Post on 10-Jan-2023
DISSERTATION
Narratorial Absence and Point of Viewin Rohinton Mistry’s
“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag”
Submitted September 2009 in partial fulfilmentof the conditions of the award of the degree of
MA in Modern English Language.
Department of English StudiesUniversity of Nottingham
Mark Moran
Contents
Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 I. Introduction: Mistry’s Particulars and the Inevitability of Ideology 5
II. The Postcolonial Discourse 6
II.1 Alienation, the Quotidian and the Sublime, Imperial Aesthetics 7 II.2 Subversion, Cooperation, Identity, and Depiction
8 II.3 English Language and Indian Writers
10 II.4 Indian Writing in English: Imperial Reflection
12 II.5 Cultural Truth: Ireland, Africa, India
13
III. The Feminist Discourse 15
III.1 Spivak and the Subaltern
15 III.2 Stratton: Patriarchy and Postcolonialism
16
2
IV. Methodology
18
IV.1 Booth’s Author, Narrator, Reader 18
IV.2 Fowler’s Point of View 19
IV.3 Simpson’s Point of View 20
IV.4 Modality: Simpson’s Category A 21
IV.5 Simpson’s Transitivity
21
V. Analysis 22 V.1 Space in Firozsha Baag
23 V.2 Temporal Perspective
25 V.3 Modality in Mistry’s Narrator
30 V.3.1 Category A Neutral 31 V.3.2 Category A Negative 31 V.3.3 Heterogeneous Modality
32 V.3.4 Category A-ve Reflective
33 V.4 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and the Ghost 35 V.5 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and her Bai
36
3
V.6 Transitivity
40
VI. Conclusion
43
VII. References 45
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the professors who have guided me
throughout the course of my academic work at the University
of Nottingham and especially Prof. John McCrae, who
recommended that I take a look at Rohinton Mistry; Dr.
Valerie Durrow, who was always helpful in answering any
questions that I had; and Dr. Peter Stockwell for his
suggestion to narrow my focus.
4
Abstract
Rohinton Mistry is an expatriate Parsi Indian writer
who has lived in Canada for more than thirty years and who
has within the past twenty years developed a reputation as
one of the influential postcolonial voices in Indian
fiction. Often compared to the realist novelists in the
19th century, his writing is known for its power of
description, its quietist prose, and its attention to the
quotidian details of the alienated Parsi community in India.
5
He is been criticized by one scholar for not “getting beyond
the particulars” to develop any kind of ideological point of
view. In this paper the author has tried to show that
ideology is implicit in the point of view of the narrator,
and thus the writer. Through an exploration of point of
view in light of postcolonial literary theory the author of
this paper reveals Mistry as a writer with contradictory
ideological aims however subtle this ideology manifests
itself in the “The Ghosts of Firozsha Baag,” Mistry’s
masterpiece of subalternity.
6
I. Introduction: Mistry’s Particulars and the Inevitability
of Ideology
“Narrative always says less than it knows, but it often
makes known more than it says.”
(Genette 1972: 198)
“When he was little,” Jacqueline, a sixty-three-year-old
maid says, “I sang Konkani songs for him…Big man now, he’s
forgotten them and so have I. Forgetting my name, my
language, my songs.” (45) Jacqueline had moved from her
native Goa to Bombay to work in a Parsi household as a
Catholic. Rohinton Mistry’s heroine in “The Ghost of
Firozsha Baag,” the third story in Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha
Baag (1987) illuminates the hybridity that characterizes
Mistry’s fiction and the India he renders with such
subtlety. Mistry’s depiction of Jacqueline and her
encounters with ghosts, her memories of her previous life,
and her Parsi masters draws together a number of currents
thematically and linguistically. So central to Mistry’s
portrayal of Jacqueline is the perspective accorded her and
7
the attendant ideology such a perspective reveals about the
author. There has been little critical interest paid to
Rohinton Mistry’s work, especially his short stories, and
what little criticism exists focuses on his Parsi identity,
or the realism of his fiction and its attention to the
quotidian. Although there has been acknowledgement that
Mistry is more political in his later work, he has been
criticized, for example, by Bharucha (2003) who claims that
Mistry is incapable of “moving beyond the particulars” to
create any type of ideological point of view. (205) On the
other hand, there are other critics like Chaudhuri (2001)
who believe that hybridity and subversion, and thus
ideology, are as much subtle discourses as explicit ones.
The “Ghost of Firozsha Baag” is about particulars, but it
rarely announces its ideological perspective directly. In
fact, Mistry doesn’t see himself as a political writer, in
his words, “If politics … come in to my work, they come in a
secondary way.” (52) What Mistry considers secondary is
primary. What lies beneath Firozsha Baag is a myriad of
contending ideological forces vying for attention despite
8
Mistry’s intent. What lies innocently on the surface, these
particulars, often belies meaning that accrues to these
particulars in the reading process. Booth (1961) reminds us
as he draws upon Flaubert, “the fully expressed ‘natural
event’ will convey its own meanings far better than any
explicit evaluative commentary might do.” (97) Mistry lets
natural events speak for themselves. This ideological
struggle working beneath the text in Firozsha Baag conspires
with the subtle, shifting linguistic manifestations of point
of view creating an ideological text without appearing that
way.
II. The Postcolonial Discourse
To understand Firozsha Baag is not only to understand
the cultural and historical influences which have
constituted Rohinton Mistry as the author, but to understand
the colonial influence of Britain upon India, of the
colonial influence of Hindus upon Parsis within India, of
the role of women in India, and finally of the neocolonial
power of depiction. Rohinton Mistry is a Parsi, middle
class, male, diaspora writer who depicts a Goan Catholic,
9
subaltern woman, portraying her in a Standard English
interweaved with Hindi and Parsi-Gujarati with no translation for
a presumed elite English speaking audience. Mistry’s socio-
cultural background, the complexities of colonialism in
India, the role of gender, and his language style are the
vortex through which Firozsha Baag was conceived, written,
and received. The ensuing discussion delves into the
disparate influences that make up the postcolonial
discourse. This postcolonial context serves a large canvas,
which informs both Mistry’s writing as well as the reader’s
understanding of it.
II.1 Alienation, the Quotidian and the Sublime, Imperial
Aesthetics
For Morey (2004) Mistry’s writing draws on a varied
inheritance from Zoroastrian religious beliefs to a hybrid
literary sensibility cultivated across various cultures.
After being exiled from Iran by Muslim Arab invaders in the
7th century these Zoroastrians fled to what is now Mumbai
and established a thriving community and were to become
known as Parsis. As a small minority surrounded by a
10
majority Hindu culture, these Parsis developed a cohesive
religious and cultural identity. Two important factors
serve as crucial antecedents to the establishment of a Parsi
outlook and thus literary disposition according to Morey: 1.
that these Parsis were not constrained by the socio-
religious proscriptions associated with caste and occupation
that stifled Hindu society and 2. that the Parsis, like
their elite Hindu counterparts, quickly aligned themselves
in their ideals and aesthetics with British values. For the
Parsi the point of view as Morey points out was not looking
up or down at their neighbors in a social sense, but looking
from a secluded margin at an overwhelming other culture.
This minority status within India, albeit elite,
destabilizes convenient postcolonial categories as the
Parsis are a doubly displaced minority, first by Persia,
then by an Indian majority of their adopted country. The
experience of colonialism that the Parsis had in aligning
themselves with the colonial power was much different than,
for example, what the Nigerians or the Irish endured under
colonial power, where native majorities were exploited.
11
It is a sense of alienation, not the resentment of
having been colonized that informs the Parsi experience and
this alienation and its attendant moral ambiguity drives
much of Mistry’s stories. According to Morey, Mistry’s
writing subverts colonial categories with subtlety in his
power of description, his naming, the paradoxes and
injustices his characters face in the quotidian dramas of
his realist fiction. His literary style borrows from
traditions from Persia, the West, and South Asia in his
frequent use of storytelling, European literary allusions,
and Indian dialects all brought to bear on his perspective
of exile.
