POPULAR IMAGES AND COSMOPOLITAN MEDIATIONS:

MASS MEDIA AND WESTERN POP CULTURE

IN THE ANGLOPHONE SOUTH ASIAN NOVEL

by

ELIZABETH TARYN SIRKIN

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Kurt M. Koenigsberger

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May, 2007

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

______________________________________________________

candidate for the Ph.D. degree *.

(signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

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DEDICATION

For all of the doctoral candidates who are still hard at work on their dissertations

and for my husband, Jeremy Richard Mason, who waited so patiently while I completed

mine.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments.…………………………………………………………………… 3

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….. 4

Chapter I: How Media Speak; What the Postcolonial Novel Says…………………… 6

Chapter II: “Written on the Brow of Some”: Inscription and Erasure in R. K.

Narayan’s The Guide…………………………………………………………. 44

Chapter III: The Trivial, the Historically Significant, and the Ideologically

Impoverished in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter………………… 70

Chapter IV: The Price of Western Media in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small

Things…………………………………………………………………………. 108

Chapter V: “I am the Walrus”: Mass Media and the Struggle for Identity in The Buddha

of Suburbia: A Conclusion……………………………………………………..147

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………185

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to my teachers and my friends, without whom this dissertation

would never have evolved nor mattered. I am indebted to the members of my dissertation

committee: Anne Helmreich, Judith Oster, and Gary Stonum, for their assistance,

encouragement and instruction throughout my course of study at Case Western Reserve

University and for their special involvement with the dissertation-writing process. A

special thank you to my dissertation advisor, Kurt M. Koenigsberger, whose eye for

detail consistently pushed me to be a stronger writer and a wiser scholar. I would also

like to express my gratitude to the entire faculty of the English Department at Case

Western Reserve University for encouraging me to work hard and for always being

supportive and reassuring, especially Christopher Flint, who co-chaired the College of

Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, through which the ideas for this dissertation

originally developed, and Thomas Bishop, who served on my dissertation committee

until moving to Australia.

I am, of course, beholden to all of the master’s and doctoral candidates I had the

pleasure of working with and beside, for their humor, friendship and their belief in my

ability to complete this project. There are simply too many to name. I must thank my

entire family: my parents, Mary Lee and Louis Sirkin and Marilyn and Jonathan Mason,

and my sisters and brothers, Tamar Sirkin and Jeffrey Luchs, Jennifer and Richard

Meldman, Rachel and Benjamin Mendelsohn and Meredith Mason. I would not have

maintained the stamina to finish without you, so thank you for loving me and nagging me

throughout the past eight years. And, to my husband Jeremy, thank you for your

kindness, your patience, your generosity and your unconditional, unwavering love.

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Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation:

Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel

Abstract

by

Elizabeth Taryn Sirkin

In this dissertation, I examine how R. K. Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman

Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy situate contemporary Euro-American

popular culture within their novels to focus a spotlight on the neo-colonial strategies that

still operate within the landscapes of Western media—print-based, televisiual, and

celluloid. I also examine how these authors engage contemporary Western media from

the perspective of Anglophone South Asian communities. What is distinctive about the

novels that I discuss in this project is that they treat this cultural exchange in a critically

cosmopolitan mode, one that balances the tension between celebrating its newness and

warning about its potential resemblance to older forms of imperialism.

That the postcolonial novels addressed in these pages engage with mass-mediated

Western texts and images from a hybrid, cosmopolitan perspective is of great

significance, because such a phenomenon works against what Rudyard Kipling, that

towering figure of imperialist literature, famously wrote: “East is East and West is West

and never the twain shall meet” (6). In contrast to Kipling’s lyric, the novels I examine

in this dissertation do not suggest a simple convergence of East and West through a kind

of mass-mediated confluence of images.

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Rather, the authors researched and discussed within these pages—as a result of

history, travel, and education—dissolve the boundaries between East and West. All of

the texts discussed in this project are hybrid and intertextual. Their characters stand

between two world and the texts themselves resonate with allusions to Western texts that

have recognizable and sometimes rival meanings in the East and in the West. Each

novelist refuses to represent the world in definitive terms, in which “East is East,” for

example. The Anglophone novel in India, is, I argue, one significant agent of revision of

received wisdom about South Asia’s relation to dominant English-language media from

Britain and the U.S. In the course of their novelistic “revisions,” Narayan, Mukherjee,

Rushdie, Roy, and Kureishi, each represent the world as impure and interrupted, at times

complicated with uncertainty and tyranny, and at other times triumphantly full of hope

and possibility.

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How Western Media Speak; What the Postcolonial Novel Says

How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises,

what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the

wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (8-9) How does newness come into the world and how do we recognize it when it does?

And, to the extent that Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses can be considered a “postcolonial”

novel, how does the literature written out of the postcolonial condition invite us to engage

this newness? How does the novel in particular—the genre through which Rushdie offers

this meditation on newness—deal with the frustrations or betrayals that accompany fresh

translations and conjoinings?

In his book, Cosmopolitanism, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah casts off

the label “postcolonialism” in favor of “cosmopolitanism”—an ideology that recognizes,

he argues, that “People are different...and there is much to learn from our differences”

(xv). Appiah uses the word conversation as a metaphor for the “engagement with the

experiences and ideas of others” (5). In a discussion with Neal Conan on National Public

Radio, Appiah explained that, “The key thing, if you’re going to be open to the world, is

that you approach it in the spirit of assuming that you can learn from the world,” but he

also cautioned that “Conversation is only worth doing if you are listening as well as

talking.” Western media often purport to listen while they are talking. Though one of the

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fundamental bonds amongst all human beings is our ability to tell and evaluate stories

and though it is true that we learn from and change through these narratives, conversation

cannot be one-sided. The suggestion made by critics of cultural imperialism such as Ella

Shohat and Robert Stam, David Spurr and Herbert Schiller that postcolonial bodies are

simply empty vessels ready to be filled by popular media products and the images

promoted by multinational corporations, as perpetuated by Western media, is deeply

condescending. The novels discussed in this dissertation demonstrate that people respond

to the influences of Western media in complex ways by reading Western popular cultural

products and images in existing South Asian and cosmopolitan cultural contexts.

In this project, I argue that what Rushdie refers to as “newness” comes into the

world through the rapidity and reach of popular media products which are increasingly

circulated about the globe. Western literature, journalism, popular music, television and

cinema continue to reach new audiences. Furthermore, mediascapes—a term that Arjun

Appadurai has coined to characterize the constantly shifting and contested spaces within

which media flows are situated—are more than just thematic images in postcolonial

literature; they permeate the language that postcolonial authors use. That the postcolonial

novels addressed in these pages engage with mass-mediated Western texts and images

from a hybrid, cosmopolitan perspective is of great significance, because such a

phenomenon works against what Rudyard Kipling, that towering figure of imperialist

literature, famously wrote: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall

meet” (6). In contrast to Kipling’s lyric, the novels I examine in this dissertation do not

suggest a simple convergence of East and West through a kind of mass-mediated

confluence of images.

8

Rather, the authors researched and discussed within these pages—as a result of

history, travel, and education—dissolve the boundaries between East and West by—in

Appiah’s phrase—“being open to the world” and listening to its dialogue, rather than “the

West’s” or “the East’s” monologues. In “Forms of Renewal,” Amit Chaudhuri explains

that it is the “Anglophone Indian…who largely constructs and repeatedly disseminates

the idea of the nation; it is he or she who both writes and consumes the novel” (par. 13).

The Anglophone novel in India, is, I argue, one significant agent of revision of received

wisdom about South Asia’s relation to dominant English-language media from Britain

and the U.S. All of the texts discussed in this project are hybrid and intertextual. Their

characters stand between two worlds and the texts themselves resonate with allusions to

Western texts that have recognizable and sometimes rival meanings in the East and in the

West. Each novelist refuses to represent the world in definitive terms, in which “East is

East,” for example, as Appiah explains in his book: “our knowledge is imperfect,

provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence” (144). In the course of their

novelistic “revisions,” Narayan, Mukherjee, Rushdie, Roy, and Kureishi, each represent

the world as impure and interrupted, at times complicated with uncertainty and tyranny,

and at other times triumphantly full of hope and possibility.

In this dissertation, I examine how R. K. Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman

Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy situate contemporary Euro-American

popular culture within their novels to focus a spotlight on the neo-colonial strategies that

still operate within the landscapes of Western media—print-based, televisiual, and

celluloid—but also how these authors engage contemporary mediascapes from the

perspective of Anglophone South Asian communities. What is distinctive about the

9

novels that I discuss in this project is that they treat this cultural exchange in a critically

cosmopolitan mode, one that balances the tension between celebrating “newness” and

warning about its potential resemblance to older forms of imperialism.

In The Satanic Verses, the character Gibreel Farishta whispers knowingly to his

friend about the white British society in which he lives, “They describe us ... That’s all.

They have the power of description and we succumb to the images they construct” (174),

which suggests that Western media products are powerful influences indeed. What

Farishta’s claim implies is that Western mass-mediated images—from journalism to

cinema and television—describe the world as a means of controlling it, regardless of

whether they do so intentionally. Michael Gorra contends that, “Seeing India...is indeed a

way of ruling [it]” (656). And, if this is true, then the postcolonial novels that I discuss in

this dissertation demonstrate that those nations formerly ruled by imperialism and

subsequently ruled by the powerful images constructed in Western media, have begun to

describe themselves: they do not passively accept Western pop cultural representations

promulgated through mass media, but complicate and challenge their authority.

The novels that occupy my attention in this dissertation include: R. K. Narayan’s

The Guide (1958), Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter (1971), Salman Rushdie’s

The Satanic Verses (1988), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), and

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). Across these texts, I trace the ways in

which individual authors treat images of Western pop culture and their media and balance

the proportion of celebration and concern over the mediations that take place between

cultures differently. By way of beginning to explore the relationship between the novel

and the mass mediated forms through which Britain (and the West) historically came to

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interpret, represent, and finally dominate other parts of the world, and to place the

contemporary Anglophone South Asian novel in this history, this chapter discusses a few

critical episodes from Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I argue that one of the postcolonial

novel’s central features is its refusal—and cosmopolitan rehabilitation of—the discourses

of colonialism as produced in such forms as imaginative literature, journalism, and

empire film as well as the subtle rhetorical strategies that still remain in Western media

from novels to popular music to television. The balance of this dissertation traces a

trajectory of critical refusal and cosmopolitan reclamation of Western media images in

South Asian communities from a novel such as The Guide, in which R. K. Narayan’s

references to Western mass media are scarce though resonant to a novel like The God of

Small Things, in which Arundhati Roy is expressly critical of the media enterprises

employed by the West and equally critical of the globalization of Western capitalist

ideals.

In Chapter Two, “‘Written on the Brow of Some’: Inscription and Erasure in

R. K. Narayan’s The Guide,” I focus my attention on the final pages of Narayan’s novel,

in which the intervention of a single American film producer threatens to misrepresent an

entire culture to a Western audience to examine the unique challenges that result from

interactions between individuals from very different parts of the world. In Chapter

Three, “The Trivial, the Historically Significant, and the Ideologically Impoverished in

Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter,” I examine the inadequacies of contemporary

forms of Western media as explored in Mukherjee’s novel. I claim that the prevalence of

Western media in Mukherjee’s text demonstrates that attempts to construct coherent

representations of the unfathomable realities confronted in the non-Western world make

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use of rhetorical tropes that emphasize difference. In Chapter Four, “The Price of

Western Media in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” I argue that the

overwhelming weight accorded to Western mass media in contrast to regional media in

Roy’s novel demonstrates the strong influence that dominant cultures have over less

affluent nations and the defiant spirit of those who resist. I conclude the dissertation in

Chapter Five, “‘I am the Walrus’: Mass Media and the Struggle for Identity in The

Buddha of Suburbia,” with an analysis of Kureishi’s novel—a novel set in London—in

which many of the characters self-consciously return to, invent, or reexamine media

stereotypes of “Indianness” to not only explore what it means to be Indian outside of

India, but to examine what it means to be English in a world without formal empires.

While I am arguing that cross-cultural conversation in a cosmopolitan mode is a

crucial feature of the twentieth-century Anglophone South Asian novel, cross-cultural

exchange, in and of itself, is not a new phenomenon. The concept of hybridity—or the

fusion of cultures and ideas that Rushdie refers to as newness—is, in fact, very old. After

all, Macaulay in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” championed just such a thing,

precisely as a tool of administrative domination, when he called for “a class of persons,

Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”

(130). Trollope too, suggested that “through the mixing of races such groups as the

‘coloureds’ or ‘mulattoes’ he saw everywhere in Jamaica may combine the (white)

intellectual ability and the (black) physical stamina necessary to plant civilization in the

tropics” (Brantlinger 6). Furthermore, Robert Young, for instance, points out that

“‘Englishness’ has always been riven by its own alterity” (xiii). He points out that the

word, “hybrid,” can be traced to the nineteenth century and that the word was first used to

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describe race as early as 1813 (though the OED cites the year 1861) (Young 6). Young

examines the concept of hybridity starting with its anxious and Victorian inception,

whereby a “structure of attraction”—the desire for cross-cultural contact—was coupled

with a “structure of repulsion”—the need for fixed racial distinctions (19), and wonders

whether hybridity in its current form still reinforces the two antithetical choices:

attraction and repulsion, colonizer and colonized, civilized and savage at the same time it

seeks to deconstruct them. And yet, Abdul JanMohamed insists that postcolonial

literature seeks not only to negate such binary oppositions between “white and black,

good and evil, superiority and inferiority and sensuality, self and Other, subject and

object” (82), but also to adopt and modify “Western languages and artistic forms in

conjunction with indigenous languages and forms” (103-4). Perhaps that is why

postcolonial fiction is both defiant and fraught with disappointment; it creates something

new that depends, for its very existence, upon the power structures it seeks to subvert or

transmute.

There is little debate that beginning in 1880 the colonial vision of the British

Empire was disseminated aggressively through a plethora of media forms including but

not limited to exhibitions, advertisements, popular literature, school books, postcards, and

cinema. Much work has been done on the imperial messages encoded in Western

literature, poetry, and journalism beginning with the adventure tale (See Anderson,

Brantlinger, Green, and JanMohamed). In these printed texts, the myth of empire was

born and Martin Green argues that, “They were, collectively, the story England told itself

as it went to sleep at night; and…they charged England’s will with the energy to go out

into the world and explore, conquer and rule” (3). In these texts, civilized society is

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pitted against barbarism, the racial superiority of the English and subsequently, white

Europeans, is unwavering, the heroes possess virtues like courage and cunning,

leadership and persistence, and the civilizing mission is always a justification for

imperialism, for domination, exploitation, and slavery. The fact that by the 1930s cinema

had materialized as the most influential medium of propaganda is also in little dispute. A

great deal of work has been done on the shared viewpoints of both British and Hollywood

cinema during the 1930s and 1940s, the decades during which “empire cinema” reached

an apex (See Chowdhry, Mackenzie, or Shohat & Stam, for example). Such films

projected certain ideologies of empire which maintained the exclusive imperial position,

the racial, intellectual, and moral superiority, as well as the cultural and patriotic pride of

not only the British but also of the entire white western world.

Salman Rushdie writes in his essay, “In Good Faith,” that

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the

transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,

cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the

absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how

newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the

world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion,

change by conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. (394)

The utopian mixture that Rushdie celebrates here is infinitely enticing, but even in his

own novel The Satanic Verses, in his “love-song” to mongrelization, hybridity and to the

newness that stems out of the mishmash of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics,

movies, and songs, there is also cultural dislocation and fragmentation, a sense of unease

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and anxiety over Western representations of cultural identity. Still, I am reminded of

what Appiah argues in his article “The Case for Contamination.” He suggests, “Cultures

are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through

these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead” (par. 19).

Sometimes changes are seamless; at other times they involve growing pains.

One need only take a cursory look at The Satanic Verses to see the

“hotchpotch”—the “bit of this and the bit of that”—that Rushdie refers to in the quotation

above. The Satanic Verses is full of hybrids. Rushdie playfully refers to figures like

“chimeras” (311, 420, 477) and “manticores” (374) (mythological creatures made up of

the different parts of many animals); when he mentions gardening he almost always

throws in a “chimeran graft” (309,420) (a blend of two different plants); and, the

character, Pamela Chamcha, for example, drinks a bottle of “Chateau Talbot” (188),

which is a French Bordeaux ironically named after an English general. Furthermore,

Rushdie’s reference to “William the Conqueror” (44) not only refers to the leader of the

Norman invasion of England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, but reminds us that much

of what we think of as characteristically English, including the language itself, was

actually shaped by this historical encounter during which England, herself, was

colonized. He makes the same point by introducing the Latin phrase, “Civis Britannicus

sum” (412). Translated, the phrase means, “I am a British citizen.” That it is uttered in

Latin ironically calls attention to the colonial allegiance of Britain to the Roman Empire.

In The Satanic Verses Rushdie employs many allusions to mass media that have

hybrid meanings, that like his characters, exist between two worlds. Some media

references belong not only to the West including those that are imitated by the East or

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borrowed from the East, and others have one meaning in the East and another meaning in

the West. Critic Michael Gorra explains that:

...for Rushdie a self-conscious mimicry becomes a way to shuttle between the

hybrid selves of the postcolonial condition, to acknowledge that one lives in two

worlds at once. And in that acceptance of discontinuity he sees not tragedy but

liberation. It does not help the postcolonial man or woman surmount dependency

so much as it denies its relevance, for without an ideal of cultural purity against

which to measure the self, there can be no mimicry per se. Instead Rushdie posits

a self that is rather like one of his own sentences, Indian and yet English too.

(“Rudyard Kipling” 655)

As Gorra suggests, in reading The Satanic Verses one might note Rushdie’s reference to

the refrain from “The Alabama Song” written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in The

Decline and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930): “I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I

tell you” (3), which is also, recognizably the refrain of Jim Morrison’s cover version of

“Alambama Song (Whisky Bar)” performed by the Doors and also covered by David

Bowie in Space Oddity. One might also recognize the song Gibreel sings in English as

he plummets through the sky, “O, my shoes are Japanese,” (5) from the film Shree 420.

Rushdie discusses this song in his essay, “The Indian Writer in England,” in which he

explains, the song is “Mera Joota Hai Japaani” (music by Ravi Shankar, lyrics by

Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri) and the chorus exclaims:

My shoes are Japanese

These pants are English

The red hat on my head is Russian

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Still my heart is Indian. (“Indian Writer” 75-83)

When Rushdie mentions “Gracekali” (26) the name conjures up the memory of the 1950s

beauty queen, Grace Kelly, and also Kali, the destroyer goddess of Hindu mythology.

Even the mention of a simple film title, like “The Magnificent Seven” (64), is layered

with double meaning. The Magnificent Seven is John Sturges’ remake of the Japanese

filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seventh Samurai. In this scene Rushdie

lightheartedly describes Indian filmmakers who imitate American filmmakers who

themselves remade a Japanese film. Therefore, I begin, in this introduction, with the

novel The Satanic Verses, not because Rushdie’s novel represents a typical response to

Western media in this post-imperial era, but because his novel is a particularly rich

novelistic response to the ambivalences of media imperialism.

Similarly, the two main characters of Rushdie’s novel, Saladin Chamcha and

Gibreel Farishta, represent mirror images of one another. Saladin Chamcha, born

Salahuddin Chamchawala, an actor/voice impersonator who works in the West, is an

Indian expatriate returning to England after his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years.

According to Rushdie, his name, Chamcha, means “a person who sucks up to powerful

people, a yes-man, a sycophant” in colloquial Urdu (“Empire” 8), while the fact that he is

nicknamed a “Brown Uncle Tom” (276), works as an insult that refers to Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s American novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to imply that Chamcha is humiliatingly

deferential to white people. Gibreel Farishta, born Ismail Najmuddin, is an Indian film

star who has dedicated his career to playing Hindu gods, though he himself is a Muslim.

Both Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta’s hybrid identities, their affiliations with

both India and England, are reinforced by their own radio, film and television

17

personalities in which each one has chameleon abilities to represent figures from a wide

range of cultures, religious groups, and imaginations. The narrator says the following

about Saladin Chamcha:

On the radio he could convince an audience that he was Russian, Chinese,

Sicilian, the President of the United States. Once, in a radio play for thirty-seven

voices, he interpreted every single part under a variety of pseudonyms and

nobody ever worked it out. With his female equivalent, Mimi Mamoulian, he

ruled the airwaves of Britain. They had such a large slice of the voiceover racket

that, as Mimi said, “People better not mention the Monopolies Commission

around us, not even in fun.” Her range was astonishing, she could do any age,

anywhere in the world, any point on the vocal register, angelic Juliet to fiendish

Mae West. “We should get married sometime, when you’re free,” Mimi once

suggested to him. “You and me, we could be the United Nations.” (60-61)

Gibreel Farishta is an actor in an entirely different market, “For over a decade and a half

he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country [India] in which,

to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the

most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme” (17). In The Satanic

Verses, Rushdie underscores one similarity between Saladin and Gibreel when an

admiring fan describes Gibreel as equally capable of shedding one self for another. He

says, “My own sympathy for your work arises out of your willingness to portray deities

of every conceivable water. You sir, are a rainbow coalition of the celestial, a walking

United Nations of gods!” (198). It is important to note that each man is described as a

veritable “United Nations,” because as actors, these characters belong anywhere and

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everywhere throughout the globe. Conjuring up a new persona for both Gibreel and

Saladin is as easy as simply putting on a costume.

In The Satanic Verses, characters like Saladin Chamcha, Mimi Mamoulian, and

Gibreel Farishta are distinguished for their ability to be and become any character, but

such talent is not always a proud or comfortable one. In their ability to try on new

personas, they often lose themselves. Chamcha thinks to himself, “It was true...Saladin

and Mimi were legends of a sort, but crippled legends, dark stars. The gravitational field

of their abilities drew work towards them, but they remained invisible, shedding bodies to

put on voices” (61). He notes that when he was younger, “...each self he tried on, had

seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily

replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now, however, change had

begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden” (64). Gorra points

out that “Rushdie’s Saladin Chamcha can even be seen as a postcolonial version of

[Rudyard Kipling’s] Kim: a professional mimic who can do a thousand English voices

precisely because none of them is authentically his own” (“Rudyard Kipling” 652).

Similarly, the same fan who recognizes Gibreel Farishta as a “walking United Nations of

gods,” furiously accuses him, moments later, of being a, “Charlatan! Poser! Fake! ...

Phoney!” (199). Rushdie’s characters make a living as walking fictions, masqueraders,

and impersonators.

Gibreel and Saladin spend tremendous amounts of time developing their

characters, but Rushdie points out time and time again, that the more difficult work lays

in thinking about who they really are, how they want to be remembered, how the

characters they play on the radio, on television, and in films exploit them as individuals,

19

how such representations might operate strategically to stereotype what it means to be

Indian, how such representations might help solidify Western notions of self and Other,

or how their ethnicity might be exploited in the global marketplace. Both Saladin and

Gibreel seem to grasp the power of the media to disseminate cultural values, ideologies,

and assumptions and how those values, ideologies and assumptions reflect and voice, as

well as shape, cultural consciousness to some degree.

Later in the novel, Saladin considers the ways in which images of ethnicity

are entrenched in patterns of global economic exploitation, and how ethnicity can be

packaged for the marketplace or censored from it. In a conversation with Hal Valance,

the creator of The Aliens Show, the children’s sitcom on which Saladin got his big break,

Saladin suffers through Valence’s rumination about the show’s market potential,

In marketing, parlance, a universe was the total potential market for a given

product or service: the chocolate universe, the slimming universe. The dental

universe was everybody with teeth; the others were the denture cosmos. “I’m

talking,” Valance breathed down the phone in his best Deep Throat voice, “about

the ethnic universe.”

My people again: Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his ill-

fitting drag hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of impermanent

women and children gleamed through barely open doors; and wondered what his

people had done to him now. ... “Audience surveys show,” he [Valance]

breathed, “that ethnics don’t watch ethnic shows. They don’t want ‘em,

Chamcha. They want fucking Dynasty, like everyone else. Your profile’s wrong,

if you follow: with you in the show it’s just too damn racial. The Aliens Show is

20

too big to be held back by the racial dimension. The merchandising possibilities

alone...” (273-74)

Saladin, who argues, “I’ve never felt I belonged to a race” (276) grows increasingly

impatient with the unwelcome identities Valance imposes upon him during this

conversation, as evidenced by the thought, “My people again.” On the surface Saladin

may appear to be on a quest to become “English.” That may be partially true, but what is

more important is Saladin’s quest to create an identity for himself as an Indian in England

that is newer, richer, and more interesting than the traditional stereotypes associated with

the center and the periphery through which Western writers, artists, and filmmakers draw,

blur, and insist upon the differences that separate the Westerner from the Other. Rushdie

recognizes the ways in which issues of identity and representation are underpinned by the

crucial connection between colonialism and mass media and also reveals how it is

possible to be English without also being white. The picture that Rushdie constructs is

one that Kipling—I am sure—would have never imagined.

Here, it is important to stop for a moment to look more closely at the history and

interconnectedness of colonialism and popular culture, of imperialism and mass media.

Empire came to be associated with a genre of literature that Martin Green refers to as “the

light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe”

(3)—the adventure tale. So, beginning in 1719, with Defoe’s novel, empire and

adventure became synonymous in literature. These are the novels, set in exotic locations,

with protagonists who face overwhelming odds and conflicts, and yet manage to meet

one challenge after another through bravery and hard work, intelligence and

perseverance. These are the novels that prepared young men to want to go out into the

21

wilderness, to explore, to exploit, and to rule and about which, JanMohamed writes,

“Instead of being an exploration of the racial Other, such literature merely affirms its own

ethnocentric assumptions; instead of actually depicting the outer limits of ‘civilization,’ it

simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality” (84). While Green

considers Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott and Rudyard Kipling to be “peaks in the

mountain chain of adventure” (xi), Patrick Brantlinger writes also of H. Rider Haggard,

W. E. Henley, and John Davidson (10).

And still, there is a rather long list of writers, who in that two-hundred-year

period, used adventure as a trope to address those blank and unexplored areas on the map

that would grow to be filled in by any number of British explorers. There were the

seafaring writers like Captain Marryat, who in his novel, Masterman Ready (1841),

depicts a family who manages to instruct future colonialists on the proper way to rule a

colony, as the Seagraves develop their own diminutive nation when shipwrecked on a

desert island. At one point in the novel, Mr. Seagrave educates his son about the rise of

the British Empire as it fought off the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and the Dutch, each

in turn, until “the sun is said, and very truly, never to set upon…English possessions; for,

as the world turns round to it, the sun shines either upon one portion or another of the

globe which is a colony to our country” (140). And of course, Marryat was followed by

writers like Frederick Chamier, Edward Howard, and Michael Scott, who emulated his

style (Brantlinger 49) and there was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Cambridge English

professor, whose two-volume Story of the Sea (1895-96) recounts the legend of the

Armada and the “Protestant wind” that conquered it to save England in 1588 (Green

322).

22

Even Tennyson uses adventure as a theme in his poetry. In “Akbar’s Dream”

(1892), for example, he imagines the downfall of the Moghul Empire and the British who

sweep in to bring peace and civility: “From out the sunset poured an alien race,/ Who

fitted stone to stone again, and Truth,/ Peace, Love and Justice came and dwelt therein”

(1448-49), or whose Ulysses uttered the words that imply that duty is “to strive, to seek,

to find, and not to yield” (qtd. in Brantlinger 36). Furthermore, though Brantlinger points

out that, “In fiction the British Empire usually comes in second to domestic concerns”

(11), there is ample evidence that even the domestic novel hinted at the topic of empire.

In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, for example, Colonel Brandon serves in India and

in her novel Mansfield Park, Antigua serves to play a significant role. In Charlotte

Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the subtle background of Mr. Rochester’s ties to the West Indies may

seem incidental, but of course, much has been made of the imperial context since Jean

Rhys authored Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (Brantlinger 12). Even a very quiet novel like

Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) incorporates undercurrents of adventure when

Miss Matty’s brother, Peter, returns from his military career in India and disrupts the

domestic routine of the elderly women at the center of the novel with his yarns about an

exotic world, “The ladies vied with each other who should admire him most; and no

wonder; for their quiet lives were astonishingly stirred up by the arrival from India” and

the stories he tells are “more wonderful…than Sinbad the sailor; and, as Miss Pole said,

[are] quite as good as an Arabian night any evening” (153-54). It is critical to note that

adventure rests below the surface in such domestic tales, after all, the early Victorians did

not think of themselves as imperialists, they simply believed in the virtues of being

British (Brantlinger 44).

23

In fact, it was not until late in the nineteenth-century that the literature associated

with imperialism began to disseminate a particularly aggressive ideology of empire.

Green notes, “We must not expect to find in the adventure novels outright celebrations of

empire; we must not expect to find outright imperial topics tackled; and we must detect

political meanings by interpretation” (9). JanMohamed adds, “While the covert purpose

is to exploit the colony’s natural resources thoroughly and ruthlessly through the various

imperialist practices, the overt aim, as articulated by colonialist discourse, is to ‘civilize’

the savage, to introduce him to all the benefits of Western cultures” (81). In this way,

JanMohamed divides colonialist literature into two categories: the “imaginary” and the

“symbolic” and argues that while the imaginary text evokes the hard and fast machinery

of the Manichean allegory—through which the Westerner never loses his relative upper

hand—the symbolic texts (like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E. M. Forster’s A

Passage to India), willingly inspect European values by contrast to those of the native

(84-85). In all of these imperial texts—from the straight adventure tale to the domestic

novel, the “invasion scare” novels like Sir George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking in

1871 and the anxious genre of spy fiction (Brantlinger 33) and the fantasy novels like

Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1911 The Lost World (Brantlinger 38)—the world appears in terms

of fixed notions of good and evil, where the protagonists rarely doubt their ability to

prevail, to tame the barbarians or claim the big blank spaces on the map for England.

The rise of journalism, particularly in the form of newspapers came at the same

time that the adventure novel and the literature of imperialism reached its peak.

According to Benedict Anderson, “the newspaper is merely an ‘extreme form’ of the

book, a book sold on a colossal scale…Might we say: one-day best sellers?” (34-5).

24

What Anderson notes as primarily important to any discussion of news media is the way

in which newspapers create a sort of solidarity amongst their readers, who are bound to

one another not only through their consumption of the very same news—the neighbors

who pick up their papers at the bottom of the driveway at the same time everyday, the

people we see reading an exact copy of our daily news at a coffee shop, on a train, or

waiting in line—but the way newspapers generate a sense of nationhood through the

stories that appear as most important in the hierarchy of headlines to the community

being served. Anderson comments, “No surprise that the search was on, so to speak, for

a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together…for rapidly

growing numbers of people to think about themselves and others, in profoundly new

ways” (36). There are, of course, profound concerns over the ways in which journalists

report about members of other cultures, particularly those cultures that have recently

become sovereign nations or those that have suffered beneath the oppression of Western

colonialism. David Spurr writes of Western journalists who depict the people of

developing countries as though they all inhabit the same “Third World” space. He

writes:

…one begins to have the impression that…every article about the Third World is

essentially the same article about the same country…The people of this all-

purpose country proudly assert their independence from colonial rule, but they are

forever doing charming things that are “typically French,” like admiring haute

couture, or “typically British,” like playing cricket and having afternoon tea.

Chinese women bobbing their hair, Africans eating ice cream—they are “catching

up” with Western lifestyles, though they cherish their traditions and continue to

25

engage in fascinating rites of voodoo worship and self-flagellation. This

generic…story nods briefly at social problems—illiteracy, famine, revolution,

what have you—but invariably concludes on an upbeat note about progress and

modernization. (51)

Such stories create hierarchies of power in new and subtle vernaculars, whereby one

particular culture’s social problems are mitigated by their interest in emulating Western

styles and Western culture, and through which the traditional dichotomies of East and

West, self and Other, superior and inferior are reinforced, however shrewdly.

By comparison, it is crucial to this project that one of the two most popular

locations for empire films was India, because that is where I have chosen to locate the

literature that I examine in this dissertation. Imperialism was a theme explored by the

cinema as early as 1902, when the first Indian-themed motion picture, Thomas Edison’s

Hindu Fakir, emerged. In this film, India is represented as a mysterious land, full of

strange, frightening, uncivilized and barbaric customs (Chowdhry 40). However, Prem

Chowdhry argues that empire films reached the height of their popularity during the years

1929-1939 (2). Jeffrey Richards describes two cycles of imperial films. The first, he

argues, took place in the 1930s when imperialism still flourished. Such films absorbed

the tropes of colonialism and the medium espoused the justifications for imperialism writ

large for the big screen. Empire cinema spoke for the powerful figures of history

particularly in films that idealized the imperial project as a benevolent “civilizing

mission” intended to curtail ignorance, disease, and tyranny. The trope of the “civilizing

mission” masked the material interests of the imperial nations, translating colonial

intervention and economic exploitation into a struggle against savagery. The second cycle

26

of empire films became popular after the British colonies began to win their

independence, when, for instance, India became a sovereign nation in 1947. The

dismantling of British Imperialism made way for a second cycle of imperial films, which

were nostalgic for empire even if they paid lip service to independence.

