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 colonization and decolonization. By this, however, I definitely want to distance myself from the imperialist view that colonized nations like India have no history of their own. Anyway, in respect to postcolonial literature, it is for obvious reasons mostly India’s colonial and postcolonial past which is more relevant. My main goal is thus not to give an extensive and detailed overview of Indian history, but to report those facts that are relevant to its (post)colonial history, as it is necessary to know the colonial history of a country when one wants to speak about the postcolonial literature of that country. I will start my historical overview from the introduction of Islam in India, because it gave rise to the tensions that today are still underlying Indian postcolonial society. In order to understand the political climate of India today, the rise of the Islamic faith, and consequently the infamous Hindu-Muslim rift, are thus still very relevant issues.

2.1 The Rise of the Mughal Empire In the early history of India it was the introduction of the Muslim faith that really shook the country to its core and would influence its history significantly. The birth year of Islam is considered to be 622, the year in which the prophet Muhammad fled to Medina, to become its spiritual leader. According to Wolpert (1997: 105), “India remained blissfully oblivious to Islam’s existence during the first two decades of that new faith’s vigorous growth”. However, from ca. 711 onwards Hinduism was no longer the only religion: after the plundering of an Arab ship on the Hindus river, an Arab force invaded Sindh and conquered Brahmanabad, which was back then a part of Hindustan and belongs to present-day Pakistan. At the beginning, the Islamic

6 rule over Hindustan was fairly ‘peaceful’: in exchange for taxes, Hindus could practice their own Hindu faith. It became more violent with the coming of the “Sword of Islam”, Mahmud of Ghazni, who, according to Wolpert, “led no fewer that seventeen bloody annual forays into India from his Ghazni perch, waging his jihads at least as much for plunder as for the promise of paradise” (1997: 107). From then on, autonomous Hindu power became more and more threatened every day; Islam found its way into the heart of India. Constant battles divided and fragmented India, not only politically, but also spiritually: in the early 16th century, India was a patchwork of different religious and political colours. At this time, the former King of Kabul, Babur – the “tiger” – came to India “as founder of the greatest Muslim dynasty in Indian history, as first pãdishãh (“emperor”) of the Mughals” (cf. Wolpert 1997: 121). It was only in the second half of the 16th century, however, that the Mughal empire became somewhat unified under the reign of Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbarn, the grandson of Babur. The empire he led, was, according to Wolpert (1997: 127), further reinforced by his wise government, for instance, trying to get the former enemies of his father’s empire on his side. Akbar’s unique achievement was based on his recognition of the pluralistic character of Indian society and his acceptance of the imperative of winning Hindu cooperation if he hoped to rule this elephantine empire for any length of time. First of all, he decided to woo the Rajputs, marrying the daughter of Raja Bhãrmal of Amber in 1562, thus luring that Hindu chief with his son and grandson as well to this capital at Agra, the start of four generations of loyal service by that Rajput house in the Mughal army. That same year, Akbar showed his capacity for wise as well as generous rule by abolishing the practice of enslaving prisoners of war and their families, no longer even forcibly converting them to Islam. […] In 1564 he remitted the hated jizya (non-Muslim poll tax), which was not reimposed for more than a century, and with that single stroke of royal generosity won more support from the majority of India’s population than all other Mughal emperors combined managed to muster by their conquests.

According to Metcalf and Metcalf, this Mughal empire was characterized by a distribution of powers. It was “operated by a hierarchic distribution of authority among different levels of society”(2002: 28). By the 18th century, however, the tide seemed to be changing: While the Mughal empire lost most of its strength to regional powers, the local communities were gaining economical and political influence.

7 2.2 Infiltration and Colonisation of India: the Raj From the 17th century onwards several trading enterprises found their way into India, in their search for new resources. Trading companies from all over Europe – Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, the UK – soon discovered the possibilities of this ‘newfound’ land. One of the most influential of these companies in respect to Indian history was the British East India Company, also frequently called the John Company. It was founded on New Year’s Eve 1600, by a royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I and became one of the biggest trading companies in the world, its official name being “The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies” (Webpage of the East India Company). It was a joint stock company, which means that “its members pooled their resources for joint trade rather than trading on their own account” (cf. Bayly 1990). Its main founding intention was to favour trade privileges in India and indeed, for 21 years it “effectively gave the newly created Honourable East India Company (HEIC) a […] monopoly on all trade in the East Indies” (Wikipedia: 2007). At first their interest was only of economical importance, but gradually the company became also an influential military power. With the collapse of the Mughal empire around 1707 (cf. Dalziel 2006) the British influence in India started to expand. However, they still experienced some trouble in Bengal, a region that is situated in the northeast of South Asia and is nowadays shared by Bangladesh and India. In the Historical Atlas of the British Empire, Nigel Dalziel writes that “in 1756 the British clashed with the ruling nawab, Siraj-ud-Daula, who objected to the Company’s growing aggrandisement and to the fortification of Calcutta”(2006: 36). However, this was quickly overcome, when Robert Clive of the Company set up a conspiracy against Siraj in June 1757 (cf. Dalziel 2006). After the defeat of Siraj, the Company’s power over Bengal expanded vastly: The Company emerged as undisputed master of Bengal, governing a population of 20 million and receiving annual revenues of ₤3 million, sufficient to finance its large army and to subsidize trading activities. Its position was confirmed in the Treaty of Allahabad (1765) in which the emperor ceded the diwani, or civil administration, of Bengal and Bihar. […] The British, whose power now extended to Delhi, became a major contender for supremacy in India (cf. Dalziel 2006: 36/37).

8 According to Wolpert, “after 1965 the John Company sought to establish its rāj (rule) over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa on as sound and permanent a basis as possible” (1997: 187). Metcalf and Metcalf refer in this respect to the famous character of Warren Hastings, who became “the first governor-general of the company’s Indian territories” (2002: 55) in an attempt to restore the peace after the turbulent years of the Company’s invasion in Bengal. Hastings was one of the most important figures in the history of the East India Company because he was the first one who tried to extend the Company’s economical and political power in a structured way. The change from pure economical enterprise with some political power to a more political enterprise with economical advantages came definitely with the India Act of 1784. With this parliamentary act the Crown’s share in the company’s profits and politics, and hence indirectly its influence in India, grew enormously. From now on, the East India Company was under relatively strict supervision of the Crown of England (cf. Wolpert 1997: 195): Under Pitt’s India Act, the directors retained their formal patronage powers of appointment to all Ranks of the company’s services, civil, military, and judicial, including statutory powers to appoint the governor-general as well as the presidency governors of Bombay and Madras. The crown, however, on the advice of the president of the board, was empowered “to recall the present or any future Governor-General of Fort William at Bengal, or any other person” in the company’s employ.

We might say that this act in reality prepared the way for “the full and direct authority over India” (cf. Wolpert 1997: 194) which would take place some seventy years later. According to Wolpert, “it was, in fact, Cornwallis […], who was to be the true architect of John Company Raj” (1997: 195). Cornwallis seemed to be a firm believer in the possibilities and even necessity of the British Empire in the world, as he believed that “the Britons were the best qualified people to govern anyone” (cf. Wolpert 1997: 195). It was “The White Man’s Burden”1 to govern those who could not govern themselves. Furthermore, Metcalf and Metcalf refer to Lord Cornwallis as a pure racist, who would even have claimed: “Every native of Hindostan, I verily believe, is corrupt”. According to Metcalf and Metcalf, “this was to be the start of a policy of racist exclusion in employment that was to characterize the Raj almost to its end” (2002: 58). Soon, the British made their intentions about the future of India very clear (cf. Metcalf and Metcalf 2002: 59):

1 Reference to a poem by Rudyard Kipling, viz. The white man’s burden.

9 The last reform was that of Lord Wellesley (1798-1805), who founded the College of Fort William at Calcutta (1802) as a place where incoming civil servants were taught local languages prior to taking up their appointments. At the same time, the Company directors established a college at Haileybury in England (1804) to provide fledgling civil servants, required to spend two years there, with the rudiments of a general education before going out to India. Thus was created the famed ‘steel frame’ of Indian administration, the Indian Civil Service, in which the British, and many Indians, took great pride.

Because of the great British military organisational skills and because of the lasting disunity among the many different Indian people, the conquest of almost the whole of India was completed successfully by the 1850s. After several wars sparked by Indian mutiny and rebellion, the East India Company “was widely blamed for provoking the rebellion, and in 1858 the government of India was transferred to the British Crown” (cf. Dalziel 2006: 78). Under the Government of India Act, one of Her Majesty’s secretaries of state was vested, through the cabinet, with full power and responsibility for the government and revenues of India, thus inheriting the duties of both court and board (cf. Wolpert 1997: 237).

The British soon realized that, if they wanted to maintain order in this foreign country in these turbulent times, they would have to make some indigenous allies as well. According to Wolpert, “more than 560 enclaves of autocratic princely rule” (1997: 240) existed throughout the years of British government. The British also ceased their reform of legislation and made sure not to impose any social or religious changes, which clearly reflects their anxiety about rekindling the mutiny and rebellion. They did make some reforms regarding the army: More and more British soldiers were recruited, so that in case of rebellion immediate action could be taken. Modernizing measures, which were started by Dalhousie, were from now on accelerated: especially postal and railroad services were further expanded. India and the UK were now economically intertwined. While India proved to be a good consuming market for products made in the UK, the import figures from India to the UK increased rapidly. Tea, coffee, cotton, opium, indigo,… were the most important export products of India in this period, providing the Empire with enormous economical prestige in the world. There was, however, an enormous racial gap between the native population and the British, fed by the horrible memories both groups retained from the wars. There was constant mutual distrust, and both communities became estranged even more than was the case before the wars. Despite their economical interdependence

10 and (forced) collaboration, they were two communities that lived completely separated from each other and that limited their contacts only to what was strictly necessary. It is therefore hardly surprising that “several new forces of enduring protest began to make themselves felt” (cf. Wolpert 1997: 249).

2.3 India, the Nation-in-the-making and Independence (1947) 2.3.1 The Rise of Nationalism in India The influx of missionaries, the funding of English education, the opening of India to private trade, and the continuing process of British unification and modernization, served only to intensify Indian perceptions of their “native” differences, cultural, socioeconomic, and political, from the officials who ran the Company Raj (cf. Wolpert 1997: 250).

Surendranath Banerjea, Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale are some of the important names in regard to this first public wave of Indian nationalism under the British rule. These nationalist movements were, however, largely regionally based; there was no such thing as one nationalist movement for all of India at that time. That came only in 1885, with the foundation of the Indian National Congress, the first all-India nationalist political organization. Chandra refers to the safety valve myth that surrounds the founding story of this National Congress, i.e. the story that it was only founded to “provide a safe, mild, peaceful, and constitutional outlet or safety valve for the rising discontent among the masses” (1989: 61), so as to avert violent revolution. Chandra, however, rejects this “myth” and replies to it that it “was not a sudden event, or a historical accident” but “the culmination of a process of political awakening that had its beginnings in the 1860s and 1870s and took a major leap forward in the late 1870s and early 1880s” (1989: 71). Gradually the Congress became more opposed to British rule, which turned the organisation into an important instrument for preparing Independence. After the first World War it was the character of Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi that became the symbol of the Indian struggle for independence. Foremost he became famous for his advertising of non-cooperation and non-violent resistance as the most powerful weapons to fight oppression. He became an influential political and spiritual leader of the National Congress in 1921, from that

11 moment on his main goal being swaraj or “complete individual, spiritual, political independence” (Wikipedia: 2007). Gradually he included in these non-cooperation politics the swadeshi policy, which meant that a boycott was imposed on imported goods, especially when they came from the UK. After spending two years in prison, Gandhi came back to see that the great unity that had once characterized the Congress under his leadership had crumbled down. In 1928 Mahatma Gandhi for a second time launched a campaign for complete independence of India. At first the British government chose not to respond, but as the protest grew stronger they decided to negotiate with Gandhi, which resulted in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in 1931 (Wikipedia: 2007). This pact had little to do with the actual transfer of power and by order of Lord Willingdon – Irwin’s successor – Gandhi was for a second time sent to prison, in an attempt to break his authority. That this attempt proved to be unsuccessful, became clear when the 2nd World War broke out: in collaboration with the Congress, Gandhi launched one of the most outspoken attacks on the British presence in India, viz. the “Quit India Resolution”. This resolution gave way to a mass protest in the streets of Bombay, where thousands of people were killed by the police and thousands of others were arrested. Soon Gandhi himself became arrested for a third time in 1942.

2.3.2 Partition and Independence Meanwhile, the dissension between the different religious groups – mainly Hindus and Muslims, but also Buddhists and Sikhs – got out of control. Violent riots broke out and according to Metcalf and Metcalf this is mainly the reason why “the British increasingly lost both the power and the will to control events in India” (2002: 207). Two main political parties came to dominate Indian politics: on the one hand, the unionist Congress – now with its main representative Jawarhalal Nehru – and on the other hand, the Muslim League. Under the guidance of the charismatic Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, the Muslims more and more started to think about creating an own Muslim nation, especially after the elections in the winter of 1945/46:

12 […] for the average Muslim voter, Pakistan came to mean two things at once. It was, as a modern nation-state for India’s Muslim peoples, the logical culmination of the long process of colonial Muslim politics. At the same time, however, as a symbol of Muslim identity, Pakistan transcended the ordinary structures of the state. As such it evoked an ideal Islamic political order, in which the realization of an Islamic life would be fused with the state’s ritual authority (cf. Metcalf and Metcalf 2002: 211).

After the rejection by Nehru of the British plan to divide the provinces, Jinnah and the Muslim League took immediate action (cf. Metcalf and Metcalf 2002), which resulted in the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946. The result was devastating: some thousands of people got slaughtered. Retaliations followed soon and in 1947 the struggle for power in the Punjab was a reality. According to Dalziel, “the only solution left was partition, overseen by the last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten” (2006: 131). The new Muslim nation Pakistan was born on 14th of August 1947. One day later, on 15th of August 1947, Jawarhalal Nehru, who would become India’s first Prime Minister, claimed the independence of a Hindu India with the following words: Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will wake to life and freedom (cf. Metcalf and Metcalf 2002: 216).

2.3.3 The Early Postcolonial Years: Nehru and Indira Gandhi The first independent years of India became very turbulent for the country and its first Prime Minister, especially with respect to Kashmir. According to Metcalf and Metcalf (2002) Nehru now felt that he had to act violently to get a hold on things. In that period Kashmir used to be a princely state with an Islamic majority but a Hindu principal, which made the situation immensely complicated and delicate. Moreover, Jinnah had sent his army of Pakistani citizens there, to occupy the capital of Kashmir, Srinagar. After the battle for Kashmir, India considered Kashmir as a part of India. However, because of the fear of another war, Kashmir was divided – although not equally: India would get the biggest part – between the two countries. According to Ali (1985) the biggest problem that Nehru and his successors had to deal with was the great smorgasbord of religious groups: Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims,… were all united by territory.

13 In 1966 Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru Jawarhalal and thus already from her childhood familiar with Indian national politics, became the first female Prime Minister of India. She governed the country from 1966 until 1977 and became Prime Minister a second time in 1980 until her assassination in 1984. She is mostly famous for one of the most controversial periods after Indian independence, namely the Indian Emergency. Indira Gandhi had advised the President, Fakhrudin Ali Ahmed, to proclaim this State of Emergency for India on 26th of June 1975. The main reasons for this were the upcoming (violent) discontent of the masses, the increasing opposition to the Congress’s power and the accusations that Indira Gandhi would have committed fraud at the ’71 elections. As a result of this state of Emergency, Indira Gandhi became very powerful, as she could now ‘Rule by decree’2, defer elections and delimitate civil rights and liberties at will. Thousands of opponents of Indira’s politics were arrested and put in jail. According to Tariq Ali (1985), another disturbing consequence of this State of Emergency, was the increasing power of Indira’s son, Sanjay. However, it was this fact also that disgusted public opinion and it were mostly the actions of Sanjay – for example, a campaign for forced sterilisation and the violent removal of the poor and homeless in the major Indian cities – that outraged the people. Because of the growing violence Indira announced in 1977 the elections, which she lost by an overwhelming majority. Morarji Desai of the Janata party3 succeeded Indira Gandhi but already after two years accelerated elections were proclaimed for 1980, because of disunity within the party. Gradually, because of the growing economical problems, the disunity within the leading political party and the scandals that came to surround it, the tide began to turn and Indira’s popularity underwent an enormous revival that nobody had expected. On 3rd of January 1980 Indira Gandhi was again elected as Prime Minister of India, until her murder by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. This violent death helped to reinforce the Indira myth, which would not easily fade away.

2 This is a kind of political law-making, whereby the lawmaker – which is often a single person – can pass laws without discussion or opposition. (Wikipedia: 2007) 3 This political party was a coalition, founded for the elections of 1977, of the former members of the Congress and the political party Jan Sangh, the organization of the mass (Ali: 1985).

14 The introduction to Ali’s book The Nehrus and the Gandhis (1985) was written by Salman Rushdie, who refers to the mythological proportions the Nehru-Gandhi family took on in Indian history. According to Rushdie, the Indians should fight this myth with actual facts, namely that the family politics of the Nehrus and the Gandhis left Indian democracy in a very bad condition. In Rushdie’s collection of essays Imaginary Homelands: Critical Essays 1981-91(1992), there is also a small essay about “the assassination of Indira Gandhi”, written in 1984 after Rusdhie heard the news of the murder himself. In this essay Salman Rushdie promptly gives his own analysis of what direction Indian politics after Indira should take. He especially stresses the fact that only when the Congress will take more in consideration what the local States want, is there a “glimmer of hope for the future” (1992: 42) of India. In his novels too, we can sometimes find sharp criticism of Indira Gandhi’s politics and the effects of it on India, especially in his novel Midnight’s Children, in which the division between fiction and history becomes not at all easily distinguishable. In Midnight’s Children Indira Gandhi is constantly being referred to as ‘the Widow’, a woman with black and green hair. She is depicted as a menacing, cruel character: But what I learned from the Widow’s Hand is that those who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why we, the magical children of midnight, were hated feared and destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect, possessor of the shakti of the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a centre-parting and schizophrenic hair…(2006: 612).

