An Attempt Has Been Made in the Present Thesis to Study and Analyse Four Selected Fictional

Summary

An attempt has been made in the present thesis to study and analyse four selected fictional works of the novelists of the Indian-diaspora from the specific angle of racial discrimination and problems faced by the Indian immigrants settled in the affluent countries of the west such as England, Canada and particularly America. At this point the literature of the Indian-diaspora requires a little bit elaboration and domain assumptions. The term ‘diaspora’, originally used for the Jews’ dispersal from their homeland, is now applied as a metaphoric designation to all expatriates, refugees, exiles and immigrants, whose lives, identities, languages and experiences have been altered by the paradigms of bilingualism, biculturalism, geographical dislocation and multiple relocation. The Indian-diaspora is one of the most important demographic dislocations of modern times, and is increasingly becoming representative of a significant force in global culture. It is perceived to belong to two distinct phases, for convenience, labelled ‘settler’ and ‘visitor’ diaspora by Makarand Paranjape akin to

Settler and Invader colonies as dubbed by Maxwell. The first category, propelled by the colonial agency, comprises forced migrations affected by slavery or indentured labour or cataclysmic political devastations such as the Partition. The second, a more recent category, comprises the voluntary migration of professionals, academics, artists, musicians, businesspersons and allied fortune-seekers. The people belonging to the second category of Diaspora go for the pot of gold and high fun but in return get only a hyphen and split identities and face numerous problems including racial discrimination in countries such as England, America and Canada. The main thrust of the present doctoral investigation is laid on the postmodern transnational dislocation and relocation. Diaspora writers are deeply attached to their centrifugal homeland and yet they yearn for belonging to their current abode. They are caught physically between the two worlds and this double marginalization by both their root culture and the host culture negates their belonging to either location. This condition of being ‘unhomed’ is associated further with alienation, a desire to reclaim the past and yet revolt against it, the inability to move out, and the urge to show solidarity with the homeland but having unwillingness to threaten relations with the host country.

For Indian immigrants diaspora is an outcome of late modernity and global crossing of boundaries, and borders for them, is an emancipatory condition. But those who have settled there, realize that it is not only for them to adopt the host country but also for the host country to adopt them. The countries to which Indians have migrated officially follow the policy of multiculturalism or ‘Salad Bowl’. But a close study of the Indian-diaspora novels shows that Indians are in real life subjected to racial discrimination, exploitation, marginalization and suffering. They are faced with an acute sense of identity. There is no doubt that all diasporic writers share the trauma of displacement as a common history, whether first hand or through their experiences.

Those who pull up from their roots have a tendency of nostalgia towards the culture of their ancestral land which takes on an idealized shape in their minds. Though diasporans, generally, may not want to return to their homeland, there is a conscious or subconscious attachment to its traditions and customs. Parallel to this runs a strong need to belong, to feel wanted by the adopted culture and the host country. 3

Indian diasporic writers have produced novels based on their raw and lived experiences. Despite being in the west, they cannot disown their national identity, racial identity and the colour of their skin. In the adopted countries, be it England, America,

Canada or Australia, the Indian immigrants daily face the plight of violence, abuse, humiliation and are racially discriminated, and their homing desire is thwarted. There are numerous diasporic novels written on this specific theme. In this connection one may mention Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye, Black Bird, Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere

Man, Boman Desai’s Asylum, USA, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, Chitra Banerjee

Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, The Sister of My Heart, and The Vine of Desire, and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Desirable Daughters.

In order to prove the hypothesis of the present thesis, a close textual analysis of

Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, Boman Desai’s Asylum, USA and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission has been attempted.

The main objective of the present study is to find out the raw and lived experiences of Indian immigrants as portrayed in diasporic Indian English fiction specially in respect of racial discrimination. It was Kamala Markandaya who for the first time took up this theme in her novel, The Nowhere Man and showed how Srinivas who chose to settle in England and adopted the host country was not allowed to do so by a generic character Fred Fletcher who represents rabid racism. This novel has such other generic characters as Srinivas, his wife, Vasantha, his son, Laxman and Mrs.

Pickering. These types of characters have since then kept on surfacing in different diasporic novels under different names. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, The Mistress of Spices, has a number of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who report their problems to the so-called ‘mistress of spices’, Tilo. In Hari Kunzru’s novel,

Transmission, the homing desire of Arjun is forcefully thwarted by the hostile milieu of the host country, America. Similar is the case with the protagonist of Asylum, USA, who is forced to marry a lesbian for the sake of Green Card which will ensure his staying on in America.