Both cycles of empire films generally reflect the late nineteenth-century ideals of

empire. They prefer a nostalgic look back at the pioneering days of empire when

imperialism was largely unchanged and uncontested. Jeffrey Richards writes, “As far as

the cinema is concerned, it will always be 1890 in India” (134). In his book he provides a

thorough survey of empire films and traces how the dogma behind empire cinema was

carefully constructed. He begins his discussion with films like The Four Feathers (1929,

1939), Wee Willlie Winkie (1937), The Drum (1938), and Gunga Din (1939), which have

their roots in literature. These films gave celluloid life to the works of authors like

Kipling (Wee Willie Winkie, Gunga Din, Kim) and Mason (The Four Feathers, The

Drum) who explored the ideas they saw emerging politically in literature. These films

explore concepts like duty and patriotism, which are integral to the imperial vision. Films

like the Tarzan films (1919, 1931, 1932, 1943, 1944, 1948, 1951, 1952), The Return of

Bulldog Drummond (1934), The Four Just Men (1939), Unconquered (1947), and 55

Days at Peking (1962) brought popular and pulp literature, boys’ weeklies and action

heroes to the big screen. These films appealed to young readers and the figures in these

films were larger-than-life; they were gods and heroes who generally suppressed some

plot against British authorities. They instilled the view—that George Orwell described in

his essay on boys’ weeklies, as pre-1914 conservative—which included the notions that,

“there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant

27

comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern that will last forever”

(528). Such ideas were popularized in a set of easily accessible books and then taken to

the extreme in the cinema. Richards notes, for example, that the Tarzan of the books is

an English gentleman, while the Tarzan of the cinema is, “a half-naked noble savage,

living in a tree house ... and speaking in monosyllables. The most famous example of

this is of course: ‘Me Tarzan ... you Jane’” (38). These films established a simplified set

of assumptions about Britain and her world role in a world in which there are clear

boundaries between Right and Wrong.

Other films played off of social values that were established in public schools or

in the military, which made it easier for audiences to identify with the heroes of the

cinema. Films like The Wheel of Life (1930), The Last Outpost (1935), and Another

Dawn (1937) portray army officers who are graduates of the public schools and are

inspired by their love for their schoolmates and by the bonds of school ties. Such

characters are products of public school breeding during which time they learned to keep

a stiff upper lip, to be stoic even when faced by overwhelming odds, and to be motivated

by responsibility, duty, sacrifice, and above all else, brotherhood (Richards 53). The lone

solitary figure in the midst of the jungle, desert, or bands of tribesmen is often seen as an

extension of the public school figure turned officer. Such cinematic military figures take

up the “white man’s burden” to bring civilization to the colonies by way of roads,

railways, telegraphs, schools, hospitals, universities, famine relief, irrigation, peace and

justice. They are assigned to their outposts in India or Africa and are recognizably

imbued with the values of the public school code: self-sacrifice, duty, loyalty and

courage. King of the Khyber Rifles (1929), Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Charge of

28

the Light Brigade (1936), Storm Over Bengal (1938), The Sun Never Sets (1940), Storm

Over Africa (1953), The Scarlet Spear (1955), Pacific Destiny (1956) and Northwest

Frontier (1959) all depict the secret of the British, that a ruler should be loved rather than

feared (Richards 114-34), what Gorra describes as the “imperial embrace” whereby

figuratively a woman is “at once raped and told that she’s loved” (“Rudyard Kipling”

646). The virtual gaze of the cinema made it possible for moviegoers to soar viscerally

about the globe to experience a taste of worldwide travel and imperial conquest.

In addition to flattering the imperial subject as the superior, invulnerable, and

empathetic governing body, films of the imperial era offered a constellation of images

that justified the human costs of imperialism. In such films, Shohat and Stam argue,

“Britain’s material interests in the imperialized world are masked by what Conrad’s

Marlowe would have call ‘redeeming ideas’: the battle against savagery (Wee Willie

Winkie, 1937), the struggle to abolish slavery (Killers of Kilimanjaro, 1959), the fight

against fascism (The Sun Never Sets, 1940)” (126). What all of these films have in

common is that in imperial sagas the world is divided into Black and White, Right verses

Wrong, where Good always triumphs over Evil. By contrast, postcolonial literature

breaks down absolutes and blurs the dichotomies between Right and Wrong, Good and

Evil. Narayan, Mukherjee, Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy all tend to question traditional

assumptions of all kinds so that their novels operate in ways quite contrary to imperial

films.

Through film, for example, Westerners were trained to identify not only with the

cultural values of their own nations but were also instructed to identify, by association,

with the “racial solidarity implied by the imperial project as a whole” (Shohat and Stam

29

119). Thus, as Shohat and Stam explain, English audiences could identify with the heroes

of the French Foreign Legion films and Euro-American audiences could identify with the

heroes of the British Raj, and so on (119). Jeffrey Richards points out that while the

British became masters of the imperial epic, “It was always Hollywood, the dream

factory, which created for ever a completely stylized and mythic England, where nothing

ever changed, where everyone knew his place and where civilized dramas of life and love

could be played out” (107 emphasis mine). The Americans glorified British military

struggles, extolled the soldiers of empire, and endorsed the ideologies of imperialism.

Similarly, the British censorship codes, for example, were applied to film globally

and so American film producers were pressured to adhere to the same policies. In

“Foreign Parts,” Ruth Vasey quotes from the MPPDA Archives of 1928 in which Jason

Joy warned production personnel that the British would not permit “the portrayal of the

white man and woman...in a way that might degrade him or her in the eyes of the native,”

nor would they “permit anything in films tending to incite the natives against the

governing race” (qtd. in Vasey). However, it is important to note, as Prem Chowdhry

does, “that by and large the Indian audience was thought of as an undifferentiated whole,

and popularly projected by British officials as ‘child like,’ ‘deficient in character,’

‘occupying a position of ignorance,’ and ‘moral corruptability’ similar to the Indian

characters in empire cinema” (17). Basically, British officials tended to suggest that if a

film could be read subversively, the colonial audience would be too simple to understand

it that way, but what the novels examined within this dissertation demonstrate is that such

a notion is not only deeply patronizing, it is largely untrue.

30

Thus, British officials believed that imperialism as undertaken by the film

industry could work as a unifying force amongst the filmgoers in the colonies where the

cinema was available. Given that the colonized territories of empire were scattered

throughout the globe, cinema was thought to provide a literal dwelling place for the

diverse races and groups of all the disparate colonies, and to welcome them, however

condescendingly, into what Queen Victoria had called the “imperial family.” Shohat and

Stam argue that in urban centers, cinema-going became an activity for the elite of the

colonies. By having access to the cinema they were invited into the matrix of the

European empire, if only on the margins. Taking into account that the first movie theaters

constructed in the colonies were built in urban centers: Baghdad, Bombay, and Cairo, for

example, and that they were associated with Europeans and the westernized colonial

bourgeoisie, the elite film patrons of the colonies then, came to identify themselves with

“their” empire (119). Because literacy is not a prerequisite for the cinema, British

officials believed that while there was scarcely a reading public for imperial fictions

throughout the colonial world, there was an eager audience for imperial films that

disseminated similar ideologies.

Prem Chowdhry makes the Indian audience of empire films the center of her

historical inquiry into Hollywood and British cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Though

there is no empirical or statistical data about cinemagoers and cinema attendance during

this period, Chowdhry produces a careful analysis of the colonial audiences for Western

films in India during that decade. Chowdhry manages to construct a convincing record

about the level with which Indian audiences participated in watching and responding to

empire films. By taking everything from archival material, police commissioners’

31

reports, Legislative Assembly and House of Commons debates, to articles, news items,

film reviews, daily newspapers from both Britain and colonial India, letters, film journals,

film propaganda and resolutions of the Motion Picture Association to reconstruct who

must have been situated amongst the Indian spectators of Western films, she argues that

the “Indian audience for cinema was a rapidly growing one” (13).

She argues, too, that the introduction of sound technology in 1931 revolutionized

the potential of empire films to reach elite and urban audiences where at least two

theaters in Bombay screened Western films regularly. She suggests, however, that this

limited viewership did not apply to Western adventure films, films that Hollywood

coined “world audience films” (14), because the spectacular action of such films

breached the language barrier. Appiah explains that even today, “The Hollywood

blockbuster has a special status around the world; but here, as American movie critics

regularly complain, the nature of the product—heavy on action sequences, light on clever

badinage—is partly determined by what works in Bangkok and Berlin” (109). In the

1927-1928 Indian Cinematograph Committee Report it was noted that:

There are certain types of western films which appeal to all classes and

communities ... The bulk of the population ... which is insufficiently acquainted

with the English language and with western ideas, enjoys films with plenty of

action, especially comic and action films ... they derive their entertainment from

watching the ‘stunts’, comic or adventurous. If there is plenty of action they can

follow the sequences of events, and they are very quick at grasping the

significance of the scenes and picking up the story. The heavy applause which is

heard from the cheap seats when the hero administers summary justice to the

32

villain or rescues the heroine in the nick of time shows a proper appreciation of

the events and is seldom at fault. (21-2)

Films featuring Indian characters were immensely popular: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,

Gunga Din, The Drum, for example. Such films, it has already been shown,

encompassed the explicit message of colonialism and depicted the moral, social and

physical domination of the colonized by the colonizers who were of course, only acting

out of duty, self-sacrifice, and loyalty to their governments.

Chowdhry observes that by 1935 more than half of the films screened in India

were foreign films. Even in smaller suburban theaters that had previously only shown

Indian films, the demand for Western films was greater than the supply. She notes that

the audience for cinema in India extended to include audiences of different classes. By

1939, there were 1265 permanent movie houses in India and 500 touring ones and

traveling cinemas reached even the interior, rural areas, moving from village to village

for one-night showings. When Indian films were unavailable, these traveling cinemas

often showed second-hand Western films which could be purchased on the cheap, so that

while Indian audiences may not have seen empire films first-run, they did indeed see

them (Chowdhry 13-16). Chowdhry concludes that, “the audience for western films,

especially for the high-adventure genre, was clearly not limited to the educated middle

class but drew its viewership from different segments of Indian society” (17). In the

Northwest Frontier Province, for example, villagers attended films in the same cinema

houses as British army officials and when rustic villagers flocked into the city to stay

with relatives during the harsh winter months, they too went to the cinema (Chowdry 16-

17).

33

Chowdhry does not, however, contend that these colonial audiences were

composed of passive viewers who allowed Western ideologies of domination and

colonial rule to simply wash over them. Chowdhry provides an excerpt from a letter

written to the editor of the London Times, by “a lady residing in India,” on September 4,

1923. In that letter, the lady in question states,

I have myself seen a film in which a perfectly impossible man—supposed to be an

Englishman—offends an Indian [Native American] by making love to his squaw,

and the Indian finally gets him and ties him to a post, where he starves to death.

This was greeted by applause by the Indians [natives of India] present. I saw

another film where a drunken guest at a wedding knocks down a Negro—the

Negro afterwards murders him. Again great applause from the natives. These are

the cheapest, commonest films and are all we get to see in India ... The Indians go

more and more to the cinema and must be thinking the British a nation to despise.

(qtd. in Chowdhry 20)

Chowdhry also points out, that as a matter of fact, Indian audiences were known to leave

the cinema hall when the British national anthem was played at the end of a feature (26).

Such actions imply that the colonial audiences were ever aware that the cinema was used

as propaganda by British authorities and that projecting imperialist images to Indian

audiences often provoked sharp negative reactions.

By 1936, the government of India began insisting that film producers in the U.S.

and in the UK be more careful about the content of their films. Their instructions were

far more detailed than those of MPPDA Archives of 1928. They threatened to censor or

refuse films, “based on episodes in British Indian history or stories in the Kipling

34

tradition,” films that “show quarrelling or fighting between Europeans and Indians or

between Hindus and Muslims,” films “in which Indian religion or social customs are

brought into ridicule or contempt, for example, films tending to overemphasize the

backwardness of certain classes of people,” films “in which an Indian is portrayed as the

villain and a European as the hero,” as well as films “which generally depict Indians as

an inferior race, with a ‘slave mentality’, cringing and dominated by a superior white

race” (qtd. Chowdhry 37). In short, they threatened to censor or refuse films produced in

the tradition of the empire films. Still, the films of Britain and Hollywood seemed

relentless. In 1942, the British film producer, Alexander Shaw, who had spent a year in

India pleaded,

But please remember, India belongs to you and me and the next Englishman. It is

no good you sitting back and being funny about Pukka Sahibs and the cabinet’s

attitude to India. Indians don’t laugh at you any more, they take you very

seriously. (qtd. in Chowdhry 44).

Indeed, the colonial Indian audiences were instrumental in shaping that second wave of

empire films that continued to disseminate imperial attitudes even after the British empire

formally ended. The message may have been softer, or more indirect, but the audience

still needed to be won over.

Shohat and Stam purport that, “The colonial/imperial paradigm did not die with

the formal end of colonialism ... one could speak of a ‘submerged’ imperial presence in

many films” (134). One only needs to look at the plethora of empire films that were

remade after independence: Tom Brown’s School Days (1939, 1950), Goodbye Mr. Chips

(1939, 1970), and Kim (1951, 1984), to name a few. Films of the Raj nostalgia genre,

35

Staying On (1980), Heat and Dust (1982), Gandhi (1982), Passage to India (1984), have

been expressly criticized by Salman Rushdie who denounces them in his essay, “Outside

the Whale” as “the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image” (91), forming “the

artistic counterpart of the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain” (92). Shohat

and Stam argue that Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi as a, “spectacular epic about an

ascetic, a Triumph of the Will for pacifists, pursues the ‘Great Man’ view of history,

subtly prettifying the British role” (136). Both Rushdie and Shohat and Stam note

television series that perform similar functions. Rushdie includes the TV series The

Jewel in the Crown in his condemnation of Raj nostalgia and Shohat and Stam mention

that even a seemingly innocuous television program like Gilligan’s Island takes place on

an island “surrounded by barbarian tribes” (134).

Television, in comparison to film, affords an even wider variety of viewpoints

than those offered by the cinema. The television viewer is bombarded with sounds and

images that spiral out from film and video cameras, tape recorded soundtracks, direct

feeds of both sight and chatter, which converge in an instant through satellite

transmission. Television has an edge over its sluggish cousin, the cinema, in the speed

and deftness with which it covers the world. Images of distant lands can be broadcast

instantaneously. Cultural values are iterated and reinforced, debated and rejected

simultaneously. Advertisements and their accompanying jingles and slogans create

immediate desires. Herbert Schiller, one of the premiere critics of media or cultural

imperialism claims that through television, the “imagery and cultural perspectives of the

ruling sector in the center...shape and structure consciousness throughout the system at

large” (qtd. in Strelitz 251).

36

Recent advances in television technology have resulted in the ability to preside

virtually over the world through the television set. Shohat and Stam argue that:

The smaller screen, while preventing immersion in a deep enveloping space,

encourages in other ways a kind of narcissistic voyeurism. Larger than the figures

on the screen, we quite literally oversee the world from a sheltered position—all

the human shapes parading before us in TV’s insubstantial pageant are scaled

down to Lilliputian insignificance, two-dimensional dolls, their height rarely

exceeding a foot. (138)

Similarly, in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie seems to suggest that the television set allows

us all to be armchair conquistadors and everything on the television eventually manages

to be given the same amount of importance. Saladin Chamcha admits that,

He watched a good deal of television with half an eye, channel-hopping

compulsively, for he was a member of the remote control culture of the present ...

he too, could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the

composite video monster his button-pushing brought into being...what a leveller

this remote-control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth-century; it

copped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set’s

emissions, commercials, murders, gameshows, the thousand and one varying joys

and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired equal weight ... he, Chamcha,

could lounge back in his Parker-Knoll recliner chair and let his fingers do the

chopping. (419-20)

Chamcha thinks to himself, “If we turned these devices upon ourselves we’d discover

more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of” (534). His observation

37

raises an issue of great significance. The television allows us, more often, to ignore what

is most important in the world, which is a tragedy considering that television could be an

avenue through which one can learn a great deal about other nations, cultures, ideas,

politics, and values.

Looking at the infrastructure of television reveals that the cultural hierarchy that

Jeffrey Richards discusses in regard to empire films, with “western civilizations at the

top, followed by those of the East” (187), is literally played out in the accessibility of

media. Our understanding of national development in Third World contexts has been

based on historically incorrect economic theories of underdevelopment in which it is

assumed that all countries were equally poor initially and that all countries have advanced

technologically at the same pace. Indian television, Doordarshan, is state-owned and

state-controlled. It was first introduced in September of 1959. At that time, the only

station was the Delhi Kendra, which broadcast programs for a couple of hours a day on

one channel. In time the reach of television was expanded to include broadcasting

centers in Bombay (1972), Srinagar (1973), Amritsar (1973), Calcutta (1975), and

Lucknow (1975) (Mankekar 301) and this information ought to reinforce the notion that

the “global” in globalization, does not mean universal.

The notion of media imperialism emerged in the 1960s (Kraidy and Murphy 300).

Not only did the concept of media imperialism presuppose that Western cultural values

such as consumerism were being expressed through the many available manifestations of

media and advertising, but also that such values were intentionally directed at advancing

nations to alter and upset traditional Third World values for the purpose of material

exploitation. Altschull explains that:

38

With the help of newspapers, and especially television advertising, capitalists

were seeking to subject their former colonies to a different kind of exploitation.

They were attempting to blot out the native histories of the new nation-states, to

destroy their cultures and their traditions, and replace them with the mechanized

consumer society they had created in industrialized lands. It was a different form

of exploitation of the proletariat, and its spearhead was the press and the

information industry. (153)

For critics of cultural imperialism, the underlying dynamic suggests that in the world

system of capitalism there is a center that includes the multinational corporations of

Europe and the United States and a periphery, which includes the nations of the

developing world. In Cosmopolitanism, Appiah explains that the critics of media

imperialism point out that when it comes to the Euro-American multinational

corporations, “The products they sell around the world promote the interests of capitalism

in general. They encourage consumption of not just films, television, magazines but of

the other non-media products of multinational capitalism” (108). What these critics have

to say may be true, but Appiah is apt to point out that researchers have found that, “if

there is a local product...many people prefer it, especially when it comes to television”

and secondly that “how people respond to these American products depends on their

existing cultural context” (109-110). What Appiah’s research demonstrates is that

cultural consumers can resist.

Still, Western media influences are not just exploitative in their message,

developing nations often have no opportunities, no media infrastructure with which to

39

disseminate their own cultures and traditions. In his essay, “Outside the Whale,” Rushdie

remarks:

Let me add only that stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture

being stereotyped; or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to

counterpunch against the stereotype. If the TV screens of the West were regularly

filled by equally hyped, big-budget productions depicting the realities of India one

could stomach the odd M.M. Kaye [Kaye is the author of the inherently racist

book used as the basis for the TV serial, The Far Pavilions]. (89)

As Rushdie suggests, there is indeed a great imbalance in the control, composition,

allocation, and substance of media and the power, arrangement, allotment, and subject

matter of media in advancing nations, which cannot compete with the West. On April 22,

1990 (otherwise known that year as Earth Day), Time Warner revealed its new motto:

“The World is Our Audience” (Sreberny-Mohammadi 343). While this motto strikes an

imperial chord in that it promises to propagate Western values across the globe, it also

dismisses altogether those cultures that have no access to television. Is Time Warner

suggesting that places without media infrastructures are then, not part of our world?

For many of the nation-states that emerged in the second half of the twentieth

century, it seems that the intense and localized administrations officially ended, but in

practice those administrations have merely shifted to include more indirect and global

surveillance of political and economic development, control over education programs as

well as economic strangle-holds in developing nations (“African Socialism” 4-6). Many

critics point out that the end result for these newly sovereign nations is ultimately

40

frustration at the failure of independence to meet their expectations and their desires, a

general disappointment in becoming a modern nation. Daniel Lerner explains that:

The mass media have been used to stimulate the people in some sense. It does so

by raising their levels of aspiration for the good things of the world, for a better

life. No adequate provision is made, however, for raising the levels of

achievement. Thus people are encouraged to want more than they can possibly

get, aspirations outrun achievements, and frustrations spread. (866)

Though the vast political and military administrations of colonialism have come to a

formal end, the media industry continues to be influential in perpetuating Western

superiority, in maintaining the colonial/imperial paradigm, and in disseminating agendas

through which the postcolonial subject is still demonized for his otherness.

With the traditional, limited conceptions of representation, one possible solution

might be to put cameras in the hands of the often-misrepresented postcolonial citizens of

this world and to allow them to show us the world as they see it. We are a long way from

putting such a solution into practice. However, it is not that Indian mass media fail to

represent the world. In fact, according to its website, All India Radio—which began in

1927 with limited broadcasting in private radio clubs—has expanded its reach to 223

broadcasting centers that “inform, educate, and entertain the masses” in 27 languages (17

national and ten foreign). Despite his short story, “The Free Radio,” in which Rushdie

spins his imaginative take on Indira Gandhi’s alleged sterilization campaign—during

which the government of India promised “one brand-new first-class battery-operated

transistor radio” (25) to everyone willing to submit to population controls—according to

41

its website, All India Radio covers 99.13% of India’s populace. Indian television and

Bollywood cinema are also highly successful within India as a nation.

So, one might ask: why study novels exclusively? There is the obvious answer, in

that artistic forms have informed and been informed by one another for centuries. For

instance, Michael McKeon notes “the evident links between literate and visual media,

between the novel, photography and film” (661). And, Keith Cohen observes “how

powerful the precedent of one art could be for the practitioners of another, how one set of

codes became the common tools of artists working in widely disparate fields” (702).

There is the logistical answer in that we, in the West, certainly see less Indian television,

we see less Bollywood cinema, and we certainly hear less All India Radio than we see

Anglophone South Asian fiction on the shelves of our bookstores. Arguably, in the West,

the English language is the magic radio, magic television program, or magic feature film,

through which the Western world can begin to converse with the East. Furthermore, as

Chaudhuri suggests when he describes the novel as “a nation metaphor” (par. 8), the

novel has been the vehicle—both in the West and in India—for reflecting upon large-

scale questions of nation.

In his essay, “In Good Faith,” Salman Rushdie writes that The Satanic Verses is a

novel that seems to ask, “You call us devils?” He then goes on to answer, “Very well,

then, here is the devil’s version of the world, of ‘your’ world, the version written from the

experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness” (403).

Rushdie seeks to upset the tradition of the colonial/imperial paradigm. That Rushdie has

no easy answers is what makes his novel so refreshing, so new, so full of possibility. In

his novel, demons can do the work of angels.

42

That The Satanic Verses and the other four novels examined in these pages are

defiant and audacious, that they create new worlds, does indeed give us something to

rejoice; that these novels recognize that imperial rule comes not only in the form of

traditional administrations, but rather, in a variety of both overt and subtle manifestations,

gives us something to consider carefully. In The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr defines

colonization as, “a form of self-inscription onto the lives of a people who are conceived

as an extension of the landscape,” and goes on to explain that for the colonizer, “it

becomes a question of establishing authority through the demarcation of identity and

difference” (7). As the authors I study in this dissertation appreciate, these self-

inscriptions and demarcations did not simply disappear when scores of former colonies

emerged as newly independent nation-states in the period after World War II, but their

novels seek to redefine the world in the new spaces that exist outside of the demarcations

between East and West.

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“Written on the Brow of Some”: Inscription and Erasure in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide

Having nothing else to do, he started counting the stars. He said to

himself, “I shall be rewarded for this profound service to humanity. People will

say, ‘Here is the man who knows the exact number of stars in the sky. If you

have any trouble on that account, you had better consult him. He will be your

night guide for the skies.’ He told himself, “The thing to do is to start from a

corner and go on patch by patch. Never work from the top of the horizon, but

always the other way.” He was evolving a theory. He started to count from

above a fringe of Palmyra trees on his left-hand side, up the other side.

“One...two...fifty-five...” He suddenly realized that if he looked deeper a new

cluster of stars came into his view; by the time he assimilated it into his

reckoning, he realized he had lost sight of his starting point and found himself

entangled in hopeless figures.

—R. K. Narayan, The Guide (13-14)

The quotation above can be read as a set of instructions for reading R. K.

Narayan’s novel The Guide. Like the protagonist, Raju, who finds that his simple theory

for counting the stars unravels when he examines the night sky more closely, the tangled

narrative that brings Raju to life is frequently interrupted and revised to erase previously

held assumptions or to disclose new revelations. This ambiguity masterfully evokes the

impurities and transformations as well as the dilemmas and uncertainties that come of

cross-cultural encounters. There is, perhaps, no greater ambiguity than that with which

44

the novel ends. Though the bulk of Narayan’s novel is a narrative through which Raju

tells his own flawed life story, I will organize this chapter around the final pages of the

novel, during which a third-person narrative describes what appears to be Raju’s

ascension into sainthood, the crowd that assembles—“like swarms of ants converging on

a lump of sugar” (215)—to witness a miracle, and the intervention of a single American

film producer who threatens to misrepresent an entire culture to a Western audience.

Reading The Guide is, indeed, like trying to count the stars; it is easy to lose sight

of the starting point. Who is the real Raju? Is he the self-described individual whose

flaws can be traced back to the railways built during his childhood? Is he, as he

confesses, only a trickster, a con-artist, a chameleon of sorts who survives by embodying

one role after another? Or, does he become, in the end, a genuine spiritual leader, a holy

man, a sadhu, a guru, a saint? Does he live up to his title, Swamiji? Does the

carnivalesque crowd—full of believers and families, government officials and

representatives from the Health Department, street vendors and journalists from around

the world—even care about Raju’s true identity? At the close of Narayan’s novel, a

reader is faced not only with these overarching questions, but also with one particularly

rich example of cross-cultural interchange when James J. Malone, an American film and

T.V. show producer from California, introduces himself to Raju and explains, “I have

come to shoot this subject, take it back to our country, and show it to our people there”

(216). The intervention of the American film producer is significant, because the mere

presence of James J. Malone provides an opportunity for a reader to examine the unique

challenges that result from interactions between individuals from very different parts of

the world.

45

In his 2006 book, Kwame Anthony Appiah defines an ideal that he calls

“cosmopolitanism” and he explains that:

…there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is

the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those

to whom we are related by ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a

shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human

life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices

and beliefs that lend them significance. (xv)

In this chapter, I will argue that through the brief and resonant depiction of Raju’s contact

with Malone, Narayan illustrates the Western media’s attempted and presumptive—but,

crucially failed—cosmopolitanism. If the exchange between Malone and Raju is read

carefully and without any preconceived notions, the text itself neither suggests that

Malone has arrived for humanitarian purposes nor for sinister ones. However, while it

seems clear that Malone does have a sense of obligation to others at a distance, he does

not appear to take the particularity of the lives, practices, and beliefs that are local to

Mangala seriously enough to embody what it means to be a true cosmopolitan, by

Appiah’s definition.

It is precisely what we do not know about James J. Malone that makes all the

difference in understanding his approach to Raju. We can imagine that Malone has heard

of the devastating effects of the drought in Mangala and that his sense of obligation to

others has drawn him to the small village, where perhaps he learned about a holy man’s

fast. We might imagine, for instance, that perhaps Malone hoped to interview Raju as a

way through which to learn more about the customs and spiritual beliefs of the people for

46

whom Raju represents hope. However, as Malone busies himself with his cables,

cameras, and microphones, it is much easier to imagine that his cameras are only poised

to capture—with great Western wonder—the exotic spirituality of the East, of a people

who believe that a holy man can fast and with his penance make the rains fall. Malone

might be like all of the other vendors who have congregated in the small town of

Mangala for profit. Geoffrey Kain explains, “The business-minded capitalize on

him…Special buses bring spectators to the ‘event,’ new shops emerge spontaneously,

hawkers sell balloons, sweets and whistles, and an American film and television

producer, interviews Raju…” (54). If Malone has truly arrived only to profit from Raju’s

story, then perhaps Malone only feigns his interest in Raju to make a buck. But, Narayan

leaves the particulars open-ended and because Malone is vague about what has drawn

him to the small village of Mangala, the brief conversation between Raju and Malone can

be read in a multitude of ways.

Narayan’s own thoughts give us a bit of a clue as to how we might interpret the

intervention of Malone. Perhaps his recorded thoughts in My Dateless Diary, which

suggest that East-West interactions can often seem petty and his quotation of Aldous

Huxley’s statement, “What a pity. When two nations get together they get the worst of

each other—Rope-trick and such things from your country and gadgets and mere

technology from the West” (132), prepare us to look at the encounter between Raju and

Malone cynically. It is true that in The Guide, Narayan’s treatment of Malone can seem

wry and satirical. The narrator suggests that, “the large pink-faced arrival was a novel

change in the routine” (216), which hints that Malone and Raju are only superficially

interested in one another. O. P. Mathur explains that,

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We are given only a glimpse of his [Malone’s] superficial smartness and business-

like manners, and the questions he puts to the Swami betray his complete lack of

understanding or sympathy for, him or for the cause for which the fast has been

undertaken. He is all polish with no suggestion of any depth… (73)

I agree to some extent with Mathur’s assessment of Malone, but, Mathur judges him

harshly. It is not that Malone lacks sympathy—or, as Appiah suggests, a sense of

obligation—it is instead that he sees Raju only as a swami capable of miracles, rather

than as a particular human life, whose individual experiences, beliefs and practices have

led him to undertake such a fast.

Malone certainly attracts a great deal of attention to himself as he takes “pictures

of the people and the temple, and of the Swami from various angles and distances” (217).

Furthermore, despite his polite gestures—a courteous Namasté, or Indian greeting upon

first meeting Raju, a gracious request for permission to film in his temple, and several

well-mannered expressions of gratitude or apology—Malone seems content to simply

exchange platitudes with Raju by asking banal questions like: “Tell me, how do you like

it here?”; “Do you feel weak?”; “Can fasting abolish all wars and bring world peace?”;

and “Have you always been a Yogi?”(217). Malone’s broad and open-ended questions

serve well as a place to start a conversation, but the fact that Malone never delves more

carefully into Raju’s life makes the exchange seem trivial. Malone asks nothing, for

instance, about the drought conditions in Mangala, about the villagers of the town, or

about their faith in Raju. He also fails to examine more thoroughly why Raju has taken

on his fast in the first place and how Raju has come to be known as Swami.

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If Malone’s questions appear to inquire into the inconsequential, it is also

important to note that Raju seems delighted to perform for the camera. Uma

Parameswaran comments that at these moments, “Raju is fully in character, building

himself up to be a giant, and finding pleasure in succeeding” (213). In response to the

question, “Tell me, how do you like it here?” Raju answers with ironic ambivalence, “I

am only doing what I have to do; that’s all. My likes and dislikes do not count” (217).

Parameswaran contends that Raju’s answer is, “characteristic of a man who has been

living off his tongue all his life” (213). When Malone asks, “Can fasting abolish all wars

and bring world peace?” Raju says, “Yes” (217), although nothing in the novel suggests

that he could possibly believe his own answer. Mathur argues that, “The clear-eyed R. K.

Narayan could never have wanted us to believe in such inanities” (75). Furthermore,

after Malone inquires, “Have you always been a Yogi?” Raju replies, “Yes; more or less”

(217), a response that M. K. Naik dismisses as a “brazen-faced lie” (653).

However, after reading these same passages, several critics have come to very

different conclusions. John Rothfork, for example, argues that when “the film maker

asks him if he has ‘always been a Yogi?’ The Sadhu says ‘Yes; more or less.’ And so he

has been” (78). Cynthia vanden Driesen declares, “What is important is his belief that his

sacrifice will benefit the community. So the bogus sadhu becomes a true saint” (168).

Even Mathur admits, “But perhaps there is another way too of looking at it” (77). She

goes on to argue that Raju says, “truthfully and touchingly to the American T.V. man, ‘I

am only doing what I have to do; that’s all. My likes and dislikes do not count’” (77,

emphasis mine). So, then, does the American filmmaker get to the truth after all? By the

end of the novel, have all of Raju’s youthful errors been erased by his service to the

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villagers of Mangala? Or, is a reader to assume that Raju’s lengthy confession, which

fills up nearly two-thirds of the novel, is R. K. Narayan’s way of setting things right, of

reconciling Raju’s public identity as a holy man with his private identity as one particular

human being who has faltered along the way?

The most ingenious aspect of Narayan’s novel The Guide, is not that the novel

presents one story or another, it is that Narayan makes it possible for a reader to

experience many versions of the same story simultaneously. Shirley Chew maintains

that, “The last scene with all its clusters of activity round one quiet indomitable will, its

sensitive balancing of seriousness and humour, its grasp of life’s ‘multitudinousness’

... publishes Narayan’s vision magnificently” (156). Like Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,

The Guide too, “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that

comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics”

(394). If there is one thing that we can say for certain about Raju, it is that in his effort to

please others, he has time and again, embraced those who could teach him to see the

world from another angle. At the end of the novel, a reader has the sense that Raju—who

willingly becomes a part of many particular human lives—is a true cosmopolitan, while

Malone—who distances himself behind his camera equipment—is not.

By filming Raju’s ascension into sainthood, does Malone indelibly rewrite Raju’s

life? The answer to this question depends upon how each individual reader feels about

things like media, cross-cultural conversations, and cultural exchange. However, by

leaving the end of The Guide open to interpretation, Narayan, in part, requires that his

reader reconsider the entire text to see the many ways in which Raju’s life is written and

rewritten throughout the entire novel. This way, Narayan asks his reader to notice that

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the truth about Raju’s life belongs somewhere between the dichotomies of each reader’s

perception of Right and Wrong. Raju’s life is, like Rushdie’s love-song in The Satanic

Verses, “mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that” (“In Good Faith” 394); it is

as difficult to pin down as it is to count the stars.

Here, it is important to go back to the beginning—of the novel at least—to see

how even the narrative techniques at play within The Guide manufacture, in subtle ways,

the same kind of elusiveness at play in the final moments of the tale, which are so

dramatically underscored by Malone’s cinematographic interest in Raju. Fakrul Alam

notes that, “the writer must have deliberated at great length on the combinations and

various angles that would most effectively project Raju’s life for readers before hitting on

the right mix of narrative devices employed” (16). Like Malone, who photographs Raju,

“from various angles and distances” (217), Narayan too must employ the strategies of a

cinematographer to achieve the desired abstractions that prove vital to his novel. Raju’s

story is revealed by two distinct narrative points of view: one is a third-person omniscient

narrator and the other is Raju’s first-person narrative confession. The first narrative

voice tells a story in the present time and begins when Raju is perceived, or perhaps

mistaken for, some sort of holy man. The second voice discloses Raju’s past. It begins

as a narrative flashback, but the reader later learns that this second voice is actually part

of Raju’s confidential admission that he may not be who he appears to be. At times, these

two voices playfully and resonantly overlap to reveal, perhaps, how Raju’s present

situation is constituted by his past, or perhaps to divulge Raju’s inner character, to make

public what Raju may not even know about himself.

