ISSN 2319 – 7684

MIDDLE FLIGHT SSM JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE A National Level Peer Reviewed Journal Vol. 2 No. 1 November 2013

SPECIAL VOLUME: NEW LITERATURES

ISSN 2319 – 7684

MIDDLE FLIGHT SSM JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE A National Level Peer Reviewed Journal

SPECIAL VOLUME: NEW LITERATURES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

S. S. MAHAVIDYALAYA KESHPUR, PASCHIM MEDINIPUR PIN: 721150, WEST BENGAL, INDIA

Vol.2 November 2013 No.1

MIDDLE FLIGHT JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE A National Level Peer Reviewed Journal

Editorial Board:

Bill Ashcroft, Australian Professorial Fellow, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW, Sydney Krishna Sen , Professor , University of Calcutta (Retd.) Tirthankar Das Purkayastha, Professor, Vidyasagar University Sankar Prasad Singha, Professor, Vidyasagar University Mahadev Kunderi, Professor, Mysore University Binda Sharma, Associate Professor, C.M.D. College (PG) Satyaki Pal , Associate Professor, R. K. M. Residential College (Autonomous), Narendrapur (PG) Goutam Buddha Sural , Associate Professor, Bankura Christian College (PG) Jaydeep Sarangi, Associate Professor, Jogesh Chandra College Sudhir Nikam, Associate Professor, B. N. N. College (PG) Dinesh Panwar, Assistant Professor, University of Delhi

Advisory Board:

Jawaharlal Handoo, Professor, Tezpur University (Retd.) & President, Indian Folklore Congress Parbati Charan Chakraborty , Professor, Burdwan University (Retd.) B. Parvati, Professor, Andhra University Simi Malhotra, Professor, Jamia Millia Islamia University Shreya Bhattacharji, Associate Professor, Central University of Jharkhand Ujjwal Jana, Assistant Professor, Pondicherry University Subhajit Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Vidyasagar University

Editor: Debdas Roy [email protected]

Published: November, 2013

ISSN: 2319 – 7684

Published by: Department of English, S. S. Mahavidyalaya Keshpur, Paschim Medinipur, Pin: 721150 Ph: 03227-250861, Mail: [email protected] © S. S. Mahavidyalaya

Price: India:Rs.300.00 Overseas: $ 30 Editorial The word ‘new’ is both limiting and liberating. Limiting because it presupposes that the literature of the colonial period is ‘old’ to which new writers of the post –colonial times occasionally look back in wistful retrospection. It draws a line of demarcation between the pre-colonial and the post-colonial times taking the year of independence of a particular nation as the point of ‘new’ beginning. Again some critics (e.g. Gurr) consider 1970s as the beginning of ‘new’ literatures because it took nearly two decades for the writers to overcome the trauma of colonial subjugation. If the literatures in English produced in places such as Nigeria, Australia, Canada, Latin American, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Malta, Singapore, New Zealand and West Indies since independence are ‘new’, are the emerging literatures of the other South Pacific islands, Asian Countries, African nations, African-American literatures having African-European cultural origin ‘newer’? If so, then what is ‘new’ today will be ‘old’ tomorrow. Thus a ‘budding’ literature faces the phobia of being untimely dated. Since the word ‘new’ is problematic, some (e.g. Boehmer) prefer the term ‘Post-colonial’ which, again, has been termed as ‘vague’ (Loomba), ‘indefinite’ (Christine MacLeod) and ‘loose’ (Deepika Petraglia- Bahri) by others. The word ‘new’ is liberating because it draws our attention to what is emerging with the passage of time and ‘one has to move with the time or else one be left behind’ (Kenneth Ramchand). The word ‘literatures’ also raises questions as to the relation of the literatures in English to the ‘heterogeneous’ productions within a country and without. It problematizes the relation of the internationally acclaimed ‘new’ literatures to ‘local nationalism, to each other’ (Bruce King’). How can a worldview of new literatures be arrived at in the face of cultural specificities? Should the indigenous productions be kept at bay? Then comes the question of language. Which ‘English’ do we speak of? What to do with the inherent imperialistic properties of the English language? Raja Rao says that we should not ‘write like the English’. Kamala Das says that ‘the language I speak becomes mine’.

Hopefully, such and other questions are no longer looked upon as ‘threats’. Immune to the brow-beats and reductive denials, the New Literatures in English have well withstood criticism by the big brothers of imperialistic culture and have well overcome the stage of ‘cultural cringe’.

Writers of New Literatures have in many cases boldly replaced the western aesthetics by their own even in the face of such disturbing question as to whether there can be a universally acceptable critical framework even within a country of cultural diversity (e.g. India) and also in the face of apprehensions regarding the ‘lack of critical practice to deal with the complexities and varied cultural provenance of post – colonial writing’ felt by Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin. The much-hyped question as to the heterogeneous nature of these disparate, culture-specific productions has been countered by tracing similar themes, common history (which is increasingly getting unsummarizable though), analogous problems of ‘decolonization and nation building’ (Bruce King), similar process of evolution, similar effects of modernization, of advanced communication, of extensive travel, of access to cyber world, of environmental consciousness , similarities of style and so on. Pangs of exile leading to the question of search for a ‘house’ (Naipaul) and occasionally to man’s perennial ‘search for the spiritual centre’ (C.D.Narasimhaiah ) is another area of affinity. Diasporic experiences – physically here but mentally there – and in-betweenness is another common area of exploration. Subjected to subjugation and disruption during the colonial period, each new country has been ‘reconstructing’ (Marion Wynne – Davies) its own distinctive traditions, myths and cultures.

Is there anything wrong if the writers of new literatures across the world give up their concerted sentimental search for affinities and acknowledge differences? Sometimes a proper understanding of the differences may help us bridge cleavages and reach a sensible consensus regarding some issues.

Nevertheless, language which is, hopefully, not the only common ground they traverse has been the most discussed issue. To them the English language, a desirable legacy, is not a derivative dialect constantly aspiring towards the correctness of the Standard English (Marian Gray). Rather they claim to have attained ‘linguistic autonomy’ by attempting to express themselves in their own distinctive ways through the medium of a language which, though not entirely their own, is evolving increasingly into an autonomous variety (Tom McArthur). Rather the cross-cultural pollination of the English and the native elements has given rise to the condition of hybridity and creolization which has proved to be immensely fruitful. New literatures have asserted their amazing vitality in registering ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’. Then again writers have to be on their guard against excessive preoccupation with protest and assertion which sometimes blurs and blunts originality and takes us away from our chosen path. The path is not strewn with flowers especially when the voices are subversive and the relation between the belligerent groups struggling for ‘space’ is metonymic. Yet the journey is its own reward and we guess that the roads lined with ‘curio shops’ are leading to a rendezvous.

The launching of the second volume of Middle Flight would hardly be possible without the unstinted support from my teachers, employers, editors, advisors, my colleagues and my beloved students. Documentation has not been impeccably uniform. Some of our reviewers accepted some well- written but differently documented papers and it has been our resolve to honour their decision. Congrats to all concerned for making the publication of the journal possible.

Debdas Roy

CONTENTS

CHINUA ACHEBE Subhajit Sengupta Chinua Achebe : A Tribute

Shreya Bhattacharji The Hegemonic Game of “Exclusion”/ “Inclusion” “Chaos”/ “Cosmos”: Exploring the Dynamics of the “Evil Forest” in Chinua Achebe’s World Soumen Chatterjee Interrogating the Unitary Concept of Nation: A Reading of Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah Sovan Maity “But for me there is no other choice”: Achebe’s Stand on the Use of the Colonizer’s Tongue

SUBALTERN LITERATURE Sankar Prasad Singha Narrativising the Marginalized: From Subaltern Studies to Dalit Writing Amit Kumar Raul Premchand’s ‘The Shroud’: A ‘Progressive’ Short Story Angshuman Kar Re-situating We Are Going Dilip K. Sasmal “Freedom” in Anand’s Fiction Dipanwita Pal Re-reading the History of Colonization of Australia in the Poems of Oodgeroo Noonuccal: An Eco-Colonial Approach Goutam Buddha Sural Meena Kandasamy: “Ms Militancy” of Indian English Poetry Joyjit Ghosh Contemporary Bangla Dalit Poetry: A Reading in Alternative Aesthetics Ujjwal Jana Blistering Aboriginal Voice: An Overview of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Select Poems

OTHER ESSAYS Aloy Chand Biswas Naipaul’s Indian Travelogues in Perspective of Travel Theory Asis De Africa to Me Now: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Sequence as Dreams of Transformation Avishek Chaudhury In Search of Silver-Lining in an Alien Land: A Review of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Basudeb Chakrabarti “If I am you, then where am I?” Mahesh Dattani’s Exploration of the Marginalized Identities in Where There’s a Will and Dance Like a Man Beetoshok Singha Wide Sargasso Sea: Resistance to and Subversion of White Supremacy Dillip Kumar Pattanayak The Rhetoric of Ceremony: Reading American Inaugural Poems

Madhumita Purkayastha ‘Rememory’ as a Strategy of Subversive Representation: A Feminist Reading of Morrison’s Beloved Purnendu Sengupta The Operation of Foucault’s ‘Disciplinary methods’ in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale S. Akilandeshwari Cultural Hybridity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea Samik Dasgupta Historiographical Reconstruction as Postcolonial Counter- narration in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace Samit Kr. Maiti Abnormal Childhood as the Symptom of Post-Colonial Malady in Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas Santanu Ganguly Towards a Humane Critical Evaluation of the Poetry of

Sarojini Naidu

Shramana Das Purkayastha “Not belonging or wanted in either”: Liminality and a Post-national Vision in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy Smita Jha Revisiting the Classics: A Case Study of Moby Dick Subrata Sahoo Dying Becomes an Art: Obsession with Death and Death-Wish in Kamala Das’s Poetry Suparna Bhattacharya The Longing for “the house big and safe” in Wide Sargasso Sea Uttam Kr. Jena Communal and National Bias in Cross-Border Partition Fiction

INTERVIEW Jaydeep Sarangi Jaydeep Sarangi in Conversation with Rob Harle

CREATIVE WRITING

Bishnupada Roy The Dark Side of the Day

Underground

Contributors

Aloy Chand Biswas, Assistant Professor & Head, Dept. of English, Egra S. S. B. College, Area of research: V.S. Naipaul Amit Kumar Raul, Assistant Professor and Head, Dept. of English, K. D. College of Commerce and General Studies, Area of research: Indian English Fiction and Nation Theory

Dr. Angshuman Kar, Associate Professor, Dept. of English, The University of Burdwan

Asis De, Assistant Professor & Head, Dept. of English, Mahishadal Raj College, Area of research: Post Colonial Theory, New Literatures in English & Afro-Asian Studies

Avishek Chaudhury, UGC-NET qualified research aspirant & Assistant Teacher, Midnapore Collegiate

School, Area of interest: Indian English Fiction

Basudeb Chakrabarti, Assistant Professor & Head, Dept. of English , Jangipur College, Area of research: 20 th Century Theatre : Pinter & Dattani Beetoshok Singha, Ex M. Phil. Scholar, Area of interest: Rudyard Kipling

Bishnupada Roy, Associate Professor, University of North Bengal, Area of research: Indian English Poetry

Dr. Dillip Kumar Pattanayak, Lecturer, Central Institute of Buddhist Studies, Leh, J&K, Area of research: American Literature, Linguistics and Translation Studies

Dr. Dilip K. Sasmal, Formerly Guest Lecturer, Dept. of English & BCA, Raja Narendralal Khan Women’s College, Area of research : Indian English Fiction

Dipanwita Pal, Assistant Professor, Galsi Mahavidyalaya, Area of research: Australian Literature: Eco- Critical Perspective

Dr. Goutam Buddha Sural , Associate Professor & Head , Dept. of English, Bankura Christian College (PG),

Area of Specialization: 19 th Century British Poetry

Dr. Jaydeep Sarangi, Reader, Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri College, Kolkata, Area of specialization: Social Linguistics, Post-Colonial Literature and Marginal Literature in English

Dr. Joyjit Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Vidyasagar University, Area of specialization: Modern English Novel, Indian English Poetry, Translation Studies & Bangla Dalit Poetry

Dr. Madhumita Purkayastha, Associate Professor & Head, Department of English, D.H.S.K. College, Assam, Area of Specialization: American Literature

Purnendu Sengupta, UGC-NET qualified research scholar & Part-Time Teacher, Raja N. L. Khan Women’s College, Area of research: Literary Theory, Novels of Margaret Atwood

S. Akilandeshwari, Full Time Research Scholar, Department of English, Holy Cross College, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, Area of research: Caribbean Literature and Jean Rhys

Samik Dasgupta, Assistant Professor, Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya, Hooghly, Area of research: Amitav Ghosh

Samit Kr. Maiti, Assistant Professor and Head, Dept. of English, Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya , Area of research: Indian Writing in English

Prof. Sankar Prasad Singha, Professor of English, Vidyasagar University

Dr. Santanu Ganguly, Assistant Professor, Netaji Nagar Day College, Kolkata, Area of research: Indian Writing in English and Sarojini Naidu

Shramana Das Purkayastha, UGC-NET qualified research scholar & Guest Lecturer, Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College, Area of interest: New Literatures & Indian Writing in English

Dr. Shreya Bhattacharji, Associate Professor, Centre for English Studies, Central University of Jharkhand, Area of specialization: Post Colonial Studies and Contemporary Literary Theories

Dr. Smita Jha , Associate Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, I. I. T., Roorkee, Area of specialization: Linguistics, Indian Writing in English, Commonwealth Literature and Literary Theory

Soumen Chatterjee, Assistant Professor in FDP, Dept. of English, Mahishadal Raj College, Area of research: New Literatures in English and Chinua Achebe

Sovan Maity, Research aspirant & Assistant Teacher, Buraburi Junior High School, Area of interest: Eco Criticism , Dalit Literature and New Literatures

Dr. Subhajit Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Vidyasagar University, Area of specialization: Renaissance Studies, Indian Writing in English, Translation studies

Subrata Sahoo, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Contai P.K. College, Area of research: Indian Writing in English and Kamala Das

Suparna Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor, Calcutta Girls’ College, Area of research: Literary Fairy tales Dr. Ujjwal Jana, Assistant Professor, Pondicherry University, Area of specialization: Post Colonial Studies, Indian Writing in English and Eco-Criticism Uttam Kr. Jena, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, K. D. College of Commerce and General Studies, Area of research: Indian English Fiction and Partition Literature

Chinua Achebe: A Tribute

Subhajit Sengupta

I dimly recall a late January afternoon. The world was twenty years younger then, and very different. For one thing, students of most English literature departments thought about their subject in ways that today’s generation of students would think primitive. The most recent author that we studied in the undergraduate classes — I was in the B.A. 2nd year then — was probably James Joyce. And around half a century separated Joyce from the early 1990s! To study contemporary, living authors in the classroom was considered a trivialization of English literature. The distance of decades, for some inexplicable reason, made writers venerable. Around the same time, however, there were a few Indian universities that had already begun to ‘violate’ tradition, so to speak, by paying attention not only to contemporary authors, but to the new English literatures that had started emerging outside England and America. This caught the imagination of some of us who were looking forward to our postgraduate classes, and beyond that, to a career in academics. There was something in the air that told us that we were at the crossroads of English literary studies, and that very shortly numerous conventional feathers would be ruffled. And so, on that late January afternoon twenty years ago I walked into a large stall at the Calcutta Book Fair, and having convinced myself of my loyalty to the Shelleys and the Shakespeares, plucked Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart off a makeshift shelf. The title, at least, owed something to Yeats, I persuaded myself! Of course, I immensely enjoyed the book; it suggested to me the treasures that lay, hitherto undiscovered by me, in Achebe’s fiction, in African English literature, and in the new English literatures in general. It was only a matter of weeks before I entertained myself with a couple of Achebe’s other novels.

The years rolled and the old calendars were inevitably rolled up too. Chinua Achebe, born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on 16 November 1930, began to be read more than ever before, most surely so in English literature departments of universities across the world. African English literature was recovered from its metaphorical darkness; Achebe, Gordimer, Fanon and Ngũgĩ’ began to occupy pride of place in hearts and intellects and on bookshelves. Considerable critical energy began to be directed towards its interpretation as postcolonial and culture studies became justly fashionable. Then, in the midst of all this, a new year began. Little did one know at the start of 2013 that Achebe, universally hailed as the father of modern African writing, had not very long to live. 21 March 2013 was a sad day. Sad, because Chinua Achebe passed away that day. Sadder still, because his death marked, as we are wont to say, the end of an era, and drove home the realization that some of the finest fiction, inspired by the intersection of African tradition, particularly its Igbo varieties, and modernity, especially as embodied by European colonialism, now remains incapable of extension by the hand that produced them. The accolades he received while he lived, and the tributes that have poured in since his passing away, are significant, particularly in light of the fact that in 1958, when Achebe sent his manuscript of Things Fall Apart to several publishing houses, it was instantly turned down on the ground that fiction by African writers would fare disastrously in the market. When it finally reached the office of Heinemann, Donald MacRae, an educational adviser, observed: ‘This is the best novel I have read since the war.’ The publishing house could not reject MacRae’s recommendation, and the rest, as they say, is history. Things Fall Apart, published on 17 June that year, not only remains Achebe’s magnum opus, but went on to become one of the most celebrated African novels of all time. One particular review of Things Fall Apart, written by a British woman, Honor Tracy, was amazingly crude. Tracy wondered if black African writers such as Achebe, who spoke persuasively about African culture, would like to return to the inglorious past of wearing raffia skirts; she wondered if Achebe would love to give up his modern job as a broadcaster for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) in Lagos and go back to the primitivism of his grandfather’s time. That review of Achebe’s first novel was an exception, for by and large the British press sang its praises: it was held that the book successfully represented tribal life from a native African’s perspective, and that Achebe was a model for aspiring novelists. Achebe followed up his famous first novel with later novels such as No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). These works focus on Igbo traditions and customs, and speak of the ways in which Christian influences and imperialism caused clashes of Western and African values during and after the colonial period. Achebe’s fiction makes intelligent use of the oral tradition of the Igbo people, and the author frequently illustrates the values of the Igbo community by incorporating folk tales, folk songs and ceremonial dances into his stories. Thus Achebe’s novels reflect Igbo social and cultural traditions both in the form of the narratives, as well as in the stories they tell. His contribution to African literature includes several short stories, children’s books, and collections of essays. Achebe was never a man to hold his thoughts back. In a lecture titled An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's ‘Heart of Darkness’ that he delivered in 1975 he famously criticised Joseph Conrad as ‘a thoroughgoing racist.’ The Massachusetts Review published it later amid raging controversy. Achebe’s assertion that Conrad’s novel dehumanises Africans and renders Africa as ‘a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril’ has developed into a major perspective on Conrad’s fiction. The essay was included in the 1988 Norton critical edition of Heart of Darkness.

Brought up in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled as a student. Although baptised Albert Chinualumogu, he dropped the ‘Albert’ from his name upon going to the university. His wry humour comes across fully when he says: ‘So if anyone asks you what Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria had in common with Chinua Achebe, the answer is: they both lost their Albert!’ Queen Victoria, of course, went into deep mourning when her first cousin, Albert, whom she had married in 1840, died in 1861. Achebe was fascinated not only with world religions and traditional African cultures, but also with stories written in his mother tongue, Igbo, and in English. In his lifetime, he was frequently questioned on issues of language, and on people wanting to know in which language he dreamt he would wittily reply that he dreamt in both Igbo and English! He fancied himself as perfectly bilingual and once pointed out, ‘I don’t know for certain but I probably have spoken more words in Igbo than English but I have definitely written more words in English than Igbo.’ As a child living through the age of colonisation, Achebe stood at the crossroads of cultures. Two of the books he recollects as being among his earliest associations with literature were a tattered copy of a prose adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his mother’s Ije Onye Kraist, an Igbo adaptation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. While Achebe's parents, Isaiah Okafo Achebe and Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam, were converts to the Protestant Church Mission Society (CMS) in Nigeria, his uncle’s family, ‘blinded by heathenism, offered food to idols.’ One Christian text that particularly intrigued and interested him was The West African Churchman’s Pamphlet, a booklet that recommended ‘interminable Bible readings morning and night.’ His Christianity notwithstanding, he and his little sister would frequently drop in at their neighbour’s house to have their share of heathen festival meals.

In 1958, the year Things Fall Apart was published, a promotion at the NBS put Achebe in charge of the network's eastern region coverage. He had to move to Enugu where he met a woman named Christie Okoli, who joined the NBS staff when he arrived. Their relationship blossomed and they married on 10 September 1961 in the Chapel of Resurrection on the campus of the University of Ibadan. When Biafra separated from Nigeria in 1967 and sought independence, Achebe became a supporter of the Biafran cause. War broke out and took its toll, leading to large-scale starvation and violence. Achebe, Christie and their children lived through this terrible and bloody civil war over the question of Nigerian unity in which almost two million people perished. Achebe appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. On the Nigerian government retaking the region of Biafra in 1970, he involved himself in politics but later withdrew when he witnessed the corruption and elitism that affected political parties. He made the United States his home for several years in the 1970s, and returned there in 1990 after a car accident left him paralysed waist downward and confined him to a wheelchair.

Achebe, in his own inimitable way, gradually became for me a writer to whose encounters and experiences with the English language I could relate my own. What he said about the use of English by African writers certainly applies to the Indian situation too; this use is neither an absurdity nor an indulgence in treachery. Achebe contends that ‘the culprit for Africa’s language difficulties was not imperialism, . . . but the linguistic plurality of modern African states.’ He has vital differences with Ngũgĩ’s Manichean perspective on the issue of language. Ngũgĩ’ perceived a battleground where the two warring forces were the imperialist tradition on the one hand, and on the other, the tradition of African resistance to imperialistic impositions; it had to be either English or the mother tongue. What flows from Ngũgĩ’s vision, according to Achebe, is that ‘Africa’s language problems resolve themselves into European languages sponsored and foisted on the people by imperialism and African languages defended by patriotic and progressive forces of peasants and workers.’ In a brief statement at the beginning of his book Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ’ publicly renounced his use of English; Achebe, on the other hand, asserts that ‘English is . . . not marginal to Nigerian affairs. It is quite central. I can speak across two hundred linguistic frontiers to fellow Nigerians only in English.’ Achebe speaks of Kwame Nkrumah, who oversaw Ghana's independence from British colonial rule in 1957 and became the first President and the first Prime Minister of Ghana. Nkrumaha, a staunch and determined opponent of imperialism, nevertheless admitted that English, despite being ‘a language alien to Ghana . . . [was] the best vehicle for achieving national communication and social and political unification.’ Achebe’s own contention is that imperialism’s approach to language was ‘extremely complex’ and that English was never an imperial imposition on the former colonies: ‘Neither in India nor in Africa did the English seriously desire to teach their language to the native . . . In Nigeria the demand for English was already there in the coastal regions in the first half of the nineteenth century.’ Achebe’s understanding of the need for the English language hardly suggests that he was apathetic to the situation of the black people of Africa. Once in Northern Rhodesia, now called Zambia, Achebe occupied a seat in a whites-only section of a bus heading to Victoria Falls. When the ticket taker wanted to know why he was sitting in the front, he replied that he hailed from Nigeria, where they sat wherever they liked in a bus. On reaching the waterfall, the black travellers from the bus cheered him. Still, Achebe was dismayed by the inability of the African black people to resist colonial racist attitudes and practices.

Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in June 2007. The American critic Elaine Showalter, who was on the panel of judges, said he ‘illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies.’ The year 2010 saw Achebe being awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra was published by Penguin Books in October 2012, and reignited discussions about the Nigerian Civil War. It would prove to be Achebe’s last publication during his lifetime. A short illness preceded Achebe’s death in Boston. In the last few years of his life, Achebe was a professor at Brown University in the United States.

The heart that bred, shaped, and sculpted some of the finest African English novels has ceased to beat. But writers do not die. Certainly, the great ones do not; they speak eternally through their yellowing pages. The body of work they leave behind confers on them an eternity that time cannot challenge. Chinua Achebe, a remarkably gifted writer and an extraordinary human being, lives on in his work.

The Hegemonic Game of “Exclusion”/ “Inclusion” “Chaos”/ “Cosmos”: Exploring the Dynamics of the “Evil Forest” in Chinua Achebe’s World

Shreya Bhattacharji

Chinua Achebe presents his amazingly vibrant tribal Igbo world as a complex “cosmos”, secure and dignified; a “spiritual commonwealth” of “living blood relatives”, “dead relatives” and “gods of the community” (Afigbo qtd. in Anyanwu 34). “Erima” or solidarity cements the tribe together (Anyanwu, 1993, p. 37). The community is placed above the individual: “. . . no man however great was greater than his people. . .” (Achebe, Arrow of God (The African Trilogy), 1988, p. 555). The traditional tribal Igbo order is surprisingly democratic, classless and creedless; governed by social consensus and referendum. The extended family forms the political, economic and social nodal unit. The communal ownership of land combined with communal ethics and collective consciousness prevents the construction of coercive state apparatuses, in direct contrast to the “commune” in erstwhile USSR or the “kibbutz” in Israel of the modern world. Age and merit jointly govern Igbo society. Men and women of exceptional caliber are accorded positions of immense socio-political power. Merit and wisdom combine to form the awesome body of the masked ancestral spirits, the “egwugwu”, advocating communal reconciliatory patterns of justice and enforcing social codes. “Age-grade”, an amazing cultural phenomenon, cuts across the political, social and economic ethos. Children born within a stipulated one-year period belong to a particular age group, demarcated along gender lines. Fostering a spirit of togetherness it serves as a remarkable community welfare organization. A culture nurtured on such values is naturally excessively tolerant and forthright. The Igbos never waged “a fight of blame” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 12).

Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane defines traditional tribal man as “homo religiosus”, the outstanding characteristic of his traditional society being the opposition between “cosmos” (“inhabited territory”) and “chaos” (“the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it”). The “cosmos” is “our world”; the surrounding space is the incomprehensible “other”, “foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, and ‘foreigners’” (1959, p. 29). In Chinua Achebe’s Igboland, each tribal village is a symbolic “cosmos” engaged in intense perpetual combat with the chaotic “other”, the “evil forest” “alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness”: “Every . . . village had its ‘evil forest’. In it were buried all those who died of . . . evil diseases . . . leprosy and smallpox. It was . . . the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine-men when they died” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 135).

Dipesh Chakrabarty in “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?” stresses the need to highlight the presence of indigenous repressive structures in all societies: “I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices . . .” (1992, p. 23). Achebe is unhesitant in his portrayal of the inherent fissures in the symbolically exclusive, hegemonic, three-tiered Igbo society of free-borns (Amadis), slaves (Ohus) and outcasts (Osus). This society employs sizeable slave labour: “. . . let the slave who sees another cast into a shallow grave know that he will be buried in the same way when his day comes” (Achebe, Arrow of God (The African Trilogy), 1988, p. 346). It denigrates certain clans to the status of osu or “outcast”: “. . .an Osu could not raise his shaggy head in the presence of the free-born . . .He was a thing set apart. . . to be despised and almost spat at. He could not marry a freeborn, and he could not take any of the titles of his clan. When he died, he was buried by his kind in the Bad Bush” (Achebe, "Chike's School Days", p. 36). This exclusionist order maintains its cohesion and stability through certain cruel and inflexible principles including ritual killings and the abandoning of innocent twins in the Evil Forest. In Things Fall Apart, a sad Obierika abandons his twin children in the Evil Forest while bemoaning their cruel fate: “The Earth had decreed that they were an offence on the land and must be destroyed” (Achebe, 1995, p. 114). And sensitive Nwoye is haunted by the ritual murder of Ikemefuna and the cries of such abandoned twins.

The late nineteenth century insidious intrusion of white colonialism, Christian missionaries, subversive force in cassock of docility, fails to threaten this secure, cohesive, dignified tribal Igbo society. This supremely confident meritocracy, blatantly dismissive of its own internal fractures, misjudges the strength of such self- effacing missionaries as Mr. Brown; the “mad logic of the Trinity” merely amuses (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 134).

The confident tribal elders of Mbanta give the missionaries “a portion of the evil forest” to build their church, an “offer which nobody in his right senses would accept” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, pp. ,134 - 135).The quietly self-congratulatory elders expect immediate destruction of the missionaries. The missionaries survive, exposing the Igbo foundation myths to be hollow and impotent. The conversions begin.Osus (outcasts) and Efulefus(misfits), the dissatisfied fringe, are the first converts – among them Nneka, mother of four sets of twins, each set brutally thrown into the “Evil Forest.” Priestess Chielo marginalizes the converts as “the excrement of the clan” and condemns the new religion as “a mad dog that had come to eat it up” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 130). This space of exclusion, an Igbo hegemonic cultural construct, acts as the classic Derridian gap. Its insidious appropriation by the colonial structure reverses the hierarchy of values, inverts meanings to cause a semantic crisis. The little red-earth and thatch church thrives in the Evil Forest.

Amazingly ambitious Christianity, initially a tentative harbinger, thus creeps in surreptitiously through the inherent cracks in the Igbo cultural matrix. Mr. Brown’s is the benign face of the “Civilizing Mission”; he discusses Igbo cosmology with tribal elders, rescues occasional twins from the Evil Forest and quietly but continually converts. Louis Althusser, in the context of “pre-capitalist historical Europe,” clearly categorizes “the Church” as the single dominant Ideological State Apparatus, an apparatus which subsumed “not only religious functions, but also educational ones, and a large proportion of the functions of communications and ‘culture’” ("Ideology and Ideological State Apparaturses", 1970). Mr. Brown’s little red-earth and thatch church grows from strength to strength. His reliance on common sense and expediency, his astute assessment that “a frontal attack” on the tribal “cosmos” would never succeed, his consequent building of a school and a hospital in Umuofia, (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 163)can perhaps be best read as Althusserian instances of the insidious working of the modern capitalist state in a colonial context. The school, another Althusserian ideological state apparatus, plays a very vital role, whether the context be Europe or colony: “It takes children from every class at infant-school age . . . then for years . . . in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’. . . it drums into them . . . a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology. . .” ("Ideology and Ideological State Apparaturses", 1970). Mr. Brown’s school, a carefully constructed ideological state apparatus, successfully manufactures students/ subjects who unquestioningly accept colonial values. Mr. Brown’s subtle brainwashing machinations construct a Christian stronghold too absolute for his arrogant successor, Rev. Smith, a fundamentalist and racist (“He saw things as black and white. And black was evil”) to shake (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 166). Mr. Brown and Rev. Smith, extreme prototypes of the “civilizing mission” introduce Igbos to the race rift, to use Foucault’s words both “insidious” and “spectacular”; placatory, self-effacing Mr. Brown penetrates the Igbo cultural marrow, while pathologically cruel, racist Rev. Smith breaks the kinship bonds.

The symbolic Igbo order collapses. “Erima” or “solidarity”, which held the clan together, weakens. As Obierika sadly says: “‘The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart’” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 160). Achebe’s portrayal of traditional tribal Igbo society is unerring and unapologetic. Unhesitant he shows certain colonial missionary intervention at times coinciding with the internal desire for reform and change. When Christian missionaries oppose the throwing of newborn twins into the Evil Forest, Nwoye is converted.

Christianity, a near-subaltern religion, with active colonial support grows at an alarming proportion to consume an entire continent. The relationship is unsurprisingly symbiotic. Christianity soon transforms into steel reinforcement ⎯ the bulwark of the colonial power structure, an effective weapon for colonial empire building. The colonial tactic is brutally simple – the grant of grotesque colonial privileges to tribes which welcome Christian missionaries, followed by the colonial machinery, and pathologically atrocious “collective punishment” for tribes which dare resist colonial inroads into the traditional world order. Perhaps at this juncture one should mention that “The Collective Punishment Ordinance of 1912” ensured that any resistance to colonial penetration would be answered with collective punishment. The honey-coated word “pacification” was used to justify atrocious genocide, each time the merciless colonial regime wiped out a resisting tribe. The hideous massacre at Abame in Things Fall Apart is fictionalized history (Achebe, 1995, pp. 124 - 126).Foucault speaks of a “veritable technological take off in the productivity of power” from seventeenth/eighteenth centuries onwards. These covert “new techniques” of power were “more efficient” and “less wasteful” than the erstwhile overt techniques based on “forced tolerances” and “costly ostentation.” Ostentation included the “spectacular” albeit “discontinuous interventions of power” the “most violent” being the “exemplary”, the “exceptional . . . punishment” (p. 61).Thus “pacification”, a devastatingly cruel experience for Black Africa, may be interpreted as a Foucauldian instance of“insidious oblique repression” of the modern state becoming “spectacular” in the colonial context.

The British colonizer deployed the notorious policy of divide and rule; the killing split, Hindu-Muslim in India and inter-tribe in Africa. A continent and a subcontinent still reel, unable to recover from the legacy of the injected venom. Ezeulu speaks of this poisonous colonial tactic: “‘Have you not heard that when two brothers fight a stranger reaps the harvest? How many white men went in the party that destroyed Abame? . . .Five’” (Achebe, Arrow of God (The African Trilogy), 1988, p. 455).

Alien British administrative machinery is thrust upon Igbo society. The colonial administration replaces the vastly tolerant traditional systems of reconciliatory justice with brutal western law courts and inhuman prisons, alien and incomprehensible to the artless tribal: “They had built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 158). The white District Commissioner remains a typical representative of the white colonial anthropologist administrator, collecting meaningless information but unable to penetrate the pulsating matrix of the non-European society he is assigned to govern. Christianity and colonialism, the symbiotic duo, re-centre those symbolically excluded. The “chaotic” Evil Forest transforms into the colonial church, the neo-converts, mostly efulefus, osus, and other abnormal, alienated and peripheral elements of Igbo society become the colonial “worthies”. Intoxicated by the heady lure of colonial power, these colonial stooges staunchly uphold a malignant Christian colonial empire: “‘Our. . .own sons have joined the ranks of the stranger . . . his religion . . . they . . . uphold his government’” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 159). The complicity of the colonized in his ownco-optation leaves almost no scope for redemption. In Adimora-Ezeigbo’s remarkable words: “It is the rat in the house that told the bush rat that there is fish in the house” (1998, p. 109).

Worthy and titled men also succumb to the lure of colonial privileges, especially medical and educational facilities, and either convert personally or allow at least one son to convert, a must for the grant of colonial favours. Ezeulu in Arrow Of God allows his son Oduche to be converted, to attend the church school and thereby acquire the white man’s knowledge: “‘I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eye there. . . if there is something there you will bring home my share. . .those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow’” (Achebe, 1988, p. 365).The traditional religion is crushed under the weight of Christianity. Such is the power of the new religion that Chike’s father though an amadi dares to marry Sarah an osu “in the name of Christianity.” Chike is taught not to eat “heathen food”, and the indignant neighbours can only mutter in impotent rage that “even an Osu was full of pride nowadays, thanks to the white man” (Achebe, "Chike's School Days", pp. 35-36).

Christianity shatters the very foundation of the tribal Igbo religion. In the colonial ethos of Arrow of God, a Christian harvest can take place and in pre-independence Nigeria of No Longer At Ease, the Christians are the privileged “ people of the Church” while the traditional Igbos are reduced to the status of “people of nothing” (Achebe, 1988, p. 221).

Colonial Christianity can perhaps be read as a subverted narrative of the Gramscian notion of “spontaneous” consent given by “the great masses” to the “general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group.” This “spontaneous consent” as Gramsci points out is "historically" caused by “the prestige . . . and consequent confidence . . . the dominant group enjoys. . .” (1992, p. 12). In the Igbo context, it seems as if the “spontaneous consent” of the traditionally excluded minority, efulefus, osusand other peripheral elements, is implicated to coerce and exclude the majority, the anti-colonial “pagans.”

The imposition of paramount chieftaincy on a politico-social world order traditionally accustomed to social consensus and democratic referendum amounts to a colonial restructuring of the Igbo hierarchy. In Adimora-Ezeigbo’sThe Last of the Strong Ones,a respected tribal elder asks: “‘How much does kosiri pay the warrant chiefs to make them take up their empty office?’” And Obiatu replies: “‘Whatever it is worth, the men consider it worthwhile enough for them to sell their fatherland.’” (1998, p. 15)

Colonialism disorients and dislocates the African psyche. Turkington speaks of “the detribalized African” belonging neither to his tribe nor to the intruders “whose actions are dictated solely by personal gain and expediency” (22-23). The “white man’s money” lures most, closely followed by the lure of administrative power positions, the hankering for the posts of “kotmas” or court messengers being a case in point: “These court messengers were greatly hated in Umuofia because they were . . . arrogant and high handed . . . They guarded the prison, which was full of men who had offended against the white man’s law” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 158). The corrupt “kotmas” amass huge money: “They did not know that fifty bags would go to the court messengers, who had increased the fine for that purpose” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1995, p. 177).

The peripheral assume center-stage in the colonial and the post (neo)-colonial arena. Conversion and acceptance of the colonial paradigms by entire clans, determined not to be left behind in the colonial race, are not unknown. This desire for a clan, later a tribe, not to be left behind, is reflected even in the nationalist politics of independent Nigeria where every tribe desires a larger piece of the national cake. Self-styled nationalist ministers like Chief Nanga tacitly encourage this feeling of tribal rivalry: “‘We shouldn’t leave everything to the highland tribes. . . our people must press for their fair share of the national cake’” (Achebe, A Man of the People, 1989, p. 12). This phantasmagorical restructuring of traditional Igbo hegemony results in multiple class/clan/tribe wars in post-independence Nigeria.

In post(neo)-colonial independent Nigeria, the neo-convert, loyal, colonial puppets, granted undue colonial sops and overtly patronized by Christian colonialism, seek to assume totalitarian power with foreign (erstwhile colonial) benediction.

Colonial Reversal of Igbo Socio-Politic Structure

Amazingly Ambitious Christianity

Enlightened(?)/Enlightening(?) Civilizing Mission

Closely followed by Colonialism/Colonial Amateur - Anthropologist - Administrators

Followed by Capitalism/Consumerism

Semantic Crisis -- Decentres the Centre/Centres the Margin

Achebe's 'Efulefus' 'Osus'/Peripheral Elements Convert to Christianity Erstwhile Ostracized become Privileged --- Dramatic/Symbolic Change of Meaning

Neo-Converts / Colonial Stooges --- Steel Bulwark for Supposedly Ordered Colonial Super/Power Structure

Become Pseudo-Democrats/Dictators in Post(Neo)-Colonial Nigeria

The “chaotic” impoverished masses inthis post(neo)colonial Nigeria form a colossal “Evil Forest” cruelly excluded by a Euro-America remote-controlled miniscule pseudo democratic/ dictatorial regime (read “cosmos”). With Euro-America tutored black monstrosity (“the joyless passion for power of many African tyrants”) positioned at the top it is colonialism revisited in all black dimensions: “The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America, and from all those virulent, misshapen freaks like Amin and Bokassa sired on Africa by Europe” (1989, pp. 46-47).To Achebe the notion of post colonialism itself is a farce: “The old white master was still in power. He had got himself a bunch of black stooges to do his dirty work for a commission”(qtd. in Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe: A Biography 137). The miniscule “cosmos”, the “Mercedes-Benz-driving, private-jet-flying, luxury-yatch-cruising oppressor”,dominates the vast “Evil Forest” of the “trudging-jigger-toed oppressed” taking pains to ensure that the divide remains unchallenged (Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 1989, p. 127).

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua.“Chike’s School Days”, Girls at War and Other Stories, London, Ibadan, Nairobi: Heinemann.1982. Print.

---. Arrow of God(The African Trilogy), London and Basingstoke: Picador in Association with Heinemann. 1988. Print.

---.No Longer at Ease (The African Trilogy), London and Basingstoke: Picador in Association with Heinemann, 1988. Print.

---.Anthills of the Savannah, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Anchor Books, Doubleday. 1989. Print.

---. A Man of the People. New York: Anchor Books, A Division of Random House. Inc.,.1989. Print.

---. Things Fall Apart, New Delhi, India: Allied Publishers Ltd. 1995. Print

Adimora- Ezeigbo, Akachi. The Last of the Strong Ones, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria: Vista Books. 1998. Print.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.Monthly Review Press. 1971. Web.

Anyanwu, U.D. “Erima: Towards a Theory of Igbo Political Tradition.” In Anyanwu,U.D. and Aguwu, J. C. U., eds.The Igbo and the Tradition of Politics,pp 31-40. The Centre for Igbo Studies, Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishing Co Ltd. 1993. Print.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh . “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?”,pp 1-26. Representations 37, Winter, 1992. Print.

Eliade, Mircea.The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature Of Religion, Trans. Willard R. Trask. San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers. 1959.Print. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe: A Biography, Oxford: James Currey, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power,” The Foucault Reader, Ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin Books. 1991. Print.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Note Books of Antonio Gramsci, Ed. & Tran.Quintin Hoare and GeoffreyNowell. New York: Smith International Publishers.1992. Print.

Turkington, Kate. Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart, London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. 1977. Print.

Interrogating the Unitary Concept of Nation: A Reading of Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah

Soumen Chatterjee

The term nation is extremely ambiguous and by this term we generally mean a community of people within a certain territory whose members are bound by a common history, culture and language and share similar beliefs and cultural practices among themselves. So, a sense of belonging is at the heart of the concept of nation. People of a community may not know each other personally, but they always feel a kind of “deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 16) with each other. Moreover, nations never existed in nature; rather nations were simply created and imaged by men. For this reason, Benedict Anderson has defined nation as “an imagined political community.” (15) Basically, nation is a psychic space and Ernest Renan has also echoed the similar view while defining nation. According to Renan –

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. (3)

In a community there may be inequalities among its members in several matters but when that community is conceived as a nation, all these inequalities are overlooked and a kind of homogeneity is imposed. Actually, unity within diversities is at the core of the concept of nation. This mythic concept of nation provided potency during the anti-colonial struggles in the twentieth century in different colonized countries. In the language of Ania Loomba, “In widely divergent contexts, the idea of the nation was a powerful vehicle for harnessing energies at all these levels” (155). The leaders, organizing their anti-colonial movements round this ideal of nation, presented the colonies as nations in chains, fettered by the shackles of the colonizers. They also showed that colonizers have segregated people from their own land that will be returned to them when independence will be dawned. Indeed, the concept of nation acted like a political vector round which disparate anti-colonial movements got a kind of shape and direction. But this vision of national integrity remained a dream as the fragility of this apparently monolithic concept of nation became more and more prominent in the postcolonial era when the awakening of regionalism destroyed the so called national unity. Several coups and civil wars that have taken place in the newly independent countries clearly demonstrate how frail this apparently unitary concept of nation is. After the independence the western educated elites came to power and instead of retrieving their native glory, they followed the beaten track of the colonizers. The westernized elite class simply “steps into the shoes of former European settlement” (Fanon 122) and for them independence is simply the transference of the unfair means from the hands of the colonizers to their own hands. These elite people, instead of doing welfare for the common people, deprived them of any advantage and themselves enjoyed life in the lap of luxury. Actually, the western educated elite people followed “the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and decadence.”(Fanon 123). The common men, along with their contributions to the anti- colonial movements, with their dreams, aims and ambitions, hardly got any exposure in these newly independent countries. To quote Ania Loomba, “The wretched of the earth have rarely been represented by the nation.”(168). Women also got hardly any fruit after the decolonization and their contribution to anti-colonial resistance was also neglected. In fact, nationalism “seems to exist primarily as a male activity with women distinctly left out or peripheralised in various national constructs.” (Davies 12). Another matter that has also hindered the path of national unity is the issue of using language. In the several newly independent countries English is given the position of the official and first language; and the indigenous languages in which common men speak are neglected. But, English in these newly independent countries has never become a nation language, i.e., a language that can express the voice of the common men. On the contrary, it always remained as the prerogative of the westernized elite class who followed the standard European model of English with European accent. Thus the use of language also problematised the solidity of nationhood. Thus the myth of nation, “instead of being the all- embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people”( Fanon 119), tuned out to be a chimera in the postcolonial era. Now in the postcolonial era literature has been used not only as a medium of nation building but also as a site for debunking the apparent monolithic nature of the myth of nation. The writers from the previously colonized countries like Amitav Ghosh, Wole Soyinka, Nuruddin Farah, Chinua Achebe, George Lamming and others have shown in their works how the myth of nation turned out to be an empty shell in the postcolonial era. Now my paper, using Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), short listed for The Booker Prize in 1987, as a case study will show how Achebe has also dismantled this myth of unity within diversities in this novel. This novel is set in the fictional state of Kangan that represents the postcolonial Nigeria. After a bloody coup now Sam has become the President of that state and he is now also acting just like a colonial ruler in that fictional state. People of Kangan hoped that this western educated man will be the true leader who will revive their lost glory and give a kind of unity to that corrupt state. But their dreams failed as Sam’s regime turned out to be a replica of the colonial period. Putting on the garb of a colonial ruler, Sam along with his western educated ministers exploited the masses terribly in the name of domestication. And the common people, who were deprived of the comforts enjoyed by the elites, suffered the same buffets in his regime which they had faced in the hands of the colonizers. Ikem described this pathetic plight of the common men in the following words:

They don’t need and can’t use the luxuries that you and I must have. They have the animal capacity to endure the pain of, shall we say, domestication (emphasis mine). The very words the white master had said in his time about the black race as a whole. Now we say them about the poor. (37)

As an autocratic ruler Sam reminds me of Mr. Slime in Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) who after becoming the ruler in the postcolonial Barbados thwarted the hopes of the anti colonial movements and just like the colonizers oppressed his own natives. Moreover, in the postcolonial Kangan there were two classes: the ruling class who led their days in the lap of luxury and the ‘poor and dispossessed’ (131) people and the rifts between them are similar to the erstwhile divisions between the colonizers and the colonized people. Thus this novel shows that mere dismissal of the white colonizers does not entail a paradigm shift in the lives of the common people. Again, the elite people who became the ministers in the cabinet of Sam had no contact with the wretched of the earth. Actually, in the postcolonial era the leaders on whom the hopes of nation building rested failed to establish “vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed” (131), “with the bruised heart” (131) of their country. As a result the situation remains same as it was during the colonial regime and national unity remains a far cry in the states like, Kangan in the postcolonial era. Moreover, being immersed in the whirlpool of power, Sam, taking the title “His Excellency”, acted like an autocrat and even took total control over the ideological state apparatuses like media, newspaper and others. He allows only that news to be published and spread where his bright image is presented. For this reason when Ikem, the editor of National Gazette, launches violent editorial crusades against Sam’s military government, he is described as an anarchist and dispersed from his post. But Ikem is not cowed down by this rather he condemns the government at the university of Bassa while delivering a lecture to the students. As a result of this, he is arrested and shot dead in the police custody. In this way, Sam strokes an atmosphere of fear and paranoia in Kangan. Actually, through the character of Sam, Achebe has presented a typical power crazy politician of the postcolonial period who severs all his links from the masses and exploits them brutally. In this context the observation of Nadine Gordimer is worth quoting:

In the person of Sam, President of Kangan, Mr. Achebe sagely illustrates that those whom the gods would make mad with power to destroy us… (The New York Times)

Indeed, he acted just like M. N. Nanga of Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966) who also misused his political power and violated his duties towards the common men. So, “Like A Man of the People, the novel Anthills of the Savannah is an anatomy of the ugliness of the absolute power and its destructive effect on the communal will…” (Okpewho 24) A close reading of this novel further evinces that Kangan was a postcolonial state only politically, but economically and culturally it still depended on the erstwhile colonial centres like Britain and America. The politicians and the rulers of the newly independent countries were controlled by the former colonial centres and they, relegating their own native culture and tradition, praised the culture of these colonial centres. Thus acting just like the agents of these erstwhile imperial centres, they blocked the way of national unity in their own countries. Here also I find that Sam eulogized and followed the Euro-American culture and his government depended on economic ground on America. He proudly tells all that Beatrice has finished her education from London, not from any local university:

She is a Senior Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Finance- the only person in service, male or female, with a first class honours in English. And not from a local university but from Queen Mary College, University of London. (my italics) (68)

Such a type of leader who depends on the former colonial centres for financial support and unhesitatingly imitates and glories their culture without taking any effort of glorifying and retrieving his native culture can never integrate and solidify his country into a whole. The novel, just like Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), further demonstrates how the conflicts between different regions within a state stand as a strong block in the way of “deep, horizontal comradeship”(Anderson 16). Here when Sam in a referendum wanted to establish himself as the president for life, out of the four provinces of Kangan, the people of Abazon opposed Sam’s proposal while other three supported Sam. For their hostile stand against him, Sam punishes the Abazonians by reducing the water supply in that province:

…all the water bore-holes they are digging in your area to be closed so that you will know what it means to offend the sun. (127)

Thus as a ruler, Sam neglected his basic duty of supplying water to his own natives. Ikem reminded Christopher Oriko, who was at the top of the ministry of information in Sam’s military government, of the government’s violation of its basic duties when he says,

From the people and their basic needs of water which is free from Guinea worm, of simple shelter and food. That is what you are retreating from. You retreat up the hill and commune with your cronies and forget the very people who legitimize your authority.(67)

Even after two years when the Abazonians visit Bassa with a goodwill delegation to meet Sam and amend their previous mistake of opposing him, Sam shuts himself within his Presidential Palace and refuses to meet the delegates. Instead of attending to the voice of the Abazonians, Sam arrests the six leaders from Abazon at the Bassa Maximum Security Prison. In this way acting like a colonial dictator, Sam perpetuates the social malaise and turns the hope of national unity and political renaissance in the postcolonial Kangan a mere illusion. Thus, Achebe in Anthills of the Savannah (1987) has presented the “societal disorganization” (Farah 13) within a postcolonial state and hinted at the fact that the politicians are solely responsible for this chaotic situation. Booker has harped on the same point while observing on Anthills of the Savannah (1987) in his The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia, The main issues concern the manner in which the nation is run, the ways in which it affects the majority of the people (including those in power), and the ways in which statesmen, leaders and politicians are either complicit with or resistant to the undemocratic administration of the nation.(19) In fact, Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), like Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1972), smacks of how the hopes of anti colonial movements are always betrayed by the power mongering elite class in the postcolonial era. Anthills of the Savannah (1987) further shows how nation that was conceived to be an imagined political community was “profoundly gendered” (Loomba 180). Here Beatrice is found to be a continuous victim of male chauvinism. When she was invited to a dinner party by Sam, she guessed that perhaps Sam had some ulterior motives behind this invitation. Her lover Chris also hinted at the hidden sexual motive of Sam when he told Beatrice to keep “all her options open” (67) while dealing with Sam. Again the postcolonial Kangan like other independent countries of the world had no plan for including women in the man stream active life. Here Ikem tells Beatrice: I can’t tell you what the new role for Women will be. I don’t know. I should never have presumed to know. (90) In fact, in Kangan women were marginalized and peripherised; besides there were inequalities even between women regarding their economic and social position which determined their relationship with each other. Here Beatrice was a western educated woman of strong economic base while her maid Agatha was ignorant and poor. These differences complicated their own relations and thereby, the hope of national unity appeared like a mirage in Kangan. This novel also reveals how national unity in Kangan can not be forged by a common language. Here the upper class western educated people speak in Standard English, while the ignorant natives like Elewa and Agatha speak in Pidgin English. Here numerous indigenous words, uttered by the common people of Kangan, float on the tide of the basic narrative in English. Moreover, the use of different accents, on the part of the elites and common men, clearly smacks of their different world views, thereby hampering the path of national integrity. In this context the observation of John Mcleod is note worthy: These differences of language reveal the difficulties concerning imagining communities through a shared language… (133)

Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) thus unfolds before us the trajectory of the postcolonial Kangan where people, being fragmented diversely, live in absolute chaos; and in this way, he has vehemently interrogated the apparent monolithic nature of the concept of nation. But his vision is not altogether nihilistic, rather in the final chapter Achebe has envisioned for Kangan of a bright future when women, marginalized common men and good willed intellectuals will play a pivotal role in forging national integrity.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of the Savannah. New York: Arnold Books, Doubleday, 1989. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.Print. Booker,M.Keith, ed. The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press,2003.Print. Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994.Print. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth(1961). trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books, 1st Pub 1967.Rpt 2001. Print. Farah, Nuruddin. “Why I write.” Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah. Ed. Derek Wright. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2002. Print. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalisms. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006(1983) Gordimer, Nadine. A Tyranny of Clowns. The New York Times,21st Feb 1988 website:http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/21/books/a-tyranny-of- clowns.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm, browsed on 06/06/2013 Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism London and New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2005. Print. Mcleod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Print. Okpewho, Isidore, ed. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print. Renan,Ernest. What is Nation? Website: http://wvvw.tamilnation.org/selfdetermination/nation/renan.htm , browsed on 06/06/2013

“But for me there is no other choice”: Achebe’s Stand on the Use of the Colonizer’s Tongue

Shovan Maity

“Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.” Chinua Achebe One of the functions of language is the signaling of whom we are and where we belong to. The greatest strength of Achebe’s use of language appertains to this notion of identity. As Trask points out, "language is very powerful means of declaring and maintaining one’s identity”(85). To Achebe, this is very important and his language is deliberately galvanized to achieve what linguists have called “convert prestige”. According to Achebe – The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience (Achebe 62). Achebe knows it very well that in Africa, English is no more than a vehicle of African cultures as well as of English. He contends that if English is to be an effective mode of communication in Africa, it is essential that it adapts itself so as to be able to express concepts that do not exist in English culture. This scenario has variously been interpreted as a process of ‘nativization’, ‘domestication’ and ‘decolonization’ of English, in which at the practical level, Achebe is a fore-runner. With this background he maintains African identity in his writings by the language of the colonizer.

Achebe and Ngugi – on the question of the use of the English Language

Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thinog’o are great examples of African writers who take different sides on the issue of the English language and post colonial writings of African culture. Ngugi is famous for advocating outright rejection of the colonialist language, believing that this rejection is central to the anti-imperialist struggle. Ngugi declares that – Africa does not exist in those languages. By removing their native language from their education they are separated from their history which is replaced by European history in European languages. (Decolonizing the Mind) He is absolutely opposed to the idea that African authors would accept the translation of African ideas, philosophy and folklore into English or French as their mission. Even worse to him is that they seem to be utterly worried about creating ‘good’ English or ‘good’ French, instead of putting their concern and energy into building an African literature: he asserts-“we have languages but our keepers of memory(writers & scholars) feel that they cannot store knowledge and emotions in African languages” (Decolonizing the Mind). Ngugi refuses to write any of his books in English after Decolonizing the Mind and wants people to learn the native language because that is the only way African culture can really be learned. On the other hand, Achebe justifiably believes that this rejection and self-censorship are not necessary. He has chosen the idea of subversion rather than rejection. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Achebe’s writing “displays a process by which the language is made to bear the weight and texture of a different experience. In doing so it becomes another language” (284). That is, what is needed is to contextualize and Africanize the use of English. He considers it further unnecessary for an African to speak like a European. For, when he was asked if an African could ever learn to use English as an English man, his response was “I should say. I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to do so” (Achebe). It is reminiscent of the words of Raja Rao who said in his Foreword to Kanthapura – We cannot write like the English. We should not. Thus, Achebe has taken a considerably different stance from Ngugi. Instead of believing that African authors put their diligence and their output into a foreign language, he asserts ‘that the English language will be able to carry the weight of (his) African experience’(286), but that it would “have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings” (286). What he sees is ‘a new voice coming out of Africa, speaking of African experience in a worldwide language’ (286); but he also makes very clear that “the price a world language must prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use” (61). Gabriel Okara is with Achebe, believing that “languages grow like living things, add(ing) life and vigour to the (English) language while reflecting their own respective cultures” (1130). Achebe himself once said, “Language is a weapon and we use it, and there’s no point in fighting it” (Gallagher 260). These are the words that Achebe lives by. He uses the ‘weapon’ of language to convince “outsiders” that Nigeria is a nation with great potential. One prominent method that Achebe uses for convincing Europeans of Nigeria’s potential was writing his novels in English and then using the African language within passages. He uses his English knowledge for infiltrating the ranks of the enemy and destroying him from within. In The African Trilogy, Achebe uses the language of the colonizer to convey the Igbo experience of that colonization. The idioms, proverbs and images employed in these books invoke his Eastern Nigerian culture, forcing the reader to accept on Achebe’s (linguistic) terms, the story he was able to tell. The issue of language is also raised directly throughout The African Trilogy. There is a telling exchange between Obierika and Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart:

Does the white man understand our customs about land? How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? (145)

Achebe is at pains to point out the way in which language can act as a barrier between two cultures. Around thirty years later, in Arrow of God, language is still a barrier to communication, yet the Igbo have been forced to realise that the acquisition of English is crucial to understanding the white man and his religion. Ezeulu sends his son to Oduche to be educated at the missionaries’ school, reminding him of the importance of “knowing what the white man knew. If anyone asks you why you should be sent to learn these new things, tell him that a man must dance the dance prevalent in his time” (514). The outcome of this kind of thinking is seen in the various attitudes towards language in No Longer at Ease. Those who have command over the English language are admired. When Obi is asked to speak at the Umuofia Progressive Union, his speech is delivered through Igbo and also through English, but his audience “still seemed highly impressed. They liked good Ibo, but they also admired English” (240). Obi’s feelings towards the language of the colonizer are not so clear. While in England he pursues a degree in English, yet: He spoke Ibo whenever he had the least opportunity of doing so... But when he had to speak in English with a Nigerian student from another tribe he lowered his voice. It was humiliating to have to speak to one’s countrymen in a foreign language, especially in the presence of the proud owners of that language. They would naturally assume that one had no language of one’s own. (214).

According to D. Carroll “Chinua Achebe was the first to truly develop an African style of writing” (123helpme.com). This statement has proved true in each of Achebe’s novels. He has even been called the father of African novels. He used this tool to achieve something that he wanted to do since his college days, and show the European that they are wrong. Achebe once said, one big message of the many that I try to put across is that Africa was not a vacuum before the coming of the white World. He did exactly this by drawing readers with the familiarities of the English language and trading folk tales and then showing them his own culture by writing with an advanced African vocabulary and knowledge of Igbo proverbs. It not only changed his career but it also changed the careers of many writers to come. Thus Achebe continues the struggle to re-establish or reconstruct the African history after long years of its distortions and destruction by foreigners. Achebe is outstanding in the use of figurative expressions that have African linguistic flavor. For example , in the extract below Achebe shows the African writer’s prowess in using the English in a more complex way to tell the African story:

The drum beat and the flute sang and the spectator held the breath. Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water. Every nerve and every muscle stood out on their arms , on their thighs, and one almost heard them stretching to breaking point. In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat (3).

