Globalism, Humanitarianism, and the Body in Postcolonial Literature

Home , Assia Djebar, Maya Jaggi, Nuruddin Farah

By Derek M. Ettensohn

M.A., Brown University, 2012 B.A., Haverford College, 2006

Submitted in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Brown University

by the Department of English as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date ______Olakunle George, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Timothy Bewes, Reader

Date ______Ravit Reichman, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii Abstract of “Globalism, Humanitarianism, and the Body in Postcolonial Literature” by Derek M. Ettensohn, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2014.

This project evaluates the twinned discourses of globalism and humanitarianism through an analysis of the body in the postcolonial novel. In offering celebratory accounts of the promises of globalization, recent movements in critical theory have privileged the cosmopolitan, transnational, and global over the postcolonial. Recognizing the potential pitfalls of globalism, these theorists have often turned to transnational ﬁction as supplying a corrective dose of humanitarian sentiment that guards a global affective community against the potential exploitations and excesses of neoliberalism. While authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, and Rohinton Mistry have been read in a transnational, cosmopolitan framework––which they have often courted and constructed––I argue that their theorizations of the body contain a critical, postcolonial rejoinder to the liberal humanist tradition that they seek to critique from within. The project attempts not only to trace the changing relationship between corporeality, technology, environment, and the state, but also to interrogate the foundational myths and inherent limits of a transnational humanitarianism that unwittingly masks deeper structural inequalities. Many theorizations of the body continue to frame it within the familiar dualism of embodiment and dehumanization. While building on work in feminist theory and trauma studies, this dissertation analyzes theorizations of the body within postcolonial literary texts that negotiate the promises and perils of an emergent globalism. In doing so, it hopes to recover the contributions that the literary can offer as a supplement to legal and political discourse. By actively theorizing the relationship between bodily experience and social structures, transnational, postcolonial authors challenge forms of global governance that, while couched in narratives of progress, have controlled and harnessed bodies in new ways.

iv CURRICULUM VITAE

Derek Ettensohn was born on August 27, 1984 in Providence, Rhode Island. He studied English and German at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, graduating magna cum laude in 2006. Awarded a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, he taught English at Gymnasium Heißen in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany during the 2006-2007 academic year. In 2007 he returned to Providence to begin his graduate studies in the English Department of Brown University.

v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks must be to the Brown University’s Graduate School for giving me the opportunity to study and work for the past seven years. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the Department of English and all the professors and peers that made my time at Brown so academically and personally rewarding. I would like to give special thanks to Lorraine Mazza and Ellen Viola for helping me negotiate the past seven years of graduate school; I can still remember your warm welcomes on the first day that set the tone for the rest of my time in the department. I would like to express my profound gratitude to the members of my committee that have supported me throughout the work on this dissertation. Guiding me through independent studies, field exams, and the dissertation I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Olakunle George for his years of support, encouragement, and advice. To Tim Bewes, whose insightful comments and suggestions helped steer the direction of the project at its formative stage. I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with Ravit Reichman, who took me on board when I struggling and who has productively reframed my work, repeatedly modeling an interdisciplinary approach to literature to which I am increasingly drawn. I would also like to acknowledge those professors who have inspired me throughout my undergraduate and graduate career. My interest in literature began at Haverford College and I am grateful for the scholarship and mentorship that I received from Raji Mohan, Kim Benston, and Azade Seyhan. At Brown, Jim Egan and Jean Feerick have continued to shape the image of the teacher and researcher that I aspire to be. It was a great privilege to do my graduate work close to family, childhood, and college friends. My first years back in Providence would have been far less entertaining without the companionship of Jamie Farrell, Liz Wiseman, John O’Leary, Natasha Dravid, Anna Mancusi, and Laura Wolflein. At Brown, I have been fortunate enough to have had the company of Jennifer Schnepf, Maria Pizzaro, David Liao, Katherine Miller, and Lucy Barnes. I would like to give a special thanks to Stephanie Tilden for being a model of generosity, empathy, and humor and Jeff Covington for providing necessary distractions. I can’t imagine graduate school without you both. I would like to thank my grandparents, Rosarina and Fred Hassan, for their patience, understanding, and occasional home cooked meals. To the extended Hassan and Ettensohn families: thank you for putting up with me and occasionally putting me up. I am particularly grateful for the camaraderie of Carmen Granda, whose giggles have gotten me through many long days. To Arturo Marquez, whose spontaneity and humor have taken me around the world and whose advice has kept me grounded when my head was in the clouds. Of course, I have been blessed to have my parents, Dave and Linda, nearby and they have shown remarkable faith in both me and my project over the years. I can’t begin to list all the things you both have made me thankful for, but I’m most grateful that we have had each other through all we’ve been through since I started graduate school, of which the dissertation was the least of our concerns. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my sister, Kristen, who passed away as I began work on the project and whose spirit, grit, and

vi intelligence I try to channel daily. Many years ago we started very on different paths––you in Worcester studying medicine, me in Providence studying literature–– but we both cherished the short rides between campuses that took us out of our respective bubbles. We were each other’s biggest cheerleader and, when I have thought to take up the path you were forced to abandon, I always remember how proud you were that I was trying something different; how insistent you were that I saw it through to the end. You saw something in me that to this day, even though I don’t know if I can be that, I’ll keep trying. I know I would never have completed this dissertation without your voice in my head and your determination as a model; I wish we could celebrate this small victory together.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

I: “The Rainbow Bridge”: Vulnerability and Literary Form 1

II: The Body and Form of the Postcolonial Novel 11

III: Globalism, Humanitarianism and Literature 16

IV: Chapter Overviews 26

CHAPTER 1–Reason and the Body: Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason 29

I. Introduction: Bodies of Reception 29

II. The Universal Body: Translating Scientiﬁc Reason 40

III. “The Ghost in the Machine”: Revising the Mind-Body Debate 65

IV. Going West: Narrating the Body Under Global Capital 81

V. “The Whole Machine”: Administering to a Corpse, Recovering the Body 88

CHAPTER 2–“The Body of Human Truths”: Nuruddin Farah’s Humanitarianism 101

I. Introduction: The Body and Form of Farah’s Fiction 101

II. The Body of Humanitarian Myth 111

III. The Trafﬁcking of Corpses and the Logic of State Failure 137

IV: Blood, Body, and the State 151

CHAPTER 3–“No Longer at Ease”: The Dis-Eased Body in Rohinton Mistry’s Fiction 170

I. Introduction: The Present Journey 170

II. Globalism, Humanitarianism, and Postcolonial Realism 181

III: Balancing Bodies and Antibodies 196

IV: Analgesic Art and the Body in Such a Long Journey 212

V: Marked Bodies: Disease, Disability and Narrative 222

CONCLUSION 247

WORKS CITED 253

viii ix INTRODUCTION

I: “The Rainbow Bridge”: Vulnerability and Literary Form

Passage to India! Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the ﬁrst? The earth to be spanned, connected by net-work, The people to become brothers and sisters, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given inmarriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together. - Walt Whitman, “Passage to India” (1871)

As it has entered the popular imagination E.M. Forster’s famous aphorism in Howards

End to “only connect” appears to capture the sentiment behind transnational literary movements that view literature as an important means of crossing the ﬁgurative and literal borders of class, race, gender, and nation that divide the globe. The well- circulated epigraph of Howards End, however, originally appears in a much more local, particular episode that sees Margaret Schlegel trying to link Henry Wilcox’s ascetic mind with his corporeal desires or, as Forster puts it, to build “the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion” (Forster 194). Wilcox’s “white-hot hatred of the carnal”condemns him to live as “meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man” (194). In the transformation from Margaret’s very particular project into a multicultural, liberal humanist imperative, “only connect” loses some of its visceral dimension in its

1 emphasis on the work of the literary imagination. The work to “only connect the prose and the passion,” has largely been imagined through the clipped imperative of Forster’s epigraph, retaining the ideological desire for a broader community and the particular challenges of attaining this ideal (195). What gets lost, however, is how the body becomes an essential component of perceiving this connection, how the imagination can work on the body and bodily sensations affect the mind. It is this affective potential of literature, effectively linking body and mind, that Forster’s novel explores.

The fantastical nature of such an effort to connect the mind with matter through a “rainbow bridge” cannot be ignored as it suggests a considerable skepticism about the ability to forge the desired connection, a skepticism that is more fully manifested in Forster’s later novel, A Passage to India, which theorizes both the longing for and limitations of cross-cultural intimacy. The difﬁcult intercultural exchange in the novel emerges from Adela Quested’s longing to experience the ‘real’ India while seemingly lacking any sympathy for the actual inhabitants of the country. She offers

Dr. Aziz, one of the facilitator of this exchange, a rather sincere explanation of what drives her to experience India at the base of the ﬁrst of the infamous Marabar Caves.

Dr. Aziz initiates the moment of exchange overwhelmed by feelings of hospitality which, he exults to his English guests, make him “feel like the Emperor

Babur” (Passage 158). For Mrs. Moore and Adela, Aziz’s reference to Babur initiates a discussion of the Mughal Emperors that, transforming Aziz into a native informer, once again makes him “the Oriental guide whom they appreciated” (159). The discussion of the Mughal Emperors doubles as a vision of how to conceive of India, or more broadly, the world as either the liberal universal brotherhood associated with the

2 reign of Akbar or the more sectarian Islamic law of Aurangzeb. Referencing Akbar’s syncretic religion Din-e Ilahi, Aziz and Adela offer competing interpretations of his rule. Adela’s identiﬁcation with Akbar’s desire to, as she states, “‘embrace the whole of

India’” is, for Aziz, “‘ﬁne but foolish…nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing, and that was Akbar’s mistake’” (160). Adela, however, maintains that there needs to be something universal about India if barriers are to be broken down. Moving her appeal to a more personal note, Adela fears that without a universal ideal she will become Anglo-Indian. Explaining her disdain for the term, Adela tells Aziz:

I can’t avoid the label. What I do hope to avoid is the mentality…Some women are so––well, ungenerous and snobby about Indians, and I should feel too ashamed for words if I turned like them, but––and here’s my difﬁculty–– there’s nothing special about me, nothing specially good or strong, which will help me to resist my environment and avoid becoming like them. I’ve most lamentable defects. That’s why I want Akbar’s ‘universal religion’ or the equivalent to keep me decent and sensible. Do you see what I mean? (161)

Adela’s vulnerability demands a belief in a universal religion that can unite a variety of sensibilities and prevent her from falling into the isolated sect of Anglo-Indian women she at once despises, but whose community feels inevitable. In her pleading desire to be understood by Dr. Aziz, Adela recognizes her imbrication in both a natural and social environment whose agency has the power to impose its will on her own. Though she wishes to avoid afﬁliation with the other Anglo-Indian women, Adela recognizes that there is nothing unique in either her person or experiences to ward off a steady transformation into what she currently rejects. She therefore must turn to something larger, a universal ideal that can break down the barriers between Anglo and Indian communities and save her from becoming isolated and insulated from humankind. The fragile sense of community these sentiments develop in Aziz is almost immediately

3 ruptured by Adela’s further inquiry into “‘this Anglo-Indian difﬁculty,’”and irredeemably lost when Adela queries Aziz on the number of wives he has directly prior to the infamous assault in the Marabar Caves that rends the Anglo and Indian communities of Chandrapore (161). The vulnerability that Adela expresses emerges out of a yearning to surpass the limits imposed by the Anglo-Indian community while not ceding the privileged, traveling sovereignty that permits her passage to the

Marabar Caves. The universality she imagines proves to be troublingly contingent on her own privileged ignorance, an example of the institutionally “sanctioned ignorance” that is invoked, Gayatri Spivak asserts, when we turn to discussions of globality or hybridity (Critique 164).

I open with Forster’s A Passage to India because it represents issues central to this project in its efforts to evaluate the promise of literature to develop the connections forged by modern technology. A Passage to India captures the difﬁculties inherent in transcultural exchange that, in Adela Quested’s discontented search for a universal religion, further seems resonant with the well-intentioned concerns of transnational literary studies. Emerging out of an uneasiness with the limitations of the nation but unable to pull away from its orbit, transnational literary studies has sought refuge in the hope of a global literature that will keep us––the contemporary critic––“decent and sensible.” New variations of Akbar’s universal religion such as cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism, and globalism promise transcultural exchange with literature serving as a passage linking diverse populations. For transnational, postcolonial authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, and Rohinton Mistry, these discourses mask speciﬁc historic conditions that may prevent the development of

4 meaningful connection. If we are to follow Forster’s imperative to “only connect” in

Howards End, the routes of these connections are not simply imagined or conceived.

They are interrupted by afﬁliations that, even when we consciously try to avoid them, structure our relationship with both our environment and others. Like Adela we may look to universals to transcend the limitations of our own particular afﬁliations, but

Forster––like the postcolonial, transnational authors of this study––demonstrates the difﬁculty of extracting oneself from our entanglements and the dangers of assuming them to have been transcended or even of imaging them as such.

While literature is capable of fostering humanitarian sentiment, the work of these novelists indicate the limitations of this sentiment to generate affective communities. Forster’s novel represents an effort to imagine sympathetic connections in and through literature, though these connections are interrupted by the very form of their communication and the corporeal particularities and individual sensations that he records in his characters. Forster’s title, A Passage to India can be read in a number of ways: Adela and Mrs. Moore’s literal journey to India; their desire to use Aziz as a medium to experience India; or the novel itself as a portal for readers to view India and, more particularly, Britain’s rule there; not to mention the novel’s reference to Walt

Whitman’s poem celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal. In Whitman’s “Passage to

India,” the same technology that has linked the broad expanses of the American landscape promises to join the world, which are “lands to be welded together” (Whitman l. 35). The opening of the Suez Canal, the literal passage to India, is an occasion for Whitman to memorialize the explorers, scientists, and inventors whose work and faith made such links possible while establishing the poet as their

5 successor: “Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,/ The true son of God shall come singing his songs/…All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,/ All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and link’d together…” (105-9). After the long list of great men from captain to chemist that permit the welding of the world into a global network, Whitman imagines the poet as completing the project through his songs. “Only connect…” therefore gets reﬁgured in

Forster’s Passage to India as an evaluation of literature’s ability to generate affective communities that can span the globe. While the explorers and cartographers ﬁlled in

“the map incognita,” the poet attempts to link the recesses and blank spots of the human mind.

Forster approaches Whitman’s elation for the coming global community with considerably more skepticism in A Passage to India, where the celebrated technologies of connection have linked the physical world but for which no poet has been able to form the “deep, horizontal comradeship” that Benedict Anderson reserves for the national in

Imagined Communities (Anderson 7). Forster’s novel explores both the nature of the possible connections linking cultures, as well the role of literature in forging them.

Read through the urge to connect passion and prose in Forster’s earlier novel, it is tempting to view Adela as representing prose, while Aziz ﬁgures an embodiment of passion. Such a reading, however, would seem to propose that Aziz’s ‘Oriental’ passion, often ﬁgured in bodily terms, is in dialectical relation to Adela’s prose, seen in her retreat to reason and fact instead of feeling. Rather than suggest that A Passage to

India ﬁgures an exchange that reafﬁrms the dualism between prose and passion,

Forster’s novel offers a more directed meditation on how narrative and its attendant

6 forms has the potential to powerfully reinforce the distinction imagined between communities even while seeming to transcend their limits. Forster makes Adela’s bodily agency readily apparent when it overtakes her subjectivity after she is called ugly during the trial: “Her body resented being called ugly, and trembled” (Passage 243). It is not that Adela or Ronny are lacking bodily sensibility or passion––their engagement occurs in the vulnerable aftermath of an accident––but rather how this vulnerability gets erased from the narrative of their betrothal. As such, A Passage to India offers the body as a potential site for evaluating the stories we tell about ourselves, a project that takes on increasing urgency in contemporary transnational, postcolonial literature that must interrogate the connected world imagined by globalism and guaranteed by the universal humanitarian sentiment of Whitman’s poet.

While the poet maintains a privileged location in A Passage to India––as seen in

Professor Godbole’s simultaneously affecting and alienating raga––it also has the power to insulate and naturalize preexisting world views. Such is the power of Aziz’s resuscitation of a poem by Ghalib that deeply affects his listeners:

They were overwhelmed by its pathos; pathos, they agreed, is the highest quality in art; a poem should touch the hearer with a sense of his own weakness, and should institute some comparison between mankind and ﬂowers. The squalid bedroom grew quiet; the silly intrigues, the gossip, the shallow discontent were stilled, while words accepted as immortal ﬁlled the indifferent air. Not as a call to battle, but as a calm assurance came the feeling that India was one; Moslem; always had been; an assurance that lasted until they looked out the door (113).

The reaction of Aziz’s Muslim audience to Ghalib’s poetry mirrors that of the Hindu audience overhearing Godbole’s raga. Aziz adopts the role of the mystic poet that can unite man with nature, albeit a nature considerably less powerful than the majestic

Nature of Whitman’s “Passage to India.” Forster’s omniscient narrator interrupts,

7 however, revealing that this moment of apparent harmony merges with a deeper, more threatening sensibility that naturalizes a uniﬁed Muslim India that overwrites the material reality external to Aziz’s insular room. Forster’s use of ragas and ghazals suggest the cultural impenetrability of literary forms, including that of the novel.

Though the various literatures represented in A Passage to India appear to create an almost global sense of pathos, their form retains a cultural speciﬁcity whose sentiment threatens to transform the local into an ill-ﬁtting universal. A study of the global

Anglophone novel therefore must question how adapting to marketability of the form affects its content and reception, while trying to guarantee that sentiment does not get isolated in the prose, but also affects the passions. Literature functions as the ephemeral “rainbow bridge” of Howards End, possessing a tenuous potential to connect body and mind or prose and passion, but that could just as easily remain in the insular realm of the mind. The body therefore becomes an important site for contemporary authors of transnational, postcolonial novels indicating the local and particular that continues to invest forms of globalism but too often gets erased in its narratives.

Though globalization can be understood as a long historical process, the undeniably increased transnational ﬂows of ideas and populations raise the stakes of Forster’s project for contemporary global Anglophone novelists who turn to the vulnerable body to prevent what Wilson Harris, in his novel Jonestown, has labeled the “predatory blockages, predatory coherence” of abstract universals that correspond with an explosion of the world’s population and that are opposed to “heart-searching conscience, heart-searching caveat” (Harris 7).

8 As the opening reading of Forster indicates, my project does not consider literature as a passive reﬂection of contemporary discourse. Rather, I try to understand how the literary works of these authors demonstrate an active engagment with the critical theoretical questions of their era. While the concerns of Forster’s late colonial period differ from those of the postcolonial, transnational texts gathered in this study, they are linked in their self-conscious awareness of literature’s agency and a skepticism of its affective power that gets invested in, and theorized around, the disruptive ﬁgure of the body. This requires both a critical attention to form, but also an awareness of historical and cultural context. This return to form does not suggest a dismissal of the political, but rather argues that attention to form and its interruption by, or structuring around, the body can expand our understanding of a text’s political entanglements.

The works of Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, and Rohinton Mistry belong to the period that saw the institutionalization of postcolonial criticism and the increasing marketability of postcolonial texts, particularly the Anglophone Indian novel. As such, the novels selected for this study are largely representative of cosmopolitan writing that enjoys a wide metropolitan audience that makes them a valuable archive for tracing out the tension between universal aspirations and particular histories and cultures that motivates their aesthetic project.

The critical role that Salman Rushdie played in both these movements marks him as something of a ghost that haunts this project. The distinctive form and cosmopolitan thematics of his works established a standard that guided a work’s reception often at the expense of less formally inventive or more locally inscribed texts.

The formal experimentation and cosmopolitan sensibility ascribed to their work have

9 secured such a reception for Ghosh and Farah. While acknowledging the inﬂuential readings that have demonstrated the premodern traveling cultures and cosmopolitanism in Ghosh or the strong critique of national discourse in Farah, I try to show how their novels betray an anxiety about the cosmopolitan project that they appear thematically to endorse. My reading explores their skepticism through the

ﬁgure of the body that tries to assert an agency over the very language of the text, allowing a clearer sense of the stakes these transnational, postcolonial authors imagine for their own work and further suggesting the location where literature imagines its own limit. In contrast to Ghosh and Farah, critics have largely dismissed Mistry, arguing that his realist form offers up an exotic India for global consumption while forging empathetic bonds that promote a false sense of a universal humanity. In my reading of the dis-ease of Mistry’s narratives in the face of the disabled or suffering body, what emerges is one of the most stringent critique of a globalism guaranteed by humanitarian sentiment. Far from manipulating sentiment through representations of suffering, a reading of the formal disturbances that interrupt Mistry’s realist mirroring of life reveals a deep concern for the overwriting of these bodies and their histories.

Mistry’s writing dramatizes the erasures necessary not only for the unity of the narrative but also for its international reception, ultimately questioning the ability for art to serve as the fabled “rainbow bridge” that will allow the human to emerge from the inhuman forces shaping it. These writers represent diverse stylistic and literary projects but all engage actively in the theorizing the role of the artist in forming transnational bonds seen in contemporary globalism and its attendant discourse of humanitarianism. In their deployment of the body, moreover, these writers summon

10 the local and political content that has marked the postcolonial as a corrective to the transnational communities imagined in their ﬁction. The question then arises as to why this turn to the body, why now, and how does the body of this project differ from critical scholarship surrounding the body from the past three decades?

To answer these questions the remainder of the introduction will focus on providing an overview of some of the key terms of the dissertation project. I begin with an exploration of how postcolonial literary criticism has framed the body, particularly the body’s relation to literary form. In the third section I discuss the recent revival of the concept of world literature, paying particular attention to theorizations of its relation to humanitarianism. The short ﬁnal section provides an overview of the key questions that inform the individual chapters of the dissertation.

II: The Body and Form of the Postcolonial Novel

As the interface between the individual and the collective, the body has been a source of fascination for literary criticism in recent decades. The body is alternatively a site of resistance or of oppression; something constructed by discourse and that which founds all discourse; the source of irreducible difference or a common human vulnerability.

Elleke Boehmer offers a narrative of the body’s deployment in colonial and postcolonial literary texts in “Transﬁguring: Colonial Body into Postcolonial

Narrative” that, as her title indicates, asserts that the material body of colonial discourse transformed into a linguistically constructed body. Boehmer argues that colonial discourse often represented colonial subjects as all body, passions, and instincts, as that which “does not (itself) signify, or signify coherently, it may be freely occupied, scrutinized, analyzed, resigniﬁed” (Boehmer 270). Recovered by

11 postcolonial, nationalist discourse, the silenced, anatomized body of colonial discourse became the site for recuperating identity, largely becoming a symbolic, unified national body that offered its own violent exclusions. The iconography of national body is a familiar target of critique for transnational, postcolonial writers who, in Boehmer’s reading, don’t narrate the national body but rather figure the body as language and narrative, able to be manipulated and constructed as the previously “inscribed body… inscribes itself” (275). The material body, transfigured into narrative, is given agency as it cedes its materiality, which is figured as the “denatured body of colonial suffering” (277). The reading of the body as the source of symbolic capital has become the dominant mode of reading ‘body novels’ such as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road,

Rushdie’s Shame, or Farah’s Maps. While such analysis offers powerful critiques of masculinist national narratives that figure the maternal body as the site of national identity, their emphasis on allegorical readings privilege the textual over the material imbrications of the body in a manner that ignores the equally important re- theorizations of the body contained in these works that function as a skeptical commentary on the power of literature to affect the change it imagines. As Boehmer indicates, the body has functioned as an important icon in colonial and postcolonial discourse that crafts a genealogy of the body that at once takes part in and is distinct from that of postmodern discourse. The arc of Boehmer’s study, however, suggests a developmental narrative that terminates in magical realist national allegories. This reading tends to flatten the distinctions between vastly different novelists, cultures, and histories, suggesting an ideal representation of the body that has the potential to serve a symbolic end that fits many postcolonial novels into the same social and political

12 project. In this respect, my work departs from Boehmer’s work on the body in postcolonial literature by showing how transnational, postcolonial authors deploy the body for a range of different purposes that more broadly consider the agency of transnational ﬁction. These include the direct revaluation of the mind-body debate in

Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, the affective dimensions of the corpse in Farah’s Links, and the formal dis-ease surrounding disabled characters in Mistry’s Such a Long Journey.

While Boehmer’s work convincingly demonstrates the central role of the body in colonial and postcolonial discourse, her study is part of a larger turn to the body in a number of disciplines. Works such as Elaine Scarry’s Literature and the Body turn to the body to counteract the perceived weightlessness of the conversations surrounding literature. Addressing the problems confronting the ﬁeld of comparative literature in a global age, Gayatri Spivak deploys contemporary formulations of the body in order to engage with ongoing debates about globalization in Death of a Discipline. Taking the

Chilean performance artist Diamela Eltit as a model of efforts “to write the self at its outermost and blurring the outlines between graphic and globalization,” Spivak argues for a planetary reading process. (91). For Spivak, ‘planetarity’ suggests a process of defamiliarization––of the body, the nation, and of the globe––that avoids easy reading or mapping, thereby resisting discursive attempts at control. Comparative literature therefore must aim to translate “not from language to language but from body to ethical semiosis, that incessant shuttle that is a ‘life’ (13).

Timothy Brennan offers a more critical appraisal of at least one strand of the disciplinary turn to the body and its relationship to the raise of a celebratory global cosmopolitanism in “Cosmo-Theory,” where he notes the theoretical shift in cultural

13 and literary studies “to a form of ‘biopolitics’ and speciﬁcally a politics of the body” (Brennan 675). For Brennan, the body is “a necessary counterpart and counterweight at the conceptual level” that accompanies the abstraction involved in postmodern theories that have moved from the individual to the subject (679). What bothers Brennan is how a retreat to the body is “the ultimate expression of a domain of enclosure that cannot be guilty of trespass on another’s” (675). The consequences of postmodernism’s abandonment of Enlightenment universals, Brennan argues, “meant giving the universalizing Western state a free hand, continuing to speak under its protections and privileges as though one were absolved from its actions by inaction” (676). Reﬂecting some of Brennan’s concerns, recent turns to the body in postcolonial literary theory such as Elizabeth Anker’s Fictions of Dignity: Embodying

Human Rights in World Literature and Ambreen Hai’s Making Words Matter: The Agency of

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature arrive with a sense of fatigue with the poststructuralism that informs much of postcolonial study. Anker and Hai echo the disappointment Simon Gikandi expresses in “Globalization and the Claims of

Postcoloniality” at the perceived failure of poststructuralism to escape from the discourse of the Enlightenment that it was meant to deconstruct (Gikandi 630). In response, Anker and Hai’s work calls for a renewed attention to the power of literature to both affect the body and how the body, in turns, affects literary form. Aligning herself with an emerging ‘new materialist’ school of thought that emphasizes affect and embodiment, Anker argues for a reconsideration of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of bodily perception as a way of returning the body to the discourse of human rights while reafﬁrming the stakes of literatures by advocating its impact on our

14 understanding of social justice.1 Hai’s own frustration with postcolonial reading practices largely centers around the overly thematic readings that have characterized postcolonial literary criticism, arguing that a return to the body recovers the agency of literature that avoids it reduction to preexisting cultural patterns.

My own project reﬂects a similar commitment to the form of postcolonial

ﬁction, heeding Deepika Bahri’s calls in Native Intelligence to recuperate a reading practice that “permits a conception of literature as simultaneously embedded in a real, reiﬁed world of commodities and in potential tension with it by virtue of its native regime of aesthetic and formal organization”(Bahri 7). My project therefore does not forward a particular theory of the body that conscripts diverse novelists to prove a variation of a similar argument, nor does it advocate constructivist or essentialist accounts of the body. Rather, my reading attempts to capture the negotiations of postcolonial authors evaluating literature’s ability to forge the affective bonds that generate humanitarian sentiment. These authors turn to the body not only to give weight to their words, but also to demonstrate the persisting limits of such sentiment.

My reading does not see these texts as blindly complicit with the Utopian promise of the nation-less migrant’s global perspective. In contrast, I see these novels as critically engaging with both the promise of an emergent globalism while offering a skeptical view of literature’s ability to guarantee such a global affective community. Finally, while demonstrating the active theorizations around the body in Ghosh, Farah, and

1 Anker, like many of the essays collected in in the recent collection New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, attempts to bridge the gap between materialist and constructivist arguments. In their introduction to the collection Diana Coole and Samantha Frost observe: “For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural” (27).

15 Mistry, I hope to further assert that literature is more than an unconscious reﬂection of modern biopolitical regimes, a ﬂat conception of literature that denies human agency.

III: Globalism, Humanitarianism and Literature

Globalism incorporates a number of problematic terms: multiculturalism, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and, neoliberalism. While often used in reference to economic and foreign policy, globalism is, more broadly, a political and cultural orientation that thinks through processes on a global scale. Globalism is the attitude that motivates the processes of cultural and economic globalization that have been extensively discussed in critical scholarship and popular literature. Whether it is the oil tankers that occlude the horizon at the conclusion of Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, the international intervention in Somalia represented in Farah’s Links, or the global implications of the illegal funding scheme in Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, the novels studied in this dissertation often engage directly with both the cultural and economic effects of globalization. By emphasizing the term globalism, however, my project looks to how these novels engage with the larger sentiments that take the globe as the normative horizon. Globalism thereby refers to what Manfred Steger has called “the global imaginary” that supports the ideology of globalization.2 The movement towards globalism can therefore be seen in both the Bush administration’s “Global War on

Terror” as well as the concern for global climate change. Both the Global War on

Terror and the discourse of climate change demand an awareness of global networks and forces that cannot be isolated or contained to one region or nation. Rather, both

2 See: Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

16 demand a global imaginary that promotes a sense of a common humanity that is under threat, problematically, by terrorists in one case and by our own species in the other.

The Global War on Terror and global climate change focus on two different strands of the global imaginary. The Global War on Terror, with the support of the human rights bestseller, cultivates humanitarian sentiment for populations whose rights are violated by Islamic fundamentalism.3 Global climate change, on the other hand, appears to demand a perspective capable of viewing the human as both a species that shares the globe and as individual actants. This reﬁguring of our relationship with one another and the planet motivates Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent calls for a renewed postcolonial literary studies to better account for the changing conception of what it means to be human living in an age of globalization and global warming. This globalism relies not on shared human sentiment, but rather shared human vulnerability. It relies on a deﬁnition of human that exceeds postcolonial thought, which Chakrabarty stresses, must imagine humanity as a “geophysical force and as a political agent, as a bearer of rights and as author of actions; subject to both the stochastic forces of nature (being itself one such force collectively) and open to the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies” (Chakrabarty 14). Chakrabarty insists that humanity must be imagined as paradoxically both human and as something that transgresses the limits of human understanding, a force operates at the level of species and has a

3 Elizabeth Anker notes how popular literature mirrored the ofﬁcial discourse of human rights violations in support of a muscular humanitarian intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Human rights bestsellers, such as Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner or Greg Morenson’s Three Cups of Tea, Anker argues serve as “apologias for humanitarian intervention…replete with exorcizing, infantilizing, and other demeaning stereotypes, even as they deploy the aesthetic codes of sentimental literature to cultivate sympathy for postcolonial despair” (Anker 35).

17 geological impact: “the human-human and the nonhuman-human” (11). This forked concept of the human suggests both the respect for the individual as well as a recognition of their situation as part of a radically alien life-force whose mode of being

“has no ontology” (14). This concept is captured well in characters such as Ghosh’s

Alu, Mistry’s Gustad, or Farah’s Jeebleh, all of whom strugle to balance individual responsibility with their imbrication in networks that exceed his comprehension or narrative capacity. It is this disjunctive thinking towards which the transnational, postcolonial body novel gestures, linking humanitarian sentiment with a decidedly post-human sensibility to sketch out the limits of human thinking and agency under globalization while reafﬁrming an essential humanity.

Before returning to how the body in the transnational, postcolonial novel negotiates this disjunction between the human-human and the nonhuman-human, I want brieﬂy to discuss the relationship between globalism, literature, and humanitarianism. The globalist perspective on the promise of literature gets encapsulated in Goethe’s Weltliteratur, which forsakes national literature in favor of a new epoch of world literature that corresponds with the modern reality of globalization. Moreover, the nineteenth-century novel, as Mariano Siskind argues, naturalized globalization, providing the “philosophical concept with a visual reality, a set of images and imaginaries that elevated the ﬁction of bourgeois ubiquity to a foundational myth of modernity” (Siskind 331). Commenting on the recent return by scholars such David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova to the concept of world literature as an attempt to account for the ubiquity of the novel form, Siskind emphasizes the role of literature in the reproduction of discourses of globalization and

18 how globalization, in turn, determines the very form of contemporary literature. Even if Siskind’s reservations concerning the global expansion of aesthetic and cultural institutions and local appropriations of these forms are met, he questions the continued humanitarian horizons of world literature, which is conceived, still in the frame of

Goethe, as an afﬁrmation of “the necessarily universal nature of the promise of the cultural emancipation of the planet. World literature becomes, in short, a discourse capable of leading the way towards global peace…” (344). Though the humanist conception of literature as allowing us to imagine the lives of others and generating

“the universal subject imagined by the Enlightenment” has widely been critiqued, its reappearance in the return to the world literature is linked to the inequalities of globalization and our heightened ability to witness these inequalities (344).

The import of literature’s humanitarian sentiment, though never abandoned, has returned as a guarantor against the excesses of globalization by affecting an empathetic global imaginary. The humanitarian potential of literature expresses itself both in the quantiﬁable value ascribed to literacy projects that promote human rights and in the less measurable expansion of the imagination that widens our sense of human community. Analogous to the relationship between globalism and globalization, humanitarianism is the motivating force behind human rights, inscribing sentiment into legal codes with literacy considered a fundamental human right.4 This link is made explicit in Gayatri Spivak’s recent An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization that balances the theoretical promise of literature to further democracy and global justice with the practice of literacy pedagogy, particularly Spivak’s own teacher training in

4 UNESCO deﬁnes literacy as a fundamental human right that “is an instrument of empowerment to improve one’s health, one’s income, and one’s relationship with the world” (UNESCO).

19 West Bengal. Along with the circulation of ideas promoted by literacy, literature ensures the humanitarian orientation necessary for the enactment of the aspirational aims of human rights. The relationship between literary form and the development of the human subject imagined by human rights discourse is explored in Slaughter’s

Human Rights, Inc., which establishes the constitutive relationship between the global dissemination of the Bildungsroman and the proliferation of human rights discourse.

This intimate relationship between the literary form of the novel and the subject of liberal human rights discourse suggests both the promise of poetics in Whitman and the limitations of humanitarianism inherent in the very untranslatability of the forms of its expression.

In contrast to the attention to aesthetic forms seen in Spivak and Slaughter,

Richard Rorty offers literature as a site for moral development.5 Returning to

Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Hume, Rorty has proposed sentimental stories as being the most effective means of guaranteeing human rights in

“Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” Rather than rely on reason and rationality, Rorty argues that a commitment to human rights needs to be affected through the humanitarian sentiment that is the novel’s providence. It is, in Rorty’s argument, our ability to imagine ourselves in the position of another suffering individual that expands the circle of humanity linked affectively. In “Heidegger,

Kundera, and Dickens,” Rorty notes that in Heidegger’s “age of the world picture,” the

5 Günter Leypoldt contextualizes Rorty’s reception in literature departments in “Uses of Metaphor: Richard Rorty’s Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making.” Critics such as Lawrence Buell in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics” accuse Rorty as subsuming formal or aesthetic pleasure to the novel as a moralizing force. Bruce Robbins offers a sharper critique of Rorty’s project, particularly Rorty’s designation of human rights as private and cultural rather than juridical in “Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on Culture and Human Rights.”

20 novel abandons “the last traces of the ascetic priest’s attempt to escape from time and chance, the last traces of the attempt to see us as actors in a drama already written before we came on the scene” (Rorty 77). In contrast to the ascetic priest that Rorty associates with Heidegger, the sentimental novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe and

Charles Dickens do not attempt to transform man, but rather argue that they urged their fellow man to understand one another as human.6 Furthermore, Rorty argues that the sentiment in Stowe and Dickens is akin to that of Martin Luther King, claiming the broader social impact of the novel: “The generosity of Dicken’s, Stowe’s, and King’s anger comes out in their assumption that people merely need to turn their eyes toward the people who are getting hurt, notice the details of the pain being suffered, rather than needing to have their entire cognitive apparatus restructured” (80). Sentimental stories, Rorty argues, confront the reader with human suffering that demands recognition. It is a liberal humanist model of reading that, while it acknowledges contemporary globalism, does not account for the sheer quantity of sentimental stories competing for an individual’s attention. Slaughter’s

“Humanitarian Reading” offers an alternative to Rorty’s sentimental ﬁction. Reading

J. Henry Dunant’s Un Souvenir de Solférino, Slaughter suggests literature as a resource for a rational, pragmatic vision of humanitarianism. Slaughter further notes that

Rorty’s is an ideal peace-time mode of reading whose uses are limited during an ongoing crisis, a fact Rorty seems to acknowledge by noting that turning to sentimental stories spurs external intervention rather than directly affecting the actual warring

6 Rorty’s choice of sentimental novels in both “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” and “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality” offers an implicit critique of the formal experimentation privileged by many postcolonial critics. This issues is explored in more detail in my discussion of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey.

21 parties.7 While Rorty longs to bring the human-human into sight through sentimental reading, Slaughter provocatively concludes “Humanitarian Reading” by asserting that

Un Souvenir de Solférino teaches us “to read the dignity of humanity of others with the indifference of a horse” (Slaughter 106). To read “with the indifference of a horse” is to respond to suffering not with identification, but with an attention to suffering that disregards not only nationality, but replaces sentiment with practical action and reason on a battlefield where “living men have become beastly and the dead and dying have been disfigured beyond recognition” (106). This isn’t the human conceived as the geophysical force per Chakrabarty, but rather the human stripped of its affiliations, at once universally vulnerable and yet indistinctly human; the human viewed through a non-human perspective.

The empathetic response with the suffering human body that Rorty imagines is the provenance of sentimental literature Slaughter suggests must be approached with a disinterestedness that provides the foundation for the reasoned legal language of human rights, effectively reducing the difference between reason based human rights discourse and humanitarian sentiment. Whether it is the disembodied subject demanded by human rights discourse or the affective force of humanitarian sentiment, the body or its abnegation plays a critical role in the construction of a global imaginary.

In their introduction to the collection Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of

Suffering, Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown repeat the frequent contrast between a humanitarianism that arises from the heart with a human rights that comes

7 Slaughter also reverses the problematic relationship between those who are the subject of humanitarian narratives and those who listen to their stories. Rather than ﬁgure the listener as having a generous imagination, he relates that “the act of story telling, particularly of stories of suffering, is a deeply generous act” (105).

22 “from the head––from legal bureaucratic duties”; human rights as “pre-existing legal protections of individuals” and humanitarianism as a moral sentiment or obligation

(Wilson 7-8). Despite these differences, both human rights and humanitarianism advocate a universal humanity that will ground “a new type of political sovereignty–– one that can be exercised across national borders,” that generates new political subjects (Wilson 5). The universality of the suffering human body, Miriam Ticktin has argued in her study of French medical humanitarianism and les sans-papiers in Casualties of Care, becomes a new way of conceiving the world and regulating borders that further gives rise to a new “‘transnational governmentality,’ which describes the way that NGOs, activists, international organizations, as well as corporations come to govern in zones the state has ceded or abandoned” (Ticktin 7). While the suffering body of humanitarian discourse demands care, Ticktin argues that the body in pain, though universally recognized as the body “imagined outside time and place, outside history and politics,” is also imagined “from a position outside reason” (13 and 15).

Recognized largely in suffering, what were previously third world political actors “are reconﬁgured as victims…ultimately in need of salvation.” (21). This focus on bodily suffering leads to what Ticktin labels an ‘antipolitics of care’ that reproduce and occlude broader structural inequalities. If humanitarianism and humanitarian narratives promises a new transnational political sovereignty, the representations of human suffering that generates such sentiment potentially reduces political subjects to biological life. Thus, the body in Ticktin’s examination of French humanitarianism becomes the conﬁrmation of individual narratives of abuse, torture, vulnerability, or illness that largely prevent the development of a more universal sense of vulnerability

23 or a view of the larger processes that have provided the context for the personal suffering.8 This focus on the “urgency of individual suffering” is a “limited temporal lens” that “has gradually worked to appropriate the resources for longer-term political responses, limiting our ability to even imagine them” (75).9 While Slaughter imagines literature as able to cultivate a similar ethos of care based on bodily suffering indifferent to national allegiances or afﬁliations, this reading risks reducing literature to a reﬂection of an emerging biopolitical regime of care. In contrast, this project views the body and the narratives that arise around the body in the transnational, postcolonial novel as evaluating how social and historical forces produce the suffering body, cultivating humanitarian sentiment that opens and forecloses worlds of possibility.

The transnational, postcolonial novel is capable of exploring the links between the human-human of sentimental tales and the non-human-human of the body as part of a larger biological species without becoming either an instrument of moral instruction or a reflection of larger cultural or political forces. In their focus on the body situated within the flows of transnational capital and surveillance, the fiction of

Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, and Rohinton Mistry, are examples of postcolonial novels that Pheng Cheah has identiﬁed as an example of world literature that contains

8 For more on humanitarianism’s apolitical aspect and the related concern with neutrality see, Ruti Teitel’s “For Humanity”; Peter Redﬁeld’s “The Impossible Problem of Neutrality”; and James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine.

9 Though Ticktin refers to specific humanitarian policies in France, we see a similar logic at play in humanitarian interventions and even in Slaughter’s reading of Un Souvenir de Solférino which advocates a similar reliance on reason and scientific fact to determine truth while reducing the suffering soldiers on the battlefield to that which remains outside of human identification. While the wounded or dying soldiers are the object of medical humanitarianism’s neutral, reasoned care, they are no longer within the realm of reason, a point that Slaughter confirms in his analysis of passage from Dunant describing the dead and dying on the battlefield as “twice dehumanized” (Slaughter 98).

24 “the hope of crafting new ﬁgurations and stories of world-belonging for a given postcolonial people” (Cheah 36). Cheah, interested in how world literature constitutes an important part of cosmopolitanism, revives the concept of world literature by accounting for the market in and power relations that Goethe ignores, while resisting

Marx’s reduction of world literature to “a mere ideological reﬂection of economic forces with almost no efﬁcacy in the world” (34). Furthermore, unlike the Frankfurt

School, Cheah ﬁgures world literature to have a non-negative force that actively constitutes and remakes the material world:

Assuming that human activity alone can transform material reality begs the question of how material reality is constituted as a form of presence, that is, as a form that persists in time. This persistence allows a world to appear and enables us to receive a world. Under conditions of radical ﬁnitude, in which we cannot explain why we continue to exist, this persistence in time is a gift that cannot be calculated by human reason. In other words, any given or present world, any world that we have received and that has been historically changed and that we self-consciously seek to transform through human activity, is riven by a force that we cannot anticipate but that enables the constitution of reality and any progressive transformation of the present world by human action (34).

The body becomes central to the work of the transnational, postcolonial novel as a force that both grounds and exceeds human reason. While Cheah’s conception of world literature may overstate its world-making potential, its emphasis on the constant negotiation between the universal and particular acknowledges a force beyond human understanding that avoids the developmentalism or global managerial reasoning that haunts a Eurocentric view world literature’s potential. Moreover, Cheah’s work calls attention to the human-human and nonhuman-human that can be seen in the oscillation between the urgency of individual suffering and the long-term, less-visible threats to both the planet and the human species that exceed human reason. It is precisely the negotiation of this tension between literature’s potential to form

25 empathetic connections and its gesturing towards the limits of human reason that gets explored by authors as diverse as Forster, Ghosh, Farah, and Mistry through narratives of the body. These narratives, furthermore, evaluate the relationship between the human and the world, forcing a consideration of how the discourse surrounding the body relates to a history of neoliberal capital.

IV: Chapter Overviews

This project reads ﬁve novels in three chapters that are each devoted to a single author.

In covering more than one novel from distinct periods of a writer’s career, I hope to convey how the body has consistently been a resource for these authors as they rethink both the postcolonial novel in the global marketplace, but also the world-making possibilities and limitations of literature and its relationship to the humanitarian discourse that undergirds globalism.

My ﬁrst chapter explores theorizations of the mind-body dualism within the work of Amitav Ghosh, focusing particularly on his ﬁrst novel The Circle of Reason. My reading challenges the critical dismissal of the novel as a failed imitation of Salman

Rushdie’s magical realism. These readings overlook the form of the novel, which indicates a critical desire to read the text as national allegory, rather than as an interrogation of theories of the body that ground colonial and postcolonial discourse.

Ghosh’s narrative in The Circle of Reason, I demonstrate, explores how scientiﬁc reason was translated into the foundation of Indian nationalism by considering the mind-body debates of turn-of-the-century Bengali intellectuals. The inability of characters in the novel to transcend their bodily limitations suggests an alternative theory of embodied

26 perception capable of challenging the subject enshrined in Enlightenment discourse.

This construction of the body, I argue, critically grounds the theorizations of cosmopolitanism and transnational networks in Ghosh’s later works such as In an

Antique Land and The Calcutta Chromosome, creating an embodied subjectivity that interrupts efforts to translate the body into the universalizing discourses of scientiﬁc and legal reason.

In the second chapter, I proceed to demonstrate the limits of the humanitarian myth that guarantees contemporary globalism, analyzing the figures of the living and dead body in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps and Links. While Maps has entered the postcolonial canon as a stringent critique of Somali nationalism during the Siad Barre regime, Links chronicles the collapse of the Somali state and the continued violence and terror that mars reconstruction effort. Farah’s theorization of the body in Maps, I maintain, contains not only a critique of nationalism in Misra’s living body, but also an affirmation of the state through the narrative that emerges following the recovery of her corpse. In the absence of the state, the figure of the corpse plays an even larger role in Links, a novel that interrogates the construction of the human in humanitarianism.

Links is Farah’s response to the calls for humanitarian aid that would eventually lead to the failed humanitarian intervention in Somalia. Grounded in representations of human suffering, these calls for a humanitarianism that could transcend difference envision the Somali population in a manner that corresponds with the colonial discourse that continues to inform the designation of Somalia as a failed state. By focusing on the ﬁgure of the corpse in Links, Farah reveals the concealed pronominal afﬁliations that structure the myth of a global humanitarianism capable of transcending

27 difference, while proposing an alternative view of the body that recognizes its imbrication in its environment.

My ﬁnal chapter considers the ability of art to inﬂuence bodily perception in

Rohinton Mistry’s ﬁction. Widely approached with critical skepticism, I analyze the realism of Mistry’s novels Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance as efforts to capture the inhuman effects of globalization that foreclose the empathetic bonds promised by the realist aesthetic. In chronicling the struggles of a Parsi family dragged unwittingly into governmental corruption and international politics, Such a Long Journey blurs the boundary between intimate, quotidian life and global affairs. Juxtaposing an intrigue plot with narratives of illness, disability and bodily suffering, the novel evaluates the ability of art to generate affective communities in the global era. The communities that form through various aesthetic encounters in the narrative are repeatedly threatened from without by a senseless bureaucracy and from within by an uncontrollable sensation of bodily dis-ease. Mistry’s ﬁction, I argue, gestures towards a global community based on humanitarian sentiment only to indicate the cultural, historic, linguistic, and corporeal boundaries that remain by highlighting the exclusions that found Mistry’s own aesthetics.

28 CHAPTER 1–Reason and the Body: Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

I. Introduction: Bodies of Reception

The human body emerges as a critically contested site of control in a striking scene towards the end of the second section of Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason. In the scene, the Indian detective Jyoti Das has just arrived in the tiny oil state of al-Ghazira to continue the pursuit of a terror suspect who has already taken him through much of

India and across the Arabian Sea. After a day interrogating a local informant, Das is invited to the flat of Jai Lal, an Indian officer stationed in al-Ghazira. For Lal, the visit is an opportunity to demonstrate to Das the high living standards he enjoys abroad: a modern, air-conditioned flat outfitted with the latest in Japanese technology. Entering the flat together, Lal hands Das the controller for a video game. Despite the encouragement of his host, Das is unable to make sense of the game; he watches the images on the screen circle confusingly before handing the controller back. Still intent to demonstrate this technological marvel, Lal calls his young son in, commenting: “He doesn’t like it much. But he has to learn” (Ghosh 288). Removing the boy’s thumb from his mouth and placing it on the controller, Lal goads his reluctant son: “Come and play with your video. It costs money” (288). When the boy finally begins to play he

29 immediately presses the wrong button, causing the image of the game to fade from the television screen. Das, watching the boy, notices “that his hands had begun to shake and drops of sweat appeared on his forehead. Suddenly a heavy putrid smell filled the room” (288). The small boy, having lost control of his bowels, removes his thumb from the controller and returns it to his mouth. Lal’s efforts to discipline his son for his failure are comically aborted by the stench, forcing the two police officers to retreat to the flat’s balcony. Once outdoors, the shakiness of the boy has been transferred to his father, whose hands tremble as he attempts to pour whiskey for his guest. “Everything is wrong,” Lal confides to Das, “nothing is right any longer; it’s all chaos. It worries me. I’m very worried” (289).

This troubled confession from the cosmopolitan bureaucrat Lal concludes a chapter dominated by the captivating narrative of another transnational migrant,

Jeevanbhai Patel. Patel, the local informant interrogated by Lal and Das, seizes control of the chapter through his artful retelling of how the migrant workers of the oil state have organized a new money-less society under the leadership of the suspected terrorist Alu. With the action of the second section of The Circle of Reason about to climax, the scene at Lal’s ﬂat is at once a comical narrative digression, as well as a place for Ghosh to explicitly theorize the transformation of the body in contemporary global capitalism. The structure of this critical chapter, “A Call to Reason,” revolves around a profound reversal of power. The police’s authority during the interrogation and bodily surveillance of Jeevanbhai Patel is undermined by Patel’s narrative

ﬂourishes, culminating in a ﬁnal scene where it is ultimately the interrogator whose body betrays him, forcing a confession of his own insecurities and feelings of

30 displacement. The professionalism and cosmopolitan assurance that distinguished Lal from the distracted and naive Das are merely a facade masking an inner set of contradictions and anxieties betrayed by the overstimulated body of Lal’ young son.

