamil poetry and poetics. Such readings on the ‘classical’, taken up from a cultural perspective, seem to offer fresh insights into the issues of contemporary society as well. This article attempts a reading of the Tamil twin epics – Cilapathikaram and Manimekalai – (roughly belong to the period between 3rd and 5th centuries) and tries to understand the heritage and ruptures in Tamil society and culture. The article raises the question regarding why the Dravidian movement in the 20th century appropriated the Cilapathikaram and totally neglected Manimekalai. But, the movement of the depressed class (Dalits) extensively used the Manimekalai to reclaim a Buddhist past and construct a Tamil Buddhism. The article tries to argue that a close reading into the themes, language and form of the twin epics in the light of the developments mentioned took place in the fields of archeology, epigraphy and iconography. It seems to provide an answer to the question raised in the article on three possible grounds: 1. By historicizing the language of the epics; 2. By locating their relation to classical poetics and 3. By resituating their religious culture within the history of the Tamil region. Such a reading may help us see the possible relation between the contemporary and the classical, mediated through the history of conflicts and contestations among religious communities. Belkacem BELMEKKI: “Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s New Approach to the Muslim-Christian Relationship: A Rupture with Old Practices?” The sense of hopelessness and destitution into which the Muslims of India plunged in the wake of the happenings of 1857 convinced Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the nineteenth-century Muslim leader, that the only panacea for this predicament lay in a normalization of relations between his coreligionists and the Christian rulers, namely the British. This made him come up with a fresh orientation whereby he exhorted the members of his

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community to discard their past misgivings about and negative attitude towards Christians and, instead, befriend them. In the view of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, cohabitation between Christians and Muslims is possible, as Islam is nearer to Christianity than any other religion in the world given the common theological roots they share. Therefore, the aim of this article is to examine Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s new approach to Muslim-Christian relationships in the context of nineteenth-century British India. Shruti DAS: “Ruptured History and the Politics of Language in Myanmar.” My article focuses on Myanmar, which is a nation built upon a patchwork of diverse ethnic cultures. Once the diversity is taken into account and self-consciousness generated among the people, the ruptured nature of history becomes constructive and contributes to an integrated national history. My article attempts to study the literary history of Myanmar and the critical position that English as a medium of literature has come to acquire in the face of anticolonial linguistic antagonism and cultural revival in Myanmar. Maria-Sabina DRAGA ALEXANDRU: “Community Ruptures: Individual Refashionings of Postcolonial Migration in Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You.” This article sets off from the observation that after the 1990s, when postcolonialism became part of the academic canon, there have been tendencies in the postcolonial discourse and literatures to shift the emphasis from rewriting group history to illustrating it in the lives of individuals who are part of the respective group. Concepts such as Avtar Brah’s “technologies of autobiographics”, prompting a focus on personal experience as a more accurate lens for diasporic life, Stephen Frosh’s ‘postmodern states of mind’ and their relation to identity crisis in situations of dislocation, and Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory as a bridge and filter between personal and group experiences, have become more and more relevant to an increasingly visible body of contemporary Indian writing capitalising on the individual. I try to analyse this shift of emphasis in Hanif Kureishi’s 2008 novel Something to Tell You and argue that, through the talk therapy trope, the novel negotiates the individual experiences of a group of four friends (Jamal, Valentin, Wolf and Ajita), of various European and non-European ethnic backgrounds, against the migrant groups to which they belong. In a London which has itself become liminal (both European and nonEuropean at the same time), the protagonist, Jamal, a psychotherapist of

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Indian origin, reimagines his own trajectory of migrant integration through a long process of analysis of self and other, which leads to an understanding of dislocation and relocation as deeply individual, personal processes. Geetha GANAPATHY-DORÉ: “Family, Geography and Ideology in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Low Land.” In a sober style and at a slow pace, the celebrated Indo-American author Jhumpa Lahiri studies the Communist movement of the 1960s in Bengal and diasporic Indian lives in America through the story of two inseparable brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, in her second novel (2013) which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. While the impulsive Udayan gets increasingly drawn into the Naxalite cause, the rational Subhash wins a place on a Ph.D. programme at an American university and moves to Rhode Island. Connecting their separated destinies is Gauri, Udayan’s pregnant wife, whom Subhash feels obliged to marry and take to the US, when his brother meets a violent death at the hands of the police. Gauri’s post-marriage emancipation in the US parallels that of India after independence. She studies philosophy and becomes a fully-fledged academic in California, abandoning her daughter Bela to the sole care of her stepfather. When after decades Gauri accidentally meets her daughter at her ex-husband’s house, Bela rejects her and introduces her mother as her aunt to her own daughter Meghna. Aging Gauri returns to Calcutta to detach herself from the hyperindividualistic turn that her life has taken in the postcommunist era, acknowledge the existence of her daughter and wait for a family reunion to occur. Subhash takes a trip to Ireland to grasp the devastating effect of the family trauma on his life. The article explores the impact of the geography of Bengal on the complexity of the characters, the notions of filiation and affiliation with regard to family, ideology and nationality, the shock of death and the joy of rebirth of identity that marriage and migration mean for women, and finally the mediating potential of grandchildren to repair the adult’s ruptured bonds with one’s self and others. Evelyne HANQUART-TURNER: “‘Who shall inherit Bengal?’ A Reading of Anuradha Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing.” This study starts with a parallel from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and considers the question of inheritance and rupture through the part played by houses in Anuradha Roy’s novel. My title “Who shall inherit Bengal?” is an echo of Wilfred Stone’s question “Who shall inherit England?” which he uses when discussing Howards End.

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Tina HARPIN: “Shameful Legacy: Rape, Incest and Parricide in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at night (1996) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2005), or how to surmount a deadly heritage?” The Trinidad-born writer and filmmaker Shani Mootoo and the South African novelist Achmat Dangor depict tormented beings struggling with the question of identity in their works. Indeed, their heroes are history’s “bastards”: born of exile and mixing, they are particularly haunted by the spectre of the colonial past that changed the concepts of filiation and affiliation, tradition and modernity. Their relationship with India is complicated by a history of suffering and deprivation, ruptures and things unsaid. The key figures in Bitter Fruit (2005) and Cereus Blooms at night (1996), Michael and Ali Mala Ramchandin are descendants and thus pose exemplarily the problem of “legacy” in community spaces that can be characterized as hybrid. In the post-apartheid South Africa, Michael is looking for an identity, but the young man in the prime of his life ends as a parricide and as someone ready to get involved in terrorist action. In the imaginary island of Lantanacamara, Mala is a woman whose painful testimony is taken by Tyler, a being himself on the margins of society because of his homosexuality. This article examines how the protagonists of these two novels overcome, in their own way, a deadly legacy, emphasizing how Dangor and Mootoo appropriate the reasons of rape, incest, and parricide to subtly reflect on the concepts of heritage, parentage, and identity. Rada IVEKOVIû: “Heritage and Ruptures - A Fine Balance Difficult to Obtain.” Heritage and rupture may appear to oppose each other. This article argues for their complementarity. Various languages/cultures and temperaments have dealt diversely with their relationship. Their rapport is like that between memory and forgetting or between continuity and discontinuity. Their relation revolves around and creates/crosses borders. Immunization is their technique. Immunization is a protocol for hammering identities and inequalities. It can revert against oneself (autoimmunity), while it was to protect from the other. It is all degrees, proportion and perspective. Extreme immunization is suicidal (because murderous), yet immunity is also vital, in a balance impossible to theorize. It is also a matter of epistemology and of cognitive politics. The article argues that a disjunctive pattern between the two has been making its way. It became particularly visible since the “end” of the Cold War. The article tests some such models regarding Asia since 1989. According to François Jullien, China rather cultivates complementarity between the two. Indian

