POPULAR IMAGES AND COSMOPOLITAN MEDIATIONS:
MASS MEDIA AND WESTERN POP CULTURE
IN THE ANGLOPHONE SOUTH ASIAN NOVEL
by
ELIZABETH TARYN SIRKIN
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Kurt M. Koenigsberger
Department of English
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
May, 2007
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the dissertation of
______________________________________________________
candidate for the Ph.D. degree *.
(signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.
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DEDICATION
For all of the doctoral candidates who are still hard at work on their dissertations
and for my husband, Jeremy Richard Mason, who waited so patiently while I completed
mine.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments.…………………………………………………………………… 3
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….. 4
Chapter I: How Media Speak; What the Postcolonial Novel Says…………………… 6
Chapter II: “Written on the Brow of Some”: Inscription and Erasure in R. K.
Narayan’s The Guide…………………………………………………………. 44
Chapter III: The Trivial, the Historically Significant, and the Ideologically
Impoverished in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter………………… 70
Chapter IV: The Price of Western Media in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small
Things…………………………………………………………………………. 108
Chapter V: “I am the Walrus”: Mass Media and the Struggle for Identity in The Buddha
of Suburbia: A Conclusion……………………………………………………..147
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………185
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to my teachers and my friends, without whom this dissertation
would never have evolved nor mattered. I am indebted to the members of my dissertation
committee: Anne Helmreich, Judith Oster, and Gary Stonum, for their assistance,
encouragement and instruction throughout my course of study at Case Western Reserve
University and for their special involvement with the dissertation-writing process. A
special thank you to my dissertation advisor, Kurt M. Koenigsberger, whose eye for
detail consistently pushed me to be a stronger writer and a wiser scholar. I would also
like to express my gratitude to the entire faculty of the English Department at Case
Western Reserve University for encouraging me to work hard and for always being
supportive and reassuring, especially Christopher Flint, who co-chaired the College of
Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, through which the ideas for this dissertation
originally developed, and Thomas Bishop, who served on my dissertation committee
until moving to Australia.
I am, of course, beholden to all of the master’s and doctoral candidates I had the
pleasure of working with and beside, for their humor, friendship and their belief in my
ability to complete this project. There are simply too many to name. I must thank my
entire family: my parents, Mary Lee and Louis Sirkin and Marilyn and Jonathan Mason,
and my sisters and brothers, Tamar Sirkin and Jeffrey Luchs, Jennifer and Richard
Meldman, Rachel and Benjamin Mendelsohn and Meredith Mason. I would not have
maintained the stamina to finish without you, so thank you for loving me and nagging me
throughout the past eight years. And, to my husband Jeremy, thank you for your
kindness, your patience, your generosity and your unconditional, unwavering love.
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Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation:
Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel
Abstract
by
Elizabeth Taryn Sirkin
In this dissertation, I examine how R. K. Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman
Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy situate contemporary Euro-American
popular culture within their novels to focus a spotlight on the neo-colonial strategies that
still operate within the landscapes of Western media—print-based, televisiual, and
celluloid. I also examine how these authors engage contemporary Western media from
the perspective of Anglophone South Asian communities. What is distinctive about the
novels that I discuss in this project is that they treat this cultural exchange in a critically
cosmopolitan mode, one that balances the tension between celebrating its newness and
warning about its potential resemblance to older forms of imperialism.
That the postcolonial novels addressed in these pages engage with mass-mediated
Western texts and images from a hybrid, cosmopolitan perspective is of great
significance, because such a phenomenon works against what Rudyard Kipling, that
towering figure of imperialist literature, famously wrote: “East is East and West is West
and never the twain shall meet” (6). In contrast to Kipling’s lyric, the novels I examine
in this dissertation do not suggest a simple convergence of East and West through a kind
of mass-mediated confluence of images.
5
Rather, the authors researched and discussed within these pages—as a result of
history, travel, and education—dissolve the boundaries between East and West. All of
the texts discussed in this project are hybrid and intertextual. Their characters stand
between two world and the texts themselves resonate with allusions to Western texts that
have recognizable and sometimes rival meanings in the East and in the West. Each
novelist refuses to represent the world in definitive terms, in which “East is East,” for
example. The Anglophone novel in India, is, I argue, one significant agent of revision of
received wisdom about South Asia’s relation to dominant English-language media from
Britain and the U.S. In the course of their novelistic “revisions,” Narayan, Mukherjee,
Rushdie, Roy, and Kureishi, each represent the world as impure and interrupted, at times
complicated with uncertainty and tyranny, and at other times triumphantly full of hope
and possibility.
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How Western Media Speak; What the Postcolonial Novel Says
How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?
How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises,
what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the
wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (8-9) How does newness come into the world and how do we recognize it when it does?
And, to the extent that Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses can be considered a “postcolonial”
novel, how does the literature written out of the postcolonial condition invite us to engage
this newness? How does the novel in particular—the genre through which Rushdie offers
this meditation on newness—deal with the frustrations or betrayals that accompany fresh
translations and conjoinings?
In his book, Cosmopolitanism, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah casts off
the label “postcolonialism” in favor of “cosmopolitanism”—an ideology that recognizes,
he argues, that “People are different...and there is much to learn from our differences”
(xv). Appiah uses the word conversation as a metaphor for the “engagement with the
experiences and ideas of others” (5). In a discussion with Neal Conan on National Public
Radio, Appiah explained that, “The key thing, if you’re going to be open to the world, is
that you approach it in the spirit of assuming that you can learn from the world,” but he
also cautioned that “Conversation is only worth doing if you are listening as well as
talking.” Western media often purport to listen while they are talking. Though one of the
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fundamental bonds amongst all human beings is our ability to tell and evaluate stories
and though it is true that we learn from and change through these narratives, conversation
cannot be one-sided. The suggestion made by critics of cultural imperialism such as Ella
Shohat and Robert Stam, David Spurr and Herbert Schiller that postcolonial bodies are
simply empty vessels ready to be filled by popular media products and the images
promoted by multinational corporations, as perpetuated by Western media, is deeply
condescending. The novels discussed in this dissertation demonstrate that people respond
to the influences of Western media in complex ways by reading Western popular cultural
products and images in existing South Asian and cosmopolitan cultural contexts.
In this project, I argue that what Rushdie refers to as “newness” comes into the
world through the rapidity and reach of popular media products which are increasingly
circulated about the globe. Western literature, journalism, popular music, television and
cinema continue to reach new audiences. Furthermore, mediascapes—a term that Arjun
Appadurai has coined to characterize the constantly shifting and contested spaces within
which media flows are situated—are more than just thematic images in postcolonial
literature; they permeate the language that postcolonial authors use. That the postcolonial
novels addressed in these pages engage with mass-mediated Western texts and images
from a hybrid, cosmopolitan perspective is of great significance, because such a
phenomenon works against what Rudyard Kipling, that towering figure of imperialist
literature, famously wrote: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall
meet” (6). In contrast to Kipling’s lyric, the novels I examine in this dissertation do not
suggest a simple convergence of East and West through a kind of mass-mediated
confluence of images.
8
Rather, the authors researched and discussed within these pages—as a result of
history, travel, and education—dissolve the boundaries between East and West by—in
Appiah’s phrase—“being open to the world” and listening to its dialogue, rather than “the
West’s” or “the East’s” monologues. In “Forms of Renewal,” Amit Chaudhuri explains
that it is the “Anglophone Indian…who largely constructs and repeatedly disseminates
the idea of the nation; it is he or she who both writes and consumes the novel” (par. 13).
The Anglophone novel in India, is, I argue, one significant agent of revision of received
wisdom about South Asia’s relation to dominant English-language media from Britain
and the U.S. All of the texts discussed in this project are hybrid and intertextual. Their
characters stand between two worlds and the texts themselves resonate with allusions to
Western texts that have recognizable and sometimes rival meanings in the East and in the
West. Each novelist refuses to represent the world in definitive terms, in which “East is
East,” for example, as Appiah explains in his book: “our knowledge is imperfect,
provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence” (144). In the course of their
novelistic “revisions,” Narayan, Mukherjee, Rushdie, Roy, and Kureishi, each represent
the world as impure and interrupted, at times complicated with uncertainty and tyranny,
and at other times triumphantly full of hope and possibility.
In this dissertation, I examine how R. K. Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman
Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy situate contemporary Euro-American
popular culture within their novels to focus a spotlight on the neo-colonial strategies that
still operate within the landscapes of Western media—print-based, televisiual, and
celluloid—but also how these authors engage contemporary mediascapes from the
perspective of Anglophone South Asian communities. What is distinctive about the
9
novels that I discuss in this project is that they treat this cultural exchange in a critically
cosmopolitan mode, one that balances the tension between celebrating “newness” and
warning about its potential resemblance to older forms of imperialism.
In The Satanic Verses, the character Gibreel Farishta whispers knowingly to his
friend about the white British society in which he lives, “They describe us ... That’s all.
They have the power of description and we succumb to the images they construct” (174),
which suggests that Western media products are powerful influences indeed. What
Farishta’s claim implies is that Western mass-mediated images—from journalism to
cinema and television—describe the world as a means of controlling it, regardless of
whether they do so intentionally. Michael Gorra contends that, “Seeing India...is indeed a
way of ruling [it]” (656). And, if this is true, then the postcolonial novels that I discuss in
this dissertation demonstrate that those nations formerly ruled by imperialism and
subsequently ruled by the powerful images constructed in Western media, have begun to
describe themselves: they do not passively accept Western pop cultural representations
promulgated through mass media, but complicate and challenge their authority.
The novels that occupy my attention in this dissertation include: R. K. Narayan’s
The Guide (1958), Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter (1971), Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses (1988), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), and
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). Across these texts, I trace the ways in
which individual authors treat images of Western pop culture and their media and balance
the proportion of celebration and concern over the mediations that take place between
cultures differently. By way of beginning to explore the relationship between the novel
and the mass mediated forms through which Britain (and the West) historically came to
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interpret, represent, and finally dominate other parts of the world, and to place the
contemporary Anglophone South Asian novel in this history, this chapter discusses a few
critical episodes from Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I argue that one of the postcolonial
novel’s central features is its refusal—and cosmopolitan rehabilitation of—the discourses
of colonialism as produced in such forms as imaginative literature, journalism, and
empire film as well as the subtle rhetorical strategies that still remain in Western media
from novels to popular music to television. The balance of this dissertation traces a
trajectory of critical refusal and cosmopolitan reclamation of Western media images in
South Asian communities from a novel such as The Guide, in which R. K. Narayan’s
references to Western mass media are scarce though resonant to a novel like The God of
Small Things, in which Arundhati Roy is expressly critical of the media enterprises
employed by the West and equally critical of the globalization of Western capitalist
ideals.
In Chapter Two, “‘Written on the Brow of Some’: Inscription and Erasure in
R. K. Narayan’s The Guide,” I focus my attention on the final pages of Narayan’s novel,
in which the intervention of a single American film producer threatens to misrepresent an
entire culture to a Western audience to examine the unique challenges that result from
interactions between individuals from very different parts of the world. In Chapter
Three, “The Trivial, the Historically Significant, and the Ideologically Impoverished in
Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter,” I examine the inadequacies of contemporary
forms of Western media as explored in Mukherjee’s novel. I claim that the prevalence of
Western media in Mukherjee’s text demonstrates that attempts to construct coherent
representations of the unfathomable realities confronted in the non-Western world make
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use of rhetorical tropes that emphasize difference. In Chapter Four, “The Price of
Western Media in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” I argue that the
overwhelming weight accorded to Western mass media in contrast to regional media in
Roy’s novel demonstrates the strong influence that dominant cultures have over less
affluent nations and the defiant spirit of those who resist. I conclude the dissertation in
Chapter Five, “‘I am the Walrus’: Mass Media and the Struggle for Identity in The
Buddha of Suburbia,” with an analysis of Kureishi’s novel—a novel set in London—in
which many of the characters self-consciously return to, invent, or reexamine media
stereotypes of “Indianness” to not only explore what it means to be Indian outside of
India, but to examine what it means to be English in a world without formal empires.
While I am arguing that cross-cultural conversation in a cosmopolitan mode is a
crucial feature of the twentieth-century Anglophone South Asian novel, cross-cultural
exchange, in and of itself, is not a new phenomenon. The concept of hybridity—or the
fusion of cultures and ideas that Rushdie refers to as newness—is, in fact, very old. After
all, Macaulay in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” championed just such a thing,
precisely as a tool of administrative domination, when he called for “a class of persons,
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”
(130). Trollope too, suggested that “through the mixing of races such groups as the
‘coloureds’ or ‘mulattoes’ he saw everywhere in Jamaica may combine the (white)
intellectual ability and the (black) physical stamina necessary to plant civilization in the
tropics” (Brantlinger 6). Furthermore, Robert Young, for instance, points out that
“‘Englishness’ has always been riven by its own alterity” (xiii). He points out that the
word, “hybrid,” can be traced to the nineteenth century and that the word was first used to
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describe race as early as 1813 (though the OED cites the year 1861) (Young 6). Young
examines the concept of hybridity starting with its anxious and Victorian inception,
whereby a “structure of attraction”—the desire for cross-cultural contact—was coupled
with a “structure of repulsion”—the need for fixed racial distinctions (19), and wonders
whether hybridity in its current form still reinforces the two antithetical choices:
attraction and repulsion, colonizer and colonized, civilized and savage at the same time it
seeks to deconstruct them. And yet, Abdul JanMohamed insists that postcolonial
literature seeks not only to negate such binary oppositions between “white and black,
good and evil, superiority and inferiority and sensuality, self and Other, subject and
object” (82), but also to adopt and modify “Western languages and artistic forms in
conjunction with indigenous languages and forms” (103-4). Perhaps that is why
postcolonial fiction is both defiant and fraught with disappointment; it creates something
new that depends, for its very existence, upon the power structures it seeks to subvert or
transmute.
There is little debate that beginning in 1880 the colonial vision of the British
Empire was disseminated aggressively through a plethora of media forms including but
not limited to exhibitions, advertisements, popular literature, school books, postcards, and
cinema. Much work has been done on the imperial messages encoded in Western
literature, poetry, and journalism beginning with the adventure tale (See Anderson,
Brantlinger, Green, and JanMohamed). In these printed texts, the myth of empire was
born and Martin Green argues that, “They were, collectively, the story England told itself
as it went to sleep at night; and…they charged England’s will with the energy to go out
into the world and explore, conquer and rule” (3). In these texts, civilized society is
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pitted against barbarism, the racial superiority of the English and subsequently, white
Europeans, is unwavering, the heroes possess virtues like courage and cunning,
leadership and persistence, and the civilizing mission is always a justification for
imperialism, for domination, exploitation, and slavery. The fact that by the 1930s cinema
had materialized as the most influential medium of propaganda is also in little dispute. A
great deal of work has been done on the shared viewpoints of both British and Hollywood
cinema during the 1930s and 1940s, the decades during which “empire cinema” reached
an apex (See Chowdhry, Mackenzie, or Shohat & Stam, for example). Such films
projected certain ideologies of empire which maintained the exclusive imperial position,
the racial, intellectual, and moral superiority, as well as the cultural and patriotic pride of
not only the British but also of the entire white western world.
Salman Rushdie writes in his essay, “In Good Faith,” that
The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the
transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the
absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how
newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the
world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion,
change by conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. (394)
The utopian mixture that Rushdie celebrates here is infinitely enticing, but even in his
own novel The Satanic Verses, in his “love-song” to mongrelization, hybridity and to the
newness that stems out of the mishmash of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics,
movies, and songs, there is also cultural dislocation and fragmentation, a sense of unease
14
and anxiety over Western representations of cultural identity. Still, I am reminded of
what Appiah argues in his article “The Case for Contamination.” He suggests, “Cultures
are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through
these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead” (par. 19).
Sometimes changes are seamless; at other times they involve growing pains.
One need only take a cursory look at The Satanic Verses to see the
“hotchpotch”—the “bit of this and the bit of that”—that Rushdie refers to in the quotation
above. The Satanic Verses is full of hybrids. Rushdie playfully refers to figures like
“chimeras” (311, 420, 477) and “manticores” (374) (mythological creatures made up of
the different parts of many animals); when he mentions gardening he almost always
throws in a “chimeran graft” (309,420) (a blend of two different plants); and, the
character, Pamela Chamcha, for example, drinks a bottle of “Chateau Talbot” (188),
which is a French Bordeaux ironically named after an English general. Furthermore,
Rushdie’s reference to “William the Conqueror” (44) not only refers to the leader of the
Norman invasion of England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, but reminds us that much
of what we think of as characteristically English, including the language itself, was
actually shaped by this historical encounter during which England, herself, was
colonized. He makes the same point by introducing the Latin phrase, “Civis Britannicus
sum” (412). Translated, the phrase means, “I am a British citizen.” That it is uttered in
Latin ironically calls attention to the colonial allegiance of Britain to the Roman Empire.
In The Satanic Verses Rushdie employs many allusions to mass media that have
hybrid meanings, that like his characters, exist between two worlds. Some media
references belong not only to the West including those that are imitated by the East or
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borrowed from the East, and others have one meaning in the East and another meaning in
the West. Critic Michael Gorra explains that:
...for Rushdie a self-conscious mimicry becomes a way to shuttle between the
hybrid selves of the postcolonial condition, to acknowledge that one lives in two
worlds at once. And in that acceptance of discontinuity he sees not tragedy but
liberation. It does not help the postcolonial man or woman surmount dependency
so much as it denies its relevance, for without an ideal of cultural purity against
which to measure the self, there can be no mimicry per se. Instead Rushdie posits
a self that is rather like one of his own sentences, Indian and yet English too.
(“Rudyard Kipling” 655)
As Gorra suggests, in reading The Satanic Verses one might note Rushdie’s reference to
the refrain from “The Alabama Song” written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in The
Decline and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930): “I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I
tell you” (3), which is also, recognizably the refrain of Jim Morrison’s cover version of
“Alambama Song (Whisky Bar)” performed by the Doors and also covered by David
Bowie in Space Oddity. One might also recognize the song Gibreel sings in English as
he plummets through the sky, “O, my shoes are Japanese,” (5) from the film Shree 420.
Rushdie discusses this song in his essay, “The Indian Writer in England,” in which he
explains, the song is “Mera Joota Hai Japaani” (music by Ravi Shankar, lyrics by
Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri) and the chorus exclaims:
My shoes are Japanese
These pants are English
The red hat on my head is Russian
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Still my heart is Indian. (“Indian Writer” 75-83)
When Rushdie mentions “Gracekali” (26) the name conjures up the memory of the 1950s
beauty queen, Grace Kelly, and also Kali, the destroyer goddess of Hindu mythology.
Even the mention of a simple film title, like “The Magnificent Seven” (64), is layered
with double meaning. The Magnificent Seven is John Sturges’ remake of the Japanese
filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seventh Samurai. In this scene Rushdie
lightheartedly describes Indian filmmakers who imitate American filmmakers who
themselves remade a Japanese film. Therefore, I begin, in this introduction, with the
novel The Satanic Verses, not because Rushdie’s novel represents a typical response to
Western media in this post-imperial era, but because his novel is a particularly rich
novelistic response to the ambivalences of media imperialism.
Similarly, the two main characters of Rushdie’s novel, Saladin Chamcha and
Gibreel Farishta, represent mirror images of one another. Saladin Chamcha, born
Salahuddin Chamchawala, an actor/voice impersonator who works in the West, is an
Indian expatriate returning to England after his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years.
According to Rushdie, his name, Chamcha, means “a person who sucks up to powerful
people, a yes-man, a sycophant” in colloquial Urdu (“Empire” 8), while the fact that he is
nicknamed a “Brown Uncle Tom” (276), works as an insult that refers to Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s American novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to imply that Chamcha is humiliatingly
deferential to white people. Gibreel Farishta, born Ismail Najmuddin, is an Indian film
star who has dedicated his career to playing Hindu gods, though he himself is a Muslim.
Both Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta’s hybrid identities, their affiliations with
both India and England, are reinforced by their own radio, film and television
17
personalities in which each one has chameleon abilities to represent figures from a wide
range of cultures, religious groups, and imaginations. The narrator says the following
about Saladin Chamcha:
On the radio he could convince an audience that he was Russian, Chinese,
Sicilian, the President of the United States. Once, in a radio play for thirty-seven
voices, he interpreted every single part under a variety of pseudonyms and
nobody ever worked it out. With his female equivalent, Mimi Mamoulian, he
ruled the airwaves of Britain. They had such a large slice of the voiceover racket
that, as Mimi said, “People better not mention the Monopolies Commission
around us, not even in fun.” Her range was astonishing, she could do any age,
anywhere in the world, any point on the vocal register, angelic Juliet to fiendish
Mae West. “We should get married sometime, when you’re free,” Mimi once
suggested to him. “You and me, we could be the United Nations.” (60-61)
Gibreel Farishta is an actor in an entirely different market, “For over a decade and a half
he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country [India] in which,
to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the
most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme” (17). In The Satanic
Verses, Rushdie underscores one similarity between Saladin and Gibreel when an
admiring fan describes Gibreel as equally capable of shedding one self for another. He
says, “My own sympathy for your work arises out of your willingness to portray deities
of every conceivable water. You sir, are a rainbow coalition of the celestial, a walking
United Nations of gods!” (198). It is important to note that each man is described as a
veritable “United Nations,” because as actors, these characters belong anywhere and
18
everywhere throughout the globe. Conjuring up a new persona for both Gibreel and
Saladin is as easy as simply putting on a costume.
In The Satanic Verses, characters like Saladin Chamcha, Mimi Mamoulian, and
Gibreel Farishta are distinguished for their ability to be and become any character, but
such talent is not always a proud or comfortable one. In their ability to try on new
personas, they often lose themselves. Chamcha thinks to himself, “It was true...Saladin
and Mimi were legends of a sort, but crippled legends, dark stars. The gravitational field
of their abilities drew work towards them, but they remained invisible, shedding bodies to
put on voices” (61). He notes that when he was younger, “...each self he tried on, had
seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily
replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now, however, change had
begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden” (64). Gorra points
out that “Rushdie’s Saladin Chamcha can even be seen as a postcolonial version of
[Rudyard Kipling’s] Kim: a professional mimic who can do a thousand English voices
precisely because none of them is authentically his own” (“Rudyard Kipling” 652).
Similarly, the same fan who recognizes Gibreel Farishta as a “walking United Nations of
gods,” furiously accuses him, moments later, of being a, “Charlatan! Poser! Fake! ...
Phoney!” (199). Rushdie’s characters make a living as walking fictions, masqueraders,
and impersonators.
Gibreel and Saladin spend tremendous amounts of time developing their
characters, but Rushdie points out time and time again, that the more difficult work lays
in thinking about who they really are, how they want to be remembered, how the
characters they play on the radio, on television, and in films exploit them as individuals,
19
how such representations might operate strategically to stereotype what it means to be
Indian, how such representations might help solidify Western notions of self and Other,
or how their ethnicity might be exploited in the global marketplace. Both Saladin and
Gibreel seem to grasp the power of the media to disseminate cultural values, ideologies,
and assumptions and how those values, ideologies and assumptions reflect and voice, as
well as shape, cultural consciousness to some degree.
Later in the novel, Saladin considers the ways in which images of ethnicity
are entrenched in patterns of global economic exploitation, and how ethnicity can be
packaged for the marketplace or censored from it. In a conversation with Hal Valance,
the creator of The Aliens Show, the children’s sitcom on which Saladin got his big break,
Saladin suffers through Valence’s rumination about the show’s market potential,
In marketing, parlance, a universe was the total potential market for a given
product or service: the chocolate universe, the slimming universe. The dental
universe was everybody with teeth; the others were the denture cosmos. “I’m
talking,” Valance breathed down the phone in his best Deep Throat voice, “about
the ethnic universe.”
My people again: Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his ill-
fitting drag hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of impermanent
women and children gleamed through barely open doors; and wondered what his
people had done to him now. ... “Audience surveys show,” he [Valance]
breathed, “that ethnics don’t watch ethnic shows. They don’t want ‘em,
Chamcha. They want fucking Dynasty, like everyone else. Your profile’s wrong,
if you follow: with you in the show it’s just too damn racial. The Aliens Show is
20
too big to be held back by the racial dimension. The merchandising possibilities
alone...” (273-74)
Saladin, who argues, “I’ve never felt I belonged to a race” (276) grows increasingly
impatient with the unwelcome identities Valance imposes upon him during this
conversation, as evidenced by the thought, “My people again.” On the surface Saladin
may appear to be on a quest to become “English.” That may be partially true, but what is
more important is Saladin’s quest to create an identity for himself as an Indian in England
that is newer, richer, and more interesting than the traditional stereotypes associated with
the center and the periphery through which Western writers, artists, and filmmakers draw,
blur, and insist upon the differences that separate the Westerner from the Other. Rushdie
recognizes the ways in which issues of identity and representation are underpinned by the
crucial connection between colonialism and mass media and also reveals how it is
possible to be English without also being white. The picture that Rushdie constructs is
one that Kipling—I am sure—would have never imagined.
Here, it is important to stop for a moment to look more closely at the history and
interconnectedness of colonialism and popular culture, of imperialism and mass media.