Ghosh juxtaposes the lack of bodily control in the globally networked Lal with the bodily fortitude of Alu, the suspected terrorist who, in declaring money to be the ultimate germ infecting the social body, has withdrawn from these very networks.

The body serves as a battleground for various projects of modernization in both this and other scenes throughout Ghosh’s novel because of its ability to function as both a symptom of and potential cure for, as Alu calls it, the “the Germ” of money in late global capitalism (280). The transformations wrought by the impact of globalization on landscape, community, and social practices ﬁnd ultimate expression in these novels through the human body’s efforts to adapt to this rapidly changing environment. A reading of the way technology and capital affect the body and character’s perceptions of their bodies is central to understanding Ghosh’s literary project. Ghosh’s debut novel, The Circle of Reason, offers a prolonged meditation on the body in the age of globalization, initiating an effort by Ghosh to fundamentally revise contemporary bodily representation and understanding; a project continued in later novels including The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), The Hungry Tide (2005), and The Sea of

Poppies (2008). In this chapter I will trace how control over the body and its translation into universal terms was essential to India’s entrance into global networks, demonstrating how Ghosh’s work demands a reconsideration of the body to imagine alternative ways of existing in a world structured by global capital. To accomplish this, my reading not only considers the importance of Ghosh’s engagement with

31 contemporary theorizations of the body, but also redeﬁnes Ghosh’s reception to explore new possibilities for the work of contemporary world literature.

The reception of Ghosh’s work has largely been framed by his almost instant canonization as one of the leading figures of global Anglophone literature since the publication of In an Antique Land in 1993. Upon its release, scholars in cultural and literary studies celebrated In an Antique Land for its productive mixing of genres, praising Ghosh for his portrayal of cultural hybridity, subaltern migrancy, and the daily practices of cosmopolitanism. In an Antique Land weaves together archival historical research with anthropological field work to create a text with elements of detective fiction, travel writing, and ethnography. This combination generated significant interdisciplinary critical attention that crafted what Gaurav Desai has labeled Ghosh’s “formidable canonical status”(Desai 125).1 Oscillating between two historical periods and modes of writing, critics lauded Ghosh for his mastery, and subsequent blurring, of literary and anthropological discourse. This kind of genre blurring proved more amenable to scholarly attention however than that of some of

Ghosh’s other, equally genre defying, works. The instant canonization of In an Antique

Land has largely overshadowed some of Ghosh’s more extreme generic experiments, such as The Circle of Reason and The Calcutta Chromosome.

1 Desai convincingly demonstrates the active production of the text’s now canonical status in the opening of his essay. Desai notes that by the time In an Antique Land was published to prominent reviews from, among others, Clifford Geertz, Ahdaf Soueif, and Anton Shammas, excerpts of Ghosh’s text had already been excerpted and published in Granta and Subaltern Studies, thus guaranteeing the awareness of most scholars of postcolonial cultural studies. When James Clifford then drew upon In an Antique Land in his essay “Traveling Cultures” and then again in the opening of his collection of essays Routes, Desai argues that the canonical status of Ghosh’s text was sealed.

32 Only two years before the publication of In an Antique Land, the cultural anthropologist Saloni Mathur lamented the reception of Ghosh’s debut novel in strictly literary terms. Frustrated by the ambivalence of anthropologists to Ghosh’s literary production as well as the efforts of the literary establishment to distance Ghosh from his anthropological work, Mathur exclaims: “The exclusionary message...is that for the literary community, The Circle of Reason is not anthropology, it is only ﬁction. For the anthropological community...both Ghosh and his book simply fail to exist...the two disciplines have effectively enforced the boundaries between the disciplines” (Mathur

62). Mathur’s dismay at the disciplinary barriers erected in response to Ghosh’s early work is inconceivable following the reception of In an Antique Land, which boldly announced the interdisciplinary aspects of the text to which The Circle of Reason had merely alluded and that the later science ﬁction of The Calcutta Chromosome would perhaps push too far. In an Antique Land arrived to the market with a narrative that reﬂected and reinforced academic theorizations of hybridity, migration, subaltern histories, and transnational culture. This canonical reception, as Desai observes, has largely obscured other important thematics in Ghosh’s work. While Desai returns to

Ghosh’s archive in “Old World Orders” to better understand the reflective nostalgia at work in Ghosh’s text, I will look to Ghosh’s theorization of technology and transnational migration on bodily perception, suggesting that the body in Ghosh becomes a site for a larger project that seeks to relocate agency in global literature. To do this I will turn to the reception of The Circle of Reason to demonstrate both its initial misreadings, as well as its connections with the bodily project of Ghosh’s later works that together suggest a transfiguration of the body in transnational, postcolonial fiction.

33 Upon it’s release, The Circle of Reason was widely considered to be an awkward imitation of the magical realism associated with the Latin American ﬁction of Gabriel

Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosas and later adapted to the Indian novel in

English by Salman Rushdie. To mark the release of the novel, The New York Times Book

Review ran a review by Anthony Burgess as well as a companion interview with Ghosh conducted by Steven R. Weisman. Both Weisman and Burgess are quick to associate

Ghosh with Rushdie and the magical realist tradition. In particular, Ghosh’s focus on the body in the novel was seen as confirmation of its magical realist intentions. Noting that the novel begins with the arrival of the lumpy-headed orphan Alu, Burgess dismissively remarks: “A deformed protagonist is to be expected in some brands of magical realism” (Burgess 1). Alu’s deformed head is only one of the physical characteristics and bodily maladies that fulfill the apparent cliches of the magical realist genre for early reviewers. Like Burgess, literary critics have documented the moments where the expected conventions of magical realism appear in the novel, fixing their readings of the novel to its own generic affinities and often dismissing the text for its inability to live up to Rushdie’s exemplary coordination of magical realist form with thematic content.2

A closer reading of Ghosh’s early novel, however, forces a reconsideration of the generic classification of The Circle of Reason that reveals a different set of thematic concerns revolving around the body and marking a new transmutation of the body in postcolonial fiction. In her essay “Transfiguring: Colonial Body into Postcolonial

2 See: Shyam S. Agarwalla, “Magic Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason” and Damodar Rao, “Magic and Irony as Principles of Structure: A Reading of The Circle of Reason.” For a more nuanced reading of how magical realism is deployed and actively undermined by the novel, see: Stephanie Jones, “A Novel Genre: Polylingualism and Magical Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Circle of Reason’.”

34 Narrative,” Elleke Boehmer offers a brief history of how bodily representation has been transformed from colonial to postcolonial discourse. Beginning with the often literal embodiment of exclusion or suppression in colonial representation, Boehmer moves to the transﬁguration of the body in early post-independence national narratives and later postcolonial national narratives. These periodic transitions are marked by shifts in bodily representation. Considering the transition from early post- independence narratives to contemporary postcolonial national ﬁction, Boehmer states:

Postcolonial nationalist narrative is bound up in a central contradiction. It cannot bring what it promises: a completely united and unifying history, an absolute unity with the national body. To conceptualize that fusion demands self-division. In effect, to transﬁgure body into narrative, to escape from being only a ﬁgure in another’s text, is to effect a break in the self (Boehmer 274).

Working through the analogy of Freud’s talking cure for hysteria, Boehmer considers transﬁguration to be predicated on self-estrangement, which proceeds as a continued reconsideration of the body’s relation to the nation in works of magical realism that translate body into narrative. In Boehmer as well as later critics inﬂuenced by her work, such as Jean Kane in “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History:

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” a new canon of magical realist ﬁction is constructed around a group of postcolonial novels “depicting the nation as a corpus...that allegorize national history through the metaphor of the body politic” (Kane 95). Considering its focus on somatic experience, The Circle of Reason is naturally categorized as a work of magical realist national allegory by both Boehmer and Kane. However, the allegorical function of the body as a metaphor for the nation that is readily apparent in novels such as Kane’s primary text, Midnight’s Children, are frustratingly absent in Ghosh’s text, which eschews a national framework as it follows

35 a set of subaltern migrants across a global landscape connected by technologies of capital and surveillance.

Those critics attempting to read the novel as a magical realist allegory of the national body have attempted to surmount the challenge of this transnational movement by dissecting the novel into three distinct sections.3 Alternately, the novel’s large cast of eccentric characters coupled with frequent narrative digressions have overwhelmed critics.4 Failing to ﬁnd an overarching signiﬁcance for all the textual elements presented in the novel, critics have disparaged the novel as an immature execution of the magical realist tropes. This popular reading of Ghosh is effectively critiqued in Stephanie Jones’ article “A Novel Genre: Polylingualism and Magical

Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason,” which demonstrates the tendency to simultaneously lump Ghosh in the magical realist genre while citing him as an underdeveloped example. Jones argues that this gesture demonstrates not only the iconic status of Rushdie’s writing, but also “the grounding of this standard in the very ease with which texts may be read as moving from perplexity and obscurity into ever more supple and comfortably abstract fables of our global age” (Jones 433). While not discounting theorizations of magical realism as an effective mode of postcolonial critique, Jones rightfully argues the tendency to glibly universalize or celebrate the

3 This approach to the novel can be seen in Claire Chambers’ pair of essays that correspond to the first two sections of The Circle of Reason. Chambers justifies this decision in her essay “Representations of the Oil Encounter in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason,” which focuses on the second section of the novel: “The novel has evident flaws, the most serious of which is that it does not hang together as a whole. It is structured into three sections, each of which has a different setting, characters and concerns....the novel’s sections remain discrete entities that for the most part fail to dovetail” (Chambers 34). The formal significance of the novel dismissed, Chambers is able to provide satisfactory allegorical readings of the thematic concerns of at least two of the novel’s sections.

4 In addition to Anthony Burgess’ review, see also: Hanif Kureishi “A Feast of Words” and Liz Heron “Lost in the Labyrinth.”

36 seeming radicalism of magical realist texts while only partially reading or dismissing entirely those postcolonial texts, such as The Circle of Reason, that don’t entirely fulfill its generic standards but open alternative figurations of the global.5 Readings that have discussed only one section of the novel or dismissed it for its awkward application of magical realist allegories of the national body have neglected the central theoretical claims of the novel.6 The Circle of Reason focuses on the body not, as Boehmer and Kane suggest, to craft an allegory of a split or fragmentary national identity, but rather to suggest a further transfiguration of the body to better account for the long history of transnational migration and the more recent rise of an empire of global capitalism.

Clues to the transﬁguration of the body are apparent in the intricate structuring of the novel’s three sections around concepts from Hindu philosophy that demand to be read together. These section heading –– “Satwa: Reason”; “Rajas: Passion”; and

“Tamas: Death”–– refer to the three gunas or strands that variously compose everything in nature.7 The three gunas, present in earlier Hindu texts such at the Maitrayaniya

Upanishad, importantly refer to the dualism between body and spirit that ﬁnd further expression in the Samkhya school of classical Hindu philosophy.8 The basis of the

5 See: Stephen Slemon “Magic Realism as Post-colonial Discourse”and Kumkum Sangari “The Politics of the Possible”

6 It is worth noting that in his interview with Steven Weisman for The New York Times Book Review, Ghosh attempts to dissociate himself from the magical realist label, stating: “In fact, there is nothing fantastical that happens in my book...parts of it are deliberately very realistic, almost a comedy of manners” (Weisman 4). Further distancing himself from Rushdie or Marquez, Ghosh suggests an alternative literary genealogy of Herman Melville and Rabindranath Tagore; writers whose inﬂuence is apparent in Ghosh’s novels from The Circle of Reason to the most recent volumes of the Ibis trilogy.

7 Chambers herself acknowledges the origin of the section title in a footnote to “Representations of the Oil Encounter.” Noting that the three gunas are “interdependent,” her subsequent willingness to dismiss the possibility of reading the novel as a whole is therefore surprising (Chambers fn. 47).

8 An overview of Samkhya thought in relation to the Upanishads, Jainism, Buddhism, and Greek philosophy is provided by A. Berriedale Keith’s The Samkhya System (2004).

37 Samkhya doctrine is the interlocking dualism of Purusha (spirit/subject) and Prakriti

(materiality/object).9 Prakriti is composed of the three gunas –– satwa, rajas, and tamas–– which, animated by the presence of Purusha, exist in a perpetual tension with one another, “the source of the world becoming” (Radhakrishnan 424). While Western dualism centers on the opposition between the mind and body, in Samkhya philosophy the distinction is between self (Purusha) and matter (Prakriti). In addition to titling the sections of The Circle of Reason after the three gunas, Ghosh names the protagonist of the novel after the famous child Nachiketa who discovers the soul’s relation to the body from the god of death in the Katha Upanishad.

In using these classical Sanskritic concepts of dualism, Ghosh suggests both an alternative structure unifying the novel, as well as the possibility that the novel itself is able to theorize a new relationship between the body, mind, and emerging globe.

Ghosh translates these concepts through the suggestive equivalence of a simple colon in his section headings, however, as the more detailed translations in the text of The

Circle of Reason suggest, these simple equivalents proceed only through a significant erasure. The simple presentation of these terms and their structural significance challenges the reader to ponder a complex intertextual web that demonstrates the difficulty of translating even supposedly universal concepts such as the body. In its intense focus on the body, The Circle of Reason questions how systems of Western thought and technology have been translated for the appropriation of colonial subjects.

9 A helpful summary of these terms is provided by Axel Michaels in Hinduism: Past and Present (2005): “The Puruṣa is completely unchanging, eternal, omnipresent, pure spiritual light; in short, pure consciousness, sufﬁcient unto itself, but not consciousness of something; its individuations, also called puruṣa are the ‘parts’ of the individual soul capable of salvation. The Prakṛti, on the other hand, is active, unconscious material––eternal, omnipresent, and imperceptibly subtle––and it is also thought, will, and feeling, for it comprises physical and psychical things” (Michaels 264).

38 The novel, moreover seeks to redefine the practice of translation in a transnational era by showing the inability of universal terms to adequately capture the full significance of the body as a defining site of global possibility.

In The Circle of Reason, Ghosh moves beyond the national allegory read into many works of magical realist ﬁction, instead playing with the relation of Hindu and

Western discourses surrounding the body on a transnational stage that is rapidly changing due to medical innovation, technological developments, humanitarian interventions and global capitalism. As Arjun Appadurai argues in Modernity at Large, the regulatory discourse surrounding the body that fortified state power has been brought into crisis by transnational movements that stretch the definition and governmental force of the state beyond recognition (Appadurai 157). The body becomes a critical site for the enactment of global governance, as well as the possible site for its dissolution. The stakes for this transfiguration of the body are demonstrably high in The Circle of Reason, which portrays a number of communities that endeavor to capture some of the entitlements of the state governance associated with the nation.

These aspirant groups are violently suppressed in the novel by national forces that attempt to maintain control of the structures of governance, even as this power is being co-opted by shadowy transnational forces. It is the dissolution of the monopoly over the idea of the nation, threatened from above by transnational forces and below by ethnic nationalisms and subaltern collectives, that characterizes the crisis of the modern nation-state in The Circle of Reason. The body becomes a critical battleground for governmental control, leading Ghosh to suggest another transﬁguration of the body under global capitalism; a ﬂexible body able to negotiate the violent excesses and

39 exploitations of global networks of power while imagining alternative possibilities. To do this I will begin with a consideration of how the body gets figured as the contested site for the translation of universal scientific reason into local contexts in both the first section of The Circle of Reason as well as in colonial India before moving to the transnational frame of the final sections of Ghosh’s novel which explore the power of narrative to translate experience.

II. The Universal Body: Translating Scientiﬁc Reason

The centrality of the body in The Circle of Reason is foregrounded in the opening scene of the novel when three forms of bodily knowledge collide in an effort to read the enormous head of a newly arrived orphan in the small Bengali village of Lalpukur.

Upon seeing the size of the child’s head, Balaram, the boy’s uncle, runs to his house to retrieve an instrument to record the boy’s cranial measurements for phrenological analysis. Meanwhile the villagers have gathered around the young boy and, ignoring his given scriptural name of Nachiketa Bose, rename him Alu after the potato-like appearance of his head. In renaming the boy after the everyday object the boy most resembles physically, the villagers displace the scriptural name from the Katha

Upanishad. This opening scene neatly puts into dialogue three forms of bodily discourse: Western scientific, Vedic, and quotidian. These various forms of bodily understanding come into frequent conflict as characters attempt to translate other forms of embodiment into the principles of Western scientific reason in the universalizing project that occupies the opening section of the novel. Recognizing the importance of somatic perception on lived experience, the effects of these translation

40 projects are critically assessed by the novel as part of a process that transﬁgures representations of the body in global Anglophone ﬁction. In following the supposed narrative of modernization not through the triumph and progress of state, nation, or empire but through the transformations enacted on the body, Ghosh’s novel develops alternative versions of progress, community, and nation.

While the narrative of The Circle of Reason revolves around competing understandings of the body, in this section I will consider how the body emerges as a potential universalizing site whose discipline and rationalization can transcend cultural or historical difference. Detailing the debates between two characters in The Circle of

Reason over how to translate scientiﬁc reason, I situate Ghosh’s novel in the colonial history of Partha Chatterjee and Gyan Prakash to explain how rationalism coincided with Indian nationalism while further opening India to networks of global capital. I then demonstrate how the challenge of translating scientiﬁc reason links Prakash’s account of science and Indian nationalism with the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, who offers an alternative form of translation that maintains the traces of difference that the hygiene campaign of Ghosh’s character in The Circle of Reason attempts to erase.

Ghosh’s fiction demonstrates the failure of these universal translation projects, indicating the continued need to imagine alternative worlds to the one constructed by capital and naturalized by reason. For Ghosh the body is a critical site to demonstrate the failures of these translation projects in the first section of The Circle of Reason. The subsequent sections of the novel propose storytelling as an alternative site of translation while also indicating its limits, leaving the final section of the novel to

41 explore the affective work of narrative to offer an alternative vision of existence in global capital.

Concerns over the form of these bodily translations are at the center of a ﬁerce debate over the local application of Enlightenment scientiﬁc reason during a meeting of the Rationalists of Presidency College that is part of a series of expository

ﬂashbacks in the opening section of The Circle of Reason. The young Balaram, impatient with the leadership of his friend Gopal, urges the group to more actively perform its mission. Formally known as ‘The Society for the Dissemination of Science and

Rationalism among the People of Hindoostan,” Balaram and Gopal argue over the best way to enact their motto: “Reason Rescues Man from Barbarity” (Ghosh 44).

Composed largely of literature students living in the same hostel, the Rationalists, in contrast to the competing Science Association, see their mission as bridging the divide between science––“something people pursued in the seclusion of laboratories”–– and the humanities (46). The interdisciplinary work of the group applies “rational principles to everything around them–to their own lives, to society, to religion, to history” (46). As part of this project, Gopal leads the group through a rereading of

Sanskritic philosophy and scripture that develops parallels with modern scientific theories; an effort to translate Hindu mythology into rational, modern, and often scientific terms. Part of this process, however, also involves a rewriting of fantastical, allegorical myths into the mundane language of the ‘real’ world. Through this process of translation the legendary wheel of fire, the sundarshan-chakra, becomes an early example of fireworks; the mythical Jatayu, the clawed bird of the epic Ramayana, is rewritten as “merely one of the last surviving pterodactyls” (48). In privileging

42 rational, scientiﬁc discourse over mythology, the Rationalist’s translation project

ﬂattens Hindu scripture and philosophy as part of a broader mission to prepare the

Bengali population to adopt Western scientiﬁc reason.

Though in agreement with Gopal’s principles, Balaram attempts to usurp leadership of the Rationalist out of frustration with the limited scope and seeming triviality of the translation project. While opposing the painstaking process of translation advocated by Gopal, Balaram supports its foundation in Western science, advocating instead for a direct translation of Western scientiﬁc theory into practical, everyday action. Dismissing reason as “empty talk,” Balaram opposes reason to the kind of passion that drove Louis Pasteur, “a passion which sprang from the simple and the everyday. A passion for the future, not the past” (50). The passion motivating

Pasteur, Balaram argues, is that of solving the quotidian problems of bodily needs.

Asserting that the body is the seat of passions, Balaram proposes an alternative translation project that seeks to directly reform the body through a series of hygiene campaigns. Gopal seeks to transform the Indian mind by rewriting its myths in a rational, Western framework; Balaram replaces these myths and history wholesale to alter the Indian body through a focus on the practical application of science.

Ultimately, however, both Gopal and Balaram are engaged in a debate over how to best translate and apply scientiﬁc reasoning that mirror the frequent debates among the intellectual bhadralok (literally:“respectable people”) circles of Bengal.10 The practices of translation engaged in by the literate class of gentry were crucial to the consolidation of colonial rule by the British as well as the emergence of the Indian

10 “bhadralok.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encylopædia Britannica Inc., 2011. Web. 28 Oct. 2011.

43 nation. In his comprehensive historical study of the role of science in the formation of modern India, Another Reason, Gyan Prakash argues for the centrality of bhadralok intellectuals in expanding the reach of colonial knowledge and power. Establishing scientiﬁc reasoning as the symbol of universal concepts such as freedom and progress, the comparative theorizing of the Indian gentry was instrumental in shaping Indian political discourse from its history as a British colony to its emergence as an independent nation. The diverse projects of modernization undertaken by British colonial rule and later by the Indian state––railroads, hydroelectric projects, mining, public health organizations, political parties, media, the atomic bomb––Prakash argues

“constitute a grid, a coherent strategy of power and identity underpinned by an ideology of modernity that is legitimated in the last instance by science” (Prakash 3).

The daily lives of the Indian populace are so imbricated in this grid of power, Prakash contends, that the scientiﬁc rationalism that grounds such a structure must be fully historicized if we are to understand modern Indian nationalism. Furthermore, scientiﬁc reason, “far more cunning than the liberal conscience will care to acknowledge,” arrived as an instrument of the state in the service of capital (Chatterjee 168). Partha

Chatterjee demonstrates in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World that reason, masking and naturalizing itself, “has been parasitic upon a much less lofty, much more mundane, palpably material and singularly invidious force, namely the universalist urge of capital” (168). The relationship between capital and reason, naturalized through the language of development, has been accepted as the order of the world.

The effect of Western scientiﬁc reason on the Indian national imagination and

India’s own relationship to world networks explored in Chatterjee and Prakash

44 complements Ghosh’s literary project in The Circle of Reason, which turns to the body to offer alternative versions of the naturalized world of global capital. Prakash’s efforts to demonstrate how science became a cultural authority in India, from the ‘civilizing mission’ introduced by the British in the early nineteenth century to the emergence of the modern Indian nation, becomes a history of the local adaptations of colonial knowledge and rule. As in Ghosh, the traces of this history are ultimately located in the archive of the colonial body, the site where the translation of universal concepts of scientific reason into local contexts occurs. Through “detailed and encyclopedic histories, surveys, studies, and censuses,” Prakash notes how the East India Company introduced scientific method to consolidate its power as it transitioned from an organization bent on quick profits to a despotic form of governance (4). Following the

1857 Mutiny, rule over India was transferred from the East India Company to the

Crown. This transition, Prakash argues, ushers in a new form of governance focused on further securing and modernizing the colony. Science, medicine, and technology were the cornerstones of this expansion of colonial rule. For Prakash these efforts were a means to better govern India while further drawing it into an exploitive global economy. Under this regime, rivers were tamed, irrigation systems were developed, and networks of railways and telegraph poles were expanded, “making the vast space of India manageable and open to capital” (4). Crucial to the inﬁltration of capital was the health and productivity of colonial bodies. Researchers and doctors, therefore, were engaged “in an effort to isolate diseases, control epidemics, and nurture bodies into healthy productivity” (4). Making the body healthy and manageable was

45 therefore the cornerstone for the production of the global networks of surveillance, capital, and bureaucracy that characterize The Circle of Reason.

Colonial rule, intent on creating populations amenable to governmental management, could only progress through the translation of scientific reason into local idioms with bhadralok intellectuals serving as crucial intermediaries. These intellectuals sought to create a modern, unified India that would merge the dizzying collection of languages, traditions, religions, and authoritative texts found on the Indian subcontinent. The difficulty of bringing these diverse traditions together is noted by

Prakash:

To appropriate and forge all these into modern India entailed more than inventing a common name, more than replaying on the Indian stage the European drama of modernity. It meant the dislocation of that modernity to another context and its translation into the idioms of those it sought to transform and appropriate (6).

Undergirding the structure of colonial governance was the authority of science as universal reason that had to be translated into a local set of terms. Seeing the potential power to gained by mediating between European modernity and local traditions, the

Indian gentry, as seen in Ghosh’s Rationalists, readily adopted this translation project.

The Indian elite therefore sought a means to assert the authority of modern science by demystifying superstitions, reforming daily practices, and preaching good hygiene; all part of an effort to standardize somatic experience.

The promise of science as a means of reform is captured in the argument between Gopal and Balaram over the direction of the Rationalists. For the indigenous elite, scientiﬁc reason became a captivating opportunity, or as Prakash puts it, “a map for the rearrangement of culture, a vision for producing Indians as a people with scientiﬁc traditions of their own” (6). Though the Rationalists, under the leadership of

46 Gopal, engage in a relatively isolated rewriting of Sanskritic texts, they understand their modest work as having a revolutionary impact. Gopal, arguing for the parallels between Hindu philosophy and modern science, sees the project of rewriting scripture as a challenge to corrupt religious institutions: “It was urgently necessary, therefore, that the society make known to the masses of Hindoostan how they were daily deceived and cheated by the self-styled purveyors of religion” (Ghosh 47). The urgency of Gopal’s translation work is matched by Balaram’s call to the immediate application of scientiﬁc rationalism. The positions held by the two friends represent the larger scope of the societies and reform organizations that Bengali intellectuals established to initiate reform. Prakash, offering a number of notable examples of

Bengali reform efforts, demonstrates the primacy of science’s place in the society and institutions of Bengal. Among these was the Brahmo Samaj, an organization established in 1829 that sought to reform Hinduism following the Bengal renaissance.

By the 1840s, Prakash notes, it increasingly employed a belief in the universal laws of nature. The editor of the premier Brahmo journal, Akshay Kumar Dutt, “began a tireless campaign to demonstrate the fruits of science and technology” that included teaching natural science courses as well as translating text-books on physics and geography into Bengali (Prakash 53). Many other societies and reform organization emerged with projects to reorganize culture, not just the religious beliefs and social customs that were the focus of the Brahmo Samaj.11 While Bengal was the ﬁrst to see

11 These other societies included: The Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge, which hosted lectures on science medicine and anatomy; the Bethune Society, which advocated for female education; as well as the Burra Bazar Family Literary Club and the Mahomedan Literary Society, which engaged in scientiﬁc demonstrations and lectures. For more information see Prakash, Another Reason, pp-52-60

47 the spread of scientiﬁc authority into the discourse of the elite, similar efforts to translate scientiﬁc language into local idioms were founded in other Indian provinces.

Though the Bengali organizations, such as the ones chronicled in Prakash and

ﬁctionalized in Ghosh, used scientiﬁc reasoning to justify a wide range of religious, cultural, and societal reforms, it is important to note that most organizations, with national aspirations in mind, turned to reform to unite the diverse Indian population.

Though their projects occupy the high and low forms, Balaram and Gopal both seek an underlying rational for unifying the Indian population. Echoing Rammohun Roy’s declaration that monism was the true teaching of Hinduism, Gopal seeks to impart scientiﬁc reason to ancient scripture to discover a rational, monotheistic base in Hindu scripture that has been corrupted over time.12 Pundits and Brahmins had distorted the ancient Hindu idea of God, the Brahma, which, according to Gopal, was really

“without attributes, without form, nothing but an essence, in everything and in nothing...the Brahma is nothing but the Atom” (Ghosh 47). By rewriting the scripture, Gopal proposes an earlier, reclaimed Hindu science that has developed prior to, or in parallel with, Western scientiﬁc reasoning. In proposing a monotheistic base for Hinduism, Gopal’s reformulation of the religion deemphasizes the importance of many forms of worship such as the visitation to shrines that has been the source of religious violence between Hindu and Muslim communities. Though the potential

12A number of critics such as Claire Chambers, Yumna Siddiqi, and Anshuman Mondal have suggested that Balaram’s character is patterned on Rammohun Roy who is regarded as the father of the Bengal Renaissance who advocated for religious, educational, and political reforms. The foundation of Balaram’s Pasteur School of Reason is often compared to Roy’s belief in education as the key to social reform and the breakdown of the caste system. However, I argue that Balaram and Gopal both draw equally from Roy and other Bengali reformists. It is important to recognize that Gopal and Balaram, despite their disputes, are coming from a common intellectual heritage that includes Roy, suggesting that there is an inherent contradiction in the reformist thinking that the novel itself will explore.

48 exists for Western scientiﬁc reason to serve as a universal intermediate that will enable better dialogue between Hindu and Muslim communities, the Rationalists never gesture towards this possibility. Rather, the parallelism between Hindu texts and

Western scientiﬁc theory attempt to sidestep religion altogether, though their foundation in distinctly Hindu modes of thinking reasserts a hierarchy of belief that dictates national thinking along historically religious lines.

Ghosh critiques the religious assumptions concealed in Gopal’s universalizing project through a juxtaposition of the Rationalist’s debates with the wars of secession that created, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In opposition to Gopal’s literary and historical translation project, Balaram posits the body as foundation for both a broader and more practical kind of reform. When Balaram takes control of the Rationalist after

Gopal graduates from Presidency College to pursue a career in law, he immediately initiates a hygiene campaign that directly applies scientiﬁc reasoning to the body. “The

Campaign for Clean Clouts” that results from Balaram’s efforts champions the need for better attention to the prosaic activity of underwear laundering (Ghosh 105). Though ridiculous, Balaram’s alliterative campaign is representative of his efforts to transﬁgure the fundamental understanding of the human body through a reform of the most basic daily practices. After Gopal’s intellectual efforts, Balaram’s focus on such a base garment is a source of embarrassment for many members of the Rationalist who argue for a theoretical approach, a set of principles they can teach. Balaram, however, rejects this argument, asserting:

The Principles of Hygiene are exactly the same thing as the Cosmic Boson or the last pterodactyl. They’re all like interesting books which you can thumb through and put back on your shelf without once feeling a need to change yourself or your own life in any ways at all...We want something immediate, something none

49 of us can turn our backs on; something which holds a new picture of ourselves in front of our eyes and says: Look! This is what you must become!...All we want to do is make people think...No one can turn his back on his body and his own clothes. If only we can sow the germ of a question in their minds, their own clothes and limbs will do the rest for us. They’ll become daily reminders, daily pinpricks to shake them out of their smugness (103).

In turning away from the activities of the mind, Balaram embraces the body as the site of meaningful reform, as potential site for the emergence of a universal that more vitally connects individuals than abstract principals. By planting the seed of self-doubt and inferiority in the minds of the public through shame, Balaram hopes that the body, its limbs, and its intimate garments, will serve as daily reminders of failure that will ultimately enact the desired reformation of the mind: the body becomes the very basis for reform, slowly transforming the mind through its daily immediacy.

Balaram’s turn to the body is grounded on the principles of hygiene that were developed following the discovery of the germ by Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century: “Has there ever been a greater break in history,” Balaram asks, “than the moment when men were unburdened of their responsibility to their bodies and all disease was assigned to the treachery of the elements” (49). This paradigm shift in the perception displaces the source of illness from the body to the surrounding environment, which becomes a hostile force that must be subdued. Balaram’s campaigns for clean underwear and later for sanitary conditions in Lalpukur, are the beginning of larger efforts that seek to control environmental factors in order to reveal the quotidian power of the body, pure and uncontaminated. The body has the promise to alter and shape individual perception, ultimately resulting in the transformation of the world at large. The embarrassment and shame provoked by a public conversation about the cleanliness of such an intimate garment, and the bodily functions it suggests,

50 is part of a productive estrangement from our comfortable bodily perceptions. “If we’re embarrassed,” Balaram asserts, “it will be because the body is so close to us; because talking of our underwear in public means means thinking about ourselves in a new and different way” (103). Balaram sees the liberation of the body as a means of fundamentally transforming our relationship with the surrounding world, which now becomes a hostile external force seeking to penetrate our bodily enclosure and upset its inherent purity. Once this relationship with the body is transformed and a common humanity liberated from the conception of the body as a source of betrayal, illness and difference, the focus can turn to the future, which requires a control over the environment that paradoxically may put this future at risk.

This intense focus on the future and its correlative investment in a universal human corporeality distinguish Balaram’s translation campaign from Gopal’s rewriting of Sanskritic scripture, despite a similar faith in the power of reform and progress.

What motivates Pasteur to enact the greatest reforms in history, Balaram argues, isn’t theorizing about the lessons of history or talking about scientiﬁc reason, rather: “It was passion; a passion which sprang from the simple and the everyday. A passion for the future, not the past. It was that which made him the greatest man of his time, for it is that passion that makes men great” (50). Pasteur’s ability to imagine a better future is grounded in his ability to see the power of the quotidian to enact reform. For Balaram, the body is an object that demands daily interaction, the home of the everyday desires and passions that is essential for the development of populations oriented to the future.

The success of the “Campaign for Clean Clouts” relies on the construction of the body as an object of that can be disciplined and controlled through a process of shaming.

51 Ghosh’s irony undercuts Balaram’s reform efforts, which, while maintaining the centrality of the body, seem alternately ridiculous (“The Campaign for Clean Clouts”), admirable (disinfecting the refugee camps), misguided (his phrenological archive), and dangerous (the militant section of the School of Reason). A more serious rebuke comes from Balaram’s loyal friend Dantu, who challenges the very construction of the body at the heart of his hygiene campaign. Raising the only voice of dissent in the Rationalists,

Dantu warns Balaram: “Dirt doesn’t lie in underwear. It is the world, the world of people, which makes dirt possible. How can you hope to change people’s bodies without changing the world?” (104). Dantu reverses Balaram’s model of reform, noting that the world is not composed of objects or bodies, but of people with histories that cannot be easily transcended. These histories are disregarded in Balaram’s narrow focus on the body and the promise that a shared humanity can emerge from the body’s discipline and standardization.

The spectacular failure of “The Campaign for Clean Clouts” conﬁrms Dantu’s worst fears, as Balaram’s personal history interrupts his efforts at public reform.

Though couched in the rhetoric of futurity, Balaram’s hygiene campaign for clean underwear is based on a deeply personal history. In one of the expository ﬂashbacks at the beginning of the novel, we learn of Balaram’s arrival in Calcutta from Dhaka.

Upon his arrival at Presidency College, Balaram sets up his room in the Eden Hindu

Hostel, and immediately sets out to meet his hero, and recent Nobel Prize recipient,

C.V. Raman. However, before he makes it out of the courtyard of the hostel, Balaram is confronted by a group of smartly dressed students. Noticing his clothing and his

Dhaka accent, the students, led by a character known only as Middle Parting, haze

52 Balaram forcing him to remove his clothing. The narrator relates: “Fumbling, weak- kneed with shame, he took his kurta and vest off. His chest was pathetically bare” (44). Not satisﬁed, Middle Parting orders Balaram to take off his dhoti.

Surrounded by students grabbing at fabric around his waist, Balaram has “only one thought in his mind: that his drawers were dirty and even death would be better than standing in the middle of that great quadrangle in dirty drawers” (44). Gopal arrives in the courtyard to rescue Balaram, stripped down to his last few scraps of fabric, from his tormentors. The scene is the origin of their friendship, as well as of Balaram’s

fixation on reforming the body. The shame of his body exposed to a group of leering students, and the potentially more devastating revelation of his unclean clouts, explicitly shape Balaram’s demand for a strict standard of bodily hygiene. Balaram’s desire for bodily reform springs from this episode of deep personal humiliation though he couches reform in a narrative of an equalizing universal standard, which would forcefully refigure the body of the masses in much the same way his own body image was transfigured through the mirror held up by the aggression of hostel students.

Considering this source, the spectacular failure of The Campaign for Clean Clouts is relatively unsurprising. Though the rally has a large turnout, a testimony to Balaram’s organizational skills, it is upended when Middle Parting returns to physically intimidate and humiliate Balaram.13

Balaram’s commitment to universal reason serves to mask the personal motives behind his calls for reform, while also attempting to correct an embarrassing,

13 Though labeled by Middle Parting as “the Fool’s Fall,” the narrator withholds what happens at the rally until the climactic chapter “The Ghost in the Machine”(88). Surrounded by police, Balaram, in a ﬂashback, recalls Middle Parting push forward through the crowd, demanding to see Balaram’s own knickers. Terriﬁed, Balaram “totters on his chair in unspeakable, bowel-loosening terror” (143).

53 unexplored incident in his personal history. Years after the incident at the college,

Balaram advises the recently orphaned Alu: “One ought to think of the future. The future is what is important. The past doesn’t matter. One can do anything with the future. One can change the world” (28). The Campaign for Clean Clouts, motivated by a similar rhetoric that is generated from memories of past injuries, comes to a halt when the unaccounted for past returns. The return of Middle Parting to humiliate

Balaram seems to conﬁrm Dantu’s claims that you cannot naively focus solely on the body nor the future, but rather must patiently attempt to change the surrounding world, which includes accounting for the complex historical legacies that construct the universal terms that motivate reform. The haunting, corruption, and ultimate disruption of reform movements by unaccounted for histories is a theme that Ghosh returns to repeatedly in The Circle of Reason. The ultimate failure and seeming absurdity of the Rationalist’s projects under Gopal and Balaram’s leadership suggests a larger problem with their practice of translation. In The Circle of Reason, Ghosh critiques the reformist enterprises of the bhadralok gentry based on a faith in the universality of scientiﬁc reason, suggesting alternate means for attaining social and cultural renewal.

The promises and pitfalls of reform movements in India based on universal concepts, such as natural law, are recorded by Gyan Prakash in Another Reason and

Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe. Reading such projects, both Chakrabarty and Prakash seek to elaborate a non-hegemonic process of translation; a historical and theoretical project that complements, though it can never fully encapsulate, Ghosh’s efforts in the literary ﬁeld. Though he argues in Another Reason that the formation of modern India must be understood through the impact of scientiﬁc reasoning, Prakash

54 urges that its diffusion and inﬂuence should be read for its alienating effects and not merely as evidence of the ‘colonization of the mind,’ or as the victory of the colonizer over the colonized (Prakash 64). Rather than view science as an imposition, Prakash notes that many Indian intellectuals thought of science as a process of translation that

“meant a realignment of power, a renegotiation of the unequal relationship between

Western and indigenous languages” (50). Crucial to Prakash’s argument about the disruptive power of translation is his desire to view the process of translating science as a form of dissemination that was generative in its ability to alter authority and identity. Prakash cites the writing of the nineteenth-century Bengali orientalist

Rajendralal Mitra to demonstrate the determination of Indian intellectuals to see indigenous interests steer the translation of Western science into Indian languages. To demonstrate its power, Prakash argues, modern science in colonial India was forced into the register of subaltern knowledges, translated into common language and “asked to open itself to and also contain the pressures of indigenous cultures, to dwell in the religious dispositions and literary writings of the ‘natives’” (64). In India, modern science was legitimated through the inherited language and stories of ancient scripture as well as through efforts to reform daily habits.14 Through its dissemination in India, science becomes a space open to renegotiation in Prakash’s account; it can displace

“the position from which science’s truth is asserted” (72).

14 Prakash supplies an excellent example of this movement between scriptural reason and the reform of daily practices in his reading of an 1896 article appearing in the Calcutta Monthly that criticized the adoption of European habits. The article argues against European practices such as drinking coffee and tea by explaining the scientiﬁc reason for the ancestral custom of drinking only water and milk. The article further informs readers of the scientiﬁc reason for wearing only white apparel, see Prakash, Another Reason, 82-83.

55 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s consideration of translation’s reliance on universal terms in Provincializing Europe tempers the promise of hybridization in Prakash’s work.

Rather than focus on the process of translation undertaken by the Indian elite as

Prakash does, Chakrabarty interrogates how historians have translated local cultural practices and idioms into a historical framework.15 While the scope of Chakrabarty’s project is broad, it speaks directly to both the overarching project of Prakash’s as well as to the specific examples of translation recorded in Another Reason. With the specificity of particular life-worlds increasingly threatened by the subordinating urges of global capital, Chakrabarty advances a program of translation that won’t be complicit in the further flattening and incorporation of diverse social structures into global paradigms.16 To allow for plurality, Chakrabarty therefore argues for thinking in terms of singularities, while not resorting to parochialism, essentialism, or cultural relativism. While acknowledging the “demonstrable and documentable permeability of cultures and languages,” Chakrabarty appeals “to models of cross-cultural and cross- categorical translations that do not take a universal middle term for granted” (Chakrabarty 83). As an example, Chakrabarty observes that the Hindi word

‘pani’ can be translated as the word ‘water’ without having to appeal to the “superior

15 Chakrabarty takes Prakash’s Bonded Histories, a history of ‘bonded’ labor in Bihar in colonial India, as one example of historical work that proceeds in a comparative frame. Prakash’s work is at once a document of how bhuts (spirits) intercede the relations of agrarian production, as well as an attempt to engage in larger academic conversations that necessitates the emergence of abstract, generalizing categories. A conversation emerges in Prakash between his own work in India and that of Michael Taussig in Bolivia that relies on a larger universal framework to enact its translation and therefore banishes many of the pluralities that Chakrabarty seeks to preserve in his own historical work.

16 An example drawn on by Chakrabarty is the Julahas weavers that are discussed in Gyanendra Pandey’s The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. While Pandey documents the displacement of the Julahas from their craft as a result of colonial policies, Chakrabarty demonstrates how text further reveals “problems of translation of speciﬁc life-worlds into universal sociological categories.” See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pgs 77-83.

56 positivity of H20” (83). Advocating models of “cross-cultural and cross-categorical translations,” Chakrabarty suggests that there is something to be learned from nonmodern instances of translation that do not take a mediated third term for granted.

In labeling these translations, ‘nonmodern’ Chakrabarty opposes acts of translation based on scientiﬁc reason with those of premodern religious texts and archives. Citing the Shunya-Puran, an eighteenth-century Bengali religious text, as well as recent scholarship on the spread of Islam in India and the development of South Asian

Suﬁsm, Chakrabarty notes that the modes of translation responsible for converting

Hindu gods into “expressions of Islamic divinity” are based on a “model of exchange and barter rather than the generalized exchange of commodities, which always needs the mediation of a universal, homogenizing middle term” (84-85).17 In contrast to the translation work of the Rationalist, which is always mediated by a universal third term, this ‘cross-categorical’ mode of translation is based on local, particular exchanges that proceed without reference to a larger, historicizing narrative.

Though translation is a central term for both Prakash and Chakrabarty, the context for their discussion varies greatly and therefore must be accounted for before continuing with a reading of how their translation projects intersect with Ghosh’s representation of the body in The Circle of Reason. Prakash’s discussion of the promises of translation is situated in a larger historical argument that asserts both the role of

17 Some examples provided by Chakrabarty include the translations of Hindu divinities in the Shunya- puran, such as: “Ganesa came as Gazi, Kartika as Kazi, Narada became a Sekha and Indra a Moulana” (84). Other examples come from Richard Eaton’s recent study, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760, where the author discusses a thirteenth-century mosque in Gujarat that has a bilingual Arabic-Sanskrit inscription that translates the Arabic Allah into a triad of Hindu gods: Visvanatha (‘lord of the universe’), Sunyarupa (‘one whose form is of the void’) and Visvarupa (‘having various forms’). A similar account is found in Carl Ernst’s discussion, in Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Suﬁ Center, of an eleventh-century coin with a Sanskrit and Arabic inscription.

57 science in the emergence of modern India while further demonstrating the alienation of

Western scientific reason through its dissemination in India. Chakrabarty, on the other hand, is concerned with displacing the practice of historicism and questions how the academic discipline of history can better translate specific, local particularities into the universalizing framework of history. Prakash’s history records how science was adopted by the Indian elite “as a project for a syntactical rearrangement of culture” (Prakash 85). Elite discourse, Prakash argues, claimed to “represent subaltern forms of culture” as part of an effort to establish a counter-hegemonic authority to British colonialism “that would guide India’s march to modernity” by translating scientific reason into primarily Hindu and Sanskritic terms (85). Despite the counter-hegemonic potential that Prakash sees in the Indian elite’s project of dissemination through translation, their claims to represent subaltern forms suggests a model of translation that relies on the superiority of a universal term. In translating subaltern forms to match a larger national narrative based on a Hindu religious tradition, the Indian gentry partook in a modern form of translation that Chakrabarty opposes through the alternative model of a “cross-categorical translation.” In this model of translation:

There are no overarching censoring/limiting/deﬁning systems of thought that neutralize and relegate differences to the margins, nothing like an overarching category of ‘religion’ that is supposed to remain unaffected by differences between the entities it seeks to name and thereby contain. The very obscurity of the translation process allows the incorporation of that which remains untranslatable (Chakrabarty 86).

Though Chakrabarty advances this model of cross-categorical and cross-cultural translation, he acknowledges the importance of appealing to ongoing conversations that are taking place in larger systems of thought. Furthermore, he concedes a certain

58 kind of historicism, “the metanarrative of progress,” that is “deeply imbedded in our institutional lives however much we may develop, as individual intellectuals, as an attitude of incredulity toward such metanarratives” (88). Acknowledging that his ideal of a cross-categorical translation based on nonmodern forms of translation remains currently untenable in practice, Chakrabarty, inﬂuenced by Gayatri Spivak’s work

“The Politics of Translation” in Outside in the Teaching Machine, offers a model of translation that retains the shock and scandal of the uncanny. In this mode of historical practice, the scandalous aspects of history writing, such as the unavoidable translations and reliance on secular universals, remain audible. The existence of these scandalous aspects, Chakrabarty hopes, will be “the ﬁrst step we can take toward working the universalist and global archives of capital in such a way as to...produce cracks in the structure of that homogeneity” (90). As in Chatterjee, Chakrabarty draws attention to the cunning nature of reason that demands uncovering an archive such as literature or the body that gestures towards the cracks in reason’s circular logic.

Despite these differences, both Chakrabarty and Prakash highlight the importance of sustained attention to the practice of translation and the necessity of recovering overlooked archives. In Chakrabarty’s assessment, recent work on the politics of translation has demonstrated that what translation produces “is neither an absence of relationship between dominant and dominating forms of knowledge nor equivalents that successfully mediate between differences, but precisely the partly opaque relationship we call ‘difference’” (Chakrabarty 17). This ability of translation to produce “difference out of ‘incommensurability,’” a phrase Chakrabarty borrows from Meaghan Morris, is seen in the production of ghostly remnants in Prakash and

59 Derridean traces in Chakrabarty (17).18 Another history comes into view Prakash suggests when we think of science’s authority in India and the modern Indian elite as products of an interlinear translation, a concept he borrows from Walter Benjamin’s

“Task of the Translator” (Prakash 51). The elite, when viewed as a product of translation, “does not appear as a copy of the original, but as a ghostly double that resists identiﬁcation as a copy by asserting difference” (51). The attention paid to the process of translation in Prakash reveals a history that, through this ghostly doubling, challenges dominant accounts of modernity as progress. The Indian elite who act like specters haunting a Western narrative of modernity in Prakash’s account are themselves haunted by traces of the subaltern reasoning they have appropriated and translated in the service of an overarching national and religious narrative. These subaltern ﬁgures haunt the narratives of progress in The Circle of Reason, reasserting themselves in the discourses on the body that the text negotiates. While Balaram,

Zindi, and Alu actively co-opt subaltern labor and models of subjectivity to further their own projects, the body repeatedly announces itself as the site where modernity is confronted by alternative forms of knowledge, interrupting the progressive narrative imagined by these characters.

These alternative forms of knowledge are the untranslatable elements of culture––such as religious rituals, gods, and spirits––that Chakrabarty worries are being assimilated into familiar master codes such as ‘culture’ or ‘religion.’ By invoking the constant and universal terms of culture and religion to explain certain untranslatable practices, anthropological and historical interpretation renders these

18 See, Meaghan Morris in her “Foreward” to Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. xiii.

60 untranslatable practices “incapable of bringing the master category ‘culture’ or

‘religion’ into any kind of crisis” (Chakrabarty 78). While Chakrabarty’s cross- categorical mode of translation maintains this disruptive potential, this form of translation, he acknowledges, is best expressed in fiction: “It is obvious that this nonsociological mode of translation lends itself more easily to fiction, particularly of the nonrealist or magical-realist variety practiced today...In these fictive narratives, gods and spirits can indeed be agents” (Chakrabarty 86). Interested particularly in the agency ascribed to gods and spirits in social organizations and movements,

Chakrabarty notes that historical monographs, including his own Rethinking Working-

Class History: Bengal 1890-1940, have difﬁculty reconciling “the general secular time of history and the singular times of gods and spirits” (78). While literature, in particular magical-realist ﬁction, has been able to better account for how the agency of gods and spirits is embedded in daily practice, Ghosh takes a different approach in The Circle of

Reason, presenting not gods, spirits or other supernatural forces as agents, but rather showing the body itself as the complex center of agency. 19 The body becomes a central

ﬁgure in the debates over the application of scientiﬁc reasoning, revealing the promises and limitations of these different modes of translation.

Though Ghosh’s work has entered the postcolonial canon primarily for its concern with movement, migration, hybridity, and subaltern agency, the debates surrounding the body in The Circle of Reason mark the foundational moment of Ghosh’s theorizations about the values and limits of modes of translation that is often

19 His most recent publication The Sea of Poppies (2008) returns to magical realist elements, while also aggressively asserting the inability for direct translation to capture experience through an extensive use of untranslated words, phrases, and concepts.

61 overlooked. More recent publications such as the ﬁrst two novels of the Ibis Trilogy,

The Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), have returned to magical realist plot elements, while also asserting the inability for direct translations to capture experience.

