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Beyond the subaltern syndrome: Amitav Ghosh and the crisis of the bhadrasamaj Makarand R. Paranjape The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 357 DOI: 10.1177/0021989412450702

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The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47(3) 357–374 Beyond the subaltern © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. syndrome: Amitav Ghosh and co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0021989412450702 the crisis of the bhadrasamaj jcl.sagepub.com

Makarand R. Paranjape Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Abstract Using some of Amitav Ghosh’s influential non-fictional writings to understand his own novels, this paper problematizes Ghosh’s works in terms of the crisis of the bhadrasamaj or the middle class makers of the nation and civil society in India. Indeed, we may detect a direct line of literary and cultural descent from the two iconic figures of recent Bangla culture, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, to Ghosh’s complex career. But instead of a continuity, Ghosh’s works are a record of epistemic ruptures engendered by the breakdown of grand narratives of nations and the eruption of civic violence. The crisis in Tagore is a combination of private and public failures exemplified in a text such as Nashtonir, filmed so eloquently as Charulata by Ray. A similar crisis in the private and public domain is seen in Ray’s Ganashatru and Agantuk, his last works. While versions of similar crises are visible in Ghosh’s novels including The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Hungry Tide, I argue that instead of confronting them head on as his predecessors did, Ghosh tends to be evasive, either by not allowing them fully to develop or escaping into coincidence, “doubling”, or romanticism. Does such a retreat into narratives of exodus or romanticized celebrations of failed experiments such as the Morichjhapi settlement signify a shift in both the self-confidence and the priorities of the bhadrasamaj, whose product and representative Ghosh is?

Keywords Amitav Ghosh, crisis of the bhadrasamaj, postcolonial, diaspora, subaltern

Amitav Ghosh is celebrated for his extraordinary virtuosity as a chronicler both of our compelling presents and forgotten pasts. As one of his ablest critics Anshuman Mondal puts it, Ghosh as a writer

is keen to examine the world from the perspective of the unsettled, or uprooted – possibilities that might offer insights unavailable to others . . . Ghosh visualises “movement” as . . . fundamental to human experience. . . a potentiality that inhabits the consciousness of even those

Corresponding author: Makarand R. Paranjape, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Mehrauli Rd, New Delhi, 110067, India. Email: [email protected]

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people often regarded as “settled”, such as peasants. Indeed, much of his work challenges the assumption that human history is one of “settled” populations and “stable” cultures. (2007: 3)

But these unusual narratives also make major epistemological gestures. For example, the hidden account of the forgotten Slave of MS H.6 in In An Antique Land (1992) or the untold “history” of malaria in The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) may be construed as attempts to formulate “‘para-colonial’ knowledges within a colonial and post-colonial milieu” (Mondal, 2007: 8). Nevertheless, though the general response to Ghosh has been laudatory, especially in the several essays on individual works, it has not necessarily added much to a critical understanding of his entire oeuvre.1 That is why this essay is at variance with much of the secondary work on Ghosh. I focus neither on a specific text, nor am I entirely enthusiastic about Ghosh’s main preoccupations. Instead, I wish to focus on what I call the crisis of the bhadrasamaj2 (or the middle class) as a key issue in his texts. Usually, Ghosh’s central preoccupation is seen as his commitment to subaltern or fugitive narratives. In contrast, I see these very preoccupations as emanating from his reluctance, if not inability, to respond squarely to the crisis of the middle classes, of which he is a part. Second, I develop this argument by placing Ghosh’s work in a lineage of influence extending back via Satyajit Ray to Rabindranath Tagore. In thus contextualizing his works, my methodology is not com- parative, but genealogical. I wish to show how this theme of the crisis of the bhadrasamaj, almost like a chromosome, reproduces itself from writer to middle class writer, across generations. In addition, I also pay close attention to his non-fiction as a way of understanding his fictional project. To me Ghosh’s work is especially important because it represents his problematic relationship with the dominant ideology of the still significant bhadrasamaj in Bengal and in India. By bhadrasamaj, which may be translated as “genteel society”, I mean the Bengali bourgeoisie newly emergent under colonialism. This amorphous and diverse “middle class” was not only constituted by colonialism but also went on to resist it to help forge the nation that became India. To explore this crisis in Ghosh’s works, I not only draw on his non-fictional writings, but also try to place him in a lineage of influence going back to Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore, the two emblematic representatives of Bengali creative genius. Both Ray and Tagore belong to this social group – as does Ghosh – whose crisis, as I shall argue, he also strives to articulate, but does not quite succeed in resolving. To this class, writing was very important. As Ghosh himself admits in “The March of the Novel through History”, “we were a cultivated people . . . Calcutta is an oddly book- ish city” (2005: 104). Dipesh Chakrabarty describes how important the “literary” was in the formation of modern Bengali identity:

For a long time, the comportment of being a modern Bengali person has had much to do with certain kinds of personal investment in Bengali language and literature. Sometime in the nineteenth century, in the mist of times that for the bhadralok have been partly historical and partly fabulous, things happened in British Bengal that made books and literature central to modern Bengali identity. (2004: 655)