In order to keep a steady focus on the underlying thrust of the present thesis a simple but coherent scheme of chapter-division has been followed, which consists of six chapters:

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man

Chapter 3 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices

Chapter 4 Boman Desai’s Asylum, USA

Chapter 5 Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

Chapter 6 Conclusion

In the literature of the Indian-diaspora we get moving pictures of immigrants, ranging from nostalgia to alienation, from ‘Melting Pot’ to ‘Salad Bowl’, from the first space to the third space, from flight to return, from journey to home, from man to ‘Nowhere man’, from emigration to staying back, from writing back to writing home, from

‘immutable marionettes’ to sexual hybrids, from Girmitiya to rucksack diaspora, from

ABCDs to revolutionaries. 5

Mass and individual movements in their multiple forms – journey, migration, exile, return – have become a new area of debate which figures conspicuously in postcolonial studies. Yet, alongside the plentiful passages from (and to) India, literature registers the ferment of this crucial movement. Hence, it may not be totally wrong to view the Indian writers scattered across the world as the authors of a ‘revolutionary movement’ trying to pin down the coordinates of an emergent identity, and evolve a manifesto of a process of writing back to the ‘Indian’ centre. In this sense, the politics of movement in Indian-diaspora, next to the territorial movements, acquires a significance which literature is able to reflect with full colour. The ambivalent relationships with the host land and with the motherland have become the central theme in much of the diaspora writing to-day.

The overall picture that emerges from a study of the novels chosen for exploration and analysis in the thesis is that the diasporic situation involves relocation not in terms of geography alone. Perhaps the more significant aspect of such migration is the socio-cultural and psychological relocation. Individuals as well as groups of people belonging to particular nation-communities in diasporic situations oscillate between two identities, two culture-value-systems and even two mindsets-one belonging to the nation and the community they are migrating from and the other the nation and the community they are migrating into. Often, these are referred to as donor and recipient cultures. A situation, therefore, emerges in almost all diasporas- particularly in those involving more ‘pronounced’ cultural distance between the donor and recipient nation-societies-wherein a serious contestation takes place on the sites of cultural identity and assimilation. This situation of riding two cultures simultaneously leads to schism and the bi-polarity of behaviour on the part of not only individuals but also social groups and communities in the host society that in its extreme form, at times, causes societal instability and disorder.

The diasporic cultural space is the space that immigrants occupy almost perpetually since assimilation is an ongoing process and no full assimilation ever takes place.

Again, it is a space where a contestation is constantly taking place – a contestation between the donor culture and the recipient culture. This contest takes place first in the minds of immigrant individuals and communities and later in their actions. While the former, namely, the donor culture tries to pull the members to their moorings as far as possible and as long as possible, the latter, that is, the recipient culture tries to oust and replace the former as much as possible and as quickly as possible. As a result, while trying to make necessary adjustments in this state of contestation between the two contending cultures, diasporic communities or individuals become janus-faced-now looking back, now the gaze fixed straight ahead. The situations of severe contestation and extreme states of conflict emerge, turning both individuals and communities into cultural schizophrenics and victims of maladjustment. Racial discrimination is the dark side of diaspora.

Prior to the emergence of the fiction of the Indian-diaspora many Indian writers had lived abroad. Some of the best novels which deal with the theme of confrontation between the East and the West are Santha Rama Rau’s Remember the House, G. V.

Desani’s All About H. Hatterr, Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope, Manohar

Malgonkar’s The Combat of Shadows, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Esmond in India and

Heat and Dust and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter. B. Rajan’s The Dark

Dancer and Too Long in the West depict the cultural and social conflict between the 7

East and the West and the reaction of an Indian on coming back home after a brief stay in England. Novels such as Timeri Murari’s The Marriage, Reginald and Jamila

Massey’s The Immigrants, Sasthi Bratha’s She and He, M. V. Rama Sarma’s The

Stream and Look Homeward, Romen Basu’s A Gift of Love, Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye,

Blackbird, Dilip Hiro’s A Triangular View, Chaman Nahal’s Into Another Dawn and

Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man focus on different aspects of the East-West encounter by analysing the problems arising out of Indians’ inadequacy to adjust themselves to the alien culture while they are in England. It was Kamala Markandaya who wrote about the second space and the third space. Her novel The Nowhere Man is a prototypical diasporic novel in which she has showed the naked reality of the Indian- diaspora in England.

It is in The Nowhere Man that Markandaya presents the most frequently experienced effects of immigration upon the Indian psyche. The title of the novel is extremely significantly, for Srinivas, a product of one country but opting to become the citizen of another, feels a sense of non-belonging and bewilderment that go with the new territory.