Empire came to be associated with a genre of literature that Martin Green refers to as “the
light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe”
(3)—the adventure tale. So, beginning in 1719, with Defoe’s novel, empire and
adventure became synonymous in literature. These are the novels, set in exotic locations,
with protagonists who face overwhelming odds and conflicts, and yet manage to meet
one challenge after another through bravery and hard work, intelligence and
perseverance. These are the novels that prepared young men to want to go out into the
21
wilderness, to explore, to exploit, and to rule and about which, JanMohamed writes,
“Instead of being an exploration of the racial Other, such literature merely affirms its own
ethnocentric assumptions; instead of actually depicting the outer limits of ‘civilization,’ it
simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality” (84). While Green
considers Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott and Rudyard Kipling to be “peaks in the
mountain chain of adventure” (xi), Patrick Brantlinger writes also of H. Rider Haggard,
W. E. Henley, and John Davidson (10).
And still, there is a rather long list of writers, who in that two-hundred-year
period, used adventure as a trope to address those blank and unexplored areas on the map
that would grow to be filled in by any number of British explorers. There were the
seafaring writers like Captain Marryat, who in his novel, Masterman Ready (1841),
depicts a family who manages to instruct future colonialists on the proper way to rule a
colony, as the Seagraves develop their own diminutive nation when shipwrecked on a
desert island. At one point in the novel, Mr. Seagrave educates his son about the rise of
the British Empire as it fought off the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and the Dutch, each
in turn, until “the sun is said, and very truly, never to set upon…English possessions; for,
as the world turns round to it, the sun shines either upon one portion or another of the
globe which is a colony to our country” (140). And of course, Marryat was followed by
writers like Frederick Chamier, Edward Howard, and Michael Scott, who emulated his
style (Brantlinger 49) and there was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Cambridge English
professor, whose two-volume Story of the Sea (1895-96) recounts the legend of the
Armada and the “Protestant wind” that conquered it to save England in 1588 (Green
322).
22
Even Tennyson uses adventure as a theme in his poetry. In “Akbar’s Dream”
(1892), for example, he imagines the downfall of the Moghul Empire and the British who
sweep in to bring peace and civility: “From out the sunset poured an alien race,/ Who
fitted stone to stone again, and Truth,/ Peace, Love and Justice came and dwelt therein”
(1448-49), or whose Ulysses uttered the words that imply that duty is “to strive, to seek,
to find, and not to yield” (qtd. in Brantlinger 36). Furthermore, though Brantlinger points
out that, “In fiction the British Empire usually comes in second to domestic concerns”
(11), there is ample evidence that even the domestic novel hinted at the topic of empire.
In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, for example, Colonel Brandon serves in India and
in her novel Mansfield Park, Antigua serves to play a significant role. In Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the subtle background of Mr. Rochester’s ties to the West Indies may
seem incidental, but of course, much has been made of the imperial context since Jean
Rhys authored Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (Brantlinger 12). Even a very quiet novel like
Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) incorporates undercurrents of adventure when
Miss Matty’s brother, Peter, returns from his military career in India and disrupts the
domestic routine of the elderly women at the center of the novel with his yarns about an
exotic world, “The ladies vied with each other who should admire him most; and no
wonder; for their quiet lives were astonishingly stirred up by the arrival from India” and
the stories he tells are “more wonderful…than Sinbad the sailor; and, as Miss Pole said,
[are] quite as good as an Arabian night any evening” (153-54). It is critical to note that
adventure rests below the surface in such domestic tales, after all, the early Victorians did
not think of themselves as imperialists, they simply believed in the virtues of being
British (Brantlinger 44).
23
In fact, it was not until late in the nineteenth-century that the literature associated
with imperialism began to disseminate a particularly aggressive ideology of empire.
Green notes, “We must not expect to find in the adventure novels outright celebrations of
empire; we must not expect to find outright imperial topics tackled; and we must detect
political meanings by interpretation” (9). JanMohamed adds, “While the covert purpose
is to exploit the colony’s natural resources thoroughly and ruthlessly through the various
imperialist practices, the overt aim, as articulated by colonialist discourse, is to ‘civilize’
the savage, to introduce him to all the benefits of Western cultures” (81). In this way,
JanMohamed divides colonialist literature into two categories: the “imaginary” and the
“symbolic” and argues that while the imaginary text evokes the hard and fast machinery
of the Manichean allegory—through which the Westerner never loses his relative upper
hand—the symbolic texts (like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E. M. Forster’s A
Passage to India), willingly inspect European values by contrast to those of the native
(84-85). In all of these imperial texts—from the straight adventure tale to the domestic
novel, the “invasion scare” novels like Sir George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking in
1871 and the anxious genre of spy fiction (Brantlinger 33) and the fantasy novels like
Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1911 The Lost World (Brantlinger 38)—the world appears in terms
of fixed notions of good and evil, where the protagonists rarely doubt their ability to
prevail, to tame the barbarians or claim the big blank spaces on the map for England.
The rise of journalism, particularly in the form of newspapers came at the same
time that the adventure novel and the literature of imperialism reached its peak.
According to Benedict Anderson, “the newspaper is merely an ‘extreme form’ of the
book, a book sold on a colossal scale…Might we say: one-day best sellers?” (34-5).
24
What Anderson notes as primarily important to any discussion of news media is the way
in which newspapers create a sort of solidarity amongst their readers, who are bound to
one another not only through their consumption of the very same news—the neighbors
who pick up their papers at the bottom of the driveway at the same time everyday, the
people we see reading an exact copy of our daily news at a coffee shop, on a train, or
waiting in line—but the way newspapers generate a sense of nationhood through the
stories that appear as most important in the hierarchy of headlines to the community
being served. Anderson comments, “No surprise that the search was on, so to speak, for
a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together…for rapidly
growing numbers of people to think about themselves and others, in profoundly new
ways” (36). There are, of course, profound concerns over the ways in which journalists
report about members of other cultures, particularly those cultures that have recently
become sovereign nations or those that have suffered beneath the oppression of Western
colonialism. David Spurr writes of Western journalists who depict the people of
developing countries as though they all inhabit the same “Third World” space. He
writes:
…one begins to have the impression that…every article about the Third World is
essentially the same article about the same country…The people of this all-
purpose country proudly assert their independence from colonial rule, but they are
forever doing charming things that are “typically French,” like admiring haute
couture, or “typically British,” like playing cricket and having afternoon tea.
Chinese women bobbing their hair, Africans eating ice cream—they are “catching
up” with Western lifestyles, though they cherish their traditions and continue to
25
engage in fascinating rites of voodoo worship and self-flagellation. This
generic…story nods briefly at social problems—illiteracy, famine, revolution,
what have you—but invariably concludes on an upbeat note about progress and
modernization. (51)
Such stories create hierarchies of power in new and subtle vernaculars, whereby one
particular culture’s social problems are mitigated by their interest in emulating Western
styles and Western culture, and through which the traditional dichotomies of East and
West, self and Other, superior and inferior are reinforced, however shrewdly.
By comparison, it is crucial to this project that one of the two most popular
locations for empire films was India, because that is where I have chosen to locate the
literature that I examine in this dissertation. Imperialism was a theme explored by the
cinema as early as 1902, when the first Indian-themed motion picture, Thomas Edison’s
Hindu Fakir, emerged. In this film, India is represented as a mysterious land, full of
strange, frightening, uncivilized and barbaric customs (Chowdhry 40). However, Prem
Chowdhry argues that empire films reached the height of their popularity during the years
1929-1939 (2). Jeffrey Richards describes two cycles of imperial films. The first, he
argues, took place in the 1930s when imperialism still flourished. Such films absorbed
the tropes of colonialism and the medium espoused the justifications for imperialism writ
large for the big screen. Empire cinema spoke for the powerful figures of history
particularly in films that idealized the imperial project as a benevolent “civilizing
mission” intended to curtail ignorance, disease, and tyranny. The trope of the “civilizing
mission” masked the material interests of the imperial nations, translating colonial
intervention and economic exploitation into a struggle against savagery. The second cycle
26
of empire films became popular after the British colonies began to win their
independence, when, for instance, India became a sovereign nation in 1947. The
dismantling of British Imperialism made way for a second cycle of imperial films, which
were nostalgic for empire even if they paid lip service to independence.
Both cycles of empire films generally reflect the late nineteenth-century ideals of
empire. They prefer a nostalgic look back at the pioneering days of empire when
imperialism was largely unchanged and uncontested. Jeffrey Richards writes, “As far as
the cinema is concerned, it will always be 1890 in India” (134). In his book he provides a
thorough survey of empire films and traces how the dogma behind empire cinema was
carefully constructed. He begins his discussion with films like The Four Feathers (1929,
1939), Wee Willlie Winkie (1937), The Drum (1938), and Gunga Din (1939), which have
their roots in literature. These films gave celluloid life to the works of authors like
Kipling (Wee Willie Winkie, Gunga Din, Kim) and Mason (The Four Feathers, The
Drum) who explored the ideas they saw emerging politically in literature. These films
explore concepts like duty and patriotism, which are integral to the imperial vision. Films
like the Tarzan films (1919, 1931, 1932, 1943, 1944, 1948, 1951, 1952), The Return of
Bulldog Drummond (1934), The Four Just Men (1939), Unconquered (1947), and 55
Days at Peking (1962) brought popular and pulp literature, boys’ weeklies and action
heroes to the big screen. These films appealed to young readers and the figures in these
films were larger-than-life; they were gods and heroes who generally suppressed some
plot against British authorities. They instilled the view—that George Orwell described in
his essay on boys’ weeklies, as pre-1914 conservative—which included the notions that,
“there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant
27
comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern that will last forever”
(528). Such ideas were popularized in a set of easily accessible books and then taken to
the extreme in the cinema. Richards notes, for example, that the Tarzan of the books is
an English gentleman, while the Tarzan of the cinema is, “a half-naked noble savage,
living in a tree house ... and speaking in monosyllables. The most famous example of
this is of course: ‘Me Tarzan ... you Jane’” (38). These films established a simplified set
of assumptions about Britain and her world role in a world in which there are clear
boundaries between Right and Wrong.
Other films played off of social values that were established in public schools or
in the military, which made it easier for audiences to identify with the heroes of the
cinema. Films like The Wheel of Life (1930), The Last Outpost (1935), and Another
Dawn (1937) portray army officers who are graduates of the public schools and are
inspired by their love for their schoolmates and by the bonds of school ties. Such
characters are products of public school breeding during which time they learned to keep
a stiff upper lip, to be stoic even when faced by overwhelming odds, and to be motivated
by responsibility, duty, sacrifice, and above all else, brotherhood (Richards 53). The lone
solitary figure in the midst of the jungle, desert, or bands of tribesmen is often seen as an
extension of the public school figure turned officer. Such cinematic military figures take
up the “white man’s burden” to bring civilization to the colonies by way of roads,
railways, telegraphs, schools, hospitals, universities, famine relief, irrigation, peace and
justice. They are assigned to their outposts in India or Africa and are recognizably
imbued with the values of the public school code: self-sacrifice, duty, loyalty and
courage. King of the Khyber Rifles (1929), Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Charge of
28
the Light Brigade (1936), Storm Over Bengal (1938), The Sun Never Sets (1940), Storm
Over Africa (1953), The Scarlet Spear (1955), Pacific Destiny (1956) and Northwest
Frontier (1959) all depict the secret of the British, that a ruler should be loved rather than
feared (Richards 114-34), what Gorra describes as the “imperial embrace” whereby
figuratively a woman is “at once raped and told that she’s loved” (“Rudyard Kipling”
646). The virtual gaze of the cinema made it possible for moviegoers to soar viscerally
about the globe to experience a taste of worldwide travel and imperial conquest.
In addition to flattering the imperial subject as the superior, invulnerable, and
empathetic governing body, films of the imperial era offered a constellation of images
that justified the human costs of imperialism. In such films, Shohat and Stam argue,
“Britain’s material interests in the imperialized world are masked by what Conrad’s
Marlowe would have call ‘redeeming ideas’: the battle against savagery (Wee Willie
Winkie, 1937), the struggle to abolish slavery (Killers of Kilimanjaro, 1959), the fight
against fascism (The Sun Never Sets, 1940)” (126). What all of these films have in
common is that in imperial sagas the world is divided into Black and White, Right verses
Wrong, where Good always triumphs over Evil. By contrast, postcolonial literature
breaks down absolutes and blurs the dichotomies between Right and Wrong, Good and
Evil. Narayan, Mukherjee, Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy all tend to question traditional
assumptions of all kinds so that their novels operate in ways quite contrary to imperial
films.
Through film, for example, Westerners were trained to identify not only with the
cultural values of their own nations but were also instructed to identify, by association,
with the “racial solidarity implied by the imperial project as a whole” (Shohat and Stam
29
119). Thus, as Shohat and Stam explain, English audiences could identify with the heroes
of the French Foreign Legion films and Euro-American audiences could identify with the
heroes of the British Raj, and so on (119). Jeffrey Richards points out that while the
British became masters of the imperial epic, “It was always Hollywood, the dream
factory, which created for ever a completely stylized and mythic England, where nothing
ever changed, where everyone knew his place and where civilized dramas of life and love
could be played out” (107 emphasis mine). The Americans glorified British military
struggles, extolled the soldiers of empire, and endorsed the ideologies of imperialism.
Similarly, the British censorship codes, for example, were applied to film globally
and so American film producers were pressured to adhere to the same policies. In
“Foreign Parts,” Ruth Vasey quotes from the MPPDA Archives of 1928 in which Jason
Joy warned production personnel that the British would not permit “the portrayal of the
white man and woman...in a way that might degrade him or her in the eyes of the native,”
nor would they “permit anything in films tending to incite the natives against the
governing race” (qtd. in Vasey). However, it is important to note, as Prem Chowdhry
does, “that by and large the Indian audience was thought of as an undifferentiated whole,
and popularly projected by British officials as ‘child like,’ ‘deficient in character,’
‘occupying a position of ignorance,’ and ‘moral corruptability’ similar to the Indian
characters in empire cinema” (17). Basically, British officials tended to suggest that if a
film could be read subversively, the colonial audience would be too simple to understand
it that way, but what the novels examined within this dissertation demonstrate is that such
a notion is not only deeply patronizing, it is largely untrue.
30
Thus, British officials believed that imperialism as undertaken by the film
industry could work as a unifying force amongst the filmgoers in the colonies where the
cinema was available. Given that the colonized territories of empire were scattered
throughout the globe, cinema was thought to provide a literal dwelling place for the
diverse races and groups of all the disparate colonies, and to welcome them, however
condescendingly, into what Queen Victoria had called the “imperial family.” Shohat and
Stam argue that in urban centers, cinema-going became an activity for the elite of the
colonies. By having access to the cinema they were invited into the matrix of the
European empire, if only on the margins. Taking into account that the first movie theaters
constructed in the colonies were built in urban centers: Baghdad, Bombay, and Cairo, for
example, and that they were associated with Europeans and the westernized colonial
bourgeoisie, the elite film patrons of the colonies then, came to identify themselves with
“their” empire (119). Because literacy is not a prerequisite for the cinema, British
officials believed that while there was scarcely a reading public for imperial fictions
throughout the colonial world, there was an eager audience for imperial films that
disseminated similar ideologies.
Prem Chowdhry makes the Indian audience of empire films the center of her
historical inquiry into Hollywood and British cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Though
there is no empirical or statistical data about cinemagoers and cinema attendance during
this period, Chowdhry produces a careful analysis of the colonial audiences for Western
films in India during that decade. Chowdhry manages to construct a convincing record
about the level with which Indian audiences participated in watching and responding to
empire films. By taking everything from archival material, police commissioners’
31
reports, Legislative Assembly and House of Commons debates, to articles, news items,
film reviews, daily newspapers from both Britain and colonial India, letters, film journals,
film propaganda and resolutions of the Motion Picture Association to reconstruct who
must have been situated amongst the Indian spectators of Western films, she argues that
the “Indian audience for cinema was a rapidly growing one” (13).
She argues, too, that the introduction of sound technology in 1931 revolutionized
the potential of empire films to reach elite and urban audiences where at least two
theaters in Bombay screened Western films regularly. She suggests, however, that this
limited viewership did not apply to Western adventure films, films that Hollywood
coined “world audience films” (14), because the spectacular action of such films
breached the language barrier. Appiah explains that even today, “The Hollywood
blockbuster has a special status around the world; but here, as American movie critics
regularly complain, the nature of the product—heavy on action sequences, light on clever
badinage—is partly determined by what works in Bangkok and Berlin” (109). In the
1927-1928 Indian Cinematograph Committee Report it was noted that:
There are certain types of western films which appeal to all classes and
communities ... The bulk of the population ... which is insufficiently acquainted
with the English language and with western ideas, enjoys films with plenty of
action, especially comic and action films ... they derive their entertainment from
watching the ‘stunts’, comic or adventurous. If there is plenty of action they can
follow the sequences of events, and they are very quick at grasping the
significance of the scenes and picking up the story. The heavy applause which is
heard from the cheap seats when the hero administers summary justice to the
32
villain or rescues the heroine in the nick of time shows a proper appreciation of
the events and is seldom at fault. (21-2)
Films featuring Indian characters were immensely popular: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,
Gunga Din, The Drum, for example. Such films, it has already been shown,
encompassed the explicit message of colonialism and depicted the moral, social and
physical domination of the colonized by the colonizers who were of course, only acting
out of duty, self-sacrifice, and loyalty to their governments.
Chowdhry observes that by 1935 more than half of the films screened in India
were foreign films. Even in smaller suburban theaters that had previously only shown
Indian films, the demand for Western films was greater than the supply. She notes that
the audience for cinema in India extended to include audiences of different classes. By
1939, there were 1265 permanent movie houses in India and 500 touring ones and
traveling cinemas reached even the interior, rural areas, moving from village to village
for one-night showings. When Indian films were unavailable, these traveling cinemas
often showed second-hand Western films which could be purchased on the cheap, so that
while Indian audiences may not have seen empire films first-run, they did indeed see
them (Chowdhry 13-16). Chowdhry concludes that, “the audience for western films,
especially for the high-adventure genre, was clearly not limited to the educated middle
class but drew its viewership from different segments of Indian society” (17). In the
Northwest Frontier Province, for example, villagers attended films in the same cinema
houses as British army officials and when rustic villagers flocked into the city to stay
with relatives during the harsh winter months, they too went to the cinema (Chowdry 16-
17).
33
Chowdhry does not, however, contend that these colonial audiences were
composed of passive viewers who allowed Western ideologies of domination and
colonial rule to simply wash over them. Chowdhry provides an excerpt from a letter
written to the editor of the London Times, by “a lady residing in India,” on September 4,
1923. In that letter, the lady in question states,
I have myself seen a film in which a perfectly impossible man—supposed to be an
Englishman—offends an Indian [Native American] by making love to his squaw,
and the Indian finally gets him and ties him to a post, where he starves to death.
This was greeted by applause by the Indians [natives of India] present. I saw
another film where a drunken guest at a wedding knocks down a Negro—the
Negro afterwards murders him. Again great applause from the natives. These are
the cheapest, commonest films and are all we get to see in India ... The Indians go
more and more to the cinema and must be thinking the British a nation to despise.
(qtd. in Chowdhry 20)
Chowdhry also points out, that as a matter of fact, Indian audiences were known to leave
the cinema hall when the British national anthem was played at the end of a feature (26).
Such actions imply that the colonial audiences were ever aware that the cinema was used
as propaganda by British authorities and that projecting imperialist images to Indian
audiences often provoked sharp negative reactions.
By 1936, the government of India began insisting that film producers in the U.S.
and in the UK be more careful about the content of their films. Their instructions were
far more detailed than those of MPPDA Archives of 1928. They threatened to censor or
refuse films, “based on episodes in British Indian history or stories in the Kipling
34
tradition,” films that “show quarrelling or fighting between Europeans and Indians or
between Hindus and Muslims,” films “in which Indian religion or social customs are
brought into ridicule or contempt, for example, films tending to overemphasize the
backwardness of certain classes of people,” films “in which an Indian is portrayed as the
villain and a European as the hero,” as well as films “which generally depict Indians as
an inferior race, with a ‘slave mentality’, cringing and dominated by a superior white
race” (qtd. Chowdhry 37). In short, they threatened to censor or refuse films produced in
the tradition of the empire films. Still, the films of Britain and Hollywood seemed
relentless. In 1942, the British film producer, Alexander Shaw, who had spent a year in
India pleaded,
But please remember, India belongs to you and me and the next Englishman. It is
no good you sitting back and being funny about Pukka Sahibs and the cabinet’s
attitude to India. Indians don’t laugh at you any more, they take you very
seriously. (qtd. in Chowdhry 44).
Indeed, the colonial Indian audiences were instrumental in shaping that second wave of
empire films that continued to disseminate imperial attitudes even after the British empire
formally ended. The message may have been softer, or more indirect, but the audience
still needed to be won over.
Shohat and Stam purport that, “The colonial/imperial paradigm did not die with
the formal end of colonialism ... one could speak of a ‘submerged’ imperial presence in
many films” (134). One only needs to look at the plethora of empire films that were
remade after independence: Tom Brown’s School Days (1939, 1950), Goodbye Mr. Chips
(1939, 1970), and Kim (1951, 1984), to name a few. Films of the Raj nostalgia genre,
35
Staying On (1980), Heat and Dust (1982), Gandhi (1982), Passage to India (1984), have
been expressly criticized by Salman Rushdie who denounces them in his essay, “Outside
the Whale” as “the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image” (91), forming “the
artistic counterpart of the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain” (92). Shohat
and Stam argue that Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi as a, “spectacular epic about an
ascetic, a Triumph of the Will for pacifists, pursues the ‘Great Man’ view of history,
subtly prettifying the British role” (136). Both Rushdie and Shohat and Stam note
television series that perform similar functions. Rushdie includes the TV series The
Jewel in the Crown in his condemnation of Raj nostalgia and Shohat and Stam mention
that even a seemingly innocuous television program like Gilligan’s Island takes place on
an island “surrounded by barbarian tribes” (134).
Television, in comparison to film, affords an even wider variety of viewpoints
than those offered by the cinema. The television viewer is bombarded with sounds and
images that spiral out from film and video cameras, tape recorded soundtracks, direct
feeds of both sight and chatter, which converge in an instant through satellite
transmission. Television has an edge over its sluggish cousin, the cinema, in the speed
and deftness with which it covers the world. Images of distant lands can be broadcast
instantaneously. Cultural values are iterated and reinforced, debated and rejected
simultaneously. Advertisements and their accompanying jingles and slogans create
immediate desires. Herbert Schiller, one of the premiere critics of media or cultural
imperialism claims that through television, the “imagery and cultural perspectives of the
ruling sector in the center...shape and structure consciousness throughout the system at
large” (qtd. in Strelitz 251).
36
Recent advances in television technology have resulted in the ability to preside
virtually over the world through the television set. Shohat and Stam argue that:
The smaller screen, while preventing immersion in a deep enveloping space,
encourages in other ways a kind of narcissistic voyeurism. Larger than the figures
on the screen, we quite literally oversee the world from a sheltered position—all
the human shapes parading before us in TV’s insubstantial pageant are scaled
down to Lilliputian insignificance, two-dimensional dolls, their height rarely
exceeding a foot. (138)
Similarly, in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie seems to suggest that the television set allows
us all to be armchair conquistadors and everything on the television eventually manages
to be given the same amount of importance. Saladin Chamcha admits that,
He watched a good deal of television with half an eye, channel-hopping
compulsively, for he was a member of the remote control culture of the present ...
he too, could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the
composite video monster his button-pushing brought into being...what a leveller
this remote-control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth-century; it
copped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set’s
emissions, commercials, murders, gameshows, the thousand and one varying joys
and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired equal weight ... he, Chamcha,
could lounge back in his Parker-Knoll recliner chair and let his fingers do the
chopping. (419-20)
Chamcha thinks to himself, “If we turned these devices upon ourselves we’d discover
more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of” (534). His observation
37
raises an issue of great significance. The television allows us, more often, to ignore what
is most important in the world, which is a tragedy considering that television could be an
avenue through which one can learn a great deal about other nations, cultures, ideas,
politics, and values.
Looking at the infrastructure of television reveals that the cultural hierarchy that
Jeffrey Richards discusses in regard to empire films, with “western civilizations at the
top, followed by those of the East” (187), is literally played out in the accessibility of
media. Our understanding of national development in Third World contexts has been
based on historically incorrect economic theories of underdevelopment in which it is
assumed that all countries were equally poor initially and that all countries have advanced
technologically at the same pace. Indian television, Doordarshan, is state-owned and
state-controlled. It was first introduced in September of 1959. At that time, the only
station was the Delhi Kendra, which broadcast programs for a couple of hours a day on
one channel. In time the reach of television was expanded to include broadcasting
centers in Bombay (1972), Srinagar (1973), Amritsar (1973), Calcutta (1975), and
Lucknow (1975) (Mankekar 301) and this information ought to reinforce the notion that
the “global” in globalization, does not mean universal.
The notion of media imperialism emerged in the 1960s (Kraidy and Murphy 300).
