Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

2009

Mapping subjectivities: The cultural poetics of mobility & identity in South Asian diasporic literature

Aparajita De West Virginia University

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Recommended Citation De, Aparajita, "Mapping subjectivities: The cultural poetics of mobility & identity in South Asian diasporic literature" (2009). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 2915. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/2915

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Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts & Sciences At West Virginia University In partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English Literature Gwen Bergner, Ph.D., Chair Dennis Allen, Ph.D. Jonathan Burton, Ph.D. Ann Oberhauser, Ph.D. Lisa Weihman, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2009 Keywords: Cosmopolitanism, Cultural geography, Diaspora, Identity, South Asia, Transnationalism Copyright 2009 Aparajita De

ABSTRACT

Aparajita De

My dissertation examines fiction and autobiography by diasporic South Asian women writers to analyze the processes of subject formation in the diaspora. Analyzing the literary expressions of Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Meena Alexander on contemporary diasporic identities, I examine the critical insights they offer to understanding subjectivity. I argue that subjectivity in the diaspora develops in response to the individual’s experience of location. By location I refer to both physical and ideological spaces the individual occupies over time. Examining subjectivity in the diaspora as an analytical and empirical category, I focus on the tactics and interventions enacted by diaspora characters for enabling survival in the diaspora. Thus, I explore subjectivity in the diaspora developing as a function of the space the individual inhabits, experiences, and responds to. My analysis illustrates that diaspora subjectivity is mediated, hybrid, relational, and representative of the tactical strategies developed by the subject, strategies both represented and enacted in the work of these writers. I argue that these strategies reflect the autonomic agency of the subject in response to their locations. My research responds to the insufficient scholarship on South Asian women writers who theorize diasporic subjectivity. At the same time, I critique the lacuna in postcolonial and cultural theory where either location or space are generically theorized but that overlook or subordinate the experiences of the human subject. I work, in short, towards a theory of subjectivity, agency, and responsibility that accounts for both the restrictions and the possibilities of social and empirical space for diaspora characters. Ultimately, my analysis of diaspora subjectivity underscores the modes of cultural survival sustaining the subject in diaspora locations.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation marks the effort and hard work of all those who have guided, supported, and encouraged me to produce better work. I want to take the opportunity of individually thanking each of my Committee members. My Chair, Gwen Bergner has been very challenging to work with. Her meticulous comments and eye for detail have immensely helped my work. She has helped me to write better. Thank you, Gwen! All my Committee members, Lisa Weihman, Dennis Allen, Jonathan Burton, and Ann Oberhauser have been very supportive of my work and without their generous and valuable advice this work would not be what it is. I want to especially thank Lisa for being so understanding during some of the most difficult periods of the dissertation. Dennis, who was always there to talk to me on the phone or extend valuable advice through email and in person which have helped me through the Ph.D program. I am honored to have known and worked with him. I want to extend my thanks to Ann, who was ever ready and enthusiastic with her books and ideas whenever I knocked at her door seeking any references. All in all, my committee is a community of people who encouraged me and honed my thoughts and ideas into the level where it is today.

I want to thank West Virginia University Libraries and our amazing librarians who have helped me to locate sources, while tirelessly answering my questions about research ports and data base searches. They have provided me with the very best resources available here that makes my work what it is. I want to thank Kelly Diamond, Linda Blake, Jing Qiu, and John Hagen for all their support. I remain indebted to the Department of English and our staff and faculty members. Amanda Riley, Michelle Marshall, Mary Vasquez, Cindy Baniak, and Marsha Bissett have been very resourceful and efficient in the guidance they have provided throughout my graduate student life. I thank our department’s Chair, Dr. Donald E. Hall for the support and enthusiasm he has for every student in the department.

I remain indebted to my parents Barun and Uma as without their inspiration and encouragement I would not have been able to pursue academics in the United States. I

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want to thank my siblings, Rajiv and Sanghamitra and my nephew, Rajarshi and sister-in- law Maumita for their unending support and faith in me. I thank Nabendu for his support, confidence, and patience with me. Without him, this dissertation would not have been written. He is a man of few words but his encouragements provided sustenance during some of the toughest moments of my work. I want to mention my recently deceased father-in-law, Niranjan Pore who would have been the happiest with my achievement, who made international phone calls asking about the progress of my work while encouraging me to work harder and produce better work. Finally, I want to thank all of my friends and colleagues who have stood by me, supported, and encouraged me despite their own work. A special thanks to Sohinee Roy to whom I remain indebted for all her support, kindness, and encouragement. I want to thank Amrita Ghosh, Gargi, and Anthony Zias. They made graduate student life seem worry free and their unending support have steered me through. Special thanks go to Shampa Chatterjee, Krishna and Sukhamay Lahiri, and Srilata Ganguly (University of Pennsylvania) for their generous support and guidance. Finally, I want to thank all my teachers—on both sides of the Atlantic—who have ever taught me, for surely, without their beacon lights I would not have been able to find my calling.

Aparajita De

Morgantown, 2009

I dedicate this work to Nabendu Pore for all his patience, love, and encouragement during every moment of my life and work here.

MAPPING SUBJECTIVITIES:

THE CULTURAL POETICS OF MOBILITY & IDENTITY IN SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORIC LITERATURE

APARAJITA DE

WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY, MORGANTOWN 2009

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

iii

INTRODUCTION Mapping Subjectivities: The Cultural Poetics of Mobility & Identity in South Asian Diasporic Literature

1

ONE What’s In a Name? Tropes of Belonging & Identity in The Namesake

36

TWO Living in Umreekah: Dancing to Transnationalism with Queen of Dreams

65

THREE Inside the Tricolor: Mapping Belonging through Displacement in What the Body Remembers

97

FOUR Making Meanings, Suturing Contradictions: An Analysis of Fault Lines

131

FIVE Epilogue: Perceptions, Limits, and Optimisms

159

WORKS CITED

163 Mapping Subjectivities: The Cultural Poetics of Mobility & Identity in South Asian Diasporic Literature

We have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe—in short, think… to live with what would otherwise be unendurable. - Gilles Deleuze (113)

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, as the main character Ashima Ganguly nears

the end of her pregnancy we are unassumingly led to the details of her culinary

improvisations that help her connect to her Indian roots amidst her American realities.

She poignantly exemplifies the immigrant angst, the nostalgia for home that immigration

provokes, and the cultural negotiations immigrants make every moment of their lives to

survive, as she goes through the simple ritual of making herself a snack. Ashima satisfies

her cravings for a delicacy native to her homeland, Calcutta, by mixing rice krispies,

peanuts, and spices. The mixture is a substitute for jhalmuri—the popular Bengali snack

from puffed rice available through vendors in the footpaths and streets of Calcutta and at

any home in India, “[O]n a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date,

Ashima Ganguly stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice

Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon

juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the

mix” (Lahiri 1). Later in the novel we note Ashima's cultural negotiations—through food

habits, language, and lifestyles—which are conditioned by her experiences of everyday

life in America and her ability to forge belonging through strategies of mediation. In a

way, her trivial gesture of concocting the snack illustrates her ability to forge her

American realities (with rice krispies and a pregnancy without the support of her native

family and community) with her Indian associations. These negotiations are relationally

developed in response to location (both geographical and ideological) and illustrate the

1 autonomic ability of the immigrant subject to survive within cultures. In fact, the methods

of forging belonging in immigrant literature is a trope deploying negotiations—conscious

and unconscious, strategies and tactics, deliberate or otherwise—that respond to the

complex experiences of cultural displacement. In my dissertation, I examine these

representations of belonging in South Asian women's diasporic literature. My

investigation illustrates the autonomic and conscious tactics and negotiations of

belonging of immigrant characters represented in diasporic space. Ultimately, I argue that

subjectivity for diasporic characters develops from their responses to empirical

exigencies in diasporic space, often with emancipatory and liberatory possibilities. These

possibilities, while hinting at the freedom and the limitations of social spaces also lead to

the development of newer identities. This then makes survival possible for immigrants

between and within cultures.

Within the limits of my analysis, I study South Asian diasporic women’s writing.

In my understanding, the writers I work with treat subjectivity, in diaspora locations,

developing as both an empirical reality and an analytic category. For me, this means that

the writers explore the practical activity of engaging diaspora identity and consciousness

that is patterned, felt, and experienced in historically contingent settings, in diaspora locations, and mediated by institutional processes and cultural forms. Consequently, my research explores the idea that subjectivity comprises the material and the empirical responses to diaspora location. It includes the inner transformation of the human subject

along with the remaking and renewal of culture and socio-political spaces of existence.

The fictional and autobiographic works of diasporic South Asian women writers like

Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Meena

2 Alexander exemplify my analysis. Through my analysis I illustrate that subjectivity in the

diaspora, that is, develops as a function of the space the individual inhabits, experiences,

and responds to. I work, in short, towards a theory of subjectivity, agency, and

responsibility that accounts for both the restrictions and the possibilities of social and

empirical space for diaspora characters. Ultimately, my dissertation reexamines strategies

of socio-cultural mediations and belonging in the diaspora to highlight the ways of

surviving—between and within cultures.

Since subjectivity develops as a function of space, I focus principally on social

space and location and the way socio-cultural interactions, interpersonal relationships,

and socio-historical contingencies forged in the South Asian American diaspora affect subjectivity. Thus, I view space and location not as a given, but as a set of superimposed spatial frameworks, as many social spaces negotiated within one geographical place and time. Thus, subjectivity is an open ended term for me. I recognize that it is unfinished and unfinishable. My analysis does not propose a single analytic framework—from history, cultural formations, social analysis, discourse, or phenomenology—for a genealogy of the subject or account for a formula of subjectivity from the inner lives of people and their intersubjective relations in a local world. My chapters look at subjects in diaspora locations represented in South Asian women’s writing and my analysis is part of an ongoing process illustrating the existential elements in social and individual experience in diaspora locations. My work explores the plural ways of addressing and understanding the daily lives and selves of diaspora individuals. I examine the inner reworking of these diaspora characters as represented by the writers to reexamine the consequences of people’s experiences and responses towards themselves and others in shaping identity

3 and social spaces. In my project, subjectivity is not an intangible object; it is closely

connected and embodied in people’s lives—in domestic spaces, public life, interpersonal struggles, and cultural practices and in constructions of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.

In studying South Asian women’s literary and autobiographic representations in the diaspora space of North America, the factors of gender, class, historical positionality

(to use Lata Mani’s term), individual experiences, and responses in the diaspora location become especially visible since they rarify gender and ethnic-cultural identity, i.e., indicating how being woman and South Asian migrant inflect identity and subjectivity in the diaspora.1 In my analysis, gender emerges as an analytical category in different

historical and spatial locations. I focus on women writers and how they represent identity

in their literary works within experiences of cultural dislocation and transnationalism to

highlight the complications in these representations. My analysis shows that these

complications result in a dissymmetrical rearticulation of gender with other axes such as

colonial history, language, and the conditions of transnationalism. To put it in other

words, cultural identities, practices, and mediations pertaining to South Asian identities

within the diaspora need to be examined within the wider social and geocultural

landscapes which produce them or are produced by them. Thus, an examination of South

Asian women’s representation of South Asian histories, experiences, and lives becomes

necessary to identify how discursive spaces construct South Asian subjectivity and are in

turn reconfigured by these identities.2

This investigation potentially opens knowledge-producing avenues about the

South Asian diaspora space and identities developed therein. At the same time this

examination expands our theoretical and discursive understanding of how social spaces

4 are intertwined with cultural and experiential histories. By examining the tactics of

negotiations represented in South Asian women’s writing I reconsider the identity and

femininity of South Asian women in the diaspora. Their strategically located and

mediated identities displace any conventional notions associated with performing a

“South Asianness” in the diaspora. The incompleteness of predicting a South Asian

identity also underscores transformations in tenets of citizenship, belonging, and cultural

identities. Although I am not suggesting the development of a radical South Asian gendered subjectivity in diaspora location, my research highlights the emancipatory sites created by these characters to articulate their voice, agency, and their abilities to

(re)create and remake social and empirical spaces. Taking up the varied and specific gendered experiences of location and dislocation in the diaspora, my chapters analyze the ways through which cultural negotiations produce space, mold identities, and help implode any formulaic blanket ascription of a developing “South Asian identity” in

diaspora locations.

My project thus argues the necessity of developing a more complex theory of

subjectivity. This is because it makes apparent how individual conditions and experiences

are retained and remade in local interactions. The subject is an agent of history and its

product. Therefore, modes of subjectivization are determined by institutional functions, family and community hierarchies, memories of colonialism, and other wider and local factors. However, subjectivity is not just a result of social control and therefore unconscious and inevitable. It is also a space for subjects to think through circumstances, create or maneuver choices to endure experiences, and survive in the contemporary

5 world. Thus, it is the means for shaping sensibility and identity—it is the articulation and

the anticipation of self-renewal and creation—a strategy to living.

My examination of individual subjectivity—formed through mediation and

negotiation—as both a strategy of existence and a material and practical means of belonging in cultures helps recast some of the assumptions of the ways in which cultural and socio-political institutions function. Refracted through socio-cultural and political

registers such as gender, location, experience, and history, my analysis of the inner life

processes of diaspora characters helps capture the dynamic potential of diaspora life and living. By articulating a theory of subjectivity through empirical experiences in social space and arguing that both transform each other, I am suggesting that people forge, foreclose, or renew their lives and identities around what is most at stake (religious identity, preserving ethnic identity through language, or a set of relationships). Thus,

whatever issue is at stake is always embedded in the shifting exigencies of the practical,

everyday life, and unfolds in particular socio-cultural and politico-historical spaces. In

my project, the individual experience of location is defined as the sensory and conscious

flow of intersubjective communication, as a space where things happen. Since experience

is specific, intersubjective, and negotiated, it is also a medium where collective and

subjective processes and reactions coalesce, contest, or form a dialectical relationship. I

focus on experiences that happen within particular social and empirical spaces—in the

diaspora space—as something that is inextricable from everyday life. By examining the

complex ways in which diaspora locations reflect the lived experiences within everyday

worlds as well as within temporary spaces and transitions of movements—my chapters

6 enlarge the presumed understandings of what is socially possible and is necessary for surviving between and within cultures.

Because so much of my dissertation concerns issues of identity, I'd like to

distinguish between the two concepts that are associated with the notion of identity: the

subject and subjectivity. The western concept of the subject has psychoanalytical,

poststructural, and other epistemological connotations. Simply put, the subject may be

understood as the counterpart of the phenomenal object. That is, it exists in dialectical

relation with the conscious world as it is either produced by it or produces it. According

to Paul Smith, it is the “sum of sensations, or the “consciousness,” by which and against

which the external world can be posited” (xxvii). Since the subject is always understood

in relation to the phenomenal world, it is perennially in conflict with forces that

determine, dominate, or affect it. These forces include the poststructural indices of

language, discourse, ideology, social formations, and/or political apparatuses. The forces

make subject-positions dynamic, contextual, and relative. Therefore, under these

circumstances, the question of the subject’s agency is negated (or comes under doubt)

and the “subject can always be conceived as being subject to something” (Smith xxxiv).

Thus, the subject is usually taken to be subservient to something in the external world.

Given these limitations in the concept of the “subject,” for the purposes of this study, I

would like to focus on the more flexible notion of “subjectivity.”

In one sense western philosophy has been a continuous engagement with the

‘problem of subjectivity’ as a locus of both consciousness and experience—a question

under debate and deemed to be open to philosophical speculation. Since I view

subjectivity as a principle that resists our disintegration into distinct, disjointed selves to

7 encourage us to understand how our interpersonal relationships, reflexive and quotidian

experiences, our needs and desires, ultimately connect us to our inner, interior selves, it

more clearly implies interiority than "subject" sometimes does. Also for me, subjectivity

denotes self-consciousness and does not simply imply the existence of an autonomic self but of its relative and partial nature that is derived from intersubjective relations.

According to Anthony Giddens, “[S]elf-consciousness has no primacy over the

awareness of others … [I]ntersubjectivity does not derive from subjectivity, but the other

way around” (51). Thus, if it is derived from intersubjective relations, then subjectivity

focuses more on the lived experiences of human beings within social and other

ideological and discursive spaces, and therefore I am not arguing about subjectivity as a

passive product of extra-personal discursive operations. I am also being circumspect

about the Derridean prioritizing of language and meaning that endlessly defer textual

processes in favor of obscure and theoretical interpretations. Derrida’s accounts serve, in

fact to reduce the human individual to an ‘effect’ of difference, denying the idea of self-

conception any agency or needful role. Instead, I want to argue about subjectivity as a

conscious, creative, dynamic, and narrative process and function achieved and

understood within the plurality of experience and intersubjective relations developed

and/or happening in empirical spaces. Perceived in this way, I would also argue that

individual subjectivity leaves open the possibilities of revising and rethinking

conceptions of one’s self, while also acknowledging the potential dangers of

misinterpreting others in relation to it. Thus, within this conceptual framework, I believe

that the concept of subjectivity allows for thinking how individuals can function as

8 purposive moral and ethical agents—something that is often denied within the concept of the subject.

If subjectivity holds possibilities for reconceptualizing or transforming the human individual within intersubjective and mediated communities, then social and empirical subjects can develop alternative sites for self-definition. This would also imply that subjectivity allows for the human individual to situate, interact, assess, or even create meaningful spaces for being and becoming. Thus, for me, subjectivity is a space of experience and struggle, it is a passage where identities are renewed, remade, or revised through practical experiences, intersubjective relationships, socio-cultural transformations of political spaces, and through individual consciousness—a space where individual and socio-cultural responsibility, ethical choices, and conflicts take place. In other words, I argue that subjectivity needs to be theorized as a space that is constituted by individual experience, intersubjective relations, and denotes one’s qualified ability to modulate, move, and/or negotiate between the spaces and functions that will determine or influence her. This conceptualization actually associates subjectivity more with agency than the concept of the subject does.

In my frame of reference, agency refers to a byproduct of subjectivity which is indicative of the possibilities for articulating resistance and subversion within ideological

(and temporal) spaces of power and coercion. So, the basic premise from which I begin my analyses is that even if one has limited agency within a particular time it is possible that in experiencing location, agency occurs as a byproduct of their subjectivity. This suggests that individual perceptions and desires can move towards the possibility of

9 doing things differently or of reconstituting them by negotiating or tactically intervening

in locational experiences.

Now that I've clarified the terms used in this study, I want to briefly remind my

readers that due to the diversity of subject-positions available and the identities they

result in, I am not arguing about tracing a stable, foundational, limited, and specific

subjectivity. Under the present aegis of global and transnational movement, influx of the

media, and technologies of communication, new types of identities and networks are

enabling people to articulate different destinies and remake lived experiences and

institutional spaces (such as nations and communities). Thus, I agree with Amritjit Singh

and Peter Schmidt’s recognition of our present moment as “a transnational moment,” to

illustrate through my chapters the ways in which local and national narratives, in literature and culture, cannot be extricated from a radically developing shared sense of human history and global interdependence (3). Therefore, in order to think

transnationally about literature, culture, and history, my chapters advocate a study of the

evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic locations across national

boundaries. Moreover, the investigation of subjectivity in contemporary settings of

migrant communities, postcolonial states, or massive displacements becomes important.

This analysis can explicate the logic of intersubjective communication and major social

constructs and processes; likewise, amid such investigations we can understand particular

domains of agency and strategy used to develop subjectivity and forge belonging.

Perhaps the investigation of the individual’s identity as their experience of location is

indicative of the new ways of defining what constitutes surviving between and within

cultures—underscoring the projects of being human.

10 Theories of subjectivity have often reduced the subject to a theoretical abstraction.

People in movement, suffering violence, or the terrors of ethnic conflicts have often been

transformed into remote discursive forms or subject positions. Feminist geographer

Doreen Massey’s work demonstrates the necessity of discussing women and men in space in materialistic terms, for she states that: “what is at issue is not social phenomena

in space but both social phenomena and space as constituted out of social relations,… the

spatial [as] social relations ‘stretched out’” (Space, Place, and Gender 2). Her notion of

space as imbricated within social relations becomes important when we consider women

in diaspora locations. This attention moves discussion away from simplistic notions of

viewing women as a group having a stable and consistent relation to spatial networks in

the diaspora developing homogeneous identities. Whilst Massey’s basic premise analyzes

economic changes impacting gender in the twentieth century British context, I have

found it difficult to forge an empirical form of analysis linking space and subjectivity

from her work. The inadequacy of the specificity of experience in her references in

discussing the denizens of diaspora space has led me to draw more on the work of

Kathleen Kirby.

In understanding subjectivity in discursive and socio-cultural space, Kirby

describes subjectivity on a three dimensional architecture—impacted by and developed

from the individual and experiential consciousness, historical, socio-cultural, and

discursive locations and social relations in and across space (“Thinking through the

Boundary” 185). Following her, I view subjectivity as a space we occupy—experience,

react to, and modify. Thus, the individual registers of space and location become sites of

examination when we view subjectivity as a three-dimensional space. Within this

11 conception, the interrogation of the hybrid space in a diaspora to understand subjectivity

makes it possible to map out the different forms of spatial interactions that may entail for

women in diaspora locations when they negotiate spatial and cultural boundaries for

themselves and for other subjects. Therefore, my chapters focus on the possibilities of

analyzing representational space and subjectivity which is aware of the ways in which

women in diasporic locations (re)negotiate their positions in space through their

interrogations of and interactions with their respective social-cultural positions.

In thinking about subjectivity, my investigation analyzes diaspora characters

without obscuring their empirical realities, in dynamic interrelationships with other

characters, or highlights processes to indicate the play of agency, development of

practical strategies, and individual consciousness, along with the reconceptualization of

social spaces. Postcolonial theorizations of the subject have often privileged the space of

articulation and formation of identity over the location the subject occupies in real time

and space—foreclosing analytic engagements within empirical spaces and locations.3

Thus, an examination of cultural representation of the conceptual significance of lived experiences of individuals is in order. This investigation can allow for the

(re)conceptualization of the intertwined nature of individual and collective experience demonstrating that power, agency, and meaning are not in theoretical opposition to each other but are intimately linked in an intersubjective matrix of location and experience.

In studying the processes of subject formation in the diaspora I have thought of the diaspora as a potential location for the formation of subjectivity. I argue about diaspora space as the site and context for cultural production, as a dynamic location for developing and rethinking identity and subjectivity under the conditions of late

12 capitalism. I like to think of the diaspora space as a metaphor for a vehicle promoting

cultural production and socio-historical change. Similar to Paul Gilroy’s perception of the

ship and her crew, black subjects, ocean, and ports as the system of communication vital

in cultural and political production, “[T]hey [ships] were something more—a means to

conduct political dissent and possibly a distinct mode of cultural production,” I perceive

of the diaspora as a socio-cultural vehicle, a dynamic location for the production of history, identity, and forging spaces of belonging (17). In Black Atlantic: Modernity and

Double Consciousness, Gilroy also argues about the transforming nature of transatlantic travel in reading cross-cultural texts by black American, black British, black West Indian, and African writers. His engagement opens up the potential of reading the diasporic experience as a transformative one. My chapters indicate the transformative potential of the diaspora through analyzing the development of subjectivity in the South Asian diaspora space as a result of the tactical negotiations of diaspora characters therein.

We all produce, know, and negotiate space—within our specific contexts and in our own terms. So, one may wonder on my insistence on seeing diaspora space as a

special site where modes of cultural belonging are negotiated. While geopolitically, culturally, and ideologically the diaspora encloses subjects in displacement and relocation it is, by definition, a cusp between cultures—a socio-cultural space that is transhistorical, lies within multiple cultures, and has a porous boundary—witnessing diverse socio- cultural traffic. So, the nature of diaspora space is such that as a discursive socio-cultural site, it illuminates and intensifies spatial negotiations molding subjectivity thus becoming revelatory of the negotiations made prominent due to one’s location in the diaspora rather than within a root culture (without the experiences of geopolitical transplantation). Avtar

13 Brah’s definition of diaspora space has been helpful in conceptualizing my ideas. Brah

argues about the conceptual category of the diaspora space inhabited by migrants, their

descendents, and those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. Thus, Brah

sees diaspora space as a genealogy of movement versus fixity in spatial location (209).

Her ideas lead us to interrogate the authenticity of identity in diaspora locations (and

outside its boundaries) and reflect on the continual negotiations that diaspora locations

signify. Brah also notes the dynamism of diaspora space where, “multiple subject

positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed, or disavowed” (208). She reminds us

that the failure to ground diaspora experiences in the historical, political, economic, and

empirical concepts of cultural hybridity will make these experiences susceptible to over-

usage, “it is axiomatic that each empirical diaspora must be analyzed in its historical

specificity” (208). Brah also suggests that the identity of a diasporic community is

constituted within experiential spaces, “it is constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively” (208). While Brah’s work is important in viewing the diaspora space as an intertwined area that is relational and dynamic due to movement and fixity within it and provides the essential framework for understanding the complexity of the diaspora

location, I found her analysis very difficult for enabling an empirical, specific, and

material analysis of the formation of subjectivity in diverse diaspora locations.

Focusing on British South Asians, Brah’s theories insufficiently illuminate the

differences in viewing diasporic formations in America and the rest of the world—within

histories of indentured migrations, slavery, migrant laborers, and conditions of late

capitalism such as transnational movement. This has led me to draw more on the works

14 of cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his theorizations of positionality and diasporization.

Hall notes the specificity of socio-cultural and spatial relations to argue for critical

attentiveness to the contexts and spaces of locations. In his “Cultural Identity and

Diaspora” the analysis of contextual histories and locations in diaspora spaces, Hall argues, become sites for the articulation of newer kinds of identities. According to Hall, this kind of identity, “is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 402).

Arguing about the need to create positions of articulation in order to empower the subject, Hall notes that eventually this kind of representation leads to newer forms of identity and becoming.

Since my research investigates the changes in subjectivity through spatial experiences within diaspora locations, Hall’s theories prove helpful in locating specific and emancipatory sites emerging through negotiations of belonging. In his Introduction to

Questions of Cultural Identity Hall has also coined the term “subjectivization” to indicate that in studies of identity and subjectivity it is important to note the particular processes of subject-formation in order to understand or to rearticulate changes in identity and subjectivity (2). However, in the study of these processes of subjectivization it is essential to scrutinize the individual in question. Thus, although space and time are notable factors in shaping immigrant subjectivities, we cannot decenter or relegate the role of the individual in accepting or rejecting the influences of space and time while carefully noting that the nature and extent of these changes will vary with individuals and their choices. Thus, in delineating diaspora subject-formations in space it is necessary to understand the nature of negotiations undertaken by the individual. My chapters

15 underscore that due to the experience of location, diaspora subjectivity is ultimately

indicative of tactical negotiations and strategies that enable the forging of effective socio-

cultural belonging. The modes of belonging I analyze become the sites for the emergence of the hybrid, radical, and enunciatory sites of identity that Homi K. Bhabha’s theories illuminate.

In analyzing the hybrid subject in space, her nature is revealed to be ambivalent and split. Most theorists on identity have noted the erasure of a “pure” culture through

migration, where culture has come to be (re)defined as a zone of translation giving way to

“cultural difference” to realize “how implicated different cultures are in and with each

other” (Location 38). Bhabha hails the hybrid space or the “in-between space” as the

space of meaning and perceives it as an ambivalent yet enunciatory space for the

emergence of identity. Bhabha’s theories indicate the nature of the hybrid and diasporic space and pave the way for arguing about the fluidity of identity and location. But space and location are always defined by the specificity of experience. Thus, the potentials of

Bhabha’s radical and hybrid space of enunciation will be more dynamic and complex if they are gendered, sexualized, classed, and contextualized. Since there cannot be any metatheory or grand narrative of enunciation if we bring in diverse elements of gender, race, class, sexuality, history, and geopolitics, and since individual negotiations to forge belonging are dynamic within location and experience, the question of the modes of negotiations become an important point of consideration.

In reconfiguring identity and subjectivity within diaspora locations and experiences they not only remind us that identity is a matter of becoming and negotiating

(an enactment of performativity, perhaps) as well as being (maintaining and sustaining,

16 perhaps). In this regard, Michael de Certeau’s concepts of strategy and tactics are

especially relevant. According to de Certeau, a strategy has the potentials to transform the

uncertainties of history into “readable spaces” (36). Therefore, the interrogation of the

empirical socio-cultural spaces in diaspora locations which are gendered and sexualized can lead to an understanding of the readable spaces or enunciatory sites that both Bhabha

and Hall mention. We can also note that this understanding could open up legible spaces

for thinking about specific identities and subjectivities while creating meaning and

knowledge about one’s own place and location of belonging. Hall relates this strategy of

making “readable spaces” that is involved in diasporization as a path to achieve a sense

of being by making one’s own place. So, my chapters argue for the strategies of

negotiation that diaspora individuals undertake—strategies that are contextualized by

gender, sexuality, and the geopolitical experience of location—ultimately enabling

identity and belonging. Another useful concept that de Certeau provides is the concept of tactics. He states that a tactic is a calculated action determined by the “absence of a proper locus,” so a tactic unfolds without a center, it is radical, and has no fixed axis of origin (36). Applying de Certeau to diaspora subject-formation, my essays demonstrate that a hybrid subject—plural, multi-dimensional, and ambivalent—improvises, negotiates, and performs subjectivity through a tactical experience of location. This subjectivity has no fixity of origin, it is determined by situational and empirical exigency, it is gendered, classed, and sexualized, and is unpredictable but specific in expression.

The radical nature of diaspora subjectivity also implies that we can neither prescribe nor define it within a metatheory of subjectivity and identity, or categorize its representation.

