Writing Imagined Diasporas : South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity [1 ed.] 9781443810173, 9781847183422

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Writing Imagined Diasporas

Writing Imagined Diasporas South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity

by

Joel Kuortti

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity, by Joel Kuortti This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Joel Kuortti

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 1-84718-342-5; ISBN 13: 9781847183422

I dedicate this book to the memory of my father

Taisto Kuortti (1936–2007) for always encouraging me to write

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Part I: Imagined Diasporic Identities in North America Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 Introduction: Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Problematic Diasporic Identity in the Writings of Jhumpa Lahiri Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37 Embodied Evidence: Rei Shimura as a Gendered Cross-cultural Detective Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 55 Over the Black Water: Silenced Stories of Diaspora in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 75 Shuffling the Cultural Matrices: Cultural Contacts in Kirin Narayan’s Novel Love, Stars and All That Part II: Different Diasporas, Transnational Connections Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 97 Challenging Gendered Violence in South Asian Diasporic Fiction Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 113 Surviving America: Robbie Clipper Sethi’s The Bride Wore Red and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons

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Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 127 Experiences of Return to India in Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk, Amulya Malladi’s The Mango Season and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan’s Motherland: The Other Side of My Heart Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 147 Critique of “Multiculturalism” in Salman Rushdie’s and Bharati Mukherjee’s Diasporic Narratives Bibliography............................................................................................ 167 Index of Names ....................................................................................... 191

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The history of this book is longer than is represented in the actual text. It began with my research on the “Rushdie affair” in the late 1980s. For this link, I am indebted especially to my MA tutor Dr. Nicholas Royle and my late Ph.D. supervisor Professor Ralph Norrman, as well as to my colleague Dr. David Robertson, who all encouraged me to pursue with my interest, against all the odds. I would also like to thank Professor Uma Parameswaran from the University of Winnipeg for her contribution in examining my Ph.D. thesis. More recently, I have worked on this book under the auspices of the Academy of Finland in our project “Reconstructing ‘America’: Racial, Gendered and Diasporic Identities” (project number 205780). I would like to thank especially Professor Jopi Nyman, who as the head of the project—in a full-headed manner—has both materially, critically, socially, and mentally enabled me to bring this book into completion. Additional funding has been provided by the Ella and Georg Ehrnroot Foundation, for which I am duly grateful. Several other people have been helpful in completing this work. Particular thanks go to Jenni Valjento for a very thoughtful reading of the whole manuscript in its final stages, and for her many resourceful insights. My further collegial compliments go to John A. Stotesbury, Roy Goldblatt, Jasbir Jain, Tabish Khair, Lotta Strandberg, Rajeshwar Mittapalli, T. Vinoda, Antonia Navarro-Tejero, Hanna Reinikainen, Kaisa Ilmonen, Tuomas Huttunen, Saara Jäntti, and Anu Hirsiaho, who have all in their various capacities helped me in many ways. Special thanks go also to Ramabai Espinet, Kirin Narayan, Saumya Balsari, Shashi Deshpande, and Manjula Padmanabhan, who have given their comments in one way or another, and who have made the work so much more fun for me to do. Finally, to my wife Dr. Anne Mäntynen, I extend my deepest gratitude for sustaining my motivation. The responsibility of the work, alas, rests, as always, with the author. Dhanyiavad. Tamara krutagntha. Valarey nanhi. Vandanegalu. Romba Nandri. Shukria. Gracias. Thank you. Kiitos. The chapters of the book have grown from various contexts. I would like to acknowledge the following earlier versions, with warm thanks to the respective editors and organizers of the given sources:

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Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: A paper at the 2007 MESEA Symposium, University of Joensuu, 15–16 June, 2007. Chapter 2: In Reconstructing Hybridity. Edited by Jopi Nyman and Joel Kuortti. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Chapter 3: A paper at the 2004 ASNEL Conference, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 19–23 May, 2004. Chapter 4: In Finnish in Avain 2.2 (2005). Chapter 5: In The Atlantic Literary Review 7.2 (2006). Chapter 6: A paper at the FINSSE3 Conference, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 18–20 August, 2005. Chapter 7: In Close Encounters of an Other Kind: New Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and American Studies. Edited by Roy Goldblatt, Jopi Nyman and John A. Stotesbury. Studies in Literature and Culture, 13. Joensuu: University of Joensuu, 2005. Chapter 8: In The Expatriate Indian Writing in English, vol. 1. Edited by T. Vinoda and P. Shailaja. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2006. Chapter 9: A paper at the “Pluralism and Equality” Conference, Helsinki, 18–22 May, 2005.

PART I: IMAGINED DIASPORIC IDENTITIES IN NORTH AMERICA

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: WRITING IMAGINED DIASPORAS: SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN RESHAPING NORTH AMERICAN IDENTITY

Imagined Diasporas It seems right that I should have been here always, that I should understand without words their longing for the ways they chose to leave behind when they chose America. Their shame for that longing, like the bitter-slight aftertaste in the mouth when one has chewed amlaki to freshen the breath. […] I Tilo architect of the immigrant dream. —Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices (1997)1

Diaspora is a loaded term that brings to mind various contested ideas and images. It can be a positive site for the affirmation of an identity, or, conversely, a negative site of fears of losing that identity. Diaspora is also a popular term in current research as it captures various phenomena that are prevalent in the numerous discourses devoted to current transnational globalization: borders, migration, “illegal” immigration, repatriation, exile, refugees, assimilation, multiculturalism, hybridity. Whether the term succeeds efficiently in this capturing is still under debate, but for the purposes of my analyses it remains a very constructive tool and a fitting metaphor for these discourses. Diaspora signals an engagement with a matrix of diversity: of cultures, languages, histories, people, places, times. In this book I look into the ways in which diasporic Indian literature handles these issues. The discussion here is, therefore, explicitly a literary one, although my analyses are informed by a variety of sociological, statistical and historical analyses of diaspora. In its transformational quality, diaspora is typically a site of hybridity which questions fixed identities based on essentialisms. 1

Bannerjee Divakaruni, Mistress, 4–5 and 28.

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Being an amalgamation of diverse cultural materials, backgrounds, and identities, it nevertheless differs from other types of heterogeneity, implying at the same time a markedly asymmetrical relationship between the different elements of a given fusion.2 In my particular analyses I employ the idea of “imagined diasporas.” This, in turn, is an application of Benedict Anderson’s term “imagined communities,”3 which he developed in the early 1980s to describe the way in which nations come into existence through imaginative efforts. I argue that in the context of diaspora there is a parallel imaginative construction of collective identity in the making, for “identity, instead of being seen as fixed, becomes a dynamic construction that adjusts continually to the changes experienced within and surrounding the self.”4 Specifically in the context of Caribbean diaspora, Stuart Hall talks about “imaginative rediscovery” of “Caribbeanness.”5 Furthermore, Hall explicitly connects this imaginative effort with the concept of hybridity: The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.6

While in their transnational formation diasporic communities extend particular nationally confined boundaries, in their actual life they are deeply embedded in particular contexts. From this ambiguous situatedness arise both the strengths and weaknesses of the theory and everyday practice of diaspora. The usefulness of the term “imagined diasporas” has been demonstrated previously by Pnina Werbner in her book Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims, in which she studies the public performance of Pakistani transnational identity politics. In her articles, written over many years, she approaches the issue from the points of view of “diasporic public sphere,” polarization of culture in the Rushdie affair, and migrants’ expressions of creativity in popular culture.7 Whereas 2

See Kuortti and Nyman, Reconstructing, 2. Anderson, Imagined, 5–7. 4 Singh et al., “Introduction,” 17. 5 Hall, ”Cultural,” 393. 6 Hall, ”Cultural,” 401–2. 7 Werbner, Imagined, 17–23. 3

Introduction

5

Werbner’s approach is sociological and focussed on a particular diasporic community, that of Manchester Muslims (although some of the articles deal with larger issues), my starting point is literary and I analyse a wider network of overlapping communities, not one particular group of people. In my analysis, the two concepts—of the process of imagining and of the formation of diasporic communities—are analogous. As Anderson reminds us, the imaginary dimension of community should not, however, be confused with imaginary or fallacious, for there is no community that is not “imagined.”8 That a given diaspora comes to be seen as a community is the result of such a process of imagining, at the same time creating new marginalities, hybridities and dependencies. Thus, the characters in the books I analyse, experience multiple marginalizations, hyphenizations and demands for allegiance. As I argue in this book, this constructive imagining also occurs in fiction. Taking notice of Avtar Brah’s cautionary note against uncritically conflating theory with writing,9 I construe literature as an influential element in the construction of theory and the world. For example, in conferences on post-colonial literatures, it has always been most rewarding to hear and talk with writers of those literatures. The same goes for diaspora. Diaspora does not emerge as a mere sociological fact but it becomes what it is because it is said to be what it is. It is on such expressions of diasporic identity in the North American context, then, that this study focuses. The central issue is the post-colonial discourse in relation to the positions of South Asian women as they emerge in writings by mainly women writers. The discourses about North American identity will be examined textually and theoretically from the perspectives of gender and ethnicity, and my readings are informed by an awareness of feminist and post-colonial theories. International diaspora studies have developed significantly in recent times and, together with post-colonial theory, they have become a major new theoretical and methodological approach in the study of culture and literature. Of major interest in the field are questions pertaining to the interconnectedness of gender, class and race10 as well as the problematization of subjectivity and identity in (trans)nationalist frameworks. The colonial project was never, however, a one-way traffic even though it was and continues to be heavily unbalanced—whether we consider such groups as indigenous peoples, descendants of slaves and indentured labourers, refugees, or immigrants. There has always been, to 8

Anderson, Imagined, 6. Brah, Cartographies, 204. 10 See Wong, “Ethnicizing.” 9

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Chapter One

use a much-used phrase of Salman Rushdie’s, an empire writing back, meaning that the colonised have adopted, and are increasingly adopting subject positions to articulate their own agendas.11 This is the same kind of assertiveness that is present in Brah’s use of the term “homing desire,” simultaneously expressing a desire to construct a home in the new diasporic location and leaving the whole concept of “home” open to criticism.12 This process of a “homing diaspora” does not imply a nostalgic desire for “roots,” nor “is it the same as the desire for a ‘homeland’”; it is realized instead as a construction of “multi-locationality within and across territorial, cultural and psychic boundaries.”13 Similarly, Rosemary Marangoly George differentiates “home” from “home-country” and comments: “Fictionality is an intrinsic attribute of home.”14 In my study I begin with this idea of multi-locational diasporic identity. The title of this book reveals the main dimensions of the study: Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity. The following claims can be made. First and foremost, I argue that the diasporic South Asians are not merely assimilating to their host cultures but they are also actively reshaping them through their own, new voices bringing new definitions of identity. Secondly, to concentrate on women writers reflects the far-reaching social changes in the status of women that have taken place from the 1980s to 2000 in the South Asian context, and the study concentrates on diasporic South Asian women writers from the United States and Canada. The diasporic writers and their texts tackle with problems such as violence, adaptation and racism, and they are in constant dialogue—even if they did not want to be—with the culture(s) of both their “origin” and subsequent “adoption.” It follows, thus, that contextual aspects are central formative elements in the narratives of identity. What is more, as Brah observes, there has been a notable feminization of diaspora.15 This calls for an analysis of diasporic 11

Rushdie, “Empire,” 8. Brah, Cartographies, 193. Brah’s extensive use of quotation marks with words such as “home,” “nation,” or “minority” draws attention to their constructed nature, instead of any essential qualities. 13 Brah, Cartographies, 197. 14 R. George, Politics, 11; for an astute discussion of literary expressions of South Asian diasporic experiences in the British context, see Susheila Nasta’s Home Truths, which she concludes by commenting on “the vital role that the diasporic imagination has played in extending our readings of the narrative of modernity and in making visible the home truths of history” (Nasta, Home, 245; emphases original). 15 Brah, Cartographies, 179. 12

Introduction

7

literature in order to enable us to take into account the changes in diasporic identity. Thirdly, the concept of nation is constantly challenged in a diasporic context where people and identities are moving and mixing. Therefore it is essential to study the challenges that the writings of imagined diasporas pose to the “national” discourses in North America. Fourthly, the designation South Asian implies an imagined community, for there is no such political or social entity as such. Geographically South Asia comprises seven countries—Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka—but broader definitions also include Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Tibet. Largely due to statistical reasons and popular imagination, this extended term is regularly conflated with “India”: “Because Indian-Americans are the largest immigrant group from the region, ‘South Asian’ often risks becoming synonymous with ‘India.’”16 The diasporic texts that I am analyzing are, broadly speaking, Indian in their historical, cultural, and linguistic underpinnings. Indian diaspora is one of the major contemporary diasporas which also has a long history. It refers to the people who have migrated from territories that are currently within the borders of the Republic of India, and the descendants of these people. The estimated size of this diaspora is over twenty million people, including NRIs (non-resident Indians) and PIOs (Persons of Indian Origin with citizenship of some other country). Generally, however, in my analyses of the texts, I use the term “South Asian” on the one hand to indicate their status as diasporic texts—as separate from Indian Indian texts—and on the other to distinguish them from the American Indian (Amer-Indian) context. Furthermore, the designations South Asia and North America capture effectively the major asymmetrical discrepancy between the “Third” and “First” Worlds within the framework of post-colonial and transnational globalization.

From Scattering to Gathering “Well, who asked you to go? […] Did somebody tie your hands behind your back and say ‘Go-go to that Calgary North Pole place?'” —Anita Rau Badami, The Tamarind Mem (1996)17

The English word “diaspora” is derived directly from the Greek word įȚĮıʌȠȡȐ /diasporƗ/, meaning “a scattering.” It is composed of the 16

G. Grewal, “Indian-American,” 93; cf. I. Grewal, Transnational, 60–1 and 226n65. 17 Rau Badami, Tamarind, 2.

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Chapter One

preposition įȚĮ (/dia/ “through” or “between”) and the verb ıʌİȚȡȦ (/speirǀ/ “to sow” or “to scatter”). From the original particular reference to the scattering of (above all) Greek, Jewish, and Armenian people, diaspora has become to signify more metaphorical journeys of people from their initial homes to other places of dwelling and working. Here I do not attempt an overview of diaspora in its multiple forms but rather aim for a discussion of literature concerning the emergence of the Indian diaspora in Canada and the United States.18 As the term diaspora implies, it concerns people who are “scattered” away from their original homes.19 However, as Brah claims, while essential for “the notion of diaspora is the image of journey […] not every journey can be understood as diaspora.”20 What distinguishes diaspora from some other types of travel is its centripetal dimension. It does not only mean that people are dispersed in different places but that they congregate (again) in other places, forming new communities. Scattering, as Homi K. Bhabha notes, becomes a gathering: I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gathering of exiles and émigrés and refugees […]. Also the gathering of the people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status—the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man.21

In such gatherings, new allegiances are forged that supplant earlier commitments. New imagined communities arise that not simply substitute old ones but form a space in-between various identifications, a hybrid space accommodating often uneasily joining parts. In the words of Nikos Papastergiadis,

18

For a history and typology (i.e. “victim, labour, trade, imperial and cultural diasporas”) of diaspora, see Cohen, Global, x. 19 In effect, these are not necessarily singular journeys, as the movements of people may be secondary, tertiary, or even further removed from that alleged home. 20 Brah, Cartographies, 182. 21 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 291. The reference is to John Berger’s and Jean Mohr’s collaborative work A Seventh Man (1975). The title of the book alludes to the fact that at the time in Germany and Great Britain one out of seven manual workers was an immigrant.

Introduction

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identity is defined as hybrid, not only to suggest that origins, influences and interests are multiple, complex and contradictory, but also to stress that our sense of self in this world is always incomplete. Self-image is formed in, not prior to, the process of interaction with others.22

In order to see how “the process of interaction with others” in the South Asian diaspora in North America has taken place, it is relevant to look at how that diaspora came into being. It is not an arbitrary process but dependent on several factors that have created and helped to shape this particular imagined diaspora. In the following, I discuss a range of these formative issues, first in the context of the South Asian diaspora in general and finally in the specific context of South Asian diasporic writing.

South Asian Arrival in North America He went to the U.S.A. (that was what his father learnt to call it and taught the whole family to say—not America, which was what the ignorant neighbours called it, but, with a grand familiarity, ‘the U.S.A.’) […]. —Anita Desai, “A Devoted Son” (1978)23

For South Asians, the desirability of North America, especially the United States, as a destination for (temporary or permanent) emigration derives to a great extent from the illusory idea of it as a place where wealth is available to everybody. This aspect of the “American Dream” is persistent, and it was evoked in the title of a recent article in The Hindustan Times as “USA: Land of Opportunities” (30 May 2007).24 The idealized prospects have drawn increasing numbers of South Asians to the United States and Canada to study, to work, and to live. All in all, since the mid-1960s the structure of immigration into North America has changed, and the emphasis has shifted from Europe to Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.25 From the US and Canadian census data it is noticeable that the increase in the number of South Asians in North America has been extremely rapid and recent. In the overall history of the South Asian diaspora in North America we can distinguish three specific periods, or immigration waves, during which there was a more substantial number of immigrants coming in. Two of these took place prior to the 1960s and produced early 22

Papastergiadis, Turbulence, 14; emphasis added. Desai, “Devoted,” 71. 24 Cf. I. Grewal, Transnational, 4–5. 25 Pedersen and Landau, “America’s,” 1650. 23

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Chapter One

diasporic communities. According to Ryan Minato, South Asian immigration to the United States began in the 1790s, but in 1898 there were only “523 South Asians” living in the country; the first immigration wave in 1899–1913, then, “brought nearly 7,000 South Asians” to the United States.26 In Canada the development was similar, and by 1908 the number of South Asians was around 5,000.27 In both countries these early immigrants were mostly men, “Sikh farmers from the Punjab region.”28 In the United States, as a result of hostility toward immigrants in the interwar period many left, and by 1940 the number of South Asians decreased radically, with approximately 2,400 remaining. Attitudes to the Sikhs were also harsh in Canada, where racists “made their lives hell” and “succeeded in halting immigration from Asia by deploying popular prejudices and mobilizing white opinion against the newcomers.”29 After 1909 the immigration rules were tightened in Canada and it followed that “[b]etween 1909 and 1943 only 878 Asian Indians were allowed to enter.”30 The second immigration wave in the United States was after the World War II, when restrictions were reduced, and by “1965, approximately 12,000 South Asians lived in the U.S.”31 Canada, then, had 67,295 South Asian residents in 1971.32 Major demographic changes have been taking place as a result of the third and largest immigration wave. In the United States this wave came after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. There is a marked difference between this and the earlier immigration, to the extent that Gurleen Grewal comments that “those who came after 1965 do not have much connection to the early history of Indian immigration.”33 In Canada a similar wave occurred after the legislative reforms in 1962 and 1967. By 1990, the South Asian population in the United States had risen to 919,626, showing an astonishing 7,600 % increase.34 More recently, a 26

Minato, “South,” 1. McMahon, “Overview,” on-line. 28 Minato, “South,” 1. A particularly interesting section of these Sikhs were those (inappropriately named) “Mexican Hindus” who moved to California and married Mexicans because the immigration laws made such marriages profitable (see Leonard, “California’s,” 612–23). 29 Cohen, Global, 109. For more on the origins of the Sikh diaspora, see Cohen, Global, Chapter 5: “Diasporas and Their Homelands: Sikhs and Zionists,” esp. 105–15. 30 McMahon, “Overview,” on-line. 31 Minato, “South,” 4; see also McMahon, “Overview,” on-line. 32 Applied, “Peopling,” on-line. 33 G. Grewal, “Indian-American,” 97. 34 Minato, “South,” 4. 27

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large number of Indians have taken up the opportunity to study and work in US academia after the changes in the immigration laws in 1965 and the later demand for “highly specialized workers deemed to be in short supply among Americans.”35 Consequently, according to census data of 2000, approximately two million people of South Asian origin live in the United States—a growth rate of 106 % over the last decade.36 In Canada, there were 670,600 South Asians in 1996, and the 2001 census enumerated about 920,000 (917,100) South Asians.37 What these crude numbers represent, then, is a far-reaching process of transformation. The sheer numbers are outstanding. From small and relatively homogenous communities of Punjabi Sikhs, the South Asian population in North America has grown rapidly—practically in three decades—into a truly significant heterogeneous multicultural minority.

South Asian Diasporic Literature The settling of migrants just described has not been unproblematic. They have experienced prejudices, overt and covert racism, segregation, and discrimination. One example of the problems is the outburst of violence in New Jersey in 1987, when a group that named itself “Dotbusters” violated South Asian women who were wearing the traditional decorative bindi.38 In her poem “Indian Movie, New Jersey” Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni takes up these incidents and shows the disillusionment of the immigrants in face of such blatant racial violence: We do not speak of motel raids, canceled permits, stones thrown through glass windows, daughters and sons raped by Dotbusters. […] Here while the film-songs still echo in the corridors and restrooms, we can trust in movie truths: sacrifice, success, love and luck, the America that was supposed to be.39

It is exactly the polarity between such an “America that was supposed to be” and the factual, experienced America that South Asian diasporic 35

Kalita, Suburban, 16. South Asian, “Brown,” on-line. See also Shukla, India, 3. 37 Statistics Canada, “Canada’s,” on-line. 38 See Pedersen and Landau, “America’s,” 1666. 39 Banerjee Divakaruni, “Indian,” 1277; emphasis added. 36

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Chapter One

writing often portrays. This is its post-colonial predicament which carries residues of colonial mimicry and decolonizing resistance. This convergence has been defined by Rosemary Marangoly George as an “immigrant genre” which, “like the social phenomenon from which it takes its name, is born of a history of global colonialism and is therefore an undeniable part of postcolonialism and of decolonizing discourses.”40 While this engagement with the history of colonialism and postcolonialism does not enclose all diasporic writing, it is a very strong feature of it. In Samina Ali’s novel Madras on Rainy Days (2004), the main character Layla listens to her husband Sameer compare the US twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis to the Indian cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad: “Twin cities […]. You go from one city to another. Twins, like you.” “Like me?” “Yes, like you. You, the American, you, the Indian. Same face, two people. So where is your home?” […] “I was supposed to inhabit America without being inhabited by it—that was what my parents wanted.”41

Here the duality is expressed on the one hand as a feature of individual identity—“Same face, two people”—and on the other as a social contestation—“that was what my parents wanted.” In the field of literature, diasporic writing comes from the margins, entering the arenas that it is allowed to occupy. The liminal and marginal status of diasporic writers comes through, for example, in the terms that are used to describe this extremely heterogeneous group: expatriate, exile, diasporic, immigrant, migrant, hyphenated, dislocated, NRI.42 Until recently, the South Asian, and more specifically the Indian, constituency in North America has been relatively small, and they have remained marginalized both in America and within the Asian American diaspora.43 The obstacles are manifold, and Uma Parameswaran comments on them in the Canadian context by saying that,

40

R. George, “Traveling,” 278. Ali, Madras, 117–8; emphases added. 42 See Jain, “Introduction,” 11–4. The liminality of Indian diasporic writing should be differentiated from that of the “Babu” writers, i.e. Indian English writing, that has adopted alienation as a mental state (see Khair, Babu, 72–7). 43 See Shankar and Srikanth, “Introduction,” 1–22. 41

Introduction

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supported by neither the ethno-centric community nor the larger community, literary efforts of the Diaspora are stifled at birth while the publishers, of course, prefer the marketability of negative stereotypes.44

Despite all these difficulties, there have been some indications that South Asians are beginning to carve out a space of their own within the Asian America. This has been happening even in the literary field, where it is manifest in the inclusion of Indian authors in several anthologies of Asian American writing such as The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (1991), edited by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, and Margarita Donnelly, as well as Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts (1999), edited by Amy Ling. Even here, the title of Yellow Light alludes synechdocally to the characteristic of East Asia, the yellow skin colour, thus marking an exclusion. The underlying approach of questioning the preconditions of migration, assimilation, and homing is, however, shared, as can be seen in the following poem by the editor of Yellow Light, Amy Ling: What is Asian America? a place? a race? a frame of reference? a government-imposed expedient? a box to check on a form? It’s a dream in the heart Like Bulosan’s claim, a tug in the gut, a gleam of recognition: Asian ancestry American struggle.45

Yet the situation has changed during the past decade for South Asian diasporic writing. According to Ketu H. Katrak, “South Asian American writers in English are among the newest voices in a multiethnic Asian America.”46 To witness this emergence, there are now several anthologies of specifically South Asian American writing, such as Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora (1993), edited by the Women of South Asian Descent Collective, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map 44

U. Parameswaran, “Home,” 38. Ling, “What,” 1. “Bulosan’s claim” refers to the title of the Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan’s book America is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946). 46 Katrak, “South,” 192. 45

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North America (1996), edited by Sunaina Maira and Rajini Srikanth, and A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America (1998), edited by Shamita Das Dasgupta. Amidst all these changes and developments, the question of identification has been and remains a major issue in the debates about cultural identity among South Asian and Indian academics, intellectuals, and especially creative writers. Diasporic Indian writing in English is a genre that is constructed in various ways. While on the one hand it can be said to be a distinctive genre within the wider scene of post-colonial (transnational, cosmopolitan) discourse, it nevertheless needs to be remembered that it is not a monolithic, homogeneous genre but a complex, multifaceted field with a marked emphasis on intercultural connections. A few general questions arise every time that works of diasporic Indian English literature, or rather literatures, are discussed. First, there is the question of language itself. The status of Indian English literature is much debated and different positions can be adopted to it—from extreme overestimation to utter denigration as unauthentic. Here I will only acknowledge this debate and say that 1) Indian English literature has, nevertheless, become an influential part of Indian literature;47 and 2) one has to take into account its limitations; in all its variety, it is still not representative of all Indian literature, nor—more importantly—is it representative of all of India.48

Secondly, similar conditions apply in the case of diasporic writing, with an even more critical emphasis on the influence of its audience: to whom does a particular text seems to be addressed to? By the sheer accident of language, Indian English writing is easily taken as leaning to the “West.” This criticism is even more present in view of diasporic writing. As Jasbir Jain has commented, we need a contextualized understanding of diasporic writing, not only of diasporic discourse itself: Diasporic writing has a wide range and a fairly noticeable difference does exist between the writing being done in different parts of the world depending on the differences in the host culture. 49

47

Rushdie, “Introduction,” viii–xiv. Kuortti, Indian, x–xi. 49 Jain, “Towards,” 22; cf. Chaudhuri, “East,” 113–6. 48

Introduction

15

With these qualifications in mind, diasporic Indian English writing constitutes a fascinating and multifaceted field to read and to study. Such a contextualization is required even if we generalize between different Indian diasporas and also, as Ramabai Espinet has commented, “between parallel communities also doing the same kind of investigation.”50

The Structure of Writing Imagined Diasporas In the present book, diaspora is studied in specific contexts, instead of being applied universally. This is done by detailed textual analyses of contemporary works of fiction that address particularly significant themes of diaspora. Particular focus is on the Indian diaspora. Through its contextual focus, the present book provides insights into the specificities of the Indian diaspora in North America. The study concentrates on eleven contemporary women writers from the United States and Canada who write on (and mainly from) South Asian diasporic experiences. They are Ramabai Espinet, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amulya Malladi, Sujata Massey, Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Kirin Narayan, Anita Rau Badami, Robbie Clipper Sethi, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan. Furthermore, the last chapter provides also a comparative reading of Bharati Mukherjee and Salman Rushdie. The inclusion of a discussion of Rushdie’s work in a book on women’s writing is based on his position as one of the most notable Indian writers but even more on his way of taking up similar issues than the women writers. Thus, his works provide intriguing dimensions for comparison. All in all, there are dozens of writers to choose from, but the ones selected here are clearly ones who have taken up complex issues in their works, and their work has been critically assessed both in academic and non-academic contexts; similarly, as the field of Indian writing in North America is by definition transnational, the authors to be discussed range from India to the USA and Canada. The book is divided in two main parts. In the first part, “Imagined Diasporic Identities in North America,” I analyse specific contexts of the Indian diasporic writing. In the first, introductory chapter, I look at the more general questions pertaining to the status of Indian women writers in a diasporic framework. This topic has invited much interest in recent years through the problematization in post-colonial theory of singular identities. The analysis of the changes in the status of women in India, and the repercussions of these in the diasporic writing that my research 50

Espinet, “Ramabai,” 106.

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Chapter One

establishes, requires that special attention be paid to questions of gender in the history and theory of feminism from the post-colonial perspective. Although the main attention is on works of fiction and their reception, questions of diaspora are addressed also theoretically. Literature on this field has grown considerably during the past decade. Literary research of the diaspora is most often characterized by interdisciplinarity and unlike traditional literary studies it regularly verges on cultural studies. Thus the selection of theoretical sources is multidimensional. Chapter two discusses the problematics of diasporic identity in the writing of Jhumpa Lahiri. She describes fiction writing as an act of cultural translation, and in this chapter I look at the ways in which Lahiri engages with the issue of translation—if not non-translation—of identity in her writings. My main attention is on one of her stories, namely “This Blessed House” from her book Interpreter of Maladies (1999). It can be read as an interpretation of the meaning of hybridity in a post-colonial context. It underlines the centrality of cultural translation in the process of possessing and re-possessing the past and the present, both chronological and spatial, in a meaningful way. It also outlines a strategy of diasporic as well as gendered resistance towards existing colonial and patriarchal hierarchies in the post-colony through the effort of imagination In Chapter three, I look at diasporic detective fiction by Sujata Massey, a multiethnic writer of detective novels. She was born in the United Kingdom as a child of a German mother and Indian father, lives in the United States and writes predominantly about Japan. The main character in Massey’s seven detective novels is Rei Shimura who is herself similarly multiculturally conditioned although Rei has Japanese-American roots. The fluctuation between identities—social, transcultural, and personal—is also passionately engaged with gender aspects. All these affect the detective activities of this young amateur female sleuth. I look at the ways in which Massey’s novel The Salaryman’s Wife (1997) represents the (Japanese) “other” and reflect on Rei’s self, or multiple selves, in a postcolonial world, how far they go in explicating and exhausting the “other,” and what repercussions this may have. The questions of identity in a crosscultural context are examined from the perspectives of nationality and language, as well as of gender and sexuality. Special attention is paid to the embodied gendered cross-cultural identity that Rei’s character represents. I argue that in her contested diasporic space between cultures, Rei struggles with the problem of overcoming the restraints of singular identities. The focus of Chapter four is on the Caribbean experiences of diaspora. I discuss central questions of diaspora in Caribbean literature by a detailed

Introduction

17

analysis of a novel by a Trinidadian-Canadian of Indian background, namely Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge (2003). In her novel, Espinet writes about diasporic experiences, the travels of immigrants from India to Trinidad, from there to Canada, and back to Trinidad. On these travels, or from the stories about them, the main character of the novel, Mona Singh, learns about things that have always been silenced in her family. Espinet both as a writer and a scholar is a part of the recent postcolonial women’s writing and research in the sense that she attempts at bringing forth themes, especially on women’s status, that have previously been muted. In this way, the novel rewrites history, constructing a model that aims at being more respectful of differences, hybridity, heterogeneity and at avoiding simplistic binarisms and juxtapositions, challenging established categories and power structures. Chapter five is an analysis of Kirin Narayan’s Novel Love, Stars and All That (1994). I look at the representation of Eastern (Indian) and Western (US) cultures in a text by a diasporic Indian-American writer. In post-colonial criticism, it is often the cultural artefacts of the centre and their representation of the “other” that are analysed in view of critical theory to expose underlying hegemonic ideological presuppositions. It is interesting to know also what happens when the direction of articulation is reversed and texts from the margins and their representational strategies become the topic of analysis. By choosing a diasporic story about cultural contact and cultural difference I want to highlight the rhetorical strategies that are used to represent other cultures. The writer of the novel is also an established anthropologist and the novel plays—explicitly as well as implicitly—with cultural and intercultural representations. The questions analysed in the chapter are: How are these representations related to the multicultural, multiethnic realities of the United States? How do immigrant people negotiate their cultural space? I argue that South Asian American authors and scholars are carving out a space for representing previously largely invisible immigrant women. In Narayan’s novel, then, this is done also with an awareness of the risks concerning claims for cultural purity and authenticity. In the second part, “Different Diasporas, Transnational Connections,” I make comparisons between different settings of diaspora. By comparing two or three works that take up parallel issues, I bring out possible differences and similarities in discussions of various topics in diverse contexts. I begin these comparisons in Chapter six with an analysis of gendered violence in Uma Parameswaran’s novella The Sweet Smell of Mother’s Milk-Wet Bodice (2001) and Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge (2003). Both of these texts evoke a diasporic Hindu

18

Chapter One

setting where women are oppressed and suffer from domestic violence, but they also display differences that can be seen in the analysis of the representation of gendered violence in the texts. In this chapter, I look at the ways in which the two diasporic Indo-Canadian texts offer approaches which may act as antidotes and challenge prevailing attitudes, values and practices that generate and enforce gendered violence. I argue that in this, the stories of silenced and abused immigrant women may have an important role in the imagining of new possibilities. Chapter seven looks at the problematization of subjectivity and identity in a (trans)nationalist framework. The focus will be on Robbie Clipper Sethi’s novel The Bride Wore Red (1996) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s short story collection English Lessons (1996). Both of the writers write about identity from a particular cultural context, that of Punjabi Sikh community in contact with another culture, thus projecting another Indian identity against the predominant Hindu (or even Muslim) identity. Sethi does this as an outsider through portraying a relationship between an American woman and a Punjabi Sikh, reflecting on her own experiences. Baldwin, then, writes from within the Sikh community in Canada. What can be seen in the stories in the book is that previously silent and silenced women are beginning to come forward. They are increasingly taking subject positions from which they can articulate issues and agendas of their own choice. In Chapter eight, I discuss three novels—Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk (2000), Amulya Malladi’s The Mango Season (2003), and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan’s Motherland: The Other Side of My Heart (2001)—which in different ways discuss the experiences of NRIs in India. A recurring theme in diasporic Indian literature is representation of the experiences of the NRIs, Non-Resident Indians (and the PIOs—People of Indian Origin), in India. The diasporic travels of these people are by no means always final, and many of them travel and move back and forth. The starting point of my analysis is Avtar Brah’s concept diasporic space in which “the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native.”51 If immigrants are often under suspicion in their new locales, there is a parallel attitude towards them in the place of their “origin” as well. If the concept of “home” is problematic, or even haunting, in the diasporic situation, such sentiments are often strengthened during a stay “back home.” On the surface level the novels seem to be very similar. The most striking similarity is in depicting an extended South Indian highcaste family setting with multiple relations and difficulties especially in 51

Brah, Cartographies, 209; emphasis original.

Introduction

19

inter-generational communication. I analyse each of the novels separately and in conclusion, contemplate their general position. These three recent examples show how seemingly parallel diasporic situations can bring forth different imaginings of identification. The final Chapter nine is a discussion of the concept of “multiculturalism” in the Indian diasporic context. It has been used as a catch-phrase in popular and populist political and social management of cultural diversity. It is also a contested site of confrontation between liberal notions of cultural difference. In its political and social applications, multiculturalism has acquired meanings that render it susceptible for asymmetrical, unequal usage. Compartmentalizing recognition of cultural differences makes for example their aestheticization and commercial exploitation easier. In this chapter, I analyse the ways in which the discourse of plurality and equality has been misappropriated in neo-colonial contexts of Britain and the United States by considering Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989) and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). In these books, the values of multiculturalist politics are questioned in view of underlying social tensions, contradictions and conflicts. While both novels clearly vouch for pluralistic values and the necessity for intercultural equality, they also challenge the simplistic, condescending ways British and US societies have appropriated the “other” for their own purposes in the name of ‘multiculturalism’ or diversity. The novels imply a more sensitive understanding of the themes of plurality and equality. Finally, there is no telling what role the South Asian diasporic migrants may play in the continuing process of reshaping North American identity. What ever it may be, it is certain that the authors of South Asian diaspora are actively taking part in imagining new diasporic identities.

CHAPTER TWO PROBLEMATIC DIASPORIC IDENTITY IN THE WRITINGS OF JHUMPA LAHIRI

A Hybrid Author Some time after the publication to international acclaim of her collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999), the award-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about her experiences as a hybrid, diasporic being, as, variously, an American author, an Indian-American author, a British-born author, an Anglo-Indian author, an NRI (non-resident Indian), an ABCD (Americanborn confused desi),1 and a lost and found author, concluding that “each of those labels is accurate.”2 In this piece, she describes fiction-writing as an act of cultural translation and identity formation in a tongue-in-cheek Cartesian manner: “Translato ergo sum,” I translate, therefore I am. The Indian critic Harish Trivedi, in a direct response to Lahiri’s views, is very sceptical of such “abuse or, in theoretical euphemism, such catachrestic use, of the term translation,” and would rather see “instances of a kind of translation which does not involve two texts, or even one text, and certainly not more than one language” as “non-translation.”3 The two diametrically opposed views on “cultural translation” expressed in Lahiri’s and Trivedi’s comments characterize, by and large, the changes concerning conceptions of translating that have occurred over the past decade.4 Similar questions inform also much of the debate on postcolonial and diasporic subjectivity, especially on the theme of hybridity. In 1

In her own diasporic novel Born Confused (2002), Tanuja Desai Hidier records the full alphabetical designation assigned by the first generation migrants to the second generation as follows: “American Born Confused Desi Emigrated From Gujarat House In Jersey Keeping Lotsa Motels Named Omkarnath Patel Quickly Reaching Success Through Underhanded Vicious Ways Xenophobic Yet Zestful” (Desai Hidier, Born, 108). 2 Lahiri, “Jhumpa,” on-line. 3 Trivedi, “Translating,” on-line. 4 See Bassnett, Translation, 6.