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The third person point of view weaves a sense of impartiality into the narrative,

while the first person point of view—which is more intimate and confiding—allows a

reader to empathize with Raju on a more personal level. Both narratives are sensitively

compassionate and forgiving of the characters. Sita Kapadia explains that, “The

omniscient voice—wiser, brighter, more sophisticated—is none the less just as indulgent,

tolerant of human weaknesses and individual peculiarities as any self-aware and self-

absorbing first-person oration” (72). More importantly, the two narratives provide what

Imitaz Habib describes as, “a sophisticated literary performance that continually re-

invents itself” (40). From a technical point of view, it is important to notice how both of

these narratives expose Raju’s innermost feelings and braid together to inform each other.

Sometimes, the omniscient narrator finishes Raju’s thoughts, as it does the first

time the first-person narrative is introduced. At that moment, the third-person narrator

interjects with a parenthetical aside to explain, “Raju said in the course of narrating his

life-story to this man who was called Velan at a later stage” (7). At other times, the

narrator seems to understand what Raju is feeling, as when the omniscient narrator

describes how Raju addressed the village children. The narrator begins with an objective

statement, “He spoke to them on godliness, cleanliness, spoke on Ramayana, the

characters in the epics; he addressed them on all kinds of things” (40). Then, in the

following sentence, the narrator examines Raju’s thoughts, “He was hypnotized by his

own voice; he felt himself growing in stature as he saw the upturned faces of the children

shining in the half-light when he spoke” (40). However, about the end of the novel, after

Raju’s first-person narrative is over and done with, Britta Olinder aptly points out that

“From that point onwards the author also excludes himself entirely from Raju’s mental

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activity observing him only from the outside. Instead he concentrates on a description of

the popular attractions developing in ironic contrast around the saint” (471). Once Raju

has risen to celebrity status, even the third-person narrative, becomes entirely objective as

though the final moments of the novel are being told through the dispassionate lens of

Malone’s camera.

If Malone, at the end of the novel, appears to inscribe Raju’s life with new

meaning by filming him, (and by new meaning, I mean to suggest that if Malone offers a

definitive answer as to whether or not Raju is the real thing), it is important to note the

many ways in which this sort of inscription takes place over and again throughout the

narrative. Keith Garebian points out that, “early in the plot there are frequent

interruptions, pauses, and breaks in the narrative” (74). Each of these demonstrates how

Raju’s identity is continuously renewed, revised, wiped clean, and restored over time.

Garebian goes on to explain that these narrative disruptions, “accord well with Raju’s

agitation and changes in identity” (74) and that, “The impression conveyed by this

sequence of recurring interruptions is one of compulsive momentum—indicative of

Raju’s imbalance” (75). In the first fifty pages alone, the narrative is interrupted thirteen

times and to various degrees—at times to change narrative points of view and at others to

shift to another time in Raju’s life. One will notice that the novel itself begins with an

interruption. The first words of the novel are, after all, “Raju welcomed the intrusion”

(3). It is true that the narrative stream of The Guide is suspended perhaps even more

often than Raju changes character.

He is, at first, a wise mystic when Velan looks upon his face, “with intense

respect” (4). A paragraph later, he is an ex-prisoner, when he remembers the barber, who

53

shaved his face and asked, “Coming out, I suppose?” (4). Two pages later, he is

reinvented when the same barber exclaims, “You look like a maharaja now” (6). Soon

after, he is a man in love as he tells Velan, “My troubles would not have started…but for

Rosie” (7). And, in an instant, he is a tourist-guide as he talks about how, “The railways

got into my blood very early in life” (8). Moments later, he is a young boy trying to

please his religious father, “I washed myself at the wall, smeared holy ash on my

forehead, stood before the framed pictures of gods hanging high up on the wall, and

recited all kinds of verse in a loud, ringing tone” (9). And then, with little warning, he is

back in the present, counseling Velan, when his memories are broken up with five brief

words from his disciple, “I have a problem, sir” (11). Later in the novel, when Raju

consciously begins to divulge his story in a whisper into Velan’s ear to clarify that he is

not, in fact, a saint, but rather an average human being just like anybody else, we are

reminded that as readers we have already learned about Raju’s growing up in the midst of

porters, signalers, and stationmasters, about the roles he has played as railway shop-

keeper, tourist-guide, lover, business-manager, and model prisoner before being mistaken

as a spiritual leader. We are reminded, through Raju’s hushed confession, of the many

ways in which the frequent narrative interruptions have already revealed his secret and of

the way that Malone, with all of his camera equipment and Western technology, appears

to miss these facts.

When Raju makes his confession, he does so with the same survival instinct that

compels him to take on all of the other roles he has embodied throughout his lifetime. As

a young boy living in the town of Malgudi, he seeks to please his father by embracing his

religion, by allowing his father to teach him the Tamil alphabet, and by attending the

54

horrible pyol school on Kabir Lane with the “old man, who habitually addressed his

pupils as donkeys and traced their genealogies on either side with thoroughness” (22),

because his father objected to the Albert Mission School, where he was certain they tried

to “convert our boys into Christians” (21). As a teenager, he welcomes the role of

shopkeeper in the railway shop, where his father felt “strange” (36), because by then,

Raju was already learning to adapt, to reshape himself for a changing India.

Raju adjusts with the landscape. In Malgudi there are subtle changes in the

topography, which reflect the impact of colonial rule. Pushpa Parekh argues that,

Like the hybrid cities of major Indian Metropolis, Malgudi contains both realities:

the persistence of an indigenous way of life as well as the colonizer’s presence.

In this light, Malgudi can be seen as a topographical compounding of colonized

cities…in which Victorian architectural complexes and classical South Indian

temples, mosques, palaces and market places exist in amazing proximity. (181)

Malgudi is, indeed, as Parekh describes. Amongst the many precolonial markers: the

Tamil alphabet (9), the Mempi Hills (19), ancient silk saris (20), Kabir Lane (21), the

Sarayu River (23), the Anand Bhavan Hotel and Iswara Temple (56), Nallappa’s Grove

(57), the Taj (76), the Ramayana (121), and the Taluk office (128), for example, there are

many signs of colonialism too, which slyly articulate the collisions of histories and

cultures: Trunk Road (8), Albert Mission Boys (21) and the Albert Mission College (41),

Market Square (47), Ellaman Street (56), the North Extension (56) and the New

Extension as well as the statue of Sir Frederick Lawley (121). Driesen argues,

It might even seem that Raju’s misdemeanors grow directly out of the vicissitudes

of circumstance. He is a victim of the coming of modern ways of life to Malgudi.

55

First, he picks up bad language from the railway workers, then as his father’s

commitments increase, he drops out of school. (169)

But to Raju, these changes mean no great sacrifice. Like the hybridized terrain, Raju is

also fundamentally changed by Western influences. He explains, “I felt at home on the

railway platform, and considered the stationmaster and porter the best company for man,

and their railway talk the most enlightened. I grew up in their midst” (8). These

experiences explain, perhaps, why at the end of the novel, Raju is so at ease with and

interested in Malone. Furthermore, these accounts help to explain how Raju grows into

the being that he is at the novel’s close. Beginning when his father’s business expands

and Raju declares joyfully that it helped him “achieve a very desirable end—the dropping

off of my school unobtrusively” (36). Raju’s instincts for survival, demonstrate that he

would hardly like to think of himself as a victim, even a victim of circumstance.

In fact, Raju is so fundamentally changed by the new railway that when his father

dies, he closes his father’s original hut shop and refurbishes the railway shop to anticipate

his customers’ every need. He fills the shop not only with a traveler’s necessities and

refreshments, but also with old magazines, books, and newspapers. When the shop is

quiet, Raju fills his time by learning everything he can from the merchandise he sells:

I read stuff that interested me, bored me, baffled me, and dozed off in my seat. I

read stuff that pricked up a noble thought, a philosophy that appealed, I gazed at

pictures of old temples and ruins and new buildings and battleships, and soldiers,

and pretty girls around whom my thoughts lingered. I learned much from scrap.

(42).

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When the shop is busy with customers, he learns from the travelers who are passing

through, engaging them in conversation about any subject. He not only gains knowledge

from these transactions and develops his uniquely cosmopolitan mould, but he also

makes a nice living and his ability to adapt to a changing world helps him provide

handsomely for himself and for his mother.

From that point on, Raju is an expert at reinventing himself. At the railway

station he quickly becomes a tourist-guide and calls himself Railway Raju. He can spot a

potential customer without the obvious clues, like travelers who arrive with cameras and

binoculars. In fact, as he explains, he can spot a customer before the train even pulls into

the station, “Even as the train steamed in at the outer signal, I could scent a customer. I

had a kind of water-diviner’s instinct. If I felt the pull of good business I drifted in the

direction of a coming train” (51). As a tourist-guide, he learns to cook up a new identity

at any moment; he can be any kind of guide for any type of customer. He explains, “I

never said, ‘I don’t know.’ Not in my nature I suppose. If I had any inclination to say ‘I

don’t know what you are talking about,’ my life would have taken a different turn” (47).

And so, Raju manages to enlighten any tourist about any landmark of interest, saying

things like, “‘Oh, yes, a fascinating place. Haven’t you seen it? You must find time to

visit it, otherwise your whole trip here would be a waste’” and he later admits that he said

such things, “only because I wanted to be pleasant” (47). One wonders, if at the end of

the novel, Raju engages with Malone out of a similar instinct: because he wants to be

pleasant.

With one customer, Marco, an archeologist interested in ancient India, for

example, Raju is the local authority on ruins, a devotee of relics. With Marco’s wife, a

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classical dancer, with whom he falls in love, Raju becomes a scholar of traditional Indian

dance to win her over. Once he does, he appears a deeply compassionate lover, willing to

give up his own family ties only for the chance to make her happy. As her business-

manager, he is deeply devoted to making her a star, and fights for her first show, “I

delivered such a lecture on the importance of our culture and the place of the dance in it

that they simply had to accept what I said...I never knew I could speak so fluently on

cultural matters” (156). As a prisoner, he survives by putting on the role of the wise and

gentle-natured confidant to the other inmates. He admits, “Whether they were homicides

or cutthroats or highwaymen, they all listened to me, and I could talk them out of their

blackest moods. When there was a respite, I told them stories and philosophies and what

not. They came to refer to me as vadhyar—that is, Teacher” (201-2). And then, of

course, there is his role with Velan and the villagers of Mangala. It is “his greatest role,”

according to Shirley Chew, and she goes on to explain that, “In return for pretending a

detachment he does not possess, he gets all the food and attention he could possibly want.

And waiving the matter of fraudulence, one must admire him, for it is not an easy part to

play” (155). With them, he is the mystic, the holy man, Swami, Swamiji, sadhu, guru,

saint, who convinces all of them, and perhaps even himself, that he can perform miracles.

In many ways, Narayan suggests throughout The Guide, that Raju’s identity is

constituted by matters beyond his control. Early in the novel, after he is first discovered

in the abandoned temple, Raju remembers what the barber said to him after he was first

released from prison, “It’s written on your face that you are a two-year sort, which means

you are not a murderer” (5), as though external appearances really do expose a person’s

inner character. Later, Velan mentions that some matters are simply fated to be the way

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they are, “He drew his fingers across his brow and said, ‘Whatever is written here will

happen. How can we ever help it?’” (18). This conversation is echoed at another time in

the novel, when Raju, himself, surrenders to a similar notion and he professes to Velan,

“It is written on the brow of some that they shall not be left alone. I am one such, I think.

Although I never looked for acquaintances, they somehow came looking for me” (47).

Likewise, Michael Gorra insists that, “Raju takes no active role in shaping his own

career: he becomes a tour guide by accident, because other people expect it of him; so,

too, he becomes a swami” (45). There may just be some elements of fate or

happenstance that lead Raju to construct the personas that he so ably embodies.

However, he is honest enough to admit that he knows that he is acting. There are

times, of course, when he feels trapped by his performances: “He felt like an actor who

was always expected to utter the right sentence” (11); “He realized that he had no

alternative: he must play the role that Velan had given him” (28); “Raju felt cornered. ‘I

have to play the part expected of me; there is no escape’” (43). And, there are times,

when Raju feels as though he can no longer keep up his act: “Raju felt like an actor who

had come on the stage, and, while the audience waited, had no lines to utter or gestures to

make” (42); “He sighed a deep sigh of relief and turned to be himself, eat like an ordinary

human being, shout and sleep like a normal man, after the voices on the river had ceased

for the night” (46); “He felt sick of the whole thing. When the assembly was at its

thickest, could he not stand upon a high pedestal and cry, ‘Get out all of you and leave

me alone. I am not the man to save you’” (210). Nevertheless, there are also times when

he takes great pleasure in acting out a part flawlessly: “Raju felt he was growing

wings…Shortly, he felt, he might float in the air and perch himself on the tower of the

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ancient temple” (18); “He sat as usual on the stone slab with beatitude and calm in his

face. … He decided to look as brilliant as he could manage, let drop gems of thought

from his lips” (28); “The essence of sainthood seemed to lie in one’s ability to utter

mystifying statements” (44); “I spoke out my love, but sandwiched it conveniently

between my appreciations of her art. … It worked” (72-3); “He composed his features for

his professional role and smoothed out his beard and hair, and sat down in his seat with a

book in his hand” (91); “We were enjoying this piece of stage-management; we felt we

had already begun to put on a show” (157). He does love the public attention he receives,

when he plays a role perfectly, and when crowds converge to witness a miracle,

newspapermen come to write his story, and Malone poises a camera to record their

interview, Raju is at the top of his game.

In fact, Raju seems to get a thrill from employing just the right strategies, from

mixing up the proper ingredients, and combining the precise balance to succeed in every

role he plays. It gives him a sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride, and perhaps a bit

of fame. Shirley Chew contends for Raju,

What he thrives on is a sense of self-importance cast up by the glitter of

superficialities—a little more information than others regarding the source of the

Sarayu, the chair next to the star dancer, a medley of anecdotes and philosophical

commonplaces spun out with self-possession. (155).

When he first begins to succeed in his role as a tourist-guide, he boasts to his mother,

“Do you know how well known I am? People come asking for me from Bombay,

Madras, and other places, hundreds of miles away. … It is something to become so

famous, isn’t it, instead of handing out matches and tobacco” (50). He recognizes the

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importance of appearances too and seems fascinated by aesthetic gestures. When the

drought jeopardizes the town of Mangala, he watches the men and women making trips

to the well and notes that they looked “picturesque, but without the tranquility inherent in

a picture” (81). And, later when the villagers believe that he has undertaken a fast to

bring down the rains, “He regretted having given them the idea. It had sounded

picturesque” (96). These thoughts haunt the final pages of the text, when Malone

intervenes to film Raju, precisely because it is not clear whether Malone has come to

discover more about Raju’s culture, or because he thinks that filming a man taken for

holy and weakened by his fast, will be as Raju puts it, picturesque.

Like a fine actor, Raju also understands and recognizes the importance of

providing the whole package, and that is why he insists that Rosie change her name when

they conspire together to launch her dancing career. He is afraid that her Western name

will fail to market her properly. He explains to Rosie, “‘The trouble with you is that

although your people are a traditional dance family, they didn’t know how to call you. …

For a classical dancer, you should call yourself something that is poetic and appealing”

(155). They settle upon the name, Nalini. And, Raju too, is not beyond dressing himself

up a bit, or wearing a costume of sorts. As a boy, he smears “holy ash” on his forehead

to appear more spiritually devoted for his father (9). When he meets Rosie, he trades in

his tourist-guide uniform of a “khaki bush coat and dhoti” for a more sophisticated “silk

jibba and lace dhoti” (56). And, in trying to keep up his appearances, he finds himself

rushing off to buy new outfits from a tailor, trying new products for his hair and for his

skin, and grooming himself obsessively. When he meets with groups at the University or

the town hall to try to book a venues for Rosie’s/Nalini’s performances, Raju dresses

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“soberly for the part,” donning a “rough-spun silk shirt and an upper cloth and a

handspun and handwoven dhoti” as well as a wrist watch and rimless glasses (156). As

the Swami, he grows out his hair and beard until one whisks against his back and the

other brushes against his chest. He wears prayer beads around his neck. It is no wonder

that an American film producer would want to pin him down on film.

Yet, although Raju seeks fame and attention, and is compelled to please others or

perform for his own self-serving purposes—for his father’s praise as a boy, to earn a

living as a guide, to win Rosie’s love and then to profit from her talent as her business-

manager, for special favors in prison, and then after prison, to avoid returning to his

tarnished life in Malgudi, and so that the villagers of Mangala will bestow gifts upon him

as compensation for his spiritual guidance in his role as a saint—Raju does seem to

genuinely care deeply for those he serves. He feels an obligation—even to Marco, whom

he despises and for whom he feels he loses his personal integrity—toward those who put

their general welfare in his hands. In his article, “A Sinner is a Sinner is a Sinner—A

Study of Raju,” Balarama Gupta brands Raju “a selfish swindler, an adroit actor, and a

perfidious megalomaniac” (186). Perhaps he is, but there are poignant moments when

Raju tries to set the record straight.

Upon his first meeting with Velan, when the villager gazes at him with devotion,

Raju tries to explain, “I am not so great as you imagine. I am just ordinary” (6).

Moments later, when Velan prostrates himself in gratitude for Raju’s help, bowing low

and trying to touch Raju’s feet, “Raju recoiled at the attempt. ‘I’ll not permit anyone to

do this’” (13). And then later, when Velan returns with the news that Raju has solved his

problems, Raju has the thought that, “He could not open his lips without provoking

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admiration. This was a dangerous state of affairs” (25). Finally, when Raju realizes how

deeply the villagers of Mangala believe in his power to work miracles, Raju reevaluates

his decision to let the villagers trust that he was a holy man:

He felt that after all the time had come for him to be serious—to attach value to his

own words. He needed time—and solitude to think over the whole matter. He got

down from his pedestal; that was the first step to take. That seat had acquired a

glamour, and as long as he occupied it people would not listen to him as an

ordinary mortal. He now saw the enormity of his own creation. He had created a

giant with his puny self, a throne of authority with that slab of stone. (95)

There are flashes and instants when Raju does appear to feel genuine remorse for

exploiting Velan and the villagers of Mangala and these moments are coupled with

flashes and instants when Raju does appear to do more good than harm, even through

trickery.

What is notable is that in nearly every role that Raju assumes he causes the

greatest harm to himself. With every change in character, he annihilates his former self

and in the process loses something that once was, and in the end probably still is, of great

importance to him. When he becomes a tourist-guide, he deserts his railway shop until he

is irrevocably in debt to the station masters and must give it up. He then takes on the role

of Rosie’s lover and he must renounce his role as a tourist guide. As a result, another

self-starter assumes the role and even answers to the name Railway Raju. He willingly

sends his mother away to live with relatives after she disapproves of his relationship with

Rosie, a married woman of a lower caste. As Rosie’s business-manager, Raju lets his

jealousy of her talent, his need to be the center of her universe, and his insatiable greed

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get in the way of his love for her. He loses her, even before he gives in to the urge to

forge her signature on documents from Marco. And, when he decides to stay in Mangala,

Raju appears to walk away from everything and everyone he has ever known or loved.

Paradoxically, he may just walk straight into the role that brings him all of the fame he

ever wanted.

When Raju learns that the villagers—desperate because of the drought

conditions—somehow have the impression that he has offered to keep a fast to bring the

rains, he is touched by their devotion to him and by their gratitude, “The earnestness with

which he spoke brought tears to Raju’s eyes” (95), but he panics too. In one desperate

attempt to end his fast, he confides in Velan, setting right his mistaken identity and laying

bare he secrets. He begins, “I’m prepared to fast for the sake of your people and do

anything if I can help this country—but it is to be done only by a saint. I am no saint”

(98). When Velan’s reaction to the story that Raju tells is unexpected and forgiving—“I

don’t know why you tell me all this, Swami. It’s very kind of you to address at such

length your humble servant’” (207-8)—Raju does not feel exonerated, but frantic and his

thoughts are erratic. At one moment Raju is nearly hysterical, “the fool would not stop

thinking that he [Raju] was a savior” (211). Moments later, Raju seems prepared to fast

until his death:

If by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom, and the grass grow, why not do

it thoroughly? For the first time in his life he was making an honest effort; for the

first time he was learning the thrill of full application outside money and love; for

the first time he was doing a thing in which he was not personally interested. He

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felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through with

the ordeal. (212)

Many critics have held up this passage as evidence that Raju does, in the end, become a

saint, but nothing in the text gives so concrete an answer. Ironically, it is at this very

poignant moment, during which Raju’s life hangs in the balance, that the narrative pulls

back to explain the very least. In this way the narrative itself seems to mimic the

detachment of the Western filmmaker through the distancing lens of the camera, in this

case, Malone’s camera.

Even more ironic is the narrative transition that propels the novel into the final

scene: “This was the starting point” (208). The literal interpretation of this sentence

would suggest that the moment a wandering newspaper correspondent picks up the

headline, “Holy man’s penance to end drought,” the public becomes interested in Raju’s

story and that from this moment forward, the crowd attracted to Raju’s story will grow

bigger. However, to this reader, the transition is terribly suggestive. Is this the “starting

point” of Raju’s story? Is this the moment when Raju begins his ascension into

sainthood? Are these interpretations mutually exclusive? Does the frenzy of public

interest in the holy man of Mangala, for example, convert Raju into a saint, even when he

may be an imposter? Does this “starting point” suggest the moment at which Raju’s

story ceases to be his own, and becomes instead the story that others—from crowd-

watchers to health department officials, newspaper reporters to the American James J.

Malone—will tell?

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There has been much debate about the final moments of The Guide. Alam writes

that at the ending of the novel, “Narayan has the detachment necessary to laugh at Indian

routes to sainthood as well as western exaltation of Indian mystics” (25). And it is true,

that though the doctors all agree that on the last day of Raju’s fast, his condition is grave,

the people who have gathered to witness a miracle are in good cheer. There is general

fun all around. However, it is unclear whether or not Malone’s cameras capture the

festival-like atmosphere. When Raju, at last, rises to make his final prayer there is the

sense that everyone takes in a breath:

He had to be held by Velan and another on each side. In the profoundest silence

the crowd followed him down. Everyone followed at a solemn, silent pace. The

eastern sky was red. Many in the camp were still sleeping. Raju could not walk,

but he insisted upon pulling himself along all the same. He panted with the effort.

He went down the steps of the river, halting for breath with each step, and finally

reached the basin of water. He stepped into it, shut his eyes, and turned toward

the mountain, his lips muttering the prayer. Velan and another held him each by

an arm. The morning sun was out by now; a great shaft of light illuminated the

surroundings. It was difficult to hold Raju on his feet, as he had a tendency to

flop down. They held him as if he were a baby. Raju opened his eyes, looked

about, and said, “Velan, it’s raining in the hills. I can feel it coming up under my

feet, up my legs—” He sagged down. (220)

Mathur argues, “As regards to the concluding passage supposedly describing Raju’s

martyrdom, critics have waxed eloquent on Raju’s reference to the rains falling in the

hills.” However, Mathur concludes, “there is no suggestion of the rains falling…On the

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other hand, the morning Sun and the great shaft of light illuminating the surroundings

suggest that there is going to be no rain” (75-6). Naik questions whether or not there can

be any conclusion, “Is this only a pathetic delusion of a dying man?...Or, is it only the

final fling of deception and self-deception by a confirmed deceiver?” (653). C. D.

Narasimhaiah infers that the story ends in Raju’s sacrifice, that it is a great expression of

his spiritual ascent. Parameswaran admits, wryly, “I prefer to pay tribute to Narayan’s

ambiguity and art by speculating that this risk, though imposed on Raju and not planned

by him, pays dividends.” She explains, “he recovers from his swoon and graciously

accedes to the humble request of disciples and government and allows glucose-saline

injections to reinvigorate his bloodstream while his halo shines brighter than ever” (214-

15).

There is no way to really know what happens and perhaps Narayan leaves the

ending open to our interpretation so that we experience and imagine every possible,

reasonable ending. In “History, Maya, Dharma,” Gorra aptly points out that “one’s view

of the ending of The Guide depends on where one stands in terms of things like swamis,

and miracle, and prayer” (50). The doctors at the scene have declared Raju’s life,

“valuable to the country” (218). A top priority telegram from the government insists,

“Imperative that Swami should be saved” (218). Rayen declares that Raju’s “efforts to

subdue violence and peace do succeed. Once he starts his fast, crowds pour into

Mangala—not for any fight or violence, but to watch the Mahatma” (72-3). Mathur

suggests that Raju “has put the small village of Mangala on the cultural map of the region

and perhaps more than neutralized the effects of the drought by the boost to the economy

which the thousands of visitors attracted by his fast must have been made to give” (77).

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Even the officials from the Health Department exploit the situation to inoculate the crowd

of villagers against diseases like malaria. In the evenings, they set up educational film

showings about the dangers of mosquitoes and the diseases they can carry. Narayan

writes, “When a huge close-up of a mosquito was shown as the cause of malaria, a

peasant was overheard saying, ‘Such huge mosquitoes! No wonder the people get

malaria in those countries. Our own mosquitoes are so tiny that they are harmless’”

(214). Though the lecturer from the Health Department is so disheartened by the outburst

that he “remained silent for ten minutes” (214), it is generally unclear whether or not

Narayan expects a reader to find comedy in the villager’s ignorance or in the fact that the

lecturer has taken the villager so seriously. I prefer to speculate about what has happened

to James J. Malone. Has he returned on this day of the fast, with his cameras? After all,

he has promised to return. He blocked the entire scene. He tested his film, his lighting

and promised to return.

As I mentioned in Chapter One, in an interview with Neal Conan on Talk of the

Nation on National Public Radio about his book Cosmopolitanism, Appiah uses the

phrase “cross-cultural conversation” as a metaphor for learning about other cultures. He

explained that, “the key thing, if you’re going to be open to the world, is that you

approach the world in the spirit of assuming that you can learn from the world” and then

added as a warning that, “Conversation is only worth doing if you are listening as well as

talking.” It is never clear whether or not Malone is carefully listening to Raju or if he is

interested in knowing an absolute truth. It is certainly hard to miss that nearly every

sensory observation noted in the final page of the novel can be translated movingly onto

film: “the profoundest silence”; the “great shaft of light”; the men who hold Raju “as if

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he were a baby” as Raju mutters the prayer, as well as the hope for a miracle, the hope

that the rains might fall, the apprehension that Raju might die, and the indelible image of

his body sagging down (220). Only one thing is for certain—it would look spectacular

on film.

I would like to think that Malone has made it to the final day of Raju’s fast and

that in the midst of a glaring sun, his camera is poised to capture Raju at prayer. I would

like to think that regardless of what happens, rain or no, miracle or not, death or recovery

at the mercy of governmental disciples, that Malone will be there to capture it all. I

would like to believe that Malone will not only recognize his obligation to the famine-

stricken village of Mangala, but that he will open his own heart, see through the lenses of

his own eyes, and take very seriously the particularity of the lives, practices and beliefs

that are local to Mangala, to learn from the villagers and from Raju, to be influenced by

them and to listen to them carefully. Unfortunately, I believe in my heart the opposite:

that while Malone is interested and respectful of the actual human beings he films, his

primary interest lies with the interests of the American viewers back at home who have

proven time and again that famine at a distance is interesting and engaging to a viewer

who feels a certain obligation to others and that a miracle performed at a distance is

exotic and spiritually uplifting to an audience thirsty for hope. Malone betrays his own

intentions from the very start, when he explains, “I have come to shoot this subject, take

it back to our country, and show it to our people there” (216). Is the subject famine? Is it

sainthood? Is it the potential for a miracle? I suppose it will be what Malone hopes his

audience wants to see.

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The Trivial, the Historically Significant, and the Ideologically Impoverished in

Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter

How does the foreignness of the spirit begin? Tara wondered. Does it

begin right in the center of Calcutta, with forty ruddy Belgian women, fat

foreheads swelling under starched white headdresses, long black habits

intensifying the hostility of the Indian sun? The nuns had taught her to inject the

right degree of venom into words like “common” and “vulgar.” They had taught

her The Pirates of Penzance in singing class, and “If I should die, think only this

of me—” for elocution.

Did the foreignness drift inward with the winter chill at Vassar, as she

watched the New York snow settle over new architecture, blonde girls, Protestant

matrons, and Johnny Mathis? Or was it not till Madison that she first suspected

the faltering of the heart?

—Bharati Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter (37)

At first blush, Bharati Mukherjee’s novel The Tiger’s Daughter is a text primarily

preoccupied with questions of cultural identity for an immigrant subject who feels

dislocated from her native land in the East and not yet sutured to her new home in the

West. In the quotation above, for example, the novel’s protagonist ponders the question,

“How does the foreignness of the spirit begin?” Despite the obvious beginnings—her

years in the United States, her degrees from Vassar and the University of Wisconsin, and

her American husband—Tara, who has returned to Calcutta for the first time in seven

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years, has no simple answer to this poignant question. That Tara concludes, “There were

no definite points in time that one could turn to and accuse or feel ashamed of as the start

of this dull strangeness” (37) is crucial for two reasons. On the one hand, it presupposes

that cultures have a way of unavoidably intermingling; cultures crisscross, transform,

influence, and contaminate one another irrevocably through education, cultural

interaction, and popular media. On the other hand—and perhaps more importantly—

Tara’s epiphany also suggests that cultures have a way of inescapably alienating one

another; they hold themselves apart so that they seem “strange” to one another. Hence,

the “venom” that Tara learns to infuse into words like “common” and “vulgar” from the

nuns at school and Tara’s own Aunt Jharna’s accusation that, “You think you are too

educated for this, don’t you?” (36) and her preoccupation with the idea that Tara has

come to “despise” traditional Indian ways.

As evidenced in the excerpt that opens this chapter, for Tara—the daughter of

wealthy, Bengali, Brahmin parents—“the foreignness” begins, in part, with her privileged

Catholic education at St. Blaise’s, with Belgian nuns in “long black habits” who teach

from a position of racial and moral superiority and with teaching materials from the

West, with the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas learned in singing class and the works

of British poet Rupert Brooke recited for elocution. In fact, the critic Brinda Bose points

out that:

Duality and conflict are not merely a feature of immigrant life in America;

Mukherjee’s women are brought up in a culture that presents such ambiguities

from childhood. The breaking of identities and the discarding of languages

actually begin early, their lives being shaped by the confluence of the rich cultural

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and religious traditions on the one hand, and the ‘new learning’ imposed by

British colonialism in India on the other. (50)

Bose’s observation suggests that because Tara learns English, reads Western texts, and

recites British poetry at school, her identity is torn between two cultures from the very

start, but “the foreignness” must “drift inward” too in more subtle ways, with beloved

musicians like the African-American jazz and pop singer, Johnny Mathis (10, 11, 37,

141) and with Western movie songs like “Que Será Será” (139), with novelists whose

works are read for school like Joseph Conrad (139) and with novels read for pleasure like

Westward Ho! (48), even with secret adolescent fantasies about arranged marriages to

Western film stars like Tony Perkins (56).

So then, “the foreignness of the spirit” that Tara’s friends and relatives so often

accuse her of having begins not only with her American sojourn, her Western university

education, and with what her Aunt Jharna refers to as her “mleccha”—foreigner or

barbarian—husband (36), but with the culmination of a variety of cultural influences—

especially Western mass media from journalism to novels, popular music to television

and cinema—much of which also impact her friends and relatives and take root, as Tara

notes, “right in the center of Calcutta.” Tara’s friends, for example, have access to a vast

array of Western media: British mystery novels are sold by vendors just outside of the

Catelli-Continental Hotel, where Tara’s group of friends often meets (3), the Western

novels the women won as prizes at Catholic school when the women were teenagers line

their bookcases (48), they quote from Tennyson, Keats, and Sassoon (68), the Old

Paradise Cinema plays Hollywood films and American Westerns daily (75), they have

easy access to the Times of London, The New Yorker, and the Herald Tribune (78), they

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watch Perry Mason on T.V. (111), attend Doris Day matinees (190), and listen to songs

like “Lemon Tree,” and “I feel Pretty” on All-India Radio (58, 187, 189). Tara’s friends

also learned English as children, read Western literature in high school and frequent the

cinemas that play American films, but not a single one of them is ever indicted, as Tara

is, for rejecting her Indian heritage.

In contrast to other readings of The Tiger’s Daughter, which tend to focus

primarily on Mukherjee’s preoccupation with questions of cultural identity, this chapter

takes a closer look at how the prevalence of Western media in The Tiger’s Daughter

reveals Mukherjee’s distaste for and desire to challenge prevailing attitudes about caste

and cultural purity amongst the bourgeois Bengali elite. In an interview with Shefali

Desai and Tony Barnstone, Mukherjee describes upper caste Bengali society as “a society

of ‘pure’ culture, where any kind of hanky-panky with bloodline, caste line, is to be

despised” and she cautions that there is, “an enormous amount of danger in the false

retention of pride in bloodlines” (143). The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah

contends that, “Cultural purity is an oxymoron.” He maintains, “The odds are that,

culturally speaking,” nearly all individuals “already live a cosmopolitan life, enriched by

literature, art, and film that come from many places and that contains influences from

many more” (Cosmopolitanism 113). The characters in The Tiger’s Daughter are

certainly influenced, as Appiah suggests, by Western literature, art and film.

However, in The Tiger’s Daughter, Mukherjee’s allusions to Western media do

not celebrate a cosmopolitan life. Instead, such allusions are politically and symbolically

significant because they demonstrate the irony of an elite social class—like the one

depicted in Mukherjee’s novel—that defines itself as “westernized” (44) and “modern”

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(108) and, in the same breath, as culturally pure. In this chapter, I argue that the

bourgeois Bengalis of Mukherjee’s novel, who privilege Western media for their own

prestige and in so doing make use of rhetorical tropes that emphasize difference,

underscore the inadequacies of technology latent in mass media. These tropes, which date

back to the colonialist rhetoric of adventure novels and empire films, underscore not only

the Western media’s inability to construct coherent representations of the unfathomable

realities confronted in the non-Western world, but also emphasize the inability of an elite

social class to confront the injustices that take place right before their eyes.

