M. A. II Eng P. G3 E5 & G3 E6 Amitav Ghosh title.pmd

SHIVAJI UNIVERSITY, KOLHAPUR

CENTRE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION

M. A. Part-II : English

Semester-IV : Paper G3 E5

Special Author : Amitav Ghosh

Semester-IV : Paper G3 E6

Postcolonial Women Writers

(Academic Year 2019-20 onwards)

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(ii)

(iii)

Centre for Distance Education

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n ADVISORY COMMITTEE n

Prof. (Dr.) D. T. Shirke

Honourable Vice Chancellor,


Prof. (Dr.) P. S. Patil

Honourable Pro-Vice Chancellor,


Prof. (Dr.) M. M. Salunkhe

Former Vice-Chancellor,

Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open

University, Nashik.

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Former Vice Chancellor,

University of Mysore

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Distance Education Bureau,

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Technology, Shivaji University, Kolhapur

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I/c. Dean, Faculty of Commerce and

Management, Shivaji University, Kolhapur

Prin. (Dr.) Smt. M. V. Gulavani

I/c. Dean, Faculty of Inter-disciplinary

Studies, Shivaji University, Kolhapur

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I/c. Registrar,


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I/c. Director, Board of Examinations and

Valuation, Shivaji University, Kolhapur

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I/c. Finance and Accounts Officer,


Prof. (Dr.) D. K. More

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(iv)

n B.O.S. MEMBERS OF ENGLISH n

Chairman- Dr. S. B. Bhambar

Tukaram Krishnaji Kolekar Arts and Commerce College,

Nesari, Tal. Gadhinglaj, Dist. Kolhapur

l Prof. (Dr.) T. K. KarekattiHead, Department of English,


l Dr. R. G. BarvekarDepartment of English,


l Dr. R. G. KulkarniMathubai Garware Mahavidyalaya,

Sangli

l Dr. M. R. PatilDr. Ghali College, Gadhinglaj,

Dist, Kolhapur

l Dr. Smt. Prabhavati Arvind PatilVivekanand College, Kolhapur

l Dr. Sunil PatilArts & Commerce College, Kasegaon,

Tal. Walwa, Dist. Sangli

l Dr. Prashant KambleRajarshi Shahu Arts & Commerce College,

Rukadi, Tal. Hatkanangale, Dist. Kolhapur

l Dr. Namdev Pandurang KhavareHon. Shri. Annasaheb Dange Arts,

Commerce & Science College,

Hatkanangale, Dist. Kolhapur

l Dr. Rajandra Satyasheel PondeWillingdon College, Vishrambag, Sangli

l Dr. D. R. MoreAt. Ujalaiwadi, Tal. Karveer, Dist. Kolhapur

l Prof. Dr. Jayprakash A. ShindeProfessor and Former Head,

Department of English,


l Shri. Sadashiv Pandu ChouguleS. B. Khade Mahavidyalaya, Koparde,

Tal. Karveer, Dist. Kolhapur

l Dr. Sudhir NikamB. N. N. College, Bhiwandi,

Thane-421305.

(v)

Preface

Dear students,

It gives us immense pleasure to provide you the self-instructional material for Elective

Group-III New Literatures in English papers E3 and E6. Elective paper E3 is entitled 'Special

Author : Amitav Ghosh' and elective paper E6 is entitled 'Postcolonial Women Writers'.

These papers aim to acquaint you with various trends and movements in African, Caribbean,

Australian and Canadian Literatures including such genres as poetry, fiction and plays.

However, it is always better to consult the prescribed syllabus of these papers. Each of

these papers contain four units which are further divided into a general topic and some

representative texts. The general topics are meant for providing the contexts in which the

prescribed texts have to be studied.

The list of reference books given at the end of the unit will help you to pursue your study

of these topics. Eight texts prescribed in the syllabus are included in this book but they are

in the form of study material not the original texts. The unit writers have made them simple

and brief. You must read the original texts to get the feel of the original and understand them

in the right spirit. These units are only notes for your guidance. You must refer to the original

materials in the books prescribed in the syllabus.

We hope that the study material in this book will prove to be of great use for your study

and advancement of knowledge.

We thank all those people who helped in accomplishing the great task of preparing this

book for students of Centre for Distance Education.

n Editors n

Prof. (Dr.) Ravindra B. Tasildar

Sangamner Nagarpalika Arts, D.J. Malpani

Commerce and B.N. Sarda Science College

(Autonomous), Sangamner,

Dist. Ahmednagar

Dr. N. B. Masal

Dr. Ghali College, Gadhinglaj,

Tal. Gadhinglaj, Dist. Kolhapur

(vi)

Paper G3 E5 : Special Author : Amitav Ghosh

Paper G3 E6 : Postcolonial Women Writers

Centre for Distance Education

Shivaji University,

Kolhapur.

Writing Team

Author’s Name Unit No

Semester-IV

Paper-E5

Semester-IV

Paper-E6

Dr. Manik Patil 1 --Sadashivrao Mandlik Mahavidyalaya, Murgud

Tal. Kagal, Dist. Kolhapur

Dr. Raghunath Kadakane 2 --

Rajaram College, Kolhapur

Prof. T. S. Deokule 3 --

Chhatrapati Shivaji College, Satara

Dr. Kalpana Gangatirkar 4 --

Mahavir Mahavidyalaya, Kolhapur

Dr. Ujjwala Tathe -- 1

Mahila Mahavidyalaya, Mangalwar Peth, Karad

Prof. (Dr.) Ravindra B. Tasildar -- 2Sangamner Nagarpalika Arts, D.J. Malpani Commerce and

B.N. Sarda Science College (Autonomous), Sangamner,

Dist. Ahmednagar

Dr. Babasaheb Kangune -- 3

Chhatrapati College, Satara

Dr. Vishwanath Bite 4Rajaram College, Kolhapur

n Editors n

Prof. (Dr.) Ravindra B. Tasildar

Sangamner Nagarpalika Arts, D.J. Malpani

Commerce and B.N. Sarda Science College

(Autonomous), Sangamner,

Dist. Ahmednagar

Dr. N. B. Masal

Dr. Ghali College, Gadhinglaj,

Tal. Gadhinglaj, Dist. Kolhapur

(vii)

INDEX

Unit No. Topic Page No.

Semester-IV : Paper-G3 E5

1. The Shadow Lines - Amitav Ghosh 1

2. The Calcutta Chromosome 33

3. General Topics : Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse 46

Amitav Ghosh - The Imam and the Indian

4. The Hungry Tide 106

Semester-IV : Paper-G3 E6

1. Postcolonial Australian Novel 137

Doris Pilkington Garimara, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence

2. Postcolonial African Short Stories 171

3. Postcolonial Poetry 205

4. Dina Mehata's Getting Away With Murder 271

(viii)

Each Unit begins with the section objectives -

Objectives are directive and indicative of :

1. what has been presented in the unit and

2. what is expected from you

3. what you are expected to know pertaining to the specific unit,

once you have completed working on the unit.

The self check exercises with possible answers will help you

understand the unit in the right perspective. Go through the possible

answers only after you write your answers. These exercises are not to

be submitted to us for evaluation. They have been provided to you as

study tools to keep you on the right track as you study the unit.

Dear Students

The SIM is simply a supporting material for the study of this paper.

It is also advised to see the new syllabus 2018-19 and study the

reference books and other related material for the detailed study of

the paper.

1

Unit-1

The Shadow Lines

Amitav Ghosh

Contents

1.0 Objectives

1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 History and Narrative

1.1.2 Life and Works of Amitav Ghosh

1.1.3 Check Your Progress

1.1.4 Terms to Remember

1.2 Plot and Summary of the novel The Shadow Lines



1.3 Major and Minor Characters



1.4 Themes and Other Aspects in The Shadow Lines

1.4.1 Theme of borders, violence, and political unrest presented in the novel

The Shadow Lines OR partition, identity and communal violence in

The Shadow Lines:

1.4.2 The Shadow Lines – The novel of memories.

1.4.3 The Theme of Nationalism

1.4.4 Significance of the Title

1.4.5 Historical Factors and Their Narratives in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow

Lines


2


1.5 Summary

1.6 Answers to Check Your Progress

1.7 Exercises

1.8 Further Readings

1.0 Objectives:

After studying this unit you will be able to

• Understand the great contribution of Amitav Ghosh in the field of post colonial

Indian English Literature

• Understand the social disturbance that occurred through partition

• Study the characters in the novel and the problems they confront

• Study the sources, setting and structure of the novel.

1.1 Introduction:

This unit discusses the concept of narrative and history, life and works of the

famous Indian English novelist, Amitav Ghosh. It also presents the detailed summary

of his popular novel The Shadow Lines, the major and minor characters in the novel

and commentary on theme, title and other aspects of the novel.

1.1.1 Narrative and History

It was considered for long time that narrative and history were sisters of art as

both consider the reader’s mind and represent experience faithfully. From Herodotus

to Victor Hugo and Georg Brandes to Benedetto Croce and A. J. Toynbee, that is

from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century it was the belief that the

historian along with his skill should be a good narrator. Vice versa, a good story

teller can’t avoid incorporating some elements of historical, i.e. communal

significance.

A narrative is an account of how and why a situation or event took place. It

unfolds a complex historical event with the details like time, setting, actions and the

personages that involve in it. It also evaluates the actual reasons of it and also

possible things to avoid it. Narrative history is the practice of writing history in a

3

story-based form. It involves history-writing based on reconstructing series of short-

term events. Since the writing of Leopold Von Ranke on professionalizing history-

writing in the nineteenth century it has been associated with empiricism. The

term narrative history thus overlaps with the term histoire événementielle ('event-

history') coined by Fernand Braudel in the early twentieth century. He analyzed

longer-term trends of forms of history-writing. A crucial and unavoidable feature of

narrative history is the fact of selectivity. The narrative historian is forced to make

choices and selections at every stage: between "significant" and "insignificant",

between "side show" and "main event", and between levels of description. Another

crucial feature of the genre of narrative history is the tension between structure and

agency. Historians differ about where to set the balance between limiting structures

and choosing agents.

Though history is considered a social science, the story-based nature of history

approves the addition of a greater or lesser degree of narration in addition to an

analytical or interpretative exposition of historical information. It is divided into two

subgenres: the traditional narrative and the modern narrative. Traditional

narrative focuses on the chronological order of history. It is event driven and tends

to center upon individuals, action, and intention. For example, in regard to the French

Revolution, a historian who works with the traditional narrative might be more

interested in the revolution as a single unit (one revolution), centre it in Paris, and

rely heavily upon major figures such as Maximilien Robespierre. The traditional

narrative focuses too much on what happened and not enough on why it happened.

Moreover, this type of narrative reduces history neatly.

On the other hand, modern narrative centers on structures and general trends.

A modern narrative would break from rigid chronology if the historian felt it

explained the concept better. In terms of the French Revolution, a historian working

with the modern narrative will use general traits of the revolution that were shared by

revolutionaries across France but would also illustrate regional variations based on

general trends. He may use different sociological factors to show why different types

of people supported the general revolution. The modern narrative overburdens the

reader with trivial data that had no significance in history. That may cause the

readers to believe that minor trivial events were more important than they were

considering major events.

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Amitav Ghosh is honoured with several awards. Almost all his literary works

are entangled with history. His fiction is characterized by strong themes that may be

sometimes identified as historical novels. His themes involve emigration, exile,

cultural displacement and uprooting. He illuminates the basic ironies, deep seated

ambiguities and existential dilemmas of human condition, humanism,

cosmopolitanism, communalism, colonial power and history. He, in one of the

interviews, has observed, "Nobody has the choice of stepping away from history"

and "for me, the value of the novel, as a form, is that it is able to incorporate

elements of every aspect of life-history, natural history, rhetoric, politics, beliefs,

religion, family, love, sexuality". He remarkably manifests a previous period and

missing experiences to life through vividly realized detail. He has contributed to the

development of ideas on the postcolonial in particular and its relation to post

modernism. His work spans genres from contemporary realism to historical fiction to

science fiction, but has consistently dealt with the dislocations, violence, and

meetings of people and cultures incoporated by colonialism.

1.1.2 Life and Works of Amitav Ghosh:

Amitav Ghosh was born on 11th July, 1956 at Calcutta (Kolkata). He belongs to

a Bengali Hindu family. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh

was a diplomat in Indian army officer. Because of his father’s job, Amitav Ghosh, in

the childhood got an ample opportunity to travel a lot in the country as well as

outside country. His travel provided him the opportunity to grow up and see the

different cultures, especially of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Iran besides India.

Amitav Ghosh started his education from Doon School, Dehradun. Later he

received his higher education in St. Stephen’s College from University of Delhi

where he completed his graduation in Arts in History. Thereafter he received his

Masters degree in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics. After completing his

Masters of Arts, he earned a diploma in Arabic from Institute Bourguiba Des

Langues Vivantes, Tunis, Tunisia. He is an omniscient personality that reflected even

at his college days. While getting higher education he emerged in the field of

Journalism. He instigated the reporting and editorial work for a newspaper. But he

left the job and went to England for his doctoral research. He got admission in St.

Edmund Hall, Oxford from where he was awarded Ph.D. in Social Anthropology on

1982. Ghosh married to Deborah Baker, the author of In Extremis: The Life of

5

Laura Riding (1993), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994.

Ghosh has two children- Lila and Nayan.

He started his career by working in the Indian Express in New Delhi. Then he

turned towards teaching field. He worked as the Professor in various universities. He

taught at Columbia University in NYU, Queens College of the City University,

American University in Cairo, Harvard University and many other. He worked as a

Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He also joined the

prestigious Queens College, City University of New York, as Professor in

Comparative Literature. He worked as a visiting Professor at the Department of

English of Harvard University too since 2005. Ghosh has also taught at several

colleges in Delhi.

Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padmashri by the Government of India in 2007.

Currently he is living in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker and is working as

the Senior Editor at Little, Brown and Co. In December 2018, Ghosh became the first

writer in English to be chosen for the conferment of the Bharatiya Gnyanpith Award,

the highest literary award in India, for “outstanding contribution in literature” in any

of the official Indian languages.

Amitav Ghosh’s Literary Career

A) Historical Fiction:

Amitav Ghosh began his literary career with his first novel, The Circle of

Reason (1986). It is set in India and Africa and winner of the 1990 Prix Médicis

Étranger. It focuses on the central character being accused of terrorism and his

journey to Africa. It is considered as postcolonial and postmodern literature for its

treatment of the colonial factors and the inter-textual nature. This is followed by his

next widely popular novel, The Shadow Lines (1988). It deals with the effects of

British colonial powers departure from India and partition in 1947. It won the famous

the Sahitya Academy Award, the most prestigious literary prize offered by the

Government of India, in 1990. He received another award, the Ananda Puraskar,

Kolkata for the same book. The Glass Palace (2000) is Ghosh’s one more historical

novel. This is a complex literary work that is set in various regions and time periods.

The novel is an address to the prevailing issues like economic changes, constitution

of nation and the impact of modernity on the society. In 2001, his novel Glass Palace

won the Grand Prize for fiction at the Frankfurt International e-book Award. Ghosh’s

6

one more contribution in the field of historical fiction arrived in the form of Triology

Ibis trilogy. Sea of Poppies (2008) is one of the first volumes in it shortlisted for

Booker 2008 . The second volume in the trilogy is recently published by the

title, River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire in 2015

B) Science Fiction:

Along with historical fiction Ghosh has proved himself as a great science fiction

novelist. The first science fiction novel of Ghosh is The Calcutta Chromosome

was published in 1996. It won the 1997 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science

Fiction. Sir Ronald Ross is considered to be the inspiration for the book. This

medical thriller, set in future, revolves around random people who are brought

together by a common thread of events.

C) Non-fiction:

Apart from fiction, Amitav Ghosh is also involved in writing non-fiction. His

major non-fictions include ‘Countdown’, a book on India’s nuclear policy, The Imam

and the Indians, a collection of essays on various topics such as history of the novel,

Egyptian culture and literature, and Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma, a

collection of travel essays. Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padmashri by the

Government of India in 2007. In an Antique Land (1992) is Ghosh’s experimental

work encompassing variety of genres like autobiographical, fictional and non-

fictional writing, blending into each other was given the New York Times Notable

Book of 1993 Award. Incendiary Circumstances, Dancing in Cambodia and The

Imam and the Indian are marked as his contributions to non-fictional genre. In 2016

he produced one more creation, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the

Unthinkable. His latest work Gun Island, released in June 2019, is a novel about a

dealer of rare books who is forced to embark on an extraordinary journey.

Awards:

Amitav Ghosh’s work is recognized internationally. He achieved several

honorary awards for his contribution in the literary field. In 1990, he received

France’s Chief Literary Award, Prix Médicis, for The Circle of Reason. Arthur C.

Clarke Award was extended to him for The Calcutta Chromosome. Another

prestigious milestone in his career arrived when Sea of Poppies won Dan David Prize

and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Glass Palace was considered

for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize but he pulled out amid the consideration

7

process. Amitav Ghosh is an established Indian author and there are more than

twenty languages in which his works have been translated so far.

Amitav Ghosh is a versatile person who is frequently honoured with various

awards. 1989 the Sahitya Academy Award, 1990 the Prix Médicis Étranger (France);

1990 the Ananda Puraskar (India), 1997 the Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science

Fiction; 1999 the Pushcart Prize, 2001 International e-book Award Grand Prize for

Fiction (Germany), 2004 the Hutch Crossword Book Award, 2007 the Grinzane

Cavour International Prize (Italy), 2007 the Padmashri (Indian), 2010 the Dan David

Prize (Israel); In 2011 he was awarded with the Blue Metropolis International

Literary Grand Prix (Canada) and in the same year the Man Asia Literary Prize.

Source or Inspiration

Amitav Ghosh has shown great impact of Salaman Rushdie and also Conrad.

The title is an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Shadow Line, and while its

precise relationship to Conrad’s text is oblique and shadowy, both share a

preoccupation with the threshold between East and West, and with the ghostly

haunting of imperial memory. More generally, Ghosh’s second novel draws

inspiration from diverse modern European and Indian texts from Proust to Tagore,

Ford Madox Ford to Satyajit Ray.


Answer in one word/phrase/sentence.

1. When Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padmashri by the Government of

India?

2. Against the background of which historical event the novel The Shadow

Lines is set?

3. Which is the first novel of Amitav Ghosh?

4. What does Ghosh comment in his novel The Shadow Lines?

5. What is proved as the source of inspiration for Amitav Ghosh for his novel

The Shadow Line?

6. Which is the type of fiction that the novel The Shadow Line belonged?

7. What is narrative history?

8


• Colonial - imposing

• Prevailing –current

• Encompassing – about

• Blending – combining

• Versatile – all round

1.2 Plot and Summary of the novel The Shadow Lines

The Shadow Lines (1988) is the Sahitya Academy Award-winning

novel written by a renowned Indian English writer Amitav Ghosh. He is one of the

most celebrated authors in Indian English and has won many national and

international awards for his fiction that is keenly intertwined with history. The novel,

The Shadow Lines is set against the background of historical events like

the Swadeshi Movement, the Second World War, Partition of India and Communal

riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta, the Maoist Movement, the India-China War,

the India-Pakistan War and the fall of Dhaka from East Pakistan and the creation of

Bangladesh. It gave great honor to the writer. In the year 1989 this novel was

declared the Sahitya Academy Award for English, by the Sahitya Academy, India's

National Academy of Letter. It became so popular that Shalini Topiwala translated it

to Gujarati in 1998.

The novel is a fine example of narration. It is the story of the family and friends

of the nameless narrator who grows up in Calcutta, who is educated in Delhi and

then follows with the experiences he gets in London. His narration informs about his

grandmother and his other relatives through the memories of his uncle and his

grandmother. The events in the novel revolve around Mayadebi’s family, their

friendship and sojourn with their English friends the Prices. Mayadebi is narrator’s

grandmother’s sister. It also centers Tha’mma, the narrator’s grandmother’s

attachment with her ancestral city, Dhaka. In the novel the past, present and future

are beautifully interwoven.

The novel begins with the narrator’s recalling his memories to his cousin Ila and

his uncle Robi in London in the early 1980. The unnamed narrator recounts a series

of stories and memories. The stories and memories belong to the narrator; his

9

uncle Tridib; and his grandmother, Tha'mma. Through narration he goes back to the

early twentieth century when Tridib's grandfather, Mr. Justice Chandrashekhar Datta-

Chaudhuri, befriends Lionel Tresawsen at scenes in London.

Tha'mma who was born in 1902 in Dhaka, British India in her childhood

Tha’mma experiences the spilt of her house caused by the quarrel of her father and

her uncle, Jethamoshai. After their marriages both sisters lose contacts with

Jethamoshai. Tha'mma follows her husband as he used to work on the railroad.

Unfortunately she loses her husband in 1936. But without losing the courage she

refuses to accept help of any sort from her family and she becomes a teacher. She

grows her child, the narrator's father. In spite of her interest in the terrorist

movements against British rule, in her youth, when the Partition takes place in 1947

her household responsibilities can’t allow her to contribute much to it. However, she

never returns to Dhaka since it becomes the capital of the Muslim country East

Pakistan. Later the narrator's father marries the narrator's mother, who soon gives

birth to a son, the narrator.

The narrator’s aunt, Mayadebi marries with the Shaheb, Justice Datta-

Chaudhuri's son. The Shaheb is a wealthy diplomat, and in 1939, he ends up needing

a special medical operation that can't be performed in India. So Mrs. Price, Lionel

Tresawson's daughter, invites Shaheb and his family to live with her in London so

that he can get medical attention there. Tridib, Mayadebi’s second son who is nine

years old, accompanies his father, while his elder brother, Jatin, stays in school in

India. Tridib loves London and is fascinated by Alan Tresawsen, Mrs. Price's

brother, and his friends Dan, Mike, and Francesca. In the time leading up to World

War II Tridib spends his days exploring bombsites and listening to Snipe, Mrs.

Price's husband who tells stories. In 1940, a bomb hits Alan's house on Brick Lane,

killing him and Dan. Later that year, Tridib's family returns to India. Mrs. Price has

two children, May Price and Nick Price. Later Tridib and May involve with each

other even after living in different places. Over the next decade, Mayadebi gives

birth to her third son, Robi. Jatin marries a woman affectionately known as Queen

Victoria, and the couple has a daughter named Ila, who is of narrator's age. From his

childhood the narrator feels his one sided attraction for Ila though there is much gap

between both of them. Ila's parents are wealthy, and she spends her childhood

travelling around the world for her father's work. The narrator, on the other hand,

never gets outside Calcutta. Instead, he spends his time listening to Tridib's stories

10

about London and other far away lands. Tridib teaches the narrator to use his

imagination and explain that the world in one's imagination can be just as real as the

outside world. Ila doesn't understand this and disagrees her uncle.

The novel opens one more layer where the narrator narrates his own attraction

for Ila. For a time, Ila's family lives with the Prices in London. In her eight year of

age her family visits Calcutta for a festival. The narrator insists Tha'mma with her

full family to accompany Ila's family to their family home in Raibajar. But he feels

nervous to meet Ila. At Raibajar under a huge table that Tridib's grandfather shipped

back from London Ila decides to play a game called Houses, which she plays with

Nick in London. She informs the narrator of who Nick is, and the narrator

understands that Nick is his rival for Ila's affection. While playing Ila acts as if her

doll Magda is disturbed by the ugly school bully in the school who tries to beat her

but Nick Price saves her. While telling the story Ila starts to cry, and the narrator

feels angry for her crying over an imaginary event. Finally, Tridib walks in with the

children and listens to the narrator Ila's story. He informs him that this is an actual

event that took place in the life of Ila, not her doll. But according to Ila’s

expectations Nick didn’t save her. Through this story Tridib informs the narrator that

everyone lives in stories.

The novel develops the silent love story of Tridib and May Price. In 1959,

Tridib and May, who is nineteen at the time, begin writing to each other. They

exchange photos after a year. In 1963, Tridib sends May a very long letter expressing

his wish to meet her as two young people meet each other in a ruin as it was shown

in an English movie. May is upset, but she plans to visit Tridib in India and

accordingly visits India and also accompanies Tridib to Dhaka.

The novel turns to the communal violence as the horrible effect of partition that

takes place in Dhaka. Tha'mma, who is retired and has time on her hands gets the

news that her uncle Jethamoshai, who is in his nineties, still lives in the family home

in Dhaka. She believes that it's her duty to bring Jethamoshai from the growing

unrest in the Muslim-majority city, Dhaka to India. Coincidentally, after some days

of this news the Shaheb receives a job posting to Dhaka, and he moves there with

Mayadebi, and Robi. According to the invitation of Mayadebi, on January 4, 1964,

Tha'mma along with Tridib and May reach Dhaka to bring her uncle to India.

Mayadebi with thirteen-year-old Robi accompanies them to the old house in Dhaka.

A Muslim mechanic, Saifuddin informs them that a rickshaw driver, Khalil, who

11

lives in the old house, takes care of Jethamoshai. Unfortunately while bringing

Jethamoshai to Mayadebi’s house an angry mob surrounded the car and rikshaw of

Khalil. As May tries to get out of car to save Jethamoshai, Tridib himself gets down,

but Tridib, Jethamoshai, and Khalil are all brutally murdered by the mob.

Considering the narrator’s attachment with Tridib his parents do not open the news

of Tridib’s murder for some days. After some days they tell him that Tridib died in

an accident. Later through Robi and May the narrator gets the real information about

Tridib’s death. He finds May and Robi feeling guilty for the death of him. But in the

end while telling the story to the narrator she relieves from the guilt that she is not

responsible for this. Robi admits that he has a recurring nightmare about the riot in

Dhaka in which he can never keep Tridib from getting out of the car. Simultaneously

the narrator experiences communal violence in Calcutta. Some days later Tha’mma

goes to Dhaka, the narrator gets the experience of horrible bus ride where the bus

driver tries his level best to save dozen boys from the angry mob. Meanwhile, in

Dhaka, the narrator finds a drastic change in the behavior of Th’amma when she

returns from Dhaka. She becomes very much silent and communicates very rarely.

Th’mma who is fond of the jewellery can’t wear them after losing her husband. But

she never separates a gold chain from her that is gifted by her husband. As the impact

of communal violence she experiences in Dhaka, the following year, gives her

beloved gold chain away to fund the war with Pakistan and appears crazy to the

narrator.

As the novel develops, the narrator finds his growing interest in Ila in London.

But she never understands it. She also dislikes the narrator’s interest in Tridib’s

stories and their childhood memories and also antics. Once Ila comes for a holiday.

She wants to enjoy the nightclub which according to Indian culture is not granted by

Robi. But she insists to go there with Robi and the narrator where Robi has

opposition to Ila’s dancing with an unknown man. But it is her view that as she lives

in London she is free to enjoy everything. Meanwhile, Tha’mma faces death bed

condition. In this situation the narrator tells this event to Tha'mma that makes her

extremely angry. She dislikes Ila’s concept of freedom. In her anger she writes a

letter to the Dean of the narrator's school the day before she dies telling the dean that

the narrator visits prostitutes and should therefore be expelled. When the narrator

goes on to pursue an advanced degree in London he realizes that Ila has great

attraction for Nick and she is completely unknown of his feelings for her. May

12

informs that Nick is lying about leaving his job in Kuwait. She believes he misuses

money. Still Ila marries with Nick and gets defrauded by Nick but she continues her

relations with Nick as she loves him and bears his disloyalty.

The novel develops with the various references of communal violence, social

uproar from Assam, the northeast, Punjab, Sri Lanka, Tripura etc. While taking

education in Delhi once the narrator comes across the information of the communal

riots and violence that disturb the society. After seeing a lecture in Delhi, the narrator

realizes that although he is never connected the events as a child, the riot he

experienced in Calcutta and the riot that killed Tridib in Dhaka were the parts of the

same political uproar. As he studies Tridib's atlas, the narrator discovers that borders

are meaningless and actually helped to create the climate that brought on the riots in

the first place.

The novel is divided in two parts Going away and Coming Home. The first part

describes the disturbances in the family that creates a border line between them.

There is description of departure between two sisters, Mayadebi’s leaving country,

Tha’mma’s going away from Dhaka, separation of the house because of the death of

grandfather of both the sisters, Tha’mma’s rejection of help from anyone after losing

the husband, her hardships etc. The second part narrates Tha’mma’s life after

retirement, both sisters’ sincere efforts to bring their uncle, Jethamosai to Calcutta in

which they get failure. The second part displays illusion of borders that the

politicians created the borders but these borders can’t separate the minds of the

people.



1. Who is the narrator of the novel The Shadow Lines?

2. Which place does Tridib call as ruin of him and May?

3. Who takes care of Jethamosai in Dhaka?

4. When did Tridib and May Price begin to write each other?

5. Where does Tridib live?


• Recount – narrate

13

• Diplomat – civil servant

• uproar – tumult

1.3 Major and Minor Characters:

Tridib –

Tridib is the protagonist of the novel. His father is a wealthy diplomat. He has a

big family, parents, two brothers and niece. His father and brothers live abroad and

have high-powered, international jobs but Tridib is the only one in his family who

does not live with his wealthy father. Instead, he remains in his grandmother's home

in Calcutta and pursues a Ph.D. in Archaeology, something to do with sites

associated with the Sena dynasty of Bengal. When he was nine years old he

accompanied his father to London. He loves London.

The writer has created Tridib’s character to mould the personality of the

narrator. He is the narrator's uncle. He is twenty years older than the narrator. Being

a very skilled storyteller, Tridib, tells stories about London and other far away lands

to the narrator. Tridib has an atlas that he uses to show the narrator at the places in

the world he talks about in his stories at the age of eight of the narrator. Accordingly

he teaches the narrator to use his imagination and explains that the world in one's

imagination can be just as real as the outside world. The narrator also succeeds in

creating his understanding about London through the stories told by Tridib. It helps

him to acknowledge London when he goes there for his higher education in his adult

age. He has proved as the greater source for the narrator. He is occupied in most of

the significant incidents in the novel.

Tridib is a shy and sensitive boy. He always avoids the topic of his marriage.

Though he is in love with Miss May Price, Mrs. Price's daughter, he has no courage

to express it directly so he begins a correspondence with May when he becomes 27

of his age. He is a loving personality that makes him popular among students and

would-be footballers and bank clerks and small- time politicians on the road between

Gariahat and Gole Park in Calcutta. He is always surrounded by the people. But such

popularity creates his ill image among the responsible and grown-ups people. No one

in the family considers him as a responsible person. The narrator’s grandmother

dislikes him for his life style which is far away from ordinary people. She blames

14

him for his workless attitude. She dislikes his neglect towards money. Though Tridib

understands her hatred, he never reacts.

Tridib likes thrill in his life. In London, in the time leading up to the World War

II, Tridib spends his days exploring bombsites. Amitav Ghosh has pictured this

lovely guy as too much sensitive. His sensitivity goes to such an extent that when he

accompanies May and Tha'mma to Tha'mma's ancestral home at Dhaka, for the sake

of saving May, Jethamosai and Khalil from an angry mob he sacrifices himself.

While facing the angry mob he jumps in it that kills Jethamosai, Khalil and also

Tridib. His death haunts May, the narrator, Tha'mma, and Robi for several days.

Tha'mma –

Tha'mma is the narrator's grandmother. The writer has portrayed this character

as a hard and having self-respect. When Tha’mma’s husband died in 1936, her son,

the narrator's father, was still a child. Tha'mma became fiercely independent.

Accepting the situation she protected her self-respect by rejecting the help from

everyone, including her younger sister, Mayadebi. Tha'mma told herself that her

relatives actually refused to help her, so she deliberately kept a proper distance from

her family. She became a teacher and refused to accept help of any sort from her

family. She became the Headmistress of a girls' school in Calcutta.

Amitav Ghosh has created this character having very strict, disciplined nature.

She is hard working, mentally strong built and patient lady. She keeps strict watch on

everyone in the family. For her, time is money. She dislikes wasting time in useless

things even not in entertainment or playing games. So she doesn’t allow someone in

the family to mould them according to own wish. The narrator was allowed to play

when he used to be ill. Everyone in the house she wants to be always busy, narrator’s

mother is in housekeeping; she herself is in the work of schoolmistress and his father

is at his job as a junior executive in a company which dealt in vulcanized rubber.

She dislikes Tridib as he doesn’t carry out any proper work and lives off his

father’s money. She thinks Tridib doesn’t compromise with his way of living. For

her, likes and dislikes are unimportant compared to the business offending for

oneself in the world. Because of this, she dislikes Tridib, whom she believes to be a

gossip. So she used to comment on Tridib, “He's a loafer and a wastrel, I would

sometimes hear her saying to my parents; he doesn't do any proper work, lives off his

father's money.” Tha’mma has strict opinions about everything in life. The woman

15

who doesn’t allow anyone to waste the time, herself insists the narrator to go for

running down to the park by the lake whether he wishes or not. She used to say,

“You can't build a strong country… without building a strong body”. She has her

strict opinions about everyone. Though the narrator is in love with Ila, she dislikes

her for free life style and understanding. When the narrator informs one incident

about Ila’s opinion about her free living she expresses her hatred. Through the view

of cutting the narrator’s relationship with Ila, she writes a letter to the Dean of the

narrator's school the day before she dies, telling the Dean that the narrator visits

prostitutes and should therefore be expelled from the school. She becomes cruel to

the narrator.

Tha’mma gives very much importance to maintain relationships. One incident in

her childhood makes her very much conscious about family and bonding among the

family members. When she was a child she witnessed the dispute between her father

and her uncle that created a wall between the houses of these two families. She

blames Tridib for not accompanying his parents to London. There is sudden turn in

her character in her sixties. After her retirement Tha’mma gets time to think about

other relations which earlier she had centered only on her own son and his family.

She hands over all the household responsibilities to her daughter in law and thinks of

her uncle Jethamoshai who is in his nineties who still lives in the family home in

Dhaka. She feels anxious about him for the rising tensions between India and

Pakistan. She believes that it is her duty to bring Jethamoshai home to India. But

unfortunately she gets failure in doing so as her uncle and also Tridib and Robi

become the victims of the communal riot after partition.

Tha’mma is the representative to show the feelings of patriotism among the

youths. As a young woman in British India, she desperately wanted to be a part of

the terrorist groups that fought for India's independence. She also represents the

common people in 1947 that have no knowledge of partition. When Partition

happened in 1947, however, Tha'mma was too busy raising the narrator's father as a

single parent to think much of it. She doesn't understand what partition is for the

border itself is invisible. The thought of returning to Dhaka, her birth place becomes

a difficult one for her. However, she never returns to Dhaka since it becomes the

capital of the Muslim country East Pakistan till her retirement. She feels shocked to

get realization that as her birth was in Dhaka means that she was born in East

Pakistan. She feels sorry to see the riot in Dhaka. She becomes the evidence of the

16

evil consequence of partition in the form of murders of Jethamoshai, Robi and Tridib

in the riot. After returning from Dhaka there comes shocking changes in her

personality. She loses interest in everything. Though the narrator tries to involve her

in his work she can hardly show interest in it. Even the news of her only son’s

becoming General Manager also can’t move her. The social disorder in India and the

loss of her own family members motivate her to separate her favourite gold chain to

fund the war effort against Pakistan.

Narrator-

The Narrator in the novel, The Shadow Lines is not given a name, but the

entirety of The Shadow Lines is constructed from memories of his own experiences,

and the memories of stories that people tell him. He recounts a series of stories and

memories to his cousin Ila and his uncle Robi. The stories and memories belong to

the narrator; his uncle Tridib; and his grandmother, Tha'mma. He was born in

Calcutta, India in 1953, where he lives with his parents and his strict

grandmother, Tha’mma. He spends his entire childhood in Calcutta. While living in

Calcutta the narrator wanders almost all over the world through the stories told by his

uncle Tridib.

The narrator though plays significant role in developing the novel, he is colored

by Amitav Ghosh as a passive person. Despite his love for certain people like Tridib,

Tha’mma, his grandmother, and Ila, he is extremely passive. He rarely inserts

himself into the action; he simply tells the reader what has happened. The narrator is

often a frustrating character, because his style of story-telling works in much the

same way as memory itself. He likes his uncle very much due to his skill of story

telling. Tridib tells him stories, pointing out far away cities in his atlas and telling

him often about living in London as a child. Though Tridib is a point of scorn for

grandmother, the narrator admires his way of living and looking at the world. Tridib

flourishes the imaginative power of the narrator. As a result of it, when he goes to

England on a year's research grant, to collect material from the India Office Library,

for Ph.D thesis on the textile trade between India and England in the nineteenth

century, he feels it quite familiar. Though his grandmother blames Tridib which is

against his view, he never reacts on it.

The narrator is quite shy and introvert person. Though he loves his cousin, Ila he

feels nervous to have direct communication with her. Till the end he can’t express his

17

love for her, instead he keeps it in his mind. When he realizes Ila’s feelings for an

English boy, Nick Price, the narrator understands that Nick is his rival for Ila's

affection. But he compromises with the situation. He doesn’t come between Ila and

Nick. Later, Ila and Nick get married, which is heartbreaking for the narrator. But he

accepts the fact without any complaint. Over the next several years in London, the

narrator reconnects with Ila where he listens to complaints of Ila about Nick. After

Ila’s rejection, his role becomes of passive observer. The narrator feels very sorry

that Ila never gives the importance to Tridib's stories. He convinces himself that as

she has traveled a lot she does not need to depend on Tridib’s stories to understand

the world. On the contrary, as the narrator never left Calcutta he shows much

curiosity about Tridib’s stories but he never actively tries to convince Ila the

importance of Tridib’s stories.

The writer has colored the narrator’s character as a loving and sensitive

personality. He shows great respect to the elders. He likes his grandmother who

always gives importance to the family relations. So he lives tuned into the inner

workings of his family. He understands Tha'mma’s deep sense of pride. He shows

great respect for his grandmother for her independent, nature of self respect.

Similarly, he shows attachment to May, daughter of Mrs. Price. He knows Tridib’s

love for May and eagerly wishes for their union. It is May, from whom, he

understands the real cause of the death of Tridib. While discussing about the same he

realizes the guilty consciousness of May who holds responsible to herself for the

death of Tridib. The discussion relieves May that she is not responsible for the death

of Tridib but it is an evil consequence of communal conflict. The narrator realizes

that the terrifying riot he experienced in Calcutta in 1964 was just like the one that

killed Tridib in Dhaka. The character of the narrator plays significant role in binding

and presenting all the events in the novel.

Ila –

Ila is the narrator's cousin and Tridib’s niece and lives in Stockwell, London.

They are of the same age. Their families joke that they could be twins, but actually

by nature they are very different. She is the daughter of Jatin, the elder brother of

Tridib who was two years older than Tridib, was an economist with the UN. Ila's

family is very wealthy and she has lived in a number of foreign cities throughout her

childhood, which makes her much less interested in their uncle Tridib's stories.

During her childhood, she lives in London at Mrs. Price's house for a while and

18

attends school with Mrs. Price’s son, Nick. When she visits Calcutta and plays with

the narrator, she indirectly tells the narrator about being bullied and beaten for being

Indian, and the narrator doesn't piece together what actually happened until years

later. Ila comments on Indians and speaks in Trotskyism in London, and tells the

narrator that nothing that happens in India is important on a global scale. Because Ila

grows up in a lot of western cities, she thinks about freedom differently than the

narrator and Robi. She loves to talk about having promiscuous sex and wears western

cloths that the narrator finds unusual. When she comes in Calcutta she insists Robi

and the narrator to go night club. Even she likes to dance with a stranger in the club

which is disliked by Robi and he forcefully brings her out of club. She opposes it and

says as she lives in foreign country she has the right to live modern life. So the

narrator’s grandmother dislikes her very much. She tries her best to keep the narrator

from Ila. Though the narrator loves her romantically throughout his childhood and

into adulthood, Ila neither realizes nor cares. She marries Nick Price and soon

discovers that this was a mistake as Nick has several other girlfriends and refuses to

give them up. Though she confesses to the narrator all the things regarding Nick and

also her defrauding by him and seeks comfort. But she later insists that Nick would

never hurt her so will continue her relations. She is the narrator's cousin who lives in

Stockwell, London.

May –

May is Mrs. Price's daughter. She’s at least ten years older than her younger

brother, Nick. She was an infant when Tridib and his family were in London in 1939.

She studies at the Royal College of Music. She is an oboist and plays in an orchestra

professionally throughout her adult life. Though she works in an orchestra she

dislikes to do this work. But she accepts it as a source of earning. Actually she likes

to work for Amnesty and Oxfam and two more relief agencies. Actually her project

was to provide housing for the survivors of an earthquake in Central America. Even

she collects fund for the relief of African famine affected people on Oxford Street

and Regent Street. In her nineteen she begins correspondence with Tridib that lasts

for four years and ends in a visit to India. Initially, May isn't sure if she loves Tridib

or not, and she remains unsure even throughout the visit. While she's in India, she

and Tridib see the tourist sights and spend time together, often accompanied by

the narrator, who is eleven at the time. Near the end of her visit, she accompanies

Tridib and Tha'mma to Dhaka and visits Tha'mma's ancestral home. When a riot

19

breaks out May gets out of the car, believing that as an Englishwoman, the mob

won't hurt her. Though she's correct, Tridib dies when he gets out of the car to

protect her and his grand uncle, Jethamoshai. May lives the rest of her life wondering

as if she killed Tridib, though she eventually comes to believe that Tridib sacrificed

himself for her. Apparently, because of what she saw in India and because of her

guilt, she sleeps on the floor and fasts one day per week. When she reconnects with

the narrator in the 1980s, she shares with him her youthful uncertainties about

whether or not she loved Tridib and her fears that she killed him.

Nick –

Nick Price is sister of May Price and Ila’s classmate and husband. He's ten years

older than May. He is a blonde, and has long hair. He is pictured as the challenger of

the narrator regarding the love of Ila. Though Ila from her childhood shows great

affections for him and considers him as an idealized person who will save her from

the problem but in actual life he neglects towards her problem. He refuses to stand up

for Ila when she was a victim of racial violence. In adulthood, Nick does nothing

fruitful in the life and just aimlessly moves here and there through life. His

sister, May, implies that Nick was fired from his last job for misuse. Not long after

Nick and Ila marry, Ila discovers that Nick has several other girlfriends and has no

intention of giving any of them up. Though she decides she could never leave him,

she punishes him by embarrassing him at dinner parties.

Mayadebi –

Mayadebi is the narrator's grandmother's younger sister and Tridib's mother.

Mayadebi marries the Shaheb, Justice Datta-Chaudhuri's son. Mayadebi is

Tha'mma's younger sister. The narrator describes the two women as being like

reflections in a looking glass. Mayadebi is lucky enough to marry the Shaheb, a

wealthy diplomat. She was not often in Calcutta. As such, she travels often

throughout her life, including London in 1939 with the nine-year-old Tridib, her

middle son. She has three sons, Tridib, Jatin and Robi. Unfortunately she loses her

two sons, Tridib and Robi in the communal vilonence. Mayadebi is a beautiful and

shy woman, and she worries often about Tridib's safety while they're in London.

Though she offers help to Tha'mma when Tha'mma's husband dies, Tha'mma refuses

her help. Tha'mma often refers to Mayadebi as somewhat foolish, as in the childhood

she used to fool Mayadebi by telling strange stories. Mayadebi used to fully believe

20

in her older sister's tale that their uncle Jethamoshai's side of the house was

entirely upside-down. It is Mayadebi with whose help Tha’mma tries to bring their

uncle Jethamosai to India though both get failure in their attempt.

The Shaheb - is a wealthy diplomat, husband of Mayadebi and son of Justice Datta-

Chaudhuri.

Mrs. Price- Mrs. Price is Lionel Tresawson's daughter. May Price and Nick Price’s

mother. She insists Mayadebi to bring Saheb to London for proper medical

treatment.



1. What is the name of Tridib’s niece?

2. What is the name of Tridib's grandfather?

3. Who is Saheb?

4. Who is Mrs. Price?

5. Who is Mrs. Price’s husband?


• Acknowledge- recognize

• Expelled – debarred

• Accompanying – going with

• Consequence – effect

• Extremely – tremendously …

1.4 Themes and other aspects in The Shadow Lines

1.4.1 Theme of borders, violence, and political unrest reflected in the novel The

Shadow Lines

OR

Partition, identity and communal violence depicted in The Shadow Lines:

21

The Shadow Lines (1988) is the Sahitya Academy Award-winning novel by

Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. It is a realistic novel with innovations and

complexities. The novel depicts the post-partition scenario of India and the violence

that followed it. It is all set against the background of the World War II and the

communal riots of 1964 in some parts of India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

The political leaders of the pre independence time in India tried to control the

political unrest in India by splitting the country in two parts, India and Pakistan.

When the British finally granted their colony of British India independence in 1947,

they divided the colony based on religious lines as the Hindu-majority country of

India and the Muslim-majority countries of East Pakistan and West Pakistan. But this

partition invited several problems. The greatest problem was of migration. Hindus

and Sikhs in Pakistan were suggested to migrate to India whereas Muslims in India

were told to migrate to Pakistan. This migration made harsh injuries on the minds of

several in the forms of the memories of the people. The Shadow Lines pictures the

pathetic situation of the people living in the post-partition period. The novel is

divided in two parts, 'Going Away' and 'Coming Home', describing the life of a

young boy growing up in Calcutta, who is educated in Delhi and then follows with

the experiences he has in London. The narrator in the story interweaves the story of

The Shadow Lines under the impression of the memories recalled by his uncle,

Tridib. Tridib has such a wonderful ability to create the word picture that even

without visiting several places in London the narrator feels quite acquainted with

them.

The novel covers almost half century after independence. It starts in 1939 during

the World War II. The narrator’s grandmother, Tha’mma who is a strict woman

follows her husband as he works on the railroad in Calcutta. Tha’mma’s sister,

Mayadebi marries the Shaheb, Justice Datta-Chaudhuri's son. The Shaheb is a

wealthy diplomat. So she travels often throughout her life. Later in 1939 for medical

purpose Mayadebi’s family shifts to London. Her middle son Tridib lives in Calcutta

with his grandmother. So there lives only Tha’mma and Mayadebi’s uncle,

Jethamoshai in Dhaka. But both the sisters lose their contacts with uncle,

Jethamoshai after their marriages. Unfortunately, Tha’mma loses her husband in

1936. After his death she refuses to accept help of any sort from her family and

begins to work as Headmistress in a school.

22

The focus of the novel is on the partition of India and the consequent trauma of

the East Bengal’s psyche. The narrator of Ghosh’s novel is a young boy who grew up

in Calcutta and Delhi in post–partition India. The trauma of partition continues

through three generations. The agonies of displacement, the sense of alienation in the

adopted land and the constant dream of a return to one’s land are the themes of this

novel. Partition was viewed as the price for political freedom from the British

colonial rule. It shows the evil fruit of partition. The events of The Shadow

Lines center primarily on riots that took place in Calcutta, India, and Dhaka, East

Pakistan, in late 1963 and early 1964. Amitav Ghosh shows the political unrest that

is connected almost with all the major characters in the novel. The major character,

Tha'mma in her youth though feels much interested in the terrorist movements

against British rule, when the partition takes place in 1947, it meant little to her as

she finds herself very much involved in her domestic responsibilities. But still this

unrest brings turmoil in her life. She gets difficulties to visit Dhaka, her birthplace, as

it becomes the capital of the Muslim country, the east Pakistan. After her retirement

she goes to Dhaka to bring back her uncle to the safe place to live with his family. So

along with her nephew, Tridib she leaves for Dhaka. The greatest blow she gets is

the murder of Tridib and Uncle Jethamosai through communal violence and

communal attack of 1963-64 in Dhaka. The narrator doesn't discover the truth until

the very end of the novel. But once he realizes the real cause of Tridib’s and

Jethamosai’s death he associates this communal violence with the violence from his

hometown in Calcutta. In his schooldays while Tha’mma leaves Calcutta for Dhaka,

he experiences the strange scenes surrounding the school building by the rioters and

the mad chase of his school bus by the rioters. Though at that time he doesn’t

understand the meaning of it later he realizes that it is a part of communal conflict

that is effect of partition. He understands the role of partition and British colonialism

that played to arise the conflict between India and Pakistan. When the narrator

becomes a grown up man after seeing a lecture in Delhi, the narrator realizes that

although he never connected the events as a child, the riot he experienced in Calcutta

and the riot that killed Tridib in Dhaka was part of the same political uproar.

The political disorder changes the lives of all the major characters in the novel.

Thamma, Tridib, his uncle, Ila, his distant cousin and May, everyone pass through

tremendous changes in their lives. Tridib and uncle Jethamosai become the victim of

communal violence. May gets a great shock of this attack. For long days she

23

considers herself responsible for the murder of Tridib. When the attackers attack

Jethmosai’s rickshaw no one is ready to go out of the car that following rickshaw.

But it is May who opens the door and then following her Tridib gets down and he

rushs in the mob to save Jethamosai. In this attack Tridib and Jethamosai lose their

lives. Almost up to end of the novel May carries guilty consciousness for the death of

Tridib. But in the end she relieves from the burden when she realizes that she is not

responsible for Tridib’s death. After returning from Dhaka, Tha’mma’s character

experiences tremendous change. She begins to live isolated without speaking with

anyone. In the end she separates her beloved chain from her favourite gold chain

from her to fund the war effort with Pakistan. One more incident that shows political

unrest in the library of Delhi when the narrator faces a speaker that reminds the

communal riots that he has faced in his childhood. As the narrator, who is grown up

in the Indian city of Calcutta, unaware of anything happening outside his home in

India, describes these borders meant that relatively—cities that are a thousand miles

away but still in India are in the forefront of his consciousness and understanding,

while cities that are a day's drive away, but in another country, simply doesn't exist in

his mind. As the narrator studies Tridib's atlas, he discovers that borders are

meaningless and actually helped create the climate that brought on the riots in the

first place. After losing Tridib and her uncle, Tha’mma, accepts this truth and gives

her beloved gold chain to Indians to fight against Pakistanis.

1.4.2 The Shadow Lines – The Novel of Memories.

The Shadow Lines has multiple layers of themes and a complex narrative

structure. Through the contrast between imagination and reality, the novel develops

with the narrator’s recalling childhood experiences. It is a novel of memories. The

Shadow Lines pictures the events that take place between English family and Indian

family. It reveals through the memory of a character. It moves back and forth from

present to past and to the present. It travels through time and places and displays the

experience of partition and its pain. There is a thin line between the memory and

reality, personal, general and emotional and practicality, communal and religious,

violence and normalcy, India and Bangladesh, India and England, partition and

migration, past and present.

The novel begins with recounting the series of stories and memories by the

narrator to his cousin Ila and his uncle Robi in London in the early 1980s. The stories

24

and memories belong to the narrator, his uncle Tridib and his grandmother,

Tha'mma. The narrator goes far back recalling the memories about three generations.

The larger part of these memories consists of Tridib, narrated to the narrator by

Tridib, narrator’s uncle. Some are narrated by narrator’s grandmother and some are

the narrator’s own memories. Many of the events that are narrated in this novel cover

the period even before the birth of the narrator. The memories begin in the early

twentieth century when Tridib's grandfather, Mr. Justice Chandrashekhar Datta-

Chaudhuri, befriends Lionel Tresawsen at Séances in London.

Tridib presents such a lively picture of memories to the narrator as if these

memories are his own memories. Tridib was just nine years old when he lived in

London. He was fascinated to see the life in London. In 1940 his family came back

to India. But these years were sufficient for Tridib to weave the memories in London

and describe various sights to the narrator. The narrator spends his time listening to

Tridib’s stories about London and other far away lands. With the help of a map

Tridib teaches the narrator to use his imagination and explains the world in one's

imagination that can be just as real as the outside world. Though an introvert, Tridib

is very close to the narrator. Tridib narrates the London life, his attachment with May

Price. Though his grandmother tries hard to keep away the narrator from the

attachment of Tridib, he likes him very much and judges him according to his own

views. He realizes, Tridib uses his education for personal liberation. He makes his

own choices and is happy the way he is. The narrator worships Tridib and secretly

wants to be like him.

The narrator through various types of memories and interprets him according to

his own sense. The narrator remembers how his grandmother used to be in his

childhood. The same after her retirement tries to live her own life. Tha’mma was

great fond of narrator. She always tried to insist practicality the narrator. She gives

preference to the practical point rather than emotions. The narrator remembers his

grandmother’s reactions about Ila. She dislikes her very much so shows great hatred

for growing attraction for Ila in the mind of narrator.

Tha’mma is a big link of memory. She narrates various events from her

childhood about partition of house and various others related with her house at

Dhaka. Tha’mma and Mayadebi who are sisters in their childhood when they lost

their grandfather, their uncle, Jethamosai tries to take his place but couldn’t get

success. Afterward the brothers, Jethamosai and this sister’s father got separated by

25

partitioning each and everything. This partition is the first glimpse of partition of

India and Pakistan that Tha’mma looks at her childhood. Tha’mma gets married and

three years later her sister marries with a big diplomat Saheb. Even after losing her

husband Tha’mma doesn’t accept the help of anyone and becomes a teacher and

controls the situation. She narrates various memories of Tridib according to her own

interpretations. She associates Tridib with people of lower social status because he

moves at public spaces that are not respectable according to Tha’mma. ‘She

(Tha’mma) had deep horror of the young men who spent their time at the street-

corner staring’ (The Shadow Lines 07). Therefore she wants to keep Tridib out of her

personal space.

Thamma’s visit to Jethamoshai is significant in this regard who is physically

present in the east Pakistan. Although Tha’mma has lost touch with Jethamoshai and

his family for a long time, still she wants to bring him back as she wants him to be

with his own people. She reminds herself again and again that it is ‘her duty to take

him away from his past and thrust him into the future.’(The Shadow Lines 230).

Jethamoshai would not let (Muslim) people in his personal space earlier but later

with passage of time he lives and eats with them. After partition he lives with Khalil,

a Muslim family. She is unable to realize his closeness and connections with

‘Khalil’s family’, a family with whom he was living. She feels surprised ‘Does

Khalil’s wife cook for him too?’ (The Shadow Lines 231)

One of the memories of Ila that tells how stories are relevant to the real life i.e.

Ila draws a map in the dust of Mrs. Price's house and adds a room for Magda, her

doll, who is the baby for the purposes of the game. When everything is set, Ila tells

the narrator what "happened" to Magda at school that day. She tells, "the ugly school

bully chased the beautiful blonde Magda home, but Nick Price saved her from being

beaten up". When Ila starts to cry, the narrator is angry and doesn't understand why

she's crying. Finally, Tridib walks in with the children and listens to the narrator

telling Ila's story. He explains the reason of Ila’s crying that the story is real that

already happened in her life. Only difference in the story and reality was that on the

place of Magda Ila herself was there and Nick Price did not save her from the bully.

It was just an expectation of Ila. According to Tridib everyone in the stories lives in

real life.

There are several memories about social unrest and communal riots that display

the relationship between nationalism and its association with brutality. It is

26

understood that the novel is written with the intention of acknowledging the

consequences of partition. The events of 1947 are joined with disturbing psychology

of Indians, border issues, sectarian hostility and violence in the nation. Kaustav

Mukherjee in his writing Chasing Ghosts and Making History: Ghosh, Tagore, and

Postcolonial India (2015) comments, “ …during the Calcutta riots of 1964, a man

manages to survive a brutal knife attack… as days go by, his mind starts showing a

delayed response …These symptoms are the result of a condition that Freud calls

traumatic neurosis.” (Mukherjee: 2015: 11) In the novel narrator says about

Tha’mma’s (his grandmother) concept of birthplace (Dhaka in East Pakistan) and

nationality (Indian), ‘at that moment she had not been able to quite understand how

her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality.’(The

Shadow Lines 168). ‘Where’s Dhaka?’ asked Tha’mma, when she visits again in

1964, for her ‘Dhaka was the city that had surrounded their own house’ (The Shadow

Lines 214). The borders or these lines of division are not visible and Tha’mma, the

grandmother, who ‘wanted to know whether she would be able to see the border

between India and East Pakistan from the plane.’(The Shadow Lines 167). ‘But if

there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know…What was it all for

then – Partition and all the killing and everything – if there isn’t.”

Robi who is a small boy while living in Dhaka is a direct evidence of the scene

of Tridib’s murder. Tha’mma and Mayadebi go to bring Jethamosai from Dhaka to

India for his safety. But while coming back a gang attacks them in which while

saving Jethamosai and May, Tridib loses his life. The mob kills Tridib, Khalil,

rickshaw driver and Jethamosai. Robi gets haunted by this scene severally when he

becomes grown up. It is Robi who clarifies all the details of this event. There is one

more source to recall the memory i.e. May Price, Mrs. Price’s daughter. May Price is

located far away from Calcutta but distance does not create border here. She still

becomes a part of Tridib’s personal space. It is May whose memory reflects the harsh

reality of communal attack on Khali, Jethamosai and Tridib in which all meet to their

ends….

1.4.3 The Theme of Nationalism:

Amitav Ghosh is one of the major Indian-English novelists who is anxious with

the Bengal Partition. The partition of India created several problems. Many suffered

through it. This suffering becomes the subject of writing for the writers. Amitav

27

Ghosh treats the theme of nationalism in his novel The Shadow Lines. This novel

provides ample opportunity to observe and color the concept of nationalism. The

novel displays the complexity of national identity. The Shadow Lines written in 1988

is the author’s reply to another strange event in Post Colonial Indian scene the 1984

Anti-Sikh riots that moved the whole nation after the assassination of Prime Minister

Mrs. Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.

The novel displays the changes that take place at individual level and at national

and international levels. The characters in the novel are described associated with the

growth of Calcutta as a city and India as a nation over a period of three decades or

more. Obviously the events those look private in the author’s life and other important

characters happen in the shadow of political events. The author selects the character

of Tha’mma, the grandmother of the narrator to evaluate the issue of the Bengal

Partition, concept of Nation and Nationalism.

The Shadow Lines depicts the fact that partition divided the nations on the basis

of religions that caused millions of people to migrate from one part to the other.

During this migration thousands of people lost their lives and millions became

homeless. But the memories could not be wiped. These migrated people suffered

through the nostalgia, the memories of birth place, and their childhood. The border

line that was created for political purpose could not divide one nation into two. For

them these newly formed two nations still was one whole country. Amitav Ghosh

presents this fact to the readers through different characters. Tha’mma symbolizes

nationalist movements of India and has been an inspiration for the narrator. He uses

his grandmother’s eyes to see her life in Dhaka as a young girl, her uncle and

cousins, the other side of the big house where everything was upside down.

Tha’mma represents India’s national identity in the Nationalist Movement. She is an

immigrant from Dhaka but her passionate love of India cannot be questioned. She

goes back to Dhaka after 20 years to bring her uncle to Calcutta as a revolution going

on in Dhaka. In Dhaka she gets shocked to see the changes at her birth place. She

feels as if she is a foreigner. Tridib comments on it and says, “But you are a foreigner

now, you’re as foreigner here as May – much more than May, for look at her, she

doesn’t need a visa to come here” (The Shadow Lines,195). While filling in a form in

Dhaka, Tha’mma writes her nationality as ‘Indian’ without any hesitation but

immediately she becomes full of confusion. She thinks, her birth place is Dhaka

means she is from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), or presently she is living in

28

Calcutta so Indian. There are a lot of questions that arise in her mind. She doesn’t

understand how the partition has changed her nationality, how one’s nationality

changes if the nation is separated. The novel presents here beautiful solution to this

confusion through the character of Jethamoshai, Thamma’s uncle. He says, “I don’t

believe in this India-Shindia. …suppose when you get there they decide to draw

another line somewhere. What will you do then? Where will you move to...? As for

me, I was born here and I’ll die here” (The Shadow Lines 106). He becomes the

victim of the communal rioting in Dhaka. The same person who proudly speaks

about his own country and rejects to leave Dhaka can’t become safe. The situation

here says that even the people who had not migrated from own country were not safe.

Narrator’s uncle, his inspiration, Tridib also dies in the incident. Tha’mma, though

born in Dhaka in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), is a true Indian at heart. She used

to dream when she was in college to be a part of the militant groups which were

fighting for India’s freedom. She was fascinated by the acts of dare-devilry

performed by the freedom fighters against the British imperialists. She didn’t know

much about the freedom struggle but she was a lover of nationalism. So she was

ready to even wash utensils, cook food and wash clothes if she could become a part

of the freedom movement. The novel shows that even after the partition no one

remained safe. Still there were so many Muslims in East Pakistan who were giving

shelter to the Hindus, often at the cost of their own lives and equally of the Hindus

protecting the Muslims as Jethamosai is shown taken care by Khalil .

Though Calcutta and Dhaka belong to two different nations, separated from

each other by the borders, the two places are closely attached to each other. The

impact of a political event in Dhaka was showing impact on Calcutta. Shobha Tiwari

in her book Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study comments, “Ghosh questions the very

basis of modern nation states. It does not matter how many states exist in a continent

or sub continent. It does not change the well being of its people. Nationhood itself is

a mirage because it is not based on any logic. When nature draws line in the form of

mountains, oceans, rivers, it is real. But manmade borders are shallow and

unjustifiable.” Thus, Ghosh explores the theme of partition of a modern nation and

has asserted futile action of the political machinery in power.

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1.4.4 Significance of Title

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines describes the story about an Indian family

and an English family since 1960 covering three decades and three cities-Calcutta,

London and Dhaka. The Partition of 1947, which drew imaginary lines across India

the nation, by making the countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India caused much

destruction through the communal violence and riots. The title of this fascinating

work relates to a key concern of post colonialism - that of borders and boundaries. It

evaluates the worthless and useless attempts of creating boundaries. The novel is the

commentary on how these boundaries can’t separate the minds, imagination and

sense of nativity and origin. It is an amazing story that lapses several borders. It is

Postcolonial criticism that examines and criticizes man-made boundaries and

borders. The novel depicts the suffering, the death and devastation caused by a

shadow line of borders that could not wipe out the connections among human beings.