Achebe’s ability to use the English Language in a unique African way is demonstrated in his narrative technique, that is, a telling which vividly shows the even , what Gerald Genette calls “mimesis”. Achebe combines so many figurative expressions in this extract to imprint the event on the mind of reader. The intensity of the wrestling is fore grounded through an vent and the reader is forced to hear not only the background music but the sound from the stretching of the combatants’ muscles through the use of hyperbole. This is how resourceful the African writer has become in his unique manipulation of the English Language. It is significant to observe the nature (animal) imagery in the simile,” ….but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water”(3).

Achebe writes in English not because he wants to write to the world in a world language or to write white people in a world language. He wants to write to the Nigerians and can only do that in English. If he wrote in his native Igbo he would only be writing to part of Nigeria. Achebe understands that the British drew the borders of Nigeria, making English necessary as a side effect. But he also knows that these are borders for which millions of his fellow Igbos died in the civil war of the 1960s. Nigeria is a land divided by three large languages and 20 little ones. English is the only language that can hold it all together without favouring any part of the country. Achebe here recognizes English’s function as an effective link-language in the rich linguistic economy of Nigeria. And Achebe is aware of the practical implications of such a decision admitting-

You cannot administer Nigeria as it is for one single day without English (Writer’s Talk: Chinua Achebe interviewed by Nuruddin Farrah).

It is notable that while Achebe imbues English with the capability of sustaining and nourishing a truly national language of literature, a language of “mutual communication” between African writers and the reading populace at large, Achebe is also careful not to attribute to English any inherent ideological value. While he acknowledges its colonial, imperial past, Achebe asserts that at his present historical moment, English has primarily utilitarian purposes; it is a useful “world language.” Thus Achebe acknowledges the imperial implications of the use of the English Language, he cannot ignore its function and status as a national Nigerian—and largely pan-African—lingua franca:

[…] there are scores of languages I would want to learn if it were possible. Where am I to find the time to learn the half-a-dozen or so Nigerian languages each of which can sustain a literature? […]. These languages will just have to develop as tributaries to feed the one central language enjoying nation-wide currency. Today, for good or ill, that language is English. Tomorrow it may be something else, although I very much doubt it (28).

In a conference on Commonwealth Literature held in Leeds in September of 1964, just after the initial publication of Achebe’s famous article, which first appeared in Spear: Nigeria’s National Magazine, and Moderna Sprak in 1964, before its 1965 publication in the journal “Commonwealth Literature :Unity and Diversity in a common culture” J.O. Ekpenyong enthusiastically—arguably even more so than Achebe—opined that “the introduction of English as the Official language is one of the greatest benefits of colonialism in Nigeria” (144). Ekpenyong explicitly cites Achebe’s recently published article and argues that to level-headed people, English does not seem to have a stiff competition with any indigenous language for election into chair of official language, for strictly speaking, it is not a foreign language in Nigeria. By the peculiar circumstance of her birth, Nigeria was born into English as the mother tongue (149). Chinua Achebe is bold enough to state that there is no use of returning to a remote past. In order to successfully find a sense of identity, it is necessary to recognize the infiltration of foreign culture. Zimbabwe is in fact a new hybrid culture and the use of the English language is evidence. But it is not traitorous to tradition and culture rather writing in English is a way of giving new life and form to them. In fact, writing in English does not only encourage interaction between African writers from different backgrounds, but also provides an opening for the promotion of African literature worldwide. Achebe does not dismiss African languages as inferior means of storytelling , but simply resigns to “the reality of present-day Africa” that nations created by the British continue to hold English as a national Language. This is not to say, he insists, “that the peoples comprising these nations were invented by the British”(77). Quite the contrary, in fact, as now many African writers like Achebe are reinventing the language of their oppressors to tell their own stories and retell their collective histories . “Let us give the devil his due,”(77) Achebe remarks , examining both sides of the post-colonial condition. If we imagine the English language as representing western culture, post-colonial literature is an example of a successful cultural transplant. Post-colonial literature written in English should only serve to strengthen a sense of identity by proving that African values and ideas can survive the translation. The key is to make the language one's own, to incorporate rather than being incorporated. That’s why Achebe has no choice but to write in English.

Works Cited Primary Sources Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann.1958. Print. …………………. No Longer At Ease. London, Heinemann. 1960.Print. ……………….. Arrow of God. New York : Anchor Books, 1964.Print.

Secondary Sources Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer And The English Language”. Morning Yet On Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975. Print. Achebe, Chinua .“Hopes and Impediments” Selected Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.Print. African Literature Association: ALA Bulletin vol-31 Philadelphia- 2006. Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin. The Post Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge , 1995. Print. Carroll, D. < http://www.123helpme.com/achebe_novels_and_nigeria.html.> web. 21.05.2013 Ekpenyong,J.O. “The Use Of English in Nigeria”. Commonwealth Literature. Ed.John Press.London:Heinemann,1965.Print. Gallagher, Susan. “Linguistic Power: Encounter With Chinua Achebe” .The Christian Century. New York State Writers Institute, 1997. Print. Hunjo, H.S .Pragmatic Nativization in New Nigerian English. Ilorin :Haytee Books , 2002.Print. Lindsfors . B. Chinua Achebe’s Proverbs. Nigeria:Nigerian Field ,1970.Print. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. “The Language of African Literature”. Decolonizing The Mind: Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986. Print. Ojaide, T . Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity. African Studies Review, 1992.Print. Trask , R. L. Language: The Basics. London and New York : Routledge, 1995. Print.

Narrativising the Marginalized: From Subaltern Studies to Dalit Writing

Sankar Prasad Singha

The term ‘subaltern’ literally means ‘of inferior rank’. It was Antonio Gramsci who adopted the term to refer to those groups of people in a society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes. These people who are denied access to state power and privileges may include peasants, workers and other oppressed sections. In fact, the Italian term subalterno which Gramsci used translates roughly as ‘subordinate’ or ‘dependent’. Gramsci used the term to question the received Marxist emphasis on the urban proletariat. The peasantry was dynamic and numerically predominant in Gramsci’s Italy and he was interested in bringing them into alliance with revolutionary forces in the city i.e. the proletariat. The semantic scope of the term has thus been extended to include all sections of the society that have been exploited and pushed out of the hegemonic power structure. According to Ranajit Guha, ‘subalternity ’as a category is to be extended to the general attribute of subordination in South Asian Society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way.”(Preface, Subaltern studies I, OUP, 1982, Vii-Viii)

Subaltern studies emerged as an innovative project of historiography out of a sense of disillusionment with the practice of history wiring in general and Indian historiography in particular. The group formed by Ranajit Guha includes such well-known names as Shahid Amin, Dipesh Chakraborty, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Paney and others. She project aimed at promoting discussion and awareness of ‘subaltern’ themes in South Asian studies. So far, eleven volumes of essays on history, politics, economics, sociology and law entitled Subaltern Studies: Writing on South Asian History and Society have been published by the group along with some valuable mono graphs and numerous journal articles. The goal of the groups is based on the assumption that Indian historiography had all along been dominated by elitism – colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism. Such a method of history writing is designed for big events and institutions and consequently “tends to ignore the small drama and fine detail of social existence especially at its lower depths” (Subaltern Studies V 138). Rejecting this unhistorical historiography subaltern scholars seek to cobble together gripping narratives of marginalized communities, races, groups and gender written with local sources and from their perspective. In the inaugural essay of the first volume, “On some Aspects of the Historiography of colonial India” Ranajit Guha very clearly states that “Parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes”. They want to draw attention to this ‘small voice of history’ thereby writing a corrective to both colonialist and bourgeois-nationalist historiography.

With its focus on South Asian history and society Subaltern studies thus grew as a form the somewhat provincial “area studies” enterprise. But with the publication in 1988 of the volume Selected Subaltern Studies edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, with a ‘Foreword’ by Edward Said it transformed itself into major theoretical framework to be used across disciplines. This volume was published and distributed by Oxford University Press, New York rather than by the Indian branches of the OUP and thus gained international attention and recognition. Gradually it was incorporated into the fast growing corpus of writing that came under the rubric of postcolonial theory. In her essay “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” Spivak makes it plain that literary theorist should aim at reading texts for suppressed or elided human various – to examine the myriad contours of oppression beyond the colonizer–colonized binary. The narrativizations of history have been structured and textured from the colonizer’s perspective and this has to change. History has to be re-written. A good example of a new writing of history is Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Sea is H”. In this poem Walcott recalls the Middle Passage (the slave voyages across the Atlantic) and recasts the experience of the slave in terms of Biblical Parallels. He opens the poem with a series of questions –

“Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, In that grey vault. The sea ……………………………. The sea is History.

The ‘grey vault’ is a colonial narrative that has captured; silenced and limited the story of the black race. The history is to be retrieved and reconstructed. Such reconstructions call into question the dominant (imperial) history and retrieve the buried (Oral) in order to contest the dominant. This is done mainly through literary and rhetorical strategies that reverse the colonial stereotypes or provide subversive interpretations of canonical texts.

The subaltern became a major presence in cultural Theory and postcolonial studies through Spivak’s negative answer to the famous question she posted in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Spivak argues that the subaltern is a divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other. Therefore Spivak comes to the conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak and representation has not withered away. One cannot construct a category of the subaltern that has a clear and unproblematic effective voice. She goes on to elaborate the problems of the category of the subaltern by looking at the situation of gendered subjects. If in the context of colonial production the subaltern ( the colonized) is denied a history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is the Indian context is probably more deeply in shadow. The retrieval of women’s literary and other texts from margins and exclusions of the canon has resulted in the increasing awareness of women’s role in the construction of social, communal, national identities. They have been subjected to torture and oppression not merely at the hands of colonial agents but also by patriarchy in native cultures. In fact, women’s texts and narratives have always been relegated to a less privileged space in the nationalist discourse because gender has been intrinsic to national imagination. The problem is all the more deep-rooted with regard to women who belong to lower class, lower-caste or tribal community. Writings by such women after present a challenge even to feminists because they resist homogenizing. Memories and diaries – personal accounts of dalit women document the sufferings of and atrocities on the women at the lowest strata of the society. Bama’s Karukku (English translation, 2000) records the lived experience of poverty, violence, rejection and suffering. It reveals the structure of the traumatic experience while also gesturing at the ways in which the victim has resisted and overcome such events.

Dalit writing which came to prominence in the 1970s with the emergence of the revolutionary Dalit Panther Movement may be viewed as a form of subaltern literature. The subalternity is caused in this case not by race, class or gender but by the consideration of caste. The term ‘dalit’ comes from the Sanskrit ‘dalan’ which means to grind. So literally it suggests that which has been ground down; it also means ‘of the soil’ in Marathi. The Origin and use of the term ‘dalit’ has been traced back to the nineteenth century Marathi social reformer, Mahatma Jotirao Phule. Its influence, however, spread thorough the works of the twentieth century thinker and leader B.R. Ambedkar who with his followers turned to Buddism as an alternative to the discrimination suffered by dalits under the caste system. In recent years the scope of the term has been enlarged to include tribals, landless farm laborers, so called ‘Criminal tribes’ and the exploited. But the more militant section of the dalit writers and thinkers would use the oppressed caste groups, those who have been subjected to caste atrocities. They hold that all earlier attempts to represent the sufferings of the dalits by non-dalit writers have been woefully inadequate because a non-dalit can never fully realize the kind of dehumanization with the stigma of untouchably attached to them. What is all the more disturbing is that the Brahminical ‘Varma’ system always tried to justify this social ostracism in terms of the idea of KARMA. In other words, the dalits were made to believe that their present suffering due to presumed sins committed in a previous birth. Thus a kind of scriptural sanction is invoked by the Hindu law- givers which made the dalits accept their fate without a murmur. The consequence was a cultural silence that destroyed their creative geniuses. Many dalit texts from mythic histories to colonial and post-Indepence India foreground the of caste- oppression resulting in cultural silence. Thus the play Shambook Vadh (2004) highlights the killing of a Shudra ascetic, Shambook by the icon of Hinduism, Rama. Shambook was killed because he opposed the Varna System and learnt something which was forbidden for a Shudra. The play illustrates Ambedkar’s argument that social reform remained the privilege of the upper caste Hinds and his conviction that “political reform cannot with impunity take precedence over social reform” (Annihilation of Caste : An Undelivered Speeh, ed. Mulk Raj Anand, New Delhi: Annold, 1990:38). Again, the following re-reading of the Ekalavya myth explains how dalit writers intend to rewrite what the Hindu myths have done otherwise:

If you had kept your thumb History would have happened Some hoe differently But… you gave your thumb and history also

(qtd. in Gail Omvedt, Dalit Visions: The Anti-Caste Movement and the construction of an India Identity, New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1998).

Dalit literature reveals the collective unconscious of this oppressed community and is seen in the main a protest against the establishment, as a commitment to new values aiming at a new social order. Sharan Kumar Limbale defines dalit literature as something “which artistically portrays the sorrows, tribulations, slavery, degradation endured by dalits”. (Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, Hyderabad, Longman, 2004:30). Dalit literature may be shown to have intellectual links with Black American literature, Minority literature and Holo caust literature. There is a common ground that all of these share in so far as the conditions that gave rise to such literatures are concerned. All of these deal with experiences of subjugation, exploitation, discrimination and suffering and as such employ a language and style that lack prestige and authority. Thus when Dalit literature describes the dalits’ experiences of suffering and exploitation by the caste Hindu, Black literature reveals the experiences of exploitation of the Blacks by the whites and the Holocaust literature lays bare the horrible experiences of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps. All these may be viewed as literatures of subversion that intend to dismantle the hegemonic and discriminatory Brahminical, white and Nazi world order.

Dalit literature has acquired over the years a pan-Indian identity and existence. Dalit writers first assert their identity in Maharasthra, Gujrat, Punjab and Karnataka. The movement for the establishment of a dalit literary identity has now taken roots in other provinces with the Hindi- speaking dalit authors at the centre of the movement. Prominent names among the Marathi dalit wirters are Daya Pawar, Namdeo Dhasal, Arjun Dangle, Sudhakar Gaikwad, Lakshman Mane, Lakshman Gaikwad etc. The wave of Marathi dalit literature influenced the dalit writers in Gujrat. The tradition of Gujrati dalit literature is nourished by many leading writers like Neerab Patel, Yashwant Baghela, Jayanta Salnaki and others. Some of the most powerful Kannada Dalit literary figures are Siddha Lingaiya, K. Ramaiya, H.Gobindaiya, Gangaram Chandal and Geeta Devi. In Punjab also we have such notable dalit writers like prem Gorkhy, Bhura Singh Kaler, Lal Singh Dil and Gurdas Ram Alam. Since the late 1970s dalit history expression has shown a dramtic increase throughout the Hindi heartland. Within the larger trend of literary assertion, autobiography in particular has been one of the most important genres since many dalit writers have launched their literary careers by narrating their life-story. The most notable dalit authobiography in Hindi is Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan (1997). In Bengali the most remarkable dalit autobiography is Manoranjon Byapari’s Itibritte Chandaljiban (2012).

Despite the range and variety of dalit writing in India, the contours of dalit literature have not yet been clearly marked out and the aesthetic parameters not suffiently well- defined.

Premchand’s ‘The Shroud’: A ‘Progressive’ Short Story

Amit Kumar Raul

In the Presidential address to the inaugural conference of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA), held in Lucknow on 9th and 10th April, 1936, Premchand, the doyen of Hindi and Urdu literature, argued:

It is the duty of our intellectuals to serve society in every possible way. They should acquire not only the art of writing well, but should also acquaint themselves with the general condition of society . . . if we place our services at the disposal of the masses of this country, we shall have done our duty. The happiness we get from serving humanity will be our reward. We stand or fall with society and as true artists we should disdain self advancement and cheap exhibitionism. (Premchand “The Nature and Purpose of Literature”, 37)

He also countered the writers who worshipped neutrality in art and championed ‘art for art’s sake’ by boldly declaring that if literature “does not arouse in us a critical spirit . . . [and] does not make us face the grim realities of life in a spirit of determination, [it] has no use for us today. It cannot even be termed as literature” (35). In his address Premchand defined ‘progressive [literature]’ in the following words:

We shall consider only that literature as progressive which is thoughtful, which awakens in us the spirit of freedom and of beauty; which is creative, which is luminous with the realities of life, which moves us, which leads us to action and which does not act on us as a narcotic, which does not produce in us a state of intellectual somnolence – for if we continue to remain in that state, it can only mean that we are no longer alive. (36)

The President’s speech rhymed excellently with the agenda of AIPWA regarding the ‘progressive’ nature of literature and the aim of the association as expressed in its manifesto:

The purpose of our association is to liberate literature and the other fine arts from the fatal grasp of the conservatives and, making them the interpreter of the suffering and happiness and the struggle of the people, to show the path of the bright future towards which mankind is striving. We claim to be the heirs of the highest values of Indian culture. For this reason we will expose the traces of reaction in whatever sphere of life in which we find them . . . We want a new literature of India to make as its subject the basic problems of our life. These problems are those of hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery. (Ahmed 184)

This questioning of the fundamental connection between art and life / society is not new. In fact, the intellectual debates and discussions on socio-political concern of art have a very long and rich past. What is striking in the Presidential address of Premchand and the manifesto of AIPWA is their significant dawning of the largest cultural movement in India at the most critical juncture of her history when, to earn much-awaited liberation from vastly ramified oppressive structures, various denominations of India negotiated hard and fought amongst themselves at the social plane while some sections under the leadership of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress tried to display nationalist resistance against the British imperialist force at the political level. This literature-society nexus as foregrounded by Premchand has, in fact, an added signification in the context of any colonized location like India because literature has the immense potential to play the pivotal role in examining traditional society, in interrogating imperialism and colonialism and in presenting social changes to forge national consciousness much needed for the anti-colonial nationalist struggles and for the true regeneration of people. But this formal declaration of Premchand at the platform of AIPWA has to be considered as his summing up of his own literary creed that gave a new direction to his own literary activity at the very outset and was persistently present throughout his career. This ‘progressive’ spirit of his gave prominent place in his writings to the plight of the marginalized and social, political, religious and economic evils that he experienced as the greatest impediments against the true emancipation of mankind. Interestingly, Premchand’s brief life span, i. e. 1880-1936, covered the most turbulent period of colonial India and he recorded faithfully the era in his large body of narratives. A true patriot, he was greatly influenced by Arya Samaj and Swami Dayananda, Vivekananda and Gandhi. The latter’s personality and particularly his ideas of non-violence and Satyagraha thrilled Premchand so much that he wrote the novels like Premashrma (1922), Rangbhumi (1924), Karambhumi (1932) out of his fascination for Gandhism to disseminate the ideals of social reform to the corners of Indian nation to enhance solidarity by severing the shackles of oppression. But soon Premchand was disillusioned with the ideology and conservatism of the Congress and his faith in Gandhi shattered completely due to Gandhi’s political response to the harsh realities of situations in 1930s. The severe suffering and enormous exploitation of the peasants and labourers at the hands of landlords, capitalists and bureaucrats and the former’s movement parallel to the latter’s nationalist movement created in Premchand an alternative vision of India. His life-long leaning towards the downtrodden, his patriotic zeal, his crusade against social injustice and his plea for root-and-branch transformation of society as found in his writings now began to be orientated to a new direction and took socialistic turn that rebelled against the profit-mongering and opportunistic capitalist class who were in liaison with the British to trickily hijack the nation after independence for fulfilling their narrow interests, and earnestly desired for the rise of the exploitation-free nation of the peasants and labourers. In September, 1936, only one month before his death, Premchand wrote a long essay entitled ‘Capitalist Culture’ (Mahajani Sabhyata) where he categorically pronounced this:

In this capitalistic culture money is the sole motive of all activity. A country is ruled, so that capitalists and bankers may derive the largest profits. From this point of view the world is today governed by bankers. Human society has been split into two parts. The larger portion consists of those who toil and labour and a very small part comprises those who have enslaved a large mass by their power and influence. They have no sympathy, no pity for this large section. It exists only to sweat for its masters, to shed blood for them and then one day to depart from this life quietly . . . (Gupta 59)

This shift in Premchand’s attitude to colonial India’s maladies and politics compelled him to hail wholeheartedly the establishment of AIPWA by some Indian writers somewhat enthused by the worldwide impact of Marxism and socialism in 1930s. The selection of Premchand as the President of the inaugural conference was not prompted by his all-India popularity as a writer but was natural because of his already venting forth through his art the ‘progressive’ elements that the new generation of writers wanted to deal with. One may refer to his works after 1932, particularly his novel Godan (1936) and unfinished novel Mangalsutra (1936), that show his ‘progressive’ disposition and bitter criticism of the capitalist profit motive in the place of his predilection for the Gandhian idealism and optimism in 1920s. Though Premchand could not formally become a ‘progressive’ writer like Mulk Raj Anand, Yashpal, Manmathnath Gupt and others on account of his untimely death, the stark and unrelieved picture of peasants’ misery and sufferings found particularly in the writings of the last phase of his literary career bears testimony to the ‘progressive’ ( i.e. depicting “realities of life, which moves us”) nature of literature as defined by Premchand himself in the Presidential address. Premchand’s life-long concern as a writer for the marginalized, his patriotism, his vision of free India, his change in political ideology, his unusual enthusiasm for the AIPWA a few months before his death, etc. require a full-length study for rendering working justice to the prolific writer. In this paper, however, a modest assessment of Premchand’s arguably most popular and powerful short story ‘The Shroud’ (1936) (Kafan) would be attempted in the light of the ‘progressive’ elements in literature as propagated by the AIPWA and endorsed by Premchand himself. When Premchand’s ‘The Shroud’ was first published in the Jamia, it created a great sensation. What arrests the readers’ sensibility is the beginning of the story. The extremely poor Ghisu and his son Madhav sit idly beside dead fire at the door of the hut in a winter night while the son’s young wife, Budhia, gives out from inside the hut shocking, heartrending screams of labour pain. What is astonishing about them is their nature and behaviour. The husband Madhav says irritatingly, ‘“If she has to die, why doesn’t she get it over and done with? What can I do by looking at her?”’(Premchand ‘The Shroud’, 45) Madhav does not go in to look at her as it may create opportunity for the father to gobble up most of the roasted potatoes. This family of chamars (cobblers) is notorious for exhibiting absolute idleness. Plenty of works are there in the village but they go jobless for being the devout practitioners of idleness. Hence, they live by pilfering potatoes and peas from other’s field. Their laziness is increased particularly after the coming of the hardworking wife Budhia to their family. If they do not get anything to eat, they steal sugarcane and munch them at night. The young wife is terribly tossing, wailing and groaning in the throes of childbirth while the father and the son are busy in roasting potatoes and eating them. When the potatoes are finished, they sleep near the fire like two coiled up pythons. A reader may feel the opening of the short story as very repulsive and unnatural. To Premchand, it is obviously abhorrent but not unnatural because their loss of all finer human sentiments is the effect of some causes of serious concern prevailing in our society:

In a society where the lot of those who toiled day and night was little better than Ghisu’s and where those who knew how to exploit the peasants were much richer, it is no wonder that Ghisu had such an outlook. One could say that Ghisu was much more intelligent than the peasants, and instead of joining the hordes of mindless toilers, he had gone over to the disreputable band of idle gossips. (47)

Premchand’s scrutiny of the traditional society finds clearest expression here. He speaks of two types of people living in the village: one, the hardworking peasants, and the other, the cunning exploiters. Madhav and Ghisu belong to the first group of people who shed sweat from their brow day in and day out and yet their economic condition remains forever miserable. Madhav and Ghisu, though oppressed, are a bit different from the peasants. They slyly neglect their duties and indulge in idle talk with others. The psychological degeneration of the father and the son, according to the writer, is due to the class of opportunist people in our society who go on inventing exploitative mechanisms and implementing them ruthlessly upon the weaker sections of society to deepen the existing fissures. The writer admits that Madhav and Ghisu are wiser than the peasants as they are able to resist the exploitation of the upper class by meanly escaping from the back-breaking labour, if not heroically fighting against it. But the erosion of human values due to extreme hunger and poverty is unmistakable. And the picture of their dehumanization due to excessive exploitation has been developed in the latter part of the story to such an extent that the readers feel disturbed by the darkness of Indian nation at the threshold of political sovereignty. In the second part of the story, the meeting of Madhav and Ghisu with the Zamindar is narrated. Budhia dies and the child in her womb also. In the morning the father and the son begin the formality of wailing loudly for the deceased but for little time only as they have to beg money for purchasing a shroud and firewood for cremating the dead body. For this purpose, they hurry to the Zamindar and show their excessive bereavement. The Zamindar simply detests the very sight of them and asks, ‘“What the hell is the matter with you? Why are you crying? I hardly ever see you around these days; it seems you don’t want to live in the village anymore.”’(49) After seeing their art of fawning, the Zamindar throws two rupees at them just to cast off the burden of their presence immediately. Ghisu is shrewd enough in manipulating the Zamindar’s favour for extracting money from the village moneylenders and shopkeepers. Though the latter contribute miserly, within an hour the collection raises to rupees five along with some food grain and firewood. Premchand here shows the absolute alienation of the low-caste destitute form the upper class and caste in Indian nation. Apparently the latter seem to be kind-hearted as a working fund has been raised thanks to their generosity for the cremation of the dead body of an untouchable wife. But it is more a result of the ploy of Ghisu and his son than of the upper castes’ benevolence. In the beginning we came across the attitude of Ghisu and Madhav towards the exploitation of the upper class and here Premchand has given the first impulsive reaction of the Zamindar, though not articulated loudly by the Zamindar, to the prayer of Ghisu and Madhav, ‘“Get out of here. You never come when sent for, and today you are fawning on me because you are in dire need. You good for nothing badmash! ”’(50) The relationship between the haves and the haven’ts in India is like that between the hunter and the hunted – based on total distrust and sheer exploitation. Premchand wants to make the readers aware of the level of the internal we-feeling and ‘comradeship’ between the rich and the poor at a time when the so-called nation bargains and fights for political freedom from the external oppressive structures. The Zamindar’s inner silent fuming and demonstration of showering blessings with two rupees is emblematic of the future politically independent nation where true liberation would remain a mere illusion or maya to the hapless and that can only be achieved after death. Hence, towards the end of the story, Ghisu considers Budhia to be lucky enough for dying a premature death and perhaps imagines the dead child in her womb as the luckiest one for not being born in this tangle of misery called a nation. Hence, quite justifiably, the father and the son rejoice to their heart’s content in the market with the money meant for buying a shroud for the deceased. The story ends with the scenes of the two idlers in the market for buying a shroud. They involve in gossips as usual but the words are not idle rather active and ‘radical’ as they present the writer’s pungent satire on the nation-in-making where social, religious and economic oppression is rampant as anything. Ghisu critically examines the justification of the custom in Hindu religion of wrapping up the dead body with new clothes and considers it as ‘horrible’ and absurd one by pathetically exclaiming: ‘“One who doesn’t even have a rag to cover one’s nakedness during one’s life, needs a brand new shroud after death.”’(51) He also draws our attention to the queer whim of the upper class even in showing pity to the depressed: ‘“If we had these five rupees earlier, we could have bought her some medicine.”’(51) They move from one shop to another and enquire of cloths – silk and cotton – but ultimately do not purchase any. Driven by some mysterious craving, they instead enter into a tavern and go on drinking and enjoying sumptuous food to their hearts’ content with the money collected for procuring a shroud for the cremation of the young wife’s dead body. Ghisu now comes to the conclusion that a shroud over a dead body which gets burnt is a mere luxury from the economical point of view that they must not afford. Moreover, it has no role in transporting the dead to the heaven. At this, the drunken Madhav refers to the religious customs laid down by the Brahmins and the upper castes. Hearing this, Ghisu highlights the uneven distribution of wealth as the greatest blot of Hindu society and religion: ‘“The rich have money to burn, so let them! What do we have?”’(51) Here Ghisu very sarcastically comments on social stratification of Indian nation and brings to the fore the naked truth about Hindu religion which is for the moneyed-class, by the moneyed-class and of the moneyed-class where the penniless is a mere cipher.

Anyway, for the first time, the father and the son enjoy their greatest happiness of gobbling up the delicacies of food and feel the pride of giving the leftover to a hungry beggar. For this, they bless the deceased from the core of their hearts and clear all doubts like public censure of their not buying a shroud or the metaphysical issue of riding to heaven after death, etc. with the following argument:

“Yes, son, she’ll certainly go to heaven. She never hurt a fly, never bothered a soul all her life. Even in her death, she managed to fulfill our dearest wish. If she won’t go to heaven, who will? These rich, fat slobs who fleece the poor and then, to wash away their sins, take a dip in the Ganga river or offer its holy water in the temples?”(54)

The story ends with the two drunkards’ complete loss in the exhilarating, intoxicating and colourful world around them. But none can forget the naive faith and hope of these two dead drunk as it clearly projects the writer Premchand’s anti-capitalist stance in 1930s. Thus, Premchand’s central concern in the short story is to show the socio-political reality as solely responsible for making two hungry hapless so insensitive and indifferent to basic human values that they, to the horror of our imagination, indulge in complete indolence when the young, pregnant wife dies in labour pain, and shamelessly enjoy food and drink with the money collected for the dead wife’s funeral rites. Though the story is about the suffering and pathetic death of a pregnant woman, she remains all through absent. Only her screams of labour pain is heard from the background. What happens to the cremation of her dead body and the much required shroud also remains enshrouded in mystery to the reader as the writer’s purpose of writing this short story is to ‘expose’ the social, religious, economic, cultural and psychological exploitation of the marginalized at the hands of the native oppressors for giving a wider and real meaning to the word ‘freedom’, used narrowly and propagated treacherously by many nationalist politicians in 1930s. Premchand’s deep acquaintance with society has led him to identify the problems of “hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery” as the root causes of the maladies and cursed politics of India. Like a true ‘intellectual’, he has dealt with the poverty-debased individuals, like Ghisu and Madhav who have shockingly become dehumanized and insensitive to all finer human sentiments and values, only to make callous people conscious of and protest against the internal oppression that, by isolating and paralyzing the masses physically and psychologically, jeopardizes the prospect of a nation worth calling. So, Premchand’s short story ‘The Shroud’, by arousing in us “a critical spirit” with the help of its sincere presentation of “the grim realities of life”, unquestionably falls within the category of “new literature of India” as articulated in the manifesto of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936.

Works Cited Ahmed, Talat. Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism. New Delhi: Routledge, 2009. Print. Gupta, Prakash Chandra. Premchand. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy, 1st Pub. 1968. Rpt. 2010. Print. Premchand. “The Nature and Purpose of Literature.” 50 Years of PWA: Golden Jubilee Celebration Souvenir. Ed. Virendra Yadav. Lucknow: Golden Jubilee Celebration Committee, 1986. Print. Premchand. ‘The Shroud.’ Trans. Rakshanda Jalil and Hafu Collins. Indian Short Stories (1900 – 2000). Ed. E V Ramakrishnan. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy, 1st Pub. 2005. Rpt. 2012. 45-54. Print.

Re-situating We Are Going

Angshuman Kar

When Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s We Are Going, which is the first book of Australian Aboriginal poetry, was published in 1964, it was severely criticized by some of the white Australian critics. An anonymous reviewer wrote: This is bad verse…jingles, clichés, laborious rhymes all piled up, plus the incessant unvarying thud of a single message…This may be useful propagandist writing…But this has nothing to do with poetry. (qtd. in Shoemaker 182)

Jill Hellyer, another white Australian critic, also criticized the technical imperfections of Oodgeroo’s poetry, which, however, she argued, get overlooked when Oodgeroo’s poetry is read aloud: “Kath Walker’s1 poetry possesses very definite merit of coming to life when spoken aloud…” (qtd. in Shoemaker 182). In the same vein, Adam Shoemaker in his Black Words White Page also focused on this oral character of Oodgeroo’s poetry and said: “Despite technical flaws, it is verse which is intended to be read loud and always gains added power when it is delivered in this way” (185). Like Hellyer, Shoemaker too, despite his appreciation of Oodgeroo’s verse as “a welcome departure from the ‘serious commitment to formal rightness’ of which Taylor speaks” (185), did not hesitate to point out the technical imperfections and irregularities of her poetry. We Are Going was criticized on other grounds as well. 21 out of 30 poems of We Are Going, were written either in ballad metre or in the form of nursery rhyme and Oodgeroo’s use of these non- Aboriginal forms was criticized by some critics like Bob Hodge who wrote: “The forms that she [Oodgeroo] predominantly chose seem to be non-Aboriginal and therefore can be suspected of being anti-Aboriginal, of betraying Aboriginality at the very moment she was seeking to proclaim it” (67). While reading Oodgeroo’s poetry and its criticism side by side one is tempted to ponder over a series of questions. What could be the reasons for the distinctively oral character of Oodgeroo’s verse? If maintaining this oral character, she was carrying forward an Aboriginal legacy, then why did she choose some non-Aboriginal forms? Did she choose some popular European forms only to assault them? Does this intention of assault also account for the technical imperfections found in her poetry? Was the choice of the form a strategic ploy deliberately used by Oodgeroo to subvert the European poetics? To answer all these questions, I would like to re-situate Oodgeroo’s We Are Going in the context of the Aboriginal history of writing. I would particularly focus on the Coranderrk petitions submitted by the Australian Aboriginal people to the white authorities in the late 19th century to argue that many of the formal peculiarities that we find in We Are Going had their seeds in the late nineteenth century Aboriginal attempts at petition-writing.

Australian Aboriginal petitions have become significant in the context of the recent re- examination of the history of writing in Australia. For long David Unaipon, whose famous Native Legends was published in 1929, was thought to be the first Aboriginal writer of Australia. Such a notion, however, has been contested by those critics who have tried to re-define the notion of writing and authorship. Penny Van Toorn, for instance, in her book, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia, has argued that “By adjusting the theoretical lens through which Indigenous writing is perceived, a new history of Aboriginal writing comes into view. It becomes possible to see that when David Unaipon published his first book in 1929, Koori peoples in the Sydney region had been reading and authoring written texts for 140 years” (2). To prove their point, critics like Toorn have particularly focused on innumerable letters and petitions written by the Aboriginal inhabitants in the nineteenth century. She has, in fact, at length written on the petitions submitted by the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Coranderrk reserve, located in Victoria, in the latter half of the 19th century, to be more specific, between 1870s and 1880s.

The British colonizers began establishing large reserves and missions in Australia from the 1860s when several Aboriginal schools and settlements started dying out in the 1840s and 1850s. The first Aboriginal reserve in Victoria was established on the bank of Acheron River in Taungurong (Toorn 123). The Taungurong people got this land mainly through the leader of the Woiworung people, Simon Wonga, and also through the help offered by William Thomas, the former Protector of the Melbourne region. “In September 1860, however”, writes Toorn, “after the Acheron community had cleared, fenced, ploughed, and sown seven hectares of crops, the newly formed Central Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines ordered that the station be abandoned and moved to another locality, Mohican Station” (124). Some of the Acheron residents moved to Mohican station, but some did not. These Taungurong families came to Coranderrk Creek (which was ‘a traditional Woiworung campsite’), when this site was approved as a reserve by the Protection Board after almost two-year-long lobbying by a 33-year old Scottish Presbyterian minister (who joined the post of General Inspector of Aboriginal Missions and Reserves in Victoria in 1861), Reverend John Green, along with Simon Wonga, William Barak (who were cousins) and William Thomas (Toorn 124). Even after the formal approval of the site as a reserve, the Taungurong and Woiworung people were apprehensive about the fate of the reserve as it was yet to be gazetted. The allocation of the land, however, was ultimately gazetted in 1863.

The most authentic record of the history of Coranderrk is Diane Barwick’s Rebellion at Coranderrk (1998). Barwick lets us know the Coranderrk community was not at all homogenous as it consisted of different Aboriginal clans. The land originally belonged to Simon Wonga and William Barak who were members of the Wurundjeri clan of the Woiworung people who shared the land with other clans of the Woiworung people and also with different other clans of the Kulin families. In the1870s, a number of people other than the Kulin families came to Coranderrk as well. Inter-clan marriages and a sense of belonging to the land kept these people of different Aboriginal clans at Coranderrk together. They also chose William Barak and Simon Wonga as the heads and spokemen for the Coranderrk people. This was done in accordance with Aboriginal customs and conventions. A senior, wise man known for his integrity was usually chosen by an Aboriginal clan as its ngurungaeta, who in the words of Barak, “spoke straight and did no wrong” (qtd. in Bawrwick 9). An ngurungaeta had the authority to speak for the entire community and he could also choose a man to whom he could give “his words” (Barak, qtd. in Barwick 9). In fact, as Toorn writes, when a reserve comprising different Aboriginal clans was located on the estate of one or two of the senior residents, the male head of the host clan was usually chosen as the ngurungaeta: The Coranderrk experience suggests that if a mission or reserve was located on the clan estate of one or more of the senior residents, the traditional gerontocracy remained largely in place. In such cases, the male head of the host clan was considered under traditional law to be the leader and spokeperson for the reserve or missionary community. Although residents from other regions periodically gained favour with mission and reserve superintendent, a person’s authority to serve as a leader and spokeperson for the community as a whole depended primarily on their seniority in the kinship network and their associated rights and responsibilities in relation to the country on which the reserve was located. (130)

A close examination of the petitions written by the Coranderrk people shows that literacy, instead of dismantling the traditional gerontocracy, was appropriated by it.

Simon Wonga died in 1875 and in the absence of Wonga, Barak became the sole speaker or ngurungaeta for the Coranderrk people. Barak was an illiterate leader. He did not know how to write but at the same time after the death of Wonga it was he who only had the authority to speak for the entire community. This made him hire scribes for the petitions that he wrote for the Coranderrk people. Initially Barak chose white men as his scribes. The first petition that Barak wrote for the Coranderrk people was written by JH Stahle in 1874, one year before Wonga’s death. This petition was submitted to the Board for the reinstatement of Mr Green, who played a key role in the establishment of the reserve and was also the manager of it from 1863 to 1874. From the early 1870s the Board started thinking of breaking Coranderrk up and shifting its residents to some other reserves so that it could be sold off to the local pastoralists. Green opposed this plan and was forced to resign from his post in August 1874. The Coranderrk people were so much fond of Green and were so grateful to him in so many ways2 that a significant numbers of petitions written by them had the plea of getting Green back amongst them. The petition of 1874, written on behalf of Barak by Stahle, who was a ‘temporary replacement’ for Green, however, did not succeed and Stahle was even dismissed by the Board for ‘supporting Green’ and for writing ‘improper letters’ (Toorn 133-4).

In October 1875, Barak wrote another petition to the Board with the same plea of the reinstatement of Green as the manager of the reserve. But learning from the previous experience, this time, no white scribe was hired. The petition was probably written by an Aboriginal youth who was one among them who were taught how to read and write by Green. The petition was not directly submitted to the Board. Since it was penned by an Aboriginal youth, Barak and his co- signatories probably thought that an authentication by a white authority was needed. The petition, therefore, was submitted to George Harker, a local judge and parliamentarian, who forwarded it to the Chief Secretary of the Board. Because of Harker’s involvement in the process, and because the Board was always afraid of written documents that would reveal their negligence and callousness, this petition was declared to be the result of the manipulations of the white trouble-makers. The style and the language of this petition show visible influences of Green’s Christian teachings and a close examination of it also makes one think that probably Barak dictated the petition to the young Abroiginal scribe. Though, on behalf of the community, Barak could somehow communicate his message through the petition, it was full of syntactic errors which affected semantic sanity of the petition.3 Petitions of this kind with grammatical errors gave the Board an opportunity to dismiss them as ‘baseless whims’ of a primitive race. It is really ironic that in writing these petitions the Aboriginal people could not engage the white scribes as well because such an engagement gave the Board the scope of dismissing their protest and pleas as inauthentic. Toorn writes: On the question of whether to enlist white mediators for their letters and petitions, however, the Coranderrk residents found themselves in double bind: they were damned if they did but equally damned if they didn’t. If they asked their non- Indigenous friends to intercede on their behalf, the Board treated their requests and complaints as inauthentic, merely the work of meddlesome white do-gooders. If the Coranderrk community penned their own letters and petitions, however, their wishes were dismissed as baseless whims of an irrational, childlike race. Either way, their words were rendered impotent. (137) It is important to mention here that the Board had at least one excuse to consider some of these petitions fake. So many times, the illiterate senior members of the Aboriginal clans signed with a cross (x). Since a cross could be put by anybody, often the authenticity of the petitions submitted with crosses were doubted by the Board and to clear this doubt so many times the Aboriginal people of the Coranderrk had to walk 60/70 miles together to submit the petitions in person before the Board. In addition to all these, there was another difficulty as well: it was the difficulty of using the European tool of literacy—which the Aboriginal people started discovering to be a very effective one for pleas and protest—by maintaining the conventional gerontocracy of the Aboriginal societies. The history of the Coranderrk petitions shows how cleverly the residents of Coranderrk negotiated all these challenges.

Toorn considers a petition submitted in 1876 to be a very significant step in these negotiations. Having come to know from newspaper that the Board was thinking of restricting their free movements, the residents of Coranderrk on 11 September 1876 forced the then reserve manager Mr Halliday to convene a meeting by ringing the station bell. When all assembled, Halliday was asked to get another witness who would record the proceedings of the meeting and so Mr James S Deans, the schoolteacher, was invited. The petition that came out a result of the meeting had three resolutions out of which two were unanimously taken. 4 In the first of these three resolutions it was written that “the Natives of Coranderrk are well satisfied with the treatment they have received from the central Board and also the present local management and request that they may not be removed from the present station, and that the Board will forward the said resolution to the present Government for consideration” (qtd. in Toorn 138). This resolution was not carried unanimously and it was put to vote. It had 17 votes for and 6 against it. The second resolution recorded the unwillingness of the residents to move to any other mission or reserve if Coranderrk was broken up and the last resolution approved of Halliday’s management of the reserve (Toorn 138-9). Toorn considers this petition very important for three reasons: a) it was a petition which was not initiated by Woiworung people and did not have Barak as a signatory, b) it was one of those few documents which recorded non-unanimity and c) in it the European convention of minutes-keeping was put in the context of Aboriginal orality. The petition, again, clearly mentioned the names of the persons who proposed the resolutions and seconded them and also the fact that Mr Deans was a witness to the meeting. By recording this, the petition, unquestionably proved its authenticity. The petition, Toorn further argues, questions “the simple binary opposition between ‘primitive’ oral cultures and ‘advanced’ literate ones, and the Eurocentric colonialist idea that, over time, ‘progress’ from orality to literacy was necessary and inevitable”. She continues to write: “By adopting alphabetic script, Indigenous Australians did not step over a threshold between orality and literacy. Instead, they wove back and forth between oral and literate institutions within European culture, as well as between European and Indigenous cultures. Far from putting an end to talk, their writings served often to empower their spoken words” (140, original emphasis).

Whereas there is little doubt that in writing petitions the Australian Aboriginal people wove back and forth between oral and literate institutions within European culture and also between European and Indigenous cultures and that writing empowered their spoken words, how far the petition mentioned above could be cited as an example of these claims could be doubted. One can point out that the resolutions of the meeting were recorded by a non-Indigenous European man and the resolutions were so flawless in terms of grammar, syntax and form that if words like ‘Coranderrk’, ‘station’ and ‘mission’ are dropped, they might well go as resolutions adopted in a meeting of a non-Indigenous European organization. The kind of weaving between orality and literacy, between Indigenous and European cultures that Toorn suggests is actually missing here. Instead, after reading the petition it is possible to think that Aboriginal orality is so trapped in the European form in this petition that it has lost its distinctive Aboriginal character. To argue that writing really did not bring an end to talk for the Aboriginal people of Australia and to show the interplay of orality and literacy, of Indigenous and European cultures that Toorn thought to be the hallmark of the 1876 petition, I would rather refer to another petition (which has not been given due attention by Toorn) submitted by the Coranderrk people under the leadership of Barak in 1881. In 1881, a parliamentary enquiry was set up to know the actual living conditions of the people of Coranderrk. During the enquiry, so many of the Aboriginal people submitted written petitions which were to be read aloud before the enquiry committee. William Barak also submitted one such petition on 5th September 1881, signed by 15 male Aboriginals.5 From the very style and form of the petition it becomes clear that it was not written by a non-Indigenous scribe. It has one or two slips and minor errors but unlike the petition of October 1875, it has clarity of thought and expression. Slips and errors prove the authenticity of the Aboriginal voice and because of the clarity of thought and expression it was no longer possible for the Board to dismiss it as ‘baseless whims’ of a primitive race. In fact, the real power of the petition comes out when it is read aloud. By pointing out the fact that the Aboriginal people often used to walk 60/70 miles to submit petitions before higher authorities in person, Toorn also writes: “To work effectively, the written petition had to be delivered as though it were an oral message. Power and meaning did not reside inherently in the alphabetically written document itself, but were activated through the ceremonial process of its face-to-face delivery and re-voicing” (143-4).

This is exactly what Jill Hellyer said about Oodgeroo’s verse. She too thought that Oodgeroo’s poetry comes alive when read aloud. We should not forget that when Oodgeroo’s We Are Going came out, the white Australian government still considered Australia a terra nullius, Aboriginal people were not included in the national census, the verdict of Mabo was far away, and the Aboriginal people were even deprived of basic rights as human beings. So, in the name of poetry Oodgeroo was actually writing petitions. In fact, the title of the first poem of We Are Going is “Aboriginal Charter of Rights”. Petitions were written by the Aboriginal Australians to make the white authorities listen to them. By bringing the content of Aboriginal petitions into her poetry Oodgeroo made the whole world hear the Aboriginal plea. By saying this, I do not want to undermine Oodgeroo as a poet; I rather would like to argue that her poetry should be considered as inseparable from her political activism. We should not forget that she led and was actively involved in different Aboriginal movements and that she acted as the state secretary of FCAATSI for a long time. In fact, the distinctive oral character of her verse, her fusion of the European form and the Aboriginal content, technical imperfections of her poetry could be viewed as deliberate experiments of Oodgeroo. But I would like to argue that it is wise to situate such poetry in the context of the tradition of Aboriginal petition-writing. In this context, it will be interesting to take note of one of the comments made by Oodgeroo in an interview. She said: “I see my books as the voice of the Aboriginal people, not my own personal voice. They dictate what I write” (qtd. in Shoemaker 186). Oodgeroo was perhaps aware that in writing poetry she was simultaneously performing the roles of an ngurungaeta and a scribe.

Notes

1. To highlight her Aboriginal identity, Oodgeroo ultimately stopped using her Christian name. “Aboriginal Charter of Rights”, the very first poem of We Are Going shows what the anonymous reviewer called ‘laborious rhyme’: We want hope, not racilasim Brotherhood, not ostracism Black advance, not white ascendance Make us equals, not dependants. We need help, not explitation. We want freedom, not frustration. (1-6)

2. This is what Toorn writes about ‘The Green Years’: “John Green worked beside the men as they cultivated the land. He recognized that they were every bit as intelligent as the Europeans, and found them to be more truthful and honest. As manager, Green asserted his Christian morality over the people’s customary laws; nonetheless, his method was, as he put it, ‘to allow them to rule themselves as much as possible. When there is any strife among them this is always settled in a kind of court’” (132).

3. We can have a look at some excerpts taken from the petition: Coranderrk Oct 20th 1875 (the day the Month we had a Meeting here) I William Barrak Remember of Coranderrk I would if you be so kind to help us for we are in trouble and I will Name the Names of those who are willing to live and die here and these are them that agree to stop…

We want a man whom God chosen to lay the foundation of Coranderrk station for he it is appointed us to the living God and that’s Mr Green for if it wasn’t for him we what a been all dead and that’s all we require Just now & many the Lord bless you Sir and give you good knowledge. 4. Let us have a look at these three resolutions: Ist Resulution Resolution proposed by James Barker and seconded by John Charles that the Natives of Coranderrk are well satisfied with the treatment they have received from the central Board and also the present local management and request that they may not be removed from the present station, and that the Board will forward the said resolution to the present Government for consideration— 17, For 6, against, resolution carried

2nd Resolution Proposed by John Briggs and seconded by Martin Simpson that if the Station at Coranderrk is broken-up they will not proceed to any other mission station in the Colony Carried unanimously 3rd Resolution Proposed by Robert Bains and seconded by James Edgar, that this meeting approves of Mr Halliday’s management of the station since his arrival on it Carried unanimously

5. Some portions of the petition read as follows:

Sir—The only complaint we have is this, we all wish Mr Green back here in Mr Strickland’s [the manager’s] position. Mr Strickland is not a fit man here in regard to work and also to the sick people; he has no idea of tilling the ground or making any improvements on the station, or doing any good for the welfare of the black here; no potatoes or hay here on the station, and the station ought [to] keep itself in meat, but it does not: we all have to buy meat…The only thing we wish is Mr Green removed back here, and then they will see that (the) station will (be) improved better, and we will also see that those who speak against us will see we have a head manager of us. So that (is) all we all have to say. (141)

Works Cited

Barwick, D. Rebellion at Coranderrk. Ed. Laura E Barwick and Richard E Barwick. Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 1998. Print. Hodge, Bob. “Poetry and Politics in Oodgeroo: Transcending the Difference”. Oodgeroo: A Tribute. Ed. Adam Shoemaker. Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1994. 63-76. Print. Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. We Are Going. Brisbane: The Jacaranda Press, 1966. Print. Shoemaker, Adam. Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988. 1989. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2004. Print. Toorn, Penny van. Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006. Print.

“Freedom” in Anand’s Fiction

Dilip K. Sasmal

G.B. Shaw in his essay “Freedom”, one of the series of B.B.C. Radio talks delivered on 18th June, 1935 (Published on 26th June, 1935 in The Listener) speaks of two kinds of slavery – the slavery of man to nature and the slavery of man to man. The first kind of slavery is something fundamental, something ingrained in the nature of things, so that no man can ever hope to be absolutely free so far as his slavery to nature is concerned. For, nature compels him to eat, drink and do a thousand other things which constitute the very basis of his life. However, the other kind of slavery of man-to-man is not as fundamental in character as the slavery of man to nature. On the other hand, it repudiates the very basis of our civilisation, a sense of equality and human dignity. From his personal experience coupled with his creative vision, Anand brings out vividly the suppression of freedom that bedevils Indian society in socio-political, economic and religious spheres. By pointing out the dark spots in our national life, he focuses on the need to eliminate them ushering in a society of equal partners that could be the foundation of a reborn civilisation. Anand’s passion for freedom can be traced back to his childhood days. As he grew up, he rebelled against his father’s blind adherence to British rule and his religious pretence. His father, Lal Chand, read the Gita daily but he did not practise the values of the holy book. His childhood experiences and observations as well as the rigid attitude of his parents influenced his emergence as a novelist for the cause of freedom. Anand’s mind was deeply impressed by three incidents of his early life. For the first time, he witnessed the contrast between life and death at the death of his pretty playmate and cousin, Kaushalya. The suicide of his aunt Devki left him sad and bewildered. She was ostracised for being friendly with a Muslim woman. Again, his arrest and caning by the police for breaking the curfew during the Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre in 1919 turned his thinking into revolutionary channels and made him an uncompromising hater of the British yoke. Thus both at social and political levels, Anand wanted to cast aside restrictive laws and practices and embrace humanism. In his college life, he exhibited interest in national affairs and read Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. He actively participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1921. Under the influence of Annie Besant, he joined the students’ strike against the British. In 1926, Anand was in Britain when the General Strike in Britain rocked the entire nation. All progressive writers favoured international socialism and confirmed it as the only solution to the world’s problems. Anand, as an amazingly empathetic writer, set his mind and heart to liberate the oppressed people. He joined the International Brigade in Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. When he was in England, he worked with Krishna Menon for the India League, an organization in England for Indians and British supporters of Indian Independence. The Indian Freedom Movement gave him an opportunity to think in new directions. The 1930s were the seedtime of modern independent India. These years were conspicuous for the Gandhian Salt Satyagrah Movement of 1930-32, the three Round Table Conferences, the Government of India Act of 1935, the Introduction of the Provincial Autonomy of 1937 and the Gandhian Movement for political and social change. These movements, especially the Gandhian ideology, deeply impressed him. Anand brooded over all these incidents and fused them into a highly personal creative art. That freedom is the main concern of Anand’s fiction is reverberated in his letter to Marlene Fisher on The Seven Ages of Man written on 17th June, 1975. He writes – The urges for freedom on all planes are the main motive force. The context is the whole of life, the trauma of birth, innocence, experience of evil and good … the struggle to mirror struggle itself in books which may be more than oneself. Because of his love for the entire mankind, Anand transcends all constricting limitations of caste, creed, economic as well as social status and all geographical boundaries of nations. The primary aim of his art is to refine and ennoble man, to stir up the dormant stores of tenderness in him for his fellow human beings. Anand pointed out that the modern writer has to play a great creative role in the reconstruction of human society. According to him, “the modern writer must go straight to the heart of the problem of our time, the problem of human sensibility in the present complex situation, the tragedy of modern man” (Apology for Heroism 76-77). In order to understand this tragedy it is necessary “to explore the sensibilities of all human beings whether in the factory, in the village square or in the drawing room, in so far as they have been affected by the Iron Age” (Apology for Heroism 79). As a writer he once confessed, “I had to soak myself in the lives of men and women from within their tormented senses. I immersed myself in the sub-world of the poor, the insulted and the injured ... I had to go through their sufferings... I had to become weak with their weaknesses...embrace the human condition in its various degrees of reality, intensely between the areas of birth and growth and decay and death. (Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand 7). His extraordinary consciousness was shattered by the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and he felt an irresistible urge to portray this exploitation through the characters of his fiction. He said –

I began to dream of writing only about the poorest of the poor human being, whom I had known, and not very much about the orthodox and superior people of high caste, class and status in the towns and villages where I had grown up. Specially was I inspired to brood on the caste ways, because the richer people were anyhow mostly on the side of the white Sahibs.” (Indian Writing in English 340)

According to Anand, a writer is superior to the moralist, the politician and the scientist; each of these takes a limited view of man, while the writer deals with the whole of man. In his own words, the writer “ is uniquely fitted to aspire to be a whole man, to attain, as far as possible, a more balanced perspective of life and to reach the apogee of human development and to lead to a universal awareness of life, thereby possessing them with the will to renew it and to change it.” (Apology for Heroism 87-88). His novels have had a great influence on social change. He once remarked on the influence his novels have exerted upon the thinking mind all the world over:

You will be reassured to know that many young Africans are reading me and feel that I confirm their familiar feelings. The greatest moment for me was when the Angolan poet, Augustino Netto, who had come from the middle of a battle for the liberation of his country, to read a poem in Algiers, told me he had been inspired once to go into action by my book, Coolie. In the dynamic world outside India, the Indian situation confronted by me has already meaning.