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“Des Tours de Babel,” Jacques Derrida brings up the double bind of translation in his comment on “the necessary and impossible task of translation, its necessity as impossibility,” implying an inevitable alteration in translation.5 In Salman Rushdie’s Shame, then, the narrator takes this inevitable alteration in translation to the subjective, cultural level: I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion […] that something can also be gained.6

This aspect of “being borne across” is significantly close to the way Homi K. Bhabha uses the term translation metaphorically in a post-colonial world to signify “the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.”7 In this chapter, I look at the ways in which Lahiri engages with the issue of translation—if not non-translation—of identity in her writings. My main attention is focused on one of Lahiri’s stories, namely “This Blessed House,” from the Interpreter of Maladies, but for illustration I will also use other stories from the collection and her novel Namesake (2004). I do not try to claim a universal applicability for my reading as I agree with Avtar Brah on the importance of perceiving the diversity of diasporic experiences.8 Different diasporas have different histories, and within themselves they have multiple formations. Rather, I consider Lahiri’s text in its specific contextuality, keeping in mind the reservations concerning the determinability of a context, especially in the way Derrida has defined it: “[A] context is never absolutely determinable.”9

Translating Identity One of the more visible geographical contexts of diasporic South Asian women’s writing is the United States. There are an increasing number of new writers emerging from there, and many of them gain recognition.10 5

Derrida, “Tours,” 171; emphasis original. Rushdie, Shame, 29; emphasis original; see also Kuortti, Fictions, 132–3. 7 Bhabha, “Commitment,” 38; emphasis original. 8 Brah, Cartographies, 183–4. 9 Derrida, “Signature,” 310. 10 See Oh, Encyclopedia, and Kuortti, Indian. For a closer discussion of the term “recognition” in this context, see Rajan and Sharma, “Theorizing.” 6

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The most popular form of fictional expression among these writers is the novel, but even in the less circulated category of short stories, there have been successes, as the case of Lahiri attests.11 In many of the new literary arrivals, the thematics revolve around cultural identity, cultural hybridity, and cultural conflict. In this, the troubled link between India and the United States is of importance, as Mary Condé comments: Many collections of Indian women’s short stories in the nineteen-nineties confront a collision of cultures, and this is a preoccupation, increasingly with the collision of cultures of India and the United States.12

It is in such a context of collision of cultures that the stories in Lahiri’s collection are situated. In various ways, they engage in the translation of hybrid diasporic identity. The story “This Blessed House” opens with a portentous sentence: “They discovered the first one in a cupboard.”13 The performative act of discovering and its description as being the first one suggest a chain of findings that is potentially transformative. Although this discovery takes place in an ordinary context of a young newly-wed couple moving into a new house, and the discovery is in an everyday context—“a cupboard above the stove, beside an unopened bottle of malt vinegar” (IM 136)—the path of discovery has colonial resonances especially as it links with the socalled “discovery of America.” This is emphasized by the fact that the beginning of the story takes place close to “Columbus Day” in October 12 (see IM 144), a remembrance of the day on which Christoforo Columbo, or Christopher Columbus, reached the Americas in 1492. The couple in Lahiri’s story, Sanjeev and Tanima, nicknamed Twinkle, are US residents of Indian origin, who have been introduced to each other by their parents’ arrangement, and married in India in August. In their diasporic condition, they demonstrate hybrid identities that are in a state of constant negotiation. This negotiation goes on between the past and the present, India and the United States, even though there is no clear discontinuity between the two; Twinkle is a Californian by birth with no first-hand experience of India, while Sanjeev is a more recent migrant from India. When they had first met four months prior to their wedding, they found that they had in common “their adolescent but still persistent 11

See A. Kumar, “Introduction,” xvi–xvii. Condé, “Contemporary,” 200. 13 Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), 136; emphasis added. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by IM. The story in question was first published in Epoch 47.1 (1998): 8–23. 12

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fondness for Wodehouse novels, and their dislike for the sitar” (IM 143). This literary and musical connection (with colonial and counter-traditional undertones) between them is soon shown to be less than deep-seated. While Sanjeev lapses into the moods of “love and happiness” (IM 141) of Gustav Mahler’s “Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5 (C sharp minor, 4th movement), Twinkle playfully wields her cigarette, “waving it around Sanjeev’s head as if it were a conductor’s baton” (IM 139).14 Furthermore, as they prepare a house-warming party for Sanjeev’s colleagues, Twinkle comments ironically on the music that “if you want to impress people, I wouldn’t play this music. It’s putting me to sleep” (IM 140). It follows that eventually at the party it is Twinkle who plays “hectic jazz records” (IM 152) of her choice. In the relationship, then, there is not only a cultural difference but—from the point of view of traditional Indian conception of gender—also a reversal of the conventional gender roles: romance, care, beauty and girlishness are presented as male characteristics, whereas curiosity, raucousness, carelessness and assertiveness are seen as female qualities. The scene inventively underlines the differences between the couple by making, on the one hand, an intertextual gesture towards Luchino Visconti’s film “Death in Venice” (Morte a Venezia, 1971), in which Mahler’s music (particularly the adagietto) plays an important part and, on the other hand, to Indian ragas and Meera bhajans which Silvia Nakkach connects especially with the adagietto of Mahler’s fifth Symphony as they all demonstrate one of the nine navarasa’s of Indian aesthetic theory—the karuna rasa, the sentiment of pathos.15 Both Twinkle and Sanjeev are apparently drawn to “Western” culture—Twinkle more intuitively and innately, and Sanjeev more purposefully and studiously (mail-ordering Western classical music records systematically and listening to Johann Sebastian Bach, reading “liner notes so as to understand it properly” [IM 155]). Perhaps due to his more recent arrival, Sanjeev is, however, closer to Indian than Western culture, and the ironical representation of his eagerness to learn classical music indicates it is done more as a snobbish gesture than out of genuine interest. In addition, the earlier literary mention of P. G. Wodehouse demonstrates the shallowness of his reading. This is further emphasized by a reference to Twinkle’s subject of study, “an Irish poet Sanjeev had never heard of” (IM 145). The poet is not revealed, but at one point Twinkle is reading a book of Sonnets “in dark red letters” (IM 148). The scene takes 14 15

For the varying interpretations of Mahler, see Botstein, “Whose,” 1–54. Nakkach, “Introducing,” on-line.

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place in the bathroom, where Sanjeev goes, without knocking on the door, to tell the bathing Twinkle that he is going to remove a statue from the lawn. This is one of the items they find in the house, a statue of the Virgin. In the scene, it could function as an allusion to W. B. Yeats’s sonnet “Leda and the Swan,” which Edward W. Said describes as an instance of Yeats’s “greatest decolonizing works [that] concern the birth of violence, or the violent birth of change.”16 Her face covered in a blue beauty mask, Twinkle in the bath is like an avatar of the blue Lord Krishna.17 Whatever the relevance of the poetry allusion is, her attitude itself is a clear indication that she has no intention to “put on his knowledge with his power,” as she literally stands up against him, letting the book of sonnets drop into the bath water.18 When Twinkle and Sanjeev, after their wedding ceremony, finally move into their new house, they begin to find objects left behind by the previous owners. The first they find is “a white porcelain effigy of Christ” (IM 136). The title of the story, “This Blessed House,” already gives the story a religious tone, further emphasized by the religious artefact, and there is a marked intercultural and inter-religious line throughout the text.19 Although some commentators acknowledge that Lahiri’s stories “concern broader social issues,”20 it is emphatically the pressures of relationship that have gained most attention in criticism.21 As has been shown earlier, these pressures are present in the text, highlighted also through the different and even conflicting attitudes that Twinkle and Sanjeev take to the findings. After their first discovery, Sanjeev wants Twinkle to throw away both the vinegar that is found in a cupboard, and more empathetically, the statue: “And at the very least get rid of that idiotic statue” (IM 136). Twinkle is, however, reluctant to throw away either the vinegar—which she thinks could be used for cooking, although 16

Said, Culture, 284; see also Beyst, “Yeats’,” on-line; and Cullingford, “Pornography.” 17 Caleb Crain compares the blue-faced Twinkle to “the Madonna statuette that she is so taken with” (Crain, “Subcontinental,” on-line). 18 Yeats, “Leda,” 182, l.13. 19 One possible allusion of the story’s title is to Homer’s Ulysses where Penelope recounts Ulysses a dream about her suitors: “And this shall to my suitors be the prize./ He that most easily shall bend the bow,/ And through the axes all his arrow flies,/ Leaving this blessed house with him I’ll go” (Homer, Ulysses, Book XIX, ll.513–6). The format is used also in Islamic and Christian traditions. 20 Noor, “Interpreter,” 366. 21 See Brada-Williams, “Reading”; Kakutani, “Liking”; Rajeshwar, “Hybrid”; Bess, “Lahiri’s.”

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she does not know how—or the statue which “could be worth something. Who knows?” (IM 136). After examining the statue more closely, Twinkle supplements her initial utilitarian explanation with another, aesthetic one: “It’s pretty” (IM 137). Twinkle’s utilitarian moment is significant for it signals a possibility of change in basic approaches to life: while Sanjeev is systematic, cautious and meticulous (IM 137), Twinkle is quite disorganized and even careless with money (IM 141). But she is determined to have her way and is therefore ready to use even such “reasonable” means. Twinkle’s determination to save the statue is puzzling for Sanjeev and causes him to feel resentment: “We’re not Christians,” Sanjeev said. Lately he had begun noticing the need to state the obvious to Twinkle. […]. She shrugged. “No, we’re not Christians. We’re good little Hindus.” (IM 137; emphasis added)

While this nagging dialogue could, and has often been, seen as a sign of the tensions between the couple, I am, however, more inclined to see the dialogue—as well as the circumstances of discovery—in a wider context: that of post-colonial history and diasporic identity. When Twinkle scorns Sanjeev for inherent cultural purity by saying: “No, we’re not Christians. We’re good little Hindus,” she is at the same time resisting a confined, predetermined view of culture and herself. The ironic use of the exclusive and inclusive cultural markers of Christian and Hindu is an indication of Twinkle’s uninhibited, eclectic approach to identity. Ketu H. Katrak calls such a perception by the term “ethno-global,” “one that certainly transcends narrow nationalism, but that celebrates an ethnic heritage along with evoking an exemplary universalist humanism.”22 To realize that this eclectic perception is not an accidental diversion in Lahiri’s work one could consider the novel Namesake which also presents several instances of unrestrictive approach to culture and identity. At one point, for example, the central character Gogol Ganguli reflects on the identity of his wife Moushumi, who, he considers, had reinvented herself [in Paris], without misgivings, without guilt. He admires her, even resents her a little, for having moved to another country and made a separate life. He realizes that this is what their parents had done in America. What he, in all likelihood, will never do.23 22 23

Katrak, “Aesthetics,” 5. Lahiri, Namesake, 233.

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Gogol is, however, somewhat mistaken as he had been reinventing himself throughout his life, without even having to move to another country. The sheer accident of being born in the United States of Indian parents,24 the inescapable diasporic hybridity, is enough to set him on a continuous course of questioning identity.

Giving Meaning Twinkle’s intense interest in the things they find in the house gives meaning to her life, and for her, “[e]ach day is like a treasure hunt” (IM 141).25 It is interesting to see what the list of “treasures” Twinkle and Sanjeev find beside the statue of Christ consists of. The items are: a 3-D postcard of Saint Francis done in four colors (IM 137); a wooden cross key chain (IM 137); a framed paint-by-number of the three wise men, against a black velvet background (IM 137); a tile trivet depicting a blond, unbearded Jesus, delivering a sermon on a mountaintop (IM 137); a plastic snow-filled dome containing a miniature Nativity scene (IM 137); a larger-than-life-sized watercolour poster of Christ, weeping translucent tears the size of peanut shells and sporting a crown of thorns (IM 139); switch plates in the bedrooms […] decorated with scenes from the Bible (IM 141); and a dishtowel that had […] the Ten Commandments printed on it. (IM 144)

These items accumulate to form “a sizable collection of Christian paraphernalia” (IM 137), and they obtain a special place in the house, much to the regret of Sanjeev, who hates the things. The haunting presence of the objects is heightened as many of them are placed on the mantelpiece, while others are used in the kitchen. Sanjeev manages to get rid of only the switch plates by changing them for new ones, for which Twinkle complains about to her friend in California. 24

In the context of diasporic writing, autobiographical analysis is common and Lahiri’s own background has also often been discussed in relation to her fiction (see Rana, “Back,” 12; Sahu, “Nostalgic”). Mandira Sen makes an interesting autobiographical observation as she comments on the names of the author and the characters in the novel: “Interestingly, the author herself uses her daknam [intimate name], Jhumpa, as a bhalonam [public name]” (M. Sen, “Names,” 9). For biographical information on Lahiri, see Karim, “Jhumpa,” 205–10. 25 This seems to be an ironic version of the Easter egg hunt practiced especially in the Anglo-American context on the Christian festival of Easter.

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Twinkle’s accommodating attitude presents a threat to Sanjeev’s cultural identity. This is evident in his uncertainty about his wife, which intensifies with the presence of the newly found objects he regards as “nonsense” that the Realtor should come and take away (IM 138). The discoveries are most of all a mystery to Twinkle, who asks: “‘Do you think the previous owners were born-agains?’ […] ‘Or perhaps it is an attempt to convert people’” (IM 137–8). Sanjeev responds bitterly to Twinkle’s comment on the previous owners’ probable attempt at conversion: “Clearly the scheme has succeeded in your case” (IM 138). Obviously, Sanjeev is much mistaken in his concern, as Twinkle shows no signs of converting. She is not even very much aware of the religion in question, although she regards the previous residents as “[h]ighly devout people” (IM 141). In his reading of Lahiri’s story, the prolific US writer on Catholicism, Paul Elie, connects the items, the “Christian paraphernalia,” specifically to Catholicism and “the canonical images of modern Catholic kitsch.”26 He further relates the story to the changes in the period after the Vatican II Council in 1962–65, to the “browning” of America, and the new immigration.27 Elie sees in the “detached” way in which Lahiri’s two “good little Hindus” approach the sacred images of this culture, “now threatening, now bewildering, now kitschy, now a source of […] genuine curiosity,” as reminiscent of how, until recently, modern North American Catholics, as a marginal, largely immigrant community, may have seen their own religion.28 The connection between the histories of Catholics and new immigrants in the United States is in itself an intriguing one. For my purposes, however, it is more suggestive to read especially Twinkle’s curiosity about Christian images in post-colonial terms. Such a reading is not simply an ironic take on the kitschiness (or otherwise) of the objects in question. Rather, it concerns the textual representation as resistant to hegemonic formations. On the ethnic level, this would mean that the former position of subjugation and subalternity is reversed and the people who had previously been suppressed gain a position of autonomy if not superiority. Before going into a more detailed discussion of this, it needs to be noted here that it is not a question of a historically continuous colonial/postcolonial connection between the United States and India, for example, but 26

Elie, “Pilgrims,” on-line. The Vatican II Council was indeed important in promoting Pope John XXIII’s concern about the world’s poor people, leading eventually to the formation of controversial liberation theology (see Freire, Pedagogy, 109). 28 Elie, “Pilgrims,” on-line. 27

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a hegemonic hierarchy reworked symbolically in the neo-colonial context. The achieved position of autonomy or superiority is neither a political or economic position but, again, a symbolic one, although in their middle class positions Twinkle and Sanjeev are relatively affluent.

Reversal of Colonial Hierarchy Thus, Twinkle’s engagement with the Christian images found in their new house works its reversal of colonial hierarchy through several movements such as the five outlined here. Firstly, there is the appropriation: Twinkle takes the things they find as their own since they have bought the house; they belong to them; they are, therefore, their rightful possessions (and as her remonstration against Sanjeev trying to dispose of the Virgin statue shows, as much hers as his). Secondly, there is the re-presentation: Twinkle exhibits the items on the mantelpiece and elsewhere without bothering about their proper contextual character; they can do anything they please with their possessions which remain void symbols, hollowed out in a postmodern manner. Thirdly, there is the re-interpretation: Twinkle takes the discovery of the items as a sign of the house being “blessed”—“Face it. This house is blessed” (IM 144)—, and the idea of their disposal as “sacrilegious” (IM 138); the objects carry no inherent meaning and can be interpreted for example, as here, as markers of general sacredness (which is of rather an agnostic kind, as the items are not actually treated in a religious or pious manner). Correspondingly, the imperial colonialists appropriated, re-presented, and re-interpreted the colonized India, just like any other colonized cultures, from their own point of view, with their own agendas, and to their own ends. When the post-colonial subject is shown to operate within the same parameters, even if only marginally and symbolically, this action works towards giving the lie to the foundation of the colonial project. On top of this, in Twinkle’s case, there is fourthly also the feminist resistance to the controlled, rationalized, patriarchal structures represented by Sanjeev that penetrate pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial communities and societies. Here Twinkle emerges as the more powerful subject and Sanjeev is relegated into a more submissive role. In my reading, the new house, then, stands for the imagined diasporic location within the adopted (and adopting) culture. Here the diasporic location is understood in Brah’s terms as a diasporic space which “includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’,” and in which “the native is as much a diasporian as the

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diasporian is the native.”29 Thus, in Brah’s analysis, the diasporic cultural re-translation can be seen as a transformative process not only for the “diasporian” but also for the “native.” The newly acquired space is rendered anew, for themselves, the old neighbourhood, and Sanjeev’s “native” colleagues alike. That this reworking of colonial structures happens in such a diasporic location, then, reminds us of the interplay between the dispersion and new formation of neo-colonial forms of subjugation and post-colonial forms of resistance. The next passage illustrates the strategic character of resistance, which may be described as the fifth movement of reversal: Behind an overgrown forsythia bush was a plaster Virgin Mary as tall as their waists, with a blue painted hood draped over her head in the manner of an Indian bride. Twinkle grabbed the hem of her T-shirt and began wiping away the dirt staining the statue’s brow. “I suppose you want to put her by the foot of our bed,” Sanjeev said. She looked at him, astonished. Her belly was exposed, and he saw that there were goose bumps around her navel. “What do you think? Of course we can’t put this in our bedroom.” “We can’t?” “No, silly Sanj. This is meant for outside. For the lawn.” “Oh God, no. Twinkle, no.” “But we must. It would be bad luck not to.” “All the neighbors will see. They’ll think we’re insane.” “Why, for having a statue of the Virgin Mary on our lawn? Every other person in this neighborhood has a statue of Mary on the lawn. We’ll fit right in.” “We’re not Christians.” “So you keep reminding me.” (IM 146; emphases added)

Here, the statue of the Virgin Mary as an example of Christian iconography is appropriated and described in Indian terms as “an Indian bride.” Twinkle also evades Sanjeev’s ironic remarks both about the placement of the statue—brazenly declaring that “[o]f course we can’t put this in our bedroom”—and the repeated negative identification with Christianity by commenting: “So you keep reminding me.” Twinkle’s attitude here is not, however, strictly religious but rather superstitious, as she regards not placing the statue on the lawn as bringing “bad luck.” What is more, Twinkle justifies the placing of it in the garden on strategic social grounds, as “fitting right in” in the community: being like neighbours. 29

Brah, Cartographies, 181 and 209, respectively; emphasis original.

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In his account of “lawn art” in suburban Boston, Christopher Todd Lynch records the practice of displaying religious artefacts in private spaces: houses, yards, vehicles.30 In the same way as Twinkle does, Lynch sees them positively “as more than lawn ornaments,” because they create an atmosphere that “imbues the neighborhoods with richer personality, bringing identities to the surface and sparking conversation and exchange.” The installations he lists are far more varied than Twinkle’s, “[i]ncluding saints with gnomes and mermaids” and “the startling contrast of an electric yellow duck next to a solemn blue and white Mary,” but the effect is similar.31 Lynch’s mentioning of one installation with a statue of “a Virgin Mary on the half-shell” resonates directly with Lahiri’s story. There Twinkle admires a “transparent decal of the Virgin on the half-shell, as Twinkle liked to call it, adhered to the window in the master bedroom” (IM 145). That the picture is thus titled because Twinkle “liked to call it” that suggests that it is, rather, something else, most probably a picture of Aphrodite ascending from the billowing sea in Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” (1485–86)—or like Twinkle herself rising from her bubble bath as she stands up against Sanjeev (IM 149). Here, then, is also already represented a mixed cultural heritage, re-interpreted by Twinkle in her (innocent) understanding of Christian mythology. One further instance of such random cultural mixing is in a culinary context when Twinkle prepares a fish stew for which she uses some previously found malt vinegar. She is not particularly fond of cooking—and specifically detests the complicatedness of making Indian food—and so she makes up a recipe for the stew: “I just put some things into the pot and added the malt vinegar at the end” (IM 144). Although Sanjeev “had to admit” his liking for the tasty, attractive stew, he is bothered about the haphazard way of preparing it, as he would like it to be repeatable, recorded in writing. The couple, then, illustrates two basic approaches to diasporic hybridity: problematized mastering and unproblematized celebration.

Empty Space vs. Hybrid Space Many readers of Lahiri’s story, perhaps with realistic expectations, have been perplexed especially with one question: why were those items left in the house in the first place? In the story, Sanjeev asks the same from Twinkle: “If they’re so precious, then why are they hidden all over the house? Why didn’t they take them with them?” (IM 138). Elie, while 30 31

Lynch, “Visionary,” on-line. Lynch, “Visionary,” on-line.

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recognizing that the story is not about religion as such, plays with the possible answers and suggests that they were simply abandoned, people “shaking the dust of Catholic culture off their boots,” or that they were left there “out of respect,” or that people who had left in a hurry had considered them inessential, or that they were left there because the people living there had died.32 My post-colonial reading of the story does not require an answer to such a question. It would, instead, suggest that the emptiness of the house was illusory to begin with, that the artefacts were not “hidden” nor “left behind.” Analogously, the colonialist, on arriving in the colony, assumed ownership over such things, without even considering the existence of the invisible colonialized. Thus, Jyotsna Singh, in her book Colonial Narratives/Colonial Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism, writes that the discovery motif has frequently emerged in the language of colonization, enabling European travelers/writers to represent the newly discovered lands as an empty space, a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their linguistic, cultural, and later, territorial claims.33

In a diasporic post-colonial situation, as in Lahiri’s story, such discoveries of empty spaces are unattainable—again underlining the falsity of the colonial situation; there never was an “empty space.” Where something analogous to an empty space can be found in diasporic stories, I argue, is in questions of identity, although it is not a space of emptiness but of hybridity questioning fixed identities in the face of different asymmetrically balanced elements of cultures. The final discovery in the story is of “a solid silver bust of Christ” (IM 156). It functions as a symbol of a final victory over the (implied) colonial past. For Twinkle it is also a victory over Sanjeev who hated its immensity, and its flawless, polished surface, and its undeniable value. He hated that it was in his house, and that he owned it. Unlike the other things they’d found, this contained dignity, solemnity, beauty even. […] Most of all he hated it because he knew that Twinkle loved it. (IM 156–7; emphases added)

The discovery of the bust represents a victory over the conquered space and time. It is a “solid” trophy for the imagined diasporic identity. In the 32 33

Elie, “Pilgrims,” on-line. J. Singh, Colonial, 1; emphases original.

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end, despite his hatred, Sanjeev sees the “undeniable value” of the object. Like Twinkle, who saw the first statue as pretty, Sanjeev has to admit that the bust had “beauty even.” The playfulness of Twinkle’s conquest and the seriousness of Sanjeev’s efforts signify also a generational difference. If the earlier immigrant generation(s) had to struggle hard to construct their diasporic identities, now a new generation is emerging for which the process is less complicated or premeditated. As the story closes, Sanjeev follows Twinkle, carrying the bust which sports a woman’s feather hat, to place it on the mantelpiece.34 The lovehate relationship exemplifies powerfully the boundaries of diasporic identity; whether you love it or hate it, there is an undeniably valuable thing from the “other” culture taking centre-stage in your own house. Of this duality in the story, Rajeshwar Mittapalli has noted: What is being dramatized is the clash between assimilation and resistance finally finding its compromise in hybridity. It dawns on Sanjeev that he has to live with the objects signifying an alien faith and culture right in his house for Twinkle’s sake, for the sake of survival in an alien land by appearing to accept its values but actually resisting them.35

While it may be that this camouflaged acceptance portrays accurately Sanjeev’s strategy of survival “in an alien land,” Twinkle’s strategy seems to be its reversal: to actively appropriate, re-present and re-interpret these “objects signifying an alien faith and culture.”

“What Need Is There for an Interpreter?” Perceptively, Simon Lewis calls the title story of Interpreter of Maladies a “postcolonial rewrite” of E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India.36 In this story there is a direct involvement with the issue of translation of identity. This comes through when Mr. Kapasi, a tourist guide who also works as an interpreter for a doctor, comments to his client Mrs. Das that “we do not face a language barrier. What need is there for an interpreter?” 34

The story is very suggestive of a psychoanalytic reading, too. For example, here in Sanjeev’s feeling of hating the bust exactly because Twinkle loves it, one can perceive a diasporic person’s ambiguous strategy of denial for the hybrid space, for cultural translation, for a reinterpretation of identity. Puspa Damai even defines Twinkle’s interest in the objects in the language of illness as “mad pursuit” (Damai, “Spectral, 140). 35 Rajeshwar, “Hybrid,” 160; emphasis added. 36 S. Lewis, “Lahiri’s,” 219.

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(IM 65). The Indian-American Mrs. Das is in India visiting her relatives with her family. On learning about Mr. Kapasi’s interpretative qualities, she wants Mr. Kapasi to sort out a problem in her marriage. She confesses to him something that she has not been able to tell anyone else, that she had been unfaithful to her husband Raj: For eight years I haven’t been able to express this to anyone, not to friends, certainly not to Raj. […] I’m tired of feeling so terrible all the time. […] I’ve been in pain eight years. I was hoping you could help me feel better, say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy. (IM 65)

Mr. Kapasi, who has become attracted to the woman, cannot understand her confiding in him and “felt insulted that Mrs. Das should ask him to interpret her common, trivial little secret” (IM 66). The act of interpretation fails, eventually, when Mrs. Das is angered by Mr. Kapasi’s question whether it is really pain, not guilt, that she feels (IM 66). After this, communication ceases, but for the story it seems that Mr. Kapasi has made an acute observation and given it an accurate interpretation. In conclusion, I would say that even if there were no language barriers as such, if there were only one language, interpretation is still important, if not indispensable. It is not, however, enough to be able to tell. In the interpersonal contact, one needs the ability to listen, too.37 In “This Blessed House,” then, Twinkle shows such consideration for Sanjeev as she is aware of his hatred for the objects. Therefore she asks for his permission to display the final discovery on the mantelpiece. As I have argued, Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House” provides an interpretation of the meaning of hybridity in a post-colonial context. It underlines the centrality of cultural translation in the process of possessing and re-possessing the past and the present, both chronological and spatial, in a meaningful way. It also outlines a strategy of diasporic as well as gendered resistance towards existing colonial and patriarchal hierarchies in the post-colony through the effort of imagination. To emphasize this, I conclude with Lahiri’s comment on the importance of fiction in such cultural translation:

37 For a discussion of the meaning of naming the malady see Damai, “Spectral,” 140.

Problematic Diasporic Identity in the Writings of Jhumpa Lahiri Unlike my parents, I translate not so much to survive in the world around me as to create and illuminate a nonexistent one. Fiction is the foreign land of my choosing, the place where I strive to convey and preserve the meaningful. And whether I write as an American or an Indian, about things American or Indian or otherwise, one thing remains constant: I translate, therefore I am. 38

38

Lahiri, “Jhumpa,” on-line.

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CHAPTER THREE EMBODIED EVIDENCE: REI SHIMURA AS A GENDERED CROSS-CULTURAL DETECTIVE

Multiethnic Writer—Multicultural Detective Rei Shimura is the multiethnic main character of Sujata Massey’s detective novels. Massey is herself similarly multiculturally conditioned, although while Rei’s roots are Japanese–American, Massey was born in the United Kingdom as a child of a German mother and an Indian father. Now she lives in the United States and writes predominantly about Japan. The feature of hybrid roots is strongly present in the thematic development of each of the novels. The fluctuation between identities—social, transcultural, and personal—is also profoundly engaged with aspects of gender. All these affect the detective activities of Rei, a young amateur female sleuth. In this chapter, I look at the ways in which Massey’s novel The Salaryman’s Wife (1997)—but also her eight other novels1—present the (Japanese) “other” and reflect on Rei’s self, or multiple selves, in a postcolonial world, how far they go in explicating and exhausting the “other,” and what repercussions this may have. I look at the questions of identity in a cross-cultural context from the perspective of nationality and language as well as of gender and sexuality, and special attention will be paid to the embodied gendered cross-cultural identity that Rei’s character represents. For emphasis, I use The Salaryman’s Wife as the main reference source, but similar issues are raised in the other novels as well.

1 Sujata Massey, The Salaryman’s Wife (1997). Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by SW. The other novels published so far are Zen Attitude (1997), The Flower Master (1999), The Floating Girl (2000), The Bride’s Kimono (2001), The Samurai’s Daughter (2003), The Pearl Diver (2004), The Typhoon Lover (2005), and The Girl in a Box (2006).

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One intriguing aspect of these novels is the fact that, despite Massey’s background as an Indo–European, or a Euro–Indian, they discuss neither of these cultural spheres more than sporadically. The novels in the series are mostly set in Japan, and they concentrate on Japanese culture with occasional gestures toward the United States. In Bride’s Kimono and the two subsequent novels, the setting is predominantly the United States, where Rei is on a (prolonged) visit. In The Typhoon Lover and The Girl in a Box Rei again returns to Japan. That Massey has chosen to write about Japan raises questions of representation, which are discussed in the course of the chapter. Initially, it can be said that it is not, after all, the case that a writer from a South Asian background needs to write about South Asia or the South Asian diaspora. A good example of this is Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music (1999), which is set mostly in London, Venice, and in a nostalgic version of Vienna—and not at all in India. Furthermore, while Massey’s work is engaged with Japan, the overall setting is relevant from the point of view of her own background. This does not mean that some kind of authorial explanation is sought here, but rather that the questions of cross-cultural identity are possibly the same for Massey as they are for her character, Rei—even though the cross-cultural setting is different. One might call it parallel hybridity. Massey herself has commented in a web-chat on the similarity as follows: I wanted to write about a woman who had a foot in two cultures. I’m Indian and German myself, but I didn’t want to write about a character exactly like myself. Rei is half-Japanese and half-American; she loves both countries, which is very much like my own background.2

Intercultural Translation Questions of identity are extensively present in all of Massey’s novels. Her work has accordingly been described in reviews as follows: “A crosscultural mystery of manners with a decidedly sexy edge”—“Massey [combines] a very entertaining mystery with lessons in Japanese culture”—“Rei is one of the most complex female protagonists around”— “Rei Shimura, breezy, sexy and smart, holds our interest.”3 Although these are mere snippets of publicity material provided by the publisher to attract

2

Massey, “Sujata,” on-line. Massey, Salaryman’s, cover; Massey, Zen, cover; Massey, Floating, cover; Massey, Bride’s, cover (respectively).

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possible readers, they manage also to capture something of the issues at hand: sexuality, culture, gender. The Salaryman’s Wife opens with a scene in a crowded Japanese train which Rei is riding on her way to the Yogetsu holiday inn in Shiroyama. The narrator comments: “I suppose there are worse places to spend New Year’s Eve than a crowded train with a stranger’s hand inching up your thigh. A crowded train undergoing a nerve gas attack?” (SW 1).4 This short, ironic passage already directs the reader to consider gender issues such as sexual harassment. The intercultural dimension is introduced on the next page, when Rei snaps at the offender with—as she describes it— the “last weapon” she possessed: “’Hentai! Te o dokete yo!’ I said it first in Japanese and then in English—pervert, get your hands off me” (SW 2; italics original). When Rei uses both Japanese and English to counter her abuser (whom she is not able to identify correctly in the crowd), the unwritten code of permitting such abuse of women by men in the Japanese context is contrasted with its unacceptability in the linguistically implied North American one. Although Rei is described as only a learner of Japanese culture and language, she also occasionally displays her expertise. This is shown, for example, when she describes the Japanese iconographic writing system to Mrs. Marcelle Chapman, an American woman also staying in Minshuku Yogetsu, by the means of bathroom signs: “See this kanji; it looks like a woman kneeling, doesn’t it? In Japanese, the word for woman is written as one who serves.” “What’s a kanji?” “A pictogram.” At her blank expression, I tried again. “The Japanese took their system of writing from China, using pictorial symbols to represent word meanings. This is the man’s symbol.” I picked up the wooden sign the intruder should have known about. “What does it look like to you?” “A blockhead on legs.” (SW 9; emphases original)

The misandry expressed in Mrs. Chapman’s last comment is first interpreted by Rei as a feminist feature, especially as her privacy in the bath has just been intruded on. Later on, this reading is contested as Mrs. Chapman turns out to be truly misandric. Another occasion of a “hasty” 4

The mention of the nerve gas attack serves also as a cultural reference, as it alludes to the sarin nerve gas attack in the Tokyo underground by the Aum Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth) cult on 20 March, 1995; see also SW 130. In February 2004 the founder of the cult, Shoko Asahara, was sentenced to death for planning the attack.

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feminist interpretation is after the murder in the inn, when Rei is asked to act as a translator between the police and the foreign visitors, and she explains Mrs Chapman’s name by referring to how, in the United States, women can keep their maiden names after marriage. Furthermore, she announces with pride that things are changing in Japan, too: “Japanese women are beginning to sue for the right to keep their name. Some friends of mine in a feminist organization are involved” (SW 45). But the police chief of Shiroyama, Captain Okuhara, is sceptical of such a change, and wants to stop her “feminist rally” and continue to translate Mrs. Chapman instead. Afterwards it turns out that this feminist “outburst” had in fact caused Rei to neglect an important detail—that Mrs Chapman used her maiden name as a cover-up. The condition of cultural hybridity is revealed to be no automatic guarantee of correct interpretation. Without critical attention, it can also prove to be misleading. The titles of the novels—also true to their themes—already function as gateways to Japanese culture. The first, The Salaryman’s Wife, refers both to Japanese gender hierarchy expressed in the traditional custom of referring to women as men’s wives and to the work culture, with its hard working office workers, salarymen, or sarariman. This is one of the rare instants in the novels that portray the stereotypical phonological play with the phonetic difficulty of the Japanese to differentiate between the “r” and “l” sounds.5 It is present in the hybrid form of Japanese spoken by such people as salarymen. Rei provides a name for this type of linguistic accommodation, too, and explains it as follows: “It’s just Jinglish,” I said, and everyone turned to look at me. “You know, the new language created by Japanese people to express cross-cultural ideas. Here a department store is spelled depaato and a white-collar worker like you would be called sarariman. Or salaryman.” (SW 15; emphases original)

The figure of the salaryman recurs, then, often in the series, but later with less description. The implied gender aspect is, however, more important for the novel than the work culture as such. 5

Another instance discusses the Japanese way of spelling “caffe latte” as ratte, embarrassingly reminding Rei of the English word “rat,” a notion which is played down by the comment: “Rats are considered very clever animals in Japanese folktales,” SW 175. This phonological play features far more distinctively in Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation (2003) although on the whole it does not parody Japanese culture itself. Likewise, Alan Courneau’s movie Stupeur et tremblements (2003), based on Amelie Nothomb’s novel, discusses Japanese office culture in an intercultural context.

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In Zen Attitude, then, there is reference to the highly popular form of Buddhism, Zen. Rei’s position between being a learner and an expert is highlighted in an episode where she explains zen to her lover Hugh Glendinning’s brother Angus, trying “to remember what [she]’d studied in [her] Asian religions class in college.”6 The novel takes a gendered view on temple practices and traditions that repress women, especially as Akemi Mihori, as a woman, cannot assume responsibility of the family temple. The take in The Flower Master, then, is similarly gendered, and the contextual implication is that of ikebana, or traditional flower arrangement, which already makes an important appearance in the first novel (SW 230–1), but now Rei herself has begun to study ikebana in order to better assimilate to Japan: Being half Japanese and half American, I sometimes struggled to fit in with my father’s Yokohama relatives. […] Still, I was clueless about ikebana, the uniquely Japanese art of flower arrangement.7

Once more, the book is topical in its treatment of Rei’s struggle with her continuously problematic identity. In her desire to “fit in,” Rei yearns for an imagined diasporic identity that would embrace also her and her world. The title of The Floating Girl is not very explicit about its theme: the Japanese manga cartoon. This implication is acknowledged, however, in the translation of the title both into German and Finnish as “Rei Shimura and the lethal manga.”8 Typical of manga, the novel deals with topics such as sexuality, transsexuality and drag.9 The novels set in the United States—The Bride’s Kimono, The Samurai’s Daughter and The Pearl Diver—also start from the internationally familiar Japanese themes of kimono, samurai and pearl diving, all from a perspective of gender. Thus the novels deal with central and recognized aspects of Japanese culture. It is noticeable, then, that the perhaps internationally most widely known Japanese concept is absent 6

Massey, Zen, 95. Massey, Flower, 2; emphasis added. 8 Massey, Tödliche Manga, and Massey, Rei Shimura ja tappava manga. In the novel, manga are described as “the single largest-selling category of book in Japan” and “today’s most important art form,” and it is mentioned that “[f]orty percent of all written material sold in Japan is comics,” Massey, Floating, 11, 15 and 18, respectively. 9 An example of this is Takahashi Rumiko’s manga series Ranma ½ (1987–1997). Among its gender features is the androgyneity of the main character Ranma Saotome, who changes into a girl when in contact with cold water, and into a boy in hot water. 7

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from the titles as well as the texts, and that is geisha.10 This is all the more intriguing since in Massey’s novels there are “modern day geishas”—bargirls, or hostesses—such as Mariko Ozawa in The Salaryman’s Wife (SW 180).11 One might think that this is Massey’s conscious preference in order to avoid the most stereotypical representation of Japan. In this she has succeeded reasonably well, to judge from the reception of her novels as windows into Japanese culture. One otherwise common instrument for intercultural exchange that is scarce in the Shimura stories is intertextuality. There are few references to actual works of either historical or contemporary art, literature, or other media.12 The cross-cultural inclination of the novels becomes apparent through another feature: paraphrasing, the kind of dictionary—“glossing over”—approach common for works of cross-cultural literature. This means that terms and expressions in another language—printed in italics—are immediately explained in the text (or in other cases there might be a glossary at the end of the book). In The Salaryman’s Wife there are a host of occasions where terms are paraphrased. Consider, for example, the following: “a minshuku, or family-run inn,” “tatami mats,” “tansu chest,” and “yukata, the guest robe” (SW 4 and 6; emphases original), or in a longer, more textual way Rei’s retort to the offender quoted earlier. All these examples are from the first chapter of the first novel. There are many more in all the novels but suffice these to show that the titles, the thematizations and the vocabulary used aim at accommodating readers—the intended audience—that are not already immersed in the “other” culture, in this case Japanese culture.

10 There is only a passing reference to the ornate hair style of “a nineteenth-century geisha,” SW 151; on the centrality of the geisha image in Western images of Japan see Jalagin, “Geisha-kuvan,” and Vesterinen, Geishan. 11 See also Vesterinen, Geishan, 82–96. 12 The most notable exception is the mention of The Tale of Genji (Genjimonogatari), “Japan’s longest and most famous novel, a weighty tome written in the eleventh century that would probably still be sitting on my nightstand in the twenty-first,” SW 14–5. This Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s remarkable work of the Heian culture is regarded as one of the first novels in the world. It was first translated into English by Arthur Waley (1925) and later by Edward G. Seidensticker (1976); the Seidensticker translation is made available on the Internet by UNESCO.

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Identity Questions of a Gendered Cross-Cultural Character Next I consider questions of identity in more detail, in particular national identity in relation to personal identity. At the beginning of the series Rei Shimura is a soul-searching woman of 27. She has lived in Japan for three years, and works as an English teacher for a Japanese company, Nichiyu, although it is not a job she would prefer, given the choice. She is interested in antiques and will, later, get the chance to become an antiques dealer. But on the Japanese labour market, language teaching is, as she explains, “about the best job a foreign woman can get” (SW 16). How foreign is she, then, with an American mother and a Japanese father, having herself been raised in San Francisco? Japan was an almost totally closed country for more than two centuries until 1854. The Japanese were not allowed to travel out, and the only foreigners allowed to enter were Dutch traders.13 That foreigners are still regarded with ethnocentric and xenophobic hostility is forcefully described in Massey’s novels. For example, checking-in at the inn in Shiroyama, Rei feels that the innkeeper Mrs. Yogetsu, noticing her slight American accent, is hostile to her: “I caught the sentiment underneath: Keep the foreigners together, separate from the rest of us” (SW 6; emphasis original).14 This embedded “us-them” divide runs through the novels as a cultural as well as personal marker, although Rei tries to fight it. She claims, for example, that it is easier for the police “to blame a foreigner” (SW 142), and pleads her grocer Mr. Waka: “Don’t be like everyone else in this country, assuming the worst of foreigners!” (SW 114). The Japanese characters, for their part, regard foreigners’ behaviour as strange (SW 162), and think that for a foreigner it is difficult to learn to understand Japanese (SW 293)—or, to mark out an absolute difference, it is considered to be even impossible. Rei has good reason to feel uncertain about the issue of foreignness, since her mother, after having been married to her Japanese husband, and Rei’s father, for thirty years, was still treated by his family like a foreigner (SW 120). But, occasionally, foreignness is also a position that can be 13

Fält, Eksotismista, 38, and Jalagin, “Suloinen,” 70. The history of the closed Japan is recorded also by Massey: “Japan was closed to the world. There were no foreigners,” SW 63. 14 See also Koskiaho, Japani, 175–82. Besides being closed to the outside, there is also a highly developed segregation within the country; see Vesterinen, Japanilaiset, 246.