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Indian modernity, I believe, came into being through a unique sacred–secular partnership that was involved in the romance of the “word”, which is why I might consider calling this journey at the heart of Ghosh’s creative project a pilgrimage. But reading habits, as Chakrabarty shows, are changing; the loss of the prestige of Bengali has given way to the adoption of English as the preferred language of many a bhadralok. The crisis that I shall discuss also has much to do with this shift. What is this crisis of the bhadrasamaj that is so central to my essay? How is it mani- fested in literary texts and cultural production? Simply put, this is an ethical as well as social crisis, consequent upon the displacement of a once-privileged group from its cultural pre-eminence in pre-Independence India. Some of this loss of privilege is mani- fested in various expressions of nostalgia and melancholy as in Parimal Ghosh’s evocative description of the changing demographics of a Kolkata neighbourhood in “Where have all the ‘bhadraloks’ gone?” (2004). But its main manifestation is in the challenges posed to the traditional notions of noblesse oblige that this class had assumed as much to legiti- mate its ascendency as actually to give back to society. I shall argue that what we see in Ghosh is an abdication of this responsibility consequent upon the “loss” of the nation that both his fiction and non-fiction underscore. What ensues is the typical diasporic flight from the real problems of the nation; whether this means that the work of the bhadrasamaj is done or “un”done remains, of course, to be seen. To elaborate my case, it would be apposite to place Ghosh in a lineage of cultural influence and descent in which two of the greatest cultural heroes of modern Bengal feature prominently. I speak, of course, of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Satyajit Ray (1921−1992). That Ghosh was deeply influenced by both is well-known. By translating Tagore’s “Khudit Pashaan” as “The Hunger of Stones”, Ghosh not only acknowledged his debt to Tagore, but also offered a compliment to Tagore’s spectacular spectrology, the peculiar haunting of the present by the past, which in an interview conducted by S. Chaudhury (Ghosh, 2000b: n.p.), Ghosh describes as “an elaborate metaphor of colonialism” (cited in Mondal, 2007: 34).3 As to Ray, what could serve as a more comprehensive acknowledgement than Ghosh’s fulsome tribute to the maestro published in 2003, twelve years after the latter’s death? Here he not only confesses that The Shadow Lines “clearly shows the influence of Satyajit Ray” but admits that Ray played an important role “in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth” (Ghosh, 2003: 5). Even more important to my purpose is Ghosh’s declaration that Ray’s “greatness as an artist is in no way diminished by the fact that he was a rivet in an unbroken chain of aesthetic and intellectual effort that stretches back to the mid- nineteenth century − a chain in which I too am, I hope, a small link” (2003: 6). At last, in February 1992, Ghosh musters the courage to write to the great man when he is lying ill in a Kolkata hospital. The letter is given to a friend of Ray’s to be handed over per- sonally when Ray is feeling better. Unfortunately, that never happens; Ray dies in April 1992; the letter remains unread. Yet, its poignant ending shows just how much he means to Ghosh:

The Japanese have a custom which allows people to pay homage to artists they admire by standing outside their houses, alone and in silence, until they are invited in. You are the only person in the world for whom I would gladly do that. (2003: 7)

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Having drawn a direct line of cultural and creative descent from Tagore to Ray to Ghosh I shall now, to use one of Ghosh’s own striking metaphors, ask if there is a cultural “chromosome” that is common to Tagore, Ray, and Ghosh. It might be called the bhadralok chromosome that carries from one generation to the next the crisis of the bhadrasamaj, the middle classes who supposedly espoused notions of decency and civility, whose ethos and values constitute the bedrock of national culture. If so, what is the crisis of the bhadralok that we find in Tagore and Ray? How does Ghosh deal with this crisis, which he has inherited through these two creative geniuses whose influence he readily acknowledges? For the purposes of my argument, I wish to examine two relatively minor works of both Tagore and Ray to see what these might tell us about this crisis. If the crisis is as pervasive as I think it is, it will manifest in some form or another even in the less significant works as it will in the major ones. Tagore’s work is vast, varied, and very complex. The crisis that I speak of recurs in several of his texts in different forms. But I want to consider a rather slim but exquisitely crafted work, Nashtanir (1901), translated as The Broken Nest (1977). One reason I choose it is because it was made into an equally fine film, Charulata (1964), by Ray. In The Broken Nest, there is a defining moment when Bhupati discovers that his brother-in-law and manager, Umapati, has not only been cheating him, but is doing so without a twinge of remorse: “He was not so much offended by the loss of the money, but this sudden revelation of treachery made him feel as if he had stepped from his room into a void” (Tagore, 1977: 68). This betrayal is immediately juxtaposed with Bhupati’s relationship with Charu, his wife: “Bhupati could not tell Charu everything” (1977: 67); there is already a gulf between them: “That was the day Bhupati had come inopportu- nately to the inner rooms of the house. At that moment his heart longed to feel that faith had a definite place in the world” (1977: 68). But Charu is sitting in the dark, brooding over her own misunderstanding with Amal, Bhupati’s cousin, for whom she has formed a troublesome attachment: “her sorrows had extinguished the evening lamp” (1977: 68). The third person in this triangle, Amal, is about to realize that his sister-in-law’s fondness for him may hurt his benefactor; before it is too late, he must rectify the situation by leaving. Bhupati, who is the representative of the bhadrasamaj, is thus grappling with its crises both at home and in the world: “What with ungrateful relatives, besieging credi- tors, jumbled account books, and an empty cashbox, Bhupati was then at his wits’ ends. There was no one to share his prosaic sorrows − he was preparing to stand alone and fight against heartache and debt” (1977: 69). Tagore shows us three fully drawn, complex characters, each isolated by his or her own misconstruction of the others; each loves the other two, but is unable to operational- ize his or her feelings purposefully. This is, no doubt, at first appearance a domestic, even personal crisis. But a careful reading of the novel shows that it has much larger ramifica- tions. Bhupati’s home, with its confusions and politics, reflects the state of late nineteenth century bhadralok society, with its own internal contradictions and tensions. The crisis in this novel, then, is both public and private, both in the realms of public engagement as well as private ethics. Bhupati’s financial ineptitude, though at first harmless, becomes more damaging as the novel unfolds. So does his infatuation with public life, whose leadership he is inadequate to assume. His failure in the public sphere costs him