Both recent novels from Ghosh include a complex glossary, labeled the Chrestomathy, a work attributed to the character Neel who is devoted to the “destiny of words” that“ have a claim to naturalization within the English language” (Poppies 501). These phrases and words, as Neel describes them, are “‘no longer (or no longer only)

Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Hind., Laksari or anything else––in its English incarnation, it is to be considered a new coinage, with a new persona and a renewed destiny” (502).

The intricacy of this compendium of words and phrases is the latest evolution of a process of cross-categorical translation that has been a hallmark of Ghosh’s work.

Canonical works, such as The Shadow Lines (1988) and In an Antique Land (1992), are distinguished by their formal structure, which alternates narrative threads that move between different geographical locations and historical periods while avoiding a direct comparative analysis.20 This contrapuntal structure, Gaurav Desai argues, through terms developed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, is in the service of a

“reﬂective nostalgia” that is capable of pointing out contradictions while resisting the efforts of “restorative” forms of nostalgia to make reductive analogies that try to locate

20 This structure contributes to Clifford Geertz’s critique, in an early review of In an Antique Land, that “(Ghosh’s) book has a sense of incompletion about i; of something not said about then, and even more, about now. It tells its stories, it constructs its ironies, and it leaves it at that” (Geertz 41).

62 and protect concepts of absolute truth (Desai 142).21 Like Chakrabarty’s cross- categorical mode of translation, the “reﬂective nostalgia” Desai identiﬁes in the formal structure of In an Antique Land embraces the contradictions and ironies of modernity without resorting to a comforting set of universal truths.

The contradictions and ironies embraced in the formal features of Ghosh’s work are further developed in the narrative of In an Antique Land, which I would like to devote some attention to before returning to The Circle of Reason. As partially noted above, In an Antique Land, alternates an ethnography of Egyptian villagers with a partially imagined narrative based on deductions from historical documents from a twelfth-century Jewish merchant based out of Cairo. Of particular interest to Ghosh is the relationship between the merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave Bomma, a subaltern ﬁgure referred to in a historical document indexed as MS H.6. Following his initial appearance in MS H.6, Ghosh traces Bomma through a series of brief references in Ben Yiju’s letters, attempting to reconstruct a narrative for the silenced

ﬁgure. The form of the text is complimented by moments of encountering instances of

Chakrabarty’s nonmodern translations. In an effort to discover more about the life of the slave Bomma, Ghosh travels to Mangalore, where “as in much of India, the religious fabric of Tulunad was woven from an equal mixture of local forms of worship

(the Bhuta-cult in this case) and the high Sankritic tradition” (Antique 252). In an effort to deduce the pedigree of the name Bomma, Ghosh explores the trafﬁcking of

21 Boym summarizes these terms helpfully in a passage, also cited by Desai, from the introduction to The Future of Nostalgia: “Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming–– wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt” (Boym xviii).

63 deities between high Sanskritism and local Bhuta cults. On the suggestion of his host,

Professor Rai, Ghosh watches a ﬁlm based on a celebrated Tulu epic that presents the story of two heroic brothers. Rai directs Ghosh to a particular scene that shows the two brothers at a shrine of a personal deity to seek his protection. Presented in Tulu, the only word Ghosh is able to understand is the frequently repeated word ‘Brahma,’ the name of the deity frequently represented in classical iconography as a “four- headed, four-armed image, accompanied by a goose” (253). Ghosh is surprised when the camera reveals instead “an elongated wooden ﬁgure, with curling moustaches, holding a sword in one hand..a warrior-deity, wholly unrelated to the Brahma of the

Sanskritic pantheon” (254). Originally named “Berme or Bermeru” as a principle deity of the Tuluva Bhuta pantheon, Berme had slowly been translated into the

Sanskritic deity ‘Brahma.’ This act of translation leaves jarring traces of the original that opens up a new understanding of this history. It is this act of translation that leads

Ghosh to confidently assume a history and narrative for the slave of MS H.6, declaring that “Bomma finally came of age and was ready at last to become a protagonist in his own story” (254). It is only through a reflection on an example of nonmodern form of translation, in Chakrabarty’s sense that it does not look to a universal scientific term, that a space finally is opened that enables Ghosh to imagine a narrative voice for the subaltern Bomma.

The form and content of In an Antique Land belie Ghosh’s embrace of a particular mode of cross-categorical translation that can best access the silenced voices of history, granting access to worlds that have been foreclosed and opening up the possibility of alternatives to the current world. I turn to In an Antique Land because its

64 reﬂective nostalgia offers worlds and relationships outside of the hegemony of reason and capital that global literature can imagine. The promise of In an Antique Land and its mode of translation, however are grounded in the challenging translational work and its frequent failure in The Circle of Reason. In other words, there is a need to return to the relatively neglected representation of the body to better understand the limits of the migration, hybridity, and cross-categorical translation that get celebrated in the canonical reception of In an Antique Land. In turning to The Circle of Reason, the challenges facing both literature and Ghosh’s own translation project are captured in the debates of the Rationalists surrounding the potential of the body in The Circle of

Reason, where the body alternately serves as the stable grounds for translating scientific reason and as the disruptive untranslatable remainder of this process. In contrast to the celebrated transnational movement of his later fiction, the first section of The Circle of Reason considers the possibility of resistance from investing in the hyperlocal, but also portable force of the body, suggesting the type of translation imaginable in In an

Antique Land begins with a reconsideration of the body itself. In evaluating the force of the body in this early novel Ghosh explores the critical limits of his own theorizations of hybridity and the complex interplay between narrative and bodily affect that opens and forecloses the transnational relationships and connections that so often are the subject of his ﬁction.

III. “The Ghost in the Machine”: Revising the Mind-Body Debate

As part of the well-educated, Indian gentry, both Balaram and Gopal are committed to projects that seek the means to translate Western reason for Indian consumption.

65 Scientific reason allows them to reassert an Indian national identity and mythology that they believe is capable of resisting overt Western influence in its foundations in universal principles. Almost forty years after the dissolution of the Rationalists, Gopal and Balaram revisit their argument over the proper mode of translation. With the disappointment of their respective projects informing their perspective, the men argue over the ability of their modes of translation to directly counter Western influence.

After seeing the sold-out Bollywood ﬁlm Aradhana together, Balaram leaves the cinema

“smiling crookedly, his eyes mistily damp,” while Gopal comes out, “irritated, resentful of his three wasted hours” (Ghosh 53). Unable to contain himself, Gopal criticizes

Balaram’s taste in “these noisy melodramas,” initiating a dispute about cinema that revolves around the Western construction of the ideals that they have held to be universal. “So much predictable rubbish,” declares Gopal, “no story, no plot, just hours of weeping and breast-beating. There’s nothing remotely real even about the way they talk” (53). Balaram, seizing upon the term ‘real,’ escalates the dispute when he retorts:

Real?...Is it real to be cut to size with a tape? What you heard is rhetoric. How can rhetoric be real or unreal? Rhetoric is a language ﬂexing its muscles. You wouldn’t understand: you’ve spent too many years reading novels about drawing-rooms in a language whose history has destroyed its knowledge of its own body. The truth is your mind is nothing but a dumping- ground for the West (Ghosh 53).

Gopal, struck by the irony of Balaram’s claim, returns the accusation:

My mind?...And what about yours? What about you, spending your life reading about Pasteur curing beer in nineteenth-century France? What about all those books you read written by crazy Europeans about the shapes of skulls in prisons? How can you say my mind is a dumping- ground...? (54)

66 The argument over Bollywood cinema quickly descends into finger-pointing over who has become more of “a dumping-ground for the West.” Neither man denies the influence of Western thinking. Rather, they both assume that the forms of thinking they have adopted are universal, open to be reclaimed and repurposed through translation. Their fierce argument, however, reveals the limitations of such translation projects.

Noting Gopal’s dismissal of Aradhana for containing “nothing remotely real,”

Balaram criticizes his friend for his lack of an emotional or bodily response to the rhetoric of the ﬁlm, suggesting that English novels have contaminated his mind and separated him from a knowledge of his body (53). The ‘real’ that Gopal is unable to

ﬁnd in Aradhana is the ‘real’ of the English novels that Gopal studied at Presidency

College; a matter of taste that Balaram accuses Gopal of taking as a universal. Gopal does not move to deny this accusation; rather, he suggests that, in term of degrees,

Balaram is even more guilty of accepting speciﬁc truths as universals. Refuting this claim, Balaram returns to the transnational status of scientiﬁc reason: “Science doesn’t belong to countries. Reason doesn’t belong to any nation. They belong to history–to the world” (54). Juxtaposed with their earlier debate over the direction of the

Rationalists, this later argument over Bollywood cinema, void of the optimism of youth, demonstrates the limitations and risks of reform projects that are routed through an appeal to the universal. The argument further highlights an important difference in the approach the two men take towards reform. Gopal, focused on reforming the mind, ﬁnds his translation project limited by class, a limitation Balaram believes he can transcend through a reform centered on the body. His project of

67 practical science and humanitarian sentiment, engages with “the everyday suffering of helpless children and their mothers,” he suggests is able to span class divisions (50).

The Circle of Reason presents these conﬂicting theories of mind and the body to drive the plot of the novel, which only ﬁnds a partial resolution in the closing chapter with the burning of a book and a body.

Balaram, indignant at Gopal’s accusation that he is merely a Western patsy, believes his own theorization of the body complicate and subvert Western models in much the way that Prakash argues in Another Reason. In the forty years after his time at

Presidency College, Balaram develops a complex series of practices around the body that challenge both Indian and English cultural norms. Following the disruption of the

Rationalist’s rally and his humiliating fall, Balaram retains his interest in science even as his enthusiasm wanes after years at a comfortable newspaper job. His thinking changes, and his passion reignites, the narrator tells us, “on 11 January 1950 at 4.30 in the afternoon” (14). On that day Balaram goes to the airport to meet yet another

Nobel Laureate in physics, Madame Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Pierre and Marie

Curie and, “an embodiment of the living tradition of science” (15). Gathered with the other reporters sent to interview Joliot-Curie and her husband, Balaram, in an impulsive moment, asks an embarrassingly sentimental and naive question.22 In the awkward silence and following laughter, Balaram runs away humiliated and furious at the scientists, telling himself: “They were all the same, all the same, those scientists. It was something to do with their science. Nothing mattered to them–people, sentiments,

22 After Professor Joliot comments on the toll airplane travel has taken on he and his wife, Balaram is eager to assert that such renown scientists could not be tired by the trip: “But, sir, he said loudly, hardly aware of what he was saying, are you not accustomed to keeping high altitudes?” (Ghosh 16).

68 humanity” (16). In these scenes Balaram’s bodily passions take over: he impulsively exclaims, erratically wanders “where his feet led him,” and ultimately arrives in a

Calcutta bookseller where he “absent-mindedly” picks up an old, tattered copy of

Practical Phrenology (16-17). Rejected by the embodiments of traditional science for having too much bodily sentiment, Balaram’s body seemingly leads him to an alternative concept of science. Unlike the science whose representatives had just humiliated him at the airport, phrenology connects what people think and how they are. As Balaram tells Gopal: “In this science the inside and the outside, the mind and the body, what people do and what they are, are one” (17). In a reaction to the disjunction he witnesses in the advanced scientiﬁc reasoning of Joliot-Curie, Balaram turns to a form of science that he believes can better account for the reality of the surrounding world and the nature of the embodied subject.

In theory, phrenology would be as rigid as traditional science, however for

Balaram, a student of literature, the ideas linking the physical and psychical worlds contained in the pseudo-science constitute its primary appeal. When he tells Gopal about his new interest in phrenology, Gopal warns him against pursuing science from such a removed perspective, insisting that they hear Madame Curie speak at the opening of the Institute of Nuclear Physics. Agreeing to attend Curie’s tape-cutting ceremony, “Balaram listened intently as she began to speak of the importance of nuclear physics and the new chapter in the prosperity of mankind it had opened” (18).

Gopal interrupts Balaram’s focus on the promise of nuclear physics through an elbow to the ribs and a wink, gestures that remind Balaram of his own coverage of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In an ironic digression, typical of Ghosh’s

69 narrative, Balaram is jolted from Curie’s speech not by the horrors of Hiroshima so discordant with the prosperity imagined by Curie, but by his anger at the language he was forced to use to cover the event. Balaram’s headline, “Nuclear bomb dropped––

Hiroshima disappears,” is rejected by the newspaper because ‘A-bomb’ should have been used instead of ‘nuclear’ (18). The pettiness of this dispute, as well as the sheer inadequacy of Balaram’s headline to capture the horriﬁc nature of the event, are absurd when weighed against the massive loss of life suffered in Hiroshima. Gopal’s elbow and wink further serve to notify the reader of the troubling distance the rhetoric of both Balaram’s headline and Curie’s speech maintain from Hiroshima. While

Balaram is revealed once more to be a fool, he is also a figure who importantly questions the logic of scientific reasoning. Indeed, if, as Balaram claims, the practitioners of Western scientific reason have theorized themselves away from human sentiment, the focus of the humanities on language and rhetoric suffers no less of a failure (indeed this is precisely what he later accuses Gopal of doing when he claims that Gopal has been reading too many novels “in a language whose history has destroyed its knowledge of its own body”). Recognizing the discord between science, history, and language and concrete experience, Balaram, after Curie’s speech, determines to focus more intently on the body and sentiment as a grounding force.

The narrator, though maintaining an ironic distance, also commits to Balaram’s project, dedicating the ﬁrst section of the novel to an exploration of how reason could be generated from a return to the body.

Balaram’s decision to ﬂee from the chaos of modernity to a simpler system of representation grounded in the body, necessitates a corresponding move that takes him

70 from Calcutta, a place “where people can’t think about the difference between what they are and what they ought to be,” to the small village of Lalpukur.23 As with his leadership of the Rationalists, Balaram envisions himself as the teacher of a small village being able to transform the daily habits of the same, simple, everyday people that had inspired Pasteur. In Lalpukur, Balaram dedicates himself to theories on the demonstrable relationship between the body and mind through his continued study of phrenology, physiognomy, and positivist criminology. While staying loyal to the teachings of his idol Pasteur, Balaram builds a large archive consisting of the measurements and physical features of every villager. Though Balaram’s excitement for these disproven pseudosciences seem to mark him as an unreliable dupe, his interest is not merely an indication of “colonial belatedness” as some critics have suggested (Siddiqi 148). Rather, Balaram turns to the pseudo-sciences, long associated with colonial justiﬁcations of imperial rule, as a reaction to contemporary science’s seeming neglect of human sentiment and bodily theory.24 He is less interested in the actual science behind these theories than in borrowing the ideas that can generate the lasting reform he desires. His adoption of a disproven form of Western scientiﬁc reasoning results in the subversion of contemporary Western science,

Enlightenment narratives of progress, and Indian social structures. The frequent

23 This desire to run away from the complexity of modern life runs through the novel, perhaps most tellingly in the ﬁgure of the detective Jyoti Das, who turns his back on this chaos for the simpler pleasure of bird watching. This represents a form of nostalgia that Ghosh will confront directly in the ﬁnal section of The Circle of Reason.

24 For more on phrenology’s role in colonial governance in India see: Kim A. Wagner, “Confessions of a Skull” History Workshop Journal. (2010) 69 (1): 27-51. In a South African context, see: Andrew Bank, “Of ‘Native Skulls‘ and ‘Noble Caucasians’: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa,” Journal of Souther African Studies, 22 (1996): 387 and Zine Magubane, “Simians, Savages, Skulls, and Sex,” in Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, eds. Donald Moore, et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).

71 alterations of data to ﬁt his own projects calls into question the neutrality of scientiﬁc method, while his focus on the body actively interrupts the progress promised by

Enlightenment reasoning.

In opposition to the straight path of progress offered by technology and implemented by Balaram’s rival Bhudeb Roy in his development of Lalpukur, Balaram is interested in a return to the body that he believes will maintain the self-knowledge necessary for reform. As the head master, Balaram shocks the community of Lalpukur when he pulls his nephew Alu out of his school and places him in an apprenticeship with a local weaver, Shombhu Debnath. He justiﬁes his decision by referring to his careful analysis of every detail of Alu’s physiognomy: “Alu’s body, his hands, his legs, his arms, not to speak of the Organ, corresponded exactly to his calculations of the proportions ideal for a weaver” (Ghosh 55). Armed with this evidence, Balaram cuts across rigid caste lines in order to make Alu an exemplar for the creative potential of bodily knowledge. The success of Alu’s education in weaving prompts Balaram to expand his efforts, creating an alternative school for the community: The Pasteur

School of Reason. Open to the entire village of Lalpukur, including its sizable refugee population, the school teaches both concrete and abstract reasoning; reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught alongside weaving and sewing. Selling the wares of its students while teaching them how to invest the proﬁts, the school seems to be a model humanitarian organization whose focus on the quotidian enables substantial reform.

Far from taking phrenology at its face value, Balaram, like the bhadralok intellectuals in Prakash’s Another Reason, adapts the ideas behind pseudoscience and ﬁts them to his own reform efforts to align the physical and spiritual. Unfortunately, he

72 also uses the supposedly neutral, pure, ideas of scientiﬁc reasoning to pursue personal vendettas.25 It is these personal vendettas, compounded by Balaram’s naive belief that one can escape the chaos of life by returning to bodily sentiment, that ultimately lead to the catastrophic destruction of The Pasteur School of Reason, the death of its staff, and Alu’s exile. The climactic action of the ﬁrst section of the novel occurs in the chapter entitled, “The Ghost in the Machine,” a reference to the phrase coined by

Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of the Mind (1949) to critique Descartes’ dualism: “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine...maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements” (Ryle

22).26 Directly addressing Ryle’s derisive label for the concept of the mind-body divide, Arthur Koestler titles his 1967 polemic against Behaviorism The Ghost in the

Machine.27 Defending the existence of the ghost in the machine, Koestler asserts:

Regardless of the verbal acrobatics of Behaviorists and their allies the fundamental problems of mind and matter, of free will versus determinism, are still very much with us, and have acquired a new urgency––not as subjects of philosophical debate, but more because of their direct bearing on political ethics, private morals, on criminal justice, psychiatry, and our whole outlook on life (Koestler 202).

25 This is the case particularly when it comes to the local authority, Roy, whose Nehru-like belief in science and technology grounding progress frequently pits him against Balaram. Some of Balaram’s most shameful moments come, as Gopal points out, from him bending his data to ﬁt his vendetta with Roy.

26 The title also refers to Toru-debi’s sewing machine that seemingly refuses to function under the load of her frantic efforts to produce enough blouses to appease Bhudeb Roy from destroying Balaram’s compound: “It’s the end. Just one more blouse left to go and he’s died...You see; he’s haunted. There’s something in him” (Ghosh 147). In an effort to revive the machine, Toru-debi tears off her blouse and cradles the machine against her to seemingly nurse it back to life.

27 Koestler doesn’t mince words; citing Ernest Gellner, he refers to Ryle as “a prominent representative of the so-called Oxford School of Philosophy which, in the words of one of its critics, ‘treats genuine thought as a disease’” (Koestler 102).

73 Rather than dispose of the debate between mind and body in favor of scientifically observable bodily processes, Koestler argues that this foundational problem continues to have an immediate impact on almost all aspects of life and urgently needs to be reconsidered. As Koestler claims in his preface, man’s evolution is a “labyrinth of blind alleys, and there is nothing very strange or improbable in the assumption that man’s native equipment...contains some built-in error or deficiency which predisposes him towards self-destruction” (xi). Explorations of this lack or deficiency in man has driven art and science, Koestler argues, since the Book of Genesis, with every period formulating their own terminology. Science, the dominant language for exploring these questions in our own time, however, has “become so dizzy with its own successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions” (xi-xii). To understand the general condition of man and therefore avoid succumbing to our self-destructive instinct, Koestler, writing in the middle of the Cold War, urges a better understanding of the relationship between mind and body. As a representative of modern science,

Curie’s exhortations of nuclear science only a few years after the devastation of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki and at the beginning of the Cold War emphasize the self- destructive instinct that so concerns Koestler and motivates Balaram’s commitment to phrenology. Like Balaram, Ghosh’s novel is committed to understanding the human predicament in the age of transnational capital through an investigation of the the problems of mind and body, of free will versus determinism. Having already established the terms of the mind-body debate in the ﬁrst section of The Circle of Reason,

Ghosh elaborates the the stakes of this debate not only through the reference to Ryle and Koestler, but also through the action of the climatic chapter.

74 The Pasteur School of Reason is the culmination of Balaram’s theorizations about reform, the body, and the subaltern. Inspired by Pasteur’s work with the peasants and brewers in France, Balaram’s interest in the everyday body leads him to the disastrous “Campaign for Clean Clouts,” but also to the heroic sanitization of the refugee camps that inﬁltrate the village of Lalpukur during the Bangladesh Liberation

War and Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. Examining the living conditions of the refugee population, Balaram is appalled by what he discovers: “he saw people eating surrounded by their children’s shit; the tin roofs were black with ﬂies; in the lanes rats wouldn’t yield to human feet; there were no drains and no clean water, and the air was stagnant with germs, pregnant with every known disease” (Ghosh 61). While the

Campaign for Clean Clouts was intended to reform through shaming the body, the refugees confront Balaram with a human condition far graver than the smug complacency of those with dirty drawers: a population struggling with the elements for their very survival. In response to these conditions, Balaram begins a humanitarian effort that douses the town with buckets of carbolic acid, saving thousands in

Lalpukur from the epidemics that ravaged other villages.

Though the center of his carbolic acid campaign, the refugees remain on the margins of both the novel and the village. Already described in terms of absolute abjection, the stream of refugees later in the war becomes a deluge that further loses human distinction: “the new refugees hardly had bodies” (83). These refugees, much like the international oil laborers described in the second section as “ghosts...not men,” lack the individualizing features of a proper, readable body; the ‘ghost in the machine’ takes on a different valence here that suggests the obscured subaltern labor that fuels

75 transnational capital (261). Though based on the rhetoric of the subaltern body,

Balaram’s humanitarian campaign, like his prior reform efforts, seems incapable of actually accounting for the subaltern. Invoking the disenfranchised “simple people” once again, Balaram imagines the Pasteur School for Reason to be an opportunity to recover the body through the mechanical disciplining of the body through weaving

(49). Approaching Alu’s teacher, Shombhu Debnath, Balaram talks of founding a school that will teach the idle refugees “more than a craft. We could show them the beginning of a new history” (106). In response to this rhetoric, Shombhu Debnath replies, “I don’t want anything to do with it. Whenever people like you start talking about history you can be sure it means nothing but trouble for people like me” (107).

The description of the refugees and Shombu Debnath’s concern with Balaram’s reform efforts reveal that the foundation of humanitarian efforts are built on a troubling rhetoric of bare life.

Despite his prophetic response, Shombu Debnath ultimately agrees to join the faculty of the Pasteur School of Reason, allowing Balaram to develop a curriculum that uses the bodily discipline required in weaving to teach reason. Like the science that Balaram has put so much faith in, the loom “has created not separate worlds but one, for it has never permitted the division of the world. The loom recognizes no continents in no countries” (55). Furthermore, the man at the loom unites bodily and mental reason by being “the ﬁnest example of Mechanical man; a creature who makes his own world as no other can, with his mind” (55). Rather than being a passive object, the body of the weaver, Balaram believes, has the agency and power to actively create and control the surrounding environment by perfectly uniting the mind and body. In a

76 prolonged aside, the narrator discusses the ability of mechanical man, particularly the weaver, to harmoniously unite the body and mind.

This unity contrasts with the seeming enslavement of Toru-debi to her sewing machine, the rumors of Bhudeb Roy’s erection following the crash of a military jet, or the video game provoked incontinence of Jai Lal’s son. These ﬁgures, ruled by machines, indicate the threat inherent in turning to technology, whose creative potential in the novel always bears the seeds of man’s destruction. Echoing Koestler,

Ghosh suggests that this danger arises from the inability of the mind of man to keep up with the changes it has wrought on the surrounding environment and social structures.

Ghosh demonstrates the inability of the mind to keep up with environmental and bodily transformations by turning to the failure of language to accurately capture or translate the nature of the paradigm shift of cotton. The narrator’s long digression regarding the history of weaving reveals the difﬁculty people everywhere had adapting cotton to their own lifeworlds. As cotton spanned continents, it “changed the world too fast, made too many demands, called for too much subtlety” (56). Cotton, in many languages, therefore becomes a “misbegotten wool” (the German baumwolle) or, as in

English, etymologically rooted in a word meaning “nothing but dreary ﬂax” (57).28

The inability of language to account for the changes wrought by the global spread of cotton is also the limits of the mind that brought about such transformations, which necessitates acts of translation that often mask the true signiﬁcance and impact of technology on the body. Moreover, through the Chinese method of storing

28 The Oxford English Dictionary suggests etymological links to a number of European romance languages and ultimately Arabic, but Ghosh notes that the arabic kutn comes from the Akkadian kitinu, which itself has the root kitu, which means dreary ﬂax (Ghosh 56-57).

77 information and patterns on punchcards, Ghosh links weaving with another paradigm shift in technology that rapidly outpaced our mind’s comprehension: the development of the computer. In The Circle of Reason, weaving is the history of civilization, a story of glory and destruction, of despair and hope. A mantra that ﬁttingly closes this aside into the history of weaving resonates with the tripartite structure of the book: “Weaving is

Reason, which makes the world mad and makes it human” (58).29

The Pasteur School of Reason extends the beneﬁts of weaving to the subaltern of Lalpukur as part of an effort, echoing Gandhi, to restore the body, recovering the promise of the man at the loom––the mechanical man whose body and mind are productively synched in creating his own world. The success of the Pasteur School of

Reason within its ﬁrst year, however, is undermined by Balaram and Shombhu

Debnath’s own baser instincts. Though the inclusive message that marked the opening of the school remains, Balaram envisions the school as a separate body needing protection from the germs existing in the village and surrounding region. He therefore uses the school’s proﬁts to build a stockpile of carbolic acid with which he douses

Bhudeb Roy, whose own plans for the town’s progress are seen by Balaram as a contagion that must be destroyed. It is this attack, coupled with Shombhu Debnath’s running away with Roy’s wife, that leads Roy to demand that the police and Jyoti Das label the faculty and students of the Pasteur School of Reason a terrorist cell. The resulting stand-off between Roy and the School of Reason is an extension of Balaram

29 Although perhaps not deliberately structured in this form, the tri-gunas of Satwa: Reason, Rajas: Passion, and Tamas: Death are strikingly similar to the composition of Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine, which is broken into three sections: Order, Becoming, Disorder. It also reﬂects the triune brain that is developed in Koestler’s chapter “The Three Brains” (265-296), which itself is based on Paul MacLean’s experimental work published in series of articles and later developed in The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions (1990).

78 and Shombhu Debnath’s atavistic vendettas against Roy, base emotions that overcome reason. The feud, moreover, is an indication that Balaram has once again failed to heed Dantu, embarking on a reform project to change people’s bodies and create a new world without accounting for the surrounding, preexisting world.

The destruction of the Pasteur School of Reason in the climactic chapter “The

Ghost in the Machine” reveals the impossibility of such narrow efforts to recover or return to the body. The students having already left the school’s compound, only the faculty composed of Balaram and Shombhu Debnath’s families remain for the showdown with the police. The members of the two families are variously described as bodily machines unable to adjust to the news that, crossing caste and class lines,

Shombhu Debnath has run away with Bhudeb Roy’s wife. Ruled by an instinctive

“puritanical code of physical strength and purity,” the mind of Shombhu Debnath’s son Rakhal, “had recoiled reﬂexively from the offence” (134-35). The event overwhelms the mind of Maya, Rakhal’s sister, who “had no equipment to deal with situations of that kind” (135). Toru-debi turns instinctively to her sewing machine as a savior, while Balaram, “tense as a spring” keeps watch on Bhudeb Roy’s house (137).

When Balaram’s feeble shot of carbolic acid falls short, Rakhal repels Roy’s ﬁrst approach to the compound with one of the Molotov cocktails he started to stockpile and sell during the earlier period of war. Alu is at a loss of words to describe the physical sensation of the thrill of this momentary victory over Roy. Balaram, believing it was his squirt of carbolic that exploded in front of Roy, undergoes a similar, though more deeply transcendent experience from this act of violence:

It was as though that one act, that simple moment of action, had dissolved the past and the present, sensation and memory, mind and body, and distilled them

79 into a blissful wholeness. Nothing mattered, nothing existed now but the ecstasy of waiting for the climax, the discovery which he knew to be at hand. Did Pasteur have an inkling of this terrifying joy when he went to examine Joseph Meister the morning after he had inoculated him with his untested vaccine? (Ghosh 141).

In this anticipatory state, Balaram believes he has come to the precipice of nirvana-like form of personal self-discovery and self-sacriﬁce. When Shombhu Debnath tries to warn him to be “like any healthy animal” and run before he is destroyed, Balaram remains focused on the path to Bhudeb Roy’s house; the source of his imminent destruction (141). In this transﬁxed state, Balaram remembers the humiliating end to the “Campaign for Clean Clouts.” Narrating the events of the hygiene campaign in the present tense, Balaram hears himself reciting “a clean body is a new body, a new body a new life,” before his own body betrays him under the “bowel-loosening terror” of

Middle Parting’s approach (143). In fuller control of his body, this time Balaram stands tall and erect, believing that this control over his body will allow him to ﬁnally eradicate Bhudeb Roy, the “single germ” standing in the way of reason (119). For

Balaram, eliminating this “germ” would bring about a shift in bodily and worldly perception as monumental as Pasteur’s.

Despite the conﬁdence, strength, and bodily fulﬁllment that he takes in standing up to Roy, Balaram’s initial act of violent retaliation proves his undoing.

Having argued that Balaram’s compound was a haven for terrorists from across the border with Bangladesh, Bhudeb Roy returns with a representative of the Indian state, detective Jyoti Das. Das, a mild-mannered, bird-loving bureaucrat surrounds the compound before shooting a warning ﬂare. From the outskirts of the forest near the house, Alu, who had been sent to dispose of Toru-debi’s sewing machine, watches as

80 the ﬂare lands in the compound, resulting in a massive explosion. Restrained from running back to the compound, Alu, “inert and uncomprehending, could only see the

ﬂames of the known world licking the skies” (149). Balaram’s attempted return to the body to recover the mechanical man who makes his own world is unable to avoid man’s self-destructive impulse. Surrounding himself with drums of carbolic acid,

Balaram desire for purity ignores the ongoing conflict in the region. The flare, landing in Rakhal’s stash of bombs––manufactured to profit from the war––ignites the bombs, converting the sanitizing carbolic acid into an equally dangerous combustible. The first section of the novel “Satwa: Reason” records Balaram’s effort to retreat from the chaos of a world where science has outpaced human sentiment or the adaptability of the human mind. The discipline of the body, Balaram promises, will return to a universal bodily reason that places the human in control of its environment. Balaram’s attempts to return human sentiment to scientific rationality by translating scientific method into universal bodily practice not only fails to account for the external world or individual histories, but also the body’s own imperatives that undermine Balaram’s disciplinary practice.

IV. Going West: Narrating the Body Under Global Capital

The second section of The Circle of Reason, “Rajas: Passion,” retreats from the body to explore how narrative generates the passion and sentiment that controls Balaram’s body. If the body became the site for resisting the chaos of modernity and creating an alternative lifeworld of the mechanical man in the ﬁrst section of the novel, narrative gets ﬁgured as potentially subversive and resistant site as the novel moves west, out of

81 India and into the Persian Gulf. After the destruction of his entire known world, Alu, now twice-orphaned and suspected of terrorism, crosses India to avoid the pursuit of detective Jyoti Das. Wracked by boils that the novel suggests are physical manifestation of his lost loved ones, Alu heads west to escape his past and free his

ﬂesh. Alu departs India with a group of migrants bound for the oil-state of al-Ghazira on the Mariamma, a boat named for the goddess of smallpox and other epidemics. As a

figure whose origins are based in the bodily transformations of disease and a symbol of outcasts who can find no home or shelter, Mariamma is an apt patron for Alu and the other migrants.30 The departure of Alu from India also marks the waning influence of the body over Alu and The Circle of Reason. The collected group of migrants includes a

Professor Samuel, a theorist of the principles of the queue, “a thing of the mind, with its own humors and properties” (171); Karthamma, a pregnant woman who wills herself to halt labor for days until she is able to sign a birth certificate; and, Rakesh, a seller of traditional Ayurvedic medicines, whose business has failed as customers switched to Western products with “advertisements and slogans which promised more than mere movement” (182). Rakesh’s abandonment of his family, land, and traditional bodily remedies in favor of the fortunes to be made in al-Ghazira, along with Professor Samuel’s theorizations of queues, and Karthamma’s insistence on the proper legal forms, suggest that the bodily force advocated in the first section of the novel cedes to a new paradigm that uses instruments of the mind to manage populations, such as bureaucracy and the fictions developed to support global capitalism. These subaltern migrants, like so many before them, the narrator relates,

30 See: Henry Whitehead, The Village Gods of South India. London: Oxford University Press, 1916, pgs 26-30.

82 are lured by the bright lights and promises of wealth and opportunity created by empire:

for through a century and a half those same lights have shone in one part of the globe or another, wherever money and its attendant arms have chosen to descend on peoples unprepared for its onslaughts, and for all those hundred and ﬁfty years Mariamma’s avatars have left that coast for those lights carrying with them an immense cargo of wanderers seeking their own destruction in giving ﬂesh to the whims of capital (189).

The avatars of Mariamma invoked by Ghosh suggest a historical queue of similar boats carrying incarnations of the goddess in the form of outcasts and subaltern migrants who, forced to sacriﬁce their body,only have the promise of capital and their own stories to sustain them.

The focus on the mind in second section of The Circle of Reason is almost a direct rejoinder to the primacy of the body in the opening section. On the Mariamma, Zindi, the massive woman transporting workers to her compound in al-Ghazira, warns Alu:

“You shut your ears to all the shit and filth these people tell you, do you understand me? All that dirt is in their own mind” (180). The filth that Balaram had located in the body has now been displaced onto the mind. It is no surprise, therefore, that the migrants settle in a quarter of al-Ghazira, far away from the body of the city, known as the “Ras al-Maqtu’, the Severed Head” (196). Cut off from ownership of the labor of their bodies and subject to constant bodily threat on the job, the migrant workers who live in the Ras turn to stories in order to gain some sense of the body that they have sacrificed to capital in the form of corrupt international oil and construction companies. After the apparent death of Alu in the collapse of the Star, a commercial center many of the residents of the Ras were constructing, Zindi, a master storyteller

83 gathers the migrant workers to narrate the event, granting them some sense of ownership:

They had lived through everything Zindi spoke of and had heard her talk of it time and time again; yet it was only in her telling that it took shape; changed from mere incidents to a palpable thing...something corporeal... she could bring together empty air and give it a body just by talking of it. They could never tire of listening to her speak, in her welter of languages, though they knew every word, just as well as they knew lines of songs. And when sometimes she chose a different word or a new phrase it was like the pressure of a potter’s thumb on clay–changing the thing itself and their knowledge of it (213).

Zindi’s stories, in a “welter of languages,” bring the diverse migrant community of the

Ras together, embodying events and ideas so they can be palpably experienced. Her skill with words enables her to expertly craft an event, changing its very reality; words creating worlds. In contrast to Balaram’s efforts to match internal nature of the mind with the external reality of the body, Zindi’s storytelling actively constructs the body it narrates. The thinking of Balaram, who placed an emphasis on action for the creation of meaning, is replaced in al-Ghazira by characters, such as the scheming Jeevanbhai

Patel, who believe that “it is not acts, but warnings, meanings, those delicate shades which remove an act from mere adventure and place it in history, which are important” (259). It is not the decisive action of Balaram, but rather the interpretation of the action that now matters. The importance of being able to control interpretation and shape the actual reception of an event is reinforced by the struggles of the migrants from the Mariamma, whose bodies are constantly read into demeaning narratives of their employers that reinforce their subaltern status. Storytelling becomes a supplement for the bodies the migrants have lost by giving their “ﬂesh to the whims of capital” (189). Rather than translate universal reason into bodily practice, the transnational migrants translate their bodily experience into narrative to reclaim a

84 sense of embodied agency. The migrants recognize that the stable body of Balaram’s practice, if it ever existed, is now constructed through a discourse that they must now interrupt with their own narratives.

The power of narration to control bodily perception and the ﬂow of capital is more clearly revealed in the tale, related at Zindi’s, of Nury the Damanhouri, a thin,

“very odd looking,” and “painfully cross-eyed” migrant from Egypt (245).

Supplementing his physical repulsiveness, Nury’s personal history is marked by a marriage that reportedly fails because of his impotence. It is this shameful story that gains him entrance to the women’s quarters of al-Ghazira where his unrestricted access is not only the foundation of Nury’s egg-selling enterprise (allowing him to buy excess eggs from one household and then sell at a premium to other households), but also provides critical household information that is then co-opted by the state. Nury’s

flourishing trade at once demonstrates the power of fiction to control perception, enabling the construction of a capitalist enterprise, but also its inevitable corruption and absorption into the functions of the state. When the fiction of Nury’s impotence is revealed he loses everything and has to throw himself more inline with the state.

Beginning as the story of an Egyptian migrant turned successful entrepreneur, the narration ends with the overthrow of the Ghaziri state at the hands of transnational oil companies. The tale of Nury the Damanhouri ultimately serves as both a fantasy of self-creation and a cautionary tale of the limits of this fantasy as local capital collides with larger transnational interests. Like the state’s interruption of Balaram’s project to recreate the world in the image of the mechanical man who synchs body, mind, and

85 world, the transnational forces at work in al-Ghazira inﬁltrate and direct these narratives of self-creation.

Nury’s story immediately precedes the narration of Alu’s miraculous survival under the ruin of the Star, another story of self-creation that consciously seeks to avoid the pitfalls of being coerced by transnational capital or bodily betrayal. Trapped under the rubble of the massive shopping complex and unable to move his body, Alu uses his four days in darkness to think about “cleanliness and dirt and the Inﬁnitely Small,” emerging to preach a new understanding of the world grounded on a new interpretation of the life of Louis Pasteur (235). Pasteur may have discovered the germ––the enemy of civilization for Balaram and Alu––but, Alu argues, he was unable to effectively battle the Germ because he had never been able to ﬁnd the origin of the

Germ. Despite his genius, Pasteur had never asked the right questions. Alu, however, shares these questions with the population of the Ras:

What is it that travels from man to man carrying contagion and ﬁlth, sucking people out and destroying them even in the safety of their own houses, even when every door and window is shut? Which is the battleground which travels on every man and every woman, silently preparing them for their last defeat, turning one against the other, helping them destroy themselves? (281).

As the self-proclaimed heir of Balaram and Pasteur, Alu declares himself to have found the answer to this riddle in the ruins of the Star: “Money. The answer is money” (281).

Whipped into a frenzy by Alu’s speech, the migrant workers in the Ras declare a war on money in an effort recover “our sweat, our work” (284). While Balaram sought to eliminate germs and discipline the body through a return to the mechanical man, Alu’s similar effort to attain purity assigns germs to the mental realm, demanding a corresponding discipline of the mind that will create a powerful communal will.

86 Almost as soon as Alu announces his war on money, Professor Samuels “delivered himself of a plan, full grown and breathing” to safely manage the collected money of the Ras through an enormous bureaucratic apparatus (281).

Much like Balaram’s atavistic return to the body ends in a disastrous separatism, so too does Alu’s efforts to rid the Ras from the disease of money, to remove his narrative from capital’s corrupting inﬂuence. The ecstatic dancing through the courtyards of the Ras, like Balaram’s momentary blissful fusion of body and soul before his death, is a vindication of Alu’s reformation of the mind. The visceral excitement of the migrant population in the Ras complements the initial success enjoyed by Alu’s war on money: he is able to pool and collectively organize money in

Ras, renegotiate labor contracts, and create a functioning socialist government. Alu’s organization creates a Utopian society which remains willfully isolated in the “severed head” of the Ras, failing to account for the external threat from the body of al-Ghazira that is controlled by international corporate interests. Ignoring reports that there will be a crackdown, Alu and other members of the Ras embark on a communal shopping expedition that the police force deliberately misconstrues as a demonstration. On the road to the market the crowd is confronted with soldiers in helicopters, which Zindi identiﬁes “as part of the machine that she had known to be lying in wait” (346). This machine, composed of the various transnational interests who controlled al-Ghazira’s oil reserves. Swooping into the procession, the helicopter creates a fog of sand and tear gas that precedes the emergence of “a line of helmeted black-uniforms with riot- shields and batons, charging the milling crowd on the road” (348). This anonymous forces of transnational corporate interests violently disperses the movement, arresting

87 many and leaving others dead in the road. In a haze that blurs the outlines of the known world in a similar manner as the blinding explosion in Lalpukur, he surviving members of the Mariamma, including Alu and Zindi, are forced farther west at the close of the second section of the novel. Despite the alternative focus on narrative, interpretation, and the mind rather than on the body, the world making efforts of Alu, like Balaram’s, spectacularly implode in the confrontation with the forces of transnational capital that replace the Indian state’s intervention in Lalpukur. To this point, Ghosh’s novel unfolds as a series of failed efforts to resist incorporation in the larger national and transnational regimes responsible for both the suffering of the refugees and exploitation of migrant labor. The ﬁnal section of The Circle of Reason offers few solutions, although it productively reframes the debate to include the state that both Alu and Balaram rejected.

V. “The Whole Machine”: Administering to a Corpse, Recovering the Body

Approached in the first two sections of The Circle of Reason from the direction of the body and the mind, the reform desired by Balaram and Alu hinges on a purification, a liberation from the Germ that will lead to a transcendent unity of body and mind. The achievement of such purity, however, comes at a willed ignorance of the surrounding world, an untenable state, destined for catastrophe, that demands an alternative solution. The circularity of scientific reason in the novel allows for a critique of those narratives of progress that directly apply science to the body and the organization of human life. The short, final section of The Circle of Reason suggests a new relationship between the human body and the surrounding environment, revealing its imbrication

88 in the ﬂuid fabric of human social life and institutions, opening it up to an ongoing process of translation and transﬁguration that allows the human to emerge.

Opening the ﬁnal section of the novel with the sublime image of a woman walking beneath the towering crescents of the sand dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental,

Ghosh immediately resets the terms of the mind-body debate in the first two sections of the novel. Having no connection to the woman, who is introduced as Dantu’s daughter Dr. Uma Vera, the “stark lunar majesty of the immense golden sand-dunes” surrounding El Oued are the only thing that “distinguish her from the thousands of other similar women who were probably doing the same thing in thousands of other small towns around the world” (355). The emphasis on the singularity of the dunes and the iterability of the woman performing her daily rounds, reflects a new paradigm for the human body in the novel. The transformative power of the human body or mind, critical to the reform projects of Balaram, Gopal, and Alu, is reduced in comparison to the natural, untranslatable force of the massive sand dunes that provide the setting for the final section of The Circle of Reason. The narrator describes the splendor of the dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental: “When you saw them poised above you, stretching towards the horizon in gigantic scalloped arcs, you could only be silent; they were outside human imagination, a force of nature displaying itself in space, like a typhoon or earthquake rendered palpable and permanent” (360). The dunes, standing outside of human comprehension in the tradition of the sublime, are a static, unyielding corollary to Ghosh’s earlier example of the incomprehensibility of the rapid transformations engendered by cotton, which is raised from a dreary flax into a globe changing industry by the stewardship of mechanical man harnessing nature.

89 The appearance of the dunes is one of the ﬁnal images in the novel representing the inability of humans to manage nature and the chaos that results from their efforts.

In an earlier scene, the young Jytoi Das visits the Alipore Zoo in Calcutta with his father. Confronted with the poor administration of care to the animals, Jyoti’s father goes on a rant about “white tigers that had gone grey, and other miserable beasts whose increasing miscegenation was marked by names like those of ascending generations of computer chips – tigon, litigon...litiligon, titilitigon...Where would it lead? Where would it end?” (36-37). Like the Chinese encyclopedia from Borges that opens Foucault’s The Order of Things, the zoo animals, under human management have become curiously mechanized, increasingly muddled, and chaotic, a disruption and mutation of familiar order that stretches the limits of human comprehension. The young Jyoti, turning his back on his bitter father, runs to the lake at the center of the zoo, for his own experience of the sublime:

There, with the chaotic surging of human life invisible behind him, he saw a shimmering, velvety carpet of ducks and cormorants and storks covering the lake. Somewhere in that mass of birds his eyes picked out a pair of purple herons... Looking at them in the ﬂesh he was struck with wonder, and as he watched them he gloried in the peace, the order, the serenity granted by a law on such a vast and immutable scale (37)

A less rigid version of Balaram’s return to the body through the loom, or Alu’s efforts to ban money, Jyoti’s interest in wild birds appears to be a vain effort to turn his back on the chaos of human life that is unable to be ruled by universal, immutable laws.

Jyoti’s pursuit of rare bird species is, furthermore, a sublimation of his own bodily desires, which, the closing scenes of the novel suggests, is another failed effort to transcend the human body.

90 Set under the Grand Erg’s towering reminders of the limits of human reason, the final section of The Circle of Reason reduces the human body and mind as part of an effort to transfigure the body that will be a model for the development of a new means of translation. This short, final section affirms the limits of bodily comprehension, while suggesting that recognizing such limitations is essential to transnational literary production and the flexible citizenship often demanded of migrant communities. The majestic dunes of El Oued are the backdrop for the encounter of two distinct migrant groups: the wealthy professionals donating their skills for a limited time to their host nation and the subaltern refugees struggling to survive. On her daily rounds Dr. Uma

Verma, the female ﬁgure walking through the dunes, discovers the remaining refugees from the Mariamma, weary and desperate for shelter after months on the run from the pursuant Detective Jyoti Das. Verma welcomes the migrants to ﬁll her own desperate need for a troupe of Indian actors to perform Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitrangada for her Algerian hosts; the performance of Chitrangada critical for preventing her colleague

Dr. Mishra from speaking at the annual celebration at the hospital. Extending a political feud between their parents in India, Verma proposes Tagore’s literature to avoid the insincerity of Mishra’s political speech at the previous year’s celebration where Mishra pronounced himself a proud socialist. This adoption of the socialist label offends Verma, whose father, Balaram’s friend Dantu, deﬁned socialism against the actions of Mishra’s father who ignored the fact “that people were not atoms to be dealt with in formulae” (377). In an argument with Mishra, Verma plays out the violent history of reform based on the progress of reason that is barely registered in the earlier sections of the novel:

91 Do you remember how you talked about technology and the Scientific Temper and building a new rational world by destroying the superstitions of the peasants? And then, when we said surely there was more to socialism than just that, that in the villages we talked of socialism as hope, do you remember how you laughed?...And, after all that, where were you when the crunch came?...Who sabotaged Lohia?...We know your kind inside out, through and through: we’ve heard your sugary speeches and we’ve seen the snakes hidden up your sleeves; we’ve seen you wallowing filth with the Congress while High theory drips from your mouths; we’ve heard you spouting about the Misery of the Masses while your fingers dig into their pockets; we’ve watched you while you were snarling over bribes with your Congress gang-mates, so we know exactly where your cynicism comes from (380).

Verma’s confrontation of Mishra pushes forward the politics and history that the novel has marginalized, only obliquely referencing in the appearance of the refugees in

Lalpukur or the angry mobs in Kerala. While the novel restrains itself from an overt politics, the desire Mishra recognizes in Verma––to “climb on the sand-dunes and let the Algerians know about your father’s Lohia-ite socialism”–– is precisely what the novel attempts on a larger scale (381). Like the Indian reformer Ram Manohar Lohia,

Ghosh’s novel opposes capitalism and communism as manifestations of a civilization driven by a continuous application of science to the economy and standards of living.

For Mishra, the option is between an atavistic return to the middle ages or an uncompromising adoption of modern scientiﬁc reasoning. Dr. Verma, however, has already located a different route through literature and a theory of translation that gets developed in her decision to perform Tagore’s Chitrangada.

The recipient of “the most modern literary awards in all the most modern cities,” Tagore is an international, cosmopolitan ﬁgure that Mishra can’t help but respect, while the play itself is a retelling of a legend from the Mahabharata in the form of a dance drama (382). Both the legend and its performance in the Algerian desert require a series of important translations. Tagore’s revision of the tale presents

92 Chitrangada as the only daughter and heir to the throne of the King of Manipur. A great hunter and warrior, Chitrangada dresses and behaves like a man. When hunting she meets and falls in love with Arjuna, who believes that she is a man. Realizing

Arjuna will never love her as she is, Chitrangada asks the god to transform her into a beautiful, feminine woman. This transformation complete, Arjuna falls in love with

Chitrangada, unaware of her identity as the princess. Arjuna, however, having heard stories of a legendary warrior princess who can rival his own stories of glory, can only think of this princess. When Chitrangada is forced to defend her kingdom, she reverts to her old form and reveals herself to Arjuna, both realizing that “beauty is only deception, an illusion of the senses” (383). For Verma, the performance of Tagore’s dance drama in front of her Algerian colleagues is both a representation of the height of modern Indian literature and a revision of a historical myth whose form can transcend cultural boundaries and the limits of language. Despite her Algerian audience, Verma struggles to complete her father’s translation of Chitrangada from

Bengali to Hindi. The play, as well as the act of translating the play, has a very personal meaning for Verma. Her father would console her about the constant teasing she receives due to her hereditary buck-teeth through his translations: “I’ll translate something for you. When I read it to you, you’ll see that things like these don’t matter” (369). Dantu, named after his own buck-teeth, suggests literature, but also the act of translating literature, as a means of demonstrating the limitations of the body and senses to define meaning by either distracting Verma with the beauty of the narrative or exemplifying the power of translation, flux, and change that can be brought to a seemingly fixed text. Dantu’s translations, however, alleviate little of the

93 self-consciousness for Verma, who continues to wonder what difference a translation can make compared to the laughter of her classmates. On a personal level, Verma’s selection of the Tagore drama satisﬁes both her nostalgia for her father’s translation projects and her own fantasy of bodily transformation that indicates the persistence of her physical insecurity.

