Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

The Literature of the Indian Diaspora Theorizing the diasporic imaginary

The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the diasporic imaginary constitutes a major study of the literature and other cultural texts of the Indian diaspora. It is also an important contribution to diaspora theory in general. Examining both the ‘old’ Indian diaspora of early capitalism, following the abolition of slavery, and the ‘new’ diaspora linked to movements of late capital, Vijay Mishra argues that a full understanding of the Indian diaspora can only be achieved if attention is paid to the particular locations of both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in nation-states. Applying a theoretical framework based on trauma, mourning/impossible mourning, spectres, identity, travel, translation, and recognition, Mishra uses the term ‘imaginary’ to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously or unconsciously, as a group in displacement. He examines the works of key writers, many now based across the globe in Canada, Australia, America and the UK – among them V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, M. G. Vassanji, Shani Mootoo, Bharati Mukherjee, David Dabydeen, Rohinton Mistry and Hanif Kureishi – to show how they exemplify both the diasporic imaginary and the respective traumas of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Indian diasporas. Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. He has published widely on postcolonial and diaspora theory, on the Gothic, and on Indian literature and cinema.

Postcolonial Literatures Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-Anglophone as well as Anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays from older journals, and reissues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include: 1. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper 2. The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 3. Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denise deCaires Narain 4. African Literature, Animism and Politics by Caroline Rooney 5. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition by Tobias Döring 6. Islands in History and Representation edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7. Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 by Anindyo Roy 8. Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging to Us’ by Evelyn O’Callaghan 9. Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body by Michelle Keown 10. Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction by Sue Kossew 11. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada Gopal 12. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire by Terry Collits 13. American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination by Paul Lyons 14. Decolonizing Culture in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction by Susan Y. Najita 15. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place by Minoli Salgado 16. Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary by Vijay Mishra Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hardback editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research strand of the series. Titles in paperback include: Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique by Benita Parry Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denise deCaires Narain Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or classic texts in the field. Titles include: 1. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris edited by Andrew Bundy

The Literature of the Indian Diaspora Theorizing the diasporic imaginary

Vijay Mishra

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2007 Vijay Mishra All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mishra, Vijay. Literature of the Indian diaspora : theorizing the diasporic imaginary / Vijay Mishra. p. cm. 1. Indic literature (English)–Foreign countries–History and criticism. 2. East Indians–Foreign countries–Intellectual life. 3. East Indian diaspora in literature. 4. India–in literature. I. Title. PR9485.45.M57 2006 820.9`891411–dc22 2006027017 ISBN 0-203-93272-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 13: 978-0-415-42417-2 (hbk)

For my wife Nalini another gift of scholarship

–

– –

tapas besa si ası . bise . ud – – – – – – – caudaha barisa ramu banabası Bereft of goods, as mendicant, as slave Rama to spend fourteen years in the woods –

–

Tulsidasa, R amacaritamanas II.29 afraid to leave the familiar temporariness V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas 174 we hide our secret identities beneath the false skin of those identities Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet 73

Contents

Acknowledgements

xi

Prologue: ‘That time is past’

xv

Introduction: The diasporic imaginary

1

1

The girmit ideology

22

2

Indenture and diaspora poetics

71

3

Traumatic memory, mourning and V. S. Naipaul

106

4

Diaspora and the multicultural state

133

5

The law of the hyphen and the postcolonial condition

184

6

Diasporic narratives of Salman Rushdie

212

Epilogue: The subaltern speaks

245

Notes Works cited Index

256 263 280

Acknowledgements

The spectre of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul stalks this book throughout, and I must begin by acknowledging my indebtedness to his works. Without Naipaul there is no centre to this book. Gratitude to him also necessitates thanking many others, some who have read Naipaul in ways similar to me; others who have given me the necessary analytical skills; and others still who have been part of the central theoretical problematic of the book, the theme of the diasporic imaginary. The names mentioned are uncharacteristically many for an acknowledgement, but this is so because the book itself is all about memory and creative recollection in which a critical discourse of objectivity meets a personal discourse of subjective interpretation and reminiscence. At that point of meeting, of conjunction, names are pivotal. I therefore begin with the names of people who have read the archive in ways similar to me. They are: Hirday Mishra, Sachi Reddy, Krishna Datt, Som Prakash, Subramani, Satendra Nandan, Sudesh Mishra, Brij Lal, Raymond Pillai, the late D. K. Sharma, Fiji Indians all. Postcolonial and diaspora theorists come next. Among them I wish to mention: Khachig Tölöyan, Jim Clifford, R. Radhakrishnan, Harish Trivedi, Sneja Gunew, Chris Connery, David McInerney, Iain Chambers, John O’Carroll, Stephen Slemon, Bob Hodge, Gareth Griffiths, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Debjani Ganguly, Jon Stratton, Nasrin Rahimieh, Deepika Bahri, Nandi Bhatia, Ien Ang and Terry Goldie. I pause to thank again Stephen Slemon, gentle friend and humane Canadian, for the two years I spent at the University of Alberta and for his subtle reminders that the book had to be completed. A number of PhD students and past and present colleagues have, at various times, alerted me to contemporary discussions about diaspora and generally ensured that my research did not become too antiquated. They are: Antonio Casella, Lily Cho, Vijay Devadas, Maria Degabriele, Helen Flavell, John Frow, David George, Garry Gillard, Helena Grehan, Teresa Goudie, Simone Lazaroo, Regina Lee, Kateryna Longley, Niall Lucy, Alec McHoul, Travis Lindsey, David Moody, Brett Nicholls, Leeanda Paino, Shazia Rahman, Jenny de Reuck, Deborah Robertson, Horst Ruthrof, Anne Surma, Serge Tampalini, Tangea Tansley, Hugh Webb and Abdollah Zahiri. Jane Mummery typed earlier versions of parts of the book, and the School of Social Sciences and Humanities’ Administrative Assistant, Cheryl Miller, made copies of the manuscript. In Perth I have received enormous support from Drs Krishna Somers and S. T.

xii Acknowledgements

Arasu. I am particularly grateful to Dr Krishna Somers for funds to establish a foundation for the study of diasporas at Murdoch University. I wish to thank Jim Clifford, Christopher Connery, Marie Gillespie, Greg Bailey, Jacqueline Lo, Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn, Harish Trivedi, Makarand Paranjape, Santosh Sareen, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Peter Reeves, Kirpal Singh, Stephen Epstein, Mark Williams, Brett Nicholls, Vijay Devadas, Alistair Fox and Hilary Radner for inviting me to conferences and/or research centres to discuss my ideas on diaspora or simply finding time to discuss my work. For the Canadian component of my research I wish to thank Margery Fee, Sneja Gunew, Kevin McNeilly, Patricia Demers, Sadhu Binning, Ajmer Rode, Ramabai Espinet, Sharon Fuller, Bill New, Frank Birbalsingh, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Ashok Mathur, Aruna Shrivastava and Zool Suleman. They have been exceptionally helpful whenever I have had to turn to materials relating to Canada in this book. During my visit to Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam and Mauritius, Mahatam Singh, Sybil Ratan, Prem Ratan, Marianne Ramesar, Esmond Ramesar, Gordon Rohlehr, Balwant Singh, Jasmine Dean, Rooplall Monar, Pat Dial, Uttam Bissoondayal, Prem Hurrynag, M. Chintamanee, Abhimanyu Anat, Deepchand Beharry, Anand Mulloo, V. Govinden, Madookar and Nandini Bhautoo-Dewnarain, Farhad Khoyratty, Satya Mahadeo, Sheila Wong, Naseem Aumeerally, Sonia Ramchurn, Kamla Mahadawo and Mooznah Auleear Owodally always found time enough for another son of nineteenth-century sugar-plantation culture. It is not uncommon to learn from close friends who purchase and read your books. I wish to place on record Subhash and Ruma Garg, Hans and Nalini Malhotra, Prem and Lakshmi Mathur, Mahendra and Rekha Pal, Maharaj Kishore and Saroj Tandon. Unknown to them, their narratives and their peculiarly hybrid neologisms, in some cases appended to invitations or more generally performatively inscribed into diasporic renditions of received Indian wedding practices, have taken me back to matters of cultural difference and creative adaptations whenever I have relapsed into a comfortable universalism. I owe a special debt to a close friend of my undergraduate years at Victoria University of Wellington, the late Boyd Anderson, from whom I learned how to write accomplished English prose. I regret so much that Boyd died so young and so very tragically. I wish to thank Frank and Rhonda Edwards, Juliet Oddie and Aye Nu, kindred spirits and rare souls, for keeping alive the importance of memory in our lives. This book begins and ends with references to a heritage that has been referred to as the indenture girmit experience. I have carried memories of that experience, thanks to my late father and mother, my brother Hirday and my sister Shiro. Although removed from that experience, my children Rohan and Paras have not been unaware of their father’s working-class indenture heritage and have sensitively engaged with it. For our granddaughters, Anjali and Tara, diaspora as read here would be a matter of archive fever only. For our daughter-in-law Kylie it will be a similar matter of understanding another history. The book is dedicated to my wife Nalini, herself part of the diaspora, but always careful not to become too

Acknowledgements xiii

sentimental about it. She has valued the work of the mind and has unfailingly provided me with the necessary stimulus for scholarship. Before my father died in 1989, he reminded me about a promise I made to him many years before. I confessed again that I was not a creative writer because I had no capacity for metaphor but, as promised, I would make up for this lack through scholarship as intellectual autobiography. I said I would write a book on Australian literature because finally I had made Australia home; I would write a book on an aspect of English literary history because this was my discipline; I said I’d work around religious texts that I remembered from childhood and construct a devotional poetics; I said I would write about films, Indian films, that created India for us in the diaspora. Finally, I said I’d write something about our own lives, about diaspora. This book completes the promise made then. The promise could be made and executed because, with all his limitations, my father (basically a self-taught man still struggling to get out of the detritus of indenture) valued education and the place of the intellect in our lives. My mother died a few months after I had completed writing the longer version of this book. She, too, was part of indenture life, married young at 16 and part of a family of eight sisters and two brothers, not unlike the Tulsi family in Naipaul’s great novel. I left Fiji when she was barely 40, but when she died years later in Sydney, although I had seen her often enough, I never managed to say a final goodbye. This is a deep regret, for I missed my chance to talk, finally, with the only person who would have understood the deep anxiety about loss that pervades this book. Like my father, she, too, had hoped to die in Fiji, her homeland, but she didn’t. After her funeral rites, I entered her room and found that she had left behind a red exercise book. It was a book written in the hand of a young child beginning his first year in school. The book had numbers and alphabet, simple arithmetic, simple sentences in English and Hindi, and a few facts about the world. It was my first book at school, and she had preserved it all these years. I held that book in my hands, and that’s when tears fell. To her that book was more valuable than anything else. Many years later I write another book, and this book is also as much about myself as about the works of writers of the Indian diaspora. But it is a limited book in its scope. It is not an exhaustive account of the literature of the Indian diaspora and it is certainly not encyclopaedic. Large swathes of the bibliography are missing from the study, and many writers are treated too lightly, perhaps even dismissively. I regret these gestures which became necessary once the project became more concerned with an understanding of the theoretical underpinning of the diasporic experience than with comprehensive critical commentaries on books written by the diaspora. Although the archive, in however truncated a form, is primarily Indian diaspora, and has a strong Fiji Indian bias, the theoretical apparatus has a much broader application, especially for people who are moved by the words with which the Bollywood film Veer-Zaara (2004) ends: ghar cale (‘let’s go home’). The Fijian narrative may require slight adjustments in the light of the December 5, 2006 military coup led by Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama. Although his motives

xiv Acknowledgements

remain murky – a combination of personality clash between a prime minister and his military commander, complicated by the traumatic aftermath of a mutiny within the army in the wake of the 2000 George Speight-led coup against Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour government – what is clear is a resurgence of tribal power struggle in the Fijian establishment once the Fiji Indian had been effectively neutralized. It is for these reasons that there is, as I write, no clearly defined objective of the Bainimarama coup nor a predictable endgame scenario in spite of the Commodore’s claim that his coup is no more than an exercise in establishing ‘responsible and accountable governance’. The research for this book was made possible through Australia Research Council Large Grants (1995–7, 2001–4) and a Canadian Government Faculty Research Award (1996). My thanks to the Australia Council for recognizing the value of the project and for its implicit endorsement of it. Murdoch University, a rare place for interdisciplinary researchers like myself, very generously granted me leave for short periods over many years to undertake research. Some of the research for the book was undertaken in the University of West Indies Library, St Augustine, Trinidad; the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Moka, Mauritius; the Fiji Museum; the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the University of Alberta Library; and the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. I wish to thank the librarians of these institutions for their generous help. In some form, parts of the book have been presented at conferences or seminars at the Australian National University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Wales, Swansea, the University of Otago, Auckland University, the University of Canterbury, the University of the South Pacific, the University of Mauritius, the University of Alberta, York University (Canada), the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Singapore, the University of Hyderabad, Murdoch University, Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Saarland. An appointment as Robert Evans Fellow at the University of Otago in October 2003 provided me with a rare opportunity to deliver a first draft of the book as a series of public lectures. I wish to thank Vijay Devadas and Brett Nicholls for arranging my visit and to the Department of Anthropology for a wonderful intellectual milieu in which to work. Fragments of this book, often in versions very different, appeared in articles published in Ariel, Canadian Literature, Diaspora, Textual Practice, Evam, New Literary History, Meanjin, PORTAL, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, and in books and occasional papers edited by Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee, Makarand Paranjape, Jacqueline Lo, Harold Bloom, and Stephen Epstein. Finally, I wish to thank Matthew Byrnie, Liz Thompson, Katherine Sheppard, and Polly Dodson, editors at Routledge, and the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their criticisms and encouragement. In spite of the critical input of so many, errors that remain are my own. Vijay Mishra Nausori–Wellington–Sydney–Perth–Canberra–Oxford– Santa Cruz–Edmonton–Perth

Prologue: ‘That time is past’

Many years ago – in 1966, to be precise – I was asked by my English tutor at Victoria University of Wellington (one Mr Wright, if I recall correctly) to explain references to an ancient Indian text in Matthew Arnold’s poems ‘Resignation’ (1843–8) and ‘The World and the Quietist’ (1848). The tutor presumed that I had some cultural understanding, some familiarity with the language, and could, for once, make an unusual contribution to English tutorials in which I had been largely a silent participant. I suspect this was because, in the days before theory reached the antipodes, readings of texts were often bland exercises in critical evaluation. The latter required, after F. R. Leavis, a sensibility peculiarly English, of which, in those early years, I wasn’t a part. The request caught me unawares. I was literally stumped; I simply didn’t know. I told the class that I’d check my facts and return with an answer in the next tutorial. That afternoon I took the cable car down to Lambton Quay to purchase two books from Whitcombe & Tombes (now Whitcoulls), New Zealand’s best-known bookseller. My weekly scholarship allowance was £7 (US$13), and the books I bought – The Poems of Matthew Arnold edited by Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, – – 1965) and The Bhagavadg ıta translated by S. Radhakrishnan (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963) – cost me £1.18.0 ($3.50) and £1.4.6 ($2.30) respectively. In other words, I spent almost half my weekly scholarship allowance to purchase these books. There were reasons for this. My University Arnold selec– – tion was a basic student text; and, as for the Bhagavadg ıta, although I carried – – a pocket edition of the Bhagavadg ıta (in Sanskrit), it was more like a goodluck charm given to me by my mother when I left for New Zealand in February 1964. And since I didn’t read Sanskrit then (I learned it many years later) the – – Bhagavadg ıta existed for me simply as a Hindu religious text known to me − − through only one verse which I had learned by rote. The verse – ‘yada yada hi dharmasya . . .’ – promised the return of Krishna whenever dharma, or the eternal law, was threatened by evil forces. I can’t recall much of what I said in the next tutorial a week later. But since I have the books I bought some 40 years ago with me as I write this prologue I can at least attempt to re-create my points of entry, however imprecisely or inelegantly. In the notes to ‘Resignation’ Kenneth Allott made the connection between the poet’s detachment (‘The poet,

xvi Prologue

to whose mighty heart / Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart’) and the – – Bhagavadg ıta with reference to the poet’s ability to ‘admire uncravingly’. Allott glosses ‘uncravingly’ as follows: ‘Like an Indian sage the poet mixes with mankind but is emotionally detached from its concerns. Cp. Arnold’s letter to [Arthur Hugh] Clough 4 March 1848 (The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough [CL] 1932: 71), “The Indians distinguish between . . . abandoning practice, and abandoning the fruits of action and all respect thereto. This last is a supreme step, and dilated on throughout the Poem.” ’ Allott then gives a typ– – ical instance from Bhagavadg ıta 6.9–10. I give the passage as it appears in the Radhakrishnan translation: ‘He who is equal-minded among friends, companions and foes, among those who are neutral and impartial, among those who are hateful and related, among saints and sinners, he excels. [Let him] try constantly to concentrate his mind (on the Supreme Self) remaining in solitude and alone, self-controlled, free from desires and (longing for) possessions’. – – Arnold’s own encounter with the Bhagavadg ıta came via a curious route. He read an account of the text in V. Cousin’s reading of the poem (in French) in 1845 from which he also gathered that Wilhelm von Humboldt had composed an influential analysis of the poem in two lectures (1826). The latter immediately occasioned G. W. F. Hegel’s less than complimentary review of them published in 1827. It is unlikely that Arnold actually read Humboldt’s lectures or Hegel’s review. He did, however, read (in 1847 or early 1848) G. Lassen’s – – Latin translation of the Bhagavadg ıta (Bonn, 1846), ‘a corrected version of A. W. Schlegel’s Latin rendering of 1823’. As Allott informs us, Clough was not impressed by Arnold’s mystical claptrap. Arnold wrote to Clough in March 1848 (?): ‘I am disappointed the Oriental wisdom pleased you not’ (CL 69). Later Clough was to censure Arnold’s Indian ‘quietism’ in a review of Arnold’s poems (July 1853): ‘. . . for the present age, the lessons of reflectiveness and caution do not appear to be more needful than . . . calls to action . . . the dismal cycle of his rehabilitated Hindoo-Greek philosophy . . .’. In response to Clough’s misgivings Arnold wrote a poem, ‘The World and the Quietist’, specifically for ‘Critias’ (Clough). The opening lines of the poem are given to Critias: Why, when the world’s great mind Hath finally inclin’d, Why, you say, Critias, be debating still? Why, with these mournful rhymes Learn’d in more languid climes, Blame our activity Who, with such passionate will, Are, what we mean to be? Glossing lines 4–5, Allott writes: ‘The mental detachment, i.e. freedom from the world’s “passionate will”, which Krishna preaches to Arjuna (while urging him to act) supplies one element of A[rnold]’s conception of the poet’s contemplative

Prologue xvii

role in “Resignation”. ’ In the end, though, Arnold is more Greek than Hindu, more comfortable with the figure of Sophocles, to whose mind an earlier ‘Dover Beach’ (the Aegean) brought ‘the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery’, than with a Krishna emphasizing that even the renouncer acts. I cannot recall or re-create what more I would have said in the tutorial – certainly a few words on ‘Learn’d in more languid climes’ which undercuts – – the message of the Bhagavadg ıta by emphasizing its pastness (playing on the meanings of ‘learn’d’) and its slackness (the meanings of ‘languid’) but per– – haps also a reading of the well-known one-verse manifesto (Bhagavadg ıta 2.47) – – – ‘karmani . kadacana’ (‘Your entitlement is only to . eva adhikaras te/ma phalesu the act, never to its fruits’) as well as a word or two on Culture and Anarchy. Nor can I remember whether there was any occasion to reflect on my own encounter with the texts of Indian high culture. After all, I belonged to a people still recovering from the detritus of indenture, still trying to find a proper language because our own was like an anti-language, a demotic created to survive and known only to those who had been part of Fiji Indian plantation history. Arnold – – was alien to me, but so was the Bhagavadg ıta. We did not know its metaphysical resonance (beyond its place in our own reading of Hinduism as affirming the comforts of a tribal religion) and certainly we did not know the austere demands it made on our need for salvation. In the ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ (1852–5) Arnold had written: ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.’ This was more like our lives as we, too, hovered between two worlds, our own, which even then seemed dead, and another, of the diaspora, not quite capable of being born in a world where the cultural logic of assimilation was the norm. And because my commentary on Arnold had to be framed in the discourse of English literary criticism (‘detachment’, ‘quietism’, ‘resignation’, ‘cycle’, and so on were the key words) the matter of declaring difference, of affirming a new knowledge and making the – – Bhagavadg ıta itself the centre of critical knowledge (above and beyond Arnold) never arose. – – Then – all those years ago – I read the Bhagavadg ıta as a footnote to Arnold, not as a text in its own right. In composing a commentary I read whatever was relevant to literary criticism, not how the text may have affected me. The fact that it did is beyond question; but that I cannot recall how it did is a testimony to the degree to which non-Western knowledge was seen to possess only instrumental, footnote value. There was no place for a radical rethinking of the (Western) past, no critical disavowal of it, no proper hatred of it (after – – Adorno). Matthew Arnold was what he was; the Bhagavadg ıta simply happened to supply him with additional ideas as creative icing on an already strong preoccupation with the links between culture and poetry. Years on, I write again with a different freedom; much of it should be evident in this book on the literature of the Indian diaspora. But the newfound assertiveness and critical certitude cannot be totally divorced from first encounters. For me the – – moment of the Arnold–Bhagavadg ıta commentary was decisive even if in my commentary I simply re-confirmed the hierarchy of the two texts. I end by correcting

xviii Prologue

a loss, or the failure to address the impact of the text on me. I no longer read the – – Bhagavadg ıta as the eighteen-chapter relatively autonomous text that just hap– – pens to be embedded in the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata. I now read – – – – the ‘Bhagavadg ıta-in-the-Mahabharata’, a work that grows out of the concerns of the larger epic, a work that tries to transform this maddening epic into a metaphysic, into a theory of epic action (where all heroes are failures and die needlessly). But it cannot win; it cannot transform lived human behaviour into a metaphysic, and its offer of salvation through a redefinition of what it is to act, and who finally acts, does not redeem the epic which, in the end, affirms not Krishna’s directive that action should be removed from the world of prakrti, . of phenomena, and based on complete understanding (of the purusa/brahman), . but Arjuna’s fear that action, even of the detached, selfless variety has the same consequence: the destruction of humankind. The scene at the end of the epic is bare, harsh, meaningless, severe: a man and a dog ascend the steep slopes of a mountain only to find their brethren in worlds to which they do not belong, only to find that the rhymes were indeed ‘mournful’. – – I have read the Bhagavadg ıta many times, in the original Sanskrit and in most English translations. I read it again while writing this prologue and I read it, as force of habit now dictates, as verses embedded in the great epic. The poem ends, the great matters of the epic must continue since the decision to fight has been made. Arjuna has been persuaded by Krishna, although in the context of the epic’s own diegesis, even before the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, the blind king Dhrtarashtra has been informed that the battle nears its end as the great Bhishma is dead. But in terms of linear time Arjuna’s elder brother, Yuddhisthira, must now inform the elders of the opposing side of his intention. Furthermore, as custom demands (as these elders are also his granduncles and teachers), he must seek their permission to fight. Yuddhisthira is the eldest of the five Pandava brothers forced to fight to regain what is legitimately theirs. He comes into the epic, though, as the son of Dharma, of the law itself, and is referred to as the Lawgiver or the Lord of the Law. Upholding the law is the message of the epic; when heroes die, the law itself becomes topsy-turvy, and social dissension and disorder follow. So the request to fight is also part of the law, a duty, and who better to fulfil this duty than the person who stands for the law, Yuddhisthira. He approaches his grand-uncle Bhishma and gets his permission to fight. He also receives from him information about how he can be killed, for if he isn’t the battle cannot be won. Bhishma foretells his death but declares that the moment will be of his own choosing. Then Yuddhisthira approaches Drona, the great archer and his teacher. Again he seeks his permission to fight and information about how he can be killed. Great archer that he is, he cannot be killed, but he declares that if the moral order becomes cankerous, then there is no point for him to live. ‘How could that be?’ asks Yuddhisthira. Drona replies, in those grand lapidary lines: – – – ´sastram . jahya m . s´rutva sumahad apriyam . caham rane – – – – ´sraddheyavakyat purus. ad etat satyam . brav ımi te

Prologue xix

And I swear to you, I shall lay down my weapons only when I have heard a great untruth from a man whose word I trust. And Drona does put down his arms, and prepares to die only when he is falsely informed by Yuddhisthira, the lawgiver, the upholder of truth, that his son Asvatthaman is dead. I am moved whenever I read these lines; no other lines – – – – from the Mahabharata (including of course the Bhagavadg ıta) move me as much. This kind of aesthetic judgement was not available to me in 1966 and, even if it were, it would have required a disavowal of a mode of literary analysis and reading, a ‘hating’ (after Adorno) of the hierarchy of text and commentary, for which I was ill-equipped. Just emerging from the constraints of a colonial education and essentially peasant upbringing, I had no cultural or intellectual resource with which to make a counter-claim. To do so would have required a different engagement with modernity, which I undertake in the ensuing pages with reference to a literary corpus written in ‘less languid climes’.

Introduction: The diasporic imaginary

There needs no ghost . . . come from the grave To tell us this. Hamlet I. v. 131–2

All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way. Diasporas refer to people who do not feel comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities as indicated on their passport. Diasporas are people who would want to explore the meaning of the hyphen, but perhaps not press the hyphen too far for fear that this would lead to massive communal schizophrenia. They are precariously lodged within an episteme of real or imagined displacements, self-imposed sense of exile; they are haunted by spectres, by ghosts arising from within that encourage irredentist or separatist movements. Diasporas are both celebrated (by late/postmodernity) and maligned (by early modernity). But we need to be a little cautious, a little wary of either position. Celebrating diasporas as the exemplary condition of late modernity – diasporas as highly democratic communities for whom domination and territoriality are not the preconditions of ‘nationhood’– is a not uncommon refrain. In the late-modern celebratory argument on behalf of diasporas, diasporic communities are said to occupy a border zone where the most vibrant kinds of interaction take place, and where ethnicity and nation are kept separate. In this argument, diasporas are fluid, ideal social formations happy to live wherever there is an international airport and stand for a longer, much admired historical process. The tension between this position and the earlier modern, reactionary reading is evident in a classic Hollywood film, Casablanca (1942). In it, as Catherine Portuges has pointed out, the opening sequence presents the spectator with ‘polyglot crowds of hopeful refugees awaiting the miracle of an exit visa to a better world’ (50). Placed against Hollywood’s own tendency to produce a cultural product that is homogeneous and unproblematically ‘American’, the ‘irreducible particularity of their [the characters’] ethnic and regional voices’ (53) suggests that Michael Curtiz, the film’s director and himself a Hungarian émigré, was introducing a discrepant diasporic narrative, a discordant, dialogic eruption, into the film as a statement about diasporic labour in the formation of Hollywood filmic practice and about alternative, unhappy, irreconcilable narratives embedded in voices that Casablanca dare not interrogate. After all, it is in Casablanca that Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), when asked about his nationality, replies, without any ironic intent: ‘I’m a drunkard.’

2 Introduction

The narrative of Casablanca posits escape to liberty as the universal ideal even if the ideology is encased in a mushy romance. Ideology, by virtue of its connection with the aesthetics of romance (which is how the film Casablanca has been popularly received), deflects a fundamental aspect of diaspora: its irreducible complexity at the level of lived social and political expression. The point, hidden from the film’s diegesis, is that diasporas have a progressivist as well as a reactionary streak in them. Both forms of this ‘streak’ centre on the idea of one’s ‘homeland’ as very real spaces from which alone a certain level of redemption is possible. Homeland is the desh (in Hindi) against which all the other lands are foreign, or videsh; it is the source of homesickness, that which ‘gives rise to the adventures through which subjectivity (whose fundamental history is presented in the Odyssey) escapes from the prehistoric world’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 78). When not available in any ‘real’ sense, homeland exists as an absence that acquires surplus meaning by the fact of diaspora, so that Sikhs in Vancouver and Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto clamour for a homeland (Khalistan, Tamil Eelam) or, in some quarters, Muslims seek a pan-Islamic utopia in the European heartland. It is not unusual for the two versions (the physical and the mental) to be collapsed into an ahistorical past going back to antiquity. We need to make an important qualification, though. This reading of the homeland must be placed alongside another truth about diasporas: as a general rule – and the establishment of a Jewish homeland is the exception and not the rule – diasporas do not return to their homeland (real or imagined). Throughout the dark years of South African apartheid few Indians (the Mahatma is the notable exception) returned to India; nor have Fiji Indians, in spite of recent troubles there. The generalist argument, however inelegantly presented above, acts as a template for a quite specific archive. To get my narrative right, to be able to say things about diasporas as exemplary as well as reactionary sites of late modernity, I want to home in on the 12-million-strong Indian diaspora – in the history of migration a comparatively recent phenomenon, although it may be argued that the modern Indian diaspora has a longer history which is in fact contiguous with an older wanderlust, the ghummakar tradition, that took the gypsies to the Middle East and to Europe, fellow Indians to South-East Asia and Sri Lanka as missionaries and conquerors, and traders to the littoral trading community around the Arabian Sea.1 Rethinking the argument that ‘it was poverty at home that pushed them [Indians] across the ocean [to Africa]’, M. G. Vassanji writes in his recent novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall ‘but surely there’s that wanderlust first, that itch in the sole, that hankering in the soul that puffs out the sails for journey into the totally unknown?’ (2004: 17). This Indian diaspora (excluding the Tamils of Sri Lanka) is a complex social formation, in fact an extraordinarily rich archive, which, in Ranjana Khanna’s words (after Derrida) is ‘both collective memory and the origin of memory’ (Khanna 2003: 271). To explore the narrative of the Indian diaspora critically, we may want to read it as two relatively autonomous archives designated by the terms ‘old’ and ‘new’. The old (that is, early modern, classic capitalist or, more specifically,

Introduction 3

nineteenth-century indenture) and the new (that is, late modern or late capitalist) traverse two quite different kinds of topography. The subjects of the old (‘before the world was thoroughly consolidated as transnational’ [Spivak 1996: 245]) occupy spaces in which they interact by and large with other colonized peoples with whom they have a complex relationship of power and privilege as in Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam; the subjects of the new are people who have entered metropolitan centres of Empire or other white settler countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA as part of a post-1960s pattern of global migration.2 The cultural dynamics of the latter are often examined within a multicultural theory. There are, of course, Indians, part-comprador, part-indenture, with long histories in many parts of Africa, notably East Africa, whose life-worlds have been the subject of some very fine writing by the twice-displaced Indian-Canadian writer M. G. Vassanji. As is clear from Vassanji’s treatment of ‘Shamsi’ traders of Gujarat who migrated to East Africa, the binary of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ offered here is not meant to isolate communities or to situate experiences within non-negotiable or exclusive frames. It should be self-evident that the ‘old’ has become part of the ‘new’ through re-migrations such as Fiji-Indians to Vancouver or Trinidadian-Indians to Toronto (one thinks of the transnational life of Ms Neela Mahendra of Lilliput-Blefuscu, the unhappy South Pacific isles inhabited by the Indo-Lilly in Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury) and that the old has not been immune to a general electronic media culture that has tended to redefine subjectivities along different lines of what Manuel Castells (1996) has termed the ‘net and the self’. I keep the distinction of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ not because the binary has to be defended or that the binary is incontestable; it is made because Indian intellectuals of the diaspora (Appadurai, Radhakrishnan and Bhabha, among many others) presume that the lives of the Indian NRIs (the ‘new’ diaspora of ‘non-resident Indians’) constitute the self-evidently legitimate archive with which to explore histories of diasporic subjectivities. They have also tended to presume that the ‘new’ presents itself as the dominant (and indeed the more exciting) site for purposes of diasporic comment. The binary therefore has a strategic function: it recognizes an earlier phase of migration, the psychic imaginary of which involved a reading of India based on a journey that was complete, a journey that was final. The ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Indian diasporas (as I have called them) reflect the very different historical conditions that produced them.3 The distinction between the old and the new becomes clearer when we note that the ‘new’ surfaces precisely at the moment of (post)modern ascendancy; it comes with globalization and hypermobility, it comes with modern means of communication already fully formed or in the making (airplanes, telephone, e-mail, the internet, videocassettes, DVD, video-link, webcam) and it comes, since 2003, with the gift of dual citizenship from India (the Indian Citizenship Act 1955 has been amended to allow the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands and Italy to retain dual citizenship). In a thoroughly global world the act of displacement

4 Introduction

now makes diasporic subjects travellers on the move, their homeland contained in the simulacral world of visual media where the ‘net’ constitutes the ‘self’ and quite unlike the earlier diaspora where imagination was triggered by – – the contents in gunny sacks: a Ganesha icon, a dog-eared copy of the R am ayana . – or the Qur’ an, an old sari or other deshi outfit, a photograph of a pilgrimage, and so on. Indeed, ‘homeland’ is now available in the confines of one’s bedroom in Vancouver, Sacramento or Perth. In short, networking now takes over from the imaginary. Presented in this fashion, this is a great, positive yarn about extremely flexible human beings. But even within the ‘new’ diaspora this version is only part of the story. The Afghan refugee to Australia or the Fiji-Indian who is illegally ensconced in Vancouver is neither global nor (hyper)mobile. Her condition, unlike those of the upwardly mobile professionals in Silicon Valley, is not unlike those of people under indenture, for she has to work in sweatshops during graveyard shifts or, as in the case of the illegal, cannot leave Vancouver as she has no access to a passport. It is this complex diaspora story that I would want to tell with some of the privileges of the critical and self-reflexive native informant. But it is a story that is also a critique of an uneasy postmodern trend towards collapsing diasporic (and historical) differences. An anecdote comes to mind here, an anecdote centred upon a question asked on my third journey to India in October 1994. The question was posed in Bombay, emblematic city, after Benjamin, of ‘marginal types such as the collector, gambler, prostitute, and flâneur’ (Patke 2000: 12). In this city of cynics and slum-dwelling cinema buffs people’s questions are not what they seem. So when the porter of the Bombay Radio Club (where once colonials came to listen to the BBC World Service over a chota peg) welcomed me with ‘Where are you coming from?’ I prepared myself for an ironic response. But I need not have worried; Indians do not have a sense of irony. The porter’s question was no more than the Indian introduction, the Indian way of opening up a social space. I remembered an early V. S. Naipaul essay in which he recounts also being asked ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘It is the Indian question . . . [of] people who think in terms of the village, the district, the province, the community, the caste,’ Naipaul had added (1972: 43). I explained to the porter at the Radio Club my history, my origin in the sugar plantations of Fiji, the fact that though a Brahmin (my surname would have given that away) I was basically working class, and had my forebears not left the Indo-Gangetic Plains in the nineteenth century I would probably be illiterate and begging in Allahabad. But it is only now, as I write down that encounter, that I realize the meaning of this very Indian question (‘Where are you coming from?’) in the way in which – – – · Naipaul had understood it. Translated back into Hindi (ap kaham· se aye haim), the question does not seek a full autobiography but is instead only a means of ‘locating’ the addressee, because in India you are where you come from, and that may also mean the caste to which you belong, the family you married into and the social and economic grouping willing to embrace you. In Fiji – the first of my diasporic homes, but a lot more, my ‘homeland’ – ‘Where are you coming from?’ (in the Fijian language) has a slightly different

Introduction 5

inflection since it is rendered as ‘Where are you staying?’ (o vaka tikotiko mai vei). But ‘staying’ does not imply the here-and-now place of residence. It carries with it, as in the original meaning of the Hindi question, the more specific sense of ancestral village or, in Fijian, one’s koro. One may live in another place for generations, but the answer given to ‘o vaka tikotiko mai vei’ is always the name of one’s koro. Fiji Indians, too, would answer this question by referring to their plantation village, that is, the plantation to which their forefathers came in the first instance.4 After the 1987 coup, when Fiji Indian identity was not deemed to be self-evidently connected to Fiji, the indigenous Fijian shadowed the question (o vaka tikotiko mai vei) with the idea of the vulagi, the foreigner, whenever the addressee happened to be an Indian. Ask the question too often in any nation-state, and with the latter-day Fijian connotation, and you begin to produce the schizophrenic social and psychological formations of diasporas. A diasporic double consciousness comes to the fore once you link this question, finally, to the presumed ultimate solution of diasporas: ‘What do we do with them now?’ In Bombay, where inter-communal relationship remained tense when I arrived, this question had indeed been asked with reference to the Indian Muslim community. As a student of diaspora theory I could see how easily a real or implied principle of exclusivism could diasporise a community that had begun to be read ambivalently ever since the partition of India in 1947 created a Muslim homeland with a fanciful name (Pakistan, ‘the land of the pure’). Where once ‘Where are you coming from?’ implied the beginning of inclusion in a community, now the same question is shadowed by another question (‘What do we do with them now?’). The question, with its shadow, is an ‘interrogative dominant’ in the cultural logic of diaspora, because the diasporic imaginary is so crucially connected to the idea of a ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1996: 180), the idea that against one’s desh (‘home country’) the present locality is videsh (‘another country’). Behind the use of desh stands ethnic doctrines based on exclusivism and purity, and linked very often to a religiously based communal solidarity of the ethnie (A. D. Smith 1986). Behind it stands the denial that the homelands of diasporas are themselves contaminated, they carry racial enclaves, with unassimilable minorities and other discrepant communities, and are not pure, unified spaces in the first place. Even in the Jewish case history that underpins readings of diaspora (by Safran for instance), migration was largely from one in-between place to another and not from Palestine to a new land. Furthermore, historically Jewish homelands had been created wherever Jews had settled, in parts of the Middle East, in Poland, and elsewhere. Many Jews looked upon these enclaves as their homeland rather than to the Israel of the Book of Exodus. Their own diasporic episteme was located squarely in the realm of the hybrid, that is, in the domain of cross-cultural and contaminated social and cultural regimes. Though Jewish history also gives us the only successful instance of diaspora nationalism, a term that Ernest Gellner uses to define a third species of nationalism beyond the Enlightenment/democratic and eugenic (Gellner 1983: 101–9), the lived experience of the Jews was not necessarily linked to a physical

6 Introduction

return to a homeland which, at any rate, is only possible with the return of the Messiah as the members of the Neturei Karta maintain in Israel itself. It is thus the creation of its own political myths rather than of the real possibilities of a return to a homeland which is the defining characteristic of diasporas. In a progressively multi-ethnic conception of the nation-state (in spite of the tragedy of the Balkan states and the break up of the Soviet Union, which was a nationstate only through the politics of coercion) diasporic theory bears testimony to the fact that we live in a world ‘where multi-ethnic and multi-communal states are the norm’ (Hobsbawm 1992: 179). The partition of India, the demands of the Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka, and the recent tragedy of racial cleansing in the Balkan states are very special – indeed, aberrant – cases. The memorial (and fictive) reconstructions of the ancient Jewish homeland, of the Armenian golden age in the era of the early Gregorian church, of the free city-state of Ayodhya under the Hindu god Rama or of the community of the faithful under Prophet Muhammad become the sublime signs of the ungraspable in the complex psychology of diasporas. Against this kind of discursive nostalgia (not uncommon among terrorist groups) the material history of diaspora leads us to deterritorialized peoples with a history and a future. This future, at least as an ideal, is the affirmation of the idea of the Enlightenment/democratic nation-state currently threatened by racialized ethnic states. For the fact is, as E. J. Hobsbawm writes so lucidly, ‘Wherever we live in an urbanized society, we encounter strangers: uprooted men and women who remind us of the fragility or the drying up of our own families’ roots’ (1992: 173). The variable archives of diasporas notwithstanding, the Jewish diaspora is the fundamental ethnic model for diaspora theory, and all serious study of diasporas will have to begin with it. But what we must now do is take away from that model its essentialist, regressive and defiantly millenarian semantics and reread it through alternative models much more attuned to spatio-temporal issues and to a diaspora’s own silenced discourses of disruption and discontinuity. In this argument, the Jewish experience is simultaneously history’s conscience, its allegory of the democratic nation-state (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993: 693–725), as well as a ‘model of European transnationalism’ (Boyarin 1996: 110). We place under erasure a narrative that requires, at every point, a theory of homeland as a centre that can either be reconstituted (as actually happened with the creation of Israel) or imaginatively offered as the point of origin. We need to replace it with a narrative of social interaction in the border zones of the nation-state. A people without a homeland is not an aberration but an already prefigured cultural ‘text’ of late modernity. In other words, the positive side of diaspora (as seen in the lived ‘internationalist’ Jewish experience) is a democratic ethos of equality that does not privilege any particular ethnic community in a nation; its negative side (which is a consequence of its millenarian ethos of return to a homeland) is virulent racism and endemic nativism. This is not to say that Jews did not suffer in enlightened nation-states; nor should the argument be seen as a denial of the right to self-determination. What the argument does, however, is emphasize that the religious fossilization of the community is not its

Introduction 7

permanent condition. What the community undergoes is a process of social semiosis whereby the tribe from a particular ‘homeland’ interacts with other cultures over a long period of time to produce diaspora. Against the fictions of a heroic past and a distant land, the real history of diasporas is always contaminated by the social processes that govern their lives. Indeed, the autochthonous pressures within diasporas, as discussed in the writing of Gellner, A. D. Smith and Safran, are of concern to diasporic subjects only when a morally bankrupt nation-state asks the question, ‘What shall we do with them?’ The unfortunate thing is that the question has been asked far too often (the Holocaust is the most obscene instance of the consequences of such a question) and continues to be asked even now. A recent example of this happened in Fiji when, soon after the coup led by George Speight in May 2000, the indigenous Fijians very loudly asked precisely this question of its own Indian diaspora. The question asked in whatever form (or embedded in an answer such as that of the Fijian prime minister Laisenia Qarase’s ‘Loss of political control and leadership is more than just an election result. It is a reflection of their [the indigenous Fijians’] worst nightmares’, Time 11 July 2005: 43) triggers the idea of the lost homeland, it ‘repeats’ the trauma, it reinforces the imaginary and darkens ‘consciousness of a racial collective as one sharing space with others, devoid of exclusivist and dominating power’ (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993: 713). As long as there is a fascist fringe always willing to find racial scapegoats for the nation’s own shortcomings and willing to chant ‘Go home’, the autochthonous pressures towards diasporic racial exclusivism, the pull of the imaginary, will remain strong. Addressing real diasporas does not mean that the discourses that have been part of diaspora mythology (homeland, ancient past, return and so on) will disappear overnight. To pursue this argument further, we need to think through key terms that give a centre to diaspora theory. The terms I wish to gloss before I return to my own reading of the diasporic imaginary are: mourning/impossible mourning, travel and translation, and trauma.

Mourning/impossible mourning Let me quote generously from Derrida’s Memoires for Paul de Man to anchor my thoughts on mourning: What is an impossible mourning? What does it tell us, this impossible mourning, about an essence of memory [of anamnesia, of remembrance]? And as it concerns the other in us . . . where is the most unjust betrayal? Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, the idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism? (1986: 6)

8 Introduction

Against impossible mourning can there be ‘true mourning’ (31)? For Derrida and for the narrative (in language) of diaspora, true mourning cannot be delinked from trope, from metaphoricity, from what Nietzsche referred to as ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’. True mourning, then, can only dictate a tendency to accept incomprehension, which means leaving it as an absence. In other words, the truth of mourning in literature, as figurative language, effectively implies that true mourning can never be defined, except as an absence. Mourning remains in us upon the death of the Other (32), and it is bequeathed to us only as memory, given in the dative case, as Derrida observes ‘to the memory’ (33). When we first meet Hamlet he is mourning his father’s death; his mourning is so vast and so inconsolable that the ‘clouds still hang on [him]’. Since the ‘truth’ of mourning never arrives, all that is left is memory, which, of course, can only be structured as a trope of absence, a ghostly trope of prosopopeia (the mode of personification that implies an absent speaker), by which memory (which like stone is silent) is given a voice (27). The normal working of mourning is precisely this, an idealization of absence because it is prior to the possibility of mourning. But ‘we can only live this experience in the form of an aporia: the aporia of mourning and of prosopopeia, where the possible remains impossible’ (35). True mourning becomes impossible because we do not accept the truth, the textuality, of mourning. Derrida’s mourning clearly grows out of Freud’s masterly synthesis of the subject: Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or the loss of some abstraction which has taken place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal and so on. (1984a: 251–2) The traumatic moment may be seen as crystallizing that loss, as a sign around which memory gives itself to the past – what Laplanche, in Ricciardi’s paraphrase, referred to as ‘the temporality of memory’ (Ricciardi 2003: 22). The (ideal) loss persists because there is no substitution for it in the ‘new object of love’ (in the nation-state in the case of diaspora). Freud goes on to remark that in some people ‘the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition’. Or, as Angelika Rauch glosses, unincorporated suffering or unbound affect turns a person’s history into pathology . . . and implies an uncompleted process that awaits belated completion before it can be incorporated into the self. Before such a completion of experience in the present, that is, before the affect can be bound in a belated image, the subject vis-à-vis her desire remains fixated on the past. This desire may be turned into a compulsion to repeat for the sake of bringing about the satisfaction of a merger between affect and signifying

Introduction 9

image. However, in the absence of this synthesis, the subject remains in a melancholic state, not able to detach from what is lost and experienced as traumatic, and hence not able to interpret the past constructively. (1998: 118) Here the concept of perceived persecution is important. Whenever the nationstate is perceived as racist or imperialist – Arnold Itwaru, for instance, reads Canada as a nation-state ‘created and upheld in the ethos of imperialism’ (1994: 7) – and the therapy of self-representation is denied to diasporic peoples, a state of melancholy sets in precisely because the past cannot be constructively interpreted, the primal loss (of the homeland, a ‘lack as an a priori, ontological condition of psychic life’5) cannot be replaced by the ‘new object of love’ (Freud 1984a: 252). But does the subject want to replace the object (and hence cure himself/herself of the trauma)? The condition of mourning is after all predicated upon a loss that the subject (such as Goethe’s Werther) does not want to replace because to do so would taint the purity of the object lost. The subject turns away from reality and clings on to the object of mourning even when reason dictates that the object can no longer be grasped, and the ‘work of mourning’ has to be completed before the ego can become free and uninhibited again. In the context of diasporas we need to ask, ‘When is the subject cured ?’ ‘Does he/she want to be cured?’ I want to suggest that the diasporic imaginary is a condition (and ‘imaginary’ is the key concept here) of an impossible mourning that transforms mourning into melancholia. In the imaginary of diasporas both mourning and melancholia persist, sometimes in intensely contradictory ways at the level of the social. In fact, if we examine the characteristics of mourning and melancholia more closely in Freud’s essay, we are struck by the match between a diaspora’s memory of homeland (which defies representation) and the nature of the lost object that forms the basis of melancholia. In melancholia the object lost is of ‘a more ideal kind’; it is much more difficult to pinpoint as, unlike the loved object of mourning, it remains unpresentable. In Freud’s own words we read: melancholia is in some ways related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. (1984a: 254) Failure to objectify the loss means that the emptiness and impoverishment of the world (the condition of mourning) are transferred on to the ego: ‘the complex of melancholia’, writes Freud, ‘behaves like an open wound [that empties] the ego until it is totally impoverished’ (262). But since the object of loss is never quantifiable (it is always deferred) the ego’s relationship to the lost object is much more ambivalent. It is here that Freud’s theory of melancholia gives us a useful analytical framework with which to reformulate the concept of mourning occasioned by traumatic recall; it becomes, to rephrase Ranjana

10 Introduction

Khanna’s very astute connections between melancholia and colonialism, ‘the basis of an ethico-political understanding of diasporas’ (2003: 30). In the case of our immediate diasporic archive – the Indian/South Asian diaspora – trauma is linked to painful experiences such as the passage, plantation life, or events in the diaspora like the Komagata Maru incident involving Sikh migrants to Vancouver at the turn of the last century. Traumatic moments heighten the sense of mourning occasioned by a prior ‘death’ of the homeland which in a sense is part of the entity, the dasein, of the subject. There is no immediate cure for the condition because the loss remains abstract; it is not compensated for by happiness in the new nation-state and is therefore internalized as the emptiness of the ego itself. It leads to retreat into essentialist diasporic instrumentalities such as places of worship (church, temple, mosque) or into social collectivities from which both the nation-state’s dominant racial group as well as other diasporas are excluded. It leads to purist readings of homelands and the search for absolute ethnic states: Khalistan, Tamil Eelam, Kashmir and so on. The stages that constitute melancholia (first the loss of the object, second an ambivalent relationship to the loss, and finally the regression of the libido into the ego) parallel stages in the life of the diasporic subject, too. What is necessary, then, is the ‘freeing [of the] libido from the lost object’ (Freud 1984a: 262), and this ‘freeing’ can come only when diasporas become full participants in a nation-state’s collective history or when they write their great books and critiques, which as ‘minor literature’ (after Deleuze and Guattari 1997) would have embedded in them the possibilities of greatness precisely because their subject matter is not a pre-given. Even when, it should be added, as in the case of Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt and Celan, one carried a legacy of a mother tongue, in their case German, they could not declare it as their own and wrote and rewrote ‘according to this mourning’ (Lyotard 1990: 93). But of course the acceptance of the necessity of the struggle for empowerment does not necessarily lead to nations redefining themselves, and certainly not in the idealist terms in which the argument has been framed by what may be called romantic practitioners of diaspora theory.

Travel and translation I borrow these words from Jim Clifford (1997), who reads them as key concepts in our understanding of an unfinished modernity. The Jews are, of course, exemplary people in the unfinished narrative of modernity either as Rebecca and her father Isaac of York in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe or as the urban cynic and estranged modern Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses (Docker 2001). These figures prefigure, anticipate or simply allegorize an entire history of travel, translation and displacement – Scott, of course, quite anachronistically in giving Rebecca and her father the option of settling in the Spain of the Moor Boabdil. Travel and translation (adjusting to a new land, internalizing its topography, naming it) rather than rootedness and return are the more relevant terms of debate. With Clifford, though, I wish to pause here and examine

Introduction 11

a book that combines the Jewish fetish for writing (letters on a parchment or paper may be worked over but not obliterated so that the texts are always a palimpsest) with Jewish travel in the Arabian Sea. The book in question is Amitav Ghosh’s highly inventive In an Antique Land (1992), a book that combines anthropological discourse with the fictional discourse of tracing events and genealogies back to their roots. This is a tale of the Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave (the slave of the manuscript MS H.6 left behind in the Geniza or chamber of a Cairo synagogue by Ben Yiju). Although the book is fascinating as a text that recovers and reconstructs a medieval world of trade between the littoral states of the Arabian Sea, its real significance lies more in its examination of a world where identities were being formed and re-formed through contact and cultural adaptation. Amitav Ghosh’s impetus for the writing of the book is located centrally in the discipline of anthropology: a young doctoral student goes to Egypt to learn Arabic as part of his training; he masters it, returns to Oxford and writes his thesis. But that is not the text as given here. The anthropological enterprise gets transformed into a narrative of travel and translation; the native informant and the researcher fuse into one as the recovery of the narrative of the slave (finally named as Bomma) becomes an examination of two worlds: an earlier boundaryless world and a modern world of rigid boundaries and passports. Research becomes an ‘entitlement’, keeping the older meaning of a promise to be kept. The memory recovered – the history of the Indian slave from Mangalore – is, however, an occasion for nostalgia inasmuch as it gestures towards a time when the nomad or the traveller was not an aberration to be rejected through protocols of immigration and exclusion but a normative figure of celebration. Diaspora, as we know it now, comes with colonial practices which destroyed the old culture of accommodation of which Ben Yiju and his slave were a part. But, as the North African variety of Arabic (in the Hebrew script) used by Ben Yiju is an uncanny reminder of the Arabic that Ghosh himself learns at Lataifa and Nadshawy (in Egypt), so, too, does the narrative of travel and translation in medieval times connect with our own (post)modern logic of mobility, transition and translation. The kind of travel embedded in Ghosh’s novel needs to be placed against postmodern travel through cyberspace so as to pay attention to the manner in which the discourse of the latter invades diasporic travel. A novel that demonstrates this with considerable immediacy is Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004). The novel in fact begins with a markedly digital discourse where computer language forms the basis of both metaphor and narrative. It ends with a virus released by a disgruntled computer geek from India, one Arjun Mehta, who suddenly loses his job as computer analyst in America. The novel is of immense theoretical value to the study of diasporas as it explores a culture of migration from India that is linked to a different kind of labour, whether the labour of fake foreign accents adopted by Indians in Bangalore call centres or the labour of computer work which generates the new Indian diasporic fantasy of the good life outside India. In Kunzru’s lightly parodistic treatment of that life, we get life experiences that tend to become, like the internet, virtual and without

12 Introduction

depth. Here travel is contained within the image of computer technology and is generated by it. Not surprisingly, Arjun Mehta’s life in the novel becomes a journey coded in the discourse and narrative of a Bollywood film such as Salaam Namaste (2005).

Trauma As I have already suggested, diasporic writing often recalls a moment of trauma in the homeland – what Derrida, quoting Hölderlin, had again referred to as an ‘impossible mourning’ (1986: 6). We return to Hamlet’s melancholia. When we first meet him he neurotically compares a dead father with the living uncle as ‘Hyperion to a satyr’ and longs for the moment when his own very solid/sullied flesh would not only melt but indeed ‘thaw and resolve itself into a dew’. Diasporic melancholia, too, is related to a moment of trauma ‘deeply tied to our own historical realities’ (Caruth 1996: 12). The exact dating of the historical moment of trauma (which is to be distinguished from ‘historical realities of our own’) is less important than its ‘posterior resubjectifications and the restructuring of the subject that is the consequence’ (Rauch 1998: 113). To poach a definition used by Juliet Mitchell, we can say that trauma ‘must create a breach in a protective covering of such severity that it cannot be coped with by the usual mechanisms by which we deal with pain or loss. The severity of the breach is such that even if the incident is expected, the experience cannot be foretold. . . . In trauma we are untimely ripped’ (1998: 121). And, as it happens so often, a ‘catalytic event in the present triggers an earlier occurrence which becomes traumatic only by virtue of its retrospectively endowed meaning’ (121). The Holocaust is the unspeakable example of such a catalytic event; on a much smaller (and by comparison insignificant) scale, the recent coups in Fiji (1987, 2000) or the massacre of Indians in Wismar, Guyana, in 1964 are another for the Fijian and Guyanese Indian diaspora respectively. These events retrospectively endow the original moment of trauma with added meaning: ‘There is no subject without guilt,’ writes Slavoj Žižek (1989: 180). Nor without trauma, we may add. The realist argument concerning evidence – I don’t see you particularly traumatized, or you seem to be happy enough – again leads to a disavowal of precisely the moments of origin and history which diasporas constantly, if mutedly, rewrite. However, instead of locating the loss, the moment of trauma, in the abstract loss of the homeland (which effectively forecloses diaspora theory), I would want to locate it, in the case of the plantation-Indian diaspora, in the space of the ships, the passage and the barracks. Here the long period of Indian indenture and plantation experience get transformed into a collective trauma that reappears primarily as the trauma of work and drudgery on the plantations. The discourse is then linked to the – – – – space of the barracks or the routine of plantation life: din cale kudar ı rat n ınd – · – nah ım ave (‘the hoe defines my days; insomnia my nights’) sing women in the cane fields. In the context of the Canadian (East) Indian diaspora I would locate it in the Komagata Maru incident (1914) and in the corresponding theme of the

Introduction 13

watno dur (‘away from home’). For Indians in East Africa, the trauma is often connected to demands for their repatriation to India by African nationalists, even though most are at least second-generation Indo-Africans. The Kenyan ‘expulsions’ and, more dramatically, Idi Amin’s declaration that ‘Asians’ were no longer welcome in Uganda are a case in point. For Indians from India living in the diaspora, that moment could be the tragedy of partition (Salman Rushdie continues to come to terms with that trauma) or even their own personal histories (those of Parsis in the works of Rohinton Mistry for instance).

The diasporic imaginary The intimations of theory are present in the outline of issues given above. Here I wish to reprise part of the argument, rework the archive, narrow the terms and, above all, offer a theoretical framework for the study of diasporas. The task is not made any easier because diaspora is itself part of some other ‘cover’ field (perhaps postcolonial studies) in a segmentation that is problematic. The placement of diaspora in this larger ‘cover’ field is for many historians of diaspora a recent phenomenon because not too long ago the study of diaspora, and the definition of the term itself, was relatively straightforward. Both analysis and definition implied a grand narrative of the history of the Jewish people. To invoke diaspora presupposed a prior understanding of a linear narrative of dispersal and return of the original people of the Book. Depending upon one’s point of view, this narrative could be rendered in epic terms or in terms of the uprooted, aimless wanderer in search of home. In the latter exegesis Jewish history was represented through narratives of retribution and loss symbolized – at least in non-Jewish narratives – through the iconography of a wanderer or wayfarer whom even God had rejected. Although Charles Maturin never explicitly refers to the Jewish experience, most readers of his classic Gothic work Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) have sensed that Maturin here uses the Jewish experience as his unspeaka– ble intertext. In the Qur’ an that history is presented as a failure by the Jews to uphold a primal contract between man and God. When we turn to descriptive predication, that is, definitions, ‘diaspora’ turns out to be a very culture-specific term. The Oxford English Dictionary refers quite explicitly to John 7.35 (‘the dispersion . . . the whole body of Jews living dispersed among the Gentiles after their Captivity’) to make the connection clear. The OED, with its characteristic homage to the written word, locates the first use of the term in Deuteronomy 28.25 where we find: ‘Thou shalt be a diaspora (or dispersion) in all kingdoms of the earth.’ The recent opening up of the word to signify the lives of ‘any group living in displacement’ (Clifford 1994: 310) is a phenomenon that probably marks a postmodern move to dismantle a logocentric and linear view of human affairs, essentialist notions of social and national cohesion that connected narratives and experiences to specific races and to origins: the model here was that of historical lexicography, of which the sublime example is the OED itself.

14 Introduction

The diasporic imaginary is a term I use to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously or through selfevident or implied political coercion, as a group that lives in displacement. I use the word ‘imaginary’ in both its original Lacanian sense (linked to the mirror stage of the ego, and therefore characterized by a residual narcissism, resemblance and homeomorphism [Laplanche and Pontalis 1980: 210]) and in its more flexible current usage, as found in the works of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek defines the imaginary as the state of ‘identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing “what we would like to be” ’ (1989: 105). Žižek makes this point with reference to the question one asks the hysteric: Not ‘What is his object of desire?’ but ‘Where does he desire from?’ (Žižek 1989: 187). In a subsequent application of this theory to the nation itself, Žižek connects the idea of what he calls the ‘Nation Thing’ to its citizen’s imaginary identification with it. In this astute extension of the argument, the ‘nation’ (as the ‘Thing’ in Heideggerian parlance that ‘presences’ itself [Heidegger 1975]) is accessible to a particular group of people of itself because it (the group) needs no particular verification of this ‘Thing’ called ‘Nation’ (1993: 210–12). For this group, the ‘nation’ simply is (beyond any kind of symbolization). The ‘Nation qua Thing’ (to use Žižek’s phraseology) is therefore constructed out of fantasies about a particular way of life that may be enjoyed by a particular community or race. The ‘way of life’, which may be defined by any number of things – pub culture, sportsmanship (rugby in New Zealand is a classic case), capacity to live life fully, liberal values, non-negotiable connections with the land, or something totally nebulous, which has meaning only when declared as an absence (‘Why can’t they be like us?’) – is seen to come under threat by the Other (multicultural community, diaspora, ‘Protestant ethnics’, to use Rey Chow’s imaginative re-reading of the subject-as-other [2002]) since the latter has ways of enjoying the Nation that do not necessarily mirror the forms of the nation’s enjoyment of itself. Nor do these alternative forms of enjoyment correspond to how the dominant community would like the nation to be (as a reflection of their own selves). Racist phobia, Žižek suggests, arises out of a proprietary sense of enjoyment of the ‘Nation Thing’ that is the exclusive property of a given group, community or race. The politics of many right-wing parties (Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia, Fijian nationalist parties) grew straight out of their racist phobia of (visible) minorities, both indigenous and diasporic (as in many settler nations), and diasporic (as in Fiji). The current anti-Muslim nationalist rhetoric in large parts of the world (Western and non-Western) is another version of the phobia: what if these chador-wearing women are really enjoying their diasporic lives amidst us and constructing the nation ‘otherwise’? But Žižek is not speaking in the abstract about this ‘Thing’ called the nation as if the nation were a fiction built around a narrative imaginatively constructed by its citizens. Drawing on Lacan’s definitions of ‘enjoyment’, Žižek attempts something rather different: he brings a corporeal element to definitions of the nation-state so that the nation is more than just a structure of feeling, an

Introduction 15

‘imagined’ construct, without any foundation in the real. Here is Žižek’s crucial qualification made with an eye to definitions of the nation that have emerged in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s influential work: To emphasize in a ‘deconstructionist’ mode that Nation is not a biological or transhistorical fact but a contingent discursive construction, an overdetermined result of textual practices, is thus misleading: such an emphasis overlooks the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency. (1993: 202) If the enjoyment of the ‘Nation Thing’ is the property of a specific community, then the Other is always seen as someone who wishes to ‘steal [the nation’s] enjoyment’ (203). But the fact remains that, in this imputation to the Other of a property that we possess (and ‘we’ here refers to those of us who own the foundational narrative of the nation), we repress the ‘traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us’ (203). Enjoyment is therefore always of the ‘imaginary’, and we continue to impute to the Other what we ourselves wish to enjoy. In other words, the fantasies of our own enjoyment return to us once we have, negatively, imputed the same to the Other. In this respect diaspora as Other has an important function to play in the construction of the fantasies of the nation-state as a Thing to be ‘enjoyed’. Žižek, it must be said, constructs his argument with reference to the disintegration of the East European communist bloc as his test case. Here the argument is that the rise of nationalisms in Eastern Europe mirrors a democratic process that, in the West, has lost all its original vigour and excitement. These emergent nation-states as ‘Other’ give back to the West its original democratic message in the typically Lacanian form of the speaker getting back from the ‘addressee his own message in its true, inverted form’ (208). In diasporas, then, the nation-state sees the loss of an ideal, the loss of its own organic connection to the Thing which it had always taken for granted. Diasporas signify a Gesellschaft, an alienated society without any ‘organic laws’ (211), against the nation-state’s own Gemeinschaft or ‘traditional, organically linked community’ (211). The nation-state sees in them reflections of its own past, its own earlier migration patterns, its own traumatic moments, and its memories of settlement. In its extended form, it is the absence of diasporic enjoyment of the ‘Nation Thing’ in the dominant group itself (and which enjoyment is the presumption upon which the nation-state itself is based) that gives rise to the exclusion of diasporas from the national imaginary.6 The theorization of this fact remains incomplete since the psychology that underlies the enjoyment, an enjoyment ultimately predicated upon melancholia and loss, is never fully understood. The effects of the enjoyment are, however, clear enough. It is diasporic enjoyment of the ‘Nation Thing’ which is absent among the ‘proprietors’ of the nation that gives rise to a range of responses, chief among them

16 Introduction

racist exclusion, cultural denigration and misrecognition (a metaracism, after Balibar 1993), that in some sense attenuate, or even deflect, a psychology that underlies the (lost) enjoyment of the nation by the dominant community. It follows that diasporas are embedded in nation-states that are already a ‘Thing’ created out of a specific kind of (lapsed) enjoyment of it. For the dominant citizenry, this ‘enjoyment’ is a matter of retrospect, and exists inasmuch as it is owned and possessed by it. For it, diasporas must have a homeland since only upon this presumption can the dominant group (or community or citizenry) define itself as a homogeneous entity. Indeed, homeland as ‘[a] fantasy structure, [a] scenario, through which society perceives itself as a homogeneous entity’ (Salecl 1994: 15) and which is predicated on the construction of desire around a particularly traumatic event applies equally well to the ‘owners’ of the nation in which diasporas are located. In the case of diaspora the fantasy of the homeland is linked to that recollected trauma that stands for the sign of having been wrenched from one’s mother (father) land. The sign of trauma may be the ‘[middle] passage’ of slave trade or Indian indenture. The ‘real’ nature of the disruption is, however, not the point at issue here; what is clear is that the moment of ‘rupture’ is transformed into a trauma around an absence that, because it cannot be fully symbolized, becomes part of the fantasy itself. The Ukrainian famine for the Ukrainian diaspora, or the Turkish massacres for Armenians, may be cited here. To be able to preserve that loss, the fantasy structures of homelands for diasporas very often become racist fictions of purity as a kind of jouissance, a joy, a pleasure around which anti-miscegenation narratives of homelands are constructed against the multicultural, miscegenation-prone reality of the nation-states in which diasporas are located. Racist narratives of homelands are therefore part of the dynamics of diasporas; they are distorted mirror images of the nature of enjoyment itself as imaginary homelands are constructed from the space of distance to compensate for a loss occasioned by an unspeakable trauma. To think of diasporas in these terms, in terms of negation, in terms of discrepant or varied understanding of the enjoyment of the ‘Nation Thing’, also stipulates a consciousness of our own beings, and the necessity of intense selfreflection and finally recognition. If for the dominant community diasporas signify their own lapsed enjoyment of the ‘Nation Thing’, for diasporas facing up to their own ghosts, their own traumas, their own memories is a necessary ethical condition. To reformulate Derrida’s ‘spectres of Marx’, by which he meant the imperative of keeping the legacy of Marx visible even as we accept the imperative of globalization in a post-Soviet world order, what I believe is absolutely necessary for diasporas to do is to keep their own spectres of slavery and coolie life (and latterly graveyard shifts and work in sweatshops) firmly in place. There is, for the old Indian diaspora, a plantation history, a lived memory of the passage (Chalo Jahaji, ‘Fare forward, fellow voyagers’ (2000), is the title of a book by Fiji’s leading historian of indenture, Brij Lal) that must be firmly kept in place. The reflection demands that we constantly revisit our trauma as part of our ethical relationship to the ghosts of diaspora. It also sends

Introduction 17

a clear signal that the idealist scenario endorsed by some diaspora theorists needs to be tempered by individual diaspora histories. In the context of the degradations suffered by Sikh migrants in British Columbia, Sadhu Binning’s observations in a poem with parallel Punjabi–English original texts act as an important reminder of another difficult, often unspoken, history so as to evoke precisely that ethical relationship to one’s past: we forget the strawberry flats we picked stooping and crawling on our knees we forget the crowded windowless trucks in which like chickens we were taken there . . . we forget the stares that burned through our skins the shattered moments that came with the shattered windows we forget the pain of not speaking Punjabi with our children . . . multiplying one with twenty-five our pockets feel heavier changing our entire selves and by the time we get off the plane we are members of another class. (1994: 41–3) To understand diasporas necessitates tampering with idealist notions of the exemplariness of diasporas in the modern world. Against a celebratory rhetoric (which would miss Binning’s ironic reference to the value of the Canadian dollar in India), the necessity of understanding a diaspora’s agony, its trauma, its pain of adjustment (before people were unceremoniously ripped apart from their mother’s wombs) with reference to other pasts, other narratives becomes decisive. And we need to accept that, contrary to idealist formulations about diasporas as symbolizing the future nation-state, diasporas are also bastions of reactionary thinking and fascist rememorations: some of the strongest support for racialized nation-states has come from diasporas; some of the most exclusionist rhetoric has come from them, too. Even as the hypermobility of postmodern capital makes borders porous and ideas get immediately disseminated via websites and search engines, diasporic subjects have shown a remarkably anti-modern capacity for ethnic absolutism. In part this is because diasporas can now re-create their own fantasy structures of homeland even as they live elsewhere. The collapse of distance on the information highway of cyberspace and a collective sharing of knowledge about the homeland by diasporas (a sharing that was linked to the construction of nations as imagined communities in the first instance) may be addressed by examining the kind of work Amit S. Rai has done on the construction of Hindu identity (Rai 1995). His research explores the new public sphere that the Indian diaspora

18 Introduction

now occupies as it becomes a conduit through which the conservative politics of the homeland may be presented as the desirable norm. In exploring six newsgroups – soc.culture.indian, alt.hindu, alt.islam, soc.culture.tamil, su.orig. india and INET – Rai finds that many of the postings construct India in purist terms. It is an India that is Hindu in nature and one in which an anti-nationalist secularism appeases minorities. In their invocations of important Indian religious and cultural figures – Vivekananda, R. C. Dutt and others − the subtext is always a discourse of racial purity (‘We must go to the root of the disease and cleanse the blood of all impurities’, said Swami Vivekananda) and the sexual threat to Hindus posed by the Muslims in India. The double space occupied by the diaspora (multicultural hysteria within the USA and rabid racial absolutism for the homeland) is summarized by Rai as follows: Finally, this textual construction of the diaspora can at the same time enable these diasporics to be ‘affirmative action’ in the United States and be against ‘reservations’ in India, to lobby for a tolerant pluralism in the West, and also support a narrow sectarianism in the East. (1995: 42) Although Rai’s conclusions may be suspect – the postings need not lead to the correlation he discovers – it should be clear that diasporas construct homelands in ways that are very different from the way in which homeland peoples construct themselves. For an Indian in the diaspora, for instance, India is a very different kind of homeland than for the Indian national. The diaspora wants, in Suketu Mehta’s words, ‘an urban, affluent, glossy India, the India they imagine they grew up in and wish they could live in now’ (2004: 351), an India projected by Bollywood. At the same time, and as we have suggested above, the nation-state needs diasporas to remind it of what the idea of homeland is. Diasporic discourse of the homeland is thus a kind of return of the repressed for the nation-state itself, its pre-symbolic (imaginary) narrative, in which one sees a more primitive theorization of the nation-state. Thus historically both the Jewish and the gypsy diasporas – two extreme instances of diaspora, and both slaughtered by the Third Reich – have been treated by nation-states with particular disdain because they exemplify in varying degrees characteristics of a past that nation-states want to repudiate. For Franz Liszt the gypsy diaspora was a ‘crisis for Enlightenment definitions of civilization and nationalist definitions of culture’ (Trumpener 1992: 860). The Jews, equally a problem but with an extensive sense of history and civilization, carried all the characteristics of an ethnic community (ethnie) and thus were both an earlier condition of the European nation-state and its mythical nemesis (A. D. Smith 1986: 22–30, 117). In late-eighteenth-century France, and in Germany (unified only in 1871), the Jews posed, for the European, a problem for an understanding of how races entered the logic of modernity. As Jonathan M. Hess has pointed out, between Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s treatise on the improvement of the Jews (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews [Ueber die bürgerliche

Introduction 19

Verbesserung der Juden], 1781) and the unification of Germany heated discussions on the ‘moral, political and physical “regeneration” of the Jews’ continued (Hess 2002: 4). David Michaelis (1717–91) felt that the Jews were racially degenerate, by climate and physique quite incapable of standing up to the heroic German. To the French, hot on the heels of revolutionary fervour, the Jews were seen as ‘the ultimate anti-citizen’, a perfect case for a ‘thought experiment’ designed to test ‘revolutionary principles of the moral transformation of both individuals and the French nation as a whole’ (Hess 2002: 5). Dohm had read the Jews totally negatively and seen their transformation into German enlightenment citizens as being of the utmost importance. It is not too difficult to read into this version of the modern citizen a failure to tolerate difference ‘in the quest for uniformity and universalism’ (Hess 2002: 8), an attitude that Hess himself sees as a failure to understand the manner in which German Jewry negotiated (with considerable difficulty given Christianity’s claim to ‘normative status in the modern world’ and its supersession of Judaism) modernity from within by pointing out Judaism’s own enlightened principles.7 If the gypsies were read as the absolute instance of a nomadic tribe (‘a dirty gypsy’ is a term of abuse in both Hungary and Romania), the profound historicity of the Jewish people gave their diaspora a specially privileged position in diasporic theory. Diasporic theory, then, uses the Jewish example as the ethnic model for purposes of analysis or at least as its point of departure. But Jewish diasporas were never totally exclusivist – ‘not isolation from Christians but insulation from Christianity’ was their motto, as Max Weinreich put it – and met the nation-state halfway in its border zones (Clifford 1994: 326). Jewish ‘homelands’, for instance, were constantly being re-created: in Babylon, in the Rhineland, in Spain, in Poland and even in America with varying degrees of autonomy (A. D. Smith 1986: 117). Movement ceased to be from a centre (Israel/Palestine/Judaea) to a periphery and was across spaces of the ‘border’. Against the evidence, Zionist politics interpreted the Jewish diaspora as forever linked to a centre and argued that every movement of displacement (from Spain to France, from Poland to America) carried within it the trauma of the original displacement (such as that from Judaea to Babylon). In retrospect, one can see how readily such a logic would erase the idea of nation as ‘palimpsestic text’ and replace it with the idea of nation as a racially pure ethnic enclave. In a very significant manner, then, the model of the Jewish diaspora is now contaminated by the diasporization of the Palestinians in Israel and by the Zionist belief that a homeland can be artificially reconstructed without adequate regard to intervening history. In 1914 the population of Palestine was around 690,000, of which fewer than 60,000 were Jews. The theoretical problematic posed here is not simply Zionist. In no less a work of art than George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the ‘Jew’ enters the realist novel to take on world-historical questions of exile and what F. R. Leavis called the ‘racial mission’ (1962: 99).8 Here what seems like a more powerful sexual desire on the part of Deronda for Gwendolen has to be repressed (and even denied) once Deronda is made aware of his race through Mordecai, Mirah’s

20 Introduction

Zionist brother, and comes to feel ‘he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew’ (Eliot 1988: 405). In marrying Mirah and finally heading ‘East’ (Palestine), Daniel Deronda affirms his place in a larger history that transcends both emotion (love for Gwendolen) and nation (England as the immediate home) in favour of a new ‘remaking’ signalled by George Eliot in a chapter epigraph taken from Heine: ‘Despite his enmity to art, Moses was a great artist . . . he built pyramids of men, he sculpted obelisks of men, he took a poor peasant slave and made a people that would last for hundreds of years. He made Israel (er Schuf Israel)’ (637). Years after George Eliot, we need to keep the Palestinian situation in mind in any theorization of diasporas even as we use the typology of the Jewish diaspora to situate and critique the imaginary construction of a homeland as the central mythomoteur of diaspora histories. The reason for this is that displaced Palestinians and their enforced mobility force us to distinguish between the Zionist project of Israel and the historically deterritorialized experiences of Jewish people generally. The latter point is made by Boyarin and Boyarin (1993). Echoing Max Weinrich, they re-read the Jewish diaspora through a postcolonial discourse in which Jewishness is seen as a disruptive sign in the mosaic of history and an affirmation of a democratic ethos of equality that does not privilege any particular ethnic community in a nation.9 Against the Zionist fictions of a heroic past and a distant land, the real history of diaspora is always contaminated by social processes and in the end by nationalist forces that govern their lives. Indeed, diasporas become more than just theoretical propositions once a morally bankrupt nation-state asks the question seen by Sartre as the nation’s racist solution, ‘What do we do with them now?’ In a post-9/11 world order that question is being asked about Muslims generally, diasporic or not. In that interrogative mood, diasporas, too, may be asked to declare whether they are ‘for us or against us’. For me, Sartre’s question remains what may be called the ‘transcendental absolute’ against which we compose a diaspora theory. To forget this fear is to ignore one of the principal lessons of modern history. Nations are not fixed entities, national cultures are not absolute cultures, they are not governed, like religion, by perennial, universal values. Nations and cultures are products of their multifaceted histories, and they grow and change with the times. Diasporas tell us much about the evolution of cultures. As a social fact of late modernity, diasporas ‘call into question the idea that a people must have a land in order to be a people’ (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993: 718). Of course, the danger of this reading is that diasporas may well be romanticized as the ideal social condition in which communities are no longer persecuted. But diasporas also remind settler nation-states in particular about their own past, about their own earlier migration patterns, about their traumatic moments, about their memories, their own repressed pain and wounds, about their own prior and prioritized enjoyment of the nation. In the end, diasporas should not be thought of through the simplistic logic of the binary. We need to think about them as ‘nonnormative’ communities not necessarily locked into the binary

Introduction 21

of ‘exile’ (the condition of a declared stand against a homeland’s policies and hence revered) and ‘diaspora’ (a ‘chosen geography and exile’) (Barkan and Shelton 4). We need to look at people’s corporeal or even ‘libidinal’ investments in nations (as denizens or as outsiders); we need to read off a modernist ‘transcendental homelessness’ against lived experience (‘all my life ah try to live in – – de Geeta and de Ramine’ [all my life I have tried to live through the G ıta and the – – writes Narmala Shewcharan, a Guyanese, in Creolized English); Ramayana], . and we need to think through critically the effects of the aesthetic (as ‘contrapuntal ensembles’, dialogic expressions, discrepant discourses or as ‘minor’ literature) on both diasporic and host citizens (Bammer 1998: 23–8). I emphasize aesthetic archives of the diaspora largely because I believe that political and social battles often emerge most powerfully in the domain of the aesthetic and especially when the aesthetic is also a critique. And when, as in Subramani’s – – a Puran (2001), the demotic itself becomes path-breaking Fiji-Hindi novel Dauk . the discourse of the aesthetic, we begin to understand the hitherto silenced voice of the subaltern in diaspora. Recognition comes, finally, through art, a point made so graphically in Mohini Chandra’s multi-media installations (on the Tate Learning website for instance) on the theme of diaspora as she, twice displaced (she is born in England), works through the inter-generationally transmitted trauma of her Fiji-Indian heritage. We begin therefore with the primarily subaltern old Indian diaspora in our study of the literature of the Indian diaspora.

1

The girmit ideology

As they flew over the sugar-cane farms of Blefuscu, he noted the high piles of black igneous boulders near the centre of each field. Once indentured Indian labourers [the Indo-Lillys], identified only by numbers, had broken their backs to clear this land, building these rock piles under the stony supervision of Australian Coolumbers [‘call numbers’] and storing in their hearts the deep resentment born of their sweat and the cancellation of their names. (Salman Rushdie 2001: 238)

Performing the final rites of my father’s funeral, for which I returned to Fiji after a long break, the priest narrated the story of Ahalya, transformed into stone by her ascetic-husband’s curse, and brought back to life as the stone is brushed by the dust of Lord Rama’s feet (Vijay Mishra 1989). Remembering the story of curse and redemption takes me back to a theoretical model of the girmit ideology (Vijay Mishra 1977) with which I wish to begin the substantive chapter of this book. Although the term girmit is peculiar to the Fiji Indian plantation experience and, marginally, to the South African Indian (‘the indentured labourers who went to Natal . . . came to be known there as girmitiyas from girmit’, wrote Mahatma Gandhi [1959: 77]), the girmit ideology may be productively read as a ‘sign’ which gives the experience of the ‘old’ Indian indenture diaspora a theoretical template. The girmit ideology – and the word girmit (from ‘agreement’) is the Fiji plantation diaspora’s vernacularized neologism not only for the indenture system, but also for a singular subaltern plantation experience – designates a form of consciousness, a system of imaginary beliefs, and defines ‘a subaltern knowledge category’ (Sudesh Mishra 2005: 15) that grew out of the collective indenture ethos. ‘Agreement’, the contract, now represents, through a process of linguistic cross-coding, an entire ethos, a legend, a tyranny and, finally, a history outside and of time and an ideology. ‘Girmit’, writes Sudesh Mishra, ‘comes into being at that extreme point when a positive intentionality – which is, after all, a species of good faith – is traumatically and perplexingly violated in the very place and time of its anticipated fruition’ (2005: 23). The violation, the failed millenarian quest, required transcendence (of the originary indenture experience), but it was an impossible transcendence because it required the ‘experience’ to be materially completed, it required a cure in the form of a postcolonial nation state where the pain of indenture may be transformed into a triumphalism of sorts and the experience itself recognized in the full sense in which Charles Taylor used the word. Although specific to the

The girmit ideology 23

Indo-Fijian indenture experience, the term girmit may be productively used to designate the life-worlds of the old Indian diaspora generally. In his foreword to Our Struggle, the autobiography of Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, the first Mauritian prime minister, Kher Jagatsingh, the nation’s Minister of Education and Culture, referred to one form of cure, ‘the creation of the ideal Ram Rajya’, invoking in the process both an epic ideal (of a golden nation-state) and Gandhi’s own allegorical rendition of the postcolonial nation as encapsulating an ideal religious polity. The push for transcendence becomes a lot more complex because we are dealing here with an ideology for which memory, promise and trauma are constitutive characteristics. Like any ideology the girmit ideology has at once historical depth and ‘metaphysical’ resonance. Even though the word itself does not survive as a marker of indenture experience in sugar plantations beyond Fiji and South Africa, it manifests itself, to borrow words from Terry Eagleton’s study of ideology, in acts that are ‘affective, unconscious, mythical or symbolic’ as well as in those that are rational and consciously articulated (Eagleton 1991: 221). Terry Eagleton’s understanding of ideology as something that encapsulates ‘the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness’ (Eagleton 1991: xiii) and is a ‘socially necessary illusion’ may be superimposed readily on to my understanding of the girmit ideology. The ‘illusion’ grew out of a (communal) memory of an ancient land that had been lost. The memory remained primarily ‘oral’, existing as it did initially through a form of epic rememoration of one’s past on the part of the first indentured labourers until supplanted by the products of written and then image technology: newspapers and then film. Referring to oral memory and the Trinidad Indian experience, V. S. Naipaul said in his Nobel lecture: ‘[We] were pretending – perhaps not pretending, perhaps only feeling, never formulating it as an idea – that we had brought a kind of India with us, which we could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat land’ (Naipaul 2003: 187). There was memory, yes, but promise, too. A promise had been made by agents and recruiters, a promise about riches and indenture (or, at least, this is how memory recast the promise), and through the promise of riches the possibilities of a glorious or heroic return home. For the despised, listless subaltern (whose self-definition rarely went beyond caste and village), this was an extraordinary promise but quite incapable of being realized in fact. So there was not going to be any collective return; promise had to be transformed into the present, into a political will for justice in the nation state itself. In the history of modernity India, the diaspora’s motherland, was the nation that linked modernity to an anti-colonial struggle and planted in that struggle the ideas of moral value and individual worth: ‘India was in the forefront of the struggles for independence,’ notes the Guyanese Indian leader Cheddi Jagan in his autobiography (1980: 45). Promise then gets linked to a very real mode of political empowerment; and, since that empowerment (as an anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggle) happened to occur in one’s ancestral homeland, it acquired a very special meaning. Not unnaturally, the girmit diaspora mimicked the homeland’s own struggle for political self-determination. In this respect in all the

24 The girmit ideology

plantation diasporas politics became very much a replication of the rhetoric of the Indian National Congress, and hence a nationalism that repeated a prior metropolitan reading of the nation through its Indian mediation. Presented in this fashion, the replication also meant a failure to theorize those rights that could not be contained within the narrative of nationalism, rights such as those of native peoples (as in Fiji) or other racial groups such as the Afro-West Indians in Trinidad and Guyana, and Creoles in Mauritius. It is precisely these rights that the Mahatma himself didn’t quite understand. The Dalit (‘Untouchable’) leader Dr Ambedkar once declared, echoing Marx, ‘But Mahatmaji I have no country’, because he wanted, against Gandhi’s unitary narrative of the state, a narrative that would include multiple and discrepant modes of representation so that ‘communals’ were not lost in the normative narrative of the anti-imperialist struggle. The girmitiyas came from ‘an old and perhaps an ancient India’ untouched by the ‘great reform movements of the nineteenth century’ (V. S. Naipaul 1976: 13). Naipaul was referring specifically to his own grandfather’s generation, but this reading has a much wider significance. In the case of Fiji, the 60,945 Indians who went there between 1879 and 1917 represented a good cross-section of the major Sanskrit-based and Dravidian-based languages, castes and religious groups of India. A close reading of the emigration passes (such as that found in Brij Lal, 1983) indicates that there is a quite remarkable congruity between the caste and religious distribution of the migrants and their counterparts in the regions from whence they came. I don’t want to dwell too long on the history of indenture in summary form here as I shall be returning to it at other points in this book. However, some historical facts directly relevant to the Fiji case (my principal archive for the girmit ideology) may be readily reprised. First, most Fiji Indians trace their ancestry to those 60,945 indentured labourers who were brought to Fiji between 1879 and 1917. Second, the north– south population distribution was about 4 to 1, and the Hindu Muslim about 10 to 1. While north–south divisions persisted in matters of marriage (but never completely), there was little sense of communal difference among people from the various regions of India because plantation life imposed uniformity at various levels: language, food, clothing and, perhaps most importantly, labour. Over time, though, Muslims in Fiji, as elsewhere, became rather different in spite of continuing to share all the features of the indenture experience. Islam and Muslim marriage practice (notably first-cousin marriages inadmissible in the dominant Hindu community) gradually introduced a Muslim exclusiveness which with the creation of Pakistan effectively created a different homeland for the Muslims. In Mauritius the adoption of Arabic as the Muslim ancestral language is an extraordinary case of an attempt by Indian Muslims there to erase their cultural past, something which even Pakistan, in adopting Urdu, an Indian language not indigenous to Pakistan, did not do. The erasure of the Indian Muslim from the Mauritian Indian diaspora is accelerated further by a governmental policy that divides the population between a Hindu community, a Muslim community and a Creole (‘General’) community.

The girmit ideology 25

In matters of political representation, although both colonial and Fijian administrations did not create further communal constituencies on the basis of religion, the demand for separate Muslim constituencies has persisted in Fiji. In spite of these differences, though, and the later insistence on difference on the basis of Islam, the teaching of the Nastaliq (Urdu) script in Muslim schools (Indian schools in Fiji teach Hindi), the general ideology of girmit has persisted at the level of everyday life. The descendants of girmitiyas, collectively, have an – – –– identifiable ethos that began as ship-brotherhood (jahaj ı bha ı). A third general point I wish to make relates to comprador migration within the old Indian diaspora. A number of mainly Gujarati migrants came to Fiji from around 1914 onwards as free migrants and quickly established themselves as small-time traders in the towns. Although they never reached the heights of European capitalists, they became the visible face of Indian commercial success. A relatively small trading community needs endogamous coherence to maintain its commercial advantage, and because this community was already global (East Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, even New Zealand) Fiji Gujaratis could bring their husbands and wives from either the transnational diaspora or from India if a spouse were not available from within their caste in Fiji. They were also the only Fiji Indian community that maintained its separate language. So in matters of identity their relationship to Fiji was rather different from those of the other Fiji Indians and their commercial self-interest not necessarily identical with those of the Fiji Indians, which is why in Fiji the term girmitiya, or even ‘Hindustani’, is never applied to them. A trading class, as the African East Indian case showed so well, is largely indifferent to political change provided that the capitalist economy is not threatened. There were, of course, pockets of other migrants – Christians who came as helping hands of missionaries, Sikhs as part of the police force, and even a few Gurkhas as part of the colonial military regiment. The first peasant revolt in Fiji was in fact undertaken by about sixty Pathans and Punjabis (Sikhs) who refused to be inducted into indenture because they argued that they had been recruited for the Fiji police force. In the ensuing fracas three were wounded, but their demands were quietly set aside as each was sent to a different estate (Tinker 1974: 231). These are matters of localised Fiji Indian ethnic politics and have little bearing on native Fijian perception of the Indian. So far as the Fijians were concerned, the Indian working class (with whom the Fijian commoner had lots in common) and the Indian business class (which gradually included Gujaratis as well as girmitiyas with whom the Indian lumpenproletariat had nothing in common) were equally kai Idia vulagis, or foreigners who enjoyed the nation ‘otherwise’. The collective phrase applied to Indians was used as a metaphor for people without customs and traditions: vakataki iva na Idia – e sega tu na nodra i tovo (‘just like Indians – a people without customs and traditions’); it was a telling part of an absolutist discourse in which the Indian was outside of the Fijian ‘nation’, an unwanted canker in its side, about whom, as early as 1927, Harry L. Foster had written scathingly as ‘spidery-looking coolies, mere bony frames in loin-cloths . . . gnarled and gaunt and crooked and fleshless – with the most hideous bodies

26 The girmit ideology

in the world’ (243–4). Nowhere is this discourse of exclusivism more marked than in the writings of the Fijian historian Dr Asesela Ravuvu, who makes it quite clear that if a vulagi (‘visitor’ or ‘foreigner’, here the Indian) ‘does not comply to the host’s [the taukei’s, the indigenous Fijian’s] expectations then he may very well leave before he is thrown out of the house’ (Ravuvu 1991: 58–60). The narrative of Ravuvu suggests that Rabuka’s 1987 Fiji coup happened because the vulagi had over-stepped his mark. What Dr Ravuvu does not gloss, but which remains implicit in his discourse, is the other term for Indians – mataqali kalavu (‘communal rats’) – which Harry L. Foster had noted as a Fijian term of abuse in 1927 (1927: 254). These displaced Indians – insecure, confused, disoriented and hysterical from the start, and who upon arrival referred to Fiji as narak, ‘hell’ – manifested classic features of ‘fragment’ societies studied by historians such as Louis Hartz (Hodge and Mishra 1991). Hartz is, of course, writing about white settler nations whose ‘ideology’, fossilized, regressive, perhaps even backward after its initial phase, generates the dominant narrative of settler nations: American New England Puritanism, Canadian prairie ruggedness, Australian bush ethos, New Zealand Benthamite paradise or even South African Boer sense of the Calvinist elect. Nothing of that kind happened to the Fiji Indians, who were a motley group of illiterate peasants suddenly confronting modernity and the need to reconstitute themselves as a community. There is no equivalence between Fiji Indians and other settler communities when it comes to power (settlers had complete control over the indigenous peoples and of the agenda of the nation), but the processes of change were remarkably parallel. Like white settler communities the Fiji Indian fragment also underwent two stages of change. Its initial stage – a constant process of assimilating later migrants into a socially inclusive community – was marked by a highly imaginative and egalitarian sense of social cohesion and purpose. In this stage the fragment redefined itself in a much more dynamic manner against those rigid, ‘time immemorial’ oppositions (caste divisions, social laws governing purity) that characterized the homeland. The first 40 years of indenture, when there was a continuous arrival of new migrants, were probably the most exciting period. But the excitement of reconstitution, the desire to create a dynamic, critically self-aware society that grew as much out of the reality of Fiji as a multiracial nation, was overtaken by a sense of loss, characterized by an inwardness, even an insularity. What triumphed was the ideology of the ‘fossil’, which meant also the triumph of myth over history. The fragment began to show an almost total lack of self-reflexivity or relationality. Excitable and prone to political hysteria, it became so self-enclosed that its activism became purely political, and a parody of the anti-colonial struggle of the Indian National Congress. In this it followed liberal principles to the letter and fought for a fair and just society. But its politics worked from within the insularity of the fragment, not from the realities of the multiracial state. A reading of the early issues of Indian newspapers in Fiji, Fiji Samachar (begun January 1927) and Shanti Dut (first issue May 1935), shows how powerfully

The girmit ideology 27

these papers reinforced the sense of ethnic solidarity and nostalgia for India. Collectively they created an imagined India that could be replicated in Fiji. So when the nation is referred to in the epigraph of all issues of Fiji Samachar, the reference to ‘desh’ is both India and Fiji: – . – – jis ko na nij gaurav nahım nij de´s ka abhiman hai – . – – saman hai vo nar nahım nar pas´u nira aur mrtak .

