Introduction

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Notes

Introduction

1. Marx notes famously: ‘these self-sufficing communities that constantly repro- duce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name. This simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refound- ing of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty’ (393). 2. In a quasi-anthropological study of the village Changel in North India, Arvind N. Das asks some opening questions in Changel (1996) that resonate with this book as well:

Does a village exist in reality? Or is it merely a construct of sociologists and others who are forever looking for an ideal type of a simplified social structure which provides an easy universe for investigation? Are the characteristics of the village essential to define it conceptually? And, if so, what are those characteristics? (7)

Das repudiates ‘the unchanging village’ thesis and posits instead a biographical study of Changel premised on its presence and its significance, aspects that are not latent or intrinsic to the village, but are essentially arguments that need to be made, based on research into rural historical, economic, and cultural processes, and re-presented in the form of a narrative of the village as a salient, sentient, organic collective. Das writes,

Quite obviously, the self-contained and self-sufficient nature of the village is a mere myth. No village is an island unto itself. This is not only in the field of economics and politics but also in the context of the so-called village community. The many forward and backward linkages which tie the village to the rest of the world exist in fact though not necessarily in the scheme of analysts. These are manifest in the case of Changel. (7)

3. Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule after peaceful negotiations in 1948 and continued to be known as Ceylon until 1972, when, during Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s second term as prime minister, the country became a republic within the Commonwealth and changed its name to Sri Lanka. 4. In his article ‘Things Fall Apart from a Sri Lankan Perspective’, Chelva Kanganayakam makes the case for a fresh look at the rural from a postcolonial perspective. In my own conversations with Chelva, we have talked of the ways in which for Sri Lankan writers in particular, as he puts it in the article, ‘the notion of an idyllic village continues to haunt the imagination’ (6).

187 188 Notes

Through the comparison with Achebe’s iconic and iconoclastic novel, this article reminds us of a postcolonial salience to the village across different cultural and national registers, pointing to an interesting overlap between the African novel and Sri Lankan literary history: ‘Had Things Fall Apart been written in Sri Lanka, using a Sri Lankan village as a backdrop, it would have been a logical sequel to all the political stances that used the village as an important trope’ (4). 5. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s personal secretary and a writer and activist in his own right, writes in his 1938 Preface to HS:

The book was written in 1908, during Gandhiji’s return voyage from London in answer to the Indian school of violence and published serially in the columns of the Indian Opinion edited by Gandhiji. Then it was published in book form [only to be] proscribed by the Bombay Government. Gandhiji has translated the book for Mr. Kallenbach. In answer to the Bombay Government’s action, he published the English translation. When Gokhale saw the translation, on his visit to South Africa in 1912, he thought it so crude and hastily conceived that he prophesied that Gandhiji himself would destroy the book after spending a year in India. With deference to the memory of the great teacher, I may say that his prediction has failed to come true. (Desai)

6. See A Study of History, Vol. 9, where Toynbee places Woolf in the august com- pany of Herodotus, Tolstoy and Victor Hugo, men he rates highly for their excellent ability to weave the literary and the political (9–10). 7. See Gooneratne (5) for the discussion of the novel’s impact on T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land and Judith Herz (81) for the connections between Woolf’s and Forster’s works. 8. A felicitous coinage that I owe to Neil ten Kortenaar. 9. See Utopian Thought in the Western World by F. E. Manuel and F. P. Manuel for a fuller discussion of utopia as it has been variously defined over the centuries in Western philosophical thought since Plato’s Republic. The book suggests that while it is impossible to formulize utopia, it is possible to identify ‘historical constellations of utopia with reasonably well marked time-space perimeters and common elements that are striking enough to permit framing generalizations’ (3). 10. This is William Grassie’s summary of Mannheim’s ideas on utopia: ‘Mannheim notes that utopia not only shares with ideology a noncongru- ence with reality, but that utopia offers a perspective critical of the given reality, thus exposing the gap between what is and an ideal of what should be. Utopia, in challenging the existing order, is always a projection into possible futures; whereas ideology, in legitimating the existing order, is directed toward perpetuating the past. Utopia tends to be the tool of social groups seeking ascendancy; while ideology tends to be the tool of dominant groups seeking to assuage their own sense of failing and justify the inadequacy of the status quo’ (emphasis in the original). 11. Thomas Vettickal writes: ‘It is probably the lack of an effective revolution- ary conception and praxis of renaissance utopia that made Marxists dismiss Notes 189

them as mere “wishful thinking” …. The term utopia is in fact hardly ever used by Marx or Engels other than as a pejorative adjective “utopian”, generally in the terms of “utopian socialism” and “utopian communism”’ (70). 12. See Ainslie T. Embree’s Utopia in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India for a thought-provoking analysis of the religious fractiousness in postcolonial India as a result of the conflict between different visions of religious utopia. In particular, Embree questions the truism that Hinduism is a ‘toler- ant’ religion, arguing that Hindu India’s utopian vision essentially works with a form of ‘encapsulation’ (rather than toleration). 13. And here the reference to ‘whistle’ and ‘bell’ become particularly significant, given Foucault’s lifelong interest in penitentiaries and rehabilitation wards. 14. Gandhi’s emphasis upon ‘Hindu-Muslim unity’ did not often find a con- vinced audience: B. R. Ambedkar, whose opposition to Gandhian politics was multi-pronged, described the 1920–40 period in particular as one of ‘civil war between Hindus and Muslims interrupted by brief periods of armed peace’ (qtd. in Rajmohan Gandhi 5). 15. See Richard Fox’s Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture (112–34) for a compelling discussion of the ways in which Hindutva has ‘hijacked’ Gandhian politics of ‘affirmative Orientalism’. 16. Also known as Hill country Tamils or Up-country Tamils, the Indian Tamils are mostly descendants of workers sent from South India to Sri Lanka in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to work in coffee, tea, and rubber plantations. The Sri Lankan Tamils (or Ceylon Tamils) are descendants of the old Jaffna Kingdom and east coast chieftaincies called Vannimais. Most Sri Lankan Tamils live in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka and in the capital Colombo, whereas most Indian Tamils live in the central highlands or the hill country which are rich in plantations. 17. ‘Dhammadipa’ is literally ‘the island of the Buddha’s Dhamma’, or the truth as taught by the Buddha. ‘Sihadipa’ is literally ‘the island of the Sinhala people’. Hoole writes of the Mahavamsa (a quasi-historical account of the Sinhala dynasty of the kingdom of Anuradhapura dating around the sixth century B.C.E.): ‘the destiny of the island (dhammadipa) and its people (sihadipa) was first manifest in the archetypal gestures of the Buddha himself, whose visits to the island provide the blueprint for the ordering of Lanka’ (100). Thus, the island is pictured explicitly as Buddhist and the chronicler constructs the arrival of the Buddha in Lanka as ‘a paradigm, a foretaste of what must occur throughout the island’s history. That history begins to unfold with the arrival of Vijaya – the progenitor of the Sinhala race – whose advent synchronized with the Buddha’s parinibbana [the final nirvana]. An explicit connection is made between the two kingships …. [Like the Buddha] Vijaya too must conquer the yakkhas [evil spirits too inferior to accept the Buddha’s word]’ (101). It is however, the military king Duttugemunu ‘who is the clos- est realization of the Buddha. Responding to the threat of non-Buddhist Lanka, the Sinhalese hero vanquishes the Tamils – a typological equivalent of the yakkhas, and after restoring the unity of Lanka, he brings glory to the dhamma by the prolific building of thupas [shrines] and the like’ (102). 18. Roberts and Tambiah conceive of the mandala (a concentric diagram having spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism) as providing ‘geometrical, topographical, cosmological, and societal blueprints’ 190 Notes

(Tambiah, Culture 253) for the ‘galactic polities’ of Southeast Asia, which Tambiah defines as ‘an arrangement of a center and its satellites and employed in multiple contexts’ (Culture 258). 19. At the time of writing this book, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) under Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, successfully carried out a military campaign against the LTTE, in which most of the LTTE top brass including the organization’s leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed or captured. The decimation of the LTTE’s hold on the north-eastern parts of Sri Lanka, in effect, signals the completion of a central objective of United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), the coalition to which Rajapaksa’s Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) belongs, and which has since its inception in 1951 campaigned on largely Sinhala nationalist policies. 20. While there were a number of small kingdoms in Ceylon, in the sixteenth century, the important ones were the largely Hindu Tamil Jaffna kingdom in the North, and two mainly Sinhalese and Buddhist kingdoms in Kotte and Kandy. All the kingdoms, except Kandy, were taken over first by the Portuguese (in the 1590s) and then the Dutch (in 1758); Kandy remained independent until it was captured by the British in 1815. 21. I discuss Amarasekera in greater detail in Chapter 4.

1 Hind Swaraj and Rural Utopia

1. Interestingly, in Building our Villages (1952) Kumarappa mentions a rough count of ‘700,000 villages of India’ (32). That is 61, 635 villages or approximately 8.8 per cent of the villages ‘disappeared’ – a number that provokes thought, for very clearly, the village in India has not ‘died’ or been supplanted by the city – given the increased population figures, it is, indeed, a fact, as the 2001 census makes clear, that villages have only become bigger and more populous. 2. For a fuller discussion of the successes and shortcomings of the Panchayati Raj system in India, especially after its initial achievements in some states (Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh), see Singh 818–827. 3. The Panchayati Raj constitutes India’s commitment to decentralization of power and to ensuring the most effective system of local self-governance. In effect from 27 May 2004, a Ministry of Panchayati Raj was created to look into ‘all matters relating to Panchayati Raj and Panchayati Raj Institutions’ (Ministry website). A Panchayat literally means an assembly ( yat) of five ( panch) wise and respected elders, chosen and accepted by the village community. Traditionally, the Panchayat settled disputes among villagers and maintained general peace. Over the years, the numbers and the scope of the Panchayat has expanded to cover members totalling up to 31, according to the size of the village, and to a range of powers designed to create local self-sufficiency and proper governance. Under the 73rd Amendment Act, 1992 (popularly known as the Panchayati Raj Act), a three-tier system (village – block – district) of Panchayati Raj for all States having population of over 20 lakhs (or two million) was devised, the functions of which included the preparation and implementation of plans for economic development and social justice; the levying and collecting of taxes, duties, tolls and fees; the constituting of District Planning Committees to prepare draft development plan for the district as a whole. For a more detailed Notes 191

analysis of the scope and range of responsibilities and powers of the Panchayat, see http://panchayat.nic.in/. 4. From the Sanskrit ashraya which means shelter or haven; hence, ashram is the place of shelter. In all, Gandhi founded seven ashrams, two in South Africa and five in India. 5. This is the opening thesis of Provincializing Europe where Chakrabarty argues that imperialist and third-world histories are inscribed within and projected as so many narratives of transition and (uneven) development, and which, in effect, reproduces European archetypes of social and political modernity: ‘... insofar as the academic discourse of history – that is, “history” as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university – is concerned, “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian,” Chinese,” “Kenyan,” and so on” (27). 6. There are many direct and indirect references to Socrates in HS, including Plato’s Apology to Socrates that Gandhi lists in the Appendix as among the texts to have influenced his thinking. Gandhi has also been read in the line of essential philosophers of the world, and notably, Anthony Parel writes in his ‘Introduction’ to HS: ‘The Gandhi of Hind Swaraj is no doubt the Socrates of modern India’ (35). In this light, HS has been read as a philosophical trea- tise as well as a political manifesto for rural reconstruction. 7. Gandhi was himself editor of the paper Young India, an important tool by which he clarified his ideas and positions to the general public and in which he ran debates with other leaders, notably the famous exchange in 1928 with Nehru regarding purna swaraj or total independence. 8. Much Gandhian scholarship has discussed the ‘modernity’ that Gandhi attacked through his writings, and the kind of counter- or alter-modernity that he championed in his own politics and praxis. Parel can be read as broadly representative of this school of reading Gandhian political strategy: Parel cites James Fitzwilliam Stephen (1829–94), law member of the Viceroy’s council, who in his essay ‘Foundations of the government of India’ (1883) could, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see India’s success only in adopting ‘the essential parts of European civilization. … The English in India are the representative of a belligerent civilization. The phrase is epi- grammatic, but it is strictly true. The English in India are the representatives of peace compelled by force’ (qtd in Parel ‘Introduction’ xx). Parel’s point is that it is only in light of such arguments as Stephen’s that Gandhi’s critique of ‘modern civilization’ can be understood. 9. Gandhi was candid about the many positives he saw in Western modernity: ‘I have been a sympathetic student of the Western social order, and I have discovered that underlying the fever that fills the soul of the West, there is a restless search for Truth. I value that spirit’ (Collected Works 32. 219). He was also however deeply troubled by what he saw as the hierarchical and missionary spirit of rationalism, which he perceived as ‘reason enslaved’ or more precisely reason instrumentalized, and warned against the setting up of false uncritical binaries between reason and religion: ‘Every formula of religion has in this age of reason to submit to the test of reason and universal assent. … But rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is wor- ship of stock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for superstition 192 Notes