Jack Lindsay observes: “He expressed his faith in a great renewal of the human spirit which was to embrace, not merely Europe, but Latin America, the West India, Africa and Asia – a new and true internationalism. He was the forerunner of the protest literature of the colonial people as they threw off their oppression”. (“Mulk Raj Anand” 4) Anand in fact wanted to study the growth of mind and the awakening of consciousness among the poor, the outcastes and the underdogs for their overall freedom. E.M Forster in his “Foreword” to Untouchable writes –

Bakha returns to his father and his wretched bed, thinking now of the Mahatma, now of the Machine. His Indian day is over and the next day will be like it, but on the surface of the earth, if not in the depths of the sky, a change is at hand. (10)

Anand has been really interested in the inner struggle, through confusion, unrest and chaos, of men and women to break through, from themselves and their weaknesses. In this sense, the weaknesses are important as the sources of strength. And when these characters are able to confront their own hatred, fear, cruelty and cowardice, they show what man can be. He transcends the geographical barrier of our country through the power of his writing. He says – He has sought in all societies in the past, and will seek in all societies of the present and future, to communicate his unique and original vision of life to other people, to intensify their awareness by way of convincing and heightening their own observation. And he will stand as an interpreter of one human soul to another, and by his peculiar talent for revealing the unity in diversity of human nature, create real bonds of sympathy between nation and nation, one people and another, and in fact between every genuine lover of life seeking to understand another. (Apology for Heroism 87- 88) All the heroes of Anand are aware of the predicaments they are in at some point or other in their lives. So they want emancipation from that condition. Krishan Chander’s words after being frustrated by the system of education in Confession of a Lover prove this. He says–

The important thing is to be – to become rebellion itself! Free! Free! Free! Utterly free!...Rebellion and freedom! ...Not acceptance and death!...It is only through rebellion against everything false that I have written poetry... And I want to embrace the people – even those who are illiterate and down and degraded! Because once we are free, all of us will grow and discover marvellous things!... We will become a big people! We will make a new life! (156)

Anand’s prime aim is to reveal an ideal humanistic vision of life. He aims at turning human society into a just egalitarian order in which man, devoid of all prejudices and distinctions would enjoy real human dignity. He emphasizes the potential of man to create a society based on love and brotherhood where every person has the right to enjoy all freedoms. He strikes a fundamentally humanitarian posture, poetises the human predicament and calls for a total transformation of man to usher in an era of spiritual regeneration. He wants to help to raise the untouchables, the peasants, the serfs, the coolies etc. Saros Cowasjee points out that Anand “in his narratives introduced a whole new people who had seldom entered the realm of literature”. (So Many Freedoms 40) Anand’s humanistic approach is echoed by Balarama Gupta as he says: “The Road re-affirms Anand’s inalienable faith in the essential dignity of man, whatever be his caste and position in society.” ( Mulk Raj Anand 33) Anand immerses himself in the sub-world of the poor, the insulted and the injured. He has a wide variety of themes ranging from romantic love to religious rituals. He shows romantic love in “A Village Idyll”, the tragic condition of the traditional woman in “Lajwanti”, unemployment, modernism and social ugliness in “The Rumour” and in “The Old Bapu”, and freedom struggle in “The Informer”. Even as a short-story writer, he shows his commitment to humanism and socialism. He is very much concerned with a type of characters who themselves are products of circumstances and situations. He creates his characters from the author-omniscient’s angle. His “The Lost Child” is a parable in which the traumatic experience of a child symbolizes the eternal verities. It is an allegory that reminds us of an aphorism of Guru Nanak that “we are all children lost in the world-fair.” The cobbler, uncle Saudagar in “The Cobbler and the Machine”, is tempted to buy a sewing machine and finds it difficult to repay the loan and as a result, he dies. It not only portrays the cobbler of India but the cobblers in general. Dhandu in “The Rumour” wants to get a job in a factory and is bewildered when he finds that the rumour he had heard of a vacancy was baseless. He then on his way back is run over by a lorry. The untouchable Old Bapu in “Old Bapu” trudges a distance of seven miles to find a job to fill his belly. The struggle of Old Bapu is expressed in Anand’s words:

The city was still a mile away, and the flesh of his feet burnt where it touched the new, hot, metalled road through the holes in the shoes. And the sweat poured down across the furrows on his face, specially through the two sharp channels which stretched from the nose towards the chin, like rivulets flooding a fallow field. (Greatest Short Stories 111)

Anand is a man of vision and a relentless fighter for human dignity. In all of his novels, he reveals his basic preoccupation with humanity. He cares passionately for other human beings and tries to show the inhumanity of man to man. The problems faced by Munoo in Anand’s Coolie overflow the geographical barriers of India. Munoo’s continual suffering from the endless, deafening roar of the machine, the poor wages, the long hours of working, bad housing condition and the callous exploitation from all sides remind us of the problems of the labour class all over the world. Shaileshwar Sati Prasad says, “Neither Ratan is idealized nor Munoo. Both are presented as ordinary mortals with their own strengths and weaknesses and Anand does not impose his ideology on them.” (The Insulted and the Injured 95) The behaviour of Nadir Khan, the trader Sardarji and the Mill-owner pricks Munoo. Neither security nor basic facilities exist inside the mills. There is nowhere to go for a meal, nor a canteen, nor a refreshment centre, not even a hospital to care for victims of the mills. He thinks that profit is their prime concern, and neither the wages nor the well-being of their employees worries them much. He curses them for his poverty, and for the cruelty and inhumanity the labourers are condemned to suffer. De La Havre has been influenced by A.A Purcell and J. Hallsworth’s Report on Labour Conditions in India (1928). Both of them speak for the Trade union:

We must take the mighty step of linking the British and Indian Trade Union Movements for the purpose of positive and sustained organising work, followed by joint action whenever conceivable and immediately practicable with the object of lifting Indian workmen and workwomen out of the morass of filthy and ghastly conditions, socially, morally and physically into a new stage of constantly improving wage standards, giving them hope for the immediate future and enabling them here and now to have what is the first essential of all Indian workers, namely, a firm grip on the means of life by the necessary increase of purchasing power at present kept out of their reach. (Report on Labour Conditions in India 43)

When Ratan has been dismissed from the mill, Munoo tries to console Ratan for his misfortune and offers his solution to meet and request Jimmie Thomas to take Ratan back to his service but Ratan does not accept his proposal. In a rage, Ratan rushes to the office of the All India Trade Union Federation to seek justice from President Lalla Omkar Nath but he does not succeed in his mission. Rather, he is surprised to find corruption and exploitation prevailing in the office. He feels impotent with rage for his failure to meet the President though he has given a bribe to the clerk to solve the problem. He soon realises his poor condition. The three communists – Sauda, Mujaffar and Stanley Jackson of the Red Flag Union visit him dramatically and emphasize that all the coolies must walk out of the mill and go on strike in protest. Munoo is very much excited at their proposal. The announcement that the mill will go on short time and there will be no work for the fourth week in every month with immediate effect, fans the fire of discontentment among the coolies, and the communist leaders fully exploit the situation. There is a large gathering of the agitated coolies and the leaders start addressing them from the dais to get the praise and applause from the audience. Sauda, a member of the Union Executive Committee, says:

“Stand up then, stand up for your rights, you roofless wretches, stand up for justice!...Stand up for life, or they will crush you and destroy you altogether. Stand up and follow me!” “We are human beings and not soulless machines. We want the right to work without having to pay bribes.” “We want clean houses to live in.” “We want schools for our children and crèches for our babies.” ‘We want to be skilled workers.’ “We want to be saved from the clutches of the moneylenders.” “We want a good wage and no more subsistence allowance if we must go on short work.” “We want shorter hours.” “We want security so that the foreman cannot dismiss us suddenly.” “We want our organisation to be recognised by law.” (Coolie 267)

This revolutionary speech by Sauda leaves a memorable impact on Munoo, Hari, Ratan and the rest of the audience. Again, this speech of Sauda reminds us of the speeches of leaders all over the world who fight for their fellowmen. Sauda’s speech in Coolie echoes the Marxian thought that poverty is the basis of all exploitation. In other words, the rich man’s lust for getting richer by hook or crook creates a big gap between the haves and have-nots. Sauda says –

There are only two kinds of people in the world: the rich and the poor’, Sauda continued, ‘and between the two there is no connection. The rich and the powerful, the magnificent and the glorious, whose opulence is built on robbery and theft and open warfare, are honoured and admired by the whole world, and by themselves. You, the poor and the humble, you, the meek and the gentle, wretches that you are, swindled out of your right, and broken in body and soul, you are respected by none, and you do not respect yourselves. (265-266)

Uncle Kirpu in The Sword and the Sickle utters the same view. He says,

In fact, ... there were no Black or White people, no yellow or brown people, not even Francisis and Germans, and English and Hindustani, and Chinis and Japanis, but there were only two races and two religions in the world, the rich and the poor... (83)

The exploitation in agriculture and tea- plantations is seen both in India and America. Barbara’s speech in Two Leaves and a Bud represents Anand’s view. Anand says,

The position of the plantation coolies in India, ... is in many respects, similar to that of the cotton plantation slaves of the Southern States of North America, of whom Harriet Beecher Stowe writes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If there be any difference, I think that actual inquiry would prove that the present economic condition of the Indian coolies is worse than that of the Negro slaves in America! (124)

Anand himself in The Bubble explains how imperialism spreads:

And the wealth is unequally distributed -- as in all empires of the past and present. Because the Imperialists have to have cheap labour in the colonies and they simply have to take surplus product away to grow rich themselves. All empires live on exploitation. (443)

Anand also protests and suggests a solution to all the above exploitations. De la Havre in Two Leaves and a Bud writes,

The black coolies clear the forests, plant the fields, toil and garner the harvest, while all the money-grabbing, slave-driving, soulless managers and directors draw their salaries and dividends and build up monopolies. Therein lies the necessity of revolution in this country.” (123)

“Revolution”, according to Anand, “is a need for togetherness, Comrade, the need to curb malice among men, the need for men to stand together as brothers…” (The Sword and the Sickle 383). In an interview with Anand at his office in December, 1974, Dr. P. Machwe, the Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi, commented that Anand’s early novels, Untouchable and Coolie, opened windows and doors to let fresh air into the mausoleum, the sentimental house, of Indian fiction. He described these works as being not only earthly and realistic, but important and refreshing in their human concerns. Anand is directly concerned with socio-political realities. In him, the sense of reality is imbued with a deep sense of humanism. Anand castigates the Hindu society for depriving the lower classes of the dignity of human existence. The titles of his most famous novels, Untouchable and Coolie suggest a picture of inhuman marginalization of an important section of society the sweat of whose brow helps the upper castes to live a trouble-free life. Margaret Berry says, “Anand’s attacks, on political as well as social and economic institutions, are carried out mainly on behalf of India’s poor, in the effort to destroy forces inimical to their development, and to build a world of freedom and equality where human potential can flourish.” (Mulk Raj Anand : The Man and the Novelist 72) Both Bakha and Munoo, although rooted in their own society, are also universal figures of tortured humanity. Anand harbours a vision of society where co-operation rather than competition and discrimination sustain mankind. He says,

We have to worship the new consciousnesses of our people as part of our love of man himself –urged by the exigencies of a tragic age, where we all stand on crossroads of possible death through the enormous armaments piled up and of abounding life in co- existence... May I add to this magic word co-existence – co-discovery. This will involve exchange, and mutual aid as well as solidarity or friendship. I consider literature as a means of communication which connects, and this connection is the extension of love. Because it is not possible anymore to be an island, on one’s own, in this world. Paradoxically, the same forces which divide the world today through rigid frontiers, have united the world, even against their will, by faster means of communication . . . This means that we are likely to meet each other, to visit different countries frequently. And we will have to find out the inner patterns of the lives of our brethren, to appreciate the variety of ways of life, and to taste different cultures. Indeed, we have to pursue co-discovery.... I think writing arises from the deepest urges for communication. And communication ends our loneliness and fosters friendship, intimacy, and brings love. If someone asks me why I have written so many books, I find myself answering that: I love.” (The Commonwealth Review 11)

As enunciated by the author himself, empathy and compassion from the keynote of Anand’s creativity, gradually evolving into essence of togetherness and fraternity marked both by inner and outer freedom.

Works Cited

Anand, Mulk Raj. The Lost Child and Other Stories. London : J.A. Allen, 1934. Print...... “Foreword” by E.M. Forster Untouchable. New Delhi: Arnold Associates, 1981. Print...... Coolie. New Delhi : Arnold Publishers, 1981. Print...... Two Leaves and a Bud. New Delhi : Arnold Publishers, 1988. Print...... The Sword and the Sickle. New Delhi : Arnold- Heinemann, 1984. Print...... ‘The Rumour’, The Barber’s Trade Union and Other Stories, 1944. New Delhi : ArnoldPublishers, 1984. Print...... Apoogy for Heroism. Bombay : Kutub-Popular, 1957. Print...... TheRoad . New Delhi : Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1987 . Print...... Lawanti and Other Stories. Bombay : Jaico Publishing House, 1966. Print...... Profession of a Lover. New Delhi : Arnold – Heinemann, 1976. Print...... The Bubble. New Delhi : Arnold-Heinemann, 1984. Print. ………...“Why I Write?”Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand, Ed. K.K.Sharma. Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan,1978. Print...... Greatest Short Stories. Mumbai : Jaico Publishing House, 2004. Print...... “Is There a Shared Tradition in Commonwealth Literature? Variety of Ways”. The Commonwealth Review,1989, Vol.1 No.1. Print. Berry, Margaret. Mulk Raj Anand : The Man and the Novelist, Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1971. Print. Cowasjee, Saros. ‘The Epic Misery’, So Many Freedoms : A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand . Delhi: OUP, 1977. Print. Gupta, Balarama . Mulk Raj Anand. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1974 . Print. Iyengar, K.R.S. Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2002. Print. Lindsay, Jack. “Mulk Raj Anand” . Kakatiya Journal of English Studies,1983, vol.5 No.1. Print. Prasad, Shaileshwar Sati. The Insulted and the Injured . Patna: Janki Prakashan, 1977. Print. Purcell, A.A. and J. Hallsworth. Report on Labour Conditions in India. London: TUC General Council, 1928. Print.

Re-reading the History of Colonization of Australia in the Poems of Oodgeroo Noonuccal: An Eco- colonial Approach

Dipanwita Pal

While talking about eco-colonialism, the renowned ‘green studies’ critic Jonathan Bate, in his The Song of the Earth argues that colonization and deforestation have frequently gone together. From the history of colonization all over the world, we can see that the colonizers have expanded their colonies by merciless destruction of natural world. Being non-natives they were not in any emotional terms with the land and its environment. They used the colonies for their own material prosperity without caring about the ecological balance. On the contrary, the indigenous people have been found to dwell in perfect harmony with nature. They understand the systematic consequences of their actions and feel deep sympathy with all the living forms. Haikai Tane, the director of Watershed Systems, Centre for Catchment Ecology, in New Zealand, writes about four paradigms commonly used for conservation purposes in Australia and New Zealand. These are nature conservation, heritage conservation, resource conservation and environmental conservation. He also puts forward the concept of ‘cultural baggage’ being carried by the colonials and imposed on their ‘new homes’. He writes, “When the colonialism becomes narrow-minded parochialism, it prevents evolutionary change, destroying the beneficial heritage of traditional societies they seek to displace. History is replete with examples of sustainable indigenous societies failing to survive when confronted by parochial colonialism”. According to him, the responsibility of the environmental deterioration in Australia and New Zealand falls on this paradox. This type of colonialism is extremely harmful for the environmental strategies essential for sustainable development resulting from ‘resource exploitation’ and ‘environmental abuse’. The concept of development competing with conservation is regarded by Tane as a colonial myth. He considers this myth to be ‘fundamentally flawed’. For him, “Humans and their habitats are integral parts of nearly each and every ecosystem. With careful design and sustainable development, they have the profound ability to enhance environmental systems including biodiversity”. He warns, “To pretend otherwise is folly”. Another frequent/consistent colonial myth he talks of is about organic farming not being an outcome of sound science which results in defiling the practitioners of organic farming. Tane suggests the urgent need for a ‘new cultural perspective to restore and rebuild the ecostructures’ required for the ‘sustainable development of human communities’. The ecological disaster in the colonized countries all over the world substantiates the concept of ‘cultural baggage’ (more poignantly). Robert Nelson in his essay “Environmental Colonialism” talks of a new form of colonialism the Africans have to face since the last half century as a consequence of the colonialist’s attempt to save the African environment. The propagators of CBNRM (Community-based natural resource management), a movement of the conservationists in the most part in southern and eastern Africa stands for the assistance of local African people to mane the wildlife conservation successful. Nelson criticizes the Western environmentalist vision of ‘depeopled land’. They force the indigenous people who love and protect their habitat to remove from the reserved area so that they can’t use the place. But they can’t stop others such as smugglers and poachers who are solely interested in excavating the forest resources. Nelson argues, “While populations must be constrained and use must be limited to avoid the massive changes industrialized countries have inflicted on their own lands, local populations with intimate knowledge living on and from the land are the very best ones to do that”. Conservation in the developing countries is coming out as a new form of ecocolonialism. The colonialists first took control of the countries for utilizing the resources, and now the conservationists are doing the same thing in the name of ‘saving the environment’. The local people are being displaced for the sake of ‘protected areas’ and wildlife parks. The indigenous people are losing their rights to live off the forest. The worst victims of this policy are the Bambuti Ba’twa tribe of Pygmies living in the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo who were evicted from their lands to establish a national park to protect gorillas in 1990s. One of their chiefs said, “Life was healthy and good, but we have become beggars, thieves and prowlers. This disaster has been imposed on us by the creation of the national park.” (qtd in Vidal). In Oceania, the concept of the ownership of land, freehold, leasehold, license tenures are the ‘gift’ of the Europeans. This process of resource and property management fails to integrate the cultural values of the Indigenous people. Tane writes, “European models for nature conservation are referred to as eco- colonial institutions by indigenous peoples of Oceania”. Tom Griffiths is highly anxious at the situation of the ecological loss:

Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological cultural loss, and sometimes a heartening parable of hope and learning. Ecologists working in Australia today often feel like they are ambulance drivers arriving at the scene of an accident…Such a roller-coaster of environmental history makes us think differently and more sharply than the rest of the world on many ecological matters.

This anxiety is echoed by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, the first Australian Aboriginal poet, through her poems. The immediate and most drastic evidence of the ‘roller-coaster of environmental history’ is the dispossession— of both, nature and human. If we study the traditional life of the Australian Aborigines, we’ll see that these people are an integral part of nature. They are the local people ‘with intimate knowledge living on and from the land’ (Nelson) who are ‘the very best ones’ to manage the natural resources and the ecological balance most successfully. So the deforestation as a consequence of colonization causing dislocation of natural environment along with the elements of nature including the Indigenous people is obviously the main culprit in the Australian ecological history. Again, the Australian Indigenous people and their natural environment are intermingled in such a way that the impact of deforestation upon them cannot be considered separately. They can’t exist without one another. Oodgeroo alludes to the colonial exploitation accompanied by dispossession, both of human and of the elements of nature in the very first poem of her first published book We Are Going. In the “Aboriginal Charter of Rights” which was presented at the 5th Annual General Meeting of the Federal Council of Aboriginal Advancement in 1962, she raises her voice against colonial dispossession:

Must we native Old Australians In our own land rank as aliens? Banish bans and conquer caste, Then we’ll win our own at last. (L. 41-44)

In “The Dispossessed” the poet asserts that it was the Aborigines who knew the ways to peaceful living: “Peace was yours, Australian man, with tribal laws you made,/ Till white colonials stole your peace with rape and murder raid;” (L. 1-2). This ‘rape and murder’ talked about is not only the rape and murder that the tribal people were the victim of, rather its territory is extended to the surrounding environment they live within and also to its elements. Destroying their surrounding means destroying the lifestyle, the ‘tribal laws’ that helped them to attain that ‘peace’, the lesson of not disturbing and not being disturbed by the other elements of nature. But nowadays, as a consequence of white encroachment on their land, these people are losing their own place— “The white man claimed your hunting grounds and you could not remain” (“The Dispossessed”, L.5). They are now compelled to serve as slaves to the white settlers ‘for greedy private reasons’ (“The Dispossessed”, L.6), working against their tribal laws and also the laws of nature. Presently they are surviving at the ‘outskirts’ in their ‘own native land’ (“The Dispossessed”, L. 12). The poem that depicts the agony of colonial dispossession most poignantly is “We Are Going”. The poem shows a few remaining people of a particular tribe, ‘a semi-naked band’ come to visit the place where they once lived and from where they were driven out by the white settlers. They come to the place which were once their favourite ‘old bora ground’. To their utter astonishment they find that it has now been converted into a garbage stand with a notice from the estate agent: “Rubbish May Be Tipped Here” (“We Are Going”, L.6). Rubbish has covered almost half of the bora ring, where once the sacred ceremony of Bora was performed. They sit confused, wondering how they became strangers to the land that belonged to them for thousands of years: “We belong here, we are of the old ways” (“We Are Going”, L.10). Actually, the act of dispossession occurs in multiple levels. The tribal people are not the only sufferers of this act. It happens on the environmental level too. These people are only a part of nature: “We are nature and the past” (“We Are Going”, L.21). Along with them were dislodged the other natural inhabitants of the land. The old ways of living that taught them to dwell in harmony with the natural world were also lost:

The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. The bora ring is gone. The corroboree is gone. And we are going. (“We Are Going”, L. 23-27)

Another poem that shows the poet lamenting for the extinction of a tribe is “Gooboora, the Silent Pool” which she dedicates to ‘Grannie Sunflower Last of the Noonuccals’. The extinction of a tribe makes her anxious because she has the capacity to realize the ecological importance of the issue. It is not the question of the end of only a particular tribe. It is the end of one of the species of nature, causing great harm to biodiversity. Gooboora is a pool that silently watches the gradual abolition/eradication of the people of the tribe that lived around it: “Gooboora, Gooboora, still here you remain,/ But where are my people I look for in vein?” (“Gooboora, the Silent Pool”, L.13-14). They have disappeared from the hill and the shore. They have gone so far away that the Silent Pool cannot see them anymore. Along with them have also gone some other things related to them: “Now lost is the Noonuccal language and song” (“Gooboora, the Silent Pool”, L.22). The sensitive heart of the poet bleeds: “Gooboora, Gooboora, it makes the heart sore/ That you should be here but my people no more!” (“Gooboora, the Silent Pool”, L.23-24). “Understand, Old One” was an outcome of the shock the poet felt at the time of visiting an old native burial ground near Brisbane at the time of excavation of bones done by the University people. Painfully she stares at the ‘learned ones/ At your open grave’ (“Understand, Old One”, L.3-4) with modern equipments “Peer and probe, handle the yellow bones,/ To them specimens, to me/ more” (“Understand, Old One”, L.7-9). She is deeply moved by the spectacle. She tries to imagine how would the ‘old one’ under the grave feel if he could come back now and she the drastically changed situation, replacing their ‘old peaceful camping place’ (“Understand, Old One”, L. 21) and ‘red fires along the quiet water’ (“Understand, Old One” L. 22) with ‘towering stone gunyas high in air/ Immense, incredible” (“Understand, Old One”, L.24-25) and “clustered neon lights” (“Understand, Old One”, L.29). The poet is not sure whether this new world, the new civilization, based on the tears of other people, leads the newly arriving Christians to their ‘most desired’ Heaven or is this the Gate of Hell, ensuring their eternal suffering hereafter as a consequence of their anti-environmental activities. Oodgeroo also registers her protest against the practice of imposing the ‘cultural baggage’ on the new abode. As Tane claims, the environmental deterioration in Australia is caused mainly by this paradox. A little knowledge about the traditional ways of life of the Aborigines helps in realizing the intensity of the ‘ecological cultural loss’ in Australia. The history of colonization of Australia also presents before us the attempt of the colonizers to wipe out these traditions. All the tribes of Australian Aborigines were “semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers” (Broome 15) within their own territories of various sizes. Their search for food was not “an aimless search but one directed by an intimate knowledge of the land and the season” (Broome 15). They attained excellent efficiency in hunting and food gathering. For the Aborigines, the land was not just soil or rock or minerals. For them, it was the whole environment that sustains, and is sustained, by people and culture. Whereas the white people live off the land, these people endeavour to live with the land. They don’t own the land, rather the land owns them. Land is at the centre of the traditional ways of life of the Aborigines. It sustains their life in every aspect—physically, socially, culturally and spiritually. The Aboriginal people never cultivated the land, never ploughed it, never planted a fruit tree or never grew corns. They never had to. They believe that Earth, the mother, had given them plenty to live on. They also believe that to farm the land would be harming the mother Earth. They just accepted what she gave them. They are spiritually connected to these places. Significantly, their spirituality is ‘geosophical’ (earth-centred), and not ‘theosophical’ (God- centred). Australian Aborigines were an integrated part of nature and knew how to how to sustain life without disturbing the balance in ecology. Their lifestyle could have been a lesson for the so-called civilized European settlers. But instead of learning from them, the white settlers were trying to efface their existence. This was actually the worst possible attack on the environment. Along with the decreasing number of the Aborigines, the balance in nature began to detoriate. And the final assault on it was the Policy of Assimilation. It was basically designed to efface the Aboriginal beliefs and traits from the lives of the Aborigines and to replace it by the white ways of life. It means that the Aboriginal people will physically exist, but exist without the lessons they received from their ancestors, the lesson that taught them to respect the laws of nature, to live and let live. In place of that they would learn to destroy the pastures, to kill the animals and so on only for fulfilling the greed of the white settlers for more money. For the success of the policy, the Aborigines Protection Board decided in 1883 that for the ‘desocialization’ of the children as Aborigines and their ‘resocialization’ as whites, they must be removed from their parents. Child removal is, for Peter Read, “to put it practically, the separation of the teaching generation from the learning generation” (xii). This separation harmed the Aboriginal process of educating the new generations their traditional lessons of the Dreamtime stories, their physical and spiritual relations with the land and with nature. Two more acts were introduced for the success of this policy—the Exemption Certificate and the West Australian Government Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944. The basic idea behind it was to give a native equal right with the whites on some derogatory conditions which mean, in brief, they would have to leave any connection with their traditional, eco-friendly ways of life and yield to the European one which is devoid of any sense of respect for nature. In “Namatjira”, a poem in the memory of the famous Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira who was sent to jail in 1959 only for sharing liquor with his fellow tribesmen and died thereafter, Oodgeroo reflects, “For you strangled in rules the white men made;/ You broke no law of your own wild clan/ which says, ‘Share all with your fellow men.’” (L. 6-8). This sense of sharing is in the blood of the Aborigines which runs through them for generations after generations. They learnt to share food, space, and life with the other creatures of the environment, to ‘live and let live’. This feeling is absent within the white settlers. In “White Man, Dark Man” she declares, “We had socialism/ Long before you came” (L.8-9). For the Aborigines, the spirit of socialism is not limited only to the human world. “The Dispossessed” also held the teachings of the whites responsible for the loss of peace on the part of the tribal people. The whites killed and raped and shot and poisoned them, snatched their hunting grounds away from them and thus took away their means of living. They could do nothing. The whites imposed upon them Christianity, which is believed to be an anthropocentric belief by a large number of modern critics. They could say nothing. The poet cries:

They brought you Bibles and disease, the liquor and the gun: With Christian culture such as these the white command was won. A dying race you linger on, degraded and oppressed, Outcasts in your own native land, you are the dispossessed. (“The Dispossessed”, L. 9-12)

Oodgeroo does never hesitate to call the whites ‘unhappy’. And the reason behind their unhappiness is their gradually increasing distance with nature. She shows them how they, in their attempt to ‘enslave’ nature and natural objects including the indigenous people, have themselves become the slaves of the rules and regulations of their own so-called ‘civilization’. Modern man takes pride in their equipments to fight against the ‘whims’ of nature and taming its agents. But they can’t realize the fact that these machines are taking them far away from the thing most desired— happiness and peace. The white people consider their ways of life, their civilization to be superior to others. So they desire that others should also follow these. But in excess of self-pride they tend not to understand the fact that they are losing their affinity to nature. The material prosperity they hanker after may not be longed for by others. In fact, that desire may not be wise at all. Through the poet the Indigenous voice questions this self- claimed superiority:

You say we must be like you, You say we must leave the old freedom and leisure, We must be civilized and work for you. Why, white fellow? (“The Unhappy Race”, L.9-12)

Promptly she denies to accept the imposition of such thoughts: “we don’t want your collars and ties,/ We don’t need your routines and compulsions” (“The Unhappy Race”, L. 13-14). Even the representative of the so-called ‘uncivilized’, ‘primitive’ people can understand the universal truth that the ‘advanced’ whites can’t, even after possessing so much ‘knowledge’ about the universe: “Poor white man of the unhappy race” (“The Unhappy Race”, L.16). Thus Oodgeroo also protests against the Policy of Assimilation undertaken by the Australian government: “Must the genius of an old race die/ That the race might live?” (“Assimilation—No!”, L. 3-4). She asserts that the process of wiping out a tradition that has been continuing for such a long period won’t be that easy. The lives of the Aboriginal people are deeply rooted in the knowledge handed down to them by their ancestors. They are leading a very happy and complacent life under those laws that help them to know their surroundings so well. Without this knowledge about the environment they can’t survive. So the idea of changing their whole belief-system within a day is not at all a wise one: “The gum cannot be trained into an oak” (“Assimilation—No!”, L. 16). Some things are there in the world that could not be and should not be changed. On behalf of these people the poet asserts/ declares: “We will forward and learn/ …but keeping/ Our own identity, our pride of race” (“Assimilation—No!”, L.19-20). They are so very much proud of their tradition of living peacefully, in alliance with the elements of nature. The poet realizes that the comfort the people of the present day are enjoying lies in the hard labour and the wisdom of our forefathers. For them, the past or the lessons acquired from the ancestors are not the things of yesterday. It is equally relevant in these days of progress and development: “The past is all about us and within” (“The Past” L.2). The modern people are the outcome of the long process of making that has been continuing from the past. Even when the poet is sitting in an ‘easy chair before the electric heater’ (“The Past”, L.8), she is lost in imagination:

At the camp fire in the bush, among my people, sitting on the ground, No walls about me, The stars over me, The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind Making their own music. (“The Past”, L.11-16)

This is the feeling that brings the Aborigines so close to nature. They can’t even imagine themselves without the natural environment they are so familiar to. This feeling does make them a part of nature that can never be separated from them: “But a thousand thousand camp fires in the forest/ Are in my blood” (“The Past”, L.23-24). The sensitive mind of the poet can realize the grief of the old people of the tribe to watch the rapid changes forcefully done to their favourite places by those people who never could and never did try to understand the significance of those places. She can also feel the agony of the spirit of the dead old people of the race if they ‘Came at night upon these miles/ Of clustered neon lights” (Understand, Old One”, L. 28-29) to see his own people and place. But by nature Oodgeroo is highly optimistic. It seems that long before Tane, Oodgeroo speaks in favour of ‘careful design and sustainable development’ that can ‘enhance environmental systems’ (Tane). It is her optimism that makes her hopeful about the situation in spite of the colonial aggression, deforestation and dislocation of Aboriginal people from their natural environment. She tries to find a way to reconciliation—way of the co-existence between development and the sustenance of the laws of nature. So the poet strongly opposes the Policy of Assimilation and speaks in favour of Integration. She is eager to learn the new things, ‘new compulsions’ that she calls the ‘price of survival’ (“Integration—Yes”, L. 8- 9). She knows that each and every tradition of the past can’t be carried forward intact in the future. Some facts are always there that have to be changed. But she never agrees to change those beliefs that sustain the lives of the Aborigines. She wants the old customs that taught them to live happily within nature without disturbing it to be kept unchanged. She asserts:

Much that we loved is gone and had to go, But not the deep indigenous things. The past is still so much a part of us, Still about us, still within us. We are happiest Among our own people. (“Integration—Yes!”, L.10-15)

In “Civilization” she admits the necessity of development. Surely, the whites have advanced in so many ways. But before they could realize it, they have become trapped in the rules and regulations made by themselves. The Aboriginal people can’t understand the meaning of this “mass obedience to clocks, time-tables” (“Civilization”, L. 16). Along with the concrete, towering buildings, cars, planes, neon lights, civilization has also introduced the jails and orphanages which were unknown to the tribal people. Oodgeroo accepts that “we have benefited, we have been lifted/ With new knowledge, a new world opened” (“Civilization”, L.28-29). But at the same time she knows that all these new things can provide only comfort. These can lessen one’s physical labour and pain, but can never bring happiness to life. Happiness can never be attained after being detached from nature. And the knowledge of the art of happiness is known only by those people who have the experience of living within nature for thousands of years. So the poet reminds the ‘civilized’ people that “if life is for happiness, /You too, surely, have much to change.” (“Civilization”, L. 33-34).

Works Cited

Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance 1788-2001. 3rd ed. NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Print. Griffiths, Tom. The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia. Australian Humanities Review. N.p. Dec. 2007. Web. 7 Feb. 2013. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December- 2007/EcoHumanities/Griffiths.html#article Nelson, Robert. Environmental Colonialism. Crumb Trail, 27 Aug. 2003. Web. 9 Apr. 2013. Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. We Are Going. Brisbane: The Jacaranda Press, 1964. Print. ---. The Dawn Is at Hand. Brisbane: The Jacaranda Press, 1966. Print. Read, Peter, and Coral Edwards. Introduction. The Lost Children: Thirteen Australians taken from their Aboriginal families tell of the struggle to find their natural parents. Sydney: Doubleday, 1989. Print. Tane, Haikai. Colonial Myths— Cultural Realities: Sustainable Development in South Pacific. Watershed Systems Ltd. n.d. Web. 9 Apr. 2013. http://www.watershed.net.nz/colonial_myths_updated.htm Vidal, John. Batwa/ Mapuche: Victims of Eco-colonialism?. Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, 13 Feb. 2008. Web. 10 Apr. 2013. http://www.unpo.org

Meena Kandasamy: “Ms Militancy” of Indian English Poetry

Goutam Buddha Sural

The title of my paper uses the phrase “Ms Militancy” which is actually the title of the second volume of Meena Kandasamy’s poems. In fact she appears to me ‘Ms Militancy the second’ of Indian English poetry, the first militant woman voice obviously is that of Kamala Das. When I first started reading the poems of Kandasamy I felt that she was a continuator of Kamala Das in the genre of confessional poetry. I sent her a mail requesting her response on my take about her poetry. She wrote back: There is a strong confessional mode in a few poems in Touch. I would advice you to also read my next collection Ms Militancy and see the poems here - because they are not confessional, or autobiographical, they are instead feminist retellings of oppressive myths from Hindu/Tamil culture. So I am not sure if I am a "confessional poet", but then, there are many poems of mine in Touch and Ms Militancy that will be classified under the genre of confessional poetry. So professor, you are indeed right in a way. I do believe that the personal is the political. Besides Kamala Das who was my earliest influence, I was also greatly influenced by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, so poems like Aftermath, or Their Daughters, or He Replaces Poetry indeed belong to that form. (http://in-mg61.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=6kol43po7t4ms#mail 21 Feb, 2013) In the “Foreward” to Kandasamy’s first volume of poems Touch Kamala Das writes: Once again after long years of search I came into contact with the power of honest poetry when I was reading Meena Kandasamy’s anthology of verse. She wore a fabric rare and strange, faintly smudged with the Indianness of her thought…Older by nearly half a century, I acknowledge the superiority of her poetic vision and wish her access to the magical brew of bliss and tears each true poet is forced to partake of, day after day, month after month, year after year… (7) Through an analysis of her poems I would try to show that she is not only a continuator of the confessional mode of writing in Indian English poetry , but in her poems she is continually trying to create a female space which is denied to them even in the 21st century. For both Kamala Das and Meena Kandasamy the starting point may be some hidden or suppressed personal experience which they needed to ventilate through their writings. But the intense interest that greets the poetry of Kamala Das is a pointer to the fact that readers still remain fascinated by the issues. The reason is the deeper concerns that almost always underpin the personal in her poems. As Joan Aleshire writes in her essay, “Staying News”, “… the poem of personal experience—the true lyric poem—can, through vision, craft, and objectivity toward the material, give a sense of commonality with unparalleled intimacy.” (8) Both Das and Kandasamy experienced failures in love and much of their poetry is rooted in their sense of being jilted in love. In Kandasamy’s poem “He Replaces Poetry” the reader comes to know the frustrating experience which turned the speaker persona into a whore; the poem begins thus: “Two months into love and today I turn into a whore.” This devastating experience has made her feel that “…happiness is a hollow world for fools to / Inhabit, where all the dreams eventually die by coming to life” (17-18). She tries to unburden herself of her suffering and frantically searches for words to express her feelings; she writes: Love has smothered me to a gay inertia and I long for a little Hurt and pain that will let me scream and I wait for offending Words to row me into words where I shall cry wildly for whole Nights like the laments of lonely, old and graying seas... (20-23)

She is confident that “Poetry, in the end, shall replace all of him” (25). Confessional poetry has often been used as a medical strategy, as a therapy that often works wonder by curing the maladies of afflicted minds. Meena Kandasamy’s poems exposes us to a reality that is universal and a psychology we are familiar with on a wide spectrum; and though the poet is clearly a part of the drama of the poem, the emotions revealed are not simply expressions of the poet. Her poems universalize the first person even as it dwells upon the poet-speaker’s solitary grief. In one of her poems “Apologies for living on . . .” the poet speaks about the helpless condition of a girl in search of her ‘prince’. The “I” in this poem is a representative character, not necessarily the poet herself: i am living on because providing apologies is easy once— i was making choices with insanely safe ideas of fleeing-madly-and-flying-away. i was a helpless girl against the brutal world of bottom-patting-and-breast-pinching. i was craving for security the kind i had only known while aimlessly-afloat-and-speculating-in-the-womb. (1-12)

The self that she presents is less herself than a person at war with several sides of her psyche, in fact there are multiple selves under the garb of first person pronoun shifting emotionally and intellectually in the world. The ‘I’ in her poems is carefully adjusted to universalize her sense of loss. In a poem entitled “My lover speaks of rape” she writes: …Tragedy in Bridal red remains a fresh, flushing bruise across Brown-yellow skinscapes, vibrant but made Muted through years of silent, waiting skin. I am absent. They talk of everyday assault that Turns blue, violate and black in high color symphony. (14-19) The irony of the phrase ‘high-colour symphony’ immediately strikes the reader. The speaker becomes every woman who is dying a dowry death or who suffers the tragedy in bridal bed. ‘Every’ here implies that no one is exempt from the loss—that is natural for all women—her, me, them, and us. The poem ends with an uncertainty—a sense of insecurity and resignation is felt in the concluding lines. The speaker is not sure if her preferred loneliness can offer her the required resistance against her lover or her lover would learn to live her life: And loneliness seems safer than a gentle night In his arms. I return from the self-defence lessons: Mistrust is the black-belted, loose white mechanism Of survival against this groping world and I am A convert too. Yet in the way of all life, he could try And take root, as I resist, and yield later, like the earth. Open eyes, open hands, his all-clear soul… Has he learnt to live my life? Has he learnt never to harm? (22-29) Even in her strongly autobiographical poems the speaker rises above the confessional self and the revelation of her intimate truth emotionally touches the heart of the reader. In her poem “Aftermath” she writes about the strange experience of a school girl who is outspoken, brave and carefree: because of your boldness and brashness and bunking classes your ulcerated vomit is taken for morning sickness. the sourness extends when you hear hushed whispers passing around girls younger than you, point at you and speak such banal secrets. in staff-rooms, and in ungainly corridors teachers chatter of your child, so vividly imagined in the backdrop of your really empty womb. slander is a slaughterhouse. (10-20) The speaker’s sense of shame sends her out from herself into society to look for other such girls who might understand her plight. The society we live in is a peculiar one which always shows a relish for something spicy, even if it is untrue and baseless. Scandal or slander, if it does not touch one personally then one finds immense pleasure in talking about such things. The speaker says that even best friends start believing in the rumour and the society mounts up pressure on her to confess the ‘sin.’ The poem speaks of a consequence which is common in case of most of the confessional poets—a sense of depression and a strong desire to commit suicide; the last lines of the poem go like this: …anger and hatred seethe in your untamed tresses yes you know how gossip chokes even the tethered dreams yes something breaks in you yes dear yes you start the brute search for sleeping pills and chaste suicide ideas. (35-40) But the poem moves beyond mere confession. It’s a marvelous blending of the autobiographical and the imaginative. I may quote here the words of an American poet Andrew Hudgins. In his essay, “The Glass Anvil: “The Lies of an Autobiographer” ” he writes: Autobiography is in some ways a translation of actuality onto the page, and in other ways, a selective and imaginative recreation, a work of art—and the two roles can go to bed together and enjoy their uneasy congress only by lying to each other. (183) In confessional poetry the autobiographical information is presented in such a way as to affect the reader’s feelings about the poet. In such poems the speaker, calling herself / himself ‘I’ builds a poem around what appears to be autobiographical information, but this is not always true. In fact any lyric poet, for that matter alters details to some degree. There is a point in the poet’s recreating their lives. It helps them transcend the personal and appear universal. In this connection we are reminded of the poetry of Kamala Das. She uses the device of ‘manipulation’ and says ‘… an author can manipulate thoughts of her readers, her devoted readers at any rate. Manipulation is not a bad word all the time” (Das “Manipulation is not a bad word all the time”). In her poem “Composition” Kamala Das writes, “I know that by confessing / by peeling off my layers / I reach closer to the soul,” (162-64) but such confessions are at times a mask to hide the actual experience. She herself says, “One must begin the habit of wearing masks to reveal the true feelings or to conceal them, whichever seems best” (Das “A considerate man will not park himself on a widow’s sofa late in the evening”). In a poem having the same title, Meena Kandasamy writes: Poetry dictates itself In your mind. Short lines Rip through, like bullets From a machine gun.

The poem comes with the Freshness of a life set free, Whistling its way Painfully, like wind searing Through the palm fronds. (8-16) In case of both the poets poetry becomes a medium of protest, a means of unburdening the psychological weight of their perceived victimization by the male world. Both of them find a kind of psychological emancipation through composing poems. In a poem titled “Eyes Meeting” Kandasamy narrates the experience of most Indian females when they are ready for the marriage market and their destiny after the wedding actually takes place: …when they come to see you For a possible bride, look at the floor The fading carpet and the unshapely toes Of the visitors who will inspect the weight Of your gold, the paleness of your complexion, The length of your hair and ask questions about The degrees you hold and the transparency of your past. (3-9) The irony inherent in the title becomes apparent when the wife’s status gets degraded to that of a slave and love turns out to be a misnomer: “you are whisked away to toil like the ancient / Slave labourers of Mesopotamia who were called Igi-nu-du / Which in the Sumerian meant ‘Not raising eyes’ ” (14-16). The confessional nature of her narratives portraying women’s experience from childhood to a grown up woman linked her poems to every Indian female. The personal nature of ‘telling’ had created a kind of collective, confessional consciousness and ultimately a collective redemption. In a poem “Their Daughters” this becomes clearly perceptible where the speaker persona speaks about ‘paracetamol legends.’ Women of her motherland have the long standing tradition of raising their heads against the oppression and torture of the males. In the lives of Indian women through generations we have seen the enactment of ‘paracetamol legends.’ The speaker asserts that the women of her generation still belong to that tradition: “We: their daughters / We: the daughters of their soil / We, mostly, write” (17-19). This marvelous use of generational-confessional strategy as used in the poem strikes the reader. Pamela Gemin in her essay “Bless me, Sisters” writes: For women writers especially, the generational-confessional provides a vital space for discussion that might never have been possible in real time, and unite poet and audience using a common cultural code. Thus, some experience considered personal and private, dangerous and even sacred—sexual and body-centered experience, for example—reemerge in richly textured poetry about virginity, pregnancy, sexual discovery, and sexual violence, as experienced both individually and collectively by women of the same generation. (236) In a poem “Give me the Clothes” there are three exhibits, three pictures of women which are hanging publicly on Brigade Road. These pictures “record shame and violation and helpless despair.” The three pictures consist of a girl at eleven, a girl at sixteen, and a woman at twenty one. The three descriptions speak of sexual harassment at a visual level. The male sees the woman as an object of desire of his domain—under his gaze of possession. In an overwhelmingly male dominated society the concept of men as watchers and women as watched is still found today despite the fact that women are moving forward in great strides. The inequality of gender relations and a sexualisation of the female image remain culturally central even today. Such images of women reassure men of their sexual power and at the same time deny any sexuality to women other than the male construction (Wykes and Gunter 38-9). Meena Kandasamy’s poems hit at the hypocrisy of the males who speak of women as goddess but practically believes in enslavement of women in household chores. The margin between a wife and maid fades away; with pungent irony the poet writes in her poem “You”: If, or when, she left you, I know you wouldn’t, You wouldn’t care to die. You will simply search For a better maid (yes the pun implied). And you might get her too. Your rigid eyes and that hackneyed fascist charm Oh, I know some daft girl will come. And she too, poor creature will slave away. Singing in the kitchen. Barefooted. And you will tell to your friends, And others about: your new goddess. (1-12) In patriarchal society the wife is allowed a sublime status if she is perfectly obedient in carrying out her domestic role. The more a wife is submissive the more she is sublime in the eyes of the society. Talking about women’s work within the home Simone de Beauvoir says, “…woman’s work within the home gives her no autonomy; … Woman is not allowed to do something positive in her work and in consequence win recognition as a complete person. However respected she may be, she is subordinate, secondary, parasitic” (475). The poet writes: Your society always makes The spoon-feeding-the-man The pot-and-pan banging, The-sweeping-the-floor The masochist slave And other submissive women As goddesses. (“You” 13-19) The gendered structured marriage leads to woman’s disempowerment as it fosters a system as it fosters a system of patriarchal hierarchy. The power imbalance in marriage leads to inequalities and restricts the choice of the female. While as an institution it idealizes equal rights and liberties for the partners, in actual life it hardly addresses the issue of power equality between the spouses. Beauvoir says that “marriage normally subordinates wife to husband” (480). But there are women who do not submit, who register their protest in various ways and are dubbed as “she-demons.” The poem goes: And my kind, or my mother’s kind, the one that fight, rebel, hit at you the one who wouldn’t mind a swear word or two, are she-demons, (“You” 20-23) In a similar vein Beauvoir also says: But she does rebel. Even if at first she was impressed by male prestige, her bedazzlement soon evaporates….Sometimes she submits with masochistic pleasure: she assumes the role of victim and her resignation is only a long, silent reproach; but it may often happen also that she engages in open battles with her master and insists on tyrannizing over him in return. (484) Side by side, both Kamala Das and Meena Kandasamy also recognize the positive role of males in their lives. Kamala Das acknowledged the positive role played by her husband behind her literary career. In an interview with Sobha Warrier she said, If my husband had not been sympathetic to some degree, I would not have been a writer at all. I know of women who decided to become writers or artists, but then changed their mind later because of the interference from the husbands. Mine not only turned away but welcomed. He took some pride in my writing which was a great help to me. (Das “Poetry died with me”) In poems like “An Angel Meeting Me”, “If everything comes crashing down” or “You will remain with me” Kandasamy writes about her male partner who is very special to her. She writes in “If everything comes crashing down”: I do not know what you would Treasure of me in your mind. But in billboards planted Across my fervent heart, I will celebrate you as the man Who made me woman. (5-10) This is an acknowledgement of the fact that the mutuality of the relationship helped her consolidate her identity as a woman. Certain features like exploitation, discrimination, humiliation, sexual abuse and assault are globally common features in the poetry of women poets. In the poetry of these two poets we find the rare power of womanhood fighting against inequalities and exploitations thrust upon them. In one of her poems “Nailed” Kandasamy writes about how the male power tries to suppress the female voice: Men are afraid of any woman who makes poetry and dangerous portents. Unable to predict when, for what, and for whom she will open her mouth, unable to stitch up her lips, they silence her. (1-3) Whenever the women try to protest, or whenever their creative energy is transformed into unembarrassed voices of power and determination the politics of power relation between the sexes becomes evident in the male’s effort at stifling the voices of women. As Nabanita Deb Sen rightly points out: The woman writer is not given the license to do as she pleases, either with the language or with her life. She must conform. As it is, she is chiefly a trespasser and a transgressor, a breaker of rules. She has already reversed the position by taking up the pen. Enough is enough. (300) Often the women are represented as disloyal and lascivious and that within the institution of marriage such women need to be regulated by a male authority whose interests are at stake. The wife’s chastity can be guaranteed only by exercising proper control over her, by subjecting her pleasures to a whole range of moral interdictions. In her poem “Jouissance” we meet such a husband whose wife perhaps wanted to be independent and self-governing: An angry philosopher froze His philandering wife: passivity As punishment for promiscuity. Rendered senseless, set in stone, She stared in unceasing surprise As her sage husband toured The world with his treatises on What pleasure meant to women And a powerpoint presentation That showed close-up photos Of her fixed phantom face. (1-11) The poem reminds us of the possessive duke of Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess.” But the point to note here is that the average women participated in the coercion as they know that there is no other alternative. It’s a ‘game’ that the male society plays in the name of upholding the norms of ‘pativrata’ and ‘stridharma’(‘devotion to husband’ and ‘wifely duty’). Not that the women don’t understand their plight but they feel that ideologically submitting to these norms would guarantee them their safe domestic life. The last stanza of the poem goes like this: Other women grasped the game. They knew no man would ever Let them be, ever set them free. So, when asked, they answered With wide-eyed wonder Yes yes yes o yes yes yes O yes yes yes yes yes yes . (19-25) Women in general, whether they belong to same or different strata of society, have a wounded psyche. In the poetry of Meena Kandasamy the confessional ‘I’ represents all such women who are targets of male violence and power. The para-factual existence of many events in her life transcends the barriers of self and reflects the anguish and agony of women cutting across class and caste.

Works Cited

Aleshire, Joan. “Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric”, After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. eds., Kate Sontag & David Graham, Graywolf Press, Minnesota, 2001. Beauvoir Simone de, The Second Sex, Vintage, London, 1997. Das, Kamala. “Manipulation is not a bad word all the time”, interview with Sobha Warrier. http://www.rediff.com/news/1996/3107edas.htm 1996 Rediff on The Net, web. 29th July, 2013. ------“Poetry died with me”, interview with Sobha Warrier. http://www.rediff.com/news/1996/3107edas.htm 1996 Rediff on The Net, web. 29th July, 2013. ------“A considerate man will not park himself on a widow’s sofa late in the evening” http://im.rediff.com/style/jul/15das.htm July 15, 1997 Rediff on The Net, web. 29th July, 2013. Gemin, Pamela. “Bless me, Sisters”, After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Hudgins, Andrew. “The Glass Anvil: “The Lies of an Autobiographer” ”, After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Kandasamy, Meena. Touch, Peacock Books, Mumbai, 2006. ------Ms Militancy, Navayana Publishing, New Delhi, 2010. Sen, Nabanita Deb. “Eroticism and the Women Writer in Bengali Culture”, Faces of the Feminine in the Ancient, Medieval and Modern India, ed., Mandakranta Bose, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000. Wykes Maggie and Gunter Barrie, The Media & Body Image: If Looks Could Kill, Sage, New Delhi, 2005.

Contemporary Bangla Dalit Poetry: A Reading in Alternative Aesthetics

Joyjit Ghosh

The creation of literature has its own laws. Higher literary creation is possible only on the basis of these laws. Those who have the right to say that 'our humanity is our burden' can easily master these rules of literary art. The gift of art can never be as heavy as the burden of humanity. R.G.Jadhav, 'Dalit Feelings and Aesthetic Detachment'

Dalit literature is the literature of the oppressed and the exploited. And the element of protest is at the heart of this literature. It protests against the evil of casteism, economic exploitation, marginalization and cultural oppression. Quite obviously, the appreciation of this literature does not fit in the paradigm of established aesthetics, which is the backbone of mainstream literature. Dalit aesthetics is distinct from traditional aesthetics in its emphasis on social concerns rather than on beauty. It is an aesthetics which, to quote the words of Sharankumar Limbale, rests on three principles : "first, the artist's social commitment; second, the life-affirming values present in the artistic creation; and third, the ability to raise the reader's consciousness of fundamental values like equality, freedom, justice and fraternity" (Limbale 120). Bangla Dalit literature, and particularly poetry with which I deal in the present paper, is revolutionany in spirit, and Bangla Dalit writers like the Dalit writers of other provinces demand different aesthetic parameters for the appreciation of their works. Thus, Achinta Biswas, a Dalit poet and a leading intellectual of West Bengal, ardently requests his fellow-poets not to fall a prey to the trappings of Sanskrit poetics, and exhorts and inspires them to discover beauty even in that aspect of life which is unpleasant and ugly.1 The thrust of the paper is the poetics of protest in contemporary Bangla Dalit poetry (in English translation) with a reference to an alternative Dalit aesthetics which has evolved in the recent years. The poets whom I discuss here include Kalyani Thakur, Manju Bala, Anil Gharai, Sukanta Mondal and Sunil Kumar Das. All of these poets protest against the exploitation and oppression of the Dalits over the centuries in very many forms in their poems. Baburao Bagul writes, " 'Dalit' is the name for total revolution; it is revolution incarnate" (Bagul 294). Bagul is of the opinion that a human being is not inherently Dalit, neglected or untouchable. It is the system that degrades him/her in this fashion. Therefore, when the system is changed, the human being regains his human essence. The Bangla Dalit poets in their works fight against this very system : Draw your sword for the time is propitious ; Voices of protest gather at your doorstep The hand that seizes a weapon The hand that holds a pen Both sing the glory of a militant protest.2 When we read the above lines of Anil Gharai we understand why Dalit literature borders on activism. The pen and the weapon become one in the hands of a Dalit poet who sings "the glory of a militant protest" whenever there is exploitation / oppression of the have-nots. Viney Kirpal insightfully observes : Dalit poetry is the product of a psychosocial situation, which can be read effectively only if the critic reads it more as a social text than as an autotelic literary creation sealed within the pages of a book. Its significance and fuller meaning will reach us better if it is placed within the contemporary social scene and explained with inputs from studies in the social sciences (Kirpal 20). Kirpal gives this observation in connection with Marathi Dalit poetry but this is true of Bangla Dalit poetry as well. Dalit poetry flourished in West Bengal in the 70s and 80s but, to agree with Manohar Mouli Biswas (the erstwhile General Secretary of Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha and Editor of 'Dalit Mirror', a little magazine and a version of Dalit Literature in English), it got the momentum in the recent years with the incidence of Singur, Nandigram as well as well as that of Jangalmahal (land of the Dalits and the tribal people). In every place the marginalized are being more marginalized. They become the playthings in the hands of 'gentlemen revolutionaries.' 3 This finds a most vehement expression in the poem of Kalyani Thakur titled "The Idle Knaves Always get better of the Honest Toilers”: Pardon me, I cannot raise my voice like you from the end of a procession. Is anyone or his forefather who is shedding tears for farmlands or Vowing for industrialization on it ever engaged in cultivation? . . . Those gentlemen revolutionaries kindly move aside. . . . Revolution takes place at your sweet will, But people of Nandigram become the victims, They go to the jail also.4 In another poem titled "They who have no King" Kalyani Thakur protests against the cunning vote- begging politicians : "Wait Matna brother, /in the name of the Thakur,/Let not a single vote go elsewhere/Send this message to every door/we want no plough, no land,/First we want a king, let your roar be/'With our votes, our King'." 5 Kalyani Thakur carefully avoids the mention of any political party but she sharpens her weapon against all those politicians who use the poor masses as their tools, and at the same time reminds the latter of their right to elect their own representative. The Dalits know that revolution is a fake word on the lips of the hypocrites who do not mean development for them and whose slogan for development is fraught with the 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. 6 The Dalit poet thus cries out : Oh gods leave us alone, we may die of hunger but our dear ones be spared. No more need for progress, let it be reserved for you; We have not perished in the marsh and wilderness for centuries; Do not take more lives in the name of development.7 Dalit poetry, therefore, often engages in provocative emotional outbursts. R.G. Jadhav justly writes, "The problem of artistic detachment does not figure in Dalit poetry. The world of poetry is a world swayed and swept by emotional surges" (Jadhav 309). This observation is fairly borne out by the poetry of Sukanta Mondal, another leading Dalit poet of West Bengal : Spartacus is in me today His blood in my vein No more chain... We are on the road of another world Pacing in thousands and in millions Towards the Sun.8 By alluding to Spartacus the poet quite ably builds up the stark mood of a rebellion against all those inimical forces that believe in repressing the Dalit voice. The ending, however, is optimistic. For the march is towards the 'Sun'. While discoursing on the Dalit aesthetics Limbale lays emphasis on the life-affirming values present in the artistic creation. Dalit literature may be aggressive at times but it is scarcely negative in its impact on the readers. It places man at its centre. "It participates", as M.N. Wankhade writes, "in man's joys and sorrows and leads him to a just revolution." (Wankhade 326). This is only too true. Thus we listen to a Dalit poet : I have the power to make a river out of a desert ; I am not alone — I possess the whole blue firmament, I breathe in the bounteous breeze, I am nature's natural. Nobody paid any heed to my song ; Now it's time for an eruption — The seething volcano wakes up.9 This is the language of fervent hope. At the same time, this is the language of cultural revolt. But Bangla Dalit poetry is not always as revolutionary as this. Sometimes it narrates excruciating pain and unutterable sadness. R.G. Jadhav lucidly observes, "To live this life is painful enough ; it can be equally painful to recreate it on the mental level. Dalit writers are deeply involved in this process" (Jadhav 310-11). Manju Bala's "Fuels" is a classic case in point at this juncture : You have ridiculed me enough. My pen has lost its sharpness of edge I fail to depict myself in page.10 The poet says that she fails to 'depict' her agony but the reader appreciates the poignant expression of a Dalit sensibility that suffers yet creates. It is tempting to say that T.S. Eliot's theory of 'depersonalization' does not hold good in the context of Dalit poetry which always prefers the expression of a lived experience to that of an imaginative one.11 A Dalit never forgets that one is a Dalit for the caste-based society does not allow him/her to forget his/her essential Dalithood what Dangle calls 'differentness'.12 A Dalit writer is, therefore, always in search of his / her cultural identity. One may be reminded of those lines in Sunil Kumar Das where the poet inspires the Dalit people to reclaim their past : Let us remember the history of our own That can empower to fight and go ahead.13

S. P. Punalekar sounds quite convincing as he states : The quest for one's identity is a prime mover in the struggle for social equality and justice. And one cannot gain justice and freedom without struggle and mobilisation. Pity, compassion and compromise derail one's self-worth and dignity. Dalits should stay away from such trappings, the Dalit writers advocate (Punalekar 238). The Dalit writer will not stop till he raises "the reader's consciousness of fundamental values like equality, freedom, justice and fraternity" (Limbale 120). Like Lord Krishna he will exhort Arjuna to enter the battlefield and fight for the cause of the oppressed : O Mighty Arjuna ! Seize your Gandeeva ! For the making of a casteless, classless world of humans.14 "A Dalit writer is bound to have a Dalit point of view", writes Sharatchandra Muktibodh, "but this is not enough for a literary artist." Muktibodh then clarifies his argument, "It is essential for him to experience a Dalit insight of his own, through it" (Muktibodh 271). Anil Gharai in the lines quoted above transforms a Dalit point of view into a Dalit insight by identifying the Dalit writer with Arjuna and the Dalit consciousness with Krishna. He thus adds a new cultural value to his poem. I would like to conclude my paper with the words of Manohar Mouli Biswas : The Dalit poets have built up a new sense of beauty through establishing a new reality of life which may be termed as Naya-reality. They use two words to make it understand : Sympathy and Empathy. When the Dalits write their own experiences in poetry it happens out of empathy and when a non-Dalit writes about the life of a Dalit it is due to his / her sympathy for the sufferings they are suffering.15 Whether a non-Dalit can write with 'empathy' or embody in his/her work a Dalit's authentic experience is often a debated question. But there is no dispute about the issue that Dalit literature is the literature of commitment, it is the literature of social consciousness and self-respect. It, therefore, rejects traditional aesthetics which is based on the established notions of pleasure and beauty, and embraces an alternative aesthetics that speaks of sharing the pains and privations of the Dalit community, and clarifies in general the role of an artist in the society he / she belongs to. [This is a modified version of the paper presented at the UGC - sponsored National Seminar on "Cultural Studies and Literary Applications", organised by the Department of English, Panskura Banamali College in collaboration with V.U.E.T.C. on 3-4 February, 2012]

Notes : 1. The interested reader may have a look at Achinta Biswas's essay titled, 'Dalit literature : Ingredients of Art and Aesthetics', in Bangla Dalit Literature of Hundred Years, ed. Manohar Mouli Biswas and Shyamal Kumar Pramanik (Kolkata : Chaturtha Duniya, 2011) p. 47 2. These lines are from Anil Ghorai's "The Warrior" ("Gita"), translated by Indranil Acharya. See the poem in Journal of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Vol. 8 (2010- 11), p. 122 3. The interested readers may go through Manohar Mouli Biswas's essay titled 'A Critical Study : Bengali Dalit Poetry Past and Present', in Dalit Mirror, ed. M. M. Biswas, Vol. XII, issue I- III (July - December 2010), p. 24 4. These lines are quoted from Kalyani Thakur's poem "The Idle Knaves Always get better of the Honest Toilers" ("Nepora Doi Maare Chirokaal"), translated by A.K. Basu. Unpublished. The original Bangla poem is available in Bangla Dalit Literature of Hundred Years, ed. M.M. Biswas and Shymal Kumar Pramanik. 5. These lines are from Kalyani Thakur's "They who have no King" translated from "Je. Jaatir Raja Nai" by Sipra Mukherjee. See Dalit Mirror, Vol. XII / XIII : issue IV-VI/ I-III (Jan - Dec 2011), p. 19 The original poem is available in Kalyani's "Je Meya Andhar Gone". 6. The phrase 'hermeneutics of suspicion' has been borrowed by M.H. Abrams from the French philosopher of language Paul Ricoeur while Abrams discusses 'subtext' in A Glossary of Literary Terms, eighth edn. (with contribution by Geoffrey Galt Harpham), 2005 Thomson Wadsworth, first Indian rpt. 2007, p. 251. 7. The quoted lines are from Kalyani's "Exploiter-Exploited Conversation", translated by A. K. Basu. Unpublished. The original poem is "Shoshok O Shoshiter Songlaap." 8. These lines are from Sukanta Mondal's "Revolt". The translation is by the poet himself. See Dalit Mirror Vol. XII/XIII, p. 24 9. The quoted lines are from "Puppet" ("Putul") by Anil Ghorai. The poem has been translated by Indranil Acharya. See the translated piece in Journal of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Vol. 8 (2010-11), p. 123 10. Manju Bala's "Fuels" has been translated by Manohar Mouli Biswas from the book of poems Aswarohir Apekshay of this poet. See "Fuels" in Dalit Mirror, Vol. XII/XIII, p. 21 11. T. S. Eliot in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' observes, "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." See the essay in English Critical Texts : 16th Century to 20th Century, edited with Notes and an Appendix of Classical Extracts, by D. J. Enright and Ernest de Chickera, (Delhi : O.U.P., 1962), p. 297 12. The use of the expression 'differentness' by Dangle has been alluded to in Sharankumar Limbale's Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, p. 13. 13. These lines are from "Choar Vidroha" ("The Choar Rebellion") published in the Rarbhum Magazine. M. M. Biswas quotes these lines in his essay 'A Critical Study : Bengali Dalit Poetry Past and Present', p. 27 14. These are the concluding lines of Anil Ghorai's "The Warrior" ("Gita") 15. The extract is from Manohar Mouli Biswas's essay "A Critical Stuey : Bengali Dalit Poetry Past and Present", p. 30

Works Cited

Bagul, Baburao. 'Dalit Literature is but Human Literature'. In Poisoned Bread : translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature. Ed. Arjun Dangle. Hyderabad : Orient BlackSwan, first pub. 2009; rpt. 2011. Print. Jadhav, R. G. 'Dalit Feelings and Aesthetic Detachment'. In Poisoned Bread : translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature. Ed. Arjun Dangle. Hyderabad : Orient BlackSwan, first pub. 2009; rpt. 2011. Print. Kirpal, Viney. 'A Study of Marathi Dalit Poetry'. In Writing Black Writing Dalit : Essays in Black African and Dalit Indian Writings. Ed. Harish Narang. Shimla : Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2002. Print. Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature : History, Controversy and Considerations. Translated from the Marathy and edited, with a commentary by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad : Orient BlackSwan, 2010. Print. Muktibodh, Sharatchandra. 'What is Dalit Literature ?'. In Poisoned Bread : translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature. Ed. Arjun Dangle. Hyderabad : Orient BlackSwan, first pub. 2009; rpt 2011. Print. Punalekar, S.P. 'Dalit Literature and Dalit Identity.' In Dalit Identity and Politics : Cultural Subordination and the Dalit Challenge, Vol. 2. Ed. Ghanashyam Shah. New Delhi : Sage Publications, 2001. Print. Wankhade, M. N. 'Friends, The Day of Irresponsible Writers is Over'. In Poisoned Bread : translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature. Ed. Arjun Dangle. Hyderabad : Orient BlackSwan, first pub. 2009; rpt 2011. Print.

