DISSERTATION

Narratorial Absence and Point of Viewin Rohinton Mistry’s

“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag”

Submitted September 2009 in partial fulfilmentof the conditions of the award of the degree of

MA in Modern English Language.

Department of English StudiesUniversity of Nottingham

Mark Moran

Contents

Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 I. Introduction: Mistry’s Particulars and the Inevitability of Ideology 5

II. The Postcolonial Discourse 6

II.1 Alienation, the Quotidian and the Sublime, Imperial Aesthetics 7 II.2 Subversion, Cooperation, Identity, and Depiction

8 II.3 English Language and Indian Writers

10 II.4 Indian Writing in English: Imperial Reflection

12 II.5 Cultural Truth: Ireland, Africa, India

13

III. The Feminist Discourse 15

III.1 Spivak and the Subaltern

15 III.2 Stratton: Patriarchy and Postcolonialism

16

2

IV. Methodology

18

IV.1 Booth’s Author, Narrator, Reader 18

IV.2 Fowler’s Point of View 19

IV.3 Simpson’s Point of View 20

IV.4 Modality: Simpson’s Category A 21

IV.5 Simpson’s Transitivity

21

V. Analysis 22 V.1 Space in Firozsha Baag

23 V.2 Temporal Perspective

25 V.3 Modality in Mistry’s Narrator

30 V.3.1 Category A Neutral 31 V.3.2 Category A Negative 31 V.3.3 Heterogeneous Modality

32 V.3.4 Category A-ve Reflective

33 V.4 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and the Ghost 35 V.5 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and her Bai

36

3

V.6 Transitivity

40

VI. Conclusion

43

VII. References 45

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the professors who have guided me

throughout the course of my academic work at the University

of Nottingham and especially Prof. John McCrae, who

recommended that I take a look at Rohinton Mistry; Dr.

Valerie Durrow, who was always helpful in answering any

questions that I had; and Dr. Peter Stockwell for his

suggestion to narrow my focus.

4

Abstract

Rohinton Mistry is an expatriate Parsi Indian writer

who has lived in Canada for more than thirty years and who

has within the past twenty years developed a reputation as

one of the influential postcolonial voices in Indian

fiction. Often compared to the realist novelists in the

19th century, his writing is known for its power of

description, its quietist prose, and its attention to the

quotidian details of the alienated Parsi community in India.

5

He is been criticized by one scholar for not “getting beyond

the particulars” to develop any kind of ideological point of

view. In this paper the author has tried to show that

ideology is implicit in the point of view of the narrator,

and thus the writer. Through an exploration of point of

view in light of postcolonial literary theory the author of

this paper reveals Mistry as a writer with contradictory

ideological aims however subtle this ideology manifests

itself in the “The Ghosts of Firozsha Baag,” Mistry’s

masterpiece of subalternity.

6

I. Introduction: Mistry’s Particulars and the Inevitability

of Ideology

“Narrative always says less than it knows, but it often

makes known more than it says.”

(Genette 1972: 198)

“When he was little,” Jacqueline, a sixty-three-year-old

maid says, “I sang Konkani songs for him…Big man now, he’s

forgotten them and so have I. Forgetting my name, my

language, my songs.” (45) Jacqueline had moved from her

native Goa to Bombay to work in a Parsi household as a

Catholic. Rohinton Mistry’s heroine in “The Ghost of

Firozsha Baag,” the third story in Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha

Baag (1987) illuminates the hybridity that characterizes

Mistry’s fiction and the India he renders with such

subtlety. Mistry’s depiction of Jacqueline and her

encounters with ghosts, her memories of her previous life,

and her Parsi masters draws together a number of currents

thematically and linguistically. So central to Mistry’s

portrayal of Jacqueline is the perspective accorded her and

7

the attendant ideology such a perspective reveals about the

author. There has been little critical interest paid to

Rohinton Mistry’s work, especially his short stories, and

what little criticism exists focuses on his Parsi identity,

or the realism of his fiction and its attention to the

quotidian. Although there has been acknowledgement that

Mistry is more political in his later work, he has been

criticized, for example, by Bharucha (2003) who claims that

Mistry is incapable of “moving beyond the particulars” to

create any type of ideological point of view. (205) On the

other hand, there are other critics like Chaudhuri (2001)

who believe that hybridity and subversion, and thus

ideology, are as much subtle discourses as explicit ones.

The “Ghost of Firozsha Baag” is about particulars, but it

rarely announces its ideological perspective directly. In

fact, Mistry doesn’t see himself as a political writer, in

his words, “If politics … come in to my work, they come in a

secondary way.” (52) What Mistry considers secondary is

primary. What lies beneath Firozsha Baag is a myriad of

contending ideological forces vying for attention despite

8

Mistry’s intent. What lies innocently on the surface, these

particulars, often belies meaning that accrues to these

particulars in the reading process. Booth (1961) reminds us

as he draws upon Flaubert, “the fully expressed ‘natural

event’ will convey its own meanings far better than any

explicit evaluative commentary might do.” (97) Mistry lets

natural events speak for themselves. This ideological

struggle working beneath the text in Firozsha Baag conspires

with the subtle, shifting linguistic manifestations of point

of view creating an ideological text without appearing that

way.

II. The Postcolonial Discourse

To understand Firozsha Baag is not only to understand

the cultural and historical influences which have

constituted Rohinton Mistry as the author, but to understand

the colonial influence of Britain upon India, of the

colonial influence of Hindus upon Parsis within India, of

the role of women in India, and finally of the neocolonial

power of depiction. Rohinton Mistry is a Parsi, middle

class, male, diaspora writer who depicts a Goan Catholic,

9

subaltern woman, portraying her in a Standard English

interweaved with Hindi and Parsi-Gujarati with no translation for

a presumed elite English speaking audience. Mistry’s socio-

cultural background, the complexities of colonialism in

India, the role of gender, and his language style are the

vortex through which Firozsha Baag was conceived, written,

and received. The ensuing discussion delves into the

disparate influences that make up the postcolonial

discourse. This postcolonial context serves a large canvas,

which informs both Mistry’s writing as well as the reader’s

understanding of it.

II.1 Alienation, the Quotidian and the Sublime, Imperial

Aesthetics

For Morey (2004) Mistry’s writing draws on a varied

inheritance from Zoroastrian religious beliefs to a hybrid

literary sensibility cultivated across various cultures.

After being exiled from Iran by Muslim Arab invaders in the

7th century these Zoroastrians fled to what is now Mumbai

and established a thriving community and were to become

known as Parsis. As a small minority surrounded by a

10

majority Hindu culture, these Parsis developed a cohesive

religious and cultural identity. Two important factors

serve as crucial antecedents to the establishment of a Parsi

outlook and thus literary disposition according to Morey: 1.

that these Parsis were not constrained by the socio-

religious proscriptions associated with caste and occupation

that stifled Hindu society and 2. that the Parsis, like

their elite Hindu counterparts, quickly aligned themselves

in their ideals and aesthetics with British values. For the

Parsi the point of view as Morey points out was not looking

up or down at their neighbors in a social sense, but looking

from a secluded margin at an overwhelming other culture.

This minority status within India, albeit elite,

destabilizes convenient postcolonial categories as the

Parsis are a doubly displaced minority, first by Persia,

then by an Indian majority of their adopted country. The

experience of colonialism that the Parsis had in aligning

themselves with the colonial power was much different than,

for example, what the Nigerians or the Irish endured under

colonial power, where native majorities were exploited.

11

It is a sense of alienation, not the resentment of

having been colonized that informs the Parsi experience and

this alienation and its attendant moral ambiguity drives

much of Mistry’s stories. According to Morey, Mistry’s

writing subverts colonial categories with subtlety in his

power of description, his naming, the paradoxes and

injustices his characters face in the quotidian dramas of

his realist fiction. His literary style borrows from

traditions from Persia, the West, and South Asia in his

frequent use of storytelling, European literary allusions,

and Indian dialects all brought to bear on his perspective

of exile.