Not only did the concept of media imperialism presuppose that Western cultural values
such as consumerism were being expressed through the many available manifestations of
media and advertising, but also that such values were intentionally directed at advancing
nations to alter and upset traditional Third World values for the purpose of material
exploitation. Altschull explains that:
38
With the help of newspapers, and especially television advertising, capitalists
were seeking to subject their former colonies to a different kind of exploitation.
They were attempting to blot out the native histories of the new nation-states, to
destroy their cultures and their traditions, and replace them with the mechanized
consumer society they had created in industrialized lands. It was a different form
of exploitation of the proletariat, and its spearhead was the press and the
information industry. (153)
For critics of cultural imperialism, the underlying dynamic suggests that in the world
system of capitalism there is a center that includes the multinational corporations of
Europe and the United States and a periphery, which includes the nations of the
developing world. In Cosmopolitanism, Appiah explains that the critics of media
imperialism point out that when it comes to the Euro-American multinational
corporations, “The products they sell around the world promote the interests of capitalism
in general. They encourage consumption of not just films, television, magazines but of
the other non-media products of multinational capitalism” (108). What these critics have
to say may be true, but Appiah is apt to point out that researchers have found that, “if
there is a local product...many people prefer it, especially when it comes to television”
and secondly that “how people respond to these American products depends on their
existing cultural context” (109-110). What Appiah’s research demonstrates is that
cultural consumers can resist.
Still, Western media influences are not just exploitative in their message,
developing nations often have no opportunities, no media infrastructure with which to
39
disseminate their own cultures and traditions. In his essay, “Outside the Whale,” Rushdie
remarks:
Let me add only that stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture
being stereotyped; or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to
counterpunch against the stereotype. If the TV screens of the West were regularly
filled by equally hyped, big-budget productions depicting the realities of India one
could stomach the odd M.M. Kaye [Kaye is the author of the inherently racist
book used as the basis for the TV serial, The Far Pavilions]. (89)
As Rushdie suggests, there is indeed a great imbalance in the control, composition,
allocation, and substance of media and the power, arrangement, allotment, and subject
matter of media in advancing nations, which cannot compete with the West. On April 22,
1990 (otherwise known that year as Earth Day), Time Warner revealed its new motto:
“The World is Our Audience” (Sreberny-Mohammadi 343). While this motto strikes an
imperial chord in that it promises to propagate Western values across the globe, it also
dismisses altogether those cultures that have no access to television. Is Time Warner
suggesting that places without media infrastructures are then, not part of our world?
For many of the nation-states that emerged in the second half of the twentieth
century, it seems that the intense and localized administrations officially ended, but in
practice those administrations have merely shifted to include more indirect and global
surveillance of political and economic development, control over education programs as
well as economic strangle-holds in developing nations (“African Socialism” 4-6). Many
critics point out that the end result for these newly sovereign nations is ultimately
40
frustration at the failure of independence to meet their expectations and their desires, a
general disappointment in becoming a modern nation. Daniel Lerner explains that:
The mass media have been used to stimulate the people in some sense. It does so
by raising their levels of aspiration for the good things of the world, for a better
life. No adequate provision is made, however, for raising the levels of
achievement. Thus people are encouraged to want more than they can possibly
get, aspirations outrun achievements, and frustrations spread. (866)
Though the vast political and military administrations of colonialism have come to a
formal end, the media industry continues to be influential in perpetuating Western
superiority, in maintaining the colonial/imperial paradigm, and in disseminating agendas
through which the postcolonial subject is still demonized for his otherness.
With the traditional, limited conceptions of representation, one possible solution
might be to put cameras in the hands of the often-misrepresented postcolonial citizens of
this world and to allow them to show us the world as they see it. We are a long way from
putting such a solution into practice. However, it is not that Indian mass media fail to
represent the world. In fact, according to its website, All India Radio—which began in
1927 with limited broadcasting in private radio clubs—has expanded its reach to 223
broadcasting centers that “inform, educate, and entertain the masses” in 27 languages (17
national and ten foreign). Despite his short story, “The Free Radio,” in which Rushdie
spins his imaginative take on Indira Gandhi’s alleged sterilization campaign—during
which the government of India promised “one brand-new first-class battery-operated
transistor radio” (25) to everyone willing to submit to population controls—according to
41
its website, All India Radio covers 99.13% of India’s populace. Indian television and
Bollywood cinema are also highly successful within India as a nation.
So, one might ask: why study novels exclusively? There is the obvious answer, in
that artistic forms have informed and been informed by one another for centuries. For
instance, Michael McKeon notes “the evident links between literate and visual media,
between the novel, photography and film” (661). And, Keith Cohen observes “how
powerful the precedent of one art could be for the practitioners of another, how one set of
codes became the common tools of artists working in widely disparate fields” (702).
There is the logistical answer in that we, in the West, certainly see less Indian television,
we see less Bollywood cinema, and we certainly hear less All India Radio than we see
Anglophone South Asian fiction on the shelves of our bookstores. Arguably, in the West,
the English language is the magic radio, magic television program, or magic feature film,
through which the Western world can begin to converse with the East. Furthermore, as
Chaudhuri suggests when he describes the novel as “a nation metaphor” (par. 8), the
novel has been the vehicle—both in the West and in India—for reflecting upon large-
scale questions of nation.
In his essay, “In Good Faith,” Salman Rushdie writes that The Satanic Verses is a
novel that seems to ask, “You call us devils?” He then goes on to answer, “Very well,
then, here is the devil’s version of the world, of ‘your’ world, the version written from the
experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness” (403).
Rushdie seeks to upset the tradition of the colonial/imperial paradigm. That Rushdie has
no easy answers is what makes his novel so refreshing, so new, so full of possibility. In
his novel, demons can do the work of angels.
42
That The Satanic Verses and the other four novels examined in these pages are
defiant and audacious, that they create new worlds, does indeed give us something to
rejoice; that these novels recognize that imperial rule comes not only in the form of
traditional administrations, but rather, in a variety of both overt and subtle manifestations,
gives us something to consider carefully. In The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr defines
colonization as, “a form of self-inscription onto the lives of a people who are conceived
as an extension of the landscape,” and goes on to explain that for the colonizer, “it
becomes a question of establishing authority through the demarcation of identity and
difference” (7). As the authors I study in this dissertation appreciate, these self-
inscriptions and demarcations did not simply disappear when scores of former colonies
emerged as newly independent nation-states in the period after World War II, but their
novels seek to redefine the world in the new spaces that exist outside of the demarcations
between East and West.
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“Written on the Brow of Some”: Inscription and Erasure in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide
Having nothing else to do, he started counting the stars. He said to
himself, “I shall be rewarded for this profound service to humanity. People will
say, ‘Here is the man who knows the exact number of stars in the sky. If you
have any trouble on that account, you had better consult him. He will be your
night guide for the skies.’ He told himself, “The thing to do is to start from a
corner and go on patch by patch. Never work from the top of the horizon, but
always the other way.” He was evolving a theory. He started to count from
above a fringe of Palmyra trees on his left-hand side, up the other side.
“One...two...fifty-five...” He suddenly realized that if he looked deeper a new
cluster of stars came into his view; by the time he assimilated it into his
reckoning, he realized he had lost sight of his starting point and found himself
entangled in hopeless figures.
—R. K. Narayan, The Guide (13-14)
The quotation above can be read as a set of instructions for reading R. K.
Narayan’s novel The Guide. Like the protagonist, Raju, who finds that his simple theory
for counting the stars unravels when he examines the night sky more closely, the tangled
narrative that brings Raju to life is frequently interrupted and revised to erase previously
held assumptions or to disclose new revelations. This ambiguity masterfully evokes the
impurities and transformations as well as the dilemmas and uncertainties that come of
cross-cultural encounters. There is, perhaps, no greater ambiguity than that with which
44
the novel ends. Though the bulk of Narayan’s novel is a narrative through which Raju
tells his own flawed life story, I will organize this chapter around the final pages of the
novel, during which a third-person narrative describes what appears to be Raju’s
ascension into sainthood, the crowd that assembles—“like swarms of ants converging on
a lump of sugar” (215)—to witness a miracle, and the intervention of a single American
film producer who threatens to misrepresent an entire culture to a Western audience.
Reading The Guide is, indeed, like trying to count the stars; it is easy to lose sight
of the starting point. Who is the real Raju? Is he the self-described individual whose
flaws can be traced back to the railways built during his childhood? Is he, as he
confesses, only a trickster, a con-artist, a chameleon of sorts who survives by embodying
one role after another? Or, does he become, in the end, a genuine spiritual leader, a holy
man, a sadhu, a guru, a saint? Does he live up to his title, Swamiji? Does the
carnivalesque crowd—full of believers and families, government officials and
representatives from the Health Department, street vendors and journalists from around
the world—even care about Raju’s true identity? At the close of Narayan’s novel, a
reader is faced not only with these overarching questions, but also with one particularly
rich example of cross-cultural interchange when James J. Malone, an American film and
T.V. show producer from California, introduces himself to Raju and explains, “I have
come to shoot this subject, take it back to our country, and show it to our people there”
(216). The intervention of the American film producer is significant, because the mere
presence of James J. Malone provides an opportunity for a reader to examine the unique
challenges that result from interactions between individuals from very different parts of
the world.
45
In his 2006 book, Kwame Anthony Appiah defines an ideal that he calls
“cosmopolitanism” and he explains that:
…there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is
the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those
to whom we are related by ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a
shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human
life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices
and beliefs that lend them significance. (xv)
In this chapter, I will argue that through the brief and resonant depiction of Raju’s contact
with Malone, Narayan illustrates the Western media’s attempted and presumptive—but,
crucially failed—cosmopolitanism. If the exchange between Malone and Raju is read
carefully and without any preconceived notions, the text itself neither suggests that
Malone has arrived for humanitarian purposes nor for sinister ones. However, while it
seems clear that Malone does have a sense of obligation to others at a distance, he does
not appear to take the particularity of the lives, practices, and beliefs that are local to
Mangala seriously enough to embody what it means to be a true cosmopolitan, by
Appiah’s definition.
It is precisely what we do not know about James J. Malone that makes all the
difference in understanding his approach to Raju. We can imagine that Malone has heard
of the devastating effects of the drought in Mangala and that his sense of obligation to
others has drawn him to the small village, where perhaps he learned about a holy man’s
fast. We might imagine, for instance, that perhaps Malone hoped to interview Raju as a
way through which to learn more about the customs and spiritual beliefs of the people for
46
whom Raju represents hope. However, as Malone busies himself with his cables,
cameras, and microphones, it is much easier to imagine that his cameras are only poised
to capture—with great Western wonder—the exotic spirituality of the East, of a people
who believe that a holy man can fast and with his penance make the rains fall. Malone
might be like all of the other vendors who have congregated in the small town of
Mangala for profit. Geoffrey Kain explains, “The business-minded capitalize on
him…Special buses bring spectators to the ‘event,’ new shops emerge spontaneously,
hawkers sell balloons, sweets and whistles, and an American film and television
producer, interviews Raju…” (54). If Malone has truly arrived only to profit from Raju’s
story, then perhaps Malone only feigns his interest in Raju to make a buck. But, Narayan
leaves the particulars open-ended and because Malone is vague about what has drawn
him to the small village of Mangala, the brief conversation between Raju and Malone can
be read in a multitude of ways.
Narayan’s own thoughts give us a bit of a clue as to how we might interpret the
intervention of Malone. Perhaps his recorded thoughts in My Dateless Diary, which
suggest that East-West interactions can often seem petty and his quotation of Aldous
Huxley’s statement, “What a pity. When two nations get together they get the worst of
each other—Rope-trick and such things from your country and gadgets and mere
technology from the West” (132), prepare us to look at the encounter between Raju and
Malone cynically. It is true that in The Guide, Narayan’s treatment of Malone can seem
wry and satirical. The narrator suggests that, “the large pink-faced arrival was a novel
change in the routine” (216), which hints that Malone and Raju are only superficially
interested in one another. O. P. Mathur explains that,
47
We are given only a glimpse of his [Malone’s] superficial smartness and business-
like manners, and the questions he puts to the Swami betray his complete lack of
understanding or sympathy for, him or for the cause for which the fast has been
undertaken. He is all polish with no suggestion of any depth… (73)
I agree to some extent with Mathur’s assessment of Malone, but, Mathur judges him
harshly. It is not that Malone lacks sympathy—or, as Appiah suggests, a sense of
obligation—it is instead that he sees Raju only as a swami capable of miracles, rather
than as a particular human life, whose individual experiences, beliefs and practices have
led him to undertake such a fast.
Malone certainly attracts a great deal of attention to himself as he takes “pictures
of the people and the temple, and of the Swami from various angles and distances” (217).
Furthermore, despite his polite gestures—a courteous Namasté, or Indian greeting upon
first meeting Raju, a gracious request for permission to film in his temple, and several
well-mannered expressions of gratitude or apology—Malone seems content to simply
exchange platitudes with Raju by asking banal questions like: “Tell me, how do you like
it here?”; “Do you feel weak?”; “Can fasting abolish all wars and bring world peace?”;
and “Have you always been a Yogi?”(217). Malone’s broad and open-ended questions
serve well as a place to start a conversation, but the fact that Malone never delves more
carefully into Raju’s life makes the exchange seem trivial. Malone asks nothing, for
instance, about the drought conditions in Mangala, about the villagers of the town, or
about their faith in Raju. He also fails to examine more thoroughly why Raju has taken
on his fast in the first place and how Raju has come to be known as Swami.
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If Malone’s questions appear to inquire into the inconsequential, it is also
important to note that Raju seems delighted to perform for the camera. Uma
Parameswaran comments that at these moments, “Raju is fully in character, building
himself up to be a giant, and finding pleasure in succeeding” (213). In response to the
question, “Tell me, how do you like it here?” Raju answers with ironic ambivalence, “I
am only doing what I have to do; that’s all. My likes and dislikes do not count” (217).
Parameswaran contends that Raju’s answer is, “characteristic of a man who has been
living off his tongue all his life” (213). When Malone asks, “Can fasting abolish all wars
and bring world peace?” Raju says, “Yes” (217), although nothing in the novel suggests
that he could possibly believe his own answer. Mathur argues that, “The clear-eyed R. K.
Narayan could never have wanted us to believe in such inanities” (75). Furthermore,
after Malone inquires, “Have you always been a Yogi?” Raju replies, “Yes; more or less”
(217), a response that M. K. Naik dismisses as a “brazen-faced lie” (653).
However, after reading these same passages, several critics have come to very
different conclusions. John Rothfork, for example, argues that when “the film maker
asks him if he has ‘always been a Yogi?’ The Sadhu says ‘Yes; more or less.’ And so he
has been” (78). Cynthia vanden Driesen declares, “What is important is his belief that his
sacrifice will benefit the community. So the bogus sadhu becomes a true saint” (168).
Even Mathur admits, “But perhaps there is another way too of looking at it” (77). She
goes on to argue that Raju says, “truthfully and touchingly to the American T.V. man, ‘I
am only doing what I have to do; that’s all. My likes and dislikes do not count’” (77,
emphasis mine). So, then, does the American filmmaker get to the truth after all? By the
end of the novel, have all of Raju’s youthful errors been erased by his service to the
49
villagers of Mangala? Or, is a reader to assume that Raju’s lengthy confession, which
fills up nearly two-thirds of the novel, is R. K. Narayan’s way of setting things right, of
reconciling Raju’s public identity as a holy man with his private identity as one particular
human being who has faltered along the way?
The most ingenious aspect of Narayan’s novel The Guide, is not that the novel
presents one story or another, it is that Narayan makes it possible for a reader to
experience many versions of the same story simultaneously. Shirley Chew maintains
that, “The last scene with all its clusters of activity round one quiet indomitable will, its
sensitive balancing of seriousness and humour, its grasp of life’s ‘multitudinousness’
... publishes Narayan’s vision magnificently” (156). Like Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,
The Guide too, “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that
comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics”
(394). If there is one thing that we can say for certain about Raju, it is that in his effort to
please others, he has time and again, embraced those who could teach him to see the
world from another angle. At the end of the novel, a reader has the sense that Raju—who
willingly becomes a part of many particular human lives—is a true cosmopolitan, while
Malone—who distances himself behind his camera equipment—is not.
By filming Raju’s ascension into sainthood, does Malone indelibly rewrite Raju’s
life? The answer to this question depends upon how each individual reader feels about
things like media, cross-cultural conversations, and cultural exchange. However, by
leaving the end of The Guide open to interpretation, Narayan, in part, requires that his
reader reconsider the entire text to see the many ways in which Raju’s life is written and
rewritten throughout the entire novel. This way, Narayan asks his reader to notice that
50
the truth about Raju’s life belongs somewhere between the dichotomies of each reader’s
perception of Right and Wrong. Raju’s life is, like Rushdie’s love-song in The Satanic
Verses, “mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that” (“In Good Faith” 394); it is
as difficult to pin down as it is to count the stars.
Here, it is important to go back to the beginning—of the novel at least—to see
how even the narrative techniques at play within The Guide manufacture, in subtle ways,
the same kind of elusiveness at play in the final moments of the tale, which are so
dramatically underscored by Malone’s cinematographic interest in Raju. Fakrul Alam
notes that, “the writer must have deliberated at great length on the combinations and
various angles that would most effectively project Raju’s life for readers before hitting on
the right mix of narrative devices employed” (16). Like Malone, who photographs Raju,
“from various angles and distances” (217), Narayan too must employ the strategies of a
cinematographer to achieve the desired abstractions that prove vital to his novel. Raju’s
story is revealed by two distinct narrative points of view: one is a third-person omniscient
narrator and the other is Raju’s first-person narrative confession. The first narrative
voice tells a story in the present time and begins when Raju is perceived, or perhaps
mistaken for, some sort of holy man. The second voice discloses Raju’s past. It begins
as a narrative flashback, but the reader later learns that this second voice is actually part
of Raju’s confidential admission that he may not be who he appears to be. At times, these
two voices playfully and resonantly overlap to reveal, perhaps, how Raju’s present
situation is constituted by his past, or perhaps to divulge Raju’s inner character, to make
public what Raju may not even know about himself.
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The third person point of view weaves a sense of impartiality into the narrative,
while the first person point of view—which is more intimate and confiding—allows a
reader to empathize with Raju on a more personal level. Both narratives are sensitively
compassionate and forgiving of the characters. Sita Kapadia explains that, “The
omniscient voice—wiser, brighter, more sophisticated—is none the less just as indulgent,
tolerant of human weaknesses and individual peculiarities as any self-aware and self-
absorbing first-person oration” (72). More importantly, the two narratives provide what
Imitaz Habib describes as, “a sophisticated literary performance that continually re-
invents itself” (40). From a technical point of view, it is important to notice how both of
these narratives expose Raju’s innermost feelings and braid together to inform each other.
Sometimes, the omniscient narrator finishes Raju’s thoughts, as it does the first
time the first-person narrative is introduced. At that moment, the third-person narrator
interjects with a parenthetical aside to explain, “Raju said in the course of narrating his
life-story to this man who was called Velan at a later stage” (7). At other times, the
narrator seems to understand what Raju is feeling, as when the omniscient narrator
describes how Raju addressed the village children. The narrator begins with an objective
statement, “He spoke to them on godliness, cleanliness, spoke on Ramayana, the
characters in the epics; he addressed them on all kinds of things” (40). Then, in the
following sentence, the narrator examines Raju’s thoughts, “He was hypnotized by his
own voice; he felt himself growing in stature as he saw the upturned faces of the children
shining in the half-light when he spoke” (40). However, about the end of the novel, after
Raju’s first-person narrative is over and done with, Britta Olinder aptly points out that
“From that point onwards the author also excludes himself entirely from Raju’s mental
52
activity observing him only from the outside. Instead he concentrates on a description of
the popular attractions developing in ironic contrast around the saint” (471). Once Raju
has risen to celebrity status, even the third-person narrative, becomes entirely objective as
though the final moments of the novel are being told through the dispassionate lens of
Malone’s camera.
If Malone, at the end of the novel, appears to inscribe Raju’s life with new
meaning by filming him, (and by new meaning, I mean to suggest that if Malone offers a
definitive answer as to whether or not Raju is the real thing), it is important to note the
many ways in which this sort of inscription takes place over and again throughout the
narrative. Keith Garebian points out that, “early in the plot there are frequent
interruptions, pauses, and breaks in the narrative” (74). Each of these demonstrates how
Raju’s identity is continuously renewed, revised, wiped clean, and restored over time.
Garebian goes on to explain that these narrative disruptions, “accord well with Raju’s
agitation and changes in identity” (74) and that, “The impression conveyed by this
sequence of recurring interruptions is one of compulsive momentum—indicative of
Raju’s imbalance” (75). In the first fifty pages alone, the narrative is interrupted thirteen
times and to various degrees—at times to change narrative points of view and at others to
shift to another time in Raju’s life. One will notice that the novel itself begins with an
interruption. The first words of the novel are, after all, “Raju welcomed the intrusion”
(3). It is true that the narrative stream of The Guide is suspended perhaps even more
often than Raju changes character.
He is, at first, a wise mystic when Velan looks upon his face, “with intense
respect” (4). A paragraph later, he is an ex-prisoner, when he remembers the barber, who
53
shaved his face and asked, “Coming out, I suppose?” (4). Two pages later, he is
reinvented when the same barber exclaims, “You look like a maharaja now” (6). Soon
after, he is a man in love as he tells Velan, “My troubles would not have started…but for
Rosie” (7). And, in an instant, he is a tourist-guide as he talks about how, “The railways
got into my blood very early in life” (8). Moments later, he is a young boy trying to
please his religious father, “I washed myself at the wall, smeared holy ash on my
forehead, stood before the framed pictures of gods hanging high up on the wall, and
recited all kinds of verse in a loud, ringing tone” (9). And then, with little warning, he is
back in the present, counseling Velan, when his memories are broken up with five brief
words from his disciple, “I have a problem, sir” (11). Later in the novel, when Raju
consciously begins to divulge his story in a whisper into Velan’s ear to clarify that he is
not, in fact, a saint, but rather an average human being just like anybody else, we are
reminded that as readers we have already learned about Raju’s growing up in the midst of
porters, signalers, and stationmasters, about the roles he has played as railway shop-
keeper, tourist-guide, lover, business-manager, and model prisoner before being mistaken
as a spiritual leader. We are reminded, through Raju’s hushed confession, of the many
ways in which the frequent narrative interruptions have already revealed his secret and of
the way that Malone, with all of his camera equipment and Western technology, appears
to miss these facts.
When Raju makes his confession, he does so with the same survival instinct that
compels him to take on all of the other roles he has embodied throughout his lifetime. As
a young boy living in the town of Malgudi, he seeks to please his father by embracing his
religion, by allowing his father to teach him the Tamil alphabet, and by attending the
54
horrible pyol school on Kabir Lane with the “old man, who habitually addressed his
pupils as donkeys and traced their genealogies on either side with thoroughness” (22),
because his father objected to the Albert Mission School, where he was certain they tried
to “convert our boys into Christians” (21). As a teenager, he welcomes the role of
shopkeeper in the railway shop, where his father felt “strange” (36), because by then,
Raju was already learning to adapt, to reshape himself for a changing India.
Raju adjusts with the landscape. In Malgudi there are subtle changes in the
topography, which reflect the impact of colonial rule. Pushpa Parekh argues that,
Like the hybrid cities of major Indian Metropolis, Malgudi contains both realities:
the persistence of an indigenous way of life as well as the colonizer’s presence.
In this light, Malgudi can be seen as a topographical compounding of colonized
cities…in which Victorian architectural complexes and classical South Indian
temples, mosques, palaces and market places exist in amazing proximity. (181)
Malgudi is, indeed, as Parekh describes. Amongst the many precolonial markers: the
Tamil alphabet (9), the Mempi Hills (19), ancient silk saris (20), Kabir Lane (21), the
Sarayu River (23), the Anand Bhavan Hotel and Iswara Temple (56), Nallappa’s Grove
(57), the Taj (76), the Ramayana (121), and the Taluk office (128), for example, there are
many signs of colonialism too, which slyly articulate the collisions of histories and
cultures: Trunk Road (8), Albert Mission Boys (21) and the Albert Mission College (41),
Market Square (47), Ellaman Street (56), the North Extension (56) and the New
Extension as well as the statue of Sir Frederick Lawley (121). Driesen argues,
It might even seem that Raju’s misdemeanors grow directly out of the vicissitudes
of circumstance. He is a victim of the coming of modern ways of life to Malgudi.
55
First, he picks up bad language from the railway workers, then as his father’s
commitments increase, he drops out of school. (169)
But to Raju, these changes mean no great sacrifice. Like the hybridized terrain, Raju is
also fundamentally changed by Western influences. He explains, “I felt at home on the
railway platform, and considered the stationmaster and porter the best company for man,
and their railway talk the most enlightened. I grew up in their midst” (8). These
experiences explain, perhaps, why at the end of the novel, Raju is so at ease with and
interested in Malone. Furthermore, these accounts help to explain how Raju grows into
the being that he is at the novel’s close. Beginning when his father’s business expands
and Raju declares joyfully that it helped him “achieve a very desirable end—the dropping
off of my school unobtrusively” (36). Raju’s instincts for survival, demonstrate that he
would hardly like to think of himself as a victim, even a victim of circumstance.