Who take pride neither in their own selves nor in their nation Men they’re not, but animals certainly, and indeed carrion. A theory of a fragment society is no more than an explanatory model, a framework against which we test social realities. Explanatory models, as theory, can never account for all moments, all nuances, all variations but what they do is provide us with a focal or reference point. The theory of the fragment briefly alluded to above finds a surprisingly cogent proof text in a rare ‘testimonio’ (‘a narrative . . . told in the first person by a narrator who is the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts’, as John Beverley defines it [2004: 81]) of indenture life in Fiji. This account is by one Totaram Sanadhya whose ship, Jumna, reached Fiji waters on 23 May 1893. By then some 12,000 indentured labourers (some with Fiji-born children) were already in Fiji. Sanadhya’s emigration pass shows that he was registered as a labourer on 2 February 1893, he came from a small village in the district of Agra, he had scars on his belly (?), his age is given as 16, and he was of the Thakur or Kshatriya caste. The last two entries are not correct. Sanadhya was in fact 18 years old and he was of the Brahmin caste. It is unusual for Indians to declare a caste different from their own because in India caste is a matter of public knowledge and public acknowledgement. But perhaps in this instance what is being alluded to is a prejudice among recruiting agents against Brahmins, who were deemed to be ineffectual agriculturalists and rigid in their social behaviour. At any rate anecdotal small talk among Fiji Indians indicates that the practice of Brahmins declaring themselves to be other than their own caste may not have been uncommon. The truth of caste antecedents perhaps lay not so much in the declarations or otherwise of being a Brahmin as in the manifest demonstration of a mastery of the textual tradition, something that Brahmins alone possessed. In terms of this test, Totaram Sanadhya was a Brahmin to his bones. Sanadhya was to spend the next 21 years in Fiji, first as bonded labourer, then as farmer and priest. He married the daughter of a fellow emigrant and returned to India with his wife and mother-in-law in 1914. Upon his return to India, Totaram Sanadhya narrated his account of life in Fiji to Banarsidass Chaturvedi, an Indian nationalist, who acted both as amanuensis and publisher. Parts of the account appeared in Indian journals between 1915 and 1922. The handwritten manuscript, however, was handed to Ken Gillion, the foundational figure of Fiji Indian historiography, around 1955 by Chaturvedi himself. In 1980, Gillion left the manuscript for editing and

28 The girmit ideology

publication with his PhD student Brij Lal, the current authority on the Fiji Indians. – My own working text is the published version of the manuscript titled Bhutlen – – kı Katha [A Tale of the Haunted Line] (1994). The narration, appropriately, begins with Sanadhya’s arrival as a bonded labourer in Nausori, the town of the first seventeen years of my life and also the first spatial crux after my signature in the acknowledgements section of this book. On the 28th of [May?] 1893 I reached the Nausori plantation barracks as one of 141 indentured labourers of the Fiji Colonial Sugar Refining Company. On the order of the Sector Manager, the English overseer [strictly ‘English-speaking’ as he was Australian] managed to allocate rooms to everyone else except me . . . he then tells me that I can only be accommodated in the haunted line . . . which I must now describe forthwith. Nausori coolie lines had 26 barracks. Each barrack had 24 rooms, 12 feet long and 8 feet wide (3.66m x 2.44m). Three people lived in each room but if you were a couple you had the room to your selves. A mother with children would also be given just one room. In this way some 1500 men and women lived in the lines. Some six chains (120 metres) away from the last barrack was the haunted line which had been inhabited at some time by indigenous Fijian workers of the CSR [Colonial Sugar Refining] Company. When after an illness eight of them died, the others simply ran – away. Since then this line has been called bhutlen (‘haunted line’) and no worker wants to live there. Nobody came close to it in the night. . . . The overseer said, ‘This will be your home for the next five years, should you leave it you won’t get another, and at any rate it is a crime to abscond’. . . . This line had the usual 24 rooms . . . it was surrounded by thick, long grass . . . infested with mosquitoes and crickets . . . to one side of the line, some distance away, was the sugar mill whose engines made a dreadful noise all day. Some three chains (60 metres) away was the [Rewa] river. . . . Later all new coolies were given their weekly ration of food: 3 kilograms of flour, 1 kilogram of dhal, 250 grams of ghee, 125 grams of salt, and so on. (26–8)

The account that follows, the clearest contemporary account of the early fragment as it comes into being, traces a number of key developments surrounding indenture that will ‘resonate in the early histories of Indian indentured communities elsewhere as well’ (Lal 2000: 239). There is much here, as markers of the materiality of a historical memory, that is of value to an understanding of the formation of Fiji Indian culture. I will, however, go through the information selectively, picking out those observations which provide material support for our reading of the fragment. I begin by selecting Sanadhya’s lament upon seeing Indians in bondage and his cry for help from the motherland. The lament is specially powerful whenever the lives of women on plantations are described. Here is one woman’s confessional:

The girmit ideology 29

Seven years after our wedding my husband died leaving behind myself, my three-year old son and my mother-in-law. I left my son with my mother-in-law and went to Dwarka for a propitious tattoo. Then with a few villagers I went to the city of Mathura and got lost in the crowd. And then as fate would have it, here I am . . . I feel like dying. (35)

Once sick and hungry in this tenebrous and uninviting land, Sanadhya attempts to hang himself but is saved, fortuitously, by some Fijian villagers whom he had befriended. Sanadhya’s relationship with the Fijians is not unusual and is symptomatic of an early fragment society much more willing to engage with native peoples because of mutual need. The inter-personal as a feature of everyday life is almost totally empty of racism: Sanadhya and the Fijians eat each other’s food (although it seems that Sanadhya is a vegetarian and a teetotaller) and learn each other’s language. Among themselves the indenture Indian fragment created social capital from a limited number of books and artefacts and through a willed harnessing of a collective memory. We get a sense of this cultural capital when we exam– – – – – ine the books that people shared: the Tulsıdasa Ramayana, . the Sukh Sagar, the – – – – – – – – . – Satyanarayan. Katha, the Surya Purana, . Indrajal, Alha Kamd. and Indar Sabha. A – few other sundry titles complete the catalogue. The Qur’an is not mentioned, but it is likely that an Urdu translation (in the Persian Nastaliq or Sanskrit – – Devanagr ı script) was also available. The Christian Bible in Hindi (Dharma´s– a tra) is not mentioned, either. In one case a book is lent out at the rate of two rupees per day. We may pause to look at the likely impact of two of these – – – – – – – – – texts: the Tulsıdasa Ramayana . and Indar Sabha. The Tulsıdasa Ramayana, . of course, had everything in it for the girmit experience: fourteen years banishment for the epic hero and God incarnate Rama, trials and tribulations in the black forest of Dandak, symbolic ravishing of his wife by the demon king Ravana, Rama’s victory over Ravana, and his return to the utopian metropolis of Ayodhya, what Ramabai Espinet’s character Mona Singh in The Swinging Bridge recalls as the ‘tale of exile and banishment . . . in broken chords and unexpected riffs telling the story of a race’ (2004: 113). Although the Tulsidasa text omitted a key episode – Rama’s subsequent rejection of Sita after returning to his kingdom – this part of the narrative was generally known and is a crucial structure for our understanding of the rejection of Mother India (Sitaincarnate) when the diaspora actually returns to the motherland. Apart from – the key structure of banishment and the presence of the demonic rak.sasas (the derogatory word for native Fijians, but also the word used to qualify indenture: – – – – – – raksas . ı-kul ı(coolie)-pratha, ‘the demonic practice of indenture’), the Tulsıdasa – – Ramayana . was written in plain demotic Hindi (in the Avadhi dialect) and was profusely sprinkled with homilies for every occasion: marriage, death, sorrow, – even agriculture and storm. Indar Sabha held a different fascination. It was the popular text without equal, and very much a mid-nineteenth-century work. It

30 The girmit ideology

was the equivalent of Oliver Twist for post-1840 British migrants to settler colonies. Composed by Agha Hasan Amanat (Amanat Ali 1816–59), during the final years of the independent state of Avadh under the poet-nawab Wajid Ali Shah, this drama centred on King Indar captured the popular imagination as none other. It was quickly transliterated from its original Urdu into Hindi and a number of other Indian languages. Kathryn Hansen, from whose essay I have – drawn the foregoing, refers to Indar Sabha as ‘a landmark in the canons of literary history and a foundational moment in the evolution of the popular culture – in South Asia’ (Hansen 2001: 79). In the style of the Indo-Persian mathnav ıs (romances) the story combines Hindu and Muslim motifs of heaven and fairies, gives space to the Hindu Lord of Death as well as to the earthly prince, the nawab, who is infatuated by desire and suffers from viraha or love-longing. For the Indian fragment in Fiji four features stand out: first, the idea of separation of lovers and their reunion; second, the mingling of many narrative traditions; third, the special synthesis of Muslim and Hindu forms; and finally a language – that resonated with the evolving cadences of Fiji Hindi, itself, like Indar Sabha, a mixture of Urdu, Braj, Avadhi, Bhojpuri and Khari Boli Hindi. Although perhaps not as a consequence of the prevalence of this text in the Fiji Indian fragment, references to Raja Indar as a kind of heavenly superstar (responsible for rain, thunder, and perhaps even crops) were not uncommon. When Indian – cinema came to Fiji, films based on the Indar Sabha themes were always extremely popular: Indar Sabha (1932); Jalpari (1952); Husn ka Chor (1953); Roop Kumari (1956). In the Shanti Dut of 21 March 1936 another film with Indar Sabha associations, Shrin Farhad (1931), is advertised as a film that played to full houses. Some of Sanadhya’s references to the persistence of oral tradition are – – echoed in a rain song (a caumasa) in which this genre is harnessed towards a diasporic semantics so that the song works on a dual temporality and semantic content, at once about plantation and pre-plantation life; at once about lovelonging and national-yearning.1 Colloquially referred to as ‘bidesiyas’ in Fiji, – – this caumasa variant utilizes a key theme of the genre (viraha, or love-in-separation) to carry the girmitiya self back spectrally, a suturing made possible, as Sudesh Mishra remarks in his astute reading, ‘by the actual severance from the desired temporality’ (2002b: 139). –

–

–

–

–

ghir ghir badra, savanva kı hai rama . – – – – kaunı nagariya mem cahı re bidesiya – – – – a pe bhuke roye gaiya behal more kothov . . – . – – – amkhiyom se asuva bahaye re bidesiya . – – – amuva ke daliy . . a mem kuhuke koyaliya – – – – manava mem agiya lagaye re bidesiya – hari hari patiya pe likh likh hari hari . – – – – kavanı nagariya mem cahı re bidesiya The monsoon clouds are gathered, O Rama, But in which place dwells the stranger?

The girmit ideology 31

My cattle are tethered and weep from hunger, Tears abound in the eyes of the stranger. On a mango’s branch the koel cries kuhuke, He sets my heart on fire, the stranger. Signing green leaves with the Lord’s signature, In what place abides the stranger? (Sudesh Mishra 2002b: 139–40) In due course Sanadhya, who was literate and a Brahmin, masters the body of religious and folk texts common to these indentured labourers and becomes a priest and a farmer. Compared to the other labourers, he does well out of these two professions. But religion does not get fixed or codified in this early phase; instead sectarian worship based on the earlier itinerant Indian bhakti (devotional) tradition of saint-singers such as Kabir, Nanak, Dadu, Jagjivandas and Ramanand begins to take hold.2 This heterogeneous mode of religious behaviour (largely though not always all-embracing and unmarked by doctrinal exclusiveness) created a form of worship linked to collective chanting, a – – – feature which explains the continued appeal of ‘Ramayan. man. dal . ıs’ (Ramayan groups) in the girmit diaspora. Sanadhya deals with a number of these sects quite extensively, explaining their localities, the number of devotees in each, the amounts of money raised by individual groups, as well as the predictable divisions among the believers. Some of the leaders of these panths or sects in Fiji, such as Pingaldas, Sitavdas, Ramnath, have since entered girmit folklore. Gradually, as Sanadhya documents, a number of social characteristics begin to emerge that part company with the social behaviour of a similar group back in India. Indians on plantations drink alcohol, they eat meat, and show much less of the self-piety that marks Sanadhya himself. Once Sanadhya accosts a decadent Indian guru and asks him why he eats meat, drinks alcohol, and generally behaves ‘like an animal’. This is the guru’s reply: Yes it was because we were deemed animals in the first place that the recruiters sold us into indenture. We learned animal ways right from the start. We lost all self-respect and coming to Fiji made us even more like animals. At least animals work according to certain fixed ways, certain principles, but we have neither social norms nor any one to tell us what these should be. So here we are, children of the great wandering sages of India now recast as the foremost gentleman animal, ‘Mr Coolie Fiji’. (1994: 76) This is a devastating speech, prescient and despairing and directed, suggestively, at Sanadhya himself, who, quite characteristically, misses the jibe. Even in its excessive self-deprecating style the speech alludes to the kinds of creative social and religious accommodation that was possible only in the fragment of which Sanadhya is at times more of an observer than a participant and actor. Key rituals such as those relating to birth and marriage were modified; there

32 The girmit ideology –

was a peculiarly Fiji Indian marriage practice of andhadhandha where both Hindu and Muslim chants were recited and holy offerings eaten; religious festivities like Ramlila and Tajia were celebrated by all. Moneys were freely given for the construction of temples and mosques alike: Hindus contributed 75 per cent of the money for the construction of a mosque in Nausori. Christianity was embraced by some but often without the loss of prior cultural and religious practices. One of the key folk festivals, Holi, lost its erstwhile decorum and was celebrated rather ‘shamelessly’, while Christmas, as an extraordinary instance of cultural accommodation arising out of colonial ‘gazetted’ holidays, became the most important day of the year (83). In the social sphere, the reformist Arya Samajis began to establish schools. As an educated and articulate man, Totaram Sanadhya got to know the progressive Methodist missionary, the Rev. J. W. Burton, with whom he debated Hindu theology. In spite of his slightly detached and puritanical stance, Sanadhya did, to some extent, become part of Fiji; he even married the daughter (Ganga Devi) of a friend. Ironically, though, it was marriage that triggered in him a desire to return home to India. Between the section dealing with his marriage and his return, there are a number of pages specifically devoted to Sanadhya’s understanding of the Fijian way of life. It has been remarked often enough that no Fiji Indian has written about native Fijians in any serious manner. Fiji Indian sociologists, historians, literary critics and writers, to a person, have not felt that Fijians were a legitimate object of scholarship. There are many reasons for this, and a defence of this neglect may be readily mounted, but even where Fiji Indians have discussed their own history it has rarely, if ever, been in the context of a Fijian rendition of either history or social practice. In devoting the pages that separate Fiji from his return to India to the indigenous Fijians (some twenty pages in all), Sanadhya makes a strong symbolic statement about the centrality of the Fijian in the girmit imaginary. In many ways these pages constitute a rare ethnographic survey of Fijian subjectivity from the point of view of the Indian outsider. The account remains, to the best of my knowledge, unsurpassed as an open, uninhibited and frank description of native peoples. It also shows the extent to which Sanadhya (and, one presumes, other Indians, too) learned the Fijian language, examples of which are given in his account. The account begins with the usual blinkered reading of a different culture, but the honesty is clear from the start as Sanadhya does not hold back his criticism of the race: prone to excitement and anger, but also indolent and eager to borrow. But immediately after this comes praise for their communal solidarity, treatment of women and the aged, and especially of widows (who are given pride of place in village gatherings and are encouraged to remarry) – the latter of special concern to Sanadhya given the large numbers of widows who signed up for indenture. He comments on the complex social organization of Fijian village life, the prevalence of law and order and justice in it, and the role of village panchayats in the distribution of the fruits of labour. Indeed, the role of the village chief (selfless in his duty and without personal wealth

The girmit ideology 33

or property) is seen as a model to be used by village leaders back at home. The Fijians treated Indians as their own brothers and sisters and compared to white men often remarked about the similarity in the colour of their skin. They invited each other to weddings, and it was not uncommon to see Fijians participating in Indian festivals such as Ramlila and Tajia. Yet even then the idea of the foreigner, the vulagi, persisted; but this was as much because the indentured labourers themselves continued to see their stay in Fiji, even beyond their years of bondage, as temporary. The idea of India as home persisted throughout. The section on Fiji ends with Sanadhya’s reference to his gradual mastery of the Fijian language, his fondness for which is captured in the samples cited and translated. And then, somewhat abruptly, after 21 years in Fiji, even as his testimonio demonstrates that ‘the diasporic body can only survive, and indeed must survive, by imagining, constructing, and ultimately becoming local’ (Trnka 1999: 50), Totaram Sanadhya departs for India. Sanadhya’s sojourn had been an interregnum of sorts, a period of banishment from which he returns reasonably well to do, though not particularly rich. He had kept in touch with his family back home, he sent them money, and his return was anticipated. Yet its suddenness strikes the reader because the narrative until then, especially with Sanadhya’s gradual engagement with the Fijian language, had suggested very strongly a sense of belonging to Fiji, a sense of the journey being final. But Sanadhya was not alone in returning to India. It is often overlooked that a third of all indentured labourers returned to India at some stage between 1885 and 1957. Many were defined as ‘rejects and incapables’ (Gillion 1962: 190), a number returned because of the free passage that was part of their contract, and a considerable number also paid their own way back. Much later in life many indentured labourers, many by now old and infirm, returned ‘home’ to die; but, during the period of indenture, for the ‘capables’ return was a matter of choice. Narratives of return, like those of arrival, are few; and once again Sanadhya’s text is invaluable. I want to trace this instance of a ‘history’ of return as a way of placing into relief the ‘dreams of return’ against the reality of encountering a motherland that had come to be an anchoring or homing point of the girmit ideology. Somewhere, Frank Kermode once remarked, ‘the dreams of apocalypse, if they usurp waking thought, are the worst dreams’ (Hamburger 1972: 97). Apocalypse as fulfilment, revelation as return, haunted the girmitiyas, and Sanadhya’s return was closely linked to this haunting memory. When he returns it seems nightmare (which usurps waking thought on the plantations) is overtaken by the serenity of dream, and he notes that the moment of return was marked by the condition of amnesia as if he and his wife had never been to Fiji. But soon a different picture emerges. This picture may be interpreted on two levels: as Sanadhya’s personal autobiography and as a collective biography of the returnees generally. At the level of the personal, Sanadhya, who returns as a relatively well-to-do person, finds that indenture money gives him some prestige and power. But 21 years in a fragment culture marked by the gradual

34 The girmit ideology

collapse of caste and hierarchy and the creation of a relatively homogeneous form of social organization (including language and food) meant that he was constantly asked to declare that he had remained true to his caste, that his Brahminhood had remained inviolate, that his marriage had been conducted within the strictures of caste and religion. So there is a lengthy account of a panchayat called to look into the propriety of his plantation marriage, the morality – – – of crossing the seas, the kalapanı, and of eating with people of other caste on board a ship.3 His wife’s cooking habits are scrutinized by other women to see if she knew all the right rituals involved in preparing a meal. Although Sanadhya tends to defend himself against all these – even declaring that his Brahminhood was never polluted (which is patently false) – there is enough agitation in his prose to indicate that he missed the ‘peace’ of indenture life, its sense of egalitarianism and brotherhood. He seems to miss the special cadences of Fiji Hindi and Fijian; he seems to miss debates with co-religionists; he seems to miss generally the vibrancy of a fragment culture. In the village demands on his money by family and friends continue, his house is burgled, and he is constantly asked to explain his indenture past. Finally he leaves his village and flees to the town of Ferozabad. Sanadhya returned to India; he survived; his world remained more or less intact, and he spent much time talking about indenture, its evils and why it should be abolished. Parts of his autobiography are published, in 1919 and 1922, but by then indenture itself had come to an end. The collective biography of the returnees, however, indicates a rather different encounter with homeland as a phenomenal reality. About this we need to say a word or two. Some, like Sanadhya himself, are re-absorbed in their erstwhile communities; many more, however, lose all their savings and become derelict. They hang around Calcutta docks, weak and infirm, in the hope of getting back to Fiji. The return rarely ever happened because a life of complete destitution back in India makes them less likely to pass the health test necessary for would-be labourers. Although Sanadhya recasts their lives as a moral fable, emphasizing the importance of returning rich and ensuring that any marriages undertaken during indenture should be properly conducted, the message is clear: the reality of return did not match the dreams of the homeland (Birbalsingh 1997: 68–9). When they returned, life was bad enough for many men; for women it was primarily a life of prostitution and poverty. Cases abound of married women with children left on the docks of Calcutta by their husbands who either were already married before they left for Fiji and now couldn’t possibly take their new wives back to their villages or had married out of caste and could never become part of their village any more. These women repeated their own prior lives as widows or rejected wives who had sought escape through indenture. Those born in Fiji and married to new arrivals replicated the horrid lives of their mothers. One women tells Sanadhya: ‘My husband brought me back from Fiji; he has now gone back to Fiji with the wife he had left behind’ (Sanadhya 1994: 144). These women (and men), writes Sanadhya more generally, have become a ‘new, unwanted caste in India’ (152).

The girmit ideology 35

In a sense it is the collective biography of the returnees that forms the basis of the many lectures that Sanadhya gives to reformist groups in India. One of these lectures – delivered between 1914 and 1919 – traces the history – of indenture (coolie-pratha, as he calls it) and forms the concluding section of the book. In his account, the story of indenture begins with the work of recruiters who never explain the full conditions of indenture; nor the distances to be travelled. Labourers were ‘loaded’ in ships like animals; mocked and caned by the officers and given ‘dog biscuits’ to eat. Upon arrival the coolies were randomly sent to various estates. Removed from the new bonds of friendship created in the ships, a few committed suicide. Workers were paid a shilling (10 cents) per ‘task’. But since these tasks varied in difficulty (the terrain, weather, health and so on affected work) they took days to complete. Consequently it was uncommon for a labourer to earn more than 9 rupees (US $1.80) per month. The purchasing power of the rupee in Fiji was low, and few were able to save. The Colonial Sugar Refining (CSR) Company itself saw them simply as ‘implements of work’, subhuman and without dignity. The rape of women by young officers from Australia and New Zealand was not uncommon. It was not unusual to hear of the murder of these women by their husbands, although they themselves were not at fault. Sanadhya speaks about the importance of an Indian commission of inquiry into the evils of indenture, but by then the Indian government was already bent on abolishing the system as the last ship arrived in Fiji on 11 November 1916. Indenture formally came to an end in 1920. Sanadhya’s document is unique and invaluable, but he was no poet; his language is laboured, and his emphasis, like that found in some Fiji Indian writers, far too centred on the self, as if writing was an engagement with the self and not an escape from it. We turn to a prose-poem on indenture from Fiji’s finest poet, Sudesh Mishra, for experience transformed into art. my destiny was an arkathi with a tongue sweeter than sucrose, who told me a story as steep as the himalayas, and his images had the tang of lassi and his metaphors had the glint of rupees, so that two days later i was on pericles, hauling anchor in the calcutta of my diaspora, and india slipped through my fingers like silk, like silk it slipped through my fingers of three thousand seven hundred and forty eight girmityas, and many things were lost during that nautical passage, family, caste and religion, yet many things were also found, chamars found brahmins, muslims found hindus, biharis found marathis, so that at the end of the voyage we were a nation of jahajibhais . . . yet this newfound myth fell apart the moment we docked in nukulau, because the sahibs hacked our bonds with the sabre of their commands and took us away in dribs and drabs, rahim to navua, shakuntala to labasa, mahabir to nandi, and my lot was a stony acreage of hell in naitasiri, where I served the indenture of my perdition . . . (Sudesh Mishra 2002a: 73)

36 The girmit ideology

Soon after the end of indenture, much of the revolutionary impetus of the fragment (as seen in Sanadhya’s narrative for instance) was gone. The Fiji colonial administration displaced the CSR Company as the key arbiter of Indian lives; events in the motherland transformed the Fiji Indian into a political subject; movements back and forth between Fiji and India meant that religious and cultural differences (between Hindus and Muslims, between Northerners and Southerners, between Sanatanis and Arya Samajis for instance) became a feature of the Indian diaspora. With peasant innocence the fragment saw political solutions in the abstract without recognizing that Fiji was not terra nullius, an empty space upon which one’s future hopes could be etched with ease. Unknown to it the girmit ideology faced a contrary definition of the nation-state, a definition that began with the colonial government’s desire to preserve a primordial Fijian identity through absolute ownership of the land (and hence, later, of the nation). Initially, of course, the Pax Britannica, the remarkable colonial interregnum, ‘the miraculous peace of the colonial time’ (Naipaul 1979: 41), created just the right kind of stability for a post-indenture Indian community to flourish. The colonial order established the rule of law and the sanctity of property, as well as the principle of the right to self-rule. The democratic ideal, as the evidence so powerfully establishes, has to be read off against the social-life values of regeneration, utopianism and millenarian fulfilment embedded in the girmit ideology. In other words, the possibility of a democratic nation state would, if achieved, retrospectively make social sense. If Fiji Indians excelled in law, in politics, in education, it was because these were material means through which a historical memory could be simultaneously laid to rest and transcended, even erased. As if this was art, Fiji Indians fought wonderful political fights like a version of the Ramlila, and became immensely litigious. In A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Naipaul looks at the mystique of law with reference to Biswas’s failure to insuranburn (‘insure and then burn’) his shop. In Cheddi Jagan’s The West on Trial (1980), and in Seewoosagur Ramgoolam’s Our Struggle (1982), both of which also begin with indenture in British Guinea (Guyana) and Mauritius respectively, the quest for democratic ideals is firmly stated throughout. In all the plantation-Indian diasporas (the old diaspora of classic capital) a ‘race’ dragged into modernity from parts of India unaffected by the great nineteenth-century reform movements saw a just nation state as the ‘sign’ of transcendence over an ideology. The difficulty with what may be called democratic absoluteness or a belief in the self-evident link between democracy and a just society (on which the nation-state also hinges) is that liberal democratic principles may not be compatible with the principles of diversity and their recognition. In other words, it may be argued that there is nothing intrinsically contradictory between support of democratic ideals and variable and even racially discriminatory support of different cultures within a democratic polity. The ‘hidden and limiting presuppositions of our [liberal democratic] theories’, suggests Joseph H. Carens (2000: 5), distort the kinds of nativist defence of the two Fiji coups of 1987 and 2000: a native people should have an absolute right to the political control of

The girmit ideology 37

their country. Although Fiji had been ‘postcolonial’ since 1970 when it gained independence from Britain, the coups signalled, for the native Fijian, their moments of anti-colonial struggle because these coups re-defined what indigenous people meant by rights and the social democratic notion of the common good, both matters of faith for the Indian diaspora. Curiously enough, the moment of postcolonial affirmation could only happen with demonstrable claims of Fijian supremacy over an immigrant, albeit thoroughly Fiji-born, population. The case of Fiji thus poses some interesting contextual questions to a number of theories of difference. The first, as I have hinted, is postcolonial theory itself because the ‘native’ agitation takes its most profound revolutionary form not against an imperial power, but against a primarily subaltern class which had historically fought against injustice, first as indentured labourers and then as citizens of the state of Fiji. The second theory is the impartiality of democratic institutions. Post-May 1987 Fiji has made it quite clear that democratic institutions in the country will be neither impartial nor even-handed since the imperative of native rights will govern policy – a belief which led to the following critical qualification from the intellectually inclined vice-president of Fiji, Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi: ‘To simply assert that once fundamental rights were all that needed to be asserted, left indigenous people vulnerable and unprotected’ (Fiji Times 24 July 2005). The third theory (among many others) is the theory of justice: Can there be a just society if the political culture of a nation must assume a two-tiered value of citizenship? The distinction between the ‘morally required’ (equal citizenship to Indo-Fijians) and the ‘morally permissible’ (special rights in favour of Fijian cultural preservation) becomes important.4 As late as 23 July 2005, the Fijian prime minister, Laisenia Qarase, continued to press this line of reasoning. He is reported as saying ‘most Fijians believed the events of 2000 were for indigenous rights and answering a call from the vanua [clan or region]. For Indians he said the coup of 2000 was simply a terrorist and lawbreaking act’ (Fiji Times). To change this political theatre of the absurd, what was necessary was the mobilization of the Indian as the real, landless underclass (which of course it was difficult to establish because of a slippage by which the visible success of Indian commerce was seen as the success of the Indian community as a whole). Failing that, what it required was individual sacrifice, the gift of death to their people by Indian politicians. Which raises the following questions: (a) When do we die for a political party? (b) When do we die for a nation? (c) When do we die for a cause? Diasporas, of course, refuse to die. And herein lies a question which may also be posed as a dilemma: Can diasporas be anything else but travellers, happy in their travel/travail; the nation-state simply an anchoring point for material advancement, and the homeland always something other than the land of our birth? If transience is our condition, if diasporas can reconstitute themselves wherever they are – in Suva or Sacramento, in Trinidad or Toronto, Mauritius or Melbourne – can diasporas die for a cause?5 To grasp hold of a nation one has to lay claim to it, establish moments of heroism that are equally part of the nation’s history. The colonizer did this

38 The girmit ideology

through brute force, through territorialization, through phallic power along with the musket – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the USA are testimonials to that fact. The Fijians sought ‘blood credentials’ through participation in wars. The immensely influential Fijian high chief Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, when recruiting soldiers for the Second World War, declared: ‘Fijians will never be recognized unless our blood is shed first’ (Kelly and Kaplan 2001: 77). Further, as in the case of Fiji, there are always moments of heroic sacrifice at the behest of the nation (independent or not) that create the concept of a right to belong. In a sense, ‘blood sacrifice’, in the primordial sense of the phrase, is a necessary component of the right to claim the nation as one’s own. In its moment of postcolonial triumph, the nationalist Fijian government decided to build a war memorial close to Fiji’s Parliament Buildings to commemorate the achievements of Fiji’s only Victoria Cross winner, Corporal Sefanaia Sukanivalu, who was given the award in 1944 and whose remains are in Rabaul, in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea (Fiji Times 28 August 2005).6 The moment and the location of the memorial are crucial signifiers of the new definition of the idea of the ownership of the land being advanced in Fiji in the wake of its coup-ridden history of the past twenty years. Does it follow that in matters of ‘blood sacrifice’ only those who have shaped a nation’s (prior) history through a war effort (the sacrifice in Gallipoli by Australians and New Zealanders, for instance) may be called upon to do so again? And, if this is so, is there not a definition of the (patriotic) citizen that coalesces with the group through whom the nation is represented? Without that legacy of a prior sacrifice the definition of the citizen in a multicultural polity (in real terms) will always be asymmetrical. There are two important messages here. The first is the message of an inherently unequal definition of citizenship based on the grounds of prior sacrifice (which may be extended to include the sacrifice to ‘tame’ the land, a claim internalized by white settlers in settler dominions from the US to Australia, but from which Fiji Indians have been excluded). The second is the need to trace actual social contacts in any theorizing of the nation. In other words, the matter of jurisdictional rights requires close examination of ways in which groups have interacted historically on a case-by-case basis. The diaspora, more passive, created economies, perhaps even saved native peoples, races from extinction, but never affected the imaginary of the peoples with whom they lived. From the Fijian perspective, in Fiji, therefore, the Indian diaspora failed to get ‘recognition’ in Charles Taylor’s sense of the word. In our reprise of key events in the recent history of Fiji we have drawn attention to the failure of the ‘political’ solution to the girmit ideology, for it seems that the democratic ideal, linked to a postcolonial liberationist struggle, was one way in which indenture and its traumatic memory could be laid to rest. Although the Indian diaspora has achieved a degree of political triumph, in Mauritius most assuredly, in Guyana and Trinidad more ambiguously, the built-in millenarianism of the girmit ethos remains incomplete. In spite of their long presence in the old plantation diaspora, they are not deemed to be

The girmit ideology 39

self-evidently the face of the nation. These contradictions are best-discussed through the literature of the Indian diaspora.

The ideology of the aesthetic I want to begin this section with a reference to four writers whose writings collectively cover some 30 years of Fijian postcolonial history. They are: Satendra Nandan, Mohit Prasad, Raymond Pillai and Sudesh Mishra. A fifth, and arguably the most important for the thesis I advance, is Subramani, to whose – – a Puran I shall return at the end of this book. We have read the comic-epic Dauk . girmit ideology as a structure (of feeling) that grew out of the experience of the plantation diaspora. One of its key constituents was a sense of betrayal, a sense that the promises of fulfilment (by recruiters who entered the girmit imaginary as ‘duplicitous arkhatis’ against innocent girmitiyas) were never met. It led to a fossilized sense of reverse millenarianism as though the promises had already been met in the homeland or would have been met had we never left. The semantic restructuring of the girmit experience with homeland idioms hence reinforces the idea of a fossilized fragment seeking renewal through a continued re-fossilization of the self. The structure is used with similar nostalgic referent by the Fiji Indian poet Satendra Nandan, who writes: youth I lost here, and grace i gave to this island place. what more than a man’s age can one give to history’s outrage? . . . i have lived this exile more gloriously than rama and built kingdoms, you may find, nobler than ayodhya, in my ancient eternal mind! (1985: 52–3) These are the words of a ghost who speaks to the poet, a kind of spectral Leechgatherer whose toils are now a matter of retrospect. He is the original girmitiya who speaks on behalf of those who participated in the first journey. He writes history through the perennial narrative of the banishment of Rama, seeing his exile in Fiji in terms of the epic hero’s own quest to recover his wife Sita and return to princely Ayodhya. But the precursor text is not available in all its totality largely because the return has to be censored. For wasn’t it so that upon his return Rama has to reject Sita, Mother India herself? Only one half of the epic, the story of banishment, is to be invoked, and it is the living in exile (‘more gloriously than rama’) that is the link to the epic text. This poem is the centrepiece of much of Nandan’s poetry and rightly so because it locates a poetic vision in an ‘authentic history [that] cannot be written / with words from living mouths’ (61). So if authentic history is not lived history, the history of actual

40 The girmit ideology

labour, that is, girmit as labour, then it has to be located in girmit as ideology, in a belief system that is sustained through a prior memory in which history is constructed in an ‘ancient, eternal mind’. Upon listening to the tale of the Leech-gatherer, Wordsworth, whose mind had hitherto been filled with ideas of death (of the promising poet Chatterton) and madness (of all poets), finds that the apocalyptic tendencies of the romantic imagination may be arrested when one is reminded of selfless labour. For Nandan, the conclusion is far less redemptive: first an apostrophic forgiveness from his forebears, then a request to his children not to forget the experience of the passage itself: o my father’s fathers what forgiveness is there for me? o my children’s children listen to the voices from syria drowning the silence of the sea! (54) The sentences turn inwards, and as we look back they anticipate V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel lecture: ‘We looked inwards; we lived out our days; the world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about nothing’. One needs to hold on to the experience of indenture, as material fact, in ways perhaps more ‘concretely’ than Nandan, or else, as Sartre once observed, ‘[literature] wilts if it is reduced to innocence, to song’ (Sartre 1974: 13–14). Against this we note that Sudesh Mishra makes a more assertive intervention in a poem in his Tandava collection: Girmitya, my maker Your journey Has broken my heart. (1992: 13) But it is in the vision of the young poet Mohit Prasad, in a poem in a series about mangoes, that we enter into the experience of the journey as an understated fabliau. The sea is calm, the sails no longer fluttering. An indentured labourer sees a woman, her eyes are seductive, her gaze tempting, and desire erupts: ‘I know I will see you again/in a grove of mangoes’. The grove is yet to come, for the land is as yet unnamed, its flora and fauna alien. But desire makes up for the lack, and the journey bearable. Mohit Prasad’s poem does not seek ‘forgiveness’ as Nandan’s does possibly because he, Nandan, feels that the elegy he has written cannot capture the original pain. And unlike Sudesh Mishra the legacy of the journey has not broken the poet’s heart in twain. In Mohit Prasad’s poem the journey is envisioned as that of a traveller, the slave Bomma of Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. I caress an empty thought as I clean out a brass plate

The girmit ideology 41

of thin dhal and broken rice bits, I am carrying a mango seed to plant at the end of this voyage. (2001: 47) The woman’s gaze and the mango seed carry a narrative of creative possibilities as signs both of the renewal of life and the stamping on the landscape of a flora that is meaningful. The labourer’s proud secret (‘carrying a mango seed’) is captured by Mohit Prasad through the present continuous form of the simple present in the original Hindi. The use of the present continuous carries the future in the present and holds out a certain kind of promise. It is this promise and the degree to which indentured labourers transformed the landscape, ‘naturalized’ the alien, re-visioned the nation in terms of their own experience and believed that theirs, too, was one of the founding narratives of the nation, that underpin the trauma of loss that comes with subsequent political upheavals and denial of the diaspora’s legitimacy. In the texts that I discuss below, mangoes are no longer eaten with the same relish; they enter into a different, more cynical semantic, and offer a different, less elegiac, mode of textual mediation. Raymond Pillai’s Fiji Hindi play Adhuuraa Sapnaa [Shattered Dreams] was first produced at the Victoria University of Wellington in November 1993. Although the play is set in the Fiji of the mid-70s, its discourse is strategically keyed into a post-1987 coup Fijian history. There are two centres to the narrative here: the first is possession of land (and the idea of permanence via ownership of land/house is a crucial signifier of diasporic lives – a piece of earth that one can claim/reclaim as one’s home is an enduring motif); the second is betrayal. The idea of ‘betrayal’, simple and almost Christian in its symbolism, has two lines of flight: loss of trust between husband and wife; and failure of promise between the landowner and the landless. Yet, as one reads the original play in Fiji Hindi and in Raymond Pillai’s own English translation, one begins to detect other lines of divergence, other lines of flight, this time in the body of the languages themselves. In the Fiji Hindi original the Indian diaspora seems to have re-constituted or re-defined itself through a language that has many of the characteristics of an anti-language, a secret at times funny and disruptive language created by a community as a means of communication among themselves and as a means of defining their exclusiveness. Through this language life-worlds are created that allow living in this world possible through laughter. For the native informant of the language, the laughter erupts in unlikely places, sometimes even undercutting as a performative act the text’s more constative content. Here is a passage in the Fiji Hindi original and in English translation. At this point in the play Sambhu, the civil servant turned farmer, recalls his first encounter with English poetry (‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, / The cow jumped over the moon’). Sambhu: agar ii duniya me aise howe sake, tab to jaruur gaai sake muun ke uppar se kros maare, jaruur pussii sake vaailin par chun chhoRe.

42 The girmit ideology

Sambhu: If such things can happen in this world, then surely a cow can leap over the moon, surely a cat can play a tune on the violin. (Pillai 2001: 200/260) Both are framed as fulfilments of a condition: the ‘if such and such a thing is possible, then surely . . .’ argument not uncommon in simple logic. But, whereas the second simply gestures towards the likely fulfilment of certain ‘acts’ under certain circumstances, the original Fiji Hindi releases a laughter, a hilarity, a subversive social semiotic, that is embedded in the mode of expression itself. It arises through two means. The first is through a rewriting of standard Hindi (where the effect is the same as that in the English translation) in the demotic. The second is through heteroglossic mimicry of the English language. It is not just that ‘a cow can leap over the moon’, it is the way in which the language bears, within the demotic (which has already signalled an ‘incivility’ or disrespect towards formal Hindi), the phonetically cadenced English words ‘muun’ (moon), ‘cros’ (cross), ‘pussii’ (pussy-cat), ‘vaailin’ (violin) and ‘chun’ (tune). What the original carries is a forceful statement about self-representation in language and by extension a total ease with the culture that encompasses it. More significantly, the Fijian landlord Jona speaks in this language, too. Apart from representing a mode of accommodation that few diasporas anywhere have been able to achieve, the language in fact has become part of what may be called a Fiji English. In a sense the possibilities of the carnival, of laughter embedded in the language itself, have made Fiji Indian diasporic lives liveable, certainly in postcolonial Fiji. But comedy even when carried in language does not redeem; the bitter irony of life rendered as laughter surfaces as Pillai’s play shows little hope for the future or an unqualified belief in the vitality of life. Against the self-evident force of the language, the narrative once again despairs and presages Sambhu’s act of suicide. Suicide, a legacy of the original girmit when, too, the incidence of suicide was very high, has now become a sign of Indian despair in contemporary Fiji. In the years since the May 2000 coup some 200 Fiji Indians have committed suicide, making their suicide rate one of the highest per head of any community in the world. It is, then, curious that in spite of the self-evident ease with which the social operates – the social here rendered as living in a world of one’s own making where witchdoctors or ojhaas act as diviners of the future – the word girmit turns up whenever the question of legitimacy arises. And here one is conscious of legitimacy as indicating belonging to the land. In Fiji, where 83 per cent of the land is Fijian-owned, land tenure has had a very special meaning for the Fiji Indian; the fear of land being ‘reserved’ (that is, reverting to the original landowners for their own use) has been a difficult political issue in the country, and much unease between the two dominant races in the country has grown out of it. For the farming community in Fiji (and for Fiji Indians generally), the word ‘reserve’ has tragic connotations as it implies a kind of finality, an end to years of labour to till the land and make it productive. And it is here that ‘reserve’ once again enters into the emotional field of girmit because central to girmit is the idea of labour as being in itself

The girmit ideology 43

redemptive. When one follows the logic of the narrative, Sambhu’s act of suicide, although dramatically connected to the discovery of his young wife’s infidelity, has a much longer cause, and that cause is Jona, the Fijian landlord who declares that his land would be reserved. Sambhu had left his job as a government clerk to fulfil the girmit dream, the dream of the self-sufficient farmer. But that does not happen, although he sees himself as being the Fijian’s equal and is not unwilling to claim his superiority over him. In an illuminating passage Sambhu refers to girmit as the ever-present experience, as a term so intrinsically connected to a particular kind of labour through which the Fiji Indian constantly renews his right to the land. The use of girmit ‘presences’ the Fiji Indian, it defines his being as someone rather special; it is an experience from which other Fiji Indians (the merchant class, Bombaiyas as they are derogatively called, or other more recent free migrants from India) would be forever excluded. So Sambhu declares: Well we should have done our girmit, served as indentured labourers. Then we too could have said to the Fijians, ‘Fiji is our country. It’s we who made Fiji.’ (Pillai 2001: 260) And again: Tambi: But we did girmit here. The Bombaiya crowd didn’t. Sambhu: Ah, now you’ve come to the point! The Bombaiyas didn’t serve girmit. And we didn’t do it either. True our elders did so, that’s why they had the right to stay on in Fiji. But what right have we got? Until we pour out our sweat into this land, we can never claim we have any rights here. (Pillai 2001: 298) In terms of this declaration, the move from government clerk to farmer repeats the girmit experience as Sambhu wishes to reclaim the country through an act of labour, a labour that would repeat an earlier moment, the original moment of arrival. Yet this replication, given the political reality of Fiji (in spite of the mid-70s historical setting of the play), can repeat the earlier tragedy only as a suicidal act, an act that transforms tragedy into farce. In this respect the text allegorically demonstrates the necessity as well as the impossibility of replicating the foundational act of girmit, because the replicated act always remains incomplete, an adhuuraa (literally ‘incomplete, unfinished’) sapnaa (‘dream’). Sambhu’s metonymical connection between labour and girmit is lost on both Minla, his wife, and Mausi, the elderly neighbour. For Minla girmit as slavery is different from labour as mehnat (work). For Mausi girmit is in the past, a historical moment to be archived, not a traumatic moment or even an ideology triggered by a later crisis (the Fijian claims to native rights in the context of the history of the play’s moment of production, not of its histoire). For Pillai the adhuuraa sapnaa extends the story of the incomplete

44 The girmit ideology

journey, the latter even more incomplete given the divergent paths of the two races in recent years even when in the national imaginary the Indians (as copious drinkers of yagona, as speakers of Fijian, as indeed part of the Fijian landscape) are so crucial to its being. In the Fiji Hindi version the point about difference is made more effectively by the Fijian Jona: kai viti kai India naii sako ek rastaa pakaro Fijians and Indians cannot walk the same road together. (Pillai 2001: 211/271) For Sambhu (and for Pillai, too, one thinks) the divergence, the following of two paths, also shows a failure to grasp the original meaning of girmit as labour and its transformation into an ideology of an absence that cannot be grasped, as a sublime moment of the failure to represent to consciousness a loss. Matters do not get any better if the Indian continues to be unwanted. Hindustani log ke sab ke maage gaaR me laat lage. lekin fir bhi nahii sudharegaa hamlog jahaa bhii jaay ke bastaa, ham log bawaal karte rahtaa, aur laat khaate rahtaa. daliddar kaam kare ke aadat hamlog ke khuun me hai. We Indians need a good kick in the arse! But even then we won’t learn. No matter where we settle, we go on creating trouble. The habits of the wretched are in our blood. (Pillai 2001: 255/315) ‘No matter where we settle’, says Sambhu – and (re)settling is a theme in this play throughout – ‘we go on creating trouble’. Canada is the escape route for the non-professional Indian middle class, thanks to the Canadian government’s generous immigration policies. But in the play’s reading, unless girmit is understood and the value of labour (which defined the Fiji Indian and created the conditions for a more egalitarian Indian world-order in Fiji) internalized, we would fail to fulfil the promise made during indenture. For the girmit ideology to end, girmit has to be internalized as labour, and life itself read in terms of that labour. This is very different from Satendra Nandan’s epic nostalgia and melancholic celebration of the past. Here the loss of the original meaning of girmit (not as bondage or indenture or travel or even as a defining [false] consciousness) holds the key to the loss of the claim to the land since labour is not renewed any more and the ‘Bombaiya fallah’s’ entrepreneurial culture becomes an Indian diasporic dream no longer linked to the girmit experience. Pillai completed this play elsewhere, in New Zealand, having drafted the first act as early as 1977. Sudesh Mishra, our next exemplary author but from whose works we have already quoted, reflected on the coup from within Fiji, and wrote Ferringhi (2001a). The title of this play is the Fiji Hindi word . – – firang ı (itself derived from the Hindi phirna, to walk, to wander), a word that connotes the charming otherness of the peripatetic traveller, not quite the for-

The girmit ideology 45 –

–

eigner nor the parde´sı (prade´sı, the romantic lover in absence and subject of the – bidesiya songs) nor indeed the Fijian vulagi which in the national song isa isa vulagi lasa dina is the departing subject of a fond farewell.7 So ‘ferringhi’ is part troubadour, part hawker, part flâneur, part the unsuspecting visitor who arrives at dinner time and part the distracted figure seen counting cars on the old Rewa Bridge. Where girmit connotes the harshness of indenture, ‘ferringhi’ imparts the infections of comedy, transforming girmit into carnival. The centrepiece of laughter in Fiji is the talanoa around the tanoa, the kava bowl. Talanoa/tanoa echo each other, dragging one into the other through euphonic and socially semiotic (not etymological) connections.8 Talanoa, or anecdotal discussion (discussion not centred on analysis of events but on recounting tales of the ‘once upon the time’ or ‘did you hear about the woman’ variety), may be seen as a discourse genre in its own right, with its own rules and regulations. The evenings following my own father’s death in 1989 (Mishra 1989) were marked by talanoa, aimless chatter (vaka-talanoa-taka) around the tanoa that introduced a strange, discordant counter-narrative (an unacted anecdotal narrative) into the solemnity of the religious recitation taking place elsewhere in the house. In Sudesh Mishra’s play anecdotal narratives are drawn upon to create form; the dramatic experience (enunciation and response) growing out of the anecdotes themselves. Anecdotes require a storyteller, a tusitala, the Samoan word used fondly for Robert Louis Stevenson that Mishra uses to give the storyteller a distinctively Pacific meaning. But, whereas anecdotes of the tusitalas were finally life-affirming, those of Ferringhi are dark narratives of the mind, narratives that can only become parables not so much of identity (as Shakespeare’s later romances were) but parables of trauma where history itself is rendered as trauma. The 1987 coup in Fiji made memory and recall all the more important because, as John O’Carroll has remarked, ‘memory [can defeat] amnesia’ (2001: 320). But because of this – memory’s triumph over amnesia – O’Carroll sees the fable in positive terms. The text, however, says something rather frightening and foreboding; the text implies the end of the anecdotal narrative as positive, redemptive, social enunciation; indeed, after the coup there can be no talanoa because storytelling itself is now a history of trauma, a dark comedy. John O’Carroll makes the important observation that this play is about storytelling itself; it is a ‘drama of narration’ (2001: 322). Although he explains what narration means to the key players in this drama, he only silently glosses what is obvious in his reading: that narration itself is story; in other words, narration (discourse) is histoire. When narration is only discours, histoire collapses into the folds of language; as presentational process it ceases to have a history different from the process itself. So, in Ferringhi, discours cannot be reconstituted, retrospectively, into an histoire, into the presented world of linear history; it is as if the signifiers no longer have their signifieds, as if the letter in a round-robin process simply returns to itself. The storyteller, as Walter Benjamin tells us after a German saying, is the man from afar who tells his tale (1973: 84). The power of the play – and O’Carroll does not exaggerate when

46 The girmit ideology

he calls it ‘extraordinary’ – resides in this slicing off of the histoire from the girmit experience, which now centres around the synchronic here-and-now temporality of the storyteller. Post-1987 Fiji saw the departure of some 30,000 Fiji Indians, many with not much more than their possessions packed in a single suitcase. Homes were locked, keys left with neighbours or with creditors. This departure was a repeat of an earlier one, many years before, of the traumatic, the originary, foundational departure from India. Sudesh Mishra’s play is written in the context of trauma as recall, not unlike Walter Benjamin’s reference in The Arcades Project to an awakening that went on in the life of the individual as in the life of generations (1999: 388). In Ferringhi five people palaver around the kava bowl. They are urban people – a Chinese, two Fijians, two Indians. Their banter is about events transformed into situations of laughter. So the first words in the play, ‘You bullshit’, already insinuates a completed anecdote prior to the first scene which is then repeated to confirm that what was said is not ‘bullshit’. The general bonhomie and recognition of the social contexts of the anecdote stipulate a community of speakers united through a common linguistic register of the ‘urban street slang of Suva’ (O’Carroll 2001: 322). That this register now also incorporates the Hindi demotic in Fiji, giving the latter a cross-cultural legitimacy, is evident in the single word ‘chalau’ uttered by Pumpkin. The ritual of kava drinking around the tanoa presupposes the use of Fijian words. Here the Fiji Hindi demotic ‘chalau’ (‘pass the cup’ or ‘pass around’) used by Pumpkin (a Fijian?) implies the incorporation of the Indian into the body of Fijian culture. Even after the coup the kava bowl remained the centre of the social. As a pan-Fijian ritual it was not seen as an alien mode of the inter-personal – after all, it was around the kava bowl that relations sat to mourn my father’s death. They, too, told anecdotes, as we see in Ferringhi’s opening scene or lila, as Mishra prefers – – – – to call all his scenes, since l ıla is both performance and life-as-play; l ıla is kri– – dati, the play of gods, linking it with maya, the world as illusion. In Fijian ‘lila’ is a relatively rare word used to refer to a long illness, especially of the consumptive variety. But something seems to have snapped, something is out of joint. The disruption in the anecdotal frame of the talanoa occurs with the arrival of Puglu, part Shiva, part satyr, part savage. Gradually the lives of the other people sitting around the kava bowl begin to emerge, initially as fragments for sure, but charged with meaning. Seru is an ex-soldier who has returned after his stint as part of the Fijian peacekeeping force in Lebanon. Part fundamentalist Christian, part nationalist (but afraid of storytelling), these references to Seru’s past introduce an uneasy element in the play as suddenly stories are not simply matters of anecdote but also of identity: who speaks, for whom and about what? The new element prepares the way for the entry of Ferringhi in the next scene (Lila Two). His opening words are at once the language of Dylan Thomas, – – of the lead characters in the Peter Brook version of the Mahabharata and of Tiresias who, too, had ‘foresuffered all’. His prose is extravagant, poetic, alien, introducing what can only be seen as a différance in the system of signification. He speaks poetry in his set-pieces, and urban slang in his conversation with the

The girmit ideology 47

other characters. Both, the poetic and the demotic, combine after memory, as nostalgia, as recall, is broken, the markets have been vandalized by rioters, and the fear of yet another likely departure recalled (chal urdh ja re panchi/ke ab ye desh huwa begana, ‘fly away yet again little bird for this land [desh] is once again alien’): When they leave, the maarkit change; no colours, no forms, jus subdued voices in a smoked-out world. Nothing to see, nothing to locate. Once a carnival, now a world the tint of fear and resignation. I go split after that. (Mishra 2001a: 345) Once the spell is broken, once carnival, the basis of laughter, is overtaken by history, the basis of realism, once Seru’s other voice, the voice of the nationalist, has been released (under the influence of Ferringhi whose stories ‘full of lasu’ [lies] ‘get him’), memory surfaces as traumatic anecdotes, the humour becomes darkish. It is then that one hears of the ‘second girmit’ (352) from the figure of the girmitiya who wants to tell his history/story (356), and through Ferringhi’s projection of voices from the past. And these references to a second girmit are located in a new time, the time after the first coup of May 1987, as if girmit time is now overtaken by coup time, and the latter will be the time of the new postcolonial subject, cagey and unheroic like the 3rd Man who lies behind the sofa for fear that a stray bullet may hit him. This third man will be the voice of the new history: Aray chutiya, if I die who’s going to write our story? (Mishra 2001a: 373) who then adds: Future? In the future I shall migrate to write a classic account of my trauma here. I already have a title: The Chundered Ghee, or How to Lose an Island and Gain a Continent. (Mishra 2001a: 374)9 In the hands of this ‘good Minister’, Sudesh Mishra suggests, the concept of ‘trauma’ itself is trivialized; it is instrumentalized so as to cash in on liberal sympathies elsewhere: ‘I shall migrate. . . .’ The ‘classic account’ written elsewhere is the kind of fatuous, insincere writing that is not about the trauma itself (as Sudesh Mishra and Raymond Pillai’s plays are) but is an extension of precisely the mercenary, self-centred trivializing of other people’s histories that diaspora writing always resists. So Mishra’s play Ferringhi also suggests abuse of storytelling especially when the teller’s ego becomes the centre of the stories told, and the self’s investment in trauma theory is a calculated ploy to substitute the man behind the sofa for those for whom memory itself has been lost: ‘The nation suffered amnesia for six weeks,’ says a voice. In John O’Carroll’s

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argument, Sudesh Mishra’s play tries to contain this amnesia by once again making memory the centre of experience, for without memory (or memorial reconstruction) even trauma cannot be recalled. My nani sold peanuts at Westend Theatre. She’d light vesi logs at four in the afternoon and roast unshelled nuts in a wok filled with black sand. I’m seven and I see the sweat beading her forehead and each bead perishing in the fire, one by one, and her hordhini flaring in the heat and I, seven, begin to tell, as they fall one after another, that suffering has a history and that every story is a quest beyond suffering. Yes, I know why she sat on her box outside the derelict theatre and heard men and women detonate nuts like grenades between their teeth, scattering shrapnel at her feet when the show began, lost in their own celluloid dreams, while she trudged home under a sky blotched with stars, day after day after day, till one night they found her sitting on the box and the show had ended and it had rained. (377–8) ‘It’s the only story,’ says Ferringhi and adds, ‘every story I tell is a variation of that story’ (378). The teller tells this story, strategically nuanced for each occasion; its significance varied with each new context, but the story remains the same. The story is about what Pillai’s Sambhu called the need for girmit labour, but here in the story of the peanut vendor the materiality of historical memory – connects with the metaphysical idea of self-less action, karmaphalatyaga, the idea of action without consequences: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action . . . / So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna/On the field of battle,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, recalling the great Hindu text (1963: 211). And this is what affects Seru, sometime truant, sometime voice of the coup master, who says ‘we borrowed from others without reflection’ and he must appease his own ‘forgotten (precolonial) gods’ (389). But we don’t know if the acts of atonement will have the same meaning in the new temporality, the ‘Bakwas Time’, the ‘timepass time’, the irreverent time (371) of the post-coup. The anecdotal narrative about the peanut vendor, the endless tales of Ferringhi, will have meaning only when history is recognized and when action overtakes meditation. Instead the new mother, Puglu, is named Maya, not the complex principle of illusion that coexists with Brahman and makes the world of Prakrit, of nature, possible, but rather Maya as the harlot, Maya as she is reconfigured in the degraded epic of – – the Ramlila based on the girmit text par excellence, the Ramayana . of Tulsidasa – – (c.1576–8), Maya who is connected with gold and treachery (kanak kaminı), the stuff of which beguiling dreams are made. This is no Maya that subtends dualist Samkhya philosophy; this is Maya as the figure that makes epic rememoration impossible. It is Maya as extensively glossed by the young Fiji Indian poet Mohit Prasad in a poem of that name: ‘Maya is architect . . . banshee . . . cockatrice . . . wailing . . . lust . . . talking’ (2001: 24–5). And this is where Sudesh Mishra’s powerful yet painful play connects with memory as trauma, memory as recall that transforms the labour of girmit into fetish, and loses its value as redemptive ideal.

The girmit ideology 49

Unlike Pillai, Mishra eschews realism, or at least is aware of the dangers of an uncritical mimeticism when it comes to identity politics: the spectator is taken in by the verisimilitude and loses a key element of artistic modality, its power to mediate reality. Looking back at Brecht, Soyinka, Kureishi and Salman Rushdie, Mishra brings together divergent temporalities, linguistic registers, high and low mimetic modes, to create national allegories of a disturbing kind. In these allegories the Fijian world is not one closed space; it is a space that is also a social product that inducts inner experience into physical space. And, as with Bataille, for whom, in Henri Lefèbvre’s words, ‘the entirety of space – mental, physical, social – is apprehended tragically’ (1995: 20), so, too, in Mishra’s play space in a hyperreal rendition of it, is structured to re-create an ‘in-betweenness’ around an alternative scansion of temporality. In The International Dateline (2001b), his play on space and time, Mishra collapses the International Dateline (which artificially creates coherent national time zones and may be moved) and the 180th meridian (which is a fixed longitudinal line dividing yesterday and today or today and tomorrow) so that the fixed meridian is at once a cartographical point of reference and a time zone that nation states around the meridian may shift at will. Extended to a conceit, the International Dateline becomes the twilight zone of possibilities, the zone where time is neither one nor the other, neither day nor night, like the twilight zone of the Narasingha avatar, the zone of improbable coincidences and conflation of identities, the space that reproduces, since it syncopates time, presencing national histories as simultaneously trauma and laughter. ‘Symmetry or Schizophrenia?’ questions the narrator of this play (454) and then proposes to lay bare a tale that reflects the split as a mise-en-abyme structure of endless reflections. The International Dateline is an immensely creative play that uses the imaginary space of the Dateline to draw many of the anxieties of modernity in the Pacific together; to show how the perceived tranquillity of the island nations is already exploded by terrorism and drug trafficking. Yet in all this it exploits this ambiguous, this indecipherable – space to speak of identity itself as being processual, identity as sandhya, as a twilight zone, within which the good (the utilitarian democratic ideal) is located: That goodness descends neither at day nor at night, neither as man nor beast, neither in the house nor outside. That goodness materializes in the verge between moments, spaces and beings. Neither one nor the other, it is the irreducible third. (509) So home, the space that one wishes to define unproblematically, the place to which one finally belongs, is accordingly an ‘overrated concept’ (509). Bihari the shopkeeper, part Fijian, part Hindu, part Muslim, part Australian, part Spanish, part Chinese and part whatever other ethnic group one can think of, consoles the elderly farmer Mungroo whose son Ananta, heartbroken after the coup, had put ‘hisself up in Ujjland [New Zealand] with that Mamya deerborcee [white divorcee]’ (459): ‘He probably feels freed from

50 The girmit ideology

the bhoja [weight] of all that’s gone on here since Leonidas [the first indenture ship to Fiji].’ How to free oneself from the weight of departure and the dreams of apocalypse constitutes one of the key elements of the diasporic imaginary. For our reading of the Indian diasporic imaginary the girmit ideology has special significance for the old Indian diaspora of classic capitalism. Although there are significant limitations inasmuch as the archive for the construction of the girmit ideology has been primarily Fiji Indian material, I do wish to stress, with some confidence, that the girmit ideology has been a significant organizing structure in the lives of the (old) plantation Indian diaspora generally. There is a coda, a corrective or a qualification from a related quarter which is necessary to point out. It comes from the works of the Malaysian Indian (Tamil) writer K. S. Maniam. In Maniam’s short story ‘Arriving’ (1995: 7–20) the key word is the Malay ‘pendatang’. It is a word that means ‘arrivals, illegals, boat-people’ or simply unwanted immigrants.10 For Krishnan, a second- or third-generation Indian in Malaysia, Mat’s perfunctory use of the word (‘You pendatang!’) – even if amicably directed towards him – had been unnerving for, yes, he thought ‘their great-grandfathers were pendatangs. Some of their grandfathers were pendatangs. Their fathers were not pendatangs. They’re not pendatangs’ (1995: 7). Thirty years earlier he had bought a corner terrace house for $20,000, a considerable sum then. The house was his home; where the house stood was his nation, he belonged, and his origin, as Indian, was irrelevant. But when an otherness is invoked, when a difference, a lack of unqualified belonging signalled, a person’s identity is ‘set adrift by [a] new uncertainty’ (10). It is as if a trauma is triggered, memory released, the repressed returns, as if the voice of grandmother Periathai, the madness and suicide of Ravi’s father Naina (Kannan) in his earlier novel The Return (1993b; first published in 1981) shadows his being. For there was an arrival, a ship that is part of his historical memory, though not of his Malaysian identity. Krishnan recalls: ‘The ship stank of human dung,’ his father’s words came to him, ‘and we, the human cattle, floated above that odour, towards our new land.’ He tried hard to recall his father’s memories of his voyage out to Malaysia but his memory was choked with some strange obstruction. Krishnan lay in that region between water and land trying to pull away from the matted, dark intrusion, but his determination seemed to fail. Yes, it had been his determination that had kept him innocent of his father’s experiences. He had decided, when he became aware of his budding consciousness, not to be influenced by other people’s memories and nostalgia. He clawed at familiarity. But he only floated, set adrift by this new uncertainty, towards an unfamiliar landfall. (Maniam 1995: 10) The whiff of uncertainty, the denial of one’s sense of belonging, the recognition that Malaysia had been part only of a ‘familiar temporariness’, transforms

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the familiar into the alien. The morning ceases to dawn as ‘dew-and-soil soaked grass’. Instead he catches ‘a whiff of rotten sewage’, notices that the light was stark and harsh. The surrounding houses now remind him of cracks and unsteadiness, not of solidity and timelessness. And yet there is the shopkeeper Ah Ho, resilient, defiant, unaffected by life’s cruel vicissitudes. Krishnan’s crisis of identity and self-awareness is severe. Mat’s cruel accusation of ‘pendatang’ had hurt until a moment of epiphanic dream cures. There are those men, historyless, who move with the current of history; behind them is nothing, before them everything (17). The past could kill, and did kill; the future had to be fronted ‘without dismay, without fear’ (18). ‘Pendatang. Pendatang. Pendatang.’ The word takes Krishnan ‘into himself’, takes him ‘into the beyond’ (18). Diasporic questions about the political (individual rights) and the personal (the accusation of non-belonging) no longer discourage since the diaspora always arrives, keeps arriving, and is not without dignity because of it. One never reaches, one continually aspires, for to reach is to die; to reach is to repeat (the earlier trauma of arrival), to complete and not to grow, points made as well in Rani Manicka’s novel The Rice Mother (2002). Pendatang, arrival, to Maniam is the condition of diasporic being. The short story ‘Arriving’ began with the image of a crow ‘scavenging at a pile of garbage’; it ends with the image of the crow again but without the metaphor of flight. For, whereas earlier the crow had flown to the shelter of the uncontaminated nearby rain tree, now the crow lingers on the garbage, ‘pecking away at the wastes of history, trying to salvage’. Krishnan’s consciousness salvages through action, transforming the accusation of arrival itself into the redemptive condition of diaspora. Arriving, of course, does not totally obliterate memory of one’s past. Although his first semi-autobiographical novel The Return does not make explicit any longing for a lost homeland, there are nevertheless degrees of unease with matters that are new or with the uncertainty of land tenure. Newness takes a cultural twist when the Tamil teacher Murugesu’s familiar stories (‘Murugesu tied most of these stories to people and incidents we knew’ [1993b: 21]) are replaced by Miss Nancy the colonial English teacher’s stories about white boys and girls in Anglo-European tales (the Boy in the Alphabet, associated in Ravi’s mind with Ernie of ‘Dobbin and Ernie’, ‘didn’t rise out of the page as Sivam, the village lout, had done in the Tamil Primer’ [24]). It may be said that grandmother Periathai’s sense of ennui, of exhaustion and father Kannan (Naina’s) madness and eventual suicide are linked to the failure to belong to Malaysia by owning land. In his short story ‘Haunting the Tiger’ (1996: 37–46) failure by Muthu to connect with the new, common culture and tenacious adherence to his Indian past leads to an unfulfilled life. Maniam has referred to two kinds of diasporic identification: the way of the tiger and the way of the chameleon. In his essay ‘The New Diaspora’ (1997) Maniam seemingly endorses both ways but casts his vote in favour of the chameleon because, as he argues, the way of the tiger means identifying with a nationalist consciousness, a move that really replaces one monolithic ideology (the colonial) with another that simply replicates its totalizing agenda. The chameleon, replacing an old skin with a new

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one through moulting, dispensing with singular narrative forms, is the metaphor of the new diaspora, multiple, selective, hybrid and in the end free of nationalist jingoism. The problematic of ‘arriving’ is a recurring theme in The Return, in his other novel In a Far Country, as well as in a number of his short stories. In the short story ‘A Hundred Years After’ (1995: 69–115) a hundred years in the nation give the narrator and his wife no identity (they remain nameless) because they had never ‘arrived’. The arrival is left to their son and daughters, who in fact are named. In a sense even the excesses of violence (the ritual killing of the pig in ‘Terminal’ [1996: 1–21] for instance) are ambiguously rendered as a ritual of arrival, and hence in spite of their unnerving cruelty redeeming. Another short story, ‘Haunting the Tiger’, as Maniam himself explains, ‘landscapes the interface between a dominant and a migrant culture’ (1996: xi). In an impressive essay, Shanthini Pillai (2000) has pointed out that Maniam often uses the symbol of the kolam – an Indian art form ‘normally drawn at the entrance to a home to invite harmony within’ in which the artist ‘normally begins by drawing a series of dots on the floor, which are then consequently embellished by a pattern of uninterrupted lines’ – with which to rethink the very idea of ‘home’ embedded in this defining symbol of the Indian-Tamil household, the ‘cabala-like designs in white’ mentioned in Maniam’s short story ‘Haunting the Tiger’ (1996: 39). In Pillai’s argument the centre of Maniam’s understanding of diasporic lives is to be located not in the uninterrupted lines of this art form but in the disruptions that constitute ethnic relations in Malaysia. The fixity of the form, the pervasiveness of the ‘emblem’, now ceases to connect with a past but enters territories of social relations in need of different strategies of negotiation and becoming. In Maniam’s In a Far Country (1993a) the character Rajan in the end recognises the importance of re-creating a kolam that answers to the call of the ‘pendatang’ by declaring that it is now placed at the entrance of a ‘home in a far country’ (quoted by Shantihini Pillai). Home, return, betrayal, trauma, these characterize what I have referred to as the girmit ideology. And, even though the word itself and the subaltern communal memory it engenders have not survived in the other plantation-Indian diasporas, the ‘memory of a betrayed intentionality’ (Sudesh Mishra 2005: 26), of failed millenarianism during indenture has its affects in the domain of the aesthetic in other parts of the old Indian diaspora as well: Surinam, Trinidad, Guyana, Mauritius and South Africa. Between 1873, when the first ship the Lala Rookh arrived with ‘279 males, 70 females, 32 boys and 18 girls’ (Mitrasing 1980: 93), and 1916, 34,304 Indian labourers came to Surinam. The period of indenture is more or less identical with Fiji but unlike Fiji the workers were almost exclusively North Indian Hindi speakers and their numbers never exceeded much over 150,000. The Indian Surinamese, however, adopted Dutch as their common language, although Bhojpuri (a dialect of Hindi) was not lost. And it is primarily in Bhojpuri that the girmit experience is recalled and made into a sign of the ‘primal’ wound arising out of dislocation. The Surinamese poet Cándani writes in Bhojpuri:

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My lost youth I recall A life spent in pain And now days are asthmatic. Remembering a farmer’s life Awaiting the hour’s end Eating with closed eyes. (Cándani 1990: 8) And Jit Narain, another poet from Surinam but located in Holland, also writes in Bhojpuri to express a longer narrative of indenture. The recruiter makes indenture The pain you suffered Pain hidden behind the veil. The body aches, the blood boils This depot is alien A stranger is recalled The heart breaks. And now in Dutch, an alien language My mind roams. What can I learn from your history? I roll in white man’s dirt Holding my nose Behind the same veil. (1988: 118; 1984: 6) And again Jit Narain writes: Let us endure the depot Why does the boat sail across the sea? Give me my grandfather Their bread is stale And you alone can bless me. My feet plough the land My hands plant seeds. I remain inconsolable But what else is there? This depot is rotten My mind begins to wander. (1984: 38)

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The Indian Surinamese tend to maintain stronger cultural ties with India owing to the presence of three large ‘ancestral groupings’ in the country: the descendants of African slaves, Indians and Javanese. There is also the historical legacy of an isolated Dutch colony in an area that is English, French, Spanish or Portuguese. There is, then, a more attenuated sense of otherness in Surinam where many more CDs and tapes of local Hindi music are produced. In the music of Kries Ramkhelawan and Anita Qemrawsing we note creative combinations of rock, soca, k-dance, reggae, rap and bobbling with the folk songs of rural India. The Indian community is also not averse to participating in crossdiasporic and India-diasporic cultural programmes, as may be seen in a Hindi newsletter such as Setubandh (‘The Bridge’) inaugurated by Mahatam Singh. In Surinam the Indian diaspora is one of three dominant and mutually exclusive diasporas (Creole, Indian and Javanese); in Trinidad the Indian diaspora once again enters into a bipolar set (Indian and Creole). Like Fiji, during much of the history of Trinidad, Indians were over 40 per cent of the population; and, like Fiji again, another race, descendants of African slaves, with similar numbers had already been there and had effectively supplanted the indigenous race. Although there is no equivalence between Fijians as landowners and Afro-Trinidadians as descendants of ex-slaves, they do occupy a similar position when it comes to the question of representing the land as a cultural and national entity. And for both the idea of the ‘entity’ so defined always comes into conflict with another definition of it that comes from the other major ethnic group in the country, the Indians. Of course, there are remnants of indigenous peoples in Trinidad, too, but of such insignificance as to be no more than a haunting reminder of European (especially Spanish) genocide. As Viranjini Munasinghe (2001) points out, the cultural politics of identity of Indo-Trinidadians has to be configured with reference to Afro-Trinidadians; and, good anthropologist that she is, she makes a case that the dichotomy (and subsequent political unease) between the two races grew out of a colonial political economy that defined ‘ex-slave labour’ and ‘indentured coolie’ labour differently. Just as a Fijian multicultural identity failed to emerge, a Trinidadian multicultural identity, too, failed because it inherited a colonial legacy that left behind different messages for the two races on the crucial question of how a multicultural nation actually comes into being. The politics of cultural struggle, which in Fiji was a struggle between landowners (first nation or indigenous people) and a group historically marginalised, became in Trinidad a struggle between two ‘historically subordinate ancestral groups’ (Munasinghe 2001: 4), of African and Indian descent respectively, to become the signifiers of the nation in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Although occupying two rather distinct historical and ethnographic spaces (the Fijian with rights that only aboriginal peoples can claim and the Afro-Trinidadian with rights by virtue of being creators of a Caribbean ethos), both Fijians and Afro-Trinidadians declare their identities as being identical with that of the nations to which they belong. In both instances, therefore, the Indian is seen as being antithetical to the very idea of a national identity. In other words, the indigenous Fijian in Fiji

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and the Afro-Caribbean in Trinidad alone can represent the nation both culturally and politically. Although the election of Mahendra Chaudhry as Fiji’s first Indian prime minister in 1999 and Basdeo Panday in Trinidad in 1995 turned the myth on its head, it made no real difference to the principal issue of national representation. Indeed, Chaudhry was removed a year later by a coup orchestrated by indigenous Fijians, and Panday’s own party lost the next election. Munasinghe quotes an interesting Calypsonian lament on Panday’s electoral success in 1995: ‘November 7th, (1995) I see Black Man Cry: Look blood still running from Black People Eye’ (5). Less skilled in calypso verse but with no less sense of traumatic loss, Fijians, too, chanted in a similar vein when their parties lost elections in 1977, 1987 and 1999. The Fijian historian Asesela Ravuvu writes about the ‘stunned and angry reaction’ to the 1987 victory of the Indian-dominated Labour-National Federation party coalition (1991: 86). Implicit in our rendition of the girmit ideology has been resistance to a homogenizing narrative of the state at a level other than that of democratic franchise. The homogenizing narrative remains a version of the narrative of assimilation which, in Trinidad, is the narrative of the Creole against the Indian notion of ancestral diversity. The Indians, as an instance of a cultural minority (although a very significant minority in this case), persist in seeing themselves as a group symbolically marginalized and excluded from the nation. Indeed, the Caribbean as a collective excludes the Indian from its image of the nation, which remains primarily Creole. At the same time in Fiji (less so here because the category of the Creole does not exist in Fiji) and in Trinidad (where the Creole is a national signifier) Indians have fiercely resisted any dilution of their cultural difference and have steadfastly refused symbolic incorporation into a prior, more fluid and mobile, ‘ethnic’ category – although, as John La Guerre (1985) points out, much as Indians in Trinidad celebrate Indian variety programmes such as Mastana Bahar as examples of the ‘vibrancy of East Indian “culture” ’ (183), the presence therein of unmistakable elements of calypso confirms a stronger process of accommodation with Creole culture. There are any number of ways in which this may be read. The first is that plantation culture affirmed the Creole/Indian divide as a matter of political economy because without that divide plantation labour would have become less readily available. The second is through a contradiction inherent in post-indenture Indian life where creolization occurred at the level of lived practice but was never articulated as such at the level of political creed. Munasinghe’s study shows many instances of Indo-Trinidadian behaviour that are self-evidently Creole but are never openly acknowledged as such. To a lesser extent, but in essence not dissimilar, are the behaviour patterns of the Fiji Indian: copious drinking of yagona, a local soporific, the adoption of the discourse of the Fijian talanoa (‘social chatter’), a meat-eating diet heavily dependent on seafood and Fijian root crops, and so on. And yet these social realities do not impinge upon the definition of the Indian, who continues to see himself in exclusivistic and pure terms. What I want to emphasise, even at the expense of theoretical finesse, is the degree to which built into the girmit ideology is a general resistance to what

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may be broadly called versions of ‘creolization’. The Latin American ideal – seen in a different model of accommodation and hybridity as represented in the figure of the mestizo (Canclini 2001) – is not seen as the norm. It is at this juncture that a work such as Helen Myers’s ethnomusicological analysis of the music of ‘Hindu Trinidad’ is of immense value. This scholarly study of the survival of musical forms in the indenture diaspora throws considerable light on the persistence of cultural practices even when there are outward signs of assimilation. Working through John La Guerre’s work (La Guerre 1983; 1985), Myers notes that ‘isolation on the cane estates’ (1998: 38) during the period of indenture (1845 to 1917) transformed an otherwise diversified community into a relatively unified one culturally. Nevertheless interactions with Creoles especially produced consensus on many matters; in language and in dress there was little that separated the two communities in Trinidad. Creoles, writes Myers, appreciate Indian food, Bollywood cinema and traditional Indian costume but find Indian ‘frugality . . . their attachment to soil, to the cane and rice . . . their elaborate Hindu liturgy’ alien if not antimodern (41). As elsewhere in the plantation diaspora, though, in Trinidad, too, as the social anthropologist David Lowenthal (1967) has observed, Indians became a lot more conscious of their difference after India gained its independence and when the road to Trinidad independence created little political consensus between Creoles and Indians. The Trinidad literary archive is informed by a certain greatness because of V. S. Naipaul, who, as Amitav Kumar has noted, ‘takes a prized place at the beginning of the phenomenon that we now call the literature of the Indian diaspora’ (2002: 120). His works require extensive analysis, which I shall undertake in other parts of this book. At this point I shall refer to just four writers/editors. I begin with Noor Kumar Mahabir’s (1985) collection of the girmit experience as memorially reconstructed by five people. Their stories belong to the original 143,900 indentured labourers who came to Trinidad between 1845 and 1917. These accounts – – are the next best thing to Sanadhya’s Bhutlen ki Katha. Narrated by five people – Fazal, Moolian, Maharani, Bharath and Sankar – the stories replicate each other to a large extent and in doing so reinforce the uniform nature of the girmit experience. The passage and the barracks figure most prominently, but there are not unusual readings of India (glorious, healthy where ‘people no hungry’ [64]), of – – the arkath . ı recruiters (‘feller fool me / bring me dis country’ [50]) and of the drudgery of work (‘I have to wuk / I have to slave trinidad’ [76]). I want to pause here and consider the only narrative by a woman collected by Mahabir. The woman’s name is Maharani, a Brahmin. A young widow, neglected and ill-treated by her family, she runs away from home and recalls the recruiter’s chant: cheenee chala cheenee chalay going tappu tappu may sara bara anna (79–80)

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Sifting sugar Sifting sugar To the island go There in the island Full twenty-five cents. – –

In Trinidad, Maharani recalls the camaraderie of the jahajıs (those who came on the same ship); she describes work on the plantation, life in the barracks, sexual infidelities, alcohol dependency, murders and generally the struggle for survival. In the end, though, she does not return to India because, as she declares, Trinidad is now her home. The next stage in the saga of Maharani, the stage that marks the beginnings of a post-indenture Indian sociality, is carried in the figure of ‘Ma’ in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s uncompromisingly honest novel No Pain Like This Body, a novel which Dionne Brand has called ‘a Veda to the beginnings of Indian life in Trinidad’ (Ladoo 2003: xii). Set in the Tola District of the fictional Carib Island (but which is clearly Trinidad), Ladoo’s novel is an intensely painful study of violence internalized. As a family of six (alcoholic father, suffering mother, and four children) eke out a miserable existence in the wet paddy fields of the district, the only feature that remains unchanged is the capacity for cruelty. The father’s irrational acts of violence towards his children and wife are presented without remorse and with a depraved sense of enjoyment on his part. Even as his son is brought back from the hospital dead, there is no proper show of grief: Ma is forced to get drunk by village women upon the advice of Pa, the male (and female) mourners use the occasion to get drunk on rum, while Ma’s parents (Nanna and Nanny) try to maintain some sense of civility. But there is no ethical order, no remorse, no culpability because, it seems, there is no order in the lives of this transplanted Indian community: their sources of strength (religion, social solidarity) are gone. Ma goes insane and probably drowns in the wet, and post-indenture life can only be captured by the grandmother (Nanny) walking, beating a drum – a dholak, one presumes – with her three grandchil. dren in tow. Nanny beated the drum with life; with love; she beated the drum with all her strength and the drum sounded loud as if a spirit was bawling in the forest. (126) A later phase of Indian post-indenture life may be seen in Ismith Khan’s novel The Jumbie Bird. Published in 1961, the novel (‘jumbie’ means ‘ghost’) traces the tensions in a small nuclear family of grandfather Kale Khan, his son Rahim, his daughter-in-law Meena, grandson Jamini and estranged wife Binti. Kale Khan hates both India (from which he had fled) and Trinidad (the country to which he had come). The ‘hate’ for both India and Trinidad is, however, not alike because, whereas Trinidad can never be the homeland lost (and is therefore hated), India

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is the homeland that is responsible for the trauma of displacement. India then becomes the land responsible for Kale Khan’s current condition, and Trinidad the space (symbolized by the novel’s primary location around Woodford Square ‘with its statue of Sir Ralph Woodford [governor, and an architect of the system of indentureship]’ [Puri 2004: 178]) in which the loss works itself out. He had come as a free man and not ‘like the rest of these low-class coolies in bond’ (Ismith Khan 1961: 9); but his first name, Kale, means ‘black’ and is an inflectional form – – – – – – of the kala of the kalapanı (‘black waters’, the word used for the passage of indenture). To thematize the novel in these terms overlooks levels of ambiguity at work in it and the complexity of identity politics in Trinidad generally. It is clear that, apart from the grandson Jamini (from whose point of view much of the novel is narrated and who is close to his grandfather), the other family members do not read Kale Khan’s homeland fetish in the same manner. But inasmuch as Ismith Khan’s novel makes the idea of return (real or imagined) one of the key cruxes it shows the persistence of a psychology (of return) that pervades Indian plantation or girmit culture. Like V. S. Naipaul’s itinerant ex-indenture labourers whiling away their lives in the veranda of the Tulsi store, Khan’s ‘old and decrepit Indians like Mongroo and Kareem’ wasted their lives away in the parks, ‘dreaming dreams of rains falling and monsoons pelting at their eardrums somewhere in Hindustan’ (27). The idea of belonging and not belonging (Rahim declares ‘We ain’t belong to Hindustan, we ain’t belong to England, we ain’t belong to Trinidad . . .’ [68]) affects everyone and implies a not uncommon condition of a diaspora lost in the desire to return to India (Kale Khan’s position) and the lure of ‘the golden rum from the sugar cane he had come to plant’ (the town fool Sookiah’s position) (139). For Kale Khan the confirmation of the journey being final (against his own view of Trinidad as a transient spot) comes from none other than the envoy from India, the newly independent country’s High Commissioner who is much fêted on his arrival. When the envoy declares that Trinidad was their home, ‘a horrifying loneliness seize[d] him . . . there was no home, no land peopled by men among whom he could walk and feel that it was his world, his home, a world that did not leave him alien and a stranger in the streets’ (200). The wish to live leaves Kale Khan, and he dies, broken hearted like ‘the calabash that had shrivelled in the sun’ (201), during a display of his own – – skills as a master of the lath . ı, the Indian wooden stick. The suicidal act played out on another Hosay day links up with an earlier moment of militant anti-colonial resistance, the Hosay uprising of 1884, in which Kale Khan had participated. As Shalini Puri has shown in her insightful analysis of the novel, Kale Khan’s failed dream of return to India marks out an emergent ‘diasporic, creolized pan-Indian identity’ (2004: 181) which is antithetical both to the old sense of Indianness prescribed by the likes of Kale Khan and to an Afro-Trinidadian sociality that has a proprietorial grip on the uses of ‘Creole’. The figure of the Maharani in Mahabir’s collection of plantation narratives surfaces as the grandmother of Kamla in Lakshmi Persaud’s Butterfly in the Wind (1990), another work in which ethnographic details act as anchoring points for the growth of the young Hindu girl Kamla. The past, however, exists not as

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traumatic memory (which it obviously did for Mahabir’s subjects, for Ladoo’s damaged characters and for Kale Khan) but as inalienable features of the landscape. In much of what we have written so far, rendering the landscape through one’s own cultural and geographical conditioning (present, too, in Ismith Khan) is one way of stamping one’s own character on the nation-state. So in Persaud’s work one finds references to the outdoor kitchen, to the building of homes, the planting of hibiscus hedges, fruit trees and vegetables, as signs of Indian presence. Put in this way, they are no more than background material for fiction, but seen through the usage of words or practices that require a gloss we sense an inherent claim being made about registering and cataloguing the land. So we read about stems of hibiscus ‘used as tooth brushes’, mangoes made into ‘kutchala and achar’, a machan built for climbing vegetables such as keraila and the ‘fireside or chulha for cooking’, the ‘rich aroma of woodsmoke, roties lifting themselves from hot iron tawas’ (84–6), and the practice of jharaying, the casting out of evil spirits often, though not always, undertaken by pundits (107–9). In Persaud’s novel, jharay acts as a means of propitiating spirits and of releasing them from bodies. And in terms of universal everyday life Sanadhya’s observation about Christmas in Fiji is confirmed in Trinidad, too: ‘Christmas was the one festivity everybody in the village celebrated. Hindus, Moslems and Christians all planned what they were going to do for Christmas with equal fervour’ (95). In the end, though everyday life in the old Indian diaspora cannot be isolated from the powerful pull of creolization (‘The East Indian has become as West Indian as all the other expatriates,’ wrote C. L. R. James [1992: 313]) or of living in a multiracial world. In the case of South Africa where the multiracial disappeared under the politics of apartheid, the writing of the Indian diaspora remained muted, and politically less agonistic. Only in the works of Ahmed Essop (1984; 1988; 1990) do we get fragments of everyday life under South African apartheid rendered with irony and humour. In spite of the stringent protocols of writing (where differential education, differential politics, and indeed differential life itself is the law), the triumph of Essop’s prose is located in its ability to unhinge lived experience from absolute segregation. In a short story such as ‘The Hajji’ (1988: 1–18) beneath the dominant narrative lies a statement of marital relationships (between Karim and Catherine) deemed to be illegal under apartheid. And in The Emperor (1984), Essop’s fable of a schoolmaster incapable of thinking outside of social regimentation, a critique of South African supremacist ideology is written in the crevices of the narrative. In a text that outwardly reads like a tale of ambition gone wrong, Essop is able to make coded references to the wrongs of authoritarianism. Not quite J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), but some of the same use of double coding may be seen in the following passage: Authoritarianism in educational institutions is a product of the political order of the country. . . . Under authoritarianism the educational institution takes on the trappings of a military camp: there are inflexible rules and

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regulations; superiors must be obeyed; instructions and orders are always issued; there is the emphasis on superficial display and forms. . . . Of those who remain, many are silenced by fear while others become obsessed. . . . (1984: 178–80) Those who have a conscience, like the English teacher Zenobia, lose out; those who follow the master (as slave in the classic version of the Hegelian dialectic) like Dharma Ashoka, the headmaster (who even re-names the school Ashoka High School, after the great Indian emperor, but the link to his own name is noticeable), are only momentarily on the ascendant before their worlds collapse because of the authoritarian ideology’s own inflexibility. With the safety of a diasporic communality gone, and crossover into other segregated worlds impossible, Dharma Ashoka takes his own life. The Indian diaspora under conditions of apartheid and censorship in South Africa, as in Essop’s works, writes fables of identity that cannot be energized by the multiracial, and certainly not by C. L. R. James’s pull of creolization. It is further east from Durban, in Mauritius, that creolization is a cultural dominant. In Mauritius the Creole is both a sign of displaced indigeneity (and hence ambivalently located as the tourist face of the nation) and a threat to the ‘stability of the national body politic and is marked for elimination’ (Aumeerally 2005). In turn the Creole sees the Indian (hegemonic since independence in 1968) not unlike the way in which the indigenous Fijian sees the Fiji Indian, as an object of derision against whom an anti-colonial struggle is yet to be mounted. Yet French-based Creole is the lingua franca of the nation, and Mauritian writing generally cannot be seen apart from the power of the demotic mother tongue. In the political sphere the tension is obvious as the Mauritian Indian sees French as the sign of a traumatic past (the French planters see Indians as a canker in the body of the nation) but which, as the language that informs the demotic, characterizes their social beings. The tension remains unresolved in spite of the adoption of English as the official language of the nation and the medium of instruction. The tension referred to is carried in language itself, as is clear from the carefully crafted short stories of Farhad Khoyratty (2005 for example) and more directly in the remarkable dramatic corpus of Dev Virahsawmy. ‘Underlying Virahsawmy’s [drama] is the conviction that Creole is the only language that can translate the experiences and cultures of Mauritius for the stage’ (Mooneeram 1999: 25). The status of Creole is thus marked by a peculiar paradox: it is the language in which Mauritians come into their own (it is their mother tongue) and yet it is the language from which the Mauritian wishes to escape by adopting either English or one of the many ‘ancestral languages’ taught in schools. Neither English nor these ancestral languages have been able to replace Creole as the language of Mauritian ‘felt-experiences’. Many of these issues, including the link between politics and language in Mauritius, are central to Dev Virahsawmy’s quite remarkable rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as Toufann. Writes Shawkat M. Toorawa, ‘Cultural creolisation

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(métissage), self-invention, the emancipation of the Kreol – it is with these threads . . . that Virahsawmy weaves in and through Toufann a different and daring narrative of freedom, belonging, inclusion, and liberation’ (Toorawa 2001: 135). But as a play produced by a writer who belongs to an Indian diaspora which has become the dominant ethnic group in Mauritius, the play functions as a timely autocritique of a working-class diaspora which, once in power, begins to establish hegemonic control across both economic and cultural fields. The play was written in 1991 at a time of great prosperity in Mauritius, but the prosperity also marked the exclusion of the Creole from the benefits of economic liberalization. That exclusion took a violent turn in 1999 when the radical Creole singer Kaya was found dead whilst in police custody. Since the police force in Mauritius is predominantly Hindu (or Indian), the death of the singer led to weeks of rioting, violence and deaths. As Michael Walling has pointed out, the target of looters was shops selling electronic consumer goods as these goods were seen as the symbol of the economic miracle from which Creoles had been excluded (Walling 2006: 201–2). Virahsawmy’s play in a sense anticipates the riots as his Prospero is a computer genius and the title of the play is not the Creole word for ‘tempest’ (which is ‘sikklon’) but the Hindi word for it: ‘toufann’. Virahsawmy’s play has theoretical value in the context of the failure of theories of globalization and transnationality to give intrinsic legitimacy to minority subjects. Even in those models that emphasize lateral and nonhierarchical networks (the rhizomatic model of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is exemplary here) the centre still holds magnetic force and creates a binary in terms of which the minor (as in Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of ‘minor literature’) is studied. And even if one were to critique the centre – a not uncommon strategy in much of postcolonial studies – the very act of critiquing it re-establishes the centre’s pre-eminence, its rather special place in all aspects of cultural production. Minorities are, however, very much part of the centre; they are not erratic and unassimilable groups somehow extraneous to the nation; they are indeed part of the national imaginary with their own legitimate perspective. The transnational (diaspora, multicultural polity) is part of globalization but requires analysis (as transnationals) neither through a utopian/dystopian reading from the liberal high ground of globalization nor from the romanticized counter-critical model of the local and the global where the local is the subaltern heroic figure stubbornly resisting the advance of global capital. The case of Virahsawmy’s Toufann poses the question: ‘What is critical knowledge/pedagogy like when a minor text connects with other subaltern texts from postcolonial peripheries without the necessity of passing through a metropolitan centre?’ Hence one shifts from matters of intertextual control, the power of the canon and hierarchy to a more lateral postcolonial reading where other minor literatures and their modes of cultural productions become decisive. At a time when the Mauritian state is busy compartmentalizing its heterogeneous population – Indian vernaculars are being re-introduced even when for an entire century Creole and Bhojpuri-Hindi were the only functional

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plantation languages – and paranoid about French as a language of settler hegemony, Virahsawmy uses Creole as the inalienable Mauritian language in which Mauritian emotions are best-expressed. Focusing on Virahsawmy’s Creole play Toufann (premiered in Mauritius in 1995 and then again, in the English version, in London in December 1999), Françoise Lionnet (to whom the play is in part dedicated) examines how a ‘minor’ literature, with its clear indebtedness to Shakespeare but written in the undeclared lingua franca of the country (somewhat absurdly English, which is hardly anyone’s mother tongue in Mauritius, is the declared lingua franca), breaks away from hierarchical and centre-oriented postcolonial theory to expose a more lateral, quotidian (that is everyday) life-world (Lionnet 2005). Although Lionnet is emphatic on the title of the play and its performance as indicative of Virahsawmy’s insistence on the here and now against a diasporic nostalgia by drawing attention to Virahsawmy’s Tamil and not North India (and therefore Hindi-speaking) background, it is equally true that ‘toufann’, the word, does impart an indenture ethos against the settler French ethos and this is because the moment of multiple Indian vernaculars is a post-independence phenomenon as the newly independent nation tried to give every subject a past and a language. In the process, of course, Creole itself became marginalized because it had no origin in a high culture outside of Mauritius. The Indiandominated post-independence governments, too, were uneasy about the links between Creole and French inasmuch as the language grew out of an unequal plantation-slave and French-planter social relationship. Lionnet’s point, however, is not based on this qualification, for what she advances is the fact that Creole is the language most widely spoken in Mauritius; it is the subaltern language (with no real high-culture origins elsewhere) and it opens up the possibility of a ‘ “transcolonial” form of solidarity’ (206). Virahsawmy’s play not only unsettles the idea of a canon as being fixed but also, through the use of Creole, demonstrates the remarkable resilience and openness of the language. As the language of hybrid identities, Creole may be seen as the subaltern language without equal since it has no history of imperial hegemony. Moreover, the title of the play – Toufann – with its dual Hindi and Creole semantic (‘tou fan’ or ‘tou fane’ in Creole means ‘it’s a mess’ [213] and in the play Prospero asks Aryel to ‘create chaos’ [Virahsawmy 2001: 228]) tells the target audience that the immediate meaning of the play is to be located in local culture and politics and not in its suggestive Shakespearian intertext, which, again, becomes meaningful only through a certain kind of high-cultural knowledge. In naming one of the characters Dammarro, the junkie, Virahsawmy again connects with the growing cultural pull of Bollywood cinema on Indo-Mauritian culture. High on ganja, Dammarro relapses into ‘Dam marro dam! Hare Krishna, hare Ram’ (Virahsawmy 225). What he recalls are lines from a song in a well-known Bollywood film titled Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971). In this respect the play is located less in the politics of postcolonial self-righteous condemnation of Shakespeare’s racist representation of the native Caliban and more in the reconstructions of newer characters whose

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moral agenda insinuates something rotten in the local state (of Mauritius) itself. In this respect Virahsawmy’s play accents a diaspora no longer locked into an essentialist sense of loss and alienation; instead it becomes a critical voice of diaspora as something other than a unified space marked by social and cultural exclusiveness. Virahsawmy’s reading of diaspora is as a body conscious of its own responsibilities towards the less privileged and more importantly declaring that, as in the case of Mauritian Creole, the diaspora has carved for itself a complex social imaginary which has grown out of the history of the Mauritian nation-state itself. Theories of diaspora cannot overlook the power of creolization (or métissage) because it foregrounds the diaspora in a different sense of being ‘rooted’. In this context the works of Samuel Selvon constitute a remarkable corpus. Yet creolization in Selvon, although presented as a homogenizing social process, is read ambivalently especially when seen from the perspective of the Indian. The ambivalence is noted by critics like Clement H. Wyke (1991), for whom creolization conceals ‘(the Indian’s) identity’, and Kenneth Ramchand, who suggests that, although Selvon’s first and perhaps most powerful novel, A Brighter Sun (1971), makes dialect ‘the language of consciousness in West Indian fiction’ (Ramchand 1972: 105), the insistence on dialect and creolization is not unmarked by a certain ambivalence towards creolization as the sign of homogenization. In A Brighter Sun as Tiger and Urmilla, people of Indian plantation culture (‘Urmilla knelt on the floor of the small kitchen and crushed the tumric and dhania with the massala stone’ (164)), negotiate new interpersonal relations with the Creole Joe and Rita Martin, they do so, it seems, conscious of their difference and their very different history when it came to addressing modernity, which, with the arrival of American soldiers, and American money, too, into Trinidad during the Second World War, takes a more urgent turn. But it is not Tiger or his wife Urmilla, or even the Martins, who carry the weight of history in this novel. That weight is carried by the drunkard and itinerant Sookdeo (he is not unlike the itinerant Sookiah we find a little later in Ismith Khan’s novel) whose death comes soon after a modern road bisects his house and land and his beloved mango tree is destroyed. Before Sookdeo dies he has a dream: He dreamed in the night that a big ’dozer came up behind him while he was working in the ricefield, and when he turned round, the ’dozer scooped him up and flung him far into the swamp, over the coconut trees and the mangroves. Then, after that, he dreamed how he was in the canefields when his parents had brought him from India to work in Trinidad. He was in the cane fields and an American came and said, ‘Hey, you’re Sookdeo?’ And when he said yes, the American said, ‘All right, we want you!’ . . . and he ran into a patch of canes to hide. (Selvon 1971: 152) The dream is structured to reflect Sookdeo’s own life story, but one of the centres remains sugar cane, a key motif in Selvon’s work here and elsewhere.