The performance of Chitrangada at the close of The Circle of Reason is an effort to resolve many of the questions surrounding the role of body, translation, nostalgia, and scientific reasoning into a coherent argument. The fantasy of bodily transformation related by the drama is enacted in real life when an ill Jyoti Das, playing Arjuna, falls passionately in love with Kulfi, who takes the part of the heroine. For Kulfi, one of the woman Zindi brought to al-Ghazira on the Mariamma, the role of Chitrangada affords her a physical and psychical transformation. Her belief in the bodily transformation afforded by the role is reflected in her carriage as she prepares for rehearsals. Her behavior troubles Zindi, who forcefully reminds her of her position: “Listen, you bitch.

Today you’re no different from when I first met you. You’re Kulfi the small-time call girl whose MA-pass husband turned her to whoring when he lost his fancy job; you’re pale-faced, unemployed old Kulfi...” (390). Zindi’s efforts to bring Kulfi back to a reality where Zindi maintains control are in vain. In a haunting scene during the dress rehearsal for Chitrangada, Jyoti, trembling with passion “his viscera, his loins...straining against an invisible, unbearable constriction,” confesses his love to

Kulﬁ as well as his true identity as the detective pursuing her and the other refugees

(399). Jyoti’s confession turns into pleas for physical intimacy that are regularly interrupted by lines from the recording of Chitrangada that plays in the background.

94 Maintaining her role as Chitrangada, Kulfi never replies to Jyoti, who reads her physical pain as a scandalized refutation of his desires, rather than a symptom of her impending death. At the cries of “Dhanya! Dhanya! Dhanya!,” when Chitrangada is supposed to reveal her “real self” to Arjuna, Kulfi instead crashes to the floor, clutching her heart (398). Having fully given herself to the performance of a new identity, Kulfi’s death at the climax of the play reveals the “real self” to be ineluctably tied to the material human body.

Remaining true to the enabling fiction of Tagore’s drama, Kulfi silently performs and mimes her role as Chitrangada. Her death meanwhile reveals the dangers inherent in adhering to fixed scripts as part of an effort to navigate the the chaos of human life. While Jyoti Das turns to birds, Kulfi to Chitrangada, Alu, Dr.

Verma, and Dr. Mishra are rigidly tied to their own master narratives of science.

Haunting the novel, The Life of Pasteur, provides the script for Balaram, Alu, and Verma that celebrates the universality of scientific reason, the triumph of humanity over nature, and the figure of the genius. The book reappears in the final section of the novel on Verma’s bookshelf, sparking a conversation about the guiding influence of

Pasteur on his two disciples, but also revealing an important addendum. Falling to the

ﬂoor, the book opens to a passage underlined in red, which states “that without the germ ‘life would become impossible because death would be incomplete’”(396).31

Considering Alu and Verma’s efforts to eliminate germs, the underlines in the book are

31 The underlined passage is taken from The Life of Pasteur, which excerpts a letter from Pasteur explaining the important work bacteria to transform matter, the passage immediately preceding: “If microscopic beings were to disappear from our globe, the surface of the earth would be encumbered with dead organic matter and corpses of all kinds, animal and vegetable. It is chieﬂy they who give to oxygen its power of combustion” (101).

95 taken as an accusatory statement, provoking Verma to wonder uncomfortably “who it was pointing at” (396). This line, directly from Pasteur, breaks the spell-like quality that his biography has held over the narrative. Kulﬁ’s death, moreover, disrupts the

ﬁxed scripts the characters have been following, challenging scientiﬁc dogma with the reality of bodily death.

After her death Kulﬁ’s body presents an immediate logistical problems for the

Indian migrants gathered in the remote Algerian outpost. Desiring a proper burial for

Kulfi, the migrants are unsure how to handle her body. Dr. Mishra, unsurprisingly, advocates calling the hospital for them to pick up the body, perform an autopsy, and write up a death certificate. Verma, however, is disturbed by how the Algerian state will handle the body of a migrant lacking papers. Daunted by the challenges of getting the body back to India, Verma decides to give Kulfi a proper, traditional cremation, like the ones “done for our fathers and mothers” (405). Mishra derides his colleague’s decision to have a proper Hindu cremation, while mocking her particular concern for

Kulfi’s body when she has handled dozens of corpses in medical school. Mishra rigidly adheres to the scriptural laws of cremation, while Verma translates these rules into their local context: carbolic acid becomes holy water, rancid butter becomes ghee, and termite ridden boxes become a proper wooden pyre. After cleaning and laying out the body, Verma receives permission from the Algerian state––whose war of independence, Verma argues, taught them “how important it is to die properly”––to cremate Kulfi (413). Like the arrival of Alu’s lumpy head in Lalpukur at the opening of the novel, Kulfi’s death reveals the body to be a contested site that grounds quotidian experience, religion and ritual, scientific logic, and state authority.

96 Cremated under the sublime Grand Erg Oriental, Kulfi’s body suggests the iterability of human experience, as well as the limits of human knowledge. The debate over her body, furthermore, demonstrates the need to account for history, while also remaining open to the variations of performance and the multiplicity suggested by cross-categorical forms translation. The final scenes reduce the body while opening it to the working of the infinitely small, rather than seeking to eliminate the chaos, alienation, and transformations suggested by the germ.32 Confronted by Kulfi’s body,

Dr. Verma descries “the tyranny of [her] despotic science,” a microbiological dogma that makes her work comparable to a mechanic who is unable to access “the whole machine” of the human body (412-413). Even surgeons, who “can see how the parts mesh, how the crankshaft connects to the gear-box,” are presented with a body that is

“all shrouded and chloroformed, face covered and weeping mothers hidden away, every trace of its humanity blanketed” (412). With Kulﬁ’s death under her roof, Dr.

Verma is able to ﬁnally view the “whole machine,” while recognizing the inadequacy of the scientiﬁc paradigm to account for the human body’s imbrication in the fabrics of social life. Rebelling against the script that has controlled their lives, Alu and Dr.

Verma place The Life of Pasteur on the pyre with Kulfi. Finally rejecting the mechanistic doctrine that reduced human life to bare life, Dr. Verma embraces the incoherence, confusion, and flexible adaptations that define humanity and avoids the rigid fixity that promises self-destruction.

32 This is later revisited by Ghosh in The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), which, I would argue, is a companion to The Circle of Reason in its presentation of bodily transﬁguration through workings of the malaria virus and advanced technology.

97 Though often approached as a magical realist text that mimics Rushdie’s technique, The Circle of Reason offers a new transﬁguration of the body that moves beyond Rushdie’s allegorical model. For Ghosh, the body becomes the keystone of a theory of globalization that privileges the inﬁnitely small, the quotidian events that are able to translate and transform. The painfully excavated and recovered body in The

Circle of Reason, open to the chaotic inﬁltrations of the mind, memory, and surrounding environment, becomes the touchstone for theorizations of transnational migration, performativity, and nostalgia. This is not a celebration of hybridity or a privileging of cosmopolitan identity. Rather, it is a theorization of the body that argues for its multiple attachments, including those to the state. The recognition of, and acceptance into, some form of statehood is necessary to fully realize the human. This is a demand to the international community to better administer to migrant populations, but also a call for Zindi and Alu this is a call to stop running west, confront the past, and return

“home.” However, as they wait in Tangiers, their eyes are pulled away from

Mediterranean and their route home and towards the Atlantic, where they see

“nothing except sleepy, crawling oil-tankers” (423). In the form of these ominous tankers, transnational capital creeps back into the novel, preventing any easy return

‘home’ for the remaining migrants of the Mariamma, as it threatens the very form and commitments of the state that may provide Zindi, Alu, and Karthamma’s orphaned infant Boss shelter.

The body has ﬁgured prominently in the critical reception of The Circle of Reason primarily as an indicator of a magical realist national allegory or as a literary representation of rationalism’s historical connection to Indian nationalism and the

98 development of a form of biopolitical governance. Despite the merit in many of these readings, they deny both the formal structure of the novel as well as the critical work that Ghosh performs in actively theorizing the body under global capital. Arthur

Koestler argues in The Ghost in the Machine for a new understanding of the body between a behavioralism that reduces human free will biological determinism and a

Cartesian dualism that privileges the mind over the body. Ghosh, invoking Koestler, argues that an openness to debates about the body continue to open up worlds of possibility and human understanding for which literature is uniquely suited. For

Koestler the stakes are to open new possibilities for understanding the human during the early decades of the Cold War that threatened human self-destruction, while

Ghosh, invoking Koestler in The Circle of Reason, tries to open new worlds of possibility in the shadow of neoliberal capital that threatens to overwrite the human in its discussions of markets and populations. If magical realism translated the body into language and symbol and biopolitical readings of the novel translated the body into a statistic and the individual to a portion of a population with little to no agency, The

Circle of Reason proposes a cross-categorical mode of translation that leaves the body open to both its symbolic import and its affective materiality. As the translation and performance of Chitrangada demonstrate, literature in Ghosh has the power to form powerful affective bonds, while Kulﬁ’s death further shows how regardless of the affective sentiment generated by ﬁction, the material body remains imbricated in larger social and political structures. In the competing discourses of globalism, Ghosh suggests that representing the contest between language and the body is crucial to opening new lifeworlds that can imagine the human.

99 By returning to mind-body debates Ghosh tries to preserve the human under global capital, a project whose challenges are further detailed in the following chapter on humanitarian sentiment and the corpse in Nuruddin Farah’s fiction. Kulfi’s corpse terminates Ghosh’s narrative as a reminder that, despite the debates over the mind and body, the human remains critically enmeshed in a broader world beyond its control, gaining its definition, in part, from the protections of the state and its laws. In focusing on the figure of the corpse in Maps and later Links, I argue that Farah’s work invests in corpse as a signal not only the limits of literature’s cosmopolitan, humanitarian sentiment, but also the continued importance of the state in the era of transnational capital. For Farah, humanitarian discourse has served as a guarantor of a benign globalism, inadvertently masking structural inequalities that perpetuate the an exploitative globalization.

100 CHAPTER 2–“The Body of Human Truths”: Nuruddin Farah’s Humanitarianism

I. Introduction: The Body and Form of Farah’s Fiction

Sadly, I hear the echo of the first shot and replay it very often in the ears of my recall. And I remember being overwhelmed with the oddest of sensations, as if an insect began to crawl down my spine, toward the nether regions of my self-reprimand. When someone first told me, I remember a most awkward sensation as if the archangel of death had served his notice on me; as if I died a quick death, but just before doing so, was able to think ahead: and I saw corpses, hundreds, thousands of unburied bodies, and a million people fleeing a savaging crisis. ––– Nuruddin Farah, "Savaging the Soul of a Nation," 1992

The visceral response to the news of Somalia’s collapse that Nuruddin Farah captures in “Savaging the Soul of a Nation” serves as an affective link between the cosmopolitan author and the Somali people caught in the crisis. Writing for In These Times, the exiled novelist vividly recalls the morbid sensation he experienced upon hearing the news that his long held fears of the destruction of the Somali state had been realized.1 Prior

1. In a 1996 interview with Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine,“‘How Can we Talk of Democracy’” Farah expresses his view that the origins of the civil war were in Ethiopia’s defeat of Somalia in the Ogaden War in 1977–1978, the topic of his novel Maps (1986). There were many indications that the Barre regime was struggling to maintain power including the efforts of the Somali National Movement, led by the Isaaq clan, to set up an independent state, Somaliland, in Northern Somalia. In response to the regional movement in the late 1980s, Barre bombed the city of Hargeisa and targeted members of the Isaaq clan. Africa Watch issued a report in 1990, Somalia: A Government at War With Its Own People, chronicling the human rights abuses that included the July 1990 massacre of civilians at a soccer stadium in Mogadishu and of an August 16th massacre of civilians in Berbera.

101 to the fall of Siad Barre's despotic regime Farah spoke to the Italian newspaper La

Stampa about a feeling of foreboding, “of a civil war in embryo, of a Somalia whose people were very likely going to savage themselves into total extinction” (‘Savaging’

14). A year after the interview, Farah, residing in Uganda and teaching literature at

Makerere University, urged the then-chairman of the Organization of African Unity,

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, to intervene in Somalia before the country descended into absolute anarchy. Despite these premonitions of impending chaos,

Farah recalls the visceral shock of hearing the reports of the first shot––fired at a checkpoint outside of Mogadishu2––that marked the beginning of Somalia's descent into anarchy. It is this sense of bodily violation, an affective reminder of national, ethnic, and local affiliations, that characterizes Farah’s fiction as it grapples with the fundamental tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism manifest in humanitarian intervention through the figure of the corpse.

Complementing the sensation of a physical and mental death, Farah’s awareness of the ﬁrst shot occurs in an awkward temporality that stretches the instant before death into an eternity. In this instant he imagines the future suffering of millions of people; human life savagely transformed into “corpses, hundred, thousands of unburied bodies." Having observed the faltering Somali state in the last years of the

Barre regime, Farah had begun writing a novel set during a civil war in Mogadishu.

When the war actually arrived the reality of its violence and chaos forced Farah to set the novel aside: “once Somalia collapsed into absolute anarchy, my novel would die in tandem with my dream, that of returning home”(17). The sensation of death Farah

2 In this paper I use the common English spelling Mogadishu rather than the more direct transliteration Moqdisho favored by some Somali historians or the Italian Mogadiscio preferred by Farah.

102 experiences is simultaneously the expiration of his hope to return to Somalia, his imagination, and his ability to narrate or raise in characters “the instinct of humanity” (17). In the concluding pages of Derek Wright's 1994 book-length study

The Novels of Nuruddin Farah, Wright notes the uncertainty surrounding Farah's continued literary production in the wake of the civil war: “It is doubtful…whether literature can contain or cope with catastrophes of the magnitude of the Somali crisis of the 1990s, or should even try: language chokes on the reality, art is helpless before its horror” (Wright 140). Unsure of his ability to represent the catastrophe of the civil war in his ﬁction, Farah began writing the non-ﬁctional work Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices

From the Somali Diaspora chronicling the experiences of Somali refugees before publishing Secrets in 1998, a novel set in the weeks preceding the collapse of the Barre regime.3 Farah ﬁnally revives a version of the civil war novel whose predecessor expired at the ﬁrst shot of the Somali civil war in 2003's Links, a novel that confronts a

Somali deathworld abandoned by the world. Farah opens the novel with the cryptic line: "'Guns lack the body of human truths!'" (Links 3). In part, Links is an effort to interrogate the nature of human truth by recovering the body that has been obscured by the vertiginous violence of civil war and the representations of Somali suffering in global narratives. The novel grapples with the fundamental tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism manifest in humanitarian intervention. In Links,

Farah returns to the representation of suffering human bodies that generated international humanitarian sentiment, challenging the origins and logics of this

3. The release of Secrets followed closely upon Farah’s receipt of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998. In addition to publishing Secrets, Penguin released editions of the earlier novels in the Blood in the Sun trilogy: Maps and Gifts. This marked the ﬁrst time Gifts, originally published in 1990 in a Finnish translation, was published in the United States.

103 sentiment through an intense focus on the figure of the corpse. While, in the previous chapter, I argued that Ghosh’s focus on the mind-body debate offered new modes of translating scientific rationality and reason that offered literature a sthe site for generating affective sentiment, in this chapter I argue that Farah highlights the possible limits and circularity of such sentiment. Like Ghosh, however, Farah uses the body to explore the potential of global literature to imagine worlds of possibility outside of the naturalized, preexisting and exploitive structures that govern the world and doom Somalia to perpetual failure. For Farah, this means wrenching literature away from the myth of the humanitarian sentiment that grounds categories like transnational fiction or world literature.

Considering its publication record, it is tempting to read Links as a definitive turn in Farah's writing. Farah’s fiction, however, has repeatedly emphasized the human body, particularly the figure of the corpse, as an important means of postcolonial critique. From his earliest novels to his recently completed Past Imperfect trilogy, Farah has used the body to explore the complex relationship between individual autonomy and social responsibility in contemporary Somalia. The metaphoricity that critics have observed to be at the core of Farah’s fiction is regularly routed through the body, creating what Derek Wright has called “a deliberately puzzling indeterminacy about where metaphor ends and reality starts” (Wright 108). Though Farah’s investment in the body is apparent in his earlier fiction, it is his 1986 novel Maps that is often cited as his most compelling theorization of the relationship between the body and the nation.

Wright, one of the most prolific Farah scholars, positions Maps as not only an exciting departure from Farah’s previous fiction, but also as, arguably, “the first African novel

104 of the body, with a great mass of body literature behind it” (118). While many critics have interpreted the body in Maps in relation to the novel’s national allegory, Wright further suggests that the body in Maps seems “to be an alternative way of constituting identity, more reliable than maps” (118). Similarly, Simon Gikandi in “The Politics and Poetics of National Formation,” argues that “an important strategy of national formation in Maps is the use of the human body as a third site of identity formation, a site beyond Askar’s individual fantasies about Somalia as signiﬁed by maps and ofﬁcial doctrines of the Somali nation as natural entity” (Gikandi 463). In Gikandi’s reading the organic, biological, human body of Misra is opposed to the intellectually constructed, naturalized Somali national ideal.4 The violence necessary to maintain this national ideal is taken out on human bodies, particularly on the bodies of women such as Misra in the novel.

Wright and Gikandi focus on the body in Maps as a reminder of the human costs of discursive formations, while further establishing the body as a site for transcending the limitations of national or ethnic identiﬁcation where an alternative form of identity can emerge. “Our new global situation,” Gikandi declares, “demands narratives which face up to the task of representing the ambivalences of the postcolonial situation” (454). By recovering the body, Farah’s ﬁction meets these demands while actively resisting the “romance of the nation and of national independence” that,

Gikandi argues, are the legacy of a colonial epistemology (452). Though Gikandi’s

4. Farah deconstructs the rhetoric of Somali nationalism, which is expressed by a number of characters in Maps, including Uncle Hilaal, who tells Askar of Somalia’s exceptionalism. Unlike African nations authorized by colonial maps, Hilaal states: “The Somali are a homogeneous people; they are homogeneous culturally speaking and speak the same language wherever they may be found” (Maps 174). The desire to unite all ﬁve Somali speaking regions motivates the war over the Ogaden region that is the backdrop of the novel.

105 argument is compelling, a consideration of how the body can function as a “third site of identity formation,”or what such a construction would mean, is largely outside the scope of his piece. The actual nature of Farah’s challenge to nationalist discourse I argue, revolves around a theorization of the body that denies the very transcendent narrative ascribed to it by critics such as Gikandi and Wright. Rather, in novels such as Maps and Links, Farah constructs the body as a challenge to a naive version of humanism that has been central to certain forms of cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism. Chronicling the history of Somalia, Farah is critically invested in theorizing the relationship between the individual and the state that grounds itself in the body. In refuting the metaphoricity that many critics have seen at the core of his writing, Farah effectively critiques the narratives of transnationalism and globalization.

The form of Farah’s ﬁction has corresponded with the aims of its content.

Farah has primarily written in the long form of the trilogy, crafting a complex body of work that, in his words, is intended “ to be a commentary on Somalia and the history of Somalia, and I like them to follow it to a certain degree––not to dictate, but to follow”(‘Democracy’ 43). To the three completed trilogies––Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979-83); Blood in the Sun (1986-98); Past Imperfect (2003-11)––

Farah has proposed a fourth trilogy composed of his early novels From a Crooked Rib

(1970), A Naked Needle (1976) and the unpublished play A Dagger in a Vacuum (1969)

(46). Critics frequently mention Farah’s commitment to the extended form of the trilogy, but often using the designation only as a periodizing tool for comparisons that chart Farah’s growing technical and thematic sophistication.5 The form of Farah’s

5. See Derek Wright’s The Novels of Nuruddin Farah (1994) and Reed Way Dasenbrock’s “Nuruddin Farah: A Tale of Two Trilogies” (2002).

106 writing, however, corresponds directly to the transnational critique found in the content of his novels. The long form of the trilogy, Peter Hitchcock contends in The

Long Space, offers an important alternative mode of narration in postcolonial ﬁction.

The extended novels of postcolonial ﬁction represent, in Hitchcock's persuasive reading, an important formal innovation tied to the chronotope of ‘the long space,’ which is “bound to the concrete predicaments of postcolonial narration as transnational critique” (Hitchcock 2). The trilogies and tetralogies from writers such as Farah, Wilson Harris, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Assia Djebar are not just “out of step with a postmodern global episteme,” Hitchcock argues, but signify a persistence that “relates to an alternative understanding of narration, a logic of form not simply outside world literature, the world republic of letters, global comparatism, or normative transnationalism” (2). The chronotope of the 'long space' of postcolonial

ﬁction interrupts a global narrative with local histories that interrupt “the truncated temporalities of globalization and transnationalism in their hegemonic formations” (9).

Turning to Farah’s fiction, Hitchcock illustrates the impact of the 'long space' on national and narrative form. Reading Farah as a “global humanist who articulates a universal disposition,” many commentators have argued that Farah’s fiction indicates the failures of the modern nation state (Hitchcock 132). Acknowledging the appeal of these readings, particularly the “fictional effect of nation where postcoloniality is concerned,” Hitchcock extends this line of thought in order reassert the specificity of the ‘long space’:

The more one attempts to narrate the existential substance of postcoloniality, the more its national predicate fades; the greater its narratological duration, the shorter its time for political subsistence. On one level, the given time of the postcolonial state is also its gift of death; in the Pharmakon of Western desire

107 the cure of nation is simultaneously postcolonial poison(132).

The form of the modern nation state, Hitchcock argues, does not correlate with reality of the postcolony; the national recedes in the face of efforts to narrate postcolonial experience. In Farah, Hitchcock notes that the folkloric elements of Blood in the Sun suggest the continuity of every day life as the Somali state disintegrates. Rather than read these elements as exotic, Hitchcock suggests that the folkloric in Farah challenges any efforts to read these elements metaphorically, or “beyond objectiﬁcation” (132).

Farah provides no “blueprints for being otherwise in the postcolony,” employing the long form in order to demonstrate that “one cannot imagine any sustainable community could emerge without the durée embedded in place” (133). The extended narrative form employed by Farah challenges efforts to read his ﬁction outside of its situation in the postcolony.

Within the three trilogies that compose the majority of his ﬁctional output,

Farah returns to similar themes, approaching them with the subtle modiﬁcations of the musical variations that are referenced in the title of his ﬁrst trilogy, Variations on the

Theme of an African Dictatorship.6 The extended narrative form of the trilogy has allowed

6. In his essay “Mapping Farah’s Fiction,” Derek Wright points to the play on variations as an indication of Farah’s postmodern literary aesthetic. Arguing that the oral history of Somalia creates a receptive audience for the performance of dictatorship, Wright reads the postmodern technique employed by Farah as a necessity for representing Somali experience: “Its past envisaged as an oral blank, Somalia has no history or, alternatively, has too much history and in too many variant versions for any of it to be certain. Its preliterate precolonial history is conceived as an endlessly reinvented narrative, improvised over a factual vacuum and on which each successive regime plays its own variations before an obliging mass-audience” (‘Mapping’ 109). Wright argues that Farah counters the dictatorship’s performance of variation by accepting the mutability of personal reality and instability of meaning under Barre’s, ﬁgured as a “debased oral performer, coercive regime (110). This is a compelling reading that accentuates the role of orality in Somali culture and Farah’s ﬁction. However, like Charles Sugnet’s “Farah’s Maps: Deterritorialization and ‘The Postmodern,” Wright’s celebration of postmodernism too readily yokes Farah with larger movements in global literature that entail similar efforts to destabilize identity and deterritorialize the nation, overlooking his resistance to these movements.

108 Farah to conceive of his fiction as an ongoing effort to chronicle Somalia, making it difficult to isolate a single novel from Farah’s body of work as representative of Somali experience. In Past Imperfect, for example, each novel centers on a character returning to Somalia after extended periods of exile, mirroring Farah’s own visit to the country after a twenty-two year absence in 1996. When taken together, the experiences of the protagonists and their relationship to Somalia create an extended return narrative that is determined not by generic expectations, but by the individual character’s experience of a specific personal and historical moment. Though the novels present similar narrative arcs, recurring supporting characters, and a common setting, the actual experience of navigating Mogadishu changes radically from novel to novel.

Mogadishu is alternately a terrifyingly chaotic “hell-on-earth” destroyed by warlords for Jeebleh in Links (2003); a foreign but domesticable space of recovery for Cambara in Knots (2007); and a deceptively calm, butt reacherous occupied territory for Malik as the rule of the Islamic Courts and Al-Shabaab falls to invading Ethiopian forces in

Crossbones (2011). In contrast to the images broadcast in news reports and ﬁlms about

Mogadishu, Farah chronicles the shifting nature of a city exposed to the vicissitudes of history, highlighting the variations of experience unable to be captured by a single narrative or image.

Though linked through many thematic variations, the trilogies, in accordance with Farah’s desire for his novels to serve as a commentary on Somalia, have widened in scope in order to accommodate and reﬂect the transnational forces that affect the country. While Farah admits that “the Siyad Barre dictatorship was easy to ﬁnd as a theme” during the writing of Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, the

109 uncertainty surrounding the direction of Somalia in the 1980s led to the protracted gestation and more abstract political considerations of Blood in the Sun (‘Democracy’

43). In his comparison of Farah’s ﬁrst trilogies, Reed Way Dasenbrock draws attention to how the evocative one word titles of the second trilogy, such as Maps and

Gifts, suggest a European colonial frame of reference that establishes how colonial cartography and humanitarian aid “created the landscape of the ﬁrst trilogy” (Dasenbrock 54). This Western frame of reference similarly informs Past

Imperfect; the narratives centering on both canonical Western texts and journalistic reporting.7 This global scope has become essential to Farah’s efforts to chronicle the history of Somalia that is being written outside of its borders not only by refugee populations and diasporic communities, but also by global powers, international agencies, and transnational corporations.

In the two decades after the collapse of the Barre regime Somalia has become synonymous with state failure, a designation that continues to determine policy.

Reports of piracy and al-Qaeda sponsored terror attacks now supplement the images of famine and civil war that resulted in the large scale international intervention of the early 1990s, reinforcing Somalia’s designation as the archetypical failed state. Through the international scope of the novels of Past Imperfect, Farah interrogates the tension between cosmopolitan humanitarianism and nationalism that has shaped Somalia’s history and are too readily elided in discussions of the transnational or global. While

7. A bibliography of both the literary texts (such as Pinocchio in Knots or Dante’s Inferno in Links) and contemporary works of reportage (such as the Trisha Stratford’s memoir Blood Money and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down in Links or the overwhelming list of newspaper articles in Crossbones) are included in Farah’s acknowledgments. Though Farah had previously included acknowledgments to his source material in his earlier novels, the bibliographies in Past Imperfect are lengthier and more prominent.

110 the chronontope of the ‘long space’ identiﬁed by Hitchock interupts the transcendental promises of transnationalism, it is the body in Farah’s ﬁction that becomes the critical site for observing the limits of humanity’s capacity to transcend the inhuman. Rather, as Pheng Cheah argues in Inhuman Conditions, “the aporias of development…force us to acknowledge that what we know as human has always been given to us by an inhuman temporality and spacing that we cannot fully grasp or control” (Cheah 230). In Maps,

Uncle Hilaal responds to Askar’s growing obsession with human bodies, by issuing a concluding remark: “Truth is body” (Maps 236). This response gets reconﬁgured in the riddle that forms the opening of Links and a new trilogy––“Guns lack the body of human truths!”–– where the body still functions as the touchstone for the particular truth that Farah tries to locate as the fundamentally human during the disintegration of the Somali state in Blood in the Sun and the prolonged statelessness in Past Imperfect.

Through the body, particularly the ﬁgure of the corpse, Farah reorients discussions of identity around questions of identiﬁcation, interrogating the convenient metaphors and allegories that structure discussions of the global or transnational.

II. The Body of Humanitarian Myth

Effectively exiled from Somalia, Farah’s frequent movements have made him a representative ﬁgure of the material difﬁculties behind the insights reaped from writing outside the borders of the nation. Born in the Italian-occupied region of Somalia,

Farah was raised in the Ogaden region that the British transferred to Ethiopia in 1954.

Border conﬂicts between Somalia and Ethiopia forced Farah’s family ultimately to move to Mogadishu. Describing his childhood in Somalia, Farah writes of his family’s perpetual movement: “We moved from one language universe to another with the

111 disquiet of tenant on a temporary lease.”8 The temporary inhabitance of, and movement between, language worlds continued as Farah pursued his secondary education at universities in India and England, accelerating after his writing generated tension with the Barre regime that resulted in his self-imposed exile in 1976. Unable to return to Somalia, Farah pursued teaching positions and fellowships in a number of countries in Europe (Italy, Germany, Sweden), Africa (Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda,

Gambia, Sudan), and North America. Even among the select company of global

Anglophone novelists writing from exile, Farah’s international migrations are remarkable. “Farah, as man and writer,” Derek Wright observes, “has become quite literally, a wanderer across worlds, a global nomad who is at once both more and less free than the traditional nomadic pastoralist” (‘Introduction’ xv). Wright, like Farah himself, is careful to balance the insights gleaned from Farah’s global wanderings with the material difﬁculties and uncertainties that confront an international migrant residing on temporary visas.

Throughout these frequent relocations across the globe Farah has continued to position his novels as responses to the history of his Somali homeland while writing almost exclusively in English. In response to the frequent questioning of his decision to write in English, Farah has maintained his commitment to an unapologetic cosmopolitan vision. Noting the censorship of the 1973 serialized novel he attempted to write in the recent developed Somali orthography, Farah, in contrast to Ngugi, has viewed writing an English as an openness to the outside world that combats narrowly

8. Quotation taken from Derek Wright’s “Introduction” in Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah (p.xv). The original citation appeared in: Nuruddin Farah, “Childhood of My Schizophrenia,” The Times Literary Supplement, 23-29 November 1990, 1264.

112 deﬁned, clannish forms of identity. Farah concludes his 1998 Neustadt Lecture by relating his reunion with his father at a hospital in Mombasa that results in an argument regarding Farah’s cosmopolitanism ideals as indicated by his choice of dress, friends, habits, and language. To his father’s criticism of his decision to write in a foreign tongue, Farah imagines one response before delivering his actual reply:

I could say, in self-defense (but did not), that writing in cosmopolitan settings, in foreign tongues, is, to my mind, more forward-looking, than much of the writing done in the indigenous languages in Africa and elsewhere; that a great body of these literatures is remarkable for its nationalistic bent, and its jingoism too; and that much of Somali oral poetry and prose is reactionary, inward- looking in a clannish sort of way (“Celebrating Differences” 24).

Though unstated, Farah’s initial response to his father’s disapproval aggressively asserts an outward-looking cosmopolitanism that is opposed to an inward-looking nationalism reliant on tradition. The audience for this response is obviously more than just his father; it addresses those critics, such as the ones in “Why I Write” attacking

Farah for writing in English, who reprimand the author for pandering to a global audiences at expense of the local.9 This guarded reply remains undelivered to his father. Instead, Farah relates to the audience a response whose more agreeable sentiments make it a ﬁtting conclusion to his lecture: “‘I wish the two of us could be sufﬁciently tolerant of each other so as to celebrate our differences. It is time we got to know ourselves better, time we celebrated the differences in our worldview’” (24).

9. The increased international attention Farah received in the late nineties also brought renewed criticism. The most strident of this criticism comes from his fellow countryman, Said S. Samatar who reviews Secrets following Farah’s receipt of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In “Are There Secrets in Secrets?” Samatar challenges the authenticity of the Somalia constructed in Farah’s fiction by gathering a lengthy list of orthographical and historical errors meant to undermine Farah’s credibility. Combined with a rather brutal critique of Farah’s literary style, Samatar seems to suggest that the only thing Farah’s fiction offers is an inaccurate Somali otherness for a desiring, global audience. Secrets, Samatar concludes, is “a fiercely non-Somali novel” (S. Samatar 143).

113 Resisting the divisive logic of his undelivered response to his father, Farah relates a familiar message celebrating diversity and tolerance. The gap between what Farah initially desires to say to his father in Kenya and what, as he reports to the Neustadt audience, he ﬁnally does say, reveals the tension at the heart of his cosmopolitan vision.

Farah’s more aggressive response remains unstated though still informing his more civil, conciliatory reply. For the audience at the Neustadt Lecture, Farah masks the reality of cosmopolitan writing, as he perceives it, with mantras suggesting how he, and those gathered to hear him, would like to imagine world literature functioning.

The truth that Farah “could say” is screened by what Farah essentially wishes he could say were true: that literature can serve to bridge world views, promote self-knowledge, and celebrate difference. His ﬁction, however, demonstrates the current limits of world literature.

In the conclusion to his Neustadt Lecture Farah supports his desire for tolerance with an entreaty, extended to his father and the audience, that we get to know ourselves better. The process of gaining such self-awareness requires an uncovering of the myths a culture tells about itself. Farah’s early work was invested in such a questioning of Somali culture, particularly in regards to the role of women.

Farah’s ﬁrst novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), provided a sympathetic portrayal of subaltern Somali women while, as Ali Jimale Ahmed argues in “Farah and the

(Re)Writing of Somali Historiography,” interrogating the inherited oral tradition that supports the hegemony of patriarchal culture.10 The title references the Somali

10. Set in the pre-independence era, From a Crooked Rib follows the protagonist Elba's struggle to ﬁnd some form of identity for herself in a patriarchal society. The novel chronicles her constant ﬂight from masculine betrayal and domination, which begins with an arranged marriage to an older man in rural Somalia and continues as she advances towards to her eventual destination of Mogadishu.

114 proverb, cited fully in the novel's epigraph, that suggests the inherent inferiority of women : “God created Woman from a crooked rib; and any one who trieth to straighten it, breaketh it” (Crooked Rib 1). Ebla, the protagonist of the novel, has so deeply internalized the tenets of this proverb that she has trouble imagining leaving her subservient role. After recalling the excruciating pain of her circumcision when she was a child, the narrator relates that “Ebla went on thinking that because woman was created from the crooked rib of Adam, she is too crooked to be straightened” (137). Farah argues for a connection between everyday oral expressions and women's subservience and abuse through the movement of Ebla’s thoughts in the scene: her mind goes from the remembrance of her agonizing circumcision, to her recalling the “indescribably painful” result of her first sexual contact where her blood and distress served to confirm her partner's manhood, and finally, to the proverb whose repetition dulls her memory of pain, allowing her to collect herself (137).

In the ﬁnal scene of the novel, Ebla restates the conclusion of the proverb:

“‘And if anyone tries to straighten it, he will have to break it’” (162). There is a new emphasis in this ﬁnal repetition that alters the matter-of-fact nature of the original, as well as the resignation apparent in Ebla's initial recitation, for a seeming desire for rupture that realizes, as Ahmed notes, “to make women viable members of the community, one will have to do away with the oppressive shell that impedes the full realization of their inherent value” (Ahmed 224). Set in the pre-independence era,

From a Crooked Rib suggests that Somalia must reexamine its most foundational myths in order to create an inclusive and vital society, even if it means breaking the very social bodies that have so long deﬁned it. Through the deeply empathetic narrative

115 following the plight of a single woman trying to assert her individual will in a society dominated by men, Farah demonstrates how common tales and myths create the material conditions for Ebla’s bodily pain. As Ahmed argues, Farah’s novel “gauges the truth the culture tells about itself” (216). In this process, From a Crooked Rib reveals the ‘truth’ of Somali culture to be untenably constructed on the backs of its women.

Though Ebla’s quest for independence from patriarchal society could be read as national allegory, as Maya Jaggi suggests in her 1989 interview with Farah, the novel insists that national independence will be compromised by the continued oppression of women.11 Rather than promote a national allegory that conﬂates women with nation,

Farah’s body of work questions the myths that are the foundation of allegorical readings.

The demand to strive for better self-awareness that Farah makes at the conclusion of the Neustadt Lecture is an extension of the process initiated in From a

Crooked Rib that seeks to gauge the truths that a society tells about itself. In accepting a prestigious international award for literature sponsored by the literary publication

World Literature Today, Farah interrogates the very notion of world literature by calling attention to the tension between celebrating differences and imposing a “forward- looking” mindset. Though he concludes his exchange with his father with a call for tolerance of difference worldviews, this sentiment only masks the ‘us’ vs. ‘them’

11. See: Maya Jaggi. “A Combining of Gifts: An Interview.” Third World Quarterly 11, 3 (1989) p. 180. In the interview Jaggi asks Farah if Ebla, with her various marriages orchestrated by third parties, was conceived of as an allegorical ﬁgure mirroring the Somali nation’s relationship with colonial and imperial rulers. Farah’s response indicates that though he did not consciously intend Ebla to be an allegorical ﬁgure, she has been read as standing in for the motherland by Somali readers. The national allegorical reading of Ebla may come naturally to many readers, but the novel seems to refute the easy association of women’s oppression with colonial oppression on which such an allegorical model depends. Later novels from Farah, such as Maps, furthermore seem to question the gendering of nations, working to collapse such allegorical readings.

116 mentality Farah exhibits in his initial defense of his cosmopolitan vision. The exchange between Farah and his father reveals the disdain for the clannish thinking of tribalism and narrow nationalist movements, while further demonstrating a similar skepticism of transnational, progressive movements that can mask similarly narrow forms of association behind a cosmopolitan worldview. Farah’s commitment to appraising the truth a culture tells about itself extends from the Somali context of From a Crooked Rib to the international community present in his most recent trilogies. Though Farah continues to chronicle the history of Somalia, the country has increasingly become a setting for his investigation of the state failure that the global community projects around Somalia. Somali history and the myth the global community tells itself come together in the project of humanitarian aid. Untangling the afﬁliations that comprise cosmopolitan humanitarianism becomes an essential project for Farah, who theorizes world literature as a critical site for the formation and perpetuation of the afﬁliations that structure our understanding of subjectivity.

Farah’s critical examination of the relation of humanitarian sentiments to narrative and state sovereignty begins in Blood in the Sun and continues into the recent

Past Imperfect trilogy. His work corresponds roughly to the resurgence of the state’s use of human right’s rhetoric following the end of the Cold War. Farah abandoned the rather direct critique leveled at the Barre regime, as well as the Cold War powers that alternately supported it, seen in Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship in order to gain an account of the larger personal, existential, and historical crises that were occurring and could not be attributed to any one agent. This transition in Farah’s work corresponds to the particular uncertainty in Somalia as the Barre regime faltered,

117 but also to global historical events that would directly shape international response to the Somali crisis. Reacting to this transition, Farah interrogates the relation between humanitarianism, literature, citizenship, and globalization, probing the myths the international community tells about itself and evaluating our very understanding of the human and its afﬁliations.

Blood in the Sun and Past Imperfect are literary responses to a shift in global dynamics that correspond to a reevaluation of the ideals of global democracy and human rights in the broader ﬁelds of humanities and social sciences. Noting the recent critical interest in the interdisciplinary study of human rights and literature, Elizabeth

Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore in “Human Rights and

Literature: The Development of an Interdiscipline,” trace the heightened visibility and

“formal momentum” of the ﬁeld to the more immediate “shift in political, social, cultural, and intellectual landscapes” after September 11, 2001 (Goldberg and Moore

2). The Bush Administration’s humanitarian justiﬁcation for the“War on Terror,” along with the Administration’s own violation of human rights at Guantánamo Bay and

Abu Ghraib, Goldberg and Moore argue, made imperative a critical reconsideration of the relation of human rights to the conduct of war, imprisonment, immigration, and torture. The invasion of Iraq, however, is only one of the more recent examples of the post-Cold War economic and military intervention justiﬁed by human rights that Jean

Bricmont has labeled “humanitarian imperialism.”12 As Jacques Rancière notes in

"Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?" the dissident movements in the Soviet

12. In Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, Bricmont argues that, following the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, new strategies that emphasized the West’s commitment to human rights, democracy, justice, and freedom were needed to justify the use of military force.

118 Union and Eastern Europe during the seventies and eighties reinvigorated human rights discourse; after the collapse of the Soviet Union “they would appear as the charter of the irresistible movement leading to a peaceful posthistorical world where global democracy would match the global market of liberal economy” (Rancière 297).

The belief in the spread of global democracy tied to global markets through humanitarian discourse can be witnessed in the expanded role of the United Nations during this period.

The massive humanitarian interventions undertaken by the UN in Cambodia and Somalia at the beginning of the nineties were unprecedented in scale, reﬂecting a changing understanding of state sovereignty. As Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava note in their introduction to the special issue of SAQ, “And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights,” globalization has had a tremendous impact on the discourse of human rights: “The increasingly swift movement of words, human beings, goods, and objects across boundaries of all kinds has contributed to a new currency of human rights discourse and its various implementations…” (Balfour and Cadava 287). The new weight of human rights contributed to the rethinking of traditional notions of state sovereignty. Recording this shift in policy that resulted, Thomas Weiss, David

Forsythe, Roger Coate and Kelly-Kate Pease in The United Nations and Changing World

Politics, cite then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 statement in

Foreign Affairs: "The centuries-old doctrine of absolute sovereignty no longer stands, and was in fact never so absolute as it was conceived to be in theory. A major intellectual requirement of our time is to rethink the question of sovereignty" (qtd. in

119 Weiss et al. 16). Koﬁ Annan, Boutros-Ghali's successor, extends this claim, writing in

The Economist:

‘State sovereignty, in its most basic sense is being redeﬁned––not least by the forces of globalization and international cooperation. States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa. At the same time individual sovereignty––by which I mean the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in the charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties ––has been enhanced by a renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights’ (qtd. in Weiss et al. 17).

Globalization and ‘international cooperation,’ Annan asserts, have contributed to a fundamental redeﬁnition of the state. The rights of individuals enhances individual sovereignty to the diminution of state sovereignty. In the wake of the Cold War, the

United Nations charted a new course that was intended to correspond with the increased pace of globalization that was redeﬁning the very conception and perception of national sovereignty. In the early nineties the traditional peacekeeping and observation missions of the UN evolved into security operations that routinely intervened in the affairs of sovereign states.13 In this era of increased international intervention, the failure of the UN’s operations in Somalia indicated the limits of the promise of an internationalism premised on humanitarian sentiment.14

In 1997 the newly appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human

Rights, Mary Robinson, in her ﬁrst major speech, addressed the failures of the United

13. See Weiss et al. pgs. 48-76 for a detailed account of UN activity following the Cold War that demonstrates the gradual transition from traditional peacekeeping missions to a new generation of broader interventions in Iraq, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Somalia. As world politics changed, the possibilities for UN action expanded.

14. These operations included UNITAF (United Task Force-Somalia) and UNOSOM I & II (UN Operation in Somalia). Through the expansion of UN activities in the era, Kenneth Rutherford notes in Humanitarianism Under Fire, that UNOSOM II “was the ﬁrst UN military operation conducted solely for the sake of human rights” (Rutherford xvi). While previous missions had observed human rights, UNOSOM II actively enforced them.

120 Nations to adhere to its fundamental role of promoting human rights: “Somewhere along the way, many in the United Nations have lost the plot and allowed their work to answer to other imperatives” (Robinson 9). This lost sense of purpose, Robinson asserts, is at the root of much of the criticism leveled at the UN “in terms of complacency, of bureaucracy, of being out of touch and, certainly, of being resistant to change” (9). In addition to these criticism, the expanded role of the UN in international affairs raised questions of its relation to American hegemony, and its use of human rights to justify military intervention. Following the well-documented operational failures of the UN in Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia,

Robinson’s address argues for a return to the core mission of the UN, which is best expressed in the aspirational language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Joseph Slaughter contends in Human Rights, Inc. that Robinson, in asserting her preference for the original language of the Universal Declaration rather than surrogates such as “human development,” “human well-being” “human security,”

“basic needs,” and “good governance,” is cautioning the international community against transforming the “humanist plot into the clinical language of

‘macroeconomics’” (Slaughter 87). “When Robinson reproached the UN for straying from its historical plot and losing the thread of the human rights plot to other imperatives,” Slaughter advances, “she suggested that state and other interests have corrupted the basic humanist vision of free and full personality development” (87).

The UN, after a period of promising expansion and disheartening failures, needed to regain the aspirational humanist values of its Charter, a project that Slaughter maintains is deeply entwined with the novel. The literary overtones of Robinson’s

121 address, which begins and concludes with references to The Golden Bough, Slaughter indicates are part of a larger overlap in the concepts of human rights and narrative form, an argument Slaughter pursues at length in Human Rights, Inc.15

Critics in the social sciences as well as journalist familiar with aid work have largely followed the familiar formula, rehearsed by Robinson, of attacking the inefﬁciencies of the bureaucracies of the UN and prominent NGOs to question the premise of human rights and humanitarian aid.16 While acknowledging these critiques, scholars in the humanities have largely interrogated the discourse of human rights to recapture the humanist sentiments that motivated the expression of human rights; a project that Balfour and Cadava consider “one of the most pressing and intractable matters of political life, and perhaps even life as such” (Balfour 277). As part of an effort to recover the plot of human rights, scholars in the humanities have asserted the deep historical connection between the humanities and human rights. In her

“Forward” to the special issue of the PMLA, “The Humanities in Human Rights:

15. Robinson relates that upon commencing work at the United Nations, Seamus Heaney presented her with a copy of The Golden Bough that bore the inscription “Take hold of it boldly and duly…’.” Slaughter notes that this inscription, which is included in the title of Robinson’s address, comes from Sybil’s instructions to Aeneas for his safe passage through the underworld in Heaney’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (Slaughter 347, note 4). For Robinson it is the lost plot of human rights that needs to be boldly and duly held to guarantee our return to the humanity. Through Heaney, Virgil, and James Frazer, Robinson suggests a return to the imperatives of human rights and humanist discourse. The reference to Virgil in Robinson’s speech is also suggestive in the context of Farah’s Links, which ﬁgures a descent into the “City of Death” via Dante’s Inferno.

16. Makua Matua makes a broad critique of the human rights project as a renewed form of Western imperialism in Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (2002). In the narrower Somali context there are a range of works from journalists and academics that critique the UN and US intervention in Somalia. Trisha Stratford’s Blood Money narrates the experience of a transnational catering company contracted by the UN in order to reveal the corruption and incompetent bureaucracy that mars the UN’s efforts in Somalia during the war. Kenneth Rutherford’s Humanitarianism Under Fire argues that Somalia was a critical turning point for humanitarian intervention that revealed the limits of the UN and America’s internationalism. Michael Maren’s account of humanitarian aid in Somalia before the fall of the Barre regime in The Road to Hell is one of many recent works that challenges the very premise of humanitarian aid. With the help of international humanitarian agencies Barre was able to manipulate refuge populations and reports of famine in order to consolidate his weakening hold on power.

122 Critique, Language, Politics” Domna Stanton recalls the long history shared by human rights and the humanities, mediated by a civic humanism that merged with “ideals of freedom, equality, justice, tolerance, secularism, and cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment” (Stanton 1518). This Enlightenment humanism, Stanton notes, has provided the basis for the development of human rights declarations since 1945. While conceding the blind spots of Enlightenment humanism’s universal aspirations, Stanton believes the humanities to be critical for rethinking “the strategies and the goals of the progressive, emancipatory practices that human rights at their best exemplify” (1523). Recent works, such as Slaughter’s

Human Rights, Inc. and Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, have further posited the novel as central to the development of right’s discourse, while arguing for its continued contributions to the ﬁeld. Literature’s ability to generate empathetic responses through its imaging the lives of others makes it a crucial supplement to the practical work of human rights; literature is a privileged site for the reimagining of human rights in the age of globalization.

Though the aspirations of human rights discourse can trace their origins in the humanitarian sentiments generated by literary forms like the novel, critics have attempted to note the differences separating human rights and humanitarianism. In their introduction to Humanitarianism and Suffering Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard

D. Brown draw a distinction between a human rights based on “pre-existing legal protection for individuals” and a humanitarianism that relies on moral claims that are

“less ﬁrmly grounded in international law” (Wilson and Brown 7). Human rights activists, furthermore, consider humanitarianism to be “laden with outmoded notions

123 of charity, protection, sentiment, and neocolonial paternalism” (8). Even when humanitarianism does not take the form of intervention, the desire to aid, as Michael

Maren observes in The Road to Hell, is not far removed from the desire to control

(Maren 218). The separation of a neutral, virtuous human rights discourse and a neocolonial humanitarianism is dismissed by Makau Mutua in Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique. Mutua argues that the discourse of human rights legitimizes humanitarian international intervention in its effort to universalize a fundamentally

Eurocentric ideology. The “grand narrative of human rights,” Mutua asserts, is dominated by the compound metaphor of “savages-victims-saviors” (Mutua 10). This metaphor presents a struggle between the savage whose cruel acts mark them as“negation of humanity” and the victim ﬁgured as a “powerless, helpless innocent whose naturalist attributes,” rights, and dignity have been violated by the savage (10).

The savior, meanwhile, intervenes on behalf of the victim to guarantee “freedom from the tyrannies of the state, tradition, and culture” (11). Observing the imbrication of human rights discourse with global capitalism and liberal internationalism, Mutua notes that for ‘savages’ and ‘victims’ the salvation of entry into the modern world is

“only possible through the holy trinity of human rights, political democracy, and free markets” (155). By demonstrating how the savages-victims-savior metaphor monopolizes virtue, champions Eurocentric values, and relegates the native ‘savages’ and ‘victims’ to prehistory, Mutua captures the central ﬂaw that undermines the good intentions of the grand narrative of human rights. The enforcement of human rights,

Mutua suggests, is not far removed from the civilizing missions of colonialism, that too readily succumbs to the “impulse to possess and transform” (17).