In fact, Raju is so fundamentally changed by the new railway that when his father
dies, he closes his father’s original hut shop and refurbishes the railway shop to anticipate
his customers’ every need. He fills the shop not only with a traveler’s necessities and
refreshments, but also with old magazines, books, and newspapers. When the shop is
quiet, Raju fills his time by learning everything he can from the merchandise he sells:
I read stuff that interested me, bored me, baffled me, and dozed off in my seat. I
read stuff that pricked up a noble thought, a philosophy that appealed, I gazed at
pictures of old temples and ruins and new buildings and battleships, and soldiers,
and pretty girls around whom my thoughts lingered. I learned much from scrap.
(42).
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When the shop is busy with customers, he learns from the travelers who are passing
through, engaging them in conversation about any subject. He not only gains knowledge
from these transactions and develops his uniquely cosmopolitan mould, but he also
makes a nice living and his ability to adapt to a changing world helps him provide
handsomely for himself and for his mother.
From that point on, Raju is an expert at reinventing himself. At the railway
station he quickly becomes a tourist-guide and calls himself Railway Raju. He can spot a
potential customer without the obvious clues, like travelers who arrive with cameras and
binoculars. In fact, as he explains, he can spot a customer before the train even pulls into
the station, “Even as the train steamed in at the outer signal, I could scent a customer. I
had a kind of water-diviner’s instinct. If I felt the pull of good business I drifted in the
direction of a coming train” (51). As a tourist-guide, he learns to cook up a new identity
at any moment; he can be any kind of guide for any type of customer. He explains, “I
never said, ‘I don’t know.’ Not in my nature I suppose. If I had any inclination to say ‘I
don’t know what you are talking about,’ my life would have taken a different turn” (47).
And so, Raju manages to enlighten any tourist about any landmark of interest, saying
things like, “‘Oh, yes, a fascinating place. Haven’t you seen it? You must find time to
visit it, otherwise your whole trip here would be a waste’” and he later admits that he said
such things, “only because I wanted to be pleasant” (47). One wonders, if at the end of
the novel, Raju engages with Malone out of a similar instinct: because he wants to be
pleasant.
With one customer, Marco, an archeologist interested in ancient India, for
example, Raju is the local authority on ruins, a devotee of relics. With Marco’s wife, a
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classical dancer, with whom he falls in love, Raju becomes a scholar of traditional Indian
dance to win her over. Once he does, he appears a deeply compassionate lover, willing to
give up his own family ties only for the chance to make her happy. As her business-
manager, he is deeply devoted to making her a star, and fights for her first show, “I
delivered such a lecture on the importance of our culture and the place of the dance in it
that they simply had to accept what I said...I never knew I could speak so fluently on
cultural matters” (156). As a prisoner, he survives by putting on the role of the wise and
gentle-natured confidant to the other inmates. He admits, “Whether they were homicides
or cutthroats or highwaymen, they all listened to me, and I could talk them out of their
blackest moods. When there was a respite, I told them stories and philosophies and what
not. They came to refer to me as vadhyar—that is, Teacher” (201-2). And then, of
course, there is his role with Velan and the villagers of Mangala. It is “his greatest role,”
according to Shirley Chew, and she goes on to explain that, “In return for pretending a
detachment he does not possess, he gets all the food and attention he could possibly want.
And waiving the matter of fraudulence, one must admire him, for it is not an easy part to
play” (155). With them, he is the mystic, the holy man, Swami, Swamiji, sadhu, guru,
saint, who convinces all of them, and perhaps even himself, that he can perform miracles.
In many ways, Narayan suggests throughout The Guide, that Raju’s identity is
constituted by matters beyond his control. Early in the novel, after he is first discovered
in the abandoned temple, Raju remembers what the barber said to him after he was first
released from prison, “It’s written on your face that you are a two-year sort, which means
you are not a murderer” (5), as though external appearances really do expose a person’s
inner character. Later, Velan mentions that some matters are simply fated to be the way
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they are, “He drew his fingers across his brow and said, ‘Whatever is written here will
happen. How can we ever help it?’” (18). This conversation is echoed at another time in
the novel, when Raju, himself, surrenders to a similar notion and he professes to Velan,
“It is written on the brow of some that they shall not be left alone. I am one such, I think.
Although I never looked for acquaintances, they somehow came looking for me” (47).
Likewise, Michael Gorra insists that, “Raju takes no active role in shaping his own
career: he becomes a tour guide by accident, because other people expect it of him; so,
too, he becomes a swami” (45). There may just be some elements of fate or
happenstance that lead Raju to construct the personas that he so ably embodies.
However, he is honest enough to admit that he knows that he is acting. There are
times, of course, when he feels trapped by his performances: “He felt like an actor who
was always expected to utter the right sentence” (11); “He realized that he had no
alternative: he must play the role that Velan had given him” (28); “Raju felt cornered. ‘I
have to play the part expected of me; there is no escape’” (43). And, there are times,
when Raju feels as though he can no longer keep up his act: “Raju felt like an actor who
had come on the stage, and, while the audience waited, had no lines to utter or gestures to
make” (42); “He sighed a deep sigh of relief and turned to be himself, eat like an ordinary
human being, shout and sleep like a normal man, after the voices on the river had ceased
for the night” (46); “He felt sick of the whole thing. When the assembly was at its
thickest, could he not stand upon a high pedestal and cry, ‘Get out all of you and leave
me alone. I am not the man to save you’” (210). Nevertheless, there are also times when
he takes great pleasure in acting out a part flawlessly: “Raju felt he was growing
wings…Shortly, he felt, he might float in the air and perch himself on the tower of the
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ancient temple” (18); “He sat as usual on the stone slab with beatitude and calm in his
face. … He decided to look as brilliant as he could manage, let drop gems of thought
from his lips” (28); “The essence of sainthood seemed to lie in one’s ability to utter
mystifying statements” (44); “I spoke out my love, but sandwiched it conveniently
between my appreciations of her art. … It worked” (72-3); “He composed his features for
his professional role and smoothed out his beard and hair, and sat down in his seat with a
book in his hand” (91); “We were enjoying this piece of stage-management; we felt we
had already begun to put on a show” (157). He does love the public attention he receives,
when he plays a role perfectly, and when crowds converge to witness a miracle,
newspapermen come to write his story, and Malone poises a camera to record their
interview, Raju is at the top of his game.
In fact, Raju seems to get a thrill from employing just the right strategies, from
mixing up the proper ingredients, and combining the precise balance to succeed in every
role he plays. It gives him a sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride, and perhaps a bit
of fame. Shirley Chew contends for Raju,
What he thrives on is a sense of self-importance cast up by the glitter of
superficialities—a little more information than others regarding the source of the
Sarayu, the chair next to the star dancer, a medley of anecdotes and philosophical
commonplaces spun out with self-possession. (155).
When he first begins to succeed in his role as a tourist-guide, he boasts to his mother,
“Do you know how well known I am? People come asking for me from Bombay,
Madras, and other places, hundreds of miles away. … It is something to become so
famous, isn’t it, instead of handing out matches and tobacco” (50). He recognizes the
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importance of appearances too and seems fascinated by aesthetic gestures. When the
drought jeopardizes the town of Mangala, he watches the men and women making trips
to the well and notes that they looked “picturesque, but without the tranquility inherent in
a picture” (81). And, later when the villagers believe that he has undertaken a fast to
bring down the rains, “He regretted having given them the idea. It had sounded
picturesque” (96). These thoughts haunt the final pages of the text, when Malone
intervenes to film Raju, precisely because it is not clear whether Malone has come to
discover more about Raju’s culture, or because he thinks that filming a man taken for
holy and weakened by his fast, will be as Raju puts it, picturesque.
Like a fine actor, Raju also understands and recognizes the importance of
providing the whole package, and that is why he insists that Rosie change her name when
they conspire together to launch her dancing career. He is afraid that her Western name
will fail to market her properly. He explains to Rosie, “‘The trouble with you is that
although your people are a traditional dance family, they didn’t know how to call you. …
For a classical dancer, you should call yourself something that is poetic and appealing”
(155). They settle upon the name, Nalini. And, Raju too, is not beyond dressing himself
up a bit, or wearing a costume of sorts. As a boy, he smears “holy ash” on his forehead
to appear more spiritually devoted for his father (9). When he meets Rosie, he trades in
his tourist-guide uniform of a “khaki bush coat and dhoti” for a more sophisticated “silk
jibba and lace dhoti” (56). And, in trying to keep up his appearances, he finds himself
rushing off to buy new outfits from a tailor, trying new products for his hair and for his
skin, and grooming himself obsessively. When he meets with groups at the University or
the town hall to try to book a venues for Rosie’s/Nalini’s performances, Raju dresses
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“soberly for the part,” donning a “rough-spun silk shirt and an upper cloth and a
handspun and handwoven dhoti” as well as a wrist watch and rimless glasses (156). As
the Swami, he grows out his hair and beard until one whisks against his back and the
other brushes against his chest. He wears prayer beads around his neck. It is no wonder
that an American film producer would want to pin him down on film.
Yet, although Raju seeks fame and attention, and is compelled to please others or
perform for his own self-serving purposes—for his father’s praise as a boy, to earn a
living as a guide, to win Rosie’s love and then to profit from her talent as her business-
manager, for special favors in prison, and then after prison, to avoid returning to his
tarnished life in Malgudi, and so that the villagers of Mangala will bestow gifts upon him
as compensation for his spiritual guidance in his role as a saint—Raju does seem to
genuinely care deeply for those he serves. He feels an obligation—even to Marco, whom
he despises and for whom he feels he loses his personal integrity—toward those who put
their general welfare in his hands. In his article, “A Sinner is a Sinner is a Sinner—A
Study of Raju,” Balarama Gupta brands Raju “a selfish swindler, an adroit actor, and a
perfidious megalomaniac” (186). Perhaps he is, but there are poignant moments when
Raju tries to set the record straight.
Upon his first meeting with Velan, when the villager gazes at him with devotion,
Raju tries to explain, “I am not so great as you imagine. I am just ordinary” (6).
Moments later, when Velan prostrates himself in gratitude for Raju’s help, bowing low
and trying to touch Raju’s feet, “Raju recoiled at the attempt. ‘I’ll not permit anyone to
do this’” (13). And then later, when Velan returns with the news that Raju has solved his
problems, Raju has the thought that, “He could not open his lips without provoking
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admiration. This was a dangerous state of affairs” (25). Finally, when Raju realizes how
deeply the villagers of Mangala believe in his power to work miracles, Raju reevaluates
his decision to let the villagers trust that he was a holy man:
He felt that after all the time had come for him to be serious—to attach value to his
own words. He needed time—and solitude to think over the whole matter. He got
down from his pedestal; that was the first step to take. That seat had acquired a
glamour, and as long as he occupied it people would not listen to him as an
ordinary mortal. He now saw the enormity of his own creation. He had created a
giant with his puny self, a throne of authority with that slab of stone. (95)
There are flashes and instants when Raju does appear to feel genuine remorse for
exploiting Velan and the villagers of Mangala and these moments are coupled with
flashes and instants when Raju does appear to do more good than harm, even through
trickery.
What is notable is that in nearly every role that Raju assumes he causes the
greatest harm to himself. With every change in character, he annihilates his former self
and in the process loses something that once was, and in the end probably still is, of great
importance to him. When he becomes a tourist-guide, he deserts his railway shop until he
is irrevocably in debt to the station masters and must give it up. He then takes on the role
of Rosie’s lover and he must renounce his role as a tourist guide. As a result, another
self-starter assumes the role and even answers to the name Railway Raju. He willingly
sends his mother away to live with relatives after she disapproves of his relationship with
Rosie, a married woman of a lower caste. As Rosie’s business-manager, Raju lets his
jealousy of her talent, his need to be the center of her universe, and his insatiable greed
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get in the way of his love for her. He loses her, even before he gives in to the urge to
forge her signature on documents from Marco. And, when he decides to stay in Mangala,
Raju appears to walk away from everything and everyone he has ever known or loved.
Paradoxically, he may just walk straight into the role that brings him all of the fame he
ever wanted.
When Raju learns that the villagers—desperate because of the drought
conditions—somehow have the impression that he has offered to keep a fast to bring the
rains, he is touched by their devotion to him and by their gratitude, “The earnestness with
which he spoke brought tears to Raju’s eyes” (95), but he panics too. In one desperate
attempt to end his fast, he confides in Velan, setting right his mistaken identity and laying
bare he secrets. He begins, “I’m prepared to fast for the sake of your people and do
anything if I can help this country—but it is to be done only by a saint. I am no saint”
(98). When Velan’s reaction to the story that Raju tells is unexpected and forgiving—“I
don’t know why you tell me all this, Swami. It’s very kind of you to address at such
length your humble servant’” (207-8)—Raju does not feel exonerated, but frantic and his
thoughts are erratic. At one moment Raju is nearly hysterical, “the fool would not stop
thinking that he [Raju] was a savior” (211). Moments later, Raju seems prepared to fast
until his death:
If by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom, and the grass grow, why not do
it thoroughly? For the first time in his life he was making an honest effort; for the
first time he was learning the thrill of full application outside money and love; for
the first time he was doing a thing in which he was not personally interested. He
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felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through with
the ordeal. (212)
Many critics have held up this passage as evidence that Raju does, in the end, become a
saint, but nothing in the text gives so concrete an answer. Ironically, it is at this very
poignant moment, during which Raju’s life hangs in the balance, that the narrative pulls
back to explain the very least. In this way the narrative itself seems to mimic the
detachment of the Western filmmaker through the distancing lens of the camera, in this
case, Malone’s camera.
Even more ironic is the narrative transition that propels the novel into the final
scene: “This was the starting point” (208). The literal interpretation of this sentence
would suggest that the moment a wandering newspaper correspondent picks up the
headline, “Holy man’s penance to end drought,” the public becomes interested in Raju’s
story and that from this moment forward, the crowd attracted to Raju’s story will grow
bigger. However, to this reader, the transition is terribly suggestive. Is this the “starting
point” of Raju’s story? Is this the moment when Raju begins his ascension into
sainthood? Are these interpretations mutually exclusive? Does the frenzy of public
interest in the holy man of Mangala, for example, convert Raju into a saint, even when he
may be an imposter? Does this “starting point” suggest the moment at which Raju’s
story ceases to be his own, and becomes instead the story that others—from crowd-
watchers to health department officials, newspaper reporters to the American James J.
Malone—will tell?
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There has been much debate about the final moments of The Guide. Alam writes
that at the ending of the novel, “Narayan has the detachment necessary to laugh at Indian
routes to sainthood as well as western exaltation of Indian mystics” (25). And it is true,
that though the doctors all agree that on the last day of Raju’s fast, his condition is grave,
the people who have gathered to witness a miracle are in good cheer. There is general
fun all around. However, it is unclear whether or not Malone’s cameras capture the
festival-like atmosphere. When Raju, at last, rises to make his final prayer there is the
sense that everyone takes in a breath:
He had to be held by Velan and another on each side. In the profoundest silence
the crowd followed him down. Everyone followed at a solemn, silent pace. The
eastern sky was red. Many in the camp were still sleeping. Raju could not walk,
but he insisted upon pulling himself along all the same. He panted with the effort.
He went down the steps of the river, halting for breath with each step, and finally
reached the basin of water. He stepped into it, shut his eyes, and turned toward
the mountain, his lips muttering the prayer. Velan and another held him each by
an arm. The morning sun was out by now; a great shaft of light illuminated the
surroundings. It was difficult to hold Raju on his feet, as he had a tendency to
flop down. They held him as if he were a baby. Raju opened his eyes, looked
about, and said, “Velan, it’s raining in the hills. I can feel it coming up under my
feet, up my legs—” He sagged down. (220)
Mathur argues, “As regards to the concluding passage supposedly describing Raju’s
martyrdom, critics have waxed eloquent on Raju’s reference to the rains falling in the
hills.” However, Mathur concludes, “there is no suggestion of the rains falling…On the
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other hand, the morning Sun and the great shaft of light illuminating the surroundings
suggest that there is going to be no rain” (75-6). Naik questions whether or not there can
be any conclusion, “Is this only a pathetic delusion of a dying man?...Or, is it only the
final fling of deception and self-deception by a confirmed deceiver?” (653). C. D.
Narasimhaiah infers that the story ends in Raju’s sacrifice, that it is a great expression of
his spiritual ascent. Parameswaran admits, wryly, “I prefer to pay tribute to Narayan’s
ambiguity and art by speculating that this risk, though imposed on Raju and not planned
by him, pays dividends.” She explains, “he recovers from his swoon and graciously
accedes to the humble request of disciples and government and allows glucose-saline
injections to reinvigorate his bloodstream while his halo shines brighter than ever” (214-
15).
There is no way to really know what happens and perhaps Narayan leaves the
ending open to our interpretation so that we experience and imagine every possible,
reasonable ending. In “History, Maya, Dharma,” Gorra aptly points out that “one’s view
of the ending of The Guide depends on where one stands in terms of things like swamis,
and miracle, and prayer” (50). The doctors at the scene have declared Raju’s life,
“valuable to the country” (218). A top priority telegram from the government insists,
“Imperative that Swami should be saved” (218). Rayen declares that Raju’s “efforts to
subdue violence and peace do succeed. Once he starts his fast, crowds pour into
Mangala—not for any fight or violence, but to watch the Mahatma” (72-3). Mathur
suggests that Raju “has put the small village of Mangala on the cultural map of the region
and perhaps more than neutralized the effects of the drought by the boost to the economy
which the thousands of visitors attracted by his fast must have been made to give” (77).
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Even the officials from the Health Department exploit the situation to inoculate the crowd
of villagers against diseases like malaria. In the evenings, they set up educational film
showings about the dangers of mosquitoes and the diseases they can carry. Narayan
writes, “When a huge close-up of a mosquito was shown as the cause of malaria, a
peasant was overheard saying, ‘Such huge mosquitoes! No wonder the people get
malaria in those countries. Our own mosquitoes are so tiny that they are harmless’”
(214). Though the lecturer from the Health Department is so disheartened by the outburst
that he “remained silent for ten minutes” (214), it is generally unclear whether or not
Narayan expects a reader to find comedy in the villager’s ignorance or in the fact that the
lecturer has taken the villager so seriously. I prefer to speculate about what has happened
to James J. Malone. Has he returned on this day of the fast, with his cameras? After all,
he has promised to return. He blocked the entire scene. He tested his film, his lighting
and promised to return.
As I mentioned in Chapter One, in an interview with Neal Conan on Talk of the
Nation on National Public Radio about his book Cosmopolitanism, Appiah uses the
phrase “cross-cultural conversation” as a metaphor for learning about other cultures. He
explained that, “the key thing, if you’re going to be open to the world, is that you
approach the world in the spirit of assuming that you can learn from the world” and then
added as a warning that, “Conversation is only worth doing if you are listening as well as
talking.” It is never clear whether or not Malone is carefully listening to Raju or if he is
interested in knowing an absolute truth. It is certainly hard to miss that nearly every
sensory observation noted in the final page of the novel can be translated movingly onto
film: “the profoundest silence”; the “great shaft of light”; the men who hold Raju “as if
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he were a baby” as Raju mutters the prayer, as well as the hope for a miracle, the hope
that the rains might fall, the apprehension that Raju might die, and the indelible image of
his body sagging down (220). Only one thing is for certain—it would look spectacular
on film.
I would like to think that Malone has made it to the final day of Raju’s fast and
that in the midst of a glaring sun, his camera is poised to capture Raju at prayer. I would
like to think that regardless of what happens, rain or no, miracle or not, death or recovery
at the mercy of governmental disciples, that Malone will be there to capture it all. I
would like to believe that Malone will not only recognize his obligation to the famine-
stricken village of Mangala, but that he will open his own heart, see through the lenses of
his own eyes, and take very seriously the particularity of the lives, practices and beliefs
that are local to Mangala, to learn from the villagers and from Raju, to be influenced by
them and to listen to them carefully. Unfortunately, I believe in my heart the opposite:
that while Malone is interested and respectful of the actual human beings he films, his
primary interest lies with the interests of the American viewers back at home who have
proven time and again that famine at a distance is interesting and engaging to a viewer
who feels a certain obligation to others and that a miracle performed at a distance is
exotic and spiritually uplifting to an audience thirsty for hope. Malone betrays his own
intentions from the very start, when he explains, “I have come to shoot this subject, take
it back to our country, and show it to our people there” (216). Is the subject famine? Is it
sainthood? Is it the potential for a miracle? I suppose it will be what Malone hopes his
audience wants to see.
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The Trivial, the Historically Significant, and the Ideologically Impoverished in
Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter
How does the foreignness of the spirit begin? Tara wondered. Does it
begin right in the center of Calcutta, with forty ruddy Belgian women, fat
foreheads swelling under starched white headdresses, long black habits
intensifying the hostility of the Indian sun? The nuns had taught her to inject the
right degree of venom into words like “common” and “vulgar.” They had taught
her The Pirates of Penzance in singing class, and “If I should die, think only this
of me—” for elocution.
Did the foreignness drift inward with the winter chill at Vassar, as she
watched the New York snow settle over new architecture, blonde girls, Protestant
matrons, and Johnny Mathis? Or was it not till Madison that she first suspected
the faltering of the heart?
—Bharati Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter (37)
At first blush, Bharati Mukherjee’s novel The Tiger’s Daughter is a text primarily
preoccupied with questions of cultural identity for an immigrant subject who feels
dislocated from her native land in the East and not yet sutured to her new home in the
West. In the quotation above, for example, the novel’s protagonist ponders the question,
“How does the foreignness of the spirit begin?” Despite the obvious beginnings—her
years in the United States, her degrees from Vassar and the University of Wisconsin, and
her American husband—Tara, who has returned to Calcutta for the first time in seven
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years, has no simple answer to this poignant question. That Tara concludes, “There were
no definite points in time that one could turn to and accuse or feel ashamed of as the start
of this dull strangeness” (37) is crucial for two reasons. On the one hand, it presupposes
that cultures have a way of unavoidably intermingling; cultures crisscross, transform,
influence, and contaminate one another irrevocably through education, cultural
interaction, and popular media. On the other hand—and perhaps more importantly—
Tara’s epiphany also suggests that cultures have a way of inescapably alienating one
another; they hold themselves apart so that they seem “strange” to one another. Hence,
the “venom” that Tara learns to infuse into words like “common” and “vulgar” from the
nuns at school and Tara’s own Aunt Jharna’s accusation that, “You think you are too
educated for this, don’t you?” (36) and her preoccupation with the idea that Tara has
come to “despise” traditional Indian ways.
As evidenced in the excerpt that opens this chapter, for Tara—the daughter of
wealthy, Bengali, Brahmin parents—“the foreignness” begins, in part, with her privileged
Catholic education at St. Blaise’s, with Belgian nuns in “long black habits” who teach
from a position of racial and moral superiority and with teaching materials from the
West, with the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas learned in singing class and the works
of British poet Rupert Brooke recited for elocution. In fact, the critic Brinda Bose points
out that:
Duality and conflict are not merely a feature of immigrant life in America;
Mukherjee’s women are brought up in a culture that presents such ambiguities
from childhood. The breaking of identities and the discarding of languages
actually begin early, their lives being shaped by the confluence of the rich cultural
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and religious traditions on the one hand, and the ‘new learning’ imposed by
British colonialism in India on the other. (50)
Bose’s observation suggests that because Tara learns English, reads Western texts, and
recites British poetry at school, her identity is torn between two cultures from the very
start, but “the foreignness” must “drift inward” too in more subtle ways, with beloved
musicians like the African-American jazz and pop singer, Johnny Mathis (10, 11, 37,
141) and with Western movie songs like “Que Será Será” (139), with novelists whose
works are read for school like Joseph Conrad (139) and with novels read for pleasure like
Westward Ho! (48), even with secret adolescent fantasies about arranged marriages to
Western film stars like Tony Perkins (56).
So then, “the foreignness of the spirit” that Tara’s friends and relatives so often
accuse her of having begins not only with her American sojourn, her Western university
education, and with what her Aunt Jharna refers to as her “mleccha”—foreigner or
barbarian—husband (36), but with the culmination of a variety of cultural influences—
especially Western mass media from journalism to novels, popular music to television
and cinema—much of which also impact her friends and relatives and take root, as Tara
notes, “right in the center of Calcutta.” Tara’s friends, for example, have access to a vast
array of Western media: British mystery novels are sold by vendors just outside of the
Catelli-Continental Hotel, where Tara’s group of friends often meets (3), the Western
novels the women won as prizes at Catholic school when the women were teenagers line
their bookcases (48), they quote from Tennyson, Keats, and Sassoon (68), the Old
Paradise Cinema plays Hollywood films and American Westerns daily (75), they have
easy access to the Times of London, The New Yorker, and the Herald Tribune (78), they
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watch Perry Mason on T.V. (111), attend Doris Day matinees (190), and listen to songs
like “Lemon Tree,” and “I feel Pretty” on All-India Radio (58, 187, 189). Tara’s friends
also learned English as children, read Western literature in high school and frequent the
cinemas that play American films, but not a single one of them is ever indicted, as Tara
is, for rejecting her Indian heritage.