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In a powerful short story Selvon renders the motif of sugar cane with great ironic force. ‘Cane Is Bitter’ (1973) is a tightly written story about a young man Romesh’s ‘revolt’ against timeless life on the estate: ‘Nothing would change. They would plant the cane, and when it grew and filled with sweet juice cut it down for the factory. The children would waste away their lives working with their parents’ (Selvon 1973: 66). In the hands of Rooplall Monar, the Guyanese writer, Creole becomes the language through which the life worlds of the Indo-Guyanese community are given expression. Whether it is religious difference coming in the way of love, as in ‘Pork Eater’ (1990) and ‘Infidel’ (1992: 56–69), or politics as in ‘Election Fever’ (1992: 151–62), the latter two stories from High House and Radio, the demotic alone can carry the tragi-comic nature of post-indenture life. It is language, then, which expresses the social, which offers a second order of meaning even when the act itself, as in the description of Alim’s violent reaction towards his daughter Naimoon for having an affair with the Hindu Sharma, is unforgivable: Blai Bladai . . . Alim out he right hand and let-go two heavy slap on Naimoon face which cause Bibi [Alim’s wife] to siver downstairs. Bibi know is murderation tonight. Suddenly she bowel go-off, and she hustling to the latrine in the backyard, whispering, ‘Allah, is murderation tonight.’ (1992: 65) The aesthetic order as an expression of felt experience makes the demotic, which is both expressive of the social as well as an ironic commentary on it, central to artistic expression. In the final story of his collection High House and Radio (1992) called ‘Cookman’ (1992: 163–74) once again it is language itself which undercuts class and economic difference. Pandit, master cook of mutton curry, is in demand by the boss of Bookers Sugar Plantation, Mr Douglas, by the cricketers and by almost everyone else. But the comedy of life around curry, funny as it is, cannot change real power relations as Creole is not in the same league as ‘backraman [white man’s] language’ and even emigration to England in the wake of the race riots of 1962 is framed as a confession of linguistic incompetency: ‘Me just going to make meself a damn fool. Is everybody talking the backraman language in London’ (174). The demotic as ‘body’, as a corporeal signifier uncensored by formal language, unifies experience which, in spite of its humour, always implies lives lived at the edges of worlds bitter and harsh. Where A Brighter Sun and Monar’s short stories use dialect ambivalently to suggest the processes of creolization as the way forward, Selvon’s ‘Cane Is Bitter’, as we have already noted, syncopates the tales memorially recounted by Mahabir’s informants as a haunting and haunted presence. There is something in the nature of cane itself that generates the oxymoron: the cane’s bitterness is a metaphor of the severity of plantation life both socially and economically. It is the centrality of that metaphor and its links to both a prior (indenture) and a later (free) history that energizes the verse of the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen.

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‘But cane is we stubborn Cross, it don’t give one scunt for Romance,’ writes David Dabydeen (1988: 23). Between 1838 and 1917, 240,000 indentured labourers went to British Guiana, which had more extensive sugar plantations than many of the other colonies. The estates, until recently owned by the British company Bookers, were the ‘homes’ of most Indo-Guyanese, who lived and worked in them. Reflecting perhaps on Selvon’s ‘Cane Is Bitter’ Dabydeen, in an introductory essay, refers to the Guyanese in literature as subjects who are ‘creatures of peasant flesh squelching through mud and cane-field’ (1986: 9) and who are damned by what they produce since rum (distilled from sugar) and sugar (the cause of endemic diabetes) in the end kill them. As agriculture, canecutting is a labour-intensive ‘savage ceremony, cutlass slashing away relentlessly at bamboohard body of cane; planting is equally vicious, a repeated stabbing into the soil’ (1986: 12). For Dabydeen, the tenderness of dialect attributed to Selvon is replaced by a ‘vulgarity’ of the dialect, existing most powerfully in its oral forms. In both Rooplall Monar and David Dabydeen language therefore becomes a broken primal cry, raw like a wound: ‘the canecutter aspires to lyrical experience and expression but cannot escape his condition of squalor nor the crude diction that such a condition generates’ (1986: 14). In Dabydeen’s poem ‘The Canecutters’ Song’ (1986: 25–6) this raw language find lyricism in a dialectic in which the white woman (of the master) is the object of desire of the canecutter (slave). Upon her the canecutter pours, almost as a religious tribute, sexual yearnings depleted by the conditions of indenture. The climax of such outpouring is framed in a food, the ‘baigan-chokey’ (roasted aubergine mixed with onions and condiments) which, along with dhal-puri, is a standard indenture cuisine. At the heart of the poem lies cane as displaced phallus and indicated as such in the picture of a piece of sugar cane that accompanies the poem. Apart from the white woman, there are also two other significant women in Dabydeen’s collection of verse. The first is ‘Ma’ around whom an indenture pastoral of rolling roti and cooking curry in the ‘karahee’ (‘For Ma’, 1986: 37) as well as the often thankless toil of women generally are enacted. The second is ‘Mala’ (‘For Mala’, 1986: 19– 20) through whom the broken pastoral finds a traumatized voice. The year 1964 saw the massacre of hundreds of Indians in Guyana, with the worst episode occurring at Wismar where Afro-Guyanese went on a killing rampage that, within hours, left many Indians dead, raped or mutilated. In Dabydeen’s rendition of the trauma (in ‘For Mala’), though, the stark imagery of a womb squashed open, made hollow, and again transformed into a type of religious desecration (‘Somebady juta Gaad holy fruit so man can’t taste she sweetness no mo!’ where the Hindi word ‘juta’ makes the puja offering itself unclean), nevertheless leads to the massacre as itself being somehow redemptive as the ‘Coolie grind massala, na mattie bone’, the coolie will grind masala and not people’s bones. Needless to say, though, the recurrence of the Wismar massacre in Dabydeen’s verse gives it a highly traumatic meaning. Further, the juxtaposition of the event with metaphors of the primal indenture experience links the function of the girmit ideology itself to a structure of consciousness (in a way) that a later event (such as the massacre) always repeats, makes meaning

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of, much as the second, symbolic, wounding of Clorinda by her lover Tancred in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (in Freud’s reading of it) repeats the original act and makes it meaningful (Freud 1984b: 293; Caruth 1996: 2). The girmit ideology as laid down here is meaningful provided that we pay attention to two features of plantation culture. The first is that the experience of indenture is directly related to the production of one commodity, sugar. The second is the acceptance of labour as a measurable unit of work, what Marx referred to as abstract labour. Clearly the latter does not mean that the indentured labourer understood the role of capital in plantation life, but it does mean that since plantation labour was measured in terms of a particular formula (where some twelve or thirteen hours of work was translated into one shilling) labour could (and did) become a measurable form of human activity. Before I expand on these points with reference to a rare instance of girmit critique and resistance, I want to refer very quickly to the most extensive fictional rendition of the girmit experience. It is to be found in the Mauritian Abhimanyu Anat’s – – – Hindi novel Lal Pasına ([Bloody Sweat] 1977).11 The novel is a sprawling saga, part social critique, part romance, part historical survey which has a direct antecedent in Anand Mulloo’s novel of Mauritian Indian plantation life, Watch Them Go Down (1957) (Bhautoo-Dewnarain 2002). In the limited space at my disposal, I want to capture two moments in this novel. The first is the labourer Kisen Singh’s – – account of a dream to his jahajı uncle Kundan. Kundan explains that dreams have no meaning, dreams are like sweat because sweat, too, has no meaning. Kisen is taken aback and answers that sweat has meaning. ‘Look around us, the greenery, the crops, all these are related to sweat’ (64). Yes, replies Kundan, this is true, but the real beneficiaries of sweat are those who never shed a drop, those who benefit from the surplus value of labour. The second moment is Kisen’s heroic act in getting between the planters and the workers, who do not wish to leave their allotted plots of land. A fracas ensues, and the planters give the order to shoot. The narrator’s voice intercedes: ‘Kisen Singh’s death was the death of history. And the death of history is apocalyptic’ (215). This, the narrator adds, is something the master understood, even if the slave does not. There was, however, one ‘slave’, Bechu by name, who stands as an anomaly; one indentured labourer who seems to have slipped through the net, who seems to have outwitted recruiting agents and who enters girmit as an extraordinarily articulate man in his mid-thirties. He is a Totaram Sanadhya with a difference in that he is exceptionally fluent in English and intervenes in the discourse of plantation labour to dismantle its contradictions. This man, Bechu, understands Anat’s fictional hero Kisen, he understands how capital had abstracted labour (as a measurable unit) from workers and, what is even more exciting, he presents us with a fulsome testimonio of resistance. – Bechu, of middling kurmı (agricultural) Bengali in origin, without a first name, which is not uncommon among Indians, reached British Guinea as an indentured labourer in the ship Sheila on 20 December 1894. He was 34, unusually slight for an indentured labourer and, it seems, unfit to work on Plantation Enmore, East Coast Demerara, to which he was indentured upon

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arrival. Within months he was given another task, that of assisting a ‘Creole driver’, and then moved to the manager’s house as a domestic servant. These are unremarkable events, and Bechu, like other ‘incapables’, would have been sent back to India upon the expiry of his initial five-year contract. He did go back – in 1901 – but not before challenging many aspects of plantation power relations. Prone to bouts of fever (he was probably consumptive), Bechu nevertheless had unusual moral strength and, it seems, craft enough to make up for his poor physique. There is certainly no mythic dimension to his name as he remained ‘undiscovered’ until the 1960s when the economic historian Alan Adamson chanced upon this ‘unusual champion of Indian sugar plantation workers in British Guinea between 1896 and 1901’ (Seecharan 1999: 13). His is therefore a case of a kind of postcolonial recovery of narratives until recently silenced by a predominantly colonial historiography that gave primacy to colonial despatches and government statistics. To narrate Bechu’s story as part of a girmit ideology we need to trace two histories: Bechu’s personal history and his public persona. The former takes us back to an orphaned child placed, like a character in Dickens, in the care of the Calcutta Scottish Presbyterian Mission where he stayed until 1876, when he turned sixteen and when Miss Cameron, his teacher and mentor at the mission died. For the next eighteen years he worked with various British ‘gentlemen’ (as he was fond of recalling) in whose company he did some travelling to places as far away as Rangoon. At the age of 34 difficult financial circumstances or so he claimed (but perhaps also a falling out with his ‘gentlemen’ patrons – one is not too sure), led him to seek work elsewhere. A wily recruiter (in girmit language – – the ‘arka th . ı ’) always on the lookout for new labourers to indenture met his match in the Christian Bechu, who clearly presented himself as an accomplished agricultural worker in spite of his slight physique, his Anglicized body language and Bengali accent. The Bechu who sets sail in the Sheila is therefore not, except for his caste, your typical indentured labourer. This personal account of Bechu (gathered from his letters) has to be set alongside the Immigration Agent General, A. H. Alexander’s, account of ‘A short history of Bechu’ sent to the Governor of British Guinea, Sir Walter Sendall, on 1 July 1899. Obviously taken aback by the presence of a ‘bound coolie’ so extraordinarily fluent in the English language (‘[he] could not have come to this colony as a common labourer unless there had been some good cause or necessity for his leaving India’), Sendall wrote to the Immigration Agent in Calcutta requesting a biography of Bechu. Since there was no trace of Bechu (it looks as if even Bechu’s emigration pass is non-existent) in the Calcutta office, Alexander could only conclude that Bechu was not telling the truth about his past. Indeed, the Governor’s own conclusion, which he conveys to the Secretary of State on 19 July 1899, is that Bechu was probably a ‘fugitive from justice’. There is much here that is of interest to a scholar bent on recovering the ‘real Bechu’. For us the search for the real Bechu is less interesting than Bechu this ‘rebellious spirit’, in Seecharan’s words (21), who turned the girmitiya stereotype on its head.

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When Bechu reached British Guinea, the colony’s Indian population was over 110,000; there was an over-supply of labour, and demand for sugar had plummeted rather dramatically. Although fewer than 18 per cent of Indians remained formally indentured, freehold land was difficult to come by and when available was either beyond the reach of the freed labourer or unavailable, as a matter of implicit government policy, to him. So Bechu comes to a colony where the vast majority of Indians, although legally free, continued to work on plantations as ‘bound coolies’. From 20 December 1894 to 26 February 1897, Bechu is a ‘bound coolie’, a domestic helper in the manager of Plantation Enmore’s house, happy with his lot with, it seems, ready access to newspapers, almanacs, government publications, Trollope (he quotes Trollope on the plantation political system as ‘despotism tempered by sugar’ [Seecharan 153]) and the like. Towards the end of this period, something happens that results in the publication on 1 November 1896 of perhaps the first letter written by a ‘bound coolie’ for the liberal newspaper the Daily Chronicle. It is difficult to speculate on the readership of this newspaper, but if other colonial newspapers of the period are anything to go by the readership was mainly colonial officers, planters and their staff and a small coterie of government clerks drawn primarily from the Creole population. There would have been some Indian readers no doubt but not too many. So the letter would have had a dramatic impact since the writer signs himself as ‘Bechu (Indentured Immigrant, Sheila, 1894)’. How could a recently arrived illiterate indentured labourer write so well? Is this a fake, a letter ghost-written by someone else? Does ‘Bechu’ exist at all? Let us read the letter afresh. Bechu’s letter is about labour, its function in plantation culture and its monetary value. Indenture, as Bechu established so clearly, was based on labour measured in terms of time and pence. He refers to the agreement (origin, as we know, of the term girmit) signed by ‘bound coolies’. Written in three languages (English, Hindi and Urdu) and not understood unless verbally translated into the labourer’s vernacular, the agreement very clearly stipulated conditions under which one worked on a plantation. The agreement very precisely states the period of service (five years), the nature of labour (primarily the cultivation of sugar cane), workdays per week and hours of work each day (Monday to Saturday excluding designated holidays; seven to ten hours per day), daily wages and task rates, guaranteed paid return passage after ten years, provision of ration. Bechu then comes to the point: the planters are not keeping their side of the bargain because punt loaders are given nine shillings per week (a shilling and six pence per day) for fourteen to fifteen hours of labour each day. There is nothing insidious about the tone of the letter; nor is there in it information not readily available to all readers. What is unusual is the fluency with which the letter was composed and the fact that a ‘coolie’ had destroyed the myth of the stereotypical illiterate Indian worker. Above all, Bechu uses the discourse of the master against the master himself. Bechu’s letters (for many were to follow) mark the beginning of a self-assertiveness that was to transform itself into a politics of equal rights and fair pay for labour. The indentured labourer

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had entered the field of capital because he understood abstract labour as a unit that can be given monetary value. This understanding would gradually place the girmit man apart from his non-Indian co-workers and other colonized subjects. It would, finally, lead to a very different understanding of the nation-state. There is something else behind Bechu’s first letter, although in it Bechu makes no reference to it. He refers to it some seven weeks later in a letter to the Daily Chronicle dated 22 December 1896. Between this letter and the first, Bechu had been defended by a fellow Indian (‘J. R. Wharton’) and vilified by members of the plantocracy (‘Langton’ and John Russell). In his letter of 22 December, the genesis of Bechu’s first letter of complaint regarding work conditions becomes clear. A fortnight before his first letter appeared (that is, on 13 October 1896) five coolies were killed by armed policeman and 59 were injured at Plantation Non Pareil. Bechu had remained ‘as quiet as a mouse’ these past two years but when he ‘saw that the lives of four of my countrymen were sacrificed for nothing, and that about ten times that number had been injured for life’ he had written (on 1 November 1896) to explain the ‘real cause of the disturbance’. As Bechu points out, the disturbance was about breach of a contract that allowed coolies to earn a shilling a day. Three gangs of indentured coolies from Plantation Non Pareil had left their estate to go to Georgetown to seek a resolution of their grievance from the Immigration Agent General. They were told to return to the estate and a sub-agent would look into their complaint. What followed was a breach of promise as the agent arrived with armed policemen and arrested the gang leaders for conspiring to kill the manager of Non Pareil (a baseless charge). When the rest of the coolies followed the policemen, requesting that they, too, should be arrested, shots were fired over their heads. They retaliated with sticks and stones, and in the ensuing fracas five people were killed. As Bechu continued to write, not so much about the incident itself, as about a culture that dehumanised workers, many other matters began to converge. The abuse of women in plantation culture (slave or indenture) is one of the better-known, albeit least well documented, aspects of plantation life. In the riot and killings that Bechu wrote about, one of the ringleaders who was killed was Jungali. His wife Jamni was kept as a mistress by the plantation manager, whose life, it was alleged by police, had been threatened by the coolies. Now, what becomes so clear is that ‘coolie anger’ is about adequate price for unit of labour plus high levels of sexual abuse. Bechu’s letters are to be placed in the context of a culture that denied the worker any dignity or self-respect; they are meant to correct readings of the coolie as malicious, unreliable, two-faced, and a constant whinger, and finally they point towards the coolie’s own capacity to reason, by which Bechu means the coolies’ own rather different entry into the discourse of modernity. What both the Non Pareil agitation and Bechu’s own letters also show is that indenture introduced the coolies to modernity, to the challenge of knowledge and to a nascent democratic spirit. Bechu was clearly exceptionally accomplished, even gifted, an ironic instance of the success of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s well-known 1835 Minute on Indian Education

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(‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ [Trautmann 1997: 111]). Indeed, he could interpret one of the strengths of imperialism – reliance on statistics – and use it against his masters. So at a time when the price of sugar was particularly low and planters used it as a pretext to cut wages (the agitation at Non Pareil in October 1896 was linked directly to it) Bechu made a case for the cessation of immigrant labour for the time being, diversification of agriculture (especially the cultivation of rice) and, for those willing to continue working on plantations, reindenture. These may seem the work of any correspondent to a colonial newspaper, but if we examine the letter (dated 24 November 1897) in which these recommendations are made we notice a remarkable use of statistical data and highly sophisticated analysis. The question posed by Bechu is this: Why continue to import labour when (a) the price of sugar is so low and overproduction simply makes the price fall even further, (b) the reindenture of able-bodied men costs much less than repatriating existing workers on the grounds that they are eligible for a return passage to India? The establishment of course charged him for libel (unsuccessfully), and in the end, in 1901, he left British Guinea, not to be heard of again. But he stands as an extraordinary instance of resistance within colonial regimes of control and, curiously, as a very astute critic of the political economy of plantation culture. The ‘recovery’ of his letters and the material surrounding his ‘two inconclusive trials in 1899’ (Seecharan 1999: 72) also demonstrates the degree to which the girmit ideology is also about modernity as a universal principle (of justice) and not an exclusively Western one. In any theory of the Indian diaspora, the girmit ideology (even when the word girmit itself carries little social or cultural capital outside Fiji and possibly South Africa) stands out as one of its more tenacious paradigms because it links a particular mode of labour transaction (the political economy of classic capitalism) with movement of people. And, since the archive that underpins the ideology is a pre-given (it is in the past), it allows us to understand the literary corpus produced in the plantation diaspora in terms of a relatively unified experience. The case, as made here, is that the girmit ideology has many of the characteristics of classic definitions of ideology including some understanding of the end of ideology itself (the latter often transformed into the dream of a democratic polity). In terms of the Indian diasporic imaginary the girmit ideology’s significance lies in the way in which it functions as a discursive crucible of unhappiness, and as a means of understanding the ways in which we have invested in our own unhappiness. For the people of the old plantation-Indian diaspora the girmit ideology is the ghost that reminds the son of the endless unhappiness of diaspora ‘Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away’ (Hamlet I. v. 12–13).

2

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The transplanted Hindu–Muslim rural culture of Trinidad into which my father was born early in the century was still a whole culture, close to India. (V. S. Naipaul 1983: iii–iv)

‘Despotism tempered by sugar’ is how Trollope defined the power of the sugar plantocracy. From Sanadhya and Bechu to David Dabydeen and Samuel Selvon, sugar functions as both commodity and metaphor. It creates the circumstances as well as the necessary revenant, a memory that leaves a ghostly residue of the past on the familiarly present. In the arcade of Hanuman House . . . there was already the evening assembly of old men . . . pulling at clay cheelums that glowed red and smelled of ganja and burnt sacking. . . . They could not speak English and were not interested in the land where they lived; it was a place where they had come for a short time and stayed longer than they expected. They continually talked of going back to India, but when the opportunity came, many refused, afraid of the unknown, afraid to leave the familiar temporariness. (Naipaul 1961: 174) What the legacy of sugar invokes is of course a history that, as girmit, is part of communal memory. This history, as we have already seen, is a subaltern history of indenture, the historical archive of which began the moment a motley crowd of illiterate peasants entered modernity via an emigration certificate signed by a Protector of Emigrants in Calcutta or Madras. Indenture history, located in the charged temporality of girmit when experience altered linear time into relentless, ever-present labour, has produced, as we have seen, its enabling aesthetic, none more powerful or influential than that of V. S. Naipaul. To make the link between a diaspora poetics and indenture history with Naipaul as our dominant proof text we need to identify significantly charged or traumatic historical moments and then rework them back into the domain of the literary as a mode of aesthetic freedom or release. The latter, that is, the domain of the literary, was for Naipaul a matter of writing allegories of the nation within a profoundly Baudelairean ‘consciousness of modernity’ which, as an attitude, was grounded in the project of a critical Enlightenment (Foucault 1992: 101). A mistaken reading of this attitude of modernity in which Naipaul was read apart from his plantation history has been largely responsible for a

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critical discourse which has seen him as a thoroughly canonical English writer who insists on the autonomy of art. Not unusually, he was appropriated by the English as the detached realist reader of society (see, for instance, Lord David Cecil in Naipaul 1996b: 95.2: 6) whose attitude is one that fails to recognize modernity as a mode also available to non-Western peoples. This is an odd state of affairs because Naipaul is an anguished observer traumatized by what I have called the girmit ideology. He also began as a writer bent on capturing in a manner hitherto unsurpassed the inflections of a creolized English in his fiction. These are some of the contradictions we need to keep in mind as we set out to establish, probably for the first time in some detail, the structural links between the work of arguably the most important postcolonial writer in the English language and his diasporic background. These are complex matters that would require a work devoted exclusively to V. S. Naipaul and indenture history, which is why neither the historical account nor the textual survey of Naipaul’s works and critics can be offered here (and in Chapter 3) in anywhere near the comprehensiveness it deserves. I want to begin by reinflecting an essay by Fredric Jameson which has already been subjected to some severe criticism. It is an uneven piece marred by an enthusiasm for formal closure that does not stand up to the textual evidence. However, if we were to think through Jameson’s argument with reference to the Naipaul corpus, and especially his early West Indian novels, we can construct a descriptive model that mirrors Naipaul’s own writing as national allegories. We can then reformulate Fredric Jameson’s central thesis about Third World texts alone being national allegories (1986: 69) to read: ‘All cultures, at particular moments of their history, produce national allegories.’ To this we could add, more specifically, that V. S. Naipaul’s works about the Indian diaspora are allegories of that diaspora. Let me then rewrite Jameson’s well-known passage to read: V. S. Naipaul’s fictions about the Indian diaspora are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call diasporic allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. The texts of Naipaul are of course much more, but we need to postpone that discussion because it would require analysis of an order very different from what I offer here. The question that immediately comes to mind, and one that must be addressed at length, is: ‘What are the historical facts that these texts allegorize in the first instance?’ Here Rob Nixon’s critique of Naipaul is a good point of entry: ‘The oeuvres of both V. S. Naipaul and his brother Shiva are dotted with instances of them rallying to the defense of the [old] Indian diaspora, whether in Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam. . . .’ (Nixon 1992: 34). This is damnation with faint praise because the partiality shown, at least in Nixon’s eyes, does not make Naipaul any less colonial or any less hypocritical, given that he commits the singular sin of claiming the privileges of the ‘exile’ or refugee without, in the strict

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sense, being one. The problem with Naipaul, as Nixon rightly points out, is that he doesn’t come clean on his pretensions. His aesthetic is modernist (after Baudelaire), his world-view at times unambiguously racist and ‘instrumentalist’, and even his definition of the colonial is valid only if it were applied lock, stock and barrel to the ‘West Indian migrant communities’ (136) by which, I suspect, Nixon means, in particular, the (East) Indian migrant community. This much is self-evident, and no defence need be mounted here. But what the critique fails to examine is precisely the conditions that give rise to a particularist point of view and why it is that Naipaul and his brother Shiva remain sympathetic to people who share their indenture background. Here we fall squarely back on to questions of diaspora and its aesthetic representation in V. S. Naipaul. What, then, is the history of the old Indian diaspora that surfaces so powerfully in his early fiction from The Mystic Masseur (1957) to The Mimic Men (1967a), and which begins to return in works written after Finding the Centre (1984)? I want to rethink this history so as to avoid the celebration of the diasporic experience as an ‘exemplary postcoloniality’. The ‘spirit of Marx’ (Derrida 1994: 53) warns us that any social theory must be subtended by reference to real struggles and/ or real material conditions, the ‘realities of oppression as known and experienced by members of the relevant class, community, or interest group’ (Norris quoted in Parry 1994: 14) so as to avoid what Benita Parry in an astute critique of Homi Bhabha has termed abstract theory’s endless turning ‘in the gyre of the present’ (Parry 1994: 24). We need to advance two critical strategies of reading here. First, we need to address Naipaul’s diasporic history and, second, we need to argue, creatively, that Naipaul’s works are allegories of the diasporic writer and the colonizer. The latter may be addressed with reference to the structural inevitability of mimicry in Naipaul’s art because for the colonized, as (plantation culture’s) diasporic subject, ‘slave’ mimicry (of the colonial universal since the diaspora’s own particularity had no value) was both innocuous (from the colonial point of view ) and subversive (from the point of view of the colonized subject) since it opened the way to a degree of self-legitimization, (self-) projection or representation and even self-transcendence. In a revealing moment Naipaul gives an instance of how mimicry works with reference to signs (in English) which, for the diasporic subject, have no meaning since the signs could not be connected to self-evident referents. He gives the example of ‘Wordsworth’s notorious poem about the daffodil’, ‘a pretty enough flower, no doubt’, but one that he had never seen (Naipaul 1972: 23). Later in the same essay (‘Jasmine’) Naipaul refers to the scent of a flower that he had known from his childhood but the name of which he had never discovered. That evening in British Guinea [Guyana] as the scent wafts towards him he asks his hosts for the name of the flower. ‘We call it jasmine,’ they reply (29). As he walks away with a sprig of jasmine stuck in the ‘top buttonhole of [his] shirt’ Naipaul remarks, ‘But the word and the flower had been separate in my mind for too long. They did not come together’. Mimicry has a similar disjunctive force: a mastery of the language of the colonizer through the impeccable logic of structural difference (paradigmatically

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substituting English icons and images for their own), but being alienated from the colonizer’s history and culture (the tradition, Rooplall Monar’s ‘backraman English’, was not their own), the colonized diaspora cannot internalize the world contained within that language with any phenomenological certainty.1 It is only when the colonized enters the metropolitan centres of Empire that the disjunction and the power of a colonial pedagogy, a ‘monkish, medieval, learning quite separate from everyday things’, becomes obvious (V. S. Naipaul 1987: 108). This understanding is important, as it allows us to contextualize a much misunderstood aspect of Naipaul’s writings, that is, the degree to which Naipaul’s cultural prejudices and his coloniality are a function of a history of colonial education and indeed of plantation social history. The origins of the counter-narrative go back in time to Naipaul’s own father, Seepersad Naipaul, about whom he writes: My father rejecting one world, came into contact with another. In him was played out the whole tragic drama of an ancient civilization coming into contact with a hideous colonial mimicry of another civilization. (V. S. Naipaul 1996a I:1.3) In spite of Naipaul’s derisory readings of the past (‘or the past will kill,’ he had warned Indians [1977: 174]), his own diasporic past has to be brought into discussions about his art. Diaspora time, originally linked to the concepts of ‘scatter’ and ‘evolution’, now parts company with the time of the Motherland which always produces a unidirectional, linear narrative. In Paul Gilroy’s narrative of The Black Atlantic (1993) time has to be located in key spaces one of which is the Middle Passage itself. The ship, the medium of mercantile capitalism and of the (middle) passage of both slavery and indenture, is the first of the cultural units in which social relations were re-sited and renegotiated. The ship and the passage are then a chronotope, like the road in picaresque novels without which the picaro hero loses all sense of who he is. In the case of the old Indian diaspora, the ‘chronotopic’ space of the ship is absolutely pivotal; it produced a site where caste purities were largely lost (after all, the crossing of – – – – the dark ocean, the kalapanı, signified, at one level, the loss of caste) and a new – – –– form of socialization that went by the name of jahajı-bhaı (ship-brotherhood) created. Social interactions during these lengthy sea voyages began a process that led to the remaking of cultural and ethnic identities, to a critical self-reflexivity of the kind missing from the stratified and less mobile institutions of the homeland. This is especially so if we remember that the indentured labourers were ‘working class’ people who had been ‘born into a culture characterized by the persistence of precapitalist relationships (or by the absence of notions of “citizenship,” “individualism,” “equality before law,” and so on)’ (Chakrabarty 1989: xiii). These precapitalist relationships began to be modified the moment this ragged and destitute crowd assembled in the space of the ships, and the discourses that emerged in due course became charged, as we have seen in both Sanadhya and Bechu, with questions of oppression and its transcendence.

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Contrary to absolutist theories that implied lived diaspora experience as being forever locked into reveries of homeland − the danger here is that one begins to repeat racist or nativist discourses of cultural anteriority and superiority which emphasize lost glories (myths replacing history) − diaspora radically reinterrogates the actual experience of life on cotton, tobacco and sugar cane plantations so as to represent themselves (people of the old Indian diaspora) as ‘creatures of peasant flesh squelching through mud and cane-field, bearing about [them] the stench of fish and fresh blood’ (Dabydeen 1984: 9). In rereading one’s past, one does not so much create timeless narratives as use real material experiences as a ‘means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ (Benjamin quoted in Gilroy 1993: 187). This memory has only recently come to be associated with modes of resistance to colonial hegemony which began the moment the subaltern entered the ‘colonial’ space of the ship or barrack. The interactions during the lengthy sea voyages began a process that led to the remaking of cultural and ethnic identities and to the displacement of ‘desire for a “homeland” ’ with what Avtar Brah has called ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1996: 197). These processes never come to a standstill in diaspora cultures; they continue to permeate all aspects of diasporic life as ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ are placed in a ‘creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origin’ (Brah 193). Since cultural situations are not fixed but mobile, since cultures travel and become contaminated in the process, a nativist (millenarian) discourse must be rewritten through a theoretically aware and critically selfreflexive diasporic discourse. The ground of that self-reflexivity in Naipaul and the historical weight of his diasporic allegories are to be located in indenture, out of which grew, as we have seen, a girmit ideology. We can now return to both equipped with a stronger historical sense.

The system and the passage ‘No space ever vanishes utterly, leaving no trace,’ wrote Henri Lefèbvre (1995: 164). And no space – mental, physical, social – is simply real or ideal. Space is always both: ideal in the sense of being positive, mathematical, logical, and real in the sense of being social and psychological. If Lefèbvre is correct in interpreting the ‘role of space, as knowledge, and action’ (11) even when it is recalled ‘tragically’ (20), then the space of the indenture ships in which Indians were sent to the sugar colonies of the West Indies and elsewhere, and the experience of the passage are important elements in the social imaginary of these people. I would argue, with reference to Naipaul and other writers of the old Indian diaspora of indenture, that any account of the production and reproduction of diaspora culture must begin with the ship’s passage: ‘indenture lives in dates and distances’, writes Arnold Itwaru in his poem ‘We Have Survived’ (1987: 293). So what was the system of indenture and the passage like, more specifically, for the plantation colony of Trinidad to which V. S. Naipaul’s forebears

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emigrated? In very general terms, some of the features of the system have been signalled in the previous chapter where the system was linked to my theorization of the girmit ideology. What I have to say here with reference in particular to Trinidad grows out of the more generalist argument already presented. Since the documentary evidence for indenture in respect of Trinidad is extensive, we shall have to be selective in our survey. Indian immigration to Trinidad began on 30 May 1845 with the arrival of 197 men, 28 women and one infant in the ship Fatel Razack from Calcutta. Between 1845 and 1917, when indenture was abolished, 143,900 people were brought to Trinidad (Brereton 1985: 21). For many of these migrants India was not a nation, but simply a ‘composite’ village in Bihar, the region that collectively produced, between 1844 and 1864, 62 per cent (120,409) of the total number of emigrants to the colonies (Lal 1983: 48–9). The point is captured in a poem by Somduth Buckhory: Bharat Sabse pahale Ham Biharion Ka Uttar Ka Ek Chota Sa Gaon hota. . . . Before all else, India To us Biharis Is a small village In the north. . . . (1979: 65) This idea of homeland as a relatively homogenous village in Bihar is, however, filtered through experience in the space of the ship, where different castes and religions came together in spite of the rigid laws of Indian society. Where ‘real’ India continued to be divided along strict caste and communal lines, the construction of an imaginary India as a village in Bihar, as in Buckhory’s poem, is mediated through the social configurations of the new space in the hull of ships. The space allotted to each labourer (coolie) in a ship was small; and, even though single men and single women were divided by a buffer of married couples, privacy was nonexistent. The first reference to officially sanctioned space was made in the 1855 regulations, in which an adult coolie was given a space of seventy-two cubic feet (2.039 square metres) and provision was made for the care of the sick in hospital bays. After the disastrous passage of Shah Allum in 1859, when 399 Indians died at sea, measures were taken to ensure that better safety equipment and lifeboats were kept on board (Tinker 1974: 145). The tragic fate of Shah Allum was a maritime disaster by any count, but there were few voyages when no one died. Between 1856 and 1857, for instance, the average

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mortality rate in the twelve ships that took 4,094 emigrants to the West Indies was 17.3 per cent or 707 of the total (Tinker 1974: 163). This compares poorly with the mortality rates of 1.2 per cent in ships to Australia carrying convicts. Voyages of up to six months were not infrequent. To get our perspective right we need to remember that ships from Britain to North America took four to five weeks, and slave ships from West Africa to the Caribbean would have taken a similar time. One of the shortest trips was that of ‘Syria in 1884: 58 days’. But this Syria ended up on Nasilai reef, Fiji, on 11 May with the death of fifty-six indentured labourers and three lascars (Lal 1979: 26). Although conditions began to change with the introduction of the steamship in the later years of the nineteenth century, it should be remembered that all migrants on voyages between 1837 and 1917 underwent more or less the same experience: from 1837 . . . to 1917 . . . the exportation of Indian labour was carried out under conditions which varied hardly at all. The mechanism, and what we may call the technology of emigration, was considerably improved; but the basic conditions remained the same. (Tinker 1974: 163–4) For people who were basically ‘landlubbers’, the space of the ship marked a radical break from their familiar surroundings. For most, this space was the first of two interludes (the second was the plantation itself) that separated them from eventual return. But the first of these spaces − the ship − was also characterized by two features that would eventually affect their psychic imaginary. The first, as we have already mentioned, was bonds of brotherhood (subsequently trans– – –– formed into the ‘sociality’ of jahajı-bhaı, literally ‘ship brotherhood’ but one presumes sisterhood, too) and the collapse of caste purities that grew out of the passage. On the plantations these bonds led to social configurations that were not unlike those of village networks in India, but much more intimate, because – – –– jahajı-bhaıs came into being through modes of socializing that transcended the – – – – strictures of caste as labourers crossed the kalapanı, the black sea, the ‘paglaa samundar’ (‘the mad ocean’)2 (Mahabir 1985: 52). Hugh Tinker refers to a particularly telling passage from G. A. Grierson’s citation of the words of a returned emigrant about the mixing of castes on board ships: ‘A man can eat anything on board ship. A ship is like a temple of Jagganath, where there are no caste restrictions’ (1974: 155). The second feature was the horror, menacing presence and pervasiveness of death (once as high as 30 per cent) and disease (Mangru 1987: 111). Amidst the wretchedness, one Ameerun’s emigration certificate (Seville, 1868) is amended to read ‘infant born on board’.3 The irony cannot be missed as there wasn’t a single emigrant who had not witnessed death and/or disease on board ship. The consequences of such desperation were recounted in a diary kept by Dr Wiley, a young surgeon superintendent on board Delharree en route to Trinidad (1872). In this diary he writes about a woman who killed her own child out of despair:

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October 31 [1872]: Blowing very hard, with heavy seas all day. Had to keep the coolies down below; unable to give a cooked meal. . . . One of the women killed her child, name Soonmereah – a strong healthy child – and another weak child died, gradually wasting away, although receiving . . . medical comforts. (Myers 1998: 9) In the cramped space, the constant crying of babies kept women’s nerves on edge, and it didn’t take too much provocation for them to crack. In the end, these experiences ‘both shattered and strengthened them’ (Tinker 1974: 117). A number of Europeans involved in these voyages (captains and doctors) compared them to the Middle Passage of slavery, especially in so far as the ‘voyage was an unforgettable episode of drama and endurance’ (Tinker 1974: 118). Captain E. Swinton of Salsette (Calcutta to Port of Spain 17 March–2 July 1858) entered the following in his diary about an epidemic on board: June 8 [1858]: One man died, age 35. Another man died; this is the last of another family, who said this morning he was much better, and really appeared far from a dying man; but it is most odd, how very suddenly these people go off from apparent medium health to general debility, though kept up with port wine and soup; and were it not for the unremitting attention of Jane [Swinton’s wife], many of them would have sunk under the disease. I hope she may not herself fall a prey to her disinterested kindness, but she seems to have no fear. (Myers 1998: 11–2) In subsequent years, many emigrants would look back at the passage itself as the most traumatic moment of their lives; it was during the passage that they thought about their homeland most intensely, and many of the fantasies of the homeland were probably created there and then. Since, to reprise Lefèbvre, ‘no space ever vanishes utterly’, the ship was a space that outlived its original design. But return was never out of their minds, and the idea of return – a homing desire, so to speak (although most did not return) – was to become one of the frames of their narrative of endurance on the plantation and, subsequently, in the land of their adoption.

The plantation barracks one a de barrick have six room man dey one room oman dey one room who have wife dem livin different barrick who have cheren dem livin in one room

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only bar up in de center if you farting i could hear if you farting dem could hear (Mahabir 1985: 55–6) After the ship, the other space was the barracks in which indentured labourers were housed, and the sugar plantations on which they worked. These are not ideal but real spaces, constructed to ensure specific productive activities. Like the space of ships (meant for cargo), the space of the barracks on the plantations had been designed for another purpose (for slavery) and was therefore totally inappropriate for a system that, in theory at any rate, emphasized communal life. Furthermore, these barracks duplicated the architecture of depots, the collecting places at both ports of embarkation and of disembarkation. The typical depot in Calcutta, the major port of embarkation, was in the shape of a semicircle with the sheds for cooking on the periphery and a nullah or large drainage system along the diameter. From the periphery to the centre of the diameter, the semicircle was divided by a road leading to a hospital on the left. On the right of the road were coolie bungalows not unlike the barracks on the plantations. Among the emigrants ‘deepoo’ (from the word ‘depot’) subsequently meant a place from where you began your period of banishment and to which one may be subsequently banished. The break from a homogenous village life with its obligatory kinship patterns along lines of caste and clan produced some interesting departures from the norms of village life in the space of these depots and subsequently barracks. Occasionally there were depot marriages between men and women of different castes and religions. For women, marriage meant that they would lead a slightly more secure life on the plantations. For the first time in their lives the emigrants came into contact with white men and their colonial clerks, and they had to adjust to new people and conditions. Sometimes they wore clothes (largely discarded army clothes) they had never worn before. In the colonies themselves, the barracks were part of general plantation culture, unchanged since the days of slavery, and placed close to the mills, or on the estates. In Chapter 1 we recounted the tale of one unusual indentured labourer to Fiji, Totaram Sanadhya, who referred to these dark, monotonous and menacing coolie – lines as ‘bhutlen’ (haunted lines) and remarked on their dehumanizing characteristics: lines of 30 or 40 rooms constructed back to back and unchanged throughout the period of indenture (ninety years). Eric Williams’s description of the barracks echoes both Sanadhya’s and the indenture folklorist’s accounts (as well as that of Naipaul’s Mr Biswas): The barrack is a long wooden building eleven or twelve feet wide, containing perhaps eight or ten small rooms divided from each other by wooden partitions not reaching the roof. The roof is of galvanised iron, without any ceiling; and the heat of the sun by day and the cold by night take full effect

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upon the occupants. By standing on a box the occupant of one room can easily look over the partition into the adjoining one, and can easily climb over. A family has a simple room in which to bring up their boys and girls if they had children. . . . There are no places for cooking, no latrines. The men and women, boys and girls, go together into the canes or bush when nature requires . . . [the wife is left alone if the husband is hospitalized]. . . . With all these can we wonder at the frequent wife-murders and general demoralization amongst the Indian immigrants? In fact the barrack life is one approaching promiscuous intercourse. (Williams 1964: 105) In an obvious allusion to this description, we read in A House for Mr Biswas that it was Mr Biswas’s experience in the barracks of Green Vale that triggered his desire to own a house. As soon as he saw the barracks Mr. Biswas decided that the time had come for him to build his own house, by whatever means. The barracks gave one room to one family, and sheltered twelve families in one long room divided into twelve. This long room was built of wood and stood on low concrete pillars. The whitewash on the walls had turned to dust. . . . The corrugated iron roof projected on one side to make a long gallery, divided by rough partitions into twelve kitchen spaces, so open that when it rained hard twelve cooks had to take twelve coal-pots to twelve rooms. The ten middle rooms each had a front door and a back window. The rooms at the end had a front door, a back window, and a side window. Mr. Biswas, as a driver, was given an end room. (Naipaul 1961: 185–6) The coolie was for all intents and purposes a convict, imprisoned on his/her master’s estate with considerable limits to his/her freedom. Punishment for vagrancy or ‘marronage’ (Tinker 1989: 67) was harsh (confinement in stocks was not uncommon), and both hospitals and jails on the estates seem to have been quite full at any given time.4 In Eric Williams’s telling prose, ‘The grand discipline of the system of indenture and the principal incentive to labour was the jail. Indentured labour was, to paraphrase Carlyle, slavery plus a constable’ (1964: 195). The system thus bred its own forms of barbarism. There were cases of girls being sold by their fathers to a number of people, sometimes with tragic consequences.5 Cane, after all, is bitter, as Samuel Selvon was to observe later. It was in these barracks and within the confines of the plantation that ‘the boundary of existence’ (Tinker 1974: 178) was defined, and it was in this second space (after the space of the ship) that other kinds of intercommunal and interpersonal relations developed. In his early study of cultural continuity among the Indians of Trinidad, Morton Klass pointed out that, although Indians did not migrate ‘in kin or village groups, or rarely even in small family groups’ (Klass 1988: 23), they nevertheless created social structures, albeit with

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a somewhat stronger emphasis on the individual. Their social status was no different from that of free slaves, whose role, against the wishes of the freed slaves, as Jean Rhys suggests in Wide Sargasso Sea (1997: 17), as bonded workers they took on. Their hours of work were long and arduous (between twelve and sixteen hours at a stretch) and wages minimal (about a shilling or ten cents per day, from which over one-third was taken for rations supplied) (Klass 1988: 14–5). Wages remained virtually unchanged throughout ninety years of indenture, work on the sugar estates continued to be hard, and survival was a matter of belief in the possibility of return to India, hopefully a rich man. Suicides were high, attributed in large part, as Sir Arthur Gordon, governor of British Guiana, observed, to ‘nostalgia or an intense desire to return to India which they had no means of gratifying’ (Tara Singh 1979). Some did return, though few returning immigrants from British Guiana, for instance, had made fortunes much in excess of £5 (Nath 1950: 221–2). The vast majority, it seems, couldn’t really show how they had benefited from their sojourn as indentured labourers. In Mauritius only 3 per cent of the Indian population of 152,861 had bank deposits in 1874. But land was made available to Indians, especially in Trinidad, while in Fiji both the crown and the Colonial Sugar Refining (CSR) Company leased out small plots of land for farming to Indians who had stayed behind. A return ticket was available to the coolies after ten years (or two continuous indentures). Approximately one-fifth took advantage of this in Guyana (far fewer in the case of Fiji emigrants). Many stories were handed down about people who returned, some true, many others apocryphal, yet they tell the same tales of disillusionment. Return to the verities of caste and village obligation and to a non-cash economy in some instances was devastating, as is evident from Totaram Sanadhya’s account. Stories of wives and their children being left behind in the ports of disembarkation to be lost among the huge mass of the Calcutta poor were not uncommon. One such tale may be found in Seepersad Naipaul’s heavily ironic reconstruction of what lay in store for those who returned (S. Naipaul 1950: 13). This is a short narrative occasioned by Trinidad’s colonial government’s agreement to honour a long-standing agreement by which indentured labourers could claim a return passage home upon completing their contracts. Seepersad Naipaul tells us that some 3,000, ranging from the well-to-do to paupers, had registered already to return to their homeland, ‘their janmabhumi, to die there’. Whether the first ‘indenture’ ship in fourteen years (the last time people left for India under the free return passage scheme was in 1936) finally sailed we are not told. 7 Seepersad Naipaul is more interested in re-creating what by then was common knowledge in Trinidad: that Indians who returned wanted to come back as soon as they reached Calcutta. Seepersad Naipaul suggests the usual difficulties encountered by returnees: loss of caste, loss of language, and the simple fact that the experience of Trinidad had changed them for good. In Calcutta ‘they add to the congested colony of colonial down-and-outs, or tapuwallahs, as the repatriates from the colonies are contemptuously called’. The returned migrants see ‘hundreds of migrants from the colonies . . . in wretched conditions in Matiaburz, Calcutta’s number one slum area’. 6

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The people The people of the old Indian diaspora are linked to the production of one commodity − sugar – a word whose origin in the Hindi word sakkar ´ adds a certain tragic poignancy to its use. From the very beginning work on the sugar plantations was an activity of the body, an act of labour with both material (sugar cane, wood, stove) and matériel (mills, tools such as the hoe, apparatus of coercion such as the whip, and so on). It sustained life but sweetened the blood and led to dia– – – betes: ‘sugar-sweet blood’ (mı th . a khun) is the plantation word for this debilitating condition. Samuel Selvon’s ‘Cane Is Bitter’ and David Dabydeen’s fantasies of the cane-cutter (Dabydeen 1984: 25–6, 52–4) gain their strength from the surplus value of the sign of ‘sugar’. ‘The working men’, wrote Marx, ‘have no country’ (Chakrabarty 1989: 228); for indentured labourers the plantation became their ‘country’, all experience, all narrative had to be linked back to plantation life and to ‘sugar’. V. S. Naipaul acknowledges this in unlikely places. In A Turn in the South, Naipaul’s sojourn into the American South, we read: Growing up in Trinidad, I had never wanted to be employed. I had always wanted to be a free man. This was partly the effect of my peasant Indian background and the colonial agricultural society of Trinidad. And though it had not been easy in the beginning, I had remained a free man. (1989: 261) In this passage Naipaul does not allude to the unequal relations of power in the colonies and those impediments placed before the descendants of indentured labourers in their quest for a political voice. He is happy to essentialize, to present desire for freedom as an act of pure will and becoming. In doing so, the materiality of plantation life and the lives of people in the space of the plantation are, finally, moved to the level of an aesthetic so totally alien to the lone Bechu on a plantation in British Guinea. Although the material basis of diaspora poetics is erased, the link between one’s ‘background’ and one’s being is nevertheless presented as the key to an understanding of the self. The peasant in Naipaul’s passage, the subaltern indentured labourer in our way of thinking, however, survives through another form of documentation. In the emigration certificates (later ‘emigration passes’) preserved in the archives of Suva, Georgetown, Coromandel (Mauritius), Port of Spain, and in the Documentation Centre in Durban, one confronts the labourer’s entry into imperial history. People without history, people who were illiterate, finally spell out their personal genealogies − their father’s name, their village, their next of kin, their marital status, their age − and undergo, for the first time in their lives, a medical examination by the depot surgeon. The emigration certificates are, in one significant manner, the document that interpellates them as ‘modern’ or ‘Enlightenment’ subjects, but the knowledge through which this subjectivity is created (the information on the certificates) is not known to them. The migrants can’t use these certificates; they do not know their contents; nor will

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they ever know that they will be preserved in colonial archives so that their children and grandchildren (people like V. S. Naipaul or myself) would dig them up some day to legitimate their own lives. Removed from their immediate use value as documents of self-identity, they nevertheless function as erstwhile documents through which a certain (retrospective) humanity may be given to a people without ‘history’. As social documents they show that the typical migrant was a Hindu man in his twenties from one of the overcrowded villages of North India. He would be illiterate, of middling to low caste, with no understanding of geography or modern medicine. On the 1866 voyage of Seville to Trinidad, for instance, the vast bulk of the migrants were lower-caste Hindus and Muslims: – – – – ahır (cattle owners), camar (leather-workers), kurmı (cultivators), mocı (shoe– – makers), sonar (jewellers) and lohar (blacksmiths). Superstitious in the extreme, many of the migrants, in oral narratives passed down to subsequent genera– – tions, recounted how they had been conned by an arkath . ı (a tout or nefarious – – recruiter) into believing that they were to undergo a very short voyage to a tapu (an island, in the case of Trinidad referred to as Chinidad) from which they would return rich men and women. In the metropolitan depots of Calcutta and Madras, where they waited for the next ship, they probably ate better food than they had eaten before: ‘depot nuh doing one ting / only cook and full it belly / . . . eat and sleep’ (Mahabir 1985: 67). Although men outnumbered women almost ten to one at the beginning (improving to ten to six towards the end), I cite a woman’s emigration certificate here because indenture was especially cruel to women, their past histories grossly misrepresented and their role as workers (on plantations) invariably under the interdiction of sexual threat.8 Here, then, is a typical emigration certificate for Ahladee, a woman migrant to Trinidad in 1866.9 EMIGRATION CERTIFICATE Ship No. 97 Trinidad Emigration Agency Depot No. 1271 Calcutta,

the 1st November 1866

Ship’s Name, ............................................................. Salisbury Name, ..........................................................................Ahladee Father’s Name, ............................................................. Sagoon Age, ....................................................................................... 24 Sex, ............................................................................... Female Caste, ............................................................................ Bagdee Occupation, ..................................................................______ Name of next of Kin, .......................................Rodoy Brother If married to whom,......................................................______ Zillah,......................................................................... Burdwan Pergunnah,......................................................... Panaghur (?) Village, .....................................................................................? Marks, .......................................................................................

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Certified that I have examined and passed the above-named as a fit Subject of Emigration, and that she is free from bodily and mental disease. Having been vaccinated. Surgeon Superintendent (Sgd) Depot Surgeon (Sgd) I hereby certify that the woman above as described (whom I have engaged as a labourer on the part of the Government of Trinidad where she has expressed a willingness to proceed to work for Hire) has appeared before me and that I have explained to her all matters concerning her duties as an Emigrant, according to clause 43 of Act XIII of 1864. Protector of Emigrants at Calcutta (Sgd) Emigration Agent for Trinidad (Sgd) Narratives of indenture have been largely about men, about their miserable and abject bodies. But equally miserable and much more abject were the bodies of women, the silent, rarely written underside of indenture experience. We need to reconfigure the indenture woman, V. S. Naipaul’s grandmother, the real Mrs Tulsi. Behind the emigration certificate are rules and regulations. A statutory quota, for instance, required that a certain percentage of workers had to be women. Since this quota was hard to fill, the ‘kidnapping of women, and recruitment of prostitutes and beggars, and so forth were not unknown phenomena’ (Klass 1988: 13). The main areas of recruitment of ‘unattached’ women were the markets, railway stations, bazaars and temples. It is possible that occasionally when recruiters were pushed to fill their ‘female quotas’ they – – turned to the temple devadasıs or even kidnapped many high-caste widows (‘Brahmin widows formed an inordinate number of the females who migrated’ [Espinet 2004: 3]) whose lives had been made hell in these ‘twice-born’ households where ancient Hindu laws were strictly enforced: among the high castes ‘every Hindu girl was “practically a wife or widow” ’ before reaching the age of fourteen (Mangru quoted in Dabydeen and Samaroo 1987: 212). Two commissioners (McNeill and Lal) who had first-hand knowledge of Indian emigration, however, offer this corrective to popular misconceptions: ‘The women who came out consist as the 1/3 of married women who accompany their husbands, the remainder being mostly widows and women who have run away from their husbands or been put away by them. A small percentage are ordinary prostitutes. Of the women who emigrate otherwise than with their husbands and parents the great majority are not, as they are frequently represented to be, shamelessly immoral. They are women who have got into trouble and apparently emigrate to escape from a life of

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promiscuous prostitution which seems to be the alternative to emigration. . . . What appears to be true as regards a substantial number . . . is that they ran away from home alone accompanied by some one by whom they were abandoned, that they drifted into one of the large recruiting centres and after a time were picked up by the recruiter.’ (Cotton 372 quoted in Reddock 1984: 12) It is clear that, the examples of kidnapping and recruitment of ‘stray’ women in bazaars notwithstanding, the social background of women was no different from that of men, and their reasons for emigration possibly similar, too. There is, then, a diasporic repressed, an occluded history, the unspeakable side of indenture, not self-evident on the emigration certificates. In part the repression probably accounts for an imaginary, but powerful, narrative of how migrants were hoodwinked into indenture through promises of riches in the – – tapus, or island-colonies, though it must be added that real or imagined belief in being tricked is part of the narrative of diasporas anyway. Pioneer, frontier or settler communities share a history of sexuality that reflects the small numbers of women available to men. Indenture society shared many of the characteristics of the consequences of this disproportion because, like slavery, men were more valuable than women. Even so, those men and women who could live together found that their relationship had no legal status, since only Christian marriages were legal. Even though marriage ordinances were soon enacted (in 1856) thanks to Thomy Hugon, the act defining Indian marriage in 1860 was still called the Heathen Marriages Act. The disproportionate number of women to men led to tension between sexes; and violent murders over women, though not many, were nevertheless not uncommon. By the end of 1842 in Mauritius, for instance, only 1,014 women had arrived as indentured labourers against 25,076 men (Pineo 1984: 28). The proportion of women to men is less unbalanced in the later years owing largely to a shift from a ‘merchant-controlled’ immigration policy to a ‘nationally sanctioned’ one which in turn encouraged the emigration of family units (Carter 1992: 6). Nevertheless, even at the best of times the proportion of men to women was hardly ever better than two to one. Of the 28,030 indentured labourers sent to Trinidad between 1845 and 1870 only 9,280 or about 35 per cent were women (Wood 1968: 156). In letters to the Mauritius Protector of Immigrants, Thomy Hugon, and in letters by him, we find many examples of what was then called ‘concubinage’ and the barter of women by men. Writes Hugon: ‘The practice of men selling their concubines is quite of local growth, and has only to be discouraged to cease entirely, it is never heard in India.’10 But women, too, sometimes showed singular resilience and independence. In the case of one Rughoonundan, we discover that his partner of fourteen years, Toolsee, simply left him and their three children for another man.11 Bridget Brereton has connected plantation infidelity with the abnormal living conditions in the barracks and the radical collapse of the traditional village sanctions against infidelity, as well as the ‘frequent absences of husbands in jail or in hospital’ (Brereton 1979:

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182–3). In another essay, Brereton has pointed out that between 1889 and 1905 in Trinidad there were some 1,600 prosecutions of indentured labourers each year for ‘absence, desertion, vagrancy, or idleness’ (1985: 24). The materials that have survived also speak of mental illness and venereal disease among the Indian labourers linked, one suspects, directly to the non-availability of women on the plantations. So, too, may be explained the high rate of suicide. A. R. F. Webber, the author of the ‘first novel of Trinidad and Tobago’, had this to say about gender discrepancy and its consequences: The problems of sex on the sugar estate are the problems of that immigration system on which the very existence of the sugar industry, and consequently the whole industrial life of the colony, may be said to be at stake. . . . The proportion of females among the 100,000 immigrant population of British Guiana is frightfully meagre. This develops a fierceness of sentiment, on questions of sex, which is horrible to behold. . . . Wife slayers are hanged by the score: here a woman may be seen noseless, or, another, with both her hands lopped off, because some fiercely jealous lord and master had been wronged. Fierce, perhaps, as much because of the wrong that has been done him, as because of the difficulty with which he is faced in filling her place, with that freedom of choice, that would obtain under less strained conditions of proportion. (Webber 1988: 7) Although Webber takes considerable freedom with history here, the ferocity of sexual politics on the plantations is on record and is one of the more barbaric aspects of the old Indian diaspora. Between 1872 and 1890 in British Guiana, seventy-nine women were killed, by and large by jealous lovers or husbands (Moore 1984). Echoing Webber, Alfred H. Mendes, a Portuguese Creole and an early man of letters of Trinidad, writes in his provocative short story ‘Boodhoo’: Well, Panalal had long been suspecting his wife of infidelity. . . . And Panalal had his suspicions verified to-day. Fortunately the discovery was made in daylight, otherwise Mulemath, Panalal’s wife, would have been dead tonight, chopped with a cutlass. . . . O yes, the Indians made no mistake about unfaithful wives! They were merciless when it came to that. (Mendes 1932: 23) The imbalance between sexes meant that some men looked to other races and to other men for sexual pleasures. The documentary sources refer to homosexuality as an ‘unnatural crime’ but provide few statistics. However, when the ‘crime’ itself is mentioned it is often associated with the North Indians (Calcuttiyas) rather than with the Tamils (Madrasis). Much later, in Trinidad and in Mauritius, it was not uncommon for Indian men to have sexual relationships with Creole women (Visits and Despatches n.d.: 248). But the evidence

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before 1871 in Trinidad shows that interracial cohabitation or living together in the same house was unheard of. Bridget Brereton for instance writes: ‘As late as 1871 the Protector of Immigration believed that no single case of cohabitation of male or female Indians with Creoles existed’ (1981: 111). In ‘Boodhoo’, Alfred H. Mendes gives the subject a rare twist through a study of plantation sexual desire presented as a series of symmetrical relationships. In this seminal narrative powerful, and sometimes ferocious, passions of the indentured labourers are deflected on to the lives of white overseers of plantations. The illicit love between the planter Henry Lawrence and a young coolie girl fractures the lines of apartheid separating coolie and master. The surviving son of this liaison (a daughter died), Boodhoo is employed by Henry as a helping hand around his sprawling bungalow. When Minnie Lawrence, Henry’s very young wife who is about the same age as Boodhoo, comes to the plantation she soon ends up having a brief but passionate affair with Boodhoo. Earlier she had remarked: It was unimaginable to her that white men, men of her blood, should be so filthy as to take to themselves these Indian women. And to have children by them! The thought nauseated her. (Mendes 1932: 19) But it is Minnie herself who falls for the sullen Boodhoo and repeats her husband’s tryst with Boodhoo’s teenage mother some twenty years before. Since this is too great a breach of taboo, especially in respect of a white woman–coolie relationship, Mendes can resolve the crisis only through the sentimentalist ploy of death during childbirth. And, of course, colonial political correctness, even for Mendes who had no coolie connection, dictated that there can be no ambiguity about the race of the child who is born: ‘blue eyes, pink skin and fair hair’. No hint of Boodhoo’s chocolate complexion here! Mendes’s short story is symptomatic of a colonial phobia of difference and purity which also, implicitly, acts as a censor to his writing. Indenture was, therefore, especially cruel to women. Life was difficult enough for women in India, but at least back ‘home’ there was the possibility of the security of sons and of the extended social order. Here childbearing could not be removed from two other factors: work on the plantations and the constantly uneasy nature of sexual relations between men and women. Birth rates were unusually low, largely because children just simply couldn’t be looked after properly. But it may also be because women didn’t want to see their children (and daughters in particular) repeat their own suffering. Child-murders and abortions were not uncommon, and midwives willing to perform abortions were in demand. For surviving children work on the sugar plantations at an early age became their destiny, too, since schools were nonexistent and child labour, because it was cheap, was indirectly encouraged by the planters. Years later, Rajkumari Singh, the first major Indo-Caribbean woman poet, wrote a poem called ‘Per Ajie’ (‘Great Grandmother’) which she dedicated to the first indenture immigrant woman:

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Per Ajie I can see How in stature Thou didst grow Shoulders up Head held high The challenge In thine eye. (quoted in Poynting 1990: 103)

The challenge of hybridity Stuart Hall has referred to the East Indians of Guyana and Trinidad (in those parts of the English-speaking West Indies where Indians exist in large numbers) as ethnic collectivities that exemplify the characteristics of plural cultural forms or institutions. Referring to Hindu marriage in the West Indies, he defines it as a plural cultural form because, though different, it has equal standing with ‘marriage of the western type’ (Hall 1977: 155). These plural cultural forms are specially evident among the East Indian communities. Six characteristics define the growth and persistence of such forms: (1) the existence of a large, ethnically identifiable community that (2) enters the socio-economic system only after its basic structures have been formed; (3) the presence of strong cultural traditions which (4) were not broken by other competing traditions as in the case of Afro-West Indians under slavery; (5) the presence of a relatively enlightened democratic apparatus that did not insist upon either forced assimilation or ethnic cleansing; and (6) a community that is able to live and work under conditions where inherited cultural traditions can be both preserved and transmitted (Hall 1977: 156). These characteristics may be found in any diaspora with strong cultural traditions that did not have to undergo years of cultural denial or denigration, as was the case under slavery. Further, for these plural societies to survive, a successful resistance to what may be called religious imperialism is essential. Above all, the persistence of such plural societies requires a large enough mass of people capable of deflecting or neutralizing, in particular, religious and cultural imperialism (in Trinidad it often meant resistance to the work of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission). Selwyn R. Cudjoe (2003) has pointed out how the indenture Indian diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago adapted cultural forms to their new environment so that folk forms such as Ramlila and other memorially recalled religious fables, as well as religio-cultural festivities such as Tajia (Muharram or Hosea), Diwali (Deepavali) and Holi (Phagua) could take root in the new environment. Often the attachment to these forms indicated a desire to create artistic life-worlds that would evade the surveillance mechanism of the colonial order with its own post-Macaulay definition of culture. In the case of the East Indians referred to by Stuart Hall their successful ‘insulation’ also led to their being despised by both Afro-West Indians and Europeans alike.12 Steadfastly refusing large-scale intermarriage or

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Europeanization, they maintained an almost impregnable social cohesion that was very different from how Afro-Caribbean society functioned (Lowenthal 1967: 605–9). Their radical ‘alterities’ are evident in George Lamming’s observation that for him the enduring importance of A House for Mr Biswas lay in the fact that ‘it is only through this novel that many areas of the non-Indian Caribbean, including Trinidad, got some glimpse of the movement and the substance of life within that Indian world’ (Lamming 1989: 47). There are several reasons for the special cohesion, and even exclusivism, noted by both Hall and Lamming. The experience of the passage and the plantation produced a group or clan ethos that was remarkably uniform. They created languages of their own as in Fiji (Fiji Hindi) or absorbed versions of Creole (as in the West Indies and Mauritius). At one crucial level Indian migrants adopted, in more than just a limited sense, a caste egalitarianism that is often inaccurately explained as a simple consequence of crossing the black waters. The breakdown of caste was a result of new modes of social organization that arose out of the demands made upon human interaction in the space of the ships and barracks. Cross-caste marriages were not uncommon, though Brahmins and Kshatriyas (the two upper castes) did make an effort to maintain some semblance of caste solidarity by marrying among their own castes. None the less, economic mobility through entrepreneurial skills had nothing to do with caste in a land where tradition did not matter and no one came – – – with an inheritance, so that ahırs and camars often outperformed the baniyas (shopkeepers). There was, as Tinker mentions in passing, the ‘Samuel Smiles atmosphere of the mid-Victorian age’ that emphasized hard work and individualism (Tinker 1974: 223), although for Mr Biswas the lives of Samuel Smiles’s heroes had no meaning in Trinidad (Naipaul 1961: 71–2). Success in life became the desired aim. Within 50 years of indenture the 1891 Trinidad census showed that, of a total population of 70,218 Indians, 39,340, or 57 per cent, resided outside the estates, though the vast bulk of working men and women remained agricultural labourers. Yet these very working-class men and women had adapted to an alien (capitalist) mode of production: the 1891 census also showed 665 shopkeepers, 125 goldsmiths and silversmiths, 720 peasant proprietors, and so on (Laurence 1985: 110–1). The community even as it continued to remain culturally homogeneous, linked in complex ways to an imaginary India that survived in highly mediatized ways, was not unaffected by other life worlds. Rum culture, a defining feature of plantation life generally, whether Creole or Indian, grew to become a very special feature of indenture society. A race that had no history of drinking became one of the larger per-capita consumers of liquor in the world. ‘Rum is a great curse to these people’, wrote John Morton of Trinidad in his journal on 24 May, 1868 (Morton 1916: 54). But relations with other races (Afro-West Indians, Fijians) remained tense, each creating stereotypes of the other. Indians continued to be seen as ‘interlopers or pagans, filthy, violent and strange in their ways and customs’ (Panday 1989: 56). In the discourses of the popular, however, we find interactions of a different kind. One such discourse is the West Indian calypso, a form in which ‘the

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Trinidadian touches reality’ (Naipaul 1962: 75) and where, occasionally, class solidarity overrides questions of ethnicity even when, as Shalini Puri has pointed out, the place of the Indo-Caribbean in the Trinidadian national imaginary as depicted in calypso remains ambiguous (Puri 2004: 183–222). The calypsonian Cephas Alexander, who styled himself ‘The Mighty Killer’, claimed to know some Bhojpuri and was famous for his Indo-Trinidadian calypsos. ‘Grinding Masala’ is one of his best-known calypsos in this genre: This is really true Ah decide this year to marry a Hindu Aha! This is really true Ah decide this year to marry a Hindu. . . . Things now getting sweet They bring a set of dhal bhaat for me to eat Lahd! Is pepper like fire Ah cyan stan the bunnin I bawling fuh waataa So big belly Ramlal Come wid a coolie druman’ a dhantal Singing: Every time ah passin gal yuh grinin’ massala. . . . (Rohlehr 1990: 493) Deference to tradition and the creation of a relatively self-enclosed Indian community did not mean that interactions did not take place. In calypso after calypso we hear how the old Indian world was slowly but surely undergoing change. For instance, The Mighty Killer wrote the calypso ‘Indians adopting Creole names’: What’s wrong with the Indian people? As though their intention is for trouble. . . . Long ago was Sumitra, Ramnalawia Bulbasia and Oosankilia But now is Emily, Jean and Dinah And Dons and Dorothy. (Rohlehr 1990: 498) And Lord Eisenhower sings of their changing diet in ‘Creolised Indians’: It’s no more pumpkin talkarie Bargie or mango chutney They now eating stew beef, pork and salad With chicken macaroni. (Rohlehr 1990: 500) Though not always explicit, inter-racial relationships are presented in a difficult light, as in the Mighty Dictator’s (Kenny St Bernard’s) ‘Mooniyah’, in

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which the mother tells the daughter, ‘Mooniyah, Mooniyah/Bap na likeam kilwaini, Mooniyah’ (‘Mooniyah, your father does not like the Creole’) (Rohlehr 1990: 500–1). And so is inter-racial politics, as can be seen from Lord Melody’s (Fitzroy Alexander’s) Guyanese calypso ‘Apan Jhaat’ (1958), in which an Indian ‘calypsonian name Lall’ tells Indians about ‘Apan Jhaat! Marsary kay Kilwili’ (‘Stick to your own race! Beat up those fucking Creoles’) (Rohlehr 1990: 503; Deosaran [1987]). Commenting on these racially charged calypsos, Gordon Rohlehr (1990: 507), the leading authority on calypsos, believes that ethnicity (the argument of Lord Melody) was a much more potent factor in the 1957 Guyana elections (which Burnham lost and which marked the beginning of serious racial tension between Afro-West Indians and East Indians) than class, which is how the Guyanese Indian leader and later, after free elections had been held in the 1990s, prime minister Cheddi Jagan explained the tensions. In later cultural spheres, in soca (soul calypso) and chutney music for instance, the kinds of hybridity suggested above have taken similarly powerful forms (Myers 1998). These types of hybrid music open up yet another space for the mingling of different races. Chutney calypso also gives Indian women a liberating space that contests the image of the Indian woman as the readily available sexual object of mainstream Afro-West Indian calypso. A typical chutney would combine the sacred and the secular, mixing mantras and bhajans (Indian devotional songs) with the faster tempo of calypso. Draupadi Ramgunair, for instance, moved to chutney calypso from straight devotional singing. In her songs she aims to rupture the negative stereotyping of Indian women in the West Indies. The word ‘chutney’ is clearly an item of food, and it is food that helped create both a relatively homogeneous indenture culture and a point of contact between Indians and Afro-Caribbeans. Indeed, the very production of a larger pan-Indian plantation diaspora is linked to cuisine. For the fact is that the old Indian diaspora had a remarkably uniform cuisine. Since food rations on the sugar plantations were identical for all indentured Indian labourers, food links the old Indian diaspora from Surinam to Mauritius to Fiji. The weekly ration, the so-called ‘dietary scale’, was made up of rice, dhal, sugar, tea, dried fish, atta (flour), salt, oil and half a pound (about 250 grams) of mutton at weekends. The pattern of daily meals based on these rations was as follows: 1st meal: black tea, roti with fried or curried vegetables or a chokha (roasted aubergine) Midday meal: boiled rice with dhal and bhaji (vegetables) Evening meal: roti and tarcari (curry) with black tea Midday meals (weekends): usual midday meal with fish and/or mutton. In a handwritten account in the Mauritius Indian Immigration Archives, H. Burton, the Colonial Emigration Agent in Madras, noted these rations in

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great detail.13 In this document we see that the labourer gets rice, salted fish, vegetables, onions and tamarind seven times a week, ghee (clarified butter) six times a week, dholl (dhal or lentils) five times a week, and oil and mutton twice a week. The amounts were small (four ounces of mutton and salted fish, for instance) but not insufficient. Flour, tea and salt are not mentioned in this document, but we know that these were also added to the ration. The pattern of daily meals based on these rations was remarkably uniform throughout the – colonies and led to a cuisine that included curried fish, baigan chokha (aubergine roasted in an open fire), vegetables (mainly beans), dhal, and varieties of – – – – – ro t.ı , both sada (plain) and parath . a (with oil) (Sammy 1984). One version of this – – parath . a is made with dhal filling and is called dhal-puri in Trinidad, where it is known as ‘buss-up-shot’ (or ‘bust up shut’), literally ‘burst-up shirt’ because the texture ‘resembles torn rags’ (Espinet 1989: 57). The move from dhal-puri to ‘bust up shut’ is part of the larger process of creolization or hybridization that leads to inter-racial interactions between diasporas, in this case between the Afro-West Indians and the (East) Indians of Trinidad. As a fast food available in the ‘Bust Up Shut’ shops, the dhal-puri is an ‘essential item on social/festive occasions irrespective of ethnicity’ (Sammy 1984). What one begins to see is the fluid nature of exchange and the immense social mobility of a culture-specific food. A whole range of other Indian foods have also become part of everyday West Indian life and language, while the Indians, in turn, were ‘steadily adopting the food styles of others’ (V. S. Naipaul 1964: 33). Among Indian food with wide cultural circulation (as well as presence in calypsos) are: bara (‘a small yellow pancake-type bread’), kachourie/phoulourie (appetizers ‘made of seasoned ground split peas and fried until brown and crisp’) and kaloungie (‘a dish of carialles . . . stuffed with a curried filling’). There is also a very interest– ing verb, ‘to chonkay’ (from the Hindi word ‘chaumkn . a’), used in large parts of the West Indies, which means ‘to give a dish extra piquancy by adding to it a blistering hot mixture of oil in preparation’ (Espinet 1989: 58–9). A good dhal, for instance, is incomplete unless it has been ‘chonkayed’.14 In Grenada, where about 10 per cent of the population (of 110,000 in 1977) are Indians, roti and curried goat is a Grenadian dish (Mahabir 1984: 11). Pierre Bourdieu has made the distinction between the ‘taste of necessity’ and the ‘taste of luxury (or freedom)’ (1984: 178). The taste of necessity is girmit taste, a taste that is, in Kantian terms, both ‘barbarous’ and of the sense (not of proper taste, after reflective judgement). So girmit food (as it replicates itself in post-indenture culture) is an example of food that belongs to a different order of domestic economy from that outlined by Bourdieu where class mobility brings about a radical, upward shift in taste for food (from fatty food for the working class to lean meat for the bourgeoisie). Although access to wealth has introduced richer varieties to girmit food (more meat, richer condiments, thicker gravy), two features have remained unchanged across classes: the range of food and what is eaten when. In her beautifully written first novel The Swinging Bridge, Ramabai Espinet notes how educated Indians in Trinidad would throw out ‘almost everything Indian

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at first, and would slowly gather back into their lives only those relics that were essential for survival . . . [eating] sada roti, tomato chokha, wearing gold churias at weddings, drying mangoes for achar and kuchela, treating nara with a special massage, rubbing down the limbs of babies with coconut oil . . .’ (2004: 29). And V. S. Naipaul, too, in his Nobel lecture, singled out indenture cuisine for specific comment and as a mark of difference: ‘For example, we ate rice in the middle of the day, and wheat in the evenings. There were some extraordinary people who reversed the natural order and ate rice in the evenings. I thought of these people as strangers . . .’ (2003: 188). Even though linguistic homogeneity (in the indenture diaspora everyone spoke a version of the Hindi dialect Avadhi/Bhojpuri at one stage) is no longer a unifying characteristic of this diaspora, food certainly is. In V. S. Naipaul’s early novels, each reference to lentils and rice or bhaji and roti repeats the standard cuisine of indenture: ‘You ain’t eat one whole roti? . . . You ain’t eat bhaji?’ Ma scolds son Herbert in The Suffrage of Elvira (1958: 64). In A House for Mr Biswas, Mrs Tulsi scoops ‘up some beans with a shovel of roti’ (Naipaul 1961: 80), and Seth worked dexterously ‘with roti and beans’ (81) and made signs with his free hand to Mr Biswas. In all these instances it is food as ‘taste of necessity’ which explains why in Naipaul food is never something to be enjoyed or an occasion for celebration. The foregoing is a very schematic account of indenture history and cultural hybridity that informs much of V. S. Naipaul’s work. The creative impulse came to the indentured labourers rather late, largely because colonial governments did not encourage state-funded Indian education. Consequently, Indians were largely excluded from the civil service and from urban life generally (Jagan 1989; Bacchus 1989). Parallel, independent and grant-in-aid schools, which most Indian children attended, lacked the resources of government schools and bred a stronger sense of isolationism and even, occasionally, ethnic exclusivism on matters of language and religion. Not surprisingly, Indians continued to live as farm-workers, market-gardeners, corner-shop owners and labourers who, unlike the Afro-Caribbean, it was argued, hadn’t quite mastered Standard English (Trotman 1989: 180). Ismith Khan records a well-known Creole saying: ‘Well I does have to say praise to Lord we here . . . and I does have to be thankful to the people who bring me here. . . . But . . . Ah didn’t know that coolie people could write’ (Khan 1979: 23).