In looking at the Parsi experience in India it soon

becomes evident that several dialectics are operating

simultaneously. The Parsis establish relationships with two

colonial powers, with the British and with the Hindus

aligning with the former and the aesthetics of ascendancy,

and secluded from the latter. The Parsi experience has been

one of being a member of an elite group and at the same time

being a muted voice as a minority.

12

II.2 Subversion, Cooperation, Identity, and Depiction

Mistry’s work has prompted several critical discussions

illuminating the complexity of postcolonial Indian

literature. Like Stratton (2002) Bharucha (2003) criticizes

how postcolonial theory obscures other elements of the

postcolonial discourse in favor of the common binaries of

resistance and subversion. Issues of gender, ethnicity,

audience, social class, even the very style of English used

to mediate a native Indian reality, are too often occluded

from the postcolonial discourse in the view of numerous

scholars.

As a separate presence for 1,300 years, lacking in a

literary tradition, and having been displaced multiple times

the Parsis developed a unique identity in India.

This cultural inheritance permeates Mistry as a writer and

helps us to understand Mistry’s writing as it falls under

the scrutiny of the converging currents of postcolonial

literary theory.

The themes Mistry engages in his writing lie outside the

dominant nationalist narrative of India, a narrative of

13

national liberation. As a diaspora writer, writes Bharucha,

Mistry is concerned more with representation than he is in

the national identity of India and the political perspective

of Mistry’s Parsi community offers an alternative reading of

India. Though not major players in Indian national

liberation, Parsis did play a limited role in opposing the

British. The Parsi role in India, Bharucha goes on to say,

can by no means be reduced to simple binaries as the Parsi

community engaged both British colonialism and the Hindu

majority at times cooperatively, at other times

subversively. Though historically the Parsis have been

concerned with mere survival as a community, recently Parsis

have become more political in their writing (Natarajan 1996)

though not focused on caste (Dodiya 2004) & (Bharucha 2003)

and more concerned with the abuse of political power and the

extreme right. (Bharucha: 2003)

Parsi embracement of the aesthetics of an imperial power

was not unlike the elite Hindu in India or the elite in

formerly colonized African countries who quickly aligned

themselves with their former masters. The Parsi’s minority

14

status, however, precluded the same kind of neocolonialism

that appeared between a native elite and their native

underclass. Fanon (1963) discusses the postcolonial

dialectic between the colonized and colonizer. Writing

within the context of the decolonization of Africa he argued

that colonial power was replaced with an indigenous

neocolonial class under the pretext of nationalist

sentiment. Using a borrowed aesthetic this native petite

bourgeois with their enlightened values of the West remained

out of touch with the struggles of the masses. Like Fanon’s

Algeria, Spivak (1988) views Indian nationalist liberation

as a bourgeois movement serving bourgeois interests, not, in

particular, the interests of poor Indian women. Even the

role of the subaltern woman in the anti colonial struggle is

rarely depicted, Spivak adds. These bourgeois aesthetics,

as Spivak and Fanon would have it, that Mistry has embraced,

are used as the very tools in Mistry’s attempt at rendering

his protagonist in Firozsha Baag.

Dodiya (2004) points out that the central motif

throughout Mistry’s realist fiction is his transforming the

15

quotidian into the sublime where communities, not

individuals, become the protagonists. Natarajan (1996) like

Bharucha, also discusses the centrality of identity in Parsi

fiction and the comic sense with which Parsi writers depict

the foibles of their community. In Mistry’s novels Bharucha

argues, echoing Fanon and Spivak, that his diasporic and

Parsi identity has limited his experience with the lower

classes and thus writes about them unconvincingly (205). It

is unfortunate that in Bharucha’s criticism she overlooks

Mistry’s portrayal of his lower class protagonist in

Firozsha Baag, hardly an unconvincing rendering of an

underclass character. Mistry’s novels get scrutinized by

scholars willing to look at his work, yet these very

qualities that critics claim are lacking in his novels, or

early novels, are found in Firozsha Baag, a work written

much earlier.

II.3 English Language and Indian Writers

Firozsha Baag has hybrid elements though a Standard

English dominates. The place of Standard English in Indian

writing has been a source of contention among Indian

16

writers, critics, and scholars. Srivastava (2007: 57)

discusses “Babu” English as an Indian English that imitates

British English to the point of absurdity, divorced from its

own context, unable to convey adequately the contours and

connotations of Indian life. This derogatory term brings up

issues of authenticity and power within an Indian context.

In discussing Mistry’s fiction it is inevitable that he be

compared to other canonical Indian authors such as Salmon

Rushdie. As a Parsi and as a Muslim Mistry and Rushdie both

write as outsiders, but where Rushdie is more of a

postmodern writer often operating within other genres such

as magical realism, Mistry typically writes within the

realist mode. Rushdie translates indigenous words, Mistry

doesn’t. Who Mistry and Rushdie write for adds a political

dimension where the production of postcolonial texts is

concerned. Khair (2001) argues that Rushdie’s English is

an English serving an elite foreign audience with its

“deracinated and cosmopolitan Westernized hybrid

sensibility” written from a privileged place. (115). The

Hindi in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, argues Khair, doesn’t

17

mediate two cultures with its unnatural use of Hindi and the

translations of these words. Instead issues of power and

representation are submerged in favor of a palatable

discourse for Western consumers. Notwithstanding Rushdie’s

linguistic pyrotechnics, Khair insists that he is writing in

a Babu English.

Not all critics agree with Khair. Refracted through

both the vernacular tradition as well as Indian writing in

English Chaudhuri (2001) criticizes the essentialist

interpretive modes within the discourse of postcoloniality

with its associating delicacy, nuance, inwardness, and irony

with English and extroversion, polyphony, magic, and non

linear plots with Indian writing (xxv). For Chaudhuri,

Indian writing has also encompassed nuances, and realism for

that matter, along with the Ramayana and its heritage of

magical and non-linear characteristics. Chaudhuri also

challenges the idea of how hybridity is realized textually

maintaining that hybridity is as much a subtle discourse as

it is an explicit one. An Indian writer, Chaudhuri goes on

to say, can write in Standard English, without transmuted,

18

appropriated, subversive, and untranslated words, and be no

less Indian. “Hybridity,” Chaudhuri continues, “can

frequently enter texts in subtly disruptive, rather than

obvious, ways; it need not be worn like national costume.”

(xxvi) What Chauhuri is saying here is that an Indian

writer can write with the aesthetics commonly associated

with the imperial tongue and yet still be very much an

Indian and subversive as well which is much different than

what Khair is implying when he argues that Rushdie’s

English, hybrid as it is, still has a Westernized sensibility

thus obscuring race, ethnicity, and power. If indigenous

words are used, they are used unnaturally, and translated,

better to be understood by Westerners. The problem with

Khair’s argument is that he does not take the time to

differentiate an immature, insecure, maladapted, Babu

English on one hand, and an English of the imperial variety

waged in a more nuanced manner, yet still communicating an

Indian consciousness.

The question of a writer’s linguistic style and what

this says about the perspective of the writer is dealt with

19

at more length later, but it draws our attention to the

larger issues of linguistic representation that lie at the

heart of postcolonial texts.

II.4 Indian Writing in English: Imperial Reflection

Chaudhuri continues his discussion observing how

certain topics are occluded in the discussion of

postcolonial India. The vernacular discourse in India,

Chaudhuri writes, unlike postcolonial theory and to a

certain degree Indian writing in English, has addressed the

native upper class (xx). Chaudhuri’s perspective is valuable

in that he not only discusses perspectives from the West,

but also perspectives from India. He claims that Western

schools of thought have undermined the sense of authentic,

in favor of hybridity, yet authenticity and hybridity, he

insists, have always lived side by side in India (xxix-xxx).

Hybridity then, is more of a Western preoccupation than an

Indian one. The Indian English novel, according to

Chaudhuri, is a space where the West can inscribe its own

preoccupations with its own history, where it can

reinterpret itself.

20

II.5 Cultural Truth: Ireland, Africa, and India

The historical and cultural conditions that helped

constitute Rohinton Mistry as a writer inevitably lead us to

the medium he uses to depict the characters in his work.