124 The celebration of literature’s potential impact on human right’s discourse and humanitarian sentiment must be balanced by a consideration of literature, particularly the novel’s, complicity with Mutua’s grand narrative of human rights. Though

Slaughter and Hunt note the centrality of the novel to the generation of human rights discourse, it is necessary to question how literature functions outside of this discourse in order to revitalize it, returning human rights to the human element at its core. The promise of world literature is its promotion of a empathetic, cosmopolitan form of reading that is able to generate sympathy or, as Richard Rorty puts it, “expand the reference of the terms ‘our kind of people’ and ‘people like us’”(Rorty 123).17 While

Rorty maintains that sentiment must supplant the moral reasoning and rationality that

Ghosh critiques in The Circle of Reason, Farah suggests a similar limit to cosmopolitan sentiment, which forecloses the worlds of possibility that literature should open.

Farah’s work contends that, at best, this form of sentimental reading is inadequate, while, at worst, it deceptively masks larger inequalities, in the process providing the tools necessary to expand and further entrench these divisions.

Indeed, the empathetic imagination, advanced by scholars such as Richard

Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah in the form of sentimental or cosmopolitan reading, reaches its limits when its own secure position is threatened.18

Slaughter emphasizes this point when he notes that “human rights literacy projects are largely models for peacetime reading, for maintaining peace and preventing war” (“Humanitarian Reading” 92). If what Rorty labels “sentimental reading” is to

17. This quote was brought to my attention by Joseph Slaughter’s “Humanitarian Reading.”

18. See: Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” (1993); Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (1997); K.Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading” (2001).

125 intervene in war, it is likely to be channeled through the nation-state or powerful transnational organizations. Rorty begins his lecture with a reference to the then contemporary humanitarian crisis in Bosnia, suggesting the ethnic cleansing of the

Muslim population by the Serbs demonstrates a reliance on moral reason rather than moral sentiment: “The Serbs take themselves to be acting in the interest of true humanity by purifying the world of pseudohumanity” (Rorty 112). The resemblance of this project to that “of moral philosophers who hope to cleanse the world of prejudice and superstition,” demonstrates, according to Rorty, the necessity of a sentimental model that can expand the deﬁnition of the human (112). While Rorty advances his model of “sentimental education” over theories of moral reason, he acknowledges that such a model relies, however reluctantly, on the powerful to effect change:

We shall have to accept the fact that the fate of the women in Bosnia depends on whether TV journalists manage to do for them what Harriet Beecher Stowe did for black slaves, whether these journalists can make us, the audience back in the safe countries, feel that these women are more like real human beings, than we had realized (129-130).

Fully aware of the condescension of this sentimental model, Rorty nevertheless insists that a top-down, rather than bottom-up, model will be the means for achieving moral progress. Rather than use moral reason to convince the Serbs of the humanity of

Muslims, Rorty suggests a empathetic model of reading that is aimed primarily at a

Western audience that can intervene, a model that has little effect on a Serbian population that lack of security has deprived of a sentimental education. If TV journalist are able to generate the level of empathy that Uncle Tom’s Cabin did, then the resulting humanitarian intervention will necessarily rely on the global reach of

American power. Rorty’s mode of sentimental or cosmopolitan reading is unable to be

126 dissociated from the state that realizes their aims, reinforcing the savage-victim-savior triad that troubles Mutua.

Though primarily a peacetime reading model, Rorty indicates that the project of sentimental reading is a top-down project that since the end of the Cold-War has taken the form of humanitarian intervention. Sentimentality is ultimately expressed through the state, which itself is formed, in part, by the sympathetic bonds of a sentimental education. In the top-down model, the humanitarian sentiment channeled through the structure of the state is used to authorize humanitarian interventions in those nations designated as “failed states.” These efforts to craft democratic states out of state failure bypass the bottom-up, organic formation of the nation-state generated by sentiment, instead relying on ethnic, linguistic, and religious afﬁliations in an effort to ensure a stable state. This paradox is noted by Amitav Ghosh in his observations on one of the UN’s ﬁrst post-Cold War humanitarian missions in Cambodia. The UN,

Ghosh observes, in “The Global Reservation,” labors to recreate the nation-state even though “the entities that result from these efforts are clearly not nation-states in the traditional sense, since the nation-state is by deﬁnition sovereign and, so to speak, self– created––an entity that has brought itself into being” (“The Global Reservation” 421).

For Ghosh, the UN’s new role in global governance presages a troubling two-tiered system of nation-states. In the ﬁrst-tier the traditional boundaries of the nation-state

“will become increasingly blurred”, while in the other tier “those boundaries will become increasingly rigid and will serve as a mechanism for the maintenance of a pattern of global order” (421). The form of the nation state, Ghosh concludes, “so eagerly embraced by the peoples of the colonized world, as the embodiment of liberty,

127 will become, effectively, the instrument of their containment”(422). The top-down model of cosmopolitan sentiment, which Rorty suggests will extend the boundaries of the nation-state, proceeds unevenly, becoming a self-reﬂexive narrative that enhances security for one tier of states while containing the threat posed by the second tier.

While humanitarian intervention may, in the short term, restore the order and security necessary for the development of a sentimental education, they are unable to deal with larger economic and structural imbalances that threaten the long-term security of these regions. This is the contradiction highlighted by Mutua, who favors a bottom-up approach to human rights. The condescension inherent in sentimental models of reading, which Rorty acknowledges as an unfortunate necessity, troubles

Mutua, who views the patronizing SVS metaphor of human rights as intricately linked to its European ideological origins masquerading as universals. "Constructed primarily as the moral guardian of global capitalism and liberal internationalism,”

Mutua argues that “the human rights corpus is simply unable to confront structurally and in a meaningful way the deep-seated imbalances of power and privilege which bedevil our world” (Mutua 157). Left unacknowledged, the affiliations of human rights discourse that motivates humanitarian intervention promise to create the tiered system of nation-states and humanity that troubles Ghosh and Mutua. The universalizing promise of sentimental reading, like scientific rationality, becomes a self- reflexive narrative that merely confirms the humanity of the humanitarians.

The conﬂict between sentiment and reason is evident in the debates surrounding humanitarian intervention in the early nineties. In Somalia, journalists and NGOs reported a familiar, though horrifying, narrative of mass death stalking an

128 already decimated, increasingly desperate, and helpless population that has been forsaken by the rest of the world; an even graver disaster will be averted only by a more robust international humanitarian intervention. Saving the Somali population became a national moral imperative in a period where, following the Gulf War,

America was still deﬁning its post-Cold War international role. Anna Quindlen, in a

New York Times editorial “Public & Private; Somalia’s Plagues,” urged Americans to aid

Somalia because foreign intervention is “sometimes obviously the moral thing to do” (Quindlen 2). Writing in August of 1992 when the escalating hostilities of the

Bosnian War was “the center of world attention,” Quindlen is troubled by the

Eurocentrism displayed in the media’s relative neglect of the serious humanitarian crisis in Somalia (1). As the executive director of Amnesty International tells

Quindlen, this “myopic ignorance” is simply racism (2). The racial limits of America’s attention and action in international affairs threatens to expose a similar limit on the cosmopolitan potential of American hegemony. Quindlen concludes her piece with the following appeal to the American populace’s humanitarianism: “Surely our empathy can transcend race” (2). Somalia, therefore, becomes a challenge to America’s cosmopolitan vision based on an empathetic imagination that can transcend differences and impact foreign policy.

Quindlen’s attempts to summon the empathy of the American public to support a humanitarian intervention in Somalia reﬂects a wider belief in the sentimental and cosmopolitan models of reading that can overcome difference in the name of a shared humanity. As Joseph Slaughter notes in “Humanitarian Reading” these models of humanitarian sentiment are premised on the reader being able to imagine an

129 identiﬁcation with a suffering person. This form of reading, Slaughter argues, is what

Elaine Scarry has labeled “generous imagining,” a term that refers to models of humanitarian sentiment that “allow the fate of another person to be contingent on the generosity and wisdom of the imaginer” (Scarry 106). When Quindlen advocates for an empathy that will transcend race, she is expressing concern for America’s ability to do what is moral; its ability to maintain its narrative as a savior of humanity that justiﬁes its increasingly imperial ambitions. The threatened Somali population, in this narrative, is the object that will allow for the fulﬁllment of the American desire to imagine itself as a moral force promoting universal human rights.

The narrative of Somali famine was ultimately a story of American exceptionalism. When the famine narrative exhausted itself, Michael Maren notes a new story emerged; it became “an American story, a military odyssey, a failed but exciting hunt for a fugitive warlord, and then an American tragedy” (Maren 213).

After the limited success of UNITAF (United Task Force) securing the delivery of aid, the humanitarian mission shifted the American role in Somalia from securing food aid, to creating an environment for the establishment of a democratic Somali State. Under

Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council adopted resolution 814, which authorized the newly established UNOSOM II (United Nations Operations in

Somalia II) to use military force in order to help reconstruct the failed Somali state.

Considered a threat to the reconstruction of civil society after an attack on UN troops,

Mohamed Farrah Aidid became the target of a manhunt led by UNOSOM troops.

This pursuit led to the Battle of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, which resulted in the death of 18 Americans. The images of Somali mobs desecrating the corpses of some of

130 these American soldiers created a new narrative of America’s involvement in Somalia.

The well-intentioned humanitarian saviors who had become state-builders, and rogue warlord hunters, ﬁnally were seen as the victims of a savage, ungrateful, and inherently violent country. On October 7, 1993 President Bill Clinton, in a nationally televised address, announced that a gradual withdrawal from Somalia that would be completed by March 31, 1994. The national conscience that had supported the humanitarian intervention, as well as the inclusive cosmopolitanism it imagined, retreated into renewed doubts regarding America’s obligations to the global community. In his address, Clinton assures the American public that troops will stay in Somalia to long enough to guarantee that Somali children would not again “be dying in the street” while also maintaining America’s international position “to help promote peace and freedom in the post-Cold War world” (Clinton).19 The moral duty to

Somalia fulfilled, the President reflects on the heroism of the American troops that refused to retreat when the first Black Hawk helicopter went down, instead forming a perimeter and protecting American lives from intense fire: “They stayed with their comrades. That’s the kind of soldiers they are. That’s the kind of people we are.”

While acknowledging the decision to withdraw troops, Clinton’s address is careful to transform the withdrawal of troops into a testament of American morality and character; a moment deﬁning what kind of people Americans are. The focus on individual bravery further deﬂected attention from the failure of a mission that most would like to forget.

19. A transcript of President Clinton’s address can be found on the web at the “Presidential Speech Archive” of the Miller Center of the University of Virginia: Bill Clinton, “Address on Somalia (October 7, 1993).” Miller Center: University of Virginia. Web.

131 When, in 1999, Mark Bowden revisited the Battle of Mogadishu in his book

Black Hawk Down, he focused on similar acts of valor in order. As part of an effort to humanize American soldiers engaged in modern warfare, Bowden writes about the heroic brotherhood of the soldiers, rather than the futility of their mission. In the afterword 2010 edition of Black Hawk Down, Bowden notes his frustration with portrayals of war “as pure madness or soldiers as sadists, stooges, victims, or lunatics, or any combination of those things” (Bowden 358). Responding to William Finnegan’s review of Black Hawk Down in The New York Times Book Review that found the book lacking “‘the literary ﬁnesse...the black irony and high style of the best modern war reporting,’” Bowden contends his narrative style is a deliberate return to an older form of war reporting (352). Comparing his narrative style to that of the Illiad and Odyssey ,

Bowden notes that his book “was a return to an age old literary form, a story of brave men at war” (358). Regardless of the literary merit of the work, Black Hawk Down became a bestseller that spawned a ﬁlm version and a video game franchise. In its reconstruction of the Battle of Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down attempts to answer how

American troops can rationalize risking their lives for a seemingly futile mission in a remote country that had turned hostile.

The answer Bowden provides, of course, is not located in a transcendent empathy, a humanitarian vision of equality, a realized foreign policy objective, or any larger cause, but is rather located in the narrower, traditional sentiment of brotherhood that developed among the elite circle of American soldiers. In the popular ﬁlm version, this ethos is perhaps best summarized in a scene near the end of the ﬁlm after the soldiers make it back to the safety of a UN base of operations after a night pinned

132 down in the heart of Mogadishu. Resupplying himself to go back into Mogadishu to rescue more men, Sergeant First Class “Hoot” Hooten, played by Eric Bana, tells Josh

Hartnett’s Sergeant Matt Eversmann:

When I go home…and people ask me, hey Hoot? Why do you do it man? Why? You some kind of war junkie? I won’t say a god damned word. Why? Because they won’t understand…They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand, it’s about the men next to you…and that’s it…that’s all it is (Nolan 126).

Following the intensely detailed urban warfare, viscerally reproduced by director

Ridley Scott from Ken Nolan’s screenplay, Hoot’s speech is a testament to a bond more real than the imagined, cosmopolitan empathy that initiated the mission.20 The represented bond is incredibly narrow, while the medium used to convey it is extraordinarily broad. In the context of a ﬁlm that portrays a small group of men stranded in unfamiliar territory and facing a hostile enemy, survival is premised on an absolute trust that is immediately limited “the men next to you.” While the Somali’s form the most immediate population against which this brotherhood forms itself, the unsympathetic American public is the other. By so accurately recreating the battle, of course, the viewer is invited to empathize with the American forces; Hoot’s speech is an invitation for the formation of a larger, more richly imagined American community.

One of the most prominent account of the UN’s mission in Somalia therefore generates sympathy for the American forces, while the Somalis in the ﬁlm, when not dying from

20. The wartime ethos of brotherhood advocated by Hoot echoes the justification of the clan based warfare in Somalia that many have argued is responsible for the prolonged fighting. Rather than think about a broader national picture, each clan fought for the narrower cause of the family––those perceived to be closest to them in blood. The admirable acts of valor that this ethos promotes must be weighed against the myopia that forecloses potential resolutions to conflict. Trisha Stratford makes a similar analogy in Blood Money, when she notes that the Australian company Morris Catering began to operate as the Morris Clan, while the UN and American troops comprised separate clans, each pursuing their own interests.

133 starvation, are memorably represented as part of the animalistic mobs encroaching upon the downed helicopters opportunistically waiting for a chance to attack their prey.

The fact that the American troops deployed in Somalia relied on the security of an intense sense of brotherhood rather than the more capacious, empathetic imagination motivating the distanced and removed American public, is hardly surprising. The special bonds that develop between men from wartime experiences is, as Bowden indicates in his reference to Homer, a theme frequently explored in literature. More surprising is the American public’s own shift in attitude towards

Somalia and the American troops. In the process of humanizing the American humanitarians, media representations further dehumanized the Somali population.

Popular print media outlets ran a syndicated Pat Oliphant cartoon depicting an

American soldier aiding a Somali child in one frame and in the second frame that same child, with a full belly, shoots and kills the soldier (Maren 213). In Links, Farah observes a similar sentiment in the statement of an American UN military spokesman explaining the military’s withdrawal from Somalia: “‘We fed them, they got strong, and they killed us!’” (Links 262).21 In a troubling series of substitutions Oliphant and the ofﬁcial spokesman for the UN military operations equate the emaciated famine victims with the armed militias, and the armed militias in turn stand in for the whole of the

Somali people. For Americans, Bowden concludes, Somalis have “effectively written themselves off the map” (Bowden 334). In popular accounts, the failure of the

21. In the author notes of Links, Farah attributes the quote to the UN spokesman Major David Stockwell, U.S. Army, as quoted in Keith B. Richburg’s Out of America. New York: Basic Books, 1997. p. 60.

134 humanitarian mission in Somalia was placed directly on a native population that deliberately chose the devastation of war over peace, while dragging other nations into a disastrous conﬂict.

The vehemence with which this narrative of Somali ungratefulness was repeated reﬂected not only the obvious frustrations resulting from the failure of a well intentioned mission, but also the disappointed expectations of America’s post-Cold

War role as a world super power championing democracy and human rights. The geopolitical complexity of Somalia confronted the sanguine vision of America as a global police force protecting civilization and promoting human development. Bowden cites a State Department ofﬁcial who, counter to America’s ofﬁcial foreign policy, notes that Somalia marked the end of a period of post-Cold War innocence:

The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that…They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to (335).

The American experience in Somalia, the State Department ofﬁcial argues, voids the emancipatory, humanistic ideals that supported humanitarian intervention, replacing them with a more cynical view of human nature. In this vision, the Somali people, inherently violent and adhering to ancient clan structures, are to blame for the country’s continued anarchy. Though expressing a view of Somalia that is not endorsed by the State Department, the pertinence of the ofﬁcial’s comment is apparent in America’s later reluctance to intervene in Rwanda. By the time Bowden published

Black Hawk Down in 1999, the failure to prevent genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda had further diminished the humanistic promise of America’s post-Cold War hegemony. The

135 narrow scope of Black Hawk Down, which humanizes a small group soldiers at the expense of a more expansive cosmopolitan vision, reﬂected this shift in America’s perception of its role in the world. Bowden notes that Black Hawk Down “contributed to a sea change in America’s attitude about war and about soldiers,” that was solidiﬁed after the attacks of September 11th (358). The changing attitudes observed by

Bowden represent both a welcome effort by the American public to understand the human element of modern warfare, as well as an unfortunate retreat from a broader humanitarian sentiments that could transcend geography, religion, and race.

Farah, writing in this moment, must gauge a cosmopolitan vision against this ever more tightly woven “circle of the we.” Links responds to both the humanitarianism that provoked international intervention in Somalia, while further showing how this vision guided a retreat into a limited cosmopolitanism structured around a two-tiered system of nation-states that the ‘failed-state’ of Somalia threatens to undermine.

Rather than the constricting “circle of reason” that Amitav Ghosh exposes in my earlier chapter, Farah seems to suggest an equally exclusionary circle of sentiment, which continues to designate a narrow circle of “people like us” that only serves to perpetuates domination. Farah’s ﬁction should be read as a critique of the familiar empathy generating narratives that were used to justify humanitarian intervention in

Somalia. His work, furthermore, suggests a critical renegotiation of sentiment in models of cosmopolitanism and world literature. In Links, Farah refutes the empathetic imagination of his cosmopolitan audience, producing a novel that seeks to reveal the limits of such sentiment by focusing on a series of metaphorically invested corpses. This emphasis on the body, which generates and directs the action of the

136 novel, denies the notion that differences can currently be transcended by humanitarian impulses. In place of this transcendent model, Farah focuses on the body, frequently the body as corpse, and its particular afﬁliations to stress the dangers of an unreﬂective humanitarianism.

III. The Trafﬁcking of Corpses and the Logic of State Failure

I had no idea who the corpse was, and after weeks of looking at dead and maimed Somali women and children, I despised men like him who killed from the sky. Until now. Here we were on the same ground, in the blowing dirt and sour stench of fetid trash, on this nameless Somali side street where neither of us belonged, and for the ﬁrst time, it felt like it was us against them. ––Paul Watson on his iconic photo of Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland’s desecrated corpse, Where War Lives, 2007.

To re-integrate himself with worldly actuality, the critic of texts ought to be investigating the system of discourse by which the ‘world’ is divided, administered, plundered, by which humanity is thrust into pigeonholes, by which “we” are “human” and “they” are not, and so forth.––Edward Said, 1976

“Take away your corpses and leave our country!” Returning to Somalia after twenty years of exile, Jeebleh, the protagonist of Nuruddin Farah’s Links, encounters this line, scrawled on a zinc wall, as the former soldier Dajaal guides him through the streets of war-torn Mogadishu (Links 269). Recognizing the line as part of a turn of the century poem written by the poet-warrior Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan, Jeebleh takes a moment to recite the lines he memorized as a child.22 The poem arrests his conversation with Dajaal regarding the broadcast of the infamous images of the

22. The poem Jeebleh recites also forms the epigraph of Trisha Stratford’s Blood Money. Both Stratford and Farah use an identically elided form of the poem, which seems to be based off a similarly excerpted letter from Sayyid Mohammed in Said I. Samatar’s Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism (1982). The full text of the letter translated from Arabic into English, which reads less forcefully, can be found in Douglas James Jardine’s The Mad Mullah of Somaliland (1923).

137 desecration of the corpses of American soldiers during the Battle of Mogadishu “like a referee stopping a ﬁght” (270). Interrupting Jeebleh’s contentious inquiries, the line of poetry functions as a pivot to redirect the discussion to Dajaal’s granddaughter who was left brain-damaged by the updraft of an American Black Hawk helicopter.

Through Sayyid Mohammed’s line, Farah connects the iconic, widely circulated representation of the bodies of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu with the uncirculated image of a Somali infant being swept out of her mother’s arms and into the air by the updraft of an American war machine.23 The line, furthermore, joins the violence that has ravaged Somalia with a long history of

Western efforts to represent it through the ﬁgure of the corpse. In a narrative haunted by dead bodies, Farah offers a powerful mediation of how corpses establishes pronominal afﬁliations––such as the ‘your corpse’ and ‘our country’ of Sayyid

Mohammed’s line, the “us against them” of Paul Watson’s account in the epigraph–– that challenge the transcendent narrative of human rights that gets linked to state sovereignty. Recognizing the metonymic potential of the corpse, Farah’s novel offers a humanism that resists this lure by acknowledging the local and particular afﬁliations and commitments that organize human experience.

The two images linked by Sayyid Mohammed’s lines capture the representation of Somalia on an international stage: the vulnerable, human population in danger of extinction and the savage cruelty, violence, and anarchy that sets the Somali state and

23. Mark Bowden in his account of the Battle of Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down (1999), records hearing stories of infants being pulled out of their mothers’ arms by Black Hawk helicopters. These stories are conﬁrmed by Sergeant John Burns (fn.359). A diary of a member of the 160th also records, in Bowden’s words, “the phenomenon”: “the Black Hawk blew the baby out of her arms and [it] rolled down the street” (fn.360).

138 its people outside of the international community. Both establish Somalia as a catastrophe through the ﬁgure of the corpse, which has a long history in the colonial discourse regarding the country. The poem recited by Jeebleh is an oral rendition of an open letter Sayyid Mohammed, the leader of the Dervish State in Somalia, wrote to the English People following British efforts to establish a colonial protectorate in

Somaliland to secure trade routes through the Red Sea and support the colonial administration in Aden.24 Considered a peripheral colony, the minimal colonial administration focused on the coast of Somalia while attempting, in the words of an administrator, to “‘interfere as little as possible with the customs of the people, and to have them administer their own affairs’”(A.I Samatar 31). Regional politics, however, forced a treaty with the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II that preserved British ports in

Somalia, but ceded much of Western Somalia (the Ogaden) to Ethiopia. The mistreatement of the Somali population under Menelik's armies resulted in the ascendency of Sayyid Mohammed and the Dervish movement. The struggle between

Sayyid Mohammed and the British spanned the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century, during which time Sayyid Mohammed, popularly referred to in the West as the ‘Mad Mullah,’ came to signify the absolute savagery that opposed the British civilizing mission. This is best captured in reports of the treatment of the corpse of the

British commander Richard Corﬁeld who died in a battle near Dul Madoba in 1913.

Sayyid Mohammed reportedly takes an arm from Corﬁeld’s corpse as a trophy before composing a morbid ode instructing Corﬁeld how to report his death to his fellow

24. For more on administration of Somalia under the British, see Abdi Ismail Samatar’s The State and Rural Transformation in Northern Somalia 1884-1986, pg. 29-45.

139 brethren in hell. After ventriloquizing the praise and might of the Dervish army, the poem has Corﬁeld relate his bodily destruction:

Say: ‘In fury they fell upon us.’ Report how savagely their sword tore you, Show these past generations in how many places the daggers were plunged. Say: ‘“Friend,” I called, “have compassion and spare me!”’ Say: ‘As I looked fearfully from side to side my heart was plucked from its sheath.’ Say: ‘My eyes stiffened as I watched with horror; The mercy I implored was not granted.’ ... Say: ‘When pain racked me everywhere Men Lay sleepless at my shrieks.’ Say: ‘Great shouts acclaimed the departing of my soul.’ Say: ‘Beasts of prey have eaten my ﬂesh and torn it apart for meat.’ Say: ‘The sound of swallowing the ﬂesh and the fat comes from the hyena.’ Say: ‘The crows plucked out my veins and tendons.’.... (S.Samatar 176).

The grim poem forces Corfield to narrate his own bodily death and viscerally imagined dissection; it records the transmorgrification from living body, to mutilated corpse, to skeleton as animals scavenge all the flesh from his body. The poem serves as spectacular supplement to reports of the actual desecration of Corfield’s corpse by

Sayyid Mohammed’s troops, an emphatic reminder of the power of the consequences of failing to “take away your corpses and leave our country.” It is also a reminder of the corpse’s ability to reafﬁrm the pronominal afﬁliations Jeebleh witnesses as he navigates contemporary Mogadishu.

The corpse of Richard Corﬁeld serves as the site for the contested narrative of

British colonialism and Somali nationalism that continues to haunt contemporary

Western representation of Somalia and the political discourse of the ‘failed-state.’

While deemed rash in his decision to confront Sayyid Mohammed and the Dervishes,

Corﬁeld, during his short tenure in Somaliland, endeavored to establish order after

140 years of anarchy internecine ﬁghting (174). Corﬁeld’s biographer, entering however unwittingly into a poetic contest with Sayyid Mohammed, pens an ode that praises

Corﬁeld for his brave service to the empire: “May we not say that, after all, / He fell as

Englishmen should fall?” (177). The selﬂess, professional service of the British colonial administration to establish order and advance indigenous populations, are weighed against the irrational, savage, and costly violence of the “Mad Mullah.” In a

1910 article entitled “Mad Mullah Turns Again to Fanatic Slaughter,” The New York

Times reports that the effort to defeat Sayyid Mohammed “represents an expenditure in the last eleven year of $50,000,000 and 5,000 lives and a mortifying, humiliating failure without a jot of compensation” (Littleﬁeld 1). Ten years later, after the defeat of

Dervishes, a British administrator lamented the fact that twenty-one years of war with

Sayyid Mohammed left Somalia “with nothing more than a few ramshackle Ford cars,” wasting resources that could have been used to lay railroad tracks, string telegraph lines, establish public universities, and generate economic development (S.Samatar

200). In this discourse, the failure of the British colonial mission is tied to the lack of return on a sizable capital expenditure, while also indicting the colonized population for its inability to take advantage of the opportunity for development.

In linking the image of the corpse of the American soldier with the vulnerable

Somali infant through Sayyid Mohammed’s oral poetry, Farah locates contemporary representations of Somalia in colonial discourse. He establishes a chain of humanitarian development projects and capital expenditure revolving around representations of corpses that extends to the present day. The anarchy and chaos that

British colonial administrators blamed for the failure of colonial projects to establish

141 law and order is linked to the historic character of the Somali people. Responding in

1992 to the humanitarian crisis brought on by famine and civil war, the anthropologist

I.M Lewis, writing for The Sunday Times, begins his piece by recalling “a brave servant of the empire called Richard Corﬁeld” who received only a bullet in his head and place in epic poetry for his efforts “to bring order to the Somalis” (Lewis 1). “The ﬁrst thing to understand about the Somalis,” Lewis continues, “is that they are not like other men...they take orders from nobody; and their sense of independence is matched by a supreme uncentralised and fragmented degree of political organisation, a kind of ordered anarchy.” (1). As Ahmed Samatar notes in his introduction to The Somali

Challenge, Lewis’ construction of Somalis pigeonholes them as “the ultimate individualists, almost man-beasts bereft of social sensibility... mummiﬁes the Somali as a different creature programmed by primeval sociobiological gene called ‘clanism’ extrinsic in its potency and durability” (A. Samatar 7). Catherine Besteman’s

“Representing Violence and ‘Othering’ Somalia” further details how the focus on traditional clan warfare altered by modern weaponry complimented the images of famine in media reporting in the construction of Somalia as a catastrophe: “Viewing

Somalia as caught in a destructive spiral of ‘tradition’ allows us to imagine them as very different kind of human beings, to pity them, and to feel safe” (130).25 The images

25. Besteman’s 1996 essay “Representing Violence and ‘Othering’ Somalia’ initiates a testy debate with I.M. Lewis in Cultural Anthropology. After being attacked by I.M Lewis in his article “Doing Violence to Ethnography,” Besteman accuses Lewis of an orientalist construction of Somalia in “Primordialist Blinders: A Reply to I.M. Lewis.” While Lewis attributes contemporary violence to the “unchanging character” of Somalia’s clan-based social structure, Besteman and Samatar offer a more compelling model that explores how “colonialism, state-building, Cold War geopolitics, international aid, and the expanding global economy” have altered social organizations and contributed to the violence (Primordialist 109).

142 of the desecrated corpses of American soldier and the starving women and children perform complementary work in excluding Somalis from the wider human community.

Farah bridges the opposing images of savagery and vulnerability that mark the rhetoric of catastrophe by centering on the corpse. Returning to Mogadishu for the

ﬁrst time in twenty years after a near death experience in New York, Jeebleh hopes that by coming to “the city of death, he might disorient death” (Farah 5). Though he justiﬁes his return to Somalia as a pilgrimage to visit his mother’s grave, Jeebleh’s true motives for returning to Somalia remain, however elusive, tied to his own effort to understand his relationship to the disaster in his homeland, his own “culpability as a

Somali” (32). His attempt “to locate his mother’s story in the context of the bigger national narrative” is part of a larger endeavor to locate a universally human narrative in a country that has so resolutely come to signify catastrophe (29). Living in exile for two decades, Jeebleh views Somalia through the familiar lens of media accounts of catastrophe. Haunting visions of hastily buried corpses invade the comfort of his New

York home. Shortly after watching the corpse of the American Ranger being dragged through Mogadishu, he mistakes “the stump of a tree for a man buried alive, half his body in, half his body out” while walking through Central Park (32). Even when

Jeebleh arrives in Somalia to ﬁnd a patchwork administrative authority, he still envisions domestic spaces as having housed corpses. Guided into a Mogadishu apartment he walks past “a huge void, which may once have housed an elevator; who knows, Jeebleh thought with a chill, dead bodies may have once been thrown down the shaft” (79). Jeebleh’s visions of corpses are fed by the familiar construction of disaster––reports of dead littering the streets, mass-graves, and hasty burials––that

143 signify the collapse of state governance and the necessity of international humanitarian intervention.

A statement conﬁrming the disaster’s impact on the Somali psyche greets Jeebleh on his arrival in Mogadishu: “Guns lack the body of human truths!”(Farah 3). Spoken by a man who introduces himself Af-Laawe, this cryptic line forms the opening of

Links. Jeebleh understands the line to be “emblematic of civil war vocabulary,” part of an alienating culture of violence from which he attempts to quarantine himself (4).

Immediately after Af-Laawe utters this line for a second time, Jeebleh witnesses a group of armed youths at the airport shoot and kill a young boy for fun. As the youths

ﬂee triumphantly from the scene, the narrator relates, “the people moved, as one body, toward the bottom of the stairs where the corpse of the ten-year-old victim lay in a gathering pool of blood” (17). The focus in the scene turns from the violent games of the youths, to the reaction of the crowd of people in the airport who were unable to stop the violence. As the youths leave the scene of the crime, the crowd merges into

“one body” around the corpse as carrion birds and a funeral van arrive.

Jeebleh’s inclusion in the “one body” of the crowd initiates the terrifying pronominal confusion that upsets his position as the individual, rational cosmopolitan subject attempting to locate his own narrative in the larger context of the Somali national story. Arriving at his hotel suite, Jeebleh reﬂects on how civil war generates

“a multiplicity of pronominal afﬁliations, of ﬁrst-person singulars tucked away in the plural, of third-person plurals meant to separate one group from another” (41). While

Jeebleh considers this pronominal afﬁliation to be a caustic byproduct of the civil war, he observes how quickly he has been drawn into its logic:

144 Pronouns aside, he felt alienated from himself, as though he had become another person, when he witnessed the brutal murder of the ten-year-old boy earlier. Thank God, that sense of alienation lasted a mere moment or two, making him wonder whether he was not the he who had left Nairobi earlier that day. Why were the demons making him engage in a discourse of the mad, a discourse marked by pronominal detours? (Farah 42).

Witnessing the act of violence, Jeebleh loses himself for “a mere moment or two” when he instinctually moves towards the corpse of the brutally murdered boy and away from the youths celebrating their kill. Though Jeebleh expresses surprise that no one in the crowd confronts the gunmen, his admonishment extends to himself. As the novel progresses the violence in Mogadishu increasingly forces Jeebleh to adopt the discourse of pronominal detours. The momentary alienation he experiences after the young boy’s death becomes a semi-permanent state that further crystallizes with each confrontation with a corpse: the murdered boy, Jeebleh’s mother, an assassin killed in

Jeebleh’s hotel room, the American soldiers dragged through Mogadishu, and a minor warlord, among others.

This alienating pronominal confusion peaks following Jeebleh’s refusal to fund his clans efforts to purchase a pair of battlewagons and his efforts to protect a stray

Alsatian dog giving birth from being beaten by a young boy. These consecutive scenes present Jeebleh actively intervening in defense of life, but also troublingly losing himself more completely to pronominal affiliations as he defines himself, a protector of animal and human life, from those who threaten it. Ostracized as a result of moral stand against his clan elders and subsequent protection of the Alsatian bitch Jeebleh turns to Af-Laawe to better understand the dimensions of this “war of the intimates” (138). The joy experienced after Barre fled Somalia, Af-Laawe relates, was short-lived, “soon it became a matter of us and them, clan families versus clan

145 families” (138). Unable “to stand the thought of being part of this kind of schism,” Af-

Laawe returns to Alsace where his Italian wife and children live, returning to Somalia a few months after UNOSOM began (139). Carrying French papers and working for the European Union with “the vague description ‘facilitator of all things European,’”

Af-Laawe views himself as above the civil war (24). He expounds his own pronominal theory, arguing that there is a ‘we’ generation represented by the elders and a ‘me’ generation that includes he and Jeebleh: “You and I belong to the me generation.

We’re professionals with qualiﬁcations, and we can survive on our own anywhere” (139). This classic evocation of cosmopolitan identity allows Af-Laawe to successfully negotiate the vicissitudes of a war that he reframes as a “me grievance dressed in we clothing” where the “invented memories of a me are cast in an imagined we” (140). In theorizing a cosmopolitan identity, Af-Laawe further considers the way the ‘me’ gets cast into the inclusive rhetoric of the ‘we,’ all the time concealing the

“overriding loyalties” and “personal ambitions” that ground the collective we, whether it be conceived as clan, the nation, or larger transnational bodies such as the UN.

In opposing the ‘me’ generation to the ‘we’ generation, Af-Laawe constructs another, cosmopolitan collectivity able to exploit these divisions, its operation, however, appears as sinister as the clan loyalties that are destroying Somalia. Af-

Laawe takes Jeebleh’s own pronominal ﬁxation and offers a more cynical version, one that remains aloof from pronominal division while seeking personal advancement through “fair means or foul” (139). Af-Laawe, Europe’s representative in Somalia, is a character with many aliases that is reportedly making a fortune playing all sides and loyal only to money. In addition to his European Union contract, Af-Laawe is reported

146 to have “effected the disappearance” of some four million U.S. dollars from the United

Nations coffers with the aid of a Frenchman and a Norwegian, though he buried the money somewhere in Somalia to avoid giving his accomplices a cut (24). More egregious, however, are reports that the NGO Af-Laawe set up to take care of the dead, “Funerals With a Difference!,” is actually trafﬁcking human body parts. The service, which promises to bury corpses gratis, “with prayers for the soul of the dead thrown in for good measure,” is part of larger cartel run by Af-Laawe that receives funds from European charities and governments while selling organs to hospitals in the

Middle East (88). Through the ﬂow of transnational capital, the cartel effectively transforms corpses into weapons. It is these transactions that earn Af-Laawe the nickname Marabou, after the carrion eating bird. Under the auspices of a charitable organization, Af-Laawe’s transnational cartel proﬁts off the dead of the city, initiating a morbid cycle: corpses fund the purchase of weapons that produce more corpses.

While Af-Laawe’s discourse effectively mocks Jeebleh’s cosmopolitan ideals by demonstrating their foundation in another form of equally sinister pronominal affiliations, it is the corpse of a young man on Jeebleh’s balcony that reveals the critical limitations of Jeebleh’s own efforts to pursue his own narrative of discovery during his return to Somalia. Immediately following Af-Laawe’s evocation of cosmopolitan identity, the two return to the hotel to find the body of an assassin sent by the clan elders to murder Jeebleh and killed by the hotel’s security. The decision not to contribute to the cycle of violence by refusing to engage in the pronominal affiliations of clan logic results in the boy’s death but also portends retribution against the assassin’s family. While the boy’s body is quickly loaded into the vans of Af-Laawe’s

147 NGO, Jeebleh realizes his efforts to remain apart from the savagery of clan logic only perpetuates it. His quest to discover the truth about his mother’s death and the location of two kidnapped girls is fully entangled in the violence that surrounds him, while his determination to follow his own narrative brings him dangerously close to the monstrous logic of the warlords who control the city. Discussing why Af-Laawe, despite his millions, remains in Somalia, Seamus, an Irish aid worker, theorizes that

“he’s his own story now, and too big a man to lose himself in other people’s ﬁbs, or to care about them...and he’ll wind up dead” (220). Similarly, the American in Charge

(AIC) of the UN mission “became his own story,” in the process “behaving very much like StrongmanSouth (Mohamed Farrah Aidid), whom he meant to expose” (221). It isn’t that these men are evil or monstrous, but simply, Seamus explains, that they are banal (221). The AIC, Seamus tells Jeebleh, conformed to type, believing in his own good intentions and therefore unable to observe his own entanglements.

This focus on individual narratives that parade as universals is exposed by

Jeebleh’s investigation into the affective power of the corpse. The activity of “Funerals with a Difference” relies on a steady supply of corpses and it is this supply that

Jeebleh threatens to interrupt with his plots to locate the body of his mother and to

ﬁnd the kidnapped children Raasta and Makka. According to Shanta, Raasta’s mother, the two girls were kidnapped to initiate violence that would proﬁt the cartel: “the cartel’s source of corpses will dry up if Raasta is back in circulation” (210). Before their kidnapping the two girls were miracle children: “Everyone congregated around them, loving them. The girls helped the others cope with the stormy weather of clan politics” (163). Raasta is a precocious child with an aptitude for language intimating

148 care, while Makka, a child with Down syndrome, “communicates boundless, generous love” (161). Makka, belonging “to no clan and to no one but herself,” has the habit of repeating the stock phrase “Aniga, anigoo ah!,” which Farah translates as “I myself am!” or rendered into the more familiar phrase, “Me, Myself, I!” (162). Makka’s insistent use of the singular pronoun is contrasted to the easy slide of the first person singular into the collective ‘we’ that troubles Jeebleh when talking with Af-Laawe. Moreover, the circularity of Makka’s phrase, “I myself am!” avoids the very problematic of self- definition in the first place, resting the definition of the “I” simply in the verb ‘to be’ and locating Makka’s sense of herself in her existence and continued survival in the world.

Structured around Dante’s Inferno, the novel leads Jeebleh to confront a series of dead in his tour through the “city of death,” forcing him to reevaluate the entanglements that deﬁne his own story. Though Jeebleh returns to Somalia opposing the abstract ideals of human rights to the barbaric clan-based violence found in

Mogadishu, the novel demonstrates through its trafﬁcking of corpses the pronominal afﬁliations structuring both discourses. In the absence of a transcendent project or truth to organize his own narrative, Jeebleh struggles with the possibilities and hazards of his imbrication with “a tarry of other people’s tales, each with its own

Dantean complexity” (Links 331). Recognizing the metonymic signiﬁcance of the corpses in the formation of the pronominal afﬁliations that threaten his cosmopolitan identity, Jeebleh is nevertheless forced to acknowledge his own links while seeking to resist their symbolic function. At the conclusion of the novel Jeebleh refuses a larger narrative to emerge from his experience: “His story was not an exemplar to represent

149 or serve in the place of others: it wouldn’t do to separate his from those informing it, or to rely solely on it for moral and political ediﬁcation” (331). Jeebleh resists the urge to become his own story, though his hasty departure from Mogadishu indicates the difﬁculty of sustaining this resistance.

The ﬁgure of corpse in Farah performs the uncanny work of linking an individual to a larger community in which, citing Farah’s epigraph taken from Freud’s

“On Narcissism,” “he is a link in a chain which he serves against his will or at least independently of his will” (Links viii). The response to the corpse in Farah’s novel signifies the acknowledgment of the role of the inhuman, that which cannot be accounted for by human reason, in the formation and continued adhesion of human communities. Jeebleh enters the “City of Death” haunted by the images of corpses, disseminated by the media, that have come to be associated with Somalia. In response to the brutality, chaos, and anarchy of clan politics, he endeavors to preserve the neutrality of his personal fact-finding mission, placing critical reason as the guarantor of rights as opposed to humanitarian sentiment. Confronted by a series of actual corpses in the novel, however, Jeebleh is wrenched from this neutral position and viscerally forced to recognize his own pronominal affiliations that structure his location in the larger social body. The corpse, Farah theorizes, functions as a powerful metonymic signifier that not only forms affiliations, but also reveals the often occluded affiliations that allow groups to cohere. The corpses in Links create an affective response that forces not only a recognition of the limits of Jeebleh’s reason, but also a realization of the inability of sentiment to transcend difference. Rather, in the novel humanitarian sentiment conceals the powerful affiliations that reaffirm themselves,

150 creating an exclusionary circle of sentiment. Farah demonstrates the danger of humanitarian sentiment conﬁrming its own narrative through the character of Af-

Laawe and the AIC. Farah’s novel implies that pronominal affiliations are not a product of catastrophes such as the famine and civil war in Somalia, but rather are a reflection of a larger international affliction that gets concealed in the transcendental humanism witnessed in the human rights discourse of the UN or the policing of international bodies and transnational capital. Humanitarian sentiment alone cannot supplement Jeebleh’s reason, rather when confronted with the series of corpses sentiment and reason cede to a visceral component of identity, an affect outside of sentiment or reason. The corpses represented in the novel reveal the basis of the pronominal logic undergirding universalizing discourse that Farah offers as an alternative vision of humanism that emphasizes the human as emerging from its situation in the inhuman world, while further asserting a need to understand how local, particular affiliations construct abstract, universal ideals.

IV: Blood, Body, and the State

In the consistent orientation of his ﬁction around the body, particularly the corpse,

Farah has argued for a better understanding of how the inhuman force field structures our affiliations, a project that has changed dramatically along with the shape of global governance and world literature since 1989. The state that mediates between death and narrative in Farah’s earlier trilogy Blood in the Sun is absent in Past Imperfect, necessitating a reevalution of the function of fiction to imagine alternative worlds.

Before concluding with some thoughts on how Farah reorients his ﬁction to serve as a critique of modern forms of global governenance, I ﬁrst demonstrate how Farah’s

151 earlier ﬁction narrates not only the exclusions of the nation-state, but also the human’s incorporation in the state that is fully revealed in the narratives that surround the corpses in Blood in the Sun and that are lacking in Past Imperfect.

Peter Hitchcock has suggested that the adage “One corpse, three living secrets,” whose variations open and close Secrets, indicates the structural force behind Farah's

Blood in the Sun trilogy (Secrets 279). The death of Magaclaawe, the foundling, that occurs precisely midway through the trilogy, generates the possibility of the three volumes of secrets produced around his corpse (Hitchcock 136). The foundling is just one of the corpses that orient the Blood in the Sun trilogy, grounding the novels in a meditation of how human communities form and adhere. In Maps, the novel Derek

Wright labeled “the ﬁrst African novel of the body,” it is the corpses of his biological and adoptive mother that fascinate the protagonist Askar, grounding the understanding of his body (Wright 118). Many critics have noted Farah’s detailed attention to the body in Maps, while reading the novel as an extended national allegory.

For critics such as Simon Gikandi, the body is instrumental to Farah’s “deconstruction of the naturalized Somali idea,” revealing the author’s “ambivalences towards the idea of nationhood”(Gikandi 462). In “The Politics and Poetics of National Formation,”

Gikandi suggests that the body in Maps is a location capable of transcending the linguistic, ethnic, and gender differences that separate Askar from his surrogate mother Misra. As a site of identity formation, Gikandi argues that an identity emerging from the body is capable of imagining the nation outside of the ofﬁcial patriarchal and biological parameters that “can only be achieved at the expense of human bodies whose collective desires the state claims to represent” (464). In Gikandi's reading, the

152 human body functions as a site capable of transcending the inhuman force of the state.

This reading, however compelling, ignores the intimate connection between the body and death developed in the novel. The living body, Maps suggests, can only be understood in relation to its death, its imbrication in, rather than transcendence from, the inhuman forces of the modern state.

The body is a highly contested site in Maps, the location of a struggle between the inhuman and human forces that structure life. Critics have often turned to the first part of the novel where Askar’s own body comes into being through its relationship to the body of his surrogate mother, Misra, for whom he becomes a “third leg” or “third breast” (Maps 24).26 These readings productively emphasize the difficulty of fixing the boundaries between self and other, and, by extension, the boundaries between national and ethnic identities in the novel. While these readings focus on how the body functions as a means of destabilizing seemingly fixed identities in Maps, they neglect the bodies imbrication in the inhuman force field of the state, the geopolitical realities of cartography. In an effort to teach Askar what constitutes Somali identity, Uncle

Hilaal distinguishes between ethnic and national identity. After declaring that Somali identity “‘is one shared by all Somalis, no matter how many borders divide them,’”

Hilaal clariﬁes that cartography imposes a critical difference between these populations (174). “‘The Somali in the Ogaden, The Somali in Kenya both,’” Hilaal tells Askar, “‘because they lack what makes the self strong and whole, are unpersons’” (175). Much like the refugees in Ghosh’s Lalpukur or the transnational

26. See: Rhonda Cobham, “Misgendering the Nation: African Nationalist Fictions and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps.” pp. 48-57; Frances Ngaboh-Smart, “Nationalism and the Aporia of National Identity in Farah’s Maps.” pp. 92-96; Francesca Kazan, “Recalling The Other Third World: Nuruddin Farah’s Maps.” pp. 253-267.

153 migrants of The Circle of Reason in al-Ghazira personhood in Maps is conveyed by the protections afforded by the state. Though the body may be an alternative means of constituting identity, Farah suggests that it cannot escape its inscription within the state. While the early parts of the novel explore Askar and Misra’s relationship through the body, the novel's progression suggests the body is critically situated within the inhuman regime of the cartographically deﬁned and recognized state.

Though much critical attention has been paid to Askar’s bodily relationship with

Misra, it is important to note that this relationship is ultimately mediated by the state.

Tellingly, the ﬁnal section of the novel opens with a passage from Romans 7:24: “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Maps 205). Excerpted from one of the most critically contested chapters in Romans, Farah’s epigraph is Paul’s ﬁnal lament after recognizing his inability to free himself from the dictates of carnal desires. For

Paul, his body frustratingly remains subject to the laws of death and sin, even as his mind and spirit are dedicated to the law of God. The materiality of his body ties Paul to the ﬂesh that he desires to transcend. Critically, Paul asserts that though Christ’s death generates a new law of the spirit, the body remains subject to the old laws of the state that binds him to death.27 The “body of this death” imposes itself on Askar through the taste of blood in his otherwise clear saliva. Unable to authoritatively claim control over his body––“I couldn’t say, ‘This is I. This is my body’”–– Askar wonders:

“had I underestimated my body? Was it seceding from me, making its own

27. “Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without law sin was dead. For I was alive without law once: but when commandment cam, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death” (King James Bible, Romans 7-9).

154 autonomous decisions, was my body forming its own government, was it working on its own, independent of my brain, of my soul?” (233). While Askar fears that his body has become an alien force overthrowing his self-governance, Uncle Hilaal, embraces the maxim “truth is body,” reﬂecting that sex provides a model of “a body that rules the mind––I almost said man” (236). Whether treated as a threat to individual sovereignty, as Askar imagines it, or as a welcome release from thought, ascribed only to the masculine body, per Hilaal, the body retains its power to alienate, to forcefully subject individuals to its own imperatives.

Though the body is figured as a disruptive source of otherness in Maps, Farah endeavors to embrace its uncertainty. Askar tastes blood in his saliva––"which is another manner of saying that I tasted someone else’s death inside of me”–– late in the novel after he learns of Misra’s disappearance (86). Mystified by the forceful reassertion of his body, Askar admits to Uncle Hilaal that he has become “obsessed with ‘bodies’––human bodies, that is, my body, Misra’s, etc. I admitted that I could find an even subterranean link between bodies and Misra’s disappearance” (Maps 233). The nature of this ‘subterranean link’ is ambiguous, though Hilaal immediately perceives that it is a manifestation of Askar's unconscious. Hilaal further buries this link by immediately referencing the work of “Freud, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, Marx and Fraser,” as well as, “‘body poetesses’ like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and ‘body novelists’ like

Toni Morrison and Günter Grass” (233). Hilaal’s intellectual discourse, his endless

‘for examples,’ citations, and references––though reading like many critical responses to Maps and, indeed, Farah’s own epigraphs to his novels––only overwhelm Aksar, masking the urgency of his own bodily senses with the words of others. Askar

155 therefore refuses “to read and know thoroughly everything these ‘men’ had written about one’s relationship with one’s body, mind, sub-or unconscious,” suggesting his link can be understood outside of this inherited framework (234). Farah, however, clearly envisions Maps as responding to and reorienting these discussions about the body and mind. In a novel that chronicles men and women suffering inhuman abuses to their living and dead bodies, Farah does not offer the body as a site of transcendent possibility as some critics have argued, but rather as the location for the recognition of the inhuman elements that guarantee humanness.

While Hilaal offers a psychoanalytic reading of Askar’s ‘subterranean link,’

Farah indicates the limits of this reading, suggesting a more expansive reading that emphasizes the connection between bodies, understood in the plural, and the cause of

Misra’s disappearance. Though Hilaal, along with many readers, assume Askar is referring to the links between his and Misra’s body that has been established since the beginning of the novel, Askar’s language indicates a less intimate understanding of the

“subterranean link between bodies and Misra’s disappearance” (233). These bodies, no longer referring simply to Askar’s body, indicate both a larger concept of the body as well as the collection of bodies presented in the novel as mangled, mutilated, and sacriﬁced in the Ogaden War. This mass of bodies include the six-hundred and three men, women, and children that Askar believes died due to Misra’s betrayal, which may be the most immediate link to her disappearance. The ‘subterranean link’ that gets readily associated with the subconscious further expands in meaning, referring not only to a connection buried in the recesses of Askar’s mind, but also the routing of this link through the realm of death, the taste of blood in Askar’s saliva. The subterranean

156 link joining Misra’s disappearance and Askar’s obsession with bodies, I would suggest, is located in their respective relationship to the Somali state, which critically determines the bodies that matter.