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 Paranjape 361 the breakdown of his marriage. Charu’s inability to attract Bhupati, her turning to Amal for sustenance, and his rejection of her causes a parallel breakdown, resulting in her los- ing her husband’s affection and, perhaps, his company as well. Both Bhupati and Charu, it would appear, are failures. They are unable to balance the contrary claims of desire and duty or kama and dharma; the result is both a civic and domestic tragedy. The emerging Indian nation cannot be built by impractical dreamers, or by failed lovers/spouses; in both the public as well as the private domain, success demands not just a certain self-awareness but enormous competence. Those who delude themselves are unable to build either nations or happy homes. The only character of the three who escapes this catastrophe of the rapidly disintegrat- ing “nest” is Amal. In a way, it is his innocence that both causes the crisis in the home and ultimately affords him an escape to the wider world. While he has shamelessly exploited his sister-in-law’s affections, he has never intended any harm to her domestic life. Charu has inspired him to become a writer but when her role in his life threatens his duty to his elder brother, he withdraws from the situation. True, he leaves Charu without support, floundering, but he has at least saved himself from moral opprobrium; he has, after all, not betrayed Bhupati. Bhupati, betrayed by both the world and by his wife may take partial cheer in that his younger cousin has not joined the ranks of those sinning against him. In Ray’s version, all is not lost in the end; there is the possibility of Bhupati and Charu actually reaching out to each other across the gulf of misunderstanding that has separated them. This is prepared for by Charu’s earlier rising to the occasion to inspire Bhupati to rally himself after his defeat by the unscrupulous forces of the world. It is she who offers to help him start his newspaper again. Why does Ray give a somewhat more hopeful conclusion to the story? To my mind it is because his version is produced in independent India. The success of the national project seems to offer the kind of hope that was unavailable during colonialism to people like Bhupati and Charu. Yet, Ray does not hesitate to suggest, in the scene in which Charu looks at Amal through her binoculars, that the more suitable father of Charu’s child is Amal, rather than Bhupati. It is Amal, not Bhupati or Charu who will carry the burden of both nation and home-making into the future because he alone of the three has both the practical competence and the moral rectitude to undertake such a project. Amal, then, emerges as a solution, however partial, to the crisis of the bhadrasamaj in Nashtanir. In his clean break with Charu, the moral order is restored. In Ray’s other films too, we see a similar elucidation of the crisis of the bhadrasamaj. Both financial and moral corruption stalks the middle-class makers of the nation. In his last films like Ganashatru (1989) or Agantuk (1991), when Ray was too ill to shoot out- doors, the very restriction to a somewhat more limited and theatrical format allows him to stage in sharper relief the ethical crisis that I have spoken of. In Ganashatru the good Dr Gupta, a loyal and fearless citizen of Chandipur is doing both his moral and civic duty by alerting the populace to the dangers lurking in the contaminated waters of the Siva temple. Incidentally, the temple is run by Bhargav, a “North Indian”, though he is sup- ported by Gupta’s younger brother and mayor of the town, Nishit. The contagion, whose source is from “outside” the bhadrasamaj, soon, however, engulfs it. In this case, the contaminated water of the temple not only shows how superstitious disregard for

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 362 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47(3) scientific evidence will endanger public health, but also subtly suggests a rising tide of majoritarian religious sentiment which is politically motivated and deployed. During the movie’s crisis, an attempt is made to silence Dr. Gupta first through cunning and then through coercion. But the film ends on a hopeful note when a group of young citizens rallies to support the doctor. Not only is his confidence in his own mission restored, but so are the possibilities of an open and plural nation evoked. Though the political estab- lishment and the media are both shown to be corrupt and colluding, there is hope not just in the idea of a “public” that is capable of rising above their manipulation, but also in democratic institutions such as the free press, and the accuracy of scientific knowledge provided by hospitals and laboratories, especially in the metropolis, Calcutta, which comes to the aid of the beleaguered doctor from the provinces. The leaders of the counter- movement are not subaltern masses, but the very middle classes, who still have some idealism and commitment to the nation. Gupta’s would-be son-in-law, a bank officer who also runs a magazine and is a theatre activist, represents this idealistic middle class. In Agantuk, the crisis widens to embrace civilization as we know it. The stranger, who is an anthropologist, at first threatens to disrupt the order of the middle-class family by possibly laying claim to his share of the ancestral property. This ancestral property is, after all, nothing but the nation, which the bhadraloks now enjoy as their patrimony. But this enjoyment is severely flawed because it does not include the subaltern classes, represented by the Santhal tribals, whom the stranger appreciates and connects this urban family to. Ray wishes to correct what Mondal calls the “cultural hauteur of a modernis- ing bhadralok class” (2007: 37), which espouses the kind of modernity that turns its back on both nature and the culture of the unlettered folk of the land. Here, Ray, the modernist, who has championed scientific rationality and progress in most of his movies, now wishes to correct this orientation, seeing how destructive, both ecologically and ethi- cally, such modernity can be. As the “stranger” tells his middle-class listeners:

Yes, cannibalism is barbaric. But do you know what is even more barbaric and uncivilized? The sight of homeless people and drug addicts in a city like New York. The ability of one civilization to vanquish others by the mere push of a button. That is a hundred times more barbaric! (Ray, 1991: n.p.)

The dominant ethos of modernity is selfishness, greed, and exploitation, which only results in humans’ alienation from nature and from one another. But Ray’s solution is from within modernity, unlike Gandhi’s solution, which is from outside it; the anthropologist-uncle is able to restore the balance and reintegrate the family with both nature and with the dispossessed classes from whom the bhadraloks have seized the nation. This is represented by Anila’s joining the Santhal dance, thus re-establishing the link of the bhadrasamaj with its subaltern peers (see “Agantuk”, online video). By the end of the film, the stranger sur- renders his share of the ancestral property in favour of his niece, but only after she has been proven worthy of the custodianship of the nation thus entrusted to her. The bhadraloks, in other words, must still shepherd the nation, but only after they are re-educated, their priorities re-aligned, and they are thus made fit once again for their role. In both movies, as in Tagore, the crisis of the bhadrasamaj forms the very backbone of the plot. Moreover, some sort of solution is offered to the problem. The perspective,

