September 2021.pmd - Teresian Journal of English Studies

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789

Teresian Journal of English Studies, July - September 2021, Volume XIII, Issue III

A Quarterly Journal

2

INSIDE PAGE OF

FRONT COVER

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

3

Contents06-11 Cultural Sensitivity and English Language Teaching Prakash Chandra Pradhan

12-21 Private Memory and Undeciphered Past: The UniversalTrauma of Orphanhood in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Gurudev MeherWhen We Were Orphans

22-38 “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment”: Anirban RayAn Egyptological Study

39-50 Chhi: The Politics of Disgust in Vilas Sarang’s Arijeet MandalSelect Works

51-61 Contestation of the Gendered-Space in Banana V. Kousalya andYoshimoto’s Kitchen Marie Josephine Aruna

62-76 Derrida and the Role of the Public Intellectual Piyush Raval

77-83 Decoding the Semiotics of Food Culture and Emotions in Runjhun PandeyLike Water for Chocolate

84-89 Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma: N.H. KallurA Critique of Colonialism

90-95 Indigenous Communication: Sujata Acharya andLanguage and Identity Sushant Kumar Mishra

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

4

Dr. Priya K. NairAssistant Professor

Research Guide - Department of Englishand Centre for Research

St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous) ErnakulamPark Avenue Road, Cochin-11, Kerala, India

Cell: 9495027525Email: [email protected]

Dr. Celine E. (Sr.Vinitha)Professor Emeritus and Manager

St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous) Ernakulam

Dr. Lizzy MathewPrincipal

St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous) Ernakulam

Dr. D. Radhakrishnan NairConsultant Editor

Teresian Journal of English StudiesFormerly Director - M.G. University

Research Centre in English

Dr. Chitra PanikkarProfessor-Department of English

Bangalore UniversityJnana Bharathi, Bengaluru, Karnataka-560056

Ph: 080–22961631, Cell: 9448375856Email: [email protected]

Dr. Jane Chapman VigilAssociate Professor, Department of English

Metropolitan State University of DenverStudent Success Building

890 Auraria Pkwy #310, P. O. Box 173362Postal Code: 802173362, Denver, CO 80204, United States

Phone: +1 303-615-1256Email: [email protected]

Editorial Advisory Board

Dr. Latha Nair R.Editor - Teresian Journal of English Studies

Associate Professor, Research Guide, and HeadDepartment of English and Centre for ResearchSt. Teresa’s College (Autonomous) Ernakulam

Dr. Kaustav BakshiAssistant Professor (Stage 3)

Department of EnglishCentre for Advanced Studies, Jadavpur University

Kolkata 700032, IndiaPhone: +91 33 2414 6681

Email: [email protected]

Dr. Renee S. RudermanAssociate Professor of English, Sigma Tau Delta Faculty

Co-AdvisorMetropolitan State University of Denver890 Auraria Pkwy #310, P. O. Box 173362

Denver, CO 80204, United StatesPhone: +1 303-615-1271


Dr. K.M. KrishnanProfessor and Director

School of LettersMahatma Gandhi University

Priyadarsini Hills, Kottayam-686560 Kerala, India

Phone: 91-481-2731041Email: [email protected]

Dr. Shima MathewAssociate Professor of English

T.M. Jacob Memorial Government CollegeManimalakkunnuKoothattukulam

Kerala, IndiaCell: 9496343906


Dr. Krishnan Unni P.Senior Associate Professor

Department of EnglishDeshbandhu College

Kalkaji, University of DelhiNew Delhi-110019, India

Cell: 9650644525Email: [email protected]

Dr. Rajesh V. NairAssistant Professor in English

School of Letters, Mahatma GandhiUniversity, Priyadarsini Hills P.O.

Kottayam, Kerala, IndiaCell: 9495738712


Dr. Rimika SinghviAssociate Professor and Head

Department of EnglishThe IIS University

Jaipur, Rajasthan, IndiaCell: 9783307195


Dr. James R. AubreyProfessor-Department of EnglishMetropolitan State University of

Denver, 890 Auraria Pkwy #310, P. O.Box 173362, Denver, CO 80204, United

States, Phone: +1 303-615-1272Email: [email protected]

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

5

Editorial Assistant:Mr. Johnson E.V.

Editorial Committee:Dr. C.S. BijuDr. Vincent B. Netto

Assistant Editor:Ms. Lakshmi Priya B.

As Shklovsky said, art makes the familiarstrange so that it can be freshly perceived. Overthe past months, one has become acclimated toa new normal, and the strange isolation of apandemic ridden world has become all toofamiliar. Now, as the world opens up again, wefind it strange to be back in offices and schools. One feels a prickling uneasinesswhile jostling through a crowd in the marketplace or dining in a restaurant. Ourrelationship with the world has changed and we must rediscover the schematics ofart, culture, language, food, travel, spaces and relationships, among others. Now morethan ever, we look to art and literature to frame our narrative of resilience and catharsis.

The way in which scholars look at discursive spaces has been indelibly altered. Thereis a discussion on in eliminable dimensions of existential trauma that manifests in thehuman psyche. These narratives maximise the opportunity to engage with topicsthat are significant to the new human experience. The asymmetries of life are capturedin works of literature and it implies that it articulates divergent concepts. The semioticspace that these narratives inhabit can also be considered as a space of artisticrepresentation, a cultural code, and perhaps a critical space rooted in very powerfulreflections. The inventiveness with which the scholars carry on a fruitful dialogue onheterogeneous topics and wide ranging ideas expound the philosophy of life.

This edition of TJES pursues lines of enquiries into the intersection of spaces andculture, language, gender, post colonialism and politics of caste. The articles in thisedition have particular focus on Asian literature and the epistemological issuesconnected with post colonial theories and cultural pluralism. This inquiry into spacesalso finds expression in an article on the Derridean concept of public space and therole of the intellectual. Interestingly, this exploration of spaces also finds its way intothe kitchen, and the hegemonic cultural codes that are operational within the existingsystem.

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.” - Jacques Derrida

Dr. Latha Nair R.

Editorial

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

6

Cultural Sensitivity and EnglishLanguage Teaching

*Dr. Prakash Chandra Pradhan, Professor, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University,Varanasi-221005, Uttar Pradesh, India, Email: [email protected],

[email protected]

Keywords: Culture, Cultural Sensitivity, Internationalism, Liberation, and Globalism.

Cultural sensitivity is an important element in English Language Teaching in recent times. Itis considered to be the 5th skill besides the four skills emphasised in ELT before the 1960s.Since cultural sensitivity is a complex issue in the interdisciplinary perspective, it is difficulton the part of the ELT teacher to inculcate this aspect to the students. It is therefore arguedthat there should be appropriate efforts to devise right curriculum, methodology and materi-als for the purpose. This paper points towards the problem of teaching cultural aspects in theclassroom and pleads that English Language Teaching can liberate the learners from a nar-rowness of being confined to their own culture. It helps them to be aware of other culturesand also to respect them. In the process they will become world citizens accommodatingdiverse cultures and traditions across the globe. Thus a focus on inculcating cultural sensitiv-ity among the learners through ELT can help in establishing globalism and internationalism.

Dr. Prakash Chandra Pradhan*

Abstract

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

7

In contemporary world of globalizationand multicultural scenario, there hasbeen a paradigm shift in ELT. TheELT aims at enabling the learners to

achieve the skills of speaking and listening, read-ing and writing. After the 1960s till 1980, therehas been an increasing emphasis on impartingcultural competence among the learners alongwith the traditional focus on communicative com-petence. However, the major focus in the 1990sis on inter-cultural communicative competence.Now culture has been considered as the 5th skillin ELT. The teacher therefore has to stress on cul-tural sensitivity, an awareness and respect forother cultures. The issue of teaching culture inELT classroom is quite complex. A number ofquestions therefore arise: Does culture belong toa single discipline? Is it necessary to follow a cul-tural curriculum? What kind of methodologywould be pertinent for teaching culture? Whatmight be the classroom activities that are to bepracticed to achieve this goal? We have to reflecton these aspects to meaningfully bring in culturalsensitivity among the students.

Cultural sensitivity is related to interdisciplinaryaspects as culture traces its origin to different dis-ciplines, namely linguistics, psychology, sociol-ogy and anthropology. Thus cultural awarenessdraws on the resources of a number of humanis-tic disciplines. The teacher who operates in theclassroom should have right frame of mind, skillsand attitudes. Also the cultural syllabus shouldhave to be appropriately framed to fit in. Pres-ently, it seems inappropriate to emphasize theteaching of British or American culture becauseEnglish medium of instruction is plentifullyprevalent in other cultures/locations such as Aus-tralia, India, New Zealand, Canada, Singaporeand a number of countries in the entire globe. Itis to be noted that English language is spoken bymore than 100 crores of people out of which only38 crores are the native speakers. Hence it is es-

sential that textual materials and audio-visualaids for teaching culture have to be appropriatelyselected. Moreover, a suitable methodologyshould have to be adopted for inculcating cul-tural sensitivity among the learners. In our view,an interactive method is more appropriate andrelevant where the students should be taught toidentify culturally significant information ratherthan telling the students what they should learnthrough a lecture and presentation method. It isimportant that curriculum, materials and meth-odology should have to be devised in such a waythat they are learner-centric. It is a challengingtask for ELT teachers to help the learners to beinternational citizens using English languagesand other languages in the appropriate situations.

For any country, preservation and promotion ofcultural wealth is important as it indicates thenational identity and the growth of its economy.The youth therefore should be aware of their ownculture while learning English as a Second Lan-guage in our country.

English language acquisition becomes an integralpart of Higher Education in India because of itsmultilingual and multi-cultural environment.This is essential for our growth as it facilitatesthe younger generation to develop different per-spectives about language and culture. It alsooptimizes the skill development potential of theyouth to contribute effectively to resolve globalissues. By learning the structures of a language,the learner is exposed to the experiences and cul-tural elements of that language because languageand culture are intimately related to each other.That is why Frederick Kang’ Ethe Iraki in his ar-ticle “Language and Culture – A Perspective”published in the journal Wajibu (Issue 19) holdsthe view: “Culture is a product of the humanmind and it is defined, propagated and sustainedthrough language. The relation between lan-guage and culture is indisputably symbiotic”

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

8

(web resources). The New Education Policy 2020of India in its clause no 22.2. emphasises: “Cul-tural awareness and expression are among themajor competencies considered important todevelop in children, in order to provide themwith a sense of identity, belonging, as well as anappreciation of other cultures and identities”(53). The document further elucidates in clauseno. 22.4: “Language, of course is inextricablylinked to art and culture. Different languages ‘see’the world differently, and the structure of a lan-guage, therefore determines a native speaker’sperception of experience” (53). Iraqi argues inhis aforementioned paper: “Language serves asan expression of culture without being entirelysynonymous with it. In most cases, a languageforms a basis for ethnic, regional, national or in-ternational identity. The concept of nationhoodfinds resonance in the adoption of a national lan-guage around which the diverse ethnic commu-nities can rally” (Wajibu, Issue 19).

Traditional approach in ELT before 1960s has notgiven priority to incorporate culture into lan-guage teaching. In recent times since the 1970sculture has however gained momentum as amajor focus in ELT because it is not possible toteach language without reference to culture.However, compared to teaching grammar andvocabulary, teaching culture is more complex anddifficult. It is essential to include cultural contentin the curriculum of language teaching method-ology. The teachers are key resources in explain-ing cultural elements in linguistic structures orextra-linguistic aspects. Culture refers to the in-tegrated pattern of human knowledge, belief andbehaviour. It consists of “language, ideas, beliefs,customs, taboos, codes institutions, tools, tech-niques, work of art, rituals, ceremonies, and otherrelated components….” (The New EncyclopaediaBritannica 784). Since culture is a broader concept,language teachers therefore face a herculean taskin the classroom while teaching culture. Teach-

ing culture is a more difficult concept than teach-ing a few concepts relating to works of literature,customs and so on. Outlining the complex rela-tionship between language and culture, Kramschtherefore points out:

Language is not a bunch of arbitrary lin-guistic forms applied to a cultural realitythat can be found outside of language, inthe real world. Without language andother symbolic systems, the habits, be-liefs, institutions, and monuments that wecall culture would be just observable re-alities, not cultural phenomena. To be-come culture, they have to have mean-ing. It’s the meaning that we give to foods,gardens and ways of life that constituteculture. (62)

ELT classroom deals with multiple cultures in thecontemporary scenario of globalization. Cultiva-tion of cultural sensitivity is therefore very im-portant. The ELT teacher has a major role to playto develop this sensitivity amongst the studentstargeting to achieve intercultural communicativecompetence in them. Teaching grammatical com-petence is not adequate. Hence the teacher shouldalso focus on teaching discourse competence,sociolinguistic competence, cultural competenceand intercultural competence as well. The goalof language course should have to achieve allthese competences implementing a right kind ofcurriculum. Linguistic competence is the abilityof the learner to create grammatically correct sen-tences/ utterances. Discourse competence refersto the ability to produce coherent and cohesiveutterances. The sociolinguistic component ofcommunication signifies to the aspects of writ-ing or speaking which depend on social, prag-matic and cultural elements. Strategic compe-tence refers to the ability of the learners to solvecommunicative problems as they arise. In thiscontext, a number of factors such as social status

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

9

of the speakers and the hearers, their age, sex andother social aspects count as important. Certainpragmatic situations and conditions affect theperformance of a speech act in one culture butnot in another. As an illustration let us take thefollowing: If a Father in the church utters: “I de-clare John and Mary as husband and wife,” heperforms an act in the context of Christian mar-riage. This event is related to a religious act inthe Christian cultural context.

An ELT teacher is the key person to break downthe cultural barriers prior to teaching-learningprocess. He should motivate the students to bereceptive to the concept of learning about cul-tures other than their own. He should start theprocess by pointing out the similarities and dif-ferences between peoples, families and cultures.The topics to be used for teaching the target lan-guage should be presented in the contexts relat-ing to the native ones, and first language equiva-lents should have to be used while teaching cul-ture specific topics to enhance learning. Abun-dant use of culture-based activities in the class-room will help the learners to be acquainted withthe target culture. Graded topics relating to cul-tural values should have to be chosen catering tothe needs from the primary level to advancedlevel that might help the learners to learn thevarious aspects of society and culture of the tar-get language. By involving the learners in theseactivities the ELT teacher could achieve the goalto increase learners’ awareness and curiosity to-wards the target culture and their own therebyhelping them to compare among cultures. Com-parisons are useful in making the learners un-derstand that certain aspects in each culture areunique and diversity is important in a globalizedcontext. This realization helps the learners toenrich their experience of cultural sensitivity.They understand that all cultures are importantand they are to operate in the atmosphere of cul-tural differences No culture is superior or infe-

rior, and therefore all cultures are to be respected.An ELT classroom should strive for achieving thisimportant and significant goal.

Language teaching is a long process in whichperformance remains imperfect. Absolute perfor-mance of learners cannot be achieved. It is there-fore not essential that all learners would acquirenative-like behaviour. The important goal is todevelop an awareness of socio-cultural andsociolinguistic differences that exist between stu-dents’ first language and target language. Suchawareness helps teachers and learners to under-stand occasional pragmatic failures and break-down in communication thereby promptingthem to find out appropriate remedial measures.

In his article, “What is the Difference and WhatDifference Does the Difference Make,” E. L. Smithholds the view that studying English does notchange one’s identity. Students’ ethnic, religious,and political backgrounds should remain thesame. Identity of an individual involves his/herdignity; it should not be compromised in believ-ing that one should have to be more American orBritish to speak English language well. It is im-portant to note that English is now spoken inmore than 100 countries, and the number of non-native speakers in English has exceeded the num-ber of native speakers in English to a quite con-siderable degree. English language now enjoyeddifferent status in different countries: nationallanguage, language for official use, educationallanguage, language used for wider communica-tion and so on. The chance of interaction and con-versation between a native speaker and non–na-tive speaker is less than the same between twonon-native speakers. That is why Alptekin be-lieves that conventions of British politeness orAmerican formality are quite irrelevant whenJapanese and a Turk are transacting business inEnglish or industrial engineers from Egypt andRomania working on a technical project in En-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

10

glish to refer to American advertisement or Brit-ish railway timetable (2002:63). Hence a new ap-proach is needed in English language teachingby taking the international status of English intoaccount. The need of the hour is to focus on theinstructional materials that will help students inbecoming “successful bilingual and interculturalindividuals who are able to function well in bothlocal and international settings” (2002:63).Brianco et al., emphasize the importance of de-veloping intercultural competence through lan-guage teaching. They hold that a third space orhybridity is quite essential in this context. Theyargue that intercultural interaction does not re-quire the learners to be assimilated to the targetculture or preserving their own culture. Thereshould be a bridge between two cultures or twospaces.

The European Council recommended certain pro-posals in language teaching which brought aboutsignificant changes in perspectives during 1970s(Bardos 2005). Research in the field of pragmat-ics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and psy-chology has influenced such paradigm shift. Inthe contemporary multicultural scenario foreignlanguage speakers should use the language ac-cording to the norms of the respective commu-nity. The situations, circumstances, topics and theco-speaker/hearer’s level of knowledge and ex-pectations of formality are to be taken into ac-count. All kinds of human competences are im-portant in this regard. General human compe-tences include knowledge of the world, socio-cultural knowledge and intercultural awareness,and communicative language competences in-clude linguistic competence, sociolinguistic com-petence and pragmatic competence. Culturalcompetence includes all these competencies.

Foreign language teaching is an important edu-cation that has the power of emancipation. It lib-erates the learners from the confines of their na-

tivity and culture. Learning a language in exclu-sion of its culture is impossible. The learners canlearn the language in relation to the rooted cul-ture. Again the learners’ language is also impor-tant. H. Ned. Seelye therefore rightly argues inTeaching Culture: Strategies for Foreign LanguageEducators: “… learning a language in isolation ofits cultural roots prevents one from becomingsocialized into its contextual use. Knowledge oflinguistic structure alone does not carry with itany special insight into the political, social, reli-gious or economic system. Or even insight intowhen you should not” (1993:10). English Lan-guage Teaching in India should operate in theatmosphere of cultural sensitivity so that theteacher and learners are to contribute meaning-fully to the substantial growth of the nation in afree world.

Works Cited and Consulted

Alptekin,Cem. “Towards Intercultural Commu-nicative Competence in ELT.” ELT Journal,vol. 56, no.1, 2002, pp. 57-64.

Bardos,Jeno.“Kulturalis Kompetenciaazide-gennyelvektanitasaban [Cultural Compe-tence in Foreign Language Teaching].”Studies in Language Pedagogy, 2005, pp. 142-57.

Cakir, Ismail. “Developing Cultural Awarenessin Foreign Language Teaching.”TurkishOnline Journal of Distance Education –TOJDE,vol. 7, no.3, July 2006.

“Introduction.”Intercultural Competence: from Lan-guage Policy to Language Education, editedby Joseph Lo Bianco et.al., Language Aus-tralia, 1999, pp. 1-17.

Iraki, Frederick Kang’Ethe. “Language and Cul-ture - A Perspective.”Wajibu: A Journal ofSocial Concern, no. 19.www. africa.peace-link. org/wajibu/articles/art_4485.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

11

Kovacs, Gabriella. “Culture in Language Teach-ing: A Course Design for Teacher Trainees.”Acta UNIV. SAPIENTIAE, PHILOLOGICA,vol. 9, no. 3, 2017, pp. 73-86, doi:10.1515/ausp-2017-0030.

Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in LanguageTeaching. OUP, 1993.

—. “Culture in Foreign Language Teaching.” Ira-nian Journal of Language Teaching Research,vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 57-78.

New Education Policy. Ministry of Human Re-source Development, Government of India,2020, pp. 1-65.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 13, 16,Macropaedia. 15th ed., U of Chicago, 1992.

Seelye, H. Ned. Teaching Culture: Strategies for For-eign Language Educators. 3rd ed., NationalTextbook,1993.

Smith, E.L. “What is the Difference and WhatDifference Does the Difference Make.” Fo-rum, vol. 22, 1985.

Tomalin, Barry. “Making Culture Happen in theEnglish Language Classroom.”2nd lecture.

Teaching English/British Council/BBC, www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/making—happen-english-language-classroom

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

12

Private Memory and UndecipheredPast: The Universal Trauma of

Orphanhood in Kazuo Ishiguro'sWhen We Were Orphans

Dr. Gurudev Meher*

The reconstitution of the personal past, of origins and identity are central to When We WereOrphan. The novel deconstructs its own detective plot by filtering the narrator/protagonist’sdelusions, rewriting history as spaces of personal nostalgia emerging in revolutionary waysas constructive and creative impulses. The novel tends to oscillate between two localities –England and Shanghai and presents the protagonist as someone who is stuck on the mar-gins, and ceaselessly moving between the centre and the periphery in the quest of his lostidentity. It brings out the historical and political significance of national events in the forma-tion of individual identities and seems to universalize the condition of ‘orphanhood,’ meta-phorically multiplying Banks, the protagonist’s own sense of homelessness into a collectiveexperience of encompassing rootlessness of the whole human race. The paper thus aims toaddress the issue of orphan-hood that is figuratively comprehended to represent a collec-tively experienced unbelonging in the framework of the novel as a result of colonial disloca-tions, mass migration and stereotypical exclusion.

Abstract

Keywords: Memory, Identity, Home, Nostalgia, and Rootlessness.

*Dr. Gurudev Meher, Assistant Professor, P.G. Department of English, Ravenshaw University,Cuttack, Odisha, India, Email: [email protected]

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

13

The novel When We Were Orphans is animaginary experiment with privatememory – the undeciphered past ofthe protagonist – in search for a lost

identity and ‘home’ in the actualization of the self.Although it is understood that nostalgia maybring misery, “Ishiguro also demonstrates that itcan serve as a foundation for imagining a worldbetter than one’s present” (Weston 337). Christo-pher Banks, the protagonist of the novel, thusdwells on his memories to unravel his true iden-tity and the source of his orphanhood which con-tinues to poison all his remaining life. Ishiguro’sprotagonists including Banks must experiencethe cathartic effect of a reconstitutive memoriali-sation which leads them to a summative confron-tation with the obvious realities which have sofar eluded their grasp. Kazuo Ishiguro, in thisnovel, experiments with the reflective sensibil-ity of a transcultural experience in which iden-tity is viewed as being permeated with the frag-mented strands of memory, relating the past withthe present. Ishiguro here depicts how the frag-mented memories of the past can be reviewedand re-examined to relocate one’s ‘home’ or ‘iden-tity’ in a globalizing cosmo-polity.

Christopher Banks, the protagonist-narrator ofthe novel, is engaged in search of his lost parentsin Shanghai who have mysteriously disappearedin his childhood. The first three parts of the novelare set in England when the protagonist is pre-sented as a young adult, grooming himself to bea detective and establishing himself as pursuinga stable career in a well-settled place. In thesethree parts, Banks’ childhood memories with hisfriend Akira in Shanghai are depicted at greatlength which reflects the nostalgic proclivities ofBanks’ psychological disposition.

Banks’ circuitous memory unfolds by degrees thevarious decisive dealings in the past, linking them

with the disparate forbearing of the presence.Banks, in his childhood, has been taken to En-gland and is raised by his aunt. Banks gets hisadmittance to Cambridge University and receivesa good education before making himself a re-nowned detective in England. As informed later,Banks’ mother is against the opium trade andeventually his parents; it seems, to have been kid-napped by the opium dealers who are supposedto pose a threat to the opium market in the terri-tory. Banks, with his fragmented memories, at-tempts to evoke the scenes of the past to unravelthe mysteries of his orphanhood. Often, in thecourse of the novel, Banks’ life is presented asessentially coloured by his engagement with thepast events – his emotional attachment to hismother and Uncle Philip, and the faithfullyshared moments with his friend Akira withwhom he recreates the drama of his father’s res-cue, time and also, as a mock detective with hisfriends.

In England, working as an eminent detective, hedevelops a hopeless affair with Sarah Hemmings,an orphan and indeed he adopts a young orphangirl named Jennifer as his step-daughter. Return-ing to China, he is, however, caught up in theongoing war between China and Japan, but tohis great relief, is intimated about the where-abouts of his parents from Uncle Philip. UnclePhilip informs Banks that his father elopes witha woman in Shanghai and dies in Singapore, pur-suing his journey. His mother was kidnappedby a powerful drug mafia named Wang Ku andwas kept by him as his concubine. Banks furthertraces the movement of his mother and finds herin a mental hospital in Hong Kong at the end ofthe novel.

Christopher Banks sustains these memories of thechildhood, continuously examining them to makesense of the present. But gradually, as the novelunfolds, we also get a clear view of the inner

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

14

working of his mind when he seems to be delud-ing himself, avoiding a direct confrontation withthe traumatic past that has shaped his presentlife. Ishiguro, in this novel, uses memory as a the-matic device to explore the dark spots of Banks’life unrecovered yet through the distorting webof the memory. Banks must return to his child-hood memories because he cannot replicate themwith anything in the present condition. Memoryhere thus takes a nostalgic turn in an attempt toreinvent the past as a solution for the problem-atic present. Banks enjoyed his life at best whenhe was staying in Shanghai with his parents andplaying with his friend Akira which has still asignificant effect on his present life. Banks failsto accept the fact that the happiness of the past isno more a reality for him and that he has to nos-talgically resort to it constantly throughout hislife to construct an integrated sense of his dilapi-dated memories. Ishiguro thus reflects uponthese nostalgic inclinations of his protagonist bysaying that most people consider this nostalgiain terms of its negativities, treating it to be anobsessive enunciation of the past, but for him,“it can be quite a valuable force in our lives”which can serve to become an “emotional equiva-lent to idealism” (Shaffer, “An Interview” 7).Thus, for Ishiguro, nostalgia is to emotion whatintellect is to idealism.

The childhood innocence of Banks is revisitedtime and again by him with a motive to snatchsome graceful moments from this beautiful pastand to resituate his lost sense of rootedness inthe process of his self-actualization. The novelmoves around a personal sense of nostalgia forone’s own childhood days. Banks’ nostalgia ef-fectuates the strong sense of realizing a betterdream and a better place to belong. Nostalgiathen becomes a positive influence which shapesthe present condition of life, ironing out the de-fects of the past. Indulging in nostalgia becomes

an inherent claim for the quest of an identity inBanks’ world of utter homelessness, as Eber andNeal point out: “. . . the search for identity inmodern society stems from a sense of incomplete-ness” (169). The fragmented sense of home-lessness inhabits the memory of ChristopherBanks when he says towards the end of the novel:“there are those times when a sort of emptinessfills my hours” (368) that demonstrates the waysin which the fragmented experience of the worldis subtly inculcated into the life of the modernman and it is difficult to evolve a central meta-phor to represent this essential human condition:

I think most people live in that kind of aworld. Nothing is a perfect metaphor forthehuman condition. This is just one meta-phor for one aspect of how people are. Thestrategy here is that we’re looking at a verystrange world, at a very strange group ofpeople, and gradually, I wanted people tofeel they’re not looking at such a strangeworld, that this is every body’s story.(Bates 216)

There are, in the novel, in fact, two more orphansin the form of Sarah Hemmings and Jenniferwhich seems to universalize the condition of ‘or-phanhood,’ that being orphaned is a commonexperience of the general humanity of “what hap-pened when parents or guardians aren’t reallywhat they seem to be” (Bates 216) and there is agradual losing of the sense of belonging. Theindividual sense of Banks’ homelessness is thusmetaphorically multiplied into a collective expe-rience of transpired rootlessness which makesthem reconfigure their identities, resituating theirlost sense of belonging through a productivetransaction with their memories and fantasies forthe creation of better world lives. To create a bet-ter world, however, is consequent upon solvingthe mysteries of the past, disentangling the dev-astating dues of the past. As Yugin Teo argues:

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

15

For Ishiguro, nostalgia connects us to ourchildhood innocence when we believedtheworld to be ‘a better, a nicer place’ thanit turned out to be when we grew up. . . .Nostalgia is intertwined with memoryand fantasy, where we remember a timewhen the outlook on life was much sim-pler and more innocent, harking back tochildhood and the days when we be-lieved that everything that had gonewrong could be fully restored to the wayit was before. The imperative behindBanks’ quest to find his missing par-ents in Shanghai is a child’s longing forthings to be returned to the way theywere. These poignant longings for a bet-ter world are often traced back to some-thing that went wrong or had been leftunresolved in the past, creating the im-perative later on to set things right. (45)

Ishiguro, therefore, says that the trio “Banks, Sa-rah and Jennifer all feel that they have to repairsomething and only then that they can pick upwhere they left off” (Shaffer, “An Interview” 9).This is the motivation behind Banks’ deliberaterecollection of his family home and the way oflife they were leading there, with a hope to re-cover them by imagining, even after years of theirdisappearance; that they might be held prisonerin some remote places in Shanghai and that theycan still be traceable to a thorough search. SarahHemmings, however, who lost her parents inearly childhood, has learnt to accept life as it is.Replying to Banks’ question as to whether shehas lost her parents long ago, she answers, “itseems like forever . . . but in another way, they’realways with me” which seems to serve as pro-viding a solution to the universalizing problemof orphanhood of the whole human race. As Pas-cal Zinck contends, “orphanhood becomes a cen-tral metaphor for universal trauma” (147) and the

individuals in the present cultural configurationof the world “must face the world as orphans”(168). The novel, with its multiple evocation ofhomelessness, thus presents several locations andplaces of identification. Christopher Banks, in hischildhood days, indentifies himself with Shang-hai, the place where his parents live and wherehe establishes a happy friendship with Akira.When, after his parents’ disappearance, he istransported to England, he cannot adapt to thelife in England owing to his attachment to theformer land and way of life there. Later in thenovel, when he meets his friend Akira once againas a Japanese soldier on the war-torn field headmits, “all these years I’ve lived in England, I’venever really felt at home there” and that “the in-ternational settlement . . . will always be myhome” (301). Shanghai holds Banks’ past andbecomes the center of his longing and belong-ing. He has already developed inwardness for theplace lost in the mist of time. Even after stayingin England for years together, he cannot forsakethe desire of returning to this nostalgic ‘home.’But returning home involves possibilities of apainful encounter with a disastrous past, an un-fortunate moment in which he lost his parentsand a familiar locality. Reflecting on the equa-tion of nostalgia and home Dennis Walder thuswrites:

Nostalgia begins in desire, and may wellend in truth. It can, and often does, serveas a key to the multiple pasts that makeus who and what we are, for better orworse. This is particularly the case in re-lation to the histories and experiences thatfall under the rubrics of the post colonial.. . . Nostalgia is usually thought of interms of longing and desire – for a losthome, place, and /or time. (PostcolonialNostalgias 3-4)

Isolated and uprooted from his family andfriends, Christopher is replanted in a new envi-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

16

ronment with the prospect of realizing new pos-sibilities. To avoid being sidelined and discrimi-nated among school children, he deliberately af-fects a narcissistic habit of imitating the elabo-rate mannerism of English children. It is intoler-able for Banks that Osbourne has once referredto him as “an odd bird at school” which is re-garded by Banks as a “casual judgment” on hispart (7). This highlights Banks’ desire to relocatehimself in an alien ambiance, reconfiguring hisidentity according to the socially accepted mod-els, evolved by a particular exclusivist society:

In fact, it has always been a puzzle to methat Osbourne should have said such athing of me that morning, since my ownmemory is that I blended perfectly intoEnglish school life. During even my ear-liest weeks at St. Dunstan’s, I do not be-lieve I did anything to cause myself em-barrassment. On my very first day, for in-stance, I recall observing a mannerismmany of the boys adopted when stand-ing and talking – of tucking the right handinto a waist- coat pocket and moving theleft shoulder up and down in a kind ofshrug to underline certain of their re-marks. I distinctly remember reproduc-ing this mannerism on that same first daywith sufficient expertise that not a singleof my fellows noticed anything odd orthought to make fun. (7)

For Banks, Shanghai hold his past to which hemust return as a ‘home coming,’ acknowledgingthe therapeutic effect of his recollection and re-flection. Amidst the war-torn atmosphere, it isthis belief- to be reunited with the home - thatcontinually heals the physical wounds of Akira,providing him sustenance to keep himself alive.Memory, in this nostalgic recollection, is subjectto the transformative manipulations of beliefwhich reveals the substantial unpresentability ofactual events. Ishiguro thus clarifies:

I am trying to capture the texture ofmemory. I need to keep reminding peoplethat the flashbacks aren’t just a clinical,technical means of conveying things thathappened in the past. This is somebodyturning over certain memories, in thelight of his current emotional condition.I like blurred edges around the events,so you’re not quite certain if they reallyhappened and you’re not quite certain towhat extent the narrator is deliberatelycolouring them. (Kelman 48)