Mistry’s protagonist in Firozsha Baag only speaks in “little

bits of English” along with Parsi-Gujarati. Her native tongue

is Konkani. Yet this story is narrated for the most part in

English. The role of the use of the English language then,

becomes political. The struggle over language is, of

course, not unique to India.

At the turn of the twentieth century the Irish were

engaged in a vigorous debate about the role of English in

Ireland and consequently the relationship that Ireland would

have with England. Literature, according to Kiberd (1995)

played a central role in the national awakening of the

Irish. It was the style, the shape of English, not its

content that many believed defined an Irish English, with

its ancient Gaelic rhythm underlying the colonial tongue.

Many doubted if English could convey an Irish native

21

reality, others doubted if Irish had the modern sensibility

of English.

The role of English was no less a point of contention

in Africa where the debate was framed by Ngugi (1981) and

Achebe (1989) with each presenting widely divergent views on

the place a master tongue played in the lives of Africans.

While Ngugi argued that a language could spiritually

subjugate a people with its attendant cultural values,

Achebe countered that English, as in India, was not

exploitive, but a positive force uniting numerous disparate

nationalities offering a common language. This idea that

there is an intrinsic meaning in a language has been a

source of much debate and it is interesting to note that

many writers and scholars from the developing world have

argued, whether explicitly like Ngugi, or implicitly like

Rao (1937) or Brathwaite (1984), that cultural truth resides

in the very language of a culture. Scholars like Fish

(1973) and Ashcroft et al (1995: 277-280) disagree with the

claim that the meaning is intrinsic in texts. Ashcroft et

al offer contradictory claims at once that a language does

22

not use a speaker, that a language does not convey a

particular world view, that categories do not shape the

mind, that meaning is created in the context of use while

also arguing that language and culture are one in the same

and that power to name is the power to control. Ashcroft et

al go on to say that it is nonsense to believe that a truth

is the exclusive preserve of a particular language and yet

goes on to claim that postcolonial writing carries with it a

concomitant “gulf of silence” and that postcolonial writers

must “abrogate the assumptions” (1989: 204) of the imperial

tongue. Though offering conflicting claims about the

universalism of language, Ashcroft et al underscore the

complexity of postcolonial writing.

Whether or not the syntax, the emotional coloring, the

lexis, of English is freighted with its own perspective, its

own ideology, is of concern to us in interpreting the

semantic content of the narrator’s utterances in Firozsha

Baag. The narrator’s viewpoint in Firozsha Baag is an

appropriated viewpoint by the author. As readers we must ask

why the narrator at times uses untranslated Hindi or Parsi-

23

Gujarati. The use of these indigenous words is deliberate

and ideological on the part of the author. The fact that

the narrator thinks and speaks mostly in English is

ideological. A full discussion of the merits of the debate

about intrinsic meaning and language between Konkani and

English, for example, is beyond the scope of our discussion,

but the idea that properties of a language carry ideological

meaning has merit in our discussion of Firozsha Baag.

III. The Feminist Discourse

In reviewing Mistry’s first novel, Such a Long Journey,

Bharucha claims that he failed to present any female

character that wasn’t stereotypical, one-dimensional

character playing a passive role, such as eccentric

spinsters. (202) Bharucha’s criticism is not unlike many

feminist critics of postcolonial literature who lament the

absence of realistic female characters in the roles of

change agents. Firozsha Baag is at once a work that

recreates classical portrayals of the woman at the same time

it privileges a woman’s perspective. The female perspective

24

is valorized in Firozsha Baag, though more on a covert

level. The place of women in literature has been an area of

wide debate drawing attention to the voices of women who

have been silenced in literature.

III.1 Spivak and the Subaltern

Spivak (Morton 2003: 19) criticizes not only the

dominant discourse’s portrayal of indigenous people, but the

entire epistemological apparatus of the West. Her refusal to

take for granted the categories of the West, including those

of Western feminists is shared by other scholars (Katak

1989; Mohanty 1984) and her concern with neo colonialism is

a theme also discussed in Peterson (1984) and Oyewumi

(1997). She is particularly concerned with the poor and

marginalized women of India who, she argues, are forever

depicted in literature by a master class and objectified

within a critical theory out of touch with their daily

lives. It is in trying to speak for subaltern women that

they are silenced Spivak contends, suggesting that subaltern

women start depicting themselves so they can be heard.

Spivak goes further subverting Western feminists who claim

25

to speak for all women when, in her view, they are part of

the colonial enterprise.

Her drawing attention to the limitations of Western

epistemology is well founded, but her feminist criticism of

patriarchal discourses is not as easily sustained. Like

much feminist criticism, for example, Stratton (2002),

Spivak assigns patriarchal value to concepts like

monotheism, religion, family, and the colonial state thus

replacing patriarchal criticism with an equally dismissive

feminist criticism. Such easy dichotomies do little to

advance the discussion of postcolonial writing. Nowhere do

we hear about the role of women, in general, in constituting

and perpetuating the discourses of religion, family, and the

colonial state. Nor do we see in her arguments agency

assigned to roles characteristic of women like Mistry’s

heroine in Firozsha Baag. It is the women who, after all,

presumably have the most influence in the family and the

rearing of children, and thus would likely carry the most

influence in the shaping of society. Her fetishizing of

26

Indian lower class women notwithstanding, Spivak’s critique

of the manifold assumptions of Western thinking is striking.

III.2 Stratton: Patriarchy and Post colonialism

Stratton (2002) is concerned with the role of gender in

postcolonial studies arguing that themes such as

coloniality, class, and race dominate the discussions about

postcolonial literature. Stratton criticizes in her study

of African literature patriarchal writing and its

marginalization of women. Similar to Loomba (1998) Stratton

addresses how both the colonized and the colonizer

subordinated women. Male writers, Stratton writes, working

in collusion with their white colonial male counterparts,

valorize the status quo depicting women as passive objects,

never as change agents, less complex, and not realistic.

Female characters are romanticized and idealized, associated

with motherhood, family, and tradition. For Stratton this

playing out of conventional roles of the sexes is an

allegory that is either perpetuated or subverted in

literature. She goes on to say that there is a “male

literary representation,” implying an essentialism that

27

exists in neat categories across gender, unwittingly

subverting her own premise that essences of male and female

are not absolute. Perhaps Stratton’s work is at its best

when she draws attention to the fact that there is little

scholarly attention paid to female African writers and very

little representation in the African literary canon from

female authors. Like Spivak she overlooks female complicity

in the categories thrust upon them by men. Women, no matter

how they have been depicted in literature or history are

ever innocent bystanders. Passivity may merely mean the

appearance of passivity. Motherhood, family, and tradition

are not passive enterprises. What would make her scholarly

work more substantial would have been her including examples

of both female and male writers depicting both genders with

subtlety and fairness. This acknowledgement of the

heterogeneity of women and criticism of essentialist

theoretical models can be found in the work of scholars such

as Mohanty (1984). The intersection of feminism and

postcolonial theory plays an important role in examining

28

“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” with its heroine situated in

such an ideological space.

If we are to believe Chaudhuri that the Indian English

novel is a discourse less concerned with understanding India

than it is with understanding the West’s relationship with

India then we have yet another dialectic operating and an

imperial one at that. The critical perspectives surrounding

Firozsha Baag encompass an extremely wide terrain: Parsi

identity; alienation vs resistance; a fixation on resistance

and subversion of the British and hybridity to the exclusion

of other aspects of postcoloniality; Mistry’s elite status

speaking to a Western audience; the place of Standard

English in Indian writing; and finally Mistry’s depiction of

female characters and characters of the underclass. All of

these themes are written across Firozsha Baag which makes

any attempt at understanding it within a postcolonial

context all the more daunting. We now turn to linguistic

concerns.

IV. Methodology

29

What stands out about Firozsha Baag at the outset is

its sense of voice, of perspective, of point of view and

that this point of view is of an old, female maid who never

comes out and states any political position, but somehow is

implicated politically.

Fowler (1986) and Simpson’s (1993) frameworks on point of

view will be used in analyzing Firozsha Baag. Booth gives

us a general orientation before we take a closer look at how

Mistry and his narrator communicate linguistically.