Why is it then, that scholars like Indrani Mitra have argued that, “If there is a

critique of this society at all,” in The Tiger’s Daughter, “it is merely a mildly censorious

eyebrow raised at an anachronistic world” (290)? I can only imagine that such critics

have mistaken Mukherjee’s psychologically realistic depiction of the awkward inner

identity struggle associated with cultural dislocation for collusion with a society

characterized by—to borrow Frantz Fanon’s words—its “intellectual laziness, spiritual

penury and profoundly cosmopolitan mould” (122). After all, despite the fact that Tara

recognizes very early in her journey that, “seven years in another country, a new

husband, and a new blue passport” cannot be “so easily blotted out” (25), it is clear that a

childhood in Calcutta, the unconditional love of a daughter for her parents, and the

loyalties of one friend to another cannot be so easily blotted out either. It is Tara’s sense

of obligation to her family, her friends, and her class, coupled with her desire to return to

a “home in a class that lived by Victorian rules” in “a city that took for granted most men

were born to suffer” (34) that is so easily confused for “merely a mildly censorious”

raised eyebrow.

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For me, there is no question that “those hard, brilliant cameos of migrant psyches

struggling, often faltering, sometimes refusing and at other times painfully adjusting,

while all the while endeavoring to come to terms with their history” are important to any

reading of The Tiger’s Daughter, as Krishna Sen suggests (26). However, it is equally

important to go one step further to examine what might be masked by the same

“struggling,” “faltering,” “adjusting,” and “coming to terms with.” By looking at The

Tiger’s Daughter with an eye to mass media, Mukherjee’s criticisms of cultural purity—

partially concealed by questions of cultural identity—are unveiled. There is perhaps no

better example of this phenomenon than the manner in which Mukherjee makes a clear

distinction between Tara’s family and friends, who romanticize their membership in a

“pure” society, and Tara, who deliberately abandons her caste by marrying an American.

Initially, this distinction illustrates the extent of Tara’s dislocation from her

childhood home. With her friends, Tara recognizes only “shavings of her personality”

(43) and at lavish celebrations, catered teas, dinners, or elegant parties, Tara begins to

wonder whether or not their “aristocratic omissions” gesture that they disapprove of her

marriage, “They had asked her about the things she brought back, had admired velours

jumpsuit and electric lady-shaver, but not once had they asked her about her husband”

(43). After seven years apart, Tara and her friends appear to have little, aside from

Western comforts, in common and Tara frets over whether or not her friends and the

people she loves most dearly will isolate or alienate her because of her American

husband. In the prayer room with her mother, for example, Tara worries that, “Perhaps

her mother, sitting serenely before God on a tiny rug, no longer loved her either...Perhaps

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her mother was offended that she, no longer a real Brahmin, was constantly in and out of

this sacred room” (50). Through moments like these Mukherjee asks her readers to

imagine what it must feel like to be a stranger in the midst of home, to feel alone in the

company of friends, and to feel unloved in the presence of family.

It is not until later—after Tara’s anxieties and suspicions are confirmed when her

friends brashly suggest that, “her marriage had been imprudent,” after they imply that her

marriage had “eroded all that was fine and sensitive in her Bengali nature” (55), and after

Tara has come to notice that, “In India she felt she was not married to a person but to a

foreigner, and this foreignness was a burden” (62)—that Tara is resilient enough to

examine her old world with the distanced vision of an outsider. With this detached vision

Tara overcomes the turmoil of her own identity crisis and her own hurt feelings to detect

the contradictions inherent amongst the society she has recently rejoined:

They were racial purists thought Tara desperately. They liked foreigners in movie

magazines—Nat Wood and Bob Wagner in faded Photoplays. They loved

Englishmen like Worthington at the British Council. But they did not approve of

foreign marriage partners. So much for the glamour of her own marriage. (86)

It is imperative to note in this excerpt from the novel (and in many that I will discuss

later) that Mukherjee uses allusions to Western mass media (in this case the Hollywood

couple, actress Natalie Wood—herself the daughter of Russian immigrants—and actor

Robert Wagner, whose wedding in the late 1950s was celebrated as the most “glittering

union of the 20th century”) to underscore her condemnation of cultural purity. This

narrative technique consistently undermines the “culturally pure” society of the Bengali

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upper caste for its ancestry in British colonialism and its potentially unconscious present-

day complicity with cultural imperialism.

Throughout The Tiger’s Daughter, Tara’s desire to reconcile two identities and

two worlds—substantiated by the previous example—is palpable, partly because, as

Maya Manju Sharma points out, Tara “could not really go home no matter how many

summers she spent with her family and friends” (6). For Tara, home is not only her

father’s lavish estate in the Calcutta of her childhood but also a two-room New York City

apartment decorated with silk scarves and warmed by the love of an American husband.

As a result, Tara finds that instead of feeling at home in the comfortable alcove of her

father’s house and in the loving affections of longed-for relatives, she feels like a stranger

in an unrecognizable city.

Traveling from the airport with her Bombay relatives, for example, Tara

remembers that “Seven years earlier on her way to Vassar, she had admired the houses on

Marine Drive, had thought them fashionable, but now their shabbiness appalled her” (18).

Looking out of the window on the train from Bombay to Calcutta, she laments that, “For

years she had dreamed of this return to India. She had believed that all hesitations, all

shadowy fears of the time abroad would be erased quite magically...But so far the return

had brought only wounds” (25). Upon her arrival in Calcutta, she senses an odd distance

between herself and her family, “Surrounded by this army of relatives who professed to

love her, and by vendors ringing bells, beggars pulling at sleeves, children coughing on

tracks, Tara felt completely alone” (28). In many ways, during her first return visit to her

homeland, Tara finds that Calcutta is as foreign to her as America on her first day at

Vassar.

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Salman Rushdie, who, like Tara in The Tiger’s Daughter, has also made a second

home in the West, recalls feeling similarly unnerved during his first return visit to his

childhood home in Bombay after nearly half of a lifetime in the West. For “those of us

who emigrated,” Rushdie suggests, “Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes

we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools”

(“Imaginary Homelands” 15). When a stranger on the train from Bombay to Calcutta asks

her, “Madam, are you new here?” Tara replies, “Yes and no” (“Imaginary Homelands”

22). Her irresolute answer is confirmation of her own plural and simultaneously partial

identity. Though she belongs to both India and America, she also belongs—to borrow

Rushdie’s term—“elsewhere” (12), to no place and to no one. Though this intermediate

position—from which Tara can straddle two cultures and also feel as though she falls

somehow between them—can be painful, scholars like Rushdie have come to treasure

this plural, partial, double vision, because it recognizes “that all systems of knowledge,

all views of the world, are never totalizing, whole or pure, but incomplete, muddled and

hybrid” (McLeod 215).

In The Tiger’s Daughter, Mukherjee gives Tara this kaleidoscopic vision, on the

one hand, to depict the agony of the migrant experience: the dislocation, the alienation

and the loss. On the other hand, with this same vision, Mukherjee hints at, not only

Tara’s willingness to be open to and learn from other cultures, but Tara’s growing ability

to see the world from multiple perspectives and angles at the same time. Eventually Tara

uses this double-vision to condemn the very notion of a “pure” society, and to

demonstrate the profound injustice that results from the chasm between the rich and the

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poor, which she comes to recognize as partly responsible for the social changes on the

brink in India.

Perhaps Tara begins to suspect how differently she has come to see the world

when she recalls how her “closed little heart had been flooded” (45) by the literature she

read during her first semester at Vassar. Unlike Tara, who came to “worry over a

dissertation on Katherine Mansfield, the plight of women and racial minorities” (33) and

who “allowed literature to disturb the placid surface of her life” (45), her bourgeois

friends—who Mitra describes as “clinging to the cultural artifacts of the imperial West as

the mark of their distinction in society” (290)—use these “cultural artifacts,” like

Western literature, magazines, film, television, popular music, and even colloquialisms as

a kind of class currency. The old man, Joyonto Ray Chowdhury, a veritable fixture at the

Catelli-Continental Hotel where Tara’s group of friends often meets, observes:

They spoke mainly in English, occasionally changing to Bengali in midsentence,

almost always in exclamations, favoring “How dare you!” and “What nonsense!”

He heard them list with enthusiasm movies they had seen or parties they had

recently attended. ... Joyonto heard their conversation alight on imported gadgets,

on stereos, transistors, blenders and percolators; each foreign word was treated

with holy reverence. When they touched current events he thought it was mainly

to show their familiarity with Time magazine or Reader’s Digest. The real

Calcutta, the thick laughter of brutal men, open dustbins, warm and dark where

carcasses were sometimes discarded, did not exist. (41)

Instead, they spar assertively with one another about politics and world events in the

same fashion with which they dish movies and recently attended parties and they appear

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shallow—the old man marvels “at their dedication to the trivial” (46)—as they flaunt

their access to Time magazine and Reader’s Digest with the same self -importance with

which they parade their access to Western gadgets and material comforts.

Ironically, as Sharma aptly points out, in the company of her childhood friends,

Tara “finds that she is different from her contemporaries in ways that cannot be

communicated even if they wished that communication, simply because the society that

Tara rejoins is without a vision of the West that they could read if they chose to” (9

emphasis added). If Tara’s friends in The Tiger’s Daughter wish to have a “vision of the

West,” they certainly have the means to create one, but that would require what Appiah

calls “cosmopolitan curiosity”—an interest in what “we can learn from one another” and

in “alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting” (97). Tara’s “Camac Street friends”

(10)—the vain, puerile Nilima and the proud, unsympathetic Reena, the inept, easily

rattled Pronob and the petty, pretentious Sanjay—all clearly have access to literature,

film, even music that would give them a vision of the West if they cared to look for it.

However, these friends are content to invest only trivial interest into these mass mediated

influences. In the context of their superficiality, the wealthy lifestyles of Tara’s friends

seem ideologically impoverished. Every tangible possession is a badge of wealth, the

ability to debate one another casually in English is a sign of privilege, and a Western

education is nothing more than a status symbol.

In Tara’s first days at Vassar she clung to her friends from home, looked forward

to their letters, and missed them terribly. However, Tara comes to realize that when she

first arrived in the United States, her friends were interested in her life only for superficial

reasons. They “wrote her long and beautiful letters” in which “they complained wittily of

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boredom in Calcutta, the movies at the Metro, the foul temper of the whiskered nun from

Mauritius, the weather’s beastliness,” but Tara recalls that they never once suspected her

“fears” (10). In fact, through what can be gathered from the novel, when Tara first

attends Vassar her friends appear to ask after nothing more than the tangible possessions

that Tara has access to by virtue of living in the United States. Tara notes that, back then,

they “envied her freedom,” but to the young Camac Street girls freedom means record

albums, transparent nighties, and Johnny Mathis live in concert (10)—things that when

Tara lives in the United States, they are never too shy to ask Tara to forward post haste.

On the flip side, during her first years in America, these same friends never ask Tara

whether she is happy, they never wonder about how anxious Tara might feel to attend

college in the States, they never guess that Tara might suspect, during those first days,

that attending Vassar is an “unsalvageable mistake,” or presume to grasp how desperately

she misses them. To feel close to her friends, Tara stands “in line at the post office,

hugging poorly wrapped parcels of shampoos and lipsticks” (10), all out of her devotion

to her friends from home and for whatever bit of affection they might send her way in

return. Years later, as they all sit together on the balcony of the Catelli-Continental

Hotel, it is quite possible to imagine that Tara’s friends, so shallow and superficial, never

once predicted that Tara would ever be so changed.

They likely believed that Tara’s years in the United States would, like their own

knowledge of and fluency with Western mass media, serve to give Tara added social

cachet with the members of their bourgeois society. There is certainly evidence that

Tara’s years in America lend her a degree of distinction amongst the elite members of her

caste, which consistently asserts its status over the lower classes. The fact that when she

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arrives in Bombay, “Little nephews whose names she did not catch were told to touch her

feet in pronam when she was introduced to them as ‘the American auntie’” (17), that her

Bombay relatives pronounce, “‘We wanted to show off the American jamai’... ‘Then the

Indian Ladies Weekly would have taken our pictures!’” (17), and that the parties she

attends when she first returns to Calcutta are written up in the Feminine Weekly and the

Ladies of Calcutta Journal, indicates that Indian publications privilege and mimic the

West; they also perpetuate cultural difference. Tara is, incidentally, more exotic and

interesting when she returns to Calcutta. Tara notes, “It was quite evident to people who

cared about such things that the city’s westernized high society had fallen in love with the

Bengali young woman from the States” (55). But, Tara thinks of her experiences—her

“student days in the foreign” (144)—in a vastly different way than others who are also

“foreign-returned.”

No one scene drives home this point better than the one between Tara and the

Nepali with whom she shares her train compartment on the way to Calcutta. Noticing the

New York address on her luggage tags he announces, “I too am foreign-returned” (23),

seeking to impress Tara with his class status. In a deeply comic scene, he introduces

himself as, “not quite but almost Prince Ratan” (23) and fumbles about in the dark to

produce handfuls of photographs taken with celebrities, bragging, “Bertie Russell is my

friend. And Greg Peck” (24). He refers, of course, to the renowned British philosopher,

essayist, and peace advocate, Bertrand Russell and the American actor, Gregory Peck,

known for such films as To Kill a Mockingbird and Cape Fear. Moments later, he boasts

that he has eaten lunch with “Greg” in Venice and that, “Bertie... has invited me to stay

with him whenever I’m in England” (26). From his use of the familiar, “Bertie” and

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“Greg” to his not-so-subtle intimation that he possesses extrasensory intellect—he

declares proudly, “I don’t mind telling you I have ESP”—Ratan’s efforts to win Tara

over are transparent and also laughable.

Ratan commits a number amusing gaffes and foibles: in response to Tara’s

American luggage tags, he proclaims, “I too have been to England,” he refers to Gregory

Peck as European though he is not in fact, and while he talks big about his friendship

with “Bertie” Russell, Tara points out, “If I’m not mistaken Bertrand Russell died last

year” (26). Though the awkward conversation between Tara and Ratan is quite humorous

indeed, Tara’s exasperated response, “that she had done more than eat with movie stars”

(25), resonates throughout the novel to articulate Tara’s immense disappointment in those

closest to her for not appreciating the complexity of the alarming new feelings stirred up

by her seven years in America. The Tiger’s Daughter is full of moments that echo Tara’s

conversation with the Nepali on the train, like, for instance, when Tara’s friends are

“perfectly relaxed as they discussed her hair, the shade of her lipstick, her sunglasses”

with a “tremendous capacity for surfaces” (42), or when “They longed to listen to stories

about America, about television and automobiles and frozen foods and record players”

(56), but never deign to ask her about the life she leads in the second country to become

her home. Like Ratan, their prestige-garnering attachments to the West, seem fostered by

the Western mass media, which they greedily consume.

Reading passages like the ones above, it is easy for me to empathize with critics

who read The Tiger’s Daughter and cringe at the ideologically bankrupt principles of

Tara’s exclusive circle of friends. Debjani Banerjee remarks that Bharati Mukherjee

“deserves commendation for her sympathetic but perceptive recreation of the elitist

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establishment of Calcutta which could have been more effective politically had the

juxtaposing vision...not been so relentlessly negative” (164). Furthermore, as Rebecca

Sultana points out, “The question is not whether Mukherjee is authentically representing

the people that she portrays in her books” (“Rewriting Nationalism” 63), it is rather, a

question—as Gayatri Spivak notes—of teasing out “what is not there” (“Rewriting

Nationalism” 61). There is no doubt, as Banerjee, Sultana, and Spivak all mention, that

the central characters in The Tiger’s Daughter are the bourgeois, the privileged, those

insulated and distanced from the dark and sinister forces amongst them. This sense of

class distinction is reinforced by the references to Western mass media, which appear so

frequently as class, caste and status symbols. Those susceptible to the daily horrors of

hunger, disease, and poverty make only peripheral appearances in the novel, but that does

not mean that Mukherjee writes about the upper castes without a shred of criticism.

Debjani Banerjee wonders, “Perhaps Mukherjee’s text pleads ignorance of the

‘Other,’ the undifferentiated, subaltern classes of Calcutta, as a reason for the gap created

in the text by their nebulous presence” (163). I cannot disagree wholeheartedly with

Banerjee’s useful hypothesis, or with her conclusion that, “while focusing on the

privileged sectors, Mukherjee perpetuates silence and lack of communication between

two groups of people” (164). After all, even Mukherjee herself has admitted to Desai and

Barnstone:

I’m attacked ... because I’m—their word is “privileged” ... Because if I’m writing

about people exactly like me—women from a certain background and with a

certain status—then I’m immediately elitist and have nothing worthwhile to say.

(136-37)

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However, it is difficult for me to ignore the possibility that perhaps Mukherjee’s critique

of high society culture is more scathing by way of her omissions. That the subaltern

classes have little voice in the drama that unfolds in The Tiger’s Daughter is in testimony

to the many ways that they are marginalized by their culture, by their caste system, and

subsequently by the entire politics of hierarchical power structures.

In a particularly provocative scene, the desultory conversation of Tara’s friends, a

news broadcast on All-India Radio Calcutta, and a demonstration below the Catelli-

Continental Hotel all converge to pit the trivial lives of Tara’s Camac Street friends

against the historical significance of the Naxalite movement (a militant communist

uprising which I will discuss in further detail later), but which can (for now) be

recognized in the “heartbeat slogans” of the rioters who chant, “Blood Bath! Blood

Bath!” (60), as well as, “Shed Blood, blood shed” (61), which resonate with the mantra of

dedicated Naxalite activists who fought out of, what Mitra describes as, “bloodshed and

heroism” (288). In their conversation about the current troubled times, it is notable that

the word, Naxalite, is never mentioned and that the word, communist, is only articulated,

in its entirety, one time, when one of them cries, “It’s going communist” (44). Instead,

the characters consistently refer to “monkey tricks” (57), “isolated skirmishes” (57),

“demonstrators” (57), “marchers” (58), “gheraos” (mobs) (60), “violence in the streets”

(61), “race riots” (89), “goondahs” (hooligans) (133), “chinless and morally weak

persons” (135), and my personal favorite, “left-of-leftists” (44). However, all of their

attempts to reduce the revolutionary protests to the size of an entertaining spectacle

backfire. Rather than making the protesters appear as either violent criminals or peevish

ruffians, they make themselves appear criminally frivolous on an appalling scale. They

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watch the protest with the same interest with which they would watch a soap opera

unfold on television, while the riot takes place literally right below them.

In the midst of one rally, Nilima declares with Marie Antoinettish naïveté, “You

know, I can’t bring myself to read any Dostoevski” (44), not because he is a communist,

but because he is Russian and by Nilima’s standards, that is close enough. She

concludes, “So, what, he was a Russian, wasn’t he?” (44). Never mind that he wrote

Crime and Punishment. As the radio broadcaster Gopa Kumar Bose announces, “Eight

men have been taken to hospital,” Nilima interjects, “Don’t be a dashed bore...I don’t

want to hear about bombings. I want music instead” (57). When Tara expresses concern,

Reena consoles her by simply dismissing the riot, “What nonsense you talk! ... It’s just a

routine sort of thing” (58) and Pronob adds, “It’s all a political stunt...Farms are being

looted, landlords are being clubbed to death. This is reform?” (58). Furthermore, as the

procession snakes its way through the streets of Calcutta to narrow the distance between

the demonstrators and the elite upper caste, Tara’s clique, relaxing upon their perch atop

the Catelli-Continental Hotel, chats about how the radio DJ, “Carefree Kevin had taken

charge of the Hit Parade” (58) and asks Tara to teach them more American phrases (59),

never once realizing that upon the terrace of their plush hotel, they are on display as

much as the revolutionaries who are soon to pass below.

As one friend turns to Tara to say, “Your first demonstration, Tara, I hope you

enjoy it” (61), Tara’s instincts are to “tell her friends not to explain” (57). Instead Tara

climbs on top of her chair for a better view, with which she notes:

...at first the procession looked like a giant caterpillar, sluggish and quite

harmless, on the busy road. Then she was able to make out banners, picket signs,

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bricks, soda bottles, bamboo poles. ... From the roof of the Catelli, Tara saw

Calcutta, squeezed horribly together, men, women, infants, some scratching their

crotches, others laughing like tourists in an unfamiliar section of town. And

always the heartbeat of the slogans. (60)

What Tara sees from the height of the Catelli-Continental is not just a crowd of men,

women, and children squeezed hideously as one mob, but she bears witness to two

classes of people who are beginning to be squashed together out of the injustice of their

circumstances, so that they can no longer ignore each other.

Sharma argues that, “This works two ways: those who view are also exposed to

the scrutiny of those they sit and comment on all day” and that, “suspended above the

sidewalk of Park Street” they are seen by the crowd as “jeweled fish in a fancy bowl in

which the water level is sinking day by day” (12-13). That many critics do not underscore

the irony in Reena’s response to the demonstration, “It isn’t really as bad as it sounds on

the radio. They [the radio announcers] are famous for exaggerating” (61-2), when the

entire event unfolds within her eyeshot, is deeply troubling to this reader, particularly

because Sharma’s point is emphasized at the close of the novel, when Tara and her

friends try to escape the Catelli-Continental in the midst of a riot and end up physically

clashing with an angry mob. When Tara and her friend cower inside of Sanjay’s car as

angry protesters hurl stones, soda bottles, and their fists at the small fiat and Pronob is

beaten until he bleeds profusely, it is decidedly clear that the radio broadcast is not, in

fact, an exaggeration. Ironically, Tara’s friends afford an exaggerated importance to the

Western mass media they have access to via their class privilege, while they defiantly

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ignore the importance of the information afforded to them via their own media

infrastructures.

As Mukherjee writes about the two riots depicted within The Tiger’s Daughter, it

is important to note that the novel never describes the Naxalite movement from the

perspective of the revolutionaries. If she had, The Tiger’s Daughter might take on a note

of the revolutionary tenor that underpins the decade during which The Tiger’s Daughter

takes place. Many critics have condemned Mukherjee for making light of the Naxalite

uprising’s historical and political magnitude. Critics like Sultana suggest that “the

Naxalite uprising of the 1970s...rocked the eastern and southeastern sections of India”

(“Rewriting Nationalism” 65). Mitra explains that, “Many of us who grew up in Calcutta

in the 1970s knew ourselves to be in some way touched, perhaps transformed, by the

storm of that revolution and the epoch of despair that followed” (288) when between the

years 1967 and 1973 landless farm workers raised arms against wealthy landowners in

movements that were structured, militant, and led by a “radical section of the Bengali

communist intelligentsia” (287). Rabindra Ray explains that, “the word Naxalite was...a

word loaded with nameless fears and aspirations, stirring hopes or despair, and always

strong passions” (3). And, Sumanto Banerjee poignantly argues that after Naxalbari,

“nothing could ever be quite the same in the Indian countryside” (i).

It is not difficult to understand why critics have been hard on Mukherjee for her

treatment of this political movement when in comparison to the remarks of Sultana,

Mitra, Ray, and Banerjee, Tara’s friends refer to these troubled times with general

indifference. One proclaims, “Really, everything, I mean just everything’s gone horribly”

(43) and another declares, “Calcutta’s going to the dogs. No question about it,” (44) in

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agreement. Furthermore, the demonstrators are juxtaposed to Tara and her friends who

gossip with one another on the balcony of the very hotel beneath which the rioters pass.

From their vantage point, the protest rally is scaled down to Lilliputian size. Debjani

Banerjee tempers her criticism of Mukherjee by noting that the “‘actualities’ of the

political events that Mukherjee refers to may not be her intended subject,” but goes on to

argue that:

the Naxalite movement, the political context invoked in the text, is consistently

undermined; destruction and loss of lives are emphasized while the revolutionary

tenor which rocked Calcutta in the late sixties and early seventies is overlooked.

(162)

Sultana, with a nod of agreement, suggests that, “The revolution’s positive aspects are

eschewed from her representation, the oppressive economic relations that had contributed

to the growth of unrest among the peasants and working classes are glossed over”

(“Rewriting Nationalism” 65). Mitra too, contends that, “The revolutionary potential of

the Naxalite movement and other anti-caste, anti-class movements of the time becomes

diminished in Mukherjee’s text to the disgruntled actions of peevish schoolboys” (288).

I agree with these critics to the extent to which they condemn Tara’s friends for

their unsettling naïveté. After all, one of them coldly turns to Tara and exclaims, “Wait

till you’ve seen a riot here. They’re really something” (42). But, I disagree with them to

the extent to which they argue, as Sultana does, that Mukherjee empathizes with the

problems of Tara’s friends and that, “the dominant classes implicated in this oppression

emerge as the victims of random violence” (“Rewriting Nationalism” 65), or to the extent

to which they argue as Mitra does, that, “Mukherjee can see only the end of all order and

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the onset of total anarchy” (290). On the contrary, I would argue that the very fact that

the text depicts the upper class as too shallow and self-absorbed to fully comprehend how

they, themselves, have contributed to the current political unrest, and furthermore, that

they choose to ignore the severity of the uprising when they are confronted by it in the

press and in the streets, implies the opposite.

Set against the backdrop of the Naxalite uprising, The Tiger’s Daughter is full of

uneasy ironies. Tara’s friend Sanjay, for example, composes a nostalgic tribute for a

foreign newspaper glorifying the affluent neighborhood in which all of the members of

Tara’s group were raised. In it, Sanjay writes:

When the heart reaches Camac Street it discovers the old Calcutta, the fair

Calcutta, the Calcutta that never again will be. It has no quarrel with the English

for it is too rich and too sophisticated to be peevish. There are few houses on

Camac Street and those that are there are set far back from the sidewalks. The

houses are immense and they mystify the poorer Calcations and enrage the

nouveau riche. These houses are not houses, but veritable compounds. Within

the walled compounds are aging gardeners, beautiful women, spoiled dogs, and

liveried servants. (65-6)

While Sanjay’s article may very well “capture his love of Camac Street” (66), as duly

noted by a very satisfied Sanjay himself, juxtaposed against the rioting in the streets, it

also captures the very injustice that fuels the revolutionary spirit of the poor in the first

place. Tara notes that, “The [local] newspapers were full of epidemics, collisions, fatal

quarrels and starvation. Even beheadings of landlords in front of their families” (97), but

all of that seems far removed from a place like Camac Street, which far from representing

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what Sanjay calls, “the fair Calcutta,” represents instead the antiseptic disregard of the

aristocracy, where spoiled dogs are better fed than malnourished children, its wealth and

sophistication so much like the imperial prosperity of Victorian times and by using the

same distancing techniques of the Western mass media. If Calcutta’s own local media

outlets have so much power to distance the upper caste from the lower caste, imagine by

comparison, how far removed a typical American feels from the famines and epidemics

that take place halfway around the world.

Before Tara left for Vassar, she too was content to live her sophisticated life and

ignore the daily tragedies of India, to simply overlook the real India surrounding her

restful and privileged life. Mukherjee notes, “The years away from India had made her

self-centered. She took everything, the heat, the beggars, as personal insults and

challenges” (86). Amongst her friends, who take the very chasm between the rich and

poor in stride as a matter of fact—Sanjay, for example, “hinted that there was something

vaguely unpatriotic about her depression” (85)—Tara seems like a possibly redemptive

force. Even Tara’s parents make light of those who are starving in the midst of their own

wealth. Noticing how thin Tara has become during her years in America, her father

jokes, “Yes, yes, that’s all Mummy and I hear from these new Bengali doctors. I tell

them if it was healthy to be thin then Calcutta would be the healthiest city in the world”

(28). While Reena is capable of remaining immune to the barrage of suffering in the

streets of Calcutta, saying things like, “These foreigners just want to take snaps of

bullock carts and garbage dumps. They’re not satisfied with modern people like us”

(108), Tara, on the other hand,

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wanted to tell her friend that the little things had begun to upset her, that of late

she had been outraged by Calcutta, that there were too many people sprawled in

alleys and storefronts and staircases. She longed for the Bengal of Satyajit Ray,

children running through cool green spaces, aristocrats despairing in music rooms

or empty palaces. She hated Calcutta because it had given her kids eating yoghurt

off dirty sidewalks. (105)

It is interesting to note, however, that Tara’s memories of untroubled times in Calcutta

are pieced together from the scenes of one of India’s greatest filmmakers, not from the

various scraps of her own memory, because Tara does not immediately recognize that the

horrors that face her on the streets of Calcutta upon her return visit have always been

there. She has “remembered” an imaginary Calcutta, one which has been immortalized on

film, but what is clear from the excerpt above is that it is more likely that Calcutta was

always troubled, and that in the past, Tara had been able to walk alongside starving

children without feeling a moral obligation, without feeling an ounce of guilt, without

feeling—like Sanjay with his unbridled love for Camac Street—that something was

inherently wrong with the Calcutta she loved so dearly.

Ironically, it may be that Tara has learned to see the “real” Calcutta only through

Western representations of developing countries, through American news programs

casually devoted to intervening when young nations face famine, cruelty or poverty. One

might suspect that it was American television that taught Tara eventually to recognize

Calcutta’s ugly side. By contrast, Tara remembers that back at Vassar, she had defended

Calcutta to the girls in her dormitory who, “identified her with the population explosion,

the loop, vasectomy in railway stations,” with aspects of Indian life with which Tara had

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very little experience and from which the people in Tara’s life had gone to great pains to

shield her, but that Tara had witnessed nonetheless. Tara remembers that her chauffeur

carried smelling salts in his glove compartment lest some outside element offend her

sensitive nature and though Tara struggled to separate the Calcutta of her father’s Camac

Street estate from Calcutta’s darker side, Mukherjee writes,

Tara had never been farther than Shambazar. She could not fully visualize

tenements and beggars. Nor did she wish to talk about it. Dark skinny buildings,

devious alleys, rotting garbage, idle men leaning against barred windows, child-

beggars in front of food stalls: all this made her physically sick. ... Her memory,

elastic, warm and gentle, showed her families asleep on sidewalks, children curled

in wooden crates, and this undermined her remarks. (11-12)

Before leaving Calcutta, Tara could see beyond these difficult visions. With the help of

her smelling salts, she could look past the dirty pictures of children without homes,

parents unable to feed their families, urban squalor, and famine, and blame the poor for

being poor, without considering the socioeconomic conditions that prevent them from

ever getting ahead.

During her return visit to Calcutta, Tara experiences all of these things first hand

and, recalling the times when her curious dorm mates asked her to paint a picture of the

slums of India, suffers “an alarming new feeling that she was an apprentice to some great

thing or power,” that “We’re all involved in each other’s fates” (130). Though

Mukherjee claims, “If I had only been interested in being heard and selling, I would have

written quaint little stories about the Indian ghetto, or nostalgia about aristocratic

Calcutta, which is what publishers want” (qtd. in Onega), Debjani Banerjee argues just

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the opposite, that Mukherjee, “sensationalizes Tara’s visit to the slums; the Indian

bourgeois and Western reader alike are taken on a guided tour” (166). Banerjee implies

that Western readers, like American publishers, or like Tara’s roommates in college, are

fascinated by the abject poverty on display in Calcutta. To some degree Banerjee’s

assertion is true. Western mass media often cultivate exotic images of suffering that

allow a Western audience to feel relief that this anguish takes place over there instead of

over here. Such programs carry rhetorical markers that suggest (often unconsciously)

that the West is superior and more civilized than the East. I might be more inclined to

agree with Banerjee if Bharati Mukherjee’s own treatment of Tara’s trip to the bustee

(slum) with the old man, Joyonto Ray Chowdhury and her friend Reena were not so

wryly and cynically satirical in its own right.

Upon arriving at the bustee, Tara notices crowds of squatters waiting in line for

the movies, giant posters of Hindi film stars ironically juxtaposed to long lines of

homeless men and women on the sidewalks. Even in the slums the movies offer a means

of escape. Tara takes inventory of shacks constructed out of movie posters and decorated

with slogans like “CAPITALISM ENSLAVES” (116), quite literally bringing the

political message to life. Looking at children playing in dirty, rusty water Tara observes

an adorably sweet little girl splashing about and notes that she would be, “perfect for

adoption ads in western periodicals: For only a dollar fifty a day you can make this

beautiful Indian girl happy. She has no mother and father” (117). The fact that Tara

internalizes what she sees at the bustee through the lens of Western adoption ads

indicates that these commercials have in some way prepared her to understand what she

could have noticed her entire life. Furthermore, two young men who live in the bustee

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agree to show them around the tenement and even entertain them, singing film songs and

acting out love scenes from movies starring Raj Kapoor and Vijayantimala as though

making a trip to the slums is as normal as making a trip to the Taj Mahal. Most satirical

of all, is Mukherjee’s portrayal of Reena, who feels indignant rather than compassionate

in the midst of this deeply poverty-stricken dwelling. “This is criminal!” she says, “How

is it they do this to your private personal property...Can’t you throw them out?” (117).

Reena spends the entire day calmly taking down the names of every squatter she sees, so

that at the end of the afternoon, she can authoritatively, “like a tremulous Brahminical

Joan of Arc” look Mr. Chowdhury in the face and say, “‘It’s your duty to serve them new

eviction notices’” (123) as if she alone could wipe away all of the poverty in Calcutta by

simply throwing a community of destitute people with no alternative place to go off of

Joyonto’s property.

Tara, conversely, is at one point so moved that she, “wanted to adopt all the

children playing with water” (117). Unlike Reena, who builds a wall between herself and

the people that she encounters at the bustee, the old man, Joyonto, aspires to reach out to

Tara, to show her how Calcutta is changing, and Tara follows him to prove to her

American husband—who accuses her of being utterly passive in the midst of great

injustices—that she has not returned to Calcutta only to ignore the suffering of others.