V. S. Naipaul and diaspora allegory I have suggested, then, that indenture history of the kind narrated above, and sadly ignored in most extended writings on Naipaul, forms the background to much of V. S. Naipaul’s writing. The project of a diasporic poetics, read through Naipaul as my primary proof text, may be refined, as I have suggested, through a rewriting of Jameson’s ‘national allegories’ as ‘diasporic allegories’. In returning to my cautious reframing of Jameson’s far too generalized, but nevertheless insightful, connection between the postcolonial text and national

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allegory, what I now want to do is construct V. S. Naipaul’s works as diasporic allegories, texts that situate themselves as mediatized aesthetic renditions of the experience of the plantation-Indian diaspora, which experience does not mean that ‘indenture history’ is a static backdrop. The experience inevitably ‘spaces’ itself out into the lives of contemporary Indo-Caribbeans by way of divisions along lines of class and should not be read as experiences equally and uniformly available to all (Jagan 1989: 15–25). Naipaul’s importance to any study of the Indian diaspora cannot be overstated because his works allow us to understand how life-worlds in the old plantation diaspora are mediated in the literary archive and the kinds of labour (a labour in fact scrupulously attuned to social and historical documentation) needed to connect the aesthetic with felt experience. In the event what one produces is not simply an account of facts that feed into art but questions about how an examination of that interaction creates a fuller, a larger cultural text. The latter also insinuates, I suggest, a modernity that does not cleanse itself of the demotic and which requires us to think through historical processes hitherto silenced by (colonial) historicism. What Dipesh Chakrabarty has referred to as ‘the secular-institutional logic of the political’ (2000: 12) is thus blasted asunder and newer, generally subaltern, postcolonial historicities infused with life-practices and forms emerge in a highly performative manner. To return to questions of a diasporic allegory, the paradigmatic text is obviously A House for Mr Biswas. It is a mixed, sprawling, quasi-epic, ‘hyphenated’ text, so very sad and tragic and yet bursting with immensely comic moments. Homi Bhabha locates its energy in the play between two discourses, one metaphoric and ascriptive, the other metonymic and radical (Bhabha 1984: 114–20). For our purposes (that is, in search of a way of understanding this text as diasporic allegory), Bhabha’s reference to the ‘ascriptive’ as belonging to a certain order of memory, of history, of discourse, may be fruitfully expanded with reference to Amitav Ghosh’s reading of the novel as a text that displaces and then re-creates India within the space of Hanuman House (Ghosh 1989: 73–8). The linking of this space with actual Indian referents is made unnecessary because the ‘symbolic structure of India is infinitely reproducible’ (Ghosh 2002: 248) and ‘lived within the imagination’ (2002: 247). These relationships, these links, Ghosh goes on to argue, insinuate an ‘epic relationship’ but without an epic text. At this point in his essay Ghosh suggests what this absent epic might be like: ‘for if that text were ever written it would be a shabby, bedraggled, melancholy kind of an epic – but still formally, an epic it would have to be’ (2002: 247). If we skip the necessity of a formal dimension of the epic, we may be persuaded that A House for Mr Biswas is precisely that absent epic, and absent precisely because of its shabby, melancholic characteristics. This form of transference/transformation of space means that India gets internalized and then projected on to another geographical space without so much as a hint of dissonance. The fixities of the epic (an absolute point of reference, a past that cannot be duplicated but only extensively rememorated) in the diaspora undergo a whole series of displacements that result in the construction of new sites as metaphors of India such as

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the Ganga Talao (‘The Sacred Ganges Lake’) in Mauritius. But the shabbiness of the displacement has another kind of epic authority because the textual source of the originary symbols is not the text of Sanskrit high culture (the absent epic – – text of Ghosh) but ‘degraded’ epic fragments from the Ramacaritamanas of – – Tulsidasa, a late-sixteenth-century vernacular rendition of the Valmiki Ramayana . in Avadhi – and this, too, as memorially reconstructed by the indentured labourers. Consequently, it is an already contaminated epic, in the Avadhi vernacular, that gets written out in the ‘infinitely reproducible space’ of Hanuman House in A House for Mr Biswas through an act of pseudo-sacralization. The striking thing about Ghosh’s interpretation is that this displacement is not seen as such (as a ‘dis-placement’) but as a very natural ‘placement’ of icons brought to the plantations by the indentured labourers. These signs ‘enter so insidiously into the vocabulary of everyday life’ and are ‘mapped purely in words’ (Ghosh 2002: 249). The relay here is not between word and actual referent, but between word and an imaginary structure which is meaningful and has value in or for itself but only inasmuch as it validates the here and now. In an early draft of ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ (incorporated in Finding the Centre [1984]) V. S. Naipaul had written: It was astonishing what they [the indentured labourers] did bring; but they were going to the end of the world and they came prepared for the wilderness: they brought holy books and astrological almanacs, images, sandalwood, all the paraphernalia of the religious shrines, musical instruments, string beds, plates and jars, even querns, even grinding stones . . . as it was, they carried India with them and were able to recreate something like their world. (V. S. Naipaul 1996a I: 1.3) Many of these items (and there was quite possibly a continuous renewal of these icons with every ship) may be found in Hanuman House, which also reappropriates (in mediated form) the earlier spaces of the Indian village, the ship and the barracks. The novel thus works through the principle of space at two levels. First, there is the level of imaginary spatial reproduction of the signs of Indianness but with a consubstantial semantics where the new sign implies an essential lack and cannot stand for the Other, for it is the Other (but only in the imagination). Second, the first mythic space undergoes a realist reproduction in houses that symbolically displace the spaces of the ship and the barracks. So a nostalgia for a lost space is worked through the social reality of a new space which carries a traumatic history of life in ships and barracks. The struggle for space that is at the centre of barrack life is repeated in Hanuman House itself where, except for the matriarch Mrs Tulsi, the privileged sons Shekhar and Owad (the two ‘gods’) and Seth, no one ever gets enough space: space has to be shared, and lives and valuables, too, so that Mr Biswas’s gift of the doll’s house to his daughter Savi (functional within the confines of private space) has to be destroyed (194–8). Hanuman House reproduces the

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earlier space that is never left behind. In this space, which is described in a barrack architectural code, new Ayodhyas, Varanasis, Lankas are constantly recreated, as geographical distance is cancelled out in the cartography of the mind. Consequently, the grand Indian epic itself gets written as the ‘space’ of Hanuman House in A House for Mr Biswas. Valmiki’s original Sanskrit epic, via the Tulsidasa vernacular rendition, text gets modified, its context and historical specificity lost to another kind of utility. This alternative ‘utility’ surfaces in the names of the three key families to which Mr Biswas is associated either by blood or by marriage: the Raghu Family, the Ajodha Family and the Tulsi Family. It need hardly be pointed out that putting the names of the families in this way triggers, for the Hindu, the author (Tulsidasa), the name of Lord Rama’s dynasty (Raghu) and his glorious kingdom (Ayodhya).15 Like its Sanskrit prototype, this epic is about Rama, scion of the race of Raghu, banished for fourteen years by his father. Rama’s wife is abducted by Ravana, the demon king of Ceylon (Lanka), who is finally killed in a fierce battle by Rama with the help of the monkey prince Hanuman. The real genealogy of the people thus gets overlaid by an earlier memory of the vernacular epic, which is then symbolized through the inhabitants of the spaces of houses and barracks. Any departure from the world order so constructed, and the equal spaces occupied by most people in Hanuman House (except for Mrs Tulsi, Shekhar, Owad and Seth), leads to swift revenge and spiteful action. The crime of Mr Biswas in giving his daughter Savi the doll’s house bought for the equivalent of one month’s wages was that it destroyed the regulative Christmas of a Canadian red apple wrapped in blue paper, a balloon, and a whistle for boys and a tiny rubber doll for girls, topped by Chinta’s insufferable ice cream (191–200). The space of the novel is thus an arena (the earlier space of ships and barracks) where the history of the old Indian diaspora is played out. There are obviously the quasi-autobiographical connections with Naipaul’s own parents’ extended family, but so are the debates between the Arya-Samajists (Hindu Reformists) and the Sanatanists (Hindu Traditionalists). Naipaul himself is very conscious of communal displacement in the Indian diaspora. In his opening address to a Symposium on East Indians held at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad in 1975, he spoke at length about the pull of ancient lineage and history (Naipaul 1982). There is some oversimplification here, as there has to be, given the nostalgic discourse that he uses, but the argument is about the power of ritual, about continuities in spite of fractures and breaks through the loss of language. Trinidadian Indians do not know what so many of the rituals mean, but they persist with them anyhow. Continuity also implies self-examination, and a re-theorization about indenture pasts so as to spell out the loss, and despairingly allude to a cure. Naipaul hammers this theme in his address, but what is interesting is not the theme itself but his compulsive references to rituals, many of which he had referred to in A House for Mr Biswas. These rituals are about ways of doing things that have a self-evident beauty; they are in fact elements that ultimately belong not so much to the realm of social practice but to art. Naipaul remembers:

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Many of the things that I took part in when I was young and didn’t always think about then are now to me very beautiful. But I couldn’t go back to them. For example, today I probably wouldn’t help a women cut a pumpkin open. There must be something, by the way – some sexual symbolism – in the belief that a woman couldn’t cut a pumpkin open by herself. A boy had to help her or a man had to cut it. There is something very beautiful about making an offering to the fire at the start of cooking. Such an ancient kind of worship, the worship of fire, the essential god, and so right in a way. But we performed those rituals unthinkingly. They were like instincts, and perhaps not to do them was to feel a kind of violation. (1982: 6) The engendering of culture as mobile artefacts of the mind, and its ‘re-siting’ in the heart of darkness, is being presented here not as a specifically Hindu phenomenon (a good 10 per cent of the labourers were Muslims) but as a specific mode of articulating the past and re-invigorating it. To create a new locale for the purposes of investing the old with new meaning is the spatial equivalent of rupturing imperial history through the diasporic, which now begins its Samvat (the Hindu calendar) or Hijra (the Islamic calendar) with the passage across the seas. Yet in the Naipaul passage cited above the real world of labour, the world of A House for Mr Biswas, where everyone in the household is always involved in labour, is replaced by the timelessness of ritual. For V. S. Naipaul, a descendant of ‘abject’ indentured cane cutters and hence almost neurotic about questions of exclusivism and vilification (which in turn reproduces its own fears of contamination and the declaration of the other as rakshas [Naipaul 1961: 350]), the matter of finding a centre (all his works since 1984 are about finding centres) and legitimating the postcolonial subject-in-transition is mediated by imperial Britain, which acts like a discursive screen. It is far too simple to read this search in terms of the grand narrative of imperialism as if here was another colonial, but this time black, a renegade, who wishes to keep the myths of imperialism intact (Shelnutt 1989). The truth, it seems, is somewhat more difficult and has to be teased out with reference to the manner in which the subject, Naipaul himself, has come into being: working-class background, totally colonial education with no emphasis on either Hindi or Indian culture, both of which disappear at an early age (Naipaul 2003: 188). Loss of language, in particular, meant loss of a special way of reading ‘home’, but it also meant that the colonial experience now entered a much more hybrid state because a foreign language had to be made into one’s own. In V. S. Naipaul’s case, lack of grounding in one’s own culture through its language produced a push to legitimize the subject-in-transition, the subject that had been the silent underside of the project of modernity. The latter is carried through what is clearly a radical use of language – the use of discordant sounds, languages, voices and bodies that impose the chaos of ‘Tangiers’ over the predictability of ‘Casablanca’ (Bhabha 1994: 182–5). In this reading, plantation cuisine, a Hobson-Jobson language (‘apologize-ologize’, ‘paddling-addling’,

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‘token-okens’), the smells of Vick’s Vaporub, bay leaf ointment, Sloan’s liniment and Tiger Balm, the use of Hindi as ‘secret language’ overpower the purely textual, non-corporeal linguistic subject. A House for Mr Biswas is the grand proof-text for the placement of the postcolonial in an alternative, enunciative epistemology even as it grounds itself in an experience formed out of plantation culture. In A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul writes about the diaspora’s ‘familiar temporariness’, the ambivalence of becoming part of the landscape and yet somehow beyond or beside it, experiencing Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit, ‘to-not-be-athome’ feeling. The failure to find roots, the failure of Biswas actually to build a house on solid foundations − the house that he finally owns and which is heavily mortgaged, the house in which he dies, is as open to the elements as any sieve − this failure is part of the totality of the diasporic experience. The house, the sign that would have transformed the route (the temporariness) into a root (the familiar) is as unsteady as the sailing ships themselves. But the final house with its ironic commentary (by Naipaul) on West Indian architecture is also a statement about the extent to which even architecture re-echoes the spatial layout of the barracks. The novel therefore begins and ends with death within the confines of a house that encapsulates, allegorically, a specifically diasporic negotiation of space in terms of indenture history and its (spatial) sites. How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated. (1961: 12–3) There is strong pathos here, but the pathos also mingles with the larger allegorical function of the space of a house: a space that one can own, possess, an idea that has its basis, finally, in landless people suddenly gripped by the fear of living in a state of perpetual transience. But we come to the passage, as discours earlier in the text but in real histoire time, towards the end of the narrative as the ‘large, disintegrating and indifferent [Tulsi] family’ and its Hindu world are already on the brink of collapse, with different kinds of hybrid interconnections disrupting the presumed unity of the narrative of the Tulsi world: the great Hindu hope of the Tulsi family, Owad, too (like his elder brother Shekhar), marries a Presbyterian. The pathos I speak of surfaces with great force in Shiva Naipaul’s powerful novel Fireflies (1970). As V. S. Naipaul’s younger brother, it is not surprising that Shiva Naipaul should return to the style and indeed life-worlds of his older brother’s decisive work. Where A House for Mr Biswas was about a man struggling to break free from the shackles of both the tyranny of an extended family and, more generally, the remnants of indenture culture, Fireflies is about

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a woman, also of the same stock as Mr Biswas, similarly locked into the petty squabbles of an extended family and in the end left alone gazing at the cane fields. (We recall again ‘Cane Is Bitter’, the title of one of Samuel Selvon’s short stories.) The title of the novel, Fireflies, as narrative and as metaphor occurs five times in the novel (99, 247, 351, 382, 413). Its second occurrence establishes the link between fireflies the object which when collected and placed in a ‘jam bottle’ would give enough light to a boy from an impoverished family (too poor to purchase even candles or an oil-lamp) to study and anecdote as a structure of meaning. This boy, now grown up, is ‘one of the most successful men in this community, a doctor with a big house and a rich wife to boot’ (247). Didn’t the fireflies ‘locked up in a bottle’ die? asked Mrs Lutchman, always the sceptic. ‘You don’t kill fireflies as easy as that, Sumintra,’ replies Mr Govind Khoja, the family patriarch so self-centred that his philosophical self-indulgence only produces highly ‘parodic’ utterances. Mr Khoja is pure Naipaul, the larger-than-life figure of the typical Trinidadian man of means incapable of converting a highly ritualistic and fragmentary culture into something significantly modern. What he encapsulates is a crisis in identity that for the Naipaul brothers can find its redemptive moments only in the discourse of comedy. For Mrs Lutchman, there are no fireflies to capture, as in the end, husband dead (it is Mr Lutchman around whom the metaphor of ‘fireflies’ is first introduced [99]) and family gone, she can only gaze at the chimneys of the sugar mill, a reminder of the legacy of the girmit ideology of the plantation diaspora. There is something sad in Mrs Lutchman’s reverie at the end of the novel, but the work had been moving towards it (‘Baby’ [Mrs Vimla Lutchman], after all, is the thematic subject of the opening sentence of the novel) and any other ending would have been aesthetically less satisfactory, perhaps even impossible. The same exhaustion, the same futility, is seen in the lives of Egbert Ramsaran and his son Wilbert in Shiva Naipaul’s next novel, The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973). Here, too, the road to riches from the old plantation Settlement (for this is what the locality is in fact called) continues to produce lives led on the edges of schizophrenia, mental fracture and unease. These lives find their metaphor in the labour of gathering chip-chip shells on the shore. The metaphor remains undeclared until the final few pages of the novel where it appears as a tableau, a set-piece, through which the unproductive labour of a post-indenture Indian culture is given ironic meaning. Wilbert, angry, disruptive, misogynist, paranoid and manic-depressive, now married to Shanty, observes the sea outside the decrepit holiday home of his father the morning after his honeymoon. The tide is out, and beds of chip-chip are exposed. Hordes of women and children come to collect these shells for their ‘minuscule kernel of insipid flesh. A full bucket of shells would provide them with a mouthful’ (318–19). In this scene, a stilled picture, as the Sanskrit aestheticians would have called it, Wilbert notices a large driftwood, an entire trunk of a tree, ‘bleached bone-white’, majestic with a power and a splendour that can only come after death but ‘condemned to rot slowly on this wind-swept, shimmering beach of swooping vultures, starving

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dogs, chip-chip gatherers and himself’ (319–20). Here, too, the image morphs into allegory; the narrative declares an uncompleted life. I have suggestively located V. S. Naipaul in a diaspora poetics of classic capital before the internal combustion engine had replaced the bullock cart, before the world had become transnational or global, before Eudora/Microsoft Outlook had replaced the snailmail, before image had replaced print, before video and DVD had replaced the eighteen-reel cinema – indeed, before the world had become thoroughly postmodern. I want to read other parts of the Naipaul corpus by connecting my theoretical premise and interpretive manual, in the first instance, to two early works of Naipaul that have not been circulating with the same regularity as many of his other works. These books are his first and second novels, The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958). When first published these were seen as domestic comedies, funny, humorous, ironic, understated, almost Chekhovian. Although the use of dialect was noted, there was little reference to two simple facts: first, the ways in which these novels established the critical discourses of postcolonial theory (sly mimicry, hybridity, the use of the demotic, and so on); second, the extent to which Naipaul, like Kafka, had entered into what has come to be theorized as minor literature: principally by the use of the majoritarian language by a minor subaltern. Unlike Kafka, however, there is a double displacement here. Deleuze and Guattari point out in their influential Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1997), ‘Even he who has the misfortune of being born in the country of a great literature must write in its language, just as a Czech Jew writes in German . . .’ (18). For Naipaul it is the birth into the Empire that is significant inasmuch as the Empire carried the language of the metropolitan centre (‘[Daffodil] a pretty little flower, no doubt; but we had never seen it,’ Naipaul wrote in ‘Jasmine’[1972]). Which is why I have referred to a double displacement because the colonial subject always found that the institutional apparatuses of Empire mediated between him and the immediacy of the [English] language. This mediation is at the heart of the revolutionary nature of Naipaul’s ‘minor’ literature. So Pandit Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur locates ‘recognition’ (in Charles Taylor’s definition) in the domain of the mastery of the ‘book’, here read as the English literary tradition, but produces pamphlets that are at best parodies of devotional manuals. In the end, though, it is the novel itself, not Ganesh, which creates a culture worthy of recognition. In matters of recognition, then, the aesthetic cannot be excluded from the ideological as it is an invaluable repository for the ideological. The Suffrage of Elvira is about colonial politics, about the social being mapped on to the political, about political chicanery and games that people play and, from Naipaul’s perspective, about the Indian diaspora’s comic involvement in democracy. When rich and powerful city man Surujpat (‘Pat’) Harbans stands as a candidate for the constituency of Elvira in the 1950 Legislative Council (Leg. Co.) general election (the first step towards independence that came a decade later) little does he realize that to win he has to appease the Muslims (and their self-proclaimed leader, the tailor Baksh), the Spaniards, the Blacks

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(three groups that collectively control about half of the votes) and the Hindus who are in the majority but never vote as an entity. Democracy comes to Trinidad not as a gift of universal suffrage; it comes to a culture with its own internal squabbles, power play, racialized life-worlds, and cultural peculiarities such as belief in obeah and other superstitions. The opening pages of the novel establish the latter discourse. Harbans’ truck hits a stray bitch with six new-born pups and almost knocks off two Jehovah’s Witnesses evangelists. The latter are on bicycles with the word ‘AWAKE’ on their pennants. The narrative of a democratic election gets overlaid with the ominous consequences of this encounter and the manner in which the bitch, her pups, especially the last surviving pup Tiger, begin to be read as signs of obeah, witchcraft and sorcery whose foundations go back to the early years of slavery when the obeah practitioners were doctors, philosophers and priests (Rhys 1997: 136). The contest becomes three-way: Preacher (whose name on the ballot paper appears as Nathaniel Anaclitus Thomas) for the Blacks, Harbans for the Hindus (and through the influence of the goldsmith Chittaranjan for the Spaniards, too), and Mazurus Baksh for the Muslims (which suited Harbans since ‘once the Muslims don’t vote for Preacher, we all right’: for this Harbans paid Baksh $2,000 [164–5]). Harbans wins after spending a considerable amount of money, but the value of the text for our argument is not in the plot itself but in the uses made of cultural practices and historical facts by Naipaul. In other words, how does Naipaul negotiate in his aesthetic those features that define the old Indian diaspora which, in time will collapse into the social formations of the border as the narrative of return is replaced by that of transnational movements, to a double displacement and even reincorporation into another form of diasporic Indianness as children of Trinidadian Indians migrating to Canada become part of the larger Canadian-East Indian diaspora? I have referred to the manner in which cultural practices are mediated in The Suffrage of Elvira. I want to begin with names, men’s names: Harbans, Chittaranjan, Ramlogan (a name associated with owners of rum shops or shops generally), Baksh, Dhaniram (the Hindu pandit), Mahadeo, Harichand, Haq, Lutchman, Mungal, Ramoutar; women’s names: Basdai, Rampiari, Etwariah (Rampiari’s mother), Nalini (daughter). In The Mystic Masseur (1957) we get the considerably archaic Phulbassia (48) and Dookhie (17) as well as the more common Bissoon (39) and of course Ramsumair. Except for Nalini (the name of Chittaranjan’s daughter and already modern) and Leela, Ganesh’s wife, these names are, in terms of naming practices in the Indian diaspora generally, archaic, or at least replicate names found on the original emigration passes of the indentured labourers. As we have already noted, one of the most fascinating aspects of the old Indian plantation diaspora is the existence of entries for all the original migrants. In these emigration certificates one finds comprehensive descriptions of the labourers; a people without an ‘official name’ were given extensive descriptions well beyond the requirements of a birth certificate: the ship’s name, the person’s name, father’s name, age, sex, caste (to the lowest identifiable sub-category), occupation, next of kin, marriage status,

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zillah, pergunnah, village, and marks on the body. Overnight they were thrust into modernity: ships, mills, railway lines, capitalist orderliness (‘call number’ became the name of the overseer), the stove and the toilet. Naipaul uses these names (as he does in these early novels) and insinuates through their usage the occluded indenture history of the characters. Names thus connect to documentation, to the emigration passes, and to both the passage where caste purities were contaminated and to plantation life where a conveniently homogeneous culture came into being, a culture that transcended the Hindu–Muslim, North–South divide prevalent in India itself. We recall a passage from The Suffrage of Elvira: Things were crazily mixed up in Elvira. Everybody, Hindus, Muslims and Christians owned a Bible. . . . The Hindus and Muslims celebrated Christmas and Easter. . . . Everybody celebrated the Muslim festival of Hosein. In fact when Elvira was done with religious festivals, there were few straight days left. (74) But the culture also, as immigrant cultures have done everywhere, has a tendency to fossilize. Dhaniram, the pundit, calls his daughter-in-law ‘Doolahin’ (48, 203), the practice of jharay (warding off evil spirits) is not uncommon as Herbert is taken to local masseurs for jharay (90, 117). Some practices, however, refer back to universal Hindu rituals: ‘kattha’ (180), ‘puja’, ‘arti’ (188). But fossilization also breeds the demotic as in the use of the word jharay itself and in words such as ‘maquereau’ (from the Hindi makarana, to move crookedly, superimposed upon the Urdu makkar, deceitful, crafty, used to describe Haq) and its participle form (‘you take up maquereauing now’ where the participle ending is given in the roman script and is not italicized, (170)). The introduction of the demotic into the majoritarian discourse, the minor discourse in fact negotiating the major, surfaces in a more readily identifiable form as linguistic variants (the nominative ‘we’ as both nominative and accusative/dative, a feature of Creole), the mixing of prefixes as in ‘down-couraged’ (38), or adding Hindi suffixes to names (Manwa, Ganeshwa), the use of the present continuous (a feature of Hindi) as in ‘fulling up’ (‘they fulling up your tank for you’ (210)), pronunciation variables (‘sukastic’ (168), ‘pussonal’ (210)) and straight-out nonce combinations such as ‘insultive’ (being insulting (210)) or shifting languages such as the use of the Hindi ‘Gaddaha! Gaddaha!’ for jackass (Naipaul 1957: 16). The inevitability of linguistic registers taking new forms notwithstanding, what I am suggesting is that Naipaul’s usage draws our attention to the historical specificities of diaspora lives, the importance of negotiating the archive (a historical fact) via the aesthetic. Of course, in terms of postcolonial theory, they indicate all those features of destabilizing master codes and narratives, of the minor blasting open the major, of the construction of a hybrid energy in writing that also suggests that literature exhausts itself should these not take place.

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Much of what goes by the name of ‘mimicry’ − mime, imitation, aping the Other, fetish for the metropolis, and so on − finds its source text in The Mimic Men, V. S. Naipaul’s heavily discursive and profoundly meditative work. The autobiographical narrative recounted here is a diasporic allegory written ‘in parenthesis’, parenthesis being the word that, along with ‘placidity’, has the most force in the text. The diasporic experience, the life of the diasporic individual, is seen as a parenthesis, as a bracket, a series of incidentals before and after which the substantive narrative of empires and peoples are written down. In the ‘little bastard island’ of Ralph Singh the protagonist, the people are largely refugees of sorts: white planters, peons, people of mixed Spanish-Amerindian heritage, people of Black ancestry, patois-speaking slaves of French planters, descendants of the slave trade, descendants of Indian indentured labourers, people who ‘were made to stand in for the aborigines and were held responsible for the nullity which had been created long before [they] had been transported to it’ (Naipaul 1994: 79). Like Trinidad, on which Ralph Singh’s island is modelled, these are all diasporic peoples. And it is precisely because the parenthesis is inconsequential that no event of importance other than a tragic drowning gets narrated (Mahood 1977: 143–4). Instead, there is a stillness, a linguistic placidity, an excessive brooding over the parenthesis itself that defines the mode of writing. The Mimic Men is Naipaul’s most introspective work: it is almost totally lacking in humour; it is about men who are powerless, whose fortunes cannot generate the romance of genealogies or the pathos of tragedy. And in this partial, penumbral world the larger struggle of the diaspora gets stunted, distorted, deflected. Memory now creates not the urgency of life but the pleasures of sex, the inefficacy of parents and the comedy of an island state, a ‘transitional or makeshift’ society, totally lacking in permanence. The three parts of the novel tell basically the same story of loss, yearning and displacement. But the Indian diaspora itself is strangely muted; its presence either indicated through an annoying geneticism (‘it was a movement of Asiatics, so cool to the idea of sharing distress’ [261]) or collectivized into the predictable image of sugar cane. All this is filtered through an exilic discourse as the one-time politician Ralph Singh settles down in a London hotel to write his memoirs. Through this act of writing (‘so writing, for all its initial distortion, clarifies, and even becomes a process of life’ [301]) Naipaul constructs the diaspora as a cipher, as a trace in the margins of the novel as it ‘intrudes’ and then gets reabsorbed into some other formation of the nation-state. But this very ephemerality, this very sense of passing, the parenthesis itself, is its source of energy as well as a site from which a counter-critique of modernity may be mounted. Through the materiality of its existence − the kind of historical materiality I have recounted in my reference to indentured labourers and their emigration certificates − we can now pose or present the narrative of the gap, the hyphen, the fissure. It is the exemplary instance of the critique of the metaphysics of presence/permanence, of the idea of subjects constructed whole. In other words, diasporas offer themselves as a series of narratives, sets of metaphors with which to begin dismantling concepts of permanence as the desirable

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condition of being. In this respect, V. S. Naipaul himself poses serious contradictions that surface with such force in a later work, The Enigma of Arrival. Yet in The Mimic Men the same unease about exile had occurred to Ralph Singh and with equal force: ‘On that first morning [Ralph Singh is returning to the island of Isabella with his wife Sandra] I should have said, “This tainted island is not for me. I decided years ago that this landscape was not mine. Let us move on. Let us stay on the ship and be taken somewhere else” ’ (1967: 60). Ralph Singh’s rootlessness takes me to the ways in which diasporic poetics or allegory has problematized definitions of culture: ‘We [can no longer] understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves,’ writes V. S. Naipaul in A Way in the World (1994: 11). To rethink culture with diasporic poetics in mind would imply that the rootedness of culture or its presumed compulsion towards such rootedness (in search of permanence, fixity, immobility, eternal values, and so forth) is now replaced, through a diasporic epistemology, by a definition in which the root is less important than the route. What routes did we take, how do we discuss our shared ‘common historical experiences of dispossession, displacement, adaptation’ (Clifford 1994: 309) − these are the urgent questions that we now ask of diasporas. They are also some of the questions that concern a reading of V. S. Naipaul through a diasporic epistemology. The failure by so many critics to locate him in the conditions and restrictive histories of the old Indian diaspora is what explains postcolonial theory’s anxiety about his works. Presented as a colonial renegade, as a native informant for the Other or as an uncritical follower of instrumental reason, Naipaul emerges as a great stylist but without a strong social vision. Seen through the argument advanced here, Naipaul is a product of an Indian diaspora, situated between an old world that can only be memorially constructed and a new that lacks the certainties of the old. And, as for home, that is another matter altogether. Home can no longer be uttered with any real certainty. The old (poetic) dichotomy (after Matthew Arnold) of a dead world and another powerless to be born is replaced by discontinuous worlds constantly being remade. Old worlds do not die; they are transformed by diasporic cultures that bring their own ‘postmodern’ ethnicities to the nation-state. And diasporic cultures, too, change. As Cheddi Jagan once observed, ‘[Indians of the diaspora] are not exactly the same as the roots from which they sprang’ (1989: 25). There is, then, a diasporic poetics of the old Indian diaspora that arises out of the experience of indenture. The master allegorist of this experience is V. S. Naipaul. Diasporas of exclusivism (like the old Indian diaspora) are unlike diasporas of the border, although people of the old Indian diaspora, too, have now become citizens of many Western liberal democracies, and the distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ diasporas will continue to be eroded. For the old diaspora, however, memories of the past had to be internalized, new spaces re-created because travel was not an option. Even the offer of a return passage to India was not taken up on a large scale. Instead of the indentured labourers, it was their children and grandchildren who returned to their ancestral

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homeland as modern-day tourists. But when they finally made it to India they panicked (as Naipaul did when he saw, in Amitav Ghosh’s words, that the ‘pure spaces of his childhood [were] not merely peopled but overwhelmingly alive’ [2002: 249]), and when they made it to the metropolitan centres, too, they remained gripped by their own rootless history and the terror of their makeshift island communities. They had to make a virtue of impermanence but not without, in the process, reconfiguring themselves like ‘antic dancers, mimic men’ who quite often forgot their working-class inheritance (Itwaru 1989: 206). Both this inheritance as well as the problematic negotiation of impermanence need to be re-theorized through narratives and routes that are not simply regressive or millenarian. We need to blast open the unifying experiences of the passage, consider the trauma of plantation life generally, examine the conditions of migrancy and displacement to overcome the ‘violence’ of migration. To understand the workings of Naipaul’s allegories of diaspora, we need to be conscious of the material history of Indian indenture, for without that consciousness the special force of Naipaul’s art is lost.

3

Traumatic memory, mourning and V. S. Naipaul

. . . history cannot simply be set against literary texts as either stable antithesis or stable background, and the protective isolation of those texts gives way to a sense of their interaction with other texts and hence of the permeability of their boundaries. (Stephen Greenblatt, 1990: 95) Despite the solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. (V. S. Naipaul 1961: 352)

Unhappy diasporas are often also traumatized diasporas. The qualification ‘often’ is important because in making that connection I do not wish to declare that diasporic lives are invariably traumatized. My concern, somewhat narrowly, is with establishing connections between diasporic memory and the aesthetic, and to ask the question whether memory or the fantasy of memorization, inasmuch as it surfaces in the aesthetic, is a consequence of traumatic recall. Further, I want to ask if there is something in the language of the subject that bears the traces of an original trauma. In this chapter I begin by suggesting that the history of indenture is a history of trauma and then examine V. S. Naipaul’s writings as instantiations of works conditioned by acts of memory linked to conditions of trauma. To do this well we need to negotiate, as the new historicists have done so well, the relay, the flows of social energy (energya) between the historical and the aesthetic. In other words, I want to consider, as the epigraph from Stephen Greenblatt makes clear, the interactive nature of the historical and the literary and the porous nature of their boundaries. This is not to say that each can function as the other (quite specific generic conventions mark off the boundaries of history and literature); rather in bringing them together, as part of a critical hermeneutic, we may produce a larger cultural text that is attuned to the creative consequences of that exchange. The production of a larger cultural text takes the form of a critical imperative when we pause at the second epigraph, from V. S. Naipaul’s finest book, A House for Mr Biswas, quoted above. The reference here is to the Tulsi family, a large extended family held together by the firm hand of its matriarch, Mrs Tulsi. The epigraph is the first two sentences of the opening paragraph of ‘The Shorthills

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Adventure’ section of the book. The novel is already two-thirds complete, the social decorum that held the extended family together is under stress, and one may wonder why the paragraph, given its importance, is placed so late in the text. The paragraph, however, has considerable value for the theme of this chapter and for the connections I make between history as traumatic recall and literature. Although there are passages of this kind elsewhere in the novel (one recalls again the wonderful passage dealing with the assembly of the older generation of indentured labourers, high on ganja, in the arcade of the Tulsi shop, speaking in Hindi and reminiscing about India and yet fearful because they are so ‘afraid to leave the familiar temporariness’ [1961: 174]); although other passages do exist, this passage acquires special meaning in the context of the family’s departure from Arwacas to another estate. The passage I have quoted immediately establishes the idea of solidity (‘the solidity of their establishment’ is both a reference to the imposing but sprawling Hanuman House, and to the roots that a migrant race had established in Trinidad) but with an important qualification. The physical (or material) rooting notwithstanding, the cartography of the mind as we discover in the next few sentences of this passage is located not so much in the idea of ‘roots’ as in ‘routes’, for which the word ‘departure’ is the key. However, unlike Deleuze and Guattari, who celebrate nomadism (the ‘route’) as the condition of the modern and who read ‘passing’ as ‘not a particular trauma’ but inevitable to growth and change, a condition of self-invention that dispenses with the idea of a fixed home or centre (Peters 1999: 20), and is indeed the epistemic other of the ‘sedentary point of view’ of history (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 23), for Naipaul diaspora and nomadism are primarily traumatic conditions that have the function of compulsion repetition. So the passage displays a rootedness, through solidity, yet affirms movement, routing and departure. As noted earlier, this idea, often grounded in metaphors of journey, transience, stage and so on, distinguishes the plantation-Indian diaspora (the old diaspora of classic capital) from the new late-modern diaspora of the border. This plantation diaspora lives out its trauma through a constant return to an original moment that is in the habit of re-wounding the subject. It is as if the moment itself has the ‘unspeakable’ feature of trauma and can be glimpsed only through its re-inscription in a narrative of departure and loss. The kind of unpacking necessary for an understanding of the old plantation diaspora requires us to return to the nature of the journey itself (the space of the ships that brought indentured labourers to Trinidad, for instance, in relentless waves over a period of some 80 years from around 1840 onwards) and how the idea of ‘a stage in the journey’ takes shape in that other space, the space of the ‘coolie lines’ of sugar plantations. (These we have already framed within a theoretical paradigm earlier.) Just as Greenblatt saw important connections between the literary and the historical with reference to Shakespeare’s use of the language of madness in King Lear and Harsnett’s account of exorcisms conducted during 1585–6 by outlawed Jesuits led by one William Weston alias Father Edmunds in his (Harsnett’s) book titled A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), so here, too, we need to examine history not simply

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as ‘decorative background’ but as an energizing principle that informs the aesthetic. But there is more to it than that, for at the heart of any such investigation is the imperative of ‘memory’s ethical urgency’ without which, as Alessia Ricciardi points out, we are ‘left with the ability to relate to the past only as spectacle’ (Ricciardi 2003: 1). In the case of the archive under discussion here, memory’s ethical urgency pushes the subject towards a history that is rendered through trauma. The latter requires urgent theorization on my part.

Trauma theory The writing of trauma implies return and repetition. ‘In its most general definition,’ writes Cathy Caruth, ‘trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’ (Caruth 1996: 11). The mighty discourse of Freud is selfevident in Caruth’s words, and one begins therefore with Freud and through him with the history of the word ‘trauma’ itself. The English language has been blessed with a wonderful dictionary, The Oxford English Dictionary. What the OED has to say about trauma will be our starting point, followed by a reading of one of Freud’s key essays and the work of two important writers on trauma in English: Cathy Caruth and Ruth Leys. In written texts, the word ‘trauma’ entered the English language in the mid-seventeenth century via Greek to mean wound. ‘Trauma . . . a wound from an external cause’ occurs in 1693, and the adjective ‘traumatic’ meaning ‘pertaining to or caused by a wound, abrasion or external injury’ (not uncommon in current medical usage) appeared some forty years earlier in 1656 (‘belonging to wounds’). The adverb ‘traumatically’ is related to a physical wound such that tonsillitis can occur ‘traumatically’, that is, ‘in connection with a wound or abrasion’. In 1895 psychical trauma was referred to as ‘a morbid nervous condition’. Most of the twentieth-century entries for ‘trauma’, ‘traumatic’, ‘traumatism’ and ‘traumatize’ in the OED refer to the uses of these words in ‘psychoanalysis and psychiatry’. Does it mean that the twentieth century is marked by a consciousness about trauma as psychic injury, an emotional shock ‘the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed’, shifting the focus away from an external wound that may require a surgical incision? In addition the later meanings make it clear that the traumatic condition may lead to or cause behavioural disturbance. The citations given in the OED now cover a wide range of behavioural disturbances. Here are a few examples: ‘For children who come from an environment in which the capacity of the family to function has been most severely traumatized by such destructive forces as poverty, ill health and discrimination, the consequences for the child are seen . . .’ (1974). In 1971, Kate Millett wrote in Sexual Politics (quoted in the OED): ‘We perceive that the traumatizing circumstance of being born black in a white racist society invests skin color with symbolic value’. Additionally the traumatized lives of Vietnam war veterans led to an acknowledgement by the

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American Psychiatric Association of a quite specific post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Here of course state compensation required the ‘victim’ to show that he/she had actually witnessed the cause of trauma or the traumatic event, which could then be established via very clearly defined procedures that doctors had to follow when examining victims suffering from PTSD. In a variant use of PTSD, a number of New Zealand First Nation (Maori) activists, notably Ms Tariana Turia, a leading Maori spokesperson, have used the same acronym to refer to their own Postcolonial Traumatic Stress Disorder. In some versions of contemporary American cultural studies trauma functions as a transcendental ‘experiential’ category worthy of critical investment. Discrepant worlds are brought together under this ‘arche-sign’, and everybody from minorities to war veterans may be discussed as traumatized victims of some aspect of the nation’s policies. Add to this a range of very serious social issues – notably those related to child abuse – and we begin to see the reason why ‘Trauma Studies’ has become such an important quasi-disciplinary field. Not surprisingly there are now many discourses ‘contending for legitimacy’ (Mowitt 2000: 276) in its very site. In a sense the OED confirms what we already know: trauma in language always arrives late, not that it never existed, but that it occurs after the event, as a deferred experience. To make this point clear let me work, this time backwards, by re-tracing ‘trauma’ in another modern language, Hindi. The word – – for trauma in Hindi is aghat(a), which means, literally, blow, shock, injury as well as killing and a slaughter-house. To imply, more specifically, trauma as – we understand it, the descriptor man(a)sik(a) (mental, or pertaining to the – – – mind) is normally used. Hence man(a)sik(a) aghat(a) would be the term used to explain a traumatic experience. Going even further back in language we find that Sanskrit (which supplies the Hindi word with the verbal root) has no pre– – cise word for trauma. There aghata is clearly seen as a word formed through – the addition of the prefix a (long a) to the root han and has the meanings of striking, killing, misfortune and pain, not trauma. It is also, as in Hindi, a place – – of execution and a slaughter-house. Manasika (from manas) occurs separately and is defined as ‘conceived only in the mind’. To the best of my knowledge, it – – – – is not collocated with aghata in Sanskrit. In a sense the Hindi aghat(a) carries or bears a meaning that the classical language did not have and which may have subsumed it under the more generic duhkha, suffering. I need to be inconclu. sive here as my archives do not allow me to go beyond what I have said thus far. What strikes me as being eminently sensible is the thesis implicit in my under– – graduate tracing of word formation: that, indeed, the Hindi aghata replays (in the literal sense) the pain of the wound or the blow in the Sanskrit original; for its new meaning as trauma to surface the word has to repeat itself in the vernacular. I expect this tracing to be true of the English word ‘trauma’ and its Greek root where it only meant ‘wound’. The person who sensed this better than anyone else was, of course, Freud. The key text here is one of his more speculative pieces, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. To this challenging essay I must now turn my attention.

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As a ‘founder of discursivity’ (Foucault’s phrase), Freud comes to us already read, and there is no better instance of an already-read Freud than Derrida’s framing of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in his essay ‘To Speculate – on “Freud” ’ (1987: 259–409). In this essay Derrida reads Freud’s work on the pleasure principle as an endless repetition, a mise en abyme that ‘illustrates only the repetition of that very thing (the absolute authority of the P[leasure] P[rinciple])’ (1987: 294), inasmuch as the Hindi word aghat(a) repeats, finally, the Sanskrit verbal root han. There is repetition but also a sense of abandonment, of resignation as Freud offers tantalizing solutions only to suggest their inconclusiveness, even their obscurity. Repetition constitutes the key to Freud’s reading of traumatic neurosis but repetition is also internal to the writing itself and it goes beyond its content: [T]he repetitive process is to be identified not only in the content, the examples, and the material described and analyzed by Freud, but already, or again, in Freud’s writing, in the démarche of his text, in what he does as much as in what he says, in his ‘acts,’ if you will, no less than in his ‘objects.’ . . . What repeats itself more obviously in this chapter is the speculator’s indefatigable motion in order to reject, to set aside, to make disappear, to distance (fort), to defer everything that appears to put the PP into question. He observes every time that something does not suffice, that something must be put off until further on, until later. Then he makes the hypothesis of the beyond come back [revenir] only to dismiss it again. This hypothesis comes back [revient] only as that which has not truly come back [revenu], that which has only passed by in the specter of its presence. (Derrida 1987: 295) For Derrida the Pleasure Principle [PP] is itself an instance of compulsive repetition, because it ‘always comes back [revient] to itself’ (293) even as the impression it gives is one of being ‘haunted by something totally other’ (293). But there is an inconclusiveness about the work (a not uncommon characteristic indeed of many of Freud’s writings) that often implies something a little short of abandonment of the argument altogether. This mode of writing in which, as Derrida says, Freud ‘renounces, abandons, resigns himself’ (295: the phrase is repeated thrice on this page) becomes especially noticeable after Freud has treated the example of traumatic neurosis. He examines the latter – the matter of traumatic neurosis – at the beginning of the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an event or a disturbance that does not quite fit into the explanatory model of the PP. So far Freud had written about the existence in the mind of ‘a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle’ (Freud 1984b: 278). The PP, if left unchecked, as we know, leads to the nirvanic principle, to the oceanic sublime of self-dissolution – indeed, to death: ‘the aim of all life is death’ (311), is one of Freud’s more famous remarks. The check in question comes through the reality principle which, to ensure that pleasure continues in the long run, tolerates unpleasure, with the qualification that the sexual

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instincts, forever prey to the unbridled pleasure principle, often ignore the reality principle even when this is ‘to the detriment of the organism as a whole’ (278). Hence Pandu, head of the Pandava clan in the great Sanskrit epic the – – Mahabharata, must not have sexual liaisons with his wives (Kunti and Madri), for if he does he will die. One enchanting night he embraces his younger wife Madri, and the poet recites at this point: –

–

–

–

bharyaya kurunandana sa taya samgamya . – – – pan. du . paramadharmatma yuyuje kaladharmana . – – (Mahabharata I, 116.12) Aroused by desire, Pandu, the scion of the race of Kurus, the upholder of the Law, unites with the Law of death. If the sexual instinct is the absolute instance of the PP (which if unbridled leads to death), then ‘traumatic neurosis’ is an instance of absolute ‘unpleasure’ in the economy of PP and this, too (if not corrected by the reality principle, which also applies to sexual instincts), leads to death. The causes of the condition of this trauma come across as ‘mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life’ (Freud 1984b: 281); its symptoms are akin to melancholia, an incomplete mourning; its cause is fright [Schreck] not fear [Furcht] or anxiety. This being so, the golden road to the unconscious – dreams – when reproducing a situation as unpleasurable as a traumatic recall cannot, surely, affirm the path of dreams as wish-fulfilment. Trauma then introduces a breach in the analytic itself, as an experience quite beyond analytical explanation. Instead of ensuring sleep, ‘dreams occurring in traumatic neurosis have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright’ (282). The usual argument has looked at this type of dreaming as evidence of the subject’s fixation on the moment of trauma, the fact being that one consciously keeps the memory of the traumatic event. Freud seems to have a contrary view: he believes that it is more likely that the memory is repressed. But the argument is abandoned in favour of something normal because the subject of traumatic neurosis is far too dark, too dismal, far too morose to be pursued at length. In the essay, then, what surfaces – erupts, to be more precise – is the child’s play with the wooden reel (Derrida has called it ‘the argument of the spool’), a story that has had any number of interpretations: a coded narrative of Freud’s own coming to terms with the loss of his daughter Sophie whose son, Ernest, is the subject of the story; the child’s accommodation of or coming to terms with absence via control of the itinerary of absence; the child’s entry into the law of symbolic difference as fort and da (‘o-o-o-o’ and ‘a-a-a-a’) designate phonemic difference and therefore the child’s first understanding of language organized along principles of systemic difference and mutual exclusiveness; the child’s ‘cultural achievement’ over instinctual gratification through control; a statement about how the reality principle functions as a corrective to the PP by making even the

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unpleasurable available for recollection and critical engagement. For us, however, and in terms of what the essay does next, the narrative (or story or even useful fiction) anticipates two crucial motifs. The first is the motif of departure; the second a compulsion to repeat. The compulsion to repeat, ‘the manifestation of the power of the [unconscious] repressed’ (290), is not a happy principle for the ego since what is repeated is more likely to cause it unpleasure. But what if an event is of absolute unpleasure, an event of such extremity, with such an impact on the mind, that it is an instance of complete horror? (‘O horror, O horror,’ Kurtz is reputed to have said.) The experience of ‘traumatic neurosis’ is one such instance of the compulsion to repeat, and Freud cites an example from Tasso’s romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580–1; first translated Edward Fairfax, 1600) as a most moving instance of this. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud 1984b: 293) In Tasso’s epic Clorinda, a ‘Saracen’ warrior and Tancred’s beloved, is killed in battle by none other than Tancred himself, a Christian knight crusader engaged in a battle against the Muslims to save Jerusalem.1 She is doubly wounded when Tancred strikes out at a tree from which a voice utters: [Tancred] you have hurt me too deeply. Let it be enough to drive me from my happy dwelling, the body where I lived, that lived through me. Why should you once again hurt this poor trunk, where I am pent by my hard destiny? How could you be so cruel to resume war with adversaries in the tomb? . . . And if you cut you murder us again. (XIII: 42–53; Esolen [2000] trans.) Freud himself continues to speculate, and in fact even to advance his own unease with the findings. ‘I am not convinced myself’, he writes, and ends the essay via – a translation by Rückert of one of the maqamat (aphorisms) of the Arab thinker al-Hariri in which al-Hariri suggests that one reaches one’s destination by limping if one can’t fly to it. (The epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, however, reads a much stronger will: ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo’, ‘If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions’ [The Aeneid VII, 312]). If we wish to pin Freud down at this point – which, for us, is at the

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point where trauma is a breach in one’s protective shield (303) and has the appearance of some demonic force at work (307) – then we get ourselves into some difficulty as trauma, a manifestation of the principle of compulsive repetition, is at once unheimlich, melancholic (as an incomplete mourning), and the engine of history. For the last, as engine of history, Freud’s notoriously speculative Moses and Monotheism (where monotheistic religion indeed repeats the trauma of betrayal, racial contamination and murder) is the irrepressible document. But, as with much else in Freud, this text is also marked by a circularity, even by false starts, detours, missed beginnings, and interventions through biographical accounts of Freud’s own departure from Vienna in the wake of Nazi persecution. Repetition thus bears witness to a past. My theorization has been that in the – – aghat(a) Hindi example the word, in repeating the Sanskrit original, bears witness to what the root word han itself hides, a trauma for which a theory was not available. To make the repressed manifest, the later language indeed intro– duces another word, man(a)sik(a), pertaining to the mind, to make the trace self-evident and to underline the fact that the striking, the violence, the wounding is inflicted ‘not upon the body but upon the mind’ (Caruth 1996: 3). And since my concern is with the aesthetic and (diasporic) trauma I must now stipulate an over-riding question: How is trauma handled in fiction? The examples given by Freud – from Tasso, the aftermath of a train accident (from which a person walks away unharmed only to suffer from its after-shock effects later) and the dream of the father recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams in which the child reproaches, ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning’ (Freud 1971: 509), to mention some of the better-known examples only – leave me with a number of characteristics of trauma (some of which are critiqued below) that have a very special bearing on the literary imagination. In a sense the concept of deferred action, of writing as the impossibility of representation, of the imperative of the twice-told tale are key thematics that I have introduced into this study. But I need to be more explicit in terms of my literary material and draw on (with reservations about the abuse of linkages between language and experience noted by Amy Hungerford (2003)) Cathy Caruth’s studies of trauma. There are some events that one cannot simply leave behind, some that we repeat unwittingly and without full understanding, some that are unassimilated to consciousness. Do these get entangled in language, do they persist in language and are borne by it? Are they tied up ‘with the trauma of another’ (Caruth 1996: 8) and does language bear witness to it? I want to suggest that what Freud saw as the essentially unstable nature of traumatic memory (because of the role of the unconscious) finds its fullest expression in the body of fiction where the very nature of art (as dream work) reworks precisely a memory that remains unstable: ‘Let me not think on’t,’ says Hamlet, an utterance that encapsulates forgetting rather than remembering the moment of trauma (a father’s death, and a mother’s overhasty marriage) as the cure for the subject traumatized. For the literary work of art the very idea of Nachträglichkeit, Freud’s word for what came to be known as ‘deferred

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action’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980: 111–14), is absolutely central to the ways in which memory and recollections are narrativized. The past, in fiction inescapably, but in life, too, is always revised with reference to later events. The argument here is that one does not explain the present by simply getting back to the moment of origin; rather the present invests meaning on the originary moment so that, as Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess, ‘our psychical mechanism [comes] into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 112). Re-arrangement, re-inscription or deferred revision works best precisely on those moments, events, memories that are not fully incorporable into a ‘meaningful context’. The ‘traumatic event is the epitome of such unassimilated experience’, write Laplanche and Pontalis (112). To get back to my principal archive yet again, I want to suggest that in V. S. Naipaul the trauma of indenture (or the displacement that marks the diaspora condition) undergoes re-inscription in the light of subsequent knowledge or experience. In this respect two inter-related ideas must be made explicit: first, the history of diaspora is a history of trauma which is then written out as impossible mourning; and, second, the history of diaspora is both a history of forgetting and the experience of that forgetting. We return, more generally, to the presumption underlying narrative and trauma in that narrative transformation of traumatic memory may itself be seen as a necessary cure. In her study of Pierre Janet and his patient Irène’s ‘maternal mourning’ Ruth Leys makes precisely this point (Leys 2000: 113) although, and correctly, she adds a caveat: ‘If narration cures, it does so not because it infallibly gives the patient access to a primordially personal truth but because it makes possible a form of self-understanding even in the absence of empirical verification’ (117). In other words, although traumatic dreams and flashbacks are ‘veridical memories or representations of the traumatic event’, they are not ‘literal replicas or repetitions of the trauma and that as such they stand outside representation’ (229). The primary target of Leys’s criticism (that the veridical becomes the literal such that traumatic repetition ‘completely interrupts the norms of representation’) is the work of Cathy Caruth, and at this point I want to bring Leys and the object of her critique, Caruth, together. Leys’s chapter on Caruth in her impressive Trauma: A Genealogy (2000) is critical of Caruth’s insistence on memory and consciousness being temporarily/‘temporally’ destroyed in the face of a massive trauma. We know Adorno’s line – poetry is impossible after Auschwitz – from which it follows that representation after the Holocaust is impossible. The unpresentable moment – the moment of absolute negation – creates such a massive fracture in the psyche that where there was memory and retrospection there is now only flashback and nightmare. So, when language represents this, it can do so only by insinuating its own failure. Leys – unwisely, I think – lumps this kind of thinking rather scathingly with ‘a postmodernist, poststructuralist approach’ (266), by which she means a mode of thinking that does not pay attention to historical and social facts. This is unfortunate

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because, postmodern or not, the value of Caruth’s work lies in its emphasis on writing trauma in language: ‘language is capable of bearing witness only by a failure of witnessing or representation’ (268). Leys would probably accept this; what she finds difficult to accept is the transfer of the accounts of the witness to the listener such that the listener is both a participant as well as a co-owner ‘of the traumatic event’ (269). But there is less of the quality of endowing retroactive meaning on the traumatic event in the recall and transfer; rather what defines the delayed deferral for Caruth is a literal ‘repetition of the delayed event’ in a manner that strips it of its representational value. The experience is missed, the temporal nature of it is beyond ‘locatability’. As a critical concept the history of a people may be read as a history of trauma. This is how Caruth reads Freud’s notoriously speculative and self-consciously agonistic work Moses and Monotheism where Jewish history is a history that repeats, in writing, the murder of the father (Moses) but which is also an ‘event’ in the general history of humankind, what Sir George Frazer in his monumental work The Golden Bough (a work that Freud admired and used in Totem and Taboo) referred to as the imperative of the ‘dying god’ narrative in culture. In traditional Freudian interpretation Frazer’s ‘dying god’ motif and Freud’s history of the Jews exemplify the repressed nature of the Oedipal, the guilt of a primal killing that returns like the repressed. Caruth’s interpretation parts company with the orthodox interpretation (but is not exclusive of it) by locating trauma as a moment of disjunction, of separation, of departure that re-appears as the materiality of the signifier, as purely ‘literal engraving of the mind by an incomprehensible reality’ (Leys 2000: 283). For Leys the Freudian position is one where some trace of historical truth remains in one’s recollected moment, however delusional it may be, and which truth (as ‘historical truth’) requires interpretation. Further, the originary moment may itself be pure fantasy, a simulacrum, and is re-created and overcoded by a subsequent (and related) event. I suppose the issue that Leys finds most debatable is Caruth’s (and many other theorists’) belief that trauma can be transmitted to those who may not have experienced it, so that the trauma of racial genocide or of the Middle Passage (of slavery) is always already present in the lives of peoples subsequently affected by it. At one level – at the level of ethical propriety, let us say – this position denudes the force of those originally affected, removes from their experience any trace of historical truth. The ethical position is therefore one where the traumatic power of those originally affected can only be recovered by conscientious historiography. However, to put it in this way obliterates what we know is an experience through deferred appropriation. In the case of indigenous Australians and First Nation peoples generally, racial genocide (as a historical event) is triggered by another event such as the recollections of the ‘stolen generation of children’ (now adults) not because the latter, that is, the recollection, can displace the enormity of the former (the perceived genocide) but because the latter ‘reinvigorates’ the former as an absence in all its materiality. Inter-generational transmission (which for Freud was a matter

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of a Lamarckian theory of acquired inheritance), however, may be embedded in the texts themselves. In other words, writing itself carries marks of trauma, and its unpresentability as trauma erupts through the performativity of writing, through traces, through its own aporias. Leys is uncomfortable with this claim (and her largely pragmatic and very precise reading of Freud would preclude such readings), but I think that for my purpose this reading – writing as performing, repeating, deferring through its interstices the original moment of trauma – is absolutely fundamental. Just as in part III (the ‘Summary and Recapitulation’ section) of Moses and Monotheism (1985) the horrors of Nazism and the obscenity of the Final Solution can only be ‘written’ as an absence, as the narrative of leaving: ‘[It] forced me to leave my home,’ wrote Freud (1985: 349). At this point in time, the representational form of the horrors of Nazism is arrested; they cannot be spoken about because they are unspeakable. They get re-enacted, they get performed through the act of leaving, and internalized. In the second prefatory note (June 1938) we read again: ‘I left [verliess ich] [Vienna].’ For Caruth the departure connotes trauma and must be performed in language, its force made all the more obvious by the shift in writing from German to English in a letter written by Freud to his son Ernst in May 1938 where his preparations to leave Vienna for London are framed in terms of a hope for freedom: ‘to die in freedom’, Freud writes in English not in German. This shift in language, from German to English, to Caruth, performatively conveys ‘within the gap or aporia . . . something that cannot be grasped or represented’ (Leys 2000: 288). Trauma in Freud is thus not denoted in the prefatory note (i.e. it is not represented) but ‘borne by the words “I left” ’ to show that Freud’s trauma of departure was unknown or opaque even to himself (Leys 2000: 289). For Caruth, it is this linguistic indeterminacy, the use of English as well as the use of departure and absence to carry the unspeakable, that is the moment of transmission of trauma to another, who is then implicated in Freud’s trauma of departure (that syncopates/displaces the Holocaust). ‘In what way,’ questions Caruth, ‘is the history of a culture, and its relation to politics, inextricably bound up with the notion of departure?’ (Caruth 1996: 4). Freud’s central insight in Moses and Monotheism, continues Caruth, is that ‘history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’ (24). The transmission is not via identification (the classical Freudian position) but by the witnessing of the fracture in language and by being haunted or possessed by what it hides. It could be argued that the effect of the material ‘confrontation’ in the end leads to identification via a detour or slippage, by the effect of the trope of metonymy rather than metaphor. The case for the linguistic trace as the site of trauma and for deferred memory as occasion for recall are not as mutually exclusive as Leys (and, one presumes, Caruth) make them out to be. It is here that the perpetrator, in certain contexts, acquires the trauma of the victim. The acquisition is not universal to all narratives of tormentor and victim and should not be used to claim that this transference therefore disorients the sanctity of memory and the sufferings of the victim. Caruth takes up Freud’s own reading of the

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double wounding of Clorinda by her beloved Tancred in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) as an instance of a demonic compulsion to repeat. The second wounding of Clorinda shows how the first remains unknown to Tancred, and precisely because it was not ‘assimilable’ it returns (compulsively) to haunt him. The absence of any knowledge of the traumatic event is what makes for the second occurrence: ‘A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed,’ says the Player Queen in Hamlet (III.ii.179–80). Leys calls Caruth’s claims ‘weird’, and I think she is correct in respect of her reading of Freud at this point (since in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud is not writing about traumatic neurosis but the compulsion towards death or the death drive). She is incorrect, however, in attributing only to Caruth a return to literary citation as an example of the overdetermined nature of the linguistic sign when elsewhere (as in dream work) Freud had often taken this turn himself. Leys declares that the act of repetition, the wounding of the tree by Tancred, is not a ‘literal’ but a figurative act; and nor is Tancred the ‘victim of the wounding’. If we accept the first, then there is no question of representation of the event since metaphor makes this possible; if we accept the second as well, then there is no ethical ‘sanctity’ of the voice of the victim since the victim’s voice is internalized by the perpetrator of the act. But the point is not really a denial of the witness or victim but the displacement of the trauma since it has no localized place of its own. In Tasso’s case the wounding has to be repeated compulsively because the trauma itself has been emptied of meaning – it has no meaning of itself – and comes into being only through its delayed re-inscription in language, which alone can ‘bear’ that which cannot be spoken about. This does not mean that we can make a huge jump and declare that Nazi perpetrators were equally traumatized by the Holocaust primarily through transference. But it does mean that after the Holocaust (as a historical fact of pure evil) it is difficult not to feel split and dissociated, difficult not to repeat the trauma in ways that suggest the impossibility of its fulsome representation. It may be argued that the kind of radical reconstructivism present in the Caruth project arises because a historical event has so disarticulated, unsettled and fractured our beings that Adorno was correct after all.

Writing diaspora via trauma I want to explore the idea of ‘writing diaspora’ in an analogy with writing trauma or writing mourning. Although there is nothing original in the use of the phrase ‘writing diaspora’, which was the title of Rey Chow’s early book (1993), I want to think through how the narrative of traumatic experience and recollection gets enacted in the literature of the diaspora, in this case the literature of the Indian diaspora. Even more narrowly, I want to take up the singular instance of V. S. Naipaul in terms of the subliminal text of trauma around the indenture/plantation experience. I am aware of the very different clinical meanings of the ‘post-traumatic’ state of the subject (the traumatic effects

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of war, sexual and domestic abuse, and so on), their specific narratives of recollection for purposes of justice and cure of the ego. Although in one sense ‘writing’ may be seen as a cure of trauma, that is not my primary concern here. Instead I wish to examine the ways in which the post-traumatic moment produces diasporic narratives always haunted by the spectres of trauma. Following on from comments already made in previous chapters, in Naipaul’s case I begin by arguing that his first account of India in An Area of Darkness is marked by a solipsistic encounter with a motherland which cannot be adequately mourned (the mourning is impossible) because the motherland carries the accusing marks of the source of trauma. In diasporic lives trauma may well be collective, a mode of silent participation and in the end accusation. In Naipaul’s case the perpetrator of the trauma is not the system that created an empire out of tea and sugar plantations (for a European leisured class) but the motherland itself. It is, to use Karyn Ball’s description of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s thesis about German congenital anti-Semitism, ‘symptomatic of [a] lingering ressentiment’ (2000: 26) for the motherland’s failure, as a kind of return to one’s historical repressed. There are two key matters we need to reprise at this juncture. The first is trauma’s ‘after the event’ (Freud’s nachträglich) occurrence because it, trauma, in the words of Angelika Rauch, ‘is less significant as an event that can be fixed at a prior date (historie) than in its posterior subjectifications and the restructuring of the subject that is the consequence (Geschichte)’ (1998: 113). The second point is that trauma’s aporia, its incompleteness, its undecidability, its free play of difference ‘disarticulate relations, confuse self and other’, and leave ‘belated effects’ that are difficult to control and are ‘never fully mastered’ (LaCapra 2001: 21). Trauma repeats itself compulsively and has a historical presence without historical teleology. History cannot be written without trauma (both at the level of the individual and of the group), but trauma cannot be part of historical form because trauma disrupts the linear flow of historical narrative with its, history’s, basis in an originary moment. For Slavoj Žižek it is ‘a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency . . . a point of failure of symbolization, but at the same time never given in its positivity’ (1989: 169). Like the Lacanian ‘Real’, it ‘cannot be inscribed, . . . [although] we can inscribe this impossibility … [it] is nothing but the impossibility of inscription’ (1989: 172–3). As the inscription of the impossible, trauma intervenes into the positivist narratives of history as it presents history itself as compulsive repetition after the event. In other words, history repeats itself as a recurrence of the traumatic moment. The force of trauma, therefore, lies in its repetition: the Australian Aboriginal land rights movement and the case of the stolen generation invoking the original, real or imagined, genocidal moment of white–aboriginal encounter; the Ukrainian famine implicating, retrospectively, the Ukrainian Jewish commissars and justifying subsequent Ukrainian–Nazi complicity – a point notoriously exploited by Helen Demidenko/Darville in her novel The Hand That Signed the Paper [1994] (Mishra 1996), among many others. But there are dangers in the hypothesis, the most important of which

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(implicit in the principle of compulsive repetition itself) is the transference of trauma from the victim to the perpetrator or even from the victim to the dispassionate observer. As (post)modern subjects, we are already in some difficulty because trauma memory comes to us with an already-formed discourse around the ‘unpresentability’ of the absolute traumatic moment, the Holocaust, where the silence of the witnesses (the right-wing argument is that since survivors can’t be witnesses – how else could they have survived? – there can be no testimony) reinforces the sublime unspeakable. The cautionary point is that one needs to keep in mind the ethical propriety of traumatic appropriation and transference, and it is here that positivist history cannot be thrown away for the sake of a postmodern historicity: to transvalue the Holocaust as the negative sublime (and hence to give it a purely transcendentalist force), for instance, in the end denudes it of any foundational value. For when the trauma returns via transference, as in the case of Naipaul argued at length below, one needs to be conscious of the prior history of the subject undergoing the effects of the transference. So, in Naipaul’s case, a posterior re-subjectification of trauma has to be located in the history of indenture, in Naipaul’s own re-structuring in the context of an incomplete mourning for the homeland. Both come together – in the middle, atmanepada, voice of self-reflexive ‘transitivity’ that marks works such as An Area of Darkness. But first, of course, is the matter of self-response which is where this study locates itself. Is there a cure of trauma through performativity, that is, by acting out or working through the memory of the event much like following the steps of a devotional manual such as that of St Ignatius of Loyola where the steps lead the believer to mentally enact and debate key issues or events in the Christian calendar? The enactment on a given day may reconstruct the moment of the Passion of Christ (as a traumatic event) which is then subjected to analysis, critical response and judgement. In therapy that is clearly the preferred path, but many of us simply mourn the loss. LaCapra suggests that mourning socializes or ritualizes repetition compulsion and in doing so turns it against the death drive (2001: 66). Melancholia, the mourning of the sentimental hero in narrative, fails to find a substitute for the lost object in what Freud termed the ‘new object of love’. The narrative form that emerges as the closest analogy of the traumatic and post-traumatic recollection is the realist novel where the lost object is finally recovered after the subject has emerged a more socially and historically mature individual. Narrative itself is both a process of engagement with the loss and a way of understanding that loss. The phrase ‘a sadder and a wiser man’ conventionally captures the tenor of the subject’s development remarkably well. The intentional fallacy notwithstanding, it has been important for me to revisit, however perfunctorily, current theoretical discourses on trauma. I need this revisiting before I can suggest that the model of trauma as something that cannot be ‘experienced or subjectivized fully’ (Ramadanovic 1998: 55) is at the heart of Naipaul’s relationship to the Indian diaspora as the subject sees himself as being ‘untimely ripp’d’ from the ‘mother’s womb’. Diasporic subjectivity then works in the shadow of trauma and is always ‘en route’, never ‘rooted’ as

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such. What I am suggesting is that in Naipaul’s writing the subject gets entangled in what Cathy Caruth has called an ‘unclaimed experience’ because the subject was not there to participate in it. I suggest that Naipaul’s works are marked by moments of aporia that signal ways in which the originary moment is recalled through deferred action, is overcoded by the latter and is endlessly reprised. In the later Naipaul this repetition takes the form of the writing out of both his departure and his family genealogy (both more or less ubiquitous after Finding the Centre).

Trauma and the enigma of return We learned from Greenblatt that history cannot be simply set off against literary texts in terms of generic opposition (differentiation by form) or relegated to the background as passive facts and figures. History interweaves with the aesthetic and produces texts charged with such complex content that any reading we offer needs to address their mutual presence, their collective energies. But what if that history is never fully understood or cannot be imagined, like Lacan’s ‘Real’ or Caruth’s trauma (Ramadanovic 1998: 59)? What if the experience exists not as historical facts alone but as a memory that affects later lives, and is in turn charged by the latter; what if the aesthetic itself ‘bears’ the marks of the trauma in its very language without either representing it fully or acknowledging its source? The wound of indenture predates Indian diasporic representation; it haunts it but has to be repeated. In what follows I want to explore, more specifically, the ways in which Naipaul’s texts transmit trauma, convey the history of trauma by aporetic semantics in the writing itself. I return to Naipaul via his first book on India. Naipaul spent a year (most of 1962) in India; the book that grew out of the visit, An Area of Darkness, was published two years later in 1964. In 1961, Naipaul had brought to a close, in a sense, his works on the Trinidad Indian diaspora which began with The Mystic Masseur (1957). The book that marks off that period (although some of it resurfaces in The Mimic Men a few years later) is his truly magnificent A House for Mr Biswas. It is in Biswas that we get a fuller sense of the plantation diaspora, their closed lives, their anxieties, their coming to terms with ‘home’ and the importance of engaging with ‘where one is at’. The novel also makes no explicit reference to India, and what exists of that country is a highly mediatized version that surfaces more or less in the social and religious practices that the Indian diaspora had internalized. There is little if any self-consciousness of the ‘degraded’ nature of these practices, their language and forms often distorted beyond recognition, but the practices were tenaciously adhered to. When the diaspora returns to the homeland – in Naipaul’s case after it had been in Trinidad for over a hundred years (although Naipaul’s own maternal grandfather was a relatively recent turn-of-the-century migrant) – it has no consciousness of the earlier history; it has only an experience of an Indian diasporic life-world overlaid with idioms that glorified the homeland. So when Naipaul reaches India in February 1962 there is nothing there to which he can immediately relate because India

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was for him an ‘empty space, mapped purely by words’ (Ghosh 2002: 249). He had come with the ‘idea of man’, and this idea of man was that of the universal rational subject as defined by the legacy of the Enlightenment in its imperially constructed instrumental form. Imperialism defined itself primarily as a ‘civilizing’ project aimed at creating out of disparate human subjectivities an identifiable, rational and ‘enlightened’ subject. Naipaul never makes this reading of the subject at all explicit, but listen carefully to the change he detects as he moves from Athens to Bombay: ‘from Athens to Bombay another idea of man had defined itself by degrees, a new type of authority and subservience’ (13). Embedded in this observation is both a recognition of difference and a statement of value: difference because Naipaul’s own colonial history had foreclosed the idea of an equally valuable subject working with an alternative splitting of reason, and value because the foreclosure had also signified a standard against which all other subjectivities should be measured. But this is of a piece with the experience of the old Indian diaspora, an experience through which the initial encounter with India is measured. India, declares Naipaul in An Area of Darkness, was the country from which his grandfather had come to Trinidad. Because it was never really described (beyond, I suspect, as some kind of paradise) it had no reality as such. His own grandfather as well as other indentured labourers of his childhood had ceased to carry the marks of indenture and were now ensconced in Trinidad. From India, therefore, ‘our journey had been final’ (Naipaul 1964: 29). Where that India survived – in the idiosyncratic Gold Teeth Nanee, re-created as ‘My Aunt Gold Teeth’ in one of Naipaul’s very early short stories (Naipaul 1967b) or in the curiously silent Babu – it had little immediate resonance, little value as an Indian touchstone for the diaspora. Memory existed as no more than artefacts like the string bed, the drums, the ruined harmonium or the paraphernalia of religion. In them, in these artefacts, ‘India existed whole in Trinidad’ (31). Yet these artefacts lacked any historical significance for the indentured labourers (or their descendants) because as a race they were not trained to link artefacts to the past; there was no sense of maintaining a harmonium, as one didn’t, much later, an HMV record-player – an artefact was simply part of a custom to be kept because it was ‘felt to be ancient’ (32). It is an attitude of a different order and one that the later diaspora regrets because it denied it a fully fledged cultural museum. When the centenaries of indenture were celebrated in these sugar plantations, it was often impossible to lay hands on an early copy of the – – or even an early religious icon. Their preservation was not Ramayana, . a dholak . part of their life-worlds as these artefacts never had any auratic value. Not that the people of indenture had not come prepared, for they did bring with them the usual paraphernalia – ‘musical instruments, string beds . . . even grinding stones’ (Naipaul 1996a I: 1.3). But they were not valued as cultural capital; rather they signified the Indian diaspora’s sense of panic exclusiveness, their private, self-enclosed worlds. To – draw upon an analogy with the Sanskrit middle (atmanepada) and active (parasmaipada) voice, they spoke about themselves (vadante) not about others

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(vadanti). Most modern European (and even modern Indian) languages no longer have a formal middle voice (to distinguish it from the active), but this is not to say that the middle voice may not be ‘semantically’ indicated. In his famous essay ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb?’, Roland Barthes (1972: 134–56) referred to diathesis or voice (active, passive, middle) as a means of designating how ‘the subject of the verb is affected by the action’ (142), a fact that is so clear whenever we use the passive voice. However, the key distinction in IndoEuropean languages is not between the active and the passive but between the active and the middle. Barthes gives the example of the verb for ‘oblation’ (yaj, ‘to offer’) to show that to sacrifice to oneself (yajate, the middle voice) implies (against yajati, the active voice) that ‘the subject affects himself in acting; he always remains inside the action, even if an object is involved’ (142). It follows that semantically the middle voice does not exclude transitivity (though grammatically it does), which means that for the crucial verb ‘to write’ (originally a transitive verb and the subject of Barthes’ essay) the subject who writes is the ‘agent of action’ (142). But this active subjectivity is ambiguously inscribed in the text because the middle voice is also the space of what Derrida has theorized as différance, that which is ‘neither simply active nor simply passive’ (1982: 9)2. This, I believe, is the tenor of Chapter 1 of An Area of Darkness, which is appropriately titled ‘A resting-place for the imagination’. So the references to inclusiveness (purities surrounding food, caste and so on) do not have the function of addressing another; they mark out the space of the middle voice in which diasporic engagements generally take shape but which in the plantationIndian diaspora took on a rather special form. They also mark out the crux of the narrative relay in An Area of Darkness: in its middle-voice equivalent the narrator, Naipaul, speaks to a narratee who is also Naipaul. And what he writes is one of the most seething, unrelieved portrayals of India ever; an India that is well beyond redemption. No Orientalist had ever been so relentlessly hysterical about the Other. The voice becomes private, and the world Naipaul creates is no longer available even to his own brother Shiva, twelve years younger. We read: The family life I have been describing began to dissolve when I was six or seven; when I was fourteen it had ceased to exist. Between my brother, twelve years younger than myself, and me there is more than a generation of difference. He can have no memory of that private world which survived with such apparent solidity up to only twenty-five years ago, a world which had lengthened out, its energy of inertia steadily weakening, from the featureless area of darkness which was India. (1964: 37–8) There is much here that requires unpacking, but I shall limit myself to two points only. The first is the idea of the indenture world lengthening out from the homeland as though there is something of a continuity between the two. The second is the much more ambiguous ‘its energy of inertia steadily

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weakening’. ‘Energy of inertia’ is a phrase that implies that there is energy here in stasis, that Indians have willed their lives that way; but there is also a satirical – – jab at Krishna’s claim in the Bhagavadg ıta that there is action even in inaction. Have the people of the ‘area of darkness’ lost Krishna’s message of continual action (even renunciation is action, he had said) and vulgarized it into fatalism? That’s the kind of narrative that underpins one side of V. S. Naipaul’s diasporic allegory: the old Indian diaspora reads the motherland in a highly contradictory fashion, yet remains fiercely protective about its own indenture history. The other side is the replay of fatalism as the ‘energy of inertia’ in A House for Mr Biswas: ‘Fate had brought him [Bipti’s father] from India to the sugar-estate, aged him quickly and left him to die in a crumbling mud hut in the swamplands’ (1961: 15). Their ‘private world’ was different, and in India Naipaul comes across a world once again impervious to change. If there is a narrative of the return of the repressed, this is it, since the area of darkness is not an imperialist metaphor (like Conrad’s) but a darkness locked within his unconscious. To write the book is a cure, but it needs mediation, it needs a story about the diasporic subject totally oblivious of the depressing weight of that world view. Soon after writing the passage quoted above, Naipaul recalls the death of Ramon, a fellow Trinidadian Indian in London. Ramon was part of the on-going ‘post-Windrush 1948’ migration of people from the West Indies to Britain, often referred to as the banana boaters because bananas (and sugar) were about all that the West Indies exported. In Ramon, Naipaul saw another kind of subject, someone not linked to the private world of the diaspora (as Naipaul was) but part of a carefree generation with rather different passions. Ramon’s passion was for cars: he fixed them; he stole car parts and often he was in trouble with the police. He died young in a car crash, and Naipaul inserts his life as a montage cut in his book. Its tone is different, and the passage about Ramon is the closest one comes to encountering in Naipaul a sense of genuine love and loss. It also signifies an absolute difference, for in India there will be no one like Ramon, no one so thoroughly postcolonial. For Ramon the Indian journey had been final, too; India can only return to him in death when an Indian student of the right caste stands in for the officiating priest. For Naipaul, though, there is a consciousness about India inasmuch as it was ‘an area of the imagination’ (44), but that ‘consciousness’ has to be carefully distinguished, its specificity acknowledged, so that the mourning it engenders may be examined. Of all the writers on the diaspora Naipaul alone seems to have grasped the finality of the journey and the meaning of those ‘willed acts’ undertaken to cope with what Sudesh Mishra has called ‘the psychology of dislocation in the plantations’ (2002: 143–4). Indeed ‘nothing had prepared [Naipaul] for it [India]’ (1964: 49), and what he sees is a reading of an ancient and continuing culture through the eyes of diaspora. Those eyes produce, often in the middle-voice, some striking analyses expressing the diaspora’s own panic, the diaspora’s own schizophrenia, but some that could have come only because India had been so totally ‘othered’ in the diaspora that its cultural logic made little sense. To

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understand these passages (and the middle-voice semantics that they engender) one needs to theorize a crucial problematic of diasporic theory, that is, their links to notions of trauma, absence and loss. That loss is compounded by a colonial awareness of the fact that India’s own history, its past (and for Naipaul the past is primarily Hindu), was very much an imperialist construction: ‘It was Europe that revealed India’s past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism’ (Naipaul 1964: 217). What I have said is that An Area of Darkness is a writing that carries traces of the original trauma which gets deflected on to the motherland through panic and irritation. The original ‘leaving’ or departure haunts the diaspora’s return, and An Area of Darkness, like his other Trinidadian novels, carries a trauma that cannot be grasped, that eludes representation, that returns, as does the middle voice, to the narrator himself. The trace that I speak of, the fragmentary representation, the aporia surfaces as the materiality of the signifier, as a literal engraving on the mind of an incomprehensible reality. I must write out one key moment of impossible inscription in full. The letter finished, I went to sleep. Then there was a song, a duet, at first part of memory, it seemed, part of that recaptured mood. But I was not dreaming; I was lucid. The music was real. Tumhin ne mujhko prem sikhaya, Soté hué hirdaya ko jagaya. Tumhin ho roop singar balam. It was morning. The song came from a shop across the road. It was a song of the late thirties. I had ceased to hear it years before, and until this moment I had forgotten it. I did not even know the meaning of all the words; but then I never had. It was pure mood, and in that moment between waking and sleeping it had recreated a morning in another world, a recreation of this, which continued. And walking that day in the bazaar, I saw the harmoniums, one of which had lain broken and unused, part of the irrecoverable past, in my grandmother’s house, the drums, the printing-blocks, the brass vessels. (Naipaul 1964: 271–2) The song is from the Hindi film Manmohan (1936) and sung by Surendra and Bibbo. Naipaul cannot recall these details but he knows that it is a song of the late thirties (the film may have reached Trinidad a few years after its release in India). Naipaul doesn’t know the meaning of the words (he has it translated in a footnote) but he senses that the second line – soté (soyé in the original) hué hirdaya ko jagaya (the diacritics are Naipaul’s), ‘you awoke my sleeping heart’ – triggers a memory, re-creates a history that takes him back to his grandmother’s home, the home that is the centre of A House for Mr Biswas. The pure mood, as film song, had appeared earlier in his novels but without commentary. In The Suffrage of Elvira (1958: 103), Mrs Chittaranjan sings the theme song from the

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film Jhoola (1941) (quite possibly Ashok Kumar’s calı re calı re merı nav calı re) which is picked up by her neighbour, the rum-shop owner Ramlogan, who also hums it (120); and Shama, in spite of Biswas’s dislike of it, sings a sullen cremation song in A House for Mr Biswas (160), and this song, too, is from a film, possibly Acchut Kanya (1936). The materiality of the song obfuscates recall; memory of the past exists only as an aporia because the song exists as mood, not as meaning. In the arcade of Hanuman House, old indentured labourers high on ganja reminisce but are afraid, afraid of the past, secure only in their ‘familiar temporariness’. Ralph Singh’s placid life in The Mimic Men is written out through a discourse of parenthesis, and the narrative around the de Chirico painting that Naipaul wants to write in The Enigma of Arrival cannot be written because ‘the antique ship – – – [had] gone’ (1987: 92). And each reference to lentils and rice or bhajı and ro .tı (‘You ain’t eat one whole roti? . . . You ain’t eat bhaji?’ Ma scolds son Herbert in The Suffrage of Elvira (64)) repeats the standard cuisine of indenture. All these re-project the past in the present and the present on to the past. The entanglement is the key to the narrative of trauma, to a history structured around an impossible recall. I am drawn to the final pages of An Area of Darkness. The chapter itself is titled ‘Flight’. The prose is traumatized, the key anchoring points in the language centre around anxiety and death as the language bears the weight of the trauma (‘flight’ after all is departure and echoes ‘fright’). The first sentence (some 110 words long) is panic-driven, written as it is in the past perfect (but continuous) form where the argument hinges on ‘[to be in such a state] is to know anxiety, exasperation and a creeping stupor’ (1964: 278). As Naipaul travels westwards, first Beirut, then Rome, then Madrid, the cities are haunted by the memory of India: ‘India was part of the night: a dead world’, and this dead world ‘rendered life itself fraudulent’ (279), affecting whatever he sees, wherever he goes. The language witnesses the trauma, and Naipaul declares that the experience of India was ‘a journey that ought not to have been made’. Adds Naipaul, ‘it had broken my life in two’ (280). Later, in his Nobel lecture, he would make the same point yet again: ‘It was a journey that broke my life in two’ (2003: 193). The gloom is persistent, the style uncompromisingly bleak, it exorcizes nothing; a life has been broken in two, or wasn’t this always so, because there had been another departure, the other departure a hundred years before of the motley crowd of indentured labourers? India repeats that earlier wound, the trauma gets repeated: after the first journey there is no other. India is the ‘Real’ that defies all representation, so how does he inscribe this impossibility? There is a piece of cloth, a gift from a patient friend who had quietly suffered Naipaul’s outbursts. The friend had asked that the cloth should be stitched into a jacket. The jacket made, Naipaul recounts a dream. Let me write that dream out, as I must now. An oblong of stiff new cloth lay before me, and I had the knowledge that if only out of this I could cut a smaller oblong of specific measurements,

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a specific section of this cloth, then the cloth would begin to unravel of itself, and the unravelling would spread from the cloth to the table to the house to all matter, until the whole trick was undone. Those were the words that were with me as I flattened the cloth and studied it for the clues which I knew existed, which I desired above everything else to find, but which I knew I never would. (280) Against, one presumes, the vast chaos of the cloth there is a desire for meaning and specificity, a desire for order, a need to be able to make sense of the world. This, in the dream, would lead to its ‘unravelling’, where ‘unravelling’ contains both the display of meaning as well as the spreading out of the cloth in all its materiality. The words italicized are part of the dream text, and to know the mystery of its unravelling Naipaul needs to understand the clues that hide its mystery. The clue to the mystery cannot be found; it is hidden in the very materiality of the cloth, in the mystery of the metonymic trope itself. In the end India, the site of the trauma, cannot be witnessed. It is transposed on to a pervasive metaphor, that of the unravelling of Draupadi’s sari by the treacherous Duryodhana; the sanctity of woman, of Mother India, almost defiled were it not for the intervention of Krishna. The unpresentable moment creates such a fracture, is so delayed, that memory and retrospection (the condition of history) are replaced by a gloomy dream (the trope of trauma). The subject wakes up in fright. Naipaul returns in the final paragraph of An Area of Darkness to the experience of India as a reprise of diasporic homelessness. But the experience only ‘rewounded’ that idea and transformed it into the Indian sublime of absolute nirvanic negation. For a moment in the writing of this painful narrative about India he had grasped it, or so he thought. Now, in the final sentence, it escapes him yet again; ‘it was slipping away from [him]’: ‘I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again’ (281). There had been a transfer, from the original departure (which was final) to a relay of the experience to another member of the plantation diaspora, that is, to Naipaul himself. But not in any full representational sense because the aporias come close to ‘the total Indian negation’ (281) with which the book ends. ‘A second time I kill my husband dead,’ the Player Queen had said in Hamlet. And a second book on India appeared after Naipaul’s third trip to the country. This book, with its painful title, India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), returns to the metaphor of wounding. It lacks the careful prose of the first, it has no moment of placidity, and little self-reflection. As art, it is in places shoddy and repetitive. But in a sense the book has to be so; it cannot be any other as once again the encounter with India, a second time in fact, triggers the pain of the first and before that the moment of original parturition and rejection by the homeland. Slavoj Žižek has drawn our attention to the proximity of trauma and fantasy: ‘The two are never simply opposed (with fantasy serving as the protective shield against the raw Real of trauma)’ (2002: lxvii). In the second book the

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encounter with Naipaul’s fantasy of India is again contained within a discourse of trauma, and many of the commentaries are written around literary texts as if literature is as good a source for truth as any other discourse. The title, with its unnerving descriptor of the civilization as ‘wounded’, situates the writer himself in a Christian exegetical tradition of writing. Much of this situating of the writer occurs very early on in the book, in fact with the foreword itself. If we follow the point of view or the camera eye, the technique of representation is patently obvious. The eye pauses on the airport, and quite specifically on the rain and the air flight, not his own but that of Gulf Air. The rain is monsoonal, and Gulf Air is a plane that operates from the rich oil emirates of the Middle East. But ‘monsoon’, too, is from the Arabic mausim (literally season), and the anxieties about India begin with Arabia and Muslims. It is an anxiety that has persisted in Naipaul to this day, but here in this earlier work it is framed as bitter accusation. It is with the Muslims that, it seems, ‘the purely Indian past died’. ‘No civilization’, writes Naipaul, ‘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’ (1977: 7–8). A decaying civilization, an abject (in Kristeva’s sense) body totally incapable of self-redemption would be of no interest to anyone, so why does Naipaul return to India, what is its attraction, its compulsive power? The answers, as given by Naipaul, are ambivalent but in many ways centrally symptomatic of the diasporic discourse about homelands. Writes Naipaul: India for me is a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for its sights. I am at once too close and too far. (8–9) And then he adds soon afterwards: ‘The starting point of this enquiry – more than might appear in these pages – has been myself’ (9). The difficulty of India has to be connected with a self that carries ‘phantasmal memories of an old India’ that grew out of the survival tactics of a plantation culture. The memory now centres on a particular sacrifice that Naipaul had already spoken about in a lecture delivered at a symposium on East Indians in the Caribbean held in Trinidad in June 1975 (see Chapter 2). The contrast in the recollection of the ritual in the lecture and in this book on a wounded civilization is telling. He recalls the sacrifice again – the first cooked thing ‘was always for the fire’, the smooth pebbles as ‘phallic emblems’, the sexual connotations of a male cutting a pumpkin open – but in this other context these references signify a way of defining one’s own self against the frightening reality of India itself. What was once a quaint act – he had spoken about it in terms of ‘some sexual symbolism’ – turns out to be a ‘truth more frightening’. The pumpkin, in Bengal and adjoining areas, is a vegetable substitute for a living sacrifice: the male hand was therefore necessary. In India I know I am a stranger: but increasingly I understand that my Indian memories, the

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memories of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like trapdoors into a bottomless past. (10) What in the 1975 lecture was ritual as aesthetic – the recollection was itself beautiful – here in this second book on India turns out to have a more frightening substratum. India confronts comfortable rituals with complex and fearful facts. The return wounds the subject as the title of this his second book about India takes us back to the myth about the second wounding of Clorinda by her beloved Tancred in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata as an instance of a demonic compulsion to repeat. Like Tancred’s second wounding of Clorinda, Naipaul’s wounding of India is repeated precisely because it was not ‘assimilable’ and must therefore return (compulsively) to haunt him. If we were to push this argument, we might even argue that Naipaul’s writing inscribes what Naipaul himself does not fully understand with reference to India. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have made the claim more explicitly: we turn to literature as a ‘precocious mode of witnessing – of accessing – when all other modes of knowledge are precluded’ (1992: xx). This is a daring claim for the aesthetic but one that Naipaul himself would endorse, especially in so far as the claim encapsulates an implicit connection between art and truth (albeit of the unconscious kind). Referring to the use of the reflexive ‘myself’, I have suggested that we need to see Naipaul’s two early works on India as acts of witnessing the source of trauma. Paraphrasing Paul Celan [Ancel], the young Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who must write his poetry in German (‘Poetry – that is the fateful uniqueness of language’, Celan had written), Shoshana Felman observes acutely: ‘To bear witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 3). The work as testimony, as a ‘bearing witness to’, presents discourse as transmission of a truth about India. It is seemingly grounded in an analytic that aims at questioning and discovering why this civilization has been wounded. But the prose itself (and again we notice the negations) is panic-ridden and suggests that the semantics of defeat and slavery cannot be brought to a close – it has to be endlessly deferred. We would expect, in spite of its obscurity, that the transmission is ‘the unsuspected medium of a healing’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 9). On the other hand, and taking our cue again from Felman and Laub, can we say that Naipaul’s testimony (to us) ‘quite explicitly rejects the very goal of healing and precludes any therapeutic project?’ (9). This is, of course, a matter of value, not of the epistemology of trauma writing, the understanding that the act of writing itself bears witness to the trauma of one’s past as that trauma repeats itself at its very source. For the fact is – and this has been my point of departure throughout – that trauma is a matter of (delayed) repetition, a matter of participating, a matter of (inter-generational) transmission; ‘one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it’ (Felman and Laub 15). Twenty-three and ten years separate The Enigma of Arrival from An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization respectively. The writer is now an

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establishment figure, part of the metropolitan cultural scene, and soon to be made a Knight Bachelor of the British Empire. With a vast and diverse corpus behind him, he returns to autobiography once again (as he had done in A House for Mr Biswas), but now autobiography has no humour, and the word that occurs only once in The Enigma of Arrival is ‘love’ (1987: 152), a point observed by Salman Rushdie in his review of the book (1991: 148–51). V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel is tragic; it is about absence, about journeys being final and unrepeatable: to rephrase Dylan Thomas’s ‘After the first death, there is no other’ (Thomas 1964: 101), after the first journey, there is no other (emphases mine). The diaspora now looks inward – ethnically, so to speak – but without retreating into the language of the people who smoked ganja in the veranda of Hanuman House and reminisced about India as home (Naipaul 1961: 174). In Salisbury, the heart of druidic Stonehenge (Britain’s indigenous civilization, the site of William Blake’s Jerusalem, ‘Albion’s druidity shore’), Naipaul comes to terms with the English Romantic past (the movement that coincided with the greatest period of British expansionism and with some of the worst excesses of slavery, which is also, in a strange way, part of his own history). It is for this reason that Wordsworth (for he is the great canonical figure here) will now be rewritten through the histories of Naipaul’s own diasporic past, and the text will end not with a narrative in which the subject is embalmed or healed through a new-found Leech-gatherer, but with the representation of a furiously burning pyre and its aftermath in Trinidad to which the artist returns two days after his sister Sati’s death. ‘Sati’, that terrifying word from which widows escaped to take up indenture, brings the narrative of exile and return full circle. There is no Romantic bliss, only a complex and constant resiting of the liminal subject between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and a consciousness about the need to cleanse those apparatuses of representation with which the colonized had been lumbered. This is not the text of ‘a colonial renegade’, ‘a witness for the Western prosecution’, to use Edward Said’s blistering pejoratives (Said 1986: 53); rather it is the narrative of ‘the grandson and great-grandson of agricultural immigrants from India’ (Naipaul 1990: 491) who, from faraway Trinidad, intervenes into the most sacred of all English discourses, the discourse of Romanticism (with its nostalgia for the pastoral), and rewrites it, but without closing it off. The autobiography styled as a novel is thus hyphenated yet again: the Salisbury figures may be fictional, but those in Trinidad are very real. The key to this intense meditation on a ‘second life’ that explores, as Naipaul says, ‘the rawness of my nerves . . . the weariness of my insecurity, social, racial, financial’ and the wish to put an end to the idea of the journey (1987: 144) is to be found in the title of the novel itself. ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ is one of Giorgio de Chirico’s earlier surrealist paintings (Kroker and Cook 1988: 30). But faced with Chirico’s painting (the title is actually Apollinaire’s) Naipaul writes down a realist history about his own departure from home and his own rootlessness through what Timothy Weiss has called ‘[autobiography’s] process of presencing; of becoming real’ (Weiss 1992: 213). Behind this novel of close observations, of minutiae, is the

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admission that, finally, the diaspora can never find home, can never belong through the logic of ‘territoriality’. For the diaspora, peace of mind, perhaps, but never that special empathy with the land that Jack had by right of being born there or Howard’s certainty about ‘home’ in the Deep South (Naipaul 1989: 3). Home becomes for Naipaul an aesthetic order, a travel/travail, a pos(i)ting of the past on to another landscape. In this act the fracture of displacement, the panic hard on the heels of escape from a stifling island community, can only be deflected and aesthetically contained or ordered. The deadly explosion in the head (Naipaul 1987: 156), the dream of falling flat on one’s back right in the middle of a street in front of people, nightmares about the body being transformed into a corpse, need soothing and embalming. Not much more than this can be achieved. In the story that Naipaul composes around the Chirico picture (but one that he doesn’t actually write out in full as a novel) he speaks of the man who arrives at a port, enters into the life of a bustling city, does his business but then panics and wants to return. He is caught in a religious ritual of which he quickly becomes the intended victim. At the moment of death he finds himself mysteriously back on the quay: He has been saved; the world is as he remembered it. Only one thing is missing now. Above the cut-out walls and buildings there is no mast, no sail. The antique ship has gone. The traveller has lived out his life. (92) Naipaul’s indentured forebears discovered this in Trinidad; their ships had also disappeared and they were left stranded on an island off the coast of Venezuela. In Naipaul’s case the ship always disappears upon each arrival as new spaces are transformed through a prior memory. Home is always a matter of postponement, it is always pos(i)ted. It is here that the story of Jack’s garden is of such great value to Naipaul himself. Not simply because of its Wordsworthian possibilities of healing (Jack’s father-in-law as the Fuel-gatherer/Leech-gatherer to the agitated Naipaul/Wordsworth) but because of the traveller’s capacity to order his own life even as the ships have in fact left the port without him. Imperialism led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of peasant Indians (illiterate, they had no sense of geography to begin with) to all parts of the globe. Travel brings them back in the age of late capital to the metropolitan centre because memory has now collapsed the imaginary homeland of India with the pastoral English homeland of the textbooks of the Cambridge School Certificate curriculum that provided an ‘abstract, arbitrary . . . education’ which meant that the old Indian diaspora lived in a world ‘where signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers’ (Naipaul 1987: 120). To make sense of this disjunction, the diaspora internalizes Wordsworth not in any vulgar sort of way, but by radically rewriting his Romantic vision: we had never seen daffodils or ‘black-and-white cows against the sky’ (38) but we wrote about them; we did not understand Romanticism and the ‘special anguish attached to the career [of a writer]’ (94) but we mimicked their discourses and

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made them our own. When Naipaul writes out Chirico’s tale, he cannot write in a spirit of antagonism, because he is always complicit in the project of the Empire and of the Enlightenment. So his postcoloniality is not adversarial but not uncritical, either. It is one in which history is accepted, but its authors are not; it is one in which the subaltern is allowed a voice and an equal legitimization. When Christopher Ricks called Naipaul ‘the most important import since Joseph Conrad and Henry James’,3 he implied the incorporation of the artist into the great English tradition through the deracination of the black colonial boy. Yet neither James nor Conrad constantly spoke about their origins in their works; neither of them showed the signs of schizophrenia verging on madness as a consequence of displacement; and neither, finally, had to agonize about home in the same manner. It is that reaction that Christopher Ricks seems to be totally unaware of − the reaction that always makes the diasporic nerves constantly on edge, the rawness exploding into paranoia. For Naipaul, as for the diaspora itself, ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, Chirico’s version as well as his own meditation on the theme, is all about journeys and ships. It is about our first journeys after which there are no other; it is about later journeys parodying earlier ones: . . . that journey back to England so mimicked and parodied the journey of nineteen years before, the journey of the young man, the boy almost who had journeyed to England to be a writer, in a country where the calling had some meaning. . . . (95) The statement, with the period changed by one whole year, gets repeated: ‘So that twenty years on I was making a journey that mimicked my first’ (152). And behind this repetition is the primal journey of his people during indenture: after the first journey there is no other. For diasporic reconstruction, the past cannot be forgotten through an act of willed amnesia; but the ship has gone, and the diasporic subject must now re-map the new space, master the landscape and engage with the nation’s prior history. If there is humanist pathos in this, it is intentional because the final words of V. S. Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival insinuate as much: ‘And that was when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden’ (318). Salman Rushdie has referred to Naipaul in passing as an instance of the ‘deliberately uprooted intellectual [viewing] the world as only a free intelligence can’ (Rushdie 2002: 61). In this chapter I have radically qualified ‘free intelligence’ by arguing that Naipaul’s world-view is deeply rooted in a trauma (of indenture) which returns when Naipaul’s ancestral homeland triggers the sense of being ‘untimely ripp’d’ from the ‘mother’s womb’. The nation has to be wounded – twice – but the witness to it is located in a language that cannot bespeak its source. To locate the starting point – always himself as Naipaul has – said – we need to be conscious of language, in the atmanepada middle voice

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which, even when grammatically unmarked (for English does not have a formal middle voice), establishes a voice speaking to oneself, not to an Other. Which is why the middle voice (inferred from the semantic content of language, and not necessarily from its form, its grammar) underpins my reading of Naipaul’s trauma, the fact of writing to oneself. Naipaul never uses the word ‘diaspora’, but it is clear that diasporic experience − the experience of displacement and migrancy − the ‘special incompleteness of the Indian child, grandson of immigrants, whose past suddenly broke off, suddenly fell away into the chasm between the Antilles and India’ (1987: 143), is behind the rawness of nerves, the neurosis that gives his prose the special quality of panic. And this prose carries the trauma of the original departure, the trauma of plantation life in the very interstices of language, in the aesthetic design of the work of art.