It is only when the novel comes to its heart-wrenching denouement that he discovers, to his shock and horror, that, in spite of several decades of British citizenship, he is still perceived by his compatriots as an outsider. His fear stems from the fact that though harassed by his antagonistic neighbour, Fred, he cannot escape, for there is no place that can offer him refuge. Cut off from the comparative security of his childhood in his homeland as a result of prolonged absence from it, he is rootless and rudderless. His final act of defiance, when he dons a muslin dhoti, and walks barefoot through London’s icy streets, are only symbolic gestures, aimed against the British bigotry.

But she knows that cultural pride, sharp political disagreement, colonial domination, racial consciousness and the subsequent tension kept the twain apart.

Unlike other writers who are of the opinion that the gap between the East and the West can never be properly bridged, Kamala Markandaya seems to suggest in her novels that cultural and political synthesis and a compromise between the two modes of living are always possible. She endeavours to establish the point that a harmonious union and lasting relationship between the East and the West can be established only through mutual respect, appreciation and understanding and not through domination. The

Nowhere Man undoubtedly proves to be a testimony of the novelist’s widening awareness of contemporary developments in race-relations at the international level. In the novel Kamala Markandaya attempts to convey the idea that senseless racial animosity and global violence will be fatal to the entire mankind. She decries racial violence and aggression and convincingly emphasizes the need for racial harmony, tolerance and universal brotherhood. She firmly believes that racial bigotry is a serious menace to global human existence, more so in the present era of multiculturalism as an official policy England, America and Canada.

Thus, The Nowhere Man is one of those earliest diasporic novels, which shows the darker side of migration and racial discrimination to which Indians are every day subjected abroad.

From the first generation settlers, the traumas of migration, dispersal and exile from their native country as well as the discrimination they experienced have become 9

potent forces in the formation of their alienated attitude. Their participation in the adopted society is limited due to both external constraints of prejudices and discrimination and the internal constraints embedded within cultural values and norms.

However, this differs from the experiences and mind set of the subsequent generations which can be attributed mostly to the environment in which they have grown up. This, in turn, has a significant impact on the individual’s concept of the self. For the younger generation of the Indian-diaspora, home is where their feet are and their hearts have been set upon this home. They have assimilated themselves in the host culture but at the same time, they cannot escape the haunting presence of the Indian culture that their parents cling on to and also the negative attitude of the host culture towards them.

Writers of the Indian-diaspora such as Divakaruni reflect on these inter-generational relations and conflicts in their writings.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, The Mistress of Spices, tells the story of

Tilo (short for Tilottama), who runs the Spice Bazaar in Oakland, California, which becomes the locus foci for the expatriate and immigrant Indians who go there not only to buy the spices that they need for their pulaos and kheers, but also (and sometimes unknown to themselves) for that magic spice that will grant them their desires.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni projects the experiences of a number of Indian immigrants and the quest for self in an alien land in order to have a stable self. The eastern emphasis on family and community as against the western idea of individual freedom posits dilemma in the construction of the self for Indian immigrants living in

America. They are torn between the country of origin and a desire to live in America with the so-called American dream. The self that they exhibit is ultimately a fragmented one, neither belonging here nor there. Divakaruni advocates an acceptance of the two cultures in order to arrive at a definite self. In her works, she exerts that a reluctance to mingle in the mainstream American culture could pose as an obstacle in maintaining security.

The basic framework of multiple journeys and the technique of magic realism of The Mistress of Spices provides ample opportunities for studying racial discrimination and other problems of Indian immigrants because Tilottma’s Spice-

Bazar in Oakland, California becomes the locus foci for the expatriate and immigrant

Indians.

There are numerous customers of Tilo such as Hameeda, Haroun and Geeta whom Tilo helps to gain a more precious commodity – whatever they most desire. Thus the novel highlights the pain of rejection, discrimination and maladjustment etc. This is the stark reality of the Indian diaspora despite the postcolonial celebration of hybridity, nomadism, border land culture, syncrecity and transculturation.

Divakaruni’s focus is, therefore, on the Indian expatriate community particularly women who visit and revisit the spice shop of Tilo and thereby Tilo catches inner glimpses of their lives which is nothing but a tale of discrimination and marginalisation. For Tilo space, like the self, is refracted and realigned into patterns that fit and match. In seeking to establish the territoriality of herself, Tilo is forced to find recognisable cognates that spam both the cultures. The novel teems with such refractions and reflections.

Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s

The Mistress of Spices very clearly highlight the life of discrimination and 11

marginalization which diasporic Indian Community faces either singly or collective group.

Markandaya’s novel through its four main characters, Srinivas, Vasantha,

Laxman and Fred represents the varying paradigm of tale. While Fred represents the antagonistic white westerner who is hostile to the migrants. Srinivas represents assimilation but Vasantha represents nostalgia and Laxman has become the second generation diasporic.

The Indo-British interaction is depicted mainly through the experiences of

Srinivas, an Indian immigrant in Britain. Srinivas becomes a ‘disoriented’ person and is considered to be a trespasser. He, even after living for half a century in England, tends to feel like a “nowhere man, looking for a nowhere city” (Markandaya 166). Being cut off from his well-founded traditional and cultural roots, he tries to get sustenance from his adopted country. But the host country and its racism thwart his desire. The Nowhere

Man clearly explodes the myth that Indians as a diasporic community are happy and prosperous in the western countries which are their favourite destinations.

Srinivas has spent several years of his life there and has started looking upon it as his own country. Considering England as his own country, he is very careful not to hurt or offend his hosts in any way. He tells Mrs. Pickering with pleasure. “This is my country now… my country! I feel at home in it, more so that I would in my own” (The

Nowhere Man 58). He shows similar feelings to his friend, Abdul Bin Ahmed telling him that England is his country, “This is where I live, in England” (The Nowhere Man

75). He does not agree with him that Britain would one day like to turn him out at any time. The East-West confrontation as treated in this novel arises mainly from the economic pressures faced by Britain in the wake of the disintegration of the British

Empire. The post-War England with all its immigration problems is not safe for people like Srinivas. With the background of Depression, the two World Wars and the loss of the British colonies started treating the immigrants in London as mere trespassers.

Unemployment and housing have become the most acute problems there. The British tend to view the outsiders with great suspicion and are very much afraid of the prevalent economic competition as they fear that sooner or later they will transgress their rights. According to them, the immigrants without money are animals and at no level is it possible to treat them as human beings.

Thus The Nowhere Man gives the dark side of Indian-diaspora in England and its ‘Melting Pot’ phenomenon in relation to Srinivas. Likewise Chitra Banerjee

Divakaruni debunks the multi-culti America and its ‘Salad Bowl’.

She is one of the most celebrated diaspora writers of the twentieth century, who highlights diaspora women protagonists, living in two cultures, their alienation, isolation, exile, mental trauma, dispersion, dislocation at the level of diasporic consciousness particularly. Her writing also stresses upon Indian culture, society with grave feeling of isolation and fractured human perception under two cultures one which is native and past and the other adopted and present, without compromising themselves.

However she proved balance between east and west. Her writing also comprises themes like patriotism, nationality, male domination, friendship, multiculturalism, racism, existentialism and alienation consequently. 13

In The Mistress of Spices Tilo, the dominating persona introduces numerous minor characters through whom we have a window opened on the Indian diaspora in

America and also on the Pakistani and the Bangladeshi diaspora.

The Mistress of Spices offers a close look at a wide spectrum of diasporic

Indians residing in America. Like in the composition of any community, Indians, too, have the rich diasporics for whom perhaps the immigrant experience has been one of cultural dispossession and material acquisition. “The rich Indians descend from hills that twinkle brighter than stars… Their cars gleam like waxed apples, glide like swans over the potholes outside my store” (The Mistress of Spices 120). But Tilo, the ministering angel, is more concerned with those who need her help. Mrs. Ahuja, Geeta and other characters and their plight clearly proves the research question of the present thesis. Hameeda and Haroun, too, have the same story to tell.

As Tilo observes the manner in which South Asians are treated in America, she begins to formulate a conception of her place in the overall structure of American race relations. Tilo first encounters the brutality of racism when one of her working-class patrons, Mohan, is brutally assaulted by two young white men one evening. As the men viciously beat Mohan, they scream, “Sonofabitch Indian, should a stayed in your own goddam country” (The Mistress of Spices 180). The young men classify Mohan (who has lived in the United States for over a decade) in the same category as all immigrants in the United States, just another minority amongst many. In contrast, Mohan and his wife Veena see themselves as separate from other minority communities that is why they wonder as to why they are the targets of racism. The third novel chosen for analysis is Transmission. It also carries over the image of America projected in The Mistress of Spices. It centres on Arjun Mehta, a computer programmer, who lands in a new job in America’s Silicon Valley, only to find that things do not turn out the way as he had imagined.