17 Thus, from the above premises, all of my chapters demonstrate how the category of the South Asian woman in the diaspora is a subject in process, developing identities due to their dynamic interactions and experience of location and therefore inextricably embedded in the landscape or the diaspora location they are a part of. While tracing a gendered South Asian subjectivity that is dynamic, contextual, and in flux, the analysis of their experiences, histories, stories, and contexts relate their importance to understanding the situatedness of their conditions of forging belonging within and between diaspora cultures. This recognition of South Asian women’s empirical experiences as a viable cultural index to understand modern citizenship, nationalism, identity, and belonging enables us to note their participation in an ongoing struggle to survive cultural displacements and enact belonging and identity. Thus, my analysis of the mediations that

South Asian women undertake in literal and aesthetic representation is an attempt to locate these experiences as contributive to the construction of a dynamic subjectivity.

My focus on these particular women writers also attempts to delineate the specificity of their diasporic affiliations to South Asian women’s writing and (re)define the modes through which subjectivity is examined in diaspora fiction. These writers constitute a regionally unified and coherent socioaesthetic corpus. Thus, they deploy thematic motifs and literary devices derived from their predecessors in South Asian literary history and cultural discourse. The preoccupations of their feminine precursors concentrated around themes of ethnocommunal identities, alienation from ethnic and cultural roots, nostalgia for home, conflict between immigrants and their American-born offspring, diasporic contests of conformity or resistance. The fictions of Bharati

Mukherjee exemplify this characteristic. In her review essay on South Asian literary

18 production, Ketu H. Katrak discusses the range of the field from the early 1960s to the

1990s. Growing from Zulfikar Ghose’s sixties novels with magical imagery and landscape redolent of his memory and nostalgia about India, to the elitist and classist tone in Bharati Mukherjee, Katrak’s broad historical survey importantly delineates the characteristics marking this early group of writers exploring the diaspora predicament

(Cheung 201). However, unlike these writers from the 1980s and early 1990s, the group of writers I examine train their imaginative and intellectual lens on the private politics of domesticity, relationships, gender roles and their oppressions, self-discovery, and a tactical carving out of identity. Juggling with the diverse ways of identity-formation in the diaspora, these writers focus on the dynamics of empirical sociocultural and temporal locations to understand subjectivity.

While I do not claim the singularity of the works in representing diaspora experiences, it is noteworthy to mention that their exploration of subjectivity through quotidian experiences and social locations—including socio cultural interactions, diasporan interconnectedness, marriage, etc., inform the discursive and aesthetic significance of their works, allowing them credence and distinction from the earlier tradition. The works I examine represent the wave of diaspora women’s writing during the last decade of the past millennium. During this period diaspora writing primarily belonged to women. Understandably, South Asian diasporic women’s writing differs from South Asian men’s writing.4 Although akin to their male precursors (e.g., Salman

Rushdie, Raja Rao, Amitav Ghosh), the writers I discuss have maintained the urban underclass immigrant as the object of their discursive and imaginative attention, but their focus is womanist, local, and personal.

19 Conspicuously, grand allusions to larger than life people, colossal journeys

resulting in epiphanies of identity, or exotic historical voyages across global terrains to

explore the modes of belonging characterizing principal male writers’ works are

interestingly missing from the more recent representations by female practitioners of the

genre. Thus, in place of a Saladin Chamcha (Satanic Verses), Saleem Sinai (Midnight’s

Children), or the globe trotting characters of Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies) questing for

identity, we encounter ordinary folks telling about their daily life which can be connected

with wider geopolitical and cultural contexts to complicate their understanding of

identity. Consequently, an apparently mundane opening with an Ashima Ganguly making

a popular Bengali snack in her kitchen carries the immediacy of the immigrant angst while poignantly alluding to the practical negotiations at play (The Namesake). Similarly, events reminisced from the daily life of Lenny Sethi in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India is

occasion enough to highlight the legacies of the violence of the Partition of India in 1947

compared to Saleem Sinai’s metaphorical and symbolic birth at the stroke of midnight in

Rushdie’s epic on the Partition. Therefore, I argue that these women writers’ work is

situated not merely as a counter literary trend against male diasporan writing but also emphasize their specific engagements with the ways subjectivity may be viewed in the diaspora.

During the early nineties scholarship in South Asian literature focused on the diversity of this literature and its richness. The common assumption, however, was that there is a monolithic “Indian” diaspora literary tradition and that men and women’s writing did not necessarily imply a difference in portraying migrant and/or diaspora experience. Moreover, geopolitical and socio-cultural debates on the nuances constitutive

20 of “South Asian writing” were not yet rife with the topical issues of gender, sexuality, caste, class, or the politics of multiculturalism.5 Nostalgia for home, (re)definitions of home due to migration, the diverse contexts of movement from home, or South Asian women’s experience of ‘freedom’ in the new world were the general focus during this initial period of the literary tradition.6

Specific anthologies focused on South Asian women’s writing during the last decade celebrate the autonomy in the South Asian women’s experience in the socio- cultural structure of America. These works tend to create an image of the ‘just liberated’

South Asian woman due to her location in America. While we can debate how these anthologies stereotype America as a utopic land of gender equality where Asian women find liberation from their ‘repressive’ homeland cultures, the characterization idealistically (and dangerously) codes America erasing domestic oppression and gender inequality while denying any agency to non-migrating Asian women. The anthology Our

Feet Walk the Sky is a prominent example. Focusing on the works of first, second, and third generation women writers of South Asian origin who reside and work in the United

States, this collection demonstrates the creative and political sensibilities of the women forging and articulating their identities as “women of color” and “South Asian” within the territory of North America in the late 1960s and 1970s. They discuss the complications of the South Asian identity as non-immigrant, U.S. citizen, resident alien,

Asian American, South Asian, or Aryan/non-White Caucasian. Within the compass of this volume, the idea of gender dynamism within the diaspora is clearly mentioned.

Variously articulating the notion that they can “be who they want to be” this volume simplistically celebrates socio-cultural and gendered freedoms (it does not mention the

21 restrictions) allowed the women of South Asian origins. Thus, the need for locating

South Asian women’s experience and writing more thoroughly within a socio-historical context and space and viewing this representation as an inseparable part of daily life is necessary. This discourse can then highlight the negotiations necessitated by the diaspora experience while portraying the limitations and possibilities of South Asian women’s coming to freedom in America, illustrating a strategic and tactical renewal of identity.

More recent scholarship on South Asian diaspora literature has perceived this experience through trajectories of race, ethnicity, history, language, memory, home, issues of marginalization, multicultural assimilation, and transnational cultures. In analyzing the literary repertoire of Bharati Mukherjee, Sara Suleri, Meena Alexander, or

Bapsi Sidhwa, critics have underscored how the development of the South Asian identity in America has to be viewed through contextualizing South Asian experience in a post- slavery America witnessing an increasing spate of global migration. Roger Bromley’s

Narratives for a New Belonging stresses the tactical belongings crafted by characters ambivalently located on cultural border zones. In one of his essays, Bromley analyzes

Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine as a narrative of metaphorical transplantation that underscores America’s cultural agenda of diversity without addressing issues of gender or power (22-3). While Bromley points out the potentials of a gendered reading for understanding new belongings, I found his essays failing to look at modes of forging diaspora belonging or delineating the importance of studying quotidian experiences in diasporic literary representations. However, Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram’s edited anthology, South Asian Woman in the Diaspora proves to be more fruitful.

22 Including essays analyzing the South Asian woman in various roles in the diaspora—in academia, in socio-political activist work, as entrepreneurs, wives, mothers, and daughters, as war victims of rape, and as lesbian individuals—the editors explore alternative narratives in South Asian women’s experience, which allow for the complexities of this experience to emerge (Puwar and Raghuram 12). Thus, this anthology argues for the necessity of viewing the South Asian woman’s diaspora experience more extensively through a variegated lens—apart from the loss, conflict, and nostalgia commonly associated with this experience. For example, Bakirathi Mani’s

“Undressing the Diaspora” complicates the ways in which performativity works in diaspora experiences. She provides an intriguing account of clothing practices among

South Asian women in the diaspora to read them as “performative enactment of desire and difference,” with potentials of “ethnic multiculturalism,” and as “acts of resistance”

(B. Mani 112, 117, 119). She argues about clothes functioning as sites for the emergence and re-engagement of performing bodies for discussing new social identity-formations in the diaspora. This focus on the dynamic nature of identity and its inseparability from popular culture and media underpins the interconnections of socio-cultural and historical practices and the mediations therein. Although Mani does not imply it, it is also possible to read these negotiatory tactics as plausible modes of self reinvention and emancipation.

Recently the study of identity has gained momentum with regard to questions of the ethics of identity. Shirley Geok-lin Lim et al.’s edited collection Transnational Asian

American Literature: Sites and Transits includes Gita Rajan’s “Ethical Responsibility in

Intersubjective Spaces: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and ‘A

Temporary Matter’” where we discern a pragmatic ethics in thinking about identity.

23 Rajan illustrates that by placing characters in challenging situations, Lahiri provokes the

articulation of a slippery ethical code. While Rajan’s essay gestures towards including

ethical actions from the domain of absolute value to that of “personal responsibility, reciprocal accountability,” she is, however, not clear if Lahiri is a representative of this kind of work or if she is a trendsetter (Rajan 139). By implication, this also means that an extended dialogue between Lahiri and other writers of the genre would have made

Rajan’s essay more critically situated. Her essay, nonetheless, indicate the importance of individual responsibility in shaping identity.

Diaspora experiences as the derivative of a cosmopolitan and transnational identity is another recent debate. Articulating the recognition of a broader sense of identity—both individual and collective—these emerging concepts implode the simplistic existence of the “hyphenated character” in diaspora literature. Rajini Srikanth’s The

World Next Door explicates the contributions of South Asian American writing and the insights it can offer us about living in the present world. Discussing the “ways of living at home abroad or abroad at home,” Srikanth analyzes how South Asian writing enables viewing the “larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller” (3). Finding complex webs of connection between Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land with Iraq’s 1990 invasion of

Kuwait or paralleling the racial-ethnic profiling of Asian and Arab Americans post

September 11 with an Indian American schoolgirl’s dilemmas of reading history in

Lahiri’s “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” come naturally in Srikanth’s book

(“Transnational Homepages”). Srikanth’s “idea of America,” however, seems strained from the weaving of multiple strands of discussions—socio-political, activist, cultural- economic, and historical—in her book. Nonetheless a valuable contribution in thinking

24 about identity and belonging in a transnational world, Srikanth helped me to think about

how I could relate literary representations of localized experiences with wider

interconnections to forge the tactics of living in a globalized world.

In analyzing the nuances of private life experiences in diaspora literature, my chapters underpin their interconnection with public spheres shaping identity. Stressing the coalition between spaces, I indicate the possibilities of perceiving interpersonal

alliances as sites for the emergence of a new belonging. My reexamination of the

intermeshed nature of the popular and the public space with the private and personal

space illustrates the diverse local, political, and socio-cultural identities a diaspora subject

experiences or negotiates. Their mediations underscore the transformative potentials of

identity along with its democratic and emancipatory possibilities. Focusing on

intersubjective relationships, daily experiences, personal interactions, socio-cultural

events, and local places in the diaspora my chapters illustrate the perpetual self

refashioning, contest, and the reappropriation of the horizons of diaspora experience and location. Saturated with the analysis of everyday experiences of diaspora subjects who participate in the collective process of identity-formation, counter the conflicts due to a hyphenated belonging, or bridge relationships between everyday life and politics, my project helps reconceptualize public spaces as a context and constituent of social experience and as a site of hybrid articulation.

My research focuses on literary works, highlighting their importance in articulating the contexts of contemporary belonging. Literature reflects our lives and literary fictions express the gamut of human experience. Gayatri C. Spivak’s In Other

25 Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, asserts that literature responsibly represents the world and when it is read in the “proper” way, reveals facts about the world:

The world actually writes itself with the many-leveled unfixable intricacy

and openness of a work of literature. If, through our study of literature, we

can ourselves learn and teach others to read the world in the “proper” risky

way, and to act upon that lesson, perhaps we literary people would not

forever be such helpless victims. (95)

While Spivak notes the value of literature in understanding civic life, I suggest that the ways of reading literature increase our self-consciousness. It enables us to critically reassess ourselves and our roles in the world to encourage a democratic dialogue on belonging and identity. Spivak’s contentions also stress “the personal is political,” so my analysis of empirical and private life exigencies of diaspora characters elaborates how cultural fictions connect the aesthetic with the collective in the discourse of identity and belonging.7

The geopolitical region of South Asia is comprised of the seven countries of

India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. In my

dissertation, I have chosen to concentrate on women writers having origins in the Indian

subcontinent currently domiciled in the United States and Canada.8 I do, however, realize

the dangers that an exclusionary positioning of these writers—as South Asian, diasporic,

women—can create. Undermining the complexities of understanding contemporary

diaspora experience, this kind of a clique can also fail to adequately stress the

specificities of representation in terms of gender, ethno-cultural, and regional affiliations.

In Outside in the Teaching Machine, Spivak warns about collapsing the specificities of

26 diasporic writing by women from the Indian subcontinent, “[S]ometimes Indian women

writings mean American women writing or British women writing, except for national

origin.9 There is an ethno-cultural agenda, an obliteration of Third World specificity as

well as a denial of cultural citizenship, in calling them merely ‘Indian’” (189). Heeding

Spivak, I am reluctant to clump my group of writers within a homogeneous cluster under

the encompassing term “diaspora.” At the same time, I don’t want to talk about them

merely as “Indian” or South Asian writers who narrate the diaspora experience.

Moreover, I am not suggesting that South Asian diasporic writing be given its own

separate literary tradition—breaking out from the broader branch of Asian (North)

American literature.10 Thus, the women writers I examine are diasporic but that does not mean that they are diasporic in the same ways.

Since these writers do not function as emblems illustrating exclusive difference in forming diaspora identity but as examples of writers specifically concentrating on the modes of identity-formation in the diaspora, I argue for a lateral affiliation among the chosen writers.11 I analyze their literary representations in terms of the interconnections

among nations, diasporas, peoples, and identities. My engagement eventually connects

the realm of literature to the material domains of politics and civic behavior. Three

analytical chapters on representative novels precede a fourth dealing with a memoir.

These chapters include my critical dialogue with theories of identity and belonging

enmeshed with questions of diaspora, transnationalism, gender, history, literary genres,

and nationhood to understand the hybrid, performative, and strategic construction of

diaspora subjectivity from everyday life.

27 Thus, the following chapters trace the maneuvers in identity occurring in

representative South Asian women’s writing. I examine the spatial and cultural

rearticulations in fictional characters that deploy the strategies and tactics of cultural

negotiations to forge belonging. My analysis underscores the ways in which we can

analyze the intermeshed processes that produce subjectivity and reconfigure space: the reconciliation with plural identities due to the interrelated spatial matrix of one’s location is discussed in my first chapter; exploring how the arena of the local landscape and the socio empirical space articulates transnational and hybrid identity is the focus of my second chapter; the ways in which geohistorical and political epochs and reconstitutions transform ethnic, gender, and national identities is discussed in my third chapter; while my fourth examines how particular social, aesthetic, and spatial practices are deployed to construct a hybrid South Asian gendered subjectivity.

Chapter 1, “What’s in a Name?” broaches the issue of identity conflict which crisscrosses the following chapters. I analyze the life experiences of Gogol Ganguly, the

American protagonist (of Indian origins) in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Published in

2003, Lahiri’s debut novel focuses on an American male of Indian origins growing up in a suburban neighborhood in Massachusetts in 1970s America. Emphasizing how Gogol’s name, his experiences at home, with friends, in conversation at social gatherings, at school, and his life at Boston or New York become specific sites which help him confront his cultural duality, this chapter argues the dynamics of forging a sense of hybrid cultural belonging. It is through the incidents related to his unique name that Gogol realizes his strategic positions within cultures—both Asian and American. The resulting tensions generated due to his plural cultural affiliations results in Gogol’s suffering from conflicts

28 regarding the locations of his identity. His hybridity becomes a source of his confusion of

belonging and makes his character endure contestatory moments of forging a static and

unitary sense of cultural belonging. Gradually Gogol’s life takes turns to help him resolve his hybrid location to reconcile him finally to his cultural plurality. I argue about the development of Gogol’s subjectivity impacted by his socio-cultural, temporal location, and his strategic position as a diasporic subject in America. The process of subjectivization (or, what Stuart Hall would also call “diasporization”) of Gogol reveals

the individuated ways of producing subjectivities that do not coalesce into fixed subjects.

I show that Gogol’s experiences at home, with friends, in conversation at social gatherings, at school, and his life at Boston or New York become specific sites which help him confront his cultural duality and the dynamics of forging his sense of belonging.

Eventually these positions coupled with his self-mediations guide him toward a syncretic reconciliation with his plural subjectivity. My attentiveness to the experiential life of

Gogol to understand the development of his subjectivity is in line with the way our everyday lives are interlinked with wider ideological spaces. Thus, the conflicts in

Gogol’s private life are linked and interconnected with the public world for the construction of the social meanings of everyday life in the diaspora and beyond.

I follow this chapter with a study of Chitra Banerjee’s recent novel Queen of

Dreams. Here I will explore the ways in which local spaces (re)configure belonging and identity and how they complicate the concept of cosmopolitanism. In this chapter I focus on the Asian American feminine protagonist Rakhi. Rakhi is unaware of her plural heritage as her parents have raised her as an ‘American.’ If my first chapter deals with

Gogol’s conflicts arising due to his sense of forging a unitary cultural identity following

29 his ‘Indian’ upbringing, my second chapter will critique the dilemmas of carving the

space of belonging Rakhi faces due to her ‘American’ upbringing. I argue that Rakhi’s

alienation from her cultural identity is remedied when she experiences the broader

dimensions of cultural interactions when the coffee shop she runs expands to become

Kurma House International. The motley crowd at the Kurma House helps her relocate to her strategic cultural plurality. Rakhi accepts the significance of her strategic cultural location as she inadvertently occupies a position where she can inherit cultures, modify, reject, and/or invent culture. Rakhi accepts her hybrid identity through her interactions at

the coffee house which also redefine her notions of belonging and un-belonging.

Eventually Rakhi embraces her hybridity (unlike Gogol who reconciles to it through loss

and failure) to develop a cosmopolitan consciousness. I argue that the cultural traffic at

the Kurma House indoctrinates Rakhi to this cosmopolitan identity. Thus, in my

characterization of Rakhi’s cosmopolitanism under the spatial influences of the coffee

house I analyze how localized places with cultural traffic operate as cultural border

spaces which can become strategic points for reconfiguring identity and culture. I call these local areas map-spaces and study Rakhi’s identity formation within its coordinates.

The following chapter explores refugee and migrant experiences to analyze the dimensions of postmodern citizenship. Inquiring along the lines of how these experiences help us to rethink the vocabularies of subjectivity in national geographies, in my third chapter, “Inside the Tricolor” I argue for the reconsideration of gendered ethnicity as a category that critically shapes citizenship and belonging in postcolonial democratic life. I focus on Shauna Singh Baldwin’s narrative of the Sikh experience of India’s Partition in

1947 through her novel What the Body Remembers. Centering on the experiences of

30 childhood, marriage, motherhood, and geopolitical displacement of the colonial subject

Roop, I examine the notion of a negotiated embodiment in understanding her subjectivity.

Noting the gradual development of Roop’s hybrid modernity, I emphasize her subtle and

clever maneuvers within patriarchal conformity to argue about the negotiations she

enables—both at the personal and the wider socio-cultural, political levels. The nuances

of her personal life intersect with the dimensions of an overarching national identity

following the Partition. This chapter also illustrates how a minor, colonial, refugee,

ethnic, rural, and gendered subject becomes the site of forging new relations of diaspora,

assimilation, and belonging. In reexamining Roop as a Partition refugee, this chapter

attempts to uncover the heterogeneous, multi-layered, and discontinuous local

experiences of gendered and ethnicised Partition migrants.

My final analytical chapter focuses on Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines.

For me, Alexander’s autobiographical impulse is an attempt to name experience and to

actively participate in crafting her hybrid identity. In this chapter I explore the ways in

which she uses narrative tropes to mingle the theoretical with the experiential to carve her

identity. Simply put, I consider the modes of reconciliation between the autobiographical

“I” and the textual “I” in the development of the self. Alexander’s position as an

academic and intellectual migrant in the United States writing about the development of

her identity following multiple migrations further complicates my examination. In analyzing the role of migrant agency and political engagement in shaping identity I skeptically argue about traditional concepts of hybridity, subjectivity, individualism, and cosmopolitan consciousness. Thus, in this chapter my concern is not so much with the genre of autobiography but with the particular practice of incorporating the

31 autobiography within postcolonial and cultural theory. Ultimately I argue that the memoir subverts the trope of trauma and loss due to migration to indicate a politics of multiple anchorages—with the emergence of a cosmopolitan subject—celebrating the ability of individuals to simultaneously find affiliations in multiple worlds and socio-cultural spaces to arrive at a paradoxically syncretic sense of belonging.

Thus, my chapters analyze the representations of empirical experiences and negotiations of diaspora characters in intersubjective relationships, socio-historical contexts, local spaces, and within cultures to illustrate that the development of diasporic subjectivity underscores the essence of living in the diaspora. For many, living and experiencing the diaspora is associated with a profound sense of survival. Perhaps, Homi

Bhabha most eloquently rearticulates this in the conclusion of his interview with Kalpana

Sheshadri-Crooks:

Survival continually haunts the dream of sovereignty with the possibility

that failure is not the other side of success or mastery: it is its lining, an

intimate and proximate mode of being or living in the midst of what we

think needs to be done afresh or anew and what requires repeatedly to be

repaired, revised, or reassembled. (“Surviving Theory” 379)

Pointing out the intimate modes of being and becoming that ultimately sustain our identities, Bhabha recognizes the human spirit that continually negotiates, reclaims, or revises modes of belonging to forge a sense of survival. All the chapters that follow evoke this underlying spirit of survival by arguing about identities and subjectivities molded through diaspora location and experience.

32 END NOTES

1 See Lata Mani 25.

2 See Doreen Massey, “its not just that the spatial is socially constructed; the social is spatially constructed” (Space, Place, and Gender 13).

3 In postcolonial theory, Homi Bhabha follows a similar trajectory as poststructural

theory. In The Location of Culture Bhabha clearly privileges textuality more than the

subject and its articulation. See Homi K. Bhabha The Location of Culture (178-182).

Also see Pheng Cheah’s critique in “Given Culture”: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom

in Transnationalism” (163, 168).

4 Rita Felski argues about treating women’s writing as representative of a separate locus

of interest in comparison to male writing. She connects literary texts by women with the

central concerns of identity and evinces the ambiguous and inevitable difference in

writing by men and women. See Felski 1-2.

5 See Nalini Natarajan’s introductory essay, “Reading Diaspora” in Emanuel S. Nelson’s

The Writers of the Indian Diaspora. Natarajan stresses the subtle and diverse strands of

the preoccupations in South Asian diasporic literature, tracing the aesthetics of loss and

cultural anxiety, religious fundamentalism incited by consumerism, and the sub-textual

terrains of gendered cultural conflicts to provide an understanding of identity and

subjectivity (xiv-xx).

6 See Emanuel S. Nelson’s Reworlding:The Literature of the Indian Diaspora and

Writers of The Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Providing a

critical commentary on the heterogeneous literary work produced by the various

diasporic Indian groups under the rubric of “literature of the Indian diaspora,” Nelson

33 focuses on the various thematic concerns of this literature. He argues that the overarchingly “haunting presence of India” informs and “unites the literature of the

Indian diaspora” (xv-xvi). In his later anthology on The Writers of the Indian Diaspora the inclusion of gay and lesbian writers’ work, and feminist women writers’ work along with well known writers deserve mention.

7 Fredric Jameson has strongly argued that meaningful questions about literature are

ultimately political. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,

he remarks, “This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary

texts. It conceives of the political perspective … as the absolute horizon of all reading

and all interpretation” (17). About four centuries earlier, Sir Philip Sidney had extolled

the virtues of literature for being specifically tied “to the particular truth of things,”

thereby capturing the essence of a situation unlike history or philosophy (An Apology for

Poetry 14). Spivak seems to echo these thoughts if only to indicate the importance of a

responsible representation connecting literature and life.

8 In recognition of the mission for the Organization of American States (OAS), I should have also included Latin America and the Caribbean to refer to the Americas. However,

since the immigration histories of South Asians are broadly similar in both the United

States and Canada I decided to limit my scrutiny within this area while recognizing the

need to work within a manageable framework. See also Sucheng Chan 1991; Gary

Okihiro 2001.

9 Emphasis in the original.

10 See Ty and Goellnicht. 2004. 1-14.They introduce the term “Asian North American” to

indicate the conflicting nature of the label, “Asian American. They argue that the latter

34 term leaves out South Asians, Filipinos, and Arab Americans of West Asian origins while also proposing the inclusion of Canadians of Asian origin who discuss the same issues of identity, multiple cultural allegiances, and marginalization in the mainstream culture (1-

2).

11 See Deepika Bahri’s notion of the “logic of adjacence” (Lazarus 220). Bahri argues

about the logic of viewing women as near dwellers in the world when their adjacence can

become more meaningful in thinking about belonging.

35

What’s In a Name? Tropes of Belonging & Identity in The Namesake

“For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” –Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December1

In this chapter, I will focus on the impact of the spatial politics of location on the

development of diasporic subjectivity. Within this agenda, I will argue that the identity-

formation of a first generation American of non-white origin occurs through a complex

process. This process depends on the respective geopolitical and socio-cultural position

the individual occupies within the hegemonic American culture.2 In this context, I will

analyze Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, focusing on the character of the male

protagonist Gogol Ganguly. The novel is a male bildungsroman of an American growing

up in an immigrant household in the 1970-90s. As the principal male character, Gogol

suffers from inner conflicts related to his hybrid ethnic identity represented by the unusualness of his name. His socio-cultural milieus also lead him to question his spaces of belonging. Consequently, the novel charts how Gogol changes his name/s to try to fit in to the demands of cultures. Finally, he reconciles himself to his unique position as a diasporic individual situated on a strategic border zone between cultures. I argue that it is the multiple cultural forces of his location that impinge on the development of his subjectivity. At the novel’s conclusion Gogol acknowledges the hybrid consciousness that informs his subjectivity. I will argue that Gogol’s identity is polyvalent and dynamic.

His ambivalent subjectivity is ever-evolving, allowing Gogol a paradoxical sense of cohesiveness at the novel’s end. His dynamic subjectivity is at once Indian, Bengali,

American, Asian American, and much more.

Although Homi Bhabha argues about the polyvalence of identity in the development of hybrid subjectivity under the conditions of colonization, I will analyze

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Gogol’s subjectivity with reference to the phenomenon of polygenesis. Polygenesis is a

continual self-refashioning that characterizes diasporic identity. This identity is inflected

by multiple socio-cultural and political forces that shape and reshape it. Thus, identity is

always in a state of flux; it is a continual birthing process resulting in the evolution of the self under diverse contexts. I have derived the idea of polygenesis from Samir Dayal’s essay “Postcolonialism’s Possibilities: Subcontinental Diasporic Intervention.” This essay

discusses the negotiation(s) the diasporic individual undergoes to facilitate the

“deconstruction of cultural boundaries, such as those constitutive of nation or

subjectivity” (“Postcolonialism’s Possibilities” 144). The in-between space that the

diasporic individual occupies decentralizes specificities of the location of nationhood,

culture, identity, and the construction of identity. The complex matrix of race, class,

geography, and socio-cultural forces that Gogol experience challenges monolithic

ascriptions for determining identity. The Namesake eventually maps Gogol’s more stable

cultural realignment with his dual (or multiple) affiliations (i.e., Indian, American,

Bengali, etc). Gogol’s polygenesis is signified through his name and through his relationships including those with his parents, his girlfriend, and his wife.

In studying the impacts of the politics of location on Gogol’s identity, I have

referred to Adrienne Rich’s term, “politics of location.” Rich uses the term, “politics of

location” as a discursive and contextual site constructing fluid identities of the “self”

through a number of registers of space. This perspective identifies the overlaps between

tropologies of physical place and the subtler dimensions of being in space. The latter

constitutes subject positions in discourse and in establishing personal and socio-political

identities. Thus, space becomes the medium for articulating subjectivity based on

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theories of national origin, gender, geography, movement and/or displacement.

Consequently, the spatial politics of location also underscore the ideologies of belonging

and exclusion—interconnecting diaspora studies and postmodern theories of identity and

subjectivity. In this analysis I have used (although with some reservations as explained

below) Chandra T. Mohanty’s arguments about subjectivity in her essay “Cartographies

of Struggle.” Mohanty discusses subjectivity as a collection of widely scattered premises

whose existence depend on discursive initiatives of the hegemonic system and on the strategic positionings and locations of the subject within that system (39). In our postmodern (and postcolonial) realities positions are dynamic. Following Mohanty we may say that postmodern, postcolonial conceptions of subjectivity resist the idea of stability and definitive spaces of belonging. Thus, by bringing both Rich and Mohanty into conversation I analyze the processes through which subjectivity is constructed in a diasporic individual under the impacts of space and position. My engagement will be attentive to the political realities of identity and subjectivity. By focusing on Gogol’s personal history I am also attentive to the possibilities of change within identities and subjectivities.