One might think that being in the mere presence of Joyonto’s compound with its

squatters, refugees, and “huts made of canvas cloth, corrugated tin, asbestos sheets,

bamboo poles, cardboard pieces and occasional bricks torn loose from compound walls”

(116) before returning home to her father, the Bengal Tiger’s grand estate, where she and

Reena “could gaze at the deserted lawns, wander through the empty marble rooms, linger

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on the spacious verandahs, bathe themselves in the ‘English’ style bathroom, and regain

their composure before the maid brought them tea and sandwiches” (123) would provide

Tara with enough perspective to change her forever. However, Mukherjee’s novel is not

so idealistic. Tara even admits to herself that perhaps, by agreeing to accompany Joyonto

to the bustee she was seeking some “big crisis that she could later point to and say: that

was when I became a totally different person” (119). Trinh Minh-ha writes that, “The

understanding of difference is a shared responsibility, which requires a minimum of

willingness to reach out to the unknown” (85). Though Tara’s motives for agreeing to

take the trip to the bustee may not be the most admirable ones, it has to be enough that

she has gone along with Joyonto willingly, that she, for whatever reasons, desires to be a

more compassionate, or as Appiah would suggest, a more cosmopolitan human being.

At the end of this powerfully provocative scene a reader is left with two

exceedingly lasting impressions: the anger and the hatred that members of the lower caste

harbor for the upper caste, and the very fear that members of the upper caste feel in the

presence of such hatred. Alongside children fit to be in Western adoption ads are bustee-

dwellers whose “obsessive distrust” and “anger against people who were obviously not

squatters” can be read on their faces (117-18). One hisses at Joyonto, “Mister, just tell

your boss we want to spit on his face” (118). These men have no reason to hide their

disgust and their anger seems almost commonplace in the presence of children who feel

the same, like the small girl who confronts Tara:

Except for its size there was nothing childish in the little girl’s face. It had

already assumed the lines of disappointment that it would retain...She came

forward, shrill and angry, circling the visitors like a bird of prey till they

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responded with embarrassed endearments and nods of the head...The arms

quivered with hatred and Tara, who was only inches away, saw blood spreading

on the bandage. There were sores on the little girl’s legs, sores that oozed bloody

pus with each shiver of hatred. (122-22)

As the child clings to Tara’s sari and screams that she wants one just like it, Tara is

shaken to the core by the ferocity of one child’s anger, her jealousy and fury. Mukherjee

writes that Tara “lost her composure” (122). Who would choose to adopt this little girl?

Up close, Tara realizes, poverty is nothing like the sanitized images captured for Western

adoption ads. There is nothing sweet about an angry child with leprosy, and there is no

compassion in Tara’s response, or tenderness in the fact that she becomes so unwound

that later she can scarcely piece together what took place. Everyone has a different

version of the truth: “Had Tara fallen on the child in order to beat her to silence? Or had

the child thrown herself on Tara and tugged at her dhakai sari with bloody poisonous

hands? Reena insisted she had heard Tara scream, Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”

(122) before two men grabbed the girl to fling her, like a rag doll, out of the room.

Writing to her American husband, Tara explains that seeing the bustee was,

“Absolutely incredible, David. I mean you can’t imagine how horrible it was. Like

seeing it at the movies or something” (129). Her letter can be read in two ways. On the

one hand, Tara’s reaction seems cool and dismissive, as if she had gone to the slums for

entertainment and could view hardship in the same manner with which she could watch a

film. On the other hand, it is possible to imagine that she has chosen to use film as a

metaphor in order to try to distance herself from the reality of what she has seen. By

suggesting that the bustee was like seeing something at the movies, Tara implies that it

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was too horrible, too real, so disturbing that it seemed intentionally so, made possible

only through the work of editing and special effects. Mukherjee uses similes comparing

actual people to figures seen in photographs, television images, or pictures from the

movie screen to represent distance on several other occasions. On one occasion—to

establish the physical and emotional distance between Tara and David—Mukherjee

writes that for Tara, it was as though David were no longer a living, breathing human

being, but that he was instead a figure on the television, “Though David wrote regularly,

the David of the aerogrammes was unfamiliar to Tara. He seemed like a figure standing

in shadows, or a foreigner with an accent on television” (62). On another occasion—

Tara’s trip to the funeral pyres with Joyonto—Mukherjee writes, “Just one corpse was

burning, and that too at such a distance that it seemed to occur in a faded snapshot” (80).

And, at the very end of the novel, Mukherjee uses the same technique to represent a shift

in Tara’s identity. After Tara visits the nuns who taught her at St. Blaise’s, Mukherjee

writes, “All her early ideas of love, fair play and good manners had come from those

women. Now as she saw them in their quaint formation on the steps of St. Blaise’s, they

seemed to her people in a snapshot, yellow and faded” (200-201), as though they are

simply mementos from her past.

Perhaps it is for a similar reason that Tara imagines David in India with his

Minolta camera, taking pictures. The camera represents a fixed perspective and vision as

well as a lack of engagement with the subjects being photographed. While Tara imagines

that David would see the “real” India through the lens of his camera, she also imagines

that he would fail to see India through the lenses of his own two eyes. By extension, if an

individual’s camera can distance the observer from what he sees, then imagine, by

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comparison, how much power a television or film camera has to alienate the viewer from

the projected image. Tara wonders:

...what David would do if he ever came to India. He was not like her. Would he

sling his camera like other Americans and photograph beggars in Shambazar,

squatters in Tollygunge, prostitutes in Free School Street, would he try to capture

in color the pain of Calcutta? She thought he would pass over the obvious.

Instead he would analyze her life and her friends in the lens of his Minolta. He

would group the family carefully, Mummy in new cotton sari on cane chair,

Daddy in “bush coat” beside her, she herself on a morah in dead center, with

servants, maids, and chauffeur in the background smiling fixedly at the camera.

He would explode his flash bulbs at Pronob’s parties, and regret he did not own a

tape recorder. (108)

At the same time, within The Tiger’s Daughter, David’s camera is used to represent the

distance that grows between Tara and her husband, because what David would look for

through the lens of his camera are the things that Tara cannot teach him about India.

Perhaps that is why Tara’s correspondences with David, her exchanges with him

by letter, are consistently marked by two specific anxieties. She worries, on the one hand,

that David has “not been able to understand her country through her” and that by

association, he has “not understood her either” (50). On the other hand, Tara also seems

preoccupied by the nagging suspicion that David would be able to come to India and

understand her own country better than she has been able, “he was wiser than she cared

to admit to herself,” and Tara imagines that David, “would land unannounced at Howrah

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Station and say to the coolie wearing a number, I’d like to see the real India” (108)—

something that perhaps Tara fears she herself has not seen.

These anxieties explain, perhaps, why Tara grows so angry with David’s letters

and so self-conscious with the letters she writes in return. David may have initially

purchased books about India in order to feel closer to Tara during their time apart, in the

same fashion that Tara turns to The New Yorker to feel closer to David by reading

segments like “Goings On About Town” and by keeping track of the baseball statistics

for the New York Mets (79). Mukherjee writes, “She read of crises in the foreign stock

markets, ads for villas in Spain, presidential commissions, the Mets, hoping the foreign

news would bring her closer to David” (78-9). However, David’s letters reveal that the

power of the Western media to bring people closer to one another has its limitations.

Armed with recently gleaned information from his books, David’s letters grow

increasingly judgmental, “David was outraged. He accused her of ‘stupid inanities,’ and

‘callousness.’ He thought the customs she praised merely degraded the poor in India”

(131). Debjani Banerjee writes that, “Tara’s epistolary exchanges with her American

husband provoke her into self-justificatory explanations of her inertia with respect to the

turbulent political situation in India” (166). It is certainly true that Tara spends a great

deal of time trying to defend herself to David. In one letter she writes:

I know you’re saying right now how can I worry about flowers when people are

dying on the streets of Calcutta, how can I be so callous, etc., I know that’s

exactly what you’re saying to yourself. Well, all I can reply is that nothing my

parents could give up would possibly change the life of the poor. (130)

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At another time, Tara censors herself, because “she knew she could never tell David that

the misery of her city was too immense and blurred to be listed and assailed one by one.

That it was fatal to fight for justice” (131). In the end, the exchanges between Tara and

her American husband work in two ways.

On the one hand, as Banerjee suggests, “the disturbing suggestion is that the

relationship between a privileged Indian and her political circumstances must be

mediated by a white, American male” (166-67). On the other hand, Mukherjee implies

that David, who has simply read a few books on India, is in no position to mediate

anything for Tara, a highly educated woman with arguably an insider’s view of the

problems facing Calcutta. After all, Tara writes, “Enough to say that poverty is an art

your people will never master” (129). Though Mukherjee never condemns David’s

behavior outright, she does juxtapose his accusations—of Tara’s “stupid inanities” and

her “callousness”—directly against some of his most insensitive comments. That David

made “horrible analogies between her Calcutta and Czarist Russia on the eve of

revolution,” that he “told her that he thought from the omissions in her letters that a

bloody struggle was inevitable,” and that he suggests, “perhaps Calcutta did not deserve

any better” (131) is deeply patronizing and degrading to Tara. His scathing criticisms of

Calcutta may be true enough, but he dismisses his very own wife’s feelings and the

conflicted emotions she must be experiencing entirely for the sake of his own moral high

ground.

Mitra argues that, “The ultimate developmental goal that the novel posits for Tara

is to be the bearer of progressive Western ideas to a moribund society” (294). Given that

it is David who insists that Tara ought to take up such an agenda, I cannot say that I agree

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entirely with Mitra’s assessment. It seems to me that in The Tiger’s Daughter, if there is

to be any developmental goal, it is for Tara to embrace the progressive ideals of the West.

I do not mean to suggest, as Rebecca Sultana does that Mukherjee “paradoxically creates

a binary of the East and West being oppressed and liberated respectively” (“Patchwork

Creations” 2). After all, Tara is infinitely aware of the discrimination and the injustices

that take place in the United States. Though her friends protest, “What nonsense!” and

that, “They knew America was lovely, they knew New York was not like Calcutta,” Tara

cannot shake the memories of ghettos and student demonstrations (56). In the midst of

the riot beneath the Catelli-Continental Hotel, Tara’s first instinct is to compare the

violence in the streets with similar riots she witnessed on television in the United States,

“Oh no, Tara thought. I saw Chicago on television, and Newark and Detroit” (61).

Thinking of muggings, and the fear of muggings, and the fear of being watched, she

confides in Sanjay that, “New York...was a gruesome nightmare” (69). And, when Reena

falls for her foreign-exchange student, the young African-American Washington

McDowell, and her heart is broken, Tara consoles her by suggesting, “In America a girl

like you and a boy like McDowell would never have met—so it’s natural that he’s gone

away” (154). Even Sanjay pronounces, “I’ve been keeping up with foreign magazines. I

know discrimination still exists. He can’t fool me. We aren’t the only backward

country!” (150). What I do mean to suggest is that while Tara may not be ready to fight

to change the culturally pure ideals of her high society, she may, by the end of the novel,

be ready to reject them outright.

It is imperative to keep in mind that The Tiger’s Daughter is a novel about a

young woman’s journey. At twenty-two, Tara’s eyes are just being opened. Unlike the

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two Western characters, Washington McDowell, the student civil rights activist, and

Antonia Whitehead, the social worker, who have come to India, “because India needs

help” and because “The third world has to be roused to help itself” (166), Tara has simply

come to India to visit with her friends and family. Mitra argues that McDowell and

Whitehead, “with their liberal-humanist agenda, are largely incomprehensible to a native

population that still lives by Victorian rules” and that, “Therefore in the ‘new’ Bengali

woman, with roots in both worlds, the text attempts to construct the ideal cultural

ambassador” (294). While there is ample evidence of Mitra’s first point, insofar as

Mitra’s second point goes there is actually evidence to the contrary.

Upon his arrival, Reena’s family, expecting an American boy, “who could sing

movie songs like “‘Que Será Será’ and say a few phrases in imperfect Bengali to delight

their host and hostess” (139), have little idea of what to do with Washington McDowell.

Each member of the family tries to reach out to McDowell, but do so in deeply

inappropriate and offensive ways. Reena’s mother, for example, “not familiar with the

ways of Africans,” draws on what knowledge she has gleaned from “Tarzan movies”

(139) and Reena’s father tries to entertain McDowell by singing “a few bars from

‘Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy’” and standing up to do his “Bing Crosby imitation” (144).

Reena, who fancies herself as more sophisticated in the ways of the world than her

parents, tries to reach out to McDowell by explaining how “she knew something about

his people from having read The Negro of Narcissus at St. Blaise’s” (143). The fact that

Reena “cleans up” the title of Conrad’s novel, actually titled The Nigger of the

‘Narcissus,’ so as not to offend McDowell probably does more to alienate McDowell

than to reach out to him. The intentional revision of the novel’s title can be read as

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overly self-conscious. And Sanjay, who translates Washington McDowell’s comment, “I

don’t need no pills” in the case that “the others had not understood McDowell’s accent”

(145) does not do much better either.

Antonia Whitehead stirs even stronger feelings amongst Tara’s bourgeois family

and friends. In a letter to the Calcutta Observer, Sanjay writes that Antonia Whitehead

is, “dangerous. She is like a snake tightly coiled.” In regards to her liberal ideologies, he

adds, “She talks in Shambazar of ‘democratization’ and ‘politicization,’ of parity and

socioeconomic balance. But I urge you Calcatians to throw out this perilous lady before

it is too late” (165). These sentiments come as no surprise from Sanjay who vehemently

opposes the protests of the lower classes and venomously writes in his own editorial in

response to the revolutionary protests taking place in the streets of Calcutta:

It is inconceivable that in this day and age of Calcutta’s enlightenment a militant

majority should try to impose its fierce will on a responsible tax-paying minority.

Does not a minority have rights? Does not the minority have feelings? We ask

these painful questions because the vocal majority will not ask them. (147)

However, Antonia Whitehead unintentionally manages to offend even the most mild-

mannered people in Tara’s circle, when after taking part in a religious ritual, she lectures

the worshipers, advocating, “less religious excitement and more birth-control devices,”

and claims, “Indians should...demand economic reforms and social upheavals...artesian

wells in the rainless villages...improved farming techniques and better trained nurses”

(174-75). Though Antonia proposes several solid ideas for improving the infrastructure of

India and does so good-naturedly and in the spirit of helpfulness, she offends the very

people she has traveled to protect.

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And Tara, whom Mitra claims to be the “ideal cultural ambassador,” finds herself

in both cases at a loss for words. In the presence of McDowell, she thinks, “He’s so

American...even more than David,” and unintentionally offends him by assuming that he

grew up in one of Los Angeles’ roughest neighborhoods. In his presence, she concludes,

“It was impossible to be a bridge for anyone” (144). Likewise, in Antonia, Tara

recognizes some of her own social hiccups upon arriving in Calcutta, “She recalled again

her own bad starts and mistakes. To Pronob and his group at the Catelli she must have

seemed as naive and dangerous as Antonia” (175). In the end, Tara decides, “There was

no way to warn the girl, no way they could be friends” (175). Over and again, Tara’s trip

home reinforces the notion that it is impossible to interpret one culture for another,

impossible to be a cultural ambassador.

If her journey teaches her anything, it teaches her to reexamine both of her

worlds, with a clearer sense of vision, but Tara is left without the ability to articulate all

that she has discovered. Trying to compose a letter to David, Tara ascertains that, “It was

so vague, so pointless, so diffuse, this trip home to India” (130). If there is a hero at all in

The Tiger’s Daughter, it would have to be the old Joyonto Ray Chowdhury, who alone

with his cryptic word games, his “short-sighted visionary small talk” (40), shouts into a

bull horn in the middle of a riot and says, “The year of the puppy is over, do you

understand? The age of snakes is coming but the boy doesn’t know it yet...We who seven

years ago spoke of honor...” (208). Though enigmatic, Joyonto’s remarks and

observations seem to underscore, poignantly, the shallow lives that the young bourgeois

men and women of Tara’s circle lead. When no one else seems to understand him, Tara

alone recognizes that there is some crucial truth in the midst of his ramblings.

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At home in Calcutta, “in a class that lived by Victorian rules, changed decisively

by the Hindu imagination” (34), Tara realizes that despite the many curious ways in

which the two cultures she belongs to touch, contaminate, and intermingle with one

another—in portmanteau words, popular songs, television shows, novels, lines of poetry,

expressions, gadgets, in the bits of this and that which combine in so many delightful

ways—they are separate in ways that cannot be reconciled. This is evidenced particularly

because the Western mass media, through which two cultures come to know each other,

do more to point out what makes one culture strange to another than the opposite.

Furthermore, the cultural exchange played out through the mass media is wholly unequal.

While in India, Tara’s friends read Western novels and learn English at school, the same

cannot be said of American school children, who are unlikely to read much if any Indian

literature and even more unlikely to learn any of India’s primary languages in a

classroom.

On the flip side, Sunil Khilnani writes that, in contrast to the U.S. constitution,

which preserves an individual’s rights, and which insists upon the ideal, “that all men are

created equal,” the Indian Constitution establishes instead, “a language of community

rights” that simultaneously produces bearers of those rights (36). In other words, while

there is still discrimination in the United States, it exists within an entirely different

matrix. In New York, Tara notes, “students were rioting about campus recruiters and far-

away wars rather than the price of rice or the stiffness of final exams.” They rioted, Tara

points out, “Because people were agitated over pollution,” and that in Calcutta, “The only

pollution she had been warned against...was caste pollution” (34). In Calcutta there exists

still a sincere anxiety that if one culture crisscrosses too much with another, the entire

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system will unravel. If American civil rights, equal protections under the law, and the

ideal of social equality threaten to change or dismantle the social divisions in India (so

modeled after the colonialist rhetoric of Western leadership and still perhaps perpetuated

by the privileging of Western media), Tara’s decision, at the end of The Tiger’s

Daughter, to return to the United States, expresses her desire to reject the notions of

cultural purity and caste pollution that govern the culture of her childhood, but it does

little to challenge them.

The Tiger’s Daughter demonstrates how mass media reveal that that there is no

definitive answer to the question, “Where does the foreignness of the spirit begin?” (37).

Mukherjee insists, “I’m looking for every side to break down in some way and constantly

create a new whole” (Desai & Barnstone142). This is an admirable goal. However, while

the exchange of mass media across cultures has the power to catalyze this breaking

down—at least in superficial ways—The Tiger’s Daughter shows us again and again, that

mass media do not just help us to see each other, mass media also help us to ignore one

another, to hold each other at arm’s length as strange or different or exotic, inferior,

backward, or uncivilized.

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The Price of Western Media in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

She [Rahel] looked back at the looming, gabled, house-shaped

Hole in the Universe and imagined living in the silver bowl that Baby

Kochamma had installed on the roof. It looked large enough for people to

live in. Certainly it was bigger than a lot of people’s homes. Bigger, for

instance, than Kochu Maria’s cramped quarters.

If they slept there, she and Estha, curled together like fetuses in a

shallow steel womb, what would Hulk Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow do?

If the dish were occupied, where would they go? Would they slip through

the chimneys into Baby Kochamma’s life and TV? Would they land on

the stove with a Heeaagh!, in their muscles and spangled clothes? Would

the Thin People—the famine-victims and refugees—slip through the

cracks in the doors? Would Genocide slide between the tiles?

—from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (179)

In her novel The God of Small Things, Arudhati Roy juxtaposes the traumatic

events of one fourteen-day period in the winter of 1969 against a second narrative that

takes place twenty-three years later. Like the satellite dish described in the quotation that

begins this chapter—through which Hulk Hogan’s ripped abdominal muscles can be

summoned by the touch of a button with more appeal than a news broadcast about famine

or genocide—Roy uses a narrative structure that effortlessly moves backward and

forward through time not only to balance the choices made by her characters with the

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consequences of their decisions, but also to weigh the wounded lives of three young

children against the failures and flaws of the adults meant to protect them, the poverty of

Untouchable men who are made to feel as though their lives are expendable against the

Touchable middle-class wealth of a family that owns and operates its own factory, and

the “Regional Flavor” (46) of a local culture against the sinister forces of a fierce

entertainment industry and global economy. In other words, Arundhati Roy consistently

puts the “small things” face-to-face with their aggressors and by doing so she gently

recognizes their fragility, while simultaneously noting the “reckless streak that develops

in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big” (173), the

remarkable boldness of resilience.

In The God of Small Things, Roy metaphorically dwarfs local media by

overloading the novel with references to Western media. Though the novel contains a

handful of references to local entertainment—including several allusions to the

Bollywood film, Love in Tokyo, a quick mention of the “best-loved comedian in

Malayalam cinema” Adoor Basi (137), a quoted passage from a traditional Indian song

about a sad, young, bride preparing to wed a man she doesn’t love (209), and several

mentions of traditional kathakali dancers—these allusions are overwhelmed by her

attention to Western media. Her references to Western literature alone are in no short

supply; she mentions The Reader’s Digest World Atlas, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,

Kipling’s The Jungle Book, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Great Gatsby,

Mutiny on the Bounty and myriad children’s books, including Rumpelstiltskin, The Pied

Piper, The Frog Prince, and The Adventures of Susie Squirrel, to name just a few. She

brings up jazz music, lyrics from the soundtrack to The Sound of Music, “Popeye the

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Sailorman,” Busby Berkeley musicals, The Nutcracker Suite, Elvis Presley, AC-DC, and

she quotes from the Rolling Stones’ classic “Ruby Tuesday.” There are allusions to Julie

Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Charlie Chaplin, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Bronze

Buckaroo, and Modern Times as well as references to the news footage of Neil

Armstrong landing on the moon, NBA basketball, Grand Slam Tennis, The Bold and the

Beautiful, the BBC, Phil Donahue, Cops, Santa Barbara, Wrestling Mania, Prime

Bodies, Listerine advertisements, and the NFL. Beyond portraying local entertainment

industries as small things and Western entertainment industries as Huge conglomerates,

Roy’s use of Western media in The God of Small Things serves two main purposes. The

first assists the reader in navigating the plot: the narrative that reconstructs the two

devastating weeks in 1969 uses the film The Sound of Music as a point of reference,

while the second narrative uses the “stainless steel womb” of Baby Kochamma’s satellite

dish to do the same. The second purpose of Roy’s use of Western media is to underscore

the crucial social and political issues at stake and examined in the novel: cultural

imperialism; class, race, and gender privilege; caste pollution; and social responsibility.

Many references to Western media keep the time and pace of the novel through

repetition. Part punctuation and part refrain, these repetitions do more than just create a

sense of cadence, they capture and reinforce the innocence and curiosity of childhood and

accumulate meaning so that each time a phrase is repeated it becomes layered with

significance. These repetitions are, as the narrator notes, “Little things, smashed and

reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning” (32). The “two-egg” twins, Estha and Rahel

(4), for example, are mirror opposites of one another in the manner with which they fix

their hair to emulate the styles of celebrities: while Rahel wears her hair in a “fountain in

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a Love-in-Tokyo” (a ponytail in a beaded hair band made popular by the 1966 Bollywood

film bearing the same name)—“two beads on a rubber band, nothing to do with Love or

Tokyo” (37)—Estha wears his hair in a “puff” to emulate Elvis Presley—“his Elvis puff.

His Special Outing Puff” (37). That Rahel, who styles her hair after the Indian actress

Asha Parekh ends up living in the United States and that Estha, who styles his hair after

the American icon Elvis Presley, stays in India, carries an undercurrent of poetic irony. In

The God of Small Things, Estha and Rahel’s identities are often conflated with these

hairstyles, as in the time when they hide behind their mother’s bedroom door, “A

Surprised Puff and a Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo” (240). Consequently, their identities

are inscribed with new meaning when Estha is teased about his hairstyle, “‘Elvis

Presley,’ Baby Kochamma said for revenge. ‘I’m afraid we’re a little behind the times

here’” (138). Said in the context of meeting their British relatives, Estha and Rahel

internalize their great aunt’s comment and interpret it to mean that they fail to measure up

to their idealized, half-white cousin Sophie Mol. From that point forward, Estha’s

“puff”—modeled after a 1950s rock icon and worn for special occasions during his

childhood in the 1970s—is symbolically layered with feelings of inferiority. Even his

hair is “a little behind the times.”

Likewise, the repeated beat, “dum dum,” from the song “Popeye the Sailorman,”

which a fidgety Rahel gets into trouble for singing at the movies, resurfaces throughout

the text to emphasize, like it does at the Abhilash Talkies, how “Excitement Always Leads

to Tears. Dum dum” (94). The house commonly referred to as “the History House,”

where Kari Saipu lived, “The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native.’

Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz” (51)—by invoking

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the name Kurtz—is imbued with the exploitation of colonialism and the spiritual shadows

of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, in which civility is conflated with

barbarism, in which mankind is depicted as duplicitous, in which life is portrayed as an

infinite struggle between good and evil, and through which Ayemenem is conflated with

darkest Africa. Throughout the novel, every time the History House is mentioned, a

reader knows to take a deep breath, because something sinister is lurking in the

background, and that nothing good can ever come out of Ayemenem’s own Heart of

Darkness.

Even something as seemingly inconsequential as Rahel’s favorite pair of yellow-

rimmed, plastic sunglasses, with red lenses that make “the world look red” (37) take on

an additional dimension of meaning as a symbol of her desire to identify with the West.

In this chapter, I argue that like Rahel, who looks at the world through the red lenses of

her yellow, plastic-rimmed sunglasses and finds that, “Everything is Angry-colored”

(176), if we look at The God of Small Things through the lens of Western media, we find

a careful examination of the strong influence that dominant cultures have over less

affluent nations through the subtle interventions of literature, music, film and television

and of the defiant spirit of those who resist. After all, there are allusions to Western

media and repetitions that have lovely meanings too. Sometimes Western media are

“smashed,” “reconstituted,” and “imbued with new meaning” so that Ammu for instance

changes the meaning of Kipling’s imperialist The Jungle Book so that his text is encoded

with her love for Estha and Rahel. Kipling’s colonialist rhetoric is wiped away when

Ammu gently takes on the voice of Shere Khan as she reads to the twins before bed, “Ye

chose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I

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to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Kahn, who speak!”

and the twins sweetly answer their mother in unison with Kipling’s next words, “And it is

I, Raksha, who answer” (57), or, when, for instance, Ammu uses “Kipling to love her

children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, thou and I (155). Despite these

defiant moments, the novel asks, as Roy asks in her book Power Politics, “Is

globalization about ‘eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of

colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?’” (14). Cultural imperialism

represents yet another means through which Someone Small—this time a local culture or

economy—is made to defend itself against Someone Big—a global entertainment

industry that sets up alluring and seductive visions of Western liberty, commerce, and

identity in societies that have few methods through which to compete.

Throughout The God of Small Things we see how Western media increasingly

underscore complicated systems of cultural domination. Scholar Janet Thormann

explains that, “In an increasingly global economy, the master signifiers of the dominating

international regime increasingly infiltrate local cultures and economies,” they introduce

“new ideals for identification,” “new forms of coercion,” and reinforce “established

forms of injustice” (299). A careful appraisal of the quotation used to open this chapter,

for example, recognizes the gulf between the volume of Western capital and the volume

of suffering in the Third World. Roy insists that, “In India your face is slammed right up

against it [the disparity between rich and poor]. To address it, to deal with it, to not deal

with it, to try and understand it, to insist on not understanding it, to simply survive it—on

a daily, hourly basis—is a fine art” (Power Politics 3). It is noteworthy that when Rahel

studies the satellite dish affixed to the house, she notes that, “It looked large enough for

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people to live in. Certainly it was bigger than a lot of people’s homes. Bigger for

instance than Kochu Maria’s cramped quarters” (179). A common-enough fixture in

Western homes, the satellite dish that Rahel’s great aunt has installed on the roof of her

home is a symbol of middle-class privilege for a woman who “had lived her life

backwards,” who had “renounced the material world” when she was young, but as she

grew older embraced it (23). Thormann adds that, “The entertainment industry motivates

and furthers the materialism and self-righteous status of the middle class citizen” (302).

That the satellite dish alone is larger than the servant’s quarters is further evidence to

Baby Kochamma of its significant contribution to her class standing as a Caste Roman

Catholic.

When Rahel envisions television personalities and documentary subjects swirling

to life above the satellite dish and infiltrating the house by means of the chimney or the

cracks in the doors, she does so in a way that demonstrates how media privilege some

desires and identities while excluding and disenfranchising others. Media, like the

novel’s oft-repeated “Love Laws,” help to lie down and reinforce “who should be loved

and how. And how much” (33). The whimsical way in which Rahel imagines Hulk

Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow—in their spandex tights—landing in Baby Kochamma’s

home with a great, “Heeaagh!” distinguishes the pair as objects of desire: they are

playful, wealthy, Western, and muscular. On the other hand, the “Thin People,” and the

“famine-victims,” are most unwelcome in Baby Kochamma’s Touchable, Christian

home. In Rahel’s vision, the Thin People and the famine-victims hover in the air above

the house, electric and disturbing, sneaky and spectral and threatening. They are perched

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and balanced in the sky above Ayemenem, waiting for the right moment to make their

descent:

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them

spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars,

famines, football, food shows, coups d’état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray.

Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns

in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming. (179)

For Rahel—thinking perhaps of her yellow, plastic-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses—

the entire world whirls in that sky “thick with TV”: the West and the East, the North and

the South, the farthest reaches of space, and they are not created equal. Within the

satellite dish whole wars play out their terrible dramas and bombs light up the night’s sky

and crash into civilian houses. Football players, fattened by shoulder pads, throw Hail

Mary passes and hope for a last second touchdown. Chefs from around the world plate

signature dishes on fine china, while whole villages starve.

Famine-victims, Thin People, and the targets of genocide would certainly be

classified amongst the poorest of the poor in a culture where caste is such a fundamental

concern, in a culture where as the narrator of The God of Small Things points out,

“human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could

get used to” (49). They would certainly be classified with the Paravans, the Pelayas, and

the Pulayas, the Untouchable classes who “were not allowed to walk on public roads, not

allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas” (71). Their entrance

into any Touchable house would constitute caste pollution. Rahel’s unique and clever act

of wonder seems to ask: What would Baby Kochamma do if the Thin People walked

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right out of her television set and into her living room? Would she still have the ability to

look away—to view “other peoples’ poverty” as “merely a matter of getting used to. A

question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing More” (120)? Roy

explains that there’s an expression in the Indian villages of the Narmada valley, “You can

wake someone who’s sleeping. But you can’t wake someone who’s pretending to be

asleep” (Power Politics 68). If Baby Kochamma—who “presides over the world in her

drawing room on satellite TV” (27) and quickly changes the channel from “BBC famines

and television wars” (29) to more desirable programming like Phil Donahue or WWF—

watched in horror as the famine-victims and targets of genocide entered her own house,

would it require that she finally face them head on? Could an Untouchable’s image on the

TV screen contaminate an entire Touchable house?

In The God of Small Things, it is difficult to say one way or the other, because

some words like “contaminate” are difficult to pin down and the line between order and

chaos is often fuzzy. Best illustrated by the great “jam-jelly question”—referring to the

years when Mammachi (Rahel’s grandmother) produces and sells her “Too thin for jelly

too thick for” banana jam, even after it is banned for being, “An ambiguous,

unclassifiable consistency” (31)—some lines can be crossed without fear of punishment,

while the cost for crossing others climbs to “unaffordable heights” (318). Looking back,

Rahel remembers:

Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just

them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into

forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be

loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers

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grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam and jelly

jelly. (31)

That Mammachi makes and sells illegal banana jam and that, “It was a time when uncles

became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals,” is only the half of it.

The other half is that some transgressions of the Love Laws are treated as though

they are rather small, like when Mammachi arranges for Velutha to attend the school for

Untouchables and hires him to work as the factory carpenter, even though, “It caused a

great deal of resentment among the other Touchable factory workers because, according

to them, Paravans were not meant to be carpenters” (74). There are other small violations

too, like when Baby Kochamma falls in love with a young, Irish priest for whom she

converts to Catholicism and enters a convent until, lonelier than ever, she returns home.

After that, recognizing that it was unlikely she would ever find a husband, her father uses

her dowry money to send her to the United States to study at the University of Rochester.

Or, how after disapproving of Chacko’s marriage to a white, working-class woman he

meets in London, Mammachi is not only glad to have him home after their divorce but

lets him run Paradise Pickles & Preserves and builds a separate door to the house leading

directly into his bedroom so that he can carry on sexual affairs with women who work in

his factory. Mammachi even slips them money from time to time, “because in her mind,

a fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love” (161). When Ammu—a Syrian

Christian—marries a Bengali—a Hindu—whom she eventually divorces, Mammachi,

with Syrian Christian charity, still welcomes her and the twins back into the fold of the

Ayemenem house, even when Pappachi thinks it unwise.

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Still, none of these transgressions threatens the order of things the way that the

Untouchable, Velutha, does, with his “lack of hesitation,” and the “unwarranted

assurance” with which he “walked” and “held his head” (73), with his courage to say,

“The days are gone...when you can kick us around like dogs,” as though he loved himself

too much (246), or the way that Estha and Rahel’s terrible love for Velutha does. Even

Ammu who warned, “I’ve told you before... I don’t want you going to his house. It will

only cause trouble,” has no idea how much trouble it will cause. The small violations of

the love laws seem innocuous, at least until Inspector Thomas Mathew reminds them,

“first you spoil these people, carry them about on your head like trophies, then when they

misbehave you come running to us for help” (247), which reminds them again of the

great “jelly-jam question” and that some lines can be crossed without fear of punishment,

while the cost for crossing others climbs to unaffordable heights. Furthermore, neither

Velutha’s self-confidence nor the twins’ adoration of him as a father figure threaten the

order of things, in the same way that Ammu’s love for Velutha does.

It is her love that leaves Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen, frightened by what his

son “had touched. More than touched. / Entered. / Loved” (74). It is her love that makes

Baby Kochamma shudder, “like a child being force-fed spinach,” and say, “How could

she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular smell, these Paravans?”