4

Diaspora and the multicultural state

In affirming difference as such, recognizing the impossibility of identity, and accepting the necessity of an ongoing negotiation of all universal horizons, Canada could start to move from multiculturalism as deep diversity – as ‘more well-managed difference’ within an authoritarian and hierarchical capitalist state form – to multiculturalism as radical imaginary, as différance, de-territorialization, more-than-life. (Richard J. F. Day 2002: 227)

I have taken on an ambitious task here and in the next chapter. The umbrella term ‘multicultural (state)’ has the power to subsume everything from diasporas to ethnic minorities and first-nation peoples; it makes, at least when co-opted by the establishment, non-generalist theories (confined, delimiting and specific as these latter are) irrelevant. Against this presumption I want to show that generalist multicultural theory may be made more meaningful when it is thought through particularist theories of diaspora, race, ethnicity and so on. There are clear strengths here: such a mapping would allow us to think of multiculturalism as a critical concept, not as a management exercise; it would allow us to show how diaspora as décalage (after Léopold Senghor) ‘forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage . . . across difference in full view of the risks of that endeavor’ (Edwards 2003: 13). For, after all, diasporic narratives are formed within multicultures. Located at once in memorialization (‘an easy recourse to origins’) and in the social realities of living in the here and now (‘an anti-essentialist presencing’) diasporas require us to keep in mind an analytic of two kinds of exclusion: exclusion from the nation-state as a group as well as exclusion of women, gays and lesbians from inside a heterosexually defined and patriarchal diaspora (Kaiwar and Mazumdar 2003: 245–51). It follows that to write about diasporic engagements in a multicultural nation-state necessitates an engagement, at least at the level of the aesthetic, with the wider politics of gender, race and sexuality. To do this well would require a much larger book, and expertise well beyond my competence. But it is important to recognize them in any critique. Within our limited framework, I will link multicultural theory specifically to the Canadian nationstate and then examine a range of texts that may be seen to be symptomatic of the general problematic of diasporas in nations avowedly committed to a generalist multiculturalism.

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Multicultural theory and politics It is considered chic for a nation to declare itself multicultural: airports say so enthusiastically, politicians declare it interminably, and the media celebrate it. There are essentially two kinds of white multicultural nations. There are those old nations that have always been multicultural but which created the idea of a nation-state as a means of transcending difference. Here the nation subsumed cultures as its enlightenment ethos (or so it was argued) allowed principles of liberal humanism to create a just society to which all could belong and for which all could die. So in them cultures were part of the nation, without the nation itself sensing the need to theorize itself in terms of its multiplicity of cultures. In these primarily European old nations, ‘multiculturalism’ as theory comes as a challenge to an earlier definition of it as empirical fact. The second multicultural nation is where Gerd Baumann’s ‘multicultural riddle’ (1999) has special force. These are settler nations – almost all of the new world (the USA, Canada and also much of Latin America), Australia, New Zealand and until recently South Africa. In most of these nations territorialization presumed the existence of a non-nation, the land was read as terra nullius, so that there was no Inuit nation, no Maori nation (although here the Maori text of the Treaty of Waitangi suggests otherwise), no Aboriginal nation, no American Indian nation, no Aztec or Mayan nation, and, in the case of apartheid South Africa, no African nation prior to European colonization. In these settler nations, settler ethos (which in New Zealand is the ethos of the Tangata tiriti, people of the Treaty of Waitangi) became identical with the nation and immigration policies (often a white-only immigration policy which until the late 1960s was offered as an article of faith, and proudly, too) aimed at creating a monolingual (or, as in the case of South Africa and Canada, a bilingual) nation under the celebratory sign of (white) assimilation. In spite of claims that have been made on behalf of every ethnic community to declare itself part of a multicultural mosaic (because it is fashionable to do so), the multicultural agenda itself is not of the making of ethnic minorities but of the dominant (white) community for whom the management of what the Canadians have referred to as ‘visible minorities’ is the principal issue. In many ways the excessive zeal with which non-visible minorities have claimed to occupy this space as well has meant that multiculturalism has often lost much of its political and social (as well as critical) edge, for if every group within a nation is itself a migrant community (except of course the nation’s First Nation people), then every nation is by definition multicultural. This argument is quite frankly nonsense because it overlooks a fundamental feature of nations and their link to power. A nation’s dominant community (whether as an exclusive group such as the bhumiputras of Malaysia or those who have declared themselves to be part of the nation’s grand narrative through ease of assimilation) is never part of the multicultural mosaic; everyone else is. To repeat: a multicultural nation or a multicultural polity is meaningless if each community within a nation state can equally claim to be part of the nation’s multicultural

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communities. In other words, in any multicultural nation there will always be a cultural imbalance between those (one or two communities) whose history is foundational to the nation and those who have come as equal citizens no doubt but whose presence can only have the same legitimacy (in terms of national ideology) retrospectively and even then only after their discrepant narratives have been incorporated into the ‘foundational narrative’ or when the necessity for the latter has been dispensed with altogether. There is, then, a presumption of recognition of the other over time as participants in the historical narrative of the land. Failure to recognize this fundamental fact often leads to an idealist or romantic theory of multiculturalism that is often way off the mark. A critical multicultural theory should be wary of this. Multiculturalism, then, is ‘a contested frame of reference for thinking about the quotidian cohesion of western civil societies uncertain about their national and ethnic futures’ (Hesse 2000: 1). Whereas an earlier ‘multiracialism’ remained defiantly colonial in its conception of race (natives, slaves and coolies were its categories of analysis) and had no capacity for self-critique (and hence never used the term ‘multiculturalism’), the later form (as ‘multiculturalism’), growing as it did from a postcolonial ethos of multiply centred cultures and histories, began to challenge the glue that had hitherto bound the liberal nation-state together. But in doing so it never altered real power or class relations, never radically altered the definition of justice itself, and saw the nation-state as a ‘context’ (as Trudeau himself had observed) in which other cultures located themselves and not as a space that may be radically transformed. It remained a structure of control that kept minorities where they are in the guise of a ‘colonialist’ (white) respect of cultural difference without changing the unified selves of the ‘managers’ themselves. In the end, multiculturalism remains a thing of the past, a way in which the project of the Enlightenment and matters of justice may be rethought (but not radically altered) so as to accommodate the ‘alien’ within. And it is for this reason – because of its pastness – that it requires constant critique and re-evaluation, the need to specify the real, material conditions of racism and their relation to capital at every point (Vijay Mishra 2005). Like much else in liberalism, the agenda of multiculturalism, too, may be readily located within unthreatening humanist parameters: individual versus collective rights, the presumption of cultural value (we recognize complex communities that have offered something to world civilization generally), accommodation of minority rights and those of First Nation peoples within a dual definition of multiculturalism (the morally required versus the morally permissible), the need for benign, liberal, non-racist, non-exclusive policies, absolute tolerance (Kukathas 1997) and the limits to tolerance (Shacher, Walzer), minimal universalism (Parekh 2000, Levy), the inclusive community (Macedo 2000, Miller 1999) and the legacy of the colonial order (Hesse, Hall, Day). At the heart of the politics of multiculturalism is the demand for recognition and at the heart of that recognition is the subject of diaspora (Taylor 1994). How does one put the ideal of recognition to practical use? In his challenging book Theory in an Uneven World (2003), R. Radhakrishnan suggests that one may

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have to think through a radical alterity in the form of the subaltern, precisely the figure whose self is excluded from Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition simply because he, the subaltern, has nothing of value to offer. His demands are therefore those of the filibustering truculent who has no exchange value since his contribution to anything culturally worthwhile is zero. But it is precisely at the point of the subaltern gaze that recognition needs to play itself out. In phenomenological parlance the subaltern is the limit situation, Kant’s native excluded from the category of the sublime, the Tierra del Fuegan or the Aboriginal, from which a politics of mutual recognition may take shape (Kant 1986). And, again, from this new perspective, who or what constitutes a legitimate object of knowledge becomes problematic. However we look at it, though, a politics of recognition implies accepting the persistence of difference located in the in-between, within a semantics of the hyphen, something that is not located in the identitarian binary of self– other but in what Derrida called différance, the always differing/deferring condition of subjecthood that does not close off identity. If the mainstream is itself ‘ethnic’ (though not ‘multicultural’, for it cannot occupy that position) and has no absolute subject position, if the mainstream declaration of a collective self is built around an illusory unity of the multicultural Other (which then confirms its own spurious unity), then it, too, needs to interrogate its own identity. Of course, it does not (and should not) follow that this recognition of itself would therefore create a level playing field on which distributive justice may be ‘liberally’ applied. What is the point of a multicultural identity politics when there is universal equality, when distributive justice has been achieved (Radhakrishnan 2003: 67)? This utopian moment is of course unreal, and even if realized cannot dissolve difference/différance itself. And, at any rate, the moment is predicated on the idea of a universal reason that has its own roots in the history of liberalism. Multicultural reason, so to speak, would struggle for justice by emphasizing the hyphen, by suggesting that selves may remain ‘authentic’ while being recognized. A multicultural reason (a further splitting of reason, of Vernunftspaltung) would also link distributive justice with recognition through a post-Hegelian (and fundamentally Marxist) understanding of cultural capital as both the value of cultural forms as well as the value of a unit of labour (Fraser and Honneth 2003). In a very real sense multiculturalism has addressed recognition claims within a liberal-democratic philosophy and not redistributive claims. This reading is best-understood with reference to multicultural politics in Canada, a nation among the very first to recognize the demographic shifts in Western nation states mentioned in my opening remarks by putting in place a Multicultural Act (1988). The Canadian Multicultural Act/Loi sur le multiculturalisme canadien is printed in two parallel columns, reflecting as well that both English and French have equal status in Canada. In a careful reading of the Act/Loi, Smaro Kamboureli (2000: 95–109) makes the observation that the Canadian Multicultural Act did not ‘translate’ the nation into another, new polity because the ‘original’ definition of the nation (and, one suspects, Canada’s English and

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French settler history) is not compromised. The latter, in a sense, is embedded in the preambles that precede the legislation and, curiously, by the persistence in the Act itself of terms such as ‘preservation’, ‘enhancement’, ‘sharing’ and ‘heritage’, all of which are ‘stable . . . unambiguous, and therefore easily reproducible’ (106). The ‘space of the hyphen’ is dispensed with because, as the argument goes, ‘what differentiates minority communities in Canada from the mainstream is that they hold on to unitary lineages of tradition, that they live through homogeneous and neatly shaped histories’ (106). Thus the key to the Act lies not so much in the section dealing with the definition of the Multicultural Policy of Canada, but in the preamble to it where it is declared that the rights of individuals and communities are self-evidently enshrined in the Canadian constitution itself. What the Act indeed lays down is not a new law nor, an addition to an existing law, let alone principles of distributive justice, but the amplification of those fundamental human rights that a nation state grants all its citizens. It could be argued that the Multiculturalism Act has a supplementary function to the Canadian constitution itself, its aim being to bring the latter in line with current social and political realities. First, it draws attention to the essential liberalism of the nation-state (something that may have been taken for granted or even lost to another generation of Canadians) and, second, it foregrounds, out of the tradition of that liberalism, a series of definitions that reflects in a more particular fashion the new ethnic mix of Canada. Let me do this by juxtaposing the first clause of the preamble, and item 3(1)(a) of the Act, which defines the aim of Multiculturalism policy in Canada: Whereas the Constitution of Canada provides that every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination and that everyone has the freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief, opinion, expression, peaceful assembly and association and guarantees those rights and freedoms equally to male and female persons 3. (1) It is hereby declared to be the policy of the Government of Canada to (a) recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage The nation-state as an abstraction (reflecting abstract enlightenment values) is then refashioned as a proactive agent in the Act. The abstract subject-addressee now becomes a political individual as the Act no longer spells out the obvious – that the nation defines itself in these enlightenment terms – but stipulates that the state has a multicultural policy with its enforcers, its agents, to oversee that in the lives of people the constitution actually works itself out. In many ways this is a very real advance on abstract rights since the Act now spells out ways in which the disadvantaged, those whose rights are a pre-given in the Constitution but

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only in an abstract fashion, would now have at their disposal apparatuses that would ensure the development of precisely those aspects of their lives that the nation-state has always valued as an inalienable human right. The opening lines of Rousseau’s The Social Contract now have a framework for real social goals. The advance that I speak of did not happen overnight in Canada. The Multicultural Act had a number of significant precursors: the Canadian Bill of Rights (1960), the Official Languages Act (1969), the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977), the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982). The ways in which the Act now provides a framework for both research and policy may be seen in the financial support that is available for the examination of areas relating to the needs of immigrants. In a report prepared by the Immigration Services Society of British Columbia, Ministry of Education and Ministry Responsible for Multiculturalism and Human Rights (the latter two are an interesting conjunction), Immigration Policy Branch, 1993 we find not only statistical data based on the lives of the targeted group of people from 23 countries over a period of 3 years and 8 months but also a theoretical engagement with key concepts such as ethnicity, integration, marginalization, adaptation and so on. In other words, what the Act has done is make the theoretical an essential part of reports that otherwise would have been largely empirical. Of course, this is not to say that the promulgation of the Act suddenly removed all kinds of racial inequalities in Canada. When the government of Canada decided to implement its policy of multiculturalism within the nation’s pre-existent bilingual framework, this is how the then prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, addressed the policy on 8 October, 1971: . . . there cannot be one cultural policy for Canadians of British and French origin, another for the original peoples and yet a third for all others. For, although there are two official languages, there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly. . . . Canadian identity will not be undermined by multiculturalism. Indeed, we believe that cultural pluralism is the very essence of Canadian identity. Every ethnic group has the right to preserve and develop its own culture and values within the Canadian context. It has been pointed out that Trudeau wanted to neutralize the endemic (and growing) English–French antagonism in Canada by effectively placing the two communities (and others who through assimilation identified themselves with either) in a polyethnic Canadian nation-state. Since everyone else except the indigenous peoples of the land are migrants, the policy of multiculturalism simply confirmed this fact. The question of French or English cultural hegemony (in reality very much a Canadian fact of life) is theoretically set aside in favour of a loose, multiethnic national ethos. To be a Canadian is quite something else yet again: it is to belong actively to a space that is defined by a number of enlightened liberal values. Canada therefore ceases to be a land of fixed or

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permanent values and cultures that a race (or two races) have created; rather it is a field to which people can bring their own values provided these are not contrary to the nation-state’s established framework of law and order. As to the utility value of the policy, this is what Gerry Weiner, Minister of the new Federal Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship, had to say about the function of his department: At this time in our history, there is probably no more important function any federal department can fulfil than that of helping support and sustain our national unity. . . . Its [the department’s] programs and funding are focused mainly on removing barriers to equality and full participation in our society. In this markedly political speech the concept of national unity is made paramount and multiculturalism, soon after considered as a largely ‘Canadian term for cultural and ethnic pluralism’ (Berdichewsky 1997: 53), is seen not as a policy of ghettoization or of encouraging the maintaining of one’s pre-Canadian way of life (although it may do these) but of actually encouraging and making possible national unity. Where once unity was linked to homogenization and assimilation into either English or French culture, now it is linked to a heterogeneous definition of the nation with the proviso that the key to the nation is not so much its objective heterogeneity (true as this may well be) but a citizen’s attitudes towards such multiplicity. Writing from what Stanley Fish (1997) has called the ‘neutral principle’ of enlightened liberalism, Will Kymlicka in a particularly comprehensive study of multicultural citizenship notes: ‘Canada, with its policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework, and its recognition of Aboriginal rights to self-government, is one of the very few countries which has officially recognized and endorsed both polyethnicity and multinationality’ (1995: 22). This is not the place to address the question of multinationality and its relationship to polyethnicity. In Kymlicka’s argument, however, the very idea of a multinational state is meaningful only with reference to First Nation peoples. For them, colonization should not have meant an end to their own nation (as, indeed, it is implied in all preambles of settler nation constitutions), which of course means that First Nations are already nations embedded within nations. They are a foundational constituent of a multinational state. The multicultural agenda is not about multinations (which is a separate debate); it is essentially about diasporas as constituents of a polyethnic social order within a multinational state. This distinction is important because, as a multiethnic and a multinational state, Canada has to address the claims of its diasporas and its First Nation inhabitants as two separate entities and agendas. However we look at it, at the core of the multicultural policy is an anti-racist agenda that arises out of the dramatic increase in the number of visible minorities in Canada. My brief here is to locate the Canadian multicultural agenda within a specific diasporic context, in this instance the context of the Canadian (East Indian) diaspora. I want to do this beginning with a subheading ‘Komagata Maru’.

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Komagata Maru Although Indian migration to Canada didn’t get going until well after the Second World War, with the real growth taking place even later in the 1960s, the presence of (East) Indians in Canada can be traced back to a brief period during 1906–7 when 4,700 Indians reached British Columbia. Numbers never increased, and many clearly returned home, so that by 1914 there were probably fewer than 2,000 Indians in British Columbia (Ward 1990: 79). Like all other Asiatic migration the Indian migration, too, must be placed in the context of a Canadian nationalist exclusiveness (buttressed by both governmental instrumentalities and racial phobia) that had deep roots in the idea of racial purity and the genetic supremacy of the European race. This was also the period of the height of Empire, and the conjunction of military might, territorial expansion and the economic power of London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and New York meant that white racial superiority was an article of faith. The Indian experience has to be seen in this larger context. I turn to the Canadian province of British Columbia because it has special significance in the history of Indian migration as it provides us with an event that functions as a traumatic sign in the diasporic imaginary of the Canadian (East) Indian. It also functions as a metaphorical trope that acts as glue to disparate diasporic narratives. This event is the Komagata Maru incident around which has developed the discourse of watno dur (‘the distant homeland’). The facts are well known, and we need do no more than recall the main events here. The Komagata Maru was a Japanese ship that brought 376 predominantly Sikh would-be migrants to Vancouver. It reached Vancouver harbour on 23 May 1914 and stayed there for two months while the Canadian government decided what to do with its human cargo. In the end the Indians were given provisions and told to leave. The incident brought together a number of racist phobias and generally highlighted the unease of a panic-driven racist Canadian state bent on excluding darker-skinned colonial subjects (for all their value as soldiers and workers). Upon their return to Calcutta on 26 September 1914 imperial India was equally ungenerous: 26 of the surviving passengers died in a confrontation with the colonial police and many others were jailed. The turn of the century in fact was a time of heightened ‘nativist’ (to use Ward’s term) frenzy, and it is not uncommon to find in the media discourses that arise quite naturally out of this fear. The Canadian response to the arrival of the Sikhs has to be placed in the wider context of a public racism that was encouraged by the newspapers which, in a way, fed readers with racist ideology, or at least provided readers with ammunition to support nativist or absolutist ways of thinking. While anti-Asian rhetoric was not uncommon, and marked by a relatively homogeneous discourse, the case against the ‘Hindu’ was something apart. Thus we read in the Daily Province, Vancouver, British Columbia, Thursday, 3 October 1907 (in an article headed ‘Look out for Hindu says Visitor to City’):

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‘Tolerate the Jap and the Chinaman if you must but rigidly exclude the Hindu. Take warning from the experience of the colony of Natal. If the poor, miserable looking, timid, shrinking Hindu visible on your street is given the chance, he will be a landowner and capitalist within a few years. Look out for him for he has every other Oriental race outdistanced when it comes to the possession of thrift and commercial keenness.’ The Daily Province cannot hide its glee at soliciting such a response from an Australian mining engineer, one Mr T. Moore Fletcher, since it corroborated what many Canadians themselves had written about Asians and the Hindu. Fletcher continued: ‘The experience of Natal, which awoke to its peril when too late, has not been wasted in Australia and New Zealand. It resulted in exclusion legislation, as a Hindu invasion was regarded as a worse visitation than a plague. Who has not heard of the watchword, “A White Australia?” I hope Canada as one of the sister colonies will follow in her footsteps.’ Reading this passage almost a century later one is struck by the manner in which the discourse of racism is consciously being put on display by the print media. The same discourse emerges during Rudyard Kipling’s visit to the Western Provinces (1–8 October, 1903). Although Kipling had come to Canada as one of the Empire’s great writers and would have felt much more comfortable if people had asked him questions about his books, reporters again preferred to frisk him about his position on coloured migration to Canada. In Winnipeg he is asked: ‘You are an authority on oriental matters. . . . What do you think of this Japanese immigration and its probable effects on Canada?’ ‘You know the Hindu: what do you think of him as a settler?’ To both these questions Kipling replies cautiously but without dispelling the reporter’s presumed bias: ‘I think I would prefer going to Vancouver first. There are so many kinds of Hindus. It is best to wait and see.’ The discourse of racism is linked in these newspapers to the question of exclusion and to the desirability of labour. Since capital follows the availability of cheap labour, one suspects that capitalists generally were more willing to turn a blind eye to matters of colour. However, the Asiatic Expulsion League, which organized a number of demonstrations against immigration, held the view that, if labour were to be imported, that labour ought to be white. The idea received a resounding endorsement from the Semi-Weekly World Vancouver of Friday, 13 September 1907, which under the heading ‘The Anti-Asiatic Movement’ observed: We suggest, therefore, that the resolution which is passed this evening demanding that the Asiatics be kept out should also demand that in so far as British Columbia needs labor the labor invited to come here be white. The Komagata Maru incident has to be framed in these discourses of Canadian racism. It begins to make a lot more sense once we recognize that racist

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discourse was a very ‘natural’ discourse in Canada at the turn of the last century. In the absence of any significant counter-discourse to racism, racist ideology itself was never questioned. The presence of the Komagata Maru in Canadian waters presented the nation and its media with a case for which they had no simple answer. Here were citizens of the Empire who claimed rights that many British and European immigrants had claimed and received. Although in the end their applications to residency were rejected on the grounds that the ship had not come directly from India, what matters is the manner in which the law itself was deployed as an instrument of racism. The Komagata Maru incident is the most powerful symbol of Canadian racism for the South Asian diaspora and it is one that is most often invoked. Such is its place in the history of Canada that Sharon Pollock wrote a play called The Komagata Maru Incident (1978) and W. Peter Ward used it as the title of his chapter on Indian immigration to British Columbia. The related theme that I want to discuss here is the watno dur. It surfaces in a number of places: as the title of Sadhu Binning’s collection of poems, as the title of the first Canadian film in Panjabi and as the intertext of many articles that one finds in small Canadian South Asian magazines such as Ankur (now discontinued), Rungh, Watan (a Panjabi quarterly), the scholarly Toronto Review (formerly TSAR) and so on. Sadhu Binning’s collection of Panjabi–English verse (given as parallel texts) is in fact titled No More Watno Dur (‘No More the Distant Homeland’). The negative here is important because, although the poems were originally composed in Panjabi, they speak of negotiation and accommodation, not of nostalgia and regret which are the normal associations of the idea of watno dur. Binning, however, arrives at this position not without some intense soul-searching. In the long polemical poem ‘My thirteenth year in Canada’ the poet explores the idea of loyalty to Canada. What constitutes loyalty? How can one ever outlive one’s past, forget one’s origins, adopt a new nation and forget the rest? Are visible minorities asked to sacrifice more than others? The old lady who speaks about her ancestors – those who built the Canadian nation-state – continues to remain so very English: ‘she spoke as if she had never left / some old and crowded London pub’. But even as the diaspora accepts and transforms, even as there is a will, a desire to produce a new sense of the citizen (not one defined by an unproblematic belonging, and perhaps not even one that is locked into the [il]logic of the hyphen), the threat to the new self comes both from within and from the ancient homeland. The diaspora struggles to ‘produce’ self-respect (recognition) in every sense of the word; it wants to transform the nation-state’s prejudices but finds that ‘THEY – the leaders of our ex-motherlands / . . . [come] seeking “financial-aid” / . . . and the next morning’s newspaper headlines / sweep our every effort away’. From within the diaspora there is another kind of danger, one that comes from the very fact of having redefined oneself; it comes, as we noted in the Introduction, from another amnesia, a forgetfulness about one’s own working-class origins, the ‘strawberry flats’ and the ‘crowded windowless trucks’ in which ‘we were taken there’ (Binning 1994: 41).

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In Binning, then, diasporas move away from narratives of return and homeland to matters of politics, in fact to an examination of the processes of resocialization with the homeland that begins to take shape. And ‘resocialization’ implies renegotiation, it implies a re-reading, it implies a self-reflexivity, and it implies finally that the idea of ‘home’ itself has shifted immeasurably and irrevocably. This renegotiation may also take the form of an unusual assertiveness. Another British Columbian poet of Panjabi origin, Ajmer Rode, himself not unfamiliar with the plight of the character Ram who wonders ‘where his house could be’ (Rode 1990: 51) and uncomfortable with ‘labels’ (Rode 1990: 38), can indeed speak on behalf of all Canadians. In a poem dedicated to the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident entitled ‘Apology’ he concludes: That is why today, on behalf of you and all other good citizens, I bow my head and profoundly apologize for what we did to the Komagata Maru passengers seventy five years ago. (Rode 1990: 40–1) The ‘easy’ manner in which the plural personal pronoun ‘we’ slips into the poem as the collective voice of the nation-state as a whole (uncommon for a diasporic discourse) is indeed very striking.

Cultural capital and critical interrogation Sadhu Binning’s desire to rethink diasporic lives critically takes me to the larger question of diasporic self-definition and self-representation, both politically and culturally, in a Canadian multicultural context. I want to address the question of self-representation through two small South Asian magazines published in Vancouver. Let me begin with the short-lived magazine Ankur (1991–3) first. The magazine hoped to provide a venue for the expression of writing marginalized by the dominant media. The doxa of multiculturalism implicit in its editorial saw the magazine as a space of the diasporic public sphere where, to use Pnina Werbner’s words, ‘unrelated individuals meet to debate broader civic and political issues’ (1998: 23). The themes of many of the contributions deal with questions of race and identity in Canada. In Jeevan Deol’s poem (April– June 1991) these questions are linked to the metaphor of the Komagata Maru: ‘My heart was on the Maru / . . . I am / Like the ship, / Forbidden to come ashore’. Sunera Thobani and Harji Sangra review Canada’s first Panjabi film, Watno Dur (produced by Sarbjit Dhaliwal), and point out that the film too readily imitates the style of the Bombay popular film and consequently overlooks the ‘rich, multilayered experience of the Indo-Canadian community’ (36). In the October–December 1991 issue (the third of seven Ankur issues published) the question of the ‘visible’ and ‘home’ resurfaces: bodies that can be

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readily distinguished and bodies upon which (prior) meanings are superimposed; homes that are lost and homes that are not homes. One of the key essays in the fifth issue (2.1 Fall 1992) connects the case against proposed changes to refugee status under Bill C-86 with the Komagata Maru incident. There, too, Paul Singh Gill points out, passengers were denied entry because their ship had not come from India direct and had stopped in Hong Kong and Japan en route. Two essays in Ankur’s fifth and sixth issues (Fall 1992 and Winter/Spring 1992) point to the difficulties of diasporic classifications, of the visible and of home. The first by Ramabai Espinet uses the case of the Indo-Caribbeans to point out her own peculiar hybridity and the problems of a racial taxonomy based on the ‘negating stereotype’ (Itwaru and Ksonzek 1994: 54) of the ‘visible’ (you look like this particular community and hence you belong to it). She writes: We are not South Asian in the true sense of the word. We are a peculiar hybrid, our cultural world more pronounced than most other children of India outside its shores. We, for the most part, speak no language but a European tongue: English, French or Dutch, in its standard form as well as the peculiar version of our Creole. (28) The second essay is by a leading Panjabi intellectual, Harjot Oberoi, who raises the issue of the state of the after-diaspora, that is, after ‘an individual has consumed all that the diaspora culture has to offer’. How does a diasporic mentality (in this argument locked into cultural essentialisms) transcend the political, social and intellectual limitations that of necessity grow out of diasporic socialization? Oberoi writes with reference to Punjabi Indians: In other words Panjabi culture in the diaspora can only meet certain needs of our lives. As we wander through other cultural mazes, the destiny of all those who left their native lands, we face issues that were rarely, if ever, the focus of Panjabi culture. Allow me to list a few of these matters: multiculturalism, feminism, moral philosophy, rights of children, modernity (or post-modernism), fundamentalism, euthanasia and Scriptures as literature. How do we as Panjabis engage with these new themes? Is there anything within the diaspora culture that will say provide answers to the dilemma posed by euthanasia or more pressingly feminism (for Panjabi culture is intrinsically patriarchal). The story of Rungh (1992–), another Vancouver-based South Asian magazine but which has had a longer patronage, requires a slightly more extended look. Although it hasn’t quite the prestige of the Toronto Review, Rungh has been able to merge the attractiveness of magazines such as Mehfil (the Indian doctor’s surgery reading material) with the more serious concerns of the Toronto Review. It has a glossy magazine format, a good feel about it, and it is immediately

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accessible. Writers like Ramabai Espinet and Aruna Srivastava who elsewhere may adopt a more uncompromisingly academic discourse drop their guard and speak directly to the concerned, critical reader. Rungh has also brought into the Indian diaspora press debates about margins within margins, subcultures within dominant diasporic cultures, old diasporas of exclusivism becoming new diasporas of the border (referring to her own Guyanese indenture background Michelle Mohabeer describes the trauma of never actually belonging to either the diaspora of exclusivism or of the border) and about the need in the South Asian1 diaspora to give a legitimate space to the creative and critical voices of gays and lesbians. Rungh 3.3, for instance, is a special issue on ‘Queering the Diaspora’ guest-edited by the poet Iqbal Rashid. These proactive moves on the part of Rungh have been a useful corrective to assumptions about a ‘diaspora collective’ that speaks with only one voice on all issues. Although Rungh concedes that political unity is valuable and, in the end, necessary, especially on matters of racism, the vast bulk of the contributions to it are designed to bring the aesthetic back into discussions about the diaspora and give writers who would otherwise not get into print a context in which their works can be discussed. Let me, then, restrict myself to Rungh’s attempts at encouraging debates about the aesthetic in the diaspora. In the early issues of Rungh (1.1–4) the debate centred on Srinivas Krishna’s film Masala (1991), an important film that may be seen as founding a filmic genre for films about the Indian diaspora. (Cinematically Masala is the intertext of Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach.) Two key moments in the history of this film are its screening at the Desh Pradesh Conference in Toronto on 8 November 1991 and later in Vancouver. Let me begin with Vinita Srivastava’s interview with Srinivas Krishna in the very first issue of Rungh. The interview was recorded against the backdrop of the very considerable interest generated by the screenings of the film. In the interview Krishna offers memory, home (and trauma) as the central themes of his film. The film, he suggests, is about people who are ‘not at home’. But he wants to make this statement itself problematic from ‘within’ the diaspora by asking questions about what ‘home’ actually means to specific diasporic groups. To many, such as some Canadian Sikhs and Sri Lankan Tamils, a homeland is yet to exist. And so Krishna’s discourse is all about the aesthetic as an opening out, as a means of establishing a certain kind of cultural power, perhaps even the transcendental power of art which, by implication, perhaps also means that art may use and abuse cultural material for its own inner dynamics or design. Not surprisingly, Krishna rejects the idea of ‘closure’, by which I suspect he means a diaspora text with a clear political agenda, with defined goals and a self-proclaimed definition of itself as being ‘representative’ or even ‘typical’. The matters raised by the film and by Krishna’s own defence of it generated very vigorous response. Two of the more extended appeared in Rungh (1.3) and were penned by Yasmin Jiwani and Sanjay Khanna. I want to read these reviews not so much as a springboard into the film’s design itself but as two statements about the place of the aesthetic in the diaspora’s understanding of its place in the multicultural nation. Yasmin Jiwani is quite forthright here:

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Masala basically trivializes the complexity of diaspora culture and repackages that culture for easy consumption by white Canadians. For these Canadians the commodified version confirms their prejudices about the diaspora. Here is Jiwani’s central criticism of the film: It was a masala that in the end, did to us symbolically what British colonialism had done to our ancestral land – it violated us, made a mockery of our sense of being, and betrayed us to the wider society. For it was a masala that combined the ingredients of an internalized racism mixed with a postmodernist discourse of identity, sexuality and race, all of which were re-cast in the ahistorical plane of Krishna’s vision of himself and his reality. Differences dislocated from their social, cultural and economic grounding floated in the spectacular plane of unreality taking fantastic shapes and grotesque forms. Violation, betrayal, mockery are all very suggestive words indeed. There is extreme anxiety here, an anxiety that becomes more meaningful if we turn to the word izzat, honour, in the essay. As Jiwani reads it, Masala is a hotchpotch, a pot-pourri that pretends to tell the whole story but in fact sells ‘us’ to the enemy, since now the enemy has the ammunition from none other than a native informant: ‘The last thing we need is one of “us” to condemn us yet again . . . and as a South Asian, he just trashed his culture in a public arena which has no sympathy for the South Asian reality’. For Jiwani the issue here is one of politics, more precisely one of political representation, because ultimately all art is bound to be political in diasporas given, as she says, we are excluded from a full participatory role in the larger society. Masala may be a bad film, a film that really cannot carry the weight of all the contradictions it wishes to explore, but the question we need to ask is: Does it betray and violate us in the way in which British colonialism violated us or in the way in which caste Hindus continue to violate Dalits? Clearly the latter is also private information that should not be aired because it would lead to Canadians (who are all racists in one version of this polemic) to say: ‘Look at your own backyard. Aren’t you also racists of sorts?’ The issue here relates directly to the perceived links between the aesthetic and the political in the diaspora. This link, as one unfortunately influential argument goes, wants to keep the native informant away from the ‘dominant other’. However generously we may want to interpret this position, it is undeniably an argument based on principles of racial exclusiveness. There is nothing new in a native informant ‘trashing’ his/her culture in the domain of the unsympathetic dominant Other. V. S. Naipaul comes to mind immediately, but few would now maintain that the exposure of the secrets of the Tulsi family in A House for Mr Biswas (our very private world of indenture anxieties and distress) made us any less than what we are or contributed to our ‘misrecognition’ by the state. And, indeed, George Lamming (1989) felt so grateful that through A House for Mr Biswas a closed world to which Afro-Caribbeans had no ready access (and which had been read in a highly racist fashion by them) had

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suddenly become available to them, too, as another very real and human social formation. Jiwani’s point about the violation of one’s izzat through the airing of this kind of privileged information to a group that is racist reflects an unresolved tension between a multicultural declaration of inclusion and a diasporic unease about the power structures that govern that principle of inclusion. Although Sanjay Khanna’s review is less tight and does not have the clarity of Jiwani’s point of view (Jiwani’s critique is uncompromisingly negative but totally unified), he is willing to engage with the text as text and prise open some of its central metaphors. And this makes for interesting reading. What was it like to be a Canadian (East) Indian that fateful day in June 1985 when the Air India plane exploded [the point at which Krishna’s Masala begins]? Khanna refers to the Vancouver Sun’s reference to ‘Canadians of East Indian origin’ who died in the crash. Why the qualification? When does the qualification become important? Does it lessen the tragedy in any way? I have referred to traumatic incidents/themes (the Komagata Maru incident, the theme of the watno dur) that trigger a deferred trauma in the diaspora. The Air India explosion was also a source of trauma but it had a variety of effects, depending upon where you stood on the Khalistan question. Unlike the Komagata Maru incident, it is not a trauma that could be ‘unproblematically’ invoked by all (East) Indians in Canada. Indeed, it had the effect of opening up tensions within the Canadian South Asian population. How and for what exactly did the diaspora mourn in the case of the Air India explosion? Personal loss aside (and there were many families directly affected by the tragedy), there was also a collective loss as Indian communities were divided, became suspicious of each other and felt uneasy, for a while at any rate, about the erstwhile natural social bonhomie that had existed at least among all Panjabi-speaking Indians in Canada. Khanna does not take these issues up but he makes the connection between the airline tragedy and the film Masala. And this is an important connection for two reasons. The first is the role of the artist in the matter of opening up old wounds. The second is the appropriateness of a particular generic form to the subjectmatter. Why was it necessary for Srinivas Krishna to rewrite this tragedy (with its enormous historical depth and resonance on matters surrounding the formation of nation-states) as a postmodern narrative that had the effect of constantly undercutting its realist designs? Is there something here that also connects with anxiety, with a divided schizophrenic self that can only be mediated through an art that is equally schizophrenic, an art that parodies itself even as it takes up matters of race and justice? The explosion was an act of madness, but an act that also said that some people in the diaspora must be made accountable for Indira Gandhi’s Golden Temple fiasco back home the year before. Srinivas Krishna can use this knowledge to defend his film: ‘The origins of the discontent lie elsewhere, not in my film.’ True, but surely the film must also address realist truth conditions. Where is that version in the film except in the final act of racist violence? On the other hand, Khanna’s own defence is significant: ‘The migration of Indians to Canada has removed for many the underpinning of religious and social life that, in India, gave continuity to their lives’ (2003:

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16). Srinivas Krishna’s Masala can read diasporas only as postmodern parodies of homelands, as comic sites where homeland essentialisms can only reproduce tragi-comic lives. There is probably nothing particularly dangerous here if the film is seen as such: as an aesthetic order that deals with questions of trauma and home within a postmodern narrative of surfaces and minor narratives because homeland certainties are no longer available to diasporas. The trouble with such a defence is that, in the end, racism becomes, after Balibar, a ‘metaracism’2 (because the form’s counter-realist narrative problematizes all truth conditions); and, unless we are given strong hints that metaracism is racism pure and simple, the film may well end up endorsing what may be called ‘postmodern racism’ (Vijay Mishra 1996). To deconstruct Masala in this fashion is, however, not the same as dismissing it outright, because what Masala does is make diasporic bodies equally legitimate in the domain of the aesthetic. Clearly this doesn’t happen in the dominant media of the nation-state: diasporic specularity is important even if it is a critically negative specularity. In Rungh (1.3) another film is discussed – Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala – in a spirited open letter to the filmmaker from Yasmin Ladha. Yasmin Ladha uses an Urdu poem about the veil falling slowly, slowly (ahista, ahista) to draw attention to the need to slow down, to interrogate, to unpack, to be wary of the White-jati audience, in short to have a highly developed sense of cultural relativism. Ladha speaks from personal experience of Tanzania (which she left when she was eleven) and rightly draws attention to the way in which Mira Nair has ‘romanticized the diaspora of Asians from Uganda’. The style is too ‘filmi’ à la Bollywood cinema, with little slowing down of the camera, with little room to pause, to think about taboos, to work through the specific semiotics of bodies – Indian-Black, Indian-White, Indian-Western – especially when it comes to the question of the female Indian body. Yasmin Ladha does not say that sex should not be shown, or that Mira Nair is exposing us to another jati as another confused native informant, but that there are ways of showing Indian sexuality, there is a long intertext of gesture, of deferral (the wohi, the ‘him’ instead of the name), and there is the body language of decorum, the gaze and so on that problematizes the representation of the female Indian body. The chief character in the film, Mina, is Westernized but not Western, observes Ladha. And finally how does one represent diasporic conflict of the kind that is seething within Mina? My interest here is not in Mira Nair’s film itself but diasporic (as distinct from mainstream) readings of it. What surfaces over and over again in Yasmin Ladha’s letter to Mira Nair is the question of representation and the issue of who can represent whom. And where indeed may we locate diasporic bodies in a multicultural nation-state? These questions become especially acute when the diaspora itself produces a critical point of view that is anti-multiculturalist. In Rungh 1.4, Neil Bissoondath (diasporic Indian via Trinidad, hence twice-displaced) states in an interview: ‘Multiculturalism constantly throws your ethnicity or exoticism at you, thereby putting you at arms length from society at large’ (11). Bissoondath, author of the polemical Selling Illusions (1994), is of course much admired

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by the Canadian Right and not unnaturally declares the necessity of some protocol (or at least a tacit understanding) by which the nation, as a Thing or as an abstract but liberal and fair entity (in spite of the semantic contradictions here), can transcend individual self-interest. But Bissoondath doesn’t then engage with multiculturalism as a philosophical doctrine that problematizes the grounds of a liberal polity. Instead he obviously sees multiculturalism as a prescriptive form, not as a fluid cultural formation that grew out of the philosophical foundations of liberalism itself: how can one create equality when difference is the basis of analysis? He sees multiculturalism, moreover, as a pernicious dark ‘counter-image’ of Gothic horror – the sort of reading that gets easily parodied in an episode of the Canadian TV serial South Park, in which ‘immigrants from the future’ are prohibited from crossing time-zones because the present finds the future threatening. The progressive diasporization of white nation-states, and especially the rise in them of diasporas of colour, is clearly the reason behind a state’s own desire to invest in the ideology and apparatuses of multiculturalism. These diasporic ‘public spheres’, ‘no longer small, marginal, or exceptional’ (Appadurai 1996: 10), in some sense also mediate multiculture through artistic articulations. The artist in isolation, the artist wounded, is now a diasporic body politic collectively isolated and collectively wounded. Built into the aesthetic is the idea of the human as being worthy of recognition. In M. G. Vassanji’s No New Land difference in itself is no ground for recognition; the capacity to encode within oneself a multiplicity of meanings is. In the figure of the central character Nurdin, a successful former sales agent in Dar-es-Salaam but seemingly a failure in Canada, the aesthetic becomes a site from which critical thinking can take place, and one of the ideological centrepieces of this critical thinking is recognition itself. It is as an allegory towards recognition that Vassanji’s novel may be seen as offering a counter-scenario to the assimilative demands of the Bissoondath vision. Things do change: Nurdin finds a certain kind of freedom in Canada, freedom to experiment, to understand the nature of love, the capacity to be meditative, to understand how his children will indeed grow up to be different and will have a different kind of fight on their hands, one in which they would want to carve out for themselves lives that won’t be absolutely identical with those of their parents or white Canadians, but enriched nevertheless through interactions with them. Three years had passed since that blustery winter night when the Lalanis stood outside the Toronto airport, contemplating a mode of transportation. Much had happened in that period and there was, in a sense, no looking back. The children were well on their way, ‘Canadians’ now, or almost. There were many new faces in the buildings of Rosecliffe Park, and many others had disappeared, to Mississauga, Scarborough, and even as far away as Calgary. There were a few stories of success now. . . . For many others, Nurdin among them, life simply ‘went along.’ (Vassanji 1991: 116)

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No New Land situates itself in the possibilities of a heterogeneous, complexly hybrid social and racial condition. Where Bissoondath presents a world threatened by the proliferation of minor and competing narratives (his ideal remains the grand narrative of Enlightenment where a universalist discourse of communicability is readily available to all), Vassanji’s world is thoroughly diasporic, incomplete, seeking to find a new ground, a new consensus, a new point of view that would build on the successes of the Enlightenment ethos but not be obstructed by its instrumental excesses. How, indeed, does one lay claim to the nation as a whole? In the Romantic version of one of Australia’s foundational epics – Patrick White’s Voss (1957) – Laura Trevelyan tells Tom Radclyffe that a nation could belong to a German expatriate explorer ‘by right of vision’ (32), but Voss’s body was not a problem as his Europeanness could be readily incorporated into settler mythology generally. Diasporic writing has a headier trajectory; it has to claim the tradition without abrogating the power of memory and one’s own difference.

Paradise lost: dreams of homeland In the works of a number of Sri Lankan Tamils living in Canada homeland memory is filtered through the devastation caused in their homeland by the Tamil Tigers’ struggle for a Tamil Eelam or an independent Tamil nation. What began as a demand for relative autonomy from the Sinhalese-controlled central government became by 1980 an adventurous and bloody struggle for complete nationhood. The history of this struggle goes back in time to the quite incommensurable, for so it seems now, agendas of the two main ethnic groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Indeed, just when some form of universal franchise was being mooted in the 1920s, in his later novel Cinnamon Gardens (1999) Shyam Selvadurai’s anglophile character the Mudaliyar Navaratnam declares: ‘We will replace a British Raj with a Sinhala Raj and then we Tamils will be doomed’ (30). The concern presaged by the Mudaliyar foreshadows the different kinds of remembering of the nation by the Sri Lankan South Asian diasporas (Sinhalese and Tamil) in Canada. For the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora the ‘Thing’ around which the diasporic imaginary congeals itself is the idea of a Tamil nation in Sri Lanka. I begin with Shyam Selvadurai’s ‘novel in six stories’, Funny Boy (1994), arguably one of the finest novels in English about Sri Lanka written by a Canadian-Sri Lankan, in which the writer grafts an easy narrative style, an innocent point of view, on the question of diasporic recollections. In this novel Selvadurai uses the genre of the Bildungsroman to represent both the growth of the child-hero (as the genre in fact stipulates) as well as the changing shape of the Sri Lankan nation in the space of less than six years. By the time the narrator-hero, Arjie (Arjun) Chelvaratnam, is fourteen, communal riots have taken place, thousands of Tamils have been displaced, Tamil Tigers, the first to use suicide bombing as a terrorist/military weapon, have emerged as a lethal force demanding a separate Tamil nation, and the stage is set for large Tamil

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migration out of Sri Lanka to Canada. So how does Selvadurai narrate these events and how strongly can we claim, on this selected evidence, that situating the aesthetic in the context of trauma is theoretically productive for the larger project of a diaspora poetics? For Tamil Sri Lankans (and, I suspect, for the Sinhalese, too), the moment of trauma is connected with the demands for a Tamil Eelam, a Tamil homeland, initially as a political bargaining point by Tamil devolutionists, but later as a much more militant demand for full independence by the Tamil Tigers. This is a complex problem that requires the investment of historical capital – the kind of capital that few literary students possess. Nevertheless, Funny Boy does not eschew historical details, even if these details are rendered through the mind of Arjie (Arjun) who, at fifteen, is asked to carry the burden of a grand historical consciousness (in the Lukácsian sense) as well as observe his own growth and development. As with the genre of the Bildungsroman, two overarching thematic concerns, one personal, the other political, are intertwined. On the personal level the concern is with the sexual development of the narrator – a child who prefers girls’ clothes and toys, who prefers to play ‘bride-bride’ not cricket and who, as an adolescent, accepts his own sexuality after meeting Shehan: ‘I would be caught between the boys’ and the girls’ worlds, not belonging or wanted in either’ (39). The political theme relates to the impact of the Tamil Eelam movement on the lives of the ethnic Tamil community in Sri Lanka. With the upheavals the relatively secure and privileged lives of upper-middle-class Tamils come to an end. What seemed like the end of Tamil diasporic existence in Sri Lanka after independence (many Tamils were also part of the struggle) now turns into a renewal of diasporic anxieties in Canada. For the fact is that, although set in Sri Lanka, the novel is actually conceived and produced in Toronto. This is important because, one suspects, in Sri Lanka itself Selvadurai would have written a different text. In terms of the argument advanced in the preceding chapter – in terms, that is, of the idea of trauma – there are two items that surround the text: the first is a spatial term, Jaffna (Daryl Uncle, a Sri Lankan Burgher and a journalist, dies on his way to Jaffna, possibly ambushed by the police); the second is the descriptive Tamil Tigers (Jegan, the son of Arjie’s father’s Tamil friend, gets implicated) that become, for the Sinhalese, identical with terrorism. The space of Jaffna may be looked at as a ‘function’ that produces consequence: Jaffna is the signifier of a Tamil homeland, Tamil grievances and Tamil solidarity. There is no escape from Jaffna; it politicizes even those who, like Arjie’s father, are apolitical. For the Tamil diaspora in multicultural Canada, Jaffna (and the struggle for it) stands for a ‘homeland’ even when the diaspora has little direct connection with that part of Sri Lanka. By the time we reach the fourth story in the novel (‘Small Choices’) the political world of the Tamil Tigers invades the largely apolitical world of the Chelvaratnams. Jegan, the son of an old friend of Mr Chelvaratnam, comes to work for the family business, and his own background as a former Tamil Tiger affects the family and its relationships with both

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its own members and the Sinhalese community as a whole. If Jegan’s politics poses a collective threat in so far as it presents the family with a racial knowledge about itself it had suppressed, Jegan has another effect on Arjie himself as he turns thirteen. Jegan’s taut and muscular body raises the spectre of desire for men that had been exploding periodically within Arjie: ‘Lately, I had found that I looked at men, at the way they were built, the grace with which they carried themselves, the strength of their gestures and movements’ (161). As political tensions increase discussions now move in the direction of the relationship of Tamils to the nation-state. Amma speaks about emigrating: ‘Australia and Canada are opening their doors’ (195), but always there is the father’s reply: ‘Never. I will never leave this country’ (207). The Chelvaratnam family is a highly colonial family – English-speaking upper-middle-class Sri Lankans who occupy positions of power and who live in houses with servants. In many ways Selvadurai does not see the irony of these privileged classes finally being dragged into the politics of racial difference. When this, too, happens, as the ‘Riot Journal’ section of the book makes clear, the family will become great misfits in Canada. Without Sri Lankan privileges (linked primarily to their Anglophile lifestyle) their lives in Canada will be particularly miserable as lesser-class migrants from Sri Lanka will probably establish themselves on an equal footing in Canada. It is an important aspect of the novel that the final glance of Arjie is towards the house, their large home, the bastion of memory and security, and not some prominent landscape in the country. Nevertheless, there is a moment – indeed, the moment of aesthetic climax in the book – that requires a commentary before we leave this novel. Section six of the novel deals with Arjie’s days at high school before the May 1983 riots. On prize-giving day Arjie was supposed to read two wellknown poems about the virtues of schooling (one of these poems was penned by Sir Henry Newbolt). These poems would also form the basis of the principal Black Tie’s formal address. The road to memorizing these poems had not been pleasant. Black Tie was a fascist in matters of discipline and had brutalised both Arjie and his friend Shehan through the excessive use of the cane. There was the moment when, out of fright, Arjie had forgotten the words and jumbled up the two poems. The principal had been unforgiving. And, although the Tamil English teacher Sunderalingam had said that at least Black Tie was not outwardly anti-Tamil, Arjie felt that his brutality should not go unremarked. And so during the prize-giving ceremony, when his time comes to recite the poems, Arjie presents a heterogeneous, mangled poem, a nonsensical pastiche that could not have acted as a prologue to Black Tie’s speech. It is the vengeance of the garbled, the wounded text. It is also, in a way, the minority Tamil revenge, of the student marginalized in a predominantly Sinhalese (English colonial) school. The Sinhalese revenge is yet to be recounted in the Riot Journal, the sixth narrative. In the end the home/ house is destroyed: ‘Finally I could not cry any more’ (311). And finally, too, Arjie will not see the fire-gutted house any more, although that is the look with which the novel ends.

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I’ve used the text selectively to make an on-going case for a diaspora poetics. There is clearly much else besides in the aesthetic design of the novel – the radical insertion of adolescent gay sexuality into the text especially is symptomatic of a counter-heterosexual discourse that needs to be addressed seriously in the diaspora. Funny Boy also brings home the heterogeneous nature of diasporic origins. Anglicized Sri Lankans were always something apart yet again back ‘home’; in Canada their erstwhile privileges are altered, and adjustment becomes difficult not only with the nation-state as a whole but with the Sri Lankan migrants, too. But even in Sri Lanka racialized politics in the end did not distinguish between one Tamil and another: Aunty Radha gets beaten, Amma’s lover Daryl Uncle is killed, and Appachi and Ammachi (grandfather and grandmother) are burned alive in their car. Selvadurai writes from Canada and he writes as well within a private and non-normative (for the diaspora) gay aesthetic. That aesthetic shadows his rendition of homeland trauma even as he points to the pervasiveness of the semantics of ‘homeland’ in the lives of the Indian (Tamil Sri Lankan) diaspora in Canada, a point established by the Sri Lankan-Canadian poet Rienzi Crusz in his memorable poem ‘The Sun-Man Takes a Tattoo’: Don’t ask for answers, ask for history: the pain of my woundings, the diaspora that runs through my life like an alphabet. (Crusz 1995: 47) The poetic vision indeed looks elsewhere, beyond a direct, affective representation of loss, to a transformation of experience into art. Nowhere is this more evident than in Michael Ondaatje’s poetic novel Anil’s Ghost. Writing neither as Sinhalese nor as a Tamil but as someone who has also lost his homeland, Ondaatje transforms the racial troubles in Sri Lanka into a general statement about the end of the ethics of being human. Even as Anil Tissera, the forensic scientist, chances upon the skeleton of a man codenamed ‘Sailor’ (by her and archaeologist helper Sarath Diyasena) and is persuaded that this is a case of state-endorsed murder, she gets enmeshed in lives affected simultaneously by the politics of racialized terror and by personal ghosts. In the hands of Ondaatje, Sri Lankan troubles are not so much politicized as made into a statement about the failure to maintain the promise of poetry in the lives of people and their nation. There are in the end no happy individuals in the novel – Sarath and his brother Gamini, the sculptor Ananda, the epigraphist Palipana, the forensic scientist Anil are all afloat, maddeningly, in a world that has ceased to make sense. The gesture that becomes necessary for meaning to return and the aesthetic glue that binds the novel together is art. Three men blow up an ancient 120-foot statue of the Buddha. Theirs is not a political or anti-religious act; theirs is an act motivated by greed, for it was said that in the stomach of the

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Buddha lay an immense treasure. But the land where the statue had stood are fields where victims of terror were burned, their bodies hid. ‘These were the fields’, writes Ondaatje, ‘where Buddhism and its values met the harsh political events of the twentieth century’ (300). The fragments which were once a great statue are reshaped into its original form by Ananda Udugama, the artist who had given a face, an identity, to the skull of ‘Sailor’. The final act in the reconstruction of this statue is the creation of the eyes, for until the eyes are sculpted or painted the Buddha is incomplete. Where the earlier effort – the creation of a face from a skeleton – was aimed at locating the murderer (possibly the state itself), this work gives back to the nation state its own vision, so that it can once again see. What it sees, though, is the energy that binds, the flutter of the ‘tiniest hearts’ (307), the spirit that triumphs. By implication this is the madhyamaka, the middle path, the path that disavows the politics of absolute difference. If there is humanist pathos in Ondaatje’s symbolic rendition of the homeland, it does not follow that detachment is the answer. Indeed, writing itself is an act of ideological engagement, and the aesthetic forces one to rethink the links between memory and homeland from the distance of the Canadian multicultural state.

Unfixed selves: the twice-displaced Another kind of homeland trauma may be discussed with reference to the lives of those members of the (East) Indian diaspora in Canada who see themselves as twice-displaced. Although there is no single moment of trauma, like the demand for a separate Tamil homeland, the literature of the writers taken up here (Espinet, Mootoo, Rashid, Ladha, Bissoondath, Cyril Dabydeen and Vassanji) is marked by both a different memory of the homeland and a different kind of accommodation with their new land. I take my theme at this juncture from Ramabai Espinet’s poem ‘Rain Time’ (1991: 19–20) in which she speaks of the agonizing condition of an erstwhile fixed self suddenly finding itself an ‘unfixed self’. Although the poem is immediately about the cruel games that history plays, about the loss of locality and its desecration, it has a larger metonymic function in so far as the phrase I have isolated sums up the themes of the vast bulk of texts written by diasporic peoples. Movement from one locale to another, from an earlier space where foundational narratives are constructed, where the metaphors of ‘living’ have their origins, where information and experience are packaged and bottled to be sent across seas (which in turn need to be deciphered, learned, memorized, ‘deep in a rusting city-center’) – in short, movement from one country to another (for whatever reason) – creates a consciousness about one’s past and produces the dilemma of unfixed selves. How does one write about these selves? How does one negotiate living here (in this instance Canada) and writing out narratives invaded by earlier memories? When, in her marvellous poem ‘Hosay Night’, Espinet writes, ‘This land is home to me / Now homeless’ (10), we immediately gloss the word ‘home’ as Trinidad / Canada. The text, one suspects, is about Trinidad, yet the poem is being composed not through the physical

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presence of the self in that country but through the idea of an ‘unfixed self’, a self-in-transition, which is located in Canada. As Mona Singh, narrator and protagonist of her novel The Swinging Bridge, says: ‘All that it took then in Trinidad was looking Indian; all it took now in Canada was skin colour’ (2004: 81). Espinet’s poems centre around painful moments that recall another, earlier history of displacement, the history of indenture in Trinidad. But to insist, from within a multicultural Canada, on diasporic experience as the master code with which to read Espinet’s poems misses much of the strength of Espinet’s powerfully political voice. In one poem (‘Orthodoxies’) she spells out her agenda – ‘Orthodoxies – / I HATE orthodoxies’ (1991: 33) – and moves into the realm of action: the necessity of working towards a fair and equitable world. It is in these poems about justice and freedom that the ageing voice of women comes across with such political urgency. The voice is overlaid with memories of the past – the experience of indenture in Trinidad – and with life in late-twentieth-century Canada, the liberal democratic nation-state from which Espinet operates. But neither the past nor the present confines her. Appropriately the title of her volume of poems is Nuclear Seasons, which is also the title of a poem that begins with echoes of a decidedly (and intertextually very apt) Dylan Thomas poem. Espinet’s opening lines are: The hand that rocks the cradle Will detonate the nightmare In the end. (59) The hand(s) are those of ‘night mothers’ – mothers as Kali-avengers – a religio-cultural reference that surfaces in a number of her poems. In ‘An Ageable Woman’ again it is a mother who claims ‘This Caribbean is mine’ (81). Over and over again the occluded history of indenture women on sugar plantations is given a real voice by Espinet, and in many instances the voice is urgent and powerful, as can be seen in this verse from ‘The Road’: My song tells tales Of much weeping Along the middle road And much that comes Is not like laughter. (48) The historical resonance of these poems finds a dramatic outlet in the production of the play Beyond the Kala Pani. At the Desh Pradesh Conference in Toronto in November 1991, the impact on the audience of this play about the suppressed voices of indenture women was electrifying. Espinet, who co-wrote the play with Nira Dookeran, Helena Singh and Valini Geer, had this to say about the production at the conference:

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For the Indo-Caribbean community, however, the effect was electrifying. The impact was that of something large and hidden, even taboo, being exposed for the first time. (Rungh 1.1–2: 11) The point tellingly made by Espinet about the twice-displaced diaspora’s ambivalent location in the semantics of homeland and in the new nation-state finds a very rich proof text in Shani Mootoo’s short story ‘Out on Main Street’ (1993). The short story telescopes the transition from the old and the new, from the life-worlds embedded in a plantation culture to the mobile, recent life-world of the new Indian diaspora. The narrator and her friend Janet (for whom she has a barely concealed homoerotic desire) frequent, although only timidly, Vancouver’s Main Street, heart of the British Columbia Indian community. Here they find that their favourite sweets – ‘meethai’, the generic name – need renaming, they need to be specified so that they become ‘korma’ or ‘chum chum’ not just ‘sugarcake’. The ‘Indianness’ of Main Street, captured in Indian sweets, also signals diasporic difference from within, a difference-in-identity in the literal sense of the word. The difference suggests an engagement with the past, a mode of remembering on the part of the old plantation diaspora, which effectively created a different kind of cultural consciousness in which generic types (one name for a variety of sweets) replaced generic specificity. The short story is replete with terms such as ‘kitchen Indians’, ‘Indian-in-skincolour-only’, ‘bastardized Indian’, about which in a moment of self-reflection the unnamed protagonist says: ‘Cultural bastards, Janet, cultural bastards. Dat is what we is. Yuh know, one time a fella from India who living up here call me a bastardized Indian because I don’t know Hindi. And now look at dis, nah! De thing is: all we in Trinidad is cultural bastards, Janet, all a we. . . . I looking forward to de day I find out dat place inside me where I am nothing else but Trinidadian, whatever dat could turn out to be.’ (51–2) Over a century before, in Trinidad, Shani Mootoo’s homeland, the country’s first Presbyterian missionary for East Indians, John Morton, had not found indentured labourers or their descendants any more promising, either. He had written about them in his journals as ‘unprincipled’, ‘untruthful’, ‘revengeful’ with, however, the possibility of becoming ‘more intelligent and stable Christians, if won to the Gospel’ (Morton 1916: 52). It is the scene of conversion and its aftermath inasmuch as women’s bodies in particular get entangled in the politics of missionary zeal, incest, home and repressed sexuality that forms the subtext of Shani Mootoo’s traumatic rendition of post-indenture life in her novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996). The novel has been subjected to an impressive reading by Gayatri Gopinath with reference to the ‘linkages between the legislation of heteronormativity, the disciplining of female sexuality,

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and the consolidation of colonial systems of labor’ (Gopinath 2005: 181). Additionally, she reads Mootoo’s novel as a text that deconstructs the idea of ‘home’ against Naipaul’s treatment of the subject in his foundational novel A House for Mr Biswas. Gopinath’s take on Mootoo’s novel is bold and original; it cannot be faulted. I want to use the same narrative to refer to the missionary system of control that worked as an instrument for the construction of a normative colonial subjectivity which had the effect of leaving diasporic subjects torn and anchorless, a theme canvassed as well in Naipaul’s ‘A Christmas Story’ (1967b: 31–54). In his journal dated 14 September 1872, John Morton had triumphantly entered the name of one ‘Arthur Hari Das, baptized Jan. 3, 1874, former Brahmo Samajist who reads Pilgrim’s Progress in “Bengalee” ’ (Morton 1916: 115–16). Cereus Blooms at Night treats the life of Mala Ramachandin as recounted by the gay nurse Mr Tyler. Trinidad is translated into the Caribbean island ‘Lantanacamara’ while the Canadian Presbyterian missionaries hail from ‘Shivering Northern Wetlands’. So as to differentiate between a nineteenthcentury Canada committed fully to British colonial practices (the Presbyterian mission was clearly an instrument of colonization that managed the evangelical side of Empire) the ‘Shivering Northern Wetlands’ is distinguished from the real Canada which also exists in the novel. This real Canada is, of course, enlightened and multicultural in the way in which the earlier never was. And it is from this Canada that Mootoo writes her powerful novel. Beneath the veneer of conversion – Morton writes about indentured workers as ‘candidates for baptism’ (Morton 1916: 79) – are lives of converts incapable of full participation in the new religion. Chandin Ramchandin, the model convert and representative hope of the wretched, considers his life ‘as the only person of Indian descent at the seminary’: Chandin seemed to be well liked by the taller, fair, heavily accented men, but he wondered constantly whether it was because he was the Reverend [Thoroughly’s] adopted son and Lavinia’s brother, or because he was of the race that it was their mission to Christianize. (38) The civilizing mission does not work as Mootoo uses Chandin’s body to typify an indenture history of violence towards women (mentioned in John Morton’s journals) and the disciplining of their sexuality. Unrequited passion for his ‘sister’ Lavinia leads to Chandin’s hasty marriage to Sarah and his estrangement from her upon the birth of his two daughters Pohpoh (Mala) and Asha. Sarah is seduced by Lavinia, and both leave for the thoroughly (note that the John Morton figure in the novel is named Reverend Thoroughly) allegorical ‘Shivering Northern Wetlands’. Mission discipline takes the form of aggressive incestuous sexual discipline as Chandin takes revenge on his children. In the dilapidated house – ‘a two-storey house . . . atop mudra stilts’ (50) – the abuse of Mala’s body is relentless. Her own life becomes meaningless, her love

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for Ambrose has no future; destroyed both mentally and physically, she kills her father and goes insane. Gopinath has written intelligently about the failure on the part of Chandin to replicate ‘the domestic idyll of the missionary home’ (182); but the idyll, based on a heteronormative sexuality, turns out to be a myth (after all, Lavinia Thoroughly is a lesbian). Using the subtext of the work to convert heathens undertaken by the Canadian Presbyterian mission in Trinidad, Mootoo draws attention to the parallel system of home-management and control alongside the legacy of indenture. And, to make the allegory itself telling, Mootoo translates the abuse of indenture women (suicides rates were always high) into the sexual abuse of daughters. In the dilapidated gothic house, which is neither the impressive house of Reverend and Mrs Ernest Thoroughly nor the mud house of indentured labourers with ‘peerahs’, ‘cattiyas’, ‘pitch-oil lamps’ and nauseating latrines (31), Mala Ramchandin (and ‘Mala’, we recall, is the title of David Dabydeen’s traumatic poem) enacts a diaspora trauma often censored from the official histories of the old Indian diaspora. Those twice-displaced, these unfixed selves, signal a diasporic awareness that cannot be contained within theories of diaspora that neglect to specify historical moments, specific experiences, and differences in historical conditioning. The ‘twice-displaced’ challenge theories of diaspora which fail to consider the ‘differential’ and uneven experiences of migration. The point is made by the young Indo-Fijian writer Shalini Akhil in her début novel The Bollywood Beauty (2005), in which Fiji-Indians living in Melbourne see themselves as Indians in a complex sort of fashion. Even though Rupa, the ‘Bollywood beauty’ from Fiji, after a fling at sexual self-discovery, enters into an Internet arranged marriage to Vikram (from Delhi), Kesh, her Australian-born cousin, feels that ‘she [Rupa] wasn’t really Indian’. She adds: And the rest of the family wasn’t either. Her great-grandfather had been, and his dad and his dad, but not anyone from her grandfather’s generation down. They had not been born and bred in India. They were too far removed to be real Indians. They looked different. They ate different food. Hell, they even made up their own language. (309) My next poet Ian Iqbal Rashid’s unfixed self shares with Ramabai Espinet a comparable biography. He, too, can trace his ancestry back to India, and like Espinet was born in an Indian diaspora community (in this instance in East Africa) going back at least a hundred years if not more. There is loss in Rashid, too, but his poems – laid out as prose poems and as free verse in the collection titled The Heat Yesterday (1995) – speak about loss of a different kind. They are less about memory of homeland than about selves whose bodies problematize the whole idea of identity and self-hood. If Espinet’s poems forcefully remind us of the silent selves of women (and especially indenture women), Rashid’s take us to marginalized beings (sexually, racially, and so on) within our

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own democratic Western communes. In this regard the first poem in The Heat Yesterday, ‘Song of Sabu’, may be seen as a prologue to the migration of people of colour to Western nation-states. Here we have the figure of the migrant outsider, long before globalization had taken hold of the modern state, whose body is on display as exotica, as the tame, unthreatening oriental body that can be casually inserted into the fantasy genre of so many Hollywood movies of the forties and early fifties. What is striking in this poem is not just the ‘unfixed self’, the mobile, rootless self, finally in America with only memories, but the point of view that gives another twist to Sabu as a corporeal being: ‘Sometimes during the day I catch myself in the mirror. The carelessly put together beauty found in young boys. But day time ghosts – they’re easily dealt with’ (Rashid 1995: 16). That sense of the body – and its powerful expression – can be seen in ‘Mango Boy’ where gay sexuality is imaged through richly textured and lush metaphors: I eat mangoes, sliced see the cayenne sprinkled, machine-gunned through honey-coloured flesh Then I ride my lover high (18) Even as these themes of passion and desire get replayed, we are conscious ever so much of the poetry of diaspora, the poetry of making sense of our lives as transplanted, transcultural, deeply uprooted communities. It is here that the titles of the poems in Rashid’s collection – ‘Bastards of the Diaspora’, ‘Another Country’, ‘Knowing Your Place’ – persuade us that there is something rather significant going on in these poems. The Canadian poets of the South Asian diaspora are now bringing to the nation a new voice, no longer nationalistic, no longer the cringe of a lesser fragment society in the shadows of mother England or France but a vibrant new Canadian voice without the tyranny of – at least in this positive sense – a dominant voice of tradition that seeks conformity. Espinet, Mootoo and Rashid now speak not only of homelands, of the agony of living in displacement; they use their ‘unfixed selves’ to weave magical poems that refashion selves and the citizen. These poets demonstrate how there is now a multiply centred Canadian sensibility that transcends ethnic boundaries. The poems are Canadian in so far as their particular voices have been produced by a specifically Canadian (multicultural) sensibility; they are Canadian in the sense of Pierre Trudeau’s vision of a culturally non-hegemonic nation-state. But they also carry those barely concealed anxieties, the ‘automatic’ attitude of racism towards the other (Espinet 2004: 105), so deeply ingrained in the majoritarian culture. The questions raised by these unfixed selves – questions of memory and dispossession – are taken up in Yasmin Ladha’s East African Indian interlinked

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series of stories (with the same characters and voices cropping up in most of them). The unusual features of Ladha’s collection of short stories The Lion’s Granddaughter (1992) are, however, a high degree of (post)modernist consciousness of the ficto-critical nature of writing and, as is not uncommon with this kind of writing, a continuous engagement with the reader. In a highly original creative mood, she calls her (implied) reader ‘readerji’, a common reader endowed with some special guru-like authority through the Hindi/Sanskrit honorific ‘ji’: ‘Sir Reader may I interest you with my diasporic wares?’ The genuflection to Salman Rushdie is obvious here, but this should not hide the originality of Yasmin Ladha’s work. It would be too easy to bracket this originality with what may be called the female diasporic sublime, the special voice of women resisting the highly patriarchal discourses of the diaspora. That voice of resistance (and, indeed, of accommodation, too) gets complicated in diasporas where quite often women are the first breadwinners. To get at the heart of the diasporic female body, in aesthetic terms, Yasmin Ladha deflects the female condition on to her ‘homeland’. In this way Ladha creates a narrative tapestry through memorial constructions that capture both a lost place and the underlying sexual and political tensions of an Indian community in East Africa in the post-independence period. The figure of the ‘lion’s granddaughter’ (Shil/ Chiku/Aisha) and her slightly different avatars give many of her stories a powerful individual voice. Yet these tales are not to be seen as ethnic tapestries, multicultural writing self-consciously addressing a rising literary/cultural field. In the following passage, Yasmin Ladha returns to the failure of binary thought (colonial/postcolonial; self/other), although in ways more like Espinet’s and Crusz’s: Readerji, is this binary inevitable? One is the colonizer, the other, the colonized. Then whoa, whoa Readerji. Now, please pick up speed and move! Chapa chapa, tout-suite (clap clap), fatafat, out of my text because I shy/ sly from any confinement/circle/missionary position. Friction/fiction between mates facilitates ousting of hierarchical positions. I don’t want to be the sturdy alphabet to set a novice at ease in Other literature – a vaccination prior to his/her flight into the Third World. But sometimes this has to be done, then I can’t help it. . . . (97) As the passage continues, the hidden reference is to the search for freedom for the ‘Sita-woman’ confined within a circle drawn by Rama’s half-brother Lakshman. The reference is not just a demand for female empowerment but also one for freedom to define writing beyond the confines of the patriarchal circle. The point, as made in the last sentence of the passage quoted above, is that it is for the writer to decide, strategically, where and when and how to define her work as ‘ethnic’ or ‘other’ or even ‘mainstream’. Two other key authors of the twice-displaced Indian diaspora are Neil Bissoondath and Cyril Dabydeen. Even as that category is being invoked here,

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it must be said that the migrants from the indenture diaspora of sugar estates constitute a quite specific group that reads both Canada and India rather differently. That difference, as we have seen, produces a Naipaul-like reading of multiculturalism in Bissoondath’s theoretical writing. In the realm of art, however, Bissoondath says something rather different as he captures the very special trauma of the Caribbean Indian migrant. I would want to explore this trauma through a reading of a pair of short stories from two separate collections published between 1986 and 1990. The stories are called ‘Insecurity’ (1986) and ‘Security’ (1990). ‘Insecurity’ is the story of Alistair Ramgoolam, a businessman in the Caribbean whose eldest son is studying in Toronto and a second is about to go to Canada. He is into business of the export–import variety and so manages to siphon off foreign currency into a Canadian bank as security because of the very uncertain future of his own Caribbean country which is obviously modelled on Trinidad. In this way he manages to deposit Can $40,000 in a Toronto bank. The desire for security, however, leads him into purchasing a house in Toronto for well over the amount of money he has in his bank. The traditional Indian fetish for ready cash and a free house is broken since the Toronto house has to be mortgaged to a bank, which means that Ramgoolam has to desperately raise foreign funds to pay for it. This is the basic plot. What is engaging is not the storyline but the psychology of the diaspora mind here. This is, after all, the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, descendants of cane cutters who migrated in the nineteenth century from North India. Although language is limited to words for religious rituals, the continuity with India is maintained through the symbolic such as the shrine in the house, the wearing of the dhoti for prayers and the role of puja as a means of asking a boon or to assure success in life. ‘We’re very insecure in this place’, Ramgoolam tells his son in Toronto. But his son’s years in Canada had created another distance: ‘Just as his father had grown distant from India; just as he himself had grown even further from the life that, in memory, his father had represented and then, later in life, from that which he himself had known on the island, so too had his eldest son gone beyond’ (77). Ramgoolam now ‘saw himself as being left behind, caught between the shades of his father and, unexpectedly, of his son’. The insecurity that had been transferred to the land, to the routine lives of people, now became something deep within him. His forefathers, too, as indentured labourers from some of the most wretched parts of India, had fought against insecurity all their lives: gods were appeased not because of the afterlife but because of the fear of an earlier wretchedness suddenly coming back to haunt them. As a diasporic narrative about Canada this story becomes much more interesting in its ironically titled sequel, ‘Security’ (1990). In the end the house bought by the eldest son was sold and a much smaller condominium purchased in its place. The rest of the profit from the sale went into a fixed deposit. And so when, suddenly, Alistair Ramgoolam, his wife and their second son Vijay pack up everything and leave their island home for Canada with only ‘one person, one suitcase’(89) they come to live in this small condominium as an extended family of parents plus three brothers (the youngest still at

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university). In this condominium Ramgoolam experiences a ‘dislocation’ that was distressing. Much as he would want to explain his present misery by contrasting it with his previous island existence (‘I knew we were insecure on that damned island’), Ramgoolam’s sense of dislocation and distress continues: one insecurity is simply replaced by another (in)security. The weekdays were long for him. He had not, even after many months, grown accustomed to the endless stretches of being alone. On the island someone had always been there. (87) And, then, Ramgoolam’s wife now works as a cook in an Indian restaurant, her erstwhile timidity gone, the essential plantation law of the male breadwinner no longer the norm, and all he can do is watch talk-back and game shows on TV. His children had become alien with Canadian views – assertive, vocal, critical and, as he felt, disrespectful. The new world of freedom affects his wife rather differently as she begins to show a rare, but not uncommon, resilience in the diaspora. The dramatic shift from male to female breadwinners often leads to diasporic women coming to terms with ‘dislocation’ much quicker than men. Ramgoolam tries his hand at various jobs, for a while as a salesman (selling encyclopaedias and vacuum cleaners) only to find that these are not ‘real’ and satisfying jobs. Ramgoolam was infuriated and ashamed at the thought of his wife’s working. She had never held a job before, had depended on him for money, she the homemaker, he the provider. (100) ‘Security’ may be added to a long list of allegorical narratives of the diaspora. In this alien world it is once again the reenactment of ritual that offers the most sustained attempt at a symbolic return to the past. In ‘Security’ the ritual is that of Divali, the night celebrated with earthen lamps to mark both the Hindu New Year and the return of Lord Rama from banishment. The ritual is full of symbolic meaning especially if Rama’s banishment is seen as a metaphor for the diaspora’s own banishment. Most importantly, Divali in the plantation colonies is an outdoor affair with rows of lamps from different households often merging into each other. In the condominium Divali is brought indoors; lamps are lit with wicks that create smoke without the ventilation of outdoor life. And so Ramgoolam’s Divali has to be cut short: the heavy smoke only triggers the fire alarm, and the sacrilegious act of extinguishing lamps has to be done. Sacrilege, the end of light – the symbolism is strong: the security of the four walls betrays the diaspora’s insecurity. The first narrative invades the second. Back to back they become back to front. Ramgoolam’s eldest son points out ‘the slash of blue lake in the distance’ and tells him: ‘You see that, Pa? That is not the Caribbean. You understand? That is not the Caribbean

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you’re seeing there’ (108). But the father would remain unconvinced, such is the force of diasporic memory. Espinet, Bissoondath and my next writer, Cyril Dabydeen, are three writers who may be set apart even as we explore the writings of what I have called the twice-displaced diaspora. This may be because there is, in a significant way, a unity of experience or a body of prior ‘texts’ that they share. The first poem in Cyril Dabydeen’s collection called Islands Lovelier than a Vision (1986) is about memory, writing and the text. The poem – ‘Legends’ – begins with a writing (‘I begin my book of legends’) and is about the subject as he recollects and then internalizes in moments of fantasy each space that he inhabits. And so back ‘home’ he looks forward to an ‘outside life’ gleaned from ‘glossy magazines’ (‘fishing in Ontario, skiing down / Vancouver mountains’). But when the outside life is achieved fantasy structures are not easily forgotten, as we see in ‘Later in Canada’ where the nation continues to exist as a version of the original simulacrum. In ‘Refugee’ we get another picture of the diaspora as the subject attempts to make a new life in Canada. The narrative is spare, it is not about nostalgia, and even less about how the refugee’s presence alters the ethnoscape of Canada. This will happen, but for the moment the aim is to work hard – ‘because you want to work hard / make cabinets, chairs, beds’ – without losing the legend of ‘make believe’. In the end the lies, the hardships of migration are set aside as one finally takes Canada ‘deep in [one’s] veins’. The poem ends with make the land intimately yours one day you will tell your sons & daughters you worked hard then they’ll begin to speak without an accent and you will be proud to be truly Canadian. The voice here is of accommodation, without excessive anxiety or unease; it is a not untypical voice of the Indo-Caribbean migrant who again in ‘Patriot’ concludes: I am anxious to make Canada meet in me I make designs all across the snow. And this is not because of the romance of assimilation, nor because of a desire for the denial of one’s past: ‘There is no doubt / where I come from,’ says the poet in ‘Dubious Foreigner’. It is because, as in the poem entitled ‘Diaspora’, the poet refuses to aestheticize the diasporic condition. Instead of the predictable narrative of migrancy we return to Dabydeen’s synecdochic trope. Here the unprepared migrant with only a presumption to knowledge about the world is

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seen as the quiet transformative agent (in New York, in Stanford) whose labour changes, in however small a way, the land to which he has come. Dabydeen’s is not a vision that reads the dominant race as threatening, nor is it dominated by it. There is instead a triumphal vision, linked to the idea of labour as the redeeming feature of life. Labour, that harsh word that bonded the poet’s grandparents to plantation life, continues to be part of the work ethic in Canada and in Dabydeen’s work suggestively distinguishes the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in Canada from the South Asian, the point stressed yet again in his short story ‘Jet Lag’ (2000: 73–85) where the ‘cold and ice’ of Canada in his ‘veins’ shadow the narrator’s first visit to his Indian ancestral home. I now want to move on to arguably the most important Canadian writer of this twice-displaced diaspora, M. G. Vassanji. Like Rashid and Ladha he, too, has prior diasporic roots in East Africa, and like them he has increasingly come around to accepting ‘multiplicity and contradiction’ as defining features of self and identity (Vassanji 1996: 118). Vassanji’s own past was always syncretic; he grew up speaking English, Swahili, Gujarati and Cutchi. But in spite of his syncretism and his emotional connection with East and South Africa (he is always moved whenever he hears the Tanzanian and South African national anthems) Black African self-determination and nationalism finally led to the uprooting of Indian diasporas in these newly emergent postcolonial nation-states. Fierce African nationalism pushed diasporas struggling for decades to define themselves (but always trapped within a colonial politics of divide and rule) to declare their loyalty. The work of Vassanji which tells a colonial narrative in which diasporic lives in East Africa are marked by social and cultural flows and contaminations best is his highly accomplished The Book of Secrets (1994). It is a novel which is located around the issue of how books hold secrets, how there are mysteries behind every book that require the skills of an imaginative archivist before their secrets can be imparted, and how the location of the secret leads to the unfolding of the life of the researcher/amanuensis. These secrets of Vassanji’s Shamsi community require careful reflection. To write about a book – in this instance a diary of a colonial administrator in Africa – is to return to Joseph Conrad. In matters of literary production and literary theory this is an intertextual move that the theme demands. If literature is all about writing in the shadow of prior masters, then any novel that is about the mysteries of the book, in the African context and written in English, takes us back to Conrad. There is a crucial moment in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1995) when Marlow comes across a book in a hut as his steamer makes its way towards Kurtz’s mysterious ivory depot. Marlow finds a maritime book, a seaman’s almanac of little practical or aesthetic value. But what strikes Marlow is the love with which the tattered pages had been stitched together. It seems as though the mariner in this lonely hut had held the book, read it, preserved it because it was something totemic, a relic with which one connected to another civilization, to another narrative based on the technology of writing and reproduction. It is precisely this magical nature of the book that attracts V. S. Naipaul’s attention when he, too, writes a commentary on Conrad (1980: 205–28). How books are

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magical commodities, how books will acquire special properties in the diaspora and how books will move with Mr Biswas as he struggles to find a space for himself – these questions had been addressed by Naipaul much earlier. Vassanji’s book, appropriately titled The Book of Secrets, is also about finding a book, chancing upon a mysterious object and then restitching it with pages in which the missing items of the book are reconstructed. The book here is like a palimpsest, faded entries in a diary, upon which another narrative is superimposed. Yet the central secret of the diary – whether the writer Alfred Corbin had slept with the alluring Mariamu and was thus Pipa’s son’s father – would remain unanswered or at least remain ambiguous to the end. The book does not open up its secrets: some things must remain between the covers of books, inside the book of secrets. Of course, there is another way of reading this. There is the great Talmudic tradition of religious commentary and counter-commentary: books, the book of the Prophets (Elijah, Ezekiel, Muhammad) or the early Christian hagiographers (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Paul), need to be recoded, overwritten, so that their secrets can be passed down. But not to everybody or by everybody. These books of secrets had secret interpreters, people who are part of the clergy, people who decide what knowledge can be transmitted, what can’t be. The modern exegete, the novelist, is not bound by these rules; his/ her task is to follow up the leads, like a detective, but whether he can be relied upon completely remains an open-ended question. To many parts of the world the book (the product of the post-Gutenberg printing press) and writing came with the colonizer. Even where writing existed, as in India, printing technology didn’t and bamboo or bark or parchment had to be used for purposes of writing until much later. Which of course meant that texts couldn’t be moved easily, disseminated or even preserved. There is the well-known story recounted in Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1976) about the intriguing response of the chief of the Nambakawara tribe when he sees the anthropologist writing his name. With colonization came a different political world order but with it also came the book, in two forms: the Bible which contained the mysteries of God and the means by which heathens may be saved, and the book that the white man read or in which he wrote. Both were mysterious objects; the reading of the one was transferred on to the other by subject peoples so that the book itself, regardless of its use value or its content, became magical. To possess the book, to own it, to pore over it, was power. And it is the book, as Alfred Corbin’s diary, that Mariamu, the sultry beauty, must steal along with the technology of writing, the Waterman fountain pen. The mystery of the book itself, the book as book, as its own materiality, its thingness (after Heidegger), continues to be the centre of the text, and it is with this that the text of Vassanji opens. They called it the book of secrets, kitabu cha siri zetu. Of its writer they said: he steals our souls and locks them away; it is a magic bottle, this book, full of captured spirits; see how he keeps his eyes skinned, this mzungu, observing everything we do; look how meticulously this magician with a hat writes

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in it, attending to it more regularly than he does to nature, with more passion than he expends on a woman. He takes it with him into forest and on mountain, in war and in peace, hunting a lion or sitting on judgement, and when he sleeps he places one eye upon it, shuts the other. Yes, we should steal this book, if we could, take back our souls, our secrets from him. But the punishment for stealing this book is harsh – ai! – we have seen it. (1994: 1) So The Book of Secrets opens in fact with the mystery of the book, the Arabic kitab, itself more passionate than the body. The book in question is found by Feroz, a Dar-es-Salaam businessman, in a store previously owned by one Pipa. It is a diary, a 1913 edition which is described in some detail: publisher (Letts), size (five by eight), utility values (three days per page, and may be used the following year), advertisements at the end (Eno’s Fruit Salt, and others), sundry information especially about southern Africa (sunrise and sunset, postal and cable rates) and so on. The diary also carries the name and address of the owner: Alfred Corbin, Kikono, British East Africa. There is much here about the colonial experience: the indiscriminate carving up of the continent (British East Africa implies a British West Africa and perhaps even a British Central Africa, a German East Africa), narratives of European explorers without much reference to the natives, a self-evident and unquestioned logic of imperialism, among many others. The book, however, has suffered from the vagaries of tropical weather, becoming more like a fossil than a book on a library shelf. It reveals little besides the day-to-day work of a British administrator in a remote outpost of the Empire. What begins to supersede the diary is the stitching together of narratives around the text, narratives that Pius Fernandes, the authorial amanuensis and ‘model reader’ of this text, laboriously reconstructs only to discover his own tangential connections with the diary. For at the heart of the diary, and at the heart of the narrative reconstruction, is an enigma, a mystery, an ambiguity about a colonial administrator and a black woman who steals the book, and a song (‘The world belongs to those who love’) from Anarkali, the popular Bombay film. Like a detective-scholar Pius Fernandes, the man who stays behind in East Africa when most other Indians have either left or plan to leave, re-creates ‘the world of that book’ and breathes ‘life into the many spirits captured in its pages’ (8). But like all discovery and narrative stitching and gathering in which fiction is interspersed with facts such as the 1910 Memoranda from which the narrator Fernandes quotes (40), like all novels about discovery/recovery, what gets exposed, and often supersedes the object, is the fragility of the subject who constructs the narrative. In finding a centre to the diary – the centre around the mysterious Mariamu whose power outlives her life – Fernandes, the archivist, too, will ‘lie exposed to [his] own enquiry, also captive to the book’ (8) as his illicit desire for his student Rita, and the English teacher and poet Richard Gregory’s desire for Mr Fernandes are finally unravelled. The magic of the book as object survives as the mystery of the book now written. And this book, too,

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in this endless cycle of exegeses lies exposed, lies incomplete, to be retold, its interstices filled, its ambiguities extended and meditated upon by yet another reader. The book of secrets is another book of secrets, and then, and then like the world of the Japanese poet Basho: ‘The world of dew / Is a world of dew / And then, and then. . . .’ Kikono, the insignificant outpost to which Alfred Corbin comes as Assistant District Commissioner with his irritating servant Thomas, is a small dusty settlement largely made of Indian and part-Indian Muslims, half of whom belong to the Shamsi sect of Islam. This settlement’s Shamsi community (a purely fictitious community created by Vassanji) has a mukhi or headman called Jamali who acts as an intermediary between Corbin’s governmental duties and the community’s own laws and rituals. Apart from the largely derelict shops, the only buildings of note are the Government Buildings and, some ten miles away, the missionary station (MCA) run by Miss Elliott and Mrs Bailey. The real heart of Kikono is, however, the Shamsi community, a partly indigenized, fictional diasporic Indian community that still refers to India as ‘desh’, or homeland (47), and whose lifestyles are a hybridized mix of Indian, African and Arab. This unusual diasporic settlement – partly totally integrated, partly alien made up of shopkeepers as well as coolies who came to work as indentured labourers on the railways or the estates – constitutes the space of the liminal other, neither totally African nor Indian, a strange amalgam of people unified by Islamic ritual, Hindu–Muslim incantations (71) and the mosque. It is a world in which Alfred Corbin (Bwana Corbin) finds himself the lone white man. How much, he had wondered, ‘this was home to the Indians and the Swahilis, who had resigned themselves to it’, but for him the place was only a ‘temporary stop’ (66). Enter into this world Mariamu, Jamali the mukhi’s niece, his sister Kulsa’s daughter and the coolie Rashid’s stepdaughter. She is the striking dancer at the festivities (43), tall and elegant, in a white frock and a red pachedi; a great cook, perfect in every way (78). Upon Thomas’s departure she very briefly becomes Corbin’s cook (51) before she marries Pipa, her betrothed from Moshi in German East Africa. But is she pure enough for Pipa? Did something happen between her and Corbin during her tenure as Corbin’s cook? Their son Akber Ali (Aku) is fair with grey eyes and arouses people’s suspicions. This is the great mystery that the diary holds, or at least Pipa thinks it does. Going through Mariamu’s belongings soon after she has been cruelly violated and murdered, Pipa finds ‘himself holding a book’. The book. He was so startled he dropped it back into the trunk, then picked it up again. Bwana Corbin’s book, he thought, which he himself would have so liked to steal that day, now hidden among his wife’s things![. . . .] Why? To steal back her secret – her shame – from the Englishman? To prove to her husband her innocence? Or to permit herself – and her husband – to take revenge on the mzungu? . . . So was this her gift to him; one which she, one day, some evening in better times, would have shown him had she lived? . . .