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culture too, with the interesting partial exception of Buddhism. As far as we can tell, African approaches favour continuity between… discontinuity and continuity. Different cultural tempers will be scrutinized from a philosophical point of view. Madhu JAIN BENOIT: “The Legacy of the Hastings Circle: Heritage or Rupture?” On 12th August 1765, the Mughal Emperor appointed the East India Company his Diwan for the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, thus transforming the Company’s role from Merchant to Sovereign and changing the political and cultural profile of India forever. How did the new rulers view their acquisition? The Company tacitly acknowledged its new responsibilities in the choice of the first governor-general, Warren Hastings, an intellectual, rather than a trader or soldier. This article proposes to explore the heritage of the ‘Hastings era.’ There can be no doubt that the syncretic vision of the Hastings era played a vital role in breaking down cultural paradigms established in Neo-classical Europe. The various artists and men of letters who were the members of The Asiatic Society of Bengal in the 1780s did not hesitate to claim that Indian literature, architecture and art were on par with ancient Greece, a claim which both astonished and fascinated European intellectuals. In this article, I assess the long-term legacy of the ‘Hastings Circle.’ I consider this important, as over the centuries, their vision of India has weighed heavily on the way Europe sees India, and, perhaps, more importantly, on the way India sees herself. This is partly because their work belongs to the formative period of the Raj, a period which was to create the administrative structures which survived, little modified, until the end of the colonial period, thus deeply influencing contemporary India. I first underscore the achievements of the Hastings circle, which established India’s claim to her ancient cultural heritage and then investigate the darker side of their legacy, in an attempt to understand how India got caught in a cultural time warp, or ‘rupture’ because of the colonial constructs built at the time. Ahmed MULLA: “Transcending the Dual Heritage of Exile in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction: The Imperious Desire for a Chosen Realm.” Jhumpa Lahiri’s fictional corpus comprises characters that move from India to settle in the Western world, and the latter’s offspring who are brought up in the mixed and conflicting heritage thus created. Though this kind of situation tends to become commonplace in the globalized world,

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these youngsters find themselves in a quandary regarding their actual identities. Associated from their early age with activities and rituals they disown, and sometimes with journeys to the ancestral land, they develop a reticence towards their parents’ culture. Though they are inclined towards being assimilated into the American mainstream society to which they are convinced they naturally belong due to their birth in its midst, their Indian parents and the heritage they personify and persistently want to transmit, represent, however, a hindrance to their complete assimilation. Conversely, India’s remoteness from their everyday environment seems to make its influence irrelevant and inappropriate. Nevertheless, these characters learn that, whether they accept it or not, they are inevitably identified as members of the “Indian” community, a community that is an evidence for other Americans who witness its existence, and which is, after all, a creation, a legacy, of Indian immigration. As a consequence, some of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Indo-American protagonists of the second generation find it necessary to move away from this uncomfortable and disturbing heritage. Implicitly dismissing theories about the empowering nature of dual heritages, they decide to create, or affiliate themselves to, a completely different “tradition,” by immersing themselves in another cultural realm. My article evaluates the differences that exist between an individual’s attitudes towards his inherited identity and his attitudes towards universal heritage, and examines whether it is possible to radically transcend one’s personal heritage. Jitka de PRÉVAL: “Heritage and Ruptures: The hero’s identity negotiations in the cinematic adaptations of Devdas.” Devdas, the hero of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (1917)’s novel, continues to inspire filmmakers of popular cinema and fascinate the public in India. Since the first adaptation in 1928 to the most recent, that tormented character has been seeking his place in the Indian society of his time. Although indecisive and inappropriate, depending on and subject to social conventions, from one adaptation to another, he gradually frees himself from the weight of colonial legacy to the point of rupture. Based on four symbolic adaptations (1935: Barua, 1955: Bimal Roy, 2002 S. L. Bhansali, 2009 A. Kashyap), this article will interrogate key sequences in the narrative to highlight the character’s relationship with his circle and identify the reasons for it. Between the version shot under British domination and one made in globalized India, cinema continues to

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question the myth of Devdas as if it were an essential component of Indian identity. Caroline TRECH: “Heritage or Rupture in Two British Asian Films: East is East and West is West.” British-Asian films are testimonies of South Asian memory, and at the same time they are detached from it. The protagonists are faced with the dilemma of dual identity, South Asian and British. Indeed, young people born in Britain to Indian parents retain a link with the culture of their parents but live indeed as British. In most British-Asian films, young characters have to make a choice, to focus on either their South Asian or their British identity. This choice inevitably announces a break with the forsaken identity. These films could represent a way of creating a link with Indian identity and cultural heritage, but they are also very British. My article analyzes the phenomenon of inheritance and identity disruption in several British-Asian movies including East is East and its sequel West is West, which has the distinction of staging an interesting turnaround. Ludmila VOLNÁ: “Cooperation of Opposites: The Home and the Foreign in R. K. Narayan’s Novels.” The fiction of R. K. Narayan, one of the so-called Founding Fathers of Indian writing in English, is best known for the imaginary town called Malgudi, read by Meenakshi Mukherjee as a metonymy of India. When Narayan starts writing in the 1930s and Malgudi and its inhabitants have been coping for several decades with the impact of colonization. The foreign forces subvert the established order, and the integrity of both the place and its characters is challenged. ‘Home’ is conceived rather as a quest for identity that harks back to belonging in terms of community, culture and a related mindset. Belonging in the geographical sense is used as a convenient tool in this configuration. While dealing with four of Narayan’s novels, the article tries to look at how this quest is represented by the interaction of opposing phenomena, and particularly focus on the ways in which this apparent conflict is resolved in the end: the Indian character of the place and the individuals is transformed, but not compromised. Celia WALLHEAD: “Three Generations of Migrancy in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss: the focus on material things.” In The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Kiran Desai has depicted three generations of characters who all struggle with their identity as a central focus of their well-being. These major characters are uprooted, by choice

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or by necessity, and find the space they inhabit, their material surroundings, the people with whom they interact and their daily work, tasks or routines are all less rather than more familiar. Some of them live in the past and their memory plays a significant role in their sense of who they are. Henry James spoke of the solidity of specification or the evocation of the concrete, what A.S. Byatt interprets as the “thinginess of things,” in an attempt to explain the impact of the specific in interpretation by the reader of unfamiliar settings and contexts. In this article, a study will be made of the material things employed by Kiran Desai in her creation of contexts of migration. The first generation is that of the embittered judge, his humiliation upon his return from England to India, and his unharmonious relation with his wife focussing upon a powder puff. The second generation, that of his daughter, who becomes Mrs Mistry upon marrying an astronaut, is ironically literally crushed beneath a bus in Moscow carrying “thirty indomitable ladies from the provinces” (27) bearing crates of babushka nesting dolls for sale. The third generation involves the daughter of Mrs Mistry, the judge’s granddaughter, also Biju, the cook’s son, an illegal immigrant in New York, who sends his father letters that are illegible because in the rainy season the ink is washed out. The theme of communication, or lack thereof, and the theme of identity, are contemplated in these symbolic objects. Finally, an application of Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” (2001) will help us understand better in what way things in their “thingness”–some objects come to be things endowed with qualities that allow them to have a special relationship with their owner or user–play a far more meaningful role than we would have at first thought in real life, and also in the invented worlds of fiction in characterisation but also in narrative strategy.