Blistering Aboriginal Voice: An Overview of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Select Poems

Ujjwal Jana

Ali Cobby Eckermann is celebrated name to reckon with in the contemporary australian aboriginal poetry. Born in 1963 in the northern territory of South Australia, Ali, a Nunga woman, was adopted into a Lutheran family soon after her birth. Ali “faced racism, violence and sexual and physical abuse in the small town where she grew up”( Eckermann quoted in Bremen). During her growing up years, Ali becomes a victim to brutal ostracism in school and in neighborhood. With utter courage she puts up with all. As he recalls “I gave birth to my son when I was 19. I visited him in the hospital before I knew he was going to be given to his adopted family. A friend held him because I couldn’t – I was completely detached”( Eckermann quoted in Bremen). Ali was 34 when she met her birth mother and four years later she also met her son Jonnie. For Ali, “It was the beginning of a very long reconnection journey. I kept meeting all these adults who’d been removed from their families”( Eckermann quoted in Bremen).

Hers is a piercing poetic voice, for whom writing poetry is neither scribbling with words, nor indulging in emotional gush. It is a means to respond to and come to terms with her ruptured self and the vanishing memory of her growing up years. Ali’s poetry fitters through her life experiences and she makes an attempt to articulate an authentic and true voice of her traumatic experiences through her poetic outputs.

A close reading of Ali's works reveals the fact that she seeks to explore her aboriginal identity by being re-connected with her Yankunytjatjara family. As has been mentioned, poetry provides her the much needed asylum for recovering the cultural amnesia and it has its balming effects on the wounds, deep delved into her psyche.Ali CobbyEckermann’s first collection of poetry little bit long time,published by the Australian Poetry Centre as part of the New Poets series in 2009 takes on both her individual experiences of having undergone scathing pain , brutal violence and stigmatic social discrimination and the century old suppression and agony of the collective aboriginal experience. The poems portray her relentless and ceaseless struggleto find her voice, identity back.In her poem ‘First Time (I Met My Grandmother), Ali gives vent to her poignant nostalgia: I feel that magic thing you do, you crawl beneath my skin To read the story of my Soul, to find out where I been

And now yous’ mob you make me wait, so I just sit and sit English words seem useless, I know Language just a bit

I sit quiet way, not lonely, ’cos this country sings loud Songs I never been out here before, but I feel like I belong

It’s three days now, the mob comes back, big smiles are on their face ‘This your Grandmother’s Country here, this is your homeland place’

Ali uses very commonplace images and words to convey her ecstasy when she reconnects with her family. The semblance of facial expression, tears gushing out of her eyes and the red soil of the desert country which is very close to her heart continue to haunt Ali. She figures out her sense of belonging ness and identity as she finds herself reflected in her mothers’s:

‘We got a shock when we seen you, you got your Nana’s face We was real sad when she went missing in that cold Port Pirie place’

I understand the feelings now, tears push behind my eyes I’ll sit on this soil anytime, and brush away the flies

I’ll dance with mob on this red Land, mundawiru place I’ll dance away them half caste lies ’cos I got my Nana’s face!

In the poem Grade One Primary, we visualize how Ali had had humiliating experiences in school. In the first stanza of the poem, we have of the racist feel: I’m sitting up the tree today And I’m NOT getting down! I don’t feel safe at school no more Just ’cos my skin is brown. In the subsequent part of the poem, we learn how Ali as a child was abused and discriminated against.Those still alive in her sensitive and mature mindscape. ………. Some kids at school are nasty And their words have such a sting. You half caste dog, you coon, you boong, You stinking bloody abo, I don’t know what these words mean – I know they hurt me like an arrow. The treatment meted out to her by her school teachers was equally objectionable and offensive.

I asked my teacher to explain And she just slapped me hard And then when it was lunchtime I was pushed over in the yard.

So now I’m sitting up the tree I’ll hide from everyone. I don’t understand this place – I’m only in Grade One.

The poem concludes with a note of irony that she is yet to pass Grade One. In another poem One Child Two Child Wailing and Wild, Ali talks about her state of experience when she was ruined in terms of her psycho-physicalexistence. She was left alone having given out her son to be adopted by someone else. She recalls the pain of child birth and the memory of separation from her child haunts her like a passion: which This finds beautiful expression in the following lines- Urgent darkness hunts us south, while my stomach churns with childbirth He waits.

Foetal juices of blood and life baptise this child from my womb He waits.

I wash my child with sand of red, avoid newborn eyes of trust He waits.

A feeble cry escapes the grave. I watch it enter Heaven He waits. …… I bite and kick and scratch and scream “Don’t take this child from me!” He waits. In another significant poem, Ali revels in her aboriginal identity when she reconnects with her Family, first with her mother and then with her son. The tattered and splinted existence of her life becomes complete as she tries to explain them with different images:

I was born Yankunytjatjara My Mother is Yankunytjatjara Her Mother was Yankunytjatjara My Family is Yankunytjatjara

I have learnt many things from my Family Elders I have grown to recognise that my Life travels in Circles My Aboriginal Culture has taught me that Universal Life is Circular

As part of the social practice, Ali, when she was a child, was taken away from her mother and was adopted by a Lutheran white family. She was robbed of her mothers’ filial affection and love and this has bearing on her words:

When I was born I was not allowed to live with my Family I grew up in the white man’s world

We lived in a Square house We picked fruit and vegetables from a neatly fenced Square plot We kept animals in Square paddocks We sat and ate at a Square table We sat on Square chairs I slept in a Square bed

The recurring image of ‘square’ is important in the sense that it does not provide her the wholesome satisfaction of his home where she was not brought up. After her meeting with her mother at the age of 34, things became different and Ali’s life was full to the brimwith joy and happiness and it a complete life in itself. From the image of ‘square’ which underlines a sense of incompleteness, it became ‘round’ signifying wholeness. In Ali’s words, One day I met my Mother I just knew that this meeting was part of our Healing Circle

Then I began to travel I visited places that I had been before

But this time I sat down with Family

We gathered closely Together by big Round campfires We ate bush tucker, feasting on Round ants and berries We ate meat from animals that lived in Round burrows We slept in Circles on beaches around Our fires We sat in the dirt, on Our Land, that belongs to a big Round planet We watched the Moon grow to a magnificent yellow Circle

Ali’s another poetry collection Love dreaming & other poems published by Vagabond Presss in 2012 investigates her personal journey as a Nunga poet who engages her culture, language and identity rooted in the Yankunytjatjara and Kokathaprovinces in the north west of South Australia. In many of his poems she has critiqued the cultural invasion of the whites on the citadel of aboriginal and indigenous culture referred to as “wild flowers”. The cultural and historical roots of the indigenous people are at stake. In the poem wild Flowers, she speaks of this with deft use of images and appropriate diction:

Mallets pound fence posts in tune with the rifles to mask massacre sites Cattle will graze sheep hooves will scatter children’s bones Wildflowers will not grow where the bone powder lies Ali’s employment of words like Mallets,rifles,massacres,bone powder quite fittingly portray the picture of a bizarre cultural clash. In the poem Intervention Allies, the public self of Ali stands conspicuous as she interrogates the efficacy of the government policy-

When john howard said let’s have an intervention the women shouted yes!

we’re sick of the drinking the weekend footy trips away happy hours in hotels without bringing their pay home to us and sometimes losing their jobs when they don’t know when to stop

we’re sick of the sarcasm the fights the occasional black eye their priority for their mates over us and the children we’re sick of their drunken breath exploding in unjustified abuse the words that can’t be retrieved when he crawls back into bed

Yes the women shouted let’s have the intervention

The Aboriginal women weren’t so sure

In Ali’s poetry, the sense of belongingness has time and again been encrypted with the idea of ‘home’. Having been denied space right from her childhood, Ali has always bemoaned the aboriginal space in her new adopted place. In the poem Town Camp, her sense of loss becomes evident-

You call it 3 bedroom house I call it big lotta trouble

You call it electricity I call it too much tv

You call it litter I call it progress

You call it graffiti I call it reading and writing

You call it vandalism I call it payback

You call it burnt car wreck I call him finish

You call it hill I call it Yiperenye

You call it a sad urban environment

I call it HOME

The complete oeuvre of Ali may not be very substantial, but as a poet, verse novelist and a memoirist, Ali tries to reach out to truth, to recognize her aboriginal culture, language and the people. It is true that her adopted cultural, religious background coupled with her traditional Yankunytjatjara culture has definitely permeated the dynamics of her writing and the perceptible tension or dilemma in her writings reflects her newly acquired world view. Her writings with its distinctive language and style provide her a platform for performing a recuperative/healing act in terms of language, identity and cultural memory.

Works Cited

Brennan, Michael.. “Ali Cobby Eckermann .” n.d. Poetry International Rotterdam. Web. 31 August. 2013 http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/18971/15/Ali-Cobby- Eckermann

Giannoukos,Tina. “Tina Giannoukos Reviews Ali Cobby Eckermann”. 18 July 2013.Cordite Poetry Review. Web. 2 september. 2013

“Ali Eckermann” n.d. poemhunter.com. Web. 31 August. 2013 < http://www.poemhunter.com/ali-eckermann/poems/Eckermann >

“My life as a stolen child, by Ali Cobby Eckermann” 19 May 2013.news.com.au.web. 5september. 2013< http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/my-life-as-a-stolen-child- by-ali-cobby-eckermann/story-fnet0he2-1226645410986#ixzz2eyDoN35k>

Naipaul’s Indian Travelogues in Perspective of Travel Theory

Aloy Chand Biswas

John Thieme in Post-Colonial Studies : The Essential Glossary says, “post-colonial theory has generally viewed travel in different light, seeing it as an activity which, since it occurs in the LIMINAL space between cultures, opens up possibilities for cultural interchange in an AMBIVALENT environment” (Thieme 264). By putting massive interest in travel narratives as a separate genre the post-colonial readers view the development of post-colonial studies with such recognition that “… BORDER spaces are the locations where new cultural formations come into being” (Thieme 263). From the early Renaissance period to the late nineteenth century, travel writing was regarded as a discourse which could manufacture a sense of self by presenting a contrast between Europe and other Border spaces. But twentieth century onwards and during the post-colonial period the focus has changed. Homi K. Bhabha’s focus, on interstitial locations and migrant subjectivity is nothing but a co-relative to the function of travel writing as a discourse which put the monocultural versions of identity to questions (Bhabha, The Location of Culture). Even Edward Said’s best essay ‘‘Travelling Theory’’ narrates travel as a ‘‘trope’’ for the activity of theory itself. According to him travel establishes connections that ‘‘erode’’ notions of “fixed positionality and discrete subjectivity” (Said, The World, The Text… 226-47). Therefore travel narratives with its axiomatic change in role of narration in the post-colonial set-up have inevitably challenged the older concepts of “home” and fixed positionality as something ‘‘stable and discrete’’ in reference to quite contemporary ideas like ‘‘borderland’’ places and transnational discourses. V. S. Naipaul is a born-traveller. Like Marco Polo, Amerigo Vespucci and many others, travelling is a great joy as well as a creative impulse to him. His travelogues depict the life he has seen in different parts of the world. Apart from writing a good number of short- stories and novels, Naipaul has written quite a few works of non-fiction out of which some are travelogues. The first of these travelogues is an account of his return to the Caribbean, the second, the third and the fifth are those of his visits to India and the fourth that of what he calls Islamic journey – a narrative of his visits to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. The significant aspect of Naipaul’s travelogues has been best put into words by R. S. Kimbahune in his article V. S. Naipaul’s Travelogue : Naipaul’s travelogues have a design that fuses self-exploration with an encounter with land and people in intellectual terms. … Being a widely read man he can bring the knowledge of history and geography to support his observations. (Kimbahune 187) Naipaul’s first visit to India could not provide him a parallel to his fixed idea about the land which he formed long ago while staying at Port of Spain among the indentured Indian labourers in Trinidad. So India could not reflect any ray of hope to Naipaul’s visionary outlook in this first travel. The land appeared to him ‘‘an area of darkness’’. In his first travelogue An Area of Darkness Naipaul’s role is like a commentator – narrator. But in his later two travelogues on India his mode of narration has changed. There he becomes a listener – narrator 1. According to James Clifford ‘‘Travel’’ is a figure for different modes of dwelling and displacement, for trajectories and identities, for storytelling and theorizing in a post-colonial world of global contacts. Travel today has become a form ‘‘both of exploration and discipline’’ (Clifford, Notes on Travel and Theory n.pag.). According to Clifford, Paul Fussel who tries to draw a subtle line of difference among explorers, travellers and tourists in his famous book Abroad, a genuine traveller always seeks what has been discovered by the mind working in history. He puts emphasis on the pleasure of the traveller’s orientation, of knowing where one is while travelling. But ‘‘location’’ here is not a matter of finding a stable ‘‘home’’ or of discovering a common experience. A tension of attraction and repulsion always works in the mind of a post-colonial traveller who neither can reject altogether ‘‘places’’ or ‘‘histories’’ he visits, nor can leave them without any assurance of a return visit. V. S. Naipaul’s travelogues are always interesting, truthful and provocative. His travel narratives are varied and picturesque. His travel literature on India which consists of three – An Area of Darkness (AD), India : A Wounded Civilization (IWC) and India : A Million Mutinies Now(IMMN) has become a historical – realistic – fictional literature. A picture of India long preserved in Naipaul’s vision was a pre-set world which he wanted to relate to India’s history and real-life situations when he made his first visit to this land in 1962. When his fictional world confronted the real world in India during his first visit, he felt a nausea of repulsion and sought for an immediate ‘‘flight’’ from this country. His first book on India ends with a chapter called ‘‘Flight’’. Still then he could not feel presence of any strain of attraction in his mind for the country, thought almost thirteen years later he did so and made a return journey to this country in 1965 and titled the first chapter of his second travelogue on India ‘‘An Old Equilibrium’’. So the usual tug of attraction – repulsion in a post-colonial travel writer also works in Naipaul particularly in reference to his travels to India, a land of his forefathers. Naipaul’s Indian travel-writings exhibit his varied aspects – his observation, aggressive mode of assessment, rational views for the weak, softened stand for the sufferers and his uncompromising manner of evaluation of men, manners, objects and developments of the country. According to Mallikarjun Patil , “… a travelogue is certainly more than a graphic record of the places and personal impressions of the sojourner” (Patil 146). While travelling in India Naipaul’s mind like that of Paul Fussel’s genuine traveller discovers: No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters. Five hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sind, Moslem rule was established in Delhi as the rule of foreigners, people apart; and foreign rule – Moslems for the first five hundred years, British for the last 150 - ended in Delhi only in 1947. (Naipaul, IWC, Foreword) Though it is a harsh but realistic account of the nation, it is a changed view of Naipaul about India from his earlier stand as stated in An Area of Darkness: It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from history of coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea- shore (Naipaul, AD 216). But both the ‘‘discoveries’’ of the mind working in history of India as stated above undergo a great change when the author travels India for the third time in 1988 and produces his third travel-account on India in 1990. All such changes of view of Naipaul are not at all unrelated responses to the country, rather these are interlinked in a manner of evolution as they happen in the author’s world of thoughts and ‘‘discoveries’’. Exile, far from being the fate of nearly forgotten unfortunates who are dispossessed and expatriated, becomes something closer to a norm, an experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of the classic canonical enclosures… Newly changed models and types jostle against older ones… (Said, Culture and Imperialism 384)

V. S. Naipaul is known for the last three decades – “… the writer as exile, the writer in search of place and moorings, the writer becoming the refracted theatre of the ‘worlds’ that have produced him” (Singh, 20). But he became totally frustrated in India, for here too he remained as exile as in England. In his first visit to India he saw here a land of ‘‘darkness’’ and mimicry of the west and left the land with a sense of repulsion to its realities. He had no hope, but to settle permanently in England, though he knew better than anybody else that England could not be his ‘‘home’’, but he settled there on compulsion which he expressed in one of his interviews: It’s a very strange relationship with England. I have no English audience because English people don’t read my books… Its very strange. I’ve spent 42 years here as a writer and have no English readership. The point about being in England in 1950 is : Where else could you think of being a writer if you wrote in English ? (India Today Plus 1997: 61, referred to by Singh 23) His travel to London was on commission, but to India was on mission. Though the mission was initially one of ‘‘root-searching’’, but later changed into a new one – to relate his findings in India to the country’s culture and history. Disgusted and disappointed he left the country in 1962, but he came back with a changed view towards India in 1975 and 1988 to re-discover India. A new India gradually evolved in Naipaul’s vision on his repeated visits to country. Critics like C. D. Narasimhaiah, D. S. Maini, Nissim Ezekiel and many others become harsh enough when they see Naipaul’s colonial self 2 overshadowing India’s realities in his first travel-account on India. Real India frustrates Naipaul. He cannot find his hope in this country. But it is a fact that India has become a literary ‘‘home’’ for Naipaul throughout his writing career. His India is not in India, but in his mind. India has become almost a psychological and cultural entity rather than a mere geographical location to him. It is a fact that wherever Naipaul is, he writes from ‘‘the centre’’. For him ‘‘the centre’’ is of course his idealized past, i.e. his idealized India. To support Naipaul’s responses to India evolving in a positive direction towards a better India as revealed in his subsequent travelogues on India, I am to refer to what Bruce King states in his book V. S. Naipaul (Second Edition): Naipaul has moved into a new phase when the pains and insecurities of the past, such as the need to travel to find subject matter about which to write, are admitted to be a source of discovery and pleasure, an opening of a world of experience and insight, a process that he now celebrates, a history which in itself is to be ordered into narrative and through which he discovers and creates a new self. (King 137) Naipaul wears a new self in his India : A Million Mutinies Now leaving behind his old self as revealed in An Area of Darkness.

Naipaul is such a travel-writer that wherever he travels he becomes able to identify with the host culture and inclines to use its standards and criteria for his evaluation. If anywhere he fails to do so, his vision blurs, as it happens in case of his 1962 visit to India. The artist in him is actually driven by an innate curiosity to go on intellectual adventures in lands populated by people who lead restricted lives. Apart from the Indian travelogues, his other travelogues on other countries like The Middle Passage (1962), The Return of Eva Peron (1980), The killings in Trinidad (1980), Among the Believers (1980), A Turn in the South (1989) – all reveal pictures of the people living there some sorts of restricted life in one way or the other. Naipaul discovers that the world which his predecessors, Conrad and Forster, had explored is one he must enter again. But he must do it in a different way – a colonial travelling among the colonials. Naipaul expresses such a view in Finding the centre that travelling did much to take him out of his ‘‘colonial shell’’. Naipaul explains his position as a travel-writer better in The Enigma of Arrival: I know, and was glamoured by the idea of the metropolitan traveller, the man starting from Europe. It was the only kind of model I had; but – as a colonial among colonials… I could not be that kind of a traveler… Especially I was aware of not having a metropolitan audience to ‘report back’ to. The fight between my idea of the glamour of traveller-writer and the rawness of my nerves as a colonial travelling among colonials made for difficult writing… I took refuge in humour – comedy, funniness, the satirical reflex, in writing as in life so often covering up for confusion. (Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival 167) Therefore The Enigma of Arrival is a faithful record of Naipaul ‘‘as a colonial travelling and writing among the colonials, as the descendant of uprooted Indians travelling, through India, the New World man in the Old World’’ (Thompson 148). Though his initial responses to India provoke a lot of adverse criticisms from different quarters all over the world, it is a truth most significantly pointed out by Herald Leusmann: Naipaul is a traveller, a cosmopolitan with a, historically speaking, universal philosophy, a specialist when it comes to describe societal changes and intolerance, chauvinism, fanaticism and religious fundamentalism, decline, defeat, failure, and disgrace, but also the minimum hope for the remnants of a culture’s pride and self-respect. To accuse him of imperial tendencies and see him as an uncritical apologist for industrial – colonial nations would be to misunderstand the agility of his observations, his transcultural point of view and his personal ethics. (Leusmann, The Atlantic Literary Review 57) Naipaul is a writer who carries within him a whole burden of race, history, language on one hand and quests for a viable tradition with the knowledge of an ex-colonial individual on the other. He is not so much interested to know about the natural forces of history shaping him and his ancestry, as much he is to take notice of the vast changes happened to a whole gamut of nationalities and cultures. “Naipaul’s compulsive journeys through the leftover territories of the Empire, his dark peregrinations in search for parallels and literary co-relatives – India, Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, the Islamic world – multiplied and accentuated his creative burdens and harsh conclusions about things” (Singh 70). His Indian critics like C. D. Narasimhaiah, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Sudha Rai and many others have pointed out the author’s position with reference his visit to India. His being torn between cultures and geographies has often resulted in harsh comments against the host-nations. As it has been seen in the case of his first visit to India. Naipaul’s is not a traveller’s glamourized picture of places and things, neither does he want to present such a picture. His accounts in his travelogues are rich in profound knowledge about life presented with an exceptional finesse and brilliance. His travel-narratives often take into account how people in India make or unmake themselves in an evolving social-order. While narrating the process of such changes, both Naipaul and the India he observes change in quite analogous ways. Critics like Edward Said and Michel Foucault argue that knowledge as grounded in the analysis of one group by another generally promotes the exercise of power over the group analysed. Travel narrative also takes part in such power-knowledge nexus. But V. S. Naipaul’s Indian travel-narratives are of a different type. The type is best summed up by Glyne A. Griffith: V. S. Naipaul, as travel writer, generally maintains rather than challenges the stereotypical representations of non-western cultures which Orientalism, as a discipline consolidated. His titles are often the sign of a narrative firmly set in the Orientalist mould (Griffith 89). Naipaul’s travel-narratives form the ontological stage on which his narrated self-consciousness plays a significant role to reach a significant conclusion. Naipaul states elsewhere: I travel to discover other states of mind. And if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background …. (Naipaul, Finding the Centre 90)

Notes 1. It has also been seen in Naipaul’s literary career as a writer of travel books that his early travel books seem to be written by someone who feels superior, but his later travel narratives prove the author as one who talks and listens to the common people as well as records his such experiences. 2. According to Homi K. Bhabha Naipaul’s early writings bear an illustration of the vibrancy and possibilities of people “with shattered, seemingly dead end colonial lives” (King 202). Therefore it is possible to see Naipaul’s colonial self gets imposed here.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K.. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Clifford, James. ‘‘Notes on Travel and Theory’’. Inscriptions 5. (Eds.) James Clifford and Vivek Dhareshwar, 7 Dec. 1998.Web. 12 December 2012. . Griffith, Glyne A. ‘‘Travel Narrative as Cultural Critique: V. S. Naipaul’s Travelling Theory’’. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28 . 2 (1993): 87-92. Print. Kimbahune, R. S. ‘‘V. S. Naipaul’s Travelogues’’. Indian Readings in Commonwealth Literature. Amur G. S., V. R. N. Prasad, B. V. Nemade and N. K. Nihalani (Eds.) New Delhi: Sterling Publications Pvt. Ltd., 1985. Print. King, Bruce. V. S. Naipaul (Second Edition). New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. Leusmann, Herald. “I am the sum of my Books” : The Trails, Trials, and Tribulations of V. S. Naipaul’’. The Atlantic Literary Review 3.1 Jan-March (2002): 53-62. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. Print. Naipaul, V. S. An Area of Darkness. London : PICADOR INDIA, 2002. Print. ---. The Enigma of Arrival. London :PICADOR, 2002. Print ---. Finding the Centre. Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1985. Print. ---. India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: Vintage, 1998. Print. ---. India : A Wounded Civilization. London: PICADOR INDIA, 2002. Print. Patil, Mallikarjun. ‘‘Naipaul, V. S. : The Travel-writer’’. V. S. Naipaul: Critical Essays Vol. II. New Delhi : Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002. Print. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. 1993, rpt. London : Vintage, 1994. Print. ---. The World, the Text and the Critic. London : Faber, 1984. Print Singh, Manjit Inder. Writers of the Indian Diaspora: V. S. Naipaul. Jaipur : RAWAT PUBLICATIONS, 2002. Print. Thieme, John. Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary. London : Arnold, 2003. Print Thompson, Margaret Cezair. ‘‘V. S. Naipaul: The Recent Autobiographical Writings and the Role of the Commonwealth writer’’. Aspects of Commonwealth Literature 1.1 (1990): 146-154. London : University of London; Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Print.

Africa to Me Now: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Sequence as Dreams of Transformation

Asis De

In my early childhood when I was a boy of mere ten years, I had read a poem entitled ‘Africa’ of Rabindranath Tagore 1, written originally in Bengali. Not only the school textbook of Geography, but also this poem created the first impression of Africa in me. As I grew a bit older and entered in my teens, I read a novel Chander Pahar [The Mountain of the Moon] 2, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, the renowned Bengali novelist and found another Africa of desert, diamonds and demons, gems and jungles, dried up riverbeds and mountains. I remember how astonished I feltafter knowing that Bandopadhyay had never visitedAfrica in his lifetime and still made so thorough a presentation of African topography and society! A work of pure imagination, this novel had a strong impact on me. From this time, Africa entered into my consciousness. During my M. Phil study on V.S. Naipaul’s fiction, I chose to write a chapter on his A Bend in the River (1979) 3, where the locale is an unnamed town in Africa. I came across an interview of Naipaul with Ms Elizabeth Hardwick which was published in the New York Times on 13-th May, 1979. The interview ends in this way: “Thinking of the Africa in A Bend in the River, I ask: What is the future in Africa?”// His answer: “Africa has no future.” As far as my personal opinion is concerned, I don’t accept his view: anything on earth has its own future, as everything is subject to time. After four years of this interview, in 1983, Achebe’s political diatribe The Trouble with Nigeria was published, where anyone could notice the far cry of a compassionate heart as he says: “We have lost the twentieth century; are we bent on seeing that our children also lose the twenty first? God forbid!” (My italics). The time one senses a loss, is also the time when the act of dreaming starts: the dream to overcome that loss. The Eurocentric historiography has depicted Africa as a land of tribalsand animals, famines and starvations, darkness and death, and above all, as a space on earth with no history and no future. The historicity of African societies has been overlooked, simply because the European colonizers saw Africa only as a potential site for plunder and profit. The European colonizers came to Africa, to borrow Conrad’s phrase, in the guise of ‘emissaries of light’, invaded the land with less candles and more guns to fetch ivory and diamond and in the literal sense, taught the Africans the lessons of Western civilization. Christianity, along with the Western educational system dismissed pre-colonial Africa as primitive and monolithic and embarked on creating ‘new’ Africans, who used the new vectors of power and knowledge to create a better civilization. There is no denying the fact that historically colonialism acted very much like a Renaissance factor in Africa’s cultural history, as it altered the ‘old’ ways of African life in small rural societies and accelerated a transformation of people’s existence and consciousness there. One may remember the condition of Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, who was torn/ sandwiched between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ ways of African civilization after the colonial masters came.

Societies were fast changing under the trans-Atlantic influences: villages were being transformed into ghettos and towns, agrarian economy was being pushed aside by trade economy, and orality was being replaced by literacy. African languages were also being replaced by the European ones. Though the overwhelming hegemony of colonialist rhetoric on such countries of Africa was heavy, during decolonization nationalist politics was pungent in the air around. After gaining political independence in the second half of the last century, people in these African countries felt a strong urgency “to reassert their pre-colonized cultures and to struggle for the recuperation of their cultural difference and its resilience in and through the local and the specific” (Griffiths, 2008: 168). Serious attempts to re-establish mythical pasts by both historiography and literature were made: postcolonial African writers and theorists “seized on the rediscovery and rehabilitation of orature as a means of connecting with the past” (Ogundele, 2002: 132). This revival of the ancient tradition of storytelling authenticated the African identity more than anything else. But one needs to remember that this “meditation on the actual past through (historical) fiction is also a meditation on the present—and an anticipation of the future” (ibid: 137). This is very much what happens in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road sequence—the fictional trilogy that concerns itself with “the cultural and human energies released by Independence” (Fraser, 2002: 69) and dreams of ‘A better world, new, a world renewed’ (Okri, 1999: 7). To quote Okri’s poem Mental Fight: Open up history’s chamber of horrors And clear out the skeletons behind the mirrors, Put our breeding nightmares to flight Transform our monsters with our light. (P.9)

To transform the ‘monsters’ with the ‘light’ of consciousness is the primary task of the artist which Okri attempts in his ‘Spirit-child’ novels. In his On Post-Colonial Future, Bill Ashcroft insists on the process of transformation as a crucial one in any postcolonial society: “It is transformation that gives these societies control over their future. Transformation describes the ways in which colonized societies have taken dominant discourses, transformed them and used them in the service of their own self-empowerment” (Ashcroft, 2001: 1). The concept of nationalism and visions of political independence are not sufficient enough to empower a nation because the post colonial nation state is marked by disappointment, instituted on the boundaries of the colonial state and doomed to continue its oppressive functions (Ashcroft, 2012: 4). A spiritual equipoise is necessary to repossess the world again, to find a better world. In the final sentence of Okri’s The Famished Road the child narrator finds the way out: “A dream can be the highest point of a life” (TFR, 574). To establish a connection with the mythic past, to get the history back, to find an identity for the nation and the individual, it is important to dream. To get away from the nightmares of colonial rule, one may believe in dreaming, as dreams pave the way for a transformed future. In the ‘Introduction’ to his Spaces of Utopia (2012)—an electronic journal, Ashcroft’s comment on the act of ‘Dreaming’ is truly illuminating: “The Dreaming is perhaps the archetypal demonstration of the infusion of the present and future with the hope of a mythic past, a fusion of time and place, because the Dreaming is never simply a memory of the past, but the focussing energy of the present” (Ashcroft, 2012: 6). At the beginning of the Nineties of the last century Okri published the initial volume of the ‘Spirit-child’ novels under the title The Famished Road (March, 1991) which brought him international fame as it became the winner of the Booker Prize that year. Two more novels were published in the same decade—Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998) which, it is clear, constitute the trilogy and are extensions of a single narrative project. Two things before and after the text of Infinite Riches clearly underline the point: at the beginning, “Volume Three of The Famished Road Cycle” and at the end, dating the period of composition of the trilogy “1989- 1998, London” (Costantini, 2002: 149; Fraser, 2002: 66). From The Famished Road through Songs of Enchantment to Infinite Riches, Okri shows a transformation of an African society (most likely to be a Nigerian society)4set in three consecutive time frames, but operating on different levels and ultimately envisioning a utopian space with infinite possibilities and hope. Bill Ashcroft’ssincere comment is worth noting: “Ben Okri… generates a utopianism through an exuberant language that provides a richly utopian view of the capacity of the African imaginaire to re-enter and reshape the modern world. It is not merely a hope for African resurgence, but a vision of Africa’s transformative potential” (Ashcroft, 2012: 7). The Famished Road, the first volume of the sequence begins with a note of transformation: “In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world” (TFR, 3). Then the first person narrator of the novel sequence, a seven-year old boy named Azaro, who is again an Abiku child, starts telling his tale. Azaro lives with his parents in a peripheral ghetto by the capital city of an African nation state on the eve of independence from colonial rule. But henceforth the narration does not follow a strictly chronological pattern: one could notice an interesting interplay between the ‘present’ of the narrative and a series of past and future events which constantly complement and enrich one another. Being a spirit-child or Abiku, Azaro combines “the precocious wisdom of someone who has lived many lives” with the boisterous naivety of a child (Fraser, 2002: 68) and amalgamates the tales of his adventures in the spirit world with his observations of the life around him. Okri uses the Abiku motif as a metamorphic presentation of the nation. In the initial volume of 1991 (TFR), Azaro’s playmate Ade reflects: “Our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit-child, it keeps on coming and going. One day it will decide to remain. It will become strong” (TFR, 547). The modal auxiliary ‘will’ presupposes a possibility of future hope for the beleaguered nation (Kamalu, 2008: 40). Azaro himself reveals: “In his journeys Dad found that all nations are children; it shocked him that ours too was an abiku nation, a spirit-child nation, one that keeps being reborn and after each birth come blood and betrayals, and the child of our will refuses to stay till we have made propitious sacrifice” (TFR, 567). Like the Abiku, the metaphor of the Road is a major one in the sequence. Okri himself says that his ‘road’ metaphor is quite different from Soyinka’s ‘road’ (Soyinka, Wole. ‘Death in the Dawn’, l.23), it “is more ordinary” (Deandrea, 1994: 82) and “it’s a road that is meant to take you from one place to another, on a journey, towards a destination” (Wilkinson, 1992: 83). The reader could find that in The Famished Road, it is shown that how the colonialists started constructing a road through the forest, where the forest itself stands for the historical and cultural dimension of pre-colonial Africa. The construction continues in Songs of Enchantment and is completed in Infinite Riches. In Book V, Chapter Eleven of Infinite Riches, Azaro finds the road in the colonial Governor-General’s dream: “It was indeed a splendid road. It had been built by the natives, supervised by the Governor-General. He dreamt that on this beautiful road all Africa’s wealth, its gold and diamonds and diverse mineral resources, its food, its energies, its labour, its intelligence would be transported to his land to enrich the lives of his people across the green ocean. […] He did not dream of the hunger he would leave behind” (IR, 236-237). The hunger left behind by the colonial rulers could be transformed into a vigorous power, and for that the nation should think differently. Azaro’s Dad in The Famished Road gives a call: “‘THINK DIFFERENTLY’, he shouted, ‘AND YOU WILL CHANGE THE WORLD’. No one heard him. ‘REMEMBER HOW FREE YOU ARE’, he bellowed, ‘AND YOU WILL TRANSFORM YOUR HUNGER INTO POWER!’” (TFR, 479). In The Famished Road, the road is also presented with a metaphysical significance when Azaro’s Dad tells him: “All human beings travel the same road” (TFR, 83) or, when Azaro himself is tormented by “a cruel and infinite imagination” of the road: “The road was the worst hallucination of them all, leading towards home and then away from it, without end, with too many signs, and no directions. The road became my torment, my aimless pilgrimage, and I found myself merely walking to discover where all the roads lead to, where they end” (TFR, 135). The road metaphor in Okri serves two basic ideas: “the ‘road’ as a medium of imperial domination and as a way to superior knowledge” (Costantini, 2002: 168). It acts positively as a symbol of transformation too, that would lead the ‘famished’ nation to some future hope.

The entire sequence, beginning with The Famished Road and ending with Infinite Riches, alternately broods over a gulf between the materially real world and the spirit world between which Azaro moves like a pendulum, counting the progress of time. Unlike his ‘alter ego’ Ade, who believes in extremity of existence—either in the physical world or in the spiritual world, Azaro believes in transforming the chaotic reality into a hopeful future. Azaro knows that in the battle between the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, the former would win as they shape the world with the materialism of money power and muscle power. But still, at the end of Infinite Riches, we find him to hope for a different result as the election is impending. The character of Dad is an inspiring one in the sequence as he becomes an icon of struggle and strength. He is metaphorically presented as the Black Tyger who is again, pretty close to William Blake’s ‘Tyger’ and therefore, burns ‘bright’. The character of the photographer, who intends “to travel all the roads” (TFR, 262) and record what he sees, is unique as his wayfaring and acquiring knowledge—both aim at recording the present disenchantment in a future hope of removing social injustice and inequality.

Okri’s women characters are transformed substantially, probably more than the men, as the nation undergoes many changes. Okri finds Africa as “the great mother at the back” of his trilogy, as he told me in an interview on 23 January, 2012 5. But it would be a bit misleading to look at the character of Mum— Azaro’s mother to be “the great mother”. If Dad stands for reality, Mum stands for something beyond reality; if Dad represents strength, Mum grace. An icon of maternal care in The Famished Road, she soon turns into the mainstay of the family. At the beginning of Songs of Enchantment, Azaro comments: ‘Mum is changing’ (SE, 43). Again, in Infinite Riches, she is seen to organize a movement, which in a way or other softens and transforms the face of the struggle led by African women in moments of crisis. The other important female character, next to Mum, is Madame Koto. She resembles the old woman of the forest: on the one hand she helps Azaro and his family several times, and on the other is accused of witchcraft, keeping a connection with evil spirits (association with the blind sorcerer). She epitomizes the chaotic energy of the physical world. In the later volumes—Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches, she could be seen as a manifestation of a voracious appetite for materialistic objects (car, money and consumer goods) and most importantly, power. She associates herself with the Party of the Rich, and thus becomes the enemy of Dad. In Songs of Enchantment, Azaro gets a vision of Koto pressing on the head of Black Tyger (SE, 222-242). In Infinite Riches, she even arranges a rally for the Party of the Rich. But the excessive lust for power doesn’t let her live; she is stabbed by her outraged proselytes (IR, 271). By this character Okri reminds his readers that “anything can turn into anything at any time” (Fraser, 2002: 75). She, in a way, represents another ‘abikuhood’: the African Past, passing through the Present of chaos and turmoil, ultimately crumbles down—for a fresh rebirth. In this ‘polyphonic fantasia’ Okri avoids conventional characterization (Fraser, 2002: 72). As his characters undergo many subtle changes and re-evaluations in the later volumes, “they demonstrate how openness and transformation are central to both Okri’s political agenda and his aesthetic experimentation. In imagining the history of Africa in terms of a mythical road that must always be kept open and characters who are always changing, Okri suggests that the survival and development of the human spirit require a continual openness to new possibilities” (Parekh and Jagne, 1998: 369). In the entire Sequence, integral to Okri’s vision is a dream of transformation of Africa. The golden days of Past have been transformed into a chaotic, somewhat bizarre Present and it is time now for a renewal: the ‘abiku nation’ would die to be reborn with a greater future. In a public address (Steve Biko Speech) in South Africa in September last year, Okri’s comment is probably the closest to the vision he dreams of in The Famished Road Sequence:

We have great wealth in all that is at the root of humanity. If there is a correlation between experience and wisdom, between suffering and understanding, Africa is the richest delta of possible transformation…. May the fire of history burn us into a new consciousness…. We can only transform that which we face…. We grow and change in accordance with necessity and vision, and yet in some mysterious way will become more and more ourselves. … Pass on the word that there are three Africas. The one that we see every day; the one that they write about and the real magical Africa (that we don’t see) unfolding through all the difficulties of our time, like a quiet miracle. Our future is greater than our past.

Notes and References

1. Rabindranath wrote the poem Africa between October, 1936 and February, 1937. After one year of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, AmiyaChakravarty requested the poet to write a poem on Africa. In a letter to Chakravarty dated 9 February, 1937 [Shantiniketan, 27 Magh, 1343], Tagore writes: “You have requested me to write a poem on Africa. I have written it”. The trigger for writing this poem was obviously the historical event of Italian invasion, but “the poem dealt with the exploitation of Africa in the widest sense” (Dutta and Robinson, 1997: 474).

2. Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay wrote Chander Pahar originally in Bengali in 1937. Its English translation has been published in 2002. Interesting information for the reader is Bibhutibhushan dedicated this novel to Khuku, daughter of his neighbour JugalprasadBanerji, as she was his first love: the tale of an unseen continent dedicated to the first love! (Chattopadhyay, 1994: 17). This novel is going to have its first movie adaptation in 2013 in the hands of a Kolkata-based film director Kamaleswar Mukherjee (The Telegraph, Kolkata. Wednesday, January 9, 2013).

3. After its publication in 1979, A Bend in the River was received by the readers and critics as a true and powerful book on Africa. As Claire Tomalin in the Sunday Times comments: “V.S. Naipaul uses Africa as a text to preach magnificently upon the sickness of a world losing touch with its past” (back cover page/ blurb citation of the Penguin paperback edition, 1980).

4. Many critics have pointed out that the setting of The Famished Road cycle may be any African nation state, as no particular details and temporal indices are given. The word ‘Nigeria’ never once appears in any of the three novels of the trilogy (Lim, 2005:59; Fraser, 2002: 68- 69).

5. In response to one of my questions regarding the interrelationship of the character of Mum and Africa, Ben told me that he finds Africa as the “great mother” with infinite nourishing potential, an omnipotent presence in all the three narratives of the trilogy. I took his interview on 23 January afternoon, as he visited India to attend two sessions in the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2012.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ in An Image of Africa. London: Penguin (Great Ideas), 1983.pp. 22- 87. Print. Ashcroft, Bill. On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformation of Colonial Culture, London and New York: Continuum, 2001, Print. ------“Introduction: Spaces of Utopia”, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 2nd series, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-17. . Chattopadhyay,Sunilkumar. Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy, 1994, English Translation. Print. Costantini, Mariaconcetta. Behind the Mask: A Study of Ben Okri’s Fiction. Rome: Carocci, 2002.Print. Deandrea, Pietro. ‘An Interview with Ben Okri’, Africa America Asia Australia, Vol.16, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. pp. 55-82. Print. Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson (ed.) Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print. Fraser, Robert. Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City. Devon: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2002. Print. Griffiths, Gareth. ‘The Myth of Authenticity’ in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. (Ed.)Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Routledge: 2008, First Indian Reprint. Pp. 165-168. Print. Kamalu, Ikenna. ‘Metaphor and the Rhetoric of Postcolonial Politics in Ben Okri’s Fiction’, Context: Journal of Social & Cultural Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2008, pp. 26-46. http://contextjournal.wordpress.com/. Lim, David C. L. The Infinite Longing for Home: Desire and the Nation in Selected Writings of Ben Okri and K. S. Maniam, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Print. Ogundele, Wole. ‘Devices of Evasion: The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination in the postcolonial African Novel’. Research in African Literatures Vol.33. No.3. Fall 2002, pp.125- 139. Print. Okri, Ben. The Famished Road (1991), London: Vintage Books, 2009. Print. ------Songs of Enchantment (1993),London: Vintage Books, 2003. Print. ------Infinite Riches (1998), London: Phoenix, 1999. Print. ------Mental Fight: An Anti-Spell for the 21st Century (1999), London: Phoenix, 2000. Print. Parekh, Pushpa Naidu and Siga Fatima Jagne (ed.) Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers: Interviews by Jane Wilkinson, London: James Currey, 1992. Pp.76-89 (6: Ben Okri). Print.

In Search of Silver-Lining in an Alien Land : A Review of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Avishek Chaudhury

Diaspora means dispersal. To be precise, dispersal of human beings from his/her own native land to an alien land by chance or choice i.e. either wilful migration or forced isolation. Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane, a story of a Bangladeshi family, migrated to London, is one such story of dispersal – a story of wilful migration in search of better habitation and living. However, though the novel tells the story of one Bangladeshi family, it at once captures the sentiments and emotions of so many immigrant Bengalees residing in the European countries especially in the U.S.A. and the U.K. Perhaps a comparison with the London-born second generation Indian expatriate, Jhumpa Lahiri is inevitable here. In her debut novel, The Namesake she too “explores the complexities of immigrant experience, the clash of lifestyles, cultural disorientation, the dilemmas of assimilation and the tangled ties between generations.” (Parvathy 293) Like Ali, Lahiri also tries to trace the shifting and evolving identities of the characters in the so-called adopted homeland. However, there are some major differences in their approach. Firstly, in The Namesake the characters belong to the elite and the upper-middle class whereas Monica Ali turns her lens on the members of lower-middle class who are struggling hard for their survival. So the problem Nazneen faces is not only confined to the psychological plane; rather, it is also an existential crisis. Secondly, the central characters of both the novels are Bengalees. But unlike Ashoke Ganguli and his family who are Indian Hindus, Chanu and Nazneen are Muslims from Bangladesh. Thirdly, while Ashima Ganguli, wife of Ashoke Ganguli wanted to come back to her native country, India, Nazneen rejects the very proposal of coming back to Bangladesh. ‘She refuses to join Chanu in his endeavor to begin a new life in Bangladesh, preferring to be a single mother in London.’(Mishra 42) This transformation of the self is important and I will discuss it later. Brick Lane actually is the name of street in London’s East End. The street is basically famous for restaurants that offer mostly North Indian cuisine. A large number of emigrated Bangladeshi people also live here in East End. Monica Ali has chosen this place as the centrestage of the novel. Our protagonist, Nazneen also lives here. At a very tender age when she was only eighteen, she was married to a man twenty years her elder and who has a face like a frog. She had no choice as her mother taught her: Fighting against one’s Fate can weaken the blood. Sometimes, or perhaps most times, it can be fatal. (B.L., p.15) So after her marriage ceremony Nazneen with her husband, Chanu exchanged her ancestral home of Gouripur for a block of flats in East End, London. The opening section of the novel narrates realistically Nazneen’s arrival in the graffiti and drug-ravaged housing developments of East End. A bewildered Nazneen finds herself in no man’s land. With her limited stock of English words – ‘Nazneen could say two things in English: sorry and thank you’ (B.L. p. 19) she prefers to confine herself in the four walls of the house. She reads the Holy Qur’an though she does not know ‘what the words meant but the rhythm of them soothed her’ (B.L. p. 21), prays five times a day to retain her calm. She often reads the old letters which Hasina has written to her. She also watches ice-skating on television: Sometimes she switched on the television and flicked through the channels, looking for ice e-skating. For a whole week it was on every afternoon while Nazneen sat cross-legged on the floor. While she sat, she was no longer a collection of the hopes, random thoughts, pretty anxieties and selfish wants that made her, but was whole and pure. (B.L. p. 41)

Chanu, on the other hand, is obsessed with his promotion. He does a menial job in the council office. He has some degrees and also wants to acquire some additional degrees to get recognition and promotion in this white society. He often invites Dr. Azad to his house to dine together. He believes that Dr. Azad can help him in getting the much desired promotion: Dr. Azad knows Mr. Dalloway, Chanu had explained to her. ‘He has influence. If he puts in a word for me, the promotion will be automatic. That’s how it works. Make sure you fry the spices properly, and cut the meat into big pieces. I don’t want small pieces of meat this evening. (B.L. p.29)

Chanu also considers himself intellectually superior to his fellow countrymen. To assert and establish his superiority he often quotes passages from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens etc. to the naïve Nazneen. He also goads their daughters to read Tagore. However, in the later part of the novel, denied of the promotion, we see a dejected Chanu who now interprets this failure in terms of racism: You see,’ he explained, ‘they feel threatened. And this is their only culture – playing darts and football and putting up pictures of naked women. (B.L. p.257)

Frustrated with this council job he later resigns from his post and works as a taxi driver at Kempton Kars for a certain period of time. The ambitious young Chanu is now lost and instead there is the voice of a defeated soldier when we hear : … all my life I have struggled. And for what? What good has it done? I have finished with all that. Now, I just take the money. I say thank you. I count it …when the English went to our country, they did not go to say. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it out of the country. They never left home. Mentally. Just taking money out. And this is what I am doing now. What else can you do? (B.L. p.214) And now he decides to call it a day here in East End and once again begin life afresh in Bangladesh. In the meantime the timid Nazneen begins to change. Being habituated with the ‘Westernized’ way of life she begins to accept the ‘white’ culture giving up her own. She now misses morning prayers: She had missed morning prayers again today. Yesterday she missed both the fajr and zuhr prayers … (B.L. p.93)

She also begins an affair with Karim who is a couple of years younger to her. The stand off between English Islamophobes and increasingly radicalized Muslim youth has drawn them close together. Now, whether this extramarital affair between a mother of two daughters and a young man may be excused or not is a matter of debate. But we can safely assert that the old Nazneen is being sublimated by a newer one who is bold and is not at all ashamed to fullfuil her desires and needs. However, the greatest amazement comes in the last portion of the novel when she turns down her husband’s proposal of going back to Bangladesh. This is the greatest transformation that Ali seems to highlight through Nazneen’s character. Since her childhood she was taught to be submissive to man and that the woman who rebels against her fate ends up longing for the security of convention. But in this white society she seems to realize that it is not fate that makes the character; rather, it is the dress that makes the character. And now when the readers are anticipating that she will marry Karim, she again becomes a rebel. Emerging confidently from her affair she dances to pop music in her room and decides to be a single mother in London. The novel ends there leaving the readers to wonder what Nazneen will do there as a single mother. ‘Ali’s empathy for disadvantaged Muslim women like Nazneen seems to have made her endow her fictional character with a will greater than what the reader of her novel has come to expect.’ (43) But this is not entirely surprising because in the recent post-modern Bangladeshi English fiction there are radical changes in the writers’ outlook on socio-cultural matters. Inspired by writers like Taslima Nasrin, Ali actually represents a magnificent flowering of that line of women’s writing that discards all pretensions and hypocrisy about social decency or gender related false assumptions and invents a narrative which is ‘affective’ – candid, frank, devoid of any romantic sentimentalization and often brutal in laying bare the seamy side of our socio-political system.

Works Cited Primary Source Ali, Monica : Brick Lane. Black Swan Edition, 2004. All quotation and page references are to this edition. Secondary Source Parvathy, S. ‘Chronicling Cultural Interface : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri’. Samyukta : A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Jan. 2004. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. ‘Enigmas of Arrival’ The New York Review of Books, Dec. 18, 2003. Print. ibid.