The border lines are the attempts to define a particular group as against another

group. Postcolonial criticism attempts to crack these apparently secure boundaries by

examining those who live on the margins of these boundaries and also deconstructing

the notion of the other. Tha’mma feels surprised about the borders as she expects

something that is shown in the maps with some colorful lines. She comments about

seeing the border from the air, “But if there aren't any trenches or anything, how are

people to know? I mean, where's the difference then? And if there's no difference

both sides will be the same; it'll be just like it used to be before, when we used to

catch a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day . . . “(The Shadow Lines

151) Even through Ghosh comments on the uselessness of the boundaries when he

suggests "...why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole

subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It’s a

mirage; the whole thing is a mirage.” It is these shadow lines that the title of this

work refers to.

1.4.5 Historical Factors and Their Narratives in Amitav Ghosh's The

Shadow Lines

The Shadow Lines is Ghosh’s second novel, who has secured his place as one of

the India’s most celebrated post-Rushdie generation of authors in Indian English

writing. The text interconnects personal memory, family love and public history. It is

a continuous narrative which shows the pattern of violence not only of 1964 but also

30

of 21st century. The fragmentary narratives unfold the narrator’s experiences in the

form of memories which move backward and forward.

The novel is a work of historical fiction that deals with the geographical area

around the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Though the

partition of British India is mostly a background event in The Shadow Lines, it is

partially responsible for the conflicts that the narrator and his family experience over

the course of the novel. The novel also develops in the background of post colonial

conflicts and the effects. From fifteenth century several European powers developed

colonies and established trading relationships with India from its "discovery". Great

Britain gained control over most of the Indian subcontinent in the early nineteenth

century and started ruling India. But the Independence movement in India made

English rulers to leave India. While leaving India Great Britain promised India the

freedom in exchange of fighting for them in the two world wars. Great Britain only

followed through after the second. This resulted in Partition, during which British

India split into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), West Pakistan (now Pakistan), and

India. The Partition happened in August of 1947, and though the British, Indian, and

Pakistani Governments took religion into account, the new borders created minorities

of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs where there hadn't been before. This caused extreme

violence, especially in the region of Punjab, which was split between West Pakistan

and India. This religious animosity continued (and still does to this day), and it's

partly what led to the riots that the narrator and Tridib experiences from 1963 to

1964 in Calcutta and Dhaka, which became the capital of East Pakistan.

Amitav Ghosh skillfully places facts in his narratives, historical events written

in the fictional language and fictional matter treated as history, thus giving the effect

of presence and absence of history at the same time. Although, chronologically, the

story begins with a passage of time in colonial India when the narrator was not even

born, it embraces a good deal of postcolonial moments, and all the episodes are held

in simultaneous focus to illuminate the narrative resolution. The novel begins thus:

“In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father’s aunt Mayadebi went to

England with her husband and her son Tridib” (The Shadow Lines p.3). The year

1939 is historically significant for the outbreak of the Second World War and the

phenomenal upheavals on the Indian subcontinent coming in its wake. Mayadebi’s

visit to London around this time, her intimate contact with the Price family and the

Tridib-May component of the story are recounted by Tridib twenty-one years later to

31

the narrator, an eight-year-old inquisitive child. May was a little baby when Tridib

saw her in London. A romantic relationship between them has developed through

correspondence, transcending the shadow lines of nationality and cultural

boundaries. The public chronicles of nations are interrogated through the means of

graphic details of individual memories that do not necessarily tally with the official

version of history. For instance, the narrator himself is a witness to the riots in

Calcutta in 1964, but when he tries to prove it to his colleagues using the traditional

medium of recording history i.e. the newspaper he initially meets disappointment. He

has woven fact and fiction in a complex and absorbing narratives.



1. To whom does the narrator narrate the events in the novel?

2. How does the narrator know the world without visiting the places?

3. Which character in the novel symbolizes nationality?

4. What does Tha’mma write in a form in Dhaka as her nationality?

5. What does the title consider as useless attempt of the politicians?


• Nationalism – patriotism

• Migrate – travel

• Immigrant – refugee

• Worthless – valueless

• Deconstructing - taking apart

1.5 Summary:

In this unit, we have discussed about the life and works of Amitav Ghosh and

about the plot and summary, the characters used by him in the novel and themes and

significance of title of the novel The Shadow Lines.

All these points, no doubt, would be helpful for the students. They will enhance

the knowledge and understanding of the novel. The students should read the original

text and discuss the points, the themes and other aspects of the novel.

32

1.6 Exercises

Answer the following:

1. Discuss The Shadow Lines as the novel of memory

2. Draw the character sketch of Tridib

3. Draw the character sketch of Tha’mma

4. Discuss The Shadow Lines as the historical novel

5. Discuss the theme of political unrest presented in the novel The Shadow Lines.

6. Historical factors and their narratives in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines.

Write Short notes

1. Relationship between the narrator and Tridib

2. Post-colonial situation in the novel The Shadow Lines

3. Character sketch of May Price

4. The end of the novel

5. The title of the novel

6. Character sketch of Ila

��

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Unit-2

The Calcutta Chromosome

2.1 Objectives:

After studying this unit, you will be able:

1) To explore the narrative techniques used in the novel The Calcutta Chromosome

2) To understand the role of the narrative techniques in shaping the narrative

3) To explain the style of Amitav Ghosh as a postcolonial Indian writer.

4) To enumerate the experiments made by Amitav Ghosh in his present novel

5) To note the significance of The Calcutta Chromosome in Amitav Ghosh's

literary career.

2.2 Introduction

Amitav Ghosh is one of the major Indian writers writing remarkable fiction and

non-fiction in English today. He was born on 11th July, 1956 in erstwhile Calcutta.

He had his schooling in The Doon School in Dehradun., Then he went to St.

Stephen's College, which is a constituent college of Delhi University for his college

education. He did his post-graduation in Delhi School of Economics. Then, he got

the Inlaks foundation scholarship with the help of which he went to England for

completing Ph.D., in social Anthropology at Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Amitav Ghosh's literary career began in his school life itself. He used to

contribute his early fiction and poetry to the "Doon School Weekly" which was

edited by his contemporary Vikram Seth, who, along with Amitav Ghosh, later

emerged as one of the major writers of Indian English fiction. Ghosh also founded a

magazine entitled "'History Times" along with his friend Ramchandra Guha, who

later became a very famous historian.

Amitav Ghosh began his career with his job at Indian Express in New Delhi.

Then he joined the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Centre for

Development Studies in Trivendram in 1999. Later, he joined the Queens College,

City University of New York as the distinguished Professor of Comparative

34

Literature. Besides this, Ghosh has also been working as a visiting Professor in the

Department of English of the Harvard University.

Amitav Ghosh has written many remarkable novels so far. He published his

debut novel The Circle of Reason in the year 1986. Then he published his several

other significant novels like The Shadow Lines (1998), The Calcutta Chromosome

(1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and Sea of Poppies

(2008), Flood of Fire (2015). The last three novels form of trilogy called The Ibis

trilogy.

Amitav Ghosh has written a lot of non-fiction as well. His noteworthy non-

fiction writings are: In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and at Large

in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), and The Imam and the Indian (2002, The Great

Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).

Ghosh has received several important awards for his writings. His first novel

The Circle of Reason got the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of the top literary awards of

France. His novel The Shadow Lines received the Sahitya Acadamy Award and the

Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome got the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Sea of

Poppies was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. It was the co-winner of the

Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2009, as well as co-winner of the 2010 Dan

David Prize. River of Smoke was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2011.

The Government of India awarded him the Padmashri in 2007. He also received -

together with Margaret Atwood - the Israeli Dan David Prize. Recently, Amitav

Ghosh got the 54th Gnyanpith Award in December 2018 and he is the first Indian

writer in English to receive this honour.

2.3 Summary: I - The Calcutta Chromosome (1995)

We are going to study Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1995).

It is one of the most complex novels by Amitav Ghosh. It is described as a medical

thriller as it is based on the life of Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932), who got the Nobel

Prize for his unparalleled research on Malaria. It was he who discovered that malaria

is caused by the mosquitoes. In fact, the novel deals with the ventures of some people

who are brought together in some mysterious ways. This novel is a very interesting

combination of certain scientific facts and fiction as well as past and future.

35

The story of the novel is set in two cities: Calcutta and New York. Although the

time of the events spans the 1990s, there is a reference to some indefinite future too.

The novel has so many characters but the story mainly revolves around the two,

namely - Antar and Murugan. Antar is an Egyptian man in the future who is on the

verge of his retirement. He works as a data analyst in the International Water Council

in New York. When the novel begins, he happens to see the remains of an identity

card on his computer Ava. And then begins his journey to Calcutta in search of the

man called Murugan who has disappeared all of a sudden in the year 1995. Murugan

worked in LifeWatch organization where Antar also worked earlier. Murugan was

fascinated by the life of Sir Ronald Ross who stayed in Calcutta for his research on

Malaria. So Murugan, who was working in New York, got himself transferred to

Calcutta. So, Antar tries to trace the movements of Murugan through the digital

archives. Antar also tries to dig into other historical documents and comes to the

conclusion that Murugan had discovered the secret behind Sir Ronald Ross'

breakthrough research on malaria. In his opinion, it was not Sir Ronald Ross who

discovered the malaria parasite. In fact, it was a "counter-science" group of native

Indians who helped Ross with their own mysterious "science". Though, Sir Ronald

Ross received the Nobel Prize for his research on the transfer of malaria parasite

through the mosquitoes, his research had wider implications. There was a group of

native Indian mystics who believed that a chromosome can be transferred from one

body to the other thereby leading to immortality. The followers of this belief can

transfer their chromosomes to another person and in course of time can become that

person. Thus, they can live an eternal life. So, it was believed that a group of such

mystics helped Sir Ronald Ross reach his conclusion about malaria. This

chromosome is strange. It cannot be detected or isolated by using the standard

techniques. It is not necessarily present in every cell. It is not even paired

systematically. It does not get transferred from one generation to other generation as

the other chromosomes do. It is believed that it develops through a process of

recombination which may be unique in every individual. It may be found only in the

brain where there is a non-generating tissue. It can be transferred through malaria.

Therefore, Murugan calls it "the Calcutta Chromosome". He wants to trace this

chromosome. That is why he has come to Calcutta. However, on arriving there he

himself gets lost somewhere in a mysterious way. Though there are other strands in

the story, this disappearance of Murugan is central to the novel.

36

2.4 Check your Progress I

1) When was The Calcutta Chromosome published?

2) Who is Antar?

3) Who is Murugan?

4) When did Murugan come to Calcutta?

5) Where does the novel begin?

2.5 Summary: II

Amitav Ghosh has divided The Calcutta Chromosome into two parts. The first

part deals with Murugan's arrival in Calcutta on 20th August, 1995. It is significant to

note that 20th August is a World Mosquito Day and on this very day Murugan arrives

in Calcutta from New York with a plan to study the life and times of Sir Ronald Ross

as well as a plan to trace the Calcutta Chromosome. The second part is about the next

day when Murugan himself gets lost mysteriously. This part deals with all the

consequent events.

2.6 Check Your Progress II

1) How many parts is the novel divided into?

2) Where does Antar work?

3) Why does Murugan come to Calcutta?

4) Which day is celebrated as the World Mosquito Day?

5) Who gets lost mysteriously in Calcutta?

2.7 Summary: III

As mentioned earlier on, The Calcutta Chromosome is a very complex narrative.

It is a multi-layered novel. It not only combines various micro-narratives with the

main story but also it combines historical and medical facts with fiction and oral

narratives. At the same time, it breaks the linearity of time i.e. past, present and

future and moves freely in time from past to future and vice-versa. Amitav Ghosh

employs multifarious narrative strategies in order to shape the intricate narrative of

The Calcutta Chromosome. We may note a few of those strategies here.

37

A) Polyphonic Narrative:

This is a term used by a Russian narratologist Mikhail Bakhtin. He distinguishes

between a "monologic narrative" and "dialogic narrative". In a traditional monologic

narrative, there is a dominance of the authorial voice. On the contrary, in dialogic

narrative, the characters in that narrative are free to have their own voices and

worldviews. Form this point of view, The Calcutta Chromosome is certainly a

dialogic narrative as it has polyphonic voices. There are different characters used as

the narrators of the novel. Antar, Murugan, Urmila Roy and Sonali Das contribute to

the narrative in their own way at different points. Even Murugan's computer Ava can

be treated as a narrator. The language and style of narration changes from character

to character.

B) Use of Magic Realism as Narrative Strategy:

Just as Amitav Ghosh uses various characters as the narrators of his polyphonic

narrative, he also combines the elements of facts and fiction which results in magic

realism. Apparently, the main story is based on the life and times of Sir Ronald Ross.

So, memoirs and historical documents are used as narrative devices. At the same

time, many oral narratives of the native Indians are skillfully used. The novel begins

in the future 21st century:

IF THE SYSTEM hadn't stalled Antar would never have guessed that the scrap

of paper on his screen was the remnant of an ID card. It looked as though it had been

rescued from a fire: its plastic laminate had warped and melted along the edges. The

lettering was mostly illegible and the photograph had vanished under a smudge of

soot. But a four-inch metal chain had somehow stayed attached: it hung down in a

rusty loop from a perforation in the top left-hand corner, like a drooping tail. It was

the chain that tripped the system, not the card.

The card turned up in one of those routine inventories that went flashing around

the globe with metronomic regularity, for no reason that Antar could understand,

except that it was what the system did best. Once it got started it would keep them

coming, hour after hour, an endless succession of documents and objects, stopping

only when it stumbled on something it couldn't file: the most trivial things usually

(The Calcutta Chromosome 1).

38

Then it moves back to the turn of 20th century. And then goes still backward to

the 19th century. Piciucco notes the temporal and spatial movement of the narrative

as follows:

1. Past: A period of time from the last decades of the 1800s up to the 1930s. The

setting is generally India, with most scenes set in Calcutta. A key protagonist is

real-life British bacteriologist Ronald Ross who gained fame for (supposedly)

discovering the link between the anopheles mosquito and malarial infection.

2. Present: Since the novel was published in 1995, "present" time is in line with

the technological developments and general circumstances of this decade.

Events in the novel occur in a limited but crucial period of time, which spans a

few weeks up to 21 August 1995. Half of the story takes place in New York,

half in Calcutta and its surroundings. The protagonist is the Bengali clerk

Murugan.

3. Future: There are no hints to a specific period of time in the whole novel. We

may reasonably presume that the action takes place within the first two decades

of the 21st century, more or less our present. The location is New York, and the

protagonist is Antar, an Egyptian computer archivist (212).

On one hand, Ghosh intends to present the entire novel as a science fiction;

on the other hand, he uses other modes of narratives like a historical novel. By

introducing an element of mysticism and magic realism Ghosh intends to

destabilize the epistemological foundation of science. That is why, Ghosh says

that "Knowledge can't begin without acknowledging the impossibility of

knowledge'' (The Calcutta Chromosome 104).

C) Networking of Multiple Stories:

According to Claire Chambers, Amitav Ghosh presents a network of various

stories in his present novel The Calcutta Chromosome. She remarks, "The Calcutta

Chromosome is replete with both types of textuality. Hypertextuality is evident in

Ghosh's negotiations with Ronald Ross's diaries and Memoirs. A more general

architextuality is apparent in the relationship of novel with the genres of science

fiction, cyberpunk, nineteenth-century ghost stories, and so on" (43). She further

mentions that all the events in the novel which take place in India, Egypt and United

States of America are connected in such a way that they together form a network of

stories.

39

D) Silence as a Narrative Strategy:

One of the unique features of The Calcutta Chromosome is its use of silence as a

narrative strategy. On one hand, it contributes to the magic realism crafted in the

novel and, on the other hand, it attempts to destabilize the epistemological basis of

western science. Alessandro Vescovi argues in this regard thus:

Following the footsteps of Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Renu, and J. P. S.

Uberoi, Ghosh dramatizes the encounter between Western science, with its

accompanying epistemology, and Indian tradition. The novel challenges the

relentless west-driven search for knowledge, epitomized by the supercomputer

named Ava, and suggests that only different epistemological premises, based on

silence, can counteract Western rationalism. The novel's literary technique mirrors

this preoccupation in that it tells a story from two different viewpoints, one of which

remains silent throughout. Narrating the viewpoint of a silent agent raises a number

of problems to the reliability of the narrator, who properly speaking is only a

"guesser." The whole narrative revolves around a foundational mystery that remains

unknown to all characters. In order to do so, the implied author must write about

something of which he too remains ignorant (37).

The subaltern characters like Mangala remain silent in the novel. Nevertheless,

Ghosh uses this silence of the native Indians as a tool for resisting the so called

eloquence of the western science and its epistemological basis.

E) Cinematic Technique:

Amitav Ghosh also employs the cinematic technique along with other narrative

strategies. For instance, he uses the flash-back technique to move back into the past

events spanning a period around three centuries. He also breaks the linearity of time

presents events as though they are presented on a screen. He uses a non-human

narrator i.e. a computer named Ava which presents the details in a cinematic way. In

a sense, Amitav Ghosh presents a "network of multiple stories" rather than a single,

linear narrative. Nevertheless, the most important strand of the story - which remains

untold throughout - is unfurled through silence. Hence, it may be said that silence is

one of the most significant strategies employed by the writer. Amitav Ghosh also

uses what is called the cinematic technique of narration. Here, he has made use of

computer-mediated mode of narration by presenting Ava - which is just an electronic

machine - as a narrator.

40

In short, it may be mentioned that The Calcutta Chromosome is Amitav Ghosh's

one of the most complex and experimental novels.

2.8 Check Your Progress III

1) Who used the term "polyphonic narrative"?

2) Which characters are used as narrators of the novel?

3) What is the name of Antar's computer?

4) In which century does the novel begin?

5) Who thinks that The Calcutta Chromosome is a "network of stories"?

6) In what way silence is used in the novel?

7) Which technique is used to move in time freely?

8) Who remains silent in the novel?

9) What does Amitav Ghosh want to destabilize through silence?

10) When can knowledge begin according to Amitav Ghosh?

2.9 Summary

As we have noted earlier on, The Calcutta Chromosome is a very complex novel

by Amitav Ghsoh. Its complexity is not only because of its theme of medical

discovery and the search for a lost character; it is also because of the various

narrative techniques and strategies employed in the novel. As the title of the novel

suggests, the novel is all about fevers, delirium and discovery. However, it is less

about fevers but more about delirium and discovery. The theme of discovery has

several layers. First and foremost, it is a discovery of malaria parasite which is

transmitted through mosquitoes. As per the scientific documents, this discovery was

made by Sir Ronald Ross in Calcutta for which he got the Nobel Prize. Secondly, it

is a discovery by Murugan who gets himself transferred to Calcutta in order to trace

the life and times of Sir Ronald Ross who lived there during his experiments. Third,

it is discovery by Antar who tries to trace Murugan - with the help of his computer

and Ava and other digital archives - who got lost in Calcutta on the very next day of

his arrival there. Fourth, it is also a discovery by the writer of the life of the so called

"counter-science" group of native Indians. Finally, it is a discovery of a strange

"chromosome" which can enable an individual attain immortality.

41

In order to deal with this multi-faceted theme, Amitav Ghosh has various

narrative strategies. He has skillfully used the polyphonic narrative technique to

narrate different micro-narrative with the help different characters. He has used

magic realism deliberately as it enables him to mix the historical and scientific facts

with the events which are completely fictional.

2.10 Glossary

� Ava: It is a name of the computer which is used by Antar, one of the employees

of International Water Council. It shows the details about the identity and the

whereabouts of Murugan.

� Chromosome: any of the rod-like structures found in all living cells, containing

the chemical patterns that control what an animal or plant is like (Cambridge

English Dictionary)

� Computer mediated Communication: communication with the help of an

electronic device i.e. computer

� Counter-science group: It is a group of native Indians who are mystical in

nature.

� Delirium: a state of being unable to think or speak clearly because of fever or

mental confusion (Cambridge English Dictionary)

� Digital Archives: collections of historical records relating to a place,

organization, or family stored in a digital format.

� Discovery: the process of finding information, a place, or an object, especially

for the first time, or the thing that is found (Cambridge English Dictionary).

� Fever: a medical condition in which the body temperature is higher than usual

and the heart beats very fast (Cambridge English Dictionary).

� International Water Council: A New York based company mentioned in the

novel.

� LifeWatch : It was a small but respected non-profit organization that served as

a global public health consultancy and epidemiological data bank.

� Malaria Parasite: a protozoan of the sporozoan genus Plasmodium that is

transmitted to humans or to certain other mammals or birds by the bite of a

42

mosquito in which its sexual reproduction takes place, that multiplies sexually in

the vertebrate host by schizogony in the red blood cells or in certain tissue cells,

and that causes destruction of red blood cells and the febrile disease malaria or

produces gametocytes by sporogony which if taken up by a suitable mosquito

initiate a new sexual cycle (Merriam Webster Medical Dictionary).

� Plasmodium : a motile multinucleate mass of protoplasm resulting from fusion

of uninucleate amoeboid cells (Merriam Webster Medical Dictionary).

� Plasmodium Falciparum Parasite: It is a unicellular protozoan parasite of

humans, and the deadliest species of Plasmodium thai cause malaria in humans.

It is transmitted through the bite of a female Anopheles mosquito. It is

responsible for roughly 50% of all malaria cases. It causes the disease's most

dangerous form called falciparum malaria. It is therefore regarded as the

deadliest parasite in humans (Wikipedia).

� Sir Ronal Ross: A British poet, novelist and scientist born in India in 1857. He

arguably discovered the malaria parasite in the year 1898 and got the Nobel

Prize for this achievement in the year 1902.

� World Mosquito Day: this day is observed annually on 20th August, in

commemoration of British doctor Sir Ronald Ross's discovery in 1897. He

discovered that female mosquitoes transmit malaria among humans.

2.11 Answers to Check Your Progress I

1. 1995

2. Antar is an Egyptian man in the future who works as a data analyst in the

International Water Council in New York.

3. Murugan is Antar's colleague in Life Watch.

4. 20th August, 1995.

5. New York

2.12 Answers to Check Your Progress II

1. Two Parts

2. International Water Council

43

3. To study the life and times of Sir Ronald Ross

4. 20th August, 1995

5. Murugan

2.13 Answers to Check Your Progress III

1. Mikhail Bakhtin

2. Antar, Murugan, Urmila Roy and Sonali Das

3. Ava

4. 21st Century

5. Claire Chambers

6. As a narrative strategy

7. Cinematic technique

8. The subaltern characters like Mangala

9. Epistemological hegemony of western science

10. Only when one acknowledges the impossibility of knowledge

2.14 Exercises

1. Explore the various themes in the novel The Calcutta Chromosome.

2. Narrate the different sub-stories in the novel The Calcutta Chromosome in your

own words.

3. Write a character sketch of Murugan

4. Write a character sketch of Antar

5. Write a character sketch of Sir Ronald Ross

6. Write a character sketch of Lutchman

7. Write a character sketch of Managala

8. Write a character sketch of Sonali

9. Write a character sketch of Urmila

10. Write a character sketch of Phulboni

44

11. Discuss The Calcutta Chromosome as a post-colonial narrative

12. Discuss various narrative techniques used in the novel and their significance

13. Discuss the implications of the title of the novel

14. Discuss Amitav Ghosh as an experimental writer with reference to The Calcutta

Chromosome.

15. Discuss how Amitav Ghosh questions the supremacy of the western

epistemology through his novel The Calcutta Chromosome.

2.15 References

1. Piciucco, Pier. Postmodern Strategies in Writing by Amitav Ghosh: The Case of

The Calcutta Chromosome, Postcolonial Literature Today, eds. Jagdish Batra

&Alan Johnson Prestige

2. Ghosh, Amitav. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium &

Discovery (1995) Alfred A Knope, Canada.

3. Chambers, Claire. Networks of Stories: Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta

Chromosome https://www.researchgate.net/publication/29Q956998 15 May

2017.

4. Vescovi, Alessandro. Emplotting the Postcolonial: Epistemology and

Narratology in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313848031 Ariel 48(1), Jan 2017.

Pp.37-69. Unformatted Doc.

Further Reading

1. Arnpurna Rath and Milind Malashe, "Chronotopes in the Chromosome: A

Chronotopic Analysis of The Calcutta Chromosome" in Polyuha, Mykola, Clive

Thomson, and Anthony Wall eds. Dialogues with Bakhtinian Theory:

Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Mikhail Bakhtin Conference.

London: Mestengo Press, 2012.

2. Banarjee, Suparno. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel Silence, Slippage and

Subversion, in Hoagland Ericka; and Sarwal, Reema, eds. Science Fiction,

Imperialism and The Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film.

Jefferson N.C.: McFarland, 2010.

45

3. Bhattacharya, Shayani. "The Silence of the Subaltern. The Rejection of History

and Language in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome" Environments in

Science Fiction: Essays on Alternative Spaces. Eds. Bernardo, Susan M, Donald

E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan III Vol. 44. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.

��

46

Unit-3

General Topic: Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse

Amitav Ghosh - The Imam and the Indian

CONTENTS

3.0 Objectives

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse


3.2.2 Answers to Check Your Progress

3.3 Amitav Ghosh : Life and Works


3.3.2 Answer Key

3.4 Summary of The Imam and the Indian

3.4.1 The Imam and the Indian

3.4.2 Tibetan Dinner

3.4.3 Four Corners

3.4.4 An Egyptian in Baghdad

3.4.5 The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi

3.4.6 The Human Comedy in Cairo

3.4.7 Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel

3.4.8 Empire and Soul: a review of The Baburnama

3.4.9 The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village

3.4.10 Categories of labour and the orientation of the Fellah economy

3.4.11 The Slave of MS. H.6

3.4.12 The Diaspora in Indian Culture

47

3.4.13 The Global Reservation: Notes toward An Ethnography of International

Peacekeeping

3.4.14 The Fundamentalist Challenge

3.4.15 The March of The Novel Through History: The Testimony of My

Grandfather’s Bookcase

3.4.16 The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled In Wretchedness

3.4.17 The Hunger of Stones

3.4.18 The Ghat of the Only World : Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn


3.4.20 Answer key

3.5 Characters in The Imam and the Indian



3.6 Themes and Narrative Techniques in The Imam and the Indian



3.7 Narrative techniques in The Imam and the Indian

3.8 Glossary and Notes:

3.9 Check your Progress


3.10 Exercises:

3.10.1 Answer in one word or sentence.

3.10.2 Write short notes on the following.

3.10.3 Answer the following questions.

3.11 Further Reading

48

3.0 Objectives:

After reading this unit, you will

• Know about colonial and postcolonial discourse

• Know about the life and works of Amitav Ghosh

• Know about the plot and summary of The Imam and the Indian

• Learn the major and minor characters in The Imam and the Indian

• Learn the themes and other aspects in The Imam and the Indian

3.1 Introduction

This unit discusses the general topic ‘Colonial and Post-Colonial discourse’ and

also the brief life and works of the well-known author, Amitav Ghosh. It also

presents the detailed summary of his famous non-fiction work The Imam and the

Indian, the analysis of the characters in the novel, the critical commentary on the

themes and the narrative techniques used in the text.

The Imam and the Indian is an extensive compilation of Amitav Ghosh’s non-

fiction writings. In it, there is a collection of 18 prose pieces, published in the year

2002, over a period of 16 years. All these pieces published periodically between his

novels in magazines, journals, academic books and periodicals. These essays and

articles trace the evolution of the ideas that shape his fiction. These essays deal about

political and social issues. He also explores the connections between past and

present, events and memories, people, cultures and countries that have shared

history. Actually, all these essays do not follow obvious theme, but Ghosh says,

“Connections are of greater importance than disjunctions.” In the present global

scenario, he believes in “the circuitry of imagination” which can go across cultures to

question human’s behaviors and relate them. These pieces are written in accordance

with circumstances of their writing which transcends time and places. The essays are

written on writer’s journey to Egypt, U.S, Baghdad, and his stay in India. His

writing analyzes human psychology, traits and attitude in general. In fact, most of his

essays are indirect comment on culture and social strata of different countries. Ghosh

combines his historical and anthropological bent of mind with his skills of a novelist

to present a collection.

49

3.2 Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse:

A discourse is a spoken or written communication between people, especially a

serious discussion of a particular subject. In the general humanities and social

sciences, discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through

language. Discourse is a social boundary that defines what of statements can be said

about a topic. Many definitions of discourses are largely derived from the work of

French philosopher Michel Foucault. In Sociology, discourse is defined as, “any

practice by which individuals imbue reality with meaning.”

Colonial discourse is a concept popularized by Edward Said. Colonial discourse

has not been the product of a certain age and it has attracted the attention of several

writers and critics. Those celebrated authors as Conrad and Defoe created remarkable

works out of the subject of Colonialism. Now a days, Colonial discourse is one of the

most current issues in literary criticism. The era of Colonialism in literature began in

the 17th C. with the publication of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611-12). However,

the term is used to refer to the literature written in English, but confined to the

century of British Colonialism and the decades of anti- or post colonial activity

which followed.

Latin American Literary Criticism discusses new themes that on reaching some

degree of generalization indicate possible directions for research. For example, a

concern has emerged lately about defining and applying the term post modernism to

Latin American symbolic production. Seed’s Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse

raises two distinctive topics. The introduction and conclusion are devoted to placing

colonial discourse into contemporary scholarship and tracing its debts, complicities,

and differences with post structuralism, subaltern studies, new historicism and

feminist theory. Discussing the concept of ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse’

takes on special importance in the current circumstances, it creates double crisis, on

one hand is the crisis affecting the status of literature as an institution and academic

literary criticism as a profession. On the other hand, we must face up without excuses

to the extreme violence generated by neoliberal capitalism and the political vacuum

left by the collapse of the socialist block. Hence, the acknowledged eclipse or waning

of the narratives of human redemption, which not long ago lent a utopian sense to

Latin American political struggles. These two factors should be a part of critical

reflection on the concept of ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse’. Seed defines the

50

colonial aspect; she seems to take it as both a perspective comparable to new literary

historicism and field of study.

“Colonial Discourse has therefore undertaken to redirect contemporary critical

reflections on colonialism toward the language used by the conquerors, imperial

administrators, travelers and missionaries.”

The central concern of these studies has been the linguistic screen through

which all political language of colonialism, including reactions to it and liberation

from it needs to be read. Thus, the method employed in analyzing colonial discourse

seems to be similar to that used to approach any kind of discourse in nay imaginable

historical or social situation. Seed suggested, ‘Both the colonial and postcolonial

discourse movements signify a revival of politics and its return to the center of

intellectual debate after decades of being relegated to a secondary position in the

predominantly social and cultural realms of history, anthropology, and literary

theory…..But the concept with language and rhetoric, the ethics and strategies of

representing anthropological others, or those of representing historically distant

cultural others are crucial and unprecedented questions with which this new work on

politics must contend. We do not repeat the past, as Santayana claimed, we only

reinvent it continually.’

“Colonial Discourse” has a long tradition in Latin America, which can be traced

back to the 1950s when the writings of German philosopher, Martin Heidegger began

to catch the attention of Latin American intellectuals. The most spectacular example

is that of Mexican historian and philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman. O’Gorman wrote

much before the poststructuralist wave, although he had a similar foundation and

perspective. His reading of one chapter of Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (1927)

made him realize first that language is not the neutral tool of an honest desire to tell

the truth.

The Uruguayan literary critic Angel Rama’s little book offers a theory about the

control, domination, and power exercised in the name of alphabetic writing. The

guidance of Michel Foucault is certainly visible and explicit what Rama has analyzed

is a complex, changing, and growing discursive formation in which power and

oppositional discourse from the colonial period to the 20th century constitute the two

sides of the same coin. The power of the “lettered city” helps indirectly in

understanding the silence inflicted by written language. Colonial and Postcolonial

51

discourses presupposed alphabetic writing, the corpus analyzed by Rama both as a

discourse of power and an oppositional discourse obscured and suppressed oral

traditions and nonalphabetic writing systems, which were forcibly repressed during

the 16th century by the lettered city. O’Gorman’s and Rama’s concerns with different

forms of intellectual colonialism and cultural dependency in Latin America led them

to construct postcolonial loci of enunciation in the very act of studying colonial

discourses. Thus, their work comprised an effort to displace field and voices: the

Third World is not only an area to be studied but a place from which to speak. Both

these thinkers have aided the growing realization that the “others” are not people and

cultures with little contact with the First World but the “otherness” applies in

disguise, among equals, in what Carl Pletsch ( 1981) termed the apportionment of

scientific labor among the three worlds. Pletsch, however, was mainly concerned

with the distribution of area studies from the perspective of social scientists and

humanists located in and speaking from the First world. O’Gorman and Rama

exemplify the perspective of social scientists and humanists located in and speaking

from the Third world. They are in one sense contemporary examples of the

“intellectual other”. For example, Tzvetan Todorov, at the beginning of ‘The

Conquest of America’ (1982), relegated O’Gorman to a footnote with a short

comment placing him among those merely concerned with geographic aspects of the

discovery. By quoting Edward Said, Todorov suggested that his own description of

the conquest of America could be read as some kind of “Occidentalism”, perhaps

complementing Said’s “Orientalism”. Said’s Orientalism (1978) uses the concept of

colonial discourse to re-order the study of colonialism. So it can be said to inaugurate

a new kind of study of colonialism. Said’s Orientalism examines how the East,

including the Middle East, is represented in the history and the literature written by

the West. The West always looks at the East as inferior people without religion or

morals. Said’s project tries to show how knowledge about the non-Europeans was

part of the process of maintaining power over them. In short, Orientalism is primarily

concerned with how the Orient was constructed by Western Literature and not with

how such construction was received by colonial subjects. It examines the Western

attitudes toward the East. Said concludes that the Western writers depict the Orient

as “irrational,” “weak” and “feminised other”. This depiction can be contrasted with

the depiction of the West as “rational”, “strong” and “masculine”.

52

Ngugi wa Thiongo’s comparative analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin concludes that although

both writers were critical of colonial discourse, one spoke from the center of the

empire while the other spoke from the core of resistance to the empire. Decentering

the center or multiplying it provides new perspectives on colonial and postcolonial

discourse: that of the locus of enunciation created in the very act of postulating the

category of colonial discourse as well as the locus of enunciation created in the act of

studying or analyzing it but of resisting it.

The term ‘Colonial Discourse’ into the vocabulary of the humanities and the

social sciences with literary bent offered an alternative approach to a field of study

dominated by notions such as “colonial literature” or “colonial history”. As defined

by Peter Hulme, colonial discourse embraces all kinds of discursive production

related to and arising out of colonial situations, from the Capitulations of 1492 to

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from royal orders and edicts to the most

carefully written prose. The advantage of the concept of colonial discourse was that it

unified an interdisciplinary roster of scholars in history and anthropology who found

the idea of “discourse” more appealing that “facts” or “information” and in the

literary studies, more appealing than the restricted concept of literature or “literary

discourse”. In the field of colonial literary studies, scholars must account for a

complex system of semiotic interactions embodied in the discursive and the textual

such as colonial semiotics.

The idea of colonial discourse invites rethinking of the hermeneutic legacy in

the context of colonial semiotics. Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America

led the way in directing attention to the colonial semiosis. As a moment, Mexican

historian and philosopher of history, O’Gorman’s engagement with colonial

situations went beyond the usual relevant disciplinary issues. His research was a

political and ideological concern relevant in Mexico in the 1950s along with a

reassessment of historiographical goals prompted by his reading of Heidegger.

There are some examples of voices emerging from colonial semiosis that are

constructing alternative postcolonial luci of enunciation. When Barbadian poet

Edward Kamau Brathwaite recounts the story of his search for a rhythm that would

match his living experience in the Caribbean, he highlights the moment when

skipping a pebble on the ocean gave him a rhythm that he could not find by reading

John Milton. Brathwaite also highlights a second and subsequent moment when he

53

perceived the parallels between the skipping of the pebble and music, a rhythm.

Brawhaite found a voice and form of knowledge at the intersection of the classical

models he learned in a colonial school with his life experience in the Caribbean and

consciousness of African people’s history. His poetry is less a discourse of resistance

than a discourse claiming its centrality. The novelist and essayist, Michelle Cliff,

who states that one effect of British West Indian colonial discourse is “that you

believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King’s English and the form in which it is

means to be expressed or else your writing is not literature, it is folklore and can

never be art….” The Anglican ideal – Milton, Wordsworth, Keats was held before us

with an assurance that we were unable and would never be enabled to compose a

work of similar correctness.

Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? could be answered by saying that

the subaltern have always spoken, although scholars and social scientists were not

always willing to listen. The questions of whether the colonized can be represented

may no longer be an issue, and if could be reframed in forms of dialogues from

different loci of enunciation rather than as an academic monologue performed in the

act of “studying” colonial discourse and not “listening” to politically engaged

persons, writers from colonial, postcolonial or Third World countries producing

alternative discourse. Perhaps, in the intellectual arena, efforts to invert an “other”

from a far and long ago disguises new forms of colonization. Jean Paul Sartre

pointed out that all non-western cultures have been reduced to the status of objects

by being observed and studied by Western scholars according to Western concepts

and categories. Thus, although the concept of colonial discourse has opened up new

areas of inquiry and helped in rethinking the discursive dimension of colonial and

postcolonial experience.

3.2.1Check Your Progress:

1. A discourse is a spoken or written …………….between people, especially a

serious discussion of a particular subject.

a) Communication b) passage c) contact d) analysis

2. The era of Colonialism in literature began in the 17th C. with the publication of

Shakespeare’s …………….

a) Much Ado About Nothing b) The Tempest

54

c) All Is Well That Ends Well d) The Merchant of Venice

3. The concept ‘Colonial discourse’ is popularized by………...

a) Louis Althusser b) Karl Marx c) Edward Said d) Jacques Derrida

4. Martin Heidegger was a ………….philosopher.

a) French b) British c) German d) Spanish

5. …………..made a comparative analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin

a) Ngugi wa Thiongo b) Nadine Gordimer

c) Chinua Achebe d) Ben Okri

6. …………. uses the concept of colonial discourse to re-order the study of

colonialism.

a) Occidentalism b) Orientalism c) Marxism d) Feminism

7. Who is the author of The Conquest of America?

a) Tzvetan Todorov b) O’Gorman c) Heidegger d) Michelle Cliff

8. …………….wrote Can the Subaltern Speak?

a) Elaine Showalter b) Gayatri Spivak

c) Jean Paul Sartre d) Michelle Cliff

9. Who is the author of The Invention of America?

a) O’Gorman b) Heidegger c) Tzvetan Todorov d) Ben Okri

10. ……………...defined discourse in sociology as “any practice by which

individuals imbue reality with meaning.”

a) Michel Foucault b) Roland Barthes

c) Edward Said d) Halliday

3.2.2 Answers to Check Your Progress:

1. Communication

2. The Tempest

3. Edward Said

55

4. German

5. Ngugi Wa Thiongo

6. Orientalism

7. Tzvetan Todorov

8. Gayatri Spivak

9. O’Gorman

10. Michel Foucault

3.3 Amitav Ghosh : Life and Works

Amitav Ghosh is an important writer of the Indian English Literature. He is

best known for his work in English fiction. He was born on 11 July 1956 in Calcutta,

India. He is from Bengali Hindu family. His father was an officer in the Pre-

Independence Indian army. Amitav Ghosh did his school education from The Doon

School in Dehradun. He grew up in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Iran. He

received a B.A. and an M.A. from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, and Delhi

School of Economics. He was awarded a doctorate in Social Anthropology from

University of Oxford. Ghosh taught literature at several colleges and universities,

including Queens College and Harvard. He worked briefly at New Delhi newspaper

‘The Indian Express’ before the beginning to write the novels. In 2004, he turned to

writing fulltime and split his time between the United States and India.

Amitav Ghosh has a peculiar attention and special position in Indian English

Fiction. His contribution is divided into two divisions: Fiction and Non-fiction. His

notable works in fiction are: The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988),

The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry

Tide (2004), Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), Flood of Fire (2015),

Gun Island (2019) and Jungle Nama (2021).

His works in Non-fiction are In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia

and at Large in Burma (1998; Essays), Countdown (1999), The Imam and the

Indian (2002; Essays), Incendiary Circumstances (2006; Essays) and "The Great

Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" (2016).

Ghosh’s fiction and non-fiction throw light on a detailed depiction of setting and

historical backdrop. His writing deals with themes such as travel and diaspora,

56

history and memory, political struggle and communal violence, love and loss.

Ghosh’s literary works all vary in their subject and treatment. There is the intimate

human dimension of things. His versatility is manifested both in his fiction and non-

fiction. It is seen that he seeks a neutral place on this earth beyond any demarcation

of borders through his writing. In his writings, there are given the references from

local to national and national to international. There are different kinds of countries,

their cultures, events, people, riots, and connections between past and present

memories that have shared history. His writing has also appeared in many

publications in India and around the world.

His first novel The Circle of Reason won a top literary award in France. His The

Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. His novel

The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997. The novel Sea

of Poppies was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. It was the co-winner of

the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2009, as well as co-winner of the 2010 Dan

David Prize. The novel River of Smoke was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary

Prize 2011. Ghosh famously withdrew his novel The Glass Palace from

consideration for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, where it was awarded the best

novel in the Eurasian section, citing his objections to the term "commonwealth" and

the unfairness of the English language requirement specified in the rules. In 2015, he

was named ‘a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow’ which is an award that

recognizes artists and cultural leaders based in the U.S. who demonstrate a

commitment to social justice. Ghosh received the lifetime achievement award at Tata

Literature Live, the Mumbai LitFest on 20 November 2016. He was conferred the

54th Jnanpith award in December 2018 and is the first Indian writer in English to

have been chosen for this honour. The government of India awarded him the civilian

honour of Padma Shri in 2007.

Ghosh lives with his wife, the author Deborah Baker, in New York and they

have two children, Lila and Nayan. Ghosh is now dedicating his time mostly in

writing.

3.3.1 Check your progress

1) Amitav Ghosh was born in ……………..

a) Calcutta b) Pune c) Madras d) Mumbai

2) Amitav Ghosh grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and ……………

57

a) America b) India c) London d) Egypt

3) Ghosh studied at the universities of Delhi and …………..

a) Cambridge b) Shivaji c) Oxford d) Pune

4) His first novel The Circle of Reason won a top literary award in ………...

a) America b) France c) Japan d) Pakisthan

5) Ghosh received the …………………award in 2018.

a) Jnanpith b) Bharatratna c) Sahitya Academy d) Pamshri

6) Amitav Ghosh has won ………… award on 8th November, 2016.

a) Tata Books Live! Lifetime Achievement Award

b) Tata Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award

c) Tata Writer Live! Lifetime Achievement Award

d) none of the above

7) When was Amitav Ghosh born?

a) 11 July 1956 b) 11 June 1953 c) 11 January 1959 d) 11 June 1960

8) What is profession of Amitav Ghosh’s wife, Deborah Baker?

a) Dancer b) Author c) Player d) Singer

9) Which novel of Amitav Ghosh won him the Sahitya Academy Award?

a) The Circle of Reason b) The Shadow Lines

c) The Calcutta Chromosome d) In an Antique Land

10) The Imam and the Indian has a collection of …………….essays.

a) Eighteen b) eight c) seven d) Twenty

3.3.2 Answer Key to Check your progress

1. Calcutta

2. India

3. Oxford

4. France

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5. Jnanpith

6. Tata Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award

7. 11 July, 1956

8. Author

9. The Shadow Lines

10. eighteen

3.4 Summary of The Imam and the Indian

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most lucid and captivating writers of modern times.

He has been writing non-fictional prose reflective essays, activist pieces, political

commentary, book reviews, autobiographical articles, academic expositions,

translations from Bengali, and literary anthropology. The Imam and the Indian is a

complete collection of the 18 prose pieces which reveals Amitav Ghosh: the novelist

as thinker, the man of ideas as a writer of luminous, illuminating non-fiction. The

book contents: 1. The Imam and the Indian 2. Tibetan Dinner 3. Four Corners 4. An

Egyptian in Baghdad 5. The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi 6. The Human Comedy in Cairo.

7. Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and The Novel 8. Empire and Soul: a review of

The Baburnama 9. The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village 10. Categories of

labour and the orientation of the Fellah economy 11. The Slave of MS. H.6. 12. The

Diaspora in Indian Culture 13. The Global Reservation: Notes toward An

Ethnography of International Peacekeeping 14. The Fundamentalist Challenge 15.

The March of The Novel Through History: The Testimony of My Grandfather’s

Bookcase 16. The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled In Wretchedness 17. The

Hunger of Stones 18. The Ghat of the Only World : Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn.

3.4.1 The Imam and the Indian

The Imam and Indian is the title piece of Amitav Ghosh’s the literary work

The Imam and the Indian. This first essay was written in Delhi, in 1985. The essay is

based on Ghosh’s travel to Egypt for his anthropological work. In this essay, he

narrated his experience with the local community in Egypt. The essay is a

combination of history, travelogue and proud of civilization. Amitav Ghosh met

Imam, Khamees the Rat and some villages, when he was in Egypt.

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Imam used to say the daily prayers in the mosque. He was a leading figure in the

village whom Ghosh wanted to meet and was intrigued by what he had heard about

him. People said he knew a great deal about herbs and the old kind of medicine.

Ghosh has shown interest in knowing more information about Imam. But the

villagers didn’t any longer want Imam who Ghosh knew that this was tradition that

in rural Egypt, Imam and other religious figures are often by custom associated with

those two professions. And no one had time for old-fashioned Imam who made

themselves ridiculous by boiling herbs and cutting hair. However, Ustad Amed, a

school teacher and many people in the village told Ghosh that the old Imam read a

lot about politics, theology and even popular science.

Ghosh also met Khamees the Rat on morning. His surname is Sudan, as Ghosh

discovered later. Ghosh liked him at once, because he was about Ghosh’s age which

was in the early twenties. He was completely illiterate. Later Ghosh learned about

Khamees the Rat who was called as the Rat, because he was said to gnaw at things

with his tongue, like a rat did with its teeth. Khamees asked so many doubts to

Ghosh that burning dead and worshipping cows in India as if in mocking way. Then

Ghosh answered that it is true that some people in India burn their dead body and

worship cows, as a tradition and custom. Meanwhile a woman who was a dark,

aquiline young woman who also asked so many doubts to Ghosh, was Khamees’s

wife. She asked Ghosh by calling him a doctor if his country had crops, fields and

canals like theirs. Ghosh replied affirmatively. She also asked innocently whether he

had night and day like them. But Khamees ordered her to shut up. Actually, Amitav

Ghosh had gone all the way from India to be a student at the University of

Alexandria. There he found the innocent and superstitious people in Egypt. He also

came across through so many customs and ignorant people. Then there was

discussion about the West. The Western people didn’t burn their dead. They’re not

an ignorant but they were advanced, educated. They had guns and tanks and bombs.

In this way, the essay presents the transformation of ideology in the course of time.

Earlier development meant something related to characteristics and humanity

whereas at present advance is seen in association with weapons. In short, the title

essay brings out the pathos of two "superceded civilizations" - one of ancient Egypt

and other of India - "vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West."

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3.4.2 Tibetan Dinner

In the essay Tibetan Dinner, while describing the fund raising dinner for

Tibetans, Ghosh says, “It was a while before the others at the table had finished

pointing out the celebrities who had come to the restaurant for gala benefit.” ‘Tibetan

Dinner’ is an experience of Amitav Ghosh in New York. Ghosh and his friend went

to the Tibetan dinner party held in a restaurant in Manhattan, New York. The

Hollywood star was hosting a dinner for the cause of Tibet. He converted to Tibetan

Buddhism. He sat at the head of a table in the party. He wore saffron robes. He was

in his early middle aged. He had with clerically cropped hair and a pitted, wind-

ravaged face. He was very sincere and had taken an oath that he would put Tibet on

the world map, make it a household word in the US.

Ghosh had served three dumplings decorated with slivers of vegetables. It was a

Tibetan mo-mo but stuffed with salmon and asparagus and such like instead of the

usual bits of pork and fat. During his meal, Ghosh recalls the Tibetan refugees in

Indian, between looking up to the solitary Monk being felicitated. Ghosh confesses

that as an undergraduate, he and his friends would get drunk when they went to eat

Tibetan food at a Tibetan refugee camp in Delhi. Ghosh says that Tibetan refugees

served mo-mo, noodles and chhang-the milky Tibetan rice beer and the food was

cooked and served by elderly Tibetans.

As Ghosh muses thus in the trendy Manhattan restaurant, he catches the eye of

the sole monk at the gathering and finds that "... his smile seemed a little guilty: the

hospitality of a poor nation must have seemed dispensable compared to the charity of

a rich one." Or perhaps he was merely bewildered, Ghosh continues. "It cannot be

easy to celebrate the commodification of one's own suffering." In the end of the

essay, he says to make Tibet a household word in western world, Tibet should be

turned into acronym like TriBeCa and used in detergent ads. Satirical comment on

people shows his subtle yet smart way of putting his point. The most interesting part

is the angle that he has given to experiences by his own observations. He has tried to

make you live the process, while giving his sharp and smart vision.

3.4.3 Four Corners

The essay Four Corners is written in 1988. It is about a road trip in the US

illustrates his keen observational powers and ability to relate the commonplace to

history. America's recreational vehicles (RVs), are, in his words, "if not quite

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palaces, then certainly midtown condos on wheels". He notices their curious names,

Native American words like Winnebago and Itasca. "The names of the dispossessed

tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar allure for marketing executives of automobile

companies. Pontiac, Cherokee - so many tribes are commemorated in modes of

transport," Ghosh observes. And then, as always, the summing up: "It is not a mere

matter of fashion that so many of the cars that flash past on the highways carry those

names, breathing them into the air like the inscriptions on prayer wheels. This

tradition of naming has a long provenance: Did not Kit Carson himself, the scourge

of the Navajo, name his favorite horse Apache?" Why doesn't Ghosh come off as a

know-it-all? With disarming frankness, he acknowledges that he doesn't have all the

answers, or even explanations, for the fascinating quirks of culture he describes.

3.4.4 An Egyptian in Baghdad

The essay An Egyptian in Baghdad is a tragic short story of Egyptian migrants.

The essay is written soon after the Gulf War, the Iraqis acted wild and blamed the

Egyptians to have taken advantage of their situation of being indulged in the war.

They were accused of taking their jobs and money, and so in their wilderness would

kill the Egyptians, snatching their papers, so that no records remain. Really it is a

tragic story of Nabeel. When he was a young man, he worked in National Service in

the army. He was thoughtful and serious person. His voice was very solemn. His

family was one of the poorest in the village. So Nabeel moved to Iraq in order to earn

money to give his family a comfortable life. He was working an assistant in a

photographer’s shop. Unfortunately, he never returned to live in the pucka house

that was being built with his money. He became missing without any whereabouts.

The awful situation of the Egyptian migrants in Iraq as they lived there in high risk

of being killed any moment by the Iraqs has been illustrated in the piece.

3.4.5 The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi

The essay The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi is about Ghosh's experiences in New

Delhi the day in 1984 that the Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, was shot. Amitav

Ghosh was living in a part of New Delhi called Defence Colony and teaching at

Delhi University. On the morning of October 31st, he took the bus to the university

at about the same time Mrs. Gandhi was shot a few miles away. By the time he

reached the campus, news had spread. The word was that she had been assassinated

by two Sikh bodyguards, in revenge for her having sent troops to raid the Sikhs'

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Golden Temple of Amritsar earlier that year. After teaching his class, Ghosh left the

university with his friend Hari Sen who lived in Safdarjang Enclave. Mobs had

formed along the streets looking for Sikhs. A woman on their bus told a Sikh to

crouch and hide; a mob surrounded the bus and the passengers said there were no

Sikhs on it. The mobs were burning the Sikh's businesses and houses, and burning

them alive as well. Hindus and Muslims who would protect the Sikhs were also

victims of the violence. Hari Sen's neighbors Mr. & Mrs. Bawa were Sikhs. Author

and Hari went to the Bawas’s house to urge them to come over. As the mobs entered

their street, the Bawas climbed over the back fence. Their Hindu cook stayed and

guarded the house. Both houses were spared. The next morning author gathered at

the compound of a relief agency where a protest against the violence had been

organized. Author recalls passage by V. S. Naipaul about whether to join a protest or

not. The organization of the Nagarik Ekta Manch, or Citizens' Unity Front was

created. The Front also produced the pamphlet entitled "Who Are the Guilty?", a

searing indictment of the politicians who encouraged the riots and the police who

allowed the rioters to have their way. The Bosnian writer Dzevad Karahasan, in an

essay called "Literature and War" (published last year in his collection "Sarajevo,

Exodus of a City"), makes a startling connection between modern literary

aestheticism and the contemporary world's indifference to violence. After the

violence, author wrote the novel The Shadow Lines. Author describes the difficulty

he has had with writing about that day.

3.4.6 The Human Comedy in Cairo

In the piece The Human Comedy in Cairo Ghosh talks about the writer Naguib

Mahfouz. He was an Arabic writer. He was born in Cairo in 1911.He grew up in the

heart of the old city where respectable families of modest means struggling to put

their children through school, lived above thriving little shops and businesses and

looked out through their dusty windows at medieval mosques, hospitals , and

religious schools. This real world is reflected in his literary work. He has written

thirty-five novels and twelve volumes of short stories, as well as several plays and

screen plays. He has used absurdism and the stream of consciousness technique into

Arabic literature. Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989. The award to

Mahfouz was clearly recognition of the achievements of Arabic literature.

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3.4.7 Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel

In the essay Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel Ghosh presents the

postmodern condition. There are cities in which virtually everyone is a foreigner.

There is an admixture of people and culture. They have their own identities. The

vicious systems of helotry juxtaposed with unparalleled wealth. In this modern age,

technology transformed everything. There is also military devastation on an

apocalyptic scale. Ghosh tells that there were some authors who wrote about the oil

encounter in their novels. Munif was one of the writers who described in ‘Cities of

Salt’ the real consequences of the sort of political restiveness. The narrator tells that

the oil is clearly the only commodity that can serve as an analogy for pepper. The

novel ends with a dramatic confrontation between the old Harran and the new where

the emir sat in coffee houses and gossiped with the Bedouin, where everybody had

time for everyone else and no one was ever so ill that they needed remedies that were

sold for money, and a universe in which Mr. Middleton of the oil company holds

their livelihoods in his hands, where the newly arrived Lebanese doctor Subhi al-

Mahmilji charges huge fees for the smallest service. It is a story that evokes horror,

sympathy, guilt and rage of the present era.

3.4.8 Empire and Soul: A Review of the Baburnama

In the essay Empire and Soul: A Review of the Baburnama Ghosh takes the

review of the book ‘The Baburnama’. It is the autobiography of India’s first Mughal

emperor, Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur (1483-1530) . Ghosh calls it as one of the

true marvels of the medieval world. It belongs with that tiny handful of the world’s

literary masterpieces. It can accurately be described as unique works that are without

precedent and without imitators. In the Western tradition, the military memoir has a

pedigree that goes back to Xenophon and Julius Caesar. But Babur had no such

antecedents available to him. As Wheeler M. Thackston, his most recent translator,

notes ‘Babur’s memoirs are the first – and until relatively recent times, the only –

true autobiography in Islamic literature.’ In other words, in setting out to write an

autobiography, Babur did something that very few writers have done. He invented a

form out of whole cloth. Babur’s true literary peers, in this sense, are such epochal

figures as Lady Murasaki and Cervantes. But this writer was also the founder of a

great empire: Babur was Pizarro and Cervantes. What made him pen this immense

book? And how on earth did he find the time? Between the moment that he gained

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his first kingdom, at the age of twelve, and his death, thirty-five later, there seems

scarcely to have been a quiet day in Babur’s life.

3.4.9 The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village

In The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village Ghosh, like an astute

anthropologist, works out the relation of Evil Eye practices with conditions of

production in rural economy of Egypt. It is based on chapters of the thesis for which

Ghosh was awarded a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Social Anthropology by Oxford University

in 1982.The article was completed, however, in Trivandrum, at the Centre for

Development Studies, where he also wrote the first part of The Circle of Reason.

Ghosh says the relations determines as a part of a wider order of society. In the

essay, Ghosh tells about the lifestyle of the village, Nacaawy. The people in the

village believe that envy has efficient action and can destroy or harm the objects or

people against which it is directed. The people of the village often say ‘we are one’,

they are tied by affinity. Ghosh describes that witchcraft and envy are both related to

beliefs in directed malevolence; they differ so far as the relationships which direct

them and the tensions from which they arise are concerned. Livestock, food, and

children are only the symbols through which envy is focused. The villagers say that it

is always the rich man who envies the poor and proverbs state, ‘The owner of a

camel envies the owner of a goat’ and ‘the strong envy the weak’.

3.4.10 Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah Economy

In another essay Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah

Economy Ghosh investigates into the history and metaphysics of labour as it

manifests itself in various forms in rural set-up. Ghosh describes the structure of

social relationships which constitutes the labour process among a community of

fellahin in the north-western corner of the Nile Delta. Ghosh tells that the system of

production in this area is neither an archaism nor a threatened form of life, on the

contrary, it is an extremely versatile and efficient form of agriculture which over the

last century has responded swiftly to global changes and in the process transformed

itself so that today, in terms of yield per acre, it is arguably the most productive form

of agriculture in the world. However Ghosh argues that the structure of labour in this

community is a means of both resisting and appropriating some of the forms of

relationship which have come to be synonymous with ‘modernity’ and that finally,

the system as a whole constitutes a commentary on the very nature of social

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relations. Ghosh describes the life of the people in the village, Nashawy. In the

village, the villagers often say of themselves ‘ we are one’ and this is at least

metaphorically true, for none of the economic disparities of the village are at all

significant when compare to the vast gap between the villagers and the landlords of

the city. Ghosh says labour power is only dominant element of the structure of work

in the village. The villagers say : We all help each other here; it is not as it is in the

cities. There is cooperation here’- the willingness to work together- is an essential

element in their community.

3.4.11 The Slave of MS. H.6

The essay The Slave of MS. H.6 is an anthropological detective story. It is a

story about the slave of MS H.6. The name was first mentioned in an article in 1942,

in a Hebrew journal called Zion, published in Jerusalem. The article mentioned a

letter that had apparently been written in the summer of A.D. 1148 by a Jewish

merchant, Khalaf Ibn Ishaq. He was living in Aden and wrote letters to his friend

Abraham Ben Yiju. At that time, Abraham Ben Yiju was living in Mangalore, on the

southwestern coast of India. The letters had written about the news of travelling

merchants and seamen who took their letters to India. At the end of the letter, there

was the name of the slave. The Slave of MS H.6 was owned by a merchant, Abraham

Ben Yiju. Abraham Ben Yiju was a Jewish merchant, well enough educated and

scholar. But instead, early in his life, he chose a career in business. At that time, the

Jewish merchants were very closely connected with the Indian Ocean trade. He made

a lot of money in India, where he married and spent 18 years. Ashu is a slave that

Ben Yiju freed. It is posited that she might be the woman who bore his child and also

his wife. He was a man who had a taste for good living. According to Ghosh, he may

have had a sweet tooth based on the gifts his friend sent him. He owned slaves.

Ghosh says, ‘Abraham Ben Yiju first acquired Bomma as a hand to work in his

house and only later took him into his businesses.’ The slave was described as a

respected member of the household of Abraham Ben Yiju and also he was the

business agent for his master. Ghosh believes his name might have been Bomma,

Bamma, or even Bama. When Abraham Ben Yiju came back to Cairo, he deposited

MS H.6, with some other letters, in the synagogue. As Mr. Ghosh learned,

synagogues in medieval times usually had an adjacent chamber called a genizah, or

storehouse, in which members of the community deposited their writings. In

accordance with Jewish custom, the contents of these chambers were occasionally

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emptied and buried to prevent the accidental desecration of any written form of God's

name. For some reason the Genizas of synagogue was not emptied for more than 800

years, and toward the end of the last century thousands of documents were unearthed,

taken out of Egypt and scattered in libraries all over the world. Written in Judeo-

Arabic (the language of the Jews of Islamic countries of the Mediterranean, a

colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic written in Hebrew characters), the letters, court

records, contracts, accounts, manuscripts of books and other writings are an

important source for the study of the social history of the Jewish communities and

Islamic civilization in this area.

But in 1135 Bomma was merely playing the part of courier for his master.

Among the things he brought back were several letters which contained detailed

instructions about what he was to do with trading companies. Ghosh tells that the

present story is an attempt to reconstruct the tapestry of real life of the 12th century,

according to some frayed but leading threads, against the backdrop of the real lives

of rural Egyptians in the last decade. The price of raisins in the 12th century, the

access to writing paper and the exchange rates of the dinar are all conjured to make

Mr. Ghosh's account of the trip Ben Yiju takes down the Nile on his way to distant

Aden something like an American Automobile Association Triptik.

Amitav Ghosh tells that he came across Bomma's name in "Letters of Medieval

Jewish Traders," by S. D. Goitein, published five years earlier. At that time, Ghosh

was doing research on Anthropology. It was also the first time Mr. Ghosh had heard

of the Cairo Genizas. Within months he was studying Arabic; then in 1980, he began

conducting anthropological fieldwork in a small village a couple of hours' journey

southeast of Alexandria, where he discovered that the Arabic dialect spoken has

much in common with the dialect of the Genizas documents.

3.4.12 The Diaspora in Indian Culture

In his essay The Diaspora in Indian Culture Amitav Ghosh tries to see Indian

diaspora from cultural and political points of view. He observes that the huge

migration from this subcontinent that began in the mid-19th century is not only one

of the most significant demographic dislocations of the modern world; it represents

nowadays an important force in global culture. The diasporic culture becomes

increasingly a factor within the culture of Indian subcontinent that becomes an

important social, political, and literary force in its own way. And, this is self

67

evidently true of its material culture which now sets the standard for all desirable in

the metropolitan areas. Ghosh goes on to relate the relationship between diasporic

populations and their mother countries in history that is maintained through the

reproduction of political and social institutions. The movement of diasporic peoples

for establishing their rights has now become the centre of world consciousness which

gradually gets its speed. We hope that the leading western world would compensate

for its past by accommodating these settlers along with their own peoples through

providing them with all sorts of social, cultural, and political facilities.