In looking at the Parsi experience in India it soon
becomes evident that several dialectics are operating
simultaneously. The Parsis establish relationships with two
colonial powers, with the British and with the Hindus
aligning with the former and the aesthetics of ascendancy,
and secluded from the latter. The Parsi experience has been
one of being a member of an elite group and at the same time
being a muted voice as a minority.
12
II.2 Subversion, Cooperation, Identity, and Depiction
Mistry’s work has prompted several critical discussions
illuminating the complexity of postcolonial Indian
literature. Like Stratton (2002) Bharucha (2003) criticizes
how postcolonial theory obscures other elements of the
postcolonial discourse in favor of the common binaries of
resistance and subversion. Issues of gender, ethnicity,
audience, social class, even the very style of English used
to mediate a native Indian reality, are too often occluded
from the postcolonial discourse in the view of numerous
scholars.
As a separate presence for 1,300 years, lacking in a
literary tradition, and having been displaced multiple times
the Parsis developed a unique identity in India.
This cultural inheritance permeates Mistry as a writer and
helps us to understand Mistry’s writing as it falls under
the scrutiny of the converging currents of postcolonial
literary theory.
The themes Mistry engages in his writing lie outside the
dominant nationalist narrative of India, a narrative of
13
national liberation. As a diaspora writer, writes Bharucha,
Mistry is concerned more with representation than he is in
the national identity of India and the political perspective
of Mistry’s Parsi community offers an alternative reading of
India. Though not major players in Indian national
liberation, Parsis did play a limited role in opposing the
British. The Parsi role in India, Bharucha goes on to say,
can by no means be reduced to simple binaries as the Parsi
community engaged both British colonialism and the Hindu
majority at times cooperatively, at other times
subversively. Though historically the Parsis have been
concerned with mere survival as a community, recently Parsis
have become more political in their writing (Natarajan 1996)
though not focused on caste (Dodiya 2004) & (Bharucha 2003)
and more concerned with the abuse of political power and the
extreme right. (Bharucha: 2003)
Parsi embracement of the aesthetics of an imperial power
was not unlike the elite Hindu in India or the elite in
formerly colonized African countries who quickly aligned
themselves with their former masters. The Parsi’s minority
14
status, however, precluded the same kind of neocolonialism
that appeared between a native elite and their native
underclass. Fanon (1963) discusses the postcolonial
dialectic between the colonized and colonizer. Writing
within the context of the decolonization of Africa he argued
that colonial power was replaced with an indigenous
neocolonial class under the pretext of nationalist
sentiment. Using a borrowed aesthetic this native petite
bourgeois with their enlightened values of the West remained
out of touch with the struggles of the masses. Like Fanon’s
Algeria, Spivak (1988) views Indian nationalist liberation
as a bourgeois movement serving bourgeois interests, not, in
particular, the interests of poor Indian women. Even the
role of the subaltern woman in the anti colonial struggle is
rarely depicted, Spivak adds. These bourgeois aesthetics,
as Spivak and Fanon would have it, that Mistry has embraced,
are used as the very tools in Mistry’s attempt at rendering
his protagonist in Firozsha Baag.
Dodiya (2004) points out that the central motif
throughout Mistry’s realist fiction is his transforming the
15
quotidian into the sublime where communities, not
individuals, become the protagonists. Natarajan (1996) like
Bharucha, also discusses the centrality of identity in Parsi
fiction and the comic sense with which Parsi writers depict
the foibles of their community. In Mistry’s novels Bharucha
argues, echoing Fanon and Spivak, that his diasporic and
Parsi identity has limited his experience with the lower
classes and thus writes about them unconvincingly (205). It
is unfortunate that in Bharucha’s criticism she overlooks
Mistry’s portrayal of his lower class protagonist in
Firozsha Baag, hardly an unconvincing rendering of an
underclass character. Mistry’s novels get scrutinized by
scholars willing to look at his work, yet these very
qualities that critics claim are lacking in his novels, or
early novels, are found in Firozsha Baag, a work written
much earlier.
II.3 English Language and Indian Writers
Firozsha Baag has hybrid elements though a Standard
English dominates. The place of Standard English in Indian
writing has been a source of contention among Indian
16
writers, critics, and scholars. Srivastava (2007: 57)
discusses “Babu” English as an Indian English that imitates
British English to the point of absurdity, divorced from its
own context, unable to convey adequately the contours and
connotations of Indian life. This derogatory term brings up
issues of authenticity and power within an Indian context.
In discussing Mistry’s fiction it is inevitable that he be
compared to other canonical Indian authors such as Salmon
Rushdie. As a Parsi and as a Muslim Mistry and Rushdie both
write as outsiders, but where Rushdie is more of a
postmodern writer often operating within other genres such
as magical realism, Mistry typically writes within the
realist mode. Rushdie translates indigenous words, Mistry
doesn’t. Who Mistry and Rushdie write for adds a political
dimension where the production of postcolonial texts is
concerned. Khair (2001) argues that Rushdie’s English is
an English serving an elite foreign audience with its
“deracinated and cosmopolitan Westernized hybrid
sensibility” written from a privileged place. (115). The
Hindi in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, argues Khair, doesn’t
17
mediate two cultures with its unnatural use of Hindi and the
translations of these words. Instead issues of power and
representation are submerged in favor of a palatable
discourse for Western consumers. Notwithstanding Rushdie’s
linguistic pyrotechnics, Khair insists that he is writing in
a Babu English.
Not all critics agree with Khair. Refracted through
both the vernacular tradition as well as Indian writing in
English Chaudhuri (2001) criticizes the essentialist
interpretive modes within the discourse of postcoloniality
with its associating delicacy, nuance, inwardness, and irony
with English and extroversion, polyphony, magic, and non
linear plots with Indian writing (xxv). For Chaudhuri,
Indian writing has also encompassed nuances, and realism for
that matter, along with the Ramayana and its heritage of
magical and non-linear characteristics. Chaudhuri also
challenges the idea of how hybridity is realized textually
maintaining that hybridity is as much a subtle discourse as
it is an explicit one. An Indian writer, Chaudhuri goes on
to say, can write in Standard English, without transmuted,
18
appropriated, subversive, and untranslated words, and be no
less Indian. “Hybridity,” Chaudhuri continues, “can
frequently enter texts in subtly disruptive, rather than
obvious, ways; it need not be worn like national costume.”
(xxvi) What Chauhuri is saying here is that an Indian
writer can write with the aesthetics commonly associated
with the imperial tongue and yet still be very much an
Indian and subversive as well which is much different than
what Khair is implying when he argues that Rushdie’s
English, hybrid as it is, still has a Westernized sensibility
thus obscuring race, ethnicity, and power. If indigenous
words are used, they are used unnaturally, and translated,
better to be understood by Westerners. The problem with
Khair’s argument is that he does not take the time to
differentiate an immature, insecure, maladapted, Babu
English on one hand, and an English of the imperial variety
waged in a more nuanced manner, yet still communicating an
Indian consciousness.
The question of a writer’s linguistic style and what
this says about the perspective of the writer is dealt with
19
at more length later, but it draws our attention to the
larger issues of linguistic representation that lie at the
heart of postcolonial texts.
II.4 Indian Writing in English: Imperial Reflection
Chaudhuri continues his discussion observing how
certain topics are occluded in the discussion of
postcolonial India. The vernacular discourse in India,
Chaudhuri writes, unlike postcolonial theory and to a
certain degree Indian writing in English, has addressed the
native upper class (xx). Chaudhuri’s perspective is valuable
in that he not only discusses perspectives from the West,
but also perspectives from India. He claims that Western
schools of thought have undermined the sense of authentic,
in favor of hybridity, yet authenticity and hybridity, he
insists, have always lived side by side in India (xxix-xxx).
Hybridity then, is more of a Western preoccupation than an
Indian one. The Indian English novel, according to
Chaudhuri, is a space where the West can inscribe its own
preoccupations with its own history, where it can
reinterpret itself.
20
II.5 Cultural Truth: Ireland, Africa, and India
The historical and cultural conditions that helped
constitute Rohinton Mistry as a writer inevitably lead us to
the medium he uses to depict the characters in his work.