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He was convinced the book contained the answer to his torment. What was the relationship between the ADC and his Mariamu? Was the boy, Aku, really his own? He could not read it, yet he would take his gift with him wherever he went. It was from her and she must be in it, described in it. The book contained her spirit. (171–2) The book is an icon, almost religious, that enters into the lives of people. Pipa cannot read it; but it has associations, it carries secrets, it has power, emblematic power, power to heal, to release one from the bondage of spirits. These are the terms in which the book gets recoded, and it will be there, like a medium, through which Mariamu’s spirit will guide Pipa’s life. Through this book prophecies will be uttered and histories written. The book lay in his shop ‘by the bedside’, ‘[I]t was memento, it was absolution’ (203): these are the terms in which it is described. Such is its iconic value, its magical property, that Pipa constructs a shrine around the book. You shall not worship idols, say the scriptures. ‘This is not right’, said Remti. ‘It is sinful, this puja, this shrine. We are not Hindus —’ ‘I have to do this,’ he said. ‘Or there will be no peace.’ (207) In a storeroom turned into a shrine he covered a trunk with a white sheet and placed the book on it: ‘Thus began his long period of private idolatry’ (209). He hesitated once more, then walked to it, the chair which was an offering to her, sent to the mosque and brought back, on which now was the sacred book. There was an incense stand on a stool to the right; and some sweets on a stool to the left. The book itself was placed on a white doily of cotton needlework. . . . He opened it gently . . . looking for the charmed word ‘Mariamu,’ without success. (218–19) He shows priests (who can presumably decipher hidden secrets) a page or two from this book in the hope of locating Mariamu’s name. When Aku learns English (memorizing ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘a farmer once trotting upon his grey mare’) Pipa asks him to write Mariamu’s name and then goes looking for its match in the book. He finds one entry after half an hour of labour (212). From here on the narrative moves swiftly to capture the lives of the next generation and we are now in the late 1950s and 1960s. Another beautiful woman comes into the picture. Her name is Rita, and she is metaphorically linked to Rita Hayworth and through her to the Aga Khan. The political winds of change lead to the sudden eruption of fierce African nationalism. In Vassanji’s novel the discourses of diaspora become more marked. The schoolteacher Pius Fernandes

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recounts his own departure from Goa in 1950 and his days as the History and English teacher at Boysschool where Richard Gregory was the Senior English teacher. A key element in the Indian diaspora relates to its consumption of popular Indian cinema. And so there is stiff competition now in Dar-es-Salaam (‘Heaven of Peace’) between the Empire Cinema and the Bharat Cinema, symbolically between the colonial world and the homeland (‘Bharat’ is India). During a history class run by Pius Fernandes, Gulnar (Rita) sings in class a song – – from the film Anarkali (1953): yah zindagı usı ki hai (242), ‘the world belongs to those who love’. It is a song that will get repeated and the story of Anarkali and her love for Saleem the son of the Mughal emperor Akbar (Akber), retold. Fernandes’ muted relationship with Rita remains precisely that – muted – as Rita’s own self gets coded through filmic images of Indian cinema – Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Nargis (243). In between Ali Akber (Aku), now in his middle age and married for twelve years to a barren woman, runs off with the seventeen year-old Rita to London. Political changes take place, Mau Mau, independence movements are in the air, and when Fernandes returns from the University of London he finds that Tanzania is set to gain its independence in December 1961. We note an important diasporic meditation at this point in the text: We were intensely aware of our essential homelessness. Our world was diminishing with the Empire. We were all travellers who had on an impulse taken off, for all kinds of personal reasons. . . . We were now aware that we all had to choose: to return home . . . but what was home now? to take up a new nationality . . . but what did that mean? to move on to the vestiges of the Empire, to the last colonies and dominions, or perhaps to retreat to where it all began, London. I of course had chosen to throw in my lot with the new nation; being a solitary man without close attachments has been a help in living up to this resolve. But for the others, even after they had opted to stay, the question always remained to plague them – to stay or to go, and where to go? (274) In spite of these changes, Fernandes’ passion for the full narrative of the diary continues. It is left to Rita to confront Fernandes and ask the obvious. How does one know about the other, about Mariamu, about Pipa if, as Rita challenges him, ‘you don’t know these things about yourself’ (297)? Life is lived – – through those who live intensely (yah zindagı usı ki hai is the haunting melody, ‘the world belongs to those who love’), but the past has to be buried, there is no more to know, and Rita asks: ‘No, sir – Pius – this is the price I am going to ask – which you’ve known all along, and I hold you to it. Let it lie, this past. The diary and the stories that surround it are now mine, to bury’ (298). He gives the diary to Rita, the second Mariamu. There is another way, a much more local way, of interpreting the diary thus entombed. The person who discovers the diary, Feroz, tells his version of the

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story of Anarkali, and he combines the 1953 Anarkali version (with the song) with Asif Ali’s 1959 version (Mughal-e-Azam) which he confuses with the first. It is in the latter that Anarkali is given to her mother, but she doesn’t sing ‘The world belongs to those who love’ in that film. That is from the first film. In – – – – a kya (‘Why be secreMughal-e-Azam there was a similar song: jab pyar kiya to darn . tive about one’s love’). Is this Feroz’s confusion or Vassanji’s own diasporic confusion as memory collapses the two versions seen in childhood in Kenya? The equation, however, is clear: Anarkali = Mariamu. ‘So Akber, who is famed for his justice, instructed that the cave be left open, at the back, and Anarkali was free – but she had to go away. She went singing, “The world belongs to those who love . . .” ’ I recall a pack of audacious schoolgirls singing this very song to me in class. Mocking. Rita and her friends, in the prime of youth and happiness almost 40 years ago. ‘ “The world belongs to those who love.” ’ Forbidden love. Perhaps all love is forbidden which is true, and it is true because the pain it causes makes us live. (300) So Mariamu/Anarkali is not entombed by Akber as in the original version. She can still sing the haunting melody of the original film with reference to the second 1959 version because the narrator forgoes the final act of closure, the final brick on the tomb is not laid. She is given her freedom by a benign king because she had lived and made Akber, too, alive in a manner not too different from Rushdie’s Boonyi Kaul Noman (or Mrs Shalimar the Clown) who through the ‘dance number of Anarkali’ had aroused the desire of the American ambassador Maximilian Ophuls in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005: 132). Diasporic memory combines the two films; the texts are no longer separate and discrete as both become, in one sense, ‘the texts of Mariamu’. But all memories will remain encrypted, they will remain entombed, including the relationships between Gregory and Pius Fernandes, between Gregory and Corbin’s wife, and perhaps even between the author and his past. In the end the act of stitching never completes the text as Pius concludes: It is, as she [Rita] put it, ‘everything else’, everything I have written and compiled in relation to the diary – what I have come to think of as a new book of secrets. A book as incomplete as the old one was, incomplete as any book must be. A book of half lives, partial truths . . . (331–2) And the novel ends before the name, date and city with ‘But I must stop now, the man has arrived for the package’ (333). It would be too easy to read this as the writerly postcolonial text or even a kind of diasporic homage, in a strange unspoken sort of way, to the colonial world. How different the postcolonial

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world is compared with the vibrancy of Kikono under the sole white man? And now who will write, where, indeed, are the mysteries of the pen (Waterman) and the diary (Letts)? More directly, why does Vassanji write about a diaspora that he has left behind? What is the trauma that he needs to write out? Is this the trauma of a self that, in Canada, exists problematically as a fissured, hyphenated, contradictory, abject self as it never did in Africa. Why must diasporas need to declare their hand, defend their memories, be apologetic about their memorial archives in the new nation-state, here Canada? In Kikono no one did, no one had to, no one was asked to. Kikono was multicultural before the word was invented; in Kikono even the absolute other – the colonial representative – could not function from a position of absolute superiority. Vassanji’s reading of that world is not exceptional; we find it in the early Naipaul, too. Which is why these twice-displaced South Asian diasporas have greater difficulty in coming to terms with multicultural difference or even with multicultural theory since their previous diasporic lives did not require a theory, they simply were. In this respect they must write differently about their experience, and feel the need for diasporic definitions that will not collapse the specificities of their prior diasporic lives. M. G. Vassanji addresses the diaspora in a multicultural nation-state at length in his novel Amriika (1999), a work which, sadly, lacks a centre and is able neither to develop the crisis of the individual, here Ramji, coming to terms with life in America nor to expose the dynamics of the East African-Indian life-world in a new country. The work meanders; it has too many different beginnings; and in the end the suicide of Michel, misguided revolutionary who bombs a bookstore in Ashfield, Michigan, so that a fundamentalist Muslim group would be implicated and hence their growing hold on the East African Muslim diaspora in America broken, fails to save the novel. Amriika is unsatisfactory also because its emotional relationships lack intensity, and when Ramji loses his one true love, Rumina, a Mariamu avatar, the text doesn’t know whether this personal loss is its centre or something larger, something that links all the various strands together to a more general problematic of displacement and exclusion from the ideology of the nation. Inqalab (‘revolution’), the journal that brings the key characters – Darcy, Ramji and Michel – together in the end is no more than an autobiographical gesture (Vassanji and his wife run the Toronto Review) and a kind of allegory of writing for which a press is crucial to diasporic selfempowerment. Amriika in the end demonstrates a feature of diasporic aesthetic imagination – diaspora writers are likely to triumph more often when their aesthetic centre is based on memory and recall. Amriika is no The Book of Secrets and in the end has little aesthetic or hermeneutic value. In his more recent book, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2004), there is much less of the political earnestness of Amriika and a lot more of the novelist as accomplished storyteller. The story of Vikram Lall, East Indian-Kenyan, is told spiritedly, and much could be said about the narrative organization of this work. What is a lot more interesting for our purpose is Vassanji’s emphasis on the racial dynamics of the country, especially the degree to which the

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Indian diaspora in Kenya created an exclusive world to which outside entry was impossible. Even then, though, one of Vassanji’s key characters, Deepa, the Indian girl and Vikram Lall’s sister, never breaks off from her African lover Njoroge and is finally rejected by her people. Vikram himself marries Shobha, daughter of the owner of Javeri jewellers, as a mere formality and seeks love elsewhere. Against the backdrop of the Mau Mau rebellion Kenya gets its independence, and its first president, an ex-Mau Mau himself, is Jomo Kenyatta. The latter’s ascendancy as the leader of all East Africans is short-lived as corruption spreads and the economy begins to collapse. Interesting as the political and economic contexts are, they are not significant to the craft of Vassanji’s fiction, nor to the selective use I make of Vassanji’s texts. Two matters emerge in Vassanji’s version of the twice-displaced diaspora. First, the East African Indian diaspora in Canada cannot replicate the vibrancy of life in Africa where, in the end, even Vikram Lall’s conservative father ends up with an African mistress. Second, and following on from the first, there was in the racial/sexual dynamics of life in East Africa an emotional substratum that can only be captured in art. Memorial reconstructions of another history become the aesthetic centrepiece of Vassanji’s art.

Recalling India We have examined two types of diasporic recollections from within the Canadian multicultural state: the first dealt with the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora’s response to the Tamil Eelam movement, the second related to the lives of a diaspora that had already spent a good part of their lives away from the homeland. We now come to the third and numerically the largest type: recollections of homeland by Indians who left India barely a generation ago. Here the loss of the abstract homeland and the psychology of melancholia and mourning are accented differently. Four writers – Rohinton Mistry, Ven Begamudré, Anita Rau Badami and Shauna Singh Baldwin – will be our proof-texts. Writing out difference – one’s own past for instance – as a legitimate aesthetic mode is clearly evident in M. G. Vassanji. In the works of the first author belonging to the third type, Rohinton Mistry, writing once again is a cure for (traumatic) loss. In remembering, in recalling, one heals, one triumphs, one fills the ego up; the world may be empty but the ego no longer is. The imaginative act, in this replay of a high modernist aesthetic, has the function of healing. Mistry’s first major work, Such a Long Journey (1991) (the title is from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’), belongs to that vibrant field of diasporic compositions where the migrant reconstructs, in fiction, memories of a past he/she has left behind. The productive space celebrated is the city of Bombay (and in the literary sense Salman Rushdie’s Bombay), that most mysterious of all postcolonial cities, but this time from the point of view of a community that is even more a minority in India than the Muslims: the Parsis, descendants of people who left Persia to escape from the massive conversions to Islam that had begun there in the eighth century. They brought with them the religion of Zoroastrianism and

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its cultural practices, many of which survive to this day. The historical period covered in the novel is a single year (1971), and the story is told against the backdrop of the Bangladesh war of liberation. The novel centres on the life of the struggling middle-class Gustav Noble who gets dragged into affairs of the state and of the city from which he emerges, like some people in classic realist texts, a stronger individual. Gustav Noble lives in a small but not uncomfortable apartment in Khodadad Building with other middle-class white-collar workers. His wife Dilnawaz and he have three children, two boys Shorab and Darius, and a daughter Roshan. Shorab is 19 and has just gained entry into one of India’s institutes of technology. The father is delighted, but Shorab rebels and leaves home soon after the results are announced. ‘Shorab will make a name for himself,’ the father had declared to all and sundry (3). Who are the other characters whose lives intersect with that of Gustav Noble and his wife? There is Miss Kutpitia, mourning for the death of her nephew Farad and keeping his room as a shrine, almost a catacomb, for the dead; there is Major Jimmy Billimoria, a former resident who had disappeared suddenly and at whose request Gustav gets involved in a clandestine transaction at the bank; there is Malcolm Sandanha, the Goan Christian who introduces Gustav to the delights of choice beef at Crawford market; there is the imbecile Tehmul – everyone called him Tehmul-Langraa (29) – whose lame body connects with Gustav’s own slight limp gathered after an accident in which he leapt to save his young son Shorab; there is his bank colleague, the humorist Dinshawji, loyal to the end, and there are others: Mr Rabadi, his dog and his daughter Jasmine, Ghulam Mohammed, Dr Paymaster still using ‘Dr. R. C. Lord’s Est 1892’ signboard outside his office, Peerbhoy Paanwalla, Kaurie Coutino the bank typist, and the unnamed pavement artist. They constitute the limited number of people who make up this narrative. Behind them stand the teeming millions of Bombay. At one point in the novel Gustav Noble asks the pavement artist to paint pictures of gods and saints on a long concrete wall that had begun to be used as a urinal wall by passers-by. He takes up the challenge but then, as the wall undergoes its transformation, the artist begins to have misgivings: Bigger than any pavement project he had ever undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey – chanced, unplanned, solitary – was the thing to relish. (184) The journey as unplanned (the artist’s ideal) enters the life of Gustav (always predictable, always planned, although there was the comic-epic moment of the

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live chicken that destroyed the serenity of a special dinner) through his friend Jimmy Billimoria’s unusual, almost absurd request. And there are always memories of ‘such a long journey’ (242), memories of one’s own childhood, marriage and fatherhood, the paradigmatic Hindu stages of life that seem to have permeated every citizen of India. In the end the artist’s wall is pulled down as the municipality has its own ideas about urban (re)development. Down goes the wall with its pictures of Hindu gods, Muslim mosques, Sikh, Christian and Parsi saints. When asked by Gustav where he will go the pavement artist replies: ‘In a world where roadside latrines become temples and shrines, and temples and shrines become dust and ruin, does it matter where?’ (338) As the artist prepares to leave, Gustav Noble notices that he has not packed his oil paints and brushes. When reminded the pavement artist says he has taken everything he needs for his journey: ‘My box of crayons is in here’ (339). Crayons against oil, the temporary, the transient, the ephemeral, the shifting, changing, the impermanent against the fixed, the permanent. There is nothing that remains in India; even gods change as crayons quickly reproduce, as simulacra, the nation’s myths and histories, its Gandhis and Sai Babas. Oils, with all the work, the labour, the necessary precision and drafts, oils are not part of a nation that defines itself in samsarik terms, nor indeed of life. It is such a long journey based on chance, on the impermanence of crayons. Oils, on the other hand, are not left to chance, to the serendipities of life. So the pavement artist moves on, to another world, to another pavement, which, too, will be destroyed, and the journey will continue. Oils have depth, crayons are all surface, illustrating contingent, passing narratives. Oils are the substance of which grand narratives are made; crayons signify, quite apart from the poor status of the artist, a self and nation always in transition, without indeed a centre. This is Bombay life through a realist lens. But no lenses come clean any more; each pair is overlaid with the foundational precursor narrative of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. And so Mistry’s novel reworks that terrain but with a firmer grounding in the real. In an interview (Ankur Winter/Spring 1993: 20–1; 21), Mistry tells the interviewer: ‘I think that if one writes from a nostalgic point of view that is very sentimental and emotional. But to create a situation which speaks of a ruinous life and experiencing that in the midst of being an immigrant [that is different].’ The qualification – to speak of a ruinous life from the diaspora (which, one suspects, has the capacity to be equally ruinous) – is important and shows how writing from the diaspora actually works. Themes do get displaced as one kind of memorial reconstruction is possible only from the vantage point of diasporic distance. The canonical diasporic writers – Naipaul and Rushdie – both attest to this qualification, the experiencing of a ‘ruinous life’ from the condition of diaspora. There is a wonderful story in Mistry’s collection of short stories Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) called ‘Swimming Lessons’, and very appropriately it is also the final story of the collection, too, in which the diasporic writer’s parents

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back home in India discuss their son’s short stories. Since this is the final story of the book, one senses that the parents are in fact commenting on their son’s works. Although in the end there is no complete match between the parents’ commentary and the stories that we ourselves have read, what is said by them may be used as a useful entry point into Rohinton Mistry’s uniformly powerful books. My hope is, Father said, that there will be some story based on his Canadian experience, that way we will know something about our son’s life there, if not through his letters then in his stories; so far they are all about Parsis and Bombay . . . and Mother said that she would also enjoy some stories about Toronto and the people there; it puzzles me, she said, why he writes nothing about it, especially since you say writers use their experience to make stories out of it. (245–6) ‘Swimming Lessons’ does say something about life in Canada, about the bleak life of immigrants living in low-rise flats in Don Mills, Toronto. It is an unhappy world – of the Portuguese woman, the overbearing Berthe, a big Yugoslavian building superintendent, with her own rebellious son and husband, the wheelchair-ridden old man in the foyer, and the Indian immigrant-narrator learning to swim and fantasizing both about scantily clad Canadian women and the city he has left behind. As diasporic narrative, it fits into the paradigm of the pain of coming to terms with the loneliness of displacement, the effort needed to master a new landscape, to map and read it as ‘natives’ do. For the author’s parents in the short stories the function of the aesthetic is to typify and present the real. In the end, however, one suspects that there is, in terms of emotional capital invested, slightly less of the Canadian experience (although that experience takes up over half of the short story) and somewhat more of the way in which the act of displacement sharpens one’s reading of the home left behind, here Bombay. In his second work (Such a Long Journey), as we have seen, Mistry returns to this magical postcolonial metropolis. In his third work, A Fine Balance (1995), he returns to this city yet again, but now the narrator refuses to name it, preferring to call it the ‘city by the sea’. Although in his second novel, too, Canada is absent, the question we need to pose is: Is diaspora important for resurrecting, sharpening, focusing the moment of trauma, or indeed constructing the moment of trauma? For Mistry, re-working the life-worlds of Bombay imaginatively – and Bombay/Mumbai is, historically at any rate, very much a Parsi city – is one way of overcoming diasporic fears of being left adrift without an anchoring point. Although A Fine Balance covers a period of more than 50 years (from the 1930s to the 1980s), the bulk of the novel deals with a much shorter period during 1975–6. These were the years when India was ruled under special emergency powers granted through a presidential decree to the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. The State of Emergency, as the period came to be called, is the

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backdrop against which four characters – the Parsi widow Dina Dalal, the student Maneck Kohlah, and the tailors Ishvar and Om – play out their lives. Each has his/her own narrative through which, collectively, a much longer period of Indian social history is narrated as a kind of ‘national allegory’ but one in which, as Peter Morey (2000: 184) has suggested, a diasporic consciousness (where the centre is located in the idea of change and transience) meets the power of rootedness, of fixity and permanence, of immutability against all odds. How, then, would we want to frame this text beyond the claim we have made about its place in terms of diasporic recollections and real or imagined trauma? There is what may be called the easy way out – reading the text off against the socio-historical realities of India. In this reading we get a devastating critique of Hindu casteism, political chicanery, absence of social responsibilities and the triumph of raw capitalism. The critique is sustained, powerful, uncompromising, relentless and connected to lived experiences. Here the lives of the untouchable leather-worker family of Dukhi mochi, the abuses during the Emergency (portrayed both through the obvious excesses of vasectomy and through the underwritten tragedy of the student activist Avinash and his family), the lives of the Muslim tailor Ashraf and his wife Mumtaz are laid bare so as to show the rotten state of the Indian social and political imaginary. Hindu casteism emerges as one of the pernicious and menacing aberrations: ‘the Muslims have behaved more like our brothers than the bastard Brahmins and Thakurs’, say the Untouchables (148). In this world even the lives of the relatively prosperous Parsi families are not untouched: mental breakdown, melancholia exploding into self-destruction, misplaced idealism leading to defeatism are the norm. In a very real sense the thrust of Mistry’s critique is directed as much towards correcting a diasporic essentialism about homelands (that homelands are paradisiacal) as it is part of the aesthetic design of the text. It has been said (in one reading of Kant) that the ideological can be hurriedly bracketed because its concerns are metaphysical (‘how and why things occur’); the aesthetic, on the other hand, demands much more considered reflection because it necessitates critical judgements and a feeling of unease about the stability of the ‘category of the aesthetic’ (de Man 1996: 71, 3). The move from the ideological to the aesthetic requires an understanding of what Georg Lukács said was a central category of the literary, that is, genre. Genre, therefore, provides both a framework and sets of prior conventions with which to begin a critical understanding of a literary work of art. The genre to which A Fine Balance belongs is the picaresque, and in more than one way. Apart from the obvious – major characters move towards the city, names are withheld from places so that Bombay exists only as a city by the sea – the people who inhabit this book often have those characteristics of the grotesque (and of the carnivalesque) that one associates with classic picaresque texts such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), The Swindler (1626) and their consummate form Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1604/1614). Often the picaresque is humorously handled by Mistry – the cripple beggar Shankar’s funeral, for instance, has the carnivalesque air of a street celebration. At other times well-meaning, hard-working people become

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beggars because of the machinations of politics and religious/caste bigotry. When the tailors (once untouchable leatherworkers) Ishvar and Om finally end up as beggars one senses that this happens because this picaresque novel needs this twist for its own aesthetic design. It could be said that, like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, here, too, there is great joy, great singing, that confirms life in the midst of wretchedness, but this reading would close off the text far too quickly. More likely, in his second novel on Bombay, Mistry wants to capture an aspect of the city that is not unlike the counter-cultural world celebrated in many Bollywood films such as Raj Kapoor’s Boot Polish (1954) and Shree 420 (1955). This counter-cultural world runs a parallel economy; it has a parallel social class and caste with its own firm laws. This is a world that has the Beggarmaster as its boss; it has its own secrets (Shankar the cripple is Beggarmaster’s half-brother). And fringe-dwellers like Rajaram the hair-collector and Monkey Man (who finally takes his revenge and kills the Beggarmaster) resurface in various avatars as well-meaning workers whose presence powerfully reinforces a version of the Indian rubbish theory (where no rubbish is wasted) as well as breaks the lines that divide: Rajaram returns as Bal Baba, the hair saint, who can read the future by caressing one’s hair. It is a world that has its own ‘dramaturgy of begging’ (541) as we see in the Beggarmaster’s request for two new beggars: ‘For this, I need a lame beggar and a blind beggar. The blind man will carry the cripple on his shoulders. A living, breathing image of the ancient story about friendship and cooperation’ (541). From outcastes to saints, freaks, charlatans, these chameleons contest the Indian ideology of immutable class and caste rules. Yet the picaresque is a genre within a larger genre (realism) which controls the central grand narrative of the text. Whereas in Rushdie the magical and the metafictional break through the historical and the realist, in Mistry’s novel the picaresque acts as a parallel narrative without threatening the work’s realist designs. The novel is not a postmodern pastiche but a version of the realist that has something of the ‘masala’ elements of Bollywood cinema: its interludes are finally reinserted into a closed world. This realist narrative has three distinct strands (and the political intervenes into all three): the life of Dina Dalal whose fierce independence also has the strong humanism of her doctor father Shroff; the story of the uncle-andnephew tailoring team, the sensitive and level-headed Ishvar and the rebellious Om; the story of the melancholically sensitive student Maneck Kohlah and his parents. The novel indeed begins and ends with the figure of Maneck, first as the student on a train and then again as the agitated figure on the platform who throws himself in front of a passing train. The self-conscious organization of the realist novel is obvious here. Maneck and Dina are essentially city people, they are part of the powerful Parsi world, the makers of the city by the sea, part of a highly educated Westernized elite. Through Om, Ishvar, the beggars and the slum-dwellers, we get the other side of the city by the sea, a picture of how the other half survive. This other half provides the city with its labour, and the history of this other half is a history of dispossession, migrancy and deterritorialization, all those characteristics that we associate with the diasporic

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experience. There is no escape from this world, except through its own internal capitalism (as in the case of the Beggarmaster) or through the transhistorical life of the mystic: the hair-collector Rajaram returns as a guru with a following. In the end there is a kind of karmic inevitability that governs the narrative. The Emergency notwithstanding, one senses that the discourse is aware of a very Indian sense of fatalism: the reader senses that the end will always be tragic, no matter where we start, whether with the rent-collector Ibrahim or the student Avinash, or the proof-reader Vasantrao Valmik. If India is recollected through a diasporic imagination, it is done not to fantasize a loss; rather it is done so as to free oneself from the shackles of memory, to return to the city of one’s birth imaginatively so as to capture the vibrancy of life there without hankering after that life. There is a strong humanist streak in Mistry’s writing that seems to be saying that this world, too, is worthy of aesthetic transformation; it, too, can produce complex characters, is alive in its own terms and should not be primarily read as a source text for cultural information. In many ways, other writers of the Canadian Indian diaspora seem to be making the same point, taking up positions less political and more self-consciously aesthetic. It is not necessary to extend the case I have made with reference to Mistry’s Family Matters (2002), another ‘meditation’ on Bombay and on its Parsi community. However, what needs to be pointed out is the extent to which this novel of Mistry, too, demonstrates a diasporic self-assurance with the dialogic possibilities of the novel form. Nowhere is this more evident than in a self-reflexive intertextual reference to A Fine Balance that Mistry embeds in his recent work. ‘Let me give you an example,’ said Vilas. ‘A while back, I read a novel about the Emergency. A big book, full of horrors, real as life. But also full of life, and the laughter and dignity of ordinary people. One hundred percent honest – made me laugh and cry as I read it. But some reviewers said no, no, things were not that bad. Especially foreign critics.’ (202) The intertextual here endorses levels of self-assurance now evident in writings from the diaspora about the homeland. It is a statement as well about the legitimate ‘objects’ of art even as the writer is located, as in this instance, elsewhere (in Canada). There was a time, not too long ago, when the concept of sensibility itself was aligned to a European consciousness (as a mode of presentation) and to a European world (as the object of presentation). The challenge of the diasporic imagination has been to explode the self-evident primacy of this position. In some ways the next text I discuss here, Ven Begamudré’s Van de Graaff Days (1993), is more directly concerned with the migrant experience. It must be added immediately that Begamudré’s own experience in Canada coincided with the period of assimilation or Canadianization (Rungh 2.3: 18). But there is no single unproblematic linear narrative (of assimilation) here; in fact there

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are two, possibly three narratives at work in the novel as lives get fractured in Canada, as parents pursue careers and their child learns to relate to his father only at the end of the novel when he is able to call him ‘Appa’, Telegu for ‘father’. The world of the husband-and-wife couple Krishna Rao and Rukmini is no longer simple, even when that life is viewed, as in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, from the point of view of a child, Krishna and Rukmini’s son Hari (Harischandra or G. Harris Chandra or HC as he is called at school – the novel itself would cover the period 1955 to 1963, the first eight years of the child Hari’s life) who grows up in Canada. In this way Ven Begamudré is able to bring a new perspective to the lives of migrants who continue to be locked into earlier social paradigms. All that remains are controlling symbols, one personal, the other cultural. Krishna, the father, passes on to his son Hari the Van de Graaff electrostatic generator, introduced to him by his own father, and gradually accepts that his son’s real passion is music (mother Rukmini buys him a piano from her savings). The other controlling symbol is the picture and statue of Ganesha, the god who removes obstacles (32, 226 and elsewhere). The picture of Ganesha that Krishna carries with him is part of calendar art – from a 1955 calendar, to be exact. This is how Ganesha is described: It was a picture of Ganesha, the god of wisdom. The god sat cross-legged on a cushion. He had the body of a pot-bellied man. The head of an elephant with one tusk broken, and four arms. His four hands clutched a shell, a discus, a goad and a water lily. His skin was yellow. Children liked him because he ate as much as he wanted, especially fruit and sweets. Adults liked him because he was the remover of obstacles, a god to be worshipped before every undertaking: building a house, leaving on a journey. (31–2) Two points of view merge here, the child’s and his father’s, but both remain strangely incongruous in their displaced nations as the descriptions cannot generate old emotions. Memory is no longer redemptive as what we begin to notice is the point already made with reference to Mistry, that is, the here and now colours the life of diaspora. Tensions remain unresolved in the space of an alien country where old securities (of the extended family, of friends) are no longer available. Recalling homelands from a diasporic space is not uncommon among writers of the diaspora. From the space of the new state, memory captures the experience of displacement as the migrant subject remembers a past, a history, a continuity from which he/she has been wrenched. That moment of wrenching, which may even be constructed as a moment of abjection (Kristeva 1982), gives writing a special diasporic centre. In many of the texts discussed this aspect may be seen as a generic characteristic of the form. But there are newer variations as the narrative now moves away from the model of diasporic (here and now) unhappiness against the positive memories of homeland to one in which the space of the diaspora heightens imagination, sharpens one’s recollections

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in a version of a Wordsworthian return (as in ‘Tintern Abbey’ for instance), although this time only through the power of the imagination. A work that does this exceptionally well is Anita Rau Badami’s Tamarind Mem (1996). This is a work that returns to the technique of the twice-told tale: ‘Enough in misery can words prevail / And what so tedious as a twice told tale’ (Alexander Pope). Or as Saroja says towards the end of the novel: ‘I only turn the pages of a book already written, I do not write’ (266). The art of storytelling – fiction itself – is given a legitimacy here in so far as art is the means by which experiences otherwise lost may be captured. So the stories are told by Kamini and Saroja, daughter and mother, about the same events, about the same family except that the mother’s story would go further back. The daughter reminisces alone in the confines of an apartment in Calgary; the mother in a railway compartment telling her stories to a group of women who are travelling with her. For the mother the train journey is part of her life since her husband worked for the railways as a senior officer. Trains, their schedules, their role in redefining the idea of space in India play an important part in the life of Saroja and her family. ‘Tamarind Mem’ – the term used by servants to describe Saroja’s acid tongue – describes both mother and daughter. Kamini’s tale shows Kamini as an independent spirit unwilling to take criticism and never at a loss for the barbed repartee. Her mother’s story shows the same characteristics, an independent spirit so much in need of love. In the end Kamini does exactly what Saroja, when young, would have liked to do: complete her university studies. For readers of Badami there are a number of pluses. First is her prose, so clear, so aware of the languages and sounds around the actors in this drama. But there is no overwriting; everything is underwritten, even one of the central episodes of the text – Saroja’s affair with the Anglo-Indian (casteless) Paul da Costa. There are possibly no more than a dozen lines about their relationship. Kamini becomes conscious of their affair when she notes that Paul alone seems to have touched her mother’s hands. But it is ahista, ahista, slowly, slowly, as Yasmin Ladha had suggested with reference to Mira Nair’s film. Second, there is the remarkable use of the feminine voice, whether those of the chief actors or of Linda Ayah, Roopa, Aunty Meera, the widow Chinna or Grandmother Putti. They come alive, through their silences. The men – Saroja’s husband, her father, her grandfather – are less interesting. It is the women who give this remarkable work its shape and design. In the end it is stories, stories that Kamini hears from Dadda, from the barber (whose tale of the mysterious begum is transposed by Kamini on to a real woman), from Linda Ayah, that keep life moving, but these are stories with strong female voices, again signalling as much women’s silences both at ‘home’ and in the diaspora. Less overtly political and more realist in its organization, my final text, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s short story collection (English Lessons and Other Stories, 1996) continues the strong trend in Indian diasporic writing towards the construction of female voices. Where Yasmin Ladha’s narratives are the product of what I have called a twice-displaced diaspora, first in East Africa and then in Canada (and a twice-displaced diaspora, I would argue, may be read as a diaspora with

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its own distinctive qualities), Shauna Singh Baldwin’s stories are about initial displacement from India to North America. Her stories are largely about closed Indian communities, whether in North America or in India. Her richest stories are, however, like ‘Nothing Must Spoil the Visit’, ‘English Lessons’ and ‘Devika’ where two narratives and experience collide. In ‘Nothing Must Spoil the Visit’, Arvind’s Canadian wife Janet visits India and is faced with the figure of the longsuffering, unhappy Chaya, once engaged to Arvind, but now married to Arvind’s younger brother Kamal. What emerges in this very tightly composed, almost cinematic narrative is a reading of culture and of women that, at first glance, leaves no room for understanding between two people from very diverse cultural backgrounds. From Janet’s point of view, Chaya is incapable of self-hood since she has no freedom of action; from Chaya’s point of view, communities of the ‘hyphen’, diasporas grappling with worlds that, finally, do collide, sometimes with tragic consequences, are always unhappy. Often diasporic lives are lived within the confines of communities that re-create an India in North America where men, in particular, simply fail to acknowledge the ‘labour’ of women and the very different socio-economic and familial structures that affect their lives. In ‘The Cat Who Cried’, Prem has no qualms in simply directing his wife’s boss to deposit her wages in his account, although his wife desperately needs to free herself from the suffocating shackles of her husband’s world and its values. In all these instances the aesthetic does not lend itself to reconstructions along an easy metaphysical line. Diasporic lives, represented in and through the literary, become complex sites, marked by both discrepant memory and an awareness of their location in a multicultural polity.

The radical imaginary In an illuminating essay Stuart Hall (2000) points out that the new political logic of multiculturalism is a lot harder to put into practice than to theorize, and it is the former (the practice) that has invariably led to arguments that are in the end circuitous, offering the right critique but unable to transform national consciousness. The literary archive, sometimes obliquely, often directly, points to the necessity of a ‘radical imaginary’ as a means of legitimating diasporas. The problem as discussed by Richard J. F. Day (2002) with reference to Canada is related to a (Canadian) multicultural policy that has become a way of managing diverse identities and not the establishment of a new order that transcends the relations of power (master and slave) ‘found in the “deficient” Hegelian forms of recognition’ (3). Day argues that the Canadian citizen must go beyond the ‘fantasy of unity’, beyond unity as the final goal of multiculturalism or indeed of the nation itself. For him multiculturalism as ‘radical imaginary’ has to be separated from multiculturalism as ‘state policy’. The latter leads to ‘management, discipline and uniformity’; the former to a creative and ‘spontaneous emergence’ of a vibrant, though not necessarily reconcilable, nation-state. The literature of the Indian diaspora has implicit in it this kind of critique: the trouble with Canadian multiculturalism is that it continues to see diversity as a

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problem to be solved, and Canadian history is replete with attempts at managing ‘ethnocultural identities’ (5). The nation’s own response is that the problem has been solved though a declaration (via the Multicultural Act) that the Canadian state has been multicultural from its very inception. In a very real sense the literary archive we have examined does not purchase this self-aggrandizing reading of multiculturalism The evidence confirms Day’s observation that: only by abandoning the dream of unity, Canada may . . . lead the way towards a future that will be shared by many other nation-states; it may, in its failure to achieve a universal mass identity, or even a universal mass of identities, inadvertently come closer to its goal of mutual and equal recognition amongst all who have chanced to find themselves within its borders. (12) Where the literary evidence reads diversity as an energizing principle that redefines the nation, and points towards ‘an ethical community of equal and mutual recognition – a Sittlichkeit’ (Day 177), Canadian official policy on multiculturalism continues to present diversity as a problem in need of fixing. The multicultural, after all, begins with the presumption that a homogeneous group (or groups who have created a sense of this homogeneity as in the Franco-British compromise in Canada) must find ways of controlling a growing diversity. It does not begin with diverse ethnocultural groups, as diaspora theory does, finding ways in which they may respond to the presumed homogeneous group. A radical imaginary would stipulate that multiculturalism as theory and philosophy should go outside the fold, outside the domain of a state-sponsored ‘rational-bureaucratic action’ to solve the problem of diversity (222). Day refers to the ‘fantasmatic structure of Canadian multiculturalism’ because it is predicated on the prior condition of a Canadian culture, and this culture can be readily recovered or accessed. What the diaspora does is bring to the state a consciousness in which both the Self and the Other are situated ‘in an impossible quest for identity amidst the endless play of différance’ (225). It follows that no identity can be prioritized over another; and, if it has been, we must confront the reason: colonial institutions that replicate only its own hegemonic form of subjecthood. From the diasporic perspective, then, the role of the Canadian state should be to provide a space for a degree of free play, without necessarily endorsing any particular ideology. What is preferred is not a ‘static, solidified order, but a dynamic and fluid chaos’ (225). To dissolve the ‘problem’ of Canadian diversity, says Day, the project of multiculturalism must acknowledge that its principles of universalism were themselves ‘particular’ (linked to a specific Western historical formation) and this particularity (now rendered as a universal) is a particularity that may be located within all particularisms (Laclau 2003: 362). If the place/terrain from which the universal subject spoke is nonexistent, then a space is created for the evolution of multiple identities, and new forms of multicultural subjectivities. The divide now is not between a subject position and a transcendental or absolute signified but

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between the particularism of the multicultural Other versus the implied universalism of the Self. As Ernesto Laclau has pointed out, self-enclosed identities that make no reference to what are outside are neither ‘viable’ nor ‘progressive’. Diasporic/ multicultural identity requires constant negotiation so as to critique the dominant group (which denies minority identity) as well as self-reflect on its own demands for particularism. Laclau asks a question that holds the key to multicultural thinking: ‘Now, how could that coexistence be possible without some shared universal values, without a sense of belonging to a community larger than each of the particular groups in question?’ (366) To reject universalism outright on the grounds that it belongs to a single group doesn’t do anyone any good. If we can see the universal not in terms of a definable content but as a ‘receding horizon’ that is flexible enough to accommodate demands other than those enshrined in its putative content, then we can enter creatively into the heart of the paradox: which is that universality is incommensurable with particularity but ‘cannot exist apart from the particular’ (367). The paradox cannot be resolved, nor should it be resolved, for the tension between the two, their non-resolution, creates the vibrant social conditions within which a democracy can thrive. The solution, if there were one, would imply that the true content of the universal has been found once and for all and there is no need for a ‘radical imaginary’. This would then be contrary to democracy as a social politics in which there must always be a struggle between competing groups for a certain particularity to become universal. In a very real sense multicultural theory makes us recognize a process of competition as well as the impossibility of arriving at a society secure in its universality. This is where I rest the evidence of the literary archive of the (primarily) Canadian Indian diaspora discussed in this chapter: the dichotomy that inheres in (multi)culture need not be resolved, but an understanding of it is crucial to a healthy democratic polity. For, after all, diasporas, traumatized and unhappy as they are, can only exist within the confines of such a democracy with the full knowledge that their particularisms are critical to the nation’s own principles of enlightened universalism. The literary archive of the Indian diaspora bears testimony to this fact.

5

The law of the hyphen and the postcolonial condition

Migrant communities bear the imprint of diaspora, ‘hybridization’ and différance in their very constitution. Stuart Hall (2000: 232)

The law of the hyphen and the Indian diaspora In classical epistemologies, the law of genre (universalism) and the law of the hyphen (particularism) are mutually exclusive: where the law of genre aspires to the condition of purity (‘genres are not to be mixed’ [Derrida 1980: 202]), establishing norms, stipulating something foundational, the law of the hyphen jostles to find room for the space occupied by a cipher that is yet to be filled out, yet to find its own conditions of being. In literature the latter takes the form of a mode (tragi-comedy, Gothic-romance, comic-epic) applied to literary forms which fail to fit into established generic taxonomies. In a nation-state the ‘citizen’ is offered as being generically pure, he/she is always unhyphenated, if we are to believe what our passports have to say about us. In actual practice the pure, unhyphenated generic category is only applicable to those citizens whose bodies signify an unproblematic identity of selves with nations. For those of us who are outside this form of ‘universal’ identity politics, whose corporealities fissure the logic of unproblematic identification, plural/multicultural societies have constructed, for their unassimilable others, the impure genre of the hyphenated subject. But the politics of the hyphen itself is hyphenated because, in the name of empowering people, the classification indeed disempowers them; it makes them, to use a hyphenated term, ‘empoweringlydisempowered’. Although the hyphen makes rebirthing and coalitional politics (seemingly) possible, the words around the hyphen claim otherwise. Further, there is no guarantee that cross-diasporic affiliations would necessarily advance and not inhibit political coalitions. In Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (1994), Kamala Visweswaran makes an interesting diasporic intervention by briefly recounting the experience of children born to the second wave of Indian (read ‘East Indian’ throughout) migrants to the United States. These migrants (the 1960s in the USA and Canada, the 1970s in Australia) had to raise their children in the West without, as Gauri Bhat notes, ‘Indian friends, Bharatanatyam dance classes, Karnatic music recitals, Hindu temple societies, or Hindi films’ (Bhat 1992: 3–4). The children

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growing up in this vacuum culture now constitute the first wave of US-born Indians in colleges, universities and the professions. But precisely because of their ‘vacuum’ upbringing they are the ones who are most aware of the relationship between diasporas, ethnicity, the nation-state and of the struggle to possess the ‘hyphen’. Their race to occupy the space of the hyphen – IndoAmericans, Indian-Americans, Hindu-Americans, Muslim-Britons – signals the desire to enter into some kind of generic taxonomy and yet at the same time retain, through the hyphen, the problematic situating of the self as simultaneously belonging ‘here’ and ‘there’. But, as we have seen, the ‘belonging there’ part of the equation cannot be linked to a teleology of return because this belonging can only function as an imaginary index that signifies its own impossibility. The latter, the impossibility, and the creative use of the hyphen through an insistence on the here and now against the there and then may be readily traced in Bollywood cinema’s treatment of the diaspora as the trauma of return implicit in its classic diaspora text, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (‘Lovers Win Brides’ 1995), is transformed into Salaam Namaste (2005) where the diaspora functions as the embodiment of creative assimilation without any hint of the long arm of the motherland. As a prelude to my literary/filmic archive, and to get my argument right, I want to look at two works: an early discursive autobiography by Dhan Gopal Mukerji (Caste and Outcast [1923]) and an essay in the New York Times (Sunday, 22 September 1996) by Bharati Mukherjee entitled ‘Two Ways to Belong in America’. Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s spirited defence of his homeland as well as an account of his life in California was written a little before Katherine Mayo’s devastating critique of India and Indian casteism in her immensely influential Mother India (1927). Mukerji’s enthusiastic defence of India is palpable (‘In India, throughout the ages, the nature of the human and the supernatural have interlaced, there has been no beginning’ (1923: 117), as is his wish to write his own partial autobiography in the time-honoured Indian genre of hagiography. In the second part of the autobiography (called ‘Outcast’) we get an early literary account of the (East) Indian in America who, a little prophetically, declares towards the end, ‘So a Hindu, who wants to find a complete antithesis to his race and culture, had better avoid Europe and come straight to America’ (30). The suggestion here is that America, the new promised land, is more of a tabula rasa than the already palimpsestic and over-coded Europe. The fact of it being a complete antithesis is its attraction. Mukerji’s early text, which was followed eight years later by his translation of the foundational Hindu religious – – text the Bhagavadgıta in 1931, may be seen as an interesting departure point for Bharati Mukherjee’s essay in which she positions herself as someone who has been cured, someone for whom the period of mourning (for a lost homeland) is over and who no longer sees her own ego as being empty. To accentuate this position she dramatizes the life of her sister Mira who in fact came to America a year earlier in 1960. Mira arrived in the USA to study child psychology and pre-school education, Bharati to study creative writing at the University of Iowa. After thirty-six years Mira is still an Indian citizen, Bharati is American. They

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began with the same ambitions – education, return to India, arranged marriage – and harboured similar political beliefs, but now they have taken slightly different paths. In 1962, Mira married an Indian student at Wayne State, in 1963 Bharati married a fellow student at Iowa, an American of Canadian parentage. In choosing a husband outside her ‘ethnic community’ and not of her ‘father’s selection’, Bharati Mukherjee writes: I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans and T-shirts, and renouncing 3,000 years (at least) of caste-observant, ‘pure culture’ marriage in the Mukherjee family. My books have often been read as unapologetic (and in some quarters overenthusiastic) texts for cultural and psychological ‘mongrelization’. It’s a word I celebrate. (New York Times, Sunday 22 Sept 1996: E13) Bharati Mukherjee speaks about discussions with her sister on the ethics of obtaining American privileges and yet somehow belonging elsewhere. Mira sees in Bharati ‘the erasure of Indianness’, the absence of an ‘unvarying daily core’. Bharati in turn reads Mira in terms of the ‘narrowness of her perspective’, her failure to engage with surfaces, with popular American cultural forms, its myths and so on. But Mira’s life is threatened, in a manner of speaking. There are pressures afoot in America with Al Gore’s ‘Citizenship USA’ drive, with its sinister extension of the word ‘alien’ which could now embrace even long-term legal migrants in the USA such as Mira. And so Mira is incensed, berating America for ingratitude, for not acknowledging her work, the taxes she has paid, and so on. She lived in the country on the understanding that her Indian citizenship was inviolate; like religion, one simply didn’t change it because it was fashionable to do so. Shouldn’t the rule (that you take out US citizenship) apply only to those who have come later, or after the new rules have been put in place? Writes Mukherjee: my sister is ‘here to maintain an identity, not to transform it’. Yet she can be manipulative, she will change her citizenship if that is what Congress wants, but she will revert to her Indian passport when the time comes, when the moment of return arrives. What if that doesn’t happen – and this question is raised because it is not the reality of the return but the magical nature of the passport, as a marker of an unchanging identity, as a sign, a confirmation that even after 36 years the self has not changed and one can return (in the mind so to speak) that is important? It is that desire for continuity, so clearly present in religious-identity politics, that surfaces in Mira’s agonistic discourse here. Against Mira’s certainties there is Bharati’s act of surrender: America spoke to me – I married it – I embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody, surrendering those thousands of years of ‘pure culture,’ the saris, the delightfully accented English. She retained them all. Which of us is the freak? (E13) Or, to put it in another way, ‘Who is still mourning?’

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Mira’s voice, Bharati concedes, is not proactive, let alone just politically active. It is the voice of the millions of migrants for whom migrancy means secure and permanent jobs so that one can remain rooted in a city, in a place, and reconnect with the homeland through a network of relationships among the migrants. Here the ancestral culture is duplicated, the cuisine maintained, and the home simply transferred to the comfort zone of America. Mira interacts differently with America from Bharati. Mira lives in America as an ‘expatriate Indian’ not as an ‘immigrant American’. Concludes Bharati: I need to feel like a part of the community I have adopted (as I tried to feel in Canada as well). I need to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can. The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation. (E13) The exile, the expatriate Indian, always wishes to return, and this is the logic of one kind of diaspora, the dominant for the time being. The other, that of the immigrant American, is played out in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (even though the protagonist here is an ‘alien’). But the price of self-transformation (which Bharati Mukherjee herself glosses positively) brings with it a trauma that may split open one’s self and for which, often, the writing out of one’s experience is crucial, at least for the artist. In other words for diasporas writing becomes one of a number of ‘enabling principles’ like congregational temple, mosque or gurudwara worship. So Naipaul and Mukherjee both write, and so does Rushdie, about their diasporic bodies, always traumatized, always wrecked by self-doubt, without, finally, the certainties of a Mira for whom the world locks itself into meaning and for whom strategic moves may be undertaken from the security of insularity. In Jasmine we read: ‘We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams’ (Mukherjee 1989: 29) and ‘Experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill’ (33). And in Jasmine, too, reappears the Indian metaphor of the pitcher that, once broken, allows its air or water within to mingle with the larger expanse of air or water outside – which, again, is a metaphor for self-transformation (43). The question that persists in spite of Mukherjee’s idealism is: How does one break the pitcher if the pitcher contains the elements of difference that cannot mingle easily with the ‘polluted’ world outside? If, indeed, the fact of the postcolonial condition makes recognition impossible? For these hyphenated subjects diasporic space as a contradictory, often racist and contaminated space now engenders the possibilities of exploring hybrid, cross-cultural and interdiasporic relationships. In the works of the stayers of diasporic art such as Bharati Mukherjee and Hanif Kureishi as well as in the film (My Father’s Daughter [2002]) of a newcomer to the form such as Parul Bhatt, the schismatic break with India of the old plantation diaspora is replaced by the idea of a comforting homeland (against the threatening nation-space in which the diaspora finds itself) that is always present visibly and aurally (through video cassettes, films, tapes, DVDs, CDs and so on). The old diaspora broke off

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contact – few descendants of indentured labourers know their distant cousins back in India − the new incorporates ‘India’ into its bordered, deterritorialized experiences within Western nation states. As Monica Ali, an impressive new voice of the South Asian Bangladeshi diaspora in Britain, shows in Brick Lane (2004), the lives of Nazneen, the mail-order bride from home, and Chanu, the somewhat older Bangladeshi already in the UK, are located in the in-between tensions created by memory (‘O Amar Shonar Bangla’ [O my golden Bengal] (178)), the chores of everyday existence (‘the honourable craft of tailoring’ (208)) and a certain freedom (at the level of corporeal desire as well as politics) that comes Nazneen’s way once Karim, the new middleman for the tailoring job, appears in her life. The simplistic binaries of here and there, of dislocation and yearning, of an imagined homeland and its faked re-creation in another land, give way to the realities of the here and now but often in nations with an undertheorized reading of its own postcolonial condition. In plural/multicultural national polities the new Indian diasporas are one among many other numerically significant groups; they can enter into coalitions with like-minded people, and fight for a liberal, just society. But the hyphen of itself, as a category designating at once one’s ethnicity and location elsewhere, is not of itself empowering. Referring to American-born Indians Kamala Visweswaran notes that they are referred to (as in Bhatt’s film, too) as ABCDs, ‘America-Born-Confused-Deshis’. Her own personal intervention at one point is, however, worth noting. Speaking about her upbringing (Indian father, American WASP mother) she adds: ‘Although English was my mother tongue, I cannot bring myself to call it my mother tongue’ (Visweswaran 1994: 117). This denaturalization of the mother tongue, as a political act (since her mother is in fact white), is a very recent phenomenon, and one that is linked at one level to the identity crisis of the new Indian diaspora racked by postcolonial anxieties. As a general rule the new Indian diasporas have failed to carve for themselves a new language (such as Fiji Hindi) or to participate fully in a language to which one has made historical contributions (Mauritian French-based Creole, West Indian English-based Creole, for instance). The play on linguistic identities (a mother tongue that cannot empower, a mother tongue that can’t be declared as one’s own – one recalls Adorno, Benjamin and Celan) thus leads to further difficulty with the hyphen, inasmuch as language locates itself in the space of the hyphen. In Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, which deals with the ‘alien’, the illegal migrant as one type of diasporic body, the hyphen negotiates what the eponymous Jasmine sees as the rhetorical space of Mrs Ripplemeyer’s ‘Out There’ versus ‘In Here’ (Mukherjee 1989: 21). Bharati Mukherjee maps out a world in which diasporic identities are also ‘illicit’ identities on the run (if they are illegal) or rent apart because the homeland is both a memory and a very real fact. The schismatic break with India in the old diaspora is replaced by the idea of a homeland that is always present visibly and aurally (through videocassettes, films, tapes, CDs, CNN news and the Internet). The new diaspora also renews and maintains contact because immigration policies in Western nation states,

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until recently, favoured family reunion. The old Indian diaspora marks itself off as a historical fact as landless people become footnotes to an imperial history. The people of the new Indian diaspora, recounts Mukherjee’s narrator, are of a different order: But we are refugees and mercenaries and guest workers; you see us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us unwrapping the last of our native foods, unrolling our prayer rugs, reading our holy books, taking out for the hundredth time an aerogram promising a job or a space to sleep, a newspaper in our language, a photo of happier times, a passport, a visa, a laissez-passer. (100–1) There are names mentioned, countries, airports: the Middle East, Sudan, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paramaribo, Florida. Unmarked jumbos, leaking trawlers, the modern and the Conradian in a journey out of one heart of darkness into another. In Mukherjee’s works people of the Indian diaspora are part of a global odyssey as they renegotiate new topographies through the travails of travel. For women, in particular, the collective horror of a double oppression present in the old (from overseers on sugar plantations as well as from their own men) is replaced by the constant abuse of their bodies as illegal migrants. Thus even as Jasmine adopts the discourse of romance to cover her fractured life – ‘I think maybe I am Jane with my very own Rochester’ (Mukherjee 1989: 236) – we cannot fail to recall the narrative of Mr Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the Creole, who is imprisoned in the ‘attic’, read through Jean Rhys’s postcolonial rewriting of Bertha’s madness as imperialist control of non-European sexual excess and available, as well, to the Indian through the Hindi film version Sangdil (‘The Stonehearted’, 1952). In referring to Mr Rochester here Jasmine defines her role as the compassionate Jane when, for many women of the diaspora, their subjectivity is always veiled as they enter into a sexual politics in which their bodies are often no more than footnotes to their husbands’ desires. Thus Mukherjee censors her Jane Eyre intertext by excluding from it the Gothic narrative of horror. Instead, the story of Jane and Mr Rochester is presented as the positive narrative of the hyphen which, in Mukherjee’s words, should not be questioned too hard. Here, however, the celebration of the hyphen becomes an extraordinary dismissal of precisely the ways in which women in the diaspora have reacted to racism and sexism both from outside (the nation state) and inside (the diasporic patriarchal order within). The latter surfaces in works such as Aurat Durbar, a collection of writings by women of South Asian origin, in which very different life experiences are narrated. There are a number of facile equivalences that Mukherjee maintains in Jasmine and in her other works that do not quite fit the real lives of diasporas. Following on Susan Koshy’s essay, ‘The geography of female subjectivity: ethnicity, gender, and diaspora’ (1994), these equivalences lead to three basic oversimplifications. The first is a celebration of American assimilation rendered

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through the master narrative of American space (Iowa’s flatness reinforces this sense). The narrative of a triumphant feminism is possible because American assimilation is so totally democratic that Jasmine’s ethnicity is never an impediment, which of course is a gross oversimplification of the degrees and levels of compromise (of their cultural baggage generally) that women of colour have to undergo in America. Second, there are also, as Susan Koshy suggests, crucial erasures of differences between ‘refugees like Du, illegal entrants like Jasmine, and the post-1965 wave of middle-class, highly educated professionals from Asia’ (1994: 79). Finally there is little by way of contestation of the idea of the subject. The norm seems to be the Western bourgeois subject, from which, it seems, the capacity of self-reflection has been removed. The lack therefore becomes the key to assimilation – one should not press the hyphen too hard is Mukherjee’s argument. In the Tulsi household Biswas felt alienated, but the diaspora acted out its own history because this diaspora had become a defining feature of the island state. Against this, in white settler states or in the UK and Europe the Indian diaspora (or for that matter any other diaspora of colour) is not an element through which the nation-state either defines or represents itself. In Mukherjee’s Jasmine, the diaspora is precariously appended to the nation and many diasporic subjects can only retreat into their apartments or houses to act out the fantasies of living here and belonging elsewhere. The prevalence of Indian mail-order brides, living in the same block of apartments, watching B-Grade Bollywood movies but at the same time keeping many of the caste and linguistic divisions of India intact are familiar features of this diaspora. The fragile unity of India, its contradictory cosmopolitanisms, give way to fierce indifference here as lives are lived in ‘an unlivable land across ocean’ (Mukherjee 1989: 153). As with Viswesvaran’s ethnographic narrative of self-fashioning, the unliveable is broached in Mukherjee’s work through the gap or the hyphen. What is of real interest in Jasmine is the problematic, but at times equally creative, nature of the hyphen confronted by Jasmine the young bride from India as she comes to terms with her Indian-(Asian-)American hyphenated self which, in America, is as yet not a recognizable cultural syntax (‘don’t question either half too hard’ says Jasmine towards the end of the novel [225]). Her motherin-law, Mrs Ripplemeyer, of course, respects difference but in the process finds the logic of the hyphen impossible as she adopts an old-style binarism: the ‘Out There’ enters into an oppositional set with the ‘In Here’ (21). How to make the ‘Out There’ meaningful in the ‘In Here’ against a binary logic of exclusivism is the challenge of the novel: ‘Think how many people thirty-five dollars will feed out there.’ Out there. I am not sure what Mother imagines. On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out There, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least for now. (21)

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‘Out There’ is the amorphous, unspecified terrain of the third/developing/ underdeveloped world, wretched, undemocratic, in need of food. American charity is for the ‘Out There’. ‘In Here’ there is security. Once you are ‘In Here’, ‘Out There’ (which was your starting point) becomes equally alien. The challenge for the ‘Out There’ in the ‘In Here’ is how to make ‘Out There’ a body of people with complex emotions with more than just an unnerving single-mindedness for escape via a Green Card. What strategies of cultural survival would make the ‘Out There’ also the ‘In Here’, part of a continuum of growth not broken up into the dichotomies of the out and the in? Jasmine is the ‘Out There’ in the ‘In Here’ geography of Iowa. Much of postcolonial theory, too, is the ‘Out There’ located in the space of the ‘In Here’. When the ‘Out There’ becomes part of the ‘In Here’ it continues to be misinterpreted by those who have always been ‘In Here’. Thus, in the section where the American wants to learn Sanskrit from Jasmine (because the ‘In Here’ assumes that the ‘Out There’ when ‘In Here’ are native informants of their culture forgetting that Sanskrit is exclusively high culture), Jasmine notes: ‘For them, experience leads to knowledge or else it is wasted. For me experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill’ (33). The past has to be deflected on to something else; it can no longer be a repository, a source of memory if you are an illegal migrant (an underprivileged group within a group). For the ‘legals’, the theory of diaspora I have recounted still holds – memory and history from ‘Out There’ get ambiguously placed in the ‘In Here’; for ‘aliens’, memory is precisely what must be destroyed, as Jasmine does so effectively. For Bharati Mukherjee there is always a creative tension between the ‘normative’ (because explicit) ‘In Here’ denizen and the heteronormative, the hyphenated ‘In Here’ diaspora negotiating a problematic ‘Out There’, through memory that both redeems and destroys. All knowledge, however, need not be bound to the binary of the here and there, even if creatively. In diaspora that binary in recent times no longer confines the aesthetic to a poetics constrained by the politics of identity and recognition. In other words, the binary is differently accented. Two writers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Adib Khan, may be mentioned here. I begin with Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999). This much heralded collection (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and endorsed by every major newspaper and magazine from the New York Times Book Review to Time) is largely celebrated, and correctly so, not for its examination of diasporic anxieties but for its exploration of human relations. The point made by the Wall Street Journal, however (‘Ms Lahiri expertly captures the out-of-context lives of immigrants, expatriates and first-generation Americans of Indian descent’), is worth noting, for it captures the collection’s decisive orientation towards anxieties of the diaspora in the place where they are at, not where they came from. Let me make myself clearer with reference to two stories, ‘A Temporary Matter’ and ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’. The first, ‘A Temporary Matter’, is the tale of a couple emotionally estranged from each other after the death at birth of their baby. Apart from their names – Shukumar and Shoba – and a few references to Indian cuisine and electricity blackouts in India, the story is a sensitive

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portrayal of a relationship that has become far too fragile to be able to move on. In the diaspora there is no extended family who may supply emotional support. Indeed, in Lahiri’s short stories it exists only as an occasional visitor, not especially desired but accommodated and then relinquished. When relationships falter, men and women are faced with their own shared emotions, locked within themselves. As Shoba and Shukumar, wife and man, live out their lives in the wake of the death of their baby six months earlier, the silences are unnerving, the evasions uncomfortable and the routine deadening. But when there is a power cut, and for an hour each night the lights are out, there is occasion for reflection and introspection. Husband and wife share their memories, Shoba initiates a dialogue about their past meetings, she softens, their bodies recapture in silence a past forever lost as she silently weeps, bodies intertwining and exploding into metaphors of snow and rain. But there can be no continuity; the relationship of love had snapped. Dialogue remained, but the art of the dialogue had shifted. On the fifth night electricity was back on at full strength, the intimate hour of darkness was gone. That night they do not switch on the power but light candles instead (for it was the darkness that had brought them together). And then out of the blue, it seems, she had something to say: ‘I’ve been looking for an apartment and I’ve found one.’ These nights had been important for Shoba; they allowed her to let memory work, to cherish and recapture the past, only to let it go. And when the art of dialogue had shifted, the intonations of the dialogue becoming different, Shukumar declares the truth about the sex of their dead baby – he was male – a truth that Shoba herself had asked her doctor not to tell her. In silence, they weep together but will not remain together. There is much more to this story than this paraphrase – primarily its lyrical beauty – that gives it such an aura, but that is not the reason for my reference to it here. ‘A Temporary Matter’ touches so delicately on an emotional register often overlooked in theorizations about diaspora: the lived experiences of diasporic bodies as individuals, as people with their very human dilemmas. ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’, the second short story from the collection I wish to examine, again reinforces precisely the conclusion arrived at in respect of ‘A Temporary Matter’. This is a story about a family’s visit to India, but the narrative centre of the work is not a family (the extended family to which the diaspora returns) but a visit to a tourist spot, the Sun Temple of Konarak in the state of Orissa. Mr and Mrs Das are American-born, as are their three children, Ronny, Bobby and Tina. And, again, the crux of the tale is not a nostalgia for the homeland or, conversely, a deep-seated cultural loss because the Indian desis in America sound so totally deracinated. The crux is located in the relationship between husband and wife on their way to Konarak with the taxi-driver guide Kapasi, the interpreter of maladies, for his other job is as a translator in a doctor’s surgery. There he explains people’s illnesses to a doctor who may not understand the language of the patients. It’s a skill that is finally, and perhaps only, acknowledged ever by Mrs Mina Das. Kapasi’s own relations with his wife had been devoid of love, and no encomium of this kind had ever come from

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her. A compliment made, guide and tourist share secrets, as Mina confesses that Bobby, the second child (earlier alluded to by the narrator as being ‘paler than the other children’ (48)), was not Mr Das’s: ‘Don’t you see? For eight years I haven’t been able to express this to anybody, not to friends, certainly not to Raj. He doesn’t even suspect it. He thinks I’m still in love with him. Well, don’t you have anything to say?’ (65) At this point the interpreter of maladies is silent. He cannot interpret this secret; he cannot quite see the significance of the confession to a total stranger. When he finally says, ‘is it really pain you feel, Mrs Das, or is it guilt?’ the reply is clichéd and breaks what for some moments before seemed like an understanding between two people out of love. For Lahiri, Mr Raj and Mrs Mina Das, like Shukumar and Shoba, are faced with dilemmas of the kind that face Western nuclear families, and what has to be resolved is not a trauma about homeland, or the sense of being left adrift; it is a matter of negotiating relationships that have foundered and been irrecoverably damaged. As for the place that they had come to see – the hills beyond the famous Sun Temple – it is not a space of reconciliation or healing but a place marked by ferocious monkeys. In the end the place gives Mrs Das ‘the creeps’ (68). In 2003, Jhumpa Lahiri followed her successful short-story career with her first novel, The Namesake. This novel, too, is about movement and settlement in a new land; it is about re-creating another world in the new; it is about a fragment society lost in nostalgia for a lost world and about children born elsewhere who cannot totally connect with the unchanging world views of their parents – themes that Mira Nair is conscious of in her film version of the novel (2006). Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, parents of Gogol and Sonia, do not change; they live and depart, their worlds remain intact, their lives are relatively unchanged by America. The emphasis on desh (homeland) rankles Gogol, who knows what the term means but who ‘never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India’ (Lahiri 2004: 118). The awkward truths that worried the ethnographer Kamala Visweswaran, truths like a mother tongue that is not a mother tongue, for Gogol Ganguli are certainly matters of reflection but not of compelling significance because to Gogol ABCDs signify the hyphenated condition that disables them from asking the telling question, ‘Where are you from?’ (118). Yet the hyphen in this novel, the hyphen as a sign as much of trauma as of creative reconstitution of a new, hybrid, empowering self, is to be located not in the American-born Gogol and Sonia but in their parents, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli. For them the hyphen makes them a ‘resident everywhere and nowhere’ (276). To present the novel’s synopsis in these terms is, of course, tragically to misread the text; it is to schematize it, to make it a proof-text about a general tendency in diasporic lives. I present it in these terms only to point out how inadequate such a reading is. At the aesthetic centre of the novel is not a diasporic poetics but an understated Russian classic, Nikolai Gogol’s great short story ‘The Overcoat’[‘The

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Cloak’], about which Dostoyevsky is reputed to have said, ‘We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat’ (Lahiri, 2004: 92). In Gogol’s story an unremarkable clerk, Akaky Akakievitch Bashmatchkins, ‘short of stature, red-haired, short-sighted, with a bald patch on his forehead and wrinkled cheeks’ (Gogol 1924: 38), poor, wretched, with few roubles to his name, has a new cloak made to replace his tattered old one that can no longer be mended. He had worn it to work for only a day when, the same night, on his way back from a party given by a colleague to celebrate his new possession, he is confronted by some men and his cloak is stolen. He is unable to secure help (from the police, from people with power) to find his cloak and he dies soon afterwards. His ghost, for a while seen demanding other people’s cloaks, finally disappears only after it has forcibly taken the cloak of the ‘great person’ who had been especially hard on him when he had sought help to regain his cloak. How does this subtext fit into Lahiri’s design? I want to offer two ways of answering this question. The first is in terms of aesthetic ordering, the second at the level of the revenant, the ghost which returns. ‘For now, he starts to read’ (291) is the final sentence of the book. What he, Gogol Ganguli, is going to read is Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’. The story has not been read by Gogol, named after Nikolai Gogol, by his father Ashoke. Gogol is his father’s favourite writer. Many years back in India it was Gogol who, in a sense, had saved Ashoke’s life. While others slept in the train, he had remained awake reading Gogol when the train collided and went off its rails. It is a story that Ashoke tells his son late in life and not long before he dies, suddenly, of a heart attack. By then Gogol had taken on a more legitimate Indian name, the one that his parents would have given him in the first place; but that name, too – Nikhil – echoed Gogol the writer’s first name, Nikolai. It is the name that Gogol adopts by deed poll and it is the name by which his friends of his mature years know him. To his earlier friends and to family, he is of course only Gogol. But, apart from the connection between escape from death owing to Gogol’s short stories, the content of the short story has no direct bearing on the lives of the Gangulis in America. Unless, of course, via allegory. Here the land of liberty, America, is the new raiment, the new cloak because the cloak of the homeland is beyond repair; it cannot be restitched (‘It can’t be mended; the cloth is rotten’, the tailor Petrovitch had told Akaky); it needs replacing. But the new is stolen, too; and the subject who had made the journey dies, only to reclaim, as ghost, that which he had lost. This kind of allegorical reading is possible, but what it endorses is pain rather than hope: all diasporas are unhappy. To encode the text in these analytical terms reduces its aesthetic power, for the point is not so much a reader’s ability to shift narrative composition from one level to another but the strength of the short story as an organizing subtext. For what the subtext alludes to is a humanist rendition of the subject, here the Bengali engineer steeped in European literature, a science graduate whose great love is literature. In this way what the subtext persuasively suggests is a diasporic sensibility that is already remarkably cosmopolitan. The irony (and Lahiri is conscious of irony as a formal characteristic of the bourgeois novel) is that Gogol, the son, is less sensitive, at the level of art, than Ashoke, his father.

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But, as the novel ends with Gogol reading Gogol the Russian genius, we mustn’t forget that the final chapter really begins with Gogol’s mother, Ashima. It is here that I want to look at our second reading, the diaspora as the revenant that returns, and haunts. On the day before Christmas 2000, Ashima prepares for a party in the house she had shared with her husband and children for most of her life in America. The house has been sold, and these are Ashima’s final days there. Her son Gogol is on his way, her daughter Sonia and her future husband, Ben, are already there. She will fulfil a promise, a promise made or an undertaking given all those years ago, to return to Calcutta. Now she will fulfil that promise: for six months of the year she will live in Calcutta at her brother’s place. But this return to the past, this ghostly reminder, disembodies her, for she knows that ‘she will be without borders, without a home of her own’ (276). Ambivalence rather than certainty grips her, for she will return only part-Indian on an American passport and with an American social security card. She’ll miss her job in the library; and Calcutta, the city to which she will move for half the year, ‘once home . . . is now in its own way foreign’ (278). Jhumpa Lahiri/Ashima’s refrain morphs into a stronger metaphor when Iqbal Chaudhary at the end of a visit ‘home’ after many years in Australia says, ‘the womb was there all right, except I could not fit into it any more’ (Khan 1994: 296). In his path-breaking first novel, Seasonal Adjustments, Adib Khan does not write to a formulaic narrative of the lost homeland. Eighteen years on, the homeland of the Bangladeshi émigré to Australia is a source not so much of the end of a schizophrenic existence elsewhere, not so much a cure, as an encounter with a nation whose social and political system was under duress, where the horrors of the war of liberation against Pakistan left behind wounds so deep that the nation seems to have lost its will to live. Under these circumstances, Iqbal Chaudhary’s return home with his daughter Nadine after his marriage to the Australian Michelle had broken down ceases to be a journey of discovery and education (for his daughter); instead it opens up reflections on what it is to be a hyphenated individual, what are the ramifications for the self of a body that no longer responds to the homeland without qualification. For diaspora engenders ‘being’ of a different order; it reinforces the uncomfortable fact that ‘life cannot be separated into their complex strands’. Continues Adib Khan’s narrator: They must remain interwoven in a complex texture. I shall never be able to close the sizeable hole at the centre of my life and shut out the view of that other world. I am destined to fret and pine, and endure the lonely burden of a dissatisfaction no one else will understand. I shall brood over what might have been. This is the way it must be. I have known too much to live contentedly. (296) The migrant’s ‘consciousness of a permanent loss’ (143), a state that haunts Iqbal Chaudhary ever since his arrival in Australia from Bangladesh, becomes a

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defining force about one’s identity for which one is no longer defensive or dismissive but indeed grateful.

Diaspora and the postcolonial condition There remains the issue of thinking through Charles Taylor’s principle of recognition and its withdrawal as a legacy of colonialism itself. The closer a nation’s involvement in colonization, the less comfortable it has been with its ex-colonial minorities. Britain, a key player in the formation of the modern idea of empire, for instance, has shown little interest in debates about multiculturalism as part of the mainstream political agenda (Hesse 2000). Seen either as a ‘spectre’ or as a threatening return of the repressed from within aimed at splintering the nation, multiculturalism is silenced, debates about it ignored. The failure to engage, theoretically, with the presence of non-white diasporas in Britain reflects a history of polarized readings of minorities. The latter were either embraced by the liberal assimilationist/‘cultural’ celebrationist or rejected by the conservative expulsionist. In due course, as neither the assimilationist nor the expulsionist solution worked and ‘ethnic and racial divisions’ continued to be ‘reproduced from generation to generation’ (Hesse 158), liberals began actively to celebrate difference, especially its aesthetic forms (but without addressing the questions of power relations) and conservatives began to read ‘difference’ as a threat to the stability of the nation. In the end, as Hesse points out in his introduction to Un/settled Multiculturisms, the fundamental issue of racism in Britain was sidelined. The difficulty with multiculturalism in Britain was with its generalized conception, as if its very generality (equal value of all cultures without, in Charles Taylor’s terms, a theory of recognition) could offer full explanations of both discrepant, indeed contradictory, social formations and of national identity (from whichever point of view you happened to hold). What is now urgent – and this is Hesse’s primary point – is the necessity to contest British multiculturalism (in its however residual form) ‘as symptomatic of an unresolved postcolonial condition following decolonization, the dismantling of the British Empire and postwar migration from the erstwhile colonies’ (11). It can be argued that addressing the legacy of colonialism at the heart of the British nation and the difficulties the British have had in coming to terms with the ‘postcolonial’ condition are larger concerns that hover over diasporas in settler nation states (including the USA) precisely because these nations not only imbibed the rhetoric of British imperialism but went a step further in virulently excluding, as we saw in the Komagata Maru incident, non-white subjects or, later, postcolonial ex-subjects of the empire. In Britain, especially, the need for a ‘particularized’ postcolonial British multiculturalism sensitive to the nation’s historical formation is therefore essential. For what has happened is that the particular has been subsumed by the idea of a ‘tolerant British nation which is intrinsically uninformed by historically racist processes’ (Hesse 12). It remains unaware of the discrepant ways in which diaspora thought affects the

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nation, the ways in which ‘unresolved discrepancies’ need to be acknowledged as being crucial to an understanding of the modern nation. In the concluding essay to Hesse’s volume Stuart Hall, too, argues that the new multiethnic and multicultural nation states grew out of the ‘dismantling of the old empires’ and ‘reflect their prior conditions of existence under colonialism’ (Hesse 2000: 212). An understanding of the connection between the two is necessary before one can explain, centrally in the context of Britain but also in the context of the other settler states, the neo-imperial character of race relations in them. At the same time we need to be conscious of three broad shifts: the end of the old European imperial system, the end of the Cold War and the spectre of globalization. At one level these three forces may well suggest a new world order no longer marked by ethnic or class difference, or agonistic politics since the triumph of individualism and capitalism has now introduced an order marked by wealth and not ethnic, religious and cultural difference. Reality in fact tells a rather different story, for even as globalization signals the idea of the universal subject it produces the figure of the subaltern who stresses his or her difference. Indeed, the ‘classic Enlightenment binary between Traditionalism and Modernity is displaced by a disseminated set of “vernacular modernities” ’ (215). In other words, diasporas acquire the symbols of modernity but on their own terms, so that global and local interests remain in tension. Hall reads this tendency as an instance of what Derrida referred to as ‘différance’ and suggests (after Homi Bhabha) that différance is played out best in the ‘borderline time’ of minorities. What is produced is a localism which is not simply a residue of the past (such as a return to absolute religious beliefs) but ‘something new – globalization’s accompanying shadow; what is left aside in globalization’s panoramic sweep, but returns to trouble and disturb globalization’s cultural settlements’ (216). The form this localism takes (progressive, creative, fundamentalist, integrative) depends upon the politics of the host nation in which minorities/diasporas are located. What happened in fact was that these coloured diasporic communities offered a ‘novel cultural configuration’ (as ‘cosmopolitan communities’) contrary to the logic of full assimilation. They were also seen both as a relic of a communal sense that ‘liberal society is supposed to have lost’ and as ‘the most advanced signifiers of the urban postmodern metropolitan experience’ (221), readings that reinforce one of the fundamentals of diaspora theory: that the nation sees in diasporas both its past and its future. The latter point is reworked as a thematic dominant in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) where a British ‘desi’ English is constructed as a special medium of communication. The language, though, does not necessarily release ‘desi’ Indian subjects from the conflicting demands of representing oneself as historically determined individuals and redefining oneself as postmodern floating signifiers. As seen in Malkani’s novel, diasporas impact on the received definitions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. The British, of course, without a theory of their own postcoloniality, see themselves not as a racial entity but as a people who have transcended race, leaving race and ethnicity for everyone else. Indeed, as Hall

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argues, the two terms (‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’) are applied variably, so that AfroCaribbeans are a ‘race’ and Asians are ‘ethnic’. Although ‘race’ is not a scientific but a social category, its implied application primarily to Blacks incorporates in its very definition racist characteristics (skin colour, shape of the nose, and so on) that transform a social definition into a genetic or ‘natural’ one. ‘Colour, is you that causing all this,’ says Galahad to himself in Sam Selvon’s seminal novel about West Indians in Britain (The Lonely Londoners) as he thinks through the unease of a mother as he bends down to touch her child, with the voice-over of ‘two white fellars’ accusing him that ‘Black’ makes the ‘lavatory dirty’ (Selvon 1985: 88). Galahad meditates on the colour of his hand: ‘Why the hell you can’t be blue, or red or green, if you can’t be white? You know is you that cause a lot of misery in the world’ (88). But, even when ‘ethnicity’ (not ‘race’) is applied to Asians because the latter’s cultures and religions are most on display, the biological referent that characterizes race is never totally absent. If the category of ‘race’ had defined Blacks as being indolent and congenitally indisposed towards the work ethic, the category of ‘ethnicity’ brought genetic characteristics (feminization of the body, incapable of playing sport, and even an inbuilt capacity for fundamentalist belief systems) to the Asians as well. The multicultural question then becomes twofold: it must address questions of racism (because the reading of both Black and Asian is ultimately racist) and at the same time engage with racial difference because even after two generations these multicultural communities have not become part of an unproblematic Britishness. A hyphenated declaration of citizenship is often the norm as Blackand-British or British-Asian descriptions are not uncommon. What these imply is the presence of the principle of heterogeneity and hybridity in the life of diaspora. ‘They are all,’ writes Hall, ‘negotiating culturally somewhere along the spectrum of différance, in which disjunctures of time, generation, spatialization and dissemination refuse to be neatly aligned’ (227). In the context of a British particularism which gets re-written as a ‘global universalism’ (Hesse 234) diaspora is rendered as ‘passive citizens’ to be distinguished from ‘active citizens’ (Mandel 1995: 95). In Britain, where the nation has not theorized its own postcolonial condition, the (generically) ‘Indian’ diaspora (variously referred to as Indo-Pakistani or simply South Asian) offers a challenge to this passive/active binary. Indeed, the conflict between a presumed passive citizenry and an actively engaged hyphenated subject in diaspora as a border zone or as an intermediate, increasingly mobile idea forms the energizing context for the works of Hanif Kureishi to which I now wish to turn.

Diaspora and the postcolonial subject: Hanif Kureishi The hyphenated subject, after all, is a body – an abject body – on display. In the realm of national representation these bodies as ‘passive citizens’ could be subjects excluded from active citizenry, part of diversity management, an embarrassing splinter in the side of the normative nation, or ignored outright. In terms of actual lived experience, from within they could not intervene in the

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dominant culture except as ‘food’ or other innocuous cultural markers (Gunew 1999). Their self-representation vacillated between a certain kind of ‘display’ in ‘ethnic’ magazines and newspapers or in Bollywood films. Bodies, after all, do matter. Against these the diaspora cinema of Kureishi and Gurinder Chadha, for example, gives the diaspora not only images of its own self but also images that require high levels of proactive critical engagement in the act of viewing. Moreover, these bodies are now exposed to general public consumption and are no longer commodities that circulate, like Bombay films, primarily in the diaspora itself. Hanif Kureishi’s films effectively began this process of engagement (Desai 2003). These films also gesture towards a new Britain engaging with what constitutes the hitherto uncontested sign of ‘Englishness’. To understand Kureishi’s significance one needs to pause at the idea of ‘Englishness’ itself and reconsider British multicultural formation as part of the nation’s postcolonial legacy. ‘And what do they know of England who only England know’, wrote Rudyard Kipling. The prose here is cryptic, if not outright enigmatic, but there is something rather significant at work here. Written in 1891, the line takes us to an unresolved elision, a silent conflation of the English and the British which at once makes questions of national identity extremely problematic. Through a historical semantic shift ‘English’ has both displaced ‘British’ and stands apart from it. As Krishan Kumar has pointed out in a very useful study of English identity, there is indeed a school of English historiography (the John Bull School) for whom ‘The history of Britain was merely the history of England as and when it took place elsewhere’ (2003: 13). But this history, seen through English eyes, presupposed that the English were different in one fundamental respect: ‘other nations have nationalism not them’ (18). This belief also meant that to the English ‘nationalism is somehow pathological, alien, continental, different, objectionable’ (19). The point is best-exemplified in the xenophobic Enoch Powell, who read the English not as a nation but as a life force that exists ‘largely in the imagination’ (267). And, since experiencing a nation imaginatively (which is in some sense akin to Benedict Anderson’s imagined community but different in that for Powell the nation remains grounded in a particular reading of race) is essentially a poetic act, Powell speaks of English identity as something that has already happened in the past, in an unchanging England captured in Shakespeare and the Romantic poets.1 ‘England’ couldn’t possibly be just another nation; its character had to be defined not in terms of the usual paradigms of the nation-state (a late-nineteenth-century European doctrine, a racial enclave, a linguistic community and so on) but as something totally other, something not located ‘within the consciousness of the English themselves’ but outside it (17). Without the usual markers of nationalism, diasporic enclaves in Britain have had great difficulty in pursuing a multicultural agenda based on a defined sense of the nation itself. In other words, since the nation has nothing to defend (except a sense of correctness about itself), it remains largely elusive. In the context of an ‘Englishness’ that resists definition but is at the same time a cultural absolute, so to speak (for there is something almost foundational about

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it even when it is not internal to English consciousness), Hanif Kureishi’s staging of the narratives of the Indo-Pakistani diaspora takes on a form rather different from anything we have examined thus far. Unlike Indian diasporic works from Canada and the USA, the Kureishi case raises questions that do not lend themselves to an easy analysis either in terms of multicultural theory or in terms of an oppositional migrant/dominant group set. Matters are confounded because the Indo-Pakistani community in Britain reminds the ‘English’ of their own earlier imperial history and the inevitability of their presence in the metropolitan centre of empire after the latter’s collapse. Their presence also suggests the staging of the scene of the return of the repressed (as abject colonized bodies in a very different power structure of imperialism) in the British nation-state whose own history had been enacted elsewhere: ‘The trouble with the Engenglish’, stutters S. S. Sisodia, ‘is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means’ (Rushdie 1988: 343). But the lifting of the lid on the repressed narrative of the diaspora, the giving of voice to people whose history had been snatched away from them and whose bodies were never given artistic representation as real, lived bodies in the nation-state, also means that a key missing element in modernity − the epistemology of a new hybrid culture uncomfortably located in the ‘here’ and ‘there’ – can be re-theorized. If Bharati Mukherjee distances herself from questions of coalitional possibilities and from a radical engagement with the diasporic self (though it must be added that she never loses sight of these issues), in the works of Kureishi diasporic lives are not detached from the political agenda of the nation-state. What we get in his works is the construction of the despairing world of the migrant in the racist agenda of Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Britain. Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) tellingly begins: ‘My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost’. The narrator continues: ‘I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories’ (3). The two histories are not totally divergent because English history – the history that happened elsewhere – is also the narrator’s other history, the distinction between the two (and the proprietorial claims that may be made) in many ways fudged by the incorporation of the other’s history as somehow one’s own. These difficulties (largely of slotting histories into exclusive categories) make for aesthetic interventions very different from the kinds we see in Canada where histories are indeed divergent and where the nation-state has not been so closely connected to the history of its migrant peoples. Kureishi’s Karim Amir, however, stands for an Englishness that can be claimed and negotiated but also critically interrogated. The bisexual Karim signifies precisely the conflation of aberrant sexuality and the diasporic Other which was at the heart of an ‘English’ nationalist cultural paranoia (Bromley 2000: 149). In settler countries such as Canada, America and Australia the diaspora can claim a certain privilege on the grounds that, apart from native peoples, everyone in these countries is a migrant. That claim is not possible in Britain precisely because ‘Englishness’ is metaphysical rather than political or national, and, quite possibly, unavailable to the vast bulk of

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British people, including the English themselves. The situation therefore translates itself into art forms that are less marked by diasporic yearnings and more by an engagement with social and cultural concerns that are trans-diasporic. So when Sammy in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid declares that ‘we are Londoners’ (and not British or English) the gesture gets around matters of ethnic difference and diasporic despair through a kind of cultural cross-over that transcends ethnic difference in the first instance but also spells out how difference may be claimed in ways other than in racial terms. In this respect Kureishi’s art stands apart, and requires an extended commentary on its own. The new engagement is readily seen in Kureishi’s early works My Beautiful Laundrette (1985; Kureishi 1992) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987; Kureishi 1992) where postcolonial hybridity is celebrated through the exposure of the diasporic repressed. By lifting the lid on the diaspora’s own homophobic and exclusive rhetoric, by representing gay and lesbian diasporic selves, by mingling the crisis of the working class with the anxieties of diaspora, Kureishi shifts the debates to questions about the diasporic body as corporeal selves within the racial economy of a nation. Indeed, in Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic (1997), it is the British-born son rather than the immigrant father who bares his growing allegiance to fundamentalist Islam and, in doing so, locates the latter precisely in the failures of the immigrant dream. Between the mid-1960s and the mid1980s, under a sinister and prolonged form of racism in Britain that had taken its most virulent form in Enoch Powell’s ‘river of blood’ speech, and that had continued in various ways with the Tories’ equation of homophobic and migrant discourses, the South Asian diaspora in Britain felt itself particularly threatened and unwanted. At the level of general communal behaviour it retreated into its own essentialisms and began to live out its imaginary homeland in the comfort zones of mosques, temples and the like. Against the linking of race with nation – most powerfully stated in Powell’s argument that races had nations to which they belonged – diasporic creative imagination (in response to their ethnicized definitions by the nation-state) began to celebrate the dynamic quality of diasporic lives in Britain. It is in this context that Kureishi’s recasting of the diasporic imagination as a dynamic hybrid space – at once out of place and central to the nation-state – is of such significance. Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid explore the complex mechanics of politics, sexuality, culture, race and capital in the UK South Asian diaspora. More specifically, beneath the gaze of a much more sinister and prolonged form of racism under Thatcherism the discourse of this diaspora began to turn inwards, replacing one form of ‘homing’ (within Britain) with another which is elsewhere, the imaginary space of the lost homeland: And indeed I know Pakistanis and Indians born and brought up here who consider their position to be the result of a diaspora: they are in exile, awaiting return to a better place, where they belong, where they are welcome. And there this ‘belonging’ will be total. This will be home, and peace. (Kureishi 1992: 35)

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The cinematic energy of My Beautiful Laundrette (MBL) may therefore be located between a new brand of resurgent racism under Thatcherism that extols racial exclusivism – each race has a nation – and those forces that had been at work to create something like a British multicultural polity. The two are, of course, interrelated, since each feeds upon the other, each implicitly responds to the other’s agenda, and both, as a consequence, get the more complex ways in which ethnicity, race, class and power interact so fatally wrong. In Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (SRGL) Kureishi foregrounds these complex interactions as identity gets deconstructed and deployed at all levels of lived experience. In the inner-city suburbs of Britain, diasporic purities can neither sustain nor redeem: ‘We are Londoners’, says Sammy in an attempt to forestall racial stereotype. But in MBL, where a lyrical vision of sorts persists, and where gay sexuality attempts to transcend racial barriers, Kureishi’s immediate concern is with the twilight zones of British life where the racial and the socio-sexual have very different meaning. Hanif Kureishi’s reading of the diaspora does not offer simple oppositions: a secure older diasporic generation against a new misguided one, an ancient dharma against the socially contingent, collective family enterprise against economic individualism (Salim berates Omar for not relying on the family), the ‘stick to your own kind, one of your own kind’ argument of Enoch Powell against non-conformity and the postcolonial hybrid. Indeed, the new cosmopolitans of Europe will make these essentialist oppositions quickly out of date. Against these binarisms Kureishi stages the triumph of the hybrid and the power of the in-between to express the new, and to occupy a space from which a critique of the old may be mounted. More important, Kureishi does the unspeakable act of forcibly fusing together two right-wing discourses on the ascendant. The first, of course, is racism. In MBL and SRGL a more subtle version of racism is its subtext. This racism had begun to take institutional form since the 1971 Immigration Act, which restricted the right of abode in Britain to ‘patrials’, the effect of which was drastically to curb ‘primarily black immigration’ (A. M. Smith 1994: 69). The second discourse is a lot more complex sociologically. During the Thatcher ascendancy the discourse of racism was grafted on to a homophobic rhetoric (and vice versa) to endorse the idea of a national good so powerfully captured in Thatcher’s voice-over (‘Where there is despair, may we bring hope . . .’) towards the end of SRGL. The manner in which the two discourses – of racism and homophobia – were deployed and effectively collapsed or homogenized through a seemingly non-racist, non-sexist discourse is one of the great triumphs of the Thatcher era and explains why people who would have otherwise voted for Labour continued to support Thatcher. What Thatcherism did was construct a new ‘sociocultural imaginary’ based on the selective deployment of two divergent modes of discrimination – racism and homophobia – so that what was being endorsed was a vigorous, heterosexual British nationhood and not racism. The nation was recast as dangerously poised between a ‘queer’ multiculturalism – where the homosexual and the black heterosexual occupy the same economic and social twilight zone – (A. M. Smith 1994: 66) and

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a xenophobic racism of which the National Front was the ugly force. So Thatcherism became the mediating category, fighting against the anti-nationalist multiculturalists and the fascist-nationalist National Front. It becomes clear that Kureishi’s decisive intervention takes place precisely when the Thatcherite agenda of this new racism and the British state is at its strongest. While recounting the development of SRGL, Kureishi wrote in his diary: 21 May 1987 Frears [Stephen Frears, the director] and I were both moaning to each other about the Tory Election broadcast that went out yesterday. Its hideous nationalism and neo-fascism, its talk of ‘imported foreign ideologies like socialism’ and its base appeals to xenophobia. (1992: 186) It must be said that Thatcher herself does not present this as a clear-cut ideological position; on the contrary, Thatcherism encouraged such a high level of apathy among the British by creating unemployment and rewarding those whose support she needed that people simply did not put their minds to ‘productive political uses’ (Eagleton 1991: 35). To open a cinematic space for the conjunctures outlined above, Kureishi uses the (diasporic) body as the border zone where transgressions occur. So Kureishi now stages, from the establishment’s perspective, extreme aberrations: black and white homosexuality; black and white heterosexuality; black upon white upon black heterosexuality. On top of all this he stages the most ‘venomous homophobic representations’ during the Thatcher years, that of the black lesbian. In SRGL the black lesbian category itself is blasted open further through the lesbian relationship of the Afro-British and the Indian-(or Asian-)British. What happens to the diasporic body, that element in the British Asian life that had been totally repressed or replaced by the imperial discourses of cultural extraneity or religious fundamentalism? At the time of the most virulent expressions of the new racism, British television and film also produced some of the most elaborate accounts of India and the Empire. From The Jewel in the Crown to A Passage to India, the diaspora’s real history within Britain was being deflected on to an epic past that endorsed the civilizing values of the British. As Lord Halsbury stated during a reading of a bill prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality in Britain, ‘We have for several decades past been emancipating minorities who claimed that they were disadvantaged. Are they grateful? Not a bit. We emancipated races and got inverted racism’ (A. M. Smith 1994: 63). He went on to use the same analogy to criticize homosexuals. At home the diaspora were no longer in need of emancipation of the type suggested by Lord Halsbury. But they were still being seen, as Halsbury saw homosexuals, as people whose bodies should remain hidden or cosmetically represented through a nostalgia for the Raj. In both MBL and SRGL the counter-discursive move on the part of Kureishi is in fact to make bodily contacts a feature of the diaspora and to rewrite, in short, narratives of ‘native’ bodies as they interact with that of the dominant white group. From Nasser’s relationship with Rachel

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and Tania’s self-exposure at the party, to the sex scenes in MBL and SRGL, one experiences a move away from the racist assumptions about the diaspora to the complex ways in which the bodies of diaspora now interact with itself and with the emergent colours and races in Britain. In staging these relationships, Kureishi disrupts the silent (‘unpresentable’) multiracial sexuality of the past (and that of Rafi and Alice in SRGL) with the more complex and raw (almost savage) sexuality of the postcolonial diaspora. It is this staging (marked so dramatically in the condom over the carrot scene, and Rafi’s incongruous arrival at that scene, in Rosie’s three types of human kiss and in Vivia and Rani’s lesbian love scene) that disrupts the calculus of the new racism but also establishes conjunctures between racist and homophobic discourses at the heart of Tory British culture. The declarations also take us back to the idea of ‘enjoyment’ of the nation that underpins any theorization of the diasporic imaginary.