In quest for a ‘different kind of voice’ for his nar-rator-protagonist, Ishiguro recognizes “[p]eople’spotential to change their lives or to change them-selves somewhere in the middle of their lives, thathas been under-estimated” (Matthews “‘I’mSorry” 120) in the narrative history of mankind.The novels thus connect the private memories ofthe individual to the collective history of a na-tion, and expose the parallel between personalsubjugation and political subjection, betweenpersonal disintegration and political disruption.Collective History, like memory, is examined inits multiple configurations, subverting the colo-nial discourse of collective experience. Banks’orphanhood then is figuratively encompassed torepresent a collectively experienced orphanhoodas a result of colonisation and stereotypicalessentialization. Banks’ liminal position in thenovel places him in an in-between condition ofmulticulturality and at the same time, it also seeksto subvert the ways in which history is (mis) in-terpreted and (mis) represented. As Ishiguro ob-serves:

I am not interested in writing aboutstorytelling, but I’m interested instorytelling in the sense of what a com-munity or a nation tells itself about itspast and by implication therefore where it’s at the moment and what it should bedoing next. If you want to draw a paral-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

17

lel between how individuals come toterms with their past and decide what todo next, and how a nation or a commu-nity approaches such things, then the is-sue of storytelling is an important one.(Matthews “‘I’m Sorry” 117)

The novel is thus open to interpretation both atpersonal and collective level. The history of theinternational settlement in Shanghai is used asbackground to unravel the mysteries of Banks’family romance and the way the family gets en-tangled in the ‘opium trade’ in Shanghai. Thenovel presents Britain’s dominance over Shang-hai in opium trading in which Banks’ father wasactively involved. Banks’ mother severelycriticises the British traders supplying opium toShanghai and China, describing it terribly “un-Christian and UN British” (61):

. . . that the British in general, and the com-pany of Morgan-Brook and Byatte speci-ally, by importing Indian opium intoChina in such massive quantities hadbrought untold misery and degradationto a whole nation. . . . ‘Are you not asha-med, Sir? As a Christian, as an English-man, as a man with scruples? Are you notashamed to be in the service of such a com-pany? Tell me, how is your conscience ableto rest while you owe your existence tosuch ungodly wealth. (60)

Ishiguro focuses on the vicious circuitry of his-torical connections which deliberate individualsto false hopes and frustration. Ishiguro attemptsto focalize this connection between history andmemory to discover the anxiety in the subjectivemind which is viewed as a result of the overlapbetween historical and personal relationships.There are continuous transformative transactionsbetween the individual and the collective whichinform the human mind, placed with the exter-

nal reality and every single fragments of experi-ence in the past is imprinted in the human mindto return again later, refashioning itself in a newconfiguration which is described by I.A. Richardsas an “apparent revival of past experience towhich its richness is due” (94). The protagonists,in such novels, must question the distorting webof history refracted as disruptions in the indi-vidual conscience. Ishiguro thus reflects uponthese historical changes which affect the privatelives of his protagonists:

I have always been interested in whathappens to peoples’ values when theyhave invested all their energies and theirlives in the prevalent set of social values,only to see them change . . . and to seewhat happens to people when, at the endof their lives, they find the world haschanged its mind about what is good andwhat is bad. But for this particular indi-vidual, it’s too late. They had the best in-tentions but history has proved them tobe either foolish or perhaps even some-one who contributed to evil. (Mason 7)

As Brian Finney argues, the condition that Bankssuffers from is “transformed by metaphoricalmultiplication into a collective experience. In factBanks occupies a liminal location in the novel, ashe fills the child’s role as an individual, and yetis a representative of the parental colonial poweras the master detective from England” (“Figur-ing the Real” 15). Ishiguro, in this novel, depictsthe general trauma of the whole humanity andtheir estrangement in a world structuralised bya colonial discourse. Ishiguro demonstrates thefact that individual moments are necessarily re-lated to the traumatic history of a nation in whichthe construction of the self and the other is ad-dressed through the same cultural and psycho-logical processes. Accordingly, Banks, in his de-tective quest for the truth, in his narrative uncer-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

18

tainty, reveals the misleading proclivities ofmemory as a device for deconstructing the tradi-tional rationalistic closure of the detective plot,in a disruptive temporality. Banks, with his de-tective unreliability, exposes the porous, narra-tivized heterogeneity of personal and nationalboundaries. Cheng thus reflects on the subver-sive properties of Ishiguro’s detective fictionwhich cut across genre, identities and nationali-ties:

. . . each narrative, inherently heteroge-neous, retains divergent potentials forplot and character development. Thepolygeneric nature of each text mirrorsthe indeterminacy of a nation that defieseasy reduction. Writing against genericconventions, societal practices, and gen-der expectations, the Japanese-Britishnovelist turns myths intocultural mock-ery, clichés into chic idea and stereotypesinto captivating personalities. (35)

According to Finney, the child’s ideal of beingprotected in this enclave of colonial power is sub-verted as an illusion in which orphanhood be-comes a trope for transnational identity (“Figur-ing the Real” 2). The protagonist gradually comesto a recognition that the “feared other” is placedwithin the self, discursively formed out of its ownfear (Finney “Figuring the Real” 2). In the wordsof Finney: “while attempting to foist onto thecolonized the stigmas of eternal childishness, arein fact themselves childlike, having evaded thematuration by projecting the unacceptable withinthemselves onto the subjects of their colonial dis-course” (“Figuring the Real” 2). History, in thenovel, is thus put to figurative use to reveal itsorigin in the personal and the psychological. Theprotagonist’s quest for his missing parents isreminiscent of the “Western power’s nostalgicattempt with the international settlement” onShanghai to re-inaugurate a “parental control

over an aberrant nation” (Finney “Figuring theReal” 3).

Banks, in Shanghai, discovers that there is noth-ing in the world which can restore him to theutopian ideal of boyhood and that it is illusive toinvert the idea of orphan-hood. “He must recog-nize,” as Tim Christensen observes, “that thereis no self-evident truth of the self to be discov-ered in the place of his own subjective originsbut a constitutive moment of difference from theself” (214) that leads him to the experience of hisown psychic ‘roots’ in which his childhood canbe viewed as an ‘alien landscape’ and in this criti-cal nothingness he must abandon the “myth ofconsciousness” in terms of both personal andnational level as “pure and abstract, untarnishedby its nebulous beginning” (Lane 19). This alienland of his childhood, in short, asserts “what wehave learned from a narrative structured as a se-ries of unstable, constantly self-displacing memo-ries” (Christensen 214). Chu-Chueh Cheng tracesa similar tendency of ‘myth-making-manoeuvre,’also in Ishiguro’s previous novel The Remains ofthe Day:

The novelist cites The Remains of the Day(1989) and When We Were Orphans (2000)as examples: while the former capitalizeson “an international myth about the En-glish butler and English country life,” thelater constructs Shanghai through “oldShanghai” stereotypes. To captivate aninternational readership, Ishiguro obvi-ously puts into good use widely circu-lated images and perceptions. . . . Thecontour of a given culture is often con-structed and perpetuated through cyclesof imagination, distortion and replica-tion. (3-4)

In Banks’ visionary Phantasm, China is projectedas a symbolic equivalent of his own orphan-hood

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

19

which categorically needs the West’s protection.Revealing the insignificance of Banks’ innocenceand Philip’s pretence, the novel, as Cheng argues,“undermines the myth of the White man’s bur-den, that the enlightened British self is morallyresponsible for civilizing the barbaric Chineseother” (12). The discovery, on the part of Banks,however, is conditioned by two antagonistic for-mulae, namely, the moment when ColonelHasegawa warns Banks of the disguised identi-fication of the Japanese solider, who is in fact adeserter wrongly recognized by Banks as hischildhood friend Akira and the most disturbingmoment of exploration that the Chinese warlordWang Ku who takes his mother as concubine hasbeen his real benefactor, all these years. Theserealizations liberate Banks from stereotyping, andfrom the strain of an elusive conception of or-phan-hood, who finally learns to mitigate the ten-sion between personal and national identifica-tion. The novel, thus, is large scale experimenta-tion with the markers and modalities of identifi-cation that create fixated entities and ideologies,in the perpetuation of national myths and ethnicstereotypes which he wants to deconstruct, iron-ing out the discrepancies between facts and fic-tion. As Cheng insightfully observes:

By juxtaposing the superficial resem-blance and actual discrepancy betweenthefactual and the fictional, Ishiguro ex-poses the falsity of stories one nation tellsabout itself and about others. Placed incontention, national fables betray the in-adequacy of reducing a given society toan array of highly identifiable markers,scenery snapshots and ethnic stereotypes.The macroscopic approach Ishiguro takesin deriding national myths hence neces-sitates a microscopic analysis of how sym-bolic sights and characters collaborativelygive intelligible physicality to an amor-phous entity called “nation.” (14)

‘Orphanhood,’ for Banks, then is a sense of utterhomelessness which creates in the individual ananxiety to belong. Banks’ sense of homeliness,childhood and parenthood disintegrate beforehim like his unpredictable memory. Banks be-lieves, as his friend also shares with him, that hisparents’ discontent and their summative disap-pearance are somehow related to his being “notsufficiently English” (76). As Akira says, “I knowwhy they stop, I know why . . . Christopher. Younot enough Englishman” (72) and admits his ownsituation as being the same for being “not enoughJapanese” (73) which disappoint “our parents sodeeply they were unable even to scold us” (73).By a methodical multiplication of these incom-patibilities in the novel, Ishiguro universalizes thetheme of homelessness and challenges the stabi-lizing contours of home and homeland. Banks’lack of English manners in his disposition forceshim to reconfigure his identity according to thepresent need which makes him search his truepersonal and national identity in a problematicdialectics of belongingness. Thus, to be himself,he must alter a part in himself; to feel at home,he must search himself in a foreign land as TimChristensen cleverly remarks: “Banks’ home isalways already – definitively – also a state of ex-ile – it is a home that is not a home, or a homethat is defined by its own absence, its meaninglying elsewhere – for Banks is English, despitebeing physically located in China and Englandis elsewhere” (214).

Banks feels the need to belong and his nostalgiafor home is just a result of his “hybridity, a dif-ference ‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim ofan in-between reality” (Bhabha, The Location 13)which reveals the unconditional polyvalence of‘homing desire’ that informs the individual’ssense of belonging. ‘Home,’ for Banks, is a stateof perpetual exile and can be resurrected to vi-tality through the “Shards of memory,” poten-tially having “numinous qualities” for transfor-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

20

mation (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 12). In amost melancholic epiphany, Banks accepts andunderstands the true meaning of orphanhood ashe declares: “. . . for those like us, our fate is toface the world as orphans, chasing through longyears the shadow of our vanished parents . . . foruntil we do so, we will be permitted no calm”(313). In a similar fashion, Akira quotes the Japa-nese monk, “it was we children who bound notonly a family, but the whole world together” (73)which can be called home.

At the end Christopher Banks discovers that heis not only exiled from the protective bubble ofhis childhood, but also from the predictable lay-ers of his consciousness. He learns that a truereturn is a near impossibility and that identitycan be reconfigured in relation to the changingcontours of home and belonging. The individual’slived experience of the locality, as ColonelHasegawa quotes from a Japanese poet in thenovel, “Our childhood becomes like a foreignland once we have grown” (297) characteristicallyechoes Rushdie’s belief that: “it’s my present thatis foreign and that the past is home, albeit a losthome in a lost city in the mists of lost time” (9).Ishiguro, like Rushdie, nourishes a similar ten-dency towards highlighting the metaphoricalambiguity of such entities as memory, identityand belonging which can be recontextualizedwith the shifting realties.

Works Cited

Bates, Karen G. “Interview with KazuoIshiguro.”Conversations with KazuoIshiguro. Edited by Brian W. Shaffer andCynthia F. Wong, Mississippi UP, 2008,pp. 199-220.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture.Routledge, 1994.

Cheng, Chu-chueh. “Chic Clichés: The Reinven-tion of Myths and Stereotypes in KazuoIshiguro’s Novels.” Enter Text, vol. 5, no.3,pp. 1-39.

Christensen, Tim. “Kazuo Ishiguro and Orphan-hood.” The Ana Chronist, vol. 13, 2007, pp.202-16. 25 Apr. 2017.

Eber, Dena Elisabeth and Arthur G. Neal. “TheIndividual and Collective Search for Iden-tity.” Memory and Representation: Con-structed Truths and Competing Realities.Edited by Dena

Elisabeth Eber and Arthur G. Neal BowlingGreen, Bowling GreenState U Popular,2001, pp. 169-82.

Finney, Brian. “Figuring the Real: Ishiguro’s WhenWe Were Orphans.”Jouvert, vol. 7, no.1,2002, pp.1-32. Accessed 22 Apr. 2017.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. When We Were Orphans.Faberand Faber, 2012.

Kelman, Suanne. “Ishiguro in Toronto.” Conver-sations with Kazuo Ishiguro, Edited byBrian W.

Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong, Mississippi U P,2008, pp. 42-51.

Lane, Christopher. Introduction. The Psychoanaly-sis of Race. Edited by Christopher Lane.Columbia UP, 1998, pp. 3–37.

Mason, Gregory. “An Interview with KazuoIshiguro.”Conversations with KazuoIshiguro. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F.Wong, editors. Mississippi U P, 2008, pp.3-14.

Matthews, Sean. “‘I’m Sorry I Can’t Say More’:An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro.”Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary CriticalPerspective.Edited by Sean Matthews andSebastian Groes, Bloomsbury Publishing,2009, pp. 114-25.

Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism.Routledge, 2003.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays andCriticism, 1981-1991. Vintage, 2010.

Shaffer, B. W. “An Interview with KazuoIshiguro.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 42,2001, pp.1-14.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

21

Teo, Yugin. “Memory, Nostalgia and Recognitionin Ishiguro’s Work.”Kazuo Ishiguro in aGlobal Context.Edited by Cynthia Wongand HuÌlyaYildiz, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 39-48.

Walder, Dennis. Post-colonial Literatures in English:History Language Theory. Blackwell Pub-lishers, 1998.

Weston, Elizabeth. “Commitment Rooted in Loss:Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.”Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.”Vol.53, no. 4, Routledge, 2012, pp. 337-54.

Zinck, Pascal. “The Palimpset of Memory inKazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.”Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines,vol. 29,2005, pp. 145-58.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

22

"Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in aDream. A Fragment": An

Egyptological StudyAnirban Ray*

Abstract

Keywords: Egyptology, Mythology, Symbols, Imagination and Creativity.

*Anirban Ray, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Presidency University (Main Campus),86/1 College Street, College Square, Kolkata-700073, West Bengal, India, Email:

[email protected]

Exploration of Oriental imagery and tropes in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan: Or, AVision in a Dream. A Fragment” had been rigorously discussed in John B. Beer’s Coleridge theVisionary, which provides Beer’s painstakingly collected data for mapping S. T. Coleridge’sintense studies in comparative mythologies. Just as the ancient Egyptian culture and antiq-uity are different from contemporary Egypt (a part of the considered “Orient”), Egyptology isalso institutionally different from “Oriental Studies.” The publications consulted by S.T.Coleridge spanning between the second half of the Eighteenth century to the early Nine-teenth century might not always be considered strictly Egyptological, though indeed theywere much informative and insightful, oscillating between travelogues and archaeological,reception-based approach. Though the nuances of the “Occident”/”Orient” divide does existin the majorly White-domain of Egyptological scholarship, applying the symbols from an-cient Egyptian mythology offers an intriguing revisit to the enigmatic space in the poem andthe poetic experience involved which yield coincidental analogies, backed by Egyptologicalresearch. This inspires a tribute to S. T. Coleridge’s vast contemplative mind capable of linkingthe antiquity with the posterity, the “Occident” and the “Orient,” and encouraging literaturestudents to investigate texts like archaeologists.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

23

A

S.T. Coleridge’s Interest in Egyptian Symbolism

“[D]reamers, from Thoth the Egyptian to Taylorthe English pagan, are my darling studies”(Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressing his rever-ence for Thoth in a letter to John Thelwall, dated19 November 1796 [from Letters of Samuel TaylorColeridge, vol. 1, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 1:181, 1: 178–183].

s Victor B. Stolberg observes, the phy-sician Galen’s opinion regarding thebenefits of opium had been recordedin antiquity; as per legendary ac-

counts the procedure of opium-manufacture wasprovided to the gifted Egyptians (practitionersof magic and members of the priesthood) byThoth, the Egyptian wisdom-deity (Stolberg 32).Thus from mythology to medical studies, opiumand the legacy of Thoth established a long tradi-tion of cerebral/intellectual influence beyondEgypt, of which S.T. Coleridge was a recipient,as indicated by the poet’s self-admission in hisletter to Thelwall cited above (Ernest HartleyColeridge 178–83), a fact noted also by MarquesJerard Redd (13, 16, 19). This opium-gift is how-ever ambivalent; for it is referred to as the “aveng-ing Daemon” (qtd. in Beer 104) by S. T. Coleridgehimself (Beer 104) which reminds us of the Egyp-tians’ ambivalent attitude towards the drug in-duced influence itself. George Hart informs thatmythically the “dual” nature of nurturance aswell as atrocity was connected with the demonic-deity Shezmu’s presiding over “wine and un-guent-oil presses” as stated in the Old Kingdom’sPyramid Texts: for yielding wine, Shezmu wasassigned the responsibility of providing “grapejuice,” he was also the provider of entities as wellas divinities (as prey) whose vital energies wereneeded for bestowing the pharaoh with “divinestrength” (Hart 146). The deduction of it drawnin the poem’s context is that opium-intake booststhe taker with mystic vision but also leaves im-

pact on his/her reasoning faculties by alteringthem temporarily.

Xanadu in the poet’s/speaker’s dream followingintoxication is replete with verdure, aquatic tra-jectory, and nurturance with milk and “honey-dew”; all these images could be tied with theEgyptian mythological concepts of fertility, linkedespecially with the cults of the deities Osiris, Isis,and Hathor. Mu-chou Poo notes that wine/beerrestored the tranquil identity of Hathor precededby her destructive Sekhmet-temperament (2). TheNile’s flooding was observed in terms of“Hathor’s return to Egypt” and her “epithet,” the“Mistress of Drunkenness” was perceived interms of wine-production, because grape-”har-vest” was thought to be supported by the “wine”-hued waters of the Nile’s “inundation” (Poo 2–3). Opium-intoxication helped the poet/speakerto visually introspect the fertile images. Poo re-fers to the studies by Émile Gaston Chassinat andMaxence de Rochemonteix of the hieroglyphic con-tents in the Horus-temple in Edfu which estab-lish a connection between the improvement ofeye-sight and the practice of drinking: Horus’s“[Green] wedjat-eye” (Chassinat and Roche-monteix Poo 3) was expected to be sharpenedwith the means of Kharga-yielded wine, whichwould enable Horus to surpass other deities (Poo3). It is intriguing to interpret this developed sightas the application of the “secondary imagination”envisioned by S.T. Coleridge as a gift possessedby the poets capable of distinguishing details andmerging them with the ability of the “esemplastic”(S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [Chapter XIII]285–96). Analogically we may compare the wine-induced eyesight gained by Horus (Poo 2–3) withopium/anodyne-induced dream experienced bythe poet/speaker of “Kubla Khan.”

Besides the vitality of fluids, the serpent asthe embodiment of cognition intrigued S.T.Coleridge. In Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

24

S.T. Coleridge draws a very interesting analogybetween the Egyptian perception regarding theserpent, the serpentine motion/movement, andthe cerebral exercise involved in reading and in-terpreting a text: “Like the motion of a serpent, whichthe Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power. . . at every step [s]he [the reader] pauses andhalf recedes, and from the retrogressive move-ment collects the force which again carries him[/her] onward” (S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria9–10; emphasis added; for serpent-connection,see also Redd 47).

In the Egyptian mythical evolutionary index, theserpent is thus much empowered. The serpent-connection is also related to the lotus-significance.We learn from the scholarship of Robert Templewith Olivia Temple that in Egyptian symbolic art,the lotus is represented as the birthing source oflife; life itself takes the representation of the“Nehep serpent” standing vertically on a lotus,as depicted in the reliefs in the crypt of the Templeof Hathor in Dendera and drawn in the Fifth vol-ume of Le Temple de Dendara by Émile GastonChassinat. It may be relevantly noted here thatColeridge was highly impressed by the iconog-raphy of Vishnu; Aparajita Mazumder mentionsS.T. Coleridge’s letter carrying the date 14 Octo-ber 1797 (the receiver being again John Thelwall)in which the floating lotus bearing the body ofthe sleeping Vishnu (S.T. Coleridge spelled thegod’s name as “Vishna”) was referred to, therebyindicating the interconnection between the ser-pent and the lotus (Mazumder 42). In a drawingcopied from the walls of Rameses VI’s tomb andincluded by Alexandre Piankoff in his Two-vol-ume [Text and Plates] publication The Tomb ofRameses VI we find the snake Nau; this Under-world-serpent occurs in the Book of the HiddenChamber’s Twelfth Hour depicted in the tomb(Piankoff 312–18, fig. 87; Temple with Temple 438,fig. 8.45). Temple with Temple explain that Naucarries the epithet “Life of the Gods” (“the Great

Ka”) and provides the route for the sun god toproceed aquatically and be received (in his beetleform Khepri) by the atmosphere-deity Shu(Temple with Temple 438, fig. 8.45; see alsoRay, “Between ‘Transhumanism’ and ‘Posthu-manism’” 224–33). A reverse application of themyth is seen in “Kubla Khan” in the vision of theserpentine Alph (“meandering . . . motion” [S.T.Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 25]) flowing to-wards oblivion (“lifeless ocean” [S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” line 28]), but rebirth/resurrectionis also hinted through the poet-figure (“His flash-ing eyes” [S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 50]).

Literature Review

Some of the Egyptological, mythical and icono-graphic symbolisms mentioned in this article on“Kubla Khan” had been anticipated and dis-cussed by Marques Jerard Redd in his PhD dis-sertation entitled “Ancient Egypt, Sacred Science,and Transatlantic Romanticism” (29–38, 1–141).It is a unique dissertation that offers preciseEgyptological insights by the interpretation ofEgyptian “Solar” symbolism in the poem in ref-erence to the cults of Ra and Horus (Redd 29–38,1–141) and has inspired and assisted myintertextual and interdisciplinary studies signifi-cantly. Redd, in reference to the trajectory of Alphand the geography of Xanadu, has brought thenocturnal mysticism and symbolic landscape ofThe Am-Tuat associated with the sun-god’s nightly“transit” in analogy with human sleeping, to bekept in mind regarding the dream of Xanadu (29–38). Redd has also drawn a comparison betweensistrum attributed to Isis and dulcimer belong-ing to the “Abyssinian Maid” (35). Redd alsocontextualizes “Mount Abora” in the Egyptianuse of the images of the “peaks” of the two hori-zons traversed by the solar deity (35). Referringto the solar as well as the lunar aspects of Horus’seyes, Redd refers to the annihilating potential ofthe “Eye of Ra” and the reverential feeling that is

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

25

evoked by the Eye in the context of the “flashingeyes” (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 50) ofthe poet-figure in “Kubla Khan” (Redd 37–38).Acknowledging and supporting Redd, I wish tocontribute further possible analogies by extend-ing the connections with the celestial, terrestrial,aquatic, and subterranean aspects in terms of vi-sual representations, gender-considerations, andcreative agencies of fertility and imagination.

“Kubla Khan” is full of “archetypes” which couldbe traced back to the Egyptian cults andworldview; in this regard, Kathleen Raine refersto “collective unconscious” (Raine 627) as inter-preted by Carl Gustav Jung for discussing raciallycarried memory of consecrated divine messagesindicating that dreams are connective conduitswith the deities who seem to be embodied withinthe human frames themselves, thereby leaving apotential for accessing the messages to be caughtand interpreted by the selected ones (Raine 627).Among the archetypal spaces, Abyssinia is fullof explorative potential not only in terms of as-similation with the Divine Mountains but alsowith the Nile’s origins (Raine 638). Abyssinia andEgypt would thus be linked and discussed interms of mythical geography, iconography, andthe functioning of the “Divine Feminine” in thepaper’s discussion.

The considerations of geography and architec-ture in “Kubla Khan” yield imagic associationswith both the female and the male. Hilde ScheuerBliss and Donald Thayer Bliss, interpreting thetext from the perspective of Sigmund Freud,elaborate and provide such anatomical andgendered associations: “pubic hair” might havebeen communicated through “forests ancient asthe hills” and “cedarn cover” (S.T. Coleridge qtd.in Bliss and Bliss 263) (Bliss and Bliss 263).“[A]mniotic fluid” might have been representedthrough the “sunless sea” (S.T. Coleridge qtd. inBliss and Bliss 263), and uterus might be equated

with “fertile ground” and “caverns measurelessto man” (S.T. Coleridge qtd. in Bliss and Bliss 263)(Bliss and Bliss 261–73) which also evoke, throughthe perception of the sky as the huge expanse ofthe body of Nut, the sky-goddess’s birthing po-tential (Pehal and Svobodová 115). David Cowarthas also interpreted the image of the poet-figurewith the “floating hair” (S.T. Coleridge, “KublaKhan” line 50) as a developing fetus in the uterusof a woman (Cowart 200). These interpretationsreferring to reproductive anatomy perceived in“Kubla Khan” by Bliss and Bliss (261–73), AlanRichardson (60–62), and Cowart (200) have in-fluenced and inspired the paper’s discussion ofthe gestating image of the poet-figure in lines50–54 of S.T. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

Warren Stevenson’s study informs that S.T.Coleridge had perused books concerning “Ori-ental” religion and geography: Stevenson refersto John Livingston Lowes who interpreted S.T.Coleridge’s inspiration in the poem transpiringfrom James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Sourceof the Nile (Stevenson 618). Thomas Maurice’sHistory of Hindostan provided an illustration inwhich we see a “stringed instrument” attributedto the “Isis Omnia of Egypt” (Maurice qtd. inStevenson 619) and a “crescent moon” adorningher head, thereby linking her with the sistrumand the hill (which bears the weight of one ofher legs) (Stevenson 619–22). This image needsto be remembered while interpreting the dulci-mer belonging to the “Abyssinian maid” and“Mount Abora” featured in her “song” (S.T.Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines 37–45) as Redd hasalso observed in terms of the musical instrumentsand the two feminine personas (35).

John Beer perceives that the “ouroboros” is repre-sented by Osiris - the embodied fertile Nile, whilethe Mediterranean Sea’s water sterilizes thefecundative potential of the physical river Nile(211). This is reflected in the culmination of theriver Alph meeting the “sunless sea” (S.T.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

26

Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines 3–5). This Egypt-centric image could be opened up again inEgyptological perspective which consults temple-reliefs, tomb paintings depicting the subterra-nean realms and yield fresh analysis regardinghow rich S. T. Coleridge’s poem is, if studied keep-ing in mind the possible connections with Egyp-tian mythology and art. The paper thus shall ex-tend the analysis of the poem deeper into thedomains of Egyptology, by tracing parallels of thepoem’s images/symbols with representations ofthe Egyptian deities Osiris, Geb, Hapi, Hathor,Isis, and Horus, and their associations with theenvironment, fluids, fertility, and generativeforces. The novelty of the paper lies in its urge tothe students of English literature to read the poemlike an Egyptologist, argued and backed by in-ter-disciplinary information.

Circle-Symbolism

The circle is a predominant trope in Xanadu: itsspread, the “dome,” the boundaries drawnaround the poet-figure all resonate in terms ofcreative force: Andrew W. Hass observes that thepoem’s cerebral gestation, expansion occur withinthe circle reflected in the physical description ofXanadu including the circle of the “dome,” aswell as the circle drawn enclosing the exaltedpoet-figure, the attempts made of acquiring thereflection of the “Abyssinian maid” throughmirror (optical reflection), but ending withdisjoined perceptions (hence the poem’s subtitleends with the words “A Fragment”) caused bythe entrance of the “Porlock” man (an externalagent) and the dissipation of intoxication (Hass83–89). Mostafa Elshamy notes that in Egyptiansymbolism, the “Shen”-ring indicates the circular,eternal basis of the Pharaoh’s administration (1:38, 1: 37–43); likewise, the monarch Kubla’s“dome” and the walls of Xanadu (“girdledround”) also tend to be circular (S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” lines 1–7).

Stevenson perceives that Kubla’s “pleasure-dome” might have been influenced by the imageof the “lunar crescent” (Maurice qtd. in Stevenson622) accompanying the snake with which theHeliopolitan Egg was encircled, as included byMaurice in History of Hindostan and consulted byS.T. Coleridge (Stevenson 622). Pehal andSvobodová inform that Horus, being recognizedas Osiris’s seed, was enclosed within uterus by a“protective circle” (qtd. in Pehal and Svobodová116) created by the supreme Re-Atum, as per“Coffin Texts Spell 148” (Pehal and Svobodová116). Dr. Ogden Goelet Jr. observes that the Egyp-tian word “pekher” is translated as “encircling”and alludes to the practice of removing evil fromthe agents by “encircling” the objects; Re him-self encircled the world regularly through thenightly and the daily journeys, thereby ensuringcosmic authority (Goelet 147). This reminds usof the poet/speaker, his eyes “flashing” (reminis-cent of solar brilliance [see Redd 37–38]), hailedwithin “a circle [woven] round him thrice” (S.T.Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 51). Hass explainsthat the circle carefully guards, provides poten-tial space where humans might be made a recipi-ent of the divinities’/godhead’s messages (82–83).The Alph also flows and re-enters the landscapeof Xanadu through the fountain and then disap-pears in the “sunless sea” (S.T. Coleridge, “KublaKhan” lines 3–5, 19–28; Stevenson 609), thus the“ouroboros” can be contextualized with theriver’s trajectory and span (Stevenson 609).

According to Hass, S.T. Coleridge’s own note pro-vided along with the 1816 text of the poem ex-plains content and scope of “vision” containedwithin an “enclosure” of “psychological” insight:the act of sleeping providing the “enclosure”leading to the poem’s exploration of the “artificeof the circle” (Hass 83–84). Hass’s observation isthat the “O”-image, indicative of the “circle” isattributed to (i) Xanadu’s encircled world secur-ing fertile landscape, (ii) circularity of the river

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

27

flowing through the caverns and exposing itselfthrough the fountain, (iii) the poet’s/speaker’sown attempt for self-shielding from the burdenof remembering and the emptiness of the source(linked with “chasm” and “caverns” [S.T.Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines 4–5, 17–28]), and(iv) creation of the “artificer’s circle” (as Hass callsit) of secured observation/feeling within whichthe poet/speaker is posited (Hass 82–90). The con-nection between mirroring the poetic paradisealso gains a new aspect if seen through CarolynGraves-Brown’s study of Hathor’s mirror-sym-bolism: the Egyptians thought that not only danceand music but also “reflective surfaces” are ca-pable of contemplation of “other worlds” (qtd.in Graves-Brown 167) (Graves-Brown 167). Thusit is through music that the poet/speaker wishesto mirror the vision’s bliss by recollecting the“song” of the “Abyssinian maid,” taking recourseto reflective memory (S.T. Coleridge, “KublaKhan” lines 37–46). It is highly interesting, asGraves-Brown points out, that “ka” was also as-sociated with mirrors as well as “intoxication”:an Egyptian would perceive mirror-gifting andalcohol-provision simultaneously while express-ing the phrase “for your ka” (Graves-Brown 167)in hieroglyphs (Graves-Brown 167). The poet/speaker seeks out creative force, through musicand stimulant (opium/laudanum/anodyne) butcould only be left with fragments.

S.T. Coleridge’s Concept of “Reconciliation”

The application of the function of S.T. Coleridge’sphrase (and concept), the “reconciliation of op-posite or discordant qualities” (S.T. Coleridge,Biographia Literaria [Chapter XIV] 2: 11–12; S.T.Coleridge qtd. in Stevenson 607) in “Kubla Khan”was perceived by R.H. Fogle who analyzed (i)Alph and the “pleasure-dome” as juxtaposed“opposites”; the shrine-like “dome” exhibitinggeometric measurement and the untamed natu-ral landscape are opposed (Stevenson 607). As

per Beer’s perception, “unity and integration”had been achieved by the “dome of Pleasure”(Beer qtd. in Stevenson 613) (Stevenson 613). Itshould be remembered in this context that thedisk is very recurrent in Egyptian solar imagery:the sphere of light/fire, encircled by the snake onRa’s head (Viaud 11) is a “reconciliation” too;since snake is a cold-blooded reptile, a creatureof the earth, caverns, as well as of the open hotdesert as it also keeps the solar orb within thecoils, which the falcon-god (a snake-preying bird)uses as his protective agent (Viaud 11).