Mistry’s protagonist in Firozsha Baag only speaks in “little
bits of English” along with Parsi-Gujarati. Her native tongue
is Konkani. Yet this story is narrated for the most part in
English. The role of the use of the English language then,
becomes political. The struggle over language is, of
course, not unique to India.
At the turn of the twentieth century the Irish were
engaged in a vigorous debate about the role of English in
Ireland and consequently the relationship that Ireland would
have with England. Literature, according to Kiberd (1995)
played a central role in the national awakening of the
Irish. It was the style, the shape of English, not its
content that many believed defined an Irish English, with
its ancient Gaelic rhythm underlying the colonial tongue.
Many doubted if English could convey an Irish native
21
reality, others doubted if Irish had the modern sensibility
of English.
The role of English was no less a point of contention
in Africa where the debate was framed by Ngugi (1981) and
Achebe (1989) with each presenting widely divergent views on
the place a master tongue played in the lives of Africans.
While Ngugi argued that a language could spiritually
subjugate a people with its attendant cultural values,
Achebe countered that English, as in India, was not
exploitive, but a positive force uniting numerous disparate
nationalities offering a common language. This idea that
there is an intrinsic meaning in a language has been a
source of much debate and it is interesting to note that
many writers and scholars from the developing world have
argued, whether explicitly like Ngugi, or implicitly like
Rao (1937) or Brathwaite (1984), that cultural truth resides
in the very language of a culture. Scholars like Fish
(1973) and Ashcroft et al (1995: 277-280) disagree with the
claim that the meaning is intrinsic in texts. Ashcroft et
al offer contradictory claims at once that a language does
22
not use a speaker, that a language does not convey a
particular world view, that categories do not shape the
mind, that meaning is created in the context of use while
also arguing that language and culture are one in the same
and that power to name is the power to control. Ashcroft et
al go on to say that it is nonsense to believe that a truth
is the exclusive preserve of a particular language and yet
goes on to claim that postcolonial writing carries with it a
concomitant “gulf of silence” and that postcolonial writers
must “abrogate the assumptions” (1989: 204) of the imperial
tongue. Though offering conflicting claims about the
universalism of language, Ashcroft et al underscore the
complexity of postcolonial writing.
Whether or not the syntax, the emotional coloring, the
lexis, of English is freighted with its own perspective, its
own ideology, is of concern to us in interpreting the
semantic content of the narrator’s utterances in Firozsha
Baag. The narrator’s viewpoint in Firozsha Baag is an
appropriated viewpoint by the author. As readers we must ask
why the narrator at times uses untranslated Hindi or Parsi-
23
Gujarati. The use of these indigenous words is deliberate
and ideological on the part of the author. The fact that
the narrator thinks and speaks mostly in English is
ideological. A full discussion of the merits of the debate
about intrinsic meaning and language between Konkani and
English, for example, is beyond the scope of our discussion,
but the idea that properties of a language carry ideological
meaning has merit in our discussion of Firozsha Baag.
III. The Feminist Discourse
In reviewing Mistry’s first novel, Such a Long Journey,
Bharucha claims that he failed to present any female
character that wasn’t stereotypical, one-dimensional
character playing a passive role, such as eccentric
spinsters. (202) Bharucha’s criticism is not unlike many
feminist critics of postcolonial literature who lament the
absence of realistic female characters in the roles of
change agents. Firozsha Baag is at once a work that
recreates classical portrayals of the woman at the same time
it privileges a woman’s perspective. The female perspective
24
is valorized in Firozsha Baag, though more on a covert
level. The place of women in literature has been an area of
wide debate drawing attention to the voices of women who
have been silenced in literature.
III.1 Spivak and the Subaltern
Spivak (Morton 2003: 19) criticizes not only the
dominant discourse’s portrayal of indigenous people, but the
entire epistemological apparatus of the West. Her refusal to
take for granted the categories of the West, including those
of Western feminists is shared by other scholars (Katak
1989; Mohanty 1984) and her concern with neo colonialism is
a theme also discussed in Peterson (1984) and Oyewumi
(1997). She is particularly concerned with the poor and
marginalized women of India who, she argues, are forever
depicted in literature by a master class and objectified
within a critical theory out of touch with their daily
lives. It is in trying to speak for subaltern women that
they are silenced Spivak contends, suggesting that subaltern
women start depicting themselves so they can be heard.
Spivak goes further subverting Western feminists who claim
25
to speak for all women when, in her view, they are part of
the colonial enterprise.
Her drawing attention to the limitations of Western
epistemology is well founded, but her feminist criticism of
patriarchal discourses is not as easily sustained. Like
much feminist criticism, for example, Stratton (2002),
Spivak assigns patriarchal value to concepts like
monotheism, religion, family, and the colonial state thus
replacing patriarchal criticism with an equally dismissive
feminist criticism. Such easy dichotomies do little to
advance the discussion of postcolonial writing. Nowhere do
we hear about the role of women, in general, in constituting
and perpetuating the discourses of religion, family, and the
colonial state. Nor do we see in her arguments agency
assigned to roles characteristic of women like Mistry’s
heroine in Firozsha Baag. It is the women who, after all,
presumably have the most influence in the family and the
rearing of children, and thus would likely carry the most
influence in the shaping of society. Her fetishizing of
26
Indian lower class women notwithstanding, Spivak’s critique
of the manifold assumptions of Western thinking is striking.
III.2 Stratton: Patriarchy and Post colonialism
Stratton (2002) is concerned with the role of gender in
postcolonial studies arguing that themes such as
coloniality, class, and race dominate the discussions about
postcolonial literature. Stratton criticizes in her study
of African literature patriarchal writing and its
marginalization of women. Similar to Loomba (1998) Stratton
addresses how both the colonized and the colonizer
subordinated women. Male writers, Stratton writes, working
in collusion with their white colonial male counterparts,
valorize the status quo depicting women as passive objects,
never as change agents, less complex, and not realistic.
Female characters are romanticized and idealized, associated
with motherhood, family, and tradition. For Stratton this
playing out of conventional roles of the sexes is an
allegory that is either perpetuated or subverted in
literature. She goes on to say that there is a “male
literary representation,” implying an essentialism that
27
exists in neat categories across gender, unwittingly
subverting her own premise that essences of male and female
are not absolute. Perhaps Stratton’s work is at its best
when she draws attention to the fact that there is little
scholarly attention paid to female African writers and very
little representation in the African literary canon from
female authors. Like Spivak she overlooks female complicity
in the categories thrust upon them by men. Women, no matter
how they have been depicted in literature or history are
ever innocent bystanders. Passivity may merely mean the
appearance of passivity. Motherhood, family, and tradition
are not passive enterprises. What would make her scholarly
work more substantial would have been her including examples
of both female and male writers depicting both genders with
subtlety and fairness. This acknowledgement of the
heterogeneity of women and criticism of essentialist
theoretical models can be found in the work of scholars such
as Mohanty (1984). The intersection of feminism and
postcolonial theory plays an important role in examining
28
“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” with its heroine situated in
such an ideological space.
If we are to believe Chaudhuri that the Indian English
novel is a discourse less concerned with understanding India
than it is with understanding the West’s relationship with
India then we have yet another dialectic operating and an
imperial one at that. The critical perspectives surrounding
Firozsha Baag encompass an extremely wide terrain: Parsi
identity; alienation vs resistance; a fixation on resistance
and subversion of the British and hybridity to the exclusion
of other aspects of postcoloniality; Mistry’s elite status
speaking to a Western audience; the place of Standard
English in Indian writing; and finally Mistry’s depiction of
female characters and characters of the underclass. All of
these themes are written across Firozsha Baag which makes
any attempt at understanding it within a postcolonial
context all the more daunting. We now turn to linguistic
concerns.
IV. Methodology
29
What stands out about Firozsha Baag at the outset is
its sense of voice, of perspective, of point of view and
that this point of view is of an old, female maid who never
comes out and states any political position, but somehow is
implicated politically.
Fowler (1986) and Simpson’s (1993) frameworks on point of
view will be used in analyzing Firozsha Baag. Booth gives
us a general orientation before we take a closer look at how
Mistry and his narrator communicate linguistically.