3.4.13 The Global Reservation: Notes towards an Ethnography of

International Peacekeeping

The Global Reservation: Notes towards an Ethnography of International

Peacekeeping was the Plenary Address at the Annual Meeting of the Society for

Cultural Anthropology held in Washington on 16 May 1993. It was published in

Cultural Anthropology, Vol.9, No.3, August 1994. This essay describes Ghosh’s

encounters with UN workers in Cambodia and their broader implications towards

what he calls anthropology of the future.” Ghosh states that the majority of the UN’s

peacekeeping operations have been in places that fall within anthropology’s

traditional domains – in Asia, Africa, and Central America. These places will

become harbingers of the future in peacekeeping operations. Ghosh believes that the

workings of international peacekeeping may contain the elements of political,

cultural, national models. It will provide political legacy to the next. The

peacekeeping mission in Cambodia undertaken by the UN which was far surpassed

that of any previous operation in the countrywide elections of May 1993. Ghosh tells

that the UN is a bureaucracy which exercises the functioning of the United Nations’

Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). In it, administrative positions were

reserved for the representative of small group of wealthy or powerful countries which

maintains relations between the poor and rich, weak and powerful nations. But

Ghosh says that the success or failure of a UN operation appears to depend largely on

the efficacy of the barriers between itself and the people of the region where it is

located.

3.4.14 The Fundamentalist Challenge

In the essay titled The Fundamentalist Challenge Ghosh talks of how, in his

own words, “intellectual pedigrees of most versions of religious extremism around

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the world today can be traced to similar moments of conversion”. Ghosh also

examines that there is contradiction between religious extremism’s reliance on

scripture and its attack on artistic production in the late twentieth century. He goes on

to give some example, relevant to South Asia and Middle East. Ghosh observes that

faith and art have coexisted peacefully, even amicably, throughout most of history.

However, relations between the realm of religion and the realm of literature are

uneasy at best in the contemporary world. As our contributors here suggest, the fault

may lie with both sides-in the deafness of most contemporary writers to the religious

yearnings of the average person; and in the aggressive intolerance of some believers

who have gone the way of fundamentalism.

3.4.15 The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of my

Grandfather’s Bookcase

Amitav Ghosh was the winner of the 1999 Pushcart prize, a leading literary

award for an essay The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of my

Grandfather’s Bookcase that was published in the Kenyon Review. Actually, the

essay was the Ida Beam Lecture at the University of Iowa and evolved very slowly

over the next three years. Amitav Ghosh used to spend his holidays in his

grandfather’s house in Calcutta when he was a child. The grandfather’s house was a

chaotic and noisy place, populated by a large number of uncles, aunts, cousins and

dependants, some of them bizaree, some merely eccentric, but almost all excitable in

the extreme. The walls of his grandfather’s house were lined with rows of books,

neatly stacked in glass-fronted bookcases. The book-cases were prominently

displayed in a large hall that served among innumerable other functions, also those of

playground, sitting room and hallway. The author was only the person who raided

the books regularly. He used to be in Calcutta for a couple of months. The speciality

of Calcutta lies in that Calcutta is an oddly bookish city. Amitav stated that all his

uncles were busy, practical and successful professionals but little time to spend on

books. But one of his uncles was a real reader who was a shy and rather retiring man,

not the caliber to educate his siblings. He was too quiet to carry much weight in

family matters and his views never counted for elder’s discussion.

Ghosh describes the importance of grandfather’s house that it was a full of

books or like a library good collection of books contained in the house. There were a

few works of Anthropology and Psychology like: ‘The Golden Bough’, the collected

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works of Sigmund Freud, Marx and Engel’s Manifesto, Havelock Ellis and

Malinowski on sexual behaviour and so on.

About a quarter of the novels in uncle’s bookcases were in Bengali-

representative selections of the mainstream tradition of Bengali fiction in the 20th

century. These were the works of Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Tagore, Bibhuti

Bhushan and so on. The rest were in English. The others were translations from a

number of other languages, most of them European, Russian, French, Italian,

German and Danish. The great masterpieces of nineteenth century were dutifully

represented the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgener, of Victor Hugo,

Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, and other. The others were Russians and Americans

alike: Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair etc. There

are also so many good authors and works referred in this essay. We find the reference

of the Hindi movies and some kung-fu-movies in this essay.

3.4.16 The Greatest Sorrow: Time of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness

The Greatest Sorrow: Time of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness tells us about

Ghosh’s nostalgic state of past. The author recalls all the joys enjoyed by him in

distress. As Rousseau said, “Remorse goes to sleep when our fortunes are prosperous

and makes itself felt more keenly in adversity.” In his book The Confessions of Jean

Janques Roussea. The essay begins with famous quotation by Dante’s ‘The Inferno’,

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.” The

author tells his landing in Colombo’s Katunayake airport on 17 July. He wonders

that the machinery of an aircraft is very fragile. The plane landed on a run way that

was flanked with wreckage on either side. Through the scarred glass of his window,

he spotted a blackened pile of debris that ended in the intact tail section of a plane.

Ghosh mentioned a small suicide squad of Tamil Tiger guerrillas which had

succeeded in entering Colombo’s carefully guarded Katunayake airport. The strike

was executed with meticulous precision and the guerrillas had destroyed some

fourteen aircraft, virtually disabling Sri Lanka’s civilian and military air fleets. It was

till than perhaps the single most successful attack of its kind. Ghosh had a great

respect for the poet Michael Ondaatje and referred his lines. Ghosh has also a great

love and respect for a Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali and throughout the essay he

often quotes his poems. Ghosh also refers to the predicament of his mind when the

70

World Trade Center was attacked on 11th September, 2001 and his daughter was in

school, his small son was at home and his wife was in the office,

3.4.17 The Hunger of Stones

The present essay The Hunger of Stones is Ghosh’s translation of Rabindranth

Tagore’s classic short story, ‘Kshudhita Pashan’. ‘The Hungry Stones’ is a Bengali

story written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1895. The story is about a tax collector,

Srijut, who is sent to a small town and stays at a former palace which is believed to

be haunted. Every night becomes more consumed by the spirits of the inhabitants of

the palace from the Mughal times and a beautiful Indian woman.

The Hunger of Stones is an allegory of the colonial condition which is a work of

extraordinary suggestive power and atmospheric richness. It depicts functionaries of

the Indian government which Tagore uses to draw a tension between the

modernizing Indian the hegemony of the British colonial order. Here, we have the

tale of a tax-collector, who sheds his tight-fitting western garb- a jacket and trousers-

to assume the baggy payjamas of the royal court from 250 years ago that he’s drawn

deeper into during his sleeping hours. While Tagore makes it clear at the end of the

story that this royal court’s extravagance makes it a deadly trap for those who

succumb to the temptation to try and indulge their lustier desires, this supernatural

explanation falls a bit short of what we may suspect the appeal of this older Indian

court truly is. Under current British colonial rule, our story teller is a functionary, but

perhaps under Shah Mahmud-II’s he would have been able to indulge in all manner

of earthly pleasures instead. Tagore draws a keen parable of Indian yearning for a

kind of past that represents something radically different that its colonized present in

the late 1800s. The story also illustrates Tagore’s sense of humour when it comes to

the conventions of the narrative form. For one, the story teller references ‘One

Thousand and One Arabian Nights’ a collection of folk tales often framed as stories

within stories much like ‘The Hungry Stones’ itself speaking of Tagore’s narrative

playfulness, he seems to have fun weaving a shaggy dog tale that lacks any real

climax. Just as the story is getting really good just as the storyteller is about to tell us

how he escaped the Shah’s temple with his sanity intact the people who are listening

to the story, must get off the train our pleasure as readers mirrors the story teller’s

pleasure in the fantasies, tempted but never truly fulfilled. In short, the story is very

interesting and catching. It is a haunted story of the old palace. The description made

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by Tagore of the story is like somewhat Gothic narratives. The supernatural

atmosphere spells the old palace.

3.4.18 The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn

The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn is a tribute to the

Kashmir poet, Agha Shahid Ali. Shahid wished the author to write something about

him after his death. Ghosh also gave him a promise that he would write something

about him after his death. Actually, Amitav Ghosh did not like friend’s talk about his

own death but he assured to write something. Furthermore, this was before Shahid

suffered from a brain tumour and ultimately fell prey to it. It is a touching story about

friendship and keeping a word of commitment. Moreover, the author fulfills his

promise of his friend who is no longer alive. The story also focuses on Shahid about

his likes and dislikes and his philosophy of life. Ghosh focuses on the views of Agha

Shahid Ali on the partition of the country. Agha Shahid Ali said, “This dividing of

the country, the divisions between people- Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu – you

can’t imagine, how much I hate it. It makes me sick. What I say is: why can’t you be

happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things?

This was like a celebration even his diagnosis. The essay also discusses Shahid’s

love for Kashmir. It also talks about his interest in music, food, literature and art. The

author also discusses his views on life.

In short, these pieces are considerable and distinguished body of writing has

appeared sporadically and been scattered within periodicals and magazines, learned

journals and academic books. It has never been available as a single body of ideas, as

the large and singular bedrock upon which Amitav Ghosh’s fictional imagination has

drawn. Ghosh’s concerns here, as in his novels, are with exploring the connection

between past and present, between events and memories, and between people,

cultures and countries that have shared a past. India and Egypt, Islam and Hinduism,

the Mughal Emperor Babur and the would-be empress Indira Gandhi, Rabindranath

Tagore’s Bengal and Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmir, the novel and history,

fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism, migration and diaspora all these themes come

alive in these essays.

3.4.19 Check Your Progress:

1. The title piece ‘The Imam and the Indian’ was written in Delhi, in ……………

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a) 1985 b)1986 c)1987 d)1988

2. …………was a Tibetan mo-mo in the essay ‘Tibetan Dinner’.

a) mustard b) bread c) chocho d) the dumpling

3. America’s recreational vehicles (RVs) are Winnebago and …………….

a) Itsaca b) tribes c) Honda d) Carson

4. …………………was working as an assistant in a photographer’s shop in the

essay ‘An Egyptian in Baghdad’.

a) Ismail b) Nabeel c) Abu-Ali d) Saddam Hussein

5. The day of Mrs.Gandhi’s death was ………………..

a) 31 October b) 30 October c) 25 June d) 29 October

6. In the essay ‘The Human Comedy in Cairo’, the narrator tells that the award to

Mahfouz was clearly recognition of the achievements of …………….literature.

a) American b) Indian c) Arabic d) Egyptian

7. The narrator tells that …………is clearly the only commodity that can serve as

an analogy for pepper in ‘Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel’.

a) Oil b) Salt c) Trench d) Cycle

8. The autobiography of India’s first Mughal emperor, Mohammad Babur is

…………….

a) Samarkand b) Julious Caesar c) Xenophon d) The Baburnama

9. ………………, food and children are only the symbols through which envy is

focused in the essay ‘The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village’.

a) Livestock b) food c) children d) Households

10. In the essay, ‘Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah Economy,’

Ghosh investigates into the history and metaphysics of …………..

a) pleasant b) Culture c) People d) Labour

11. ……..movement was founded on a quest for the dissolution of all differences of

selfhood, wealth, caste and gender.

a) Morocco b) Virasaiva c) Hindustani d) Geniza

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12. V. S. Naipaul wrote the novel……….

a) Area of Darkness b) Satani Verses c) Mother India d) Guyana

13. UNTAC employees and volunteers were………….

a) Foreigners b) political leaders c) capitalist d) villagers

14. Ghosh thinks that for most of human history, religion and ………….have been

virtually inseparable, everywhere.

a) Literature b) philosophy c) logic d) politics

15. The walls of my grandfather’s house were lined with rows of ……….

a) photos b) cups c) medals d) books

16. Agha Shahid Ali was born in ………………..

a) America b) India c) Pakisthan d) Bangladesh

17. The essay ‘The Hunger of Stones’ is a translation of ‘Kshudhita Pashan’ by

……………

a) Rabindranath Tagore b) Salman Rushdie

c) Nadine Gordimer d) Gunter Grass

18. The World Trade Center was attacked on 11th September ……….

a) 2001 b) 2000 c) 2002 d) 2003

3.4.20 Answers to Check your progress:

1. 1985

2. the dumpling

3. Itsaca

4. Nabeel

5. 31 October

6. Arabic

7. Oil

8. The Baburnama

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9. Livestock

10. labour

11. Virasaiva

12. Areas of Darkness

13. Foreigners

14. Literature

15. Books

16. India

17. Rabindranath Tagore

18. 2001

3.5 Characters in The Imam and the Indian

Amitav Ghosh uses the characters well to display broader scenario. Ghosh

projects himself as a writer without boundaries and deals with characters that do not

have a fixed location - geographically. His writings also to signify the futility of lines

that divide nation-states on geographical landscape, the shadow lines amid one’s

place of birth and one’s nationality, and the impact of borders on human lives. The

characters built are themselves eccentric and very well display the old costumes and

thought alleys of people which have shaped them. His characters do not occupy

discrete cultures, but dwell in travel in cultural spaces that flow across borders drawn

around our modern nation-states. His characters often projected to exemplify the

artificiality of national boundary and of literary foundation with a new insight. The

characters in his works have strong associations with places, people, books, objects,

the same as many of his readers. His description of places is rich with knowing.

Ghosh also provides an insightful analysis of the Indian subcontinent and its culture

and history, identity and nation, family and displacement, tradition and modernity

through the eyes of his characters. Amitav Ghosh becomes a character in his own

experiences to share his story and thus, he is successful in not being preachy. He is

self critical and analytical about his surrounding people and himself.

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Imam: Imam was a big man, with very bright brown eyes, set deep in a

wrinkled, weather-beaten face. Imam was distinctly untidy. And his turban had been

knotted around his head. His blue jallabeyya was mud-stained and unwashed. But his

beard was short and white and neatly trimmed. He had seen better days but he had

certain energy in the way he arched his shoulders. Obviously, he was a vigorous,

restive kind of person. He had divorced his first wife and his second wife had left

him. Now he lived quite alone and had his meals with his son’s family who lived

across the square centre of the village, on the dusty open square, which was the

oldest part of the village. Imam was an old fashioned healer and a barber by

profession. People said he knew a great deal about herbs and the old kind of

medicine. He also read politics, theology, and even popular science.

Khamees: Khamees was in the early twenties, scrawny, with a thin, mobile face

deeply scorched by the sun. He had that brightness of eye and the quick, slightly

sardonic turn to his mouth. However, he was completely an illiterate. He was called

as the Rat -Khamees the Rat - because he was said to gnaw away at things with his

tongue, like a rat did with its teeth. He lived with his wife who was very innocent.

He asked so many doubts to the author. Meanwhile, his wife also innocently asked

doubts about Indian cultures.

Ustad Ahmed, Shopkeeper, Villagers are also characters in the story The Imam

and the Indian.

Buddhist Monk: Buddhist Monk was an actor, Hollywood star. He was in his

early middle age. He had with clerically cropped hair and a pitted, wind-ravaged

face. He converted to Tibetan Buddhism. He was very sincere and had taken an oath

that he would put Tibet on the world map; make it a household word in the US. So

he was hosting a dinner for the cause of Tibet (raising funds for schools). He invited

all the celebrities for the party. He sat at the head of a table in the party. He wore

saffron robes.

Kit Carson, General James H.Carleton, Barboncito - the Navajo leader,

Manuelito – the most renowned of the Navajo war chiefs, are some characters in the

essay Four Corners.

Nabeel: Nabeel was a young man. He had worked in National Service in the

army. He got his degree and decided to do salaried jobs in the Agricultural Ministry.

But he didn’t get the job. He was very thoughtful and serious. His voice was very

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solemn. His family was one of the poorest in the village. So he left his village in

Egypt and went to Iraq, Baghdad. In Baghdad, he was working as an assistant in a

photographer’s shop. He sent money to his parents to build his house. But he never

returned to live in the house. The author thinks that there may be tragic end of

Nabeel in Baghdad. Nabeel and Nabeel’s family had befriended with Ghosh, who

was living in Egypt for doing the research in 1980 and 1981.

Abu-Ali: the old shopkeeper, a very fat person who could eat two chickens and

a pot of rice at one sitting, had three sons, had built apartments for his sons,

Ismail: Nabeel’s best friend as well as his cousin. He was lively, energetic,

always ready with a joke or a pun. He was a construction labourer in Iraq. Ismail and

Nabeel lived and cooked and ate together in Baghdad.

Fawzia – Nabeel’s sister-in-law, She was a pretty, good humoured woman, wife

of Nabeel’s elder brother Aly

Mrs. Indira Gandhi: Prime Minster of India in 1984, assassinated by two Sikh

bodyguards, she has real qualities of fortitude, dignity, physical courage, endurance,

etc.

Mr. and Mrs. Bawa : Mr. and Mrs. Bawa was an elderly Sikh couple. Mr.

Bawa was a small and slight man. He was casually dressed, his turban was neatly

tied and his beard carefully combed and bound. He was puzzled after hearing Indira

Gandhi’s assassination. Mrs.Bawa a small, matronly woman, was dressed in a salwar

and kameez.

Hari Sen : Hari Sen was Ghosh’s friend. Hari Sen lived with his family in a

household so large and eccentric that it had come to be known among his friends as

Macondo, after Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical village.

Hari’s mother: Hari’s mother was about fifty years old. She was a tall graceful

woman with a gentle, soft-spoken manner. In an understated way, she was also

deeply religious, a devout Hindu. When she heard about the violence on Sikh

community she immediately decided to help Mrs. Bawa.

Naguib Mahfouz: He was born in Cairo in 1911. Mahfouz was a modest,

generous and kindly man. He worked as a civil servant. He was the most interesting,

innovative, imaginative writer in Arabic literature. He has written thirty-five novels

and twelve volumes of short stories, as well as several plays and screenplays. He was

77

awarded the Noble Prize in 1989. He worked for much of his life for Mohammad al-

Dhahabi, a religious scholar and a minster of the government department in the

Ministry of Religious Endowments.

Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur: India’s first Mughal emperor. He gained his

first kingdom, at the age of twelve. He had made Samarkand the capital of a vast

empire and built it into a great centre of art and literature. In the course of his life, he

is an old man had become increasingly sinicized and had developed an interest in

Buddhism and Confucianism.

The Slave of MS H.6: The Slave of MS H.6 is an Indian slave who is owned by

a Jewish merchant. He is described as a valuable member of the household of

Abraham Ben Yiju and as that man's business agent. Ghosh believes his name might

have been Bamma.

Abraham Ben Yiju : Abraham Ben Yiju is a Jewish merchant, scholar, and

calligrapher who owned an Indian slave; this pairing is what initially attracted

Ghosh's interest. According to Ghosh, he may have had a sweet tooth based on the

gifts his friend sent him. Actually, he was born in Tunisia and made a lot of money in

India before he went to Egypt to live out his life. He was a man who had a taste for

good living.

Ashu: Ashu is a slave that Ben Yiju freed. It is posited that Ashu might be the

woman who bore Ben Yiju’s child and also his wife.

Surur : Surur is Ben Yiju's son. His mentor, Madmun, sends a piece of coral to

him as a gift.

Sergeant: He was a Bangladeshi sergeant, a large, friendly man with a bushy

moustache. He was teaching a group of Cambodian soldiers’ professional de-mining

techniques. He met Ghosh at the edge of a Cambodian minefield and became close

friends. The sergeant told how badly they were living in Kompong Thom, Cambodia.

Still, they were working hard there to get more money.

Mike: He was a young, Anglophone Westerner, tall in the way that used to be

called willowy, with untidy shoulder-length hair. He was wearing colourful, roughly

woven clothes of the kind. Mike had acquired an interest in Indochina as an

undergraduate and had eventually gone on to a degree in area studies. He has spent

several years in Vietnam and Cambodia and was fluent in the languages of both

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countries. He was good company in a friendly, easygoing way. He read Gabriel

Garcia-Marquez and Granta, avoided red meat, and believed in many admirable

causes. Mike was deeply concerned about the welfare of the ethnic Vietnamese in

Cambodia.

Mya Than Tint: He was one of the most important Burmese writers of the

twentieth century. He was an amazing man. He spent more than a decade as a

political prisoner. For part of that time he was incarcerated in the British-founded

penal colony of Cocos Island.

Mr.Tax-collector, author’s cousin, Karim Khan, Guide, a messenger, cook,

Meher Ali, Shah Mahmud II – these are the characters in ‘The Hunger Stone’

Agha Shahid Ali: Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He

grew up in Kashmir, the son of a distinguished and highly educated family in

Srinagar. He earned an MA from the University of Delhi, an MA and PhD from

Pennsylvania State University, and an MFA from the University of Arizona. In 1987

he began teaching at Hamilton College in New York, and later moved to the

University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he served as the Director of the MFA

creative writing program. He also taught at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren

Wilson College and was a visiting professor at Princeton University and in the

Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. A Kashmiri American

Muslim, Agha Shahid Ali is best known as a poet in the United States and identified

himself as an American poet writing in English. Ali wrote nine poetry collections

and a book of literary criticism as well as translated a collection of Faiz Ahmed

Faiz’s poetry. At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able

to blend multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant

free-verse. His poetry reflects his Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. Ali was

deeply moved by the music of Begum Akhtar, Eqbal Ahmed and James Merrill.

However, Amitav Ghosh suspects that the strongest connection between the two rose

from the idea that "sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner"—

traces of which were seen in Ali's and Akhtar's demeanor in their respective lives.


1. Who taught in the village’s secondary school?

Mohammad Abduh b) Ustad Ahmed c) al-Azhar d) Imam

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2. The food was cooked and served by ……….Tibetans.

elderly b) young c) older d) women

3. Who was the Navajo leader?

a) Kit Carson b) General James H.Carleton

c) Barboncito d) Manuelito

4. …………..was a construction labourer in Baghdad, Iraq.

a) Nabeel b) Ismail c) Abu-Ali d) Riyadh

5. Mr. and Mrs. Bawa was an elderly …………..couple.

a) Sikh b) Jain c) Hindu d) Muslim

6. Naguib Mahfouz has written ………. novels.

a) five b) ten c) thirty d) thirty-five

7. Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in ……...

a) 1948 b) 1947 c) 1949 d) 1950

8. ………….is Ben Yiju's son.

a) Surur b) Yusuf c) Abraham d) Madav

9. ………….freed Ashu as a slave.

b) Khalaf b) Abraham Ben Yiju

c) Yusuf ibn Abraham d) Madmun


1. Ustad Ahmed

2. elderly

3. Barboncito

4. Ismail

5. Sikh

6. thirty-five

7. 1949

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8. Vietnamese

9. Surur

10. Abraham Ben Yiju

3.6 Themes in The Imam and the Indian

The Imam and Indian is a collection of journalistic and scholarly articles and

lectures published in the year 2002. In the preface, Ghosh declares that the pieces are

heterogeneous by nature and they cannot be put under same captions. He further

remarks that the pieces are written in his utterly attentive phase. Every piece entails a

particular issue or story behind it, which he later develops into full-fledged ones in

his other works. A reading of the collection makes it apparent that Ghosh’s extensive

travelling combined with enthusiastic scrutiny prompted him reproduce his

experiences as reflected his narratives. His dexterity of being an ethnographer,

anthropologist, historian, translator, and a fiction writer is weaved together

throughout the work. Hence, though it is difficult to put the essays in a single

thematic structure, a careful reading of the pieces can bring forth the implicit

political, social and cultural concern of Ghosh. He, without directly referring to the

issue of globalization, has focused on the various aspects to it. The fact that today’s

world is about interaction, communication, and development, culminating in a

globalised world seems to be the underlying subject matter in a number of pieces in

the collection. For instance, large scale migration of people taking place between

continents due to social, political and economic reasons has faded the borders.

Globalization has also given rise to a uniform world order as people belonging

different continents are living together. In the piece ‘The Ghat of the Only World:

Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn’ Ghosh tells the Kashmiri-American Poet Agha Shahid

was born in Delhi and was brought up in Kashmir. In the year 1975, he migrated to

Pennsylvania. One of the dominant themes of Ali’s poetry is meeting of culture.

Ghosh talking about “voyage between two continents” in the building of Shahid

reflects the microcosmic view of the transcontinental milieu in which Ali was living.

The overwhelming “fragrance of Kahmiri food is invading “the dour, grey interior of

the elevator”. Shahid’s apartment would always be filled with vibrant sounds of

Indian music and conversations in the building in which people of different culture

and background lived. On the other hand, as a postmodernist who had been travelling

to alien lands, Ghosh juxtaposes such a scenario with that of cultural disintegration,

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imperialism and hegemony, waning human relationships, materialistic outlook of the

people, hankering for security and love, diasporas etc. In the title essay ‘The Imam

and the Indian’ Ghosh records how a country today is measured in terms of

destructive forces, rather than productive ones, as the Imam says, ‘We have guns and

tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you have- we’re way ahead of

you.’ Ghosh realizes that the superiority of the West has become an acceptable fact

among all, no matter either it be an Indian or an Egyptian, or anyone else, their

preoccupation with Western hegemony is a reality of the present times. Imam’s

refusal to acquaint Ghosh of his traditional healing process is perhaps for the reason

that old customs are not trusted anymore. In fact, Ghosh mentions that the Imam has

been ashamed of talking about it himself. The customs and traditions, which

constitute the identity of an individual, community and a nation, have now become

obsolete. As an anthropologist Ghosh’s visit to Egypt is search of a genuine and

settled culture bewilders him when he finds the restlessness prevailing there, as the

villagers seemed to be the “airlines passengers in a transit lounge”. But in the

postmodern era, the one’s location doesn’t matter.

In another essay ‘The Egyptian in Baghdad’, Ghosh tells the tragic story of a

migrant Nabeel who moves to Iraq in order to earn money to give his family a

comfortable life. Unfortunately, he never returns to live in the pucka house that was

being built with his money. He became missing without any whereabouts. The awful

situation of the Egyptian migrants in Iraq as they lived there in high risk of being

killed any moment by the Iraqs has been illustrated in the piece. As the piece is

written shortly after the Gulf war, the Iraqis acted wild and blamed the Egyptians to

have taken advantage of their situation of being indulged in the war. They were

accused of taking their jobs and money, and so in their wilderness would kill the

Egyptians, snatching their papers, so that no records remain. In the essay ‘The

Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village’ Ghosh portrays the life of the Egyptian. In

an otherwise peaceful atmosphere of a rural Egyptian life, not much affected by the

outside forces, having their own principle of living, there is the practice of witchcraft

that prevails. The solidarity between the people in the village, as they say “we are

one” is amply replicated through their sharing of …….the same dialect and the same

cultural ethos, which distinguish them from the people of the cities….. The close knit

community of the village are dependent on each other in spite of the “relation of

envy” which according to Ghosh is “itself a relation” between the rich and poor. The

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upshot of migration is again depicted in a very poignant manner in the essay ‘Tibetan

Dinner’. Ghosh comes across a Tibetan Buddhist monk at a dinner table in a

restaurant at Manhattan where a dinner organized for a Tibetan cause. The monk and

the “momos” served at the restaurant takes him back to his college days in Delhi,

when he and his friends used to frequent the shacks of the Tibetan refugees where

they served their local delicacies like momo, noodles and rice beer known as chhang.

The essay reflects the destiny of the migrants. Migration has been a driving force of

the last century and the fact is that whether it is forced or self-willed, the sense of

dislocation, alienation and nostalgia permeates the minds of those who are away

from their homeland. Ghosh’s acquaintance with Agha Sahid Ali and his poetry

made him realize that the poet could not be away from Kashmir ever. Shahid lived in

Kashmir through his poetry, though being away from the place. Shahid had

experienced rejection and disappointed as well as unhappiness for being a Kashmir-

Muslim during his Delhi University days. As a diasporic writer Ghosh thus puts

forward in the cross-cultural perspective such as an idea of space, for which a person

has to move to another country in search of that security and love which he is unable

to receive in his own.

In ‘The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi’ when Ghosh recounts his first hand experience

after effects of Indira Gandhi’s murder in Delhi, the idea of space is called upon

again. The dreadful face of violence that Ghosh witnessed being inflicted upon the

Sikhs raises the pertinent concern that in a country where people of various

ethnicities, culture, religion lives together, can become so brutal to their own people.

The plight of the Sikhs being so much insecure could only be felt by the ‘ordinary

people’, referring to the ones who did not belong to any group or political party.

Ghosh also expresses the dilemma of being a writer who was supposed to be

reproducing such a situation of terror, or would be writing about the ones who took

risk to help the victims. Though there had been other anomalies too behind such a

ruthless act of violence, the Sikhs, who had been living in Delhi for a long time,

could feel the sense of alienation triggered by an incident which they might not even

approve or had not been aware of. In the essay ‘The Greatest Sorrow: Time of Joy

Recalled in Wretchedness’ also Ghosh throws light on another dismal picture of

civil-violence meted out in places like Kashmir, Sri Lanka and even America. It

seems violence too is not constrained by any border. In the essay ‘Petrofiction: The

Oil Encounter and the Novel’ Ghosh doesnot conform to the postmodern condition

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where people and culture cannot be defined with their distinct identities. It is a story

that evokes horror, sympathy, guilt and rage. He tells that the identities are lost

somewhere in the name of a global culture and technology. At one hand , the system,

which Ghosh regards as the ‘vicious’ one has brought slavery into practice, whereas

a particular segment is getting rich day by day. The technology which can be used for

constructive purpose has also given rise to modern warfare of mass destruction.

Nothing seems to be in a balanced state of order.

Ghosh’s essay ‘The Slave of MS.H.6’ is remarkably restrained and highly

suggestive piece of writing. It is an ethnographic allegory – form of commentary that

uses the past to speak indirectly about the present. It is the story of the slave Bomma.

The archive is a synecdoche of postmodernism and post-modern theoretical practice,

with its globalizing tendency, and its complicity with the most imperialistic aspect of

the modern American state. In Philadelphia, Amitav Ghosh might be travelling in the

West, but his sly civility ensures that he is not travelling with the west. To recover

the subaltern consciousness, Ghosh has learned not French but Village Arabic:

instead of affiliating his text with high theory, he has spent years reading ancient

manuscripts and talking to Egyptian peasants. The painstakingly specific and situated

nature of his historical research and anthropological inquiry, and the way he has

foregrounded his own location, not only in relation to his Egyptian informants but

also to the intellectual and military culture of the West, is a challenging model to

literary critics in the Western academy whose critical practice involves the

application of high theory to Third World texts-we might call that travelling in the

East two old civilizations. In the essay titled ‘The Fundamentalist Challenge’, Ghosh

talks of how, in his own words, “intellectual pedigrees of most versions of religious

extremism around the world today can be traced to similar moments of conversion”.

He goes on to give some example, relevant to South Asia and Middle East.

In the piece ‘The Human Comedy in Cairo’ Ghosh talks about the writer Naguib

Mahfouz who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989. The award to Mahfouz was

clearly recognition of the achievements of Arabic literature. Here, Ghosh seems to

affirm the emergence of world literature. He further mentions that such award means

a lot in countries like Egypt and India –both representing two old civilizations and

the tremendous effort they are putting to break away with the bondage imposed upon

them by the modern world. In ‘March of the Novel through History’ also Ghosh

accepts novel as an international genre, which does not restrict to the boundaries

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irrespective of variation in language and culture. At the same time in ‘The Diaspora

in Indian Culture’ Ghosh regards the repressive action of the Government of India of

banning the Area of Darkness by V.S.Naipaul and Satanic Verses by Salman

Rushdie as “reprehensible and senseless”. Ghosh believes that repression does not

work in tackling with ideals. The “colonial mentality” of belittling ideas and

responses thus revealed through it, as he thinks that it is always through the

mediation of London that the relation between modern India and its diasporic

population is sustained.

The assortment of pieces in this work of Ghosh takes the readers to different

territories altogether. The time frame of the essays varies too which seems to be the

critical tactic he employs to connect his work to a larger perspective. His range in

dealing with different subjects is evident, as he moves from serious topics to the

lighter ones, as in ‘Four Corners’ he mentions the point in America in which four

American states meets those being New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah. He

further mentions that it is a favourite haunt for the ones who are interested in road

trips. The recreational Vehicles or RVs he notices are named after the Native

American tribes. The essay also bears testimony to the fact that all borders are

subjective, as it is found that the tourists though throng to this place attracted by its

beauty and also to view ...the magic of the spectacle of two straight lines intersecting

…the division is hardly noticeable. In another essay ‘Categories of Labour and the

Orientation of the Fellah Economy’ Ghosh’s focus is directed toward the social

relation within the fellahm community which forms their process of labour. His study

centers round the different factors contributing towards attaching so much value to

labour within the community. On the other hand in ‘The Global Reservation: Notes

towards an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping’ is an anthropological study

on the Sylheti UN peace keeper who had been assigned with the task of digging out

the Khmer Rouge’s members in Cambodia, gradually becomes accustomed to the

cruelty prevailing there. Nonetheless, the personal viewpoint that he provides in the

essays makes them appear more vivid to the readers and also succeeds in seizing

one’s attention as it makes the narratives more gripping in nature. He thus bestows

responsibilities over the “good things” as to convey in Shahid’s words, to remove all

sorts of ignorance from the minds of the people. It requires to make them aware of

the true nature of all the developments taking place around them, so that they can use

those for their benefit rather than succumbing to the adversities produced by them.

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Ghosh's fixation with "encounters" between cultures and the modes of thought

they embody is one of the notable themes in The Imam and the Indian. It could

result, at times, in scepticism - the Imam's suspicion of the doctor al-Hindi, who

comes from the land where cows are worshipped and the dead are burnt. Or, it could

give rise to conflict like the one between the Navajos and the early settlers in North

America. In most cases, the humans caught up in the clash of cultures are unaware of

its historical import. Look at Babur's near dislike for the kingdom that he won in the

battle of Panipat and which was to earn him a place in history. In the modern world,

however, such encounters are almost always violent and throw up a detritus in the

form of an uprooted populace. Like the Tibetan monk Ghosh encounters at a New

York charity dinner for the Tibetan cause. Some, like Nabeel, are lost to friends and

relations forever. Others, like the Sylheti UN peace-keeper entrusted with clearing

the Khmer Rouge's mines in Cambodia, learn to cope as best as they can and soon

become inured to the brutality around them. And most touchingly, Agha Shahid Ali,

a resident of "the country without a post-office" - Kashmir - who must die of cancer

in Northampton, denied the right to go back to his homeland in his last days.

What comes in the way of peaceful coexistence between two peoples? And what

happens to the people caught in the midst of war or civil violence? Are there any

alternative patterns of relations between different cultures - one that does not lead to

strife?

The Imam and the Indian shows different kinds of countries cultures, events,

people, riots, and connections between past and present memories that have shared

history. The site of violence that sheds communal riots, bloodies and a common

historical memory displaces whole populations in the article The Ghosts of Mrs.

Gandhi. Yet, it suggests that communal violence can also make visible the

connections between and the continuity of social relations and communities that

nation seeks to efface. Violence here becomes both sign and testimony of the shared

identity of events, memories and communities. It also reveals the frontiers policed by

nation states that separate people, communities and also families. He suggests that

the nature of boundaries can be understood through the metaphor of the looking

glass. The national borders between the people of India and China, Egypt and Tibet

share the similar history. Thus, In Ghosh’s non-fiction, articles, essays, and short

stories the fundamental identity of people, cultures and countries is constructed.

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Ghosh also provides an insightful analysis of the Indian subcontinent and its

culture and history, identity and nation, family and displacement, tradition and

modernity through the eyes of his characters. His interpretation on the ‘question of

identity’ and ‘sense of belonging’ is based upon self, space, and time. Moreover, the

political implications in his works are hard to avoid since the stories are told by

voices often described as ‘displaced, exiled, and even lost or perhaps rather

forgotten.’ Ghosh’s fundamental concern is in people and their lives, their histories

and plights, and his voice emerges to re-locate the position of ethnography from the

inside by “displacing the omniscient, narrativising voice of the traditional historian

from the centre to a shared position within a polyphonic discourse alongside other

voices - real-life”.

His writings are concerned with exploring the significance of India for

humankind, and the problems that man faces in the twentieth century - sociopolitical

violence, freedom and authority, tradition and progress, individual and family,

preservation and annihilation. Ghosh seems to agree that India’s problems differ very

little fundamentally from those of the other newly formed ‘post-colonial nations’

together with the intolerable burden of ceaseless poverty. He witnesses the Indian

subcontinent in terms of enslavement, caste, impoverishment, religious archaism, and

salutes the enduring heroism of her poor. In contrast, he also celebrates the survival

of permanent values, as if India is the best witness in the modern world to an age-old

wisdom that lies in compromise, hospitality and tolerance.

Ghosh, as a ‘travel’ writer with a postcolonial background has practically

explored both the known and unknown human experiences through glimpses of

history and cultural roots. In his creative works, Ghosh projects himself as a writer

without boundaries and deals with themes and characters that do not have a fixed

location - geographically. His writings also to signify the futility of lines that divide

nation-states on geographical landscape, the shadow lines amid one’s place of birth

and one’s nationality, and the impact of borders on human lives. Based on this

assumption, John Thieme feels that “in all Ghosh’s work, one of the main emphases

is on the arbitrariness of cartographical demarcations”. However, a close reading

reveals the contradictory issue, that his works reflect nostalgia for roots or a sense of

home. While his writings “illuminates the intimacy between the familial and the

foreign, his work suggests that a robust cosmopolitan sensibility requires close

attention to the energies of domestic life,” states Shameem Black. As an individual,

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Ghosh’s self-consciousness is tied-up with “the centrality of Calcutta to his literary

experience and imagination”.

Ghosh does not think of himself as a ‘political’ writer and yet, paradoxically,

nationalism and anti-nationalism is a major concern as seen in the familial

relationships of his works. His writing has a strong political content - whether it is to

do with India or Cambodia or Bangladesh or Burma, and it would be a difficult task

to wipe out the politics from his writings. Ghosh addresses the contestation of

‘border’ and ‘home’, in connection with his roots in the Indian subcontinent. In a

literary conversation with Frederick Luis Aldama, Ghosh talks of his childhood

pastime spent in his grandfather’s house as mostly reading books, for Calcutta to him

is “a bookish city,” as he wrote in The Testimony of my Grandfather’s Bookcase

(1998). His reading appears to help him to live within his own space and within his

own literary creativity. It also obvious that Ghosh has maintained a tenuous but

lasting long-distance connection with Calcutta, the city he once lived in and still

remembers with nostalgia.

Critical themes such as myth and history, imagination and politics, the ebb and

flow of peoples across continents and generations, colonialism and beyond, quest and

discovery are reflected in The Imam and the Indian. His characters often projected to

exemplify the artificiality of national boundary and of literary foundation with a new

insight. Ghosh’s works interface the connection and disassociation of diverse

ideological concepts and human realities. The narrator creates the world vividly,

borrowing colours from others, just as Ghosh did as a young boy, in his essay The

Testimony of my Grandfather's Bookcase.

From a different viewpoint, extreme fundamentalism in a form of violence is

one of the foundation stones of the early post-independence nationalism. In his essay

The Fundamentalist Challenge, Ghosh confronts the “dehumanization of

contemporary life” by questioning political oriented religious fundamentalism: “Why

are these movements so easily pushed over the edge, why are they so violent, so

destructive, and why is their thinking so filled with intolerance and hate?” (284-285).

In this sense, the notions of freedom, autonomy and democracy are well connected

with violent behavior in the political background of the Indian history. In a literary

discussion with Neluka Silva and Alex Tickell, Ghosh has openly pointed out saying

that, “I hate these fundamentalists, I hate extreme nationalism the way in which that

kind of violence lives in our imaginations and lives in our minds is very much a

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South Asian thing” (215-218). Violence, in the context of his fictional narratives is

the reproduction of voices that represent political upheaval, economical insecurity,

religious fanaticism and social differences. Violence erupts when truth resists and

challenges the socio-political. And, violence causes chaos, trauma, disorder and

disintegration, and more importantly displacement.

Since violence seeks to strangulate the spirit of freedom, the idea of

“representations of representations” becomes the chief cause of socio political

violence. Seen from another angle, it can be considered that the issue of human

evolution and the theory of violence is a combination of social fact that further

generates violence as interpretative, suffering as representational, displacement as

identity, and an integral part of human existence. In this sense, the calculated use of

violence by means of instilling fear and intimidation is to attain goals that are

political, religious, social or ideological in nature. To accept violence in this order,

particularly for marginalised and displaced persons, is to accept defeat and reality,

the reality of being betrayed by law, being subjugated by social structure in a clashes

of class struggle, being marked as a homeless wanderer - being a prisoner in one’s

own backyard. From another point of view, critics too analyze Ghosh’s tireless

campaign against the “dehumanization of contemporary life” as a mere political

exertion of “anti-nationalism”, which in different ways breed different connotation.

However, Ghosh negotiates the struggle of that suffering in silence. In his essay The

Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness, writes, ...the sufferings of

displacement are tinged here with the hope of arrival and the opening of new vistas

in the future. An expulsion offers no such consolation: the pain that haunts it is not

that of remembered oppression; it is rather that particular species of pain - so well

documented in the literature of Partition - that comes from the knowledge that the

oppressor and the oppressed were once brothers (312). Voices that compel attention

get deepened when the feeling of insecurity of the minority groups, especially of

those who do not have political stability are expressed, and it is not “easy to celebrate

the commodification of one’s suffering”. There is a possibility in striking counter-

violence when there is a great disparity in the way state security and welfare system

were implemented. However, Ghosh’s chief purpose in referring to the culture of

violence is not to indulge in any blame game but to show how the lessons of history

have never been learnt.

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1. The large scale ………..of people taking place between continents due to social,

political and economic reasons has faded the borders.

2. …………….has also given rise to a uniform world order as people belonging

different continents are living together.

3. …………………reflects the microcosmic view of the transcontinental milieu in

which he was living.

4. In the title essay ‘The Imam and the Indian’ Ghosh records how a country today

is measured in terms of destructive forces, rather than ……………….ones.

5. The …………and …………., which constitute the identity of an individual,

community and a nation, have now become obsolete.

6. The awful situation of the Egyptian ………..in Iraq as they lived there in high

risk of being killed any moment by the Iraqs has been illustrated in ‘The

Egyptian in Baghdad’.

7. The piece ‘The Egyptian in Baghdad’ is written shortly after the

…………………war.

8. The dreadful face of ………….that Ghosh witnessed being inflicted upon the

Sikhs in ‘The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi’.

9. Ghosh tells that the ………..are lost somewhere in the name of a global culture

and technology.

10. In ‘Four Corners’ Ghosh mentions the point in …………….in which four

American states meets those being New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah.

11. The essay Four Corners’ also bears testimony to the fact that all borders

are…………….

12. Ghosh’s study centers round the different factors contributing towards attaching

so much value to ………….within the community in ‘Categories of Labour and

the Orientation of the Fellah Economy’

13. Ghosh interprets that the ‘question of identity’ and ‘sense of belonging’ are

based upon self, space, and …………

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14. Ghosh also celebrates the survival of permanent values, as if India is the best

witness in the modern world to an age-old wisdom that lies in

compromise,…………… and tolerance.

15. Ghosh talks of his childhood pastime spent in his grandfather’s house as mostly

reading books, for Calcutta to him is ………, as he wrote in The Testimony of

my Grandfather’s Bookcase (1998).


1. Migration

2. Globalization

3. Agha Shahid Ali

4. Productive

5. Customs, traditions

6. Migrants

7. Gulf

8. Violence

9. Identities

10. America

11. Subjective

12. Labour

13. Time

14. Hospitality

15. a bookish city

3.7 Narrative techniques in The Imam and the Indian

In The Imam and the Indian the narrative technique used by Amitav Ghosh is

unique one. As a research scholar, he himself enters in the stories as a narrator.

Sometimes, he himself does not tell the story to the readers but employs a narrator,

sometimes nameless and sometimes named, to tell the story. Amitav Ghosh uses the

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first person narrative in the essays and employs the pronoun “I” which makes it very

easy for the narrator to tell each and everything which he faces, sees or hears. Amitav

Ghosh, through this technique easily presents the thinking of others without editing

anything; otherwise it would have been very difficult for him to recount others’

sayings. The Imam and the Indian is not a conventional Travelogue but it has many

aspects of that. It is a historical work that has been blended with the present times. In

it, Ghosh takes different types of people, culture and history. Ghosh constructs his

stories with a research of History and Anthropology.

The Imam and the Indian is a very different kind of historical non-fiction. There

are eighteen different pieces in which historical events, different cultures and their

places are reflected. The essay, The Slave of MS. H. 6 presents to the readers an

interesting history of Medieval Egypt. Ghosh’s attempts to find out more about an

Indian slave mentioned by a Jewish/Egyptian merchant in some 12th century

manuscripts. Amitav Ghosh has given an autobiographical account of his

anthropological-historical ‘field trip’ in Egypt. He was a young doctoral student, and

he supplies the content for his ‘discovery’ of the story of ‘BOMMA’ who was a slave

(from India) and lifetime merchant of ‘Abraham Ben Yiju’, a jewish merchant

originally from Tunisia, who arrived in India around AD1130, via Egypt and Aden,

and lived here for seventeen years (Ghosh, 2011). Amitav Ghosh describes his

detective work concerning this slave and in the same process he also throws light on

the culture and families of an Egyptian village. A very interesting part of the essay is

the personal story of the narrator’s stay in the small agricultural village in Egypt

when he is also working on his doctorate in social anthropology. A large number of

philosophical comments given by the narrator in ‘Empire and Soul: A Review of The

Baburnama’ increase the interest of reader. He describes events of past and events of

present and draws parallel between those events. Most of these Authorial comments

underline that in medieval time there was no division between culture and language,

but in present it is there. When the narrator goes back to the past, he realizes about

this and gives a lot of comments about how culture mingles. He moans that the way

of easy acceptance of cultures is broken down.

Amitav Ghosh breaks new ground in his narrative technique yet retaining the

graces of conventional narration. His writings have the advantage of being translated.

He writes with a strange stroke of genius about a cross section of society of which

the English language is a part of the intellectual achievement. The vigour and vitality

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of his narration is embedded in the native soil. He presents his themes through

complicated plots. He weaves the story based on people who are complex entities.

They are rooted to the native soil but also travelling across countries and continents.

In this process, they gather influences and experiences which have a transforming

effect on their thoughts and character. Their inter-racial mingling gives an additional

dimension to their personality. Ghosh delineates the Indian Diasporas in various

countries. He uses his intellectual inventiveness in employing a language that suits

his globe-trotting characters. The language is made to suit the background and

cultural status of the character. Amitav Ghosh is one of the most distinctive and

influential writers of India. His diverse and generically composite oeuvre has one

constant and that is his attempt to find connections between seemingly unrelated

subjects. His works tend to challenge the artificial “shadow lines” that have been

erected to separate fact from fiction.

Amitav Ghosh has used a postmodern narrative technique, historiographic

metafiction in The Imam and the Indian. In the essay The Ghat of the only World,

Amitav Ghosh tells the life of his friend Agha Shahid Ali in America. The short

essay begins with the death bed time of Ali Shahid whose pain of brain tumor and

cancer. His career life opens a lecturer at Hindu College, Delhi University. Amitav

Ghosh and Ali Shahid become acquaintance and after settling in America both are

close friends. Their conversation travels on history, culture, social concern and

integration of universal brotherhood. One day Amitav Ghosh has met Ali Shahid in

his residence at Brooklyn. Shahid’s talk diverts in Bengali food which is introduced

by his friends of West Bengal. He consciously talks on Indian diversity system.

Amitav Ghosh uses historiographic metafiction in the form of question. It is a

tool for awakening the mind of people on Hindu, Muslim issue in India. In America,

Amitav Ghosh and his friend Shahid tells that they lead a happy life and enjoy the

privilege of citizen. But Hindu and Muslim problem is created and also the

unstoppable issue in India. It is the self-reflexive question in the mind of the people.

Shahid blurts, ‘This dividing of the country, the divisions between people- Hindu,

Muslim, Muslim, Hindu - you can’t imagine, how much I hate it. It makes me sick.

What I say is: why can’t be happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music

and all these wonderful things? (346) In another essay ‘Empire and Soul: A review of

the Baburnama’, Amitav Ghosh treats Hindu-Muslim controversies. It is an

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autobiography piece of Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur (1483-1530) . Amitav Ghosh

keenly decodes Babur’s mind which witnesses in this prose clearly.

Babur was Pizarro and Cervantes. What made him pen immense book?(It

numbered 382 folio pages in the original.) And how on earth did he find the time?

Between the moment that he gained his first kingdom, at the age of twelve. And his

death, thirty-five years later, there seems scarely to have been a quiet day in Babur’s

life (88). Amitav Ghosh describes the history of Babur, detailed history of temple,

Babur masid demolition in 1992 and its origin of demolition of religion building in

India in chronological order.

Ghosh uses very simple language in his narratives. It is really heart-warming to

read books in which straight forward language is used to convey what the author

wants to say. The choice of words is very imaginative. Ghosh constantly experiments

with form and genre to adumbrate a dialogic, non-coercive method of knowledge

transmission. The narrator “Amitab” in the essay An Egyptian in Baghdad describes

two seemingly heterogeneous strands - the Egyptian families and village

communities with whom Ghosh resides in the early 1980s. Ghosh presents his

multidisciplinary research in a fragmentary and imaginative way to challenge the

claims of academic discourses to definiteness. The narrative technique used by

Amitav Ghosh in his The Imam and the Indian is fragmentary and it is a collection of

the narrator’s experiences in the form of memories from his innocence into the

realization that nationalism, national identity and borders are all shadow lines.

Amitav Ghosh focuses on a single family or a single character making it a model for

a broader national and international experience. The narrator of Amitav Ghosh

presents the events with amazing insight, sometimes skipping from city to city in the

same breath and recreating events that had happened before he was born. He

accurately describes the lines and borders that are being drawn throughout the world

to divide and isolate one man from the other. In ‘Four Corners’ Ghosh mentions the

point in America in which four American states meets those are New Mexico,

Arizona, Colorado and Utah. Further he adds that it also bears testimony to the fact

that all borders are subjective. He is the chronicler of the lives around him. Ghosh

weaves together personal lives of the characters that populate his novels with public

events of that time with a rare touching humour, which evokes, in many cases

simultaneously, a smile and a sigh. In his works, Ghosh frequently focuses on the

ways the partitioned South Asian subjects have been affected by colonialism’s

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legacy. Ghosh’s works straddle the generic borderlines between fact, fiction,

autobiography, history, anthropology and travel book. He explores the connections

and ruptures between the two worlds, the medieval and the contemporary. Amitav

Ghosh’s training in historical and anthropological research, his deliberate avoiding of

grand theorist gestures, and his link with the subaltern studies project, make his work

more interesting and gripping. His writings manifest the recent concern of

anthropologists with the porousness of the cultural boundaries. Under the influence

of the subaltern studies scholars, Ghosh made a stringent empirical research to find

historically situated subjectivities of a network of traders and their slaves who were

functioning between south-west India and North Africa during the Middle Ages. Out

of an intricate web of memories, relationships and images Ghosh builds his narrative.

Stream of consciousness is a genre which has housed some of literatures’ most

remarkable minds. The constant forward and backward movement between different

times and realities expresses associations that the author tends to make in different

situations at different points. His works do not try to explain the eccentricities by

being profound. He never uses words which, for most of us, are nothing but a

nebulous knot of ideas. He always uses a very simple and clear language. Amitav

Ghosh, in his works, deploys the strategy of multi-narratives wherein the main

narrator deduces the truth from the sub-narratives. Ghosh’s powerful and tactful use

of the multiple narrative techniques is very conspicuous here.

The Imam and the Indian deals with the history. Gulf War, World War II,

Violence, and the partition of the countries have provided Amitav Ghosh with raw

material against which he studies the historical truth—the meaning of nationalism

and political freedom in the modern world. In the subsequent sections the author uses

the same method to exercise his historical imagination.

In The Imam and the Indian Ghosh has used the mode of the autobiographical

traveller’s tale to study the past thousand years’ history in the context of two

continents—Asia and Africa. Naturally the scope of this book is much larger in both

chronological and geographical distribution. But one thing becomes very clear that

Ghosh’s aim is to bring out the unity of human experience not with standing the

diversity of context. The works of Amitav Ghosh are a combination of history and

fiction. It can be observed that Ghosh gives a lot of space in his works to History,

nevertheless, the fiction still holds the central position. Amitav Ghosh experiments

with very innovative narrative techniques which are deceptively intermixed with the

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texture and structure of his works. In addition to allegory, symbols, fantasy, magical

realism, narrative fluctuating backwards and forward in time, Ghosh employs a very

compelling use of a narrator in his works who narrates the stories, and at the same

time presents a critique. The roles of the narrators, however, keep changing. The

narrator of Ghosh is omnipresent and pretends to know everything. It makes

judgment upon characters leading to polyphonic or multi-voiced narratives. Ghosh’s

technique of narrating the story is quite gripping and engages the readers. His art of

narration is supplemented by his wide knowledge of English language which he uses

fluently and effectively to depict the events in the story. To reflect the constant quest

for the true story, Amitav Ghosh uses multiple voices of various narrators and the job

of the main narrator is to deduce the truth from different sub-narratives.

3.8 Glossary and Notes:

Envy: jealousy

Enmeshed: cause to become entangled in something

Malevolence: wickedness, evil

Commodification: commoditization

Commemorated: memorialize

Navajo: a member of a North American people of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico.

Whereabouts: location, site,

Assassination: murder, shooting

Catastrophe: disaster, calamity

Repugnance: disgust

Incendiary: inflammable

Contestant: competitor

Commodity: product, goods, service

Envisage: imagine, visualize

Apocalyptic: showing or describing the total destruction and end of the world,

or extremely bad future events

Fellahin: pleasant

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Diaspora: is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic

locale. Historically, the word diaspora was used to refer to the mass dispersion of a

population from its indigenous territories, specifically the dispersion of Jews. While

the term was originally used to describe the forced displacement of certain peoples,

"diasporas" is now generally used to describe those who identify with a "homeland",

but live outside of it.

V. S. Naipaul :(17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidad and Tobago-

born British writer, He is known for his comic early novels, his bleaker novels of

alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. In the

late 19th century, Naipaul's grandparents had emigrated from India to work in

Trinidad's plantations as indentured servants.

Proliferation: explosion

Compassionate: sympathetic

Migration: immigration, colonization

Wretchedness: misery,

Debris: wreckage, remains

Hegemony: domination, supremacy

Succumb: give way, prey, fall victim

Fundamentalist: a person who strictly follows the rules and teachings of any

religion

Religious fundamentalism is the movement based on belief of a community (or

individuals) in absolute authority of the sacred texts of its own religion or faith. They

believe that their own religion is beyond any fault and thus, should be forced on

others.

Opiate: a drug that contains opium, especially one that causes sleep

Bulwark: a defensive wall

Extremism: the fact of someone having beliefs that the most people think are

unreasonable and unacceptable

Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist,

historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.

97

Taslima Nasrin: (born 25 August 1962) a Bangladeshi-Swedish writer, physician,

feminist, self proclaimed secular humanist and activist. She is known for her support

of eugenics, writing on women's oppression and criticism of religion, despite forced

exile.

Ethnography: the scientific description of different races and cultures

Peacekeeping: intended to help keep the peace and prevent war or violence in a

place where this is likely.

Cold War: the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between

the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was

waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse

to weapons.

Interventionism (politics): a political term for significant activity undertaken by a

state to influence something not directly under its control. It is an act of military,

economical intervention that is aimed for international order, or for the benefit of the

country.

Intercession: the action of intervening on behalf of another.

Anthropology: the study of human beings, especially of their origin, development,

customs and beliefs

Culminate: to reach a final result

Surpassed: to do something better than somebody/something else or better than

expected.

Bureaucracy: a system of government by a large number of officials who are not

elected; a country with this system.

Contingent: a group of people from the same country, organization, etc. who are

attending an event.

Encapsulated: express the essential features of (something) succinctly.

Offset: to make the effect of something less strong or noticeable

Replicates: to copy something exactly

Egalitarianism: the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and

opportunities

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Epistemological: relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its

methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.

Manifestation: a sign that something is happening

Kampong Thom: a province of Cambodia

Pol Pot (born 19 May 1925 – 15 April 1998) was a Cambodian revolutionary and

politician who governed Cambodia as the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea

between 1975 and 1979. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and a Khmer nationalist,

he was a leading member of Cambodia's communist movement, the Khmer Rouge,

from 1963 until 1997 and served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of

Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. Under his administration, Cambodia was converted

into a one-party communist state governed according to Pol Pot's interpretation of

Marxism–Leninism.

Cambodia : a country located in the southern portion of the Indochinese

peninsula in Southeast Asia, bordered by Thailand to the northwest, Laos to the

northeast, Vietnam to the east and the Gulf of Thailand to the southwest.

Ethnicity: the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national

or cultural tradition

Circumspect: thinking very carefully about something before you do it because you

think it may involve problems or dangers.

Allegation: claim

Ascendancy: dominance

Eavesdrop: listen in, overhear something

Testimony: indication, proof

Pillaging: prowling

Maxim Gorky: a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist

realism literary method, and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for

the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Conceivable: imaginable

Brew: ferment

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Theosophist: Religious philosophy or speculation about the nature of the soul

based on mystical insight into the nature of God., often Theosophy The

system of beliefs and teachigs of the Theosophical Society, founded in New

York City in 1875, incorporating aspects of Buddhism and Brahmanism,

especially the belief in reincarnation and spiritual evolution.

Exhaustion: tiredness

Discernible: visible

Perturbation: anxiety; mental uneasiness.

Jocularity: the quality of being happy and liking to make jokes

Quizzical: curious

Bereavement: grief, mourning, sorrow

Conviviality: friendliness

Repartee: banter

Concoction: mixture

Potentate: monarch

Vortex: a whirling mass of fluid or air, especially a whirlpool or whirlwind

Obscure: vague

Zion : is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering Jewish history

and ethnography, printed in the Hebrew language

Jerusalem: is a city in Western Asia, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between

the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the oldest cities in the world, and is

considered holy to the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity,

and Islam.

Itinerant: a person who moves from place to place, typically for work, like

the itinerant preacher who moves to a new community every few years.

Synagogue: house of prayer

Congregation: a group of people assembled for religious worship.

Commemoration: the action or fact of commemorating a dead person or past event.

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Expatriate: send (a person or money) abroad.

Basavanna (Basaveshwara): 12th century Indian statesman, philosopher, poet,

social reformer and Lingayat saint in the Shiva-focussed bhakti movement, and a

Hindu Shaivite social reformer during the reign of the Kalyani Chalukya/Kalachuri

dynasty. Mahatma Basaveshwara was active during the rule of both dynasties but

reached the peak of his influence during the rule of King Bijjala

II in Karnataka, India.

Manumission: release from slavery

Idiosyncratic: eccentric

Goitein: (April 3, 1900 – February 6, 1985): a German-Jewish ethnographer,

historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle

Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza.

Agha Shahid Ali (4 February 1949 – 8 December 2001) was an Kashmiri-

American poet. His collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-

Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office,

and Rooms Are Never Finished, the latter a finalist for the National Book Award in

2001. The University of Utah Press awards the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize

annually in memory of this "celebrated poet and beloved teacher."

3.9 Check Your Progress:

1) The Imam and the Indian was written by ………………

a) Khushwant Sing b) Salman Rushdie

c) Amitav Ghosh d) TslimaNasrin

2) The Imam and the Indian was published in ………………

a) 1991 b) 2002 c) 2004 d) 2012

3) Imam was by profession…………….

a) a barber and a healer b) farmer and shepherd

c) magician and prophet d) artist and writer

4) People said that Imam knew a great deal about………………

a) art and music. b) politics and religion.

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c) herbs and the old kind of medicine. c) law and morality.

5) Khamees asked so many doubts to Ghosh that burning dead and worshiping

…………..in India.

a) God b) nature c) deities d) cows

6) In Egypt, Ghosh had a friend named………………….

a) Imam b) Khamees c) Salim d) Abu-Ali

7) Who was haunted by his childlessness which had impact on his behavior?

a) Abu-Ali b) Imam c) Khamees d) Salim

8) ………………………. was always behaved as though all the worries of the

village had fallen on his shoulders.

a) Abu-Ali b) Khamees c) Imam d) Salim

9) The ……………… between the people of India and China, Egypt and Tibet

share the similar history

a) national borders b) history and culture

c) religion and politics d) god and goddess

10) The title essay "The Imam and the Indian" brings out the pathos of two

……………….one of ancient Egypt and other of India.

a) superceded civilizations b) corrupt politics

c) glorious culture d) budding democracy

11) The Egyptians were afraid of the Indian soldiers as they were…….

a) white and gray b) tall and dark

c) brave and aggressive d) None of these

12) The civilization of both Imam and Ghosh are older and rich which gave

importance for…………….

a) technology b) religion c) humanity d) culture

13) Imam and Ghosh both were fighting to establish superiority in terms of

…………….