(75). It is Ammu’s consent that leaves Mammachi bewildered as she thinks of her own

daughter, “naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy

coolie...his black hips jerking between her parted legs...Like a dog with a bitch on heat”

(244). It is Ammu’s transgression that leaves Mammachi in a fury because she has

“defiled generations of breeding” (244). And, it is all three of them—Ammu, Estha and

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Rahel—who in the end will never forgive themselves for violating the laws which laid

down, “who should be loved and how. And how much,” because for the rest of their

lives they will separately carry the grief of knowing that, “they had loved a man to death”

(307).

By contrast, some small transgressions of the Love Laws, like Chacko’s marriage

to Margaret Kochamma—the white, working-class woman he meets while studying at

Oxford—are portrayed as producing splendid, desirable creations, like Chacko’s daughter

Sophie Mol; half-white and half-Syrian Christian, she is beach-colored, with beautiful,

“deep red-brown” hair (137), and “bluegrayblue” eyes (139). Robert Young traces such

adulation throughout history, noting that even in the 1800s, while the children of

interracial couples were on the one hand considered, “degenerate, and, literally, degraded

(that is, lowered by racial mixture from pure whiteness, the highest grade),” they were on

the other hand, “often invoked as the most beautiful human beings of all” (Young 16).

Meanwhile, other transgressions of the Love Laws, like Ammu’s marriage to a Bengali—

a Hindu who drank too much and slept around—are rendered to have “unfortunate”

results, like Ammu’s children, Rahel and Estha; Baby Kochamma thought of them as

“Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry” (44),

and also thought that, “Together they were trouble. NataS ni rieht seye. [Satan in their

eyes.] They had to be separated” (286). Based on these distinctions, one thing that ensues

in The God of Small Things then, is an examination of the ways in which the small

children, Estha and Rahel, come to recognize that some races, genders, and classes are

privileged by media, by the laws of culture, and by the laws that “lay down who should

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be loved and how. And how much.” When they return from Cochin with their cousin

Sophie Mol, they conclude that:

Littleangels were beach-colored and wore bell-bottoms.

Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport-Fairy frocks with forehead

bumps that might turn into horns. With Fountains in Love-in-Tokyos. And

backwards-reading habits.

And if you cared to look, you could see Satan in their eyes. (170)

It is difficult to ignore the parallel here—perhaps unintended—between The God of Small

Things and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, in which Rushdie merges both angelic

and demonic characteristics in the novel’s “twin” protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and

Saladin Chamcha and about which Paul Brians notes, “Demons can behave like angels

and vice versa.” Estha and Rahel’s self-worth is constructed through their identification

with an ideal—in this case their half-white, beach-colored cousin Sophie Mol with her

bluegrayblue eyes—so that by comparison, Estha and Rahel—not half-white, not beach-

colored, not bluegrayblue-eyed—learn to think of themselves as different, as Other, as

inferior and “Loved a Little Less” (177).

Estha and Rahel do not learn to feel different, Other, inferior, and “Loved a Little

Less” in a vacuum. In The God of Small Things, Estha and Rahel learn this lesson in

myriad ways and in a variety of environments, like at the Abhilash Talkies where they

see the “World Hit,” The Sound of Music, as a treat precisely one day before they pick up

their beach-colored cousin with bluegrayblue eyes from the Cochin airport. The delicate

balance between Estha and Rahel’s anxiety over Sophie Mol’s arrival and the timing of

their trip to the cinema conspire to make the twins hyperaware of their differences and

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inadequacies. Even though the narrator explains that, “In a purely practical sense it would

probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem,” and

that the narrator also admits that “is only one way of looking at it” (32), it is also possible

to say that The Sound of Music works like a bookmark that underscores all of the dark

moments to come later in the novel. After all, the damages to every character—physical

and psychological: Estha’s molestation at the cinema, Sophie Mol’s death and the death

of Velutha, Estha’s being Returned, the razing of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, Ammu’s

expulsion from the Ayemenem house and her subsequent early death at the “viable, die-

able age” of thirty-one (310), and the terrible emotional traumas that accompany these

tragedies—trace back in some way to the trip to see the film that begins with Julie

Andrews dwarfed to a tiny “speck on the hill” that “gets bigger and bigger till she bursts

onto the screen with her voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint” (57) even

if that too, is only one way of looking at it. Realistically, the events to follow have little

to do with either Sophie Mol’s arrival or Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer kissing

on the big screen, but the poignant way in which these two events are echoed with poetic

irony in the dark moments that come later is difficult to ignore.

As the narrator of The God of Small Things notes, it is impossible to place blame

with any one person, with any one event, with any one mistake, or flaw, or failure, or

misjudgment. What takes place within the confines of the novel has everything to do

with history and politics, with the forces of power and privilege that have exerted

themselves throughout centuries, through which those who are Big have the power to

bully those who are Small, sometimes with the best of intentions. The narrator explains:

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Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago.

Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the

Dutch Ascendancy, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s

conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian bishops murdered by the

Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their

chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began

long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a

teabag.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws

that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much. (33)

And still, the fact remains that the children do accompany their mother, Ammu, their

great aunt, Baby Kochamma, and their uncle, Chacko, on a trip to the Cochin airport to

pick up their British aunt, Margaret Kochamma, and their beach-colored cousin, Sophie

Mol, and terrible things happen when they stopped at the Abhilash Talkies to see The

Sound of Music and terrible things happen when they all returned together to Ayemenem.

The first chapter of the novel is the only chapter to end with a disclaimer. It reads,

“however, for practical purposes, / in a hopelessly practical world...” (34). What follows

that disclaimer amounts to this: nothing was ever the same again.

It could be argued that “for practical purposes” it all actually starts in the week

leading up to the trip to the Cochin airport, in the week leading up to the special and rare

trip to the Abhilash Talkies to see the von Trapp children sing, “High on a hill lived a

lonely goatherd,” that it all starts when someone utters the question, “What will Sophie

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Mol Think?” (130) and when Baby Kochamma reminds Rahel and Estha, that by meeting

their British aunt and half-British cousin for the very first time, they will be

“Ambassadors of India.” As Baby Kochamma reminds the twins, “You’re going to form

their First Impression of your country” (133) and that week, every time the twins are

overheard speaking in Malayalam, “she levied a small fine which was deducted at source.

From their pocket money” and makes them write one hundred times each, “I will always

speak in English, I will always speak in English” (36). She also forces them to practice a

song with which to entertain their newly-arrived relatives during the long car-ride home

and insists that they rehearse their “Prer NUN sea ayshun” (36)—a word reduced to pure

phonemes to emphasize the Indian dialect with which they are spoken as well as the

syllable: NUN. The Sound of Music is, of course, a movie that begins at the abbey—a

place to which Baby Kochamma can certainly relate—where Maria is a problem to be

solved, a fact that Estha and Rahel know, because they have already seen The Sound of

Music twice, “They knew all the songs” (35), an important point considering what they

bring to the movie and how the movie informs them in return. On the way home from

the Cochin airport, where Estha and Rahel behave badly, as a partial apology, they agree

to sing the car song and “Their Prer NUN sea ayshun” is perfect (147).

The fact that they all travel to the Abhilash Talkies—and later to the Cochin

airport to pick up Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol—in Chacko’s skyblue Plymouth

equipped with its “four-sided, tin-lined, plywood billboard that says on all four side, in

elaborate writing, Paradise Pickles & Preserves” (45) is significant. It emphasizes that

the family—seemingly insulated from the outside world within the confines of the very

car that advertises the family’s local business and that comes to represent Ayemenem’s

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own economies of desire, consumption, and political power—is enmeshed, catapulted

even, into a powerful global economy complete with its own standards of desire,

consumption, and political power. The American-made car advertising the family’s

products: mixed fruit jam and hot-lime pickle—local flavors—with the image of a

kathakali dancer in a fluttering, swirling skirt—for “Regional Flavor” in an “Overseas

Market” (46)—points in the direction of The Sound of Music—a film that going to see, as

Chacko explains, is “an extended exercise in Anglophilia” (54). Such irony is, as Arjun

Appadurai suggests, “the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized,

deterritorialized world” (52), in which someone like Chacko can condemn his relatives

for being a “family of Anglophiles” on the way to the airport to pick up his beach-colored

daughter and his British ex-wife—who exclaims on the way home, “Oh dear! I feel as

though I’m in an advertisement!” (145)—and she is, of course.

Chacko’s skyblue, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, Plymouth is a symbol of what

Appadurai identifies as “the ways in which local historical trajectories flow into

complicated transnational structures” (65). Appadurai’s ideas are reinforced by the

lecture that Chacko begins in his “Reading Aloud Voice” (54) as he drives beyond the

gates of the Ayemenem house. Invoking the historical legacy of colonialism—“the

cultural insult” from which Roy explains, “Fifty years after independence, India is...still

flinching” (Power Politics 13)—the skyblue Plymouth becomes a moving classroom in

which Chacko waxes eloquent about being “Prisoners of War...The very worst sort of

war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our

conquerors and despise ourselves” (52). On the one hand, Chacko’s history lesson is

rebuffed as ridiculous when Ammu retorts sarcastically, “Marry our conquerors, is more

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like it” alluding, of course, to Margaret Kochamma. Furthermore, it is doubly ironic that

Chacko contends, “We belong nowhere...Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our

joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important

enough. To matter” (52), only moments after showing off his privileged Oxford

education by quoting a long passage from The Great Gatsby, a novel wrapped up in the

American Dream and Western materialism, as he jets off to Cochin in his American car,

outfitted with advertisements for the factory that he owns and operates in a culture where

some “three hundred million people are illiterate and live without even one square meal a

day” (Power Politics 46). On the other hand, what Chacko says is internalized by the

twins, who may not “despise” themselves, but do feel, at least sometimes, that they are

not important enough to matter.

To Rahel and Estha, it is this feeling—that sometimes they are not important

enough to matter—that rematerializes at the Abhilash Talkies and again at the Cochin

airport when they pick up their British relatives. On the way to the cinema to see The

Sound of Music, the twins are told not to “blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or

gobble”—things that many young children do—because “only clerks behaved like that,

not aristocrats” (80). This lesson resurfaces when Rahel and Estha, “certain two-egg twin

members of the audience in Abhilash Talkies” (101) look up toward the big screen and

realize that they can never live up to the ideal presented before them. On the car ride to

the Abhilash Talkies they also overhear Baby Kochamma insulting Hindu pilgrims at

prayer, “I tell you, these Hindus...They have no sense of privacy,” and they also hear

their Uncle Chacko’s sarcastic response, “They have horns and scaly skins...And I’ve

heard that their babies hatch from eggs” and they remember that their own biological

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father is Hindu and though they know that their uncle is joking—Estha and Rahel do not

have horns and scaly skin and did not hatch from eggs—his comment tugs horribly at

their hearts, especially because it comes from the man who has always been the closest

thing they have ever had to a Baba. When Rahel makes a smart-alek comment to Ammu,

her mother asks her, “D’you know what happens when you hurt people?...When you hurt

people, they begin to love you less” (107). And, as soon as those cautionary words leave

Ammu’s lips and hit the air, Rahel feels a little less loved. She feels this way again when

the family returns to Ayemenem with Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol:

Little Girls Playing.

Sweet.

One beach-colored.

One brown.

One Loved.

One Loved a Little Less. (177)

Because, when the family returns to Ayemenem, there is a great stir over the arrival of

Sophie Mol, but no one seems to care much about the return of Estha and Rahel.

Watching The Sound of Music, Estha and Rahel are struck by feelings of

inadequacy as they watch Baron von Trapp, who is, “Arrogant. Hardhearted” and has “a

mouth like a slit” (100), but still loves his children, because their own father has simply

tossed them away. They feel inferior as they watch Julie Andrews exhibit her peppermint

love for seven children who are not even her own, because at the Ayemenem house they

are made to feel like burdens upon their grandparents, their great aunt, and their uncle.

They are simply unwanted distractions, their mother’s baggage, more mouths to feed. As

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Rahel and Estha watch the film, the lessons they learn on their way to the Abhilash

Talkies come back to them and they wonder if they are loveable children:

Baron von Trapp had some questions of his own.

(a) Are they clean white children?

No. (But Sophie Mol is.)

(b) Do they blow spit bubbles?

Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.)

(c) Do they shiver their legs? Like clerks?

Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.)

As the quotation above indicates, they feel different, Other, inferior, and “Loved a Little

Less.” Thormann points out that, “The mechanical description of the movie’s idealized

relations underlines...the Indian children’s fragile security, the precariousness of the love

they receive from their single mother and her extended family” (302). Captain von Trapp

is an aristocrat, his children are clean, “like a pack of peppermints” (100), Julie Andrews

is the governess who sings songs to the children just to comfort them from thunder, and

the two-egg twin members of the audience in Abhilash Talkies are merely clerks by

comparison, but Sophie Mol (with her beach-colored skin and bluegrayblue eyes) isn’t.

If there is any question about whether the twins are truly looking to identify with

the characters in The Sound of Music, it is answered by Roy herself who writes, “Ammu

explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most

with” (94). The twins’ desire to identify with characters from the film is underscored by

the very fact that word is italicized and capitalized. Baby Kochamma, who has spent

time away in a convent, identifies most with the nuns and likes the early part of the film

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when Maria hasn’t yet left the abbey. Rahel, desperate for a father figure, “supposed she

Identified most with Christopher Plummer, who acted as Baron von Trapp,” even though

her Uncle Chacko—her closest surrogate for a father—“didn’t Identify with him at all

and called him Baron von Clapp-Trapp” (94). Sherif Hetata points out that watching

“Western or Northern culture” in a “consolidated, alluring image of the other,” presents a

view of the world, “where comparison with our life can only force us to look up to it in

reverence” (285). Though Estha makes no declaration about whom he “Identifies” with, it

becomes clear soon after he takes his seat in the “peanut-crunching darkness” of the

auditorium, when “There was a voice from outside the picture...There was a nun in the

audience...It was Estha who was singing. A nun with a puff. An Elvis Pelvis Nun. He

couldn’t help it” (95-6). Revering them so greatly, Estha wants to become one. Still,

while Estha’s small voice fills the theater, an extra nun at the abbey, Rahel looks up at the

movie from her seat and takes note only of the differences between the women on the

screen and the women in her life.

Similar to the way that Rahel takes inventory of the nuns on screen, “No hair on

their knees. No melons in their blouses” (95), in contrast to the only nun in her own life,

Baby Kochamma, who was “weighed down by her melons” (94), Estha recognizes that

what the sweets vendor at the theater does to him beneath the counter is wrong by

judging himself against the nuns in The Sound of Music. Estha leaves the safe grip of his

family behind in the theater with the innocent intention of singing aloud by himself in the

lobby of the Abhilash Talkies. He begins with, “Oh, how do you solve a problem like

Maria? / How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand” (97) and somehow ends up with a

bottle of “fizzed fear” (100)—a sticky, sweet Lemon drink—in one hand and the

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Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s hand over the other, moving up and down slowly and

then quickly. The narrator, demonstrating perhaps how Estha turns to the movie to make

sense out of that inexplicable, terrifying moment explains, “He got a cold bottle and a

straw. So he held a bottle in one hand and a penis in the other. Hard, hot, veiny. Not a

moonbeam” (98). The feeling that Estha experiences when the Orangedrink Lemondrink

Man touches him underneath the counter at the Abhilash Talkies is mirrored later in the

novel after Estha is bullied into accusing Velutha of kidnapping, an accusation that seals

Velutha’s fate, and is rewarded for doing so with a Coke, “So once again, in the space of

two weeks, bottled Fear for Estha. Chilled. Fizzed. Sometimes Things went worse with

Coke” (297). Estha’s dual violations (the sexual assault perpetrated by the Orangedrink

Lemondrink man, and later, the fact that he is made to identify his beloved Velutha as a

perpetrator of violence) are unlike anything depicted in a nice, clean, peppermint film

like The Sound of Music in which lovely children learn to sing and in which seven

children’s love for their governess is mirrored by their father’s love for her too and in

which the nice, clean, well-behaved children are loved by both.

When Estha is sexually assaulted by the sweets vendor, he is sick with worry and

overcome with guilt that perhaps what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man does to him

under the counter is his own fault, some sort of punishment for singing in the theater and

then later in the lobby when he has no right. From that point forward, whenever Estha is

referred to as a nun, as he is when he retreats into the Paradise Pickles & Preserves

factory after the family returns to Ayemenem, “a nun’s voice singing the boat song”

(188)—thinking that “Anything can Happen to Anyone” and that “It’s Best to be

Prepared” (189)—his identity is conflated with the fear and anxiety he feels at the hands

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of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man at the Abhilash Talkies over and again. At the

theater, Estha wonders if perhaps what the sweets vendor does to him is his own fault,

because he is, even though he holds no birthright, just as the Orangedrink Lemondrink

Man accuses him, “a lucky rich boy, with porketmunny and a grandmother’s factory to

inherit” (100). The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s comment haunts him like a refrain

when he returns to the film feeling dirty and ashamed (102) and haunts him again later at

the Cochin airport when Sophie Mol tells him that he is lucky (143). However, at the

cinema, Estha imagines Baron von Trapp asking, “Have they ever, either or both, ever

held a stranger’s soo-soos?” Estha wants to pretend that nothing does happen with the

Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, but in his mind he answers, “N...Nyes. (But Sophie Mol

hasn’t),” before envisioning Baron von Trapp’s answer, “Then I’m sorry...It’s out of the

question. I cannot love them. I cannot be their Baba. Oh no” (101-2). Looking to The

Sound of Music for answers and for solace, and finding nothing that relates to his own life

at all, Estha begins to develop a hierarchy for self-worth in which his cleaner, whiter

cousin deserves a father figure and is entitled to economic privilege and in which the

mistreatment of a darker, Indian child is just par for the course, just another small failure

for a little boy who is “Loved a Little Less.”

After all, what does a fragile Indian boy know about any of Julie Andrews’

favorite things? How could Estha relate to “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes”

or “Bright copper kettles” anyway? How much could he possibly know about “Wild

geese that fly with the moon on their wings” when he has just held something that was

definitely not a moonbeam in his hand? What experience could he possibly have with

“Doorbells and sleighbells and schnitzel with noodles” (101) in Ayemenem? The effect

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is devastating at the Abhilash Talkies and it is devastating later in the novel, when Estha

and Rahel are found in their hiding place at the History House, with all of the things that

they have carefully toted over the river to Be Prepared. The Touchable Police Officer,

after mistaking Velutha for the children’s abductor and beating him to within an inch of

his life turns to the twins and says, “Don’t worry. You’re safe with us now,” before he

notices all of the children’s provisions, two of which link Velutha’s fate to The Sound of

Music: “The pots and pans,” like Julie Andrews’ bright copper kettles, and “The

inflatable goose,” which could perhaps be coaxed into flying with the moon on its wings.

These items, coupled with the, “The Quantas Koala with loosened buttoned eyes” which

represents, perhaps, foreign travel, “The ballpoint pens with London’s streets on them”

and the “Socks with separate colored toes,” which were brought as gifts from Margaret

Kochamma and Sophie Mol, the “Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses” that make the

world look angry colored, and the “watch with the time painted on it,” which symbolizes

how Estha and Rahel’s are made to grow up at that very moment, all conspire to

represent how this is yet another time during which the twins are unlike anything

depicted in a nice, clean, peppermint film like The Sound of Music (295).

Estha’s guilt is only confounded by the fact that after Ammu cares for him

tenderly and with great kindness, she explains to the sweets vendor that they will have to

leave the film early because they “Mustn’t risk a fever. Their cousin is coming

tomorrow...From London” (104), as though Estha’s “feeling vomity” (102) is not a good

enough reason to leave the cinema on its own. His cleaner, whiter cousin deserves a

welcome party. Estha, darker, half-Hindu, must not greet her with a fever; that would not

make him a very good Ambassador of India. It also does not make Estha feel any better

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when the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man looks up at Ammu with new respect in his eyes

for a woman with family from London. Furthermore, he feels an added degree of

culpability thinking that he is ruining everyone else’s good time. When Ammu fetches

the rest of the family, Rahel is heartbroken:

But Ammu! ... The Main Things haven’t even happened yet! He hasn’t even

kissed her! He hasn’t even torn down the Hitler flag yet! They haven’t even been

betrayed by Rolf the postman! ... The Nazi soldiers haven’t even come! ... They

haven’t even done “High on a hill lived a lonely goatherd”!

In the chronological world of The God of Small Things, the Main Things have not

happened either: Ammu has not kissed Velutha, Sophie Mol has not died, Velutha has not

been betrayed by his father, Vellya Paapen, (or by Baby Kochamma, or by Rahel, or by

Estha), the Policemen have not come, and Ammu has not listened to the Rolling Stones

singing “Ruby Tuesday” on her tangerine transistor radio.

As they leave the theater early, before the Main Things have happened, all that is

about to happen is confounded by the fact that Sophie Mol’s arrival from London is

imminent. Rahel worries that her Ammu might grow to love Sophie Mol more than she.

After all, Sophie Mol is cleaner and whiter, and perhaps Baron von Trapp could love her.

She might even smell like peppermint. In a desperate attempt for reassurance, Rahel

shyly and apprehensively asks her uncle, “Chacko, for example...just for example, is it

possible that Ammu can love Sophie Mol more than me and Estha? Or for you to love

me more than Sophie Mol for example” (112), while Estha sleeps curled like a comma in

Ammu’s arms wondering the same things.

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That the children are desperate for a father figure in their lives is evidenced not

just by their anxiety over how much of the love they have grown accustomed to will be

reallocated to Sophie Mol, or by looking up to the big screen at Captain von Trapp and

wishing that he would be their father, but also by Rahel’s ironic reaction to a man who

means to insult her when the family encounters a Communist/Naxalite Labor Union

March on the way to the Abhilash Talkies in the first place. When they are stopped in

traffic on the way to Cochin to see The Sound of Music and to later pick up their British

relatives and bring them home to Ayemenem, a union marcher leans into the window of

Chacko’s skyblue Plymouth (like the color of the perfectly clear sky in The Sound of

Music) and asks Rahel in a kind voice, “Feeling hot, baby?” and then adds in a spiteful,

mocking tone, “Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!” laughing delightfully at

his own cruelty. However, Rahel does not feel snubbed by the marcher. Instead, she is

proud that he has mistaken her uncle for her father. She is grateful for the

misunderstanding. She is grateful too, to her “two-egg” twin brother, who catches her

before she gets Velutha in trouble for attending the march. Seeing him in the sea of

people, Rahel’s impulse is to lean out of her window and capture his attention. Estha,

who realizes that Velutha’s participation in the Naxalite rally will only bring trouble

because it threatens the order of things, stops her from pointing him out to Baby

Kochamma, Ammu and Chacko. That Rahel thinks she sees Velutha is dangerous

enough, but if the adults see him too, it might be deadly. Well, that Rahel thinks she sees

Velutha does prove deadly, but not until later.

It is Baby Kochamma who has seen an article in the papers about the Naxalite

uprisings in Palghat, who is truly afraid in the midst of the rally. The article is

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accompanied by an unclear photograph of a wealthy landowner who had been violently

killed by a Naxalite, who had been “tied to a post and beheaded” (66). Baby Kochamma

recalls the precise details of the photograph, “His head lay to its side, some distance away

from his body, in a dark puddle that could have been water, could have been blood. It

was hard to tell in black and white” (66). The fact that Baby Kochamma looks into the

crowd of union marchers and believes that she sees the Naxalite Rajan—the man

photographed in the newspaper and accused of the beheading—in every communist at the

march, underscores the fact that later in the novel, when the police kill Velutha, the

images of his body mirror the images of the beheaded landlord from the papers. When

Rahel and Estha see Velutha’s beaten body, they note, “Lesson Number One: Blood

barely shows on a Black Man. (Dum dum)” (293), just as it is difficult to discern the

chemical makeup of a “dark puddle” in the black and white photograph that Baby

Kochamma recalls from the papers. Furthermore, when a Naxalite marcher mocks Baby

Kochamma in the midst of the rally, Baby Kochamma’s humiliation becomes unsafe. The

marcher who taunts Baby Kochamma and calls her, “Modalali Mariakutty”—Modalali in

Malayalam means landlord—makes her fear for her life as she thinks of the landlord from

Palghat and taunts her enough to make her want revenge. Handing Baby Kochamma a

communist red flag, he insists that she wave it, while proclaiming, “Inquilah Zindabad!”

or, Long live the Revolution. Seeing all Naxalites as the same, Baby Kochamma

eventually exacts her revenge on Velutha. She goes after the only Naxalite she can get

her hands on.

In The God of Small Things, Roy confronts the epistemic Naxalite movement

head on, unlike Bharati Mukherjee, who in The Tiger’s Daughter, only addresses the

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same epistemic moment in history indirectly. Perhaps the fact that Mukherjee’s text takes

place in northern India, in Calcutta, where the Naxalite uprisings were rather fierce,

where they “struck terror in every bourgeois heart” (66), while Roy’s text takes place in

southern India, where the Naxalite movement took on a very different shape accounts for

the difference. The narrator of The God of Small Things explains that there were several

theories about the popularity of the Naxalite movement in Kerala. The most convincing

explanation is explained as “the real secret...that communism crept into Kerala

insidiously,” because in Kerala, the Naxalite movement was watered down. The narrator

suggests that it was:

a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a

caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within

the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They

offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox

Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy. (64)

In other words, in Kerala, the Naxalite movement barely threatens the order of things, it

hardly purports to actually fight for a classless society and it hardly promises equality.

Mukherjee examines the life of the bourgeois, the privileged, those insulated from the

dark and sinister forces amongst them, those who plead ignorance of the subaltern classes

in their midst. Her characters see the Naxalites as nuisances and peevish hooligans.

Conversely, in The God of Small Things, Roy examines a different class of “privileged”

Indians, the middle-class, whose wealth is extraordinary by comparison to the very poor,

but relatively modest in comparison to the bourgeoisie. Roy’s characters do not have the

advantage of turning a blind eye.

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In the context of the Naxalite rally, which intersects with the family’s trip to the

Abhilash Talkies, Baby Kochamma’s fear, the “age-old fear” of being dispossessed,

appears to stems from her own family’s proximity to poverty. Though they are vilified

for their wealth by Naxalite marchers, it is also true that Velutha (an Untouchable) lives

in a little hut a mere three minutes away from the Ayemenem house (75). Furthermore,

on the other side of the river, “Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated

directly into the squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed river bed” in the same waters

where the factories dumped their waste, the same waters where mothers washed their

children’s clothes and people bathed (119). That Rahel and Estha’s family does not

belong to the most elite class is clearly evidenced by the fact that when Ammu is young

she has no dowry, by the fact that the entire family lives together (grandparents, parents,

aunts, uncles, children, all under one roof), and by the fact that going to the cinema is a

special treat further underscored by sarcastic exchanges between Ammu and Chacko who

go back and forth with one another about who behaves like the more “honest-to-goodness

Genuine Bourgeoise” (60).

By the same token, Baby Kochamma’s fear takes on a particularly malicious

edge, because, while the communist rally congregates to demand modest wage increases

for paddy workers who worked some eleven and a half hours a day, to appeal for a lunch

break, and to request that they no longer be addressed by their caste names—“They

demanded not to be addressed as Achoo Parayan, or Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan Pulayan,

but just as Achoo, or Kelan or Kuttan” (66-7)—Baby Kochamma is deeply unnerved by

the delay. Not only is she unsympathetic to the measures being protested, she is agitated,

overall, by her concern about being late for the start of The Sound of Music.

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Baby Kochamma’s fear of being dispossessed links the two narratives that

intertwine in The God of Small Things together, because as the narrator of the novel

points out, twenty-three years later, Baby Kochamma still fears any threat to her middle-

class comforts:

She was frightened by the BBC famines and television wars that she encountered

while she channel surfed. Her old fears of the Revolution and the Marxist-

Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing

numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing,

famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture. (29)

But while Baby Kochamma has to face her fears directly in the midst of the union march

on the way to the Abhilash Talkies, while she is humiliated and made to wave a

communist flag by a marcher who taunts her, these years later Baby Kochamma is an

armchair conquistador. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue about the medium of

television, “Larger than the figures on the screen” Baby Kochamma can “quite literally

oversee the world from a sheltered position” from which, “the human shapes parading...in

TV’s insubstantial pageant are scaled down to Lilliputian insignificance, two-dimensional

dolls, their height rarely exceeding a foot” (Shohat and Stam138). So, unless those

famine victims and targets of genocide do truly come to life as Rahel imagines that they

do in the excerpt that begins this chapter, they pose very little threat to Baby Kochamma

at all.

The real threat lies in the way that television is a medium through which Western

culture and global economies can infiltrate smaller, less affluent ones with speed and

grace and through its marriage of the historically significant and the mindlessly trivial

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play into and reinforce local systems of inequality. In Power Politics, Roy writes, “I

don’t mean to put a simplistic value judgment on this particular form of ‘progress’ by

suggesting that Modern is Good and Traditional is Bad...What’s hard to reconcile oneself

to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it” (2). What Roy

describes here about the modernity of Western media is duly noted throughout the text of

The God of Small Things. In the novel, Roy does not suggest that television, in and of

itself, is a dangerous thing. However, she does point out what she calls “the

schizophrenic nature of it” whereby famines are given the same attention as football

games and soap operas run alongside 24-hour news stations. In The God of Small Things,

Roy writes:

Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem

house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The

impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to

understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight.

Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’état—they all arrived on the

same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in

Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now

whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned

up like servants. And so, while her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby

Kochamma followed American NBA league games, one-day cricket and all the

Grand Slam tennis tournaments. On weekdays she watched The Bold and the

Beautiful and Santa Barbara, where brittle blondes with lipstick and hairstyles

rigid with spray seduced androids and defended their sexual empires. Baby

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Kochamma loved their shiny clothes and the smart bitchy repartee. During the

day, disconnected snatches of it came back to her and made her chuckle (27-8).

References to blondes and football, American basketball and daytime soap operas may

appear innocuous enough, but there is something sinister in the juxtapositions. In Power

Politics, Roy argues, “As Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres

and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding

cell phone networks...female infanticide...husbands who continue to burn their wives”

(2). As Roy explains, it is troubling that these diametrically opposed events coexist in the

same space without any intervention on the part of those who witness them.

Likewise, there is something troublesome in the way that through her satellite

dish, Baby Kochamma witnesses massacres—described as “picturesque”—in the same

manner with which she enjoys WWF wrestling. These massacres, I suppose, do carry a

certain large-scale drama in their own right and there is perhaps something sinister about

they ways in which Western programs steal their way into Baby Kochamma’s

consciousness slyly and seductively in “disconnected snatches” that make her smile.

There is something disconcerting about the fact that on American television, a fifteen-

year-old boy arrested a reality police drama gets to explain himself, “I’m fifteen years old

and I wish I were a better person than I am. But I’m not. Do you want to hear my

pathetic story?” (280), when in Baby Kochamma’s own immediate universe, Velutha is

beaten to death without any opportunity to defend himself or to speak on his own behalf,

for a crime he does not commit. There is something deeply unnerving in the images that

suggest that the access to television equates to an access to power. After all, Baby

Kochamma “presided over the world,” blondes protected their “sexual empires” as

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though the insignificant dramas of trivial television programs mimic the historically

significant circumstances of British imperialism in India, for example.

Roy seems to suggest that the caste prejudice that occurs in The God of Small

Things is somehow unstoppable; it is simply innate; it is simply an extension of centuries

of colonialism. Such terrible things occur out of, “Feelings of contempt born of inchoate,

unacknowledged fear—civilizations fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of

powerlessness” (292), all of which are tied up in the rationalizations of empires through

which it was the duty of the powerful figures of history to serve the suffering of the

powerless, of children, women, and lower castes. It was their duty to fight the benevolent

civilizing mission of colonialism. Thormann argues that in The God of Small Things,

“Global inequality is aligned with the local inequalities that determine and limit the

possibilities and choices of the characters,” so that they inevitably act out with “brute

force” and in so doing, enjoy that “power, the underside of law” (304). Velutha’s

traditional father, “torn between loyalty and love” mortgages his own son’s life under the

obligation of his mortgaged glass eye, paid for out of kindness by Mammachi. Baby

Kochamma, disgraced by Marxist demonstrators—among whom Velutha is sighted—is

insistent upon revenge, because to her, the marchers demonstrating for higher wages are

the same as those violent Naxalites photographed for the paper. To get to Velutha, she

uses Estha and Rahel as pawns and tricks them into accusing him of crimes he did not

commit and she also uses her nephew Chacko’s grief as a catalyst, “Chacko breaking

down doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It was

her idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be Returned” (305).

It is easy to pin it all on Baby Kochamma, because Chacko’s sadness over the loss

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of his only daughter, over losing her only weeks after being reunited with her for the first

time since she was an infant, is poignant. It is easy to sympathize with his anger.

However, on the other hand, Chacko is also tied to many of the novels worst aggressors.

In the very name Uncle, he is tied to the Orangedrink Lemondrink man who violates

Estha. For example, when they leave the Abhilash Talkies, Ammu calls Estha’s

molester, “uncle.” She gently tells her son, “Estha, you stay here with Uncle. I’ll get

Baby Kochamma and Rahel” (104). Furthermore, the police officer at the Kottayam

police station that takes Estha’s testimony against Velutha—the testimony that makes

Velutha “disappear”—is also an uncle, as evidenced by Baby Kochamma’s instructions,

“all you have to do is to go with the Uncle with the big meeshas. He’ll ask you a

question. One question. All you have to do is say ‘Yes’” (302). Additionally, Chacko is

the only man in the novel with power and privilege: his Oxford education, his pickle

factory, his property rights. He is a Big man. And yet, still, it is impossible to read The

God of Small Things and not feel sorry for Chacko, who loses his ex-wife a second time,

who loses his daughter a second time, who loses everything including the business that

Mammachi gives him. In the end, the local Marxist labor leader, Comrade Pillai, who

Chacko mistakes for a friend, capitalizes on Chacko’s personal grief and uses the scandal

within his family to rile up the employees of Paradise Pickles to burn down the factory

for the sole purpose of advancing his political career.