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 Paranjape 363 no doubt, is that of the privileged classes in all texts, though the latter are sympathetic to those below them in social rank and economic ability. The subalterns rarely speak for themselves in either Tagore or Ray, but are represented in proxy by the bhadraloks. Let us now return to Ghosh’s works. Ghosh’s non-fiction, especially Incendiary Circumstances (2005) − portions of which appeared earlier in The Imam and the Indian (2002) − clearly shows how world events, notably India’s national trauma of the 1980s in which thousands of Sikhs were massacred following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, have shaken his faith in the stability of nation states. Because histories are underwritten by the protocols of the nation, when the latter is dis- rupted, it is history itself which seems to be impossible to write. This is the epistemic rupture that Ghosh speaks of again and again, in this instance quoting I. A. Rehman, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, for whom it seems as if “Everything is dis- credited. Everything is lost, broken into pieces” (Ghosh, 2005: 102).4 Ghosh admits that he “cannot look ahead” in the face of outrages such as the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 “that have made the future even more obscure than it is usually acknowledged to be” (48). But we soon realize that what is at stake for Ghosh is much more than injustice meted out to one community: “Why was it that in the 1980s, history itself seemed to stumble and come to a standstill?” (48). His belief in the very idea of a nation state is shaken. Because “the actions of the state provide that essential element of continuity that makes time, as a collective experience, thinkable, by linking the past, the present, and the future” (48), collective experience, shared memory, and a hopeful future are themselves threatened. The state thus conceived is not merely an apparatus of rule but “a conscious, ethical institution”, an instrument designed to conquer the “unhistorical power of time”; it is the state that “has provided the grid on which history is mapped” (48). But in the 1980s, “time’s continuity” itself is “vitally damaged” by the conflagrations: “certain parts of the state had been absorbed by − had indeed become sponsors of − communal violence” (49). For others it might not have been thus, but for Ghosh the moment was nothing short of apocalyptic; quoting Agha Shahid Ali, Ghosh cries out, “Everything is finished, nothing remains” (49). For Mondal the crisis in Ghosh’s works is a result of the loss of credibility of “the grand narrative of Indian nationalism that had animated the struggle against colonial rule” (2007: 25). This in turn produces “a corresponding crisis of representation in both its political and discursive senses” (2007: 25). Therefore, “the very notion of the modern, representative state itself” becomes subject “to scrutiny and reappraisal” (2005: 26). Ghosh’s works offer “a critique of the nation’s self-representation” (2007: 27). This critique, deriving as Ghosh himself acknowledges from “a similar moment in the intellectual life of India” as the Subaltern Studies project, offers an “affirmation of the subaltern, and its critique of prevailing conceptions of Indian nationhood” (2007: 27). Thus Ghosh’s texts embody “India’s protracted and corrosive crisis of identity” and “are therefore caught on the horns of an acute political and ethical dilemma” (2007: 28). As Mondal describes it,

On the one hand, the critique of prevailing conceptions of nationhood are absolutely necessary in order to realise the larger goal of “freedom” promised at independence; on the other hand, that very goal may be increasingly jeopardised by the acceleration of India’s political disintegration that some of these “anti-national” discourses seem to support. (2007: 29)

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In Tagore, the nation-building project is very much an ongoing endeavour, with its promised fruition somewhere in the future. In Ray, it is more or less a question of retaining one’s faith in that project, despite the contrary forces that seem to be gaining ground. But in Ghosh, the idea of the nation itself seems to have come undone. Mondal interprets this undoing of the grand narrative of the nation as Ghosh’s partici- pation in postmodernist concerns: “To a greater or lesser extent, all of Amitav Ghosh’s major works resonate with many of the preoccupations that have been marshalled under the rubric of ‘postmodernism’. . . Ghosh exhibits an interest in the nature of language, textuality, and discourse” (2007: 20). He links Ghosh’s postmodernist leanings to “the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s that created a crisis of the postcolonial Indian state” (2007: 23). However, I see a fundamental distinction between the radical postmodernist scepticism of representability itself and Ghosh’s fictional project. I disagree with Mondal because postmodernists would question the ability of language to represent reality, while Ghosh does seem to accept the writer’s mission not just to make sense of our world, but also to portray it responsibly: “To write carelessly, in such a way as to appear to endorse terrorism or repression, can add easily to the problem, and in such incendiary circumstances, words cost lives” (2005: 201). Ghosh is thus closer to the “engaged” artist than the playful postmodernist. But my departure from Mondal becomes more significant when I locate the essential problem in Ghosh’s work not so much as his loss of faith in the grand narrative of the nation or his resorting to a sort of subalternist fiction to counter it. The problem is also not the unresolved tension between postmodernist propensities or a continuing commitment to Enlightenment ideals, the particular Indian variant of which is the disintegration of the Nehruvian state and the need to reassert some of its lost values. Nor, indeed, is it that the recurrent themes of his work − knowledge, science, rationality in The Circle of Reason (1986), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), and In an Antique Land (1992) or identity, colonialism, religion, and nationalism in The Shadow Lines (1995), In An Antique Land, The Glass Palace (2000a), The Hungry Tide (2004b), and Sea of Poppies (2008) − do not, in the end, add up to a “coherent and sustained intellectual project with a core set of themes” (Mondal, 2007: 38). It is somewhere else, which Mondal hints at but does not follow up: “many of the key moments in Ghosh’s texts involve the fore- grounding of an ethical situation which remains unresolved” (2007: 174). In Ghosh, the central conflict, whether personal or ethical, continues to lurk beneath the surface. It is never brought fully into relief. Ghosh seems to evade a full confrontation or face-off. Instead, the narrative escapes from it, veering off either to a trans-generational chronicle as in The Glass Palace or to a romantic climax as in The Hungry Tide. The question that I wish to raise is whether or not Ghosh’s work is a case of fiction in retreat from the world, unable to face the crises of our times and seeking solace, instead, in some form or the other of writerly escapism. Let me give some specific examples of this predicament. In The Circle of Reason the conflict between rationality, whether scientific or practical, and its discontents, whether impractical obsessions or calculated dishonesty, is never brought to a head, nor is the issue of science and its Other, which recurs in The Calcutta Chromosome, sorted out. In the former text, the subaltern alternative of Shombhu, the master-weaver, is also articu- lated only partially, failing to become a viable alternative. Instead, the narrative shifts

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 Paranjape 365 both spatially and thematically to the diaspora, where another series of oppositions and tensions is depicted without being fully followed through or worked out. Is the circle of reason, then, completed or is it abandoned? In The Shadow Lines, too, we have at least two sharp delineations of the crisis of the bhadrasamaj. One is the constant risk of the descent into economic degradation and the loss of class security (Ghosh, 1995: 132-5). Beneath the world of bourgeois privileges is another world of gnawing poverty and loss of respectability. This world is both aesthetically ugly and morally shameful, like the dirty linen on the clothesline inside the shabby, rundown, lower-end suburban flat of the narrator’s poor relatives, Hindu refugees displaced from their home in Bangladesh:

I was already well-schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility . . . It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother’s voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to those slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn’t study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn’t use them like claws to cling to what we’d got, that was where we’d end up, marooned in that landscape. (Ghosh, 1995: 134)

We see similar passages concerning Urmila, exploited by her entire family, in The Calcutta Chromosome (Ghosh, 1996: 133). Unlike the celebration of subaltern deprivation in a series of figures such as Shombhu (The Circle of Reason) and Fokir (The Hungry Tide), there is nothing to retrieve, nothing to salvage from this deprivation. There is no nobility in the loss of class and the only way out seems to be through the upward mobility that education affords, eventually leading to emigration. Unlike Apu who struggles to survive both emotionally and economically, the very option of leaving India that Ghosh’s characters have makes it unnecessary for them to attempt to solve the crisis of the bhadrasamaj. Another example from the same novel is the clash between two versions of womanhood as represented by the narrator’s grandmother, on the one hand, and Ila, on the other. Ila’s lack of “modesty” is seen by her as a cry for freedom from patriarchal and other forms of oppression experienced in India:

Do you see now why I’ve chosen to live in London? Do you see? It’s only because I want to be free. Free of what? I said. Free of you! she shouted back. Free of your bloody culture and free of all of you. (Ghosh, 1995: 88-9)

To her grandmother this is merely license:

It’s not freedom she wants, said my grandmother, her bloodshot eyes glowing in the hollows of her withered face. She wants to be left alone to do what she pleases: that’s all that any whore would want. She’ll find it easily enough over there; that’s what those places have to offer. But that is not what it means to be free. (Ghosh, 1995: 89)

Obviously, both are “wrong”, but the novel offers us no mediating voice, no way to dis- cover the way out of this very real dilemma that the Indian bhadramahila (literally gen- tlewoman, the female equivalent of bhadralok) faces each day of her life.

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In The Calcutta Chromosome, again, the possibility of an alternate history of the dis- covery of the cause of malaria is never realized. Instead, we retreat into an area, however exciting and fictionally compelling, of magic, mysticism, and − if the outcome of Murugan’s quest is considered − madness. The dominant or official narrative of science is unsatisfactory, but so is its Other, the subaltern story of Mangala’s and her cohorts’ quest for “interpersonal transference”. In The Hungry Tide, the faceoff between Nirmal, the romantic revolutionary and Nilima, the practical idealist, is also not resolved. It results in a permanent rupture whose resolution is only hinted at in the possible coming together of Kanai and Piya in the next generation. Between Kanai and Piya too are several unresolved tensions including the debate between the rights of humans and animals competing for the same territory. The physical union of Nirmal and Nilima, however, is best seen in the cyclone shelter that Nirmal designs in the very hospital that is Nilima’s pride; it is in this room that some of the principal characters seek shelter as the storm blasts their world to bits. On the other hand, the bourgeois–subaltern tensions remain; in neither generation is the love triangle between Nirmal–Kusum–Horen or Kanai–Moyna– Fakir quite resolved. In her extended discussion of Ghosh’s “spectrology”, Bishnupriya Ghosh begins by making a persuasive case for Ghosh’s attempts to excavate and memorialize “vernacular” traditions and narratives:

By grafting these stories into The Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh implies that Tagore’s and Renu’s ethical concerns continue into our contemporary postcolonial time, only now the progressive intellectual must guard against a ‘‘forgetting’’ facilitated by the current global hierarchies of knowledge. (2004: 201)

However, as I have already shown at length, these ethical concerns are merely tabled in Ghosh’s texts, without being central either to plot or the development of the characters. Individuals confront moral dilemmas and ambiguities, then move on without attempting necessarily to resolve them in the manner that is crucial to both Tagore and Ray. Strangely, even the best of Ghosh’s critics, including Meenakshi Mukherjee, have not paid enough attention to such evasions and retreats. Instead, Ghosh often emerges as the “authentic” Indian writer in contrast to, say, Vikram Chandra, whose attempts to superimpose “Indianness” upon his work are taken to be a sign of diasporic anxiety about Indianness.5 To me, however, such approaches and adjustments to their homeland, especially in the case of Indian writers of the diaspora, are very much a part of the cultural logic of expatriation.6 The contrast with Tagore and Ray is striking. In Tagore, as in many of his contempo- raries, we find the struggle to counter colonial defeat, which is also the overriding theme of “The Imam and the Indian”, through both individual and collective agency. The individual, as in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, is the reference point, the locus of resistance. Yet, individual self-culture or sadhana is not a retreat from the world but the beginning of a larger programme of action that eventually involves the building of some form of collectivity – the svaraj or selfhood of Gandhi or the svadeshi samaj of the native society of Tagore. There is not just an enduring commitment but almost an obsession with the construction of this collectivity, which is nothing short of a modern, plural, and equitable