Michael Rice discusses that in Egypt, the institu-tion of the Pharaoh, the machinery of his king-ship, and his “ka” were appreciated because oftheir essentialized “reconciliating of opposite[s]”;Jung’s exploration of a person’s inner conflictsinspired him to interpret in a societal/nationalscale, the birthing and developing phases ofEgypt as the yoking together of reverses, in “col-lective unconscious” (Rice 253–56, 270–71). Bypursuing the conceived structures of the society,manners, pantheon, the inhabitants of the Nilevalley were able to achieve a distinct “individu-ation” (Rice 254). Egyptian kingship and civili-zation functioned as a continued coexistence of“apparent opposites” both in the mass and the“individual” registers (Rice 254–56). “KublaKhan” is also a reconstitution of the aural (the“song” by the “maid”) and the architectonic (the“dome”). The intriguing juxtaposition of the “ice”and the “sunny” in the “dome,” analogous withthermal distinction between cold/water and heat/fire (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 36), andin an extended register the sun and the moon,could be interpreted, with a perception by HenriFrankfort, that refers to the persona of the Egyp-tian king within whom Horus’s (solar) principleis represented, and whose supposed twin siblingcould be the falcon-headed lunar-deity Khonsuupon whose head we see “moon disk and cres-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

28

cent” which is derived from the notion of the sunand the moon as identical offsprings (Frankfort72). Kubla’s interest in the “opposites” (S.T.Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 36; S. T. Coleridge,Biographia Literaria [Chapter XIV] 2: 11–12; Rice253–256) thus may be re-interpreted involvingPharaonic identity and kingship (Horus’s eyeshave also been noted by Redd [37–38]).

Osiris: Conception and Fruition

In Xanadu’s landscape the “cedarn cover” fillsup the “romantic chasm” linking it with terres-trial depths (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines12–13). The oil of cedar (that is “cedarn”) and thecedar plant itself were supposed to have origi-nated respectively from the water and blood of

the Earth divinity Geb (Gardiner 33; Bikai 15).Bikai, referring to Georg Rosen’s observation in-forms that cedar as well as “resinous oil” formedfrom the wept “tears of Isis or Hathor” and inLebanon Osiris became the deified personifica-tion of cedar (Bikai 16). Marie-Louise Buhl in-forms that Osiris’s soul made the cedar tree hisresidence, as known from the accounts in Philae(90). The vicinity of the cedarn and the wailingwoman’s desire/mourning remind us of the at-traction for the mystic, the ambivalent daemonic,and the subterranean mysteries (S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” lines 12–19).

Fig. 1. In this relief from the Temple of PharaohSeti I built in Abydos, Osiris holds his erect pe-

nis while Isis intends her union with him for con-ceiving Horus (for mythological and architecturaldiscussions, see Knapp 12–13). The scene is rel-evant in both Egyptology and English Romanticliterature scholarship if we keep in mind (i)Osiris’s link established with the fertile Nile’s “in-

undation” and semen, as discussed by Pehal andSvobodová (117–19), and (ii) Beer’s tracing of theNile-significance of Osiris (accounted in Antiq-uity by Plutarch) in reference to the fertile Alphand the solar motif (Beer 109–20). Osiris’s ejacu-lation can be contextualized in the ejaculatory-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

29

motif “the mighty fountain” (S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” line 19). The relief depicting thetense but sacred moment before conceptionevokes the images of the eroticized “chasm” inXanadu replete with suggestions of reproductiveorgans and motion (the “thick pants . . . breath-ing” and “mighty fountain” [S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” lines 18–19; see also Richardson60]) creating an ambience which is both “savage”and “holy” (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines12–14). Photograph by Anirban Ray.

The Egyptians were exceptional in being gender-equal while seeking iconographic fertility, just as“Kubla Khan” requires both the musician-cum-singer “maid” and the male poet’s/speaker’s voiceand words to maintain the chain of creative flowcatering to the fertility of Xanadu. The fertilitymotif, in terms of both process and product, invegetative and reproductive mode is conspicuousin Xanadu and involves both the sexes. Frankfortnotes that the deceased pharaoh’s Osiris-formsustained Egypt influencing flooding as well asirrigation (183). Osiris thus represents thatfructifying force and the poet-figure wishes toreach that perfection, by seeking the Isis-figure(the Egyptian counterpart of the “Abyssinianmaid” [as discussed by Stevenson 619–22]) andNut, the feminine figure of the sky and of the“mound” (Massey 5: 242–46). Osiris’s body is thebed for grain’s germination as observed in Isis’sTemple in Philae (Frankfort 185). Frankfortmentions that the remembrance of Isis wasobserved and wailing accompanied corn-cuttingindicating death (of Osiris) but the seasonfollowing would indicate “resurrection” impliedin the grain-germination (Frankfort 186). Thepoem further mentions “. . . chaffy grain beneaththe thresher’s flail” (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”line 22), providing an allusion to Osiris’s attributethe flail (an emblem of authority carried by thepharaoh as well, indicating terrestrial/agri-cultural dominance) (Pinch 178–79). Frankfort

informs that according to the Pyramid Texts 308–09, Osiris’s heavenward transit is intrinsicallyconnected with the agricultural process; thewinnowing of “the grain” causes “chaff” to arisein “clouds” (Frankfort 186–87). Frankfort thusrefers to the “mounting chaff” (qtd. in Frankfort186) which is supposed to have contained theessence of the deified pharaoh Osiris-Unas (inwhose Pyramid Texts this reference occurs) whowas assured freedom from the terrestrialcontainment following burial (Frankfort 186–87).Thus it seems to be an upward transition, topursue a construct aerially, and this movementissues from the depths of the earth (Frankfort186–87) corresponding to the appearance of the“fountain” as reflected in the words “from thischasm” (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 17).

The poem’s aquatic exuberance thus resonateswith Osiris-association. R. A. Schwaller de Lubiczmentions that Osiris’s tomb was situated inBiggeh, and one stream of the Nile was supposedto be born from Osiris’s “left leg” enabling veg-etation to flourish in Egypt (777). Frankfort notesthat the subterranean energies vitalize the seedsfrom dormancy to fruition, rendering the pres-ence of Osiris perceived “in the grain” (Frank-fort 190). Associations of developing purity wereextended to the silt carrying flood water, andOsiris was acknowledged as the generating forcebehind it, being fathered by Geb (Frankfort 190).Following Jacques Vandier, Cherine Abou ZeidRagueh also writes that the body of Osiris seemedto have the origin of the annual flood therebyrendering him as another deity of the Nile; thePyramid Texts also imagine him as an oceanic rep-resentation, enclosing the land of Egypt (Ragueh11). The “fountain” in “Kubla Khan” and water-explosion occur in the midst of rocky erosion,thus subterranean earth and terrestrial exteriorare both covered by Alph’s movement and ex-panse (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines 17–28).Pehal and Svobodová explain that the mixing of

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

30

earth and water was integral in terms of percep-tions of flooding and conception: semen’s colouras well as milk-colour were reminded of by the“yellowish-white sediments” of the White Nileaccumulating on the banks (Pehal and Svobodová117); the Nile is also analogous with the seminalfluid of Osiris which is extracted for conceptionof Horus by Isis (Pehal and Svobodová 117–119;also see fig. 1 of this paper).

Geb and Hapi: “Androgyny”

Robin L. Inboden refers to Elizabeth BarrettBrowning, in whose perception the poetical at-tributes in S.T. Coleridge’s work constitute a“feminine” aspect, which balances itself with the“masculine” attribute noticed in his “Romanticgenius” (Inboden 129–130). While the Eighteenthcentury studies of masculinity were revisited byS.T. Coleridge, his apprehension regarding self-effeminacy led him to engage with the notionsof “androgyny” and its expressions in art, hav-ing William Shakespeare as a source of inspira-tion (Inboden 142). Keeping this dual trait inmind we shall revisit the poem to trace imagesof “androgyny” in connection with the genderediconography of the Nile in Egyptian art. BridgetMcDermott notes that Hapi’s “androgynous” rep-resentation (hanging breasts added to his body)was employed for Inundation-depiction (McDermott 42; see also Ray, “Ancient Egyptian Artand Architecture” 9). The fountain itself becomes

an “androgynous” and/or bi-gendered agency:(i) it is reminiscent of male ejaculation, but (ii) itssource from the subterranean is also uterine rep-resented through the “chasm” and the “caverns”(Gilbert and Gubar 160–162; Benzon 11; Richardson60; S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 4, line 12,line 17, line 27) evoking the image of water-break-ing before delivery. The “amniotic fluid” fillingup the uterus is analogous with the “sunless sea”(Burke 206–09; Wheeler 33–35; Richardson 60;S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 5) while thebirthing through the “vaginal canal” involvinglabor pain as well as breathing is reminiscent ofearth’s “fast thick pants” (Burke 206–09; Wheeler33–35; Richardson 60; S.T. Coleridge, “KublaKhan” line 18). The double-gendered associationsobserved in the geography become justified ifGeb’s persona is considered: Egyptian texts andimages assign a degree of effeminacy to him, butthis is crucial since his body projects rocky, aridsurface and also promises lush vegetation (Viaud14–15; Roth 195–96; see also Ray, “Bram Stoker’sThe Jewel of Seven Stars” 52–57). Similarly, Dr.Ayman Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed observesthat the water-deity Hapi’s masculinity is shownthrough his brisk walking or seated position, hisadherence to time-wise inundation and “moral”strength, while his abdomen, breasts reflect thefeminine nurturance (46).

Fig. 2. S.T. Coleridge contemplated that opium-intake leads the poet to “a spot of enchantment,

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

31

a green spot of fountain and flowers and trees inthe very heart of a waste of sands” (S.T. Coleridgeqtd. in Richardson 62) (Richardson 62). It doesevoke an image similar to Egypt’s fertile valleyon the two banks of the Nile, beyond which thedesert extends on both the East and the West.Opium tends to take the poet/speaker to a sort ofpharaonic land where artists thrived to produceimages in visually stimulant colors. The poet’s/speaker’s words become intriguingly relevant inour visualization of the “offering processions”from the “cenotaph temple” of Ramesses II inAbydos (see Wilkinson 144–45, for architecturalaccount); the colored carriers’ body-structures arereminiscent of “androgynous” Hapi, the personi-fied Nile (Pinch 136–37). Hapi is the provider ofnourishing liquids (Pehal and Svobodová 117);likewise the intoxicated poet/speaker envisionsthe aquatic flow of Alph. Photograph by AnirbanRay.

Hathor, Nut, Isis: The “Divine Feminine”

The connection between the two “archetypes,”(i) the Female Muse (“the Abyssinian maid”) and(ii) the subject of her “song,” the elevated locus(“Mount Abora”) also embodies Egyptian “col-lective unconscious” if studied through Jung’sperceptions (Raine 262–63). Rice perceives thatthe Egyptians did not live amidst the hills of veryhigh altitude, but the “hilly landscape” of theiroriginal source of migration might have got em-bedded in their memory, resulting in the demar-cation of the regions beyond Egypt by “threehills” in hieroglyphs implying the hilly sourcewhich in their “Egyptian unconscious” becamethe exoticized space later in their art and litera-ture (262–63). David O’Connor and StephenQuirke also provide an interesting study that thedifference between (i) Egyptians’ own land offamiliarity and (ii) foreign geographical myster-ies was connoted by the hieroglyphic word “h3st”used for representing “foreign land” which con-

stitutes green “strip” over which “three-peaked,desert mountain ridge” was shown (11).

Graves-Brown discusses that, since the Egyptiansconsidered the mountains as repositories of min-eral resources, Hathor was revered as the guard-ian deity of “mines and mining;” “desert andforeign lands” were also her domain (167).Normandi Ellis, referring to the cults of Hathorand Horus in Dendera and Edfu respectively,notes that the pharaoh, representing Horus,would venerate Hathor (identified with thePharaoh’s Queen) lovingly (which can be contex-tualized with the poet’s/speaker’s appeal for the“Abyssinian maid”), and the symbolic marriageof Hathor-Horus represented the lunar-solar har-mony in Edfu Temple of Horus (Ellis 212–213)(which becomes, in a religious context, a “recon-ciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” [S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [Chapter XIV] 2:11–12], and the temple-space becomes similar tothe “miracle of rare device” [S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” line 35]). Hathor thereby becomesa fitting Egyptian candidate corresponding to the“Abyssinian maid”; in argument we may add theepithet “Lady of Punt” (qtd. in Sweeney 74) as-signed to her in her ambience over Eastern Af-rica (Sweeney 74), and Punt was a deified land(“Ta Netjer”) to the Egyptians (Sweeney 70–74).The ancient awe for the mysterious land was car-ried through posterity in the Orientalists’ andexplorers’ obsession with the Nile’s source, andS.T. Coleridge’s interest was kindled by thosesearches, proved by his consultation of Travels toDiscover the Source of the Nile by Bruce (Beer 111).Graves-Brown tells us that in ancient Egyptiandevotion, Hathor appealed to both the sexes:women turned to her for acquiring her safeguard-ing during childbirth; husbands received “sistraand menit-necklaces” from “Hathor dancers”(who assisted birthing) indicating that men’smasculinities and sexualities also require femi-

nine assistance and essence (Graves-Brown 167)

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

32

and are thus not threatened by associations with

jewelry and music (see also Ray, “Bram Stoker’s

The Jewel of Seven Stars” 51–61). This image of

Hathor’s aural and aesthetic communication to

men could be re-applied in our studies of “KublaKhan” where the (male) poet/speaker seeks out

the “Abyssinian maid” (keeping in mind Hathor’sPunt connection [Sweeney 70–74]) enamored byher dulcimer-playing (keeping in mind Hathor’ssistrum [see Redd 35]) whose “song” evokes“Mount Abora” (corresponding to the hills inEgyptians’ “collective unconscious” [Rice 262–63]).

Fig. 3. A depiction of Ihy breastfed by his motherHathor from the Temple of Hathor, Dendera (formythological connection, see Hart 8, 65, 77–78;Pinch 147–48, 158). Hart notes that the therapeu-tic and exhilarating rattle-sound was representedby the character of Ihy whose name means“sistrum-player” (qtd. in Hart 77), so he was es-sentially linked with his mother Hathor’s ven-eration (Hart 77; see also Ray, “Ancient EgyptianArt and Architecture” 3–11; see also Ray,“Cleopatra VII Philopator’s Final Moments” 128–132; see also Ray, “Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of SevenStars” 52–57). Ihy’s infantile iconography is alsoconnected with “intoxication” (“celebrations”with drinks was integral in Dendera’s festivities)

and he was thought to preside over “beer” and“bread” according to some Coffin Texts’ spells(Hart 77–78). This association is relevant because“Kubla Khan” transpires from intoxication andtraces the poet’s/speaker’s cerebral attempts torejoin the fragments and culminates with thepoet-figure seeking nourishment in the “milk ofParadise” (S.T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines 42–54). Photograph by Anirban Ray.

Images of conception and birth in Egyptian icono-graphical thought were organic, individual, andcosmological. According to Martin Pehal and

Markéta Preininger Svobodová, an analogy was

drawn between (i) Nut giving birth to Ra and (ii)

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

33

the dead embalmed body as a fetus gestating inNut’s uterus to the material sarcophagus (115).Gerald Massey notes that the image of the cowwas chosen as the “sign-language” (in hiero-glyphs) for the representation of the precipita-tion and the moisture provided by heaven (244).In Ani’s Papyrus, entitled Book of Going Forth byDay, we see the benevolent presence of Hathor’sbovine form on the connecting zone between theAfterlife and the earthly domain (Goelet 170,Plate 97; see also Ray, “Cleopatra VII Philopator’sFinal Moments” 132–33). The “maid” whose“song” the poet/speaker attempts to re-constructcelestially (“that dome in air” [S. T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” lines 42–46]) corresponds toHathor, whose temple at Dendera contains the“hypostyle hall” having “sistrum-capitals” (col-umns resembling the musical instrumentsistrum) constituting a symbolic union of theaural and the architectonic (Wilkinson 149–51;Viaud 23; see also Ray, “Ancient Egyptian Art andArchitecture” 3–11; see also Ray, “Cleopatra VIIPhilopator’s Final Moments” 128–32; see also Ray,“Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars” 52–57). S.T. Coleridge links the Mountain (“Mount Abora”)with the female principle, the “maid”; in this con-nection we may note Massey’s observation thatthe “divine lady of the mound” was an epithetfor Nut and she was the revered “giver of liquidlife” (5: 245), given a bovine manifestation whosebody formed the sky-vault sustaining the weightof Ra (Viaud 16). Massey discusses that the ce-lestial register was perceived as milk-nourished,originating from the “Divine Mother” (qtd. inMassey 246) “cow [goddess] Hesit” with whomthe goddesses Isis, Hathor, Nut were all identi-fied and compared (Massey 5: 244–46).

The Poet-Figure

Towards conclusion, the poet/speaker acquires anempowered state of self-assertion but it is simul-taneously a vulnerable state seeking nourishment

(S. T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines 50–54). Pehaland Svobodová inform that in Egyptian thoughtthe demised, the living humans, and even thedivinities sustain themselves with milk; sucklingof the pharaohs as well as of the male child-dei-ties are represented in religious art (117). “Hymnto Hapy” stresses the nourishing aspect of milkwhile referring to the Inundation, and the “Pyra-mid Texts Spell 413” mentions that Isis’s milk andthe Nile’s flooding are made available for thedeceased pharaoh (Pehal and Svobodová 117).This milk-flooding association extended with theejaculation-motif encompasses the procreationand the nurturance-image in “Kubla Khan.” Onetitle of Meher-Weret, the female bovine deity wasthe “Great Swimmer” (qtd. in Pinch 163) (Pinch163). Geraldine Pinch observes that as Nun’s “fe-male counterpart,” Meher-Weret was perceivedas the primordial abyss’s “fertile current”; in herbody of water the stars floated constituting theMilky Way, and she was the medium upon whichthe solar boat floats (163). This mythological in-formation, coupled with the gendered readingsof “Kubla Khan” by Bliss and Bliss (261–73),Richardson (60–62), and Cowart (200) we cancomprehend the connection between floating,gestation, milk, and flashes of light around thegestated poet-figure (S.T. Coleridge, “KublaKhan” lines 50–54).

Chapter 169 of the Book of the Dead entitled the“Chapter for erecting a Bier” describes the deceasedpurified by Tjenmyt’s “beer” and Apis’s “milk”(Faulkner and Goelet 127–28); likewise the poet/speaker seeks the “milk of Paradise” (S.T.Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” line 54). Goelet men-tions that the scribe Ani’s (a conscious writer-fig-ure) hair and the cosmic ocean Nun are linkedtogether, following a practice in which a particu-lar divinity and a “part” of the human body areconnected; thus divine assistance is ensured(Goelet 168). This water-hair connection (Goelet168) intriguingly resonates with the poet-figure’s

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

34

“flashing eyes, his floating hair” (S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” line 50) indicating a shifted exist-ence achieved by him in an Egyptian manner of“transfiguration” (Goelet 151). The argument infavor of the Egyptian association is that the en-circled poet appears in the poem’s concludingpart, and the entire poem speaks about the poet’s/speaker’s attempts to reconstitute following thedream-vision; in this context we are reminded ofBob Brier’s observation that the Egyptians sought“resurrection” along with sunrise followingdeath and placement in the sarcophagus whichis an enclosing, protective container (120–22).

Inboden observes that though some recurrenceof identical images have been noticed in poeticalexercise produced following laudanum-intake,scholars are doubtful of the biochemical influenceon neural consciousness and activity, and the tra-jectory of the conceived images (131–33). The vi-sual and poetic strengths of the poet’s creativityearn the feared reputation of a “sorcerer,” but S.T.Coleridge mellows it down to the nourishingcalmness in the sustaining qualities of “honey-dew” and “milk” (Inboden 138; S.T. Coleridge,“Kubla Khan” lines 53–54). Marco Zecchi informsthat in Egyptian thought honey was supposed tohave a “solar origin”; Re’s tears were imaginedto have brought forth “bee, . . . wax and honey”(Zecchi 76). Problems of “ocular” category werethought to be treated with honey in Egyptian“medical” knowledge (Zecchi 78). ThroughPlutarch we know that sweetness was equatedwith truth by the Egyptians, thus Maat’s “sweet-ness of truth” was bestowed by bringing “figsand honey” to the deities (Zecchi 80). Zecchi thusstates that “sweetness” was thought in terms ofveracity as well as proficiency in Thoth’s counseland speech (81). Since S.T. Coleridge provides ahyphen between honey and dew, we may referto it as the melon fruit which the Egyptians en-joyed: Old Kingdom hieroglyphs from around“2400 B.C.E.” mention it (Murray, Pizzorno, and

Pizzorno 282). It may also mean the sweeteneddew; both dew and milk were feminine and wereassociated with the two goddesses Tefnut(“dew”) (Viaud 13) and Hathor (“milk”) (Viaud23–25) respectively. Both had solar associationsand Hathor had a dual nature of calm and ragein her leonine forms (Pinch 129–30, 137–39, 195–97; Poo 2; Viaud 13, 36; see also Ray, “BramStoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars” 52–57). Thus theimportance of the poetic voice supported by flu-ids linked with Thoth and Maat resonate withthe intoxicant-stimulant preceding the poem andwith the conclusion sweetened with honey.

Interpretative Pleasure in Interdisciplinary Ap-proach

The woven trajectories of images manifest thatboth sensual pleasure and creative toil constitutethe expanse of “Kubla Khan.” The ancient Egyp-tians too constructed and conceived happinessdespite dependence on the climate of the NileValley; their zealous life-philosophy was summedup beautifully by the remark of the eminentEgyptologist of England, Arthur Edward PearseBrome Weigall: in Weigall’s perception, the an-cient Egyptians’ “light-hearted”-ness surpassesthose of all other races and archaeology is con-strued as “a merry science” by the fruits ofEgyptology (77). This article, welcoming a simi-lar enthusiasm, has attempted to weave thestrands of mythological attributes and implementthem in harmony with literary studies on “KublaKhan.” Such interdisciplinary study justifies thearchaeological as well as the visual dimensionsin the poem considered canonical in English lit-erature. Indeed the text of such an intricate poemis not very different from a hieroglyphic inscrip-tion standing freely in a site or preserved in anobject in a museum/private collection: the plea-sure and cerebral reward of deciphering and es-tablishing interconnection involve both.Egyptology is a similar process, aimed at un-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

35

covering and interpreting the polychromatic,symbol-rich world of the Egyptians.

Thus an Egyptological reading of “Kubla Khan”is speculative but not entirely improbable or be-yond context. In fact, in argument for the appli-cation of Egyptology, it may be noted that the ar-chaeological potential of “Kubla Khan” had beenemphatically stated by Weigall, who wrote thatthe dreamlike pursuit enables an archaeologistto engage with the ancient Egyptians (62–63, 77–78). The zest for happiness and artistic “pleasure”and Egyptology open up a vibrant space for thefemale instrumentalist, the topography, and thearchitectonic wonders. The conclusion with a ref-erence to Weigall’s own words thus shall be apt.Weigall quotes the last five lines from “KublaKhan” indicative of the fluid-nurturance of theexalted poet-figure and the delight of Paradise,and it can be perceived that S.T. Coleridge’s lineswould resonate “[i]f the Egyptologist . . . couldrevive within him one-hundredth part of the elu-sive romance, . . . much . . . is to be found in hisprovince” (Weigall 77–78), indeed in the sameway the poet/speaker of “Kubla Khan” aims toreconstitute his vision of Xanadu, Kubla’s“dome,” and the “song” by the “maid” (S.T.Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” lines 37–54). Weigall’sinvitation is a fitting tribute to S.T. Coleridge’sintensely written poem; the perception comingfrom an Egyptologist certainly renders the poemmore intriguing for the students of literature,asking for the extension of the borders of the dis-ciplines of Egyptology and English literature. Itdeserves special appreciation as to how passion-ately an Egyptologist perceived resonance withEgyptian zest in Coleridge’s poem just asColeridge himself drew delight in studying Egyp-tian mythology in comparison/connection withthe Classical and other Oriental Mythologies andcultures, as discussed by Beer in the chapters ofhis book Coleridge the Visionary (1–367). For trulyS.T.Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” opens up offering

symbolic richness and colours reminiscent of thevisual delight in ancient Egyptian art.

Note:

For in-text parenthetical citations, the long titlesof the sources consulted have been shortened. Ihave written on the application of Egyptology intexts and arts before; four of my previous papershave been cited in this paper, which is anothercontribution to this area.

Works Cited

Beer, John B. Coleridge the Visionary. Chatto andWindus, 1959.

Benzon, William. “Articulate Vision: A StructuralistReading of Kubla Khan.” Language andStyle, vol. 18, 1985, pp. 3–29.

Bikai, Pierre M. “Ishtar (The Cedar-Tree) and theDefeat of Gilgamesh.” Archaeology andHistory in Lebanon, vol. 14, 2001, 25 Aug.2020, pp. 14–23. www.ahlebanon.com/images/PDF/Issue%2014%20-%20Au-tumn%202001/Ishtar%20(the%20Cedar-Tree)%20and%20the%20Defeat%20of%20Gilgamesh%20-%20Pierre%20M.%20Bikai.pdf .

Bliss, Hilde Scheuer, and Donald Thayer Bliss.“Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan.’” AmericanImago, vol. 6, no. 4, 1949, pp. 261–73.JSTOR, 22 Aug. 2020.www.jstor.org/stable/26301244.

Brier, Bob. Ancient Egyptian Magic: Spells,Incantations, Potions, Stories, and Rituals.Quill, 1980.

Buhl, Marie-Louise. “The Goddesses of the Egyp-tian Tree Cult.” Journal of Near EasternStudies, vol. 6, no.2, 1947, pp. 80–97.JSTOR, 7 Oct. 2020, www.jstor.org/stable/542585.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

36

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Es-says on Life, Literature, and Method. U ofCalifornia P, 1966.

Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, editor. Letters of SamuelTaylor Coleridge. In Two Volumes. RiversideP, 1895. Cornell University Library. InternetArchive. Internet Archive, 25 June 2010.www.archive.org/details/cu31924104096536/page/n215/mode/2up. Accessed 22Aug. 2020.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria; or,Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life andOpinions. Vol. 1, 2. Rest Fenner, 1817. Uni-versity of California Libraries. InternetArchive, uploaded by ian frederick-rothwell, 3 Mar. 2008, www.archive.org/de-tails/ biographialitera00colerich/page/n7/mode/2up. Accessed 8 Oct. 2020.

—-. “Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream. AFragment.” The Broadview Anthology ofBritish Literature: Volume 4: The Age of Ro-manticism, edited by Joseph Black et al.,3rd ed., Broadview P, 2019, pp. 589–90.

Cowart, David. Literary Symbiosis: TheReconfigured Text in Twentieth-CenturyWriting. U of Georgia P, 2012.

Ellis, Normandi. “Sekhmet, Bast, and Hathor:Power, Passion, and Transformationthrough the Egyptian Goddess Trinity.”Goddesses in World Culture: Volume 1: Asiaand Africa, edited Patricia Monaghan,Praeger, 2011, pp. 201–14.

Elshamy, Mostafa. Ancient Egypt: The Primal Ageof Divine Revelation: Volume I: Genesis. Rev.ed., Mostafa Elshamy, 2015.

Faulkner, Raymond O., and Ogden Goelet,translators. “The Balance of the ThebanRecension”/The Chapters ComprisingThe Theban Recension of The Book of GoingForth by Day Which Do Not Appear in ThePapyrus of Ani.” The Egyptian Book of the

Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day: BeingThe Papyrus of Ani (Royal Scribe of theDivine Offerings), by Scribes and ArtistsUnknown, Chronicle Books, 1998, pp. 99–135.

Frankfort, Henri. Kingship and the Gods: A Studyof Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Inte-gration of Society and Nature. 1948, U ofChicago P, 1978.

Gardiner, Sir Alan H. The Admonitions of an Egyp-tian Sage from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden.J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1909.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “The Mirror andthe Vamp: Reflections on Feminist Criti-cism.” The Future of Literary Theory, editedby Ralph Cohen. Routledge, 1989, pp.144–66.

Goelet, Ogden, Jr. “A Commentary on the Corpusof Literature and Tradition whichConstitutes The Book of Going Forth byDay.” The Egyptian Book of the Dead: TheBook of Going Forth by Day: Being ThePapyrus of Ani (Royal Scribe of the DivineOfferings). By “Scribes and Artists Un-known,” translated by Raymond O.Faulkner and Ogden Goelet, edited byEva Von Dassow, 2nd rev. ed., 1994. Chro-nicle Books, 1998, pp. 137–70.

Graves-Brown, Carolyn. Dancing for Hathor:Women in Ancient Egypt. Continuum, 2010.

Hart, George. The Routledge Dictionary of EgyptianGods and Goddesses. 2nd ed.,Routledge,2005.

Hass, Andrew W. Auden’s O: The Loss of One’sSovereignty in the Making of Nothing. StateU of New York P, 2013.

Inboden, Robin L. “Damsels, Dulcimers, andDreams: Elizabeth Barrett’s Early Res-ponse to Coleridge.” Victorian Poetry, vol.46, no. 2, 2008, pp. 129–50. JSTOR. 27 Aug.2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40347415.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

37

Knapp, Bettina L. Women in Myth. State U of NewYork P, 1997.

Massey, Gerald. “Ancient Egypt: The Light of theWorld.” The Sign-Language of Astronomi-cal Mythology. Cosimo Classics, 2007.

Mazumder, Aparajita. “Coleridge, Vishnu, andthe Infinite.” Comparative LiteratureStudies, vol. 30, no.1,1993, pp. 32–52.JSTOR. 12 Dec. 2014, www.jstor.org/stable/40246861.

McDermott, Bridget. Decoding EgyptianHieroglyphs: How to Read the Secret Lan-guage of the Pharaohs. Chartwell Books,2001.

Mohamed, Ayman Mohamed Ahmed, Dr. “I ˆ tThe Milk Goddess in Ancient EgyptianTheology.” Journal of the General Union ofArab Archaeologists vol.2, no.2, 2017, pp.28–56. Journal of the General Union of ArabArchaeologists, 7 Oct. 2020. www.jguaa2.journals.ekb.eg/article_4793_1737073a09c5b8b4740c14fa3d56056d.pdf.

Murray, Michael, et.al. The Encyclopedia of Heal-ing Foods. Atria Books, 2005.

O’Connor, David, and Stephen Quirke. “Intro-duction: Mapping the Unknown in An-cient Egypt.” Mysterious Lands, edited byDavid O’Connor and Stephen Quirke,UCL P, 2003, pp.1–21.

Pehal, Martin, and Markéta PreiningerSvobodová. “Death and the Right Fluids:Perspectives from Egyptology and An-thropology.” Journal of Ancient EgyptianInterconnections, vol. 17, 2018, pp. 114–36.Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections.6 May 2020. www.egyptianexpedition.org/ articles/death-and-the-right-fluids-perspectives-from-egyptology-and-an-thropology.

Piankoff, Alexandre, translator. The Tomb ofRamesses VI: Texts. Edited N. Rambova,vol. 1, Pantheon Books, 1954.

Pinch, Geraldine. Handbook of Egyptian Mythology.ABC-CLIO, 2002.

Poo, Mu-chou. "Liquids in Temple Ritual." UCLAEncyclopedia of Egyptology, edited byWilleke Wendrich, 2010, pp. 1-7.eScholarship: University of California. TheRegents of the University of California,2017, www.digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0025dxbr.Accessed 22 Aug. 2020.

Ragueh, Cherine Abou Zeid. “The Blessing ofGrain Represented in god ‘Nepri’ and HisAffiliate Gods of Grain: ‘Osiris’ and‘Renenutet.’” Journal of the Association ofArab Universities for Tourism and Hospital-ity, vol.13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–22. Journal ofAssociation of Arab Universities for Tourismand Hospitality. 7 May 2020. www.jaauth.journals.ekb.eg/article_48016_58197fd2c61691eca2b91ff34d71ec79.pdf.

Raine, Kathleen. “Traditional Symbolism in‘Kubla Khan.’” The Sewanee Review, vol.72, no.4, 1964, pp. 626–42. JSTOR, 27 Aug.2020. www.jstor.org/stable/27541061.

Ray, Anirban. “Ancient Egyptian Art and Archi-tecture in Asterix and Cleopatra and Asterixand Obelix: Mission Cleopatra.” Proceedingsof National Conference on “Innovation in Vi-sual Arts” (NCIVA ’17) Edited by PradeepJoshi et al., Excellent Publishing House,2017, pp. 3–11.