NOTICES BIOGRAPHIQUES DES AUTEURS

R. AZHAGARASAN R. Azhagarasan est titulaire d’un doctorat en littérature comparée (Le folklore tamoul et anglais) et enseigne au département d’anglais de l’Université de Madras. Il a publié des articles sur les questions de politique culturelle dans des revues nationales et internationales, tant en tamoul qu’en anglais. Il a également travaillé sur les traductions tamoules de Alice au pays des merveilles pour la célébration du 150e anniversaire du roman, Alice. Il a traduit (du Tamil en anglais) une collection des écrits critiques d’un militant dalit, Ravikumar sous le titre Venomous Touch (Un toucher empoisonné), publié chez Samya, Calcutta en 2009. Il a codirigé avec Ravikumar The Oxford Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing chez Oxford University Press, New Delhi en 2012. Il a traduit (de l’anglais en tamoul) la brève introduction sur le poststructuralisme écrite par Catherine Belsey pour les presses universitaires d’Oxford. Cette traduction fut publiée par les Éditions Adayalam en 2009. R. Azhagarasan a compilé une anthologie sur le concept de ‘Bhakti’ en tamoul. BELKACEM BELMEKKI Belkacem Belmekki est professeur en civilisation britannique et du Commonwealth à l’Université d’Oran. Ses travaux de recherche se concentrent sur la communauté musulmane en Inde britannique au 19ème siècle. Actuellement, il dirige le Laboratoire de Langues, Littérature et Civilisation/Histoire en Afrique, qui est un partenaire de la SARI. CORNELIUS CROWLEY Cornelius Crowley est Professeur d'études britanniques à l'Université Paris Nanterre (France) dont il a dirigé le Centre de Recherches Anglophones. Ses recherches les plus récentes se focalisent sur la question de l'euroscepticisme britannique par rapport à la politique postimpériale de l'anglosphère britannique. SHRUTI DAS Shruti Das est Maîtresse de Conférences au Département d’anglais postLicence, Université de Berhampur Orissa, en Inde. C’est une poétesse dont les créations ont été publiées au niveau national et international, une

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critique littéraire réputée et conférencière, bilingue - en anglais et dans sa langue maternelle Odia. Elle a participé à de nombreux séminaires nationaux et internationaux sur les compétences de la littérature et de la communication en anglais, en Inde et à l’étranger. Elle a des fonctions importantes dans des conseils consultatifs et de rédaction de diverses revues littéraires indiennes et internationales. Elle est rédactrice en chef de Literary Oracle, une revue à comité de lecture. Elle a écrit trois livres, i.e., From Margin to the Centre: A Toni Morrison Reader (2009), Contemporary Communicative English (2e édition publiée en 2015) et A Daughter Speaks (2013, son premier recueil des poèmes. Elle a été publiée dans des anthologies telles que The Scaling Heights de l’Inde, The Inspired Heart 2 & Inspired Heart 3 du Canada, Syndic Literary Journal, Young Men’s Perspective des États-Unis, Life as a Human online Journal pour n’en nommer que quelques-unes. Beaucoup de ses poèmes ont été traduits en cinghalais et ont été appréciés au Sri Lanka. Ses poèmes couvrent divers domaines de la culture contemporaine et insistent sur la nécessité de l’existence d’une fraternité mondiale cosmopolite tout en honorant la beauté des cultures autochtones. Son premier recueil de poèmes a été inclus dans les repères bibliographiques du Journal of Commonwealth Literature en 2014 aux côtés de maîtres de la littérature du Commonwealth contemporaine. Son deuxième recueil de poésie Lidless Eyes sera publié sous peu par Partridge Inde, une maison d’édition liée à Penguin Random House. Elle s’intéresse aux questions sociales, aime voyager et rêver. Elle adore les animaux. Son CV est disponible sur www.buodisha.edu.in. MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU Maria Sabina Draga Alexandru est Maîtresse de conférences en anglais à l’Université de Bucarest, Roumanie. Elle a publié de nombreux articles sur les littératures contemporaines en anglais, principalement la littérature des femmes, des études de cours et le postcolonialisme, un livre intitulé Conditia postmoderna: spre o estetica un identitatii culturale (La Condition postmoderne: Vers une esthétique des identités culturelles, Bucarest: Université de Bucarest Press, 2003) et a codirigé un recueil d’essais intitulé Women’s Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (vol I sur la réécriture de l’histoire et vol II sur le corps et ses représentations, Bucarest, Université de Bucarest Press, 2005 et 2006). Elle vient d’achever son deuxième doctorat portant sur la fiction contemporaine indienne en anglais à l’Université d’East Anglia, Norwich, Royaume-Uni. Elle étudie actuellement la zone d’intersection entre les littératures postcoloniales de la diaspora et des femmes de l’époque post-communiste

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et elle va bientôt commencer à diriger un troisième volume de la collection Women’s voices (dont le titre provisoire est « Women in Performance »). GEETHA GANAPATHY-DORÉ Geetha Ganapathy-Doré est Maîtresse de conférences habilitée à diriger des recherches à la Faculté de droit, sciences politiques et sociales, Université de Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité. Elle est l’auteur de The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English (2011). Elle a dirigé et codirigé plusieurs ouvrages parmi lesquels On the Move, The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in English (2012) et Images de la décolonisation (2013). Ses recherches récentes tournent autour des relations entre l’Inde de l’UE, les questions des droits humains, le développement durable et le cinéma postcolonial. Elle a traduit quelques nouvelles et des poèmes du tamoul en français. Auparavant responsable des comptes rendus de livres pour la revue Postcolonial Text, elle siège actuellement au comité éditorial d’Atlantis, la revue de l’Association espagnole d’études angloaméricaines. Elle est l’actuelle présidente de la SARI. http://www.reseauterra.eu/auteur234.html EVELYNE HANQUART-TURNER Evelyne HANQUART-Turner est professeur émérite d’anglais à l’Université de Paris-Est Créteil et membre du Darwin College. Elle a étudié et enseigné à la Sorbonne et à Cambridge avant son élection à une chaire à l’Université de Paris-Est Créteil où elle a fondé et dirigé l’imageur Research Institute (EA 3958). Elle a publié de nombreux ouvrages en français et en anglais sur EM Forster, Rudyard Kipling, le Raj britannique, et des écrivains indiens contemporains comme Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Nair, Shashi Tharoor et Amitav Ghosh. Elle est l’auteur de La Voix anglophone du roman indien. De l’Empire à la diaspora (L’Harmattan, 2013) et travaille actuellement sur les traductions de nouvelles indiennes en français et un livre sur la corruption, la violence et le terrorisme au 21e siècle dans la fiction indoanglaise. Courriel: [email protected] TINA HARPIN Agrégée de lettres modernes, ancienne élève de l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Tina Harpin est Maître de Conférences en littérature comparée à l’Université de Guyane. Sa thèse de doctorat porte sur les écritures fictionnelles de l’inceste et de la race aux États-Unis et en l’Afrique du sud aux XXème et XXIème siècles. Sa recherche porte sur la question du racisme et les rapports problématiques existant entre la