IV.1 Booth’s Author, Narrator, Reader
Booth (1961) recalls James Joyce’s revising an
overwritten Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, carefully ridding
it of most of its adverbs and adjectives and “all but a
scarcely recognizable remnant of authorial commentary.” (97)
Booth’s discussion of the implicit presence of the author
through a narrator who uses little explicit commentary is
useful for our understanding Mistry and his narrator. Booth
explains how direct statements can be replaced by numerous
“devices of disclosure and evaluation.” Like Fowler and
Simpson, Booth claims that rhetorical heightening is evident
30
in all writing whatever claims to objectivity there are on
the part of the author. An author’s decision about what
parts of a story to tell, what sequence and proportion of
episodes he uses, how pace and timing is employed, and how
points of view can be manipulated all can contribute to
authorial judgment. (272) Another powerful way an author
can comment indirectly is through authorial silence writing
“realistically,” yet according to Booth, realistic
characters are laden with “additional effects.” (273) The
qualities an author endows his characters cannot be viewed
dispassionately by the reader. Thus a reader’s reaction to
a character affects our reaction to the events this
character relates.
Mistry’s Firozsha Baag is a quotidian drama situated in
the very minutia of the marginalized existence of a maid yet
Mistry’s portrayal is loaded with implicit judgment, much of
it made through what is not being said. Booth offers a
foundation on which we now can look at linguistic taxonomies
in analyzing perspective in Firozsha Baag.
IV.2 Fowler’s Point of View
31
Fowler (1986) argues that our representation of the
world is such because of the categories we are given in the
language we use and that these categories encourage
stabilization of ideas. A discourse is the realization of
the thinking style of a particular culture, the very style
of the language itself encourages habits of mind and
behavior. In this way language not only reflects upon, but
constitutes, and not dispassionately. In seeking stability
the needs of the dominant class are served. Structure is
imposed with these categories to help make sense of the
world. Indeed disruption is radical. Yet was it most
salient to our discussion is his claim that “texts can be
conventional yet signify much more than their propositions
literally state.” (168) In his discussion he shows how
perspective is created through paradigmatic (discourse
level) relationships that transcend the syntagmatic
(propositional) level.
In Fowler’s model of point of view he distinguished
three types: psychological, ideological, and spatio-
32
temporal. The psychological point of view is concerned with
how the author and the narrator are related to one another
and the various shifts and contrasts from both inside the
consciousness of the narrator and outside this
consciousness. Fowler identifies four types of narration
including Type A or internal narration, which is the type used
in Firozsha Baag (and thus the only one discussed here).
The ideological point of view reveals the categories and
beliefs used to understand the world and is carried out
either directly or indirectly across one dominating point of
view or a variety of points of view. Ideology is manifested
directly in the use of modal structures where an author or
narrator evaluates the world of the story. In Fowler’s
framework modality can announce ideology directly or merely
provide language that is symptomatic of a particular outlook
on the world. Spatio-temporal point of view is shown in the
way the events of the story are presented either slowly,
rapidly, or disrupted. Events can be viewed close up,
focused, or less clear.
IV.3 Simpson’s Point of View
33
According to Simpson each author is constituted by the
discourses in which s/he lives and these conditions go far
beyond the writer. The text’s structure presents a
perspective, reflects and constructs ideology, maintaining
hierarchies. Simpson extends Fowler’s framework on point of
view using Fowler’s spatio, temporal, psychological, and
ideological indices building a framework which identifies
specific types of modality and transitivity. His model
taxonomy includes deontic modality where degrees of
permission, obligation, and requirement are shown, usually
in the course of persuading or in acts of politeness;
boulomaic modality where desire is expressed (I hope, I wish,
I regret); epistemic modality---most important according to
Simpson in regards to point of view, where degrees of
confidence in a proposition are revealed (could, must, I
think); and modality of perception where the degree of
commitment is predicated on reference to human perception
(it’s clear that you are right, it’s obvious that you are
right).
IV.4 Modality: Simpson’s Category A
34
In Simpson’s Category A he provides three types:
Category A positive (A+ve), Category A negative (A-ve), and
Category A neutral. All three types show varying degrees of
intrusion by the narrator. In Category A+ve verba
sentiendi, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, and generic
sentences appear with great frequency. Deontic and
boulomaic modal operators are highlighted foregrounding
desire, duty, obligation, and opinions. Epistemic and
perceptual modality are suppressed and thus words of
estrangement do not appear. As a consequence the narration
is oriented towards the reader. In category A-ve epistemic
and perceptual modalities are used creating a negative
shading. Bewilderment, estrangement, and a highlighting of
uncertainty are foregrounded in this type of narrative which
occur often after abrupt transitions into this mode. A-ve
often occurs in the self questioning time of a homodiegetic
narrative. In A neutral narratives there is an absence of
narratorial modality where there are no qualified opinions
of people or events. The narrative is carried through
categorical assertions with physical description, little
35
psychological development, and a lack of connectivity and
causation. Category A neutral is a non reflective mode.
IV.5 Simpson’s Transitivity
Along with modality Simpson also believes that the way
experience is encoded in language, in particular, whether or
not agency is included or left out from a process has
immense value in how an utterance is constructed and
received. His framework of transitivity helps identify the
particular processes at work in language. Simpson’s model
includes four processes representing action, speech, states
of mind, and states of being. Material processes are processes
of doing, either by an animate actor (action process) or by
an inanimate actor (event process). Action processes can be
intentional or they can be superventional (where a process just
happens). Verbalization processes are processes of saying.
Mental processes are internalized processes of sensing and
can be perception processes (seeing, hearing) reaction
processes (liking, hating) and processes of cognition
(thinking, understanding). Relational processes are
processes of being and can either be intensive (x is a)
36
relationship, possessive (x has a) relationship, or
circumstantial (x is at/on a) relationship.
V. Analysis
The Ghost of Firozsha Baag is a story narrated by a
sixty-three year old Catholic maid from Goa while she is
preparing a dinner for her Parsi masters. The coordinates
of space and time are fluid throughout the course of
Jacqueline’s narrative about a ghost that never seems to
leave her alone. Her account is fraught with digressions
starting with a Christmas Eve Mass two years previous and
shifting time frames from experiences she had had as a child
in Goa up to a ritual she and her female master perform
together to finally rid the home of the ghost. To locate
Jacqueline spatially is first to identify the most prominent
space of the narrative, the space where she sleeps and
works.
Text A
After midnight mass I always sleep outside, by the stairs, because bai and seth must not be woken up at 2 am, and they never give me a key. No ayah gets a key to a flat. It is something I have learned, like I learned forty-
nine years ago that life as ayah means living
37
close to the floor. All work I do, I do on floors, like grinding masala, cutting vegetables, cleaning rice.
Food also is eaten sitting on floor, after serving them at dining table. And my bed is rolled out at night in
kitchen passage, on floor. No cot for me. Nowadays, my weight is much more than it used to be, and is getting very difficult to get up from floor. But I am managing. (45)
V.1 Space in Firozsha Baag
That Mistry’s heroine inhabits a very different space
than that of her Parsi masters, and the thought of a sixty-
three year old woman struggling to get up from the floor
every day to serve them cannot be lost upon a reader
familiar with the elite status of the Parsis in India.
Jacqueline doesn’t merely do certain activities on the
floor, she lives on the floor, indeed she is narrating this
very story sitting on the floor. She sleeps outside in the
hallway of this housing complex, when her arrivals are not
suitable for her masters. Floor fixes her social status and
orients the reader ideologically right from the outset of
the story. Implicit in the quotidian details of her space
that she describes lay issues of class inequity.
38
Stockwell’s (2002: 43) deictic center is clearly in this
apartment along with Jacqueline’s neighborhood, in a spatial
sense. Locative expressions and nouns with locative
connotations orient the reader: by the stairs, sounds coming
from her masters’ bed, the gas stove table. Her neighbors live on
the third floor of C Block and open up doors; she goes to the grocery store.