My analysis locates the (diasporic) subject on a three-dimensional architecture involving the coordinates of culture, geography, and the more personal dimension of psyche and desire. This three-dimensional approach to exploring subjectivity allows me a more sensitive and complex play of emotion and intellectual engagement than simply locating the subject along poststructural coordinates of language and discourse. I also consider subjectivity as a place of experience, response, and reaction—as a space we occupy. This is slightly different from Mohanty’s idea of subjectivity as a “depthless

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projection of discursive actions” (Kirby 185). Thus, although Mohanty discusses the

dynamism of postmodern subjectivity, there is no understanding of how subjects

constitute themselves radically and/or unpredictably against cultural imperatives. It

would also be interesting to test Mohanty’s argument about the instability of strict

boundaries with regards to individuals situated on the borders of cultures (individuals

such as Gogol). Presumably in a heterogeneous nation-space, ethnic identities determine

conformities and inclusions (or differences and exclusions) based on considerations of

race and ethnicity. One’s immediate physical/geographical coordinates of location—

whether urban, suburban, or, rural also impact one’s identity within a culture. Besides these larger indexes of belonging, diasporic identity-formation also depends on the strategies of social assimilation (in consonance with the American melting-pot ideology

which expects the immigrant to “adjust” to the mainstream culture) of diasporic

individuals within their smaller personal spaces. Thus, a complex matrix of spatial

locations shapes diasporic subjectivity. The cultural tensions and conflicts that Gogol’s

character experience informs his complex subjectivity.

As Mohanty argues, this sense of subjectivity contests the borders of any unipolar

hegemonic structure of identity. Gogol’s hybrid consciousness is signified through his

name. Homi K. Bhabha theorizes cultural hybridity due to the impacts of colonization.

For him the indeterminate, interstitial zone or “place of hybridity” is a state of “in-

between-ness” experienced by the colonized (Location 125). In diaspora studies, this

postcolonial concept further evokes the idea of cultural dislocation that diasporic

individuals suffer within the dominant culture. The resulting sense of alienation in the

diasporic individual leads to inner conflicts and uncertainty about belonging to any one

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space of cultural identity. Gogol’s initial conflict about the identity signified through his

name is analogous to the alienation characterizing hybrid individuals. For Bhabha,

hybridity is never a free-floating order of existence beyond the politics of identity. It is

the result of a dual affiliation (“both/and”) and an opening up of reified and homogeneous

categories. However, the unique diasporic consciousness that Gogol develops is a stage

slightly beyond this hybridity. This consciousness is synonymous with a development from individualism to communitarianism. It is a transition from American citizens’ comprehending themselves as unique individuals having rights and duties to a newer conception of the self. This self is not an isolated entity but is situated within an wider and diverse ethnic and cultural community to which they belong. This collective identity is diasporic and it is hybrid. The diasporic hybridity that I analyze in Gogol is precisely this.3 As an American, Gogol thus occupies a “third space” of negotiation within the

diaspora.

On a broader scale, my argument engages with the way U.S. ethnic studies

intersect with postcolonial studies. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt first indicate this

confluence. The duo theorize “borders” as a complex discursive site, neither assimilating

nor marking the alien Other. They explore “borders” as a space of “exile, mobility, and

survival strategies” for U.S. residents, with the consequent (re)emergence of “alternative

and multiple identities mixing old and new” (Singh & Schmidt 13). They also stress the

position of “borders” between diasporas and the host-nation to focus on the racial and ethnic boundaries marking diaspora space from those of the host-nation. This attention enables the opening of avenues for a transnational dialogue on concepts of citizenship, belonging, and postmodern socio-political identity. Gogol’s hybrid position of

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negotiation as a strategically located border space American helps illustrate how his

identity is relational to the dynamics of the spaces he seeks to belong—both Indian and

American. My analysis of Gogol’s hybrid position in the contexts of his relationships

within the (sub)urban spaces he occupies also attempts to comprehend the ways in which

the indices of socio-cultural belonging are forged within the diaspora and beyond,

ultimately engaging with the scholarship on subject-formation and subjectivity in the

field of diaspora studies.

Lahiri’s other notable collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, has

received copious scholarly attention. Many of the arguments on it have focused on its

representation of the processes of negotiation female Indian immigrants undertake in the

United States.4 The Namesake, however, is relatively new to significant scholarly interest.

A recent essay already focuses on Ashima, the primary female character. Ann Marie

Alfonso-Forero theorizes Ashima as a transnational individual in “Immigrant

Motherhood and Transnationality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction.” A corresponding

discussion on Gogol could have been worthwhile too. Interestingly, Pauls Toutonghi’s

essay on The Namesake examines Gogol as a product of Lahiri’s intertextual and

international appetite for literary allusions. Reading the parallels between The Namesake

and Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Toutonghi concludes that through Gogol Lahiri

creates a post-national culture that is “… a mix of influences, a post-national jumble, a

confusion of origins and outcomes” (80). His arresting and thorough reading of both

texts, however, make no references to the inner contests that Gogol’s hybridity leads to I

also missed a discussion of the way Lahiri poignantly melds Gogol’s reconciliation with

his dynamic identity within her narrative or the way Gogol’s identity is constructed by

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(and helps construct) the overarching spaces of familial and socio-cultural systems—

something that Lahiri’s Russian literary predecessor does not attempt. Furthermore, I

remain uncertain whether Toutonghi celebrates a postnational existence or ponders the scope of its realization in our contemporary times. Nevertheless, the ways in which

Gogol Ganguly reconciles himself to his plural belonging through his everyday experiences among friends, family, and through his name became a point of scrutiny for me.

Gogol is a de jure citizen of America. However, he is an American inhabiting a

border space who is continually influenced by cultural forces due to his dual heritage. He

does not have to adjust to American culture to the extent that his immigrant parents do (as

he is born into it), nor does he have to feel obliged to adopt a culture to feel “rooted.”

Logically and as a border American, Gogol can participate in mainstream American

society and culture to the extent that he chooses. However, it is his unusual name that

leads him to realize his unique hybrid consciousness. The culturally diverse heritage that

he develops (due to his Bengali heritage, his Massachusetts residence, his adult life in

New York) shapes his complex subjectivity. It includes him within the special

community of people who may not have physically dislocated from their place of origin

(are not immigrants) but may owe some kind of affiliation/s to places and/or people from

other lands or socio-cultural spaces. It is the reconciliation with his cultural hybridity that

eventually helps Gogol to comprehend his complex position within cultures. Thus, I want

to stress that Gogol’s identity (as a diasporic subject and as an American) is not only

affected through structural-ideological processes of (re)negotiation with the diaspora, but

also from movements and tensions within and outside the diaspora. This results in

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reconsidering the forces that influence the shaping of individual identity and/or subjectivity in diaspora space.

Due to Gogol’s special socio-cultural position, these reconsiderations may lead to

fluid and enmeshed discourses on “race,” “nation,” and “ethnicity” for comprehending

the forces shaping Gogol’s hybrid subjectivity.5 In this context, I want to reference David

Theo Goldberg’s comments: “[T]o succeed so long in effecting the materiality of

differential exclusions, racialized discourse has to be grounded in the relations of social

subjects to each other and in ways of seeing, of relating to, (other) subjects” (qtd. in

Ernest 113). By extension this means that the act of considering the specificity of any one

of these experiences (that Gogol has as a non-white, Bengali, American, Asian, etc.) as

the only form of identity or community inextricably contests the integrated nature of the

development of all three discursive sites.

Gogol’s immigrant Bengali parents, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguly, do not suffer

any confusion regarding cultural allegiance. They live their life of practicality and

cultural ease in a Massachusetts suburb. They find themselves “home” only during their

visits to Calcutta, becoming “Manu” (Ashima’s daknaam) and Mithu (Ashoke’s

daknaam) respectively.6 Thus, although Ashima and Ashoke may feel dislocated

(psychologically, politically, physically, and geographically) from home in Calcutta,

Gogol feels more comfortable than they do in the New England suburbia setting of the

novel. During occasions of visiting India, Gogol and his sister Sonia watch their parents

slipping comfortably from their practical American immigrant selves to their “bolder, less

complicated versions” (81). Interestingly, Gogol does not experience such a slippage at

any point during their vacations to India. He, “never thinks of India as desh. He simply

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thinks of it as Americans do, as India” (118).7 Unconsciously, then, Gogol is already

American. However, his dislocation and feelings of un-belonging within American

culture or in the Bengali culture of his parents’ is more psychological. It is a displacement

produced due to a realization of ethnic difference (and/or the consequent exclusion) from

his immediate sub-urban American community. It is also the result of the feelings of

unease and guilt due to his inability to uncritically identify with the Bengali culture of his

heritage.

When I refer to Gogol’s ethnic position as a significant trope shaping subjectivity,

I mean the immediate cultural and ethnic difference that his name and socio-cultural interactions attribute to him. Initially, it is his name (Russian, Indian, American, and unusual) that never lets him forget his double difference (his Otherness) from his

American milieu, leading him to experience a perpetual sense of exclusion from unproblematic belonging to America. Through Gogol Lahiri narrativizes the position of

the diasporic situated within the fault lines of an interstitial space. For Samir Dayal this

feeling is synonymous to, “[O]ne which is not home, another that will never truly allow

the diasporic to feel at home” (“Min(d)ing the Gap” 237). The plural anchorage of the

diasporic stimulates a juggling of identities that can be tossed, slided, or embraced.

Gogol’s self identity evolves as a result of his inability to belong anywhere and his

necessity to negotiate a new space within which he feels included.8 This realization takes

effect at the moment Gogol’s grappling self begins its journey toward a new space of

cultural ease, toward the end of the novel.

During the first part, the novel shows that the contested aspects of Gogol’s

identity converge in his name. Names essentialize, yet we cannot operate without them.

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Personal names signify individual personal identity. Proper names locate the space of the body and signify its location as a subject within discursive and ideological frameworks. It is the proper name that fixes gender (more often than not) and suggests nation and/or ethnicity. Gogol’s name (both his daaknaam and his good name) mark his distance from and difference within mainstream American culture. His name charts his way to self identity and helps explore some of the dynamics characterizing the development of subjectivity in diasporic literature. Lahiri devotes a major part of her narrative to exploring the fluidity of Gogol’s identity through the ambiguity in his name. Gogol’s name results from the non-arrival of a letter (supposedly containing his chosen name) from his grandmother in Calcutta. He is hastily christened ‘Gogol’ after his father’s favorite Russian writer—fulfilling the administrative regulations of the American hospital in which he is born (27-28). Thus, we have Gogol Ganguly: Bengali due to his parentage, American due to his place of birth, and Russian due to the association with writer, Nikolai Gogol.

The narrative progressively shows Gogol’s love-hate relationship with his name.

At the novel’s beginning, Lahiri details how Gogol detests his name that separates him from the American milieu he would like to be compatible with. “Being called” Gogol is one of the primary sites that constitute his subjectivity in language. By rejecting the interpellation “Gogol,” we may say that Gogol resists from the beginning the realization of his self within any culture. However, he falls unwittingly within the same circle of fixity of a space of belonging by socially unnaming himself and then going by “Nikhil.”

His unwillingness to go to kindergarten (56-7) or to be “Nikhil” (the new name his parents come up with when the principle of a school finds the name “Gogol” odd) is the

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initial indicator of the ambiguous identity he inhabits. The peculiarity of the name,

“Gogol” provokes him to find a strange kinship among names in a graveyard during a class project. The oddly named, unknown tombstones of immigrants poignantly signify

the fraternity eleven-year old Gogol forms with them. They represent people with hybrid affiliations, outsiders like Gogol oddly named (according to the standards of the culture they find themselves in), and therefore unfit for recognition within that culture. These names transcend spatio-temporal barriers to embody a similar predicament to Gogol’s.

Following his experience in the kindergarten, Gogol realizes that his unique name can set him apart from his peers (58-60).

By his fourteenth-birthday, Gogol starts to “hate questions pertaining to his name.” He hates that his “name is both absurd” and “doesn’t mean anything “in Indian””

(75-6). “At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear” (76). It becomes the site of his exclusion from American culture in which he seeks recognition. An initially disconcerted Gogol identifies his American location to be the only signifier of his identity. However, the sense of cultural alienation that he suffers due to his name first makes him lonely, then makes him chart a new mode of belonging, and then finally makes him reconcile to his hybrid and dynamic position within cultures. Ruth

Yu Hsiao mentions that “the loneliness of belonging nowhere is [a] leitmotif in the narrative [of diasporic literature]” (223). Gogol confronts this loneliness through his name. During his college year at Yale Gogol officially changes his name to Nikhil. Nikhil can be easily Americanized to “Nick” and gives Gogol a delusional cultural ease. He

ironically charts a new mode of dislocation during his college years, becoming Gogol at

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home for his parents and Nikhil for his friends outside. His old and new names unassumingly embody the plurality of his diasporic identity.

Gogol’s distinctly non/ethnic name tempts one to raise the question of genealogy with respect to the manner in which the “ethnic” individual emerges. To pose Foucault’s questions, if only along slightly modified terms, we may ask: does the act of naming an individual constitute the mode of emergence of the ethnic?9 Or, how does the ethnic name itself? What kind of identity is manifested/asserted through this name? The problem here is not only epistemological but also rooted in complications imbricated within ethnicity and identity. In an essay entitled, “I Yam What I Am: The Topos of

Un(naming) in Afro-American Literature,” Kimberly Benston emphasizes the distinct problem of naming and unnaming and the active interplay of naming with identity and ethnicity. Benston concludes that naming and unnaming constitutes “a staging of self in relation to a specific context of revolutionary affirmation” (qtd. in Radhakrishnan 69).

Gogol’s naming and subsequent unnaming is not related to “revolutionary affirmation”

(Benston’s observations were made with respect to African-American literature). Gogol’s naming affirms his ethnicity, while simultaneously indicating his difference from his

American friends and his immediate social milieu. Alternately, Gogol’s unnaming implies the reassertion of an alternate self, into a state of unchallenged authority and sense of comfort in his “new” name and identity. According to Benston, the act of unnaming is “a means of passing from one mode of representation to another,” of breaking the rhetoric and influence, of distinguishing the self from all else—including community and culture (Radhakrishnan 69). Gogol’s unnaming unobtrusively includes him within the circle of representation; the name itself becomes an agent through which

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this is enabled. What theoretically follows is a case of inverse displacement. The ethnic

individual gives him or herself a name by unnaming the former ethnic name. This new

name then represents the ethnic individual from within their own point of view while

being attentive to ascribing authority and empowering this new name. Thus, Gogol

unnames his different name and (re)represents himself as Nikhil—showing his agency

over his name, exercising the agency through the unnaming, and empowering himself as

Nikhil through acts of social assertions. This process is, however, fraught with conflicts

and complexities within Gogol.

Gogol’s transition to his new name triggers new complications and tensions.

During his initial days of being Nikhil, Gogol mourns for his loss when “he doesn’t feel

like Nikhil” (105). Yet he clings to Nikhil to be more accessible to the American society

to which he “feels” attached, “He didn’t want to go home on the weekends, to go with

them to pujos and Bengali parties, to remain unquestionably in their world” (126).10 This conscious disaffiliation with his cultural heritage involves a sense of distance from his ethnic roots. Gogol’s naming himself Nikhil, and then his reversal to Gogol, marks moments of dilemma that his character faces. Lahiri shows how Gogol mediates between the realities of his lived experiences—both as Gogol and as Nikhil—after reconciling with the realities of his heteroglossic and heterogeneous identity. Interestingly, Gogol’s performance of identity as signified through his name reaffirms essentialized notions of cultural identities. Gogol is still the interstitial, marginalized, hyphenated character in the

Asian American diaspora just as his alternate identity, Nikhil. His act of unnaming puts him into the same paradigm of determining one’s ethnic identity through their names, while unwittingly trapping him into the conundrum of “Can you really escape a fixed

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ethnic identity conferred through naming?” Postcolonial scholars may sometimes be

tempted to translate Gogol’s performative acts of naming, unnaming, and renaming to be resistant to “the regimes of multiculturalism” (Thapan 60). Although simply read this is only a way of understanding the psychological stages that Gogol’s character undergoes to eventually reconcile to the multiple axes of his identity.

I also want to refer to the notions of filiation and affiliation that constitute identity: both socio-cultural and political. Edward Said indicates the notion of “filiation” and “affiliation” in his work, The World, the Text, and the Critic. Said argues that

“filiations” arise due to ties an individual has or develops with localities and people from

the culture or community they identify with. According to Said, “affiliations” are

followed (or replaced) by “filiations.” The former develop due to links an individual has

with social groups and spaces (Said 8). Filiations are natural ties while affiliations are

naturalized. These ties are eventually read as the rite of passage from “nature to culture”

that complicates the links one has with nations and homeland (Said 20). In the

contemporary context of globalization, decolonization (and neocolonization), and

multiculturalism, these ties are amorphously linked. They confuse fixed borders and

sequences in the process of filiation and affiliation and the defined moments of change

from one to the other tie. Thus, one tie coalesces into the other either materially or sometimes even unconsciously. Therefore, in postcolonial discourses both “filiations” and “affiliations” are constructed, contested, and confusing. Gogol’s natural ties with

America (his filiation) and his naturalized ones with India (his affiliation) become

contested and confused as his parents wrestle to reverse it. Both ties are anxiety-ridden as

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he unsuccessfully attempts to chart a definite path of identification with any one tie in the

novel’s beginning.

In the beginning, and as a naturalized citizen of America (his filiation), Gogol recognizes the virtues of his socio-political rights while progressing with the process of name change. He feels that his unusual name prevents the recognition of the natural ties he has with American culture. He also believes that his new name can give him the filiaton he desires. The dichotomy that he has with his identity (signified through his name) and the way he feels like an outsider with it is elaborated in the dinner table conversation he has with his parents. He is trying to justify his name changing to them.

‘“No one takes me seriously,’” while simultaneously resisting the Bengali ethnic mode of having a pet name (100). This interplay of outsider/insider status within Gogol, making him ironically feel comfortable within his American identity (although he is not yet ready to acknowledge his uniqueness within this identity) and feel uncomfortable with his ethnic “pet name,” leads him to undergo a rite of passage. It is this journey that leads him to reach a reconciliatory position with the contested space he inhabits. This inside/outside existence of Gogol not only stresses the ambiguous borders marking the “inside” from the “outside,” it also points out the importance of studying subjectivity in individuals who occupy this unique position such as Gogol/Nikhil.

As Nikhil, Gogol attends a panel on Indian novels written in English while at college. The issues of “marginality” and the teleological question to immigrant children that have no response: “Where are you from?” that are discussed within the panel are of no special interest to him (118). Gogol ironically fails to put himself in the bracket to respond to the issues plaguing the discourse of identity. He feels like an outsider at such

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gatherings and thinks that these issues have no meaning for him. Coincidentally, if Gogol

feels like an outsider in the context of issues influencing Asian Americans, he wants to be

an insider when it comes to exercising his social rights as an American citizen. Lahiri

mentions Gogol’s justifications as he decides to go ahead with the renaming, “it was a

right belonging to every American citizen” (99). The exercise of his political and civil rights as an American citizen also underscore the complexity of the diasporic identity in

America. As Gogol’s case pinpoints, becoming American cannot only be achieved through immigration and naturalization. As Nikhil too, Gogol feels dislocated and grapples between two worlds to find stability in neither. It is only toward the novel’s end, replete with familial losses and bereavements, that Gogol’s character matures enough to realize that he belongs to both worlds.

Through a string of relationships and personal events Gogol learns that for the world outside he will always be Gogol Ganguly. His being American is linked with his ethnic heritage and, for the characters he interacts with, it becomes a point of difference and exclusion from them. Thus, for Maxine (his girlfriend) and her family he is simply

Gogol; for their neighbors, such as Pamela, he is an Indian. Even for Lydia (Maxine’s mother), Gogol’s being American is a matter of doubt (157). With or without his name, mainstream America catalogs individuals like Gogol as Asian Americans.11 Lydia and

Pamela’s doubt about Gogol’s being American led me to be critical to the constitutions of

their ideas of “Americanness.” At the same time, I became attentive to the indoctrinations

of Indianness that Gogol suffered from.12 In a subtle moment in the novel, Lahiri

questions the boundaries that define a community/nation. She also hints at the tensions

that characterize the familial spaces of individuals like Gogol. As a diasporic individual

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situated on cultural borders, Gogol is outside of the fixed boundaries that apparently

define both spaces—those of his Bengali home and his American one. The characters he interacts with, such as Lydia, Gerald, Pamela, or even his parents, set these borders of

belonging. Lydia and Pamela’s doubts about Gogol’s being American form the foundations of the ideology through which America is defined as a nation space composed of people who conform to particular characteristics of race, religion, and/or ethnicity. The consolidation of America along such terms makes it an essentially white

space while making doubtful the inclusion of nonwhites within its imagined nation-space.

This phenomenon leads one to try to define Whiteness.13

According to Whiteness studies scholars such as Ruth Frankenberg, whiteness is

“a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced” that are “intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination” (qtd. in Rudrappa 141).

Thus, while admitting some within its corpus, a white ideology rejects other ethnic individuals on arbitrary grounds of incompatibility and inassimilability. The consequences of the workings of this ideology affect individuals like Gogol whose being

American come under constant scrutiny. Apparently, “Whiteness” is the foundation on which American-ness is based. It is the underlying yet invisible principle that guides the ways in which Lydia or Pamela imagine America. Gogol’s non-whiteness palpably conditions his social interactions. His American citizenship, accent, and food habits eventually do little to admit him into Americanness. Ashima and Ashoke’s attempts to indoctrinate him into Bengali culture–through traditional cuisine, routine visits to

Calcutta, “arranged” marriage to Moushumi, Bengali get-togethers, are ineffective to

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make Gogol a Bengali. These tensions result in Gogol’s state of cultural displacement

and unbelonging.

The novel details some of the social strategies that immigrant parents adopt for

their children. Sometimes these strategies result in similar dilemmas and conflicts that

Gogol develops about his identity. Gogol’s ambivalent subjectivity also develops as a

result of Ashima’s and Ashoke’s attempts to protect their children from “cultural

annihilation” by preserving their particular ethnic heritage through the upbringing of their

children in America. In a predominantly white Christian New England college town, with

neighbors in the “Johnsons, Mertons, Aspris, or the Hills,” Ashima cooks and serves

Indian dinners to their Bengali friends “so that for the rest of his life Gogol’s childhood

memories of Saturday evenings,” consist of thirty people packed in their house eating and

conversing in Bengali (51, 62-3). She teaches Gogol how to recite Tagore’s children’s

poems besides tutoring him in the names of the major Hindu deities “still, they do what

they can” (54, 65).14 The language lessons in Bengali or the occasional dose of the Apu

Trilogy that Ashima and Ashoke try to teach Gogol fail as he loathes this cultural

enforcement (65-6).15 Finding the Bengali script odd and the lesson pages of the language

book similar to toilet paper, Gogol “hates” the indoctrination of Bengali culture his

parents impose upon him (66). For one, he prefers American food and culture. He

requests Ashima to cook “American dinner once a week as a treat,” while grocery shopping trips have tuna, mayonnaise, or bologna in his cart (65, 72).16 These conscious

choices depict a constant zone of separation and discomfiture, versus identification and

comfort. Gogol wants to identify with mainstream American culture with which he feels

comfortable. He separates it from the culture his parents want him to identify with. His

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relationships with women also focus on the dilemmas he faces regarding the space(s) of belonging. His relationship with Ruth sets him thinking on how she just wouldn’t fit in

Ashima’s household, where they still eat his “mother’s food” and where he’s “still

Gogol” (115).

As geopolitical locations and wider social interactions also shape individual subjectivity it would be myopic to attempt to analyze Gogol’s subjectivity through the lens of his personal history only. Gogol chooses New York over his parents’ choice of

Massachusetts as he admittedly did not want to “remain unquestionably in their world”

(126). This conscious distancing from the conflicts and pressures of home may have paved the way for his later realization (without familial influences) that he occupies a contested cultural position and thus a unique subjectivity. In New York Gogol experiences everything (the museums, the vibrant and diverse communities of people, and the life around) his parents overlooked during his previous visits as a child. Shortly he gathers a diverse group of friends around him, chief among them being Maxine.

Maxine is an upper-class Manhattan resident; she confides to Gogol that she’s comfortable living with her parents instead of renting her apartment. Gogol quickly realizes the impossibility of the living arrangement in his case (132). He and his parents belong to different worlds and for him home is not synonymous with the address he grew up in—his parents’ house at Pemberton Road. Maxine and her family become a part of

Gogol’s life and activities at New York: “From the very beginning he feels effortlessly incorporated into their lives” (136). Maxine’s confidence about who she is and where she comes from distinguishes her in Gogol’s eyes from the conflicts he perennially suffers from. These conflicts make him unconfident, unstable, and uneasy. Gogol perceives this

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difference in Maxine and realizes that “she has the gift of accepting her life” with her parents, with being herself (138). Diligently, Gogol weighs the differences between

Maxine’s parents and his to admit that for him “it doesn’t matter what they (his parents) want” any more—the line has been drawn and Gogol hammers the first assertion of his identity (139). He knows what he does and does not want. He wants to be independent of his parents’ pressures and their expectations of him. This conscious disaffiliation from them results in a gnawing sense of betrayal in Gogol (141). His attempt to incorporate

Maxine into his family fails quite predictably. This is due not only to the tone of formality, awkwardness, and discomfiture around Maxine that characterize the older

Gangulis, but more prominently in their exclusion of Maxine when Ashoke passes.

Ashoke’s demise draws Gogol back into the circle he had willingly abandoned.

The mourner’s meals in which they (Ashima, Gogol, and Sonia) partake as part of the

Bengali ritual draws Gogol back into the web of his heritage and culture (180-1). In such a context Maxine fails to live up to Gogol’s expectations; her unease at the typical

Bengali gatherings, her inability to fathom the reasons for Gogol’s “necessity” to stay with his mother during this time pushes her away from the relationship. Her insulation from Gogol’s moment of grief, “…aware that his father’s death does not affect Maxine in the least” and Gogol’s excluding her from Ashoke’s rites in the Ganges breaks their relationship (182, 188). With this estrangement Gogol realizes that he cannot belong to

Maxine’s world in the same way that she cannot belong in his.

Gogol ponders the dilemmas of the spaces constituting his zone of comfortable belonging, while the novelist resorts to a subtle flashback. In a poignant moment metaphorically connoting Gogol’s grappling with cultural spaces for forging an identity,

55

Lahiri mentions child Gogol’s walk by the sea shore with his father to a place “where

there was nowhere left to go” (187). Gogol’s unconscious realization that he has

exhausted the options of skipping from one mode of belonging to another with literally

“nowhere left to go” triggers a soul-searching moment. The moment escalates into reconciliation following another serious brush with life.17 This time it is an arranged

marriage with Moushumi Mazoomdar, the daughter of a family friend. During their

courtship Gogol marvels at the uncanny likeness of their lives, with the same family rituals of visiting Calcutta frequently, the similar mistaken assumptions that they are

“Greek, Egyptian, Mexican” (212). Moushumi, however, is unlike Gogol in thinking

about her identity. She finds comfortable refuge in French literature and culture. For her,

this refuge symbolizes a freedom from the guilt, misgivings, and expectations that her

immediate cultures, American and Indian, represent (214). Although Moushumi willingly

discards both cultures’ expectations and influences, she takes offense when her American

fiancé Graham criticizes Bengali culture (217). Although Lahiri does not focus the

narrative on Moushumi, we can sense a similar conflict regarding cultural alliances and space(s) of belonging in her as well. Gogol marries Moushumi but a year later Moushumi starts an affair with a German professor and old acquaintance of hers, Dimitri Desjardins.

Gogol’s marriage breaks up, disregarding the tradition of Bengali couples to stay married

(276).

The novel ends with a mature Gogol coming home to Pemberton Road for the last time before Ashima sells the house. It is in the room where he grew up that Gogol realizes that somehow the name “Gogol” has stuck to him. He reconciles himself to the fact that his mismatched and abandoned name had helped him to reinvent himself and

56

reconcile himself to his multiple spaces of belonging. This dynamic acceptance of the

ambiguous plurality of his identity, irrespective of name, is signified in the final episode

of the novel. Here Gogol (re)discovers the collection of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories that

his father gifted him as a teenager. He remembers his name that was now hidden, “yet it

was the first thing his father had given him” (289). “For Gogol Ganguli,” the inscription

read, “The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name” (288).

When he realizes that the givers and keepers of his name (his parents) are no longer going

to be there in his life, the inevitability of erasure of “Gogol” (the identity) creates a sense

of grief and unease in him. This sense of loss results in a reconciliation with the new and plural nature of his subjectivity.

Gogol’s new self metaphorically resembles a polygenesis: the quality of experiencing “multiple births” that frustrates, as Dayal suggests, the complacent analysis of his location as an Asian-American, or an American, for that matter (“Min(d)ing the

Gap” 246). The symbol also implies the continual and traumatic destruction of prior selves and is a powerful emblem for the diasporic individual. The expressed desire for assimilation (such as Gogol tries with his name Nikhil) is, according to Dayal, “not simply a disadvantaged group’s unacknowledged insularity and desire for exnomination” but an attempt to inscribe their own histories into the ongoing narrative of the host nation without being reduced to ciphers (“Min(d)ing the Gap” 258). Gogol’s name initially symbolized the threat of reducing him to one. His assimilationist tendency as Nikhil may be read as an act of political and critical participation of the diasporic individual to resist this erasure. His recognition of the loss and erasure of Gogol, with Nikhil representing the ambiguous site of difference and assimilation, paradoxically synthesizes his identity.

57

This ultimately enables his realignment as a diasporic individual positioned on the borders of cultures. It is, ironically, the loss of his father and his divorce from Moushumi that make him realize the plurality of his identity. It is as Gogol that he derives a part of this identity (287). The knowledge and acceptance of his fluid, partial, and plural identity both as Nikhil and as Gogol, gives him a paradoxical feeling of stability. The reinvention of the identity that Gogol experiences resembles a rebirth and a perennial self refashioning—the concept of polygenesis that I referred to above. Thus, Gogol reconciles to a fluid subjectivity that is influenced by the spaces of his experience and belonging.