IV.1 Booth’s Author, Narrator, Reader

Booth (1961) recalls James Joyce’s revising an

overwritten Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, carefully ridding

it of most of its adverbs and adjectives and “all but a

scarcely recognizable remnant of authorial commentary.” (97)

Booth’s discussion of the implicit presence of the author

through a narrator who uses little explicit commentary is

useful for our understanding Mistry and his narrator. Booth

explains how direct statements can be replaced by numerous

“devices of disclosure and evaluation.” Like Fowler and

Simpson, Booth claims that rhetorical heightening is evident

30

in all writing whatever claims to objectivity there are on

the part of the author. An author’s decision about what

parts of a story to tell, what sequence and proportion of

episodes he uses, how pace and timing is employed, and how

points of view can be manipulated all can contribute to

authorial judgment. (272) Another powerful way an author

can comment indirectly is through authorial silence writing

“realistically,” yet according to Booth, realistic

characters are laden with “additional effects.” (273) The

qualities an author endows his characters cannot be viewed

dispassionately by the reader. Thus a reader’s reaction to

a character affects our reaction to the events this

character relates.

Mistry’s Firozsha Baag is a quotidian drama situated in

the very minutia of the marginalized existence of a maid yet

Mistry’s portrayal is loaded with implicit judgment, much of

it made through what is not being said. Booth offers a

foundation on which we now can look at linguistic taxonomies

in analyzing perspective in Firozsha Baag.

IV.2 Fowler’s Point of View

31

Fowler (1986) argues that our representation of the

world is such because of the categories we are given in the

language we use and that these categories encourage

stabilization of ideas. A discourse is the realization of

the thinking style of a particular culture, the very style

of the language itself encourages habits of mind and

behavior. In this way language not only reflects upon, but

constitutes, and not dispassionately. In seeking stability

the needs of the dominant class are served. Structure is

imposed with these categories to help make sense of the

world. Indeed disruption is radical. Yet was it most

salient to our discussion is his claim that “texts can be

conventional yet signify much more than their propositions

literally state.” (168) In his discussion he shows how

perspective is created through paradigmatic (discourse

level) relationships that transcend the syntagmatic

(propositional) level.

In Fowler’s model of point of view he distinguished

three types: psychological, ideological, and spatio-

32

temporal. The psychological point of view is concerned with

how the author and the narrator are related to one another

and the various shifts and contrasts from both inside the

consciousness of the narrator and outside this

consciousness. Fowler identifies four types of narration

including Type A or internal narration, which is the type used

in Firozsha Baag (and thus the only one discussed here).

The ideological point of view reveals the categories and

beliefs used to understand the world and is carried out

either directly or indirectly across one dominating point of

view or a variety of points of view. Ideology is manifested

directly in the use of modal structures where an author or

narrator evaluates the world of the story. In Fowler’s

framework modality can announce ideology directly or merely

provide language that is symptomatic of a particular outlook

on the world. Spatio-temporal point of view is shown in the

way the events of the story are presented either slowly,

rapidly, or disrupted. Events can be viewed close up,

focused, or less clear.

IV.3 Simpson’s Point of View

33

According to Simpson each author is constituted by the

discourses in which s/he lives and these conditions go far

beyond the writer. The text’s structure presents a

perspective, reflects and constructs ideology, maintaining

hierarchies. Simpson extends Fowler’s framework on point of

view using Fowler’s spatio, temporal, psychological, and

ideological indices building a framework which identifies

specific types of modality and transitivity. His model

taxonomy includes deontic modality where degrees of

permission, obligation, and requirement are shown, usually

in the course of persuading or in acts of politeness;

boulomaic modality where desire is expressed (I hope, I wish,

I regret); epistemic modality---most important according to

Simpson in regards to point of view, where degrees of

confidence in a proposition are revealed (could, must, I

think); and modality of perception where the degree of

commitment is predicated on reference to human perception

(it’s clear that you are right, it’s obvious that you are

right).

IV.4 Modality: Simpson’s Category A

34

In Simpson’s Category A he provides three types:

Category A positive (A+ve), Category A negative (A-ve), and

Category A neutral. All three types show varying degrees of

intrusion by the narrator. In Category A+ve verba

sentiendi, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, and generic

sentences appear with great frequency. Deontic and

boulomaic modal operators are highlighted foregrounding

desire, duty, obligation, and opinions. Epistemic and

perceptual modality are suppressed and thus words of

estrangement do not appear. As a consequence the narration

is oriented towards the reader. In category A-ve epistemic

and perceptual modalities are used creating a negative

shading. Bewilderment, estrangement, and a highlighting of

uncertainty are foregrounded in this type of narrative which

occur often after abrupt transitions into this mode. A-ve

often occurs in the self questioning time of a homodiegetic

narrative. In A neutral narratives there is an absence of

narratorial modality where there are no qualified opinions

of people or events. The narrative is carried through

categorical assertions with physical description, little

35

psychological development, and a lack of connectivity and

causation. Category A neutral is a non reflective mode.

IV.5 Simpson’s Transitivity

Along with modality Simpson also believes that the way

experience is encoded in language, in particular, whether or

not agency is included or left out from a process has

immense value in how an utterance is constructed and

received. His framework of transitivity helps identify the

particular processes at work in language. Simpson’s model

includes four processes representing action, speech, states

of mind, and states of being. Material processes are processes

of doing, either by an animate actor (action process) or by

an inanimate actor (event process). Action processes can be

intentional or they can be superventional (where a process just

happens). Verbalization processes are processes of saying.

Mental processes are internalized processes of sensing and

can be perception processes (seeing, hearing) reaction

processes (liking, hating) and processes of cognition

(thinking, understanding). Relational processes are

processes of being and can either be intensive (x is a)

36

relationship, possessive (x has a) relationship, or

circumstantial (x is at/on a) relationship.

V. Analysis

The Ghost of Firozsha Baag is a story narrated by a

sixty-three year old Catholic maid from Goa while she is

preparing a dinner for her Parsi masters. The coordinates

of space and time are fluid throughout the course of

Jacqueline’s narrative about a ghost that never seems to

leave her alone. Her account is fraught with digressions

starting with a Christmas Eve Mass two years previous and

shifting time frames from experiences she had had as a child

in Goa up to a ritual she and her female master perform

together to finally rid the home of the ghost. To locate

Jacqueline spatially is first to identify the most prominent

space of the narrative, the space where she sleeps and

works.

Text A

After midnight mass I always sleep outside, by the stairs, because bai and seth must not be woken up at 2 am, and they never give me a key. No ayah gets a key to a flat. It is something I have learned, like I learned forty-

nine years ago that life as ayah means living

37

close to the floor. All work I do, I do on floors, like grinding masala, cutting vegetables, cleaning rice.

Food also is eaten sitting on floor, after serving them at dining table. And my bed is rolled out at night in

kitchen passage, on floor. No cot for me. Nowadays, my weight is much more than it used to be, and is getting very difficult to get up from floor. But I am managing. (45)

V.1 Space in Firozsha Baag

That Mistry’s heroine inhabits a very different space

than that of her Parsi masters, and the thought of a sixty-

three year old woman struggling to get up from the floor

every day to serve them cannot be lost upon a reader

familiar with the elite status of the Parsis in India.

Jacqueline doesn’t merely do certain activities on the

floor, she lives on the floor, indeed she is narrating this

very story sitting on the floor. She sleeps outside in the

hallway of this housing complex, when her arrivals are not

suitable for her masters. Floor fixes her social status and

orients the reader ideologically right from the outset of

the story. Implicit in the quotidian details of her space

that she describes lay issues of class inequity.

38

Stockwell’s (2002: 43) deictic center is clearly in this

apartment along with Jacqueline’s neighborhood, in a spatial

sense. Locative expressions and nouns with locative

connotations orient the reader: by the stairs, sounds coming

from her masters’ bed, the gas stove table. Her neighbors live on

the third floor of C Block and open up doors; she goes to the grocery store.