The narrator for example recounts how he has been captured on the Widow’s command to undergo a sterilisation. In a sarcastic tone the implications of Indira’s politics are described: Test- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves… but that was only a side-effect, because they were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more than that: hope, too, was excised […] (2006: 613).

2.4 Contemporary India: Remnants of the British Presence The British have been present and influential in India from around 1600 until around the time of independence, which of course is the reason why still numerous remnants of that influence can be found. The railroad and postal system which were

15 introduced and further extended are naturally still present in India. A lot of place names still refer to the British presence. The most obvious proof, however, is the language: English is still one of the 22 official languages of India. According to Wikipedia (2007), Hindi is the language most spoken but English is, nonetheless, still frequently used. According to Hohenthal (1998): In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks third in the world, after the USA and UK. An estimated 4% of the Indian population use English; although the number might seem small, out of the total population that is about 35 million people (in 1994)(Crystal 1995:101). Although the number of speakers of English in India is somewhat limited (as compared to the total population), that small segment of the population controls domains that have professional prestige (Kachru 1986a: 8).

One major reason for the still frequent use of English is that in a country that hosts around 800 different languages, English can be very useful and welcome as a means of bridging the language gap between those languages, as a lingua franca. Annika Hohenthal describes how the use of “English serves two purposes” (1998), referring to Kachru (1986). First, because language operates as “a tool for the administrative cohesiveness for a country”. The second reason is that English qualifies as “a language of wider communication” (1998). English is the dominant language in the media: according to Hohenthal the “number of English newspapers, journals and magazines is on the increase” (1998). Also in education, English is still mandatory, thanks to the “Three Language Formula”: The Three Language Formula was developed for the educational load to be more fair, to promote national integration, and, to provide wider language choice in the school curriculum (Srivastava 1990: 43). According to the formula, people from non-Hindi areas study their regional language, Hindi, and English. Hindi speakers, on the other hand, study Hindi, English and another language (cf. Hohenthal 1998).

However, the English language in India underwent some significant changes, all inspired by the local languages (cf. Hohenthal 1998): South Asian English has developed to a more distinctive level than in other countries where English is used as a second language (Crystal 1988: 258). English in India has evolved characteristic features at the phonological, lexical, syntactic and even at discourse level. Initially, these innovations were rejected by purists, but they are becoming increasingly accepted: English is not anymore treated as a foreign language; it is part of the cultural identity of India.

Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin also take this in account and consequently make the distinction between English and english “as an indication of the various ways in

16 which the language has been employed by different linguistic communities in the post-colonial world” (2002: 8). Also in Indian fiction, English still is frequently used as first language, which makes it kind of problematic in respect to postcolonial writing. As in postcolonial literature the former colonized nation seeks to detach itself from its colonial past, the use of the colonizer’s language to do so seems highly ambivalent. This truly seems to constitute the paradox of the (Indian) postcolonial writer. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin refers in this respect to authors like Rao and Achebe, who “have to overcome an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacement of the pre-colonial language by English”. Postcolonial authors like Salman Rushdie have often been accused of ‘selling out’ because of their use of the English language as first language of his novels. Fletcher in his Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie acknowledges those contradictory response to Rushdie’s language choice and writes that […] Rushdie’s use of English has seemed to some to signify acquiescence in the imperial and neo-imperical design, while most commentaries agree that Rushdie undertakes the “chutnification” of English, or the creation of a hybrid language to “de-colonize” English (Rushdie’s own term) or disarm it through ironical use (1994: 4).

He consequently states that “if the imposition of a foreign language on a people is seen as a form of oppression […] then Rushdie’s taking control of English and bending it to his purposes” (1994: 4) makes a powerful statement. What is more, according to Harrison paraphrasing Rushdie, “in parts of South India […] Hindi may feel more ‘colonial’ than does English today” (2003: 107). According to Harrison, Those drawbacks to the use of a former colonial language that seem inherent, […] must actually be apprehended historically, both in terms of the continuous evolution of the language – not least through its role in colonial and postcolonial encounters – and, […] in terms of the history of the idea of language’s to (national) culture, identity, politics and so on (2003: 109).

Rushdie rejects the opinion of those postcolonial critics by who the “continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic” (1997: xii). He argues that English has become every much a part of India as has his mother language Urdu, “the camp-argot of the country’s earlier Muslim conquerors” (1997: xii).

17 Furthermore, Rushdie in his typical satirical manner silences his critics by concluding that “many of the attacks on English-language Indian writing are made in English by writers who are themselves members of the college-educated, English- speaking élite” (1997: xiv).

18 3 Postcolonial Discourse: A (De)Construction of ‘the Other’ 3.1 Imperialism – Colonialism – Post-colonialism – Globalization

When speaking of ‘postcolonial literature’, it is important to try and define what is meant by the concepts of ‘colonization’, ‘imperialism’, ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘post-colonialism’. As Harrison justifiably argues in his work Postcolonial criticism: “The terms colonialism, imperialism and the postcolonial are used differently by different writers” (2003: 7), which makes it relatively difficult to define them accurately. Especially the concepts of colonialism and imperialism are very often intertwined and therefore not easily distinguishable. In his book Postcolonialism: an historical introduction Robert J.C. Young states that “both colonialism and imperialism involved forms of subjugation of one people by another” (2001: 15), but the form in which this is executed differs. In the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary we can find the following definition for the noun ‘colonialism’: “The belief in and support for the system of one country controlling another” (2003)4. However, for ‘imperialism’, the dictionary offers two definitions and adds that this noun is often used disapprovingly: 1 a system in which a country rules other countries, sometimes having used force to obtain power […] 2 when one country has a lot of power or influence over others, especially in political and economical matters.

According to Young “imperialism in its nineteenth-century form was essentially a French invention” (2001: 30), although it was soon to be imitated by the other colonizing countries. Central to this practice of imperialism was the idea of the ‘civilizing mission’. This idea has since then constantly been used to legitimate the practices of domination, subordination and exploitation. Young goes on to mark the difference between colonialism and imperialism as following (2001:16) : Here a basic difference emerges between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and which was developed for ideological as well as financial reasons, a structure that can be called imperialism, and an empire that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company, a structure that can be called colonial.

4 Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

19

The online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2006) states that one should turn to the etymology of both words to understand the difference between the two. So, according to this encyclopaedia, imperialism is derived from the Latin word for power and colonialism “involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the new arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin” (Webpage Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 2006). However, the encyclopaedia with this definition downplays the economical aspect of this enterprise. Young therefore distinguishes two main categories of colonisation: First, there are the colonies that were founded for the sake of settlement, for example the settlements of British North America, New Zealand and Brazil. Second, there are what Young calls the “directly (or indirectly) administered ones, generally situated in the tropics, that were established for economic exploitation without a significant settlement” (2001: 17). It is in this last category that Young puts British India. We could say that in India both structures were present, as its infiltration was initially a commercial question but it gradually became part of a larger ideology of the British Empire too. The East India Company at first was only interested in the economical advantages India could bring: ivory, gold, spices, tea… Only after the ideological and political aspect also became prominent, as the Company’s power after came in the hands of the British Crown. From that moment on it was really a part of the enormous British Empire. During its heydays, the Empire covered almost a quarter of the earth’s total surface and ruled over approximately a quarter of the total population (cf. Wikipedia 2007). The main problem, however, which complicates the matter of colonial and postcolonial discourse is the enormous diversity of forms in which colonisation appears (cf. Young 2001). It is this aspect also that makes any universal theory of colonialism or postcolonialism fairly impossible. Harrison, however, resents the fact that “postcolonial studies has been concerned mainly with European colonial expansion since the Renaissance, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (2003: 7). Young criticizes in this respect also the work of Said and that of Frantz Fanon, who “developed the analysis of colonialism as a single formation” (2001: 18) and who based his theory on the work of Le Sartre. Although Young

20 admits that French colonialism was fairly homogenous, he also points to the fact that in respect of British colonialism this never was the case. Young’s main critique on Fanon’s work was that he tried to account for the phenomenon of colonialism in one single universal theory. However, Harrison calls Fanon “a key figure in postcolonial studies” (2003: 153). Harrison states that Fanon’s “own perspective on relativism and universals is often misunderstood” (2003: 153). Harrison resents the postcolonial criticism on the notion of ‘universality’ voiced by the authors of The Empire Writes Back, who falsely link the concept of universality with ‘Eurocentrism’. Young makes another very important insight for postcolonial discourse, namely that “the apparent uniformity or diversity of colonialism depends very largely on your own subject position, as colonizing or colonized subject” (2001: 18). That is also why among the researchers there has been an immense discussion about the use of the term ‘postcolonial’. Quayson states that “like postmodernism and poststructuralism, postcolonialism designates critical practice that is highly eclectic and difficult to define” (2000:1). Sanga also acknowledges the ambivalence of this term and says that “postcoloniality refers to a condition as well as a predicament in which formerly colonized peoples attempt to mark out their place as historical subjects” (2001: 1). Harrison remarks that the term postcolonial to denote a culture may thus “carry misleading implications concerning the cessation of imperialist influence and interference” after independence (2003: 8). This is also the main reason why Quayson prefers to use the unhyphenated version ‘postcolonialism’ instead of the hyphenated ‘post-colonialism’, which was “first used by political scientists and economists to denote the period after colonialism” (2000:1). According to Quayson the unhyphenated version thus marks a tendency and is hence seen as a process. According to Harrison, referring to Stephen Slemon, an accurate postcolonial theory must always take the “radically fractured and contradictory” nature of the postcolonial society (2003: 136) in account. Young consequently proposes that: Many of the problems raised can be resolved if the postcolonial is defined as coming after colonialism and imperialism, in their original meaning of direct-rule domination, but still positioned within imperialism in its later sense of the global system of hegemonic economic power (2001: 57).

Young’s vision consequently brings us at once to the concept of the globalisation. Sanga describes in her book Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: migration,

21 translation, hybridity, blasphemy, and globalization the relation between globalisation and the pre-existing forms of imperialism: European imperialism of the past three centuries was in fact what presaged the globalization of the modern world. […] The decline of one form of colonialism in the 1950s has led, however, to another form of imperialism that manifests itself in the form of a cultural and economic control of the once colonized world by the Western powers under the masks of global advancement. Social theorists such as John Tomlinson rightly argue that what seems to have effectively taken the place of imperialism is globalization (2001: 140).

Sanga furthermore explains the aspect of globalization by the example of the postcolonial writer Salman Rushdie, who has become himself a “metaphor of globalism” (2001: 7-8). Also Rollason states that “Rushdie, as an émigré with a foot in both Eastern and Western worlds, is himself clearly both product and exponent of that globalisation” (2001: chapter 3). Sanga further refers to the criticism authors like Rushdie have received in respect to this postcolonial discussion by scholars like for example Aijaz Ahmad. Ahmad accuses postcolonial theories of just being a tool of the West for continuing to dominate the rest of the world. Sanga consequently reformulates the critique of Ahmad on Rushdie for being a member of an elitist group of emigrants whose work actually is Western of character. Ahmad refers also to the fact that “literature that is independent of dominant Western influence, and is a vibrant example of the new cultural production of the postcolonial world, has been sidelined or overlooked” (cf. Sanga 2001: 9). In his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing Salman Rushdie strongly opposes this accusation. According to Rushdie, the reason why Indian literature not written in English has been overlooked is mainly because in general the quality of that literature has been rather poor. I will come back to this point, when I focus more in particular on Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

22 3.2 Defining the West and Orientalism Postcolonial history writing has always been based on some key conceptualisations, which have been constructed by scholars belonging to the tradition of West-European history writing and which have become very controversial in respect to the postcolonial discourse. The most striking ones are the two opposing concepts of ‘the West’ or West-Europeans and ‘the Others’ or ‘the Orient’, which all bear witness to the colonial way of thinking and which postcolonial discourse seeks to reject. In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West the author, Robert J.C. Young, discusses two main philosophical models of history that have been dominating the western tradition of history writing and formulates reasons for dismissing these models. First, he discusses the Hegelian model of history, which is often applied to the process of colonization and is in fact a model of the ‘master- slave relationship’ according to Young. The Hegelian dialectic is one that strives and moves towards totality, which progresses to a better, more complete place. It starts at one point in time and then moves forward (‘thesis’); During this process of progress, however, it encounters confrontations (‘antithesis’). The thesis and antithesis subsequently melt into a synthesis, after which the process will be repeated again until totality is reached. Young launches a very important critique on this model, especially in relation to the postcolonial history, namely that our view of history is not at all neutral but that it relies on the view of history when Europe was a powerful suppressor. He calls this “link between the structures of knowledge and the forms of oppression of the last two hundred years” the phenomenon of “Eurocentrism” (1990: 2). Eurocentric ideology considers all non-European cultures as childlike, still stuck in an earlier stage of development. Also in the Marxist model of history this ‘Eurocentrism’ is present, according to Young and it thus does not really offer a sufficient alternative as it contains the same basic plot structure. Central in the Marxist model stands the relationship between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’. According to Young, much of the knowledge we have of the other, is actually more bound up with ourselves and has little or nothing to do with the other. However, critics like Quayson (2000) resent the claims that Marxist dialectic would be completely useless in respect to postcolonial studies.

23 The point I want to make here is that from the point of view of postcolonialism, there is no need to perceive Marxist and poststructuralist discourses as mutually incompatible. The crucial index for evaluating any particular configuration of ideas is whether it provides ways of getting out of confusing habits of thought (2000: 14).

According to Quayson, “Marxism did provide a prime anti-hegemonic discourse by which to contest the West” but the main problem existed in the fact that the rhetoric hardly ever matched with the practice, partly because the derivative ideology had to take shape within contexts that were riddled with their exacerbated cultural contradictions. Thus, in practice, the mobilization of the masses actually entailed the concentration of power in the hands of a radical elite who turned out not to be very different from the Western bourgeoisie they so vehemently criticized (2000: 15).

Quayson therefore advocates “a more culturally sensitive form of Marxism” (2000: 16). Young also refers to another idea inherent in Marxist dialectic, viz. the ‘civilizing mission’ thought, which I have already referred to earlier on and which is present in this Marxist dialectic (1990: 2): To this extent, Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who declared that ‘Africa has no history’, and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there.

It thus brings to the question of colonisation a sense of morality, which of course goes hand in hand with economical and political ideas about colonisation: It is ‘the white man’s burden’ to bring civilisation to the childlike culture of the ‘others’, if necessary with violence. The phrase became famous by the poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) written by Rudyard Kipling, a British imperialist author who was born in India: Take up the White Man's burden! Have done with childish days The lightly-proffered laurel, The easy ungrudged praise: Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers.

According to Theo D’Haen (2002), Rudyard Kipling was one of the first writers of empire to also emphasize the duties of imperialism and not only the privileges. He was the first person who advocated the ‘civilising mission thought’ so clearly, which made him the ‘ethical voice’ in times of imperialism. Although the bigger part of his

24 works are situated within India, Kipling always keeps defending English imperialism which is why Kipling is often accused of being a thorough racist. Salman Rushdie himself wrote an essay on this author in his Imaginary Homelands. Rushdie criticizes the writings of Kipling on the basis of this intrinsic racism his writing is characterized by. Rushdie claims that he has never been able to read Kipling’s literature in a calm manner, because of the opposite emotions of anger and delight it brings him. He also refers to the fact that the racism that can be found in those writings is often downplayed by the West, because Kipling would have merely reflected “the attitudes of his age” in his work. Rushdie cynically writes that this excuse is outraging for “members of the allegedly inferior race” (1992: 74). Young also stresses the fact that important issues like race and gender are not at all considered in the Marxist view of history. In this respect it is thus more a narrative of the western self. Young states that: […]the politics and theory of postcolonialism can be largely identified with the goals and practices of so-called “Third World Feminism” (Park and Sunder Rajan 2000); with respect to Marxism, the difference is that it incorporates predominantly non-western forms of Marxism that have been developed to analyse the system and histories of imperialism and colonialism, their aftermath and their persistence (2001: 58).

Young also refers to the work of Edward Said, who raises the term “Orientalism”. According to Said this is one of the main deficits of West-European colonial history writing, which he defines as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (1995:1). In his introduction, Said refers to the fact that especially the French and the British have a very long tradition of “Orientalism”. According to Said, the by “the West” constructed concept of “the Orient” was used as a means for constructing an identity for this “West” itself. It operated as an antidote for the West-European society and culture, therefore being one of the “deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (1995: 1). In other words it made it possible for the West to construct an “idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and culture” (1995: 7). Also Young refers to this historical notion of ‘Otherness’: But in History, of course, what is called ‘other’ is an alterity that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns ‘its’ other. With the dreadful simplicity that orders the movement Hegel erected as a system, society trots along before my eyes reproducing to perfection the mechanism of the death struggle: the reduction of a ‘person’ to a ‘nobody’ to the position of ‘other’ – the inexorable plot of racism (1990: 2).

25 Said pays special attention to a more historical and material definition, viz. “the Orient” being “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1995: 3). He refers to Foucault’s work The Archaeology of Knowledge and the term d i s c o u r s e: […] without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period (1995: 3).

Robert Young also acknowledges the importance of the insights of Said but nonetheless states that “Said cannot get out of the Hegelian problematic that he articulates, and indeed tends himself to repeat the very processes that he criticizes” (1990: 11).

3.3 Subaltern Studies: the Need for a New Perspective One of the most influential theorists who prepared the way for the Subaltern Studies group is Homi K. Bhabha. Bhabha was born in Mumbai in 1949 and is currently a Professor English literature at Harvard University. He was the first one who tried to create a dialogue between theories of colonialism and psychoanalytics. In his thinking he is very much influenced by Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Said’s Orientalism and Fanon. In his famous essay The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism Bhabha describes the postcolonial societies as characterised by both ‘ambivalence’ and ‘hybridization’. By ‘hybridization’ he means “the emergence of entirely new cultural forms” (cf. Eakin, 2001). According to Bhabha, different cultures ‘negotiate’ their way in to a global or colonial encounter. Bhabha advocates that we desert the idea of ‘nations’ as nations are – like literature – always constructed concepts, narratives. In the introduction to Nation and Narration Bhabha explicitly stresses this idea: Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation – or narration – might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the West (1990: 1).