of reason but for an appreciation of its inherent limits’ (CW 32. 223). These ‘inherent limits’ of reason are what Jürgen Habermas, in reading Hegel, has also seen, despite understanding reason differently from Gandhi, as among the aporetic traps of European modernity: ‘In Hegel’s view, then, the culture of the Enlightenment appeared as only the counterpart to a religion frozen into positivity. By putting reflection and instrumental rationality in the place of reason, the Enlightenment pursued an idolatry of reason’ (Habermas The Postnational Constellation, 135). 10. See Maharajan 93–8 for a detailed discussion of the ways in which Gandhian political thought incorporated select elements of what he perceived as ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. Gandhi’s idea that tradition and modernity are not antinomies merits further scrutiny, especially since Gandhi’s definition of tradition was not rooted in the merely conventional, as is evident from the many non-conventional practices he championed in the ashrams he founded. In this sense, tradition can be seen as distinct from convention which might be defined as the ritualistic practice of a rule whose veracity and relevance has not been tested by the individual. 11. The concern with defining the nation – in the very midst of nationalist agita- tion – and, indeed, with orienting the gaze not only at the colonizing centre but also inward, towards the philosophy and motivations underlying the struggle for freedom itself, made Gandhi rather unpopular with his contem- poraries, including his arch-supporter and protégé Nehru, whose call for purna swaraj or complete independence overrode Gandhi’s call in the 1928 Congress meeting for a more gradual model of an evolutionary Dominion status. Gandhi then considered India unready for complete independence and his reluctance was read by many as his inability to disengage himself from British loyalty. In HS, Gandhi identifies one of the reasons for his reluctance: his lack of conviction in precisely an ‘India’. Gandhi’s misgivings regarding the nation-state as a representative category of collectivity signalled his unease with the fraught history of the nation-state in Europe, as well as his sense that a highly statist, bureaucratized, top-down government (Nehru’s Soviet vision) would be highly unsuitable to harness India’s teeming differentiæ. 12. The phrase is Ashis Nandy’s from The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (1983). 13. See Manfred B. Steger’s Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power for an exploration of Gandhi’s thoughts on Hindu-Muslim hospitality. In HS, Gandhi proffers: ‘[t]he introduction of foreigners does not necessarily destroy the nation, they merge in it. A country is one nation only when such a condition obtains in it. India has ever been such a country. In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals … if Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in dreamland. The Hindus, Mahomedans, the Parsees and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen and they will have to live in unity if only for their own interest’ (113). Parel underscores Gandhi’s perhaps naïve but certainly abiding conviction that saw ‘Indians as primarily members of a single nation (praja) and only secondarily as members of a sect or a caste or a region, Indians whose humanity would be strong enough to enable them to tolerate difference within the context of a deeper national identity’ (‘Introduction’ xxxi–xxxii). Notes 193

14. See Peter Brock’s Mahatma Gandhi as a Linguistic Nationalist (45–63) for a fuller discussion of Gandhi’s championing of the vernacular languages and the problems identified by Gandhi in the creation of a rashtrabhasha (literally, the language of the country). This was a project he gradually came to eschew in light of his increasing understanding of the aporias inherent in the nation-building project as well as the very real hurdles in cobbling together from out of the several hundred Indian tongues and dialects any one language (Hindustani, as Gandhi first thought) to carry the burden of nation-wide communication. Ironically, Gandhi widely wrote and corresponded with fellow-activists in English and, in his letters, often alludes to his awareness of this irony. 15. A good example of this is Gandhi’s notion of ‘chastity’. In 1906, Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya or celibacy and in HS, he speaks of embracing chastity:

Chastity is one of the great disciplines without which the mind cannot attain requisite firmness. A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emascu- lated and cowardly. He whose mind is given over to animal passions is not capable of any great effort. This can be proven by innumerable instances. What, then, is a married person to do, is the question that arises naturally; and yet it need not. When a husband and wife gratify the passions, it is no less an animal indulgence on that account. Such an indulgence, except for perpetuating the race, is strictly prohibited. But a passive resister has to avoid even that very limited indulgence, because he can have no desire for progeny. A married man, therefore, can observe perfect chastity. (HS 97)

The disquisition redefines chastity but also presents problems at multiple lev- els: on the one hand, Gandhi’s notion of chastity weds the realm of the sexual with his overarching project of swa-raj (self-mastery) even as he insists that chastity is not a state of physical being but one of mental discipline, so that it is possible for married men to observe perfect chastity as well as the unmarried man. As Parel notes, Gandhi is not alone in this line of thinking – Gandhi’s favourite author, Tolstoy, conceived of chastity as a state of mutual fidelity in marriage, thus attempting to accommodate the traditional Judaeo-Christian reading of sexual innocence within the social boundaries of marriage, arguing for chastity within marriage to mean abstention from adultery (57). At the same time, then, as Gandhi attempts to wed together Western and Eastern, he attempts also to re-present the pragmatic face of the well-known Hindu notion of brahmacharya, making available in a Gramscian way an organically-forged intellectualism. Here, however, are also several problems and contradictions: not only is the language rather forgetful of the woman satyagrahi, here is a reading premised on the very divorce of pleasure and sex, arguing for a sexual abnegation not very different from utilitarianism and bourgeois conservatism. How then was Gandhi a radical? Was not his approach to life singularly impracticable? Gandhi’s own brahmacharya at the age of 37 and his thorough embroilment in nationalist politics came at a tremendous personal cost: his eldest son became an alcoholic, causing a heartbroken Gandhi to publicly disavow him as son, and his other sons consistently suffered from an absent father. 194 Notes

And what is the story of Kasturba’s response to her husband’s high decision? Perhaps we shall never fully know – in a candid moment in his memoirs, Gandhi himself admits to the many problems his vow of celibacy presented to his young wife. Quite unselfconscious in his paternalism towards Kasturba, he writes of his first forays into the celibate life with a degree of comic exactitude:

What then, I asked myself, should be my relation with my wife? Did my faithfulness consist in making my wife the instrument of my lust? So long as I was the slave of lust, my faithfulness was worth nothing. To be fair to my wife, I must say that she was never the temptress. It was therefore the easiest thing for me to take the vow of brahmacharya. (The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Brahmacharya I, 205)

Gandhi’s general orthodoxy when it came to women’s rights as women (and not just as mothers, sisters, and wives) is an idea much explored by feminists: as Debali Mookerjea-Leonard puts it, there is ‘both enthusiastic approbation and a persistent anxiety’ in scholarship on Gandhi’s attitude to and views on womanhood (Mookerjea-Leonard par. 5). Madhu Kishwar’s writings on Gandhi are a good example of the twin ways in which feminists have approached his political thought: on the one hand, she notes that Gandhi ‘helped women find a new dignity in public life, a new place in the national mainstream, a new confidence, a new self-view and a consciousness that they could themselves act against oppression’ (‘Gandhi on Women’ 1694); on the other, his politics remained pathologically rooted in an uncon- cern for women’s material realities:

One of the limitations of Gandhi’s thinking … was that he sought to change not so much the material condition of women as their ‘moral’ condition. … He failed to put an economic content into his concept for emancipation. Gandhi failed to realise that, among other things, oppression is not an abstract moral condition, but a social and historical experience related to production relations. He tried changing women’s position without either transforming their relation to the outer world of production or the inner world of family, sexuality and reproduction. (Kishwar, ‘Gandhi on Women’ 1699)

16. Trusteeship is a crucial idea in Gandhi’s program of swaraj. Intimately tied to what he defines as ‘neighbourliness,’ trusteeship forms, for Gandhi, the very essence of interpersonal relationships. Many of Gandhi’s ashrams and social programs were funded by renowned wealthy businessmen such as Jamnalal Bajaj and Ratan Tata, an illustration of the idea of trusteeship, wherein the rich reinvested money in society and converted individual wealth into communal value. For an analysis of the philosophy behind trusteeship and its economic efficacy, see Gopinath 331–44. 17. See Alpana Sharma Knippling for a summary of the Subaltern Studies collective’s scholarship on the ways in which nationalist politics in India in the early 1930s and 1940s remained insular because of its bourgeois under- pinnings: ‘In their studies of the strategic exclusion of the subaltern from Notes 195

national narratives of emancipation, such Indian Marxist historians and theorists as the Subaltern Studies historians and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have pointed out that nationalism, or the organized resistance to imperialism, will itself always participate in “the cultural aspects of imperialism” as long as organized resistance to imperialism is a bourgeois movement. Bourgeois liberatory discourses of nationalism, in other words, cannot function in oppositional ways to discourses of imperialism because they are already aligned with discourses of imperialism, even contained within them’ (Knippling 170). 18. See Parekh 37–46 for a discussion of how Gandhi came to choose the term over others presented to him by friends. Satyagraha in Gujarati as well as in Hindustani (Gandhi’s preferred language of communication with the general Indian populace) means literally ‘the desire/quest for truth’. Gandhi spoke of this desire however as a force: ‘The force implied in this [satyagraha] may be described as love-force, soul-force, or more popularly but less accurately, passive resistance’ (HS 85). See also Dalton (42–66) in ‘Gandhi as Leader’ for the difference between satyagraha and duragraha, its philosophical opposite. 19. In Sanskrit, himsa means violence and ahimsa is its philosophical opposite, non-violence. 20. Gandhi’s decisions were not without its detractors, many of whom held him directly responsible for delaying India’s independence by retracting or calling off the disobedience movements. See Lieten (33–48) for a fuller discussion of the ramifications of Gandhi’s and INC’s decisions; as Lieten writes, ‘For many leftist nationalists, particularly for the youthful communists, [Gandhi’s] truce with the Viceroy [Irwin] was an ominous sign of betrayal at a moment when the nationalist feelings of millions of Indians were set aflame’ (44). 21. To borrow a term from Carolyn Abbate (223). 22. The felicitous phrase is Valerie Traub’s (118). 23. Lieten reminds us here too that this was not unproblematic: ‘Gandhi adopted tactics of winning over both extremes, Williamson [the director of the Intelligence Bureau in the late 1920s] wrote on April 4, and used “tactics not unknown among democratic party leaders framing slogans for an electioneering campaign. I have shown that to the businessmen he held out visions of great wealth, and that, at the request of Jawaharlal Nehru, he advertised an utopia for the ‘teeming millions’. That the one compromise appeared to conflict with the other did not seem to worry him at all”’ (43). 24. See Partha Chatterjee for a provocative analysis of the ‘nationalist resolution of the woman question’ where he posits that by focusing on practices such as sati, early and widow marriages and purdah, colonization involved ‘assuming sympathy with the unfree and oppressed womanhood of India, [through which] the colonial mind was able to transform this figure of the Indian woman into a sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of a country’ (118). By making a public-private binary between the home and the world, the spiritual and the material, the nationalists recast the issue of women’s emancipation as the site for forging cultural identity; the discourse simultaneously made women subjects of debate and objects of change, a kind of spectator politics that allowed the question of women’s rights itself to be transcribed as one about the identity of the colonized nation. 196 Notes