Her day to day life as a maid is shown in the objects she
makes reference to, the spaces she inhabits, her physical
descriptions. This ghost sits on her chest, or sits next to
her bedding, or puts his head on her chest, or sleeps with
her, or lays down with her all of which brings up different
concerns for the reader. Throughout Jacqueline’s narrative
she’s frequently dismissive of this ghost with his sexual
overtures, yet this ghost is apparently not so aggressive
that she is terrified of it shrieking in horror at the idea
of a ghost being anywhere near her in such an intimate place
as a bed. Jacqueline’s ambiguous behavior, foregrounded in
spatial deictics towards this ghost, suggests romantic
interest. Spatial orientation is shown also in Jacqueline’s
reminiscing about her childhood in Goa with its wells, its
39
villages, and its crowded bus stations. These spatial
lexical items clearly foreground a lower class woman though
there are other times when the narrator’s spatial
orientation has a positive valence, for example, later on in
the narrative Jacqueline finds peace and quiet on a balcony.
At the end of Jacqueline’s narrative she’s told to go inside,
away from a Parsi religious ritual, to another space as not
to intrude into the privacy of her masters confirming her
lower social status. Before the close of the story
Jacqueline’s female master tells Jacqueline that she is here
with her after a Parsi ritual to get rid of the ghost and
then invites Jacqueline to come with her for tea. At last
Jacqueline’s space is shared with her master implying an
ambiguity in Jacqueline and her female master’s relational deixis
with its shifting from distance and subordination to
proximity and solidarity. This shifting deixis in this
domestic relationship is a metaphor for India’s relationship
with its colonial master in the larger society, one also of
distance and subversion, of closeness and cooperation.
40
Spatial orientation in Firozsha Baag is a central theme
that brings to light what is often criticized within
postcolonial discourse—subalternity and the voiceless poor,
many of whom are women, who are simply written out of
narratives. That Jacqueline brings us into her space and
fixes our attention on it signifies to the reader that there
may be much more going on than a maid simply telling a
series of vignettes. Her space is valorized.
One cannot help but to see the irony in the alienation
of this maid in a spatial sense at the hands of Parsis who
themselves have been alienated historically within the
larger Indian community. Jacqueline is secluded just like
her Parsi masters. Right from the outset the reader is
brought into the physical space of the subaltern Indian
female. In one sense Mistry is stabilizing the concept of
the subordinated woman through the use of space. This maid
is associated with the word down and she’s on the floor and
she sleeps outside. Few short stories involve such close
attention to the details of the space of a character with
such low social status. No explicit evaluation has been
41
given at this point about Jacqueline’s status as a maid.
The reader is left to infer perspective and disposition on
the part of Jacqueline through physical description.
Spatial point of view has quickly been established in the
beginning of the story and it orients the reader’s
understanding of the distance that separates Jacqueline and
her masters. Later in the story this physical distance
closes and thus the reader infers a new interpretation of
the scope of Jacqueline’s relationship with her bai, the
lady of the house. Working together with temporal
perspective, Jacqueline’s point of view becomes even more
solidified.
V.2 Temporal Perspective
Temporal perspective in Firozsha Baag oscillates
between the varying times of the stories Jacqueline tells,
story time according to Gennette (1972), and the time of
narrating signaled to the reader typographically with
italics (textual deixis in Stockwell’s terms). Temporal deixis
shifts throughout the story on one level as Jacqueline
recalls various episodes of her life while on another level
42
in the deictic center, the kitchen, as Jacqueline prepares
dinner. Who she is speaking to, the narrattee, is unclear, but
the reader get a sense that Jacqueline is speaking almost as
if she’s cutting vegetables as she rambles on and on
digressively. In this sense the reader projects him/herself
into the narrative as an implied participant. The temporal
time span of her reminiscing ranges from when she was little
to two years prior to the time of narration at Christmas.
In Gennette’s terms, the duration of time varies throughout
Jacqueline’s narrative flashback along with the actual time
Jacqueline takes in telling her stories which take place
within the time it takes her to prepare a meal and attend to
her masters’ needs while they eat it. Within this short
amount of time the reader is drawn into the memories of
Jacqueline as her mind roves from one scene to the next in
an endless progression surrounding her main narrative about
the ghost. This central narrative is disrupted by
diversions about: Parsi speech habits; singing to her male
master when he was a child; leaving Bombay; life as a dark
skinned woman; being teased about her dealings with the
43
ghost; various neighborhood antics; a childhood boyfriend;
cockroaches; her mother’s sewing; going to the beach as a
child; and the Portuguese in Goa.
If we are to agree with Simpson (1993: 21) that the “…
knowledge, attitudes and opinions of the medium through
which the fiction is narrated are, after all, likely to
govern the type of spatio-temporal viewpoint which develops”
then we can look at Jacqueline’s narration in a certain
light. Upon closer examination we see temporal deictic
patterning foregrounding three elements: frequency adverbs
and references to habitual action/routines; repetition of
the fact that Jacqueline has been a maid for forty-nine years;
and a significant amount of time spent on recalling a
childhood boyfriend and his sexual advances. It is what is
implicit in Mistry’s writing where communication occurs on a
whole different level.
As a maid, and an old one at that, it comes as no
surprise that she has had a lot of life experience and that
as a maid her life will have been one of various routines.
Her language confirms this. She always sleeps outside by
44
the stairs after midnight mass; her bai looks like she wants
to bite someone every morning; people make fun of her all the
time; the ghost came every Friday night; always on Friday
night; the ghost slept with Jacqueline every Friday night;
every year she goes to midnight Mass; all day and all night she
rides the bus. This deictic patterning creates a sense of
habit and regularity on several levels the significance of
which are open to the reader. Being sixty-three and having
been a maid for such a long time we only find it natural
that her days are ordered by the exigencies of her masters.
Why is it that she always sleeps outside by the stairs after
midnight mass? No provision is made for this elderly maid
and after such a long time of service, for a key to be given
to her to quietly open the door at two in the morning so as
not to awaken her bai and seth. What ideologically freighted
frequency adverb this always is. The social distance
between Jacqueline and her master is immense and carries
with it undertones of an utter contempt at times and lack of
trust these Parsis have for this maid of forty-nine years. This
contempt is inferred by the reader of course because
45
Mistry’s commentary is in disguise. That this narrative is
focalized through the consciousness of a lower class woman
is evident elsewhere in its temporal orientation, for
example when Jacqueline rides a bus all day and all night to get
to Bombay, something her Parsi masters would have probably
never experienced. The quotidian details of her life are on
full display: time for seth to come home; time to cook the rice. This
is the time of the day to day and it is this type of time
that regulates Jacqueline, that has so much control over
her.
Jacqueline is situated temporally not only in the day
to day, but is placed in the context of a life time, in
particular, her forty-nine years that she has spent as a
maid in the same house and same housing complex. Having
repeated forty-nine years five times over the course of her
narrative draws attention to itself. In her own words she
has been forty-nine years in this house as ayah…forty-nine years in Firozsha
Baag’s B Block…I learned forty-nine years ago that life as ayah means living
close to the floor…who I have not seen since I have come back to Bombay—what
did I say, forty-nine years ago...How many times have I burned dinner in forty-
46
nine years? Such temporal contrast between the temporality of
daily existence and the broader sense of time compressed
into the distal deictic expression forty-nine years ago is not
lost on the reader. Juxtaposed against one another, this
day to day time and time in a sense of a life time heightens
a sense of loss, of subalternity. Her repeating this
allusion to time could suggest many things, but I would
argue that there is enough evidence that her propositions
referring to the length of time she has spent as an ayah is
a manifestation of not only sexual tension, which is closer
to the surface, but more importantly, emotional loss and
longing.
There is one digression Jacqueline has that is longer
than the rest, her reminiscing about Cajetan, a childhood
boyfriend. Its length draws attention to itself as her
other digressions take up much less time. Jacqueline talks
about two episodes involving Cajetan, one where he makes
overtures towards her on a beach, and another episode where
he is seen making yet more sexual overtures towards another
girl. Time is compressed with the real events occurring
47
over several years though told quickly. Jacqueline hasn’t
seen Cajetan since she had come to Bombay, forty-nine years ago.