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a) violence b) culture c) religion d) power

15. Khamees took Ghosh to his home and comforted him by stating that he would

like to visit India but he requested to …….if he dies in India.

a) invite b) bury c) award d) welcome

16. ……..is the greatest novelist in the Bengali language.

a) Bankim Chandra Chatterjee b) Nirad Chaudhari

c) G.V.Desani d) Shashi Tharoor

17. ……..was a theosophist.

a) author’s cousin b) Karim Khan c) Guide d) a messenger

18. Agha Shahid Ali published his first collection of poem in Writer’s workshop

organized by P.Lal in ………..

a) Calcutta b) Kashmir c) Delhi d) Bengal


1. Amitav Ghosh

2. 2002

3. An Antique Land

4. a barber and a healer

5. herbs and the old kind of medicine

6. God

7. Khamees

8. Khamees

9. Abu-Ali

10. national borders

11. superceded civilizations

12. tall and dark

13. humanity

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14. violence

15. bury

16. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

17. author’s cousin

18. Calcutta

3.10 Exercises:

3.10.1 Answer in one word or sentence.

1. Who is Naipaul?

2. Name the Bosnian writer mentioned by Ghosh in ‘The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi’.

3. ……………….of the oil company holds livelihoods of the inhabitants of Harran

in his hands.

4. Lebanese doctor ………….. charges huge fees for the smallest service.

5. Mention the names of novels written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

6. What is the name of the first novel of Amitav Ghosh?

7. Who is Lila?

8. In the essay, ‘The Hunger Stones’ the author says that ………. cries ‘Stay away!

Stay away! It’s a lie, all of it’s a lie.’

9. When was Agha Shahid Ali born?

10. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for ……………………in 1913.

11. ………………..was one of the greatest rulers in the history of the Indian

subcontinent.

12. Nacaawy was once one of the largest estates in …………………………

13. For the villagers the principle of cooperation the willingness to work together is

an essential element as a ………………………

14. Pearl and Jewel were the names given to ……………….in the markets of the

Middle East.

15. The saint,…………….…,was the contemporary of Ben Yiju and Bomma.

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3.10.2 Write short notes on the following:

1. Character sketch of Imam

2. Amitav Ghosh as a post colonialist writer

3. Agha Shahid Ali as a poet

4. Mob violence in The Ghosts of Mrs.Gandhi

5. The Slave of MS. H. 6

6. Nabeel

3.10.3 Answer the following questions.

1. Assess the contribution of Amitav Ghosh in the field of the Indian English

Writing.

2. Comment on Amitav Ghosh’s style of writing with reference to the essays in

The Imam and the Indian.

3. Comment on the symbolic suggestions in the essays in The Imam and the

Indian.

4. How does Amitav Ghosh depict mob violence in ‘The Ghosts of Mrs.Gandhi’?

5. Comment on the signifance of the ending of the essay ‘ The Ghosts of

Mrs.Gandhi’?

6. Discuss the themes with reference to the essays in ‘The Imam and the Indian’.

7. Explain the major theme in Amitav Ghosh’s essay “The Diaspora in Indian

Culture”

8. Comment on the portrayal of Agha Shahid Ali in the essay ‘The Ghat of the

Only World’

9. Analyze the importance of Amitav Ghosh in the history of the Indian English

Writing.

3.11 Further Readings:

1. Anjan, Kumar. 2013. The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. Major Themes. New Delhi:

Adhyayan Publishers & Distributors.

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2. Bhatt, Indira Nittayandam, Indira. 2001. The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh. New

Delhi: Creative Fictions.

3. Bhattacharya, Sajalkumar. 2014. “Amitav Ghosh: The Indian Architect of a

Postnational Utopia.” In Post liberalization Indian Novels in English, edited by

Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan. Anthem Press.

4. Black, Shameem. 2015. “Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in

English.” In A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Ulka Anjaria,

296-309. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP.

5. Chitra, Sankaran. 2012. History, narrative, and testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s

fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press.

6. Dalal, Meenakshi. 2013. “Thematic patterns in the novels of Amitav Ghosh.”

7. Desai, Gaurav, and John Hawley. 2019. Approaches to Teaching the Works of

Amitav Ghosh, Approaches to Teaching World Literature: 157: Modern

Language Association of America.

8. Dhawan, Rajinder Kumar, ed. 1999. The novels of Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi:

Prestige books.

9. Hawley, John C. 2005. Amitav Ghosh, Contemporary Indian Writers in English.

New Delhi, India: Foundation Books. Reprint, Cambridge : ProQuest LLC,

2010.

10. Huttunen, Tuomas. 2000. “Narration and Silence in the Works of Amitav

Ghosh.” World Literature Written in English 38 (2):28-43.

��

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Unit-4

The Hungry Tide

Contents

4.0 Objectives:

4.1 Amitav Ghosh: Life and Works



4.2 The Plot of The Hungry Tide



4.3 Comprehensive Summary and Analysis





4.5 Myth and Ecological Concerns in The Hungry Tide

4.6 Human Space and Landscape in The Hungry Tide/Nature versus Man in The

Hungry Tide

4.7 Answers to Check Your Progress

4.8 Exercises

4.9 References for further study

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4.0 Objectives:

After studying this unit you will be able to:

� Understand Amitav Ghosh as a novelist and his contribution to the Colonial and

Post-colonial Indian English Novel.

� Familiar with the plot, characters, themes and critical aspects of the novel.

� Understand myth and ecological concerns in The Hungry Tide.

4.1 Amitav Ghosh: Life and Works

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on July 11th, 1956 in a

Bengali Family. He was educated at the all-boys Doon School, where he edited ‘The

Doon School Weekly.’ After his schooling, Ghosh received degrees from

St.Stephen’s College (University of Delhi) and Delhi School of Economics. Ghosh

grew up in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. As a

youngster he was brought up on the stories of Partition, Independence and the

Second World War. History was his prime obsession. His fiction reflects political

and historical consciousness.

Ghosh authored ‘The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), The

Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004),

and The Ibis trio logy set in the nineteenth century – Sea of Poppies (2008), River of

Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015). Most of his works deal with a historical

setting. Ghosh’s notable non-fiction writings are In An Antique Land (1992),

Dancing in Cambodia At large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), The Imam and

the Indian (2002), Incendiary Circumstances (2006).

Critics praise Ghosh for his portrayal of characters, traditions and brilliant

narrative technique.

His novels received different prestigious awards. The Circle of Reason won the

Prix. Medieis etranger, one of France’s top literary Awards. The Shadow Lines won

the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award and the Anand Puraskar. The Calculta

Cromosome won the Arthur C.Clark award in 1997. Sea of Poppies was short listed

for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. River of Smoke was short listed for the Man Asian

Literary Prize, 2011.

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Amitav Ghosh lives in New York with his wife Deborah Baker. Ghosh has been

a fellow at the centre of Study in Social Sciences, Calcutta and centre for

Development Studies in Trivendrum. He has been also a visiting Professor at the

Department of English of Harward University since 2005.

Ghosh was awarded the Padmashri in 2007 and in the year 2009, he was elected

as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His Works

1) The Circle of Reason (1986)

This work is inspired by Herman Melville’s nineteenth century classic Moby

Dick. It is a story of flight and pursuit. It describes the adventures of Alu, a young

weaver. He is suspected as a terrorist. He is chased by an inspector from Bengal to

Bombay and on through the Persian Gulf to North Africa. The work is divided into

three sections, comprising the three main phases of the protagonist’s life.

2) The Shadow Lines (1988)

For novel Ghosh was awarded with the prestigious ‘Sahitya Academy Award’ in

1989. The novel focuses on the narrator’s family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their

connection with an English family in London. The novel depicts the lives of two

different, yet intertwined families, one Indian and one English. The novel refers to

the blurred lines between nations, land and families as well as within one’s own

identity.

3) In An Antique Land (1992)

It was first published in India in 1992 and abroad the following year. It is based

on the author’s Sojourn in Egypt. He visited Egypt in order to leave Arabic and to

undertake historical research on a group of twelfth-century Jewish Tunisians. In An

Antique Land discovers ancient and modern cultures of the trio-Jewish, Arabic and

Hindu. The book rediscovers history and relationship between India and Egypt.

4) The Calcutta Chromosome (1995)

This novel won the Arthur C. Clark Award for 1997. The novel is called as “a

kind of mystery thriller.’ There are multiple characters and swift turns in the plots.

The novel can be read as a science fiction.

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5) Dancing in Cambodia, At large in Burma (1998)

This work is in the form of travelogue and it reveals the writer’s perceptions

about the socio-political situations in Cambodia and Burma.

6) Countdown (1999)

It is about the nuclear lobby in both India and Pakistan.

7) The Glass Palace

It is a story of Rajkumar an Indian boy of eleven years old, who is an orphan.

He is in Mandalay (Burma) who works in a tea-stall owned by a woman called Ma

Cho a half-Indian. The novel is set primarily in India and Burma.

8) The Hungry Tide (2004)

The novel takes its setting as the sea and plains of Bengal Sundarbans. The

story moves around three characters Piyali Roy, Kanai Dutt and Fokir.


I ) Fill in the blanks:

1) Amitav Ghosh was born on________

2) Amitav Ghosh’s novels are notable for________

3) Amitav Ghosh’s first novel is_________

4) Amitav Ghosh was awarded with the Prestigious Sahitya Academy Award

for his novel________

5) The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh is inspired by _________

II) Answer the following questions with one word/phrase/sentence each.

1) Which novel by Ghosh is regarded as a mystery thriller?

2) What is the setting of the novel The Hungry Tide?

3) What are the three novels included in Ibis Trilogy?

4) What are the major influences on Ghosh?

4.1.2 Terms to Remember:

� Moby Dick - Herman Melville’s Nineteenth century classic.

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‘The Circle of Reason, ‘a novel by Ghosh is inspired by this work.

� Sundarbans – The tiny islands situated at the eastern coast of India, in the Bay of

Bengal.

4.2 The Hungry Tide: An Introduction

The Hungry Tide was published in 2004. It won the 2004 Hutch Crossword

Book Award for fiction. This novel reflects writer’s sociological view and his insight

into colonial past. This novel covers only a few weeks in the lives of a few

characters. The story proceeds in Sundarbans, the tiny islands situated at the eastern

most coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal. For settlers here, life is extremely

precarious. There are constant threats of attacks of tigers and tidal floods. At this

place three persons meet-Piyali Roy, a young marine biologist, Kanai Dutt, a middle

aged business man and illiterate fisherman Fokir. The novel deals with humanism,

environmentalism and conflict.

Plot

The story of the novel begins when Kanai Dutt, a rich businessman and

translator meets Piyali Roy, an American Scientist of Indian descent who specializes

in marine mammals. Kanai Dutt comes to Sundarbans to visit his aunt and to

investigate a journal written by his deceased uncle. Piyali Roy intends to investigate

the rare Irrawaddy Dolphin. This dolphin is rare as it survives in both freshwater and

saltwater. While speaking in train, Kanai gives Piyali an invitation to visit his aunt’s

place. The two part ways when they arrive Canning, the transit railway station.

Piya arrives at the Sundarbans. She has to fight against the bureaucracy to get

approval to conduct her research. The local authorities give her approval on the

condition that she has to take their boat and local observers. In fact, they want to

keep an eye on her. While completing her research, she gets acquainted with a local

fisherman, Fokir. Fokir claims to have seen the irrawaddy dolphin recently. While

she is conversing with the local man, she gets distracted and falls into water. Her

official observers are unconcerned but Fokir immediately dives in and rescues her.

Because of this Piya dismisses the official entourage and chooses with Fokir. Piya

also gets acquainted with Tutul, Fokir’s son who helps Fokir in his work. They work

very well together even though they have language barriers. Fokir helps Piya and

takes her to different places where she can observe the dolphins.

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Piya and Fokir visit the town of Lusibari where Kanai has been staying with his

aunt. Kanai is quite busy with his Uncle’s notebook. The main focus of the notebook

is the conflict between Government's force and thousands of refugees on the

Sundarban’s natural preserve in 1970s. Piya is quite surprised to find out that Fokir

and his family members are friends of Kanai’s family. When Piya tells about her

research, Kanai and his family agree to help her by providing more boats. Kanai also

insists to come along with Fokir and Piya. But actually he is jealous of Piya’s

intimacy to Fokir.

At first the expedition is going very well. Fokir and Piya split the group, taking

their smaller boat in search of hidden canals of the jungle. When both are out, the

rest of the crew gets a warning about major storm, they wait for Piya and Fokir for

sometime but finally decide to head back without them. Piya and Fokir are away

from all the people. As the storm is too strong they take refuge in the mangrove

forest.

Fokir tries his best to save both of them but unfortunately he has killed by the

flying debris and Piya survives. She returns to Lusibari and conveys Fokir’s family

about his fate and heroism. She raises money to support Fokir’s family. She

establishes a research foundation for the study of Irrawaddy dolphin. She names this

foundation after Fokir in honour of his brave help in her research.

This novel deals with various themes like the might of nature, ecoculturalism,

caste, roots loss of relationships etc.


I) Fill in the blanks :

1) ________ is the topic of research of Piyali.

2) ________ is a local fisher man.

3) Nilima, Kanai’s aunt lives in_________

4) ________ works as a translator in Delhi.

5) Piyali and Fokir take refuge in the _________

II) Answer the following questions with one word/phrase/sentence each

1) Why does Kanai Dutt come to Sundarbans?

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2) On which condition the local authorities give Piyali Roy permission for her

research?

3) What is the name of Fokir’s son?

4) What is the major theme of the novel The Hungry Tide?

5) Who is Piyali Roy?

4.2.2 Terms to Remember :

� Irrawaddy Dolphin – The Dolphin survives in both fresh water and salt water.

� Canning – The railway station.

� Lusibari – The small island where Kanai has been staying with his aunt Nirmala.

� Mangrove Forest – Jungle in the Sundarbans where Piya and Fokir take refuge.

4.3 Comprehensive Summary and Analysis

Part I The Ebb-Bhata

The Tide

Kanai Dutt is a middle aged businessman from Delhi. Piyali Roy is a marine

biologist born in India but brought up and educated in America. She has specific

appearance due to her close cropped black hair, loose cotton pants and oversized

white shirt. She has a proportionate and slim body structure and long face. Kanai

also observes that there is no bindi on her forehead and no bangles or bracelets she

wears only a silver stud in one of her ears. From her personality it is clearly

identified that she is ‘foreigner’ and ‘outsider’.

Kanai is forty two years old and of medium height. His thick hair has started

showing streaks of grey at the temples. His personality exhibits confidence. His

sunglasses, corduroy trousers and suede shoes suggest ‘middle-aged prosperity and

metropolitan affluence.’

Piya has two big backpacks which she carries herself. Piyali and Kanai, both

are going to Sundarbans.

The opening chapter introduces the two protagonists of the novel. It also

introduces the Sundarbans – that is going to play a main role in The Hungry Tide.

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An Invitation

Both Piyali and Kanai are travelling from the same train. Piyali comes and seats

behind Kanai. When she is managing to take the tea inside the compartment some of

the tea spills on the pages of Kanai. Piyali has already noticed Kanai on the platform.

She apologizes and offers a handful of tissues but Kanai assures her that the papers

here just zerox copies. He tells that he has recognized that Piyali is an American

through the way she speaks, her accent. He provides his information to her that he is

a translator and interpreter and knows six languages and various dialects. Piyali is a

cetologist, studying marine mammals, dolphins, whales, dugongs, etc. She wishes to

do survey of the marine mammals in the Sundarbans. She also tells Kanai that though

born in Calcutta, she has been raised in Seattle. Kanai informs her that he is going to

Lusibari in the Sundarbans, to meet his aunt Mashima. He also invites Piyali to come

there Mashima’s husband Nirmal Bose has been dead a long time and Mashima has

asked Kanai to investigate papers recently discovered.

Canning

Kanai was unmarried but several women have come in his life.

He has come to Canning after thirty years. He imagined this place to be a jungle

but in reality his place was as crowded as any Kolkata bazaar. He had met his uncle

when he was a college student.

Kanai’s Mashima (Nilima Bose) informed him that his uncle, Nirmal Bose was

constantly remembering him while he was on death bed. Then suddenly before two

months she asked Kanai to come to Lusibari telling him about her husband’s

writings. She wanted Kanai to come and to look at the contents of the writings.

Mashima, 76 years old has come to the station to receive Kanai. He tells her

about his meeting to Piyali Roy.

The childless Nirmal and Nilima Bose had devoted their life in social work for

the inhabitants of Sundarbans. Nirmal was a Headmaster but later got actively

involved in social work after retirement. Nilima too had founded a trust called

Badabon Trust. After Nirmal’s death, Nilima was deeply involved in social work for

which she was widely respected.

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While describing the lives of Nirmal and Nilima Bose, the writer comments on

the environmental degradation. The mighty Malta river has been reduced to a

‘ditch.’

The Launch

Piya is relieved when she gets a permit for research on the marine mammals of

Sundarbans from the forest department. However, the department posts a forest

guard to accompany her. The guard introduces her guide Mej-da and insists her to

hire his boat. Mej-da’s steamer is old and he identifies the Gangetic dolphin and

Irrawaddy dolphin as birds.

Lusibari

Lusibari is shaped like a conch shell. It is cut off form many other islands.

Lusibari, the small village is situated on the island. At the centre of the village, is a

maidan and in the maidan there is a market place, a school, a Head master’s house,

clusters of houses, stalls, sweetshops. Kanai has visited Lusibari in 1970. And now

the village has become overcrowded.

The Fall

Mej-da is ignorant of marine life. He shows Piya group of crocodiles as dolphin.

Piya sees a fisherman at a distance. Mej-da takes his boat closer to the fisherman.

This fisherman is of the age of Piya. The guard points his gun at him and shouts

“Poacher”. There is a child with the fisherman, it begins to cry. The guard snatches

a thin wad of notes from the child’s hand and puts it in his pocket. Piya looking this

feels sad and takes out a handful of notes and throws them at the fisherman. But in

doing so she slips on her plastic chair and is thrown forward into the muddy brown

water.

S. Daniel

After looking at the portrait of Sir Daniel Hamilton, Kanai recalls his earlier

visit to his aunt’s place. Sir Daniel had explored the crab-covered shares of the tide.

S.Daniel bought ten thousand acres of land of Sundarbans. Then there established

the villages. People flocked to the islands from all part of Orissa, Bengal and Santhal

paragana and started living there forgetting class and caste. S.Daniel wanted to build

a new kind of society. But the ideal, utopian society in the dreams of Daniel on the

islands of the Sundarbans was never realized.

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Snell’s Window

Piya is rescued by a fisherman from the muddy river water. The fisherman

promises her to take her to Lusibari. Piya gets rid of the guard and fisherman and

decides to take help of this fisherman.

The Trust

Lusibari the small island was thickly populated. Nilima (Mashima) lived in a

small building which also served as a guest house for the Badabon Trust visitors.

Kanai in the guest house has been taken care by Moyna, who is the wife of Fokir.

Fokir was the son of Kusum, the girl Mashima had rescued from exploiters.

Fokir

A bond is developed between poor fisherman Fokir and Piya from the moment

Fokir saved her from drowning. Fokir has a son Tutul. Piya offers money to Fokir

but he refuses and accepts just one note. Fokir takes Piya to Lusibari and later helps

her in the research.

The Letter

Kusum, Fokir’s mother was Kanai’s childhood friend. Kanai finds a large

sealed packet addressed to him. The packet contains Kusum’s story.

The Boat

The chapter describes the crudely put together shabby, shanty like boat of Fokir.

He shows due respect for Piya’s modesty when she gestures to her to go under the

hold of his boat and change into an old, worn out sari and get out of her wet clothes.

Nirmal and Nilima

Nirmal and Nilima Bose first come to Lusibari in search of a ‘Safe haven’ in

1950. They had fallen in love with each other and got married. Nirmal was a leftist

intellectual originally from Dhaka teaching English Literature at Ashutosh College.

Nirmala was his student. They decided to settle in Lusibari. The chapter describes

the island and the social work done by Nirmal and Nilima for the inhabitants.

At Anchor

The chapter describes Fokir’s small boat which was actually a multipurpose

boat. It also describes the condition of Sundarbans boatman.

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Kusum

Kanai had visited Lusibari in 1970. At that time he met Kusum who was also a

child and was living under the care of womens Union.

Words

Piya is in Fokir’s boat. Fokir prepares food. He, at night, starts singing a song

without knowing the language and words, Piya too understands the grief in it.

The Glory of Bon Bibi

In the Sundarbans, it is faith that Bon Bibi rules over the jungle and takes care of

people. For the people of Lusibari Bon Bibi is their deity. But Kusum tells Kanai

that Bon Bibi did not come to her rescue web she invoked her as her father was being

dragged into a forest by a tiger and was killed there. Bon Bibi did not save her from

women traffickers. Kusum was Kanai’s only friend in Lusibari, during his ‘exile’

from school as punishment for trying outsmarting his teacher.

Stirrings

In the boat, at night, Piyali was shivering with cold; Fokir took her in his arms to

comfort her. When her shivering stopped she sat up abruptly in embarrassment. He

too sprang back. Piya knew that Fokir was married, had a child and she did not want

to get into a ‘personal entanglement’ with him. In fact she was completely devoted

to her ‘vocation.’

In the next morning Piya spots a group of Irrawaddy dolphin. Her task is to

work out the patterns in the behaviour of this rare species.

Morichjhapi

Morichjhapi was an island near Lusibari. One night, a great number of Dalits

suddenly appeared there over-night. They cleared the mangroves and built huts.

They were mostly refugees from Bangladesh. They did not understand the local

language. They settled in Morichjhapi. But government in West Bengal declared

Morichjhapi a protected forest reserved and determined to evict the settlers there.

Nirmal, was on the side of settlers where as Nilima on the side of local people there.

Then there created a drift in their relationship.

Suddenly Kusum appeared there with her son Fokir asking for medical help for

settlers. Nilima expressed her inability. Kusum was massacred in the settlers. Final

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confrontation with authorities in mid-may-1979. Nirmal then returned to Lusibari

and died in July that year.

An Epiphany

Piya observes dolphins and decides to go ahead for her research.

Moyna

Moyna, Fokir’s wife is part of ‘Barefoot Nurse’ programme started by Nilima’s

NGO. Moyna, married to illiterate person like Fokir wants to go to college at

Canning but Fokir is content with Fishing and catching crabs. This has created

trouble in their married life. Tutul was always with Fokir as Moyna was busy in the

work in hospital but she wished that Tutul should go to school. Moyna was practical

and worldly wise. Nirmal introduced Moyna with Kanai. He feels tender towards her

and addresses her informally as ‘tumi.’

Crabs

Piya studies the behaviour of dolphins till midday. She feels sorry as her

research has caused inconvenience to Fokir. But Fokir has caught required number

of crabs for his living.

Travels

Nirmal is disturbed when Kusum goes missing after the Bon Bibi performance.

Nirmal is retired from the school and is invited to visit other schools. Kanai had

given him the book ‘Travels’ b Bernier.

Garjontala

Fokir takes Piya to a settlement called Garjontala. She watches dolphins - the

mother and calf and crabs too.

A Disturbance

Moyna, married Forkir but their married life is a bit disturbed but still she gets

worried when she hears roaring of the tiger and barking of dogs. When Kanai asks

her the reason of her restlessness she replies “You are not a woman. You won’t

understand.”

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Listening

Fokir and Piya are not able to communicate through languages but a kind of

bond is developed between them and they communicate through gestures.

Blown Ashore

Kanai reads Nirmal’s note book. Kanai reached Morichjhapi. There he met

Kusum and her son Fokir, Kusum narrated them her story. When Kusum’s mother

was taken to Dhanbad, Kusum also went there Rajen helped her to find out her

mother. Later Rajen married Kusum but died in an accident.

A Haunt

It is about Piya’s progress in the study of dolphins.

Dreamers

Nirmal decides to live in Morichjhapi and teach the students to read and write.

He decides to teach them to dream also.

Pursued

The bond between Piya and Fokir is strengthened when Fokir saves Piya from

the jaws of the crocodile. Their boat almost turns over and is hugely damaged.

Their head for Lusibari now.

The Flood: Jowar

Part II Beginning Again

Nirmal’s Plan

Nirmal is excited as he returns from Morichjhapi at the prospect of beginning

afresh in life. He would teach the students how myth and Geology are intertwined.

And given all the credit for this new phase is his life to Horen Naskor who has

brought him to the island though by accident.

Land Fall

Fokir rows hard against the current and takes Piya safely to Lusibari. Then

suddenly after showing her Mashima’s house, he and Tutul disappear without giving

her a chance to thank and pay them for their labours. Mashima welcomes Piya to

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Lusibari and allots her a room in the guest house upstairs, where Kanai is already

staying in one of the three rooms.

A Feast

The settlers have achieved a self-contained society at Morichijhapi an egalitarian

set up “a place of true freedom for the country’s most oppressed.” Nirmal wishes to

settle there and contribute his share to the development of Morichjhapi.

Catching Up

In this chapter Piya knows more about Moyna, Fokir's wife as well as Kanai.

She also feels envy for Moyna. She knows that Kanai belongs to Modern India.

Storms

Nirmal tells Fokir about various storms on the island.

Negotiations

Piya engages Fokir to help her in her research. She also conveys her gratitude to

Fokir for what he did for her and wants to give him a gift to him and his family in the

form of banknotes. Moyna takes money and conveys her gratitude. Piya suggests

Fokir to help her in the research on dolphin and she would pay Fokir a salary plus

daily allowance and rent for boat. She also promises to give him bonus of 300

dollars. Moyna is overjoyed as it is a windfall for them. Fokir tells her that he would

arrange a stream boat for her. The boat of Horen Naskor can be used.

Nilima’s Reasoning

Kusum requests Nilima to set up medical facilities in Morichjhapi. But Nilima

turns down the request. According to Nilima the settlers in Morichjhapi were

refugees and they have seized the Government land. She also strongly advises

Nirmal to stay away from Morichjhapi. But Nirmal is leftist. Nilima has built the

hospitals and trust and now she does not want to go against the Government. Nirmal

is torn between his leftist ideas and his wife who has sacrificed so much for him.

A Sunset

Kanai tells Piya about Fokir and his mother Kusum. Fokir was like his mother,

but only in looks Kanai asserts. Kusum was spirited, tough, and full of fun and

laughter. Fokir was born in Bihar and has come to Morichjhapi with his mother.

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She has joined a group of refugees who have occupied as island nearby. The land

belongs to the Government and so there is standoff and many people died. Kusum

also died and Fokir was only of six. Horen Naskor took him in after his mother’s

death. He has been a father to him even since.

Piya tells about her mother. Piya’s mother died of cancer when she was only

twelve years old. He also states that he would like to be with someone like Piya.

While they are talking Fokir informs Piya regarding the availability of Horen

Naskor’s steam boat. She starts preparing for expedition.

Habits

Nirmal accompanied Kusum and Fokir to the Garjontola island deep in the

jungle in Horen Naskor’s boat in mid January 1979 for the Bon Bibi Puja. Nirmal

does not believe in religious rituals. Kusum informs him that the Government has

been creating pressures on settlers to leave Morichjhapi. That afternoon Kusum and

Horen return soon but Nirmal stays there for some time.

A Pilgrimage

Fascinated by Piya’s knowledge of the Irrawaddy dolphin and her research

Kanai joins Piya’s expedition. He would act as a translator between her and Fokir.

Destiny

Nirmal and Kusum come together at Garjontola during Bon Bibi’s Puja. Nirmal

is moved by the faith of the people in the tide country in the mythical Bon Bibi.

The Megha

Horen’s steam boat is named M.V.Megha. The boat is old and Piya is anxious

whether the old boat would be able to follow dolphins. Fokir’s boat would be also

accompanying the steam boat and once they reach the destination, Piya would be

with Fokir in his boat to tract the dolphins. Piya agrees when they return, they find

Nilima there. Kanai informs her that he would be away with Piya for a few days as

her translator on Horen’s steam boat. He added that he is taking Nirmal’s notebook

with him. Nilima warns Kanai and Piya of the danger lurking in the jungle. Nilima

wonders whether the reason for Kanai going to dangerous terrain is Piya.

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Memory

At the Bon Bibi Puja Nirmal is surprised to find that the prayer is a blend of

Arabic, Persian and Bangla. Although it is printed in an old tattered pamphlet, Horen

the illiterate Fisherman has memorized it; it is all in his head.

Intermediaries

Nilima warns Piya about her nephew thinking as ‘irresistible to other sex’ and

many women have led him to believe that. She also advises Piya to be careful.

Besieged

The Government adopts stern measures to evict the settlers from Morichjhapi.

Nirmal who joins a group of school masters on a steam boat, witnesses their plight

from a distance but is greatly relieved to find that Horen, Fokir and Kusum are safe

on the island. He hopes to have them back soon at Lusibari.

Words

Moyna is very intelligent woman. She can sense Piya’s softness towards Fokir.

She can even sense the danger when Fokir and Piya are left alone during the trip.

She also knows Kanai’s flirtatious nature.

Crimes

Kusum is deeply affected by the police siege of Morichjhapi and the plight of

settlers. She has become very weak.

Leaving Lusibari

Piya and Kanai leave Lusibari early next morning. Moyna arrives just before

they are about to leave Lusibari. She takes Tutul, her son away because she doesn’t

want him to miss school. Kanai points out the vast difference between Piya and

Fokir as observers an emotional bond between them. He himself starts desiring Piya.

But Piya’s attitude towards him is quite cold. She even explains that Fokir and she

can communicate well on the basis of the bond they share and they do not need a

language to communicate with each other.

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An Interruption

The steam boat stops and they are forced to spend the night in a village close by

where Horen has acquaintances and relatives. Kanai has almost ended Nirmal’s note

book.

Alive

Nilima does not like Nirmal’s going to Morichjhapi as it affects his health. She

tells Nirmal that, if he wants to work for people he can do so in Lusibari. She also

blames Kusum for tempting her husband there and she thinks that Kusum can also

come to Lusibari to work for people and so the ugly rumours about Nirmal and

Kusum will come to an end.

Nirmal comes to know that Morichjhapi is encircled on all side by Police and it

is almost impossible to get out of the island as Police has sunk all the settler’s boats.

Nirmal is anxious to get Kusum and Fokir safely out of Morichjhapi. Horen and

Nirmal hid their boat among the mangroves and reach Kusum’s dwelling. She is

reluctant to leave but allows Forkir to leave till the trouble is over. Nirmal also

decides to stay back. Kanai reads the last words of Nirmal and asks Horen what has

happened later. Horen takes away Fokir from Morichjhapi.

Outsiders burnt the settlers’ huts, boats and destroyed their fields. Women are

taken away from them and Kusum was one of them. Nirmal was put on a bus with

other refugees to send back to their camp in Madhya Pradesh. But perhaps they must

have left him off because he found his way back to Canning.

A Post Office on Sunday

Kanai tells Piya about Nirmal his leftist thoughts, his work for settlers.

According to him Nirmal was also a historical materialist.

A Killing

Around the midnight Kanai, Piya and Horen come to know from the pug marks

of a tiger that beast is drawn towards the small village and people are following and

shouting. The tiger is trapped inside the hut. Piya wants to save the tiger from the

people. Hers pleas remain unheard. She wants to take help of Fokir but finds that

Forkir is leading people in hut. The hut has been set on fire and the tiger is killed by

people. Her efforts to save the animal fail. No one is aware of the need to preserve

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our wild life. The scenario is man versus animal and survival of the fittest in the

Sundarbans.

Interrogations

They leave the village in morning and return to their boat. Kanai and Piya see a

boat with Khaki uniformed forest guards. They were going to the village. The

guards have been informed of the presence of foreigner woman in the village. The

guards to investigate this, interrogates Fokir but Kanai bribes them and releases Fokir

from their clutches.

Mr. Sloane

This chapter discusses how Piya becomes interested in studying the dolphins.

Fokir has learnt about animals from his mother who has wanted to settle in

Garjontala after the Morichjhapi incident, which never comes to be. So Fokir often

dreams of her when he comes there and in the process, has become friendly with

dolphins.

Kratie

Asked about her personal life Piya tells Kanai that she had been in a serious

relationship with a young man Rath who was working as a local representative of

Fisheries Department while she was in Kratie in eastern Cambodia. But the

relationship failed and she decided to be on her own. Kanai wishes to tell her his

feeling but is unable to do so.

Signs

Kanai is perhaps as “good at heart” as Fokir expects him to be in order to

receive Bon Bibi’s blessings. He sinks deeper and deeper into the marsh and

hallucinates that he has seen a tiger. He is rescued by Piya, Fokir and Horen.

Lights

In the evening, Piya invites Kanai to have a look at the glow-worms flashing

there lights in rhythm around the mangroves. Kanai informs Piya that he is going the

next day to Lusibari and then to Delhi. Kanai plans to leave at day break the next

day with Horen while Piya would be away with Fokir. They both admit that they

have enjoyed each other’s company. Kanai hopes that he will soon see Piya in New

Delhi. Piya firmly tells Kanai that she is not the woman he is looking for.

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A Search

Kanai gives a large manila envelope to Piya as a parting gift. Kanai heads for

Lusibari and Piya joins Fokir in his boat.

Causalities

Cyclone has impended and Piya and Fokir haven’t yet reached back to their

make shift boat.

A Gift

Piya and Fokir are away from the boat and Fokir looks for a place to anchor his

boat. She reads the letter written by Kanai who wishes that she should spend a brief

period of togetherness with Fokir.

Fresh Water and Salt

This chapter reveals how a simple woman like Kusum was wooed and courted

by two older men- Nirmal and Horen. Nirmal was educated and Horen was a simple

boatman. Finally, Horen’s silent love won. It is in the same manner the uneducated,

poor fisherman like Fokir and educated and sophisticated Kannai's love for Piya. It

is Fokir’s love for Piya that, Horen hopes would bring back the boat safe from the

cyclone.

Horizons

Next morning Piya senses the upcoming storm. She wakes up Fokir and asks

him to get back to the Megha. Horen and Kanai can spot for them as there is no

shelter nearby and Horen thinks about the safety of his grandson who is on the

Megha. So he has no option but to leave. He hopes that Fokir would definitely save

himself and Piya.

Losses

Fokir and Piya are trapped in the storm but Kanai is safely dropped at Lusibari

by Horen. Horen asks Kanai to inform Moyna about Fokir.

Getting Ashore

Piya and Fokir are stranded in the jungle as the storm rages. Kanai comes to the

hospital. Moyna is worried about Fokir and Piya’s safety. Kanai assures her that

Fokir knows how to steer his boat in the storm.

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The Wave

The storm is increasing and there is flood. People are taking shelter in Lusibari

hospital. Fokir lays down his life to save Piya in the storm.

The Day After

The next day Horen comes with his boat. In Fokir’s boat Piya is there only as

Fokir had died. They bring Fokir’s dead body back for cremation. Moyna is shattered

at the loss of her daring husband. Piya ponders the unspoken bond she shared with

this poor, unlettered fisherman who had lost his life shielding her from the ravages of

the storm.

Home: An Epilogue

After Fokir’s death Piya forms a strange friendship with Moyna. Piya raises

money to help Moyna and Tutul as well as obtains funds for her project on the

Irrawaddy dolphin from several environmental and conservation groups in Kolkatta.

She decides to continue her research from Lusibari. Kanai has agreed to be with her

hence the project is rightly named after Fokir.


I) Fill in the blanks:

1) Kanai Dutt knows ________languages.

2) Piyali has been raised in________

3) Nilima Bose, Kanai’s aunt is known as _________

4) Nirmal and Nilima came to Lusibari________

5) _________ ruled the jungles of the country of eighteen tides.


1) Who is Mej-da?

2) Who has discovered the islands of Sundarbans?

3) Who was Fokir’s mother?

4) Who was the father of the twins Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli?

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5) What does Kanai give Piya as a parting gift?


� Cetologist – One who studies marine mammals.

� Badabon Trust – A trust founded by Nirmala Bose.

� Sir Daniel Hamilton – a Scotsman who had explored the tide.

� Bon Bibi – Deity of the people of Lusibari.

� Morichjhapi – An Island near Lusibari.

� M.V.Megha – Horen Naksor’s Steam boat.

� Kratie – A place in Eastern Cambodia.


Piyali Roy

The Hungry Tide revolves around the character Piyali Roy (Piya), an Indian

American cetologist whose focus of research is the study of fresh water dolphins.

She starts working in the Sundarbans with Kanai Dutt, a translator and expert in six

languages and Fokir, an illiterate fisherman.

Kanai is visiting his aunt Nilima (Mashima) a social worker who has set up an

NGO named Badabon Trust and runs a hospital in Lusibari one of the islands in the

Sundarbans. Kanai wants to read the diary written by his late uncle Nirmal an

idealistic Marxist intellectual. Piya through her relationship with Kanai and Fokir

comes to know the several issues of Sundarbans. These issues are the problems of

settlers in Sundarbans, wild life conservation, urban-rural conflicts, and caste and

class politics in post colonial India etc.

Piya grew up in Seattle and never learned Bengali, though she was born in

Calcutta to Bengali parents. She doesn’t always need spoken language to

communicate. When she meets Fokir she believes that they are able to communicate

with each other. At the beginning of the novel Piya believes in the power and

goodness of conservation efforts. As the novel progresses, Piya is forced to recognize

that conservation isn’t always a force for good- it often happens at the expense of

poor people like Fokir. Though Piya and Fokir are clearly attracted to each other and

develop a quiet romance through out the novel, they never act on their feelings for

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each other. About six weeks after the cyclone, when Piya returns to Lusibari, she

suggests that she would like to name her ongoing project after Fokir. She also wants

to work with local fishermen to carry out her project and share funding with the

Badabon Trust, which suggests that she learned that conservation efforts are most

effective when implemented in a way that actually helps locals.

Kusum

Kanai sees Kusum at Lusibari during his first visit to his aunt Nilima. She is an

odd looking teenager with short hair cut. She is dressed in the ‘frilly’ frock of a child

instead of a woman’s saree. Horen the fisherman has brought her there in order to

save her from the clutches of a local land owner Dilip Choudhary, who has already

sold her widowed mother into prostitution at Dhanbad. Kanai befriends Kusum.

We next meet Kusum at the railway platform at Dhanbad. She falls in love with

a lame vendor Rajen and marries him with her mother’s permission and blessings.

Rajen finds out her mother and reunites them. The Mother dies soon after. Kusum

has a son Fokir. After Rajen’s death she joins the group of refugees from

Dandakaranya Camp to the uninhabited island of Morichjhapi in the Sundarbans.

Kusum soon becomes a part of settlement at Morichjhapi. Horen Naskor and

Nirmal are the regular visitors to Morichjhapi. Both visit Kusum till she loses her

life in the people’s resistance to the Government’s violent use of force to evict them

from Morichjhapi. After her death Horen brings up Fokir as his own son. Horen

admits that he had been secretly and silently in love with Kusum right from the

moment he had brought her to Lusibari as teenager. He was then a married man and

was a father of three children. He was so much in love with her that he was ready to

leave his wife for her but Kusum denied. He saved Kusum from Dililp Choudhari’s

men.

Eight years later Kusum returned to Morichjhapi. Horen goes to Morichjhapi to

catch a glimpse of her. Nirmal too, was in love with Kusum. But Nirmal was

articulate and Horen was a silent lover. Horen’s love for Kusum finds fulfillment.

Nilima/Mashima

Nilima comes from a well-to-do family in Kolkata. As a frail, young, asthmatic,

she falls in love with her teacher, a Marxist idealist Nirmal and marries him in the

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face of stiff opposition. After Nirmal is involved in his political activities, they go to

Lusibari.

Nirmal is involved in teaching. Nilima gets together the women of the island

and forms women union through which she tries to give some work for women who

will make economically independent and active. Later this body is transformed into

Badabon Trust, an NGO. Nilima is called Mashima (mother’s sister) by the grateful

islanders. She also sets up a hospital in Lusibari for the inhabitants.

Kanai Dutt is Nirmal’s nephew. Both Nirmal and Nilima love Kanai very much.

Nirmal is active in struggle of the settlers in the island whereas Nilima against it.

Nirmal’s frequent visits to Morichjhapi creates suspect in Nilima’s mind. She

suspects that Nirmal is emotionally involved in Kusum. Later it was observed that

Nilima’s suspect was right. After Fokir’s death Piya decides to stay in Lusibari and

pursue the project named after Fokir with the help of 76 year old Nilima and Nilima

gives her consent as she was deeply committed to the welfare work in Lusibari.

Fokir

Fokir is a poor fisherman whom Piya meets when she is in the cane of forest

guard and Media. Fokir saves her when she falls into the water. Piya completely

trusts him. Fokir doesn’t speak English nor understands English and Piya doesn’t

understand Bengali but still they have cultivated a strong emotional bond. He takes

care of Piya, makes accommodations for her privacy, offers her deal about river

dolphins and is eager to help her in her studies. Fokir’s wife Moyna does not like his

profession and she thinks that there is much danger and no future in this profession.

She wants to provide education to Tutul, their son.

Fokir’s mother thinks that Fokir had the river in his blood. During the cyclone,

Forkir and Piya aren’t able to make it back to the Megha in time and so many rides

out the cyclone on Garjontola. Fokir ties them to a tree to keep them from blowing

away. After the storm ends, Fokir dies when a flying object hits him. Piya decides

to name her project after him.

� Kanai Dutt – a wealthy, middle aged translator who works in New Delhi. He

has come to Sundarbans for the second time to read the notebook of Nirmal.

� Nirmal Bose – a Marxist intellectual and a promising writer. He teaches in

Lusibari.

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� Nilima Bose – Nilima is Nirmal’s wife and is known as Mashima in Lusibari.

� Horen Naskor – He is a fisherman. He was in love with Kusum though he was

a married man. He looks after Fokir after Kusum’s death.

� Moyna – She is Forkir’s wife and a trainee nurse at the Lusibari hospital.

� Tutul – Fokir and Moyna’s five year old son.

� Nogen – Horen’s 14 year old grandson.

� Rath – He was a Cambodian in the Cambodian forest service. Piya had a

romantic relationship with him but he married another woman.

� Rajen – Kusum’s husband.

� Dilip Choudhary – a wealthy man in the Sundarbans who preyed on vulnerable

woman.


I) Fill in the blanks:

1) For Fokir’s dolphins are ________

2) ________is Forkir’s wife.

3) _________ looks after Fokir after Kusum’s death.

4) ________ is Horen’s fourteen years grandson.

5) Nirmal was a _________ intellectual.


1) Who is Dilip Choudhary?

2) Who is Kusum’s husband?

3) Who saved Kusum form Dilip Choudhary?

4) Where does Kusum come after Rajen’s death?

4.5 Myth and Ecological concerns in The Hungry Tide:

Mythological stories play an important role in our lives. They are related to birth

and death, destiny; ideas of moralities in Indian Epics like the Ramayana and the

Mahabharata have numeral mythical stories that have universal appeal. Certain

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myths are part of folk tales. The myth of Bon-Bibi is one them. The Myth of Bon

Bibi has its significance in the life of the people of the Sundarbans.

The myth of Bon Bibi symbolises the Hindu-Muslim syncretism. Bon Bibi is

the tiger-goddess that protects fishermen in the mangrove forest against storms,

cyclones and wild life. The villagers believe that Bon Bibi rules over the jungle.

Nirmal, the rationalist Marxist dismisses it as a figment of the native’s fertile

imagination where as young Kanai is mesmerized by the performance of ‘The Glory

of Bon Bibi’ by the local inhabitants.

The story of the tiger-goddess begins in Medina, one of the holiest places in

Islam. A childless devout Muslim, Ibrahim is blessed with the twins through the

intervention of the archangel Gabriel. They are Bob Bibi and Shah Jongoli. When

the twins come of the age, they are to travel from Arabia to “the country of the

eighteen tides” – atthero bhatir desh. Thus charged, Bon Bibi and Shan Jongoli set

off for the mangrove forests of Bengal, “dressed in the simple robes of Sufi

medicants.”

The jungles of “the country of eighteen tides’ are currently the realm of a

powerful demon king, Dokkhin Rai, who hold sway over every being that leaves

there. He hates mankind and has an insatiable craving for human flesh. One day

Dokkhin Rai hears strange new voices in the jungle calling out the azan, the Muslim

call to prayer and finds out that Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli have entered his realm.

He attacks but is defeated in battle. Merciful Bob Bibi divides the realm – on half of

the tide country would remain a wilderness to be ruled over by the Dokkhin Rai and

his demon hoards. The other half she claims for herself. Under her rule this once

forested domain is soon made safe for human settlement. Thus order is brought to

the land of eighteen tides with its two halves, the wild and the sown, “being held in

careful balance.” All is well until human greed intrudes to upset this order.

One the edges of the tide country, lives Dhona, a rich man who has put together

a fleet of seven ships in the hope of making a fortune in the jungle. Dhona’s fleet is

about to set sail when it is discovered that the crew is short of just one man. The

only person at hand is an unfortunate young man Dukhey. Dukhey’s mother is

unwilling of Dukhey’s joining the fleet and she advises him to invoke Bon Bibi

whenever he finds himself in trouble and the tiger-goddess will certainly help him.

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As soon as Dhona’s fleet enters Dokkhin Rai’s territory, strange things begin to

happen. Dokkhin Rai comes in his dream and promises to load his fleet of ship with

as much honey and wax as they can carry in exchange of human flesh. Dhona falls

prey to temptation and leaves Dukhey behind. Dukhey call out to Bon-Bibi, who

immediately appears with Shah Jongoli. Together they teach the demon a lesson and

nurse Dukhey back to health and transport him back to his mother.

The poor fishermen sing the songs and prayers in which they prey to Bon-Bibi

for their safety and well-being. People shed tears in gratitude while watching the

performance of ‘The Glory of Bon-Bibi’ and thank for protecting them.

Kusum while watching the performance starts uncontrollably crying as she

laments that Bon-Bibi did not come to her aid when her father, a poor fisherman was

mauled and carried into a mangrove forest by a tiger. But Horen consoles her that

her father was a good and holy man and so she chooses to call him first near him.

Later on Kusum’s son Fokir too grows up to believe in Bon Bibi. So the people have

unquestioning belief in myth. Fokir know about the place through mythological oral

narratives he had learnt form Kusum, his mother and people.

The Bon Bibi myth connects the people with nature. People who are living in

the company of nature have to face different natural calamities like cyclone, storm

and attacks of tigers and wild animals. They respect nature and they have a fear for

nature and nature represents super power. Their fear and respect for Bon Bibi saves

them from tigers, they believe. They surrender Nature as it is beyond human control.

Nilima, a well-educated and city bred woman too believes in such myths. No person

will enter into the forest without invoking the protection of Bon-Bibi. Nirmal,

Nilima, Kanai and Piyali are outsiders and they come into contact with locals, listen

and observe their performances and religious rituals of the Sundarbans and do not

want to disturb the lives of people shaped by mythic ideas.

‘The Hungry Tide’ represents richness of oral tradition derived from

mythological tales. The knowledge provided through these myths is sometimes

superior to conventional knowledge. These people are quite close to nature and there

is a deep sense of attachment between them and nature, where as for Piya the

dolphins are the subjects of her research, for Fokir they are Bon Bibi’s messengers.

For the inhabitants of the islands, nature is a bountiful mother as well as a

hostile force. The storms and the tigers are the forms in which nature expresses its

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hostility to human beings. Piya is aware to the inhabitants avenging the cruelty of

these forces. Her strong reaction to the incident when a trapped tiger is being tortured

by people from an island who had earlier lost many men and live stock to the beast

shows Piya, the environmentalist at her forceful best. But the inhabitants prevail.

The gentler aspects of nature are represented by the river dolphins which Kusum

names for her son as ‘God messengers.’ Even the slightest change in river waters or

big threats like cyclones can be predicted with a charge in the dolphins’ behaviour

and appearance in and out of water. Mythology is beautifully linked with nature and

science.

4.6 Human Space, Landscape and Nature Versus Man in The

Hungry Tide

The Hungry Tide is set in the Sundarbans which is covered by mangrove forests.

The narrator's a long river trip in search of Irrawaddy dolphin. But eventually it

becomes a combination of travel, anthropology, ethnography migration, landscape

and environmentalism. Ghosh here intertwines human space and landscape.

Nature Versus Man

The tide or the tidal land has the power to charge the course of rivers and

reshape lands. Ghosh discusses the conflict between the natural world and man made

world. Sundarbans, one third of which is in India and two thirds in Bangladesh is

home to many endangered species like Royal Bengal Tiger and Irrawaddy dolphins.

There is conflict between the human and the non-human for space. The relation

between the human settlers and the predators is exquisitely expressed in the myth of

Bon-Bibi the tiger goddess. And the role of the Government in protecting the

environment is mocked in the episode of Piya’s encounter with the forest guard.

There are 3 characters Piya, Kanai and Fokir. Piya is a young ecologist who

comes from Seattle, United States for her research over breed of fresh water dolphin.

Kanai is middle aged Linguist who runs a translation bureau in Delhi. And Fokir is a

poor fisherman. The focus of the novel is Nirmal’s notebook. In the notebook there

are several incidents depicted regarding the refugees who have come to Morichjhapi

with the intention of settling there. They cleared the land making it fit for

agriculture. Nirmal, gets involved with the refugees and becomes the witness of the

eviction of these settlers through a “brutal display of state power” Nirmal, is found

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wandering in the port later of town of canning never recovering from the trauma of

the event. The story of Morichjhapi plays very important role in the novel.

The people who came to settle in Morichjhapi were the refugees from East

Pakistan (Now Bangladesh) who had lost their homeland. These people were great

in numbers and Indian Government agreed to settle them Dandakaranya, which was

strange place to them. So these people headed towards Sundarbans in the hope of

setting there. But the Government of India, along with the Government of West

Bengal was not ready to allow them to settle in the island of Morichjhapi. These

people, Government started here involving in illegal activities like killing trees and

destroying forest resources. They were distributing the land among themselves with

some authorization from the Government officials to enter into the island and they

were creating their own administrative system. The State Government could not

allow this and acted to evict the settlers.

The main reason behind this was to restore ecological balance. The killing of

tiger in a village focuses the man versus nature conflict. The myth of Bon Bibi

represents the relationship between the human and the predators. The myth explains

that the people do not want to harm nature or animals but what they want is to

survive among those hostilities.

The Government forcefully removed refugees from Morichjhapi to restore

ecological balance. The Government wanted to clear mangroves and plant coconut

and casuarinas trees in Morichjhapi whereas the mangrove forest has its own

ecological value and their replacement by coconut and casuarinas trees would cause

more harm to the flora and Fauna of the region. The Government servants like the

guard are not at all aware of the safety of nature but the local habitants like Fokir are

real caretakers. It is the new technology like nylon nets, motor launches that harm sea

creatures and not poor people.

In The Hungry Tide we find the people of Sundarbans tidal lands struggling very

hard for their existence against a number of natural forces, ferocious animals like

tigers and crocodiles and natural calamities like cyclone. Everything is very

powerfully presented by Amitav Ghosh.

4.7 Answers for Check Your Progress

4.1 I 1) 11th July 1956 2) narrative technique

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3) The Circle of Reason 4) The Shadow Lines

5) Moby Dick

II 1) The Calcutta Chromosome. 2) Sundarbans

3) Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and The Glass Palace

4) Independence, partition and political and historical

4.2 I 1) Irrawaddy Dolphins 2) Fokir

3) Lusibari 4) Kanai Dutt

5) Mangrove forest

II 1) Kanai Dutt comes to Sundarbans to visit his aunt to investigate a

journal written by his deceased uncle.

2) The local authorities at Sundarban gives her approval on the condition

that she has to take their boat and local observers.

3) Tutul.

4) Myth and ecological concerns/Ecoculturalism is the main theme of the

novel.

5) Piyali Roy is an American scientist of Indian descent specializing in

marine mammals.

4.3 I 1) Six 2) Seattle 3) Mashima

4) 1950 5) Dokkhin Rai

II i) Mejda is the guide given to Piyali by the Forest Department

ii) S.Daniel has discovered the islands of Sundarbans.

iii) Kusum

iv) Ibrahim – the Sufi fakir

v) A large Manila envelope

4.8 Exercises

Questions for long answers

1) Comment on the role played by Piyali Roy in The Hungry Tide.

2) Discuss Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide as a post-colonial novel.

3) In The Hungry Tide Amitav Ghosh portrays the different attitudes of the

inhabitants of Sundarbans.

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4) Write a critical note on the structure and plot construction of The Hungry Tide.

5) Describe the myth of Bon Bibi and its significance in the life of the people of

the Sundarbans.

Short Notes

1) Nirmals’s note book

2) The character of Kusum

3) The bond between Piyali and Fokir

4) Moyna

5) The incident of tiger hunt

4.9 Reference for further study

Banerjee Amrita: ‘Hostile Spaces Gendered Responses- A Reading of The Hungry

Tide.’

Dewani Richa: Amitav Ghosh: A Biographical Study.

Pal, Dipanwita: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

Tiwari Shubha: Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study.

��

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Unit-1

Postcolonial Australian Novel

Doris Pilkington Garimara, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence

1.0 Objectives

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Doris Pilkington

1.3 Indigenous Australian Literature

1.3.1 The term – Aborigine

1.3.2 Aborigine Theory

1.3.3 Development of Indigenous Australian Literature

1.4 Stolen Generation

1.5 Outline of the Story

1.6 Check Your Progress

1.7 Chapter-wise summary along with Critical Comments

1.8 Critical Comments on the Themes

1.8.1 Racism and Colonialism

1.8.2 Family, Culture and Identity

1.8.3 Altruism cs. Cruelty

1.9 Critical Comments on the Symbolism

1.9.1 Rabbit-Proof Fence

1.9.2 The Journey

1.9.3 Moore River Native Settlement

1.10 Key to Check Your Progress

1.11 Exercises

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1.0 Objectives

After reading this unit you are going to learn:

• Development and Salient Features of Indigenous Australian Literature

• Stolen Generation: Australia’s Darkest History

• Doris Pilkington alias Nugi Garimara's Biographical Details and Her

Literary Contribution to Indigenous Australian Literature

• Impact of White Settlers’ Oppressive Strategies on the Aboriginals

• Adventurous journey of the girls to their roots.

1.1 Introduction

Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence is a 'novel' before written by Doris Pilkington

aliasNugi Garimara (1937 – 2014) and was published by University of Queensland

Press in 1996. The book is based on the adventurous escape of three half-caste

Aboriginal girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, who due to their mixed-race lineage are

separated from their families by the government, journey back to their families by

following the rabbit-proof fence that crosses Australia. Molly, Daisy, and Gracie are

the author’s mother, aunt and their cousin respectively.

When Pilkington who was estranged from her mother met her after around

twenty years in 1962, she shared her story of her first escape and trek home,

following a fence that bisects the length of Australia from north to south to protect

farmland from hordes of rabbits. Pilkington interviewed her mother and her two

aunts extensively before the publication of the novel in order to get a realistic and

true version of events as possible.

The novel transcribes various experiences of displacement and resistance of

Aboriginal peoples and provides a basis for a collective listening or rereading of

Australia’s complex colonial history. The book touches upon displacement and

resistance like - the involuntary migration of Aboriginal peoples, especially the

Nyungar and the Mardudjara, along the rabbit-proof fence towards government-

assigned settlements such as Jigalong, the forced relocation of mixed-race children

that is, the Stolen Generations to missionary camps to be made culturally white; and

the children’s heroic journey of escape and homecoming-again navigated through the

rabbit-proof fence. The insidious mechanisms of racism, colonization, forced

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assimilation, and cultural genocide are present on each page of Follow the Rabbit-

Proof Fence. The book aims to demonstrate that Aboriginal storytelling not only

discloses a history of disruption imposed by European settlement, but, perhaps more

importantly, registers the Aboriginal peoples’ strength to resist, adopt, and reconnect.

Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence and its film version helped awaken Australians to the

plight of the Aborigines. It is translated into 11 languages. The Australian Film

Institute named the movie version the year’s best film 'of 2020' and it won prizes at a

dozen film festivals around the world.

1.2 Brief Biography of Doris Pilkington

Doris Pilkington (1937 - 2014) / Garimara was born at the Balfour Downs

Station in the East Pilbara near Jigalong, her family’s ancestral home. Her mother

named herNugi Garimar Nugi Garimara, but she was called Doris after Molly’s

employer at the station. In 1940s young Doris and her baby sister Anabelle were

removed from their home while their mother, Molly, was in the hospital recovering

from an appendectomy. They were sent just as their mother had been to the Moore

River Native Settlement in order to be “properly” educated and kept isolated from

their indigenous family. Molly joined her daughters at the camp after, but after just a

year there she absconded from the camp once again, with Doris’s younger sister

Annabelle. Doris was left behind with her aunt Daisy who had, just like her sister

Molly, been sent back to the camp as an adult. Doris grew up believing that her

mother had given her away, and the truth emerged in snippets as she grew into

adulthood.

At eighteen Doris left the mission system as the first of its members to qualify

for the Royal Perth Hospital’s nursing aide training Programme. Following marriage

and a family, she studied journalism and worked in a film/video production. Working

as a nurse and raising six children, Doris began to compile her aunt’s stories and

composed a series of books describing the torment of the Stolen Generations, the

children of Australian Aboriginal descent, especially children of mixed race, who

were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and forced into

internment camps. Not until Christmas Eve of 1962 did Doris see her mother again.

An aunt had told her who her mother was. Doris Pilkington / Garimara found out

where she lived and took her children to meet her. That was when her mother, Kelly

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shared her story of her first escape and trek home, following a fence that bisects the

length of Australia from north to south to protect farmland from hordes of rabbits.

Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter, originally published in 1991, is her first book

and won the 1990 David Unaipon National Award. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is

Garimara’s best-known book and was first published in 1996 a movie based on this

novel was released internationally in 2002 as the ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, directed by

Phillip Noyce. Doris’ own story is told in Under the Wintamarra Tree (UQP 2002).

Ms. Pilkington Garimara used her celebrity 'status' press for the Aboriginal cause.

She was an original member of the government-sanctioned Reconciliation

Committee to repair relations between the white and native people and a principal

promoter of National Sorry Day, an annual event started in 1998 to commemorate

the government’s mistreatment of Aborigines. In 2002 she was appointed Co-Patron

of State and Federal Sorry Day Committees’ Journey of Healing. Garimara passed

away at the age of 76 in Perth, Australia.

1.3 Indigenous Australian Literature

Aboriginal literature is basically involved with the maintenance and extension of

Aboriginal self-assurance and the feeling of self-respect. Three major elements come

together in Indigenous Australian literature – cultural nationalism, literary talent and

Aboriginal pride. Above all, the Aboriginal literature deals and fights for the identity,

an impetus for many native literatures across the world. For more elucidation, this

unit discusses the term Aborigine, Aborigine Theory and Development of Indigenous

Australian Literature.

1.3.1 The term – Aborigine:

1. Aborigine means a person, animal, or plant that has been in a country or region

from earlier times.

(en.oxforddictionaries.com › definition › aborigine)

2. An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person –

• Of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent

• Who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and

• Is accepted as such by the community in which he/ she lives.

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(http:// www. Creative Spirits.info/aboriginalculture/people)

3. Indigenous peoples, also known in some regions as First peoples, First

Nations, Aboriginal peoples or Native peoples, or autochthonous peoples, are

ethnic groups who are the original or earliest known inhabitants of an area, in

contrast to groups that have settled, occupied or colonised the area more

recently.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_ peoples)

1.3.2 Aborigine Theory

Aboriginal Australian is a collective term for all the indigenous people from the

mainland and Tasmania. This group contains many separate cultures that have

developed in the various environments of Australia for more than 50,000 years.

These people have broadly shared, though complex, genetic history, but it is only in

the last two hundred years that they have been defined and began to identify

themselves as a single group. Aboriginal people were marginalized in their own land.

Hence several Aboriginal tribes and many native languages have been wiped out.

Their lands, resources and stocks were forcibly taken by the European colonizers.

However, in spite of their differences in language, culture, tradition, colour, region

and religion, only their belongingness to Aboriginality and their Aboriginal

consciousness has kept them united. The exact definition of the term Aboriginal

Australian has been changed over time and place with the criteria such as – family

lineage, self-identification and community acceptance.

1.3.3 Development of Indigenous Australian Literature

Australia had long been inhabited by Aborigines before the British colonizers

came on the island around the end of the eighteenth century. It is believed that

Aborigines arrived there about 50000 to 40000 years ago from Asia. There, they

developed their own culture based on a close contact with the Australian territory.

They felt a sort of identification with the land. Respect for their homeland was

reflected in their lifestyle and they lived harmoniously with nature. Their culture

boasted paintings along with traditional dances and religious rituals, but the most

striking part of their culture is the storytelling.

Hence, it can be stated that Indigenous literature of Australia initially descended

from the folklore, which was transmitted in the form of storytelling. This storytelling

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tradition is significant in the lives of Aboriginal people since it is considered

essential by the elders of the Aboriginal communities to pass on their culture, the

social collectivity of the Aboriginal communities to their next generation. It’s also in

a way, making them understand their role in the collectivity. There are numerous

Aboriginal stories known across Australia and each community has its own stories

which differ from other communities and regions. However, a common characteristic

of Aboriginal groups is their similar belief systems which are called the ‘Stories of

the Dreaming’. They instruct the people on the rules of living, ancestral being,

history, teachings on the natural environment, and teachings on the spiritual world.

The ‘Stories of the Dreaming,’ have been handed down through the generations

and are not owned by individuals as they are believed to be belonging to a group or

nation. The knowledge gained through these stories pertains to all spheres of

Aboriginal life. They speak of social, moral, ethical values besides spiritual and

transcendental truths. They are also the repositories of geographical and

environmental knowledge, which help the people to survive in the harsh environment

of Australia. The moral lessons generally enlighten and teach them the gap between

vices and virtues. Undoubtedly, the stories are not only important to younger

generations to lead a better life but also to enrich people’s knowledge on aspects

important to Aboriginal life. As far as the present situation of Aboriginal stories is

concerned, it is obvious that there has been an expansion of Aboriginal literary

tradition from oral to written literature. Many Aborigines, whose culture had been

threatened by British colonizers for decades, feel the need of doing all possible

efforts in order to prevent the disappearance of their culture. It is only in the last

decades that an Australian Aboriginal literature has flowered, after long years of

silence. They have carved a niche for themselves in writing number of novels,

poems, songs, plays, autobiographies and histories. Many Aboriginal people consider

writing as a tool to express their knowledge of the cultural inheritance and the

subjugation of their people. Australian Aboriginal literature as a representation of

Aboriginal World, articulate the black past and contemporary Aboriginal identity. It

elucidates the relationship between Australian Aboriginal writing and other forms of

Australian literature. The evolution of Aboriginal literature in Australia is in

reflection of the socio, economic, literary and cultural circumstances that affected the

lives of Aboriginals. Aboriginal literature in English may be considered like a

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translation of Aboriginal culture through a new language and communication forms

as well as into a totally new postcolonial world.