The union between Askar and Misra’s bodies ruptures during the Ogaden War, when Askar prepares his body to serve in the Somali army. Askar’s body thwarts these efforts, vomiting up the excessive food meant to fuel its growth. Askar is further betrayed by his body when he awakens to ﬁnd blood covering his sheets and groin. In response to Misra’s suggestion that he has menstruated and her jokes about his

‘womanhood,’ Askar becomes more determined to tame his body’s unruliness in order to become a “man ready to die and kill for his mother country, a man ready to avenge his father” (110). His unruly body must be disciplined and controlled in order to be sacrificed for Somalia. “What’s a body for?” Askar asks: “To worship God? To have sex, have children?” (234). The answer, for Askar, appears to be located in connecting the body with sacrifice. At the end of the novel , following Salaado’s prompt to consider the meaning of “ ‘Sac-ri-fice’,” Askar reflects on the word:

Sac-ri-fice! For Misra––a mastectomy; Hilaal––a vasectomy; Salaado–– removal of the ovaries; Qorrax––the exaction of blood, so many ounces a- bleeding; Karin––a life of sacrifices; Arla and Cali-Xamari––his parents–– their lives; the Somali people––their sons, their daughters and the country’s economy. In short, life as sacrifice. In short, life is blood, and the shedding of one’s blood for a cause and for one’s country; in short, life is the drinking of enemy blood and vengeance (257).

While critics have read the bodily losses of Misra, Hilaal, Salaado, and the others listed by Askar in this passage as mirroring the dismemberment of the Somali national body after the Ogaden war, Farah appears more interested in the challenging the idea of

157 sacrifice than in the allegorical significance of these character’s sacrifices.28 Through his slow, repeated pronunciation of the word “sac-ri-fice” Askar attempts to familiarize

“the senses of his body with what his mind already knows” (257). In a series of analogies, Askar suggests life as sacrifice, blood, and finally vengeance. While the third person narration of the passage grants some authority to Askar’s reading of sacrifice, there are reasons to be skeptical of the power that Askar’s mind is capable of asserting over his body.29 In contrast to the expansive notion of sacrifice held by

Salaado, Askar perverts sacriﬁce into vengeance, losing his sense of self in the process.

“Who is Askar?” he questions immediately following his reflection on sacrifice that promised to align his mind and body. Askar’s metaphysical uncertainty precedes the arrival of two police officers who ask a variant of the same question before taking

Askar to a nearby police station to inquire after his role in Misra’s death. This questioning prompts the narrative of Maps, returning us to the novel with particular attention to the concepts of the body, sacriﬁce, and blood that, misinterpreted, lead to

Askar’s betrayal of Misra.

In Askar’s final reflections, sacrifice becomes analogous with life, blood, and, critically, vengeance. By retaining the ability to sacrifice his own life, Askar reserves

28. Derek Wright offers such a reading: “These truncations seem to signify, allegorically, both the dismemberment of the Ogaden and the further fragmentation of the territories of Greater Somalia” (‘Mapping Farah’s Fiction’ 120). Charles Sugnet provides a similarly allegorical reading of the mutilation of Misra’s body in “Deterritorialization and the ‘Postmodern’.” (Sugnet 534).

29. The alteration of the narrative voice between three personal pronouns has been noted in many critical responses to Maps. Rhonda Cobham offers the most inﬂuential reading of the pronominal shifts in “Misgendering the Nation: African Nationalist Fictions and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps.” She argues that the pronouns correspond with the “voices of judge, witness, and audience” that are revealed at the conclusion of the novel (Cobham 49). The third person singular ‘he’ “seems to correspond to the perspective of an elusive audience” that is able to move across the narrative making important connections “that often go well beyond the realm of the protagonist’s immediate experience” (51). The third person singular narration appears the most neutral of the narrative voices.

158 the right to take another’s. Associating life with sacriﬁce, Askar suggests that life becomes grounded in the ability to take the life of others in a violent circuit that Farah aims to short, by demonstrating that the blood that is the “vitality of life” and “the essence of one’s being” is linked to a broader world where this same concept of blood signiﬁes annihilation (31). When Misra requests to see a shark on a planned trip to the ocean, Salaado reads her desire as a sign of Misra’s capacious imagination that “is larger than the world of which she isn’t an integral part” (200). Considering this desire, Salaado wonders, “Does Misra expect her seeing a shark will remind her of a larger cosmos, a much more aggressive universe, one in which blood is not a life-force but that of death and self-destruction?” (201). After Misra’s vicious treatment as an outsider during the war, she needs no external reminder of the destructive force of blood. Her status as a non-integral part of the world she inhabits is a direct result of her lack of Somali blood, her native Amharic tongue, and her gender, all of which establish her as the scapegoat for Somalia’s failure to maintain possession of the

Ogaden. Askar’s inability to recognize the dehumanizing sacriﬁces demanded of Misra blind him to the signiﬁcant death and destruction that maintain the life-force of his blood. While blood is understood as guaranteeing the vitality of life, Askar’s desire to tie identity to blood paradoxically diminishes its life-force.

Such a reduction of vitality through distillation and concentration is suggested by the “blood in the sun” of the trilogy’s title. In the ﬁnal novel of the trilogy Nonno, the aged family patriarch, constructs a metaphor for his daughter-in-law Damac around the camel, which, he observes, “stores its water neither in its humps nor in its stomach but in its blood” (Secrets 172). Although she is unable to fuly grasp Nonno’s “water-in-

159 the-camel’s blood” allegory, Damac contributes to its formation when she compares her son Kalaman’s name to a sheet of water:

It is as though you are approaching the source of aqueous matter, and the mere thought gives you energy, making you invest all your will in pushing through the heat haze until you reach the coveted bio, the source of life, water. In a mirage, though, despite the nearness of bio (the word means water in Somali), the vapor retreats the closer you get to it, moving farther and farther from you, making you suicidally thirstier (170).

Building upon Damac’s naming metaphor, Nonno offers the ﬁgure of a camel in the desert whose consuming thirst has rapidly depleted the store of water in its blood.

This story of the camel in the desert, Nonno suggests, is “emblematic of a wider parabolic meaning,” figuring the madness of the collapsing Somali state that has become suicidally thirsty (172). Clannish affiliations further distill blood, diminishing its bios in the pursuit of the mirage of purity. Though Nonno’s riddle frustrates Damac, she nevertheless integrates the metaphor into her own worldview, stating a few pages later that her “visceral distrust” of blackmailers is “tucked away in the unreachable niches of the water in my blood” (178). The source of Damac’s visceral response is not found in her blood, but rather in the external and inorganic compound that vivifies her blood. The vital presence of water in blood challenges Askar assertion that blood is synonymous with life, country, and sacrifice. Rather, Farah suggests that there is an external, inorganic, and inhuman element securing the human. Efforts, such as

Askar’s, to transcend this inorganic element enervate blood in a misguided desire to distill it.

Extending Nonno’s metaphor of the rapidly depleting water in the camel’s blood, Farah’s Blood in the Sun suggests the necessity of recognizing the inhuman forces that constitutes human life. The inhuman force ﬁeld of the state, Farah suggests, is

160 responsible for producing the humanizing effects that are absent in Askar’s equation of blood with life. As a child Askar predicts that only in Misra’s death could she and he be united: “only in death, her death, could she and I be related, only then would I somehow feel as though we were a mother and a son” (Maps 38). This childhood prophecy proves correct as Misra’s death forces the state to recognize them both as subjects under its laws. It is Misra’s mutilated corpse, incorporated into the state, which generates the narrative of Maps. After overhearing a conversation between two nurses in a market about “‘the corpse of a woman, black as dead shark,’” Salaado reclaims Misra’s body: “‘I rushed straight to the hospital, found a doctor I knew and went, with him, to the mortuary. It was Misra––a corpse no one claimed. She had been reduced to that’” (254). Though she desires to claim Misra’s corpse, granting it its proper identity and preparing it for burial, Salaado is concerned about the

“bureaucratic, political and other complications” that will result from her acknowledgment of Misra’s body (252). Hilaal explains the difﬁculty over what to do with the body to Askar: “But we could not deny that she existed, that she was who she was…er…to you, that she became whom…er…you had suspected her to have become and that you are to us…er…who you’ve been––a son” (252). Eyed through the potential involvement of the state, Misra’s corpse forces an uncomfortable acknowledgment of the links joining Askar to Misra and Misra to Hilaal and Salaado.

Her death functions to inscribe in the state a previously unrecognizable relationship that had placed Misra, as an Amhara refugee that Hilaal had previously named an

“unperson,” outside of the Somali nation. Despite Hilaal and Salaado’s efforts to bribe the mortuary technicians into silence, the evidence of her mutilated corpse prompts

161 Somali authorities to question Askar. Askar’s response to police questioning in the

ﬁnal scene of Maps is the ﬁgurative beginning of the narrative that compromises the novel. It is over Misra’s corpse that Askar generates the tripartite structure of the narrative.

Rather than defining life in opposition to death, Maps offers a model of life emerging out of death that reorients the concept of sacrifice by locating the human ultimately in the inhuman field of the state. Thomas Laqueur in “Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the Making of ‘Humanity’” argues that the definition of the human has, increasingly been centered in death. Borrowing the term “the circle of the

‘we’” from David Hollinger, Laqueur defines the circle as “that category of creatures to whom we ascribe rights and whom we feel obligated to treat decently to help if their rights have been abrogated” (Laqueur 35). This circle of the we, Laqueur asserts, has critically expanded in the last two centuries to include the dead. The challenge for sympathy, he notes, was not if sympathy could be extended to the suffering individual, but whether they could be pulled into “the circle of the ‘we’” after death. As part of a new biopolitical rule based on care, the dead were brought into the narrative of the living. The power of narrative, Laquer argues, is its ability to expand the ‘circle of the we’ to include the dead, previously displaced figures. In Maps this possibility for narrative exists in part because of its guarantee in the state. Though humanitarian narratives seek to expand the ‘circle of the we’ post-1989, Farah demonstrates the seemingly unconscious, inhuman affiliations that are generated around the figure of the corpse limit this movement in Past Imperfect.

162 The acknowledgment of such afﬁliations is characteristic of the “new world novel” that Debjani Ganguly argues has appeared “at the intersection of post-1989 geographies of violence, hyperconnectivity through advances in information technology, and the emergence of a new humanitarian sensibility in a context where suffering has a presence in everyday life through the immediacy of digital images” (Ganguly 145). In “Deathworlds, the World Novel and the Human,” Ganguly considers how the human is ﬁgured in the “new world novel” that is responding to alterations in the theorization of sympathy and sovereignty, concepts that have long been considered the foundation of the English novel. Building on the reconsiderations of modern sovereignty in Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” and Cheah’s Inhuman

Conditions, Ganguly asserts that the contemporary world novel responds to the increasing difﬁculty of theorizing “the ‘human’ in transcendental terms as the realm of reason, imagination, dignity, and freedom” by recognizing the immanence of the inhuman in the human (151). In the effort to combat the dehumanizing processes of globalization, Cheah observes that theorists have turned to cosmopolitanism and human rights as the primary means of “ﬁguring the global as the human” (Cheah 3).

Noting the discourse of self-alienation that characterizes accounts of globalization, however, Cheah rejects those versions of cosmopolitanism and human rights that deﬁne the inhuman “as a ﬁnite limit of man, a defective feature of human existence that is not proper to the true end of man but that we have thus far failed to control” (2).

Such discourses, Cheah suggests, compare phenomena such as “commodiﬁcation, technology, totalitarian domination, and the like…to animals or ghosts, associate them with death, and characterize them as subhuman precisely because they are improper to

163 us and must be overcome or transcended if we are to actualize the freedom that is our due” (2). While this notion of the human underpins contemporary understanding of globalization, Cheah asserts that the vicissitudes of globalization necessitate a further, radical rethinking of the human that questions the pre-comprehension of humanity “as the bearer of dignity, freedom, sociability, culture, or political life, and therefore as an ideal project that needs to be actualized” (3). The ‘new world novel,’ Ganguly suggests, is a critical site for this project of rethinking the human in the wake of globalization.30 Responding to the instantly accessible spectacles of violence and suffering, Links reﬂects a new humanitarian sensibility that attempts to conceptualize the human within “the inhuman force ﬁeld of global capitalism and its war machines” (Ganguly 147).

In Links, Farah demonstrates the inhuman force field, the warlords and “market forces” that determine the continued devastation of Somalia at the hands of a global economy (Links 154). These forces become more explicit in Crossbones, the final novel of the Past Imperfect trilogy, whose title refers to both the poison fed to Somalia by larger transnational organizations in pursuit of capital and the piracy that originates from the toxic deathworld this poison has created. The novel relates the exploitation of nation that has been almost two decades without a functioning government. Without a recognized government, international corporations have sent super tankers filled with toxic waste to dump off the Somali coast, killing off the fish remaining after

30. Ganguly argues that Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006) and Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2003) represent two distinct approaches toward relocating the human in the ‘new world novel.’ “While Courtemanche’s novel brings to the fore the immanence of the inhuman in the human,” Ganguly asserts, “McEwan’s Saturday plays out the liberal fantasy of the transcendence of the inhuman through the exercise of a moral imagination grounded in reason, ethical care and respect for the other” (Ganguly 153).

164 international trawlers had already decimated the stock in Somali waters. Heavy weaponry passes through the unprotected Somali waters en route to unstable African regions, such as Sudan, where they will further incite civil war. Somali pirates terrorize the international imagination while more sinister forms of international piracy remain unreported. The devastation of the sea corresponds to the poisoning of the Somali body with the drug qaat exported from neighboring countries, and the poisoning of the mind by Islamic fundamentalism funded by al-Qaeda. Caught in the web of competing international interests, Somalia remains a means to an end, its population afforded few of the rights enshrined in the UN Charter. In Crossbones the heroes from the earlier novel have become displaced, ineffective, or murdered: Jeebleh deliberately remains on the periphery of the narrative, quickly departing Mogadishu for Nairobi; the strong-willed Cambara of Knots is unable to function under the rule of the Islamic

Courts of al-Shabaab and the burden of taking care of the frail Bile; Seamus no longer lives in Somalia. Most alarmingly, Dajaal, the experienced soldier whose quiet sacriﬁce is the foundation for the narratives of all three novels, is betrayed and murdered along with his grandson and heir apparent Qasiir. Farah’s pessimism is further reﬂected in the Somali youth who seemingly no longer possess a will of their own; readily giving themselves to violence in return for the material wealth promised from piracy or the spiritual rewards promised by Islamic fundamentalist terror campaigns. Jeebleh, whose empathy for all forms of life at the outset of Links opposed a respect for life to politics, now tells his son-in-law: “Politics is a living thing, and you can never tell with living things…Living things kill or are killed; they walk away, they change alliances; they bite, they are crushed underfoot. Lice or not, living things are the darkness upon

165 the face of the deep” (Crossbones 112). Contradicting the chronology laid out in ﬁrst book of Genesis, Jeebleh suggests that living things were the very darkness that existed before God gave form to the earth; before God separated light from darkness and recognized the light’s goodness. Life, Jeebleh argues, predates this division; the formless abyss of the deep remains at the core of every being. This darkness is an inhuman otherness that cannot be transcended, but must be recognized in order to read its effects.

In the pessimistic conclusion to the Past Imperfect trilogy, Crossbones, Farah demands the recognition of the toxic, inhuman force ﬁeld of politics that relegates

Somalia to the doomed status of a terminally failed state, isolated from the international community through afﬁliations that are obscured in the discourse of transnational humanitarianism. In demanding the recognition of these links, however,

Farah does not suggest a narrow communitarianism, but rather establishes the grounds for the recognition of what Judith Butler has called “a ‘common’ corporeal vulnerability” (Butler 42). In Precarious Life Butler is careful not to posit this bodily vulnerability as a new basis for humanism, noting that the recognition of vulnerability is contingent on norms of recognition: “if vulnerability is one precondition for humanization, and humanization takes place differently through variable norms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject” (43). Though images of a vulnerable population may generate empathy and provoke a humanitarian response, the recognition of such vulnerability only acknowledges certain populations as human subjects. Without the state, the human has few means of recognition. The

166 state that existed in Maps, able to recover Misra’s corpse and provide her with the narrative and national afﬁliations she lacked in life, no longer functions in the

Mogadishu of Links and the ﬁnal novels of Past Imperfect. In the contemporary

Mogadishu of these novels only humanitarians are capable of sacriﬁce, while the

Somali dead are, the novel suggests, at best buried hastily without an autopsy. The

figure of the corpse reveals the exclusions and limitations of the state, but also of a global community that has excluded Somalia from the global bios, which Cheah defines as “a system of means and ends in which the contribution of each member is reciprocated with benefits and rewards that are not merely monetary” (Cheah 201).

Like the bios in Farah’s Secrets, the global bios guarantees life but continues to recede

“the closer you get to it”(Secrets 106). The body that questions the power and scope of state sovereignty in Maps interrogates the assumptions that ground the forms of global sovereignty that have resigned Somalia to state failure in Links and the remainder of

Past Imperfect.

In Past Imperfect Nuruddin Farah continues the evaluation of the role of the body and narrative in organizing collective experience, a process that he begins in his earliest novel From a Crooked Rib and becomes a centerpiece of Blood in the Sun. A chronicler of Somali history, Farah’s ﬁction has necessarily broadened in scope; the critique of the Barre regime in Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship expands to include the nationalist discourse in Blood in the Sun as the weakened Barre government verged on collapse. In these earlier novels the body of women, refugees, and other marginalized populations demonstrate the paradoxical exclusions of the

Somali state while showing narrative’s capacity to imagine a role for them within the

167 state. While critics have read the body as a site that transcends the differences inscribed by the state, these reading ignore how the human body in Farah’s early

fiction is enmeshed in the inhuman forces of the state. With the collapse of the Barre government and the continued failure of the Somali state, Farah confronts a different world in Past Imperfect. While Misra’s corpse founds the narrative of Maps, no such act occurs in Links, where the Somali state no longer exists, replaced by a series of international agencies, NGOs, and opportunistic capitalist enterprises. Farah therefore turns to the corpse to demonstrate the limits of humanitarian sentiment which, despite its promise to transcend national, linguistic, religious, and racial barriers, both masks affiliations and reaffirms deeper structural inequalities.

In place of the exclusion of scientific rationality and developmental progress masquerading as universals in Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, Farah explores the limits of universal humanitarian sentiment in guaranteeing an affective global community through the representation of the corpses that have set Somalia outside of circle of humanity. While Farah demonstrates that the circle of sentiment can be as exclusionary as the reason of Ghosh’s novel, he further considers how the long form of postcolonial fiction can counter contemporary representations of the global, offering alternative means of situating the human in the world and for speculating about the future. This concern with how to ethically represent the struggles of the present while reorienting our perception of the future links Farah’s concerns with Rohinton Mistry, the subject of my final chapter. Though Mistry’s realist fiction is often contrasted to the more formally and thematically experimental work of Farah and Ghosh, it offers an equally compelling site for exploring how postcolonial, transnational authors portray

168 the limits of the translation project of the novel through their representation of the body. While Richard Rorty offers sentimental, realist narratives from Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe as a model of literature’s affective potential, for Mistry, the realist novel as a guarantor of global humanitarian sentiment is premised on a set of local sacriﬁces and exclusions surrounding the body that must be acknowledged before the novel can perform the necessary affective work to imagine a shared future.

169 CHAPTER 3–“No Longer at Ease”: The Dis- Eased Body in Rohinton Mistry’s Fiction

I. Introduction: The Present Journey

At the opening of Rohinton Mistry’s 1991 novel, Such a Long Journey, Gustad Noble anxiously waits for the arrival of the morning edition of The Times of India, relishing the predawn darkness that “made everything seem clear and well-ordered” (Mistry 6).

Caressing the arms of the chair in which he sits, “Gustad remembered the sign on the store, he could see it even now. Clearly, as though it is a photograph before my eyes:

Noble & Sons, Makers Of Fine Furniture, and I also remember the ﬁrst time I saw the sign–too young to read the words, but not to recognize the pictures that danced around the words” (6). Gustad’s touch of the furniture generates a photographic image that carries Gustad to his youth, while transporting the reader into Gustad’s mind through a sudden shift in narrative voice that has Gustad listing the pieces of furniture that surrounded the familiar name on the sign: “A glass fronted cabinet with gleaming cherry-coloured wood; an enormous four-postered canopy bed; chairs with carved backs and splendidly proportioned cabrioles, a profoundly digniﬁed black desk” (6).

Harkening back to the memory of the lost furniture workshop and store––more particularly, its signage––Gustad produces the detailed images of furniture that appears to ground his sense of self prior to his inheritance of the Noble name. When

170 less pleasant thoughts intrude, Gustad pushes them out of his mind until “once again, the furniture from his childhood gathered comfortingly about him. The pieces stood like parentheses around his entire life, the sentinels of his sanity”(6). This listing of objects secures Gustad’s identity; the furniture bookends his life, granting it a comforting coherence grounded in a mythologized past that extends into a desired future. This future is ﬁgured in Gustad’s son Sohrab, whose entrance exam results, contained in the awaited newspaper, are the cause of Gustad’s early morning reverie.

This focus on both the past and future, however, appears to foreclose the concerns of the present. The exclusions of the present necessary to maintain this comforting realm of darkness is apparent with the arrival of The Times of India, which interrupts the well-ordered scene with the clanking of the “metal ﬂap of the mail slot” and the appearance of the white lines of the newspaper:

Gustad switched on the light and put on his glasses. He ignored the grim headlines about Pakistan, barely glanced at the half-naked mother weeping with a dead child in her arms. The photo caption, which he did not stop to read because the picture looked the same as the others that had appeared regularly in the past few weeks, was about soldiers using Bengali babies for bayonet practice (7).

Bypassing the grim reminders of the war between East and West Pakistan, Gustad turns past the now commonplace images of suffering to the Indian Institute of

Technology exam results contained in the inner pages of the paper. Much like the nostalgia for the glory days of Noble & Sons, the exam results comfort in their promise of a speculative return to glory. As Sohrab later observes of his parents, “The dream of

ITT took shape, then took hold of their imaginations. And the Indian Institute of

Technology became the promised land. It was El Dorado and Shangri-La, it was

Atlantis and Camelot, it was Xanadu and Oz. It was the home of the Holy Grail” (66).

171 In focusing on the item of personal interest that Gustad sees as securing his family’s future, Gustad relegates the humanitarian crisis to the borders of both his mind and the Indian nation. Such a Long Journey dramatizes the inability of Gustad to sustain this willed ignorance, the illusion that the individual will is enough to secure a stable, self- contained future.

Gustad’s efforts to maintain his well-ordered realm is a theme that is repeatedly emphasized in the novel through the central allegories of the wall that separates the

Parsi community of the Khodadad Building from the encroaching Bombay metropole,

Gustad’s ﬁxation on maintaining his body, and the blackout paper that he leaves on the windows of his apartment.1 The blackout paper, in particular, becomes a potent symbol that ﬁgures Gustad’s retreat from the world that, in a gesture towards national allegory, coincides with the defeat of Nehru’s capacious humanist vision. As the narrator of Such a Long Journey contends, the 1962 Sino-Indian war with China “froze

Jawaharlal Nehru’s heart, then broke it…the unﬂinching humanist, the great visionary, turned bitter and rancorous…his appetite for philosophy and dreams lost for ever, he resigned himself to political intrigues and internal squabbles” (10-11).

Gustad’s retreat, his withdrawal from the affairs of the world, is connected to Nehru through the blackout paper that, following the war with China, continues to darken

Gustad’s apartment much like Chou En-lai’s betrayal “blighted for ever, darkened

1 In 1995 Bombay ofﬁcially became Mumbai. For the purposes of this chapter I will refer to Bombay/ Mumbai according to the conventions of the novel being discussed. Mistry’s later novel Family Matters (2002) deals more directly with the issue of naming, as well as the Hindu nationalism that he sees as behind such efforts. Such a Long Journey takes up these issues through the character Dinshawji who rails against the renaming campaign of “that bastard Shiv Sena leader who worships Hitler and Mussolini” (Mistry 73).

172 permanently” Nehru’s days and night (11).2 Gustad, like Nehru, retreats to the narrow confines of his family and the petty squabbles of the Parsi apartment complex. While many critics have read the novel as a chronicle of Gustad and India’s inevitable embrace of the outside world––figured in Gustad’s removal of the blackout paper in the concluding lines of the novel––I am more interested in Mistry’s evaluation of the power of art, the body, and civic governance in mediating this exposure. The novel appears to question the role of art to overcome the complacency of compassion fatigue seen in Gustad’s melancholy retreat from the world, aiming instead to orient the novel towards the present, the hinge elided in Gustad’s retreat into the fantasies of the past and future. In so doing, I will argue that while Mistry’s realist mode of fiction seeks to foster a sense of the interconnectedness of the globe it does so through a reassertion of the specificity of the local that confirms the humanity of the individual subject even as it situates it within a larger, bureaucratic apparatus. In the earlier chapters I demonstrated how the utopian visions of Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason that try to remove the body and mind from the chaos of the surrounding world fail to account for the imbrication of the subject in the state. In Links, Nuruddin Farah demonstrates the need for the state by revealing the affective links that structure transnational organizations like the United Nations, reinscribing structural inequalities despite universal aspirations. Following over twenty years of state failure Farah ends the Past

Imperfect trilogy unable to imagine a future for the Somali people without a state

2 Nehru’s dream of Asian solidarity were betrayed by the Chinese leader who, on October, 20, 1962, ordered the invasion of Kashmir’s Aksai Chin, leading to humiliating defeat for both the Indian army and Nehru’s policy of non-alignment: “And such a humiliating defeat, everywhere people talking of nothing but the way the Chinese had advanced, as though the Indian Army consisted of tin soldiers. To think that till the very end both sides had been proclaiming peace and brotherhood” (Mistry 9).

173 capable of mediating local needs and the global demands. While Mistry grounds Such a

Long Journey in the present, he does not give up a vision of utopia, but rather suggests that its materialization will necessitate the difficult negotiations with the local forms that structure the present, including the bureaucracies of the state. The vulnerable bodies in Mistry’s fiction at once display the power of empathetic realism to imagine a global community, while further revealing its sacrificial logic that demands a constant renegotiation of the present terms of transnational sentiment.

Such a Long Journey establishes its concerns with the present tense in its framing epigraphs. Drawn from Firdausi’s Shah-Nama, T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” and

Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, the epigraphs indicate an arc that mourns the corruption of the world, endures the difﬁcult odyssey towards redemption, and desires the emergence of a new language, a veritable new landscape free from the restrictions and disappointments of the old. Though, as Jaydipsinh Dodiya notes, the epigraphs gesture towards a more global understanding of humanity, reconstructing “a universal journey which is a human one,” they also stage the impossibility of arriving in the promised land of the universal (Dodiya 61). Rather, the references to Zoroastrianism in the ﬁrst epigraphs perform an ongoing odyssey away from the particulars of the

Parsi community to the destination of Tagore’s seemingly universal “new country.” The epigraphs move from a moment chronicling the height of Zoroastrian and Persian culture, to its interaction with, and fostering of, a new paradigm in the presence of the

Magi at Bethlehem, and ﬁnally to the imagined embrace of renewed engagement with the broader world in Tagore’s Gitanjali.

174 Part myth and part history, the Shah-Nama, or ‘Book of Kings’, chronicles the history of the Persian nation from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century. Composed almost four centuries after the conquest,

Firdausi’s epic was intended to be “above all the encapsulation, in both content and language, of what it is to be authentically Persian” (Potts vi). In his ‘Foreward’ to Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, published in conjunction with the exhibit of same name at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Timothy Potts notes that Firdausi deliberately restricts his chronicle to the pre-Islamic period: “His poem was to be a paean to a Persian past that struggled to maintain itself against Arab, Turkish and other peoples and ways of life” (vi). In the text excerpted by Mistry, an anonymous male speaker asks the gathered priests about the Kings who had once possessed the world: “How did they…hold the world in the beginning, and why is it that it has been left to us in such a sorry state? And how was it that they were able to live free of care during the days of their heroic labors?” While critics have read the epigraph from

Firdausi as emphasizing the glory of the Zoroastrian past that contrasts to Parsi’s current, diminished status, the epigraph appears to displace this glory further into the remote past.3 Critically, while recalling a glory of an earlier age, Shah-Nama chronicles the fall of the Sassanid Empire and the decline of the Zoroastrianism in the region. The return to a classic Persian text explaining the origins of the contemporary Parsi community reveals only another text’s acute longing for an idealized past; a questioning of who came before and who is to blame for the loss of Eden. The Shah-

Nama is not a celebration of Zoroastrian history, but rather a melancholic longing for a

3 See Dodiya 61-62

175 Persian past prior to its exposure to the Islamic religion and Arabic language that

Firdausi blames for the decay of Persia’s cultural glory.

In contrast to this longing, the second epigraph from Eliot’s “Journey of the

Magi” invokes the figures of the Magi, traditionally members of the Zoroastrian priestly caste, to indicate the difficult present that finds the men journeying between a world they cannot return to and one that has not yet come into existence: “A cold coming we had of it / Just the wrong time of the year / For a journey, and such a long journey…” (Eliot 69). In The Gospel of Matthew, the Magi who deliver gifts to the newborn Jesus stage an interchange between the customs of an ancient religion and the birth of a new religious idiom.4 Eliot’s poem explicitly stages this interaction between the ancient religion and the birth of a new paradigm in the final stanza of the poem:

All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death (Eliot 69).

4 In Matthew, the Magi are described as “wise men from the east” (Matthew 2:1). The term ‘wise men’ a translation from the classical latin magus, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the root for the English magus, plural magi: “a member of an ancient Persian priestly class, which became inﬂuential in the development of Zoroastrianism” (“Magus” 2a). Though there is no reference in the bible to the number of Magi that arrived in Bethlehem, it has been common in the Western Christian tradition that there were three wise men: Melchior, a Persian scholar; Caspar, an Indian scholar; and Balthazar, an Arab scholar. In this tradition the representatives of the ancient Eastern civilizations therefore attend to the birth of a new, Western civilization.

176 The poem which begins with “a journey, and such a long journey” concludes with an unsettling return home for the Magi who are restless in their previous way of life. The poem highlights the paradox of the birth of Jesus, which foretells the redemption of humanity only through his eventual death withe Magi’s gifts serving as offerings that seem both to celebrate life and death.5 However, the Birth, which is also a Death, implies another death: that of the male infants Herod ordered killed in the Massacre of the Innocents after the Magi informed him of their prophecy.6 The Magi therefore must return home with the agonizing knowledge that their science and wisdom contribute as much to birth as to death, a reﬂection on technology, transnationalism, and progress that ﬁnds echoes in the ambiguity of science in Ghosh’s The Circle of

Reason. Finally, and most relevant for Mistry, the poem suggests that the Birth is a

“hard and bitter agony” for the Magi, indicating the declension of their system of belief. The collected exposures of the journey renders their native homelands alien, resulting in the melancholy resignation that concludes Eliot’s poem. While Chinua

Achebe references the difﬁcult homecoming imagined in Eliot’s poem in the title of his novel No Longer at Ease, Mistry emphasizes the journey which continues even upon the

Magi’s arrival.

5 Deepika Bahri offers a more explicit association between the gifts of the Magi to a funeral scene in Such a Long Journey that involves frankincense and myrrh, noting that the gifts celebrating life in Eliot’s poem are now “unambigiously offerings to death” (Bahri 144).

6 The wise men arrive ﬁrst in Jerusalem where they relate their prophecy to Herod, who tells them: “Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also” (Matthew 2:8). Warned in a dream by God not to return to Herod, the wise men depart for their country via an alternate route. “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men” (Matthew 2:16).

177 This withdrawal from the world and the longing for death at conclusion of the journey of the Magi is overcome in the ﬁnal epigraph excerpted from Song 37 of

Tagore’s Gitanjali, which begins “I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power…that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity” (Tagore 29). The difﬁculty of the “cold coming” of the

Magi’s journey is repeated in Tagore, as is the wish for “another death” witnessed in the desire to retreat into insigniﬁcance. The lines that Mistry takes as his ﬁnal epigraph arrive at the moment of the journey’s exhaustion: “And when old words died out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.” In contrast to Firdausi, Tagore’s song expresses optimism in the ability of mixture to generate a new culture, a new country capable of generating wonders equivalent to that of the old. This is Gustad’s “El

Dorado and Shangri-la,” the imagined future of his son’s success at ITT, and the belief that “all things would be given and all things would be possible and all things would come to pass for he who journeyed there and emerged with the sacred chalice” (Mistry

66-7). The ‘journey there’, however, remains in perpetual progress. Positioned between the nostalgia for a receding past and the unﬂagging expectation of a redemptive future forever out of reach, the second epigraph, like the action of Mistry’s narrative, asks what it means to persist through the long journey of the present. The ellipsis that

Mistry inserts into the second epigraph emphasizes the narratives location in the uncomfortable mixture imagined in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” somewhere between

178 the lamented loss of cultural speciﬁcity in Shah-Nama and the promised land of a new, global idiom as imagined in Tagore’s Gitanjali.7

The present is the disorderly, unsettling location where the quotidian interacts unpredictably with the global events that Gustad attempts to bypass in his reading of

The Times of India. The present is the messy location where, like the Magi’s arrival in

Bethelem, technological advances that promote cross-cultural exchange and care coexist with the unintended sacriﬁce of innocent lives. In the uneasiness of this present, bodily sensation, injury, and death are pushed to the fore in much of Mistry’s

ﬁction. Whether it is the body that inscribes cultural difference in Mistry’s early short story “Squatter” in Tales from Firozsha Baag, the forced sterilization and disablement of the protagonists during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in A Fine Balance, or the protracted illness of the family patriarch that drives the narrative of Family Matters, the body in

Mistry’s fiction figures as what Ato Quayson has called an “‘excessive’ sign” that both grounds realist fiction while also short-circuiting its representation (Quayson 14).

Quayson, building on the work Lennard Davis on the eighteenth and nineteenth- century realist novel in “Who Put the The in The Novel?” contends that while the disabled body is “structurally constitutive to the maintenance of the novel’s realism,” it also reveals realism’s cultural construction (21). In Aesthetic Nervousness, Quayson notes that literature manifests the uneasiness witnessed in encountering disability, where

“the disabled body sharply recalls to the nondisabled the provisional and temporary nature of able-bodieness and indeed of the social frameworks that undergird the

7 Gitanjali itself was heralded for its universal qualities. Writing the introduction to the English edition translated by Tagore, W. B. Yeats notes that the lyrics “display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long” (Yeats xiii).

179 suppositions of bodily normality” (14). The dis-eased body, the nexus of Quayson’s

“aesthetic nervousness,” disrupts the longed for autonomy of both art and the individual in Such a Long Journey, indicating a rejection of a utopian future in favor of the difﬁcult, ongoing journey of the present for both the novel’s characters and

Mistry’s readership. Mistry demonstrates through his narratives of disabled bodies the limits of efforts to control or direct the perception of the body or bodily sensations in

Such a Long Journey through art. Rather than make order out of these events, Mistry offers a realist aesthetic, centered around the body, that, I will argue, is crucial to startle Gustad out of his complacent nostalgia, demonstrating that an engagement with the cold reality of the present journey becomes a means of guaranteeing an ethical future. In part, this requires a reading of the postcolonial, realist novel that pulls the genre away from its critical reception as a form occupied with the past through a regressive, market-driven nostalgia. Even if dealing with the present, postcolonial, realist fiction such has Mistry’s has been viewed with guarded suspicion, with many critics contending that the form opens up exotic cultures for facile consumption on the international market. I therefore start with a focus on Mistry’s reception in the global literary marketplace, focusing particularly on his bestselling novel A Fine Balance. By returning to debates about the form of postcolonial fiction, I hope to demonstrate that it is in realist fiction that Mistry locates the promise of engaging with the world even as the “old words die out on the tongue…the old tracks are lost” and the new melodies, country, and wonders appear still to be on the horizon. The focus on the body in

Mistry’s ﬁction, I will argue, simultaneously preserves the individual subject while also

180 demonstrating the limits of art, civic governance, and the individual that gestures to the vital inseparability and contingency of the three.

II. Globalism, Humanitarianism, and Postcolonial Realism

Such a Long Journey illustrates the difﬁcult progress towards a new global society. The end of the old ways may have been foretold, but a new idiom has yet to arrive. In the interim, Mistry offers realism as a mode capable of chronicling the journey while insistently turning the reader outwards to the world. While Farah shows the effects of humanitarian discourse in perpetuating structural inequalities in Links, Mistry explores the humanitarian capability of the postcolonial novel in guaranteeing an ethical globalism. Unlike Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason which attempts to retheorize the relationship between body/mind and labor/technology under global capital, Mistry’s

ﬁction ﬁgures the body as a local site that interrupts the intricate patterning of his novels and the transnational humanitarian sentiment that they generate. Rather than engender sympathy, the suffering disabled, diseased, or aging body in Mistry’s work instead reveal the potential erasures of humanitarian discourse.

As the narrative of Such a Long Journey dramatizes Gustad’s exposure to global affairs, so too does Mistry’s realist form attempt to surmount the willed ignorance, melancholy resignation, and insular exceptionalism of a predominantly Western readership. When, in November of 2001, Oprah Winfrey announced Mistry’s 1995 novel A Fine Balance as the ﬁrst novel selected to her eponymous Book Club after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, she stressed the novels ability to jar. During the roundtable discussion of the work which aired in January of 2002, Winfrey and her gathered panelists shared feelings of shame and embarrassment at their, as well as America’s,

181 apparently willed ignorance and isolation from the rest of the world. Oprah opened her discussion of Mistry’s novel by stressing that she had “never encountered pages that took me so far, and removed me from my own way of life and way of thinking the way A Fine Balance did” (“A Fine Balance Discussion”). Unaware of the events of The

Emergency of 1975 that are chronicled in the novel, Oprah confesses that she was like many Americans, who “were all in our own little world…not even…aware, conscious, or in any way connected to what was going on in 1975.” For Carlyn, a member of the discussion panel, reading the previously obscured history of Mistry’s novel was “like

September 11 for me, it just knocked me out of my little bubble of life and put me in a whole other place.” Oprah, for her part, acknowledged that this sentiment was precisely the reason for her selection of the novel. Detailing her thought process,

Winfrey reveals: “I read it and thought, ‘This will do, in some ways, what September

11 has done. Take us out of our own little shell. Expose us to a whole other world out there going beyond our backyards.” Comparing their experience reading A Fine Balance to the violent exposure of the terror attacks of 9/11, the members of Oprah’s Book

Club offer Mistry’s novel as a narrative capable of generating a productive unease that, mirroring the thematics of Mistry’s ﬁction, forces an interaction with the networks that link the broader world. The post-89 humanitarian sentiment that motivated the

American intervention in Somalia gives way to a realization that the world that

America imagined in the preceding decade had its own competing histories and narratives that the American population had willfully ignored.

For Winfrey and her panelists, the rather discordant experiences of viewing

9/11 and reading Mistry’s novel reveal not only an alarming lack of awareness, but also

182 a willfully maintained ignorance that becomes apparent only in its shocking violation.

While a novel such as A Fine Balance can “take us out of our own little shell” by revealing these gaps in knowledge, unlike 9/11 it is an experience that, though exposing a false sense of secure isolation, ultimately comforts as the panelists translate the unfamiliar events by situating them in their own local, personal histories, which are now framed within a broader context. Though A Fine Balance evokes the feeling, as expressed by Carlyn, of “a little bit of shame that I knew so little,” it is simultaneously able to offer an antidote by offering a narrative driven history lesson capable of filling in those gaps (“A Fine Balance Discussion”). In its representations of the horrific impact of The Emergency of 1975 on the lives of its characters, Mistry’s novel serves to both educate Oprah’s readership while allowing them to extend beyond their relative isolation, creating an empathetic bond with the circumstances of a remote, fictional set of characters. Like the images of suffering used to generate humanitarian sentiment discussed in the previous chapter on Nuruddin Farah, A Fine Balance, in these readings, creates a shameful sense of ignorance and violation that such an event could be allowed to happen, while almost immediately overcoming this sensation by substituting knowledge and empathy for action.

Winfrey’s afﬁrmation of the humanitarian stakes of literature came at a moment when her Book Club was at the center of a cultural debate over the value of popular literature in America following the embarrassing circumstances surrounding her selection of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Having initially accepted both

Winfrey’s addition of his novel to her Book Club as well as the offer to appear on the

Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss The Corrections, Franzen voiced his discomfort with his

183 selection in a number of promotional interviews leading up to his appearance on the show.8 In response to Franzen’s uneasiness,Winfrey rescinded the invitation to appear on her show, their scufﬂe sparking a wider discussion about the rift between high-art and popular culture that focused particularly on the form of contemporary ﬁction.

Engaging this debate in Atlantic Unbound, the online journal of The Atlantic, Scott

Stossel in “Elitism for Everyone” offers the deﬁnition of literature as the fundamental dividing line between the two camps:

Literature should disturb the mind and derange the senses; it can be a palliative, but it is not meant to be the easy, soothing one that Oprah would make it. Oprah is using her club to help her readers Get Culture, as though Culture is something that can be doled out like Prozac or pay raises, to elevate your happiness level and social status. Modernism (and postmodernism) taught us that the true rewards of art and literature are not easily gained, but must be attained only through difﬁculty and struggle (Stossel).

As Stossel indicates, his vision of literature is indebted to a modernist sensibility that distrusts the apparent ready-made accessibility of culture that Oprah’s Book Club promotes. Though Stossel revises his position on Oprah’s Book Club, conceding that her intentions “to enlighten and to instruct and, importantly, to somehow elevate [her] audience in doing so” remind him of the more highbrow Reader’s Subscription edited during the 1950s by W.H Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling, his discomfort persists (Stossel). Stossel’s admiration for Oprah’s aims does not extend to the

8 The cumulative damage of these interviews can be seen in David Kirkpatrick’s overview of the scuffle in The New York Times. Discussing his selection with The Portland Oregonian, Franzen revealed that “I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it” (Kirkpatrick). Shortly after, in an interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” Franzen continued, “I feel like I’m solidily in the high-art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood” (Kirkpatrick). Finally, in an interview with Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon Franzen disparaged Winfrey’s past selections: “She’s picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one dimensional books that I cringe, myself, even though I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight” (Kirkpatrick).

184 literariness of her selections, a point he stresses by contrasting the Reader’s

Subscription selection of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake with Oprah’s “treacly ﬁrst selection,”

Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean (Stossel). In their desire to “raise the level of literary culture,” Stossel and Franzen betray a deep anxiety about the means necessary to affect this desire, namely a turn to realism that appears incapable of carrying out the edict that literature must “disturb the mind and derange the senses.”9

Stossel’s comments echo twentieth-century critiques of realism that have frequently deployed realist representation as foils for innovative literary techniques that seek to elevate literary culture. Reevaluating the nineteenth-century realist novels in Narrating Reality, Harry Shaw observes that critics have often interpreted realist representation as both “naively transparent and malignantly totalistic” (Shaw 9).

Raymond Tallis, parodying the overdetermined reception of realist literature that can be seen in Stossel’s vision of literature, mimics these claims in the opening of In Defence of Realism: “It has, with striking few exceptions, lost its literary function; and if it has any political function, it is to support the status quo, to collude with one version of reality and pass it off as if were reality itself” (Tallis 1). The impetus to read realist modes of ﬁction as imposing or normalizing their vision of reality has been particularly problematic for postcolonial theorists and novelists who frequently have associated the form with the historical and scientiﬁc positivism that Ghosh critiques in the decidely

9 Franzen signaled a desire to shift to a more realist mode of writing in a 1996 article for Harper’s “Perchance To Dream: In The Age of Images, A Reason To Write Novels.” The Harper’s article, as Robert Rebein notes in “Turncoat: Why Jonathan Franzen Finally Said ‘No’ to Po-Mo,” was part of a larger shift that saw Franzen “turning his back on postmodernism and siding instead with a realist tradition” (Rebein 201). This transition was even more apparent in 2010’s Freedom, a novel in which, as Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times notes, Franzen “completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist…into a kind of 19th–century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters” (Kakutani).

185 unrealistic narrative of The Circle of Reason. In “‘The Plague of Normality’:

Reconﬁguring Realism in Postcolonial Theory” Laura Moss traces out realism’s reception in postcolonial theory. While acknowledging that some realist texts perpetuate imperialism, Moss, building on David Carter’s defense of realism in

“Tasteless Subjects,” urges a reconsideration of realism’s ability to resist. Though the association between realism and imperialism is convincingly established in Peter

Hulme’s work on Robinson Crusoe in Colonial Encounters or Timothy Brennan’s argument connecting realism with the rise of European nationalism in “The National Longing for

Form,” Moss contends that these readings risk creating an essential realism that denies the variations, particularly historical variations, within realist writing.10 Condemning colonialist realist practice, Moss argues that these critics fail “to distinguish more clearly between the realism used in the service of imperialist beliefs written by authors who look in from the outside in a fallaciously objective manner and the realism produced by authors who are indigenous to the postcolonial locations of their narratives” (Moss 4). Though she calls attention to the quantity of postcolonial ﬁction written in the realist mode in order to read resistance into the postcolonial realist novel, Moss’s assertion is further complicated by market forces that have encouraged the production and prizing of realist novels. When, in an effort to prove realism’s continued relevance, Tallis notes that “the great majority of novels short-listed for the

Booker prize are realistic,” there must be a concern that, far from proving that realism

10 Alternatively, Moss presents Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House as acknowledging the quantity of postcolonial realist novels, but also as suggesting that this realism is to be read as an early stage in the development of postcolonial literature that terminates in more experimental modes. For more on Appiah’s problematic association of realism as a literary mode with nationalism as an ideology, see Susan Andrade’s “The Problem of Realism and African Fiction” (Andrade 185).

186 remains de mode, these novels are appreciated in a marketplace that values them precisely for their inability to resist (Tallis 2).

The quantity of best-selling, prized, realist ﬁction from ﬁgures in recent

Anglophone Indian writing such as Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Monica Ali, and Jhumpa Lahiri does not conﬁrm the resistance Moss wishes to read into realist

ﬁction, but rather reintroduces what appears to be Franzen’s anxiety that market forces evacuate whatever resistance may adhere in the realist novel. A 2000 article in

The New York Times, entitled “India’s Post-Rushdie Generation; Young Writers Leave

Magical Realism and Look at Reality,” explored both the return of Indian writers to realism and the corresponding hype that the Renaissance in Indian writing could save the English novel. In an interview for the article, the author Raj Kamal Jha comments of the turn to realism:

Magic realism was very popular with writers who came immediately after Rushdie…but the same writers have turned away from it. I think it is because of the inherent unsatisfactoriness of the form, the way in which its formulas further confuse and complicate an already confused and complicated reality (Rothstein 2001).

Refuting this claim in the piece, the literary scholar Michael Wood echoes Stossel in his defense of Rushdie, asserting that Rushdie “is interested in reimagining reality itself, not just imagining alternatives to reality…there is no escape in Rushdie…And confusing and complicating things is quite often a way to understand them” (Rothstein

187 2001).11 In renouncing magical realist formulas as obfuscating, Jha however does not offer realism as providing a transparent window onto reality. Rather, he suggests that situating the “confusing and complicating things” outside of literary form allows for a deeper appreciation of their existence as more than just the work of literary imagination. Though postcolonial literary critics have continued to emphasize post- realist ﬁction, Indian writers such as Mistry have turned to realism as a form capable of resisting through its efforts to capture the unsettling chaos of everyday life that needs no exaggeration.12

Though critics trumpeting the work of Mistry have often cited the tendency of postcolonial theorist to overlook the realist text while privileging more experimental forms of writing, they must also recover realist novels from their dehistoricizing reception in the marketplace. Though Moss establishes a divide between realist novels that serve to further establish imperialist beliefs and those realist novels “produced by authors who are indigenous to the postcolonial locations of their narrative,” transnational, cosmopolitan authors––such as those featured in The New York Times

11 Like The New York Times piece, which opposes Rushdie to a newer generation of writers, much of the scholarship on Rushdie has positioned him in relation to magical realism and postmodernism. More recently critics such as Elizabeth Anker and Clare Barker have convincingly recovered Rushdie’s concern with human rights and disability that have largely been discounted due to his formal commitments, which appear minimize the trauma and loss experienced by his characters. Anker in “Narrating Human Rights and the Limits of Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown” argues that Rushdie’s late novel marks an important move away from magical realist form that may be read as Rushdie’s coy self-recrimination “for his own historic investment in the tantalizingly (sic) diversions of magic realism” (Anker 161). Anker extends her recovery of Rushdie’s commitment to human rights in a chapter on Midnight’s Children in Fictions of Dignity. Similarly, Barker reads Midnight’s Children as a disability narrative in Postcolonial Fiction and Disability. Together, this recent scholarship urges a reconsideration of Rushdie’s work for its humanist concerns, suggesting that the opposition explored in The New York Times breaks down on closer inspection.

12 Anker notes a similar recognition in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, particularly when it comes to representing suffering: “Shalimar repeatedly suggests that unmediated experience is sufﬁciently contested and vertiginous on its own terms, which the dissimulation of magic only compounds” (Anker 161).

188 article that were raised in the West but set their novels in India––and the literary marketplace intervene to attenuate this distinction (Moss 4).13 In the wake of the celebrations of India’s Golden Jubilee celebrating ﬁfty years of independence, Indian writing in English was featured in dedicated issues of The New Yorker and Granta, as well as the Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West edited volume, The Vintage Book of

Indian Writing 1947-1997. These publications built upon the sense that Indian writing in

English was undergoing a renaissance that had larger implications for rejuvenating the form of the novel in English, with many critics echoing Bill Buford’s assessment in The

New Yorker that in Indian ﬁction “what we are witnessing is not a school or a trend but something bigger in scope” (Buford 8).