Again we have contrasting deictics at play here, small
amounts of time in a daily schedule set against deictics
foregrounding distal qualities in the form of memories abut
things that had happened a long time ago. There is not much
necessarily significant about an old maid telling stories
interspersed with allusions to the temporality of her daily
existence along with her recounting episodes from her life
from a long time ago. There is something significant,
however, about how the quotidian details of her life are
juxtaposed alongside such events taking place over such
longer durations of time. There is a terrible loss that is
suggested by these two temporalities working dialectically
against each other. What makes this even more interesting
is the idea that perhaps she’s so controlled by her day to
day existence run by the clock that she’s simply unaware of
what’s going on on an emotional level. Time is one of the
motifs of Firozsha Baag, Jacqueline’s very telling of the
story, the act of narration, is interrupted by the
48
exigencies of time signaled by what Stockwell call’s textual
and compositional deixis. These words in the story are
italicized to signify temporal change. Throughout
Jacqueline’s storytelling she is either disrupted by her
masters requests about dinner or she breaks away from her
storytelling to either speak to herself quietly, speak to
herself in an internal monologue, or perhaps speak to an
implied narrattee in the room with her.
(1) Jaakaylee, bai calls out, is it ready yet? She wants to check curry
masala. Too thick, she always says, grind it again, make it smoother. And she
is right, I leave it thick purposely.
(2) Curry is boiling nicely, smells very tasty. Bai tells me don’t forget about
curry, don’t burn the dinner.
(3) Back to kitchen. To make curry needs lots of stirring while boiling.
This pulling the reader back into the time of narration, as
opposed to time of story, foregrounds the temporality of a
maid, a cook, a subaltern in (1) (2) and (3). This
orientation of time, focalized through this particular
narrator renders a particular perspective, outlook, mind
style with all its attendant ideology. Authorial intrusion
49
is non existent as well as heightened evaluation with
adjectives or adverbs. Again, it is with a nuanced subtlety
that Mistry has painted a world, described a world, which
is, as Fowler would have it, symptomatic of a world view.
We have particulars that are speaking for themselves.
Particulars that are moving beyond themselves creating a
clear ideological perspective. No mention of a husband or
children yet she speaks at great length about this Cajetan.
The workaday clock. Time lost over forty-nine years.
Longing. Subalternity is foregrounded, yet no rage. Mistry
gives no explicit judgment. What develops is a profound
sympathy for this maid, and less for her Parsi masters.
Mistry has become self critical. This narrative is not,
overtly at least, a Parsi narrative looking out or looking
in, but an external look at Parsis from an outsider.
In light of postcolonial theory what Mistry has done is
make the reader take the time to spend a lot of time with a
character whose time is typically written out of stories.
Through his manipulation of temporal deictics, his attention
to the day to day time of a maid, Mistry has brought social
50
class and the Parsi standing within this class structure in
India, to the foreground.
V.3 Modality in Mistry’s Narrator
The spatio-temporal characteristics of Firozsha Baag
give us a foundation on which we can further explore
perspective as it is manifested psychologically and
ideologically. One way Simpson explores point of view is
through the ways characters reveal their attitudes towards
each other and objects, through the use of modality.
Through the use of modal lexical verbs, modal auxiliaries,
adverbs, and adjectives or simply by using no modality
Mistry comments.
“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” is narrated in the first
person by a participating character thus making it a
Category A narrative according to Simpson’s model of
modality, but Jacqueline’s narration oscillates between all
three of Simpson’s modalities within Category A though
Categories A-ve and A neutral are foregrounded. Often there
is little explicit, qualified opinion and judgment about
events or characters, and little subjective evaluation,
51
where the story is mostly told through categorical
assertions. There is little attempt at psychological
development for much of this text. Where there is a shift,
however brief, at certain moments in the appearance of
modality, it is striking, a point we will return to later.
We now return to the story.
V.3.1 Category A Neutral
Waiting for her bai and seth to return home she lays
down to sleep:
Text B
Then the cockroach sounds started. I lay quietly in the dark, first to decide where it was. If you put a light on they stop singing and then you don’t know where to
look. So I listened carefully. It was coming from thegas stove table. I put on the light now and took my chappal. There were two of them, sitting next to cylinder.
I lifted my chappal, very slowly and quietly, then phut! phut! Must say I am an expert at cockroach-killing. The poison which seth puts out is really not doing
much good, my chappal is much better. (51)
This text is typical of Jacqueline’s linguistic style over
the course of her narrative. Physical description and a
recalling of events are foregrounded in her style with
little time spent on reflecting upon what is happening.
52
Perhaps the reader at this point can infer that being a maid
one wouldn’t have the time, the luxury to reflect. Perhaps
it reveals a low level of education.
V.3.2 Category A Negative
Modality does appear however, for example in the text above
an epistemic modal operator must is used to qualify the
proposition I am an expert. Epistemic modals appear elsewhere
expressing the degree of confidence the speaker has in what
is being said:
(4) …he vanished again! Now I knew it must be a bhoot. I
knew he would be on the third floor also… (44)
(5) From Panjim to Bombay on the bus I cried…but I knew
leaving was best… (45)
(6) I knew what I had seen. (47)
(7) After drinking my tea that morning I knew what had
happened. (50)
In (4)-(7) the modal lexical verb knew expresses a very high
level of commitment to the propositions about either leaving
home or her witnessing the ghost. Would Jacqueline have
said It was a bhoot or leaving was best with no qualification if
53
she were absolutely certain about seeing this ghost or
leaving her hometown? The use of such categorical
assertions would have changed, however subtle, the reader’s
interpretation of Jacqueline’s experience. The pragmatic
meaning here is at odds with the propositional content.
Knew in this context signifies not assurance but
uncertainty. There’s a subtle shift in the discourse from
description of physical action and of events operating with
neutral modality to a discourse of hesitancy operating with
negative modality, and in (4)-(7) it is a hesitancy that is
barely registered, yet there and it suggests that there is
just enough ambiguity that perhaps Jacqueline may not be
seeing ghosts, that perhaps her leaving her home town may
not have been the best thing to do. These epistemic modals
signify a reflective mode used periodically with physical
descriptions like the ones in Text A: cockroaches started making
sounds, she lies down, don’t turn the lights on or the cockroaches stop singing,
listen, turn the lights on…etc.
V.3.3 Heterogeneous Modality
54
It becomes more and more apparent that a strategy of
the discourse in Firozsha Baag is its heterogeneity in its
modality. It is this first person narration with its
external perspective offering some, but not much in the way
of the narrator’s deeper feelings that heightens the
contrasting reflective mode the narrator engages in, however
briefly. As it is commonly said, absence is the highest
form of presence. Having not given the reader access to his
heroine’s inner emotional world, the brief rupture in this
predominantly modal neutral narrative disrupts the
narrative. The emotional center of the narrative presents
itself. Jacqueline refers to the ghost in dismissive
language several times calling him a rascal and a ghost of
mischief on several occasions and is constantly trying to
push him off as he chokes her, sleeps with a buttoned up
collar to dissuade his groping, and stops eating fish and
becomes a vegetarian in the hope that this may throw him off
the trail. She keeps quiet about this ghost and his visits,
but eventually her guilt leads her to confession. It is
Christmas time again and she waits for this bhoot who
55
doesn’t appear. Modality changes into a more explicit
reflective mode:
V.3.4 Category A-ve Reflective
(8) …first I thought maybe he is late, maybe he has
somewhere else to go… (51)
Text C
But he did not come. Why, I wondered. If he came to the bedding of a fat and ugly ayah all this time, now what was the matter? I could not understand. But then I said to myself, what are you thinking Jaakaylee, where is your head,do you really want the ghost to come sleep with you and touch you so shamefully?...Now I was completely sure my confession had got rid of him and his shameless habits…I thought, maybe if he is ashamed to come into my bed, he could wait for me on the stairs like last year. (51)
Here we have a shift into Simpson’s Category A negative mode
where epistemic modality and evaluative adjectives adverbs
with negative polarity are more prominent. Simpson notes
that one of the reasons why authors shift into a more
dominant A-ve is to show self-questioning that typically
occurs at key points in homodiegetic narratives (59), which
is our case here with Jacqueline. The reader finally gets
access to Jacqueline in a way she hasn’t shared. Now it is
internal narration, reflective. In (8) we see epistemic
56
modal adverbs maybe weakening her propositions, creating
uncertainty. Epistemic operators signal qualification of
concepts of knowledge, belief, and cognition and are seen in
Text C in the use of modal adverb maybe and the modal
lexical verbs wonder, understand, and thought expressing concepts
of knowledge, belief, or cognition and thus are epistemic in
character. Completely sure is an epistemic modal expressing
degree of commitment. In a life governed by habit and
consistency we now see uncertainty and disorientation. She
had previously known so much about this ghost, had been so
certain, however we as readers interpreted her utterance.