25. See Lieten for a detailed analysis of the ‘dual character’ of the emerging bourgeois leadership of nationalist movements: ‘The leading lights of Indian industry in the early 1930s manoeuvring on the crest of the nationalist movement, were interested in obtaining economic and financial concessions within the imperialist system. Devolution of the ministry of industries to the states under the dyarchy system in the mid-1930s served this purpose. Since at this stage even their anti-colonialism was restricted, it would be illegitimate to refer to their moves behind the scene as an expression of anti- imperialism, i.e., a struggle against international monopoly capital. Such an anti-feudal struggle would, given the political character of the new epoch, endanger the overall position of the big business class’ (46). 26. The Brahmo Samaj and the Prarthana Samaj alone published 37 periodicals, mostly in English and Bengali but a few also in Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, and Hindi, suggesting something of the rise of print journalism and the role it played in fostering a nationalist consciousness. See Vilanilam 60–3 for a fuller discussion of the kind of elite self-fashioning that such print culture spawned in nineteenth-century India. 27. The Bhadralok has been well studied as a remarkably heterogeneous body whose collusions and collisions with the colonial government necessitate the need for reimagining the role of the Bengali intelligentsia in the cultural Renaissance and the nationalist movement of the nineteenth-century. The alienated non-elite, non-bhadralok sections of nineteenth-century Bengal have also been well examined, and have been the focus of the Subaltern Studies school, in whose variegated work, events of extraordinary resistance or ‘revolts’ (Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Shahid Amin) as well as of quotidian dissidences (Douglas Haynes and Gyan Pandey) have been studied as presenting the ‘other’ face of a publics that differed from, subverted, and challenged the narratives of elite nationalism. There is, however, in this powerful ‘subalternist’ argument a general tendency to recast social relationships within dichotomous paradigms of the dominant and the dominated – a formula that allows for an easier designation of subalter- nity, and hence helps understand the complex plays of ‘voice’, resistance and autonomy, but that also obscures those times and spaces of overlap and intersection that characterize all power equations in real life. In this sense, Gandhi’s role in wedding subaltern publics with elite publics is a case in study of a novel kind of collectivization whose fulcrum was constituted not by the familiar variables of class, education, or colonial dispossession, but by a shared ethic of voluntary service, of duty. His ashrams were places one could gain ‘entry by merit [and] exit by choice’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 162), instantiating one kind of civic solidarity and collective action where paradigms of dominant-dominated did not quite hold. 28. For a fuller discussion of this change, see Chatterji 527–73. 29. ‘“[F]unctional integration” of social relations via networks … [meets with] … a “social integration” of the collective lifeworld of those who share a collective identity; a social integration based on mutual understanding, inter- subjectively shared norms, and collective values’ (Habermas, Postnational Constellation, 82). 30. In 1903, in South Africa, Gandhi started a weekly newspaper, Indian Opinion, issued every Saturday in four languages. Three years later Gandhi dropped Notes 197

two of those languages for lack of competent editors, but he himself edited the paper in the other two languages and issued the paper on time until he left South Africa in 1914. From India, Gandhi continued supporting Indian Opinion all his life by providing regular editorial materials, and moral and financial support. In 1919 Gandhi started two weeklies in India, Young India and Navjivan and issued it regularly all his life except for the durations during which the government banned the press. In 1933 Gandhi added a third weekly, Harijan and ran it for as long as he was alive except during the time when the press was ceased. Vilanilam notes that none of these newspapers ‘had high circulations except Young India which at one time printed close to 50,000 copies daily’ (81). 31. See Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s meticulously researched article on Indian Opinion which she says ‘marked Gandhi’s apprenticeship as journalist’ and which ‘played a very significant role in the early years of the twentieth century by fostering the idea of one united Indian community and a national identity.’ 32. Consider, for instance, when Kochrab village was attacked by plague in 1917, the Satyagraha ashram moved to Sabarmati where it renamed itself after the place, only to be renamed once more as Harijan Ashram in 1930 when Gandhi turned his attention to the amelioration of ‘untouchables’, whose emancipation he espoused by calling them ‘Harijans’ or ‘the children of god’. The renaming, however, was not an unproblematic move and B. R. Ambedkar, a fierce opponent of several of Gandhi’s policies, although a lifelong friend, rejected the epithet as condescending and instead favoured ‘Dalit’ (meaning ‘the downtrodden’), the term that has now come to categorize the whole range of discourses and literatures of/about the formerly Untouchable. See Ramachandra Guha’s article ‘Gandhi’s Ambedkar’ published in The Hindu for an interesting analysis of the two leaders. Ashrams similarly at Wardha and Segaon were instituted by the charity of prominent industrialist Jamnalal Bajaj; Segaon was a strategic move because it was a village of outcastes and Gandhi renamed it ‘Sevagram’ or the ‘village of service’ to symbolize his campaign against untouchability. 33. Gandhi’s championing of the Panchayati Raj as a system of grassroots governance was essentially an articulation of a mass-based democracy. Here too, Gandhi resorted to the use of symbols to convey his idea of a democratic India as ‘composed of innumerable villages [where] there will be ever- widening, never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid and the apex sustained by the bottom’ (Harijan, 28 July, 1946; CW 45: 220). For a fuller discussion of Gandhi’s vision of panchayat self-governance, see Terchek 198–227. 34. Gandhi’s own belief in morality paralleled his faith in God, and in HS, he represents his empirical critique of modern civilization within the rubric of ‘godlessness’:

The British Government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilisation, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the Ancient Civilisation, which is the Kingdom of God. The one is the God of War, the other is the God of Love. My countrymen impute the evils of modern civilization to the English people and, therefore, believe that the English 198 Notes

people are bad, and not the civilization they represent. My countrymen, therefore, believe that they should adopt modern civilization and modern methods of violence to drive out the English. ‘Hind Swaraj’ has been written in order to show that they are following a suicidal policy, and that, if they would revert to their own glorious civilization, either the English would adopt the latter and become Indianised or find their occupation in India gone. (Preface to HS 7)

If the idealization of the past and the propping up of false binaries, this time to bolster his argument about the inherent superiority of the Ancient over the Modern, presumably the old Indian over the current English, appear as problematic ways of rethinking History, then the language in which Gandhi voices this simplistic idea compounds the reductiveness in the vision. It is difficult to gauge here how much of such rhetoric is meant for popular understanding (is Gandhi deliberately employing dumbed-down versions of political high-speak?) and how much is precisely Gandhi’s own inability to see the limits of ‘Indianness.’ 35. Gandhi’s admiration for the philosophy in Islam is to be found in his many editorial pieces in Young India and in his speeches. Gandhi’s engagement with Islam – and determination to find shared ground – became more pro- nounced in his last years as India came closer to partition. See McDonough 3–6; 33–8 for a fuller discussion of Gandhi’s observations about Prophet Mohammed, the holy Qur’an, and the Islamic faith. McDonough posits that ‘[Gandhi’s] positive, respectful response to Islam was not a matter of political pragmatism, nor a façade to unify Indians at a critical period of their history, but it went far beyond – to a philosophical understanding of the very essence of Islam’. 36. See Sadan Jha’s thought-provoking and nuanced discussion of the charkha as a ‘semiotic space’ that for Gandhi was also ‘a metaphor of “ancient work ethics” and a symbol of economic and social reaction to the British rule’ (3114). 37. To the question if the charkha was not also a machine, Gandhi avers: ‘I would make intelligent exceptions. Take the case of the Singer’s sewing machine. It is one of the few useful things ever invented, and there is a romance about the device itself.’ (Preface to HS 8). More pertinently, he clarifies: ‘What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on “saving labour” till thousands are without work and thrown on the streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all. I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it is not philanthropy to save labour, but greed.’ (HS 8) 38. ‘The movement of the spinning-wheel is an organized attempt to displace machinery from that state of exclusiveness and exploitation and to place it in its proper state. Under my scheme, therefore, men in charge of machinery will think not of themselves or even of the nation to which they belong, but of the whole human race’ (Young India 17 September 1925; CW 23: 321). Notes 199

39. I am cautious in claiming for Gandhi any form of feminist enterprise here, especially since he remained a traditionalist in the private sphere and neither spoke of nor recommended any real reorganization of familial duties along the lines of gender. See Thapar 85–101 for an extended discussion of the construction of ‘new woman’ for the purposes of Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century and the role Gandhian politics played in such construction. 40. Swadeshi became a popular face of swaraj and bonfires where Manchester cloth and imported English goods were publicly burnt became vivid exam- ples of the reach of Gandhi’s call for supporting all things deshi. 41. A full examination of urban artisans (many of them Muslims) in colonial and postcolonial India is outside the scope of this study, and yet, quite legiti- mately a concern for my argument which traces the ways in which homoto- pian imaginings of India as Hindu nation is often built upon a systemic and discursive blindness to the needs and desires of other members of the polity. The discursive idealization of craft as an expressly rural venture has been cri- tiqued by many scholars, notably Venkatesan (78–95), Greenough (216–48), and Mohsini (191–201). Mohsini writes: ‘a major implication of both the independence movement’s promotion of homespun cloth and the national campaigns’ preoccupation with village industries was that those movements necessarily excluded artisans and crafts that had historically resided in and produced from India’s urban centres’ (196). About the decline of chikankari, a kind of embroidery for which Muslim artisans in Lucknow in particular are famous, Clare Wilkinson-Weber has argued: ‘the success of Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign to enshrine khadi (homespun cloth) as the cloth and costume of choice for Indians over and above more luxurious textiles … may have damp- ened interest in chikan for at least some of its previous consumers’ (292). 42. For a fuller discussion of the role and work of V. D. Savarkar, Gandhi’s contemporary and advocate of Hindutva, their differences, and the history of the formation and growth of the Hindu Right in India see Kapur 119–38 and Jaffrelot 83–93.