Bhabha consequently states that the concept of ‘nation’ is thus characterized by a high degree of ambivalence “for the nation, as a form of cultural elaboration […] is

26 an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture as its most productive position” (1990: 3). This ambivalence is definitely worth investigating, for “if the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history […] then what effect does this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationess?’” (1990: 2). One of the most powerful and interesting insights of Bhabha is that “the ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’” (1990: 4). Although Bhabha is considered to be an important theorist in the postcolonial discourse, he has often been criticised because of his extremely difficult and inaccessible writing style. However, as Eakin points out in the New York Times, He is credited with charting a new way of thinking about identity and cultural conflict. His name merits an entry in the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. And he is one of the most-sought-after speakers on the academic lecture circuit (NYT, November 17, 2001).

What is more, Bhabha also strongly influenced the work of what was later called ‘the Subaltern Studies group’. The Subaltern Studies group is a collective of historians and scholars from South-Asian origin – and to some extent also scholars from all over the world interested in the postcolonial South-Asian society –, who seek to construct a new perspective on postcolonial studies. Some of the famous scholars that belong to this group are Cayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, N.K. Chandra, Ranajit Guha and Gayan Prakash. According to Quayson “the work of the Subaltern Studies group was primarily designed to challenge the dominant modes of retelling India’s past” (2000: 54). The term ‘subaltern’ was borrowed from the Italian political philosopher Gramsci who used it to denote those who are subordinated by hegemonic power and hence are denied a meaningful place in history (cf. Quayson 2000). In Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies Dipesh Chakrabarty explains what Subaltern Studies is really about and wherein its origin lies. In order to enfeeble the critique on subaltern studies given by scholars like Arif Dirlik, who claimed that Subaltern Studies merely use the same methods like the British Marxists, Chakrabarty provides a “small history” of the Subaltern Studies project. According to Chakrabarty, the Subaltern Studies grew out of a debate in the 1960s between two extremes in relation to the question about nationalism and

27 colonialism. First, there was the opinion held by Anil Seal, who claimed that Indian nationalism had its origin in an Indian elite who had learned from the British rulers. Second, there was the position of Chandra, who saw nationalism as an anti-reaction to colonialism and as a bringer of unity among the people (2002). The inconsistencies inherent in both these narratives gave rise to the formation of a new generation of scholars, who called themselves ‘midnight’s children’ and in 1982 the birth of Subaltern Studies was a fact (cf. Chakrabarty 2002). One of the main representatives of this early Subaltern Studies group was Ranajit Guha, who accused the two former postcolonial narratives of being elitist, as they did not recognise the power of the subaltern peoples for making their own destiny. According to Chakrabarty, in this aspect there is indeed some correspondence with the attempt to write “history-from-below” by scholars like Thompson and Hobsbawn but nonetheless points to three main differences, in which the “history-from-below” approach and Subaltern Studies prove to be distinct: Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital, a critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge) (2002: 8).

Subaltern Studies instead advocates a theory which acknowledges the politics of the people, of the masses, because of “the failure of Indian the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation” (cf. Guha 2000: 5). Rosalind O’Hanlon states that Their task, and that of all historians who write in the same idom, thus becomes one of ‘filling up’: of making an absence into presence, of peopling a vacant space with figures – dissimilar in their humble and work-worn appearance, no doubt, but bearing in these very signs of their origin the marks of a past and a present which is their own (2000: 79).

Chakrabarty also refers to Guha’s rejection of any kind of ‘staging theory of history’ and of the use of the term ‘prepolitical’ to speak about the consciousness of the mass. The term ‘prepolitical’ had been introduced by Hobsbawn to denote the consciousness of the peasantry, which had not yet reached the political stage of modernity and capitalism. According to Chakrabarty, Guha rejects this because it merely reproduces “the same logic of representation as that used by the elite classes in dominating the subaltern” (2002: 16). According to Chakrabarty – again referring to Guha’s work – this of course also raises the “question of the relation between texts and power” (2002: 15). In a Western tradition of history writing that relies on written testimonies, what happens to cultures that have an oral tradition of passing forth

28 history? And as history is mostly written by the dominant in history, what happens to the history of the subordinated? What happens to the history of those who do not have a chance of delivering a written testimony of it? It is in this respect that the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is often being referred to. Because he was especially interested in the relationship between power, language and knowledge and the relationship between the subject and power his work is for obvious reasons applicable in the postcolonial discourse. O’Hanlon also stresses the influence of Foucault’s thinking in Subaltern studies: Yet it is Foucault, of course, who has constructed our most powerful critique here, not only of Man as a universal category but of the way in which modern societies discipline and subjugate their populations through the production, in the discourses of the human sciences, of norms of thought and behaviour which lay down the sort of subjects that we are, and prescribe to us the law of our being. […] With Nietzsche, Foucault exposes the obsession with origins which underlies the search for a self-constituting universal human nature, for ‘the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession’. With the dissolution of the universal human subject goes also, of course, the seamless narrative movement of history, from the past to our present, which we continually attempt to construct and to recognize ourselves in (2000: 94-95).

In his work The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault uses the term ‘archive’ and he is mostly interested in defining what constitutes those archives and how they are produced. First, Foucault uses the term ‘historical a priori’: “the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually said” (2006: 143). What Foucault means is that “the domain of statements” is formed by all sorts of knowledge, concepts and ideas and thus is far from neutral. It is in this context that Foucault uses the term ‘archive’: Instead of seeing, on the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place, we have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive (2006: 145).

Foucault formulates the greatest difficulty with this concept of the ‘archive’: It is impossible for us to describe our own archive, because it is exactly this archive which provides us with the frame of rules by which we speak. So, according to his theory, one can never fully untie himself from his own ‘archive’ and thus never fully understand and describe the workings of it. Thus we should try not only to look at what has explicitly been said but also to what has been implied with it: Chakrabarty here refers to Eugen Weber:

29 In his well-known study of nineteenth-century rural France, Peasants into Frenchmen, Eugen Weber provides a succinct formulation of this approach: “The illiterate are not in fact inarticulate; they can and do express themselves in several ways. Sociologists, ethnologists, geographers, and most recently demographic historians have shown us new and different means of interpreting evidence (2002: 15).

Quayson also recognises this fact and formulates that because the Subaltern Studies group really want to let the subaltern speak they attend to non-conventional sources of historiography since the established documentary accounts are noted to be completely contaminated by the perspectives of the elite classes in whose interests the history of India had predominantly been written (2000: 58).

Thus to avoid an elitist approach of postcolonial studies, Chakrabarty refers to Guha’s “metaphor of reading”, which reflects “the need for the historian to develop a conscious strategy for reading the archives” (2002: 16). Chakrabarty then refers to the perhaps most famous essay in respect to Subaltern Studies, namely Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?. In this essay Spivak formulates a critique on philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault and in her way of thinking she seems to be related to Derrida. Her opinion on Subaltern Studies is also ambivalent: She both acknowledges its importance and criticizes it. Although the Subaltern Studies group justifiably focuses on Said’s notion of the ‘permission to narrate’, Spivak argues that the theorists of this group do this “master-slave dialectic” (2001: 2201). When these writers speak, in their essentializing language, of a gap between interest and action in the intermediate group, their conclusions are closer to Marx than to the self- conscious naivete of Deleuze’s pronouncement on the issue. Guha, like Marx, speaks of interest of the social rather than the libidinal being (2001: 2201).

However, on the question whether the subaltern can indeed really speak she answers fairly negative: For the (gender-unspecified) “true” subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation (2001: 2202).

According to Spivak the problem is that all postcolonial studies prevent to depict the subaltern as subjects in history. They are still subordinated, as ‘real’ subaltern people are almost never heard. Spivak subsequently narrows her theory down to the position of women in postcolonial historiography. According to Spivak, whether in colonial or in postcolonial discourse, “the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant” (2001: 2203). If, in the contest of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as a female is even more deeply in shadow (2001: 2203).

30 Thus, the act of speaking is, according to Spivak, determined by the acts of hearing, encoding, responding and interpreting. One does not exist without another. As we can read in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism: The historian who tries to recover the past should sketch “the itinerary of the trace” that the silenced subaltern has left., should mark the sites where the subaltern was effaced, and should delineate the discourses that did the effacing (2001: 2196).

Spivak received a lot of criticism after the publishing of her article. The main critique launched on Spivak in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is “that she leaves us no place to stand” (2001: 2196). Her political pronouncements are unambiguous, but she steadfastly refuses to advocate solutions beyond an openness to the other that can appear vague, undiscriminating, and indeed theatrical. To continually dismantle one’s own assumptions seems itself an act of privilege, a deconstructionist’s luxury that few can afford […] (2001: 2196).

However, despite of this criticism the fact remains that she has become one of the key figures in the postcolonial debate who raised some very interesting and puzzling issues.

3.4 Postcolonial Literature The term postcolonial literature is especially reserved to denote the literature of former colonized countries after their Independence, in which its writers seek to both criticise the practices of colonialism and imperialism and give their country its place in history back by clearly distinguishing their mother country from the former colonizing country. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (2002), those postcolonial literatures developed gradually, like national consciousness did. All postcolonial texts have in a sense to do with migration, place, displacement, domination and subordination. In the work The Empire Writes Back, the authors distinguish four different models that have been used to account for the vast variety of postcolonial texts. First, they discern the “national or regional models” which account for the literature of former colonized countries that followed the same developmental course as American Literature did. These literatures have become completely independent, by “national literary differences ‘within’ English writing” (cf. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2002: 16). Consequently also the postcolonial literature of India can be

31 described in this way. A second category of postcolonial literature is referred to by the authors as “the ‘Black writing’ model” (2002: 19): This model accounts for all African postcolonial texts. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, these models are “race-based models which identify certain shared characteristics across various national literatures” (2002: 14). Third, they discern “wider comparative models” (2002: 22), which try to account for postcolonial literatures by investigating issues like the disjunction of language and place, thematic parallels, the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized or the dominating and the dominated. A last category of models are what Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin call “models of hybridity and synchreticity” (2002: 32). ‘Hybridity’ refers to the fact that those postcolonial writings are a collection of two different cultures: They borrow elements from both the indigenous and the former colonizer’s culture, which gives them disposal over a kind of ‘double vision’. In The Empire Writes Back the authors offer the following definition for ‘synchreticity”: Synchreticity is the process by which previously distinct linguistic categories, and, by extension, cultural formations, merge into a single new form (2002: 14).

In the postcolonial writings that belong to this category the perspective shifts to ‘the Other’ and “received history is tampered with, rewritten, and realigned from the point of view of the victims of its destructive progress” (2002: 33). Their main purposed is thus to reject the European traditional definition of history. In this category we can thus definitely place for example Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children. I thus will focus here on Indian postcolonial literature, and more specifically on the work(s) written by Salman Rushdie, probably the most famous Indian English writer. However, there are plenty of other Indian postcolonial writers that are worth mentioning. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997, edited by Salman Rushdie himself, contains among others extracts from G.V. Desani, R.K. Narayan, Anita and Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Salman Rushdie himself. In the introduction Rushdie (1997) states that the main purpose of this anthology of Indian literature was to represent the best pieces of Indian literature that were published in the first fifty years after the Independence. In this anthology consequently four consecutive generations of writers make their

32 appearance. For the fact that all works included are in English, Rushdie makes the following claim: The prose writing – both fiction and non-fiction – created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India, the so-called ‘vernacular languages’, during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, ‘Indo-Anglian’ literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books (1997: x).

Rushdie even calls it “the achievement of the writers”, who like him work in English and who are included in the anthology, that they have succeeded in finding “literary voices” that are “distinctively Indian” despite the forged nature of English in India (1997: xiii). By the example of Salman Rushdie, I will attempt to answer Spivak’s question in regard to the postcolonial literature. Although writers like Rushdie themselves in the past have been accused of some form of elitism, I will try to investigate whether through this postcolonial literature – although on the edge of Western culture too – the subaltern can indeed speak. For, when we are indeed incapable of ever untying ourselves from our own cultural frame of thinking, aren’t it those authors like Salman Rushdie who have come the closest to untying them from both perspectives? Or like Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, a character in The Ground Beneath Her Feet says: “The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame” (cf. Rushie 2000: 43). Harrison (2003) in this respect importantly refers to Spivak’s notions of ‘vertreten’ and ‘darstellen’ in respect to the representation of (subaltern) minorities. Both of these German words have the mean of ‘represent’ in English, but each are used differently: ‘Vertreten’ is used in a political context, whereas ‘darstellen’ is used to denote the “artistic senses of depiction” (2003: 95). Harrison also acknowledges the importance of this difference in regard to postcolonial writings and states: Any writer may write about India, Algeria, or anywhere else, ‘representing’ it in the ordinary literary sense, but only certain writers are eligible, it would seem to ‘represent’ it in the latter sense, where literary ‘representation’ becomes linked to notions of authenticity, typicality, and the ability to speak for others (2003: 95).

Thus, I will try to investigate if an author like Rushdie, who belongs to two different cultures and at the same time does not fully belong to either of them, can indeed really speak for the subaltern minority. As Rushdie himself seems to be convinced of ‘authority’ because he stated in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian

33 Writing that the Indian postcolonial authors, who like him work in English, are “ensuring that India, or rather, Indian voices […], will henceforth be confident, indispensable participants in that literary conversation” (1997: xv) with the world which characterises literature.

34 4 The Breaking of Ties 4.1 Salman Rushdie: a Biographical Overview

It seems to me, more and more, that the fictional project on which I’ve been involved ever since Midnight’s Children back in 1975 is one of self-definition. […] as an attempt to come to terms with the various component parts of myself – countries, memories, histories, families, gods. First the writer invents the book; then, perhaps, the book invents the writer.5

Salman Rushdie was born in Mumbai in a Muslim family on 19 June 1947 – the year of India’s independence, which makes him thus something of a ‘Midnight’s child’. At the age of fourteen he was sent to England to attend school there. Meanwhile, when he was seventeen, his family moved from India to Pakistan. Later on he studied History at King’s College Cambridge, which at once explains Rushdie’s interest in the fine line between fiction and history. After graduating he went back to his family in Pakistan, where he briefly worked in television. However, after a while he returned to England, where he found a job as a copywriter in an advertising company. In 1975 his first novel Grimus was published, but it was only his second novel Midnight’s Children, published in 1981, which would bring him international attention. Salman Rushdie was awarded numerous prizes for this novel, including the prestigious ‘Booker Prize for Fiction’ in 1981, and in 1993 Midnight’s Children even received the ‘Booker of Bookers Prize’, which is an award for the best work that ever won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the first 25 years. The novel recounts the story of the generation of the ‘Midnight’s children’: The generation born in the same night that Nehru proclaimed India’s Independence. Rushdie masterfully blends history with fiction in a magical realist fashion. In 1983 his third novel, Shame, was published and in 1988 Rushdie outraged the Muslim world by his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. Furious because of the allegedly blasphemous tone of the novel against the Islam, the Iranian Ayatollah Kohmeini issued a fatwa – which de facto equals a death sentence – against Salman Rushdie, who was forced to go into hiding under police protection. This fatwa was issued on Valentine’s day 1989, which is exactly the day on which The Ground Beneath Her Feet starts. Salman Rushdie,

5 www.contemporarywriters.com , Thursday, August 17, 2006. Copyright @ Booktrust, British Council, the authors, the photographers. Produced by the Literature Departments of the British Council in association with Booktrust.

35 however, kept publishing many books, including novels, collections of essays, a children’s book and a travel narrative: The Jaguar Smile (1987), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991), East, West (1994),The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), Fury (2001), Step Across this Line (2002) and Shalimar the Clown (2005). Rushdie and his literature have, especially since the publishing of Midnight’s Children and the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses, become the subject of an enormous amount of critical essays. According to Keith Booker “there are many reasons for Rushdie’s critical prominence in the West” (1999: 2). One of the main reasons for this is that “Rushdie’s works match up extremely well to criteria of literary quality that have been widely accepted among Western critics” (1999: 2). Rushdie’s work is characterised by a strong sense of hybridity, as it is “rooted in both the Indian and the Western (especially British) cultural traditions” (1999: 2). However, according to Booker, this dimension of hybridity has also been a source of controversy as well. A lot of the Indian critics deny that Rushdie’s work can ever be representative of Indian culture and literature, because “Rushdie’s work (like Rushdie himself) would be too extensively rooted in Western literary traditions” (1999: 3). What is more, the fact that Rushdie has left his country of origin and writes from the West frequently has been used to accuse Rushdie of elitism. Because Rushdie is educated in Britain and now lives in America, a lot of the Indian critics have argued that he lost the power to represent the subaltern minority. A lot of these critics consequently accuse Rushdie of having become a Western product in the process of globalisation. I will mostly concentrate on Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which was first published in 1999. In this novel Salman Rushdie reworks the famous Orpheus and Eurydice myth by giving it a more contemporary setting and blends it with its more feminist Indian version, namely the Rati and Kama myth. In doing this, he not only makes the reader familiar with those two myths but also with the history of modern popular music. The basic storyline of the novel tells the story of the famous Indian rock star, Ormus Cama and his muse Vina Apsara, through the eyes of a third character, Umeed Merchant. Umeed was a friend of Ormus and his competitor for Vina’s love. When Vina disappears in an earthquake, it leaves both Ormus and

36 Umeed wrecked. In order not to forget her the narrator tries to reconstruct the story of her life and the one of the love of her life Ormus Cama, who is supposed to be “the greatest popular singer of all” (2000: 89). Reviews of The Ground Beneath Her Feet have been both positive and negative. One of the major critical assaults is that the novel is too superficial. Rollason for example states that, although he can still appreciate Rushdie’s satirical eclectic style, it is a shame that Rushdie’s characters are still “stuck firmly within the Anglo-American rock-music mainstream” (2001: chapter 6). He claims that his main disappointment lies also in the fact that the Orpheus and Eurydice myth is not elaborated in more depth, which makes “the analogy […] at best rather forced, and at worst downright vague” (2001: chapter 5). Despite those accusations I have chosen this novel, because it shows in a marvellous way how Rushdie keeps offering the reader alternative versions of reality. Those critics who claim that The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a disappointing and shallow novel, I believe, have seriously ‘misread’ it. First of all, critics like Rollason who called the connection with the Orpheus/Eurydice myth too vague, have clearly not picked up the references to its Indian variant, viz. the Rati/Kama myth. Later on I will explain how Rushdie will play with those different versions of reality, seeking to bridge the gap between the dominant Western view of history and the subaltern discourse, which is all to often denied its place in history.