Wide Sargasso Sea: Resistance to and Subversion of White Supremacy

Beetoshok Singha

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985) has pointed out that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England. Literature is the most significant production of cultural representation. Postcolonial resistance to such cultural representations has taken many forms. The most important form of textual resistance is the widespread practice of counter-colonial literary discourse. Helen Tiffin points out, “the re-reading and re-writing of the European historical and fictional record are vital and inescapable tasks” in producing the postcolonial counter discourse (Ashcroft et al. 95). Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a classic example where she takes up some characters and the basic assumptions of a canonical British text to resist and subvert these from a postcolonial perspective. In order to explore the matter fully it appears worthwhile to concentrate on Rhys’s upbringing, her own sense of ‘in- betweenness’ which prodded her to give voice to the mad woman in the attic. Born on 24 August 1890, Jean Rhys is a Dominican, the daughter of a Welsh doctor while her mother is a creole – a White West Indian. She moved to England in 1907, returned to Dominica only once in her life. Her passion for the marginalized, the urge to state the case of the underdog characterized her first book The Left Bank (1927) and was acclaimed highly by Ford Madox Ford (Wyndham 3). It is Ford Madox Ford who drew our attention to this aspect of her writing championing the cause of the underdogs of the society. In her earlier Caribbean fiction Voyage in the Dark (1934), she passionately states the case of Anna Morgan but simply laments at her fate, rendering her heroine only able to start her life anew after all her distress. Her White spouse, while not overbearing or cruel, simply fails to empathize with her. He feels no repentance for wrecking her life let alone fearing any retribution. It is in Wide Sargasso Sea, that her Caribbean heroine is not simply wronged but can challenge the wrongdoer without lamenting her lot. For many years Rhys has cherished a fantasy for the first Mrs. Rochester – otherwise dehumanized and speechless female. In a letter to Selma Vaz Dias, She wrote: I’ve read and re-read “Jane Eyre” of course, and I am sure that the character must be “built up”. The creole in Charlotte Bronte’s novel is a lay figure – repulsive which does not matter and not once alive which does … She must be at least plausible with a past , the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he things she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to everything on fire and eventually succeeds (Raiskin 136 -137). Thus Rhys’s heroine shows an apparent complicity with the imperial institutions. It may even seem that she upholds a belief in ancestry and purity of race which is tantamount to monoculturalism. But this is only on the surface. Underneath this Rhys renders her heroine the potentiality to dismantle the organs of those very institutions. The reader should never forget that Antoinette’s tragedy is not solely the outcome of her husband’s attempt to confine and define her within European norms but her and at large all creole people’s failure to harmonize themselves with either the European or the indigenous population of Caribbean islands. If in later life, Antoinette is compelled to resist the overwhelming White authority in her childhood and her family meet only violence from the Black population for being a member of the Whites. In the novel Antoinette is a girl reviled by both the Black Caribbeans and White Europeans as “white cockroach” and “white Nigger” respectively, epithets which can be traced back from the history of slavery and cruelties perpetrated by her ancestors (Mary Lou Emery 165). A solitary and unloved child Antoinette assumes that her friendship with Tia, the Black Caribbean child, was to last throughout her life only to be deceived and rebuffed. But prodded by her own people and specially unable to resist the temptation of hurting a White, Tia employs all sorts of mischievous tricks thereby prompting Antoinette to use racial slur. During the burning of their home in Coulibri, Antoinette is hit with a stone presumably thrown by Tia. Yet Tia shedding tears, and Antoinette bleeding, the racial barrier seems unable to wipe out all childhood attachments: “We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass”. (Raiskin 27). Clearly, both the girls, if were left to themselves, could perhaps achieve a redeeming vision in which both can recognize their plight and sympathize. After a legacy of exploitation for centuries and then the shock of getting emancipated makes virtually difficult for both the girls to stand on equal terms. The relationship between Antoinette and her unnamed English husband, presumably Rochester, soon becomes strenuous. Believing in the letter of Daniel Cosway, Rochester thinks that he has been tricked into marriage: “They bought me, me with your paltry money. You helped them do it. You deceived me, betrayed me and you’ll do worse if you get the chance” (Raiskin 102). There is no mistaking that, as observed McLeod, in “marrying Antoinette, he lays claim to the authority over her representation” (McLeod 164). But what might seem quite normal in his own country, should meet only with rebuff resistance in a place virtually controlled by women. He felt it incumbent upon him to dominate the other women, to put his long cherished legacy of colonial norm over theirs but every time is threatened with a hostility where both indigenous people and nature took part. When Rochester starts calling her Bertha, she protests and identifies this attempt to the process of ‘obeah’ or making zombie: “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.” (Raiskin 88) True, Antoinette herself resorted to Chiristophine’s occult skills in her attempt to keep Rochester. But her effort to be a part of the colonial order yields no satisfactory result as Rochester quickly perceives the dominant other self upon him, a feeling which makes him retain his colonial identity even more firm and distinct. It is this dominant colonial self which is always ill-at-ease perceiving everything out of order: “Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger” (Raiskin 41). He is quite frank in acknowledging his defeat at the end of the second part of the novel: “I was tired of these people. I disliked their laughter and their tears, …Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and loveliness”(Rhys 103).It is not difficult to assume that behind Rochester’s deep-seated uneasiness there lies his ignorance of the Caribbean life and ways. It is this ignorance which at times threatens to foil Rochester’s authority, i.e. his power over the Euro-creoles and Blacks alike. In his seminal work Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault writes: … power and knowledge directly imply one another, that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations (Foucault 27). Rochester, as Rhys presents him, comes to the Caribbean islands for the sole purpose of marrying Antoinette thereby inheriting her large fortune. His attempt to change his wife’s name from Antoinette to Bertha may be seen as defining the exotic Euro-creole within the Anglo-Saxon code of ethics. The ‘un- Englishness’ of the Euro-creoles and the ‘horrible’ ways of the Blacks only make him impatient to return to his own country. All these circumstances only foreground the essential hostility between European and Euro-creole culture while the former is dominant and the latter is doubly isolated from native Caribbean and the White European. As the novel proceeds, instead of having Rochester in her power, it is Antoinette who gradually surrenders hers. Rhys resorted to the cult of zombi to depict this subjugation. Citing Maximilien Laroche’s Exile and Tradition (1918), Sandra Drake writes: The Zombi is, in reality, the legendary, mythic symbol of ...a spiritual as well as physical alienation; of the dispossession of the self through the reduction of the self [to a mere source of labour] …They [Haitian writers] see in [the zombi] the image of fearful destiny which they must combat; a destiny which is at once collective and individual (Drake 200). There is little room for doubt that the physical alienation of the creoles both from Africa and from Europe is foregrounded by the psychical alienation as they are eschewed by both. This sense of being doubly alienated is always heavy on Antoinette and came out at smallest instigation. On hearing Amélie’s song she says: It was a song about a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all (Raiskin 61). Her claustrophobic existence is perfectly in keeping with Bhabha’s theory of ‘in-between’ space. The dwellers of this place have to undergo cultural changes. But these changes make them alien both to their past and the condition they are living in. As Bhabha theorizes it: The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia of living. (Bhabha 7) Throughout the novel Rhys makes it clear that the Euro-creoles like Antoinette got used to Caribbean ways and even resorted to their customs, like Antoinette’s use of love potion. Despite their living side by side with the Whites the natives are acutely aware of the history of slavery before the Emancipation Act of 1833. They take the smallest opportunity to deride and at times kill the Euro-creoles as they burnt Coulibri. For the Euro-creoles, on the other hand, tension with the natives obviously became intensified after the Emancipation and their resorting to native ways makes the natives give up the last shred of awe and respect for the descendants of their one time masters: “Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger” (Raiskin 14). Thus threatened and derided outside, Antoinette feels subjugation at home by Rochester. On his part, Rochester, apart from meeting inward resistance from Antoinette, feels uneasy in encountering Christophine whom he regards as the source of Antoinette’s evil magic. Mona Fayad notices that this “phallic mother”, really “castrates” Rochester, first through her gaze and then through her words (Fayad 235). When Rochester averts his glance from Christophine, she smiles to herself, an act which puts him in awkward situation. Secondly, she serves Rochester coffee, calling it “bull’s blood”. Fayad illustrates that the true source of his anxiety lies in taking this as a mockery to his manhood (Fayad 235). He was also uneasy regarding Christophine’s influence upon his wife. Even their commonplace conversations are enough to unnerve Rochester. Hearing Antoinette talking to Christophine in patois he thinks “But whatever they were singing and saying was dangerous. I must protect myself” (Raiskin 90). His fear that Christophine will motivate Antoinette against him was not entirely groundless as Christophine indeed once told Antoinette to brave all the worldly oddities with courage: “Get up, girl, and dress yourself. Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world” (Raiskin 60). It is Christophine again who unmasks Rochester of his assumed superiority taken for granted nearly by all else. She reminded him of Antoinette’s first refusal to marry him, and after marriage it is Rochester who purports to desert Antoinette. She actually challenges him to his face by asking him to return half of the dowry he inherited by marrying Antoinette and leave soon. The reader cannot fail to notice the aptness of Christophine’s words as Rochester “no longer felt dazed, tired, half hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready to defend [him]self” (Raiskin 95). Feeling virtually defenceless against Christophine on moral ground, he now intends to get rid of her by threatening her to take legal measures against her. Here the novelist allows him success and Rochester is able to reduce the power of both the women―Antoinette and Christophine. Henceforth he takes control of the narrative reducing Antoinette to a crazed woman denied sexual fulfillments. Thus the alleged madness of Antoinette at the end of the second part of the novel only serves as an excuse for the unchallenging master narrative of Rochester. But if Antoinette’s position is to be identified with ‘zombi’ then the fact must be taken into account that this state is also transitory. In accordance with Depestre, Sandra Drake states that the history of colonization is the process of man’s general zombification (Drake 202).Drake elucidates the fact that according to Caribbean belief if zombis taste salt then their hypnotized state comes to an end thereby making them aware of the cruelty and dehumanization perpetrated on them. It arouses in them an uncontrollable desire for revenge. Concomitant with this belief Rhys makes her heroine smell the odour of vetivert, frangipanni, cinnamon and lemon-salts or agents that will arouse the zombi in her. In her act of setting Thornfield Hall ablaze, she successfully freed herself from other’s definition. Waking, Antoinette takes the candle in order to give her dream a reality. The novel ends with her walking with the candle through the dark corridor. The dreamy climax also presents her symbolic disaffiliation from Europe. To Tia’s question “You frightened”?, she decides to answer positively by jumping over the parapet. After all her ordeal the Zombi does not only kill self, i.e. the zombified European self but also regains her original identity, which is only the mirror image of Tia. The burning of Thornfield Hall is simultaneously a negation of the colonial imposition and assertion of own identity which threatened by both the Blacks and the Whites, now gives vent to its passion. Thus in her conscious reworking of Jane Eyre Rhys achieves a complete reversal of values: all that was hellish in Bronte’s text turns out to be the creation of Europe itself. The reawakening of the zombi also ignites the divine fire instrumental to purge the hell i.e. Thornfield Hall and liberate the human being therein.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge,1994. Print. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991. Print. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Print. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York:W.W. Norton & Company,1999. Print. Thieme, John. Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary. London: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

The Rhetoric of Ceremony: Reading American Inaugural Poems

Dillip Kumar Pattanayak

In America, presidents have the right to invite a poet to read out a poem during their inaugural ceremonies. This tradition virtually commenced in 1961 with President John F Kennedy who invited Robert Frost, the most popular poet of the then America. Following the his footsteps, President Bill Clinton invited Maya Angelou and Miller Williams to read their poems during his first and second inaugural ceremonies in 1993 and 1997 respectively. Again in 2009 and 2013, President Barak Obama invited Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco to read a poem each during the inaugural ceremonies of his first and second presidential incumbency respectively. I Robert Frost recited “The Gift Outright,” a poem earlier published in his A Witness Tree in 1942 during the inaugural ceremony of President Kennedy. This is a short poem of 16 lines written in iambic pentameter. A historicist critique of the poem presents a lot of points conveyed by the poet. The very first line is a striking one – The land was ours before we were the land’s (1)1 It conveyed the idea that America always belonged to the colonists, not the colonialists. He proceeds to further to explain and clarify this statement in the next four lines. Mordecai Marcus comments in this context , “ Here Frost presents himself as a spokesperson for the Americans and adopts a tone of grieving and longing desperation…” (Introduction). The next two lines , where Frost has played with the word ‘possess’, suggest that Americans realized they had to give themselves the gift outright,i.e., the independence by freeing themselves from the British colonization. This is best presented in line No. 13 (“The deed of gift was many deeds of war”). Albert J Von Frank in his article “On ‘The Gift Outright’ ” writes that this line in parenthesis lacks the tonal and grammatical relationship with anything else in the poem and signals about the Revolutionary War, i. e., the War of American Independence (26). The word ‘deed’ in this line is a pun. The deed of gift suggests accepting the legality of constitutional independence by the Americans themselves. “The deeds of war” suggests the War of American Independence. Thus the word “possess” refers to the geopolitical possession of the land by the colonists. In the last three lines, Frost has intended to explore the country further. Historical evidences prove the fact that the west of America had not been explored by the time of the adoption of the constitution in 1789. So the poet writes: To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced. Such as she was, such as she would become. (14-16) Thus an approach of historicism to “The Gift Outright” reveals how Frost has praised colonization in relation to the attitude of the colonists. II

1 All citations from the inaugural poems of Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco are from www.poemhunters.com

On the other hand one finds Maya Angelou interesting on diverse grounds. When she read “On the Pulse of Morning” for Mr Clinton in 1993, she referred to the manifold backgrounds of America and her people. The poem’s themes are about the land, change, assimilation, responsibility, pledge for the future etc. The poem begins with the reference to the pre-historic time of mastodons and dinosaurs and ends in wishing ‘Good morning’. So the poem requires a study under the lens of new criticism, historicism, post colonialism and autogynography. “On the Pulse of Morning” has a number of images – visual, aural and tactile. The frequent use of ‘Rock’, ‘River’, and ‘Tree’ as metaphors asserts that America is essentially a land of pristine Nature. She has used these words 22 times beginning with capital letter in each case. Even she has personified them at times. The poet uses the phrases like ‘ The singing River’, ‘ the wise Rock’, and ‘the speaking of the Tree’ (Ll. 42 and 50). America has always been an inviting land to everybody. Some other visual images like ‘dust’, ‘debris’, ‘riverside’, bloody feet’, gold’ etc., present the picture of pollution and tormented people. “On the Pulse of Morning” is full of modern references like toxic waste and pollution (18). So a new critical outlook suggests how the pristine world of America has changed with the passage of time into a world of debris. A historicist approach refers to the pre-historic time, when mastodons and dinosaurs used to inhabit the land of America. Angelou writes, “Hosts of species long since departed,/ Marked the Mastodon, /The dinosaur … left dried tokens / Of their sojourn here… (Ll. 2-5).” Again the poet echoes the refrain of 1930’s and urges her audience to “give birth again to the dream” (Ll. 79 – 80). The myth of American Dream was essential then to invigorate the spirit of the people, as the economy of the country had collapsed drastically. A post-colonial criticism unveils the tortures the black–Africans had undergone and how the native–Indians were crushed and subdued. Here is a glimpse of the lines from the poem: You, who gave me my first name, you, Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then Forced on bloody feet, Left me to the employment of Other seekers – desperate for gain, Starving for gold. You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought, Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare Praying for a dream. (56 – 66) The native Indian tribals like Pawnee, Apache, Seneca etc., were mercilessly annihilated by the colonialists after the discovery of the gold mine in California in 1849. The black-Africans like Ashanti, Yoruba and Kru etc. had been cruelly dealt with as they were slaves of the colonialists. In this context Prof Irshad Gulam Ahmed writes, “ ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ opens the history of America with the violent annihilation of native American cultures and includes the violence of slavery against African peoples.”(5) At another point, the poet has allegorically referred to the painful experience of black-Africans and her own. She says: You … have crouched too long in The bruising darkness Have lain too long Face down in ignorance. Your mouth spilling words Armed for slaughter. (15- 20) The lines seem to be a replica of Harriet Bitcher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The black-Africans had been tormented, beaten, slaughtered and treated like animals, as they were slaves. As it is a poem to be read before the public, Angelou allegorically tells her own story how she was raped at the age of eight only. This trauma had bruised her so much that she remained in oblivion of the people for a long time, being unable to express herself in the society. Here Kelloway Kate’s remarks on Angelou’s appearance on both presidential inauguration and the court occasions are very relevant. Kate writes, “She [Angelou] looked magnificent, sternly theatrical with unsmiling low mouth. She wore a coat with brass buttons, a strange reminder of the eight year old Maya Angelou who stood in a court room, terrified at the sight of the man who had raped her.” (poemhunters) Looking at the melting pot ideology of American civilization, Angelou writes: There is a true yearning to respond to The singing River and the wise Rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, The African, the native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French , the Greek, The Irish, the rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik, The Gay , the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. They hear. They all hear The speaking of the Tree. (41 -50) Here the pot says how the American society has assimilated people from all the strata of life. And as if echoing the message of Mr Clinton, she gives the clarion call to the people of America, “Lift up your eyes upon/ This day breaking for you. / Give birth again / To the dream ...” (77 -80). So she wishes them at the end “Good morning.” In this way Angelou’s inaugural poems present many a thing in a nut-shell. III Prof. Miller Williams read his poem “Of History and Hope” during the second inaugural ceremony of President Bill Clinton in 1997. A stylistic study of the poem enlightens that the poet recollects the glory of the past and anticipates a better dawn of his country. The very title is quite suggestive itself. It hints that the poet will reflect on the past and the future of America. The history is always important for a country, as the success and the failure are always rooted in it. In a way it seems, the poet has remembered his predecessors, Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, the first and the second inaugural poets. The poet writes: We have memorized America, How it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, Telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do. (1-5) Whereas the first two lines are a reminiscence of Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” the next two lines remind us of Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning.” In his poem Frost has sung the glory of colonial past and the history of the birth of America. And here Williams echoes the same idea, when he says that Americans have always remembered their country’s past. Angelou in her poem had raised several issues of the country related to the past , the present, and the future. But Williams only expresses his concerns about the future of the country in his poem. The code use of the auxiliary “do” in line No 5 stresses the fact that the Americans are always aware of the past and the future of their country. In the next three following lines, the poet has paid his homage to the people who have sacrificed their lives for the sake of the country. Then he has raised several issues regarding the future of the country, by asking the public six questions. Williams asks: But where are we going to be, and why, and who? . . . But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how Except in the mind of those who will call it Now? The children. The children. And how does our garden grow? (13-16) These questions starting with ‘but’ and ‘and’ prove that the poet doubts the credibility of his answer and is suspicious about the future of the country. At the same time the poet centers his hopes on the children who are the future of the country and who will safeguard the “gift” [American Independence] given to them. Again the word ‘”gift” reminds us of Frost’s poem. In lines 15-17, Williams has employed metaphors.”Garden” and the “waving hands” are suggestive of the school and the school-going children; “flowering faces” are suggestive of the young children who are “rarely in a row”, i.e., who have not learnt the responsibilities of life yet . The other metaphor “brambles’ suggests that children will not be allowed to be rough people in their life. The use of such metaphors expresses the notion how the people of America want their children to be responsible citizens of the future. The poet has also used several foregrounding devices in this poem which bring about a deeper sense in the poem. There are two deviations: the first occurs in line 10 and the second at line 14. Line 10 reads, “The disenfranchised dead want to know.” The deviation occurs when it says that the dead want to know. How can the dead want to know? Knowing is a quality only associated with living human beings, not with the dead. Thus the deviation suggests that the present Americans are answerable to their forefathers so far as the responsibility of the Independence of their country is concerned. Similarly, the use of upper case ‘N’ in “… who will call it Now?” in line 14 is a deviation, for it is an adverb of time used at the end of the sentence and should be in lower case. But the deviation is equally significant as it refers to the present mindset of American children who are the future of the country. There are three distinct parallelisms in this poem. Firstly, “the children” is repeated in line 15, which heightens the importance of the children in American society. Secondly, the lines numbering 18- 19, 20-21, 22-23, and 24-25 are unique. All of them start with wh-words, and yet they are not interrogative sentences; they are relative clauses of the noun “many people” and the wh-words are subordinating conjunctions. For example: Who were many people coming together cannot become one people falling apart. Who dreamed for every child an even chance cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not. Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head cannot let chaos make its way to the heart. Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot. This parallelism asserts that Americans will stand together not to leave their children in the hands of destiny, to enforce the laws of the land and to spread education in their country. Here the deviation in using a stop (.) in place of a semicolon (;) suggests that the poet wants to pay special attention to these issues separately. The third parallelism occurs in lines 26-27, where the poet has used the same structure of three coordinate clauses : “ We know what we have done and what we have said, / and how we have grown….” This reminds the people of America of their past. The only left-branching used in this poem occurs in line 18. The subordinating conjunction ‘who ‘ followed by ‘were’ as part of the relative clause should be used syntactically after the noun ‘many people’ that it modifies. But it has been left-branched and used before the noun. This foregrounding is done to maintain the parallelism with the subsequent three sentences that follow it. Thus Miller Williams has been able to succinctly present the history and hope of his country. IV Elizabeth Alexander read her “ Praise Song for the Day” During Barak Obama’s first presidential inaugural ceremony in 2009, as the fourth American poet to have this credit. The poem largely depicts the human world within and without America. So the poem needs to be analyzed from the humanistic perspective. Wikipedia defines humanism as an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns, attaching prime importance to human rather divine or supernatural matters. Further Paul Kurtz and Edwin H Wilson assert that in humanism faith and knowledge are required for the hopeful visions of the future( Preface). From the above point of view, if we analyze Alexander’s “ Praise Song”, this will be a fine specimen of human study. The poem can be comfortably divided into three parts that reflect three different themes about the present, the past and the future respectively. The first part comprises eight tercets; the second of the next three tercets; and the third of the last ten lines. The first part concerns with the day-to-day activities of Americans as well as people in general of the world. Alexander presents the present panorama of life on a broader canvas. She shows how people are busy in today’s world and how they have little time to exchange their words. The poet begins the poem with: Each day we go about our business, Walking past each other, catching each other’s Eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. (poemshunter) The second part stresses on the sacrifices and contributions of the people who have been instrumental in building up America as a nation. She dedicates this part to those people who “have died for this day” (25). She requests the audience to “Sing the names of the dead who brought us here” (26), for her poem is the “ Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day” ( 31) of Obama’s inauguration. Now from the reminiscences of the past, Alexander moves on to the future vision. The third part expresses her future expectations. She writes: Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love? Love beyond martial, filial, national, love that casts a widening pool of light . . . In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, Anything can be made, any sentence begun. (poemshunter) Commenting on these lines, Jordan Dickie writes that these lines “are deeply intimate, and easily be argued, with their common theme of ‘love’, to be trying to bring American citizens together under their common humanities . . .” (BestWord). Alexander has raised the issue that “love’ is meaningless if it does not ‘cast a widening pool of light’ beyond the martial, filial, and national love. This is the love for humanity. Hence the lines echo the Vedic concept of the human world as a single family. The poet visualizes that anything can happen and love is the binding force for the mankind. Thus Dickie sums up the poem: It is a praise song for moving forward with the unified emotions and the passions of a colorful and multicultural people who see a brighter, more humane future on the horizon, that the government they now believe better represents them as a ‘people’ and will act with the interest of all humanity and heart. (BestWord)

V Richard Blanco read his “One Today” during Barak Obama’s second inauguration as the President of America. Critics are divided in their opinions. Some critics like Michael R Burch have praised the poem, whereas critics like Carol Rumens have described it as a “ valiant flop”(The Guardian). So a dynamic approach will be helpful to establish it as a suitable occasional poem. The poem primarily presents two points: the unity in diversity in American life and the personal references of the poet. The theme of unity in diversity is highlighted in three different ways. The elements like the sun, the earth (ground), the wind, and the sky are given importance, as they sustain the American life as one and the unique. Blanco has tried to convey to the people of America the message that they share all these universal elements equally. Hence they are united and one. For example, the poet writes: One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. (Ll. 1-4) ……………………………………………………… One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat… (Ll. 27-28) ………………………………………………………. The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains mingled by one wind –our breath… (Ll. 34- 35)

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked their way to the sea. (Ll. 47 -49) Next, the poet has focused on American city life. He starts how people begin their day and return exhausted. He gives the graphic description of people‘s busy schedule, the panorama of the market place, reading events highlighted on newspapers, works of farmers and daily wagers, noise pollution in cities, technological developments, and tired commuters. In between leaving and coming back home, the poet has mentioned how people do various things throughout the day. Blanco writes in this context: My face, your face , millions of faces in morning’s mirrors, each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day: (Ll. 7-8) ------We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight of snow, or the plum brush dusk, but always – home… (Ll. 61- 62) Another important issue that Blanco has pointed out is the American Dream and the melting pot ideology. People from different parts of the world have come to America, as the poet himself, and have been assimilated with the mainstream American life. This is indicated by the poet by using multi-lingual greetings such as ‘hello, shalom, buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos dias” (Ll. 42-43). Again by alluding to the saying of Martin Luther King, the poet has conveyed double meaning. He writes, “… the ‘I have a dream’ we keep dreaming’ ”(Ll. 19). When the allusion refers to the dream of the people that have been a part of American life, the second part reminds us the American Dream of success in life. This is how the theme of unity in diversity is very much reflected throughout in this occasional poem. The second point is the inclusion of personal references. Richard Blanco has deliberately inserted such lines at three places. For example: . . .ring up groceries as my mother did for twenty years, so I could write his poem.(Ll. 14-15) . . . hands as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane so my brother and I could have books and shoes.(Ll. 31-33) . . . Hear . . . In the language my mother taught me … (Ll. 41- 44) These lines show how the poet longs for his past days under the patronage of his parents. Thus, commenting on the poem, Michael R Burch writes,“In any case, Blanco’s mingling of the universal and the personal helps keep the poem from becoming just another jingoistic bit of fluff.”(‘Blanco’s “One Today’”)

Works Cited

Ahmed, Irshad Gulam. ‘Poetry and Politics: Poetry of Witness after the Second World War.’ Handout given during a Refresher Course (Duration: 6. 2. 2013-26.2.2013) in English at North Bengal University, West Bengal, India. 2013. Print. Burch, Michael R. “Richard Blanco’s Inaugural Poem: One Today”. www.poemhunters.com. 27. 04. 2013 Dickie, Jordan. “A poetic analysis of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem ‘Praise Song for the Day’ ’’. www.bestword.com. 28.04.2013 Frank, A. J. Von. The Explicator. 38:1 (Fall1979). pp 22-23. Print. Kate, Kelloway. “Poet for the New America”. The Observer. (January 24, 1993). www.poemhunters.com. 27. 04. 2013 Kurtz, Paul and Edwin H Wilson. “Prface to Humanist Manifesto Ii (1973). qtd. in Attitude towards religion and atheism. www. wikipedia. com. 27.04.2013 Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Ciritical Companion.Westport, Connecticut:Greenwood Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-313-30325-8 Marcus, Mordecai. Introduction. The Poems of Robert Frost: An Explication (Ed.). The University of Michigan: G.K.Hall, 1991. Print. Rumens, Carol. “Richard Blanco’s ‘One Today’ ”. The Guardian. (22 January 2013) Tambo, Claire.”Fraught Occassions.”JHU Press Blog. Internet. January 22, 2013: 2.35PM. www.poemhunters.com. 28.04.2013

‘Rememory’ as a Strategy of Subversive Representation: A Feminist Reading of Morrison’s Beloved

Madhumita Purkayastha

I am accused of tending to the past as if i made it, as if i sculpted it with my own hands. i did not. the past was waiting for me when i came, a monstrous unnamed baby, and I with my mother’s itch took it to breast and named it History. she is more human now, learning language everyday, remembering faces, names and dates. When she is strong enough to travel on her own, beware, she will. Lucille Clifton: “I am accused of tending to the past…” momma help me turn the face of history to your face. June Jordan: “Gettin down to get over…”

You came right on back like a good girl, like a daughter…”

Toni Morrison: Beloved

Toni Morrison reinvented memory as “rememory” in terms of narrative strategy, counter hegemonic storytelling and multi perspectival discourse in Beloved. Literary narratives partake of the fundamental characteristic of narrative discourse, which is to have not only a tale—an underlying sequence of events with a beginning and an ending—but also a teller. The central concern in studying literary narratives is the role of the teller in the deployment of the tale. Again, Black Feminist literary theories have stressed on the need for alternative reconstructions of the past and narrative strategies of subversive representation in articulating the anguish and trauma of slavery, repressed memories and tales impossible to tell. A feminist reading of Beloved would reinforce her use of “rememory” in the “deployment of the tale” as an enabling/empowering strategy of subversive representation by black women whose historic “triple marginalization” in the United States of America has been problematized by their painful memories of a trouble-ridden/traumatic past as well as resistance of the “margins” to be “centred”. A feminist reading of the text would entail a notion of telling the other side of the story, which is the focal enterprise of feminist criticism and feminist theorizing. The association of alterity—otherness—with woman, or constructing the woman as other has problemmatized the situation of African-American women in America in ways that are different from that of the white women. They have been constructed as the “othered” race, the “othered” class as well as the “othered” gender. Their “unspeakable” stories had not yet been told, their muted voices waited to be heard— but they would have to tell their stories in a different way. The repressed or suppressed stories of trauma and anguish, construed as stories of the Other could then become the enabling conditions for the writing and reading of feminist narrative. Again, a perspectival notion of the story would imply the preference of a point of view and suppression of alternative voices and versions. Rememory acts here as a technique of subverting one coherent line of narration by bringing in multiple (polyphonic) as well as dissenting (antiphonic)voices/strands of narration.1 Beloved is rife with “mumblings”—“mumblings in places like 124”, which disrupt silences and disturb speech. A striking form of subversion that finds expression in feminist discourses is the anti-narrative strategy. It seeks to challenge ordered and coherent narrativity and deconstruct hegemonic forms and structures of monologic and phallocentric discourses. In Beloved Toni Morrison uses rememory as a strategy of subverting narrative coherence and order of recorded history by relativizing the rational metanarrative and putting into perspective the dominant discourses of recorded history by the whites as well as fugitive slave narratives by black males. Morrison revisions a history both spoken and written, felt and submerged, coalescing the known and the unknown elements of slavery—insignificant to the captors but major disruptions of black women’s experience of nurturing, loving and being. Morrison’s reconstruction of the historical text of slavery takes into cognizance not only the physical and psychic anguish of slavery but also the stark reality of slavery defying traditional historiography as well as the fact that the victim’s own chronicles of slavery were systematically submerged, ignored, mistrusted or superceded by historians of that era. A complicated interplay between recovered and remembered events and literary structures could be achieved through a manipulation of narrative structure. Reclaiming history functions here as thematic emphasis and textual methodology.2 However, in reconceptualizing and reconstructing American history through the consciousness of African-American slaves, Morrison also counters the canonical voices/ perspectives of the black male in traditional slave narratives. Rememory as strategy allows a shift from the locus of the known and the articulated to a locus of the visual, impossible to name, the unspeakable. In Beloved Morrison enters the realm of a new historicism that values the individual and fictive narrative as a truth-telling one. Here she balances the archetypal story (a borrowed slave’s narrative—Margaret Garner’s story) and a contemporary fictive autobiography to achieve a subversion of the narrative by focusing on the psychological disintegration and reintegration of an individual black woman, which is not a representation or a collective text in the conventional sense but a story that could be appropriated as the collective experience of black slave women. Rememory or the complex process of recovery of repressed memory allows for a slave narrative where the narrator is not effaced. Here, Sethe translates, interpretes and provides to the reader a richly textured psychological and experiential view of personal and historical events. Sethe’s “rememories” become not only the text of her own interior life but also an imaginative re- construction of the distorted, incomplete, eclipsed narrative of black women’s history during slavery and beyond. The inclusion of the theme of trauma, omitted from conventions of the traditional slave narrative allows for the subversive retelling of one woman’s story during and following the period of slavery.3 In Beloved silence becomes a protest against assimilationist tendencies. This kind of silence is different from the dropping of "a veil" that Morrison speaks of in relation to traditional slave narratives. Whereas old slave narratives exercised a willed omission of trauma as a defensive armor against humiliating or embarrassing memories, Morrison's strategic silence seeks to disrupt the very forces of assimilation and cultural hegemony that would lock others into helplessness and sanctioned ignorance. Sethe's circling around the subject becomes a narrative problematic of "pinning" down her story: Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off - she could never explain. Because the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. (B,163) Morrison has confessed that, when she wrote the novel, she feared that it would be her least read book because "it is about something the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia" ("Pain" 120). Sethe couldn't bring herself to talk about her past "because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable; to Denver's inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling incomplete reveries" (Beloved 58). But Morrison turns this very impossibility of telling for her characters into a possibility of narration. As she turns the self-censuring re-memories of her characters into a rhetoric of silence which points to the abysmal experience and missing details in the life of her characters that escape inscription, she demonstrates that confronting the past is liberating. Although Morrison has in certain instances denied ‘feminist concerns’, on radio in 1983 Toni Morrison affirmed that she was a “valuable” as a writer because she was a woman, “because women, its seems to me, have some special knowledge about certain things”.4 In another interview with Sandi Russel in 1986 she said:

I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other, as both black and white man do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving/loving way. They are writing to repossess, re-name, re-own.5

As Peach pointed out, the experiences of reclaiming and repossessing are crucial for black women writers who write from an especially difficult position.6

The narrative act of reclaiming and repossessing black slave women’s “unspeakable terror” is the central concern in Beloved. “That’s all you let yourself remember” Sethe had told Baby Suggs (B,6), but she herself “worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe”. Yet her devious memory threw up fragments of repressed events. The refuge of willful amnesia was disrupted by the arrival first of Paul D and then Beloved. I would say that Morrison writes for the black woman in Beloved. One could be contend that the women share narrative space with men in Morrison’s narrative and Paul D had “something blessed in his manner” who could “walk into a house and make the women cry” (B,21). However, in his post coital resentment after having slept with Sethe (which he had been imagining since 25 years) Paul D devalues Sethe’s “tree” (the bunched up scarred flesh on her back that had borne the lash) when he compared it to Sixo and his tree: “Now there was a man, and that was a tree…and the tree lying next to him didn’t compare”. (B,27) For Baby Suggs and Sethe “a man was nothing but a man… They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house”. (B, 28) Neither women set much store by their men whose appearance and disappearance reinforced the paradigm of absent black males. The poignance of their loss was eventually replaced by resignation. She could accept Paul D’s leaving as an inevitability she had come to terms with. Sethe had no knowledge of the incapacitation and insanity of her man Hal, (who had witnessed her humiliation at the hands of the nephews but could do nothing about it) the “somebody” who had fathered all her children and given her a sense of self through wifehood and motherhood. “Not knowing” spared her another excruciating pain and loss. The central narrative concern is however Sethe’s “mother-love” that was so “thick” that she could kill her child rather than endure her dehumanization in slavery. The interpersonal memories of Sweet Home, which she shares with Paul D and her transgressions into Paul D’s rememories could have helped in the recuperation and healing had not the overwhelming pain and humiliation of having her “milk stolen” surfaced with her rememory. The act of murdering her child reenacts and is symbolic of a stolen motherhood, erased identity and displaced self. It is only with the return of Beloved who is invested with the dual identity of Sethe’s mother and daughter that the process of exhuming trauma can begin. The slave mother's absence has greatly impaired the development of the child's subjective identity/self. Sethe "didn't see her [own mother] but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo." What she seems to remember most about her mother is the woman's absence. Without explicitly saying so, Sethe feels personally affronted by her missing mother "She never fixed my hair nor nothing," Sethe tells Denver and Beloved "She didn't even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember." Sethe "guess[es]" that her mother had to sleep closer to the "line-up"; however, she suspects that her mother had merely wanted to sleep elsewhere and intentionally deserted her daughter at night (60-61). Even though Sethe is familiar with the conditions of slavery, she cannot help but resent her mother's incessant unavailability. When Denver asks Sethe what had happened to her mother, Sethe suddenly remembers "something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind" (61). John Bowlby defines a form of repression in which "certain information of significance to the individual being [is] systematically excluded from further processing" as "'defensive exclusion'" (45). Sethe had defensively excluded the memory of her mother and, in particular, the events surrounding her mother's death. "When fragments of the information defensively excluded seep through, fragments of the behavior defensively deactivated become visible" (Bowlby 65). In recalling the fate of her mother, Sethe brings to the surface feelings of anger, bitterness, and sorrow. What she remembers is that, while trying to escape slavery, her mother had been captured, returned to the plantation, and hanged before the rest of the slaves. In order to reclaim her freedom, Sethe's mother had been willing to leave her child behind. Sethe finds it difficult to accept the fact that her "ma'am would run off and leave her daughter" (203). When Nan tells her that she was the only child her mother kept, Sethe initially feels "unimpressed" and later feels "angry" (62). Sethe infers that Nan wanted her to know how much her mother had cared about her, that she was loved because she had been the only child not thrown away. However, being allowed to live and being loved are not equivalent in Sethe's eyes. To Sethe, love means being "willing to die" for someone and being willing to "give [one's] privates to a stranger in return for a carving" (203). She would never consider deserting one's child an act of love. Foregrounding feminine subtexts like the pain of being black slave mothers constitutes a major concern of Black feminists. In discussing motherhood in slavery, Barbara Christian reveals that "the African emphasis on woman as mother was drastically affected by the institution of slavery, since slave women and men were denied their natural right to their children" (219). She goes on to explain that "some slave women were so disturbed by the prospect of bearing children who could only be slaves that they did whatever they could to remain childless" (220). When faced with the decision of whether to kill her children or relinquish them to a life of slavery, Sethe races her children into the shed and quickly slices open her two-year-old's throat with a handsaw. According to Wyatt, Sethe's maternal subjectivity “is so embedded in her children that it . . . allows her to take the life of one of them" (476). In killing her own child, Sethe insists upon her subjectivity. Sethe was the girl with the iron face in Paul D’s memory – the girl who could endure intolerable pain and had a reservoir of strength that was intimidating. For Sethe, the cowhide used on her back was insignificant compared to the enormity of the violation – both physical and psychological—of her motherhood. The potency of Sethe’s rememory of the stealing of her milk is achieved through reiteration: “They used cowhide on you?” “And they took my milk.” “They beat you and you was pregnant?” “And they took my milk!” It is Sethe’s mother-love that makes her want to compensate for Beloved’s lost childhood. With Beloved mysterious appearance, from the irrational realms of a magical supernatural world, Morrison collapses the framework of rational narrative to make space for the lost selves of dead black women. Beloved speaks in fractured sentences. Her fragmented rememory of a past mingles with Sethe’s rememory as well as Denver’s, who is at last able to participate in memories of Sweet Home. Beloved’s primal memory of captivity in a slave ship hold or womb interplays with Sethe’s primal memory of the slitting of her child’s throat and the feel of warm blood soaking her fingers, which in turn draws in Denver in its intricate web of nurturing and being as she takes her mother’s milk mixed with Beloved’s blood. The threesome exist in a virtually alienated world of reliving the past. Sethe comes to terms with her guilt but Beloved, symbolic of a recuperated past threatens to consume her. It is Denver who breaks out of the charmed circle of rememoried past to bring in the present in the form of help from the neighbourhood.

Lorraine Bethel in Some of Us Are Brave writes that at the core of Black feminism lies “Black women- identification” and that Black feminist literary criticism ... is most simply the idea of Black women seeking their own identity and defining themselves through bonding on various levels --- psychic, intellectual as well as physical--with other Black women... Black women-identification is black women not accepting male --- including Black male --- definitions of femaleness or Black womanhood… 7 bell hooks, speaking from her personal experience, says that black women "who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived existence, just as they developed strategies of resistance..."8 The joy of being together and the bondage of sisterhood may be new to the white, middle-class burgeoning feminists but to black women like her, "sisterhood" was nothing new for "(she) had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply..."9 She expresses her intention to "enrich, to share in the work of making a liberatory ideology and a liberatory movement", and points out the peculiar dilemma of black women, who, she contends, must "recognize the special vantage point (their) marginality gives (them) and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist sexist hegemony as well as to envision and create a counter hegemony.” As Angela Davis asserts, slavery constructed an alternative definition of womanhood for the black women that included a tradition of "hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, a legacy of tenacity, 11 resistance and an insistence on sexual equality" Black womanhood therefore, in its essence became an antithesis of white womanhood therefore, in that they achieved it through a combination of “grit, shit and 12 mother wit” , all of which entailed a tremendous capacity to endure pressure, hardships and toil. Sethe’s journey from captivity to freedom is a celebratory reiteration of a memory of excruciating physical pain and psychological anguish, which however, brings her to her children and her “home” where Baby Suggs and other black women tend to her and partake of her pain. The idea of women bonding naturally cuts across racial barriers when Mrs. Garner sheds tears of helplessness in her inability to protect Sethe or the “Whitegirl” Amy Denver who had helped to birth Denver.

Morrison employs the strategy of using black cultural tropes of resistance to resignify the logocentric world through the use of black women’s ritualistic performances of the Spirituals -- through Baby Suggs's preaching in the Clearing, and through the women's choral singing. Beloved, through her ghostly presence, represents the spirit of "the disremembered and unaccounted for". The inscription of "Beloved," carved on the headstone as the trace of Sethe's "mother-love," haunts the text with meanings that speak to the terror of slavery. Morrison's intimation of unspeakable thoughts is often suggested through Sethe's "picturing" things. For instance, Morrison describes Sethe's rememories as "pictures" drifting in front of her face. Remembering "Sweet Home," Sethe tells her daughter Denver: "'Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture of it - stays, and not in my rememory, but out there, in the world'" (Beloved 36). Such a language bears no pretense to universal or essential human experience. It points to its limit of expressiveness, implying that experience exceeds the violence of language. Through the portrayal of Schoolteacher, Morrison indirectly voices her critique of modernity and Enlightenment thinking. Schoolteacher is represented as a caricature of rationalistic thinking, going around with "a notebook" in his hands, in which he writes things about the slaves with the very ink that Sethe mixes for him, and advising his nephew" 'to put [Sethe's] human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right' " (193). Schoolteacher is worried about the deplorable state Sethe and her children are in only because his selfish interests are at stake: "There was nothing there to claim." He also regrets and reprehends his nephew for having maltreated Sethe, because she had “cut and run” and Sweet Home is being deprived of "at least ten breeding years" from Sethe. The prose here is dehumanizing, denying Sethe her human subjectivity. Morrison is acutely aware of her position as a black American woman writer using an imperial language as a means of expression, Morrison uses it to unsettle the arrogant, imperial domain of language use. Sethe's simple, monosyllabic words - no, no, no - ring deeper than Schoolteacher's bombastic speech. The repetition of the single sound expresses the inarticulate but protective response that compelled Sethe to attempt taking her children's lives rather than allowing Schoolteacher to force them back into slavery. Calling attention to an unknowable - i.e., incommensurable - reality, Sethe's words re-mark her own cultural difference. Morrison undertakes narration as a communal act, deftly manipulating the voices around her subject. Morrison's narrator does not subsume other voices into a single, univocal, and authoritative voice, but instead acknowledges the possible differences among members of the community. In Beloved, Morrison introduces oral narrative techniques - repetition, a shifting narrative voice, interactive re-memory, and an episodic retelling of the past - that contribute to the shaping of the aural/oral and participatory dynamics of ritual black folk culture within the private, introspective form of the novel. Through the depiction of Baby Suggs, who acts as a spiritual guide for others, Morrison launches the book's major choral aspect and introduces its ritualistic dimension. Here religion is elevated to ritual and spiritual healing. Baby Suggs's healing rituals in the Clearing, where she becomes an "unchurched preacher" (87), offer members of her community advice and help without making it static or rule-bound. Her morality is based on love rather than on rigid moral dictates. Baby Suggs rejects the definitions of formal religions, preferring the guidance of perceptive imagination: She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. (88) The group of women who gather as a community outside of Sethe's house at the end of the novel reiterate the ritualistic dimension of the Clearing. "In the beginning was the sound," Morrison writes of this gathering, "and they all knew what that sound sounded like" (259). Alerted by Denver to Sethe's suffering, they have come together to help Sethe cast out the trauma of her murdered baby, Beloved. Sethe experiences a repetition of the Clearing ritual when the women burst out in song: Morrison's struggle, as can be seen from all this, is for a kind of "writing" that can be "indisputably black" without the vestiges of essentialism. It is a struggle for a mode of writing that can "shape a silence while breaking it." The language she uses is speakerly/conversational, familiar as an idiom to black communities, and is particularly indicative of women conversing with one another, suggesting a "conspiratorial" tone. For Morrison, this phrase 'Quiet as it's kept'from The Bluest Eye has "a female expressiveness" – a conspiratorial tone. In Beloved this "feminine subtext" is sustained throughout the narrative, and is most eloquently captured in a late chapter which describes Stamp Paid approaching 124: Almost. Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken. (B,199) This sentence, written from the external perspective of Stamp Paid, preserves the feminine subtext as a mark of difference. It hints at the "unspeakable thoughts" of the women of 124 without invading and preempting that difference. The language here exemplifies Morrison's notion of that "stirring, memorializing language," a "seductive, mutant language" that she identifies with women's "own unsayable, transgressive words" ("Nobel" 6). Such is the language of the women of 124 and of the blind woman whose story with the aggressive visitors Morrison relates as a part of her Nobel Prize Speech. Morrison's use of rememory as subversive narrative strategy facilitates the engagement of literary text in a cultural critique through what Michel Foucault has referred to as "the re-appearance of . . . these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges" once suppressed "within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory" (Foucault 81-82) Morrison's narrative project is a non-hegemonic practice in which the creative tension among the different kinds of power/knowledge that discourse can wield is recast as a part of changing ways of looking and thinking, which is the project of feminist reading/writing.

References

1. Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives. Cornell University Press  1989. 2. Holloway, Karla F.C. “Beloved: A Spiritual” Callaloo, Vol.13, Summer 1990, The John Hopkins University Press. Pp 516-525. 3. Koolish, Lynda. “Fictive Strategies and Cinematic Representations in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Postcolonial Theory/Postcolonial Text”, African American Review, Vol. 29 No. 3, Autumn 1995 Indiana State University Press. 4. 1983 Radio Interview quoted in Peach. Toni Morrison. 1995. p. 14. 5. Mackay, Nellie Y. Ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall and Company.  1988, p. 54 and 46. 6. Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. p. 14. 7. Bethel, Lorraine. But Some of Us are Brave. Eds. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1982. p. 184. 8. hooks, bell. “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory,” Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South end Press,  1994. p.10. 9. ibid. p. 11. 10. ibid. p. 15. 11. Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. p. 29. 12. Davis, Angela. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”, The Black Scholar 3 (December 1971) p. 7.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1987. -----. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Penguin, 1993. -----. "The 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature Speech." Dictionary of Literary Biography: Yearbook 1993. Ed. James W. Hipp. New York: Random, 1993. -----. "The Pain of Being Black." Interview with Bonnie Angelo. Time 22 May 1989: 120-22

The Operation of Foucault’s ‘Disciplinary methods’ in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Purnendu Sengupta

Margaret Atwood’s critical acumen encompassing the ideas related to feminism, eco-feminism, dystopian fiction, apocalyptic fiction, gothic romance and post colonialism waives any simple downright interpretation. Atwood’s productive literary career is shaped and reshaped by the major philosophical, political and cultural issues that have been persistently structuring and restructuring society from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. Interestingly, Atwood’s own ideas have cast formative influences to reshape the ideas related to feminism, Apocalyptic fiction, eco-criticism, dystopian fiction etc. Her writings are mainly grounded in the volatile socio-political and cultural concerns of contemporary times. In Atwood’s own words, “I do see the novel as a vehicle for looking at society-- an interface between language and what we choose to call reality, although even that is very malleable substance” (Conversations 246). Atwood bears a strong belief in the pragmatic function of art: “If you think of a book as an experience, as almost the equivalent of having the experience, you are going to feel some sense of responsibility....You’re not going to put them through a lot of blood and gore for nothing; at least I’m not” (151).Coral Ann Howells has made the following meaningful observation regarding Atwood’s writings: From The Edible Woman onwards, her novels have focused on contemporary social and political issues. ‘And what do we mean by “political”?’ she asks in an interview after The Handmaid’s Tale : ‘What we mean is how people relate to a power structure and vice versa’(Conversations185).This wide definition of politics accommodates Atwood’s major thematic concerns: her scrutiny of relations between men and women, which she has always construed as a form of power politics; the representations of women’s lives , their bodies, their fantasies and their search for identity; her engagement with questions of national identity and Canada’s international relations, especially with the United States; her wider humanitarian concerns with basic human rights, and her environmental interests and increasingly urgent warnings about global warming, pollution and the risks of biotechnology(6). Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale narrativizes the im/personal history of Offred, the handmaid of the Commander named Fred in the Republic of Gilead where the fertile women are possessed and used as biological machine for production. The totalitarian regime of the Republic of Gilead employs and executes several means to buckle the lives of the freedom seeking women. Offred has been portrayed by Atwood as a narrator of her own miserable story. Through the narration of Offred the reader comes to know about the disciplinary methods which are at work in the Republic of Gilead to indoctrinate the handmaids. The handmaids are kept under constant surveillance whether they are within the Red Centre, the heart of Gilead or whether they go out for shopping. While discussing the “Language and storytelling” in The Handmaid’s Tale, Gina Wisker observes: There is a tendency for dystopian novels engaging with the dangers of totalitarian society to focus on repression of thought and expression. Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), Brave New World (1932) and other dystopian novels explore connections between state repression of its subjects, and that of their thoughts, through the perversion and oppressions of language (95). In the Gileadean regime, special language is used for personal greetings and other encounters. Those who do not produce the correct greetings fall under the suspicion of disloyalty. The rituals of Gilead, which involve various persecutions, are given particular names such as ‘Prayvaganzas’,’Salvagings’, and ‘Particicutions’. Offred’s narration provides the peepholes for the readers to observe repressive mechanisms of totalitarian regime. Offred, while migrating to Canada along with her daughter and husband, was captured and brought to the Red Centre to be used as a handmaid. Often slipping into the past, she contextualises her present.

The Handmaid’s Tale through the lenses of earlier critics:

The Handmaid’s Tale, from the date of its publication, has succeeded in eliciting a flood of responses from academicians across the seas. The initial responses are focussed on the novel’s feministic critique of reproductive technology. Critics like Mary McCarthy , Kate Fullbrook and Cathy Davidson have read the novel as a dystopian feminist novel. Lorna Sage has interpreted the novel as a political satire in which she “recognises Atwood’s critique of American values and considers Atwood’s Republic of Gilead as Middle America undermined by fanaticism, fuelled by fundamentalism, where traditional values mean everyone has one limited role, and all are under constant scrutiny , except for the ‘ Eyes of God’, the secret police” (Wisker 90). Neeru Tandon and Anshul Chandra in Margaret Atwood: A Jewel in Canadian Writing have made the following observation, “It deals in patterns of oppression and victimization based on sexual difference. As a woman’s story of resistance it is far more concerned with gender politics than with nationality” (137). In the book Canadian Literature: An Overview edited by K. Balachandran, Mrs. Suka Joshua has read the novel with reference to the concerns of eco-criticism and has shown how Atwood is preoccupied with the seriously damaged and degraded status of the environment that would ultimately result in leading human civilization either to the vortex of the Republic of Gilead or to the bio-chemical waste land as depicted by Atwood in her Oryx and Crake. Again, Harold Bloom has read the novel as a Gothic text that echoes the repressive nation-states still dominating the lives of women. Bloom in his self- fashioned style has made the following observation: The Handmaid’s Tale emerges from the strongest strain in Atwood’s imaginative sensibility, which is Gothic. A Gothic dystopia is an oddly mixed genre, but Atwood makes it work. Offred’s tone is consistent, cautious, and finally quite frightening...Her [Atwood’s] Gilead, at bottom, is a vampiric realm, a society sick with blood. The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant Gothic achievement, and a salutary warning to keep our Puritanism mostly in the past (Bloom’s Guide 8-9). The novel also poses questions about the problems of textualising history. We are left to depend on Offred’s taped record, rescued into an archive in a distant future, where her transcribed words are viewed by another male, Professor Pieixoto, who treats her as part of an archive, undependable because her reports are told in the first person. Martine Watson Brownley has touched the right cord while evaluating the function of Pieixoto: A pompous pedant, condescending to his audience and his material, he [Pieixoto] represents positivist historiography at its worst. The title of his address, “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s tale,” reflects his emphasis on method and technique, in his case not very critically applied, rather than interpretation. Peripheral evidence—for example, “a metal footlocker, U.S. Army issue, circa perhaps 1955,” which even Pieixoto has to admit “need have no significance”(381)—is more carefully scrutinized than the Handmaid’s surviving text. His concerns center on old-fashioned political history and its great men; dismissive of the Handmaid’s story, he longs instead for “even twenty pages or so of print- out” from the Commander’s home computer (Tale 393). Indeed, misreading the Handmaid’s text, Pieixoto reveals his male centric world view. According to Gina Wisker, the novel is “a powerful feminist critique of a potential future where women’s freedom is entirely eroded, but it also challenges and undermines many tenets of feminism, showing the views of second wave feminism to be both insightful in places and limited”(97). Thus the novel under discussion has been interpreted from multiple perspectives. However in this paper I will make a humble attempt to analyse how in the dystopian world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ‘disciplinary power’ is at work to reproduce conformist subjects and how certain characters strive to resist the circulation of power.

Foucault’s idea of disciplinary methods and how it operates in The Handmaid’s Tale:

Michel Foucault is one of the most debated thinkers of the twentieth century .A close survey of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Power/ Knowledge and Discipline and Punish reveals Foucault’s notion of power and how it is connected with social life. Foucault deviates from the traditional way of considering power as personal possession that is employed to restrict individual freedom. Foucault also attempts to alter the common perception that power is exercised only from the platform of the privileged and its application is directed towards the underdogs. For Foucault power relations are the basic fabric of social life, simply because “to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other action is possible – and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction” (Afterword 222-23). In his Discipline and Punish Foucault makes an elaborate discussion on the political nature of discipline and how ‘power’ is embedded in the custom of punishing the guilty down the ages. We may take recourse to Foucault’s idea of ‘disciplinary power’ in order to analyse how the mechanism of disciplinary power operates to construct conformist subjects in Gilead. Foucault, while discussing about the genealogy of body as ‘an object and target of power’, maintains: ... the methods which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assumed the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called ‘disciplines’...The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines(137-38). Repudiating the conventional view that the practice of incarcerating criminals from the end of the eighteenth century reflects a humanitarian advance, he describes instead the emergence of a peculiarly modern form of punishment as discipline. Central to this type of punishment is an attempt to place individuals’ everyday lives – their bodily behaviour, identity, activity and seemingly insignificant gestures – under surveillance in order that these undergo correction through the imposition of a rigorous time-table, the development of habits and corporeal constraints. These disciplinary methods are not confined to institutions such as the prison but gradually permeate broader social relations. The disciplinary methods that were in force to inform the handmaids materialised themselves through various practices. The preaching of Aunt Lydia, the practice of Testifying, the evenings of Ceremony all are meant to produce conformist characters like Janine. The stratification of both women and men in sub-categories according to the roles assigned to them for the furtherance and continuation of Gilead’s ideology surfaces the systematic ploys generally adopted to produce conformist individuals. Women are classified as per the necessity of Gilead: wives, aunts, handmaids, marthas, econowives, unwomen, jezebels. Men are classified as per the duties assigned to them: commanders, eyes, angels and guardians. What is remarkable in Atwood’s hierarchical classification of both men and women is the implication that both the sexes play pivotal role in structuring the mindset. Throughout the novel there are numerous occasions which reveal that the handmaids’ actions are regulated by the preaching of the aunts. Whenever they have to decide something that challenges their restricted boundaries, they are reminded of what the aunts said. One such occasion arises when the Japanese tourists requested the handmaids to have a picture of them. Offred’s refusal of their request is grounded on Aunt Lydia’s preaching: “Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen – is to be—her voice trembled— penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable” (Tale 38-39). As conversations with the Guards are not allowed in Gilead, Offred merely nods to Nick when he asks “Nice Walk?”. She knows that Nick is not supposed to speak to her. It is Aunt Lydia who has warned them: “Of course some of them will try, said Aunt Lydia. All flesh is weak. All flesh is grass, I corrected her in my head. They can’t help it, she said, God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It’s up to you to set the boundaries. Later you will be thanked” (55) Aunt Lydia’s indoctrination makes the inculcation of the Gilead’s ideology possible for the handmaids. They are made to look through the lens provided by the aunts. Aunt Lydia’s famous proclamation about freedom is directed to establish the seeming privileges to live in the self-defined world of Gilead: “There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are given freedom from. Don’t underrate it” (34). Offred reacted with indifference—“What I feel towards them is blankness” (43)—to the bodies hanging by hooks from the wall, the place of Men’s Salvaging. And the readers are informed of what aunt Lydia has said— “Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary” (43). Thus aunt Lydia with her words ceaselessly haunts the handmaids. Testifying is a special occasion in which the Handmaids are led to reveal some secret of their past. In one such Testifying Janine’s confession—how “she was gangraped at fourteen and had an abortion”—results in her humiliation. Janine is held responsible for being gangraped and all present in Particicution agree that it has occurred to teach her a lesson. Janine’s bursting into tears suggests that she is still not ready to accept what the aunts attempted to stamp on her. But on the following Testifying occasion Janine’s confession—“It was my fault, she says. It was my own fault. I led them on. I deserved the pain” (82)—sets her as an “example” for others. Even aunt Lydia appointed Janine to act as a spy after Moira attempted to escape from Gilead. What is striking in Janine’s character is her internalisation of Gilead’s doctrines and becoming the flag-bearer of the same regime. Thus Offred describes her as one of “Aunt Lydia’s pets” (37). Janine’s pride in showing off her rounded belly signals how ‘disciplinary methods’ succeed in producing conformist character. Foucault’s idea of “Panopticism” illustrates the subtle operation of power in modern world. Foucault takes recourse to Bentham’s idea of Panopticon, an ideal architectural form that enables the constant observation of individual inmates in organizations such as the asylum, prison, hospital, factory or school. Its principal effect is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Punish 201). The efficiency and effectiveness of this type of arrangement lie in the fact that both the inmates and staff feel under constant pressure to behave in line with the rules of the institution because they can never be certain they are not under constant surveillance by superiors. In this way they come to scrutinize their own behaviour as the gaze of surveillance turns inwards: He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constrains of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously play both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (Punish 202-03).

In The Handmaid’s Tale the main action is very much dependent on surveillance. It has been argued by Foucault that pre modern method of punishing the guilty in public is replaced by Panopticism, which ascertains more control over the subjects, studying their behaviour and attitude. In Gilead, both the methods are made to operate simultaneously: the pre-modern method of punishing the guilty in public so that it may induce fear among other concerned subjects as well as modern machinery of controlling the subjects through surveillance. The pre modern method of punishing the subjects in public to turn them as examples for others appears from the opening chapters of the novel. Offred and Ofglen, while they went out for shopping, came across the dead bodies hanging from the Wall. These dead bodies have been subjected to public show to imply that any transgression of Gileadean principle will meet terrible consequences. Again in Chapter 43 of the novel the Handmaids severely attacked and killed a man dressed in Guardian’s uniform. Though Aunt Lydia’s claim that the person having raped a pregnant woman caused the death of baby is refused by the accused saying “I didn’t....” (291), the Handmaids, particularly Ofglen, kicked him to death. Later Ofglen reveals that the person was punished because he belonged to Mayday association, a secret revolutionary organisation formed to overthrow Gileadean regime. She kicked him severely to relieve him of the brutal punishment. Ofglen committed suicide to avoid the brutal torture inflicted on the disloyal. Foucault’s argument—“ in a penality employing public torture and execution, example was the answer to the crime; it had, by a sort of twin manifestation, to show the crime and at the same time to show the sovereign power that mastered it....”( Punish 93)—aptly suggests why brutal tortures were exercised in the Gileadean regime for punishment. In the Gileadean regime no one is let free to exercise her/his will. The Eyes and the Guardians keep watching over the activities of all. One Handmaid is accompanied by another while they move out to do their shopping. Offred specifically mentions how each one of them is used to spy over the other—“We are not allowed to go there except in twos. This is supposed to be for our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers” (Tale 29). The fear that she is being watched haunts Offred while she negates the Doctor’s proposal of making “copulation” with her—“ “It’s too dangerous,” I say. “No. I can’t”. The penalty is death. But they have to catch you in the act, with two witnesses. What are the odds, is the room bugged, who’s waiting just outside the door?” She gets relief with the thought that she has “crossed no boundaries” and “all is safe” (71). Not merely are the handmaids the subjects of Panopticism, but also the Commander, Serena Joy, Nick, all of them fall under the purview of this surveillance. With the assistance of Nick, the Commander makes a secret arrangement to meet with Offred in his chamber at night. Serena Joy makes provisions for the copulation of Nick and Offred, keeping the Commander at bay from her design. All these arrangements were kept secret to keep off the inevitable punishment for flouting Gileadean principles. When Serena Joy discovers the secret meeting of the Commander and Offred, she gets furious and curses her saying—“A slut. You’ll end the same” (299). Ultimately Offred was arrested for “violation of state secrets” and it causes Serena Joy to go “white” (306). Pieixoto provides the information that the Commander, who seems to be Waterford, was killed in one of the first purges, soon after the events portrayed in Offred’s story. Offred’s narration reveals how in Gilead both ‘State Ideological Apparatuses’ and ‘State Repressive Apparatuses’, to use Althusser’s terms, worked together to subjugate individuals. In this context, we may quote Foucault’s idea of power that will help us to understand the mechanism of power in Gileadean regime: “Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation.” (Knowledge 98) But The Handmaid’s Tale is not merely a story of subjugation. Offred’s narration includes the stories of rebels like Moira and Ofglen. Moira always stands against the repressive societal norms. Offred knew Moira from her college days. Moira prefers to live with women because it does not let her feel that she is inferior. Moira believed that “the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction” (Tale 180). Indeed it was Moira’s rebellious nature that prompted her to make attempts of escaping from the Gileadean regime. Moira turns out to be an awe-inspiring personality for Offred. Though Offred desires to share the charismatic heroism of Moira’s nature, she is afraid of the horrible consequences. Offred seems to be well aware of the very lacuna of her nature: They’ve given me a small electric fan, which helps in this humidity. It whirs on the floor, in the corner, its blades encased in grillwork. If I were Moira, I’d know how to take it apart, reduce it to its cutting edges. I have no screwdriver, but if I were Moira I could do it without a screwdriver. I’m not Moira. (180) On the other hand, Ofglen was associated with Mayday organisation to undercut Gileadean authority. Ofglen’s devotion to the organisation surfaces when she vehemently kicks the suspected person to death. Harold Bloom has made an apt judgement as he remarks “Though perhaps not as bold as Moira, Ofglen still presents to Offred another choice about how to live in her circumstances, working in small ways to overthrow the system” (Bloom’s Guide 20-21). Unlike Moira and Ofglen, Offred did not make any attempt to rebel against the Gileadean regime. In spite of that Offred strove to resist the Gileadean power through her gestures and behaviour. From the very early chapters of the novel the readers are offered ample hints of how Offred can use her ‘body’ as a resource of power : “I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will”( Tale 83). She moves her hips to prick the sexual urge of the Guards who are left helpless because they do not have the permission to satisfy their sexual need. Offred makes a proper use of the opportunity and comments—“I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there” (32). Offred repeatedly expresses her kleptomaniac desire to steal something, which hints her burning desire to go against the authority. Offred does not agree with the Doctor’s proposal of copulating with him but agrees to Serena’s proposal to copulate with Nick. In exchange Serena gave her the picture of her daughter. She played scrabble with the Commander flouting the Gileadean norms and managed to take advantage of the situation demanding cream for her body. Offred as a character is torn in between two worlds—her own world that prompts her to elicit pleasure from what is prohibited and the world of Gilead which strives to indoctrinate her according to its own necessity. Thus the novel not merely presents the victimization of individuals through the exercise of power, it also narrates how certain characters, through different means, attempt to resist the systematic execution of power. Thus Foucault’s ideas offer enough ground to lay bare the mechanism and circulation of power in the Gileadean regime. But no single interpretation is complete in itself in our time when plurality of meaning in a given text has justly been accepted as a critical practice. In spite of that it is undeniable that an approach to The Handmaid’s Tale from Foucauldian perspective certainly opens up a different avenue.