Notice the evaluative adjectives and adverbs with negative
polarity in the self referential fat and ugly and to the ghost
in shameful, shamefully, and ashamed all of which indicate the
presence not of A-ve, but of Category A positive modality.
A+ve modality typically foregrounds a narrator’s opinions as
well as desires, obligations, duties, and possibilities.
Could as in he could wait for me upstairs is a deontic modal, which
typically appear in A+ve modality, expressing possibility
and/or politeness. In this text modality oscillates between
57
A-ve and A+ve. The last sentence in Text C offers
interesting contrasts in modality first starting with
epistemic qualification and disorientation then on to
subjective feelings and expression of deontic possibility.
These shifts in modality signal change in Jacqueline. The
juxtaposition of positive and negative modalities in this
text creates a tension in a pragmatic sense. Evaluative
adjectives are used with negative polarity yet Jacqueline is
showing politeness and willingness to entertain
possibilities. The locutionary effect is one of modesty,
and politeness, but the illocutionary force is based on an
emotional need that runs deeper than sexual desire. The are
other times when a shift from A neutral or A-ve into A+ve
occurs:
(9) …because it can can cause serious accident… (48)
(10) …he would hold me tighter. Or would try to put his
hands… (48)
(11) …I would tell my father who would give him solid
pasting and throw him in the well
where the bhoot would take care of him. (49)
58
In (9)-(11) modals express possibility, not degrees of
commitment and thus change the
feeling of the text.
In Text C Jacqueline’s disposition vis a vis the ghost
changes for the first time in her story. Her previous
negative categorical assertions about this ghost
notwithstanding, she all of a sudden speaks about this ghost
in much different terms. This ghost goes from a rascal, a
shameless ghost of mischief, a ghost to be got rid of, to a
ghost she is sympathizing with, making allowances for. For
the first time in the story Jacqueline is not in the object
position, where things are being done to her, it is the
ghost who now has less status, less agency, if not more
human.
V.4 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and the Ghost
A relational deictic shift occurs, in the words of Stockwell (
). According to Stockwell there are many types of deixis,
such as relational deixis, that go beyond person, place, and
time. Attitude is encoded in relational deixis and changes
in modality cue deictic shifts. Jacqueline becomes polite
59
for the first time towards this ghost. In her reflecting
she gains agency, no longer just a maid at the beck and call
of her masters; no longer a bystander narrating events she
has had little control over. This relationship between this
ghost and Jacqueline becomes more human. The reader now
understands that there is a gap between Jacqueline’s
locutions about this shameless ghost and the illocutionary
subtext that is Jacqueline’s desire for intimacy. What lies
beneath her narrative is a very poignant loneliness. Shifts
in modality lead us to these claims. Later in her
narrative, amid the accounts of her experiences and while
her narration is disrupted by the exigencies of her working
life, she slips into A+ve again this time with a boulomaic
modal of desire:
(12) I wished they would come home soon. (53)
Now her reflecting is more explicit, and nowhere in the rest
of the story is the reader privileged with Jacqueline’s
emotional world than when she remembers her parents and
Cajetan in the darkness and then begins to sew only to
remember her mother’s sewing and she feels sadness along
60
with the nice and quiet dark. Her utterances are filled with
evaluations; we finally hear desire from her. That we hear
her desire, however brief it appears, we interpret it as
significant:
(13) I wondered if the ghost was coming again. (52)
Line (13) is a complicated utterance indeed. It is
categorized as A-ve modality with its modal lexical verb
wondered, but pragmatic terms this is a speech act
functioning as a demand: I need you to come back. Here
illocutionary force converges with epistemic modality. In
the world Mistry has created, what is not said speaks more
than what is said. With Mistry, no commentary is
commentary.
V.5 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and her Bai
Jacqueline’s relationship with her bai undergoes, like
her relationship with the bhoot, change, or a shift in
relational deixis. Over the course of Jacqueline’s
narrative evaluative adverbs and adjectives, modalized
expressions, spatial deictics, and politeness strategies all
converge in encoding this relationship socially. Like her
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relationship with the ghost, her relationship with her bai
moves from one of distance to closeness. Jacqueline is
situated socially very early in the story as she refers to
herself as ayah (maid) and then hears her bai call out to her
asking if the food is ready. Asymmetrical naming strategies
is just one way social distance is realized in this text.
The word bai is a Guajarati term used as a title of respect
for a woman, often used as a suffix. (Interestingly bai has
several meanings throughout India based on the numerous
languages spoken there. In Hindi it can either mean brother
or maid depending on the tone used and in Urdu bai implies
that someone is a prostitute.) Her bai (never does the
reader learn her actual name) naturally refers to Jacqueline
as Jaakaylee, her first name, though mispronounced. Politeness
strategies help also to encode Jacqueline’s relationship
with her bai. Though socially distant from one another,
Jacqueline and her bai also share a certain level of
intimacy, living in the same house together for many years.
A lot is taken for granted in this relationship
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pragmatically thus the economy in which Jacqueline’s bai
addresses Jacqueline:
(14) Jaakaylee, my bai calls out, Jaakaylee, is masala
ready? (44)
Bai calls out to Jacqueline regardless of what Jacqueline is
doing at the time, not walking into the same room to ask
Jacqueline; simply calling out. The bai calls out because she
is depicted as being further away from Jacqueline thus their
relationship is characterized by distal deictics. Social
distance also manifests itself spatially. These utterances
by the bai occur periodically as Jacqueline is preparing the
meal and narrating her story. The fact that Jacqueline is
much older than the bai doesn’t affect her lack of positive
politeness strategies. Bai orders and requests and
Jacqueline listens:
(15) Bai tells me don’t forget about curry, don’t burn the
dinner. (48)
Interestingly we don’t even hear Jacqueline respond to her
bai for a very long time further encoding the social
distance between the two. Jacqueline’s attitude towards her
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bai is encoded in the adjectives she uses to evaluate her bai
describing her bai words like mean (45) and angry (45).
Deontic modality is foregrounded expressing bai’s attitude
towards Jacqueline:
(16) Then bai said I must stop…(46)
(17) But a masala machine they will not buy. Jaakaylee must
keep on doing it till her
arms fall out from shoulders. (47)
(18) On that morning I had to wash whole balcony floor… (54)
In (16) Jacqueline is not asked, but ordered to stop going
to school so she would have time for her duties as a maid.
In (17) and (18) Jacqueline again responds to duties and
commands all encoded with deontic modality. Notice how the
bai’s modal perspective is not one of politeness and
qualification in contrast to Jacqueline’s politeness
strategy where her reaction to bai is mitigated with a
epistemic modal auxiliary might:
(19) Then I thought, no, it is better if I go in quietly
before they see me, or bai might get angry…(53)
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This a classic master-servant relationship and it is encoded
by lexis, modality, spatial dexis, and politeness strategies
and implicitly reduces the status of Jacqueline. While bai
speaks in imperatives in making requests foregrounding
obligations and duties using deontic operators, Jacqueline’s
language is more cautious in her use of epistemic modal
operators. Bai speaks at Jacqueline, always the one who
initiates turns; Jacqueline gives private non verbal
responses directed to either herself or an implied reader.