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used for one’s own advantage as happens when Rei and her lover Hugh try to explain their objectionable behaviour: “It was a mistake we made, as foreigners. I’m so sorry, I won’t do it again” (SW 98). This is, however, only a marginal feature, providing explicitly a moment of comic relief rather than genuine cross-cultural understanding. More important for the narrative than the xenophobic or ethnocentric demarcations is the personal identification constructed through national or ethnic characteristics. Rei seems to be in constant dialogue with herself about her identity. Language is an important aspect in her challenging condition of cultural hybridity, since she has to reside between—and within—two languages. The aspect of linguistic hybridity is further complicated by her limited ability to read written Japanese, which is often played with in the stories. For example, in The Flower Master, readers’ knowledge of Rei’s ability to read only some hiragana, phonetic lettering, and not the kanji, pictorial characters, is used to provide a narrative clue: “Hiragana was used specifically for me. […] Who knew that I couldn’t read kanji?”15 When she understands who knows her “secret,” she is able to solve the case; here Rei can transform her incompetence into meaning. Things will not always work out, though. Rei’s name is very problematic for her identification. While genderneutral (or ambiguous) from an Anglophone perspective, in the intercultural context the form of the name is confusing, as it resembles both Japanese and American names. At the beginning, Rei explains this to the American, Mrs. Chapman, to whom she introduces herself: “Rei Shimura,” I said slowly, as I always did growing up in the United States. “Is that Rae with an e, or Ray with a y?” “Neither. It’s a Japanese name that rhymes with the American ones.” (SW 4–5; emphases original)

This experience of having always to explain one’s self (and name) is indeed common for people with mixed cultural backgrounds. In Rei’s case this situation is further played with in gendered terms because the name implies androgynous tones, as the previous quotation indicates.16 Rei’s 15

Massey, Flower, 359; emphases original. As the use of an ambiguous name here attests, the male norm of detective fiction is often camouflaged (and simultaneously problematized) in alleged genderneutrality; cf. Sara Paretsky’s private-eye V. I. Warshawski, who on her first appearance in Indemnity Only (1982) obscures her female name and identity, Victoria Iphigenia, by using only the initials V. I., or an indefinite nickname “Vic”

16

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homosexual flat-mate, Richard Randall, takes up this feature and sings the Lemonheads song “It’s a Shame about Ray” to her, to which the indignant Rei replies: “That song is about a man called R–A–Y” (SW 111).17 The need to give such explanations will not cease; there are always new situations in which one has to start from the beginning. Later, in an American military base bar, a man wonders to her: “A gal named Ray? Your Mom and Dad must have really wanted a son,” the man who had let me enter said. “It’s a Japanese name,” I said. (SW 220)

Cultural hybridity is sometimes a bothersome condition for Rei, and the fact that her name is Japanese does not make things any easier. It is not with her Japanese side, however, that Rei has problems; her American self is also under constant scrutiny. Her time in Japan, despite her own desire to shake off her American past and her dependence on her parents, has not managed to delete it all. On one occasion, she thinks about her own reactions: “The assertive American was re-emerging after three years of suppression” (SW 58). Earlier, she had thought differently: “Once I would have said something, but after three years in Asia I had become too polite. Too Japanese” (SW 3). But for Rei, returning to an American identity is not easy, or even desirable. This comes clear when Yuki Ikeda’s husband, Taro, asks her whether every American owns a gun. Her feeling about being thus stereotypically misrepresented is mixed: “Sometimes it was really embarrassing to be an American” (SW 65). In the course of the novel, Rei experiences a kind of a revelation. In a discussion with an American businessman, Joe Roncolotta, who has lived in Japan for a long time, she perceives her own position between being a learner and an expert of Japanese culture: How self-righteous I’d been, priding myself on my encyclopedic knowledge of Japan. Talking to Joe Roncolotta made me realize how much of the book I had left to read. (SW 201)

Later on, Mrs. Chapman calls Rei “Miss Know-It-All” for showing intimate knowledge of Japanese culture (SW 414). This consciousness of

to avoid being patronized (Paretsky, Indemnity, 7, 48 and 177). Vic’s ethnicity is also marginalized in the US context as her Polish surname indicates (Paretsky, Indemnity, 223). 17 This is a 1992 song written by Evan Dando and Tom Morgan.

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her incomplete knowledge implies that she is also more reliable as a narrator, because she is more conscientious and, hence, truthful. Earlier, Hugh who in the course of the novel becomes Rei’s lover, does not understand—or does not consider important—Rei’s questioning of identity. To him it is simpler: “[Y]ou are Japanese, more or less. Although I don’t understand the game you’re playing with your nationality” (SW 25). A major identificational instance comes later when Rei puts a question to Hugh in the course of a longish episode: “I have a question for you.” I kept my voice light. “Do you think of me as Japanese or American?” “I don’t know why you’re worrying about things like this after the night we’ve had—you could have lost your life on those stairs…” “You pointed out once that I had a problem defining myself. I wanted to hear what you thought. I’m curious,” I added, feeling his eyes on me. “Both,” he said at last. […] “It’s impossible to be both!” I was irritated at his cop-out. “What do you want me to say? That you have the face and figure of the woman in the Japanese art book, but a meaner streak than Tonya Harding? That despite your tea ceremony manners, you’re absolutely undaunted by power?” (SW 306)18

Rei is angered by Hugh’s thoughtful answer, which she regards simply as evasive; she wants to gain some clarity about her identity. Unlike Rei, Hugh—who later discovers the full impact of his own Scottishness—is not puzzled by her cultural split. Towards the end of the novel, however, Rei seems to be able to become more assertive. She for example claims Tokyo as hers: “This is my city, and I’ll live here on my terms, okay?” (SW 379; emphases added). This assertion articulates her struggles both with her geographical location (my city) and her relationships—especially with her lover (my terms). If the issue of identity is temporarily resolved at the end of the novel in Rei’s statement, “this is my city.” Her success in “homing” of diaspora is, however, only temporary, for the questioning returns in the following books in the series.19 18

Tonya Harding is the infamous US figure skater who arranged for her competitor’s assault on the eve of the 1994 US Championships, and whose wedding night video was distributed by the Penthouse magazine. 19 Although the Shimura novels are acutely concerned with American and Japanese identities, there are also occasions that display similar concerns for, for example, European and Indian identities. Thus, Rei’s lover in the first novel, Hugh Glendinning, makes a sharp distinction between English and Scottish identities: “I’m not English. I’m a Scot” (SW 43); also the traditional ethnic segregation in

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Embodied Evidence It is not only cultural markers such as names that are called into question. What is even more fundamental for the story is that Rei is presented as an embodied example of hybridity. Rei’s physical characteristics—such as her feet—become very important for the setting. At the inn she senses Setsuko Nakamura, the salaryman’s wife of the title who is shortly to be murdered, staring at her: “Her gaze lingered on my feet. Yes, they are larger than yours, that’s good nutrition and my American half, I thought angrily” (SW 11; emphasis original). Here Rei reveals her own implied stereotypical thinking about Oriental women with tiny feet contrasted with her American side. The stereotype is gently deconstructed when Rei immediately remembers that she has a hole in her sock—a detail that had not escaped the pedant Setsuko. Rei’s general outlook—setting her apart from both the Americans and Japanese—is also commented on. Another Japanese guest at the inn, Yuki Ikeda says: “’I can see it in your bone structure.’ She pointed at my cheeks. ‘Strong American character. You are not a typical konketsujin’” (SW 33; emphasis original). The mention of the term konketsujin is a very crucial point at which Rei contemplates her own personal genetic and cultural make-up: The word, which meant half-blooded person, made me flinch. Mr. Katoh, my boss at Nichiyu, had asked about my ethnic background during my job interview and, sounding sad, advised me to keep it to myself. Blue-eyed blond teachers were always flavor of the month and landed the bestpaying jobs. Looking Japanese complicated things, perhaps hinted that I was ainoko, a child born from a short-lived, illicit union. […] I had brownish-black hair, a small Japanese nose, and almond-shaped eyes. Still, I was undeniably konketsujin. I hated the word, even spoken by somebody meaning no offence. (SW 33; emphases original)

Both notions, konketsujin and ainoko, appear several times in the Shimura novels, and they indicate problematic relations between the Japanese and foreigners. Especially problematic is the term ainoko which refers to the thousands of people who are the offspring of American military and Japanese women, and who “were treated like refuse” after the war (see SW

Japan is taken up, for example the inferior position of the Korean minority through the character of Mari Kumamori (Massey, Flower, 260–1); see also Vesterinen, Japanilaiset, 246–7, and Tames, Matkaopas, 92–3.

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165). Rei had not had to face this social stigma herself, unlike Mariko Ozawa’s mother (SW 170–1). Rei’s ethnic background also appears in a different gendered context. The dimension of physical appearance is an important one in the novels especially for passing as a member of a culture. When Rei tries to eliminate her divided genealogy, she also has to change her physical outlook. An illustration of this problematic can be found at the start of The Flower Girl, where Rei is in a beauty parlour having her leg hair removed: “Japanese women don’t like to cry out,” Miss Kumiko said brightly. “Not even when delivering babies. […] Would you like a handkerchief?” “No, thank you, and this is hardly childbirth. It’s a bikini wax!” Damn my American half for making this process necessary. If I’d been fully Japanese, I would have inherited the hairless gene. But I was hafu or hanbunjin or konketsujin or whatever name Miss Kumiko secretly used for mixed-race people.20

For Rei, then, cultural and social identity is very much expressed in corporeal terms. In her desire to be like a Japanese person and the anguish of not being one, she continually has to confront her own hybridity. The most visible of these corporeal signs is undoubtedly Rei’s hair, which plays almost a role of its own, and so it often appears as a decisive feature in Rei’s play with identity. At the beginning of The Salaryman’s Wife, Rei describes herself through her hair as a “small JapaneseAmerican, and with the kind of cropped haircut that’s perfect in San Francisco but a little too boyish for Japanese taste” (SW 2). While there are occasions where Rei passes for Japanese, sometimes she is something completely different, as is expressed by Yuki, who earlier commented her bones: “I like your hair! It is not typically Japanese!” (SW 33). When Rei agrees to go “nosing around” in the tsuya, or wake, of the murdered Setsuko to collect information, she also agrees to wear a wig for the occasion to conceal her features, or as Hugh’s “office lady” Hikari Yasui puts it, to “be more normal” (SW 149).21 Wearing the wig, Rei finds to her utter amazement a new side in herself: “For the first time in my life, I looked totally Japanese” (SW 151). Her own observation is confirmed reversely by Mrs. Chapman, who comments on her outlook: “If you wear that, you don’t look at all American” (SW 152). Finally, starting out on her 20

Massey, Flower, 1; emphases original. “Ofiice ladies” (OL, Jap. ǀeru) are female equivalents of sararimen, although often low in rank and subservient to male workers. 21

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mission, Rei mixes these two sides of her—Japanese and American— through a culturally very emphatic image by describing herself as follows: “I felt like a Japanese Barbie doll” (SW 154). The imagery works towards highlighting the problematic hybrid identity since it is as strong as it is ambiguous. It is also ambiguous in gender terms: how can the objectified sexed model of femininity of the Barbie doll be reconciled with Rei’s feminist outlook?22 The traffic here is not, however, totally one-way. When Rei becomes a celebrity, if somewhat notorious, through her involvement in a murder case that she finally manages to solve as a highly amateur detective, young women start to idolize her especially by copying her hairstyle. The grocer, who earlier expressed his xenophobic attitudes, now comments: “Young ladies are adopting your haircut, do you realize? They call it the ReiStyru”— that is, Rei-style (SW 363; emphasis original). It seems that the young English teacher has finally arrived.

Gender and Transcultural Detection Rei’s tentative arrival in Japan echoes the more general appearance of ethnic or post-colonial detectives. In their introduction to a collection of articles on post-colonial detective fiction, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Müller comment: “Ethnic detectives seem to be everywhere.”23 Furthermore, they note that “ethnic detective novels address issues of personal and social identity that reflect the importance of the ethnic community for the particular detective.”24 This dimension of personal and social identification is present in Rei’s case, too, as I have demonstrated throughout this chapter. On the combined level of personal and social, Rei’s gender is not without influence on her detective qualities, either. As Theo D’haen notes: “What is also held against her is her sex, specifically when she acts as an amateur sleuth.”25 As a foreign, or half-Japanese, woman, Rei is 22 For a critical analysis of the Barbie doll in Asian American context, see Pamela Thoma, who writes for example: “Because Barbie is a material object she may be the clearest example of how global commodities of beauty carry with them symbolic narratives, even if such commodities are not immediately thought of as representations, narrative texts, or cultural products” (Thoma, “Beauty,” para. 29). For the sari-clad Barbie’s entry into India, see I. Grewal, Transnationalism, 80– 120. 23 Fischer-Hornung and Müller, “Introduction,” 11. 24 Fischer-Hornung and Müller, “Introduction,” 12. 25 D’haen, “Samurai,” 46.

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underestimated by the police and everybody else around her, and dismissed as a “girl-detective-in-training” (SW 183). Within a year, though, the grocer, Mr. Waka, already considers her to be “an amateur investigator” whose help is needed, and Rei feels herself to be “like a female Arnold Schwarzenegger.”26 This is quite a change from her earlier having felt “like a Japanese Barbie doll,” and in general Rei is physically, mentally and methodologically far removed from Schwarzenegger-type action heroes. The first case that Rei accidentally encounters is the already mentioned death of a salaryman’s wife, Setsuko Nakamura. Rei finds her body out in the snow and describes the situation: What had looked like bark was a frozen length of human hair. And the pale, trailing branch was a slender forearm, hair shaven off in the superfeminine manner of many Japanese women. The last thing I took in before my feet gave out were glossy scarlet fingernails, one of them broken. A condition Setsuko Nakamura would not have tolerated, had she been alive. (SW 137; emphases added)

In this event, apart from the “super-feminine” shaven arms, Rei’s eye catches another, more significant feminine detail—a broken fingernail— that becomes important in the course of events. The police want to solve the case quickly by implying that Setsuko had committed suicide to save the honour of the family, because she had been over-using her husband’s money by shopping extensively. In order to confirm this scenario, the police ask Rei, in her capacity as a woman, to tell “about ladies’ nature and the likely story” (SW 49). Rei refuses to comply with such an explanation as she is not satisfied with such a simplified, sexist explanation. Taking lead from the “intolerably” broken fingernail, she becomes involved in investigating the case—and further encouraged to do so when her foreign lover Hugh becomes suspected of murdering Setsuko. Rei does not stop pursuing the case even after her Japanese elder cousin, Tsutomu, or Tom, tells her otherwise: “After you speak to the police, this mission of yours should end. […Y]ou’re an English teacher, not a crime fighter”; furthermore, this overtly wellmeaning concern gets an explicit patriarchal turn when Tom emphasizes his words with a traditional hierarchical comment: “In Japan, young people listen to their elders” (SW 133). But Rei is adamant in her status as an independent woman and will not yield to intimidation, however culturally motivated it may be.

26

Massey, Flower, 61 and 342, respectively.

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Throughout the case, Rei continues to follow her—in many ways naïve—instincts and manages to bring the case to a close, taking the culprit to justice, saving Hugh from prison, establishing her own antiques business, revealing that Mariko is Setsuko’s daughter, and securing her own independence—which has, after all, been her ultimate goal in coming to Japan. As she says: “I would never be a salaryman’s wife! I have far too much ambition” (SW 359). In the seemingly libertarian, self-reliant, and independent position that she claims for herself, she is still somewhat traditional: she is intimidated by foul language, shy of nakedness and her own body, and longs for a handsome male companion.27 In this way, Rei’s uncertainty about her sexual identity is not dissimilar from the uncertainty about her ethnic identity. In the wider context of transnational global capitalism, the American-Japanese Rei can be considered to be a representative of post-colonial detectives. Ed Christian describes the position of such detectives as follows: Post-colonial detectives, approaching crime with a special sensitivity enhanced by their marginalized positions, are especially quick to notice societal contradictions because they have always been exploited by them.28

Rei falls short of none of these qualities. Furthermore, the double marginality as an ethnic female private investigator provides her with a particularly exceptional platform for intercultural understanding.

Uncanny Connection The connections between Rei’s personal quest, her detection, and the Japanese culture in The Salaryman’s Wife are, finally, intertextual. I will close this discussion by considering an interesting story embedded in the novel. It connects Rei with a mid-19th-century legend about Shiroyama’s past and its status as Japan’s “ghost capital,” and especially the legendary ghost story about Princess Uchida Miyo (SW 21).29 The legend tells about the leadership of the town being taken over by means of murder. The 27 For examples of these, see Massey, Zen, 68, SW 9, and Massey, Floating, 28, respectively. 28 Christian, “Introducing,” 1. 29 Princess Miyo should not be confused with Kakinouchi Narumi’s four-part anime cycle Vampire Princess Miyu (Kyuuketsuhime Miyu) (1988), which was also made into a TV series of 26 episodes (released on DVD in 1998) and manga cartoons (1990–2001).

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samurai lady Princess Miyo, the sister of the murdered leader, manages to escape by using her knife, runs into the forest and disappears, to return only as a ghost in stories. Just as in Setsuko’s case, within her feminist reading Rei is not satisfied with the traditional story. To her it seems to be merely a cover-up for violence. In her view: The legend was an easy way for the town to romanticize its brutal takeover. The ghostly fate of the princess was pure propaganda, a bit of sweet bean paste smeared over the ending like dessert. (SW 23)

Interested in antiques, Rei accidentally buys a lacquer pine box from a dingy shop in Shiroyama. It turns out that the box bears the names of Shiroyama and Uchida Miyo, carved on the inside of the box. The box and the inscription make Rei feel an “uncanny connection” with the Princess, as well as with Setsuko and Mariko: Only it wasn’t just a little girl in an exquisite kimono enjoying a way of life soon coming to an end, it was myself in the first grade, panicked over what crayon to use when drawing my skin color. It was Setsuko huddled in a cardboard box, and Mariko shunned at the swimming pool. We four, a number considered bad luck because it was pronounced shi, the homonym for death. (SW 260; emphasis original)30

In closer specialist scrutiny the inscription in the box is, indeed, verified to have been carved by Princess Miyo. Rei has a somewhat romantic view of Princess Miyo—“a little girl in an exquisite kimono”—but she is nevertheless able to draw parallels between the four women: Miyo, Setsuko, Mariko, and herself. They had all suffered from specific diasporic experiences of not-belonging: Miyo for being an unwanted relative, Setsuko for being an ainoko, Mariko not only for being an ainoko but half-black as well, and finally Rei for being a konketsujin in Japan and mixed-colour in the United States.31 When the truth about the box is revealed, the Shiroyama Folk Art Center wants to buy it from Rei for ¥1.2 million, two hundred times more than she had paid for it. Rei is delighted for Miyo’s sake, for now “[p]eople will finally know that Princess Miyo escaped. Maybe even who she became” (SW 372). At the same time the sale establishes Rei as an antiques dealer, granting her the imagined diasporic identity she had 30

The kanji for death, shi, appears also in Rei’s name shi-mura. Mariko’s father is revealed to have been a black American soldier who died in Vietnam (SW 294). 31

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longed for. Finally she, too, escapes death in the final phases of the novel, and her hope is that people may even know who she became. In her contested diasporic space between cultures, Rei struggles with the problem of overcoming the restraints of singular identities. What she will become through this struggle, eventually, depends on the way she imagines an identity that can encompass the multiplicity that forms her.

CHAPTER FOUR OVER THE BLACK WATER: SILENCED NARRATIVES OF DIASPORA IN RAMABAI ESPINET’S THE SWINGING BRIDGE

“It is an untold story” In the course of the past few years, diaspora literature and research have rapidly gained scope especially as a result of immigration, which has increased in many ways and for many reasons. In this chapter I discuss central questions of diaspora in Caribbean literature through a detailed analysis of a novel by a Trinidadian-Canadian of Indian background, namely Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge (2003).1 Through my discussion, I argue that diasporic writing and theory disrupt and dislocate existing hegemonic discourses—they rock the boat and shake the bridge of established truths. Espinet writes about diasporic experiences, the travels of immigrants from India to Trinidad, from there to Canada, and back to Trinidad. On these travels, or from the stories about them, the main character of the novel, Mona Singh, learns about things that have always been silenced in her family. Of particular importance is the rhythmical, musical story of her great-grandmother, Gainder. However, “It is an untold story.”2 Telling an untold story is fitting for Espinet, for both as a writer and a scholar, she is a part of the recent post-colonial women’s writing and research in the

1

With this novel, Espinet was shortlisted for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Best First Book, Caribbean and Canada Region Prize. Her other works include the poetry collection Nuclear Seasons (1991) and the children’s books The Princess of Spadina: A Tale of Toronto (1992) and Ninja's Carnival (1993). She has also edited an anthology of Caribbean women’s poetry, Creation Fire (1990). See Kuortti, Indian, 130. 2 Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (2003), 3. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by SB.

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sense that she attempts at bringing forth themes, especially on women’s status, that have previously been muted through neglect and suppression. In her diaspora study Cartographies of Diaspora, Avtar Brah has commented that while “at the heart of the notion of diaspora is the image of a journey, “not every journey can be understood as diaspora.”3 Brah notes, too, that not all diasporas are the same but depend fundamentally on their contextuality, and that “each empirical diaspora must be analyzed in its historical specificity.”4 Furthermore, Brah emphasizes especially that diaspora should not be understood through binary opposition but as a heterogeneous space which is influenced by different factors such as gender, “race,” class, religion, language and generation.5 In this chapter, I start from this outline of Brah and aim, first, to show that Espinet’s novel is a diasporic narrative, and, secondly, to contextualize that diasporic narrative. In addition, I look at the ways in which Espinet’s novel emphasizes heterogeneity rather than simple binaries. In her research on Caribbean literatures, Elina Valovirta has critically analyzed the applicability of various post-colonial and feminist theories to the study of Caribbean literatures.6 Although recently the field has received more attention, Valovirta refers to Denise deCaires Narain to argue that there are only a few studies that approach Caribbean women’s writings in English either theoretically or methodologically.7 Such research is, however, very important, as it aims at providing a different view of history. Thus, Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido write about the historical silencing of Caribbean women—and women writers— in various totalizing master discourses, and the necessity to break out of the chains of silence and invisibility.8

3

Brah, Cartographies, 182. Brah, Cartographies, 183. 5 Brah, Cartographies, 183. 6 Valovirta, “Kumbla,” 136. 7 Valovirta, “Feminist,” n.p. The books Valovirta mentions are Carole Boyce Davies’s and Elaine Savory Fido’s (eds.) Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990) and Evelyn O’Callaghan’s Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (1993). Besides these, one could mention Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), Alison Donnell’s and Sarah Lawson Welsh’s (eds.) The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (1996), Brinda J. Mehta’s Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the “Kala Pani” (2003), and Alison Donnell’s Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (2006). 8 Boyce Davies and Savory Fido, “Introduction,” 1 and 3. 4

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Espinet, too, has discussed these themes in her own academic work. In her novel, however, she does not seek to produce some kind of “Caribbean universalism” but deals emphatically with the history of one particular community, that of the Indians, on one of the islands, namely Trinidad.9 Espinet herself notes that her task has been to stay as close as possible to reality in time and place because, despite the seeming uniformity of the Caribbean archipelago, it contains a wide variety of unique manifestations: “Certainly this is the case with Trinidad which is the most polyglot, contradictory and hard-to-pin-down of all of them.”10 Reflexive application of theories is crucial for avoiding meaningless or even harmful universalizations, and thus, in this chapter, space is left for the differences and multiplicity of women’s experiences.11 Here this multiplicity is understood in the sense in which Homi K. Bhabha has defined it, as a Third Space—a cultural difference, rather than cultural diversity: It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew.12

This Third Space, a liminal space, is exactly what Espinet’s text deals with—together with many other diasporic writings. Furthermore, in this chapter, I analyse the gender issues that are central in the novel: how gender, the patriarchal structures and the masculinist discourse within the heteronormative matrix have on the one hand effected the development of colonial structures but also the post-colonial reality. Most importantly, I look at how the silenced narratives of women rewrite history.

The Journey across the Black Waters How to convey a story that has not been told? How to narrate a history that has not been written? How to sing songs that one has not heard? And how to know where to go when you do not know where you are coming 9

Designations such as “Indian,” “Indo-Caribbean,” “Caribbean,” “West Indian” and so forth are in different contexts used for different identifications. In this chapter, I have contextualized the discussion especially in Trinidad and its Indian community and, consequently, use these labels; other designations stem from the sources. 10 Espinet, e-mail to author. 11 Cf. Gedalof, Against, 2; Bulbeck, Re-orienting, 6. 12 Bhabha, “Hybridity,” 99.

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from? These are questions that trouble Mona, the novel’s main character. The novel tells the story of one family and it concentrates on the matrilineal family history beginning from Mona’s great-grandmother, Gainder—with additional features from the history of her father’s family.13 Each of the three parts of the narrative begins with a brief historical section named Kala pani. These sections—typographically separated from the main text by italics—tell a story about the crossing of the Black Waters, kala pani. They summarize effectively a narrative passage from 19th-century India to contemporary Canada in the year 1995. The narrative is, however, linked to the wider, colonial history of the Caribbean and especially Trinidad. It tells how the effects of colonialism are still felt through global connections and how the unwritten histories can be found and revived. Special attention is paid to the discovery of women’s histories. When the British administration of India decreed a law banning sati, the widow-burning, the philanthropic jurisdiction left widows to face another kind of predicament. Without their deceased husbands’ support, it was especially women without a male progeny who were often rejected by their husbands’ families—and they had no recourse to their childhood homes, either. They gathered in temples for protection, to pray, sing and beg; many of them were driven, by choice or by force, into prostitution— or so it was imagined. This historical background also features in Espinet’s novel (see SB 3 and 247). Slavery was abolished in Britain in 1834, but in practice it ceased in the British Empire only in 1838, after the four-year transition period.14 It was then that such industries as sugar production were jeopardized, as they had depended on slave labour. As a solution to this imminent “problem,” a system of indentureship, sometimes called “the new slavery,” was developed.15 In Trinidad this system was based on five-year contracts and 13

It is complicated to construct a coherent outline of the novel’s characters, as they are called variously by different names and their relationships are complex. One partial and partly misconceived attempt is Patricia Clark’s “The Swinging Bridge: Family Tree of Mona Singh,” on-line. 14 Later than this, slavery was abolished in France (1848), Cuba (1860), Holland (1863), the United States (after the Civil War in 1865) and Brazil (1888), Thieme, Post-Colonial, 2; Jayaram, “Study,” on-line. 15 Thieme, Post-Colonial, 126. Similar systems were also used by other colonial powers. The first such system was adopted by the French in Réunion (1827) and Mauritius (1834); other notable systems were constructed in British Guyana and Fiji in the Caribbean, and also in East Africa and South-East Asia (see Seenarine, Recasting, on-line; Hoefte, “Review,” on-line; SADP, South, on-line). There was also opposition to indentured labour especially as a result of the obvious

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it remained effective from 1845 to 1917. During that period, 149,939 Indian indentured labourers were brought to the island.16 Labourers were also transported from other parts of the world, most notably from China, but the Indians remained the majority. Thus, by 1883 the Indian constituency of the total population was already one third, and “the steady increase of the East Indian population was reflected directly in the figures of sugar production.”17 Owing to its numeric and temporal dimensions, there is no doubt that in her book Espinet is describing the Trinidadian Indian diaspora in the sense in which Brah defines it.18 The present time of the novel is 1995. It is a time when Trinidad celebrated the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured labourers. The first arrivals came to the island on May 30, 1845 on the Fatel Rozack, which carried 231 passengers.19 As newcomers among the creoles and blacks—who already had established their status—and the Amer-Indians—who already had been reduced into a minuscule minority—the Indians were demoted to a despised position, which has remained effective even after 1962 when the island received its independence.20 After gaining independence, the racial division on the island was politicized. There were certain external factors contributing to this politicization, among them especially the strengthening race prejudices in Canada, as well as the racial policies of South Africa, the assumption of power by a white minority in Rhodesia, Britain’s immigration policy, the support given by many people in Britain to Powellism, the discrimination and injustices to which black people were subjected in the United States. 21

This world-wide political polarization is also evident in Espinet’s novel, and it functions as a sounding board for its own view against such polarization. One dimension in this view is that Espinet pays attention to the fact that, as Trinidad was gaining its independence, the substance for unification was sought from the cultures of the creoles and the freed disadvantages it caused to the status of women, and it was banned twice in 1839– 44 and 1848–51, but it continued after that well into the 1920s (Seenarine, Recasting, on-line). 16 Hoefte “Review,” on-line; Rampersad, “Jahaaji,” on-line. 17 Parry et al., Short, 175. 18 Brah, Cartographies, 182. 19 SADP, South, on-line; see also SB 278. 20 Dookeran, “East,” 80; Parry et al., Short, xiii. 21 Parry et al., Short, 276; see also SB 38–9 and 104–5.

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slaves, not the cultures of the Indians (not to mention Amer-Indians).22 This domestic political schism appears in the course of the novel, although Mona herself does not care very much about it. It is best illustrated in the letters-to the-editor that Mona’s father Da-Da, or Mackie Singh, sends and which Mona later finds when she goes through the family’s old papers. Using the pen-name “Nizam Maharaj,” Da-Da—himself very much a creole at heart—wanted to speak for the whole of the Indian community as he felt the existing policy to be discriminatory against the Indians on a racial basis (SB 69–71). The text also deconstructs the seeming homogeneity of the Indian community, for although the Trinidadian Indians are stereotypically considered to be Hindus, the pen-name that DaDa chose is an indication of the wider community, including the Indian Muslims; the Hindi word maharaj means “a ruler” and the Urdu word nizam refers specifically to the Islamic ruler of Hyderabad. Instead of the demands for national, ethnic and political unity, Espinet is offering a model that respects multiplicity and differences, and in which Mona wants to believe—despite the grim reality. The main reason for the invisibility—or downright denial—of the Trinidadian Indian history can be seen precisely in the very low status of the indentured labourers and their descendants, even though they comprise more than 40 per cent of the total population. As additional reasons for the marginalized status of the Indians as coolies Kalpana Kannabiran mentions “the religion, the alien dress, language, unfamiliar food habits, and the ill-understood ceremonies of the Hindu religion.”23 Referring both to Khal Torabully’s article “Coolitude” and the book by Marina Carter and Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora, Veronique Bragard discusses the creative intercultural memory of the Indo-Caribbean “kala pani women.”24 Espinet herself is not convinced about the usefulness of the term coolitude.25 Nevertheless, in the same way negritude, the term aims at revealing and challenging the monolithic colonial discourses. In the case of the kala pani women, this also means challenging the hegemonic masculinist discourses.26 Gainder’s fate powerfully reflects the general conditions under which people—and especially women—left India for Trinidad: the majority of those who left were from the lower castes and “most women who migrated 22

This part of the political history of Trinidad is discussed in chapter four of the novel (SB 61–78), but it is also present in chapter 13. 23 K. Kannabiran, “Crossing,” 193–4. 24 Bragard, Voyages, 12. 25 Espinet, e-mail to author. 26 Bragard, Voyages, 369.

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were either from the lower classes/castes, or marginalized sections like Brahmin widows and prostitutes.”27 Gainder is portrayed as one of the intended labourers. She was not, however, a widow as she escaped just before being married to an elderly widower. This talented thirteen-yearold singer and dancer found her way to a Vaishnavite temple in the holy city of Benares. After having hidden there for a while she heard that women were being recruited for Trinidad, or Chinidad—the land of sugar28—to work on the sugar plantations. Thus began Gainder’s journey across the Black Waters (SB 3 and 248). Although Espinet writes a fictive story, her text is based very closely on historical knowledge, at the same time reading this knowledge in a contrapuntal deconstructive manner, through gaps and erasures. Central for this contrapuntal reading is women’s history, overlooked in both colonial and post-colonial histories, and against which this emerging history is written.29 This is the grievance that Mona begins to set right in the novel as she traces the history of her family right down to Gainder.

Rewriting Rewritten Espinet is not the first Caribbean writer to write about a history effaced by colonial history. Among other writers there are, for example, the Trinidadian Sam Selvon (A Brighter Sun, 1952) as well as the Barbadian George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin, 1954) and later the Trinidadian-born V. S. Naipaul, of whom Bruce King notes: “Naipaul begins the new great tradition of writers from the former colonies telling of the post-imperial world.”30 It is exactly Naipaul whose novels Mona reads in her youth, thanks to the liberal-minded Miss Lotte and her library, where there is a corner for “West Indian Books”: “All three of V. S. Naipaul’s books were there” (SB 157).31 Mona’s father, Da-Da, despises 27

Kannabiran and Kannabiran, “Introduction,” 13. The name of Trinidad stems from the Spanish word denoting “Trinity”, whereas the Indian distortion Chinidad refers to the Hindi word chƯnƯ (Chinese), denoting white sugar (I. Lewis, Sahibs, 83). Espinet also writes briefly about the aboriginal people of Trinidad, commenting: “Once the whole island of Trinidad was called Iere, land of the hummingbird; now the Amerindian name survives only in a small village where no Amerindians are left” (SB 249). 29 Said, Culture, 51. 30 King, V. S. Naipaul, 22. 31 These books are not mentioned by title, but Naipaul’s first three novels were The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and Miguel Street (1959); Miguel Street was in fact written first but it was published only after the other two 28

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the works of the new West-Indian writers because he sees them as degrading the West Indian people: “They had one purpose only: to make us look bad.” This judgement is made especially on the grounds that all of these writers, Naipaul among others, published their works in England (SB 72). Espinet also alludes to Naipaul on another level by naming one of her characters Ralph Singh, after the main character in Naipaul’s Mimic Men (1967), which is set in Trinidad.32 That Espinet’s Ralph Singh is Mona’s uncle, who is known by the name Baddall and whom she hates deeply, underscores the way in which Espinet is not satisfied with the existing rewriting of Trinidadian history, such as that produced by Naipaul, because it does not tell the story of women. In consequence, she rewrites even this rewriting. This discontent also becomes clear in the way that Espinet concludes her poem “Hosay Night” criticizing Naipaul: “Lost to me—like elephants/And silks, the dhows of Naipaul’s/Yearning, not mine.”33 In the poem, Espinet is not interested in the elephants, silks and boats that Naipaul yearns for but rather the dilemma of home and homelessness.34 Counterhistory is also written by the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff, of whom Kaisa Ilmonen, a researcher of Caribbean literatures, notes: It could be said that Cliff rewrites the history of the colonized Caribbean and, in so doing, reveals the exclusiveness of Western historiography by focusing on the gaps and blank spots in the colonial representation of history.35

Espinet’s writing is a similar re-writing, but unlike Cliff, she does not seek for the hidden history from the African but especially, like Naipaul, from the Indian traditions and myths. From Naipaul Espinet differs in her relationship with Trinidad. In his writings on Trinidad, Naipaul has been pronouncedly sarcastic, criticizing all aspects of the island—for which he books, King, V. S. Naipaul, 10. The dates of the incidents in the story are not clearly specified, but Espinet comments that it is these books that are referred to in the text, not the more famous books A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and The Mimic Men (1967) (Espinet, e-mail to author). 32 The original name of Naipaul’s main character Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men is Ranjit Kripalsingh, but he took on the new name in school (Naipaul, Mimic, 93). Espinet herself comments that the names have nothing to do with each other (Espinet, e-mail to author). The Mimic Men is placed in fact in the fictional island state of Isabella, but its model is clearly Trinidad (King, V. S. Naipaul, 75). 33 Espinet, “Hosay,” 10. 34 Mishra, “Unfixed,” 169. 35 Ilmonen, “Rethinking,” 110–1.