In contrast to other readings of The Tiger’s Daughter, which tend to focus
primarily on Mukherjee’s preoccupation with questions of cultural identity, this chapter
takes a closer look at how the prevalence of Western media in The Tiger’s Daughter
reveals Mukherjee’s distaste for and desire to challenge prevailing attitudes about caste
and cultural purity amongst the bourgeois Bengali elite. In an interview with Shefali
Desai and Tony Barnstone, Mukherjee describes upper caste Bengali society as “a society
of ‘pure’ culture, where any kind of hanky-panky with bloodline, caste line, is to be
despised” and she cautions that there is, “an enormous amount of danger in the false
retention of pride in bloodlines” (143). The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah
contends that, “Cultural purity is an oxymoron.” He maintains, “The odds are that,
culturally speaking,” nearly all individuals “already live a cosmopolitan life, enriched by
literature, art, and film that come from many places and that contains influences from
many more” (Cosmopolitanism 113). The characters in The Tiger’s Daughter are
certainly influenced, as Appiah suggests, by Western literature, art and film.
However, in The Tiger’s Daughter, Mukherjee’s allusions to Western media do
not celebrate a cosmopolitan life. Instead, such allusions are politically and symbolically
significant because they demonstrate the irony of an elite social class—like the one
depicted in Mukherjee’s novel—that defines itself as “westernized” (44) and “modern”
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(108) and, in the same breath, as culturally pure. In this chapter, I argue that the
bourgeois Bengalis of Mukherjee’s novel, who privilege Western media for their own
prestige and in so doing make use of rhetorical tropes that emphasize difference,
underscore the inadequacies of technology latent in mass media. These tropes, which date
back to the colonialist rhetoric of adventure novels and empire films, underscore not only
the Western media’s inability to construct coherent representations of the unfathomable
realities confronted in the non-Western world, but also emphasize the inability of an elite
social class to confront the injustices that take place right before their eyes.
Why is it then, that scholars like Indrani Mitra have argued that, “If there is a
critique of this society at all,” in The Tiger’s Daughter, “it is merely a mildly censorious
eyebrow raised at an anachronistic world” (290)? I can only imagine that such critics
have mistaken Mukherjee’s psychologically realistic depiction of the awkward inner
identity struggle associated with cultural dislocation for collusion with a society
characterized by—to borrow Frantz Fanon’s words—its “intellectual laziness, spiritual
penury and profoundly cosmopolitan mould” (122). After all, despite the fact that Tara
recognizes very early in her journey that, “seven years in another country, a new
husband, and a new blue passport” cannot be “so easily blotted out” (25), it is clear that a
childhood in Calcutta, the unconditional love of a daughter for her parents, and the
loyalties of one friend to another cannot be so easily blotted out either. It is Tara’s sense
of obligation to her family, her friends, and her class, coupled with her desire to return to
a “home in a class that lived by Victorian rules” in “a city that took for granted most men
were born to suffer” (34) that is so easily confused for “merely a mildly censorious”
raised eyebrow.
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For me, there is no question that “those hard, brilliant cameos of migrant psyches
struggling, often faltering, sometimes refusing and at other times painfully adjusting,
while all the while endeavoring to come to terms with their history” are important to any
reading of The Tiger’s Daughter, as Krishna Sen suggests (26). However, it is equally
important to go one step further to examine what might be masked by the same
“struggling,” “faltering,” “adjusting,” and “coming to terms with.” By looking at The
Tiger’s Daughter with an eye to mass media, Mukherjee’s criticisms of cultural purity—
partially concealed by questions of cultural identity—are unveiled. There is perhaps no
better example of this phenomenon than the manner in which Mukherjee makes a clear
distinction between Tara’s family and friends, who romanticize their membership in a
“pure” society, and Tara, who deliberately abandons her caste by marrying an American.
Initially, this distinction illustrates the extent of Tara’s dislocation from her
childhood home. With her friends, Tara recognizes only “shavings of her personality”
(43) and at lavish celebrations, catered teas, dinners, or elegant parties, Tara begins to
wonder whether or not their “aristocratic omissions” gesture that they disapprove of her
marriage, “They had asked her about the things she brought back, had admired velours
jumpsuit and electric lady-shaver, but not once had they asked her about her husband”
(43). After seven years apart, Tara and her friends appear to have little, aside from
Western comforts, in common and Tara frets over whether or not her friends and the
people she loves most dearly will isolate or alienate her because of her American
husband. In the prayer room with her mother, for example, Tara worries that, “Perhaps
her mother, sitting serenely before God on a tiny rug, no longer loved her either...Perhaps
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her mother was offended that she, no longer a real Brahmin, was constantly in and out of
this sacred room” (50). Through moments like these Mukherjee asks her readers to
imagine what it must feel like to be a stranger in the midst of home, to feel alone in the
company of friends, and to feel unloved in the presence of family.
It is not until later—after Tara’s anxieties and suspicions are confirmed when her
friends brashly suggest that, “her marriage had been imprudent,” after they imply that her
marriage had “eroded all that was fine and sensitive in her Bengali nature” (55), and after
Tara has come to notice that, “In India she felt she was not married to a person but to a
foreigner, and this foreignness was a burden” (62)—that Tara is resilient enough to
examine her old world with the distanced vision of an outsider. With this detached vision
Tara overcomes the turmoil of her own identity crisis and her own hurt feelings to detect
the contradictions inherent amongst the society she has recently rejoined:
They were racial purists thought Tara desperately. They liked foreigners in movie
magazines—Nat Wood and Bob Wagner in faded Photoplays. They loved
Englishmen like Worthington at the British Council. But they did not approve of
foreign marriage partners. So much for the glamour of her own marriage. (86)
It is imperative to note in this excerpt from the novel (and in many that I will discuss
later) that Mukherjee uses allusions to Western mass media (in this case the Hollywood
couple, actress Natalie Wood—herself the daughter of Russian immigrants—and actor
Robert Wagner, whose wedding in the late 1950s was celebrated as the most “glittering
union of the 20th century”) to underscore her condemnation of cultural purity. This
narrative technique consistently undermines the “culturally pure” society of the Bengali
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upper caste for its ancestry in British colonialism and its potentially unconscious present-
day complicity with cultural imperialism.
Throughout The Tiger’s Daughter, Tara’s desire to reconcile two identities and
two worlds—substantiated by the previous example—is palpable, partly because, as
Maya Manju Sharma points out, Tara “could not really go home no matter how many
summers she spent with her family and friends” (6). For Tara, home is not only her
father’s lavish estate in the Calcutta of her childhood but also a two-room New York City
apartment decorated with silk scarves and warmed by the love of an American husband.
As a result, Tara finds that instead of feeling at home in the comfortable alcove of her
father’s house and in the loving affections of longed-for relatives, she feels like a stranger
in an unrecognizable city.
Traveling from the airport with her Bombay relatives, for example, Tara
remembers that “Seven years earlier on her way to Vassar, she had admired the houses on
Marine Drive, had thought them fashionable, but now their shabbiness appalled her” (18).
Looking out of the window on the train from Bombay to Calcutta, she laments that, “For
years she had dreamed of this return to India. She had believed that all hesitations, all
shadowy fears of the time abroad would be erased quite magically...But so far the return
had brought only wounds” (25). Upon her arrival in Calcutta, she senses an odd distance
between herself and her family, “Surrounded by this army of relatives who professed to
love her, and by vendors ringing bells, beggars pulling at sleeves, children coughing on
tracks, Tara felt completely alone” (28). In many ways, during her first return visit to her
homeland, Tara finds that Calcutta is as foreign to her as America on her first day at
Vassar.
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Salman Rushdie, who, like Tara in The Tiger’s Daughter, has also made a second
home in the West, recalls feeling similarly unnerved during his first return visit to his
childhood home in Bombay after nearly half of a lifetime in the West. For “those of us
who emigrated,” Rushdie suggests, “Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes
we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools”
(“Imaginary Homelands” 15). When a stranger on the train from Bombay to Calcutta asks
her, “Madam, are you new here?” Tara replies, “Yes and no” (“Imaginary Homelands”
22). Her irresolute answer is confirmation of her own plural and simultaneously partial
identity. Though she belongs to both India and America, she also belongs—to borrow
Rushdie’s term—“elsewhere” (12), to no place and to no one. Though this intermediate
position—from which Tara can straddle two cultures and also feel as though she falls
somehow between them—can be painful, scholars like Rushdie have come to treasure
this plural, partial, double vision, because it recognizes “that all systems of knowledge,
all views of the world, are never totalizing, whole or pure, but incomplete, muddled and
hybrid” (McLeod 215).
In The Tiger’s Daughter, Mukherjee gives Tara this kaleidoscopic vision, on the
one hand, to depict the agony of the migrant experience: the dislocation, the alienation
and the loss. On the other hand, with this same vision, Mukherjee hints at, not only
Tara’s willingness to be open to and learn from other cultures, but Tara’s growing ability
to see the world from multiple perspectives and angles at the same time. Eventually Tara
uses this double-vision to condemn the very notion of a “pure” society, and to
demonstrate the profound injustice that results from the chasm between the rich and the
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poor, which she comes to recognize as partly responsible for the social changes on the
brink in India.
Perhaps Tara begins to suspect how differently she has come to see the world
when she recalls how her “closed little heart had been flooded” (45) by the literature she
read during her first semester at Vassar. Unlike Tara, who came to “worry over a
dissertation on Katherine Mansfield, the plight of women and racial minorities” (33) and
who “allowed literature to disturb the placid surface of her life” (45), her bourgeois
friends—who Mitra describes as “clinging to the cultural artifacts of the imperial West as
the mark of their distinction in society” (290)—use these “cultural artifacts,” like
Western literature, magazines, film, television, popular music, and even colloquialisms as
a kind of class currency. The old man, Joyonto Ray Chowdhury, a veritable fixture at the
Catelli-Continental Hotel where Tara’s group of friends often meets, observes:
They spoke mainly in English, occasionally changing to Bengali in midsentence,
almost always in exclamations, favoring “How dare you!” and “What nonsense!”
He heard them list with enthusiasm movies they had seen or parties they had
recently attended. ... Joyonto heard their conversation alight on imported gadgets,
on stereos, transistors, blenders and percolators; each foreign word was treated
with holy reverence. When they touched current events he thought it was mainly
to show their familiarity with Time magazine or Reader’s Digest. The real
Calcutta, the thick laughter of brutal men, open dustbins, warm and dark where
carcasses were sometimes discarded, did not exist. (41)
Instead, they spar assertively with one another about politics and world events in the
same fashion with which they dish movies and recently attended parties and they appear
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shallow—the old man marvels “at their dedication to the trivial” (46)—as they flaunt
their access to Time magazine and Reader’s Digest with the same self -importance with
which they parade their access to Western gadgets and material comforts.
Ironically, as Sharma aptly points out, in the company of her childhood friends,
Tara “finds that she is different from her contemporaries in ways that cannot be
communicated even if they wished that communication, simply because the society that
Tara rejoins is without a vision of the West that they could read if they chose to” (9
emphasis added). If Tara’s friends in The Tiger’s Daughter wish to have a “vision of the
West,” they certainly have the means to create one, but that would require what Appiah
calls “cosmopolitan curiosity”—an interest in what “we can learn from one another” and
in “alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting” (97). Tara’s “Camac Street friends”
(10)—the vain, puerile Nilima and the proud, unsympathetic Reena, the inept, easily
rattled Pronob and the petty, pretentious Sanjay—all clearly have access to literature,
film, even music that would give them a vision of the West if they cared to look for it.
However, these friends are content to invest only trivial interest into these mass mediated
influences. In the context of their superficiality, the wealthy lifestyles of Tara’s friends
seem ideologically impoverished. Every tangible possession is a badge of wealth, the
ability to debate one another casually in English is a sign of privilege, and a Western
education is nothing more than a status symbol.
In Tara’s first days at Vassar she clung to her friends from home, looked forward
to their letters, and missed them terribly. However, Tara comes to realize that when she
first arrived in the United States, her friends were interested in her life only for superficial
reasons. They “wrote her long and beautiful letters” in which “they complained wittily of
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boredom in Calcutta, the movies at the Metro, the foul temper of the whiskered nun from
Mauritius, the weather’s beastliness,” but Tara recalls that they never once suspected her
“fears” (10). In fact, through what can be gathered from the novel, when Tara first
attends Vassar her friends appear to ask after nothing more than the tangible possessions
that Tara has access to by virtue of living in the United States. Tara notes that, back then,
they “envied her freedom,” but to the young Camac Street girls freedom means record
albums, transparent nighties, and Johnny Mathis live in concert (10)—things that when
Tara lives in the United States, they are never too shy to ask Tara to forward post haste.
On the flip side, during her first years in America, these same friends never ask Tara
whether she is happy, they never wonder about how anxious Tara might feel to attend
college in the States, they never guess that Tara might suspect, during those first days,
that attending Vassar is an “unsalvageable mistake,” or presume to grasp how desperately
she misses them. To feel close to her friends, Tara stands “in line at the post office,
hugging poorly wrapped parcels of shampoos and lipsticks” (10), all out of her devotion
to her friends from home and for whatever bit of affection they might send her way in
return. Years later, as they all sit together on the balcony of the Catelli-Continental
Hotel, it is quite possible to imagine that Tara’s friends, so shallow and superficial, never
once predicted that Tara would ever be so changed.
They likely believed that Tara’s years in the United States would, like their own
knowledge of and fluency with Western mass media, serve to give Tara added social
cachet with the members of their bourgeois society. There is certainly evidence that
Tara’s years in America lend her a degree of distinction amongst the elite members of her
caste, which consistently asserts its status over the lower classes. The fact that when she
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arrives in Bombay, “Little nephews whose names she did not catch were told to touch her
feet in pronam when she was introduced to them as ‘the American auntie’” (17), that her
Bombay relatives pronounce, “‘We wanted to show off the American jamai’... ‘Then the
Indian Ladies Weekly would have taken our pictures!’” (17), and that the parties she
attends when she first returns to Calcutta are written up in the Feminine Weekly and the
Ladies of Calcutta Journal, indicates that Indian publications privilege and mimic the
West; they also perpetuate cultural difference. Tara is, incidentally, more exotic and
interesting when she returns to Calcutta. Tara notes, “It was quite evident to people who
cared about such things that the city’s westernized high society had fallen in love with the
Bengali young woman from the States” (55). But, Tara thinks of her experiences—her
“student days in the foreign” (144)—in a vastly different way than others who are also
“foreign-returned.”
No one scene drives home this point better than the one between Tara and the
Nepali with whom she shares her train compartment on the way to Calcutta. Noticing the
New York address on her luggage tags he announces, “I too am foreign-returned” (23),
seeking to impress Tara with his class status. In a deeply comic scene, he introduces
himself as, “not quite but almost Prince Ratan” (23) and fumbles about in the dark to
produce handfuls of photographs taken with celebrities, bragging, “Bertie Russell is my
friend. And Greg Peck” (24). He refers, of course, to the renowned British philosopher,
essayist, and peace advocate, Bertrand Russell and the American actor, Gregory Peck,
known for such films as To Kill a Mockingbird and Cape Fear. Moments later, he boasts
that he has eaten lunch with “Greg” in Venice and that, “Bertie... has invited me to stay
with him whenever I’m in England” (26). From his use of the familiar, “Bertie” and
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“Greg” to his not-so-subtle intimation that he possesses extrasensory intellect—he
declares proudly, “I don’t mind telling you I have ESP”—Ratan’s efforts to win Tara
over are transparent and also laughable.
Ratan commits a number amusing gaffes and foibles: in response to Tara’s
American luggage tags, he proclaims, “I too have been to England,” he refers to Gregory
Peck as European though he is not in fact, and while he talks big about his friendship
with “Bertie” Russell, Tara points out, “If I’m not mistaken Bertrand Russell died last
year” (26). Though the awkward conversation between Tara and Ratan is quite humorous
indeed, Tara’s exasperated response, “that she had done more than eat with movie stars”
(25), resonates throughout the novel to articulate Tara’s immense disappointment in those
closest to her for not appreciating the complexity of the alarming new feelings stirred up
by her seven years in America. The Tiger’s Daughter is full of moments that echo Tara’s
conversation with the Nepali on the train, like, for instance, when Tara’s friends are
“perfectly relaxed as they discussed her hair, the shade of her lipstick, her sunglasses”
with a “tremendous capacity for surfaces” (42), or when “They longed to listen to stories
about America, about television and automobiles and frozen foods and record players”
(56), but never deign to ask her about the life she leads in the second country to become
her home. Like Ratan, their prestige-garnering attachments to the West, seem fostered by
the Western mass media, which they greedily consume.
Reading passages like the ones above, it is easy for me to empathize with critics
who read The Tiger’s Daughter and cringe at the ideologically bankrupt principles of
Tara’s exclusive circle of friends. Debjani Banerjee remarks that Bharati Mukherjee
“deserves commendation for her sympathetic but perceptive recreation of the elitist
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establishment of Calcutta which could have been more effective politically had the
juxtaposing vision...not been so relentlessly negative” (164). Furthermore, as Rebecca
Sultana points out, “The question is not whether Mukherjee is authentically representing
the people that she portrays in her books” (“Rewriting Nationalism” 63), it is rather, a
question—as Gayatri Spivak notes—of teasing out “what is not there” (“Rewriting
Nationalism” 61). There is no doubt, as Banerjee, Sultana, and Spivak all mention, that
the central characters in The Tiger’s Daughter are the bourgeois, the privileged, those
insulated and distanced from the dark and sinister forces amongst them. This sense of
class distinction is reinforced by the references to Western mass media, which appear so
frequently as class, caste and status symbols. Those susceptible to the daily horrors of
hunger, disease, and poverty make only peripheral appearances in the novel, but that does
not mean that Mukherjee writes about the upper castes without a shred of criticism.
Debjani Banerjee wonders, “Perhaps Mukherjee’s text pleads ignorance of the
‘Other,’ the undifferentiated, subaltern classes of Calcutta, as a reason for the gap created
in the text by their nebulous presence” (163). I cannot disagree wholeheartedly with
Banerjee’s useful hypothesis, or with her conclusion that, “while focusing on the
privileged sectors, Mukherjee perpetuates silence and lack of communication between
two groups of people” (164). After all, even Mukherjee herself has admitted to Desai and
Barnstone:
I’m attacked ... because I’m—their word is “privileged” ... Because if I’m writing
about people exactly like me—women from a certain background and with a
certain status—then I’m immediately elitist and have nothing worthwhile to say.
(136-37)
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However, it is difficult for me to ignore the possibility that perhaps Mukherjee’s critique
of high society culture is more scathing by way of her omissions. That the subaltern
classes have little voice in the drama that unfolds in The Tiger’s Daughter is in testimony
to the many ways that they are marginalized by their culture, by their caste system, and
subsequently by the entire politics of hierarchical power structures.
In a particularly provocative scene, the desultory conversation of Tara’s friends, a
news broadcast on All-India Radio Calcutta, and a demonstration below the Catelli-
Continental Hotel all converge to pit the trivial lives of Tara’s Camac Street friends
against the historical significance of the Naxalite movement (a militant communist
uprising which I will discuss in further detail later), but which can (for now) be
recognized in the “heartbeat slogans” of the rioters who chant, “Blood Bath! Blood
Bath!” (60), as well as, “Shed Blood, blood shed” (61), which resonate with the mantra of
dedicated Naxalite activists who fought out of, what Mitra describes as, “bloodshed and
heroism” (288). In their conversation about the current troubled times, it is notable that
the word, Naxalite, is never mentioned and that the word, communist, is only articulated,
in its entirety, one time, when one of them cries, “It’s going communist” (44). Instead,
the characters consistently refer to “monkey tricks” (57), “isolated skirmishes” (57),
“demonstrators” (57), “marchers” (58), “gheraos” (mobs) (60), “violence in the streets”
(61), “race riots” (89), “goondahs” (hooligans) (133), “chinless and morally weak
persons” (135), and my personal favorite, “left-of-leftists” (44). However, all of their
attempts to reduce the revolutionary protests to the size of an entertaining spectacle
backfire. Rather than making the protesters appear as either violent criminals or peevish
ruffians, they make themselves appear criminally frivolous on an appalling scale. They
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watch the protest with the same interest with which they would watch a soap opera
unfold on television, while the riot takes place literally right below them.
In the midst of one rally, Nilima declares with Marie Antoinettish naïveté, “You
know, I can’t bring myself to read any Dostoevski” (44), not because he is a communist,
but because he is Russian and by Nilima’s standards, that is close enough. She
concludes, “So, what, he was a Russian, wasn’t he?” (44). Never mind that he wrote
Crime and Punishment. As the radio broadcaster Gopa Kumar Bose announces, “Eight
men have been taken to hospital,” Nilima interjects, “Don’t be a dashed bore...I don’t
want to hear about bombings. I want music instead” (57). When Tara expresses concern,
Reena consoles her by simply dismissing the riot, “What nonsense you talk! ... It’s just a
routine sort of thing” (58) and Pronob adds, “It’s all a political stunt...Farms are being
looted, landlords are being clubbed to death. This is reform?” (58). Furthermore, as the
procession snakes its way through the streets of Calcutta to narrow the distance between
the demonstrators and the elite upper caste, Tara’s clique, relaxing upon their perch atop
the Catelli-Continental Hotel, chats about how the radio DJ, “Carefree Kevin had taken
charge of the Hit Parade” (58) and asks Tara to teach them more American phrases (59),
never once realizing that upon the terrace of their plush hotel, they are on display as
much as the revolutionaries who are soon to pass below.
As one friend turns to Tara to say, “Your first demonstration, Tara, I hope you
enjoy it” (61), Tara’s instincts are to “tell her friends not to explain” (57). Instead Tara
climbs on top of her chair for a better view, with which she notes:
...at first the procession looked like a giant caterpillar, sluggish and quite
harmless, on the busy road. Then she was able to make out banners, picket signs,
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bricks, soda bottles, bamboo poles. ... From the roof of the Catelli, Tara saw
Calcutta, squeezed horribly together, men, women, infants, some scratching their
crotches, others laughing like tourists in an unfamiliar section of town. And
always the heartbeat of the slogans. (60)
What Tara sees from the height of the Catelli-Continental is not just a crowd of men,
women, and children squeezed hideously as one mob, but she bears witness to two
classes of people who are beginning to be squashed together out of the injustice of their
circumstances, so that they can no longer ignore each other.
Sharma argues that, “This works two ways: those who view are also exposed to
the scrutiny of those they sit and comment on all day” and that, “suspended above the
sidewalk of Park Street” they are seen by the crowd as “jeweled fish in a fancy bowl in
which the water level is sinking day by day” (12-13). That many critics do not underscore
the irony in Reena’s response to the demonstration, “It isn’t really as bad as it sounds on
the radio. They [the radio announcers] are famous for exaggerating” (61-2), when the
entire event unfolds within her eyeshot, is deeply troubling to this reader, particularly
because Sharma’s point is emphasized at the close of the novel, when Tara and her
friends try to escape the Catelli-Continental in the midst of a riot and end up physically
clashing with an angry mob. When Tara and her friend cower inside of Sanjay’s car as
angry protesters hurl stones, soda bottles, and their fists at the small fiat and Pronob is
beaten until he bleeds profusely, it is decidedly clear that the radio broadcast is not, in
fact, an exaggeration. Ironically, Tara’s friends afford an exaggerated importance to the
Western mass media they have access to via their class privilege, while they defiantly
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ignore the importance of the information afforded to them via their own media
infrastructures.
As Mukherjee writes about the two riots depicted within The Tiger’s Daughter, it
is important to note that the novel never describes the Naxalite movement from the
perspective of the revolutionaries. If she had, The Tiger’s Daughter might take on a note
of the revolutionary tenor that underpins the decade during which The Tiger’s Daughter
takes place. Many critics have condemned Mukherjee for making light of the Naxalite
uprising’s historical and political magnitude. Critics like Sultana suggest that “the
Naxalite uprising of the 1970s...rocked the eastern and southeastern sections of India”
(“Rewriting Nationalism” 65). Mitra explains that, “Many of us who grew up in Calcutta
in the 1970s knew ourselves to be in some way touched, perhaps transformed, by the
storm of that revolution and the epoch of despair that followed” (288) when between the
years 1967 and 1973 landless farm workers raised arms against wealthy landowners in
movements that were structured, militant, and led by a “radical section of the Bengali
communist intelligentsia” (287). Rabindra Ray explains that, “the word Naxalite was...a
word loaded with nameless fears and aspirations, stirring hopes or despair, and always
strong passions” (3). And, Sumanto Banerjee poignantly argues that after Naxalbari,
“nothing could ever be quite the same in the Indian countryside” (i).
It is not difficult to understand why critics have been hard on Mukherjee for her
treatment of this political movement when in comparison to the remarks of Sultana,
Mitra, Ray, and Banerjee, Tara’s friends refer to these troubled times with general
indifference. One proclaims, “Really, everything, I mean just everything’s gone horribly”
(43) and another declares, “Calcutta’s going to the dogs. No question about it,” (44) in
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agreement. Furthermore, the demonstrators are juxtaposed to Tara and her friends who
gossip with one another on the balcony of the very hotel beneath which the rioters pass.