Her day to day life as a maid is shown in the objects she

makes reference to, the spaces she inhabits, her physical

descriptions. This ghost sits on her chest, or sits next to

her bedding, or puts his head on her chest, or sleeps with

her, or lays down with her all of which brings up different

concerns for the reader. Throughout Jacqueline’s narrative

she’s frequently dismissive of this ghost with his sexual

overtures, yet this ghost is apparently not so aggressive

that she is terrified of it shrieking in horror at the idea

of a ghost being anywhere near her in such an intimate place

as a bed. Jacqueline’s ambiguous behavior, foregrounded in

spatial deictics towards this ghost, suggests romantic

interest. Spatial orientation is shown also in Jacqueline’s

reminiscing about her childhood in Goa with its wells, its

39

villages, and its crowded bus stations. These spatial

lexical items clearly foreground a lower class woman though

there are other times when the narrator’s spatial

orientation has a positive valence, for example, later on in

the narrative Jacqueline finds peace and quiet on a balcony.

At the end of Jacqueline’s narrative she’s told to go inside,

away from a Parsi religious ritual, to another space as not

to intrude into the privacy of her masters confirming her

lower social status. Before the close of the story

Jacqueline’s female master tells Jacqueline that she is here

with her after a Parsi ritual to get rid of the ghost and

then invites Jacqueline to come with her for tea. At last

Jacqueline’s space is shared with her master implying an

ambiguity in Jacqueline and her female master’s relational deixis

with its shifting from distance and subordination to

proximity and solidarity. This shifting deixis in this

domestic relationship is a metaphor for India’s relationship

with its colonial master in the larger society, one also of

distance and subversion, of closeness and cooperation.

40

Spatial orientation in Firozsha Baag is a central theme

that brings to light what is often criticized within

postcolonial discourse—subalternity and the voiceless poor,

many of whom are women, who are simply written out of

narratives. That Jacqueline brings us into her space and

fixes our attention on it signifies to the reader that there

may be much more going on than a maid simply telling a

series of vignettes. Her space is valorized.

One cannot help but to see the irony in the alienation

of this maid in a spatial sense at the hands of Parsis who

themselves have been alienated historically within the

larger Indian community. Jacqueline is secluded just like

her Parsi masters. Right from the outset the reader is

brought into the physical space of the subaltern Indian

female. In one sense Mistry is stabilizing the concept of

the subordinated woman through the use of space. This maid

is associated with the word down and she’s on the floor and

she sleeps outside. Few short stories involve such close

attention to the details of the space of a character with

such low social status. No explicit evaluation has been

41

given at this point about Jacqueline’s status as a maid.

The reader is left to infer perspective and disposition on

the part of Jacqueline through physical description.

Spatial point of view has quickly been established in the

beginning of the story and it orients the reader’s

understanding of the distance that separates Jacqueline and

her masters. Later in the story this physical distance

closes and thus the reader infers a new interpretation of

the scope of Jacqueline’s relationship with her bai, the

lady of the house. Working together with temporal

perspective, Jacqueline’s point of view becomes even more

solidified.

V.2 Temporal Perspective

Temporal perspective in Firozsha Baag oscillates

between the varying times of the stories Jacqueline tells,

story time according to Gennette (1972), and the time of

narrating signaled to the reader typographically with

italics (textual deixis in Stockwell’s terms). Temporal deixis

shifts throughout the story on one level as Jacqueline

recalls various episodes of her life while on another level

42

in the deictic center, the kitchen, as Jacqueline prepares

dinner. Who she is speaking to, the narrattee, is unclear, but

the reader get a sense that Jacqueline is speaking almost as

if she’s cutting vegetables as she rambles on and on

digressively. In this sense the reader projects him/herself

into the narrative as an implied participant. The temporal

time span of her reminiscing ranges from when she was little

to two years prior to the time of narration at Christmas.

In Gennette’s terms, the duration of time varies throughout

Jacqueline’s narrative flashback along with the actual time

Jacqueline takes in telling her stories which take place

within the time it takes her to prepare a meal and attend to

her masters’ needs while they eat it. Within this short

amount of time the reader is drawn into the memories of

Jacqueline as her mind roves from one scene to the next in

an endless progression surrounding her main narrative about

the ghost. This central narrative is disrupted by

diversions about: Parsi speech habits; singing to her male

master when he was a child; leaving Bombay; life as a dark

skinned woman; being teased about her dealings with the

43

ghost; various neighborhood antics; a childhood boyfriend;

cockroaches; her mother’s sewing; going to the beach as a

child; and the Portuguese in Goa.

If we are to agree with Simpson (1993: 21) that the “…

knowledge, attitudes and opinions of the medium through

which the fiction is narrated are, after all, likely to

govern the type of spatio-temporal viewpoint which develops”

then we can look at Jacqueline’s narration in a certain

light. Upon closer examination we see temporal deictic

patterning foregrounding three elements: frequency adverbs

and references to habitual action/routines; repetition of

the fact that Jacqueline has been a maid for forty-nine years;

and a significant amount of time spent on recalling a

childhood boyfriend and his sexual advances. It is what is

implicit in Mistry’s writing where communication occurs on a

whole different level.

As a maid, and an old one at that, it comes as no

surprise that she has had a lot of life experience and that

as a maid her life will have been one of various routines.

Her language confirms this. She always sleeps outside by

44

the stairs after midnight mass; her bai looks like she wants

to bite someone every morning; people make fun of her all the

time; the ghost came every Friday night; always on Friday

night; the ghost slept with Jacqueline every Friday night;

every year she goes to midnight Mass; all day and all night she

rides the bus. This deictic patterning creates a sense of

habit and regularity on several levels the significance of

which are open to the reader. Being sixty-three and having

been a maid for such a long time we only find it natural

that her days are ordered by the exigencies of her masters.

Why is it that she always sleeps outside by the stairs after

midnight mass? No provision is made for this elderly maid

and after such a long time of service, for a key to be given

to her to quietly open the door at two in the morning so as

not to awaken her bai and seth. What ideologically freighted

frequency adverb this always is. The social distance

between Jacqueline and her master is immense and carries

with it undertones of an utter contempt at times and lack of

trust these Parsis have for this maid of forty-nine years. This

contempt is inferred by the reader of course because

45

Mistry’s commentary is in disguise. That this narrative is

focalized through the consciousness of a lower class woman

is evident elsewhere in its temporal orientation, for

example when Jacqueline rides a bus all day and all night to get

to Bombay, something her Parsi masters would have probably

never experienced. The quotidian details of her life are on

full display: time for seth to come home; time to cook the rice. This

is the time of the day to day and it is this type of time

that regulates Jacqueline, that has so much control over

her.

Jacqueline is situated temporally not only in the day

to day, but is placed in the context of a life time, in

particular, her forty-nine years that she has spent as a

maid in the same house and same housing complex. Having

repeated forty-nine years five times over the course of her

narrative draws attention to itself. In her own words she

has been forty-nine years in this house as ayah…forty-nine years in Firozsha

Baag’s B Block…I learned forty-nine years ago that life as ayah means living

close to the floor…who I have not seen since I have come back to Bombay—what

did I say, forty-nine years ago...How many times have I burned dinner in forty-

46

nine years? Such temporal contrast between the temporality of

daily existence and the broader sense of time compressed

into the distal deictic expression forty-nine years ago is not

lost on the reader. Juxtaposed against one another, this

day to day time and time in a sense of a life time heightens

a sense of loss, of subalternity. Her repeating this

allusion to time could suggest many things, but I would

argue that there is enough evidence that her propositions

referring to the length of time she has spent as an ayah is

a manifestation of not only sexual tension, which is closer

to the surface, but more importantly, emotional loss and

longing.

There is one digression Jacqueline has that is longer

than the rest, her reminiscing about Cajetan, a childhood

boyfriend. Its length draws attention to itself as her

other digressions take up much less time. Jacqueline talks

about two episodes involving Cajetan, one where he makes

overtures towards her on a beach, and another episode where

he is seen making yet more sexual overtures towards another

girl. Time is compressed with the real events occurring

47

over several years though told quickly. Jacqueline hasn’t

seen Cajetan since she had come to Bombay, forty-nine years ago.