—-. “Between ‘Transhumanism’ and ‘Posthu-manism’: The Mummy-’Transformers’ ofSeth Kearsley’s Mummies Alive! (1997).”Disaster, Holocaust and Dystopian Literature:Concepts and Perspectives. Edited by ParulMishra et al., Upanayan Publications,2020, pp. 224–33.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

38

—-. “Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars: Sexual,Creative and Aesthetic Aspects from An-cient Egyptian Mythology.” TheorizingSexuality in English Literature. Edited bySunil K. Mishra and Rituparna Mu-kherjee, Upanayan Publications, 2020, pp.51–61.

—-. “Cleopatra VII Philopator’s Final Moments:Depictions in Five Paintings.” Journal ofComparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol.42, no.2,2019, pp. 126–37.

Redd, Marques Jerard. “Ancient Egypt, SacredScience, and Transatlantic Romanticism.”Diss. University of California, Berkeley,2011. UC Berkeley: UC Berkeley ElectronicTheses and Dissertations. eScholarship:University of California. The Regents of theU of California, 17 Nov. 2020, www.escholarship.org/uc/item/6q98h4p2.

Rice, Michael. Egypt’s Making: The Origins ofAncient Egypt 5000–2000 BC. 2nd ed.Routledge, 2003.

Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Sci-ence of the Mind. 2001. CUP, 2004.

Roth, Ann Macy. “Father Earth, Mother Sky:Ancient Egyptian Beliefs AboutConception and Fertility.” Reading theBody: Representations and Remains in theArchaeological Record, edited by Alison E.Rautman, U of Pennsylvania P, 2000,pp.187–201.

Schwaller de Lubicz, R. A. The Temple of Man: Apetof the South at Luxor. Translated byDeborah Lawlor and Robert Lawlor, illus-trated by Lucie Lamy, vol. 2, 1957, InnerTraditions International, 1998.

Stevenson, Warren. “‘Kubla Khan’ as Symbol.”Texas Studies in Literature and Language vol.

14, no. 4, 1973, pp. 605–30. JSTOR, 18 Mar.2014. www.jstor.org/stable/40754231.

Stolberg, Victor B. Painkillers: History, Science, andIssues. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood/ABC-CLIO, 2016. Print.

Sweeney, Emmet. “The Genesis of Israel andEgypt.” Series: Ages in Alignment, vol.1,Algora Publishing, 2008.

Temple, Robert, and Olivia Temple. The SphinxMystery: The Forgotten Origins of theSanctuary of Anubis. Inner Traditions,2009.

Viaud, J. “Egyptian Mythology.” LarousseMythologie Générale. Edited by FélixGuirand. The Larousse Encyclopedia of My-thology, translated by Richard Aldringtonand Delano Ames, Reed Consumer/Inter-national Books, 1997, pp.9–48.

Weigall, Arthur E. P. B. The Treasury of AncientEgypt: Miscellaneous Chapters on AncientEgyptian History and Archaeology. WilliamBlackwood and Sons, 1911. University ofCalifornia Libraries . Internet Archive,Internet Archive uploaded by ianfrederick-rothwell, 29 Apr. 2008. Accessed7 Oct. 2020. www.archive.org/details/treasuryofancien 00weigrich/page/262/mode/2up>.

Wheeler, Kathleen M. The Creative Mind inColeridge’s Poetry. Harvard U P, 1981.

Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Temples ofAncient Egypt. Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Zecchi, Marco. “On the Offering of Honey in theGraeco-Roman Temples.” Aegyptus, vol.77, no. ½, 1997, pp. 71–83. JSTOR, 29 Nov.2016, www.jstor.org/stable/41217689.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

39

Arijeet Mandal*

Chhi: The Politics of Disgust in VilasSarang’s Select Works

The paper attempts to unravel the politics of disgust in the select short stories by Vilas Sarang.Disgust is a universal emotion among humans; however, the conditions under which eachperson feels disgust are largely determined by one’s cultural conditioning. Vilas Sarang is anauthor who has written several short stories that have been published in various magazinesduring the 1970s and 1980s, later some of them were compiled into a collection by Penguin.His works incite disgust and revulsion in their imagery, but only on the surface, his main goalis rather to document the condition of the people living different kinds of life outside themoral structures of well-fed upper and middle classes and castes. His works also deal with themodern Indian society that has become a fractured expression of modernity echoing the‘feverish fret’ of modern life.

Abstract

Keywords: Disgust, Emotions, History, Caste, Class, and Vilas Sarang.

*Arijeet Mandal, PhD Research Scholar, Department of English Language and Literature,University of Delhi, Delhi–110007 and Assistant Professor, Department of Film Studies,

Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700032, India, Email: [email protected]

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

40

We, as humans, are disgusted by a lotof things. We are disgusted by rot-ting bodies, slime, muck, dust anddecay of most kinds. We are also dis-

gusted by few specific things as Indians if weare to put such a varied population under oneidentity. We as Indians are disgusted by othercastes, religions, and often the very idea of sharedspace with the other. Yet, somehow, we functionas a democracy with its ups and downs. None-theless, the underlying current of disgust as astructure, its object choices and its associatedcultural values flow silently through this multi-lingual Nation-State. One must however ask thisquestion before engaging in a deeper analysis —“What is disgust?”

To sum it up briefly, disgust is a complex emo-tion that exists among humans, and to a large partowes to cultural conditioning (or symbolic struc-ture) of a population as well as individuals. Thisis why it is never just a feeling but an emotionwith cultural and political values attached to it.Disgust is set in motion or ‘triggered’ when onemeets an object that is out of its (the self’s) per-ceived order of things, that is, outside of its sym-bolic position in the world. This out-of-order orout-of-place object is a reminder of the fragilityof human life itself, along with all other humanlaws, rules, positions and cultural associations.

Before taking it further, there are a few clarifica-tions I need to make regarding the emotion ofdisgust. The earliest study of the concept of dis-gust came from Charles Darwin himself. Henoted how in Tierra del Fuego a ‘native’ touchedhis cold-cut meat on his plate, and immediatelyhe felt disgusted at the touch, and the native feltdisgusted at Darwin having cold meat. In hiswork, he tried to frame disgust as an evolution-ary trait that humans have in order to negate thetoxicity of different elements (Darwin 269). Theirony of such a biologism is that his example of

the disgust felt by him when a “native” touchedthe food on his plate, and the “native” being dis-gusted because of the cold-cut meat (as opposedto warm cooked meat in tropics) sets out a prob-lem that is not solved by his methods. Disgust isnot just an evolutionary trait, if it is, then it islargely contextualised through cultural mecha-nisms, as is argued by William Miller (W. I. Miller3-4). There are also theorists such as Paul Rozin(Rozin and Fallon), David Pizarro and others whotook a turn and studied disgust as behaviours,and talked about how disgust affects morality,judgement as well as decision making (Pizarro,Inbar and Helion). There is also the pioneeringwork by Andras Angyal, who largely seemed toagree with the idea that disgust is an emotionthat stops people from coming close to objectswhich are deemed unhealthy but at the same timementions how it is shaped by cultural values andpositions of objects in a symbolic order1 (Angyal).

There is however another way to look at emo-tions than as biological imperatives, and by ex-tension a different way of seeing disgust too. Tak-ing from the study of emotions by Robert C.Solomon, we can see how his methodology takesinto account major philosophical ideas such asAristotle’s Rhetorics, Descartes’ notion of ‘pas-sions,’ Spinoza, and Nietzsche into a history ofemotions. Along with this, he also considers thediscoveries in science, psychology, and psycho-analysis into his methodology into a holistic pic-ture of a phenomenological reading of emotions,albeit keeping an eye on both science and phi-losophy (Solomon 7). Therefore, borrowing fromthe existentialist and phenomenological readings,I made a distinction between ‘feelings’ and ‘emo-tions. ‘Feelings are our reactions to the worldaround us, syntax for our emotions. Emotions,on the other hand, form the basis of our relation-ship to the world around us and have a historyof its own. Neither of these two is historical, butemotions are subject to materialistic changes in

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

41

history and its dialectic relationship with culturalpractices, orders and beliefs. Disgust, is also anemotion, which has a history of its own and islargely felt through cultural practices, politics andsocially produced values.

There are a few other things about disgust thatneed to be said outright before getting into theliterary analysis of texts.

Politics of Disgust

One of the first people to look at disgust througha phenomenological understanding was AurelKolnai in his work On Disgust. Kolnai tried topoint out how some elicitors of disgust affect usnot for the reasons we think they do. For example,if we see a fresh corpse or a fresh piece of fleshfrom an animal, we are not disgusted. We holdthe hands of our dead friends and relatives, wetouch their feet, we even kiss them goodbye, andit does not disgust us, even if death brings a feel-ing of awe. However, were it so that the corpse isrotting, ridden with maggots and stinks of de-composition, we would promptly be taken bydisgust. In essence, what we are disgusted of isnot the Dasein of an object, not what it is, but forthe Daseinslage, what it appears to be (Kolnai 44-52). We also read death symbolically and throughover determination. Let us consider for examplethat there are certain animals, insects, worms,odours or wounds that we find disgusting. Wefind some animals disgusting, and this is not onlyabout animals that are diseased or bug-ridden butthat the very existence of some animals is uncom-fortable to us. We are disgusted by rats and mice.This is not because they do us harm by eatingleftovers, or occasionally nibbling away clothesand food. We are disgusted by rats, bats and micebecause they remind us of sewers and filth, andby extension risk of contamination. We are alsodisgusted by worms, insects or maggots, whetheras a blob of tangled ooze slithering in mud or asa honeycomb gathering in a section of decom-

posing flesh. Worms too, runs with a parallel fearof decay and contamination of the healthy. Thepungent smell of urine, the foul odour of toilets,unchecked fermentation, rotting things and foulsmell, in general, are met with disgust, and aremet by gag reflexes and expressions of “retch-ing” as Darwin had recorded earlier. The skin toois very sensitive to the elicitors of disgust. Weoften recoil from the touch of things, animals andalso people we associate with the disgusting. Theolder account of Darwin’s problem with theother’s touch, and the “naked savage’s” disgustwith cold meat maybe a culturally relative prob-lem, but it does point out to the fact that touchand skin plays an important role together. We arenot only disgusted by something unwanted onour skin, but also of the things that grow fromour skin. This includes unwanted or abnormalbody hair, flaky skin, and abnormal wounds.Consider the amount of disgust that people of-ten show towards patients of leprosy, dermato-logical disorders and those with odious gan-grenes; it not only affects the well-being of indi-viduals, but indeed points out a social order.

Kolnai, as well as Miller, puts the disgust of deathnot on Death itself, but on the crossroad of lifeand death, the aspect of life in death. Millersays—

What disgusts, startlingly, is the capacityfor life, and not just because life impliesits correlative death and decay: for it isdecay that seems to engender life. Imagesof decay imperceptibly slide into imagesof fertility and out again. Death thus hor-rifies and disgusts not just because it smellsrevoltingly bad, but because it is not an endto the process of living but part of a cycleof eternal recurrence (W. I. Miller 40).

This is indeed a brilliant breakthrough by Miller,as we indeed are disgusted by something ‘life-like’ in the dead. Severed hands, a vampire corpse

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

42

with red lips, Frankenstein’s monster, or a skel-eton out of a haunted closet are all elements ofhorror throughout literature, however, they donot demand disgust as much as they do dreadand fear. The fundamental aspect of disgust,therefore, is the possibility of life within death. Itis the sense of dread and loathing one would feelat the indifference of nature or cosmos againstthe conscious self-aware ‘self.’ Disgust kicks inwhen we see a glimpse of a world-without-us2.The fact that life goes on without us, in cosmosthat is indifferent to our existence.

Disgust, however, is not just existential anxiety.It is in fact one of the most political emotions wehave in us as humans. Take for example the rela-tions of class and disgust. It is as if the lowerclasses are always stuck with ‘disgusting jobs’ orare subject to humiliations and shaming for thejobs that they do. Similar frameworks existedunder the slave society, feudal society and now ahighly regimented capitalist society. The bour-geoisie, like the feudal lords before them, alwaystake labour as a punishment, especially the labourthat gets their ‘hands dirty.’ A major influence ona Marxist interpretation of the history of emo-tions came from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach andsubsequent works which argue that human con-sciousness itself develops through the dialecti-cal relationships with materialistic conditions.Emotions, an adjacent branch of consciousnesscan thus also be seen as developing through andaccording to the development of materialisticconditions, albeit from a Marxist perspective. Aconnecting author to the subject of Marxist schooland study of disgust, horror and other emotionswere few works by Georges Bataille. Bataille ar-gues that the Bourgeoisie as a class had neverreally cared much about cleaning or keeping cit-ies and habitats clean, because there is no profitto be made there (Bataille 66-68). Thus, works likesweeping, scavenging, sewage cleaning or clean-ing, in general, is considered as a passive right in

a capitalist society, but at the same time does notwant to spend capital on it because of lack ofprofit. This filth in the streets on the other handfeeds into the conservative right-wing imagina-tion, and history has shown how the right-wingalways begins its solidifying appeal to the massesby a ‘cleaning event.’ Whether Goebbels’ “derSäuberung” or other examples closer home, theright-wing has a fascination with cleaning andcleansing. Historically, the target enemy of right-wing imagination has always been called bynames that supposed to evoke disgust, whetherHitler’s analogy of Jews being maggots in anyGerman wound (Hitler 52), or the imaginationof the “native” whenever Macaulay referred toit (Macaulay and Macaulay) about Indians, orwhenever Dalits and Muslims are referred to inthis country by the conservative lot. Disgustseems to occupy a crucial role in dissociating andhumiliation of the working classes and minori-ties. A situation that is also mentioned in detailby psychologists as Pizarro, Rozin and otherswhere it became clear that people tend to be moreconservative if they are given political question-naires in a ‘filthy’ environment (Pizarro, Inbarand Helion) (Rozin and Fallon).

On one hand, emotions such as disgust are safetynets for an existential angst; on the other hand, itis the tool that is used to keep objects (and objec-tified people) in its designated place by deeplyembedding it with cultural stereotypes, laws andtaboos. The objectified people can be any groupthat is not in the ruling classes or in power ofdominant ideological constructs. For example, aDalit person’s sub caste is often used as a slur toevoke or articulate disgust. Mehtar, Chamar,Muchi, Dom, Bhangi are all sub castes, and yetthey are used as substitute word for a profession;this only reiterates how the order-of-things arearticulated via a systematic structure of powerfortified by disgust for those professions and the‘lower castes.’ A woman’s body hair might be

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

43

viewed with disgust because it is a marker offemininity ‘out-of-order,’ a hormonal body-spe-cific trait that flouts the rule laid down by patri-archy and therefore challenges its boundaries.An example would be how body hair, facial hairand even visibly developed muscles in womenare often seen with a tinge of disgust. There isalso disgust that is explicitly related to sex andsexual interaction. As Miller argues, sex happensbecause disgust is overcome by sexual appetite—ejaculation of any kind out of context is taken asan object of disgust (semen, urine, arousal fluidin women etc) and so is any part of the body withall its biological traits (sweat, hair, smell, odouretc.) If the sexual arousal is not there, it is ‘out oforder.’ In a similar manner, anything out of theheteronormative practice is often seen with ex-treme prejudice and disgust by sections of thesociety. As the laws change slowly regardingsome of these aspects, the structures are stillrooted into the very fabric of society, and are of-ten governed by political and existential con-cerns.3

The emotions that we go through today, and theobjects that make us feel a particular range ofemotions have both gone through changes. Theway we react to things and the things we react towere shaped by the history of that land, a mate-rialistic history of class, caste, gender, sexuality,and range of cultural values make it possible. Anexample would be how laws and rules havechanged over time, and to this date bears a his-tory of its relationships with disgust and shame(Nussbaum 72-74).

Politics of Disgust, Caste and Gender

There is also a special case that presents itselfwhen we discuss caste and disgust. The Hindusociety comprises of enclosed classes, the enclo-sure is maintained both by endogamy and physi-cal distancing, in this society of closed classes theuntouchables are the lowest in the order. As

Ambedkar says, the touchable Hindu tries tomaintain this barricade in order to feel superiorin society in one way or another. The function,therefore, is not to look towards systematic andcollective progress of society, rather it is designedto make individual or caste members feel supe-rior to the immediate underclass (or undercastein this case). Thus, the sense of collective con-sciousness is not present or barely makes a dentin the overall structure of the society. In additionto that, we have previously discussed how dis-gust has certain elicitors, or objects that triggerdisgust in people. When Ambedkar says that“The Untouchables are nobodies. This makesthe Hindus some bodies...” he is basically point-ing towards the fact that because of this struc-ture, an entire people are reduced to pure objects(Ambedkar 100-02). The concept of purity andpollution in caste goes deeper. Pauline Kollendapoints out how that sociologists such as Marriott,Inden, Louis Dumont and others had concludedthat Hindu mythology and its worldview dividespeople not into individuals but as ‘dividual’(Kollenda 70). Roughly, this means that Hindussee themselves as an already coded body, sincethe original ‘Codeman’ was Brahma from whosedifferent parts of the body came the differentvarna, the Hindu is already a coded product ofthe original coding of the God himself (Kollenda69). The jatidharma or one’s duty both as a casteand an individual is therefore hardcoded into thebody itself, and can be maintained in harmony ifonly one follows the right conduct for their caste.These coded particles (also pinda, literally mean-ing body) carried in sweat, hair, saliva et ceteraare easily transferred from one person to another,and therefore must be regulated and be ex-changed only with a higher caste than one’s ownthan a lower caste if exchange happens at all. Itis because of this that a Hindu must work on notjust avoid pollution but trying to continuouslypurify one’s coding through right action (both

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

44

labour and morality), right eating and right mar-riage (Kollenda 68-70). Therefore, there is no in-dividual, only a member of a caste and how thatcaste situates itself in the world. The Hindu bodyis already a site for the contradictions of ‘guna,’and these gunas make certain food pure and im-pure, and certain castes pure and others impure.In essence, unlike class, in caste defilement andcorruption is ontologically guaranteed by birthitself.

Lastly, there is also the case of gender and sex.To a large extent, sex is possible because there isa sexual appetite. It is not uncommon for peoplewho for some reason lose sexual appetite to re-port disgust when encountered with the genitals,body fluids, or any other sexualised object beingpresented. The fantasy that guards the personagainst the anxiety related to sex doesn’t existanymore; all that remains therefore is repulsionand disgust. Gender and disgust are also relatedto this sexuated nature of language. It is not as ifwomen do more disgusting things than men, butthe architecture of discipline and punishmentfalls heavier on women than men. Not only ‘dis-gusting habits’ such as picking nose, spitting,farting, puking, but body odour and others arealso judged more heavily if it comes from women;it is in fact accompanied by several other mark-ers that women are not supposed to have accord-ing to patriarchy. Examples would be facial hair,overgrowth of hair in the body, untended pubichair, warts, pimples, exceptionally developedmuscles and several other markers that are con-sidered disgusting in women. There are also hab-its that are considered repulsive in women, suchas loudness, obstinacy, rebelliousness and anyother trait which runs opposite to being a docilesubject. In essence, the biological markers of hair,muscles and others all point towards the patriar-chal anxiety about control on the female bodyagainst the objectively real differences of the realbodies. A slight marker that challenges the sov-

ereignty of patriarchal power through biologicaldifference is treated as the cultural value of re-bellion. Nonetheless, we do find that certain ob-jects and elements are sexualised in language it-self, and are thus free to move within the broadersocial realm with several implications. An ex-ample would be that of menstrual blood, while itis certainly not related to sexual acts, it is quitesexualised in its meaning socially. The menstrualblood is taken as a marker of young girls achiev-ing sexual maturity and celebrated in severalcultures, while at the same time it is an object oftaboo. As Kristeva argues, it is in fact the patriar-chal fear of acknowledging women’s sexualitythat makes them resort to disgust as an anchoragainst it (Kristeva 58-59). This is because the“Other,” or the existential anxiety that we tendto back away from and take refuge in the emo-tions of horror, fear and disgust, this “Other” isengendered in language itself (Ibid). In short, thestructures of language, politics, social valuesmake up the way we feel disgust, what we reactto and to a large extent what we do with the ob-ject of disgust.

Thus, with this brief discussion of disgust, wemay try to analyse some of the short stories byVilas Sarang. We shall try to see it as anintertextual analysis, between different conceptsof disgust and the text itself.

Sarang, Disgust and Order

Vilas Sarang (1942-2015) was one of the mostimaginative and brilliant writers of moderntimes. Sarang has published books as Tandoor Cin-ders (2008), Women in Cages (2006), The DinosaurShip (2005), A Fair Tree of the Void (1990), In theLand of Enki and several other books. There arealso books on poetry, including many translationsand original work in Marathi. Sarang has alsocontributed to the academic world as well. Hewas the editor of the anthology Indian EnglishPoetry since 1950 (1989) and The Stylistics of Liter-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

45

ary Translation (1988). Vilas Sarang has beenlauded by great authors such as Samuel Beckett,Vikram Seth and Dilip Chitre (Tehelka). His sto-ries are poetic and haunting, bizarre yet common-place, real yet borrowed often from the magical.

Sarang wrote, or at least started publishing, a bitafter the political and cultural movement by theDalit Panthers and the effects of that is also seenin his work. Sarang started writing during thedecade of the seventies. In Bombay, along withthe perils of Emergency and the fanaticism of theIndian National Congress, there was also the slowdeath of the parliamentary leftist organisationsand the rise of Marathi nationalism. This was thetime when figures such as Balasaheb Thackerayand Balwant Moreshwar Purandare entered thepolitical horizon rallying for Marathi national-ism. This was also when stalwart literary figuressuch as Balchandra Neimade campaigned againstwriting in any other language than Marathi. Itwas not just the time of the rise of communalforces but also a turn towards ethnocentric poli-tics in Bombay and Maharashtra. Literary figureslike Vilas Sarang, Arun Kolatkar and for sometime Namdeo Dhasal formed a bastion againstthis language nationalism and the social censor-ship on writing in English or any other languages(Tehelka). The effects of the Dalit Panthers inSarang are also visible because of how he keepschallenging the aesthetic of the reader on thesurface. However, underneath the surface, he ispushing boundaries to make the reader reflecton the real politic of the everyday lives of mil-lions of people living in the direst conditions.

One of his stories, “Musk Deer,” is about a per-son who develops an umbilical abscess on thenavel, and also works part-time as a collector ofshares from beggars working under his “boss”(Sarang 22-38). Sarang has a flair for the uncanny,the absurd and especially the disgusting in hisworks. He also has flair to begin his stories in a

manner that is as enchanting as Kafka orMarquez. Sarang begins “Musk Deer” with thepassage:

Waking up one morning he felt a kind ofwetness in his navel. He lifted the tail ofhis night-shirt and peered down. His na-vel was indeed filled with a liquid, toppedby a thin film. He dipped a finger in theliquid and held it close to his eyes. Then hesniffed at it. It had that odour peculiar tolint from the navel. Disgusting, if you like,but also exhilarating in a way. He sniffedagain.

Of course, he didn’t know what had hap-pened. But he was amused rather than in-trigued. ‘Good God, am I turning into amusk deer or something?’ he asked him-self (Sarang 22).

The reference to navel fluids and musk deer isabout the very prized liquid from Himalayandeer species that produces a scented liquid fromits glands to produce pheromones, not only is itvalued for its scent but also for its fame as anaphrodisiac. The liquid slowly thickens and turnsyellowish over time forming a crust over the sur-face, and the spot aches a great deal. Althoughthe doctor gives him a dosage of antibiotics andasks him to rest, he goes on working forWaghmare, his boss. An interesting thing to noteis that throughout the story he is called MuskDeer by the narrator. However, the point is notthe description of abscess and the liquid and itssmell, as much as what he does with it. MuskDeer works for a man, Waghmare, who is theringleader for beggars who report to him andgives him a cut of his money. On this occasion,he was asked to locate three possibly runawaybeggars. Musk Deer encounters the crippled beg-gar who has his legs amputated till his buttocksand sees him in a dream. He also goes on a searchfor Bansi Lal, another beggar working for his

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

46

boss, who is also affected by leprosy. Bansi Lal isfriends with a crow, and this crow brings piecesof meat for him everyday and waits for him tocook it and throw some of the cooked meat backat the crow. Bansi Lal reveals that he recently hadan upsetstomach because the crow brought insome meat that was rotting, but is otherwise quitecontent as long as the “Parsis were dying”(Sarang 30). The image of a man stricken withleprosy eating human meat, violating a strongtaboo against cannibalism, somehow is natura-lised. What we feel is not revulsion as much aspity and empathy for the conditions of thesepeople. Lastly, he finds Narayan, a young new-comer who previously served with a godmanwho kept having sex with him without consent(because he ultimately runs from him). Narayanis found by Musk Deer, and Musk Deer imag-ines him as his long-lost elder brother, and de-cides to elope with Narayan to his native home-town. All these falls flat when his abscess seem-ingly collapses and he is taken to a hospital.

What we find in this story is akin to a few theo-retical premises on which we worked. First, thiscase of fluids, rots and festering wounds in thebody, like Musk Deer and Bansi Lal, is a reminderof the chaotic nature of life, the excess of life it-self. It is for this reason that these things are dis-gusting as Miller argues (Miller 40). Secondly, thecases of absolute poverty leading people to re-sort to eating leftover human meat, the disgustin the streets, the oozing of fluids and the ema-nation of odour from the body is a violation ofan order, and is akin to Kristeva’s description ofabjection. Kristeva’s notion of abjection is the en-counter of a total lack of meaning-making struc-ture; it may be triggered by an object, but abjectis not an object. Rather, it is the fall into this abysswhere we fall out of the symbolic structure oflanguage (aka structures of meaning). The onlyrespite is then the anchoring emotions of horror,awe, disgust and so on. However, underneath all

of these disturbing images of the repulsive andthe disgusting, we see that there is, in fact, noorder in the real world of the poverty-strickenpeople of the country. Disgust is used by Sarangas a way to point out not just the real politic ofpoverty but also the poverty of the symbolic or-der that is maintained by the upper classes.

Sarang, Sex and Disgust

In another story, “Women in Cages,” from thesame book as mentioned earlier, it reveals hard-ships in the brothel, albeit from a subjective pointof view of a woman working as a prostitute, Sarsa.Sarsa is growing old, and therefore the rate atwhich men are attracted to her from beyond thecages where they are kept for the show is becom-ing less by the day. She still has debts, and withno savings, for her own, she can’t do anythingonce she cannot earn anymore due to her age.She wishes she had got AIDS as a sure way ofending her life, but she did not have it. The onlyother person who seems close to her is Babloo, amale prostitute. Babloo too is getting old, but hehas AIDS and he claims that in his trade age doesnot matter. Babloo describes the brutal realitywith a graphic description, he says:

…a passive homosexual like him had noreason to worry about finding customers.A woman of the cages had a working lifetill about the age of thirty-five. But a pas-sive male prostitute could go on workinginto old age. Passive males were alwaysin great demand. Their looks, their age didnot matter; only the hole mattered. It wasas if the hole were a disembodied, abstractentity (Sarang 87).

What is perhaps meant by a ‘passive homosexual’is the idea of a person who offers anal insertionas a service in the exchange. It is somewhat dis-turbing to read it concerning modern queertheory, but more than that the disturbing notion

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

47

is this sex trade itself. The apparent disembo-diment of the anal orifice is reminiscent of theidea of total objectification of the orifice, not justobjectification alone but the person itself becomesan absent object: ‘only the hole exists.’ Thisdehumanisation and turning a person into asexual object generates a moral panic for somereaders, but what appears disgusting is how thecharacters themselves are just done with theirbodies.The revulsion is palpable in the descrip-tion. Sarsa wishes she had AIDS to end life itself.Babloo comes and visits her to bid adieu beforesuccumbing to AIDS, and in Sarsa’s dream,Babloo asked relief from the body to be turnedinto a rabbit. The structure of prostitution andexploitation goes hand in hand, and it makes alasting impact on the psyches of people involved.While the post-ejaculation male feels a releaseand desire for ascension from the muck of abrothel, the ones who actually are bound in cageslive with that disgust turned against them.

A similar story is “The Odour of Immortality.” Itnarrates the story of Champa, a Nepalese villagegirl who works as a prostitute in Kamathipura.When she too, like Sarsa in the previous story,was affected by failing customers and a debt tothe Kothibai (the boss lady), she went for the eso-teric. Champa asked a tantric (who incidentallycalls vaginas with the euphemism ‘eyes’) fromher village to perform a ritual so she could havemore vaginas all over her body. That is exactlywhat happened. Only, as the narrator describes:

After two weeks, Champa complained ofitching all over her body, with burning sen-sation arising fitfully in various parts. Thenshe thought the ulcer was blossoming onthe left side of her body, along the latitudeof her belly. She lifted her left breast like abag that was in the way, and peered at theleft side of her trunk. There was indeed anulcerous growth on her body, the nature

of which could not as yet be ascertained; itwas like a volcanic island that had newlyerupted in the geography of her body….A day or two later, it became clear that avagina had grown on the left side ofChampa’s body. Like small-pox, the organscovered her body. Champa was in a stateof delirium. She felt her body was open-ing up to the world, like a tender, exoticred flower, with innumerable petals…Theinitial reactionwas close to horror, as itmight be someone transformed into a gi-ant insect. And, indeed, Champa had theappearance of a large beetle, with a headlike a giant turtle’s head protruding out ofthe shell of a body thick with a surfeit ofvaginas (Sarang 90-91).

The graphic description of a woman, who is oth-erwise always reduced to a sexual object devoidof any human agency of her own, has suddenlyturned into a giant mass of vaginas. Champa thusbecomes a sexual object that turns against its sub-ject, because sex with her multiple vaginas doesimpart an unforeseen pleasure, but at the sametime makes those men impotent. It is as if the re-turn of the object into the real has made the malesgo through a castration. Other descriptions goalong with this; not only does she grow vaginasbut also pubic hair with each vagina. On the dayshe menstruates she has to be wrapped up in asaree, and every male client runs away becauseof the odour. It is when the rumour of impotencesurfaces that she starts getting fewer and fewerclients, and is again stumbles upon divine inter-vention. The Hindu god Indra comes to her inthe guise of a beggar, but she can easily smell the‘odour of immortality’ on him and asks for theboon of vision. And all her vaginas then turn intoeyes.

There are obvious graphic descriptions of elici-tors of disgust, like pubic hair, images of ulcer,

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

48

small-pox, the image of men clinging to her ‘asleeches’ to reach vaginas all around her body in-cluding above waist with chairs and stools, andabove all her monthly flow of odorous menstrualblood. Beyond these elicitors of disgust is theobvious repulsion that starts against her eversince it is discovered that men become impotentafter having sex with her. Thereupon, she alsoturns into this semi-divine person with all thevaginas replaced by eyes, and no one can meether gaze anymore. It is as if the traditional objectof male-gaze suddenly becomes an all-seeing eye.Both as a woman covered with vaginas all overher body, and as an all-eyes body, later on, sheproduces the threat of castration against men. Itis precisely for this that she is at first treated withrepulsion, and then with reverence of a goddess;it is as if Sarang positions the uncanny at the endof the symbolic system, but they reside in such astate that horror and awe, disgust and reverenceare not Manichean opposites but part of the samesymbolic unknown. The premise here is reminis-cent of not just Kristeva’s concept of abjection,but also Irigaray’s take on the plurality ofwomen’s sex and the male anxiety about themultiplicity of women’s sexuality (Irigaray 23-25).

Lastly, I would like to point towards the storycalled “Om Phallus.” Much like Kafka’s Metamor-phosis, the story begins with the narrator reveal-ing that one morning he awoke from bizarredreams and found himself turned into an ‘erectphallus’ (Sarang 99). It is by far one of the mostbizarre stories by Sarang, to the point that theabsurdity borders a comedic effect sometimes.The Phallus abandons all social life uponrealisation of his predicament, and gives up hisjob, has an absurd farewell from his girlfriendand eventually leaves the city, only to be foundand venerated in a village. In the village, he getsa temple erected for him, and a line-up of devo-tees, including one widowed woman who takescare of him, often trying to rub oil and mastur-

bate this five-foot-tall penis. While he promptlymakes up a fictitious story about the trifecta ofgods Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, and explainshow he is the severed lingam of Shiva; ironically,he starts believing in his own fictional narrativeand starts ‘drying up.’ While genitals are oftenan object of disgust when removed from thesexual appetite of the onlooker, here it becomesan object of awe and then an object of reverence.Once again what we see is that Sarang pushesthe boundaries of symbolic structure, or culturalhierarchies, and takes it to its logical extremes.In a method that is reminiscent of Hegel as wellas Lacanian critique, any relation taken to an ex-treme reveals its core malfunctions or flaws. It isonly when Sarang pushes these limits that werealise we do not just see the disgust (or feeldisgusted)about genitals were it to step into therealms of divinity, esoteric, or any other anchor-ing feeling that takes the existential and sexualangst away.