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famille, la communauté, et la nation dans la littérature américaine, africaine et antillaise, francophone et anglophone. Elle a écrit plusieurs articles et recensions et a contribué à de récents ouvrages collectifs tel les Écritures du corps – Nouvelles perspectives, chez Classiques Garnier. Elle a participé en outre à l’écriture de notices pour le Dictionnaire universel des femmes créatrices, et a co-dirigé, au sein du Collectif Write Back, l’ouvrage Postcolonial Studies : modes d’emploi, publié aux PUL en 2013. RADA IVEKOVIû Rada Ivekoviü, philosophe, écrivaine féministe, est née à Zagreb, Yougoslavie, en 1945. Directrice de programme au Collège international de philosophie, Paris (2004-2010), elle enseigna à différentes universités en Yougoslavie, aux États-Unis, en Inde, en France et ailleurs, en particulier au Département de philosophie de l’Université de Paris-8 (Saint-Denis) et, précédemment, à l’Université de Zagreb. Elle eut son doctorat à l’Université de Delhi au début des années soixante-dix, en études bouddhistes. Page personnelle : www.reseau-terra.eu/auteur22.html ; Les deux derniers livres en français : -Les citoyens manquants, 2015: http://al-dante.org/nouveautes/; -L’éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi, 2014: http://www.klincksieck.com/livre/?GCOI=22520100070010 ; Livre en ligne en anglais : -A Politics of Philosophy/A Politics of Reason (en 6 chapitres), 2009: http://radaivekovicunblogfr.unblog.fr/2009/10/30/a-politics-ofphilosophy-a-presentation-for-publishers Quelques articles en plusieurs langues : -« Politiques de la philosophie à partir de la modernité », http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/fr/articles/113 ; -« La traduction permanente », http://eipcp.net/transversal/0606/ivekovic/fr ; -« Translation and national sovereignty. The fragility and bias of theory », Translation, N°4, 2014: http://translation.fusp.it/issues/issue-4

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MADHU JAIN BENOIT Madhu Benoit est professeur de Civilisation britannique/Histoire des idées à l’Université Stendhal de Grenoble 3 où elle enseigne la civilisation et la traduction. Sa thèse de doctorat, Shelley, prophète de la non-violence étudie l’aspect politique de l’œuvre de ce poète. Ses recherches portent sur le Romanticisme et sur la civilisation et la littérature postcoloniales, plus particulièrement sur l’Inde. Parmi ses publications récentes figurent un ouvrage sur la vie et les écrits de Sir William Jones : Sir William Jones et la représentation de l’Inde (2011); et plusieurs articles, dont « Translating Classics, Cultures », Muse India, (Hyderabad Literary Festival 2012) et « Transparent Peaks – Shelley’s Imperialism », Transparence romantique, (2014), Presses Universitaires de Limoges. AHMED MULLA Ahmed Mulla a été Attaché Temporaire d’Enseignement et de Recherche à l’Université de La Réunion (France) pendant deux ans. Il est actuellement professeur certifié d’anglais et membre de la Société d’Activités et de Recherches sur les mondes Indiens (SARI). Docteur ès lettres postcoloniales anglophones depuis février 2012, il est l’auteur d’une thèse consacrée à l’étude des conflits identitaires dans la fiction de Jhumpa Lahiri. Ses recherches portent sur les concepts d’héritage, de culture et d’identité en contextes diasporiques, et plus précisément sur la manière dont ceux-ci apparaissent dans les œuvres d’auteurs caribéens et américains d’origine indienne. http://oracle-reunion.pagesperso-orange.fr/amulla.html MICHEL NAUMANN Michel Naumann, Prof Émérite de l’Université de Cergy, est spécialiste de littérature africaine et d’histoire des idées en Inde. Il a enseigné en France (Universités de Metz, Tours, Paris12 et Cergy) et en Afrique (Congo, Cameroun, Universités de Niamey et Kano) et publié des ouvrages sur l’histoire du Commonwealth, M.N. Roy, la vie politique et la décolonisation britannique ainsi que sur la littérature africaine. Membre fondateur du SARI, il en a été Président. JIDKA DE PREVAL Doctorante à l’Institut de Recherches sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (IRCAV), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, membre du Groupe de recherche sur les formes filmiques plastiques et sonores indiennes : Les Cinémas Indiens – IRCAV et cofondatrice de l’association Kinétraces www.kinetraces.fr, dont elle est trésorière. Sa thèse, en cours depuis novembre 2012, est intitulée « R. K. Films & studios (Inde), histoire,

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création et circulation de formes esthétiques (1948-1988) », sous la codirection de Laurent Véray et de Térésa Faucon. Publications récentes (articles) : « Les mystères d’un négatif bengali en France », BioScope Inde (en cours), « Filmfare et Raj Kapoor : complicité ou dépendance mutuelle ? Étude de cas (presse indienne) » dans Kinétraces Editions n°1, « Aag (Le Feu), un manifeste esthétique? » dans Gerflint Synergies Inde (en cours), « Le rôle du cinéma indien dans la promotion d’un "espace sécularisé". » in Education et Sécularisme, Perspectives africaines et asiatiques, dir. Évelyne Hanquart-Turner, Ludmila Volna, L’Harmattan, 2013. CAROLINE TRECH Caroline TRECH est Docteur, qualifiée aux fonctions de Maitre de conférences. Sa thèse a porté sur « L’identité britannique dans les films British-Asians, 1997-2007 ». Elle est actuellement Prag d’anglais à l’université de Rouen où elle enseigne, l’anglais, la civilisation britannique et le cinéma. Caroline Trech a enseigné et étudié dans diverses universités telles que: l’ULCO, Paris X, l’université de Keele en Angleterre, l’université de Charlotte en Caroline du nord et l’université de Tampa en Floride. Elle est également secrétaire de la SARI depuis 2013. Ses domaines de recherche sont la civilisation britannique, la diaspora sud asiatique, le cinéma britannique, British-Asian et indien. https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00914627/file/TRECH.pdf LUDMILA VOLNÁ Ludmila Volná enseigne la littérature indienne d’expression anglaise à l’Université Charles à Prague. Sa recherche porte sur le roman indien de langue anglaise, sur la culture et la civilisation indiennes ainsi que sur la culture tchèque. Elle a codirigé deux volumes, Children of Midnight: Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Pencraft International 2012) et Éducation et Sécularisme : Perspectives africaines et asiatiques (L’Harmattan Paris 2013), et a publié de nombreux articles dans des anthologies et dans des journaux à comité de lecture, comme Archiv Orientální (Praha), CLCWeb (Purdue University Press), ou Editions A3 (Paris). Ludmila Volná a également présenté les résultats de sa recherche dans de nombreuses communications à titre d’invitée et dans des colloques internationaux dans différents pays d’Europe, d'Asie et d'Amérique. Elle fait partie des groupes de recherche IMAGER Université Paris XII et ERIAC Université de Rouen et SARI (Paris), et est membre de plusieurs associations scientifiques, comme par exemple IACLALS où elle est aussi représentante des membres étrangers. Elle fait partie de plusieurs comités d'édition de journaux académiques.