Transmission tells the story of several characters who are fishes out of water, trying to adapt to the new conditions but are unable to do so. Much of the book describes Arjun K. Mehta’s rise and fall. He knows his way around computers, but languishes in India with his second-rate college degree and a job offer from

Databodies, which promises to send him to the US as a computer consultant. It’s less of an opportunity than it first appears: it gets him to the land of his dreams, but it’s a land that doesn’t quite live up to his dreams, and his job-contract makes him close to an indentured servant of Databodies, hired out, when jobs are available, but reaping little reward for himself.

Transmission targets the high-tech world of contemporary powerful corporations who live off the cheap work of cyber-coolies like Arjun Mehta, the protagonist of the novel. A computer programmer, Mehta has come from India to

Silicon Valley in pursuit of his own American Dream. Yet he soon discovers he has few rights in America, and that he is simply regarded as cheap labour. When the anti- virus corporation for which he works fires him, Arjun starts creating powerful computer viruses named after his favourite Bollywood star Leela Zahir, which throw the entire world in state of paranoia over impending terrorist attacks. Arjun’s progress from cyber-geek to FBI suspect, is interwoven with the stories of Leela Zahir, Guy

Swift, a London marketing executive, and PEBA, the Pan European Border Agency, a 15

group of bureaucrats whose mission is to safeguard European borders from immigrants.

The novel presents a contemporary world whose citizens are manipulated by marketing slogans and big corporations.

The transition from Hari Kunzru’s Transmission to Boman Desai’s Asylum,

USA is a smooth and natural one. Boman Desai represents the Parsi face of Indian

Diaspora. The other notable examples are Bapsi Sidhwa, Farrukh Dhondhy, Rohinton

Mistry and Boman Desai. They may be said to be a product of double diaspora. The

Parsis had migrated from Iran to India and now most of them have migrated to the west. The protagonist of Asylum, USA, Noshir Daruwalla, is a diasporic engaged in the search for a home away from home.

The entire novel deals with Noshir’s attempts to stay on in the USA and find a suitable home and a partner to share his intimate space. All of his efforts are directed towards being comfortable in a home. He discovers that the space of the home becomes exclusionary or inclusionary. His exclusion or inclusion from this intimate space of the home is predicated upon specific spatial practices indulged in by himself and the several women in his life.

For Noshir, finding a suitable partner and a suitable house to live in go together.

For instance, the very first relationship he has in the USA is with Barbara. Barbara and

Noshir enter into a contract. They will get married to facilitate Noshir’s stay in the US and eventual citizenship. In return, he will pay her a certain amount of money. It is intended only as a symbolic marriage. When Barbara emphasizes that the marriage is

“not for real” Noshir responds: “but we will need to live together” (Asylum, USA 28). Noshir faces the same problem which other Diasporans face in America and other countries which they choose to adopt as their home. Noshir’s identity is a fractured identity. It is in Chicago that he is exposed to transculturation. The event which is symbolic of his transtculturation takes place in the chapter ‘This is Riff’.

Noshir’s new flatmate Carrie, a divorce, gives him a new American name, Riff. This new name is indicative of his partial detachment from his Indian roots. But neither the detachment nor the assimilation is complete. He neither enjoys the identity of being

Riff nor does he like being Noshir.

The ground realities of America as Disneyland or a land of promises, as also its

Salad Bowl and rainbow ideologies or belief is indeed belied in the diasporic novels set in America. Such novels deconstruct the great American Dream and project images of

America which are contrary to the expectations of people who migrate to America and become victims of racism. Desai begins his novel by characterizing America as a

‘pseudo-place’, one whose myths and legends become generative tropes for people in poorer nations like India.

Of the four novels analysed in the present thesis that is, Kamala Markandaya’s

The Nowhere Man, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, Hari Kunzru’s

Transmission and Boman Desai’s Asylum, USA, only The Nowhere Man is set in

England. The remaining three novels are set in America. Many other novelists of the

Indian diaspora are settled in Canada and Australia but the picture is pretty much the same everywhere. The diasporic fictional characters everywhere remain a Trishanku figure and the total assimilation in the host country is an immense impossibility however transculturated they may be. Racism is a feature of the western world and 17

diasporics always have a hyphenated identity. The American dream pulls the Indians but the promise of living in diaspora creates a bitter taste in the mouth of characters like

Noshir Daruwalla and Arjun. The present study, therefore, generates the question as to why multiculturalism remains an official stand in England, America and Canada whereas as the day-to-day realities of the Indian diasporics tells a different story as fictionally projected in the four novels under discussion in the present investigation.