Works cited Atwood, Margaret. Margaret Atwood: Conversations, ed. Earl E.Ingersoll. London:Virago, 1992. Print. ______The Handmaid’s Tale, Vintage, 2011. Print. Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Guide: The Handmaid’s Tale. Chelsea House, 2004. Print. Brownley, Martine Watson. Atwood on Women, War, and History: “The Loneliness of the Military Historian”, ed. Harold Bloom. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Print. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan.Vintage Book, 1991. Print. ______Afterword: the Subject and Power, in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault:Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, 1983. Print. ______Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, ed.ColinGordon,Pantheon Books, New York, 1980. Print. Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Joshua , Mrs. Suka. Atwood’s Abysmal World and its Vanished Visionary gleam (An Ecocritical Investigation of Margaret Atwood’s Futuristic Novels), ed. K.Balachandran, Sarup & Sons, 2007.Print. Tandon, Neeru and Anshul Chandra. Margaret Atwood: A Jewel in Canadian Writing. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2009. Print. Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Cultural Hybridity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

S. Akilandeshwari

The word ‘culture’ is notoriously hard to pin down, because cultural study is not really a discrete ‘approach’ at all but rather a set of practices. As Patrick Brantlinger points out cultural study is not “a tightly, coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda”, but a “loosely coherent groups of tendencies, issues, and questions” (qtd. Guerin 240). Cultural study is composed of elements of Marxism, new historicism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, studies of race and ethnicity, film theory, sociology, urban studies, public policy studies, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies. This cultural study generally shares four goals: A. Cultural studies transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. B. Cultural studies are politically engaged. C. It denies the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or elite and popular culture. D. It analyzes not only the cultural work, but also, the means of production. Cultural study includes the questions and issues of subjectivity. It analyses the relation of society to individual lives. Though cultural studies practitioners deny ‘humanism’ or ‘humanities’ as valid categories, they strive for what they call ‘social reason’, which often strongly resembles democratic ideals. One of the most challenging features of the culture is its assault on traditional categories of gender and sexuality. Along with all other absolutes, the questions of gender and sexuality have been replaced with the issues of ambivalence, ambiguity and multiplicity of identities. The term ambivalence is adapted by Homi K. Bhabha into post-colonial discourse to describe the mix of attraction and repulsion, and also to discuss the relationship between colonizers and colonized. It represents itself as nurturing in colonial discourse. According to Homi Bhabha ambivalence disrupts the clear-cut authority of colonial domination because it disturbs the simple relationship between colonizers and colonized. The effect of the ambivalence is to produce a profound disturbance of the authority of colonial discourse. The concept of ambivalence is related to hybridity because, just as ambivalence ‘decentres’ authority from its position of power, so that authority may also become hybridized when placed in a colonial context in which it finds itself dealing with and often inflected by other cultures. Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. Hybridization is in many forms: linguistic, cultural, political, racial and so on. Homi Bhabha contends that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in a space that he calls the ‘Third Space of Enunciation’. Cultural identity always emerges in this contradictory and ambivalent space. Bhabha makes the claim to a hierarchical ‘purity’ of cultures untenable. This hybridity and ambivalence makes a person to overcome the issues of cultural diversity and cultural difference. It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory may open the way to conceptualizing an international cultures, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. This ‘in between’ existence carries the burden and meaning of culture, and it makes hybridity so important. Hybridity is used in post-colonial discourse to describe the cross-cultural ‘exchange’. It has been regarded as replicating assimilationist policies by ‘masking’ or ‘whitewashing’ cultural differences. The idea of hybridity is used to describe the mutuality of cultures in the colonial and post colonial process in expressions of syncreticity, cultural synergy and transculturation. Culture is a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled. Stuart Hall argues that culture can only be a site of ongoing struggle that can never be guaranteed for one side or the others, and this culture is never reducible to politics. This cultural practices and forms of representation have the black subject at their centre and put the issue of cultural identity in question. The recent theories of enunciation suggest that, though the person speaks, in his own name, and from his own experience, the person who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are not identical, not exactly in the same place. Cultural identity is not a transparent or unproblematic one, which is never complete, always in process, and constituted within, not outside representation. In the first position ‘cultural identity’ is defined in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’ which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. This ‘oneness’, underlying all the other, more superficial differences is the truth, the essence, of ‘Caribbeanness’, of the black experience. Such a conception of cultural identity plays a critical role in all post-colonial struggles which have so profoundly reshaped the world. According to Hall, the second position of cultural identity recognizes that, as well as many points of similarity as there are critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’ or ‘what we have become’. People cannot speak from any exactness, about one’s experience, one’s identity, without acknowledging its ruptures and discontinuities that constitute, precisely the Caribbean’s ‘uniqueness’. Cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It belongs somewhere from history, so it undergoes constant transformation. In this second position of cultural identity one can understand the traumatic character of ‘the colonial experience’. This second position also describes, how the black people, black experiences, were positioned and subjected in the dominant regimes of representation. The colonizers have the power to make them to see and experience themselves as ‘Other’. The idea of otherness as an inner compulsion changes the conception of ‘Cultural identity’. Therefore, this paper analyses, hybrid life of Caribbean people both personally and culturally, specifically in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea was written in 1966. Antoinette is the protagonist of this novel. Wide Sargasso Sea deals with an upbringing in the colonial or racial atmosphere, the feeling of being exiled, the slow alienation from people and environment, the graduation to madness and the premonition of death. The attitudes of the patriarchal society that forced Antoinette into a powerless, victim position are also explored. This novel Wide Sargasso Sea is written in response to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, tells the tale of the silenced archetypal ‘mad woman in the attic’. Antoinette is a daughter of Alexander Cosway and Annette. So she named after by her father Cosway as Antoinette Cosway. When her mother marries Mr. Mason, she was forced to acquire the name of Mr. Mason. The unnamed male protagonist, who married Antoinette, begins to call her by another name as, Bertha. She is already confused over her identity for the black people call her as ‘A white cockroach’. But she protests against her husband when he refused to tell why he called her as Bertha? But it is the token protestation and is inclined to think that it does not matter. At the end of the second part of the novel, Antoinette find out that Rochester means doll by the name Bertha. Antoinette is helpless within the patriarchal society that strips her identity and her wealth. The tradition of the mad Creole wife is established. So Rochester hates his wife and also other people and the place. Antoinette narrates part three from England, where she is locked away in a garret room in her husband’s house, under the watch of a servant, Grace Poole. A hidden captive, Antoinette has no sense of time or place. She does not even believe she is in England when Grace tells her so. Violent and frenzied, Antoinette draws a knife on her stepbrother, Richard Mason, when he visits her. Later she has no memory of the incident. Antoinette has a recurring dream about taking Grace’s keys and exploring the house’s downstairs quarters. In this dream, she lights candles and sets the house ablaze. One night, she wakes from this dream and feels she must act on it. The novel ends with Antoinette holding a candle and walks down from her upstairs prison. This novel, Wide Sargasso Sea has black subject at its centre. Antoinette’s family is a Creole, avoided by both black and white people. The issue of cultural hybridity is a questionable one. Here, Antoinette speaks from her own experience of hybridity. Wide Sargasso Sea examines its enunciation of the transformation of the ‘other’ into a ‘self’. This novel also examines not only the personal experience of cultural hybridity but also the experience of their community. Wide Sargasso Sea reflects Hall’s view that is, cultural hybridity of Caribbean people, which is always in process of their inner experience, but never gets completed. Wide Sargasso Sea seemed to burst out of nowhere. Since her childhood in Dominica in the British West Indies, Rhys had been keen to give voice to the untold experience of the Creoles – people who share the experiences of the protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys herself was of European descent, yet born and brought up in Caribbean Island. Antoinette’s hybridity is obviously and fundamentally mixed up with the hybridity of others on her island, and with Jane Eyre, who came to live off the Creole’s wealth by marrying the Englishman who had established his home at the West Indian woman’s expense. Rhys’s writing is loaded with hidden histories that it hints at or reveals through sinuous strategies of expression and evasion. Her stories are filigreed with strikingly eloquent gaps, like the one exposed when Rochester, on honeymoon with Antoinette, wonders, why an apparently idyllic village is called ‘Massacre’. “Something must have happened a long time ago” (Rhys 55). Antoinette draws a blank: “Nobody remembers now” (Rhys 55). A sinister sense of secrecy pervade the place, beneath its hypnotic beauty lurk the scars of history. The deadly battle that swells between Rochester and Antoinette reflects an age-old, annihilating struggle over territory. It reminds that the attempt to conquer patches of earth involves an attempt to conquer peoples. The Creoles were, in Rhys’s opinion, misunderstood and maligned both by the blacks of the islands and by the wealthier white Europeans who came to settle in the West Indies after slavery was abolished, taking advantage of the new economic climate and usurping the Creoles’ superior perch. This is what the first reason to force Creoles to feel themselves as ‘Others’. Antoinette and her family do not fit in with the white people in Spanish Town. According to Christophine, the servant of Antoinette’s family, Jamaican ladies do not approve of Antoinette’s mother, Annette, because she is too beautiful and young for her husband, and because she comes from Martinique, which was then a French colony, unlike Jamaica, an English colony. When Antoinette asks her mother the reason for few people visit in them at Coulibri Estate since her father’s death, her mother makes excuses about the road being bad and travel being difficult. Rhys sets a tone of oppressed silence in this West Indian landscape, the calmness before the storm of racial violence. In a state of disrepair and decay, the Coulibri Estate represents the downfall of the colonial empire and its exploitative reign in the West Indies. When Antoinette’s mother tells her about Mr. Luttrell’s house, she says: “Mr. Luttrell’s house was left empty, shutters banging in the wind. Soon the black people said it was haunted, they wouldn’t go near it. And no one came near us” (Rhys 15). This tale of Mr. Luttrell describes the mood of apprehension among the island’s whites, who fear the revenge of the black ex-slaves. Antoinette and her mother are complete outsiders in their community, like Christophine their servant. Antoinette feels as estranged as her mother when others call her a ‘white cockroach’ – I never looked at any strange Negro. They hated us. They called us white cockroaches. Let sleeping dogs lie. One day a little girl followed me singing, ‘Go away white cockroach, go away, go away’. I walked fast, but she walked faster. ‘White cockroach, go away, go away. Nobody wants you. Go away (Rhys 20). Then Tia, the daughter of a servant accuses Antoinette and her family of not being like ‘real white people’. Accepted by neither white nor black society, Antoinette feels great shame. Tia’s betrayal of Antoinette when they bet pennies emphasizes the importance of money and currency in relationships. The pennies serve as symbol of capitalism, but they are gifts from Christophine, a figure seemingly far removed from such capitalism. The fact that Tia envies Antoinette’s pennies, and even betrays her friend to obtain them, reveals Tia’s acceptance of white ideals and the capitalist system. Money symbolizes the altered, even degraded values of the island people, and it accounts for the kind of corrupted innocence that Antoinette recognizes in the family garden. As white people who do not have money, Antoinette and her mother can no longer command the respect of the black community. When Antoinette and Tia exchange clothing, their roles are symbolically reversed without money; Antoinette is no longer entitled to the nicer clothing of a white Creole girl. Annette feels shame when she looks at her shabby daughter, because Antoinette represents, in that moment, the extent to which the Cosway family has fallen in social rank. According to Hall, cultural hybridity is much less familiar, and more unsettling. One cannot understand the formation of cultural hybridity, if it does not proceed, in a straight, unbroken line. The black Caribbean hybridity as ‘framed’ by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture. This Caribbean identity, involves the dialogic relationship between these two axes. The first axe deals with some continuity with the past. The second axe deals with profound discontinuity. African religion, which has been so profoundly formative in Caribbean spiritual life, is different from monotheism of Christianity. The uprooting of slavery, transportation and the insertion into the plantation’s economic condition of the Western world ‘unified’ the people of colonizer and colonized across their differences. The boundaries of difference are continually repositioned in relation to different points of reference. Similarly, in the developed West, the people are very much ‘the same’ belonging to the marginal, the underdeveloped, the periphery, the ‘Other’ and at the outer edge and at the ‘rim’, of the metropolitan world. At the same time the relation of the ‘Otherness’ to the metropolitan centre is not a standard one. Each has negotiated its economic, political and cultural dependency differently. And this ‘difference’ whether they like it or not, is already inscribed in their cultural hybridity. Similarity and continuity, and difference and rupture are described in the novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Here Rhys describes that Creoles have been compared with other black people because they are resisted by real white people. So they feel themselves as different from white people. They also have some ruptures in their mind about the cultural difference. But these vectors are tied with dialogic relationship with other. This Creoles have some continuity with past. Antoinette remembers her past life which is mentioned in the first part of the novel. She is forced to accept her Afro-Caribbean ancestries. Antoinette’s hybridity is resolved by the acceptance of her Black Caribbean heritage and rejection of anything tied to England. The religion of Caribbeans is formed from African religion. But in the time of colonization they were forced to accept monotheism of Christianity. Whatever it is, they also separate themselves as Protestant. Godfrey, a Protestant is another servant in Wide Sargasso Sea. But Christophine and Annette were Roman Catholic from Martinique. Once Godfrey says, “….The Lord makes no distinction between black and white, black and white the same for him. Rest yourself in peace for the righteous are not forsaken” (Rhys 16). In referring to the devil, Godfrey quotes from the Bible, “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out” (John 12:31). Antoinette compares her garden with the Garden of Eden and the trees with the Tree of Life. She says, “Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in that Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell” (Rhys 16, 17). Obeah is a system of belief in African and Caribbean folk practice in which the practitioner is perceived as both priest and sorcerer. White slave owners regarded the practice as witchcraft and tried to stamp it out. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Christophine practices this Obeah. Local gossip continues when Annette and Mason return from their honeymoon. Antoinette is troubled and frightened by the gossip she has overheard, especially tales about Christophine as a woman who practises Obeah. The word Providence generally denotes the outworking of the goodness of God. It is therefore considered unwise to go against it. Mason means that Aunt Cora has evaded the disasters experienced by other long established planter families when the Emancipation Act came into force. The phrase sounds as if Antoinette is repeating Mason’s own words. It is clear that he dislikes and distrusts Aunt Cora. Christophine, a Catholic, protests against Protestants or other black communities because she thinks that they are all non-conformists. Ritual sacrifice of animals and birds is practised in Obeah. This section also introduces Mr. Mason’s prejudices against the blacks of the West Indies, as well as his miscomprehension of the Creole position. In the somewhat upturned Caribbean world, the servants are in control while Creole whites like the Cosway live in fear. Mr. Mason, however, misjudges the ex- slaves as harmless and childlike, and he is supremely confident that, as a white Englishman, he is safe from all harm. He cannot understand how his wife feels subjected to the very people she is meant to control. Antoinette tries to get relief from ‘Otherness’ because of its instability. The Creole community is planned to escape from their political and economic control and condition differently. But this difference is inscribed in their mind. To capture this sense of difference which is not pure ‘Otherness’, a person needs to spread out the play on words as theorist Jacques Derrida did. According to him ‘difference’ is a marker which sets up a disturbance in the settled understanding or translation of the world concept. It sets the word in motion to new meanings without erasing the trace of its other meanings. It is possible with this conception of ‘difference’, to rethink the positionings and repositionings of Caribbean cultural hybridities in relation to at least three ‘presences’ of Presence Africaine, Presence Europeanne, and Presence Americaine. This ‘difference’ and ‘deference’ is marked in the life of Antoinette as a Creole. According to Christophine, the new white families which move into Mr. Luttrell’s old estate bring trouble to Antoinette’s family. These families further upset a tenuous social balance by highlighting the difference between prosperous English whites and poor, powerless white Creoles. Antoinette’s forest dream and the heavy footsteps that she hears behind her represent the approach of new English colonials, who have come to the islands to make their wealth and to reap the rewards from the old slave owners’ misfortunes. While her mother begins to re-emerge herself in this propertied society, Antoinette spends less and less time at Coulibri, feeling unsettled and apprehensive about the new arrivals. Rochester searches for traces of England in the strange world around him. He compares the red tropical land to parts of England, and finds books by Byron and Scott on the bookshelf. He tries to imagine his wife as a young English girl in an attempt to comfort himself in his decision to marry her. When Antoinette hands him a cup of water, Rochester imagines that “looking up smiling, she might have been any pretty English girl” (Rhys 60). He already wonders about the truth of her pure English descent, marveling at her interactions with the black servants and silently disapproving of her refusal to assert rank with them. He feels physically uncomfortable in the hot climate of the Indies: although mostly recovered from his fever, he still imagines that the green hills are closing in around him. From the outset of his story, Rochester often feels antagonized by a natural landscape that he associates with his wife and her Creole background. This is the difference which is expressed in the second part of the novel. Rochester imagines whatever as England, but nothing has changed in the landscape of West Indies or other realities of Creoles and other black people. Another ‘difference’ and ‘deference’ is found in Antoinette’s culture. Fish that had been preserved in salt was food for slaves. Wealthier people ate fresh fish. Like wearing Tia’s dress, eating fish is another sign of Antoinette’s childhood connections to black culture. The presence of Africaine is reflected in the life of creoles. Jamaicans discovered themselves as the sons and daughters of ‘slavery’. They also discovered themselves as ‘black’. It is the presence of Africa, which has placed the Caribbean hybridity against ethnic background. Black, brown, mulatto, white – all must look Africaine in the face, speak its name. But this origin of identity remains unchanged by dismemberment and transportation. Antoinette’s family identifies themselves as black and after ‘Emancipation Act’ they were hybridized with other slaves of black people. Therefore they cannot mingle with real white people. Antoinette’s two dreams – of forest and of chasing by a person – mirrors colonization of Mr. Masan and her husband. This kind of personal colonization separates her from her community and life. Antoinette’s husband also feels alienated from his wife because of her mental confusion. Thus, the white colonization made Creoles of Jamaica to identify themselves as blacks. Annette is also refused by other Jamaicans, because she is from Martinique. Displacement is often reflected in the novels of Caribbean literature. In Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, displacement and dismemberment reflects in the life of Rochester and Antoinette. Rochester as a white man felt this kind of displacement and dismemberment among all the black servants of Antoinette in Granbois. Antoinette too feels displacement and dismemberment with real white people like her husband. This is what the extraordinary level of her madness in Thornfield of England. But this displacement and dismemberment are not fully expressed by Antoinette, because of her condition of madness. The feeling of otherness and the presence of Africaineness is identical in Antoinette’s representation of events, which comes into competition with her husband. On several occasions in the text, the attention is drawn to the incompatibility of each other’s mental vision, as they both compete for the control of meaning. In the narration of Antoinette’s husband, he argues with her about the appearance and manner of Christophine: “Her coffee is delicious but her language is horrible and she might hold her dress up. It must get very dirty, yards of it trailing on the floor”. “And is this feast day?” “She wanted it to be a feast day” “Whatever the reason it is not a clean habit”. “It is you don’t understand at all. They don’t care about getting a dress dirty because it shows it isn’t the only dress they have. Don’t you like Christophine”? ( Rhys 71). Through this argument, one can understand that Rochester’s lack of knowledge about local custom. The incident is in stark contrast to Rochester’s position in Jane Eyre, where his version of life in the Caribbean is the only one the reader has, while Bertha is reduced to shrieks and unintelligible noises. Here Rochester refuses to accept the words of Antoinette about her community. Therefore it shows the domination of patriarchal and colonial society. Rochester chooses to believe Daniel Cosway’s slander that “there is madness in that family” (Rhys 82), and that she has intimate relations with her cousin Sandi, preferring these allegations to Antoinette version of her family history. By the end of Part two he has made for himself his own version of events in which he believe that his father and eldest brother have married him off to Antoinette so as to be rid of him, situating her as the focal point for his anger. Rhys exposes the ways in which colonial discourses create their own images of alterity rather than reflect an existent reality, while undercutting this process by highlighting the extent to which the husband’s knowledge is based on the flimsiest of evidence. Significantly, Antoinette’s husband makes a drawing which anticipates both her fate and that of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. Rhys draws attention to the presence of unruly voices of people in subservient positions which challenge and unnerve those in positions of power. In so doing the novel explores the ways by which those made subject to others can resist the attempts by authority and establish their voices as the dominant and controlling ones. Therefore, it is proved, the presence of Europeanness in Rochester, makes him to speak continuously. It also makes Antoinette to maintain silence everywhere in her life. The European presence interrupts the innocence of the whole discourse of ‘difference’ in the Caribbean by introducing the question of power. The Third, ‘New World’ is the space where the creolizations and assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated. In the Fourth ‘New World’ Creoles prove themselves as different race. The meaning of ‘Racism and reaction’ is that racism is culturally and historically specific rather than naturally occurring and universal. Where the term ‘race’ is usually associated with physical or biological differences in such things as skin and eye colour, ‘ethnicity’ describes social or cultural differences that are not necessarily visible or grounded in nature. As it is used in ‘New ethnicities’, ethnicity is an anti-essential term, an attempt to understand the cultural construction of difference, rather than difference as a biological or racial marker that is fixed in the genes. “The term ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated and all knowledge contextual” (Procter 117). It is this understanding of ethnicity that allows Hall to offer a re- reading of a major category of difference-‘black’-not as a racial marker, a matter of pigmentation or skin colour, but as an historical and discursive ‘positioning’ that has shifted over history. More particularly, it allows him to locate ‘black’ within the British context at a significant historical conjuncture as an identity formation that is presently shifting from one position or context to another. ‘New ethnicities’ begins by tentatively describing this shift in terms of two moments that are overlapping rather than consecutive, but which viewed together indicates the re-positioning of the ‘black’ as a label of identification. It places an emphasis on unity rather than difference, while reversing the oppositional logic of racism through the construction of an essentially good black subject and an essentially bad white subject. ‘Culturally’, he argues, the construction of a hegemonic, or unified black identity, formulated itself in terms of a critique of a way blacks were positioned as the unspoken invisible “other” of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses (Procter 117). Where a certain brand of post-modernism might emphasize the endless deferral of meaning as it moves from position to position, sentence to sentence, for Hall it is crucial to remember that meaning is generated when it ‘stops’. This ‘full’ stop is never final or fixed, always arbitrary and contingent. This is why self-reflexivity, contingency and difference alone are not enough. “There has to be a politics of articulation” (Procter 121), a means of linking or bringing together individuals to form new alliances. Where in traditional identity politics such alliances were formed through an emphasis on unity and the suppression of difference, Hall prefers the idea of “ “unities” in difference” (Procter 121). In this context, identity is not nomadic, endlessly wandering or deferred; on the contrary it recognizes that: every identity is placed, positioned, in a culture, a language, a history, it is its specificity, on conjuncture. But it is not necessarily armour-plated against other identities. It is not tied to fixed, permanent, unalterable oppositions. It is not wholly defined by exclusion.

Works Cited

Adjarian, M.M. “Between and Beyond Boundaries in Wide Sargasso Sea”. College Literature 22 . 1 (1995). Print. Curtis, Jan. “The Secret of Wide Sargasso Sea”. Critique 31. 3 (2005). Print. Guerin, Wilfred L., Labor, Earle., Morgan, Lee., Reesman, Jeanne C., and Willingham, John R. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. McLeod, John. Beginning Post-Colonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print. Procter, James. Stuart Hall. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Books, 1966. Print.

Historiographical Reconstruction as Postcolonial Counter-narration in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Samik Dasgupta

It is the post-Rushdie generation of Indian English writers who initiated the second phase of postcolonial writing in India back in the 1980s, and their writings were primarily engaged in “the charting of cultural territory” by way of re-writing the past. Amitav Ghosh is one of these writers whose works reflect a constant preoccupation with postcolonial ideas, particularly with reference to history as a political tool for defining identity. As a postcolonial writer, Ghosh perceives the Eurocentric meta-history as the chief instrument of ‘the modern political myth-making’ which creates the self-other binary opposition in human society. His novels question the established versions of colonial and nationalist history based on Eurocentric perceptions, and at the same attempt at re-narrating the past as a necessary strategy for redefining identity in the modern world. In this paper, I shall examine Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace as a typical postcolonial narrative, and explore the ways it reinterprets the colonial history of Burma and India from a non-European, non- hegemonic viewpoint, rejecting the Eurocentric historiography which founded on a systematic erasure of ‘other’ voices. Through its elaborate narrative moving across time and space, the novel presents the intertwined histories of Burma, Malaya and India in the British regime and in the process traces the rise of nationhood in these countries through anti-imperialist freedom struggle. Against this vast historical backdrop, Ghosh subaltern historiography charts the “unmaking and remaking of individual and collective identities and examines the self- fashioning and self-alienation that followed in the wake of colonial defeat” (Mondal 113). The novel begins in 1885 at the time of British imperialist invasion of Burma. The distant noise of the ‘English canon’ is heard outside the royal palace in Mandalay, called the “Glass Palace”. The royal authority’s response to this British military advancement comes in the form of a proclamation which questions the legitimacy of the colonial intervention in Burma. What, however, is perhaps most significant about this proclamation, is the way it identifies the British power as a cultural threat rather than a political one: To all Royal subjects and inhabitants of the Royal Empire: those heretics, the barbarian English kalaas having most harshly made demands calculated to bring about impairment and destruction of our religion, the violation of our national traditions and customs, and the degradation of our race, are making a show and preparation as if about to wage war with our state….His majesty, who is watchful that the interest of our religion and our state shall not suffer, will himself march forth… will efface these heretics and conquer and annex their country. (The Glass Palace 15-6)

This proclamation is an anticipation of the clash of cultures and the construction of the East-West binary opposition which was to be initiated through colonizing process, with the imposition of the hegemony of European culture over the native ones. The Anglo-Burmese war which begins on 14 November 1885, leads to the surrender of the Burmese royal army, and the deportation of Thebaw, the last of the Burmese kings, to India to be kept under the house arrest at Ratnagiri. The colonial history justified this British military intervention in Burma as part of the European civilizing mission, and highlighted the essential barbarity of the native rulers. Uma, the wife of the Indian collector at Ratnagiri, tells Dolly, an attendant of the Burmese royal family: “One hears some awful things about Queen Supalayat … that she had a lot of people killed … in Mandalay….Doesn’t it frighten you, she said, to be living in the same house as someone like that?” (113-4). In reply to this inquiry, Dolly turns Uma’s attention to the picture of Queen Victoria, the symbol of British authority, hanging by the front door of her house, and exposes the façade of humanism and generosity of the British Empire with her pointed question: “Don’t you sometime wonder how many people have been killed in Queen Victoria’s name? It must be millions, wouldn’t you say? I think I would be frightened to live with one of those pictures” (114). In the novel Ghosh explores the hypocritical nature of British colonialism in a number of ways. Queen Supayalat tears apart the humanistic ideals posited by the British authorities as means of justifying their colonial exploitation. She tells the officials who come to inquire after them in the Outram House at Rantagiri:

This is what they have done to us, this is what they will do to all of Burma. They took our kingdom, promising roads and railways and ports, but mark my word this is how it will end. In a few decades the wealth will be gone – all the gems, the timber and the oil – and then they too will leave. In our golden Burma where no one ever went hungry and no one was too poor to write and read, all that will remain is destitution and ignorance, famine and despair. We were the first to be imprisoned in the name of their progress; millions more will follow. (88) Ghosh uses the Burmese Queen’s diatribe against British imperialists to question the so called civilizing mission of colonialism, and expose the lust for wealth and power which underlie the colonial discourse of enlightenment. The colonialism as portrayed in the novel is a power that causes more than the destruction of the economy of the native land. The novel demonstrates how colonialism shapes the perception of the colonized subjects, and even turns them into collaborators to the colonizing process. The first instance of such manoeuvring is evidenced in the deployment of the Indian soldiers in the Burma expedition. “There were”, the narrator tells us, “some ten thousand soldiers in the British invasions force, and of these the great majority – about two third - were Indian sepoys” (26). Ghosh’s description of these Indian soldiers marching towards the royal city of Mandalay particularly focuses upon their absolute loyalty and psychological servitude to the colonial rulers. The Glass Palace reveals how the participation of the Indian soldiers in the colonization of Burma leads to the rise of an anti-Indian nationalist feeling among the Burmese population. The realization that the British army in Mandalay consisted not of British but Indian soldiers, turned the hostility of the Burmese crowds towards Indians living in Burma. The novel reports how with the spreading of the news of Indian imperial army marching into the city, the Indian community in Mandalay barricades itself within the Hajji Ismail’s compound. Rajkumar, unaware of this sudden change of situation, suddenly finds himself turned into a hated ‘outsider’ as an Indian among the Burmese, and is subjected to the violent assault of the Burmese crowd before being rescued by the pistol- wielding Chinese, Saya John. The incident narrated in the early part of the novel, anticipates the rise of the Burmese nationalist movement which in course of time would turn against the Indians as collaborators to the colonizing process carried out in Burma. The colonial experience as captured in the text operates in a number of ways shaping the identities and motivations of the characters as they try to negotiate their sense of self and evaluate their place in the colonial scheme of things. Ghosh here aims at exposing the fundamental nature of the European ‘civilizational imperialism’ which thoroughly indoctrinated the colonized people in the Western notion of progress, and established the legitimacy of the European powers as rulers of the colonies founded by them. As Ashis Nandy in The Intimate Enemy (1983) very aptly points out, the European rationalists and modernists apotheosized imperialism as a harbinger of civilization to the uncivilized world, and helped “to generalize the concept of the modern west from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category”(xi). This very notion of ‘civilizational imperialism’ is revealed in The Glass Palace as colonial tool of constructing the self-other dichotomy. The novel, as it stands, shows how the colonized people’s submission to the Eurocentric notion of progress eventually led to their psychological enslavement on one hand, and their participation in the colonizing process on the other. In fact, the novel puts forward the personal stories of a series of ordinary individuals, in order to expose the myth of modernity. Saya John and Rajkumar are two such characters whose career demonstrates the disruptive aspect of colonialism. Saya John, the Chinese teak trader and mentor of Rajkumar, is an admirer of the European modernity. To him, It was the Europeans who saw that tame elephants could be made to work for human profit. It was they who invented everything we see around us in this logging camp. The entire way of life is their creation. … (The Glass Palace 74) John believes that the whole enterprise of logging timber from the forests could not have been possible without the Europeans’ ingenuity. Rajkumar who grows up under the mentorship of Saya John, comes to share Saya’s conviction about the Europeans. In the later course of the novel he opposes the anti-colonial movement in Burma believing that the Burmese economy would collapse without the patronage of the British. In his reconstruction of the colonial history of Burma, Ghosh places the story of deposition of the Burmese king alongside the intertwined histories of Rajkumar and Saya John that move through the inter- war years to the Japanese occupation of Burma during the Second World War. The rise of Rajkumar as a subaltern rubber planter and teak merchant, as presented in the novel, reveals the way in which the colonial project of modernization comes to be sustained through the collaboration of the expatriate Indian community. Ghosh’s historiographical narrative shows how Rajkumar, led by Saya John, enters the timber trade and eventually turns into an active collaborator in the colonizing process through his capitalistic pursuit of money. Ghosh suggests that the success of Saya John and Rajkumar is bases on a shrewd appraisal of the rules of the colonial game. In fact, it is precisely due to his identification with the British colonizers that Rajkumar turns into a ‘hated outsider’ in Burma, particularly at the wake of the Burmese nationalist uprising. During one of her conversations with Uma, Dolly tells her of the growing resentment of the Burmese people against the Indians because of their identification with the British colonizers: “Indian moneylenders have taken over all the farmland; Indians run most of the shops; people say that the rich Indians live like colonialists, lording it over the Burmese” (240). The conflict between the Burmese and the Indians subsequently leads to a riot that lasts several days causing death to hundreds of men. “It was discovered”, Ghosh tells us, “that the trouble had started with a clash between Indian and Burmese workers at the docks. Many Indian and Chinese-owned businesses were attacked, among them one of Rajkumar’s timberyards” (245). While Rajkumar defends the colonial authority’s decision to deploy more Indian reinforcements to fight the rebels, Uma accuses people like Rajkumar as responsible for the event: “It’s people like you who’re responsible for this tragedy. Did you ever think of the consequences when you were transporting people here? What you and your kind have done is far worse than the worst deeds of the Europeans” (247). Apart from Rajkumar and Saya John, the novel presents characters like Arjun and Beni Pradas Dey as victims of the European metanarrative of modernity. Educated at Cambridge, Beni Prasad, the Indian collector of Ratnagiri, is a typical representative of that class of people which the British rulers wanted to create in order to facilitate their governance of the colonized societies. Thoroughly imbued in the civilizing mission of modernity, Beni Prasad considers that his immersion in European culture has given him a superiority over others. The narrator tells us, “He had heard it said once that she [the Burmese Queen] had always really loved Thebaw.” But he wondered, “what could they possibly know of love, of any of the finer sentiments … these semi-illiterates who had never read a book in all their lives, never looked with pleasure upon a painting?” ” (152). As a servant of the Raj and a fully subscribed supporter of its civilizing mission, Beni Prasad believes himself to be an agent of progress and liberty. However, the Queen turns the collector’s rhetoric of modernity inside out, declaring that their illegal imprisonment by the British government is a matter of greater scandal compared to the affair between the elder princess and a poor coachman’s son which the collector finds so scandalizing: … We have heard so many lectures from you and your colleagues on the subject of the barbarity of the king of Burma and the humanity of the Angrez; we were tyrants you said, enemies of freedom, murderers. The English alone understands liberty, we were told; they do not put kings and princes to death; they rule through laws. If that is so, why has King Thebaw never been brought to trial? Where are these laws that we hear of? Is it a crime to defend your country against an invader? Would the English not do the same?”(150) In fact, it is the ‘gaoler’, who remains a prisoner all through his life, trapped by the discrepancy between his ideology and the reality to which he must submit. In his attempt to adopt the ideals of modernity, Beni Prasad finds himself entangled in the self-constructed shadow lines that separate him even from his wife, and splits his own self. His sense of inferiority to the European officers was so deeply ingrained in his personality that “there seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues” (186). The failure of Beni Prasad is due to his inability to look beyond the metanarrative of Enlightenment. One of “the most successful Indians of his generation; a model for his countrymen” (186-7), Beni Prasad remains a tragic character by trying to live his life “in conformity with incomprehensible rules” (187). The tragic plight of the collector born of his entrapment in the Eurocentric discourse on modernity anticipates the tragedy of Arjun, Uma’s nephew, and a loyal officer in the British imperial army, whose belief in the emancipator promise of modernity proves to be a deception. Like Beni Prasad, Arjun holds that the ‘true freedom’ consists in breaking the taboos of past life: “ ‘Look at us!’ Arjun would say, after a whiskey or two, ‘we’re the first modern Indians; the first Indians to be truly free. We eat what we like, we drink what we like, we’re the first Indians who’re not weighed down by the past’ ” (279). In the process of imitating the Western ways of life Arjun becomes most English of the Indians in his battalion. But in doing so, he separates himself from his native people. In Calcutta, Arjun finds himself targetted by Congress workers for serving in an ‘army of occupation’. A Burmese student participating in a political demonstration tells Arjun that in Burma when they see Indian soldiers they say, “ ‘…There goes the army of slaves – marching off to catch some more slaves for their masters’ ” (288). While braving the Japanese attack in the forest of Malaysia, Arjun for the first time discovers his alienation from the Indian cause. The pamphlet signed by Amreek Singh of INA says, “Brothers, ask yourselves what you are fighting for and why you are here: do you really wish to sacrifice your lives for an Empire that has kept your country in slavery for two hundred years? (391). Hardy, one of Arjun’s friends in the British, reminds him of the inscription over the entrance to their Military Academy, ‘The safety, honour and welfare of your country comes first, always and every time’ (330), and asks him: “Where is this country?” and “why was it that when we took our oath it wasn’t to a country but to the King Emperor – to defend the Empire?” (330). With his changing perception about the nature of truth, Arjun discovers that he has been no more but a willing tool at the hands of the colonial masters: “It was as if I wasn’t really a human being – just a tool, an instrument” (407). Confused at the discovery of the hollowness of all his assumptions, Arjun wonders: What are we? We’ve learnt to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that except for the colour of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognize us as Indians. When we joined up we didn’t have India on our minds: we wanted to be sahibs and that’s what we’ve become. Do you think we can undo all that just by putting up a new flag? (439) At the same time his encounter with the racial barriers reveal to him the limitation of the idealistic promises of modernity to which they committed themselves. In spite of their submission to the European values and practices of modern living, they were not accepted by the Europeans fellow officers. In Singapore Arjun finds the Europeans deserting the swimming pool as he, along with his Indian friends, jump into the water. Kumar, one of Arjun’s associates comments, “We’re meant to die for this colony – but we can’t use the pools” (383). The novel in its attempt to produce a counter-narrative of European historiography puts forward such little stories of the East-West encounter, and in the process questions the established history of European modernity. The narrative dealing with Arjun’s disillusionment and his joining the INA is closely connected to the disillusionment of Uma, who in course of her travel of the European countries, discovers the wily nature of the British colonialism pitting Indians against the Burmese in order to fortify the Empire. It is Uma who points out to Dinu that the expansionist aspiration of Germany and Japan are simply the result of their appropriation of the successful imperialist British model. Dismissing Dinu’s concept of colonialism as means of countering the evils of Indian caste system, untouchability and widow burning, Uma tells him: Colonialists would like us to believe this, but there is a simple and clear refutation. It is true that India is riven with evils such as those you describe – caste, the mistreatment of women, ignorance, illiteracy. But take the example of your own country, Burma – they had no caste system….Women had high standing – probably more so than in the West. There was universal literacy. But Burma was conquered too, and subjugated ….It is simply mistaken to imagine that colonialists sit down and ponder the rights and wrongs of the societies they want to conquer: that is not why the empires are built. (294-5) She reminds Dinu that one “must not be deceived by the idea that imperialism is an enterprise of reform” (294), and at the same time suggests that the Indian struggle for independence should include the struggle for reform in an Indian way. Significantly, The Glass Palace shows how the ‘shadow lines’ etched by the colonial powers, are re-inscribed through nationalist imaginings. As a matter of fact, the ideal of nationalism as presented in the novel is incapable of freeing itself of the colonial notion of modernity and cultural homogeneity which led to the construction of the self-other binarism in the colonized society. Ghosh in this novel, therefore, rejects the Eurocentric historiography built upon the self-other binary notion of identity, and attempts to capture the heterogeneity of experience by constantly focusing upon the stories of individuals crossing all physical and psychological boundaries. Throughout the novel, Ghosh recounts the stories of a whole range of dislocated people beginning with King Thebaw, Queen Supayalat, Beni Prasad, Uma and Arjun down to the subaltern figures like Saya John, Rajkumar, Dolly, Kishan Singh and Ilongo. An intricate network of familial ties connect these people as they move from one place to another. Saya John’s son Matthew marries Elsa, an American, and their daughter Alison falls in love with Dinu when he comes to visit the Morningside estate in Malay. Neel marries Manju, Uma’s niece, and settles in Rangoon before dying in an accident. Manju too dies on her way back to India in the Long March, leaving behind her the daughter, named Jaya. Alison and Saya John dies in the Japanese attack in Malay, and Dinu gets back to Rangoon and marries Ma Thin Thin Aye, the young girl who helped to shelter him during the Second World War. All these familial relationships cut across cultural and national boundaries and in the process defy the separatist notion of the Eurocentric colonial and nationalist history. In fact, following the precept of postmodernism Ghosh believes that identity is a dynamic concept, and a product of social and cultural negotiations initiated by physical movement. The characters in the novel constantly move from one place to another, and it is through their trafficking between the ‘home’ and the ‘world’ they develop a constantly evolving amorphous identity. Rajkumar, as an orphan boy moves from Chittagong to Burma and grows into a prosperous teak merchant. As Rakhee Moral puts it in her article, “Ghosh’s characterization of this petty luga-lei turned timber tycoon is one way of addressing the vital problematic of the settling and resettling of communities and individuals amid the confluence of nations and nationalities” (148). The story of Rajkumar’s love, romance and trade spreads across countries and cultures, and in the process questions the established boundaries of nations and nationalities. From Burma Rajkumar travels to Ratnagiri in search of his boyhood love, and returns to Burma after marrying Dolly, the girl he saw and fell in love with when she accompanied the Burmese royal family on their way to exile. Rajkumar keeps trafficking between Burma and Malaysia where he sets up a rubber plantation. Significantly, in spite of his appropriation of the role of the colonizer, Rajkumar shows a capacity to transcend the self-other division inherent in the colonial perception of things. In spite of being an Indian, he identifies himself with Burma, before being forced to leave the country and join the “Long March” of the Indian migrants back to their homeland with the sad knowledge that the “Ganges could never be the same as Irrawaddy” (The Glass Palace 544). Throughout the novel Ghosh focusses upon the shifting nature of identity of his characters born out of the experience of diaspora. Dolly Sein, like Rajkumar, embodies a trans-national identity that can accommodate the ‘other’. As Anshuman A. Mondal points out, it is Dolly who most of all exemplifies the portability of identity through the multiple locations of her ‘home’. Dolly comes to the court of Mandalay from her native village as an attendant to the royal family and takes the palace as her home. She suffers a sense of loss after getting transported from the Mandalay palace to the Outram House at Ratnagiri along with the Burmese royal family. But this sense of loss gives way to a new sense of belongingness following her nearly twenty years of stay in that place. In fact, while setting out for Burma with Rajkumar by her side, Dolly feels like leaving her home, and takes in a last glimpse of the lane that led to the Outram House: “the leaning coconut palms, the Union Jack, flapping above the gaol on its crooked pole, the rickety teashop at the entrance to the lane. This was home, this narrow lane with its mossy walls of laterite. She knew she would never see it again” (171). From Burma Dolly further travels to Morningside Rubber Estate at Malaysia and then visits Culcutta during Neel’s marriage. She revisits Calcutta as a refugee after the death of Neel and Manju, and finally returns to Burma, and joins the Buddhist order, leaving Jaya and Rajkumar in the custody of Uma. All such travels and cross-border ties as presented in the novel disrupt the ‘shadow lines’ constructed by the grand narratives of colonial and nationalist history. What I would like to contend in this paper is that the novel is an attempt on the part of the author to challenge all forms of polarization produced by the colonial and nationalist history by way of foregrounding little stories of ordinary individuals shaped by primal human values. During Dinu’s convalesces Dolly hears voices of women crying over their dead children, and she identifies herself with them: It was as though the walls turned porous in the stillness of the night, flooding her room with an unseen tide of defeat and suffering.… She’d begun to cry – it was as though her voice had merged with that of the unknown woman; as though an invisible link had arisen between all of them – her, Dinu, the dead child, his mother. (211) It is the emotion of love that melts all social and cultural barriers between Dolly and Rajkumar, and forges the link between the Indo-Burmese Dinu and Chino-American Alison. In fact, as pointed out by Rakhee Moral, love in this novel “is curiously symbolic of exiles coming together, as it were, of families meeting out of a shared compulsion across disputed and dispossessed territories. Ghosh in the midst of despair and wartime disillusion seems to reiterate here the quiet and unchallenged faith that only such love and desire can sustain” (150). The most significant aspect of Ghosh’s fictional discourse in The Glass Palace is the presentation of a dialogical perception of humanism. Parting and meeting of people across geopolitical boundaries as captured in the novel produces an intertwined history of the South-Asian countries during the one hundred years of political struggle in the subcontinent, and it is this heterogeneous history of people that questions the monolithic and exclusionist ideals of identity constructed by the official history of colonialism and nationalism. The novel, in spite of its elegiac note is not merely a story of defeat. In his interview with Frederick Luis Aldama, Ghosh comments: For me, at some point, it 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 … But around defeat there’s love, there’s laughter, there’s happiness, you know? There are children. There’s faithfulness. This is what life is and I want my book to be true to that. (Ghosh, Interview with F.L.Aldama 89) The most emblematic image of melting boundaries appears at the fag end of the novel. The narrator, Jaya’s son, recounts his memory of discovering Rajkumar and Uma – the two sworn critic of each other’s views – lying naked in bed together, locking their dentures one upon the other in a kiss. The narrator comments: I had never seen a kiss before. In India, in those days, such things were excised from sight by unseen censors, in real life as in film. Even though I did not know that this embrace had a name, I did realize that to remain in that room would be to violate something that was beyond my understanding…. What I saw that morning in my great-great-aunt Uma’s bedroom remains to this day the most tender, the most moving sight I have ever seen, and from the day when I sat down to write this book – the book my mother never wrote – I knew that it was this that it would end. (546-7) The Glass Palace, after all, is a portrayal of the changing image of the self, and notion of identity itself, in the time of the breaking and making of nations. It is this constantly changing identity of human individuals that reveals itself through the image of “The Glass Palace” – a symbolic representation of the brittle and multi-dimensional self-consciousness.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, Indian Reprint. 2010. Print. Biring, Jagroop S. “Colonising the Mind: Civilisational Imperialism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” The Atlantic Literary Review 6.3 (2005):.95-105. Print. Bose, Brinda Ed. Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2003. Print. Dasan.A.S. “Questing for Truth:History-Fiction Interface in the Recent Indian English Fiction.” Littcrit 33.2- 64 (2007): 5-24. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. Interview by Frederick Luis Aldama. “An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 76.2 (2002): 84-90. Print. JSTOR. Web. 19 May 2011. ---. Letter to Sandra Vince. 18 March 2001. Outlookindia. 19 March 2001.Print. outlookindia.com.Web. 12 June 2012. ---. The Glass Palace. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India and The India Today Group, 2003. Print. Gupta, Santosh. “Looking into History: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade. Ed. Rahul Bhargava. New Delhi: Rawat, 2002. 242-52. Print. Kadam, Mansing G.. “Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace: A Postcolonial Novel.” Littcrit 30.2 (2004):35-49. Print. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. McClintock, Scott. “Travels Outside the Empire: The Revision of Subaltern Historiography in Amitav Ghosh.” South Asian Review 27.2 (2006):5-24. Print. Mondal, Anshuman A.. Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010. Print. Moral, Rakhee. “ “In Time of the Breaking of Nations”: The Glass Palace as a Postcolonial Narrative.” Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Brinda Bose. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2003. 139-54. Print. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Rev. of The Glass Palace. amitavghosh.com. Web. 10 Sep 2012. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Neb, N.K. “Humanistic Concerns in Amitabh Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” Cyber Literature 17.1 (2006): 24-30. Print. Punekar, R. Mokashi. “Repositioning Borders: A Reading of The Glass Palace.” Critical Practice X.1 (2003): 52-58. Print. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1995. Print. Sengupta, Jayita. “Ghosh’s The Glass Palace through post-colonial lens.” The Quest 16/1 (2002): 26-32. Print. Thieme, John. “Amitav Ghosh.” A Companion to Indian Fiction in English. Ed. Pier Paolo Piciucco. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004. 251-75. Print. Vinoda, T.. “A Tale of Three Countries: The Glass Palace as a Postcolonial Text.” Litcrit 30.2 (2004):7-24.Print.

Abnormal Childhood as the Symptom of Post-Colonial Malady in Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas

Samit Kr. Maiti

Trinidad-born novelist of Indian ancestry, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is universally recognized as a post-colonial maverick recording the cultural fragmentation, spiritual degeneration and psychic abnormalities of the people of the Third World nations in post-imperial situations in an inimitable comic style and with utmost sincerity and precision. He is chiefly a novelist; and novel becomes a powerful tool in his hand to carry out a social inquiry into the traumatic experiences of the colonized people in the post-colonial societies, as Champa Rao Mohan admits categorically in the Preface to Postcolonial Situation in the Novels of V.S.Naipaul:

He (Naipaul)…dwells on the contradictions and failings of the postcolonial cultures and societies while criticizing them for their intellectual and cultural parasitism on the West. At the same time, however, there runs through his novels a poignant awareness of the traumas of the displaced, deracinated people and the problems and paradoxes of Third World societies that still grope for self-definition. (vi)

Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, an epical work in its conception and execution, is virtually a saga of cultural disintegration, corruption, malnutrition, moral aberration, insecurity, psychosis in a post-colonial Caribbean island which get manifested through Naipaul’s touching treatment of childhood of the protagonist of the novel, Mr Mohun Biswas. The narrative shows the ill-fated birth and gradual evolution to maturity, through many hurdles, of Mr Biswas to become a journalist of Sikkim Street; but, most significantly, to become the owner of his ‘own’ house. But the objective of this paper is to show how the childhood of the protagonist - which happens to be the most sensitive and formative part of his life - gets badly affected as an unavoidable impact of colonization, even at a time when the colonizers are dispelled from the island and the island is desperately struggling to shape its own identity as an independent nation. Naipaul’s contention is that the fate of the Third World countries remains perpetually ambivalent and they are to bear the indelible scar of colonization and imperial domination. This ambivalence and cultural scar are most conspicuous by their presence in Naipaul’s depiction of abnormal, spoilt and problematic childhood of the protagonist as wells as of many children. The birth of Mr Biswas takes place amidst chaotic screams of the new-born baby, the shrieks of the midwife and the unlucky predictions of the local pundit. Even shortly before Mr Biswas was born there had been another spell of customary quarrel between his father, Raghu and his mother, Bipti. Finally, Mr. Biswas comes on the surface of the earth with all possible sorts of unlucky symptoms - six-fingered, born in the wrong way, and in the most ‘inauspicious’ hour of midnight-for which Bissoondaye had to resort to a very tricky method to avert unfortunate disasters of the boy and the family. Bissoondaye had to venture the lonely night to walk to the next village to search a hedge of cactus, the leaves of which were cut into strips and hung over every door, every window, every aperture to restrict the entrance of evil spirit into the hut. And, then came the prophecies of the pundit on the basis of the child’s physiognomical potentialities: “First of all, the features of this unfortunate boy. He will have good teeth but they will be rather wide, and there will be spaces between them. I suppose you know what that means. The boy will be a lecher and a spendthrift. Possibly a liar as well. It is hard to be sure about those gaps between the teeth. They might mean only one of those things or they might mean all three.”(Naipaul 12) Now, these types of assumptions of a man’s nature on the basis of physiognomical features are not uniquely Caribbean; these have their precedence in Chaucer’s remarkable portrayal of the character of Wife of Bath in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer describes her in the following words: “Gat-toothed was she, smoothly for to seye.”(Robinson 123) A number of commentators like Prof. Curry suggest that this physical feature is a sign of ‘boldness, falseness, gluttony, and lasciviousness.’ So from the very birth Mr Biswas becomes an object of mockery, ridicule, derision and fear. Thus, Mr Biswas achieves the stigma of being a “classic loser”(Singh 2) since his birth in the penniless house of Raghu and Bipti. This is evident in Naipaul’s portrayal of the character of Mr Biswas, where from the very early section of the novel he resorts to the weapon of irony, ridicule and sarcasm. Mr Biswas’s first name ‘Mohun’ ironically denoted to ‘the beloved’, the name given by the milkmaids to Lord Krishna. John Thieme is right when he says: “By giving Biswas a name accorded to one of the avatars of Vishnu, Naipaul ensures that his central character is viewed in an ironic light; he establishes him as a Hindu mock-heroic figure.”(507) Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas narrates the birth, growth and constant search for identity of Mr Biswas amidst a plethora of hardships in the Caribbean island, which in allegorical terms, can be equated with the birth, evolution and honest efforts for self-definitions of the Third World nations in post- imperial situations in general. Again, like the birth of Mr Biswas, the birth of a post-colonial Third World nation occurs from the womb of topsy-turvy situations of the former colonies and conspiracies, manipulations and abject schemes of the hypocritical colonial masters. Secondly, almost religious adherence to the prophecies of the local pundit and their peculiar solutions suggests the pathetic state of cultural sterility of a Third World nation. Colonization crushes the former education-system of a native country and employs an educational system that would render the colonized people culturally and intellectually handicapped. So the picture of the ambience of Canadian Mission School at Pagotes and even the process of elementary education in that school where Mr Biswas had to pass as many as six years of his early teens is irrevocably dismal and gloomy. The image of Mr Lal, the headmaster at Canadian Mission School with ‘his small hairy hands fussing with cylindrical ruler on his roll-book’(Naipaul 40), brings immediately into reader’s mind the archetypal image Mr Creakle, the notorious headmaster of the Salem House in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), whose sole motto was ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’. The method of education of Canadian Mission School was oppressive, artificial, pseudo-disciplinary, soulless and mechanical. Instead of emphasizing on the proper efflorescence of the finer sensibilities, moral faculties, the art of self- dependence and humane qualities of its students, the school relied chiefly on unscientific principles of education. The school resounded with the mechanical and repetitive chantings of the boys: Ought oughts are ought, Ought twos are ought. Or, One twos are two, Two twos are four. (Naipaul 43) Mr Lal’s ears imbibed a solid satisfaction from the clamorous chantings of the boys. Occasionally, he proved his authority on some boys with his inhuman and ingenious methods of punishment, as Naipaul narrates so brilliantly:

He held the rod at both ends and bent it back and forth quickly. The sleeves of his jacket fell down past dirty cuffs and thin wrists black with hair. The jacket was brown but had turned saffron where it had been soaked by Lal’s sweat. For all the time he went to school, Mr Biswas never saw Lal wearing any other jacket.(43)

The situation is funny, no doubt, but the hard fact is that this ambience is not, at all, a congenial backdrop for the nourishment of the tender childhood. There was hardly any scope for fulfillment of rosy dreams and imaginations for the little boys; education, for them, was not a pleasurable experience, rather a source of inexpressible mental and physical oppression, as Mr Biswas experienced once for committing a mistake during his customary learning:

He (Mr Lal) caught hold of Mr Biswas, pulled his trousers tight across his bottom, and began to apply the tamarind rod, saying as he beat, ‘Ought twos are ought. Ought oughts are ought. One twos are two.(Naipaul 43-44)

All these demoralizing methods of education in the Caribbean Island speak volumes of the total breakdown of the cultural and educational system as an inevitable result of the onslaught of the colonial rule; the effects of which can be discerned in the tortured childhood of the protagonist.

Childhood is a period of insecurity and psychosis for Mr Biswas due to the untimely and tragic death of his father and the absence of motherly care and affection at home. There are hardly any warm and familial relations among the members of the house:

He was not happy there and even after five years considered it a temporary arrangement. Most of the people in the hut remained strangers, and his relations with Bipti were unsatisfying because she was shy of showing him affection in a house of strangers.(Naipaul 46-47)

Consequently, Mr Biswas does not develop a normal and healthy personality. He grows into a problem child. He develops the habit of smoking at a very early age, plays the forbidden games outside the school campus, makes knives and bayonets on the railway track out of the nails and does many more wicked things. When his attempt to become a pundit in the house of Jairam ends in disaster, he goes to work as an assistant in Bhandat’s rum-shop where through Bhhadat’s children he enters into the bizarre world of the adults - scandal about extramarital affairs, sex, betrayal and obscenity:

They (Bhandat’s boys and Mr Biswas) were learning to smoke; they were full of scandalous and incredible revelations about sex; and at night, in whispers, they wove lurid sexual fantasies.(Naipaul 62)

Then comes the epiphanic moment of Biswas’s quarrel with his mother:

‘It is my fate. I have had no luck with my children. And with you, Mohun, I have the least luck of all. Everything Sitaram said about you was true.’ ‘I have heard you and everybody else talking a lot about this Sitaram. What exactly did he say?’ ‘That you were going to be a spendthrift and a liar and that you were going to be lecherous.’ ‘Oh yes. Spendthrift with two dollars a month. Two whole dollars. Two hundred cents. Very heavy if you put that in a bag. And lecherous?’ ‘Leading a bad life. With women. But you are too small.’ ‘Bhandat’s children are more lecherous than me. And with their mother too.’(Naipaul 65)

So what we gather is a very squalid picture of childhood in the Caribbean Island in the post-colonial situations. Mr Biswas, Alec, Bhandat’s boys are universal prototypes in a post-colonial country who, because of their abnormal situations, desperately hanker after to escape the sordid reality, to belong to an imaginative reality like the post-colonial diasporic writers. Even by considering the basic fact that childhood is the period of instinctive rosy dreams and free imagination, it can fairly be asserted that creation of an ideal of beauty, romance and magic is not a matter of Keatsian passion for these children, rather a matter of survival strategy for them; a sort of defence-mechanism that help them to cope with reality and to define themselves in their devastated homelands. This forced Mr Biswas and Alec to enter into the profession of sign paintings where they could fulfill, at least partly, their urge for creativity and romance. Later on, Mr Biswas developed an inclination to read romantic novels:

He read the novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli. They introduced him to intoxicating worlds. Descriptions of landscape and weather in particular excited him; they made him despair of finding romance in his own dull green land which the sun scorched everyday.(Naipaul 77)

He became gradually addicted to reading those types of novels which describe, in the manner of the romancers, the struggle o a poor protagonist for searching the meaning of romance, like the boy protagonist in Joyce’s short story ‘Araby’:

He stayed in the back trace and read Samuel Smiles. He had bought one of his books in the belief that it was a novel, and had become an addict. Samuel Smiles was a romantic and satisfying as any novelist, and Mr Biswas saw himself in many Samuel Smiles heroes: he was young, he was poor, and he fancied he was struggling.(Naipaul 78)

There came occasional moments of restlessness and spiritual crisis which got manifested through his arbitrary physical movements. Spiritual crisis transformed into physical restlessness:

There were the days when he became a conductor on one of Ajodha’s buses which ran in competition with other buses on a route without fixed stops. He enjoyed the urgent motion and noisy rivalry, and endangered himself needlessly by hanging far out from the running-board to sing to people on the road, ‘Tunapuna, Naparima, Sangre Grande, Guayaguayare, Chacachacare, Mahatma Gandhi and back,’ the glorious Amerindian names forming an imaginary route that took in the four corners of the island and one place, Chacachacare, across the sea.(Naipaul 79)

So, having been disillusioned of the post-colonial reality, the children became gradually permanent denizens of the world of fantasy and magic land. For them, real happiness and solidarity of identity lie in escaping the immediate reality which can be analyzed as a mark of their existential crisis. What Naipaul gives in the novel is a faithful recapitulation of the situations of the East Indians in Trinidad, as Champa Rao Mohan comments:

Naipaul being an East Indian himself speaks largely from his own childhood memories and is able to render a more accurate and comprehensive picture of what was to him a lived experience. In the early novels that form the Trinidad tetralogy-The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul deals predominantly with the East Indian experience in the West Indies.(Mohan 13)

Hence, the situations and experiences of the novel are largely autobiographical in nature. Many events in the novel have exact parallels in the life of the author. Even, the character of Mr Biswas is modeled on Naipaul’s father. But, autobiographical experiences never take the form of hallowed glorification, because Naipaul is fundamentally a Conradian pessimist:

In Naipaul’s vision of the world, pessimism may be said to be a central strain, while his commitment to truth is uncompromising. As his vision matures, it becomes increasingly pessimistic with his own growing sense of disillusionment.(Mohan 10)

In fact, the children in a post-colonial society lead a fragmented, fractured and tortured existence; they don’t experience a life of cohesion and harmony. The childhood period of the children like Mr Biswas, Alec, Bhandat’s boys is a period of maladjustment, malnutrition, insecurity, psychosis and various physical and psychological crises. Colonization breaks the total infrastructure of a native land, and after the departure of the colonial masters colonial hangovers exist to affect the physical, cultural, educational and economic structures o a country, and by virtue of being the most sensitive, tender and vulnerable part of human life childhood gets most badly affected.