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himself has been bitterly criticized.36 Espinet, on the other hand, directs her harshest critique at the patriarchal society and racial conflicts. Mona’s narrative begins—after a short framing story—with historicallinguistic problems. Words from a distant time and place begin to haunt her, old-time words calling her back to the past: “words like gloaming, lovevine, lianas, pois-doux, zaboca, mango vere, pomme-chytère, Manzanilla, calypso, j’ouvert morning, ginga, carilee, googoonie, chuntah, calhul. Patois words and Hindi words” (SB 5; italics original).37 This overlapping of time and space—the present in Canada and the past in Trinidad—structures the novel while leaving many gaps both in the family history and the characterization. At the same time it points at the hybridity of the Caribbean linguistic “creole continuum” with its “proliferation of an embodied language within the smooth code-switching”, which for its part “brings to the surface the silences and erasures of Caribbean colonial history.”38 Mona is in the middle of a film project collecting material on HaitianCanadian immigrant women, thus facing different problems concealed by history. Mona works as a researcher for another Caribbean woman, a St Lucian director, Carene, and she tries to persuade Carene to include in the film the story of Cecile Fatiman, a central figure in the 1791 Haitian revolution. Fatiman was an African-born princess who was taken as a slave to Haiti. She was the vodoun-mambo (voodoo priestess), who performed the legendary slaughter of a black pig at Bois-Caiman (Bwa Kayiman, Alligator Woods) and crowned the houngan (voodoo high priest) Boukman Dutty to lead the revolution. (SB 10–1).39 As the novel also testifies, neither Fatiman nor any other women are mentioned in the histories of the Caribbean islands, not even in the already classic Haitian history The Black Jacobins by the Trinidadian C. L. R. James (SB 10).40 36

King, V. S. Naipaul, 2–3. Of these words, pois-doux means Sweet pea (Inga laurina Willd. [Fabaceae]), zaboca means avocado (Persea americana), mango vere means Long mango (“mango vert”; Mangifera indica), pomme-chytère means Golden apple (“pomme de cythère”; Spondias cythêrea), Manzanilla refers to a long sandy beach on the eastern coast of Trinidad, j’ouvert morning is the morning of the j’ouvert carneval, ginga is a small shrimp, carilee is Bitter melon (“karela”; Momordica charantia), googoonie is a snack prepared of pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan), pepper, garlic, etc., chuntah refer to tongs used in open fire, and calhul is a ladle used especially to portion out dal (Espinet, e-mail to author). Special thanks to Ramabai Espinet for explicating the terms. 38 Cryderman, “Ghosts,” para. 7; see also Ashcroft et al., Empire, 44–50. 39 Laurent, “Ezili,” on-line; Connor, Children, on-line. 40 Cf. James, Black, 70. 37

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The most burning issue for Mona is familiar from women’s history: the invisibility of women in official historiography.41 In this she has a “role as feminist historiographer.”42 The mere thought of having “yet another woman edited out of history” makes Mona angry (SB 11). First of all, it is difficult for her to find information about Fatiman, because she is not mentioned in the basic history books. Secondly, the thought that two Caribbean women would leave Fatiman out of the film—the only woman who made a profound impact on the Haitian revolution and the birth of the first black republic— is for her a bitter issue to which she returns often in the course of the narrative (SB 61, 164, 202 and 241). In the end, Mona does not succeed in persuading Carene to take Fatiman on in the film, but she receives an impulse to make her own film about her great-grandmother Gainder. At the same time, she notices how little she had previously known about the history of Indians in Trinidad. She had learned something about slavery at school, but the teaching had focussed on the royal English history and the explorers and had barely mentioned the indentured labourers. She comes into contact with a Trinidad she had not known to exist: “An entire history that we had never been taught at school” (SB 133). The curriculum change that was carried out after Trinidad became independent did not reach Mona because she immigrated to Canada with her family in 1970. This reform, pursued by the Prime Minister “De Doctah” Hector James, aimed at making the teaching “local” so that in schools “we would learn about slavery, our own history and geography, and the names of our own flora and fauna” (SB 194; emphases added). Mona, who is just completing her schooling, is critical of the reform: “Why we have to be so limited? Local this and local that? Why we can’t have everything? De Doctah could haul his tail, you hear?” (SB 195). This sentiment is shared by many others, too, who think British education would be a greater asset for them. Mona is frustrated by her ignorance of the history of her own family and her own people (SB 276). Mona’s experience of history is matched by Espinet’s own experience, which she has described as follows: for a long period in my life this was unknown to me and unknown to most of my contemporaries. […] We didn’t grow up taking that history for granted. In fact we grew up in deep denial of it, without knowing, of course, that that was what we were doing.43

41

Cf. Espinet, “Invisible.” Donnell, Twentieth-Century, 168. 43 Espinet, “Interview,” on-line. 42

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In her novel, Espinet writes about ignorance but also about mimicry and denial of the past, as especially the more educated Indians who had converted to Christianity abandoned their background as “backward”, only to return later to their earlier traditions gradually, selectively and in the safety of their homes (SB 29). What is in question in such a denial is not only a colonial system but also the attitude absorbed by the colonised—the colonised mind which Bhabha describes as the ambivalent mimicry of the colonial discourse, a difference that is almost the same but not quite.44 Bhabha quotes Naipaul’s Mimic Men to describe this mimicry: We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown comer of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.45

Lost within the Heteronormative Matrix When Mona’s Canadianized big brother, Kello (or Kelvin), is inflicted with the complications caused by AIDS, the overall general problematics of history become interwoven with family history and its complications. Furthermore, Kello’s hidden homosexuality deconstructs the existing gender structure in questioning the heteronormative matrix. This comes through when Mona ponders Kello’s position with regard to “the politics of being gay.” This seems to be a pressing issue for the fact that Kello had lived in a heterosexual relationship, and he had wanted to keep his homosexuality hidden from his family, and especially from his children (SB 160). Mona does not know how to relate to this, especially when it is revealed in such a sudden and final way. When he is dying, Kello asks Mona to act as an intermediary and to purchase back the family house in Trinidad. Reluctantly, Mona accepts this task and simultaneously she ends up unravelling questions of family history. All through her adult life, Mona had wanted to stay unmarried and, especially, she “had been determined to reject the role of family custodian” (SB 62). When she finally manages to purchase the family property, she returns to Canada and feels her position to be awkward: Now we were all back in the same house, the ancestral lands reclaimed. I was sure a deeper meaning would unravel in time, but for now I felt as if 44

Bhabha, “Mimicry,” 85–6. Bhabha, “Mimicry,” 88; quoted from Naipaul, Mimic, 146. The writer Amit Chaudhuri, for his part, criticizes Bhabha’s view of Naipaul’s novel (Chaudhuri, “Waiting-Room,” on-line). 45

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Despite her optimistic belief that some kind of “a deeper meaning would unravel in time” concerning the land acquisition, she is at pains to understand “the men in the family and their very different responses to land” (SB 55). For Mona, the fact that on his death bed Kello wants to repossess the land, means that “he was manifesting a powerful masculine drive to possess, to control, even in the face of a terminal illness” (SB 56). This incident is an indication of an understanding of the post-colonial gendered view of land.46 It is noticeable in Kello’s special wish before his death, when, in line with the ideology of diasporic “homing desire,”47 he wants his children, in which his “seed […] exists”, to develop a relationship with Trinidad and to understand the value of the family property (SB 165–6). Another point in the novel where the issue of homosexuality emerges is directly related to the colonial heritage. It deals with the relationship of a Canadian missionary deaconess, Lotte, and another white woman, Lorna. The implicit lesbian relationship of these two women enrages Mona’s father, DaDa, who thinks bitterly that “people like Lotte and Lorna always came to backward places like here to do what they couldn’t do at home” (SB 156). This critical comment on the double standards of colonial masters (and mistresses) takes up a theme that is discussed, for example, in Audre Lorde’s autobiographical book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name which she has called a “biomythography.” In her book, Lorde discusses the specificity of the Caribbean type of love between women. The term zami originates from the island of Carriacou in Granada: “A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.”48 Carole Boyce Davies comments on the word, that zami (literally “the friends” in Caribbean French patois), love between women, as a submerged conceptual and physical reality of Caribbean life, is a critical factor in [the] reintegration of Caribbean self and its broader acceptance.49

Although Espinet does not pay particular attention to homosexuality, and while the relationship of the two white women does not fit the concept of

46

Nash, “Remapping,” 228; also Rose, Feminism, chapter 5. Brah, Cartographies, 180. 48 Lorde, Zami, 255; emphasis original. 49 Boyce Davies, Black, 117. 47

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zami, these two incidents indicate the ways in which her text opens a way to deconstruct the hegemonic patriarchal heteronormative matrix. Central in this deconstruction is Mona’s refusal ever to marry. In school she had founded a secret club with her schoolmates, the Dirty Skirts Club, which opposes subordinating practices, even though the girls’ ideals in the club are romance and love, but never marriage. Similarly, failure at school would have meant for them “early marriage and a life bound to a washtub, scrubbing dirty clothes and smell diapers” (SB 135). As an Indian, Mona is more tightly restricted by social, and especially gender, discipline than her schoolmates of other ethnic origins, or this is, anyway, what she thinks (SB 138). However, like the Dirty Skirts Club, her homosexual experiments in her youth with her cousin Sonia meant more a search for heterosexuality that deviated from the norms set by her environment rather than homosexual desire (SB 83–5). In the cases of Kello and the Dirty Skirts Club, the text of the novel seems to fail to deconstruct the heteronormative matrix.50 The women are bound to stay put and the homosexuals to die.

Gainder’s Songs and the Silencing of Women In her book, Lorde underlines the importance of renaming, of spelling her name anew. Similarly, in The Swinging Bridge names play an important role. Many of the characters have Christian names, but the names used for them are mostly nicknames.51 When Mona remembers having heard that this practice is based on expelling evil spirits, her Trinidadian younger cousin Bess comments: “Sounds like an African thing. My God, Mona, so much crossover in this place, and still so much war about two nations this and that” (SB 279). Here the interpretation of this naming practice is an indication of recognition of hybrid identity rather than binary opposition. In this, Espinet’s novel differs from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1965), which is a reinterpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel Jane Eyre (1847). In Rhys’s text, Rochester renames the white creole woman: “[H]e wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass.”52 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak comments on this colonial renaming as follows: 50

Cf. Donnell, Twentieth-Century, 169. This feature is common in Indian (diasporic) literatures, for example in Lahiri’s Namesake, 25–9 (see also M. Sen, “Names,” 9–10). 52 Rhys, Wide, 147. 51

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In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism.53

In many places, Espinet writes about another kind of naming processes that are connected to the multiplicity and heterogeneity of Trinidadian cultures, but in Gainder’s case the imperialist way of renaming emerges most strongly. When after Kello’s death Mona talks to her mother, Muddie (or Myrtle), about her difficulties, she tells also about the film project and how much it troubled her that “women’s actions were so often erased” (SB 251). At this point she becomes aware that no one in her family had told her about her great-grandmother. She did not even know her name. When Mona asks Muddie about her, she gives a laconic answer: She was a woman they called Gainder. She took on the name Beharry, but it wasn’t her real name. […] She didn’t have a real name. I don’t even know whether Gainder was her first name. We don’t know too much about her. She was a low-class kind of person. (SB 251)54

The ambivalence of Gainder’s name is directly linked with the colonial history of indentured labourers mentioned earlier. The fact that she is talked about as “a low-class kind of person,” compared to the beggar woman Baboonie, who is thought to be a prostitute, also links her to the class and gender structures, and they are both oppressed by the hierarchy embedded in these structures. Mona’s initial interest in Cecile Fatiman is transformed into an interest in Gainder. The rest of the novel tells about the search for information on Gainder’s person and history. Mona is especially interested in the songs that Muddie says Gainder used to sing until her husband Joshua forbade her ever again to sing or dance in public. This prohibition freezes Gainder’s heart (SB 249). Muddie tells Mona that Gainder used to sing the Ramayana not in the usual version but “the kind that village women would sing” (SB 251). Although Muddie had learned these songs as a child, she could remember them only in fragments, and furthermore she could not 53

Spivak, “Three,” 250. Gainder (Hindi genda) refers to the yellow marigold flower (Tegetes erecta), which is much used in Hindu ceremonies (SB 262). Beharry is an English version of Bihari, someone from Bihar (SB 293).

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say what the Hindi texts meant. Because grandfather Jamesie had forbidden these songs, as well as calypsos, in their home, Muddie thinks the texts were at least partly “questionable” (SB 252). In her search for the lost history, Mona is helped by the family history once compiled by her aunt Alice, as well as by Bess, who still lives in Grandmother Lily’s house. The history is pronouncedly quiet about Gainder, about whom there are only three sentences at the end of the last page: “Lily’s mother was named Gainder. She came from India in the nineteenth century. She died in childbirth” (SB 271; italics original). When she examines the folder containing the history, Mona notices the remains of torn pages, which makes her suspect that grandfather Jamesie had perhaps torn out Gainder’s songs to censor the texts that he had deemed suspicious. Bess is concerned about the increase of violence especially against women in Trinidad in the mid-1990s. In Trinidad in the mid-1990s there was a real concern about violence against women, especially wives, and the organization Women Working for Social Progress staged campaigns to stimulate cooperation between the different ethnic communities to oppose the growing violence.55 However, Mona—who remembers all the violence she had seen and experienced—is not convinced that the phenomenon had in fact strengthened. She had seen so much violence around her against women that it causes conflicts within her.56 The stereotypical view of Indian men as “wife beaters” and representatives of a strong traditional patriarchy is based both on sacred Hindu texts and superficial ideas about the Indians, as well as on the puritanical (colonial) Victorian values that Indians themselves had adopted through colonial education.57 The imbalance among indentured labourers between the number of men and women soon led to problems: violence increased, the “price” of unmarried, marriageable girls rose even higher than in India, and therefore the arkatiyas, middlemen, tried actively to find suitable women for indentureship; and as a result of the new sati laws in India, there were plenty of widowed women “available” (SB 248).58 Thus all this violence against women, and such attempts at silencing them as those that Jamesie and Joshua performed, they all contributed to the fact that Mona wanted never to marry. The name of the novel The Swinging Bridge refers to a further incident that had confirmed her conviction. A boy named Kenny La Fortune mocks her by calling her a country girl in order to put her in her place. He also provokes her to walk 55

K. Kannabiran, “Crossing,” 204. See Chapter nine for a discussion of violence in Espinet’s novel. 57 Rampersad, “Jahaaji,” on-line; Naidu, “Indian,” on-line. 58 Rampersad, “Jahaaji,” on-line; Naidu, “Indian,” on-line. 56

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the swinging bridge over the river near Cousin Sonia’s house. When Mona complies with the summons, Kenny begins to swing the bridge with his friends. Although Mona manages to pass the test and crosses the bridge, she is enraged by the treachery and her interpretation of it is that “it was his little mannish attitude, as if he was sure that he was better than I was and would always be” (SB 87). Through this experience Mona learns how important it is in life to be careful, not to swing (SB 137). Behind all this patriarchal suppression and violence evident in the Indian community was the widely shared idea that Indian girls were hot hot from small—no wonder they had to marry them off as children, and no wonder wife beating and chopping was so common among those people. They were not civilized or “creolized” enough. (SB 144–5)

These imaginary ideas, ideological hierarchies and real sufferings form Mona’s understanding early in her life, and she begins to dedicate her time for her escape. This happens on a specific day at the age of eleven—on “the day I escaped rape and probably murder” (SB 40).59 Thus, Mona has quite a burden to bear when she returns to Trinidad on her new mission, to find Gainder’s songs: “I would search for her songs until I found them” (SB 262). When she notices that pages have been torn out of the family history, she is enraged and feels this as Jamesie’s “private revenge” (SB 271). What comes to her rescue, then, are Lily’s shop books, soft-covered notebooks in which she had marked every item that the family had purchased from the local shop on credit. What is more important than these shopping notes are the notes Lily had written at the end of each of these eighteen notebooks. These pages without shopping notes in each of the notebooks contain diary entries (SB 271–3). By combining the information from Lily’s notes, Mona is finally able to draw up Gainder’s story (SB 273–4). From the marginal notes of everyday life, recorded in secret in an economic, housekeeping context—a context grandfather Jamesie would not have even given a glance—emerges an unpretentious life story. Both the prohibition on performing that Jamesie had instituted for Gainder and Lily’s secret notebook diaries emphasize the patriarchal division between the private and public spheres that emerges in the novel. In this division, home is seen as private and the outside world as public, and in patriarchal thinking home is seen as

59 Naipaul’s Ralph Singh is similarly obsessed with the idea of escaping Isabella (Naipaul, Mimic, 145).

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women’s sphere and the public as men’s sphere.60 That the novel presents the notebooks as Lily’s sanctuary shows, however, that the dominant hegemonic structure is not without flaws and gaps, but also that it always already contains sites for resistance and counteraction. What is even more important for at least Mona is to find Gainder’s songs, which she had first heard of from her own mother. Since her childhood, Mona had liked calypsos a lot, and this new musical discovery gives her new enthusiasm, even a new direction for her life: she was “alive again” (SB 277). Glancing through Lily’s notes, Mona wishes hard to find the songs. When she finally does find some texts in Hindi that she thinks may be the songs, she hopes even harder that they would not be bhajans, religious songs, and she looks for the Hindi word that she knows: Esu, Jesus. She does not find the word, and she is convinced that the songs really are Gainder’s songs. This is confirmed when Bess takes Mona to a rand that she knows. This woman, Chandroutie, is a Ramayana singer, and with her knowledge of Hindi she interprets the songs for them. The fact that the Hindi term rand/randi means both a widow and a prostitute is a further indication of the poor status of widows in India and diasporic Indian communities.61 Furthermore, this ambiguity is emphasized by Bess’s shunning reply for Mona’s question about the meaning of rand: “Oh, just a lady living alone down the road” (SB 276).62 However, Bess is enthusiastic about the matter and connects the songs with the recent revival of consciousness about the existence of the Indian community on the island: “We are just beginning to be known to the general population, Mona. So much about us is unknown to them.” Mona, for her part, is not so sure about the positive impact and thinks that not even the Indians know much about themselves and their own history (SB 277).

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Blunt and Rose, “Introduction,” 2. Gangoli, Silence, 14n30; Haram, “Muslim,” on-line. 62 As an indication of the ambiguity of names, one can consider an incident in Trinidad in 2000, in which a woman named Chandroutie was sentenced to death with her husband for the murder of their child. The woman was, however, thought to have been abused by her husband and thus not responsible for the deed. (Cudjoe, “Chandroutie’s,” on-line, Cudjoe, “In Chandroutie’s,” on-line.) Another similar case is related to the name of Etwaria, who was the “bamboo wife” of DaDa’s father Pappy. Seenarine mentions a case in the 1880s when the almost 60year-old husband of 16-year-old Etwarea kills her by chopping off her arm with a cutlass, the most typical symbol of Indian family violence (Seenarine, Recasting, on-line). 61

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The Voice Gets Stronger Gradually Mona manages to compile a picture of the woman named Gainder. She even manages to get the rand Chandroutie to sing the songs on tape. The songs prove to be extremely important for Mona: “These songs were my bounty, swinging open a doorway into another world, returning across the kala pani to the India the girl Gainder had left, alone” (SB 293). This newly-found image of Gainder is as valuable as gold for her. In an imitation of postponed “dowry,” she considers it as “gold that would make sense of my own life,” as she plans to make a film of her own about Gainder and her crossing of the kala pani (SB 294). Just as the songs swing “open a doorway into another world,” the title of the novel similarly reflects the variously repeated journeys across multiple waters, and the swinging bridge develops into a metaphor of diasporic dislocation: always providing connections, never itself connecting—always vulnerable, never steady. Furthermore, Gainder’s songs are important because they are not merely songs that she sang, but she wrote them, too. Despite all the attempts at suppression, one of the songs had even existed as a popular hit. Mona translates the songs into English, and Bess agrees to exhibit them in a Divali exhibition, while Bess’s boyfriend Rajesh, too, takes part in the endeavour by painting canvases for their display. Mona’s plans to present Gainder’s life story are, however, frustrated by the leaders of the Indian community. Bess comments on this that the grand picture is still what everybody wants. The righteous Indian family, intact, coming across the kala pani together. Like the way the migration is presented today. Not this story. Not a journey of young widows looking for a new life. Wife-murder? Beatings? You must be mad, they would say. (SB 297)

A story about an unmarried woman coming to Trinidad and the violence she experienced would not be suitable for the emerging consciousness of the Indian diasporic community. As it is, the post-colonial situation has not changed the demand for patriarchal uniformity to “force women down on their knees” (SB 297). Embittered, Mona realizes once more that it is very hard to get women’s voices heard. She tells Bess about her own “doubts that life was changing for women” (SB 301)—because it is not. And Bess is worried about the new consciousness of Indianness as parochial: “It’s Indian time now, Mona, everybody says that. […] Indian pride is commendable, but

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hatred of others is not” (SB 300). Amidst all these doubts, Mona decides to continue on the path she had chosen with her film, for, after all, Gainder sang these songs and Grandma Lil hid them for safekeeping in the back of her shop books. Lily recorded them for her daughters, for my cousin Bess, for my sister Babsie, for me, for all the women to come, for my film that would tell Gainder’s story. (SB 298)

The novel ends with Mona returning to Canada. On her return, she thinks: “Like any other migrant navigating new terrain, I bring my own beat to the land around me” (SB 305).63 For Mona, this rhythm is the rhythm of the dub of her childhood, the Caroni Dub. Gainder sang in secret, despite her husband’s prohibition of her singing, and she also loved in secret a man who had saved her life on the way across the kala pani. This secret of Gainder’s is connected in Mona’s mind to the Caroni dub, and the novel ends with this hybrid music in both a doubtful and also a hopeful mood: Caroni Dub is the beat I hear, behind the songs that my great-grandmother Gainder wrote, telling the story of her secret life, her life, her love, locked in a cell carved out of a rocky outcropping on the island of St. Helena, off the coast of Africa. (SB 306)

It is significant that it is specifically Caroni Dub that is the beat Mona hears in Gainder’s songs.64 It functions as a metonym for the foregrounding of speech, speaking, voice and—most significantly— speaking over. It is a telling marker of a minority discourse challenging the colonial structures of naming, power and subjugation. It speaks for the potentiality of post-colonial counterdiscourse and “the freedom to engage

63 Mona’s favourite music—together with hymns—are the calypsos, the Caribbean creole music. Caroni Dub, albeit fictional, is one of such creole songs, but it also refers to Indian chutney music, an example of which is Sundar Popo’s popular song “Caroni Gyal” from the early 1970s (Saywack, “Caroni,” on-line). As a name, Caroni refers to places in Trinidad: it is the name of the central plateau but also of a village, a county, and a river flowing into the Caroni Swamp at the south east side of Port of Spain. There is also Caroni River in Venezuela that flows into the sea near Trinidad. 64 Furthermore, in connection with Mona’s liking of calypso, Meredith M. Gadsby notes that “calypso is originally a women’s song,” and that “[w]omen’s lyrics also openly challenge patriarchal attitudes toward women” (Gadsby, Sucking, 61 and 65, respectively).

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with that [Indian-Caribbean women’s] history, to know its traumas, to celebrate its triumphs and to negotiate its telling.”65 In her novel, Espinet strongly brings out ideas connected with diasporic experiences: disconnectedness, nostalgia for roots, the conflict between past and present, uncertainty, intracommunal tensions, and the colonial heritage. Here the experiences of diasporic women speak of separation from both the hegemonic and the marginalized cultures, making the uncertainty about identity even more wounding. The book emphasizes the ways in which gender has influenced the construction of colonial structures for example through the history of indentured labour, but also the post-colonial reality within the independent Trinidad. By studying the matrilineal history, one can find gaps and erasures in the colonial history, and these show that the patriarchal structure and masculinist discourse—within the existing heteronormative matrix—have dominated in both the colonial and the post-colonial situations by means of suppression and outright violence. Through her search, Mona finds Gainder’s songs and they bring out women’s stories, especially the silences stories of diasporic women. With them, the novel rewrites history, constructing a model that aims at being more respectful of differences, hybridity, heterogeneity and at avoiding simplistic binarisms and juxtapositions of people, “races”, genders, religions, classes and generations. The songs form a swinging bridge between the past and the present and they challenge established categories and power structures.

65

Donnell, Twentieth-Century, 171.

CHAPTER FIVE SHUFFLING THE CULTURAL MATRICES: KIRIN NARAYAN’S NOVEL LOVE, STARS AND ALL THAT

Cultural Authenticity In post-colonial criticism, it is often the cultural artefacts of the centre and their representation of the “other” that are analysed in view of critical theory to expose underlying hegemonic ideological presuppositions. From an analytical point of view, it is interesting also to know what happens when the direction of articulation is reversed and texts from the margins and their questioning of identity and representational strategies become the topic of analysis. In this chapter, I engage with a close textual analysis of Kirin Narayan’s novel Love, Stars and All That (1994).1 My aim is to look at the representation of Eastern (Indian) and Western (US) cultures in a text by a diasporic Indian-American writer. By choosing to discuss a diasporic story about cultural contact and cultural difference, I want to highlight the rhetorical strategies that are used to represent other cultures. The writer of the novel is also an established anthropologist and the novel plays— explicitly as well as implicitly—with cultural and intercultural representations in the academic context. The questions analysed in the chapter are: How do immigrant people negotiate and represent their cultural space? How do issues of authenticity emerge in these representations? How do these representations relate to the multicultural, multiethnic realities of the United States? At the beginning of Narayan’s novel, the twenty-three-year-old Gita Das has come to the United States from Bombay. She has won a scholarship, and is studying at Berkeley, California. The new situation

1

Kirin Narayan, Love, Stars and All That (1994). Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by LS.

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compels Gita to negotiate her cultural space. Eighteen months earlier in India, the family astrologer had made a prediction for her: Gita didn’t know the Hindu calendar beyond the date that Ganesha Kaka, the astrologer, had authoritatively declared. To say Chaitra 2040 instead of March 1984 that came far more readily to her lips was to claim a cultural authenticity that she knew was fake. But in America, it seemed the only thing that would shield her difference, protect her boundaries, so she could do the work she had taken on in coming here: to be alone and to study. (LS 5; emphases added)

Right from the start, the novel is explicitly an inquiry into cultural authenticity, a story about the meeting of cultures, and a problematization of identity. When Indian Gita in the previous quotation explains her behaviour to her American roommate Bet, she uses a cultural code that she feels would “shield her difference, protect her boundaries.” The issue Gita and Bet are debating is dating. Bet regards Gita’s abstinence from dating as abnormal. Bet’s social and moral standards differ from Gita’s, which is illustrated in her definition of what is normal: “Normal is hot-blooded, […n]ormal is interest in things like men and sex” (LS 4; emphasis added). Gita’s reply on the other hand is that she need not waste time dating, for the astrologer had said to her that “in Chaitra twenty-fourty I’ll meet the right man” (LS 4).2 Bet considers this explanation strange and exotic, and in an act of protecting her own boundaries she ironically asks Gita: “Twenty forty? Is this some sort of pension plan or one of those next lives you people believe in?” (LS 4; first emphasis original). There is a collision of cultures in their exchange. The normal Bet expects is not a shared value—and she underscores this by talking about “you people” when referring, somewhat condescendingly, to the Hindu belief in reincarnation. Gita however hangs on to her own norms, even if she is aware that the position of “cultural authenticity” that she claims is a “fake” one. With this juxtapositioning of the different set of norms, it becomes clear that the question of norms concerning cultural identity is problematic in the novel. In the text this problematization is made explicit in two ways: there is first of all the narrative in which this questioning begins as Gita struggles with her identity in her new diasporic position, balancing between different norms and expectations.

2

In the Hindu calendar, Chaitra is the first month of the year (in March–April), heralding the coming of spring. The colourful Holi festival is celebrated on its eve (I. Lewis, Sahibs, 81).

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Secondly, there is the metanarrative level where the questioning itself is placed under scrutiny. The metanarrative element is present throughout the story and begins with the mentioning of the materials Gita studies: “She was reading an interesting article about how the past is known only through the narrative forms that shape it” (LS 4). The reference here is to the metahistorical theory that was still relatively new in the mid-1980s when Hayden White had published his book Tropics of Discourse (1978). There he proposed a narrative understanding of historiography: In general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.3

Appropriately, the novel probes the question of narrativity. Together with this implication of metahistory, the text explicitly brings forth many other theoretical discourses: deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, neo-Marxist literary criticism, feminism, and especially colonial or postcolonial theory. The theories are introduced together with the names of a host of theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, JeanPaul Sartre, Betty Friedan, Amilcar Cabral, Franz Fanon and Edward W. Said. The text implies an acute awareness of critical theory that informs Gita’s passage in the United States and more will be said on this later. The critical attribute both compels and enables Gita to negotiate her identity. In this process, Gita goes through several phases and levels of identification in her new host country. As Ganesha Kaka had predicted, Gita does eventually find a man in Chaitra 2040, or March 1984, although not the one she had first imagined. Eventually, she gets involved with Norvin Weinstein, a professor at her university. Having begun with Gita’s move to the United States, it is in her relationship with Norvin that her process of transformation really accelerates. Norvin had served in Peace Corps in Nasik, Maharashtra in 1966–68 and reflects on his experiences of India in his conversations with Gita.4 Despite his education and training—and his consequent inherent claim for authority—as a professional interpreter of cultures, Norvin ironically displays a tremendous tendency to oversimplification and

3

White, “Historical,” 82. See also White, Metahistory. The Peace Corps is a US volunteer organization that has members working all over the world (see “Peace,” on-line).

4

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homogenization of other cultures. In due course, Gita counters Norvin’s views. She vouches for diversity and contextuality. Gita first challenges Norvin when he talks about Gita’s hair, commenting: “I never did understand why Indian women with that fabulous thick hair always went in for braids” (LS 54). In her response, Gita both defends the convenience of the practice and further contests the whole idea Norvin has about the hair of Indian women: Nasik is not all of India. So many other communities, like Christians or Parsis, wear their hair short. And even among Hindus and all, since that film actress Sadhana bobbed her hair, short hair became known as a Sadhana cut. If you go now, you’ll see a lot of women with short hair. (LS 54; emphases added)5

The feature Norvin had been talking about, the way Indian women wear their hair, is deconstructed by Gita, who comments that “Nasik is not all of India.” She gives a more contextualized and diversified illustration of the situation by referring to “many other communities.” Furthermore, she sees heterogeneity also within the majority community: “even among Hindus.” Where Norvin saw a shared constant practice, Gita sees diverse customs. This stage of realisation of diversity is important in the development of Gita’s critical thinking. Another explicit moment for Gita’s deeper understanding of cultural identity to emerge is when Norvin celebrates the idea of being a Parsi.6 Norvin holds a poststructuralist idea of Parsi, considering it “a floating

5

The “Sadhana cut” refers to one of the trend-setting Bollywood actors of the 1960s, Sadhana Shivdasani (born 1941), and the Hindi film Hum Dono (1961) which made this particular haircut style famous. Rather than short hair, a Sadhana cut meant a fringe cut covering the forehead. See Dwyer and Patel, Cinema, 97. 6 The Parsi are a religious minority in the Indian subcontinent. This Zoroastrian community was forced to move from their original home in Iran after Islamic expansion. There is an especially influential Parsi community in Mumbai. Among prominent Parsis one could mention the family of Indian industrialists, the Tatas, the late Zanzibari rock singer Freddie Mercury, and the diasporic post-colonial critic Homi K. Bhabha. Notable literary Parsi figures include Rohinton Mistry, Bapsi Sidhwa, Dina Mehta, Firdaus Kanga, Keki Daruwalla and Boman Desai, and more recently Ardashir Vakil, Meher Pestonji, Sohrab Homi Fracis, and Farishta Murzban Dinshaw (see Kapadia et al., Parsi). John Thieme notes about the Parsis that “[t]heir significance in Indian society has far exceeded their small numbers” and that they “are among the most Westernized of Indian communities” (Thieme, Post-Colonial, 205).

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signifier” and “a state of mind” (LS 72). Gita disagrees with him emphatically by saying: They are Zoroastrians […]. They have a history. They might be a small minority in India, but with so many talents they’re famous all over the country. There are people with names you can immediately recognize as Parsi in science, industry, law, music. This isn’t just an abstract category you can switch around because you feel like it. (LS 72; emphases added)

If earlier Gita’s contention was based on cultural diversity, here she argues with Norvin about correct contextual representation of the Parsis. As Gita observes, the Parsis “have a history” that is distinct and cannot be reduced to a mere “abstract category.” In general, as the incidents concerning Indian women’s hair and the cultural meaning of being Parsi suggest, already as an academic novice in cultural theory, Gita seems to be more perceptive of cultural difference than Norvin with his long experience and expertise. The confrontation arises from the contact between two different cultures, and as Gita’s comments to Norvin indicate, it is informed by a pedagogical drive. Even if Gita does not simply adopt the position of a superior commentator, there are, however, several problems in her position as well.

Representations of Different Realities No matter how perceptive Gita might be, it is not easy for her to overcome her original position of dichotomizing the United States and India: the one a “big lonely place” and the other a space of happiness where one would “understand everything and be content ever after” (LS 304). For a long time her gravitational centre continues to be India. But it is not a real India anymore; it is a nostalgic, unchanging world. In India, for her, “[e]verything follows the same old routines” (LS 228). When Gita goes on a visit to India, her aunt Saroj Shah tries to set her up with computer scientist Ajay. Together, Saroj and Ajay assure her that India is not such an a-historical, timeless, unchanging relic of the past, but that even there “everything’s changing all the time” (LS 228). Furthermore, with this constant change, Ajay—another immigrant to the United States—feels resentment and he comments: “America or India, things were always changing, changing, sweeping close connections out of your life” (LS 229). Thus, in the diasporic situation, Gita is also gradually able to perceive India in terms of dynamic change rather than nostalgic inertia. In the course of her discoveries towards the end of the novel, Gita realizes what her current lover Firoze sums up for her as follows: “everything is

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mixed up, every horizon opens onto another even more complicated one, and no solution is ever final” (LS 304). Both India and the United States are represented in the novel in ways that closely match the discussion of diasporic identity. There is first the narrative level switching back and forth, with settings in the United States and India. While India for Gita is primarily a source of such problems as discussed before, it is also a resource of pleasure: “It made her so happy to be connecting Bombay to Berkeley” (LS 73). Secondly, there is the textual level, with words, phrases, references and allusions that point specifically to either of the cultures. That Indian terms such as namaste, mali, jori, Kamasutra or nimbu pani are italicized and sometimes explained—“A jori, a pair” (LS 5)—shows the direction of cultural traffic that the novel represents: from the margin to the centre.7 This seems to cater for, as Sheng-mei Ma has argued, for “an American market eager for politically correct yet exotic voices drawn from Orientalism.”8 As the text is, however, self-conscious about such tendencies, it functions at the same time as a critique of such exoticizing discourse. Thirdly, there is the metanarrative level, on which India and the United States are a topic of discourse and commentary. The novel is metafictionally aware of this representational position. For example, Gita’s struggle with her traditional upbringing and exposure to the way of living in the United States—especially with regard to sexuality—provoke Gita to think: “She knew she was being boring: if she were a character in a book, for example, wouldn’t this foot-dragging, this lack of exciting action get on a reader’s nerves?” (LS 137). This is a singular point in the text wherever such explicit distancing is set up. There are other instances, however, where such commentary is presented more implicitly and subtly. One such instance of implicit distancing is when Gita is looking at a map when she is planning a trip to India. In post-colonial theory in general, maps have been a special topic of analysis because of their power of representation. For example, John Fiske has discussed the importance of understanding this representational effect, commenting that “unless we can control the world discursively by maps we cannot control it militarily or economically.”9 Gita encounters this power in face of one specific 7

One common aspect in Indian diasporic creative and critical writing is the problematization of the use of English (see Rushdie, “Empire,” 8). In Narayan’s novel, however, the language question is marginal, but at the beginning Gita is ashamed to confess to Norvin that she does not know Marathi, whereas he has picked up some elementary skills (LS 63 and 73). 8 Ma, Immigrant, 106. 9 Fiske, “Act,” 161.

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world map. She looks at the map of the world where the United States is projected in the middle and India is split in two on both edges of the map, as the following quotation shows: In this [map], the United States displaced crested England at the center. Golden and spacious, land of the free, the United States was flanked by two broad oceans. Canada offered salutations, and South America bowed to her feet. Bulky handmaidens, Asia, Africa, and Europe seemed to be bending toward her. India was split between two edges of the map. It was amputated at Assam on the side that should have comfortably cradled Bangladesh; sliced off at Punjab on the left. Trying to trace her forthcoming winter travel between Delhi and Bombay, Gita found that she had to jump back and forth between two incomplete Indias. (LS 202; emphasis added)

Focusing in this way on the United States, the map displays a distorted, cracked view of the world with “two incomplete Indias.” This is not a more deformed world than a one with, for example, Europe at the centre, but it is certainly a view of the world, a representation of a particular point of view through a selected projection. Similarly Ajay, who becomes disillusioned with the marriage plans with Gita, senses this distortion: he saw his universe cracking. The continents were disintegrating into many Indias and Americas. People were falling apart into many selves. […] Being Indians in America wasn’t enough to make a choice. (LS 293– 4)

He had thought it would make a difference to marry an Indian girl that it would be a solution to the fear of disintegration. Gita, however, proves to be “too free” in her ways for his liking, too forward for a girl raised in India. Like Gita—and to some extent Firoze—Ajay too realizes that the mere fact of being an Indian is not enough to create a gravitational force of identification which would encompass the existing differences, discrepancies and distortions.

The Case of the Missing n In America, Gita had been made into a mystic, exotic, exoticized representative of another culture in the sense that Sheng-Mei Ma defines the alleged American yearning for authentic exotic voices.10 This takes on essentializing forms, too, as the earlier case of the hair indicates. 10

Ma, Immigrant, 106.

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Nevertheless, the exoticism does not function only on the level of her hair but extends to the colour of the skin: “In America, her dark complexion had taken on a touch of mystery, even for herself” (LS 102). This exoticizing, racialist feature is not, however, described as a predominantly American one. Gita is also aware of “how colour conscious people could be in India” (LS 108). She herself displays some trait of this colour consciousness, too. It is in her consciousness of her own skin, as in the passage just quoted, and in her relation to her environment. When she is waiting for her predicted “March Man” to appear and sees a potential one her reaction is that “this man was probably an Arab or Latin American or Italian or something. It was not always easy to tell with people of that complexion” (LS 15). The blanket homogenization that Gita makes serves as an ironic counter-commentary to the hegemonic Eurocentric discourse of Orientalism.11 At the same time, however, it retains the troubled racist connotations that it carries. Gita’s journey in mid-1980s US academia takes the young Indian woman first to Berkeley as a student, then as a research assistant to Norvin, and after their divorce, as a budding academic (as well as poet) to Whitney, Vermont. The western and eastern coasts of the United States are contrasted strongly through the choice of the place where Gita begins her independent university career. She compares the overwhelming whiteness of Whitney to the colourfulness of California: “She had never felt so dark in Berkeley” (LS 171). Gita even sounds a hilarious note in a small clandestine sign of rebellion on that otherwise seemingly monocultural, suffocating Vermont campus: [T]here was a certain truth to defacement of the n in the Whitney sign by the main gate. No matter how often campus authorities repainted that sign, or how often the small white campus security car patrolled past, that n continued to be missing. (LS 171)

Whitney without the n turns into Whitey. As the most unlikely of places, it becomes the place in which Gita finds her new identity. Without connections, without people she knows, “stripped of all her stories,” with only the “single ethnic shelf at the health food store” to find familiar food stuffs on, and “no hope of tuning in to a raga on the radio” (LS 171), Gita can no longer rest on the once so familiar ground and she is forced to find something else instead. When Gita was doing research for Norvin on American images of India, she had found that these “are actually building on ones deriving 11

See Said, Orientalism, 55–7.

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from a colonial interaction in which descriptions of lazy natives and misguided practices served to justify domination and conversion efforts” (LS 138) and, as Norvin concludes, “they become caricatures by the time they reach here” (LS 138). It is exactly such caricature-like representations of the “other” that Narayan’s novel seems to be challenging. This challenge is not an attempt at censorship, as can be seen in the scene where Gita’s Aunt Saroj thinks about an incident around a Peter Sellers film which the Indian government had wanted to ban owing to the false image it gave of Indians.12 To Saroj, such representation did not constitute a threat, for as she says: “all of us saw it and laughed” (LS 285; emphasis original). Although there are some scenes that might seem like caricatures, tending to serve the purposes of exoticizing marketing purposes—such as the grocer in Whitney asking Gita “What tribe?” when she says she is Indian (LS 204), or Gita never being “sure whether people in California only said ‘Holy cow’ to Indians” (LS 22)—, in general, Narayan’s novel can be seen rather as a genuine attempt at more thoughtful interaction than regular mainstream stories. The novel contrasts the American views of exotic Indians with Indian views of the United States feature. These views frequently refer or allude to feminism, thus working towards an argument for the advancement of the status of women, especially in India. In a telephone conversation with Aunt Saroj about Gita’s divorce, Saroj’s friend Kalpana Vats comments sarcastically: Foreign marriages […]. Out there it always happens, this divorce. […] But Hindu marriages, they are sacred […]. Not like for these minority types, small castes, foreigners, and all. Hindus recognize the meaning of dharma. Wife must stay with husband, whether he is rich or poor, good or bad. (LS 169; emphasis original)

But Aunt Saroj does not share this idealized position on Hindu marriages. She is in favour of alternatives and counters Kalpana: Of course that’s the standard line, but we don’t have to swallow it. Personally, I’m all for divorce. It’s wonderful when people are so brave as to see they have emotions, and then do something about it. (LS 169; emphasis original)

12

This alludes to the 1968 Blake Edwards film The Party in which Sellers performs the part of a certain Hrundi V. Bakshi, a very clumsy and accident-prone actor, reminiscent of the latter-day Rowan Atkinson.

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In the Indian environment Saroj’s position seems to be out of place. It becomes understandable when we know that she herself had been castigated in her life, having been a Communist and not bearing a child. Thus speaking of bravery in relation to divorce reads also as an affirmation of her own position. Later on, in a letter to Gita she takes this stand further: “All the good stories for women don’t have to be about marriage and motherhood” (LS 301). Here once more Narayan captures powerfully the critical edge of postcolonial writing. By drawing our attention to the counterhistorical writing by women, her novel expresses what Bhabha describes as “a specifically feminist textuality of political subversion”13 and evokes the idea of “feminization of narrative.”14 In this capacity, Narayan’s novel is giving voice to the diasporic experiences of immigrant South Asian women. The radicalism of this position in the context of the United States arises from the inevitable combining of seemingly incoherent cultural matrices in a way that diasporic people are compelled to engage in.