4.2 The Characters in TGBHF: on the Edge of Different Cultures The three main characters in The ground beneath her feet all are characterised by a strong sense of not-belonging. Both Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant and Ormus Cama are born in India but both ‘untie’ themselves from their mother country and emigrate in the course of their lifetime to England and/or America. Vina Apsara born Nissa Shetty, the female protagonist, is perhaps the most prominent example of this not- belonging. Vina Apsara was born in America, in a family of Greek-Indian migrants. After the suicide of her mother her father sent her to relatives in India. Although of

37 Indian ancestry, Vina finds it hard to appreciate the country of her ancestors. In fact, when she meets Rai Merchant at the beach for the very first time she even states: I hate India. […] And there’s plenty of it to hate. I hate the heat, and it’s always hot, even when it rains, and I really hate that rain. I hate the food, and you can’t drink the water. I hate the poor people, and they’re all over the place. I hate the rich people, they’re so goddamn pleased with themselves. I hate the crowds, and you’re never out of them. I hate the way people speak too loud and dress in purple and ask too many questions and order you around. I hate the dirt and I hate the smell and I specially hate squatting down to shit. I hate the money because it can’t buy anything, and I hate the stores because there’s nothing to buy. I hate the movies, I hate the dancing, I hate the music. I hate the languages because they’re not plain English and I hate the English because it’s not plain English either. I hate the cars except the American cars and I hate those too because they’re all then years out of date. I hate the schools because they’re really jails and I hate the holidays because you’re not free even then. I hate the old people and I hate the kids. I hate the radio and there’s no TV. Most of all I hate the goddamn gods. (2000: 71-72).

In fact, Vina thus seems to blame India for not being America. Vina is depicted as someone who, as a truly westernized subject has totally lost the connection with the country of her ancestors. However, after returning to America she gradually starts to appreciate her Indian heritage. Also their family life is disrupted: Vina’s mother killed herself and Vina’s brothers and sisters, after which Vina’s birth father sends her away. Umeed’s parents also die at a fairly young age and Ormus has always been the outsider in his family, his mother blaming him for the death of his twin brother and his father, who always saw Ormus as a symbol of the decay of Indian youth, murdered by his older brother. In short, these characters thus all seem ‘gifted’ with a sense of non-belonging. According to Jaina C. Sanga, the theme of ‘migration’, displacement, (not) knowing one’s place is a recurring postcolonial metaphor in Salman Rushdie’s work. By calling into question normative constructions of home and exile, individual and nation, history and fiction, and fantasy and reality, Rushdie’s writing enacts the complexities of representing the postcolonial migrant experience (2001: 14).

Umeed, the narrator, seems aware of this sense of not-belonging himself, when he formulates his belief that “in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging” (cf. Rushdie 2000: 72). What is more, in this semi-satirical passage, Rushdie’s narrator questions the concept of ‘ties’ and even seems to make a strong political statement against western society – inspired by Marxist socialism – that orders, divides and labels people: For those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel (2000: 73).

38

Umeed proceeds by giving an overview of human exploration of the continents, the world and even space and concludes that “this is the species that kids itself it likes to stay at home, to bind itself with […] ties” (2000: 73). However, immediately after this, Umeed stresses the fact that it is his own subjective view and all that is therefore not obligatory for the reader to believe, thereby undercutting his earlier strong political statement. This offering of alternative, often contradictory opinions is typical of Salman Rushdie’s writing, as we will see later on in the chapter about the alternative versions of reality/fiction present in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Umeed at one point in the text even seems to openly advertise the premeditated ‘breaking of ties’ in respect to one’s knowledge about the world. He starts by pointing at ‘knowledge’ which has been widely accepted, namely that “disorientation is loss of the East”. Consequently, he connects this ‘knowledge’ with the power of language, which clearly marks the influence of Foucault, by saying: “That’s the official version. The language says so, and you should never argue with the language” (2000: 176). But whose language? Umeed criticizes this fact and goes on by asking himself whether this whole concept of orientation, home, ties, knowing one’s place isn’t “just the biggest, most truly global, and centuries-oldest piece of brainwashing” (2000: 177). However, Umeed Merchant is not the only character in the novel who contemplates this detached state of not-belonging: also Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, Ormus’s father, thinks about the concept of ‘outsideness’, in respect to his comparative mythology. On page 42-43 the reader becomes a witness of the discussion between Sir Darius and his fellow-scholar, the Englishman William Methwold. In response to Sir Darius’s question about what happens to “the people who just don’t belong”, the Englishman gives a rather startling imperialist point of view: Aren’t they, well, like waste paper, and all the stuff one puts in the bin? Aren’t they simply surplus to requirements? Not wanted on the voyage? Don’t we just cross them off the list? Cut them? Blackball them out of the club? (2000: 43).

The answer of William Methwold, I believe, can be read in two ways, which depend on our understanding of ‘the ones who don’t belong’. We can read this not-belonging in the sense of emigrants, like Salman Rushdie, who seem to fall in between two

39 cultures, not yet fully belonging to the culture of their new country and not anymore to the one they left behind. In this sense it functions as a critique of both the Subaltern Studies group and Western historians, who both seem to forget in their overview the category of the ones who don’t belong in those two categories. Another way of reading it is to consider the ‘ones not belonging’ as the subaltern people, whose stories have been frequently ‘scratched’ out of history books and whose place as subjects in history has been systematically withheld from them. According to Sanga, it is just this aspect of migration that Salman Rushdie vigorously attacks: “The Western metropolis must contend with its postcolonial history as told by its migrants and incorporate this voice into the national narrative” (2001: 17). In this sense we can probably read Sir Darius Cama’s fear of Independence as a fear of not-belonging. In respect to postcolonial studies, the sentence uttered by Sir Darius Cama after this discussion seems to give an interesting reply, and seems to be one of the thoughts that runs through the whole novel like a thread: “The only ones who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame” (2000: 43). That one could have the possibility of really stepping out of the frame, proves that in the novel a lot of importance is attached to the value of self-reliance or self-choice, the possibility of making his own life and place in history. This idea of ‘self-reliance’ became a very important issue in literature by the work of one of the earliest novelists in American literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson used this term with regard to nineteenth- century American literature – arguably still at a postcolonial stage – which he wanted to stimulate to become independent for British literature. In this respect Emerson wrote in his essay Self-Reliance: Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which its members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-Reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whose would be a man must be a nonconformist. […] Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind (2004: 535).

According to Emerson, by being more self-reliant “America must achieve its literary and cultural independence” (cf. Cain 2004: 476). As American literature was the first postcolonial literature written in English to achieve an independent status, the connection of this notion of ‘self-reliance’ with Indian English postcolonial

40 literature thus is very relevant. That Rushdie is influenced by those first American writers who ‘freed’ American Literature, is reflected by the names he gives the two sons of Mull Standish, namely Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne Crossley and Mr. Waldo Emerson Crossley. Also Umeed, the narrator, clearly believes in self-reliance when he speaks about choosing one’s own roots. By roots he means “not the ones we’re born with, can’t help having, but the ones we put down in our own chosen soil, the you could say radical selections we make for ourselves” (2000: 414). Dhar in this respect refers to Rushdie’s own opinion about his “international connection”: He writes that as an Indian living in London ( this in spite of his British citizenship), he is a part of a larger group of migrant writers from all over the world, who have the unique privilege of choosing their literary parents (1992, 20-21). (cf. Dhar 1999: 161)

These self-chosen roots definitely are depicted as much better versions of the roots you are born with and according to which you are labelled by society, perhaps against your own will.

4.3 Salman Rushdie’s Style as a Form of Breaking Ties I will try to demonstrate the use and need for authors like Salman Rushdie, as a connection between the two conflicting visions – the western biased and the subaltern biased one – on postcolonialism, by focusing on Rushdie’s writing style, which proves to be conceived by a mixture of influences. I will take a look at the type of narration in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the intertextuality as a mark of globalization and Rushdie’s use of alternative realities and the consequently blurry and delicate line between fiction and reality.

4.3.1 Unreliable Narration The term ‘unreliable narration’ was first used by Wayne C. Booth in his work The Rhetoric of Fiction. This unreliability can consist in the emotional and psychological instability of the narrator, the lack of information that narrator has about the events recounted by him, or sometimes even in the deliberate purpose of

41 misleading the reader. Unreliable narration is a frequently recurring type of narration in the novels written by Salman Rushdie. Not only in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but also in quite a few of his other novels. In both Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh the story is told by a first person narrator recounting the events that shaped his life, mostly so as to ‘tell the truth’, to write a small history of his – the narrators are always male! – life. These unreliable narrators are always of subaltern origin and the result of this first person narration is that it gives a strong sense of subjectivity to the story, which thus makes it unreliable. The subjectivity consequently is one aspect of why this type of narration is unreliable. The main need to write down their histories felt by these narrators can be quoted by the words of Saleem Sinai, the narrator in Midnight’s Children, who says: “I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity” (cf. Rushdie 2006: 4). As a result, the first person narrator in these novels also always is at the centre of the story, is always one of its leading characters: The narrator tells the story to add meaning to his life. For example, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Umeed claims he wants to tell Vina’s story, but at the same time he tells the story of his ‘liaison’ with her. If he wouldn’t tell this story, nobody would have ever known what he meant to Vina. So, the fear of being forgotten is definitely present. From the start my place was in a corner of their lives, in the shadow of their achievements. Yet I will always believe I deserved better. And there was a time when I almost had it. Not just Vina’s body, but her attention. Almost (2000: 160).

And indeed, in telling the story of Ormus and Vina, Umeed also will foreground his place in (their) history. He may have been a side character in the life story of Vina and Ormus, but in this story he becomes one of the main characters. Moreover, with Vina and Ormus dead and no other people around who ever knew about their secret love-relationship, Umeed’s story is the only one that is left available for us. There is no way of telling if his version of the facts is indeed what happened. Moreover, the reader gets alerted to this fact when Umeed himself says that “honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art” (2000: 213). Another important warning sign for the reader can definitely be found in the opening chapter of the book, when Umeed says “I, too, am compromised, no man knows better than I how irredeemably” (2000: 22).

42 I believe that the use of this type of narration functions as a means of underlining Rushdie’s belief in alternative versions of stories, in alternative realities. I think everyone will readily agree that if the story would have been told by Ormus Cama or Vina Apsara, it would look quite different. In section 4.2.3 I will elaborate this presence of alternative storylines and versions of reality further. Even if Umeed would indeed truthfully try to recount the story of Vina and Ormus, there are numerous events he tells which he only heard from Ormus or Vina and thus has a lack of knowledge of. Also the notion of relying on one’s memory is fairly unreliable: one can not only fail to remember things, but even remember things in a false way. Until today scientists have not yet managed to account for the workings of the mind in the process of remembering. But what is agreed upon among those scientists is that memories are unreliable. The narrator himself obviously is aware of that fact, because he states that “we change what we remember, then it changes us, and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves” (2000: 505). On page sixty four there is a clear example of ‘failing to remember’, when Umeed tells about the day he met Vina for the very first time: But at once I halt myself. It is possible that I am pouring the wine of several beach weekends into the bottle of a single day. Damn it, there are things I can’t remember. Was it on this day, or another day? […] So much is lost (2000: 64-65).

This problematic issue of trying to remember things also is reflected upon when Umeed states: “As I try to remember the exact sequence of events, I find that my memory has become a silent movie” (2000: 13). As ‘remembering things’ has a reconstructing function, it is very likely that the events in the past which are ‘remembered’ in the present are at least partly influenced by the knowledge the narrator gained afterwards or by his emotions. In short, Umeed’s story offers the reader just his subjective, perceived version of reality. Umeed himself points at the immense variety of explanations and stories when he says: “No shortage of explanations for life’s mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find” (2000: 74). Ironically enough, Umeed even uses the term ‘unreliable narration’, when he speaks about his rejection of any system of belief: “They seem flimsy, unpersuasive examples of the literary genre known as ‘unreliable narration’” (2000: 123). Thus, although his story might be misleading the reader, the narrator sometimes seems to

43 make the reader deliberately aware of his unreliability. The reader consequently is advised – although implicitly – of taking a critical stand while reading the novel. In respect to the postcolonial debate, the choice of using unreliable narration is of course not accidental.

4.3.2 Intertextuality as a Mark of Globalization The Russian linguist Michael Bakhtin introduced the basis for the theory of intertextuality by referring to the concept of ‘dialogism’: according to Bakhtin all language appeared in a dynamic relation with the language that precedes and follows it. A text thus never constitutes an isolated, independent unit but should be seen as a part of a conversation with preceding and following texts or thoughts: all texts are dialogic in nature. This quality of intertextuality both adds meaning to previously appeared texts and gets shaped by those preceding texts. Rushdie’s work is and has always been characterized by a high degree of intertextuality: his work is related to texts and influences from both Indian and Western culture. In fact, on the level of the basic storyline, The ground beneath her feet is based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth on the one hand and its Indian equivalent, the myth about Rati and Kama on the other hand. Salman Rushdie takes up these myths and in an inventive fashion alters them. In chapter five I will bring these two myths and the way they are represented in the novel into focus. For now we can note that, throughout the novel there are a lot of references to Greek, Roman and ancient Indian mythology: Orpheus and Eurydice, Rati and Kama, Helen of Troy, Dedalus, Medusa, Odysseus… Furthermore, throughout the novel Rushdie refers to famous figures from both Indian and Western political life like Mahatma Gandhi (2000: 28), Indira Gandhi (2000: 192), Sanjay Gandhi (2000: 228) and Sir Winston Churchill (2000: 88). He refers to famous writers like Aristotle (2000: 82), Giovanni Battista Vico (2000: 83), Novalis (2000: 101), Nabokov (2000: 112), Milan Kundera (2000: 380) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (2000: 209). As The Ground Beneath Her Feet is largely about music, it should cause no surprise that there are numerous references to world-famous songs, artists and bands. Rushdie explicitly refers to artists like John Lennon (2000: 282), Manfred Mann

44 (2000: 281), Garfunkel (2000: 156) and Mick Jagger (2000: 282). For example, the title of chapter twelve, “Transformer”, also is the title of a famous Lou Reed album, and the song Ormus hears his brother Gayomart sing the melody but of which he can not understand the words appears to be the hit Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan. However, Rushdie also makes use of recurring characters from his own work: Characters like William Methwold (from Midnight’s Children), Homi Catrack (also from Midnight’s Children) and Aurora Zogoiby (from The Moor’s Last Sigh) all return as minor characters in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (cf. Rollason 2001). Another proof of this intertextuality in The Ground Beneath Her Feet can be found in the playing with names. This occurs at various places in the novel: Rushdie then not always uses the name to refer to that actual historical person in history but uses it in a different context as the name of a character in the novel. It thus extends the function of referring to, it serves as a means of characterizing the character. For example, the combination of the names Darius and Xerxes in the name of the character Sir Darius Xerxes Cama refers to two famous characters in world history. Darius is the name of the king who ruled the Persian empire in the 6th-5th century B.C. and Xerxes was his son and successor. As a matter of fact, the Persian empire was at its height during the reign of Darius I (Wikipedia: 2007). In Rushdie’s novel, Sir Darius Cama, belonging to the upper echelons of British-Indian society, seems in fact an upholder of the British presence in India. What is more, on looking upon the cheering Indian crowd in the stadium when he is preparing for his match of cricket, Sir Darius thinks: The country’s imperial overlords, observing the bawdiness of the populace, could only feel disappointed at the continuing backwardness of those over whom they had ruled so wisely for so long. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, walking out to bat, wanted to cry aloud, “Brace up! Do yourselves justice! The British are watching!” (2000: 28).

It seems that Sir Darius has been completely brainwashed by British imperialism. He even refers to Britain as “the mother country” (2000: 88), which is a quite ironical thing for an Indian to say. The references in his name to the Persian Empire thus in a way seem to serve as a satirical pun on his love for the British Empire. Also the characterization of the main character, Ormus Cama, can be seen as some form of intertexuality, but in an implicit way. However, more will become clear when speaking in detail about the characterization of the main characters below.

45 The consequence of this high degree of intertextuality is of course that the reader has to be aware of those intertextual references in order to fully grasp the novel. All these references, in accordance with the unreliable narrative perspective, give the reader the task of ‘doing his homework’. One should not take the offered story for granted but read it very carefully, evaluate and examine it. As a matter of fact, not only the reader’s understanding of the story but the whole story itself changes with and depends on the degree in which the reader grasps these intertextual references. Thus, alternative versions of the story become visible according to the understanding of those references. Rollason states that it is exactly this openness of novels that the linguist Roland Barthes designated as “the death of the author” (cf. Rollason 2001). According to Rollason (2001), Barthes meant by this notion “that the literary text henceforth belonged not to its writer but to its reader, who now had the right to interpret its words multiply and at will”. It is with the same kind of reading-strategy that the reader is invited to explore Rushdie’s otherworlds and alternative realities.