Again we have contrasting deictics at play here, small

amounts of time in a daily schedule set against deictics

foregrounding distal qualities in the form of memories abut

things that had happened a long time ago. There is not much

necessarily significant about an old maid telling stories

interspersed with allusions to the temporality of her daily

existence along with her recounting episodes from her life

from a long time ago. There is something significant,

however, about how the quotidian details of her life are

juxtaposed alongside such events taking place over such

longer durations of time. There is a terrible loss that is

suggested by these two temporalities working dialectically

against each other. What makes this even more interesting

is the idea that perhaps she’s so controlled by her day to

day existence run by the clock that she’s simply unaware of

what’s going on on an emotional level. Time is one of the

motifs of Firozsha Baag, Jacqueline’s very telling of the

story, the act of narration, is interrupted by the

48

exigencies of time signaled by what Stockwell call’s textual

and compositional deixis. These words in the story are

italicized to signify temporal change. Throughout

Jacqueline’s storytelling she is either disrupted by her

masters requests about dinner or she breaks away from her

storytelling to either speak to herself quietly, speak to

herself in an internal monologue, or perhaps speak to an

implied narrattee in the room with her.

(1) Jaakaylee, bai calls out, is it ready yet? She wants to check curry

masala. Too thick, she always says, grind it again, make it smoother. And she

is right, I leave it thick purposely.

(2) Curry is boiling nicely, smells very tasty. Bai tells me don’t forget about

curry, don’t burn the dinner.

(3) Back to kitchen. To make curry needs lots of stirring while boiling.

This pulling the reader back into the time of narration, as

opposed to time of story, foregrounds the temporality of a

maid, a cook, a subaltern in (1) (2) and (3). This

orientation of time, focalized through this particular

narrator renders a particular perspective, outlook, mind

style with all its attendant ideology. Authorial intrusion

49

is non existent as well as heightened evaluation with

adjectives or adverbs. Again, it is with a nuanced subtlety

that Mistry has painted a world, described a world, which

is, as Fowler would have it, symptomatic of a world view.

We have particulars that are speaking for themselves.

Particulars that are moving beyond themselves creating a

clear ideological perspective. No mention of a husband or

children yet she speaks at great length about this Cajetan.

The workaday clock. Time lost over forty-nine years.

Longing. Subalternity is foregrounded, yet no rage. Mistry

gives no explicit judgment. What develops is a profound

sympathy for this maid, and less for her Parsi masters.

Mistry has become self critical. This narrative is not,

overtly at least, a Parsi narrative looking out or looking

in, but an external look at Parsis from an outsider.

In light of postcolonial theory what Mistry has done is

make the reader take the time to spend a lot of time with a

character whose time is typically written out of stories.

Through his manipulation of temporal deictics, his attention

to the day to day time of a maid, Mistry has brought social

50

class and the Parsi standing within this class structure in

India, to the foreground.

V.3 Modality in Mistry’s Narrator

The spatio-temporal characteristics of Firozsha Baag

give us a foundation on which we can further explore

perspective as it is manifested psychologically and

ideologically. One way Simpson explores point of view is

through the ways characters reveal their attitudes towards

each other and objects, through the use of modality.

Through the use of modal lexical verbs, modal auxiliaries,

adverbs, and adjectives or simply by using no modality

Mistry comments.

“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” is narrated in the first

person by a participating character thus making it a

Category A narrative according to Simpson’s model of

modality, but Jacqueline’s narration oscillates between all

three of Simpson’s modalities within Category A though

Categories A-ve and A neutral are foregrounded. Often there

is little explicit, qualified opinion and judgment about

events or characters, and little subjective evaluation,

51

where the story is mostly told through categorical

assertions. There is little attempt at psychological

development for much of this text. Where there is a shift,

however brief, at certain moments in the appearance of

modality, it is striking, a point we will return to later.

We now return to the story.

V.3.1 Category A Neutral

Waiting for her bai and seth to return home she lays

down to sleep:

Text B

Then the cockroach sounds started. I lay quietly in the dark, first to decide where it was. If you put a light on they stop singing and then you don’t know where to

look. So I listened carefully. It was coming from thegas stove table. I put on the light now and took my chappal. There were two of them, sitting next to cylinder.

I lifted my chappal, very slowly and quietly, then phut! phut! Must say I am an expert at cockroach-killing. The poison which seth puts out is really not doing

much good, my chappal is much better. (51)

This text is typical of Jacqueline’s linguistic style over

the course of her narrative. Physical description and a

recalling of events are foregrounded in her style with

little time spent on reflecting upon what is happening.

52

Perhaps the reader at this point can infer that being a maid

one wouldn’t have the time, the luxury to reflect. Perhaps

it reveals a low level of education.

V.3.2 Category A Negative

Modality does appear however, for example in the text above

an epistemic modal operator must is used to qualify the

proposition I am an expert. Epistemic modals appear elsewhere

expressing the degree of confidence the speaker has in what

is being said:

(4) …he vanished again! Now I knew it must be a bhoot. I

knew he would be on the third floor also… (44)

(5) From Panjim to Bombay on the bus I cried…but I knew

leaving was best… (45)

(6) I knew what I had seen. (47)

(7) After drinking my tea that morning I knew what had

happened. (50)

In (4)-(7) the modal lexical verb knew expresses a very high

level of commitment to the propositions about either leaving

home or her witnessing the ghost. Would Jacqueline have

said It was a bhoot or leaving was best with no qualification if

53

she were absolutely certain about seeing this ghost or

leaving her hometown? The use of such categorical

assertions would have changed, however subtle, the reader’s

interpretation of Jacqueline’s experience. The pragmatic

meaning here is at odds with the propositional content.

Knew in this context signifies not assurance but

uncertainty. There’s a subtle shift in the discourse from

description of physical action and of events operating with

neutral modality to a discourse of hesitancy operating with

negative modality, and in (4)-(7) it is a hesitancy that is

barely registered, yet there and it suggests that there is

just enough ambiguity that perhaps Jacqueline may not be

seeing ghosts, that perhaps her leaving her home town may

not have been the best thing to do. These epistemic modals

signify a reflective mode used periodically with physical

descriptions like the ones in Text A: cockroaches started making

sounds, she lies down, don’t turn the lights on or the cockroaches stop singing,

listen, turn the lights on…etc.

V.3.3 Heterogeneous Modality

54

It becomes more and more apparent that a strategy of

the discourse in Firozsha Baag is its heterogeneity in its

modality. It is this first person narration with its

external perspective offering some, but not much in the way

of the narrator’s deeper feelings that heightens the

contrasting reflective mode the narrator engages in, however

briefly. As it is commonly said, absence is the highest

form of presence. Having not given the reader access to his

heroine’s inner emotional world, the brief rupture in this

predominantly modal neutral narrative disrupts the

narrative. The emotional center of the narrative presents

itself. Jacqueline refers to the ghost in dismissive

language several times calling him a rascal and a ghost of

mischief on several occasions and is constantly trying to

push him off as he chokes her, sleeps with a buttoned up

collar to dissuade his groping, and stops eating fish and

becomes a vegetarian in the hope that this may throw him off

the trail. She keeps quiet about this ghost and his visits,

but eventually her guilt leads her to confession. It is

Christmas time again and she waits for this bhoot who

55

doesn’t appear. Modality changes into a more explicit

reflective mode:

V.3.4 Category A-ve Reflective

(8) …first I thought maybe he is late, maybe he has

somewhere else to go… (51)

Text C

But he did not come. Why, I wondered. If he came to the bedding of a fat and ugly ayah all this time, now what was the matter? I could not understand. But then I said to myself, what are you thinking Jaakaylee, where is your head,do you really want the ghost to come sleep with you and touch you so shamefully?...Now I was completely sure my confession had got rid of him and his shameless habits…I thought, maybe if he is ashamed to come into my bed, he could wait for me on the stairs like last year. (51)

Here we have a shift into Simpson’s Category A negative mode

where epistemic modality and evaluative adjectives adverbs

with negative polarity are more prominent. Simpson notes

that one of the reasons why authors shift into a more

dominant A-ve is to show self-questioning that typically

occurs at key points in homodiegetic narratives (59), which

is our case here with Jacqueline. The reader finally gets

access to Jacqueline in a way she hasn’t shared. Now it is

internal narration, reflective. In (8) we see epistemic

56

modal adverbs maybe weakening her propositions, creating

uncertainty. Epistemic operators signal qualification of

concepts of knowledge, belief, and cognition and are seen in

Text C in the use of modal adverb maybe and the modal

lexical verbs wonder, understand, and thought expressing concepts

of knowledge, belief, or cognition and thus are epistemic in

character. Completely sure is an epistemic modal expressing

degree of commitment. In a life governed by habit and

consistency we now see uncertainty and disorientation. She

had previously known so much about this ghost, had been so

certain, however we as readers interpreted her utterance.