Conclusion

In literature, disgust has been used as a trait todebase, humiliate or as a tool of self-loathingthroughout time. From Shakespeare’s use of mi-nor insults in Henry IV to “thou art a boil, aplague sore” in King Lear, or Ben Jonson’s moreprolific use of the word “shit” and “fart;” and ofcourse, followed by the literary genius of scato-logical humour in Jonathan Swift, we have a longhistory of it. We also have a detailed manual ofhow to use disgust in dramaturgy in Indian aes-thetic theory; however, unsurprisingly enough,the bibhatsya rasa or the odious rasa inNatyashastra specifically forbids its usage on dwijaor upper-castes (Ghosh and Bharata 108-10). It isnot until the later age of the coloniser and thecolonial other meeting each other does spark astudy that seems more philosophical in its ap-proach, and is self-reflective to the point that itbecame an interest for phenomenologists. There

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

49

are later works that specifically addresses theaesthetics of the repulsive and disgusting, likeUmberto Eco’s essay On Ugliness, and GlauberRocha’s critique of cinema in Aesthetics of Hun-ger. I have however, stuck around mostly withphilosophical works for my intertextual analysisas it seemed more self-reflexive in its approachand identification of the ‘why’ of the emotion ofdisgust than the ‘how’ of it.

To conclude, Vilas Sarang is still one of the lessercelebrated and researched authors in literature.The ways in which he tried to challenge the no-tions of the disgusting and the revered, the sa-cred and the taboo, is the roughly enlighteningto read but shocks the readers beyond one’simagination.

Endnotes

1 Andras Angyal’s use of the term symbol andorder are quite different from the now popu-lar use of it by Lacanians.

2 A term that is used heavily by philosophers ofpessimism. See Cosmic Pessimism by EugeneThacker.

3 To put it in an extremely simple way, the aver-age homophobe is guided by fear of contami-nation of their bodies and collapse of society,rather than something really rational or scien-tific. The conditions are guided by existentialangst, as well as political conservativism.

Works Cited

Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. “Dr. BabasahebAmbedkar: Writings and Speeches.”Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. Untouchablesor the Children of India’s Ghetto, vol. 5,Ambedkar Foundation, 2014.

Angyal, Andras. “Disgust and related aversions.”The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psycho-

logy, vol. 36, no. 3, 1941, pp. 393-412. doi.org/10.1037/h0058254.

Bataille, Georges. “The Psychological Structureof Fascism.” New German Critique, no. 16,Winter, 1979, pp. 64-87. www.jstor.org/stable/487877.

Darwin, Charles. The Emotions and the Expressionsof Man and Other Animals. CUP, 2009.

Ghosh, Manmohan and Bharata. Natyashastra.Edited by Manmohan Ghosh, translatedby Manmohan Ghosh, Asiatic Society,1951.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. HURST ANDBLACKETT, 2010.

Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which is Not One. CornellU P, 1985.

Kollenda, Pauline. Caste in Contemporary India:Beyond Organic Solidarity.Waveland, 1985.

Kolnai, Aurel. On Disgust. Open Court, 2019.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror An Essay onAbjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez,Columbia U P, 1982.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington and BaronMacaulay. Speeches: With His Minute onIndian Education. AMS P, 1979.

Miller, Susan Beth. Disgust: The GatekeeperEmotion. Analytic P, 2004.

Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust.Harvard U P, 1997.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Hiding from Humanity:Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton UP, 2006.

Pizarro, David. et. al. “On Disgust and MoralJudgment.” Emotion Review, vol. 3, no. 3,2011, pp. 267-68.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

50

Rozin, Paul and April E Fallon. “A Perspectiveon Disgust.” Psychological Review, vol. 94,1987, pp.23-41. www.researchgate.net/publication/19339241_A_Perspective_on_Disgust.

Sarang, Vilas. The Women in Cages, CollectedStories. Penguin Books, 2006.

Solomon, Robert C. True to Our Feelings: What Our

Emotions Are Really Telling Us. OUP, 2007.

Tehelka. Dilip Chitre, The Man Whom Samuel

Beckkett Knew. 14 Sep. 2014. www. archive.

tehelka.com/story_main14.asp?file

name=hub091705The_Man.asp.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

51

Contestation of the Gendered-Space inBanana Yoshimoto's Kitchen

V. Kousalya* and Dr. Marie Josephine Aruna**

Generally kitchen is a part of the house or building where food is prepared. But if the termkitchen is put to scrutiny within the context of gendered construction it is pertinent thatkitchen is viewed as a territory solely in control of women. For centuries women’s life hasbeen inevitably linked to the kitchen. It has been looked at as a space that patriarchy con-ceptualized to confine and control women. However, women writers like Banana Yoshimotohave re-conceptualized this secured gendered-space as an instrument to unveil their storyof identity and individuality. In her debut novella Kitchen she foregrounds the innovationalaspect of the gendered construction where woman possessed intimacy with kitchen andviewed it as a place of solace in times of melancholy and joy. Mikage Sakurai, the femaleprotagonist in Kitchen feels neither oppressed by patriarchy nor dictated by traditionalcustoms that she should be circumscribed by the kitchen. Rather, she discovers that thekitchen has not confined, but liberates and enlivens as a human entity, companion andprovide respite from the asphyxiating world of trauma. This paper endeavours to analyzeand change thereby present an exciting study on the non-conformity of gendered roles, bysubverting and reconstructing the kitchen space as a liberatory way in reclaiming women'sidentity.

Abstract

Keywords: Feminism, Contestation, Conformity, Gendered-Space, and Liberation.

*V. Kousalya, Ph.D. Research Scholar, Department of English, Kanchi MamunivarGovernment Institute for Post Graduate Studies and Research, Puducherry-605008,

Tamilnadu, India, Email: [email protected]

**Dr. Marie Josephine Aruna, Assistant Professor and Research Supervisor, Departmentof English, Kanchi Mamunivar Government Institute for Post Graduate Studies andResearch, Puducherry-605008, Tamilnadu, India, Email: [email protected]

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

52

Kitchen is a concrete cubicle space,hub of family well-being and nour-ishment which renders complete-ness to house, but in realistic di-

mension it is the focal point of cultural politics.Generally it has no gendered construction, butthe rise of patriarchy and blind faith in culturalnorms and stereotypes transfused kitchen witha new identity as women’s space. Society judgewomen’s worth, capability and identity by theparametric quality of her cooking and this testi-fies how society has started to associate kitchenas an inseparable entity in the life of women folk.For ages, women are not aware of this disinte-grated nefariousness of society which dupedwoman by making her to believe holding powerin the kitchen as a privilege. By insisting on thenotion of family well-being, culture cajoled andchained woman in the kitchen and she too hap-pily embraced it because nothing renders hermore happiness than the good health and joy ofher family.

Kitchen is used as a trap door by patriarchy tocolonize women’s psyche. They manipulativelycolored this gendered subjugation in the nameof cultural identity thereby bringing universal-ity to an ideology that exists between women andcooking. Woman and man’s relationship with thekitchen is akin to colonized and colonizers. Thecolonizer is the receiver of all goods producedby colonized via hard labour similarly, in the con-text of kitchen space men always exists as the con-sumers of women produced food. Starting withthe ancient Sanskrit text Abhinaya Sakuntalamsociety has formed a trio with women, cookingand hospitality. Kitchen is the center of women’slife where she starts and ends her day. The act ofcooking is pious because it connects an individualhand, head and heart. In general context cook-ing is conceived as an act of love, but in the caseof many women whose lives are confiscated inthe kitchen it is manifested as an expression ofself-love.

Initially women felt happy and content abouttheir perennial space in kitchen. But whenwomen were denied of doing anything other thanhousehold chores they felt traumatized and thispressured them to question why a kitchen is re-garded as feminine space? The bliss of being inthe kitchen turned out to be a torture and pun-ishment. But the young protagonist of this no-vella Mikage Sakurai finds intense emotional at-tachment with kitchen and she feels it gives hersolace and peace of mind from the traumaticworld. Contrary to the women who try to findcomfort out of kitchen Mikage loves to be in thekitchen for all day long because kitchen busiesher mind without letting any depressing thoughtto lowdown her spirit. Unlike other womanMikage finds life in the kitchen as she says, “Iwould stare at a bright red tomato, loving it fordear life. Having known such joy, there was nogoing back” (59). Mikage feels this way becauseshe has developed a passion for cooking andyearns to have a career in culinary art. Thisnewfound passion, interest and love makeMikage see the kitchen as heaven on earth. Thisresearch examines how a kitchen is labeled asgendered feminine space by scrutinizing societalframework and patriarchal conceptualization.Besides, it also spotlights how women likeMikage still cling to the kitchen space, therebydeconstructing patriarchal compulsion ofgendered space and creating an identity on theirown.

Mikage Fascination with the Kitchen

The novella Kitchen foregrounds the dynamicview of a woman’s relationship with the kitchenwhich no longer stands as a place of domesticityand confinement rather a liberating phenomenonwhich renders new identity and solace. The no-vella chronicles the life of a young woman MikageSakurai, who after losing her grandmother, heronly blood relation on this earth becomes ob-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

53

sessed with aloofness and anxiety unaware ofhow she is supposed to move ahead in life. Thepangs of being all alone in this world with noshoulders to cry over and no soul to listen to herjoys and suffering made her so traumatic. Thefeeling of Mikage is akin to the one narrated byHaruki Murakami and it is recorded in the linesas follows, “But even so, every now and then Iwould feel a violent stab of loneliness. The verywater I drink, the very air I breathe, would feellike long, sharp needles. The pages of a book inmy hands would take on the threatening metal-lic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the rootsof loneliness creeping through me when theworld was hushed at four o’clock in the morn-ing” (Murakami 202). Mikage to ease out herdesolateness takes refuge in the kitchen whichencircles her with a compassionate aura like amother. The opening line of the novella testifiesher inexplicable love with the kitchen as follows,“The place I like best in this world is the kitchen.No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’sa kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, itsfine with me” (3).

Mikage love with the kitchen is not an ephem-eral phenomena and she proves it by embracingcooking assistant as her profession in the laterpart of her life. The kitchen is synonymous withwoman because patriarchy and culture deliber-ately ascribed woman’s place in the kitchen inorder to hinder their thinking and to have domi-nance in a societal sphere by keeping women folkin the periphery. Women instead of scrutinizingculture and its dogmas embraced their role in thekitchenas a privilege and pride without appre-hending “How women exist and are only con-scious of themselves – in ways that men haveshaped” (Beauvoir 46).

On the other hand women inherently possessedlove for cooking and held kitchen as their rightand power. This demonstrates how culture

sowed seeds have grown to an extent wherewomen started to animate kitchen as their bestcompanion in their troubled life and relation-ships. In the novella Mikage even goes a stepahead and expresses her wish to die in the kitchenand it spotlights the emotional fervor that shepossessed with kitchen which provides her per-sonal space which human beings failed to pro-vide her in times of adversity as follows,

When I’m dead worn out, in a reverie, Ioften think that when it comes time to die,I want to breathe my last in a kitchen.Whether it’s cold and I’m all alone, orsomebody’s there and it’s warm, I’ll staredeath fearlessly in the eye. If it’s a kitchen,I’ll think, “How good.” (4)

Initially Mikage love for kitchen resided in sub-dued state and she is completely unaware of it. Itis only after her grandmother’s demise, she real-ized her intense love for kitchen in full order.Because after her grandmother’s death, lonelinessdescended upon her. Loneliness is the greatestanxiety where an individual is in desperate needof his own self or others. Deprived of both,Mikage entered a traumatic state of sleeplessnights, which haunted her reality. Unaware ofwhere to go, what to do and how to regain hercomposure, she is about to become malady, butthen fortunately she has found the blissful spaceof kitchen which rendered her comfort and se-renity. As she says,

Three days after the funeral I was still in adaze. Steeped in a sadness so great I couldbarely cry, shuffling softly in gentledrowsiness, I pulled my futon into thedeathly silent, gleaming kitchen. Wrappedin a blanket, like Linus, I slept. The humof the refrigerator kept me from thinkingof my loneliness. There, the long nightcame on in perfect peace, and morningcame. (5)

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

54

The above lines explicitly reflect how Mikage hasstarted to have emotional bonding with kitchensimilar to child and mother. In panoramic viewkitchen might be a place for cooking and a partand parcel of home, but in a deeper sense it isthe only companion and space provided forwoman where she thinks about her dreams, de-sires, feelings, emotions, hopes, fear, anxiety, in-expressible ideas etc. To be pertinent it is the onlyprivate space where women will be in her ownself. The sound produced by refrigerator is gen-erally viewed as noise, but for Mikage it is a humlike a lullaby which lures her to sleep. HereMikage personifies Kitchen as a mother who lullsher to sleep in calmness amidst the disruptiveworld of aloofness.

Mikage obsession with kitchen is ridiculed by herfriend Yuichi. One day Yuichi invites Mikage tohis home in order to make her feel less lonely.And while they are waiting for Yuichi motherEriko he tells Mikage “A lot of people would sayyou learn a lot from the toilet” (8). Actually Yuichideliberately said toilet instead of kitchen and thisprojects the male attitude who view the kitchenas a trivial space and the woman who devotesher life to it as worthless. In addition womancooking goes hardscrabble in every householdas culture has ordained it as a woman’s obliga-tion. Though woman thinks that she possess au-thority in the kitchen it is only flimsy fantasy be-cause she cooks food according to her father,husband or son’s preference and not on her ownaccord. This testifies that even in the kitchen in-visible rule of patriarchy reigns. Men don’t wantto give any space of thinking for women becausethey want to live freely without any queries andobligations that are the reason patriarchy dictateswoman should spend their life in kitchen therebywittily uprooting their reason in the name of cul-ture. But in modern world women have attainedequality and they are no longer puppets in thehands of men but still they desire women to be

submissive as Ian Fleming vividly describes therole of woman as follows, “These blitheringwomen who thought they could do a man’s work.Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mindtheir pots and pans and stick to their frocks andgossip and leave men’s work to the men”(Fleming 72).

Death and loneliness are the key factors whichenabled Mikage to comprehend her love for thekitchen. Besides, it made her to clearly figure outwhat she desires to become in life. That is to saykitchen acts as a teacher or spiritual guide inmolding her life and helped her in finding hertrue love. Mikage lived with a fear of aloofnesswhile her grandmother is alive. It hints how inyounger age Mikage is aware of the complexmeaning of the saying “Death and its associates,after the initial shock, produce callousness” (100).This intense fear of death, which loomed in theair deprived Mikage of happiness which pre-vailed in her day-to-day existence as she remarks,“The space that cannot be filled, no matter howcheer-fully a child and an old person are livingtogether-the deathly silence that, panting in acorner of the room, pushes its way in like a shud-der. I felt it very early, although no one told meabout it” (21).

Death ends one life and begins a new one. In thecase of Mikage death encircled her with psyche-delic loneliness, but instead of shuddering at itlike any other woman she bravely faced it. Andit enabled her to come to an understanding withthe universal truth about the mysticism of lifewhere she is not an exception in worldly sorrowsand sufferings as she says, “When was it I real-ized that, on this truly dark and solitary path weall walk, the only way we can light is ourown?...Someday, without fail, everyone will dis-appear, scattered into the blackness of time. I’vealways lived with that knowledge rooted in mybeing” (21). Besides, Buruma’s view further

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

55

justifies Mikage search for kitchen as follows,“The kitchen is to Mikage: a refuge from loneli-ness after the death of a loved one” (29).

The knowledge about death has made Mikage toseek a place where she will be on her own de-void of all worldly sorrows and temptation. Andshe finds the best place to be kitchen from whereshe could find resilience. Besides, she deliberatelyclouds her thought about kitchen anytime for thatmatter to forsake the sadness which constantlystalks after her. For instance, when she decidesto shift to a new apartment from Yuichi’s house,she thinks not about Yuichi or his mother Eriko,who provided her shelter rather she misseskitchen as she says, “Someday, I wondered, willI be living somewhere else and look back nostal-gically on my time here? Or will I return to thissame kitchen someday?” (42).

The rejuvenation of spirit which Mikage discov-ered in the kitchen is not an ephemeral phenom-enon rather an enlightenment which encouragedher to face the horror and mysteries of life with-out any fear and inhibitions. This strong will isnot everyone’s cup of tea and it takes years andexperience. A child will get this confidence whenshe/he is with parents, but in the case of Mikageit is quite surprising and breathtaking becauseshe has found this limitless courage from an in-animate space like the kitchen. Its silence enablesher self-exploration and she understands the cy-clic process of life where it is not she who suffersall alone in this cosmos as she says, “As I growolder, much older, I will experience many things,and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Againand again I will suffer; again and again I will getback on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t letmy spirit be destroyed” (42).

In the world, whatever happens to an individualno matter whatever intolerable sorrow attackshim, somehow or the other he has to exist andwill ultimately end up with food for sustenance.

Because food plays a vital role in individual lifeas Virginia Wolf points out, “One cannot thinkwell, love well, if one has not dined well” (Wolf17). To elaborate it is similar to existentialist phi-losophers’ ideology who says human beings’ lifeon this earth are unavailing and trying to findthe meaning of our existence in this complexuniverse is also a futile endeavour. But to makeour life worth living we need to live our worth-less life to the fullest. In a sense, we need to dothings which provide contentment and happinessto our soul. Therefore, to make her life worth liv-ing Mikage develops a love towards the kitchen.In addition, Mikage attachment with kitchengradually enables her to understand that it isimpossible for an individual to live on this earthdevoid of contact with fellow beings. One has tohave attachment to people or things by knowingthat one day or the other they too will leave uspermanently. Mikage understands the harsh soli-tude, the ephemeral existence of beings and be-trayal caused by death is part and parcel of anindividual existence.

Mikage yearns to have a kitchen and its silencethroughout her life because she deems it as anindispensable entity for her survival and peace.Mikage herself questioned why she loves kitchenand also finds an answer as she says, “Why do Ilove everything that has to do with kitchen somuch? It’s strange. Perhaps because to me akitchen represents some distant longing en-graved on my soul. As I stood there, I seemed tobe making a new start; something was comingback” (56). The distant longing symbolizes hercareer and companion in life. No matter wher-ever she goes in this world she always expects tohave a kitchen by her side like a child who de-sires to have his mother always around him. Thisexquisite bond is expressed by Mikage in theform of letter which she address to kitchen asfollows,

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

56

Dear Kitchens.

I will have countless ones, in my heart orin reality. Or in my travels. Alone, with acrowd of people, with one other person-in all the many places I will live. I knowthat there will be so many more. (43)

Besides the silence which she spots in the kitchenis not a deadly one that alarms and haunts herpsyche rather a compassionate melody whichreckons the consciousness and restores her com-posure. This silence is like a mirror which projectsher mind and identity without any disguise. Itallows her to explore and excavate her real selfwhich is deeply buried in her unconscious asexplained by Harold Pinter as follows,

I think that we communicate only toowell, in our silence, in what is unsaid, andthat what takes place is a continual eva-sion, desperate rearguard attempt to keepourselves to ourselves. Communication istoo alarming. To enter into someone else’slife is too frightening. To disclose to oth-ers the poverty within us is too fearsomea possibility (92).

It is not only in India where patriarchy insiststhat woman should marry at right age and spendtheir life in kitchen by serving her in-laws andhusband everywhere the case is same and thisinclude Japan too. During the time when thisnovella was written women were not enjoyingtheir full freedom which women in our contem-porary society are enjoying. Only the sufferingsof women are quite different, whereas the patri-archal and cultural dominance is almost sameacross the world. Mikage fascination towardskitchen is boundless and it is testified becauseeven in her dream she thinks about the kitchen.Dreams are the gateways to realize soul yearn-ings and desires as explained by Naby Wagaman,“Dream can help you understand yourself, get

answers, clarify our purpose, discover ideas,reach closure, remove fears, reduce stress andmore” (Wagaman 119). Dreams give image torepressed emotions and yearnings which an in-dividual hesitates to confess in this democrati-cally confined world. Mikage often dreams ofscrubbing the sink in the kitchen and having con-versation with Yuichi. Kitchen dream, signifies asymbol of change and transformation as per anindividual wish and desire and not by chance orforce. Mikage dream is significant and symbolicbecause it spotlights her unrealized love forYuichi and hints at the transformation which sheis about to make in her life. This transformationis not superficial rather an internalization whereshe takes her love for kitchen so seriously andindulge in learning cooking to have a career inculinary art. She crazily engrossed herself incooking and without anyone aid, solely relyingon books she learnt cooking with all her heart.The following lines record her daftness and lovefor cooking as follows, “For the whole summer Iwent about it with a crazed enthusiasm: cook-ing, cooking, and cooking. I poured all my earn-ings from my part-time job into it, and if some-thing came out wrong I’d do it over till I got itright. Angry, fretful, or cheery, I cooked throughit all” (57). Whereas Mikage dedication in learn-ing cooking is recorded in the words of Eriko andYuichi as paranoid as they say, “Mikage has gonecompletely nuts, hasn’t she?” (57) and this hintsat the patriarchal attitude who views it as de-based work but for women like Mikage cookingis a therapy which breaks her callousness. To bepertinent Mikage has attempted to bring orderout of her chaotic life through art of cookery.

Unveiling Doing Gender in Kitchen

“Kitchen is the nerve centre and the most impor-tant premises of any home” says Lagomarsino(2004). The obligations propounded by cultureto men and women in relation to the kitchen are

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

57

marred by obscurity. If we scrutinize the frame-work of culture and its attribute to women ev-erything is in favour of men who act as a pivot inconsideration of both domestic and societal spec-trums. But the key difference is that in the publicsphere patriarchal dominance is out rightly vis-ible whereas in domestic sphere it is concealedand operated via foreordained principle. It is tre-mendously difficult to make women understandthe whimsical impression that kitchen space is agendered construction deliberately created toencircle women in the periphery as Lupton says“Emotions like food and eating, are commonlyregarded as the preserve of the embodied selfrather than the disembodied, philosophizingmind. Like food and eating practices, the emo-tions are traditionally linked with the feminine,with the disempowered and marginalization”(Lupton 31). Because culture for ages in femi-nine ground emphasized that “woman role is thatof feeding children and socializing them into cu-linary competence” (Hollows 186). Culture hasmanipulatively made women folk to blindly em-brace kitchen space with wholeheartedness asBeagan points out “This disproportionate divi-sion of labor is rationalized through implicitgendered assumptions, such as women’s appar-ently natural proclivity for maintaining familyhealth” (Beagan 203).

Many women do accept their role in the kitchenwithout any doubts and inhibitions because cul-ture has manipulatively ordained them to believethat it is a part of culture and custom as Gargsays “Women have always had to wrest this spaceto work from the invisible margins within themargins” (2001). Alice Walker explains in herwork “Possessing the secret of joy” that tortureis not a culture. In Afro-American culture womenfolk endure almost every torture meted out tothem by male chauvinist without any protestbecause gendered construction and culture haveingrained in their mind that sufferings and tor-

ture are very common and they have to endure itwith utmost patience in order to have survival inthe domestic and public sphere. Adding to thatculture makes gender roles meet certain inescap-able assumptions, expectations and obligations.

The other dimension of woman attraction to-wards the kitchen beyond gendered compulsionis that it gives vent to their repressed emotionaloutlet and thereby makes them escape from thesuffocating situations for a time being. For in-stance, when a woman starts to cook in thekitchen with love she completely forgets herselfand does everything with full focus and concen-tration. In this context Kitchen acts as a seduc-tive drug which turns woman indifferent to herown sufferings and agonies for the nonce. Thisis the case with Mikage too, because her pres-ence in the kitchen boosts up her spirit by ren-dering some insight to her muddled psyche thatshe is not alone which humanity failed to bestowon her. This intimacy with kitchen gives her com-posure and serenity which she lost after hergrandmother’s demise. It is not that she finds thissolace and comfort only to the kitchen in herhouse rather she finds this same closeness to anykitchen around the world for that matter.

As soon as Mikage gets into the house of Yuichithe first thing she looks for is the kitchen. ForMikage kitchen is not a cubicle rather the soul ofthe house. The description of things in Yuichi’skitchen by Mikage illustrates her profound loveand respect for Kitchen as follows,

The good quality of the mat on the woodfloor and of Yuichi’s slippers; a practicalminimum of well-worn kitchen things,precisely arranged. A Silverstone fryingpan and a delightful German-made veg-etable peeler-a peeler to make even thelaziest grandmother enjoy slip, slippingthose skins off. Lit by a small fluorescentlamp, all kinds of plates silently awaitedtheir turns; glasses sparked (9-10).

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

58

Mikage considers kitchen to be a sacred place likethe temple that is the reason she takes into ac-count everything that is present in the kitchenfrom trivial thing like a mat to significant one likepans and pots. Even the grim kitchen looks likeheaven to Mikage for instance Yuichi’s kitchen isnot at all furnished with objects like those inmodular kitchen. Most of the things in Yuichi’skitchen are worn-out and arranged in disorderlystate, but still she finds beauty amidst ugly. Be-sides, her animation of lifeless things in thekitchen like peeler as delightful, glasses as sparkleand plates waiting for their turns like humansfurther adds up to her intense attachment to thekitchen.

Food serves as a medium for Mikage to get alongwith Yuichi’s transgender mother Eriko. One dayMikage cooks food for Eriko when she tells herearly in the morning that she feels hungry. Whileeating both explores each other personality andget into an understanding. Eriko though physi-cally has transformed into a female psychologi-cally she still remains as male and this is testi-fied when she says “I’m always hungry in themorning, even though I’m still sleepy. But there’snothing to eat in this house. Let’s call for takeout.What would you like?” (17). This illustrates thetypical male attitude because generally men don’tlike to cook and prefer to eat their choice of deli-cacies from restaurant as stated by Coxon “Men’srelationship to cooking has traditionally beendefined as a hobby” (209).

There is a famous saying that only by foodwoman can reach the heart of man. And this turnsout to be obviously true in the case of Mikage.Eriko is aware of Mikage desolate state and hersearch for a new place to stay. Emotionally Erikocomprehends Mikage trauma because she too hascrossed many hurdles by being a woman in soci-ety and offers her apartment to Mikage delight.When Mikage tells her that she will regularly pay

rent Eriko jocularly says “But instead of rent, justmake us soupy rice once in a while” (20). Thisillustrates the effect that food can have on people.Food is not alone for existence rather it has multi-faceted roles. In a sense it can also be used as anexpression of love, defense, anger, confusion, hateetc. as Lupton says “Emotions like food and eat-ing, are commonly regarded as the preserve ofthe embodied self rather than the disembodied,philosophizing mind. Like food and eating prac-tices, the emotions are traditionally linked withthe feminine, with the disempowered andmarginalized” (Lupton 31). Whereas BananaYoshimoto showcases how this gendered con-struction of the female role in the kitchen andcooking can be utilized in various positive dimen-sions which results in changing of norms in so-cial relations that reflect support changes in ori-entation.

Food as an Expression of Love

Food serves as a paradigm in bringing Mikageand Yuichi together. Initially, both are not natu-rally drawn to each other, but kitchen space ren-dered them an opportunity to understand theirspacial-deixis and pent-up feeling. Mikage devel-ops enormous affection for Yuichi only afterEriko’s death because she feels pity for Yuichiwho has become orphan like her. Mikage is awarethat Yuchi has a girlfriend named Nori and shevacated from Yuichi apartment because her stayin Yuichi house raised a lot of conflicts in theirrelationship. But in the later part of the novellawhen Nori confronts Mikage and her stay atYuichi’s house. Mikage in a fit of frenzy expressesher likeness to Yuichi when Nori threatens herto stay out of his life as follows, “Even if you arehis girlfriend, it doesn’t strike me as somethingyou should decide for him” (71). As pointed outby eminent psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud whosays, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. Theyare buried alive and will come forth later in ug-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

59

lier ways” (Freud 297). Mikage out of controloverpowered by frenzy involuntarily and indi-rectly confess her love for Yuichi.

Similarly,Yuichi feeling about Mikage gets un-locked by alcohol and he openly expresses hisdesire to have her in his life as he says, “I wishthis night would go on forever. Mikage, pleasemove back in” (65). Yuichi mind is in a daze andtumultuous confusion like the conflict betweengood and bad in one’s head. His heart desires forMikage whereas his mind is confused about hisfeelings and this is evident when he says,

I myself don’t even know. Right now Ican’t think. What do you mean in my life?How am I myself changing? How will mylife be different from before? I don’t haveany cue about any of that, I try to thinkabout it, but with the kind of worthlessthoughts I’m having in the state I’m in. Ican’t decide anything. (65)

During Mikage second entry into Yuichi’s house,she behaves as if she has lots of authority overhim like a wife. Even Yuichi feels the same waywhen Mikage orders him to do chores like herhusband. Mikage beats around the bush to makeYuichi understand her love for him. Mikage seesthat the kitchen hasn’t been used after Eriko’sdeath so she decides to cook an extravagant din-ner for Yuichi’s delight and cooks for two hoursand prepares all the delicacies which Yuichi cher-ishes to eat. The splendid dinner itself asserts herlove in a feminine way and it is described as fol-lows,

The limpid night descended, and we be-gan to eat the extravagant dinner I hadprepared. Salad, pie, stew, croquettes.Deep-fried tofu, steamed greens, beanthread with chicken (each with varioussauces), Chicken Kiev, sweet-and-sourpork, steamed Chinese dumplings…. Itwas an international hodge-podge (62)

Distance kindles Yuichi love for Mikage as sheleft to Izu for her work. One day while she isabout to eat Katsudon after starving for the wholeday she dials Yuichi and learns that he too isstarving for good food as he gets their nothingother than tofu. When Yuichi asks her what shehas for dinner, Mikage hesitates to tell him be-cause she feels so bad to eat good food all aloneafter knowing that her loved one is starving overthere and she says, “I couldn’t bring myself totell him, “Hey, I’m about to eat pork and rice!” Itseemed like the worst kind of treachery” (91).Unable to let Yuichi starve, she orders anotherKatsudon and decides to travel all alone in thedark night to Yuichi’s place. Mikage journey isdescribed in the beautiful lines as follows,

“That’s how I came to find myself stand-ing alone in the street, close to midnight,belly pleasantly full, a hot takeout con-tainer of kastsudon in my hands, com-pletely bewildered as to how to proceed”(63).

The inn situated in Isehara where Yuichi stays isreserved for monks who shun meat and taxidriver too cautions Mikage who is havingkastsudon in her back bag as he says,

“You know, there used to by many monksin this area, and they couldn’t eat meat,so they invented all these different waysto eat tofu” (94).

But Mikage love gives her all courage and shedecides to transgress all the restriction for thesake of Yuichi and goes ahead to find his room.She injures her hand while climbing to Yuichiroom and succeeds in giving him kastsudon.Yuichi on seeing Mikage gets perplexed whetherit is a dream or reality because it’s not an easytask to come Isehara from Izu all alone in a taxi

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

60

at midnight just to bring kastsudon. Yuichi’s heartunbolts his love for Mikage when she says,

I came here from Izu in a taxi. You see,Yuichi, how much I don’t want to loseyou…..After this you and I may end upseeing nothing but suffering, difficulty,and ugliness, but if only you’ll agree to it,I want for us to go on to more difficultplaces, happier places, whatever comestogether. I want you to make the decisionafter you’re completely better, so take yourtime thinking about it. In the meantime,though, don’t disappear on me (101)

After eating kastsudon Yuichi asks Mikage whyit is so that everything he eats with her turns outto be so tasty and realizes his repressed love forher. Mikage many times failed to express her loveto Yuichi through words but at last she triumphedby expressing it with food by adhering to the say-ing food is a symbol of love when words are in-adequate and thereby successfully fixed thechasm between them. Besides Mikage proves theinherent meaning of the saying there is nothingin the world that good food cannot fix.