This fluidity reflects the contours of postmodern belonging but, in Gogol’s case, it is also inextricably linked to the redefinitions of the word “American.” According to political scientist Ronald Takaki, “[O]ur diversity is at the core of what it means for us to be Americans” (qtd. in D’Souza 21). It is Gogol’s plural anchorage and his reconciliation to it that informs this redefinition. It is also not surprising if Lahiri has touched a chord in children of first generation immigrants in America. Torn between two or more worlds (of the home and the home country), they often suffer from the same predicaments of identity and belonging that Gogol suffers from. First-generation American children grow up within a cultural space that gradually distances them from their ethnic roots through the promises of assimilation. They find assimilation within mainstream American society difficult (if at all possible), but exploring it is quite beyond the scope of this essay. This feeling inevitably involves a sense of loss. Ralph Ellison commented that this alienation from the indigenous culture can lead to new cultural formations (Kitson 88). Gogol’s final journey toward a synthetic and ambiguous identity echoes the promise of the “new cultural formation” that Ellison envisions.

58

In conclusion I would like to point out that in the renaming of Gogol as Nikhil

Lahiri touches on the reconciliation with his plural identity that he achieves at the novel’s

end. Translated into English Nikhil means “sky”: “he who is entire, encompassing all”

(56). The name metaphorically informs the all-encompassing (and polyvalent) nature of

diasporic identity. This identity is characterized by a double consciousness. This doubleness is derived, as Dayal describes, from seeking equilibrium from belonging to two or more cultures at the same time (“Diaspora and Double Consciousness” 47). It results from the plural locations situating the diasporic individual in space. It is the selective impacts of the contours of the spatial politics of belonging that eventually shape

Gogol’s unique subjectivity. The unique hybridity of his identity that initially threw him

into a chaotic mess of belonging and difference paradoxically becomes a trope for

stabilizing him at the novel’s end. His dilemmas encompass the personal to indicate that the politics of belonging in the diaspora involves a similar dilemma that has to be negotiated on the theoretical level as well. The stabler identity he achieves toward the novel’s end may be appropriated with reference to a widening of the universe and with being at ease as Nikhil and as Gogol. This is expressed by Saul Bellow’s dog in the novel

The Dean’s December: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” (qtd. in

Imaginary Homelands 21).

In this essay I have stressed how the discursive initiative of the hegemonic site differentially constructs subjectivity. My essay illustrates that diasporic identity is formed due to the variegated influences of the contours of one’s location—cultural, geographical, political, and psychological. The spatial contexts and their resultant politics inform this identity. A reconciliation with or a refusal of dual (or multiple) cultural affiliations

59

characterize the sense of belonging and dislocation in the diaspora. I have also shown that

this dynamic identity defies the logics of the fixity of the location of belonging and results in a hybrid consciousness involving a perennial becoming of “both/and.” Such a strategic position and consciousness not only opens us to the possibilities of thinking beyond the spaces of the boundaries of belonging but also forces us to reconsider the definitions of what it means to be American.

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ENDNOTES

1 Qtd. in Rushdie 21.

2 I am using the term “hegemony” as theorized by Marxist philosopher Antonio

Gramsci—to refer to an organizing principle of values, beliefs, and moralities of ruling

class elites to maintain social status quo. I am only slightly broadening the implications

of the term in this essay to refer to a dominant culture. Hegemony in this context refers to

the principles of cultural values, morals, and beliefs of the dominant and mainstream

American culture. Within mainstream and dominant American culture, diaspora culture is

a dynamic subculture. Thus, American culture is a hegemonic culture with regard to diaspora subculture. See Gramsci 1971.

3 Samir Dayal too, has theorized the hybrid and double consciousness in his essay,

“Diaspora and Double Consciousness.”

4 Consider for example the especially poignant story of “Mrs Sen’s,” included in the collection. Her inability to learn how to drive successfully in America not only

metaphorically signifies her lack of physical mobility but also her inability to

successfully navigate across cultural boundaries (See Forero 861, note. 5).

5 For postcolonial theorist Timothy Brennan, nation is, “both historically determined and

general. As a term, it refers both to the modern nation-state and to something more

ancient and nebulous – the ‘natio’—a local community, domicile, family, condition of

belonging” (qtd. in Bhabha 45). Ann Phoenix integrates the contentions of primary race

scholars to classify race as “socially constructed, involv[ing]es power relations, and

becom[ing]es socially significant through social, economic, cultural, and psychological

61

processes.” (103). Stuart Hall defines ethnicity as the term that, “acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, and situated, and all knowledge is contextual” (Shukla 8).

6 The daknaam or the pet name is a specialty the Bengali nomenclature grants. In Indian

(Bengali) custom it sets the individual’s private (and personal) life apart from her

professional realm. Lahiri makes a couple of references to this phenomenon within her

narrative, commenting that: “They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all

people” (26).

7 “Desh” is the generic Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, and Oriya word for country, most

immigrant Indians refer to India as desh. (118).

8 In this context, Pico Iyer’s contention in, “The Soul of an Intercontinental Wanderer” is particularly relevant. Iyer observes that the first-generation citizen born of immigrant parents is constantly on the move, crisscrossing continents on a jet, a “resident alien of

the world, permanent resident of nowhere” (13).

9 Foucault had deliberated at length on representation, interpretation, memory, and counter-memory in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. There he had talked on the

question of naming and representation; I am only slightly modifying his questions to

appropriate them to the context of my essay.

10 ‘Pujo’ in Bengali means worship. In this context it probably refers to a religious

occasion celebrated at friends’.

11 Asian Americans have even been excluded from the term “minority” in the

multicultural imagination of America. People speak of American to mean “white,” and

62

minority usually means “black.” Semantically then, Asian Americans are excluded as they are neither black nor white (Wu 20). In fact it was in 1999 when the College Board sponsored a study of educational achievement that specifically excluded Asian

Americans from the definition of “minority.”

12 Although Gogol is politically a citizen of America—holding an American passport, he

also has an Indian/South Asian heritage. I have used double quotation marks around the

word “American” in this case, to point out the multi-located implication/s of the term.

This multidimensional meaning explodes the stereotypical association of the term with

Caucasian, white, etc. In fact, recent statistics show that twenty percent of the children

growing up in contemporary America are foreign-born or have a parent that was born

abroad. The latest Census also reports that nearly half the children under the age of five

are Hispanic, Asian, or black (The New York Times May 17, 2007). I also want to clarify

that Gogol is not Asian American (although for demographic cataloguing, he is one). He

is simply an American—a richly embracing term that is difficult to contain within

conventional monolithic ascriptions of race, community, and/or religion.

13 I have capitalized the “W” in Whiteness to denote it as a homogeneous index for ethnic

and racial category based on skin color. Thus, within my discussion I am not looking into

its subcategories. I also understand that within any heterogeneous and diverse communal

space/s some sections of the population are “whiter” than others due to their economic,

social, and/or political status quo.

14 Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengal and India’s poet laureate, epitomizes

Bengali culture through his poems, songs, novels, essays, etc; he was awarded the Nobel

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Prize in Literature in 1913. He later refused the Knighthood in 1915 in objection to

British policies in India. For more on Tagore see .

15 The Apu Trilogy represents Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s classic rendition of

Bengali writer Bibhutibhushon Bandopadhyay’s novel on Apu. The trilogy consists of

The Song of the Little Road (1955, Panther Panchali), The Unvanquished (1956,

Aparajito), and The World of Apu (1959, Apu Sansar). For more on Ray see, Andrew

Robinson’s Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. The Biography of a Master Film-Maker.

I.B.Tauris, 2004.

16 Italics are mine. I have italicized “once” to indicate the resilience with which Gogol

negotiates his preferences with his mother’s—the matriarch of the house.

17 Gogol’s brief affair with the married Bridget does not significantly lead him to

question the meaning and location of his identity—as much as his relationships with

Maxine and Moushumi do. So I have decided not to analyze this episode in my essay. His

affair ironically ties in with Moushumi’s extra-marital relationship about which he was

unaware. This may result in equating Gogol’s predicament with that of Bridget’s

unnamed and ignorant husband.

64 Living in Umreekah: Dancing to Transnationalism with Queen of Dreams1

“If you know from whence you came, there’s no limit to where you can go” –James Baldwin2

In this chapter I discuss Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel Queen of Dreams.

Spanning a little over thirty years and set in the San Francisco Bay area, the novel deals

with the conflicts and identity crises that the female protagonist Rakhi faces. I am

attentive to her character development as a first generation American of Indian-Bengali

origin. I analyze Rakhi’s transition from a conflicted individual to a more mature self

through her engagement with the reconfigured cultural spaces of her coffee shop and her

reentry into the music arena of her estranged husband Sonny. I argue that Rakhi’s

engagement with these socio-cultural spaces make her part of a transnational community

developing her as a cultural citizen. Her cultural citizenship represents the emergence of a

new type of cosmopolitan subject. My essay illustrates that such a reading enmeshes

postcolonial diasporic discourses of identity, belonging, and nationalism. The novel

demonstrates that the wider socio-cultural identity developed through Rakhi’s interaction

with a diverse set of people and cultures, her quotidian experiences with food, music, and dance, helps her gain a firmer sense of self. Her maturity also helps her to re-bond with

her father and husband. While claiming Rakhi’s transnational identity, I also analyze the

complex role of a transnational community in the context of the diaspora, the nation-

state, and how it engages with the processes of diasporic subject-formation.

My essay opens up a conversation with Linda Basch et al.’s seminal work on

transnationalism in Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial

Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. The authors argue that transnational identity can only develop among immigrants who sustain their homeland ties

65 simultaneously with the ties they develop with their host countries (Basch, et al. 7). For

Aihwa Ong too, transnational identities are the prominent modes of identification

characteristic of a nomadic subjectivity in immigrants and immigrant network groups

under conditions of flexible capital accumulation. Ong talks about the realignment of

political, social, ethnic, and cultural identities due to international migration under

conditions of late capitalism (16-17). Taking their cues, I am going to argue that such an

identity can be transgenerational and not limited only to direct immigrants and/or

immigrant networking groups spanning nation-states. My essay shows that transnational identities can be developed, sustained, and perpetuated in people who may not be direct

immigrants (although they may of immigrant origin). I borrow Lisa Lowe’s argument in

her famous “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American

Differences,” where she points out that the definition and the transmission of culture is a more complicated process than we would like to assume. Lowe mentions that “[C]ulture may be a much ‘messier’ process than unmediated vertical transmission from one generation to another, including practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented” (27). In congruence with this observation, I want to analyze the process through which Rakhi’s develops a plural sense of subjectivity. I suggest that although travel and displacement rework notions of citizenship and belonging, postmodern cultural logic of belonging in residents (or people who may not be

geopolitical migrants) under conditions of late capitalism is inflected and reconfigured by

the flow of culture and media.

This redefinition results in a dynamic notion of (diasporic) subject making

underscoring the significance of localized spaces and daily experiences. In analyzing

66 Rakhi’s developing subjectivity in the context of the reconfigured spaces of the coffee shop and the disco, I illustrate how her sense of belonging and rootedness are (re)routed

(without involving any physical traveling) within a multicultural scenario. I agree with

Inderpal Grewal that instead of a focus on mobility and immobility of people as the “key to identity formation at the end of the twentieth century,” postcolonial discourses on the diaspora should be attentive to transnational connectivities or communities (36). These communities are now one of the major means through which subjects and identities are

(re)configured. They enable communication and interaction across borders and boundaries (re)producing subjects, places, and identities. The community at the coffee shop or at the disco, described in Divakaruni’s novel is such a transnational community.

Rakhi’s interaction and participation within this community helps embody her as a cultural citizen evading the frontiers of the fixity of belonging. This cultural citizen is also a kind of cosmopolitan, whom Grewal calls “postcolonial cosmopolitan” (38). She observes that this cosmopolitan figure is diasporic, stable in straddling across heterogeneous ideological spaces and practices, and has a hybrid consciousness (58-60).

In studying Rakhi’s developing subjectivity using the trope of the coffee shop and the disco my essay illustrates the formation of a new cosmopolitan subject with a wider affiliation to identity. Her realigned subjectivity as a postcolonial cosmopolitan does not result from her being an immigrant (she is an American); however, it does indicate the possibilities of viewing transnationalism in diasporic individuals such as Rakhi as an actively enacted process.

Specifically, my focus on transnational community formation (that helps in

Rakhi’s growth as a cultural citizen) within the diaspora space is not to suggest that it is

67 the only means by which diasporic Indians form relations and identities across geographical space. I am also not suggesting that transnational social network sites are the only sites of subject-formation in the diaspora. In fact, I am drawing attention to one critical arena in which diasporic identifications are negotiated, affirmed, reproduced, and reassessed. I argue that cultural citizenship is the process through which diasporic individuals may assert simultaneous belonging to two or more distinctly different socio- political and cultural systems. This plural sense of belonging not only characterizes aspects of immigrant subjectivity but may assume significance in (re)envisioning the identities of first generation citizen subjects. In the context of the novel, Rakhi’s participation in the transnational network/community in the coffee shop and the disco entails both her identity as an American of Indian origin and her emplacement in a specific geopolitical and global context.

At the same time I want to assert that production of diasporic Indianness is not about the production of sameness and homogeneity. It is not the production of unalloyed cultural purity or what Paul Gilroy has termed the notion of “ethnic absolutism.” I want to stress that diaspora identity and individual subjectivity within it do not encourage notions of cultural nationalism or of fixed identity. It does not locate and/or impose any particular tradition or identity within the confines of one specific territorial boundary.

Diaspora identity deploys an intercultural perspective shaping identity. In fact, it is characterized by localized difference combined with a shared desire to form a community beyond the socio-cultural and geopolitical confines of the nation-state. This transnational space and community network does not generate strict definitions of belonging in the diaspora. Instead, it strives to affirm and recognize national/cultural difference, even as it

68 reinforces the diaspora’s commitment to being part of a global community. Thus, I analyze the ways through which the transnational community at the disco or the transformed Chai House enables diasporic individuals (like Rakhi) to sustain and reproduce transnational ties among dispersed communities. I suggest that these communities help generate and reaffirm diasporic collective and multiple cultural identities within the nation-space of residence, de-homogenize cultural differences, and strengthen alliances with another geopolitical entity—the originary homeland space, without involving travel and displacement.

Thus, my chapter is attentive to the formation of transnational communities among first generation citizen-subjects through the enactment and performance of, and the participation, in culture. The most common avenues of this transmission may occur through forms of media, music, food, and interaction with people. By implication this means that I want to explore transnationalism as a connective and transmitted process in cultural circuits which gets (re)produced and (re)modified through diverse cultural spaces and performances. That is to say, that I am interested in exploring transnational cultural spaces as connectivities and as the means through which subjectivities and identities are created or reinvented. Through this focus I am trying to also disaggregate the various levels of connections—both spatially and temporally—making up the contemporary, mobile, diasporic, and cosmopolitan subject. This separation becomes especially significant if we want to understand how and why some transnational connectivities influence identities more strongly than others. This can then help us to rethink the relationships that migrants have towards each other, the surrogate state, their homeland, and to diaspora individuals. Thus, one’s participation within cultural spaces

69 can enable seamless border crossings (without any physical movement) and/or the ability to transcend borders altogether. So, I want to show Rakhi’s subjectivity as a developing cosmopolitanism that is dependant on particular connectivities available at a given time and place and her willingness and ability to transmit and participate in these discursive networks affecting identity. Moreover, the continuity of a transnational tie emerges when

Rakhi’s Chai House become the site for a vibrant multicultural assembly in the transformed Kurma House International. The community of people, music, and cuisine bring together cultural diversity and ideas resulting in the formation of a diverse network.

The commonality that binds this group of people is their knack for music and culture.

Their ages vary from the younger first generation American to the older generation of immigrants in America. While the latter hold on to a nostalgic and often utopic image of their land of origin, the former identify with multiple cultures and practices—each group becoming transnational by their specific and complex consciousnesses of belonging, with or without involving direct geographical displacement.

Although diaspora scholars on South Asia have commented on Divakaruni’s repertoire of works (short stories and novels), Queen of Dreams has not attracted specific attention yet. Most scholars have studied the processes through which Divakaruni has portrayed the immigrant experience.3 Scholars have been critical about how Divakaruni

has sometimes blended realistic terms of immigration with generous helpings of

mythology and fantasy (Husne Jahan’s essay in the context of The Mistress of Spices).

Some have critiqued how she has unrealistically empowered her immigrant women characters from India with entrepreneurial ventures irrespective of US immigration laws and their legal-juridical implications (e.g. Vine of Desire). Still others have reviewed how

70 she has reinforced Indian cultural and patriarchal stereotypes in her work (e.g. Arranged

Marriage, Sister of my Heart). However, Divakaruni’s recent repertoires of works seem to respond to her critics and reviewers. As in Queen of Dreams, she has been attentive to show a cosmopolitan interdependence that can truly enrich South Asian literature by dissolving strict boundaries of Indianness. Detaching herself from her earlier trend to market an ‘exotic’ and ‘mythic’ India for her Western readership, Divakaruni has explored the notions of how America appropriates its immigrants into a hegemonic homogeneity. By focusing on Queen of Dreams, I am attentive to how she advocates the aesthetic dissolution of boundaries through cultural networks, which complicate postcolonial discourses of travel and mobility.

In the field of literary criticism on South Asian literature of the diaspora, my essay opens up the possibilities of a conversation correlating transnationalism and diaspora literature with cultural geography. In debates around globalization, transnationalism and communication, diaspora as a concept has been re-appropriated.

This has resulted in studies that pointed out the heterogeneity, diversity, transformation, and difference in the concept of the diaspora (Hall, Clifford). However, cultural studies’ intervention on specific questions of how spatiality or its lack complicate concepts of cosmopolitanism, the need to be attentive to local cultural spaces and networks, and how they selectively influence identity need more investigation. I am engaged in a spatial approach focusing on a local cultural space. My analysis shows that these spaces function as one of the ways enabling transnational diasporic identity formation. My essay invites more studies on social-formations and practices beyond discourses that are nation-centric.

I believe that these studies can be relevant to an understanding of the significance of

71 transnational cultures and their formations, and at the same time, avoid celebrating postnational or denationalized worlds.4 I am analyzing integrated identity-development among diasporic individuals through inflecting the energies of a “cultural nationalism” toward a geopolitical and an evolving wider sense of identity. I am attentive to local spaces and communities that help in this evolving identity. The writers of Between

Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State have earlier examined women and their evolving identities in diverse locales ranging from places such as Beirut to Quebec. For the first time, this interdisciplinary work examines how nationalism, homeland, country, region, or locality get (re)defined through the lens of gender. The contributors critique notions of multicultural nationalism and global feminism in various essays dealing with socio-cultural practices, literature, or politics.

Following their line of inquiry, my essay adds to this ongoing scholarship to underscore how minor cultural circuits (such as coffee shops and discos) too can enable rethinking the notions of identity, nation, and belonging while adding to the discourses on the diaspora.

The volume of migration in recent years has compelled social scientists to be attentive to the number of migrant people whose lives are stretched across national borders. Literature has also been quick to explore the identities that develop in these groups of people. For Eugenia Georges, the word “transnational” is, however, often loosely used without specificity. The inability to conceptualize transnationalism in concrete terms lays bare the complexity of the identities that develop due to a bricolage of cultures and ideas that influence and reconfigure the modern nation-state due to migration. It is best to think of it as an ongoing process of linkage and connection

72 maintained between the country of settlement and the lands of migration. For Arjun

Appadurai the term “transnational” has been used to signal the fluidity with which ideas, objects, capital, and people move across borders and boundaries. While examining the production of a “public culture” within a postcolonial setting, Appadurai notes that despite a “global cultural economy” the world is still made of “disjuncture and difference” (Appadurai 30). He further talks about reconceptualizing “landscapes of group identity” and introduces the concept of “-scapes” as in ideoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, ethnoscapes, and technoscapes (35-6). For Linda Basch however, transnationalism calls attention to the connections between people as well as the movement of ideas and objects within a global circuit (Basch, et al. 27). She characterizes transmigrants as people who “take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities, embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states” (7). Aihwa Ong defines transnationalism to refer to “the cultural specificities of global processes, tracing the multiplicity of the uses and conceptions of “culture”” (4). In the context of my essay, I am using the term

“transnationalism” to refer explicitly to the relationship developed and maintained through socio-cultural performance and networks/connectivities within certain local socio-cultural spaces that may involve first generation migrants and/or their first generation citizen-subject/offspring.

Furthermore, the authors of Nations Unbound define transnationalism as the process through which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations linking together their dual or multiple experiential spaces—those of origin with those of settlements (Basch, et al. 7).5 In the context of my essay, however, I want to agree with

73 Lisa Lowe’s view of a dynamic, contested, and fluid culture, where “the boundaries and

definitions of Asian American culture are continually shifting and being contested from

pressures from both inside and outside the Asian origin community” (Lowe 28). Thus,

people who are first generation citizen subjects also develop a transnational

consciousness through interaction with diverse cultures and societies. Inderpal Grewal

and Caren Kaplan also theorize the various uses of the term “transnational” in their essay

“Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” While noting the

multiple meanings and usages of the term transnational they also point to the

synonymous usage of “diasporic” and “transnational” (665). According to them

“diasporic groups can be best understood through the politics of cultural identity or

cultural citizenship” (665).

Following their argument, I would also like to reference my previous chapter on

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. There I characterized the hybrid consciousness the

central character Gogol, develops at the end of the novel. I argued that Gogol’s diasporic

and hybrid subjectivity developed as a result of his spatial location—his socio-cultural,

ethnic, and geopolitical position. I concluded that Gogol ultimately reconciled his plural

self at the end of the novel. In this earlier chapter, I analogized diasporic consciousness to

polygenesis or that involving multiple births. As diasporic subjects, both Gogol and

Rakhi develop a hybrid and plural consciousness, but the processes through which they

develop their complex subjectivities are different. If Gogol’s initial confusions regarding

his identity arise from his socio-cultural interactions (including the cultural enforcements

of his parents and his experiences with his American friends), Rakhi’s are the result of

her inaccessibility to her ethnic/cultural legacy from her family. While Gogol is not

74 reconciled to his multiple socio-cultural affiliations and fails to find stability in the

knowledge of the polyvalence of his existence until the novel’s end, Rakhi gains stability

in her identity through her access and interaction within a diverse socio-cultural space. If

on the one hand, Rakhi’s initial conflicts result from her fragmented sense of personal

history and her inaccessibility to her twin cultural heritages, her final stability is charted by her celebratory knowledge and acceptance of her plural identity. On the other hand,

Gogol’s conflicts stem from his confusion regarding the multiple axes of his belonging.

Eventually Gogol becomes reconciled to his hybrid self after trying and failing to fit in with fixed notions of belonging in fixed spaces (e.g., Nikhil/Nick for his American friends and Gogol for the Indian circle). Through culture, cuisine, and community Rakhi glories in the multiplicity of her own identity that lends her a sense of synthesis and stability amidst the socio-spatial traffic of the coffee shop and the disco. For Gogol, however, family, friends, and social acquaintances somehow create a sense of exclusion in him, until he realizes his strategic positioning as an American. Unlike Gogol’s sense of reconciliation to being a border American, Rakhi develops a more syncretic and complex sense of self and belonging that is not formed due to denial and access, exclusion, and trauma. It is constructed through cultural performances and amidst multicultural diversity.

In his seminal Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy has described the notion of diasporic belonging as a kind of double consciousness. (It was W.E.B. Du Bois who characterized it as such.) It is a sense of being part of a hegemonic/national culture as well as being part of a geographically, dispersed ethnic-cultural group sharing a common history and homeland (real or imagined). In his work, Gilroy critiques ethnocentric cultural studies in

75 Britain that deploy the black/white binary. He is concerned with recuperating various traditions and histories left outside the consideration of traditional narratives of race and culture. He defines the black Atlantic through a “desire to transcend both the structures of the nation-state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (66). However, he does not address the Asian diaspora (or what may be called the “Brown Pacific”), as he takes the Atlantic as a single, homogeneous unit of analysis (Gilroy talks about the

African diaspora in Britain). Thus, Gilroy’s approach calls for a more inclusive, more specific, more transnational, and intercultural perspective, with implications of gender identity that can further de-homogenize the idea of the black Atlantic (this lacuna is somewhat clarified in his recent Postcolonial Melancholia). Although we may read

Gilroy’s theories in consonance with the fictional world of the Queen of Dreams,

Divakaruni’s novel further ramifies the notions of belonging in the diaspora. The celebratory, fluid, and syncretic sense of “Indianness” that Rakhi develops at the end of the novel while dancing to Sonny’s remix is predicated on the idea that this Indianness is different from the essential mythologized entity she initially identified with. Her ideas are now formed due to the impacts of a transnational community and cultural activity. Such a community signals a post-diasporic position, one that takes into account the fluid and dialectical interplay between the nation and the multiple diasporas within the nation. This community is simultaneously located outside the family scene within which current articulations of nation and diaspora may occur.

The first part of the novel shows Rakhi unsure of her identity and estranged from her musician husband and her immigrant parents. Rakhi’s alienation is mostly due to her inaccessibility to her cultural heritage which informs her present identity as a diasporic

76 individual in North America. The narrative progresses to show how Rakhi rediscovers

herself, her parents’ love and care for her, and her own rekindled love for Sonny

following the death of her mother in a mysterious car crash. As the cultural spaces around

Rakhi reconfigure and become more diverse following her mother’s death, Rakhi realizes

her dual cultural heritage. She identifies with the multicultural camaraderie at the Chai

House and at Sonny’s music scene to develop a wider sense of belonging as a cultural

citizen.

In the context of the diaspora, the concept of cultural citizenship embraces the

politics of belonging between the spaces of settlements and residence, between other

diasporic communities, to help understand the formation and development of

transnational communities. Lok Siu’s article “Diasporic Cultural Citizenship:

Chineseness and Belonging in Central America and Panama” demands reference in this regard. For her, cultural citizenship is a concept illustrating “how belonging is enacted

and constituted in quotidian practices of inclusion and exclusion” (9). She further argues

that cultural citizenship functions beyond the boundaries of a single culture and/or nation- state. She observes that the development of a transnational network through cultural citizenship not only underscores the interaction between “the diaspora’s local-national

engagements” but it is also equally “enmeshed in the global context” (8). Realizing cultural citizenship through transnational networks and communities also helps in recognizing and sustaining the socio-cultural and political space of the United States as a

multicultural republic. The novel’s narrative illustrates how these socio-cultural spaces

influence localized definitions of what it means to be diasporic Indian. For Rakhi,

belonging gets redefined as not simply a notion of here and there, but as an issue of how

77 the here and there come together on the levels of interstate relations, cultural activities,

and everyday life experiences.

The first half of the novel shows how Rakhi’s parents’ insulate her from any

notion of her Indian identity. She grows up with a monocentric cultural identity-

conflicted and alienated from her self. At this point, one may be prone to read the novel

as an exercise warning against the perils of a monocentric cultural identity. Edward

Said’s essay, “The Text, the World, the Critic” concludes with a discussion of this notion.

Said notes that monocentrism is similar to ethnocentrism as it is reductive and narrow.

According to him, monocentrism mistakes the eccentricity of Western culture to focus

instead on its concentricity. Said observes how monocentrism denies plurality, totalizes

structure, and believes continuity to be given (22). In the first part of the novel and the

episodes following the death of her mother, Rakhi’s sense of alienation and conflict is

due to the imposition of a monocentric cultural identity. This identity was forced on her

by her parents. They wanted Rakhi to grow up sure of her present in America, without realizing that one’s past (in terms of one’s cultural heritage) adds a fuller dimension to one’s sense of self. This denial to her access to a complete cultural heritage blurs Rakhi’s sense of self.

Rakhi’s inaccessibility to her cultural history blocks the means to her self- knowledge. Jonathan Friedman has noted the significance of the knowledge of one’s cultural history. In his famous essay in American Anthropologist Friedman observes:

Constructing the past is an act of self-identification and must be

interpreted in its authenticity, that is, in terms of the existential relation

between subjects and the constitution of a meaningful world. This relation

78 may be vastly different in different kinds of social orders. It is also a

practice that is motivated in historically, spatially, and socially

determinate circumstances. The latter in their turn are systemically

generated in a larger global process that might help us to account for the

vicissitudes of identity contests that have become so pervasive in this

period of global crisis and restructuring. (836)

Thus, the knowledge and construction of the past is a necessary tool to attain self identification. This awareness enables a meaningful relationship between the subject and the world. The knowledge helps us to comprehend the socio-cultural, historical and political locations that construct our specific and strategic identities. In the novel, Rakhi’s confusions and sense of alienation derive from her non-accessibility to her cultural history. For Rakhi the past is denied. In her mother’s words this denial protected her from splitting between two worlds—her American realities and her Indian heritage. As this vital link between history and identity is disrupted in Rakhi, the idea of India assumes a larger-than-life mythic proportion for her. Her confessions are self revelatory: “I hungered for all things Indian because my mother never spoke of the country she’d grown up in—just as she never spoke of her past” (39). Rakhi paints India as, “an imagined India, an India researched from photographs, because she’d never traveled there” (11). It is no wonder that she constructs an exotic India through her paintings of bathing elephants or coffee jars named “Ootacamund”—a scenic village in Southern

India (26). Soon Rakhi realizes that it is through her paintings that she’s trying “to preserve the past” (35).

79 Rakhi’s sense of things Indian influences even the food she serves at her coffee shop. Her floundering Chai House has muffins, breads, coffee, and other snacks with

Indian names: “Next to them are lemon-glazed Danishes, and then a plate of the crumbly sugar-and-cinnamon cookies we’ve christened Delhi Dietbusters” (24). Her mother urges her to do something authentic and different within the space of the Chai House: ‘“You need to find something authentic to offer your customers, something that satisfies a need in them that’s deep and real”’ she advises (53). As Rakhi and her co-proprietor Belle ponder the deeper meaning of her advice, Rakhi’s mother is killed in a car crash. After her death, at a time when Rakhi desperately wants to find the real “essence” to her mother through her dream journals, she is frustrated again. They are written in Bengali, a script as inaccessible to her as the rest of India: “They [the dream journals] are filled with her mother’s writing, the words in an alphabet she doesn’t know how to read” (138).