Notice the evaluative adjectives and adverbs with negative

polarity in the self referential fat and ugly and to the ghost

in shameful, shamefully, and ashamed all of which indicate the

presence not of A-ve, but of Category A positive modality.

A+ve modality typically foregrounds a narrator’s opinions as

well as desires, obligations, duties, and possibilities.

Could as in he could wait for me upstairs is a deontic modal, which

typically appear in A+ve modality, expressing possibility

and/or politeness. In this text modality oscillates between

57

A-ve and A+ve. The last sentence in Text C offers

interesting contrasts in modality first starting with

epistemic qualification and disorientation then on to

subjective feelings and expression of deontic possibility.

These shifts in modality signal change in Jacqueline. The

juxtaposition of positive and negative modalities in this

text creates a tension in a pragmatic sense. Evaluative

adjectives are used with negative polarity yet Jacqueline is

showing politeness and willingness to entertain

possibilities. The locutionary effect is one of modesty,

and politeness, but the illocutionary force is based on an

emotional need that runs deeper than sexual desire. The are

other times when a shift from A neutral or A-ve into A+ve

occurs:

(9) …because it can can cause serious accident… (48)

(10) …he would hold me tighter. Or would try to put his

hands… (48)

(11) …I would tell my father who would give him solid

pasting and throw him in the well

where the bhoot would take care of him. (49)

58

In (9)-(11) modals express possibility, not degrees of

commitment and thus change the

feeling of the text.

In Text C Jacqueline’s disposition vis a vis the ghost

changes for the first time in her story. Her previous

negative categorical assertions about this ghost

notwithstanding, she all of a sudden speaks about this ghost

in much different terms. This ghost goes from a rascal, a

shameless ghost of mischief, a ghost to be got rid of, to a

ghost she is sympathizing with, making allowances for. For

the first time in the story Jacqueline is not in the object

position, where things are being done to her, it is the

ghost who now has less status, less agency, if not more

human.

V.4 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and the Ghost

A relational deictic shift occurs, in the words of Stockwell (

). According to Stockwell there are many types of deixis,

such as relational deixis, that go beyond person, place, and

time. Attitude is encoded in relational deixis and changes

in modality cue deictic shifts. Jacqueline becomes polite

59

for the first time towards this ghost. In her reflecting

she gains agency, no longer just a maid at the beck and call

of her masters; no longer a bystander narrating events she

has had little control over. This relationship between this

ghost and Jacqueline becomes more human. The reader now

understands that there is a gap between Jacqueline’s

locutions about this shameless ghost and the illocutionary

subtext that is Jacqueline’s desire for intimacy. What lies

beneath her narrative is a very poignant loneliness. Shifts

in modality lead us to these claims. Later in her

narrative, amid the accounts of her experiences and while

her narration is disrupted by the exigencies of her working

life, she slips into A+ve again this time with a boulomaic

modal of desire:

(12) I wished they would come home soon. (53)

Now her reflecting is more explicit, and nowhere in the rest

of the story is the reader privileged with Jacqueline’s

emotional world than when she remembers her parents and

Cajetan in the darkness and then begins to sew only to

remember her mother’s sewing and she feels sadness along

60

with the nice and quiet dark. Her utterances are filled with

evaluations; we finally hear desire from her. That we hear

her desire, however brief it appears, we interpret it as

significant:

(13) I wondered if the ghost was coming again. (52)

Line (13) is a complicated utterance indeed. It is

categorized as A-ve modality with its modal lexical verb

wondered, but pragmatic terms this is a speech act

functioning as a demand: I need you to come back. Here

illocutionary force converges with epistemic modality. In

the world Mistry has created, what is not said speaks more

than what is said. With Mistry, no commentary is

commentary.

V.5 Relational Deixis: Jacqueline and her Bai

Jacqueline’s relationship with her bai undergoes, like

her relationship with the bhoot, change, or a shift in

relational deixis. Over the course of Jacqueline’s

narrative evaluative adverbs and adjectives, modalized

expressions, spatial deictics, and politeness strategies all

converge in encoding this relationship socially. Like her

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relationship with the ghost, her relationship with her bai

moves from one of distance to closeness. Jacqueline is

situated socially very early in the story as she refers to

herself as ayah (maid) and then hears her bai call out to her

asking if the food is ready. Asymmetrical naming strategies

is just one way social distance is realized in this text.

The word bai is a Guajarati term used as a title of respect

for a woman, often used as a suffix. (Interestingly bai has

several meanings throughout India based on the numerous

languages spoken there. In Hindi it can either mean brother

or maid depending on the tone used and in Urdu bai implies

that someone is a prostitute.) Her bai (never does the

reader learn her actual name) naturally refers to Jacqueline

as Jaakaylee, her first name, though mispronounced. Politeness

strategies help also to encode Jacqueline’s relationship

with her bai. Though socially distant from one another,

Jacqueline and her bai also share a certain level of

intimacy, living in the same house together for many years.

A lot is taken for granted in this relationship

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pragmatically thus the economy in which Jacqueline’s bai

addresses Jacqueline:

(14) Jaakaylee, my bai calls out, Jaakaylee, is masala

ready? (44)

Bai calls out to Jacqueline regardless of what Jacqueline is

doing at the time, not walking into the same room to ask

Jacqueline; simply calling out. The bai calls out because she

is depicted as being further away from Jacqueline thus their

relationship is characterized by distal deictics. Social

distance also manifests itself spatially. These utterances

by the bai occur periodically as Jacqueline is preparing the

meal and narrating her story. The fact that Jacqueline is

much older than the bai doesn’t affect her lack of positive

politeness strategies. Bai orders and requests and

Jacqueline listens:

(15) Bai tells me don’t forget about curry, don’t burn the

dinner. (48)

Interestingly we don’t even hear Jacqueline respond to her

bai for a very long time further encoding the social

distance between the two. Jacqueline’s attitude towards her

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bai is encoded in the adjectives she uses to evaluate her bai

describing her bai words like mean (45) and angry (45).

Deontic modality is foregrounded expressing bai’s attitude

towards Jacqueline:

(16) Then bai said I must stop…(46)

(17) But a masala machine they will not buy. Jaakaylee must

keep on doing it till her

arms fall out from shoulders. (47)

(18) On that morning I had to wash whole balcony floor… (54)

In (16) Jacqueline is not asked, but ordered to stop going

to school so she would have time for her duties as a maid.

In (17) and (18) Jacqueline again responds to duties and

commands all encoded with deontic modality. Notice how the

bai’s modal perspective is not one of politeness and

qualification in contrast to Jacqueline’s politeness

strategy where her reaction to bai is mitigated with a

epistemic modal auxiliary might:

(19) Then I thought, no, it is better if I go in quietly

before they see me, or bai might get angry…(53)

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This a classic master-servant relationship and it is encoded

by lexis, modality, spatial dexis, and politeness strategies

and implicitly reduces the status of Jacqueline. While bai

speaks in imperatives in making requests foregrounding

obligations and duties using deontic operators, Jacqueline’s

language is more cautious in her use of epistemic modal

operators. Bai speaks at Jacqueline, always the one who

initiates turns; Jacqueline gives private non verbal

responses directed to either herself or an implied reader.