Australian Aboriginal literature is today enriched with fiction, plays, poems,

essays and other works authored by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of

Australia. Nearly all are in English, as Indigenous Australians had not written in their

languages before the colonization of Australia. Aboriginal leaders like Sir Douglas

Nicholls and Bennelong’s letters are also part of Indigenous Australian Literature.

The Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 are the first traditional aboriginal document

recognised by the Australian Parliament. At the time of colonisation, Indigenous

'people'had not developed a system of writing, so the first literary accounts of

Aboriginals came from the journals of Early European explorers that contain

descriptions of their first contact with the Aboriginals. The colonizers portrayed a

very dreadful picture of Aboriginal people and their cultures to the world. On this,

Mudrooroo Narogin mentions that “Aboriginal literature begins as a cry from the

heart directed at the white man. It is a cry for justice and for a better deal, a cry for

understanding and an asking to be understood.” (Narogin, Mudrooroo. Writing from

the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature. Melbourne: Hyland House,

1990). In Writing from the Fringe, Narogin asserts that the primary agenda of the

contemporary Aboriginal writers is to give their people a history, an alternative to the

dominant white myth masquerading as objective history.

Notable Aboriginal writers are David Unaipon, Oodgeroo, Noonuccal, Sally

Morgan, Jack Davis, etc. Leading Aboriginal activists Marcia Langton and Noel

Pearson are contemporary contributors to Australian non-fiction.

1.4 Stolen Generation

The British settlers, as it happened in other British colonies, got hold of the

Australian land and its owners, the Aborigines and confined them in special

restricted areas. In an effort to control Aborigines’ lives and force them to live and

behave like the whites, the British administration forcibly removed them from their

territories and carried them to reserves. However, the colonizers hardly reached their

goal as the Aborigines strongly refused to be white. As a result, the British planned

to take mixed-race children away from their families and grow them in special

settlements. This black chapter of Australian history is called The Stolen Generation.

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“Stolen Generation" was the practice of removing part Aboriginal children and

Torres Strait Islander children from their original families and culture. The practice

took place from the early days of British colonisation in Australia that is, from the

year 1804 until about 1969. Numerous nineteenth and early twentieth century

contemporary documents indicate that the policy of removing mixed-race Aboriginal

children from their mothers was related to an assumption that the Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander cultures were inferior to the British and other European

countries. Moreover, it was assumed that the full-blood tribal Aboriginal population

would be unable to sustain itself and was doomed to extinction if not saved in time.

A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia and others

believed that mixed-race children could be trained to work in white society where

they could learn to behave like Europeans and study European and especially English

culture. The apparent intention was to take care of these children as British people

thought their families were not able to do it properly, simply because they did not

have their lifestyle. Moreover, they, over generations, would marry white and be

assimilated into the society. Hence children of the Aboriginal communities were

removed by governments, churches and welfare bodies to be brought up in

institutions, fostered out or adopted by white families. The people who took

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children away from their original families

purely believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of the children.

They removed the children under the pretext of giving them opportunity for

education, protection from abuse, poverty, neglect and the act of racism mainly from

white people.

In fact, this act towards the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was

unjust. It broke important cultural, spiritual and family ties and has left a lasting and

intergenerational impact on the lives and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander people. The children who were taken away were lied to and were treated

unfairly. They were abused and were taken to places they didn’t want to go. They

were ill-treated, miserably fed, and desperately needed to be helped. However,

words such as “welfare” or “protection” were frequently used in similar acts.

Government policies concerning Aboriginal people were implemented under

different laws in the different states and territories of Australia. These laws meant

nearly for every aspect of the lives of Indigenous people who were closely controlled

by government: relationships and marriage, children, work, travel, wages, housing

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and land, and access to health care and education. Records about the Stolen

Generations and their families were kept by the governments, as well as by churches,

missions and other non-government agencies.

As we can imagine, this caused a very serious harm to Aboriginal society, but it

was even worse considering the major role children played in assuring the

continuation of a thousand-year-old storytelling tradition which the British effaced in

no more than a century. This black chapter of Australian history called The Stolen

Generations, is of great importance for understanding the role of oral tradition in the

novel Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence that will be analysed in the next pages.

Historian Peter Read referred the term "Stolen Generations” to the children

affected in the practice in his publication - The Stolen Generations: The Removal of

Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883 to 1969 (1981) which examined the

history of the government actions. Another historian, Robert Manne who defended

that terminology, believes that some of the Aboriginal community use the term to

describe their collective suffering.

1.5 Outline of the Story

The opening two chapters of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence are set in the

1700s, when British explorers first arrived in Australia. The author recounts the

action through the point of view of several Aboriginal people: Kundilla and

Yellagonga, leaders of two different tribes; their wives and children; and other

members of the two tribes. The native people watched the British arrivals and tried to

make sense of what they saw. There were tremendous differences between the two

cultures. Though Kundilla and Yellagonga, were warily optimistic at first, soon it

became clear that the English had only one goal: take as much Aboriginal land as

they could. As the colonizers’ hold on Australia grew tighter, Aboriginal tribes all

across the continent were forced to abandon their lands, their cultures, and even their

languages, while the English doled out meagre rations and supplies to the peoples

they had ruined and remarked blithely on the Aboriginals’ ‘gratitude’ for those

“small things.”

British people claimed native land as their own, and established laws banning

tribal ceremonies and hunting. They meted out harsh punishments to Aboriginal men

who broke British laws. By the end of the nineteenth century, White settlements

began to dot the landscape. Realizing that they would not be able to manage the areas

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dominated by European settlers, the native tribes began to move south toward a

government outpost at Jigalong. They used the British-built rabbit-proof fences to

navigate. These fences were built in 1907 as a futile attempt to keep rabbits from

invading Western Australia. The one running north-south is almost 1,200 miles long.

And the fence worked like a compass for Aboriginal travelers. Jigalong was a

government depot built for the men who maintain the rabbit-proof fence. The depot

superintendent had a second role as Protector of Aborigines. Gradually, seminomadic

tribes began to settle there.

After detailing the lives of Aboriginal peoples and the arrival white settlers to

Australia, Pilkington turns to her mother’s story which is the basis of the present

novel under study. Maude is a 16-year-old Aboriginal girl who works at the station.

She has an affair with a rabbit-fence inspector named Thomas Craig, and they have a

baby girl whom they name Molly. Since Molly is a half-caste girl, she endures

teasing from the other Aboriginal children, but as the number of half-caste / mixed-

race, children in the area begins to grow, Molly feels less alone. Her half-caste

cousins Gracie and Daisy too join Molly soon. While Molly, Gracie, and Daisy play

and grow, local government officials watch the girls carefully. Half-caste children all

around the country are being rounded up and sent away to “missions,” where they are

educated and assimilated far away from their native roots. In July of 1930, when

Molly is fifteen, Constable Riggs, the Protector of Aborigines, arrives in Jigalong to

take Molly, Gracie, and Daisy to send them to the Moore River Native Settlement.

Molly is fourteen while Gracie is eleven, and Daisy, just eight years old. After a long

and overwhelming journey, they arrive at the settlement which Molly thinks looks

more like a jail than a dormitory and the girls long for home. On the arrival to the

Settlement itself, Molly’s mind is made up to run away home. She plans to take her

sisters and escape at first opportunity. The next day itself she begins their journey

home. It is a nine-week, 1,600 kilometers trek across Western Australia. Molly plans

to find the rabbit-proof fence first and follow it all the way home, but their journey is

not so simple. The government hunts them, sending out search planes and trackers to

try and corner the girls in the vast wilds of the outback. The girls, desperate for food

and drinkable water, rely on the survival skills they have learned from their tribe.

Also they rely on the kindness of strangers, the strangers who often report them to

the authorities as soon as the girls are out of sight. Despite all these dangers of wild

animals, bad weather, cold winter temperatures, and infected wounds, the girls make

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it to the rabbit-proof fence. As they near home, Gracie in order to meet her mother

breaks off from the group. Molly and Daisy, seemingly against all odds, make it back

to their families. As soon as the girls arrive back in Jigalong, their parents pack up

and move them out of sight of the government’s watchful eyes, hoping to keep the

girls safe from recapture.

In the epilogue, Molly marries a stockman and has two daughters, one of whom

is Doris Pilkington Garimara. When the girls are very young, Molly gets

appendicitis. As soon as she is out of the hospital, she and her daughters are

transported back to the Moore River Native Settlement. Molly again escapes with her

younger daughter, but her four-year-old Doris has to stay at the settlement. After

decades, Doris sees her mother again. Doris’s younger sister, Annabelle, is taken

from Molly and put in a children’s home; Molly never sees her again. Gracie never

returns to Jigalong. Daisy moves to another camp with her family. She trains as a

housemaid, marries, and has four children. Doris remains at the Moore River

Settlement until she’s twelve. Then she is sent to a Christian mission. Unwilling to

become a domestic worker, she trains as a nurse’s aide. She marries and has four

children. In the 1960s, she takes the children to meet Molly for the first time. When

her children are grown, she studies journalism and works as a researcher in

Aboriginal stories. She writes three books, one of which is Follow the Rabbit-Proof

Fence.


I. Choose the correct alternative

1) The Rabbit-Proof Fence is built to ------.

i. protect farmland from rabbits ii. protect Jigalong from Aboroginals

iii. navigate the whites to Jigalong iv. stop the entry of white settlers

2) The stolen-generation is ------.

i. Aboriginal children ii. Children of White settlers

iii. Half-caste children grew up in government settlements

iv. Children of Whites and Aboriginal peoples

3) The half-caste children are those whose ------.

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i. mother is white and father is black

ii. father is white and mother is black

iii. both parents are Aboriginals

iv. Both patterns are white settlers

4) The government sends the half-caste children to the Moore River

Settlement to ----

i. teach them Aboriginal culture

ii. give them proper schooling

iii. groom them into good human beings

iv. prepare them for British ways of life

5) The Rabbit-Proof Fence is located in ............. Australia.

i. Eastern ii. Northern

iii. Western iv. Southern

II) Answer in One Word.

1. Who are called as Indigenous people?

2. In which century did the British colonisers come to Australia?

3. Which is the common characteristic among the Aboriginal groups in

Australia?

4. Who referred the term ‘Stolen Generation’ to the half-caste children?

5. What is Jigalong?

1.7 Chapter-wise summary along with Critical Comments

Chapter 1

By choosing to start the book long before her mother’s story began, Pilkington

introduces the readers the history of colonialism in Australia. She also offers readers

a glimpse at Aboriginal life untainted by racism, cruelty, or colonialism.

Kundilla, the tall and dignified head of the Aboriginal tribe though is satisfied

with the place he has selected for his tribe’s winter camp is unaware of the

149

devastation and desolation which would soon ravage his peaceful tribe and way of

life. He takes pride in the rituals his family clan perform together on their shared

territory. Here Pilkington continues to imagine what Kundilla’s morning routine

must have been like, and how his ordinary life looked, before white settlers

descended upon his homeland. She shows the self-assured and dignified Kundilla in

a state of peace, tranquility, harmony, and prosperity in order to highlight the ways in

which the English settlers would ravage Aboriginal land and Aboriginal life,

decimating everything the Aboriginals had built for themselves over the course of

their long history.

Kundilla’s wife, Mardina when thinks of how her two teenage sons will soon

leave the camp to complete the rituals of tribal law which will turn them into men.

By giving readers insight into the thoughts of Kundilla’s wives, Pilkington further

demonstrates the pride and tranquillity of the Nyungar tribe at this point in their

history prior to the arrival of white settlers. The whole camp consists of about sixty

people – Kundilla’s family and their tribe who live in harmony with the land around

them. They live a nomadic lifestyle in which they roam from place to place,

sustaining themselves on the bounty of the vast and varied Australian continent

without depleting it. As Kundilla readies for a trip to the coast, suddenly, “an

ominous sound” echoes through the forest, shattering the tranquil atmosphere of the

camp. In this passage, Pilkington reveals that the seemingly tranquil existence of

Kundilla and his tribe has been interrupted before as well. Kundilla is aware of the

fearsome threat to his family and his people. The “raiders” have struck fear into the

hearts of the Aboriginals, and the idea that they have returned to inflict more

violence and destruction upon the Nyungar people is more than Kundilla can bear.

Kundilla seethes with anger as he remembers how “cruel and murderous men”

American whale hunters come ashore to kidnap Aboriginal women and keep them as

“sexual slaves” on their ships. However, the brave warriors of Kundilla’s tribe, the

Nyungar are no match for the whalers’ advanced weapons, which include muskets,

swords, and pistols. Kundilla is angry and terrified as he contemplates how

powerless he and his tribe are against the advanced weaponry of the invaders.

Kundilla’s desire to protect his family and his culture is intense, but he worries that it

is also futile in the face of such unstoppable violence.

When whalers and sealers first began arriving on the coast, Kundilla and his

tribesmen were friendly and welcoming, communicating through sign language with

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the white men and marvelling at the men’s sailing vessels. The Nyungar men offered

to take the sealers to collect birds’ eggs on a nearby island, as a show of welcome

and good faith. The white men took the Aboriginals over to the island by boat and

then left them there stranded; then they returned to the mainland, where they

ransacked the Nyungar camp and kidnapped six women. The cunning whalers and

sealers knew that the Nyungar people welcomed them with respect and kindness

because they considered them as ‘gengas’—spirits of their tribe’s ancestors. Kundilla

reflects on how he and his tribesmen were deeply deceived by the hunters the last

time they came ashore, when his men mistook the whalers’ cruelty for an act of

goodwill and charity. This example is just one of many which Pilkington will use

throughout the text to highlight the ways in which white settlers and later, the

Australian government cruelly took advantage of the Aboriginal people.

The loud “boom” which had just frightened the Nyungar, Pilkington reveals, had

come from a cannon salute. British soldiers, with orders to set up a military base and

deter more whalers and sealers from operating, were raising the Union Jack for the

very first time on the shores of Western Australia. Pilkington ominously describes

the cannon boom of the British soldiers' sinister sign for the Aboriginal people.

Kundilla and his sons reach the coast, and Kundilla admits to his children that he

is frightened. However, the generous behaviour of the pale men in ‘strange scarlet

jackets’ seems to be harmless to Kundilla. They all return to the camp to assure their

people that everything is all right. Kundilla’s fears seem to be assuaged at least for

the moment. Unfortunately, Kundilla cannot possibly foresee the terrible violence

and dispossession that these British colonists will perpetuate on the Australian

continent.

Chapter 2

In the opening of the chapter, Pilkington again begins with an idyllic scene of

Aboriginal life before the devastation wrought by white settlers, as if to underscore

the devastating effects of colonialism on the Aboriginal people. The chapter portrays

the camp at Borloo, in the tribal land of the chief Yellagonga. Yellagonga too is

anxious about the strange men, the ‘gengas’ who have been visiting the Aboriginal

land since long. Though Yellagonga’s grandfather had told him stories of the gengas,

Yellagonga insists that these gengas are different. He remembers an incident wherein

some tribesmen were asked to follow a group of white men to a nearby river. When

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they met Fremantle, the Captain of the ship, they were told in English that his British

government had advised him to meet with the tribesmen and seek their approval

before bestowing an English name upon their country. The tribesmen did not

understand what the English Captain, Fremantle was saying. However, Fremantle

thanked the men for their consent, and then announced that he was naming the land

Western Australia. He saluted the British flag, which his men had raised at their

encampment. Fremantle and his men thus take advantage of the language barrier

between themselves and the Nyungars. They appear to be seeking to have a

‘discussion’ with the Nyungar to obtain their consent to rename the land, but actually

the settlers are cruelly exploiting the fact that they have a practical advantage over

the Nyungar, and do not need, in reality, to obtain their spoken consent at all when

they can simply take whatever they want through coercion and violence.

Just as in the first chapter, Pilkington reveals that the Aboriginals were not

inexperienced to the threat of white invaders. The story Yellagonga shares with his

tribesmen is not one of bloody conquest or senseless rape and murder of his

tribeswomen and men, but it is just as insidious as it shows that the British were

slowly worming their way into the tribal landscape, and even acting falsely altruistic

toward the Aboriginals in order to gain their trust.

Yellagonaga when addressing his people tells them about the shipwreck and the

newly arrived whites. That time Yellagonga like Kundilla showed concern for the

whites. Pilkington foreshadows that, like Kundilla and his men, Yellagonga and his

tribe will be made to suffer.

Pilkington makes it clear that these people were the first European civilian

settlers. It was June of 1829, and Australia’s wet winter weather was a disappointing

for them The English settlers seemed surprised by the winter weather in the middle

of their summertime. Pilkington reveals that their ignorance of the Australian

continent and their disdain for the way things were there fuelled their violence,

derision and hatred for the Aboriginal people as they ravaged their land, culture and

traditions.

Pilkington describes a silent war between two captains James Stirling and

Charles Fremantle who both strived for the same band of Nyungar land as they

journeyed from England. Stirling soon found that Fremantle had taken formal

possession of one million square miles of land, naming his bounty Swan River

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Colony. Pilkington here highlights the greed and competitiveness of the English

settlers. They were so obsessed with amassing the land for themselves that they

completely discounted the fact that a thriving civilization already exists on this

strange continent and that their actions could destroy and eradicate that culture.

Chapter 3

Pilkington further details the way the English settlers flourished in the newly

grabbed land. The settlers who arrived with Captain Stirling had their pick of

Aboriginal land. The wealthiest and most influential were able to select the ‘best’

land, and were advised to keep up their Englishness and maintain English traditions.

As the colonists settled in, they spent their time in many fun activities. However,

while maintaining their own traditions the English were negligent about the ways by

which they were encroaching upon Aboriginal culture. The settlers lacked empathy

or concern for others, and relied upon the crafty mechanisms of colonization to

prosper while they ruined the land of their new colony’s indigenous population.

The Nyungar people as well as the entire Aboriginal population soon began to

realize that the arrival of the settlers meant the destruction of Nyungar society and

the dispossession of their lands. Yellagonga too was anxious about the future of

Nyungar’s survival and the destruction of the wilderness. When the Nyungars

attempted to hunt, they were sentenced under English law and taken away to Rottnest

Island Penal Colony. They were never seen again. While some could escape, many

Aboriginals were incarcerated unjustly for the rest of their lives. It was the fate of

many tribesmen, Pilkington writes. This 'passage' contains a motif that is repeated

throughout the novel - the tragic and horrifying pattern of cruelty against the

Aboriginals and their homeland by their colonizers.

In short, the settlers deprived the Nyungar of their food source, forced them to

commit ‘theft’ of their own resources, and then punished them with life

imprisonment. The English created laws which favoured their own interests while

they forbade the Aboriginals from carrying out their own traditional sacred laws.

However, the crafty English attempted to “pacify” the Aboriginals with gifts of food

and clothing. Being helpless against the English settlers, the Aboriginals soon learnt

to acknowledge the white man’s brutal strength and accepted meekly the cruel and

unusual white system of justice and punishment.

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Pilkington further describes the long-term effects of colonization across the

Australian continent. As the English settlers travelled farther inland, they conquered

every tribe they met. The Aboriginals, dispossessed of their land, their traditions, and

their families, attempted to find secret and sacred sites where they could still perform

their rituals and ceremonies. They were thus pushed out of their homelands and were

under the control of the settlers. Eventually their rituals faded from their collective

memory and the Aboriginal seasonal calendar was eventually forgotten.

The colonialists continued to take disadvantage of the threatened Aboriginals.

They were enslaved as the British could not afford to pay English servants the high

wages. However, the Aboriginals were paid only in food. As a further insult white

invader acknowledging the “sorry” fact that they had driven the Aboriginals off their

land and deprived them of their own culture began an annual distribution of blankets

to them. The false philanthropy with which the settlers attempted to make

compensations with the people they had slaughtered, imprisoned, and enslaved

reveals how inhumanly they treated the natives of Australia.

Chapter 4

Pilkington continues with the impact of the colonisation on the virgin Australian

land and its peoples. By the 1900s, Western Australia was developed into a

prosperous settlement, especially in terms of mining and agriculture. As the white

settlements flourished, they expanded farther into the countryside, wiping out even

more Aboriginal land. Soon, all arable land in the south-west, as well as the coastal

areas to the north of Perth, were occupied by white settlers. The original inhabitants

of this land, the Mardudjara were completely driven out as white settlers encroached

deeper and deeper into their territory. Gradually their power increased. Not only they

had superior weaponry and practical means to subjugate the Aboriginals, but they

established farms and mines which gave them greater power to continue on their path

of destruction and violation of Aboriginal land.

Pilkington writes that several tribes comprising the Mardudjara people, were

referred to as Mardu after their common language soon travelled towards Jigalong

where most Mardu people were working as stock-people or domestic help for the

white station owners. Pilkington writes that the Mardu saw this work as ‘a form of

kindness’ done to them by their white colonizers. The roots of colonialism thus grew

deeper and deeper into Australia with each passing year. Many Mardu began to move

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south, away from their ancestral lands, to the Jigalong Aboriginal community.

However, the violence of colonialism and the cruelty of their oppressors like assault,

rape, and murder which became more common, systematic and rampant made the

task of finding a new homeland difficult and dangerous. Desperate to ensure the

survival of their culture and traditions, the dispossessed Mardu risked everything in

order to reclaim their identities. Some Mardus, making their way to Jigalong,

encountered what they believed to be a ‘mardu’, a dangerous, flesh-eating spirit but

were surprised to discover just a man who was ‘neither black nor white’ but a muda-

muda, or a half-caste, born to a white man and an Aboriginal mother. The Mardus

were led by the half-caste men to a nearby station, where they settled and began

learning how to prepare “white man’s food.” The nomads further learnt that they

must clothe their naked bodies in the presence of white settlers, and this baffled them

altogether. As the nomads set out on their journey to find a place in which they could

safely practice their own way of life reclaiming their cultural identity in the process,

they were confronted with the new reality of their world. They found that many

Aboriginal people had been assimilated into white culture, and realized that they too,

must learn how to do so, at least to some extent, in order to survive in a world now

completely dominated by white men.

After two months, the group of nomads decided to move on as they planned to

walk east, to the rabbit-proof fence and then to the government outpost at Jigalong,

where they knew other members of their tribe had sought safety and protection. The

Mardu continued their journey, using the fence as a marker. By then they had learnt

about white customs and traditions but still were determined to reclaim their own

culture on a land which they could once again call their own. As the group moved

through the desert, they were joined by other groups of Mardu nomads who too were

heading towards Jigalong. The nomads trade stories among themselves about the

terrible events that had frightened and awed them all throughout the desert like -

white man’s food, clothing and the strange animals they had brought to their land -

cattle, sheep, foxes, horses, and rabbits. For them some of them were offensive,

much like the colonizers themselves.

Pilkington explains that rabbits in particular thrived and multiplied at such an

alarming rate in Australia that the government, in 1907 constructed a rabbit-proof

fence which ran north-to-south through Western Australia, and attempted to keep the

invasion of rabbits into Western Australia from the east at bay. In fact, the fence

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proved useless, as there were already more rabbits on the Western Australian side of

the fence than on the other side. The rabbit-proof fence serves as a symbol

throughout the text of the ridiculous way the British colonized the continent. They

did all they could do to eradicate anything that displeased them. Their treatment to

the rabbits in some ways reveals their dehumanizing treatment to the Aboriginals.

Towards the end of the chapter Pilkington talks about birth of Maude, her

grandmother, born at Jigalong to one of the women in the nomads called Minden.

Pilkington writes that Maude grew up in a loving environment playing with relatives

in nearby camps and exploring the wilderness around her. Pilkington introduces the

character of her grandmother, Maude, as part of a new generation who grew up under

the influence of racism and colonization.

Chapter 5

Jigalong, a government depot established in 1907, is used as a base for the

maintenance of men charged with attending to the rabbit-proof fence and keeping it

clear of brush, debris, and dead animals. The Superintendent of the Jigalong Depot is

also known as “Protector of Aborigines.” All Mardu people who come to Jigalong

from the desert were given food rations, clothing, tobacco, and blankets, and hence

the depot slowly began to arouse the curiosity of nomadic people nearby. Many were

sick and tired of struggling to find food in the bush, wish for a place they can sleep at

night without fear of being attacked by white men. Pilkington frames Jigalong as a

refuge from the danger that now exists all through the Australian outback. However,

though Jigalong seemed safe it was directly under the watchful eyes of the Australian

government. Pilkington here stresses the fact no place was actually safe for the

Aboriginals. By the 1930s Jigalong grew steadily and become a base camp for secret

and sacred rituals and ceremonies by tribal elders. The Mardu developed a semi-

nomadic lifestyle. Even though Jigalong was a government outpost, the Mardu

continued their cultural traditions and important ritual such as hunting and eating

communally.

Maude is betrothed to an older man from her tribe who in fact does not want to

marry Maude. Maude is secretly pleased, and glad to not be married off to someone

older. Maude likes her life as it is. She has been trained to work as a domestic help

for the Superintendent at the depot, Mr. Keeling and is known in Jigalong as a bright,

reliable, and intelligent girl. Maude evades her ancient cultural tradition and operates

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according to the new ‘world order’ at Jigalong in which Aboriginals and white

Australians live and work in closer proximity. Maude soon remains pregnant by

Thomas Craig, an Englishman, employed alongside Maude’s father as an inspector

of the rabbit-proof fence.

Maude thus sets a new precedent in this new world. She has a relationship with

a white man and gives birth to the first half-caste child, Molly who belongs to both

worlds or, perhaps, to neither. She is registered as the first half-caste child at Jigalong

station by the Superintendent, Mr. Killing. Molly grows up into a pretty little girl but

her Mardu playmates tease her for being outcast and for her light complexion.

However, soon she is joined by her muda-muda / half-caste cousins – Daisy and

Gracie. The growth in half-caste children indicate that muda-muda children no longer

is a novelty at Jigalong.

Mr. Killing informs the Department of Native Affairs about the girls’ presence

and of the fact that the blacks consider half-caste as inferior. Keeling writes that he

believes the girls would be better off if they were removed from Jigalong. Keeling’s

interference in the girls’ development is typical of the Australian government’s sense

of entitlement when it comes to meddling in the affairs of Aboriginal people, and

their relentless insistence that they know what is best for the people whose vibrant

way of life they have effectively destroyed.

As the half-caste children are born all over Australia, the government believes

that part-aboriginal children are more intelligent than their darker relations and hence

decides to isolate and train them to work as domestic servants and labourers at white

settlements. Internment camps, or “missions” are set up to improve the welfare and

educational needs of half-caste children. Pilkington writes that Molly, Gracie, and

Daisy were unaware of the government’s designs on them, even as patrol officers

travelled from station to station and routinely removed Aboriginal children from their

families and transported them to internment camps. The government’s racism is

evidenced by their belief that children who are partly white are more worthy of

education. The government wants to assimilate the half-caste children into Australian

society while still keeping them segregated in prison-like schools. The government

also wishes for the eradication of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal culture, and

believes it can achieve this goal. As years pass, the government keeps a watchful eye

on Molly, Daisy and Gracia while their parents attempt to shield them from capture

by rubbing ground charcoal all over the girls’ bodies to darken their skin. The girls’

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parents know that the girls are under surveillance, and hope that disguising them will

shield them from facing further violence, loss, dispossession, and erasure of their

culture. However, in July of 1930, fourteen year old Molly, eleven year old Daisy

and Gracia, just eight are taken away by the government as the girls’ families weep

and wail.

The girls are cruelly ripped away from their families, and Constable Riggs

knows that the Mardu are powerless to stop him. He also tells the girls not to bring

any of their possessions—an attempt to further divorce them from their identities,

and from any comforting memories of their home or their families. Riggs’s desperate

desire to remove all the half-castes reveals his desire for completion of his mission

and his betrayal of his role as a “protector” of the tribe. Molly’s white father,

Mr. Keeling is powerless to stop the capture.

Chapter 6

Molly, Gracie and Daisy are headed to the settlement at Fremantle and are

treated like cargo to various Constables who attend to them. They are completely

disoriented about the destination and are too exhausted to cry as they are subjected to

horrible and dehumanizing conditions. They travel by road as well as on ship. On

the ship, the girls receive kind treatment from the crew members who attempt to give

them knowledge and tools that will help them feel less frightened, lost, and alone.

Finally the girls arrive in Fremantle and head towards Perth Girls Home and from

there to the settlement at Moor River. None of the girls then realize that their fate is

entirely in the hands of the Department of Native Affairs and will never be able to

return to their families.

Pilkington cites two different letters which were sent through the Department of

Native Affairs concerning the girls’ welfare. One, from Mr. Keeling, the

superintendent at Jigalong Depot who advised the Chief Protector of Aborigines that

it was of no use removing the girls from their home. Pilkington writes that someone

must have read the letter, but no one responded. Another letter to Constable Riggs,

from the Chief Protector of Aborigines, states that the girls have been collected by

Matron Campbell and are on their way to the settlement, but that they are “very

scared of the other children and require watching to prevent them from running

away.” The letter concludes that the girls will surely “accept the inevitable” and fall

in line. Despite Mr. Keeling’s warning that removing the girls from their families to

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Moor River would not be serve the purpose, the government removed them from

their homes anyway. The government’s philanthropic agenda of protecting and

educating Aboriginal children does not actually consider children’s welfare.

Chapter 7

The trip to the settlement is laborious and stressful as the roads are wet due to

heavy rains. When the girls finally reach Moore River, it is dark. The girls are taken

to the wooden building which will be their dormitory. The girls notice, as they

approach, that the door to the building is covered in chains and padlocks, and that

there are bars on all the windows. For the girls the building looks just like a jail. The

entire atmosphere is definitely not like a school but a miserable concentration camp.

The girls spend their first night in a strange and unwelcoming new environment and

cling to one another, taking refuge in their shared background and the bond of

family. The next day a girl named Martha Jones guides them about the school and

assures that things at Moore River are not that bad, and that the girls will get used to

the place soon.

As the girls explore their new surroundings and pay even closer attention to

where they’ve wound up, they realize that they are in very strange and frightening

territory, the ‘marbu’ country. The inmates warn them to forget their native tongue

and speak in English. They are also told that the children who try to run away from

the establishment are locked up and left alone without food and tea for days in a

building called ‘boob’. Additionally, they are paraded around the camp with shaved

head and lashed with a strap. If anyone still tries to run away, the “black tracker”

always catches any runaways and returns them to the camp to be flogged and locked

up. Hearing about the violent punishments for runaways creates the dual effect on the

girls – it frightens them of punishments if they get caught and secondly necessitates

their escape even more strongly. Molly on the first night itself realizes that she and

her sisters must escape from the settlement at any cost. Pilkington demonstrates not

only Molly’s courageous and fearless spirit but also her heroic refusal to surrender

her language, culture, identity, and values despite many dangers and threats that

surround her.

Chapter 8

The girls’ first day of school is a dark, wet, cold morning. All the girls in their

dormitory are awakened at 5:30 a.m., and soon head to breakfast, then back to the

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dormitory again to wait for the school bell. Molly feels she is too grown up for

school, and this is just one of the many reasons why she feels she must get herself

and her sisters out of the settlement. After the school bell rings, Martha instructs the

three girls to follow her to school. However, Molly insists her to go ahead. As Molly

is determined not to even begin her “education” at Moore River, she has devised a

plan to get herself and her sisters out of the settlement though the consequences are

dire. As the other girls leave the dormitory, Molly draws her sisters close to her and

tells them to grab their bags as they are leaving, and going home to Jigalong.

Molly knows she must reclaim her destiny and find a way back to her family, far

away from the clutches of the settlement. Scared of the punishment, Gracie and

Daisy initially protest but Molly confidently convinces them that the journey home is

easy once they find the rabbit-proof fence which will take them to Jigalong. Molly

has learned from her father that the fence was installed from north to south for almost

the entire length of the country. Deeply homesick, Gracie and Daisy trust their elder

sister, Molly and agree to follow her lead. They begin their journey running for their

lives. They cross a deep river by finding a tree which has created a natural bridge

across the river. This first bridge symbolizes the providential relationship the girls

will have with nature as they undertake their quest. Pilkington points out the

“kinship” between Molly and the natural world and writes that it is Molly’s intimate

knowledge of the wilderness and how to survive in it that gets her, Gracie, and Daisy

through the rest of their ordeal. By locating the position of the sun, and the other

orientation skills she has gained through “knowledge of bushcraft”, Molly sets

herself and her sisters on the right path. The girls come to a sand plain and thickets of

acacia scratch their bare legs. Pilkington notes that the girls still continue their

journey happily investigating beautiful wildflowers, interesting and intriguing parts

of their vast continent. Despite all their prowess in nature, the girls are worried about

the trackers and hence use their knowledge for safety. They sleep soundly in rabbit

burrow during nights and nibble on some bread they nicked from breakfast, and

drink water from clear pools they find in the dunes. Little Gracie, the most fearful of

the group, is haunted by a nightmare in which a spirit comes for her and her sisters.

Again, Pilkington uses the girls’ fear of the mythical marbu to illustrate their general

fear of any pursuers as they realize the seriousness of their situation and the length of

the journey ahead of them.

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Molly’s assurance now and then gives the younger girls courage to move on.

The girls soon arrive at another branch of the Moore River and cross it precariously

along a wire fence. After passing through an area of bush land the girls encounter

two Mardu men who advise them to be careful of the terrain and of a Mardu tracker

who collects runaway girls from the bush. The men give the girls some food to eat,

as well as a box of matches and salt. It helps them sustain throughout the journey. In

this first instance of the girls’ reliance on the kindness of strangers, they are able to

meet and connect with other Mardu in the bush. Here, the girls’ identity and their

connection to their culture helps them in a different way than just providing them

with knowledge: they can communicate with and draw empathy from members of

their own tribe.

They faced ferocious animals, hunger, rough terrain, rain storms and oppressive

heat and, worse of all, the constant threat of being recaptured by the patrols that had

been sent out looking for them. They supplemented what food they were given by

trapping wild animals and eating whatever bush tuck they could find. The girls make

a plan to follow a routine whenever they reach a farmhouse or local station. Gracie

and Daisy approach the house and ask for food while Molly stays out of sight, where

she can watch them in case of any trouble. Along the way home the girls are helped

graciously by some strangers though they recognise them as runaway girls from the

Moor Settlement. Molly takes every effort to confuse the trackers if they are

informed by these strangers. They ask for food from farmers and then take off in the

wrong direction and then double back in case they are reported. Meanwhile news of

their escape and pleas for their capture spread like wildfire across Australia.

Pilkington heightens the drama of the narrative by highlighting the girls’ lack of

awareness of the danger they are in. During nights Molly is kept awake by thoughts

of how far the three of them still must travel. Molly, the eldest, reckons with the fact

that their families are still far away, and that the journey toward reclaiming their

destinies will be longer than she perhaps realized.

The girls soon reach a point in their trek at which things steadily become more

and more difficult, and the obstacles they face become clearer. Between the

voracious government authorities hunting them and the onset of physical distress, the

girls struggle to keep ahead of all the challenges that threaten to drag them back to

Moore River. The girls have now been on the run for a month, and they are tired,

sore, and disheartened. However, even in their most painful, desperate moment, the

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girls look out for one another, physically carrying one another to ensure they are safe

and able to carry on.

Finally, the girls reach the rabbit proof fence and feel a sense of relief and

renewal as they begin following the fence toward Jigalong. For the three girls,

Pilkington writes, the fence represents proximity to love, home, and security. Molly

excitedly tells her sisters that they are almost home, despite the fact that reaching the

fence is only the halfway point in their journey. The sight of the rabbit-proof fence

symbolizes that the girls’ journey to this point has been a success. Molly’s plan has

come to fruition, and in the depths of their pain and misery, there is at last a happy

end in sight. Though Molly knows there is still so much more ground to cover, she is

encouraged by the sight of the fence, and tries to make her sisters feell relived and

full of hope.

The tracker discontinues the search after only a short while as the tracking the

girls become difficult. Knowing that they are being hunted, the wily girls double

back on their own tracks in order to deceive anyone who might be hunting them.

They continue to stay one step ahead of their pursuers, taking careful measures to

ensure that nothing interferes with their journey home to their families. By the time

September rolls around. After five weeks in the bush, the girls are weary, but remain

determined. They eat emu chicks, as food in the bush is growing scarcer as they draw

further north, and continue to sleep under the cover of heavy brushes.

The government, frustrated by their inability to complete the seemingly simple

task of tracking down three young, defenseless girls, doubles down on their efforts

not out of a desire to help the girls, but out of a desire not to be embarrassed by them.

As the girls draw nearer and nearer to home in the days that follow, policemen grow

more and more desperate to close in on the girls, but are unable to close in on their

tracks. The girls’ journey reach a crucial point when they come upon a local station.

However, Gracie decides to depart from the group to meet her mother at Wiluna.

Though Molly and Daisy are devastated to separate from Gracie, they continue their

journey. Soon the girls reach a familiar cattle station where they meet their aunt who

greets them with both joy and sadness. Finally, the girls arrive at a kind of home base

completing their goal and get attention, affection, and care after days of hardship.

The next day the girls head towards their final destination Jigalong on a camel

accompanied by their cousin.

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It is October, they reach their homeland. The final part of the girls’ journey is

full of happiness and triumph. By the time the girls finally return to their families,

their journey has become an enormous metaphorical statement about the human need

to remain connected to family, culture, and identity in the face of racism,

dispossession, and cruelty. The next morning, their families move away from the

depot, with no intention of returning until they are certain that the government has

stopped looking for their daughters. The girls’ families had lost them once and now

they do everything in their power to ensure that they are not dispossessed of their

children once again. The girls are frightened of being returned to the Moore River

Native Settlement after such a long and arduous journey, and they are more than

aware that there are many government officials who would love nothing more than to

recapture them and send them back.

The Protector of Aborigines at the Jigalong Depot writes to A.O. Neville, Chief

Protector of Aborigines that the girls are safe and are camouflaged in the desert by

their families and that attempting to recover them now is futile. Though Molly is

sighted by Constable Riggs, she is not caught as she is proved to be quite a costly

affair to the government. However, the government shows interest in capturing Daisy

to save its reputation. Towards the end of the chapter, Pilkington reveals that

Gracie gets recaptured soon after returning to Wiluna and cannot meet her mother

ever. She is taken to the Moore River Native Settlement. Pilkington shows that

Gracie represents the countless Aboriginal people who forcefully disconnected with

their culture and had to adopt English ways of life.

Chapter 9

In the epilogue, Doris Pilkington reveals what becomes of her mother, Molly

and her two aunts, Gracie and Daisy in the years after their historic trek. Molly works

as a domestic help at Balfour Downs Station for many years. She is married and has

two daughters, Doris and Annabelle. In November of 1940, less than a decade after

her escape, Molly is once again taken to the Moore River Native Settlement along

with her two daughters. However, Molly’s intrepid spirit wins out again, when she

once again undertakes the same journey along with Annabelle, leaving Doris behind

in January of 1941. However, despite her efforts, both of her children - Doris and

Annabelle grew up in government settlements. Three years later Annabelle is taken

by the authorities, and Molly never meets ever. Molly still lives in Jigalong, and is an

active member of the community there.

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Gracie, after finishing her education at Moore River, where she is sent after

being recaptured at Wiluna, leaves the settlement and begins working as a domestic

helper on several different farms. She marries a young station hand and has six

children. After being separated from her husband, she passed away in 1983 without

ever having returned to Jigalong and meeting her family. The fact that Gracie never

returned to Jigalong is symbolic of the inability of most Aboriginals to ever return

home either to the land of their birth and childhood, or to the home of their true

cultural identity, unmarred by colonialism.

Daisy like Molly reunites with her family and they all move together to a town

south of Jigalong. She is trained as a house maid, like Molly and Gracie and marries

a station hand with whom she has four children. After her husband passes away,

Daisy works as a housekeeper at a mission. Pilkington says that Daisy is still alive,

and lives with her children and their families in Jigalong. She is the only one who

manages to evade recapture. Pilkington credits Daisy’s love for storytelling, vivid

memory, and zest for life which helped her to complete Follow the Rabbit-Proof

Fence. Pilkington contrasts Daisy’s life with the countless numbers of Aboriginal

children who were not as fortunate and who were made to suffer in settlements like

Moore River until as late as the 1970s.

The girl, Molly, Pilkington’s mother who successfully completed the historic

nine weeks trek along with her sisters is now in her late seventies. The trek across

Australia is one of the longest in the recorded history of the country and certainly the

longest that was accomplished barefooted. Pilkington is in awe of her mother, whose

journey through the bush was an “incredible achievement”. Pilkington’s reverence

for her mother’s spirit mirrors her reverence for the endurance of the Aboriginal

people. Despite centuries of unspeakable violence and cruelty, Pilkington’s mother’s

story ends on a note of hope for the ability to reclaim one’s fate in the face of

oppressive and inhuman colonial rule.

1.8 Critical Comments on the Themes

1.8.1 Racism and Colonialism

English settlers claimed Australia as a British colony in the late 1700s, marking

the beginning of a long and treacherous process of displacement and extermination of

Australia’s indigenous people, the Aboriginals. In Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence,

Pilkington marks that in the early days of colonization many Aboriginal tribes

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believed their colonizers to be spirits / gengas rather than human beings, and thus

underestimated or failed to understand what a grave threat colonizers will pose to

their land, culture, and lives in future. British colonizers not only killed and enslaved

Aboriginal people systematically they also systematically destroyed Aboriginal

culture, forbidding Aborigines to speak their own languages, practice their own

traditional laws, and perform their tribes’ sacred rituals. In examining the effects of

racism and colonialism on her own family’s history, Pilkington shows how the

English tried repeatedly to skew their actions as beneficial to Australia’s indigenous

population. This attitude led to the creation of government settlements like Moore

River Settlement described in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, where half-caste

children were held in captivity with the intention of being forcibly assimilated into

white society.

In their records, English colonizers frequently described the ways they deprived

their black servants of wages and dignity, paid them little rice and assured

themselves that the Aboriginals were grateful for small things. Moreover the whites

kept relations with the Aboriginal girls and who gave birth to half-caste children.

These children were later sent to government settlements such as the Moore River

Settlement, where Pilkington’s mother Molly along with her sisters Daisy and Gracie

were sent as young girls. The children of this “Stolen Generation” were constantly

being surveilled by officials from the Department of Native Affairs, who saw the

ever-increasing numbers of half-caste children in Australia as a threat to white

supremacy. As a result, government officials separated as many part-Aboriginal

children from their families as they could, forcing them into settlements where they

would be “educated” and distanced from their Native roots.

Pilkington writes about her mother and aunt’s escape from the settlement and

their return home, after which A.O. Neville wrote a letter in which he stated, that it

was a pity that the young girls went ‘native’ and ought to have been brought in years

ago. Neville’s letter highlights the sinister ways in which white Australians masked

the violence of their actions, hiding behind titles like “protector” and feigning

benevolence and “pity” even as they expressed feelings of ownership of and disgust

for the Aboriginals. Racist attitudes such as these perpetuated the mechanisms of

Aboriginal oppression and confinement until the mid1970s, still just seven years

after Aboriginals were granted equal rights in 1967.

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The racism faced by Doris Pilkington’s family and virtually all other Aboriginal

people at the hands of white Australians is rooted in the colonialist practice of

exploiting and eventually eradicating entire peoples and cultures under the banner of

“civilization.” Pilkington’s book situates the far-reaching effects of racism and

colonialism within the history of Australia, and the much longer history of the

Aboriginal people.

1.8.2 Family, Culture and Identity

Despite the loss, sorrow, racism, and dispossession which mark Doris

Pilkington’s family history, a strong and resilient sense of collective identity is

ultimately what spurred Molly, Gracie and Daisy to escape captivity and undertake

the long and dangerous journey homeward. Along the way, it was the girls’ culture

that is, their people’s customs, traditions, and intimate relationship with the natural

world which enabled them to survive in the hostile Australian bush. As she describes

the cultural foundation which shaped the lives of her mother, aunt, and cousin,

Pilkington argues that even when the cultural identity of a group is threatened with

removal, a strong sense of shared identity has the power to act as a beacon of hope

that can light the path “home.”

The imperialist English settlers who first descended upon Australia murdered,

raped, and otherwise decimated the Aboriginal populations of the continent. Once

their dominance over the Aboriginals was complete—achieved through more

advanced technology and weaponry—English colonizers began not only to enslave

and torture the Aboriginals, but to systematically destroy their culture by forbidding

them to speak their own languages, practice their own laws and rituals, and live on

their own ancestral and sacred lands. This decimation of Aboriginal identity is felt

deeply by Pilkington’s family, who live in Jigalong—a government outpost

established in the early 1900s, which attracted nomadic peoples from the desert

whose traditional food supplies had been lost or destroyed by imperialism. Jigalong

thus became a “sitting down place” for many Aboriginal peoples, a “base camp for

holding sacred and secret ceremonies,” and a permanent home for an Aboriginal

group whose culture and traditions had, for centuries, been nomadic.

Molly, Pilkington’s mother and the protagonist of the story was the first half-

caste child born amongst the Jigalong Aboriginals, though many mixed-race children

would be born there in the years to come. As the Aboriginals who settled in Jigalong

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were forced to adapt their nomadic culture to new conditions, interactions between

the members of the tribe and the white Australians living nearby similarly began to

deviate from the established norm. As more and more-half caste children were born

and then taken away, the mothers of these children grew increasingly aware and

frightened of the ‘re-education’ that their young ones would undergo, and the ways

in which this stood to weaken any meaningful sense of shared cultural identity.

When fifteen-year-old Molly, her eleven-year-old sister Daisy, and their younger

cousin Gracie were taken away, shortly after an official from a nearby station wrote

to the Chief Protector of Aborigines that the girls were “running wild with the

whites”, they were placed in an internment camp disguised as a school. Subjected to

despicable, prison-like conditions and barred from speaking their native language,

the girls decided to flee for home. The eldest, Molly, devised a plan to make the

thousand-mile trek through the bush by following the rabbit-proof fence, a fence

which had been constructed to keep invasive wild rabbit populations away from

Western Australian civilization. As the girls traversed the bush, they relied upon their

cultural education, the ones their families had given them to survive the journey

home. Trapping rabbits and other animals for food, finding hiding places, navigating

the bush, and looking out for one another’s safety and well-being were skills and

lessons that had been instilled in the girls from their youth, and they used this

knowledge to light their path home.

Though white Australians were attempting to conduct a cultural genocide on a

massive scale through the creation of internment camps such as Moore River and

through the removal of mixed-race children from the homes of their families, Molly,

Gracie, and Daisy expressed unflagging allegiance to and security in their familial

and cultural identities. Pilkington highlights the girls’ shared and firm sense of

identity, and their deft, willful use of all they learned from their culture, as

instrumental in their escape from the shackles of forced assimilation. Through Molly,

Gracie, and Daisy’s story, Pilkington makes a case for the resilience, necessity, and

beauty of familial and cultural identity.

1.8.3 Altruism vs. Cruelty

Throughout Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Pilkington examines the line

between altruism and cruelty. As she reproduces communications sent between

members of the Australian government, and imagines interactions between

government officials and the half-caste children they were tasked with capturing,

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however, this line sometimes becomes blurry. The cruelty of the Australian

government’s campaign to forcibly assimilate—even eradicate—Aboriginal culture

is undeniable, but by disguising their actions under the cover of altruism and

“protection,” the government was able to surveil and control Aboriginal communities

by confining them to “schools” and “settlements” that were effectively internment

camps until well into the twentieth century.

In the early 1900s, the Australian government sought to pacify the Aboriginal

people by handing out rations, blankets, and other supplies. Government officials and

civilians alike marveled at the “gratitude” with which Aboriginal people received

these meager, half-hearted reparations, and wrote mournfully in letters and

newspaper articles of the “dispossession” of the “once-numerous” tribes. These

meager attempts as compensation, an insult to the Aboriginal people, were really

designed to pacify not the Aboriginals but the Australians, allowing them to feel

slightly better about the destruction, violence, and chaos they had unleashed upon the

continent, as well as the government’s ongoing systemic subjugation of Aboriginal

people. The insidiousness and cruelty of such unthinking shows of pretentious

altruism is a major concern of Pilkington’s book, and she teases this theme out, as the

book progresses, through the characters she reimagines and recreates.

Doris Pilkington was herself raised at the Moore River Native Settlement, and

has said in interviews that she did not realize the true nature of the place she came to

see as her home or the true role of “protectors” like A.O. Neville and constable Riggs

until long after she had left the settlement. The irony of bestowing the title of

“protector” upon men whose role in their local governments was to hunt down, round

up, and forcibly remove half-caste children from their families is profound

throughout the text. In their letters to one another, these “protectors” discuss what to

do with the children they are charged with monitoring in disdainful language.

Officials abduct the girls Molly, Gracie and Daisy from their homes and transport

them thousands of miles away without any concern for the damaging effect this

forced separation will have on the girls. When a constable charged with watching

Molly, Gracie, and Daisy becomes otherwise occupied, he leaves them in a jail cell

for several days while they await passage south to Fremantle. The government often

labeled these government officials as “protectors” of Aboriginal people, but charged

them with undertaking duties and tasks which actively caused harm and trauma to

them, and perpetuated the cycles of loss and dispossession which had already

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plagued the Aboriginal people for centuries, since the arrival of the very first white

settlers.

Mrs. Flanagan, is perhaps the character most emblematic of the sometimes

deceptive boundary between altruism and cruelty. When Molly, Daisy, and Gracie,

nearly halfway through their trek through the bush, approach Mrs. Flanagan’s

farmhouse starving and in rags, she feeds the girls, clothes them, and sends them on

their way with sacks of food, sweets, and supplies for the journey ahead. While the

girls are in Mrs. Flanagan’s house, she assures them that she will not report them to

the authorities, and she asks them questions about their journey so far and their

ultimate destination. When the girls depart, Mrs. Flanagan, watching them go,

decides that it’s unsafe for the girls to go off into the bush alone. Out of a sense of

“duty,” Mrs. Flanagan calls her local superintendent and reports the girls, including

information about their ultimate destination: Jigalong by way of the rabbit-proof

fence. Mrs. Flanagan is satisfied with herself, proud of her “altruistic” decision, but

unaware of the devastating effect that her phone call might have on the girls’ futures.

Pilkington leaves it up to the readers to decide for themselves whether Mrs. Flanagan

was acting out of cruel, racist motivations, or whether she truly saw herself as an

altruist concerned with the girls’ safety.

In cases like Mrs. Flanagan’s, altruism is, in effect, cruelty. Even if readers are

to believe that A.O. Neville, Constable Riggs, Mrs. Flanagan, and the assorted

government officials who hunt the girls through the bush were all acting out of a

genuinely altruistic desire to protect the girls, Pilkington shows how even such

“altruistic” actions on the part of white Australians repeatedly led to experiences of

unspeakable suffering and hardship for Aboriginals.

1.9 Critical Comments on the Symbolism

1.9.1 Rabbit-proof Fence:

The Rabbit-proof fence stretches 3256 kilometers from south coast to northwest

coast in Western Australia. Fence is always considered as a symbol of prohibition on

freedom. When the white settlers arrived the new land, the first thing they did was

they built “the great fences of Australia”, and then overpowered the aboriginal

people. In fact, the aim was to restrict the rabbits from invading Western Australia

which they could not do. However, later it was used to restrict the movements of the

Aboriginals. The fence not only ruined the natives’ lifestyle but it compelled them to

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follow the white men’s rules. In the book the fence symbolizes exploitation where

the oppressors, the whites exploited the Aboriginals and made their survival

impossible on their own land. The fence categorically highlights the split between the

European and Aboriginal culture.

1.9.2 The Journey

The journey of 1,600 kilometers undertaken by the girls symbolizes the resolve

and courage in the Aboriginals to defy the English settlers and show the English that

if natives are determined to break their rule, they can. It also reveals endurance of the

Aboriginal people who despite centuries of unspeakable violence and cruelty, nurture

the hope for the ability to reclaim their fate in the face of oppressive and inhuman

colonial rule.

1.9.3 Moore River Native Settlement

The Moore River Native Settlement where the Aboriginal half-caste children are

brought symbolizes confinement. In fact the settlement which was originally

intended to be a self-supporting farming community was soon morphed into a

welfare hostel for half-caste children. The goal of the Whites was to integrate half-

caste children into western society by teaching and preparing them for English ways

of life. However, the settlement gave rise to the Stolen Generation who lost their

families, language, traditions and identity as the natives of Australia.

1.10 Key to Check Your Progress

I) Choose the correct alternative.

1) i. protect farmland from rabbits

2) iii. Half-caste children grew up in government settlements

3) ii. father is white and mother is black

4) iv. prepare them for British ways of life

5) iii. Western

II) Answer in One Word.

1. Ethnic groups who are the original or earliest known inhabitants of an area.

2. Around the end of the eighteenth century.

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3. ‘Stories of the Dreaming’.

4. Historian Peter Read

5. A government depot built for the men who maintained the rabbit-proof

fence.

1.12 Exercises

1. Elucidate the development of Aboriginal Australian Literature.

2. Discuss the term ‘Stolen Generation’.

3. Write in detail the adventurous journey of the girls to their native place.

4. Sketch the character of Molly.

5. Write a note on the significance of rabbit-proof fence in the novel.

6. How does Pilkington discuss the cultural clash between the white settlers and

the Aboriginals in the novel?

7. Comment on the significance of the novel Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence to

Doris Pilkington.

8. Discuss symbolism in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.

9. Discuss various themes in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.

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Unit-2

Postcolonial African Short Stories

Selected stories from Jump and Other Stories (1991) by Nadine Gordimer

i) Jump

ii) My Father Leaves Home

iii) A Journey

2.0 Objectives:

After studying this unit you will be able to:

1. Understand Nadine Gordimer as a postcolonial African short story writer

2. Explain the settings, narrative techniques, themes and characterisation

in Nadine Gordimer’s short stories

3. Find relationship between the post-apartheid society and literature

2.1 Introduction:

To begin with, we would briefly refer to the terms ‘colonialism’ and ‘post-

colonialism’. Colonialism is the conquest and control of other people's land and

resources. It dates back to second century Roman Empire. Colonialism in its newest

form continued till middle of the twentieth century in countries in Asia, Africa and

America. The European Powers not only controlled the people of these countries but

also their lands and resources badly altering the economies of the natives. For

example, the British exported cotton grown in India to Britain and the clothes

manufactured in Britain were sold to Indians. This in a way ruined the traditional

handloom industry in India. Along with the movement of goods, the European

Powers moved merchants, missionaries, administrators and soldiers to the colonized

land. Furthermore, these colonial conquests were followed by religious and socio-

cultural activities. Here the colonizers considered themselves superiors to the

colonized people. They were on a civilizing mission. The colonized were made to

see themselves inferior with respect to economy, culture, religion and society. This

in a way affected the psyche and the consciousness of the colonized people.

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Now let us have a look at the term ‘Post-colonialism’. The term ‘post’ means

after. However, this phase doesn’t indicate the end of colonialism. Post-colonialism

is basically the scenario after the colonised people got political independence from

the colonizers. The cultural and economic independence is not envisaged here. The

rise of new economic powers like the United States of America (USA) changed the

socio-political scenario of the twentieth century world. The USA was never a

colonizer. The process of decolonisation is different to the USA or Australia, for

instance, than the process of decolonisation in an Asian or an African country. The

issues of race and gender come into force. In India, all the citizens are not equal

beneficiaries of political independence. Yet some communities are marginalized.

Similarly, in South Africa, the British people practised apartheid – discrimination

between the Whites and the African races – even after political independence. Thus,

‘post-colonialism’ remains a complex term to be defined in the context of African

countries.

Literary works not only portray the context in which the literature is produced

but also represent contemporary society and its power structure. There is a close and

complex relationship between literature and politics. The European colonizers

juxtaposed ‘white’ with ‘black’. They claimed that black was ugly and related it to

the culture of Africans. The European culture was presented as superior culture while

the culture of the natives was labelled as inferior. The African writers are linked to

the politics in one way or the other. For instance, Nadine Gordimer, a white South

African woman writer, was a member of African National Congress (ANC).

Modern African Literature has emerged from the colonial encounter between

Europe and Africa. It reminds the African people of the injustice done to them by the

colonial powers. Nineteen century African literature dealt with the lives of slaves.

Liberation and independence were the major topics of African literature produced

during the colonial period. Most of the African literature has been published in the

second half of twentieth century. South African Literature is a wing of African

literature. Black as well as white writers with diverse backgrounds have contributed

to South African Literature. South African literature is a kind of confrontation

between two dissimilar civilisations. It is more or less a conflict between the

conquerors and the conquered or the victimizers and the victims. Some African

writers have tried to erase the prejudices of the European powers through their

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writings. One of such writers is Nadine Gordimer. She occupies a pride of place

among South African writers.

Nadine Gordimer, a South African white writer, was born in 1923 in South

Africa to a Jewish father from the East European country and British mother. Her

father was a watch-maker, who shifted to South Africa in search of a fortune. At the

very early stage of her life she came to know about racial discrimination.

Consequently, in the later phase of her life, Gordimer become an opponent of

injustice to the native Africans by the white rulers. She was not only an anti-

apartheid crusader but also a human right activist. Her experiences find a place in her

literary creations. It is difficult for a white writer to show solidarity with the black

Africans. Through her writings, we are able to understand that apartheid is an

integral part of South African life. Her literary works reflect her concern for racial

and political issues in South Africa. Gordimer has many novels, short stories and

essays to her credit. Some of her well known novels are The Lying Days (1953), A

World of Strangers (1958), A Guest of Honour (1971), The Conservationist (1974),

Burger’s Daughter (1979), July’s People (1981), My Son’s Story (1990) and None to

Accompany Me (1994). Gordimer has written over two hundred short stories. Her

short story collections include Face to Face (1949), Six Feet of the Country (1956),

Not for Publication (1965), A Soldier’s Embrace (1980), Something Out There

(1984), Reflections of South Africa (1986), Jump and Other Stories (1991) and Loot

and Other Stories (2003).

Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She died in 2014.

Short story as a literary form became popular in the twentieth century mainly

due to its compactness. Features like minimum number of characters and focus on a

single incident in the life of the main character attracted the writers and readers alike.

The form not only gave scope for the outward description but also a chance to peep

into the minds of the main characters. The form is one of the apt vehicles to deftly

depict the postcolonial scenario. The features of African short stories and those of the

stories by Nadine Gordimer can be studied through the representative short stories

from the collection Jump and Other Stories.

First published in 1991, Jump and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen short

stories written by Nadine Gordimer. The major happenings in these stories take place

in South Africa and Europe. Especially, white characters portrayed by Gordimer

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move across the continents. The stories are set in the late 1980s when the apartheid

was on the verge of abolishment. The events in these stories exhibit the characteristic

of the times. The collection helps us to understand Africa, its people and their

culture. The collection explores what family life and human values have in common

across Africa and Europe. The stories in this collection also deal with racial tension.

Most of the stories focus on individual characters. Political rivalry and decision

making ability are the major reasons in shaping of the main characters of Gordimer’s

stories. The decline in personal relationships is one of the main themes of the stories

in this collection.

Now we will see briefly the selected stories Jump, My Father Leaves Home and

A Journey.

2.2 Section – 1

Jump

Introduction

According to Lazar (1996: 785) Gordimer always chooses the order of the

stories in her anthologies. Her first story often sets the tone for rest of the stories in

the collection. The story "Jump" introduces many aspects of the whole collection.

Story in Brief

Jump

The story begins with the protagonist put in a well-furnished room of HOTEL

LEBUVU equipped with a telephone and a television set installed in the room

accompanied by a good quality cassette player. He is listening to a music track from

a film about an American soldier in Vietnam. He was also provided with a girl to

cook and love-making.

He is aware that he himself is both the hero and the criminal. In an attempt to

alter his previous identity, he had shaved off his beard. He smokes imported brands

of cigarettes. Initially he was offered whisky, but it was stopped now.

He remembers the deal. He was promised everything he wanted. But the deal

was not honoured. He was not provided with a house with a garden, a watchman and

a car. He expected that taking into account his international experience he would be

rehabilitated in the information and public relations department.

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He was presented in a press conference clean shaven with neat haircut in slightly

shiny tropical trousers. Along with the tin-pot African television crew, the BBC,

CBS, Antenne 2, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen were invited for the presser. In the

presence of the higher authorities like the Commander of the Armed Forces and the

Minister of Defence he told his story. He had told his story repeatedly to everyone

during the probe, the debriefing and the interviews.

He had spent his childhood in the capital of an African country. He was an

ordinary colonial child of parents who had come out from Europe to find a better life

where it was warm and there were opportunities. His parents were neither interested

in politics nor in the blacks. He grew up playing adventurous play which meant little

for the blacks. As an adolescent he had joined a parachute club and jumped – the rite

of passage into manhood.

His father was a lower ranked civil servant. His parents expected him to be an

accountant. He apprenticed as a draughtsman to an architect. In addition to jumping

from the sky, his weekend hobby was photography. He raised his pocket money by

selling amusing shots of animals and birds to a local newspaper.

In an overnight revolution, there was change in the guard and the blacks came to

power. The country where he was born earlier ruled by the whites, was taken back by

the blacks. He hated the blacks and their regime.