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http://ualk.ff.cuni.cz/staff/ludmila-volna http://imager.u-pec.fr/membres/enseignants-chercheurs/volna-ludmila-473519.kjsp http://eriac.univ-rouen.fr/author/ludmila-volna/ CELIA WALLHEAD Celia Wallhead a étudié à l’Université de Birmingham, où elle est licenciée en philologie française et hispanique. Elle est docteur de l’Université de Londres et de l’Université de Grenade, Espagne. Elle a enseigné l’espagnol à l’Université d’Auckland en Nouvelle Zélande et à l’Université d’Aberystwyth au Pays de Galles. Elle a travaillé au British Council à Grenade, et depuis 1990, elle enseigne l’anglais à l’Université de Grenade. Elle a écrit des livres et des articles sur des thèmes liés à l’Espagne, comme, par exemple, la guerre civile ou l’auteur américain Washington Irving. Elle se spécialise dans l'étude des auteurs contemporains postmodernes et postcoloniaux tels qu'A.S. Byatt, Thomas Pynchon et Salman Rushdie.

RESUMES EN FRANÇAIS DES ARTICLES

R. AZHAGARASAN : « La lecture du contemporain par le biais du classique. » La renaissance actuelle des études classiques tamoules a ouvert de nouvelles possibilités de lecture et de compréhension de la poésie et de la poétique du tamoul classique. Ces lectures du « classique » réalisées à partir d’un point de vue culturel semblent offrir de nouvelles perspectives sur les enjeux de la société contemporaine. Mon article tente une lecture de l’épopée tamoul double – Le Cilappatikaram et La Manimekalai – (à peu près entre le troisième et le cinquième siècles de notre ère) et essaie de comprendre son héritage et les ruptures de la société et de la culture tamoules. Il soulève la question concernant la raison pour laquelle le mouvement dravidien du XXe siècle s’est approprié Le Cilapatikaram et a totalement négligé La Manimekalai. Mais, le mouvement des castes opprimées (dalits) a largement utilisé La Manimekalai pour récupérer un passé bouddhiste et construire un bouddhisme tamoul. Mon article essaie de soutenir qu’une lecture attentive des thèmes, de la langue et de la forme de ces épopées jumelles à la lumière de l’évolution évoquée ci-dessous a eu lieu dans les domaines de l’archéologie, l’épigraphie et l’iconographie. Elle semble fournir une réponse à la question soulevée dans ma communication selon trois motifs plausibles : 1. Par l’historicisation la langue des épopées ; 2. En localisant leur relation poétique classique et 3. En replaçant leur culture religieuse dans l’histoire de la région du Tamil Nadu. Une telle lecture, comme mon article tente de démontrer, peut nous aider à voir la relation possible entre le contemporain et le classique, à travers la médiation de l’histoire des conflits et des contestations entre les communautés religieuses. Belkacem BELMEKKI : « L’approche de Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan des relations islamo-chrétiennes : rupture avec les anciennes pratiques ? » Le sentiment de désespoir et la misère dans lesquels les musulmans de l’Inde ont été plongés suite aux événements de 1857 a convaincu Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, le leader musulman du XIXe siècle, que la seule panacée pour cette situation réside dans la normalisation des relations entre ses co-religionnaires et les dirigeants chrétiens, à savoir les

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Britanniques. Ceci a donné une orientation nouvelle qu’il a apportée aux membres de sa communauté à qui il a demandé de laisser tomber leurs dernières réticences et leur attitude négative envers les chrétiens et, à la place, de se lier d’amitié avec eux. Pour Sayyid Ahmad Khan, la cohabitation entre chrétiens et musulmans était possible vu que l’Islam est plus proche du christianisme que de n’importe quelle autre religion dans le monde étant donné les racines théologiques communes qu’ils partagent. Par conséquent, le but de cet article est d’examiner la nouvelle approche de Sayyid Ahmad Khan des relations entre musulmans et chrétiens dans le contexte de l’Inde britannique du XIXe siècle. Shruti DAS : « L’Histoire fracturée et la politique linguistique du Myanmar » Mon article se concentre sur le Myanmar. Il s’agit d’une nation construite à partir de cultures ethniques et variées. Une fois que la diversité est prise en compte et une conscience de soi en tant que peuple instaurée, la nature disruptive de l’histoire devient constructive et contribue à la création d’une histoire nationale unique. Mon article essaie de comprendre l’histoire littéraire du Myanmar et la position critique qu’a acquise l’anglais comme moyen d’expression littéraire face à l’antagonisme linguistique anticolonial et à la resurgence de la culture nationale au Myanmar. Maria-Sabina DRAGA ALEXANDRU : « Ruptures communautaires : refontes individuelles de la migration postcoloniale dans Quelque chose à te dire de Hanif Kureishi. » Cet article est basée sur l’observation qu’après les années 1990, lorsque le postcolonialisme a été incorporé au canon académique, il y a eu des tendances dans les discours et littératures postcoloniaux à déplacer l’accent mis sur la réécriture de l’histoire du groupe à l’illustration de l’histoire à travers la vie des individus faisant partie du groupe. Des concepts tels que « les technologies des autobiographies » d’Avtar Brah, suscitant une focalisation sur l’expérience personnelle comme une optique plus précise sur la vie de la diaspora, « les états d’esprit postmodernes » de Stephen Frosh et leur relation avec la crise d’identité dans les situations de dislocation, et la théorie du traumatisme de Cathy Caruth comme un pont et comme un filtre entre les expériences personnelles et expériences de groupe, sont devenus de plus en plus pertinents pour le corpus de plus en plus visible de l’écriture indienne contemporaine qui tire un réel bénéfice de son intérêt pour l’individu. J’analyse ce changement de focalisation dans Quelque chose à te dire de Hanif Kureishi publié en 2008 et montrer qu’à travers le trope de

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thérapie par la parole, le roman négocie les expériences individuelles d’un groupe de quatre amis (Jamal, Valentin, Wolf et Ajita), de diverses origines ethniques — européennes et non-européennes, contre les groupes de migrants auxquels ils appartiennent. Dans un Londres qui est ellemême devenu liminal (à la fois européenne et non-européenne), le protagoniste, Jamal, un psychothérapeute d’origine indienne, réinvente sa propre trajectoire d’intégration en tant que migrant à travers un long processus d’analyse de soi et de l’autre, ce qui lui permet de comprendre la dislocation et la relocalisation comme des processus personnels profondément individuels. Geetha GANAPATHY-DORÉ : « Famille, géographie et idéologie dans La terre basse de Jhumpa Lahiri. » Dans un style sobre et avec une cadence lente, la célèbre auteure indoaméricaine Jhumpa Lahiri étudie le mouvement communiste des années 1960 au Bengale et la vie des Indiens de la diaspora en Amérique à travers l’histoire de deux frères inséparables Subhash et Udayan Mitra dans son deuxième roman qui a été présélectionné pour le prix Booker. Alors que l’impulsif Udayan se voit plus en plus attiré vers la cause naxalite, le raisonnable Subhash gagne une place dans un programme de doctorat dans une université américaine et se déplace à Rhode Island. Leurs destins séparés se croisent de nouveau lorsque Subhash se sent obligé d’épouser Gauri, la veuve enceinte de son frère après que ce dernier meurt victime d’une violence policière. L’émancipation, assez capricieuse, de Gauri après le mariage ressemble à celle de l’Inde après l’indépendance. Gauri accompagne Subhash aux États-Unis, étudie la philosophie et devient une universitaire à part entière en Californie, abandonnant sa fille Bela au seul soin de son beau-père. Lorsqu’après des décennies, Gauri rencontre par hasard sa fille à la maison de son ex-mari, Bela la rejette et présente sa mère comme sa tante à sa propre fille Meghna. Gauri revient à Calcutta pour prendre du recul vis-à-vis de la tournure hyperindividualiste qu’a prise sa vie dans l’ère postcommuniste, reconnaître l’existence de sa fille et attendre une réunion de famille qu’elle espère voir se produire. Subhash entreprend un voyage en Irlande pour saisir l’effet dévastateur de traumatisme familial sur sa vie. Mon article examine l’impact de la géographie du Bengale sur la complexité des personnages, les notions de filiation et d’affiliation par rapport à la famille, à l’idéologie et à la nationalité, le choc de la mort et la joie de la renaissance de l’identité que le mariage et la migration signifient pour les femmes et enfin le potentiel de médiation que possèdent les