Postmodern ethnicity Towards the end of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) one suspects that the author himself intercedes to distinguish between selves who wish to remain ‘continuous’ and those who are creatures of ‘selected discontinuities’ (427). Diasporas of exclusivism – the old Indian diaspora – for reasons linked to the nature of late-nineteenth-century imperialism remained largely ‘continuous’. In these selfenclosed societies (Naipaul defends the subject-matter of his Trinidadian novels precisely on these grounds) diasporas, in Rushdie’s words, ‘wished to remain . . . continuous’. In the later diaspora – the new Indian diaspora – of border culture, the ground of being for diasporic subjects is not only unstable but also openly contaminated. It is the ground on which Saladin, the subject of ‘selected discontinuities’, can write ‘a love-song to our mongrel lives’ (Rushdie 1988: 394). Sadly, the Islamic world did not read the novel in Saladin’s terms. The artistic productions of the new, late modern diaspora – Vikram Chandra’s highly imaginative Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) is exemplary here – provide us with mediated cultural experiences of deterritorialized diasporic peoples for whom belonging is not linked to the control of the nation’s social, political and cultural myths nor a narrative of return. The diasporic subject like Edward Said’s ‘exile’ knows that ‘in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity’ (Said 1984: 166). Does Said imply that the ‘exile’ indeed begins to defend the borders of the nation to which he has arrived? It seems so, and indicates the ways in which the exile, used here generically, inhabits the space of the nation-state itself. In Kureishi this much is clear – the hyphenated, hybrid citizen declares ‘ownership’ of his adopted nation. When, however, ‘the tragedy of multiplicity [is] destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One’, as Salman Rushdie writes in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995: 408), diasporas do retreat into a semantics of exclusivism and separatism. At these moments the fantasy structure of the

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homeland appears as the imaginary haven, as the sublime sign, an absence, to which diasporas return for refuge. Rushdie’s warning, however, is salutary: It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (Rushdie 1991b: 10) If that which has been lost cannot be reclaimed, then something else has to be celebrated. In Rushdie’s works, as in Kureishi’s, that something else is the interdiasporic, creatively hybrid conditions that provide diasporas with new, vibrant cultural forms. It is this celebration which intervenes into erstwhile imperialist renditions of diaspora. In Britain the Indian (Asian) diaspora’s presence bears ‘the imprint of diaspora, “hybridization” and différance in their very constitution’. Bollywood cinema has the drawing power (though not the universality) of West End musicals; curry is celebrated as a British dish.2 Note the impact on British Asian Bhangra (derived from a Punjabi folk form) of Caribbean reggae and the soul and hip hop styles of Black Africa, which are in themselves highly complex hybrid music, and of Bombay film music. The music of Apache Indians, though already under fire from the ‘Asian Cool’ scene in Britain (Morris 1994), com. – – – bines rap with Bollywood as in ‘Pyar mujh se pyar tum kyom itna karte ho’ (Lovin’ [let me love you] 1997). Asian bands such as KK Kings, Fun’Da’Mental, Panjabi MC and Kaliphz are further evidence that cultural commodities travel swiftly, criss-crossing geographical boundaries, creating new and vibrant forms. In Nitin Sawhney’s album Beyond Skin (1999) the accompanying pamphlet declares: ‘I believe in Hindu philosophy. I am not religious. I am a pacifist. I am a British Asian. My identity and my history are defined only by myself – beyond politics, beyond nationality, beyond religion and beyond skin’. Sawhney uses fragments from political speeches – ex-Indian prime minister Vajpayee’s in Beyond Skin; a collage of Enoch Powell’s, Margaret Thatcher’s and Martin Luther King Jr’s and Richard Nixon’s in Human – and fuses styles to reaffirm his unease with pure genres. He has even recorded a track with Yothu Yindi’s Aboriginal front man Mandawuy Yunupingu in Arnhem Land, Australia. In Human one gets a ‘stunning fusion of Indian classical, jazz, discrete house, trip hop and electro’ (The West Australian 22 August 2003, Today Section, 7). Sawhney, and Indian music in the diaspora generally, demonstrates levels of imagination and creativity absent, in their immediacy, in literature because music can be so much more mobile and more readily translated into social and cultural practice. The case of Cornershop may be taken as being symptomatic of the British Asian music scene generally. Begun in 1988 by Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayers

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as The General Havoc, the band changed its name to Cornershop in 1992, after perhaps the stereotype of the Asian corner-shop keeper in Britain. (‘Why can’t Asians in Britain play football?’ ‘They’ll open a shop whenever they get a corner kick.’) Cornershop shows all the characteristics of a fusion band that freely adopts and adapts musically and politically. There is the political statement in the song ‘Hanif Kureishi Scene’ with the line ‘Your life is so pristine, mine’s like the Hanif Kureishi scene’ and much more joyful celebration of Bollywood in ‘Brimful of Asha on the 45’, which alludes to the successful remixing of many of the Bollywood playback singer Asha Bhosle’s songs in the British Asian pop scene. Yet, in a sense, the Asha Bhosle remix has a popularity in the British Asian (Indian) diaspora that Cornershop finds difficult to equal. Says Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh: [In] the case of a lot of Asians, they don’t like Cornershop because what they want to listen to is music that will make them off their x-plane, whether it is folk music, social or spiritual music or religious music. We don’t do that. We pose a lot more questions, even if we don’t have a lot of lyrics. We don’t expect a lot of Asians to get that. If I were an Asian who wanted an easy life, it would be the last damn thing I’d be listening to. (Rungh 3.4 (1997): 17) Nitin Sawhney, Cornershop, and Badmarsh and Shri ‘belong to a generation of young British Asian acts . . . who have emerged from the ethnic underground to make music that blends – and transcends – traditional pop categories’ (Time 27 December 2001, 96). In their CDs – Dancing Drums (1998) and Signs (Outcaste, 2001) – Badmarsh and Shri (Mohammed Akber Ali, a YemeniIndian, and Shrikanth Sriram, originally from Bombay) have moved away from the Bollywood-influenced, highly artificial compositions of the Asian club and underground music in London to a vibrant and mixed form that combines traditional drums, strings and winds (tablas, sitars, flutes) and connects with garage, funk, reggae as well as Bollywood. The transformation also indicates a shift away from ‘ethnic’ to the global, as Nitin Sawhney’s appeal clearly demonstrates. Recently in the British Indian–Pakistani diaspora even classical forms such as the Sufi qalandari dance and singing have been crossed with contemporary music. The best instance of this is the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s quite extraordinary rendition of ‘dam mast qalandar mast mast’. Three instances of cultural translation may be taken up here, and all three refer to the British South Asian (Indian) diaspora. The first is a musical adaptation of the well-known Bollywood film Hum Aap ke Hain Kaun (‘Who Am I to You’, 1994), the second Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams, the third Akram Khan’s fusion of Indian Kathak and Western modern dance forms in MA (‘Mother’). By the 1990s Bollywood Cinema had become an indispensable cultural form in the lives of the global Indian diaspora (Mishra 2002). Mainstream weeklies such as TimeOut began to carry news about Bollywood cinema. Indeed, TimeOut (10–17 October 2001) carried a feature essay, ‘Hooray for Bollywood’,

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which referred to the pervasiveness of the form. In terms of money earned, diaspora is now one of the largest markets for Indian cinema (Bollywood as well as other regional cinemas); in the UK, Bollywood cinema is among the top grossing foreign films. Further in Britain where the ‘new’ Indian diaspora has a long history, and where film and television have invested in British representations of India to a considerable extent, Bollywood has now entered, albeit slowly, into mainstream cultural consciousness. So, when the Indian diaspora began to intervene in British cultural productions with an eye to its own distinctive artistic traditions, Bollywood became the indispensable form to imitate (as in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding), parody (Kaizad Gustad’s Bombay Boys), deconstruct (Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach) or creatively re-write (as in Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice). This shift has been particularly evident since the final decade of the twentieth century. In the past diasporic artistic productions took the form of engagement with classical forms, be it music, dance or theatre. So the Sanskrit play The Little Clay Cart would be performed by aspiring British Asian actors. With the impact of Bollywood cinema, there has been a decisive shift to the popular musical, which is why Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral based on Hum Aap ke Hain Kaun (and echoing through its English title Three Weddings and a Funeral) is so important. Presented by the Tamasha Theatre Company (with the Birmingham Repertory Company) the musical, after a brief season in the studio of the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, opened formally in September 2001 for a season at the Lyric. Formed in 1989 by Kristine Landon-Smith and Sudha Bhuchar, the company has produced a number of plays, perhaps the best-known of which is their 1997 production East Is East, which was made into a film three years later. Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral adapts a popular genre (Bollywood melodrama) and retains the characteristics of that genre to the extent that the songs, although rendered in English, are sung to the tunes of the Hindi original. What is created is not the hybridity of British ‘fusion’ music but a different kind of aesthetic assertiveness in that in adapting Bollywood the diaspora connects with a popular form out there and makes it its own. Thus in Tamasha’s adaptation of the film the language is English but the bodies are (diasporic) Indian. Listening to the musical with the original Bollywood film in mind, parallel texts emerge, but along with them a sense of a slight dissonance, in that the original can never be adequately replaced, the original remains the sign of the lost homeland that in the end defies complete reclamation. We return to Rushdie’s prescient observation: ‘we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost’ (Rushdie 1991b: 10). With Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams, which began at the Apollo Victoria in 2002 after Starlight Express ended its eighteen-year run there, a diaspora fetish (Bollywood cinema) finds a different, mainstream translation. Here the procedures are similar to those adopted by Tamasha, but the audience is cross-cultural (which was not the case with Fourteen Songs where the audience were all Bollywood cinema buffs). In Bombay Dreams, the art form that has the highest currency in the Indian diaspora is repackaged for a much wider audience because the form itself is seen as another element in

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Western aesthetic modernity: for Western culture always adapts artistic forms on the ascendant, and in doing so liberates art from its own inherently quotidian tendencies. When Akram Khan’s MA received its world première in Singapore in May 2004 commentators were immediately struck by a daring choreographic style shaped by the fusion of Indian and Western dance forms. Its subsequent reception in London, Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, Munich, Brussels, Taipei, Vienna, Düsseldorf and Perth re-affirmed and extended its initial impact. The exercise in this new aesthetic was unlike other experimentations in that it explored a space not of difference, nor of genuflective acknowledgement of the Other, but of a new radical and creative imaginary where the new is measured not in terms of an acknowledgement of the aesthetic from the Self at the centre (the dominant subject who stands for the nation’s ‘timeless and immemorial’ culture) but in terms of culture as part of a national imaginary that is dynamic, fluid and even chaotic. Akram Khan’s MA in this respect is an ideological statement as much as a creative triumph of multicultural dance: it designates culture as located within a space of free play that releases energies contained within a pristine, hallowed form and presents it as a ‘field of structure out of which anything might emerge’ (Day 2002: 225). In this respect, even as MA designates a triumphant art form of diasporic hybridity, it insinuates an ideological imperative: diasporic difference is not an aberration to be gradually transformed into national norms but a statement that the Other is to be treated as if it were the Self (224). The creative energy of MA grew out of and is to be located within the latter intersubjectivity. These three examples, plus the extraordinary Trilogy of Indian Ink (Krishnan’s Dairy, The Candlestickmaker and The Pickle King) of the Indo-New Zealander Jacob Rajan, designate three aspects of diaspora in a multicultural nation. The first suggests self-representation but the impossibility of capturing that which is lost; the second the appropriation of diasporic forms towards mainstream, capitalist ends; the third the aesthetic possibilities of combining tradition with modernity as the highly controlled and rigorously defined movements of Kathak synergize with the fluidity and energy of modernism. If the Tamasha adaptation in the end still remains apolitical (and may be interpreted as such), Bombay Dreams, in its most generous interpretation, designates the end of diaspora as a separate entity within the nation. Akram Khan’s MA, of course, requires no qualification to make the even stronger claim that the Other now enters the nation state with the typically Derridean différance, a quest for identity that cannot be articulated within any one particular cultural regime. The great work of diasporic rememoration and self-critique in the ‘new’ diaspora is, of course, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. If A House for Mr Biswas established one kind of diasporic foundational narrative within the regime of the realist, Salman Rushdie has created another through the hyperreal modalities of the postmodern. In Naipaul the nostalgia for return remained strong as old men in the verandah of the Tulsi shop smoked their ganja and reminisced about their homeland. In Rushdie, as we have noted, Gibreel and Chamcha

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debate the differences between being joined to the past – and hence being, to a degree, ‘continuous’ – and being a ‘willing re-invention’, a creature of ‘selected discontinuities’. What is celebrated is the challenge of the new and a rejection of the earlier distinction based on the purity of holding on to a memory. As Rushdie himself has written, ‘The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs’ (Rushdie 1991b: 394). But, even as the movement of newness into the world is celebrated, the text also generates a return to the old rhetoric of nativism, religious purity and racial difference. Instead of hybridity, the Rushdie affair, as I will argue at length in the next chapter, in fact presented us with a radical instance of the differend (Lyotard 1988). Without getting into the debates surrounding the Affair, what needs to be said in the context of diasporic theory is that any kind of threat (and the Muslim South Asian diaspora did see the work as being unconsciously complicit with the right-wing British attitude that always parodied the ‘Pakis’ in Britain) invariably raises the defences of ethnicity and racial exclusiveness. It is then that the new diaspora picks up the categories of the old and begins to question, through its own new-found conservatism, the very foundations of late-modern hypermobile diasporas. What, then, are the implications of the foregoing theorization for the study of the Indian diaspora? I have addressed two issues: first, that any study of the Indian diaspora should look at two different archives as part of one’s research; and, second, that though the new diaspora, in the age of late capital, is such a powerful critique of the ethnic origins of nation-states it should be remembered that the relic of the calls for nativism and purity – calls that have always been possible through the organizational skills of a diaspora’s priestly caste – can be triggered whenever Sartre’s ghostly question ‘What do we do with them now?’ surfaces. It is a pity that at precisely the moment when another foundational narrative had supplanted an earlier one, a new lamp for the old, the millenarian panic of the old diaspora returned to haunt the new. One thing is clear to me: the ideology of homeland and the discourse of nativism, exclusivism or irredentism are never erased and do become enabling discourses whenever the diasporic community is, for whatever reason, under threat. Thus in the Rushdie affair the subcontinental Muslim diaspora in Britain and elsewhere retreated into its racialized discourse of religious purity and cultural difference. But, then, diasporic narrative has never been unproblematic, as is evident in Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995); and just when we think we have found a useful model with which to read it a new twist in the narrative takes us back to an ambivalence located at the heart of a fundamental opposition: the purity of generic taxonomy versus the slippage of the hyphen. I turn to Hanif Kureishi once again. In his essay ‘The Rainbow Sign’ (1992: 3–37), Kureishi writes about the trauma of listening to Enoch Powell’s expulsionist rhetoric in the sixties. This rhetoric – of which ‘I seem to see (like the Roman) the River Tiber foaming with much blood’ is the best-known line – affected him so deeply that for a while he felt that he couldn’t possibly belong to

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England. He speaks about alternative homes – Pakistan for instance – but does not find that solution to diaspora enervating. Return to an imaginary homeland is not what Kureishi endorses: ‘I came home . . . to my country,’ he writes. So Kureishi sees his work as a means of redefining belonging and ownership of a nation. His is the voice of Shahid Hasan’s over Riaz’s in The Black Album. To Shahid, who reads Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Kureishi 1995: 7), Riaz’s worry about people ‘losing themselves when they come here’ (6) because of a loss of religious zeal is precisely the aberrant diasporic attitude that disallows the capacity to engage in what Barnor Hesse has referred to as the ‘transruptive’ act. For that engagement to be effective, gestures towards ethnic absolutism must be rejected. If the diasporic imaginary is very much a function of a specific postcolonial condition located within ex-colonial powers or white settler nations (which in turn has made a radical rethinking of the multicultural difficult), then it is the majority people themselves who must self-reflect as much as diasporas. It follows, as Kureishi argues, ‘It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being British isn’t what it was’ (36). Trauma itself may be cured once this new way of being British (or Australian, or American or Canadian), difficult as the cultural change may be, becomes part of everyday life. For diaspora there is, then, an ethical necessity to relativize, to self-critique, which is not the same as adopting what Pico Iyer has referred to as the position of the detached ‘Global Soul’ (2000: 25) for whom there is no privileged nation or social community. Although there is a touch of extended annotations to selected South Asian diasporic texts here, in the context of multicultural theory as ‘postcolonial condition’ it has to be argued that literary/cultural histories of nations can no longer be correctly written without considerable reference to diaspora lives. Even as trauma (arising out of the anxieties of a racist world here and now) and mourning (the loss of a homeland back then) remain defining psychological modes, cultural production need not simply create lost past worlds or an impossible contemporary world. It needs to enter into debates about majoritarian culture as well as critique its own internal aberrations: that the Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka have problems of a different order from economic migrants from India, that these refugees and the Sikhs may well have relationships with homelands mediated by the sense of the possibility of a ‘new’ homeland connected essentially to not so much a past history as to a millenarian eschatology, that class and gender relations in the diaspora may well be archaic and in need of a radical overall. Kamala Visweswaran had despaired because she could not claim her mother tongue as her own. As writers of minor literature (after Deleuze and Guattari), diaspora writers invariably write not in their mother tongue but in their ‘(m)other tongue’. If I end the chapter here, surreptitiously rewriting the loss of the homeland with the acquisition of this problematic notion of a ‘mother tongue’, it is not because I want to suggest that the process runs full circle. Instead I want to leave it as a creative ambiguity, as another hyphen in our lives through which diasporas construct provisional meanings. And, if I do not opt

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for the idealist scenario, it is because I suspect that nation-states will always internalize the exemplariness of diasporic lives as their own condition of late modernity. Or see in diaspora’s capacity for a double enjoyment (of both the target nation state and a homeland as may be seen in Farrukh Dhondy’s highly imaginative Bombay Duck) a threat to nationalism itself, to the idea of belonging, of owning just one nation. In the domain of the aesthetic, diasporic creative dynamism alone challenges what Barnor Hesse referred to as the ‘unresolved postcolonial condition following decolonization, the dismantling of the British Empire and post-war migration from the erstwhile colonies’ (Hesse 2000: 11). This creative dynamism now produces writers who not only win prizes and huge advances from publishing houses, but who also make diaspora experience itself the centre of national life. As a postcolonial critique, diaspora aesthetic now makes one voice, equally suddenly with Marlow, ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth’ (Conrad 1995: 18). A dialogic narrative of selfexploration and recognition can now begin.

6

Diasporic narratives of Salman Rushdie

‘Home’ has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. (Salman Rushdie 1994: 93)

For large groups of people around the world − Cubans and Mexicans in the USA, Indians and Pakistanis in Britain, Canada and the USA, Meghrebis in France, Turks in Germany, Chinese in Southeast Asia, Greeks, Polish and Armenians in various parts of the world, Chinese and Vietnamese in Australia, Canada and the USA, Indians in Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean (the list can go on and on) − the idea of ‘home’ has indeed become a ‘damaged’ concept. The word ‘damaged’ forces us to face up to the scars and fractures, to the blisters and sores, to the psychic traumas of bodies on the move. Indeed, ‘home’ (the heimlich) and the idea of belonging – in some instances an obsession with place, what Rushdie, using a hyphenated phrase, has referred to as ‘belonging-to-your-place’ in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999: 55) – is the new logic of (post)modernity as the condition of ‘living here and belonging elsewhere’ begins to affect people in an unprecedented fashion (Clifford 1994: 311). No longer is exile (which has overtones of a triumphal rejection of one’s homeland) rendered simply through an essentially aesthetic formulation (note the geographical breaks, the attractive hyphens of Joyce [Dublin-Trieste], Pound [London-Paris-Rome], or Eliot [New England-London], for instance); on the contrary, it is a travail/travel in a larger, complex politics of diaspora. The narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Umeed Merchant (Rai), gives mobility a positive turn as he believes that in every generation, blessed or cursed, there are a few souls that are ‘born not belonging’ (72). These people ‘come into the world semi-detached . . . without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race’. It should be obvious from what I have written thus far in the book that to write about damaged homes, to re-image the impact of migration in the age of late capital, requires us to be alert to debates about diaspora theory. As we have noted, one of the overriding characteristics of diasporas is that they do not, as a general rule, return. This is not to be confused with the symbols of return or the invocations, often through the sacred, of the homeland or the home-idea. The trouble with diaspora is that the past and the future both have a certain ‘unreality’ because, if the past is an unreal reference point, the

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future, too, cannot be grasped through a narrative of historical teleology. It must therefore be declared forthwith that diasporas cannot conceptualize the point towards which the community, the nation within a nation, is heading. The absence of teleologies in diaspora is also linked to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the ever-present time of historical (messianic) redemption. In this lateral argument, an eventual homecoming is not projected on to the future but introjected into the present, thereby both interrupting it and multiplying it. Diasporic history thus contests both the utopic and irreversible causality of history through heterotopic (Foucault) or subversive (Benjamin) readings. In these readings, time is turned back against itself in order that alternative readings, alternative histories may be released. In this ‘diverse scansion of temporality’,1 in this active re-membering (the seizing ‘hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (Benjamin 1973: 257) as opposed to the mere recalling) of traces and fragments, a new space in language and time is opened up, and historical moments are sundered to reveal heterotopic paths not taken. The absence of teleologies, this intense meditation on synchronicity, thus opposes the tyranny of linear time and blasts open the continuum of history to reveal moments, fragments, traces that can be re-captured and transformed into another history. The exiles or emigrants or expatriates Rushdie writes about require us to look into one particular diasporic development that has a direct bearing on the texts discussed in this chapter. The year 1963, the year the Beatles exploded on the world scene, may also be chosen as the watershed year in global migration. Demand for labour in Western Europe and Britain, and the collapse of the colonial empires of Britain, France and Holland, meant that millions of non-white migrants from the outposts of the Empire, as well as guest workers from Turkey, began to enter the European city on a scale unprecedented since the Moorish invasions. The contemporary European city, for instance, is now a very different demographic fact. It is no longer the centre out of which radiates imperial activity. European cities are no longer controlled by the logic of centre and periphery (the metaphor of the Empire). Instead, what we get, in Iain Chambers’s words, is a new kind of demographic redistribution ‘along the spatio-temporal-information axes of a world economy’ (Chambers 1994: 108). It is this awareness of the transnational nature of nation-states and the presence in them of degrees of difference that led Khachig Tölölyan, founding editor of the journal Diaspora, to maintain that struggles from the margins for the centre and for definitions of the ‘national’ subject are equally legitimate concerns for the constructions of identity or selfhood (1991). These embattled ethnicities in nation-states no longer construct their nationalisms through a homogeneous and synchronous imagining of the nation collectively reading its newspapers or responding to global events as a totality. The presence of diasporas marks the end of nation-states defined in terms of a community of speakers/thinkers that could be relied upon to arbitrate for the national good. In short, what is emerging is a condition of differential rationalities, differential readings of the nation and differential enjoyment of it. In Rushdie’s case the

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idea of nation as ‘enjoyment’ (and not primarily as an imagined community) found early expression in his foundational novel Midnight’s Children. To locate Rushdie’s take on diasporas one needs to begin with this text.

The moment of Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie entered the world of English fiction in 1981 with the publication of his best-known book, Midnight’s Children. As the exemplary ‘writerly’ text (Barthes 1975) the novel came with a radically different agenda – a work in which the realist and the fantastic will be conjoined through techniques of storytelling that would combine the methods of Laurence Sterne, Joyce and Marquez with, more importantly for Rushdie, the epic-fabulist styles of Indian writers, to create a magically realist text. Magic realism introduces the very Indian – Rushdie speaks of the book growing ‘concentrically out of Indian elements’ (Rushdie 1985: 9) – world of fantasy, an anti-logical world, into what may be called the magisterial discourse of realism. In a lecture delivered on his behalf by Harold Pinter titled ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ – Rushdie couldn’t deliver it himself as he was under the fatwa then – Rushdie referred to the novel as the form that rejected ‘totalized explanations’ of ‘the modern condition’ because the form was created to ‘discuss the fragmentation of truth’ (1991b: 422). In its ‘elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself’ (423), the novel, this ‘most freakish, hybrid and metamorphic of forms’ (425), expresses the new episteme of the postmodern condition. In pushing for a generic hybridity (a postmodern resistance to the classical bifurcation of East/West) Rushdie composes what may be referred to as a text which is also a theory about the interface of the postcolonial and the postmodern. In other words, the text may be theorized in both or either ways, and this kind of openness or resistance to the binary (‘It was so, it wasn’t so’, ‘Believe, don’t believe’ are not uncommon directives for the reader in Rushdie) is at the heart of what may be called Rushdie’s postcolonial poetic. Let me invoke a passage here from Midnight’s Children. In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I felt yesterday hanging in mid-air – just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! (1981: 25) Texts, one may argue, are as much theories about their own composition as anything else such as artistic representation. Midnight’s Children is a text that seems to be much more overtly aware of the theoretical status of the artistic object. At the heart of the theoretical enterprise is the crucial question of history as epistemology and as a form of true representation. As epistemology the questions raised are as follows: Who writes history? From whose point of view?

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Who is the subject of history? What is the nature of historical research? What are historical archives? Is history always linear? Is history primarily European and linked to the Enlightenment? Is the novel linked to this reading of linear history? Has history a teleology, an end, a design, whether Hegelian utopian or Marxist materialist? In other words, is there a grand narrative of history that gets repeated and in doing so constructs peoples and races by giving them historical legitimacy: Europe’s contribution to peoples without history? Could there be subjects without a history? Do we, then, have to create Enlightenment subjects, rational beings, before they could be given cultural legitimacy? Then, of course, there is the question of historical representation: the realist text was written in the shadow of historical principles, and often the novel has been one of our great sources for momentous historical events. But then come the demands from the margins for alternative histories – histories, for instance, of the subaltern variety, class histories of people without any ‘presence’ in the domain of documented histories. These demands lead to a re-theorization of the category of history; they lead to a postmodern claim for alternative, minor histories; they lead to the displacement of grand narratives by narratives that are contingent, narratives that are established within frames that require other forms of knowledge construction. For practical purposes these narratives now challenge the very foundation of a consensual democratic ethos in the sense that these narratives may in fact speak of world views that are incommensurable, that require different kinds of cultural know-how and that, in some cases, lead not to difference but to Lyotard’s differend, the presencing of such radically contingent moments and histories that require us to rethink the foundational rules of liberal dialogue to begin with. Without making too grand a claim, I would want to argue that to read Midnight’s Children is to think through these issues even as we read the text or, alternatively, to claim that the text embeds these issues in its aesthetic design. I begin at the end of the novel, with the final chapter entitled ‘Abracadabra’, a word which, here, is both the magical sound to conjure spirits, ‘a cabbalistic formula derived from the name of the supreme god of Basilidan gnostics, containing the number 365’ (442), and the sound of the wheels of a train as it chugs along railway lines. So at the end of his various journeys – journeys that, as we shall see, take him to many parts of the Indian subcontinent, from Kashmir to Agra to Bombay to Karachi to Rawalpindi, to Dacca (Bangladesh) to Delhi – we find the narrator Saleem Sinai returning to the city of his birth, the magical metropolis Bombay. He has with him his son Aadam and his friend Picture Singh, the ‘most charming man in the world’, meaning that he is not only immensely attractive but that he can charm more snakes than anyone else. Aadam, of course, is the second generation of the magical children, like Saleem but different, but like him a father’s son and yet not his father’s son: the ambiguous twists continue to the end. But when Saleem returns to this magical metropolis at the age of almost 31 (1978) the city was ‘my Bombay, but also not mine’ (435). The billboards had changed; the shop signs, too, had changed; the roads had changed; the past simply failed to reappear, much as he

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tried. Except for Chowpatty, a dirty strip of sand where vendors were heard selling their fried lentils (‘hot-channa-channa-hot’: zor garam, channa zor garam), modernization had hit this city in a big way. No longer connected to that old world (except for these fleeting sounds and smells), Saleem is ‘revived’ or brought back to ancient memories as he tastes (for he has a remarkable sense of smell and taste) a green chutney, green as grasshoppers, and follows his nose to the makers of this pickle: ‘Braganza Pickle; best in Bombay’ (439). Leaving Picture Singh (whose part of the story will now remain incomplete, to be filled in by the reader), he rushes to the Pickle Factory only to discover that the establishment is run by none other than his former ayah (babysitter-nurse) Miss Mary Pereira, she who using a ‘very melodramatic device . . . a kind of Bombaytalkie, B-movie notion’ (Rushdie 1985: 4), had changed history by swapping the babies so that Saleem Sinai was his father’s son and was not. And so, the day before his 31st (which would fall on 15 August, India’s independence day), he visits the factory and begins to manage the factory for Mary. So here, in the final few pages of the novel, the narrator Saleem Sinai speaks of his own special blends of pickle, he speaks of the ‘chutnification of history’: the pickling of time, its preservation and blending. Chapter headings now emerge, a pattern may be configured, as Special Formula No. 30 ‘Abracadabra’ corresponds to chapter 30 of the book. Like Chanel 7 or 5 (the seventh or fifth formula of a fragrance), the chapters are thirty blends, thirty jars of pickles, thirty chutnifications of history. The narrator is more explicit: he speaks of his book as an ‘autobiography’ (he doesn’t wish to hide it as fiction: he presents what we think is fiction as historical, albeit autobiographical, fact) composed in ‘words and pickles’ (442). In The Moor’s Last Sigh pickles are replaced by varieties of spices; and these, too, mixing and blending, become Indian metaphors of history. These 30 jars, ‘waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation’ (549), are summarized very quickly and presented with the dismissive ‘believe don’t believe’ take-it-or-leave-it attitude. But there remains an empty jar, the 31st, the chapter that is not written, the chapter that may never be written or the chapter that gets deferred to the end of time because the curious Prince Shahryar must never be told by Scheherazade that the book ever comes to an end. Or, again, is this the chapter of the grand epic tradition, encyclopaedic like no other, to which any number of narratives may be written? The – – Mahabharata was continuously expanded, its end came not because the plot comes to an end but because writers have exhausted themselves: ‘what is not here is nowhere to be found’, says the grand epic. Or, then, again, there is the simurg story about the thirty birds that haunts Rushdie (his first novel, Grimus, is an anagram of simurg).2 Is this the postcolonial metaphor? A metaphor also for diaspora? The pickled version of history – ‘to pickle is to give immortality’ (549) – gives shape and meaning – a form, to be precise (as Rushdie says) – to the ingredients of history. History gets written down or is encoded as a grand Indian conceit based on its cuisine, its smells, its tastes: ‘the intricacies of turmeric and cumin, the subtlety of fenugreek . . . cardamoms . . . garlic, garam masala, stick cinnamon,

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coriander, ginger . . . not to mention the flavourful contributions of the occasional speck of dirt’ (443–4). Indian history comes with the whiff of the subcontinent’s smell of urine, spices and cow dung. Recall traumatized Naipaul’s encounter with India in An Area of Darkness and his incapacity to read the land because he came with the analytical tools of instrumental reason. The smell of [Indian] history nauseated him; in Rushdie’s narrative the smell of history is the real truth behind India. Yet Rushdie’s extended conceit both as the 31 jars and as history’s chutnification do not come suddenly. Thirty-one years ago there was another jar, ‘a pickle-jar, emptied of lime casaundy, washed, boiled, purified – and now, refilled’ with a tiny ‘umbilical cord’ (123). But whose cord was it? Saleem’s or the other’s? Whose history indeed gets chutnified? And what his– – tory if all history, as the Indians say, is maya, an illusion, anyway? The umbilical cord is both severed and ambiguous, its author/authority/origin unknown. One empty jar remains. Thirty-first today, exclaims Saleem on 15 August (1978), but the jar must remain empty, the thirty birds do not find their thirtyfirst in heaven, for Simurg is in fact none other than the thirty themselves. The future cannot be preserved, but prophetic images of strife and communal butchery presage the religious riots of Bombay in 1992. It is an alternative vision of history, encased as well in an alternative aesthetic. And this aesthetic, it seems, is the aesthetic of the sublime, the aesthetic of boundlessness, of a history too large, too varied to be framed or contained in jars so that one jar will always remain empty; like the spire of the Hindu temple, the novel is like a crowded mountain, ‘it swarms with life, all forms of life . . . [it includes] as much of life as it can’ (Rushdie 1985: 10). It is also an aesthetic rendering of a history that has to be chutnified, mixed and preserved, a history of smells and of disbelieving. Not a history of certainties, and certainly not a history of redemption, but a history of mute silences, of bizarre coincidences as well as of irreconcilable differences. One needs a different conception of freedom, perhaps even of ethical responsibility, where one does not deny life even as one affirms the impossibility of any kind of historical totality. At his birth the prime minister had written to Saleem’s mother: ‘. . . Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own’ (232). To the question ‘In what sense?’ Saleem responds that he must answer in ‘adverbs and hyphens’. I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term ‘modes of connection’ composed of ‘dualistically-combined configurations’ of the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. This is why hyphens are necessary: actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world. (232) Since Padma, the first recipient of the text, its ideal intra-textual reader, remains bewildered, the narrator explains further the meanings of these modes. So ‘active-literal’ refers to Saleem’s action that literally, directly affected

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or altered the course of seminal historical events. He gives an example: he gave the language marchers their battle cry, ‘Danda lé ké maru ché’ (188). Passivemetaphorical is the mode that encompasses analogous connections: the infant state’s desire for quick growth and Saleem’s own equally quick physical growth – both father and son would drink copious amounts of milk (124). Passive-literal refers to those national events that directly affected the lives of Saleem and his family such as the freezing of his father’s assets by the nation-state or the explosion in the Walkeshwar Reserve that unleashed the cat invasion. Finally ‘active-metaphorical’ groups together those events in which things done by Saleem were mirrored in the macrocosm of public affairs so that his private life was symbolically at one with history. The mutilation of his middle finger and its consequences, for example, parallel similar confusions in the history of the nation. The last three happened in the MCC (the Midnight’s Children’s Conference), but the first, most significant mode passed them by. Yet the activemetaphorical is complicated by the fact that India itself is ‘quite imaginary’ (111) as we had been told: ‘a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream’ (111). And the nation, too, gets represented through the colours of its flag – saffron, white and green (116). The hyphens and the correlations raise the point I’ve made about the manner in which fiction becomes a theory about its own being. Rushdie’s fiction does it quite explicitly, as it invokes the value of the hyphen to write about ways in which disparate items are brought together. But the hyphen also marks the Indian nation-state, fragmented, hyphenated, where minorities (Muslims for instance) will become people of the border or will live quasi-diasporic lives, living here and there, living here and belonging elsewhere. So Emerald and Zulfikar establish homes in Pakistan and become fierce nationalists; The Brass Monkey, Saleem’s sister, becomes the siren of Pakistan, and Alia becomes a successful schoolteacher there. Amina and Ahmed Sinai also move there and die tragically during the Indo-Pakistan war. Only Saleem magically crosses the subcontinent, ends up in the Sundarbans and Dacca and thence to the Delhi magicians’ quarter from where he returns with Picture Singh to Bombay. Saleem alone returns; the realists don’t. India is for the magicians, not for the believers, as one might say. This is a story of magic plus realism, in line with the magic realism of a Gabriel Marquez. But it is a magic realism from the point of view of someone seeing the world as though through a peepshow of mysterious slides. It is a paean to our mongrel lives, to use a phrase Rushdie had used about another of his works; a counterfoil to the story of that other Aziz, a Dr Aziz scarred by the accusation of attempted rape made against him by Adela Quested in the dark womb-like caves of Marabar. These caves are emptied of their contents; except for the sound ‘boum’, there is nothing; there is no concept, no signified to which these sounds can be attached. They are empty signifiers, caves with sounds, but without meaning. In Midnight’s Children things remain vague or at least confusingly abundant, but the caves are never empty, the signifiers full of

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semantic possibilities, the text ready to be overwritten, indeed inviting complicity and correction by the reader, presented as the writerly ideal of Roland Barthes in front of our very eyes. Salman Rushdie clearly imagines the nation differently. In the passage from The Ground Beneath Her Feet we have already cited Rushdie celebrates ‘the nonbelongers’ and certainly the narrator Umeed Merchant feels that to not belong may well be the natural condition of humanity. So in the domain of art we reinvent the figure of the ‘tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask’ (Rushdie 1999: 73) (so many figures from Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnivalesque (1968)) to fulfil our needs because these figures are of the liminal, of the borders of culture, the unassimilable, forever on the margins, and so on. It is ‘the fate of migrants’, says Omar Khayyam Shakil, the narrator of Shame (1983), ‘to be stripped of history, to stand naked amongst the scorn of strangers’ (63). Shakil himself is a ‘translated’ man with roots in India (place of birth), Pakistan (post-partition Indian Muslim homeland) and England (where he ‘lives’), which is why his narrative about Pakistan is peppered with diasporic anxieties and diasporic semantics. For Pakistan stands for a certain kind of erasure of memory (its Indian past crystallized in the name Iskander Harappa, Alexander the Great vernacularized plus the site of ancient Indian civilization), a certain kind of forced rootedness, a misplaced hopefulness because the nation was ‘just insufficiently imagined’ (87). To write about Pakistan necessitates examining the narrator’s own diasporic condition in England so that he has to link one kind of shame (the shame of a nation, which is to be distinguished from guilt) with the shame of a diaspora when it fails to enact the past they have packed into ‘bundles and boxes’ (63). So, even as the story of Sufiya Zinobia proceeds, the memory of the Pakistani father in East London butchering his daughter for a sexual misdemeanour with a white boy (because of cultural sharam, ‘shame’) ‘haunts this book’ of Rushdie (116). In Rushdie’s art, the centre therefore shifts to the margins and it is through marginal figures – from Saleem Sinai and Omar Khayyam Shakil to Saladin Chamcha, the Moor Zogoiby, Umeed Merchant and Malik Solanka – that stories of those who do not belong are told. Take for instance the case of the Moor Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). His life is the ‘tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of the Many by One’ (408) but his life is also an allegory of the diaspora, and of the author, Rushdie, as well. For The Moor’s Last Sigh is his first major post-fatwa novel; it is written from a position of exile, from the loss of multiplicity in the wake of a fundamentalist ‘Oneness’, both religious and secular. The Moor’s tragedy is of course the tragedy of nations here and now, as in India, that most diverse and multifarious of all nations, threatened by a Hindutva of exclusiveness, and there and then, as in the case of the expulsion of the Moors of Spain. As it was then, so it is now. The choice of the space of the ‘then’ takes us back to the great tale of a Moor: Othello, the Moor of Venice. I wish to draw on Barbara Everett’s brilliant essay ‘ “Spanish” Othello: the making of Shakespeare’s Moor’ (1982) to make intertextual

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connections before returning to the here and now, the place one is at. Everett points out that in Shakespeare’s own lifetime the play was generally known as The Moor of Venice and not Othello. It would have also struck some contemporary spectators of the play that the names of a number of characters were Spanish not Venetian: Roderigo, Iago. It would also be clear to the audience that after one of the crucial battles against the Moors – the eleventh-century battle of Clavijo – the apostle James came to be known in Spain as ‘Santiago [Saint Iago] Matamoros, St James the Moor-killer’. Everett points out that every time ‘Iago’ is uttered by the Moor the audience would have recalled that ‘Santiago’s great role in Spain was as enemy to the invading Moor, who was figurehead there of the Moslem kingdom’ (103). After the eighth century (when the Moors began invading the Iberian Peninsula) Spain was a racially polyglot nation with Christians, Muslims and an economically powerful Jewish minority. However, in the wake of the Reconquista (‘reconquest’) as Catholic kingdoms fought the Moors to win back the Peninsula, Moors as well as Jews were considered aliens. By 1492 the Jews had been expelled, and in 1609 ‘all Moors, baptized and unbaptized’ (105) were, too. Many sought refuge in Protestant England, which in 1599 and 1601 issued two edicts specifically aimed at the ‘transportation of these refugees from the country’. The edicts declared: the Queen’s Majesty is discontented at the great number of negars and blackamoors which are crept into the realm since the troubles between her Highness and the King of Spain, and are fostered here to the annoyance of her own people, which want the relief consumed by these people. . . . (104) Shakespeare’s Othello, as Everett points out, begins with Iago and Roderigo, ‘two quasi-Spaniards’, showing considerable hatred and envy of the ‘Moor’. Their barely concealed racist tone reflects even more the ‘political climate of the times’ (107) and suggests contemporary English attitudes towards the Moor as barbarous, fierce, lustful and a threat to sexual decorum and control. With this there was also an implicit cross-over of the discourse of derision for the ‘Moor’ into a pre-existent discourse of anti-Semitism. For Shakespeare, then, the ‘Moor’ is more than just an ethnological category; he is in fact . . . a member of a more interesting and more permanent people: the race of the displaced and the dispossessed, of Time’s always-vulnerable wanderers; he is one of the strangers who do not belong where once they ruled and now have no claim to the ancient ‘royal siege’ except the lasting dignity or indignity of their misery. (106) It makes sense to examine Rushdie’s use of Shakespeare via the kinds of readings offered by Barbara Everett, for The Moor’s Last Sigh is about ‘Time’s always-vulnerable wanderers’ as well as about murders most foul. The ‘Moor’ and the

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‘Jew’ began to occupy the same space (we are all ‘jews’, in lower case, Lyotard had written [1990]) in the cultural imaginary but they also fought for the same commodity (pepper). The ‘Moor’ Zogoiby, part Spanish Jew (his ancestors left Spain for India in 1514), part Goanese-Christian, part perhaps, too, Muslim (given some inter-breeding among Jews and Moors in Spain), is the sign whose body presences différance in the nation-state. Rushdie’s novel begins with an escape and a conceit. The narrator is presented as a Luther figure nailing his ‘theses’ on the gates of Wittenberg. He rewrites Luther’s ‘Here I stand, I will no other, so help me God’ to read ‘Here I stand. Couldn’t’ve done it differently’ (1995: 3). Do we get here a post-fatwa stand by Rushdie, a concealed statement that a reformist Islam is urgently needed? Is this Rushdie’s hidden critique of Islam and modernity? Quite possibly, although this is going to be (after Shakespeare) ‘A Moor’s tale, complete with sound and fury’(4), located in the condition of diaspora. This condition is examined through its location in the worlds of the Goan Christian community and the Cochin/Travancore Kerala Jews whose ancestry is ‘Moorish’ or Spanish JudaeoIslamic. But for these two diasporas, the Goan and the Jewish, to have flourished for so long (around 2,000 years in the case of the Jewish) a decentred or a multiply centred nation-state was necessary. And it is this decentred idea of India (that has historically sustained diverse cultures) which is currently under threat. To underline it, Rushdie has to write a text that celebrates diaspora but also alludes to threats to it. He presents a family saga as a central template around which the history of India – its ironically presented European ‘discovery’ as the source of spice against its internal history as a ‘sub-condiment’ (not a ‘sub-continent’) of 30 jars of chutney with an as-yet-to-be-filled 31st jar (Midnight’s Children ) – as its ‘uncreated conscience’ (after James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus) is given voice. Like Scheherazade, the Moor writes down his life-story to amuse Vasco Miranda. Yet his first reader (Aoi Uë, ‘a miracle of vowels’) is frightened not by the narrator’s appearance or deeds but by his words: ‘She was frightened by my words, by what I set down on paper, by that daily, silent singing for my life’ (427). What frightens, beyond meaning, beyond narrative and story, is the materiality of the signifier, writing itself. It is this power of writing that brings us close to Rushdie as ‘text’, Rushdie as someone who circulates beyond the book with effects not related to its reading. Rushdie’s words are frightening because they come already read even by those who do not read them. Rushdie has become a signifier of something else, a signifier around which a number of binaries are played out: freedom of speech versus censorship, liberalism versus fundamentalism, textual multiplicity versus textual singularity; the one versus the many, free thought versus bigotry, open versus closed societies, universal law versus contingent law, contamination versus purity, diasporic difference versus assimilation, and many more. To think through these issues, and to advance my argument about the use of diaspora in Rushdie, I want to speak about a text that was forcibly centred even when, like everything else Rushdie has written, it is a totally decentred, highly magical postmodern text. The text is Salman Rushdie’s incendiary The Satanic Verses.

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The texts of The Satanic Verses Few works of fiction have been the subject of debates as intense as those that have surrounded The Satanic Verses since its publication in 1988. Books have now been written on the Rushdie affair, a film made on the author’s death (much-deserved, as it turns out in the film) by the Pakistani film industry, and Tehran for a considerable period re-emphasized Khomeini’s fatwa at any staged denunciation of the West. The author’s life, immediately following the fatwa, became a double exile in the company of his ‘protectors’ in the Welsh countryside of ‘unafraid lambs’, country houses, and farmers from whom he learned to ‘hide [his] face’ (Rushdie 1991a: 128). The cause of Rushdie’s second exile, of course, was a book about migrancy, dispossession, cultural hybridity and the absence of centres in diasporic lives. To give these themes an intertext, a frame, or a narrative template, they were hoisted on another moment in history when ‘newness’ entered the world, the moment of Islam and its messenger the Prophet Muhammad or ‘Mahound’ as Dante and Rushdie’s narrator, both ill-advisedly, called him. The entry of strange people into so many parts of the globe presents the older inhabitants with precisely the threat of the new, the threat from ‘ideas’ no longer commensurable with one’s own faced by desert peoples 1400 years ago. Yet the tale of ‘newness’ that Rushdie narrates is overlaid with the ideology of Indian Islam, a hybrid, contradictory phenomenon, that conjures strange dreams about the founding text and Prophet of that religion. Indian Islam, which Rushdie says has ‘always known the importance of secularism’ (2002: 232), thus has a polytheistic splinter in the side of its monotheism so that Islam’s severe monotheism is tempered by autochthonous gods, dervishes, the figure of the ascetic, and other borrowings from Hinduism where the intercession of female gods in any act of worship is not excluded outright. Moreover, this kind of ideological syncretism is truer still of Bombay, Rushdie’s magical metropolis, the city of his birth, the postcolonial city, the city built by the British that ‘isn’t India’ (Rushdie 1999: 49), the city that challenges in its own claims to modernity the erstwhile metropolises of London and Paris. What is true of Indian Islam, ‘this syncretic Indian Islamic context’ as Feroza Jussawalla has called it (1995: 90), is also true of Indian narrative forms and culture generally. The Aryans, the Moguls, the British have all been invaders, leaving their traces behind in a cultural space marked by a multiplicity of beliefs as the nation gradually reabsorbs multiplicity into a totality. Thus the central themes of The Satanic Verses – how ‘newness’ enters the world, how the many coexists with one, and why love remains the only organizing principle of our lives – get written in a hybrid discourse (true also of his other writings) that is borrowed from the Bombay film industry, the idioms of Hobson-Jobson (Rushdie 1991b: 81–3), – – the texts of a colonial English curriculum, the Kathasaritasagar, the vast Indian – – – epic tradition, the various Persian narratives known as qissa and dastan, notably the Persian tale of the Simurg from Farid-ud-din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds as well as popular narratives from a range of socio-linguistic registers. The Satanic Verses situates itself in the midst of these heterogeneous discourses. It is

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from the space of hybridity, of multiplicity, that many of the characters speak. Mimi Mamoulian, for instance, knows very well the meaning of the world as ‘pastiche: a “flattened” world’ (261), and the author’s own, very postmodern intervention makes this clearer still: Gibreel . . . has wished to remain, to a large degree, continuous – that is, joined to and arising from his past . . . whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, ‘false’? [Where Chamcha is therefore perceived as ‘evil’] Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established terminology, is to be considered ‘good’ by virtue of wishing to remain, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man. — But, and again but: this sounds, does it not, dangerously like an intentionalist fallacy? — Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, ‘pure’, – an utterly fantastic notion! – cannot, must not, suffice. (1988: 427) Rushdie begins by offering the usual binary between the continuous and the discontinuous, between tradition and modernity, between good and evil, only to undercut it through the intervention of the hybrid. Indeed, what this extended statement about the construction of the self indicates, in the context of the diaspora and margins, is that subjectivity is now formed through modes of translation and encoding because in the world today erstwhile distinctions ‘cannot, must not, suffice’. This last phrase, in fact, sums up the agenda of the book as a whole: distinctions made through established cultural epistemes (including the ubiquitous self–other distinction) will always fail. Yet, even as hybridity is celebrated, one gets the feeling that the disavowed leaves its traces behind because, as we shall see, The Satanic Verses itself failed to convince the diaspora that there is no such thing as an ‘untranslated man’: large sections of the diaspora wish to retain this nostalgic definition of the self and cling to ‘millenarian’ narratives of self-empowerment in which only the untranslated can recapture a lost harmony, a pristine sense of the past. This idea of the pristine past is often constructed around a ‘symbol of Authority’ that, viewed as ‘God, Father, Leader, Master’, as Nico Israel has put it (175), problematizes precisely the definitions of diaspora as a ‘process of continual, anxious becoming’ endorsed by Rushdie. Clearly the latter understanding of diaspora introduces the heterotopic into the utopian or the linear and produces precisely the heterogeneous, contradictory rendition of history which sits uncomfortably with the wish to recapture a lost, albeit hallowed place. The odd thing is that even as technology creates new and vibrant forms (post-Ravi Shankar music crossed with cyber religion for instance) it also reproduces so readily texts of the homeland which, in the diaspora, have a function different from the homeland in which they originated. In this respect, The Satanic Verses anticipates this contradiction which is embedded in what Ian Baucom has called ‘the riddle of postcolonial migrancy’ (200).

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If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant’s-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis . . . that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity. (Rushdie 1991b: 394) Rushdie goes on to state: The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, and songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. (394) The celebration of the hybrid, however, also leads to the endowing of fiction itself with what Gilroy has called ‘an absolute and non-negotiable privilege’ (Gilroy 1992: 190). The aesthetic order (where Rushdie locates The Satanic Verses) as somehow immune to a counter-attack through a non-aesthetic reading of the text is of course central to the Rushdie affair in the wake of Khomeini’s fatwa. The debates surrounding the relationship between aesthetic autonomy and blasphemy, and the location of meaning in the circulation of the text as much as in its content, are absolutely fundamental to any reading of this text. To these matters we shall return later.

The diasporic avant-garde The Satanic Verses as the story of ‘migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent’ (Appignanesi and Maitland 1989: 75) nevertheless drops the old realist modes of writing and embraces the European avant-garde to interrogate diasporic subject positions by constructing allegorical or counter-hegemonic subaltern renditions of the geopolitical imaginary of South Asians in Britain. At another level, though, it also keeps its realist nose sharply in focus. This is partly because the book is as much about South Asians in a racialized Britain as it is an avant-gardist break in the history of ‘English’ fiction. Rushdie, in fact, is quite explicit about this dual agenda: [The Satanic Verses] begins in a pyrotechnic high-surrealist vein and moves towards a much more emotional, inner writing. That process of putting away the magic noses and cloven hoofs is one the novel itself goes through: it tells itself, and by the end it doesn’t need the apparatus any more. (1991c: 120)

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At the risk of repetition, let me underline once again that The Satanic Verses is the text about migration, about the varieties of religious, sexual and social filiations of the diaspora. The work is the ‘millenarian’ routed through the space of travel (the aeroplane replaces the ship) and then problematically rooted in the new space of the diaspora. In this respect the text’s primary narrative is a tale of migrancy and the ambiguities of being an Indian (or Pakistani) in Britain. In the process, the work explores the disavowal of so many fundamental assumptions made necessary by the condition of diaspora. The narrative, in fact, begins with people who have already lost their faith in religion and who now have a truly diasporic relationship with India. As Rushdie has explained, these people are the new travellers across the planet; having lost their faith, they have to rethink what death means to the living and how desire can find expression when people cannot love. One of the key phrases that recurs deals with being born again (to be born again, you have to die, says Gibreel to Saladin), and the diasporic world is very much the world in which one undergoes a rebirthing. In the case of Gibreel and Saladin, the context in which this occurs combines the fantastic free-fall from an exploding plane (AI 420) from the height of Mount Everest, a full 29,002 feet,3 with the realist narrative of terrorism and hijacking. The combination of these two generic modes – the fabulist and the realist – is striking, since it forecloses the possibility of an unmediated realist reading of the text (which is what in fact happened): two people die and are immediately reborn as they were at the moment of their death. The rebirthing of Gibreel and Saladin, then, parallels, say, the rebirth of Amba as – – Shikhandin in the Mahabharata, the founding Indian text that is simultaneously diachronic and synchronic: it happened then, it happens now. One becomes someone else but keeps the earlier history/biography intact. The relationship between Rushdie’s writings and Indian epic tradition of generic mixing is a narrative we cannot go into here, but it is nevertheless important to refer to it, if only because it reminds us of the fictiveness of the text and its relationship to the ‘eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition’ (Rushdie – – – 1988: 70). Moreover, as Gibreel’s song ‘O, my shoes are Japanese’ (mera juta – – – hai japanı from the Raj Kapoor film Shri 420) shows, the dominant cultural form of modern India, the Bollywood film, the successor to the encyclopaedic pan-Indian epic tradition, constantly adapts itself to and indigenizes all global cultural forms, from Hollywood to Middle Eastern dance and music. Characters travel in spite of their travails; damaged homes proliferate. The ‘emigration’ of Salahuddin Chamchawala from Bombay has close parallels with Salman Rushdie’s own pattern of emigration. From the insertion of the well-known autobiographical ‘kipper story’ (the young Rushdie at Rugby [an English boarding school] was not allowed to get up from the dining table until he had finished his kipper, which he didn’t know how to eat!) to his own uneasy relationship with his father, there are striking parallels between Saladin and his creator. It is not Gibreel but Saladin who is reborn and who accepts the need for change: the nostalgia for the past (a house, one’s ancestral religion, and so on) is not something one can live by but something to which, in an act of both

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homage and acceptance of his father Changez Chamchawala, Saladin returns. The use of Rushdie’s own first name Salman (which in fact is his middle name: Ahmed Salman) for Salman the Persian, the man who transmits the message of Islam, implies a degree of authorial ideological investment in the text. For Salman the Persian is also diasporic and makes Islam a political as well as religious revolution staged by ‘water-carriers, immigrants and slaves’ (101). Even the radical Iranian cultural critic suppressed under the Shah’s regime, and for many the harbinger of Khomeini’s revolution, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923– 69), refers to one Salman-e Faresi (Salman the Persian) who ‘found refuge in Medina with the Muslims and played such an important role in the development of Islam’ (Al-e Ahmad 1982:16). This Salman-e Faresi may not have been the prophet’s contemporary, but the connection between Iran (through the figure of Salman) and the advent of Islam ironically underscores the strength of Iranian furor against Rushdie. In Al-e Ahmad’s reading of the Islamization of Iran, what is emphasized, perhaps too simplistically, is the idea of Islam being invited into Iran. Unlike earlier Western incursions, Islam, another foreign ideology to the land of the Zoroastrians, is not an invasion but a response to Iran’s own need to embrace the austere harmony of the ‘one’. It is through Saladin/Salman (Rushdie) that the new themes of diasporic interaction are explored. Saladin sees in the relics of Empire in the heart of London ‘attractively faded grandeur’. Gibreel, on his part, only sees a ‘wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past’. When asked about his favourite films, Saladin offers a cosmopolitan list: ‘Potemkin, Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador’ (439), whereas Gibreel (the larger-than-life Bombay film actor modelled on Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood cinema’s biggest star, and N. T. Rama Rao, a hero-god in countless mythological films turned politician) offers a list of successful commercial Hindi films: ‘Mother India, Mr. India, Shree Charsawbees: no Ray, no Mrinal Sen, no Aravindan, or Ghatak’ (440). The lists, the choices made, the implied discriminations, their respective negotiations with the idea of migrancy, all indicate the complex ways in which two diaspora discourses (the absolutist and the fluid) work. Gibreel, for his part, does not undergo mutation but remains locked in the worlds of memory and fantasy, worlds created as much out of ‘American B movies and . . . local “Bollywood” extravaganzas’ (Hamilton 1995–6: 93). Saladin is both here and elsewhere, and his return to the Motherland to be at his father’s deathbed is perhaps the more cogent symbol of the nomadic diasporic condition. Gibreel, on the other hand, acts out his actor’s fantasies and becomes the conduit through whom (in his imagination) the Prophet receives the – Qur’an.4 Blasphemy, therefore, falls not to the hybrid mutant but to the nostalgia-ridden Gibreel. In all this, two ideas – the idea of newness and that of love − keep cropping up. At the point of interaction where the old and the new come together – as is the case with the diaspora’s encounter with the vibrant politics of the metropolitan centre – new social meanings get constructed, especially in the domain of psycho-sexual politics. Thus the capacious Hind and not the bookish Muhammad effectively runs the Shaandaar Café: her great cooking is

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what improves the material condition of the family rather than Muhammad’s Virgilian rhetoric, which has no use value in Britain. Gender relations therefore get repositioned in the diaspora, and women begin to occupy a different, though not necessarily more equitable, space. (The manner in which a diasporic restaurant culture in Britain is actually based on wives as cooks is quite staggering.) In another world, the earlier world 1400 years back, in the world of Jahilia, however, it is Hind, the powerful wife of the patriarch Abu Simbel, who has to battle with another new idea: ‘What kind of an idea are you?’ (335) is the question asked of the Prophet. Yet the idea of the ‘new’ (the idea of the ‘post’ in any modernity) also has a tendency to get fossilized, which is why, as a heterogeneous, ‘unread’ text, The Satanic Verses has been appropriated, positively and negatively, towards both diasporic (hybrid) and essentialist ends. I will return to the latter in the context of Rushdie and the sacred. For the moment, I want to explore further the question of racial politics and diasporic identity.

Race, identity and Britishness The late 1960s saw the emergence of a new racism in Britain for which Enoch Powell was the best-known, but not the only, spokesperson. In what seemed like a remarkable reversal of old Euro-centric and imperialist readings of the black colonized as racially inferior, the new racists began to recast races on the model of linguistic difference. This ‘difference’, however, had to be anchored somewhere, and the easiest means of doing this was by stipulating that nations were racial enclaves marked by high levels of homogeneity. Thus a race had a nation to which it belonged. The British had their nation and belonged to an island off the coast of Europe, and so on. In the name of racial respect and racial equality, this version in fact gave repatriation theorists such as Enoch Powell a high level of respectability in that, it was argued, what Powell stood for was not racism but a nationalism that the immigrants themselves upheld. What the argument simplified was the history of imperialism itself and the massive displacement of races that had taken place in the name of Empire. Nowhere is this more marked than in the Indian, African and Chinese diasporas of the Empire. More importantly, however, the new racism was used to defend Britishness itself, to argue that multiculturalism was a travesty of the British way of life, which was now becoming extremely vulnerable. The only good immigrant was one that was totally assimilable, just as the only good gay or lesbian was someone who led a closet life. Writes Anna Marie Smith: Only the thin veneer of deracializing euphemisms has shifted over this period, with blatantly racist discourse on immigrations being recoded in discourse on criminality, inner-cities’ decay and unrest, anti-Western terrorism, and multiculturalism. Indeed, the fundamentally cultural definition of race in the new racism allows for this mobile relocation of the racial-national borders to any number of sociopolitical sites. (1994: 62)

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In The Satanic Verses, it is by way of the Sufyan family (Muhammad, the Bangladeshi schoolmaster with a weakness for European classics, his wife, Hind, and their daughters Mishal and Anahita) that we enter into changing demographic patterns and race relations in Britain, as well as see how homeland family norms negotiate the new gender politics of diasporas. The Sufyan family live in Brickhall Street, the old Jewish enclave of tailors and small-time shopkeepers. Now it is the street of Bangladeshi migrants or Packies/Pakis (‘brown Jews’ [Rushdie 1988: 300]) who are least equipped for metropolitan life. Thus, in Brickhall, synagogues and kosher food have given way to mosques and halal restaurants. Yet nothing is as simple as it seems in this world of the diaspora. The space of the Shaandaar Café B&B becomes the space of new labour relations between husband and wife but also new forms of sexuality. Mishal becomes pregnant by the second-generation diaspora Hanif Johnson, while Jumpy Joshi has sex with Pamela, even as her husband Saladin sleeps under the same roof. The diaspora here finally crumbles and falls apart not only because the pressures come from the newly acquired socio-sexual field of the participants in the diasporic drama but also because the drama has to contend with racist hooliganism as the diaspora becomes progressively an object of derision. It is through this brand of fascism that death finally comes to the diaspora. Both the café and the community centre are burned down, Hind, Muhammad, as well as Pamela, die, and suddenly there is no room for nostalgia, no room for the discourse of mysticism (469) that had sustained the discourses of the homeland. Instead, the imperative is to transform one’s memory into modes of political action because the world is far too ‘Real’ (469). It is at this point in the narrative that diasporic identities become complicated by the presence in Britain of people who have already gone through the diasporic experience in other parts of the world. The Bengali, Afro-Caribbean, East Indian Caribbean, East African Indian, Sikh, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and so on gesture towards new forms of diasporic awareness and coalitional politics. From the Africanist ideal of Dr Uhuru Simba to the multifaceted, decentred, simulative worlds of the Sufyan girls, Jumpy Joshi and Hanif Johnson, one now begins to see not one legitimation narrative of the diaspora but many. ‘The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hisss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means’, stutters S. S. Sisodia (343). When those who were instrumental in creating that history (as subject peoples on whose behest the Empire believed it was acting) are within the metropolitan centres of the Empire itself, the idea of Britishness is threatened. Both the challenge and the threat are summarized elegantly by Iain Chambers, who writes: It is the dispersal attendant on migrancy that disrupts and interrogates the overarching themes of modernity: the nations and its literature, language and sense of identity; the metropolis; the sense of centre; the sense of psychic and cultural homogeneity. In the recognition of the other, of radical alterity, lies the acknowledgement that we are no longer at the centre of the world. (1994: 23–4)

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Chambers’s ‘we’ here is British, but the definition that he gives of the British is very much an intermediate one. It is a definition on which the subjects of the centre – the British as an ethnic entity – also begin to find that subjectivity is ‘interactively’ constructed, on the move, so to speak. The cultural imperative that underlies Chambers’s move is that the diaspora now invades the centre and makes prior, essentialist definitions of nation-states based on notions of racial purity (Enoch Powell), a historical relic of imperialism itself. It is the privileged site of that imperialist history and its constructions of Britishness that get replayed in the doctrines of purity in postcolonial Britain. Yet, as I write, I think what is implicit in the Chambers thesis – the need for a radical pedagogy about ethnic identities – is precisely what needs underlining. How does one make decisive interventions in the curriculum so that Britishness itself is opened up for debate? It is the agenda of the agents who would transform the apparatuses of control through which the idea of the self is constructed that requires further examination. Like Hanif Kureishi, Rushdie speaks of a ‘post-diaspora community’ in Britain which now becomes a site from which a critique of Britishness itself (and the imperial relationship between the British and Indians that has a 300 yearlong history) is now being mounted. The migrant living here and elsewhere would find it difficult to fit into, say, Margaret Thatcher’s imperious definition of the Briton during the Falklands War. For diaspora ‘Britishness’ is not a pregiven, it is at once a statement of exclusion and a sign to be negotiated. To be British in a post-diaspora Britain is to be conscious of multiple heritages and peoples’ divergent or variable participation in the long history of Britain. For many, an easy, unproblematic re-insertion into a utopic or linear narrative of the British nation is impossible. In The Satanic Verses we get a strong affirmation of the undesirability of this version of linear history. We are therefore faced with ‘the possibility of two perspectives and two versions of Britishness’ (Chambers 1990: 27). One is Anglocentric, frequently conservative, backward-looking, and increasingly located in a frozen and largely stereotyped idea of the national, that is, English, culture. The other is ‘ex-centric’, open-ended, and multi-ethnic. The first is based on a homogeneous ‘unity’ in which history, tradition, and individual biographies and roles, including ethnic and sexual ones, are fundamentally fixed and ‘encrypted’ in the national epic, in the mere fact of being ‘English’. The other perspective suggests an overlapping network of histories and traditions, a heterogeneous complexity in which positions and identities, including those relating to the idea of the ‘citizen’, cannot be taken for granted and are not ‘interminably fixed but tend towards flux’ (Chambers 1990: 27). The peculiar irony of Rushdie’s own anti-racism rhetoric is that the circulation and reception of The Satanic Verses produced very different effects: the Muslim threat against Rushdie’s life was used by white supremacists to portray all Muslims as fundamentalists. As Rushdie himself has pointed out: ‘The idea that the National Front could use my name as a way of taunting Asians is so horrifying and obscene to my mind that I wanted to make it clear: that’s not

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my team, they’re not my supporters, they’re simply exploiting the situation to their own ends’ (1991b: 115). Conversely the uses made of Rushdie in defence of ‘Britishness’ imply a problematic incorporation of the name ‘Rushdie’ into British citizenry. The appropriation of Rushdie by British writers in the name of the autonomy of the aesthetic order again has a similar agenda. Rushdie, the politically correct defender of the diaspora, became the equally correct ‘British’ citizen under the protection of Scotland Yard and defended by Harold Pinter.

Diaspora, the sacred and Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses is one radical instance of diasporic recollection or rememoration. But it is also a text around which arguments about anti-modernity, the anti-secular and the place of essentialist, fixed dogma were raised. Although the fatwa against Rushdie is now over (in theory, at any rate, since an edict by a Grand Ayatollah cannot be revoked) and volumes have been written on what came to be known as the ‘Rushdie affair’, I wish to return to it to explore the relatively undertheorized links between diaspora and the sacred. The question we want to ask is: What, then, is the place of the sacred in diaspora as it emerges as a result of the Rushdie controversy? In diaspora the sacred is linked to a certain type of memorial reconstructions of prior (sacred) narratives. These reconstructions act as points de caption, nodal points, that both connect a displaced subject to his/her past and also give a sense of continuity. But there are critical questions that need to be raised, too: What exactly is the status of the past in diaspora? How is the past constructed as a moment the recollection of which redeems us from current crises? As we have seen, there was one type of re-invigoration of the past in the ‘old’ Indian diasporas. In these nineteenth-century diasporas, loss (of one’s connection with a continuous past) was recast in a narrative of ‘reverse millenarianism’. There was a golden age back then that we have forfeited through our banishment. Let us therefore imaginatively re-create that golden age which would bridge this huge chasm created because of our current bondage to the indenture system. The predominantly Hindu ‘old’ diaspora found a grand template in the myth of Rama and his banishment, but it could work only if the future could be re-projected on to the past, only if fulfilment could be rendered by memorially constructing a time when paradise had been found. The alternative to this millenarian ethos is a version of memoration in which the continuum of imperial history is blasted through a radical meditation on the conditions of migrancy and displacement. The recapitulation of one’s history leads to a confrontation with the narratives of a postcolonial world order. Where the old diaspora’s narrative of a golden age left behind was after all commensurate with, in this instance, British notions of racial exclusiveness (each race has its own home, its own past, its own ways of coming to terms with its past) the postcolonial diaspora attempts to penetrate the grand narrative of the nationstate itself, to reconfigure its own narratives in an independent, secular fashion.

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However, when interventions into secularity threaten an earlier memory, even the late-modern diaspora turns to versions of millenarian rememoration and retreats into an essentialist discourse, even with the foreknowledge that the past can no longer redeem. It is in this context that I would like to explore the intersection of the radical agenda of diasporas (as communities in a multicultural order) and the idea of the sacred. No reading of The Satanic Verses can be complete without considering the reception of the text in terms of the sacred. Religion is a key lived experience, arguably one that touches more than most, especially those forms of religion by which subjects define their identity. More directly, religion with its stress on life-worlds and alternative modes of self-expression, is seen by cultural theorists as essentially pre-modern and hence not a particularly useful critical practice (Viswanathan 1998). The difficulty in bringing religion back into culture lies in the enlightened state’s separation of the secular and the religious, where the latter is seen as a primarily personal affair, while the great passions of modernity are played out in the secular domain. Where once religion was a ‘knowledge-producing-activity’ and very much in the vanguard of social and political change, it is now a transcendental absolute with little value beyond serving, in the public sphere, the needs of the poor through meals on wheels and homes of shelter. But religion when transformed into what may be called a ‘magisterial narrative’ (after Erickson) can no longer act if the controlling ethos of the state is liberal. Writes Wendy Steiner in an elegant chapter titled ‘Fetish or Fatwa?’: ‘The ideas of a fundamentalist are exclusionary and performative, i.e., valid only when turned into actions; an article of faith is not a mere topic of discussion to the believer’ (1995: 123). As an ‘agential’ or performative form, then, the sacred, in this instance, refuses to accept the aesthetic autonomy of the text and connects the narrator’s voice unproblematically with that of the author. The defence of Rushdie’s book – a defence mounted on his behalf by the world literati – stresses that it is ‘art and not theology’ (Steiner 119), emphasizing its non-negotiable relative autonomy. However, Rushdie himself in his celebrated 1984 essay primarily on British films about India (‘Outside the Whale’) had insisted on the interconnection between art and the social order (1991b: 87–101). Later, though, and especially after the furor over The Satanic Verses, Rushdie seems to have shifted a little, speaking less about the sociology of the text and a little more about the distinctively different disciplinary category occupied by works of art (1991b: 393–414). The secular defence of art which presupposes the ‘freedom to question orthodoxies and hence to give offense’ (Steiner 121), however, sits uncomfortably with the felt lifeworlds of people of the diaspora. Agitated, unhappy, sometimes traumatized lives even when celebrating the artistic achievements of a Naipaul or a Rushdie feel uneasy when their worlds are critically exposed to readers with little sympathy for their plight. What is this hallowed status of the aesthetic order if its defence makes for even greater wretchedness within diaspora? The liberal nation-state, of course, reads a diaspora’s panic retreat into its own essentialisms as symptoms of its inherent illiberality, its incapacity to understand the

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values of a civic society, indeed its barbarism. In the minds of the Conservative Right a feeling of moral righteousness, the ‘I told you so’ attitude, re-emerges. Curiously, then, Rushdie, the defender of hybridity and rootlessness, Rushdie whose art was possible precisely because of the in-between penumbric world he occupied, becomes the symbol of a secular democracy threatened by medieval, pre-Renaissance fanaticism. If I return to the controversy even when the terrain has had a thorough going over already, it is because the controversy has special resonance in our own uneasy post-9/11 world where the non-negotiable primacy of modernity itself is under severe strain. Now, here comes the difficult part of the presentation in the context of The Satanic Verses as a text with quite specific effects; indeed, Plato’s warning in the Phaedrus is remarkably prescient: ‘once a thing is committed to writing it circulates equally among those who understand the subject and those who have no business with it; a writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers’ (Plato 1973: 275e). The British Muslim response to The Satanic Verses was not through the narratives of hybridity nor through an interventionist politics that would use Rushdie’s book to point out the massive contradictions between the diaspora and the ideology of ‘Britishness’; rather, it was through a reappropriation of the myths of totality, of millenarianism (the survival mechanism of the old diaspora), and through an Islamic Middle Eastern reading where, in Daniel Pipes’s words, ‘the written word must describe truth; storytelling in the bazaar is one thing, but a published and bound book is quite another’ (quoted in Erickson 1998: 131). In other words, the Muslim response was mounted not through a constantly revalidating and contingent subjectivity in medias res nor on a re-theorizing of the aesthetic in the diaspora but on a resistance based on the discourse of an essentially pre-diasporic mode of thinking. In this way The Satanic Verses as an intervention in the project of modernity faced modernity itself as an unnecessary formation in diasporic culture. Clearly, the Bradford Muslims, one of whom (the prominent member of the Bradford Council of Mosques, Shabbir Akhtar) declared that it would be apostasy to allow Islam to compromise ‘its internal temper of militant wrath’ (Steiner 1995: 124), cannot be both modern (demanding the separation of church and state) and anti-modern (expecting all religions, including Christianity, to be forever militant), but such indeed is the complex/contradictory narrative that came to be articulated. Thus what we get is the new, late-modern diaspora trying to cling to totalities, to the unreal completeness of the earlier, older diaspora where, even for a Naipaul, there was never an unproblematic totality to aspire to in the first instance. The old diaspora, in spite of its ideologies of totality, could not have responded to The Satanic Verses with the same sense of unqualified rejection. After all, the fatwa against Rushdie originated in the diaspora – in Bradford – and not in Iran. From the borders, from the interstices of existence, from the liminal, the diasporic subject uses, in Rukmini Nair’s and Rimli Bhattacharya’s words, fragments of religious faith . . . [to] ‘shore’ up his existence, give him much needed stability in a hostile environment. When that stability is blown

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to bits by an author as well ensconced and integrated as Rushdie, panic results. The neurosis of nemesis replaces the certainties of nostalgia. (1990: 28–9) One may disagree with Nair’s and Bhattacharya’s use of ‘certainties’, and perhaps even reverse the final sentence to read ‘the certainties of nostalgia embalm the neurosis of nemesis’, but the point is valid. What is missing from diasporic theory is a theory of the sacred based not on the idea of the sacred as a pathological instance of the secular, in itself defined along purely modernist lines, but as a point from which interventions can take place. In short, as Al-e Ahmad pointed out, the sacred is a source of metaphors of empowerment easily available for ethnic mobilization. In all our debates about the diaspora, the sacred has been missing, which is why The Satanic Verses as text and reception is so valuable. For what the text has done, by dint of its very title, is to foreground something highly contentious in Islam and in Islamic definitions of the sacred. Racialized politics meets its sacralized Other here as the title horrifies. We need to pause, pull ourselves back from cultural theory and enter into the theologically derived field of textual exegesis. I wish to draw on John Erickson’s fine chapter, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses’ (Erickson: 129–60), to make these points. – The ‘satanic verses’ are reputed to have followed verses 19–20 of Surah 53 – – – (‘The Star’) of the Qur’an: ‘Have you thought of Al-L at and Al -‘Uzza, and on – Manat, the third other?’ (Koran 1999: 372). The reputedly surviving ‘satanic verses’ that follow read: ‘They are the exalted Birds/And their intercession is desired indeed’ (Erickson 140). In The Satanic Verses the ‘satanic verses’ are ambiguously located both in the call for recitation from the Archangel Gibreel and in Mahound’s own desire to accommodate, for political reasons, the pagan – – – goddesses (Lat, ‘Uzza and Manat) of pre-Islamic Arabia. The larger narrative structure in which all this occurs is of course the dream of Gibreel Farishta in which Farishta (a little too cleverly) takes on the persona of the archangel himself. The verses then would have been used to persuade the Grandee Abu Simbel to accept Allah as a supreme God who is not averse to accommodating earlier pagan belief systems. In The Satanic Verses Mahound wrestles with Gibreel (through whose mind this aberration had entered his thoughts) and declares that these ‘foul verses’ were the work of the ‘Devil’, of ‘Shaitan’ (Rushdie 1988: – 123). The authorized text of the Qur’an now reads: Have you thought on Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzza, and on Manat, the third other? Are you to have the sons, and He the daughters? This is indeed an unfair distinction! They are but names which you and your fathers have invented: God has vested no authority in them. The unbelievers follow but vain conjectures and the whims of their own souls, although the guidance of their Lord has long since come to them. (Koran 1999: 372)

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The ‘satanic verses’ do not exist here; they are simply part of an orientalist fantasy aimed at discrediting the Prophet of Islam. Beyond the heretical implications embedded in The Satanic Verses, it was the latter, the way in which the text plays to the discourses of orientalism, which hurt Muslim readers most. For the phrase itself (‘the satanic verses’) does not exist in Islamic discourses; nor is there any notion of any uncertainty on the part of the Prophet here, and certainly no suggestion that ‘Muhammad’s unconscious desire is the source of the verses imputed to the Devil’ (Erickson 141). Rushdie’s book – its title especially – – was therefore read as implying the Qur’an itself as being ‘satanic’ or the work of the Devil. This, of course, is a complete affront to a great religion. Erickson refers to this as a ‘monumental misunderstanding leading to the condemnation of the author’ (141). Erickson, in largely literary terms, however, sees the misunderstanding as a failure by these Muslim readers to understand the nature of Rushdie’s ‘oppositional discourse’, as it pits itself against an Islamic ‘magisterial discourse of exclusion’ (142). Erickson is correct in seeing the response as an epistemic struggle between multiplicity and exclusiveness, the sort of struggle already foreshadowed, had the Christian Right taken it on, in Midnight’s Children where Christ seems to have escaped his Roman persecutors and ends up in Kashmir: ‘I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir . . . you should’ve seen that Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners’(17). I would want to argue, though, that Rushdie reinflects this ‘opposition’ in slightly different terms, giving the two discourses a meaning that may be located in a larger definition of the sacred. What constitutes ‘true recitation’? Is the sacred to be defined only in terms of the imperative of the ‘true recitation’ from which other ‘verses are banished’ (Rushdie 1988: 124)? Is the sacred to be located in beings who are ‘perfect’, beings that do not waver, who do not relapse into errors? Or is it something else altogether different? At the end of the ‘Mahound’ section of the novel we get a short passage written initially from the point of view of Gibreel Farishta, the mongrelized subject of diaspora, and then from that of the narrator. For Mahound the triumph of the religion of ‘submission’ marks the ‘new beginning of Time’, a new birth, but one which in Baal’s valedictory ode is also ‘One full of fear. / An idea that runs away’ (126). For Gibreel there is no escape from – – – the three goddesses – Lat, ‘Uzza, Manat – as they wreak another kind of vengeance on him, the vengeance of the ‘Many’. He cannot explain them away as the ideas of Satan (‘he has no devil to repudiate’), he cannot ‘wish them away’; they are there forever disturbing the ‘true recitation’, forever suggesting that newness comes into the world already contaminated, never as the absolute but something already in the process of change, the condition indeed of diaspora. ‘The Satanic Verses’, wrote Rushdie a little later, ‘is for change-by-fusion, changeby-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel lives’ (1991b: 394). To emphasize this, to find how Rushdie reads the sacred and how the unified discourse of the sacred is used by the diaspora to define a lost purity from within the hybrid, the hyphen, is not to say that The Satanic Verses is best-read

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along these lines. What I am doing is selectively using The Satanic Verses to underline the two inherently oppositional narratives of diaspora: the hyphen and the total, the fracture and the whole. Rushdie himself suggestively titled one of his post-fatwa talks ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’(1991b: 415–29). Discussing literature (especially the novel) and religion Rushdie positions them in a condition of perennial ‘dispute’ because the novel offers an aesthetic based on the ‘idea of inconstancy, metamorphosis, or . . . “perpetual revolution” ’(418). The form releases us from a religious, absolutist paralysis of the ‘sacred’ but at the same time does not disallow ‘sympathetic portrait of a devout believer’ (417). The novel form offers a ‘secular definition of transcendence’: to kill it, as Carlos Fuentes said, is tantamount to killing society (420). The novel by its very dialogism (after Bakhtin), the ‘form created to discuss fragmentation of truth’, rejects ‘totalized explanations’ (422). Because it has no rules (an ‘uncompleted genre’, as Bakhtin again called it), it challenges ‘sacralized absolutes’ (423). Rushdie is not presenting literature (or the novel) or even the artistic imagination as ‘sacred’ against the sacredness of religion (or any other belief, be it secular or religious); rather he offers the form as one that uncovers best the dilemma of the postmodern world, of which diaspora (or migrancy) is a key component. So in a sense diaspora may be rendered either as a quasi-religious transcendental absolute (as a ‘unitary language’) or as historical inquiry aware of the material processes that brought it into being. It is the latter reading which, with the full force of the ‘secret identity of writer and reader’ the novel brings into being and which is the form’s ‘greatest and most subversive gift’ (426). The Satanic Verses, therefore, takes us back to two kinds of diasporic narratives: the narrative of the hyphen which presences the boundary where the politics of epistemic violence and a self-conscious re-definition of the project of modernity are located; and the narrative of the ‘sacred’ which diasporic communities construct as a defence mechanism or as a means of connecting the impossible world of the here-and-now with the lost, ideal world of the there-and-then. The latter narrative created a fixed point of origin when none existed because the discourse of the sacred refuses to be pushed to the liminal, to the boundary. It wants to totalize by centring all boundaries: the many and the one cease to be in dispute, for the former ‘submits’ to the latter. Religion in the diaspora – and my point is that the Rushdie affair was primarily a diasporic affair – has surplus value of a different order; its defence (periodically) redefines the nature of the diaspora itself. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie, in fact, connects the moment of newness itself with the diasporic performance in the sense that the Prophet’s intervention into the staid politics and religion of Jahilia is made possible only through people who are always on the margins of society, ‘water-carrier immigrant slave’ (104). The sacred is thus a means of radical self-empowerment, especially for those who work under the tyranny of the merchant classes of the Arab world. In that sacred discourse, the language, however, was not of the many, of the hybrid, but of the one. The radical, in other words, was not the idea of multiple narratives and contingency or coalitional politics, it was not the affirmation of the hyphen, but the starkness of the total, of the one:

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Why do I fear Mahound? [thinks the Grandee of Jahilia Abu Simbel.] For that: one one one, his terrifying singularity. Whereas I am always divided, always two or three or fifteen. . . . This is the world into which Mahound has brought his message; one one one. Amid such multiplicity, it sounds like a dangerous word. (Rushdie 1988: 102–3) The radical one, however, also carried a dangerous principle of female exclusion. Where the many had always found space for female goddesses, the Prophet finally excludes them from the position of divine intermediaries, though not before toying with the idea of their symbolic incorporation in the ‘new’: ‘Messenger, what are you saying? Lat, Manat, Uzza – they’re all females! For pity’s sake! Are we to have goddesses now? Those old cranes, herons, hags?’ (107) In the deserts of Arabia and at a particular historical moment, the radical, the new, could be conceived of only as an austere unity around the mathematical one. In the version of radical alterity that defines the modern diaspora, it is the many that must now splinter the impregnable fortresses of the one. This is the monumental irony of the debates around the book. The trouble is that the nation-state has never acknowledged the diasporic contribution to modernity, always reading diasporas (especially those of colour) as the ‘one’, always regarding them as a dangerous presence in the West, the monstrous ‘devil/scapegoat of Western society’ (Erickson 147). At the height of the controversy surrounding the burning of the book, the British minister responsible for race relations, John Patten, issued a press release entitled ‘On Being British’ (18 July 1989), in which the ideology of the one is used to berate the excesses of another ideology of oneness. It can be seen that race relations in Britain itself produced a desire to return to the security of the past: both whites and Muslims in Britain (and indeed everywhere after 9/11) return to their own essentialisms in moments of (perceived) crisis. Have the efforts of those who have struggled for a multiply centred nation-state therefore collapsed because the state itself created an environment in which a historical moment (that of the Prophet) would be de-historicized, reshaped, and used as a defence of the diaspora by the diaspora itself? Does hegemony always suppress difference? Or does it entertain and even encourage difference provided that it is a ‘difference’ that can be footnoted adequately in the grand history of Empire, which Sir Ernest Barker once referred to as a ‘mission of culture – and of something higher of culture?’ (quoted in Asad 1993: 250). When the hegemonic power loses its clarity of vision in terms of its own definition of unity, then a crisis erupts as the authentication of social identities becomes urgent. And in this quest for identity legitimation is hybridity the desirable aim or a fact of life? Does the sacred reject the hybrid? Is the sacred point of view homogeneous to begin with?