Conclusion

For ages kitchen space has been forced by patri-archy as feminine center, but it is deconstructedin the modern society because women no longerfinds this space as an oppression but a liberatingfactor. Women in contemporary society havestarted to use kitchen to showcase their talent inculinary art, thereby grabbing an economic in-dependence and end up in creating an identityon their own without relying on male counter-parts. That is to say many women have started toembrace a successful career in culinary art andparading the world as reputed chefs. Like colo-nized people who wrote back to colonizerswomen have re-framed this gendered space andmade patriarchy who stifled their talent to feel

ashamed of their actions. Kitchen no longer mir-rors as conformity when woman deliberatelychooses it with love and will. The false consciouscreated by a culture which dictates a woman’splace is in the kitchen and interpellation of thisidea into a woman’s psyche gets erased whenwomen started to question their own space in thisworld. Besides this revolution of gendered-spacehas rather attained neutralization where men toohas started creating an identity in kitchen. Thisfeminine gendered space of kitchen is no morefeminine rather has evolved in to a common placefor all people who love cooking irrespective ofsexuality and culture.

Works Cited

Buruma. Ian. “Weeping Tears of Nostalgia: Re-view of Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.”The New York Review of Books, 1993.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. VintageBooks, 1989.

Beagan, Brenda et.al. “It’s just easier for me to doit.”Rationalizing the family division of foodwork, Sociology, 2008.

Caxon, Tony. “Men in the kitchen: Notes from aCookery Class.” The Sociology of Food andEating, edited by Anne Murcott, Gower,1983.

Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. Penguin Books, 2002.

Garg, Mirdula. Just Between Us-women speak abouttheir writing. Edited by Ammu Josephetal., Asmita, 2001.

Hanson, Elizabeth. “Hold the Tofu - Review ofKitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. The NewYork Times Book Review, 1993.

Hollows, Joanne. Feeling like a Domestic Goddess:Postfeminism and Cooking, 2003.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

61

James R, Hollins. Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Si-lence. South Illinois UP, 1970.

Lagomarsino. A. Kitchen Album Summary, Mediaspace kitchen album summary, Arki, 2004.

Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body and the Self. Sage,1996.

Murakmi, Haruki. (1949). The Wind-Up BirdChronicle. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Narayan, R.K. An English Teacher. Indian ThoughtPublications, 2007.

Wagaman, Nancy. The Curious Dreamer’s Prac-

tical Guide to Dream Interpretation. Applied

Conscious Technologies, 2017.

Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy. Wash-

ington Square P, 1997.

Yoshimoto, Banana. Kitchen. Grove P, 1993.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Penguin

Books, 2004.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

62

Derrida and the Role of thePublic Intellectual

Piyush Raval*

Keywords: Public/Engaged Intellectual, Persecution, Commitment, Democracy, Political, and Late Period.

A

b

s

t

r

a

c

t

Abstract

As the public intellectual is defined in terms of his/her engagement with the public, Derrida’srole and contribution, after his death, as a public intellectual is examined here in order tothink about the role of public intellectual in our contemporary world. Not only did Derridadefine intellectuals as lay persons but also he recognized the growing persecutions of in-tellectuals all across the world and founded the Parlement international des ecrivains (PIE)[International Parliament of Writers] as well as set up a network of Asylum Cities for per-secuted writers and artists. Derrida reserved the space for the public in his philosophy ofdeconstruction which was considered esoteric and unintelligible to the public beyond theuniversity. Derrida’s late period was the serious work of the public intellectual duringwhich he addressed contemporary issues in politics, ethics and religion. The persistentengagement with political issues like apartheid, racism, anti-Semitism, illegal immigrants,refugees, death penalty, state terrorism, censorship, etc. and profound meditation on themessuch as democracy, hospitality, cosmopolitanism, religion, gift, friendship, animals, me-dia/virtual world and the university, accorded to the ‘abstruse theorist’ Jacques Derridathe esteemed status of the public intellectual in the last century.

*Piyush Raval, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sardar Patel University, VallabhVidyanagar, District Anand, Gujarat-388120, India, Email: [email protected]

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

63

O

The Term ‘Public Intellectual’

ur contemporary world has been fac-ing great political, social, economic,religious and environmental crises asnever before. In this regard, the role

of public intellectual has become significant inraising collective concerns over them. The term‘public intellectual’ which was coined by RussellJacoby in The Last Intellectuals: American Culturein the Age of Academe (1987), defined it as one whoaddresses a general and educated audience.Jacoby’s definition excludes intellectuals whoseworks are too technical or difficult to engage apublic. The history of the public intellectual canbe traced back to the ancient world. Great mindsfrom Galileo to Freud such as Machiavelli, Milton,Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant etc. werepublic intellectuals who found and addressed thepublic. In his Prison Notebooks (1971), AntonioGramsci developed the idea of organic intellec-tual and defined its role in terms of productionand organization of the proletariat. Gramsci hadinitially intended to write a history of Italian in-tellectuals. However, he did not find any intel-lectual from the working class, which he consid-ered as one of the reasons for the failure of theOctober revolution. As a public intellectual, Sartrehad a sense of personal stake, sheer effort andrisk in speaking about colonialism, commitmentand social conflict. He developed an elaborate no-tion of littérature engagée (‘engaged’ or ‘commit-ted intellectual’) in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?(1948), to deliberate upon the social responsibil-ity of the intellectuals. In the last decade, EdwardSaid’s view of public intellectual in Representa-tions of the Intellectual (1994) became significant.He regarded the intellectual as ‘an individualwith a specific public role in society that cannotbe reduced simply to being a faceless profes-sional, a competent member of a class just goingabout her/his business. The central fact that theintellectual is an individual endowed with a fac-

ulty for representing, embodying, articulating amessage, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opin-ion to, as well as for a public’ (11). Thus, Gramsci,Sartre and Said gave utmost importance to thepublic in their definitions of the intellectual.

Public Intellectuals in France

In world history, France has inherited a great tra-dition of public intellectuals. The intellectualcommitment after l’affaire Dreyfus (1894–1906) hasbeen largely uninterrupted, except during theAlgerian War of Independence (1954–1962). TheDreyfus Affair gave French intellectuals likeFrançois Mauriac (1885–1970) and RaymondAron (1905–1983) a stature and influence in soci-ety that they had never enjoyed elsewhere in theworld. Since the death of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), there are few public intellectuals and thosewho exist are either media-driven, telegenic com-mentators or solitary figures in academia.Though the generation of intellectuals extendingfrom Foucault to Derrida rejected the posture ofthe universal intellectuel (à la Sartre) and tried todevelop other ways of being an intellectual, theystill inherited and extended the tradition ofFrench intellectuals.

Is Derrida a Public Intellectual?

The debate over Derrida’s legacy has intensifiedsince his death. The legacy has been historicizedby adopting different routes and methods. SinceDerrida’s death, there has been a decline of hightheory. Derrida himself saw a great generationof critical theorists dying before him. Derrida’sachievement as a theorist and an intellectual wasextraordinary hence Derrida is relevant not onlyin recovering the future for critical theory but alsothinking about the role of public intellectual incontemporary world.

Though Derrida did not write prose as clear as awindow pane, it would be arbitrary to deny him

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

64

the status of the public intellectual. Derrida’s ob-scurity was a source of charisma. His oracularobscurity became an effective vehicle in makinghim a prominent public intellectual. In Public In-tellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001), Posner pre-pared a table wherein he counted numbers ofmedia mentions, web hits and scholarly citationsof public intellectuals between 1995 and 2000. Thetotal count numbers of Derrida as public intel-lectual were: 535 media mentions, 15, 510 webhits and 6,902 scholarly citations. In the table onscholarly citations of top 100 public intellectualsduring 1995-2000, Derrida with 6,902 scholarlycitations held No. 4 position only after Foucault(13, 238), Bourdieu (7,472) and Habermas (7,052).

The present essay confronts with questions suchas: How do we examine Derrida’s reputation asa public intellectual after his death? Derrida’s lifeas a public intellectual was frought with the his-tory of the late twentieth century and earlytwenty-first century. An Arab Sephardic Jew bornin Algeria, Derrida attacked the Western tradi-tion rigourously. Habermas claimed that Derridaengaged in the ‘egotistical philosophy of the sub-ject,’ a philosophy which is divorced from prac-tical political philosophy. To counteract this claim,Derrida engaged in an endless critique of theconventional demand that the future of democ-racy must go beyond itself and fail to ascribeproper meaning: ‘I’m not proposing a . . . politi-cal theory because what I’m saying, exceeds, pre-cisely, knowledge (83).’ Richard Rorty in his es-say ‘Habermas, Derrida and the Functions ofPhilosophy (1998)’ contended that Derrida is a‘private philosopher.’ However, Derrida did en-gage with the public issues of the time; he did soby questioning the formulaic ideas about iden-tity, politics and the limited perspective of meta-physical philosophers like Sartre. As a public in-tellectual, Derrida more than anyone, impart tous an epistemological break with the ossifiedways of engaging with the world.

Dickstein (1992) observed that a number of U.S.academics in 1970s and 1980s, influenced by theContinental, mainly French social theorists suchas Barthes, Lyotard, Lacan and Derrida, adoptedan esoteric, jargon-laden, obscurantist style. Theywere intellectuals who wrote about public affairsin a manner unintelligible to the public beyondthe university.

Derrida’s Views on Intellectuals

According to Derrida, the definition of the intel-lectual in Europe depends on three conditions:(1) the particular types of skill and knowledgebeing assumed/legitimated, (2) a division be-tween private and public event and (3) the as-sumption of a division of labour between the in-tellectual and the non-intellectual. The engagedintellectuals always speak as lay people. Theircommitment is non-religious. Derrida regards theintellectual as the victim of new and concentratedpersecutions all over the world today. The intel-lectuals in the past few decades have had to takenotice of the far reaching transformations of thepublic sphere. The conditions of having a voicein the media, have been exposed to endless de-flections and political and economic appropria-tions. According to Derrida, the conditions of thepublic speech and the figure of the intellectual inthe public domain need to be changed. The taskof an intellectual is to make available discoursesand elaborate strategies that resist any simplisticchoice between cultural identity and social jus-tice. Derrida too cleared his position: [I wouldsay that the left, for me, the left where I wouldresolutely want to recognize myself, is situatedon the side where today people are analyzing thetroubling and new logic of this equivocation andtrying to make real changes to its structure; andalso to the very structure of politics, the repro-duction of this tradition of political discourse](126).

Habermas and Derrida both often turned out tobe on the same side and allies in relation to mat-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

65

ters of political urgency. They even worked to-gether in international associations founded in1993 such as the Parlement international desecrivains (PIE) [International Parliament of Writ-ers], which under its first president SalmanRushdie and vice-president Derrida launched anappeal to European cities to set up a network of‘cities of refugee’ for persecuted writers, or CISIA(Comité International de Soutien aux IntellectuelsAlgériens (International Committee of Supportfor Algerian Intellectuals) which is active in Al-geria and in other parts of the world. As an en-gaged intellectual, Derrida wrote:

I am thinking of the millions of childrenwho die every year because of water; of thenearly 50 percent of women who are beaten,or victims of violence that sometimes leadsto murder (60 million women dead, 30 mil-lion women maimed); of the 33 million AIDSsufferers (of whom 90 percent are in Africa,although only 5 percent of the AIDS re-search budget is allocated to them and drugtherapy remains inaccessible outside smallWestern milieux); I am thinking of the se-lective infanticides of girls in India and themonstrous working conditions of childrenin numerous countries; I am thinking of thefact that there are, I believe, a billion illiter-ate people and 140 million children whohave no formal education; I am thinking ofthe keeping of the death sentence and theconditions of its application in the UnitedStates (the only Western democracy in thissituation, and a country that does not rec-ognize the convention concerning children’srights either and proceeds, when they reachthe age of majority, to the carrying out ofsentences that were pronounced againstminors; and so on). I cite from memorythese figures published in major official re-ports in order to give some idea of the or-der of magnitude of the problems that call

for an “international” solidarity and forwhich no state, no party, no trade union, andno organization of citizens really takes re-sponsibility. Those who belong to this In-ternational are all the suffering, and all whoare not without feeling for the scale of theseemergencies—all those who, whatever civicor national groups they belong to, are de-termined to turn politics, law, and ethics intheir direction. (125–26)

Frances Ferguson (2007) finds it difficult to di-vide Derrida’s career which is less chronologicaland overlapping in terms of developing intellec-tual concerns. But W.J.T. Mitchell dividesDerrida’s career into three stages: early philo-sophical stage; middle autobiographical stage,and the late period. The late period, which wasmarked by a restless quest for justice, is the workof ‘the public intellectual who writes on a broadvariety of topics.’ The late Derrida is a public in-tellectual who writes extensively about contem-porary issues in politics, ethics and religion. Hemeditates on themes such as democracy, hospi-tality, cosmopolitanism, religion, gift, friendship,animals, media/virtual world, university and thefuture to come. The final decades of Derrida aremarked by the problematic of ‘post’ and various‘ends’ or ‘deaths’ of author, man, humanism, his-tory, a whole generation of thinkers, deconstru-ction and theory.

The Late Derrida as a Public Intellectual

As a public intellectual, Derrida spoke on politi-cal questions including Eastern European issues,Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment the apartheidregime, and the imprisonment of the African-Americans in the United States (composing anopen letter to President Clinton and the FirstLady about Mumia Abu-Jamal. Negotiations(2002) are a collection of some of these interven-tions wherein a tension plays out between ethi-cal and political imperative, on one hand, andthe impossibility of hospitality, on the other.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

66

Democracy and the Vision of Future to Come

Derrida spoke about democracy to come as anunconditional demand in his interviews and inThe Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe(1992), On the Name (1995) and Rogues: Two Es-says on Reason (2005). Derrida upheld democracyas ‘the only system, the only constitutional para-digm, in which, in principle, one has or assumesthe right to criticise everything publicly, includ-ing the idea of democracy, its concept, its history,and its name’ (87). The idea of democracy alignswith messianicity without messianism, and withdistinction between law and justice. The irreduc-ible gap between the ‘idea of democracy’ andwhat happens beneath the name of democracy isambiguous. This idea of democracy is notKantian, but governs most concretely urgent,here and now: ‘If nonetheless I still cling to thisold noun democracy and speak so often to the “de-mocracy to come,” it is because I see in it the onlyword for a political regime that, because it car-ries conceptually the dimension of inadequationand the to-come, declares both its historicity andits perfectibility. Democracy authorizes us in prin-ciple to invoke these two openings in public, quitefreely, in order to criticize the current state of anyso-called democracy’ (130).

Political Europe

Derrida critiqued Europe’s political project ofeconomism and monetarianism in The OtherHeading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (1992). Theeuro is perhaps not an “evil” in itself. There canbe another kind of social and political implemen-tation of the “transfer to the euro”’ (124). EachEuropean nation-state has its own calculationsand responsibilities in this matter, those of Ger-many and France being very serious. Derrida’ssympathies are toward ‘a political resistance (theresistance of a certain political Europe) to a Eu-rope that would be no more than just the man-ager of its economy, nonetheless I am not wholly

satisfied either by the concept of the “political”that underpins this discourse. It transfers ontoEurope, and the frontiers of Europe, a traditionof the political, of the nation-state, and I wouldhave plenty of questions and reservations aboutthis’ (125). With some hesitation he expressedfaith in European democracy and its institutions:‘I am “against” all those who are “against” Eu-rope’ (133).

Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Derrida’s writing from ‘Edmund Jabes and theQuestion of the Book’ and ‘Violence and Meta-physics: An Essay on the Thought of EmmanuelLevinas’ to ‘Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew,the German’ (1989), has engaged with the Holo-caust and Nazism. His clearest engagement withNazism and the Holocaust can be seen in bookssuch as La Véritéen Peinture (1978), translated asThe Truth in Painting (1987); Feu la cendre (1987),translated as Cinders (1991); De l’esprit (1987),translated as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question(1989); and Mémoires pour Paul de Man (1986, re-vised 1989), translated as Memoires for Paul de Man(1986). The philosophy of Derrida has been satu-rated with the event of the Holocaust. Derrida’swork itself is an engagement with the Holocaustand grows from its cinders. The traumatic effectsof the Holocaust pervade Derrida’s preoccupa-tion with memory, death and mourning: ‘Thethought of the incineration of the holocaust, ofcinders, runs through all my texts […] What isthe thought of the trace, in fact without whichthere would be no deconstruction? […] Thethought of the trace […] is a thought about cin-ders and the advent of an event, a date, a memory.But I have no wish to demonstrate this here, themore so, since, in effect, ‘Auschwitz’ has obsessedeverything that I have ever been able to think, afact that is not especially original’ (211-12).Derrida’s achievement as the most serious thinkerof his generation is, according to Anidjar, due to

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

67

the presence of the Holocaust in his philosophy.Leslie Chamberlain has a similar view: ‘Derrida,a great artistic-philosophical mind at his innova-tive best in the 1970s and early 1980s, devoted alifetime’s work to show how the Holocaust im-posed a constraint on any future humanist cul-ture (Jewish Quarterly 68). Deconstruction, thename given to his philosophical method byDerrida, was a lament for truth-seeking classicalmethods in the face of the modern evil. RobertEaglestone also observes this in his seminal studyof the relationship The Holocaust and thePostmodern (2004): ... the Holocaust is all-perva-sive in Derrida’s work. That is, deconstruction isnot indebted to the Holocaust, nor does it explainit, but it stems from it ... (280). Derrida also wrotein a harrowing sentence in Judéitiés: Questions pourJacques Derrida (2003): ‘I am still dreaming of asecond holocaust that would not come too late’(173). Much of Derrida’s deconstructive concernwith the Holocaust and Nazism comes from hisexperience as a Jew. Derrida inscribed hisJewishness on the surface of numerous texts andthematizes in his readings the Jewish concernsof Levinas, Jabès, Freud, Celan, Benjamin andScholem. Derrida remarked: ‘I do not find in anydiscourse whatsoever anything illuminatingenough for this period [the twentieth century]’(179). The debate over the uniqueness of the Ho-locaust and Derrida’s own use of ‘Auschwitz and...’ raise serious questions which are central bothto Derrida’s work and his legacy. Derrida hardlyemployed the term ‘Auschwitz’ or the Hebrewword ‘Shoah’ arguing: ‘I find a bit indecent, in-deed, obscene, the mechanical nature of impro-vised trials instigated against all those whom onethinks one can accuse of not having named orthought ‘Auschwitz’’ (Anidjar, ‘Everything’). Hepersisted in writing the word ‘holocaust’ with-out capitalizing (on) it and deployed it in a vari-ety of contexts, stretching to its original Greeksources and decontextualizing it by writing: ‘I amstill dreaming of a second holocaust that would

not come too late’ (173), or ‘Of the holocaust therewould remain only the most anonymous supportwithout support, that which in any event neverwill have belonged to us, does not regard us. Thiswould be like a purification of purification by fire.Not a single trace, an absolute camouflaging bymeans of too much evidence [...]’ (Anidjar, ‘Ev-erything’)

‘Others are secret’: Heidegger and De Man

Derrida expressed his views on the Heideggercontroversy in many of his books and interviews.He asked us not to bother much about thephilosopher’s biography but rather pay attentionto the philosopher’s intellectual work.: ‘I amamong those few people who have constantlydrawn attention to this: you must (and you mustdo it well) put philosophers’ biographies back inthe picture, and the commitments, particularlypolitical commitments, that they sign in their ownnames, whether in relation to Heidegger, orequally to Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, orBlanchot, and so on’ (Of Spirit, 145). He also foundthis attitude adopted by readers even in the deMan affair: ‘Every time (and it never fails to hap-pen) that someone interviewing me asks meabout Heidegger, and not about Heidegger’sthought (which is often little known and attractslittle attention), but about Heidegger’s “Nazism,”and then they associate my friend de Man withthat (his entire work is generally unknown inFrance: forty years of a great theorist’s oeuvre),these are traps, and traps for me. There is a wishto limit or neutralize my work (very different, bythe way, from that of de Man, who in fact onlyread me, and I only met him, quite late, in the1970s—since I was not in Belgium in 1940 butexpelled from my secondary school at the time,because I was Jewish)’ (149). Derrida further clari-fied his position on de Man: ‘Don’t say that I “de-fended” him, even if that was a courageous thingto do. I said clearly, without the least equivoca-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

68

tion, that, limited as it was in its duration and tothat time, his guilt was undeniable and complete.I even went so far as to write that this wrongdo-ing was “unpardonable”[...] (149) Derrida soughtto reconstitute the over determination of de Man’stexts of the Nazi period when a great chunk ofAmerican academic intelligentsia was intent toexploit the discovery of de Man’s youthful articlesby using it as a weapon against ‘deconstruction.’

Persecution of Intellectuals in CommunistCzechoslovakia

To support dissident and persecuted intellectu-als in the universities of Communist Czechoslo-vakia, Derrida had set up the branch of Jan HusEducational Foundation in France. As the VicePresident of the French branch, Derrida was ona visit to Prague to speak at a seminar onDescartes in 1981. At the end of his journey, hewas arrested at the airport and imprisoned byCzecho-slovakian police on the charge of ‘pro-duction and trafficking of drugs.’ He was releasedand deported the next day from Prague onlyupon the intervention of the French media andthe French government, then the newly electedFrench President François Mitterand (1916–1996).

Algeria and CISIA

Derrida admitted that all his statements wereinspired by a painful love for his birth place Al-geria, which he left first at nineteen, before thewar of independence. Therefore he often wentback to Algeria, bearing in his heart great lovefor her, which never ceased. It is precisely for thisreason that he joined and supported the Appeal‘Taking a Stand for Algeria.’ The Appeal was readby Jacques Derrida during a public meeting or-ganized by the CISIA and the League of HumanRights, on 7 February 1994, after the publicationof an appeal for civil peace in Algeria:

First of all, to reaffirm that any solution mustbe a civil one. The recourse to armed violenceto defend or conquer power, terrorism; repres-sion, torture and executions, murders andkidnappings, destruction, threats against thelife or security of persons, these can only ruinthe possibility which are still within Algeria’sreach in order to build its own democracy andthe conditions of its economic development. Itis the condemnation by all of the practices ofterrorism and repression which will thus be-gin to open a space for the confrontation of eachand everyone’s analyses, in the respect of dif-ferences. (301)

The problems of unemployment, despair andincreasing poverty in Algeria made Derrida signthis Appeal. The Appeal takes a stand four timesfor: 1. a new international solidarity, 2. an elec-toral agreement, 3. a dissociation of the theologi-cal and the political, and 4. a new Third State.Derrida defined the Third State as ‘the unflinch-ing condemnation of the death penalty no lessthan of torture, of murder or the threat of mur-der’ (123), and the new Third State as ‘what saysno to death, to torture, to execution, and to as-sassination’ (123). As a consequence of the Ap-peal, Derrida wrote that the conditions of womenin Algeria have ameliorated and they carried thelife of reason and the reason to live, ‘in the homesand in the streets, at school, at the university, inthe places of work and in all the institutions’ (123).

Apartheid, Mandela’s Imprisonment and Politi-cal Oppression

Derrida joined the council of the Foundationagainst Apartheid in 1983 and wrote the essay‘Racism’s Last Word’ (1985) for the catalogue ofthe exhibition of Art against Apartheid. The ex-hibition was assembled in Paris in November1983 by the Association of Artists of the Worldagainst Apartheid, in co-operation with theUnited Nations Special Committee against Apart-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

69

heid. Eighty-five of the world’s most celebratedartists contributed their paintings and sculpturesto the exhibition.

Also in his essay ‘Admiration de Nelson Mandela,ou Les lois de la réflexion’ (‘Laws of Reflection:Nelson Mandela, in Admiration’), first publishedin Pour Nelson Mandela (1986), and later in Psyché:Inventions de l’autre, II (1987–2003), Derrida paida tribute to the iconic leader of the politicalstruggle against apartheid in Africa, NelsonMandela and called him an admirable leader, ‘aman of reflection’: ‘Mandela becomes admirablefor having known how to admire. And what hehas learned, he has learned in admiration. Hefascinates too, as we shall see, for having beenfascinated’ (64). Derrida also examined Mandela’sthought and practice through close readings ofhis speeches and writings in The Struggle Is MyLife (1990). Mandela accused white governmentsof never answering, but demanding that blacksbe quiet and make written representations: ‘re-sign yourself to correspondence and to corre-sponding all alone’ (78). Derrida’s most impor-tant analysis was of the statements delivered byMandela in his own defence during his trial of1962 and the Rivonia trial of 1963–64. Mandelawas arrested in August 1962 four months afterthe creation of Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of theNation) in November 1961. Mandela was em-ployed in sewing mailbags and kept in solitaryconfinement twenty-three hours a day in PretoriaCentral Prison. At the conclusion of the RivoniaTrial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment inMay 1964. The essay ‘Laws of Reflection’ was asignificant articulation within the series of reflec-tions that Derrida made as a public intellectualthroughout his career on questions of law andjustice, ethics and politics, and democracy.

Imprisonment of the African Americans in theU.S.

Acquainted with the increasing problems of ra-cial discrimination in the USA through his fre-

quent visits, Derrida spoke on the subject of theimprisonment of Afro-Americans by writing anopen letter to President and First Lady Clintonabout Mumia Abu-Jamal. At the time when SouthAfrica was relegating the death penalty to thegarbage pail of history, the Afro-American po-litical activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamalreminded that Pennsylvania like other Americanstates wanted to offer up more ‘black blood’ toits racist intoxication in a state that prides itselfon being the state in which the United StatesConstitution was written. Thus, Pennsylvaniacontinues to violate in letter and spirit the Ameri-can Constitution. According to Derrida, theprison system in the USA is developing at agreater rate than in the rest of the world. Almost3,000 people await death by hanging, electrocu-tion, gas chamber, lethal injection, or firing squad.Certain American prisons, for example, in Colo-rado, are among ‘the most inhumane in the world(automated, roboticized, removed from all hu-man contact, day and night under electronic sur-veillance, and first of all–let us not forget this inparticular–reserved for political prisoners; realdeath camps that are sometimes run by privatecompanies in the most tranquil conscience andthe best management possible on the market ofrights)’ (127). The convicts spend betweentwenty-two and twenty-three hours a day in theircells under cruel and humiliating conditions.Since 1992, they are deprived of books and ra-dios and abstained from communication with theoutside. The International Parliament of Writers(IPW) as a movement judged it necessary to voicethis indignation. The movement is ‘opposed inprinciple [...] both to police and prison tortureand to the death penalty, which goes without say-ing from the moment that we rise up against allviolations of the freedom to speak and write, allviolence and all hindrances to freedom that anyforce, whether governmental or not, imposes onintellectuals, writers, scholars, journalists’ (128).

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

70

The death threat to Abu-Jamal is analogous toattempts made by contemporary world today ‘tosilence (by murder, prison, exile, censorship inall of its forms) so many intellectuals or writers,so many journalists, so many men and womenwho demand their right to free and public speech’(128).

Middle East Questions: the Israel-PalestineConflict and the Capital Punishment of SaddamHussein

The topic of Islam was of serious concern toDerrida. When the Algerian IntellectualMustapha Cherif called Derrida for an interview,the later immediately rushed to him. The resultof their intellectual conversation was the bookIslam and the West (2008) which talks about thedistressed relationship between Islam and theWest and attempts to break the notion that twocivilizations are locked in a bitter struggle forsupremacy. When the American PresidentGeorge Bush declared war on Saddam Husseinand killed Iraqis in 2003, Derrida condemnedthem through these comments: ‘The armed wordof politicians, priests and soldiers is more thanever incompetent, unable to measure up to thevery thing it is speaking and deciding about, andthat remains to be thought, that trembles in thename “world,” or even in saying good-bye to theworld. And that what there is to bear, as the re-sponsibility of the other, for the other, must beborne where the world itself is going away bygoing into the absolute disaster of this armedword that I shall not even call psittacist, so as notto insult Poll, Robinson Crusoe’s parrot (psittakos),first victim of the humanist arrogance thatthought it could give itself the right to speech,and therefore the right to the world as such’ ( 360).Derrida reported that he had a bout of flu, andhad wild dreams of George Bush. Derrida notonly signed the Birzeit Appeal protesting Israeliattacks on Palestinian higher education, but he

also accepted a honorary doctorate from HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem in 1998 by travelling toIsrael amidst its government’s horrifying crimesagainst Palestinians. Derrida visited the USA ona regular basis for teaching and had offeredmuted criticism of Zionism and Israel in Religionas he wished to avoid public obloquy. When he,in the essay Religion, did not name BaruchGoldstein as the mass murderer in Hebron,Derrida was considered as betrayer by both thePalestinians and the Arab Jews in Ashkenazi-dominated Israel.

Unconditional Hospitality and the Cities ofAsylum

Derrida engages with international political andethical problems – the question of the public orprivate forgiving of crimes such as those com-mitted recently under Apartheid in South Africa,under French colonialism in Algeria and underNazi dictatorship in Germany in his essay ‘OnForgiveness’ (2001). An impossible and radicalopenness of Derrida can be seen in his wish toextend unconditional hospitality to the sovereignother through his project of cities of asylum (cit-ies of refuge) against the calculated and restric-tive hospitality of the state in Cosmopolitanism andForgiveness (2003). He also critiques the nationstate as a unified community marked by bordersand sovereignty: ‘Today the task is as urgent asit is difficult: everywhere, but especially in a Eu-rope with the tendency to close up on the out-side to the extent that it claims to be open on theinside’ (131). Unconditional hospitality is insepa-rable from the idea of justice but cannot be for-mulated into rule or policy. Therefore Derridaargues: ‘Everything possible must indeed be doneto get the laws of hospitality written into actuallaw. When that is not possible, everyone mustjudge in their own soul and conscience, often“privately,” what must be done (when, where,how, up to what point) without the laws oragainst them’ (132).

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

71

The first issue of the Parliament of Writers’ Jour-nal Autodafe informs that the Parliament (theParlement international des ecrivains) was convenedin haste after the assassination of Tahar Djaoutin Algeria in 1993 and Salman Rushdie was itsfirst president. From the moment of its creation,the Parliament has been involved in setting upnetwork of Asylum Cities that offer refuge towriters and artists threatened by fundamentalistand totalitarian regimes. Among the thirty citiesin this network are Barcelona, Frankfurt, Salzburgand Venice. Derrida wrote the essay ‘On Cosmo-politanism’ for the PIE conference of cities of ref-uge held in Strasbourg in 1996.

As a public intellectual having political commit-ment and solidarity with immigrants, both legaland illegal, the notion of hospitality is importantfor Derrida. This forms the basis of a speech madeby Derrida on 21 December, 1996 in the Théàtredes Amandiers at Nanterre. Derrida’s speech waspublished in the journal Plein Droit and in thebook Marx en jeu which marked the performanceof a play at the same theatre based on Spectres ofMarx. He chooses to analyze the position of un-documented immigrants according to the lawsof hospitality. It was an evening organized by theHauts-de Seine Collective and the National Or-ganization of Sans-Papiers to mark solidarity withthe sans-papiers who occupied the Church of SaintBernard in Paris, with ten of them going on hun-ger strike. It was widely reported to alert bothintellectuals and the wider public to the conse-quences of the Pasqua Laws passed in 1993 whichturned the clandestine (an immigrant without theappropriate documentation, who will be re-named sans-papiers) into a criminal and madehospitality to clandestines an offence that couldbe punished by up to five years in jail. On 28August riot police stormed the Church of SaintBernard and expelled all those who had soughtsanctuary there. Both before and after this eventsans-papiers took refuge in the Théâtre de Soleil,

where Ariane Mnouchkine in collaboration withHélène Cixous put on a collective creation EtSoudain des nuits d’éveil [‘And Suddenly, SomeNights of Awakening’] (1997). In December 1996,Jean-Louis Debré put forward a projet de loi onimmigration which gave mayors powers to po-lice the certifict d’hébergement which was requiredbefore immigrants could enter the country sup-posedly to check that they had decent places tostay, but was generally experienced as harass-ment.

Religion: Judaism and Its Afflictions

Derrida wrote on religion in his books andviewed that the relationship between religion andphilosophy, faith and knowledge is problematic:‘If God is completely other, the figure or the nameof the wholly other, then every other (one) is ev-ery (bit) other. Tout autre est tout autre. This for-mula disturbs Kierkegaard’s discourse on onelevel while at the same time reinforcing its mostextreme ramifications. It implies that God, as thewholly other, is to be found everywhere there issomething of the wholly other’ (77–78). Livingin a Christian culture as a Jew, Derrida decon-structs the three monotheistic religions – Judaism,Christianity and Islam – and underlines the re-sponsibility of each religion towards the other.He contextualizes the community of the pure. Bythat time, he had read Heretical Essays (1996) byJan Patocka.