Impossible Collage The position of Indians who go to the United States to study is a topic much written about in recent fiction and criticism. In this, Narayan’s novel is no exception. Whether it is Gita or Firoze, or Saroj or Ganeshan, the astrologer, all discuss the dilemmas of the diasporic immigrant and the post-colonial intellectual. Until quite recently, South Asian immigration to the United States has been relatively scarce and compared to, for example, the Chinese, there have not been many predominantly Indian communities, which has resulted in a tendency to homogenize people from different backgrounds as “South Asian.” But what is an Indian immigrant in the United States, then, when one is “mixed up” like Firoze and Gita: an Indian, a South Asian, a Third World citizen, an Indo-American, an Asian-American of Indian origin? Firoze defines this predicament as especially one concerning communication: “Being at the crossroads of all these cultures it becomes harder and harder to find anyone who remotely understands” (LS 181). One common aspect in Indian diasporic creative and critical writing related to the problems of understanding is to problematize the use of English. Salman Rushdie has been one of the most vocal writers on this topic, arguing for the need for diasporic people to “conquer English” and 13 14

Bhabha, “Hybridity,” 103. Kuortti, Fictions, 96.

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remake it “for our own purposes.”15 This cultural and political stance bespeaks of agency rather than colonial mimicry. The colonial centre is deprived of its central position on the linguistic stage. As a consequence of this baring of hegemonic position, the old “home” cannot be assigned such a position either. In her memoir Fault Lines, the poet and novelist Meena Alexander has elaborated on the loss of the past: “Am I American now I have lost my shining picture? Now I have no home in the old way? Is America this terrible multiplicity at the heart?”16 Here Alexander questions the prediction of diasporic identity on the loss of roots, the “home in the old way.” Following Rushdie’s cue, Alexander furthermore calls for a decolonization of American English: There is a violence in the very language, American English, that we have to face, even as we work to make it ours, decolonize it so that it will express the truth of bodies beaten and banned. After all, for such as we are the territories are not free.17

While Alexander makes a call for resistance to the hegemonic language practice, there is also a recognition of its double bind. In Narayan’s novel, too, there are instances where this language aspect comes up. In the beginning Gita is ashamed to confess to Norvin that she does not know Marathi whereas he has picked up some elementary skills (LS 63 and 73). This obviously presents a problem for claims of authenticity, which are, after all, at the core of Gita’s questions about identity. In another scene, Firoze expresses the language dilemma forcefully: I guess I have the regular background of any elite person in a previously colonized society. I’m more Western than Indian. I think in English. I’m estranged from traditions that should be mine. (LS 64–5)

Firoze’s comment is not surprising, for he is a serious thinker, problematizing and questioning received positions. He is very strict in his post-colonial critique and rejoices over “kicking out Coca-Cola from India” (LS 19).18 He is also very conscious about the diasporic position of 15

Rushdie, “Imaginary,” 17. Alexander, Fault, 201. 17 Alexander, Fault, 199. 18 This refers to the expulsion of the brand from India in 1977 by the socialist Minister of Industries, George Fernandes. Earlier, in 1960, Arthur Koestler had coined the term “coca-colonization” to describe the globalizing tendencies of 16

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being in-between cultures, with the English language as the focal point, as he ponders when thinking of Gita: Both of us eating fake Indian food in Berkeley, California, and we’re not speaking Farsi or Gujarati or Bengali or Punjabi or Hindi but English to each other. I mean, just think about it for a minute. (LS 76; italics and emphasis original)

The colonial irony of the apparent post-colonial status of English is not lost on Firoze and other characters. Later on in his thoughts Firoze comes to a conclusion concerning the reasons why people do not return to India or wherever they came from to study in Europe or the United States: “I see that for each and every one of us, it ends up being not a matter of principles but of situations” (LS 200; italics original). He has come to see the world in terms of contextuality rather than identity. Nostalgia is replaced by realistic pragmatism. In view of diasporic identification, Gita’s hair that Norvin used to praise is one of the focalizing elements of the story, marking a cultural difference between American and (diasporic) Indian cultures and simultaneously obfuscating essential readings of that difference. The book is divided into two parts, the first part beginning with a description of Gita’s habit of washing her hair on Saturday nights, which Bet then considers abnormal. By the second part of the novel, Gita has divorced Norvin and changed her habit so that she “washed her hair on Sunday mornings” (LS 164). This is a further indication of Gita’s transformation, as well as an instance of detaching from Norvin, who has proved to be a womanizer. Towards the end of the novel, Gita also cuts her hair short and explains this action to Firoze as follows: “I was just so fed up with being that Woman with the hair, you know, all the exotic mystery. I feel I shed a whole persona” (LS 301). The shedding of “a whole persona” into which the hair cutting leads is central to Gita’s change—if not development. She has ceased to be an unproblematic whole, an exotic and mysterious Indian woman and has become something else. Gita discusses this “something else” she has become with Firoze. Also well versed in colonial and post-colonial theories, Firoze comments that “we’re all possessed by cultural others in one way or another” (LS 304). This comment on otherness is not a sufficient explanation for Gita who replies: “Except, that at this moment it can be sort of hard to say what makes for a cultural self and what’s an other […]. People like us are an American lifestyle (see Koestler, Lotus). The company returned to India in 1993 (Shiva, “India,” on-line).

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impossible collage, aren’t we?” (LS 304; emphasis added). The “impossible collage” Gita evokes is an outstanding illustration of the postcolonial predicament of hybridity and ambivalence, the condition that Bhabha has termed the “Third Space of enunciation.”19 It is indeed this condition that informs the novel’s take on cultural difference—rather than cultural diversity—that Bhabha further describes as a “process of signification” in which culture poses as a problem “at the significatory boundaries of cultures.”20 Furthermore, it is at such boundaries that the narrative moves: we can look back to the beginning where Gita wanted to “shield her difference, protect her boundaries” (LS 5; emphasis added). Narayan is by far not the only Indian American writer to write about issues of diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. In this genre she can be compared to Bharati Mukherjee, who in her novels Wife (1975) and Jasmine (1989) has explored the encounter of American culture by Indian immigrant women. In Wife the protagonist Dimple Dasgupta faces problems in adjusting to her new life in New York. The dilemma between being a traditional Hindu wife and a modern metropolitan woman finally leads to schizophrenia and drives Dimple to murder her husband Amit. The framework within which Dimple places her answer to the confusing situation is excessive, unrealistic and delusional, yet culturally derived: “Women on television got away with murder.”21 The straightforward manner in which Dimple seems to interpret media representations is a tragic reminder of the possibility of extreme cultural misreading. In an ironic way it is also an acutely proper reading, underscoring the contrast between (stereotypical ideas of) American particularistic femininity and Indian communal subjectivity. In Jasmine, then, Mukherjee’s protagonist Jasmine escapes from communal violence in Punjab, India, to the United States.22 But the America that Jasmine encounters is not the one she had imagined. It is an America of trash and immigrants. The novel is a highly critical take on American immigration policy and hostile attitudes towards immigrants, in spite of all of the talk about multiculturalism. In an interview with Bill

19

Bhabha, “Hybridity,” 100. In this article, Bhabha takes a critical look at critical theory itself and examines the way in which it—in its different forms— appropriates the Other as the eternal horizon of interpretation and difference. 20 Bhabha, “Hybridity,” 95; in the same context, Bhabha regards notions like “multiculturalism” as “anodyne,” and prefers to stress the concept of cultural difference. This position seems to fit in with Narayan’s novel, too. 21 Mukherjee, Wife, 213. 22 For a more detailed discussion of Mukherjee’s Jasmine, see Chapter nine.

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Moyers, Mukherjee has multiculturalism as follows:

voiced

her

opinions

about

American

Maybe for the white, Anglo-Saxon males, the country is becoming depressing or no longer a dream. But the rest of us are coming with an eagerness to refashion ourselves. Letting go of the old notions of what America was shouldn’t be seen as a loss. I hope that as we all mongrelize we will build a better and more hopeful nation.23

The “eagerness to refashion” oneself, the hopefulness with which the transnational migrants such as Jasmine confront the protectionist policies and practices of the First World is clearly an agenda of many writers of post-colonial, transcultural fiction. In her interview with Nicholas A. Basbanes, she says: I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I’m ashamed of my past, not because I’m betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult life has been lived here, and I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of making a home here […]. I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying that the luxury of being a U.S. citizen for me is that I can define myself in terms of things like my politics, my sexual orientation or my education. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis of what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race.24

For the celebration of the diversity, or “mongrelization,”25 of her cultural heritage Mukherjee for one has come under severe criticism. Mukherjee has received harsh criticism for her views, but despite such attacks, she continues to describe a world that would be a more humane place through the shared experience of migration. Similarly, Narayan’s novel brings forth the diasporic experience of Gita, although the experiences are very different from those in Mukherjee’s novels. The aspect of questioning authenticity in Narayan’s novel is not present solely on the narrative but also on the level of critical theory. 23

Mukherjee, “Conquering”; emphases added; cf. I Grewal, Transnational, 65–74. Basbanes, “Bharati,” on-line. In yet another interview, Mukherjee defines herself as a Bengali rather than Indian, or “an American writer of Bengali-Indian origin” (Chen and Goudie, “Holders,” para. 5). 25 As an important literary proponent of hybridity Rushdie, too, has used “mongrelization” as a trope of hybridity: “The Satanic Verses […] rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure” (Rushdie, “Good,” 393). 24

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Splitting Hairs in Theory In its narrative and metanarrative capacities, Narayan’s novel reads partly as an anthropological or sociological study, which obviously stems from the fact that the author Kirin Narayan is herself an established anthropologist who also shares biographical similarities with her character Gita. It does not, however, automatically follow that this proximity establishes objectivity or authenticity. Narayan has written on the issue of the authenticity of the native observer: [T]he loci along which we are aligned with or set apart from those whom we study are multiple and in flux. Factors such as education, gender, sexual orientation, class, race, or sheer duration of contacts may at different times outweigh the cultural identity we associate with insider or outsider status.26

Here she outlines lucidly how a native position, although different from a non-native one, cannot claim a simple stance of authenticity as both positions are contextually bound. Similarly Gita struggles with her insider and outsider statuses when she describes herself jumping “back and forth between two incomplete Indias.” Here the representation of a diasporic subject is not given in the form of cultural authenticity but through personal complexity. One minor yet thematically significant character in the novel is Kamashree Ratnabhushitalingam-Hernandez, a visiting lecturer at the university in Berkeley, who links up with Gita particularly in the mention of her hair, which was “cut with fashionable asymmetry” (LS 148). Kamashree is introduced to her audience through her postcolonial educational background, her sequence of postmodern publications, her unchallenged supremacy in the posthumanist era of postfeminism as deconstructed by diasporic women of color. (LS 148)

When she begins her lecture, Gita is soon lost: “It seemed like a lot of words rarely used in everyday conversation slapped together in a succession in so rapid-fire there was no time to remember what these terms were supposed to mean” (LS 149). This ironic take on the confusing complexity of academic discourse alludes specifically to the influential post-colonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her physical and

26

K. Narayan, “How,” 671–2.

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scholarly outlook as well as in her allegedly complex, difficult and even undecipherable language use.27 In her account of recent Indian English writing, the Indian literary scholar Shyamala A. Narayan is disturbed about Kamashree’s character in Narayan’s novel. She connects the character overwhelmingly with Spivak and comments: “One wonders why Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provokes such extreme reactions.”28 The evocation of Spivak in this context is relevant to the discussion of South Asian American cultural identity. Spivak’s outstanding and controversial career as a successful and influential Indian critic in American academia might partly account for the above portrayal but more pertinently it reads like Narayan’s disagreement with—or challenge of—Spivak’s cultural analyses. At least Spivak is not mentioned by name even though by that time she was already an established critic and other post-colonial, poststructuralist critics are named. That it has a bearing on the actuality of academic life in its transatlantic connections becomes evident in the furore over the accessibility of especially Spivak’s and Bhabha’s writing. After the publication of Narayan’s novel, the journal Philosophy and Literature began to distribute its notorious Bad Writing Awards.29 The fourth awards were given in 1999 to Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha.30 Butler reacted to the prize in her op-ed article in The New York Times, 27

In her article “Third World Diva Girls,” bell hooks criticizes diasporic academics in the United States, writing about “how easy it is to imagine we are superior to others and therefore deserve special treatment or have the right to dominate” (hooks, “Third,” 100). 28 S. Narayan, “Room,” 112. In the same context, S. Narayan also gives a translation of Kamashree’s tongue-in-cheek name: “Kamashree = ‘Goddess of sexual love,’ Ratnabhushitalingam = ‘one whose phallus is ornamented with gems.’” It is notable that S. Narayan does not explicate the Hispanic part of the name, Hernández. However, Hernández (son of Hernán) alludes to the conquistador Hernán Cortés, who was among the first colonizers of the Americas, and was behind the colonisation of Mexico. In post-colonial Mexico, Cortés is regarded poorly, which can be seen in the fact that there is only one statue of him in all of Mexico (Anderson, Imagined, 199). 29 See “Winners,” on-line. 30 In 1996, Bhabha had been involved in the hoax that the physicist Alan Sokal created with the journal Social Text, ridiculing cultural studies and postmodernist theorists with his mock article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,.” In an ArtForum article, Bhabha contests “Sokal’s simplistic fantasy of a pure polarity between science’s reasoned arguments and the inherent obfuscation of cultural languages of allusions, metaphors, puns, and rhetorical strategies” (Bhabha, “Laughing,” 15).

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claiming that the “targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism.”31 This was a perceptive observation on the mechanisms of subduing especially feminist and post-colonial criticism, which Bhabha had discussed already in 1988, in his article “The Commitment to Theory”: “Is the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the “other” that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?”32 Butler’s critique was not, however, enough to prevent further denigration of critical theory. Thus, shortly after that, the literary critic Terry Eagleton reviewed Spivak’s book Critique of Postcolonial Reason in the London Review of Books, criticizing it scathingly for “obscurantism,” being “inaccessible,” and springing “from the commodified language of the US.”33 Years later, the wider academic community responded by publishing a collection Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, in which Spivak is interviewed on “The Politics of the Production of Knowledge.”34 The incident indicates that the presence of critical theory can have some troubling influence. Sheng-mei Ma argues that there is a market for politically correct yet exotic Asian American literature.35 Similarly, there seems to be a demand for South Asian academics, as Rosane Rocher comments: “Intellectuals of the South Asian diaspora constitute a small, but notable group in the American Academy” and bear the imposed, impossible burden of being “privileged voices” “‘representing’ South Asia or the Third World at large.”36 The notable presence and impact of the South Asian American intelligentsia and the contradictory responses it provokes, is an intriguing dimension in the novel. There are several possible ways to interpret Kamashree’s character, but, as a decisive indication of the changes within Gita, towards the end of the novel she cuts her own hair short like Kamashree, much like Indian women had earlier followed the Sadhana style.

31

Butler, “Bad,” on-line. Bhabha, “Commitment,” 21. 33 Eagleton, “Gaudy,” 5–6. For the debate between Eagleton and Spivak, see Wright, “Centrifugal,” 67–82; and Wright, “Can,” on-line. 34 Spivak, “Politics,” 181–98. 35 Ma, Immigrant, 106. 36 Rocher, “Reconstituting,” on-line; cf. hooks, “Third,” and Spivak, “Can.” 32

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The Post-colonial Predicament To conclude, Narayan’s novel is a perceptive view of the post-colonial predicament created by the experience of being between an Indian and an American diasporic identity. In a review of the novel, John Muthyala claims that Narayan “problematizes processes of subject construction where identity is both a given and a matter of acquisition.”37 Similarly, what my analysis of the novel suggests, rather than vouching for a purist view of authentic, original identity and an originary past, is that the novel questions both the notion of pure identity and the postmodern view of a fluid identity. It is an explication of the value of cultural difference—in Bhabha’s terms—rather than cultural diversity. Narayan’s novel is in many ways a story about stories. There are embedded stories in the text, and there are historically deconstructed stories on the metanarrative level. There is also a strong argument for the narrativity and a constructedness of reality. A comment in the novel by Gita’s friend Zelda recapitulates this effectively: “[N]o good stories ever really end. They’re just always getting remade and retold” (LS 311; emphasis original). The way in which the novel foregrounds the importance of women’s narratives and storytelling in showing the world is reminiscent of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s conception of “rewriting of history” as “an endless task.”38 It is a task of storytelling, Trinh reminds us: “For all I have is a story.”39 As I have tried to argue in my analysis, South Asian American authors and scholars like Narayan have been carving out a space for representing previously largely invisible immigrant women. In Narayan’s novel, then, this is done also with an awareness of the risks concerning cultural purity and authenticity: whether one claims it or shuns away from it. The title of the novel, Love, Stars, and All That, refers to a prediction made for Gita at the beginning of the story. At the end, Aunt Saroj goes again to Ganeshan to ask about the inefficacy of divination: “So tell me, Kaka, […] why is it that sometimes your predictions don’t work” (LS 307). The answer Ganeshan Kaka gives seems to be a tongue-in-cheek comment on the part of the author as well. In its very humanist outlook, the comment promotes agency; it gives the existential responsibility for action back to people, and to the reader:

37

Muthyala, “Review,” on-line. Trinh, Woman, 84. 39 Trinh, Woman, 119. 38

Shuffling the Cultural Matrices: Kirin Narayan’s Novel Love, Stars and All That “Heh, heh,” Ganeshan Kaka cackled from his armchair. […] “That and all is the great mystery. You have planets, you have numbers, and then, sala, you have got the human choice. Planets simply open up possibilities—it is for the people to act.” (LS 307; emphases original)40

40

The word sala means “wife’s brother,” and has a derogatory connotation (I. Lewis, Sahibs, 206).

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PART II: DIFFERENT DIASPORAS, TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS ,

CHAPTER SIX CHALLENGING GENDERED VIOLENCE IN SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORIC FICTION

Challenging Representations Violence against women is an acute and widespread global problem. Apart from its gruesome physical actuality, it is deeply grounded in cultural representations, through which it is also perceived. In his analysis of European 19th-century works of literature and music, Lawrence Kramer delineates the inscription of gender polarity and patriarchal cultural justification of sexual violence in Europe. He comments that it is precisely in the realm of representation, of images charged with value, pressure, feeling, images recognized and misrecognized, conscious and unconscious, that actual sexual violence is grounded and in which its antidote must likewise be grounded.1

In the process of cultural negotiation, the imaginary representations of such hegemonic cultural formations as literature and music become to be established as “the truth” about the world they represent. This process is an influential indication of the power of images and representations in creating social reality. Furthermore, Kramer suggests that the antidote for biased representations created in this manner can also be found “in the realm of representation.” This is an optimistic understanding of the possibilities of using art (in a wide sense) for healing purposes. In the present postcolonial context of diasporic writing it is, however, an adequate position, as it indicates the similarly optimistically perceived potential of postcolonial counter-writing. In this chapter, taking my lead from Kramer’s perception, I look at the ways in which two contemporary diasporic IndoCanadian texts act as cultural antidotes and challenge prevailing attitudes, values and practices, especially concerning gendered violence. 1

Kramer, After, 19.

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The study of violence—and especially gendered violence—is laden with ambivalence. While the experience of violence is real, there are often disputes over its representation, ranging between victimhood and consent, sexual autonomy and sexual harassment, cultural interpretations and hormonal manners, independent performance and outright provocation, or even pain and pleasure. One largely underrecognized ambiguous aspect of gendered violence is the fact that it is most often committed by close acquaintances, not strangers. In this chapter, I will discuss one particular form of violence against women, namely domestic violence committed by partners and relatives. In Shauna Singh Baldwin’s short story “Jassie,” the protagonist claims that the kind of violence that one should be afraid of is not the one shown on television: The kind of violence one should fear is always quiet and comes all wrapped up in words like Love until you live with it daily and you value only that which is valuable to the violator.2

It is the ultimate ambiguity that the most positive human features, such as “love,” are combined with the most negative ones. Leslie Moran and Beverley Skeggs further comment on this ambivalent side of violence that women’s experience of domestic violence has long drawn attention to the fact that those whom you know the best, those who are most intimate, those you trust, are also those who are most likely to be the most dangerous and the most violent.3

This aspect of ambivalence—violence perpetrated by acquaintances—is present in my analysis of gendered violence in The Swinging Bridge (2003),4 a novel by Ramabai Espinet, and The Sweet Smell of Mother’s Milk-Wet Bodice (2001), a novella by Uma Parameswaran.5 Both of these texts evoke a diasporic and (partially) Hindu setting where women are oppressed and suffer from domestic violence. In Espinet’s book, although the Singh family is Christianized, they are still in many ways influenced by Indian traditions and the Hindu religion. The books also display 2

Singh Baldwin, English, 146. Moran and Skeggs, Sexuality, 174. 4 Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (2003). Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by SB. 5 Uma Parameswaran, The Sweet Smell of Mother’s Milk-Wet Bodice (2001). Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by SS. 3

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differences which will be looked at while analysing the representation of gendered violence in the texts. In the diasporic Indian communities, the traditional Indian hierarchies existing in the castes, classes, genders, religions, and ethnicities are enacted in new environments. Even if they tried to (as they sometimes do), these communities cannot isolate themselves totally from the surrounding society, but they have to make adjustments to their lives, values and traditions. This often results in various kinds of problems. One dimension where these problems are manifest can be found in the issue of women’s status, interlocked, as Kalpana Kannabiran and Vasanthi Kannabiran define it, in “parallel systems of patriarchy that constantly [contend] with each other in the struggle for cultural hegemony in the diaspora.”6 This conflictual situation may discourage those who suffer from violence from raising the issue, for example in fear of being accused of disrespect for traditional cultural values.7 I do not, however, attempt an evaluation of cultural practices as such by imposing a set of values in the well-meaning philanthropic manner that the colonialists employed, for example, in the case of sati in 19th-century India. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak defines such action for “the protection of woman (today the ‘third-world woman’)” as “a signifier for the establishment of a good society.”8 The discussion here is not prompted by an undertaking to substantiate the existence of some such “good” society in which women are protected from sexual violence. There is no society where gendered violence is absent, although it may vary in form and degree, for violence has a human history. It follows, therefore, that neither are there “bad” societies per se, communities that are intrinsically infested with gendered violence. While I do not regard Indian, or diasporic Indian, culture as specifically prone to gendered violence, the histories of diasporic communities have, however, made them vulnerable to such forms of 6

Kannabiran and Kannabiran, “Introduction,” 14. Although I am here discussing narratives of heterosexual relationships, similar issues are relevant—if not more pressing—for other forms of sexuality within the existing heteronormative matrix. (See Bhaskaran, Made, 14.) There is little material on gay, lesbian and queer writing in the Indian (including the diaspora) context. In recent years there have, however, been several publications that cover the field, see the edited collections by Ruth Vanita, Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (2001), Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), and Ashwini Sukthankar, Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (1999). 8 Spivak, Critique, 288; emphasis original. 7

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silence that disguise—or possibly even enhance—gendered violence. The colonial intrusions—such as the banning of sati—have had an innate ambiguity, for on the one hand they “may have helped reduce violence against women in some instances” while on the other they may “be relegitimized in postcolonial times through claims to ‘authentic’ precolonial culture.”9 The existing violence and structures of violence in a given culture should, thus, be seen in their historical contexts, not as a part of fundamental nature of that culture. In her discussion of media representation of a case of domestic violence in the United States, Radhika Parameswaran pays attention to the ways in which “third-world” cultures are regularly portrayed in an essentializing manner as violent, backward, primitive, exotic, and oppressive for women. I agree with her observation that when we are addressing questions of domestic violence, “it is important to remember that it is a problem that affects women all over the world, of every race, culture, and class” and that we need “to look ‘at’ with sensitivity to the specifics of the situation whatever race, class, gender, or ethnicity issues may be involved.”10 This is an important reminder of the necessity of specific contextualisation when discussing gendered violence in diasporic communities. Otherwise we indeed risk setting these communities apart from mainstream communities as something of less moral value In this chapter, special attention is paid to the contestations of cultural values and practices that underlie the assumptions of women’s space and are used to authorize women’s oppression and domestic violence. These are issues that have been recognized in feminist criticism.11 My analysis of women’s stories about gendered violence pays attention to women’s interpretation of it, for, as Jyoti Puri notes, “what is less clear from available feminist scholarship is the meaning of aspects of sexual aggression from the viewpoint of women.”12 Through textual analyses, I demonstrate, firstly, how the texts discussed represent gendered violence. Secondly, I analyse in what ways these representations emerge as culturally dependent. And lastly, I look at the possibilities the texts suggest for going beyond restrictions, oppression and violence in an intercultural, diasporic context. To obtain an understanding of the cultural 9

McWilliams, “Violence,” 124. R. Parameswaran, “Coverage,” on-line. 11 Here feminism should not be understood as a hegemonic Western construction but as a network of various feminisms (see Kuortti, “What,” 383–98). For more on the critique of “Western” feminism(s), see Mohanty, “Under,” Gedalof, Against, and Bulbeck, Re-Orienting. 12 Puri, Woman, 78. 10

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specificity of violence against diasporic Asian women in Canada, first I outline the issue briefly through statistics.

Violence against Immigrant Women in Canada “Violence against women—in all its forms—[is] still pervasive and under-reported.”13 This is the overall situation recorded in the United Nations’ report on the global status of women, The World’s Women 2000. The situation has not improved, despite many organizations, programmes, campaigns, as well as international declarations and other treaties over the past twenty-five years since the adoption of the UN “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.”14 This shows that the issue is still urgent and needs to be taken up in fiction as well as in scholarship. Domestic violence is also gendered violence, and it mainly concerns women. One study from Britain shows that a quarter of reported crimes of violence “are domestic and, of these, 88 % involve male perpetrators.”15 Although there are cases of women battering their male partners, Deborah L. Rhode warns against trivialization of violence against women and says that in the United States, “[i]n cases reaching the criminal justice system, women account for 90 to 95 percent of those brutalized by a partner.”16 If we consider the representation of domestic violence in fiction, it (roughly) follows these figures. This is also true of the examples discussed in this chapter. According to the UN report, the most common form of violence against women is abuse by a husband or intimate partner. It further notes that “[i]n national studies in 11 countries, the proportion of women who report having been abused by an intimate partner at some point in their lives ranges from 5 to 48 per cent.”17 In Canada, for example, the Manitoba Association of Women’s Shelters website announces that “51 % of Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16.”18 Statistics Canada’s report Family Violence in Canada from 1998 reveals that women outnumber men nine to one as victims of spousal assault.19 Statistics such as those quoted here 13

The World’s Women 2000, 152. The United Nations, “Convention,” on-line. 15 Boyle, Media, 85. 16 Rhode, Speaking, 109; see also Assessing Violence, on-line. 17 The World’s Women, 153. 18 Manitoba Association, on-line; see also Morris, “Violence,” on-line. 19 Statistics, “Family,” on-line. 14

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show clearly that the issue of gendered domestic violence against women is a topical issue. The alarming figures call for a discussion to find ways to raise awareness about the problem, and to effect changes in human behaviour and social structures. Despite Radhika Parameswaran’s observation that domestic violence occurs among all women, there are indications that women from minorities such as immigrant women are more likely to suffer from gendered violence than other groups of women. In Canada, it has been established that 80 % of “Aboriginal women have experienced family violence” while for “Canadian women in general, the (conservative) figure is one in ten.”20 In their everyday lives, immigrant women face specific difficulties—racism, language problems, isolation, and poverty—that make them more vulnerable to violence.21 Among immigrants, women from developing countries, then, are the most in danger of violence.22 While the phenomenon of domestic violence is widespread, in some studies of domestic violence, however, there is a notable underrepresentation of Asian women. Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, for example, speculate on this and say: “It has been suggested that traditional Asian values emphasizing close family ties and harmony may discourage Asian women from disclosing physical and emotional abuse by intimates.”23 A similar line of thought can be found in Parameswaran’s novella, where Krista, a female helper in a women’s shelter, ponders on the difficulties of helping abused Asian women: “These Asian women, they were a secretive bunch; never wanted to let on they had ever been in a shelter, or on welfare. Something about their culture, she supposed” (SS 32). In such a climate of silence and concealment, creative expressions of challenges to gendered violence become ever more significant.

From Silence to Womanvoice In diasporic communities, the social values and practices of the originary country are often retained in some form or another. In India it was only in 1983 that “domestic violence was recognised as a specific criminal offence by the introduction of section 498-A into the Indian Penal Code.”24 Since then, the authorities have reported an increasing number of 20

MATCH, “Circle,” 235. Pinedo and Santinoli, “Immigrant,” on-line. 22 Brownridge and Halli, “Double”; Gurr et al., on-line. For a discussion of the situation in the United States, see Abraham, Speaking. 23 Tjaden and Thoennes, Extent, on-line. 24 “Laws,” on-line. 21

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cases of domestic violence—over 50,000 cases in 2003—of which dowryrelated violence is the most common type.25 The contextually sanctioned denial of the extent and seriousness of domestic violence is deeply embedded in Indian diasporic communities as well. The contextually mediated attitude towards violence is also present in Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge. The setting of the novel is the Indo-Canadian diasporic situation with Trinidad as the originary country. The novel tells the story of the main character Mona Singh.26 She has immigrated to Canada in the 1970s with her family, and for her, it has been an escape from a society plagued by poverty and violence. In her experience, there is a deeply ambiguous attitude towards home. On the one hand it is “a safe place” (SB 24), while on the other, it is riven with violent encounters. This story shows how gendered violence constructs and steers society at large and the people—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders alike—in particular. The violent events of the past are not forgotten but are re-activated in the course of diasporic travels. All through her childhood Mona witnesses domestic violence as well as other forms of gendered violence around her. The text abounds with references to violence against women, whether it is the gang rape of the old beggar woman, and renaming her contemptuously as Baboonie— “young girl” (SB 111); or the marriage of Gokool and Jasmine, in which Jasmine stays content even though she is continuously beaten and sexually abused by her husband (SB 89); or the death of young, pregnant Kowsilia in a baking oven—after suspicions have arisen that the unborn child has been incestuously begotten by either her own father or one of her brothers (SB 135); or the repeated battering of Bess’s servant girl Girlie (SB 302). It seems that the history of the island is full of violence. An especially traumatic incident takes place in the kitchen of Mona’s home when Uncle Baddall—true to his nickname—harasses Mona’s mother sexually (SB 36). Mona is utterly enraged by this violation: “I felt mad. Vex too. Madvex” (SB 37). The aggression leads her almost to stab him with a knife. The moment is so painful that even the language changes. In her state of being madly vexed, she describes it as being “madvex.” This is a highly creative reaction in the disturbing situation— more disturbing because it, too, takes place in the kitchen. In her analysis of the use of the phrase “sucking salt” in the Caribbean, Meredith M. Gadsby suggests even that 25

Bhalla, “India,” on-line. For a short history of women’s rights movements’ actions on the issues relating to domestic violence (previously called “wifebeating”), see R. Kumar, History, esp. 115–42. 26 For a more detailed discussion of the novel, see Chapter four above.

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in the midst of great hardship, Caribbean women use language to resist, to challenge, to mobilize for retaliation. For me then, “sucking salt” carries with it the same challenge, the same preparedness to persevere and fight.27

As a Caribbean woman, Mona does follow this pattern of linguistic resistance and contestation, sucking her “madvex” salt in the process. Mona can never forgive Baddall for his violation: “Baddall and I remained bound in the deep complicity of warfare” (SB 236). He had made continuous sexual advances to young Mona as well, ever since she was eight. She had been able to evade them for seven years, even the final attempt to get Mona to masturbate him, prompted by the sermon of a priest “warning about hellfire and the evils of onanism” (SB 236). After this, he not only leaves her alone but also deserts his family and emigrates to Canada. Furthermore, Mona has suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of her father, who has unfounded suspicions about her sexual frivolity (SB 179–80). To complete the picture, her boyfriend Bree also hits her, driving their relationship to termination (SB 196). She expresses her linguistic contestation by confronting Bree’s reverence for the Prime Minister “De Doctah” James: “Who? Who is De Doctah to tell me what to do? Who?” (SB 195). This challenge is apparently too much for Bree to bear, so he resorts to violence and—“as if a dam had broken its ramparts” (SB 196)—hits her repeatedly in the face. They never recover from this violent outburst, although there remains an ambivalent affection, and years later, when they meet in New York, they even make passionate love without returning to the past. As a result of all these experiences, Mona promises herself that she would never marry (SB 181), not when a married woman’s reality would be filled with fear of violence, disparagement, and the blocking of opportunities (see SB 135). Just as in the post-colonial situation in general, the effects of (colonial) violence and oppression are carried over to the future, with ever-continuing corollaries. In the mid-1990s, at the time of the novel’s present, there was a profound concern for the increase in the level of violence against women in Trinidad. The action group Women Working for Social Progress campaigned for cooperation between different ethnic communities to counter violence.28 When Mona returns to Trinidad in 1995, her cousin Bess expresses this same concern for violence against women. Mona is not 27 28

Gadsby, Sucking, 133. Kannabiran, “Crossing,” 204.

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convinced about the increase in numbers because she remembers all her experiences, as well as “all the other scenes in countless homes across the island, scenes that I would never know” (SB 302). For her, the presence of violence has always been strong. The turning point for Mona, the moment she decides she has to escape from the island, is “the day [she] escaped rape and probably murder” (SB 40). She is eleven years old when a man tries to capture her but she manages to get away. When she tells about this to her mother, her mother gets angry: “Promise me that you will never talk to anybody about this. It too disgraceful. […] Nobody will believe you didn’t go with that man under that bush” (SB 46). Whatever her mother’s real feelings about the matter may be, the concern she expresses is that of the dominant patriarchal society in which the women are subjected to shame even in the face of rape and murder. The result is that women are told to keep silent about the experiences of violence as they would mark them as the culpable ones, bringing shame on the whole family. In consequence, Mona tells noone about the harassments, and singles herself out as a special, dirty case: “I was sure that this nastiness had not happened to anyone else in my family or to any of my friends. Everyone else looked so clean and ordinary” (SB 236). When the traumatic experiences are not shared, when the stories are not told, it results in silence, misconceptions, and more violence. Furthermore, Mona perceives the contradictions and ambiguities of her life, her alleged dirtiness, to stem from her Indianness. She suspects that “other girls—black, Chinese, mixed, the few white girls in the school— did not live with the same threats. Or did they? I never knew” (SB 138). She has to hide the social restrictions as a “shameful Indian secret” from her Creole and other friends who would have considered these as proving her backwardness (SB 186). As Mona sees it, the scene of domestic violence is pervasive in the Indian community: “For Indians, life in Trinidad at that time was a mess of contradictions. […] It was a puzzle, the sheer violence of that time” (SB 187). She seeks release from those contradictions through the songs of her great-grandmother, songs that had been forbidden by her great-grandfather and hidden away from the family history. In an article on Espinet’s novel, Brinda Mehta considers the Ramayana song sung by Chandroutie as a way out of the violently imposed silence:

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While speaking its text of exploitation and violation, the female voice claims its individuality by giving these abuses a public forum in song unhindered by institutional bureaucracy or limited access to writing.29

In the form of public song, the stories of women have a way out of silence, out of their invisibility. Elsewhere, Espinet speaks in terms of a special “Womanvoice” to describe this new space.30 It is in this new acquired space of women’s own voice that new forms of subjectivity can be created and transmitted. Furthermore, it provides a ground for a new woman to emerge, to reclaim her place: We hold our fire And try, meanwhile To prepare our daughters, The new women, for The sacred ground Of reclamation.31

Learning Strong Language The ambivalence of violence present in Espinet’s novel is also portrayed in Uma Parameswaran’s book, in its representation of attitudes to domestic violence. In the foreword to her book Parameswaran describes how the text emerged from her own involvement with, and concern for, the plight of abused immigrant women (SS 9). She has, for example, been a member of the board of the Immigrant Women’s Association of Manitoba, an organization that also appears in the story. The novella tells the story of the main character, Namita, from Jaipur, and her arranged marriage with Tarun Neggill. Namita’s elder sister Asha is two years her senior, and she had been married off when she was eighteen, despite their father’s demurs about her young age and his stance against dowry. But Papaji’s young new wife, Bina-Ma, whom he had married after his first wife’s death, expresses a more down-to-earth view: “After all, dowry is just the old way of making sure daughters also, and not just the sons, get a share of their father’s property” (SS 40; emphasis added). Bina-Ma sees dowry as a means to secure some equality for the daughters within the patriarchal structure. This is a very optimistic interpretation of the

29

Mehta, “Engendering,” 33. Espinet, “Mama,” 29. 31 Espinet, “Nuclear,” 62; emphasis added. 30

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tradition, which has been under serious criticism for its misuse. This darker side of the practice turns out to be true for Namita as well. Before entering an arranged marriage at the age of 21, Namita is able to complete her BA and start her Fine Arts degree. The man she finally marries is an Indian emigrant to Winnipeg in Canada. After the wedding in India, Tarun returns to Winnipeg and Namita follows later to join him as his sponsored wife. The relationship suffers, however, from the fact that they live together with Tarun’s parents. Under the pressure of other relatives, the parents feel their family honour, izzat, is offended because Namita did not bring any dowry with her (SS 43). The ideal marriage turns into nasty reality, and as Papaji will not yield to a cash settlement, problems begin to escalate, even though Namita is reluctant to accept that there are problems with Tarun, and naively believes in his earnestness. The extent of Namita’s denial of the vulnerability of her situation becomes clear when she ends up in a women’s shelter after she is thrown out of her matrimonial home in Winnipeg. She is certain that at the root of the problem are her in-laws acting against Tarun’s will. She waits for him to correct the situation, expecting him to “say it was all a mistake, and […] take her home” (SS 17). The reader knows that this will not happen, for Tarun is simultaneously secretly preparing for a divorce (SS 45–7). He uses a lawyer to get out of the situation without having to pay alimony. The lawyer, one Chalak Singh, is a stereotypical example of a lawyer who uses the predicament of clients for his own ends. What is more, in all his dishonesty he stands for the traditional patriarchal values, having no trouble with helping Tarun to fabricate a story to back up his divorce petition. He also demonstrates deeply misogynist attitudes in his thinking: “But women were generally too uncooperative. Once they tasted freedom, they held our men in contempt […]. Women, ugh, it was well he kept his own on short leash” (SS 47). The contrastive rhetoric—uncooperative, freedom, contempt, short leash—is particularly striking in comparison to Namita’s totally restricted situation, seriously calling into question the very consistency of patriarchal principles and structures. The abuses against Namita become more serious after she is thrown out, although Tarun tries to keep up a façade until the divorce is granted. Showing his insensitive and calculative character, Tarun gets enraged and threatens Namita with desertion and violence when he finds out that she, too, has used a lawyer in order to secure alimony from him. He had himself, however, all along been inventing fabricated instances of adultery and cruelty as bases for divorce. After the divorce is granted, Namita expresses her suspicions of Tarun being adulterous with his brother’s wife Menka. Tarun loses control of himself and reverts to physical and sexual

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violence: he beats her up and rapes her (SS 66–8). The violent reaction confirms the suspicions, and further testifies to the exploitative structures that the story depicts. Tarun’s final violation, however, is mental, threatening her even with death. He forbids Namita to go to the temple which he attends regularly: “Don’t you dare come to the temple. Unless you want to get yourself killed one of these days” (SS 68). Research has established that the temple would be the last place for immigrant Hindu women to search for help in the face of domestic violence.32 Namita goes there, however, without Tarun knowing. She befriends Charu, another victim of spousal rape. Charu does not trust the women of the community to help the ones like Namita and herself. She tells about the reactions to her complaints about marital violence on the part of her former husband: Like, when he raped me three times one night when I was four months pregnant, and I miscarried, know what one of these prissy ladies said. Don’t mind it, you’ll conceive again. (SS 58)

This negligent comment is a shocking example of the extent to which these women have been subjugated, with no possibility of sharing their experiences. On her visits to the temple, Namita learns also that Tarun had kept his marriage a secret, flirting with the women at the temple. Tarun’s betrayal and outburst of violence drains all of Namita’s hopes and will to live, and she falls into deep lethargy. Her life is eventually saved by people from the shelter (SS 69). Referring to Catherine Reisman’s research,33 Marita Husso writes that women in violent relationships are afraid of losing control of their aggression and feeling of hatred. Only when women feel they can no longer suppress their aggression are they able to let go of their relationship and at the same time they begin to assume the identity of a survivor.34 There is this kind of turning-point in Parameswaran’s story, too, when Namita finally finds the power within herself to counter her (by now) exhusband. Towards the end of the story he again appears in her flat and begins to caress her. Irritated by this breach of privacy, especially as they are already divorced, she “flung the boiling tea on his arm and side,” hitting him with the saucepan, and drives him out: “Get out of my house. […] And don’t you dare come back” (SS 71–2; emphasis added). Her former attitude of submission and apathy turns into self-reliance and 32

S. George, When, 137–8. Reisman, “Making,” 245. 34 Husso, “Heikkouden,” 89. 33

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action. The assertion of her own space, “my house,” is a decisive moment, after which she is gradually able to compose her subjectivity from the traumas of her life. It is also significant that it is in a kitchen that this aggression is activated, and that it is a cooking utensil that is used in the counteraction. It reminds us that the space of suppression—within the confines of traditional Indian femininity—can also function as a space of assertion. Namita is aware that this moment of violent aggression is only a premeditated attempt at exorcising her past, for all those deliberate actions were just that, actions deliberately gone through. “You have a long way to go, baby,” she told herself, knowing she would gladly give all she had gained for a night in his arms. (SS 72)35

The ambivalent emotions still have a hold on her, although already the next day she thinks better of her act of rebellion: “It had felt good to ‘beat the shit out of him’—she savoured the phrase she had picked up at the shelter from one of the young women” (SS 75). Through her revolt, however intentional a construction it may be, Namita recovers from the abuse and begins her life anew. She comes to remember her childhood when she used to sit in a nearby peacock garden talking to Kanhaiya, Lord Krishna. All this comes alive when she manages to phone home in India and talk to Bina-Ma. Bina-Ma tells her that they had sent her the statue of Krishna that she had left at home. Finally someone feels her need, someone who understands: Bina-Ma knew, had known all along, would always know and feel. Across the world she felt her mother’s arms around her and she pressed her face into the sweet smell of her milk-wet bodice where lay the ocean of nectar, now and forever hers to sip. (SS 73)

From the past folds of “the sweet smell of her milk-wet bodice,” and the memory of the peacock garden, Namita gains the assurance to move on with her life. She begins her journey by going to fetch the statue which she understands the in-laws had kept. Finally she is reunited with the statue, her treasure. 35 Namita’s expression “You have a long way to go, baby” plays hilariously with the mock-feminist advertisement slogan “You have come a long way, baby,” which the Philip Morris tobacco company began to use in 1960s to market its Virginia Slims cigarettes to women (see Toll and Ling, “Virginia,” 172–80). It implies an ironical take on the disparity between different conceptions of women.