2 Beddagama: Dystopia in Ceylon

1. Glendinning cites in her biography of Leonard Woolf his own understanding of his outsiderliness in terms of social class as expressed in Growing: ‘“I was an outsider to this class [that of the Stephens], because, although I and my father before me belonged to the professional middle class, we had only recently struggled up into it from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers”’ (Leonard Woolf 141). 2. All references to Woolf’s letters are from Frederic Spotts’ edition, Letters of Leonard Woolf: 1880–1969. 3. Judith Walkowitz suggests that such a modality of opposition could be extended to bifurcate the city itself: for example, a divided London – East End and West End – ‘took on imperial and racial dimensions, as the two parts of London imaginatively doubled up for England and its Empire’ (26). 4. Wayne K. Chapman writes of Woolf’s essay-writing skills as early as his schooldays at St. Paul’s, London: ‘The end of the English monarchy – and 200 Notes

we hear more about that today – was neither shocking nor unthinkable to Woolf, at 17 or 18 … as early as 1898, Woolf said that constitutional monarchy “is a sham … that the time will come … when there will be no uneducated class … a time when all disguises can be done away with” … This was a very daring position for a schoolboy to take in the context of Queen Victoria’s recently celebrated Diamond Jubilee’ (216). 5. There is a fair amount of disagreement over what qualifies as literary success: while Anindyo Roy suggests that the novel missed critical acclaim until the 1960s when a second visit by Woolf to Sri Lanka resuscitated interest in the ex-colonial officer and his records, a late review in May 1939 in The Daily News extols the novel unequivocally: ‘The Village in the Jungle is not a work of art – it is a miracle in writing. At no time has the author’s more celebrated wife, Virginia Woolf, approached this height in workmanship’ (qtd. in Tansley 46 n.3). In Sri Lanka, the impact of Woolf’s novel has been vast and significant. Yasmine Gooneratne posits that ‘the novel holds a central place in the English literature of Ceylon as the first great (if not quite the first) work of creative art to emerge in modern times from the experience of local living’ (3). 6. I am aware of the argument made by some critics that ‘[t]he Bloomsbury group defies definition’ (Orr 4) and is a heuristic really; that there was, for its own members, no formal sense of an elite club or set. And yet, one might be fairly on stable ground when one reads Virginia’s own description of the ‘group’ in one of her letters to Vanessa: ‘The Bloomsbury hypnotism, I may say, is rank … I can’t help thinking that there is something rather sublime about us. I often feel very sublime myself – Odd, disconnected thoughts of undoubted spiritual beauty come upon me unawares’ (Letters 212). Leonard was a part of the ‘Old Bloomsbury’ which was, as Orr tells us, ‘[t]he Bloomsbury Group as it existed before World War I … and the individuals specifically discussed here include Virginia and Leonard Woolf; Virginia’s younger brother, Adrian Stephen; Lytton Strachey and his baby brother, James, who was, in fact, the tenth of ten surviving in the family – and Roger Fry’ (Orr 4). Leonard knew from his Cambridge days a number of intellectu- als who came to identify themselves with Bloomsbury (especially Roger Fry, G. E. Moore, Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keynes) and with his engagement to Virginia in 1912, he became formally a part of Bloomsbury. 7. Seshagiri writes: ‘Gleefully aware that the exhibit’s focus on non-Western subjects appalled London audiences, [Virginia] Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell attended the Post-Impressionist Ball in March 1911 dressed as savages “à la Gaugin”. ... Vanessa recalls that “we wore brilliant flowers and beads, we browned our legs and arms and had very little on beneath the draperies”’ (qtd in Lee 287), and Virginia writes: ‘Vanessa and I were practically naked’ (Moments 201). The spectacle of the ‘bare-shouldered bare-legged’ sisters at the ball outraged ‘indignant ladies who swept out in protest (Q. Bell 170)’ (64). 8. Stansky writes: ‘On February 7 [1910], a group of friends, including Virginia, boarded the H.M.S. Dreadnought, at that time the most powerful battleship in the world, posing as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite (with darkened skin, fake beards, rented costume, and invented “bunga-bunga” Notes 201

speech)’ (17). They were given a grand tour of forty minutes aboard the battleship. Two days later, when Cole made the hoax public, The First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, had to answer questions in Parliament about the penetration of military security and the insult to the honour of the Royal Navy. 9. See Rajiva Wijesinha for a reading of Woolf’s novel as ‘a basically vulgar and patronizing work’ that ‘appears to justify [colonial] presence in and subjuga- tion of another country … [and] is not in fact concerned in the slightest with the moral problems arising from that presence, either in terms of nations or in terms of the individuals who had, either as ruler or as ruled, to face those problems’ (139; 145). 10. Interestingly, this odd phrase, taken from Our Mutual Friend, was to be the title of what eventually became the first two sections of T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, first published at the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in September 1923. Yasmine Gooneratne suggests the possible verbal and thematic connections between Eliot’s poem, first published in September 1921 by Woolf in the Hogarth Press, and VJ:

His publisher’s Ceylon experience was, of course, known to Eliot, as it was to the other members of Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle, and it is hardly probable that Eliot had not read Woolf’s 1913 novel, reprinted as often as it was before 1921. The fact that The Village in the Jungle is not among the many references provided by Eliot in this most heavily annotated of poems suggests that the borrowing … was as unconscious in fact as it appears to be in the text, the result of an intimate, involuntary communication of impressions, of convictions, and even of images, rather than of quotation consciously and deliberately made. (4)

The concern with voice and point-of-view, as seen in The Waste Land and VJ, may well be another significant connection between Eliot and Woolf. 11. It is fascinating to trace in Woolf’s letters to his friends in London (in the letters to Strachey particularly) the steady jettisoning over time of the ‘in-joke’ in Latin or of Cambridge arcana, so frequent in his earliest correspondences from Jaffna, for the new etymologies he found when he began to learn to read and write Tamil and Sinhala. One such instance is the four-line poem ‘To Ponamma’ (Ponamma in Tamil translates as ‘the golden mother’) that he appends to a letter to Sydney Saxon-Turner dated 12 June 1910. The general rubric is Tamil-inspired but the poem is profoundly ambivalent in a way characteristic of the later works by Woolf:

O Golden Mother, in this embrace of thine Thy fruit of motherhood is bought & sold: The cancerous kiss, the ecstasy is mine, For then thy womb bears gold, Mother of Gold (Spotts 150)

Woolf’s short story ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ written many years later, during the period of his courtship of and engagement to Virginia, revisits the 202 Notes

theme of sexual love, dramatizing the fraught predicament of a Cambridge- educated man seduced by a fair-skinned Burgher prostitute in Colombo who reciprocates his love only sexually, and cannot provide him with any intellectual satisfaction. As often in Conrad, a curious double-edged irony characterizes the man’s attitude to the woman on whom he projects a fantasy of ‘something beautiful mysterious everlasting’ (Glendinning viii). The story’s tragic ending brings to a somewhat expected close a typical Conradian mis- recognition, as ‘the real thing’ sifted through interlocutors and narrators, gets dissipated as so much unreality after all (13–14). In the poem then as well as the short story, as in the 1913 novel, the concern with the real and the ways to narrativize the real is at the heart of the writer’s dilemma. 12. See Jean-Michel Rabaté’s 1913: The Cradle of Modernism for a thought- provoking discussion of the importance of 1913 in the genesis and evolution of artistic modernism. Of particular interest is Rabaté’s discussion of ‘the splintered subject of modernism’ whose emergences in Russian literature occurred in 1913, ‘first in poetry with [Osip] Mandelstam’s Stone, then with Andrei Biely’s Petersburg’ (150–1) and which set the tone for Eliot and Pound’s 1922 efflorescence in England, marking ‘a privileged moment in the history of modernity, a time full of foreboding … [of ] a world that seemed on the brink of chaos and uncertainty’ (216). 13. ‘They were the nicest of people and I was very fond of them, but they would have thrown stones at me or shot me in the back as I walked to the trap, had they dared’ (Growing 193). This is Woolf’s despairing assessment of the situation in which he found himself ordering recalcitrant villagers in Hambantota into various formations that would minimize the spread of rinderpest among precious cattle. The event also occasions another of Woolf’s epiphanic moments where he decries the nature of his imperialist location: ‘the absurdity of a people of one civilization and mode of life trying to impose its rule upon an entirely different civilization and mode of life’ (Growing 193). 14. See Woolf’s description, e.g., of Arab fishermen and Tamils: ‘The Arabs fas- cinated me, both in themselves and because of the contrast between them and the Tamils. The Tamil crowd was low in tone, rather timid, depressed and complaining in adversity. The Arab superficially was the exact opposite’ (Growing 93; my emphasis). Here also, Woolf modifies his descriptions of the Tamils and Arabs (‘the behaviour of the Semitic [as contrasted] with that of the Dravidian’) that he sent in his letters to Lytton Strachey as a contrast ren- dered ‘perhaps somewhat unfairly’ (93). Later, he writes with some dismay of his unpopularity among Jaffna people, but it is tempered with a recognition that his presence as ‘imperialist and proconsul’ was in itself an extraneity that perhaps justified their hostile reaction (111). Throughout then, Woolf remains deeply conscious of how things and people appear and how context decisively shapes both the appearance and the ways in which such appearance is received and understood. 15. ‘Polgahawela. What a soft liquid gentle Sinhalese word this – Field of Coconuts – was when compared with Tamil places like Kangesanturai and Kodikana!’ (Growing 132) 16. See George D. Bond (53–7) for a fuller analysis of the influence of Olcott and Blavatsky upon a young Dharmapa-la. Notes 203

17. Woolf often wrote of his fascination for the contemplative and meditative aspects of Buddhist philosophy, all the more remarkable to him because he was sensitive to the ways in which it provided a stay to its followers who were among the most impoverished people he had ever met (Growing 159). In the novel too, this interest in Buddhism emerges in the descriptions of Buddhist ceremonies that perform a primarily communal function – of bringing people together in a mood of quiet contemplation, of allowing them to recast their struggles and hardships within a larger, cosmic order (162–3). 18. In his belief in the necessity for emphasizing means as well as ends, Woolf is almost Gandhian: in one of his letters, he writes to Kingsley Martin that ‘I cannot pretend to believe what you believe or that any one, individual or government, Jew, Arab, capitalist, or communist, is justified in doing immense evil immediately on the excuse that he thinks it will hypotheti- cally in the distant future prevent a greater evil or produce a very great absolute good.’ (qtd in Leventhal 164). 19. Woolf’s interest in Ceylon’s welfare is well discussed in William Clarance’s essay ‘The Ironies of Federalism’. Clarance, a former UNCHR representative in Sri Lanka, calls Woolf a ‘firm friend of Ceylon’. 20. In an article in The Guardian dated 27 October 2006, ‘Failure Can Aid the Science of Comparative Peace’, Jonathan Steele writes of Leonard Woolf’s precocious and far-sighted ‘view that only federalism could solve the conflict between the island’s two main population groups’. 21. Coomaraswamy was the son of Elizabeth Clay Beebe, an Englishwoman, and Sir Mutthu Coomaraswamy, Tamil member of the Legislative Council and one of the most distinguished Ceylonese of his time (Brow 68). He is most well known for his work on medieval Sinhalese art, but he was also greatly involved with philanthropic causes and social reform in Ceylon. 22. Venkatesan writes of Coomaraswamy’s work on Indian artisans that for him ‘Indian craft was timeless materializing, not an individual’s vision but a community’s, indeed an entire nation’s’ (80).

3 Kanthapura and Khasak: Utopia in Distress

1. Indeed, though he spoke and wrote proficiently in English all his life, Rao championed the need to foster Indian vernaculars and making integral to Indian education the knowledge of indigenous tongues. 2. That such a case is not entirely invalid or outmoded is shown by James W. Earl’s reading of Kanthapura as recent as in a 2007 essay where he draws the comparison between Achakka’s rambling, digressive style and its ‘faithfulness to the Indian narrative tradition’ and whose ‘uneconomical and un-unified’ style he sees ‘famously’ exemplified in the two Hindu epics (111). 3. Sthala-purana, literally in Sanskrit, ‘place-legends’, are Hindu texts that tell of the origins of particular temples and shrines, and are written usually in the vernacular languages. As with other purana, the sthala-purana also tend to be anonymous, with authority for the tales/legends being usually assigned to the keepers of the temple. 4. Significant to Rao’s vision for Indian English is an early sign of what would become a hallmark of his writing: the interest in metaphysics, and in 204 Notes

particular, in the nondualistic traditions of Vedanta philosophy. In the preface to his second collection of short stories, The Policeman and the Rose, Rao writes:

These stories were written mainly in France…. The French literary scene overpowered me .... ‘I will not write like the English,’ I was to write in an introduction to Kanthapura, ‘I can only write as an Indian.’ … Thus to stretch the English idiom to suit my needs seemed heroic enough for my urgentmost demands. The Irish, remember, had done it. ... Joyce had broken in ... giving us sound and symbol structures that seemed made for almost the unsayable. So why not Sanscritic (or if you will, Indian) English? In such a world of linguistic ferment, at that time there were also going on experiments with form. Kafka had broken the crust of realism and given fabled meanings to man’s fears. The Surrealists having abolished the natural as the concrete gave earth wings upwards, and even more, bore blindfold downwards into subter- ranean fires. And suddenly Malraux burst in on the scene, upsetting all intellectual stratagems, and giving the world an international dialect of, as it were, pure gesture and metaphysic meaning. For an Indian therefore who wanted to forget Tagore (but not Gandhi) to integrate the Sanscrit tradition with contemporary intellectual heroism seemed a noble experiment to undertake. (xv–xvi)