If we assume that the center, in regards to relational
deixis, is one of master-servant and marked by distance,
then this relationship between Jacqueline and her bai is
unstable. A shift occurs later in the story signaling to
the reader that if Jacqueline must sleep and work on the
ground, and sleep outside at times, and be interrupted, and
prepare food a certain way, and forever accommodate her lady
of the house, then she is also more of a peer with her bai
eating with her, holding conversations with her, and being
asked for help. If deontic modality is foregrounded in the
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obligations and duties imposed or required of Jacqueline
then there is an abrupt shift in
(12) I wished they would come home soon. (52)
Wished is a boulomaic modal lexical verb expressing desire
and signals a change in Jacqueline’s modality and suggests
not distance, but intimacy. It is a striking contrast to
her previous disposition towards her bai, one marked by
distance and adjectives of negative polarity. Towards the
end of the story Jacqueline’s bai returns home only to see
the ghost and shriek in horror. Intimacy is foregrounded
now with the preposition with as bai asks Jacqueline to sit
with her, then the bai sits down with Jacqueline, and then the
bai conducts an exclusive Parsi ceremony with Jacqueline.
After Jacqueline screams in the course of this Parsi ritual
breaking a pair of scissors and suggesting that bai could
take the money out of her paycheck, bai responds consoling
her:
(20) I’m here with you. (56)
In (20) proximal spatial deixis intersects with relational
deixis. Now bai and Jacqueline share solidarity, a
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solidarity that transcends their respective social roles.
Bai goes on to ask Jacqueline for help and then goes and
makes tea for both of them again revealing a shift in
relational deixis.
We see how spatio-temporal point of view and modality
create not one perspective, but several. Transitivity
patterns work in tandem with space, time, and Jacqueline’s
attitude towards things to create a nuanced depiction of a
subaltern Indian maid’s humanity. Ideology continues to
implicate itself in linguistic devices, not through explicit
commentary.
V.6 Transitivity
Jacqueline’s subordination foregrounded temporally,
spatially, and in her attitude towards her propositions, is
also evident in the characteristics of transitivity in the
way she depicts herself in her narration. Jacqueline is
shouted at, spoken to, acted upon, and waits for people
rarely acting in the role of agent. Dominant transitivity
patterns of this text reveal an external perspective with a
sharp departure, like was shown in the previous discussion
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on modality, into a more introspective mode. The consistent
use of the passive voice and Jacqueline’s consistent role as
receiver of action creates a world in which she has little
control over her circumstances.
Material processes of action and intention and
verbalization processes dominate in Jacqueline’s narrative.
Processes of verbalization center occur for the most part
when kids (and adults) in her neighborhood would mock her
and her, according to them, eccentric behavior. It is
mentioned time and time again, but she never responds. This
teasing she mentioned seven times throughout the course of
the text. Line (21) was typical of these taunts:
(21) Children in Firozsha Baag would shout, ayah bhoot!
ayah bhoot! every time they saw me. (47)
In terms of Simpson’s framework of transitivity (21) is a
process of verbalization where the participant roles include
the SAYER, the person/people who speak(s), the TARGET, the
addressee, and the VERBIAGE, what is said. In (21) the
children are the SAYERS, Jacqueline (me) is the TARGET, and
ayah bhoot! ayah boot! is the VERBIAGE. Jacqueline is never
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the SAYER in these exchanges, always the TARGET. Never do we
see Jacqueline appear as the first word or in the first
phrase of the sentence. She is the receiver of action, an
object. This passive construction is a consistent
characteristic revealing her lack of social status:
(22) made a lot of fun of me (47)
(23) teasing everyone was doing to me (47)
(24) fun they made of me (51)
Where there are material processes they usually involve the
ghost, or a boy from her youth who pursued her romantically,
as agents:
(25) …yet he came…ghost slept with me…how he came to my bed,
lay down with me, tried to touch me… (49)
Material processes are processes of doing and are
categorized as action processes in Firozsha Baag as these
actions are performed by animate actors. These material
processes of action in Firozsha Baag are also intentional
processes as they are done voluntarily. Notice in (25) that
this ghost is the doer, again Jacqueline is the receiver of
action and occupies the final position syntactically.
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Notice also the intransitive structure in the first four
clauses further foregrounding passivity. Material processes
are broken down into three participant roles: ACTOR, PROCESS,
and GOAL. Jacqueline is the GOAL in these clauses of
material processes:
ACTOR PROCESS GOAL
(25) (he) tried to
touch me
Notice also the movement predicate came in (25)
foregrounding spatial deixis of movement towards Jacqueline.
We see this elsewhere where she is waiting for the ghost to
come and waiting for her bai-seth to come or waiting for
fisherman to come to help stop inappropriate behavior of a
young boy she had been with. She also stood in one place waiting
for her uncle earlier in the story (44) expressing more
inaction than action. The physical action that is prominent
in the text is carried out by either the ghost of this
Cajetan character from her past and the physical action is
sexual. Other material processes happen of course, for
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example when Jacqueline is preparing dinner or when she
participates in a religious ritual at the end of the
narrative, but these are minor events. Mistry’s depiction
of Jacqueline could be considered conventional in terms of
transitivity with her being assigned such passive status as
a female maid. Yet for a brief moment patterns of
transitivity shift, as Jacqueline becomes introspective:
(26) I wish they would come (52)
(27) But sewing and remembering brought me more sadness
(52)
(28) I wondered if the ghost was coming again (52)
In (26)-(28) we see mental processes of cognition which
express internalized processes. Participant roles for
processes of cognition include SENSOR and PHENOMENON. The
mental processes of cognition converge here with the use of
boulomaic and epistemic modal lexical verbs, wish and
wondered respectively. (26) is broken down into its
constituent parts within the framework Simpson provides us:
SENSER PROCESS PHENOMENON
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(26) I wish
they would come.
Jacqueline now occupies the subject position syntactically
showing agency. She is doing the action, here the thinking.
She is not narrating events or describing physical action or
talking about what other characters are doing like she does
for most of her narrative. The reader enters her inner
world. In (28) we see an interesting example of agency and
passivity operating simultaneously. Jacqueline in the
subject position and is the doer, yet the movement predicate
coming heightens her passive status in her relationship with
this ghost and with the rest of the characters in the text.
The transitivity patterns in these clauses all contribute to
a sense that Jacqueline is a character whose agency is
severely circumscribed. One striking absence that presents
itself in examining transitivity is the lack of extended
dialogue until the very end of the narrative. Things are
done to her or words are spoken at her. In this sense she’d
a voiceless subaltern at the margins.
VI. Conclusion
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Rohinton Mistry and his short story “The Ghost of
Firozsha Baag” subvert numerous postcolonial categories.
He is after all an elite by way of education, language, and
cultural identity who has written a story about a subaltern
woman with a very different social background not to mention
a different gender. His story is not about Parsi
alienation. His portrayal of an elderly female made is
stereotypical in one sense, in another sense he has elevated
a female character assigning her agency. He has included
the voice of the lower class.
What makes this story so compelling is that it offers
no simple solution to the author’s intent or ideological
bearings. Ideology in this story is contradictory,
ambiguous. Bharucha argues that Mistry merely describes
characters who suffer, but goes no further, maintaining the
status quo. A recent novel, White Tiger, was published
by an Indian writer where the servant slits his master’s
throat only to admit at the very end of the story that he
would never say it was a mistake to have done so: “It was
all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour,
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just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.”
(321) Perhaps the reader can draw the conclusion that
because Jacqueline continues to go about her business as a
maid as the story closes that she is content and this is the
way things are. It is a truism in linguistics that language
constitutes and stabilizes and perpetuates class inequity.
In this sense Mistry’s limited point of view is constituting
his worldview based on his position as a member of the
privileged class. He depicts on his terms. Bharucha would
ask where the rage is and maybe she has a point. Mistry has
never dealt with caste issues so he is incapable of
empathizing on that level with Jacqueline. In an insidious
way “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” in portraying Jacqueline
with no resentment is asking of the reader accept her status
as the way things are. Yet somehow this reading is
inadequate. If we don’t feel the rage of Jacqueline, we
feel, because of the effects created linguistically, a
profound empathy for her, her rage not necessary for us to
be so drawn to her. This empathy inevitably leads to an
ideological reckoning on the part of the reader whether or
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not any throat has been slit. Mistry then is both
subverting and perpetuating the status quo. In this way his
“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” is both a disruptive and
cohesive influence in postcolonial Indian writing.
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