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In the final comical scene on a bus back home, she sits next to a teenager and starts talking: “I wonder if you could help me. […] I am new to this country […] and I really would like to learn some strong street language. […] Like, ‘beat the shit out of you’, you know, some real stuff,” she said. “Kick butt,” he said. “Kick butt,” she repeated. “Shoot some crap,” he said. “Shoot some crap,” she repeated. “Asshole.” “Asshole.” (SS 77–8; emphasis added)

The youth is at first astonished by the sudden approach but finally helps her in her quest to assert her own place by gaining a command of a new mode of language. It is remarkable that this assertive action takes place in language, for it is indeed one of the most contested sites of post-colonial resistance. This can be seen as an example of answers to Salman Rushdie’s call for post-colonial migrants to “conquer English” and in the process remake it “for our own purposes.”36 This is also Namita’s method, and when she thinks of the choice of “strong street language” that she is offered, she thinks: “None of them sounded as good as her own contribution, ‘beat the shit out of you’” (SS 78). Even before asking for help, she had already started to conquer the English language on her own, in her own way. That the way she is taking is complicated is confirmed by her young teacher who does not regard her efforts as authentic. When the marginalized “other” acquires the language of the centre, the language is already and inevitably changing. What is not reproduced on the typographical level is, however, registered by the youth, a participant in this lesson: “You gotta be born to street language. Don’t sound the same coming from you.” “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Guess I’ll just have to be my prim and proper Paki self.” (SS 78; emphases added)

The irony of Namita’s response is explicit in the mocking way she adopts the insulting identity of a “Paki.” It works well with the young man as well, for he thinks she is all right. Namita has already abandoned being

36

Rushdie, “Imaginary,” 17.

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prim and proper, and if her language does not sound “the same,” it is only proper. In that way she will not simply lapse into colonial mimicry.

Learning to Walk As the recent United Nations Research Institute for Social Development report Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World notes: “There is […] no one unified international women’s movement, nor […] any such thing as global feminism.”37 Discussion of any form of social and cultural phenomena needs to take into account their contextual underpinnings. Nevertheless, without claiming a universal applicability, the report further comments: Transnational female mobilization has helped lay the foundation of global civil society over the past century. Its notable achievements include opposition to war, articulating an international treaty on women’s rights, and the politicization of violence against women.38

Whatever forms violence against women takes, it has been opposed on the basis of international solidarity. Leila J. Rupp comments that the call for solidarity based on gender-specific violence, which seems a recent theme in the history of women’s international organizing, can be traced to the pained protests of women during the First World War against the rape of women in wartime.39

While the history of the anti-violence struggle is based on solidarity, it is also contextually structured. A discussion of this history in the Caribbean Indian diasporic context needs to take into account the specificities of that history, and not simply postulate on the international mobilization. In this chapter, I have looked at how particular texts of the Indian diaspora manage this contextualization. The representations of violence are rooted in the cultural forms in which they appear. Through criticism of these forms and representations, it is possible to learn about them and, eventually, to change them. Karen Boyle records that

37

UNRISD, Gender, 174. UNRISD, Gender, 174. 39 Rupp, Worlds, 226. 38

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Feminist analyses of men’s violence against women have made some impact on the way in which these crimes are represented, making certain kinds of male violence visible and challenging some (though not all) of the myths surrounding men’s entitlement over women.40

Here Boyle does not vouch for any “causal explanations” of media texts as that would be reductive, but proposes a more complex involvement with the myths that circulate violence against women.41 It is my contention that texts such as those discussed in this chapter offer approaches which may act as antidotes and challenge prevailing attitudes, values and practices that generate and enforce gendered violence. In this, the stories of silenced and abused immigrant women may have an important role. At the beginning of Parameswaran’s story, Namita is given training shoes by the helper at the shelter, Krista. She wants Namita to have them so that she can take some exercise. To begin with, she is, however, too weak and Krista comments: “I thought your sneakers would help, but I guess you need more time to learn to walk again; that’s what abuse does to you, drops you to your knees and you gotta learn all over again to walk” (SS 16; emphasis added). This process of learning how to walk again is, indeed, what Parameswaran’s story is about. At one point, Krista thinks of the potential of women’s enlightenment and solidarity: If these women would just realize they didn’t have to feel ashamed simply because their partners were devil’s double-dyed jerks, if they would just recognize each other and share their stories, if they could just spread the word that there was help available and no woman need put up with shit …. (SB 32; emphasis added)

Although Krista is somewhat sceptical about the possibility of change, at least by means of outside help, there remains a way forward: the renunciation of shame, the sharing of stories. The book, albeit no straightforward model for action, offers a possible antidote to demeaning, vicious, even destructive representations that subject people to domestic violence both as perpetrators and as victims. By the end of the story Namita is learning—learning to speak and to walk. In part this includes learning how to ride the bus on her own. The bus driver gives her directions and greets her at the end of her ride. In its outward banality the phrase he uses is an ethical and humane response, suitable for closing this discussion: “Have a good life” (SS 78). 40 41

Boyle, Media, 91. Boyle, Media, 26.

CHAPTER SEVEN SURVIVING AMERICA: ROBBIE CLIPPER SETHI’S THE BRIDE WORE RED AND SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN’S ENGLISH LESSONS

Hyphenated South Asian Diaspora Recent years have witnessed a growing amount of—and interest in— diasporic writing. Especially strong has been the growth of diasporic writing among Indian writers, as new writers and titles appear continuously.1 Diasporic writing remains, nevertheless, largely marginalized under the label of ethnic literatures, in contrast with mainstream fiction, which claims universality rather than exceptionality. This topic has invited some critical interest in recent years through the problematization of singular identities, in the theorization of hybridity.2 In Robbie Clipper Sethi’s book Fifty-Fifty: A Novel in Many Voices (2003), the framing character Rosa Gill experiences the particularity of Indian diasporic experience as she tries to find a seat in the cafeteria of her new college where people stick to their own ethnic groups: “There were even tables of Asians—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese,” but none seemed to be open for Indians.3 Among these nationally or ethnically defined spheres there is no worldwide—or fifty-fifty—table she herself would identify with. Finally she finds a turbaned Sikh, Rajeev, with whom to socialize. Rosa Gill defines herself as fifty-fifty—with a “mongrel” mother of various European origins and a Punjabi Sikh father. The existence of a South Asian diaspora is thus represented emphatically as a hyphenated hybrid existence, although there are those, such as Bharati Mukherjee, who denounce hyphenated identities. 1

Kuortti, Indian, x–xi. See Kuortti and Nyman, “Introduction,” 4–5. 3 Sethi, Fifty-Fifty, 6. 2

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The post-colonial situation of diaspora is embedded in colonial histories which frame the ways in which different diasporas get started and constructed. Abraham Verghese has suggested the term “third South Asia” to refer to the space inhabited by South Asians in the United States and Canada.4 It records the emergence of South Asians as a strong presence and as active participants in the cultures and economies of North America. Verghese sees this third South Asia as “a continent that hovers in space over North America.”5 This ghostly but material presence can be read in the fictional representations of South Asians in North America.

Representations of Diasporic South Asia In this chapter I look at the problematization of subjectivity and identity in a (trans)nationalist framework. The idea is to examine the ways in which women’s diasporic literature represents the negotiation of identity in a situation where cultures meet, collide, and amalgamate. I discuss a specific section of the South Asian community, that of Sikhs. This focus is significant particularly because it was people from the Sikh community that were among the first South Asians to immigrate into North America. What the analyses of the texts provisionally illlustrate, then, is how the people of the Sikh minority, especially women, have managed to carve out a cultural space for themselves, in spite of all the social, political, and cultural obstacles. The focus here will be on two books: Robbie Clipper Sethi’s The Bride Wore Red (1996) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons (1996). Both of the writers write about identity from a particular cultural context: the Punjabi Sikh community in contact with another, North American culture. Not only this, but they also project another Indian identity against the predominant Hindu identity—or even the minority Muslim identity. The hegemonic idea of India as Hindu is supplemented and overwritten by representing Indian identity through Sikh characters and traditions. Sethi does this as an outsider by portraying a relationship between an American woman and a Punjabi Sikh, reflecting on her own experiences of an intercultural marriage. Singh Baldwin, then, writes from within the Sikh community. In their mixed representation of culture, the intercultural relations in the books are interwoven with issues of religion, gender, and nationality.

4 5

Verghese, “Foreword,” xiv. Verghese, “Foreword,” xiv.

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Both of these books were published in North America in 1996.6 While both books depict a transnational situation of intercultural contacts, formally, however, they are very different. Sethi’s book, set in India and the United States, is “a novel in stories,” a series of thirteen stories told from different points of views—in the first, second and third persons— building up into an integrated narrative.7 Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons is a more conventional collection of women’s stories set in India and Canada. It is also technically closer to traditional short stories in comparison with Sethi’s postmodern structure and narration. While Sethi’s challenge to the literary forms of short story and novel are formal and structural—a hybrid between the two types of narrative— Singh Baldwin uses more subtle methods of rewriting tradition: orality and the silence of women is replaced by a written narrative. The feminist writer and director Trinh T. Minh-ha considers women as storytellers in her significant polemical contribution to the discussion of post-coloniality and feminism, Woman, Native, Other. The importance that she attributes to storytelling is remarkable, and it is based on the Sartrean notion of commitment based on freedom, and so the function of literary art “must be to remind us of that freedom and to defend it.”8 Ultimately this can only be achieved in the existential situation of absolute “choice and responsibility.”9 In the world of hegemonic patriarchy, however, women are denied the possibility of choosing and being responsible. The sphere of life reserved for women is defined and restricted by society and its collective institutions, as well as everyday mundane practices. In Singh Baldwin’s story “Jassie,” the Sikh protagonist Jassie is in a retirement home, sharing a room with a white Christian woman, Elsie. Jassie complains to herself: “She tells me stories from her past but I have none to give her that she could understand.”10 In her diasporic situation, knowing that 6

Later, after three years, Singh Baldwin’s book made its way into an Indian edition, which is not common for diasporic books. 7 In her later novel Fifty-Fifty Sethi again uses a similar kind of technique. There are twelve chapters with varying points of view (and with one framing character, Rosa or Sally), although in this case only in first person (with one chapter in first person plural as Rose’s three aunts are said to “speak with one voice”, Sethi, FiftyFifty, 100). The chapters function both as individual stories and as part of a larger narrative. Similar technique was used earlier in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s book Arranged Marriage (1995). 8 Trinh, Woman, 11. 9 Trinh, Woman, 12. 10 Shauna Singh Baldwin, English Lessons (1996), 143. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by EL.

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she is going to die in a foreign land, Jassie cannot hope to tell her story and be understood by the representative of the metropolis, but she keeps hoping: “Perhaps one day when she is forgetful I may tell her some of my story to bring it into words” (EL 144). Her hope of being able to word her story is indeed in the moment of forgetfulness, when the listener would be inattentive and forget her own Western cultural preconceptions. What Singh Baldwin’s story does, then, is to use such a moment of forgetfulness so that it writes that story which Jassie cannot tell to Elsie: polygamous families, colonial situation around Partition, missionary school education, secret affair with a Muslim man. And when the teacher, Mother Agatha, compares their backgrounds as the same, Jessie understands that “she meant we both knew English history and none of our own” (EL 147).11 The rewritten history that emerges is a story “hovering” over a diasporic woman’s life, not existing because unseen: disapproved of by (whatever) religious traditions, nationalistic politics, social environment, even family members. It is, however, urgent that she is able to tell her story some day, even if for the time being she has been forced to postpone it— “this is not the time” (EL 149). Trinh describes the process of rewriting history as “an endless task,” and the only available way to rewrite is through stories: “For all I have is a story.”12 As we can see, in Trinh’s view, in writing there resides an important task: “To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively.”13 Writing is not perceived as a career but as a mode of becoming, of formulating an identity. Writing is not, however, the sole answer to the needs of subversion. Trinh goes on to affirm that her acclaim of writing is not meant “to say that writing should be held in veneration in all milieus or that every woman who fails to write is a disabled being.”14 Silence, whether construed as not-writing, invisibility or suppression, can also become empowering: “Silence as a refusal to partake in the story does sometimes provide us with a means to gain a hearing.”15 It is not a question of whether the subaltern can speak or not, but rather that it is made known that there are silences.16

11

Compare this perspective on history with Ramabai Espinet’s comments in Chapter four. 12 Trinh, Woman, 84 and 119, respectively. 13 Trinh, Woman, 18–9. 14 Trinh, Woman, 7. 15 Trinh, Woman, 83. 16 See Spivak, “Can,” 271–313. Comparably, in her analysis of the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, Anna-Leena Toivanen argues that Vera’s narratives do not

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Silences are here understood as sites of inarticulation in view of political, social, cultural, or epistemological hegemonic authority. Women, Trinh comments, “have little authority in the History of Literature, and wise women never draw their powers from authority.”17 The empowering view of silence stems from the understanding that no position of power—neither in politics, literature, or other spheres of life—can contain suppressed, subversive, and counterhegemonic voices. Trinh argues that in-between grounds always exist, and cracks and interstices are like gaps of fresh air that keep on being suppressed because they tend to render more visible the failures operating in every system. Perhaps mastery need not coincide with power.18

The power of the male tale, although it first seeks to silence the women, is equivocated, overpowered when the “same” story is told differently in the female tale. Storytelling prevails over history. Fiction overcomes fact, and Trinh reminds us of what Aristotle said, that poetry “is truer than history.”19 This is possible at least when we begin to perceive the gaps and erasures in the master narratives. Trinh celebrates the power of women’s storytelling, a power which is not repressive, not mastery. She looks for another space: “Between knowledge and power, there is room for knowledge-without-power.”20 In this space, within this knowledge-without-power gap, Trinh seeks a platform where freedom may prevail and change would become possible, and which would confirm that in spite of the repressive systems, the subaltern can have voice. This understanding of the transformative capacity of storytelling is what I interpret to be the point of departure for the intercultural works discussed in this chapter.

claim a position of “giving voice” to subaltern women but rather point out that these women have been silenced (Toivanen, “Menetyksen,” 66 and 159). 17 Trinh, Woman, 122. 18 Trinh, Woman, 41. 19 Trinh, Woman, 120. “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular” (Aristotle, Poetics, IX:3, 35). 20 Trinh, Woman, 40. This is an idealistic view but at least it acknowledges the link between knowledge and power.

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Outsider: Robbie Clipper Sethi’s The Bride Wore Red In Sethi’s The Bride Wore Red, the Sikh culture is approached from the perspective of cross-cultural interaction and, to be more precise, intercultural marriages. It presents an outsider point of view, which is emphasized by the choice of the main protagonist, an American, Sally. It is with her that the story begins and closes, even though there are other focal—mainly female—characters in between. In the first, title story of Sethi’s novel, Sally tells in the second person about her feelings about her first trip in 1975 to India with her husband, Deshi. She is marrying into Deshi’s Punjabi Sikh family, after a long period of living together unmarried in the United States—“enjoying connubial bliss just fine without the approval of God, the family, or the IRS.”21 The expression shows Sally’s irreverent position towards normative markers of social status, be they religious (God), social (family), or institutional (IRS, the Internal Revenue Service). At the beginning of the book, despite Sally’s subversive attitude, they travel to India for the marriage ceremony. The conflicting emotions of the protagonist are amply expressed on their arrival at the airport in Delhi. She thinks: “Now you’re with the man you’ve always wanted. In a place you don’t belong” (BWR 1). Furthermore, the second-person point of view of the opening story gives it a particularly detached atmosphere. The narrator is talking about Sally as an outsider, like in the opening sentence: “You’ve stayed with Deshi because he is the only man you ever wanted who did not require a wife to play dumb to make him feel smarter” (BWR 1). The feelings of cultural disparity are paired with an appreciation of a gendered proximity. Sally as a woman is able to feel herself to be on a par with Deshi, which for her is most important. The cultural differences between Deshi and herself, then, match with her own sense of difference within the American culture: [Y]ou’ve always thought yourself exotic, the one who didn’t belong. When you told the boy next door that you were marrying an Indian, he laughed and said, Sally, I always knew you’d end up with a foreigner; you never could stand the typical American boy. (BWR 1; italics original)

The novel demonstrates that the cultural differences do not run neatly between various groups but also across them. There are, however, occasions where the text betrays its positive comprehension of cultural 21

Robbie Clipper Sethi, The Bride Wore Red (1996), 1; italics original. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by BWR.

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multiplicity and signals a somewhat troubled attitude. Thus, on arrival in India, Sally sees “a sea of swarthy faces” (BWR 1; emphasis added). Sally encounters a mass of indistinguishable people with a swarthy, dark complexion. The racialized marker emphasizes that all that is familiar to Sally has evaporated, language is incomprehensible, and even Deshi acts differently. To begin with, a line is drawn between the traditional, religious Sikh family and the nonreligious American Sally. She has agreed to a Sikh marriage ceremony with Deshi on the insistence of Deshi’s mother, who wants them to have married in a temple. Sally compares her own view with that of Deshi’s mother: “You’ve never had much of a god yourself. You think maybe her god might console you” (BWR 10). When Sally asks Deshi what this God is like, his answer is: “The Sikh god […] is truth” (BWR 10). The discourse of truth does not authenticate the matter for Sally. She thinks instead: The truth is, you spend every spare moment in the bathroom, the only place you can be alone, and every time you look at your remarkably white face in the mirror, you burst out crying. (BWR 10; emphases added.)

In the solitude of the bathroom, Sally encounters forcefully her difference from her surroundings. The dark faces she has seen earlier are contrasted here with the remarkably white face staring at her in the mirror. Sally’s agnostic views on religion resonate with her comparably untraditional outlook. In that sense she is a realisation of that mythological modern American young woman of the 1970s: independent, professional, determined, dieting. She has fought to keep her 22-inch waist, and it is contrasted with Deshi’s sister “whose tires of flesh pour out from under her sari blouse as if she didn’t know that people were starving in India” (BWR 12). In a complementing contrast, Deshi is not a traditional Sikh. After moving away from India he, “and his sister had rebelled against their religion” (BWR 20), Deshi by contesting the traditional haircut and beard, his sister by abandoning her Sikh name and changing her religion from monotheist Sikhism to the polytheist Hinduism of “holy fire and little brass idols” (BWR 21). The story portrays the United States as a place which allows such a new identification. In the third story, “The White-Haired Girl,” the narrative point of view is that of Deshi’s aunt, Mataji. She and her husband have also moved to the United States to live with their son Hermeet in New Jersey. Mataji has great troubles in adjusting to the American way of living just as she had when she had to move from the Punjab to Delhi after the partition in 1947.

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She does not even want to learn English. She says: “I have never had to learn a language to satisfy the men in power, and I never will” (BWR 52). There is defiance in her stance as she tries to make the best she can of a situation that contradicts her convictions. It can also be mentioned that Mataji’s sticking to Punjabi is not only a linguistic choice; it resonates historical pride as standing up against the British, and, simultaneously, for religious belief, traditional values, and even—if paradoxically—a woman’s pride; it was, after all, the husbands that had to learn English and work for the British. Mataji wants desperately that Hermeet should marry a Sikh girl rather than be blinded by the Norwegian girl, Gudrun (or Goodie), with whom he is already having an affair, and therefore she arranges a meeting with a Westernized Sikh girl, Muni and her traditional family, the Singhias. When they meet, she describes Hermeet and his immigration status as follows: He has not only received his green card, […] he has sponsored us all. He is very successful, American in business, Indian at home. Your daughter will have the best of everything—two flats, fully furnished, a handsome, successful husband, and, if I may say, a mother-in-law who does not interfere. (BWR 54–5; emphasis added.)

She captures the idealized Indo-American dream very neatly—American in business, Indian at home—complete with a prosperous economic status, and physical attraction. Hermeet does not want the rich girl, and the plan falls through. By allowing the story to be told from the point of view of different protagonists, the novel develops into a study of cross-cultural problems. The ordinary setting for Sethi’s stories is an Asian man marrying a nonAsian woman. In the story “Missing Persons,” There is one female character, Surinder Kaur, who manages it the other way round and marries an American man. But then again, we are told through an ironic authorial intervention that “Surinder Kaur was created to make this story more original. But she escaped authorial control to marry a stock character” (BWR 181).22 This metafictional narrative creation—so close and yet so far from Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine23—further emphasizes the regularity of the other relationships.

22

In this story, Sethi plays with two pairs of female and male characters, first Leslie and Surinder Singh, and later Leslie and Surinder Kaur (BWR 174–203). 23 See Chapter nine in this book.

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What emerges as central within these relationships is the question of identity: who is able and allowed to retain the identity that he or she feels familiar with? One passage shows clearly such a problematization. When Hermeet and Goodie marry, Hermeet’s parents move in with the couple. After five years, his mother Mataji goes to see a doctor. She can immediately tell that the doctor is a Gujarati, whereas the doctor, named Siddhart Doktor, has no such capability of cultural literacy: After twenty years in the United States, he was resigned to Americans’ inability to distinguish Indian communities. He couldn’t speak Punjabi, but he knew Hindi, and that was close enough. (BWR 111)

For the doctor, Mataji’s complaints are not extraordinary. In fact, he thinks that “all of his cases shared the same general problem: this Punjabi lady had been living a life ill suited to her identity. She was caught between two worlds” (BWR 113). The doctor recognizes this in-betweenness in himself, too. Deshi’s step-niece, Nina, is another female character in the novel who tries to do the unconventional. Her mother, Deshi’s unofficially adopted sister, is herself unconventional, raising her daughter alone as an illegal immigrant. Nina is relieved that her mother got them out of the “community of overdressed women and spoiled men” (BWR 160). It is only when she tries to settle herself in the United States that she is driven into troubles. The immigrant laws have been made more restrictive, forbidding Nina to get a Social Security number. This effectively bars her, above all, from work. To speed her prospects in getting the desired green card, she persuades her step-cousin Chotu to marry her, even though they do not live together. She thinks that after “marrying Chotu and getting my green card, I would be a legal American girl” (BWR 166). Things turn wrong for her, however. The Immigration officials investigate their marriage and discover it to be counterfeit because the address they had given is for a dormitory for single students. Nina is deported and she leaves, voluntarily, as she wants to avoid any harm coming to her mother. She is determinate, however, to get back to America, and she agrees to marry another man, the choice of her family, in order to get back. For the Punjabi women in the novel, there is very little chance to develop their own identities. The few exceptions, Surinder Kaur and Nina, do not function as full-fledged characters in this respect. But the American counterparts do not fare much better, either. In two chapters, “A White

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Woman’s Burden,” an ironic twist of Rudyard Kipling’s poem,24 and in “The White Widow,” Sally, facing the burdens of childlessness as well as widowhood, has to face her in-laws as well, which she does not manage gracefully. The diasporic experiences represented in Sethi’s novel are multiple. The main focalising character is, nevertheless, an American for whom the Indian diaspora functions as a transformative context. This outsider perspective indicates again that diaspora does not mean a transformation only for those who travel but, in Brah’s words, “the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native.”25

Insider: Shauna Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons Shauna Singh Baldwin’s English Lessons is very different in its narrative from Sethi’s novel. First of all, it narrates fifteen unrelated stories that range geographically from colonial Rawalpindi to post-colonial Toronto in the late 20th century. Furthermore, it is more traditional in form when compared to Sethi’s narration. Perhaps the most notable difference concerns characterization, as Singh Baldwin’s characters in a narratological sense tend to be rounder and more focused. From the chapatti-kneading Sardarni Sahib of the first story, “Rawalpindi 1919,” to the frustrated wife of the last story, “Devika,” the women of Singh Baldwin’s stories try to make the best they can of the situations that they are unavoidably in. Servants, wives, daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, friends, all have their burdens to bear. The anonymous wife in the story “Montreal 1962” goes into a contemplative routine of washing her husband’s turbans. He has been offered a job and she imagines what he has been told: “They said I could have the job if I take off my turban and cut my hair short” (EL 4). Rather than doing so, she makes up her mind: I will not let you cut your strong rope of hair and go without a turban into this land of strangers. […] My hands will tie a turban every day upon your head and work so we can keep it there. One day our children will say: “My father came to this country with very little but his turban and my mother learned to work because no one would hire him.” (EL 7)

Her overriding attitude is that of pride and superiority. She concludes: “Then we will have taught Canadians what it takes to wear a turban” (EL 24 25

Kipling, ”White,” x. Brah, Cartographies, 209; emphasis original.

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7). This attitude—“we will have taught Canadians”—is a very remarkable position, especially as the story is set in 1962 when the immigration laws in Canada had not yet been made more permissive and South Asian women had not yet entered the labour market in greater numbers. Monika Fludernik attributes this to an engagement “in a hybridization of the Canadian custom of ‘going out to work’” for it is not done to give her more freedom but “to preserve the izzat of her husband.”26 Kanwaljit, the woman of the title story, “English Lessons,” then, has come to live in America with her husband Tony—which is the way he wants to be called there. They have married more than two years earlier, just before Tony has left for America, and have lived separately all this time. Now that they live under the threat of Kanwaljit being deported before she gets her magical green card, Kanwaljit changed her name to Kelly saying: “No one here can say Kanwaljit. And Kanwaljit is left far away in Amritsar” (EL 124). She, too, has had to leave behind her identity. She wants to take English lessons to bring her school English up to date in order to pass her eventual immigration interview. As they have to live covertly, it is also difficult to find a teacher who would not report them. Finally they find a Punjabi woman who is married to a white man, which for them is a sign of her unconnectedness with the Sikh community, for the Gurdwara congregation would not approve of such an intercultural marriage. The narration is very economical and unpretentious. In the space of five pages the narrative manages to portray the predicaments under which Kelly has had, and still has, to live. But now she is resolute: first of all, she wants these English lessons. Although Tony instructs the teacher: “I will not like it if you teach her more than I know. […] She will learn quickly, but you must not teach her too many American ideas” (EL 126). When the lessons are arranged, then, in defiance, Kelly makes up her mind: “Tomorrow, I will ask her where I can learn how to drive” (EL 126). She has made her decision, it seems. Despite her husband’s direct instructions, she will no longer stay in the background. She is going out to conquer Canada. Nilanjana S. Roy, a reviewer of Singh Baldwin’s collection, focuses on the characters and says: Most of them are Sikh, and considering the zeal with which that Indian community has embraced brave new worlds, it’s significant that this

26

Fludernik, “Colonial,” 276; italics original.

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Chapter Seven collection merely makes the reader wonder why it took so long for IndoAnglian fiction to get around to their stories.27

In the literary scene, especially after Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 made the international headlines, Indian writing in English has gained in popularity. However, as Roy’s comment here implies, the fact is that Indians, and Indian literatures, are still univocally regarded as a homogeneous group, and Hindu or Hindi, for that matter. But other groups, such as Sikhs, are gradually emerging, as well. Roy is partially right about the belatedness of Indian English writing “getting around” to Sikh stories in general. There is, however, especially Khushwant Singh who already in 1956 brought Sikh history and literature to international attention with his seminal book on the Partition, Train to Pakistan. The trauma of the 1947 Partition has been deep, leaving a painful reminder of the dangers of emphasizing communal identity: “It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves—and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols.”28 The trauma has never left, and despite a great deal of writing, it has remained a silent pain for many, as is indicated in the title of a book on Partition writing, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, by Urvashi Butalia. In her version Butalia comments: “I focus on the stories of the smaller, often invisible, players: ordinary people, women, children, scheduled castes.”29 Such a shift in focus of narrative has been an important element of literature in recent years. In my analysis, more important in Singh Baldwin’s stories than the Sikh backdrop itself, is the centre-staging of women. Roy again observes that “while few stories here depend on a solely female point of view, most of the protagonists are women and the narrative voice itself is almost exclusively feminine.”30 Singh Baldwin has written about the intercultural relationship between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs from the point of view of women in her novel What the Body Remembers (1999) set in the early 20th century, leading up to the Partition. Towards the end, after escaping the massacres to Delhi the main character Roop realises she is a Sikh. Furthermore, she feels deeply the pain that violence has meant for women: “So much shame, so little izzat for girls and women. […] See me, I am 27

N. Roy, “Glossary,” on-line; emphasis added. Another relevant comparable minority community who have only quite recently emerged into literary and general awareness are the Parsis (see Kapadia et al., Parsi). 28 Sidhwa, Cracking, 101. Bapsi Sidhwa writes also about Partition experiences. 29 Butalia, Other, 11. 30 Roy, “Glossary,” on-line.

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human, though I am only a woman. See me, I did what women are for.”31 The subversive, hidden, unheard stories of women are struggling to emerge. And in the process, in the becoming as Trinh puts it, identities are formed. The feminization of diasporic narrative during the last decades is not completely surprising.32 For example the proportion of South Asian women migrating to North America has become more or less to equal that of men after the 1960s. All this, again, is related to the more general changes in the position of women in the global market. As Delia D. Aguilar notes, “the world’s work force today […] has become radically feminized” and also tremendously migratory.33 That South Asian women have entered the labour market is of great impact, especially in view of their traditional role of domestic work. The fact that this shows also in the number of publications is remarkable and noticeable. Especially in the field of diasporic literatures, many new women writers have emerged. And with them, new stories have been presented to their readers.

Surviving America The final story of Singh Baldwin’s collection is “Devika.” In this story, the frustrated wife of Ratan, Devika, tries to adjust to her new environment in Toronto. She yearns for relatives to tell her “what to do, how to do it, how to live, how to be good, how to be loved” (EL 170). But there is nobody from her family around to support her, “there was only Ratan, and Canada, and herself. No one else” (EL 170). Devika discovers a way of survival, however. After receiving a letter from her old friend, Asha, she begins to act as if Asha was visiting them. She serves food to her, talks to her. In their youth, Asha had been very untraditional in her attitudes: “wilful, fun-loving, irreverent” (EL 151). Now, in her letter, she tells about her marriage, child, and all the things she had previously denounced. Devika does not want to let the Asha of her youth vanish, and she relishes in showing the imaginary guest hospitality. Gradually, Devika changes into Asha and begins to act in the way that she thought Asha would have.

31 Singh Baldwin, What, 498; emphasis original. The next novel, The Tiger Claw (2004), moves away from these themes. It is about a World War II Muslim secret agent Noor Inayat Khan and her life. 32 Kuortti, “Feminization,” 45–9. 33 Aguilar, “Imperialism,” on-line.

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Towards the end of the story, the transformation is completed: Devika declares to Ratan: “I am Asha, […] Devika was afraid of living here, so she just … flew away” (EL 171). This appropriation of another identity could be interpreted as delusional from the point of view of Devika’s actions. A more positive perspective would be to see the change as a subjective choice when facing up to a fear of living. In order to survive, Devika chooses to become a person she thinks better suited for her new life. Ratan accepts this transformation as it will make his life easier, too. The new Asha, whose name means “hope,” begins her new life powerfully by expressing her wishes: to go and see the Niagara Falls, to learn to love, work, drive. In this chapter I have looked at the problematization of subjectivity and identity in a (trans)nationalist framework. From the preceding analysis of texts from the “third South Asia,” here especially the North American immigrant Sikh community, it can be concluded that in these stories women who have previously remained silent, silenced, are now beginning to come forward. They are increasingly adopting subject positions from which they can articulate issues and agendas of their own volition. How they finally manage to feed into the “host” culture remains to be seen; these stories do not give an unambiguous answer to that question. The stories also portray several ways in which the intercultural relations are integral to questions of identification in terms of religion, gender, and nationality. What is clear, too, is that changes on a global scale in women’s social status have also had effects on the position of diasporic South Asian women in North America. The situation of these women is by no means uncomplicated. Identities are difficult to change, and to live in a continuous state of in-betweenness is no longer painless. Some find consolation in traditionalism, others embrace the new environment. Yet others create identities from the bits and pieces of their lives. This is what finally Devika does when she changes into Asha: “Asha closed her swollen eyes and felt Devika drift away as though she had never been” (EL 171).

CHAPTER EIGHT EXPERIENCES OF RETURN TO INDIA IN ANITA RAU BADAMI’S THE HERO’S WALK, AMULYA MALLADI’S THE MANGO SEASON AND VINEETA VIJAYARAGHAVAN’S MOTHERLAND: THE OTHER SIDE OF MY HEART

NRI Experiences One recurring theme in diasporic Indian literature is representation of the experiences of the NRIs, Non-Resident Indians (and the PIOs—People of Indian Origin), in India. The diasporic travels of these people are by no means always final, and many of them travel and move back and forth. If immigrants are often under suspicion in their new locales, there is a parallel attitude towards them in the place of their “origin” as well. If the concept of “home” is problematic, or even haunting, in the diasporic situation, such sentiments are often strengthened during a stay “back home.” In this chapter, I look at such problematics through a discussion of three recent novels: Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk (2000), Amulya Malladi’s The Mango Season (2003), and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan’s Motherland: The Other Side of My Heart (2001). The opening question is: in what different ways do the novels elaborate on the experiences of the returning NRIs in India? Each of the novels uses different techniques and focalisation, although on the surface level they seem to be rather similar. The most striking similarity is in their depiction of extended South Indian high-caste family settings with a multiplicity of relationships and difficulties especially in inter-generational communication. I analyse each novel separately and in conclusion, contemplate on their general position, as well as make some comparisons and observations on their specific diasporic contexts. In popular media, one can see that there is a wide-spread, mutual distrust and resentment between NRIs and RIs (Resident Indians, or to

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some, “Real”). I am interested in seeing what kind of responses seemingly similar stories have for the cultural contact between these two groups, or rather, identities. For analysis, I have chosen three narratives which portray young diasporic girls or women who come to India at the ages of 7, 15, and 27. As they are traditionally and socially considered vulnerable, it is interesting to see how these characters deal with, influence, and cope with their respective problematic identificational situations. I am not interested in the (possible) autobiographical dimensions of the novels, even though their female authorship would easily suggest such an associative reading. The single most relevant and decisive aspect of each of the books is their young female protagonist. Through my readings, I illustrate how the novels offer contrasting yet overlapping viewpoints onto the notion of return. Here, return is not understood in the sense of nostalgic homecoming, but as a transformative process. It is seen primarily as a macro-level concept which overrides personal experiences. A “personal return” carries with it a larger looping structure. It is a Möbiusstrip kind of effect of repetitive creation, destruction and re-creation, of indefinite multiplication, of complexity, ambiguity, even contradiction and aporia, of liberty and individuality, as well as mutual dependence and community.1

Return indicates a transformation due to which return to the “same” is not possible.2 The starting point for my discussion is a diasporic space in which both those who move and those who do not change, in which, in Avtar Brah’s words, “the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native.”3 In their hybridity, I argue, the novels respond to what Said described as “overlapping territories, intertwined histories,” and challenge the hegemonic colonial and traditional certainties.4 In their respective ways, then, they participate in “the regeneration of communities and selves out of heterogeneous experiences in the new country.”5

1

Galle, “Soyinka’s,” 79–80; original footnote omitted. In her discussion of nostalgic return (Gr. nostos), Marigo Alexopoulou demonstrates that the idea of “the impossible-return-to-the-same” dates back to (at least) Classical Greek tragedies (see Alexopoulou, Nostos, on-line). 3 Brah, Cartographies, 209; emphasis original. 4 Said, Culture, 72. 5 Boehmer, Colonial, 250. 2

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Creating New Memories In Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk (2000), the seven-year-old Nandana is sent to India after her parents die in a car accident. Due to the tragedy, she loses her will to speak and remains speechless almost until the end of the novel. Furthermore, she denies that the parents are dead, and when she is taken to India, she regards it only as a short visit, after which she will return home.6 That is not to happen, however. Nandana’s closest relatives are her grandparents whom she has never seen because she was born in Vancouver. Nandana’s mother Maya had left for the United States to study, and after a while she married a Canadian man, Alan, against her parents’ will and much to their discontent. Maya’s enraged father Sripathi, through whom most of the novel is narrated, has cut all communication with Maya. As Nandana’s custodian, he nevertheless goes and brings the orphaned girl to India. Nandana refuses to speak and remains silent through most of the story, although a section in most chapters is focalized through her. The other central characters of the novel are Ammayya, Sripathi’s mother; Nirmala, his wife; Putti, his unmarried sister; and Arun, his activist son. The story itself is not contextualized historically very closely; there are only occasional references to historical events. Instead, this story of the everyday heroism of Sripathi Rao—to which the title alludes—is situated in mundane and familial matters. Arun, immersed in his own activist practices, cannot perceive his father’s heroism. He comments: “See, you had your independence of India and all to fight for, real ideals. For me and my friends, the fight is against daily injustice, our own people stealing our rights” (HW 239). Sripathi is no fighter, however, but a hard-working copywriter who “did not believe in ostentatious displays—of possessions or of emotions” (HW 3). At the age of sixteen he had sworn not to be like his father who had humiliated the family by having a public liaison with another woman. Sripathi had decided he would be dutiful to his family and especially to his mother, and be an ordinary, simple, respected man (HW 61). There is, however, a hidden side to Sripathi—without anyone knowing it (or so he imagines), he writes letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines as “it was the perfect way to vent his spleen and express his deepest

6

Anita Rau Badami, The Hero’s Walk (2000), 154 and 229. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by HW. Already at her young age, she also knows definitely where her home is: “I am not American, […] I am Canadian” (HW 153).