Rakhi’s inability to decipher the Bengali script completes her exclusion from her mother’s life. During this time a special bond develops between Rakhi and her father, when he offers to act as mediator between Rakhi and her mother’s dream journals. “I can help you read them,” he offers (142). As a third person cultural negotiator, mediator, and translator, Rakhi’s father ushers Rakhi into the hidden recesses of their lives in Calcutta,

India, among the mystic horde of the dream tellers, and the tea shop where he worked part-time.

Rakhi’s feeling of exclusion from her mother’s life also affects her knowledge about her self. She realizes that she is not sure of who she is and what she wants from life: “[H]osts of unspoken longings hang in the air, invisible as stars in daytime. I can’t quite grasp them, can’t say, This is what I want for my life” (151). At the same time her

80 business at the Chai House is suffering. When she is on the verge of closing her business her father offers her support: “‘I have some money … would you consider letting a new partner join your business?’” he suggests (182). Soon Rakhi and her father make arrangements to resuscitate their business. As they do so they realize that their combined efforts have brought them together for the first time, without the influence of Rakhi’s mother who had always been their buffer zone: “Before this, all their interactions took place in the presence of the mother, through her, as it were. She was their conductor, their buffer zone, their translator” (185). In this new space of understanding that develops between father and daughter, the Chai House gives way to the Kurma House

International. Initially it is modeled after the tea shop her father worked in. He prepares sweets, snacks, and other dishes he had learned there for her reconfigured coffee shop.

Before this, Rakhi had gotten her first real glimpse of India through her father’s reminiscences of the tea shop: “‘Tell me about the shop where you worked.’ And is plunged into her first Indian story” (186). Rakhi realizes that through the “lineage of sweets” in her “own American life” she became close to India, her father, and to the duality of her self-identity (193).

Soon, the Kurma House draws a motley crowd of singers, musicians, and cultural artists. The initial and special circle of musicians is comprised of elderly immigrants from different parts of India (219). Rakhi’s father sings old songs and makes traditional gourmet food from Bengal. During this transition of the Chai House into the Kurma

House International music creates a cultural enclave comprised of only older immigrants from India identifying with the tunes that Rakhi’s father belted out. This initially-created transnational community of first generation immigrants mythically recreates a vision of

81 their homelands through music and food. For Rakhi this unusual throng of elderly people

from India ironically connotes a foreignness she cannot identify with. Clad in traditional

Indian attire or in western ones, the group requests one old tune after another from her father. ‘“Does he know the songs from Anand? From Guide? Could he sing ‘Gaata Rahe

Mera Dil’?’” (217).6 Their excitement at this long forgotten cultural connection established through music makes their presence inscrutable for the others. “There’s an enigma about them—where they’ve come from, why they left those distant places. What they’ve had to give up in order to survive in America” (219). Their music seems to recreate the nostalgia that their forgotten Indian lives represented, “…once upon a time,

in a land far, far away” (219). Their migrant consciousnesses uncritically make them

mythologize their homelands, conflating their specific locations, reasons and histories of

dislocation. Salman Rushdie has poignantly commented on this migrant sensibility in

“The Location of Brazil”:

The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types

of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in

memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to

define themselves—because they are so defined by others—by their

otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur,

unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find

themselves. (124)

According to Rushdie, the migrant romantically mythologizes his originary homeland. In

this process they end up exoticizing their homelands and themselves. In the novel, Rakhi

cannot yet find any affiliations with this transnational group of elderly migrants from

82 India. For her and Belle their community represents a group of customers who come for

Rakhi’s father’s music and Bengali sweetmeats coincidentally keeping their business

afloat. It is only when the group widens to attract a diverse crowd that Rakhi begins to

participate and feel included. Only then does she feel that there is a deeper potential in the Kurma House than just food and music. This feeling is echoed when Sonny remarks,

‘“[M]aybe you’re on to something’” (218). From this juncture onwards Rakhi journeys to

the path of realizing her wider affiliations of identity.

The symphony of cultures gathered at the Kurma House demands a closer

scrutiny. Their musical soirees are described poignantly: “Word of our soirees must have

traveled, for one day an African American comes in with a tall, carved drum, and a flute

player who looks like he’s from South America. A week later there’s a hippie with a

braid and a tambourine” (219). The people don’t only come back for the food; they create

community and celebrate themselves as part of that special community. The narrative

reveals, “[F]or them, what happened in this shop isn’t a performance but a ceremony,

something they were part of” (218). Thus, the Kurma House International is not an

exclusive arena for performing South Asianness per se. Although a part of the audience

at the coffee shop is South Asian, the Kurma House is not an ethnic ghetto promoting a

particular brand of cultural nationalism through traditional cuisine or music. Rather the

community at the Kurma House includes the multicultural dimension of diasporas,

marking it a dynamic zone of cultural and socio-historical traffic. In the confluence of the

multiple cultures that the coffee shop attracts Rakhi gains a stronger sense of her identity

to realize that she’s a part of the new generation of people who belong to both worlds

without splitting between here and there. This younger generation finds their wholeness

83 articulated through their multivalent existences and modes/signs of cultural identity, such as music and food.

In my analysis the space of the coffee house (and the disco) assumes socio-spatial significance. I read them as social texts, as crucial discursive sites contributing to the development of Rakhi’s subjectivity. Here I would contextualize how the spaces of the coffee shop or the disco become transnational circuits for the enactment or development of cultural identities by using the theories of space and identity. In his theories of space and spatiality Habermas argues that, traditional cafes are “social spaces” in that they are sites for conversation, social meetings, and in general mark the conviviality between and within communities. Following him and in the field of cultural geography scholars have also been attentive to the socio-spatial significance of maps, the construction of spaces, and identities that develop due to a complex interrelation between spaces and maps.

Stephen P. Hanna and Vincent Del Casino talk about “map spaces” in their essay

“Mapping Identities, Reading Maps: The Politics of Representation in Bangkok’s Sex

Tourism Industry.” The duo argues that due to the complex interconnection between maps and spaces, we see the development of new or altered identities. This interconnection also results in the formation of new spaces and arenas of communication.

Thus, according to them, map spaces evolve due to the erasure of the boundaries between maps and spaces (Hannah & Del Casino 163). As specific socio-cultural spaces within the geographical area of California, the coffee shop and the disco become significant points of traffic between diaspora space and the hegemonic nation space. Following

Hanna and Del Casino we may then theorize the spaces of the coffee shop and the disco as map spaces. The map spaces of the coffee shop and the disco consequently

84 dehegemonize the boundedness of maps and belonging. Due to the dynamic zone of

socio-cultural interaction that the spaces of the coffee shop (and later the disco) embody

they mime and displace dominant ideologies of belonging and identity, nation and

homeland. Thus, the transfigured space of Rakhi’s coffee shop (and Sonny’s disco) is a

map space functioning as a critical arena where notions of socio-spatial and cultural

identities are constructed and contested. By the commingling of different cultures and

ideas represented in these spaces, Rakhi’s character develops a sense of inhabiting

multiple positions both within and across particular local contexts. A sense of belonging

is thus forged here in moments tying individual biography and national origin. This

coming together, suggests Sallie Westwood, is better conceptualized as a “correlative

imaginary” (41). This terminology links spaces within the nation-state to other nation-

states to which a migrant/diasporic individual may have/develop affective allegiances. I

argue that the map spaces of the coffee house and the disco embody this “correlative

imaginary” by linking the diaspora with the nation-state and with broader socio-political

processes. Map spaces generate a fluid and malleable sense of belonging. Their existence

signifies the importance of the spatial in the production of cultural identities. Therefore, analyzing Rakhi’s developing subjectivity within the reconstituted map space and cultural

community of the coffee shop and disco means that we see her not only evolving as a

diasporic individual within those map spaces but also as a transnational cultural citizen.

This cultural citizenship, according to Grewal, results in the formation of a new

type of cosmopolitan subject. She terms this subject the “postcolonial cosmopolitan”

(38). This subject is formed within networks characterized by a dynamic and wide

economy of production and consumption across borders and boundaries. Rakhi enacts

85 this brand of cosmopolitanism with the realization of her multiple cultural attachments as a diasporic individual through her participation in the cultural space of the Kurma House

International. Although this new type of cosmopolitanism may be the result of globalization and flexible capitalism, the concept cannot be simplified to denote merely a mode of postcolonial globalization. As this cosmopolitanism is produced within diverse cultural networks, it is enmeshed within the discourse of nationalism and the identities of belonging. It brings into conversation the complex interaction of the local and the global and how they affect postmodern identity formation. In the context of Rakhi’s development as a postcolonial cosmopolitan subject, it is interesting to note how transnational local circuits (such as the coffee shop and the disco) displace dominant ideologies of identity, belonging, and difference.

The diasporic web of “affiliation and affect” that the map spaces of the Kurma

House International and the music scene call into being also displace the hierarchical and privileged position of the “home” country as the originary site of cultural identity (Gilroy

16). The home country is redeployed as “one of many diasporic locations” according to

Gayatri Gopinath (304). Thus, both the nation-states of India and the U.S. are displaced as primary sites of belonging due to the formation of transnational communities. Lok Siu also argues that the formation and incorporation of transnational communities force us to reconsider the boundaries of the state (26-7). They make the state multicultural, cosmopolitan, and enable the emergence of the multiple loci of notions of belonging.

Thus, diasporic transnational circuits deterritorialize the nation-state and decenter fixed notions of belonging.

86 Rakhi’s consciousness of belonging elides conventional notions of legal-juridical

citizenship. Following Grewal and Kaplan, this notion of belonging revivifies the

diasporic individual as a cultural citizen while indicating the possibilities for the emergence of a postnation (Grewal and Kaplan 665). Arjun Appadurai and Bruce

Robbins celebrate cosmopolitanisms and diasporas as liberatory spaces against fixed and oppressive notions of belonging.7 In Modernity at Large Appadurai argues that due to the

plural nature of postmodern diasporic belonging a postnationalist order is emerging. He claims that under this new order, “the nation-state is becoming obsolete and other formations for allegiance and identity have taken place” (166-68). According to David

Harvey, this freedom from spatial constraints deterritorializes the territorially bounded nation-state. By implication then the postnationalist space may result in the deterritorialization of diasporic subjectivities. Such an expansive notion of diasporic subjectivity under conditions of late capitalism, however, has its own limits. The process may reverse under special circumstances when the nation-state is reterritorialized along

ethno-religious and cultural lines. This may happen in what Stuart Hall has called

“dangerous moments”—when the hegemonic entity of the state comes under threat (177).

While noting the flux in boundaries and identities due to global postmodern cultural

forces Hall observes that these cultures also engender essentialist notions of identity. He

comments that the dissolution and destabilization of borders can result in the formation of

“exclusivist and defensive enclaves” (184). Such a reterritorialization of the state and

rediscovery of identity can function as a form of fundamentalism, leading to a reassertion

of local ethnicities that are as “dangerous as national ones” (Hall 184). The novel’s

narrative embodies this threat through its focus on the local incidents following the

87 national calamity of 9/11. It progressively describes how a wave of xenophobic civil unrest attempts to reterritorialize the boundaries of the state and belonging to it.8 In my examination of this episode within the novel I analyze how wider geopolitical forces affect individual diasporic subjectivity.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, South Asians in America were sometimes mistaken for Middle Eastern insurgents or terrorists and were vulnerable to race- or ethnicity- based hate crimes. Divakaruni’s novel too represents this period of turbulence in incidents surrounding Rakhi’s coffee shop. The resulting violence and trauma provokes Rakhi to rethink her belonging in America. In a wider context, the incidents underscore how diasporic identities are linked to geopolitical processes.

Fundamentalist identity-support groups morph the map space of the Korma House

International. From an international cultural community brought together by cuisine and music, Rakhi’s coffee shop becomes a segregated space that is “un American.” The subsequent incidents of violence against Rakhi, her father, Sonny, and Jespal are the results of a xenophobic assertion of homogeneous American cultural identity. The incidents unbalance Rakhi, shake her notions of belonging in America as an American:

“‘Belle, I don’t have to put up a flag to prove that I’m American! I’m American already. I love this country—hell, it’s the only country I know,’” she frustratedly retorts (293). As the terrorist attacks changed “some people’s lives more than others,” Rakhi realizes the extent of her transformation by the current political history (294). For the first time, she becomes conscious of her “brown skin, the Indian features, the dark eyes… the black crinkles of [her] hair” and realizes that her familiar American self is an alien for her (and others) after 9/11 (301). As Rakhi’s ethnic and racial identity slowly distance her from

88 her spaces of belonging, she becomes conflicted about her “true” identity. The assailants

already stamp them as foreigners: ‘“You ain’t no American,’” they say (301). This leads

Rakhi to wonder, ‘“But if I wasn’t American, then what was I?”’ (301). She realizes that

the current cultural and socio-political history had just expelled her and is unsettled,

‘“And people like us...who lost a sense of belonging”’ that she is unsure of the contours

of her belonging (302). She suffers from misgivings, ranging from ‘“which deity should I

pray to, American or Indian?”’ to ‘“can you be a guest in the country where you were

born and raised?”’ (305) Through Rakhi’s conflicts we understand how individual

diasporic identities transform due to geopolitical processes. We become aware of how

these identities change or become contested sites due to wider socio-political and cultural

spaces.

While Rakhi tries to dissipate her bitter sense of unbelonging, the community at

the Kurma House steps forward to provide her emotional and mental succor. They form a protective band of support around her easing her recovery from the traumatic incidents:

When closing time comes, the men hang around, pretending to be busy,

packing and repacking their instruments. They wait outside until the store

is locked up, and stroll behind Rakhi and Belle to the parking lot, chatting

casually with her father…. Their solicitousness makes her want to laugh

and cry. They do this each night, until she grows used to the ritual, until

she finds it comforting and companionable. Some days she forgets how it

began. (306)

The close-knit community at the Kurma House not only shields Rakhi during this

moment of crisis, they also carry her back to the path of realizing the wider dimensions of

89 her location and identity. Furthermore, the mysterious man in white whom Rakhi meets

in the eucalyptus grove guides her to other revelations. In his company, Rakhi feels that

she is a tiny dewdrop on a “web huge beyond imagining” and other people who are all

around her, skittering past her—who are also “still somewhere on the web” (320-1). The realization of this deeper connection between people and the circle of life around her

makes Rakhi more mature, accommodating, and confident. She realizes the flux in

identity to find her true self amidst diversity and cultural activities.

She reaches the full dimension of this realization in the final episode of the novel.

This occurs when Sonny invites her to his club and she uninhibitedly joins the company

there. The music scene at Sonny’s disco enables her identification as a cultural citizen.

Earlier in the novel Rakhi’s estrangement from Sonny resulted from his obsessive

inclination towards creating music. During their college years when they met Sonny used

to pen notations for a “bhangra remix” and loved the camaraderie of night clubs (78). As

Sonny reinvents the bhangra remix for America as disc jockey “DJ Sundance,” Rakhi

gets alienated from him (334). She feels isolated and unwelcome at his music scene. The

situation changes after 9/11 and the resuscitation of her coffee shop when she is more

confident of herself. Her entry into the dance floor at Sonny’s music joint simulates her

conscious (re)entering into a vibrant and multiply located dynamic cultural circle. The

catchy rhythms of Sonny’s music draw her unsuspectingly to the circle, helping her better

understand him. She realizes that it is not money, glamour, or easy popularity that has

intoxicated Sonny at the disco. It is much more. It’s the ability to “make a roomful of

people lose themselves to the mood and become one with the sound” (339). As she

dances uninhibitedly to its beats she realizes that the music created “from random bits

90 and castaway pieces … sound[s] like no one thought it could” (339). The chord of

fellowship in the people swaying to the music draws Rakhi into their web. Rakhi pirouettes to the beats and spins:

[T]o the circumference, is held and spun back, once, twice, three times.

She’s astonished to find herself smiling. With each revolution, she’s

increasingly a part of the music, part of the scene, and as she dances to the

darkness inside her eyelids and feels the sweat sprout on her skin and the

beat throb through her, she’s suddenly, deeply grateful. (339)

Although, Rakhi may seem to be under the influence of others (especially men) and seem to be acted upon, than acting herself, she does so unconsciously. Her immediate responses result from her ability to work in situations that others may have created for her. Such an argument may complicate the sense of her developing agency. As subjectivity develops as a function of a space, it may be also be read to be an unconscious reaction of the mind to unregister patriarchal control. Through dance and music Rakhi realizes the multicultural and wider community that she is a part of. They ease her identity conflicts and make her realize a kinship that is far wider than the compass of an exclusive American or South Asian cultural identity. She and Sonny touch orbits once more through music and dance. Most cultural studies scholars note the influence of popular culture and its performance that construct a special space for enacting, reproducing, or generating identities and subjectivities. In her essay “‘Bombay, U.K.,

Yuba City’: Bhangra Music and the Engendering Of Diaspora” Gayatri Gopinath

observes that in the context of the development of bhangra remix in the diasporic cultural

space, cultural forms like music and dance may be read as texts. She observes that these

91 texts are “enabling, recuperative, resistant… that demands the revision of identity, culture, and community” (304). This empowering influence of cultural spaces underscores one of the many ways in which belonging may be forged. Here the “poetics of place” intersects with the ideologies of postmodern belonging constituting nationalist discourses (Lipsitz 3). Following Gopinath, I want to conclude that the transnational space created by the music at Sonny’s disco or those at the Kurma House create a global circuit of production and consumption. This space reconsolidates community, consciousness, and a sense of identity through music, food, and people. Specifically, these spaces help reconfigure Rakhi’s homogeneous sense of cultural identity to a syncretic cosmopolitan one. These spaces revivify Rakhi as the cultural citizen and what I have earlier called the postcolonial cosmopolitan (following Grewal).

The cultural performances at these social circuits also influence the

(re)construction of the subject and individual identity. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity is relevant in this context. Critiquing the existence of the unitary subject,

Butler observes that parodic repetition and performance of community contest fixed notions of identity. She argues, “[A]cts, gestures, enactments generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (Gender Trouble 136). Thus, the map spaces of the coffee shop and the disco are polyphonic social sites enabling the revision and (re)production of cultural identity through cultural performances. The communities at Rakhi’s coffee shop and at

Sonny’s disco function as means of constructing “community” that explicitly cut across lines of religion, race, age, language, caste, class, and nationality, performing a special

92 notion of “community” through identity and difference. In a sense, then, the map spaces of the coffee house and the disco make visible the impossibility of a coherent, stable, pure, and fixed identity. Through their constant shaping and reshaping from other cultures and their influences, these spaces displace notions of cultural purity and consistency. Such a functionality of the transnational community and space further exposes “origin” as performance through which India or South Asia is displaced from its mythic, exotic homeland status. The spaces also make Rakhi understand that her multiply located cultural position does not split her between two worlds but makes her a part of a dynamic international community.

In conclusion, my essay illustrates the importance of transnational social circuits in the production of a cultural citizen such as Rakhi. My essay shows that cultural performances and transnational communities formed within map spaces can enact a special category of belonging characteristic of diasporic locality. While characterizing

Rakhi as a postcolonial cosmopolitan subject I have also shown that transnationalism can be a transgenerational process without involving movement or geopolitical displacement.

Through my analysis of the novel, I have shown that the notion of mobility in our postmodern realities need not be valorized. Global interaction between people in unassuming social spaces (such as coffee shops and discos) can result in wider affiliations of identity and belonging. Rakhi’s maturity and self development under the influence of map spaces point toward new directions of comprehending postmodern citizenship and belonging. It may be too utopic yet to envision the dissolution of nation- states and formally disregard legal juridical citizenship due to our participation in cultural arenas. Although culture and identity usually connote sameness and difference, however,

93 it may not be too unrealistic to agree that culture and identity can lead to solidarities of sameness with a difference. The transnational community described in the novel embodies this identification within diversity. Rakhi’s developing subjectivity under the impact of this community also makes us hopeful of this evolving mode of cosmopolitanism. It is through her life experiences and conflicts of belonging that Rakhi understands the true meaning of her name. For, translated from the Bengali, Rakhi means

“bond.” Her experiences illustrate how culture, space, and identity bond us no matter where we are from. These bonds enrich our identities to add to who we become. James

Baldwin’s words come to mind after analyzing the novel in this context: “If you know from whence you came, there’s no limit to where you can go (qtd. in Rena Fraden

2001).”

94

ENDNOTES

1 “Umkeerah” or America may have been first (mis)spelt as such in Tahira Naqvi’s tragic-comic story “All is Not Lost.” The aberration mimics South Asian Indian

(especially Western Indian) colloquial pronunciation of America. However, it is not to be assumed that I am hinting at an offensive imitation of this pronunciation through its usage in my title. See Tahira Naqvi “All is Not Lost” 145-54.

2 Qtd. in Rena Fraden 109.

3 See especially Robert Ross, ‘“Dissolving Boundaries’: The Women as Immigrant in the fiction of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,” Also see Husne Jahan’s “Colonial Woes in Post-

Colonial Writing: Chitra Divakaruni’s Immigrant Narratives.”

4 See Beck “Cosmopolitan Society” and “Cosmopolitan Perspective” for more.

5 Italics mine.

6 This is the opening line to a popular number from the film Guide (1965). Adapted from

R. K. Narayan’s novel of the same name the movie had several hummable tunes and is

considered a classic by Hindi cinema buffs.

7 See Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.”

8 The killing of a Sikh Chevron gas pump owner immediately after 9/11 is a case in point.

Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered on September 13, 2001 at Mesa, a Phoenix suburb in

Arizona. The assailant, Frank Silva Roque worked for Boeing’s helicopter division and had recently moved to Mesa from Alabama. He fired three rounds from his .380 calibre firearm to shoot Sodhi in the back. When Roque was arrested by the police, he reportedly yelled, ‘“I’m an American patriot, arrest me and let the terrorist go wild!”’ (qtd. in Jeet

95

Thayil 2). Roque was acting on the assumption that Sodhi was an Arab and therefore a terrorist.

96 Inside the Tricolor: Mapping Belonging through Displacement in What the Body Remembers1

This mottled dawn This night-bitten morning No, this is not the morning We had set out in search of --Faiz Ahmed Faiz2

Noting the Indian presence (and influence) in mainstream America, the state of

Washington declared August 15 as “India Day” on February 2007.3 Both in the

subcontinent and outside August 15 is commonly significant as the day of India’s

(re)emergence from colonial rule, although it is also the day when the country was divided along sectarian lines into West Pakistan, East Pakistan, and India in 1947. The

Partition is a phenomenon that haunts notable political (and socio-cultural) happenings

(or mishaps) in the subcontinent to redefine much of the cost of freedom from the

British.4 This divide shapes ideologies of belonging in the nations of India and Pakistan.

Keeping the significance of August 15 in mind and reading (and writing) from America during the sixtieth year of our independence (and Partition), in this chapter I will explore the discursive process(es) of the construction of individual gendered subjectivity due to the reconfiguration of the nation along religious lines. I develop my argument after the

Partition scholarship of Urvashi Butalia and Jill Didur who have observed in The Other

Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India and Unsettling Partition: Literature,

Gender, Memory, respectively, that the Partition is a historical convulsion in the subcontinent that is, at once, a gendered, silenced, and ever-haunting presence in Indian

(and Pakistani minds). Theoretically my essay engages with how postmodern theories of

space and spatiality are in dialogue with postcolonial theories of gender and nationalism.

97 I focus on the development of the subjectivity of a Sikh woman, Roop, in the

backdrop of this historical time through a study of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel, What

the Body Remembers. The novel recounts Roop’s story from 1928 through 1947. It

focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Roop and Satya (the names mean

form and truth respectively). They are the two wives of the Anglophile Sardarji, who

works as an engineer with the imperial irrigation department in the Punjab. The narrative

covertly teases out the implications of the position of women within a patriarchal (Sikh

and Hindu) society. Furthermore, it captures the experiences of dislocation and

displacement that Roop suffers due to marriage, motherhood, and Partition. My analysis

of Roop’s subjectivity reveals that, as a colonial and gendered subject situated in the

transitory moment of nation-formation, she has a fissured and ambivalent subjectivity.

Her experiences neither convey her complicity with the desire to adapt the colonial

trappings of power (through language and culture), nor do they inform her absolute

resistance to them. I argue that her subjectivity develops as the result of her negotiated

embodiment as a Sikh woman in the reconfigured space of the nation and her culture. In

my frame of reference, “embodiment” refers to the process through which existential

conditions and experiences facilitate the articulation of culture and self. By the term

“negotiation,” I imply a process of mediation and selective intervention that allows for reconfiguring and/or establishing a web of connections and intersubjective relations—

between subjects, or between public and private spaces. I want to argue that the diverse

experiences of Roop locate her in the discourse of hybrid modernity. And the

negotiations she undertakes with her self, her family, and the nation space she

98 (re)inhabits reinforce this continual negotiation, allowing her active agency within these

spaces.

I have derived the concept of negotiated embodiment from the theories of Gilles

Deleuze. He contends that embodiment refers to lived spaces that locate bodies while

connecting them, temporally and historically, to other bodies. According to him,

embodiment is the mode through which bodies are made to constitute “the cartography of

the social field” (“Desire and Pleasure”). He (along with Michel Foucault and Judith

Butler) theorizes negotiated embodiment to refer to the ways in which bodies resist

discursive systems of power. This concept allows a body agency and influence over other

bodies, while enabling resistance to the body’s own desires for connecting with these

other bodies. I argue that Roop’s subjectivity develops through her negotiated

embodiment of systems of tradition and modernity—through experiences of marriage,

motherhood, and Partition—allowing her agency and self control, instead of constructing

her as a complicit and gendered colonial body. Her negotiation (and resistance) within

cultural spaces mobilizes her activity in the larger socio-political sphere, informing the

role of women within them. In this negotiated shuttling between ideological systems,

Roop’s subjectivity also informs a pan-Indian cultural identity that evolved after

decolonization. An examination of the emergence of this ambivalent post-colonial

identity has the potential for creating discursive spaces to reevaluate women’s position in

nation-states and/or how they are produced (or reproduced) by socio-political histories of

nations.5

My argument about the construction of a gendered subjectivity in the backdrop of the Partition eventually links the private realm of the nation (symbolized by the role of

99 woman in it) with its public and national space. This indicates that subjectivity is as much

a thematic as well as a constitutive index of identity. In my earlier chapter I pointed out

that subjectivity is a space of experience, reactions, and response. In this chapter my

analysis demonstrates that the process of constructing subjectivity has constitutive and

thematic importance. I conclude that in order to understand the multiple aspects of

subjectivity, we have to realize that its development informs not only the familiar

connections of education and domesticity, but also the larger questions of citizenship,

belonging, political responsibility, class, caste, race, religion, and sexuality. Simply put,

subjectivity, then, is not only a space for an individual’s immediate (or local) socio-

political and cultural experience; it also integrally locates the individual within the wider

dimensions of social and politico-cultural life. Within this understanding, a gendered

subjectivity is then thematic and constitutive. Thus, my focus on the seemingly trivial

happenings and domestic events in the protagonist Roop’s life helps understand how they

inform and/or contest hegemonic and patriarchal spaces. It may also indicate how women

are included within wider socio-communal and political spaces. This dynamic gendered

traffic within spatial domains highlights women’s socio-political accountability,

enriching our perspectives regarding the development of their subjectivities in interaction within the wider sphere of a nation or community.

In the field of Partition scholarship my study engages the legacies of the Partition

with the way modern India is (re)defined—socio-culturally, politically, and

geographically. My intervention opens up a dialogue with postcolonial theorists like

Partha Chatterjee, among others, while drawing theoretical props from philosophers such

as Gilles Deleuze and Doreen Massey. While I attest to some of the arguments of

100 Chatterjee, I argue that by restricting women’s role to the “ghar” or inner domestic space, we unobtrusively relegate their political functions as citizen-subjects outside that space. I

critique the construction of the binary gendered spatial categories of the “ghar” (private)

and the “bahir” (public). This socio-cultural and spatial division was first mobilized in anti-colonial nationalist discourse during nineteenth-century India (Chatterjee 6).6

Critiqued in this way, I want to argue that by including the everyday practices of

gendered citizen- subjects there is a sense of relationality and interconnection developed

between the spaces. This sense reconceptualizes the public sphere. In fact, a gendered

interaction becomes a process and a context of social experience imbricated in relations

of power, and as a hybrid site of contestation and transformation.

I also engage with Homi K. Bhabha’s theories on the development of an

ambivalent and passive colonial identity by pointing out the agency and empowerment

that characterizes Roop’s fissured subjectivity as a gendered colonial body. My analysis

of her complicated and negotiated embodiment of the spaces constituting home and

nation also reveals the overlaps between the discourses of gender and religion with that of

nationalism. In fact, citizenship for the female refugee/migrant was politically presumed

to be determined by the voices and religion of their families of origin. According to

Kavita Daiya, this practice embodies “women as property of family and ethnic community” to articulate their belonging and subjectivity in “disempowering modes”

(22). A past school of feminist critics on nation and nationalism have already critiqued

the invisibility of questions of gender (Yuval-Davis 1). However, this lacuna is due to the notion of the nation ‘automatically’ extending kinship relations in horizontal comradeship

(Anderson 7). The fraternity comprised of men and the reproduction of the nation or of

101 national consciousness did not include women. Ernest Gellner’s theories of nationalism also underscore the result of elitist representations of marginal groups in the production of nationalist discourses. It is, however, relevant that since nations are temporal and spatial constructs, discourses on nationalism and belonging should take into consideration the dynamics of the context and role of gender and sexuality (Yuval-Davis 4). Yuval-

Davis and Floya Anthias identify the major ways in which women are inserted into nationalist discourse: as biological reproducers of the nation; as reproducers of the boundaries of the nation; as transmitters of national culture; and as signifiers of national difference (Davis & Anthias 7).