4.3.3 Alternative Realities: Rushdie’s Otherworlds In his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet Salman Rushdie constitutes an interesting intertwining of two conflicting myths, namely the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and the Rati and Kama myth. Those two myths have the same basic structure and theme, viz. the loss of love and the quest of the one lover to try and bring his lost love back. However, the main difference lies in the gender-roles. In the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, it is the man who descends to the underworld in order to save his love. In the Rati and Kama myth, its Indian Hindu variant, it is the woman who undertakes the quest of bringing her love back. The Indian variant is thus much more feminist than its Greek-Roman equivalent. Those two myths in essence offer two different, alternative versions of the same basic narrative structure. When Clark in his work Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds, writes that “the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice […] fails to fulfil expectations or challenge readers with anything startling or new” (2001: 199), I think he does not pay enough attention to the tensions created by the dynamics between the two myths and especially to the

46 brilliant way in which its Indian variant, the Rati and Kama myth, complicates and challenges the gender-roles. According to me, Rollason (2001) makes the same mistake. In chapter 5 I will elaborate further on the presence of those two conflicting myths in the novel. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, however, does not only offer alternative versions on the level of the basic storyline, but there are even explicit references to the existence of alternative realities, which I will call ‘other worlds’. I should remark that I will not use this term in exactly the same sense of Clark (2001). Clark defines those ‘other worlds’ as “the overlapping realms of cosmology, mythology, and mysticism” (2001: 3). What I will call other worlds are the ‘alternative realities’ that are offered by the author, not only to the reader, but also to the characters in the novel. Although these alternative realities also can be situated in the realm of mythology – like is in fact the case with the two alternative love myths mentioned above –, these ‘other worlds’ can thus be manifested in various ways. In the novel itself it is the character of Ormus Cama, the Indian rock singer, who first becomes aware of the existence of those different worlds. In its description, that ‘other world’ ironically enough seems to bear a lot of resemblance to modern- day American society: “the place is swarming with people” who are “in too much of a hurry”, who indulge themselves in promiscuity, eat greasy food with ketchup that dribbles down their faces and who are “laughing too loud, crying too hard” (2000: 98). The mentioning of “the Herald Tribune” seems indeed to confirm the fact that the narrator is indeed describing one side of American society. In this description obviously a critical judgement is made of this American society. Furthermore, when Ormus states that in this ‘other world’, “John Kennedy got shot […] and Nixon’s president”, “East Pakistan […] seceded from the union”, “the British aren’t in Indochina” and “Lou Reed’s a man” (2000: 350) it becomes clear that Ormus is describing our non-fictional world! By this, the distinction between the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’, stories and ‘history’, becomes very fluid and blurry. This perfectly shows Rushdie’s love for confronting the reader with contradictions and making the evident disappear. In an interview with The Guardian of 1999, Rushdie admits this fact and says about this:

47 It’s called The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and the ground is shaking and uncertain and unreliable. I thought, do it to the reader as well, just progressively pull the rug out.6

I will examine this fine and intriguing line between history and fiction in more detail in chapter 4.3.4. As I have already said, Ormus is the first character who perceives the existence of that ‘Other World’. In the beginning, however, Ormus only becomes aware of this alternative version of reality or ‘otherworld’ in his dreams. In this world of dreams it is the ghost of Gayomart, his dead-born twin brother, who invents the songs. The metaphor of the ghost is a recurring one in (post)colonial literature. Generally, it symbolizes the haunted past of former colonizing countries. The ghost then comes back to haunt people who have been engaged in any form of colonialism or who seek to cleanse the official version of history from all untruthfulness. A famous example is Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost. In this novel the main character, haunted by a skeleton, tries to let victims of a political murder by the Sri Lankan government ‘speak’ by searching for the truth. In this search for the truth, however, she intends not only to let this one victim speak but to recover the history of all those who disappeared in the Sri Lankan postcolonial period. By searching and following his brother into this other world, Ormus can hear the melodies and vowel sounds of those songs but not the words. What is more, it is exactly in the existence of this other world that Ormus will find his own musical power because as we can read in the novel “in Gayo, Ormus found the Other into which he dreamed of metamorphosing, the dark self that first fuelled his art” (2000: 99). This ‘doppelgänger’ theme is in fact a very important feature with regard to the construction of those ‘other worlds’. In the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2003) the following definition is offered of the noun ‘doppelgänger’: “A spirit that looks exactly like a living person” or “a person who looks exactly like someone else but who is not related to them”. What is more, not only Gayomart and Ormus are ‘doppelgängers’ but so are Vina and Maria, who seems to be her ghost image, and even Vina and Mira, the look-alike whom Ormus will falsely mistake for his lost love. In respect to those ‘other worlds’, Ormus and Gayomart can be seen as

6 Wollaston, Sam, “Bombay Mix” in The Guardian, 2 April 1999.

48 two alternative versions of one person, who each seem to be wound up in different dimensions or realities. At first, Gayomart does not pay much attention to his living twin brother but gradually Gayomart’s behaviour changes: from the moment Ormus arrives in England his brother no longer runs away in his dreams but comes up to him in a menacing, almost evil way: Ormus is appalled by the hostility in Gayomart’s glittering grin. Why do you hate me, he asks. Why do you think, his brother replies. I’m the one who died (2000: 281).

The situation changes dramatically after the car accident Ormus has in England: from now on, although his brother seems to have escaped, he is able to perceive both worlds at the same time. Through each eye Ormus now has access to another world, and thus in this way disposes of a kind of double vision. This accident thus seems to have a lot of significance and more particularly where this accident takes place, namely England. It seems that, only after his acquaintance with the ‘real’ England after migrating, Ormus does acquire this double vision. However, we might say that his ability of looking into the otherworld has been announced already when he is on the plane to England. It is here namely that the character of Maria makes her first appearance, right after he “passed through the membrane” (2000: 255). This “passing through the membrane” is described by Rai, the narrator, and signifies the moment one becomes a foreigner (2000: 418). The young Indian woman seems to appear as from nowhere and comes up to Ormus, talking to him about their endless nights of making love, kissing him and telling him that she will be “every woman” he has ever wanted, “of every shape, of every race, of every wild proclivity et cetera” (2000: 256). After the accident, when Ormus Cama lies in a coma, Maria reappears as the nurse. About this appearance, the narrator says that “she seems to materialize from nowhere” (2000: 315). Again Maria starts talking to Ormus about their past love life and even starts making love to him. Although Lady Spenta Cama, Ormus’s mother takes all kinds of safety measures to prevent her from coming, she keeps returning. Maria herself claims that she comes from “his secret world” (2000: 317). After Vina has awoken Ormus from his coma, Maria keeps coming regularly but “Vina’s presence guarantees Maria’s absence”, so that this Maria character seems to belong to another world.

49 In her conversations with Ormus, Maria refers to their “life in the otherworld” and talks about how “realities are in conflict” (2000: 326). It thus seems that in Ormus those two different realities are heading for a clash with each other. It can be suspected that Maria and Vina are two versions of one and the same person. The narrator also points to this fact when he says that Vina “feels injured by the very existence of this Other, it offends her” (2000: 324). He even states that “Other-hatred is for Vina the mirror image of self-love”, which actually sounds very similar to the critique of Western history-writing voiced by the Subaltern studies group. Maria uses the metaphor of earthquakes to explain the battle between those two alternative versions of reality: Two worlds in collision. Only one can survive and so on. In the end this world will crumble and fall and et cetera and we will be together at home for ever and I will make you mad with joy et cetera et cetera et cetera as you must already know (2000: 326).

Earthquakes are connected to human “Fault”. They are “the means by which the earth punishes itself and its population for its wrongness” (2000: 327). They are consequences of the upcoming clash between the two different worlds, a clash in which one of the two worlds possibly will disappear because it is not strong enough to survive. Ormus Cama seems to be the only one in the novel who is aware of this upcoming clash, and it fills him with fear: If each of us has alternative existences in the other continuum, which of our possibilities will live on, which will disappear? If we are all twins, which twin must die? (2000: 389)

Indeed, after the release of Ormus’s predicative earthquake songs, a series of earthquakes shakes the world. The narrator tells us that “the 1980s had been a bad time for the whole faulty earth” (2000: 450-451) and sums up the list of earthquakes that took place in the 1980s: Algeria (1980), Mexico City (1985), San Salvador (1986), India-Nepal (1988), China-Burma (1988), Armenia-Turkey (1988), Tajikistan (1989). What is more, the narrator starts his story in the novel on the day of the earthquake in 1989, again in Mexico. The narrator states that this earthquake “measures a full nine on the Richter Scale, which is to say: as bad as it gets” and a “XII on the Modified Mercalli, meaning complete destruction” (2000: 471). Vina Apsara dies in this earthquake, which is described by the narrator as “the first great calamity to be caused by the collision of worlds described by Ormus Cama […] the beginning of an unimaginable end” (2000: 471).

50 In the following years, Ormus starts to wear an eye patch, in order to be able to control his double vision. Whenever he takes off his eye patch he is able to perceive the other world and Maria comes to visit him. However, on the morning after he marries Vina Apsara, he seems to have lost his double vision. The years passed and the otherworld did not return, Maria no longer came to see him, and with the passage of time he began to have his doubts about its existence; it began to feel like a trick of the mind, a mistake. It was like waking from a dream; into happiness (2000: 436).

This, however, does not make Ormus feel at ease, he changes his musical style and writes pieces, which are named “Sounds of the Otherworld”. The narrator says that “the longer the otherworld remained hidden, the more fearful he became” (2000: 437). From that moment on, Ormus Cama starts to think that “the otherworld is the next world […] the world that will succeed our own” (2000: 437). Towards the end Maria also starts to visit Rai, both in his photographs and his dreams and tells him: “Do you remember when we were lovers? Do you remember our wonderful first night of love? No […] you don’t even remember me, do you, you bastard” (2000: 448). The fact that Maria visits both Ormus and Rai, confirms two things: First, that Maria indeed can be seen as an ‘other worldly’ version of Vina and second, that also Ormus and Rai (a.k.a. Umeed) seem to be depicted as each other’s ‘other’. That this is a fact of which Rai is aware becomes clear when he states that “the great man lost a twin brother, but (without knowing it) gained me. I’m his true Other, his living shadow self” (2000: 386). Near the end, Maria appears one last time in a photograph and afterwards it is her caretaker who explains on camera to Umeed what has happened: The worlds heading for collision, already it has begun, the earthquakes, you have perceived their meaning, I think. Your friend Ormus feared the worst long ago, it damaged him, I am sorry. He envisioned the end of your line. But the truth is, your line is stronger than we believed […] Whole areas are devastated, torn and shredded, just no longer there. Where they were is now a non-being that drives people mad. Incomprehensible nothingness (2000: 507-508).

Essentially, Ormus’s disposal over a kind of double vision after the car accident seems to bear a lot of similarities with the life of the postcolonial author himself. As Sanga states, Rushdie himself writes with a “double vision” as a result of his migration, his status as “an insider and an outsider in both worlds” (2001: 15). Sanga characterizes this double vision as both plural and partial: “plural because his writing contains aspects from several cultures, and partial because the writing does

51 not fully ascribe to either culture” (2001: 15). It is exactly because of his not- belonging and writing from the margins that “Rushdie authors and questions the unequal relations between peoples, races and languages” (cf. Sanga 2001: 17). Maybe also herein lies the strength of the postcolonial author. If we assume that one can never truly escape the context and the surrounding world that shapes one’s thoughts, one’s writing, one’s worldview, can’t the postcolonial author function as a solution for bridging the gap? This a valuable question that should definitely be raised in postcolonial literary studies. Is it true that “double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth” (2000: 420)? However, the main question remains whether writers like Salman Rushdie, who have gradually become a “product and exponent of that globalisation” (cf. Rollason 2001: chapter 3) are indeed capable of letting the ‘subaltern speak’ through their work. Does the one who steps out of the frame indeed see the big picture, or does one perspective ultimately disappear behind the other one? Later on I will try to formulate an answer to this question, by examining the dynamics between the Orpheus-Kama myth and the role of music in the novel.

4.3.4 The Fine Line Between History and Fiction When studying postcolonial literature – and frankly, any kind of literature – one should always keep an interest in history too, as the two always – although not always apparently – go hand in hand. As T.N. Dhar states in his work History- Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel (1999): “It still remains true that man’s very being is intimately connected with history” and Even though the mode of representing and understanding it has become problematic in recent times, his knowledge of himself and the world he inhabits continues to be largely shaped and very often conditioned by his understanding of what it was like in the past (1999: 9).

According to Dhar it thus is a mistake to merely compare historical facts in a novel with what really happened in history, an attitude of which he accuses traditional historians. In this we can see the influence of Bhabha who stated that in respect to the (post)colonial debate it is far more interesting to investigate how ‘truths’ are constructed than to investigate how true they are. Because of the recent discussions in respect to issues like postcolonial discourse, for example under influence of the

52 Subaltern Studies group, “the modes of history-writing have changed radically and the boundaries between history and fiction are no longer as tight as they were thought to be” (1999: 27). Harrison also acknowledges this fact and states: The work of narrative fiction […] can never be wholly or ‘purely’ literary; it ‘always is, it says, it does something else’, to repeat Derrida’s phrase. […] The critic wanting to assess the ideological work that a given piece of fiction has performed must recognize, however, that literature can frame ideological and historical material in different ways, and that particular readers’ responses will have varied historically (2003: 147).

So, according to Harrison, when reading a novel accurately, the reader must have some degree of awareness of “the contexts and modes of recognition” and “the historical conventions of reading and literature as such” (2003: 147). According to Dhar, the Indian historiographic metafictional novel by Salman Rushdie explores, questions, challenges and criticises history and “accepts that there can be several valid views of the past” (1999: 168). Dhar characterizes these metafictional novels as self-reflexive works in which the authors “use the modes of parody and magic realism to contest the very idea of realism as a reliable method of representing reality” (1999: 168). The magical realist novel thus either offers an ‘alternative reality’ of the past or questions the generally accepted version of history (cf. Dhar 1999). A lot of critics have condemned Rushdie and his followers for writing in this magical realist style and the literary critic Pankaj Mishra even referred to this style as an illness of the post-independent era, which he called “Rushdie-it is”. Central to all this is Rushdie’s belief that any kind of historical reconstruction or remembering is de facto fragmentary. Dhar acknowledges the fact that Rushdie’s work is characterized by a “tone [… that] suggests that our incapacity to see things in their wholeness is something to which we are condemned; we just cannot write a full and total account of anything” (1999: 170). Rushdie makes the reader also constantly aware of that fact, for example by means of the ‘unreliable’ narrator Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant. Any version of reality, every story thus naturally contains the narrator’s biased remembrance of that reality, which makes the distinction between fiction and history indeed quite problematic. Dhar refers in this respect to what he calls “the crux of the whole enterprise of history-writing”, viz. “that all accounts are bound to be incomplete”. Also the narrator in The Ground Beneath Her Feet seems aware of that fact when he says that

53 Reason and the imagination, the light and the light, do not coexist peacefully. They are both powerful lights. Separately or together, they can blind you. Some people see well in the dark (2000: 147).

Another typicality of the metafictional historiographic novel is, according to Dhar, the tension created by the “opposition between the official and non-official views of the past” (1999: 174). In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the narrator also contemplates this opposition, when he tries to describe the first meeting between Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. Umeed tries to recount this first meeting and criticises the world for changing the story according to its need for mythology: Many different versions of the first encounter between Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama are presently in circulation, thanks to the clouds of mythologisation, regurgitation, falsification and denigration that have surrounded their story for years (2000: 90).

Ironically enough, the narrator himself only retells the story according to what he has heard of it from Ormus or Vina, because he himself was not even there! What is more, in his version of the first meeting the narrator purposely foregrounds the role of Persis Kalamanja, the girl Ormus’s mother had picked out for marriage, in the whole story. The main reason for doing this, according to the narrator himself, is to give Persis the place in history she actually deserves, as she has been constantly erased from it in the version of the story as Vina and Ormus themselves recounted it. So, basically, even the account of the events told by the two people who were actually there has its flaws. About the conflict between the officially accepted version and its non-official variants the narrator further states that Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives (2000: 199).

Although The Ground Beneath Her Feet is not so explicitly concerned with Indian history as novels like Midnight’s Children and Shame, there are passages in the text where the narrator’s relation to the history of his country of origin becomes clear. The novel is situated against the background of world history but with here and there specific references to Indian history, especially when the narrator explains his reasons for migrating and leaving India, which he compares with a divorce: “Freedom, then? Not exactly. Not quite a liberation, no. It feels like a divorce” (2000: 248).

54 The narrative starts with the birth of Ormus Cama in 1937 and ends in the late 1990s, when Rai is the only survivor of the three of them. Through the narrator’s description of the day of Ormus’s birth and especially Sir Darius Cama’s way of thinking, the reader gets information about the Indian historical background, especially in the first half of the novel. For example, the cricket game scene is very important because it implicitly bears witness of the turbulent years before Indian Independence. There is an explicit reference to the historical Mahatma Gandhi and the reader is made aware of the tensions between the nationalists and the unionists by the description of the cricket game. The reader is informed of the nationalist attitudes toward this game of cricket, which the nationalists accuse of being a Communally divisive, anti-national throwback, in which men of colonialized mentality performed like monkeys for the amusement of the British and gave unhelpful assistance to the policy of divide-and-rule (2000: 28).