Then who is to blame? Certainly not Ammu, Estha or Rahel, who have no rights

to property, no locus standi—or as the twins say over and over again, “No Locusts Stand

I” (56). After all, the evidence bears out their innocence: Estha is Returned, Ammu is

expelled from the house and dies alone, and Rahel loses her other half. Poor Sophie Mol

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cannot be blamed either. After all, she is taken by the river. Similarly, Margaret

Kochamma can hardly be blamed for her anger. After losing both her husband and her

only child, she never even hears the whole story. Mammachi appears a victim too:

beaten with a brass vase by her husband, old and nearly blind, she loses the pickle factory

that she created from the ground up to Chacko’s indiscretions.

Even the servant, Kochu Maria, who seems to enjoy the desperation of all of the

people she serves, can hardly be considered guilty of anything. Her name alone, Kochu

Maria, literally means “little” Maria and throughout the novel her concern that people

would take advantage of her lack of education makes her a sympathetic character. How

sinister could Kochu Maria be? She is a woman who feels small simply because “Rahel

told her than an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon”

and, because she unknowingly “laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat

called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose” (163).

She is a woman who remains certain that when Estha reenacts Julius Caesar and falls

backwards onto his bed declaring, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?” he is saying something like,

“Kochu Maria, You Ugly Black Dwarf” (163). Kochu Maria is so small, literally and

figuratively that she feels as though she, “couldn’t stop wearing her kunukku because if

she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook’s job...she was a Syrian

Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan” (162). She could not

possibly be blamed.

So then, even Baby Kochamma, who seems sinister as she avenges her own

dishonor, is also portrayed as someone too damaged to carry all of the guilt for what

happens in the novel. Just by having the name “Baby,” she is portrayed as someone

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small. As the narrator proclaims, “Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but

everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to

be an aunt” (4), and though she claims to have surrendered herself to a loveless life, she

hurts every day as she carries her torch for Father Mulligan even long after he, himself,

has died. Must she bear the brunt of responsibility for what happens?

Perhaps there can be no certain answer to the question, “Who is to blame?”

After all, what stands out most about Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is the

way the novel breaks down absolutes, blurs the boundaries between easy dichotomies of

Right and Wrong, and questions traditional assumptions, just like the many unmixable

mixes that convalesce despite themselves throughout the novel. Estha and Rahel can read

each other’s thoughts. For example, “She [Rahel] remembers (though she hadn’t been

there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha at the Abhilash Talkies” (5),

and “He [Estha] couldn’t hear himself think for the noise. Trains. Traffic. Music. The

Stock Market” (16) that Rahel brings back to Ayemenem with her after so many years

away.

What is so beautiful about The God of Small Things is the way that it focuses on

something small and something beautiful, even if it should not be. When Estha and

Rahel, themselves transgress the love laws, when they reach out to one another to touch

each other in ways that siblings should never touch it is also beautiful, even though it

transgresses every law that lays down order in the West as well as the East. The narrator

explains:

But what was there to say.

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Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted

together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the

base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle

of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over.

Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only

that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved.

And how. And how much. (310-11)

I would argue that this is what postcolonial novels do. They break the rules, they

transgress boundaries, and they blur the distinctions between Right and Wrong. Though

it flies in the face of order, what happens between Rahel and Estha is also beautiful.

Roy writes, “In the midst of a bloody military coup, for instance, you could find

yourself fascinated by the mating rituals of a purple sunbird, or the secret life of a captive

goldfish, or an old aunt’s descent into madness. And nobody can say there isn’t truth and

art and beauty in that” (Power Politics 7). Isn’t there also beauty to be found in Ammu,

in the unmixable mix as she carries within her, “The infinite tenderness of motherhood

and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber” (44)? One might ask if Ammu’s defiance is

meant to represent a transgression against Western media, if it defies the power structures

of a fierce global economy, or, if perhaps it is just like the “cheap coincidence” when she

hears the words of The Rolling Stones’ song “Ruby Tuesday,” “Cash in your dreams

before / They slip away / Dying all the time / Lose your dreams and you / Will lose your

mind” (313-14), coming out of her tangerine transistor radio just as she makes the

decision to meet with Velutha for the first time? With so many metaphors that have their

roots in Western film and music, so many references to Western popular culture, it is

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difficult not to say that “for practical purposes in a hopelessly practical world,” perhaps

Roy does suggest that every tragedy that takes place in the novel can be traced back to a

random coincidence.

And yet, the novel ends with the single paragraph, “Tomorrow.” It ends Ammu’s

promise to Velutha to return the next day. She keeps her promise even though the next

day is a dangerous one and even though the cost of their meetings has already begun to

climb to unaffordable heights. Though that tomorrow will bring madness for Ammu and

her children, the fact that the novel ends at that moment of hope suggests that there is

something beautiful in Ammu’s defiance of the Love Laws: “the laws that lay down who

should be loved and how. And how much.” The last word of the novel suggests that

despite the consequences, Ammu’s affair with Velutha is in some ways worth it and that

loving him, crossing the line, threatening the order of things, and transgressing is worth

the cost of every tragedy to come after.

It is through the romance that blossoms between Ammu and Velutha that The God

of Small Things is most defiant. As a whole, the novel works against those Western

novels popular at the height of imperialism, the Imperial Romance. Adbul Jan Mohamed

describes this genre as one in which “the villains are always the dark, evil natives” and in

which “civilized societies” are pitted “against the barbaric aberrations of an Other” (91).

Mohamed explains that such interracial romances “always end with the elimination of the

threat posed by the Other...to justify the social function of the dominant class and to

idealize its acts of protection and responsibility” (91). With the inter-caste relationship

examined within the pages of The God of Small Things, the opposite happens. If Velutha

is characterized as dark and evil by those within the novel who uphold caste divisions and

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class distinctions (Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, for instance), Roy makes it clear

that Velutha is truly the reverse: gentle, kind, compassionate, intelligent, paternal, and

good. In the end, there is nothing threatening about Velutha. The threat lies elsewhere.

Instead, it is those who protect “generations of breeding” (244) and the policemen who

enforce the laws who appear barbaric. Far from legitimizing the systems that enforce the

caste system and declare “the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And

how much,” Arundhati Roy unveils their injustice. Civilized society looks uncivilized,

the dominant class appears crude and unsophisticated, and those demonized for their

otherness do the work of god, the god of small things.

Roy convinces the reader that despite the costs, Ammu’s act is an act of bravery, a

threat to the structured order of things. The ending of The God of Small Things is entirely

contrary to the order of a film like The Sound of Music in which everyone escapes, in

which everyone is loved, and everything ends well. Ammu’s single act of defiance,

despite all of the trouble it causes, goes to the heart of what is most important in The God

of Small Things. Roy shows us that even those most fragile can break the rules and they

are to be celebrated for their bravery, even if that bravery is reckless, even when that

bravery does not seem worth the price.

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“I am the Walrus”: Mass Media and the Struggle for Identity in

The Buddha of Suburbia: A Conclusion

We were proud of never learning anything except the names of

footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics of “I am the

Walrus”

—from Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia p. 178

I am He as You are He as You are Me

And We are all together…

I am the Eggman

They are the Eggmen

I am the Walrus

GOO GOO GA JOOB

—opening lyrics of The Beatles’ “I am the Walrus”

How does one address the many frustrations of feeling in between cultures and

simultaneously write about the freedoms, insights, and celebrations that come out of this

distinctly intermediate position? Is it possible to balance so many objectives at the same

time? Is the struggle to write about a marginalized culture truthfully and honesty even

possible? How does one examine cultural identity without falling into the abyss of the

artificial, the offensive, or the insincere? Such questions are crucial to a writer like Hanif

Kureishi who has argued that efforts to portray only positive images of ethnic minorities

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require “useful lies and cheering fictions: The writer as public relations officer, as hired

liar” (Sammy 64), roles that Kureishi himself has refused to play. Given that The Buddha

of Suburbia is a novel set not in India, but in the West—in the South London suburbs and

in the city of London—this chapter asks not only about what it means to be postcolonial

in a world without formal empires, but also asks what it means to be Indian outside of

India in such a world. In his essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie addresses

this very question. He goes on to ask:

How can culture be preserved without becoming ossified? How should we

discuss the need for change within ourselves and our community without seeming

to play into the hands of our racial enemies? What are the consequences, both

spiritual and practical, of refusing to make any concessions to western ideas and

practices? What are the consequences of embracing those ideas and practices and

turning away from the ones that came here with us? (17-18)

In The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi seems to address Rushdie’s questions one by

one by representing a furiously vast array of Indian characters: some of whom refuse to

assimilate to Western culture, some of whom want change for themselves and their

communities, and some of whom are eager to reject the traditional values of their Indian

culture in favor of Western values. Kureishi’s characters often voluntarily assume new

identities and try them on for size and these different Indian identities are celebrated.

In many ways, The Buddha of Suburbia is a novel that takes this dissertation full

circle. In Chapter One, for instance, I noted that in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic

Verses, the character Gibreel Farishta confides carefully to a friend that in the white,

British society in which they have come to live, the dominant class need only “describe

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us…and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (174). By contrast, in The Buddha of

Suburbia, Kureishi’s Indian characters examine the power of the dominant class by

manipulating the Indian stereotypes perpetuated by Western media—and subsequently,

the powerful pictures they construct—in an effort to redefine, re-imagine, and reinvent,

what it means to be “Indian” in England. In equal turns, Kureishi’s characters seek to

embrace, as well as challenge these stereotypes to reveal just how easily identity can be

exploited, faked, and conjured.

Accordingly, Elizabeth de Cacqueray explains that Kureishi’s references to works

of world literature, British television and English pop music, express his characters’

identities and work within the principle of “tell-me-what-you-read/listen-to” and “I’ll-

tell-you-who-you-are or what-you-are-feeling” (170). In a text saturated with allusions to

Western media—from the British tabloid The Daily Mirror (14, 113, 153) to Italian

Vogue (250); from Voltaire’s Candide (10) to Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (20);

from the plays of Anton Chekhov (114, 201) to those of Tennessee Williams (92); from

Westerns with John Wayne (83, 183) to cinema featuring Orson Welles (118); from the

poignant British comedy Steptoe and Son (6, 20) to the lowbrow Candid Camera (20);

from Tamla Motown (176) to Jefferson Airplane (190)—it is the song, “I am the

Walrus,” from the Beatles’ 1967 album Hello, Goodbye (though only alluded to briefly)

that may just emerge as the perfect metaphor for all of the characters in The Buddha of

Suburbia as they examine their identities and reinvent themselves.

Through what Jörg Helbig describes as “a frantic ‘stream-of-nonsense,’ crammed

with bizarre images and word-play” (79), “I am the Walrus” deconstructs distinctions of

meaning, knowledge and identity until they are reduced to mere gibberish, “GOO GOO

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GA JOOB.” Based largely upon Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,”

which appears within Alice in Wonderland, “I am the Walrus” includes the refrain, “I am

the eggman/They are the eggmen,” which recognizably recalls Carroll’s famous

character, Humpty Dumpty, whose philosophy on language is summed up, Helbig

explains, “in his personal doctrine: ‘When I use a word it means what I choose it to

mean’” (80). Helbig concludes that, “What ‘I am the Walrus’ is all about is the urge to

dissolve not only meanings, but any kind of borderlines, categories, and hierarchies” (80),

which is precisely what the novel The Buddha of Suburbia aims to do.

It goes beyond simply examining what it means to be postcolonial in a world

without formal empires, or what it means to be “Indian” in England and does something

unique and crucial: it seeks to redefine what it means to be British in such a world. The

novel’s protagonist cynically and aptly makes readers aware of this intention when he

says, “Yeah, sometimes we were French Jammie and I, and other times we went black

American. The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were

always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it” (53). Bart Moore-Gilbert talks of the

novel’s “increasingly serious and self-conscious process of negotiation with...

‘Indianness’” (“Hybridity” 202), but one thing that becomes increasingly more clear to

this reader is how that “process of negotiation”—to borrow Moore-Gilbert’s phrase—is

deliberately explored in order to begin a process of negotiation with Englishness.

The first lyrics of the Beatles’ song, “I am the Walrus,” “I am he as you are he as

you are me/ And we are all together” get right to what is most critical to Kureishi and his

novel. Though that particular lyric from “I am the Walrus” may very well resonate with

all of the characters in The Buddha of Suburbia, it is especially apropos for the

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protagonist, whose first words as the narrator of the novel parallel the song’s opening

line, as he introduces himself by name and declares that he is “an Englishman born and

bred, almost” (emphasis mine 3). The juxtaposition of his name, Karim Amir—a name

which is recognizably Indian—against the fact that he is an Englishman establishes the

psychological tension of both “belonging and not” (3) from the very first sentence of the

novel. He goes on to admit:

I am often considered a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having

emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care—Englishman I am (though not

proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is

the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not,

that makes me restless and easily bored. (3)

While Karim reminds us from the outset of the novel that he knows no home aside from

the South London suburbs where he was born and raised, he also characterizes himself as

“funny,” as a “new breed” (3), as an Englishman who belongs to two cultures and two

continents and knows only one. The son of an Indian-born, Muslim father and a white,

working-class, British-born mother, Karim Amir is adolescent, bisexual, biracial, and

bicultural. Karim is “he” and “you” and “me” all rolled into one, the epitome of a person

caught “between” identities.

Though he considers himself an Englishman, Karim is also aware that the

conventional notion of Englishness in the sixties and the seventies did not include its

New Commonwealth citizens, “I was sick too of being affectionately called Shitface and

Curryface, and of coming home covered in spit and snot and chalk and wood-shavings”

(63). The opening of the novel establishes that there is a clash between the way Karim

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sees himself and the way others see him, as he argues, “Englishman I am (though not

proud of it)” (3), as if to suggest that he both embraces his Englishness and proudly

stands outside it. He brazenly argues, “Fuck you, Charles Dickens, nothing’s changed”

(63). Why would he want to identify with the boys who, “held chisels to our throats and

cut off our shoelaces” or the kid who “tried to brand my arm with a red-hot lump of

metal” or the one who “pissed all over my shoes” (63) or with any number of other

English boys who perpetrate endless offenses against him because of the color of his

skin. Even his nickname, “Creamy” (85), exemplifies his multiple identities, as the color

of his skin is lighter than his father’s, but also racially distinct from what was then

described as traditionally English.

In keeping with the notion of subverting hard and fast cultural distinctions—an

idea celebrated in the lyrics to “I am the Walrus”—it is noteworthy that Karim is both

happy to play the middle and desperate to blend in. On the one hand, he says, “I felt it

would be heart-breaking to have to choose one or the other, like having to decide between

the Beatles and the Rolling Stones” (55) and later that, “although I hated inequality, it

didn’t mean I wanted to be treated like everyone else” (149). On the other hand, he is

consistently apprehensive about fitting in. He admits, “...as a rule I cared fanatically

about the way I looked, and behaved as if the entire world had nothing better to do than

constantly observe me for slips in a very complicated and private etiquette” (40), a

confession which is further evidenced by his attempts to keep up with the latest trends by

studying Melody Maker and New Musical Express (8), magazines devoted entirely to the

music industry. Celia M. Wallhead argues, “The power of the media in the West...is

shown by the way all the characters’ aspirations are formed through their favourite

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medium, or by the fact that they exploit a certain medium to fulfill their objectives or to

create an identity (76). Fittingly, many of the allusions to Western media that Kureishi

employs in regards to his protagonist reinforce Karim’s own identity; they take up

multiple objectives, escape easy genre classification, and inform other media: Karim

reads about fashion in magazines committed to popular music, for example, he enjoys the

work of Norman Mailer (62)—who is as much a journalist as he is a novelist, as much a

playwright as he is a film director—and by his own admission, he finds it difficult to

decide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. All of these allusions underscore

Karim’s feelings of “inbetweenness.”

If there is any doubt as to whether or not media constitute meaning in Karim’s

life, one must only note how Karim feels connected to the rest of the world through

media. At one point in the novel, Karim compares his mind to “a kind of cinema for

myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through” (217) and at another point, Karim

wonders, “If the secret police ordered you to live in the suburbs for the rest of your life,

what would you do? Kill yourself? Read?” (145). The power of media in Karim’s life

can be evidenced in part by that simple question, because Karim does, in fact, escape

through books and movies and television when he believes he will live in the suburbs

forever. He describes the enormous window to the world that media provide, right from

his tiny, seemingly insignificant bedroom in the hardly spectacular landscape of the

South London suburbs. Karim pronounces:

I read Norman Mailer’s journalism about an action-man writer involved in

danger, resistance and political commitment: adventure stories not of the distant

past, but of recent times. I’d bought a TV from the man in a chip shop, and as the

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black-and-white box heated up it stank of grease and fish, but late at night I heard

of cults and experiments in living, in California. In Europe terrorist groups were

bombing capitalist targets; in London psychologists were saying you had to live

your own life in your own way and not according to your family, or you’d go

mad. In bed I read Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes I felt the whole world

was converging on this little room. (62)

Karim’s description of the entire world collapsing in upon itself in the middle of the quiet

nights in the South London suburbs through the mediums of journalism, television and

magazines only seeks to underscore his own disillusionment with the circumstances of

the real world that surrounds him. At one point Karim describes his mother as “tired.

She reminded me of the real world. I wanted to shout at her: Take that world away!”

(18). That such a world can so easily be forgotten simply by turning to novels and

television and pop music underscores the power of media in the first place. In fact, when

Karim rushes to move from the suburbs to the city, it is important to note that he takes

only a handful of disparate items, including: “twenty records...Tropic of Cancer and On

the Road, and the plays of Tennessee Williams” (92), because for Karim, mass media

hold the greatest capital value, they stand to demonstrate who he is as a person and who

he aspires to be.

Similarly, Kureishi gives us Karim’s father, Haroon who is jaded after years of

trying to assimilate, of masking his Indian accent, of “trying to be more of an

Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous” (21). Even his in-laws refuse to call him by

his Indian name, “He was always ‘Harry’ to them, and they spoke of him as Harry to

other people. It was bad enough his being an Indian in the first place, without having an

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awkward name too” (33). After concluding that, “The whites will never promote us...Not

an Indian while there is a white man left on the earth...they still think they have an

Empire when they don’t have two pennies to rub together” (27), Haroon defiantly decides

to embody the foreign stigma that living in England for most of his life has failed to strip

away and constructs an identity in keeping with the preconceived expectations of

socialites in South London, with the fixed philosophies fostered by the Western media’s

fascination with Eastern enlightenment, with karma, nirvana, tantra, mysticism, gurus and

salvation as well as magic carpets, camel rides, and 1001 Arabian Nights.

Kureishi satirically demonstrates that in order to pander to these expectations,

Haroon even dresses the part. At one point in the novel his outfit is compared to the

styles emulated by the Beatles, when he sets out of his house wearing “a red and gold

waistcoat and Indian pyjamas,” and Karim notes that he, “was probably the only man in

southern England at that moment (apart, possibly, from George Harrison)” to be dressed

in such a way (31). Haroon’s resemblance to one of the Beatles is no coincidence. In her

book Karma Cola, Gita Mehta traces the relationship between the Westerners, who

flocked toward India to find salvation and the Beatles’ sojourn in India in 1968, during

which time they studied transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Given that the Beatles had already begun to incorporate the Indian sitar in their music and

that the press was likely to follow the Beatles anywhere they traveled, it is no surprise

that through the Beatles India captured the imagination of a vast Western audience.

Mehta writes, “The Beatles discovered India escaping from America” (67) and notes that,

“People are apt to follow their heroes…and follow they did, rushing for mantras…” (68).

The fact that Haroon chooses to dress by replicating a style that the Beatles’ borrowed

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from India and subsequently perpetuated throughout the West by being photographed in

such clothing during press releases and on television appearances, is only part of the ruse,

part of his image-making technique, part of what helps his followers belief that he is the

real thing. Mehta calls this “mythological osmosis” and also “rock and roll” (200).

Additionally, Haroon consults books on everything from Buddhism, Sufism, and

Zen (5) to Christmas Humphreys (the British barrister turned Buddhist) (20), reads

translated volumes of Confucius (30), co-opts enlightening phrases and meditations from

yoga books, and regurgitates and reinterprets it all for a spellbound audience of

businessmen and suburban housewives, “hissing his s’s and exaggerating his Indian

accent” (21) along the way. Ironically, the Indian identity that Haroon adopts as he begins

to speak on Eastern enlightenment in no way resembles his own identity, when as young

man he left Bombay for England. If Haroon is what he reads, by de Cacqueray’s “tell-

me-what-you-read and I’ll tell-you-who-you-are” formulation, he is, perhaps, a walking

caricature, a generic “Oriental.” Conversely, if Haroon is, as Wallhead suggests, simply

manipulating popularized impressions of Eastern enlightenment, then there is no doubt

that he is enjoying every minute of his mystical routine. While it is never clear whether

or not Haroon’s identity as a spiritual leader is genuine, what is clear is that Haroon

successfully co-opts an image enabled by media and makes it his own. It is also clear,

that he is more successful as a “Buddha of suburbia,” than he is as an Indian immigrant

trying to blend in with his British contemporaries.

Rather than suffer the jabs of party guests who poke fun at his expense: “Why has

our Eva brought this brown Indian here?”; “And has he got his camel parked outside?”;

“No, he came on a magic carpet” (12), Haroon takes ownership of these stereotypes,

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perpetuated by comic books and empire films, by embracing them and using them to

enchant his audience. Karim explains, “The candle industry was stimulated, Venetian

blinds were lowered, Indian sandalwood stinkers were ignited and put in flowerpots, and

a small carpet was put down for the Buddha of suburbia to fly on” (32). Still, while

Haroon rejoices in his role as a sage and in the attention he receives in that regard, it is

unclear whether he is to be taken seriously as a guru or not. On the one hand, the women

in his life seem unconvinced by his Indian pajamas and suburban guru act. His wife

refuses to participate in his charade, even though he “wanted her to be with him, to

witness him being respected by others” (6). Furthermore, while Eva, the woman Haroon

eventually takes as his mistress, introduces him to the guests attending her party as her

“good and deep friend Haroon” who will “show us the Way. The Path” (13), there is a

sense that even she sees right through his adopted persona: “Eva also insisted on Dad

improving his service: she got him to consult esoteric library books early before work”

(115). On the other hand, Karim’s friends seem enchanted. Charlie insists, “Your father.

He’s the best. He’s wise” (14) and Karim’s friend Helen, mesmerized by Haroon’s

routine, claims, “Your father looks like a magician” (31).

And yet Karim’s childhood friend, Jamila argues that, “He’s a complete phoney”

(72) and his Auntie Jean and Uncle Ted dismiss Haroon’s behavior arguing that, “Your

mum’s told me all about what a caper your dad’s been leading over in Beckenham” (44).

Even Karim himself wonders whether or not his father is just “a renegade Muslim

masquerading as a Buddhist” (16):

I wanted to see if Dad was a charlatan or if there was anything true in what he was

doing. After all, he’d impressed Eva and then done the difficult thing—knocked

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Charlie out. His magic had worked on them and I’d given him the “God”

moniker, but with reservations. He wasn’t yet fully entitled to the name. What I

wanted to see was whether, as he started to blossom, Dad really did have anything

to offer other people, or if he would turn out to be merely another suburban

eccentric. (22)

In the end, Kureishi never forces the point. Waddick Doyle suggests that perhaps

Haroon’s true identity lies somewhere between that of a “suburban eccentric”—a walking

caricature—and the real thing. He asks, “Is he a charlatan trading on the gullibility of

Westerners’ craving for the exotic Indian Other (just as he once craved Englishness)?”

and asks at the same time, “Is he also wise and compassionate and Buddha-like and

sincere?” To both questions Doyle responds, “Without a doubt” (111). Can Haroon

rejoice in a media-constructed stereotype and help his followers at the same time? Sure.

And, it is essential that readers recognize that Haroon is deeply fulfilled after letting go of

the little blue dictionary he always carried, from which he suffered to learn a new word

everyday, because, as he’d say, “You never know when you might need a heavyweight

word to impress an Englishman” (28). It is imperative that readers appreciate what

Haroon gains by liberating himself from his own desire to assimilate, from his own

longing for acceptance.

In direct contrast to Haroon is Karim’s childhood friend Jamila who seems intent

on changing the world. Though Jamila would never admit to embracing a stereotype of

her Indian identity, her own image certainly mirrors those represented in media by her

favorite authors and musicians. The daughter of Indian shopkeepers, Jamila is proud of

her Indian heritage and the fact that she defines herself as a feminist, as politically active

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and rebellious. After being educated by the librarian who worked next door to her

parents’ shop and who had spent time as a missionary in Africa, Jamila decides that

“Miss Cutmore really wanted to eradicate everything that was foreign to her” (53) and

makes a conscious decision to cast off “all that ‘old, dull, white stuff’ they taught you at

school and college” (95) in favor of educating herself. However, there is evidence that

Miss Cutmore’s instruction inspired Jamila to be transgressive in the first place. Karim

explains, “Jamila received the highest-class education at the hands of Miss Cutmore, who

loved her. Just being for years beside someone who liked writers, coffee and subversive

ideas, and told her she was brilliant had changed her for good” (52-3). While Miss

Cutmore’s history as a missionary raises alarms, it is clear that she does expose Jamila to

a great works of literature, foster her love for learning, and give Jamila a strong

educational foundation on which to build.

In fact, even at the tender age of thirteen, Jamila reads Baudelaire, Colette and

Radiguet, listens to Billie Holliday, and dreams of becoming Simone de Beauvoir (52).

Though Miss Cutmore may have spoken to Jamila’s parents, “as if they were peasants,”

Karim admits, “She drove me mad by saying Miss Cutmore had colonized her...Jamila

was the strongest-willed person I’d met: no one could turn her into a colony” (53). In

keeping with her strong-willed personality, Jamila finds herself in and identifies with

what Karim refers to as “her post-Miss Cutmore books: the ‘classics’ as she call them,

Angela Davis, Baldwin, Malcolm X, Greer, Millett” (95). Karim explains, “We lived in

rebellious and unconventional times, after all. And Jamila was interested in anarchists

and situationists and Weathermen, and cut all that stuff out of the papers and showed it to

me (82). In other words, Jamila clearly engages with media to learn about what is

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happening in the world politically and to become involved in the political movements

discussed in the papers and in world news. This is further emphasized by the fact that she

identifies with authors who embrace their minority status in efforts to enact social

change. Karim explains that Jamila felt as enriched by the feminist poetry that she tacked

upon her walls—Christina Rossetti, Sylvia Plath, and what Karim sarcastically refers to

as the “other vegetarians”—as she did by the music of Aretha Franklin “and the other

mamas” (95), all feminists who write about empowerment, and respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Though one could argue that Jamila’s identity is as self-consciously constructed

out of Western media as Haroon’s, she embodies an entirely different media “type” as

she works feverishly to revolutionize both her traditional Indian culture and the changing

ethnic landscape of England. Through Jamila, Kureishi both depicts and challenges

certain Indian stereotypes, mainly that of arranged marriage, about which Mark Stein

aptly notes is “almost a cliché in Indian writing in English” (126). When Jamila’s father

undertakes a hunger strike to coerce her into a marriage, Kureishi, using his entire host of

characters, carefully manages to present all sides of the arranged marriage debate. In the

first place, he gets readers to sympathize with the very weight of Jamila’s dilemma by

representing her father, Anwar’s, fierce traditional beliefs—which are fittingly

underscored by the fact that Anwar has no interest in Western media whatsoever as he

stares “directly in front of him as he always did at the television screen, except that it

wasn’t on” (59)—and also the dire consequences of disobeying him. Anwar’s “I won’t

eat. I will die. If Gandhi could shove out the English from India by not eating, I can get

my family to obey me by exactly the same” (60) attitude is both cheeky and deeply

troubling. Jamila is ever aware that her father may very well die from his hunger-strike,

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leaving her mother, Jeeta—“who knew nothing of the outside world” (51)—completely

alone.

Secondly, Kureishi addresses the concern that by depicting an arranged marriage

in the first place he is playing into the hands of the Indian communities’ racial enemies

by allowing Jamila to voice her own concern about how her father’s behavior might

appear to a British public already harboring a host of negative feelings toward the Indian

community. After all, Karim himself addresses the commonly held image of “swarms of

Indian peasants who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s” of whom the public said,

“they were not familiar with cutlery and certainly not with toilets, since they squatted on

the seats and shat from on high” (24). So, it is no surprise that when Karim asks if he can

share her dilemma with his friend Helen, Jamila’s response is characteristically ardent,

“Yes, if you want to expose our culture as being ridiculous and our people as old-

fashioned, extreme and narrow-minded” (71), a sentiment which is echoed later in the

novel, when we see the arranged marriage through the eyes of Tracey, one of Karim’s

theatre colleagues, who objects to a character that Karim develops based upon Anwar and

his hunger strike.

Tracey argues, “I’m afraid that it shows black people...As being irrational,

ridiculous, as being hysterical. And as being fanatical” (180), while Karim notes that their

conversation is “suddenly between ‘minorities’” (180). In this way, the conversation

between Karim and Tracey—like Jamila’s own cautionary objection to the idea that

Karim would share this deeply shameful set of circumstances with a cultural outsider—

comes to represent any voices that might object to Kureishi’s development of a character

like Anwar in the first place. Kureishi raises point and counterpoint himself. As Tracey

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states her reservations about the character, Karim continuously interjects to remind her

that his character is based upon “One old Indian man” and that, “It’s not a fanatical

hunger-strike. It’s calmly intended blackmail” (180). In this way, Kureishi toes the line

between critiquing traditional Indian values and portraying positive images of Indian

ethnicity; he voices any anticipated concern over the idea of depicting an arranged

marriage himself.

Thirdly, Kureishi turns the entire notion of arranged marriage inside-out and

upside-down when Jamila eventually decides to consent to her father’s demands, not

because she intends to obey her father, but because as Karim explains even her decision

to enter into an arranged marriage is subversive:

I kept thinking to myself, Typical Jamila, that’s exactly what she would do, as if

this were something that happened every day. But she was marrying Changez out

of perversity, I was sure of it ... Marrying Changez would be, in her mind, a

rebellion against rebellion, creative novelty itself. Everything in her life would be

disrupted, experimented with. She claimed to be doing it only for Jeeta, but there

was real, wilful contrariness in it, I suspected. (82)

Though Jamila’s decision to agree to an arranged marriage is made in part out of self-

preservation—to save her father’s life and to protect her mother’s interests—it is also

made out of her desire to deconstruct the entire convention. Stein explains that the

“stereotypical notion of an arranged marriage is undermined through Jamila’s creativity”

(127). Stein has a point about Jamila’s rebellious embrace of the arranged marriage, but

circumstances have the last word when her husband-to-be arrives and he, Changez, is not

“the rippling physical specimen” (81) Anwar had expected. Anwar exclaims, “‘I want

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some boy who can climb a ladder! Plus I need someone to carry boxes from the

wholesaler. When Changez arrives he can run the shop with Jamila. I can take that

woman’—he meant his wife—‘out somewhere beautiful’” (79). Anwar’s hopes are

dashed when he sees Changez, and the physical deformity in his arm, for the first time

and when Changez admits, “Business isn’t my best side, yaar, not my best. I’m the

intellectual type, not one of those uneducated immigrant types who come here to slave all

day and night and look dirty” (107). One wonders where Changez might have seen such

a type in the first place if not for Western media. Jamila, herself, could not have planned

it better.

Finally, we see the arranged marriage through the eyes of Jamila’s new husband.

Naive and good-natured, as evidenced by his favorite novels and films, what he calls “the

classics,” but which are all light-hearted and adventurous: P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur

Conan Doyle, and Westerns with Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper, or John Wayne (83)—

Changez goes through a series of hard and fast changes after marrying Jamila. Karim

jokes:

If you think books don’t change people, just look at Changez, because

undreamed-of possibilities in the sex line suddenly occurred to him [as he read

Harold Robbins, known for including graphic sexuality in his novels], a man

recently married and completely celibate who saw Britain as we saw Sweeden: as

the goldmine of sexual opportunity. (96)

And, later, when Karim uses Changez as the basis for a character in a play, the staged

Changez, Tariq, arrives at London’s Heathrow airport, “having been informed in Bombay

by a race-track acquaintance that you merely had to whisper the word ‘undress’ in

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England and white women would start slipping out of their underwear” (188-89). The

real Changez is savvy enough to recognize that Jamila will never desire him sexually, so

he agrees to let her move into a commune on her own, but later is relieved to be invited to

join her, which he does. There, he eventually transforms from the patriarch of their

family, as he would be in India, into a maternal figure as he eventually cares for the baby

that Jamila has with another man. In this way, the marriage between Changez and Jamila

becomes nearly unrecognizable as a traditional, Indian, arranged marriage. If there is

someone who suffers most, perhaps it is Changez, who at one point says, “This is too

Western for me...Here, in this capitalism of the feelings no one cares for another person”

(215). He enters into the arranged marriage with all of the most conventional intentions

and winds up with a father-in-law who despises him and a wife who rejects him.

Each of these characters manipulates a stereotype propagated by Western media:

Haroon stops trying so desperately to be accepted as an Englishman to play into the

hands of the British expectations fostered by media; Jamila refuses to be “colonized” and

cultivates a rebellious streak out of the very literature, poetry and music of

empowerment; to reinforce his role as head of the house, Anwar embraces the stereotype

of the stern Indian patriarch, rejects Western values and instead behaves “like a Muslim”

(64); to remain close to his wife, Changez does the opposite and drops his role as a

traditional husband in a traditional arranged marriage, noticing that England is a very

different place from the one he imagined while reading Sherlock Holmes; and, of course,

Karim becomes an actor, a profession which seems to be in his blood given that one of

his father’s siblings edited a movie magazine and that, as he says, “Once when I was

seven or eight, Dad told me he thought I should become an actor” (23). Thus, Haroon

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plays a guru, Jamila plays an activist, Anwar plays Gandhi, Changez plays nursemaid,

and as Karim searches for where he truly stands amidst his many possible identities, he

takes his father’s one time advice and literally becomes a professional chameleon.