5. In an essay, ‘Raja Rao and France’, that appeared in the 1988 volume of World Literature Today which marked the occasion of Raja Rao being awarded the Neustadt Prize, Chantal Curtis writes:

Perhaps at this stage one might ask oneself why, if France is Rao’s intellectual mentor, he who first wrote in Kannada, the language of his native state of Mysore, did not prefer to write in French when he chose a more universal language. As he once mentioned in an interview, it is the rhythm of the Sanskrit epic which seems to him, as a Brahmin, to point to ‘Reality’, the Absolute, a reality beyond the reality perceived by the senses - the only valuable search for an artist. No language can fully accommodate this aim; the expressed is ‘silence’, and expression takes form through the medium of a language. French expression requires a classical form. ‘Had I written in French, I should have played on the harp’ Rao wrote in a letter to a friend. As in Western music, in French the score is written and must follow a certain framework, its value depending more often on the position of the word in the sentence than on the essence. The English language is far more supple, has less precision, and can be molded so as to adapt to a Sanskrit sensibility. (598)

6. Heredia writes: ‘in spite of its pretensions to be nationalist and modern, its militant chauvinism and authoritarian fundamentalism make Hindutva the very antithesis of Gandhi’s Hinduism. Hindutva is in fact but a contemporary synthesis of Brahmanism. This is why in the end the Mahatma [was] Notes 205

vehemently opposed by the traditional Hindu elite, who felt threatened by the challenge he posed’. 7. In the Foreword to Kanthapura, Rao writes memorably, problematically: ‘We, in India, think quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharata has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. The Puranas are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous “ats” and “ons” to bother us – we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling. I have tried to follow it myself in this story.’ 8. Dey shows the ways in which Rao’s stylized storytelling borrows also from the Bible: ‘It was only too natural for Rao to look for the linguistic correla- tive of an orthodox Hindu sensibility in the timeless classic of the English language. The style of the Bible can be more fruitfully adapted to express the concept of an archaic ethos which is presumed to have remained the same for centuries and embodies a lifestyle closer to the ritualistic society found in the presentation of the primitive and close communities of the Biblical time than the complex linguistic strictures of modern English which arise from a mode of life fully defined by the historical, existential present’ (49) 9. (In)famous lines: ‘I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. – But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here [in India] and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education’ (Lord Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education). 10. Harikatha literally means the story of Hari, another name of the Hindu god Vishnu whose eighth avatar (out of ten incarnations) was Krishna. Harikatha is traditionally a composite art form usually comprising of story telling around a religious theme and incorporating various populist idioms of poetry, music, drama, dance, and philosophy. During important festivals or on auspicious days, Harikatha becomes a platform for combining entertain- ment with the transmission of cultural, educational and religious values to the masses. 11. It is perhaps unsurprising that Rao’s biography of Gandhi, published in 1998, was entitled Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi. 12. Oottupulackal Velukkutty Vijayan (1930–2005) was born in Palakkad, Kerala to O. Velukkutty who was an officer in Malabar Special Police of the erstwhile Madras Province in British India. As a child, Vijayan was home- schooled until he was 11. He went on to complete a B.A. from Victoria College in Palakkad and obtained a masters degree in English literature from Presidency College, Madras. Though he began his professional life as a tutor at the Malabar Christian College, Calicut, Kerala and later at the Government Victoria College, teaching would prove to be a short 206 Notes

stint. In 1958, Vijayan joined Shankar’s Weekly as a cartoonist and political satirist, launching what would be an extraordinarily successful career as a cartoonist with such prestigious papers as The Patriot, The Hindu and The Statesman. As his work as cartoonist flourished, Vijayan, with the success of Khasak, continued writing, and although he was to never replicate the thumping success of that first novel, his substantial corpus of six novels and several collections of short stories and essays has ensured him a place in the pantheon of India’s most eminent writers. 13. I will adhere to Vijayan’s English translation of the novel for this chapter; however, I am aware of P. P. Raveendran’s argument that Khasakkinte Itihasam and Legends of Khasak differ in some important details – differences that can be accounted for by Vijayan’s attempt to take the novel to English-reading audiences as well as by the slow but sure change in aesthetic sensibilities of the writer in the 25 years it took him to write and publish the English translation. All quotations from the novel in English are from Legends of Khasak, unless indicated otherwise. 14. To a literary historian, the chronicling of various ‘isms’ and movements often reveals a kind of anti-incumbency factor, which constantly converts challengers into conservatives and creates modernists out of the old guard. Especially in twentieth-century Malayalam writing, as Palakeel says, one finds one has to ‘relabel the progressives as modernists’ (194), and old conservatives often transform into reactionaries. Kesava Dev is a good example of a social realist writer whose idiomatic sophistication deploys several signature modernist features such as irony, juxtaposition, and the use of myth and history in ‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporane- ity and antiquity’ (as T. S. Eliot said of Joyce’s Ulysses in his famous 1923 essay ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’). 15. See Satchidanandan, Raveendran (179–80), in particular, for a discussion of the novel’s unique stylistic innovations in Malayalam. 16. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Kayar (Coir, 1978) is the most famous of such narratives: the over 1000-page long novel deals with hundreds of characters over four generations, ‘bringing back to life an axial period (1885–1971) during which feudalism, matriliny and bonded labor gave way to conjugal life, everyone’s access to a piece of land, decolonization and the industrial revolution of the 1960s’ (Zimmermann). 17. It is interesting to note that in Khasak the two dominant communities of Khasak are the Ezhavars (the largest Hindu community in Kerala) and the Rowthers (a distinctive Islamic community with Turkish ancestry, living largely in Tamil Nadu and Kerala), while in Legends, Vijayan changes these to the Hindus and Muslims – an anxiety-ridden conflation that, as Raveendran says, is accomplished in the narrative ‘only by a violent act of ideological invasion’ (191). The change is, in all likelihood, accounted for by Vijayan’s desire to reach out to as wide an English-speaking readership as he can with the English translation. 18. It is interesting and revealing that Ravi comes to Khasak with the burdens of a past whose tragedies quite deliberately have mythic resonances: there is mention of an illicit affair with his step-mother, remorse over which pushed Ravi into spurning Princeton and joining an ashram, which too he has to leave because of guilt over a ‘sin with a yogini’ (a female devotee). These Notes 207

tenuous details mark Ravi quite early in the novel as a tragic figure of classical proportions, a move that sits in counterpoint with his status also as a modernist hero. 19. As in Woolf’s novel where the jungle and the village are conceived of as mutually conflicting and distinct spaces, in Khasak too, Ravi realizes the need to understand the limits of the village. The Thottiyas are symbolic of the vast numbers of India’s tribal populations who remain on the peripheries of not just the national but also the rural. 20. Raveendran has argued that a literal translation of this significant moment in Khasak departs from the translated English text that appears in Legends. He provides a literal translation of the passage from the Malayalam original with which I concur:

‘What is the truth about him?’ They asked one another. They recalled the spell that the Mollakka had sought to cast on Nizam Ali. It had no effect on him. ‘The Khazi’s truth’, they said, ‘is the Sheikh’s truth’. ‘What then of the Mollakka’s? Is he untrue?’ They were puzzled. ‘He too is the truth’. ‘How can that be so?’ ‘Because truths are many’.

The last line ‘Sathyam palathu’ (Truths are many) can be read ‘as a meta- textual comment on the polyphony implied in the narrative of Khasak … [as] the guiding motto behind the structuring of Khasak’ (Raveendran 181). The change from ‘Truths are many’ to ‘Many truths make the big truth’ is accounted for by Raveendran as Vijayan’s concession to an English-speaking audience and to the change in his own sensibilities as a writer in the twenty- five years that separated the first publication of the novel in Malayalam and its translation into English. Vijayan’s late writings, Gurusagaram (The Eternity of Grace), Pravachakante Vazhi (The Path of the Prophet) and Thalamurakal (Generations) show a mature transcendentalist at work, and in many ways, the English translation – Legends of Khasak – fits better into Vijayan’s late sensibility than the one that was at work when he first wrote Khasakkinte Itihasam in 1969.

4 Koggala and the Reclaimed Buddhist Utopia

1. The struggle for autonomy by Sri Lankan Tamils goes back to the 1950s, and it assumed a militant trajectory with the rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the 1980s. In the early 1960s and ’70s, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) worked for Tamil representation, but an increasing hardliner politics of marginalization and discrimination against the Tamils by successive Sinhala-dominated governments radicalised Tamil youths, and from 1976 onwards, the sectarian discord became more intense under the secessionist agenda of the LTTE. 2. At the time of writing this book, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) under Mahinda Rajapakse’s Presidency, successfully carried out a military campaign 208 Notes

in 2009 against the LTTE, in which most of the LTTE top brass including the organization’s leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed or captured. The decimation of the LTTE’s hold on the north-eastern parts of Sri Lanka, in effect, signals the completion of a central objective of United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), the coalition to which Rajapakse’s Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) belongs, and which has since its inception in 1951 (after Solomon Bandaranaike broke away from the United National Party) campaigned on largely Sinhala nationalist policies. 3. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, for instance, writes ‘The most that can be said of Wijenaike’s style is that it is lucid. It possesses no distinction. The slow, leisurely pace of the narrative is in keeping with the village life it depicts’ (Sri Lankan English Literature 255). 4. What is present-day Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon until 1972. I will be using Ceylonese and Ceylon to speak of the people and the country, since that was the name in currency during a large part of Wickramasinghe’s and Wijenaike’s writing careers, and at the time of the publication of Gamperaliya (1944), and The Waiting Earth (1966), the novels under consideration in this chapter. 5. Preface to The Waiting Earth. 6. Uprooted (2009) by Lakshmi de Silva and Ranga Wickramasinghe (son of Martin Wickramasinghe) is the first translation of Gamperaliya into English and came 65 years after the novel’s publication in Sinhala in 1944. The novel has been previously translated into Tamil (1964) and Russian (1965), and other works by Wickramasinghe, particularly the short stories, have been translated into French and Japanese. Gamperaliya was also made into a highly- acclaimed film in 1964 by Sri Lanka’s leading filmmaker Lester James Peries who retained the Sinhala title. The film contributed greatly to the reputations of Wickramasinghe and Peries. In Sinhala, the title means ‘the transforma- tion of a village’. Interestingly, the salience of the rural and the still-strong purchase of the idea of the village in Sri Lanka is made evident by the fact that the translators have chosen not to entitle the trilogy in English as strict translations of the Sinhala titles, but have gone with Uprooted: The Village, The Village and the City, and The City as the three titles respectively. The Sinhala title, however, remains on the cover page, thus raising interesting questions regarding the ways in which translations steer (English-reading) audience responses to texts (and authors) hallowed in a certain (Sinhala) culture and literary tradition. Given the demographics of the population in Sri Lanka (73.8 per cent Sinhalese; 13.9 per cent Tamil; and the remaining comprised of Muslims, Indian Tamils, Burghers, Veddahs, and others), and the recent- ness of the translation of Gamperaliya into English, it is evident that the novel’s primary readership within Sri Lanka for all these decades was largely Sinhalese. 7. The focus on the walauwe or the feudal manor is a significant difference from the focus in Woolf’s novel on the life of the jungle-people, the Veddahs. In Kanthapura, while the action is centered on ‘the Brahmin quarter’ of the village, Achakka’s narration alludes to the proximity of a diversity of rural castes, subcastes, and occupations. 8. Anagarika Dharmapa-la (1864–1933) was the central figure in the revival of Buddhism in Ceylon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was the founder of many schools and YMBAs in the style of Christian Notes 209