While critics and the popular press hailed the literary production of the Indian subcontinent, they were also aware of the effacement of differences that occurred in the marketing of Indian ﬁction. Graham Huggan, in The Postcolonial Exotic entitled

“Consuming India,” notes the effects of the Golden Jubilee’s reception in The New

Yorker, which “seems to subscribe to the myth of a disparate nation brought together by Western marketing moguls, and made available to a relatively informed, if not necessarily discerning, consumer public…” (Huggan 60). Commenting on the

ﬂattening effects of the media coverage of the Golden Jubilee, Bishnupriya Ghosh in

When Borne Across argues that in marketing India through its ﬁction, “the plentitude of these other worlds is contained and managed in neat packages: exotic worlds ‘reﬂected’ in the writing of equally exotic writers; delicious ethnic, racial, and religious othernesses; and a vast plural fund of variations in English” (B. Ghosh 33). Both

13 Moss acknowledges the market in more depth in “Can Rohinton Mistry’s Realism Rescue the Novel?” I discuss this article in more detail below.

189 Ghosh and Huggan emphasize postcolonial ﬁction as a consumable good, a “delicious” difference presented as a banquet for the sampling tastes of a Western readership in many ways echoes Said Samatar’s criticism of Farah’s Secrets as “a ﬁercely non-Somali novel” due to its exoticism and cosmopolitanism (S. Samatar 143). Marketed and largely produced in the West, Indian writing in English, indeed much transnational

ﬁction, complicates Moss’s distinction between imperialist and indigenous realist

ﬁction, while reiterating her central question concerning the ability of the realist novel to be a “form for political and social engagement in the postcolonial context” (Moss 1).

The terms of this resistance, however, must also include an ability of the realist work to resist the dehistoricizing forces of the market that largely determine a works circulation and reception.

Indian literature in English, like India itself at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, was packaged and resold for global consumption, with the realist novel problematically symbolizing both an appetite for Indian otherness as well as the recovery of the English novel. Critics hailing Indian writers such as Mistry, Vikram

Seth, and Monica Ali as returning the novel to its nineteenth-century origins, posited the postcolonial realist novel as the savior of the contemporary novel. This tendency can be seen, for example, in James Wood’s review of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane for The

New Republic, entitled “Making it New,” that praises not only the novel’s realist form, but also its return to content appropriate to the form of the novel:

What is not so often said is that this new material has another and perhaps more momentous service to perform, which is to return ﬁction to its nineteenth-century gravity. This it does by re-importing into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion,

190 obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety––and thereby restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measures escape (Wood).

For Woods, the realist postcolonial novel is an exciting genre precisely because it restores a purpose to the realist form of the novel that, he implies, has been lost in contemporary Western ﬁction. A. G. Mojtabai echoes Wood’s rhetoric of postcolonial authors rescuing the novel from its irrelevance in her review of Mistry’s work for The

New York Times, which begins:

Those who continue to harp on the inevitable decline of the novel ought to hold off for a while. The unique task of the genre, after all, is truthfulness to human experience in all its variety, and thanks to the great migrations of population in our time, human variety is to be found in replenished abundance all around us. The displacements, comminglings and clashing of peoples and cultures have released new energies, strange pollens; indeed, the harvest has barely begun (Mojtabai 1996).

Common to the reviews of Mojtabai and Wood is a belief that the novel form has been given a new vitality by the global movements of populations and ideas. While this radically accelerated global circulation has been captured in postmodern or magical realist works, these reviewers insist that it is the promise of humanism in the postcolonial realist novel that is capable of revitalizing the form of the novel, returning it to its ‘appropriate content’. Repeating Jha’s dismissive sentiments concerning magical realism, Mojtabai concludes her review: “Rohinton Mistry needs no infusion of magical realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is quite magical enough” (Mojtabai 1996).14

14 See also John Updike’s review of Family Matters for The New Yorker, for example, which compares Mistry to a “nineteenth-century novelists, for whom every detail, every urban alley, every character however lowly added a piece to a full social picture…” (Updike 2002).

191 Comparisons to the nineteenth century novel abound in popular reviews of realist ﬁction, often becoming a key component of the marketing material in the form of backcover reviews. As with Wood’s review of Brick Lane, this reception is deeply problematic in its suggestion that the postcolonial novel can successfully return to the realist ﬁction of the nineteenth century because postcolonial nations belatedly replay the history of the West. Alistair Cormack, in “Migration and the Politics of Narrative

Form: Realism and the Postcolonial Subject in Brick Lane,” neatly summarizes the troubling nostalgia behind the celebrated return of the Indian novel in English to a nineteenth century realism: "We do not simply get to witness again the birth of the individual as she navigates social constrictions on her identity" (Cormack 719). Laura

Moss, playing with Mojtabai’s hyperbolic claims from The New York Times review in

“Can Rohinton Mistry's Realism Rescue the Novel?”, suggests that this disavowal of history is precisely what allows for the broad circulation of bestselling novels like Ali's

Brick Lane or Mistry's A Fine Balance. Mistry’s ﬁction, Moss argues, attains its popularity precisely because it “does not resemble what has come to be viewed as a postcolonial novel of resistance” (‘Mistry’s Realism’ 158). Rather, the back cover reviews and book club selections that “foreground the universal humanist elements of the novel…decontextualize, dehistoricize and ultimately depoliticize the realism in the novel and thus make it more palatable for a general American public”(163). In order to rescue realism, Moss suggests the need to recover the political and historical valences.

Distancing Mistry's work from the frame of the nineteenth century European realist novel, Moss therefore situates A Fine Balance in relation to the classics of social realist

192 Indian writing in English such as Raj Anand’s Untouchable, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, and

Bhabhani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers.

The ready consumption of the realist postcolonial novel makes it the ideal object for studying “the global commodiﬁcation of cultural difference” that Graham

Huggan has labeled “the postcolonial exotic” (Huggan vii). Mistry’s awareness of the position of his work in the literary marketplace is readily apparent in an interview with

The Canadian Fiction Magazine in 1989.15 In response to Hancock’s suggestion in 1989 that Mistry’s publishing record and awards indicates a writerly gift, a form of genius he compares to Mozart or Beethoven’s, Mistry offers the following assessment: “Is it a gift? Or a fortuitous conﬂuence of events? Is it because Multiculturalism is fashionable?…It is not propitious to examine these things too closely” (Hancock 146).

In this reply to Hancock, Mistry suggests an awareness of the global forces that create a broad audience for his ﬁction and facilitate its reception. Speaking within the speciﬁcity of the Canadian literary market, Mistry acknowledges that the reception of his work has been conditioned by the prevailing discourse of Canadian multiculturalism, a topic that he discusses at length with Hancock. And while it may not be “propitious to examine these things too closely,” inquiries such as Gail Low’s exploration of the role of the global literary marketplace on postcolonial literary

15 In his interview with Mistry, Geoff Hancock notes the enormous literary success Mistry enjoyed following the first story he submitted to the Hart House Review: “You’ve done remarkably well in a short time. You won a prize with the first story you wrote, and the second. Within five years, you’ve been in all the major quarterlies, brought out a book with a major publisher, and been nominated for the Governor General’s award for fiction” (Hancock 145-6). To this lengthy list of prestigious literary awards for the short stories collected in his 1987 collection Tales from Firozsha Baag (published in the United States in 1989 as Swimming Lessons and Other Tales from Firozsha Baag), Mistry would add the Governor General’s award for Such A Long Journey in 1991, the Giller Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for A Fine Balance in 1995, and Family Matters in 2002. Additionally, all three of his novels were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and, more recently in 2012, Mistry was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

193 production in Publishing the Postcolonial offer critical insight into how postcolonial texts

“are marketed and received as exoticised artefacts that promise access to non- threatening cultural others” (Low xv).

These questions of reception, already present though moderated in Mistry’s interview with Hancock, become more relevant in light of Mistry’s apparent anxiety with his elevation to American literary celebrity. In a 2001 interview with Ajit Jain conducted shortly after his selection to Oprah’s Book Club, Mistry dismisses any concerns with being labeled with Oprah’s logo: “I have no qualms about that because I am well acquainted with logos, having had so many on my books in the past–the

Governor General’s, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize short-list” (Jain 2001). The selection of A Fine Balance to Oprah’s Book Club, however, enormously elevated

Mistry’s proﬁle and expanded his readership in the United States, setting the stage for the large scale promotion of his 2002 novel Family Matters. While Mistry never voiced a Franzen-like concern with Oprah’s branding, in the transcript of his episode of

Oprah’s Book Club he appears uneasy with the desire of the panelists to read the historical context out of the novel. A revealing moment that demonstrates this tendency arrives after Mistry stresses the importance of human connection in the novel. Carlyn, picking up on Mistry’s use of the word family, expresses her own feelings of familiarity generated though the act of reading and discussing the novel: “I get a sense of family, just with us sitting here. We’re family for these moments. We’re all connected…how important it is to feel that way with one another” (“A Fine Balance

Discussion”). Both Oprah and Mistry respond to Carlyn’s comment by repeating the particular challenges of the cultural and historical context that must be overcome in

194 the novel, focusing particularly on caste. The reader may imagine a familiar connection through the facile act of reading, but the novel itself dramatizes the difﬁculty of creating and maintaining these connections in the formation and dissolution of the diverse community that develops in Dina’s ﬂat.

The success of A Fine Balance established Mistry as a literary celebrity, setting the stage for the large-scale promotion of his 2002 novel Family Matters. Mistry’s adoption into the American mainstream, his elevation to the status of literary personality and potential savior of the English novel, however, were relatively short- lived. Mistry canceled the remaining American stops on his 2002 promotional tour for

Family Matters due to the racial proﬁling at American airports that the government instituted after September 11 as extra security measures.16 Aside from a limited edition release of his short narrative The Scream, Mistry has yet to publish a follow-up to

Family Matters. The response of Winfrey’s panelists to Mistry’s fiction in the aftermath of 9/11 suggests both the potential for realist fiction to productively unsettle, as well as the danger that––like the news reports of atrocity that Gustad bypasses––it may penetrate, only to safely be distanced, dehistoricized, and anesthetized. Noting the political dimension obscured by the exotic aesthetic, Huggan argues that “the exoticist rhetoric of fetishised otherness and sympathetic identification masks the inequality of the power relations without which the discourse could not function” (Huggan 14).

Mistry’s fiction therefore must maintain a fine balance between its universal aspirations and its specific historical grounding, without which it risks becoming an exotic,

16 In the epilogue of When Borne Across, Bishnupriya Ghosh highlights the ethical intervention that Mistry’s withdrawal from the book tour made “in the spiraling racism of U.S. ‘homeland security’ policies that perpetrated violence toward speciﬁc populations in the name of protection” (B.Ghosh 186).

195 sentimental piece chronicling postcolonial suffering that serves to comfort even as it shocks, reafﬁrming and naturalizing the power dynamics that engendered the conditions of such suffering.

III: Balancing Bodies and Antibodies

As an exemplar of the postcolonial realist novel many critics have attempted either to distance A Fine Balance from the realist label or, alternatively, to use the novel to defend or, as Moss does, extend the possibilities of the realist mode of literary production.

Critics such as Sharmani Patricia Gabriel in “Diasporic Hybridities and the

Patchwork Quilt,” have argued that A Fine Balance should be considered a critique of realism that “sets out to destabilize those aspects of the realist narrative that contribute to the homogenization of the nation’s time-space continuum” (Gabriel 88). Similarly,

Peter Morey in Fictions of India, refutes criticism of the overdetermined nature of

Mistry’s realism, claiming the novel to be “an example of what one might describe as post-colonial meta-realism” (Morey 184). Much like Huggan’s assertion that postcolonial exotic texts are both complicit and resistant to global appropriation through their “ironic self-conciousness” and use of what he terms a ‘strategic exoticism’ and ‘staged marginality’ that are “designed as much to challenge as to proﬁt from consumer needs,” these critiques argue for Mistry’s strategic appropriation of a problematic form of representation (Huggan xi).

Other critics, however, have sought to recover the realist form of the novel altogther. Defending and extending the claims of realism, Tyler Tokaryk considers the novel to be an example of a Bakhtinian “grotesque realism” that is capable of changing

196 “the public perception of the body politic, of how authoritarian economic discourses operate, of how we read and tell stories to one another” (Tokaryk 24). Perhaps the most sophisticated defense of Mistry’s literary realism comes from Eli Park Sorensen in “Excess and Design in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance,” which gestures back to

Lukács to argue that the novel’s realist aesthetic is essential for understanding “the novel’s interpretive/utopian potential as a postcolonial literary text” (Sorensen 344). In

Sorensen’s reading, the excessive patterning and weaving apparent in the postcolonial realist form of A Fine Balance “shapes and uniﬁes irreconcilable perspectives into one inseparable unity––a novelistic dynamic that traces the possibilities of de-fetishized forms of experiences“ (360).17 While Sorensen admirably reinserts formal, literary elements into his analysis of the novel as part of an effort to extend scholarship of

Mistry beyond what he considers the abstract thematics of globalization and caste, the desire to read unity into the formal structure of A Fine Balance is in tension with the disjuncture imposed upon the lives of the characters at the conclusion of the novel.

Sorenson attempts to resolve this tension by arguing that the novel balances the abstract truths of Valmik––a proofreader and slogan writer who appropriately provides the refrain for the novel in his advice “to maintain a ﬁne balance between hope and despair”––with the concrete experiences of Dina, the Parsi widow in whose apartment the community at the center of the narrative forms (Balance 228-9). Despite

17 Sorensen’s formalist reading of A Fine Balance echoes Deepika Bahri’s analysis of Such a Long Journey in Native Intelligence. While Sorensen reads the “utopian-interpretative potential” of A Fine Balance through Lukacs, Bahri turns to the Frankfurt School to argue that the mimesis of the realist novel is “intimately tied to to the prospect of utopian thinking” (Bahri 128). Not surprisingly, they read the formal unities of Mistry’s narrative similarly, Bahri claims: “The tight construction of the novel, tying in various motifs… overworks the principle of order, recalling in every plot resolution all that is left unreconciled in reality” (Bahri 129).

197 this balance of abstract truths and concrete lived experience, the formal satisfactions of the novel remain premised on the misery and abjection of its subjects.

Sorensen’s effort to recover the “utopian-interpretive potential” of literary realism in the postcolonial context overlooks the human sacriﬁces that the novel reveals are necessary to maintain the space of the literary. Towards the conclusion of the novel, Valmik narrates life as a series of accidents to Dina. Though Valmik relates a series of accidents, Dina acknowledges, “there was nothing accidental about his expert narration” (Balance 554). Listening to this story, Dina expresses a sense of wonder:

His sentences poured out like perfect seams, holding the garment of his story together without calling attention to the stitches. Was he aware of ordering the events for her? Perhaps not––perhaps the very act of telling created a natural design. Perhaps it was a knack that humans had, for cleaning up their untidy existences––a hidden survival weapon, like antibodies in the bloodstream (554-555).

Sorensen, analyzing this passage, offers aesthetic form as an antibody, a “hidden survival weapon” during the state-of-emergency represented in the novel (Sorensen

353). Literary form in Sorensen’s reading stabilizes a world thrown out of balance by

Indira Gandhi’s emergency: when laws no longer operate according to ordered principles, narrative adopts principles to restore a sense of order, to generate meaning from chaos. This reading, however, erases the troubling association of narration with the bodies own defense from antigens, or foreign matter. The act of storytelling creates a “natural design” premised on the removal or neutralization of elements that trouble its totality, much like Balaram and Alu struggle to insulate themselves and their communities from germs in The Circle of Reason. So deeply ingrained is this “hidden survival weapon” within A Fine Balance that its splits and junctures can be read only at the seams of a narrative that, in seemingly celebrating unity in diversity through the

198 overarching allegory of Dina’s quilt, actually demonstrates the material challenges and sacriﬁces required to establish these links, while further warning of their potential misappropriation and rapid disintegration.

Rather than celebrate the seamlessness of the narratives construction as

Sorensen does, I read A Fine Balance to be concerned with uncovering the hidden costs of its aesthetic choices––the foreign elements that get neutralized and destroyed to protect and ensure the survival of the narrative corpus, though seemingly preventing it from forming lasting connections. The reading of form as an antibody, I will demonstrate, is fundamentally anti-body––the bodily being what is sacriﬁced to form in Sorensen’s reading of the novel. The impetus to recover literary realism in Tokaryk and Sorensen’s pieces therefore results in a troubling erasure of the bodily struggle and sacriﬁce represented in the novel in favor of the transcendence afforded by form. This is not a rejection of realism nor a suggestion that Mistry’s narrative should be read as a critique of realism, rather is to suggest the critical imbrication of the body in structuring Mistry’s realist aesthetic, which desires a narrative capable of bypassing the antibodies of the Western literary bloodstream to build a global humanism based on an appropriately appreciated socioeconomic, historic, and cultural difference.

The tension between a desired formal unity and the sacrifices required to attain it are readily apparent in a set of passages from A Fine Balance that center on accidental meetings, unifying technologies, and the overwritten human body. By focusing on the troubling bodily sacrifices, I offer a reading of Mistry that suggests a move away from interpretations of the novel as longing for the transcendent promise of the humanitarian novel and instead focus on the critical differences and sacrifices that

199 must be acknowledged for any chance at a lasting unity or change. Many critics,

Sorensen included, note the important role that trains play in A Fine Balance, which opens and closes with the sound of pneumatic brakes shrieking and hissing as a train fails to come to a stop before colliding with characters caught on the tracks. At the opening of the novel, this braking is responsible for the Parsi university student

Maneck accidentally dropping his books on the Hindu tailor Omprakash, or Om, who is traveling to the city in search of work with his uncle Ishvar. As the train comes to a sudden stop, Maneck, Om, and Ishvar discover that they are all traveling to a common destination: the Parsi widow Dina Dalal’s apartment. It is due to the collision of the train with an individual on the tracks that Mistry’s characters, in Sorensen’s words,

“accidentally meet for the ﬁrst time and initiate a friendship” (Sorensen 346). Though the accident brings the friends together, an alternative interpretation of the halted train is revealed in the grumbles of a passenger: “Why does everybody have to choose the railway tracks for dying?…No consideration for people like us. Murder, suicide,

Naxalite-terrorist killing, police-custody death––everything ends up delaying the trains” (Balance 6). While the disgruntled passenger bemoans the regularity of delays due to the seeming propensity for individuals to bring their deaths to the tracks, the references to Naxalite terrorists and police-custody deaths situates A Fine Balance in the speciﬁc historic moment of the Emergency. As Morey, in Fictions of India, notes: “the equation of the railway with a preferred form of death is an instantly striking metaphor for a nation that runs over the people while, itself, going ‘off the rails’” (Morey 175).

From the deaths on the track that open and close the novel, to the attempted cover-up of the torture of a student protest leader Avinash by dumping his body on the tracks,

200 the train certainly functions in one sense as a metaphor for the human cost of state progress. The fact that the protagonists of the novel meet on a train as a direct result of such a death on the tracks, however, demands further consideration.

At a structural level, the deaths on the railway tracks in A Fine Balance accrue signiﬁcance in their apparent ability to unify the narrative through repetition while, at a ﬁgurative level, the bodies on the tracks interrupt the progress of the technologies that are intended to promote communication and unity. Noting the metaphorical register of Morey’s reading, Sorensen extends this reading in a footnote, stating:

“Trains and railways of course metaphorically refer to linking, but the body causing delay also becomes a ﬁgure of the opposite; the breaking of human relations, the suspension of individual connectivity, as well as the suspension of causality as such” (Sorensen n.347). The disruptive body in this reading becomes the symptom of the Emergency that breaks down causal relations, resulting in the collapse of the promise of the modern state at the very moment the state attempts to reassert its power. There is, however, something troubling in Sorensen’s contention, perhaps unintentional, that it is the human body on the tracks that interrupts human relations and individual connectivity that, in the course of his argument, is then reestablished by the novel’s realist aesthetics. Sorensen seems to privilege technology––whether it is aesthetic form or the railway––over the human being on the track. His reading of the passage notes the disruptive force of the body while eliding that it is, in fact, the body on the tracks that guarantees the accidental meeting between the characters that are to inhabit Dina’s apartment, providing the structural unities of repetition and weaving that undergird his argument. Rather than neutralize the body by writing over it,

201 recovering the body reveals the central tension in the novel between those disgruntled riders,“people like us”––a broad category including fellow travelers on the train, readers like Carlyn, and critics like Sorensen––along for the journey of the narrative, longing for connection, and the disruptive elements that interrupt their progress towards this longed for unity. The passengers on the train continue their journey while gawking at “the hastily covered corpse awaiting its journey to the morgue” (Balance 6).

In recovering this sacriﬁcial body, I argue Mistry engages with the contradictions and limitations of the humanitarian potential of the postcolonial realist novel while crucially highlighting, rather than overwriting, the body’s constitutive relationship with aesthetics.

Narrated as natural design, the accident that opens the novel is one of the primary formal unities that stitch the novel together. This unity, however, is premised on the bodily sacriﬁce of the individual on the tracks; a sacriﬁce that gets erased in readings that privilege the novel’s formal design. The dehumanization of the individual run over by the train––reduced to an element of form, inconvenient source of delay, or spectacle––extends to the passengers on the train. In contrast to the shiver the train experience running down “its long steel spine,” Mistry describes the passengers on the train as insensate masses, a “bulge of humans…distended perilously, like a soap bubble at its limit” (Balance 6, 3). The same dehumanizing logic by which a death on the tracks becomes an interruption of the schedules of the passengers extends to the passengers themselves, suggesting a dangerous expansion of this dehumanizing rhetoric that places the promise of technology before the actual human. Mistry thereby establishes a tension between the celebrated, humanizing instruments of a potentially unifying

202 technology of modernization and the dehumanization of the human subject. Though the technology exists for a humanitarian globalism promised by forms such as the widely-circulated postcolonial realist novel, Mistry suggests the temporary, potentially exploitative nature of these connections that are neutralized by the “hidden survival weapon,” the antibodies immanent in the modes and technologies of their transmission.

Returning us to our persistence in the long journey of the present, Mistry reasserts the foreign potential of the body that interrupts the operation of expelling or assimilating antibodies.

Covered up and quickly forgotten as the train and narrative continue their journey focused on the consequences of Om, Ishvar, and Maneck’s meeting, the body on the tracks cruelly becomes their fated destination as the characters are brought into the larger narrative of the Indian state. Critics have approached the disﬁgured, crippled, and mutilated bodies that accrue in A Fine Balance as a sign of Mistry’s overdetermined narrative structure that repeatedly exploits and sacriﬁces its characters. Referring to the bus that crushes the beggar Shankar, Hilary Mantel argues that Mistry’s characters are resigned to the fate predetermined by their author’s desire for a patterned narrative structure: “They loiter forever on street corners, hoping to catch the bus but knowing it is likely that when it comes it will mow them down; the driver’s name is Mistry, and within his six hundred pages he will crush them all” (Mantel). Ian Almond extends Mantel’s critique in “Re-Orientalizing the Indian

Novel,” which argues that this resignation to fate reinstates oriental tropes that deny the existence of tragedy: “A Westerner’s understanding of the East as the antithesis of tragedy seeps into the novel, offering an almost mystical alternative to the bleak,

203 political landscape the book surveys” (Almond 216). Since rejoinders to Almond and

Mantel that argue that the book is fundamentally about the quest for patterns miss

Mistry’s critique of this desire for patterns, it is necessary to evaluate the criticism of

Mistry’s exploitation of disabled and disﬁgured characters more fully through a reading of Shankar’s death and funeral procession. The death and funeral procession of Shankar the beggar, which involves a corpse and a funeral train complete with railway porter pallbearers, has been interpreted either as a carnivalesque celebration of the body or, per Mantel, the authorial exploitation of the suffering of impoverished population. My analysis of the scene acknowledges the compelling nature of these readings while offering an alternative that will lead to a larger discussion of the disruptive potential of the body in Mistry’s ﬁction.

Towards the conclusion of the novel the legless beggar Shankar loses his life in a “terrible accident” when he loses control of his gaadi––his vehicle of a wooden platform and castors––and gets hit by a double-decker bus. After his death, the

Beggarmaster, responsible for protecting Shankar in return for a portion of his earnings, reveals that Shankar is his half brother and, therefore, that he would spare no expense for his funeral procession and cremation. In order to accommodate the pace of “the great number of cripples,” the lavish farewell is “the slowest-moving procession ever to wind its way through city streets” (Balance 494). The slow movement of the train of beggars through the city attracts the attention of riot police who attack the procession halfway to the cremation ground believing the beggars to be

“troublemakers indulging in street theatre” and Shankar’s corpse to be a “symbolic

204 dummy” (497). For Mantel this moment is the most egregious evidence of Mistry’s authorial manipulation:

Mistry here is making a dangerously destructive comment on his own technique. Like the Beggarmaster, the author is keen on getting a good return from Shankar…It is a miscalculation; we see that Mistry himself has made a ‘symbolic dummy’ of the weakest and most vulnerable of all his creations… He is ours to look at; he is not ours to feel with (Mantel).

At the heart of Mantel’s critique of A Fine Balance is the calculated efforts to generate sentiment that, in making instruments of the characters, deny their humanity. Mistry relies on the disﬁgured and diseased body, Mantel argues, to secure his realist aesthetic. In the quest for universality, Mantel suggests that Mistry drives the train of the narrative over his characters and, ultimately, into cliché.

Though not invalidating Mantel’s argument, Shankar’s death takes place off- stage and is related to Dina, Maneck, and the reader through Beggarmaster’s brief narration, allowing the extended scene of Shankar’s funeral procession to serve as the

“payoff “for his sacriﬁce. The sacriﬁcial logic at work in Mistry’s text is made more explicit in Tokaryk’s account of the novel. In his focus on the carnivalesque scenes in A

Fine Balance that puncture the rhetoric of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, Tokaryk argues that “the individual’s death/injury has implicit within it a rebirth of the community as a whole” (Tokaryk 31). The funeral procession for Shankar, composed of “atrophied” bodies moving in a “froglike squat,” a “sideways shufﬂe of a crab,” or a “doubled over” crawl until “their behinds raised in the air like camels’ humps,” proceeds with the appearance of “more of a festival than a funeral” (Balance 494-5). Reading the procession as a Bakhtinian carnival, Tokaryk asserts that “in their celebration of their grotesque, dying bodies, the beggars change the public perception of the body politic,

205 of how authoritarian economic discourses operate, of how we read and tell stories about the other” (Tokaryk 32). In an earlier scene in the novel a crowd that had been forced to attend a rally for Indira Gandhi is crushed under an 80 foot cut-out of the

Prime Minister, accidentally knocked over by a circling helicopter. In its subversion of

Gandhi’s power, Tokaryk offers this scene as “the death of the individual body and the potential rebirth of the body politic” (31). However, considering the coerced and accidental nature of their injury at the rally or Shankar’s pitiful death, it is difficult to locate the agency or sense of communal rebirth that Tokaryk attempts to read into the scenes. We should be skeptical of a reading of narrative form that doesn’t just represent the disastrous consequences of enforced economic development, but also appears to operate according to its logic; the involuntary sacrifices of lower classes instrumentalized and normalized for the benefit of the few.

Though they arrive at different interpretations of the scene, both Mantel and

Tokaryk read Shankar’s death as a sacrifice that either belies a calculated manipulation of sentiment or that lays the foundation for a renewed body politic. Neither, however, devotes much time to an actual analysis of the effects of Shankar’s disfigured body in the text. Though Tokaryk focuses on the procession of grotesque bodies, he erases the body at the center of the procession. Similarly, the source of Mantel’s uneasiness with the vulnerability of Shankar’s character is left unexplored in her effort to pin this uneasiness on an authorial exploitation of sentiment. The Beggarmaster, a character well acquainted with profiting off of suffering, suggests an alternative logic behind the funeral procession he has arranged for his half-brother Shankar. Noting the paucity of

206 donations from the crowd that has gathered to watch the procession, the Beggarmaster explains to Dina and Maneck:

Pity can only be shown in small doses. When so many beggars are in one place…It’s a freak show. People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars (Balance 493).

When spaced throughout the city in an elaborate staging by the Beggarmaster, the cripples gathered for the procession generate a compassion that is fatigued when they crowd on stage and threaten to overwhelm the main action. Emphasizing this staging, the Beggarmaster applies the ubiquitous real-estate phrase to the business of begging:

“the three most important things are location, location, location” (494). Originating at the Vishram Vegetarian Hotel, the location of the procession, furthermore, removes

“the assembly of crippled, blinded, armless, legless, diseased, and faceless individuals” from affecting pity and generating donations (493). Rather, onlookers inquire if “some hospital, for lack of space, was conducting an outdoor clinic” (493). The Beggarmaster, aware of the staging, suggests a design to the procession that moves it out of the economy of begging and into a deliberation on the affective potentialities of Shankar’s body.

Laying on a bamboo bier outside the back door of Vishram’s Vegetarian Hotel next to a storage shed, Shankar’s body is concealed under a sheet and covered with a blanket of fresh ﬂowers; the “mutilated corpse” a sight too unbearable for the gathered mourners (494). Beggarmaster, in his narration to Dina and Maneck, reveals the upsetting state of Shankar’s body: “Both Shankar and the gaadi were crushed completely––not possible to separate the two. Removing the wood and castors embedded in his ﬂesh would have meant mutilating his poor body still more. It will

207 have to be cremated with him” (Balance 491). However grisly, the enmeshing of

Shankar’s body with the instrument of his mobility reinforces the humanizing and dehumanizing potential of prosthetic technology––the gaadi that is ﬁgured as a means of his humanization earlier in the novel, becomes an alien object disrupting the purity of his body in death. Shankar, referred to as Worm by most of the characters in the novel because of his inability to walk, reclaims his birth name once he receives the present of the gaadi from the Beggarmaster. During their time in a work camp, Ishvar urges Shankar––still known as Worm––to reveal his true name, arguing: “But now you have the gaadi. What’s your real name?” (Balance 341). Ishvar notes that Worm, a name based on the limited motions of Shankar’s disabled body, does not reﬂect

Shankar’s transcendence of these limitations through his gaadi. The accident, furthermore, is the result of the Beggarmaster who, unable to imagine Shankar’s disabled form gathering any momentum on his platform, neglects to install brakes on the gaadi. Though Beggarmaster wishes to improve Shankar’s condition of living, he is unable to fully imagine the impact of his gift or consider its actual use. Moreover,

Beggarmaster is unwilling to make a more signiﬁcant intervention for his half-brother, such as removing Shankar from the begging economy of the streets, which would impact his own proﬁt. Shankar’s fate questions a notion of progress that overwrites the body, while further highlighting the risk of a humanitarian sentiment like

Beggarmaster’s that remedies immediate physical discomfort only to leave the larger structural inequalities present.

More central to the narrative of A Fine Balance, Shankar’s funeral procession is a testing ground for the public viability of the enclosed community created within Dina’s

208 apartment that crosses religious and caste lines. In bringing the Parsis Dina and

Maneck into the funeral train, the scene recalls the funeral procession in the Pariah quarters in Rao’s Kanthapura. In Rao’s novel, which chronicles the spread of Gandhi’s

Indian nationalism to a rural South Indian village, the Brahmin protagonist Moorthy’s decision to cross caste lines and openly carry the body of a lower caste woman results in the excommunication of himself, “his family, and all generations to come”(Rao 42).

Similarly, for Dina and Maneck the beggar’s funeral is a radical crossing of class and religious lines. Interrupting the procession with the honks of his car, Dina’s brother

Nusswan demands a consideration of the family’s reputation: “‘You’re not walking another step in the procession! Of all things––going to a beggar’s funeral! How low can you sink? What will people say of my sister’” (497). Dina, formerly unsure of how to comport herself during the carnivalesque procession “‘where there is a death but no mourning,’” gains enough conﬁdence and security from the crowd to withstand the demands of her brother. Returning home, elated from the experience, Dina rather glibly tells Maneck that Nusswan will be “having bad dreams tonight, I think.

Nightmares of funeral pyres––his reputation going up in smoke” (498). Maneck, however, turns from this analogy that substitutes reputation for the body, returning to the specter of another body improperly mourned. In response to Dina,

Maneck smiled, but his thoughts were of the other cremation, three days ago. Where he should have been. Where the generational order of dying was out of joint…Crackle of kindling. Smoke smarting the eyes. And ﬁngers of ﬁre teasing, playing, tickling the corpse. Causing it to arch, as though trying to sit up…a sign, they said of the spirit protesting (498).

For Maneck, Shankar’s procession is haunted by the funeral that he was unable to attend for his friend Avinash, the student activist whose body, bearing evidence of

209 state torture, was found on the train tracks. Maneck holds a dark mirror to the carnivalesque procession of Shankar, reﬂecting on yet another mutilated corpse in the novel that remains hidden from view. He imagines Avinash’s parents beginning the procession from the morgue, the corpse decomposing “in the unrefrigerated world.

Where everything ended badly” (494). The body’s uncontrollable movement in the

flames, the viscerally alliterative “crackle of kindling” and eyes smarted by smoke, contrasts with Beggarmaster’s assurance that the cremation ceremony is a beautiful sight that generates “a completeness, a calmness, a perfect balance between life and death” (495). Returning to the specter of another, more somber, funeral procession centered around another badly mutilated corpse, Maneck uncovers the protesting spirit of a cremated body, refusing to overwrite the human costs of the Emergency in sacrificial logic or reflective platitudes. Shankar’s procession reveals the body’s potential to challenge authority balanced by its capacity to be subjugated by it; the ability of the prosthetic technology of the state to both humanize and overwhelm the human.

In his persistent return to the body, Mistry adds a visceral ﬂeshiness to the body that refuses to become a “symbolic dummy” readily written over, incorporated, and consumed. When the riot police charge the train of mourners they upset Shankar’s bier. Having believed the body to be a prop in a staged political protest, the police halt their attack abruptly when Shankar’s corpse is exposed and his body parts spill across the street. The commanding ofﬁcer apologizes to Beggarmaster in a macabre exchange:

“‘Trust me, heads will roll for this blunder,’ promised the commanding ofﬁcer, while his men hurried to retrieve the one which already had: off the bier and into the road, along

210 with a few other body parts” (496). At the heart of the narrator’s seemingly tasteless comment is the literalization of the ofﬁcer’s ﬁgure of speech, the material effects of his metaphoric language of violent dismemberment.

Mistry wrenches the novel away from the realm of the purely ﬁgurative through a recovery of the ﬂeshiness of the body. While the procession recalls the protest in Such a Long Journey that I will discuss in the next section, its invocation of street theater and the relation of performance to material reality is further developed in

Mistry’s later novel Family Matters. In that novel, the central character Yezad hires a pair of Brechtian actors to convince his boss Mr. Kapur to run in the local elections.

One of the actors, Bhaskar, summarizes the grandiose plot: “Our objective is to rekindle Mr. Kapur’s noble urges. We must move him beyond catharsis, beyond pity and terror, to a state of engagement––into the arena of epic realism, where the man of action…” (Family Matters 288). Interrupted by Yezad’s skeptical friend Vilas the scene gently mocks Bhaskar's belief in a precisely calibrated aesthetics that, like “an exact science” can master cause and effect (288). The plan of course fails; Mr. Kapur is “too far gone into the realm of fantasy. The realm of his rhetoric” (300). The “delayed- action epiphany” that Yezad waits for never arrives; Mr. Kapur is simply too caught up in his desire to “‘become one with the organic whole that is Bombay’” to be affected by the actual differences that divide the city (299). Despite his revulsion of the body odor, dirty clothes, and oily hair, Mr. Kapur is determined to train himself to overlook this discomfort to follow his almost touristic desire to experience being part of the masses of Bombay “to mingle with her people, be part of that crush of bodies in the streets and trains and buses” (299). The actors’ efforts to rupture Mr. Kapur’s nostalgia-tinged

211 illusion of Bombay with the actualities of modern Mumbai through epic realism fail.

Moreover, the actors are necessarily limited in their ability to control either the reception of their art or the world external to it, directly contributing to Mr. Kapur’s murder at the hands of Shiv Sena thugs––the “hazardous element” that the actors were intended to replace (280).18 Though Mr. Kapur maintains a dangerously naïve, romantic vision of Bombay and its masses, the instruments used by the actors to rupture this illusion prove inﬂexible and ineffective. Rather Mistry reorients his aesthetics in these novels around the body, the very object that separates Mr. Kapur from his romanticized masses. While Mr. Kapur believes he can transcend this difference by altering his appearance––essentially performing poverty by mimicking its outer forms––and the actors retreat to an incongruous theory, the dis-eased body at the center of Mistry’s novels becomes the effective site for wrenching the global anglophone novel away from the illusory unities promised by its ﬁgurative rhetoric.

IV: Analgesic Art and the Body in Such a Long Journey

The reception of A Fine Balance, largely determined by critics responding to Mistry’s formal decisions, has often written over the body at the center of Mistry’s realist aesthetics. In my reading of the novel I attempted to demonstrate how renewed attention to the body in A Fine Balance demonstrates the tendency of this reception, as well as the narrative act itself, to function as an antibody, neutralizing or assimilating

18 Mistry’s ﬁction is often critical of Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist political organization that emerged in the 1960s to demand preferential treatment for Mumbai natives over the inﬂux of South Indian and Muslim immigrants to the city. It is believed that Shiv Sena sparked the violent riots in Mumbai in January 1993 (Hazrika 1993). Mumbai University banned Mistry’s Such a Long Journey in 2010 due to its disparaging portrayal of Shiv Sena after Sena members staged a protest by burning copies of the novel (Nelson 2010).

212 difference to facilitate global consumption. While skeptics of the postcolonial realist novel assert that A Fine Balance renders complex historical and cultural differences as exotic consumables for a Western audience, recent efforts to recover the novel that have focused on formal unities and meanings continue to ignore how Mistry constructs these unities over the bodies of characters. As the character of Valmik contends, the act of narration involves assimilating or rejecting differences in an effort to preserve and extend itself, a survival process from which Mistry’s own narratives can not be excluded. The “hidden survival mechanism” of narrative in A Fine Balance allows characters to make sense out of their own experiences of the Emergency, but also threatens to overwrite histories in a similar manner to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency narrative. By connecting the antibodies of the narrative of A Fine Balance to the narrative of Gandhi’s Emergency and to the act of narration itself, however, Mistry makes both the sacriﬁces of narrative form and its humanitarian potential apparent.

Though Mistry’s realist fiction emphasizes sympathetic connections, has been readily been adopted into the postcolonial literary marketplace, his novels themselves have actively critiqued the universalizing operation of sympathy with which they are most readily identified. While my reading of A Fine Balance primarily attended to the necessity of recovering the body in Mistry’s fiction, I now want to return to Such a Long

Journey to consider the work that the body performs in the novel to extend a theory of community that grounds itself in the human and more-than-human environment that we inhabit. My reading of Such a Long Journey, moreover situates this return to the body in the speciﬁc historical and cultural moment confronting the Parsi community of

Mumbai as its cultural and economic inﬂuence declined in equal proportion to its

213 population. Finally, I will attempt to account for the troubling sacriﬁces demanded at the conclusion of the novel. The assemblage of protestors at the end of Such a Long

Journey results in both the sacriﬁce of the handicapped Tehmul and, over his corpse,

Gustad’s epiphanic moment of narrative resolution. As with Shankar’s funeral procession, we can not escape the representational stakes of these novels where narrative resolution arrives at the expense of their most vulnerable characters. We should, however, read these sacriﬁces in the context of Mistry’s theorization of the body in the global anglophone novel.

Set in 1971, the main action of Such a Long Journey occurs during the

Bangladesh War of Liberation and the subsequent Indo-Pakistani War. Like A Fine

Balance, Such a Long Journey offers a sharp critique of Indira Gandhi’s rule, though it is set about four years prior to the Emergency that provides the backdrop for the latter book. In its portrayal of the effects of national and international history on the daily life of a small, interconnected cast of characters, Such a Long Journey, like Mistry’s other

ﬁctions, places governmental administration, community, and art into conversation with one another. Unlike the later novel that imagines a new community of Hindus and

Parsis forming and ultimately being disbanded by the impact of governmental policies,

Such a Long Journey, like its predecessor Swimming Lessons, is a narrative that explores the impact of modernization on the tightly bound Parsi community within an apartment complex in Bombay. The walled-in Parsi enclave houses Gustad Noble and his wife Dilnavaz’s family, which includes their eldest son Sohrab, their middle-child

Darius, and their youngest child, and only daughter, Roshan. As mentioned in the introduction, the relative stability of the family is upset by Sohrab’s decision to decline

214 his seat at the Indian Institute of Technology as well as the 15-year-old Darius’s supposed pursuit of a neighbor’s daughter, and Roshan’s mysterious illness. The largest threat to the family’s security, however, arrives in the form of the letter from Major

Jimmy Bilimoria, on which Gustad reﬂects in the darkness of the moments before dawn at the opening of the novel.

The letter from the old friend who disappeared abruptly from the Parsi apartment complex introduces the central plot line of the novel, bringing the humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh, notably bypassed by Gustad, into direct relation with the security and well-being of the Noble family. The letter requests that Gustad, using his position at a bank, transfer government funds into an account that will fund the training and arming of Mukti Bahini resistance ﬁghters. Jimmy works for RAW, the Research and Analysis Wing, that serves as the main intelligence and counterterrorism branch of India. The director of RAW, Jimmy learns is Indira

Gandhi, who uses RAW “like her own private agency. Spying on opposition parties, ministers…anyone. For blackmail” (Mistry 270). The Prime Minister, wishing to fund the Mukti Bahini discretely without ofﬁcially involving India in the conﬂict between

Pakistan and Bangladesh, establishes a separate bank account into which Jimmy asks

Gustad to deposit an enormous sum of money. The plot is ripped straight from the headlines of the bizarre Nagarwala scandal which involved the disappearance of 60 lakh rupees from the State Bank of India (Aggrawal 11). In Investigative Journalism in

India, S. K. Aggrawal relates that in May 1971 Ved Prakash Malhotra, the Head

Cashier of the State Bank of India, received a call telling him that the Prime Minister wanted to talk with him, “followed by a familiar voice which told him that Rs. 60 lakhs

215 were urgently needed for a secret mission to Bangladesh...He was told to collect a slip for the sum from the Prime Minister’s ofﬁce” (11). The Prime Minister would later deny this request for money, accusing her courier Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala of imitating her voice to steal the money. The case raises a number of questions about

Gandhi’s administration, which a newspaper report in Such a Long Journey, substituting

Bilimoria for Nagarwala, aptly notes:

For example, assuming that Mr Bilimoria has the talent of voice impersonation, is it routine for our national banks to hand over vast sums of money if the Prime Minister telephones? How high up does one have to be in the government…to make such a call? And was the Chief Cashier so familiar with Mrs Gandhi’s voice that he accepted the instructions without any veriﬁcation whatsoever? If yes, does that mean that Mrs Gandhi has done this sort of thing frequently? (Mistry 195).

When Bilimoria is betrayed, accused of fraud and extortion, the funding plot crumbles, exposing the unwilling Gustad to the messy complexities and uncertainties of the present from which he would like to retreat. Instead Gustad is thrust into the regional geopolitics and corrupt bureaucracy of the Gandhi administration outside of which he would like to imagine himself and the Parsi community of the Khodadad apartments.

The primary symbol of Gustad’s retreat in the novel is the black stone wall that protects the Khodadad apartments from the encroaching metropolis of Bombay. From the opening of the novel the wall of the compound, is under threat by a municipal proposal to widen the road, a project that threatens to make the complex “more a prison camp than a building” with the residents “all cooped up like sheep or chickens” (Mistry 17). Moreover, the wall is unable to keep out the noises and smells of the city. As Gustad complains: “The ﬂies, the mosquitoes, the horrible stink, with bloody shameless people pissing, squatting alongside the wall. Late at night it became

216 like a wholesale public latrine” (Mistry 16). In an effort to secure the wall against the threat of the inefﬁcient bureaucracy of the local municipality while restoring its insulating function, Gustad hires a street artist to transform the wall into a shrine to gods, saints, and prophets from an assortment of religions: “Hindu, Sikh, Judaic,

Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Jainist” (182). The holy paintings almost immediately transform the makeshift latrine into a place of reverence and worship.

Gustad’s plan to beautify the black stone wall, converting it into a monument, works to perfection: the unhygienic conditions that bred mosquitoes and produced an awful, disruptive odor are replaced, Gustad notes, with the “delicate fragrance” of incense and ﬂower offerings that pleases the senses: “The black wall had verily become a shrine for all races and religions” (212; 286).

This transformation of the wall is at the center of Deepika Bahri’s analysis of

Such a Long Journey in Native Intelligence, where she argues for a critical framework capable of addressing the aesthetic dimension of postcolonial literature. I will follow

Bahri’s argument of Such a Long Journey, particularly her reading of the aesthetic function of the wall, before turning to what I consider a critical challenge to this aesthetics in the form of the disabled and diseased body in the novel. In her chapter on

Mistry, entitled “The Economy of Postcolonial Literature,” Bahri asserts that postcolonial critics have paid too much attention to the “economy of postcolonial literature in the global marketplace,” ignoring “the economy of the individual text” (Bahri 123). The formal features of a text, Bahri contends, oppose those aspects of the text such as its ideological content, conﬂicts, and market, constructing the economy of the text as “those components of value that contest its reduction to

217 exchange value alone” (123). The wall, in Bahri’s reading, is an example of an organizing formal element––the text’s internal economy––that exceeds broader postcolonial thematics to expose a varied set of human concerns that Bahri insists are usually overlooked in postcolonial criticism:

The limit space of the wall functions as a central device in the novel with multiple signiﬁcations, among them are the symbolic limits of representation in the national and minority narrative, a visual symbol of the internal religious and social divisions within the nation, a metonymic pointer to the threatening excess that lies beyond, on either side, and the wall as freighted metaphor that unfolds in various ways…In a critical sense, then, although sometimes a wall is just a wall, here we are faced with a story wall, a wall in a story, an intentional wall, a wall beyond auctorial intention, and a wallwith a story (Bahri 133-4).

The complex function of the wall in the novel––its ability to be move beyond the intention of its author, to have a logic immanent to the text while maintaining its analogies to the real world––allow the wall, like the non-English words in Such a Long

Journey, to function as a “cryptogram for a dialectical relation to the ‘other’ and for interpretation as a Sisyphean labor that must surrender meaning even as it seems to attain it” (29). In her focus on the complex interiority of the text, its ‘native intelligence,’ Bahri pushes against reductive readings of postcolonial texts that prioritize thematic concerns.

The “aesthetic cognition of literature” that is central to Bahri’s overarching argument in Native Intelligence offers a reading of Such a Long Journey through the novel’s own meditation on aesthetics through the central ﬁgure of the wall (7). In her attention to the role of the wall to an understanding of aesthetics in the novel, however,

Bahri overlooks how the body critically grounds this aesthetic in Mistry’s ﬁction.

While Bahri is attentive to the moments of bodily sensation in Such a Long Journey, her reading of the wall overwhelms the body that, I argue, is capable of offering an

218 alternative reading of the conclusion of Such a Long Journey that suggests the body as a more promising site for analyzing Mistry’s aesthetic. After establishing the irrefutable centrality of the wall to the structuring of Mistry’s narrative, Bahri must account for the complicated events surrounding the seemingly inevitable destruction of the wall at the conclusion of the novel.

As the pavement artist converts the wall into a shrine filled with drawings of a diverse set of holy figures, the wall becomes a source of tension for the artist between his learned migratory behavior and his newfound desire for permanence. After his first day of work at the wall, the formerly itinerant street artist, who drew temporary creations at the mercy of wind, rain, and the “regulation black-sandalled feet” of the police, settles down near the wall to protect his creation, sleeping under the stars on just a mat (Mistry 212). When patrons of the wall habitually touch the wall while performing their obeisances, smudging the depictions, the artist for the first time finds this behavior bothersome. In response, he decides to paint over the crayon drawings with oils and enamels to lend them a degree of permanence. The pavement artist even represents the wall on the wall, an act that suggests both the wall’s shrine like status, as well as an insular self-referentiality to the artistic project that Mistry appears to be critiquing. Similarly, the pavement artist erects a small, semi-permanent shelter next to the wall. It is a radical transformation from the ethos of perpetual movement that the artist had followed, summed up neatly by the narrator:

Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs (Mistry 184).

219 The pavement artist’s eventual abandonment of this cycle, tied deeply into his bodily rhythm, in favor of his efforts to preserve his artistic achievements is signiﬁcant. In a novel whose title references the duration of the journey, such as an effort to replace the harmony of the body with the comfort of art is almost certain to fail.

The disruption of the artist’s new routine at the wall materializes in the form of another artist who now represents the unresponsive bureaucracy of the local government. The threat of the municipality’s road expansion plans return at the conclusion of the novel in the unexpected form of Gustad’s childhood friend Malcom

Saldanaha, a musician whose inability to support himself with his art has him serving as an arm of the municipality. The pavement artist meets Malcolm and the demolition crew’s arrival at the Khodadad Building with a sense of devastation: “When Malcolm broke the news to him, he crumpled…There he sat, cross-legged, unable to summon up even a trace of the resources that had fueled his wanderings in the old days” (Mistry 324). The artist’s investment in the wall leaves him at a loss, entirely devoid of the resources he had formerly relied on to survive. In her analysis of the moment of the wall’s destruction, Bahri suggests that the pavement artist’s fate mirrors that of art in its “precarious position in a world of uncertainty and change, its future unknown, and its purpose ambiguous” (Bahri 141). Bahri, reading the conclusion of the novel through the destruction of the wall, offers an interpretation of the novel that sees in the wall and the pavement artist a compelling symbol of an artistic “quest for alternative futures” that will continue to be the long journey of the novel’s title (141).