In her theories on space and spatiality in For Space, Doreen Massey notes that the postcolonial debate over the nature of modernity is an attempt to spatialise the story of

European modernity (For Space 62). She contends that the consequence of this spatialisation has “opened up a multiplicity of trajectories” and global peripheries while irrevocably altering the discourse of modernity (For Space 63-4). She notes that spatialising modernity reconfigures narratives and spaces of history, thereby generating new social processes and identities (For Space 71). This creation of social processes and identities is akin to the Deleuzian concepts of reterritorialization and negotiated embodiment that can result in transforming the cartography of the social field. In the postcolonial narrative of Baldwin’s novel, a focus on Roop, the gendered colonial subject, brings out the multiplicity of dispersed and marginal discursive trajectories while showing the dynamic relationality between gender and space. The negotiated embodiment that characterizes her subjectivity underscores the attributes of colonial modernity that is, at once, fissured, fragmented, and ambivalent.

102 I chose Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel as a work by a diasporic South Asian

writer narrating from the exclusive perspective of Sikhs during pre-and post-Partition

India. Although Khushwant Singh has narativised the Sikh experience poignantly in his

Train to Pakistan, Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers explores subjectivity of a Sikh

woman. Such a view from a person of Sikh origins (although Baldwin is a Canadian citizen, she was brought up in India) provides an insider’s approach to the Sikh

predicament in India’s Partition. This perspective attends to the issue of looking at the

sub-continental epoch of Partition from above (Baldwin is a diasporic writer and not a

resident of Pakistan or India) and below (she is writing about a religious minority, the

Sikhs, in India). While most scholarship on Partition literature has been attentive to the

violence that it represented, little has noted the classed and patriarchal logics that the

literature reinforces. A couple of articles comment on the growth of a bourgeois

nationalism within the subcontinent (Didur 5-7). Few however, interpret Partition

literature to have re-constructed notions of subjectivity and the re-enforcement of a

nationalist imaginary in present day India and Pakistan. Scholarship on the (re)production

of the supplemental and the marginal that may have impacted the bigger political center

in the story of the Partition has also gone mostly unnoticed. Furthermore, this scholarly

attention could not only impact the way we now critically think and review Partition

literature, but could also underscore how the forces from the periphery of society shaped

(or challenged) the dominant nationalist imaginary, or alternately, how these forces were

produced by the hegemony. Since mass access to Partition literature started recently in

1956 with the publication of Train to Pakistan, literary criticism and commentary has

much potential for future scholarly endeavors.7

103 Recent scholarship by Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, and Urvashi Butalia has

pointed out the gendered nature of Partition violence through a study of testimonials from

the Partition. Suvir Kaul appreciates that this criticism interrogates Partition narratives

through the lens of gender and sexuality (Kaul 10). A gendered focus indicates the way in which the politico-social and the historical became intertwined with the private and the

domestic. For Sangeeta Ray, en-gendering India (in her book by the same name) should

also be a project that charts the “representation of the “native” woman as upper-class

Hindu,” in three historically linked discourses—“British colonialism, Indian nationalism,

and postcolonialism” (Engendering India 7). This critical remapping, Ray contends, will

uncover the genesis of the “new woman,” within the “liminal space between colonial

subjection and an incipient nationalism,” to comprehend a “sectarian religious

mobilization in the very inception of the nation” (Engendering India 6, 7). Jill Didur’s

recent book sheds light on the ambiguous and silent re-presentations of women’s

experiences narativised in Partition literature. While this attempt may complement the

historical record of the Partition, it also illuminates how women’s individual experiences

construct the memory of the Partition. Most scholars have examined (or critiqued) the

fictional re-presentations of women belonging to minority religious communities (like

Muslim women), and other castes. Their scholarship examines how gender identities

were transformed and mobilized to inform (and conform to) the overarching Hindu

identity upon which the nation was reconfigured (which implodes the secular self-image

of India). Unfortunately, studies focusing on individual gendered experiences of violence

and the (re)accommodation of selves and identities in a divided India following 1947

have failed to be produced. This also implies that, by attending to the individual

104 experiences of partition refugees, postcolonial and partition scholarship need to go

beyond the ideological critiques of gendered violence that occurred during the time.

Furthermore, in countering the homogenizing abstraction of Partition history, a focus on the individual experience attempts to uncover the heterogeneous, multi-layered, and discontinuous local experiences of Partition refugees. Such examinations can become useful premises to explore the concepts and evolution of citizenship and national identity.

By investigating a fictional representation of a Sikh woman and her identity developed in the backdrop of the Partition, I want to emphasize that as scholars and as the successors of the legacies of Partition, we should endeavor to investigate some of the fragmented textures and accidents of understanding the notion of belonging in postcolonial histories.

Although aesthetic texts like literature may prove to be insufficient accounts of history, they are representations of everyday life marking the limits of social and scientific accounts of narrating historical, empirical, and human experiences. Viewed in this way, literary representations also enable us to (re)interrogate the narratives of dominant cultural memories and histories to open up new spaces for rethinking the articulation of the human within society and culture. My focus on the character of Roop is in congruence with the scholarship of Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin. They point out that locating women at the center of the discourse on Partition indicates fissures and gaps in existing scholarship. They note that a gendered focus casts a different light on the events and consequences of the Partition. The duo theorize that this de-centering of the patriarchal discourse on Partition points out the reconstruction of gender identity along sectarian lines and directly influences the way one constructs identity in the subcontinent following the Partition (Menon and Bhasin 18-9). This reconfiguration, they argue, helps

105 explore the relationship of gender, citizenship, and the construction of a postcolonial nation (Menon and Bhasin 21). Engagements with Baldwin’s novel along the lines of

religion and gender linked to the making of a citizen-subject after decolonization are still lacking. The only notable article on the novel, Edward J. Mallot’s “Body Politics and the

Body Politic: Memory as Human Inscription in What the Body Remembers,” connects the novel with the field of memory studies to expand the “applicability of Western trauma

research in non-Western contexts” (Interventions 165).

Roop’s story links her predicament to questions of belonging within the suddenly

changed equation of nation and national territory. Roop’s narrative gives metaphorical

form to the allegories of the nation—symbolized as a woman, as mother, and as a

fragmented being on the verge of transition from old to new, from colonized to free, from traditional to modern. My observation reasserts Fredric Jameson’s position that most postcolonial novels are allegories of the nation (“Third-World Literature” 66). According to him, the narrative of the postcolonial nation envisions how gaps are closed and margins erased in forming a community that emerges at the end of history. This postcolonial state cuts across race, class, religion, and gender. Furthermore, argues

Jameson, this sense of collective community distinguishes third world literature from the fragmented, individualistic narratives of the western world. He contests, that as a child of

Western capitalism, the novel is born out of the radical split between the private and the public. For him, the third world novel, necessarily resolves this division by taking the

form of “national allegories,” where “the telling of the individual story and the individual

experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of

the collectivity itself” (“Third-World Literature” 85).

106 Aijaz Ahmad strongly critiques Jameson’s definition of “third-world texts” and cultural productions in “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” for not being attentive to other useful categories of gender, language, class, ethnicity, region, and race. Baldwin’s novel, it seems to me, provides a good example of a narrative that intersects the reconfiguration of religio-gender identity/subjectivity with that of the remapping of the nation—thereby linking the pertinence of both Jameson and Ahmad’s contentions. In What the Body Remembers the experiences of Roop and Satya—as daughter, wife, mother, and citizen-subject— not only embody their conditions as women, but invoke the inclusion and the sense of the (forcible) formation of a community during the years prior to and during 1947. The latter part of the narrative recounts Roop and her family’s experience and perspectives post 1947 while encountering the problems of containment, marginality, centrality, and boundaries within the newly formed Hindu-majority India. These problems characterize most postcolonial and modern nations. In this context, it is interesting to historicize the beginning of religious mobilization in India, which has been one of the most syncretic and diverse sites of multicultural identity.

British historiographers Christopher and Susan Bayly have argued that prior to

1860 there was perhaps no identifiable and inalienable Muslim, Sikh, or Hindu identity that could be distilled from particular circumstances of individual events or specific societies (Christopher Bayly 202 and Susan Bayly). Sumit Sarkar has observed that in the twentieth century popular notions had begun to define community not as a shared culture but as religious identity in India. This delineation was observed among the Urdu- speaking elite of Uttar Pradesh (in Central India) in the last quarter of the nineteenth

107 century, the Sikhs in Punjab, and the Jats in rural south-east Punjab in the 1920s and ’30s.

Thus, localities often mirrored the larger areas of collective identities, and the complex and intricate process of community-based solidarity could be delineated in the obscure hamlets, or in the dusty by-lanes of towns and villages. Sarkar has shown how regional and communal identities originated from mosques, temples, and neighborhood Sufi shrines, from madarasas, pathshalas, and local sabhas. Taking his argument, we may say that villages like Pari Darwaza (in which the first part of the novel is set) or Faridpur were already constituted through their religious majorities (or minorities).The people there were separated (or mobilized) according to their religious beliefs and communal identities. Baldwin notes this too in snippets involving her characters or in unassumingly accounting for the demographic composition of Pari Darwaza.

The first and second parts of the novel are set at Pari Darwaza (the name means

“portal of the gods”) from 1928-1937. It is a nondescript village in the Punjab district predominantly populated by Sikhs (30-1). The few Hindus there are converted to Islam and occupy a minority status. In the segregation of the Hindu well from the Sikh one, the communal tension at Pari Darwaza in 1928 is somehow contained (35). We sense familial discord between Roop’s practicing Sikh father Bachan Singh and his Hindu half-brother

Shyam Chacha (38). Gujri, their kitchen help and play-mate, also has Hindu lineage, although within the premises of Bachan Singh’s house she cannot practice it. Neither does he allow Revati Bhua, their cousin sister, from following any Hindu ceremonies and social practices: “‘No more temple for you, you go to the gurdwara instead. No more

Hindu superstitions and ceremonies—you study the Guru Granth Sahib’s words’” (53).

As a patriarch, Singh decides the dominant faith to be practiced in his house against the

108 desires of Gujri, Revati Bhua, or of his daughters—Roop and Madani (54-5). Bachan

Singh’s mock-animosity toward Abu Ibrahim, their Muslim neighbor, symbolized in the partridge fight, ironically underscores the communal tension that escalated in 1947 (42-

43). Although Roop and Ibrahim’s daughter Huma are play-mates, Gujri prohibits

Huma’s entry into the kitchen for fear of defilement disrupting their friendship (70-1).

The daughters of their Hindu neighbor, Pandit Dinanath, are also segregated from the

Sikh family. The neat communal compartmentalization of this rural society has its own internal dynamics. The Sikh-Muslim relation at Pari Darwaza is on comparatively more congenial terms than the Sikh-Hindu relation. Roop’s family criticizes Hindu mourning rituals and visits to the temple, and Bachan Singh participates in a violent exchange with

Arya Samaj Hindus in a neighboring village (48-9, 50-1). Ironically, Roop is unsure of her actual faith in her early years in the village. Although Bachan Singh imposes Sikhism on her, Roop unknowingly has her name tattooed on her arm in Urdu, a language that

“only Muslims use,” instead of in Gurmukhi—the Punjabi script (62).8 These early years mark Roop to be innocently noncompliant to the traditions typical of Sikh girls her age.

The hegemonic control of patriarchy somehow fails to eclipse her spirit. She is not aware that her body is a tool for (re)inscribing political and socio-cultural differences. She is uncertain of this until the second part of the novel, so she basically does what she wants to without being consciously manipulative or contesting.

The later part of the narrative focuses on the stages of Roop’s education: at home, beyond, and later on at her husband Sardarji’s insistence, with Miss Barlow. Initially

Roop and her sister Madani are sent to a grooming school of sorts under Lajo Bhua. Their teacher indoctrinates them on the basic “virtues” of good Sikh women, reasserting basic

109 value for maintaining a patriarchal order. “Never say no,” “Always speak softly,” and

Never be angry” are the rules of thumb for becoming good wives (84-6). Soon Roop awkward in Lajo Bhua’s school. She feels that she can’t squat on floors if she marries a rich man: “‘How will I live in a rich man’s house if all I know how to do is sit on the ground like a dihaati?’” (87). Bachan Singh loans money to send them to a boarding school for Sikh girls, Bhai Takht Singh’s school, where Roop can sit on chairs (88).

There, too, the haughty and plainspoken Roop refuses to learn how to cook. She expects a good marriage with a rich man where she will have servants to cook and clean for her as,

“[C]ooking should be learnt by women who need it in place of beauty” (90). Her family is anxious about her arrogance and ambition. After a year and a half, the sisters return to

Pari Darwaza and, soon after, Madani is married off. Her marriage triggers Roop’s insecurities of remaining a spinster unless she controls her supercilious ways. It is during Madani’s wedding that Roop is made aware of her “real home and family”—her married home. Marriage is seen as a mode of stability—the “real” home for women who are otherwise visitors in their parental homes (97-8). Thus, marriage comes to imply dislocation from familiarity. For Roop this journey starts in 1937.

Roop gets married in 1937, when the anti-colonial nationalist movement under

Gandhi is at its full swing. The form of Roop’s developing subjectivity also starts to re- form itself at this time. She is quieter, less arrogant, and less adventurous. She knows that her haughty nature may ruin her chances of marriage. “Roop has learnt shame. Roop has come to dread what-people-will-say” (112). Thus, patriarchal society has made her conform to its gendered codes of behavior and regulations, although Roop still expects to marry a rich man with a large house, servants, and nice clothes for her. Thus, we see that

110 in the rudimentary stages of her identity-formation as an adult woman, Roop already shows a selective compliance to regulatory socio-cultural orders. She acquiesces to patriarchal mores on her own criteria. She becomes less arrogant so she can get married although she is resolute in marrying into the higher social class. Throughout the rest of the novel we see her seamlessly traversing and negotiating socio-cultural spaces.

Sometimes she compromises with the influences of these spaces, while at other times she negotiates with them on her own criteria. Thus, it would be uncritical to interpret Roop as a complying and submissive feminine subject. At the same time it would be unjust to analyze her dynamic socio-cultural interaction by simply labeling her manipulative without being attentive to her socio-historical position.

Roop’s marriage to Sardarji, senior to her by several decades, Oxford educated, and a member of the landed gentry, with a childless wife, initiates her into the upper class lifestyle (118-9). Although Roop has a name that marks her from other women (her name means “form” in Hindi), the lack of a proper name for her husband is problematic.

Sardarji is a generic name for a person from Western India who wears a turban. It can also imply that Roop’s marriage to him was not any particular event as every Sikh woman got married to a Sardarji. It may also mean that in order to characterize Roop,

Baldwin deliberately avoids naming Sardarji. Ironically, it can also mean that, as Roop changes the most following her marriage, it is of no consequence whether Sardarji has a specific name—since he is the chief subject influencing her change after marriage.

Presumably, one of the chief functions of women inside a marriage may be to bring forth male children as Sardarji believes. He marries Roop chiefly in the hope of a male heir

111 from her. Therefore, Roop’s marriage and motherhood and their significance in

continuing the patrilineage is one of the main tropes in the second part of the novel.

Her social re-forming begins shortly at their Rawalpindi house, under the expert

tutelage of the domestic attendants, Mani Mai and Atma Singh. Sardarji appoints the duo to initiate Roop in the ways befitting his standard of living. Mani Mai helps her to conform in attire while Atma Singh teaches her the right way to use cutlery “‘Fork in left, knife in right.’ The English, she learned, eat with their unclean hand. ‘Close your mouth,

Choti-Sardarniji. Sit straight. Cover your head’” (163). As they move to Khanewal in

Southeast Punjab, Roop graduates to a new level of personal modification. Under

Sardarji’s orders, she wears European underwear (instead of the traditional Punjabi kachcha), brushes her teeth with toothpaste, and unveils her face (155, 162-3). Roop’s malleability and youthful enthusiasm make her transformations under Sardarji easier.

However, she does not acquiesce to change entirely. Initially, Roop’s transition from traditional to European modernity is controlled by Sardarji. She knows that noncompliance would mean a return to the decrepitude of Pari Darwaza. Under Sardarji’s dictates, Mani Mai sets the boundaries of the communal significances of Roop’s adornments—no bindi, vermilion, or mangal-sutra as they are Hindu marks and customs, no nose pins as they are Muslim marks (163). As the hegemonic patriarchal space

(re)organizes Roop’s physical and social habitus, it also (re)inscribes and constructs her body as a Sikh woman’s body.9

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze conceived of the body as becoming in relation to other bodies. This understanding is an extension of Benedict Spinoza’s theories.

Spinoza contended that a body was limitless and existed in a dynamic relationship whose

112 internal structure and external limits were subject to change (Hardt). Deleuze further argues that the body desires to connect to other bodies to form assemblages that are as much political and collective as they are biological. Thus, Roop’s body becomes the point of connection to other bodies (such as Satya, Mani Mai, or Sardarji). It easily adapts to the mores of the other bodies due to its desire to connect to them. Thus, the being of the body is contingent on its dynamic interaction with other bodies. Roop’s becoming is simultaneously dependent on the socio-cultural and political history of her time. And the marking (or making of a new body after unmaking the former) of her body as a Sikh woman wedded to a member of the landed gentry is inextricably linked to her location in time and space.

In Deleuzian terms, the becoming of a body in history, space, or in other physical or biological systems of power is termed embodiment. The gradual construction of

Roop’s body and identity within the socio-political and cultural context represented by

Sardarji and his agents of control signify the mode of embodiment that Deleuze theorizes.

Roop charts an embodied negotiation in relation to other bodies. Through the theorizations of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler we know that embodied negotiations are also the ways through which bodies resist systems of power or ideology. According to

Deleuze, embodied negotiation controls the desires of a body from connecting to other bodies (deterritorialization). Embodied negotiation may result in the (re)emergence of autonomic and symbolic bodies reconfiguring social orders and/or processes

(reterritorialization). Moreover, Doreen Massey argues that the concept also initiates a world of flows between bodies and identities, opening up multiple spaces for interaction, ultimately affecting the conception of subjectivity (For Space 80-1). She adds that

113 identities (like space) are constructed through interrelations (or their lack) and that both identities/entities are co-constitutive (For Space 10). So, the emphasis on space, spatiality, and flow brings distinct identities into new configurations. This process of interaction and negotiation also results in the process of the (re)constitution of identities

(For Space 70-1). As Roop traverses between spaces that construct her as a body, while navigating through experiences that embody her as a feminine (colonial) subject, we see that she is constructed along multiple trajectories. Her response and/or relations with other bodies in space reconceptualize her identity and those spaces. Her being in those multi-located and open spaces implies her confronting the challenges of the “negotiation of multiplicity” (For Space 141).

As a gendered body, Roop’s practices of socio-cultural reproduction through marriage and motherhood define the processes of her socio-cultural interaction. Feminist geographers Pamela Moss and Isabel Dyck have theorized that motherhood, and other modes of socio-cultural inscription, signification, or complicity can construct a discursive body (Moss & Dyck 37). Thus, marriage and motherhood are experiential spaces that also construct Roop as a discursive body. When Roop agrees to sacrifice her first born to

Satya’s care, she becomes a compliant and discursive body. Satya wants to rear the child as befitting Sardarji’s status in society, underscoring that Roop comes from a lower class while hurting Roop’s feelings of motherhood and fertility (205-7). Roop does not resist this demand. Her desire to rise up in society through her marital gains has curbed her ability to resist:

A few months ago there was a Roop who might have protested, a Roop

who had no fear because she could imagine no harm, no consequences. A

114 few years ago there was a Roop who could have stood before many a man

and known herself his better by blood. But that Roop is gone and in her

place stands a woman who has climbed beyond her father’s kin, and now

must hold fast in the game of fortune. (175-6)

This revelation, however, makes clear that Roop has constricted agency. Although she is pliable, she changes according to her personal interests. The passage also implies that

Roop’s compliance is directly proportional to her personal gains, in this case in continuing her favors as Sardarji’s wife. Thus, Roop negotiates her identity as and when her contexts and socio-cultural space demand. However, she accepts the conditioning of her identity by her immediate socio-cultural space only to benefit herself. Within a patriarchal system (symbolized by Sardarji) or space of control, she molds herself to appear to be complicit while manipulating the system for her own ends. Roop’s character analysis reveals how we can categorize the development of her subjectivity as an embodied negotiation within an overarching hegemonic system of power. Roop’s negotiations are discursive strategies aimed at sustaining the material conditions of her life with Sardarji. Thus, it is through the realization of the means to her material ends that ultimately helps make Roop open up spaces for resistance and transformation. These spaces become strategic sites from which she later modifies the patriarchal system of power controlling her to articulate a stronger and confident sense of self. Her manipulative ways thus signify a mode of resistance and subversion.

Presumably, the private-public divide characterizing Roop’s life in colonial India as Sardarji’s wife and her careful and clever manipulation of circumstances align her, ironically, to the discourse of a colonial modernity. Although they are within the domain

115 of domestic space, Roop’s subtle interventions broaden her spaces of mediations to make

for her later role in (re)forming national belonging. Seen in the larger context of

nationalism and national identity, this later (re)alignment of Roop as a female citizen of divided India makes way for rethinking about women’s positioning and the negotiations

they undertake in their transformations in domestic and affective life. By focusing on

Roop’s domestic life we not only study her as the central emblematic figure through

whom socially transformative sites can be located, but we are also resituate her within

new social and class formations within the national sphere.

In the novel, Roop’s strategies of intervention within patriarchal space become

more pronounced after the birth of her second child, Timcu. When Timcu goes to Satya

for a fine upbringing, Roop is reduced from being a gift to being a gift-giver, appeasing

the needs and the whims of Sardarji and Satya: “She, once the gift, has become gift-giver

who keeps on giving: one girl-baby, and now she is to give a boy” (226). When Timcu

comes to Satya, Pawan, Roop’s daughter, gets returned (235). Meanwhile, the household

moves to Rawalpindi in 1940. Since her marriage with Sardarji and her subsequent stays

at Lahore and Rawalpindi, Roop is bereft of familial contacts at Pari Darwaza. She does

not even go there during the period of her childbirth (which is almost traditional). It is

only when she wants her “sauken” Satya out of the way that she plays the card of “going

to my family” against Sardarji. Her manipulation of Sardarji to ward off Satya’s influence

comes out of desperation when Satya snatches one after another of her children.

However, the strategy works at the cost of her vigor and physical strength. She starves

herself for a week and sends a missive to her father before finally going off to Pari

Darwaza, and extending her stay there for a month (260, 263-71). After missing his son

116 and wife, Sardarji finally journeys to Pari Darwaza to bring them back, promising that no more of Roop’s children will go to Satya and that they will now live separate from her pernicious influence (284, 292-295).

When the domestic space is being reorganized in this way, Roop’s historical position too needs attentive analysis. In the world of the novel she occupies a significant space. She is a gendered subject in the transitory moment of nation-formation. She is constructed by discourses of patriarchy, colonialism, nationalism, and tradition. However, her embodiment within these discursive systems conforms to them as much as it contests them. In her argument linking gender with nationalism, Nira Yuval-Davis argues that socio-cultural symbols are significant in imagining nations. Thus, constructions of manhood, womanhood, gender relations, and sexuality embody the dimensions of the collective consciousness (Yuval-Davis 22-3). She further adds that it is crucial to understand women’s subjectivity in relation to their role in reproducing and/or transforming cultural and national symbols. According to Yuval-Davis, cultural models develop as a result of subjective experience and become the ways in which “individuals experience themselves, their collectivities and the world” (Yuval-Davis 42). Following

Yuval-Davis, I argue that Roop’s negotiated embodiment as wife and mother from 1937 through 1948 reconstructs the ideology of national belonging and the role of women in the new space that emerged after decolonization. Decolonization also led to opening discursive spaces marking the borders between empire and nation. The process of Roop’s developing subjectivity during this historical time represents her as a subject in transition from colonial subject to citizen-subject. Homi K. Bhabha’s theories on the emergence of

117 postcolonial subjectivity are especially pertinent here. He usefully notes “the particular

ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation” in Nation and Narration (1).

Bhabha’s essay “DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation” theorizes the concept of the nation as performatively constituted within a specific location in history and culture (“DissemiNation” 299). In a postcolonial nation

performativity is enacted by a temporality of representation within the nation that moves

between cultural formations and social processes without a centered causal logic

(“DissemiNation” 293). We are therefore confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population. This ambivalent nation-space is internally

marked by the discourse of the minorities, the heterogeneous history of contending

peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense locations of cultural difference. Bhabha calls

this ambivalent space of double-writing dissemination (“DissemiNation” 299). His

theories also address the slippages in identities occurring in the border-zones between

nation and empire (Location & Nation and Narration). Bhabha’s consequent model of cultural pluralism emphasizes the emergence of counter-narratives and/or hybrid

identities that complicate homogenized constructions of collectivities and national

communities. However, Bhabha’s model does not empower the hybrid identity, or give

strength to its fragmented sense of self through agency. As a colonial and hybrid subject,

Roop’s selective adaptation of tropes of tradition and modernity give her agency and

underscore the mode of negotiated embodiment I mentioned above. The articulation of

Roop’s newly formed identity becomes more pronounced in the next part of the narrative.

This part begins when the family moves to Lahore in 1942, leaving Satya at

Rawalpindi (296). Satya’s superfluity in the narrative smoothes her exit and she dies after

118 contracting tuberculosis. The hegemonic construct of maintaining the patrilineage

through fecund and complying women get disrupted in Satya. Thus, Satya’s inadequacies

as Sardarji’s wife (she was insulated from modern English learning) and her failure to produce male heirs necessitate her exit from this part of the novel. Although Roop

perpetuates the family line, she is neither too subservient nor too reluctant to comply with

hegemonic and regulatory systems. She is tutored by her children’s English governess,

Miss Henrietta Barlow. Roop’s transition from the naive belle to the English speaking

socialite is necessarily an ambivalent one. For one, Roop’s English education is an

ambiguous tool of modernity in itself. Roop’s brief spell of English learning forms part of

a catalogue of developing her feminine talents worthy of the class position Sardarji

inhabits; it also sets her foil, Satya in direct contrast to her. Roop is of humbler origins, and a symbol of deracination through her English learning. Although Satya prepares the traditional Punjabi “pinni” sweets so liked by Sardarji (while Roop cannot even cook), she cannot muster even the brief English greetings of “Thank you” and “Welcome” that

Roop exchanges in social gatherings. Besides, Satya is always bedecked in the traditional

Punjabi attire of the salwar and the kameez, while Roop transitions to the sari and the blouse. This establishes Roop’s significant historical position as a transitional and a colonial subject who navigates between older and newer spaces. Even as the contours of these spaces—of home and world, tradition and modernity—and the lines between them seem to be shifting, Roop is simultaneously able both to inhabit these spaces and abstract

herself from them.

Roop’s knowledge of English language and etiquette enables her to participate in

public and private spheres, in addition to entertaining Sardarji and his friends, Rai Alam

119 Khan and Cunningham, over dinner (342-51). Miss Barlow’s zeal makes her aware of

politics and current events “But Roop can look over The Statesman … searching for simple paragraphs on which to practice her English. She picks out names she recognizes—Master Tara Singh, Mahatma Gandhi… and the new name Sardarji’s friends in Lahore are sure is coming, ‘Pakistan’” (333). Incidentally Roop’s knowledge of

English makes her an indirect participant in the political turbulence around her. English informs her of the historical and political situation of the time and widens the domains of her thoughts and consciousness. During this rudimentary stage of English learning, Miss

Barlow expects her to unlearn her language and accept English as her own (338). Miss

Barlow renames Pawan and Timcu Joan and Edward (379). Roop firmly resists this re- naming, leading to Miss Barlow’s quick departure for England (380). At this time

Roop’s person is described as “so much more sophisticated” in chiffon or Belgian lace saris, snug cholis, kolhapuris and leather sandals, instead of in loose kameez, juti, and other traditional Sikh gear (307-8, 333-4, 348) . Her transformations lend her more mobility outside the four walls of Sardarji’s house at Lahore. She accompanies him to parades or in cricket match finals (307). At these gatherings Sardarji instructs Roop to

“be at his side and … wear a sari like the wives of other civil servants” (Baldwin 307).

Her re-forming also attests to the fact that she has risen in class from her humble “peasant

background” to Sardarji’s social class and stature. Roop’s transformation makes us

attentive to the classed way in which women participated and negotiated a “fractured

modernity” through their movement in domestic and public spaces (Joshi 3). In Lahore,

in July 1942, Roop’s changing garb, a sari, puts her in possession of a pan-Indian identity

that escapes regional, communal, or linguistic ascriptions; it is also not overtly a “western

120 influence.” Represented in a sari and a blouse, Roop’s figure constitutes the ambivalent

modernity of the Hinduized Indian identity (while the blouse is a British contribution to

the preeminently Hindu sari). Roop’s appearance in this part of the novel superficially

constructs her embodied negotiation of identities in this transitory period of history.

Seamlessly, Roop mingles with the Hindu imaginary of the nation, making her family’s

identification with Hindu India smoother after the Partition.

Through Roop’s character development, Baldwin suggests that the historical moment of transition to national modernity for the middle-class and the nouveau riche

(like Sardarji), and for the feminine subject (in this case Roop), is fraught with tension

and confusion. In the crucible of the transition to nationhood, Roop’s character embodies

the fractured modernity that characterizes postcolonial discourse, or as Fanon put it

famously, it characterizes the “pitfalls of national consciousness” (148-205). The matrix

of intersecting spaces and identities that Roop embodies enables us to perceive a complex

critique of a woman’s socio-political and cultural position within a larger space. This

connection links the development of Roop’s subjectivity with thematic and constitutive elements around her. From a feminist perspective, Paula Rabinowitz argues that women’s literature—analogous to women’s place—is viewed as private and extra historical, while masculine discourse and narrative have been universalized (Rabinowitz 7). She suggests

the importance of understanding women’s private and personal lives to help perceive how

women’s writings engage in public debates, and how they construct narrative and

political history, or, how they may “discursively construct subjectivity, agency,

nationalism…” (Didur 5).Thus, connecting Roop’s private and public experiences and

121 her mobility within both spaces, may help us comprehend the development of her complex subjectivity during this period of historical transition.