9/11, Philosophy in the Time of Terror

Derrida was in Shanghai, at the end of his longtrip to China when he heard of September 11. Inconversation with Giovanna Borradori, Derridain his characteristic style refused to talk aboutSeptember 11 as a major event but considered itin one way a major event which brought aboutthe end of cold war era. 9/11, for Derrida, was amajor event as it inflected trauma upon people’s

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

72

consciousness and unconsciousness and posedthe threat of a more dangerous future. The event,according to Derrida, called for a philosophicalresponse, a response that calls into question themost deep seated conceptual presuppositions inphilosophical discourse (100). He wished that anew philosophical reflection will awaken us fromthe concepts associated with 9/11 which are theproducts of ‘dogmatic slumber.’ Derrida critiquesthe prevailing discourse of the media and offi-cial rhetoric too heavily relied upon received con-cepts like ‘war’ or ‘terrorism.’ He also attendedto all the words in his reading of 9/11 specificallyterrorism without ascribing any prejudged mean-ing to it. The word ‘terrorism,’ Derrida argued,derived in large part from a reference to the Reignof Terror in France, a terror carried out in thename of the state (103).

Animal Rights

One of the last essays that Derrida was to pub-lish before his death was ‘The Animal That There-fore I am’ (2006) about the philosophical ques-tion of suffering in human and animal life. Wecome to late Derrida, motivated by a certain ten-derness marked by sorrow. As a public intellec-tual, the late Derrida took on the sorrow of loss(personal friends like Barthes, de Man, Foucault,Althusser, Deleuze, Levinas, Lyotard); the weightof mourning; the horrors of political oppression(South Africa, Nazi Germany, CommunistCzechoslovakia); the disturbing question of thefate of animals; the gift of and the hope for mercy;friendship and its risks; Judaism and its afflic-tions and much more.

University

Derrida delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Futureof the Profession or the university without con-dition’ at the University of Frankfurt in 1998wherein he professed that we should have faithin the university and within the university, the

humanities. He stated that academic freedom –‘an unconditional freedom to question and as-sert, the right to say publicly all that is requiredby research and knowledge and thought concern-ing the truth’ – is the very claim of the university.To grant this claim to the university, he arguedfor a resistance to various forces and assumesresponsibilities: ‘The university is thought andis represented from the privileged place of thephilosophical: within and outside the Humani-ties. Kant granted such a privilege to the Facultyof Philosophy in his architecture of the univer-sity’ (49). The Humanities in future, wroteDerrida, will also cross the disciplinary bordersinto interdisciplinarity or cultural studies, with-out dissolving the specificity of any discipline.They will even examine their own history andthe history of the concepts which institutional-ized them. He adds another six rather seven the-matic and programmatic titles to this. The newHumanities would treat:

(1) The history of man, the idea, the figure, andthe notion of ‘what is proper to man.’

(2) The history of democracy and the idea ofsovereignty.

(3) The history of professing, the professionand the professoriat.

(4) The history of literature.

(5) The history of profession, the profession offaith, professionalization and the profe-ssoriat.

(6) The history of the ‘as if ’ especially thehistory of the distinction between perfor-mative acts and constative acts.

The seventh point about new Humanities putsto rout the very authority attached to knowledge,the profession of faith and to the performativeputting work of the ‘as if.’

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

73

Media/Virtual World

As the era of paper and the multimedia technolo-gies of writing are transforming completely ourexistence, Derrida wondered: ‘Writing, literature,even philosophy—as we think we know them—would they survive beyond paper? Survive be-yond a world dominated by paper? Survive thetime of paper? Survive “these paperies”?’ (64).However, Derrida favored paperless culture andadvocated de-paperization in our modern world.With digitized photography and genetic imprints,we are paperless people: ‘I remember the firsttime I went to the Soviet Union. Intellectuals therewere severely deprived of paper—for writingand for publishing. It was one of the serious di-mensions of the political question; other mediahad to make up for the lack’ (54). He points tothe ecological, economic and techno-economic-political benefits of paperless civilization: ‘[...]even deprived of paper and all the machinery thatgoes with it, individuals or social groups mightnonetheless gain access by computer, television,and the internet to a whole global network of in-formation, communications, education, and de-bate’ (63).

But Derrida is critical of Debord’s criticism of thesociety of the spectacle: ‘Do not forget that TV, ina state of complete revolution, is on the point ofcoming into its own, and there are already over-laps with multimedia that are differently power-ful and virtually diversifiable. So it makes nosense to be “against” TV, journalists, and themedia in general (which can moreover play a“democratic” role that is indispensable, whateverits imperfections). There is even less sense anddignity in condemning the “spectacle” or the “so-ciety of the spectacle.” Where would we go withno spectacle? Where would society go? And lit-erature, and the rest, and so on? What do theywant to impose on us? What do they pretend theywant? There is spectacle and spectacle, no doubt

about it, markets and markets, and one of themcan be liberation from another; one can also,against the other, free up possibilities of eventsor inventions worthy of the name. The stereo-typed rhetoric against the “society of the spec-tacle,” like the rehashing of set-piece formulas—”Debord”—is becoming a sinister specialism ofspeakers and journalists. It is often cynically andarrogantly exploited by the worst actors—ofpatched-up and in fact out-of-date spectacles’ (39-40).

Conclusion

Derrida himself agreed to the political dimensiondecipherable in all his texts in an interview withAntoine Spire published in Paper Machine. Aquote from this interview self-examines Derrida’srole and contribution as a public intellectual:‘When I went to teach clandestinely and got my-self imprisoned in communist Czechoslovakia;when I argued actively against apartheid, or forthe freeing of Mandela, or against the death sen-tence, for Mumia Abu Jamal; or when I took partin the founding of the Parlement internationaldes ecrivains; when I wrote what I wrote aboutMarx, about hospitality or undocumented per-sons, on forgiveness, witnessing, the secret, orsovereignty—just as when I launched the Grephmovement and the Etats Generaux de la Philo-sophic [States General of Philosophy], then con-tributed to the creation of the College interna-tional de philosophic [International College ofPhilosophy]—I would like to think that theseforms of engagement and the discourses that sup-ported them were themselves in agreement (itisn’t always easy) with the ongoing work ofdeconstruction. So I tried to adjust a discourse ora political practice to the demands of de-construc-tion, with more or less success, but never enough.I don’t feel a divorce between my writings andmy engagements, only differences of rhythm,mode of discourse, context, and so on. I am more

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

74

aware of the continuity than of what has beencalled abroad the “political turn” or the “ethicalturn” of deconstruction’ (2001: 152-153). As apublic intellectual, Derrida has addressed politi-cal issues such as apartheid, racism, anti-Semitism, illegal immigrants, refugees, deathpenalty, state terrorism, censorship, etc. Thus,Derrida was a seminal public intellectual of thetwentieth-century whose late works reveal seri-ous concerns for the public issues of his time.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor [1974]. Minima Moralia: Reflec-tions on a Damaged Life: Translated byE. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 2010.

Anidjar, Gil, “Everything Burns: Derrida’sHolocaust.”Los Angeles Review of Books, 9Oct. 2014, www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/everything-burns-derridas-holocaust/#!>Accessed 21 Sep. 2020.

Anidjar, Gil. “Ashes to Ashes: Derrida’sHolocaust.” Desire in Ashes: Deconstru-ction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, edited bySimon Morgan Wortham and ChiaraAlfano, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 19-42.

Chamberlain, Leslie. “A Shoe Story.”JewishQuarterly, vol. 53, no.2, 2006, pp. 68-72.doi:10.1080/0449010X.2006.10705298.

Chérif, Mustapha.Islam and the West: AConversation with Jacques Derrida. Tran-slated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, U ofChicago P, 2008.

Derrida, Jacques.”Racism’s Last Word.”Translated by Peggy Kamuf,CriticalInquiryvol. 12,1985, pp. 290-9. ww.jstor.org/terms. Accessed 06 Feb. 2017

—. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. [2010]Edited by Michel Lisse et al., translated

by Geoffrey Bennington,U of Chicago P,2011.

—.Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of PaulCelan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit andQutiPasanen, Fordham U P, 2005.

—.OnCosmopolitanism and Forgiveness [1997],translated by Mark Dooley and MichaelHughes, Routledge, 2003.

—.”The Animal That Therefore I am (More toFollow).”The Animal That Therefore I am,edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translatedby David Wills, Fordham U P, 2008, pp.1-51.

—.”Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, inAdmiration’, translated by Mary AnnCaws and Isabelle Lorenz, in Psyche:Inventions of the Other, Volume II, edited byPeggyKamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg,Stanford U P, 2008, pp. 63-86.

—.Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Translated byPascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas,Stanford U P, 2005.

—. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides:A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.”Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues withJürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,edited by Giovanni Borradori, translatedby Pascale-Anne Brault and MichaelNaas, Chicago U P, 2003, pp. 85-136.

—.Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar,translated by Boris Belay, Routledge, 2002.

—. “Taking a Stand for Algeria.”Acts of Religion,edited by Gil Anidjar, translated by BorisBelay, Routledge, 2002, pp. 301-07.

—.”Open Letter to Bill Clinton.”Negotiations:Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001,edited and translated by Elizabeth

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

75

Rottenberg,Stanford U P, 2002, pp. 130-32.

—.Paper Machine.Translated by Rachel Bowlby,Stanford U P, 2002.

—. “For Mumia Abu-Jamal.”Negotiations:Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001,edited and translated by ElizabethRottenberg,Stanford U P, 2002, pp. 125-29.

—.”The future of the profession or the universitywithout condition (thanks to the Huma-nities, what could take place tomorrow)”,Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Criti-cal Reader, edited by Tom Cohen, CUP,2001, pp. 24-56.

—. “But . . . No, but . . . Never . . . , and Yet . . . , asto the Media: Intellectuals, Attempt atDefinition by Themselves. Survey,” PaperMachine, translated by Rachel Bowlby,Stanford U P, 2001, pp. 33-40.

—. “Paper or Me, You know . . . (NewSpeculations on a luxury of the Poor).”Paper Machine, translated by RachelBowlby, Stanford U P, 2001, pp. 41-65.

—. “Not Utopia, the Im-possible.” Paper Machine,translated by Rachel Bowlby, Stanford UP, 2001, pp. 121-35.

—. ‘Sussex Lecture,’ Derrida: A Very Short Intro-duction, [1997] OUP, 2011, pp. 83–84.

—. Religion.Edited by Jacques Derrida and GianniVattimo, Stanford U P, 1998.

—. “The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (TheBad Example: How the New York Reviewof Books and Company Do Business).”Points…Interviews, 1974–1994, edited byElizabeth Weber, translated by Peggy

Kamufet. al, Stanford U P, 1995, pp. 422-54.

—. Spectres of Marx.Translated by Peggy Kamuf,Routledge, 1994.

—. On the Name[1993].Edited by Thomas Dutoit,translated by David Wood et al., StanfordU P, 1995.

—. The Gift of Death [1992].Translated by DavidWills, U of Chicago P, 1995.

—. “Canons and Metonyms: An Interview withJacques Derrida.” Logomachia: The Conflictof the Faculties, edited by Richard Rand,U of Nebraska P, pp. 195-218, 1992.

—. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe[1991]. Translated by Pascale-Anne Braultand Michael B. Naas, Indiana U P, 1992.

—. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question [1987].Translated by Geoffrey Bennington andRachel Bowlby,U of Chicago P, 1989.

Dickstein, Morris.Double Agent: The Critic andSociety,OUP, 1992.

Eaglestone, Robert. “Derrida and the legacies ofthe Holocaust.”Derrida’s Legacies: Litera-ture and Philosophy, edited by SimonGlendinning and Robert Eaglestone,Routledge, 2008, pp. 66-75.

Eaglestone, Robert.The Holocaust and thePostmodern, OUP, 2004.

Ferguson, Frances.”Jacques Derrida and theCritique of the Geometrical Mode: TheLine and the Point.”Critical Inquiry, vol.33,2007, pp. 312-29.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Note-books. Edited and translated by QuintinHoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Inter-national Publishers, 1971.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

76

Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse ofModernity. Translated by Frederick Law-rence, Polity P, 1987.

Jacoby, Russell.The Last Intellectuals: AmericanCulture in the Age of Academe. Basic Books,1987.

Mitchell, W. J. T and A. I. Davidson. The LateDerrida.Chicago U P, 2007.

Posner, Richard A. Public Intellectuals: A Study ofDecline. Harvard UP, 2001.

Rorty, Richard. “Habermas, Derrida and theFunctions of Philosophy.” The Derrida-Habermas Reader, edited by Lasse Thomassen,U of Chicago P, 2006.

Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual,Pantheon, 1994.

Wise, Christopher. “Derrida and the PalestinianQuestion.”Area Journal, 2002, pp. 167-85.Gale Academic One File. Accessed 17March, 2020.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

77

Decoding the Semiotics ofFood Culture and Emotions in

Like Water for ChocolateRunjhun Pandey*

Keywords: Food, Cooking, Culture, Traditions, Emotions, Sensuality, and Myth.

Abstract

Food is a significant part of culture. To understand the culture of a commu-nity, it is important to know their food habits. Food not only nourishes thebody but also becomes a tool to express the feelings and desires of humans.In the novel, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, food is an importantelement that brings together and blends a variety of human emotions, tradi-tions, and culture. From the title to the chapter division, food is in the heartof the novel. This paper explores how the story of Tita unfolds the inexticablebond that exists between food and one’s emotions. This study pinpointshow traditional concepts about cooking as an emotionless practice gets sub-verted to affirm that it does involve the gamut of human emotions.

*Runjhun Pandey, Research Scholar, Department of English and Foreign Languages,GurughasidasVishwavidyalya, Koni, India, Email: [email protected]

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

78

Since time immemorial, eating has beenconsidered not as human activity butalso seen as a means for existence.Having multiple social functions, eat-

ing has become symbols of expressing emotion,suppressing emotion, validating social norms,and defining identity and culture. Culture is theideas, customs and social behaviour of a groupof particular people or society and one cannotseparate food from the existing culture. The re-lationship between culture and food is as old ashuman civilization. Both culture and food are somuch influenced by each other that one cannotdiscuss culture without food and food withoutculture as it serves as a metaphor for expressingethnic identity. Not only food but cooking, eat-ing habits and consumption are at the core oflives, inscribed in psyches, embedded in cultureand are a vehicle of social interaction. Be it a cel-ebration or a period of mourning, food alwaysmarks its presence as a significant part in all thecultures. It unites people of the same ethnicgroup, binds them together in rituals and nur-tures their relationship.

The novel illustrates Mexican tradition, ritualsand beliefs through the character Tita De LaGarza. The vital role of food and tradition inMexican culture is also represented in the novel.Mexico was governed by Spain for 300 years andthus after independence it has left its influenceon the culture and cuisine of Mexico. Mexicansprepare very unique and fascinating dishes nor-mally and also for special events. Their life re-volves around food in its centre. The same is be-ing depicted in the novel where food is given acrucial place. it is in the centre of all the charac-ters especially Tita.

Food plays a great role to understand and to ex-plore any particular culture. Food is so engravedin any culture that it persuades the emotions ofhumans and sometimes becomes a companion to

express feelings and desires through the act ofcooking. Most of the diaspora novels, food andcuisines work as a link between the native andhost country. Jhumpa Lahiri in her Namesake givesa significant space for Ashima’s love for nativefood and also shows the cultural conflict whenGogol prefers American food to Bengali dishesmade by Ashima. In Edible Woman, MargaretAtwood creates the protagonist Marian whorebels against the system of the society, genderand its oppression through food imagery. By con-suming the cake image of herself, she has trans-formed herself as a subject, a consumer ratherthan a consumable object. Eating cake signifiesher recognition and rejection of her former self.By baking and eating cake, Marian becomes afree soul with self-knowledge. In the novel, LikeWater for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, food is seenas an important element which brings togetherand blends a variety of human emotions, tradi-tions and culture. This paper explores how thestory of Tita unfolds with food being the mostsignificant element along with the traditions ofher family. Tita expresses every minute emotionthrough her cooking and food, which makes thenovel a perfect blend of emotions, food and tra-ditions with some magic and myths from Mexi-can culture.

In this paper, we shall be discussing how foodand culture mingle together to form a beautifulrelationship between emotions, feelings, memo-ries and traditions in the novel Like Water ForChocolate. The novel is about a girl named Titafrom the De La Garza Family, living in Mexico.She comes from a family where food, kitchen,consumption habits and preservation techniquesare regarded as very important. They take theseissues very seriously. The novel is divided intotwelve chapters named after each month fromJanuary to December, with one exclusive recipefor each chapter. The chapters are named aftermonths depicting the change in seasons and ac-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

79

cording to the season, the dishes and preserva-tion techniques change. This shows that not onlyfood but making recipes and depicting it in de-tail, as well as the garnishing, preservation tech-niques and consumption habits, are also men-tioned prominently in the novel by the author. Itdepicts that food, eating habits and consumptionhas a very special place in any culture and theyare an integral part of the lives of the people inany culture. The novel revolves around Tita whois the youngest daughter of the De La Garza fam-ily and according to tradition she is forbidden tomarry and should take care of her mother as longas she lives.

Tita was so much into food that she was born inthe kitchen between beautiful aromas of spicesand delicious food. She felt a deep love for thekitchen where she spent most of her life from theday she was born. Since the day she was bornher mother knew that Tita would take care of herand the kitchen. Tita would even get to knowabout the timing of the day through the smell ofthe food in the kitchen, such was her relation-ship with food. There is a contrast shown in thenovel between the domestic world of Tita in thekitchen and a practical world outside. Tita wasthe queen and the kitchen was her realm. Thephrase “like water for chocolate” is a commonexpression in many Spanish-speaking countries,and it means that one’s emotions are on the vergeof boiling over. In some Latin American coun-tries, such as Mexico, hot chocolate is made notwith milk, but with near-boiling water instead.

The tradition of the De La Garza family deniesTita the right to love and marry, which is the ba-sic right of every girl. It is like denying the exist-ence of human emotions and feelings. But Titacouldn’t stop herself from getting smitten by loveand she fell in love with Pedro who was later re-jected by her mother and instead got married tohis older sister Rosuara. This made Tita’s life hell

and she found her escape in the kitchen makingrecipes to express her emotions. Tita finds hersolace between different ingredients in thekitchen, making recipes for the members of thefamily and especially for Pedro. The food is usedas a catalyst between the love of Pedro and Tita.She used her dishes to express her emotions andfeelings. “Just as a poet plays with words, Titajuggled ingredients and quantities at will, obtain-ing phenomenal results and all for nothing: herbest efforts are in vain” (64)

The author uses magical realism to combine thesupernatural with the ordinary. It is used verycreatively to represent the characters’ feelingsand ongoing situations. Due to the magical na-ture of food in the novel, it has exact consequenceon the people eating the food in terms of infus-ing the cook Tita’s emotions into the food whichare thus transferred beyond the food into thehearts and minds of those who consume it. Shemakes others feel through the dishes made byher. She makes food a new language in thekitchen and gives her feelings a new voice. Thefood becomes her means of communication andshe uses it efficiently to express the emotionalturmoil going on in her life.

In the De La Garza family, food was not just forconsumption and not just a part of daily routinebut it was a part of their culture and traditions.Tita’s mother mama Elena says that in her housesausage making was a real ritual. In the novel,food helps people to forge and maintain all formsof relationships. Most importantly, Tita seesNacha as her “real mother.” Tita feels and acceptsNacha’s love through the nourishment she pro-vides in her meals, and they develop their rela-tionship around their shared love of the food andkitchen. In contrast, Nacha never had a good re-lationship with Rosaura, as she rejected Nacha’sfood from an early age. Before weddings, bap-tisms and funerals, the women in the novel gather

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

80

around for food preparation. The ritual of cook-ing brings ladies together even when their rela-tionships are disturbed, and is central to mark-ing the importance of life events involving food.Cooking is an act of love, as is eating food thathas been lovingly prepared with all heart andpassion.

In the novel the power to cook, love, and digestfood is a sign of a full heart and soul, whereas alack of interest in food, cooking, or an inabilityto digest, is often associated with being less fullyalive. The two characters whose relationship tofood is most thoroughly explored are Rosauraand Tita, but some connection is also made withMama Elena, Nacha, Gertrudis and Pedro. At ayoung age, Tita is ready to try all of the peculiarand most exotic recipes Nacha can cook up, whichis a symbol for her willingness to let herself beindependent and experience life fully. In contrast,Rosaura is described as a “picky” eater, whodoesn’t eat properly as she should and showsleast interest in the activities of the kitchen. Shealso fails on the one occasion that she tries to cookfor Pedro. Rosaura is often termed as nauseous;later in life, she develops persistent gas and ulti-mately dies of chronic indigestion. When Titacooks food infused with her emotions of lust anddesire, both Rosaura and Mama Elena describethe food as “too salty,” while Pedro and Gertru-dis both feel Tita’s love and passion affect theirbody and senses. In contrast with Gertrudis andPedro, whose bodies are full of passion and heartsare open to receiving love; Mama Elena andRosaura are both disinterested to allow others tobe close to them. They are not passionate enoughto understand the depth of the food prepared byTita.

Furthermore, the ability to feed others is an im-portant part of Tita’s personality. She is portrayedas deeply loving and generous, devotes much ofher life in the kitchen cooking and feeding her

family. Even when food supplies run short dur-ing the war, Tita consistently makes sure thateveryone is fed. Tita so embodies the nurturingside of womanhood that she magically beginslactating simply out of love for her nephew,Roberto. In contrast, Rosaura, who is passionlessand motivated by outward appearances, finds herbreasts are dry when both of her children areborn. Mama Elena, whose violence and crueltyframe her as the anti-feminine maternal figure,was also unable to nurse Tita.

While cooking is a traditionally appropriate wayfor women to keep themselves busy, it can alsobe used as an opportunity for subversion. Tita’smagical cooking allows her to express and shareall of the emotions she is expected to subdue. Bydropping her tears for Pedro into the weddingcake batter, Tita spreads her sadness to all theguests. The wedding ends with everyone cryingover past love and vomiting all over the floor.She ruined Rosura’s wedding unintentionally andher sadness effectively “poisons” the bride,groom, and everyone else complicit in Tita’s suf-fering – giving Tita an unintended revenge. Later,after Mama Elena doesn’t allow Pedro and Titafrom talking to each other or being alone in theirhouse, Tita starts to see her cooking as a way ofconveying her love to Pedro. Tita makes deliciousmeals with Pedro’s imagination in mind, andPedro compliments Tita’s cooking as a way ofreturning her love. She uses the power of herownership of the kitchen, and explores theboundaries of creativity and intimately impactsothers. Even while she appears to be obeying andconforming to her gender role, she is actuallyrebelling and striving for freedom.

Tita’s mother also talks about her daughters asshe is talking about food, saying the girls areready for marriage as she was dishing up a plateof tacos. There are many beautiful images usedby the author in the novel to show how food is

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

81

involved in the lives of Pedro and Tita. For in-stance, Tita fed Rosaura’s son with her milk withonly Pedro knowing this fact and no one else. Thisbrought both of them close together instead ofkeeping them apart. Thus again food (milk) be-came a catalyst in their love. The emotions be-tween them are compared with food items andnot just food but the process of making food also.When Pedro sensually sees Tita she says that nowshe understands how the dough feels when it isplunged into boiling oil.

Food is also presented for medicinal purposes inthe novel. In the Mexican culture, many homeremedies are used to make people feel better froma disease. Hence there is a prominent mention ofthose food items, spices and herbs which are usedfor medicinal purposes. The medicinal use offood is an important cultural aspect depicted inthe novel. At the beginning of every chapter,there is an exclusive recipe mentioned, some-times its preservation techniques are also dis-cussed which emphasise the cultural aspect offood preservation techniques. The importance ofrecipes according to the season is also depictedin the novel.

It was very pleasant to savour its aroma,for smells have the power to evoke thepast, bringing back sounds and evensmells that have no match in the present.Tita liked to take a deep breath and let thecharacteristic smoke and scent transporther through the recesses of her memory.(LWFC12)

The feelings and emotions of Tita are also con-nected with the food that she makes and the foodgets the taste of her feelings. The food also influ-ences her memories and whenever she used tosee apricots she used to remember a particularincident with Pedro which made them grewcloser together. The smell and aroma of somespecial food items used to transport her to an-

other world of memories, which was her escapefrom the harsh reality in which she was living.So here food acts as her companion in escapingfrom reality and reliving her memories with herlove Pedro. The cake which she made for themarriage was mixed with her tears as she waslonging for Pedro’s love and when the guests hadthat cake they also started wailing over the lostlives in their own lives. Such influence Tita hadover food, which could be seen throughout thenovel and it also makes her relationship with foodauthentic and everlasting. She could arouse thefeelings of people through her food. In ChitraBanerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices,the protagonist Tilo (named after sesame seedknown for nourishment) has the mystical powerof sensing the spices and she solves the problemsof her customers by using spices. The writer hasinvoked life and feelings in the spices, givingthem significance as equal to a human being. Sheattributed human-like feelings to the spices.

It was then she understood how doughfeels when it is plunged into boiling oil.The heat that invaded her body as so realshe was afraid she would start to bubble-her face, her stomach, her heart, herbreasts- like batter, and unable to endurehis gaze she lowered her eyes and hastilycrossed the room, to where Gertrudis waspedalling the Pianola, playing a waltzcalled The Eyes of Youth.” (p. 18)

After the marriage, Pedro gave some roses to Titato express his love. Tita couldn’t keep those rosesas she used to fear her mother a lot. So she de-cided to make a dish using the petals from therose and it turned out to be very delicious as shemixed the love of Pedro in the form of rose pet-als. This shows how she didn’t even waste thoserose petals and instead used it to make a recipe.It was Pedro’s love in the form of flowers whichshe mixed and made a dish out of it.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

82

with that meal it seemed they had discov-ered a new system of communication, inwhich Tita was the transmitter, Pedro thereceiver, and poor Gertrudis the medium,the conducting body through which thesingular sexual message was passed. (49)

Pedro really liked the dish made by Tita but itcreated a different feeling for Tita’s sister Ger-trudis as she felt an intense heat in her body. Itaroused the sensual feelings inside her becauseit was made out of love between Pedro and Tita.Hence with that dish, they discovered a new sys-tem of communication, in which Tita was thetransmitter, Pedro the receiver and poor Gertru-dis as the medium, the conducting body throughwhich their sensual message was passed. Theingredients of the food items used by Tita arecompared beautifully with the words of a poet.

Not only the food item’s aroma and smells butalso the colour affected her in one way or theother. While she was making the cake for thewedding of her sister and her love Pedro. Sheused to get frightened by the white colouredsugar and the frosting; she felt that white colourmight seize her mind, dragging along those snowwhite images from her childhood.

The whiteness of the sugar frightened her.She felt powerless against it, feeling thatat any moment the white colour mightseize her mind, dragging along thosesnow- white images from her childhood.(34)

The feelings and emotions of Tita are also com-pared by Nacha(her nanny and cook) to thedishes and vessels in the novel. Nacha says,’ onlythe pan knows how the boiling soup feels but Iknow how you feel right now.’ Every part whichis in the process of making food including ves-sels and dishes are also mentioned in the noveland they are placed beautifully to mingle it withthe emotions and feelings of the protagonist.

When Tita used to cry over the fact that her lifeand her sister are getting married, her tears usedto change the taste of the food and her motherwould know it all. The author has also empha-sised on the table manners and etiquettes of theMexican culture, for instance when Tita was em-barrassed during Pedro’s marriage she couldn’tleave until everyone finished. It made her suf-fering even worse. But the culture didn’t allowher to escape that situation. Tita and her sister’seating habits were different and thus their na-ture was also different. It is said that we are whatwe eat so the eating habits of a person depictshow that person is in real life. All of these as-pects are very well mentioned in the novel.

Food is also used as a symbol for the pleasures(and the dangers) of life, echoing Tita’s belief “thejoy of living was wrapped up in the delights offood (11). Food in the novel becomes a metaphorfor sex, for love, for longing, for hope, and forhappiness. From the title to the chapter division,food is in the heart of the novel. The tragic storyof Tita unfolds with food being the most signifi-cant element along with the traditions and cul-ture of her Mexican family. Thus the author didan incredible job in creating food metaphors withthe emotions of Tita. In a way she has made acookbook of feelings and emotions disguised inthe form of a novel.

Works Cited

Ballinger-Dix, Elizabeth. “Like Water for Choco-late Themes: Food and Cooking.”LitCharts, 21 Dec 2016, www.litChartsLLC. Accessed 3 June 2021.

Dobrain, Susan Lucas. “Romancing the Cook:Parodic Consumption of Popular Ro-mance Myths in Como Agua ParaChocolate.”Latin American Literary Review,July-Dec, pp. 55-66.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

83

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. Trans-lated by Carol and Thomas Christensen.Doubleday, 1992.

Lomnitz, Larissa Adler and Marison Perez-Lixaur.A Mexican Elite Family, 1820 -1980:Kinship, Class, and Culture. Princeton U P,1987.

“Mexican Cuisine and Cooking.” Puerto Vallarta

Travel Magazine, www.hypermex.com/

html/pv_cook.

Mexican Culture. www.mexicanculture.about.

com/culture/mexicanculture.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

84

Dancing in Cambodia, at Large inBurma: A Critique of Colonialism

Dr. N.H. Kallur*

Keywords: Reclaiming, Rewriting, Colonialism, Colonized, Natural andHuman Resources, Impact, and Critique.

Abstract

*Dr. N.H. Kallur, Professor, Department of Studies in English, Karnataka University,Dharwad-580003, Karnataka, India, Email: [email protected]

Jnanapeeta awardee Amitav Ghosh is a prominent prolific Indian writer in En-glish. Reclaiming the past and rewriting of socio- political history of specially SouthAsian countries is the signature aspect and nature of his writings, so is his Dancingin Cambodia, at Large in Burma. Though this text is mainly a travel account of Ghosh’svisit to Cambodia and Burma, it also unfolds the impact of colonialism through theperception of the author and the response of people who are affected by it. Colo-nialism, a process of establishing colonies, controlling, subordinating and rulingthem and using the natural and human resources of them, has affected the coloniesadversely but it has brought about some noteworthy changes in the lives of thecolonized as well. This dual nature of colonialism is present in Dancing in Cambodia,at Large in Burma. Therefore, the present paper aims to critique the impact of colo-nialism on the life and culture of specially South Asian countries.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

85

Amitav Ghosh is one the prominent andprolific Indian writers in English andJnanapeeta awardee for the year 2018.His novels and writings are research

based rewritings of history-social and political-with multiple meanings. So is his Dancing in Cam-bodia, at Large in Burma. Though this text is mainlya travel account of Ghosh’s visit to Cambodia andBurma, it also unfolds the impact of colonialismthrough the perception of the author and the re-sponse of people who are affected by it.

Colonialism has affected the colonies adverselybut it has brought about some noteworthychanges in the lives of the colonized as well. Thisdual nature of colonialism is present in Dancingin Cambodia, at Large in Burma. Therefore, thepresent paper aims to critique the impact of co-lonialism on the life and culture of specially SouthAsian countries.

The simplified definition of colonialism is: it is aprocess of establishing a colony or settlement ina new country.... a body of people who settle in anew locality, forming a community subject to orconnected with their parent state; the commu-nity so formed, consisting of the original settlersand their descendents and successors. It is alsoconsidered as a process of domination, whichinvolves an encounter with the native, fightingwith them, conquering them deceitfully, control-ling and ruling them, exploiting the human aswell as natural resources, providing the marketsfor finished products, and making every effortto perpetuate the colonial rule. In order to ac-complish this colonizers employ military, politi-cal, economic, religious, linguistic and culturalapparatuses. Feudalism, capitalism, imperialism,colonialism, neo-colonialism and globalizationare different forms of domination and exploita-tion. They are supplementing one another. AniaLooma’s view supports this argument. She re-marks that colonialism is the midwife of capital-ism and imperialism. Colonized and colonizers

have viewed it differently. The natives have con-sidered colonialism as a cruel, brutal, inhuman,barbaric, dehumanizing, thingifying, mystifyingand racialized hypocrite act, where as the colo-nizers have viewed it as a divine directed,progress oriented, educating, enlightening,emancipating, and civilizing process.

The chosen text has three sections namely “Danc-ing in Cambodia,” “Stories in Stones” and “AtLarge in Burma.” Firstly, the paper examines theimpact of colonialism on Cambodia. Before Cam-bodia became a colony of France, king Norodomruled it efficiently and guarded it for more thanforty years from being colonized by France. Hewas successful in resisting every element ofFrench cultural influence. When King Norodomdied on 23 April 1904 there was the fight for suc-cession, Sisowath, half brother of Norodom, whowas favouring the French and became the kingwith the support of French. Thus, through de-ceitful way colonizer colonized Cambodia andbegan exerting its control over it. In return tocolonizers’ help King Sisowath handed over hispalace to be used as the premises of a French-run school for Cambodians. This move by theKing led to the use of institutional machinery forsupplementing the process of colonization. KingSisowath’s life-time desire was to visit France.Once when he got the opportunity of visiting it,he didn’t miss it. He visited it along with his en-tourage consisting of officials and a group ofCambodian classical dancers.