From their vantage point, the protest rally is scaled down to Lilliputian size. Debjani
Banerjee tempers her criticism of Mukherjee by noting that the “‘actualities’ of the
political events that Mukherjee refers to may not be her intended subject,” but goes on to
argue that:
the Naxalite movement, the political context invoked in the text, is consistently
undermined; destruction and loss of lives are emphasized while the revolutionary
tenor which rocked Calcutta in the late sixties and early seventies is overlooked.
(162)
Sultana, with a nod of agreement, suggests that, “The revolution’s positive aspects are
eschewed from her representation, the oppressive economic relations that had contributed
to the growth of unrest among the peasants and working classes are glossed over”
(“Rewriting Nationalism” 65). Mitra too, contends that, “The revolutionary potential of
the Naxalite movement and other anti-caste, anti-class movements of the time becomes
diminished in Mukherjee’s text to the disgruntled actions of peevish schoolboys” (288).
I agree with these critics to the extent to which they condemn Tara’s friends for
their unsettling naïveté. After all, one of them coldly turns to Tara and exclaims, “Wait
till you’ve seen a riot here. They’re really something” (42). But, I disagree with them to
the extent to which they argue, as Sultana does, that Mukherjee empathizes with the
problems of Tara’s friends and that, “the dominant classes implicated in this oppression
emerge as the victims of random violence” (“Rewriting Nationalism” 65), or to the extent
to which they argue as Mitra does, that, “Mukherjee can see only the end of all order and
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the onset of total anarchy” (290). On the contrary, I would argue that the very fact that
the text depicts the upper class as too shallow and self-absorbed to fully comprehend how
they, themselves, have contributed to the current political unrest, and furthermore, that
they choose to ignore the severity of the uprising when they are confronted by it in the
press and in the streets, implies the opposite.
Set against the backdrop of the Naxalite uprising, The Tiger’s Daughter is full of
uneasy ironies. Tara’s friend Sanjay, for example, composes a nostalgic tribute for a
foreign newspaper glorifying the affluent neighborhood in which all of the members of
Tara’s group were raised. In it, Sanjay writes:
When the heart reaches Camac Street it discovers the old Calcutta, the fair
Calcutta, the Calcutta that never again will be. It has no quarrel with the English
for it is too rich and too sophisticated to be peevish. There are few houses on
Camac Street and those that are there are set far back from the sidewalks. The
houses are immense and they mystify the poorer Calcations and enrage the
nouveau riche. These houses are not houses, but veritable compounds. Within
the walled compounds are aging gardeners, beautiful women, spoiled dogs, and
liveried servants. (65-6)
While Sanjay’s article may very well “capture his love of Camac Street” (66), as duly
noted by a very satisfied Sanjay himself, juxtaposed against the rioting in the streets, it
also captures the very injustice that fuels the revolutionary spirit of the poor in the first
place. Tara notes that, “The [local] newspapers were full of epidemics, collisions, fatal
quarrels and starvation. Even beheadings of landlords in front of their families” (97), but
all of that seems far removed from a place like Camac Street, which far from representing
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what Sanjay calls, “the fair Calcutta,” represents instead the antiseptic disregard of the
aristocracy, where spoiled dogs are better fed than malnourished children, its wealth and
sophistication so much like the imperial prosperity of Victorian times and by using the
same distancing techniques of the Western mass media. If Calcutta’s own local media
outlets have so much power to distance the upper caste from the lower caste, imagine by
comparison, how far removed a typical American feels from the famines and epidemics
that take place halfway around the world.
Before Tara left for Vassar, she too was content to live her sophisticated life and
ignore the daily tragedies of India, to simply overlook the real India surrounding her
restful and privileged life. Mukherjee notes, “The years away from India had made her
self-centered. She took everything, the heat, the beggars, as personal insults and
challenges” (86). Amongst her friends, who take the very chasm between the rich and
poor in stride as a matter of fact—Sanjay, for example, “hinted that there was something
vaguely unpatriotic about her depression” (85)—Tara seems like a possibly redemptive
force. Even Tara’s parents make light of those who are starving in the midst of their own
wealth. Noticing how thin Tara has become during her years in America, her father
jokes, “Yes, yes, that’s all Mummy and I hear from these new Bengali doctors. I tell
them if it was healthy to be thin then Calcutta would be the healthiest city in the world”
(28). While Reena is capable of remaining immune to the barrage of suffering in the
streets of Calcutta, saying things like, “These foreigners just want to take snaps of
bullock carts and garbage dumps. They’re not satisfied with modern people like us”
(108), Tara, on the other hand,
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wanted to tell her friend that the little things had begun to upset her, that of late
she had been outraged by Calcutta, that there were too many people sprawled in
alleys and storefronts and staircases. She longed for the Bengal of Satyajit Ray,
children running through cool green spaces, aristocrats despairing in music rooms
or empty palaces. She hated Calcutta because it had given her kids eating yoghurt
off dirty sidewalks. (105)
It is interesting to note, however, that Tara’s memories of untroubled times in Calcutta
are pieced together from the scenes of one of India’s greatest filmmakers, not from the
various scraps of her own memory, because Tara does not immediately recognize that the
horrors that face her on the streets of Calcutta upon her return visit have always been
there. She has “remembered” an imaginary Calcutta, one which has been immortalized on
film, but what is clear from the excerpt above is that it is more likely that Calcutta was
always troubled, and that in the past, Tara had been able to walk alongside starving
children without feeling a moral obligation, without feeling an ounce of guilt, without
feeling—like Sanjay with his unbridled love for Camac Street—that something was
inherently wrong with the Calcutta she loved so dearly.
Ironically, it may be that Tara has learned to see the “real” Calcutta only through
Western representations of developing countries, through American news programs
casually devoted to intervening when young nations face famine, cruelty or poverty. One
might suspect that it was American television that taught Tara eventually to recognize
Calcutta’s ugly side. By contrast, Tara remembers that back at Vassar, she had defended
Calcutta to the girls in her dormitory who, “identified her with the population explosion,
the loop, vasectomy in railway stations,” with aspects of Indian life with which Tara had
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very little experience and from which the people in Tara’s life had gone to great pains to
shield her, but that Tara had witnessed nonetheless. Tara remembers that her chauffeur
carried smelling salts in his glove compartment lest some outside element offend her
sensitive nature and though Tara struggled to separate the Calcutta of her father’s Camac
Street estate from Calcutta’s darker side, Mukherjee writes,
Tara had never been farther than Shambazar. She could not fully visualize
tenements and beggars. Nor did she wish to talk about it. Dark skinny buildings,
devious alleys, rotting garbage, idle men leaning against barred windows, child-
beggars in front of food stalls: all this made her physically sick. ... Her memory,
elastic, warm and gentle, showed her families asleep on sidewalks, children curled
in wooden crates, and this undermined her remarks. (11-12)
Before leaving Calcutta, Tara could see beyond these difficult visions. With the help of
her smelling salts, she could look past the dirty pictures of children without homes,
parents unable to feed their families, urban squalor, and famine, and blame the poor for
being poor, without considering the socioeconomic conditions that prevent them from
ever getting ahead.
During her return visit to Calcutta, Tara experiences all of these things first hand
and, recalling the times when her curious dorm mates asked her to paint a picture of the
slums of India, suffers “an alarming new feeling that she was an apprentice to some great
thing or power,” that “We’re all involved in each other’s fates” (130). Though
Mukherjee claims, “If I had only been interested in being heard and selling, I would have
written quaint little stories about the Indian ghetto, or nostalgia about aristocratic
Calcutta, which is what publishers want” (qtd. in Onega), Debjani Banerjee argues just
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the opposite, that Mukherjee, “sensationalizes Tara’s visit to the slums; the Indian
bourgeois and Western reader alike are taken on a guided tour” (166). Banerjee implies
that Western readers, like American publishers, or like Tara’s roommates in college, are
fascinated by the abject poverty on display in Calcutta. To some degree Banerjee’s
assertion is true. Western mass media often cultivate exotic images of suffering that
allow a Western audience to feel relief that this anguish takes place over there instead of
over here. Such programs carry rhetorical markers that suggest (often unconsciously)
that the West is superior and more civilized than the East. I might be more inclined to
agree with Banerjee if Bharati Mukherjee’s own treatment of Tara’s trip to the bustee
(slum) with the old man, Joyonto Ray Chowdhury and her friend Reena were not so
wryly and cynically satirical in its own right.
Upon arriving at the bustee, Tara notices crowds of squatters waiting in line for
the movies, giant posters of Hindi film stars ironically juxtaposed to long lines of
homeless men and women on the sidewalks. Even in the slums the movies offer a means
of escape. Tara takes inventory of shacks constructed out of movie posters and decorated
with slogans like “CAPITALISM ENSLAVES” (116), quite literally bringing the
political message to life. Looking at children playing in dirty, rusty water Tara observes
an adorably sweet little girl splashing about and notes that she would be, “perfect for
adoption ads in western periodicals: For only a dollar fifty a day you can make this
beautiful Indian girl happy. She has no mother and father” (117). The fact that Tara
internalizes what she sees at the bustee through the lens of Western adoption ads
indicates that these commercials have in some way prepared her to understand what she
could have noticed her entire life. Furthermore, two young men who live in the bustee
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agree to show them around the tenement and even entertain them, singing film songs and
acting out love scenes from movies starring Raj Kapoor and Vijayantimala as though
making a trip to the slums is as normal as making a trip to the Taj Mahal. Most satirical
of all, is Mukherjee’s portrayal of Reena, who feels indignant rather than compassionate
in the midst of this deeply poverty-stricken dwelling. “This is criminal!” she says, “How
is it they do this to your private personal property...Can’t you throw them out?” (117).
Reena spends the entire day calmly taking down the names of every squatter she sees, so
that at the end of the afternoon, she can authoritatively, “like a tremulous Brahminical
Joan of Arc” look Mr. Chowdhury in the face and say, “‘It’s your duty to serve them new
eviction notices’” (123) as if she alone could wipe away all of the poverty in Calcutta by
simply throwing a community of destitute people with no alternative place to go off of
Joyonto’s property.
Tara, conversely, is at one point so moved that she, “wanted to adopt all the
children playing with water” (117). Unlike Reena, who builds a wall between herself and
the people that she encounters at the bustee, the old man, Joyonto, aspires to reach out to
Tara, to show her how Calcutta is changing, and Tara follows him to prove to her
American husband—who accuses her of being utterly passive in the midst of great
injustices—that she has not returned to Calcutta only to ignore the suffering of others.
One might think that being in the mere presence of Joyonto’s compound with its
squatters, refugees, and “huts made of canvas cloth, corrugated tin, asbestos sheets,
bamboo poles, cardboard pieces and occasional bricks torn loose from compound walls”
(116) before returning home to her father, the Bengal Tiger’s grand estate, where she and
Reena “could gaze at the deserted lawns, wander through the empty marble rooms, linger
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on the spacious verandahs, bathe themselves in the ‘English’ style bathroom, and regain
their composure before the maid brought them tea and sandwiches” (123) would provide
Tara with enough perspective to change her forever. However, Mukherjee’s novel is not
so idealistic. Tara even admits to herself that perhaps, by agreeing to accompany Joyonto
to the bustee she was seeking some “big crisis that she could later point to and say: that
was when I became a totally different person” (119). Trinh Minh-ha writes that, “The
understanding of difference is a shared responsibility, which requires a minimum of
willingness to reach out to the unknown” (85). Though Tara’s motives for agreeing to
take the trip to the bustee may not be the most admirable ones, it has to be enough that
she has gone along with Joyonto willingly, that she, for whatever reasons, desires to be a
more compassionate, or as Appiah would suggest, a more cosmopolitan human being.
At the end of this powerfully provocative scene a reader is left with two
exceedingly lasting impressions: the anger and the hatred that members of the lower caste
harbor for the upper caste, and the very fear that members of the upper caste feel in the
presence of such hatred. Alongside children fit to be in Western adoption ads are bustee-
dwellers whose “obsessive distrust” and “anger against people who were obviously not
squatters” can be read on their faces (117-18). One hisses at Joyonto, “Mister, just tell
your boss we want to spit on his face” (118). These men have no reason to hide their
disgust and their anger seems almost commonplace in the presence of children who feel
the same, like the small girl who confronts Tara:
Except for its size there was nothing childish in the little girl’s face. It had
already assumed the lines of disappointment that it would retain...She came
forward, shrill and angry, circling the visitors like a bird of prey till they
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responded with embarrassed endearments and nods of the head...The arms
quivered with hatred and Tara, who was only inches away, saw blood spreading
on the bandage. There were sores on the little girl’s legs, sores that oozed bloody
pus with each shiver of hatred. (122-22)
As the child clings to Tara’s sari and screams that she wants one just like it, Tara is
shaken to the core by the ferocity of one child’s anger, her jealousy and fury. Mukherjee
writes that Tara “lost her composure” (122). Who would choose to adopt this little girl?
Up close, Tara realizes, poverty is nothing like the sanitized images captured for Western
adoption ads. There is nothing sweet about an angry child with leprosy, and there is no
compassion in Tara’s response, or tenderness in the fact that she becomes so unwound
that later she can scarcely piece together what took place. Everyone has a different
version of the truth: “Had Tara fallen on the child in order to beat her to silence? Or had
the child thrown herself on Tara and tugged at her dhakai sari with bloody poisonous
hands? Reena insisted she had heard Tara scream, Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”
(122) before two men grabbed the girl to fling her, like a rag doll, out of the room.
Writing to her American husband, Tara explains that seeing the bustee was,
“Absolutely incredible, David. I mean you can’t imagine how horrible it was. Like
seeing it at the movies or something” (129). Her letter can be read in two ways. On the
one hand, Tara’s reaction seems cool and dismissive, as if she had gone to the slums for
entertainment and could view hardship in the same manner with which she could watch a
film. On the other hand, it is possible to imagine that she has chosen to use film as a
metaphor in order to try to distance herself from the reality of what she has seen. By
suggesting that the bustee was like seeing something at the movies, Tara implies that it
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was too horrible, too real, so disturbing that it seemed intentionally so, made possible
only through the work of editing and special effects. Mukherjee uses similes comparing
actual people to figures seen in photographs, television images, or pictures from the
movie screen to represent distance on several other occasions. On one occasion—to
establish the physical and emotional distance between Tara and David—Mukherjee
writes that for Tara, it was as though David were no longer a living, breathing human
being, but that he was instead a figure on the television, “Though David wrote regularly,
the David of the aerogrammes was unfamiliar to Tara. He seemed like a figure standing
in shadows, or a foreigner with an accent on television” (62). On another occasion—
Tara’s trip to the funeral pyres with Joyonto—Mukherjee writes, “Just one corpse was
burning, and that too at such a distance that it seemed to occur in a faded snapshot” (80).
And, at the very end of the novel, Mukherjee uses the same technique to represent a shift
in Tara’s identity. After Tara visits the nuns who taught her at St. Blaise’s, Mukherjee
writes, “All her early ideas of love, fair play and good manners had come from those
women. Now as she saw them in their quaint formation on the steps of St. Blaise’s, they
seemed to her people in a snapshot, yellow and faded” (200-201), as though they are
simply mementos from her past.
Perhaps it is for a similar reason that Tara imagines David in India with his
Minolta camera, taking pictures. The camera represents a fixed perspective and vision as
well as a lack of engagement with the subjects being photographed. While Tara imagines
that David would see the “real” India through the lens of his camera, she also imagines
that he would fail to see India through the lenses of his own two eyes. By extension, if an
individual’s camera can distance the observer from what he sees, then imagine, by
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comparison, how much power a television or film camera has to alienate the viewer from
the projected image. Tara wonders:
...what David would do if he ever came to India. He was not like her. Would he
sling his camera like other Americans and photograph beggars in Shambazar,
squatters in Tollygunge, prostitutes in Free School Street, would he try to capture
in color the pain of Calcutta? She thought he would pass over the obvious.
Instead he would analyze her life and her friends in the lens of his Minolta. He
would group the family carefully, Mummy in new cotton sari on cane chair,
Daddy in “bush coat” beside her, she herself on a morah in dead center, with
servants, maids, and chauffeur in the background smiling fixedly at the camera.
He would explode his flash bulbs at Pronob’s parties, and regret he did not own a
tape recorder. (108)
At the same time, within The Tiger’s Daughter, David’s camera is used to represent the
distance that grows between Tara and her husband, because what David would look for
through the lens of his camera are the things that Tara cannot teach him about India.
Perhaps that is why Tara’s correspondences with David, her exchanges with him
by letter, are consistently marked by two specific anxieties. She worries, on the one hand,
that David has “not been able to understand her country through her” and that by
association, he has “not understood her either” (50). On the other hand, Tara also seems
preoccupied by the nagging suspicion that David would be able to come to India and
understand her own country better than she has been able, “he was wiser than she cared
to admit to herself,” and Tara imagines that David, “would land unannounced at Howrah
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Station and say to the coolie wearing a number, I’d like to see the real India” (108)—
something that perhaps Tara fears she herself has not seen.
These anxieties explain, perhaps, why Tara grows so angry with David’s letters
and so self-conscious with the letters she writes in return. David may have initially
purchased books about India in order to feel closer to Tara during their time apart, in the
same fashion that Tara turns to The New Yorker to feel closer to David by reading
segments like “Goings On About Town” and by keeping track of the baseball statistics
for the New York Mets (79). Mukherjee writes, “She read of crises in the foreign stock
markets, ads for villas in Spain, presidential commissions, the Mets, hoping the foreign
news would bring her closer to David” (78-9). However, David’s letters reveal that the
power of the Western media to bring people closer to one another has its limitations.
Armed with recently gleaned information from his books, David’s letters grow
increasingly judgmental, “David was outraged. He accused her of ‘stupid inanities,’ and
‘callousness.’ He thought the customs she praised merely degraded the poor in India”
(131). Debjani Banerjee writes that, “Tara’s epistolary exchanges with her American
husband provoke her into self-justificatory explanations of her inertia with respect to the
turbulent political situation in India” (166). It is certainly true that Tara spends a great
deal of time trying to defend herself to David. In one letter she writes:
I know you’re saying right now how can I worry about flowers when people are
dying on the streets of Calcutta, how can I be so callous, etc., I know that’s
exactly what you’re saying to yourself. Well, all I can reply is that nothing my
parents could give up would possibly change the life of the poor. (130)
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At another time, Tara censors herself, because “she knew she could never tell David that
the misery of her city was too immense and blurred to be listed and assailed one by one.
That it was fatal to fight for justice” (131). In the end, the exchanges between Tara and
her American husband work in two ways.
On the one hand, as Banerjee suggests, “the disturbing suggestion is that the
relationship between a privileged Indian and her political circumstances must be
mediated by a white, American male” (166-67). On the other hand, Mukherjee implies
that David, who has simply read a few books on India, is in no position to mediate
anything for Tara, a highly educated woman with arguably an insider’s view of the
problems facing Calcutta. After all, Tara writes, “Enough to say that poverty is an art
your people will never master” (129). Though Mukherjee never condemns David’s
behavior outright, she does juxtapose his accusations—of Tara’s “stupid inanities” and
her “callousness”—directly against some of his most insensitive comments. That David
made “horrible analogies between her Calcutta and Czarist Russia on the eve of
revolution,” that he “told her that he thought from the omissions in her letters that a
bloody struggle was inevitable,” and that he suggests, “perhaps Calcutta did not deserve
any better” (131) is deeply patronizing and degrading to Tara. His scathing criticisms of
Calcutta may be true enough, but he dismisses his very own wife’s feelings and the
conflicted emotions she must be experiencing entirely for the sake of his own moral high
ground.
Mitra argues that, “The ultimate developmental goal that the novel posits for Tara
is to be the bearer of progressive Western ideas to a moribund society” (294). Given that
it is David who insists that Tara ought to take up such an agenda, I cannot say that I agree
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entirely with Mitra’s assessment. It seems to me that in The Tiger’s Daughter, if there is
to be any developmental goal, it is for Tara to embrace the progressive ideals of the West.
I do not mean to suggest, as Rebecca Sultana does that Mukherjee “paradoxically creates
a binary of the East and West being oppressed and liberated respectively” (“Patchwork
Creations” 2). After all, Tara is infinitely aware of the discrimination and the injustices
that take place in the United States. Though her friends protest, “What nonsense!” and
that, “They knew America was lovely, they knew New York was not like Calcutta,” Tara
cannot shake the memories of ghettos and student demonstrations (56). In the midst of
the riot beneath the Catelli-Continental Hotel, Tara’s first instinct is to compare the
violence in the streets with similar riots she witnessed on television in the United States,
“Oh no, Tara thought. I saw Chicago on television, and Newark and Detroit” (61).
Thinking of muggings, and the fear of muggings, and the fear of being watched, she
confides in Sanjay that, “New York...was a gruesome nightmare” (69). And, when Reena
falls for her foreign-exchange student, the young African-American Washington
McDowell, and her heart is broken, Tara consoles her by suggesting, “In America a girl
like you and a boy like McDowell would never have met—so it’s natural that he’s gone
away” (154). Even Sanjay pronounces, “I’ve been keeping up with foreign magazines. I
know discrimination still exists. He can’t fool me. We aren’t the only backward
country!” (150). What I do mean to suggest is that while Tara may not be ready to fight
to change the culturally pure ideals of her high society, she may, by the end of the novel,
be ready to reject them outright.
It is imperative to keep in mind that The Tiger’s Daughter is a novel about a
young woman’s journey. At twenty-two, Tara’s eyes are just being opened. Unlike the
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two Western characters, Washington McDowell, the student civil rights activist, and
Antonia Whitehead, the social worker, who have come to India, “because India needs
help” and because “The third world has to be roused to help itself” (166), Tara has simply
come to India to visit with her friends and family. Mitra argues that McDowell and
Whitehead, “with their liberal-humanist agenda, are largely incomprehensible to a native
population that still lives by Victorian rules” and that, “Therefore in the ‘new’ Bengali
woman, with roots in both worlds, the text attempts to construct the ideal cultural
ambassador” (294). While there is ample evidence of Mitra’s first point, insofar as
Mitra’s second point goes there is actually evidence to the contrary.
Upon his arrival, Reena’s family, expecting an American boy, “who could sing
movie songs like “‘Que Será Será’ and say a few phrases in imperfect Bengali to delight
their host and hostess” (139), have little idea of what to do with Washington McDowell.
Each member of the family tries to reach out to McDowell, but do so in deeply
inappropriate and offensive ways. Reena’s mother, for example, “not familiar with the
ways of Africans,” draws on what knowledge she has gleaned from “Tarzan movies”
(139) and Reena’s father tries to entertain McDowell by singing “a few bars from
‘Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy’” and standing up to do his “Bing Crosby imitation” (144).
Reena, who fancies herself as more sophisticated in the ways of the world than her
parents, tries to reach out to McDowell by explaining how “she knew something about
his people from having read The Negro of Narcissus at St. Blaise’s” (143). The fact that
Reena “cleans up” the title of Conrad’s novel, actually titled The Nigger of the
‘Narcissus,’ so as not to offend McDowell probably does more to alienate McDowell
than to reach out to him. The intentional revision of the novel’s title can be read as
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overly self-conscious. And Sanjay, who translates Washington McDowell’s comment, “I
don’t need no pills” in the case that “the others had not understood McDowell’s accent”
(145) does not do much better either.
Antonia Whitehead stirs even stronger feelings amongst Tara’s bourgeois family
and friends. In a letter to the Calcutta Observer, Sanjay writes that Antonia Whitehead
is, “dangerous. She is like a snake tightly coiled.” In regards to her liberal ideologies, he
adds, “She talks in Shambazar of ‘democratization’ and ‘politicization,’ of parity and
socioeconomic balance. But I urge you Calcatians to throw out this perilous lady before
it is too late” (165). These sentiments come as no surprise from Sanjay who vehemently
opposes the protests of the lower classes and venomously writes in his own editorial in
response to the revolutionary protests taking place in the streets of Calcutta:
It is inconceivable that in this day and age of Calcutta’s enlightenment a militant
majority should try to impose its fierce will on a responsible tax-paying minority.
Does not a minority have rights? Does not the minority have feelings? We ask
these painful questions because the vocal majority will not ask them. (147)
However, Antonia Whitehead unintentionally manages to offend even the most mild-
mannered people in Tara’s circle, when after taking part in a religious ritual, she lectures
the worshipers, advocating, “less religious excitement and more birth-control devices,”
and claims, “Indians should...demand economic reforms and social upheavals...artesian
wells in the rainless villages...improved farming techniques and better trained nurses”
(174-75). Though Antonia proposes several solid ideas for improving the infrastructure of
India and does so good-naturedly and in the spirit of helpfulness, she offends the very
people she has traveled to protect.
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And Tara, whom Mitra claims to be the “ideal cultural ambassador,” finds herself
in both cases at a loss for words. In the presence of McDowell, she thinks, “He’s so
American...even more than David,” and unintentionally offends him by assuming that he
grew up in one of Los Angeles’ roughest neighborhoods. In his presence, she concludes,
“It was impossible to be a bridge for anyone” (144). Likewise, in Antonia, Tara
recognizes some of her own social hiccups upon arriving in Calcutta, “She recalled again
her own bad starts and mistakes. To Pronob and his group at the Catelli she must have
seemed as naive and dangerous as Antonia” (175). In the end, Tara decides, “There was
no way to warn the girl, no way they could be friends” (175). Over and again, Tara’s trip
home reinforces the notion that it is impossible to interpret one culture for another,
impossible to be a cultural ambassador.