If we assume that the center, in regards to relational

deixis, is one of master-servant and marked by distance,

then this relationship between Jacqueline and her bai is

unstable. A shift occurs later in the story signaling to

the reader that if Jacqueline must sleep and work on the

ground, and sleep outside at times, and be interrupted, and

prepare food a certain way, and forever accommodate her lady

of the house, then she is also more of a peer with her bai

eating with her, holding conversations with her, and being

asked for help. If deontic modality is foregrounded in the

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obligations and duties imposed or required of Jacqueline

then there is an abrupt shift in

(12) I wished they would come home soon. (52)

Wished is a boulomaic modal lexical verb expressing desire

and signals a change in Jacqueline’s modality and suggests

not distance, but intimacy. It is a striking contrast to

her previous disposition towards her bai, one marked by

distance and adjectives of negative polarity. Towards the

end of the story Jacqueline’s bai returns home only to see

the ghost and shriek in horror. Intimacy is foregrounded

now with the preposition with as bai asks Jacqueline to sit

with her, then the bai sits down with Jacqueline, and then the

bai conducts an exclusive Parsi ceremony with Jacqueline.

After Jacqueline screams in the course of this Parsi ritual

breaking a pair of scissors and suggesting that bai could

take the money out of her paycheck, bai responds consoling

her:

(20) I’m here with you. (56)

In (20) proximal spatial deixis intersects with relational

deixis. Now bai and Jacqueline share solidarity, a

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solidarity that transcends their respective social roles.

Bai goes on to ask Jacqueline for help and then goes and

makes tea for both of them again revealing a shift in

relational deixis.

We see how spatio-temporal point of view and modality

create not one perspective, but several. Transitivity

patterns work in tandem with space, time, and Jacqueline’s

attitude towards things to create a nuanced depiction of a

subaltern Indian maid’s humanity. Ideology continues to

implicate itself in linguistic devices, not through explicit

commentary.

V.6 Transitivity

Jacqueline’s subordination foregrounded temporally,

spatially, and in her attitude towards her propositions, is

also evident in the characteristics of transitivity in the

way she depicts herself in her narration. Jacqueline is

shouted at, spoken to, acted upon, and waits for people

rarely acting in the role of agent. Dominant transitivity

patterns of this text reveal an external perspective with a

sharp departure, like was shown in the previous discussion

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on modality, into a more introspective mode. The consistent

use of the passive voice and Jacqueline’s consistent role as

receiver of action creates a world in which she has little

control over her circumstances.

Material processes of action and intention and

verbalization processes dominate in Jacqueline’s narrative.

Processes of verbalization center occur for the most part

when kids (and adults) in her neighborhood would mock her

and her, according to them, eccentric behavior. It is

mentioned time and time again, but she never responds. This

teasing she mentioned seven times throughout the course of

the text. Line (21) was typical of these taunts:

(21) Children in Firozsha Baag would shout, ayah bhoot!

ayah bhoot! every time they saw me. (47)

In terms of Simpson’s framework of transitivity (21) is a

process of verbalization where the participant roles include

the SAYER, the person/people who speak(s), the TARGET, the

addressee, and the VERBIAGE, what is said. In (21) the

children are the SAYERS, Jacqueline (me) is the TARGET, and

ayah bhoot! ayah boot! is the VERBIAGE. Jacqueline is never

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the SAYER in these exchanges, always the TARGET. Never do we

see Jacqueline appear as the first word or in the first

phrase of the sentence. She is the receiver of action, an

object. This passive construction is a consistent

characteristic revealing her lack of social status:

(22) made a lot of fun of me (47)

(23) teasing everyone was doing to me (47)

(24) fun they made of me (51)

Where there are material processes they usually involve the

ghost, or a boy from her youth who pursued her romantically,

as agents:

(25) …yet he came…ghost slept with me…how he came to my bed,

lay down with me, tried to touch me… (49)

Material processes are processes of doing and are

categorized as action processes in Firozsha Baag as these

actions are performed by animate actors. These material

processes of action in Firozsha Baag are also intentional

processes as they are done voluntarily. Notice in (25) that

this ghost is the doer, again Jacqueline is the receiver of

action and occupies the final position syntactically.

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Notice also the intransitive structure in the first four

clauses further foregrounding passivity. Material processes

are broken down into three participant roles: ACTOR, PROCESS,

and GOAL. Jacqueline is the GOAL in these clauses of

material processes:

ACTOR PROCESS GOAL

(25) (he) tried to

touch me

Notice also the movement predicate came in (25)

foregrounding spatial deixis of movement towards Jacqueline.

We see this elsewhere where she is waiting for the ghost to

come and waiting for her bai-seth to come or waiting for

fisherman to come to help stop inappropriate behavior of a

young boy she had been with. She also stood in one place waiting

for her uncle earlier in the story (44) expressing more

inaction than action. The physical action that is prominent

in the text is carried out by either the ghost of this

Cajetan character from her past and the physical action is

sexual. Other material processes happen of course, for

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example when Jacqueline is preparing dinner or when she

participates in a religious ritual at the end of the

narrative, but these are minor events. Mistry’s depiction

of Jacqueline could be considered conventional in terms of

transitivity with her being assigned such passive status as

a female maid. Yet for a brief moment patterns of

transitivity shift, as Jacqueline becomes introspective:

(26) I wish they would come (52)

(27) But sewing and remembering brought me more sadness

(52)

(28) I wondered if the ghost was coming again (52)

In (26)-(28) we see mental processes of cognition which

express internalized processes. Participant roles for

processes of cognition include SENSOR and PHENOMENON. The

mental processes of cognition converge here with the use of

boulomaic and epistemic modal lexical verbs, wish and

wondered respectively. (26) is broken down into its

constituent parts within the framework Simpson provides us:

SENSER PROCESS PHENOMENON

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(26) I wish

they would come.

Jacqueline now occupies the subject position syntactically

showing agency. She is doing the action, here the thinking.

She is not narrating events or describing physical action or

talking about what other characters are doing like she does

for most of her narrative. The reader enters her inner

world. In (28) we see an interesting example of agency and

passivity operating simultaneously. Jacqueline in the

subject position and is the doer, yet the movement predicate

coming heightens her passive status in her relationship with

this ghost and with the rest of the characters in the text.

The transitivity patterns in these clauses all contribute to

a sense that Jacqueline is a character whose agency is

severely circumscribed. One striking absence that presents

itself in examining transitivity is the lack of extended

dialogue until the very end of the narrative. Things are

done to her or words are spoken at her. In this sense she’d

a voiceless subaltern at the margins.

VI. Conclusion

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Rohinton Mistry and his short story “The Ghost of

Firozsha Baag” subvert numerous postcolonial categories.

He is after all an elite by way of education, language, and

cultural identity who has written a story about a subaltern

woman with a very different social background not to mention

a different gender. His story is not about Parsi

alienation. His portrayal of an elderly female made is

stereotypical in one sense, in another sense he has elevated

a female character assigning her agency. He has included

the voice of the lower class.

What makes this story so compelling is that it offers

no simple solution to the author’s intent or ideological

bearings. Ideology in this story is contradictory,

ambiguous. Bharucha argues that Mistry merely describes

characters who suffer, but goes no further, maintaining the

status quo. A recent novel, White Tiger, was published

by an Indian writer where the servant slits his master’s

throat only to admit at the very end of the story that he

would never say it was a mistake to have done so: “It was

all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour,

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just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.”

(321) Perhaps the reader can draw the conclusion that

because Jacqueline continues to go about her business as a

maid as the story closes that she is content and this is the

way things are. It is a truism in linguistics that language

constitutes and stabilizes and perpetuates class inequity.

In this sense Mistry’s limited point of view is constituting

his worldview based on his position as a member of the

privileged class. He depicts on his terms. Bharucha would

ask where the rage is and maybe she has a point. Mistry has

never dealt with caste issues so he is incapable of

empathizing on that level with Jacqueline. In an insidious

way “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” in portraying Jacqueline

with no resentment is asking of the reader accept her status

as the way things are. Yet somehow this reading is

inadequate. If we don’t feel the rage of Jacqueline, we

feel, because of the effects created linguistically, a

profound empathy for her, her rage not necessary for us to

be so drawn to her. This empathy inevitably leads to an

ideological reckoning on the part of the reader whether or

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not any throat has been slit. Mistry then is both

subverting and perpetuating the status quo. In this way his

“The Ghost of Firozsha Baag” is both a disruptive and

cohesive influence in postcolonial Indian writing.

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