Once when he took a photograph of a sea-bird alighting on some sort of tower

structure, soldiers with machine guns had captured him, smashed his camera and

locked him up like a black. He was a potential threat to the new government. He was

detained for five weeks in a dirty cell. His parents learnt that their innocent boy only

two years out of school was an imperialist spy. His parents had appealed the white

people to get him released. When he was put in prison by the blacks, the whites had

released him recognizing his invaluable qualities. He could photograph anything he

liked, even a military installation of interest to the new State’s enemies. Besides, he

had a gift of language. As a result, he worked for the whites. In the day he worked as

a draughtsman while in the night he went to clandestine meetings. He felt patriotic.

His white parents thanked God as according to them he was safe in a good company

of the whites. They were proud when told their son was being sent to Europe to

study. The protagonist was aware that his parents must have realized that he was not

studying in Europe. His parents never made any effort to jeopardize the opportunities

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they were not able to provide him. He used to phone his mother every third day in

the European city to which she and his father had returned when the people who

knew about these things said it was time to go.

The whites were the people of substance. He was involved in their confidential

and complicated international business. He always used to travel to France,

Germany, Switzerland and other unspecified destinations on the European Mission.

The whites had provided him with one of the finest houses with a full-time house

maid. It was office-cum-residence with the latest forms of telecommunication. He

was provided with the bulky fatigues, the boots and the beret. As the protagonist had

disappeared without informing his parents, they had thought he was dead. After two

months he had rang his mother to tell her that he was alive. He had secretly

disappeared giving up the house with the telecommunications systems and the maid.

He had planned the blowing up of trains, the mining of roads and the massacre of

sleeping villagers.

After he surrendered to the blacks, he rang his mother and enquired about his

father’s health in the European winter and whether they need money (Money was

provided to him to send to his parents who were deprived of their position – that was

part of the deal.). She avoided talking about the summer in Africa. His parents had

failed to understand his life. They repented his upbringing. When the parents had

learnt about his capture by the black government, they had blamed their decision of

allowing their son to join parachute club with his young white friends. In a letter

written to him, his mother had questioned the God for punishing them in such a

manner.

In the weeks of debriefing and in the press conferences when repeatedly asked

about his association with the murderous horde, he had provided the details about his

European missions and destabilization.

He used to travel on European missions with the beard, the fatigues and the

beret. He took flights to campaign for support from multinational companies

interested in access to the oil and minerals the blacks were giving to their rivals. For

destabilization, he had got support from the neighbouring white State – a huge airlift

of supplies, planes – military support – a training base for the rebel army of the white

group and in the use of advanced weapons and strategy. He was assigned the task to

go to that State and to meet the Commander of National Security and Special

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Services and seek their co-operation is destabilization – to win the war, stabilize by

destabilization and set up a regime of peace and justice.

He had slowly understood the meaning of destabilization and the horror of the

war. He had seen the male refugees captured at the border were made to join the

forces and were put back over the border to die. Their villages burned, their families

hacked to death. The disinformation regarding violence was not communicated to the

whites at the base. Through the training received at the base, the secret radio station,

latest weapon made available, the boots and uniforms made in the factories of the

allies the protagonist had understood that destabilization was nothing but a kind of

war. He had also understood the brutality of war. The girls of twelve or thirteen were

brought in planes for the men receiving military training at the base. He had learnt

that the army of the whites had become a murderous horde that burned hospitals, cut

off the ears of villagers, raped, blew up trains full of workers.

The protagonist would see the results of his European mission through the hotel

window - beggared streets, people living in the apartments previously owned by the

white people now without electricity, water and glass in the windows.

After going through the trauma of guilt, one day the bearded protagonist in the

white rebel army’s outfit, had surrendered to the black regime’s representatives in a

European city. He was ready to share the information about the white rebel outfit

including atrocities, its allies, its sources of supply and secret bases.

In the hotel room, the protagonist listened to his confession tape-recorded during

the press conferences. The protagonist equates debriefing with destabilization. The

things promised in the deal were not honoured. He was in the custody of the black

regime for more than six months. His movements were not restricted and as the

debriefing was over, he was of no use to them. He spends time in the hotel with the

girl provided to him. She invites him to go out to the beach. He is not ready.

He had turned into a chain smoker. He goes to the window of the sixth floor of

the hotel and notices the beggared city, the orphaned children and men without ears.

He contemplates jumping from the window, but avoids doing so.

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Analysis of Jump

Setting

The story is set against the political activities in an African country. It is a kind

of war of the white rebels to overthrow the blacks. The underground activities of the

whites aim to destabilize the black regime. The main happenings in the story ‘Jump’

take place in Africa and Europe. The protagonist was put at a well-furnished hotel

room in Africa after the debriefing. It was a kind of safe house for him. He was

provided with food and a young girl to fulfil his physical needs. In this setting, the

author acquaints us with the protagonist’s past, his destructive activities, the deal

promised to him and his lavish lifestyle.

Here Europe is not only the place where the parents of the protagonist reside

after his father’s retirement, but also a place to plan activities leading to destabilize

the black government. He was stationed at an office-cum-residence equipped with

the latest forms of telecommunication in a European city. His visits to European

countries to seek help for the black deeds of the white rebel army are also suggestive

of the role of Europe in the violence in African countries.

Thus, Gordimer’s familiarity with the lifestyle of the whites is reflected in this story.

Narrative Technique

Every happening is the story is told to us by the omniscient narrator, i.e. the

author. The narration in the beginning of the story is in third person.

“He is aware of being finally reached within all this as in a film a series of

dissolves passes the camera through walls to find a single figure, the hero, the

criminal. Himself.” (p. 3).

Even the protagonist’s confession is not in the first person narration. Gordimer’s

narration in this story is not a linear one. In this story the narrator jumps from present

to past, to the upbringing of the protagonist in an African town, to the present

situation at the hotel, to the press conference held in the recent past and to present

abandonment of the protagonist by the representatives of the black government.

The readers have to always remain alert to know when the narrator is talking

about the present situation and when the protagonist is sharing a past experience. The

shifts in the present and the past in the narration allow the author not only to detach

herself from the happenings but also to comment on the happenings. The narrative

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technique used by Gordimer acquaints us to the protagonist’s awareness of the

consequences of his involvement in the violent activities and increase in his guilt

consciousness.

Thus, Gordimer’s narrative technique, employed in this story, succeeds in

acquainting the readers with the psychology of the protagonist and his understanding

of destabilisation and debriefing.

Symbols and Images

In her writings, Gordimer uses symbols and images very effectively. Some of

the examples from this story are – the beard, the parachute jump and the congealed

egg. The beard of the protagonist in the story is a symbol of male prowess. The

‘parachute jump’ symbolizes the passage of a child into the male world of violence.

The image of a congealed egg indicates the existence of the protagonist in isolation,

post-confession.

The ‘Jump’ Metaphor and the title

The metaphor of jump has been effectively presented in the story on different

levels. When as a boy, the protagonist jumps with a parachute, in this physical jump

he is able to overcome fear of jumping. In the later part of his life the same jump

turns to be a jump into a male world of violence and death. Thus the title ‘Jump’ not

only refers to the boy’s jump with the parachute but also indicates a teenager’s shift

in the world of a man. Nadine Gordimer successfully extends this metaphor further

by making her protagonist to courageously face a press conference and reveal his

involvement in the activities to destabilize the black regime. But at the end of the

story, she doesn’t make the same protagonist to jump from the window of the sixth

floor of a hotel. It could have been the suicidal jump - an act of cowardice. Here the

courage shown in the first jump with a parachute is absent. The people are all around

him. Perhaps he is saving his life to see the fulfilment of promises made to him in the

deal.

The End of the story

The story ends with the protagonist standing at the window of sixth floor of a

hotel contemplating suicidal jump. He had confessed everything in the press

conference and hence he is neither required by the media and nor of any use to the

representatives of the black government. He is left in the hotel room just with a

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female companion to satisfy his lust. He is psychologically tormented on his

participation in the atrocities on the African people and the consequences he is able

to see from the window of his hotel room. Thus he reflects on his past and the

present. Now he thinks there is no manliness in jumping from the hotel window.

To put an end to his misery he contemplates jumping down from the sixth floor.

Though he feels that his life is no more worthy of living, he dares not to commit

suicide. Perhaps, his mind is oscillating between his guilt consciousness and probable

rehabilitation (waiting for fulfilment of the promises made to him in the deal –

mainly a house and a car).

Themes

The theme of apartheid

The conflict depicted in this story is between the white rebels and the black

government. The whites are trying to regain power in the erstwhile colony now ruled

by the blacks. As a supporter of apartheid, the protagonist was actively involved in

the brutality - the massacre of the villagers and rapes of the very young black girls.

Pained by the atrocities on the blacks, this white protagonist later on turns anti-

apartheid. As we know Nadine Gordimer was active in anti-apartheid movement, her

views are reflected through her stories. We may consider her literary works as

‘literature of protest’– a white author writing against the white rulers.

On the other hand, though the story has a political background, Gordimer’s

political leanings are not reflected in this story. She was a member of ANC. Besides,

Nadine Gordimer tries to tell the readers that there was no difference in the white

outfit and the black government. The whites had provided the protagonist an office-

cum-residence equipped with the latest forms of telecommunication. They had also

provided a full-time house maid. Similarly, the blacks had put him in a hotel with

well furnished room equipped with a telephone. He was provided with a girl to cook

and love-making.

The Theme of Violence

The story ‘Jump’ mentions many violent activities. Initially, the protagonist is

involved in the planning and execution of violent activities against the blacks such as

blowing up the trains carrying innocent workers and killing the villagers - black

deeds of the whites to regain power. Thus, staying in the background and supported

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by the neighbouring white state, he orders murder, bloodshed and violence. Being a

staunch supporter of apartheid, he carries out such activities in order to destabilize

the black rule. There was a paradox. The whites were trying to set up a regime of

peace and justice by using violent means. Here, the author tries to communicate that

when in or out of power; ‘violence’ is a weapon of the whites to dominate the

colonized.

Gordimer makes the readers to witness the inner turmoil of the white man who

indulges in the acts of violence. After gradually realizing the horrifying

consequences of the violent activities like the beggared city, the orphaned children

and the men without ears, the protagonist feels guilty of his involvement in the

atrocities against the blacks and he decides to come clean.

The story describes how the war affects the people on both sides of the fight.

The fallout of violence is one of the major factors which transforms the protagonist

in this story.

The theme of Betrayal

The motif of betrayal plays an important role in the development of the story

‘Jump’. Firstly, the protagonist betrays his parents by not fulfilling their

expectations and not telling them the truth about his nature of work. Secondly, the

protagonist abruptly changes his loyalty from the white revolutionaries to the black

government. He turns against his own people. His confession in the press conference

though good, is a not only betrayal of his race but also a kind of political betrayal.

Thirdly, the black rulers betray the protagonist by not providing a house with a

garden and a car as per the deal. As he was no longer of any use to them, the

promises were not fulfilled. Fourthly, the temporary relationship of the protagonist

with the very young girl is also a kind of sexual betrayal. The love-making of the girl

is not responded to her desire to go for a walk on the beach.

Thus, the protagonist in the story betrays his own race and is betrayed by the

other race.

Characters

The story mainly revolves around the protagonist. Along with the unnamed

white protagonist, we come across his parents, a full time house maid at his

European office and a very young girl at the hotel in Africa.

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The Protagonist

The unnamed protagonist of this story is a youth misled by the white rebel

groups. He is the son of a lower ranked white civil servant in Africa. He had joined a

parachute club as an adolescent. Apart from jumping from the sky, photography was

his weekend hobby. He used to earn his pocket money from photography.

He worked as an apprentice draughtsman to an architect whereas his parents

expected him to be an accountant. The company of parachute jumpers led him to

work for a rebel group of the whites.

Photographing a military establishment led him to prison by the black

government. On the request of his parents, the whites had released him and sent him

to Europe for training. He became an imperialist spy. He frequently used to travel by

air to some European countries in relation to the counter-revolution against the black

government.

He was associated with the planning of destabilizing the black government. He

was involved in violent activities like the blowing up of trains full of innocent

workers, burning down hospitals, the massacre of sleeping villagers (cut off the ears),

raping children and forcing women to kill their husbands and eat their flesh.

He was psychologically disturbed to see that the young girls of twelve and

thirteen years of age being offered to the military men to satisfy their physical

hunger. After knowing the effect of atrocities on the blacks, he decided to change his

loyalty. He surrendered to the representatives of the black government and revealed

everything about the black deeds of the white rebel army. There was a deal to

rehabilitate him. He was put in a hotel by the blacks. He was able to see from the

sixth floor of the hotel the results of European Mission – the beggared city, the

orphaned children, the men without ears. He repented on his involvement in such

crime and contemplated to jump from the sixth floor.

The author has portrayed the protagonist both as a criminal and a hero. He is a

criminal for his involvement in the manly world of violence. His gift for languages is

one of the reasons for his downfall. He is a criminal as he is against the black rulers.

The white rebel group made him a criminal. He is also a betrayer as he changed his

allegiance. The transformation in him is one the factors to consider him a hero. He is

a hero for his confession. The transformation in his courage to admit his guilt

(wrong-doing) makes him a hero.

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The parents

The white parents of the protagonist are from Europe. His father was a lower

ranked civil servant. Post-retirement on the advice of some whites they had returned

to Europe and are leading modest lives in a European city. Though they were neither

interested in politics nor in blacks, staying back in Africa was a quite risky affair.

They expected their son to become an accountant. Earlier they thought that their

son was in a good company of the whites and they were proud to know that he was

sent to Europe to study. However, the reality was different. They learnt later that he

was an imperialist spy.

They used to receive telephone calls from their son. The mother also used to

send letters to their son. As there was no communication with son for two months,

they had supposed that he might have been dead.

They had failed to understand their son’s life. They thought something was

wrong in upbringing of their son. His life was a kind of God’s punishment to them.

Terms to remember:

i) Clandestine: secret, underground

ii) Beret: a soft flat round hat

iii) Fatigues: the brownish green uniform worn especially by soldiers when

working or fighting

A) Check your progress -

Answer the following questions in one sentence each.

a) What is the name of the hotel where protagonist was put in?

b) Name the European countries the protagonist used to visit.

c) What was the hobby of the protagonist besides jumping?

d) Make a list of TV crews mentioned in the story.

e) On which floor of the hotel was the protagonist staying?

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2.3 Section – 2

My Father Leaves Home

Introduction

We are able to know some traits of Nadine Gordimer’s short story from the very

first story in Jump and Other Stories. One story is not enough to understand a writer

and her story telling techniques. It is time to search answers to some of the questions

like - Do we know our roots? Is there need to trace our roots? Have we ever tried to

understand the struggles of our parents? How much do we know about the past of our

father? Now let’s turn towards the next story ‘My Father Leaves Home’.

The story focuses on the portrayal of the narrator’s father. The other persons

mentioned in the story are father’s parents (narrator’s grandparents), narrator’s

mother, the lodge manager and the narrator and her fellow travellers (the gypsies, the

Frenchman and the Englishman and the locals) in the narrator’s hunting trip.

Story in Brief

My Father Leaves Home

In the story, the narrator, most probably the author, tells us about her father’s

life. The father of the narrator comes from a village where tomatoes and daises are

grown. The village houses have pens and cages for chickens and ducks. The

narrator’s father belonged to a house without a pig. There was also a post office in

the village. The narrator’s grandmother was a toothless old woman shelling peas with

a black scarf tied over her head and apron. She used to sit on a bench outside. The

narrator’s father belonged to an impoverished shoe-maker’s family. The villagers

believed that at the age of thirteen a boy becomes a man and hence the narrator’s

father was sent off his home in search of the fortune. His bag was packed by the old

woman (his mother) with the clothes of a cold country, as he had no other clothes.

She had sewed up rents and darned socks. In the absence of hand-me-down coat for

him, she had put a cap, a coat and a shawl in his bag. He began his voyage leaving

his home on a horse-drawn cart. His mother saw him off. He wore a suit and newly

mended boots. With the option to continue family trade of shoe-making, he had

decided to become a watch-maker. He was equipped with watch-making tools like

the loupe for his eye, the miniature screwdrivers and screws, the hairsprings, the fish-

scale watch glasses.

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Listening to the gypsies singing in a bar, he had waited to board a train at the

railway station in the autumn cold night. As there was the least possibility of his

mother accompanying him to bid farewell, his father (a bearded man) had come to

the railway station. The grandfather of the narrator had saved money and arranged

for their son’s train ticket and ship’s passage. He had handed over to his son the ship

tickets and documents necessary for the voyage. Thus, there was no formal farewell

from his parents to this teenage boy.

After his arrival in the Southern Hemisphere, the narrator’s father had noticed

the changes in weather. It was too hot for him to be in the suit. He had learnt a few

words of other language on the ship. He might have met someone who had preceded

him by a year or so. He had travelled by train for two days and landed at a poor

relative. He had started his watch-making business by taking his watch-making tools

to the mines. He had visited the compounds where the black miners had proudly

acquired watches as the manacles of their new slavery (pp. 61-62). Along with the

terse jargon of English, he had also picked up the local language of the miners. He

knew though he was poor and alien, he was privileged to be a white. He had also

noticed that the back miners used mostly cheap watches which were not worth

mending. It was possible for them to buy a new watch for the price they would pay

for their repairs. So it was because of the blacks he had became a businessman. He

used to buy Zobo pocket watches and sell them to his black customers. After selling

the watches by hawking at the compounds of the black miners, he had started a tin-

roofed shop with watches, clocks and wedding rings for sale. He used to stay there.

He used to sell watches on instalment to the white miners. He had also learnt to keep

books.

He had taken singing lessons and was inducted at the Masonic Lodge. He was a

light baritone and at Masonic concerts he used to sing ballads with words by

Tennyson. From the tin-shack, he had started his new shop with its sign

WATCHMAKER JEWELLER & SILVERSMITH (p. 63). Thus he had become a

successful businessman. After successfully courting an English speaking young

woman, he had married her. His wife used to play the piano and his children would

sing the song sitting around her.

His eye-sight had weakened with the passage of time. He had grown old and

was taken to drinking. To avoid accidents, he had stopped going to Masonic

meetings by his car. He was religious. He used to visit the synagogue on special

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occasions like the Day of Atonement. His wife had opposed his attendance in death

anniversaries of the old European migrants in that village. She hated those ignorant

and dirty people. According to her, the villagers slept like animals round a stove and

they used to bathe once a week. In the quarrels between husband and wife she used

to mention this. As a result the narrator’s father used to feel as if he was a kaffir.

The narrator, one of the daughters of the protagonist of this story, was on a trip –

for hunting. In the train journey, she came across the partying gypsies. They enjoyed

eating paprika sausage and slivovitz and drinking wine. In the train journey she had

also noticed a Frenchman slicing the sausage using a horn-handed knife. While

drinking the white liquor, the Englishman was trying to read a copy of Cobbett’s

Rural Rides keeping it on his lap. Besides, the narrator had also noticed in her

journey that the local people sat on suitcases and a man who couldn’t speak the

language of the travellers was in search of a place to sit in the compartment.

At the village station the narrator and others alighted on an autumn cold night.

There was no one to receive them from the hunting lodge. Even there was no station-

master. The travellers at the station were sitting on their baggage in the dim visibility

of the glow of the bar. They were at an unknown stage of a journey to an unknown

place (p. 61).

On her hunting trip, the narrator had come across the gypsies, the Frenchman

and the Englishman and the locals and the cold autumn night. These fellow travellers

and the railway station at the end of her journey had made the narrator to think of her

father’s journey in search of fortune. She thought she may search her father’s village.

The narrator doesn’t know the name of her father’s village in his country. He had

never told it to the narrator. She thinks it would be difficult for her to find it.

Analysis of My Father Leaves Home

Setting

The story begins in a European village and the main happenings take place in a

village of the black miners in Africa. A train compartment and the woods are the

other locations in the story.

Narrative Technique

In the beginning of the story the narration is in the form of the camera

movement. The narrator (or the author) is most probably one of the daughters of the

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protagonist in the story. The most paft of the story has been narrated in the third

person. It indicates the distance between the father’s past and the children’s present.

At the end of the story the narration is in first person where the narrator reflects on

her present search of her father’s village.

Themes

The ‘Journey’ motif and the Title

The use of ‘journey’ motif in the story suggests the struggle of narrator’s father

to establish himself in life. The journey of the protagonist starts from Northern

Hemisphere to Southern Hemisphere on a horse-drawn cart followed by train and

ship. The narrator also travels by a train. She is in search of her father’s village. As

the narrator’s search for her father’s village has not ended, it is a continuous one; the

narrator aptly uses the present tense in the title as well as in the whole story. The

author obliquely makes the reader to find the parallels in the wanderings of the

protagonist, the gypsies and the narrator. There is clarity in the title of the story ‘My

Father Leaves Home’. The readers can easily recognize the narrator and understand

the narration.

The victim turns the victimiser - Irony motif

The protagonist in the story had left his East European country due to

persecution. He was a victim of the circumstances and was marginalized in his own

country. He came to an African country as a Jew, a white European. After a period of

hard struggle he settles as a watch-maker in the country of blacks. He became a

businessman as he was a white and his customers were blacks. After becoming a

successful businessman – a watch-maker turns a jeweller and a silversmith – his

attitude towards the blacks is a scornful one. He used to shout at the black man who

swept the floor and throw the man’s weekly pay grudgingly at him. Here we may

notice that forgetting his humble origin, the father adapts to the racial discrimination

in Africa. Here the irony is that once a victim now turns a victimizer (Lazar,

1992:795). Though he adapts himself to the new situation, he has to say to his white

wife

“You speak to me as if I was a kaffir” (p. 64).

This is an instance of how Nadine Gordimer comments on the continuation of

apartheid.

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The hunted becomes the hunter - The ‘hunt’ metaphor

The narrator in the story ‘My Father Leaves Home’ on a hunting trip compares

the hunting of animals with the hunting of Jews.

“I hear the rustle of fear among the creatures. Their feathers swish against stalks

and leaves. The clucking to gather in the young; the spurting squawks of terror as the

men with their thrashing sticks drive the prey racing on, rushing this way and that, no

way where there are not men and sticks, men and guns. They have wings but dare not

fly and reveal themselves, there was nowhere to run to from the village to the finds

as they came on and on, the kick of a cossack’s mount ready to strike creeping heads,

the thrust of a bayonet lifting a man by the heart like a piece of meat on a fork. Death

advancing and nowhere to go.” (pp. 65-66).

Thus, the blind rustles of a bird chase reminds the narrator of the cause of

blindness of her grandmother (fire or shot) – pogrom. The narrator also reminds of

the ill treatment given by her father to a black sweeper at his shop. As a child sitting

of the father lap the narrator has witnessed the feat created by her father among the

blacks. A person who had fled against racial prejudices had turned a racist. The

continuation of racism is indicated by the phrase ‘across the world’ with which the

story ends.

...the beaters advancing, advancing across the world” (p. 66).

Ironically, at the end of the story the narrator notices that the hunted had become

the hunter.

The Autobiographical element

In this story Nadine Gordimer imagines her father’s migration to South Africa

from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. He was a watch-maker. A Jewish boy in his

teens from a poor family leaving his country in search of a fortune, carrying his

watch-making tools with him, marrying an English woman in Africa and becoming a

successful businessman - all these mentions found in the story are references to the

life of Gordimer’s father.

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Characters

The Father

The protagonist of ‘My Father Leaves Home’ belongs to an impoverished

shoemaker’s family in an East European country. He is a persecuted Jew who

migrated to Africa at the age of thirteen in the clothes of cold country. After the

initial period of struggle, he adapts in the new African country and establishes

himself as a successful businessman. He becomes a watchmaker, a jeweller and a

silversmith and marries a white woman in the country of blacks. He goes to Masonic

gatherings. He is a religious person. He goes to synagogue on the Day of Atonement.

He also discovers the privileges of being a white. However, he doesn’t tell his family

history to his children. His daughters neither know the name of his village in an East

European country nor the language of that country. The narrator, one of his

daughters, obliquely compares her father’s past with the wanderings of the gypsies.

The Parents of Father (Narrator’s grandparents)

An old woman shelling peas on the bench was mother of narrator’s father. She

used to wear a black scarf tied over her head and an apron. She had lost her teeth and

her lipless mouth is closed. She used to sit on the bench outside and carry

needlework, i.e. embroidery on towels and pillowcases. She had played an important

role in sending her son to an African country. She had packed his bag with all the

essentials her son may need. She couldn’t accompany him to the railway station to

bid him farewell. By the time of her son’s marriage she had gone blind. She was

injured in a pogrom. His village back home in the European country had no surgeon

available so there was no operation possible on his mother’s eyes.

The narrator’s grandfather, head of the family, was a bearded man. He had saved

money and arranged for their son’s train ticket and ship’s passage. He goes not only

to the railway station but also to the dockyard to see him off.

Terms to Remember:

i) Gypsy: a member of a race of people who traditionally spend their lives

travelling around from place to place, living in caravans.

ii) Pogrom: an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of

Jews in Russia or Eastern Europe.

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iii) Masonic Lodge: It means both a group of people and also a building used for

meetings of Freemasonry, an organization / fraternity of people (Masons) from

diverse ideologies and varied religious creeds believing in one God. The

purpose of Freemasonry is to make good men better men – better husbands,

better fathers and better citizens.

iv) Kaffir: an insulting term for a black African

v) slivovitz: a fruit brandy produced in Central and Eastern Europe

vi) beater: a person paid by people hunting to force game birds and animals into a

place where they can be seen and therefore shot

B) Check your progress

State whether the following statements are true or false.

a) The narrator’s father belonged to a watch-maker’s family. True / False

b) The Englishman tried to read a copy of Cobbett’s Rural Rides. True / False

c) Wordsworth’s ballads were sung at Masonic concerts. True / False

d) The Gypsies used to sing in the bar at the railway station. True / False

e) The narrator’s father married an African woman. True / False

2.4 Section – 3

A Journey

Introduction

Before we read the third story ‘A Journey’ let us reflect on the word ‘father’.

Try to answer the following questions.

i) Is ‘father’ the real head of a family?

ii) Does a father shoulder the responsibilities of a family?

iii) Can any member of a family play the role of a father?

iv) At what age can one play the role of a father in a family?

v) Who can be a real father? One who is a biological male parent of a child or one

who brings up a child?

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Story in Brief

The narrator is travelling from Europe to Africa. In the plane, the narrator

watches a beautiful woman with a very small baby, perhaps not more than ten days

old and a son of about thirteen. The narrator describes beauty of the infant in her own

words. Just like his beautiful mother, the thirteen year old son was equally beautiful.

“The boy was beautiful as his mother...Theirs identical round brows were clear

horizons, their nostrils and earlobes appeared translucent, their skin, lips and eyes

had the colouring of portraits in stained glass.” (pp. 143-144).

Then we are collectively acquainted with these three members of a family. The

narrator describes the breast feeding of the baby in the following manner.

“The boy and the mother leant over it – this process – reverently. Once I saw her

put her well-used but beautiful hand round the curve of the boy’s head and hold it

there a moment. A trinity.” (p. 144)

During the journey, the narrator notices that the boy plays two roles – one as a

child busy with games and another as a responsible member of a family (in the

absence of his father), taking care of the new born baby.

The trio leave the plane in the middle of Africa. The country they alight had

recently experienced an attempted coup. After they leave the plane, the narrator

imagines what happened to them before the journey and what was going to happen at

the end of the journey. We see these happenings from the perspective of the teenage

boy.

The boy first tells us why they had been to Europe. As there was no good

hospital in the country where his father was posted, mother and son were sent to his

parents’ country for the birth of the baby, while his father remained in Africa as a

diplomat.

The boy remembers the days after his twelfth birthday. There was change in the

behaviour of his parents. Both the mother and father were silent at meals. The boy

tells,

“The private language we used to speak together – cat-language – we didn’t use

any more..... For instance, if I was eating with my elbows on the table, my father

would use a cat voice to tell me I had bad manners, and if my father forgot to fill up

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my mother’s wineglass my mother would use her special cat voice to complain she’d

been left out.” (p. 146).

The silence of his parents was for two reasons. One was the unplanned

pregnancy of his mother and another was his father’s extra-marital affair.

The boy also tells us how his father used to take him for swimming and hunting.

The boy is able to notice his father’s affection towards him. The boy not only

mentions the need of privacy for his parents but is also worried about their quietness.

His father used to go out in the country for his job. The boy notices the physical and

psychological changes in his mother. He describes the knocking of the baby inside

his mother’s stomach as like Morse code.

When the baby is born, the boy says, “I was the first to see my mother with the

baby.” (p. 148). Here we notice that the boy has begun to think that it is his

responsibility to take care of the baby in the absence of his father.

“It was born so healthy the doctor said we could fly back with it when it was

only nine days and sixty-two minutes old...Its eyes were able to open by then. They

were big and dark and shiny...I thought it was curious about us. We both kissed its

head often. That funny hair it has.” (pp. 149-150).

Then we come across the baby’s first journey. In the aircraft the boy plays with

the baby. The boy also helps his mother in fetching plastic cups of water from the

dispenser and dumping the baby’s napkins in the lavatory. The boy was taking care

of the baby in the absence of his father. In the course of the journey, the mother used

to show the boy from the window scenes like the whole river.

When they alight at the African country, they wait for the father to come to the

airport to receive them. The boy observes mother feeding the baby at the airport. His

father was happy to receive his wife. But the son was not happy to see the father who

had come to receive them. The silence which started with the unplanned pregnancy

and love-affair was over now.

The narrator now takes us to the husband’s eagerness to receive his wife. He

woke up early and rang the airport to know whether the flight was in time. He came

with wet hair to receive his family. He had showered after love-making to another

woman. With full of memories, he drove himself to the airport. Here the author’s

outward description of the nature matches the inner feelings of the husband. He

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reaches the decaying airport in time and waits in the dirty arrival hall. Sitting on a

broken seat, his mind lingers in the memories of his strained relationship with his

wife before that unplanned pregnancy over his extra-marital affair. He was waiting

for his woman now with the thoughts of reasons for the delayed pregnancy.

After the arrival of the trio at the airport, the father notices the change in the

boy.

“The boy was looking at him with the face of a man, and turns back to the

woman as if she is his woman, and the baby his begetting.” (p. 156).

Analysis of A Journey

The story takes place mainly in the aircraft and at the airport. The aircraft is

going from Europe to Africa carrying a small family along with other passengers.

We are not only taken to the dining table at the home of a diplomat but also to the

swimming pool and spear-fishing.

Narrative technique

When it comes to the narrative technique, Gordimer leaves her mark through

shifts in perceptions of the narrators. In the first part of the story, Gordimer as an

omnipresent narrator, introduces her characters (here the woman and her two

children) to the readers. Later on we are acquainted to the happenings in the story

from the teenage boy’s point of view through his first person narration. At the end

again the narration shifts to third person where author takes control of the narrative.

Consequently, there is repetition of the same things from the two perspectives. For

instance, the baby has been described from the narrator’s perspective as well as from

the teenage boy’s perspective. The narrator describes the baby as follows.

“The baby could not have been more than ten days old. It had abundant black

fine hair standing up from its head the way hair lifts from a scalp under water; as if

the hair had been combed, floating, by the waters of the womb. The pathetic little

bent legs had never been used. The eyelids were thick and lifted slowly, a muscular

impulse still being tested, revealing an old and wondering gaze: eyes very dark, but

no colour that could be described as black or blue.” (p.143)

When the baby is born, we are acquainted to the new born child from the boy’s

perspective.

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“I was the first to see the baby. I saw it when it was exactly 40 minutes old. I

was the first to see my mother with the baby....We looked at the baby together, its

ears, its feet and hands; everything was all right. Its eyes didn’t open. We were

surprised by its hair; it had a lot of wet-looking black hair that stood up on its head as

she carefully dried it with the edge of a blanket.” (pp. 148-149).

Symbols and Images

The references to swimming pool, squash playing and spear-fishing in the story

point towards the luxuries enjoyed by the ruling whites in Africa. However, the

decaying airport described in the story indicates post-colonial condition in African

countries. While describing the mother, the son and the baby, the narrator refers to

‘A trinity’ (p.144). Here we are reminded of the Christian imagery of ‘The Trinity’ -

the existence of one God in three forms, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Similarly, the title ‘A Journey’ not only indicates physical journey, but is symbolic of

the journey of an adolescent into manhood.

The Title and the ‘journey’ motif

The titles of Gordimer’s stories are always significant and are embedded into the

plot. Though it reflects the main theme of the story - journey of an adolescent into

manhood, the title of the story ‘A Journey’ is open to multiple interpretations.

Gordimer skilfully weaves the journey motif in the story. On the one hand, it is a

physical journey together of a mother, her baby and son from one continent to

another. On the other hand, it separately is the first journey of a baby, a boy’s

journey into fatherhood and a wife’s post-delivery journey back to her husband’s

place.

Themes

Journey of a baby

This story is of a journey of a healthy baby from his grandmother’s place in

Europe to the place of his father’s posting in Africa. In its very first journey the baby

is fortunate to travel in an aircraft. The journey is made comfortable by the special

arrangement in the plane. This journey in a way is also an indication of the luxuries

enjoyed by the white diplomats in Africa and their children. During the journey the

baby not only receives motherly love but also fatherly care from its elder brother.

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Journey of a boy into manhood

This story is mainly a journey of an adolescent into manhood. A boy of thirteen

years of age travels to Europe with his mother for the birth of her second child. His

journey into manhood begins while travelling back to Africa- place of his father’s

posting – with his mother and the new born baby. In the absence of his father, he has

to untimely shoulder fatherly responsibilities in the physical journey. In the aircraft

as a responsible member of a family, he has to pay attention towards the new born

baby. He has to change napkins and bring water in cups. On the psychological level,

the boy considers his responsibility to look after the woman who is travelling with

him – his mother. For example, at the airport he shields his mother from the male

gaze while she is feeding the baby. “My mother sat down on our canvas bag and I

knelt in front of her so people wouldn’t see when she opened her clothes and fed the

baby.” (p. 151). He is witness to the silence of his parents and the conception of the

baby. He has knowledge of how a baby is born. He is also aware of his father’s

extra-marital affair. He has seen physical changes in his mother during pregnancy.

This makes him feel that he is an alternative to his father. Hence he is not happy to

see his father at the airport but looks at his father with the face of a man. He sees his

mother as his woman.

Thus the story A Journey deals with two levels of childhood – the infancy and

transitional phase between childhood and adolescence.

Journey of a wife

The journey is also journey of a wife rather than of a mother. There is a gap of

twelve years in the two children of this mother. The life before second pregnancy

was a troubled one marked by the forced pregnancy and strained husband-wife

relationship. She is sent to Europe as there is no good hospital facility at the place of

husband’s posting in Africa. The journey to Europe and back to Africa brings no

change in the situation to her. Apart from becoming mother for the second time, wife

remains a wife. Through the narrator’s perspective we know that her husband’s

infidelity continues as comes to the airport showered, there is enough scope to think

so. Just like the teenage son is trying to share the responsibility of the family, she

remains a loyal member of the family. Here the institution of family is in danger.

Only difference is that the empty space created by the husband’s absence is tired to

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be filled by her teenage son. The story tells us about a husband’s life in the absence

of his wife, just like it narrates life of a teenage boy in the absence of his father.

Oedipal love

The traces of oedipal love can be easily noticed in this story. Through her

account, the narrator in the plane makes us to visualize it. The description of the

physical changes in the mother by the teenage boy is suggestive of this. Here the boy

describes his mother’s breasts and their warmth. He also describes her breast-feeding

of the baby. But we are taken closely to the theme of oedipal love when the boy

notices that his father is not paying enough attention to his mother. He has an affair.

The boy also has the knowledge of the conception of the baby. Here through his

views on the conception of baby, Gordimer analyses the psyche of a teenager.

Nadine Gordimer is able to take us to this love triangle when in the journey the

boy takes fatherly care of the baby. The absence of his father during the birth of the

baby and in the journey develops the intimacy between the son and the mother. Here

the boy considers his father his rival. We can notice this as the boy is not happy to

see the father at the airport who had come to receive them. The boy is emotionally

involved in this love while the husband thinks of physical gratification. The husband

waiting at the airport to receive his wife is nothing but a man waiting for his woman.

When we look at the end of the story from the narrator’s perspective we come to

know more about boy’s love towards his mother.

“The boy was looking at him with the face of a man, and turns back to the

woman as if she is his woman, and the baby his begetting.” (p. 156)

Characters

Besides the narrator, there are four persons mentioned in this story - the new-

born baby, the teenage boy, the father and the mother. These are all white characters.

The Baby

At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes the baby. According to her

it could have been less than ten days old. It has black fine hair, little bent legs and

very dark eyes under thick eyelids. We also learn about its beauty from the boy – the

baby’s elder brother. He describes its ears, feet and hands and wet-looking black hair.

The baby is born healthy in a hospital at its grandmother’s place in Europe.

During its first ever journey the baby is nine days sixty-two minutes old. The baby is

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born after the gap of twelve years after the eldest child. Neither the narrator nor the

boy tells us about the gender of the baby.

Through the narrator as well as the boy we are able to understand that the baby

is neither like the mother nor like the boy. This hints that in appearance the baby is

like the absent father.

The Boy

The thirteen year old boy is beautiful like his mother. His brows, nostrils and

earlobes are identical to his mother. His skin, lips and eyes are also equally beautiful.

Just like his parents, the boy wanted a brother or sister to him. After his twelfth

birthday, his wish is fulfilled. He travels to Europe along with his mother for the

birth of the baby. He is the first to see the baby (just like a father) at the hospital,

exactly forty minutes after its birth.

During his journey back to Africa he behaves like a responsible member of his

family. In this journey, he takes care of the baby just like a father. He helps his

mother changing nappies in the aircraft and at the airport. The purpose of his help

seems to stabilize his fragmented family. During this journey he develops a peculiar

intimacy and incestuous love for his mother and a sort of hatred towards his father.

Thus we see the transformation in the boy. When he accompanies his pregnant

mother to Europe – he is a child and when he is back to Africa he is a man.

The Father

The father of the teenage boy is an economic attaché in a country in the middle

of Africa. He had many acquaintances at the Consulate Office and airport. He had a

car. He used to wear linen trousers and sandals. The political situation in that country

is not good. There was a coup in the recent past. He is an affectionate father. He

takes his son to swimming, squash playing and spear-fishing. But for the boy he

seems to be a careless father. He is not on good terms with his wife, probably for two

reasons. Firstly, the unplanned second pregnancy of his wife which is a rather

delayed one and secondly he had an extra-marital affair. Hence both husband and

wife are silent in the house during their meals. He used to go out for the sake of his

job. In his absence, their teen age son was the only male at home. As there was no

good hospital at the place of his posting, he sends his wife to a European country for

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the birth of their second child. While the black people never part from their children,

the father sends an immature thirteen-year-old boy as the only companion of his

wife. In this way, he unnecessary creates a rival for himself. He thinks of his wife as

just a woman. This is revealed through his thoughts at the arrival hall of the decaying

airport when he is waiting to receive his family.

Thus an affectionate father of a teenage boy is also a disloyal husband.

The Woman

The woman in this story is wife of a diplomat posted in an African country. She

has a thirteen year old son and a very small nine days and sixty-two minutes old

baby. She is in her forties but still beautiful. She had delicate skin around her eyes,

hers ears were nacreous, her lips needing no paint. According to the narrator she is

‘well-used but beautiful hand’ (p. 144). She wears fashionable and expensively

discreet dress. She is representative of white urban woman who are concerned with

preservation of appearances (Lazar, 1992:799). We see her from the perspectives of

the narrator, her husband and her teenage son. She is in the story from the beginning

till the end. However, we don’t get a chance to know her from her own perspective

(see Lazar, 1992).

In the beginning of the story, the white narrator sees her as a white woman who

is mother of two children. Her husband treats her as his woman. Her son watches her

changing physically during her pregnancy. Both the narrator and her son describe her

feeding the baby. The woman narrator describes her from the female gaze and we

look at her from the male gaze. Throughout the story she doesn’t speak just like her

baby.

The Narrator

In this story, Gordimer makes her presence felt. She invents herself as a

peripheral character in the narrative – a lady with grey hair (p. 149). She self

mentions – I don’t know – they disappeared (Lazar, 1992:789).

Terms to Remember:

i) Economic Attaché: person attached to an ambassador’s staff with a particular

responsibility, here connected with trade and industry

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ii) Consulate office: office of an official appointed by the government to live in a

foreign city in order to help people from his own country who are travelling or

living there and protect their interests

iii) Coup: sudden unconstitutional, often violent, change in government

iv) Morse Code: system of sending messages, using dots and dashes or short or long

sounds or flashes of light to represent letters of the alphabet and numbers

v) Nacreous ears: pearly, just like mother of pearls

C) Check your progress –

Complete the following sentences choosing the most appropriate option.

1) The boy’s father was ________________.

a) a Counsel- General

b) an Economic Attaché

c) a Custom’s man

d) a Consulate officer

2) The private language used in the family was ______________.

a) Dog-language

b) Pig-Latin

c) Cat-language

d) Morse code

3) The baby was ___________________during its first journey.

a) Ten days old

b) Nine days and sixty-two minutes old

c) Forty minutes old

d) Nine months old

4) The baby’s first journey was from _____________________.

a) South Hemisphere to North Hemisphere

b) Africa to Europe

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c) East Africa to South Africa

d) Europe to Africa

5) The woman used to accompany her husband for _____________________.

a) Swimming

b) Spear-fishing

c) Playing squash

d) All of the above

2.5 Summary

Through the study of above three stories by Nadine Gordimer we are able to

understand the post-colonial and post-apartheid African society depicted in these

stories.

Narrative Technique

The major happenings in these stories are set in Europe and Africa. The

narrative technique of Nadine Gordimer is marked by shifts in perceptions. Various

viewpoints and perceptions are juxtaposed against each other to striking effect in ‘A

Journey’ and ‘My Father Leaves Home’. In ‘Jump’ the narration shifts between the

past and the present. Her narrative technique supports portrayal of inner-self of her

characters and themes. The narrative technique of Nadine Gordimer is so wonderful

that these stories are difficult to summarize.

Gordimer communicates her themes through the simple use of language. She

prefers short sentences. While three word sentences are very common like - There

are they (A Journey, p. 158), there are also many instances of single word sentences

like - Himself. (Jump, p. 3), Someone. (A Journey, p. 158). Sometimes the reader

may fail to know her intention in using ‘luggage’ (A Journey, p. 145) and ‘baggage’

(A Journey, p. 157).

The author is also very selective in her diction. The African aura is rightly

created with the use of appropriate words. She also chooses words suitable to the

messages she intends to communicate through her stories. For instance, we find use

of military vocabulary in ‘Jump’. The vocabulary of hunting used in ‘My Father

Leaves Home’ also effectively brings out the message home.

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However, one observation is to be noted that there is no place for humour in

these stories.

Migration from Europe to Africa

A common thread running in these stories is that Europeans with humble

backgrounds migrate to Africa in search of fortune. It is paradoxical to learn that the

white Europeans, who consider themselves racially and culturally superior to

Africans, come in search of job to Africa – the land of the blacks. In ‘Jump’ the boy

has come with his parents in search of better job opportunities in the former colony.

In ‘My Father Leaves Home’ the racial tension itself has forced the protagonist to

flee to Africa from Europe.

Development of the protagonist from ‘Child to Man’

The journey motif has been used in the stories ‘My Father Leaves Home’ and ‘A

Journey’. Though there is no spiritual journey in these stories and in ‘Jump’, they

are similar to the ‘bildungsroman’ novel. The word ‘jump’ indicates the shift from a

world of a child to the world of a man. This is applicable to all the stories considered

here. In the first story it begins with the physical jump from the parachute. In the

second story it is a daughter’s jump to understand father’s world – the past and in the

third story it is premature jump of a teenage boy into the world of man-father. The

protagonist’s shift from the world of a child to that of a man is a recurring theme in

the stories ‘Jump’ and ‘A Journey’. In this regard the words ‘jump’ and ‘journey’

appear synonymous.

Characterization

Though the stories focus on protagonists, the titles of these stories are not

character-centric. The characters are mentioned by their relations and not by names.

We know these unnamed characters as baby, boy, father and mother. Besides,

Gordimer avoids mentioning the gender of the baby in ‘A Journey’.

Apart from the ‘baby’ in ‘A Journey’, these three stories represent three main

stages of human beings – a teenage boy in ‘A Journey’, a radicalized youth in ‘Jump’

and an old father in ‘My Father Leaves Home’. In two of these stories, viz. ‘My

Father Returns Home’ and ‘A Journey’ the writer is obsessed to mention the age of

the protagonists as thirteen. Similarly, ‘beard’ as a symbol of male prowess recurs in

her stories. When a member of white revolutionaries, the protagonist in ‘Jump’ has

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beard and the grandfather in ‘My Father Leaves Home’ is also bearded. All the three

stories deal with white male protagonist in Africa. Furthermore, she juxtaposes her

white characters against black people as in ‘A Journey’ at the arrival hall of the

decaying airport the husband thinks on the upbringing of black children by their

parents. Contrastingly, he has not paid enough attention to his son.

In these stories, we find Gordimer consistently using cloth imagery effectively

to project her protagonists. The main characters are identified by the clothes they

wear. The military uniform in ‘Jump’, the winter clothes in ‘My Father Leaves

Home’ and the fashionable and expensive dress of the mother in ‘A Journey’ all are

typical of Gordimer’s characters. We come across different faces of the protagonist

in ‘Jump’ through his appearances. He is bearded and in the fatigues and the beret

when with the whites and goes to secret meeting in civil dress. During the press

conference with the representatives of the black government, the protagonist is

without beard and in shiny tropical trousers. The protagonist in ‘My Father Leaves

Home’ wears a cap, has a newly mended boots. His bag is packed with clothes of a

cold country and darned socks. Winter clothes in a southern country not only indicate

the impoverished background of the protagonist but also his struggle for identity.

Gordimer also makes us to witness both positive and negative transformations in

her protagonists. The protagonist in ‘Jump’ wants to reveal heinous crimes while the

father in ‘My Father Leaves Home’, a sufferer of racial tension in his own country,

becomes a racist in his adopted country.

Representation of women characters

Though the writer is a woman her focus is on male protagonists. Relatively,

women characters get marginal status in her stories. Besides, we are introduced to the

women characters from male gaze. The author has hardly portrayed them from

female gaze. Let us have a look at some of the women characters in her stories.

Among the women characters in ‘Jump’ are protagonist’s mother, a full time house

maid at his European office and a very young girl at the hotel in Africa. A very

young girl provided to him in the hotel has been portrayed as a potential lover of the

protagonist. Gordimer represents her as a young pretty girl mainly through her

function – to satisfy the physical need of the protagonist via her body. The woman

author looks at this young girl from the male gaze. Similarly, the English wife in ‘My

Father Leaves Home’ and mother in ‘A Journey’ are as good as mute witnesses to the

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development of the plot in these stories. Thus, with these limited instances at hand, it

is difficult to label her as a feminist writer. Perhaps the compactness of stories does

not permit Gordimer to elaborate on her women characters.

2.6 Answers to Check your progress

A) Section I – Jump

Answer the following questions in one sentence each.

a) Hotel Lebuvu

b) France, Germany, Switzerland

c) Photography

d) African, BBC, CBS, Antenne 2, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen

e) Sixth floor

B) Section II – My Father Leaves Home

a) False

b) True

c) False

d) True

e) False

C) Section III – A Journey

1) Economic Attaché

2) Cat-language

3) Nine days and sixty-two minutes old

4) Africa to Europe

5) Swimming

2.7 Exercise

1. Show how contemporary African society is reflected in Gordimer’s short stories.

2. Comment on the setting of Gordimer’s stories.

3. What are the main themes of Gordimer’s stories?

4. Discuss why Gordimer deals with unnamed characters in her stories.

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5. Write a note on autobiographical elements in Nadine Gordimer’s stories studied

by you.

6. Write a note on representation of women in Gordimer’s stories.

7. Write the story ‘A Journey’ from mther’s point of view.

8. Is Gordimer a feminist writer? Justify.

9. Discuss Gordimer as a post-apartheid African writer.

10. Comment on the violence in Gordimer’s stories.

11. Write short notes on the following:

a. Journey motif in Gordimer’s stories

b. Treatment of time in Gordimer’s stories

c. Narrative technique in Gordimer’s stories

d. Twists and turns in Gordimer’s stories

e. Suitability of the titles of Gordimer’s stories

f. Images and symbols used in Gordimer’s stories

g. Cloth imagery in Gordimer’s stories

h. The ed of Gordimer’s stories

2.8 Reference for further study

P.S. All the page numbers mentioned for the above stories are of Bloomsbury

paperback edition of 2003.

Gordimer, Nadine. (2003). Jump and Other Stories. London: Bloomsbury

Publishing.

Lazar, Karen. (1992). Jump and Other Stories: Gordimer’s Leap into the 1990s:

Gender and Politics in Her Latest Short Fiction. Journal of Southern African Studies,

Vol. 18, No.4, pp. 783-802.

Trump, Martin. (1986). The Short Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Research in African

Literatures, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 34-369.

��

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Unit-3

Postcolonial Poetry

This unit is divided into three sections:

1) Caribbean Poetry

2) Canadian Poetry

3) Indian Poetry in English

1) CARIBBEAN POETRY

Structure

3.1.0 Objectives

3.1.1 Introduction

3.1.2 Pamela Mordecai

3.1.2.1 Easy Life

3.1.2.2 Last Lines


3.1.4 Mahadai Das

3.1.4.1 Horses

3.1.4.2 The Leaf in his Ear


3.1.6 Let’s sum up

3.1.7 Unit End Activities

3.1.8 References and suggested reading

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3.1.0 Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:

• describe characteristic features of Caribbean poetry ;

• explain major concerns of Caribbean poetry;

• examine select Caribbean poems;

• identify socio-cultural, literary and environmental aspects of Caribbean poetry.

3.1.1 Introduction

The term ‘Caribbean’ indicates the geographical region including all the

territories associated with European powers like Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and

others. Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of

the Caribbean region. The territories that were part of the British Empire came

together as the West Indian Federation in 1962. After the break-up of the federation,

the islands comprising it became independent in the 1960s. Even now there is a

common cricketing team of the West Indians. Like sports, literature also continues to

be considered regionally rather than nationally. The term ‘West Indian’ is based on

the linguistic determinant of the use of English while ‘Caribbean’ emphasizes

geographical and historical determinants (Ashcroft et al 18). The ‘Caribbean’

literature does not have indigenous literary tradition. It is affected by colonial power

of Spain, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

3.1.2 Pamela Mordecai

Pamela Claire Mordecai (born 1942) is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, short

story writer, scholar and anthologist who lives in Canada. Pamela Mordecai is multi-

talented and prize-winning author. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she attended high

school in Jamaica, and Newton College of the Sacred Heart in Newton. A trained

language-arts teacher with a PhD in English from the University of the West Indies,

she has taught at secondary and tertiary levels, trained teachers, edited an academic

journal, and worked in media, especially television, and in publishing.

Mordecai has written articles on Caribbean literature and has edited and co-

edited groundbreaking anthologies of Jamaican poetry and Caribbean women’s

writing, among them Jamaica Woman, 1980, 1985 (with Mervyn Morris); From Our

Yard: Jamaican Poetry since Independence, 1987; and Her True-True Name, 1989

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(with Betty Wilson). Mordecai has also published textbooks, children’s books, four

collections of poetry (Journey Poem, 1989, de Man: a performance poem, 1995,

Certifiable, 2001, The True Blue of Islands, 2005), a collection of short fiction, Pink

Icing, and a reference work, Culture and Customs of Jamaica, 2001 (with her

husband, Martin). Her play, El Numero Uno, had its world premiere at the Lorraine

Kimsa Theatre for Young People in February 2010.

Mordecai has written articles on Caribbean literature, education and publishing,

and has collaborated on, or herself written, more than 30 books, including textbooks,

children’s books, six books of poetry for adults, a collection of short fiction, a novel,

and (with her husband, Martin Mordecai) a reference work on Jamaica. She has

edited several anthologies, including the Sunsong series. Her poems and stories for

children are widely collected and have been used in textbooks in the UK, Canada, the

US, West Africa, the Caribbean and Malaysia. Her short stories have been published

in journals and anthologies in the Caribbean, the US and Canada. Her poetry was

included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa. Her play El Numero Uno had its

world premiere in February 2010 at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People

in Toronto, Canada.

3.1.2.1 Easy Life:

So you haven’t had a very

easy life. Well, you must tell me

which way you walk that you didn’t choose.

which one you lie with that you didn’t

fancy; which dirt you eat but you

never scrape it together eagerly.

yea, greedily, with your own

hands…

Who can have

a clear ear for your plight? The red ones,

crazy with the sun, howling

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their misconstructions at the sky?

Children dragging bellies heavy

with their fathers’ seed to monstrous

beginnings? Who born twist? Who

born dead? Who chop before they born?

I not even dealing with hungry:

hungry is them same

greedy hands, scratching up dirt:

not dealing with sick neither:

sick is the wriggling things that

turn up when dirt scratch.

I am saying, did someone teach

you to name things? Chew food so you

could swallow? Hide you behind

a door and offer to evil men

her breasts for their distraction?

Say to you, ‘No, you can have some,

but pickney, never everything’? Say

to you, ‘No mind, whatever, it will

pass’? Whisper, almost at the end

‘Ecstasy also that too, that will pass’?

Say to you, ‘Everyday

give thanks, give praise’?

She prayed who set her back

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against the world to plant

you deep for long life

and everyday gave thanks.

In this poem the speaker comments on the plight of women in general.

According to the speaker, the life of a woman is not so easy. As a woman, she has a

less choice. Her destiny is decided by others. She has to undergo good and bad

experiences which she had never imagined before. In the first stanza of the poem,

narrates describes:

So you haven’t had a very

easy life. Well, you must tell me

which way you walk that you didn’t choose.

which one you lie with that you didn’t

fancy; which dirt you eat but you

never scrape it together eagerly.

In the next stanza, the speaker says that nobody cares about the plight of

women. ‘Who can have a clear ear for your plight’? According to the narrator, the

red ones are crazy with the sun and howl their misconstructions at the sky. The

narrator comments upon the heavy dragging bellies of children. The speaker talks

about ‘greediness’ of human beings by using the phrase ‘greedy hands’. The

condition of the children is also miserable.

Who born dead? Who chop before they born?

I not even dealing with hungry:

hungry is them same

greedy hands, scratching up dirt:

not dealing with sick neither:

sick is the wriggling things that

turn up when dirt scratch.

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In the next stanza, the speaker in the poem asks a question which is about the

existence of women and their status in society. The speaker raises a question ‘Did

someone teach you to name things’? As a woman, she just follows the orders given

by others. ‘Chewing’ or ‘Swallowing’ of food is decided by others. The speaker talks

about love-making which also becomes one of the worst experiences to a woman.

The speaker in the poem refers to men in general as ‘evil men’. As a woman, she has

to offer physically to the needs of her companion.

Hide you behind

a door and offer to evil men

her breasts for their distraction?

Say to you, ‘No, you can have some,

but pickney, never everything’? Say

to you, ‘No mind, whatever, it will

pass’? Whisper, almost at the end

‘Ecstasy also that too, that will pass’?

Say to you, ‘Everyday

give thanks, give praise’?

Thus, in the poem ‘Easy Life’, the life of women has been portrayed. Pamela

Mordecai was commented on the miserable plight of women in the poem ‘Easy

Life’. The speaker in the poem clearly focuses that how the life of a woman is not so

easy. Being a woman, she has to undergo physical and mental turmoil.

3.1.2.2 Last Lines

This is the last line I draw.

Alright. Draw the last line.

But I tell you, yonder

is a next. No line ever last,

no death not forever.

You see this place? You see it?

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All of it? Watch it good.

Not a jot nor a title

going lost. Every old

twist-up man you see,

every hang-breast woman,

every bang-belly pickney,

every young warrior

who head wrench

with weed, white powder,

black powder, or indeed

the very vile persuasion

of the devil—for him not

bedridden you know—

every small gal-turn-woman

that you crucify on the

cross of your sex

before her little naseberry

start sweeten,

I swear to you,

every last one shall live.

Draw therefore, O governor,

prime minister, parson,

teacher, shopkeeper,

politician, lecturer,

resonant revolutionaries,

draw carefully

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that last fine line

of your responsibility.

In the poem, ‘Last Lines’, the speaker is first person ‘I’. The speaker makes

everybody realize his/ her responsibilities. The poet conveys connotative meaning in

a very powerful and effective manner in the poem ‘Last Lines’. In this poem, there is

only one stanza and thirty-four lines. The pronoun ‘I’ is used which clearly indicates

the speaker is communicating with readers and sharing his/her experiences.

The poem opens with a very important and meaningful statement that is the

main ideology of the poem itself.

This is the last line I draw.

Alright. Draw the last line.

We often talk about the mortality of human life. We often indulge ourselves in

counting the years that we have spent hitherto and we think about our remaining life.

Here, in this poem, the speaker firmly comments on human life in the form of lines.

One has to complete so many lines one after another till the last line. According to

the speaker in this poem, after all, it’s in our hand to give appropriate shape to our

life. After all, we have to design our own destiny. Till the last day of one’s life, one

has to keep up his/her efforts ceaselessly.

The speaker in the poem does not believe in death and end of human life as well.

Generally, we believe death is the end of life. According to the speaker, after one’s

death also he/she remains alive in the hearts of people through his/her achievements

and righteous deeds.

No line ever last,

no death not forever.

You see this place? You see it?

All of it? Watch it good.

Not a jot nor a title

going lost.

The poem is full of positivity, vigour, vitality and energy. The speaker makes an

appeal to everybody including old twist-up man, hang-breast-woman, bang-belly

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pickney and young warrior never to give up and enjoy the life exuberantly till the last

day of life. The noun ‘pickney’ is used in West Indian English. The word ‘pickney’

is commonly used to mean ‘child’ in West Indian English. The speaker comments on

how a gal-turn-woman is crucified on the cross of sex before she becomes mature

enough.

Every old

twist-up man you see,

every hang-breast woman,

every bang-belly pickney,

every young warrior

who head wrench

with weed, white powder,

black powder, or indeed

the very vile persuasion

of the devil—for him not

bedridden you know—

every small gal-turn-woman

that you crucify on the

cross of your sex

before her little naseberry

start sweeten,

I swear to you,

every last one shall live.

In the concluding part, the speaker makes an appeal to the governor, prime

minister, parson, teacher, shopkeeper, politician, lecturer and resonant

revolutionaries to draw carefully the last fine line of their responsibilities. According

to the speaker, governor, prime minister, parson, teacher, shopkeeper, politician,

lecturer and revolutionaries are the pillars of any society or nation. So, if they prepare

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a road map for the society, it will become easier to common, ordinary people to draw

the lines of their destinies. Therefore, if everybody is doing his/her work sincerely,

honestly and act responsibly, our life will become meaningful and fruitful. So, these

last concluding lines are very important from the point of view of connotative

meaning. These last lines make everybody responsible to meet the new challenges.

Draw therefore, O governor,

prime minister, parson,

teacher, shopkeeper,

politician, lecturer,

resonant revolutionaries,

draw carefully

that last fine line

of your responsibility.

The title of the poem ‘Last Lines’ is apt and meaningful. It initiates thinking and

rethinking process in the minds of readers. It develops a different and positive

approach towards life. The message ‘One should never give up and go ahead’ is

indirectly reflected in this beautiful poem by Pamela Mordecai.

CHECK YOUR PROGRESS-1

A) Answer in one word/ phrase/ sentence each:

1. In which poem does the reference of ‘bang-belly pickney’ occur?

2. To whom does the speaker in ‘Last Lines’ make an appeal to draw the last

line of various responsibilities in human life?

3. In which poem does the line, ‘Who born twist? Who born dead? Who chop

before they born?’ occur?

4. Who is the writer of the poem ‘Easy Life’?

5. In which English does the word ‘pickney’ occur?

6. How many lines are there in the poem ‘Last Lines’?

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B) Answer the following in about 600 words each:

1. Explain major themes of Caribbean poetry with reference to the prescribed

poems of Pamela Mordecai.

2. Describe the plight of women with reference to the poem ‘Easy Life’.

3. Describe human life with reference to the poem ‘Last Lines’.

C) Write short notes on the following:

1. Significance of the title ‘Easy Life’

2. ‘Last Lines’

3. End of the poem ‘Last Lines’

3.1.4 Mahadai Das

Mahadai Das was a Guyanese poet. She was born in Eccles, East Bank

Demerara, Guyana, in 1954. She wrote poetry from her early school days at The

Bishops’ High School, Georgetown. She did her first degree at the University of

Guyana and received her B.A. in Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, and

then began a doctoral programme in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Das

became very ill and sadly was never able to complete the programme.

She was a dancer, actress, teacher and beauty queen (Ms. Dewali, 1971), served

as a volunteer member of the Guyana National Service around 1976 and was part of

the Messenger Group promoting ‘Coolie’ art forms at a time when Indo-

Guyanese culture was virtually excluded from national life. She was one of the

first Indo-Caribbean women to be published. Her poetry explicitly relates to ethnic

identity, something which contrasts her with other female Indo Caribbean

poets. Another theme in her writing is the working conditions in the Caribbean

islands. Das’s ‘A Leaf in His Ear’ was included in an article on ‘10 Female

Caribbean Authors You Should Know’. One of Das’s last published work of poetry

was named ‘Bones’ and was published in 1988 by the Peepal Press of London.

Sadly Das died in 2003 on April 3rd

in the country of Barbados, from an illness

relating to cardiac arrest which was suffered 10 days before her death. Das was never

able to live up to her full potential due to the life ending cardiac arrest related disease

that sadly put an end to her life at the young age of only 49 years old, leaving much

of her story to still be told.