While Bahri’s argument that an artistic quest is at the heart of the novel is persuasive, I would suggest that it is equally important to recognize how Mistry

220 grounds this quest and aesthetic in the body. Expanding Bahri’s claim allows not only the evaluation of aesthetics in Mistry’s fiction to become apparent, but also his critique of a particular conception of art that, in overwriting the body, unwittingly reinscribes and, moreover, masks structural inequalities. The wall, though capable of uniting a diverse population through its artistic representations, conceals greater inequalities, ultimately becoming a dangerous symbol capable of crystalizing resistance to the local municipality while further conserving the status quo. In one of the coincidences that has become a distinguishing mark of Mistry’s fiction, Malcolm’s demolition crew arrives at the wall as a procession protesting the corruption and inefficiency of the municipality approaches the Khodadad Building. This morcha, protesting the local municipality’s misappropriation of funds that are responsible for the breakdown of the infrastructure of sanitation and transportation, arrives at the wall that has used art to effect the very hygienic improvements demanded by the protesters, albeit only to the benefit of the Parsi inhabitants (Mistry 312). Before reaching the municipality, the morcha stops at the wall to meditate and pray “‘that in the spirit of truth and nonviolence we will defeat our enemies!’” (326). Alerted by a municipal worker on

Malcolm’s crew of the wall’s imminent destruction, the prayers for nonviolence directed towards the wall devolve into violence against those workers who threaten the wall. In the “savage ﬁghting” that ensues around the wall, “the sea of violent humanity” hurls a brick that catches Tehmul on the forehead, killing him almost immediately

(331;333). The confrontation that results in Tehmul’s death, as Dr. Paymaster, an unexpected and reluctant member of the morcha, explains, is “‘what might be called an act of God…or an act of artistry. Which comes to the same thing’” (330). As an

221 accidental meeting, the confrontation can be thought of as an act of God, an act of the novelist as God, or as a result of the art on the wall transcending its authorial intention and inspiring division and discord rather than the universal harmony to which it aspires. This ﬁnal interpretation, as Bahri notes, suggests that the fate of the wall, if it does not necessarily symbolize the end of art, at least acknowledges its precarious position in the face of competing regimes of power. However, this reading neglects the role the wall plays in engendering inequality, inciting the riot that concludes in

Tehmul’s sacriﬁcial death. The wall becomes a sacred shrine, but its origins as part of

Gustad’s machinations to isolate himself from the sounds and smells of the city indicts the wall as a piece of art whose universal ambitions serve extremely narrow ends, suggesting not art’s struggle against the forces of the external world per Bahri’s reading, but rather something destructive in its very insularity and self-reﬂexivity. The wall’s destruction, moreover, reveals the body as containing the very power attributed to art in Bahri’s argument and becomes another fortress to protect Gustad from the outside world.

V: Marked Bodies: Disease, Disability and Narrative

The wall becomes one of the central interface with the body in a novel full of bodily maladies and technologies that mediate the body’s interaction with the surrounding world, including medicine, humor, narrative, ritual, religion, superstition, and sacriﬁce.

The novel opens with a set of contrasting bodily images. A bhaiya delivering milk to the residents of the Khodadad Building disgusts his clients as “ﬂakes of dry dead skin fell from his ﬁngers” (Mistry 1). Nearby, Gustad performs his daily prayers: “Tall and

222 broad-shouldered, Gustad was the envy and admiration of friends and relatives whenever health or sickness was being discussed. For a man swimming in the tidewater of his ﬁfth decade of life, they said, he looked so solid” (1). As a bulwark of

Parsi health and masculinity, Gustad’s solid appearance contrasts to the exposed, degraded body of the bhaiya, whose sloughing skin invites revulsion amid the hygienic concerns of his customers. Gustad’s powerful frame, moreover, is a reminder of the ideal of Parsi masculinity for a community conscious of its own decline in population and inﬂuence from its height during British colonial rule.19 As Sooni Taraporevala notes in the introduction to her photography collection Parsis: The Zoroastrians of India, demographically Parsis are “a dying community” whose deaths outweigh births (9).

The declining Parsi birthrates, moreover, contrast with the population growth in India, projected to number 1200 million people in 2020. “At that point,” Taraporevala observes, “Parsis, who will number 23,000––0.0002 per cent of the population, will cease to be termed a community and will be labelled a ‘tribe’, as is any ethnic group below 30,000” (9). Mistry’s novel chronicles the impact of migration and demographic trends on a Parsi community whose traditions are increasingly under attack. Gustad’s efforts to maintain his bodily containment, opposed to the worldly exposure and weakness of the body of the bhaiya, is therefore ﬁgured as a means of isolating himself and his community in the glories of the past as their religious traditions are under attack from a municipality that couches its concerns in the very discourse of

19 This anxiety over the decline of the Parsi community, evident in much of Mistry’s ﬁction, has been chronicled in photographic collections such as Sooni Taraporevala’s Parsis: The Zoroastrians of India (2004) or ethnographic studies such as T. M. Luhrmann’s The Good Parsi (1996). Luhrmann provides an account of the effeminacy and impotence attached to younger Parsi men, which she interprets as a metaphor for the end of empire (Luhrmann 132-33).

223 containment and hygiene.20 This comes up in debates within the novel, as well as in the popular press, over the continuation of traditional Parsi funeral rites at the Tower of

Silence, a circular structure where the dead are laid out to be consumed by vultures. In

Such a Long Journey this practice comes under threat not only by Parsi reformists who favor cremation, but also by the growth of Bombay; the tenants of newly erected luxury high-rises complain of vultures dropping ﬂesh on their balconies and of corpses that are exposed to their sight-lines (Mistry 316-19).21 Though Mistry gently mocks the tenor of these debates between orthodox and reform camps over the treatment of the Parsi dead in these scenes, Such a Long Journey is a novel that presents a minority community striving to move beyond its past glory in order to integrate with the contemporary Indian nation while still preserving its traditions.

The anxiety over the future of the Parsi community in India is ﬁgured through bodily degradation in the novel. Reﬂecting on Sohrab’s decision not to go to ITT,

Gustad wonders:

What kind of life was Sohrab going to look forward to? No future for minorities, with all these fascist Shiv Sena politics and Marathi language nonsense. It was going to be like the black people in America––twice as good as the white man to get half as much. How to make him realize what he was doing to his father, who had made the success of his son’s life the purpose of his own? Sohrab had snatched away that purpose, like a crutch from a cripple (55).

Gustad fears that Sohrab underestimates the threat Shiv Sena and Hindu nationalism pose to their conjoined futures, that Sohrab must educate and elevate himself or risk

20 Monica Ringer’s Pious Citizens (2011) is an excellent intellectual history of Zoroastrian reform movements, particularly Zoroastrianism’s “capacity to generate progress and civilization” (Ringer 3).

21 Sherally Munshi chronicles the effects of modernization on Parsi funeral rites in “The Ghosts of Doongerwadi,” noting not only the encroachment of residential developments, but also the 97 percent decline of the vulture population due to destruction of habitat and poisoning from the drug Diclofenac (Munshi 57). The reduced vulture population has resulted in dead bodies “unconsumed, left to rot” (58).

224 being marginalized. ITT guarantees a future that can stabilize the present; without such an imagined destination Gustad views the present in terms of bodily disability, a trope repeated throughout Such a Long Journey to represent, however problematically, the threat facing the community. The overwhelming presence of the disabled, diseased, and marked body in Such a Long Journey serves as the locus for debates over the relation of the particular to the universal as they connect to the specific, historic condition of the Parsi community following the British Raj as it looked for a new purpose in the Indian nation.22 The ultimate breakdown of Major Bilimoria’s powerfully-built body into “nothing more than a shadow” through Indira Gandhi’s manipulation and betrayal is the apparent human cost and sacrifice necessary for a unified image of India (267). Bilimoria’s fate looms as the potential toll of assuming the national mantle, while the eccentric Miss Kutpitia’s resistance to any change appears to signify the similarly devastating cost of continued isolation from the Indian nation.

Gustad’s desire to withdraw from the teeming Bombay cityscape, his nostalgia for the glory years of Noble & Sons along with his dream for Sohrab’s future at the

Indian Institute of Technology––Gustad’s “promised land”––indicate a retreat in the face of the challenges and changes of the present (Mistry 66). The wall, even before its destruction, no longer protects the inhabitants of the Khodadad Building from the chaos of the city or, considering the references to blackout paper, the geopolitics of the

Indian state. From the odor of the latrines, the annoyance of mosquitoes, the atrocities reported in the newspaper, and the nightly imputations of an elderly neighbor against

22 In “Zoroastrianism and the Body” Alan Williams notes that the body is to be treated with similar respect to the soul in Zoroastrianism and that the “body here and now is seen as reﬂecting the inner nature, and...bodily sickness denotes sickness of soul...” (Williams 155).

225 the Tatas––the family ruling the multinational Indian conglomerate of the same name––the outside world regularly inﬁltrates the courtyard of the Khodadad building.

More perilously, a vandal terrorizes the courtyard despite the wall and a security guard, scattering the remains of dead animals outside of Gustad’s window and destroying his garden. Considering how thoroughly the outside world has inﬁltrated the Parsi enclave of the Khodadad Building, Gustad’s efforts to reinforce the wall with artistic representations of religious ﬁgures are based more on controlling the perception of this invasion by mediating the interface between his body and the environment. Despite his tall, broad-shouldered body being the image of health and

ﬁtness––an image of solidity for a community worried about its own permanence––

Gustad ﬁghts to conceal a slight limp caused by a serious accident only a few years prior to the time of the novel. After reading the notice from the municipality, Gustad walks “with hurried strides” to measure the potential effects of the road-widening project (16). The narrator notes Gustad growing worried about the road noise and stink:

The diesel smell persisted, following him through the compound as he returned home. It reminded him of his accident nine years ago, when such a smell had been present, also strong and undiminishing, while he lay in the road with his shattered hip, in the path of oncoming cars. He wrinkled his nose and wished the wind would change. His hip, the one which made him limp, began to hurt a little as he entered the ﬂat (Mistry 16-7).

The smell of diesel fumes cause the memories of the accident that broke Gustad’s hip to resurface, forcing a visceral, bodily recall of the injury that he goes to great lengths to conceal throughout the novel. His effort to conceal and suppress his limp and keep it

“at an ignorable minimum,” however, repeatedly fail under emotional duress, such as when he blames himself for Roshan’s mysterious illness. Though buoyed by his visit to

226 Dr. Paymaster, when Gustad arrives back at the Khodadad Building the stench from the wall leaves him feeling helpless: “The insidious stink in his nostrils left no room for optimism” (165). As Gustad’s pessimism and self doubt deepens, he loses control over his body: “His limp slipped its usual containment, and by the time they reached the door, he was swaying wildly from side to side” (165). Relinquishing his effort to contain his injury, Gustad’s wildly swaying body recalls what he considers the

“supremely pathetic example of hip-fracture victims…with nothing to look forward to but a life of pain, their bodies swaying frighteningly from side to side while they strained and panted and heaved in their pitiful pursuit of ambulation” (29-30).23 This image of a host of other disﬁgured bodies further reminds Gustad of his trip to

Madhiwalla Bonesetter’s clinic where the “hideous and pitiful” spectacle of “broken bodies” with “splintered ﬁbulae and tibiae that had ruptured the skin” or “a cracked humerus grotesquely twisting an elbow”appeared in such quantity that it appeared as though “someone was churning out these extravagant mutilations with great deliberation” (131). The Bonesetter’s clinic is the site of both tremendous human suffering and vulnerability, as well as the “hope pure and primal, that sprang unattended and uncluttered from the very blood of the patients” as they wait for redemption through the Bonesetter’s hidden methods (131). The horrible sights and sounds of the clinic, combined with an underlying, primal hope allows Gustad to momentarily forget the pain of his own body and empathize with the mass population

23 This description applies to Tehmul who, unlike Gustad, “had had the misfortune to be treated by conventional methods” (Mistry 29). Gustad’s alternative treatment from Bonesetter is a good example of the novel’s openness and evaluation of alternative and traditional medical practices, which Valérie Narayana discusses at more length in “Health as Metaphor: The Diminished Body in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey.”

227 from which the black stone wall is intended to divide him. Tied to his bodily injury, the smell of diesel and urine gets associated with the failures of the black stone wall to insulate Gustad from the outside world. The fumes, urinous odors, and mosquitoes that invade his apartment remind him of his own bodily injury and vulnerability, which, though he endeavors to mask, seems to offer a vision of “redemption” that is otherwise denied to Gustad in the novel.

In a world that is increasingly outside of his own power to control, Gustad’s body becomes a stabilizing bulwark that he must preserve. Gustad’s daily exercise––“one hundred squats and pushups every morning”––disciplines his body while recalling the morning routine he enjoyed with his muscular grandfather during the glory days of Noble & Sons. Gustad, in turn, passes on his dedication to body- building to his younger son Darius, who ﬁnds a refuge in his body against the losses and inconsistencies he suffers to the outside world. After a series of pets that all succumb to illness, Darius retreats into himself: “Over and over, the external world had let him down. Now it would be foolish, he decided, to invest any more time or energy on such a world, and turned his attention to himself. His physique became his hobby” (43). In Gustad’s younger son Darius, the novel presents a narcissistic reaction to loss that mirrors Gustad’s own effort to preserve and strengthen his body by blocking noxious external stimuli through the beautiﬁcation of the wall. As the artist transforms the wall into a shrine, the stink and insects that interrupt his recollections of the past with the pressing demands of the present are replaced by pleasant odors that facilitate Gustad’s internal retreat, recreating the paradise that has been lost:

“Zinnias, marigolds, mogra, …enveloped his senses in fantastic profusion of colour and

228 scent, making him smile dreamily and forget his exhaustion..Instead of the stink, this glorious fragrance of paradise. Heaven on earth” (286). Just as the diesel fumes reinstate the vulnerability of Gustad’s body, the scent of the offering around the wall allow Gustad to retreat from this reality and from the conﬂicts of the present, as is evident when he once again ignores his wife’s demands to remove the blackout paper:

“Dilnavaz’s gibe about the blackout paper was buzzing inside his head, worrying him like the flies and mosquitoes of old. By and by, however, the wall’s fragrances wrapped their rich veils over him and made him forget” (310). Dilnavaz’s desires, transformed into the inconvenient, pesky presence of the flies and mosquitoes, are blocked by the false haven created by the wall, which now provides a retreat not only from the outside world, but, through altering Gustad’s senses, his internal conflicts. The representations of the diverse religious figures allows Gustad to insulate himself from the pressing demands of the present, enfolding himself in the sensory comforts of the limited world mediated by the black stone wall. What is sacrificed in this desire for preservation is the vital connection with the very body Gustad seeks to insulate––its rhythms and vulnerabilities––that the pavement artist associates with “the cycle of arrival, creation and obliteration” (184). Like the pavement artist’s effort to make his art permanent and, in representing the wall on the wall, self-referential, Gustad’s quest to preserve the Khodadad Building from the encroaching city and his body from advancing age and infirmity are, at best, undermined by this very desire for preservation and, at worst, unwittingly repeat and aestheticize exploitive structures and divisions.

The embraced vulnerability of the pavement artist’s crayon drawings or of the suffering bodies at the clinic are overwritten through the preservation efforts of

229 Gustad and the pavement artist. Mistry’s narrative attempts to relocate a sense of disease within the monumental form of the realist novel through its representation of disabled and diseased characters, particularly the sacriﬁcial ﬁgure of Tehmul. When

Sohrab renounces his parents’ dream to pursue the arts, the young Roshan is stricken with a mysterious illness, and Major Bilimoria makes his unsettling request, both

Gustad and his wife Dilnavaz turn to the resources available to insulate their family from the uncertainty of the present. For Gustad it is the artistic preservation of the wall, while for Dilnavaz it is the artiﬁce of Miss Kutpitia’s spells that return a semblance of order to the Noble household. Though many critics have noted that the women in Such a Long Journey appear to be caricatures––Miss Kutpitia the lonely eccentric and Dilnavaz the domestic goddess–– they share many of the same desires as their male counterparts and, more critically, revert to methods to achieve their ends that are strikingly similar.24

Like the pavement artist who is able to transform a mundane wall into a shrine for Gustad, or Mistry’s narrator, Miss Kutpitia offers the ability to reveal the “hidden meaning of mundane events,” transforming the randomness of the everyday into readable signs that grant Dilnavaz some sense of control (4). Convincing Dilnavaz that her family has been cursed by evil eye responsible for Sohrab’s deﬁant refusal to attend

ITT and Roshan’s illness, Miss Kutpitia provides a number of spells that may cure where a doctor’s medicine cannot. This artiﬁce, however, requires a substitute that can absorb the curse, casting it permanently out of the Noble’s household. The empty vessel that Miss Kutpitia and Dilnavaz identify to harbor the curse and secure their

24 See: Mukherjee “Narrating India” (87).

230 artiﬁce is, of course, the lame, simple-minded Tehmul. In her effort to convince

Dilnavaz to use Tehmul, Miss Kutpitia argues: “Tehmul himself will not notice anything. What I say is, we should be happy that for the first time he will do something good for another person” (110). When Dilnavaz hesitates to perform the spell after seeing Tehmul smile like an innocent child, she quickly blocks the feeling of self- loathing for her wickedness by reassuring herself that it is “not possible for anything to remain inside this skull––definitely an empty shell” (153). Dehumanized, Tehmul’s sacrifice is necessitated by the plots of not only Dilnavaz and Gustad, but also Mistry’s narrative in Such a Long Journey. When the brick catches Tehmul in the head at the conclusion of the novel, it is unclear how much blame should fall on the Dilnavaz’s spells, Gustad’s aestheticization of the wall, the municipality’s plan for progress, the morcha’s resort to violence, or Mistry for caving to the narrative demands for resolution in the symbolic death of the novel’s most helpless character.

Tehmul-Lungraa, or Lame Tehmul, while pushed to the margins of the narrative, proves central to each of the multiple plot strands in Such a Long Journey. As a young boy Tehmul falls from the lone tree in the compound while retrieving an entangled kite. Offering its medicinal properties to those inside the compound as well as those passing through, the branches of the neem tree soothes the itches of measles and chicken-pox, its leaves keep the bowels moving, and its twigs serve as “toothbrush and toothpaste rolled into one” (30). This giving tree that generously supports the bodily health and comfort of others betrays Tehmul, however, who breaks his hip in the fall from the neem tree’s branches. The details of Tehmul’s accident suggest not only his exceptional status as an ‘unhealthy’ body unable to partake in the healing properties of

231 the neem tree, but also functions as a disturbing specter of illness that haunts the very source of communal health. The fall from the neem tree is both physically and mentally debilitating for Tehmul. Though he avoids landing on his head, “something went wrong inside due to the jolt of the accident…after the fall Tehmul was never the same” (30). Preferring the company of children to that of adults, Tehmul is in his mid- thirties, characterized through his hobbling gait, restless scratching habit, and a limited vocabulary spoken with an incomprehensible swiftness. Gustad maintains a close relationship with Tehmul who, in many ways, acts as a double reminding Gustad of not only the potential devastating consequences of his own broken hip, but also his ability to contain those ill effects through an apparent force of will over his body.

In contrast to Gustad’s willfully controlled body, Tehmul is a disruptive ﬁgure of the unruly body. Though Gustad thinks of Tehmul as a child, he is forced to consider

Tehmul’s adult sexual desires when he interrupts a dispute between Tehmul and the prostitutes of the House of Cages, who refuse both Tehmul and his money. Gustad escorts Tehmul out of the brothel where Peerbhoy Paanwalla gives him a paan “‘to reduce his juice production’” (205). Peerbhoy associates Tehmul’s desires with the urges of his body that overwhelm his simple mind, concocting a paan mixture to rein in this excess of bodily desire. The incident at the brothel is recalled later in the novel when Gustad enters Tehmul’s room late one night to chastise him for not following the blackout restrictions only to ﬁnd Tehmul in the act of copulating with the near life- sized doll that Roshan won at a school rafﬂe. Entering Tehmul’s apartment to give him a fright and teach him a lesson, Gustad discovers Tehmul completely “lost to the world” (302). When Gustad, still unaware of his intruding on a private moment,

232 sharply yells out, the narrator relates: “Tehmul screamed and jumped around, his right hand clutching an enormous erection…Tehmul, still proceeding with the automatic movement upon his rampant penis, ejaculated with a whimper” (302). Despite the shock of Gustad’s interruption Tehmul is compelled to satisfy “a man’s urges,” the physical desires that his “child’s mind” cannot understand (303). Confronted with the unruly body of Tehmul, Gustad reacts with anger at the violation of the doll that is linked to his young daughter and the convent school she attends.

Recalling Tehmul’s rejection by the women at the House of Cages, however,

Gustad’s anger turns to pity for Tehmul, whose mind cannot understand the urges of his body, thereby reducing him to substitute a doll for the affections of a woman.

Though he does not feel sexual shame at Gustad’s arrival, Tehmul offers a tearful apology for his disobedience of the blackout restrictions that further serves as explanation of the merged demands of his bodily discomfort and sexual desires:

“VeryverysorryGustad. Feelinghothot. Feelingveryveryhot” (303). Reacting to

Tehmul’s distress,“Gustad wished he had the power of miracles, the power to cure

Tehmul’s ills, restore to him all the rights and virtues of mortals” (303). In his empathetic response Gustad desires to regulate the forces of mind and body in Tehmul, bringing them into correspondence to relieve a suffering he perceives in Tehmul, but which is more apparent in his own embarrassed reaction to Tehmul’s unruly body.

Gustad’s discomfort is obvious when Tehmul, thanking Gustad for returning Roshan’s doll to him, kisses his knuckles: “Touched by the act, also repelled by the saliva glistening on his skin, Gustad was confused, uncertain about how to deal with this situation” (304). Tehmul’s lack of bodily containment and lack of awareness of bodily

233 shame interrupts Gustad’s usually conﬁdent actions. Motivated by an uncomfortable embarrassment with Tehmul’s incontinent body, Gustad desires to balance the urges of the body with the comprehension of the mind. Though seemingly well-intentioned,

Gustad’s objective can only be realized in Tehmul’s death at the end of the novel, his return to the mortal realm capable of controlling his unruly body.

As with Shankar in A Fine Balance, critics have read Tehmul as a representative of

Bakhtin’s grotesque. Valérie Narayana, in her reading of metaphors of health in Such a

Long Journey, asserts that Tehmul evokes Bakhtin’s lines on the Kerch terracotta

figurines that simultaneously embody birth and death in their figuration of the incompleteness of life: “In the character of Tehmul we find a man-child, carrying within him both the death of his potential adulthood and the promise of eternal childhood” (Narayana 136). Extending Narayana’s reading, Tehmul therefore simultaneously embodies the nostalgic longing for a receding past and the undisclosed promise of a future where he will, returning to Gustad’s words, regain “all the rights and virtues of mortals” (Mistry 303). Narayana’s interpretation of Tehmul as an

“incomplete project,” however, indicates how Tehmul interrupts the associations of origins and destinations with the long journey of the present (137). For Narayana,

Tehmul’s “diminished” body––particularly in the scene with Roshan’s doll––prompts

Gustad’s empathy, “subverts the notions of shame, beauty, guilt, causality, illness, and most of all health” (137). While Narayana correctly asserts that the novel’s portrayal of illness critiques metaphors of health and well-being, the suggestion that Tehmul serves as a “pathetic image” that generates compassion in both Gustad and the reader avoids

234 the difﬁcult interpretative work that would account for Tehmul’s death at the close of the novel (137).

A subversive presence that formally disrupts the text with his “cascading utterances…bereft of commas, exclamations marks, semicolons, question marks,”

Tehmul reveals what Quayson has labeled ‘aesthetic nervousness’ when narrative confronts disability (Mistry 32). More than a ‘pathetic image’ that serves as an object for Gustad’s compassion and humanitarian sentiment, Tehmul reminds Gustad of the vulnerability of the human body that cannot be controlled through daily prayers, diet and workout regimens, or medicine. The disruptive force of Tehmul’s unruly body is evident in the previously described scene where Gustad catches Tehmul masturbating with Roshan’s doll. While Gustad enters Tehmul’s ﬂat to enforce the discipline necessary to secure the Khodadad Building from the external threat of the Pakistani air raid, his anger transfers from Tehmul’s violation of the blackout regulations to his violation of Roshan’s doll and the lack of control such an act implies. Gustad tries to calculate how many nights Tehmul had used the doll, imagining “Tehmul undressing the doll each night, caressing it tenderly” (303). Gustad’s desire to protect the community is momentarily lost in his uneasy and seemingly uncontrollable reﬂections on Tehmul’s body. The sexual shame and discomfort Gustad experiences witnessing

Tehmul’s unruly body is opposed to Tehmul’s agony at failing to protect the compound, for which he begs forgiveness. In this reversal of roles, Gustad ﬁxates on Tehmul’s body while Tehmul, unashamed of his bodily urges, expresses the concern for the community that initially motivated Gustad to enter the apartment. The compassionate response imagined by critics like Narayana, becomes as much of an effort to control

235 the uneasiness of interacting with the unruly disabled body as an actual concern for

Tehmul.

The disruption of Gustad’s objections by the sight of Tehmul’s unruly body is the primary level of aesthetic nervousness that Quayson discerns “in the interaction between a disabled and nondisabled character, where a variety of tensions may be identiﬁed” (Quayson 15). In Such A long Journey, however, the interaction between

Gustad and his almost-double Tehmul takes on another dimension in Gustad’s effort to conceal and master his own disability. This effort, however, is overwhelmed by both external stimuli and Gustad’s affective responses, demanding a further effort to control his surroundings and interactions that are essential to maintaining his perception of reality. The plot of the novel, however, repeatedly places pressure on Gustad’s conception of reality through his confrontation with illness and disability, forcing both

Gustad and the reader to recognize the vulnerability of a reality based on identifying strategies to isolate oneself from suffering. It is therefore troubling that Tehmul’s death at the conclusion of the novel is the occasion for Gustad’s life-afﬁrming revelation, as though Tehmul must be sacriﬁced for Gustad’s more central family narrative to reach its resolution.

Tehmul’s death establishes a formal totality for the novel while reinforcing

Gustad’s ﬁnal epiphany. In doing so, it offers a resolution that is typical of the

“perpetual discursive dependency on disability” that David Mitchell and Sharon

Snyder have labeled “narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell and Snyder 47).25 ⁠ Whether “as a

25 Mitchell and Snyder’s discussion of disruptive work of disability in narrative prosthesis is, as Quayson acknowledges, very similar to his concept of aesthetic nervousness. Quayson, however, moves the discussion of narrative prosthesis into the aesthetic realm that complicates the “narrative pragmatism or instrumentalism” that he sees in Mitchell and Snyder’s idea (Quayson 26).

236 stock feature of characterization” or “as an opportunistic metaphorical device,”

Mitchell and Snyder argue that throughout history the disabled body has been invested with an excess of meaning (47). The disabled body functions in Mitchell and

Snyder’s reading as “an object with its own undisciplined language that exceeds the text’s ability to control it” (49). Once this disruptive force is acknowledged, however, the text’s “repair of the deviance may involve an obliteration of the difference through a ‘cure,’ the rescue of the despised object from social censure, the extermination of the deviant as a purification of the social body, or the revaluation of an alternative mode of being” (53-4). ⁠ Citing the term ‘crip ex machina’ that John Hockenberry coins in his review of Million Dollar Baby, Michael Davidson notes in Concerto for the Left Hand the tendency in film for disabled figures to be terminated, “providing the able-bodied viewer a measure of compassion for the victim while permitting an identification with the able-bodied hero who survives” (Davidson 15).26 We must question if Mistry’s narrative operates in a similar manner, offering the disabled body as an object that not only grounds the realism of the novel, but is also the object over which transnational and transcultural connections develop. In other words, we must ask if representations of bodily suffering and illness in Mistry conjure a transnational community of concerned readers whose desire to care and to cure unintentionally relegates his most vulnerable characters outside of the broader human community.

26 Hockenberry offers a scathing review of the conclusion of Million Dollar Baby, which presents the protagonist committing suicide after suffering a spinal cord injury. This conclusion, Hockenberry argues, insults “millions of Americans with disabilities by accepting as utterly plausible the plot-twist that a quadriplegic would sputter into medical agony in a matter of months and embrace suicide as her only option in a nation where millions of people with spinal cord injuries lead full long lives” (Hockenberry 2005).

237 The narrative resolution of Such a Long Journey suggests that the disabled character of Tehmul gains visibility and purpose in moments of extreme bodily duress and suffering that allows Gustad to reveal critical acts of compassion that reafﬁrm a shared humanity imagined between reader and text. The compassionate care that

Gustad provides for Tehmul’s corpse is in sharp contrast to the communal indifference demonstrated by the inhabitants of the Khodadad Building. Similarly, Gustad’s desire to care for Tehmul’s body and to cure his disability provides a counterpoint to Tehmul’s

ﬁgurative poisoning at the hands of Dilnavaz and Miss Kutpitia’s magic. It is Gustad’s heroic effort to secure the appropriate care for Tehmul’s corpse that reveals his growth as a character. Gustad’s trek across the courtyard of the Khodadad building with

Tehmul’s corpse takes up substantially more narrative space and signiﬁcance than

Tehmul’s actual death:

Without a word, Gustad slipped one arm under Tehmul’s shoulders and the other under his knees. With a single mighty effort he rose to his feet, cradling the still warm body. The bandaged head lolled limply over his forearm, and he crooked his elbow to support it properly. …Sohrab gazed after his father with fear and admiration. People watched from their windows as Gustad strode under their eyes without faltering, as though he and Tehmul were all alone, as if the dead weight of the grown man in his arms was nought but a child’s. Some of the neighbors covered their heads and folded their hands together when the ruvaan passed by. Without a trace of his limp, without a fumble, Gustad walked the length of the compound, past the ﬂats near the gate, past the compound’s solitary tree and his own ﬂat, past Inspector Bamji’s Landmaster, till he reached the end. When he gained the entrance to the stairs he stopped and turned around to look, once, at the group at the other end. Then he continued. On the stairs, the weight in his arms made his feet come down heavily at every step. The sweat poured freely off his face, splashing on Tehmul’s blood-soaked shirt. At the landing he could sense that people were watching through their spyholes (Mistry 335-6).

Mistry narrates Gustad’s care for Tehmul as a demonstration of his beyond human strength that is a spectacle Gustad consciously performs for the audience of the

238 Khodadad Building and his own wayward son. His pause at the threshold of the building to survey the crowd, his awareness of the people hidden behind their spyholes, all spur Gustad to continue his righteous performance that sees his sweat mix with Tehmul’s blood in a manner unthinkable in the earlier scene with the Roshan’s doll. Banishing any trace of a limp, striding “without a fumble” as he carries Tehmul’s dead body, now referred to in the text alternately as the ruvaan (soul) or “the heavy body” to reﬂect the materiality of the corpse. Gustad performs a physical feat that, in yoking the physical to the moral, reestablishes him as a ﬁgure of authority within the compound and his family.

Through Tehmul’s death, Gustad is able to recover his family while also regaining the strong, virtuous body that the ﬁrst pages of the novel tells us “was the envy and admiration of friends and relatives whenever health and sickness was being discussed” (1). There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of this ending which banishes one disabled character in the process of seemingly curing the other. As the future Gustad imagines through his children is put in jeopardy by factors ranging from illness and disaffection to municipal mismanagement and international politics,

Mistry’s novel focuses narrowly on Gustad’s individual crisis. Mistry contrasts

Gustad’s state of emergency with the ﬁgures of perpetual injury, such as Tehmul or the lower classes outside the protection of the walls of the Khodadad Building, who only gain access to the human community when they become objects of compassion in the novel at moments of bodily duress or death. The novel imagines that for one group health is upset by illness while in the other, illness is perpetual and interrupted only by death. The focus on the individual at the heart of the Mistry’s empathetic realism

239 reveals an apolitical core that, in focusing on the struggle of the individual crisis, seems to ignore the perpetual one outside the Khodadad Building’s walls. While this reading must be acknowledged, I would argue that Mistry knowingly implicates his reader in desiring this closure and restitution for Gustad whatever the costs.

As I have suggested throughout this chapter in discussions of the many storyteller or artist ﬁgures in the two novels such as Valmik, Miss Kutpitia, and the pavement artist, Mistry is as interested in the affective power of art as he is in the exclusion necessary to create such affect. The realist novel, like the spells of Miss

Kutpitia or the narratives of Valmik, can give a sense of order or control to the chaos of the world, though Mistry desires to show the cost of this refuge on the vulnerable bodies of characters such as Shankar and Tehmul. Such a Long Journey explores the ability of art to inﬂuence perception and create new realities or imagine new bonds forming. This ability to generate sentiment is balanced in the novels by a recognition of art’s unwittingly divisive capabilities that is deeply political. The division between art and reality breaks down repeatedly in Mistry’s ﬁction; the funeral procession that is mistaken for political theater in A Fine Balance is mistaken for political theatre and commandeered by the police is complemented by an actual political procession in Such a Long Journey that is described by a character as a tamaasha, or theatre, that will block the arrival of the ambulance, later the hearse, to tend to Tehmul (Mistry 335).27 The faith that an attention to form can perhaps manage the effects of art like a science leads to the terrible consequences of the Brechtian theatre troupe of Family Matters. Those

27 The tamasha has political valences as well, as it often “satirizes and pokes fun at contemporary society, often at the expense of politicians and businessmen” (Brandon 108). See: James Brandon, The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, pgs. 108-9.

240 who have criticized Mistry’s reliance on a realist form neglect how intently Mistry evaluates the effects of aesthetic form in his novels.

Rather than reorient towards a utopian future, the body in Mistry’s ﬁction tries to alert readers to the potential exclusionary work of artistic production regardless of its aesthetic form. Near the conclusion of Such a Long Journey Mistry turns to yet another storyteller, Peerbhoy Paanwalla, whose art relates to the palung-tode paan–– paan that can help break the bed––that he sells in front of the House of Cages. The stories of sexual feats he tells complement the supposed physical effects of his paan, granting conﬁdence to the men visiting the brothel. As so often occurs in the novel,

Peerbhoy shows narrative’s ability to alter perception of the body, though Mistry again warns of those left out of this economy. Intrigued by the crowd gathering around

Peerbhoy, Gustad wonders if the paan seller is telling his traditional stories only to discover he has arrived at a new topic:

But Peerbhoy was not spinning his time-honoured yarns about the House of Cages: the aphrodisiacal tales for tyros guaranteed to heat the blood, elevate flagging confidence and boost paan sales. No, there would be no more of that for a while. In deference to the mood of the country and the threat from without, Peerbhoy Paanwalla had mobilized his talents for the common good, using his skills to weave a tale that defied genre or description. It was not tragedy, comedy or history; not pastoral, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral or tragical-historical. Nor was it epic or mock-heroic. It was not a ballad or an ode, masque or anti- masque, fable or elegy, parody or threnody. Although a careful analysis may have revealed that it possessed a smattering of all these characteristics. But since things such as literary criticism mattered not one jot to the listeners, they were responding to Peerbhoy’s narrative in the only way that made sense: with every fibre of their beings. They could see and smell and taste and feel the words that filled the dusk and conjured the tale; and it was no wonder they were oblivious to the gutter stink (306).

Peerbhoy’s genre-deﬁning tale mocks the West Wing of Pakistan, whose leader turns to guns and a war agains the East Wing to “‘make him forget the failure of his own

241 little derringer’” (307). The war against Bangladesh, Peerbhoy’s narrative suggests, is related to a failing of the body that results in a lack of purpose that can be regained through the war. Like other examples of art, however, Peerbhoy’s narrative may elicit a visceral response in his listeners, capturing “every ﬁber of their being,” but it is also in the service of commercial and political ends, “arousing patriotic passion and national pride instead of priming lust” (308). Instead of selling palung-tode after this story,

Peerbhoy now sells “Patriotic Paan” whose design mimics the tricolor of the Indian

ﬂag; narrative, still does not escape the market. In effect, Peerbhoy’s multi-genre narrative––in an experimental form that mimics popular postmodern, postcolonial narratives––repeats the story that it relates: sexual energy is displaced and attached to the nation. Narrative, Mistry cautions, can capture the body and repurpose it, overwriting the body in the process and insulating the reader or listener from the present,“the gutter stink,” in much the same way as Gustad quarantines the present in the opening of the novel.

The body that is put to use either sexually or in the service of the nation is contrasted in Such a Long Journey with the disabled body of Tehmul, the “empty shell” that is not permitted a plot, though he is instrumental in the plot (153). The scenes that emphasize Tehmul’s frustrated sexual desires at both the House of Cages and later with Roshan’s dolls are not diversions of the plot or an effort to establish Tehmul as a pathetic ﬁgure of Gustad and the reader’s compassion, though they have been read as such. Rather, they are central to a narrative that is deeply concerned with imagining a future for a community whose way of life is threatened. Excluded from both

Peerbhoy’s narratives of sexual and national conquest, Tehmul is the crippled ﬁgure in

242 the novel whose unruly body worries Gustad precisely because he can understand no purpose, no future for Tehmul or the maimed bodies at Madhiwalla Bonesetter’s clinic.

Without Sohrab’s admission to ITT, Gustad feels like a cripple without his crutch because he is unable to imagine persisting in the present without an orientation towards the future. While the novel is full of diseased, aging, or disabled characters,

Mistry distinguishes between these conditions through their orientation to the future.

Though the difference between disability and disease is difﬁcult to establish, disease is generally located in the body, while disability is socially constructed, “not something that a person possesses but something one encounters when dealing with other people” (Herndl 593).28 In Such a Long Journey, the distinction largely rests on the ability to imagine a future for a character or place them in a narrative that establishes their value to the community. A distinctin made apparent when Miss Kutpitia tells

Dilnavaz that incorporating Tehmul unwittingly into their plot ﬁnally would allow him to “do something good for another person” (110). While Hilary Mantel places characters like Shankar and Tehmul into the economy of Mistry’s ﬁction, suggesting that like Miss Kutpitia he is always trying to get the most value from their deaths, I would argue that these characters call attention to the body opposing it to the antibody function of narrative and reorienting Mistry’s texts in the present.

Tehmul’s death may bring closure to the narrative and restore Gustad’s family, but it also calls attention to the multiple artistic projects––the pavement artist’s

28 While this is a working distinction between disease and disability, Diane Price Herndl in “Disease versus Disability: The Medical Humanities and Disability Studies”notes both the limitations of distinguishing between the two, but also the risks of joining the categories, thereby diluting the deﬁnition of disability. She further distinguishes disease disability around categories such as time, “ontological state versus temporary condition” and representation, “as tragedy, end-of-life-as-we-know- it, difﬁculty, or change of mode” (594).

243 undertaken for Gustad, Miss Kutpitia’s spells orchestrated for Dilavaz, Mistry’s narrative for a transnational Anglophone audience––merge around his body and are responsible for his death. His death, much like Shankar’s, forces a consideration of the economy of Mistry’s ﬁction, the ‘use value’ seemingly assigned to disabled characters whose disruptive bodily presence is written out of the narrative blood stream. In drawing attention to the exclusions that ground even the inclusive, cosmopolitan vision of the pavement artist’s wall paintings or the formally inventive allegories of Peerbhoy

Paanwalla that get situated in the market, Mistry offers a postcolonial realism that dramatizes the disruptive elements that are removed to generate the stories that circulate in the global bloodstream. Mistry expands from reﬂections on his own narrative art to the national and global narratives such as the Indo-Pakistani War of

1971 in Such a Long Journey or Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in A Fine Balance. The dangers of the sacrificial logic represented in Such a Long Journey become apparent, the bodies of characters sacrificed to the narrative project of the Indian State as it projects into the future. While the cruel fate of the characters in A Fine Balance outraged many readers such as Hilary Mantel, Mistry crafts a story that shows how the same narrative design that allows for empathetic connection and exchange is built on unacknowledged bodily sacrifices, implicating the desire for connection in his transnational audience while showing the enmeshments in state structures that block any such exchange.

At the opening of Such a Long Journey, Gustad sits in the dark, alternating between recollections of a nostalgic past and projections for the future that insulates him from the contemporary concerns of the newspaper that arrives to interrupt his

244 reverie. The humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh is pushed to both the border of

Gustad’s mind and the Indian nation. While transnational fiction can imagine the arrival in the cosmopolitan “new country” of Tagore’s Gitanjali––indeed this imagination seems to be one of its appeals––Mistry’s fiction dramatizes the potentially analgesic properties of narrative that overwrites the body in its nostalgic recreation of the past or its projection of a utopian future. Mistry locates the hinge of these narratives in the present tense, which he figures through the disruptive presence of the body in his fiction. Though a variety of artistic enterprises can alter bodily perception in the narratives of A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey, this ability comes at a high cost. By focusing on the bodily effects of narrative, Mistry’s fiction serves as both a defense of postcolonial realism and an assertion of its value for recovering the body that situates these narratives in the difficulties of the present.

While critics of postcolonial realism point to the forms transparency, Mistry’s

ﬁction shows how all art––however experimental or genre defying the form––is unable of controlling its effects, risking both incorporation in a global market or serving as a distraction that insulates readers from the challenges of the present that compose the long journey towards a utopian future that does not overwrite the differences inscribed in the body. The riot outside the walls of the Khodadad Building does not end after

Tehmul’s death, but rather concludes after the morcha overturns a barrel of sewer sludge on Malcolm, who now blames the very inefﬁciencies of the municipality for which he works as organizing the morcha. Gustad, reﬂecting on the experience of the wall, Jimmy, and Tehmul, agrees: “‘Nothing is beyond the government. Ordinary people like us are helpless against them’” (338). The body in Mistry’s novel is

245 enmeshed in the bureaucracies and plots of the state and any journey towards the future will involve an engagement with the realities of the present the recognize this situation. While readers like Carlyn imagine the familiar bonds created through transnational narratives, Mistry’s novels incessantly point to the limits of such sentiment. His ﬁction uncovers the body enmeshed in culture, history, and the state that suggests a much longer journey before any arrival at the transnational “new country” promised by the poetry of Tagore or the connected globe of Whitman’s

“Passage to India.”

246 CONCLUSION

In “Passage to India,” Walt Whitman imagines a world whose every physical recess has been mapped by voyagers, scientists, and inventors, these disparate locales linked by “the true son of God, the Poet.” Reason marches lockstep with sentiment to guarantee a global community that fuses Man with Nature. The novels gathered in this study explore the failures of scientiﬁc reason and humanitarian sentiment to generate the global community longed for in Whitman’s poetry and later in Rabindranath

Tagore’s Gitanjali, whose new country and new melodies are still obscured. Instead these authors theorize new models of literature’s relation to the world. This project has explored contemporary transnational, postcolonial fiction that, while participating in the global literary market, resists its ahistoricizing tendencies through the representation of the histories embedded in the body. The theorizations of corporeality in the works of Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, and Rohinton Mistry pull away from metaphorical and allegorical readings of the body that have dominated postcolonial literary studies. In part, these authors use the body to ground their fiction in specific histories even as they are adopted by a global market. Rather than imagine a global community that can transcend the differences of the present, transnational, postcolonial novels like Farah’s Links, Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, and Ghosh’s The

Circle of Reason theorize the body as a critical site to evaluate the claims of globalism

247 and humanitarianism, suggesting a return to the local and a negotiation with the state that is often elided in the global reception of these works.

The limits of scientific reason and humanitarian sentiment can be witnessed in the almost bodiless figures that gather at the margins of dominant narratives. One can think of the refugees that enter Lalpukur or the ghostly transnational migrants who sacrifice their body to capital in the al-Ghazira episode of The Circle of Reason. These

ﬁgures recur thematically in the dehumanized population of savages and victims in

Western representations of Somalia in Links or of Misra’s loss of body, life, and identity to Somali nationalism in Maps. Mistry, meanwhile, evaluates the ability of realist ﬁction to humanize the mass of humanity outside of the Parsi compound in Such a Long

Journey or the disabled characters in A Fine Balance. These novels seek to extend the circle of sentiment to these populations that reveal the continued gaps in the global imagination. They do so, however, not through sentimental narratives, but rather a return to the human body and its enmeshment in the state. If there is to a utopian project in these novels it proceeds only through a negotiation with local governmental and bureaucratic structures.

Both the chasms that divide the human population and the means to bridge these gaps through sentiment are explored in the story of Balaram’s birthday in The

Circle of Reason. Balaram, born in 1914 under an ill-omened astrological sign, never learns his day of birth from his parents. Rather, he must choose a date from 1914 to claim as his own. While, as Gopal relates, other students in their cohort at Presidency

College would have chosen memorable events that symbolize difference––Bengali terrorist strikes against the British, memorable dates associated with the start of the

248 First World War, or American and Canadian court decisions regarding the racial status of Indian immigrants––Balaram could not choose any of these dates: “Even reading about them he suffered, for he saw them as abysses tearing apart the path of Man’s ascent to Reason” (Ghosh 39). The gaps and chasms that Reason intended to bridge reemerge in both the violent reprisals and legal exclusions of 1914. Instead of returning to these memorable dates Balaram instead locates his birth in the indistinct “several dozen days in May and June when Jagadish Chandra Bose, in a laboratory in south

London, demonstrated to stunned audiences of scientists and poets and politicians, all half-deafened by the ringing of sabres in Europe, that even a vegetable so unfeeling as a carrot can suffer agonies of fear and pain” (39). Bose’s experiments link the poet, politician, and scientist together to view proof of a common suffering that suffuses all living things. Evident in Balaram’s choice of a date of birth is both his continued faith in scientiﬁc reason to bridge disciplines and generate ethical models of relation and an effort to imagine the vulnerability and pain of all living things––human, animal, vegetal. While Balaram’s decision to follow the path of reason is well intentioned, his inability to consider reason’s enmeshment in a world outside of itself dooms his determined mission to humanize through science. Gopal relates this story of his friend’s birthday to the detective Jyoti Das as an indication of Balaram’s inability situate science in larger historical processes. Balaram’s path to enlightened reason is based on the superstitions of his parents, suggesting both the inseparability of the two and the misguided nature of Balaram’s effort to translate scientiﬁc rationality directly into bodily practice.

249 Balaram’s desire to pursue his own utopian project requires a science isolated from the realities of the surrounding world, a singular emphasis on scientific reason to locate a universal human experience. The iterations of his translation project in the novel repeatedly fail due to their inability to account for personal, regional, and transnational histories. At the conclusion of the novel the remaining characters plan their return to India having recognized in their flight across continents the loss of their body, which gains definition in its relation to the state. However, as the oil tankers that occlude the horizon in the final scene of The Circle of Reason indicate, the forces of globalization make such a return a daunting, potentially impossible task. Rather than celebrate the arrival of a new set of universals in transnational movement and migration, Ghosh’s novel suggests a negotiation with the flawed state bureaucracies of the present. Following works such as John Marx’s Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel,

1890-2011 or Elizabeth Anker’s Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World

Literature, I view global Anglophone literature as engaging with pressing issues of global governance. The work of transnational, postcolonial ﬁction therefore situates itself in relationship to the governmental discourse of both the state and global organizations. In Farah’s most recent novel, Crossbones, the character Ahl arrives in

Somalia at a small shack serving as Immigration with the narrator relating his recognition of the consequences of state failure for Somalia: “Ahl thinks that until today he has never understood the full meaning of the term ad hoc: the heartlessness, the mindlessness of a community failing its responsibility toward itself; a feebleness of purpose; an inadequacy” (Crossbones 94). While Ahl and the other characters negotiate the ad-hoc nature of Somali governance in Crossbones, Farah presents Somalia as

250 similarly negotiating the ad-hoc nature of global governance’s approach to both failed states and the environment. Farah, in his concern with illegal dumping, illegal ﬁshing, illegal importation of drugs and weapons, and illegal detention through the specter of

Guantanamo in the novel, demonstrates the legal maneuverings and blind-spots of global powers that is failing in its responsibility to itself. These global powers discount

Somalis as political agents, while further dismissing them as humans troubled by the long-term effects of environmental pollution and toxicity on their security and health.

The body becomes a touchstone in the transnational, postcolonial novels read in this dissertation to recover the human in the ad hoc governance of globalization.

In The Circle of Reason, Balaram turns to scientiﬁc reason to overcome personal and regional history. In Links, Farah suggests a similar effort in Western humanitarian narratives surrounding Somalia that overwrite colonial histories, while in Such a Long

Journey, Mistry locates this tendency in the apolitical empathy of realist ﬁction. In each case, the body interrupts the effort to transcend a history of encoded differences, returning the novels to the administrative chaos of the present rather than a celebrated globalism guaranteed by humanitarian sentiment. In analyzing the role of the body in multiple novels from each author, I have sought to demonstrate the continued importance of the body in theorizing the relationship of the local and global even in a changing geopolitical landscape that spans the years before the collapse of the Soviet

Union to those following the attacks of September 11.

Recently, the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid has suggest a “post-post-colonial” generation of writers more engaged with portraying local events for their universal, human resonances than local particularities. Quoted in the epigraph to Paul Jay’s “The

251 Post-Post Colonial Condition,” Hamid notes a generational rift: “People are writing about the subcontinent with eyes that are not meant to be seeing for someone who doesn’t live there, people who are not exoticizing where they come from...The basic humanity is not different from place to place” (Jay 51). The ‘basic humanity’ that links global communities is expressed in a realistic mode of writing that captures daily life without the exotic, touristic gaze that he pins to an earlier generation of postcolonial writers. The humanity that Hamid represents in novels like Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist however, is not a sentimental vision, but rather a commonness developed in the human’s deep enmeshment in local histories and state structures. While Hamid identiﬁes a ‘post-post-colonial’ generation of writers to indicate the more unabashedly global worldview he shares with other writers of his generation born after decolonization, Hamid and contemporaries such as Hari Kunzru,

Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Teju Cole, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie inherit many of the concerns that occupied the earlier generation of postcolonial authors who form the subject of this project. While this younger generation engages more explicitly with the economic and cultural effects of globalization, their efforts are complemented by transnational, postcolonial authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton

Mistry, and Nuruddin Farah continue to critically explore how these networks came into existence and the location of the human within them.

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