Works Cited

Mohan, Champa Rao. Postcolonial Situation in the Novels of V.S.Naipaul. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004, Print. Naipaul, V.S.. A House for Mr Biswas. London: Picador, 2003, Print. Robinson, F.N.(ed.). The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, Second Impression, 2000, Print. Singh, Siddhartha. Review of the novel, Connect! Web. 15 March, 2013. Thieme, John. “A Hindu Castway: Ralph Singh’s Journey in The Mimic Men,” Modern Fiction Studies, (Autumn 1984), Print.

Towards a Humane Critical Evaluation of the Poetry of Sarojini Naidu

Santanu Ganguly

Sarojini Naidu was a distinguished writer of Indian poetry in English, a patriot par excellence and a national figure in Indian politics. Daughter of the legendary Aghorenath Chattopadhyay who was the first Indian to be awarded a D.Sc degree (from Edinburgh University), she passed her matriculation at the age of twelve and left to study English literature in England. Marriage to the physician Major (Dr) Govindarajulu Naidu and a family of four children could not restrict the poetic streak in the young Sarojini, and the turn of the century found her participating whole-heartedly in India's struggle for freedom. She toured India extensively while delivering speeches to energize the people of the country and her first speech was delivered in Madras in 1903 when she was only twenty four years of age. Her political life received a boost when she came in touch first with Gopal Krishna Gokhale in 1902 and Gandhi in 1914. She became the first Indian woman President of the Indian National Congress at its Kanpur session in 1925. When Gandhi was arrested during the Salt Satyagraha on 6th April 1930, the mantle of leadership fell on Sarojini Naidu. She produced three anthologies of poetry during her lifetime—The Golden Threshold (1905); The Bird of Time(1912) and The Broken Wing (1917), and a posthumous collection entitled The Feather of the Dawn (1961)—before turning to a full-time political life. In my paper, I shall discuss how the poems have been viewed and analysed over the years by critics then and now. Thus my paper seeks to present the changing contours of Sarojini criticism over a long period of time as literary epochs changed both in world and Indian literary history.

The earliest commentator on Sarojini Naidu's verse was Arthur Symons, author of the acclaimed work The Symbolist Movement in Literature. He was a renowned poet during Sarojini's time and her earliest literary produce was sent by her to him for judgment. He was the one who wrote the Introduction to her maiden anthology The Golden Threshold when it was published by William Heinemann in 1905. Symons was an important literary personality at that time and one would have expected his introduction to be appropriate for a budding poet whose literary talents were being showcased before the world for the first time. On the contrary, the introduction is filled mainly with biographical trivia and physiognomic details. Symons gives details of Sarojini's birth, parentage and upbringing, how she proved to be a polyglot from a young age and could compose poems of 1300 lines quite early in her teens. Physical descriptions abound, as for example her eyes that always "turned towards beauty as the sun-flower turns towards the sun" (The Golden Threshold 15); her long black hair hanging straight down her back; her slender, short build which might erroneously have induced people to take her for a child; her habitual taciturnity and her musical voice when she did speak. Along with physical descriptions, we find Symons dwelling at length upon the letters that Sarojini had sent him in her teens. He narrates how she invited him to "come and share my exquisite March morning with me" (The Golden Threshold 17) and devotes one long paragraph on her decription of neem, champak, serisha trees, silver-breasted birds, flaming blue and gold sky and everything that is "hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and unashamed in its exalting and importunate desire for life and love" (The Golden Threshold 18). But at the end of it all, we find that amidst all his ramblings, Symons has done Sarojini a favour — he identifies her works as a representative of the East to the Western reader — the department of a woman of the East finding expression through a Western language and under partly Western influences. Symons wisely identifies the desire for beauty as the one quality that characterized Sarojini as a poet, and concludes by highlighting the philosophical quality of her mind — "her eyes were like deep pools, and you seem to fall through them into depths below depths" (The Golden Threshold 26).

In marked contrast to Arthur Symons, it is Edmund Gosse who makes a more judicious analysis of the literary efforts of Sarojini in his Introduction to her second book of poems The Bird of Time. Having acknowledged graciously that the earlier introduction by Symons had been mainly biographical, Gosse first identifies the lacunae in Sarojini's a priori poetic capabilities. He reveals: "The verse which Sarojini had entrusted to me were skilful in form, correct in grammar and blameless in sentiment, but they had the disadvantage of being totally without individuality" (The Bird of Time 4). Gosse confesses that he laid the poems aside in despair for they were imbued with a familiar Western feeling and imagery that echoed the styles of Shelley and Tennyson. In the garb of a genuine literary mentor therefore, he advised the inexperienced Sarojini to discard the Anglo-Saxon sentiments and settings and to concentrate on "some revelation of the heart of India, some sincere penetrating analysis of native passion, of the principles of antique religion and of such mysterious intimations as stirred the soul of the East long before the West had begun to dream that it had a soul" (The Bird of Time 5). He acknowledges happily how Sarojini's immediate acceptance and execution of his advice transformed her from "a clever machine- made imitator of the English classics" to a "genuine poet of the Deccan" (The Bird of Time 5) producing in the process the fine specimens of poetry that he was introducing to the world. Having described the transition, Gosse now proceeds to identify the features of the poems contained in The Bird of Time and correctly pinpoints the change of voice from The Golden Threshold. He finds the initial tone of ebullience now muted and he understands that this has resulted from the poet's close companionship with sorrow. He says that her own fragile health and the sight of her own suffering countrymen had "thinned the jasmine garlands and darkened the azure of her sky" but prays that the desire for beauty and fame and "the magnificent impulse" (The Bird of Time 7) may still remain energetic in her heart.

Gosse's introduction is genuine literary criticism all right, so refreshingly different it is from the analysis of Symons. One realizes why Sarojini had dedicated The Golden Threshold to Edmund Gosse (and not to her parents, to whom she dedicated the second collection of poems) as a gift for having "showed [her] the way to the Golden Threshold" (The Golden Threshold 6). He begins with a comparison between Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu finding the former to be less mature on account of her youth. From here he goes on to describe how Sarojini became a welcome guest at his residence, how she mustered up the confidence to lend him her poems for judgment, how he pointed out her faults to her and advised her to change her subjects and style, and the happy consequence that followed. Thus, while Symons goes round and round the same theme which does not help the reader much, Gosse's analysis displays a logical progression of thought. It shows why Gosse commanded such an exalted place as a literary critic, introducing to the world such literary stalwarts as Henrik Ibsen, Toru Dutt as well as a few French masters in his book French Profiles. Sarojini's epigraph to The Bird of Time — "and lo! the bird is on the wing" (viii) — indicates the extent to which Gosse's advice enthused her.

Contemporary reviews of Sarojini's works in England were flattering in the extreme. The Review of Reviews felt that The Golden Threshold "should silence for ever the scoffer who declares that women cannot write poetry" (qtd in The Bird of Time i) while The Times opined that "her poetry seems to sing itself as if her swift thoughts and strong emotions sprang into lyrics of themselves" (qtd in The Bird of Time i) and the Glasgow Herald proclaimed that "there is something fundamentally human" (qtd in The Bird of Time ii) in the pictures present in her poems. Reviewers of The Bird of Time were no less enthusiastic. "She has more than a profusion of beautiful things" gushed the Daily Chronicle (qtd in The Broken Wing i); "she possesses her qualities in heaped measure" (qtd in The Broken Wing i) acknowledged The Bookman while the Yorkshire Post felt that Sarojini had enabled the British to "grow into an intimate relation with the East" (qtd in The Broken Wing i). Gosse had praised Sarojini with the words "Indeed, I am not disinclined to believe that she is the most brilliant, the most original, as well as the most correct, of all the natives of Hindustan who have written in English" (The Bird of Time 2) but the eulogies of the reviewers I have just mentioned made literary criticism hyperbolic. But it was one enterprising critic named James H Cousins who, in his book The Renaissance in India published in 1918, changed the contours of Sarojini criticism from hyperbolic to the downright bizarre. In the poem "Leili" in The Golden Threshold, Sarojini had written the lines "A caste-mark on the azure brows of Heaven, / The golden moon burns sacred, solemn, bright" (The Golden Threshold 62) and Cousins makes the following critical review of these lines : The figuring of the moon as a caste-mark on the forehead of heaven is in itself a unique achievement of the imagination in poetry in the English language. It lifts India to the literary heavens, it threatens the throne of Diana of the classics; it releases Luna from the work of asylum-keeper, and gives her instead the office of remembrancer to Earth that the Divine is imprinted on the open face of Nature (265) Whatever that may mean.

With the emergence of new branches of literature such as post-colonial studies and Indian Writing in English, the contours of Sarojini criticism encountered a new bend. The poetry of Ezekiel, Mahapatra, Ramanujan and Kamala Das were used as touchstones by critics to judge the poetry of Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, although they belonged to separate periods in literary history. As a result of this faulty methodology, the poetry of Sarojini appeared lacklustre and naïve to aficionados of post- Independence poetry, and this has released a bitter wave of unabashed Sarojini bashing by critics in the last few decades. Eunice de Souza found Sarojini's poetry to be "confidently mindless versifying" (1) while A.K.Mehrotra (who incidentally condemned Sri Aurobindo's Savitri as "a worthless epic of 24000 lines") branded her poetry as "mellifluous drivel" (9). Although existing chronologically in the modern period and being friends with such modernists as W.B.Yeats and Ezra Pound, Sarojini preferred to write in an Edwardian register, prompting critics like Nissim Ezekiel to find her poetry anti-modernist and retrogressive in both form and content: It was Sarojini’s ill-luck that she wrote at a time when English poetry had touched the rock bottom of sentimentality and technical poverty. By the time it recovered its health she had entered politics, abandoning the possibility of poetic development and maturity. (12) Vasant Shahane seems to drive the critic's nail into the poet's coffin with his conclusion: Sarojini Naidu cannot by any stretch of imagination or valid criteria be described as an established poet, though she received a great deal of uncritical praise for her three volumes of poetry. She lacked the power of reflection both as politician and poet and therefore her effect has not been very enduring (8).

Having mapped the changing contours of Sarojini criticism from her own day to our own day, we are now in a position to perceive that the judgment of Sarojini's poetry has indeed been heavily polarized between being praised out of proportion and being denounced vehemently. I personally feel that there are two fundamental reasons behind the poor reception and evaluation of Sarojini's poetry in recent times. The first is a total misunderstanding of her poems. Surprising though it may sound, her poems are indeed quite deceptive. Critics have mainly fished in surface waters and formed opinions based on the literary interpretations of the poems alone, without really going deep into the content. For instance, if one studies the ordinary meaning of the popular poem "Palanquin Bearers" from The Golden Threshold then one will dismiss it as maudlin because it describes the mundane, all-too-familiar image of four bearers carrying a palanquin on their shoulders in which is seated a lady (a newly-wed bride perhaps) who is being transported from one place to another. Even if the staunchest supporter of Sarojini cannot defend the poem beyond saying that it is a quintessentially Indian image projected in a rhetorically articulate and musical tone. But if one considers the palanquin as a symbol of the country India and its occupant as not any ordinary lady but as Mother India herself, then the eponymous palanquin bearers become patriots like Sarojini herself, who had taken it upon themselves to carry the hopes of their country on their responsible shoulders and deliver her from bondage under British rule to independence. Viewed in such a new light, the poem loses its so-called naïveté and becomes pregnant with significance. It reveals to the discerning, serious reader a deeper meaning which had been cleverly and artistically camouflaged till now.

The second reason for the popular prejudice against Sarojini's poetry is that her works have been studied primarily as hermetically sealed texts. Critics like Meena Alexander have gone to the extent of divorcing her poems from her life, speeches and letters to conclude that there exists a gap between her political and literary life: There seems to be a radical cleft between the intense, if imprisoning passions of her poetry and the political life she espoused. Did the female self she discovered in political action successfully subvert the passive if anguished images she picked up from turn-of-the-century English poetry? Or is there a dichotomy between poet and politician scarcely to be explained, pointing towards complicated, covert procedures of creativity? (WS-68) In reply, one can assert that Sarojini's poetic output manifests both overt and covert representations of the political. Poems like "Village Song", "In the Forest" and "Leili", for instance, describe in figurative terms the conscious decision taken by nationalists like Sarojini to dedicate their lives to the service of the country and their preparations for the same. On the other hand, the political register of poems like "To India" is more obvious. "To India" was recited by Sarojini at the Bombay Congress in 1904, and its words, dripping with patriotism, did not fail to make a dazzling impression on leaders and cadres alike. It is entirely possible to read "The Temple" group of poems in The Broken Wing as poems of nationalism and therefore coloured by the political. Thus, the political in Sarojini was never far from her poetry. In the words of Parama Roy, Sarojini’s entry into the arena of the political … in a fundamental way was not incongruous with the nature of her poetic corpus or indeed with the trajectory of her poetic career. In a vital sense, her entry into politics (or at least the role she came to play in the nationalist struggle) would have been far less easy without her first having been the kind of poet that she was.

I shall give another example from a different context. A sensitive reading of her poem "The Pardah Nashin" reveals that Sarojini (who had always criticized the evil Muslim custom of veiling) is projecting here the melancholy of a woman forced to live a life of seclusion. But Sarojini's biographer Padmini Sengupta would have us believe that "sometimes in her romantic moods, Sarojini unduly praised customs she herself strongly condemned during her long years of reform and social service. It was in this mood that even the Purdah Nashin was lauded, and in order to understand this attitude one must remember that Sarojini was living in the midst of a Purdah world which had its own fascination" (68). Sengupta's specious contention seems to plead that Sarojini was a liar who had no belief in what she wrote.

In conclusion it may be said that an undesirable oscillation between good and bad criticism of Sarojini's works has taken its toll on the literary merit of her works which Gosse had discovered and isolated for praise many years ago. As a result, she has been relegated to the sidelines and little research has been conducted into her works. An appeal can be made banish pre-conceived notions against such poets, study their works in the proper perspective supported by historical and biographical material, and give them the merit that they deserve. The time has therefore come to discount established negative criticism of the works of Sarojini Naidu and discover her anew.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Naidu, Sarojini. The Bird of Time. London: William Heinemann, 1912. Print. ⎯ ⎯ The Broken Wing. London: William Heinemann, 1917. Print. ⎯ ⎯ The Feather of the Dawn. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1961. Print. ⎯ ⎯ The Golden Threshold. 1905. New York: John Lane, 1917; London: William Heinemann, 1905. Print.

Secondary Sources

De Souza, Eunice. Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Ezekiel, Nissim. “On Sarojini Naidu”. Sunday Standard, 11 February 1962. Print. Alexander, Meena. "Sarojini Naidu: Romanticism and Resistance." Economic and Political Weekly 20.43 (Oct 26, 1985). WS68-WS71. Print. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. NewDelhi:Oxford UP, 1992. Print. Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Web. 29 July 2012.http://www.ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8s20097j/ Sengupta, Padmini. Sarojini Naidu: A Biography. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966. Print. Shahane,V.A and M.N.Sarma. The Flute and The Drum: Studies in Sarojini Naidu’s Poetry and Politics. Hyderabad: Osmania U, 1980. Print.

“Not belonging or wanted in either”: Liminality and a Post-national Vision in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy

Shramana Das Purkayastha

In attempting to define ‘nation’, Ernest Gellner concedes that nations are strategically constructed communities. Theorists of nation have frequently emphasised the role of voluntary loyalty to a shared cultural ethos in constituting the foundation of nation. Gellner, however, argues that individuals can be loyal to various sorts of affiliation, many of which may not necessarily coincide with the political unit called the ‘nation’. Religious affiliation, for instance, may create an imagined community amongst people of common religious faith. But that community transcends the geographical boundaries of nation. Voluntary will, therefore, helps in the formation of so many complex forms of community, that it cannot justly be regarded the constitutive factor exclusively of national community. Moreover, there is nowhere to be found a monolithic, essential “national” culture, shared by all the residents inhabiting a particular geographical space. Cultural formations are so complex and variegated that it is hardly possible for all the inhabitants to feel connected with each other on the ground of cultural commonality. There is no natural correlation between the geographical boundaries of a nation and the culture/s contained within it – Cultural boundaries are sometimes sharp and sometimes fuzzy… this richness of differentiation does not, and indeed cannot, normally or generally converge either with the boundaries of political units… or, with the boundaries of units blessed by the democratic sacrament of consent and will. (29) Thus dispelling the myth of nation as an entity based naturally on people’s volition growing out of a consciousness of sharing one culture, Gellner affirms that nations are “created” at the behest of nationalism. Gellner radically departs from the commonly held assumption that nations precede the emergence of nationalism. Rather, he says, nationalism creates a socio-political condition which paves the way for the formation of nation. One culture, as a result, gets posited as the legitimate, “pure” national culture. Suppressing all kinds of heterogeneity, one single culture/language/ ethnicity/religion is strategically conflated with the geographical boundaries of a nation, so that all individuals residing within them are projected as descendants of the same cultural lineage: The cultures now seem to be the natural repository of political legitimacy… Under these conditions, though under these conditions only, nations can indeed be defined in terms both of will and of culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units.” (Gellner 30, emphasis added) Such a conception of ‘nation’ provides us with a useful interpretive tool to understand the root cause behind the political problems postcolonial nations are struggling to cope up with. Anticolonial impulse in the colonies necessitated a struggle on the part of the colonised to resist, not only the political dominion of the West, but also the deleterious impulse of Eurocentric cultural hegemony. Homogeneous nations and national identities, hence, were created at this revolutionary impetus. Pre- colonial cultures and traditions were revived and made the foundation of the new ‘nation’. As Leela Gandhi observes: The energies of the anti-colonial nationalisms… are… fuelled by an indomitable will-to- difference. In its intensely recuperative mode, national consciousness…names its insurgent cultural alterity through the nation-- as ‘Indian’, ‘Kenyan’, ‘Algerian’ etcetera” (113, emphasis added) Such process of strategically essentialising the nation precisely illustrates Gellner’s dictum about the artificial conflation of a particular culture with the geographical-political unit of a nation: “Polities then will to extend their boundaries to the limits of their cultures and to… impose their culture with the boundaries of their power. The fusion of will, culture and polity becomes the norm…”. (Gellner 30) This process of homogenising the nation, however, entails a willed amnesia. Although nationalist discourse claims to empower “all” the people of a nation and to speak for the entire imagined community, the question, as to “whose imagined community” the nation is, poses some serious problem. The homogenous nation constructed through a selective remembering of certain culture or historical details necessarily excludes some ethnic, linguistic, religious or cultural groups and relegates them to a position of marginality. The national imaginary that impelled the anticolonial enthusiasm of the Indian subcontinent, for example, was predominantly Hindu in spirit. Invoking Hindu myths, remembering the history of Aryan valour against Muslim invasion and positing the political struggle as a version of mother-worship, Indian nationalism implicitly debarred the non-Hindus, specifically the Muslims and the tribal people, from claiming a place in the imagined national community. In addition, the nationalist rhetoric represented the anticolonial politics as a deeply gendered space, peopled by masculine heroes, thus excluding the female, or even the non-heteronormative subject. “Nations”, hence, “are communities created not simply by forging certain bonds, but by fracturing or disallowing others; not merely by invoking and remembering certain versions of the past, but making sure that others are forgotten or repressed”. (Loomba 169) However effectual this essentialising process may have been in channelizing the anticolonial recalcitrance, it produces serious political problems in postcolonial nation-states. Independence in the colonies is followed by transference of power. Yet, the newly-freed nation-states often come to emulate the European model of homogenous nation and centralised governmental power. The postcolonial nation- states, in their attempt to homogenise the national identity, coercively suppress all traces of contradiction. The deleterious rhetoric they use against the minorities echoes the racist language of European colonialism, to resist which, ironically, the postcolonial nations have been brought into triumphant birth. Political freedom does not ensure the decolonisation of the mind; the ruling indigenous power merely fits itself into a derivative paradigm. Fanon remarks that the new postcolonial elite “by its laziness and will to imitation,… promotes the ingrafting and stiffening of racism which was characteristic of the colonial era” (qtd Mitchell 4). Jayprakash Narayan’s comment on the Congress rule in post-independence India reflects the same thought: “One of the more malignant features of that machine is its continued adherence to the British imperialist theory that it is the duty of the people to obey first and then to protest”. (qtd Gandhi 119, emphasis added) The dominant ethnic/ religious/ gender/ linguistic/ cultural group favoured by the national imaginary gains greater political visibility, whereas minority communities suffer from disempowerment. Postcolonial nationalism, in consequence, is continuously threatened by innumerable conflicting voices that clamour to be heard. “Nation itself… [becomes] a ground of dispute and debate, a site for the competing imaginings of different ideological and political interests”. (Loomba 173, emphasis added) Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy captures such a moment of crisis in post-independence Sri Lanka. Set in the 1980s, the novel delineates a nation torn asunder by the gory conflicts between two ethnic groups--- the Sinhalese and the Tamil. Their strife dates as far back as to the colonial period. Each has asserted at different points of time its status as the original inhabitants of Sri Lanka, thus claiming a prominence in the national imaginary. However, the irony lies in the fact that long years of racial intermixing has rendered any attempt to racialise the nation futile. Neither the Sinhalese, nor the Tamils can claim to have retained their ethnic purity. In Funny Boy, the narrator’s grandmother Ammachi voices her aversion against the Sinhalese, when she objects to Radha’s choice of a Sinhalese boy, Anil. She ardently supports the militant Tamil Tigers in their demand of a separate Tamil nation. Yet the fact remains that the narrator’s family embodies a hybrid, rather than “pure”, culture. Arjie reflects: “….My friends were Sinhalese. My parents’ best friends were, too. Even our servant was Sinhalese… we spoke with her only in Sinhalese.”(57) This biculturalism vindicates K. M. de Silva’s statement that in Sri Lanka “…it would seem that neither the Sinhalese, nor the Tamils remained racially pure”. (De Silva 12) Yet “it is in the name of ‘pure’ identities, ethnic or otherwise, that genocides and massacres are carried out.” (Dasgupta xxxix) The Sinhalese-Tamil rift was caused originally by the colonial decision of imposing a unitary governmental structure on Sri Lanka. In the pre-British era, the Portuguese and Dutch rulers kept the administrations of the Sinhalese and Tamil areas separate. British administration, however, ignored the complex social relationships between the two ethnic groups. What further complicates Sri Lankan political situation is the fact that Ceylon gained independence, not through a nation-wide mass movement, but through “negotiation between the British establishment and a thoroughly anglicised local middle class elite…” (Wijemanne ii). The two ethnic groups, consequently, never had the opportunity to imagine themselves as ONE nation engaged in an anti-colonial struggle against ONE common enemy. Sri Lanka at all times remained “one state housing what could be called… two ‘nations’.” (Dasgupta xl) Post- colonial Sri Lanka witnessed a steady rise in power of the majority Sinhalese group. The unitary state- structure, “purely a British invention” (Wijemanne, i) is kept in place, as a result of which, the demands of the minority Tamils went unheard, and were even pronounced anti-national. Soon after independence, Indian Tamils were disenfranchised. In 1956, Official Language Act made Sinhalese the national language. Such political actions overtly alienated the Tamils and sought to render Sri Lankan nation-state a predominantly Sinhalese one. Such forcible homogenisation of the post-colonial nation, as stated earlier, inevitably culminates in internal recalcitrance. The demand for political equality on the part of the Tamils soon took the shape of violent separatism. Groups like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) resorted to insurgent strategies to carve out an independent nation based exclusively on Tamil ethnicity. The Sri Lankan Government however tried to supress the Tamil dissent by enforcing anti-terrorism laws and even licensing mindless massacre of the Tamils. A “veritable bloodbath swept through Sri Lanka in 1983. At least 400 people… mostly Tamil, died… The violence mainly hit Colombo where Sinhala attackers apparently carried voter lists and attacked Tamils living there”. (Dasgupta xli) Against the backdrop of this volatile political situation, Shyam Selvadurai accords a narrative centrality to a figure distanced as much from the dominant Sinhalese as from the militant Tamil group. I would argue in the present paper that in the context of Funny Boy, this liminality of the narrator is projected as constructive of a “post-national” identity that transcends the parochialism of modern nation- states. The narrator’s sense of non-belonging to either group enables him to develop the detached perspective of an exile. Recent postcolonial theories have striven to move beyond the categories of nation, national community and identity, to formulate a new in-between space of extra-, or, “post-nationalism”. This interstitial space turns out to be enabling, as it paves a way out of the coercion of nation-states. “After colonialism, it is imperative to imagine a new transformation of social consciousness which exceeds the reified identities and rigid boundaries invoked by national consciousness”. (Gandhi, 124) In this context, the figure of the itinerant exile is valorised as one who escapes the reductive categories national identity tries to coerce one into. In Funny Boy, however, Selvadurai records the experiences of Arjie, whose peculiar sexual and ethnic identities ordain him to a position of marginality at home and outside in the nation. The word “exile”, in Selvadurai’s novel, then, applies not so much to a spatially displaced physical body, as to a culturally dislocated self, ill at ease at one’s own home(-land). This “political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, between languages” (Said, 403) is able to supply a post-national reconceptualization of nation and hence, in the ultimate analysis, it may be concluded that exilic non-belonging turns out to be a rather desirable alternative. Arjie’s identity as a Tamil boy marginalises him in Sinhala dominated nation-state. His situation is even more precarious due to his cultural hybridity. His father’s eagerness to feign a Sinhalese identity has made Arjie imbibe Sinhalese culture. Hence prospect of gaining a sense of national belonging is forever unavailable to him. The promise of a Tamil nation, held up by the Tamil Tigers is but an empty signifier for him. The interstitial space that he inhabits with his bicultural, bilingual upbringing prevents him from belonging to any ethnically essentialised national community. Moreover, his sexual identity as a non-heteronormative individual distances him from the heterosexual discourse of society and nation. It may be pertinently pointed out that the position of the homosexual individual within the discourse on nationalism is precarious in a special way. Discussing the interrelation between nation and gender, Gayatri Gopinath notes that even in nuanced feminist critiques of ‘nation’, the homosexual’s distinctive sense of national belonging and national imagining remains unexplored. Heteronormative conceptualisation of ‘nation’ is kept intact, rendering the interstitial space of the queer figure forever unrepresented. “‘[N]on-heteronormative’ figure is ‘perpetually excluded or denied existence’ in South Asian narratives of the nation: for the queer figure, the home and the nation are always already unavailable”. (Jayawickrama 127) Throughout the novel, Selvadurai builds up an intricate pattern of inter-connection between Arjie’s sexual and ethnic aberrations, and also between different conformist performative codes the dominant gender and/or political groups try to regulate him with. Selvadurai thus shows, to use the terms of Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “solidarities in the form of similarities between modes of repression and struggle that all minorities experience separately but experience precisely as minorities”. (9) Selvadurai, however, as I would argue, presents Arjie’s “minority” status as enabling, as it affords Arjie the creative freedom to formulate for himself the trans-national identity of a sexually and culturally hybrid self, defying all essentialist concepts of national belonging. Arjie’s state of marginality in relation to gender norms is highlighted at the very beginning of the novel. The first chapter of Funny Boy delineates the watertight demarcations that even the children are able to draw between the two genders. Their playgrounds are divided into boys’ and girls’ domains. These divisions, however, seem to mirror the ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil at the national level. “Selvadurai’s pervasive conceptualisation of space as both gendered and racialised terrain and particularly his persistent conflation of personal and national levels allow us to read these spaces as parallel to the state of the nation”. (Jayawickrama, 124) Yet while the political hostility builds up impermeable boundaries between people, the children’s innocent world permits transgression to a certain extent. For, in the boy’s domain, we find a girl called Meena, and the narrator himself, despite being a boy, turns out to be the leader of the ostensibly feminine game of bride-bride. Selvadurai however points out that Arjie has not yet developed the mature, independent selfhood that may wilfully resist the censor of both gender and ethnic norms to assert an “in-between” identity. The codes of sexual normativity, therefore, try to fit him into conformist gender roles. To remove all traces of “aberration” from him, Arjie’s father forces him to play cricket and be assimilated into the boys’ world. Arjie’s parents with their conventional conceptions of sexuality present gender boundaries as biologically determined and hence fixed. We may compare this with the essentialist conceptions of nationhood, that similarly compartmentalise individuals into rigidly segregated identities. When the Sinhalese, or the Tamils, intend to “essentialise” the nation on the basis of ethnicity, they do so on the basis of the assumption that people of one ethnic group are united by some shared innate traits absent in the other group. The fact of cultural exchange and interaction is willed into oblivion. To forcibly suppress all signs of contradiction, the dominant group resorts to violence as a means of ethnic cleansing. Funny Boy is replete with multiple instances of insensitive ethnic “othering”. The train Radha Aunty was travelling in was attacked by a Sinhalese mob and many Tamils were killed. As a result, even for Radha, who once could move beyond ethnic barriers to love a Sinhalese boy, all Sinhalese came to be represented as a menacing force, essentially distinct from her self. The “we” is set apart from the “they”, where the latter poses a threat of termination to the former. Arjie notes: I realised that she had changed. There was… a harshness that I had never seen before… It was so clear now that I was surprised I had not seen it before, that I had not understood the moment I saw Radha Aunty with that bloody bandage around her head that her relationship with Anil was over. (90-94) In much the same manner, Jegan too adopts a fundamentalist racial identity. Jegan has once been involved in the LTTE, the anti-Sinhalese insurgent group. Like Radha, he too realises the absurdity of essentialised ethnic labels. But the consciousness of being antagonised by the dominant Sinhalese group, impels him to assert a militant ethnicity, being full aware at the same time of the coercion involved in it. Jegan tells Arjie— If you become a Tiger you cannot question anything they do… On the other hand, what is the alternative? We cannot live like this under constant threat from the Sinhalese… As my father used to say, ‘It’s small choices of rotten apples’. Here you can be killed by the Sinhalese and there you can be killed by… the Tigers. (172) While Radha and Jegan take up aggressive Tamil identities, Arjie’s father adopts another strategy of survival that may be compared almost to self-annihilation. He tries to conform to the dominant cultural paradigm and allows his identity to be eroded. Notably the motive of both these groups remains the same- -- to gain political visibility, to avoid being, in Jegan’s words, “always second-class citizens in our own country” (172). Whereas Ammachi, Radha and Jegan hope to find political-social prominence in a new Tamil-only nation, and hence support the Tamil Tigers, Arjie’s father chooses to be a “mimic man” imbibing Sinhalese culture only to be included in the national imaginary. He says: “…we are a minority, and that’s a fact of life… As a Tamil you have to learn how to play the game… The trick is not to make yourself conspicuous.” (169) He puts Arjie in a Sinhalese class for he considers Sinhalese to be “the real language of the future” (60) The fact remains that the minority of post-colonial nation-states, constructed in imitation of the European model of homogenous nations, are deprived of the opportunity to fashion autonomous selfhood. Despite, even because of, his father’s conformism, Arjie’s family remains forever alienated in the Sri Lankan nation. Their attempt to feign a Sinhalese identity seems futile. Arjie’s mother laments: “One doesn’t feel safe speaking Tamil these days… I don’t want … [my children] to live as we do. Always having to watch what they say and do” (185-186). At school, Arjie is repelled by a Sinhalese classmate, because his knowledge of Sinhala notwithstanding, his ethnic identity as Tamil remains unchanged. Yet, he cannot be admitted to the Tamil class either, for his familiarity exclusively with Sinhala has rendered him misfit in that group (210-211). Similarly, it is the same sense of self-alienation that forcible gender conformity too entails for Arjie. When his parents coerce him into becoming a “man”, he feels only lonelier, being distanced from the female world to which he once “gravitated naturally” (3). Following a quarrel with Diggy, his brother, Arjie leaves the boys’ domain forever. But meanwhile, his place in the girls’ domain has been usurped by his female cousin whom he called Her Fatness. The attempt to cast the homosexual individual into the mould of “normalcy” only culminates in further marginalisation: …then there would be the loneliness. I would be caught between the boys’ and the girls’ worlds, not belonging or wanted in either. (39) Arjie’s sexual as well ethnic identities, then, cumulatively consign him to an interstitial space--- as a homosexual, he fuses feminine behavioural traits in a biologically male body; as a Tamil, growing up learning Sinhalese culture, he evinces a cultural hybridity that defies simplistic ethnic divisions. For Arjie, therefore, the solution lies neither in conformity, nor in adopting any essentialised identity, but in realising the resistant potential of this liminality. He must claim this in-between space as his own from which he would be able to construct a “post-national” identity for himself. He can then “imagine an alternative space apart from the one designated by socially accepted and implemented structures of identity. This alternative space… allows both narrator and author a way to reclaim ‘home’.” (Jayawickrama, 129) The process of self-fashioning is initiated properly when Arjie meets Shehan at his school, the Victoria Academy. Previously in the initial chapters dealing with Arjie’s childhood, we have found a description of Arjie’s sense of empowerment at the moment of his transformation as a bride: I was able to leave the constraints of my self and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self… It was a self-magnified, like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema… like Malini Fonsekas and the Geetha Kumarasinghes, I was an icon a… perfect being…. (5) The childhood game of dressing up as a bride thus first enabled him to escape the compulsion of performing a socially assigned gender role. Remarkably, the figure of the cross-dressed male body, which society regards as the most “imperfect”, seems to Arjie to be a “perfect” entity, worthy almost to be deified. It is his most natural self, destabilising essentialist categories. It is to be noted that in the passage quoted Selvadurai adeptly conflates Arjie’s aberrant sexuality with the fact of his cultural hybridity. Arjie appreciates both Sinhalese and Tamil cinema and the two actors he mentions are both Sinhalese (Mitchell 83). However while these events involve only an immature act of transgression on the part of the child narrator, more decisive assertions of an alternative sexual and ethnic identity occur during his adolescence. Victoria Academy represents a place where normative gender and ethnic identities are generated. Arjie’s father sends him there to be a “man” as well as to learn Sinhalese. Black Tie, the headmaster of the school, forces norms of hypermasculinity onto the boys. The students are subjected to extreme physical punishments and Black Tie beats Shehan for having long hair which, for him, is a sign of effeminacy. On the other hand, Black Tie is also connected with the identitarian politics of Sri Lankan nation. He is involved in strife with Mr. Lokubandara. The latter is a Sinhalese and intends to make the school a predominantly Sinhalese one, eliminating all signs of a Tamil presence from it. Although Black Tie himself does not want to “essentialise” the school (“he wanted the school to be for all races and religion”, 215), his personal motive of retaining his position of authority comes to be connected with the Tamil interest. The presence of a Tamil Headmaster is deemed necessary if the Tamils are to avert expulsion from the school. As Arjie’s teacher Mr. Sunderlingam tells him, “I have reason to believe our principal is losing the battle, and if he is overruled, Tamils like us will suffer. Our loyalties must therefore be with him”. (240) Black tie wants Arjie to memorise two poems that will impress the cabinet minister at the prize-giving ceremony, and, as a result, Black Tie’s continued authority in the school will be insured. However, acquiescence to Black Tie’s designs would make Arjie align himself with the identitarian politics of the nation at large, whose microcosmic replica Victoria Academy turns out to be. Members of each of the conflicting ethnic groups try to essentialise the school, or for that matter the nation, to ensure an exclusive access to power. The culturally hybrid post-national self must at all cost be distanced from this tug-of-war. For Arjie, his human concern for Shehan is more important. He dissociates himself from both Sinhalese and Tamil interests: I was not sure that, as a Tamil, my loyalties lay with Black Tie. I thought of Mr. Lokubandara and the way Salgado and his friends assaulted that Tamil boy. I thought of the way Black Tie had beaten both Shehan and me. Was one better than the other? I didn’t think so. (242) He has now begun to assert his non-belonging; unlike Jegan and Radha, Arjie does not resort to a willing suspension of disbelief to take up an essentialised identity, no less coercive than the hegemonic, exclusivist national identity. He questions and then rejects every kind of identitarian politics, be it state sponsored or aimed at securing minority interests, just as at the end of the novel, he would spurn all socially determined gender roles. Arjie evolves into a post-national, post-gender individual, refusing to be curbed by normative codes of conduct. When Arjie first meets Shehan Soyza, he is intrigued by the confidence the latter evinces and which he himself lacks. Shehan has a clear-eyed understanding of his homosexuality and instead of trying to abide by the rules of heteronormativity, he asserts his “natural” self. He has sex with the head prefect (226) and it is he who initiates the homoerotic relationship with Arjie (243). Shehan’s mature knowledge of his own alternative sexual orientation gives him a sense of power. He does not belong to the “normal” society, but at the same time he is released from its constraints: “Soyza had a certain power which gave him immunity from bullies like Salgado… there was a confidence about him, an understanding of his own power”. (212, emphasis added) Arjie too will eventually resist being cast into reductive essentialist categories, but not until he, like Shehan, learns to claim his exilic liminality. The post-national self will then be “immune” against the “bullies” of a coercive postcolonial nation-state. The moment of asserting both a post-national and post-gender self comes at the prize-distribution ceremony. Arjie plans to jumble up the lines of the poem Black Tie wishes him to recite before the minister. The Tamil interest does not concern him. Disavowing loyalty to any ethnic affiliation, Arjie thus prioritises his own personal interest in which his humane concern for Shehan comes first. To rescue Shehan from the persecution of Black Tie it is necessary to have the latter removed from his position of power. If Arjie can embarrass him in front of the minister, Black Tie will be unable to win the latter’s favour and consequently, his headmastership at the school will come to end: I would do them wrong. Confuse them, jumble lines, take entire stanzas from one poem and place them in the other until the poems were rendered senseless. Black Tie… would be forced to make a speech that made no sense. His attempt to win the cabinet minister to his side would fail, he would… be forced to resign, and that would solve things for Shehan. (270,271) The post-national self thus resists being appropriated by any of the political factions of the nation. Whereas the postcolonial nation-state experiences only internal fragmentations and a chain of violence and counter-violence, a vision of post-nation paves the way for the emergence of a more humanitarian worldview. Arjie’s act of confusing the poems and thus affirming his love for Shehan is followed by a sense of exilic banishment from his familiar sphere: “I was no longer a part of my family in the same way. I now inhabited a world they didn’t understand and into which they couldn’t follow me.” (278) Arjie has carved out his own “home”, his private space--- inessential, hybridised, decentred. This moment of self-recognition ironically precedes the chapter entitled ‘Riot Journal: An Epilogue’, that delineates the gory conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil. While the post-colonial Sri Lanka witnesses a bloodbath due to the ethnic aversion of the two warring groups, Arjie’s stance of non-belonging seems to be the sanest alternative available. Unlike Radha, he does not sacrifice his love to the lunacy of ethnic violence. In the context of the riot, in which Arjie’s home is destroyed by the Sinhalese, Arjie comes to know that Shehan is Sinhalese. But Arjie has by now moved beyond the parochial categories of nation and ethnicity: “Shehan was Sinhalese and I was not. This awareness did not change my feelings for him; it was simply there, like a thin translucent screen through which I watched him”. (295, emphasis added) The bonds of human relationship, seen from an extra-national perspective, then, turns out to be far more transcendent and inclusive than the narrow borders of politically imagined communities of modern nation-states.

Works Cited

Dasgupta, Sayantan. ‘Introduction’. A South Asian Nationalism Reader. Ed. Sayantan Dasgupta. Kolkata: Worldview, 2007. Pp.xxi-lxix. Print. De Silva, K. M. A History of Sri Lanka. New Delhi: OUP, 1981. Print. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New Delhi: OUP, 1998. Print. Gellner, Ernest. ‘What is a Nation’. A South Asian Nationalism Reader. Ed. Sayantan Dasgupta. Kolkata: Worldview, 2007. pp. 28-36. Print. JanMohamed, Abdul and David Lloyd. ‘Introduction: Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse: What is to be Done?’. Minority Discourse. Eds. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. New York and Oxford: OUP, 1990. Print. Jayawickrama, Sharanya. ‘At Home in the Nation? Negotiating Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy’. New Delhi: SAGE, 2005. Vol 40 (2). pp. 123-139. DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054312. Accessed February 15, 2013, 11:12 A.M. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Mitchell, Scott. ‘This Sweet Touch: Alienation and Physical Connection in the Works of Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, and Salman Rushdie’. PhD Thesis. University of Missouri-Columbia, 2010. Print. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Print. Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Print. Wijemanne, Adrian. War and Peace in Post-colonial Ceylon 1948-1991. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1996. Print.

Revisiting the Classics: A Case Study of Moby Dick

Smita Jha

Revisiting a classic is, by its very nature, both an invitation and a challenge: invitation, because it is always a pleasure to revisit any classic; challenge, because any such visit makes us more and more aware of the difficulties one has to encounter in trying to throw fresh light on the work in question. Moby Dick is indeed a classic; in fact, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are the three acknowledged classics in the history of American fiction. The basic point, however, is: what really is a classic? In his essay titled ‘What is a Classic?’ T.S. Eliot argues at length to say that, in order to claim to be a classic, a book or a literary exercise has to have certain qualities which he enumerates as ‘maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language and perfection of the common style’ (Eliot, 1957), and ‘universality’ (Eliot, 1957) as opposed to provinciality and comprehensiveness’ by which he means the ‘comprehensiveness’ (Eliot, 1957) of thought and feeling. He further says that a classic should have ‘an amplitude, a catholicity…, qualities which are fully present in the mediaeval mind of Dante (Eliot, 1957). And though in the present essay Eliot discusses the characteristics of a classic with particular reference to Virgil, he maintains, in spite of so many ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, ‘howevers’, and ‘therefores’, that the word ‘Classic’ ‘has, and will continue to have several meanings in several contexts’ (Eliot,1957), and thus leaves the scope for further discussion wide open. Moby Dick, being a multi-layered and multi-dimensional novel may be viewed from several angles. We may examine this fictional work, first, in respect of its structure or narrative pattern, for here is a novel, dotted with digressions and parentheses and apostrophes, that has been written in 135 chapters of unequal lengths, at times a chapter covering less than one page, a novel that presents to us an amazingly intertwined mass of details about places, people and objects to contend with. Secondly, it may be discussed in the light of its ambience, for the kind of atmosphere it evokes and makes us feel intensely is indeed overpowering, and reminds us necessarily, in this regard, of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, and, as part of voyage literature, of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Thirdly, this novel may be interpreted as a testimony of the ceaseless, eternal encounter, between Man and Nature, and takes us inevitably far, far back into antiquity, to Homer’s Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. Fourthly, we may go through it in terms of its images and symbols, of its symbolical make-up, for in the present novel symbolism is indeed an effective mode, as it should be, of communication. Moby Dick may as well be considered as a revenge tragedy, for revenge is the dominant motif in the present book. However, at the bottom of everything there is Ahab’s character that contributes largely to the greatness and enduringness of this novel, and it is in physical, moral and philosophical terms that I propose to examine and interpret his character in the present paper. II The protagonist of Moby Dick, Ahab, is a strange and queer character, perhaps a singular and unique figure in the whole corpus of American fiction. He is the captain or commander of the whaling ship named Pequod; he is an experienced sailor; he has been going out to the sea from the tender age of fifteen, but, as we find him in the book, he is an ‘old man’ (Melville, 1851) now. In fact, it is almost repeatedly that Melville speaks of him as an old man. It is both natural and understandable that in the course of his voyage or sea-expedition he has encountered several struggles, vicissitudes and adversities, several ups and downs, so much so that he has lost one of his legs, which has been snatched off from his body by a massive and mighty White Sperm Whale. Ahab is a physically handicapped person, a lame, limping man, walking with a stick in his hand and with one of his legs made of hard, dry, inflexible ivory, and it is as such that he is presented to us for the first time in Chapter 28 of the book, although small, passing references to him are made earlier too. Captain Ahab, says the novelist, stood upon the quarter-deck ‘erect, looking straight out beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow’ (Melville, 1851), and there was ‘an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in the fixed and fearless forward dedication of that glance’ (Melville, 1851). The novelist speaks of his ‘whole high broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mold’(Melville,1851), of his ‘tawny scotched face and neck’ (Melville,1851), of his ‘nameless regal overbearing dignity’(Melville, 1851). It is in view of his strength and energy, his tenacity and stubbornness, his confidence and courage that he is known, at least among the old sailors, as “old Thunder” (Melville,1851), as a person who has the power to hold people in awe, and it is this very man who is “the absolute dictator” (Melville,1851) of the Pequod. ‘A Khan of the planks, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab’. (Melville, 1851).

Is it at all possible or even desirable to compare Ahab with Santiago, the old fisherman, in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea? Santiago, we may very safely surmise, is older than Ahab; he goes out to the sea, after repeated failures, all alone in his boat just to catch fish for his sustenance, while Ahab sails out on his voyage to capture and kill his tormentor, the White Sperm Whale, with full preparations. Santiago comes back to the shore, all exhausted, traumatized and disappointed, but alive, while Ahab is killed with all the members of the crew, never to return home. Both Santiago and Ahab are tenacious and formidable in their own ways, but while Santiago is loving and compassionate towards the huge fish he has caught, supposedly his enemy, and tries to protect it against the ever-preying sharks, Ahab is a monomaniac, seized with the dark and diabolical passion of wrecking vengeance upon the White Sperm Whale. However, the points of similarities and difference apart, Ahab does remind us of Santiago in a particular, specific context. III Ahab’s name may be associated, as quite a few critics and scholars, for instance, Leon Howard, H.E.Pommer, Nathalia Wright, M.O.Percival, H.P. Vincent and M.R.Stern, have actually done, with the names of such mythical and historical personages as Prometheus, Perseus, Hercules, Job, Jonah, Milton’s Lucifer, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, George Washington and Admiral Nelson, in varying contexts and for various reasons. However, the moot point is if at all this “grand, ungodly, godlike man” (Melville, 1851), Ahab, has a moral vision of his own, if at all his character is strengthened by a kind of moral integrity which we have to understand and explain, or else, if he is just a person, delirious, “demoniac” (Melville,1851), the sinister, bizarre image of “madness maddened” (Melville,1851), who, because of his moral blindness, thinks merely in terms of revenge and retribution. The moral or immoral aspect of Ahab’s character may be considered in three different ways, though in the present context all the three ways are necessarily and perhaps unavoidably linked with one another. The first approach is conventional, and we have to examine the problem in terms of established norms, beliefs and principles. Secondly, there is Ahab’s own point of view, his attitude to the White Sperm Whale, to its nature or quality, and finally we have also to keep in mind the readers’, particularly the sensitive and intelligent readers’, response to the given situation, a situation in which Ahab finds himself irrevocably placed. In all fairness it is Ahab’s point of view, his attitude to the big whale, Moby Dick, that should be considered first. Ahab is a seasoned sailor; he knows the sea better or more than others, and though he has his family on land in New Bedford, it is very sparingly that he thinks or speaks of his wife and children, for Moby Dick, or its death, is his sole obsession. He tells his crew members: I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flamesbefore I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts blackblood and rolls fin out. (Melville, p.156) And he goes on to tell them: I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the White Whale agent, or be the White Whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.(Melville, p.157) This ‘black terrific” (Melville, 1851) Ahab is generally ‘inaccessible’ (Melville, 1851) to people; he has hardly anything to do with morals or religion as such, at least in the present case, and if at all there is anything to guide or goad him on at the moment, it is the deadly game of seek-and-hide, of assault and resistance that is being played between the hunter and the hunted. The conventional approach is clear, and perhaps there is no ambiguity in or about it. In three separate chapters of the present novel, Chapter 41 titled ‘Moby Dick’, Chapter 42 titled ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ and Chapter 54 titled ‘The Town Ho’s Story’, Melville tells us about all that is relevant and useful with regard to the size or dimension, nature or quality of the White Sperm Whale known as Moby Dick. This Sperm Whale is an ‘enormous creature with enormous power’ (Melville, 1851); it has its own beauty and majesty, and though in certain situations, mostly adverse ones, it may have its own malignity or monstrosity, it is generally looked upon as God’s amazing creation, as ‘the symbol of divine spotlessness’ (Melville, 1851), as a supernatural being, mysterious, fleeting, inscrutable, unconquerable. The sailors are superstitious about it; they think, and they are convinced in their own ways, that it is ubiquitous, so much so that, according to some of them, it has been ‘encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time’(Melville,1851). It is this very White Sperm Whale, inviolate, inviolable and immortal in popular perception that the crazy and wild Ahab is determined to destroy out of sheer revenge. The period of mid-19th century in America was, by and large, one of faith, though because of the growing impact of science on society, people had started raising questions about Christianity. Melville himself was an ‘intensely religious man’ (Wagenkecht, 1952), and what Ahab’s chief mate, Starbuck, a devout Christian tells him is indeed significant: “Great God! But for one single instant show thyself … never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--In Jesus’s name no more of this, that is worse than devil’s madness.”(Melville, p.513). Starbuck implores Ahab to give up his pursuit in the name of Jesus. The Captain does not listen to his chief mate, does not care at all for the voice of a tradition-bound society. All the crew members and Ahab, along with the whaling ship, Pequod, perish as the inevitable result of this ignoble challenge to divinity. There is but one survival, that of Ishmael, the narrator of the story in the novel. As for the readers’, the sensitive and the intelligent readers’ response to the moral or immoral aspect of Ahab’s character, it may be said that Ahab is one of the Titans of antiquity, a sort of primitive or primordial figure who goes by instinct rather than by reason, who is a lonely person deeply and dangerously immersed in his own self, and who, once bound by a mission or goal, does never look back either for the sake of convenience or for personal safety. In reply to Starbuck Ahab tells him: Ahab is forever Ahab man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders. (Melville, p.514) It is obvious that there is something elemental about Ahab as there is also something elemental about Heathcliff in Emily Brontes’ Wuthering Heights. Both are great and extraordinary characters; however, the difference between the two consists in the fact that while Ahab perishes predominantly on account of intense hate, Heathcliff courts death on account of both intense love and intense hate. Moreover, it would indeed be curios and interesting to see if both of them have suffered from what is widely perceived and known as death-wish. In any case, in spite of his morbidity and vindictiveness, Ahab is an admirable character, stern, tough, unbending, and terrible in his conviction. He is neither moral nor immoral; really speaking, he is amoral, one who is not to be judged by the norms or the proprieties of a traditional society. IV In the excerpt from the text quoted immediately above Ahab speaks of fate, of Fate’s immutable decree and calls himself the Fates’ lieutenant, the very instrument of Fate working under orders. However, the use of the term, the Fates instead of Fate, gives a new twist and dimension to the whole line of argument. Is Ahab a fatalist? No, he is not. Does he believe in the theory of pre-destination? No, he does not. In the present novel Melville makes references to so many religions, to Paganism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, to local tribal deities and the forms of worshipping them, and he does also mention the names of such thinkers and philosophers as Descartes, Locke, Kant and Rousseau. However, at this moment Melville’s Ahab believes only in one religion, ‘the religion of rowing’ (Melville,1851) or whaling; capturing or killing the White Sperm Whale is his religion, his mission, his passion, his obsession, and his reverence for the Whale is ironically evident, for almost in hysterical vein he mumbles to himself: “Leap! up, leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; defyingly I worship thee!” (Melville, p.465) Ahab is generally looked upon as a romantic hero, ‘a Byronic wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’(Leon Howard, 1961); he may be a romantic Byronic hero in a certain limited, conventional sense, for the word ‘romantic’ is an all-encompassing one, a word from which emanate various suggestions or implications. In fact, Ahab is a tragic figure, a victim of his own fatal flaw, the flaw of chasing a mighty and invincible Whale out of sheer revenge and hate to the finish, and, as in the case of Shakespeare’s major tragic figures, so in his case too his character is his destiny. But far more than anything else, some of us do feel inclined to interpret Ahab’s character differently, perhaps in quite a positive sense. Ahab a is highly, fiercely individualistic figure, a man of unrestricted free will, absolutely in no mood to submit to the will of God and speaking of Fate or the Fates as a remembrance and a confirmation of his line of action, a man who takes his own decision and makes his own choice in the face of all pressures, persuasions and protests. Ahab is the main character in this theatre of the Absurd. Whether a theist or an atheist, an agnostic or a nihilist, Ahab is an existential character for whom even death or suicide could be one of the options. V When Harman Melville died in 1891 he was very nearly a forgotten man, and a large segment of the reading public wondered that he had lived so long. In spite of the fact that a sizable number of such literary celebrities as William Morris, James Thomson, Edward Carpenter, R.L. Stevenson, Sir James Barrie and John Masefield were greatly interested in Melville, for more than three decades, from the beginning of the American Civil War to the end of World War I, he suffered neglect, but thereafter, that is, from 1919 onwards he emerged as one of America’s most widely read, discussed and admired authors. Moby Dick, of all his books, continues to remain the real focus of close and pointed attention. Moby Dick, containing 135 chapters and ending up with an Epilogue, reads more as a manual of whaling operations than a literary exercise, for in chapter after chapter of the book Melville keeps on telling us about the art, craft or technique of whaling fishery. In fact, chapter 32 of the book is a 12-page long discourse on cetology. Melville’s four books Typee (1846), Omoo(1847), Redburn ( 1849) and White Jacket (1850) are largely autobiographical, for they record their author’s experiences and reminiscences of sea-voyages, and even Mardi (1849) and Moby Dick(1851) are autobiographical to a considerable degree. It is also pointed out that one fourth of Moby Dick is ‘based upon Thomos Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) (WagenKnecht, 1952), so that the picture of Melville that emerges out of these details or accounts is not one of a novelist, but nearly of a literary discoverer of the South Seas. Moby Dick is a book based on Melville’s memory, imagination and research. The narrative part of this novel is flawed, for it is only in four chapters of the book, Chapter 48 titled ‘The First Lowering’ and the last three chapters, Chapter 133 titled ‘The Chase-First Day’, Chapter 134 titled ‘The Chase- Second Day’ and Chapter 135 titled ‘The Chase-Third Day’, that Ahab’s encounter with the White Sperm Whale is presented, and also because the narrator of the story, Ishmael, seems to have got lost in the welter of dense details. Moreover, the narration of events in the novel is marred by long and monotonous interruptions. Nevertheless, Melville has tried to make his book as much dramatic as he could possibly manage to do so, injecting into it the elements of suspense and thrill, dread and excitement admirably well. In fact, there are quite a few chapters in the present novel, Chapters 38, 39, 40,108 and 129, that seem to be part of a regular play, complete with stage directions and other necessary adjuncts. All these limitations and merits notwithstanding, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is an American Classic chiefly for its enduringness and universal appeal. The most important element in this book, however, is the character of Ahab who towers above most of the other heroes present in American fiction. It is time we hailed Moby Dick as a classic and revisit it. Moby Dick is indeed an epic in prose.