missionary organizations at work in India and Ceylon, the most famous being the Maha Bodhi Society he started in 1891 for the revival of Buddhism in India. He is also credited with creating a brand of Buddhist revivalism in Ceylon that Gananath Obeyesekere has called ‘Protestant Buddhism’ (223) for the ways in which it appropriated Protestant Christian ideals of freedom from institutional oppression and focus on individual action, for use towards a rejection of British missionary work and claims of Christian superiority. In his later years, Dharmapa-la’s anti-Christian rhetoric became particularly stri- dent as he called for a complete rejection of British ideological apparatuses and a return to Buddhist-Sinhala dominance. Neil DeVotta characterizes his rhetoric as having four main points: ‘(i) Praise – for Buddhism and the Sinhalese culture; (ii) Blame – on the British imperialists, those who worked for them including Christians; (iii) Fear – that Buddhism in Sri Lanka was threatened with extinction; and (iv) Hope – for a rejuvenated Sinhalese Buddhist ascendancy’ (78). 9. 1956 saw the passage of the Sinhala Only Act making Sinhala the only official language of the country. The Act was the first step taken by the new government of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to realize one of the main campaign promises that had brought about his landslide victory in the general election. The rationale behind the passing of such a bill was to dislodge English from its position of dominance in the system of bureaucratic governance that the British had put into place. However, it was a fact that the civil services and governmental organizations had attracted vast numbers of Ceylonese Tamils who formed a majority of the work force. Hence, the instatement of Sinhala as the only official language of national governance meant the retrench- ment of many Tamils who were not fluent in the language, and proved to be an official endorsement of a general Sinhalese perception that the British divide-and-rule policy had, in a large part, favoured the minority Tamils over the Sinhalese majority. As Tambiah notes, ‘[t]he law had its intended effect. In 1955 the civil service had been largely Tamil; by 1970 it was almost entirely Sinhalese, with thousands of Tamil civil servants forced to resign due to lack of fluency in Sinhala’ (Ethnic Fratricide 62). The Act proved to be the first real speed bump in the post-colonial nation-building process, and was violently opposed by the Tamil-speaking minority. The passing of the bill was followed by rioting and the first of many violent conflicts between Sinhalese and Tamil nationalist groups. See Tambiah (Leveling Crowds 42–52), in particular, for the importance of 1956 in Sri Lankan history: ‘The year 1956 was historic, because it saw the political success of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, which had remained latent for some time and begun to gain momentum in the early fifties’ (42). 10. 1956 saw the first among many internecine riots to occur in Ceylon: the Gal Oya riots were the first ethnic riots that targeted the minority Tamils in independent Ceylon. The riots started on June 11, 1956 and occurred over the next five days. The Gal Oya settlement scheme was begun in 1949 to settle landless peasants in formerly jungle land. Gal Oya River in the Eastern province was dammed and a tank was created with 40,000 acres of irrigated land. In 1956 the settlement had over 50 new villages where over 5000 ethnic Sri Lankan Tamil, Muslim, Indigenous Veddah, and Sinhalese were re-settled. The Sinhalese made up approximately 50% of the settlers (Tambiah, Leveling 210 Notes

Crowds 83). This fact will become significant when we examine Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth. 11. Brow provides a succinct summary of the ways in which the discourse of political nationalism of the 1970s and popular representations of the Sinhala nation accorded with each other: ‘the present “era of development” was bound to the glorious past of the Sinhala kings and the fate of the village community was linked to the national destiny of the Sinhala people, both being contained within a sweeping narrative of virtue, degeneration and redemption. Crudely summarized, in the time of the ancient Sinhala kingdoms the nation was believed to have been ruled by a succession of heroic and righteous kings who presided over a society composed of prosperous, contented and largely self-sustaining village communities. This social order flourished for more than a thousand years but eventually succumbed to foreign invasion and the imposition of colonial rule. Redemption, however, was now at hand, as national virtue could be regained if contemporary rulers were to emulate the ancient kings by governing righteously and pursuing a vigorous policy of development that would revitalize peasant agriculture and restore the village community’ (68). 12. Much anthropological commentary has focussed on the connections between postcolonial Sinhala nationalist discourse and its strategic use of serviceable Buddhist myths and legends in the construction of Sri Lanka as a Sinhala nation-state. An overarching ideological framework created continuities between Buddhist myths of origin as recorded in the Mahavamsa chronicles of the 6th century B.C.E., linking ‘the Sinhala race’ to the founding father King Vijaya and other heroes such as Dutugämunu whose victory over the Tamil King Elara of Anuradhapura, provided a readily adaptable pattern for the struggle for a ‘Sinhala only’ Sri Lanka. See Kemper (53–978) and Nira Wickramasinghe (88–92) for a fuller discussion of this. 13. See A. Pemadasa’s The Incredible Gam Peraliya (1995) for an extended refuta- tion of the novel’s realism and for a biting critique of Sarachchandra’s 1943 Modern Sinhalese Fiction and the Peradeniya School of criticism whose work Sarachchandra led as Professor of Sinhala at the University of Peradeniya. 14. The literary debates between Wickramasinghe and Sarachchandra (lifelong friends despite their differences) form the heart of Sinhala criticism between the 1940s and 1960s. Sarachchandra argued that modern Sinhala fiction was a genre borrowed from the West and a deliberate break away from Sinhala classical literature: ‘It is a remarkable fact about modern Sinhalese literature that, not only does it owe little to the literature of preceding periods, but that it even rejects the values of that literature and seeks sustenance from sources far removed from the original fount of its inspiration’ (‘Preface’ to An Anthology of Sinhalese Literature of the Twentieth Century v). He considered the greatest limitation of precolonial Sinhalese writing (much of it authored by monks) its inability to be a ‘mirror of life’ (‘Preface’ v), and its preoccupation with otherworldly themes, an aspect that made such narratives inherently non-secular in content and non-realist in idiom. In Sarachchandra’s reading, Sinhalese literature bloomed only when the colonial encounter with the West caused the emergence of writers ‘from among the laity’ and he cred- its ‘a class of western-oriented intelligentsia’, that arose in the nineteenth century, with ‘the true ‘liberation’’ (‘Preface’ v). Wickramasinghe refuted Notes 211

this position and in several essays written in Sinhala and English ‘tried to demonstrate that pre-modern Sinhala narratives were indeed realistic and they did have complex ordinary human life as their subject-matter. He also argued that the modern short story in Sinhala evolved from narratives like the Ja-takas’ (Liyanage). Unlike Sarachchandra, Wickramasinghe read the colonial encounter as a mixed blessing: his own history of Sinhalese literature written in 1948, for instance, ends in the seventeenth century with the ballad-writer Alagiyavanna’s death, and in one brief paragraph, he more or less dismisses ‘modern’ Sinhalese literature of which his own writing would be an integral part: ‘It is only in the present day that the initial chaos result- ing from the contact of our culture with that of the West is beginning to abate. The new literature that is rising from the product of this contact is yet too young to be estimated’ (Landmarks 202). 15. See Liyanage for a fuller exploration of ‘overlooked non-realist elements in the pre-modern [Sinhala] narrative prose ... [and the latter’s role in] contemporary discussions about the nature of post-realism in modern Sinhala literature’ (7). 16. These stories have been remarkably popular in Europe too, a point that Wickramasinghe makes as well (Landmarks 126–7). E. B. Cowell in the Preface to the Ja-taka Stories observes: ‘The same stories may thus in course of their long wanderings, come to be recognised under widely different aspects, as when they are used by Boccaccio or Poggio merely as merry tales, or by some Welsh bard to embellish king Arthur’s legendary glories, or by some Buddhist samana or by some medieval friar to add point to his discourse. Chaucer unwittingly puts a Ja-taka story into the mouth of his Pardoner when he tells his tale of ‘the ryotoures three’; and another appears in Herodotus as the popular explanation of the sudden rise of Almaeonidae through Megacles’ marriage with Cleisthenes’ daughter and the rejection of his rival Hippocleides’. (ix) 17. Among the particular tales Wickramasinghe recounts are the Dharmapa-la Ja-taka where a king incensed by the love he sees his queen shower upon their newly-born son has the child tortured to death, whereupon, the queen dies in grief; the Ksa-ntivada Ja-taka where a sexually dissolute king tortures an ascetic to death for luring his harem-maidens away by his preaching; and the Asa-ntamanta Ja-taka where an old woman enamoured of a young pupil of her son’s attempts to kill her son so she may live happily with her young man. 18. A dominance that, many in Sri Lanka have argued, created, for a large part of the twentieth century, a stranglehold on Sinhala writing: it is not until the 1980s and 1990s, when Gamini Viyangoda’s translations into Sinhala of Gabriel García Márquez and Latin American narratives of magical realism appeared that a perceptible shift in Sinhalese literary criticism and writing occurred. While an earlier generation of writers (for instance, Gunadasa Amarasekera, Madawala Ratnayake, and Leel Gunasekara), under the august example of Wickramasinghe and Sarachchandra, had preferred and drawn inspiration from French and Russian realist traditions, a new generation of writers (such as Simon Navagattegama, Ajith Tilakasena, Daya Dissanayake) emerged in the 1980s and 1990s who were drawn to the post-realisms of the Latin Americans and clued into global literary trends in other languages such as English, where the writings of Salman Rushdie (among others) had begun 212 Notes

to transform literary landscapes. Interestingly, the impact of much post- realist fiction on the emergent Sinhala writers was also felt in a rediscovery, as it were, of those non-realist and anti-realist aspects of classical Buddhist literature that had been overlooked and marginalized by the dominant realism of Wickramasinghe and the generation of writers inspired by his writing and by the criticism of Sarachchandra. See Liyanage for a detailed discussion of this new generation of writers whose work turns ‘to classical and folk Sinhala literature for models of alter-realistic narrative’ (10). 19. The story of Gamperaliya is set in Wickramasinghe’s childhood village of Koggala, about 120 kms south of Colombo, in the first decade of the twentieth century (1904–1910, to be exact). The declining walauwe or feudal manor, Mahagedara, is at the heart of the novel. The walauwe belongs to Muhandiram Kaisaruwatte and his wife Matara Haminé, their daughters Anula and Nanda, and son Tissa. The novel’s plot is quite straightforward as it follows the fortunes of the Muhandiram and his family. The love interest between Nanda and her lower-class English tutor Piyal provides the main line of action. When Nanda refuses Piyal’s proposal of marriage in the name of family honour, he leaves Koggala for Colombo where he succeeds in building a strong business. Nanda, in the meantime, marries Jinadasa who is of her class and background but with whom she is forced to lead a life of thrift until, forced by penury, Jinadasa leaves the village to make it good in the far-away town of Bibile. There, he falls ill from malaria and refuses to return to Koggala for six years, trying his hand at various businesses, only to fail and become a sick itinerant. The Muhandiram passes away, the walauwe faces collapse, and the lives of Haminé, her daughters, and Tissa who studies in Colombo, become increasingly impoverished. Piyal’s love for Nanda draws him constantly back to the village and in the six years that Jinadasa is away, he and Nanda become close, as he also provides financial help to Nanda’s family. Nanda receives news of Jinadasa’s passing away, and finally acquiesces to Piyal’s second proposal of marriage. They marry and begin a new life together, until one day Nanda receives a telegram that her husband has taken gravely ill in a distant village. On rushing to the place, she hears he has passed away. Still in shock, she goes to the mortuary where she finds not the body of Piyal, as she had feared, but that of Jinadasa. She completes the final rites of the dead and returns to her life with Piyal and the two are finally reconciled. 20. In his poem ‘Colonial Cameo’, Regi Siriwardena remembers the day his mother, who only spoke Sinhala, ‘the servant’s language’, took him to school and said ‘goodbye’ in that tongue, to the amusement of his English-speaking classmates:

My mother pretended not to hear that insult. The snobbish little bastards! But how can I blame them? That day I was deeply ashamed of my mother. Now, whenever I remember, I am ashamed of my shame. (12)

21. Kanthapura’s memorable opening line goes thus: ‘High on the Ghats is it, high up on the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian seas, up the Notes 213

Malabar coast it is, up Mangalore and Puttur and many a centre of carda- mom and coffee, rice and sugarcane’ (1). Not only is the enjambed prose a unique experiment in Indian English, Kanthapura the village is, unlike remote Koggala, firmly in the midst of centres of colonial traffic of spices and other commodities. 22. See Tambiah (Buddhism Betrayed 72–3) and Spencer (285–6). 23. That such a reading is not a thing of the past is reinforced by a recent fea- ture on the novelist where much acclaimed writer-director Tissa Abeysekara writes of a part of the village Koggala converted into a museum:

Within the grounds is the Martin Wickramasinghe Museum of Folk Culture. The museum has a wonderful collection of artefacts and memo- rabilia which recreate – for those familiar with his works as well as the uninitiated – the world of peace and harmony which forms the key theme of his literature. The artefacts speak to us of a world totally integrated and at peace with the environment. The hand crafted kitchen utensils, the clay and earthenware vessels in which wholesome food was cooked over wood fires, the loft canopying the hearth to filter the wood smoke, the tools used for cultivating paddy fields, the mats, bullock carts and other conveyances; all the utensils of an unhurried way of life rooted in a simple agrarian economy. ... Here agriculture was tinged with commerce, the ploughman lived side by side with the fisherman, and life did not begin and end within boundaries, but opened out towards distant horizons across the sea. It’s a world now confined to memories and to the written page accessible to those who can read the language in which Sri Lanka’s greatest writer in modern times wrote. (Abeysekara)

24. This is well known Sinhala writer Gunadasa Amarasekera’s summation of Wickramsinghe’s life and work. Amarasekera (b. 1929) is a prominent Sinhala writer, poet, and cultural critic who, along with Nalin de Silva, became popular (and controversial) for the Jaathika Chinthanaya (national consciousness) movement, which dominated Sinhala intellectual debates from the mid-1980s onwards. A form of Occidentalism impelled Amarasekera’s first formulations of such consciousness (positing itself as anticolonialist but also oppositional to all ‘Western’, wijathika or foreign, thinking) and projected a Sinhala-Buddhist ‘umbrella culture’ into which all minority cultures could be assimilated (Hennanayake 170). While Amarasekera may have meant such consciousness to represent a uniquely Sri Lankan ‘liberal form of multiculturalism’ (Hennanayake 169), it is also true that extreme Sinhala nationalist formations such as the Sihala (also Sinhala) Veera Vidhana (SVV), National Movement Against Terrorism (NMAT) and Sihala Urumaya are the progeny of the ideological groundwork laid by Amarasekera’s school of thought. As a litterateur, Amarasekera has routinely invoked the example of Martin Wickramasinghe, and for his own writings, is widely acclaimed as the doyen’s worthy successor (Seneviratne). 25. See, for instance, ‘[t]he elders did not join the young people [in eating]. They knew that their presence would dampen the spirited exchanges and gibes, and flow of jokes and laughter of the young folk. Young village folk feel that 214 Notes

it is improper to engage in repartee and tease each other in the presence of their elders’ (7). 26. The two servants of the household, Sada and an unnamed younger boy who is a new recruit, have a differential relation among them that comes from Sada’s seniority as a servant in the household as well as his advanced age. Sada is described ‘as one of the family’ and so receives superior clothes at the New Year, while Nanda kindly gives the younger servant a gift of a packet of fire-crackers to make up for the latter’s inferior clothes. Neither joins the family in eating or other public activity; however, as the fortunes of the family decline, Nanda and Anula begin to rely on Sada increasingly, and the old servant becomes less amenable to staying within his boundaries. 27. Sada’s unexpected presence and injunction to go into the house, while Nanda and Piyal are arguing on the verandah are explained by Nanda thus: ‘it must be because you’re a young man!’ (17). 28. The concern with demarcating the limits of women’s social and sexual behaviour goes back to Dharmapa-la’s injunctions upon dress and names as the signifiers of Sinhala Buddhist dissidence. Hewamanne writes: ‘[r]idiculing both men and women for imitating western fashions, Dharmapa-la advocated the Indian sari for women and the cloth and banian [upper vest] for men. ... Dharmapa-la’s mother was among the first women to follow his advice, and the new dress soon caught on. The same happened when Dharmapa-la advocated name changes. Deciding that people should first be decolonized within the cultural domain, he wanted Sinhalese to shed their European names and take up ‘Aryan’ Sinhalese names. He himself started this trend by changing his given name, Don David, to Dharmapa- la. His close associates did the same and a mass name-changing movement followed in both urban and rural areas’ (30). 29. Nanda’s mother Matara Haminé is a good example of the kind-hearted but generally vacuous village woman, who gets duped by unscrupulous men and needs her husband to rescue her and the family. None of the women characters are exceptional in any way except as carriers of their patriarchal lineages or as good, virginal girls. Kathrina and her daughter, Laisa, (never more than types or cautionary tales) who deviate from the norm are seen by the women of the village as coquettes, and are therefore vulnerable to ridicule and ostracism until they mend their ways. 30. This kind of a lexical and ontological blurring has often marked the rhetoric of political Sinhala nationalism per se: for instance, when President Jayawardene became President of Sri Lanka in 1978, he exclaimed: ‘We have had an unbroken line of monarchs from Vijaya to Elizabeth II for over 2,500 years ... and now myself, the 306th head of state from Vijaya in unbroken line’ (qtd in Kapferer 85). Kapferer’s point that Sinhala politicians are not manipulating the masses, but ‘share an ontological ground with them’ (81) puts into perspective, indeed, Podi Singho’s constant identification of his own needs as that of his family’s. 31. Much work has been done on the uneasy relationship between nationalism and feminism. Tanika Sarkar in a conversation with Urvashi Butalia says: ‘[w]omen will always be incomplete national subjects. This is because a nation is a territorial concept. Land is central. Yet women often, and most women in India certainly, have no right to land. These two things, home Notes 215

and land, will never belong to them’ (Butalia). As Anne McClintock also points out, ‘[m]ale nationalists frequently argue that colonialism or capitalism has been women’s ruin, with patriarchy merely a nasty second cousin destined to wither away when the real villain expires. Yet nowhere has a national or socialist revolution brought a full feminist revolution in its train. In many nationalist or socialist countries, women’s concerns are at best paid lip service, at worst greeted with hilarity. If women have come to do men’s work, men have not come to share women’s work. Nowhere has feminism in its own right been allowed to be more than the maidservant to nationalism’ (5).

5 Rethinking the Binary: Rural Heterotopia

1. Interestingly, the paradoxes and frustrations of return do not bother Piya as much as they do Anil – this may well be a function of a different time and place: five years after Anil’s Ghost, a variety of novels by expatriate Indians ( Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake is a paradigmatic example) and films (Ashutosh Gowariker’s suggestively titled Swades had enormous success among the non-resident Indian diaspora) have dealt with the theme of return to India. Invariably, such writings and cinema have invoked the need to recommit oneself to the nation, its people, and typically, its villages. 2. Running After the Family (1982) is set in Sri Lanka and is largely a personal memoir based on two trips Ondaatje made in the late 1970s. In 1998, Ondaatje published Handwriting, a collection of poems that ‘returns’ to the place of his birth and early life. Neither work concerns itself, however, with the ethnic conflict in the country, focusing instead on different aspects of Sri Lankan culture and the writer’s personal memories of the place and people. 3. ‘Sailor’ is the name Anil and Sarath give to the remains of a body they find in a grove of monks in Bandarewela, a government reserve, and that does not date from prehistoric times as the other remains do. Sailor is thus a contemporary who must be accounted for and in whose identity Anil foresees a clear path to indicting the government for its brutality and extra-constitutional acts. The quest to find Sailor’s identity is ostensibly the main plot of the novel but, as is quite usual in an Ondaatje work, a bricolage effect makes the narrative anything but a straightforward quest fiction. The novel is part-memoir, part-Bildungsroman, part-detective story, part-travelogue – all of which makes it difficult to pin down the work’s (and its creator’s) political standpoint. 4. In a book as recently published as 2008, Yumna Siddiqi argues by way of a memorable image that ‘[t]o be a postcolonial subject is to be an unbidden guest at the table of modernity. Its fruits are spread delectably before one: technological prowess, economic development, political freedom. Yet, as one reaches for these, one feels a hint of queasiness, for they evoke the postcolonial double bind: a desire to embrace the modern, but the knowledge that the dialectic of modernity has entailed the subjection of the colonized. What elements of the postcolonial contract entail the continuance of this subjection by other means? Is the postcolonial version of modernity inevitably marked as belated and inauthentic? Doubts about the salubriousness of the meal are compounded by the uncomfortable sense of being unwelcome—superficially, 216 Notes

there is good cheer, a slap on the back, but this bonhomie is tinged with suspicion and arrogance. One will eat at this table if one is lucky enough to squeeze in among the habitual diners, but not without misgivings’ (141). Siddiqi’s reading of Ghosh’s novel The Circle of Reason is thus attuned to ‘the ambivalences of postcolonial modernity’ in it. Her position is that, even as ‘Ghosh emphasizes the relation between Enlightenment rationality and police … [and] underscores the repressive aspects of colonial rationality that linger in the structures of postcolonial government … At the same time, Ghosh’s novel stages a succession of utopian projects that bear the imprint of Enlightenment reason. It points to the liberatory dimensions of reason and valorizes the characters’ pursuit of these Enlightenment projects’ (141). Such a reading is, in many ways, characteristic of a signature move in some postcolonial criticism where a curious kind of critical ‘nervousness’ continues to present extenuations of and elaborate apologias for literary representations of postcolonial modernities as always already derivative discourses, where the targets of implicit and explicit condemnation are invariably Europe and the cognate postcolonial nation-state respectively. In such readings, novels like those of Ghosh, at their best, present ‘ambivalences’ and, at their worst, only so much shadow-play. This is not to say that the exploration of ambivalences in postcolonial novels is itself wrong, but it is to recognize that the critiques Ghosh provides in his novels – certainly in The Hungry Tide – are tied also to a tacit understanding of modernity in the post-colony as being not only the leftovers from a European buffet. An ab initio understanding of modernity in postcolonial novels as the burnt-out end of someone else’s cigarette or as the trail of gas behind a shooting star (one might go on with the analogies) does not do justice to novelists like Ghosh and Ondaatje in whose writings there is an insistent attempt to understand such modernity on its own terms, not just as a by-product or lingering after-effect of colonialism. I think here, as a counter to Siddiqi’s reading, Tapan Raychaudhuri’s instructive caveat in his book Europe Reconsidered: ‘This book is structured around one central argument. It questions the adequacy of paradigms such as westernization and modernization and suggests instead an alternative concept, that of ... phenomena which do not represent the synthesis of two cultures or any simple importation of artefacts from one culture into another. The encounter generated unpredictable responses, often complicated by the colonial experience. The cultural encounter with the West is an analytically distinct phenomenon from the colonial encounter though the two over- lapped and influenced each other. One reviewer of my recently published volume of essays stated that I treated all cultural development in nineteenth- century India as a product of the encounter with the West. Nowhere have I stated or implied any such thing. On the contrary, it is my view that the encounter with the West resulted in often unexpected developments which acquired a measure of autonomy’ (Preface xvii–xviii). In my own readings of Ghosh’s and Ondaatje’s works, I have found them remarkable writers because they exhibit a willingness to consider modernity in India and Sri Lanka as (also) autochthonous, self-autonomous phenomena and in the wake of British colonization, as a mutable, self-evolving, and inherently complex process not always identifiable with or denominated by Europe’s agon, as if trapped in that unending epic battle of Harold Bloom’s theory of The Western Notes 217