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thoughts—those blatant, embarrassing emotions that he was so reluctant to display in speech or action” (HW 8). And this is no small accomplishment; he has written these letters every day for many years on all kinds of matters he sees around him. His activity is reflected in the pseudonym he chose as a young man when he started to write the letters: Pro Bono Publico. On behalf of the people. Like his boyhood heroes—the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Jhanda Singh the Invisible—he was a crusader, but one who tried to address the problems of the world with pen and ink instead of sword and gun and fist. (HW 8–9)

The trope of the crusader is an ambiguous illustration of the world in which Sripathi fights his fights, apart from the everyday matters of work and family. All of this is marked by his ritual of selecting a suitable pen from the thirty-two pens he has for his writing: “He touched them one by one, lifted his favourites, and wondered which one he ought to use” (HW 9). Later on, the significance of the pens is used as a symbol of reconciliation When the news of Maya’s death is brought to her parents, Nirmala seeks solace from her religious devotion and from the gods Krishna and Shiva, Ganesha and Lakshmi (HW 42). The frustrated and enraged Sripathi throws old shoes at the idols and regards Nirmala’s worship as useless nonsensical rituals (HW 43). This act of desecration makes Nirmala turn, for once, against Sripathi, which is very much against her character, because, usually “[s]he could not defy her husband, she had never been taught how to do so and she lacked the courage besides” (HW 113). In this extreme emotional crisis, she finds that ability and courage, and says: “My rituals are no worse than yours” (HW 43). It turns out that she had all the time known about Sripathi’s secret writing mission for a long time (HW 14). She does not think highly of it either; for her the writings are nothing but idiotic letters and “big-big” words (HW 43). Where Sripathi resorted to a traditional form of vilification, Nirmala for her part derides linguistically the value of his efforts. Their characteristic ways of ritualistically attempting at communication—by the means of writing or prayer—shows also their desire for communication with their “lost” daughter Maya. Furthermore, the collision of rituals between Sripathi and Nirmala is an indication that the integrity of the patriarchal family community, resting on Sripathi’s shoulders, is in jeopardy at the time of Maya’s death and Nandana’s arrival. The kleptomaniac Ammayya suspects everyone of plotting against her, and at the age of 42 Putti is burdened by her mother,

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who refuses all her marriage prospects. With the arrival of the unspeaking Nandana, the dormant questions of allegiance and home are evoked. This evocation of the catalytic effect of diasporic influence is quite subtle as relatively little is said explicitly about the diasporic experience in this novel. Similarly there is not much said about the colonial experience, even though its lingering effects inform the basic outlook of the family. The colonial past is referred to by Arun in the passage that was quoted earlier, and again in the description of the purchase of stained-glass panes for the windows of the Big House, the Raos’ ancestral home, which were “bought from a British family that had smelled the winds of change several years before Independence and moved back to England” (HW 6). Apart from these cursory remarks, the outcome of the British colonial contact is mentioned only once more in Ammamma’s singular dismissal of Partition, as can be seen in the following extract: In Ammayya’s somewhat limited world, there were only three countries— England, America and India. Pakistan and Bangladesh (which she still called East Bengal) did not count as countries because, as far she was concerned, India’s partition was a mistake that never happened, Jawaharlal Nehru was a womanising fool like her own husband (God take care of his soul) and Gandhi was a traitor to decent Brahmin sentiments with his allmen-including-untouchables-are-equal nonsense. If Ammayya did not acknowledge Partition, it had not occurred. (HW 140)

Ammayya’s moment of self-willed (albeit in reality impotent) rewriting of history is reminiscent of Saleem Sinai’s chutnification of history in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,7 although the resemblances end there. It remains a part of Ammayya’s traditionalist outlook, which is best illustrated in her zealous adherence to the Brahmanical practices of widowhood, excelling even her own mother-in-law. This is described as follows: “She dug up archaic fasts and rituals and became more rigidly Brahmanical than the temple’s own priest” (HW 65). It is between Ammayya’s extreme adherence to tradition, Sripathi’s own low-key traditionalism, and Maya’s disregard of tradition that the story evolves. In this process, Nandana functions as a catalyst, a transforming vehicle who is herself changed, too. The issue of NRIs is not a governing topic of the novel, and it does not surface through Nandana’s character. Its presence is mostly felt in relation to the marriage arrangements that are made in the story. Before Maya had 7

Rushdie, Midnight’s, 459.

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gone to the United States, she had been engaged to be married. Her future father-in-law P. K. Bhat has certain requirements for the future wife of his Philadelphia-based son, Prakash. These conditions characterize the prevalent defensive, xenophobic attitudes: “We only want a decent girl from a good family, one who knows how to fit into life in the West without losing sight or our Indian values” (HW 100; emphasis added). As it happens, such an “Indian dream” of Maya both “fitting in” and “not losing sight” is finally unrealistic because she breaks up the engagement with Prakash and the worst fears seem to become true. When Maya had informed the family of the break-up, Nirmala contemplated the case as follows: Did we not bring her up properly? Must be that foreign place. Their ways are different, all right for them perhaps, but for a girl brought up here, it must be difficult to resist temptation. (HW 111; emphasis added)

It is clear that for Nirmala, too, the “foreign place” with “their ways” constitutes a threat that jeopardizes the identity of a young, vulnerable Indian girl such as Maya. However, unlike Sripathi who stops writing his fortnightly letters of family news and advice to Maya, Nirmala maintains contact with her through her weekly phone calls. In the case of the unmarried Putti, the situation is different. Ammayya uses her own xenophobic fears to prevent Putti from marrying. She wants her daughter to remain the unmarried helpmate to her mother as sanctioned by tradition. The extent to which the elimination of this anxiety is executed comes clear in the case of the smart young engineer from America, whom Ammayya turned down because she had heard rumours that men from abroad already had white wives and used their Indian ones as maidservants. (HW 81; emphasis added)

The implicit irony is that regardless of the situation, it is Putti’s fate to be a maidservant to her mother, not to the feared “man from abroad.” Furthermore, other barriers are created to thwart all other suitable boys. The most explicit instance of contemplation of the destructive foreign influence on identity is when Sripathi meets Nandana’s uncle Sunny, Dr. Sunderrajan, in Canada. Sripathi thinks of him as follows: His soft Canadian voice retained no trace of India. He had yielded to a new citizenship, thought Sripathi. First you change the way you dress, then your hair, your manners, your accent. Abracadabra, zippo, zippa: a new person stands before you. Had Maya’s accent changed as well, from

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Madrasi spice to Canadian ice? Sripathi cringed at his play with words. Long years as a copy-writer could reduce even sorrow to a jingle. (HW 143; emphasis added)

The loss of identity is here described as a slippery slope; if you yield once and let even one aspect go, the rest is sure to follow: from the external aspects of dress and hair all the way to innermost characteristics. For Sripathi, the most telling element of this identity change is Sunny’s loss of accent: “His soft Canadian voice retained no trace of India.” The transformation has become final when “no trace of India” is left. This fear of loss of identity is, indeed, at the heart of resistance to “foreign” influence, not only in this novel but in more general terms as well. As I argue, the way Nandana develops and influences her surroundings, shows that the process of hybridization in a contact situation need not be conflictual or negative. For Nandana, India proves to be a very different place from Vancouver. When Sripathi arrives with Nandana at Madras railway station, he understands this: It must be strange and disorienting for her […], the steady roar of sounds—vendors, children wailing for their parents, coolies shouting for customers, beggars, musicians—the entire circus of humanity under the high arching roof of Madras Central Station. […] Minutes later they were on the platform, surrounded by all that was familiar to him and strange to the little girl swaying beside him. (HW 151–2; emphases added)

The extreme contrast between his and Nandana’s experience is made explicit: whereas everything was familiar to him, it was strange to her. In this way, Sripathi and Nandana form two points in the cycle of life, one an experienced veteran, other a beginner. Facing “the entire circus of humanity,” Nandana begins her life in India. To her, India appears at first as a hot and zoo-like exotic place (HW 152–3). There everything is different: the English language as well as the school (HW 200–1), and, to her utter dismay, even tooth-fairies work differently (HW 263). When she eagerly waits for the Halloween party, she “realized that in India they didn’t have Halloween. Instead there was something called Deepavali” (HW 278). Falling like Alice into the Wonderland, everything familiar indeed turns strange. Practically nothing is done, however, to ease Nandana’s passage to India. At one point, when Nandana has not been eating properly, Putti comes to a realization:

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Chapter Eight No sense you have. That child won’t eat vegetables and all. She had a foreign father. They eat meat. I am telling you, Shanti Kumar told me. She had a really bad time when her grandchildren came from foreign. They wanted cow and goat and pig and all. (HW 221; emphasis added)

Putti’s attitude is perceptive and accommodating, although she finds a traditionalist explanation for Nandana’s refusal to eat—“a foreign father.” When Nirmala understands the predicament, she immediately takes her shopping bags and goes to buy meat, in spite of Ammayya’s overtly Brahmanical veto: “[D]on’t think I will allow you to bring meat into this house” (HW 221). The decisive change for Nandana and the whole narrative takes place when Nandana is abducted by Mrs. Poorna, the “mad lady” (HW 306) in the neighbourhood (HW 297–300). While she is being held up, Nandana makes a promise to herself that when she gets away, she will start talking. When she gets a chance to call for help, she shouts for her grandmother Nirmala by the designation she had wished to be called: “Ajji!” (HW 300). She calls for Sripathi, too, “the word strange in her mouth, ‘Ajja’” (HW 300). Nandana is eventually found and this ordeal, the real “hero’s walk” for everyone, brings the family closer together. Nirmala and Putti find their courage to assert their own will. The newly defiant Nirmala, amazed at her own daring (HW 319), decides to marry Putti off to a lower-cast Munnyswamy’s boy, Gopala, in the neighbourhood, as he had helped in finding Nandana. This is done against traditions, without consulting with, or gaining the approval of, Ammayyu or Sripathi. Nirmala thinks resolutely: “If they could manage with a half-foreign granddaughter, why not these people who at least had the same rituals?” (HW 320). She is even ready now to bring in the case of Maya to argue for her view: “If her husband dared to do ooin-aayin about caste and creed, she would remind him of their Maya” (HW 321). Nirmala has really found in herself a new person, a new woman, in a process of awakening that the reader has gradually been made aware of since the argument over rituals. Thus, the diasporic encounter has repercussions beyond one’s expectations. Already the virtual transatlantic link with Maya had started a process of transformation. The arrival and presence of Nandana fosters this process, and eventually there is a recognition of diasporic changes “at home” as well. As a final gesture of reconciliation between Nandana and Sripathi, then, he promises her one of his precious pens. As she picks up the cheapest, instead of the more expensive one he offers her, Sripathi thinks: “Just like her mother […]. She liked to make her own choices” (HW 358). For a fictional work, this revelation is a subtle example of how issues

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concerning changes in the status of women can be dealt with progressively. It is all the more an accomplishment as it is arrived at by using a traditional male protagonist rather than a female one. Nandana’s tragic story develops towards a resolution, even though not on a grand scale, but in the hearts of the participants. It appears that Nandana had finally arrived, but not alone. The whole family changes with her, and as Sripathi puts it, “it was time now to create new memories” (HW 322). Here, the process of transformation prompted by the diasporic contact creates a space that requires new imaginings: emotionally, socially, and culturally. It is a travel experience gained without travelling.

“Anywhere Could Become Home” In comparison to the young Nandana in Rau Badami’s book, the protagonist of Vineeta Vijayaraghavan’s Motherland (2001) is a fifteenyear-old teenager, Maya. She is “shipped off” to India by her parents as a protective and punitive measure after a car accident with her boyfriend Steve, who had been drunk-driving after a party.8 With such different characters, the starting points for the contact between NRIs and RIs are quite different but the experiences of these contacts are, however, very similar. The subtitle of the book, The Other Side of My Heart, is very evocative, implying a split of the heart in two. “Motherland” refers here to India, the land of Maya’s birth and of her mother, or, rather in this case, of her mothers. Maya had grown up in India until the age of four, after which she was sent to her parents who were living in New York. Her family is an extended high-caste Malayali Nair family from her mother’s side. Raised by her grandmother Ammamma, Maya had even first thought her to be her real mother (M 10–1). When Maya arrives in India, then, she spends her time with her cousin Brindha and Brindha’s nanny Rupa, and is introduced to a suitor. Later, after an accident, she is taken care of by Ammamma from whom she learns a lot about life. Maya is finally reconciled with her mother, and even discovers a family secret. If The Hero’s Walk is quite explicitly not historically contextualized— after all, a tragedy is expected to be set above or beyond history— Motherland is, in contrast, located in a specific historical and political context. When Maya arrives in India, she is questioned by men from the Central Bureau of Intelligence because the former Prime Minister Rajiv

8 Vineeta Vijayaraghavan, Motherland: The Other Side of My Heart (2003), 1–2. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by M.

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Gandhi has been assassinated only three weeks earlier by Tamil Tigers.9 The men show her some pictures of suspects, among them pictures of a girl. The intelligence men, who are portrayed in an old James Bond film fashion as somewhat ridiculous, tell her that: “‘Young girls are the best criminals […]. Because you all look innocent.’ His emphasis on the word ‘look’ was insinuating” (M 8). This question of involvement with the Tamil Tigers will emerge frequently in the story, and in the end it serves as a decisive moment of identification for Maya. It takes place when Brindha, Rupa and Maya are interrogated for assisting the Tigers. When the cousins are released and Rupa is arrested, Maya thinks: “I was frozen, not child enough to throw myself on Rupa. Not child enough to stand up for her, and not adult enough either” (M 220). The inclusion of the politico-historical context is, however, described more as an exciting adventure for the teenage girls, who are fascinated by danger in their rebellion against their parents and other adults, rather than as a critical involvement with the issue of the Tamil cause. Maya’s character, unlike Nandana in The Hero’s Walk, is very selfconscious not only about herself physically—being a teenage girl with periods—but also about her unstable relationship between India and the United States. She sees in them both good and bad qualities: “[W]hile America was verging on paranoia preserving the sterilized sanctity of the country” (M 6), India on the other hand was hot and full of people staring at her (M 9), the traditional India legends were remote (M 53), and the food there is too spicy and difficult to eat (M 30 and 18). But Maya is determined to feel at home in India: If I scrubbed hard enough, I hoped I would peel away that layer of Americanness that made me feel clumsy and conspicuous here; I wanted to unearth that other person who had felt at home here and known how to fit in. Now more than on earlier trips, I felt how hard and how exhausting it was to translate, even though we were all speaking English. There were so many ways of being and expressing myself that I had to leave behind, and so many I had to relearn. (M 35; emphases added)

These processes of cultural translation, unlearning, and relearning—the steps in finding that “other person” within oneself—are going on all the time throughout the novel. Technically these processes are represented in 9

Another historical anchor is the mentioning of Jayalalitha, who, as it is said, “had become Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu last week” (M 56). The passage merits a brief encounter with the concept of corruption, but otherwise it remains an independent temporal marker, without further implications.

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the text mostly not through parenthetic explanations to the reader, as is common in diasporic writing, but through Maya’s thinking. As such it would speak of an effort to offer a more subjective perspective, and at the same time of a less didactic, more respectful one. Whether this strategy succeeds, then, depends on the readers will to accept it. A reflective board for Maya is her British cousin Madhu whose untraditional, lax ways are frowned upon by the rest of the family. Madhu does not care much about India and this causes Maya to defend her own attitude towards India: “‘I like coming to India,’ I said, believing it more as I heard myself say it, reacting defensively to Madhu’s disdain” (M 94). Madhu is not convinced about Maya’s stance because she sees how the Indians do not appreciate the Americans in contrast with the British. Describing a tailor’s mimicking of her British accent, Madhu says: People are still in love with the English. It’s the ultimate irony. I bet no one is trying to sound like you […]. Face it, Maya. Indians respect Britain much more than they respect America. Every Indian still holds a candle for the Queen. (M 102; emphasis added)

Maya is puzzled by this ironic and perceptive observation of the attitude of Indians towards Britain and the United States. It shows an awareness of the colonial mimicry still present in the post-colonial situation. The claim that an American identity is not an adequate one in India causes Maya anguish. She tries very hard to understand her own diasporic position between the United States and India, and says to Madhu: “I had an Indian passport until a couple years ago […]. Why can’t we feel like we belong here?” (M 103). Even though Madhu cannot be convinced by such arguments, Maya feels herself increasingly confident with her Indian side, the other side of her heart. One of the extreme trials—a kind of self-imposed “cricket test”—of Maya’s loyalty to India is described in relation to her taking a bath.10 Whereas in the United States she loves to take long showers, in India she wants to manage her baths as quickly as possible because the hot water is separately heated for her and cools fast (M 34), and she does not want to be treated as a special case. Later on, when she has gradually made herself 10

The “cricket test” was the British Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit’s phrase in 1990 to disparage the loyalties of diasporic South Asians to Britain (Werbner, Imagined, 226). Brah comments on the underlying racism of the “test”: “It is unlikely that Tebbit would question the allegiance of populations of European origin in the Americas, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand to their countries of adoption” (Brah, Cartographies, 194).

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use less and less hot water, and the supply of toiletries she has brought with her runs out, she prepares herself to announce to everybody, some day soon, that: “I can withstand what you can withstand, I don’t need to be accommodated” (M 142). This simple everyday detail illustrates the long way that Maya has travelled in her cultural translation. Although the journey is not yet finished, she sees that it is possible for her. One important aspect of Maya’s search for identity is her contemplation of womanhood. She often thinks about issues of femininity such as dress and make-up (M 28), arranged marriage (M 48), dating (M 48), and the position of women in families in India (M 69). On this last issue, she makes a direct question to her Aunt Reema about whether they had wanted a boy or a girl when they were expecting Brindha. Reema’s answer is as direct and affirmative as the question is insecure: “In our Nair families, you want girls. Girls keep the family together and they keep the family name going” (M 69). After this (in the wider Indian context) exceptional answer the question no longer seems to bother Maya and the issue is left at that. What does bother her is her relationship with her boyfriend Steve. Having an American boyfriend becomes a problem, she realizes, when she thinks about the possibility of Steve coming to India. She thinks: “I couldn’t remotely imagine bringing Steve here either. […H]e was not Indian, not Hindu, not Malayali, not high-caste” (M 112). The inner complexities, of which the relationship with Steve is an example, do not get resolved in the novel. It is another part of the journey still ahead of her. It is interesting that the issue of caste should arise in relation to Steve. as it somehow seems to be absent from much of the story. But Maya is aware of her upper-caste status, for example when she goes swimming with Rupa. She gets leeches on her skin from the water, which she then asks Rupa to remove. The servant does not want to, as she fears the reaction of the family. Maya comes up with an explanation: “She was from a low caste, she wasn’t supposed to touch me” (M 127). In this aspect, Vijayaraghavan’s novel appears to be somewhat less progressive than Badami’s. In its allegedly realistic representation of the caste system, it does not, nevertheless take a critical position on it—one way or the other. To conclude the discussion of Motherland, I quote the philosophical ending of the novel. It illustrates how the cultural contacts between the diaspora and home influence each others. Maya finds it hard and confusing to return to her American home after the summer (M 230). The novel records that she has learned a lot from her discussions with Ammamma during her recovery from the injury, a whole new way to

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imagine her life. She concludes the story heartbreakingly, even idealistically: Ammamma had given me maps of my past and future to navigate by. Sanjay uncle had said there weren’t maps for where we lived, but that wasn’t true. There weren’t maps of our roads and our homes, but there were maps for the inside, maps of the heart, and they could only be drawn by those who loved you. Maps of the physical world were changed all the time because history and memory ultimately trumped geography. With what Ammamma had given me, I had a suspicion that I, too, could surpass geography. I could live anywhere, be grafted and take root anywhere, and anywhere could become home. (M 231; emphases added)

The novel consists of an ongoing process of cultural translation. In the contact situation changes takes place and they give way to new identifications. Similarly, in her interview survey of family narratives of South Asian Diaspora, Kirin Narayan observes that a given narrative can be contextualized differently, yielding different identifications. She concludes by quoting thoughts about “home” in a situation of diasporic multiplicity by an interviewee who says that if there’s no such place for you, if there’s no home so to speak, then everywhere can be your home. And in a way that’s kind of liberating, and might I say empowering, too?11

As the passage from Motherland on the previous page shows, the diasporic contacts work as transformative moments, and even Maya gains new ways to imagine herself, “new maps” to navigate her “past and future” life. Her anxiety is finally reduced by her (at least provisional) realization that with the help of such imaginary maps, “anywhere could become home.”12

Familiar Territory Amulya Malladi’s The Mango Season (2003) is different from the two previous books in its setting and characterization. Unlike the other two novels, The Mango Season is wholly ahistorical. The focus is emphatically on the personal experience and relations of the main character, Priya, in the context of an NRI in contact with RIs. Malladi’s book gives also a 11

K. Narayan, “Haunting,” 431; emphasis original. Compare this idea of imaginary maps to Mahasweta Devi’s collection of stories Imaginary Maps (1995); see also Fiske, “Act,” 156–161. 12

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more personal impression, as it is the only one of these stories that is told in the first person. Set in Hyderabad, among the Telugu Brahmin Rao family, it portrays the 27-year-old Priya’s journey from the United States to her family in India with an intention to tell about her recent engagement to a man named Nick, and their marriage plans. She finds the task immensely difficult and cannot bring herself to confront her family and reveal the matter which she had kept as a secret. As things turn out, Priya finds it socially extremely difficult to resist her family’s plans for an arranged marriage. Therefore she ends up going through the pelli-chupulu,13 as well as marriage plans with the chosen bridegroom, Adarsh. Seven years earlier Priya had escaped an arranged marriage by going to study Computer Sciences in the United States.14 She had stayed away from India ever since. Her move abroad is a difficult issue for the rest of the family, except for her father who regards it as an opportunity rather than as a betrayal of the motherland (MS 118). This ambiguous situation paves way for the pending collision of cultural identities. After several years away, everything in India seems unnatural and chaotic to Priya (MS 13). She experiences the diasporic ambiguity very strongly on her return: I winced; I was doing that complaining-about-India thing that all of us America-returned Indians did. I had lived here for twenty years, yet seven years later, the place was a hell-hole. (MS 17; emphases added)

As an “America-returned Indian,” Priya is very self-conscious about her altered relationship with India, her acquired predisposition to “complain about India,” to the extent that she describes it derogatorily and controversially as “a hell-hole.” At the same time, nevertheless, she feels it absurd having to adjust to India because, as she thinks, she “was Indian, yet everything seemed only vaguely familiar” (MS 22; emphasis added). She regrets the loss of small Indian joys that she had not even thought she missed (MS 64). The diasporic ambiguity is her ultimate trauma. Within all these conflicting emotions, she perceives a split within her: “It was as if there were two people inside me: Indian Priya and American Priya. Ma’s Priya and Nick’s Priya. I wondered who the real Priya was” (MS 65). She is very acutely aware that she cannot live in India any more, but, nevertheless, she 13

Pelli-chupulu is a bride-seeing ceremony. Amulya Malladi, The Mango Season (2003), 1. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by MS. 14

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cannot bear the thought of losing her family (MS 65). Even with her Americanized vision in which she saw some things better, while other things had blurred beyond recognition (MS 90), she feels that India was “still her country” (MS 185). But it was not her home any more: Home was in San Francisco with Nick. Home was Whole Foods grocery store and fast food at KFC. Home was Pier 1 and Wal-Mart. Home was 7Eleven and Starbucks. Home was familiar, Hyderabad was a stranger; India was as alien, exasperating, and sometimes exotic to me as it would to a foreigner. (MS 126)

It is interesting that Priya should identify her home through a set of American companies. In India, her life is defined through domesticity and privacy, whereas life in the United States is characterized by consumerism and public places. Although she has lived most of her life in India, her years “abroad” have, indeed, already accommodated her very thoroughly into her adopted country. The extended family setting in this novel is slightly more complicated than in the two other novels under discussion in this chapter, even though it is restricted to the level of aunts and uncles on Priya’s father’s side. Among the characters relevant for the present discussion is Anand, one of Priya’s uncles, who lives in a love marriage which he entered into secretly, without the family’s consent. His wife Neelima is treated badly by the family because she is the wrong type of Brahmin, a Maharashtrian, not a Telugu. The other uncle, Jayant, and his wife Lata have, so far, produced two daughters. The expectations are therefore high on the part of the husband and his father to produce a male heir now that Lata is pregnant again. Even more so because Priya’s father Ashwin and mother Radha already have a son, her brother Natarajan, or Nate for short. But Nate is also having a secret affair with a Delhi girl, Tara. The only aunt, Sowmiya, is a 30-year-old single woman. Over all of this rule the matriarch Ammamma and the supreme patriarch Thatha. Priya has a particularly traumatic relationship with her mother, which is crucial to the story. Her mother wants to dictate everything in her life, including her hairstyle and clothing (MS 8). She is especially determined to marry her off, for, as she says: “An unmarried daughter, Priya, is like a noose around the neck that is slowly tightening with every passing day” (MS 35). Priya is made to understand that only a partner of the family’s choice would do, and under the pressure she does not dare to tell about Nick, even though this has been the whole reason for her visit. Priya had refused Nick’s offers to come to India with her, as she has been telling him repeatedly that

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The xenophobic fears of the West are realised explicitly in the following list of commands of parental guidance that Priya expresses ironically, even sarcastically: All Indian parents who see their children off to the Western world have a few fears and the following orders: Do not eat beef! (The sacred cow is your mother!) Do not get too friendly with foreign people; you cannot trust them. Remember what the English did to us. Cook at home; there is no reason to eat out and waste money. Save money. Save money. Save money. DO NOT FIND YOURSELF SOME FOREIGN MAN/WOMAN TO MARRY. (MS 3; emphasis original)

Priya has not followed these rules, except for the first one (MS 31), and thus she is from the beginning aware that hers is a mission impossible. One particular issue Priya cannot stand in India, and which finally alienates her from the country, is the way women are treated. She appears explicitly as a feminist not only for how she is treated herself but for the other women around her: the unmarried Sowmiya, the unwelcome Neelima, the pregnant Lata, the concealed Tara, and even the matriarch Ammamma. They have all been treated badly by men throughout their lives. But some things change with regard to this after Priya gradually reveals her relationship to the members of her family. They are all shocked by her decision, but there is also a new awareness emerging. Sowmiya has lived her whole life for the family, and that experience makes her to lament bitterly: “There is no personal for women” (MS 151; emphasis original). This sense of a loss of ones self for the benefit of an community called “the family” is the tragedy of Sowmiya’s life. However, finally she is about to marry a man, Vinay. Her pelli-chupulu is arranged for the same day as Priya’s. After the event, Sowmiya becomes frightened at a thought that Vinay might not allow her to work, although she had already received a job offer (MS 171). Furthermore, she fears that she has to take care of his parents as well in the way that she has had to care for her own, and that nobody is going to care for her (MS 150). Encouraged by Priya’s “unorthodox” behaviour, also Sowmiya becomes confident. She is not going to sit down and wait, but she will decide for herself what she

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is going to do (MS 171). Therefore, she asks Priya to arrange a secret meeting with Vinay before the wedding so she can clarify these things before deciding to get married. After being initially shocked by the boldness of Sowmiya’s request, Vinay willingly agrees to the conditions laid by her and the marriage can take place. Lata, too, changes. At first she seems to be a traditional, submissive wife and daughter-in-law, but it turns out that that is not the case. At one point she makes a strong statement about the status of women: “Our choices are so pathetic. […] Disgusting lives we women have to live” (MS 151). Furthermore, after she hears about Priya’s relationship with Nick she declares triumphantly: “I wish more women would stand up for what they want” (MS 202). In her newly discovered self-reliance she is able to begin to make up her mind on her own. Although the family had already decided that her third pregnancy would be aborted if the ultrasound and amnio tests show that the foetus is a girl, Lata refuses the tests (MS 206). Regardless of the protests of Jayant and Thatha, she decides to have the baby even if it is a girl. In the same way as she acted as a catalyst for Sowmiya, Priya activates Lata’s new assertiveness. The diasporic contact provides an occasion to begin new imaginings. These do not, however, emerge simply as imitations but as active reformulations of previous circumstances: Sowmiya and Lata do not step outside of their contexts but they begin to refashion their status within it in a different manner. There is one further aspect to the novel that merits attention in this context. It is the question of race. The Rao family appears very racist in their opinions. There are several discussions in which this comes up. Ammamma for example says that: “The white people are just … crooks […]. And the black people … those kallu people are all criminals […]. All black people … dirty they are” (MS 74). Priya is shocked by these explicit racist views and she tries to argue, without success, that that is not true: Of all the stupid things to do I had to go and try to change my family’s mind about the evil and corrupt Western world. I might as well have tried to climb Mt. Everest in my shorts. (MS 76)

Although she is aware of not having been unlike the others when she went to the United States, she had gradually learned to live among and with different kinds of people. That the family’s attitudes had not changed in the meanwhile is ultimately disturbing for her. This discrepancy causes the final surprise of the story which comes after the family finally becomes reconciled with Priya and agrees to keep her as a daughter even if she marries Nick. Even Ammamma relents: “‘[A]t least,’ Ammamma said with a broad shrug, ‘he is white, not some

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kallu’” (MS 209). It comes as a terrible realisation to Priya that she has forgotten to tell the family something important. She thinks to herself: “Damn it! Had I forgotten to mention Nick was black?” (MS 209). The storyline is not followed up after this realisation, and the novel has a somewhat open and not necessarily harmonious or happy ending. But Priya is happy that she has not lost her family, and happy that she is home again: “It was a relief to be back in the U.S. This was familiar territory and I didn’t feel like a cross between a delinquent teenager and a bad daughter anymore” (MS 212; emphasis added). Priya’s visit had been in many ways influential. The diasporic Priya had effected changes at “home,” while herself she had been made more conscious about her own identity. There is, however, no guarantee of the direction of the inevitable transformation, and in Priya’s case there is also no actual reconciliation between the different Priyas. In the end, she still finds her “home” to be in her “familiar territory,” in the United States.

Impossibility of Return In this chapter, I have discussed three works that bring out different approaches to NRI (or PIO) experiences on “return” to India. The texts are written from three different Indian diasporic contexts: Badami’s from Canada, Vijayaraghavan’s from the United States, and Malladi’s from both the United States and Denmark. Although these contexts are relevant in relation to the NRI characters depicted in the stories, the experiences of a child, a teenager, and a young woman are in themselves different, regardless of the place the texts stem from. In all the three cases of diasporic experiences of return, the results were different. Whereas Nandana was affirming her new position in India, Priya’s sense of home in the United States was reinforced. In Maya’s case, then, there was a clearer adaptation of a mixed identity. These examples show how seemingly parallel diasporic situations can bring forth different imaginings of identification. In an interview Shashi Deshpande has characterized diasporic Indian writing as different from Indian writing, because the perspective is different.15 In the three novels, this is indeed the case: the perspective is on the diasporic experience, not the Indian experience. Despite regular grievances against the exoticizing or denigrating character of diasporic literature, the three novels seem to engage seriously (even if at times humorously) with the problematics of imagining diasporic identity. It is 15

Deshpande, “Women,” 44.

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also an issue these novels themselves take up in places. Deshpande’s ironic comment on the exoticization of India in literature is: “Now we cannot have tigers and elephants so we have spices and grandmothers.”16 There is a profound truth in Deshpande’s statement: while wildlife is absent both grandmothers and spices do have an immense presence in these books, even to the extent that Malladi’s book presents South Indian recipes with the text.17 Whether these can be regarded as exotic or exoticizing features, then, is another question which depends very much on the position of the reader. All aspects of culture are open to different representations, and can in the process become interpreted either as familiar and “homely,” or as strange and “exotic.” It is between such ambiguities that the characters in the three novels negotiate their identities. Each of the stories of the three novels moves from a relatively static situation into a new achieved stasis through a crisis due to the arrival of an NRI/PIO person. In recounting these experiences, the texts contemplate on the possibility or impossibility of return. My analyses illustrate that they do not describe nostalgic homecomings but fundamentally transformative processes. Amitava Kumar considers the ambiguous phrase: “There’s no place like home” in his introduction to an anthology of expatriate Indian writing. He sums up the issue of impossibility of return perceptively by saying that “it can also mean that the idea of home is a delusion, it never existed in its safely pure form.”18 For Nandana, India is a place of nonreturn as she has never been to India. Maya, then, regards India as a place of resource, another side of her heart, while for Priya, it has become a strange place and her “home” is already elsewhere. In all the cases, “return” is ultimately impossible, for it transforms the people involved, rendering themselves and the places of their visit different. To conclude, I quote from The Hero’s Walk, at the end of which Sripathi thinks about the ways of and difficulties in writing about his experiences. The final question is acute and relevant for any creative writer or critic: He thought about his daughter and her husband, about Ammayya and his father, and about all that he had lost and found. How was he to put it all into words? (HW 359) 16

Deshpande, “Women,” 45. These elements do not necessarily indicate an exoticizing or Westernized approach. For example, Bulbul Sharma’s collection The Anger of Aubergines: Stories of Women and Food (1997) achieved success in India before it found its way onto the international market. 18 A. Kumar, “Introduction,” xviii. 17

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The ambiguity is similar than with the concept of return: when you begin to put experiences in words, they begin to change. There is no return. At the same time it is also a possibility, based on the transformational quality of imaginative work.

CHAPTER NINE CRITIQUE OF “MULTICULTURALISM” IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S AND BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S DIASPORIC NARRATIVES

The Birth of “Multiculturalism” Multiculturalism has been used as a catch-phrase in popular and populist political and social management of cultural diversity. It is also a contested site of confrontation between liberal notions of cultural difference such as Homi K. Bhabha’s sense of differential processes of signification1 and conservative insistence on universality.2 As such critics as Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Avtar Brah argue, multiculturalism has acquired meanings that render it susceptible to asymmetrical, unequal usage. If we compartmentalize recognition of cultural differences it makes their commercial exploitation easier, and it follows that either the “aestheticisation of ethnic difference glides over politics,” or it “turns multiculturalism into a form of ‘boutique xenophobia,’”3 as is indicated ironically in Uma Parameswaran’s play Rootless but Green Are the Boulevard Trees (1988): [T]hat’s called multiculturalism out here. Each group stays together and once a year there’s a three-ring circus, a zoo called Folkorama where everyone visits everyone else’s cage.4

1

Bhabha, “Commitment,” 34. For example, Arthur M. Schlesinger writes on universalism: “Our task is to combine due appreciation of the splendid diversity of the nation with due emphasis on the great unifying Western ideas of individual freedom, political democracy, and human rights” (Schlesinger, Disuniting, 138; emphasis added). 3 Huggan, “Exoticism,” 92. 4 U. Parameswaran, Rootless, 117. 2

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In this chapter I analyse the ways in which two examples of diasporic novels—Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989)—criticize the form in which the discourse of multiculturalism, plurality and diversity has been misappropriated in the neo-colonial contexts of Britain and the United States. In 1975 John Berger published a collaborative work A Seventh Man with the photographer Jean Mohr.5 In the book, for the first time on a larger scale, Berger brought to public awareness the plight of migrant workers in Europe, for whom “migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another.” 6 He links the phenomenon of migration directly to the neo-colonial situation: A man’s resolution to emigrate needs to be seen within the context of a world economic system. Not in order to reinforce a political theory but so that what actually happens to him can be given its proper value. That economic system is neo-colonialism. […] And so, if the forces which determine the migrant’s life are to be grasped and realized as part of his personal destiny, a less abstract formulation is needed. Metaphor is needed. Metaphor is temporary. It does not replace theory. 7

In this chapter, I look at the ways in which diasporic literature answers to the requirement expressed by Berger: “Metaphor is needed.” In what way can imagined diasporic identity emerge as such a metaphor? What dreams (or nightmares) are there beyond the dreams dreamt by another? “Multiculturalism” as a term emerged in the post-World War II environment.8 In a political sense, it became validated in 1971 through its adoption as an official Multiculturalism Policy in Canada.9 Australia followed Canada’s course in 1973. India might compete for the place of being the first state to adopt the idea of multiculturalism in its constitution, but the term has not been used there in a critical sense before the 1990s.10 More recently, the European Union has claimed multiculturalism as its core. To indicate this, it has adopted “Unity in Diversity” as its motto although the idea itself has been used earlier in many contexts, most

5

The title refers to the fact that at that time in Germany and Britain one in seven manual workers was an immigrant. 6 Berger and Mohr, Seventh, 43. 7 Berger and Mohr, Seventh, 41; emphasis added. 8 It evolved from “multicultural” which first appeared in 1941 (Stratton and Ang, “Multicultural,” on-line). “Multiculturalism” first appeared in 1957 (OED). 9 Department, “Canadian,” on-line. 10 Bhattacharya, “Multiculturalism,” 151–2.

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notably again in India where the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, used it to define the nation.11 Multiculturalism in its various forms is thus closely tied to the discourse of nation and nationalism. From their Australian cultural studies perspective, Jon Stratton and Ien Ang develop Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities” in their discussion of the differences between multiculturalisms in the United States and Australia. Parallel to the concept of “imagined diasporic communities” used in my analyses, they coin the expression “multicultural imagined communities” to describe the ways in which countries that have adopted multiculturalist approaches construct their national identities.12 Stratton and Ang argue that (in this case, in Australia) the political agenda of multiculturalism creates a fictional entity that becomes an embodiment of the nation: “What it does is present to the people of Australia a public fantasy—a collective narrative fiction—of the diverse character of Australia as a nation.”13 Multiculturalism emerges here as a hegemonic policy that is used in building “a public fantasy,” the nation. In the United States the “multicultural imagined community” developed in a different way. As a result of its history of multicultural immigration, the United States is effectively multicultural even though on the federal level it does not identify itself as such. (There are differences between the individual states in this matter.) The equivalent of the EU motto in the United States is the Latin maxim “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one.14 The motto of the United States expresses a rhetoric of singularity that implies an alleged universal ideology of Americanness. As Stratton and Ang critically note, this ideology has overlooked questions of identity politics and race in its 11

“Unity in Diversity” is still the motto of the Indian Statistical Institute. The Indian national motto is “Satyameva Jayate,” Sanskrit for “Truth Alone Triumphs.” 12 Stratton and Ang, “Multicultural,” 124. Cf. Anderson, Imagined, 5–7. 13 Stratton and Ang, “Multicultural,” 148; emphasis original. In her critical discussion of the multiculturalism debate in the Australian context, Sneja Gunew argues that the effective use of multiculturalism “would mean that the whole tradition of Australian literature would need to be reread differently so that the positionality and history involved in all cultural productions be foregrounded (Gunew, “Denaturalizing,” 116). 14 The writer and former UN Under-Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor punningly comments on the US motto that “if India were to borrow it, it would read ‘E Pluribus Pluribum’! Everything exists in countless variants” (Tharoor, “How,” online).