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petits-enfants pour réparer les liens que les adultes ont rompus avec euxmêmes et avec d’autres. Évelyne HANQUART-TURNER : « "Qui héritera du Bengale ?" Une lecture d’Atlas of Impossible Longing d’Anuradha Roy. » Cette étude commence par un parallèle établi à partir de la fin de Howard de EM Forster, et considère la question de l’héritage et de la rupture du point de vue du rôle joué par les maisons dans le roman d’Anuradha Roy. Mon titre « Qui héritera du Bengale ? » est un écho de la question (« Qui héritera Angleterre ? ») posée par le critique Wilfred Stone lors de son analyse de Howards End. Tina HARPIN : « Legs honteux : viol, inceste et parricide dans Bitter Fruit d’Achmat Dangor et Cereus Blooms at night de Shani Mootoo. » L’écrivaine et cinéaste d’origine trinidadienne Shani Mootoo et le romancier sud-africain Achmat Dangor mettent en scène dans leurs œuvres des êtres tourmentés aux prises avec la question de l’identité. En effet, leurs héros sont des « bâtards » de l’Histoire : nés d’exils et de mélanges, ils sont particulièrement hantés par le spectre du passé colonial qui a bouleversé les notions de filiation et d’affiliation, de tradition et de modernité. Leur rapport à l’Inde est compliqué par une histoire de souffrances et de privations, de ruptures et de non-dits. Les personnages clés de Bitter Fruit (2005) et de Cereus Blooms at night (1996), Michael Ali et Mala Ramchandin, sont des descendants qui posent ainsi exemplairement le problème de « l’héritage » dans des espaces communautaires que l’on peut caractériser comme hybrides. Dans l’Afrique du Sud post-apartheid, Michael se cherche une identité, mais le jeune homme dans la fleur de l’âge finit parricide et prêt à l’action terroriste. Dans l’île imaginaire de Lantanacamara, Mala est une femme âgée dont le témoignage douloureux est recueilli par Tyler, un être luimême en marge de la société du fait de son homosexualité. Cet article examine dans ces deux romans comment les héros surmontent chacun à leur façon un héritage mortifère, en étudiant comment Dangor et Mootoo s’approprient les motifs du viol, de l’inceste et du parricide pour engager une réflexion subtile sur les notions d’héritage, de filiation et d’identité. Rada IVEKOVIû : « Héritage et Ruptures – Un équilibre final difficile à trouver. » L’héritage et la rupture peuvent apparaître comme des notions opposées. Cet article plaide pour leur complémentarité. Des différentes langues/cultures et des tempéraments ont traité diversement leur

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interrelation. Leur relation ressemble à celle entre la mémoire et l’oubli ou entre la continuité et la discontinuité. Leur relation tourne autour et crée/traverse les frontières. L’immunisation est leur technique. L’immunisation est un protocole pour déterminer les identités et les inégalités. Elle peut tourner contre elle-même (auto-immunité), alors qu’elle est censée protéger le sujet de l’autre. C’est une question de degré, de proportion et de perspective. L’immunisation extrême est suicidaire (parce que meurtrière), mais l’immunité est également essentielle, dans un équilibre impossible à théoriser. C’est aussi une question de l’épistémologie et de la politique cognitive. Mon article soutient qu’un modèle disjonctif entre les deux a été fait en chemin et qu’il est devenu particulièrement visible depuis la « fin » de la guerre froide. Ma communication teste certains de ces modèles par rapport à l’Asie depuis 1989. Selon François Jullien, la Chine cultive plutôt la complémentarité entre les deux. La culture indienne aussi, à l’exception partielle, intéressante, du bouddhisme. Pour autant que nous puissions en juger, les approches africaines de la continuité préfèrent la continuité… entre la discontinuité et la continuité. J’essaie d’examiner les différentes humeurs d’un point de vue philosophique. Madhu JAIN BENOIT : « L’héritage du Cercle Hastings : héritage ou rupture ? » Le 12 août 1765, l’empereur moghol nomme la Compagnie des Indes son Diwan pour les provinces du Bengale, Bihar et Orissa, transformant ainsi le rôle de la compagnie des marchands et changeant le profil politique et culturel de l’Inde pour toujours. Comment les nouveaux dirigeants voient-ils cela ? La compagnie a reconnu tacitement ses nouvelles responsabilités dans le choix du premier gouverneur général, Warren Hastings, un intellectuel, plutôt qu’un commerçant ou un soldat. Cet article propose de découvrir l’héritage de « l’époque Hastings ». Il ne fait aucun doute que la vision syncrétique de l’époque Hastings a joué un rôle essentiel dans l’effondrement des paradigmes culturels établis en Europe néo-classique. Les différents artistes et hommes de lettres qui étaient les membres de la Société asiatique du Bengale dans les années 1780 n’ont pas hésité à affirmer que la littérature indienne, l’architecture et l’art étaient à égalité avec la Grèce antique, une revendication qui à la fois étonnait et fascinait les intellectuels européens. Dans cet article, je discute de l’héritage à long terme du ‘Cercle Hastings’. Je considère cela important, puisque, au cours des siècles, leur vision de l’Inde a pesé lourdement sur la manière dont l’Europe voyait l’Inde, et, peut-être plus important encore, sur la façon dont l’Inde se voit.

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C’est en partie parce que leur travail appartient à la période formative du Raj, une période qui vit la création des structures administratives qui ont survécu, peu modifiées, jusqu’à la fin de la période coloniale, influençant ainsi profondément l’Inde contemporaine. Je commence par l’examen des travaux du Cercle Hastings, qui a établi la légitimité de l’Inde à revendiquer son patrimoine culturel antique. Je procède ensuite à l’analyse du côté sombre de leur héritage pour comprendre comment l’Inde a été prise dans une faille spatio-temporelle culturelle ou une ‘rupture’à cause des concepts coloniaux construits à l’époque. Ahmed MULLA : « Transcender la Dualité de l’Héritage de l’Exil dans la Fiction de Jhumpa Lahiri : L’impérieux désir de choisir son univers. » L’œuvre fictionnelle de Jhumpa Lahiri suit des personnages de migrants qui quittent l’Inde pour s’installer dans le monde occidental. Elle s’intéresse également à la progéniture de ces exilés qui est élevée dans l’héritage hybride et conflictuel ainsi créé. Si ce genre de situation a tendance à se généraliser dans un monde globalisé, il n’en demeure pas moins que ces jeunes personnes vivent leurs identités comme la source d’un véritable dilemme. Associés dès leur plus jeune âge à des activités et à des rituels qu’ils renient, et parfois même à des séjours au pays des ancêtres, ces jeunes développent une forme de méfiance à l’égard de la culture parentale. Cependant, leur désir d’assimilation à la société américaine, qui leur semble légitime puisqu’ils y sont nés, est contrecarré par leurs parents indiens et l’héritage que ces derniers représentent, héritage qu’ils s’acharnent à vouloir leur transmettre. À l’inverse, l’absence de l’Inde réelle de leur environnement quotidien réduit d’autant l’influence de celleci, qui semble alors injustifiée. Toutefois, ces individus apprennent à leurs dépens que, peu importe leur façon de se considérer, ils sont inévitablement perçus en tant qu’« Indiens ». Cette identité, qui est associée à une minorité devenue visible pour les Américains, est, du reste, un héritage de l’immigration indienne. Il en résulte que certains enfants de migrants décrits par Jhumpa Lahiri éprouvent de manière impérieuse la nécessité de s’éloigner de ce patrimoine qui leur inspire un indubitable malaise. Ce faisant, ils apportent un démenti implicite aux théories qui mettent en avant l’enrichissement supposé que procurent les héritages mixtes, et ils préfèrent mettre en place, ou plutôt s’attacher à une « tradition » entièrement différente, en s’immergeant dans un tout autre univers culturel.