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 Paranjape 367 nation, which will not only be the alternative to colonialism, but an example of a better way to live for all oppressed or colonized people. In Tagore we see this effort again and again being met with various degrees of failure or success. The whole project of the Bengal Renaissance was the formation of such a collective or samaj. In Ray, we see the after-effects of the formation of such a nation in the moral degradation of the middle classes who made the nation, occasioned sometimes by economic hardships and priva- tion, at other times by greed and lack of scruples. There is also the ongoing struggle between rationality and civic values and religious or other forms of irrationality or corruption. Thus, never in his vast body of work did Ray evade the crisis of the bhadrasamaj or seek to escape from it. Whether the solutions offered are inadequate or persuasive, the fact remains that Tagore and Ray, as creative artists, constantly grapple with the most important issues for their times, assuming and even asserting, their social responsibility. Hence, the major works of both Tagore and Ray arise from the crisis of the bhadrasamaj and are ways of tackling it. But when we come to Ghosh, we notice a deep ambiguity regarding the author’s role. It is as if the confidence in the writer’s mission is no longer available to him. Instead, the imperative seems to be to chase after fragments and traces so as to construct a forgotten or untold story as in In An Antique Land or The Calcutta Chromosome. The writer’s task seems to be to capture a lost world, to pursue fugitive knowledge, to reconstruct from a tiny scrap of information a whole world of overlooked possibilities. But when it comes to making sense of the very conditions that cause the writer’s displacement, the riots and breakdown of civic order that fracture the narrative of the nation state, Ghosh seems somewhat tongue-tied. His response seems to be a bewildered retreat, the inability to express anything but “outrage and sorrow” (2005: 48). It is not as if in the past, the bhadrasamaj acted directly, sometimes precipitously, as Nikhil does in Tagore’s Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 2005), to redress the situation, while today’s middle classes, in contrast, seem only to stand by and watch with impotent horror. Ghosh’s middle-class Hindu neighbours also acted courageously, as he tells us in Incendiary Circumstances, to shelter and save their Sikh neighbours who were targets of murderous mobs following the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. But when it comes to Ghosh’s fiction, we notice a change in attitude, symptomatic of many members of the present bhadrasamaj. Instead of responsibility, there is an air of helplessness, even defeat. What can I do? − seems to be the stance; these problems are too big for me to take on. In Ghosh’s case, all his erudition, experience, and narrative skill do not help him overcome his hesitation in confronting the crisis head-on so as to venture an alternative or a solution. Responding to the cataclysm of 9/11, Ghosh’s daughter, significantly named, Lila (or divine play), her eyes bright, simply says, “Where were you? I saw it all. From the window of our history class we had a clear view” (2005: 52). It is this clear view that Ghosh lacks, even though the window of his history class, encompassing stints in Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, Egypt, New York, Burma, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world, is so deep and wide. Ghosh responds to the crisis of our times by epistemic panic − “nothing will be the same again” – (54) or a sort of mourning over the loss of our maps of “longings without limit” (49). Instead of alternatives or solutions, a “sense of pessimism” and “recurring reference to defeat” (Mondal, 2007: 38) marks Ghosh’s work. In an interview with Frederick Luis

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Aldama in which he explains his critique of colonialism in The Glass Palace, Ghosh speaks at length about this:

[I]t became very important that this book encapsulate in it the ways in which people cope with defeat, because this has really been our history for a long, long time: the absolute fact of defeat and the absolute fact of trying to articulate defeat to yourself and trying to build a culture around the centrality of defeat. This is not just a fact for us; it’s a fact for the indigenous peoples in the Americas, in Australia, and wherever you go. But around defeat there’s love, there’s laughter, there’s happiness, you know? There are children. There are relationships. There’s betrayal. There’s faithfulness. (Ghosh, 2004a: n.p.)

It is almost as if Ghosh writes about a world “beyond repair” (Mondal, 2007: 38). In “The Fundamentalist Challenge”, Ghosh diagnoses the problem that afflicts us: “religion has been reinvented as its own antithesis” (2005: 120). He is both grimly astute and theo- retically perceptive in reminding us that “these reinvented forms of religion are not a repudiation of but a means of laying claim to the modern world” (122). Furthermore, they begin not with “a positive content of faith” but in “acts of repudiation” (123). The demon that stalks liberal democracies is “supremacism” (128), while “the non-sectarian, anti-imperialist nationalism of a Gandhi or a Saad Zaghloul (the Egyptian nationalist and statesman) was founded on a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heteroge- nous populations which had nothing to do with asserting supremacy” (128). Yet, when it comes to his own fiction, Ghosh’s deep suspicion of the very project of the bhadrasamaj of which he is a descendant appears to prevent him from presenting any positive options or remedies to the crises he articulates. At best we have individual acts of heroism, sacrifice, or love, as in the case of Fokir and Tridib; even these are not just few and far between, but frequently futile. Given the nature of the crisis, which is collective, not merely individual, personal heroism may not be a sufficient response. Sadly, one must consider seriously the question of whether the dredging of unusual if not exotic histories and locales − phrenology, malaria, oil, cetology, opium, and so on − is tanta- mount to some form of evasion or escape. In Tagore and Ray, despite the very real fact of defeat, the belief in individual and collective agency is never lost. The scope for self- improvement, struggle, resistance, and realization remains, as does a faith in some larger ideal of duty, progress, love, or integrity. Again, in Gandhi, superior moral force or satya- graha (literally, insistence on truth, as popularized by Gandhi) is seen as the antidote to colonial power and brute strength. These discourses, then, are not sites of defeat or nos- talgic cravings for lost worlds; they are manful and brave confrontations that inspire and plant the seeds of a new society. In Ghosh, however, there is a question mark over the efficacy of all these alternatives. Only the writer’s compulsion to tell a story, to fabricate a narrative out of the loss remains. As in the case of the director of the research institute in tsunami-stricken Andaman, what is salvaged from the wreckage is that box of slides, the record of investigative research, which is “an expression of the innermost sover- eignty of the self” (Ghosh, 2005: 24). For Ghosh, this assertion of his innermost sover- eignty is the compulsion to write, to tell the stories that he is impelled to tell, which is his antidote or response to the challenges and crises of our times. Not that a writer thus inspired has no purpose, no mission in life: Ghosh tells us what he must do: “the room for dissent has shrunk as the world has grown freer”, which is why