A little bit later, we can read that “these were demoralized, rudderless days for the smart set that revolved around the British Presence in India” (2000: 49). We can find a reference to the “Quit India Resolution” made in 1942 and the riots that followed (2000: 49). However, the reader only registers those events through the eyes of Sir Darius Cama, who apparently was in favour of the British. The author here strikingly makes use of focalization: the events are depicted in the way Sir Darius Cama apprehends them. The reader thus only perceives one version of history, namely the one seen through the eyes of someone who opposes Indian Independence and whom the narrator describes as “a natural leader of men caught in a dead end of history and deprived of followers” (2000: 52). About this end of the British Empire, the narrator tells us merely that it was “one of the greatest upheavals in the history of nations” and that the people all had to “deal with the uncertainty of the modern” (2000: 62). The narrator tells the reader also about “the year of divisions, 1960”: the year in which Bombay State was divided into Gujarat and Maharastra, the state of which Bombay would now become the new capital. That the narrator is not at all pleased with all those divisions becomes clear when he states: You can’t just keep dividing and slicing – India-Pakistan, Maharashtra-Gujarat – without the effects being felt at the level of the family unit, the loving couple, the hidden soul. Everything starts shifting, changing, getting partitioned, separated by frontiers, re-splitting, coming apart. Centrifugal forces begin to pull harder than their centripetal opposites. Gravity dies. People fly off into space (2000: 164).

55 A little while further the narrator describes the political situation of India around Christmas 1963. This India is described as “a nation in dire need of guidance” (2000: 192) after the death of Nehru: Jawaharlal Nehru was dead. His successor, Indira Gandhi, was little more than a pawn in the hands of the Congress kingmakers, Shastri, Moraji Desai and Kamaraj. A fanatical gang of political bully boys, Mumbai’s Axis, was on the verge of seizing control of Bombay, and Hindu nationalism was sweeping the country. There was a general feeling that things were going too fast, that the national railway train was roaring ahead without a driver, and that the decision to drop international tariff barriers and deregulate the economy had been too hastily taken (2000: 192).

There are also a few references to the Emergency period, which had an enormous impact on Indian history and which the narrator describes as “the earthquake that people remembered, the earthquake that gave us the shock that shook our confidence in who we were and how we had chosen to live” (2000: 218). The earthquakes are thus connected here more specifically to Indian politics. However, in spite of those references to Indian history, they merely appear in this novel as background information and are not as crucial to the story as is the case in for example Midnight’s Children. As Rollason justifiably notices, Rushdie at one point in the novel abruptly shifts the centre of the story to the West, viz. first to England and later on to the United States, “with virtually no subsequent revisiting of the subcontinent” (2001: chapter 1). Thus, according to Rollason, “the reader watches East being replaced by West as the epicentre”(2001: chapter 1) of the story. Salman Rushdie himself offers the reader a kind of ‘fictional’ account of the world’s rock music ‘history’ by telling the love story between Ormus and Vina. Rushdie mixes fiction with history in a masterly fashion. He refers to the greatest historical rock singers like Lou Reed, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, etc., whereby he sticks relatively close to history but even this is a matter of perspective: incapable of giving a full-sized overview of rock history, the author only chooses the rock stars that he considers to be the most important ones. Thus, by making a selection of rock artists he constitutes his particular version of the history of rock music. What is more, by making the fictional Indian rock singers Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara the greatest singers of all times, Rushdie dramatically alters this rock ‘history’. Rushdie takes the history of rock music, which has traditionally been accredited to the West, and makes it subaltern, thereby offering the reader an alternative reality:

56 So according to Ormus and Vina’s variant version of history, their alternative reality, we Bombayites can claim that it was in truth our music, born in Bombay like Ormus and me, not “goods from foreign” but made in India and maybe it was the foreigners who stole it from us (2000: 96).

4.3.5 The Clash of the ‘Otherworlds’: East Versus West When we attempt to read The Ground Beneath Her Feet as a postcolonial critique of the continuing influence of Western imperialism, a very interesting interpretation comes to the surface. As I already mentioned earlier on, the otherworld Ormus describes bears a lot of similarities to our historical reality, dominated by a Western point of view. Ormus refers to the fact that in that otherworld Kennedy is murdered in a shooting and Lou Reed is a man. All those aspects refer to major events in world history, but all of them are distinctively western. However, in the ‘real’ world of the novel, the perspective of the world’s events seems to have shifted more to the East. First of all, in that world, the world’s greatest rock stars of all time are Indian! So interestingly, the invention and culmination point in the world’s rock history is situated in the East. With regard to the discussion about history writing in the postcolonial era, those two different worlds are depicted throughout the whole novel as if heading for a clash in which one of the two worlds will disappear. This makes it very easy to understand those two different realities as the competing western view of history and the Eastern one, as a battle between two opposing types of postcolonial discourse. Maria, the girl who comes to Ormus in his ‘visions’ and who apparently belongs to this western other world, is the first one who explicitly refers to those “two worlds in collision” (2000: 326). She is also the one who points out that only one of the two will survive. With regard to postcolonial studies this makes in fact a very interesting case, when we consider those two worlds as two kinds of postcolonial discourse fighting to obtain a dominant ‘voice’ in world history. The battle then seems to be about taking one’s place in history. Ormus Cama’s thoughts upon hearing Jesse Parker sing the song he invented accurately describes what is at stake: “Someone was stealing his place in history” (2000: 99). Maria - with a kind of western imperialist self-confidence – predicts that it will be Ormus’s world, and thus the subaltern discourse, that will “crumble and fall” (2000: 326), whereas the western hidden discourse will rise to the occasion and rule.

57 The earthquakes that shake the eastern reality seem to be precursors of the oncoming clash with its western equivalent. Surprisingly, by the end of the novel it becomes clear that it is the western world that proves to be the weakest and disappears. Salman Rushdie hence lets the subaltern discourse prevail, as this discourse is the only one that remains after the confrontation of the two. By making the subaltern discourse as the only type of discourse that remains Rushdie thus seems to make a powerful statement with regard to the postcolonial debate. This notion of ‘the East overcoming the West’ also returns in Rushdie’s introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. In respect to postcolonial subaltern literature Rushdie declares that what seems to be the case is that Western publishers and critics have been growing gradually more and more excited by the voices emerging from India; in England at least, British writers are often chastised by reviewers for their lack of Indian-style ambition and verve. It feels as if the East is imposing itself on the West, rather than the other way around (1997: xiv).

58 5 When West and East Meet: Orpheus and Eurydice Versus Kama and Rati 5.1 Origin of the Orpheus Myth

The myth about the lovers Orpheus and Eurydice is world-famous and has been a recurring theme in both art and literature. The story is one of the most compelling mythical stories from ancient times, which has proven to be a great source of inspiration for composers, painters and writers and has hence appeared in numerous adaptations. The singer, poet and lyre player Orpheus was, according to a few surviving texts, born in Thrace, i.e. the Northeast of Greece, around the twelfth century B.C. It is said that he was the son of the muse of the art of epic poetry, Calliope, and King Oeagrus of Thrace. However, many other ancient writers were convinced that he was actually the son of Apollo, the god of medicine, healing, light and truth and the supposed leader of the muses7, who gave him the lyre at his birth. Orpheus definitely seemed to have inherited the god’s musical talent, because from when he was young, he was able to speak through his music to nature, animals, trees and even rocks. The story goes that all of nature was under his spell when he played music. That is also why, according to a lot of ancient writers, he is regarded as the founder of the eldest metre, the hexameter8, and as an ancestor of both the poets Homer (ca. 8th century B.C.) and Hesodius (ca. 700 B.C.). He fell in love with the tree nymph Eurydice, but the day they married she was haunted by the beekeeper Aristaeus, who loved her too. In her flight from him, she got bitten by a snake and died. When Orpheus received the bad news, he immediately went down to the underworld, trying to bring his Eurydice back from the dead. He crossed the Styx9 , managed to move Hades and Persephone, the vengeful gods of the underworld, and convinced them to let Eurydice go back with him to the world of the living. However, there was one important condition: he had to promise not to look back to his love until they were out in the light, back in the human world. When they were

7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo 8 http://www.in2greece.com/english/historymyth/mythology/names/orpheus.htm . According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexameter, this used to be the standard metre used by both Romans and Greeks, existing of six metrical feet per line. Also Ovid’s metamorphoses, to which Rushdie frequently refers, was composed of hexameters. 9 In Greek mythology, this was the river which was believed to be the frontier with the underworld.

59 almost at the border, Orpheus was torn apart by doubt and fear and looked back, whereupon Eurydice immediately fell back into the underworld, never to return. After losing his Eurydice for a second time, Orpheus wandered for seven days on the riverbanks of the Styx, trying to convince the ferryman of the underworld, Charon, to take him back to the underworld but without success. About the ending there is a lot of speculation: the story goes that after he has lost Eurydice for the second time, Orpheus retreats into the woods and spends his days playing music and enchanting all nature. His heart forever broken, he refuses all love declarations of other women and becomes the first pederast, which causes an outrage among the local female population, the Thracian maenads. In a bacchant orgy, they try to kill him by throwing sticks and stones at him, which refuse to hit him because of his enchanting musical talent. Furious, the maenads consequently throw themselves on Orpheus and tear him apart. It is said, that after his tragic death, the muses collected his body parts and buried them. His head, still singing, fell into the Hebrus river and drifted towards the island of Lesbos, which became the centre of lyrical poetry. His lyre became a constellation and his soul descended to the Elysium, where it was forever united with the soul of his Eurydice. I recounted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice here as it is written down in the version of the Roman poet Virgil, because it is this version which Salman Rushdie seems to follow in his novel. Rollason (2001) states that although the story of Orpheus is originally Greek, only the Roman versions by Virgil in the fourth book of the Georgics and the slightly younger one by Ovid in the Metamorphoses are the only two versions that have survived. However, although no complete Greek account of the story is thus extant, the name of Orpheus is referred to by some ancient Greek writers too: Rollason (2001) refers in this respect to Euripides and Plato. Literary critics, however, have discovered that the myth of the death of Eurydice, as we all know it, was only added much later and thus did not appear in the original story of Orpheus. Rushdie himself brings this to the reader’s attention when he claims: The name Eurydice/Eurydike means “wide-ruler”. The first recorded use of this name in tellings of the Orpheus story occurs in the first century B.C.E. It may therefore be a relatively recent addition to the tale. In the third century B.C.E. she was called Agriope, “savage watcher”. This is also one of the names of the witch goddess Hecate; and of wide-ruling Queen Persephone herself (2000: 499).

60 The character of Orpheus later gave way to a sort of cult in the sixth century B.C., whose members were called the ‘Orphics’ (2001). Orphism10 seems from then on to have been a kind of religion in the ancient Greek world, in which especially the gods Hades, Persephone and Dionysus were adored. Since Virgil took up the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, there have been numerous adaptations of this myth, especially in drama and music. Wikipedia(2007) lists more than ten different operas that are dedicated to or at least inspired by the Orpheus myth. The most famous ones or adaptations are by composers like Haydn, Gluck, Monteverdi, Offenbach, Rossi and, more recently, Philip Glass. However, also in popular music there has been a lot of interest in the Orpheus myth: Nick Cave’s song The Lyre of Orpheus and former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett’s modern opera for guitar Metamorpheus are only two examples of this. In drama one of the most famous adaptations is probably Orpheus Descending, a play written by Tennessee Williams who was also the author of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, which mostly became famous in its 1951 film version starring Marlon Brando. Orpheus Descending retells the Orpheus myth in a modern 1950s American setting. Some even say that the movie Moulin Rouge actually bears a lot of similarities with the Orpheus and Eurydice myth (cf. Wikipedia 2007)11. Salman Rushdie is hence by no means the first author inspired by this myth. As I already mentioned earlier on, Rushdie takes up the Orpheus myth but nonetheless changes it dramatically. I will consider those references to the Orpheus myth and Rushdie’s changes to it in further detail later on. Rollason interestingly reads the use by Rushdie of the Orpheus myth as a way of revisiting the ‘death of the author’ theme. For that tale ends with the spilling of a poet’s blood: Orpheus is killed by a vengeful band of would-be followers. Such is the mythical destiny around which Rushdie has consciously woven his new fiction, ten years on from the fatwa (2001: introduction).

10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/orphism 11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus

61 5.2 Origin of the Rati Myth and Comparison with the Orpheus Myth The ancient Greek-Roman myth about Orpheus and Eurydice definitely bears a lot of similarities with a myth in Hinduism, viz. the Rati-Kama myth. This myth is written down in the fourth Veda, the atharvaveda, dated around 1500 B.C. (Wikipedia 2007), which would in fact make it older than the Orpheus myth. The Vedas are considered to be the oldest texts in Hinduism and maybe the oldest surviving scriptures ever. They are subdivided into four different books: the Rig- Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda and the Atharva-Veda. It is in this last book that the myth of Kama and Rati can be found. In this myth the Hindu god of love, Kama, is turned into ashes by the god Shiva for disturbing his meditation. Rati, Kama’s wife and the Hindu goddess of lust and passion, manages to convince Shiva to give her back her husband. However, Kama is restored only as “a mental image, representing true love and affection, and not just physical lust”12. What is more, in the Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Myth we can find that Kama is described in Atharva-Veda as “the primeval stir or impulse at the beginning of creation” (cf. Dallapiccola 2002: 109), which clearly connects him with the mythological figure of Orpheus, who is considered to be the creator of music. Although there is thus a strong sense of similarity between these two myths, there is also one major difference, viz. of who saves who: in the ‘Western’ myth, it is the man Orpheus who will go back to save his beloved, while in the Indian myth of Rati and Kama, it is the woman who tries to bring her beloved back to life. Thus, the Indian myth is much more feminist in tone. Also the role of the ‘bringer of death’ is very distinct: in the ancient myth, the nymph Eurydice gets killed by a snake while running away from Aristaeus. However, in the Hindu myth, it is lord Shiva, a god, who, deliberately, out of revenge, kills Kama. Salman Rushdie in this novel constantly plays with these two different views on the same basic myth. There is a constant dynamic between these two alternative storylines. In this respect, Salman Rushdie shares his interest in the similarities between Indian and ‘Western’ mythology with a lot of scholars, like Max Müller, who tried to connect famous ‘Western’ myths to their ‘Eastern’ equivalent. Especially during the Empire, there

12 http://www.webonautics.com/mythology/kamadeva.html

62 was an increasing interest in those matters: in 1784 the Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded by Sir William Jones. According to Metcalf and Metcalf (2002: 61), “the society dedicated itself above all to study of the religious and cosmological texts of Indian antiquity”. These scholars tried to discover the relations between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek myths and texts, their main goal constructing a history for India. Central to this history was the momentous discovery of a past, through shared ‘Aryan’ linguistic ties, that linked India with Britain itself. As Jones wrote, between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin there existed “a stronger affinity than could possibly have existed by accident”, hence all three had “to have sprung from some common source”.

However, this did not mean that the British stopped believing in their own superiority. Although there seemed to be a linguistic relationship between the two, as far as the British were concerned India was politically and scientifically still in its infancy. Salman Rushdie often refers to this affinity between the great ‘stories’ in the world. Moreover, in his children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, this belief constitutes the very core of the novel. In this book all the stories in the world circulate in one big sea, influencing, changing and reaffirming each other constantly. Also Sir Darius Cama and his fellow scholar William Methwold, two characters in The Ground Beneath Her Feet are intrigued by the relation between the Indian and ‘Western’ myths. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had in his younger days fallen under the influence of the German- born Scholar Max Müller, whose work in comparative mythology had led him to the conclusion that all the ancient myths of the Proto-Indo-European or Aryan cultures – Zoroastrians, Indians, Greeks – were in essence stories about the sun (2000: 40).

As I mentioned already, Max Müller was a German scholar who became famous for his comparative mythology and his studies of the Indian Vedas, which are, according to Müller, to be situated around 1500 to 1200 B.C. ( Wikipedia: 2007) and which are supposed to be the oldest written texts of Hinduism.

5.3 Mixture of Both Myths in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ That Salman Rushdie’s novel The ground Beneath Her Feet has at least been inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth already becomes clear by looking at the table of contents of the book: chapters with names like ‘The Keeper of Bees’, ‘Legends of Thrace’, ‘Goat songs’ and ‘Beneath her feet’ all bear witness to this.

63 Actually, already when looking at the cover of my edition of the novel13, there is a reference to this myth: the cover is decorated with an Andy Warhol-like depiction of lyres. Salman Rushdie refers to this ancient myth in his contemporary piece of literature –the events recounted in the novel are situated in the second half of the 20th century –, which also means that he adjusts the myth to the contemporary setting. The Ground Beneath Her Feet takes us on a journey through the history of rock music: its Orpheus is not an ancient Greek lyre player, but a rock star, Ormus Cama and so is his ‘Eurydice’, Vina Apsara. There are a lot of references in the text which allude to the Orpheus myth and adaptations of it. Already in the opening chapter, ‘The Keeper of Bees’, the narrator even makes an explicit reference to Virgil: Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant asks the reader if he knows “the Fourth Georgic of the bard of Mantua, P. Vergilius Maro” (2000: 21), which is the volume in which the ancient writer for the first time took up the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Also in this first chapter, and in fact before the mentioning of Virgil, there appears a reference to another famous adaptation of the love story: the opera Orfeo by the German composer Gluck (2000: 12). In this passage, Vina Apsara sings the part of both Eurydice and Amor, the goddess of love. Rushdie, however, indicates Gluck’s deviation from the original story: Gluck changed the ending of the story, because he thought it unacceptable to send the people home with a bad feeling. In Gluck’s version love will triumph over death, but the reader immediately gets the feeling that in this story there might not be a happy ending, as the narrator states that “the earth began to shake just as she finished” (2000: 12). Umeed Merchant, the narrator, also explicitly refers to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth when he explains why he is telling us the story: I have chosen to tell our story, hers and mine and Ormus Cama’s, all of it, every last detail, and then maybe she can find a sort of peace here, on the page, in this underworld of ink and lies, that respite which was denied her by life. So I stand at the gate of the inferno of language, there’s a barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a coin under my tongue for the fare (2000: 21).