Canon whose story is already known because ‘the larger always swallows the smaller’. Indeed, as Ghosh and Ondaatje suggest by reorienting their interest in the rural (so often not a guest at the table of modernity, whether European or otherwise), the critical genealogies of modernity and its aftershocks have to be problematized from outside of the registers of the urban and the metro- politan, and it is from the perspective of the rural too that perhaps a renewed understanding of the utopian in postcolonial societies can and needs to be made. 5. See Chakrabarty (Habitations 130–1) for a stimulating discussion of the importance of travel by boat in Tagore’s and Nirad Chaudhuri’s encounters with the Bengali village in early twentieth-century India. The boat allowed for the construction of – what one might simply call – perspective, allowing for the evocation of an idyllic pastoral countryside but from a distance that was both physical and ideological. 6. The evidence that for Ghosh the trope of the dynamic village is a matter of abiding interest can be found in the remarkable essay (first written in 1985) ‘The Imam and the Indian’ which provided for James Clifford the animus for his insightful work Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997). Ghosh writes in that essay of the ethnographer’s surprise discovery of historical and cultural dynamism in one of the most remote corners of Egypt where he had gone hoping to find ‘on that most ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge. Many of them had worked and traveled in the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, others had been in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, others to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. And none of this was new: their grandparents and ancestors and relatives had traveled and migrated too, in much the same way as mine had, in the Indian subcontinent – because of wars, or for money and jobs, or perhaps simply because they got tired of living always in one place. You could read the history of this restlessness in the villagers’ surnames: they had names which derived from cities in the Levant, from Turkey, from faraway towns in Nubia; it was as though people had drifted here from every corner of the Middle East. The wanderlust of its founders had been plowed into the soil of the village: it seemed to me sometimes that every man in it was a traveler. Everyone, that is, except Khamees the Rat, and even his surname, as I discovered later, meant “of Sudan”’ (5–6). 7. To adapt a word from Chakrabarty (136).

Conclusion

1. In an interview with Rediff.com, dt 16 October 2008. 2. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) was English director Danny Boyle’s multiple Oscar- winning film on the life of slum-dwellers in Mumbai. The central characters of the story are the urban poor of India and the film follows the rise of one such character through the usual suspects of India’s recent fame (or notoriety) on the world stage: call centres, Bollywood, quiz-shows, reality television, 218 Notes

tabloid journalism, religious riots, and so forth. A prominent theme in the film is the attribution of a zesty, amoral (even immoral) energy to India’s rising underclasses, a theme that allows for a subversion of the pieties and hypocrisies of official, educated, globalizing India. The film, despite its many strengths, is a good example of the continuing appeal of essentializing por- traits of India, and in the film’s eventual retreat into kitsch, one sees very much alive the spectre of an Orientalized representation. 3. ‘India Shining’ was the political slogan of the then governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during the 2004 Indian general elections. The slogan encapsulated a general feeling of economic optimism in India after a bountiful monsoon in 2003 and as part of the largely Hindu right-wing party’s attempt to pro- mote India internationally. BJP eventually lost the 2004 elections and many editorials suggested that the slogan was partly to blame, especially consider- ing issues such as rural poverty, urban unemployment, and rising inflation. The Congress Party became the biggest party in Parliament after a campaign pledging to improve the plight of India’s poor. The negative assessment of the ‘India Shining’ campaign was echoed after the election by former Deputy Prime Minister and a major BJP ideologue, L. K. Advani, who said the catch- phrase was ‘not wrong … but not appropriate. … In retrospect, it seems that the fruits of development did not equitably reach all sections of our society’ (‘BJP admits “India Shining” error’). Bibliography

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Abeysekera, Tissa 23, 133–4, 171, dystopia 3–33, 60, 86, 89, 131–2, 186, 213 146, 163–86, 199, 222 Achebe, Chinua 65–6, 79, 188 Amarasekera, Gunadasa 31, 152, Eliot, T. S. 63, 68, 74, 97, 105, 115, 158, 190, 211, 213, 229 188, 201–2, 206 Anil’s Ghost 16, 27–33, 163–5, 180–5 Foucault, Michel Beginning Again 60, 62 and heterotopia 11–16, 23, 163–4, Bhabha, Homi 47 170–5, 180, 185, 189 Bloch, Ernst 10, 14, 16 metropolis 15, 35 Bloomsbury 5–6, 60–9, 70–6, 89–90, The Order of Things 11–12, 180 97, 200–1 ‘Of Other Spaces’/‘Des Espaces Boehmer, Elleke 62, 64, 76, 92 autres’ 11–15, 164, 171–5, 180 Bringing Tony Home 185 and utopia 12–17 Buddhism 4, 25–8, 83–5, 138, 150, Forster, E. M. 5–6, 42, 60, 63, 67, 81, 189, 203, 208–9 95, 188 Buddhist nationalism 29, 85–6, 209 Burrows, Victoria 163, 170 Gamperaliya/Uprooted 4, 16, 18, 27, 29–30, 34, 91, 133–49, 157–61, Ceylon 4–6, 24–31, 60–91, 133–49, 208, 212 158–62, 185, 187, 189, 199–209 Gam Udava/Village Awakening 135 postcolonial 63, 133, 136, 162, 173 Gandhi, Mohandas and village 28–9, 59, 70, 74, 80–91, and Leonard Woolf 7–8, 59, 62 135, 146, 158–62 critique of modernity 7, 38, 43 and lost utopia 28, 134–5, 141, and ashram 3, 17, 19–23, 36, 146, 150 46–57, 93, 115, 121, 180, Ceylon Diaries 5 191–7, 206 Changel 20, 22, 187 Hind Swaraj 4, 6, 19, 35–59, 191, City of Rains 184–5 198 colonialism, colonial and Hinduism 26, 42, 103, 189, critiques of 7, 37, 39–40, 44, 63–9, 204 89–96, 161–2 and Hindutva 18, 58, 103, 189, post-Independence India 2, 17–20, 199, 204 30, 100, 107, 113, 122, 138 ‘Quit India Movement’ 95 Conrad, Joseph 5, 62–6, 71–6, 81, and the public sphere 46–55 89, 202 and rural life 19–20, 27 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 18, 28, and utopia 7, 18–30 87–91, 134–5, 203 Ghosh, Amitav 16, 21–3, 32–4, 163–86, 216–17 Das, Arvind 20, 22, 187 Goonewardene, James 30–1, 132, Dass, Nirmal 184 152 Dharmapala, Anagarika 7, 18, 25, 31, Growing 5, 62, 67, 83, 89–90, 199, 85–9, 134–5, 202, 208–11, 214 202–3

232 Index 233

Heart of Darkness 66, 71, 73 Ondaatje, Michael 16, 21–33, 163–86, heterotopia 3, 11–23, 32–4, 160–86, 215–17 215 The Order of Things 11–12, 180 and Foucault 11–23, 163, 170–80 Orientalism 34, 73, 104, 182, 189 and rural 3, 21–34, 160–82 Other 9, 41, 42, 44, 65, 69, 71–2, 75, Hind Swaraj 4, 6, 19, 35–59, 191, 91, 183 198 and ‘selving’ 16, 163, 167, 170 homotopia 3, 8–9, 16–28, 91, 94, ‘Of Other Spaces’/‘Des Espaces 106, 118, 121, 127, 140–86 autres’ 11–15, 164, 171–5, 180 The Hungry Tide 16, 22–4, 32–4, A Passage to India 66 163–82, 216 and heterotopia 163–82 postmodernism 24, 65, 113 ‘ultramodern’ 113 Islam 21, 38, 41–2, 56, 116, 118–28, A Quiet Place 132 162, 198, 206 The Journey Not the Arrival Matters 62 Rao, Raja 3, 17–22, 58, 74, 93–112, 116–41, 161–77, 203–5 Kaliyuga 133 Ricoeur, Paul 10, 16 Kanthapura 4, 16–23, 34, 93–136, rural 176–7, 203–13 and cosmopolitanism 23, 33, 177, as Gandhian village 95–104 186 and homotopia 4, 16–17, 21, 94, as dystopia 3, 7–33, 86–9, 131–2, 106, 118–27, 161, 177 146, 163, 165–86, 199 and modernism 104–12 as heterotopia 3, 11, 14–32, Kipling, Rudyard 5, 76, 81 160–86 utopia 4, 7, 21, 30–59, 85–94, 157, Legends of Khasak/Khasakkinte 190 Itihasam 17, 20–4, 34, 93–130, 161–3, 178, 181, 186, 203, Said, Edward 34, 42, 64–9, 180–2 206–7 sarvodaya 3, 17, 106 and Gandhi 21, 93, 112–8, Sinhala 127–9 Buddhist 1, 3–7, 18, 25–31, 83–8, and Malayalam language 112–29 132–59, 189–90, 207–14 Levitas, Ruth 9–16, 179–80 ideal Sinhala-Buddhist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam 8, woman 29–30, 147–59 11, 30, 32, 190, 207–8 literature 3, 5, 18, 31, 132–40, 211–12 Mannheim, Karl 9, 16, 162, 188 nationalism 7, 16, 18, 25–32, Marxism 10, 113, 125, 129 85–119, 132–59, 162–4, 189, Meyerowitz, Selma 61–2 209–14 modernism 24, 59, 64–92, 97–129, Sirisena, Piyadasa 18, 135 202 Sobti, Krishna 22–4, 171 and the flâneur 109, 117, 122–6 Sowing 62, 84 Moments of Being 61 Spivak, Gayatri 164, 195 More, Sir Thomas 9–10 Strachey, Lytton 5, 60–3, 73, 76, 200–2 Nehru Stories Of the East 62, 72 and Gandhi 6, 20, 37, 44, 191–2 swaraj 1, 3, 17, 21, 36, 50, 56, 94, and modernization 54–5, 107 160, 162, 192, 194, 199 234 Index

Tamil and utopia 3–60, 85–92, 140–86 Eelam 8, 26, 119, 207 and women 29, 102, 137–59, 162 literature 20, 31–2, 114, 131 The Village in the Jungle 4–7, 28, unrest in Sri Lanka 8, 25–32, 54, 62–92, 112, 200–1 131–69, 207–10 and modernism 63–84, 87–92 The Third Woman 132 The Waiting Earth 27–34, 149–86, 208, 210 utopia 3–60, 85–92, 140–86 The Waste Land 74, 188, 201 and Gandhi 7, 18–30 The White Tiger 183–5 and heterotopia 3, 11–23, 32–34, 160–86, 215 Wickramasinghe, Martin 34, 7, 18, and Levitas 9–16, 179–80 27–30, 91, 132–59, 161–7, ‘lost utopia’ 28, 134–5, 141, 146, 208–13 150 in comparison with Leonard and women 29, 102, 137–59, 162 Woolf 4–7, 18, 27–9, 60–92, 134–5, 146–9, 161–2, 208 Vijayan, O.V. 17, 21, 22–4, 93–130, Wijenaike, Punyekante 18, 27–31, 161–86, 205–7 132, 149–59, 161–2, 186 village Williams, Raymond 8 and imperialism 7, 62–8, 89, Woolf, Leonard 4, 18, 27, 60–92, 140 97, 108, 133–5, 140, 161–2, and dystopia 3–33, 60, 86, 89, 199–203 131–2, 146, 163–86, 199, 222 Woolf, Virginia 4–5, 60–8, 74–6, and heterotopia 3, 21–34, 105, 200–1 160–82 and homotopia 3, 8–9, 16–28, 91, Yuganthaya 133 94, 106, 118, 121, 127, 140–86 Zindagi Nama or Life Story 22, 24