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“we need to recreate, expand, and reimagine the space for articulate, humane, and creative dissent” (2005: 137). The stories that Ghosh tells aim at doing precisely this. What better way of understanding why he stands up for the dispossessed and displaced peas- antry that congregates in Morichjhapi only to be slaughtered and scattered again at the hands of a state that has itself come to power riding on the back of a similar popular peasant uprising in Naxalbari some years back?7 Morichjhapi, then, becomes the antithesis to Naxalbari, the subaltern dissent against a dissent that has now turned into state power. But like Nirmal in The Hungry Tide, Ghosh romanticizes Morichjhapi. Nirmal’s relationship with it is conducted in secret like an adulterous liaison, like the dirty secret of the bourgeoisie (Ghosh, 2004b: 190). The settlers set up their own democratic local government, even taking a census (2004b: 172), as if they can arrive here instantly and intuitively, without the complex journeys of the Bengal Renaissance or the national struggle for freedom. That is why this subaltern utopia is only as convincing as the Marxist one projected onto Naxalbari. The impracticality of the whole enterprise is evi- dent in Nirmal’s own redundancy here. When he discovers that he has literally nothing to teach the Morichjhapi children – they have so little use of his book knowledge − he concludes, “I’ll teach them to dream” (2004b: 173). Not content with being so utopian, Ghosh goes a step further: “in Morichjhapi had been planted the seeds of what might have become if not a Dalit nation, then at least a safe haven, a place of true freedom for the country’s most oppressed” (2004b: 191). After a century of the most contentious and cynical caste and identity politics, such sudden innocence seems rather unconvincing. Interestingly, all projects in the tide country are as doomed as the colonial plan to build a new port in Canning a century ago. “Look”, says Nirmal to a young Fokir, “at the waters that flow past it [the badh or the dam] and how limitless they are, how patient, how quietly they bide their time” (Ghosh, 2004b: 205); can any human project survive their ambush? The flimsy dam that keeps the settlement from being overwhelmed by the waves is also being undermined by many sub-human creatures, including the crabs that scrape, burrow, and breed in it. We are forced to agree with Nilima when she says, “Nirmal, you have no idea of what it takes to do anything practical . . . You live in a dream world − a haze of poetry and fuzzy ideas about revolution. To build something is not the same as dreaming of it: building is always a matter of well-chosen compromises” (2004b: 214). In the tide country: “transformation is the rule of life; rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days” (2004b: 224). No wonder, the motto of the book is Rilke’s “life is lived in transformation” (2004b: 225). The fluidity of the tide country becomes a metaphor for the uncertain matrix of Ghosh’s world in which no human ideal or project has a fighting chance to make a lasting impression. On the edge of the more settled world of the nation state, this land of shifting borders and uncertain boundaries nevertheless attracts both Piya and Kanai in the end. Somehow, in this liminal no-man’s land, like voyagers who have survived both storm and shipwreck, they find themselves together in the midst of less privileged people, to whose lives they may be able to make a difference as Nirmal and Nilima did in the previous generation. The bhadrasamaj of Bengal was able to “translate” the fruits of the Enlightenment into a peculiarly Indian brand of humanism in spite of the humiliation and self-alienation wrought by colonialism. From Rammohan Roy to Ramakrishna, from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Ray, and from Tagore to Sunil Gangopadhyay, the bhadraloks were able to

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 370 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47(3) domesticate in India a “rationality mediated by religion” (Mondal, 2007: 33) whose ultimate aim was not just individual liberty but collective self-determination. The dispersal of the bhadrasamaj, partly in response to the lack of opportunities within the national space during the 1970s and 1980s, coupled with unprecedented opportunities of upward mobility through migration, has resulted in a change of priorities. From Bharati Mukherjee to Kiran Desai, writers of the diaspora have told stories of “the inheritance of loss”. At one level, this is to be expected, not mourned; we cannot expect them to fight national battles or articulate Indian crises. Those who remain invested in the project of the bhadrasamaj and its concomitant, the nation, must do so themselves, in this context if not through their own fiction, then at least through their criticism. In Ghosh’s case, however, perhaps all is not yet lost. At the end of “The Fundamentalist Challenge”, Ghosh reaffirms his faith in “prepostmodernist” notions which refuse to accept that “some part of the effort that human culture has so long invested in matters of the spirit will not, somehow, survive” (2005: 137). This convoluted sentence, once we account for the double negatives, simply means that spirituality will survive the distortions of religious intolerance. The troubled terrain of the nation state may be vacated, but the “loss of paradise” (2005: 39) does not only produce just narratives of “The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness”, (2005: 36-55) but perhaps another kind of story, more hopeful in its outcome. Ghosh calls The Circle of Reason an “exodus novel, a story of migration in the classic sense of having its gaze turned firmly toward the future”; no wonder the book ends with the words, “Hope is beginning” (1986: 45). The crisis of the bhadrasamaj is left behind. Or, to put it another way, transposed to the diaspora, it becomes a collective of individual crises, not of individuals who form a collective. In the process, has the bhadralok chromosome mutated beyond recognition? A partial answer to this problem may be found in that extraordinary reading by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986):

The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature. (1986: 18)

Is Ghosh practicing a minor literature in this sense of the term? Yes. Not because he writes “minority” chronicles of subalterns, nor because he fails to address issues central to the continuing project of the bhadrasamaj, with its deep investment in the nation. Ghosh is a practitioner of a minor literature because he deterritorializes English, writing in a major world language from a point of view that is essentially that of an outsider. In that sense, everything that Ghosh writes is deeply political and it also embodies the collective enunciation of a people, in this case the people without a history, the subalterns who have been passed over by both the imperialists and the nationalists, those labouring classes whose sweat and toil built empires and nations, but who have been swept aside in the convulsions of time. Such a reading also allows us to mark rather than elide the shift in the enunciation of the bhadrasamaj from Bangla-dominant bilingualism to an English-dominant one. Many