However, there are not only references to the Orpheus myth, also the Hindu myth of Kama and Rati is referred to. In fact, Vina Apsara compares herself to the Hindu goddess Rati when she states: “So let’s never forget I was the one who fetched

13 Salman Rushdie, The ground beneath her feet, London. 2000. Cover designed by Lucy Albanese.

64 him out of the underworld, (…) like that Hindu goddess” (2000: 323). For Ormus Cama, the reference to Kama, the Hindu god of love, is clear: Cama is Kama. Rushdie’s novel is a constant intertwining of these two myths and as a consequence it is not at all clear what part the different characters take in the novel: there seems to be a constant question of who saves who and who tears who down. The three main characters – Ormus Cama, Vina Apsara and Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant, the storyteller – circle around each other and variably seem to take up different roles in the story. Like Rai says at the end of the first chapter in a kind of explanatory introduction: Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. But Aristaeus, who brought death, also brought life, a little like lord Shiva back home. Not just a dancer, but Creator and Destroyer, both. Not only stung by bees but a bringer into being of bee stings. So, music, love and life-death: these three. As once we also were three. Ormus, Vina and I. We did not spare each other. In this telling, therefore, nothing will be spared. Vina, I must betray you, so that I can let you go (2000: 22).

5.3.1 Ormus as Orpheus or Kama? Already from the beginning of the story, there are text elements that link the character of Ormus Cama with the mythical figure of Orpheus. Ormus Cama was born at ‘Apollo Bunder’, which at once evokes the question of the fatherhood of Orpheus: was King Oeagrus the father of the mythical lyre player, or was it the god Apollo? The choice here for ‘Apollo Bunder’ seems to reflect a preference for the divine version of the story, providing the character of Ormus Cama with a kind of divine sense that nowadays too surrounds most of the contemporary pop ‘gods’. Ormus is described by the narrator as a musical sorcerer whose melodies could make city streets begin to dance and high buildings sway to their rhythm, a golden troubadour the jouncy poetry of whose lyrics could unlock the very gates of Hell (2000: 89).

In short, Ormus Cama is described as a modern-day rocking Orpheus. In the novel Ormus Cama is consequently represented as a melting pot of the most famous figures in the world’s rock history: Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, etc. are all implicitly or explicitly present in the characterization of the male protagonist. At a time when the ‘West’ had lost most of its religious sense, pop stars and movie stars became like a divine surrogate for this loss of religion. Everyday-people became godlike by their celebrity status.

65 As we grow, we lose our belief in our progenitor’s superhuman nature. They shrivel into more or less unimpressive men and women. Apollo turns out to be Oeagrus, god and Joseph the carpenter end up being one and the same. The gods we worship, we discover, are not different from ourselves (2000: 58).

Ormus Cama apparently bears his main physical and emotional resemblance to the ‘King,’ Elvis Presley, which is also indicated by the numerous puns and word- plays by the author on the subject. Growing up, Ormus Cama’s movements are characterized by “the increasing explicitness of his pelvic thrusts and the dervish thrashings of his arms” (2000: 89), a movement well-known by Presley’s admirers. Elvis ‘The King’ Aaron Presley was born 8th of January 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi. The narrator explicitly refers to Elvis’s background when he ironically enough warns the reader of imagining Ormus As a mere echo, just another of that legion of impersonators who […] rendered grotesque, the fame of a young truck driver from Tupelo, Miss., born in a shotgun shack with a dead twin by his side (2000: 89).

He too, like Ormus Cama, thus was the survivor of a partly dead-born twin: his dead brother was called Jesse Garon Presley. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the name of Jesse reoccurs not accidentally as the name of the singer Jesse Parker, who Ormus furiously accuses of being the thief of his song ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Also here Salman Rushdie plays with names: the last name ‘Parker’ is a reference to the name of Elvis’ manager, ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. This playing with names becomes very clear on page ninety one: But of course there were imported American magazines, and Ormus could have seen pictures of Jesse Parker (perhaps alongside the sinister figure of “Colonel” Tom Presley, his manager) in Photoplay or Movie Screen (2000: 91).

Also in the description of Ormus’s physical appearance, there seems to be a lot of resemblance with ‘The King’: The baby-cruel curl of his upper lip, or the thick black hair hanging in sensual coils around his brow, or the sideburns that were straight out of a Victorian melodrama (2000: 89).

Although the birth stories of Ormus Cama and Elvis Presley are very alike, the death of the protagonist is more similar to the one of yet another legend in the history of music: John Lennon. The famous lead singer of the immensely popular band ‘The Beatles’ was murdered on 8th of December 1980 in New York, shot near the entrance of his building when coming home.14 Ormus Cama dies in the same

14 http://www.johnlennon.com/site.html

66 way: he is shot near to the entrance of his home, the ‘Rhodopé Building,’ by a woman dressed like Vina Apsara. Also the last words that Ormus Cama utters are identical to the famous last words uttered by John Lennon on the way to the hospital. To the question whether he knew who he was, John Lennon answered ‘yes I know’, which are the exact last words Ormus Cama utters before he dies. Ormus Cama’s love of fresh bread and fondness of baking his own are also a features he has in common with the legendary John Lennon.15 The utopian worldview by which Ormus’s music is characterized also seems to be influenced by the ideological aspect which is to be found in a vast majority of the songs written by Lennon. The song ‘It shouldn’t be this way’ of Ormus evokes the same kind of utopian, ideological way of looking at life as do Instant Karma! and Imagine, Lennon’s major hit songs. What is more, like Ormus, Lennon too was threatened with expulsion from America. The main reason for this was his criticizing of the US government’s share in the Vietnam war, a criticism he could not voice as a non-citizen of the US. This resemblance is reflected clearly in the warning Ormus receives by an US official for the ‘dangerous’ political content that his songs contain: We have some concern about certain lyrical content. There is naturally no question of infringing any individual’s First Amendment rights, but the songwriter if we understand it correctly is not a U.S. citizen. A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host’s best rug (2000: 381).

Furthermore, the relation between Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara is depicted in at least as mythical a way as the relationship of John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. Under the influence of Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s music got more and more obscure and experimental. In October 1965 they released their album Two Virgins, whose cover showed a full frontal naked picture of ‘Johnandyoko’. Also Ormus and Vina at one point in the story appear, although not completely naked, in a very similar manner on the cover of their album Doctor Love and the Whole Catastrophe: On the sleeve he and Vina posed in the fig-leaved nude, like classical statues wearing shades. Like mythical lovers, Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, Venus and Adonis. Or a modern pair. He was Doctor Love and she, in this reading, was the Whole Catastrophe (2000: 422).

The resemblance of Ormus to Freddie Mercury, the famous lead man of the legendary band ‘Queen’, lies not so much in appearance as in origin: Mercury, born

15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ground_Beneath_Her_Feet

67 Farrokh Bulsara16, was a child of Parsi parents and became one of the greatest pop icons in the history of the UK. Both Ormus and Freddie Mercury thus are of Indian origin and become famous Anglo-Indian singers. What is more, both of them keep their Indian descent a secret from the outside world. Also the name of the woman, Maria, who secretly visits Ormus Cama and tries to seduce him but seems to belong to another world, could be linked to the persona of Freddie Mercury: his closest girlfriend was called Mary Austin. The pirate radio station for which Ormus works upon arrival in the UK is called ‘Radio Freddie’ and is located on a bark called the ‘Frederica’. Anyone familiar with Salman Rushdie’s work knows that this will not be a coincidence. Another major influence on the Ormus character is Bob Dylan, much admired by Salman Rushdie. Christopher Rollason stresses the importance of Dylan as a “key influence on the figure of Ormus” and refers to an interview in the Salon in which Rushdie himself would have stressed the importance of Dylan’s music in his personal life (2001). Rollason refers to the numerous quotations and references to Dylan’s song that are present in the novel. According to Rollason, references can be found to at least eleven different Dylan songs: from Blowin’ in the Wind to Everything is broken and Mr. Tambourine Man. However, Dylan and Ormus also seem to bear a lot of resemblance in respect to their personal life: for example, the car crash of Ormus will remind the Dylan fan of his “motorcycle accident of 1966” (cf. Rollason 2001). Also the anti-establishment character of Ormus’s songs seems to be something he inherited from Bob Dylan, according to Rollason. Further there are numerous references to other great idols of the emerging rock scene in the second half of the 20th century and all these are needed by Rushdie to construct a new, contemporary rock setting, renewing the ancient Orpheus character in a rock ‘n roll version of it. Because Salman Rushdie accredits all those features of the famous ‘western’ rock gods to the Indian rock singer, Ormus Cama, he thus sort of ‘rewrites’ the history of rock music and makes it something of subaltern origin. “Just as England can no longer lay exclusive claim to the English language, so America is no longer the sole owner of rock ’n’ roll: that is Ormus’s unstated sub-text” (2000: 378).

16 http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Mercury

68 Also the murder of Ormus can be linked with the Orpheus myth: after the oath Ormus makes to Vina, namely that he will not touch her until their marriage in ten years, Ormus turns down all other female candidates that are prepared to fill Vina’s shoes. Just like Orpheus turned away from love after the death of his beloved Eurydice. This, however, was also the reason why he got killed in the end by the maenads. In the end of the novel, Ormus too will get killed by a woman, dressed like Vina, probably for rejecting her. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet the narrator explicitly makes a comparison to the death of Orpheus: Ormus, holding himself aloof from all blandishments, even engenders violence in some women who think it unreasonable of him to deny himself, who espy in his rejection of them an insult to red-blooded women everywhere. Threats are received, and the policing of VTO concerts, as well as security at the Rhodopé Building, is stepped up as a result. Such bacchic fury is one part of the temper of the times (2000: 393).

However great the number of textual references to Ormus being Orpheus, it is not at all clear whether Ormus plays such a heroic role in The Ground Beneath Her Feet as does Orpheus in the classical myth. This fact is also frequently stressed in the voice of the narrator, Umeed Merchant, who was also hopelessly in love with Vina Apsara and had a secret ‘liaison’ with her. It is true that when Vina disappears for the first time after the house where she lived with the Merchant family burned down, Ormus claims that he wants to “follow her beyond the grave” (2000: 169) but these remain merely words. When he hears that she is still alive he claims that he will go after her, no matter where and no matter what it will take: “I’m going to find her,” Ormus repeatedly swore. “No limit to where I’ll go. To the ends of the earth, Rai. And even beyond.” (2000: 78).

But in the end, it takes him quite a while before he manages to tear himself away from India and start his pursuit of Vina. At first the narrator offers two main reasons for this: it wasn’t easy in these times to travel with an Indian passport and “after that there was the problem of foreign exchange”(2000: 178). However, some pages later, at the beginning of chapter seven, the same narrator weakens his own defences on Ormus’s behalf by saying: I must confess that I never completely accepted the passport/foreign exchange explanation of Ormus’s non-pursuit of Vina. Where there’s a will, etc. (…) “I’ll follow her to the ends of the earth”, he boasted, but he wouldn’t even go as far as the airport (2000: 189-190).

69 Further on this same narrator also downplays the role of Orpheus in ancient mythology, when he speaks about the suicide of his own father after the death of his mother. He does not refer explicitly to the character of Ormus Cama, but one can not help but notice that there seems to be a hidden accusation present behind this apparently ‘neutral’ statement. There are those who say that the songsmith Orpheus was a coward because he refused to die for love, because instead of joining Eurydice in the afterlife he tried to drag her back to the life before; which was against nature, and so failed. Judged by this standard, my father was a braver man than the Thracian lyre player (2000: 206).

Especially when Vina disappears for a second time – and this time forever – in the earthquake, Ormus does not really give evidence of a heroic behaviour. At first, he resorts to narcotics and sex with Vina look-alikes in order to try and keep his memory of Vina alive. In the end, rather than follow Vina into death he prefers to bring her back alive in the form of the look-alike Mira. There is nothing heroic about it. He does not save his love, quite the other way around: the mirror image of Vina keeps him from dying. Also Vina’s father criticizes his son-in-law for searching the “easy way out” by using narcotics and indulging himself in the whole business of Vina look-alikes, when he says: If he wants to be with my poor girl so much, then why not be a man and shoot himself in the mouth. Yeah. Why doesn’t he just blow his head off and to hell with everything. Then they’ll be together until the end of time (2000: 497).

The narrator in this respect refers to Plato, who condemned Orpheus for the same reason. Also Plato called Orpheus a coward because he refused to die for love. Again the narrator connects this vision of a cowardly, weak Orpheus with the image of Ormus when he says: Orpheus, the despised citharode – the singer with the lyre, or let’s say, guitarist – the trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries, between Apollo and Dionysus, man and nature, truth and illusion, reality and the imagination, even between life and death, was evidently not to austere Plato’s taste. Plato, who preferred martyrdom to mourning, Plato the ayatollah of love (2000: 498).

However, this non-heroic and passive role in respect to his pursuit of Vina – as opposed to his leading and mythologized position in the history of rock music – together with his one minute stay in the world of the dead after the car accident connects him more to the role of Kama, the Hindu god of love, who appears in the Rati/Kama myth. But the most obvious textual reference to the fact that Ormus is connected to the mythological Kama by the author is of course his name, Cama.

70 Ameer would conflate Ormus Cama and Vasco da Gama – “Ormie da Cama, your great explorer, discovering you like a new world full of spices” – and it was a short step from Gama to Gana, song, and between Cama and Kama, the god of love, the distance was even less. Ormus Kama, Ormus Gana. The embodiment of love, and also of the song itself (2000: 125).

Here the author clearly connects the persona of Ormus with both Kama and Orpheus, by calling him both “the embodiment of love, and also of the song itself” (2000: 125). The narrator even explicitly compares Ormus’s life with the character of Kama, the god of love: So also Ormus Cama, exiled from love by the parents whom he had failed to transfix with love’s arrow, shrivelled by their lack of affection, is restored to the world of love by Vina (2000: 148).

I therefore would conclude that in terms of physical appearance and in terms of Ormus’s position in history as the pioneer and even inventor of rock music Ormus is indeed depicted as a modern-day version of Orpheus. Just like Orpheus could enchant the whole world with his lyre-music, so Ormus enchants all the world with his rock music. However, in terms of his relationship with Vina he bears a lot more resemblance with Kama, the god of love. He does not save his love, on the contrary, he is saved by his love for Vina. Moreover, in his relationship with Vina, Ormus is depicted as a impotent, weak version of the mythological Orpheus character.

5.3.2 Vina as Rati or Eurydice? And Vina’s story, with its echoes of the high old yarns of, oh, Helen, Eurydice, Sita, Rati and Persephone – tall Vina’s tall tale, which in my circumambulatory way I am hastening to tell, certainly had a tragic dimension (2000: 58).

There can be found a lot of passages in the novel where allusions are made to the resemblance of Eurydice’s story to the one of the female protagonist of the novel, Vina Apsara. Vina Apsara was the name she chose for herself after running away from Piloo Doodhwala, leaving her old names – Nissy Shetty, Nissy Poe and after going back to India Nissy Doodhwala – and thus her past behind. The two words ‘Vina’ and ‘Apsara’ result from Indian culture: ‘Vina’ being an Indian instrument. The Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Legend gives the following definition of the noun ‘Vina’: “a seven-stringed bamboo lute with a resonance gourd placed at one or both ends” (cf. Dallapiccola 2002: 201). Interestingly enough, the word ‘Vina’ appears

71 also in Sanskrit where it – according to the web encyclopaedia Wikipedia (2007)– has the meaning of ‘to long for’, ‘to hope for’, ‘to wish’ and ‘possibly, some sort of sexual position’. This last meaning makes the allusion to Rati, the goddess of lust and passion, of course fairly obvious. The idea of ‘lust’ actually can also easily be found in the characterization of Vina. The narrator, Umeed, in fact often refers to the fact that Vina always spoke a lot and freely about sex. In interviews the female singer would share all the details of her sex-life with the worlds, which often made Ormus uncomfortable. Also the fact that Vina does not believe in monogamy, although she loves Ormus, also can be read in this way. Vina thus really represents ‘lust’ in the novel, whereas her love Ormus Cama seems to represent love. ‘Apsara’ too comes from Sanskrit, namely from ‘apsaras’, referring to a kind of water nymph in Hindu mythology. The apsaras are divine beauties, the dancers of the gods, who dwell in Indra’s paradise, svarga. Mistresses of the gandharvas and, occasionally, of men, they can assume any form at will. […] Heroes who fall in battle are swept away by the apsaras to svarga (cf. Dallapiccola 2002: 26).

The narrator also explicitly refers to the origin of these two words and in doing so, adds a kind of warning on behalf of “that under-age nymphet” (2000: 96) Vina, thereby linking these strongly marked elements from Indian mythology and culture to the more ‘Western’ ancient myth of the death of Eurydice. In Vina’s full name both myths thus seem to be connected: Vina, the Indian lyre. Apsara, from apsaras, a swanlike water nymph. (In Western terms, a naiad, not a dryad.) Look out, Vina. Nymph, watch your step. Beware the ground beneath your feet (2000: 55).

Already the title of the novel makes the reader aware of the connection between Eurydice’s ending and Vina’s. For both death will come from ‘the ground beneath’ their feet: Eurydice will get bitten by a snake that crawls in the grass under her feet, while Vina will even completely disappear in the ground during the earthquake. Throughout the whole novel, when speaking of Vina Apsara, there is a recurring sense of doom, as to announce this terrible death. I’m not saying that he was carried by demons down to some ancient supernatural inferno. No, no. But chasms did open. They can, and did. They consumed his love, stole his Vina from him and would not give her up. And they did send him, as we shall see, all the way to Hell and back (2000: 54).

The ground which once was believed solid is thus now described as deceiving, as something you can and should not rely on.

72 The ground, the ground beneath our feet. […] The tunnels of pipe and cable, the sunken graveyards, the layered uncertainty of the past. The gaps in the earth through which our history seeps and is at once lost, and retained in metamorphosed form. The underworlds at which we dare not guess (2000: 54).

Despite her terrible death Vina Apsara is not only depicted as a destroyed person. She is also frequently depicted as the Destroyer, the one destructing force that also tore the others down during her lifetime. Dionysiac goddesses: that’s closer to my personal experience. What I know about is Vina. Vina, who came to us from abroad, who laid waste to all she saw, who conquered and then devastated every heart. Vina as female Dionysus. Vina, the first bacchante. That, I could buy (2000: 61).