If her journey teaches her anything, it teaches her to reexamine both of her
worlds, with a clearer sense of vision, but Tara is left without the ability to articulate all
that she has discovered. Trying to compose a letter to David, Tara ascertains that, “It was
so vague, so pointless, so diffuse, this trip home to India” (130). If there is a hero at all in
The Tiger’s Daughter, it would have to be the old Joyonto Ray Chowdhury, who alone
with his cryptic word games, his “short-sighted visionary small talk” (40), shouts into a
bull horn in the middle of a riot and says, “The year of the puppy is over, do you
understand? The age of snakes is coming but the boy doesn’t know it yet...We who seven
years ago spoke of honor...” (208). Though enigmatic, Joyonto’s remarks and
observations seem to underscore, poignantly, the shallow lives that the young bourgeois
men and women of Tara’s circle lead. When no one else seems to understand him, Tara
alone recognizes that there is some crucial truth in the midst of his ramblings.
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At home in Calcutta, “in a class that lived by Victorian rules, changed decisively
by the Hindu imagination” (34), Tara realizes that despite the many curious ways in
which the two cultures she belongs to touch, contaminate, and intermingle with one
another—in portmanteau words, popular songs, television shows, novels, lines of poetry,
expressions, gadgets, in the bits of this and that which combine in so many delightful
ways—they are separate in ways that cannot be reconciled. This is evidenced particularly
because the Western mass media, through which two cultures come to know each other,
do more to point out what makes one culture strange to another than the opposite.
Furthermore, the cultural exchange played out through the mass media is wholly unequal.
While in India, Tara’s friends read Western novels and learn English at school, the same
cannot be said of American school children, who are unlikely to read much if any Indian
literature and even more unlikely to learn any of India’s primary languages in a
classroom.
On the flip side, Sunil Khilnani writes that, in contrast to the U.S. constitution,
which preserves an individual’s rights, and which insists upon the ideal, “that all men are
created equal,” the Indian Constitution establishes instead, “a language of community
rights” that simultaneously produces bearers of those rights (36). In other words, while
there is still discrimination in the United States, it exists within an entirely different
matrix. In New York, Tara notes, “students were rioting about campus recruiters and far-
away wars rather than the price of rice or the stiffness of final exams.” They rioted, Tara
points out, “Because people were agitated over pollution,” and that in Calcutta, “The only
pollution she had been warned against...was caste pollution” (34). In Calcutta there exists
still a sincere anxiety that if one culture crisscrosses too much with another, the entire
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system will unravel. If American civil rights, equal protections under the law, and the
ideal of social equality threaten to change or dismantle the social divisions in India (so
modeled after the colonialist rhetoric of Western leadership and still perhaps perpetuated
by the privileging of Western media), Tara’s decision, at the end of The Tiger’s
Daughter, to return to the United States, expresses her desire to reject the notions of
cultural purity and caste pollution that govern the culture of her childhood, but it does
little to challenge them.
The Tiger’s Daughter demonstrates how mass media reveal that that there is no
definitive answer to the question, “Where does the foreignness of the spirit begin?” (37).
Mukherjee insists, “I’m looking for every side to break down in some way and constantly
create a new whole” (Desai & Barnstone142). This is an admirable goal. However, while
the exchange of mass media across cultures has the power to catalyze this breaking
down—at least in superficial ways—The Tiger’s Daughter shows us again and again, that
mass media do not just help us to see each other, mass media also help us to ignore one
another, to hold each other at arm’s length as strange or different or exotic, inferior,
backward, or uncivilized.
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The Price of Western Media in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
She [Rahel] looked back at the looming, gabled, house-shaped
Hole in the Universe and imagined living in the silver bowl that Baby
Kochamma had installed on the roof. It looked large enough for people to
live in. Certainly it was bigger than a lot of people’s homes. Bigger, for
instance, than Kochu Maria’s cramped quarters.
If they slept there, she and Estha, curled together like fetuses in a
shallow steel womb, what would Hulk Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow do?
If the dish were occupied, where would they go? Would they slip through
the chimneys into Baby Kochamma’s life and TV? Would they land on
the stove with a Heeaagh!, in their muscles and spangled clothes? Would
the Thin People—the famine-victims and refugees—slip through the
cracks in the doors? Would Genocide slide between the tiles?
—from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (179)
In her novel The God of Small Things, Arudhati Roy juxtaposes the traumatic
events of one fourteen-day period in the winter of 1969 against a second narrative that
takes place twenty-three years later. Like the satellite dish described in the quotation that
begins this chapter—through which Hulk Hogan’s ripped abdominal muscles can be
summoned by the touch of a button with more appeal than a news broadcast about famine
or genocide—Roy uses a narrative structure that effortlessly moves backward and
forward through time not only to balance the choices made by her characters with the
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consequences of their decisions, but also to weigh the wounded lives of three young
children against the failures and flaws of the adults meant to protect them, the poverty of
Untouchable men who are made to feel as though their lives are expendable against the
Touchable middle-class wealth of a family that owns and operates its own factory, and
the “Regional Flavor” (46) of a local culture against the sinister forces of a fierce
entertainment industry and global economy. In other words, Arundhati Roy consistently
puts the “small things” face-to-face with their aggressors and by doing so she gently
recognizes their fragility, while simultaneously noting the “reckless streak that develops
in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big” (173), the
remarkable boldness of resilience.
In The God of Small Things, Roy metaphorically dwarfs local media by
overloading the novel with references to Western media. Though the novel contains a
handful of references to local entertainment—including several allusions to the
Bollywood film, Love in Tokyo, a quick mention of the “best-loved comedian in
Malayalam cinema” Adoor Basi (137), a quoted passage from a traditional Indian song
about a sad, young, bride preparing to wed a man she doesn’t love (209), and several
mentions of traditional kathakali dancers—these allusions are overwhelmed by her
attention to Western media. Her references to Western literature alone are in no short
supply; she mentions The Reader’s Digest World Atlas, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
Kipling’s The Jungle Book, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Great Gatsby,
Mutiny on the Bounty and myriad children’s books, including Rumpelstiltskin, The Pied
Piper, The Frog Prince, and The Adventures of Susie Squirrel, to name just a few. She
brings up jazz music, lyrics from the soundtrack to The Sound of Music, “Popeye the
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Sailorman,” Busby Berkeley musicals, The Nutcracker Suite, Elvis Presley, AC-DC, and
she quotes from the Rolling Stones’ classic “Ruby Tuesday.” There are allusions to Julie
Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Charlie Chaplin, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Bronze
Buckaroo, and Modern Times as well as references to the news footage of Neil
Armstrong landing on the moon, NBA basketball, Grand Slam Tennis, The Bold and the
Beautiful, the BBC, Phil Donahue, Cops, Santa Barbara, Wrestling Mania, Prime
Bodies, Listerine advertisements, and the NFL. Beyond portraying local entertainment
industries as small things and Western entertainment industries as Huge conglomerates,
Roy’s use of Western media in The God of Small Things serves two main purposes. The
first assists the reader in navigating the plot: the narrative that reconstructs the two
devastating weeks in 1969 uses the film The Sound of Music as a point of reference,
while the second narrative uses the “stainless steel womb” of Baby Kochamma’s satellite
dish to do the same. The second purpose of Roy’s use of Western media is to underscore
the crucial social and political issues at stake and examined in the novel: cultural
imperialism; class, race, and gender privilege; caste pollution; and social responsibility.
Many references to Western media keep the time and pace of the novel through
repetition. Part punctuation and part refrain, these repetitions do more than just create a
sense of cadence, they capture and reinforce the innocence and curiosity of childhood and
accumulate meaning so that each time a phrase is repeated it becomes layered with
significance. These repetitions are, as the narrator notes, “Little things, smashed and
reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning” (32). The “two-egg” twins, Estha and Rahel
(4), for example, are mirror opposites of one another in the manner with which they fix
their hair to emulate the styles of celebrities: while Rahel wears her hair in a “fountain in
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a Love-in-Tokyo” (a ponytail in a beaded hair band made popular by the 1966 Bollywood
film bearing the same name)—“two beads on a rubber band, nothing to do with Love or
Tokyo” (37)—Estha wears his hair in a “puff” to emulate Elvis Presley—“his Elvis puff.
His Special Outing Puff” (37). That Rahel, who styles her hair after the Indian actress
Asha Parekh ends up living in the United States and that Estha, who styles his hair after
the American icon Elvis Presley, stays in India, carries an undercurrent of poetic irony. In
The God of Small Things, Estha and Rahel’s identities are often conflated with these
hairstyles, as in the time when they hide behind their mother’s bedroom door, “A
Surprised Puff and a Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo” (240). Consequently, their identities
are inscribed with new meaning when Estha is teased about his hairstyle, “‘Elvis
Presley,’ Baby Kochamma said for revenge. ‘I’m afraid we’re a little behind the times
here’” (138). Said in the context of meeting their British relatives, Estha and Rahel
internalize their great aunt’s comment and interpret it to mean that they fail to measure up
to their idealized, half-white cousin Sophie Mol. From that point forward, Estha’s
“puff”—modeled after a 1950s rock icon and worn for special occasions during his
childhood in the 1970s—is symbolically layered with feelings of inferiority. Even his
hair is “a little behind the times.”
Likewise, the repeated beat, “dum dum,” from the song “Popeye the Sailorman,”
which a fidgety Rahel gets into trouble for singing at the movies, resurfaces throughout
the text to emphasize, like it does at the Abhilash Talkies, how “Excitement Always Leads
to Tears. Dum dum” (94). The house commonly referred to as “the History House,”
where Kari Saipu lived, “The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native.’
Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz” (51)—by invoking
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the name Kurtz—is imbued with the exploitation of colonialism and the spiritual shadows
of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, in which civility is conflated with
barbarism, in which mankind is depicted as duplicitous, in which life is portrayed as an
infinite struggle between good and evil, and through which Ayemenem is conflated with
darkest Africa. Throughout the novel, every time the History House is mentioned, a
reader knows to take a deep breath, because something sinister is lurking in the
background, and that nothing good can ever come out of Ayemenem’s own Heart of
Darkness.
Even something as seemingly inconsequential as Rahel’s favorite pair of yellow-
rimmed, plastic sunglasses, with red lenses that make “the world look red” (37) take on
an additional dimension of meaning as a symbol of her desire to identify with the West.
In this chapter, I argue that like Rahel, who looks at the world through the red lenses of
her yellow, plastic-rimmed sunglasses and finds that, “Everything is Angry-colored”
(176), if we look at The God of Small Things through the lens of Western media, we find
a careful examination of the strong influence that dominant cultures have over less
affluent nations through the subtle interventions of literature, music, film and television
and of the defiant spirit of those who resist. After all, there are allusions to Western
media and repetitions that have lovely meanings too. Sometimes Western media are
“smashed,” “reconstituted,” and “imbued with new meaning” so that Ammu for instance
changes the meaning of Kipling’s imperialist The Jungle Book so that his text is encoded
with her love for Estha and Rahel. Kipling’s colonialist rhetoric is wiped away when
Ammu gently takes on the voice of Shere Khan as she reads to the twins before bed, “Ye
chose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I
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to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Kahn, who speak!”
and the twins sweetly answer their mother in unison with Kipling’s next words, “And it is
I, Raksha, who answer” (57), or, when, for instance, Ammu uses “Kipling to love her
children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, thou and I (155). Despite these
defiant moments, the novel asks, as Roy asks in her book Power Politics, “Is
globalization about ‘eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of
colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?’” (14). Cultural imperialism
represents yet another means through which Someone Small—this time a local culture or
economy—is made to defend itself against Someone Big—a global entertainment
industry that sets up alluring and seductive visions of Western liberty, commerce, and
identity in societies that have few methods through which to compete.
Throughout The God of Small Things we see how Western media increasingly
underscore complicated systems of cultural domination. Scholar Janet Thormann
explains that, “In an increasingly global economy, the master signifiers of the dominating
international regime increasingly infiltrate local cultures and economies,” they introduce
“new ideals for identification,” “new forms of coercion,” and reinforce “established
forms of injustice” (299). A careful appraisal of the quotation used to open this chapter,
for example, recognizes the gulf between the volume of Western capital and the volume
of suffering in the Third World. Roy insists that, “In India your face is slammed right up
against it [the disparity between rich and poor]. To address it, to deal with it, to not deal
with it, to try and understand it, to insist on not understanding it, to simply survive it—on
a daily, hourly basis—is a fine art” (Power Politics 3). It is noteworthy that when Rahel
studies the satellite dish affixed to the house, she notes that, “It looked large enough for
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people to live in. Certainly it was bigger than a lot of people’s homes. Bigger for
instance than Kochu Maria’s cramped quarters” (179). A common-enough fixture in
Western homes, the satellite dish that Rahel’s great aunt has installed on the roof of her
home is a symbol of middle-class privilege for a woman who “had lived her life
backwards,” who had “renounced the material world” when she was young, but as she
grew older embraced it (23). Thormann adds that, “The entertainment industry motivates
and furthers the materialism and self-righteous status of the middle class citizen” (302).
That the satellite dish alone is larger than the servant’s quarters is further evidence to
Baby Kochamma of its significant contribution to her class standing as a Caste Roman
Catholic.
When Rahel envisions television personalities and documentary subjects swirling
to life above the satellite dish and infiltrating the house by means of the chimney or the
cracks in the doors, she does so in a way that demonstrates how media privilege some
desires and identities while excluding and disenfranchising others. Media, like the
novel’s oft-repeated “Love Laws,” help to lie down and reinforce “who should be loved
and how. And how much” (33). The whimsical way in which Rahel imagines Hulk
Hogan and Bam Bam Bigelow—in their spandex tights—landing in Baby Kochamma’s
home with a great, “Heeaagh!” distinguishes the pair as objects of desire: they are
playful, wealthy, Western, and muscular. On the other hand, the “Thin People,” and the
“famine-victims,” are most unwelcome in Baby Kochamma’s Touchable, Christian
home. In Rahel’s vision, the Thin People and the famine-victims hover in the air above
the house, electric and disturbing, sneaky and spectral and threatening. They are perched
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and balanced in the sky above Ayemenem, waiting for the right moment to make their
descent:
The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them
spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars,
famines, football, food shows, coups d’état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray.
Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns
in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming. (179)
For Rahel—thinking perhaps of her yellow, plastic-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses—
the entire world whirls in that sky “thick with TV”: the West and the East, the North and
the South, the farthest reaches of space, and they are not created equal. Within the
satellite dish whole wars play out their terrible dramas and bombs light up the night’s sky
and crash into civilian houses. Football players, fattened by shoulder pads, throw Hail
Mary passes and hope for a last second touchdown. Chefs from around the world plate
signature dishes on fine china, while whole villages starve.
Famine-victims, Thin People, and the targets of genocide would certainly be
classified amongst the poorest of the poor in a culture where caste is such a fundamental
concern, in a culture where as the narrator of The God of Small Things points out,
“human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could
get used to” (49). They would certainly be classified with the Paravans, the Pelayas, and
the Pulayas, the Untouchable classes who “were not allowed to walk on public roads, not
allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas” (71). Their entrance
into any Touchable house would constitute caste pollution. Rahel’s unique and clever act
of wonder seems to ask: What would Baby Kochamma do if the Thin People walked
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right out of her television set and into her living room? Would she still have the ability to
look away—to view “other peoples’ poverty” as “merely a matter of getting used to. A
question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing More” (120)? Roy
explains that there’s an expression in the Indian villages of the Narmada valley, “You can
wake someone who’s sleeping. But you can’t wake someone who’s pretending to be
asleep” (Power Politics 68). If Baby Kochamma—who “presides over the world in her
drawing room on satellite TV” (27) and quickly changes the channel from “BBC famines
and television wars” (29) to more desirable programming like Phil Donahue or WWF—
watched in horror as the famine-victims and targets of genocide entered her own house,
would it require that she finally face them head on? Could an Untouchable’s image on the
TV screen contaminate an entire Touchable house?
In The God of Small Things, it is difficult to say one way or the other, because
some words like “contaminate” are difficult to pin down and the line between order and
chaos is often fuzzy. Best illustrated by the great “jam-jelly question”—referring to the
years when Mammachi (Rahel’s grandmother) produces and sells her “Too thin for jelly
too thick for” banana jam, even after it is banned for being, “An ambiguous,
unclassifiable consistency” (31)—some lines can be crossed without fear of punishment,
while the cost for crossing others climbs to “unaffordable heights” (318). Looking back,
Rahel remembers:
Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just
them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into
forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be
loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers
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grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam and jelly
jelly. (31)
That Mammachi makes and sells illegal banana jam and that, “It was a time when uncles
became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals,” is only the half of it.
The other half is that some transgressions of the Love Laws are treated as though
they are rather small, like when Mammachi arranges for Velutha to attend the school for
Untouchables and hires him to work as the factory carpenter, even though, “It caused a
great deal of resentment among the other Touchable factory workers because, according
to them, Paravans were not meant to be carpenters” (74). There are other small violations
too, like when Baby Kochamma falls in love with a young, Irish priest for whom she
converts to Catholicism and enters a convent until, lonelier than ever, she returns home.
After that, recognizing that it was unlikely she would ever find a husband, her father uses
her dowry money to send her to the United States to study at the University of Rochester.
Or, how after disapproving of Chacko’s marriage to a white, working-class woman he
meets in London, Mammachi is not only glad to have him home after their divorce but
lets him run Paradise Pickles & Preserves and builds a separate door to the house leading
directly into his bedroom so that he can carry on sexual affairs with women who work in
his factory. Mammachi even slips them money from time to time, “because in her mind,
a fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love” (161). When Ammu—a Syrian
Christian—marries a Bengali—a Hindu—whom she eventually divorces, Mammachi,
with Syrian Christian charity, still welcomes her and the twins back into the fold of the
Ayemenem house, even when Pappachi thinks it unwise.
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Still, none of these transgressions threatens the order of things the way that the
Untouchable, Velutha, does, with his “lack of hesitation,” and the “unwarranted
assurance” with which he “walked” and “held his head” (73), with his courage to say,
“The days are gone...when you can kick us around like dogs,” as though he loved himself
too much (246), or the way that Estha and Rahel’s terrible love for Velutha does. Even
Ammu who warned, “I’ve told you before... I don’t want you going to his house. It will
only cause trouble,” has no idea how much trouble it will cause. The small violations of
the love laws seem innocuous, at least until Inspector Thomas Mathew reminds them,
“first you spoil these people, carry them about on your head like trophies, then when they
misbehave you come running to us for help” (247), which reminds them again of the
great “jelly-jam question” and that some lines can be crossed without fear of punishment,
while the cost for crossing others climbs to unaffordable heights. Furthermore, neither
Velutha’s self-confidence nor the twins’ adoration of him as a father figure threaten the
order of things, in the same way that Ammu’s love for Velutha does.
It is her love that leaves Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen, frightened by what his
son “had touched. More than touched. / Entered. / Loved” (74). It is her love that makes
Baby Kochamma shudder, “like a child being force-fed spinach,” and say, “How could
she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular smell, these Paravans?”
(75). It is Ammu’s consent that leaves Mammachi bewildered as she thinks of her own
daughter, “naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy
coolie...his black hips jerking between her parted legs...Like a dog with a bitch on heat”
(244). It is Ammu’s transgression that leaves Mammachi in a fury because she has
“defiled generations of breeding” (244). And, it is all three of them—Ammu, Estha and
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Rahel—who in the end will never forgive themselves for violating the laws which laid
down, “who should be loved and how. And how much,” because for the rest of their
lives they will separately carry the grief of knowing that, “they had loved a man to death”
(307).
By contrast, some small transgressions of the Love Laws, like Chacko’s marriage
to Margaret Kochamma—the white, working-class woman he meets while studying at
Oxford—are portrayed as producing splendid, desirable creations, like Chacko’s daughter
Sophie Mol; half-white and half-Syrian Christian, she is beach-colored, with beautiful,
“deep red-brown” hair (137), and “bluegrayblue” eyes (139). Robert Young traces such
adulation throughout history, noting that even in the 1800s, while the children of
interracial couples were on the one hand considered, “degenerate, and, literally, degraded
(that is, lowered by racial mixture from pure whiteness, the highest grade),” they were on
the other hand, “often invoked as the most beautiful human beings of all” (Young 16).
Meanwhile, other transgressions of the Love Laws, like Ammu’s marriage to a Bengali—
a Hindu who drank too much and slept around—are rendered to have “unfortunate”
results, like Ammu’s children, Rahel and Estha; Baby Kochamma thought of them as
“Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry” (44),
and also thought that, “Together they were trouble. NataS ni rieht seye. [Satan in their
eyes.] They had to be separated” (286). Based on these distinctions, one thing that ensues
in The God of Small Things then, is an examination of the ways in which the small
children, Estha and Rahel, come to recognize that some races, genders, and classes are
privileged by media, by the laws of culture, and by the laws that “lay down who should
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be loved and how. And how much.” When they return from Cochin with their cousin
Sophie Mol, they conclude that:
Littleangels were beach-colored and wore bell-bottoms.
Littledemons were mudbrown in Airport-Fairy frocks with forehead
bumps that might turn into horns. With Fountains in Love-in-Tokyos. And
backwards-reading habits.
And if you cared to look, you could see Satan in their eyes. (170)
It is difficult to ignore the parallel here—perhaps unintended—between The God of Small
Things and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, in which Rushdie merges both angelic
and demonic characteristics in the novel’s “twin” protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and
Saladin Chamcha and about which Paul Brians notes, “Demons can behave like angels
and vice versa.” Estha and Rahel’s self-worth is constructed through their identification
with an ideal—in this case their half-white, beach-colored cousin Sophie Mol with her
bluegrayblue eyes—so that by comparison, Estha and Rahel—not half-white, not beach-
colored, not bluegrayblue-eyed—learn to think of themselves as different, as Other, as
inferior and “Loved a Little Less” (177).
Estha and Rahel do not learn to feel different, Other, inferior, and “Loved a Little
Less” in a vacuum. In The God of Small Things, Estha and Rahel learn this lesson in
myriad ways and in a variety of environments, like at the Abhilash Talkies where they
see the “World Hit,” The Sound of Music, as a treat precisely one day before they pick up
their beach-colored cousin with bluegrayblue eyes from the Cochin airport. The delicate
balance between Estha and Rahel’s anxiety over Sophie Mol’s arrival and the timing of
their trip to the cinema conspire to make the twins hyperaware of their differences and
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inadequacies. Even though the narrator explains that, “In a purely practical sense it would
probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem,” and
that the narrator also admits that “is only one way of looking at it” (32), it is also possible
to say that The Sound of Music works like a bookmark that underscores all of the dark
moments to come later in the novel. After all, the damages to every character—physical
and psychological: Estha’s molestation at the cinema, Sophie Mol’s death and the death
of Velutha, Estha’s being Returned, the razing of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, Ammu’s
expulsion from the Ayemenem house and her subsequent early death at the “viable, die-
able age” of thirty-one (310), and the terrible emotional traumas that accompany these
tragedies—trace back in some way to the trip to see the film that begins with Julie
Andrews dwarfed to a tiny “speck on the hill” that “gets bigger and bigger till she bursts
onto the screen with her voice like cold water and her breath like peppermint” (57) even
if that too, is only one way of looking at it. Realistically, the events to follow have little
to do with either Sophie Mol’s arrival or Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer kissing
on the big screen, but the poignant way in which these two events are echoed with poetic
irony in the dark moments that come later is difficult to ignore.
As the narrator of The God of Small Things notes, it is impossible to place blame
with any one person, with any one event, with any one mistake, or flaw, or failure, or
misjudgment. What takes place within the confines of the novel has everything to do
with history and politics, with the forces of power and privilege that have exerted
themselves throughout centuries, through which those who are Big have the power to
bully those who are Small, sometimes with the best of intentions. The narrator explains:
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Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago.
Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the
Dutch Ascendancy, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s
conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian bishops murdered by the
Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their
chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began
long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a
teabag.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws
that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much. (33)
And still, the fact remains that the children do accompany their mother, Ammu, their
great aunt, Baby Kochamma, and their uncle, Chacko, on a trip to the Cochin airport to
pick up their British aunt, Margaret Kochamma, and their beach-colored cousin, Sophie
Mol, and terrible things happen when they stopped at the Abhilash Talkies to see The
Sound of Music and terrible things happen when they all returned together to Ayemenem.
The first chapter of the novel is the only chapter to end with a disclaimer. It reads,
“however, for practical purposes, / in a hopelessly practical world...” (34). What follows
that disclaimer amounts to this: nothing was ever the same again.
It could be argued that “for practical purposes” it all actually starts in the week
leading up to the trip to the Cochin airport, in the week leading up to the special and rare
trip to the Abhilash Talkies to see the von Trapp children sing, “High on a hill lived a
lonely goatherd,” that it all starts when someone utters the question, “What will Sophie
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Mol Think?” (130) and when Baby Kochamma reminds Rahel and Estha, that by meeting
their British aunt and half-British cousin for the very first time, they will be
“Ambassadors of India.” As Baby Kochamma reminds the twins, “You’re going to form
their First Impression of your country” (133) and that week, every time the twins are
overheard speaking in Malayalam, “she levied a small fine which was deducted at source.