Works Cited Arvin, Newton. Herman Melville (New York, 1950). Eliot, T.S. On Poetry and Poets, (London, 1957),p-59,67,67,69,53. Howard, Leon. Herman Melville (Minnesota, 1963), p.20. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick (New Delhi,1998),p.82,p160.p.160,p.156,p.157,p.147,p.145,p.195,p.179,p.513.,p.514.p.207,p.465 Percival, M.O. A Reading of Moby Dick (Chicago,1950) Pommer, H.E. Milton and Melville (Pittsburgh,1955) Stern, M.R. ed. Discussions of Moby Dick (Boston, 1960) Stone, Geoffrey. Melville( New York,1949) Thorp, Willard. Herman Melville (New York, 1938) Vincent, H.P. The Trying of Moby Dick (Boston, 1949) Wagenknecht, Edward. Cavalcade of the American Novel (Calcutta, 1969), p.75, p.73. Weaver, R.M. Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York,1921) Wright, Nathalia. Melville’s Use of the Bible (C Durham,1949)

Dying Becomes an Art: Das’s Obsession with Death and Death-Wish in Her Poetry

Subrata Sahoo

In his colossal theoretical work of literary criticism “The Philosophy of Composition”, which was published first in April, 1946 in “Graham’s Magazine”, Philadelphia and printed in book form in 1996 by Moyer Bell Ltd, Edgar Allan Poe affirms what constitutes good poetry. According to his affirmation, the proper subject of poetry is beauty and the most legitimate tone is melancholy; the fittest subject of poetry is death allied with beauty. He states that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (158). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their work entitled The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination go on to explore the habitual themes in women’s literature that arise from women’s position in a male-dominated society. They think that women have internalized the notion that they “exist only to be acted on by men, both as literary and sexual objects” (8). Women are supposed to become the works of art, rather than create art. With a view to become the works of art, women must either subordinate their individuality or, as Gilbert and Gubar think, kill themselves “into a perfect image” (14). They write: Whether she becomes an objet d’ art or a saint, however, it is the surrender of the self—of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both—that is the beautiful angel-woman’s key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice, which dooms her both death and heaven. For to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. A life that has no story…is really a life of death, a death-in- life”(25). Kamala Das(1934-2009), who has poeticized the modern Indian feminine psyche’s aggression and revolt against the male-oriented norms of society and whose emotional response is filled with agonizing circumstances of feminine dilemma and the ensuingfretfulness and anguish, transforms her anger and anxiety into aggressive poetic out-cries. But it is not always that she transforms her rebellion and hatred into poetic out-cries. Often her anger and rebellion lead to fatal depression and a feeling of nothingness. In a number of poems, she goes on to articulate her sense of depression and feeling of nothingness leading ultimately to the feeling of a desire to commit suicide. Here some of her poems, which are characterized by Poe’s proper subject of poetry, i.e.,death and death-wish, need to be explored as they represent her own self in what Gilbert and Gubar call ‘death-in-life’ predicament. It is evident from her autobiography, My Story (1988)that Kamala Das was married at the age of fifteen. So when she was a teenager, she met a man who was none other than her husband and sought in him love and emotional companionship: I had expected him to take me in his arms and stroke my face, my hair, my hands and whisper loving words. I had expected him to be all that I wanted my father to be, and my mother. I wanted conversation, companionship and warmth. Sex was far from my thought. I had hoped that he would remove with one sweep of his benign arms, the loneliness of my life… (84). But what she received was the opposite of her expectation. We see in “An Introduction”: When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me But my sad woman body felt so beaten. (25-29) This lustful experience led (her) to consider her woman body as the source of her troubles and pains, and brought her an awareness of her offended feminine self. It was at this juncture that she became so disillusioned by her husband that her feminine self was forced to celebrate love outside marriage, as we see in “Glass”: I Enters Others’ Lives, and Make of every trap of lust A temporary home.(19-22) But here she failed in her aspiration for love and her feminine self remained overshadowed by frustration and anxiety leading eventually to an ever-increasing sense of nothingness of her life. The poem “The Descendants” is stamped by her emotional defeat, frustration and the feeling of nothingness: We shall give ourselves to the fire or to The hungry earth to be slowly eaten, Devoured. (15-17)

“The Invitation” is marked by her desire to merge herself with the sea when haunted by relentless mental suffering caused by the reminiscence of her loveless and lustful sexual experience. For her the call of the sea was like a summon. She wrote, The sea is garrulous today. Come in, Come in. What do you lose by dying, and Besides your losses are my gains (4-6). The ‘sea’ in this poem urges her to end her life: You are diseased With remembering, The man is gone for good. It would indeed Be silly to wait for his returning. Come in, Come in (12-16). “The Suicide” is dominated by an overwhelming passion for suicide. As is with “The Invitation”, in this poem the ‘sea’ functions as a dominant signifier for death: Only the soul may enter The vortex of the sea. Only the soul knows how to sing At the vortex of the sea (11-14). She wrote: I have enough courage to die (28). As she has ‘enough courage to die’, she is in quest for an escape from her pains by taking her own life. She writes in “Composition”: I feel my age and my Uselessness. All I want now Is to take a long walk Into the sea And lie there, resting, Completely uninvolved. The ‘sea’ is in fact a dominant symbol in all these poems. The ‘sea’ symbolizes Das’s central mood, her emotional restlessness, intoning the self’s confessional sense of ‘melting’ and ‘dissolving’ into nothingness. To her the ‘sea’ stands for death. She did not want to live a loveless life. She wanted a ‘simple’ life full of love, and preferred death to a loveless life: And If love is not to be had, I want to be dead…(53-55). Das contemplated to commit suicide by taking a sleep-inducing pill, luminol with a view to escape from the unbearable pains caused by the coarseness of her husband’s treatment, as it is obvious in “Luminol”. Here death has been imaged forth as ‘sleep’: Love-lorn It is only Wise at times, to let sleep (1-3). To the poet, death is only an alternative. But immediately, she rejects ‘rest’ considering it a minor hunger: But, Rest is only a childish whim, A minor hunger. (‘Composition’) Also in her autobiography, Das writes that she had been haunted by the idea of death: I have been for years obsessed with the idea of death. I have come to believe that life is mere dream and that death is the only reality. It is endless, stretching before and beyond our human existence. To slide into it will be to pick up a new significance. Life has been, despite all emotional involvements, as ineffectual as writing on moving water. We have been mere participant in someone else’s dream. (218) Hence, Das, it may appear to us that, is in a state of psychological trauma. Here it must be remembered that a poet like Das who wages a revolt against the patriarchal norms of the society should not search for an escape from the dissatisfied world she wants to change for the cause of women. She herself states that her writing is for the upliftment of the subordinated women in patriarchal society: I needed to disturb society out of its complacence. I found the complacence a very ugly state. I wanted to make women of my generation feel that if men could do something wrong; they could do it themselves too. I wanted them to realize that they were equal. I wanted to remove gender difference (Kaur, 1995). She conforms to Cixous’ concept of real woman: The woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man and the universal subject [who] must bring women to their senses and their meaning in history (880). Here it may appear that there remains a big hiatus between the physical self and the poetic self of Kamala Das. In fact, it seems that her physical self is the woman who suffers and her poetic self is the mind which creates. When her physical self suffers, it contemplates to end itself. But the process involves the evolution of her selves with her physical self becomes paralyzed and her poetic self emerges out of her frozen physical self to create anew. Therefore, what Das has shown is that if one knows to die one knows how to live; one who knows to surrender conquers the whole; and I can conclude that the inherent message in these poems of Das is that women should not have to die in order to live. Rather, they must come forward to raise their voices against the patriarchal oppression and subordination. Undoubtedly, creating anew through writing can be the potent medium as well as a vehicle to reach the destination of liberated self.

Works Cited

Primary Sources Das, Kamala. The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.Orient Longman, 1973. ------.The Descendants.A Writers Workshop Publication, 1967. ------.My Story. Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi. 1988 Secondary Sources Cixous, Helen. “The Laugh of the Medusa”.Trans. Keith Cohen and Frank Cohen. Signs: Journal Of Women in Culture and Society:1 (Summer,1976), 875-893. Print. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Raven, With The Philosophy Of Composition. 1st. edn. Moyer Bell Ltd., U.S., 1996 (The essay was published first in Graham’s Magazine, Philadelphia, 1946). Print. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan.The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. 2ndedn.Yale University Press. 2000. Print. Interview: “I Needed to Disturb Society”, Interviewed by Iqbal Kaur.Perspectives of Kamala Das’ Poetry.Ed. IqbalKaur. New Delhi. Intellectual Publishing House, 1995.

The longing for “the house big and safe” in Wide Sargasso Sea

Suparna Bhattacharya

Images of family and house surrounded by a garden surface repeatedly in Antoinette’s recollection and these images can be seen as the intersectionality of dis/locations, denials, and displacements that runs through the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In the concluding section of the novel when the “Creole lunatic” (Rhys 136) Antoinette is locked in the attic in England, she dismisses the illusion that Grace Poole shares with Leah: “After all the house is big and safe, a shelter from the world outside which, say what you like, can be a black and cruel world to a woman. May be that’s why I stayed on” (Rhys 105-6). With the memory of her Coulibri house on fire, her queries like “When must I go, where must I go?” (Rhys 66) and “What am I doing in this place and who am I?”(Rhys 107), Anoinette becomes conscious of struggle within her − between the thick walls of the house and a fierce spirit, the darkness and blazing fire till she finally enacts her dream of setting the “cardboardhouse” (Rhys 107) on fire. It will be significant to explore the various resonances of Antoinette’s emphatic “must I go” and discuss how the images of home and family, so central to nineteenth century English life, are inscribed in the context of the Creole. The paper will attempt to explore how the image of house and comes to be dismantled as Antoinette sets the house on fire to reach the “location of one’s own dreaming, an extension of one’s own being” (Ashcroft et al 163) within Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The Creole backdrop, that is most significant in understanding this anxiety of Antoinette, is revealed from the outset of the novel. Wide Sargasso Sea, authored by the Creole Jean Rhys, is set in Jamaica and Dominica, the time-frame approximately 1834 to 1845, encompassing the socio-cultural condition after the passing of the British Emancipation Act of 1833 and its ratification in 1834. The novel opens with the fatherless child Antoinette’s awareness that her family did not belong to the ranks of the white people, a notion later confirmed by the African girl Tia as she distinguishes Antoinette’s family from the “Real white people” (Rhys 14). Antoinette’s mother Annette was an inhabitant of the French colony of Martinique and had never been approved by the Jamaican ladies of the English colony. Her dead father Cosway had been a slave owner and the owner of Coulibri estate. Soon after the Emancipation Act the widowed Annette, as Daniel Cosway writes later to Rochester, “have no money and she have no friends” (Rhys 57) and the estate “goes quickly to bush”(Rhys 57). The former slave-owners are detested, hated and made to feel they do not belong to the place as Antoinette also discovers the “strange negro” (Rhys 13) to be filled with hatred and calling “us white cockroaches”(Rhys 13). Daniel Cosway’s letter mentions Annette’s madness in connection to the belief that the tropics precipitated madness on European colonists but this is further complicated with the term Creole: “and soon the madness that is in her, and in all these white Creoles, come out. She shuts herself away, laughing and talking to nobody. . .” (Rhys 57). The label ‘Creole’ originally referred to a white of European descent, born and raised in a tropical colony. Between seventeenth century to the nineteenth, the term in English came to include those born in the West Indies, whether white or negro. In Jamaica and the old settled English colonies, the word was used in its original Spanish sense of “criollo” meaning born into, native, committed to the area of living, and it was used in relation to both white and black, free and slave (Braithwaite 10). Colonialism/Postcolonialism reprints a table from W. B. Stevenson’s Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825) detailing ‘the mixture of the different castes, under their common or distinguishing names’ which is significant in this context as it categorizes the “‘European’ in relation to other Europeans and Creoles becomes ‘white’ when put in relation to ‘Indian’ or ‘Negro’” (Loomba 103). Unlike the diasporic populace, the Creoles, however, rarely display any collective memory, vision or myth about the original homeland (Safran 83). This lack of a homeland disturbs the formulation of one’s identity. The position, affiliation and location of the Creole cannot be accommodated within the colonizer-colonised praxis. The Spanish-speaking Creole communities in South and Central America were “simultaneously a colonial community and an upper class” (Anderson 58). They were marginalized in the imperial administration and sought advancement that the existing system denied them. Thus their nationalism was born out of both dispossession and privilege, a condition that the ex-slave owners of Jamaica and Dominica did not enjoy after the Emancipation Act. The multiple implication of the term Creole is enmeshed in the history of colonization and can be read within the politics of race and place. Colonization, as Europeans originally used the term, “signified not the indigenous peoples, or the extraction of their wealth, but primarily the communities who sought to maintain their allegiance to their own original while seeking a better life in economic, religious or political terms” (Young 21). Race and Place are crucial in locating oneself in the world, and fixation of identity and also precipitating otherness. JanMohamed’s concept of Manichean allegory draws attention to the binary opposition between races that constructed the European Self and the non-European other. This othering, as Foucault argues, was carefully engendered in the European society through madness. However, as Megan Vaughan points out, in colonised societies, ‘the need to objectify and distance the “other” in the form of the madman or the leper, was less urgent in a situation in which every colonial person was in some sense, already “Other”’. In Wide Sargasso Sea madness, as Daniel Cosway’s letter points out, is a part of the coloniser’s nightmare, much like the haunting fear of miscegenation. The question of location or home-ness is problematised for the Creole who are not exiles, expatriates or diasporic but faced with similar questions: “Where is the place of ‘home’ to be located for such groups? In the place of birth (nateo), in the displaced cultural community into which the person is born, or in the nation-state in which this . . . community is located? (Ashcroft et al 86). The Europeans wanted to retain a distinction between the colonizers and natives rather than integrate with the local population. In Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester’s inquisitiveness about village called Massacre disturbs Antoinette. She pretends ignorance about it and defers it to almost unknowable pre-historicity: “Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now” (Rhys 38). This anxious evasion or imposed amnesia can be linked with the repressed fear of miscegenation since historically there was a massacre of around seventy Caribs including Thomas “Indian” Warner, the half-Carob son of foremost English colonist Sir Thomas Warner, and a Carib leader who chose to live with his mother’s family after being mistreated by his step-mother. Thomas “Indian” Warner was killed by Colonel Philip, the legitimate son of Sir Thomas. Antoinette had come aware of the differences when her white Creole mother married Mason, and her new English stepfather represented Englishness that stands for a world beyond. Wide Sargasso Sea has been seen as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), which, displays traits of a dominant culture in its creation of Bertha as a she-monster, “an inchoate ‘other’(often female), who is not even a native informant but a piece of material evidence once again establishing the Northwestern European subject as ‘the same’”(Spivak 113). Brontë’s Bertha Mason had been “produced by the axiomatic of imperialism” (Moore-Gilbert et al 150) as Spivak observes in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”: In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as a white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialist and black native. (Moore-Gilbert et al 153) Benita Parry is critical of Spivak’s view that Christophine is tangential to the narrative and “cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole, rather than the native” (Moore-Gilbert et al 156). She refuses to accept Bertha Mason the real woman from the colonies and identifies Christophine as a native female agent who has been largely ignored. Spivak maintains her stand by pointing out that certain crucial functions assigned to Christophine − she upholds black rituals as culture-specific and hence cannot be commodified by the whites, challenges Rochester with possessing monetary motive and using the Creole girl for his advantage, and displays an awareness of the letter of law and her own rights. Rhys was concerned with the white Creole than Christophine as a black native informant. She wanted “the Creole’s ‘I’” (Rhys 137) to come to life. Jean Rhys (1890-1979) was born to a Welsh father and a white Creole mother whose family had great influence on the island for generations at Roseau on the Caribbean island of Dominica. She went to England in 1907 for education and spent most of her life in remote English villages, visiting Dominica only once in 1936. Peter Hulme points out in “The Locked Heart: The Creole Family Romance of Wide Sargasso Sea” that the novel was “written by, in West Indian terms, a member of the white colonial elite, yet somebody who always defined herself in opposition to the norms of metropolitan “Englishness”; a novel which deals with issues of race and slavery, yet is fundamentally sympathetic to the planter class ruined by Emancipation” (Hulme 72). In a letter written to Francis Wyndham on 29 March 1958 Rhys confesses that she had “nearly forgotten Creole” (Rhys 136) till the idea of writing about the first Mrs. Rochester stirred. She describes how her West Indies memories surrounded her till it clicked in her mind that she “had material for the story of Mr. Rochester’s first wife” (Rhys 136).On April 9 1958 she wrote to Selma Vaz Dias: I have read and re-read Jane Eyre of course, and I am sure that the character must be “built up”. . . The Creole in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a lay figure- repulsive which does not matter, and not once alive which does. She’s necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry- offstage. She must be atleast plausible with a past, the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abhominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. (Rhys 136-7) Rhys occupied a crucial position within the postcolonial praxis since as a Creole herself she could appropriate the voice of the Native Informant. There might have been a few zones of identification between them, too. When Rhys left her native place, she carried a conviction that she has never managed to “get into the sacred circle. I was always outside, shivering (Vreeland221). In a letter dated December 6, 1949, written to Peggy Kirkaldy Rhys confesses that her BBC interviewer Sema Vaz Dias might have “expected a raving and not too clean maniac with straws in gruesome unwashed hair” (Rhys 134). In 1966 she writes to Diana Athill that Brontë’s Creole lunatic shocked her and she was annoyed at the projection of “only one side-the English side”(Rhys 144). The two figures of Jane and Antoinette can be read in terms of their respective location within, and, attitude to the family. The circle of nuclear family was a part of nineteenth century feminist individualism. As has been argued by Spivak, Brontë provides a sequential arrangement of family/counter-family dyad in Jane Eyre. The novel plots the journey of Jane from the counter-family to the family-in-law. The novel Jane Eyre opens with a poor orphan child denied the bliss of a family refuge. Jane moves to Lowood but her fiery rebellious nature is not entirely altered under the influence of Helen Burns and Miss Temple. It is in Thornfield attic that Jane’s rationality and irrationality “intersect” (Gilbert and Gubar 348) as she hears the laughter of Bertha, “her own secret self” (Gilbert and Gubar 348). Since Bertha occupies a no-man’s land between human and animal, she is not entitled to a family under the spirit of Law. Jean Rhys portrays Antoinette as a child whose world comprises of her house, the garden, Christophine, Sass, and her mother. She loves her native place as “if it were a person” (Rhys 53) and cannot think of a superior reality, as is evident in her query to her husband “is the world more beautiful, then?”(Rhys 53). Yet, she lacks a rootedness, a sense of home and wanders − in the garden, the ruined Coulibri Estate, the park in England and passages.

During her encounter with Rochester Christophine presents Antoinette in relation to three other co-ordinates: Creole, home and England: She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She don’t come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she don’t come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it’s you come all the long way to her house-it’s you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have. Now you don’t love her and you break her up. What you do with her money, eh? (Rhys 95) She repeats the word “house” thrice in the passage and sets it in relation to “Creole” and “England”, pointing to the central issue of the essay. Antoinette’s earliest recollection is of a home having almost no visitors. She had been a witness to how Nelson’s Rest, the home of her neighbor Mr. Luttrel, her mother’s only friend, is abandoned to ruin and gossip after his suicide. Antoinette makes a parallel between both the houses: “Soon the black people said it was haunted, they wouldn’t go near it. And no one came near us.”(Rhys 10). As the mother withdraws into the house, Antoinette begins to moves out into the large, unkept and wild garden around. She spends time in the kitchen which was in a cut-off far-building and becomes close to Christophine who slept in the adjoining room. When the black negro girl pursues her singing “White cockroach, go away, go away. Nobody want you. Go away.” (Rhys 13), she walks fast in search of safety of home. Instead of clinging to her mother or shutting herself in her room, she chooses to sit close to the old wall at the end of the garden. The green moss cocooned her as soft velvet and she “never wanted to move again” (Rhys 13). Chrisophine finds her in the dark and the next day Antoinette has Tia as her mate. The two girls spend most of their time in the bathing pool, sometimes till mid-day, sometimes till late afternoon. Antoinette’s long absence from her home never raises her mother’s query “where I had been or what I had done” (Rhys 14). When Antoinette has a nightmare her mother accuses her of frightening her brother with her noise and she tries to sooth and console herself with the thought that she “safe from strangers” (Rhys 16) and close to “the wall green with moss” (Rhys 16). During her mother’s wedding feast she develops a sense of dislocated-ness- “they had forgotten me and soon I wasn’t thinking of them” (Rhys 17). Yet, Antoinette is deeply hurt when Tia tells that her “old house so leaky” (Rhys 14).Thus, her childhood is fraught with a feeling of home-lessness which makes her search for alternative codes of security.

England and Englishness becomes a persistent standard after the wedding of Annette with Mr. Mason. There is a feeling of being “contented and protected” (Rhys 22) as Antoinette finds her step-father “so sure of himself, so without a doubt English” (Rhys 21). She begins feeling “glad to be like an English girl” (Rhys 21) and though she “missed the taste of Christophine’s cooking” (Rhys 21), she adopted the habit of English food. The home and identity is sought to be constructed on a conceptual Englishness which Christophine tries to debunk: “You think there is such place?”(Rhys 67). “The Miller’s Daughter”, painted after Tennyson’s poem, becomes her favourite picture but she cannot visualize the typical English snowfall: “White feathers falling? Torn pieces of paper falling?”(Rhys 67). She asserts her desire to see England and upholds it as alternative, an ideal that would ensure stability-“I will be a different person when I live in England and different things will happen to me” (Rhys 66). During a stroll under the vigilance of Grace Poole and Leah in the last section of the novel, the “grass and olive-green water and tall trees looking into the water” (Rhys 109) gave her the feeling: “This, I thought, is England” (Rhys 109). She connects her health with this environment, of being away from the confines of walls−“If I could be here I’d get well again and the sound in my head would stop” (Rhys 109). The loss of the house in Coulibri lets loose a series of abrupt cessation of associations. As their house in Coulibri is set on fire and the family moves out, Antoinette has the first physical sense of dislocation and dispersal. She realizes she “would never see Coulibri again” (Rhys 27) − the ferns, orchids, ginger lilies and jasmine would all perish in the flames like the parrot Coco. She runs towards Tia with the thought “I will live with Tia and I will be like her” (Rhys 27), but the girl hurls a stone at Antoinette, making her bleed profusely. She recovers from a long delirious fever that lasts for six weeks to finds her plait like the severed umbilical link with her lying in the drawer. She does not miss her mother and rationalizes that since the mother “was part of Coulibri, that had gone, so she had gone” (Rhys 28). Antoinette is sent to convent that remains her “refuge” (Rhys 33) for eighteen months till she is “seventeen, a grown woman” (Rhys 35) and her step-father takes her away with the promise of a “secure” (Rhys 35) future. During a visit that she pays to Christophine after marriage to procure obeah potion, her old nurse advises her to leave Rochester since the English man had married the Creole girl for money. Antoinette reveals that as per English law all she possessed now belongs to her husband and hesitates from leaving. Yet, she is aware of an inevitable moment and inescapable compulsion that comes to be expressed through: “When must I go, where must I go?” (Rhys 66) Antoinette has, as a child, frantically sought to clutch to a family and home but what remains are fragments of memories as she narrates them to her newly-wed husband Rochester. She tells him about a night when two huge rats frightened her and she ran out of the room and slept in the hammock. The insecurity and desire for a refuge rings clear for Rochester to respond but his gaze is too much fixed on the house Granbois as a material possession and he provides a detailed description of the rooms brilliantly lit with candles, swept and dusted, the furniture and verandah. He writes to his father about this property. He is haunted by the swimming pool which he finds rather “wild, untouched, above all untouched with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness” (Rhys 52). After Daniel Cosway’s letter, Antoinette’s passionate flare-up and Christophine’s challenge, Rochester decides to return to England. The decision is largely a response to Antoinette’s assertion: “I wish to stay here in the dark . . . where I belong” (Rhys 81). Rochester seeks to shatter any attachment or sense of belonging and hits on a plan to uproot and dislocate Antoinette: “She said she loved this place. This is the last she’ll see of it” (Rhys 99). Yet, like the inviolate orchid, the place also challenges Rochester with an impenetrable mystery lying beyond his possession: I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. (Rhys 103) When Antoinette is brought to England and shut in the cold attic, she seems to enter into the England of Brontë’s novel: “This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England” (Rhys 107). She has been pushed into a role that she must play within a book between cardboard covers and she can neither reason why nor what she ought to do. In this fictive England she has to enter the construct of a self-immolating, self-silencing subject but Rhys ensures “that the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as an insane animal” (Moore-Gilbert et al 154) for the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction. In her dream she takes the keys from Grace Poole and wanders the lonely house and she “seemed to know the house very well” (Rhys 112). She is haunted by the thought of someone following her. The dream sequence ends as she sees Bertha within the gilt frame and shrieks for Christophine’s help. Leaving a wall of fire behind she dreams rushing to battlements from where she sees once again the red sky, the green moss, the pool at Coulibri and Tia. As Rochester’s voice rings behind Antoinette awakes: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.”(Rhys 112). Antoinette’s query “When must I go, where must I go?” (Rhys 66) culminates in her concluding remark that emphatically asserts her agency and direction: “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.”(Rhys 112). Till her dream in the attic room Antoinette’s concept of home and family tried to stilt on a continuous series of binaries that are beyond her. She had tried to construct selfhood and home on her perceived notions of race and place. In the light of the leaping flames when Antoinette sees “the ghost” (Rhys 111) and declares “I knew her” (Rhys 112) the former series when denial, rejection, deference collapse. The meeting is not simply that between Antoinette and Bertha Mason, but a sense of her location freed from other qualifiers like race and place. Antoinette neither hates nor is frightened as the “house big and safe” neither tempts nor eludes but is engulfed by flames.

Works Cited

Primary Text Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Richard J.Dunn. New York: Norton & Company.1971. Print. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L.Raiskin. London: W.W.Norton & Company. 1999. Print

Secondary Text Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso, 1991.Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post-colonial Studies: Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2000.Print. Barker, F. and P. Hulme and M. Iversen eds. Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory. Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1994. Print. Braithwaite, E.K. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica:Savacou Publications, 1974, Print. Carr, Helen. Jean Rhys. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1996.Print. George, Rosemary, M. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth century Fiction. University of California Press, 1999.Print. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2007. Print. Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Mongia, Padmini ed. Contemporary Postcolonial Theory. London: Arnold, 1996.Print. Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Gilbert Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley eds. Postcolonial Criticism. London: Longman, 1997. Print. Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”, Oxford Literary Review9 (1-2): 3019.Print. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return”, Diaspora, 1, 1:83-99. Print. Simpson, Anne B. Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print. Trivedi, Harish and Meenakshi Mukherjee eds. Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996. Print. Vreeland, Elizabeth. “Jean Rhys: The Art of Fiction LXIV.” Paris Review76 (1979): 218-37. Print. Young, Robert, J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Print.

Communal and National Bias in Cross-Border Partition Fiction

Uttam Kr. Jena

At the beginning of the Partition crisis in 1947, what Gyanendra Pandey calls “the third Partition” (35), violence was the cruelest and bloodiest. As enumerated by Pandey, violence in the other two partitions of India—the demand for political division, culminating in the Lahore Resolution of 1940 and the partition of families and communities after the call for Direct Action by Jinnah in 1946, were not smeared with that much blood as that of the third one. The third Partition led to violent uprooting, mass migration and killing of the other community in the name of religion. Anders BjФrn Hansen takes the large scale forced migration to be “an example of ethnic cleansing, i.e. the altering of the demographic outlook along the ethnic/ religious affiliation”(17). Violence during the third partition in the name of nationality, community and religion was so rampant and massive in scale that it was but genocidal in nature. Within the span of some few months, as Urvashi Butalia points out : ….about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan…. Estimates of the dead vary from 2,00,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted…about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). (3) During those riotous Partition days communal hatred in the name of religious identity was at its peak for religion was the prerequisite for nationality. Such murderous hatred resulted in mindless killings, looting, arson, rape and abduction, of the other people—the otherness defined by religious, ethnic and communal differences. But the national histories of both India and Pakistan naturalize and normalize the third partition. In both India and Pakistan, history has at times been used as a weapon against the enemy. Yet in both countries, there has been a determined attempt to beat back the flames of mistrust and hatred by challenging the way in which the event of 1947 has been mythologized to sustain a sense of identity. When the Indian historiography portrays it as a momentary aberration in the face of its secular and non- violent ideology, Pakistani historiography presents it as a moment of joy, forgetting about its bloodiest killings, rapes and abductions, forgetting about the human side of it to glorify only its political agenda as the fruition of the century old Muslim aspirations. However, in the recent years, the revisionist historians of 1947 have started to explore the human-dimension of Partition by representing a violent struggle with its traumatic aftermath. Keeping aside the grand-narratives of nationalist historiography they try to write back the pain and trauma of the victims of the cataclysmic event and for this they turn again and again to the vast volume of literature written on the partition of the subcontinent. But the problem with the literature of Partition written both in India and Pakistan is that they are configured along the national histories and communal consciousness of their respective countries. Instead of attributing the cause of the partition and its accompanying violence as the concoction of the vicious design of the Imperial machinery and the ploy of some barbaric Hindu/Sikh and Muslim criminals, most of the South Asian partition literature strives to locate the barbaric antagonists, outside of their own community, in Muslims or in Hindu-Sikhs. Except for a few writings by Saadat Hasan Manto, a nationalist, communal or religious bias run through most of the Partition narratives. As has been implied in recent revisionist historiographic formulations, such as those of Gyannendra Pandey, Veena Das, Ashis Nandy etc. much of the partition fictions fail to rise above the “Us versus Them” (Pandey 175) syndrome in its representation of the mindless brutality and violence that followed the partition of the sub-continent in 1947. In view of this historiographic formulation two novels across the border are discussed to reveal the national and communal bias that run through them. In Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man the politics of community and nationality is clearly discernible through the use of her prose of otherness in which she depicts a community attributing the violence to the other. In this novel there is a conscious attempt by the author to project one community, the Hindu/Sikh, as barbaric and the other community and its people, the Muslims, as civilized. Sidhwa shows that for the newly created Pakistan which claims itself to be the sacred nation of Muslims is civilized under their leader and spokesman the Quaid-e-Azam, Jinnah and that violence and brutality lie beyond its borders in India, with the uncivilized Sikhs and Hindus. In her novel The Ice-Candy-Man Sidhwa, like Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, narrates from a Pakistani point of view. But where as Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided vehemently argues for and justifies Partition only falling short of its accompanying violence, Sidhwa in The Ice-Candy-Man takes violence as the trope which she ascribes to be the savagery of the Hindu/Sikhs against the civilized Muslims. In her novel Sidhwa provides Pakistan with an identity which stands in opposition to the Indian identity as she finds the Indians (Hindu/Sikh) to be the enemy-other. The othering that we see in Sidhwa is but a conscious attempt to make secure the national identity of Pakistan as a civilized one on the face of a barbaric other-nation, India. But she is able to deftly conceal her intention by allowing the narrative through the perception of a naive, handicapped, eight year old Parsi girl-narrator. The choice of the innocent child Lenny as the narrator helps Sidhwa present a fairly credible account of the horror and violence of partition. Further the present tense narrative helps to inter- connect the past and the present for a broader focus on the contemporary havoc. In an interview with David Montenegro Sidhwa states about Lenny to be “doing two things here. I’m establishing a sort of truthful witness, whom the reader can believe. At the same time, Lenny is growing up- learning, experiencing, and coming to her own conclusions- one of them, that truth, truth, nothing but the truth can lead to a lot of harm, too. And in understanding the nature of truth, its many guises, she gradually sheds her innocence and understands the nature of men”. (David 519-520) The novel The Ice-Candy-Man not only narrates the mindless horror, brutal violence and the changes in the social configuration during the cataclysmic days of partition through the child narrator’s perceptions but presents a double perspective by putting into the narrative a second narrator. The second- narrator is but the authorial voice/comment, appearing occasionally at the end of chapters, with political maturity and keener insight. The intervension of the second-narrator in the novel, according to Ralph Crane, gives “a sense of hind sight which strengthens, adds authority to the immediacy of the intimate first person narration, and draws together past and present” (56). But the second-narrator’s comments in the novel are directed against India’s nationality and ethics of non-violence as upheld by Gandhiji. The authorial voice at the end of Chapter X is sarcastical and critical of Gandhiji: It wasn’t until some years later- when I realized the full scope and dimension of the massacres—that I comprehended the concealed nature of the ice lurking deep beneath the hypnotic and dynamic feminity of Gandhi’s non-violent exterior. And then, when I raised my head again, the men lowered their eyes. (Sidhwa 88) The accusation is that Gandhiji’s saga of non-violence only has a “hypnotic” edifice without any substantial reality or sustainability. Further by attaching the adjective “feminity” to the Gandhian non- violence, masculinity is alluded to Jinnah, the Father of Pakistan. More than this, through the use of the word “ice”, Sidhwa reduces the stature of Gandhi to the degrading level of the popsicle-seller Ice-Candy- Man who dupes the gullible masses with his mischievous designs. By likening Gandhi with the Ice- Candy-Man she means to say that Gandhi too cunningly exploits the masses taking advantage of their innocence. And with this Sidhwa shifts all charges of manipulation to Gandhi. With Sidhwa’s sincere attempt to elevate Pakistan’s image as a civilized nation and Jinnah as its apostle Father in Ice-Candy-Man, Gandhi is castigated and India is ascribed with a communal and barbaric identity. In an interview with Niaz Zaman, Sidhwa herself vents out her anger against Gandhi for Hinduizing the independence movement and holds him responsible for the partition: Gandhi really sowed the seeds of partition and turned the whole independence struggle into a Hindu movement. It’s hard for people in the west, where he is deified, to regard him as a petty manipulative politician. (532) Gandhi’s principle and means of non-violence are denounced; his fast-unto-death amidst the masses is castigated and at one point Sidhwa tentatively calls the Mahatma to be “a demon in a saint’s clothing”. She attains her purpose through the angry remonstration of the butcher and Masseur, the admirers of Ayah, Sidhwa bedevils the image of Gandhi and his secular ideology. It not only Gandhi but the whole of Congress leadership is severely criticized only to eulogise Jinnah and Muslim League. By calling the Congress leaders as “bastards”, the very legitimacy of Jinnah and the Muslim League is upheld as against the very illegitimacy of the Congress and its leadership. In an interview with David Montenegro, Sidhwa puts forth her support for Jinnah and Pakistan: He (Jinnah) was caricatured as a stick figure, as a very stiff villain of the piece. And I felt, in Ice-Candy-Man, I was just redressing in a small way, a very grievous wrong that has been done to Jinnah and Pakistanis by many Indian and British writers. They’ve dehumanized him, made him a symbol of the sort of person who brought about the partition of India. A person who was hard-headed and obstinate. Whereas, in reality, he was the only constitutional man who didn’t sway crowds just by rhetoric, and tried to do everything by the British stands of constitutional law. Gandhi totally Hinduized the whole partition movement. This excluded the Muslims there. He brought religion into the Congress Party. And Jinnah, who was one of the founders of the party, found he had to edge away from it because it was changing into a Hindu party (David 533). So siding with Jinnah, when Sidhwa criticizes Gandhi for his dubious role in partition with his suggestion that Sikhs cannot live together with the Muslims, she never at all refers to Jinnah’s communal speech in the Annual session of the Muslim League in March 1940. The accusation even goes further that the Hindus/Congress connive with the British to make the Muslim League insignificant and a defunct body. And Sidhwa vents out her anger against the Congress for playing a mischievous political game to clip Muslim League’s wings through the Butcher’s angry remonstrations. Gandhi’s identity as the apostle of non-violence is put to question and he is conceived to be the instigator of the communal tension leading to violence. By ascribing violence to the other community (Hindu/Sikh), Sidhwa makes a conscious effort, in accordance with the Pakistani national historiography, to salvage the image of Pakistan and the Muslims as civilized taking at the same time a severe criticism against India and the Congress as barbaric and violent. Such presentation of the partition violence goes contrary to the discourse of the national historiography of India which projects itself as secular, peace- loving, progressive and modern, describing violence as the provocation of the other community. In such contraries lie the method of naturalizing the violence perpetrated by one’s community as the natural outcome of some provocation from the other community. In this context Gyanendra Pandey comments: …. the violence was always ‘out there’, and never in us. Violence was what was done by the other although in a literal sense this other sometimes included wayward members of the speaker’s own community. While this is easily recognized when we analyse memories of moments of collective violence like partition, the existent drive to consign violence to a realm ‘out there’ perhaps needs to be thought through a little more. (Pandey 188) In her novel Ice-Candy-Man, Sidhwa shifts all responsibility of violence to the Hindu/ Sikh, happening ‘out there’ beyond the frontiers of Pakistan on the Indian side of the border. And when this violence erupts in Pakistan, the very communal bias of Sidwa is foregrounded as she holds the Akali’s responsible for the brutal violence on the innocent Muslim peasants. If the Sikhs emerge as the most virulent kind of beast, Muslims, who react, react not as an organized army but as “goondas”. That the Muslim mob is of only ‘goondas’, as the aberrations of any civilized society, is Sidhwa’s conscious ploy to normalize the Muslim violence and to shift the sole responsibility outside of the boundary of the Muslim community. Further, when the author equips the Sikh mob with “curved swords”, “Kirpans and hockey sticks”, she consciously takes them away from the Muslim mob to present a contrasting picture of the mob psychology. Sidhwa sticks to the same othering design even while taking about the East Punjab violence through Ranna’s story and when the ghost train from Gurdaspur reaches Lahore with: Everyone in it is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslims. There is no young women among the dead! Only two gunny bags full of women’s breasts!” (Sidhwa 149) Violence in Punjab is presented as the organized mechanism of only the Sikh and Hindu provocateurs. Afterwards, even in the Ayah’s abduction and rape and the manipulative ploy that the Ice-Candy- Man plays, is also presented to be the outcome of the provocation by the Hindu/Sikhs by alluding to the event of the ghost train coming from Gurdaspur. Ayah is to be abducted and raped because young Muslim girls were abducted from the train to be violated—“There is no young women among the dead!” And when abducting Ayah—“Her violent sari slips off her shoulder, and her breasts strain at her sari-blouse stretching the cloth so that the white stitching at the seams shows” alludes to “only two gunny bags full of women’s breasts” of the Gurdaspur ghost-train. With this Sidhwa wishes to reveal that Lahore did witness partition violence but this violence is only in response to the Sikh/Hindu barbarism committed across the border. This othering that we see in Sidhwa is an attempt to secure the life of the Muslim community or the Pakistan nation. When in Ice-Candy-Man Sidhwa presents her communal and nationalistic bias in an explicit way through a discourse that elides and naturalizes violence ascribing it to the other community, Chaman Nahal’s bias is implicitly expressed in Azadi by means of othering the other community. In the introduction to his novel, Nahal himself asserts: The greatest harm political decisions such as Partition do is that they polarize ethnic groups and place them in their own narrow confines and compartments, they force them to act their ethnicity out. (XII) Though Nahal tries this novel to be an objective representation of community, religion and nationality, still it is mired by some sort of bias. The author succumbs to the communal and the nationalist bias here and there although he seeks an objective approach by looking both inwardly (India) and outwardly (Pakistan) in his representation of partition violence. Azadi meticulously depicts the impact of partition on the Hindu families in Pakistan through the central unifying consciousness of Lala kanshi Ram whose family becomes the microcosm of all Hindu families who moved to the other side of the border amid horror and fear of death unleashed so brutally by the Muslims on the Hindu/Sikhs. The beginning of the novel is over cast with a sense of fear and horror as the Viceroy’s announcement of Partition is awaited. The conversation between the Lala and his wife is a conscious attempt on the part of Nahal of othering the Muslim Community in terms of violence and brutality which pose serious questions regarding the collective consciousness of the other community. When partition seems imminent the couple converse in fear and pain: ‘If Pakistan is created, we’ll have to leave. That is, if the Muslims spare our lives!’ ‘There will be much killing, you think?’ ‘Don’t you know the Muslims? There has been much killing going on for the past many months. Imagine what will happen once they’re in power” (28) What Nahal attempts to project here through the Hindu consciousness of Lala Kanshi Ram is the very barbarity of the others –the Muslims who will not spare a single Hindu life, to define their own nationality in terms of ethnic cleansing. The fear of Muslims in Pakistan; loss of property, friends and blood relations; and psychological trauma—being refugees in their own land constitute a marker of the consciousness of the West Punjab Hindu and Sikhs. Azadi powerfully maps the political psychology of fear unleashed on the Hindus and Sikhs in the nascent Muslim Pakistan. Lakhmir Singh acclaims Azadi as a land mark partition novel “for depicting the trauma of partition, for its superb delineation of the anguish of the people, for revealing the gradual erosion of the Punjabi consciousness, as also for showing the communal frenzy in its worst aspects”(224) The demonology with which Bapsi Sidhwa perceives the Hindus/ Sikhs and the Congress in Ice- Candy-Man is shifted to the Muslims and the League in Azadi by Chaman Nahal. Like their Muslim counterparts the Butcher and Masseur in Ice-Candy-Man nailing the Hindus, Kanshi Ram’s wife prabha Rani and Isher Kaur evaluate the demonic nature of the Muslims: Ishero, do you think the Muslims will get their Pakistan? Isher Kaur’s voice: ‘Difficult to say, chachiji. I hope they don’t—these badmash!’ ‘Your chacha thinks there will be much killing.’ (Nahal 32) By attaching the derogatory adjective “badmash”, Nahal ascribes notoriety to the whole Muslim community with his implicit desire to extol the Hindu/ Sikhs. And this notoriety does not only define the community identity of the Muslims but is ascribed to the Pakistani – national identity as a whole : … the slaughter of so many? That’s what it would mean, if Pakistan did come into existence. (35) When Gandhiji, his non-violence and even his fasts-unto-death are trivialized by Bapsi Sidhwa, Jinnah has been castigated by Nahal to eulogise Gandhi, his principles and the Congress. When Sidhwa laughs at Gandhi’s fasts-unto-death sit-ins among the crowd, Nahal praises its very efficacy—“If nothing else worked, his fasts unto death always did.”(35) When Sidhwa ends up calling Gandhi in Ice-Candy-Man, “a demon in a saint’s clothing” and just two pages later an “improbable toss-up between a clown and a demon”, Nahal presents him as a savior in Azadi—“Mahatmaji is going to save us”(37). Azadi textualises a strong exaltation of Gandhi as the national leader upon whom the masses pin all their hopes and faith. But in contrast to Gandhi’s secularism and dream for a united-India, which Nahal projects as the Indian national consciousness, Jinnah has been drawn as a communal leader and the architect of Partition: But the Muslim League had slowly made him (Abdul Ghani) aware of the threat to him in a free Hindu India. It was not a question of his personal view; the League or Jinnah Sahib knew better. They said, view your Hindu neighbours with suspicion, and he did that. They said there should be a Pakistan, and he shouted for Pakistan. (42) Azadi meticulously depicts the meaning of the riots, in the aftermath of Partition, for the survivors “by dramatizing the pain of violence, displacement and resettlement with compelling vividness” (Srinath 66). The traumatic experience of the West Punjab survivors in newly created Pakistan whose lives were changed overnight is presented through the central unifying consciousness of Lala Kanshi Ram and his son Arun. The fear of Muslims in Pakistan; loss of property, friends and blood relation; and psychological trauma being refugees in their own land- are the problems that the family faces in Pakistan. Migrating to India, the family of Lala Kanshi Ram confronts the problems of displacement, rehabilitation, disillusionment and the of identity in a country supposed to be his own nation. So the novel deals with two major themes of the partition—the theme of exile and the theme of the search for identity. The West Punjab Sikhs and Hindus are haunted by the forthcoming Muslim rule and its violence in the form Pakistan. And what Chaman Nahal maps vividly in Azadi is the political psychology of the Sikhs and Hindus in a newly created nation for the Muslims. Episodes such as the violent procession of the jubilant Muslims in Sialkot, the violent and murderous raids upon both the Hindu and Muslim refugee-convoys respectively in Pakistan and India, the parade of nude Hindu Women in Narowal and of naked Muslim women in Amritsar are presented realistically. Nahal presents the plight of both the Hindu/Sikhs and the Muslims objectively in an unbiased secular vein. With his desire to keep himself aloof from any national or communal bias Nahal makes his protagonist feel for the plight of both. He finds both the communities equally guilty. But the revisionist historicists and aesthetics such as Veena Das and Ashis Nandy call such objectivity as an inauthentic balance: Most of this literature remained inauthentic, because it tried to reduce the violence to the language of feud in which violence from one side was equally balanced with violence from the other. Thus, the description of violent, inhuman acts perpetuated upon those travelling by a train coming from Lahore would be matched by another description of similar, gruesome acts to which travelers coming from Amritsar where subjected. (Das 199) The writer’s unconscious bias for his own community and nation unconsciously leads him to an inauthentic balancing by shifting the responsibility of barbarism to the other community, though apparently he strives to attain an objective approach. In his novel Azadi Chaman Nahal complicated the representation of the Muslims by putting in opposite strains of secular nationalist and Hindutva discourses side by side. Although Nahal tries his best to strike a balance between Abdul Ghani, a Muslim League diehard and Chaudhary Barkat Ali, a Congress sympathizer, the Hindutva othering of the Muslims as barbaric lascivious predators, out to abduct and rape Hindu women comes to the surface. Dehumanization on the part of the Muslims is specified through the examples of Sunanda’s rape by captain Rahmat-Ullah Khan and the kidnapping of Chandni by the Muslim marauders. With Sunanda’s agonizing cry—“‘Leave me, you brute. Have pity on me’” the novelist comes out to justify the brutality and barbarity he ascribes to the Muslim community. Even so, Nahal’s description of the nude parading of the Hindu and Sikh women in Narowal foregrounds his communal bias of othering the other community and his dormant wish of legitimizing a retaliatory violence by his own community against an entire community. The description of the forty odd nude women whose ages varied from sixteen to sixty, whose sexual organs were defiled, who were tortured and tormented, spitted and were hurled with vulgar abuses expulses any sense of civility and humanity from the Muslim other. But when Nahal describes the parading of the nude Muslim women in Amritsar the vividness is toned down, completely shorn off the lurid details so as to expurgate the Hindu/ Sikhs of the offence. Chaman Nahal’s view in Azadi draws on Savarkar’s sophisticated discourse of Hindutva as found in his writings and speeches including Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History. Savarkar contrasts the stereotyped motion of the meek Hindu “Self” with the hyper-sexual, hyper-aggressive Muslim “Other”. The Hindu tolerance is taken by him as perverted virtue. It is with this Hindutva logic that Chaman Nahal presents the nude parading of the Muslim women in Amritsar which elides vivid details It has been a common practice with the Indo-Pak partition novelists that the heroes are mostly taken from their own communities. Such heroes representing a community and/or nation are presented as honest and virtuous who suffer the painful trauma perpetrated by the villainous and barbaric other community. In the novels written by Indian authors the heroes are mostly Hindus or Sikhs like Lala Kanshi Ram and Arun in Chaman Nahal’s Azadi, Juggut Singh in Train to Pakistan, Bakshiji, Nihang Singh and Prem Singh in Tamas. Likewise novels written by Pakistani novelists have Muslims as heroes who try to fight out their communal and national identity from the Hindu/Sikhs who have been othered as villains and enemies. The hero of Abdullah Husein’s The Weary generation is Naim Beg, Zakir in Intizar Husain’s Basti, the Muslim Popsicle-seller in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man. The two female protagonists, Sughra and Zohra, in Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided are but Muslims. Centred around such protagonists and configured along the respective nationalist historiography, most of the partition fiction written across the border fail to rise above, what Gyanendra Pandey calls- the “Us versus Them” syndrome.

Works Cited Butalia Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voice from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin BooksIndia, 1998. Print. Crane, Ralph. “A Passion for History and for Truth Telling: The Early Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa.” The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa. Eds. R.K. Dhawan and Novy Kapadia, New Delhi: Prestige, 1996. Print. Das, Veena & Ashis Nandy. “Violence, Victimhood, and the Language of Silence”. The Word and the World: Fantany, Symbol and Record. Ed. Veena Das. New Delhi: Sage Publication, 1986. Print. David, Montenegro and Bapsi Sidhwa. “Bapsi Sidhwa: An Interview”. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (winter, 1990). Print. Hansen, Anders BjФrn. Partition and Genocide: Manifestation of Violence in Punjab 1937-1947. New Delhi: India Research Press, 2002. Print. Nahal, Chaman. Azadi. Introduction. New Delhi : Penguin Books India Ltd.,. 2001. Print. Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Sidhwa, Bapsi. Ice-Candy-Man. Penguin Books India Ltd. New Delhi. 1989. Print. Singh, Lakhmir. “Chaman nahal: Azadi.” Major Indian Novels: An Evaluation. N.S. Pradhan Ed. Atlantic Highlands, new Jersy: Humanities Press, 1986. Print. Srinath, C.N., “The writer as Historical witness: Chaman Nahal’s Azadi”. The Literary Criterion Vol. 25 Issue 2, 1990. Print. Zaman, Niaz and Bapsi Sidhwa. “Bapsi Sidhwa: An Interview”. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (winter, 1990). Print.

Jaydeep Sarangi in Conversation with Rob Harle

Jaydeep Sarangi

About Rob Harle:

Rob Harle (1948 – ) is a writer, artist and academic reviewer of Australia. His Writing work includes poetry, short fiction stories (some experimental and co-authored by a computer), academic essays and reviews of scholarly books and papers. His work is published in journals, anthologies, online reviews, books and he has two volumes of his own poetry published – Scratches & Deeper Wounds (1996) and Mechanisms of Desire (2012). Recent poetry has been published in Rupkatha Journal (Kolkata), Nimbin Good Times (Nimbin), North Coast Poets (Byron/Lismore), Deakin Literary Review (Geelong), Beyond the Rainbow (Nimbin). His art practice currently involves digital-computer art both for the web and print. His giclée images have been exhibited widely. He is especially interested in promoting the inclusion of visual art in academic and scientific journals. Formal studies include Comparative Religion, Philosophy, Architecture, Literature and Psychotherapy. His thesis concerned Freud's notion of the subconscious and its relationship with Surrealist poetry. Rob's main concern is to explore and document the radical changes technology is bringing about. He has coined the term techno Metamorphosis to describe this. He is currently an active member of the Leonardo Review Panel, Editorial reviewer for the Journal of Virtual World Research and an Advising Editor for the Journal of Trans-technology Research. His awards and honours include : First Prize - Sculpture,Wyong Art Festival, 1988. Membership of the Golden Key National Honour Society (invitation on Academic merit only) 1997. Selected with one other from the Arts Faculty for consideration for Vice Chancellor’s Prize 1997. Essay: “Kant & Aquinas”. Artwork, Publications and selected writings are available from his website www.robharle.com [email protected]

Hello! Would you please tell us about your childhood? Hello Jaydeep. I had a great childhood 'till about 13 or 14, no major traumas - nice comfortable stable home and parents, uncles, two very indulgent aunts and so on. Three grand parents had died before I was born so only ever knew one grandma, as a child she taught me to listen to and appreciate birdsong. In the words of Shelley:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest they full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Adolescence was a turbulent time best described as an “agony and ecstasy” situation.

Any mentor? I have no heroes but mentors would be: (Sculptors) Constantine Brancusi and Henry Moore; (Writers) Leonard Cohen, Jean Paul Sartre & Charles Simic, (Painters) Girgio de Chirico.

When did you come Nimbin? I arrived in Nimbin 1989, so 24 years ago!

I’ve never gone there but heard a lot about the town and its vibrancy. Please tell us about Nimbin..... Long story, but briefly Nimbin has a long colourful history. First as a farming and timber getting area, then a dairy farming area. The village was basically finished late 60's but was recycled in 1973 with the Aquarius Festival – hippies, artists, alternative seeking pioneers changed Nimbin to the alternative capital of Australia. It's very small only a couple of thousand people but has a powerful creative energy and many important “firsts” have come from Nimbin people. It is not at all like a normal Australian rural town – it's vibrant, cosmopolitan, creative, cutting edge in many ways, and an important voice in environmental sustainability and community relationships. One friend said if Nimbin was in India it would designated a “sacred village”.

Who are important Nimbin writers these days? There are many excellent writers but the most important ones specifically living in Nimbin I would say are: David Hallett, Nathalie Buckland, Tamaso Lonsdale, Christine Strelan and Barbara Taylor.

Is there any written record of the history of Nimbin literature? Not specifically literature that I'm aware of. The history of Nimbin is recorded in quite a few studies, Margaret Olley a very famous Australian artist has roots and connections with Nimbin, Arthur Pike wrote some important stories about the place.

Your formal academic studies comprise: Philosophy of Mind, Comparative Religion, Architecture and Psychotherapy. How did these subjects help you as an artist? Immensely! They gave me a broad and deep base from which to draw inspiration. These disciplines really do try to get to the “heart of the matter”, obviously from different perspectives. Artists and writers I believe need a broad education not a tunnel vision education such as a molecular biologist might have.

Do you have any dilemma in expressing beauty and truth? This is a hard question to answer because I'm not sure what truth is! If we take truth to possibly mean honesty, or true to oneself, no, no dilemma at all. Despite the notion of post-modernism to the contrary I believe beauty is an intrinsic human quality like “common decency” and I have no problem expressing beauty even in the most bizarre of my techno-surrealist artworks and poems.

How is beauty attached with truth in the expression of art? Again, if the work is coming from the heart it will have an honesty and a beauty that is discernible regardless of the subject matter.

You are an artist, writer and researcher . You are a multifaceted and multidimensional man with diverse interests. How do you modulate your interests? With difficulty! I've worked very hard for many years - serving three mistresses is not easy. I'm now putting research very much on the “back burner” and I'm no longer creating artwork specifically for exhibition. My plan is to concentrate on poetry and review writing work. And to create artworks when the need compels me to do so.

Your art practice includes: drawing, sculpture and recently, digital images - both for the web and print. How did you start all these rare forms of artwork? It is a bit of a mystery why I started making sculpture and drawings early on, there were no influences or encouragement from anyone at all in this regard, I made my first “sculpture” when I was 4 years old. Loved drawing, especially of a technical nature at school, worked in a drawing office after I left school then studied architecture. Too many bureaucratic rules and nonsense influenced me to leave architecture and to become a sculptor. I have serious spinal health problems so had to stop sculpture after twenty or so years. My digital images are a sort of combination of drawing and sculpture but with light (not paint or pencil) in fact I often have used scans of my sculptures in my digital artwork. Some of my images can only exist or be made with a computer, like fractals they only exist because of the digital computer. The impulse to create artwork and to write creatively must be a genetic thing, or a genetic memory. I've only recently found out that my great grandmother was a poet and painter, my great uncle was an amazing painter in the romantic style in the late 1800s.

For P.B. Shelley, ‘poets...are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society...’...Do you that think this quote still holds truth in this age of cyber mania? Yes even more so, I'm not saying the job is easier and I'm not suggesting right at this moment that many are listening, but I believe we are entering the post-digital era. This is an era when we have all the wonderful, seductive digital/cyber “things” but these are beginning to be seen for what they are, useful tools and aids for humanity, not ends in themselves. Check out Mel Alexenberg's wiki definition of the “post-digital”. Cyber mania is slowing and even the “dumbed down” masses are starting to realise human values, together with spiritual values (not religious dogma) are necessary for our survival. In the words of Shelley again:

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Can the age of facebook produce a poet like John Keats? Yes absolutely!

Why do you write poems? It is an inner compulsion and a complete mystery to me. I love the constraint of only a few lines to convey what I want to say in the most powerful, mystical, painterly way. This is why haiku is so amazing. Basho can impart the meaning of life in 3 lines! I don't write very much haiku but have read a great deal of Basho and the Japanese poets (in English). Love the French poets especially Baudelaire. And of course all the Surrealist poets, as my thesis concerned a Freudian analysis of Surrealist poetry comparing it to poetry which was written by a computer.

What are your seminal volumes? Scratches and Deeper Wounds (1996) and very recently Mechanisms of Desire. (2012). I haven't been as prolific poet as I would have liked, as I mentioned serving three mistresses takes a lot of effort. Scratches deals with two themes; firstly our apparent “aloneness” in the universe and secondly; the dangers of genetic engineering, coupled with the recent insidious, digital technological invasion into traditional human life. Mechanisms also has a couple of themes; one is the absurdity of our supermarket society and the greed that underpins it; secondly, the damage done to true spirituality by bureaucratic, authoritarian religions; and thirdly, as with Scratches, the digital/genetic engineering/technological control of life.

Are you familiar with contemporary Indian poets in English? Yes some, not as many as I would like but that is changing rapidly. Indian contemporary poets I'm familiar with seem to have a softness, perhaps a mystical feel which I greatly admire, I can sense this influencing my future work to some extent.

Do they write differently than an Australian? Yes! I find Australia a hard country, that is, the landscape (beautiful as it is) is unforgiving. We are still culturally the Wild West, there are minor exceptions of course, poets and artists are ignored or barely tolerated. So this affects the way Australian's write most definitely, as I said above there is a gentleness about Indian poets even if they are describing scenes of abject poverty. Wonderful for me to understand and experience this!

You coined the term techno Metamorphosis. What does it signify? The term means the changes that technology is bringing about and affects what it means to be human. The more we advance technically the greater the possibilities and dangers of destroying or at best modifying things that we barely understand. It more refers to things like neural brain implants, genetic modification and augmentation than simple technical things like an advanced smart-phone for example.

Your poems dazzle with metaphors of supermarket society and modern day syndromes. Why do you use them? Because I'm a contemporary poet living in this absurd (a la Camus) society we've created, I see it as a hideous bad joke, half the world is starving and we have a supermarket selling out-of-season mangoes for $4, together with 100 varieties of breakfast cereals, it's obscene and disgusting. I don't think poetry about the Outback or sheep or bloody kangaroos has any relevance at all anymore.

What is the future of poetry in the world? I'm a poet not a clairvoyant but I hope it will be appreciated by more people as they realise we are in the post-digital era and we need to again live with a sense of wonder. That is, the new art and poetics in this post postmodern era must help restore our abandoned metaphysical and spiritual modes of being. This art, also now in the post-digital age must re-humanise the technology of the digital. We need to embrace sustainability and re-envisage the "mysterium, temendum et fascinans."

Do you write satires? How about and artist your fellow poets from NSW? Some of my poems are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, having a bit of fun within this absurdity, not exactly satirical but close enough I guess. Hallet, Strelan and Robin Archbold are very good at satirical pieces.

Can writing poems be taught? Yes and No! If someone doesn't have it in them to be a poet no amount of education and training will make them a good poet. Writing poetry is not like any other type of writing, for example anyone can be taught to write a newspaper article. But - most young poets can benefit from training, especially through constructive critique of their own work and exposure to quality poetry. The best book I ever read to nurture and hone a poet's skills was The Poet and The Poem by Judson Jerome

Rob, would you share with us one of your recent poems? A pleasure. This one is very recent and unpublished.

Ledgers of Creation Enter into this deep loathsome secret your anachronistic education cannot save you, my therapist collapsed into oblivion as I recited the formula for her, the equation for nano-genetic-conflation.

The seeds are all in Patent Process animal DNA is following fast, precise catalogues of life Ledgers of Creation owned by the few.

Bank vaults bulge with vulgar obscenity as plastic wads of worthless cash inflate, traded on the Stock Exchanges of insanity where piranhic feeding-frenzy riots daily, the blood wrested from the Everyman 'till only a dry and empty bag of skin remains. Shylock reigns supreme in this deep secret with raw blood slopping down his chin as he devours his every “pound of flesh”. © Rob Harle 2013

The Dark Side of the Day

Bishnupada Roy this has been an irrational day I failed to think thinking is a rape of the gentle flesh what the day gives night takes away what keeps us alive also gives us death the death-force is in the air there is no innocence where we expect it the soft orb bulges and glows like the globe and my hand moves on impulse of hard colonialism of use and throw the exacting time draws blood exacting disciplines all and conditional I must meet their demands and be up for remittance or be knocked out by their karate punch.

Underground

Bishnupada Roy a crazy rat in the cellar brews an incantatory froth the days are tipsy with wrong keynotes but it is silent here and cold the sticky tentacles caress the nights for a lullaby of the old the coded smile is a rat poison and no succour in a day of escape there is no rule of engagement here but the accent betrays the portentous as lacking substance.