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There are a few reoccurring themes in many of Das’s writings including the very

poor and unfair working conditions that many Caribbean people sadly have to endure

for their entire life. In addition to poor working conditions, another reoccurring

themes in Das’s writings have to do with is ethnic identity and the negativity coming

from outside Europeans. These themes, although reoccurring in Das’s many writings

and poems, also tend to be the theme of a majority of Caribbean authors.

Poems:

• Bones (Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 1988)

• A Leaf in His Ear: Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2010)

Several of her poems were included in The Heinemann Book of Caribbean

Poetry (Heinemann, 1992).

3.1.4.1 Horses

All the pink-coloured horses are coming in.

They gallop in from the sunset, hearts

beating like a drum.

Unbridled, they canter,

Flushed. Approaching twilight.

Behind, Sun is a blaze of metal

Sinking into the sea.

Where are the golden horsemen?

They too are drowning.

They will rise from the Sea tomorrow.

Their dust will rise up from the east.

Meanwhile, the horses come in,

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last troops in the twilight,

with their hoofs of steel, their wild manes.

The drums from the Amazon are thundering and,

breasty women are blowing into the fire.

The children are petulant, sucking their thumbs

with outcast expressions.

It is suppertime and their stomachs are groaning.

But outside the hut, the men

are hammering the goatskin drums with their fingers.

They wait for the horses to come in.

‘Horses’ is a beautiful descriptive poem by Mahadai Das. The description of

‘pink-coloured’ horses, ‘golden’ horsemen and the drummers hammering the

goatskin drums are given in a very exquisite manner by the poet. The picturesque

description appeals to the readers. Simultaneously, hunger, malnutrition and poverty-

stricken background touch the heart of readers. The poem is divided into six stanzas.

In the first stanza, the description of horses is given. These are pink-coloured

horses. They gallop in from the sunset. Their hearts are beating like a drum.

All the pink-coloured horses are coming in.

They gallop in from the sunset, hearts

beating like a drum.

In the second stanza, the speaker continues the description of horses. Speaker

makes comment on the vigour, energy and speed of horses approaching in the

twilight. It is the end of the day and the sun is likely to sink into the sea. The speaker

describes the sun as a blaze of metal. These are the picturesque qualities of the poem

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which appeal to the readers. After reading the poem, readers can create the mental

picture of horses riding in the late evening.

Unbridled, they canter,

Flushed. Approaching twilight.

Behind, Sun is a blaze of metal

Sinking into the sea.

In the next stanza, the description of horsemen is given in a very lucid manner.

These horsemen are referred to as ‘golden’ horsemen. It is the time of evening. It is

the time of sunset. And the entire atmosphere is irradiated with ‘golden’ colour.

Therefore, the horsemen appear to be ‘golden’. These horsemen are also drowning

into the sea just like the sun. But the speaker promises that they will rise from the sea

on the next day. Besides, their dust will also rise up from the east. This is the

beautiful imagination of the poet.

Where are the golden horsemen?

They too are drowning.

They will rise from the Sea tomorrow.

Their dust will rise up from the east.

In the fourth stanza, once again the poet describes the horses arriving at their

destination. Their last troops arrive in the twilight. The horses are described minutely

in this stanza. Phrases like ‘hoofs of steel’ and ‘wild manes’ clearly throw light upon

noble qualities, powerful physique and gallantly appearance of the horses. In another

scene, the drums from the Amazon are thundering and breasty women are blowing

into the fire.

Meanwhile, the horses come in,

last troops in the twilight,

with their hoofs of steel, their wild manes.

The drums from the Amazon are thundering and,

breasty women are blowing into the fire.

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In the next stanza, the appealing description of hunger and poverty-stricken

family is given. It is suppertime and children are sucking their thumbs out of hunger

with outcast expressions. Their stomachs are groaning.

The children are petulant, sucking their thumbs

with outcast expressions.

It is suppertime and their stomachs are groaning.

Again, in the last stanza, the struggle in the lives of poor families is portrayed.

There are a few men who are hammering the goatskin drums with their fingers. They

are hammering the drums outside the hut and waiting for horses to come in.

But outside the hut, the men

are hammering the goatskin drums with their fingers.

They wait for the horses to come in.

To sum up, ‘Horses’ is the descriptive poem and it appeals to the readers. Socio-

economic and cultural issues of tribal communities in Amazon are shown by the

poet. Here, these poverty-stricken families have to undergo struggle in order to earn

their livelihood.

3.1.4.2 The Leaf in his Ear

For Charlie

Left, the golden leaf bears from his ear.

At eighteen, Bushman fighting to control diamonds

in his glass head. The waters of the river

swirl by.

I and I, Rastaman, with knotty India hair, has long ago, ceased.

The good Lord swallowed him up.

Into Guiana forests. North-west.

Dogs bark and howl.

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In this first of May day, the Almighty is Rain,

voices, wind in banana suckers.

‘The Leaf in his Ear’ is a short poem by Mahadai Das. There are two stanzas

only and the first person pronoun ‘I’ is used by the speaker to share the experiences.

There are references of ‘golden leaf’, ‘Guiana forests’ ‘Charlie’ and ‘Rastaman’ in

the poem. The poem ‘The Leaf in his Ear’ appears to be subjective and personal in

tone. The poem seems to be deeply rooted in the personal experiences of Mahadai

Das.

The beginning of the poem clearly states that it is for Charlie. The speaker

comments how the golden leaf bears from his ear. In this stanza the reference of

‘Bushman’ occurs. The word ‘Bushman’ conveys connotative and contextual

meaning in this poem. According to the Cambridge Dictionary ‘Bushman’ means ‘a

member of one of the first groups of people to live in southern Africa, especially in

the Kalahari desert, who used to live as hunter-gatherers but are now mainly

farmers’. The Merriam Webster defines ‘Bushman’ as ‘an indigenous people of

southern Africa who have traditionally lived by hunting and foraging in small groups

and are considered the oldest inhabitants of the region’. The speaker makes comment

how at the age of eighteen, Bushman used to fight for controlling diamonds. The

beautiful description of this scene appeals to the readers. ‘Diamonds in his glass

head’ and ‘the waters of the river swirl by’ create mental picture of the scene before

the eyes of readers.

For Charlie

Left, the golden leaf bears from his ear.

At eighteen, Bushman fighting to control diamonds

in his glass head. The waters of the river

swirl by.

In the second stanza, the speaker emphasizes his/ her existence and involvement

in the scene by repeatedly using the pronoun ‘I’. There is reference of ‘Rastaman’

with knotty India hair in this stanza. The speaker commemorates Rastaman.

Unfortunately, Rastaman is no more now as the speaker gives reference: ‘The good

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Lord swallowed him up’. There is reference of ‘North-west’. It is the first day of

May. Almighty God appears in the form of Rain. Tribal communities worship the

sun, the moon, rain and other animate as well as inanimate objects just like Almighty

God.

I and I, Rastaman, with knotty India hair, has long ago, ceased.

The good Lord swallowed him up.

Into Guiana forests. North-west.

Dogs bark and howl.

In this first of May day, the Almighty is Rain,

voices, wind in banana suckers.

To sum up, ‘The Leaf in his Ear’ is a beautiful lyric poem. There are references

of animate and inanimate objects in the poem. There is nature imagery in the poem

that appeals to the readers.

CHECK YOUR PROGRESS-2


1. Which coloured horses are mentioned in the poem ‘Horses’?

2. How does Mahadai Das describe ‘Horsemen’ in the poem ‘Horses’?

3. In which poem does the reference of Amazon occur?

4. Who was fighting to control diamonds in the poem ‘The Leaf in his Ear’?

5. In which poem does the reference of ‘golden leaf’, ‘Guiana forests’ ‘Charlie’

and ‘Rastaman’ occur?


1. Explain major themes of Caribbean poetry with reference to the prescribed

poems of Mahadai Das.

2. Explain hunger, malnutrition and poverty-stricken background with special

reference to the prescribed poem of Mahadai Das.

3. Comment on the imagery in the poems of Mahadai Das.

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1. Significance of the title ‘Horses’

2. ‘The Leaf in his Ear’

3. Description of horses and horsemen

3.1.6 Let's Sum Up

In this unit, we discussed Caribbean Poetry with reference to the select poems of

Pamela Mordecai and Mahadai Das. Both poets have abundantly used nature

imagery. Their poetry consists of pictorial qualities. The description that is given in

their poems appeal to the senses of readers and it can create the mental picture in the

minds of readers. Caribbean Poetry has its own distinctive characteristic features

which are reflected in the poems of Pamela Mordecai and Mahadai Das.


1. Read and critically evaluate other Caribbean poems.

2. Compare Caribbean poets with each other.

3. Make a list of Post-colonial Caribbean women poets and highlight their

contribution.

3.1.8 References and Suggested Reading

Pamela Mordecai and Mervyn Morris, eds. Jamaica Woman: An Anthology of

Poems. (Exeter, NH: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc., 1982)

Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry in English Selected By Stewart Brown and Ian

McDonald

https://www.britannica.com/art/Caribbean-literature

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2) CANADIAN POETRY

Structure

3.2.0 Objectives

3.2.1 Introduction

3.2.2 Margaret Avison

3.2.2.1 Birth Day

3.2.2.2 Snow

Check your progress

3.2.3 P.K. Page

3.2.3.1 The Landlady

3.2.3.2 Stories of Snow

Check your progress




3.2.0 Objectives


• describe characteristic features of Canadian poetry ;

• explain major concerns of Canadian poetry;

• examine select Canadian poems;

identify socio-cultural, literary and environmental aspects of Canadian poetry.

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3.2.1 Introduction

Canadian literature consists of the body of written works produced by

Canadians. It reflects the country’s dual origin and its official bilingualism.

The literature of Canada can be split into two major divisions: English and French.

Most of the earliest poems were patriotic songs and hymns (The Loyal Verses of

Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell, 1860) or topographical narratives,

reflecting the first visitors’ concern with discovering and naming the new land and its

inhabitants.

In the early 20th century, popular poets responding to the interest in local colour

depicted French Canadian customs and dialect (W.H. Drummond, The Habitant and

Other French-Canadian Poems, 1897), the Mohawk tribe and rituals (E. Pauline

Johnson, Legends of Vancouver, 1911; Flint and Feather, 1912), and the freedom

and romance of the north (Robert Service, Songs of a Sourdough, 1907). John

McCrae’s account of World War I, “In Flanders Fields” (1915), remains Canada’s

best-known poem. Slowly a reaction against sentimental, patriotic, and derivative

Victorian verse set in. E.J. Pratt created a distinctive style both in lyric poems of sea

bound Newfoundland life (Newfoundland Verse, 1923) and in the epic narratives The

Titanic(1935), Brébeuf and His Brethren(1940), and Towards the Last Spike (1952),

which through their reliance on accurate detail participate in the documentary

tradition. Influenced by Pratt, Earle Birney, another innovative and experimental

poet, published the frequently anthologized tragic narrative “David” (1942), the first

of many audacious, technically varied poems exploring the troubling nature of

humanity and the cosmos.

Toronto’s Canadian Forum (founded in 1920), which Birney edited from 1936

to 1940, and Montreal’s McGill Fortnightly Review (1925–27) provided an outlet for

the “new poetry” and the emergence of Modernism. Emphasizing concrete images,

open language, and free verse, these modernists felt that the poet’s task was to

identify, name, and take possession of the land. Fueled

by fervent literary nationalism and anti-Americanism, by the expansion of new

presses and literary magazines, and by the beckoning of avant-garde forms, poetry

blossomed after 1960. Prolific, ribald, and iconoclastic, Irving Layton published 48

volumes of poetry celebrating life in memorable lyric lines and lambasting Canadian

sexual puritanism and social and political cowardice.

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Margaret Avison (Winter Sun/The Dumbfounding, 1982), Anne Wilkinson (The

Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1968), Gwendolyn MacEwen (The Poetry of

Gwendolyn MacEwen, 1994), Phyllis Webb (Selected Poems: The Vision Tree,

1982), D.G. Jones (A Throw of Particles, 1983; Grounding Sight, 1999), E.D.

Blodgett (Apostrophes series), and Don Coles (Forests of the Medieval World,

1993; Kurgan, 2000) grapple with metaphysical and mystical concerns through

images drawn from places, travel, mythology, and nature. Sharon Thesen (The

Beginning of the Long Dash, 1987; Aurora, 1995; A Pair of Scissors, 2001) and Don

McKay (Field Marks, 2006) spin evocative poems out of historical events, key

personages, the natural world, and the quotidian. The desire of women to express

their distinctive voices and experiences in nonconventional forms also resulted in a

surge of feminist literary journals (Room of One’s Own, Atlantis, Tessera, Fireweed)

and presses. Collections by Marlatt (Touch to My Tongue, 1984; This Tremor Love

Is, 2001) and Di Brandt (Questions I Asked My Mother, 1987; Jerusalem, Beloved,

1995) reenvision language, sexuality, and subjectivity through a feminist, lesbian,

and theoretical lens. Anne Carson writes playful poems that interweave

contemporary and past voices. In Autobiography of Red (1998)—the story of the

winged red monster Geryon and his doomed love for Herakles—she draws on the

Greek poet Stesichoros, while in The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29

Tangos (2001) she invokes English poet John Keats. A classics scholar, Carson has

also translated Euripides’ plays (Grief Lessons, 2006) and Sappho’s poems (If Not,

Winter, 2002). Poets who engage in virtuoso and highly experimental probings of

language include Lisa Robertson (XEclogue, 1993, rev. ed. 1999; The Weather,

2001) and Christian Bök (Eunoia, 2001). In Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent

Person (2001) and Little Theatres; or, AturuxosCalados(2005), Erin Mouré offers

inventive translations of Portuguese and Galician authors as she explores ideas of

local and global citizenship and community.

Inflected by anger and sorrow, Marie Annharte Baker (Being on the Moon,

1990), Chrystos (Fire Power, 1995), Beth Brant (Mohawk Trail, 1985), and Marilyn

Dumont (A Really Good Brown Girl, 1996) protest stereotypes of First Nations and

Métis. Dionne Brand’s No Language Is Neutral (1990) and Marlene Nourbese

Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988) challenge the

colonization, sexism, and racism of the English language, while George Elliott

Clarke’s collage Whylah Falls (1990) uncovers the life of Canadian blacks in a 1930s

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Nova Scotia village. In mapping arrivals and departures through an increasing

diversity of voices and selves, celebrating and mourning differences, and protesting

coercion, constraint, and smugness in a bountiful array of forms from sonnet to

ghazal to documentary long poem, Canadian poets have opened the country of the

mind and the minds of the country.

3.2.2 Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison (1918-2007) is the Canadian poet who twice won Canada’s

Governor General’s Award and also won Griffin Poetry Prize. She attended the

University of Toronto and completed BA and MA. She worked as a librarian,

teacher, editor and social worker at church missions in Toronto. Avison’s collections

of poetry include Winter Sun (1960), Dumbfounding (1966), Sunblue (1978), No

Time (1990), Concrete and Wild Carrot (2002), and Momentary Dark (2006). She

assisted in translating several Hungarian poems and stories into English for two

anthologies of Hungarian literature.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Her work has been praised for the

beauty of its language and images”. Further she is described as a “Canadian poet who

revealed the progress of an interior spiritual journey in her three successive volumes

of poetry” by the Encyclopedia Britannica. Avison can be considered a spiritual or

metaphysical poet, “her work is often described by reviewers as introspective,

observant, and deeply spiritual”.

3.2.2.1 Birth Day:

Saturday I ran to Mytilene.

Bushes and grass along the glass-still way

Were all dabbled with rain

And the road reeled with shattered skies.

Towards noon an inky, petulant wind

Ravelled the pools, and rinsed the black grass round them.

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Gulls were up in the late afternoon

And the air gleamed and billowed

And broadcast flung astringent spray

All swordy-silver.

I saw the hills lie brown and vast and passive.

The men of Mytilene waited restive

Until the yellow melt of sun.

I shouted out my news as I sped towards them

That all, rejoicing, could go down to dark.

All nests, with all moist downy young

Blinking and gulping daylight; and all lambs

Four-braced in straw, shivering and mild;

And the first blood-root up from the ravaged beaches

Of the old equinox; and frangible robins’ blue

Teethed right around to sun:

These first we loudly hymned;

And then

The hour of genesis

When the first moody firmament

Swam out of Arctic chaos,

Orbed solidly as the huge frame for this

Cramped little swaddled creature's coming forth

To slowly, foolishly, marvellously

Discover a unique estate, held wrapt

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Away from all men else, which to embrace

Our world would have to stretch and swell with strangeness.

This made us smile, and laugh at last. There was

Rejoicing all night long in Mytilene.

The poem ‘Birth Day’ is symbolic and consists of metaphorical language.

The spiritual journey is narrated in the poem. Narrator has turned in “of

sunwardness”. In terms of turning in “of sunwardness”, the narrator runs to Mitilene

and instead of daybreak experiences, her journey commences on Saturday. The

symbolic significance of these specific details suggest a new epoch. This new epoch

is the regeneration of human soul. In this poem ‘Saturday’ denotes the prelude to a

Sabbath. The entire poem vibrates with the annunciation of

a unique estate, held wrapt

Away from all men else, which to embrace

Our world would have to stretch and swell with strangeness.

Not only, however, does this poem announce “the hour of Genesis”, it

simultaneously is, for the narrator, the initial movement into the Genesis. The bird,

lamb, root, sun and water imagery which the poet uses in order to describe the

narrator’s flight to Mitilene supports this idea of regeneration.

In ‘Birth Day’, we have a narrator, who, through the process of turning

sunward becomes herself part of the transfigured world which she wishes to

announce. Those to whom she speeds her “news” also become characters in the

framework of the New Dawn; upon beholding (in this instance the acceptance of) the

“unique estate” they “smile and laugh at last”. Then,

There was

Rejoicing all night long in Mytilene.

In the poem, we have so many nature images that create the mental

picture of ‘regeneration’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘genesis’ in the minds of readers. Description

of bushes, grass dabbled with rain, roads reeled with shattered skies, hills—brown,

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vast and passive, petulant wind, old equinox and frangible robins’ symbolize

spiritualism, metaphysics, human temperament and mood. There is reference of

Mytilene in the poem. Mytilene is a city in Greece.

3.2.2.2 Snow:

Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.

The optic heart must venture: a jail-break

And re-creation. Sedges and wild rice

Chase rivery pewter. The astonished cinders quake

With rhizomes. All ways through the electric air

Trundle candy-bright discs; they are desolate

Toys, if the soul’s gates seal, and cannot bear,

Must shudder under, creation’s unseen freight.

But soft, there is snow’s legend: colour of mourning

Along the yellow Yangtze where the wheel

Spins an indifferent stasis that’s death’s warning.

Asters of tumbled quietness reveal

Their petals. Suffering this starry blur

The rest may ring your change, sad listener.

The negative side of the human condition is examined with positive zeal in the

opening lines of the poem ‘Snow’:



And re-creation…..

The mood conveyed through the key words “optic”, “venture”, “jail-break” and

“re-creation” is one of self-willed awareness.

Reigo takes "Snow" as a demonstration that "the simple act of looking up into

the falling snow and suffering the pain of over-exposure is an instance of

transcendence and spiritual rebirth." "It is a case of seeing the world in a grain of

sand. Avison advocates openness to experience and demonstrates that whole, honest

experiencing of our own private physiological processes brings us into harmony with

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creation, even if only momentarily and at the cost of suffering and alienation. Her

message is that anything "really experienced" is a way to the state of grace.

Imaginative vision—‘Snow’- controversial poem—



and re-creation

The central principles here — the equation of seeing with being; the bursting of

generally accepted boundaries of perception; and "the imagination's re-creation of the

world of experience". The optic heart unites sense (eye) and inner being (heart) in a

multi dimensional, imaginative vision that breaks through conventional structures of

perception; it includes both the "inner eye" (of "Apex Animal") and the outer, both

physical and non-physical experience. Jail-break is a risky process, however, for it

always entails a kind of death; yet that death is ultimately essential to life and being

— "must venture" connotes both danger and necessity.

Check Your Progress-3


1) In which poem does the reference of ‘Mytilene’ occur?

2) What does ‘Saturday’ denote in the poem ‘Birth Day’?

3) Where does the narrator in the poem ‘Birth Day’ make flight?

4) In which poem does the reference of ‘jail-break’ and ‘optic heart’ occur?

5) Which river is referred to in the poem ‘Snow’?


1) “The work of Margaret Avison is often described by reviewers as

introspective, observant and deeply spiritual”. Discuss with reference to the

prescribed poems.

2) Explain nature imagery in the prescribed poems of Margaret Avison.

3) Explain the spiritual journey and regeneration with reference to ‘Birth

Day’.

4) Describe ‘the equation of seeing with being’ with reference to ‘Snow’.

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1) Significance of the title ‘Birth Day’

2) ‘Snow’

3) Spiritualism in the poem of Margaret Avison

3.2.3 P. K. PAGE

Patricia Kathleen "P. K." Page, (23 November 1916 – 14 January 2010) was best

known as a Canadian poet, though the citation as she was inducted as a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada reads “poet, novelist, script writer, playwright, essayist,

journalist, librettist, teacher and artist”. She was the author of more than thirty

published books that include poetry, fiction, travel diaries, essays, children’s books,

and an autobiography.

As a visual artist, she exhibited her work as P.K. Irwin at a number of venues in

Canada and abroad. Her works are in the permanent collections of the National

Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Page won the Governor General’s Award in 1954 for The Metal and the Flower,

and the Canadian Authors Association Award in 1985 for The Glass Air. In 1977 she

was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion of the

Order in 1998. In 2003, she was made a member of the Order of British Columbia.

3.2.3.1 The Landlady

Through sepia air the boarders come and go,

impersonal as trains. Pass silently

the craving silence swallowing her speech;

click doors like shutters on her camera eye.

Because of her their lives become exact:

their entrances and exits are designed;

phone calls are cryptic. Oh, her ticklish ears

advance and fall back stunned.

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Nothing is unprepared. They hold the walls

about them as they weep or laugh. Each face

is dialled to zero publicly. She peers

stippled with curious flesh;

pads on the patient landing like a pulse,

unlocks their keyholes with the wire of sight,

searches their rooms for clues when they are out,

pricks when they come home late.

Wonders when they are quiet, jumps when they move,

dreams that they dope or drink, trembles to know

the traffic of their brains, jaywalks their street

in clumsy shoes.

Yet knows them better than their closest friends:

their cupboards and the secrets of their drawers,

their books, their private mails, their photographs

are theirs and hers.

Knows when they wash, how frequently their clothes

go to the cleaners, what they like to eat,

their curvature of health, but even so

is not content.

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And like a lover must know all, all, all.

Prays she may catch them unprepared at last

and palm the dreadful riddle of their skulls—

hoping the worst.

First published in May 1944 in Canadian Forum, the portrait of the “Landlady”

(Planet 108-109) is among Page’s poetic tributes to the kind of inherent loneliness of

the human condition.

The poem employs an impersonal narrator to relate the impersonal traffic of

boarders through, quite literally, the lonely rooms of the landlady’s house. The air

there is “sepia” (1), the dull brown colour of old photographs that covers over the

colours of the original scene. Her physical hunger to take something from her tenants

into herself is emphasized by the sibilant alliteration in “the craving silence

swallowing her speech” (3). She craves silence so that she might better hear what her

tenants are doing, “swallowing” her own words in favour of the consumption of

theirs.

The vocabulary of photography again describes her “camera eye” (4) recording

the activities of her constant influx of boarders. Her blinking “shutters” record

selected elements of her tenants’ lives into “exact” (5) mental snapshots, sepia-

coloured in that their subject matter, these tenants’ various comings and goings, is

generalized to contain few variations in tone. Her mind is an album for these shots

through which she can pore when repelled, “stunned” (8), from any further access

into the secrets of their lives. Her tenants react to her behaviour by keeping their

actions deliberate, their expressions as blank as “zero” (11), and their phone calls

“cryptic” (7). She can never find them “unprepared” (9) without the “walls / about

them” (9-10), a state of vulnerability for which she longs, imagining a glimpse of

honesty or scandal simmering beneath impassive faces.

The landlady “peers / stippled with curious flesh” (11-12), a description

referring to a dotting technique in artwork, used here subtly to reiterate the landlady’s

status as a product of the poet’s artistic creation, though sketched with words and not

a paintbrush. The adjective also evokes her goose bumps of anticipation, making her

“jump,” “dream,” and “tremble” (17, 18) to know what her boarders are doing.

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The alliteration of the ‘p’ in line 13 strengthens the comparison of her padding

in a steady repetitive beat “on the patient landing like a pulse” (13); like a cat

burglar, consistent and noiseless, the landlady steals furtively through the tenants’

living areas, rifling through their belongings as if to glean knowledge of their owners

by osmosis through the “curious,” fleshy membrane of her fingertips.

The poem construes sight as both a camera that locks her tenants into frames to

keep them still and a “wire” (14) with which she can unlock their doors and try to

unlock their minds. Because of her skill at employing this “wire,” she “knows them

better than their closest friends” (21), but despite this one-sided intimacy, she “is not

content” (28). She, “like a lover, must know all, all, all” (29). This repetition mimics

her dissatisfaction with the boundaries by which her knowledge of them is

constrained. She wishes to overrun these constraints, wanting above all else to “catch

them unprepared at last” (28). Her snapshots are insufficient, merely surface

portraits. She obsesses over the thought of invading her tenants’ heads, to bore past

their expressionless faces until she can “palm the dreadful riddle of their skulls” (29)

and experience them beyond the bodily limits of her senses and theirs. She intuits

some treasure to be found by penetrating through their eyes, across their final,

insurmountable boundaries, and thinks gleefully of the prospect of rooting for truth

in the tangled enigma of their minds.

Exemplary of one of Page’s frequent early themes, a fundamental alienation that

extends beyond the scope of her idiosyncratic behaviour, the landlady remains static

and unchanged, a steady pulse in a world of erratic motion. She hopes to fill her

gaping emptiness with her tenants’ secrets, desiring a flash of something authentic or

even compellingly horrific to break the repetitive monotony of her daily existence

and to escape “the room of ‘you’” (“Prediction” 21). The prison of selfhood to which

she is confined similarly confines her to the role of observer, always at a distance

from her objects. This distance is underscored through the poem’s narration by an

impersonal, objective voice through which the speaker can avoid admitting the same

failure in human connection by keeping herself distinct from the landlady’s ravenous

loneliness.

3.2.3.2 Stories of Snow

Those in the vegetable rain retain

an area behind their sprouting eyes

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held soft and rounded with the dream of snow

precious and reminiscent as those globes—

souvenir of some never-nether land—

which hold their snow-storms circular, complete,

high in a tall and teakwood cabinet.

In countries where the leaves are large as hands

where flowers protrude their fleshy chins

and call their colours,

an imaginary snow-storm sometimes falls

among the lilies.

And in the early morning one will waken

to think the glowing linen of his pillow

a northern drift, will find himself mistaken

and lie back weeping.

And there the story shifts from head to head,

of how in Holland, from their feather beds

hunters arise and part the flakes and go

forth to the frozen lakes in search of swans—

the snow-light falling white along their guns,

their breath in plumes.

While tethered in the wind like sleeping gulls

ice-boats wait the raising of their wings

to skim the electric ice at such a speed

they leap jet strips of naked water,

and how these flying, sailing hunters feel

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air in their mouths as terrible as ether.

And on the story runs that even drinks

in that white landscape dare to be no colour;

how flasked and water clear, the liquor slips

silver against the hunters’ moving hips.

And of the swan in death these dreamers tell

of its last flight and how it falls, a plummet,

pierced by the freezing bullet

and how three feathers, loosened by the shot,

descend like snow upon it.

While hunters plunge their fingers in its down

deep as a drift, and dive their hands

up to the neck of the wrist

in that warm metamorphosis of snow

as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know

who, lost in the white circle, fall at last

and dream their way to death.

And stories of this kind are often told

in countries where great flowers bar the roads

with reds and blues which seal the route to snow—

as if, in telling, raconteurs unlock

the colour with its complement and go

through to the area behind the eyes

where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies.

237

Of all the poems that Page wrote in the 1940s, ‘Stories of Snow’ most clearly

outlines the complexities in perception. Here Page’s complex perception points

beyond the problem presented by the perceptions themselves back to the perceiver.

Page does not just develop a multitude of images from a single image, she also

attempts to understand the source from which these images spring. These

discoveries, though nebulously and intuitively manifested, point to the imaginative

exploratory operations of the mind, the basis from which all imagination and

understanding radiate. The poem is suggestive and visionary. It refers to the border-

line area of perception in which things are and are not, the area in which things

unknown begin to unveil their mysterious nature.

Like all of Page’s better poetry, it finds its depth and breadth in its complex

image pattern. The poem centres itself on an image pattern that is not new to Page.

Images of snow and whiteness appear in many of her complex poems. In this poem

snow or whiteness is not only a core image, but also the main subject. ‘Stories of

Snow’ is, as the title notes, a poem about the mysterious stories which surround

snow. Snow takes on a mystical significance and is intricately interwoven with the

world of dream. As Page notes in her opening stanza:


an area behind their sprouting eyes

held soft and rounded with the dream of snow

precious and reminiscent.........

Page is not content to let her image rest even in her opening stanza and she

develops the image and begins at once to gradually widen her circle of imagistic

ideas. “The dream of snow” suggests a snow storm as it moves into a second image:

............the dream of snow

precious and reminiscent as those globes—

souvenir of some never-nether land—



238

The swirl of storm is caught and ensnared in a container, but even the container

becomes a complex. It is as Page’s punning suggests, a never never land of

childhood fantasy and delight, a world of innocence and dreams, though it is also a

foreshadowing of the fanciful Netherland which with its stories “hold(s) their snow

storms circular, complete”. In actuality, Page puns upon never never land when she

says “never nether land”. It is easy to connect nether and land together and come up

with Netherland, the setting for part of the poem, but separated, a second pun comes

to light. “Nether land” plays upon the word Netherland in the same way that “never

nether land” plays upon never never land. Thus, a “nether land” can be a lower or

low down land, a place not necessarily named for its elevation relative to sea level,

but relative to a scale that is more easily discerned if nether is connected with world.

The “nether land” that Page talks about could be connected to the underworld, a

hellish place in which the dreams of snow and pure imagination are kept in

containers:



It is a place out of the reach of children, a world where the imagination is denied

to children and only kept for childlike adult frivolities, which are far from innocent.

The complex grows as does the dual quality of snow and whiteness. Not only

does the colour elicit innocent dreams where

.......in the early morning one will waken


a northern drift......

It also elicits the cold terror of hunters that

............go

forth to the frozen lakes in search of swans—

the snow-light falling white along their guns,

their breath in plumes.

Both creation and destruction are possible within the total perspective, and the

elements of creation and destruction are, often as not, confusingly intermingled with

239

each other. The hunters may “feel/ air in their mouths as terrible as ether”, but air “as

terrible as ether” is not a simple literal image, for it also conjures up feelings of

terror, coldness and drugged sleep. Similarly, the image of woodsmen “who, lost in

the white circle, fall at last/ and dream their way to death” conjoins an image of stark,

harsh reality with blissful innocence. A terrifying irony is latent in Page’s image of a

“warm metamorphosis of snow”. Death evolves from the innocent vision. The white

snow is the point of confusion, which is neither hot nor cold and which with its

dreamlike confusion only leads to a metamorphosis in which the snow itself does not

change, but the person ensnared in it does. The innocent, blissful dreams of a person

freezing to death and the soft warmth of feathers on a dead swan both point toward a

final innocence which cannot ever really be reconciled with reality. The swan and the

woodsman both die. The elusive quality of snow and whiteness still pervades all of

the answers that can be brought up by the segmentation which produces the many

hues of the rainbow and creates a defined reality.

There is a second pervading irony intrinsic in the fact that it is not snow or

whiteness that blocks the route to the mysterious world of dreams and fantasy, but

colours and defined reality. It is “reds and blues which seal the route to snow”. Even

though man has produced many classifications in which he can categorize his

knowledge, these classifications are only a small part of the totality which he

understands and even they can slip back easily into the strange undivided world of

whiteness and wholeness. The all encompassing whiteness is a kind of primal

awareness which


.........behind their sprouting eyes

held soft and rounded with the dream of snow.

It pervades the being even though the “vegetable rain” of colours is in reality

what the “sprouting eyes” visualize.

The poem points beyond perception and into the imagination, the storehouse

where images and concepts are only loosely connected to the exterior world.

The world demands conscious attention and extracts it from the individual at the

expense of the subconscious world of dream and fantasy. Even the stories become a

key to the world of fantasy and the world of snowy whiteness:

240

as if, in telling, raconteurs unlock

the colour with its complement and go

through to the area behind the eyes

where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies.

The stories are also constructs and it is only conjecture as to whether or not

these formulated constructs can break the bonds and enable the reader to find the

freedom of his own imagination. The story is only a stimulant. The individual still

has to rely on his own imagination to create the image which the story suggests.

People “retain / an area behind their sprouting eyes” in which their imagination can

generate fantasy. It is a matter of finding a key to open the door to this area.

“Stories of Snow” not only develops this pattern of thought, it also completes it

with a pattern of dream images that flow into one another. Page admits that she is

fascinated with dreams. She feels that they are more significant than most people

think they are.

By moving from an image of colourful flowers to an image of white lilies, Page

starts her movement into whiteness and dream:

where flowers protrude their fleshy chins

and call their colours,

an imaginary snow-storm sometimes falls

among the lilies.

The whitewashed flowers become further transformed and the image subtly

shifts again from flowers to snowflakes, as the image of lilies spins into an image of

a snowstorm, which is reminiscent of the snowstorm of the little globe full of

artificial snow. The image does not settle long there either. It moves quickly from the

image of snow falling “among the lilies” to an image of snow drift seen upon

awakening from being “held soft and rounded with the dream of snow”:

And in the early morning one will waken


a northern drift.

241

The image moves quickly again “from head to head”. The white linen of a

pillow suggests further bed images and Page shifts to an image of hunters arising

“from their feather beds” who “part the flakes (of snow) and go/ forth to the frozen

lakes in search of swans”. Even the image of hunters falls into the pattern. The snow

falls “white along their guns” and their breath expires in white plumes in the cold.

The image then shifts rapidly from the hunters to their ice boats which also

reflect the white imagery. Waiting in the wind, the boats look “like sleeping gulls”

that “wait the raising of their wings”. These boats are not ordinary boats, for they do

not float on top of the water. Instead, they “skim” the white frozen water and “leap

the jet strips of the naked water”. They do not really fly, yet they do not really float.

The hunters are “flying, sailing hunters”; they are not one thing or the other. Speed

and confusion intermingle as the hunters move across “electric ice” and are caught

by air as cold and “as terrible as ether”. As Page notes “even drinks/ in that landscape

dare to be no colour”. The intoxicant liquor, another beclouding influence, appears to

be disguised, “masked and water clear”. It appears “silver against the hunters’

moving hips” like quicksilver, liquor in the broad sense of the word which in colour

mimes silver’s colour.

Shifting from seagull-like boats and quicksilver-liquor, Page moves to the image

“those dreamers tell” of “the swans in death”. In contrast to the boat that skims and

rises the above the water, the shot swan ceases to fly and falls back to earth “a

plummet,/ pierced by the freezing bullet”. Again there is a confusion of hot and

cold. The bullet is figuratively cold, as it kills and numbs, even though in actuality it

has no connection with the cold. The image shifts slightly again and instead of

focusing on the swan, its focus moves to “three feathers, loosened by the shot” that

“descend like snow upon it”. The feathers are similar to the flakes of falling snow.

The swan blends in with the snow it has fallen into. It is covered with white feathers

which look “deep as a drift” of snow.

The image radiates beyond the parallel with the snow as the image of falling

feathers unites it with the earlier images of the dreamers lying in bed on feather

pillows and the hunters arising “from their feather beds”. The metamorphic warmth

of the snow-like feathers similarly reflects the warmth of the feather beds of

dreamers. Thus, the image of the lost woodsmen not only illustrates the confusion

between warmth and cold, it also illustrates the confusion between dream and reality.

In effect, the woodsmen are immersed in a “metamorphosis of snow” which reflects

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another of the many possible dream worlds filled with whiteness and confused

senses. They are also dreamers, but their bed instead of being made of feathers, is

made of snow, its antithesis. They too are caught in a circle which holds them in a

contained world “circular, complete”. Like the three feathers they make a spiral

descent to where they will “fall at last/ and dream their way to death”.

The confusion of the senses is completed with death. The imaginative world has

in a sense swallowed up the real world and, in its greediness, swallowed itself up too.

Yet Page leaves us with an interesting thought which undermines these negative

aspects of the imaginative world of snow and whiteness:

........stories of this kind are often told

in countries where great flowers bar the roads

with reds and blues which seal the route to snow.....

The question is, are these stories the distorted product of the jealous world of

reality, that area which “bars the roads” to snow “with reds and blues?” Can the

raconteurs trapped in the world of realities ever fully “go/ through to the area behind

the eyes/ where silent unrefractive whiteness lies?” Page’s statement is tentative. It is

only “as if, in telling” that “raconteurs unlock/ the colour”. For Page, pure

imaginative process demands more of the individual than that. The stories are an

attempt, but they do not fully encompass the imaginative world that they

contemplate. Insight and understanding of the imaginative processes that operate

beyond our ken of understanding are illusive. The area “where silent, unrefractive

whiteness lies” is an area which demands much more contemplation or meditation

than simple stories can ever offer. To comprehend or even glimpse a world of total

unity or whiteness in a segmented world is far from an easy task.



1. In which year the poem ‘The Landlady’ was published?

2. Whose eyes are described as ‘Camera’?

3. In which poem does the reference of Holland and hunters occur?

4. In which poem does the reference of ‘frozen lake’ and ‘flying, sailing

hunters’ occur?

243

5. Whose death is mentioned in the poem ‘Stories of Snow’?


1. Comment on inherent loneliness of the human condition with special

reference to P.K. Page’s ‘The Landlady’.

2. Explain dreamlike images in ‘Stories of Snow’.

3. Explain the major theme of P.K. Page’s poetry with reference to the

prescribed poems.

4. Explain major trends in Canadian poetry with reference to the prescribed

poems.


1. Significance of the title ‘Stories of Snow’

2. Landlady

3. Imagery in the poem ‘Stories of Snow’

3.2.4 Let's Sum up

In this unit, we discussed Canadian Poetry with reference to the select poems of

Margaret Avison and P.K. Page. Canadian poetry has its own distinctive features

which are reflected in the poems of Margaret Avison and P.K. Page. We studied the

spiritual journey in ‘Birth Day’ and the negative side of the human condition with

positive zeal in ‘Snow’. The descriptive and pictorial qualities as well as beautiful

imagery in P.K. Page’s poetry appeal to the readers. The poems of Margaret Avison

and P.K. Page give new insight to the readers and we experienced the same while

studying prescribed poems of Margaret Avison and P.K. Page.


1. Read and critically evaluate other Canadian poems.

2. Compare Canadian poetry with Caribbean poetry.

3. Make a list of Post-colonial Canadian women poets and highlight their

contribution.

244


https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Avison

Man and Mandala: The Poetry of Margaret Avison. Hendrika Williamson. Thesis.

Simon Frazer University. August, 1970

Mapping the Mind’s “I”: Vision, Perception, and Complicity in the Early Poems of

P.K. Page. Jane Swann.

The Development of P.K. Page’s Imagery: The Subjective Eye—The Eye of the

Conjuror. Thesis. Allen Keith Valleau. The University of British Columbia. July,

1973.

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3) INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH

Structure

3.3.0 Objectives

3.3.1 Introduction

3.3.2 Toru Dutt

3.3.2.1 Sita

3.3.2.2 Our Casuarina Tree

Check your progress

3.3.3 Imtiaz Dharkar

3.3.3.1 Purdah – I

3.3.3.2 Another Woman

Check your progress




3.3.0 Objectives


• describe characteristic features of Indian Poetry in English;

• explain major concerns of Indian English Poetry;

• examine select Indian English poems;

• identify socio-cultural and literary aspects of Indian Poetry in English.

3.3.1 Introduction

Indian women poets writing in English from Toru Dutt to Kamala Das and from

Sarojini Naidu to Suniti Namjoshi reveal the mind-boggling variety of theme as well

as style that poetry is capable of offering. In the last fifty years absorbing a variety of

influences, dealing with a range of themes and generating diverse strategies of poetic

expression each one of them has tried to speak in a distinctly personal voice, yet they

246

form a part of chorus, a collective voice asserting the autonomy of women. It needs

to be remembered that poetry written by women need not be viewed only as feminist

poetry. In fact the belief that one is a woman is almost as absurd and obscurantist as

the belief that is a man. However, literature by women tends to get marginalized

because of the disparate tendencies of reception to their writings. In writing and

particularly in writing poetry women are allotted personal but not public spaces, a

private but not a political or rhetorical voice.

Women poets have often raised their voice against social and cultural

conventions that constrained their freedom and perpetrated a sort of institutional

subjection of women. Women writers assert that the creation of a community of

women is necessary antidote to the excess of individualism. They believe that

women need to explore their collective consciousness and shared experience in order

to transcend the fragmentation and isolation of their lives. With regards to the new

trends and techniques in women’s poetry there is a remarkable movement connecting

the domestic with the public spheres of work. Increased metropolitan activities,

sophisticated life styles, globalization, urbanized influences of pop, disco and cafe

culture, Anglo-Americanization and the public and convent education of the present

generation of women poets have made their poetic language, chiselled, sharp, pithy

and effortless. The deconstructive strategies of narrative and conceptual frames,

along with the simultaneous assimilation of pan-Indian elements have made their

poetry a formidable area of study and research. The fissures and fragments of post-

modern life are questioned and reflected in the highly experimental diction. The

problems of sociological vis-à-vis literary politics, of gender inequities of

margilization and subhumanisation of women, of their social and artistic exclusion

and of the dominant need for inclusion and democratization, all contribute towards

the distinctive character of this poetry. For the first time, mapping out new terrains

the poetry of such Indian women poets bring forth the suppressed desires, lust,

sexuality and gestational experiences. This new poetry in new forms of new thematic

concerns of contemporary issues has changed the course of human civilization as the

country entered the new millennium. As such, it does not remain isolated from the

global trends and can be corroborated by the fact that it has incorporated itself the

manifestations of the feminist movements that swept through Europe, America,

Canada, and Australia since 1960s. At the same time in India appeared the poetry of

Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Tara Patel, Imtiaz Dharker, Gauri Deshpande, Suniti

247

Namjoshi, Gauri Pant, Lakshmi Kannan, Vimla Rao, Meena Alexander, Margaret

Chatterjee, Charmayne D‘Souza, Mamta Kalia, Sujata Bhatt, etc.

3.3.2 Toru Dutt

Among the early English writers of Indian Renaissance who gave independent

outlook, right direction, original subjects, the name of Toru Dutt stands first. Her best

work has depth of human motives and emotions and an abiding faith in Indian

values. Besides writing in French and English, she turned to Sanskrit literature to get

the sacred touch of India's Muse and introduced to the world about her splendor

beauty and rich treasure-house of ancient wisdom. It was a matter of deep sorrow

that she died so early when her talent was blossoming under the vast auspicious

knowledge of Indian myths, legends and folklores. She fascinates us for her personal

life as well as due to her creative genius.

Like Bronte sisters and Keats, her family, too, became a victim of consumption

and she died in the prime of her youth, only at 21. Before her sad and slow death, she

lost her elder brother Abju aged only 14 and sister Aru only at 20. Edmund Gosse

writes, "It is wonderful to grasp of a girl who at the age of twenty one had produced

so much of lasting worth." The great Indian critic Amar Nath Jha also writes," There

is every reason to believe that in intellectual power Toru Dutt was one of the most

remarkable women that ever lived." She belonged to a very rich, respectable and

intellectual family of Calcutta. Her father Govin Chunder Dutt was a cultured man

steeped into the deep knowledge of the West and the East. Her mother was also a

woman of very modest and loving disposition and from her mouth the young Toru

had listened to the immortal stories of ancient Indian heroes and heroines. The other

family members too were highly learned and pursuing the great tradition of music

and literature.

Toru's father embraced Christianity and afterwards left Calcutta and settled at

Nice, in the south-east of France. Here Toru and her sister learnt their first lessons in

French and soon they excelled in this language and used it effectively and

proficiently for their literary leanings. Their first literary fruit came out with the title

Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields with admiring maturity and depth. Of the 165 pieces,

8 were by Aru and remaining by Toru. Though it was a translation from French to

English, but it was marked by a great original genius as Toru's selection and rejection

has made it almost a new creative work. No wonder, Edmund Goss read it with

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‘surprise and almost rapture’. He declared, “If modern French literature were entirely

lost, it might not be found impossible to reconstruct a great number of poems from

this Indian version”.

Keeping and maintaining the original rhythm, sense and meaning, Toru’s

translation has almost touched the beauty and glory of newly creative work, pouring

her bleeding heart out of the family tragedy in willingly chosen works of French

Romantics. Here, in them, she gave free play to her soaring imagination, unchecked

and unbounded, loneliness, dejection, ardours and agonies of life. Likewise, her

French novel 'Le Journal de Mademoiselle d'Arvers' which was published

posthumously, has captured the eyes of the public both at home and abroad. She has

captivated the music of French language and life.

3.3.2.1 Sita:

Three happy children in a darkened room!

What do they gaze on with wide-open eyes?

A dense, dense forest, where no sunbeam pries,

And in its centre a cleared spot.—There bloom

Gigantic flowers on creepers that embrace

Tall trees: there, in a quiet lucid lake

The while swans glide; there, "whirring from the brake,"

The peacock springs; there, herds of wild deer race;

There, patches gleam with yellow waving grain;

There, blue smoke from strange altars rises light.

There, dwells in peace, the poet-anchorite.

But who is this fair lady? Not in vain

She weeps,—for lo! at every tear she sheds

Tears from three pairs of young eyes fall amain,

And bowed in sorrow are the three young heads.

It is an old, old story, and the lay

Which has evoked sad Sîta from the past

Is by a mother sung.… 'Tis hushed at last

And melts the picture from their sight away,

Yet shall they dream of it until the day!

When shall those children by their mother's side

Gather, ah me! as erst at eventide?

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‘Sita’, written by Toru Dutt, is a poem that refers to a woman who was

abandoned by her husband in a forest. Within this poem, Dutt provides many images

from the forest. Readers soon realize the woman who is singing about Sita is a

mother putting her three children to bed. The mother begins crying after telling her

children about Sita, which makes her children begin to cry as well. Dutt shows the

mother’s connection to Sita’s unhappy life, her connection to her children, and how

the story will continue to live on.

The poem has a steady flow to it until the line “Is by a mother sung. . . . ‘Tis

hushed at last” (18). The long pause in the middle of the line creates a sense of

mistreatment. Readers sense that this story is being sung by a mother who is possibly

being treated unfairly or “hushed” by her own husband as well. Readers can relate

this line to Sita’s life being hushed by her husband. They can also read this line as

the mother dealing with a husband who has silenced her in the past.

Three happy children in darkened room!

What do they gaze on with wide-open eyes?

In the first line we get a picture of three happy children sitting in a dark room

listening to something. There is question that is being asked by the poet to the

readers - what are these three children gazing at with their eyes wide open? What are

they listening to that is so interesting that they are involved in it so much.

A dense, dense forest, where no sunbeam pries,

Gigantic flowers on creepers that embrace

Tall trees; there, in a quiet lucid lake

The white swans glide; there, “whiring from the brake,”

The peacock springs; there, herds of wild deer race;

There, patches gleam with yellow waving grain;

There, dwells in peace the poet-anchorite.

In the above line we get a picture of a dense forest. We also get a picture of how

dense the forest is. It is so dense that there is no space for sunlight; the forest is

covered with trees and its branches, even though its morning it looks very dark.

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There is big wild flowers on creepers that has grown around the tall trees, there is

quite lake which is crystal clear, in that lake there are swans floating and making

sound while they stop at intervals, there is peacock which is leaping in joy and a

group of deer racing each other. There are patches on the land which are shining with

yellow grains, all these things are making the forest a pleasant and peaceful place to

live and the poet feels that it is like a home for poets, like a religious recluse where

they can spend time in solitary and tranquility.

But who is this fair lady? Not in vain

She weeps, - for lo! At every tear she sheds

Tears from three pairs of young eyes fall amain,

And bowed in sorrow are the three young heads.

After the beautiful forest is described the story now moves to another part where the

story teller says that there is some beautiful woman sitting all alone in this peaceful

forest who looks unhappy and she is crying and this is making those three children

who are involved in this story cry as well. They have bowed their head in sadness.

It is an old, old story, and the lay

Which has evoked sad Sita from the past

Now we get a picture of who the story is about, the story teller talking. It is an old

story it is a story of Sita of Ramayan that is being recalled from the past.

Is by a mother sung……..”Tis hushed at last

And melts the picture from their sight away,

Yet shall they dream of it until the day!

When shall those children by their mother’s side

Gather, ah me! As erst at eventide?

Now we know from the above line who is the story teller is. It is the mother of those

three children who is telling a tale from Ramayana about Sita and struggle but when

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her children seemed sad and started crying after listening to this story she finishes the

story in hurry as she is unable to see her children sad. But the poet says even though

the mother wants those children to forget the story they would still remember it until

the end of the day. Finally, in the end after finishing the story the mother gathers all

her children and hugs them pacifying.

3.3.2.2 Our Casuarina Tree:

Like a huge Python, winding round and round

The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars,

Up to its very summit near the stars,

A creeper climbs, in whose embraces bound

No other tree could live. But gallantly

The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung

In crimson clusters all the boughs among,

Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee;

And oft at nights the garden overflows

With one sweet song that seems to have no close,

Sung darkling from our tree, while men repose.

When first my casement is wide open thrown

At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest;

Sometimes, and most in winter,—on its crest

A gray baboon sits statue-like alone

Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs

His puny offspring leap about and play;

And far and near kokilas hail the day;

And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows;

And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast

By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast,

The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed.

But not because of its magnificence

Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:

Beneath it we have played; though years may roll,

O sweet companions, loved with love intense,

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For your sakes, shall the tree be ever dear.

Blent with your images, it shall arise

In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes!

What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear

Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach?

It is the tree’s lament, an eerie speech,

That haply to the unknown land may reach.

Unknown, yet well-known to the eye of faith!

Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away

In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay,

When slumbered in his cave the water-wraith

And the waves gently kissed the classic shore

Of France or Italy, beneath the moon,

When earth lay trancèd in a dreamless swoon:

And every time the music rose,—before

Mine inner vision rose a form sublime,

Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy prime

I saw thee, in my own loved native clime.

Therefore I fain would consecrate a lay

Unto thy honor, Tree, beloved of those

Who now in blessed sleep for aye repose,—

Dearer than life to me, alas, were they!

Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done

With deathless trees—like those in Borrowdale,

Under whose awful branches lingered pale

“Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton,

And Time the shadow;” and though weak the verse

That would thy beauty fain, oh, fain rehearse,

May Love defend thee from Oblivion’s curse.

‘Our Casuarina Tree’ is a poem published in 1881. It is a perfect example of

craftsmanship. In this poem Toru Dutt celebrates the majesty of the Casuarina

Tree and remembers her happy childhood days spent under it and revives her

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memories with her beloved siblings. It still remains one of the more popular

poems in modern Indian literature.

In the poem, “Our Casuarina Tree,” the speaker (resembling Dutt herself)

associates with the happiness of her childhood in India. Yet the speaker also

associates the tree with the memory of lost loved ones—people from her youth

(probably based on Dutt’s dead siblings) with whom she, when a girl, played beneath

the tree.

The fact that the tree is associated, in the speaker’s mind, with other persons is

already foreshadowed in the poem’s title through the use of the word ‘Our’. The

speaker’s perspective is immediately more than merely her own: the title already

implies that she thinks of the tree as not simply hers but as belonging to others, too.

The opening image, which compares a large vine crawling around the tree to a

“huge Python” (1), might at first seem dark and foreboding, but the image ultimately

emphasizes the great strength of the tree itself. For some readers, the tree symbolizes

the ancient and venerable culture of India, while the huge encircling vine symbolizes

the potentially deadly influence of colonialism. Most immediately, though, the vine

itself seems to add a kind of beauty to the tree; the vine, after all, is called a “scarf”

(6), a word with fairly positive connotations.

The “crimson” flowers that cluster on the boughs of the tree (7) are the red

flowers, resembling a kind of mistletoe, produced by casuarina trees themselves. The

flowers are not, in other words, products of the encircling vine. The tree has its own

beauty, and the beauty and nourishment provided by the flowers apparently attract

birds and bees, so that the tree, though ancient, seems full of life and full of lovely

sounds. Even as the sky grows dark, the tree seems brimming with the sounds of the

birds and insects (11). Rather than being simply an inert object and rather than

appealing simply to human eyes, the tree seems teeming with vitality and energy.

The tree is situated in the midst of a “garden” (9), and indeed, the surroundings are

described in terms that sound almost Edenic.

In the first stanza she imagined the rugged trunk of the tree to a huge python

winding round and round. The creeper has indented deep with scars up to the top of

the tree. One may also sense a similarity between the tree in the clutches of a creeper

attempting to sap its strength and the three young Dutts in the grip of a killer disease

– tuberculosis. Toru says the flowers of the tree are hung in crimson clusters. Toru

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tells us that her Casuarina Tree, a haven for the winged, birds and insects, is almost

visibly alive, alive with the buzz of bees and with the chirping of birds. This song

sung from the tree soothes its listeners and has a tranquilizing effect on men who

relax and rest as the bird sings.

In the second stanza, the tree is associated with even more kinds of life,

including baboons (adult and young) that sit or leap or play in its branches, kokila

birds that sing in or near it, “sleepy cows” (19) that walk beneath it, and “water-

lilies” that flourish in the “broad tank” (meaning a pool, pond, or lake) on which the

tree casts its shadows. The tree, in other words, is at the center of a complex,

harmonious ecosystem—a natural environment in which humans, too, feel right at

home. Again, the similarities to the Biblical Garden of Eden are difficult to ignore.

That garden, too, contained a tree associated with a snake (as this one is, at least

metaphorically, in the poem’s opening line). But the tree in the Garden of Eden

eventually came to symbolize human misery through sin and a loss of innocence.

The casuarina tree, in contrast, seems to symbolize man’s harmony with the rest of

God’s creation. This tree seems beautiful and sustaining no matter the time of day or

the change in seasons.

The second stanza is replete with the pictorial and visual imagery of the tree and

the gray baboon and his offspring. In winter a gray baboon used to sit on one of the

branches of the tree watching the sunrise. On the lower branches, the offspring of

the baboon used to leap about and pay. Gradually, as the sun rises, the “kokilas”

begin to greet the day with their song and a mesmerized Toru Dutt watches “sleepy”

cows that have not yet shaken off their lethargy, on their way to the pastures.

However, if the first two stanzas emphasize the tree’s connections with the rest

of nature (including birds, bees, animals, and other plants), stanza 3 emphasizes the

tree’s connections with persons the speaker especially loved (and loves). Earlier,

young baboons were said to play in the tree (17); now the tree is associated with the

play of human children (25). The tree, already Edenic in various respects, is here

linked to a time of special innocence in the speaker’s life. However, no sooner are

the joys of childhood mentioned than the pain of loss is also implied (26-29). Earlier,

the tree had been associated with sounds of pleasure (9-11); now it seems to give off

a “dirge-like murmur” (30), a “lament” (32), and even “an eerie speech” (32).

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While in the third stanza, Dutt establishes that it is neither the stateliness of the

tree nor its external beauty that endears to her. She writes:

“But not because of its magnificence

Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:”

The beauty of the tree is no more than an added gift. Its actual importance lies in the

fact that it is a part of the Dutts’ existence, a reminder of family ties, of the warmth

shared by three siblings. The Abju-Aru-Toru bonding was indeed strong and

in ‘Sita’ Toru mentions, “Three happy children…” sitting in a dark room listening to

a story and then sighs because she knows that they will never again “by their

mother’s side/Gather”. Like Keats, she had to suffer a lot. She had seen bitter

struggle for life and death, untold miseries after the death of her beloved brother and

sister.

Yet even as the speaker laments the loss of loved ones, she already imagines

consolations for such loss. She alludes to an “unknown land” (33) that is nevertheless

“well-known to the eye of faith” (34)—a supernatural realm probably associated in

Dutt’s own mind with heaven, since she and her family were Christians. The speaker

claims to have heard the “wail” of loss (35) even while traveling in “distant lands”

(36), such as “France or Italy” (39), but by the end of stanza 4, the tree becomes

associated again, in her mind, with her homeland and with her childhood (41-44).

Despite the losses she has suffered, especially the losses of loved ones, the tree

remains, in her mind, finally a symbol of happiness, innocence, and deep affection.

For these reasons, it is, again, the symbolic opposite of the tree associated with sin

and death in the Garden of Eden.

The fourth stanza is highly philosophical. The poet observes “Unknown yet well-

known to the eyes of faith”. Here the term ‘unknown’ denotes not simply the native

home of the poet but also the world of the departed soul. A man who has the eye of

faith can see the unknown as well-known. Yoga also says that when a man has an

unwavering faith in the existence of the divinity through the art of meditation and

poetry, nothing remains unknown to him in the universe, because he lives on the

plain of consciousness, usually felt as vacuum of the transcendental stage of smadhi.

This is what exactly Toru Dutt feels here. Interestingly Toru’s mystical and

spiritual approach to poetry is centered to her profound knowledge of great Sanskrit

epics and scriptures. The music which Toru refers here is not an ordinary music

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which we hear in our day to day life; it is music of the soul, which once it is attained,

never dies and continues to vibrate with the highest percipience in the mind of the

seeker. Toru Dutt is not like the “Skylark” of Shelley, “the scorner of the

ground” but she is the “Skylark” of Wordsworth “a pilgrim of the sky” and does not

despise the earth where cares abound.

At the end of the poem she absolutely transcends the mortal, materialistic and

mundane frame of mind and attains the power of love to overcome the negative

forces of life like death and darkness, terror and fear. In this stanza, the words and

the phrases like ‘trembling hope’, ‘love’, ‘death’, ‘the skeleton’, ‘and oblivion’ are

very suggestive. She means to say that a man of unflinching love and devotion never

fears the blows of death. Toru does not express any desire to fade “far away” and

“dissolve”. Their Casuarina tree does not make her long for “easeful” death. Instead,

even though its “timelessness” mocks the transience of the human world, the tree is

to her a support, a reminder of the joy she once experienced with Abju and Aru. So,

in the final stanza, Toru Dutt, aware both of Druidism and the customary tree-

worship in India, wishes to “consecrate a lay” in the Casuarina Tree’s honour.

Ultimately, the poem becomes a celebration less of the tree itself than of the

loved ones associated with the tree, loved ones “Who now in blessed sleep for aye

repose” (47). In this line, the religious significance of the tree, which had earlier been

mainly implied, now becomes explicit. The beautiful garden on earth is merely a

foretaste of the beauty of heaven, although death is here associated with metaphorical

“sleep” and “repose,” phrasing that echoes the reference to real physical sleep in line

11. Presumably, just as the speaker and her beloved playmates awoke from real sleep

to play beneath the real tree, so they will someday awake from the metaphorical

sleep of death to enjoy the pleasures of heaven.

In any case, the final emphasis of the poem is not on an afterlife in heaven but

rather is on the afterlife of the real, physical tree and, even more significantly, on the

afterlife of the present poem that celebrates that tree. The speaker hopes that the

memory of this tree will live on in her poem as the memory of trees celebrated by

Wordsworth has lived on in that poet’s work (49-53). Although the speaker professes

humility about her own poetic talents immediately after alluding to Wordsworth (53),

the final lines of the poem express her hope that the tree (and, implicitly, her poem

itself) will never be forgotten (55). The poem is in every possible sense the opposite

of the kind of “curse” mentioned in the poem’s very last word.

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In this poem, Toru Dutt sings glories of the Casuarina tree and describes it in

detail. On the surface of it, it appears that it is all about the Casuarina tree, but

actually the tree is just a medium to link the poet’s past with the present. The poet

remembers the tree because of the many happy memories of childhood days that are

linked to it which are a source of comfort and consolation to her in another country.

The poem, therefore, underlines the importance of memories in human life. The tree

brings to her mind the memories of time when she used to play under it in the

company of her brother and sister, both of whom are already dead. She was very

close to her dead brother and sister named Abju and Aru respectively who loved the

Casuarina tree very greatly. So she loves the tree greatly. But lost in the memories of

her siblings who are now dead, she is looking forward to death as an acceptable

thing. The memories of her brother and sister bring tears into her eyes. She hopes

that the tree will be remembered forever as the yew trees of Borrowdale

immortalized by Wordsworth are still remembered. She immortalizes the tree for the

sake of her loved ones by writing a poem for it.

“Our Casuarina Tree is more than the poetic evocation of a tree; it is recapturing

the past, and immortalizing the moments of time so recaptured. The tree is both tree

and symbol, and in it implicated both time and eternity.”- K. R. Srinivasa Iyenger,

Indian Writing in English

The poem ‘Our Casuarina Tree’ is a beautiful symbolic poem harmonizing both

matter and manner in accurate proportion. The tree stands for a symbolic

representation of Toru’s past memory. Apparently it symbolizes the rich tradition of

Indian culture and philosophy which played an important role in shaping the poetic

and aesthetic sensibility of the poet. In Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the bird

symbolizes the world of art and beauty. In Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’, the bird is the

symbol of freedom and liberty. Similarly, in Toru Dutt’s ‘Our Casuarina Tree’, the

tree connotes the nostalgic feelings and memory of Toru Dutt. This is the tree under

which she played with his brother and sister- Abju and Aru. So the very thought of

the tree transported her to her golden past days.

To sum up, the poem ‘Our Casuarina Tree’ shows a perfect blending of feelings

and forms, matter and manner. It contains what Eliot means by his phrase “unified

sensibility”. It is a combination of both the East and the West. In form, it is very near

to the Romantic and the Victorian poems. In theme it dives deep into the

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unfathomable ocean of the Vedanta and the Upanishad of body and soul, life and

death.