Like Saladin Chamcha in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Karim is willing to live

his own life—to borrow Judith Mishrahi-Barak’s term—as “a hermit crab” (93), whereby

Karim embodies one identity or personality after another, the way a hermit crab moves to

inhabit one shell until it outgrows it and searches for an alternative. In The Satanic

Verses, Chamcha notes that each “self” he tried on “had seemed reassuringly temporary.

Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next,

one Saladin by another” (64). While Karim relishes in his ability to assume new identities

as one might try on new outfits, the process of acting is not always cause for celebration.

Eva, usually so supportive of all of Karim’s endeavors, at one point, suggests, “Actors,

Karim, are convivial company. They put on funny voices and do imitations. But they

have no personality” (206). To a certain degree, Eva’s words ring true as we watch

Karim lose himself in roles that resemble almost everyone in his immediate circle:

Anwar, Changez, and Jamila, each in turn, “I am he as you are he as you are me/ And we

are all together” and so forth and so on, as the song goes.

Many critics have argued that the theater, the world of the stage, that performing

serves as the key metaphor for The Buddha of Suburbia. Moore-Gilbert, for example,

explains that, “the key metaphoric structure of reference in the novel is, of course, the

theatre” (“Hybridity” 202). Alamgir Hashmi notes “playing moves the plot, and

searching for a character becomes both a structural and symbolic device” (26). And,

Gayatri Spivak reminds readers to “notice that Karim, as he learns performance from

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British and American directors is being asked to be ‘Indian,’ or to portray migrants

favorably” (148). Such critics are right to point out that, through theater, Karim’s cultural

identity is tested. He learns that he is often judged by his appearance only, he learns that

ethnic minorities are often relegated to the same marginalized status and community, and

he learns that regardless of the roles he is given or the directions he is made to adhere to

in performing such roles, the quest to appease every side (the white community as well as

his own community) is often impossible to achieve.

There are several poignant examples. For instance, Karim is deeply offended by a

fellow actor, who, in a jealous rage after Karim is cast in a radical, theater troupe,

suggests, “If I weren’t white and middle class I’d have been in Pyke’s show...Obviously

mere talent gets you nowhere these days. Only the disadvantaged are going to succeed in

seventies’ England” (165). Karim is further agitated when, after meeting for the first

rehearsal with this group, he swiftly realizes that he has, indeed, been cast specifically to

portray an ethnic minority. For example, when he offers to create a character modeled

after his white friend, Charlie, he is reminded, “We need someone from your own

background...Someone black” (170). Karim finds this unnerving, noting, “I didn’t know

anyone black, though I’d been to school with a Nigerian” (170). Berthold Schoene argues

that, “Karim’s specific individual difference remains unacknowledged by Pyke; in fact, it

is erased as a negligible detail of little import” (121). Notably, Karim cynically admits,

“Two of us were officially ‘black’ (though truly I was more beige than anything)” (167).

To Karim, his specific ethnicity is a detail of considerable magnitude and he finds that in

the theatrical world he must consistently distinguish himself as Indian, not black.

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I quite agree with critics like Moore-Gilbert, Hashmi, Spivak, and Schoene, who

point out that such moments—which take place in the world of the theater—are quite

important to The Buddha of Suburbia. The very fact that all of the members of his cast

fail to distinguish marginalized cultural groups as unique and distinct certainly raises

compelling and thought-provoking ideas about cultural representation. However, what I

find even more extraordinary are the ways in which allusions to media up the ante in

regards to questioning cultural representation. What these critics overlook are the defiant

ways in which Karim uses the theater to revise, re-imagine, reconstitute or reclaim the

offensive Indian stereotypes that are disseminated by Western media. Cynthia Carey

points out that Kureishi exploits the theater as a space where “recovering a dignified and

authentic identity requires a constant battle with wrong perceptions, racial clichés and

imitated behavior” (121). In the context of his acting career, embodying a character is

often emotionally and politically painful for Karim; however, it is also empowering. In

his roles, he can be subversive and defiant as he is in his first role as an actor, in the part

of Mowgli in a staged production of Kipling’s imperialist The Jungle Book.

In this role, Karim is cast, as the director Shadwell unsympathetically reveals,

because he is, “An actor who’ll fit the part” (140). Shadwell goes on to suggest, “In fact,

you are Mowgli. You’re dark-skinned, you’re small and wiry, and you’ll be sweet but

wholesome in the costume” (142-43). When Shadwell patronizingly wonders whether or

not Karim is familiar with Kipling’s work, Karim replies, “Yeah, I’ve seen the film”

(140). By the time The Buddha of Suburbia was written, there were at least two Western

film versions of The Jungle Book: a live-action film, shot in 1942 and the Disney

animated adaptation, released in 1967. Though it is unclear to which film Karim refers,

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what is clear is that while Shadwell thinks of The Jungle Book quite academically, Karim

thinks of it in its more popular version. If Karim does intend to refer to the animated

version of The Jungle Book, then the fact that Shadwell takes himself, perhaps a bit too

seriously, is only further underscored by the fact that Karim equates The Jungle Book,

and subsequently the role he is cast to play in the staged version, as a cartoon.

That Shadwell will later decide that racially, Karim does not, in fact, entirely fit

the part of Mowgli is foreshadowed in this same scene when first—after an unsuccessful

attempt to speak to Karim in an Indian dialect—Shadwell exclaims:

What breed of people two hundred years of imperialism has given birth to. If the

pioneers from the East India Company could see you. What puzzlement there’d

be. Everyone looks at you, I’m sure, and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how

interesting, what stories of aunties and elephants we’ll hear from him. And

you’re from Orpington. (141)

Secondly, Shadwell specifically addresses the subject of Karim’s ethnicity, suggesting

that Karim’s destiny is “to be a half-caste in England...belonging nowhere, wanted

nowhere” (141). Shadwell’s remarks about the disparity between Karim’s brown skin and

his upbringing in the South London suburbs as well as his observation that Karim is “a

half-caste” consistently serve to mock and undermine the director every time he insists

that Karim was given the part of Mowgli “for authenticity and not for experience” (147),

particularly when Shadwell concludes that in order to adequately embody the role of

Mowgli, Karim must fake an Indian accent and darken his already dark skin in order to

“play” Indian.

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Though critics like Doyle point out that the “Indian boy as imagined by...Kipling”

is “colonialist, if not racist” (113), Karim reconstitutes Kipling’s words by making them

his own, as he does when he is content to reconfigure the language of The Jungle Book to

make it relevant to his own life, as he does when he refers to himself as Mowgli and

Jamila as Shere Khan in their adolescent pursuit of one another, “I watched Jamila, and

pressed my nose to the glass and made a range of jungle noises. I was Mowgli

threatening Shere Khan. But she didn’t hear me” (51). Similarly, when Shadwell insists

that Karim develop a demeaning mock-Indian accent and parade around on stage wearing

nothing more than a loin cloth and brown boot polish—“shit brown cream” (146)—to

darken his skin, Karim, at first, protests. He begs Shadwell to reconsider the costume and

the accent claiming, “I feel wrong in it. I feel like together we’re making the world

uglier” (146), and claims that, “It’s a political matter to me” (147). But when Shadwell

refuses to entertain Karim’s objections to stay true to Kipling’s original text, asking

Karim, “Where was our Mowgli born?” and “What accent do they have in India?” and

finally reminds Karim that he has been “cast for authenticity and not for experience”

(147), Karim takes matters into his own hands and asserts his own political agency over

the role by “suddenly relapsing into cockney at odd times” (158), effectively changing

the politics of the play entirely. By slipping in and out of his mock-Indian accent, Karim

asserts his own agency over the part. Karim effectively pokes fun at both Kipling’s

original colonialist vision and simultaneously exacts revenge against Shadwell. Schoene

notes that in the end, “Shadwell’s strategy backfires. Rather than further clarifying what

is already commonsensically obvious to him, his (re)production becomes a parody and

Karim’s central performance some kind of farcical ethnic drag act” (121). Rather than

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trying to portray Mowgli in the purely “authentic” way that Shadwell envisions, Karim

exposes Kipling’s Mowgli as well as Shadwell’s directorial rendering of the accent, the

costume, and the ethnicity as artificial as well as blatantly Orientalist.

Furthermore, Kureishi applies his characteristic narrative topspin in regards to

Karim’s performance so that each character present at the production of The Jungle Book

reacts to it differently and their opposing voices raise numerous concerns about ethnicity,

identity, political responsibility and representation and they respond not only to Karim’s

performance or to Shadwell’s questionable direction, but also to Kipling’s original text.

On the one hand, Karim’s mother “wept with pride,” and his Auntie Jean “laughed a

great deal” (156). For them, Karim’s costume is not an issue of political importance and

Karim notes, “The key to impressing Mum and Auntie Jean, and the best way to keep

their tongues off the risible subject of my loin-cloth, which inevitably had them quaking

with laughter, was to introduce them to the actors afterwards” (156). On the other hand,

to Haroon and Jamila, Karim’s costume and his depiction of Mowgli are of great political

significance.

Karim’s father is outraged at the performance and explosively reacts in a rage at

what he calls this “Bloody, half-cocked business” and he angrily condemns Kipling’s The

Jungle Book for being prejudicial: “That bloody fucker Mr. Kipling pretending to Whity

he knew something about India! And an awful performance by my boy looking like a

Black and White Minstrel” (157). Sangeeta Ray suggests that, “Kipling’s identity as a

respected imperialist writer is attacked by Karim’s father who reduces Kipling to a

sycophant, and British imperialists to an undifferentiated mass—‘whity’” (234). It is

important to notice that Haroon’s aversion to Karim’s performance is confined to the

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material that Karim reenacts and to what he looks like upon the stage; it is a matter of his

“looking like a Black and White Minstrel” (with a painted body instead of a painted

face), a matter of the boot polish darkening Karim’s skin. Haroon problematizes

Kipling’s role as the imperialist writer and, Eva pins her anger on Shadwell, who insisted

upon darkening Karim’s skin, “Eva turned and gesticulated towards me, as if she were

taking him [Shadwell] to task for something he’d done to me” (157). However, neither

one of them lays the blame on Karim. They think of him as the victim of prejudice rather

than the opposite.

Conversely, Jamila blames Karim for his own political naiveté and his complicity

with the performance. For Jamilia, it is not just about the fact that the play is, as she says,

“completely neo-fascist” (157), it is that the whole portrayal on Karim’s part is

“disgusting, the accent and the shit you had smeared over you. You were just pandering

to prejudices...And clichés about Indians. And the accent—my God, how could you do

it? I expect you’re ashamed, aren’t you?” (157). She hardly listens when Karim replies,

“I am, actually.” Instead, she suggests, “you’ve got no morality” (157). In this sense, she

denounces him for being a part of the production in the first place and suggests that by

agreeing to the accent and the loin-cloth, he aligns himself with both Kipling’s and

Shadwell’s vision, ignoring his own agency—the lapsed accent and all—entirely.

Ironically, it is only Changez, the most recent immigrant to England, who “had chuckled

all through the show.” He says, “Good entertainment...take me again, eh” (157), perhaps

because to him, the production rang so false, that he was hard-pressed to take it seriously.

No matter what his reason for enjoying the play, it is Kureishi’s ability to look at the

production from every ideological angle—as if through a kaleidoscope—that makes The

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Buddha of Suburbia so adept at imbuing a text as familiar as Kipling’s The Jungle

Book—and perhaps the film version to which Karim refers—with new and transgressive

meanings.

In a novel like The Buddha of Suburbia, so full of references to Western masss

media, from literature to magazines to television to film, Western pop music alone

emerges a powerful landscape through which the notion of what it means to be British in

a world without formal empires is explored and examined and so to focus only upon the

world of the theater would be to miss a great deal. Jörg Helbig argues that, “The Buddha

of Suburbia electrifies the social momentum reflected in pop music” (81). Furthermore,

Moore-Gilbert explains that, “popular music plays a role in building wider kinds of

communities...which might provide a template for more productive relations between

different ethnicities in contemporary society” (Hanif Kureishi 116-17). Indeed, in The

Buddha of Suburbia music becomes a medium of cross-cultural exchange and socio-

cultural evolution, where both high and low, margin and center meet. The novel takes

into account a diverse and vast array of music, from jazz to hippy funk, psychedelic rock

music to punk. In fact, The Buddha of Suburbia is so infused with references to popular

music—from Ella Fitzgerald (53, 116) to David Bowie (68, 118, 247), the Rolling Stones

(10, 14, 55, 118, 153, 247, 249) to the Third Ear Band (10), Bob Dylan (6, 134, 238) to

Pink Floyd (8, 14, 15, 48), Louis Armstrong (25) to Cream (10, 176), Otis Redding (88)

to the Beatles (9, 10, 14, 20, 31, 55, 85, 118, 178, 249)—that it almost seems like a novel

set to a soundtrack. When reading Kureishi’s novel, one can practically hear the slip of a

diamond stylus between the grooves of an old LP.

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Indeed, it is important to note how Karim’s parents—each from such disparate

ethnicities—met for the first time at a dance where everyone from Glenn Miller and

Count Basie and Louis Armstrong all played together (25). To further emphasize how

different his parents were—not just in their ethnicities, but in their upbringings—Karim

explains how his father initially moved to England to further his education, “Like Gandhi

and Jinnah before him, Dad would return to India a qualified and polished English

gentleman lawyer and an accomplished ballroom dancer” (24). In the meantime, it was

while practicing his ballroom dancing that Haroon, “first laid eyes and hands on a pretty

working-class girl from the suburbs called Margaret” (25). That Haroon was the upper-

crust gentleman and Karim’s mother, Margaret, was from a lower-class family turns

traditional expectations of the interracial and intercultural couple on its knees.

In keeping with Haroon and Margaret’s relationship, Helbig suggests that, “The

recurrent theme of pop music, for instance, deliberately dissolves the traditional

borderline between popular and high culture” (80) and Rita Felski explains that,

“Furthermore, the new ideologies and lifestyles disseminated by the mass media are

blurring the rigid distinctions between classes” (37), as in the case of Margaret and

Haroon, where music blurs the line between upper- and working-classes. Additionally,

that they should meet in a setting where Glenn Miller, a white, American jazz musician

and bandleader played with Louis Armstrong and Count Basie, two black, American jazz

musicians is equally significant, because as Moore-Gilbert explains, jazz is “perhaps the

first major instance of ‘cross-over’ between musical cultures with different national or

‘ethnic’ origins” (“Hybridity” 197). As a greater illustration of the cross-cultural, cross-

class, jazz-induced relationship between Haroon and Margaret is the portrayal of their

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children. On the one hand there is Karim’s brother Allie, who “had decided to become a

ballet dancer and had to go to an expensive private school” (19). In severe contrast is

Karim, who at one point talks about his rougher education saying, “we disrupted all

lessons; we were fighters; we never carried no effeminate briefcases since we never did

no homework” (178), in a different class entirely than a private school for ballet.

When Karim’s own brother, Amar, who “called himself Allie to avoid racial

trouble” (19), congratulates Karim for landing a role in a television soap opera, he

surprises Karim when he says, “Television is the only medium I like” (268) and then

points out that Karim’s most recent theatrical role was somehow too synthetic, “It was

idealistic. The politics got on my nerves. We all hate whingeing lefties, don’t we?”

(267). Allie goes on to warn Karim to remember where he comes from. He says:

They should shut up and get on with their lives. At least the blacks have a history

of slavery. The Indians were kicked out of Uganda. There was a reason for

bitterness. But no one put people like you and me in camps, and no one will. We

can’t be lumped in with them, thank God. We should be just as grateful we

haven’t got white skin either...Let me say that we come from privilege. We can’t

pretend we’re some kind of shitted-on oppressed people. (267-68)

Ironically, what Allie fails to recognize is how mass media continue to “lump” people

like himself and Karim in with the rest of the oppressed peoples of the world on a much

larger scale. Television moguls see their dark skin and conflate them with slavery,

immigration, and with marginalization. Karim’s own television roles include playing a

taxi driver (235) and the son of an Indian shopkeeper (259) and he is consistently

photographed for magazine and newspaper articles “beside barbed-wire” (228). Even in

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his latest role in a television soap opera which “would tangle with the latest contemporary

issues...abortions and racist attacks, the stuff people lived through but that never got on

TV” (259), Karim will be another Indian teenager whose parents own a convenience

store. It is images like these that people like Karim and Allie work so hard to contradict

in their own lives.

If there is any doubt that such stereotypes can be damaging to the psyche,

Kureishi’s text is haunted by a ghost-character, Gene—a character who is only spoken of

and who never actually appears in the novel—a West Indian actor described as, “talented

and sensitive, thin and kind and raunchy, with this beautiful face,” who killed himself by

taking pills because he, “never got the work he deserved” (201). The specter of Gene

hardly stands out in the novel, but he is referred to as a genius whose roles were confined

to bit parts:

He emptied bed-pans in hospital programmes. He played criminals and taxi-

drivers. He never played in Chekhov or Ibsen or Shakespeare, and he deserved

to. He was better than a lot of people. So he was very angry about a lot of things.

The police were always picking him up and giving him a going over. Taxis drove

straight past him. People said there were no free tables in restaurants. He lived in

a bad world in nice old England. (201).

Through media Gene literally comes to embody what it means to be stereotyped.

Because Indians are described as marginalized in the media, Gene becomes first,

marginalized in his profession and then later marginalized in his own life until he quite

literally disappears.

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In the end, all of the characters that Karim is asked or cast to play represent some

variation of an ethnic stereotype from his patently offensive role as Mowgli to the

rejection of the role he desires to play as Anwar, from the character based upon Changez

to the small part he lands in a “television film, playing a taxi driver” (235), and finally his

pièce de résistance as the rebellious son of an Indian shopkeeper in a soap opera. With

all of the attention paid to trying to define what it means to be an Indian in London,

Kureishi resolves that such a definition or invention is impossible and thus, when

Kureishi’s white characters also manipulate the stereotypes cultivated by Western media,

Kureishi undermines media images that attempt to represent identity all together. John

Clement Ball aptly notes that in the “collapsed ‘world’ in downtown London—a world of

parody, pastiche, simultaneity, and simulacrum” Karim is no more authentically Indian in

his roles “than Charlie is authentically punk or Eva authentically artsy” (23). For

example, after moving to the city, Haroon’s mistress, Eva, surrounds herself with

members of England’s entertainment industry, “every third rate actor, assistant film

director, weekend writer, part-time producer and their friends” (134) in an attempt to

make it appear as though she fits in with her new metropolitan environment. Karim notes

that every attempt she makes to appear more cosmopolitan and sophisticated only works

to denote the opposite:

As my darling new mother (whom I loved) moved radiantly about the room

introducing Derek...to Bryan, who was a freelance journalist specializing in film,

or Karen, who was a secretary at a literary agency, to Robert...as she spoke of the

new Dylan album and what Riverside studios was doing. I saw she wanted to

scour that suburban stigma right off her body. She didn’t realize it was in the

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blood and not the skin; she didn’t see there could be nothing more suburban than

suburbanites repudiating themselves. (134)

What Karim notes here, in this excerpt, is significant in several ways. First and foremost,

he points out how very instrumental the media can be as cultural capital and in

structuring and nurturing cultural acceptance. Second, Eva’s preference for acquaintances

involved in acting, directing, and writing underscores her desire to revise her own

identity. Third, it is important to note how Karim refers to Eva’s party guests as “third

rate,” “assistant,” “weekend” and “part-time,” because they are likely anxious, as Eva is,

to be taken seriously. Finally, Karim’s awareness of Eva’s efforts to shed her suburban

identity for one more urban and sheik emphasizes both the ease and complexity of

playing a role. Though Karim notes that, “there could be nothing more suburban than

suburbanites repudiating themselves,” there is also no doubt that Eva successfully

manages to dupe a number of her party guests, whose notions of urban sophistication are

likely as superficial as those pandered by media.

Similarly, when Charlie first stumbles upon the discordant rifts, the unmistakable

edge and the unmasked fury of the sounds and style of punk music and wants to try on

that look and that anger, Karim’s concern that it would be “artificial” (132) for suburban

boys, like himself and Charlie, to masquerade as angry young men from the estates

demonstrates the dilemmas and complications of representation and identity. Back then,

in a bar rocked by aggressive musical notes without “a squeeze of anything ‘progressive’

or ‘experimental’” and full of “pallid vicious little council estate kids with hedgehog hair,

howling about anarchy and hatred” (130), Charlie notes how music has the power to

disturb, to stimulate change, to be defiant and audacious. He claims, “The sixties have

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been given notice tonight” (131) as if to imply that music alone can change the direction

of an entire decade, but Karim warns, “It would be artificial...We’re not like them. We

don’t hate the way they do. We’ve got no reason to. We’re not from the estates. We

haven’t been through what they have” (131-32). In some ways, when Karim argues that

they “can’t wear rubber and safety-pins and all” (131) because it would be false, he

points out how dangerous it can be when identity is faked or conjured. However, it is

important to keep in mind that even though Charlie, with his white skin, can pretend to

“hate the way they do” (132), and pass for a skinhead, Karim, with his dark skin cannot.

Later in the novel, when Charlie does manage to fool just about all of England

(and become a star in the United States) with his punk persona, Karim sees right through

Charlie’s manufactured image. Like the Sex Pistols, who became a media phenomenon,

made famous through Malcolm McLaren’s savvy use of television, tabloid press and

record label shenanigans, Karim witnesses that Charlie’s success depends upon the same

trickery. Though media outlets—the papers, magazines and television programs—all

equate Charlie’s punk image with “the new nihilism, the new hopelessness and the new

music which expressed it” (153), Karim knows better than to be fooled by Charlie’s

outraged, “Can’t play, can’t sing, can’t write songs, and the shitty idiot people love us!”

attitude. About Charlie’s first television appearance, Karim notes:

...Charlie was magnificent in his venom, his manufactured rage, his anger, his

defiance. What power he had, what admiration he extorted, what looks there were

in girls’ eyes. He was brilliant: he’d assembled all the right elements. It was a

wonderful trick and disguise. The one flaw, I giggled to myself, was his milky

and healthy white teeth, which to me, betrayed everything else. (154)

178

Though Karim notices that Charlie’s punk identity is, in his words, “a big con trick”

(154)—even Charlie admits, “The music’s feeble, OK? I’m no Bowie, don’t think I

don’t know that” (247)—Karim also notices how the music changes once it goes

overseas, where the circumstances that Charlie pretends to rail against no longer exist.

Though Charlie fakes his anger over unemployment and class tensions in England, that

menace loses some of its drama in America, where it is no longer relevant.

In New York City, Charlie sells Englishness instead of rage and Karim notes, “he

was getting a lot of money for it” (247). Even Charlie’s English identity is manufactured,

“Charlie had acquired this cockney accent when my first memory of him at school was

that he’d cried after being mocked by the stinking gypsy kids for talking so posh” (247).

Schoene suggests that, “By juxtaposing syntheticity (punk) with ethnicity (Indianness) in

this manner, Kureishi demolishes the notion of any originary cultural authenticity (116).

While Schoene is certainly correct in his summation—after all Karim’s mere presence

with Charlie serves to function as “a full length mirror, but a mirror that could remember”

(251), through which Karim and Charlie see themselves in one another and recognize

who they are as well as who they pretend to be—it is, perhaps, more important to note

that in America Charlie’s accent identifies him as British, while Karim’s skin identifies

him as Indian, despite the fact that he and Charlie sound the same.

Likewise, when Haroon suggests to a magazine reporter, “I have lived in the West

most of my life, and I will die here, yet I remain to all intents and purposes an Indian

man. I will never be anything but Indian” (263), it is wrong to mistake his tone as

culturally essentialist. He is a far cry from Anwar, who Karim explains is, “Like many

Muslim men—beginning with the Prophet Mohammed himself, whose absolute

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statements, served up piping hot from God, inevitably gave rise to absolutism” (172). I

believe that what Haroon is really suggesting at the end of the novel is that it does not

matter how he sees himself, he will always appear on the outside —as Karim does in

America—to be nothing more than an Indian man.

While throughout The Buddha of Suburbia, Karim learns to respect himself and to

embrace his own Indian heritage, it would be wrong to suggest that the color of his skin

represents his identity accurately. At Anwar’s burial, Karim looks out at the crowd of

mourners in attendance and recognizes them finally as the people he loves most. He

realizes:

I did feel, looking at these strange creatures now—the Indians—that in some way

these were my people, and that I’d spent my life denying or avoiding that fact. I

felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing, and

as if I’d been colluding with my enemies, those whites who wanted Indians to be

like them. (212)

And, at the end of the novel, when Karim takes the majority of his family out to celebrate

his new television role, Karim’s feelings at Anwar’s funeral resurface, “I was surrounded

by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time” (284). However,

Karim resolves to be something different, to somehow embrace all of the parts of himself

that make him whole. When his mother responds to one of his performances, she

contends, “But you’re not Indian. You’ve never been to India. You’d get diarrhoea the

minute you stepped off that plane...You’re an Englishman, I’m glad to say” (232). His

response, “I’m an actor. It’s my job” (212), indicates that his identity is not as simple as

his mother claims either. Karim is, indeed, “an Englishman born and bred, almost” (3).

180

After seeing the same play, Eva claims, “It was about this country...About how

callous and bereft of grace we’ve become. It blew away the self-myth of tolerant, decent

England” (228). The Buddha of Suburbia does this too; it blows away the myth of a

tolerant and decent England in a world without empires. Ball claims, “London continues

to project and to be associated with images of the old imperial city at the fulcrum of

world culture and political influence” (14) and perhaps he is correct in his conclusion. If

media help to perpetuate that image of England, there is certainly a need for change,

because in the media we see time after time methods of image-making that tie fashion

and style, cultural capital and pop culture to matters of race, culture, and identity to

reinforce ethnic stereotypes. Moore-Gilbert explains, “Kureishi rearticulates these

stereotypes as signs of the power of the formerly marginalized to trouble the norms and

values of the centre” (“Hybridity” 198). Similarly, Anthony Ilona points out that, from

politics “to the televisual and print media, the classroom and the playground, Kureishi

demonstrates how the principle of Othering and exclusion is woven into the fabric of the

nation with dehumanizing psychological effect” (96), but Kureishi also demonstrates as

Michael Gorra explains, “the ways in which it is possible to be English and not yet

white” (656): “I am he as you are he as you are me/ And we are all together.” Or, rather

what it should mean to be British in a world without empires. It comes as no surprise to

me that The Buddha of Suburbia takes place in the South London suburbs, where

incidentally, the Prime Meridian or Longitude Zero can be found. Robert Young

describes the scene:

At the top of this small hill, you have found yourself at the zero point of the

world, at the centre of time itself. Paradoxically, for Greenwich to be the centre

181

of the world in time it must be inscribed with the alterity of the place. Stand to

the left-hand side of the brass strip and you are in the Western hemisphere. But

move a yard to your right, and you enter the East: whoever youa re, you have

been translated from a European to an Oriental. Put one foot back to the left of

the brass strip and you become undecidedly mixed with otherness: an Occidental

and an Oriental at once. It was with a supremely knowing gesture towards the

future that in 1884, the division of the newly homogenized temporal world into

East and West was placed not in Jerusalem or Constantinople but in a South

London suburb. In that gesture, it was acknowledged that the totality, the

sameness of the West will always be riven by difference. (1)

In The Buddha of Suburbia what underlies every character’s journey on the quest for self-

discovery, is the notion that perhaps the only “character” in need of change is England

herself.

What Kureishi shows us in The Buddha of Suburbia is that the cultural landscape

of England has, in fact, irrevocably changed and this is something that all of the novels

included in this dissertation show us. As part of the Western mass media—in that they

are mass-marketed novels in and beyond the West—the novels in this dissertation use

images of mass media to demonstrate that the entire white Western world has changed.

The Buddha of Suburbia articulates, in part, the messages rendered in every novel

examined in this dissertation. Kureishi employs much of what is sacred to Rushdie in

The Satanic Verses. If, in Rushdie’s words, The Satanic Verses is a novel that asks, “You

call us devils? Very well, then here is the devil’s version of the world, of ‘your’ world”

(“In Good Faith” 403), The Buddha of Suburbia shows us an equally enticing view of the

182

world from the perspective of those marginalized for their otherness. Furthermore, by

rendering that world, Kureishi deconstructs the fixed conceptions of “Indianness”

maintained by Western media by establishing the vast diversity of points-of-view

amongst the members of the Indian community in England.

Karim, like Raju in The Guide, demonstrates what it must feel like to embody one

role after another, only to cast off his desire to live up to the expectations of others in

favor of fulfilling himself. The narrator of The Guide suggests, “For the first time in his

life he [Raju] was making an honest effort; for the first time he was learning the thrill of

full application outside money and love; for the first time he was doing a thing in which

he was personally interested” (212). And yet, both Karim’s and Raju’s true identities are

effectively erased once they are performed on stage or on film. Like Tara in The Tiger’s

Daughter, Karim feels cut off from his Indian identity and finds that media are

inadequate landscapes for exploring what it means to be Indian. Tara concludes, “It was

impossible to be a bridge for anybody” (144), just as Karim concludes that he is

uncomfortable in the role of interpreting his ethnicity for a white audience. Like

Mammachi’s banana jam, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Karim too, is

“ambiguous” and “unclassifiable” (31) and, like Roy, Kureishi uses references to

Western media to underscore significant moments throughout his novel. For Roy it is The

Sound of Music and for Kureishi it may be “I am the Walrus,” but each author uses

Western media to negotiate the political significance of Western media’s authority in

constructing powerful images of what the world should look like. Each novel shows us

that the world has in fact become—to borrow Kwame Anthony Appiah’s word—

183

“cosmopolitan.” They are asking us to notice. They are asking us to catch up. They are

asking us to listen.

184

Epilogue: The Conversation Continues

Pakistani novelist Moshin Hamid’s 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is

made up of a single monologue, through which the protagonist tells his life story to a

stranger over dinner in a Pakistani café. When asked by Terry Gross, host of National

Public Radio’s Fresh Air, why he chose to depict both characters—the Pakistani and the

stranger—through the narrator’s eyes, Hamid answered:

Well, the novel is structured the way it is—with a Pakistani man speaking to an

American who doesn’t speak back—in part, because … in the media of the world

today, we see a great deal of one side of a conversation and much less of the

other. So, in this case, by reversing that—by having the American be relatively

silent and the Pakistani speak much more—I was trying to play with that notion.

When I heard this interview, I was struck by the utter luck, the sheer coincidence, the

perfect symmetry with which this project and Hamid’s book collide. If this dissertation

tends to treat what Hamid call “media of the world” as largely Western, it is for two

reasons. The first is that, as Hamid elides world media with the American perspective,

many postcolonial authors also understand a global popular culture to be fostered

primarily by Western media empires. For such authors to complicate our understanding

of these products by recontextualizing them in cosmopolitan discourses is a way to claim

an alternative perspective on “the world” that the “media of the world” purport to

describe, and to tell stories about a genuine global dialogue so that they are heard.

The second reason that I have often cast Western media as a unified whole is

simply rhetorical. In The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr explains that, “In colonial

discourse every individual weakness has its political counterpart—uncivilized society,

185

according to this logic, being little more than the uncivilized mind and body writ large”

(76). If the postcolonial authors of Anglophone South Asian fiction that I have treated in

this dissertation are attempting to complicate the logic of colonial discourse and to

counter the rhetorical tropes that have their roots in imperialism but which still influence

our world through the mediascapes of literature, journalism, popular music, television

and cinema, then I have intentionally taken up Western media to represent all that is

dangerous about imperialism writ large for the big screen.

On Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan on National Public Radio, Kwame

Anthony Appiah warned that in the matter of cultural exchange, “Conversation is only

worth doing if you are listening as well as talking.” The authors represented in this

project not only require that we listen to what they have to say, but make us complicit in

telling their stories that open mass-mediated images produced in the West to a global

conversation. When the end of a novel is left open to interpretation, as it is in R. K.

Narayan’s The Guide, we finish the narrative simply by imagining what happens next.

There is, certainly, much to learn by listening to the members of another culture, of

hearing the other side of the conversation of which we so often hear only our version.

In his interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio, Hamid clarified his

intentions in regard to the narrative structure of the novel. He explained, “The Pakistani

character is speaking to an American character; there’s a conversation going on. And, for

me, that conversation is more what I’m about. I’m somebody who has both a Pakistani

and an American identity.” With the exception of Narayan, the authors examined in this

dissertation all have one home in India and have made another in Britain or the U.S. so

they are all very-well equipped to lay bare what a full two-sided conversation in the

186

world—rather than in “the East” or “the West”—should look like. After all, Appiah’s

cosmopolitanism implies that to be home is not be in the East or in the West, but simply

to be in the world. As these authors treat the newness of rapid and far-reaching cultural

exchange, they do so in a way that balances a tension between their celebration of such

immediate conversation—made possible through popular culture and mass media—and

their concern over its potential to fall into the traps of older forms of colonial discourse

and cultural imperialism.

This conversation should continue and it is my hope that it will reach new

audiences, speakers, and listeners not just through novels but through the mediascapes of

popular culture. Perhaps Indian-language writing, Indian television, Bollywood cinema

and All India Radio are the places toward which to look in a continuation of this project.

Such a study might reveal a different model of cosmopolitanism than the one generated

by Appiah and embraced by the Indo-Anglican writers of this project. Furthermore, such

a study would require—to borrow Rushdie’s phrase from The Satanic Verses—a different

set of “fusions, translations and conjoinings” (8) than the ones examined in these pages.

In “Times of Renewal,” Amit Chaudhuri describes the novel as “a nation metaphor” (par.

8) and, to this point, the novel has been the vehicle—both in the West and in India—for

reflecting upon large-scale questions of nation, which are consistently subject to revision

in the face of change. However, it is possible to imagine such questions of nations

reflected in other mediascapes: languages can be translated, satellite television brings

both sides of the world closer together everyday, the market for Bollywood cinema is

forever expanding, and All India Radio is available via the world-wide web. When we

turn our attention to the ways in which questions of nation are reflected in Indian popular

187

culture, perhaps it is time to ask whether or not the binary oppositions between center and

periphery, civilized and savage, East and West ever really existed or whether or not we

invented them to divide, to conquer or to reclaim the world.

188

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