Vina is thus not only compared to Eurydice, mostly in relation to her ending, but also to the god Dionysus and the bacchants. In this depiction of her, the love and death of her Orpheus, Ormus, seem to be united. She is not only the love of his life that will encourage him to undertake a journey to the underworld to save her, but she is also the one who in the end will destroy him. In this respect, the narrator raises another possible interpretation of the Eurydice story when he states: Did Eurydice – of whose origins we know little, although the official version is that she was a wood nymph, a dryad – actually bubble up from the Underworld to capture Orpheus’s heart? Was she an avatar of the Queen of Darkness herself, hunting for love in the illuminated world above? And therefore, in being swallowed by the earth, was she merely going home? (2000: 499)

Here the author typically offers the reader different possible versions of one story. In this version of the Orpheus story, Eurydice is thus absolutely not depicted as the passive being she is believed to be in traditional classical literature. However, apart from some little textual references to Eurydice and the resemblance between Vina’s death and Eurydice’s, it becomes difficult to connect the figure of Eurydice with the female protagonist of the novel any further, a fact to which also the critic Rollason (2001) points. Despite of those textual references to Eurydice, I believe that Vina holds a much stronger position in the novel than Eurydice does in the myth. In the novel, the narrator refers to a discussion he had with Vina exactly about this theme: A man is for power and a woman is for pain. I’ll say it again. Orpheus lives, Eurydice dies, right? Yeah, but you’re Orpheus too, I start to tell her. It’s your voice that’s making the enchanted stones of the city rise deliriously into the blue, that causes the city’s banks of electrical images to dance (2000: 460).

73 As I already mentioned before, Vina compared herself with the Hindu goddess Rati, who brought her love Kama back from the dead after he was killed by the god Shiva. Indeed, in the novel Vina also brings Ormus back alive after he died for one minute. Ever since the car accident in England Ormus had been in a coma for months. When Vina arrives Ormus is dying but on hearing her voice he awakes again. Thus, although she does not have to go on a dark quest in order to save her love it is indeed Vina who saved him and brought him back alive. She whispers his name “at which he opens his eyes; it’s as simple as that” (2000: 321). Indeed, the Rati-interpretation does more justice to the character of Vina than does the Eurydice version. About Eurydice we have little or no personal information, besides from the fact that she was a tree nymph who married Orpheus and died from a snake bite. Because of this, Eurydice is hence constructed as a very passive character. Moreover, she seems to be just a side character to set the actual story about Orpheus in motion. Vina, on the contrary, is a much stronger character: in her relationship with Ormus Vina was definitely the more dominant person. She was the one who demanded her sexual liberty, who refused to marry him and finally set the date. What is more, in the story it is Vina who brings Ormus back alive, which makes her a kind of female Orpheus. However, I believe Vina’s powerful position bears more resemblance with the goddess Rati, who saves her husband Kama after he was destroyed by the god Shiva. However, the Eurydice-like death of Vina in the end seems to undermine the strong position of Vina in the story. It thus becomes not at all clear how Rushdie supports the feminine in the novel. Keith Booker in this respect refers in his introduction to Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie to critics like Ambreen Hai who find that in his novels “Rushdie’s representation of the feminine is marked by a deep ambivalence” (1999: 8). Hai questions Rushdie’s “contradictory efforts to conjoin discourses of colonialism and gender”, which of course shows the influence of Spivak’s essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? According to Booker referring to Hai For one thing, […] Rushdie uses figures of female artistry in changing and contradictory ways to represent his own postcolonial artistic and political work, and borrows or competes with what he sees as strategies of feminist revision to enable or situate his own postcolonial narration. For another, in relation or addition to these representations, Rushdie attempts feminist work by questioning certain patriarchal norms and recasting or foregrounding cultural and social injustices toward women. Thus he also seeks to transform the categories of both the feminine and the (formerly) colonized (1999: 8).

74 5.3.3 When East and West Meet… It is interesting to investigate what happens when those two alternative versions of the same basic myth ‘clash’ in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Which version of the myth will ‘overcome’ the other one: the Western Orpheus/Eurydice myth or the feminist ‘Subaltern’ Rati/Kama variant? Just like the two ‘other worlds’ that are heading for a clash as I discussed earlier on in chapter 4.3.3., also the two alternative myths of Orpheus and Rati are bound to be confronted with each other. Also here Rushdie masterfully mixes and plays with these two possible alternative storylines. According to me, those two different possible variants of the same basic myth again seem to serve Rushdie’s purpose to offer the reader different possible views and versions of reality. Although there are more explicit references to the characters of Orpheus and Eurydice, they seem only apparent in the surface structure of the novel. In spite of the numerous references to the myth as described by Virgil and its adaptation by Gluck and the characterisation of Ormus as Orpheus there is little resemblance on the level of the basic story line. Although Vina’s death in the novel is by the narrator always being compared to the death of Eurydice, more similarities can not exactly be found. As Rollason points out, “the reader will […] search in vain for an episode that might approximate to Orpheus’ descent into hell and his attempt to undo his consort’s death” (2001: chapter 5). From this point of view, it becomes clear that the Orpheus myth only is not sufficient as a means for explaining the underlying structure of the story of Vina and Ormus Cama. I have pointed to the fact that the basic story line, despite the numerous references to the Orpheus myth, much more resembles the plot line of the Indian Rati/Kama myth. I have also stressed the fact that an analysis of the role of both Vina and Ormus in the story ultimately seems to lead to the conclusion that the Ormus/Vina couple bears much more resemblance with the Rati/Kama couple than it does with the Orpheus/Eurydice couple. So, on the level of content the novel seems to be more inspired by the Indian variant, which thus seems to be much more crucial to the story than the Orpheus myth. Again it seems that Rushdie in a way lets the Eastern variant ‘prevail’. Moreover, I believe that the main and only reason for referring to the Orpheus and

75 Eurydice myth is to make the reader acquainted with the basic story line and theme, viz. the story of bringing back alive the lost love. Rushdie relates to the Western variant to make his western readers aware of its Indian equivalent. The myth of Orpheus is world famous and it is very unlikely that the western reader would not know or at least never had heard of the story. However, its Indian variant is not so famous among western readers. This in fact is a way of ‘deconstructing otherness’: by connecting the western Orpheus myth so closely with the subaltern Rati myth Rushdie shows his readers that this ‘other’ culture is not so very different from our own.

5.3.4 The Role of Umeed ‘Rai’ Merchant The major complication that rises when we consider the position of Rai in the story is the fact that he is both narrator and one of the three main characters in the novel. As I discussed earlier on, the type of narration clearly underlines the ambiguous position of Rai. This unreliable narration makes it very difficult for the reader to understand the actual role Rai had in the lives of both Ormus and Vina. Actually, for most part the reader has to rely on how Rai positions himself within the story of their lives. Rai himself compares his role in the love history of Vina and Ormus with a character in the famous Orpheus and Eurydice myth, namely the snake. He loved her like an addict: the more of her he had, the more he needed. She loved him like a student, needing his good opinion, playing up to him in the hope of drawing forth the magic of his smile. But she also, from the very beginning, needed to leave him and go elsewhere to play. He was her seriousness, he was the depths of her being, but he could not also be her frivolity. That light relief, that serpent in the garden, I must confess, was me (2000: 113).

In the Orpheus myth the snake is the one who brings death and takes Eurydice away from the lyre player Orpheus. However, in the novel Rai more than once stresses the fact that Vina was the one that kept coming back, searching for him. […] Vina, whatever she said or didn’t say, kept coming back to wherever I was to be found. I was her favourite thorn; she couldn’t get me out from under her skin (2000: 229).

As I mentioned already earlier, Rai seems to be constructed as Ormus’s ‘other’ in his relationship with Vina, a fact of which he himself is very much aware.

76 Vina is the one who keeps “bouncing” from Ormus’s to Rai’s bed, choosing who she wants to be with for that moment (2000: 337). On closer inspection, the position of Rai seems to bear a lot of similarities with the position of the postcolonial author like Rushdie himself in the world. In the story Rai is constructed as an outsider: although he plays a (minor) role in the lives of both Ormus and Vina he belongs to neither of them completely. As Vina’s lover and Ormus’s friend Rai knows both their worlds, in which he is just a side character. Rai openly acknowledges this fact when he states: “from the start my place was in a corner of their lives, in the shadow of their achievements” (2000: 160). The main goal of the whole story told by Rai in fact seems to be an attempt to ‘put things right’. Maybe he does this also to ‘write himself back into history’ because he feels that after the death of Ormus and Vina, like the girl Persis Kalamanja, he seems to be effaced from their life stories: “Persis complained of having been erased from the record by Ormus; I could say the same of Vina’s treatment of me” (2000: 299). In this respect we thus can easily compare Rai’s position with the position in which an emigrated postcolonial author like Rushdie finds himself. One of the characters condemns the fact that Umeed and his parents are converts and says Religious conwersion, it is like getting on a train. Afterwards, only the train itself is where you are belonging. Not departure platform, not arrival platform. In both these places you are totally despised. Such is conwert (2000: 70)17.

Basically, this description can also be applied to people who migrate and leave their mother country behind. And indeed, emigrated from his mother country and migrated to a culture that is not totally his own, the postcolonial author Salman Rushdie is all too many times denied his place in either of them. Indian critics claim that he has no right to speak and try to represent the ‘subaltern minorities’ because he chose to leave his Indian culture behind and sold out to the West. Western critics often criticise him for the same reason.

17 Rushdie purposely lets this character speak in this way. The man is as he says himself “a man of the people” and maybe that is why he speaks English with an accent and a lot of grammatical errors.

77 5.3.5 The Role of Music in ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ One of the main critical remarks Rollason makes in his article Rushdie’s Un- Indian Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet is that this novel by Salman Rushdie lacks power. According to Rollason, this lack of power is mainly due to the fact that the author only refers to typical Western rock music. According to Rollason, this seems to imply that Rushdie now lets the West prevail over the East. Indeed, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet the history of rock music constitutes the central story frame within which the other storylines are situated. According to Rollason (referring to Carla Power 1999), Rushdie has opted for this theme for two main reasons: first, Rushdie himself is a well-known rock’n’roll fan and second because Rushdie can himself be considered “a household name […] literature’s first global celebrity – as famous as a popstar” (2001: chapter 3).

More importantly, by making music his main topic, Rushdie makes his novel accessible to anyone. Everybody loves music and everybody has at least heard of the famous pioneers of rock history, which makes it a topic of universal importance. The main reason for this universality is the crucial role of music in our lives. In the novel itself the necessity of music in everyday life, namely as a means of uttering one’s fears, hopes and dreams, is frequently emphasized. The narrator for example clearly connects the mentality of a generation in a time of war with the music that generation produces: […] because in this dark time it’s the rock music that represents the country’s most profound artistic engagement with the death of its children, not just the music of peace and psychotropic drugs but the music of rage and horror and despair. Also of youth, youth surviving despite everything, in spite of the children’s crusade that’s blowing it apart (2000: 265).

An intrinsic feature of music is the power it has to move people: music has the ability to change people’s minds, to start a revolution, to make people fight for freedom and to influence their political consciousness. Governments generally are well aware of the power of music. Testimony of this is for example the fact that in Iran all western music is banned, even in movies18. The Iranian Prime Minister Mahmud Ahmadinejad claimed that the ideas advocated in western music are contradictory to the Islamic character of Iran. Ahmadinejad accused western music of being a means

18 http://www.radio.nl/2003/home/medianieuws/010.archief/2005/12/102030.html

78 of imperialistic western thought to gradually invade the country. A similar accusation can be found in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, when Umeed states In India it is often said that the music I’m talking about is precisely one of those viruses with which the almighty West has infected the East, one of the great weapons of cultural imperialism, against which all right-minded persons must fight and fight again (2000: 95).

As I already mentioned earlier on, numerous references can be found to the greatest popular singers of the twentieth century. Bob Dylan, Freddy Mercury, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Lennon, Diana Ross, The Everly Brothers, Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, Manfred Mann, Brian Epstein, Louis Armstrong, Simon and Garfunkel, Shirley Jones, the Driftwoods, Bo Diddley are only some of the names of famous characters or bands that are referred to. All of these indeed refer to the world’s rock history, but all are Western stars, which prompts Rollason to say that VTO’s music, and, therefore, the greater part of both Vina’s and Ormus’ musical production is, from the textual descriptions and the sources and analogies named, clearly a textbook case of mainstream Anglo-American 60s/70s stadium rock, bereft of any “Asian” input other than the two stars’ national origins and the piece of trickery that is the “Gayomart conceit” (2001: chapter 8).

At first sight this seems indeed problematic when we assume that Rushdie believes that in literature “the East is imposing itself upon the West” (cf. Rushdie 1997: xiv). The idea of two worlds in collision after which the subaltern one is the world that will survive would not make sense if Rushdie at the same time would let the West prevail with regard to music history. It is in this respect that Rollason critically asks himself the question: “What, in fact, is Indian about these two – apart from their origins?” (2001: chapter 8). According to Rollason The Reader will search in vain for any but the most superficial references to any subcontinental musical tradition, be it erudite, folkloric or popular (2001: chapter 8).

Rollason hence deplores that Rushdie does not treat the topic of ‘world music’ with more intensity. Although Vina’s music towards the end of her life moves to this kind of ‘world music’, “Rushdie’s treatment of a potentially interesting theme proves disappointingly superficial” (2001: chapter 9). Rollason states that Essentially, the notion of “world music” entails an openness to musical dialogue and cooperation on a footing of cultural equality, whether the collaborators are all from third-

79 world or “exotic” backgrounds or, as in the Buena Vista case19, hail from both sides of the first/third world divide (2001: chapter 9).

According to Rollason, Rushdie has “missed a golden opportunity” by not paying more attention to the phenomenon of ‘world music’, which makes The Ground Beneath Her Feet a bit of a disappointment: We could have had an Indian Buena Vista Social Club; what we get is VTO, playing born-in- the-USA rock’n’roll while laying claim to an Asian “authenticity” that derives from literary sleight-of-hand alone (2001: chapter 9).

However, I do not believe that the fact that Rushdie merely refers to Western famous rock stars weakens my earlier interpretations of the clash between the alternative realities in the novel. As I pointed out earlier on, the clash between the two other worlds can be read as a clash between the two different types of discourse which occur in the debate about postcolonial historiography. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet the main character Ormus warns the world of this oncoming clash. In the end Rushdie lets the subaltern world and discourse overcome this clash. The hidden western world, however, disappears in the clash. However, I do not believe that the fact that Rushdie positions his Subaltern Indian characters within a Western rock music setting undermines this theory. On the contrary, I even believe it clearly reinforces the connection I make between those battling realities and the postcolonial debate. By taking the whole history of western rock music and making it something subaltern, Rushdie seems to make a much stronger argument than if he had made all musical references Indian. Instead of just referring to Indian influences, Rushdie takes the western rock history as we know it and turns it into an invention of the Subaltern world. He does this by claiming that VTO, the rock band of Ormus and Vina, was the greatest band of all times: And in the whole half-century-long history of rock music there is a small number of bands, a number so small you could count to it without running out of fingers, who steal into your heart and become a part of how you see the world, how you tell and understand the truth, even when you’re old and deaf and foolish. On your deathbed you’ll hear them sing to you as you drift down the tunnel towards the light: […] VTO was one of those bands (2000: 157).

By making the Indian band VTO the best rock band ever, with a greater musical force than the famous Western examples like the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Elvis ‘The King’ Presley, Rushdie makes also the world’s rock history distinctively subaltern.

19 Rollason here refers to “The Buena Vista Social Club”, a Cuban/American band which was founded in the 90s.

80 This is what Ormus and Vina always claimed, never wavering for a moment: that the genius of Ormus Cama did not emerge in response to, or in imitation of, America; that his early music, the music he heard in his head during the unsinging childhood years, was not of the West, except in the sense that the West was in Bombay from the beginning, impure old Bombay where West, East, North and South had always been scrambled, like codes, like eggs, and so Westerness was a legitimate part of Ormus, a Bombay part, inseparable from the rest of him (2000: 95-96).

Just like the British colonizers forced their history or their versions of history upon India, Rushdie now forces his version of rock music history upon the West through his novel.

81 6 Conclusion

From all this, I hope it has become clear that accusing Salman Rushdie of selling out to the West is all too easy and not at all fair. I verily believe that it is exactly because Rushdie can draw on both Indian and Western culture that he is in the position of bringing the two perspectives and cultures closer together. For, if it is indeed the case that we can never fully untie ourselves from our own context, migrated authors like Rushdie, because of their ‘displacement,’ seem definitely to have come the closest to seeing ‘alternative perspectives’, to knowing both worlds – the western and the subaltern one – equally. Critics who accuse Rushdie of being unable to let the subaltern speak in his novel The Ground Beneath Her feet because of his western writing style and the western musical and literary references in his work have clearly missed the point Rushdie is trying to make. According to me, Rushdie uses those western references to bring us closer to an understanding of that subaltern world and perspective: by relating to aspects of western culture and comparing them to their subaltern equivalents Rushdie makes the western reader aware of the fact that this culture is not so very different from our own. It is no coincidence that Rushdie uses the theme of music to make his point, after all music has an enormous universal power: everybody listens to it, everybody sings it, and it tells us a lot about how we perceive the outside world. Rushdie first introduces the world-famous Orpheus myth to introduce his characters. However, this all stays relatively on the surface of the text. Underneath, the Indian myth of Rati seems to be stronger and more crucial to an understanding of the love story between Vina and Ormus. Rushdie thus lets the ‘subaltern’ version of the story prevail. Also by making Vina and Ormus, two Indians, the greatest rock stars ever, Rushdie lets the subaltern perspective on things prevail. By calling VTO better than Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Elvis Presley together, Rushdie makes a very powerful argument. I believe this argument is so strong exactly because Rushdie refers to the history of rock music, of which the West has frequently claimed to have invented it. I think Rushdie advocates a project of ‘untying yourself’ from your traditional perspective of the world in order to become aware of alternative realities in history.

82 Beware the ground beneath your feet, beware the alternative realities the world can offer you.

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