Theorizing the discursive contours of Indian nationalism, Partha Chatterjee studies the trajectory of Indian nationalism from the moment of “departure” to the

moments of “maneuver” to “arrival”; he does not substantiate the contestatory nature of

the struggle for nationhood at the socio-political and cultural level. This struggle should

include the expanse of the individual and the collective level. Roop’s participation in the

general life around her, her initiation into “polite” society with cutlery, language,

arithmetic, and attire, importantly shatter the “essentialist construction of the ‘Indian

woman’ that helped some women but hindered others in their quest for equality” (Forbes

191). Roop’s character re-presents the ambivalent and fractured modernity that signifies postcolonial India. Her changed role within the household and outside it focuses on the

widening of social spaces for women while forcing intellectuals to revise the role of

women within the ideology of tradition and national identity. Chatterjee’s work also best

maps the spatial dichotomy of the home and the world. He argues that they are distinct

and gendered to resolve the paradoxical nature of Indian nationalism (Chatterjee 120).

Besides failing to expand on the consequences of gendering spaces in women’s lives in

pre-and post-colonial India, Chatterjee categorically limits women’s roles in the domestic

realms. This denies them political agency and ignores their roles in the wider public and

communal sphere of life. Chatterjee claims that “women’s autonomous subjectivity” is

only to be found in the domestic archives of home rather than “the external domain of

political conflict” (Chatterjee 37). However, Roop’s role in this novel challenges this

122 monochromatic assumption. Her character and her socio-cultural mobility make her an

active and connected component of domestic and public spaces.

Roop’s encounter and emergence into the public and the national is linked with

the larger tensions at the socio-cultural and political levels. This is shown in several

episodes towards the end of the novel. For example, when Roop leaves Lahore with her

children, Mani Mai, their Muslim servant who is left behind, is “too cheerful” and dry- eyed. She hastily bids the travelers farewell in Muslim style, “khuda hafiz” (396-7). This linguistic change in greeting immediately emphasizes the fact that because Lahore will be a part of Pakistan, it will be homogenously constituted with respect to religion. Therefore,

its predominantly Muslim population need not acknowledge other modes of greetings after the (re)allocation of land. Minor as it may seem, this incident brings to light the undercurrents of religious (or communal) hostilities and emerging modes of intolerance that surfaced immediately with the reconstitution of living spaces of people. At their

Lahore house the women shared an all-female space that was dominated by a hegemonic

Sikh ideology. As soon as the exchange of power was decided on the national level with the demarcation of Lahore as a predominantly Muslim space, the latent hostilities

(re)emerge. Similarly, a little later, the journeying Roop sees Huma, her childhood pal surrounded by marauding and raping Sikh soldiers (403-4). Roop may have halted, intervened, and rescued the woman, but she decides to proceed as if she did not see or hear anything. In this instance, gender and homo-social memories and bonds become insufficient markers of solidarity as significant other indices of identity—of caste, class, and religion—emerge to generate indifference and animosity. Rather than disregarding the role of gender, the “woman question” itself must be redefined as a critical political

123 force. This will enable interrogating the ways in which identities form, re-form, and

operate. The instances in the novel provide an idea that there is an underlying tension

among the women in the novel due to their communal (and class) affiliations. As

Baldwin sutures this into her narrative, we see that she has unobtrusively made her

women political subjects and actors—actively engaged in socio-civic responsibilities—

while narrating the reconstruction and the rehabilitation of the community and the nation.

Roop’s re-formed identity in 1947 India also echoes Bhabha’s theorizing of the fragmented hybrid identity discussed above. Her narrative disrupts the homogeneous re- envisioning of India as a Hindu-space. Roop’s Sikh identity and the legacy of her living ways in Lahore and Rawalpindi not only change in Delhi to inform the larger Hindu identity, they also disrupt that identity with aspects of the Punjabi culture—with its language, food, and sensibility. From a secure Sikh resident to a refugee from Lahore,

Roop’s complicated identity development indicates the matrix of identity (-ities) that emerge with changes in geopolitical dimensions. The remaining part of the narrative shows Roop becoming more clear-headed, courageous, and cynical about her life’s situation with her children. The novel ends with her taking charge as the matriarch of the refugee family in Delhi. She becomes the receptacle of the memories of dislocation (due to her marriage and the Partition) and of hope. She also transforms into a body bearing the collective memories of “acts of honour” and “martyrdom” practiced by her family and community. The novel ends on a note of rebuilding and hope as Roop tries to rejuvenate her riot-wrecked family in their uprooted lives in Delhi. Her reconciliation with her life as a Delhite and a Sikh/Punjabi imbues her character with dynamic

124 complexity. Her positive attitude to change simultaneously accords her resistance and compliance, helping her to re-form her identity in the newly carved out country.

Roop’s rehabilitation in Delhi signifies the creation of a national identity that is ambivalent and fractured. She notes the small accommodations that they have made as refugees, such as Sardarji’s adopting the Delhi-way of tying his turban, or the Hindi “ji- han” in place of the Punjabi “hanji” that she coaxes Atma Singh to use in the Delhi markets (469). Similarly, Delhi feeds them with the typical Punjabi delicacies—including the wheat rotis or the pinni sweets for the children. This simultaneous cultural traffic disrupts the monolithic cultural construction of the nation. It may also embody the possibility of resistance (through cultural intercourse) exercised by the migrant that always underwrites the discourse of the nation and the communal identity of its subjects.

This (re)construction of Roop’s religious and communal identity also underscores her

embodied negotiation that I discussed earlier in the chapter. Incidentally the massive

rehabilitation of the dispossessed people from Sind, west Punjab (comprising of

Sikhs/Punjabis) and of Hindus increased the population of Delhi by nearly fifty percent.

This internal migration helped constitute the throbbing cosmopolis of Delhi after 1947.

Within this re-constituted city-space, the Sikhs occupied an outsider/insider status to

embody, among other things, the complex linguistic and ethnic fabric of being “Indian.”

In the novel’s conclusion Roop reveals the fact of her defective ears to Sardarji to

provide him with strength and hides from Jeevan the martyrdom of Kusum at the hands

of Bachan Singh. She smoothly transitions from Sardarji’s demure, “brown koel” to the

dynamic and confident “Sardarni” (208, 465). She survives the throes of the Partition

through adapting some of the trappings of a Hindu identity (through language, attire,

125 food), while simultaneously influencing the (re)configuration of the space she now inhabits. The cost of freedom and new identity in a (re)constituted land gives Roop a strength and an insight to articulate her weakness without caring for the consequences.

This ending note gives Roop a paradoxical status. Her new existence has neither pure agency nor unalloyed oppression. This ambiguous subjectivity becomes, in fact, a viable model of subjectivity characterizing the “new” woman who emerged after the Partition.

I indicated earlier in the essay that Roop’s ambivalent subjectivity develops as a result of her negotiation with the public and the private during the transitory phase of nation-formation. Roop’s (re)forming allows us a close focus on the transitory and religio-gendered self at the same time as it proffers a panoramic sense of society and nation. The form of the novel also equips Baldwin with the critical tools to draw together, without collapsing them, the social and the individual, the domestic and the public, the home and the world, the universal and the particular, with existence and imagination. It seems to me that Roop’s character development articulates the pluralism of cultural and/or religious identity with shared values, while offering a vigilant critique of the exclusions and excesses of the national make-up of a nation in transition—newly truncated along sectarian lines. As an oppressed group within any culture with a patriarchal ideology and social structure, women’s relation with the nation and in questions surrounding the issue of citizenship and women’s subjectivity in the construction of the nation remains a perennially controversial area.

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist critic, has suggested that any oppressed group needs to generate a positive culture without which political emancipation is not possible. He further argues that nobody can live in perpetual deferment of their sense of selfhood and

126 subjectivity, or free themselves from bondage of any kind without first realizing and having a strong affirmative sense of who they are (Eagleton 37). This recognition, as

Priyamvada Gopal states, marks the ultimate triumph of alienation and marking of the self as the Other within any discourse signifying the point of disruption from the colonial to the postcolonial (Gopal 27). This recognition also critiques the monolithic character of the nation-space by occupying a specific moment of disruption and inclusion within that space. The location of the nation-space within culture and nation exemplifies the cosmopolitan nature of culture while indicating that no cultures have “national characteristic and form” (qtd. in Gopal 27). The inclusion of the Sikh within the Hindu polity of divided India marks this disruption during the transition of the nation; in the context of Baldwin’s novel, Roop’s Hinduization and the Sikh influences of her refugee family members reconfigure the public and national space of Delhi.

Through her negotiated embodiment of contestatory discursive spaces, Roop’s ambivalent subjectivity as a colonial subject and as a gendered minority accentuates the complexity of postcolonial subjectivity. The novel reminds us that we are still in the process of reinventing the dynamics of our identities as citizens of the nations of India,

Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The work also opens up critical spaces for examining how minorities are constructed within collectivities or how they reproduce the nation. At the same time, my attention to the representation of Partition history through individual and gendered experience reemphasizes the need to revisit the significance of the term

“democracy.” I believe that as critics (and postcolonial historical subjects) we need to look at it as a hegemonic term circulating in discourses on public spheres that affect postcolonial histories and national modernities around the world. Commenting on the

127 value of democracy, Homi Bhabha argues that, “[i]f we attempt to de-realize democracy, by defamiliarizing its history and its political project, we recognize not its failure but its frailty” (“Democracy” 35). Understanding the development of democracy in India after

Partition through minor representations like Roop holds the potential to transcend the limitations of its frailty and allow us to cope with the trials of living in a new era. Thus, for reinventing democracy and comprehending belonging to a nation fraught with a troubling history, it is the task of writers, activists, cultural scholars, or people’s organizations to look out for spaces or fissures for intervention. Spivak’s notes that, “to be human is to be always and already inserted into a structure of responsibility” (xxiv).

Integrating this responsibility into understanding and redefining belonging and identity can also be a tool for celebrating freedom, both socio-cultural and intellectual—with or without the baggage of Partition. It can, as Veena Das notes, help revisit the tensions and divides characterizing belonging in the two nations by creating “therapeutic spaces” (Das

193). As a people coping with existence in a postcolonial and substantively connected world acknowledging the multiple and simultaneous strands of our identities, we should commit ourselves to retrieving those therapeutic spaces.

128

ENDNOTES

1 In India the reference to the tricolor implies the national flag with white, saffron, and green color. Although most critics argue about the secular nature of the flag, the colors have religious connotation. Thus, green signifies Islam, white is for Christianity, and saffron signifies a color sacred and significant to Hindus. The color blue which Sikhs hold significant, is not a prominent presence in the flag (the Ashok Chakra in the middle has blue colored spokes, but the chakra in itself was a Buddhist symbol).

2 Qtd. in Hasan ix.

3 See “August 15th: India Day,” Mutiny 14 Aug 2007, 15 Sept. 2007.

for the transcript of the declaration signed by the current governor of Washington state.

4 I prefer the use of the upper case “P” in Partition, unlike scholars such as Jill Didur, to point out the colossal significance of the event that continue to impact socio-political and cultural relations between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh even today. On the other hand,

I have not capitalized the “I” in “independence” as I believe that the Partition has been a more monumental event than independence itself.

5 I have used “postcolonial” with a hyphen only in this instance to refer to the decisive temporal marker of the decolonization process.

6 See Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural

Nationalism (London: Hurst & Company, 2001). Also see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial

Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late

Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) among others for commentaries on the gendering of the home and the world in nationalist discourses.

129

7 See Didur for a genesis of the readership on Partition literature (4).

8 This inscription on Roop’s body metaphorically marks the diverse cultural body of

India. In this context, it would then be difficult to dissect the Muslim strand from the

Hindu or the Parsi; French or English from the Hindu or the Muslim identity.

9 Habitus is an interlocked system of durable, transposable dispositions, a set of practical hypotheses that unconsciously structure our beliefs and everyday actions. It is the collective property of an ethnic group, a class, or in this case, of a nation or community of people. Bourdieu notes that “habitus is a product of history” (qtd. in Rudrappa 141).

130 Making Meanings, Suturing Contradictions: An Analysis of Fault Lines

Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines represents the complexities associated with diasporic experience. I argue that as a postcolonial literary artist and scholar,

Alexander’s commentary on the diasporic predicament indicates the comprehension of a totality. This totality involves recognizing the synthesis of contradictions and continuities in subjective experiences. Consequently, I analyze the discrepant constituents of her narrative and examine the memoir as a literary and personal document. My analysis reveals that Fault Lines exemplifies and (re)informs the concept of hybridity as a discourse of contradiction, ultimately renewing and relocating the term within cosmopolitanism. I suggest that Alexander’s developing consciousness is the locus of contradictions to the objective world through indices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and language. It is also inflected due to subjective cognition involving individual and personal relationships. I argue that Alexander’s specific experiences cannot be adequately analyzed by hybridity talk and that we need to understand and incorporate the concepts of cosmopolitanism to comprehend her subjectivity. Finally, I show that Alexander’s subjectivity, manifest in the totality of her experiences of migrations and displacements, is characterized by a gradual realization that her complex identity is impossible to delimit, name, or contain within boundaries.

Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines has had two editions, one in 1993 followed by a revision a decade later. It is the revised edition that is the focus of my chapter. The first edition reveals how Alexander, a Syrian Christian born in Allahabad, India, in 1951 and christened Meena Elizabeth Alexander, spent the first four years of her life in her grandparents’ ancestral home at Thiruvella, Kerala, South India. Her father’s work as a

131 civil servant took her away from Kerala as she was the eldest among three sisters. From age five until she reached seventeen Alexander traveled between Khartoum, Sudan and

Kerala. In her words, “I turned five on the Arabian Sea, my first ocean crossing. For the next thirteen years my childhood crisscrossed the continents” (6). After taking her doctoral degree in English Literature from Nottingham University, England she moved briefly to Delhi and Hyderabad to teach. Eventually she settled in New York City, USA after marrying a Jewish American in India. Early on in the memoir, Alexander mentions in passing her father’s work in the Indian Civil Service which led to their initial migration to Sudan (6). In her words, “[I]n 1956 my father, who worked for the Indian government, had been “seconded” abroad to work in the newly independent Republic of the Sudan.

My mother and I followed him in February of that year” (6). The conditions of her writing the memoir, thus underscore Alexander’s class position for self-representation in navigating across cultures. Her subsequent migrations to India, Europe, and America for purposes of education, work, or for claiming domicile implicate her class position in the politics of location and articulation. They complicate understanding her hybridization or the consequences of her developing subjectivity. Incidentally, postcolonial critics such as

Lata Mani scrutinize “questions of positionality and location” to meditate issues of postcolonial representation and inquiry (25). Thus, discerning the development of

Alexander’s subjectivity implies analyzing her continual negotiations within and between cultures due to the collision of language, race, class, sexuality, gender, and history.

However, to understand the nature of Alexander’s developing subjectivity, we have to analyze her position and experiences within the discourse of cosmopolitanism. So how does hybridity theory fail to define Alexander’s subjectivity?

132 In cultural theory, the concept of hybridity refers to the notions of a shared, ambiguous, yet distinct process of living that is ambivalent and dynamic. For Homi

Bhabha, the concept always implies an enunciatory site of contest and confrontation resulting in the emergence of cultural difference and identity. In its simplest sense, hybridity theory exposes the violent implications of culture as an organic and coherent body. Although Bhabha’s theory celebrates the enunciating space of translation between cultures, it is not analytically specific. In a world still influenced by the impacts of colonization (and globalization), hybridity cannot simply mean a process celebrating cultural mixture and difference or the creative potentials of mixture if it ignores the questions of politics and inequality and the question of history. In fact, hybridity theory is not enough to accommodate experiences of diaspora, slavery, sexuality, or the position of racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, there is a need to go beyond the general postcolonial perspective that hybridity theory provides. We need to look for a theoretical vocabulary to address the specific and local conditions of migration to the metropolis, regardless of the cultural relativism favored by hybridity.

This is how the concept of cosmopolitanism becomes relevant. Cognizant of local identities and the nuances that inform the larger socio-cultural body politic, cosmopolitanism highlights individual histories, experiences, and positionality due to race, class, ethnicity, language, food, etc., which hybridity theory seemingly effaces.

James Clifford’s essay “Traveling Cultures” is a polemic against dominant practices within cultural anthropology that privilege dwelling, localized movements, and elide the wider global world of intercultural exchange in which “the ethnographic encounter is always already enmeshed” (100). So, Clifford calls for focusing on the “cosmopolitan

133 experiences” (101). Therefore, the use of the term by Clifford is not a passive account of

a hybrid cultural agency, but, seen as traveling culture, hybridity potentially evolves into

cosmopolitanism thereby transforming into a positive account of a practical and actively

developed agency. In proposing the politically (and culturally) significant role of

cosmopolitanism, Clifford endows cosmopolitan mobility with a normative function. He

argues for perceiving a culture of displacement within specific and often violent contexts

of “histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction, histories that generate

discrepant cosmopolitanisms” (“Traveling Cultures” 108). Furthermore, Clifford stresses

the redefinition of mobility beyond literary travel to include “different modalities of

inside-outside connection” (“Traveling Cultures” 103). So, for Clifford, hybridity needs

to be adequately nuanced according to current conditions of movement, travel, and

migration. He therefore, advocates an evolving cosmopolitanism.

However, to simply argue for Alexander’s cosmopolitanism due to her multiple

migrations would be inane—a globe trotter, a casual tourist, or a migrant laborer would

readily include themselves within the definition. To avoid this conflation and to prevent

this naiveté we must understand what cosmopolitanism implies and what/who falls within

this purview. Furthermore, as scholars, we cannot dehistoricize the specific contexts of

travel and migration in any critical discourse involving the diasporic cosmopolitan

intellectual. Thus, conditions of historical inequality, questions of class, ethnicity,

religion, language, sexuality, and gender cannot be universalized in this discourse. The

specific accretions of these differences correlate to crafting a belonging within wider

geopolitical spaces. Eventually, these spaces become sites of (re)negotiating diverse identities and histories. Moreover, the cosmopolitanism I have discerned in Alexander is

134 the result of her harsh questioning of radical decolonization and the consequent erasure of specificities of experience due to migration and personal history. A multiply located diasporic intellectual who was initiated into the impacts of migration at the age of five as the daughter of a civil servant in a recently decolonized country, Alexander’s developing cosmopolitan subjectivity is also a strategy (used unobtrusively) to interpret local events as a means of politicizing current socio-cultural and political events.

Examining Alexander’s constantly changing modes of dwelling, her discrepant histories of migration, colonization, and sexual abuse become necessary parameters to help locating local realities within global histories. Thus, Fault Lines sutures the event of sexual abuse by her grandfather with the national trauma following September 11. The private space of anger, realization, and renewal of identity enmeshes with the wider public sphere of history and location. In this way, through her conscious participation and active agency, Alexander’s developing subjectivity does not merely signify a hybrid cultural existence. It is, in fact, the development of a cosmopolitan sensibility.

Furthermore, her determination to write her self in an improvised language that can accommodate the dimensions of her life and the vicissitudes of her experiences relates to my overall project which examines the ways of liminal agency of the cultural migrant.

Within the limits of this chapter I examine how hybridity transitions to cosmopolitanism for a migrant like Alexander.

Written with the purpose of finding a meaning for the self, Fault Lines does not limit its narrative to the exfoliation of individual personality only. The incidents described and the experiences distilled from memory do not present a tunnel vision of

Alexander’s self isolated from other selves. In fact, her memoir traverses the

135 development of an embedded, relational self which is hinged upon its unstable

hyphenation with people, places, and events. Incidents in America spark off associations

in India, violence in public life triggers the recovery of personal trauma. Thus, we can

argue that the interiority of Alexander’s self that is private and individualized is always

already inextricably linked with the larger public life. Her personal records intersect with

public history and she speaks not just for herself, but transforms into a commentator of the times, initiating a complex interrelational process of reevaluating the self with respect

to the greater history. So, we can say that Alexander’s memoir is not so much about an

academic personality as it is about the growth of a postcolonial poet of color’s mind. It is

not so much a localized vision of the self, but a conglomeration of disjunctive

experiences linked to the collective. It is not a hybrid self narcissistically echoing the

diversity of self-experience, but a cosmopolitan self that is nuancing the specific in the

public.

Alexander strategically locates and reconciles her position in America as a

postcolonial woman poet of color raising biracial children. She acknowledges that her

subject-positions due to her racial, ethnic, sexual, gendered, professional, and personal

identities, following 9/11, have been rarified and given new meaning. It is hard to ignore the extent to which the events of 9/11 in the United States have changed attitudes not only toward the nation and immigration, but also toward the minorities and immigrants already living in the country. In scenes reminiscent of the McCarthy witch-hunts,

Muslims and Arabs were arrested, harassed, and humiliated in the wake of the attacks.

Therefore, during this time, Alexander realizes that simplistically locating herself in

America and claiming the country as home (since she’s raising her children there) or her

136 self as a South Asian American cannot be easily resorted to after her perception of 9/11.

So, after 9/11, she could no longer uninhibitedly wear a sari. Referring to her attendance

at the newly established Asian/American Research Institute she admits that, “[I]t was the

sort of gathering to which I would wear a sari without thinking twice, but now something

nagged at me… There was a pall of suspicion extending over Arabs and beyond to South

Asians, brown people who looked like they could be Arabs” (287). Later, releasing her

thoughts with poetry, Alexander confesses that there was fear surrounding their lives that

was changing their perspectives about life in America and life as an immigrant, “the fear on this island [of Manhattan], the condition of our lives, not knowing what could strike next, fire, pestilence—that bitty white powder filled with anthrax spores,” suddenly

nothing seemed certain or meaningful (288). However, Alexander still claims America as

home, only her identities there become more complex. This re-claiming of America in a

newer light contradicts her earlier perspectives on the country, her literary sensibility, and

her location therein.

But does her personal history have wider reverberations in communal history? As

a South Asian American woman writer who is leaving her imprint on the map of world

fiction, we are piqued to know how Alexander’s plural locations and her multicultural

and multiracial identities yoke the local and the global after 9/11. Can Fault Lines

transcend its limitations (of being a personal record) to become, as it were, a record of

bigger things to come? To find an answer, we need to contextualize the memoir in the

wider arena of South Asian American literature and heed Alexander’s position there.

For one, identity seemed to be conceived differently after 9/11. If Fault Lines

evokes this changing mode of perception, then Alexander’s description of the climate of

137 suspicion that surfaced after the attacks can also be taken as a statement offering possibilities for suturing transregional and political affiliations among immigrant and ethnic minorities in America, speeding up assimilation, and minimizing differences with mainstream America for a visible minority such as the South Asians. So it may seem to be strategic, not opportunistic that as a piece of work having socio-cultural and political significance, Fault Lines provides a premise through which South Asians, scholars, and

Americans can look for alliances in broader communitarian terms with other Asian

Americans, not for the time being, but for the future. This alliance can (re)create and renew the place to move across the essentialist modes of belonging generated through enclaves based on differences in race, class, religion, and ethnicity. Read in the context of finding a wider political awareness, I would argue that the cosmopolitan sensibility that

Alexander develops through migrations and empirical experiences in America after

September 11 is indicative of a future where Asian Americans (hand in hand with many other Americans) will move beyond traditional categories of belonging to make choices

about cultural and civic affiliations and responsibilities. To my mind, this affiliation can truly translate to what it means to be “a citizen of the world.”

Becoming cosmopolitan necessitates a harmonious conglomeration of specific and discrepant experiences of travel and dwelling. Therefore, I have analyzed the development of Alexander’s cosmopolitan consciousness through a collage of contradictions. Contradictions can make for unstable and diverse meanings. So, in order to grasp the totality of a developing consciousness, we need to acknowledge that the

variegated and multiple aspects of becoming that this subjectivity entails should be traced

to a genealogy of being and becoming. This genealogy, metaphorical and personal,

138 political and private enables the mapping of the here and the now of migration with the there and then of dislocation. In my frame of reference, genealogy relates to a catalog of events that uncovers the constituents of Alexander’s experiences. Discerning a genealogy in Alexander enables analyzing how the events of her life recombine and reconstitute her subjectivity. For a multiply located subject like Alexander, this genealogy is fissured, contradictory, confusing, or unrelated; nonetheless, it constitutes the totality of her migrant’s experience. In the case of Alexander, she develops a decentered subjectivity where syntactical time ruptures with the rubble of distinct and seemingly unrelated experiences and existences—characteristically fissured with gaps, silences, and spaces of experience—both narrative and metaphorical.

The question of genealogy, while vital in the examination and comprehension of history, has been, however, frequently ignored in the discourse of cosmopolitanism.

Metaphorically, genealogy may be analogous to the idea of cartography—in the sense that both are translation of time into space changing the unfolding of history into a teleological schema. According to Nietzsche’s formulation, genealogy is a counter- historical discourse that does not trace the value of a thing in its origin. In fact, genealogy engages with the various and diverse meanings and interpretations of concepts and institutions in order to demonstrate their current expression in a long history of unrelated and contradictory articulations. Thus, genealogy is always unfinishable, always in process, often alienated from an “origin.” It emphasizes complexities and decentered- ness, rather than continuities and stabilities. Thus, genealogy can be associated with a heterogeneous dynamism which crucially anchors it in the concepts of a poststructuralist

139 ethics informing globalization. Viewed in this way, genealogy can, then, become a

relevant term in the discourse of cosmopolitanism.

In outlining a genealogy for understanding cosmopolitanism, the question of

personal and gendered history becomes relevant. Following September 11, Alexander

starts to reevaluate her position as working intellectual in America. Consciously

commenting on the politics of her own dark female body, due to which she could not

simplistically claim an American literary heritage (after Thoreau or Frost), although she

lived and worked there, Alexander reveals: “[H]ow dark I looked, unmistakably Indian”

(287). She describes her early Khartoum journals as replete with quotations from the

Western literary masters, “from Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, Wallace Stevens” (102).

Even as she traces her affiliations with the literary traditions and languages of Coleridge,

Schlegel, Dylan Thomas, or Verlaine, she realizes that her subject-positions and life

experiences need a special language. With utter despair and loss she reveals that “there was nothing in the refined notions I set about to elaborate (drawing on Husserl and

Merleau-Ponty, the notions of intentionality and corps vecu) that might be inclusive of what I was—no color there, no female flesh, no postcolonial burden” (141). In America, she immerses herself in the reading of Edgar Poe and Emerson. Although she identifies with their art she knows that they don’t voice her experiences, portray her in America: “I wanted to breathe the clear air of America. But where would I find it” (164)? So, she feels the necessity to create a language to breathe in, find belonging, and home—a language that clothed her sensibilities and captured the complexities of her positionalities: “[T]he language I used had to be supple enough to reveal the intricate mesh of otherness in which [she] I lived and moved” (118). Thus, without any role

140 models or literary precursors, Alexander becomes acutely conscious of her marginal

status in Anglo-America and echoes the need to reinvent her self and find an appropriate

language to cloth her ideas and claim her self as a poet in America. Moreover, since the

events of September 11 trigger the context of Alexander’s reexamination of her position and location in America and India, I want to briefly refer to the question of body and gender.

Alexander seems to be acutely conscious of her female body with its questions of gender, class, and ethnicity. In postcolonial (and postmodernist) discourses it becomes vital to identify the markers that (re)inscribe the body. Mikhail Bakhtin has analyzed how the body is the “material bearer of meaning” through various markers denoting the body in space, culture, and time (xiii). For Alexander, the turning point in re-imagining herself in America was through the color of her skin. This realization of the presence of her ethnicity (along with her multiple languages, questions regarding her sexuality, gender, and migrancy) pervade Alexander’s text to record how minorities express themselves within hegemonic populations versus within their own groups. Thus, in representing her identity to her readers, Alexander also resorts to the strategic positioning of her identity as a South Asian woman of color within the multicultural space of America. In her own words: “[A]nd the point, the sticking point, is my dark female body. I may try the voice- over bit, the words-over bit, the textual pyrotechnic bit, but my body is here, now, and cannot be shed” (202). Her persona as a minority woman of color, situated in America, can be perceived as her reconstruction of an Other within a hegemonic system. Alexander mentions the violence and rage she confronted as a woman of color during her early years in Minneapolis, where she consciously started to question the other aspect of her

141 identity—her ethnicity. She cynically mentions the ascribed (re)configuration she faced

as an ethnic other in 1970s America, bordering on wonderment and doubt: ‘“They don’t

know what to do with us, exotic, Asian, border-line black”’ (188). As a female body not

only feeling disconnected from itself (due to her multiple and fragmented histories), but

as a woman of color, Alexander also articulates her feeling of not having a voice or

agency in America. She inquires passionately, “What does it mean to be Unwhite in

America? Can I make lines supple enough to figure out violence, vent it, and pass

beyond?” (169). She repeatedly questions if she will be able to write herself to resist any

socio-cultural homogenization. Her inquiries regarding her conflicting socio-cultural positioning in America (and India) coupled with her resolve to mold this ascribed position also imply her involvement in the politics of (re)presentation and self articulation.

For tracing the genealogy of Alexander’s consciousness, the narrative moments reassessing the meanings of the word “dwelling” also become important. The realizations of her ethnic, gender, and sexual identities in America and her reevaluating “home” in

Kerala are linked to the events of September 11. Interlinked with the historical-political event is the recovery of a memory of abuse. These realizations constitute the totality of her consciousness regarding the ‘true’ nature of her identity. The national event of

September 11 coupled with the memory of sexual abuse mark the re-examination of her relations with her multiple homes in America and India, with her family and her self.