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Indian English writers dislike being identified by the language they use partly because it raises unproductive questions about nativity and authenticity, but also, possibly, because they wish to see themselves as a part of the Indian cultural continuum, not forever at odds with it. Deleuze and Guattari show us how to account for, even to accommodate the importance of medium, and not just the message. But unlike the schizoid rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, however, we must note that there is no Oedipal neurosis in Ghosh when it comes to Tagore and Ray. Instead, there is a sort of homage for the ancestral patrimony, as I have already tried to show. From the defiant desire of a Tagore or a Ray, a desire that can stand tall and straight against the power of the colonial state, in Ghosh we have a desire that is “already submissive and searching to communicate its own sub- mission” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 10; emphasis in the original). That is why we see in Ghosh’s work “an entire micropolitics of desire, of impasses and escapes, of submis- sions and rectifications” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 10). This paper has been an attempt to open up this terrain, to unblock its impasses. Once we have entered this difficult, if dim, territory, it hardly matters which way we stumbled into it, whether via the crisis of the bhadrasamaj or the theory of a minor literature: “We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 3). Ghosh has already cautioned us that his notion of a chromosome is “different, non- standard, unique” (1996: 250) because it is “not transmitted from generation to generation by sexual reproduction” but because “it develops out of a process of recombination” it is “particular to every individual” (1996: 250). There is no point in expecting that Ghosh will pick up where Ray left off. If anything, we must see this vertical descent from Tagore through Ray to Ghosh not so much as “interpersonal transference” (1996: 250) as a mutation (1996: 105; 217). As Murugan tells Antar, “knowledge is self-contradictory. . . to know something is to change it, therefore in knowing something, you’ve already changed what you think you know . . . [O]ne way of changing something – of affecting a mutation, let’s say − is to attempt to know it, or aspects of it” (1996: 105). It is, almost in the exact words, what Murugan repeats to Urmila: “just suppose you believed that to know something is to change it, it would follow, wouldn’t it, that to make something known would be one way of affecting a change? Or creating a mutation, if you like?” (1996: 217). Are we, by attempting to know Ghosh in this unprecedented manner, affecting a change, a mutation in the way his work is perceived and understood? I don’t know. But at the end of our endeavours, what does remain are all these stories. If the “biggest prize of all” as Murugun puts it, is the “ultimate transcendence of nature”, then Ghosh through all his narratives has certainly staked his claim to this sort of “immortality” (1996: 107). After all, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor” (1986: 27). In conclusion, we may well ask if Ghosh’s refusal to pursue the themes of his literary forbears constitutes a strategic retreat from, or a full-fledged rejection of, the bhadralok project? Perhaps, such a question is itself misplaced or badly framed. Surely, there are other ways of engagement available to today’s bhadraloks, if such a category is allowed still to exist in our globalized times. A writer’s activism may be separate from his art; Ghosh, certainly, has lent the prestige of his name to several ecological causes, which also figure prominently in a text like The Hungry Tide. Also, the “national” may now be

Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 372 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47(3) the preoccupation of other groups, other classes, somewhat lower down in social hierar- chy, consequent to the democratization of Indian politics. In any case, Dalits and other subalterns who were silenced through the centuries are now quite vociferous on the Indian literary stage. Is the bhadralok writer’s abandoning of the national project with all its local, social challenges a proof of the fruition of his ancestors’ mission or an admis- sion of his own displacement, even irrelevance? Or does his entry into a bigger, global arena of intervention signified by the shift from the vernacular to English mark a continuity rather than a departure from the past? Whatever the answer, it is clear that such deterritorialization, as in Ghosh’s case, generates new narrative forms and thematic codes, with which we are only now coming to terms.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. The secondary literature on Ghosh is already considerable. John Hawley’s (2005) early mon- ograph is still a useful introduction. Also worth looking at are collections of essays edited by Tabish Khair (2003) and by Brinda Bose (2003). There is, however, a body of less interest- ing if more voluminous work, consisting largely of conference papers and descriptive reit- erations of Ghosh’s novels. See for instance Auradkar (2007), Bannerjee (2009), Bhatt and Nityanandam (2001), Choudhury (2009), Dwivedi (2010), Sarsani (2010), and Tiwari (2008). One reason for this spurt in Ghosh studies is, of course, the canonization of Ghosh. Many of his novels, particularly The Shadow Lines (1995), are prescribed to students in Indian and foreign universities. But it also reflects the growing evidence of his importance and popular- ity as a major contemporary writer. The central argument in this paper may be found in a preliminary form in my own previous work on Ghosh “Mutations of the Calcutta chromosome? Amitav Ghosh and the mapping of a ‘minor’ Literature” (Paranjape, 2011). 2. Bhadrasamaj is a term I use; the more frequently used word is the singular bhadralok, which may be translated as “gentleman”. For an account of the rise and fall of this group see Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (2005) by Tithi Bhattacharya. However, I am more interested in the bhadrasamaj as a category. This is as much an idea, even ideal, as it is a specific class. That is why a huge diversity of mostly upper caste, educated Bengalis, from a clerk in a government office to a wealthy landowner could be included in it. I would argue that the bhadralok was a nineteenth century reinvention of the neo-Vedic idea of Arya or “noble”, superimposed upon the rising but colonized bourgeoisie. I first started thinking of these ideas when I was invited to deliver the keynote address in a conference devoted to Ghosh at Tarakeswar College, West Bengal (now Pashchim Banga) in March 2010. The descent of Kolkata intellectuals on this semi-urban community underscored the value of the “literary” to contemporary Bengali identity, though no longer in Bengali but in English. My thanks to the organizers for their invitation and hospitality. 3. Bishnupriya Ghosh (2004) offers a fascinating analysis of Ghosh’s texts, especially The Calcutta Chromosome, as cases of postcolonial spectrology. In addition, see Claire Chambers (2003) for an early analysis of Ghosh’s treatment of science in the latter text and John Thieme (2003) for a perceptive reading of the novel’s unique contribution to a subalternist subversion of dominant knowledge systems.

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4. Subsequent references are to this edition of Incendiary Circumstances and will be cited par- enthetically by page numbers in the text. 5. See Mukherjee’s (1993) “The anxiety of Indianness: Our novels in English”; see also The Perishable Empire (Mukherjee, 2000, 166-86), where this essay is included. Chandra’s extremely readable reaction is to be found in “The cult of authenticity” published in the Boston Review (2000). Mukherjee’s (1995) essay, “Maps and mirrors: Coordinates of meaning in The Shadow Lines” is included in the Oxford University Press (New Delhi) students’ edition of the text. 6. See for instance, Makarand R. Paranjape: (1994) “Indo–Anglian as Anglo–Indian: Ideology, politics, and cross–cultural representation” and (2000) “Afterword: What about those who stayed back home? Interrogating the privileging of diasporic writing”. 7. The Morichjhapi massacre is still not fully documented. In addition to the sources Ghosh lists, see Modhumay Pal’s Morichjhapi: Chinna Desh, Chinna Itihaas (2009), which also contains an English chapter by Ross Mallick on “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre”.

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