For King Sisowath, France was a paradise on theearth, without missing the opportunity he under-took journey to study the institutions of Franceand benefits that could result from putting theminto use. In the official document, referring tostate craft and patriotism, released after return-ing from France, King Sisowath remarks: “Noneshould hesitate to sacrifice his life when it is amatter of divinity of the King or of country. Theobligation to serve the country should be ac-

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

86

cepted without murmur by the inhabitants of thekingdom; it is glorious to defend one’s country”(DCLB 40). This view reiterates the divine theoryof Kingship and reflects mental colonization ofthe people. He was impressed by system of trans-portation, industrial and agricultural develop-ment in France and remarks: “In France the cit-ies are linked to each other and the distances thatseparate them are crossed.” He gives call to hispeople to work hard, to clear new land for agri-culture, to raise more animals, apply themselvesto industries and to familiarize themselves withmodern machinery. He said his concern was “tomake his kingdom prosperous, to develop intel-lectual resources and to increase the wealth ofpeople... emulation is the only means of turningresolutely to the path of progress” (41). Theshocking and the worst part of King’s journey toFrance is that though colonial government hadgot every help from the king to get control overCambodia, the Colonial Ministry in Paris wroteasking the king to reimburse the expenses in-curred during his trip to France. The King hadgenerously handed out tips and gifts worth sev-eral thousand francs. “In return he and his en-tourage had received a few presents from Frenchofficials. The French government now wanted toreclaim the price of those gifts” (42). This act ofFrance shows its ungratefulness and business-mindedness of colonizers.

The staunch critics of colonialism like Fanon haveviewed that highlighting of the positive impactof colonialism is like hiding of adverse effects ofcolonialism. This article explores its positive im-pact also. One positive impact of colonialism isthat the Cambodian classical dancers, under theguidance of Princess Soumphady, travelled toFrance to take part in an exhibition and show-cased the rich legacy of Cambodian classicaldance to the Western world. The dancers dancedso brilliantly that Rodin, France’s acknowledgedapostle of arts, remarked: “the show had helpedme to discover the infancy of Europe.” Further

he exclaimed: “These Cambodians have shownus everything that antiquity could have con-tained. It is impossible to think of anyone wear-ing human nature to such perfection; except themand the Greeks” (DCLB 37). He was completelyoverwhelmed by the performance, admired thema lot, drew the sketches of these dancers and wentto airport to see them off. He remarked: “whenthey left ...I thought they had taken away thebeauty of the world... what an emptiness they leftfor me!”(39). This observation exemplifies therewriting of history from the colonized perspec-tive also.

The colonial occupation has brought about lot ofchange in the lives of several persons like Pol Potor Saloth Sar, Thiounn and Khieu Samphan. PolPot or Saloth Sar, son of a peasant rose to the levelof becoming ruler of Cambodia. Loth Seri, PolPot’s brother, remarks about Pol Pot: “He had al-ways loved books; he read all the time, especiallyin French. It was the knowledge he got in Paristhat made him what he is”(35). Luk Khun Meak,a talented dancer and favourite mistress of KingSisowath’s son Monivong, using her connectionintroduced several of her relatives into palace.Saloth Sar is one such beneficiary. His connec-tion with the palace ensured places in thecountry’s best-known schools and he wasawarded scholarship to study electronics in Paris.It was when he was in Paris deeply influencedby communist ideology. So, after returning toCambodia, though worked for short period, hewas secretly working for Communist Party. Later,he disappeared and worked till he brought hisparty to power. He wished to bring radical changein socio-economic and political structure of Cam-bodia. The period of his reign from 1975 to 1979was the bloodiest, brutal and violent one.

Another person whose life changed tremen-dously due to colonial impact was Thiounn, Pal-ace Minister and one of the most remarkable andrespected persons in Cambodia. He was not an

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

87

aristocratic to get place in the rigidly hierarchi-cal world of Cambodian officialdom. But as heknew French he had worked as an interpreter forthe French. This connection helped him to climbthe ladder of official hierarchy. Thiounn’s sonsand grandchildren got good education in France.In fact his son Thiounn Mumm was a great Cam-bodian students’ leader in France. When Pol Potwas in France he joined the circle of ThiounnMumm, influenced by the ideology of Commu-nist Party and rose to the level of becoming anunforgettable ruler.

Another common man whose life was trans-formed due to colonial impact was KhieuSamphan. He was educated on the French pat-tern and one of preeminent political figures inCambodia. He was renowned throughout thecountry as an incorruptible idealist, an economicthinker and theorist; his doctoral thesis onCambodia’s economy is still highly regarded. Herefused to accept any of the lucrative offers. Likehis comrades he disappeared and lived in jungle.He surfaced after the 1975 revolution as the presi-dent and spokesperson of Pol Pot’s DemocraticKampuchea. He played a vital role in the UNsponsored peace negotiations. He experiencedthe torture of new government; he was drivenout of the city with family and made to work witheverybody. However, he was offered a job of jour-nalist in the new government but he refused it.Instead, he worked with Department of Archae-ology for a while and then took a teaching job atthe School of Fine Arts.

No doubt that common people like Saloth Sar,Khieu Samphan and Thiounn could rise to thelevel of becoming eminent personalities in Cam-bodia but the European ideology which the neo-colonisers or enlightened Cambodians tried toimplement in Cambodia didn’t work favourably.For instance, Pol Pot’s regime created upheavalin the entire country. In fact this text accounts thedreadful effects Pol Pot’s regime through the nar-

ration by affected persons like Chea Samy,Molyaka, soldiers and relief workers. One of therelief workers recounts the experience of victimsduring Pol Pot’s regime as follows: “a brothercalled away in the dark, an infant battered againsta tree, children starving to death”(16). The plightof Cambodia after Pol Pot’s regime was chro-nicled like this: “The country was like a shatteredslate: before you could think of drawing lines onit you had to find the pieces and fit them to-gether” (16).

People are haunted by blood-clotting and terribleexperience of Pol Pot’s regime. Once Ghosh re-quested Molyaka, a Cambodian friend, to takehim to meet Chea Samy, wife of Pol Pot’s brotherand presently working as dance teacher in TheSchool of Fine Arts. Molyaka was not ready toaccompany Ghosh because she had the worstexperience of Pol Pot’s regime. She said that shewas thirteen years old in 1975 when she wasevacuated with her family of fourteen membersto a labour-camp. She was separated from herparents and sent to work in a fishing village. Forthe next three years she worked as the servant offisher folk family. Only once she saw her parentsduring this time when she was selling fish in themarket. With the invasion of Vietanamese, PolPot’s regime came to an end in 1979 and conse-quently all the evacuees were sent back to theirplaces. Molyaka struggled hard to locate her fam-ily members. After months of searching she couldlocate only her mother and two brothers and theremaining ten were dead. The event of herfather’s death affected her mother so much thatshe could not come out of that shock for long timeand her brother was afflicted with paralysis. Themain target of Pol Pot’s regime was urban middleclass and it wished to restructure the entire soci-ety. Besides this she had the worst experiencewith underpaid army people. Like Molyaka sev-eral people had lost their closed ones and livedwith that traumatic experience. People are wor-ried whether the same plight continues or things

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

88

are going to be better. A Cambodian remarks “myfather says to me there will be peace in your life-time and you will be happy.” He told me ‘mygrandfather used to tell my father the same thingand now I say the same thing to my nephewsand nieces. It is always the same” (33). The fail-ure of Pol Pot’s administration reminds Fanon’sview that the national bourgeoisie of colonizedcountries has none of the virtues of its counter-parts in the West where bourgeoisie contributedfor the progress over feudalism in economic, le-gal, political and social terms.

Before the colonial occupation, Cambodia was arich country, “Cambodians in general had a stan-dard of living that would be considered enviableby most people in Bangladesh or India”(28 ). Af-ter the colonization it had been subjected to oneof the heaviest bombings in the history of war.An Austrian, rescue worker, remarks: “Such abeautiful country, such a wonderful people-al-ways smiling. But why are they always at war?Why can’t they get on with building their coun-try? What Cambodians are good at is destruction”(29). In spite of that it had managed remarkablywell considering it had been built up almost fromscratch after the Pol Pot regime in 1979.

The colonial policy of appointing ethnicity basedarmy led to internal enmity and hatred amongthe ethnic groups in Cambodia. One of the KhmerRouge defectors shared the kind of training theyhad received at political camps as follows: “asfar as the Vietnamese are concerned wheneverwe met them we must kill them, whether theyare militaries or civilians, because they are notordinary civilians, but soldiers disguised as ci-vilians. We must kill them, whether they are men,women, or children, there is no distinction, theyare enemies. Children are not militaries but ifthey are born and grow up in Cambodia, whenthey will be adult, they will consider Cambodianland as theirs. As to women, they give birth toVietnamese children” (25). It holds true to Fanon’s

view that colonialism “entirely disrupts the cul-tural life of a conquered people” (Habib 743).

As far as the impact of colonialism is concernedthe story of Burma is no different from that ofCambodia. Before colonization, in the words ofGhosh’s relative: “it was golden land. The rich-est country in Asia except for Japan. There areno people on earth to compare with the Burmese-so generous, so hospitable, so kind to strangers.No one goes hungry in Burma: you just have toask and someone will feed you” (67). Before theconquest by British Burma had been the mostdeveloped country in the region with an impres-sive agricultural surplus and a superabundanceof natural resources-oil, timber, minerals. It hadhad an important petroleum industry, a highlyeducated population, almost universal adult lit-eracy, a lively independent press, a rich literaryculture and a frame work of democratic institu-tions. This state of Burma ummask the fact thatthe arrival of British was neither divine directed,nor civilizing nor development oriented. It isclear that the British had no other reason thanthe commercial. In order to stay long in such acountry with abundant natural resources theycolonized it following their famous policy of di-vide and rule.

After the colonial occupation, with the supportof British, a large number of Indians had settledin Burma. Indians occupied disproportionatenumber of government posts and Indian mer-chants and moneylenders dominated crucial sec-tors of country’s economy. This policy of Britishgovernment resulted in enmity and hatred to-wards Indians. Therefore it is said “Burmese na-tionalism practically started with anti-Indian ri-ots”(67). Burma has mainly these ethnic groupsnamely Burmans, the Karen, the Rakhine, theShan, and the Mon besides many smaller groups.During colonial times, British recruiting policiesfavoured minority groups over the ethnic Bur-mans. The British Burma Army was formed

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

89

largely of units such as the Karen Rifles and theKachin Rifles. The minority groups have had afear of being dominated by the Burmans, themain ethnic group, but Aung San, leader of Anti-Facist People Freedom League, transcended themistrust of Burman politicians belonging to mi-norities. Probably it was because he had marrieda Christian and he himself was Buddist. Despitehis youth, Aung San was the country’s acknowl-edged leader, the hero of its independence move-ment. It was widely believed that General AungSan would assume Burma’s leadership once theBritish granted the country its independence, in1948. But Aung San had to be victim of the eth-nic rivalry that was promoted by the colonizers.After his assassination his trusted friend U Nubecame the first Prime Minister in January 1948.But within three months civil war broke out. In-surgents belonging to different ethnic groupsoutnumbered the government troops and cap-tured important centres. This violent and anar-chic state continued for a decade. In 1962, Gen-eral Ne Win, the chief of the army abruptly tookcontrol of the government and suspended theconstitution. The new regime also met withstrong civilian resistance. The undemocratic law-less situation has continued for almost three de-cade. Many ethnic groups don’t want indepen-dence they claim that they are independent. Oneof the Karenni leaders says: “The British hadclearly recognized Karenni autonomy and hadrejected the option of annexing the Karenniterrritories to Burma” (93). For this cause severalpersons have fought life time. One Karenni leadersays: “When I started to fight I was a boy and Iknew nothing” (96). With the emergence of AungSan Suu Kyi, daughter of late Aung San, thingsare expected to be normal. Under her leadershipBurma is attempting to be united and emerge asa transformed nation. But the idea of nationalconsciousness is not resulting in the expected

result. For instance, Mr. Htoo, a Karenni leaderexpresses doubt: “With Aung San Suu Kyi maybe peace can come back to Burma, if she is notassassinated. Aung San was good to the minori-ties so the Burmans killed him. With Aung SanSuu Kyi it may be the same” (99). In fact majorityof Burmans have lost hope in democracy and theybelieve ‘democracy is the only problem.’ A mem-ber of Kachin minority opines:”ethnic groupstook up arms when Rangoon had a democraticgovernment. A change to democracy won’thelp”(100). The whole Burma is shattered intopieces due to racial, regional, and tribal conflicts.This happening exemplifies Fanon’s view on na-tional unity and ‘concept of nation.’ He calls it asan ‘empty shell’ and further remarks “The ideaof the unified nation crumbles into pre-colonialantagonism based on race and tribe” (Habib 742).Thus colonial rule has completely changed thenature and structure of its erstwhile colonies. Thefire of ethnic rivalry set by the colonizers is notyet extinguished. No one knows still how manyare going to be burnt in that fire. However,Amitav Ghosh ends sections of this book withthe hope of change and returning to earlier gloryin Cambodia and Burma. In Burma Aung San SuuKyi is the ray of hope.

Works Cited:

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction toLiterary and Cultural Theory. Viva Books,2013.

Ghosh, Amitav. Dancing in Cambodia,at Large inBurma. Ravi Dayal, 1998.

Habib, M.A.R. A History of Literary Criticism andTheory. Wiley, 2008.

Nayar, Pramod K. Contemporary Literary and Cul-tural Theory: From Structuralism toEcocriticism. Pearson, 2010.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

90

Sujata Acharya* and Sushant Kumar Mishra**

Keywords: Language, Identity, Tribes, Indigenous People, Indigenous Commu-nication, and Autochthonous People.

Indigenous Communication:Language and Identity

Abstract

*Dr. Sujata Acharya, Principal and Director- Academics, KISS Deemed University, Patharagadia,Bhubaneswar -751024, Odisha, India, Email: [email protected]

**Prof. Sushant Kumar Mishra, Professor, School of Language Literature and Cultural Studies,Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Email: [email protected],

[email protected]

This research paper makes an attempt to understand the issues related to identity of tribalpeople as defined by the use of the linguistic communication in the context of migrationand subjugation under larger framework of the centralizing nation state laws regardinglanguage(s) of the indigenous people. Studying in the larger historical framework of mi-gration and indigenous people’s identities, the article focuses on the tribes of Odisha andsome other parts of India. After a comprehensive review of the term ‘indigenous’ and re-lated concepts for defining ‘tribal people’ in the context of communication, the scholarshave tried to comprehend the contemporary usage of the terms in the context of India. Thearticles intend to put forth the point that in the Indian context, the tribal and the indig-enous do not mean the same. Even the non-tribal people are as indigenous as the tribalpeople. In the context of Odisha, the Odia language is as much an indigenous means ofcommunication as any language of a tribe notified by the government schedules. Hencethe Indigenous language and the interrelationship between the indigenous languages donot reflect the same issues as we find in the Latin American of in some other parts of theworld. UNESCO’s definition of ‘indigenous language, culture and people’ may not be ex-actly applicable in the Indian context. The authors have tried to comprehend the issues oflinguistic communication in the context of these dichotomous definitions and understand-ing of ‘Indigenous’ and communication issues related to ‘languages.’

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

91

Indigenous communities have lived forlong with the surroundings aboutwhich they have evolved deep knowl-edge. This knowledge is part of their

cultural narrative, their knowledge systems andtheir education systems. It is often argued thatthe indigenous communities in India do not havethe proper education systems as we understandtoday. In fact, this argument is so important thatwe have often relegated the education status ofthe indigenous communities in India as simplynull and void. We have the issues of literate andnon-literate but that is different from the debatesof the educated and non-educated, especially inthe Indian context. Before we discuss these is-sues further, it might be better if we may definewhat we mean by ‘indigenous communities’ inthe Indian context.

Indigenous describes any group of people nativeto a specific region as well as to the people wholived there before the colonists arrived, definednew borders, and began to occupy the land. Thesecommunities are having a historical continuitywith pre-invasion and pre-colonial societieswhich developed on their territories, and con-sider themselves different from other sectors ofthe societies.

In India indigenous people comprise 8.6% of thenational population. India was the home to about700 tribal groups with a population of 104 mil-lions as per 2011 census. These indigenous peopleconstitute the second largest tribal population inthe world after Africa.

The indigenous people in India are known invarious ways like, ‘Tribes,’ ‘Primitive,’ ‘Adivasis,’‘Bansvasis,’ ‘Tribal,’ ‘Aboriginal,’ ‘Native,’ and etc.Some say, they are the autochthonous people ofthe land who are believed to be the earliest set-tlers in the Indian peninsula, prior to the inva-sions and foreign settlers. During this period,each Indigenous community was a homogenous

and self-contained section and there was not anyhierarchical discrimination. Every tribe was hav-ing a ‘Head’ or ‘Chief’ to shoulder the responsi-bility of that particular group. Slowly, the Heador Chief was recognized as the King or Raja orthe Ruler as assumed political and militarypower.

In recent times, there is a lot written and dis-cussed about the aboriginal and the indigenouscommunities. The issues come from the docu-ments from the United Nations. A perusal of theUnited Nations documents on the related area,we understand that the United Nations as a rep-resentative of the international ethos startedthinking about the situations and the rights ofthe indigenous communities. The documentshave mentioned about the aboriginal and the in-digenous communities in various parts of theworld like Canada (in American continents) toAustralia and other parts of the world. Appar-ently, in these documents, the aboriginal and theindigenous people are identified naturally with-out providing any proper framework and defi-nition which might lay down the criteria to iden-tify who may be considered the aboriginals andthe indigenous people in a particular geographi-cal space. The representatives coming from thevarious parts of the world have talked about thesecommunities in their space but overall the mean-ings attributed to these terms are left undefinedand open ended. Hence, as a reader and re-searcher one has to make sense of the terms asthey have been used in context.

As can be deduced from the perusal of the UnitedNations documents, the term ‘indigenous’ has notbeen properly defined but understood in a cer-tain context. It is presumed that those people whohave come from other places and settled in a par-ticular place are not indigenous. The ‘indigenouspeople’ are apparently identified in the contextof the people who came from outside and settled

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

92

down in particular lands, often controlling theresources of the people who lived there beforetheir arrival. This is an important aspect of thedefinition as the issue comes to India. We haveseen the special emphasis on the welfare ofpeople here dwelling mostly in forest areas, orthose notified by the government of India as partof the ‘scheduled tribe’ often since the Britishtimes. Now, if the indigenous people are thosewho come from certain tribes, who are the oth-ers who do not belong to the notified tribes? Forexample, how would we identify the people fromBengal who speak pre-dominantly Bengali or thepeople from Odisha who speak pre-dominantlyOdia? This question might be extended to theother ethno linguistic communities residing invarious states of India. Since the linguistic divi-sion of the states after 1947, each state identifiedon the basis of ethno linguistic communities havetheir own age old language, culture and otherknowledge systems. It might be difficult to iden-tify when the Tamils or the Telugus or theMarathis or the Punjabis settled in their landsdominating the resources of the people who pre-habited those lands. If the forest dwellers in theseareas are considered the ‘indigenous’ people,then we should have a history of the people whocame from somewhere and settled there. For ex-ample, the Odia speaking people should have ahistory where it should be identified that theysettled coming from somewhere else overtakingthe resources of the people who constitute ‘tribes’today. However, the situation in India is differ-ent. We can identify the languages of India go-ing back to its earlier linguistic forms withoutalmost no discontinuity in the evolution of thelinguistic forms. This is different than what wenotice in Americas or Australia and other placesin the world. The continuous linguistic formswith evolving patterns indicate that the non-tribes in India are also indigenous people whoinhabited these lands since times recorded in his-tory. So, in the Indian context the ‘aboriginal and

the indigenous’ people are part of the dominantcultural spaces while cohabiting with the peopleliving in forest areas or in hilly tracts. Each ethnolinguistic community dominates certain naturalareas for its survival and their cultural identityhas evolved according to the natural surround-ings which they inhabit since times known tohistory.

Another factor is important from the point ofview of linguistic identities of the aboriginals isthat the people cohabiting in the nearby areas arenot recorded to have any linguistic and powerconflicts. In history, we hardly study about anywar between the tribes and the regional kings.The regional kings are not known to have anysuch conflict as we learn in the history of Ameri-cas, Australia or Africa for the control and ex-ploitation of the natural resources. On the con-trary, we find in Sanskrit a text known asBrihatkatha which is supposed to have its originsin the languages other than Sanskrit, often con-jectured to have its origins in the tribal languages.As per the admission in the text itself, the storieshave their origins in Paishachi language whichwas further presented in Prakrit and forms ofSanskrit so that the non-Paischani knowingpeople could also enjoy them. The cultural van-tage point here comes from all the ethno linguis-tic communities inhabiting a region. Perhapsthere has not only be cohabitation across geo-graphical variations within the presently identi-fied linguistic states but also a form of culturalinteraction and resource sharing mutually ben-eficial to all the communities. This may be a rea-son why the cultural or power clash stories inthe folklores of all the tribal and non-tribal com-munities do not figure prominently. Had therebeen such clashes, at least the folklores of thegroups of agrarian and nomadic communitiesshould have recorded such clashes in their lore.Hence, we may find that cohabitation and mutu-ally beneficial sharing of resources have been

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

93

more important, it may be conjectured safelyperhaps that in such circumstances, the identi-ties of such groups in terms of language, com-munication and power over natural resourceswere not threatened by the other groups, whetherdominant or not so dominant. With no recordsof such clashes between the people’s groups, onemay safely presume that each group could de-fend their livelihood. The wars between the kingslargely impacted the dominance over the groupfrom one king to the other without much changein the living patterns which defined the identityand the power over the locally available re-sources.

Given such patterns as the dominant cohabitingof people with no wars between people reportedgenerally by historians until 17th century, we mayask what happened since the 17th century that ledto the reported violent clashes. This question isimportant but not relevant for us in the contextbecause even after the 17th century, the clashesreported are by the settled farmers or betweenthe religious groups. The clash between the for-est dwellers or hilly tract dwellers and the main-land people are not generally reported by thehistorians. Hence, we need to visit the basic con-cept of the aboriginals and the indigenous peoplein the context of India. The United Nations frame-work does not help us in identifying the indig-enous people in India as there have not been suchlarge scale migrations from lands far off at leastin the recorded history as we find in the historyof Americas and Australia. Even the theory ofAryan invasion, though not fully conclusive andonly conjectural as one possibility, is far removein history and it is very difficult to identify thenon-Aryans (which include large groups likeDravidians) as the indigenous people. Even inthe state of Tamil Nadu, a major hub of the domi-nant Dravidian political movements, the Tamilsor the Dravidians are not considered the Indig-enous people. Groups like Toda, Kurumba,

Adyan and such others are identified as the‘tribes’ who may qualify to be called ‘aboriginalsand indigenous people’ of Tamil Nadu. Perhapsthe concern of the United Nations for the aborigi-nal people needs to be re-visited in the Indiancontext.

In the Indian context, there are several laws pro-mulgated by the governments to protect the in-terests of people dwelling in their traditional ar-eas. For example, in Jharkhand or in Himachalor in many areas of North East, outsiders cannotbuy land as it might render the local populationout of control of their own resources. Now, by nostretch of logic we may argue that people in en-tire Himachal or entire North East are indigenouspeople excluding folks living in other similarstates across India and that too when there is nohistory of conflict in these areas as we see inAmerica and Australia between the indigenouspeople and those who came to settle from out-side within known history, it would contravenelogic to consider only these people as indigenous.Odisha can be an interesting example. Accord-ing to an article in The Hindu by SatyasundarBarik. Odisha is one the most diverse states interms of the tribal groups with varied ethno lin-guistic identity in India.

If we look at the census of India, we find thatOdisha has approximately 22 percent of the tribalpopulation. But, if we presume that they are theaboriginals and the indigenous people, thenwhere from have migrated the remaining 78 per-cent population to Odisha?

If such a large population has migrated to Odisha,then there must be archeological and historicaltraces for such large scale movements. Unless wefind proof of such large scale migrations toOdisha, we may safely presume that people inOdisha are almost all the indigenous people. Inrecent times, we may find people migrating forjobs, business or other similar purposes to

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

94

Odisha, in towns and cities and they may be iden-tified as outsiders. However, they are mostly ur-banized and live in such conditions where thecommunication happens in various languagesspoken nationally and internationally. They mayuse languages from their home states, then fromOdisha (whether Odia or other languages spo-ken in the vicinity of the places inhabited by theperson) and often English and Hindi also. Mostlypeople from other areas of India may not haveany problems in using these languages fromOdisha because the Indian languages have a largecommon lexical base. Syntactically also the lan-guages of India have a lot of common features.Given the syntactic and lexical similarities in thelanguages of India we may think of a communi-cation pattern which may empower the peoplefrom various regions and various people whoconstitute India. More specifically, in Odisha, wehave to think how to linguistically empower thetribals and others who are all subjugated oftentoday due to the predominance of languages fromsuch families which are non-Asian, predomi-nantly English. However, we have to understandfirst that the language and culture should not bepresented in such a way that they become thedivisionary tools for communication between thecohabiting populations who differ from one areato the other area in their customs and languageusages. Efforts to include the languages of all thetribals, all the people inhabiting in Odisha wouldbe the first step towards establishing a harmoni-ous and cordial society.

If we look at the languages in Odisha, we see thatthere are seven other language forms in Odishaalong with the eighth category ‘others.’ Then inOdisha, we have Santali also with more thanthree varieties. There are Bengali and Hindispeakers also in Odisha. As is reported by re-searches, there are at least 21 tribal languages inOdisha and some of them are falling out of use.If these languages really disappear, it may be

great loss not only to Odisha but to entire hu-manity. With the loss of these languages, therewould be loss of the knowledge systems con-tained in these languages.

The NEP 2020 now has emphasized and the edu-cationists too have emphasized since long, thelanguage of basic education should be the mothertongues of the children, and the NEP 2020 pro-posed that children be taught in their mothertongue or local language, at least in primaryschool, if we really wish to realize the full po-tential of these children.

Communication happens when there are at leasttwo persons participating in the process. It is fun-damental to the existence and survival of humansas it is a process of creating and sharing ideas,information, views, facts, and feelings among thepeople to reach a common understanding. In-digenous communication is local communicationthat is unique to a given culture of society whichexisted before the arrival of modern mass mediawhich is a formally organised bureaucratic sys-tem of communication. This indigenous commu-nication system still exists today despite changesbrought by technology. Indigenous communica-tion can take many different forms such as festi-vals, traditional institutions, folklore, drama,music, song, dance, drums and poetry amongstothers are dominant sources of entertainment,and they inform and reform social, moral andhuman values of their societies.

If the tribal languages and languages of others inOdisha are not empowered, there may be loss ofcommunication among various groups and sec-tions of the society. We have to make efforts to-wards establishing such education systems whichprovide equal opportunities to all linguisticgroups, but without making the divisionary cat-egories like ‘aboriginals and indigenous’ whichare more suitable in the context of Americas,Australia or other such places where we have a

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

95

known history of large scale migration of the con-temporary dominant groups.

Works Cited and Consulted:

Appropriate Technology. vol. 19, no.2, IT Publica-tions, Sep. 1992, pp. 103-05.

Barik, Satyasundar. The Hindu. www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/tribal-communities-in-odisha-are-speaking-up-to-save-their-dialects/article 18713925.ece

Hornberger, N. H. and Swineheart K. F. “Bi-lingual Intercultural Education andAndean Hip Hop: Transnational Sites forIndigenous Language and Identity.” PennGSE, vol. 41, no. 4, 2012, doi:10.1017/S0047404512000486.

Mohanty, Ajit K. “Languages, Inequality andMarginalization: Implications of theDouble Divide in Indian Multilingua-

lism,”International Journal of the Sociologyof Language, 2005, doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.2010.042. Research Gate, www.re-searchgate.net.‘

“(MTB) Education in Tribal Dominated Schoolsof Odisha.”IOSR Journals, www.iosrjournals.org.

“Orissa Data Highlights: The Scheduled Tribes.”Census India, www.censusindia. gov.in/Tables_Published/SCST/dh_st_orissa.pdf

Richards, Paul. Indigenous Agricultural Revolution,Hutchinson, 1985.

United Nations.”A perusal of the United NationsDocuments.”www.un.org /development/desa/indigenouspeoples/about-us.html

Vaughan, J. and Singer, R. “Indigenous Multilin-gualism Past and Present.”Language andCommunication, vol. 62, 2018, pp.83-90.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.06.003.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

96

The Research Paper (Article) should accompany the following separately:

◆ An abstract (about 100 words), a brief biographical sketch of above 100 words for authorsdescribing designation, affiliation, specialization, number of books and articles publishedin the referee journals, membership on editorial boards and companies etc.

◆ The declaration to the effect that the work is original and it has not been published earliershall be sent.

◆ Tables, charts and graphs should be typed in separate sheets. They should be numberedas Table 1, Graph 1 etc.

◆ References / Work Cited used should be listed at the end of the text.

◆ Editors reserve the right to modify and improve the manuscripts to meet the Journal’sstandards of presentation and style.

◆ Editors have full right to accept or reject an article for publication. Editorial decisions willbe communicated with in a period of four weeks of the receipt of the manuscripts.

◆ All footnotes will be appended at the end of the article as a separate page. The typo scriptshould use smaller size fonts.

◆ An Author/Co-author shall submit only one article at a time for consideration of publicationin the Journal. The author/co-author can send another article only on hearing from theeditor whether it is accepted / rejected.

◆ The author getting one article published in the Journal has to wait for a year to get anotherpublished.

The submission of Research Paper (Article) must be in the form of an attachment with a coveringletter to be sent as e-mail.

Aims and Scope

St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous) Ernakulam publishes Teresian Journal of English Studies(TJES). It is a double-blind peer reviewed international journal. It is published as aquarterly. It is designed for the academic and research community all over the worldinterested in English Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies. The journal expectscooperation from academicians and researchers in the subject areas. The journal looksfor papers conceptually sound at once methodologically rigorous. The journal format isreader friendly. The academia and the researchers will have an easy access to the websiteof the journal.

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

97

Ethical Guidelines for Authors

The Author shall present an accurate and complete account of the research performed. Thecorresponding author must have obtained the approval of all other authors for each submission.The material in the submission shall be original. The material based on prior work, including that ofthe same author/s shall be properly subjected to proper citation.

Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers

The Peer reviewer shall review manuscripts for which they have the subject expertise required tocarry out a proper assessment. Peer reviewers shall respect the confidentiality of peer review andshall not reveal any details of the manuscript under review and of its review. Peer reviewers shall beobjective and constructive in their reviews.

Ethical Guidelines for the Editor

The Editor shall actively seek the views of authors, readers, reviewers, and editorial advisory boardmembers about ways of improving the journal’s success. The Editor shall support initiatives toeducate researchers about publication ethics. The Editor shall provide clear advice to reviewers.The Editor shall require reviewers to disclose any potential competing interests, if any, before agreeingto review a submission.

The Journal abides by theThe Best Practices Guidelines of the

COPE (COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATION ETHICS)for Authors, Peer Reviewers, and Editors.

© Teresian Journal of English Studies, Department of English and Centre for Research,

St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous) Ernakulam, Park Avenue Road, Cochin-682011, Kerala, India.

Ph: 91-484-2351870, Fax: 91-484-2381312, Website: <www.teresas.ac.in>

Email: [email protected] / [email protected]

Journal Website: www.tjes.teresas.ac.in

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the writtenconsent of the publisher. St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous) Ernakulam and Teresian Journal ofEnglish Studies assume no responsibility for the view expressed or information furnished by theauthors. Edited and published by the Editor for and on behalf of St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous)Ernakulam, Cochin-682011, Kerala, India and printed at Green Offset Printing Press, 43/609B, MariaTower, Powathil Road, Ayyappankavu, Cochin-682018, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.

Submit your article to: [email protected] / [email protected]

Subscription can be done by visiting www.tjes.teresas.ac.inchoosing a suitable plan and paying online.

Subscription Rates:

1 Year Rs. 3000/- ($ 150)

2 Years Rs. 5400/- ($ 270)

Per Issue Rs. 750/- ($ 40)

Subscription Procedure:

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890

12345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567891234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789


A Quarterly Journal

99

September 2021.pmd - Teresian Journal of English Studies

Documents

Transcript of September 2021.pmd - Teresian Journal of English Studies