They trigger her (re)definitions of belonging and identity as a woman, South Asian, poet, intellectual, daughter, mother, and citizen. Because I argue that she develops a

cosmopolitan perception due to the contradictory and local nuances informing her

142 identity, it is essential to understand that cosmopolitanism necessarily involves recognition of a decentered, various, and contingent process. Thus, Alexander’s spatial dislocations fracture and destabilize her idea of home and identity: “[M]y two worlds, present and past, were torn apart, and I was the fault line, the crack that marked the dislocation” (15). Throughout her narrative Alexander struggles to come to terms with her constantly changing domicile: “[M]y life shattered into little bits and pieces. In my dreams, I am haunted by thoughts of a homeland I will never find” (27).

The seeming discrepancies between the two versions of the memoir are befuddling. The older version of 1993 describes Kerala as Alexander’s transcendental dwelling place. It is her “real” nadu (Tamil for home) despite her multiple homes in the world. In the second version of 2003, written in the context of September 11, 2001,

Kerala morphs to a place that houses memories of abuse. Thus, the different versions of

Alexander’s memoir, may confuse the reader who seeks to distill a “structure of meaning” (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s phrase) in an example of self-writing. At the disruptive turn of events in her memoir, Alexander feels disturbed that she may have

“written a memoir that was not true” (241). Her aim, she confesses, is not to cross out what she had written earlier in her memoir, but to “deepen that writing, dig under it”

(229). She, however, realizes that it is necessary to revisit parts of her memoir and rewrite them in the light of a disturbing memory that is resurfacing. As “a woman cracked by multiple migrations,” Alexander’s fragmentary self revelations become synonymous with the migrant predicament (2). For her, the genre of the memoir becomes a metaphor of the migrant self.

143 Similarly, when Alexander rewrites parts of her memoir in the second edition, she

knows that she will have to suture the memories of childhood abuse with her experiences

as an adult coping with migration through art. For Alexander, her fractured sense of self

can paradoxically enable her to discover some form of stability so that “[T]he girl child

and the woman flow together” (243). While detailing the moment of painful recovery

from her abuse, Alexander briefly alludes to the terrorist attacks of September 11. The

violence perpetrated there becomes a context for recollecting her personal violation by

Ilya. Similarly, her home in Manhattan and location (ethnic, cultural, political, and historical) there after the September events puncture any stability associated with home, shredding the fabric of life and puncturing the sense of coherence. The collage-like evocation of her experiences and memories converge the distinctions between Thiruvella and Manhattan, where, “just as in my birthplace children hunt for scraps of food in waste heaps” (176).

If the 1993 version narrates her idyllic and Edenic visions of a childhood spent in

Kerala, punctured with her schooling and early adolescent years at Khartoum, Sudan, then the second version portrays Kerala as a home that is not always safe and protective but a complex and flexible location which becomes “a place to escape to and a place to escape from” (George 9). Thus, in the first version of the memoir, Alexander claims her

Indian heritage as her “nadu.” In poignant language she reveals that Kerala clothes the sense of her being “[M]y right hand reaches through the mirror with no back… I feel the warmth of the sun in Thiruvella. I smell the fragrance of new mango leaves” (7). With a narrative redolent of Kerala, Alexander paints her maternal grandfather as a savior-like figure. She lovingly calls him Ilya. As she narrates her first dislocation to Sudan, the

144 analogy of separation from home becomes equivalent to a parting from Ilya “[T]hat

moment of parting from Ilya, repeated time and again as we returned to Thiruvella, only

to leave again, became my trope of loss” (63). Another two hundred pages later,

Alexander reiterates her steadfast sense of belonging and bonding that Ilya and Kerala meant for her. Musing about the multiple anchorages of her soul, Alexander confesses

that her thoughts are always captured by “a garden whose every inch I had known in

childhood, and at the heart of the garden, a tree with shining leaves and dipping blossoms

I had never seen. I saw Ilya’s hands planting the tiny shoot…” (215). Among her many

homes and places of sojourn, her Ilya and Kerala form an inextricable duo that is

intimately connected with Alexander’s evolving sense of being and belonging. However,

all of the coherent associations attain contradictory proportions in the second edition of

the memoir.

In this edition, Ilya metamorphoses into a distant and relational entity, as

“grandfather Kuruvilla” (240). She confesses that following her remembering of abuse,

she “cannot bear the thought of my grandfather,” the same who was indivisible from her

soul (273). She wonders why he abused her, “why did he expose me [Alexander] to the

violence in his head?” (272). She tries to connect Ilya’s abusive behavior to his violent

and traumatic memories of India’s partition in 1947: “[A]fterwards he would set me on

his knee, speak of the horrors of Partition” (272). However, she struggles to find a

justification for his violence and ultimately finds none. While evoking home and

belonging through her Indian heritage, she has a similar bewilderment. Kerala (and Ilya)

become sites of location and dislocation, love and hate, peace and turmoil, belonging and

alienation.

145 In rewriting about the house of her childhood in Kerala and her memories thereat,

Alexander ends up recreating and revising the section of her memoir titled, “A Book of

Childhood.” Through fits and spurts of recollection of an abusive memory, she recalls the

“teak desk where [I] had to lie down as he touched my body” or, the white walls where

she pressed herself trying to escape from the assault (240). If it was easy for her to evoke

home and familiarity in Kerala at her ancestral house at Kuruvilla with Ilya, then the

resurfacing of violent memory make both memories unfamiliar and “unhomely.” Feeling

unbelonged and homeless, she ponders, “[W]here was my home? It was hard for me to

figure out” (256). Gradually realizing the relative stability promised by the shelter of her

childhood, Alexander knows that it is no longer a safe sojourn of her being, becoming, or

for her memories. Her nonchalance towards Kerala is evident even to her mother, who

points out that, ‘“[E]ven though you are in constant globetrot…someday the house will

be yours’” (266). Her poetry had been redolent of her happy memories from Kerala and

the Thiruvella house of her childhood now evokes a place which has barbed wire at the

edge of the garden: “My back against barbed wire/snagged and coiled to belly

height/…The green tree/battened on despair/cast free/The green roots kindled to cacophony” (129-131). Her aesthetic sensibilities surrounding her childhood home now suggest violence, unfamiliarity, alienation, and mock the feelings of the safety mesh associated with “home,” “homeland,” or “belonging.” Similar feelings are evoked when

Alexander describes the violent aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001.

During the September attacks, Alexander, along with her daughter Svati,

(re)discover the fraternity that race and ethnicity can create (or destroy) in a time of socio-political and cultural crisis. Her earlier distinction from her daughter, who labels

146 herself “peach Svati” to her “brown mama” now undergoes transformative (re)definition

as a community of brown women who came under the shadow of doubt after 9/11 (170).

Svati admits how her brown skin set her apart from her classmates. “[M]y skin was screaming at me, Mama…[T]hey were staring at me. All the kids in class” (280). As realizations of the complexities of belonging to America dawn on Alexander she

confesses that she’s unsure of “fashioning a self in a violent world.” This uncertainty

characterizes the rest of the memoir—through form, content, and structure (281). She

pens her dilemma and her resolve in her characteristically poetic language thus:

This is a book of slow, sometimes uncertain accretion that I have had to

cut and polish into form. The destruction visited on the island where I

make my home, a second home, tore open the skin of memory, made me

start to write again. But to close this book I had to go back to India. I had

to return to the house of my childhood. (229)

Resolving to revisit and recreate her Kerala memories, the rest of the memoir yokes

together the complex imbrications of Alexander’s postcolonial identities with American

ethnicities.

As a postcolonial memoir, Fault Lines touches upon every aspect of the

controversy surrounding migration or diaspora. Postcolonialists’ gourmand appetite for

questions of race, class, sex, caste, gender, relocation, English language education for

non-English speakers, immigration and claim to America, arranged marriage in

‘traditional’ Indian society, etc. are present in this early example of the immigrant memoir. Reviews greet it interestingly. Nalini Natarajan hails it as the “nostalgic recovery of self and body” and poignantly indicates the multiple strands of interest within

147 the memoir for the critical mind (143). Literary studies have been more than generous in

their attention to Alexander. From examining the impacts of colonial education, to

discerning the ethical singularity of the metropolitan migrant, the search for home, to

analyzing it as an example of a feminist postcolonial oeuvre, Fault Lines has occasioned

multiple critical interventions (Gairola, Ray, Shankar, and Ponzanesi respectively).

However, all of these experts could have discussed the memoir’s success in relocating the

discourse of hybridity in the debate of cosmopolitanism in greater detail. Should we

consider Alexander’s memoir to be tracing a cosmopolitan sensibility? How do

contradictions inform this consciousness and should we attend to the question of

genealogy to understand this development? Simply assigning a symbolic home to

Alexander or (re)claiming her memoir as an example of feminist work seemed to gloss

over the questions I have raised. Especially in the light of the revised edition, posing

these questions seemed more relevant. Lavina Shankar Dhingra has had the most

engagements and opinions in print about the memoir. Her critical safari began with

finding Alexander a home in 2001. Later in 2004, her essay, ‘“No Nation Woman’ Writes

Her Self” culminates in the process of regaining (critically) Alexander’s home in the

literary and aesthetic world of her art (93-4). Although I missed any hints on either

connecting Alexander’s hybrid homes with the evolution of a cosmopolitan

consciousness or a critical realization that cosmopolitanism can be best understood through mapping a genealogy of contradictions and intersections, Shankar provides some valuable (and controversial) bases from which the memoir may be rethought. At the same time, I want to mention that the complexity of understanding Alexander’s evolving sensibility can be analogous to Fredric Jameson’s argument about the schizophrenic

148 characteristic of postmodern discourse in his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logics of

Late Capitalism.

Jameson remarks how our postmodern situations make it impossible to think of

past, present or future in a unified manner. He concludes that syntactical time snaps as a

result of this: “[I]f we are unable to unify the past, present and future of the sentence,

then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present and future of our own biographical

experience or psychic life” (26-7). So distilling a unifying sense of self from reading a

postmodern postcolonial memoir such as Fault Lines is not a likely premise. In fact,

Alexander’s fragmented and anachronistic account seems to echo a rupture of any continuity of self or of a self within a systemic order—metaphorical or literal.

Furthermore, Jameson does not adequately address the constraints of historical conditions and personal dissolution in the political. Thus, Alexander’s cosmopolitan subjectivity may also be characterized as decentered.

The notion of this subjectivity had been earlier advanced by poststructuralist theory. This theory, however, inadequately addresses the issue of the subject’s agency.

Closely tied with language and linguistic influences, the “I” of the subject is somehow lost in poststructuralist theory as it is filtered through a particular theory of language.

Moreover, if we reject the poststructural distinction between consciousness and the unconscious then we can argue for a different conception of the human subject—the subject as agent. Having failed to generate satisfactory accounts of human agency and mediatory interventions of the subject in shaping identity, postcolonial and diaspora theories have provided some solutions. The latter argue about the development of the active agency of the subject through mediations. These mediations (re)constitute the

149 subject through reconfigurations of the elements of race, class, sexuality, history, gender,

and language inflecting and decentering the subject. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has

talked about this mediatory ability of subjects. Hall theorizes identity as a continual

process of negotiation, “which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable to discover places from which to speak” (401-02). Thus, for Hall the emergence of new subjects in the hybrid space empower them with agency; however, he does not discuss whether the hybrid space is diverse, distinct, and specific, or whether all migrants will express similar hybridities. To avoid the theoretical homogenization of the hybrid experience, arguing for a specifically located yet decentered cosmopolitanism becomes pertinent. This is especially true when Alexander’s sense of self is evoked in its multiplicity and contradictions, and her migratory experiences—with journeys, self articulation, quest for justice, or the reconfiguration of communal and personal identity— reveal new strategies of mediation. Thus, her decentered subjectivity is empowered by its ability to intervene in and negotiate being and becoming within cultures.

Since I argue for a model of the migrant’s subjective agency, my idea of

Alexander’s decentered subjectivity is nuanced from the notion advanced in post structuralist thought. To characterize her subjectivity in Fault Lines, I borrow a particular model of “decentered subjectivity” from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a Mexican-born performing artist and cultural scholar. Gómez-Peña uses this term with respect to the transnational and transitional identities within cultural borderlands. I want to apply his idea to Alexander’s memoir to argue that a decentered subjectivity can be traced through the cultural migrant’s subjective genealogy. This is to say that a decentered subjectivity is not replaced by a simple paradigm of tradition and origin, but evolves as a fluid form of

150 cultural affirmation. This development is plural and makes for the emergence of a robust subjectivity.

Furthermore, in the discourse of cosmopolitanism, the question of one’s social

class becomes equally significant along with factors of ethnicity, history, gender, or

sexuality. Literary migrants to the metropolitan centers (like Alexander) belong to the

group of elite intellectuals and therefore need to be examined historically. Attention to

the history of movement becomes especially important if the concepts of class and travel

(or migration) are to be understood as dynamic formations. Moreover, analyzing

Alexander’s developing subjectivity becomes complicated when we consider her status as

a multiple migrant within locations, educational sojourns, and homes in India, Sudan,

England, France, and America. For most of us, Alexander exemplifies the elite migrant.

Her migrations to Oxford, America, or France to study and pursue a literary career

complicate the idea of her subjectivity. Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory examines the erasure of

class relations in contemporary literary production and the bourgeoisification of Third

world elite intellectuals. Sharply rebuking those who emigrate to the metropolitan

locations for professional gains, Ahmad’s critique demands the assessment of the

material conditions of displacement (85-6). Although he emphasizes a Marxist

methodology for discerning class without linking it to other valid and crucial categories

of critique, Ahmad provides us with a useful reminder that class relations play a vital role

in cultural studies along with factors of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.

According to Timothy Brennan, cosmopolitanism is an ambivalent phenomenon.

Although Brennan does not situate the term within or as nuanced from cultural hybridity,

he provides useful ways in which we might read the play of power and class in

151 interpreting cosmopolitanism. Carefully delineating the roles of academics and

intellectuals, Brennan observes how in valorizing a certain kind of cosmopolitanism, it becomes complicit with power and empire (“Cosmo-Theory” 664). Earlier, in his At

Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Brennan argues that cosmopolitanism needs

to be seen as a double sided term, offering the promises of a world citizenship while

avoiding any serious contentions about “class historical engagement” (31). Brennan’s

argument also distinguishes the ethical praxis of cosmopolitanism from the older notions

of internationalism. For Kwame Appiah, on the other hand, cosmopolitanism is

associated with the idea of making us “citizens of the world” however, he does not

address the complexities associated with the dimensions of belonging such as race, class,

gender, sexuality, language, history, and location. He gestures towards a liberal, humanist

cosmopolitan ideal where “a tenable cosmopolitanism, in the first instance, must take

seriously the value of human life… and reconcile with a kind of universalism” (Appiah

222-3). Thus, even if Appiah celebrates the variety and simplicity of a diverse social and

cultural life as a pre-condition for self-creation at the heart of a meaningful life, he almost

completely glosses over the issue of specificity. Within Alexander’s privileged, elite, and

migrant intellectual position, talking of her cosmopolitanism without analyzing her social

class position would be problematic.

In analyzing how one’s social class can complicate the discourse of

cosmopolitanism, I look to Homi Bhabha. In his “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan,”

Bhabha speaks of the context of minorities and English speaking immigrants to Britain to

observe that the vernacular migrant becomes a cosmopolitan in translating between

cultures and negotiating among positions to enter into “larger national and social

152 conversations” (139). Bhabha then analyzes the liminal position of the migrant to focus

on their anxieties of acculturation and repression within dominant cultural practices

(139). Ironically, since Bhabha describes how he became a vernacular cosmopolitan

when he left Bombay as a young Parsi to “study English at Oxford,” in the beginning of

the essay, as a means to set out his affiliations to the early migrants to Britain, his

vernacular migrant cosmopolitan is of the elite kind—renegotiating cultures and

traditions only in academic terms (135). In Bhabha’s frame of reference the position of

the cultural translator is, thus, occupied by the privileged author, text, or postcolonial

critic at the western metropolis. Thus, Bhabha’s social positioning becomes a major

deterrent to viewing the hybrid and the cosmopolitan subject as un-elite.

Similarly, Alexander’s hybrid identity and her negotiation among cultures through

experience and language can hardly make her transposition un-elite and impartial. Thus,

we need to look critically at Alexander’s social class and positioning as well in order to

understand how they affect the nature of her development of a cosmopolitan subjectivity.

The elite subjectivity developed through Alexander’s memoir becomes explicit if we are critical to the conditions of her migration. Writing from Manhattan, Alexander is the product of middle-class First World intellectuals of Third-World origin, whose geographical migrations have often also entailed upward class movement. Thus, migration is the alibi for Fault Lines.

Presumably, Fault Lines may be read as Alexander’s way to transmit the complexities involved in becoming American—complexities that are heightened by topicalities and contexts, social class, ethnicities, racial identities, and identifications. As she struggles to work in an environment where her dark skin is the point of alienation, her

153 memoir becomes one that evokes a palimpsest of place and belonging, whose very

indices have been altered by traumatic knowledge. It is this heightened awareness from

which she knows she has to write her self and reflect on the world. Reflecting on the world needs appropriate language to clothe it and to nurture our recollections. Thus, the question of language proves to be especially enigmatic in the case of Alexander. Early on in the memoir, she speaks about the violence in her speech as she juggled with several languages due to her relocations, “[S]he babbles in a multitude of tongues: Malayalam,

Hindi, Tamil, Arabic, English, French” (30). Her forked tongue further adds to her sense of fragmentation and dislocation. Alexander mourns the loss of her mother tongue,

Malayalam, as she becomes a polyglot in this linguistic straddling.

Besides this, the loss of the mother tongue is frequently experienced as a loss of memory or identity, a loss that intensifies the fragmentation of the subject. However, later in the narrative, Alexander employs her multilingual resonances to enable a dynamic and fluid sense of being, “[s]he has to invent a language marked by many tongues” (261). In her invention of a different kind of language Alexander feels the tugs of her location: as a migrant, woman of color, poet, and feminist. In this realization, Alexander knows that she has to recast her experience in a language molded to reveal the complexities of an identity due to multiple dislocations, “The language I used had to be supple enough to reveal the intricate mesh of otherness in which I lived and moved” (118). Thus, the language she creates is rich with her experiences and her location in America— inextricably linked with who she is and what she thinks about.

Alexander’s polylingualism coupled with the realization that she has to (re)invent her own language for articulating a sense of self echoes the heterogeneity associated with

154 a cosmopolitan consciousness. In the context of her multiple language abilities, Rosi

Braidotti’s theory of the nomadic subject is especially intriguing. For her, the polyglot is

a nomad in language (8). In understanding the postmodern, culturally differentiated

feminist subject, Braidotti resorts to the figuration of the nomad. For her, the singularity of this identity is in its non-fixity and perennial (re)constitution: “[T]he polyglot is a variation on the theme of critical nomadic consciousness; being in between languages constitutes a vantage point in deconstructing identity” (Braidotti 12). Thus, according to

Braidotti, nomadic identity is contingent and consistent in destabilizing stable and

uniform notions of identity. She underscores the translational nature of the polyglot

nomadic subject to conclude that this subject does not lay claim to any fixed symbolic

order (through its defiance of any fixed structure of signs/languages). The subject is in a

continuous process of becoming through translating and re-presenting in multiple

languages and identities. Although Braidotti does not elaborate the nature of the loss

entailed in translation, she notes that “polyvalence does not mean anarchy” and

destabilization in articulating identity (15). Polylingualism, Braidotti argues, leads to a

self that is a complex collection of fragments (15). She contends that the polyglot is an

ethical entity, “confronting multiplicity and yet avoiding relativism” (Braidotti 15). In

Alexander’s narrative, the fragmented linguistically displaced subject is also a polyglot

nomad who seeks a different kind of language to represent the paradoxical coherence of

its identity and subjectivity. For Braidotti, this is similar to the concept of “transposition”

(to write or perform a musical performance in a different key or, in a different tongue)

used in music or genetics (Transpositions 5). The cohesiveness or harmony in a nomadic

identity, for Braidotti, is enabled by “repetitions, cyclical moves, rhythmical

155 displacement” (22). Alexander’s narrative self-representation enacts this cohesiveness through repetitions, narrative cycles (in the twice located episodes from the book of her childhood), and in articulating the need to develop a different kind of language.

As a child of a decolonized India, Alexander embraced the British educational system that indoctrinated her in English. As a result, Alexander feels the colonial legacy bequeathed by the English language de-scripted her of her native Malayalam:

“Sometimes I think of the English language as a pale skin that has covered up my flesh, the broken parts of my world” (73). Alexander contends that writing can retrieve the self continually erased from an “original” script through her language(s), and prevent her from erasure: Sometimes I think I have to write myself into being. Write in order not to be erased” (73). For the purposes of defining her subjectivity, writing for Alexander becomes a process of constant translation and successive adaptation to different cultural realities. Therefore, I would also argue that writing across languages is a transformative transposition for Alexander, an ability that helps her to perform a symphonic utterance, albeit in a different key. As she attempts to explain this peculiar transformation,

Alexander confesses: “[A]nd I speak as someone who even as she writes in English thinks through the rhythms of many other languages…[s]o that the strut and play of words, the chiseled order of lines permits a sense crystallized through the seizures of dislocation” (260). Acknowledging the resonance of the languages of her migration, she

(re)creates a unique language that articulates this echo. Thus, instead of a loss of identity through the loss of language, Alexander molds a language echoing her many tongues. For her, writing makes her a polyglot in each of her tongues and her writing echoes her cosmopolitan developments, articulating in different languages a coherent narrative of the

156 self. In the act of transposing several cultures and experiences of migrations, Alexander

presents herself as a self-translator located on the cusp of multiple cultures. Within such a

position it is, therefore, difficult to possess or locate any one coordinate of identity and self to claim.

Given Alexander’s disruptive and contradictory narrative and her use of multiple languages, I want to conclude by arguing for a migratory reading of the memoir. This sort of reading recognizes that the writing of the memoir is attuned to the past and the present to emerge as a historically grounded, painful, and often coercive physical and mental dislocation. Fault Lines seems to provide strategies for continual negotiations to understand the self through revoking denials and ruptures from time and place. A migratory reading also leads to only a speculative articulation versus an absolute one, thus, implying that the migrant self is a self in process, always in production. Stuart Hall mentions that this articulation resists conceptualizing identity as a finished product, to point out to the notion of “‘a production,’ which is never complete, always in process”

(“Cultural Identity” 391). For Alexander, the diversity of location and experience marks it as multivocal, dynamic, and having heterogeneous and conflicting positions. So, the result will be a multiplicity of identities, marking a perpetual movement along numerous subject positions, where none of the positions hold a place of privilege. A migratory reading of the narrative of Fault Lines justifies the discontinuous narrative of the memoir and the way Alexander describes people and places in opposing and/or amicable light.

Viewed as a mosaic of memories through time, about people, self, and experiences in life,

Alexander’s memoir is an early example ofrefashioning select experiences into narrative.

As a complex epistemological product complicating fiction and reality, narrated and

157 textual self and the narrator self, her memoir seamlessly transforms the past to simulate it through words, language, and images to recreate (renew and reinvent) something that is lost in time—making literature out of history—and blurring fact and fiction.

Thus, from the narrative of Fault Lines, Alexander may risk coherence of meaning because she sutures contradictory possibilities of being, becoming, and belonging in America and India. But as I have substantiated, these contradictions ultimately (re)inform the totality of the locus of her aesthetic and literal repositioning in both parts of the world. Contradictions in ethnic and cultural belonging to America that were let loose after the national crisis of 9/11 are coupled with the alienating feelings

Alexander develops about her originary homeland and family. These discrepant and fractured affiliations are not only characteristically hybrid; they also reinforce a new cosmopolitanism. This cosmopolitanism is intriguing to analyze in the multiply migrant elite like Alexander, whose strategically nuanced self-reflections can qualify as a document of cultural enactment—a continuum of becoming through local and specific experiences connecting us to the world around. In Alexander’s words, the connections forged through poetry and art, “knits [us] into the fabric of a shared world” (qtd. in

Maxey 23). Therefore, viewing the development of a cosmopolitan consciousness through Fault Lines holds the promise of integrating diversity while relocating the discourse of hybridity. For most of us, this can then open up robust and emancipatory possibilities of becoming citizens of the cosmos.

158 Epilogue: Perceptions, Limits, and Optimisms

My analysis of select diasporic fiction and autobiography informing discourses of cultural hybridity and diaspora reemphasizes the liminal agency of diaspora characters.

While highlighting the inner reworkings of these characters in day to day diaspora spaces,

I have discussed the strategic interventions these characters enable in relations between themselves, wider geo-political spaces, and cultural communities. Therefore, by exploring the evolution of individual subjectivity through selective mediations, I have

(re)examined discourses of hybridity, belonging, and cosmopolitanism. Taking up the varied and specific gendered experiences of location and dislocation in the diaspora, my chapters analyze the ways through which cultural negotiations produce space, mold identities, and help implode any formulaic blanket ascription of a developing “South

Asian identity” in diaspora locations. Thus, in studying subjectivity developed in empirical and intersubjective spaces, my project eventually relocates the discourse of hybridity as a fairly robust form of politics connected to processes such as diasporization, decolonization, and globalization.

My chapters describe the genesis of a cosmopolitan identity which is intercultural, intersubjective, and has multiple locus. By focusing on an individual human subject and her developing subjectivity through intersubjective relations, my chapters argue for the constitution of the concrete human being. In this way, my chapters also enable a dialogue on collective agency. In fact, by focusing on the tactics and interventions characterizing the development of agency, my project underscores the liberatory promises of the diaspora space. Because my chapters outline the dynamic intermixture of identities and belonging, it is possible to misunderstand my endeavor as a euphoric demonstration

159 advocating a classless, secular, raceless, denationalized society. In fact, the cosmopolitan

sense of belonging that some of my essays argue for implies a more expansive mode of solidarity. This solidarity is attuned to democratic principles and human interests without the restriction of territorial and cultural borders. Thus, I am not arguing that an evolving and syncretic sense of belonging implies uncritical acculturation and a utopic space of equality. In fact, my analysis advocates a more emancipatory and balanced political space from where we can act, recognize our similarities (and our differences), and enter into enabling dialogues to help our conditions. For I realize that our specific and heterogenous

locations are also locations of critique helping us to realize and address inequalities

within and beyond.

Therefore, in this dissertation, I hope to have produced an analysis of literature that is reflective of a plural sensibility in diasporic belonging without the formulaic

explorations of themes of alienation and conflict symptomatic of this literature. My

analysis is optimistic about a literature that does not campaign for an uncritical exnomination through multiculturalism. Although I remain critical about the efficacy of a socio-legal apparatus for multicultural pedagogy and awareness in the world today, I am

buoyant that as scholars, critics, and producers of ethnic and/or multicultural studies, we should, at least, be perceptive enough to bring into conversation those works that

advocate, however subtly, this sensibility in narratives of identity.

At the same time, I want to indicate that all of my chapters and analytical

parameters share an important and necessary premise. Since travel, migration (coercive

or voluntary), and displacement provide the context within which these diasporic representations are situated, it is worthwhile to mention that these narratives are located

160 and operate within a given democratic machinery and socio-political structure. Thus, the

analyses in all my chapters derive from the fact that the material and aesthetic conditions

in migration are depicted within a democratic space. Simply put, the events that

precipitate the characters in Queen of Dreams, The Namesake, or even those described in

Fault Lines would not have made similar conclusions, analyses, or theoretical

interjections if they were not in cognition of the democratic spaces of their production,

imagination, and consumption. This is to say that the novels and the memoir in my

analyses would have not been written and envisioned with characters having mediatory

means to interact, function, and change with relation to other characters or spaces unless

they were represented within a reasonably democratic apparatus.

The realization of the commonality of the representative space in these literary

productions also helps figure the human in the global. In studying the forms of belonging

through intersubjective and empirical experiences, my chapters instill a deeper feeling of

belonging to humanity by focusing on social communication and sympathy. None of the

characters I have analyzed in my chapters work in isolation or simply as individuals

without social and civic existences. For example, Gogol realizes his subjectivity through communication with people he interacts with due to his work, family, origins, and through personal experiences (The Namesake). Rakhi evolves into a postcolonial cosmopolitan due to her interactions with the people frequenting her café and their solidarity with her as a community after September 11, 2001 (Queen of Dreams).

Similarly, Roop reconfigures her subjectivity as a result of a geopolitical epoch, as an

ethnic and religious minority, and a female member of her family (What the Body

Remembers). For Meena Alexander, a sense of self would have been unrealizable had it

161 not been for her experiences with others she met and interacted with through her multiple

migrations (Fault Lines).

Also since my project explores the ways of survival within cultures, my chapters

illustrate the indispensability of the normative structure that democracy provides as a way

of being in location (and dislocation). In conclusion, I do believe that my essays facilitate the arduous process of (re)establishing a platform for discussing the development of belonging and identity under conditions of socio-political and democratic cultures.

Although these are enough reasons to celebrate these narratives of migrant belonging, let me warn that the transnational and the diasporic space is not always the unlimited space of freedom and self articulation. In fact, there are locations that are more democratic than others—diasporic South Asian wives denied rights and responsibilities due to their dependent visas, migrant laborers working inhumane hours with meager benefits, or senior and disabled people with little mobility and independence. The realities of these existences complicate the freedom and the idea of an expansively realized democracy within the diaspora space of North America. By recognizing these limitations and freedoms of the migrant and diasporic space, my chapters necessarily open up portals to debate identity and the processes through which geography and location aesthetically

(re)inform the projects of being human.

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