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Chapter Nine persistent invocation of the colour-blind universalism of American principles, which has no room for a serious recognition of its own particularist WASP roots and the historically real exclusions brought about in its name.15

I argue that in a multicultural context—which all diasporic situations in effect are—it is of crucial importance to create in-between spaces that are not dependent on either a singular or compartmentalized communal identity. Ang formulates this ethical call as follows: “I would argue however that precisely because essentialising and divisive claims to ethnicity and the assertion of distinct and separate ‘peoples’ are so rampant today, we urgently need to lay stress on the unsettling horizon of hybridisation.”16 In Britain, again, multiculturalism has a different history. As a policy, it became significant in the early 1980s through the work of the Greater London Council (GLC), which directed funds to ethnic minorities in order to facilitate them in maintaining and creating their own cultures.17 With its long colonial history of both immigration and racism, Britain has struggled with the problem of cultural diversity. That the issue is not a transparent one is poignantly put in Salman Rushdie’s comment on the stereotypical way in which the white British majority characterizes people of colour in the new colony of Britain as “problem”: You talk about the Race Problem, the Immigration Problem, all sorts of problems. If you are liberal, you say that black people have problems. If you aren’t, you say they are the problem. But the members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem.18 15 Stratton and Ang, “Multicultural,” 137. In his in many ways debatable book We’re All Multiculturalists Now, the sociologist Nathan Glazer records the same exclusionist history when he writes: “‘Multiculturalism’ is the price America is paying for the inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same degree as it has incorporated so many other groups” (Glazer, We’re, 147). 16 Ang, “Together-in-Difference,” 152. 17 Brah, Cartographies, 163; Malik, “CRC,” on-line. See also Malik, Meaning. Amartya Sen argues that the policy did not achieve multiculturalism but rather “plural monoculturalism” (A. Sen, “Uses,” 25–30). 18 Rushdie, “New,” 138; emphases added. The two-way nature of racism is expressed in other words, in a compassionate way, in Barbara Taylor’s collection of migrant viewpoints, “The Enemy Within”: “we are all victims of the racism in our society, whether we are black or white” (Taylor, “Enemy,” 1).

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In the hegemonic narrative assertion of British national identity, the migrant population becomes externalized. As Bhabha writes in Nation and Narration: “In each of these ‘foundational fictions’ the origins of national traditions turn out to be as much acts of affiliation and establishment as they are moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion, and cultural contestation.”19 In the exclusion of the “new colony,” as Rushdie reminds us, the cause and effect sequence becomes reversed and the injured party is regarded as the problem, when it actually is the other way round: “We simply suffer from the effects of your problem.” Jopi Nyman writes that we need to be made aware of this reversal and that “to read the nation is not only to read the dominant narrative, but one also needs to pay attention to other stories and stories of the Other.”20 In this chapter I discuss comparatively two examples of such “other stories.” In Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses the values of multiculturalist politics are questioned in view of underlying social tensions, contradictions and conflicts. While both novels clearly vouch for pluralistic values and the necessity for intercultural equality, they also challenge the simplistic and condescending ways in which British and US societies have appropriated the “other” for their own purposes in the name of “multiculturalism” or cultural diversity. While the novels cannot be read as blueprints for action, they do imply the need for a more sensitive understanding of the themes of plurality and equality.

“I like curry, I do” In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party returned to power in 1979, led by Margaret Thatcher. In the same year BBC2 began its comedy series “Not the Nine O’clock News,” pronouncedly critical of the Tories.21 In one of its sketches the still little-known comedian Rowan Atkinson parodies a politician addressing a Conservative Party Conference bearing the designation “Realism and Responsibility.” In a memorable way he says: I am also a Conservative—and Conservatives are back in power, what a wonderful word; […] we are mostly concerned with two main issues. Firstly, immigration. Now, people really do get this party wrong every time on this issue, don’t they. We don’t think immigrants are animals, for God’s sake. I know a lot of immigrants personally and they are perfectly nice people. They are black, of course, which is a shame. But also, some 19

Bhabha, “Introduction,” 5. Nyman, Imagining, 34. 21 Fiddy, “Not,” on-line. 20

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Chapter Nine of them can do some jobs almost as well as white people, and we acknowledge this. Now, a lot of immigrants are Indians and Pakistanis, for instance. And I like curry, I do. But now that we have the recipe … is there really any need for them to stay? Conservatives understand these problems, you see.22

This short satirical piece outlines acutely some of the problematics at play in the discussions of the themes of pluralism and equality, especially as they are addressed in view of immigration policies. Firstly, there is the dehumanising reference to the animal-human distinction; secondly, there is the racialized division into black and white people; thirdly, the racialized division of labour disparages the abilities of immigrants; and finally, the significance of a particular section of the diaspora—the Indian and Pakistani immigrants—is reduced patronizingly to a single cultural feature, curry: “I like curry, I do.” The immigrants are regarded as a second order element of society, and thus, after bringing the synechdocal curry into Britain, they can be made redundant in a unconcerned manner: “But now that we have the recipe.” In her Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities Avtar Brah delineates the emergence and predominance of the discourse of “multiculturalism” in Britain since the beginning of the 1980s, at the time the Conservatives were “back in power.” One of her contentions in the use of the term is that “British ‘multiculturalism’ carries the distinctly problematic baggage of being part of a ‘minoritising impulse.’”23 Acutely aware of the problems arising from the minority discourse she sees its use “as a polite substitute for ‘coloured people’” and its implementation as inevitably leading to the marginalization of immigrants as minorities, whereas there should be “a multi-axial understanding of power; one that problematizes the notion of ‘minority/majority.’”24 Instead, Brah would rather see the coexistence of different cultures intersectionally, as a diaspora space where different diasporas in England exist side by side “with the entity constructed as ‘Englishness,’ thoroughly re-inscribing it in the process.”25 This is the kind of position which understands the construction of (national) identity to be an ever-continuing process that depends on the contribution of all of its constitutive communities. It is also a position which is seen as the most perilous by the conservatives as it threatens the imagined unity of a nation. 22

Wilson and Posner (dir.), Best; emphasis added. Brah, Cartographies, 229. 24 Brah, Cartographies, 186 and 189, respectively. 25 Brah, Cartographies, 208–9. 23

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In Bhabha’s criticism, multiculturalism is seen as a liberal notion which speaks of “exoticism.”26 If Brah vouches for a diaspora space as the enunciative location for constructing diasporic identity, Bhabha searches for a third space, an in-between, a split-space of enunciation [that] may open the way towards conceptualizing an international culture based not on exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.27

Both Brah’s “diasporic space” and Bhabha’s “third space” are notions which imply that there is no primordial essence that a culture can claim as its form. On a par with her use of the notion “strategic essentialism,” Spivak, then, adopts a practical view on multiculturalism: “We must no doubt claim some alliance with liberal multiculturalism for on the other side are Schlesinger and Brzezinski.”28 She criticizes multiculturalism for its way of using the word “culture” in the same was as Michel Foucault uses the word “power”: “It is a name that one lends to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.”29 In Spivak’s view, the dream of the New Immigrant (and here she speaks especially about diasporic women) of the present-day global capitalism is an appealing hyperreal community in which she becomes marginalized as yet another native informant.30 To counter such reification of diasporic subjects, which is an even bigger evil than multiculturalism itself, “some alliance” with multiculturalist theory and practice is needed. These observations are relevant in view of the previous satirical sketch in which the immigrants are dehumanized, racialized, denigrated, and made redundant by politicians precisely at the moment of gaining power. When we consider the sketch more closely, we can see that it is not just an isolated, ahistorical joke but it alludes clearly to the speeches that Thatcher gave at Conservative Party Conferences similar to the mock conference. As the new Prime Minister in October 1979 she talked about “a victory for realism and responsibility,”31 thus echoing the motto of the conference in 26

Bhabha, “Commitment,” 34 and 38. Bhabha, “Commitment,” 38; emphases original. 28 Spivak, Critique, 396; emphasis added. With Brzezinski Spivak refers to Zbigniew K. Brzezinski and his book Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. 29 Spivak, Critique, 353; Spivak refers to Foucault, History, 93. 30 Spivak, Critique, 393–5. 31 Thatcher “Speech” (1979), on-line. 27

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the sketch. More decisively, in October 1978, still in opposition, she expressed her views on immigrants as follows: “It is true that Conservatives are going to cut the number of new immigrants coming into this country, and cut it substantially, because racial harmony is inseparable from control of the numbers coming in.”32 In Thatcher’s politics, there was no place for “multiculturalism,” which led eventually to the abolition of the GLC in 1986.33 What Thatcher proposed instead of multiculturalism was “racial harmony,” which was to be achieved through the “control of the numbers.” This “racial harmony” was clearly a euphemism for maintaining the position of the “British” intact. (This can be seen in the way Thatcher spoke elsewhere about the popular fears of “them” swamping “us.”) Rushdie has also commented on Thatcher’s “numbers game” in a 1982 article, saying that of the black communities, over forty per cent are not immigrants, but black Britons, born and bred, speaking in the many voices and accents of Britain, and with no homeland but this one. […] But perhaps the worst thing about the so-called “numbers game” is its assumption that less black immigration is self-evidently desirable.34

In his own kind of statistical counter-game of numbers Rushdie shows that British immigration policies imply racism. This racism has a long colonial history, and its residue lingers on strongly. Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses35 offers, among other things, a view of the status of “multiculturalism” and British race relations during the Thatcher regime in mid-1980s.36 He describes an imaginary London area of Brickhall, a hybrid based on two actual predominantly Asian parts of London, namely Brick Lane in the East and Southall in the West.37 Rushdie’s Brickhall is a mainly South Asian borough just like its real-life 32

Thatcher, “Speech” (1978), on-line; emphases added. When the Labour Party returned to power in 1997 as Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” it did not change the adopted immigration policies. On the side of multiculturalism, it began to promote new hybrid cultural forms under the (then) trendy banner “Cool Britannia.” (See Blake, Irresistible, 24-6.) 34 Rushdie, “New,” 131–2. 35 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988). Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by SV. 36 One of the other issues on the application of “community relations” about which Rushdie writes critically is the public housing situation of immigrants (Rushdie, “Council,” 12). See also SV 263–4 and 464–7. 37 Seminck, Novel, 8; “Southall Town,” on-line. 33

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prototypes. The main characters of the novel, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, are of Indian origin. At one point Saladin’s English wife Pamela Lovelace, a leftist race relations activist, reflects sarcastically on the situation of “community relations”: I work in a community relations council in the borough of Brickhall, London […]! We just elected our first black Chair and all the votes cast against him were white. […]! Last week a respected Asian street trader, for whom MPs of all parties had interceded, was deported after eighteen years in Britain because, fifteen years ago, he posted a certain form fortyeight hours late. (SV 183)

Pamela’s soliloquy against British immigration policy is bitter, as she recounts the racial division behind the politics, leading to arbitrary—or rather for the Conservatives politically useful—deportations and, later in the novel, racial violence and police brutality. Here Rushdie is deliberately taking Thatcher’s politics to task. In her 1978 speech Thatcher—whom Saladin’s boss Hal Valance “referred to affectionately as ‘Mrs. Torture’” (SV 267)—had declared boldly: “Compulsory repatriation is not, and never will be, our policy and anyone who tells you differently is deliberately misrepresenting us for his own ends.”38 The reported deportation referred to in The Satanic Verses, then, directly confronts the alleged politics of the Conservative government claiming the opposite. This is no surprise in view of Rushdie being Thatcher’s “lifelong political opponent.”39 The political situation in Rushdie’s novel is seemingly multicultural and tolerant but at the same time it is saturated with underlying racialized tensions. These are symbolically present in a scene at the Club Hot Wax (“formerly the Black-An-Tan”) where the audience dances to the hybrid music of hip-hop and hindi-pop. Recording the emergence of this kind of musical mixtures, Andrew Blake comments that the British music scene had been transformed by the Caribbeans since the late 1970s and later by the Asians: “Having been successfully reverse-colonised by the Caribbean, musical Britain has also become partly Asian.”40 The DJ himself is a

38

Thatcher, “Speech” (1978), on-line. Rushdie, “Playboy,” 196. 40 Blake, Irresistible, 14. In the United States, there is a parallel South Asian “desi” youth culture of invoking “regional identity through particular music mixes” (Maira, “Mixed,” 229–30; see also Desai Hidier, Born, 187: “this was a breed of Indian I had never seen before in my life”). 39

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Caribbean named Pinkwalla.41 In his physical make-up, he is hybridity embodied, a seven-foot albino, his hair the palest rose, the whites of his eyes likewise, his features unmistakably Indian […]. An Indian who has never seen India, East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. (SV 292; emphasis added)

Furthermore, the place in which he performs is furnished with wax figures of notable characters of black British history: Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady, but, being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence’s candle; […] Abdul Karim, aka The Munshi, […] the black clown of Septimius Severus, […] George IV’s barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw […] dances according to his ancient fashion with the slave’s son Ignatius Sancho, who became in 1782 the first African writer to be published in England. (SV 292)42

The evocation of forgotten figures of Black Britain reveals the racial character of the constructed British identity. Especially the contrast

41

Pinkwalla’s name means “a pink guy.” His real name, Sewsunker, alludes to the South African golf player Sewsunker Sewgolum (1930–1978) who in 1963 was the first black player to play and win a tournament under the Apartheid government (“Order,” on-line). Even if Rushdie has often been derided for his poor style in capturing the spirit of rap poetry, and for stereotypical representation of the Caribbean accent, the following example from Pinkwalla’s chant is topical: Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-demmake-insinuation-we-no-part-a-de-nation-an-mi-make-proclamationa-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-Occupation (SV 292; italics original). 42 Here, as usual, Rushdie’s text is full of allusions and references. Ignatius Sancho’s 1782 book is Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s story of his life in slavery was published in 1774 in Rhode Island, and it is entitled A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, Written by Himself (see Brians “Notes,” on-line). Abdul Karim was Queen Victoria’s Indian tutor (see Anand, Indian). Grace Jones released her album Slave to the Rhythm in 1985, and the 1986 TV series Shaka Zulu portrayed King George IV (Tomaselli, “Shaka,” on-line).

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between the dark, black Jamaican Mary Seacole and the light, white British Florence Nightingale exposes this ever-repeating erasure.43 There are also the “wax villains” who represent the “dark” side of colonial history: “Mosley, Powell, Edward Long, all the local avatars of Legree” (SV 292). The scene sets up a confrontation between the suppressed black British presence and the contemporary white supremacist British politics of the controversial Oswald Moseley and Enoch Powell, who had been outspoken against immigrants and multiculturalism, tracing the history back to the 18th-century racist historian of Jamaica, Edward Long, and the cruel slave-owner Simon Legree in Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was Long who denied the blacks their humanity in a negrophobic way by referring to them “as the vilest of human kind, to which they have little more pretensions of resemblance than what arises from their exterior forms.”44 If post-colonial criticism has analysed the colonial situation in terms of mimicry, then in the figure of Pinkwalla this white black man mimicry is indeed “at once resemblance and menace.”45 This menacing presence becomes clear as the scene ends up with Pinkwalla burning, on the audience’s request, a wax figure of “Maggie” in a huge microwave oven: “O how prettily she melts, from the inside out, crumpling into formlessness” (SV 293). This symbolical act, evoked explicitly in the remembrance of Guy Fawkes, is a forceful expression of resistance to the immigration policy of the UK. One of the novel’s angry young women who is disillusioned with British multiculturalism is Mishal Sufiyan, the daughter of an Indian immigrant family housing Saladin. She refers to London as “the Street as if it were a mythological battleground” with “the new Kurus and Pandavas, the white racists and black ‘self-help’ or vigilante posses starring in this modern Mahabharata, or, more accurately, Mahavilayet” (SV 283). The old battle-lines between the National Front versus the Socialists are redrawn in racial terms, because, as Mishal infers, “Thatcherism has its effect” (SV 284). It is exactly this effect of Thatcherism that the novel recaptures. In Brixton, London, in 1981, race riots erupted after the police had begun their Swamp 81 operation, stopping and searching black youths.46 This resulted in “the battle of Brixton”: petrol bomb attacks, looting, and 43

Nightingale was opposed to Seacole, whom she saw as promoting bad habits and immorality (Robinson, Mary, 122). 44 Quoted in Bhabha, “Mimicry,” 86; Bhabha’s emphasis omitted. 45 Bhabha, “Mimicry,” 86. 46 “Brixton Riots,” on-line. The name of the operation is another allusion to Thatcher’s comment on “them swamping us.”

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violence.47 Similarly, in Rushdie’s novel the racial tensions erupt as violence and the police raid Club Hot Wax. The television cameras—the residue of colonial gaze naively taking sides—follow the incident and there is even suspicion of witchcraft and cannibalism (SV 455). The deep, and deeply colonial, fears and stereotypes stick fast. If the immediate results of racial tensions may be assigned to contemporary politics, Gibreel sees them in the context of a more pervasive British colonial history. “Did they not think that their history would return to haunt them?” (SV 353). The racial tensions and problematics of multiculturalism indicate, then, that “their history” has indeed returned to haunt them. In a telling passage Saladin, who has been overtly eager to assimilate an English identity, enters a state in which he cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep. In this state he experiences a strange dream in which “he found himself dreaming of the Queen, of making tender love to the Monarch. She was the body of Britain […] and he had chosen her” (SV 169; emphasis added). This image of a sexual act with the Queen is another forceful counter-imperialist moment where Saladin is acting out the worst fears of colonialists: the native “choosing her,” violating a white woman (SV 169). That it is the Queen, “the body of Britain,” is the ultimate transgression. For Rushdie, it becomes a true dream which is the redeeming, emancipatory victory of diasporic writing: “To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.”48

The American Dream, Migrating Hope One of the most controversial but prolific diasporic Indian writers—along with Rushdie—is Bharati Mukherjee. Much of the controversy centres on her politics of identification, as she has moved from India to Canada and then to the United States. Refusing straightforward labelling of herself, she nevertheless uses the terms “American writer of Indian origin,” or “American” to describe herself: I am an American, not an Asian-American. Rejecting hyphenation is my refusal to categorize the cultural landscape into a center and its peripheries; it is to demand that the American nation deliver the promises of its dream and its Constitution to all its citizens equally.49

47

Mackie and Phillips, “How,” on-line. Rushdie, “Imaginary,” 17. 49 Mukherjee, “American,” on-line. The first appellation is from Basbanes, “Bharati,” on-line; cf. I. Grewal, Transnational, 65–74. 48

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This quotation is from Mukherjee’s 1997 essay “American Dreamer” published in Mother Jones. In the essay, she deliberately uses the idea of the American Dream to define her own position as a diasporic citizen of the United States. This dream is not, however, the kind of dream “dreamt by another,” but a fundamentally constructive process of transformation: “We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of dreams” (J 29). The dream is not expressed as assimilation into an already existing construct, “Americanness.” Nor is it said to be a hyphenated identity. Mukherjee’s American dream is, rather, a two-way process of transformation: As a writer, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show that I (along with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like me) am minute by minute transforming America. The transformation is a two-way process: It affects both the individual and the national-cultural identity.50

When considered in the present context of the discussion of multiculturalism, this idea of “transforming America” is of central importance. It tells about the will and ability of diasporic people to adopt a subject position in face of the new environment. It would be simplistic and misconceived to claim that such a position is available to all diasporic people. The cosmopolitan intelligentsia to which diasporic and postcolonial writers belong is in many ways privileged in this in comparison to more subaltern migrants. At the same time, it is an indication that such a position is, after all, possible. It is this kind of migration of hope—with all its sinister conjectures of racism, violence, and exploitation—that Mukherjee’s narrative recounts. In Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine51 the setting is different from Rushdie’s. The traffic of immigration is also more post-colonial than colonial. The protagonist, 16-year-old Jasmine, escapes communal violence from Punjab, India to the United States. The idea of emigrating is originally an idea that her husband Prakash Vijh has planted in her with his own dream, even though he insists it should be hers as well: “Jasmine, what do you think of America? […] I want for us to go away and have a real life. […] You have 50

Mukherjee, “American,” on-line; emphasis added. On Rushdie’s identity as a new American after he moved to New York in the year 2000, see Rushdie, Step, especially 336–44; for a discussion of the debate on Rushdie’s views on the United States, see Kuortti, “Novelists,” 79–81. 51 Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (1990). Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text preceded by J.

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to want to go away, too. You have to want to have a real life” (J 81; emphases original). But Jasmine does not know about America, she is not out of balance with her life. The plans to leave are made on the basis of the letters that Prakash’s former teacher sends from the United States. When Prakash is assassinated, the optimistic plans change and Jasmine has to escape. Before that, she had, however, already developed a dream: “If we could just get away from India, then all fates would be cancelled. We’d start new fates, new stars. We could say or be anything we wanted” (J 85; emphasis added). Their dream is fashioned around the American ideal of liberty to be and say “anything we wanted.” When Prakash is killed, Jasmine is left only with a vision, a mission to burn Prakash’s suit in America (J 114). It is this dream-vision she follows with her forged immigration documents and savings. She has to lean on the help of “travel advisers” specialized in transporting illegal immigrants, for a fee (J 99). The multiplicity of diasporic travels is shown as Jasmine travels in the “shadow world” of “people who coexist with tourists and businessmen,” that is, “refugees and mercenaries and guest workers” (J 100). Jasmine travels through the Middle East and the Sudan to Germany and the Netherlands, continuing in fishing boats to South America, and finally Florida. Diasporic travels are, indeed, anything but clear-cut: “The zigzag route is the straightest” (J 101). The America Jasmine encounters, however, is completely different from the one she had expected or imagined with Prakash. Maybe it is at such a juncture of irreconcilable realities that a new identity can emerge. As Meena Alexander puts it: “Am I American now I have lost my shining picture? […] Is America this terrible multiplicity at the heart” 52 Losing the idealized image, the “shining picture,” leaves the door open for a new vision. Jasmine loses her picture immediately on arrival. Her initial experiences are to be raped and, consequently, to murder her rapist. When she finally manages to begin her journey in America, she finds an America of trash (J 128) and beggars (J 139), an America of immigrants, “aliens,” and “illegals” (J 140).53 During her first day she wonders: “I had been in America nearly a day and had yet to see an ‘American’ face” (J 129). The imaginary turns into reality. The imagined idea of a singular Americanness is changed for the lived multicultural experience, in the “terrible multiplicity” of the diasporic margins of the mainstream, where faces do not look “American.” 52

Alexander, Fault, 201; emphases added. On the double standards on the issue of illegal immigration in the “Nannygate Scandal” of 1993 in the United States, see Brah, Cartographies, 201–3. 53

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A fresh and vulnerable newcomer to the United States, Jasmine is rescued by a Quaker woman, Lillian Gordon, who helps illegal immigrants to survive in the United States. Lillian not only gives Jasmine new hope but she teaches her how to manage on her own. She teaches her, for example, how to walk and talk in a proper American way so that the Immigration officials would not be able to discover her. If entering the country required a careful strategy, staying in proves to be at least as demanding. In this effort, Lillian’s everyday help is crucial. For Jasmine, therefore, Lillian “represented […] the best in the American experience and the American character” (J 137). The hope with which Jasmine migrated is sustained by Lillian’s down-to-earth care. The politics of multiculturalism and its counter-narratives are made real in the lives of diasporic people. Throughout the novel, Mukherjee writes scathingly about American immigration policy and hostile attitudes towards immigrants (J 137). For example, Lillian’s destiny is to be jailed for assisting “the so-called army of illegals she’d helped ‘dump’ on the welfare rolls of America” (J 137; emphases added). As Mukherjee’s text exemplifies, such liberal ideas of multiculturalism are under severe attack in the conservative echelons of American society. One indication of this is the vocabulary used to describe the migrants: army of illegals and dumping. The hostile attitudes of immigration policy and public opinion are amply expressed in both Rushdie’s and Mukherjee’s novels. For example, in The Satanic Verses, Gibreel is approached by “a kindly middle-aged woman in a headscarf” who presents him with a racist leaflet, “demanding the ‘repatriation’ of the country’s black citizenry” as she comments, conspirationally leaning to him: “’You’ll be interested in this.’ […] ‘Look at it this way,’ […] ‘If they came over and filled up wherever you come from, well! You wouldn’t like that’” (SV 326; emphasis original). Although such racist chauvinist rhetoric is not restricted to the Western metropolitan cultures, Gibreel—coming from that “wherever”—does not share the sentiment, and goes on with his mission of redeeming London. Analogously, in Jasmine, “a woman in a flowered dress” comments to a TV reporter: “I don’t think they’re bad people, you know. It’s just as there’s too many of them” (J 27). It is noticeable that in both novels it is the seemingly harmless women who are portrayed as purveyors of colonial, racist attitudes, just like the politician in the Atkinson sketch, in a naïve patronizing manner, calls immigrants “perfectly nice people.” These examples show how deeply embedded these racist, xenophobic positions are, despite all pretensions of multicultural values.

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Mukherjee sees multiculturalism in two complementary ways.54 On the one hand, there is the discrepancy between the ideal and the real with regard to the immigrant, the diasporic, the alien. The identification as a multicultural nation does not ring true in face of gross violations of decency, justice, and even the basic human rights. At the same time, there is also a positive, optimistic, hopeful side to multiculturalism, at least in the way it is lived out in the lives of those marginal(ized) people. In Mukherjee’s opinion, the American dream is perhaps be lost “for the white, Anglo-Saxon males,” whose identity may be threatened by the multicultural presence. But, she continues, “the rest of us are coming with an eagerness to refashion ourselves. Letting go of the old notions of what America was shouldn’t be seen as a loss. I hope that as we all mongrelize we will build a better and more hopeful nation.”55 The “eagerness to refashion” oneself, the hopefulness with which the transnational migrants such as Jasmine confront the protectionist policies and practices of the First World, is clearly an agenda of many writers of post-colonial, transcultural fiction. This celebration of diversity, or “mongrelization,”56 has come under severe criticism from the political right, too. Mukherjee is one of those who have received harsh criticism for their views. For example, the right-wing writer Lawrence Auster has denigrated the whole project of multiculturalism and describes Mukherjee as an “imperialist” and says: “This South Asian immigrant ‘loves’ America so much that she wants to take it over for her own people—and kick us out.”57 Here “us” and “the rest of us” are polarized. It is this kind of opposition which in Spivak’s view should be countered by joining forces with liberal multiculturalists. Auster demonstrates a deep animosity against anything that appears to be against “us,” meaning white Anglo-Saxon American culture, sometimes equated with “Western culture.” Despite such attacks, Mukherjee and Rushdie continue to describe a world that would be a more humane place through the shared experience of migration. In her interview with Moyers, Mukherjee further commented that 54

A third way could be constructed along the lines Spivak argues for adopting “some alliance” with liberal multiculturalism. 55 Mukherjee, “Conquering”; emphases added. Cf. Jopi Nyman’s discussion of reimagining America in the context of Mukherjee’s novel Leave It to Me (1998) (Nyman, “Imagining,” 415–7). 56 Rushdie, too, has used “mongrelization” as a trope of hybridity: “The Satanic Verses […] rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure” (Rushdie, “Good,” 394). 57 Auster, “How”; emphasis original.

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I don’t like to use the phrase melting pot […], because of the 19th century associations with mimicry; that one was expected to scrub down one’s cultural eccentricities and remake oneself in the Anglo-Saxon image. If I can replace melting pot with a phrase like fusion vat, or fusion chamber, in which you and I are both changed radically by the presence of new immigrants, I would be much happier.58

Corresponding to Mukherjee’s requirement that “you and I are both changed,” it is not only the characters of the novels—Saladin Chamcha, Gibreel Farishta or Jasmine—who go through processes of transformation, changes of identity. The whole of society is undergoing change “by the presence of new immigrants.” This is the hope that the New Immigrant brings along on her/his diasporic travels. It is also a position which challenges existing theorization, as Kristin Carter-Sanborn comments: Mukherjee’s move to represent mainstream American culture in terms of “third world” identity must stand in problematic relation to a feminist or “third world” politics of difference.59

There is urgency in Mukherjee’s conception of hopeful refashioning of new Americans: “These new Americans are not willing to wait for a generation or two to establish themselves.”60 In a 1987 essay, Rushdie described the transformative meaning of a migrant as follows: “[T]he migrant is not simply transformed by his act [of migration]; he also transforms his new world.”61 In The Satanic Verses, Gibreel actually attempts this kind of radical change by transforming the English weather and making London a tropical city complete with what he describes as desirable results but which critics such as Auster would undoubtedly regard as adulteration of Western culture: [I]ncreased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behavior among the populace, higher quality popular music, new birds in the trees, new trees under the birds […]. Emergence of new social values […], emphasis on extended family. Spicier food. (SV 354)62

58

Mukherjee, “Conquering”; emphases added. Carter-Sanborn, “We,” 585. 60 Mukherjee, “Immigrant,” 28. 61 Rushdie, “Fog,” 210. 62 See also Sharma, “Salman,” on-line. 59

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Gibreel’s venture turns out to be as delusional as it is ironical—a reversal of the Orientalist exoticism63—and it ends up in his own destruction. Saladin, on the other hand, gets another chance in life “in spite of his humanity” (SV 545). This is a very positive note for the possibilities of pluralism and equality in a world interpenetrated with the forces of singularities and totalitarianism. What is here expressed figuratively in fiction parallels with the actual process that takes place in imagining diasporic communities.

Reshaping Diasporic Space The situation of a migrant is vested with difficulties. Things might be different for those economic migrants who belong to the affluent economic, academic or social elites, but for an ordinary migrant, as John Berger puts it, “migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another.”64 It is, however, possible to begin to think about the diasporic migrant space in terms of an active reshaping. After the most acute conflict around Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses had receded, the post-colonial anthropologist Talal Asad wrote about the situation of multiculturalism in Britain. He saw the affair as an identity crisis for Britain as it has come to face the postimperial reality in which the empire has begun to write back, as Rushdie has said.65 In Asad’s view this writing back does not, however, happen as a validation of an existing singular identity but as a continuous process of creating an identity in a new situation, for “social identities do need to be ‘authenticated,’ but […] their authentication derives from our ability to continuously reinvent ourselves out of our confused cultural conditions.”66 In this chapter, I have traced some ways in which narratives of diaspora have tried to put forward new ways of thinking about migration, and to create new dreams. The focus has been on the Indian diasporic experiences as they are represented in Rushdie’s and Mukherjee’s novels. As I have argued throughout this book, the Indian diaspora is a growing presence, especially in North America. Mukherjee, too, acknowledges this in her novel The Tree Bride (2004), when the protagonist Tara Chatterjee thinks about her time in the United States: 63 That is, as an overabundant image of the Orient created by the “European imagination” (see Said, Orientalism, 55–7). 64 Berger and Mohr, Seventh, 43. 65 Rushdie, “Empire,” 8. 66 Asad, “Multiculturalism,” 472; emphasis original.

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During the twenty years I’ve been in California, an immigrant fog of South Asians has crept into America. Quiet, prosperous, hardworking, professional […]. There are Indians in every town, every hospital, every high school and college, in banks, motels, 7-Elevens and taxis, and a startling number have begun appearing in everyday American families.67

There is no telling what role the South Asian diasporic migrants may play in this process of reshaping North American identity. Whatever it may be, it is certain that the authors of the South Asian diaspora are actively taking part in it. Let Jasmine have the last word here: “Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud” (J 241).

67

Mukherjee, Tree, 19.

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INDEX OF NAMES Aguilar, Delia 125 Alexander, Meena 85, 160 Alexopoulou, Marigo 128n2 Ali, Samina 12 Anderson, Benedict 4, 5, 149 Ang, Ien 149, 150 Aristotle 117 Asad, Talal 164 Atkinson, Rowan 83n12, 151, 161 Auster, Lawrence 162–3, 164 Bach, Johann Sebastian 24 Bannerjee Divakaruni, Chitra 11, 115n7 Basbanes, Nicholas 88 de Beauvoir, Simone 77 Beecher-Stowe, Harriet 157 Berger, John 8n21, 148, 164 Bhabha, Homi K. 8, 22, 57, 65, 65n45, 78n6, 84, 87, 87n19, 87n20, 90, 90n30, 92, 147, 151, 153 Blair, Tony 154n33 Blake, Andrew 155 Botticelli, Sandro 31 Boyce Davies, Carole 56, 56n7, 66 Boyle, Karen 111–2 Bragard, Veronique 60 Brah, Avtar 5, 6, 6n12, 8, 18, 22, 29–30, 55–56, 59, 122, 128, 137n10, 147, 152, 153 Brontë, Charlotte 67 Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. 153, 153n28 Bulosan, Carlos 13n44 Butalia, Urvashi 124 Butler, Judith 90–1 Cabral, Amilcar 77 Carter, Marina 60

Carter-Sanborn, Kristin 163 Chaudhuri, Amit 65n45 Christian, Ed 51 Clark, Patricia 58n13 Cliff, Michelle 62 Columbus, Christopher (Christoforo Columbo) 23 Condé, Mary 23 Coppola, Sofia 40n5 Cortés, Hernán 90n28 Courneau, Alan 40n5 Crain, Caleb 25n17 Culler, Jonathan 91 Damai, Puspa 33n34 Dando, Evan 45n17 Daruwalla, Keki 78n6 Dasgupta, Shamita Das 13–4 deCaires Narain, Denise 56 Derrida, Jacques 22 Desai, Boman 78n6 Desai Hidier, Tanuja 21n1, 156n40 Dshpande, Shashi 144–5 D’haen, Theo 49 Dinshaw, Farishta Murzban 78n6 Donnell, Alison 56n7 Donnelly, Margarita 13 Dutty, Boukman 63 Eagleton, Terry 91, 91n33 Edwards, Blake 83n12 Elie, Paul 28, 31 Espinet, Ramabai 15, 16–7, 18, 55– 74 passim, 55n1, 98, 103–6 passim Fanon, Franz 77 Fatiman, Cecile 63–4, 68 Fawkes, Guy 157 Fernandes, George 86n18

192

Index of Names

Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea 49 Fiske, John 80 Fludernik, Monika 123 Forster, E. M. 33 Foucault, Michel 77, 153 Fracis, Sohrab Homi 78n6 Friedan, Betty 77 Gadsby, Meredith M. 73n64, 103 Gandhi, Rajiv 135–6 George, Rosemary Marangoly 6, 12 George IV, King 156n42 Glazer, Nathan 150n15 Groniosaw, Ukawsaw 156n42 Gunew, Sneja 149n13 Hall, Stuart 4 Harding, Tonya 46n18 Homer 25n19 hooks, bell 90n27 Husso, Marita 108 Ilmonen, Kaisa 62 Jain, Jasbir 14 James, C. L. R. 63 James, “De Doctah” Hector 64, 104 Jayalalitha 135n9 Jones, Grace 156n42 John XXIII, Pope 28n27 Kakinouchi Narumi 51n28 Kanga, Firdaus 78n6 Karim, Abdul 156n42 Kannabiran, Kalpana 60, 99 Kannabiran, Vasanthi 99 Katrak, Ketu H. 13 Khan, Noor Inayat 124n30 King, Bruce 61 Kipling, Rudyard 122 Koestler, Arthur 86n18 Kramer, Lawrence 97 Kumar, Amitava 145 Lahiri, Jhumpa 16, 21–35 passim, 27n24, 67n51

Lamb, Kevin 91 Lamming, George 61 Lawson Welsh, Sarah 56n7 Lewis, Simon 33 Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin 13 Ling, Amy 13 Long, Edward 157 Lorde, Audre 66, 67 Lynch, Christopher Todd 31 Ma, Sheng-Mei 80, 81 Mahler, Gustav 24 Maira, Sunaina 14 Malladi, Amulya 18, 126, 139–44 passim Massey, Sujata 16–7, 37–52 passim Mehta, Brinda J. 56n7, 105 Mehta, Dina 78n6 Mercury, Freddie (Farrokh Bulsara) 78n6 Minato, Ryan 10 Mistry, Rohinton 78n6 Mohr, Jean 8n21, 148 Moran, Leslie 98 Morgan, Tom 45n17 Moseley, Oswald 157 Moyers, Bill 88, 162 Mukherjee, Bharati 19, 87–9, 88n24, 113, 120, 148, 151, 158– 65 passim Murasaki Shikibu, Lady 42n12 Muthyala, John 92 Müller, Monika 49 Naipaul, V. S. 61–2, 61n31, 62n32, 65, 70n59 Nakkach, Silvia 24 Narayan, Kirin 17, 75–93 passim, 139 Narayan, Shyamala A. 90, 90n28 Nasta, Susheila 6n14 Nehru, Jawaharlal 131, 149 Nightingale, Florence 157, 157n43 Nothomb, Amelie 40n5 Nyman, Jopi 151, 162n55

Writing Imagined Diasporas O’Callaghan, Evelyn 56n7 Papastergiadis, Nikos 8 Parameswaran, Radhika 100, 102 Parameswaran, Uma 12, 17, 98, 102, 106–112 passim, 147 Paretsky, Sara 44n16 Pestonji, Meher 78n6 Popo, Sundar 73n63 Powell, Enoch 157 Puri, Jyoti 100 Rajeshwar Mittapalli 33 Rau Badami, Anita 7, 18, 127, 129–36 passim, 144–6 Reisman, Catherine 108 Rhode, Deborah L. 101 Rhys, Jean 67 Rocher, Rosane 91 Roy, Nilanjana S. 123–4 Rupp, Leila J. 111 Rushdie, Salman 4, 6, 15, 19, 22, 85, 110, 124, 131, 148, 150–65 passim Said, Edward W. 25, 77, 128 Sancho, Ignatius 156n42 Sartre, Jean-Paul 77 Savory Fido, Elaine 56, 56n7 Schlesinger, Arthur M. 147n2, 153 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 50 Seacole, Mary 157, 157n43 Seidensticker, Edward G. 42n12 Sellers, Peter 83, 83n12 Selvon, Sam 61 Sen, Amartya 150n17 Sen, Mandira 27n24 Seth, Vikram 38 Sethi, Robbie Clipper 18, 113–32 passim, 115n7 Sewgolum, Sewsunker 156n42 Sharma, Bulbul 145n17 Shivdasani, Sadhana 78n5 Shoko Asahara 39n4 Sidhwa, Bapsi 78n6 Singh, Jyotsna 32

193

Singh, Khushwant 124 Singh Baldwin, Shauna 18, 98, 113–36 passim, 115n7, 125n30 Skeggs, Beverley 98 Sokal, Alan 90n30 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 68, 90–1, 91n33, 99, 147, 153, 153n28, 162n54, 162 Srikanth, Rajini 14 Stratton, Jon 149 Takahashi Rumiko 41n9 Taylor, Barbara 150n18 Tebbit, Norman 137n10 Tharoor, Shashi 149n14 Thatcher, Margaret 151, 153–5, 157, 158n46 Thieme, John 78n6 Thoennes, Nancy 102 Thoma, Pamela 49n21 Tjaden, Patricia 102 Toivanen, Anna-Leena 116n16 Torabully, Khal 60 Trinh T. Minh-ha 92, 115–7, 125 Trivedi, Harish 21 Tsutakawa, Mayumi 13 Uchida Miyo, Princess 51, 51n28 Vakil, Ardashir 78n6 Valovirta, Elina 56, 56n7 Vera, Yvonne 116n16 Verghese, Abraham 114 Victoria, Queen 156n42 Vijayaraghavan, Vineeta 18, 127, 135–39 passim, 144–5 Visconti, Luchino 24 Waley, Arthur 42n12 Werbner, Pnina 4–5 White, Hayden 77 Wodehouse, P. G. 24 Women of South Asian Descent Collective 13 Yeats, W. B. 25