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The debates surrounding identity, the aesthetic order, the diaspora and the sacred reached a point of extreme dissonance once Khomeini invoked the fatwa against Rushdie. What the debates also underlined, in the general context of the relationship between diasporas and the nation-state, is that often the ground rules that govern the nation itself may not be applied uncritically to inhabitants who fashion themselves in ways that are not identical with those of the majority of citizens of the state. In ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ Rushdie referred to dialogues that may ‘become impossible’ (1991b: 420). He had in mind in particular a conflict between the ‘primacy of language versus the primacy of economics’. We may translate these terms as a conflict between the materialists and the humanists, and this dispute cannot be resolved except by staging the dispute itself in the form of art (here the novel). Rushdie did, however, understand the implacable nature of disputes when it came to transcendental matters, matters primarily related to the sacred. I want to push the discourses of the Rushdie affair further (and towards a theoretical conclusion) by suggestively re-defining it in terms of what Jean-François Lyotard has called the differend.

The Rushdie affair and oppositional discourses The Rushdie affair draws us to a case in which definitions of the aesthetic and the sacred are so opposed to one another that there is no equitable resolution of the differences. Indeed, I would be even more forthright. The Satanic Verses generated a number of discourses that quite simply are incommensurable with each other on any count. If one were to use Lyotard’s legal terminology, we have a case of litigation in which there are no ground rules acceptable to all the parties concerned. In the aesthetic domain, The Satanic Verses bears witness to differends by finding idioms for them or, in the words of Pinaki Chakravorty (1995: 2214), ‘by underscoring the different conceptions of authorial intention assumed by a “multivoiced” literary novel and by the “univocal” legal society that condemns it’. Yet in the political domain the reaction to the text has been articulated through conflicting discourses that cannot lead to equitable resolution because the discourses presuppose rules of judgement that are totally at variance with each other. There is not an effective law that could accommodate these two competing positions because there is nothing in law that relates, with equal detachment and validity, to both. It is here that the Rushdie affair itself becomes modernity’s test case for the differend, and one, I would argue, that is more interesting than other literary debates such as those over Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Lolita or Power without Glory. To pursue the differend here – and given that the affair itself now looks a little dated – I will limit myself to a handful of statements made both for and against Rushdie. The Satanic Verses had a dual audience: English readers in the West and people from the Indian subcontinent, whether in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh or the 12-million-strong ‘Indian’ diaspora overseas. The fantasies recounted in the book are those of people who are Indian (especially Bombaywallahs), and

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much of the humour in the book is also very distinctively Indian, as are innumerable allusions that are readily accessible only to the ideal Indian reader. Rushdie’s Islam, too, is Indian Islam with its mixture of strong Hindu elements. Not surprisingly, among non-white readers the book has been discussed most intensely by British Asians (perhaps more passionately by British Muslims) and by Indians in India. In Pakistan and in Bangladesh, the critical reception has not been as great. For Indian Muslims its publication could not have come at a worse time. Already on the defensive in the wake of Hindu revivalism, the last thing the Muslims in India wanted to see was a book that exploded (or attempted to explode) Islam’s non-negotiable position about Muhammad and the text of archangel Gibreel (Gabriel’s) revelation. As the Persian saying goes, – – – – – – – khuda dı vana basad / Ba Muhammad ho´syar (‘Take liberties with Allah, but Ba — . be careful with Muhammad’) (Naqvi 1993: 179). Yet the Indian audience must have been of special significance to Rushdie because the first review of the book, by Madhu Jain (even before the book was launched in Britain), in the form of an interview with the author, appeared in India Today on 15 September 1988. This was followed immediately by another interview, with Shrabani Basu in Sunday (18–24 September). The India Today issue also carried excerpts from the Mahound section of the book, clearly with the author’s permission. The cynic could argue that this was a calculated risk by both Rushdie and Viking/ Penguin, his publishers, and was aimed at creating vigorous but critical debates among the Indian intelligentsia. However, politicians, too, read the review, and the Muslim Opposition Member of Parliament Syed Shahabuddin, eager to fill the Muslim leadership vacuum in India, immediately asked the Government of India to ban the book. Whether it was out of political expediency (the Muslim vote bank in India is huge) or out of a genuine worry that the book was indeed blasphemous, one does not know, but the book was banned within a month of the publication of Madhu Jain’s review. Because the book was not officially launched until 26 September, it is unlikely that many people had seen the book before it was banned in India. In fact, the excerpts published in India Today were probably the only sections of the book that people had read. In defending ‘Islam’ from a perceived threat and in condemning Rushdie, Shahabuddin played into the hands of the Hindu fundamentalists, for whom his ire confirmed Islam’s perceived (and erroneous) inflexibility and totally closed world view. In this version, Shahabuddin made a religiously correct statement but a politically naïve one. Let us explore the case a bit more. Shahabuddin’s essay appeared in The Times of India on 13 October 1988. It is important to realize that by 1988 the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had become an extremely powerful political party with strong grassroots support, especially in North India. The Ayodhya affair had reached a point of no return; and, looking back, one can see that the destruction of the mosque was simply a matter of time. I invoke Ayodhya here because what Shahabuddin is really speaking about is the feeling of the average Muslim in India who is now being told about this unpardonable affront to the Prophet on the part of a renegade Muslim. This information was not available to the

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average Indian Muslim before Shahabuddin politicized Rushdie. In the same essay, Shahabuddin then becomes a defender of the many avatars, rishis (‘our – religious personalities’), for which the Qur’an has no place at all. In making this naïve political remark, he in fact begins to speak precisely like the devil who can entertain a multiplicity of gods in the pantheon for the sake of civic harmony. In short, Shahabuddin speaks less like a Muslim and more like Rushdie at this point and fails to appease precisely the electorate he is in most need to convince – the vast Hindu electorate. This kind of counter-reading is possible because even Shahabuddin’s non-fictional prose has another agenda: to speak of national harmony, even as he invokes a fundamental fact of Indian life, which is that there is precious little intellectual dialogue between Hindus and Muslims in India precisely because Islam cannot countenance idolatry. The Hindu, on the other hand, cannot live without it. As an instance of the differend at play, Shahabuddin’s rhetoric exposes the differend within India, and the need, in that country, too, to discover other means by which dialogue can take place. There are, then, three levels (and sub-texts) at which Shahabuddin operates. At the level of the Islamic defender of the faith, the claim is a simple one of Rushdie giving offence to Muslims who revere the Prophet as the perfect man and whose name the devout Muslim chants five times a day. The connection between Mahound and the Prophet is made explicitly in The Satanic Verses, which, of course, suggests that the book was written to offend. The second text of Shahabuddin is different. It is based on Indian legal codes that explicitly state (Article 295A of the Indian Penal Code) that offence to anyone’s religion in India is punishable by fine and/or imprisonment (not by death, let us add). Shahabuddin here invokes a variant of a law that exists, in different forms, in the West. In this instance, it is a case of litigation that can be mounted and/or defended successfully. However, it is the third text of Shahabuddin, the use of the affair to underline Islam’s own respect for other religions (even those that are not religions of the Book and condemned in the – Qur’an), that is interesting. The Satanic Verses thus becomes a means by which Indian Islam distances itself from one of the fundamental characteristics of Islam (that the Hindu is essentially a Kafir). In 1989 this was an important move on the part of thinking Muslims in India who saw Hindu fundamentalism as their greatest threat. How to appease the Hindu? How to emphasize that Islam never condoned the destruction of temples? How to use The Satanic Verses to become a defender not only of Islam but also of the multitude of religions within India? Indeed, how to be another Rushdie and yet uncompromisingly anti-Rushdie? These are the texts that have emerged from the debates thus far, as they touch on Indian social life and political life. And the strategy backfired. The vernacular press did not support Shahabuddin, and Rajiv Gandhi’s banning of the novel was seen as another act of appeasement of the Muslims not long after the Shah Bano case, in which Muslim Sharia laws were allowed to override Indian secular law. In Britain, where the protest began with the Islamic Foundation in Leicester’s director Faiyazuddin Ahmad and where Muslims did read the book closely, the protests were directed not so much against the author

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as against his publisher, Viking/Penguin Books, which was asked to withdraw the book and pay compensation to the Muslim community for sacrilege. It was also in Britain that pan-Islamic support was mustered and, finally, if we are to believe one version of the events, a request made to Khomeini to act on behalf of all aggrieved Muslims. The request, however, seems to have been anticipated in remarks made by a number of British Muslims, one of whom, M. H. Faruqi, in fact, wrote, ‘[p]erhaps it would be more salutary if the author is allowed to enter into Islamic jurisdiction and prosecuted under relevant law’ (quoted in Appignanesi and Maitland 1989: 61). It hardly needs to be added that this ‘relevant law’ condemns the offenders of Islam to death. Two points to Rushdie, two points to Islam, one to Hinduism (unwittingly). It is in the context of these debates that one would like to read Rushdie’s most important defence, which was published on 22 January 1989. It is an interesting defence because it is straight out of the project of modernity. The key to Rushdie’s argument is to be found in his carefully written sentences against what he sees as the essentialist Islam of the ‘tribe of clerics’, a ‘contemporary Thought Police’. The ‘Thought Police’ have established the ground rules for the discussion of Islam, not Islam itself. Rushdie writes: They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelations into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. (quoted in Appignanesi and Maitland 1989: 74–5) These are perfectly reasonable arguments, and not at all unusual among liberal intellectuals in the West or, for that matter, in other parts of the world as well. However, in presenting the argument in these terms, Rushdie implicitly accepts that his own work is a critique of Islam and, furthermore, assumes, against the evidence, that any religion can survive the kind of historicization that he has in mind. Since the spheres of religion and the state are not at all clearly demarcated in Islam, Rushdie’s case makes sense only if the two spheres indeed were separate. The choice for civilization, as Rushdie argues, is simple: one has to choose between Enlightenment and barbarism. However, is the choice so straightforward that one can state quite simply: ‘It is time for us to choose?’ Choose what? A secular sphere in which the laws of blasphemy do not apply? At one level diasporic ideology, as we have argued, resists the historical in favour of the mystical and the universal. No matter how powerfully the argument is presented, it cuts no ice, even with British Muslims, as may be seen from Michael Foot’s elegant defence of Rushdie. Foot’s larger target is Dr Shabbir Akhtar’s defence of the burning of the book in Bradford: ‘Any faith which compromises its internal temper of militant wrath is destined for the dustbin of history, for it can no longer preserve its faithful heritage in the face of

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corrosive influences,’ wrote Akhtar (Agenda, 27 February 1989; quoted in Foot 1989: 243). The point that Akhtar misses, and which we have made already in different form, is that if all religions were similarly militant against each other, especially in those nation-states in which one of the religious groups has been defined traditionally as the outsider, we would all be in a dreadful mess. What is there in Islam that needs the temper of militancy and what is the political and social payoff of underlining this militancy? Foot’s counter-argument is that the retreat from militancy has been Christianity’s new-found strength, an argument with which Akhtar would not agree, or refuses to see. Clearly, the force of the argument (and Foot scores strongly against Akhtar here) is not at issue. What is at issue is whether Foot (and Rushdie) can see Akhtar’s argument. Millions of Muslims can, just as many Westerners cannot. Two points to Rushdie here, two to Islam. We can, of course, go through any number of defences of Rushdie. One, however, that is of some importance is Carlos Fuentes’ essay ‘Words Apart’ (1989), which appeared in the Guardian on 24 February 1989, a little over a week after the proclamation of the fatwa. Fuentes invokes Mikhail Bakhtin to make the case that the novel is the form of modernity, in which a multiplicity of languages and voices can expose the folly of a world view that locks itself into meaning. Such a world view – where ‘reality is dogmatically defined’ – is that of the Ayatollahs of this world. For them, the source of all meaning is a closed sacred text that allows for no disagreement. Fuentes then goes on to counterpoint absolute truth against the idea of constantly searching for the truth. He affirms Luis Buñuel’s positions: ‘I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth’ (Fuentes 1989: 246). The statement exaggerates, in a surrealist sort of a way, but the point comes across clearly. It is this position that is reversed for those who have condemned Rushdie. They would gladly give their lives away for those who claim to have found the truth and would murder unbelievers, those incapable of living with absolutes. We can cite many more instances of the debates surrounding the Rushdie affair, but the lines of the differend return to a simple opposition. Rushdie views the case as one in which justice can be meted out provided all parties concerned can talk about the issues, but within an Enlightenment framework in which the aesthetic object has a special place. As the affair dragged on, Rushdie began to repeat the aesthetic argument. The book is fiction, it is literature, the ‘highest of arts’ (Rushdie 1999b: 29), and therefore not subject to absolutely realist readings. In both collections of his critical essays (1991b and 2002) this position is extensively and monotonously reprised.

Rushdie and diasporic differend Can one theorize the Rushdie affair and make an intervention into diasporic aesthetics without repeating the rhetoric of intractability? I have suggested that the Rushdie affair dramatically draws our attention to diasporic politics within a nation-

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state as an instance of the differend. With a little closer attention to Lyotard’s own thinking on the differend we can now make some remarks about the uses of the differend as a mode of analysis that goes beyond consensual politics. This is how Lyotard defines differend on the opening page of his book The Differénd: As distinguished from litigation, a differend [differend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgment to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule). (1988: xi) The most obvious modern instance of the differend is the claim on the part of certain revisionist historians such as Robert Faurisson and David Irving that the Holocaust needs to be rethought and the ‘facts’ modified. Faurisson, for example, goes on to dispute the very existence of gas chambers because he could not find a single individual who has actually seen a gas chamber with his own eyes. What is at issue here is the nature of the referent. Since reality is not ‘what is “given” to this or that “subject” ’ but a ‘state of the referent (that about which one speaks) which results from the effectuation of establishment procedures defined by a unanimously agreed-upon protocol’ (Lyotard 1988: 4), it follows that any object of analysis of knowledge comes into being only in so far as it ‘require[s] that establishment procedures be effectuated in regard to it’ (9). When the establishment procedures unproblematically link up diverging phrase regimes within discursive laws that are fixed, laws such as dialogue, consensus, and so on, the matter is resolved. However, when the linkages cannot be effectuated by virtue of a radical heterogeneity of the items – by virtue of their intrinsic incommensurability − then we begin ‘to bear witness to the differend’. Lyotard continues: ‘A case of differend between two parties takes place when the “regulation” of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom’ (9). To give the differend any real presence or effectiveness, to make it legitimate in spite of the absence of assimilative linkages between the phrase regimens of the competing ideas, one needs to recast the phrases themselves through new idioms in order that the elements that make up a phrase – its referent (what it is about, the case), its sense (what the case signifies), the person to whom it is addressed (the addressee), the person through whom the case is made (the addressor) – can be given new meaning. Lyotard speaks of silence, a negative phrase, as an example of something that has yet to be phrased: since it cannot be staged, it has no effectiveness. The claim here is not that every dispute must be resolved but ‘how to argue for a nonresolvable heterogeneity (the basis for all true discussion) that is not

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a simple pluralism’ (Carroll 1984: 80). What the Rushdie affair dramatizes so forcefully is that the diasporic imaginary and the postcolonial are phrases in dispute because in moments of crisis the parties concerned present their case in a language and through sets of manoeuvres unacceptable to the other in a court of law. The conflict is not a simple opposition between us and them, the nation-state and the diaspora, or the colonizer and the colonized; rather, it is a consequence of phrase regimens endemic to the worlds engendered by these terms. It seems that Rushdie’s works confirm the radical practice of heterogeneity where the differend is affirmed and not ‘suppressed or resolved’ (Carroll 1984: 75). The subjects in his works do not exist outside or prior to the phrases through which they are constituted. There is, then, no supra real or a real outside the subject positions so constructed through which arbitration can take place. This does not mean that there is no room for correct or proper political action from a position of consensus or detachment (the image of the law); rather the flight from spurious ground rules (the ‘authentic base’, as some would say) draws attention to the problematic nature of the subjects in these works. A refusal to grant objective history (the real) priority and, furthermore, to see this reality as an instrument of totalitarianism and injustice because the victim’s testimony is considered to be without authority leads Lyotard to claim that history (rationality) is really unjust in cases of the differend. One has to return to disarticulations, to silence, to feelings, to the corporeal, and not simply to the mental, for counter-hegemonic positions. In this respect, the aesthetic order especially signals the possibility of alternative worlds that do not seek legitimation purely through facts. The aesthetic then contains unresolvable ‘heterogeneities’ – Keats came close to it with his phrase ‘negative capability’ – because unbridgeable gaps are left in ‘dispute’. Lyotard sees this in Kant’s own claim that the ethical, for instance, could not be deduced from the cognitive. The aesthetic, too, cannot be demonstrated through recourse to the cognitive and hence to reality. The Kantian sublime is thus a celebration of heterogeneity because, while it demands a certain universality, it does not assume that the universal is a given. The sublime celebrates antinomy as the mind stretches it as far as it can. The mind embraces the sublime as if this were desirable and necessary and would continue to do so if reason were not to reestablish its law. Yet in that moment of celebration, in that dispute between faculties, in that incommensurable differend, no object can be represented that equals the idea of the totality. In all this the urgent demand is that the differend should be listened to. The diasporic imaginary, as the littoral, is that which defies social assimilation with ease. If and when that assimilation occurs, diasporas disappear. Until then, what we have to address – as a matter of justice – is the radical politics of heterogeneity. Since the differend ultimately is unresolvable, and phrases cannot be linked unproblematically, the differend, as David Carroll explains, ‘proposes strategies . . . of resisting . . . homogenization by all political, aesthetic, philosophical means possible’ (Carroll 1984: 87) – except, of course, for a literary

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genre such as the novel, which does link the various phrase regimens together. These phrase regimens, such as the cognitive, the prescriptive, the performative, the exclamatory, the interrogative, in themselves represent mutually exclusive modes of representing the universe (Lyotard 1988: 128). The aesthetic then becomes a site for the differend to be presented even as the phrase regimens themselves remain incommensurable. Ultimately, of course, Rushdie is speaking about justice for the diaspora, about Britain’s failure to theorize its own colonial past and postcolonial present, and about the loss of the project of liberalism, the subtext of Shalimar the Clown (2005). Is the concept of justice (beyond its legal bourgeois usage as it relates to specific legal codes and acts) equally available to all citizens or is it that justice is the prerogative of only those citizens who are part of a homogeneous British family that includes not only white Britons but also the assimilable black? What I have done is think through some of the radical incommensurabilities in the texts of Rushdie from the perspective of what Lyotard has called the differend, as both the staging of and engagement with difference as dispute. In the politics of the Rushdie affair, we encounter phrase regimes that are in conflict. So firmly grounded are the opposing views in a particular ideological and epistemological formation that either, from the point of view of the given epistemology or truth conditions, is equally true and valid. Given such a persuasive rhetoric, even the question of a communicative community capable of arbitrating, consensually, is out of the question. In the case of the Rushdie affair, compromise or justice is not possible because the grounds of the arguments are incommensurable. There are no winners and losers in the Rushdie affair, only the presencing of the differend through agonistic discourses and politics. What must be recognized is that in this presencing there is no possibility of a recourse to the grand narratives of the centre or the nation-state (recall both Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher here). The differend attests to the possibility of limit situations in diaspora which require us to ‘witness’ diasporic life-worlds otherwise. As the texts of Rushdie have shown, the role of the aesthetic in any such witnessing is decisive.

Epilogue: The subaltern speaks

In Gayatri Spivak’s celebrated essay the (female) subaltern cannot speak because there is ‘no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak’ (1993: 103). There is some ambiguity in the paper, for elsewhere she suggests that no subaltern (regardless of sex) can speak, and later still in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) the ‘sexed subaltern’ is suggestively redefined as the absolute Other, the ‘raw’ man (dem rohen Menschen) of Kant, repudiated for ever by the category of the sublime and rejected from the Law of Reason. One suspects that the subaltern (male or female) cannot speak because the act of speech (and hence the possibility of empowerment) negates the category of the subaltern itself. Like the New Hollanders or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego mentioned in the Third Critique, the subaltern is foreclosed as a subject outside culture and the ‘law’ (Spivak 1999: 26). This is the peculiar doublebind: for the subaltern to speak (in the only legitimate language – that of the master) is to repudiate subaltern subjectivity; to not speak is to deny the subaltern self any agential function. The archive of the Indian diasporic imaginary has been squarely located, except for the occasional vernacular voices of a Sanadhya, Naipaul, Rooplall Monar, Raymond Pillai, David Dabydeen, Shani Mootoo or Ramabai Espinet, in the language of the majority, here primarily received standard English. There has been one moment, though, of a fully fledged utterance in the demotic, in the vernacular, that is peculiar to plantation culture, and this utterance is in the – – a Puran (‘A Subaltern Tale’), is form of a novel. This novel, Subramani’s Dauk . written not only in Fiji Hindi (a language, as mother tongue, exclusively spoken – – by Fiji Indians) but in the Sanskrit (Devanagar ı) script. To bring my book to a close, and to return to where I began, that is, to my own origins in the old Indian diaspora, I wish to write a word or two about this remarkable novel written in the language of the subaltern. Further, to give my commentary critical salience (beyond my reference to Spivak), I wish to comment on Fiji Hindi as an anti-language (after Halliday) and then offer a theoretical framework via Dibesh Chakrabarty’s critically acclaimed book Provincializing Europe. On Fiji Hindi, this is what Rodney Moag had to say about the language in the introduction to his foundational grammar of Fiji Hindi: Whatever its origins, Fiji Hindi is regarded as a corrupted and substandard form of the language by those who speak it. In this, it is identical in prestige level and social function to most of the regional dialects of Hindi in

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(contemporary) India. It is a spoken language used for informal purposes only. On all formal occasions, and whenever Hindi has been written down in Fiji, it has been standard Hindi. . . . (1977: vi) This is the description of a pragmatic linguist and it is written with formal grammatical principles in mind. But there is another, more productive way of reading this language through Michael Halliday’s description of anti-languages. Halliday reads an anti-language in semiological terms as a product of an anti-society, a society ‘that is set up within another society as a conscious alternative’ (1979: 165). Examples of anti-societies include criminals, vagabonds, social undesirables who populate the ‘underworld’. Their anti-languages are marked by high levels of ‘relexicalization’ (new words for old) but with a ‘different vocabulary only in certain areas, typically those that are central to the activities of the subculture and that set it off most sharply from the established society’(165). Further, anti-languages tend to carry the interpersonal and the ‘textual’ more than the experiential. In other words, an anti-language reorients itself towards ‘social value’, becomes accessible only to the initiate and is a discourse that bears ‘an alternative reality’ (167). This ‘reality’ is as much a desire to maintain group solidarity as it is in itself a ‘reality-generating’ system like all languages. Halliday draws upon Bhaktiprasad Mallik’s study of the language of the underworld of West Bengal to provide us with much of his supporting data. Beyond the theoretical observations we have borrowed from Halliday, we can see direct links between one or two words of the data used by Halliday and Fiji Hindi itself. As we have pointed out in an earlier chapter, the depots of the indentured labourers of North India were in Calcutta, a city then (and now) notorious for its underworld. Reference to just four words from the – – – data would suffice: ghot, . a. All four words have made their . kotni, . khalas and rutih way into Fiji Hindi, and all four, in Mallik’s list, are words that belong to the anti-language of the Bengal underworld. Ghot. (from dhok, ‘swallow’) means ‘to . swallow a stolen thing to avoid detection’, kotni . (from English ‘cotton’) means – – – ‘a cotton bag’, khalas (from Arabic ‘murder’) replaces the more common khun, – – ‘murder’, and rutih . a (from rot.ı , ‘bread’) means ‘to share bread secretly with a convict detained in prison’. All these words, with more generalized meanings – (rutih . a began to mean a scheming person generally), made their way into the Fiji Hindi demotic. The foregoing is not meant to establish a case for Fiji Hindi as a complete instance of an anti-language; rather it is meant to show two things: first, Fiji Hindi is capable of generating an alternative reality and, second, as a social semiotic, it has marks of social resistance and protest as well as an interpersonal dimension that enabled social intercourse to take place through a unique discourse made out of the original vernaculars of the indentured labourers. No Fiji Hindi speaker whose origin can be traced back to North India remembers their forefathers speaking a language other than their own. And those who can (like people from South India) soon found that Fiji Hindi was in fact no

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one’s mother tongue as such, but belonged to anyone with an indenture back– – a Puran (2001), Subramani, bearer of a Tamil name, ground. The writer of Dauk . shows how the language transcended ethnic origins and became a signifier of the girmit ideology itself. Fiji Hindi as described by Moag and as we have theorized, via Halliday, as an anti-language thus produces a medium of communication that not only rehistoricizes historicism (after Dipesh Chakrabarty 2000), but also produces a syntax for the production of newer, generally subaltern, postcolonial historicities infused with ‘performative’ life-practices or forms. In this argument the Fiji Hindi demotic produces a subaltern social consciousness, a sense of a contra-modernity, a further splitting of reason, of Vernunftspaltung, that cannot be explained by the prior logic that inheres in (European) historicism. A (contra)modernity that does not cleanse itself of the world of demons, spirits and gods, that seems to delight in keeping radical oppositions intact like a version of ‘negative capability’ (Keats), requires us to think through historical processes hitherto silenced by [colonial] historicism. These features are part of the structure of Fiji Hindi. A striking characteristic of Fiji Hindi is the manner in which it sublates into the logic of capital (the production of sugar under indenture and later) discrepant life-worlds and heterogeneous historicities. The Fiji Hindi case exemplifies Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that histories of capital’s ‘life-processes’ (2000: 50) are always in excess of ‘abstract labor’ because the disciplinary processes of the factory (the symbol of classic capitalism) could sublate neither the master– slave relationship nor those expressive forms of being human that ‘are acted out in manners that do not lend themselves to the production of the logic of capital’ (66). This fact had not gone unnoticed by Marx, for there is in Marx the insinuation that he did have to think through ways in which real labour, the labour of felt experience, those multiple ways of being human, could be transformed into abstract labour. If the real, the ‘thingness’ of being, must refer to ways of work practice that are linked to non-materialist modes of being (the agency of gods and spirits in our lives for instance), then the translation of labour into an abstract category (as a measurable unit of labour) will also carry with it traces of lived experience. It is now clear even to orthodox Marxism that the working classes had to be created, and that working classes are not some ‘trans-cultural’ subject within a universalist historicism. Writes Chakrabarty: If real labor . . . belongs to a world of heterogeneity whose various temporalities cannot be enclosed in the sign ‘history’ . . . then it can find a place in a historical narrative of commodity production only as a Derridean trace of that which cannot be enclosed, an element that constantly challenges from within capital’s and commodity’s – and by implication, history’s – claims to unity and universality. (92–3) The insight into this occurs fleetingly in Marx, but occur it does. Which leads Chakrabarty to the importance of translating even as the colonial enterprise is

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transitional (from one mode of production to another). But because the act of translating an existing labour (the artisan, the family unit) into abstract labour is not unproblematically transitional or exchangeable (but is translational) there is a disruption in the historical narrative. The act of barter as distinct from generalized exchange of commodities mediated through abstract labour (the Fijian practice of kere kere for instance) is a radical instance of an alternative model of exchange. In Fijian society the statement kere-a na i sulu vei Mahendra Chaudhry (‘to ask Mahendra Chaudhry for a skirt’) framed as a kere kere implies barter or exchange of a sulu at a later date. There are, then, specificities of life-worlds that need to be narrated in a postcolonial/diasporic discourse, and these specificities may be contrary to the logic of a received historicism. They raise questions of untranslatability, of the incommensurable, of the processes by which gods and demons are invoked as agents in human life and ‘grounded in [alternative] rationalities’ even as modernity is embraced. The history of labour (and Marx’s reduction of it into an abstract unit) must now be rendered as a multiplicity of archives. It would take its clues from subaltern histories, both as discourse and as a site from which the sublime object of the postcolonial subject may be constructed. An alternative postcolonial reading of the archive would therefore be conscious of questions of difference (precisely those elided, as Chakrabarty says, in the dominant traditions of Marxism [94]), would pay attention to the ‘heterotemporality’ of the world underpinned by an ethics and a politics acutely aware of this difference. At the same time it needs to be conscious of the immense resilience of the bourgeoisie in matters of capital and history. Unless there is critical vigilance, historical critiques are likely to be derailed through their incorporation or routinization back into the grand narrative of historicism. As a critical mode, subaltern and, in my reading, diasporic histories are not simply a matter for minority groups or the downtrodden; they belong even to those of us who are not subaltern at all. I have borrowed Chakrabarty’s terms with scandalous unoriginality, except for a few matters of qualification here and there. I have, to reprise my argument, insisted with Chakrabarty on the ideology of the aesthetic as a moment of resistance to the realism of history which ‘creates a certain irreducible heterogeneity in the constitution of the political’ (178). But against the implicit celebration of the fluidity of the poetic over and above the wooden rigidity of the prosaic (a not uncommon structuralist binary of the metaphorical versus the metonymical), against Chakrabarty’s preference for Sanskrit-derived – Bengali words (the word ad. d. a which, according to R. S. McGregor’s Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary, is Tamil in origin stands out as the sole exception) and against a high cultural understanding of rasa theory that underpins many of Chakrabarty’s readings of Bengali texts, the subaltern text forges an imagination through the use of vernacular prose and subversive literary genres. Subramani’s – – a Puran is, for me, the text through which we can raise questions such as: Dauk . What form has the ‘history of the secularization of thought’ (236) taken when viewed through a subaltern discourse? What is the place of transcendental reason? What statements are being made about historicism?

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–

So in reading Dauk a Puran we must begin by unpacking a book that recon. stitutes the ethnographic, that indeed tells a story that combines Vidia Naipaul the storyteller of A House for Mr Biswas and Naipaul the ethnographer of India: A Million Mutinies Now. I begin with words from Vidia Naipaul’s preface to his father’s collection of short stories I have already quoted elsewhere in this book: we came from ‘an old and perhaps an ancient India’ untouched ‘by the great Indian reform movements of the nineteenth century’. But overnight we were thrust into modernity: ships, mills, railway lines, capitalist orderliness (‘call number’ became the name of the overseer), the wood stove and the toilet. A people with no more than a single name were given extensive descriptions on their emigration passes well beyond the requirements of a birth certificate: name, father’s name, zillah, village, pergunnah, caste, age, religion, height, occupation, next of kin, marks on the body, and much else besides, all signed by the Protector of Emigrants. What was modernity like for them? What was their history? How did they take to social justice, equity, politics, capital? Do political ideas (voting, for instance), dramatic political events (a coup, for instance), the death of a political saviour (Dr Bavadra, for instance) have the same meaning in their own subaltern voice? Do we take that voice seriously now that those who could not or even should not speak have spoken? When the subaltern (the absolute Other of diaspora) speaks, nation-shattering moments like the Rabuka coup become mischievous acts; they are presented as parodies of heroic deeds, their self-importance reduced to trivia. – – – So the chief character in the novel, Fijilal, declares: jaise rambuka idhar kup – – – – – – – – – – – maris, kalluk ghare barat taiyar. Accha tamasa: ek taraf kup kai hangama, idhar sadik jhañjha t. (5) (‘No sooner did Rabuka hit the coup, Kallu’s ready to marry off his daughter. What fun: on one side a commotion about a coup, on the other wedding woes’). Here, then, surfaces what Bakhtin in his memorable book on Rabelais referred to as the ‘folk culture of humour’, a massively undertheorized sphere of ‘people’s creation’ (1968: 4). Bakhtin, of course, goes on to examine – a the links between politics and the carnivalesque. In the Ojha scene in Dauk . – Puran where the great healers, witch doctors and sorcerers of the area gather to cast aside the spell of the Rabuka coup, the carnival nucleus of the world of Rabelais surfaces, as the ‘borderline between art and life’ (Bakhtin 1968: 7). And yet this is a life experience meaningful to the participants (although ironically rendered), reminding us of the ways in which elements excluded from the realist domain of art surface in the subaltern sphere as the grotesque, the scatological, and so on. – – a Puran is a massive novel, over five hundred pages of tightly written Dauk . – – Devanagrı script, comprising some 250,000 words in all. As I have already noted, it is written in Fiji Hindi, a demotic, almost an anti-language of a specialized group. This language, a repository of heteroglossia, is marked by self-mockery and irony; it reduces all speakers to the same level of linguistic competence as there is no Fiji-Indian who speaks it better than another. Native Fijians speak in it, too, and give it their own syntax. The demotic . – – – – also trivializes high culture – pan. dit . ayak caro disam jhomkis . tribhuvan mu r. uth

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sanskı rit islok (‘Pandit Tribhuvan lifted his head and, addressing all four corners of the universe, recited a Sanskrit verse’) (161) – has a sense of a collective world-view and designates a distinctive mode of socialising. When the subaltern speaks he does not speak from within hegemonic codes nor does he see himself as we see him. I have gendered my subaltern here as male not because I want to marginalize even more the unpresentability of the subaltern woman native informant (who is for Spivak the figure of the postcolonial sublime) but because I want to enter into this novel through the voice of its – – – male first-person narrator, Fijilal, who jokingly referred to himself as f ıjılal – – a (4). This Fijilal (literally ‘son of Fiji’), with a withered left hand, girmit. ram dauk . beak-like nose and protruding teeth, is in a parodistic Hegelian sense the historical consciousness of the subaltern Dauka. He tells his tale (the tale of the picaro on the road) to the ethnographic researcher, one Vidiadhar Shrivastava – – – (bidiyadhar s´ rıvasto). The connection with V. S. Naipaul is obvious as his first names are Vidiadhar Surajprasad. The tale cannot be recorded (Fijilal refuses – to speak into a kod. a [a tape recorder]), and his words have to be transcribed by the ethnographer-amanuensis. In an ironic echo of the composition of the great – – Indian epic the Mahabharata, the narrator Fijilal (upon whose birth women had – – – – – – a ganes bhagvan, ‘Fijilal, you are the complete Ganesha god’ cackled: f ıjılal to pur [15]) tells Vidiadhar, ‘okay, write, whatever there is to write’ (11), and like the – – Mahabharata the text begins to unfold in the epic’s characteristically episodic – – – – – – manner. We note the reference to writing: babu– ´srıvasto kagad ma kuch ghasıte . – – laga. The word for writing given here is ghasıte . not likhe (which is both a stand– ard Hindi and Fiji Hindi word for writing). What is ghasıte? . Although one of its meanings is to ‘scrawl’, in Fiji Hindi it has the meaning of being dragged and – – – in its noun form (as ghasıta) . is the sledge used to drag sugar cane. Ghasıtn . a (‘to – drag’) is in this sense the demotic of likhna (‘to write’) and deflates the highcultural value of writing. The ethnographer wishes to write the history of the Daukans; Fijilal replies, ‘If you want to write history, then go to the government (to official sources)’ (6). He adds, ‘Until now no one has come to hear our history. Yes they’ve heard the story of girmit . . . but if the babu wants to hear the – – a Puran.’ The opposition here history of the Daukans, then I’ll narrate the Dauk . – is between itihasa, history, in Sanskrit (‘thus indeed it was’: as, ‘be’, declined – into the third-person perfect asa to which iti, ‘thus’, and the particle ha are – prefixed), and purana, . the largely post-epic literary genre of multi-layered anecdotal narratives. Fijilal speaks about the need for every kind of history to have – – a place in the ‘grand narrative of the nation’ – des kai itihas ma – ‘not to forget the stories of magic and native peoples’ (ojhan aur taukin kai). And here comes a decisive passage that is at the heart of this kind of subaltern history: I smiled silently. ‘Now your [Vidiadhar Shrivastava’s] history will become topsy-turvy, upside-down, rough shod. That which you educated people thought was useless, which you throw out as refuse, the same I have kneaded – – a Puran.’ into my Dauk . (6)

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And this story, Fijilal insists, has to be narrated over three days during which there will be the usual eating and drinking – narration itself as part of a kind of carnival. The interesting point here is that the interviewer agrees to follow the unofficial, ethnographic narrative. – Yet this puran will mimic the epic; it will enter into the latter’s formal struc– – ture, especially the formal structure of the Ramayana, . the book of the various – man. dal . ıs (village singing groups) mentioned in the novel. Although the epic as received is the degraded vernacular epic of Tulsidasa and not the Sanskrit highculture text of Valmiki, the formal structure remains largely intact. Valmiki’s – – as does Tulsidasa’s, which, incidentally, carries an Ramayana . has seven books, – . – – a Puran, too, is divided eighth book (Lava ku´s kamd) only in the vulgate. Dauk . into seven books as both intertextual affirmation of the epic tradition and as subaltern deflation through a non-epic mode of discourse. At the same time, through the use of the Ramlila (folk dramatization of the epic) in Fiji even the Tulsidasa text (itself in demotic Avadhi) is transmitted as part of a Fiji-Hindi discourse. Debates around specific portions of the text – the nature of Dasaratha’s – – boon to his wife Kaikeyi, whether there could have been a Ramayana . without the banishment of Rama (47), which arrow of Rama’s killed the monkey king Bali (110), and so on – occur in a number of places. And, indeed, the pervasiveness of the epic discourse is so strong that when a Fijian (Ratu) bemoans the vagrant life of his wife (who has a passion for Indian films) we read: – – – – – – – – – ratu bilap karai laga jaise ram lılam nak katep supanekha (‘Ratu’s grief was like that of Supnekha’s in a Ramlila after her nose had been sliced off [193]’. The epic form imposes a prior pattern on the episodic anecdotal narrative, although the seven books of the novel are not keyed into the epic structure. Unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, nothing will be gainsaid by reading the travails of the epic hero (Rama in this instance and not the Homeric hero of the Joycean imagination) into the – – a Puran’s relationship to the life of the wanderer Fijilal. As a subaltern text Dauk . Indian foundational book is that of the sly mimic who invests the master form with an alternative, subaltern episteme. ‘So you may take it’, says Fijilal, ‘this – puran is the carnival of the Daukas’ (25). Not only that, whatever remains of the – – a Puran’ (26). And at the end girmitiyas ‘is to be found only here, in this Dauk . of each part we get the subaltern narrator’s voice undercutting the usual valedictory endings of the books in the vernacular epic of Tulsidasa: So here, take it, the first part has come to an end. I’ve said yes, but for – three days how on earth will I sustain this puran? If the talk gets derailed in the middle, then what shall I do? I’ve started it, but how will it end? I’ve bought myself a real predicament. And if someone prints even this personal aside, then what will happen? They’d laugh or will call me a liar and teller of tales. (125) Epic and puranic antecedents are one thing, a consciousness of the novel form quite another. For the novel came with colonization, and reached Fiji at any

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rate already in its full bourgeois avatar. The consciousness of the form is evident throughout, as may be seen in Fijilal’s reflection on it: The babu told me the history of the village in great detail but nothing about himself. Place of birth, family, education. His own life he simply set aside. Perhaps the educated make their histories in this fashion. In my – – a Puran I have included the incidental, the useless, the pointless, and Dauk . incorporated everything no matter what or where – wherever you look there is Fijilal’s own story! (490–1) Fijilal alludes to something else besides, for the antecedent implied here is not the realist text but the earlier pre-bourgeois picaresque form. The picaresque, though, is now infused with a distinctively subaltern multi-stranded episodic structure, for Fijilal narrates not only his own life but also the life-worlds and experiences of many other people. The Fijian word talanoa (‘talk around the Kava/yagona bowl’) occurs in the novel in a number of places to reinforce this distinctively localised form of narration. Don Quixote meets a man called Gines de Pasamonte, who says he’s writing a book about his life. Don Quixote asks, ‘And what is the title of the book?’ ‘The Life of Gines de Pasamonte,’ he replies. ‘Is it finished?’ asks Don Quixote. ‘How can it be finished’, replies the other, ‘if my life isn’t?’ (Cervantes 176–7). This is a fascinating episode because the formal structure of the work of art is derived directly from the empirical, from the structure of the writer’s own life, and the – – a Puran has a stronger sense of an novel isn’t finished because life hasn’t. Dauk . ending and has in a sense a structure of conversion, a sense of self-awareness (not in the Western teleological sense, though), but it cannot quite round itself off in the way in which Naipaul’s great text did: ‘Afterwards the sisters returned to their respective homes and Shama and the children went back in the Prefect to the empty house’ (Naipaul 1961: 531). If one places the picaresque form (which we’ve suggested is the literary antecedent here alongside the epicpuranic narratives of Indian culture) against classical autobiographies such as The Confessions of Augustine or Rousseau’s Confessions, we see how crucial a structure of conversion in the latter works is. In these works the moment of conversion structures everything that went before it – everything tends to be seen to be leading up to this moment of insight which then radically changes the hero. As a character Fijilal is neither a rogue nor a clever simpleton; nor does he simply boast about his own life, forgetting the changes in others. Although the structure remains linear, with no peak, no point of highest intensity such as a conversion or a change of life or death or a happy marriage (characteristics of – – a Puran parts company from the picaresque the realist historicist text), Dauk . genre on two counts. First, it locates itself in the non-epic Indian narrative – tradition of the puranas . and, second, it has a hero who is in fact philosophically self-aware, has a highly developed ironic view, has dreams, is prone to

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nightmares, and possesses a thorough grasp of social structures. Fijilal is the Indian subaltern wanderer, the ghummakar (one of the very few Fiji Indian words that does not occur in the novel) who cannot stay in one place, although – – – in a sense he always seeks home. In the end he hears a voice: kab ghare aiho f ıjılal (‘When will you come home, Fijilal?’). The voice tells him, do not despair, you’ve seen everything, you’ve found everything, how much longer must you walk? – – – – – Fijilal asks again: ka pava (‘What have I found?’). And gets the reply: vahı jaun tu – – – mangat raheo – halukapan. jano ab janam saphal hoy gay (‘That which you wanted, a lightness of being. Think that life has achieved its purpose’). Genre, Georg Lukács declared many years ago in The Theory of the Novel (1971), is key to literary analysis. I have referred to the picaresque as – – a Puran’s generic intertext, with obvious qualifications. There are, howDauk . ever, other generic intertexts that ‘encode’ the picaresque form and give – – it local texture. The sagars and s´astras mentioned in the novel by the village storyteller Rajpati are examples of such genres. Rajpati in fact refers to – – – – Bisram Sagar and Kok S´ astra, the latter a text on the delights of sex. Sagar, of course, means ‘ocean’ and is attached to large collections of tales like the – – Kathasaritasagar used as a model by Salman Rushdie. Fijilal in fact tells Rajpati – – – – a Puran’ is a ‘Dauk a Sagar’ (10). In passing Fijilal had also that his own ‘Dauk . . – alluded to his ‘Puran’ being made up of 1,001 tales (6) where the implicit genre is that of the Arabian Nights. These are the available literary contexts as the teller narrates the tale: a three-day narrative, Vidiadhar with pen and paper, friends running around on errands, the space of the courtyard framed by the village and the corner shop, the women cooking, children hanging around, even the storyteller Rajpati turning up, men coming from the cane fields at lunch time, and so on (11). And what’s in this marathon narrative/ narration? ‘Cow dung’, says Fijilal, but also ‘river, mountain, moonlit night, wedding, renunciation, and a woman named Pingala’. Pingala surfaces as a narrative allusion to a popular forties Hindi film song about Pingala and Bhartari: . . – – – – – – – – bhiks. a dede maiya pingala jogı khar.a hai dvar maiya pingala (191). So a song frames the text as well, and surfaces at the end of the novel with strains of its last lines: . – – – – –– – – – kesar candan cho r. ke raja . . . daya na aı o nirmohı o nirmohı chor. cale mamjhdhar. . . . Film, of course, was also a major art form that mediated between the Indian diaspora and India (Mishra 2002). Fijilal’s friend Paina is an inveterate filmgoer and fond of recalling the late-forties film stars Shyam and Suraiya. Other films mentioned are Ram Baan, Lanka Dahan (112), Sri Ram Bhakt Hanuman, Hind Kesari, Hunterwali (113), movies from the mid-thirties to the early fifties. The two sisters, one Kamini, Fijilal’s love-object, the other Kaushal, are named after the film star Kamini Kaushal. ‘Dominance without hegemony’ (after Ranajit Guha 1997) led Dipesh Chakrabarty to look at the different ways in which modernity was negotiated by the subaltern. Unlike the Calcutta urban middle classes who constitute Chakrabarty’s source for the ways in which local social practices (the pri– – sm macy of the home-woman, the grhi . . ı ) and aesthetics (rasa . n. ı or grhalak – theory, the discourses of the ad. d. a) qualify received notions of Enlightenment

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modernity, the subaltern peasant classes show a very different and in some ways a – a lot more ironic attitude toward modernity. One of the central episodes of Dauk . – – Puran is the ‘Assembly of the Ojhas’ (which is not unlike the MCC in Rushdie’s – Midnight’s Children). In this assembly, the ojha (the village witchdoctor) and the – ojha-cum-priest intervene in the rational discourse of modernity. Fijilal’s father himself is one (though not so important as to be included in the conference) – – and seems to have specialised in fixing strained stomach muscles (nara) (48). This is post-Rabuka coup (1987) Fiji, and a bull has spoken in one of the adjoining villagers. The military has made its presence felt in the town, although many villagers are unaware of this (393). Fijilal’s father convenes a three-day confer– – ence of the ojhas to discuss the nation’s state of affairs. One of the key ojhas, Kichkindha, is persuaded to come; and Fijilal’s friend Kesava, son of Kamachi – and Murugan Sardar, makes a file for each of the ojhas. Each file, with an – ojha’s name on each, has a pen and a pencil and is placed in a plastic envelope tied with a colourful ribbon (394). The responsibility for pinning name-tags – on the shirts of each ojha fell to Fijilal’s father. The mimicry (‘sly mimicry’) of conference organization is complete when Fijilal’s father and Kesava spread a sheet on which is written, ‘The Unending Ojha Conference: for National – – – and International Peace’ (akhan. d. ojha sammelan des aur jagat santı ke hit (396)). – Finally a photo is taken of the ojhas with the bull that had spoken. –

–

On Friday between ten and twelve all the ojhas arrived. Bhimraj, ojha extraordinaire. Looked dim-witted. Carried bat shit in his pocket. Wearing a cap and riding a horse, he reached Murugan Sardar’s house. Paina held his horse and Kesava took him to the place where he was to be seated. Bhimraj purified the area of the gathering with a wave and a puff and then bound the place well with a mantra. (395) –

The great ojhas – Bhimraj, Kichkindha, Suleman, Apisalome (a Fijian with a special bond with the shark god Dakuwaqa), Mata Navbhavani, Topiwala, Langhauti Das, Jata, Badlu, Karia Kot, Tukaram, Talwar – become part of a carnival, sprinkling turmeric and blowing mantras. On Monday they present an oracle: ‘For the next ten years the nation will have great difficulty. Slowly things will get better. But there remains a cloud’ (404). The parodistic design of the conference is obvious enough, and the three-day affair may be seen as a way of bringing the political – post-coup Fiji – into the text. In the code of the Ojha Conference, the entire struggle for political representation (and the struggle to be accepted as legitimate interpreters of the nation on the part of Indians) is presented as a game, a farce, based on an alternative narrative of the nation. – – a Puran is the discourse of the silenced subaltern diaspora, Subramani’s Dauk . and the text introduces, in a sense, its own impossibility of being, its own exclusiveness. Where a poem by David Dabydeen or a short story by Rooplall Monar – – a Puran, like Dev written in creolised English remains largely accessible, Dauk . Virahsawmy’s Toufann, is written in a hidden code, the exclusive language of

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a diasporic community (or a nation as a whole as in the case of Virahsawmy). In this respect it defies all theories of transnationalism or cross-diasporic communitarianism. But its virtue lies precisely in its exclusiveness, for it signifies – in an extended atmanepada (middle) voice the subaltern speaking to himself and not to another. In this work modernist categories, which are crucial categories of the postcolonial, are contained within local, diasporic world views, and these world views are embedded in the text only tangentially, so that the power of the Australian mill manager can only be shown with reference to the – – ease with which he can leave the country: saheb gay asteliy . a (58) (‘the saheb has gone to Australia’). Knowledge surfaces indifferently, anecdotally: to the question, ‘How would you solve the land problem?’ the casual answer given is ‘A second girmit, I say’ (306). When Rabuka’s coup brings an end to a democratically elected government, news of it is presented through subaltern eyes (381–7): the radio doesn’t work, there is talk that the British will come and whip the coup leaders up, and the news of the coup itself comes to the village – – – via Bhaggan who says des ma kup mar dihis (‘in the country someone has hit a – – – – coup’). To this news the spectator replies, yahı tem . raha kup marek (‘did he have – – – – – to hit a coup now?’), kup mar dihis, ı kaun bhakha (‘hit the coup, what language is this?’). A bull speaks (391), and the conference of the Ojhas starts. This extraordinary and original text is a repository of cultural history and of Fiji Hindi. Much more can be said about the novel – plantation cuisine, the mystique of radio, inter-racial relations, absorption of indigenous practices, Bollywood cinema – but the point has been made about the nature of the subaltern speech act. The subaltern speaks but only to himself, his acts of selfrepresentation confined to a demotic accessible only to people like himself in – – a Puran has a larger allegorical signifithe middle voice of différance. But Dauk . cance in that it symbolizes the silence of diaspora generally. All diasporas are unhappy, for if and when their subaltern absolute Other speaks she can only speak to herself.

Notes

Introduction: The diasporic imaginary 1 The South Asian (‘Indian’) diaspora is conservatively estimated at 12 million: Europe 1.6 million (1,300,000 in Great Britain), Africa 1.7 million (1,100,000 in South Africa), Mauritius 600,000, Asia (excluding Sri Lanka) 2 million (1,200,000 in Malaysia), Middle East 1.4 million (largely guest workers in the Gulf States), Latin America and the Caribbean 1 million (largely in Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam), North America 2.8 million, the Pacific 800,000 (320,000 in Fiji). These figures, slightly modified, have been taken from Benedict Anderson (1994: 326–7, fn 23). My figure of 12 million includes the itinerant workers in the Middle East but not Tamils of Sri Lanka. It does include Sri Lankan Tamil migrants to the West and re-migration from the old Indian diasporas. Anderson, too, omits Tamils in Sri Lanka from his calculation. 2 Very generally – and with the clear proviso that these distinctions are, in historical terms, very provisional – we can speak of the Indian diasporas as the old diaspora of exclusivism (of plantation or classic capital or modernity) and the new diaspora of the border (of late modernity or postmodernity). Diasporas of the border (so defined) in Western democracies are visible presences – ‘we are seen, therefore we are’, says the Chicano novelist John Rechy – whose corporealities carry marks of their hyphenated subjectivities (Castillo 1995: 113). 3 In Singapore the government prides itself on its CMIO (Chinese-Malay-IndianOther) model of ethnic taxonomy which valorizes and transcodes, along racially essentialist lines, the specificities of communal experience even as the nationstate struggles to establish the primacy of the transcendent Singaporean citizen. 4 In Italian the expression ‘mio paesano’ (from ‘paese’, a small town, village or an entire country) suggests that the speaker is from the same nationality as the person who asks the question. 5 Alessia Ricciardi, 27. At this point in her study of mourning Ricciardi is referring to Lacan’s re-reading of the Freudian notion of Trauerarbeit (‘sorrow work’) in which Lacan questions the ‘objective of “realism” in the work of mourning’ by locating mourning at that point in the symbolic order (that is, in culture) at which the subject confronts ‘its own lack in the shape of a “hole” in the Real’. This reading has considerable hermeneutic value in diaspora theory as it locates mourning at that point in the psychic life of the subject at which a past event (or a memory of it) releases a lack that makes living ‘here’ impossible. 6 The Mauritian Indian case, on the face of it, presents itself as an exception to the rule since the Indian diaspora has governed the island state since its independence on 12 March 1968. However, inasmuch as the prior, colonial, history of Mauritius created a cultural imaginary from which the Indians were largely excluded (a French-Creole cultural hegemony was prevalent), the Indian ‘enjoy-

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ment’ of the nation (as a new, creative jouissance) fits into the pattern I have outlined. 7 Jonathan M. Hess’s study considers at length the links between modernity and the problematization of Jewish identity. There were those like Abraham Geiger (1810–74) who read Jesus as a figure who ‘bequeathed to modernity’ modern characteristics – of enlightenment and critical thinking – by virtue of his engagement with Judaism. In an unpublished note (March 1770) Moses Mendelssohn wrote: ‘And Jesus a Jew? – And what if, as I believe, he never wanted to give up Judaism?’ (Hess 2002: 91). Kant, of course, felt otherwise and denied that the ‘pure religion of reason’ (Christianity) had anything to do with Judaism. There was in the end something out of joint as modernity, in its attempt to create a universal subject, produced, from within its very principles of secular universalism, the language of anti-Semitism (Hess 208). 8 F. R. Leavis in his influential The Great Tradition writes about Daniel Deronda as two different books: one, the Deronda book, which is ‘the bad half’ (94), and the other, ‘the good part’, which he calls the Gwendolen Harleth book (100). To Leavis, George Eliot’s Zionist inspiration results in an ‘emotional flow’ that leads to self-indulgent and in the end insincere writing. At the level of art I think Leavis correctly suggests that the real moral insight that could have come only through a forthright engagement with the Deronda–Gwendolen side of the plot gets attenuated because of the imperative of a ‘racial mission’ (a world-historical mission, after Lukács) that must insist upon the union, via a presumed love, of Deronda and Mirah simply because the latter is a Jew and Gwendolen isn’t. 9 The difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardim (or Mizrahim, ‘Arab Jews’) complicates a single narrative of Zionism. Further, the Holocaust, or Shoah, ‘the defining negative event of Jewish exilic existence’ (Arad 2003: 5), as it gets rendered in contradictory Israeli state discourses, cautions us against constructing an unproblematic diasporic metanarrative around the Jewish experience. In Gulie Arad’s fascinating account we read how the Shoah has shifted from conscious state-endorsed ‘disrememberance’ (none other than the founding father of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, felt that Holocaust victims signified, in Gulie Arad’s words, the futility of ‘Jewish existence in exile’) to a sign of ‘Israel’s collective identity’. But where once ‘forgetting was essential to energize the task of creating a nation’ (11) the new emphasis on the Shoah as ‘Israel’s collective consciousness . . . its political trope’ (16), largely in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, prevents Israel from creating a ‘more inclusive counter-memory’ and a less ‘one-dimensional people’ (26). The point of Arad’s persuasive argument is that diasporic memorializing (even of something as unpresentable and obscene as Auschwitz and Treblinka) ‘is not sufficient for healing or for the prevention of future evil’ (26). This latter ethical imperative should never be lost in diaspora theory.

1 The girmit ideology 1 In her scholarly study of the music of Trinidad, Helen Myers (1998) recounts how her search for the ‘Number One song’ (263) led to her discovery that the vast bulk of folk songs in Felicity (the village in Trinidad which was the focus of her research) dealt with passion, sensuality, absence, love-longing – indeed, all those features that belong to the genre of viraha. Myers translates a song sung by

258 Notes –

one Sankey in Felicity that touches on some of the themes in the bidesiya recalled by Sudesh Mishra. Blow eastern breeze, pain comes up! Oh! pain comes up, oh! pain comes up! Blow eastern breeze, pain comes up, oh! What city at search my husband? (Myers 1998: 271)

2 These names belong to what is known as the nirguna . saint tradition of North India. The indentured labourers thus opted for the devotional songs of medieval saints who were known for their progressive social views and who believed in the mystical unity of being. They stressed the emotional, affective dimensions of belief (as against the high intellectualism of the Hindu ‘great’ tradition) making their sayings and loosely organized theological discourses accessible to the general populace. See Chaturvedi (1972) and Vijay Mishra (1998). – – – – 3 The crossing of the ocean (the kalapanı ) and the idea of ship brotherhood – – –– (jahajı bha ı ) function as a recurring motif in much writing from the old diaspora. The dedication in Birbalsingh (1989) reads ‘For all who crossed the kala pani’. Ramabai Espinet’s prologues to all three parts of her sensitively written The Swinging Bridge are entitled ‘Kala Pani’. 4 See also R. R. Nayacakalou on Fijian leadership (1975). The subtext of Nayacakalou’s book is that in Fiji the historical process of colonization affected races rather differently, producing not generalist (unitary) reason but discrepant narrative(s) – indeed, a splitting of reason (Vernunftspaltung). In this multiracial nation Indians appropriated Western historicism and the idea of the transcendental modern subject but native Fijians defined postcolonial reason (even of the instrumental variety) in very different terms and insisted that pre-modern practices (such as the offer of tabua, whale’s tooth, to seek forgiveness) permeate modern colonial culture. And, again, this is part of a critical postcolonialism which would see the ritual of tabua as a modern political mode of empowerment (or expression) and not dismiss it for being pre-political (and hence anti-modern). For the Fiji Indian the pre-modern (in the public sphere) had to be eradicated altogether because it inhibited colonial ideals of individualism and democracy. In this reading a contra modernity thus lay with the Fijians and not with the Indians. 5 Globalization and transnationalism have now produced the twice-displaced diaspora of indenture. One suspects that the Indian diaspora in Fiji will become even more of a minority as Fiji is read as a place of betrayal. Between 1987 and 1999 the Fiji Indian population dropped from being 49 per cent of the total to 43 per cent. Since the 2000 coup it has dropped even further to 41 per cent. Fiji’s 2003 birth rate statistics show that only 28 per cent of all babies born were Indian (Fiji Times 17 February, 2006). After the race riots of the 1960s in Guyana the Guyanese Indian population dropped by almost 10 per cent within twenty years. 6 See also Remembrance Day Supplement, The Fiji Times 14 November 2004: ‘During the war and today at peacekeeping operations, Fiji has lost approximately 248 soldiers [almost all Fijian] as follows: i. First World War 1914–1918 – 131; ii. Second World War 1939–1945 – 51; iii. Malayan Campaign – 21; Peacekeeping Operations: i. Soldiers – 42; ii. Police Officers – 3; Total = 248’. 7 When applied to Fiji Indians the term vulagi (kai idia vulagi, ‘the Indian outsider’) means the unwanted, the outsider, although in its normal, traditional usage it

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has the meaning of the stranger, the visitor or the pilgrim who must be treated with courtesy. Asesela Ravuvu (1991: 58–60) makes it quite clear that as vulagis Fiji Indians can never be complete citizens of Fiji. 8 In 1947, to commemorate Indian independence, Pandit Pratap Chandra Sharma – – . published Pravas Bhajana mjali (A Diasporic Offering of Verse). Although the collection is primarily religious and didactic verse with a few hagiographical accounts of the lives of people who had underwritten the cost of the book’s publication, there is in the volume one poem that gestures towards the use of kava (yaqona) in – – – the lives of Fiji Indians. This poem, ‘Nagona kı atma katha’ (‘Yaqona: an autobiography’), suggests a new, hybrid, social space around the kava bowl that brings races together. 9 See Satendra Nandan, ‘A country lost, a home found’, The Canberra Times, 14 November 1990: 21: ‘I may have lost an island country but I have gained a whole island continent’. 10 The root word is ‘datang’, to which the prefix ‘pen-’ has been added. Its general meaning in Bahasa Indonesia is ‘outsider’, ‘stranger’ (Kamus Indonesia-Ingrris, 133). However, in Bahasa Malay it means ‘immigrant’ (Comparative Dictionary of Malay-Indonesia Synonyms, 301).The words for ‘illegal immigrant’ in Bahasa Malay are ‘pendatang haram’. I thank Professor David Hill of Murdoch University for pointing out these differences. 11 Between 1834 and 1870 some 370,000 indentured labourers, or on an average some 10,000 each year, reached Mauritius.

2 Indenture and diaspora poetics 1 In 1936, when Naipaul was ‘three years 10 months and 15 days old’, his father gave him a copy of Alice Meynell (ed.) The School of Poetry (n.d.), which contained poems regularly taught in the colonies in the first half of the twentieth century at least. All the poems in this collection including ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, ‘On Westminster Bridge’, ‘To Autumn’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and of course ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ were framed by a ‘garland’ of daffodils and a very bright yellow sun (V. S. Naipaul 1996a I: 1.1). 2 More recently Brother Marvin’s calypso ‘Jahaji Bhai’ uses the term to define and claim ‘an Indian and African unity based on their shared conditions of entrance into Trinidad and the impossibility of separating out those two histories’ (Puri 2004: 217). 3 Emigration Certificate No. 32799, National Archives, Port of Spain. No further bibliographical data available. 4 The percentage of indentured population convicted under labour laws during 1907–8 ranged from 3 per cent in Mauritius to 20 per cent in British Guiana and Fiji. 5 Tinker (1974: 204) recounts a particularly gruesome Fiji case in which a girl had been sold by her father to four separate people. In the end the girl, her parents, and one of the four lovers were hacked to death by another jealous lover and his accomplice. 6 See Lal (1983) and Carter (1992) for accounts of family or group migration to the colonies. 7 Seepersad Naipaul may have been alluding to the offer made to the Indians of Trinidad for a free journey back to India when India gained independence in

260 Notes 1947. Indians were also asked if they wanted to convert their British colonial passports to Indian passports. Selvon (1987: 16) points out that in a few country areas Indians took the matter very seriously, some even threatening ‘to commit mass suicide’ if they were not sent back to India. The vast majority of Trinidadian Indians, however, took no interest in the debates. 8 There is an interesting inversion in A House for Mr Biswas, where Mrs Tulsi and her daughters have such a powerful presence in the text. 9 Trinidad Archives, Port of Spain. No further bibliographical data available. 10 Letter dated 17 August 1848. The Protector to the Colonial Secretary, Mauritius Museum of India, Moka, Mauritius, PL 32. 11 Letter of Rughoonundan dated 17 July 1883, Mauritius Museum of India, Moka, Mauritius, PL 47. 12 A study of Creole and Hindustani (indenture Indian) attitudes towards each other in Surinam for the period 1959–61 showed a high level of mutual distrust. In this survey, Indian attitudes towards Creoles were: 9.5 per cent positive, 63 per cent negative, 9.5 per cent neutral, 2 per cent no answer, and 16 per cent no opinion. Creole attitudes towards Indians also showed high levels of distrust: 2.8 per cent positive, 83.3 per cent negative, 13.9 per cent neutral with no ‘no answer’ and ‘no opinion’ responses (Dew 1989: 128). 13 Appendix to Enclosure No. 17: Dietary Scale of the Mauritius Emigration Depot for Each Adult, signed by H. Burton, Colonial Emigration Agent. No date. Mauritius Indian Museum, Moka, Mauritius, BIA/I. 14 Ramabai Espinet uses ‘chonkayed’ as a verb in her memorable novel The Swinging Bridge: ‘the dhal chonkayed with geera and garlic . . .’ (106). – – 15 Fragments of a Ramayana . in the Kaithi script brought by a migrant to Mauritius on 15 December 1843 have survived and are located in the Indian Immigration Archives (1842–1910), Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Moka, Mauritius.

3 Traumatic memory, mourning and V. S. Naipaul 1 In Torquato Tasso’s epic Clorinda was in fact the daughter of an Ethiopian Christian queen who was given away. As she lies dying she asks to be baptized, but when Tancred brings water to the dying soldier he lifts her helmet and recognizes her. In Tasso’s lachrymose verse we read: ‘La vide, la conobbe, e restò senza/e voce e moto. Ahi vista! ahi conoscenza!’ ( XII, 67). Sigrid Weigel (2003: 92) translates: ‘He saw her, knew her. And he could not move/or speak. Ah, thus to see and know his love!’ Weigel argues, contra Caruth, that the return of Clorinda’s voice (in being wounded twice) reinforces a guilt shut up in Tancred’s memories. 2 The full quotation reads: ‘And we shall see why that which lets itself be designated différance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice, saying an operation that is not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the action of a subject on an object, or on the basis of the categories of agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms. For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression’ (Derrida 1982: 9). The middle voice as the repressed

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of philosophy (which allows for the binary of active/passive) resurfaces in the différance and, in the case of Naipaul, is a means of differing trauma. 3 Cited on the back of the dust jacket for V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (1994).

4 Diaspora and the multicultural state 1 The category ‘South Asian’, like much else we use, homogenizes the subject and excludes in particular non-normative sexual subjects. In writing about the literatures of the Indian diaspora their presence needs to be acknowledged, especially since the dominant cultural forms consumed (and reproduced) in the diaspora – forms such as Bollywood cinema and bhangra disco – are overdetermined by social presumptions that work extensively from a homophobic and uncritical heterosexual social rhetoric. 2 One of the dangers of a misunderstood multicultural agenda (Bissoondath, ‘boutique multiculturalism’) is that the demand for a diversity of cultural spaces and positions in a nation may imply the need for the politics of absolute difference as a means of organizing nations. In such a politics diasporas then become victims of an epistemology of ‘otherness’, of a meta-racism, where exclusion principles and practices are put in place because it is argued that this is what diasporas want.

5 The law of the hyphen and the postcolonial condition 1 The notorious 1831 Minute on Indian Education by Thomas Babington Macaulay implied the possibility of Indians being admitted as Englishmen because being English was a matter of taste and feeling. It is therefore interesting that the Empire could handle Indian English gentlemen (Nehru, Jinnah) but not ‘the leper in the diaper’ (as he was called), the Mahatma himself, who refused to act as an Englishman and began to carve out, for once, the idea of a radically different Indian subject, firmly located in the ethos of the Enlightenment, but not someone who could be seen as being manifestly ‘English’. 2 Jessica Winter writes in The Guardian of 12 December 2003: ‘On a recent weeknight at the Harrow Warner Village cinema, the only film to sell out its screenings was also the only film without a promo poster displayed outside the lobby. You may not have heard of it, but the Hindi musical melodrama Kal Ho Na Ho, directed by Nikhil Advani, has nestled comfortably in the box-office top 10 for two weeks now. Showing in just a few dozen theatres, Bollywood’s latest export – three tempestuous hours of laughter, tears, strops and spontaneous songand-dance – boasts easily the highest per-screen average of any movie currently playing in the UK.’

6 Diasporic narratives of Salman Rushdie 1 I owe this phrase to Iain Chambers. 2 Rushdie himself has explained the story of Simurg (from Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, a Persian fable) as follows: ‘Twenty-nine birds are persuaded by hoopoe (hoopoop), a messenger of a bird god to make pilgrimage to the god. They set off and go through allegorical valleys and eventually climb [Qaf] mountain to

262 Notes meet the god at the top, but at the top they find that there is no god there. The god is called Simurg, and they accuse the hoopoe of bringing them on – oh dear – a wild goose chase. The whole poem rests on a Persian pun: if you break Simurg into parts – ‘Si’ and ‘murg’ – it can be translated to mean ‘thirty birds’, so that, having gone through the process of purification and reached the top of the mountain, the birds have become the god’ (Haffenden 1996: 245). In Islamic – mysticism it may be called the condition of annihilation, of fana. 3 The height of Mount Everest, 29,002 feet, was compulsory knowledge for geography students in the colonies. 4 I refer to translations familiar to Rushdie: N. J. Dawood (1956/1999) and Maulana Muhammad Ali (1917/1999).

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Index

Adamson, Alan 67 Adorno, Theodor xvii, xix; and Horkheimer, Max 2, 10,114, 117, 188 Ahmad Faiyazzudin 239–40 Akhil, Shalini 158; Bollywood Beauty 158 Akhtar, Shabbir 240–1 Ale-Ahmad, Jalal 233 Alexander, A. H. 67 Alexander, Cephas [‘The Mighty Killer’] 90 Ali, Monica 188; Brick Lane 188 Allott, Kenneth xv–xvi Amanat, Agha Hasan 30 Ambedkar, Dr. 24 Anat, Abhimanyu 66; Lal Pasina 66 Anderson, Benedict 15 Ankur 143–4, 174 Apollinaire 129 Appadurai, Arjun 3, 149 Arad, Gulie 257 Arnold, Matthew xv–xvii; and the – – Bhagavadgıta xvi; Culture and Anarchy xvii; ‘Dover Beach’ xvii; ‘Resignation’ xv–xvii; ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’ xvii; ‘The World and the Quietist’ xv–xvi Bachchan, Amitabh 226 Badami, Anita Rau 172; Tamarind Mem 180 Bainimarama,Voreqe, F. xiii–xiv Bakhtin, Mikhail 241, 249 Baldwin, Shauna Singh 172; English Lessons and Other Stories 180–1 Balibar, E. 16, 148 Ball, Karyn 118 Bangalore: call centres 11 Barker, Sir Ernest 236

Barthes, Roland 122, 214 Basu, Shrabani 238 Bataille, G. 49 Baucom, Ian 223 Baudelaire, Charles 71, 73 Baumann, Gerd 134 Bavadra, Dr. 249 Bechu 66–70; 71, 74; see also indenture Begamudré, Ven 172; Van de Graaff Days 178–9 Benjamin, W. 4, 10, 45, 46, 188, 213 Beverley, John 27 Bhabha, Homi K. 3, 73, 94 – – Bhagavadgıta, The xv–xviii, 123, 185 Bhat, Gauri 184 Bhatt, Parul 187, 188 Bhattacharya, Rimli 232–3 Bhojpuri: in Mauritius 61; in Surinam 52–3 Bhosle, Asha 206 Binning, Sadhu 17, 142–3 Birbalsingh, Frank 258 Bissoondath, Neil 148, 149, 150; and multiculturalism 148–9; ‘Insecurity’ and ‘Security’ 160–3 Blake, William 129 Bogart, Humphrey 1 Bollywood [Bombay] cinema 62, 177, 185, 189, 208, 216, 225, 226 Bourdieu, Pierre 92 Boyarin, Daniel and Boyarin, Jonathan 20 Brah, Avtar 75 Brand, Dionne 57 Brecht, Bertolt 49 Brereton, Bridget 85 British [Asian]: and Bollywood 205–7; music scene 205–8 Bucher, Sudha 207

Index

Buckhory, Somduth 76 Buñuel, Luis 241 Burton, H. 91 Burton, Rev. J. W. 32 Calypso 55, 89–91; and chutney music 91, 92; and racism in Guyana 91 Canada: and multiculturalism 133–8; and the Canadian Presbyterian Mission 88, 156, 157, 158; racism in 140–2; South Asian magazines in 143–5 Cándani 52–3 Carens Joseph H. 36 Carlyle, Thomas 80 Carroll, David 243 Caruth, Cathy 108, 113, 114–17, 120 Casablanca 1–2 Castells, Manuel 3 Cecil, Lord David 72 Celan, Paul 10, 128, 188 Cervantes, Miguel de 176; Don Quixote 176–7, 252 Chadha, Gurinder 199, 207 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 94, 245, 247–8, 253 Chakravorty, Pinaki 237 Chambers Iain 213, 228–9, 261 Chandra, Mohini 21 Chandra, Vikram 204 Chaturvedi, Banarsidass 27 Chaudhry, Mahendra 55 Chow, Rey 14 Clifford, J. 10 Clough, Arthur Hugh xvi Coetzee, J. M. 59 Conrad, Joseph 123, 131, 164, 189, 211 Cousin, V. xvi Creolization: and food 92–3; and music 89–91; in Guyana 64–6; in Mauritius 60–3; in Trinidad 55–6 Crusz, Rienzi 153 Cudjoe, Selwyn R. 88 Curtiz, Michael 1 Dabydeen, Cyril 160, 163–4 Dabydeen, David 64–5, 71, 82, 254 Day, Richard J. F. 133, 181–2 de Chirico, Giorgio 129, 131

281

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 61, 100, 107, 210 Demidenko [Darville], Helen 118 Deol, Jeevan 143 Derrida, J. 2, 7–8, 12, 16; différance and the middle voice 122, 136, 184, 260–1; on Freud 110–12 Dhaliwal, Sarbjit 143 Dhondy, F. 211 Diaspora: theory 1–6, 14–21, 212–13; and multiculturalism 133–43; and the radical imaginary 181–3; and the twice-displaced 154–72; population of the Indian 256; recollections of India 172–81; see also Naipaul, V. S. Dickens, Charles 18 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm 18 Dookeran, Nira 155 Dostoyevsky, F. 193 Dutt, R. C. 18 Eagleton, Terry 23 East is East 207 Eliot, George 19, 20; Daniel Deronda 19–20, 257 Eliot, T. S. 48 Emigration Certificate [Indenture] 82–4, 85, 101 Englishness: defined 199–200 Erickson, John 233–4 Espinet, Ramabai 29; and girmit cuisine 92, 144, 145, 154–6, 158, 159; The Swinging Bridge 29, 92–3, 155, 258, 260 Essop, Ahmed 59–60; The Emperor 59– 60; ‘The Hajji’ 59 Everett, Barbara 219–21 Fairfax, Edward 112 Faruqi, M. H. 240 Faurisson, Robert 242 Felman Shoshana and Laub, Dori M.D. 128 Fiji: coups in 5, 7, 12, 26, 37; Fiji Indians in 3, 42, 59; and Fijian rights 7; and the Fijian language

282 Index 4–5, 32–3, 45; and indenture history 24–6; and Trinidad 37–8; first peasant revolt in 25; race relations in 25–6 Fiji Indians, The: and Fijian aspirations 36–8; and the fragment society 26; and Fiji Hindi 245–8; and jahajibhai ethos 25; and labour 42–4; and land tenure 42–3; and the Fijian splitting of reason 258; and theory of fragment society 36; declining birth rate 258; social organization of 31–2 Fiji Samachar 26 Fish, Stanley 139 Fletcher, T. Moore 141 Fliess, Wilhelm 114 Foot, Michael 240–1 Foster Harry L. 25–6 Foucault, M. 110 Fourteen Songs … and a Funeral 207–8 Frazer, Sir George 115 Freud, S. 8–9, 66, 108, 118; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 109–12; Moses and Monotheism 113, 115–16; The Interpretation of Dreams 112–13 Fuentes, Carlos 241 Gandhi, M. K. 22, 24 Gay, John 177 Geer, Vahni 155 Gellner, E. 5, 7 Ghosh, Amitav 11; and diaspora 94, 105; In an Antique Land 11, 40 Gill, Paul Singh 144 Gillion, Ken 27 Gilroy, Paul 224 Girmit: defined 22; and religious beliefs 29–32; as ideology 22–3 Goethe 9 Gogol, Nikolai: ‘The Overcoat’ 193–4 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah 118 Gopinath, Gayatri 156–7, 158 Gordon, Sir Arthur 81 Greenblatt, Stephen 106–8 Grenada 92 Grierson, G. A. 77 Gustad, Kaizad 207

Guyana [British Guinea] 12, 38, 52, 65, 73, 81, 82, 86, 91; and indenture history 65; and literature of 64–70 Gypsies 18–19 Hall, Stuart 88–9, 181, 184, 197–8 Halliday, M. A. K. 245–6; and theory of anti-language 245–6 Halsbury, Lord 203 Hamlet 1, 8, 12, 70, 113, 117 Hansen, Kathryn 30 Hanson, Pauline 14 Hartz, L. 26 Hegel, G. W. F. xvi Heidegger, M. 14, 98, 165 Hess, Jonathan M. 18, 257 Hesse, Barnor 196, 210, 211 Hill, David 259 Hindi 2, 109, 113, 160; as Fiji Hindi 245–7 Hobsbawm, E. J. 6 Hölderlin 12 Holocaust, The 257 Hugon, Thomy 85 Hungerford, Amy 113 Indar Sabha 29, 30 Indenture, Indian: barrack life 78–80; convictions 259; food 91–3; hybridity 88–91; language 102; marriage 88; mortality rate 76–7; people 82–8; sexual relations 85–7; the system and the passage 75–8; suicides 81; see also Bechu, Hindi, Guyana, Naipaul, V.S., Trinidad, Surinam India: and diaspora politics 23–4, 26; dual citizenship 3; Indian philosophy 48; Indians in East Africa 13; nostalgia for 27 Irving, David 242 Israel, Nico 223 Itwaru, Arnold 9, 75 Iyer, Pico, 210 Jagan, Cheddi 23, 36, 91, 104 Jagatsingh, Kher 23 Jain, Madhu 238 James, C. R. L. 59, 60

Index

James, Henry 131 Jameson, Fredric 72, 93–4 Jane Eyre 189 Jewel in the Crown, The 203 Jiwani, Yasmin 145–7 Joyce, James 10, 221, 251 Jussawalla, Feroza 222 Kafka, Franz 100 Kamboureli, Smaro 136–7 Kant, Immanuel 243, 245 Kapoor, Raj 225 Kaya 61 Keats, John 243 Kermode, Frank 33 Khalistan 2, 10, 147 Khan, Adib 191; Seasonal Adjustment 195–6 Khan, Akram 206; MA 206, 208 Khan, Ismith 57, 93; The Jumbie Bird 57–8 Khanna, Ranjana 2, 9–10 Khanna, Sanjay 145, 147–8 Khoyratty, Farhad 60 King Lear 107 Kipling, Rudyard 141, 199 Klass, Morton 80–1 Komagata Maru 10, 12, 139, 140–3, 144 Koshy, Susan 189 Krishna, Srinivas 145; Masala 145–7 Kristeva, J. 147 Kumar, Amitav 56 Kumar, Krishan 199 Kunzru, Hari 11; Transmission 11–12 Kureishi, Hanif 49, 187, 198–204, 205, 206, 229; My Beautiful Laundrette 201–4; My Son the Fanatic 20; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid 201–4; The Black Album 209–10; The Buddha of Suburbia 200; ‘The Rainbow Sign’ 209 Kymlicka, Will 139 La Guerre, John 55, 56 Lacan, J. 14–15, 256 LaCapra, D. 119 Laclau, E. 183 Ladha, Yasmin 148, 159–60, 164, 180

283

Ladoo, Harold Sonny 57; No Pain Like this Body 57 Lahiri, Jhumpa 191; The Interpreter of Maladies 191–3; The Namesake 193–5 Lal, Brij 16, 24, 27 Lamming, George 89, 146 Landon-Smith, Kristine 207 Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J. B. 114 Lassen, G. xvi Lazarillo de Tormes 176 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 14 Leavis, F. R. xv, 19–20, 257 Lefèbvre, H. 49, 75, 78 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 165 Leys, Ruth 108, 114–17 Lionnet, Françoise 62 Liszt, Franz 18 Lowenthal, David 56 Lukács, Georg 176, 253, 257 Luther, Martin 221 Lyotard, Jean-François 237; and the differend 237–44 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 69, 88, 261 Madraiwiwi, Ratu Joni 37 Magic realism 214, 218; see also Rushdie – – Mahabharata, The xviii–xix, 111, 126, 216, 225; Peter Brook version 46 Mahabir Noor Kumar 56, 59 Malaysia 3 Malkani, Gautam 197; Londonstani 197 Mallik, Bhaktiprasad 246 Maniam, K. S. 50–2; ‘Arriving’ 50; In a Far Country 52; ‘The New Diaspora’ 51; The Return 50–1 Marquez, G. 218 Marx, Karl 16, 66, 82 Maturin, Charles 13; Melmoth the Wanderer 13 Mauritius 3, 25, 38, 52, 66, 81, 85, 256–7, 259; Ganga Talao in 95; writing from 60–3 Mayo, Katherine 185 McGregor, R. S. 248 Mehta, Suketu 18

284 Index Mendelssohn, Moses 257 Mendes, Alfred H. 86–7; ‘Boodhoo’ 87 Michaelis, David 19 Millett, Kate 108 Mishra, Sudesh 22, 30–1, 35, 39, 40, 123, 258; Ferringhi 44–8; The International Dateline 49 Mistry, Rohinton 13, 172–8; A Fine Balance 175–8; Family Matters 178; Such a Long Journey 172–4; ‘Swimming Lessons’174–5; Tales from Firozsha Baag 174–5 Mitchell, Juliet 12 Moag, Rodney 245–6 Mohabeer, Michelle 145 Monar, Rooplall 64, 65, 74, 254 Mootoo, Shani 156–9; Cereus Blooms at Night 156–8; ‘Out on Main Street’ 156 Morey, Peter 176 Morton, John 89, 156 Mourning: theorizing of 7–10; and melancholia 9, 119 Mukerji, Dhan Gopal 185; Caste and Outcast 185 Mukherjee, Bharati 185–7; Jasmine 187, 188–9, 200 Multiculturalism: theory and politics 133–9; and minorities 133; and first nations 134; multicultural reason 136; and anti-racism 139– 40; in the UK 196–7; see also Canada Munasinghe, Viranjini 54 Muslims 2; anti-Muslim rhetoric 14, 20; in Fiji 24–5; Islam and Hinduism 239; see also Rushdie Myers, Helen 56, 257–8 Naipaul, Seepersad 81, 259–60 Naipaul, Shiva 72, 73; Fireflies 98–9; The Chip-Chip Gatherers 100–1 Naipaul, V. S. 4, 164, 187, 231, 250, 259; and allegory 72–5, 93–4; and Hindi films 124–5; and Romanticism 129– 30; and the literary canon 71–2; and the middle voice 119–26; and

trauma 117–32; A House for Mr Biswas 36, 58, 79, 71, 80, 84, 89, 93, 94–5, 106–7, 120, 122, 124, 125, 146, 157, 165, 208, 249, 252, 260; A Turn in the South 82, 129; A Way in the World 104, 261; An Area of Darkness 118–26; Finding the Centre 95, 120; India: A Million Mutinies Now 249; India: A Wounded Civilization; ‘Jasmine’ 73; ‘My Aunt Gold Teeth’ 121; Nobel lecture 23, 40, 93; on indenture cuisine 93; on India 24, 56, 58, 105; The Enigma of Arrival 104, 125, 128–31; The Mimic Men 103–4, 120, 125; The Mystic Masseur 100; The Suffrage of Elvira 93, 100–2; use of language 97–8 Nair, Mira 148, 207; Mississippi Masala 148, 180; The Namesake 193 Nair, Rukmini 232–3 Nandan, Satendra 39–40, 44 Narain, Jit 53 Nayacakalou, R. R. 258 Nietzsche, F. 8 Nixon, Rob 72–3 O’Carroll, John 45–8 Oliver Twist 30 Ondaatje, Michael 153; Anil’s Ghost 153–4 Othello 219–20 Pakistan 5, 24, 238 Palestine 5, 19–20 Panday, Basdeo 55 Parry, Benita 73 Passage to India, A 203, 218 Patten, John 236 Persaud, Lakshmi 58–9; Butterfly in the Wind 58–9 Pillai, Raymond 39, 48, 49; Adhuuraa Sapnaa 41–4 Pillai, Shanthini 52 Pinter, Harold 214, 230 Pollock, Sharon 142 Portuges, Catherine 1 Powell, Enoch 199, 201, 202, 209, 227, 229

Index

Prasad, Mohit 39, 40–1, 48 Puri, Shalini 58, 90 Qarase, Laisenia 7, 37 Qemrawsing, Anita 54 – Qur’an, The 4, 13, 226, 233–4 Rabuka, Sitiveni 249, 255 Radhakrishnan, R. 3, 135–6 Radhakrishnan, S. xv–xvi Rai, Amit S. 17–18 Rajan, Jacob 208 – – Ramayana, . The 4, 21, 29, 48, 95–6, 121, 260 Ramchand, Kenneth 63 Ramgoolam, Sir Seewoosagur 23, 36 Ramgunair, Draupadi 91 Ramkhelawan, Kries 54 Rao, N. T. Rama 226 Rashid, Iqbal 145, 158–9, 164 Rauch, Angelika 8–9, 118 Ravuvu, A. 26, 55 Rechy, John 256 Rhys, Jean 189; Wide Sargasso Sea 81 Ricciardi, A. 8, 108, 256 Ricks, Christopher 131 Rode, Ajmer 143 Rohlehr, Gordon 91 Rungh 144–9 Rushdie, Salman 3, 22, 172, 177, 187, 205, 207, 212, 213, 214, 253; and Bollywood cinema 225–6; and the differend 237–44; and Indian Islam 222; and postmodernism 214–15; and the novel form 214, 241; and the sacred 230–7; and the tale of simurg 216, 222, 261–2; and trauma 13, 49, 129, 131, 160; Fury 3, 22; Midnight’s Children 174, 210, 214–19; Shalimar the Clown 170, 244; Shame 219; The Ground Beneath Her Feet 212, 219; The Moor’s Last Sigh 204, 216, 219–21; the Rushdie Affair 224, 237–44; The Satanic Verses 204, 208–9, 222–41 Safran, William 5, 7 Said, Edward W. 129, 204 Salaam Namaste 12

285

Sanadhya, Totaram 27, 28, 29, 56, 59, – – 66, 71, 74, 79, 81; Bhutlen kı – Katha 27–36 Sangra, Harji 143 – Sanskrit 109, 113; atmanepada middle voice 119, 121–2, 131–2, 160, 207 Sartre, Jean-Paul 20, 40 Sawhney, Nitin 205–7 Scheherazade 216, 221 Schlegel, A. W. xvi Scott, Sir Walter 10 Seecharan, Clem 67 Selvadurai, Shyam 150–3, 179; Cinnamon Gardens 150; Funny Boy 150–3 Selvon, Samuel 63–64, 65, 260; A Brighter Sun 63, 64; ‘Cane is Bitter’ 64, 65, 71, 80, 82, 99; The Lonely Londoners 198 Sendall, Sir Walter 67 Shah Bano case, The 239 Shah, Wajid Ali 30 Shahabuddin, Syed 238–9 Shakespeare, William 45, 62, 199, 219 Shankar, Ravi 223 Shanti Dut 26, 30 Sharma, Pandit Pratap Chandra 259 Shewcharan, Narmala 21 Sikhs 10, 17, 25, 210; in Canada 140–1 Singapore 256 Singh, Helena 155 Singh, Mahatam 54 Singh, Rajkumari 87 Smith, A. D. 7 Smith, A. M. 202–3, 227 South Africa 3, 52; writing in 59–60 Soyinka, Wole 49 Speight, George 7 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 3, 245 Srivastava, Aruna 145 Srivastava, Vinita 145 Steiner, Wendy 231 Stevenson, Robert Louis 45 – – Subramani 21, 39; Dauk a Puran: and . Fiji Hindi 245–8; as subaltern text 245–55 Sukanivalu, Corporal Sefanaia 38

286 Index Sukuna, Ratu Sir Lala 38 Surinam 3, 52–4; and music 54; indenture history of 52; poetry in 53–4 Swindler, The 176 Swinton, Captain E. 78 Tamils: Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada 150–3; Tamil Eelam 2, 10, 150 Tasso 66, 112, 113, 117, 118, 128, 260 Taylor, Charles 22, 38, 136, 196 Tempest, The 60 Thatcherism 202–3, 229 Thobani, Sunera 143 Thomas, Dylan 46, 129, 155 Tinker Hugh 76–80 Tölölyan, Khachig 213 Toorawa, Shawkat M. 60 Trauma: theory 12–13, 52, 108–17; and diaspora 117–20; intergenerational transmission of 115–17 Travel and translation 10–12 Trinidad 3, 38, 52, 54–9; and indenture history 75–88, 89, 92, 103, 107; and race relations in 54–5 Trollope, Anthony 68, 71 Trudeau, Pierre 135, 138, 159 – – Tulsidasa: see Ramayana . Turia, Tariana 109

van Humboldt, Wilhelm xvi Vassanji M. G. 2, 3, 172; Amriika 171; No New Land 149–50; The Book of Secrets 164–71; The In-Between World of Vikram Lall 2, 171–2 Virahsawmy, Dev 60–3, 254–5 Visweswaran, K. 184, 188, 190, 193, 210 Vivekananda, Swami 18 Waitangi, Treaty of 134 Walling, Michael 61 Ward, W. Peter 140 Watno dur 12, 14–15 Webber, A. R. F. 86 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 206–7 Weiner, Gerry 139 Weinrich, Max 19 Weiss, Timothy Werbner Pnina 143 White, Patrick 150 Wiley, Dr. 77–8 Williams, Eric 79–80 Wordsworth, William 40, 73, 129, 180 Wyke, Clement H. 63 Zionism 19–20 Žižek, Slavoj 12, 14–15, 118, 126

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