1) How many children are referred to in Toru Dutt’s poem ‘Sita’?

2) Who are the listeners of the story of Sita?

3) Which birds are referred to in the poem ‘Sita’?

4) In which poem does the reference of huge Python occur?

5) What is compared with huge python in Toru Dutt’s poem?

6) What are the names of Toru Dutt’s siblings?


1) Discuss major themes of Indian poetry in English with reference to

prescribed poems of Toru Dutt.

2) Explain nature imagery in the prescribed poems of Toru Dutt.

3) Explain family relations with reference to prescribed poems of Toru Dutt.

4) ‘Childhood memories of Toru Dutt are reflected in ‘Our Casuarina Tree’.

Discuss.


1) Title of the poem ‘Sita’

2) Biographical references in Toru Dutt’s poems

3) Description of Casuarina tree

3.3.3 Imtiaz Dharkar

Imtiaz Dharker, was born in Lahore in 1954 in Pakistan. She was raised in

Glasgow, Scotland as her parents were migrated there when she was not than a year

old. Imtiaz Dharker has published six collections of poetry Purdah and Other Poems

is the first volume of her poetry published in 1988. Her other collections of poetry

are Postcards from God (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), The Terrorist at My

Table (2006), Leaving Fingerprints (2009) and Over the Moon (2014). Dharker

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shaped pictures for her poetry on her own. She studied in Britain. Born and brought

up abroad, Imtiaz Dharker was confident enough to oppose her community's

orthodox nature in unequivocal terms. By doing so, she articulated both self-

confidence and resistance which ultimately became the coordinates of her poetry.

Among women poets, only Dharker was exposed to the nuances of two religions, the

Islam and the Hinduism, one by birth and the other by marriage to a Hindu Anil

Dharker. Besides, other socio-cultural influences have also shaped her sensibility,

"consciously feminist" (King 321). The context of her poetry expands from her inner

world to the outside reality and even beyond that. It is the constant shift of emphasis

from exclusiveness to inclusiveness that makes her poems remarkable. Dharker

raises the emblem of revolt against the conventional Islamic culture, which through

its traditions and customs, attempts to subjugate and subordinate women at each and

every phase of life.

3.3.3.1 Purdah-I

One day they said

she was old enough to learn some shame. She found it came quite naturally.

Purdah is a kind of safety.

The body finds a place to hide.

The cloth fans out against the skin

much like the earth that falls

on coffins after they put dead men in.

People she has known

stand up, sit down as they have always done.

But they make different angles

in the light, their eyes aslant,

a little sly.

She half-remembers things

from someone else’s life,

perhaps from yours, or mine –

carefully carrying what we do not own:

between the thighs, a sense of sin.

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We sit still, letting the cloth grow

a little closer to our skin.

A light filters inward

through our bodies’ walls.

Voices speak inside us,

echoing in the spaces we have just left.

She stands outside herself,

sometimes in all four corners of a room.

Wherever she goes, she is always

inching past herself,

as if she were a clod of earth,

and the roots as well,

scratching for a hold

between the first and second rib.

Passing constantly out of her own hands

into the corner of someone else’s eyes…

while doors keep opening

inward and again

inward.

The veil or 'Purdah' is used in the Islamic religion to conceal the body, which is

nothing but a means to assert that women are weak and dependent. That is why they

are required to be safeguarded and protected from the glaring lustful eyes of men.

Dharker finds connotations of gender discrimination in the 'purdah' system that

suffocates every Muslim woman's body. Through her poems, she describes the

process by which a woman's freedom is curtailed and restricted. A Muslim girl's

desire for freedom and independence and her helplessness to break the chains of

boundaries of religion, customs and patriarchal supremacy are prominently present in

her unpolished words in two poems on Purdah. Her art folds a momentum, which is

activated by the oscillation of a woman's two facets i.e., her inner real self and the

outer masked self. She has boldly expressed her own experience, which is indicated

in her use of the first-person narrative.

These two poems of Imtiaz Dharker unfold an acutely conscious identity of a

double marginalized personality, a Muslim and a woman, through her sensitive

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depiction of the cameo narratives from women's lives, contributing to the

accentuation of the pain of living in a chaotic society. The poetry of Dharker

attempts to destroy condemnation of the exploitive rules and regulations against the

emancipation, self-respect and reverent life of women, particularly in the Muslim

community. Dharker asserts that women's social discrimination and religious

restrictions have denied them all their possibilities and opportunities, making them

psychologically disabled and paralysed. Dharker has honestly portrayed female lives'

nuances in her poetry, showing her courage and sensitivity to emotions. Her poems

enlighten our sense of right and wrong, the injustice, and mistreatment in the lives of

the women on pretext of culture, rules and regulations established by the patriarchal

society.

The consequence was a work rich in layer– it speaks of doors "opening inward

and again inward", of the slight interaction of advance and move away across "the

borderline of skin". (P.15). The title of the poem "Purdah" is very significant;

literally, it denotes veil or cover but carries a deeper connotation; in fact Purdah is a

typical patriarchal machination that confines the women within the false sense of

security and decency. By using Purdah as a metaphor, Dharker posits how the social

and cultural constructs of certain conventions are deliberately used as instruments of

regimentation to gratify the self-interest of a particular section of society. No doubt,

Purdah becomes the symbol of repression, subjugation, subordination and oppression

of women. It bases flagrant violation of their basic rights, freedom and dignity, and

the individuality of women. However, in Muslim society, it is indispensable for

women to be covered from head to foot in the black veil. Purdah's custom absolutely

dehumanizes women, since it suffocates their personalities; demeans and dwarfs their

self-esteem, and turns them into non-entity where they fail to express themselves as

individual persons.

The poem "Purdah I" focuses on a significant phase in the life of a girl growing

into youth in the Muslim community. In youth, her physical beauty attracts the

attention of people which is improper in a conservative society. Therefore, she must

maintain the decency and decorum of a young lady since, "she was old enough to

learn some shame" (P.14).

Dharker seems to be enormously conscious of Purdah's tremendously negative

bearings, which deprive and take away a young woman of the opportunity to

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experience her life entirely and confined her to the limited space she traverses. The

following lines reveal this fact effectively:

Purdah is a kind of safety

The body finds a place to hide.

The cloth fans out against the skin

much like the earth that falls

on coffins after they put dead men in.

The woman enclosed within purdah "stands outside herself/sometimes in all four

corners of a room" (P. 14). The poet explores and deciphers that the situation and

circumstances of the woman is no less than the "clod of earth"; she remains as a

broken creature with a deadened mind; she finds herself miserably incapable and

helpless while trying to achieve a balanced personality. The poet touchingly

describes the predicament of a Muslim woman living under Purdah in the following

extract:

She stands outside herself

sometimes in all corners of the room.

Whenever she goes, she is always

inching past herself,

as if she were a clod of earth,

and the roots as well,

scratching for a hold

between the first and second rib. (P. 14)

In the closing lines of the poem, Dharker's attitude to the purdah system

becomes still more critical. In the Muslim community, women feel themselves

mechanically controlled as puppets in the hands of men and their actions are only

determined by the wishes of the male members. Some men look at women only as

sexual objects; their exploitation physically, psychologically and emotionally quite

often further aggravates their agony. This idea is precisely communicated in the

following citation:

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Passing constantly out of her own hands

into the corner of someone else's eyes…..

while doors keep opening`

inward and again

inward. (P. 15)

It is evident that the door opening inward highlights the image of exclusion and

seclusion of a woman who only passes her time in a secluded ambiance ignored and

unnoticed deliberately by her family members. The poem performs as a vehicle

where Dharker directly analyzes, condemns and criticizes the norms and customs of

a powerful, rigid and unyielding system where women are repressed, suppressed,

oppressed, and subjugated, which in turn obstruct their natural development.

3.3.1.2 Another Woman

This morning she brought green “methi”

in the market, choosing the freshest bunch;

picked up a white radish,

imagined the crunch it would make

between the teeth, the sweet sharp taste,

then put it aside, thinking it

an extravagance; counted her coins

out carefully, tied them, a small bundle

into her sari at the waist;

come home, faced her mother-in-law’s

dark looks, took

the leaves and chopped them ,

her hands stained yellow from the juice;

cut an onion, fine, and cooked

the whole thing in the pot

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(salt and cumin seeds thrown in)

over the stove,

shielding her face from the heat.

The usual words came and beat

their wings against her: the money spent,

curses heaped upon her parents,

who had sent her out

to darken the people’s doors.

She crouched, as usual, on the floor

beside the stove,

When the man came home

she did not look into his face

nor raise her hand; but bent

her back a little more.

Nothing gave her the right

to speak.

She watched the flame hiss up

and beat against the cheap old pot,

a wing of brightness

against its blackened cheek.

This was the house she had been sent to,

the man she had been bound to,

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the future she had been born into.

So when the kerosene was thrown

(just a moment of surprise,

a brilliant spark)

it was the only choice

that she had ever known.

Another torch, blazing in the dark.

Another woman.

We shield our faces from the heat.

‘Another Woman’ is a poem about social evil and it narrates a personal saga of

victim lady. In a simple and sympathetic language, the poem details the inhuman

treatment of society on women. Specifically, it deals with the evil of dowry. The

purpose of poem is to raise awareness about the increasing number of ‘bride burning’

and dowry deaths, taking place in our society. It suggests that the women portrayed

could be any women. The poet takes up a little incident in the life of a married

woman of a middle-class family and through this little incident projects the fate of all

women.

The poem starts with the protagonist buying ‘Methi’ in the market choosing the

freshest bunch available. She wants to buy white radish but puts it back thinking it as

an extravagance. She comes back to home and starts her daily work of cooking.

Her mother-in law gives her dark looks and curses. The woman is unnamed who is

representative of every oppressed woman in the society. She is busy in her work and

she is silent. The woman silently endures every inhuman treatment. Her husband

comes and the woman is shown as bending more, looking downward to her work.

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Her husband is called as a strange man which shows the unhealthy relationship

between them.

The woman is uncomplaining and going through the traumatic conditions in her

life. While cooking she is shielding her face from the heat. The usual curses are

shown like birds beating their wings against the woman. She did not look up to the

man. ‘Nothing have her right to speak’. The only thing which is bright in the poem is

flame of the stove. There was no choice given to the women and this woman is

representative of all those. So, this was the house to which she had been sent to.

At the end of the poem, the woman dies as the kerosene was thrown over her

and her death is also not discussed which was the only choice made for her. The end

is very suggestive where poet uses repetition figure of speech by the line ‘Another

Woman’. The words suggest the repetitive deaths of women incurred due to inhuman

treatment given to women.

This morning she brought green “methi”

in the market, choosing the freshest bunch;

picked up a white radish,

imagined the crunch it would make

between the teeth, the sweet sharp taste,

then put it aside, thinking it

an extravagance; counted her coins

out carefully, tied them, a small bundle

into her sari at the waist;

come home, faced her mother-in-law’s

dark looks, took

the leaves and chopped them ,

her hands stained yellow from the juice;

These lines capture the stark picture of a woman belonging to a traditional

lower-middle-class Indian family. She went to market this morning and brought

green Methi. She picked up white radish which she wanted to buy. She imagined the

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sweet-sharp taste of the crunch it would make between her teeth but put it aside

thinking it an extravagance to spend money on that radish. She counted the left coins

after paying for Methi and tied them into a small bundle at the edge of her sari. When

she came back, her mother-in-law looked at her angrily. The women showed no

reaction at all and sat down silently to chop the Methi leaves. Her hands got strained

with yellow juice from the Methi. While cooking over the stove, she had to keep

facing the dark looks of her mother-in-law. She tried to shield her face from the heat

of the stove.

The usual words came and beat

their wings against her: the money spent,

curses heaped upon her parents,

who had sent her out

to darken the people’s doors.

She crouched, as usual, on the floor

beside the stove,

When the man came home

she did not look into his face

nor raise her hand; but bent

her back a little more.

Nothing gave her the right

to speak.

The taunts and jabs of the mother-in-law has become an everyday affair of her

life. Mother in Law accuses her of spending too much money wastefully. Mother in

law keeps cursing her parents also. She says that they have sent their daughter to

darken the lives of others. It is no wonder then that the birth of a girl child is dreaded

in an Indian family. The women suffer not only at the hands of her mother in law but

at the hands of her husband. While mother in law keeps abusing her every day. The

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husband remains indifferent to her sad state. She keeps sitting on her heels with her

knees bend on closed to her body near the stove when her husband enters in the

house from his work. She doesn’t even looks at his face or raises her head because

she has no hope from him. She bends her back even more and keeps crouching as

usual. She has not been given the right to speak even.

She watched the flame hiss up

and beat against the cheap old pot,

a wing of brightness

against its blackened cheek.

This was the house she had been sent to,

the man she had been bound to,

the future she had been born into.

Using highly metaphorical language, the poet gives an image of women’s

terrible tortured state. At the physical level, she is watching the flames of stove and

beating against the cheap old pot. The flame of stove is beating her blacken cheeks.

Metaphorically poet presents that her blacken chicks is the women youth and beauty

that has been eaten by her husband whose is an offshoot of that very flame. The

green Methi seems to sing her simmering sighs. ”This is the house she had been sent

to. This was the man she had been bound to. This was the future she had been born

into. In this way poet projects the reality of Indian women.

So when the kerosene was thrown

(just a moment of surprise,

a brilliant spark)

it was the only choice

that she had ever known.

Another torch, blazing in the dark.

Another woman.

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We shield our faces from the heat.

Here the poet continuous with her metaphor of the flame rising from the

kerosene stove. At once there is a brilliant spark of fire. So also happens with a

woman whose heart is already burning with the constant nagging of her in lose. She

has been burnt. She was just another woman. It was in her fate to keep burning and

remain surrounded by darkness. The poet says ‘we shield our face from the heat’. In

other words, the society remains unconcerned about the terrible fate of the

uncomfortable woman.



1) What is Purdah?

2) What does Purdah symbolize?

3) In which poem does the reference of typical Indian house-wife working in

the kitchen occur?

4) Which Indian vegetables are referred to in the poem ‘Another Woman’?

5) In which poem does the reference of ‘bride burning’ occur?


1) Comment on gender discrimination with special reference to the prescribed

poems of Imtiaz Dharker.

2) Explain issues of ‘dowry deaths’ and ‘bride burning’ with special reference

to the prescribed poems of Imtiaz Dharker.

3) Critically evaluate the portrayal of Indian women in Imtiaz Dharker’s

poems.

4) Explain major trends in postcolonial Indian poetry with reference to the

prescribed poems of Imtiaz Dharker.


1) ‘Purdah’- a burden in Imtiaz Dharker’s poem ‘Purdah-I’

2) Title of the poem- ‘Another Woman’

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3) Indian housewife portrayed in ‘Another Woman’

3.3.4 Let's Sum up

In this unit, we discussed Indian women writers with reference to the select

poems of Toru Dutt and Imtiaz Dharker. Toru Dutt shared her childhood memories

in ‘Our Casuarina Tree’. There are so many references from her personal life in the

poem ‘Our Casuarina Tree’. The poem ‘Sita’ is based on the story of Sita from the

Ramayana. One can find the influence of India’s great heritage and culture on the

poetry of Toru Dutt. Imtiaz Dharker is a postcolonial Indian woman writer. She

focussed on social issues related to gender discrimination, dowry deaths and bride

burning in her poems.


1) Read and critically evaluate other Indian women writers.

2) Make a list of various themes of Indian poetry in English by women writers.

3) Make a list of Indian women poets and highlight their contribution.

3.3.6 Reference and Suggested Reading

Iyengar K.R. Srinivasa. (1985). Indian Writing In English. New Delhi: Sterling Pubs.

King, Bruce. (2005). Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford University Press.

Naik M.K. (2004). A History Of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi.

Naik, M. K. (1985). Perspectives on Indian Poetry in English. Abhinav Publications.

Nayar, Pramod. (2000). Modern Indian Poetry in English: Critical Studies. Creative

Books.

Sinha, Sunita. (2008). Post-Colonial Women Writers: New Perspectives. New Delhi:

Atlantic pubs.

��

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Unit-4

Postcolonial Indian Drama

Dina Mehta’s Getting Away With Murder

4.0 Objectives

4.1 Postcolonial Indian Drama

4.2 Postcolonial women playwrights in India

4.3 Dina Mehta’s Life and works

4.4 Introduction to the Play

4.5 Summary of the Play

4.6 Major and minor characters

4.7 Theme and Structure of the play Getting Away with Murder

4.8 Points to Remember


4.10 References for further study

4.0 Objectives:

After studying this unit, you will be able to –

● learn about the life and times of Dina Mehta as the Indian Playwright in English.

● understand the nature and characteristics of the Social plays of Dina Mehta.

● learn the plot structure and the story in general of Getting Away with Murder

● study characterization in the play Getting Away with Murder.

● Comment on the use of imagery and diction in Dina Mehta’s Getting Away with

Murder.

4.1 Postcolonial Indian Drama:

Of all the literary forms, drama earns the most distinctive place. All other

literary forms except drama provide pleasure of reading and have audible effect but

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they fail to produce visual effect upon the minds of the people. Only drama as a

literary form gives us dramatic pleasure in the form of theatre along with reading

pleasure and thereby generates audio-visual impact upon the minds of the people.

There is hardly any literary form that gives so sensory pleasure as drama. Infusing

life into action, drama not only presents the life as it is, but also gives the vision of

seeing it. All social problems and issues are presented through drama in such a way

that they become very effective. Drama has been enjoying popularity since its very

origin. In recent years Indian English drama is at its glory of performance drawing

comparatively more people than past years into the theatrical arena. The present full

flowering of Indian English drama has not occurred in a day; rather it has to walk a

long path to reach this present stage. Right from Aurobindo, then Rabindranath

Tagore to contemporary wide ranging artists like Mohan Rakesh, Girish Karnad,

Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Dattani, Badal Sirkar, Mahasweta Devi and Usha Ganguli

it has attained its present position.

Before the Indian English drama made its appearance on the literary scene,

drama had been pre-existing in other languages in some form or other since the

Vedic period. If we trace back to history, we see the long line of development in

Indian drama beginning its journey with the Sanskrit plays. The drama in India had a

religious origin. It emerged out from the different episodes taken from The

Ramayana, The Mahabharata and The Bhagvadgita as the ancient Greek tragedy

came into being with the ceremonial worship of Dionysus and the same happened in

the case of English drama with the dramatizations of major events in Christ’s life.

Indian drama made its journey with music and dance at the beginning. The same is

still existing and somehow seen in practice during religious festivals like Dussehra in

present India. Bharata’s Natyashastra in Sanskrit which covers all the major aspects

of dramatic art is the most pioneering work on Indian dance and drama written in the

Vedic period. The importance of Natyashastra lies in serving as the oldest of the

texts as regards the theory of the drama. Bharata regards drama as a divine origin and

assigns it to Veda calling it the ‘Fifth Veda’. Bharata hardly misses any element that

requires for dramatic art in Natyashastra. From the dramatic text to the stage setting,

everything is discussed in detail in Natyashastra. The most remarkable dramatists of

ancient India were Kalidasa, Ashwaghosh, Shudraka, Bhasa, Harsha, Vishakhadatta,

Bhavabhuti, Murari, Mahendravikramavarman and Bhattanarayana whose dramatic

works which claim special place in the history of Indian drama are Bhasa’s

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Urubhangam, Karnabharam and Madhyamavyayoga, Shudraka’s Mricchakatika,

Kalidasa’s Abhigyana Shakuntalam and Malavikagnimitram, Bhavabhuti’s Uttar

Ramacharita, Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa, Mahendravikramavarman’s

Mattavilasa, etc.

Till 15th

century, Sanskrit drama reached to its glory but afterwards it almost

ceased to be written as well as performed due to foreign invasion. In the 17th

century

and onward, drama revived in the form of Loknatya (People’s Theatre). Loknatya

(People’s Theatre) went on to be performed in some form or other in different parts

of India in folk languages till the British came in India. With the arrival of the

British, Indian drama took the road of modernity. But the real beginning of staging

English drama took place in 1831 when Prasanna Kumar Thakur set up Hindu

Rangmanch at Calcutta and staged Wilson’s English translation of Bhavabhuti’s

Sanskrit drama Uttar Ramacharita. The amateur theatre developed with the works of

Bharatendu Harishchandra, acclaimed as ‘the Father of Hindi Drama’. The writing of

Indian English drama started with Krishna Mohan Banerji’s The Persecuted in 1837.

Only after the appearance of Michael Madhu Sudan Dutt’s Is This Called

Civilization on The Literary Horizon in 1871, Indian English drama made its true

journey. In 1920, a new drama largely influenced by prevailing movements like

Marxism, Symbolism, Psychoanalysis and Surrealism appeared in almost all the

Indian languages. Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo who deserve the first

Indian dramatists in English in the true sense belonged to this time. Tagore’s plays

mostly written in Bengali are also available to us in English. His remarkable plays

are The Post Office, Chitra, Sacrifice, Red Oleanders, Chandalika, Muktadhara,

Natir Puja, Sanyasi, The King of the Dark Chamber, The Cycle of Spring and The

Mother’s Prayer. Being well-rooted as regards the Indian ethos and ethics in their

theme, these plays received wide acclaim among people. Sri Aurobindo who is one

of the major voices in Indian English drama enriched theatre during the time with his

five complete blank verse plays along with six incomplete plays. His complete plays

are Perseus the Deliverer, Vasavadutta, Radoguna, The Viziers of Bassora and Eric

and each of these plays is written in five acts.

During the colonial era, other eminent playwrights who have made significant

contribution to the growth of Indian English drama are Harindranath Chattopadhay,

A.S.P. Ayyar, P. A. Krishnaswamy, T.P. Kailasam, Bharati Sarabhai, J. M. Lobo

Prabhu and Sudhindra Nath Ghose. There are seven verse plays to Harindranath

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Chattopadhay’s credit published collectively in Poems and Plays. They are grounded

on the lives of Indian saints. Along with verse plays he also wrote five prose plays

published collectively in His Five Plays. His prose plays reflect his socialist bent of

mind in theme and structure. A.S.P. Ayyar wrote six plays. In the Clutch of the Devil

is his first play and the last one is The Trial of Science for the Murder of Humanity.

Ayyar’s plot and characterisation are subordinated to the message and he employs

the drama as a mode of apprehension of reality pertaining to contemporary life.

Though Kailasam is regarded as ‘the Father of Modern Kannada Drama’, his genius

finds its full expression in his English plays such as The Burden, Fulfilment, The

Purpose, Karna and Keechaka. Bharati Sarabhai is the modern woman playwright

during the colonial era of Indian English drama. She has written two plays The Well

of the People and Two Women. Of these two plays, the former is symbolic and poetic

that has made a significant contribution to the Gandhian social order, while the latter

is realistic, written in prose and probes the private world of a sensitive individual. Up

to Post-Independence era, drama in English on Indian soil could not hold the ground

firmly as poetry and novels had done. The same went on even after Independence

and still now drama has not attained the same status as poetry and novels.

In the Post-Independence Era Indian English drama develops a bit in

comparison to early years but still cannot come up to the place of poetry and novels.

The main factor for this poverty is the composite form of drama that gives rise to

many problems and issues involving the playwright, the actors and the audience all at

a time, whereas poetry and fiction are free from such compositeness. However, the

Post-Independence Indian English drama has gained currency by the increasing

interest of the foreign countries. A good number of plays by Indian playwrights Asif

Currimbhoy, Pratap Sharma, Gurucharan Das were successfully staged in England

and U.S.A. Indian drama took another step to its growth and development when

Kendriya Natak Akademi in 1953 and next National School of Drama established by

Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1959 started working. But no change came over the status

of Indian English drama as no noticeable effort was taken to establish regular school

of Indian English drama in our country. Still development comes due to growing

interest among people. In the Post-colonial era, poetic plays also developed side by

side the plays written in prose. Among verse playwrights, Manjeri Isvaran,

G.V.Desani, Lakhan Dev, P.A. Krishnaswami, M. Krishnamurti, S.D. Rawoot, Satya

Dev Jaggi, Pritish Nandy, Hushmat Sozerekashme, Sree Devi Singh, P.S. Vasudev

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and S. Raman are mention worthy. The number of prose playwrights is larger in

comparison to verse playwrights. The most prolific playwright of the Post-

Independence period is Asif Currimbhoy who has written and published more than

thirty plays. Some important plays are The Tourist Meeca, The Restaurant, The

Doldrumness, The Coptives, Goa, Monsoon, An Experiment with Truth, Inquilab,

The Refugee, Sonar Bangla, Angkeer and The Dessident M L A. Pratap Sharma wrote

two prose plays A Touch of Brightness and The Professor Has A War Cry. His plays

were staged even abroad successfully but they failed to be staged in the country. Sex,

moreover remains the prime theme of his plays but Pratap Sharma shows a keen

sense of situation and his dialogue is often effective. Nissim Ezekiel’s Three Plays

including Nalini: A Comedy, Marriage Poem: A Tragi Comedy and The Sleep

Walkers: An Indo American farce are considered to be a welcoming addition to the

dramaturgy of Indian English drama. Songs of Deprivation is also a short play by

Ezekiel.

The contemporary Indian English Drama is post-colonial in the sense of its

cultural identity. A new and completely original drama has appeared with the

appearance of contemporary dramatists Girish Karnad, Mohan Rakesh, Vijay

Tendulkar, Mahesh Dattani and Badal Sirkar on the literary scene of the nineteen

eighties. They have paved Indian English drama towards the path of modernity.

Deviating from classical and European models, contemporary Indian drama is now

experimental and innovative in terms of themes and techniques. Instead of following

the footsteps of traditional dramatists, Girish Karnad, Mohan Rakesh, Vijay

Tendulkar, Mahesh Dattani and Badal Sirkar have made their experiments over the

traditional themes and techniques from present socio-political perspectives.

Contemporary Indian English Drama takes up the issues related to the urban, middle

class, English speaking society which is undergoing a noticeable cultural change.

Issues like marital infidelity, homosexuality, licentiousness are common place

subjects of plays, e.g. Do the Needful, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, The Harvest,

etc. The necessity of the focus on the conflicts in the lives of contemporary Indians

springs from the complex situation in which she/he exists. Socio-cultural scenario of

India was affected to great extent by the colonial rule. Traditional Indian society

which was inherently hierarchized was further stratified with the master-servant

paradigm of colonial rule.

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Along with contemporary male dramatists, contemporary female dramatists also

took efforts to complete another half of Indian English drama that remained

incomplete for a long time by infusing feminine psyche into it by their co-

participation with their male counterparts and thus made it truly complete. In this

regard, the contribution of Usha Ganguli and Mahasweta Devi is undeniable.

Mahasweta Devi wrote five plays Mother of 1084, Aajir, Urvashi O’ Johny, Byen

and Water. Mother of 1084 is a heart-rending account of the anguish of an apolitical

mother who had witnessed and experienced the horrors of Naxalite Movement of

1970s. In Aajir, Mahasweta Devi concentrates on the issue of the fast and rapid

deterioration of values and their impacts on society, especially on uneducated people.

4.2 Postcolonial women playwrights in India

Women playwrights in India contributed to the genre from the late nineteenth

century, though not in a very significant way. The postmodern era seems to be

productive for Indian English drama as it has received fresh impetus from many

women writers. Many movements like Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA)

were a great boost to the theatrical aspect of women-centered issues. Subsequently, a

glut of theatre festivals, workshops, ideologically committed theatre groups

celebrating the cause of women burgeoned. IPTA gave women a platform to use their

creative talent without being forced into a position of economic and sexual

exploitation. Women’s theatre joined with the Street theatre movements to voice

their feelings.

Early post-Independence women playwrights are Kamala Subramaniam

[Gandharee and Kaikeyee (1962)], S. Janaki [The Siege of Chitor (1960)], K. B.

Thakur [Mother and Child], Mrs. Billimoria [My Sons (1963)], Shanta Rama Rau

and so on. Shanta Rama Rau brings out a similar picture about the British rule by

way of transforming E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India into drama form. K. B.

Thakur and Kamala Subramaniam are fascinated by the epic theme. The former

highlights the inseparable bondage between the mother and the child, the latter

questions herself as why women like Gandharee and Kaikeyee could disregard

principles of justice. Historical themes moved the hearts of playwrights like Janaki.

In this phase, the most famous women playwrights are Dina Mehta, Uma

Parameshwaran and Manjula Padmanabhan.

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Late twentieth century, that is, the postmodern era gave birth to an abundant

number of women playwrights like Poile Sengupta, Veenapani Chawla, Gowri

Ramnarayan, Pritham K Chakravarthy, Anuradha Marwah, Anju Makhija, Annie

Zaidi, Meher Pestonji, Tripurari Sharma, Shivani Tibrewala, Nivedita Pohankar,

Swar Thounajam, Anupama Chandrasekhar, Nayantara Roy, Trishla Patel, Ayesha

Menon, Jyoti Mhapsekar, Ninaz Khodaiji, Manjima Chatterjee, Deepika Arwind,

Nandini Krishnan, and so on. Most of these playwrights merge the Classical Indian

and Western techniques to present more modern plays. Women dramatists also tried

to enrich the soil of Indian drama by projecting the inner world of feminine psyche in

the theatre.

In the texts of women playwrights, one feels the pulse of the people of the

country, their daily struggles, their problems and difficulties as tangible realities.

Women writers expressed their resentment against the politics of exploitation on the

basis of gender discrimination. They revived the traditional myths of Sita, Savitri,

and Draupadi and tried to reinterpret from women’s point of view. The issues raised

in their plays are amazing in their variety and range, especially with regard to the

women’s experiences. Before going to discuss these playwrights, it will be of some

help to understand this section of Indian women dramatists comprehensively. So, the

women playwrights who are excluded from the study are being taken up for a brief

discussion to provide a wider perspective.

The women writers in English literature can be broadly classified into three

categories. The first category consists of writers who are writing before the

emergence of feminism as a well-defined forte. In this phase, women writers were

struggling hard to be acknowledged on par with men among the intelligentsia. The

second category in the order is the feminist writers who wrought the essential

rebellious spirit against the male chauvinism and talked of women’s emancipation,

individuality and their socio-economic and political equality. This group revolted

against patriarchy and demanded freedom from male dominance. The last category

tries to strike a balance between the two aforesaid groups. Here, too one can find an

emphasis on the sense of suffocation in a patriarchal society complimented by an

acute awareness about rights and equality. However, this group talks less about

social and political freedom (Khan, 2006, p. 50).

Both the western and Indian dramas, which are phallocentric in chatrecter, have

focused mainly on man and looked at the world through man’s eyes. Drama mainly

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focuses on social issues and holds up mirror to the contemporary society. As such

women playwrights, being victims of gender restrictions, remained absent from

theatrical world for a very long time. While we find a large number of women

making mark in different genres and sub-genres such as poetry, novel, short story,

autobiography and fiction, their number is conspicuously low in the field of drama in

India. Women playwrights did not write any play till the twentieth century.

Women’s writing tries to protests against the male dominance, repression,

division, alienation and marginalization and thereby offers a different perspective

and opinion. In the early phase women performed very happily to the script written

by male playwrights. They had neither their voice nor their words to express

themselves. They had no option but to read out or speak words written by male

writers and perform roles created out of their imagination. Though many male

playwrights talked about women’s issues, their presentation lacked the authentic ring

of women’s emotions and feelings.

The women playwrights who are remembered for their remarkable contribution

are Dina Mehta, Manjula Padmanabhan and Polie Sengupta. They have introduced

new subjects affecting the feminine psyche in their works. Dina Mehta is a

playwright and an editor from Mumbai. Her first full length play was The Myth

Makers (1969). Her play Brides are not For Burning (1993) won the first prize in

worldwide competition sponsored by BBC in 1979. Some of her well known plays

are Getting Away with Murder, When One Plus One Makes Nine, Sister Like You,

etc. Next is Manjula Padmanabhan who won the inaugural Onassis Prize for her play

Harvest. She has written powerful plays, comic strips, short stories, novel for

children, travelogue, picture books, autobiographical novel and Illustrator. Her well

known plays are Lights Out, The Artist Model, Sextet and Harvest. Polie Sengupta

was born in Kerala in 1948. She has won the Sandesha Special Recognisation Award

for Children’s Literature in 1994. Her first play is Mangalam. Apart from this, she

wrote Keats was a Tuber, Samara’s Song, etc. She is also a founder of theatre club.

Recently, she published her novel titled Inga.

Women writers in India keep on writing about complex issues such as

sensuality, subjugation, alienation, migration, identity crisis, free sex, etc. The

contemporary women writers were always considered inferior to their male

counterparts, their canvas was narrow and they largely confined themselves to the

depiction of the enclosed domestic space and their experience within it. In spite of

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the limitations they have definitely raised the consciousness about the woman’s role

in the society. The portrayal of women characters by a women writer is always

realistic and as such authentic. Portrayal of women and their issues by a male

playwright tends to be a little unconvincing as he fails to understand the female

psyche and perspective. Only a woman playwright like Manjula Padmanabhan could

write a play like Lights Out about women’s objectification and victimization. This

play poignantly depicts an incident like gang rape and captures the reaction of both

the males and females of the house over the incident.

4.3 Dina Mehta’s Life and works:

Dina Mehta lives in Mumbai, India. She was fiction editor with the Illustrated

Weekly of India from 1976 to1982. She has published two books of short stories, The

Other Women and Other Stories (1981) and Miss Menon Did Not Believe in Magic

and Other stories (1994). Her stories have also appeared in Cosmopolitan (USA), the

London Magazine, Home and Gardens (UK), and have been translated into German,

French and Japanese. She has written prize – winning plays like Brides are Not For

Burning, which won first prize in the BBC International Playwriting Competition

(1979), The Myth Makers, Tiger Tiger, Getting Away radio and television. Dina

Mehta has published two novels, And Some Take Lover (1992) and Mila in Love

(2003).

Mehta is Indian writer belonging to the Parsi community. Among the Indian

writers belonging to the community of Parsi’s Dina Mehta is prominent. Generally,

the Parsi novelists who write in English are differentiated into two categories;

expatriate writers and stay-at-home writers and Dina Mehta falls into the category of

stay-at-home writers. Other Parsi novelists like Firdaus Kanga, Rohinton Mistry,

Farrukh Dhondy and Bapsi Sidhwa are included in the list of expatriate novelists.

The work of these novelists reflects the life of their community and the history of

India. Their works portray their ethnic identity and relationships like motherhood,

intricate baffling relationship of men and women, incest and adultery.

Dina Mehta states, “The women dramatist can see more clearly into the female

psyche than the male and this is reflected in her plays”. Mahasweta Devi, Uma

Parameswaran, Dina Mehta, Poile Sengupta and Manjula Padmanabhan are some of

the leading names of the ‘Theatre of Protest’ movement who, for a wider reach wrote

in English to project the situation of the women. They expressed their anger against

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the exploitation on the basis of the gender discrimination. Dina Mehta is talented

Indian writer. In her plays, she stages real life incidents to bring to the limelight some

social issues such as the evil of the dowry, female foeticide, child abuse, rape,

subjugation of women, and so on.

4.4 Introduction to the Play:

Getting Away with Murder is one of the three plays in the collection entitled

“Body blows-women violence and survival” published by Seagull Books, Calcutta in

2000. The play was first performed by Indus International, a sociocultural group for

women at British Council Theatre in Mumbai in 1990. The play seeks to portray the

lives of three friends Mallika, Sonali and Raziya who are connected perhaps by the

strain of suffering that they undergo in the hands of male hypocritic and dominating

human. The private world outside is so corrupted that women have to face childhood

sexual abuse, differential treatment on the male and the female child, infidelity of

partners with whom they have an utterly insecure relationship, sexual harassment at

workplace and elsewhere, and a disheveled life despite having been educated.

4.5 Summary of the Play:

The curtain rises with the meeting of two friends, Sonali and Mallika at the

restaurant. When Sonali is late, a stranger appears and ogles at Mallika performing a

seduction ritual and leaves the place on seeing Sonali. The conversation of the two

friends moves from the personal to the impersonal, starting from the lives of three

friends to the women in general who suffer everywhere.

For Sonali, life appears in all its inscrutable aspects. She is married to Anil and

lives with her husband and ma-in-law. She hates her mother-in-law and nicknames

her ‘witch’. Sonu does not trust her mother-in-law as she was deprived of her

mother’s love in her young age. She says to Mallika alias Malu, “She’s not a bitch.

She’s a witch. Sly. Secretive. She spies on me. She stores up evidence against me –

with which to bludgeon me one day. My mother-in-law hates me” (Body Blows:

Women, Violence and Survival hereinafter referred to as BB 58). She has developed a

fear of psychosis and imagines that “Someone indoors is watching me. From the taxi

this morning, I look up at my window and saw a withered hand at the parting of my

curtains” (BB 58). She is also jealous of Malu’s independent nature. Sonali’s life is

in disarray and she discloses to Mallika the agonies in her mind. After her father’s

death, Sonali’s mother had a tough time in bringing up her children. So she with her

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two children went to her lonely, middle-aged bachelor brother, Narotam’s home for

shelter. Sonali was completely controlled by her mother and was in her

recapitulations. She also highlights the gender discrimination in her family: “Gopal

escaped all that because he was born with an extra set of accessories” (BB 59). Gopal

comes in the line of the patriarchal privilege and so need not go through the girl

child’s disadvantages. Sonali has not enjoyed her mother’s love, because she is a girl

child. Since Sonali was abused as a child by her uncle Narotam, she suffers in her

married life. She has been experiencing a trauma in her subconscious. The very

thought of her mother and her past life makes her hysterical. Sonali’s mother died

shortly after her wedding and she did not like her uncle Narotam. “He keeps popping

up in the weird water-colours she turns out. Painted always in menacing reds”

(BB74). When Sonali was twelve years old, her uncle died from a fall. Thus her

childhood was a very bad experience to her. Her child abuse has made her averse to

girl child and so she opts for her female foeticide and aborts it during her first

pregnancy. Now she is pregnant for the second time but does not wish to continue

her pregnancy. She is more afraid to give birth to a girl child and thinks that the child

too will suffer in this world like her. Sonali requests Malu to persuade Raziya to do

amniocentesis test on her, which is banned in India for the purpose of sex

determination. Sonu is not ready to wait for nine months to know the gender of her

child. Her main aim is to get rid of the girl child. Mallika is taken aback and outraged

by Sonali’s words. Sonu is an educated woman with a good financial status and her

decision to abort a girl child is a shocking statement. Sonu’s husband is a kind of

person who cheerfully welcomes a row of daughters but she is afraid for two reasons.

First, Anil’s three brothers’ first born is a boy and the second reason is her child

abuse. The discrimination and deprivation that Sonali was subjected to in her

childhood becomes a psychic residue in her subconscious mind. She has been

brought up by her mother with the idea that “a woman’s failure to bear a son is just

retribution for misdeeds in her past life”. Raziya explains the medical hazards of

doing amniocentesis test. Malu gives evidences and statistics to convince Sonu and

make her understand the facts. She believes that abortion instigates multiple murders

and “Out of 69 abortions in one month in a high-class Bombay nursing home, 68

were of girl foetuses.” Sonali is not ready to accept Malu’s words’. Sonu is firm in

her decision as her sufferings are deep-rooted in her heart that she regrets her birth,

“to be born as a girl is to be subject to violence and servitude! I know, I know! ( BB

63)”

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Sonali turns hysterical whenever she remembers her mother’s harshness. Her

repressed feelings affect her psyche and she reveals her tormented mind in a

monologue. She suffers from delusions and behaves like a split personality. She

morphs into an eight-year-old girl and changes her voice like that of the girl to

narrate the sufferings of her tormented soul and then regresses to her normal voice in

a kind of incessant back and forth movement. She stands before the mirror and acts

out both her personas by modulating her body and voice. The scar caused to her as a

child is indelibly embedded in her adult consciousness. She feels as if she is circling

around something alien and familiar. Her mother-in-law’s peep into her room

appears like her uncle’s to her.

Sonu’s childhood traumatic experience made a deep scar and it is thus fresh in

her memory and surfaces at every opportunity. First, she suffered a natural

miscarriage when her husband Anil was away in Delhi. Sonu’s miscarriage on that

night is re-enacted before the eyes of the audience through the flashback technique.

That day, when Gopal happened to visit Sonali, the bleeding started. When Raziya

rushed to Sonu’s room, she was facing the wall lying on bed in a kind of stupor.

Going back to history reveals some facts about Sonali’s enigmatic and mysterious

nature as a manifestation of her want of care and sympathy of a mother. Moreover,

when Sonu has taken terrible wallops, he could not help her. Anil wishes the child to

be a girl and gladly tells Sonali, “Lovely, I’ve always wanted a daughter” (BB 85).

Suddenly Anil slaps Sonali for her unreasonable stubbornness and then regrets

his behaviour. But Sonali echoes her mother’s opinion that “just as a scorpion enjoys

stinging people with all the pent-up venom in its tail, lordly men desire to sting their

women – and a good wife always lets her husband do so” (BB 86). Sonali represents

the average Indian middle class woman bound by certain established norms whether

logical or illogical. She bears the physical violence meted out to her. She is not

against it whereas she blindly accepts it as her duty as a loyal wife.

Slowly Anil tries to console Sonali and allows her to go for a catharsis. Anil

enquires about him for which Sonali replies, “Him, him. You don’t know who I’m

talking about? (Moves to the painting.) Here, the canvas is still wet from yesterday,

here he is, the red monster” (BB 86). She calls her uncle a red monster and tells Anil

that her mother used to put fresh flowers before his portrait in her home everyday

and forced Gopal and Sonali to remember his kindness and pray for him. Seeing the

painting, she gets triggered and goes back in time. One day when Gopal and Sonali

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were playing, Gopal sent his toy cart flying across the floor. That very moment,

Narotam appeared unsteadily in a drunkard position, “. . . his left foot seemed to find

the runaway cart . . . he went into a skid and hit the floor . . .” (BB 86). Sonali and her

brother Gopal worked hand in glove to do away with Narotam. Remembering all

this, she is panicky and behaves strangely: “I feel . . . something in the shadows . . .

waiting to pounce on me . . . pushing and clawing . . . my head . . . my head hurts. It

hurts . . . it hurts . . . call Gopal, please, call Gopal for me . . . (She falls into a faint)”

(BB 87). The author has used the apt imagery that her uncle Narotam is like a

ferocious animal pouncing upon its prey. Perhaps she has delusions in which she sees

a shadow figure lurking in the back and waiting to make a sexual assault on her. This

mental fixation and baseless fear in her is the reason for her aversion to a girl child.

Anil takes this chance as a purgation process to overcome the fear in her. Later

in the same day Sonali is asleep after check up and consuming tablet. She is

surrounded by Mallika, Anil and Gopal, and Anil forces Gopal to reveal the truth

about Sonali to save her: “If you had watched her struggle to remember . . . a battle

fought behind her eyes . . . bathing her face in sweat, dragging at the corners of her

mouth, those frightful headaches . . . Gopal?” (BB 87). It is only through Gopal’s

eyes, Sonali’s past is disclosed. Gopal was unfortunately helpless and used to see

“night after night . . . coming to her bed, the pious swine with sandalwood paste on

his foreheads and holy beads round his neck” (BB 87) and threaten her into silence

and submission. Gopal regrets now that he couldn’t do anything as he was just eight

years old then. “I could have told her to . . . kick where it hurts. To grow her nails

and scratch out his eyes. Stick a finger in her throat and make herself sick . . .. I

could have yelled for Mother . . . or played an alarm on my tin drum . . . instead of

hiding my face in the bedcovers to distance the nightmare . . . . I was in the same

room and I did nothing . . . nothing!” (BB 88) When Gopal unwinds the past, Sonali

gets up and dramatizes as an adult and also an eight-year-old girl, the scene from her

past. Gopal and Sonali reenact the same scene that happened years ago in unison. As

Sonali relives the traumatic betrayal done by her uncle, her husband sustains her

through his love and understanding. As an understanding spouse, he enables his wife

to have a cathartic effect and steady her mental equilibrium. The purgation restored

Sonali to normalcy. Aristotle views, in traditional drama the recognition scene is

pivotal and the emphasis is on self-discovery, on the recovery of the past as means of

finding our true selves. In the process of confronting her inner conflict, Sonali has

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discovered her real self. She has killed the ghost that haunted her for months and

found her way to salvation and peaceful life. She has the stability of mind to accept

her mother-in-law as her mother. Finally matters are resolved and everyone gets

relieved. This play not only depicts a child abuse but also very clearly pictures the

aftermath of that abuse, the lingering psychological trauma of the victim.

Mallika is economically an independent woman who manages her life on her

own but she too has her tale of woe. She owns a food stuff agency with her partner

Pankaj Pinglay who contributes nothing more. Malu does not have any epic dreams

about the marriage estate. She views marriage as a mere business. But she loves

Sonali’s brother Gopal, a kind of flirting guy and he too loves Malu. Raziya and

sonali suggests Malu to marry Gopal, but she gives reasons to avoid it. Pinglay is a

dim-witted person and addresses Mallika as Mallikaji which, she feels, is

hypocritical. He is a male-chauvinist and often snubs her. Malu’s staff Thelma twice

used office phone to make a long distance call to enquire about her mother’s health

as the latter is not well. Knowing this Pinglay, “a vindictive man,” started threatening

her citing the phone bill hike. When Thelma is apologetic, she also reveals: Pinglay

is “always telling me his wife is old enough to be pensioned off . . . and asking me to

accompany him to . . . hotels outside the city”(BB 70). Raju, the fellow-worker of

Thelma, keeps mum and he remains non-committal. Malu is straight-forward and

bold, and saves Thelma from Pinglay’s sexual harassment. Now she has confirmed

the dinner with Raziya on 8- 8.30 pm at Raziya’s home.

Raziya, a doctor, is a barren woman and she too has a pile of sorrows. Raziya

could not bear a child, so her husband Habib opts for bigamy. Her mother-in-law

believed that “an educated wife is a penance to her husband” (BB 77) but Habib

loved Raziya and fought with his mother to marry her. Still Habib plans to wed his

niece Fatma’s friend, Zamena, a nineteen-year-old, brought up in a pious household,

as his mother has been nagging him about this for a long time. Raziya is not

divorcing him whereas she remains as his first wife ever. Without protesting, she just

accepts the second marriage.

Mallika is appalled at the indignity that Raziya is ready to bear. Sonali is

unhappy about it but Raziya, though a doctor by profession, submits herself blindly

to the subjugation. Raziya agrees with Malu that Sonu is protesting against men:

“what Sonali’s attempting a jihad against men! We are the victims!” (BB 78). Malu

continues to support Sonu that “at least she’s sounding a battle cry! Making a

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gesture, however muddled! Using her helpless hands to claw at the blinds, while a

brilliant woman like you submits meekly to this humiliation” (BB 78). Raziya carries

pain in her heart and asserts that Indian women find it difficult to break free from the

shackles of the oppressive traditions. Patriarchal culture considers women merely as

instruments of reproduction. She agrees with Sonali that “woman’s inferior status is

partially redeemed when she becomes a mother of son” (BB 78). Raziya also stresses

Sonu’s point that the man older than a woman has the right on her body. But Raziya

is not the one to exonerate herself from the guilt but she is prepared to face the

situation squarely.

On the sidelines, the playwright also highlights the sufferings of widows

throughout the country: “Our widows die many times before their death . . .” (BB

74). Gopal has been to north India wandering all over places like Ranchi, Chaibasa,

the Sahebganj district and clicked photographs of everything from derelict fishing

boats to witches. Women are viewed as sexual objects and are considered as the

weaker sex but more shocking thing is that they are branded as witches. Malu thinks

that these may happen in some isolated places and not in all places. When Malu

meets Gopal, he displays some reliable photographs of the women who are treated as

witches in some places. They are authentic photographs of women killed in Bihar as

witches and they all appeared in a 1988 issue of The Illustrated Weekly of India. This

is mentioned by Dina Mehta herself in the play.

First Gopal takes the case of Indumati from Ranchi whose face is smeared with

muck. “The mob at her heels is drumming her to the river, where they’ll kill her and

throw her in” (BB 79). Indumati’s eyes were looking at Gopal straight in an accusing

manner. He says, “I had snatched her moments of deepest dread and humiliation –

and was about to walk away with them for public display, like a trophy” (BB 80).

Then Gopal ran all the way to the police station and she was saved in the nick of the

moment. Malu is shocked to hear whether all these occur in Ranchi. Gopal replies

that “A medieval mentality still exists there, side by side with the computers and the

VCRs” (BB 80). Though it is considered that people do this out of their ignorance. In

many places of north India, women are persecuted by their own relatives and

villagers for money and property.

Through Gopal’s eyes, Mehta exposes the callous attitude of policemen towards

such injustices meted to women. The police and judiciary are aware of all this

violence but they never initiate any serious action. In this case, Gopal has forced

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them to jump into action to save that woman. They give lame excuses to remain

passive. The careless response of police to such incidents is that they are deep rooted

superstitions and cannot be questioned. Gopal further gives statistics about the death

toll of women who are killed in this manner. He cites evidence from Singbhum

district: “200 women are killed as witches every year. Male relatives move in on

their land. Lots of such cases . . . they have the backing of power groups within the

community” (BB 80).

The next case Gopal takes is Dulkha Devi of Tharwar. Gopal snapped her in the

bazaar the previous day evening but the next day, “she was stripped naked within

sight of the police station, her face blackened, head shaved, forced to run round the

village while the men beat her with burning brands and sticks till she died” (BB 80).

It is because the village priest has denounced her as a witch. Once Dulkha Devi had

repulsed the priest’s advances, so, after her husband died of consumption, he

avenged her resistance by accusing her of eating her husband up as a witch. The

widows and deserted women of Chaibasa district are the play things in the hands of

the male community in that village. “Male relatives have accused them of being

witches in order to usurp their land”. They are not only a few women suffering, but

many such cases are pending in the courts. The next instance is a very beautiful

woman, Minzari from Barisola village, a widow with a three-year-old daughter. Both

their lives are in danger because her “brother-in-law, who covets her land, had

accused her of being a witch” (BB 81). Gopal has gathered the evidences against

those injustices happening to the women. Gopal is not satisfied to be a kind of

rapacious tourist who just ransacks places and people’s lives for public exhibition.

He wants to take some serious efforts and actions against such evils and beastly

behaviour.

According to Malu, “the greater the divergence between this goddess images of

woman and her exploited human counterpart, the greater the fervour of her devotees

–”(BB 81). Her term “exploited human counterpart” reminds Gopal again about the

witch-belt of Bihar. The play offers a strong criticism on the way women are being

treated in our society. Dina Mehta gives the real picture of how women are treated

and the play, though written in the 90s, is germane to the contemporary India.

Finally four months later, Sonali and Mallika meet at the same restaurant with

the annoying interruptions from the same stranger. Malu shares her idea of marriage

with Gopal and also of adopting the little girl of Minzari. Raziya proves this and

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without depending on her husband, she continues to live her own life with her

profession whereas her husband Habib happily lives with his second wife. Sonali’s

pregnancy is seventh months old and she is ready to welcome her daughter. She has

traversed the passage through a plethora of self-doubts, fears, guilt, smothered anger

and silence towards articulation and affirmation. She stopped smoking, never took

the test and also wrote to her Ma-in-law to return home from Varanasi to help her in

taking care of the child.

4.6 Major and minor characters

4.6.1 Sonali

Sonali is a victim of childhood sexual abuse this had led her to psychosis and the

later death of her villain uncle help her to expel herself out of that incident which

keeps haunting her nightmares. Her psyche problem provoked her to commit the

female foeticide during her previous pregnancy to avoid “violence and servitude” for

her unborn girl-child. Due to her childhood incident she even in the third month of

her pregnancy did not inform her husband about this because she wants her friend

Mallika (Malu) to ask Dr. Raziya to perform amniocentesis on her to find out the sex

of the unborn child. Sonali confesses to Mallika that if a woman cannot give birth to

a son it mean she has done some misdeeds in her past life.

Sonali tries to justify her female foeticide and her attempt of sex detection in her

next pregnancy is her emancipation and her rights though she knows that

amniocentesis is banned. Anil tries to console Sonali and allows her to go for a

catharsis. Sonali represents the average Indian middle class woman bound by certain

established norms whether logical or illogical. She bears the physical violence meted

out to her. She is not against it whereas she blindly accepts it as her duty as a loyal

wife. At the end of the play Sonali’s pregnancy is seven months old and she is ready

to welcome her daughter. She has traversed the passage through a plethora of self-

doubts, fears, guilt, smothered anger and silence towards articulation and affirmation.

She stopped smoking, never took the test and also wrote to her Ma-in-law to return

home from Varanasi to help her in taking care of the child.

4.6.2 Mallika

Mallika is a successful and bold woman, who rejects the advances of her male

co-worker. She works with Mr. Pinglay, who is a male chauvinist and restricts her

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only to do secretarial work. Her co-partner tells her that women should either do

secretarial work or maximum to PR work. He even fixes up her lunch with clients

without her knowledge just to put her in problem and create inconvenience. However

he disturbs Mallika because she was always there forward in all the business dealings

and running the entire office. She even rescued Thelma, her secretary, who was

sexually harassed and blackmailed her with the phone calls that she made some time

back by her co-partner. Mallika’s ambiguous relationship with Sonali’s brother

Gopal an irresponsible lover, Raziya and Sonali suggests Malu to marry Gopal, but

she gives reasons to avoid it. At the last, she has taken a decision of marriage with

Gopal and also of adopting the little girl of Minzari.

4.6.3 Raziya

Raziya is a successful doctor and an individual woman but a victim to

antiquated society. She gives self-infliction by accepting for the second marriage of

her husband, just because she cannot bear any child, by which she fails to become a

traditional wife as a child bearer. Raziya’s troubled relationship with her husband can

also be seen in the light of atrocity, when she knew her husband Habib’s affair with

his niece Fatima’s friend Zamena, whom even he plans to marry. But she didn’t react

because she cannot have a child of her own. Raziya accepts his decision blindly, “the

fault lies with me. The fatal flaw. I’m that Joke of nature – a barren woman” (BB 77).

4.6.4 Gopal

Gopal is Sonali’s brother and Mallika’s irresponsible lover, Mallika has come to

compromise with his odd ways, as she says herself, “If I call so late, I might find

another woman with him”,(Getting Away 73). Gopal is involved with the upliftment

of women by fighting against the practice of women being burnt in rural areas under

the allegation that they are witches. He even undertakes the care of Minzari’s little

daughter, after Minzari is beaten to death. However, it is still left to the reader to

ponder if Gopal really meant to play the absolute philanthropist in this case, given

the facts that Gopal was given to infidelity and cheating, and there are hints that

indicate that he had an illicit relationship with Minzari. Gopal has gathered the

evidences against those injustices happening to the women. He is not satisfied to be a

kind of rapacious tourist who just ransacks places and people’s lives for public

exhibition. He wants take some serious efforts and actions against such evils and

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beastly behaviour. He is also sensitive to his sister Sonali and even comes out with

the truth about her sexual abuse during childhood.

4.6.5 Anil

Anil is Sonali’s husband a businessman having Bhatnagar Constructions. He

loves Sonali and is very careful about her. He doesn’t need anybody to tell him about

his wife. He always want a daughter as child but Sonali wants to abort girl child.

Anil tries to console Sonali and allows her to go for a catharsis. Anil takes chance as

a purgation process to overcome the fear in her and he is successful to overcome a

fear in her mind.

4.7 Theme and Structure of the play Getting Away with Murder

The play has cyclical structure. In the beginning, Sonali and Mallika had met for

lunch. The same situation is created at the end. However, there are some crucial

changes. The stranger ogling at Mallika reappears in the last scene but is successfully

banished. Moreover, whereas earlier, the friends had parted on a note of disarray,

questioning motherhood, as Sonali conjured up the image of herself coming out of

her mother’s womb: “I see her twisted face… twitching this …as they drag me out of

her with forceps – a slimy, piteous mess”(64). This drew attention to the fact that

motherhood is not considered by all women to be a privilege or a boon. The pain

inflicted upon a women’s body due to forced pregnancy can also be a kind of

violence, leaving her psyche damaged. Glorification of motherhood does not take

away this pain from it. It instead reveals it as another strategy of containment

whereby the woman’s body has to be contained within domestic space by bearing

children so that the body’s proliferation outside domesticity comes to be seen as a

threat to social order.

At the end of the play a similar meeting takes place. However, having had some

upheavals during the play (“I still have my moments of panic. Still look sometimes

for the disgust in Anil’s eyes – after all - he got landed with damaged goods” (91),

Sonali is shown bearing a child at the end. So does one consider this end as

reductive, as it shows women as conformists? For, Raziya too is reconciled to her

fate in that she do nothing against her husband’s second marriage due to her failure

to bear him children. Alternately, one can see this conclusion as optimistic, and

consider as empowered, because she has been purged, so to speak, of her fears.

Whereas traditional drama involved complications and then its resolution, here, it is

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the characters’ self-realization that lends gravity to the denouement. Raziya too, is

able to confess,” The enemy is within, don’t you see!”(78), meaning thereby, that

women in India will have to break the shackles that tradition binds them in, to

confront their real selves. Hence, Sonali too, confidently claims,”Nothing can change

overnight, I guess, we can be goddesses if we want it enough.”(92).

Thus, in covert or overt ways, each of these plays voice a new ethos of

resistance, sometimes trying to analyse women’s exploitation in the domestic and

public sphere, sometimes accepting women’s own complicity in such exploitation. In

either way, they try to define women’s theatre against male-dominated ideologies

and try to represent the under-represented aspect of sexual abuse in women’s lives.

Thus, they use a medium of exploitation – their body – as a weapon to fight against

that very sexual exploitation.

4.8 Points to Remember

Theatrical arena:-a theatre with seats arranged around a central acting arena.

Greek Tragedy:- Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Greek

inhabited Anatolia. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th

century

BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy.

Dionysus:- In Greco-Roman religion, Dionysus is a nature god of fruitfulness and

vegetation, especially known as a god of wine and ecstasy.

Uttar Ramacharita:- Life of Shriram from ruling Ayodhya till the end of life.

Blank Verse:- Blank verse is unrhyming verse in iambic pentameter lines. This

means that the rhythm is based towards a pattern in which an unstressed syllable is

followed by a stressed one (iambic) and that each normal line has ten syllables, five

of them stressed (pentameter).

Foeticide:- Abortion of a fetus.


Short notes

1. Describe Sonali’s childhood traumatic experience.

2. Raziya as an individual woman.

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3. Discuss the theme of the play Getting Away with Murder.

Choose right alternative from multiple choices given

1. What is the religious origin of Indian Drama?

a) Ramayana b) Mahabharata c) Bhagavadgita d) All of these

2. What is the pioneering work on Indian Dance and Drama in the Vedic Period?

a) Bharta’s Natyshastra b) Mudrarakshasa

c) Mattavilasa d) Abhigyana Shakuntalam

3. Who set up Hindu Rangmanch at Calcutta?

a) Krishnamohan Banerji b) Mahesh Dattani

c) Prasanna/Kumar Thakur d) Girish Karnad

4. Who is the Father of Modern Kannada Drama?

a) Mohan Rakesh b) Kailasam

c) Girish Karnad d) Badal Sarkar

5. …… is the Modern Woman Playwright of during the colonial era of Indian

English Drama.

a) Bharati Sarabai b) Dina Mehta c) Sarojini Naidu d) Anita Desai

6. National School Of Drama was established in…..

a) 1953 b)1955 c)1959 d)1951

7. Which play of Dina Mehta won the first prize in worldwide competition

sponsored by BBC in 1979?

a) Sister Like You b) Brides are not for Burning

c) Getting Away with Murder d) One Plus One Makes Nine

8. Getting Away with Murder was first performed in…….

a) Prabhodhankar Thakare Theatre Mumbai b) NCPA Mumbai

c) British Council Theatre Mumbai d) Prithvi Theatre Mumbai

9. What is the name of Sonali’s Husband?

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a) Sonu b) Malu c) Gopal d) Anil

10. Who was abused as a child by his/her Uncle Narotam?

a) Malu b) Sonali c) Raziya d) Anil

11. Sonali is more afraid to give birth to ……..

a) a girl b) a boy

c) Both of these d) None of these

12. Who explains the medical hazards of doing amniocentesis test?

a) sonali b) Raziya c) Malu d) Sonu

13. Who forces Gopal to reveal the truth about Sonali to save her?

a) Anil b) Malika c) Raziya d) Narotam

14. Whom does Gopal marry on suggestion of Raziya and Sonali?

a) Malu b) Raziya c) Sonu d) Sonali

15. Which culture considers women merely as instruments of reproduction?

a) Matriarchal b) Western c) Patriarchal d) Ancient Indian

Answers:

1) D

2) A

3) C

4) B

5) A

6) C

7) B

8) C

9) D

10) D

11) A

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12) B

13) A

14) A

15) C

4.10 References for further study:

1. Aston, Elaine. “Finding a Tradition: Feminism and Theatre History”, An

Introduction to Feminism and Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

2. Dr. Sharma, Shuchi.”Interrogating Phallocentrism: A Study of Select plays by

Indian English Women Playwrights.” Research Journal of English Language

and Literature. 3.2.2015:1-5 4

3. Mehta, Dina. Getting Away with Murder. Body Blows:Women,Violence and

Survival. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000.

4. Ganguly Anindita. Subdued Echoes of Violence and Terror in Dina Mehta’s

Getting Away with Murder and Brides Are Not for Burning, The Criterion: An

International Journal in English, Vol. 5, Issue-4 (2014)

https://www.the-criterion.com/V5/n4/Ganguly.pdf

5. Chandhok Suchita. Recalcitrance in Getting Away With Murder, The Criterion:

An International Journal in English, Vol. 8, Issue-3. (2017)

https://www.the-criterion.com/V8/n3/IN18.pdf

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