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Il devient dès lors être intéressant d’évaluer les écarts qui peuvent exister entre, d’une part, les attitudes à l’égard de l’identité dont l’individu hérite et, d’autre part, celles qui prévalent face aux héritages universels. L’article examine s’il est envisageable de dépasser son héritage personnel de manière radicale. Jitka de PRÉVAL : « Héritage et ruptures : Négociations identitaires du héros dans les adaptations cinématographiques de Devdas. » Devdas, le héros du roman éponyme de Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (1917), continue d’inspirer les réalisateurs du cinéma populaire et de passionner le public en Inde. Depuis la première adaptation de 1928 jusqu’aux plus récentes, ce personnage tourmenté cherche sa place dans la société indienne de son temps. Bien qu’indécis et inadapté, tributaire et souffrant des conventions sociales, d’une adaptation à l’autre, il s’affranchit un peu plus du poids de l’héritage colonial jusqu’à la rupture. Partant de quatre adaptations emblématiques (1935 : Barua, 1955 : Bimal Roy, 2002 : S. L. Bhansali, 2009 : A. Kashyap), nous interrogerons des moments (séquences) clé de l’histoire pour mettre en évidence le rapport du personnage à son entourage et pour en dégager les raisons. Entre la version tournée sous la dépendance britannique et celle réalisée dans une Inde mondialisée, le cinéma continue d’interroger le mythe de Devdas comme s’il était un composant essentiel de l’identité indienne. Caroline TRECH : « Héritage ou rupture dans deux films BritishAsian : East is East et West is West. » Les films British-Asian. témoignent de la mémoire sud-asiatique mais en même temps s’en détachent. Les protagonistes doivent faire face au dilemme de la dualité identitaire, sud-asiatique et britannique. En effet, les jeunes gens nés en Grande-Bretagne de parents indiens par exemple, conservent un lien avec la culture de leurs parents mais vivent bel et bien comme des Britanniques. Dans la plupart des films British-Asian les jeunes personnages doivent faire un choix, celui de privilégier leur identité sud-asiatique ou britannique. Ce choix annonce forcément une rupture avec l’identité délaissée. Ces films peuvent être un moyen de créer un lien avec l’héritage identitaire et culturel indien mais ils sont également très britanniques. Cet article a pour but d’analyser ce phénomène d’héritage et de rupture identitaire dans plusieurs films British-Asian et notamment East is East et sa suite West is West qui a la particularité de mettre en scène un retournement de situation intéressant.

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Ludmila VOLNÁ : « La coopération des contraires : le chez-soi et l’étranger dans les romans de R.K. Narayan. » La fiction de R. K Narayan, un des pères dits fondateurs de l’écriture indienne en anglais, est surtout connue pour la ville imaginaire appelée Malgudi qu’il avait conçue et qui a été interprétée par Mukherjee comme une métonymie de l’Inde. Narayan commence à écrire dans les années 1930. Dans ses romans, Malgudi et ses habitants sont, depuis plusieurs décennies, confrontés à l’impact de la colonisation. Les forces étrangères subvertissent l’ordre établi, et l’intégrité de la place et de ses personnages est mise en cause. Le « chez-soi » est conçu plutôt comme une quête d’identité, un sentiment d’appartenance à la communauté, à la culture et à un état d’esprit commun, et l’appartenance dans le sens géographique du terme est utilisé comme un outil pratique. Tout en traitant de deux romans de Narayan, mon article se penche sur la façon dont cette quête est représentée par l’interaction des phénomènes opposés, et surtout sur la façon dont ce conflit apparent est résolu à la fin : le caractère indien de la place et des individus se transforment, mais ne sont pas compromis. Celia WALLHEAD : « Trois générations d’état migratoire dans La perte en héritage de Kiran Desai : une focalisation sur les choses matérielles. » Henry James a parlé de la solidité de la spécification ou de l’évocation des choses concrètes, ce qu’A.S. Byatt interprète comme la « choséité des choses » dans sa tentative d’expliquer l’impact du spécifique dans l’interprétation par le lecteur de paramètres inconnus et contextuels. Cet article étudiera les choses matérielles employées par Kiran Desai dans sa création des contextes de migration. La première génération est celle du juge aigri, son humiliation à son retour d’Angleterre en Inde et sa relation difficile avec sa femme qui passe son temps à se concentrer sur sa houppette. La deuxième génération, celle de sa fille qui devient Mme Mistry en épousant un astronaute, sera, par un destin ironique, littéralement écrasée sous un bus à Moscou transportant « trente dames indomptables venant des provinces » et portant des caisses de poupées gigognes babouchka à vendre. La troisième génération implique la fille de Mme Mistry, la petite-fille du juge et aussi Biju, le fils du cuisinier, un immigrant illégal à New York, qui envoie à son père des lettres illisibles parce que l’encre est délavée dans la saison des pluies. Ces objets symboliques servent à aborder le thème de la communication, ou l’absence de celle-ci et le thème de l’identité.

INDEX

A affiliation, xiii, 73, 80, 84, 89, 227, 228 Ambedkar, B.R., 111, 117 ancestral, 62, 64, 96, 107, 152, 230 appearances, 42, 170 archetype of chastity, 103 Aryan, 102, 105, 106, 135, 136, 155 Asia, 20, 66, 146, 151, 153, 154, 160, 161, 197, 204, 207, 209, 214, 215, 222, 228 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 116, 117 Barua, P.C., 165, 166, Baudrillard, Jean, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17 bikhuni, 103, 109, 113, 114 Brahmanical Hinduism, 133 British Asian, xvi, 20, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189, 194, 222, 231 British India, 139, 145, 146, 147, 189, 190, 217, 226 British-Asian Cinema, 183, 184 British-Asian Films, 183, 185, 194, 222 Buddhism, xiv, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112,113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 199, 202, 203, 225, 229

C capitalism, xiii, 7, 89, 212 Chennai Kalvi Sangam, 105 Christianity, 107, 129, 141, 142, 143, 147, 202, 226 cognitive politics, 198, 228 Cold War, 11, 80, 212, 228 collective re-memory, 22 colonial constructs, xiv, 124, 130, 134, 135, 229 commodized availability, xiii Commonwealth Literature, 154, 218 communism, 12, 77, 80 complementarity, 228 conservative nostalgia, xiii continuity, 61, 65, 86, 87, 103, 143, 198, 201, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209, 213, 228, 229 cooperation of opposites, 89, 98, 231 cosmopolitanism, 74, 75 creative destruction, xiii creolization, xvi, 54 crime, 35, 38, 39, 43, 80, 179 critical negotiators, xvi D Dalit, xiv, 102, 107, 108, 112, 217, 225

