Stepping out of the Frame Alternative Realities in Rushdie’S the Ground Beneath Her Feet

Universiteit Gent 2007 Stepping Out of the Frame Alternative Realities in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet Verhandeling voorgelegd aan de Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte voor het verkrijgen van de graad van Prof. Gert Buelens Licentiaat in de taal- en letterkunde: Prof. Stef Craps Germaanse talen door Elke Behiels 1 Preface.................................................................................................................. 3 2 Historical Background: the (De-)Colonization Process in India.......................... 6 2.1 The Rise of the Mughal Empire................................................................... 6 2.2 Infiltration and Colonisation of India: the Raj ............................................. 8 2.3 India, the Nation-in-the-making and Independence (1947) ....................... 11 2.3.1 The Rise of Nationalism in India ....................................................... 11 2.3.2 Partition and Independence................................................................ 12 2.3.3 The Early Postcolonial Years: Nehru and Indira Gandhi................... 13 2.4 Contemporary India: Remnants of the British Presence............................ 15 3 Postcolonial Discourse: A (De)Construction of ‘the Other’.............................. 19 3.1 Imperialism – Colonialism – Post-colonialism – Globalization ................ 19 3.2 Defining the West and Orientalism............................................................ 23 3.3 Subaltern Studies: the Need for a New Perspective................................... 26 3.4 Postcolonial Literature ............................................................................... 31 4 The Breaking of Ties.......................................................................................... 35 4.1 Salman Rushdie: a Biographical Overview ............................................... 35 4.2 The Characters in TGBHF: on the Edge of Different Cultures ................. 37 4.3 Salman Rushdie’s Style as a Form of Breaking Ties................................. 41 4.3.1 Unreliable Narration........................................................................... 41 4.3.2 Intertextuality as a Mark of Globalization ......................................... 44 4.3.3 Alternative Realities: Rushdie’s Otherworlds.................................... 46 4.3.4 The Fine Line Between History and Fiction...................................... 52 4.3.5 The Clash of the ‘Otherworlds’: East Versus West ........................... 57 5 When West and East Meet: Orpheus and Eurydice Versus Kama and Rati ...... 59 5.1 Origin of the Orpheus Myth....................................................................... 59 5.2 Origin of the Rati Myth and Comparison with the Orpheus Myth ............ 62 5.3 Mixture of Both Myths in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ ...................... 63 5.3.1 Ormus as Orpheus or Kama? ............................................................. 65 5.3.2 Vina as Rati or Eurydice? .................................................................. 71 5.3.3 When East and West Meet… ............................................................. 75 5.3.4 The Role of Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant................................................... 76 5.3.5 The Role of Music in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ ..................... 78 6 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 82 Bibliographical References ........................................................................................ 84 2 1 Preface In the past two decades the author Salman Rushdie has become the world- wide famous symbol of the ambivalent position of the postcolonial author in modern society. Born in India in the year of its Independence, Rushdie and his contemporaries really have something in common with the ‘Midnight’s Children’. This ‘Midnight generation’ is the first generation that will have known India only as a free, independent country again. They are not familiar anymore with the actual practices of colonialism, but they are nonetheless still very much influenced by the consequences of colonialism – with regard to their personal lives as well as political and economical life – in the early postcolonial period. In the second chapter I will give a short overview of India’s history. The starting point of this overview will be the rise of the Mughal Empire, because the introduction of Islam in India is a crucial factor which today still continues to determine India’s political life. Consequently, I will expand on the British infiltration and colonisation of India and its struggle for Independence. I will continue this historical overview with some information about the political climate in the early postcolonial period by referring to the two foremost famous politicians in modern Indian history, viz. Jawarhalal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi. India was not the first and only colonized country that became independent: the twentieth century was characterised by a world-wide process of ‘decolonisation’. Gradually, historians and philosophers started to question the way in which history had been written before by the West, by the colonizers. Scholars like Edward Said, Robert Young, and Homi K. Bhabha managed to develop new perspectives on postcolonial historiography. In chapter three I will briefly introduce the most important of them. I will also refer to the Subaltern Studies group – to which scholars like Chakrabarty, Spivak and Guha belong – which sought to ‘write history from below’ and which introduced some crucial ideas in the postcolonial discourse. As history and literature/fiction are always interdependent, the Subaltern Studies group also applied a lot of their theories to postcolonial literature and came to the conclusion that its main goal should be ‘let the subaltern speak’ by ‘representing’ 3 them accurately. Postcolonial literature thus should give the subaltern minority their place in history back. Salman Rushdie has frequently been accused of not being able to represent the subaltern Indian minority truthfully. The main reason for this is his elitist position: although Rushdie is born in India he was educated in England and currently lives in America. Because of this and because his literary style logically is strongly rooted in the Western literary tradition, Salman Rushdie has been condemned heavily by some Indian critics. Also the fact that he has chosen to write his novels in English is a fact strongly opposed by those critics. Those critics argue that Rushdie has become too much a product of globalisation and is thus incapable of truly ‘letting the subaltern speak’. However, in my dissertation I will try to investigate whether postcolonial authors like Rushdie who have emigrated from their country of origin and who write about it ‘from the West’ can serve as a means of bridging the gap that nowadays exists between the two conflicting traditions of history writing, namely the Western one and the Subaltern one. As the philosophers Foucault and Bakhtin and many other theorists have claimed, we are always determined by our surroundings and the context in which we live and understand history. According to those thinkers, it is fairly impossible to ‘untie’ yourself from the traditional, cultural perspective by which you perceive the world. I will investigate whether authors like Rushdie (who have literally undergone some sort of displacement or migration) have come the closest to ‘untying’ themselves and hence can function a means of bridging the gap between those different perspectives. Indeed, Rushdie as a migrated author, disposes over a kind of double vision: although he belongs to two different cultures at the same time, he belongs to neither of them fully. In chapter four I will explain how Rushdie constantly ‘unties’ himself from either perspective in order ‘to see the whole picture’ by exploring his writing style. Rushdie – in his contradictory writing style – keeps making the readers aware of the existence of alternative versions of history, alternative perspectives to look at the world. I will consider Rushdie’s masterly manner of mixing elements from both Indian and Western culture as a way of trying to ‘deconstruct the Other’. By this ‘other’ I not only mean the other image that the 4 West has created in history writing to come to terms with its colonial history but also the creation of the other image (of the still dominating West) by the Subaltern Studies group. In the last chapter I will show how Rushdie as a matter of fact manages to ‘let the subaltern’ speak by offering alternative realities for the traditionally accepted Western way of thinking. I will explore this into depth on the level of the basic story line of his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. 5 2 Historical Background: the (De-)Colonization Process in India At the heart of the idea of India there lies a paradox: that its component parts, the States which coalesced into the union, are ancient historical entities, with cultures and independent existences going back many centuries; whereas India itself is a mere thirty-seven years old. And yet it is the ‘new-born’ India, the baby, so to speak, the Central government, that holds sway over the greybeards. Centre-Stat relations have always, inevitably, been somewhat delicate, fragile affairs (Rushdie 1992:41) Because a complete overview of Indian history would take us too far, I will limit my overview to the most influential evolutions with regard to the processes of

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