Index

250 Dangor, Achmat, xvi, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 55, 56, 57, 228 Derrida, Jacques, xiii, xiv, 73, 75, 85, 86, 116 Desai, Kiran, xv, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 17, 231, 232 Devdas, xv, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 18à, 181, 189, 194, 230, 231 dialogicity, 98 diaspora, 7, 17, 19, 20, 31, 34, 46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 68, 184, 194, 219, 222 dislocation, 19, 20, 22, 23, 226, 227 dispossess, 62, 79 dispossession, xiii Dravidian discourse, 102, 105, 116 dynasty, 60, 64, 157, 205 E ecology, 80, 82 education, 3, 39, 61, 69, 72, 92, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 161, 174, 178, 189, 22 Eliot, T.S., xiii, 59, 60, 66 empowerment, 210 enrichment, xiii England, 9, 28, 59, 63, 85, 134, 135, 153, 157, 159, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 222, 227, 232 ethnic cultures, 149, 226

F family, xv, 3, 6, 8, 9, 16, 30, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50,

51, 60, 61, 62, 64, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 94, 96, 105, 11, 114, 159, 161, 174, 175, 176, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193, 208, 219, 227 filiation, xiii, 62, 73, 80, 84, 227, 228 film adaptations, 165, 168, 189 foreign, xvi, 41, 43, 44, 52, 67, 72, 74, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 146, 155, 171, 208, 214, 231 Foucauldian, 112, 136, 209 Foucault, Michel, 116 framed narrative, 118 G gender as an operator, 197 geography, xv, 59, 65, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 91, 227 globalization, xv, 68, 150, 151, 158, 175, 209, 212 Great Revolt, 140, 145 H Hastings, Waren, 123, 127, 128, 129, 133, 136, 229 heirs, xiii, 12, 29, 63, 134 heirloom, 62, 65 heritage, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 8, 35, 36, 42, 44, 45, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 80, 82, 85, 91, 92, 96, 101, 123, 124, 136, 141, 184, 185, 187, 190, 191, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 221, 225, 228, 229, 230, 231 heterogeneity, 89, 149 Hindi film, 179

Index Hinduism, 90, 107, 108, 127, 132, 133, 135, 137, 143 history, xiii, xv, xvi, 19, 31, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 50, 52, 54, 55, 59, 61, 65, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 87, 89, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 126, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 166, 173, 181, 186, 194, 199, 203, 204, 208, 211, 219, 220, 221, 225, 226, 228 home, 5, 9, 11, 16, 20, 21, 23, 28, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 68, 73, 78, 81, 83, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 130, 159, 175, 197, 205, 206, 207, 213, 231 house building, 5, 9, 10, 12, 16, 28, 41, 49, 53, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 81, 85, 96, 103, 107, 193, 227 houses dynasty, 60 Howards End, xv, 59, 63, 64, 227 I identity, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 19, 21, 24, 29, 34, 35, 39, 40, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 62, 63, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 83, 84, 93, 94, 96, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 116, 134, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181, 184, 186, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 197, 210, 221n 222, 227, 228, 230, 231

251 identity crisis, 19, 24, 31, 93, 186, 188, 226 illegitimate, xiii, 40, 65 immunity, 214, 215, 228 incest, xvi, 33, 35, 36, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 219, 228 Indian tradition, 90, 128 Indianness, 59, 90, 96, 98, 175 Islam, 107, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 185, 202, 226 J jihad, 145, 146 Jones, William, 105, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134, 137, 221 K Kashyap, Anurag, 166 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 225 L Lahiri, Jhumpa, xv, 67, 68, 74, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 90, 221, 227, 229, 230 language, xiii, 3, 9, 26, 27, 68, 70, 71, 72, 93, 104, 106, 109, 119, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 200, 209, 210, 212, 218, 223, 225, 226 latent violence, 176 linguistic homogeneity, 150

Index

252 M Malgudi, xiv, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 231 Manavdharmashastra, 131, 132, 133 memory, 4, 22, 29, 31, 35, 37, 39, 52, 79, 84, 167, 178, 198, 228, 231, 232 migrant, 5, 8, 20, 25, 78, 81, 226, 227 migration, 21, 22, 23, 33, 50, 82, 83, 85, 226, 227, 232 Modernism, xiv, 9, 17 modernity, xiv, 9, 17, 19, 22, 31, 63, 89, 90, 91, 98, 99, 101, 142, 147, 197, 201, 203, 204, 206, 214, 215, 228 modernization, 90, 141, 147, 160 Mootoo, Shani, xvi, 33, 35, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 228 multicultural, xv, 5, 20, 28, 74, 151, 190 multiculturalism, 5 mummification of India, 132 Muslim-Christian Relationship, 139, 225, 226 Mutation, 74, 82, 170 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 167, 174, 180, 181 Narayan, R.K., xiv, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 98, 99, 231 national history, 149, 150, 151, 161, 226 nationality, 150, 151, 154, 227 nationhood, 150, 160 Naxalite, 77, 78, 79, 80, 86, 227

Nehruvism, 80 O Orientalism, xiv, 105, 119, 123, 124, 128, 136, 137 P Pakistan, 140, 141, 143, 144 147, 154, 184 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 211 parabaiks, 157 parricide, xvi, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55 partition of Bengal, 77 pastness of the past, xiii People of the Book, 143, 144 political ruptures, 150 postcolonial London, 23, 28 postcolonial novel, 86 postmemory, 22 presence, xiii Prophet Mohammed, 142, 145 psychogenealogy, 80 Pundit Iyothee Thass, 101, 104, 107, 109, 111 Q quest for identity, 40, 62, 152, 231 Quran, 140, 143, 144, 145 R Raj, 60, 124, 130, 132, 134, 137, 143, 219, 229 rape, xvi, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 51, 56, 228 resistance, xvi, 6, 7, 20, 70, 151, 157, 208 Richmann, Paula, 110

Index Roy, Bimal, 165, 166, 168, 172, 173, 174, 181, 230 ruling elite, 155 rupture, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 11, 35, 36, 44, 45, 62, 63, 101, 113, 116, 123, 124, 139, 150, 160, 184, 185, 192, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 225, 227, 228, 229, 231 S single language policy, 160 South Africa, 33, 34, 36, 40, 43, 45, 50, 56, 219, 228 Space, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 17, 48, 57, 70, 91, 197 space, xiv, xv, 6, 7, 21, 28, 45, 46, 53, 54, 63, 70, 81, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 116, 124, 129, 130, 175, 177, 179, 184, 191, 193, 205, 206, 207, 208, 222, 232 Sramanism, 133

253 symbolic objects, 232 T talk therapy, 20, 25, 27, 226 Tamil Buddhism, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116, 117, 225 technologies of autobiographics, 19, 21, 226 time warp, xiv, 124, 130, 134, 136, 229 tradition and modernity, xiv, 206, 228 transmission, xv, xvi, 33, 34, 38, 39, 46, 50, 55, 69, 70, 74, 85 trauma, 19, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 52, 83, 227 Trinidad, 33, 34, 46, 47, 52, 228 U unfamiliar, 109, 232 unwilling encounters, xvi, 55