From their pocket money” and makes them write one hundred times each, “I will always
speak in English, I will always speak in English” (36). She also forces them to practice a
song with which to entertain their newly-arrived relatives during the long car-ride home
and insists that they rehearse their “Prer NUN sea ayshun” (36)—a word reduced to pure
phonemes to emphasize the Indian dialect with which they are spoken as well as the
syllable: NUN. The Sound of Music is, of course, a movie that begins at the abbey—a
place to which Baby Kochamma can certainly relate—where Maria is a problem to be
solved, a fact that Estha and Rahel know, because they have already seen The Sound of
Music twice, “They knew all the songs” (35), an important point considering what they
bring to the movie and how the movie informs them in return. On the way home from
the Cochin airport, where Estha and Rahel behave badly, as a partial apology, they agree
to sing the car song and “Their Prer NUN sea ayshun” is perfect (147).
The fact that they all travel to the Abhilash Talkies—and later to the Cochin
airport to pick up Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol—in Chacko’s skyblue Plymouth
equipped with its “four-sided, tin-lined, plywood billboard that says on all four side, in
elaborate writing, Paradise Pickles & Preserves” (45) is significant. It emphasizes that
the family—seemingly insulated from the outside world within the confines of the very
car that advertises the family’s local business and that comes to represent Ayemenem’s
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own economies of desire, consumption, and political power—is enmeshed, catapulted
even, into a powerful global economy complete with its own standards of desire,
consumption, and political power. The American-made car advertising the family’s
products: mixed fruit jam and hot-lime pickle—local flavors—with the image of a
kathakali dancer in a fluttering, swirling skirt—for “Regional Flavor” in an “Overseas
Market” (46)—points in the direction of The Sound of Music—a film that going to see, as
Chacko explains, is “an extended exercise in Anglophilia” (54). Such irony is, as Arjun
Appadurai suggests, “the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized,
deterritorialized world” (52), in which someone like Chacko can condemn his relatives
for being a “family of Anglophiles” on the way to the airport to pick up his beach-colored
daughter and his British ex-wife—who exclaims on the way home, “Oh dear! I feel as
though I’m in an advertisement!” (145)—and she is, of course.
Chacko’s skyblue, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, Plymouth is a symbol of what
Appadurai identifies as “the ways in which local historical trajectories flow into
complicated transnational structures” (65). Appadurai’s ideas are reinforced by the
lecture that Chacko begins in his “Reading Aloud Voice” (54) as he drives beyond the
gates of the Ayemenem house. Invoking the historical legacy of colonialism—“the
cultural insult” from which Roy explains, “Fifty years after independence, India is...still
flinching” (Power Politics 13)—the skyblue Plymouth becomes a moving classroom in
which Chacko waxes eloquent about being “Prisoners of War...The very worst sort of
war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our
conquerors and despise ourselves” (52). On the one hand, Chacko’s history lesson is
rebuffed as ridiculous when Ammu retorts sarcastically, “Marry our conquerors, is more
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like it” alluding, of course, to Margaret Kochamma. Furthermore, it is doubly ironic that
Chacko contends, “We belong nowhere...Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our
joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important
enough. To matter” (52), only moments after showing off his privileged Oxford
education by quoting a long passage from The Great Gatsby, a novel wrapped up in the
American Dream and Western materialism, as he jets off to Cochin in his American car,
outfitted with advertisements for the factory that he owns and operates in a culture where
some “three hundred million people are illiterate and live without even one square meal a
day” (Power Politics 46). On the other hand, what Chacko says is internalized by the
twins, who may not “despise” themselves, but do feel, at least sometimes, that they are
not important enough to matter.
To Rahel and Estha, it is this feeling—that sometimes they are not important
enough to matter—that rematerializes at the Abhilash Talkies and again at the Cochin
airport when they pick up their British relatives. On the way to the cinema to see The
Sound of Music, the twins are told not to “blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or
gobble”—things that many young children do—because “only clerks behaved like that,
not aristocrats” (80). This lesson resurfaces when Rahel and Estha, “certain two-egg twin
members of the audience in Abhilash Talkies” (101) look up toward the big screen and
realize that they can never live up to the ideal presented before them. On the car ride to
the Abhilash Talkies they also overhear Baby Kochamma insulting Hindu pilgrims at
prayer, “I tell you, these Hindus...They have no sense of privacy,” and they also hear
their Uncle Chacko’s sarcastic response, “They have horns and scaly skins...And I’ve
heard that their babies hatch from eggs” and they remember that their own biological
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father is Hindu and though they know that their uncle is joking—Estha and Rahel do not
have horns and scaly skin and did not hatch from eggs—his comment tugs horribly at
their hearts, especially because it comes from the man who has always been the closest
thing they have ever had to a Baba. When Rahel makes a smart-alek comment to Ammu,
her mother asks her, “D’you know what happens when you hurt people?...When you hurt
people, they begin to love you less” (107). And, as soon as those cautionary words leave
Ammu’s lips and hit the air, Rahel feels a little less loved. She feels this way again when
the family returns to Ayemenem with Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol:
Little Girls Playing.
Sweet.
One beach-colored.
One brown.
One Loved.
One Loved a Little Less. (177)
Because, when the family returns to Ayemenem, there is a great stir over the arrival of
Sophie Mol, but no one seems to care much about the return of Estha and Rahel.
Watching The Sound of Music, Estha and Rahel are struck by feelings of
inadequacy as they watch Baron von Trapp, who is, “Arrogant. Hardhearted” and has “a
mouth like a slit” (100), but still loves his children, because their own father has simply
tossed them away. They feel inferior as they watch Julie Andrews exhibit her peppermint
love for seven children who are not even her own, because at the Ayemenem house they
are made to feel like burdens upon their grandparents, their great aunt, and their uncle.
They are simply unwanted distractions, their mother’s baggage, more mouths to feed. As
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Rahel and Estha watch the film, the lessons they learn on their way to the Abhilash
Talkies come back to them and they wonder if they are loveable children:
Baron von Trapp had some questions of his own.
(a) Are they clean white children?
No. (But Sophie Mol is.)
(b) Do they blow spit bubbles?
Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.)
(c) Do they shiver their legs? Like clerks?
Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.)
As the quotation above indicates, they feel different, Other, inferior, and “Loved a Little
Less.” Thormann points out that, “The mechanical description of the movie’s idealized
relations underlines...the Indian children’s fragile security, the precariousness of the love
they receive from their single mother and her extended family” (302). Captain von Trapp
is an aristocrat, his children are clean, “like a pack of peppermints” (100), Julie Andrews
is the governess who sings songs to the children just to comfort them from thunder, and
the two-egg twin members of the audience in Abhilash Talkies are merely clerks by
comparison, but Sophie Mol (with her beach-colored skin and bluegrayblue eyes) isn’t.
If there is any question about whether the twins are truly looking to identify with
the characters in The Sound of Music, it is answered by Roy herself who writes, “Ammu
explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most
with” (94). The twins’ desire to identify with characters from the film is underscored by
the very fact that word is italicized and capitalized. Baby Kochamma, who has spent
time away in a convent, identifies most with the nuns and likes the early part of the film
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when Maria hasn’t yet left the abbey. Rahel, desperate for a father figure, “supposed she
Identified most with Christopher Plummer, who acted as Baron von Trapp,” even though
her Uncle Chacko—her closest surrogate for a father—“didn’t Identify with him at all
and called him Baron von Clapp-Trapp” (94). Sherif Hetata points out that watching
“Western or Northern culture” in a “consolidated, alluring image of the other,” presents a
view of the world, “where comparison with our life can only force us to look up to it in
reverence” (285). Though Estha makes no declaration about whom he “Identifies” with, it
becomes clear soon after he takes his seat in the “peanut-crunching darkness” of the
auditorium, when “There was a voice from outside the picture...There was a nun in the
audience...It was Estha who was singing. A nun with a puff. An Elvis Pelvis Nun. He
couldn’t help it” (95-6). Revering them so greatly, Estha wants to become one. Still,
while Estha’s small voice fills the theater, an extra nun at the abbey, Rahel looks up at the
movie from her seat and takes note only of the differences between the women on the
screen and the women in her life.
Similar to the way that Rahel takes inventory of the nuns on screen, “No hair on
their knees. No melons in their blouses” (95), in contrast to the only nun in her own life,
Baby Kochamma, who was “weighed down by her melons” (94), Estha recognizes that
what the sweets vendor at the theater does to him beneath the counter is wrong by
judging himself against the nuns in The Sound of Music. Estha leaves the safe grip of his
family behind in the theater with the innocent intention of singing aloud by himself in the
lobby of the Abhilash Talkies. He begins with, “Oh, how do you solve a problem like
Maria? / How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand” (97) and somehow ends up with a
bottle of “fizzed fear” (100)—a sticky, sweet Lemon drink—in one hand and the
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Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s hand over the other, moving up and down slowly and
then quickly. The narrator, demonstrating perhaps how Estha turns to the movie to make
sense out of that inexplicable, terrifying moment explains, “He got a cold bottle and a
straw. So he held a bottle in one hand and a penis in the other. Hard, hot, veiny. Not a
moonbeam” (98). The feeling that Estha experiences when the Orangedrink Lemondrink
Man touches him underneath the counter at the Abhilash Talkies is mirrored later in the
novel after Estha is bullied into accusing Velutha of kidnapping, an accusation that seals
Velutha’s fate, and is rewarded for doing so with a Coke, “So once again, in the space of
two weeks, bottled Fear for Estha. Chilled. Fizzed. Sometimes Things went worse with
Coke” (297). Estha’s dual violations (the sexual assault perpetrated by the Orangedrink
Lemondrink man, and later, the fact that he is made to identify his beloved Velutha as a
perpetrator of violence) are unlike anything depicted in a nice, clean, peppermint film
like The Sound of Music in which lovely children learn to sing and in which seven
children’s love for their governess is mirrored by their father’s love for her too and in
which the nice, clean, well-behaved children are loved by both.
When Estha is sexually assaulted by the sweets vendor, he is sick with worry and
overcome with guilt that perhaps what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man does to him
under the counter is his own fault, some sort of punishment for singing in the theater and
then later in the lobby when he has no right. From that point forward, whenever Estha is
referred to as a nun, as he is when he retreats into the Paradise Pickles & Preserves
factory after the family returns to Ayemenem, “a nun’s voice singing the boat song”
(188)—thinking that “Anything can Happen to Anyone” and that “It’s Best to be
Prepared” (189)—his identity is conflated with the fear and anxiety he feels at the hands
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of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man at the Abhilash Talkies over and again. At the
theater, Estha wonders if perhaps what the sweets vendor does to him is his own fault,
because he is, even though he holds no birthright, just as the Orangedrink Lemondrink
Man accuses him, “a lucky rich boy, with porketmunny and a grandmother’s factory to
inherit” (100). The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man’s comment haunts him like a refrain
when he returns to the film feeling dirty and ashamed (102) and haunts him again later at
the Cochin airport when Sophie Mol tells him that he is lucky (143). However, at the
cinema, Estha imagines Baron von Trapp asking, “Have they ever, either or both, ever
held a stranger’s soo-soos?” Estha wants to pretend that nothing does happen with the
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, but in his mind he answers, “N...Nyes. (But Sophie Mol
hasn’t),” before envisioning Baron von Trapp’s answer, “Then I’m sorry...It’s out of the
question. I cannot love them. I cannot be their Baba. Oh no” (101-2). Looking to The
Sound of Music for answers and for solace, and finding nothing that relates to his own life
at all, Estha begins to develop a hierarchy for self-worth in which his cleaner, whiter
cousin deserves a father figure and is entitled to economic privilege and in which the
mistreatment of a darker, Indian child is just par for the course, just another small failure
for a little boy who is “Loved a Little Less.”
After all, what does a fragile Indian boy know about any of Julie Andrews’
favorite things? How could Estha relate to “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes”
or “Bright copper kettles” anyway? How much could he possibly know about “Wild
geese that fly with the moon on their wings” when he has just held something that was
definitely not a moonbeam in his hand? What experience could he possibly have with
“Doorbells and sleighbells and schnitzel with noodles” (101) in Ayemenem? The effect
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is devastating at the Abhilash Talkies and it is devastating later in the novel, when Estha
and Rahel are found in their hiding place at the History House, with all of the things that
they have carefully toted over the river to Be Prepared. The Touchable Police Officer,
after mistaking Velutha for the children’s abductor and beating him to within an inch of
his life turns to the twins and says, “Don’t worry. You’re safe with us now,” before he
notices all of the children’s provisions, two of which link Velutha’s fate to The Sound of
Music: “The pots and pans,” like Julie Andrews’ bright copper kettles, and “The
inflatable goose,” which could perhaps be coaxed into flying with the moon on its wings.
These items, coupled with the, “The Quantas Koala with loosened buttoned eyes” which
represents, perhaps, foreign travel, “The ballpoint pens with London’s streets on them”
and the “Socks with separate colored toes,” which were brought as gifts from Margaret
Kochamma and Sophie Mol, the “Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses” that make the
world look angry colored, and the “watch with the time painted on it,” which symbolizes
how Estha and Rahel’s are made to grow up at that very moment, all conspire to
represent how this is yet another time during which the twins are unlike anything
depicted in a nice, clean, peppermint film like The Sound of Music (295).
Estha’s guilt is only confounded by the fact that after Ammu cares for him
tenderly and with great kindness, she explains to the sweets vendor that they will have to
leave the film early because they “Mustn’t risk a fever. Their cousin is coming
tomorrow...From London” (104), as though Estha’s “feeling vomity” (102) is not a good
enough reason to leave the cinema on its own. His cleaner, whiter cousin deserves a
welcome party. Estha, darker, half-Hindu, must not greet her with a fever; that would not
make him a very good Ambassador of India. It also does not make Estha feel any better
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when the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man looks up at Ammu with new respect in his eyes
for a woman with family from London. Furthermore, he feels an added degree of
culpability thinking that he is ruining everyone else’s good time. When Ammu fetches
the rest of the family, Rahel is heartbroken:
But Ammu! ... The Main Things haven’t even happened yet! He hasn’t even
kissed her! He hasn’t even torn down the Hitler flag yet! They haven’t even been
betrayed by Rolf the postman! ... The Nazi soldiers haven’t even come! ... They
haven’t even done “High on a hill lived a lonely goatherd”!
In the chronological world of The God of Small Things, the Main Things have not
happened either: Ammu has not kissed Velutha, Sophie Mol has not died, Velutha has not
been betrayed by his father, Vellya Paapen, (or by Baby Kochamma, or by Rahel, or by
Estha), the Policemen have not come, and Ammu has not listened to the Rolling Stones
singing “Ruby Tuesday” on her tangerine transistor radio.
As they leave the theater early, before the Main Things have happened, all that is
about to happen is confounded by the fact that Sophie Mol’s arrival from London is
imminent. Rahel worries that her Ammu might grow to love Sophie Mol more than she.
After all, Sophie Mol is cleaner and whiter, and perhaps Baron von Trapp could love her.
She might even smell like peppermint. In a desperate attempt for reassurance, Rahel
shyly and apprehensively asks her uncle, “Chacko, for example...just for example, is it
possible that Ammu can love Sophie Mol more than me and Estha? Or for you to love
me more than Sophie Mol for example” (112), while Estha sleeps curled like a comma in
Ammu’s arms wondering the same things.
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That the children are desperate for a father figure in their lives is evidenced not
just by their anxiety over how much of the love they have grown accustomed to will be
reallocated to Sophie Mol, or by looking up to the big screen at Captain von Trapp and
wishing that he would be their father, but also by Rahel’s ironic reaction to a man who
means to insult her when the family encounters a Communist/Naxalite Labor Union
March on the way to the Abhilash Talkies in the first place. When they are stopped in
traffic on the way to Cochin to see The Sound of Music and to later pick up their British
relatives and bring them home to Ayemenem, a union marcher leans into the window of
Chacko’s skyblue Plymouth (like the color of the perfectly clear sky in The Sound of
Music) and asks Rahel in a kind voice, “Feeling hot, baby?” and then adds in a spiteful,
mocking tone, “Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!” laughing delightfully at
his own cruelty. However, Rahel does not feel snubbed by the marcher. Instead, she is
proud that he has mistaken her uncle for her father. She is grateful for the
misunderstanding. She is grateful too, to her “two-egg” twin brother, who catches her
before she gets Velutha in trouble for attending the march. Seeing him in the sea of
people, Rahel’s impulse is to lean out of her window and capture his attention. Estha,
who realizes that Velutha’s participation in the Naxalite rally will only bring trouble
because it threatens the order of things, stops her from pointing him out to Baby
Kochamma, Ammu and Chacko. That Rahel thinks she sees Velutha is dangerous
enough, but if the adults see him too, it might be deadly. Well, that Rahel thinks she sees
Velutha does prove deadly, but not until later.
It is Baby Kochamma who has seen an article in the papers about the Naxalite
uprisings in Palghat, who is truly afraid in the midst of the rally. The article is
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accompanied by an unclear photograph of a wealthy landowner who had been violently
killed by a Naxalite, who had been “tied to a post and beheaded” (66). Baby Kochamma
recalls the precise details of the photograph, “His head lay to its side, some distance away
from his body, in a dark puddle that could have been water, could have been blood. It
was hard to tell in black and white” (66). The fact that Baby Kochamma looks into the
crowd of union marchers and believes that she sees the Naxalite Rajan—the man
photographed in the newspaper and accused of the beheading—in every communist at the
march, underscores the fact that later in the novel, when the police kill Velutha, the
images of his body mirror the images of the beheaded landlord from the papers. When
Rahel and Estha see Velutha’s beaten body, they note, “Lesson Number One: Blood
barely shows on a Black Man. (Dum dum)” (293), just as it is difficult to discern the
chemical makeup of a “dark puddle” in the black and white photograph that Baby
Kochamma recalls from the papers. Furthermore, when a Naxalite marcher mocks Baby
Kochamma in the midst of the rally, Baby Kochamma’s humiliation becomes unsafe. The
marcher who taunts Baby Kochamma and calls her, “Modalali Mariakutty”—Modalali in
Malayalam means landlord—makes her fear for her life as she thinks of the landlord from
Palghat and taunts her enough to make her want revenge. Handing Baby Kochamma a
communist red flag, he insists that she wave it, while proclaiming, “Inquilah Zindabad!”
or, Long live the Revolution. Seeing all Naxalites as the same, Baby Kochamma
eventually exacts her revenge on Velutha. She goes after the only Naxalite she can get
her hands on.
In The God of Small Things, Roy confronts the epistemic Naxalite movement
head on, unlike Bharati Mukherjee, who in The Tiger’s Daughter, only addresses the
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same epistemic moment in history indirectly. Perhaps the fact that Mukherjee’s text takes
place in northern India, in Calcutta, where the Naxalite uprisings were rather fierce,
where they “struck terror in every bourgeois heart” (66), while Roy’s text takes place in
southern India, where the Naxalite movement took on a very different shape accounts for
the difference. The narrator of The God of Small Things explains that there were several
theories about the popularity of the Naxalite movement in Kerala. The most convincing
explanation is explained as “the real secret...that communism crept into Kerala
insidiously,” because in Kerala, the Naxalite movement was watered down. The narrator
suggests that it was:
a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a
caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within
the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They
offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox
Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy. (64)
In other words, in Kerala, the Naxalite movement barely threatens the order of things, it
hardly purports to actually fight for a classless society and it hardly promises equality.
Mukherjee examines the life of the bourgeois, the privileged, those insulated from the
dark and sinister forces amongst them, those who plead ignorance of the subaltern classes
in their midst. Her characters see the Naxalites as nuisances and peevish hooligans.
Conversely, in The God of Small Things, Roy examines a different class of “privileged”
Indians, the middle-class, whose wealth is extraordinary by comparison to the very poor,
but relatively modest in comparison to the bourgeoisie. Roy’s characters do not have the
advantage of turning a blind eye.
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In the context of the Naxalite rally, which intersects with the family’s trip to the
Abhilash Talkies, Baby Kochamma’s fear, the “age-old fear” of being dispossessed,
appears to stems from her own family’s proximity to poverty. Though they are vilified
for their wealth by Naxalite marchers, it is also true that Velutha (an Untouchable) lives
in a little hut a mere three minutes away from the Ayemenem house (75). Furthermore,
on the other side of the river, “Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated
directly into the squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed river bed” in the same waters
where the factories dumped their waste, the same waters where mothers washed their
children’s clothes and people bathed (119). That Rahel and Estha’s family does not
belong to the most elite class is clearly evidenced by the fact that when Ammu is young
she has no dowry, by the fact that the entire family lives together (grandparents, parents,
aunts, uncles, children, all under one roof), and by the fact that going to the cinema is a
special treat further underscored by sarcastic exchanges between Ammu and Chacko who
go back and forth with one another about who behaves like the more “honest-to-goodness
Genuine Bourgeoise” (60).
By the same token, Baby Kochamma’s fear takes on a particularly malicious
edge, because, while the communist rally congregates to demand modest wage increases
for paddy workers who worked some eleven and a half hours a day, to appeal for a lunch
break, and to request that they no longer be addressed by their caste names—“They
demanded not to be addressed as Achoo Parayan, or Kelan Paravan, or Kuttan Pulayan,
but just as Achoo, or Kelan or Kuttan” (66-7)—Baby Kochamma is deeply unnerved by
the delay. Not only is she unsympathetic to the measures being protested, she is agitated,
overall, by her concern about being late for the start of The Sound of Music.
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Baby Kochamma’s fear of being dispossessed links the two narratives that
intertwine in The God of Small Things together, because as the narrator of the novel
points out, twenty-three years later, Baby Kochamma still fears any threat to her middle-
class comforts:
She was frightened by the BBC famines and television wars that she encountered
while she channel surfed. Her old fears of the Revolution and the Marxist-
Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing
numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing,
famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture. (29)
But while Baby Kochamma has to face her fears directly in the midst of the union march
on the way to the Abhilash Talkies, while she is humiliated and made to wave a
communist flag by a marcher who taunts her, these years later Baby Kochamma is an
armchair conquistador. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue about the medium of
television, “Larger than the figures on the screen” Baby Kochamma can “quite literally
oversee the world from a sheltered position” from which, “the human shapes parading...in
TV’s insubstantial pageant are scaled down to Lilliputian insignificance, two-dimensional
dolls, their height rarely exceeding a foot” (Shohat and Stam138). So, unless those
famine victims and targets of genocide do truly come to life as Rahel imagines that they
do in the excerpt that begins this chapter, they pose very little threat to Baby Kochamma
at all.
The real threat lies in the way that television is a medium through which Western
culture and global economies can infiltrate smaller, less affluent ones with speed and
grace and through its marriage of the historically significant and the mindlessly trivial
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play into and reinforce local systems of inequality. In Power Politics, Roy writes, “I
don’t mean to put a simplistic value judgment on this particular form of ‘progress’ by
suggesting that Modern is Good and Traditional is Bad...What’s hard to reconcile oneself
to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it” (2). What Roy
describes here about the modernity of Western media is duly noted throughout the text of
The God of Small Things. In the novel, Roy does not suggest that television, in and of
itself, is a dangerous thing. However, she does point out what she calls “the
schizophrenic nature of it” whereby famines are given the same attention as football
games and soap operas run alongside 24-hour news stations. In The God of Small Things,
Roy writes:
Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem
house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The
impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to
understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight.
Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’état—they all arrived on the
same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in
Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now
whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned
up like servants. And so, while her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby
Kochamma followed American NBA league games, one-day cricket and all the
Grand Slam tennis tournaments. On weekdays she watched The Bold and the
Beautiful and Santa Barbara, where brittle blondes with lipstick and hairstyles
rigid with spray seduced androids and defended their sexual empires. Baby
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Kochamma loved their shiny clothes and the smart bitchy repartee. During the
day, disconnected snatches of it came back to her and made her chuckle (27-8).
References to blondes and football, American basketball and daytime soap operas may
appear innocuous enough, but there is something sinister in the juxtapositions. In Power
Politics, Roy argues, “As Indian citizens we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres
and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding
cell phone networks...female infanticide...husbands who continue to burn their wives”
(2). As Roy explains, it is troubling that these diametrically opposed events coexist in the
same space without any intervention on the part of those who witness them.
Likewise, there is something troublesome in the way that through her satellite
dish, Baby Kochamma witnesses massacres—described as “picturesque”—in the same
manner with which she enjoys WWF wrestling. These massacres, I suppose, do carry a
certain large-scale drama in their own right and there is perhaps something sinister about
they ways in which Western programs steal their way into Baby Kochamma’s
consciousness slyly and seductively in “disconnected snatches” that make her smile.
There is something disconcerting about the fact that on American television, a fifteen-
year-old boy arrested a reality police drama gets to explain himself, “I’m fifteen years old
and I wish I were a better person than I am. But I’m not. Do you want to hear my
pathetic story?” (280), when in Baby Kochamma’s own immediate universe, Velutha is
beaten to death without any opportunity to defend himself or to speak on his own behalf,
for a crime he does not commit. There is something deeply unnerving in the images that
suggest that the access to television equates to an access to power. After all, Baby
Kochamma “presided over the world,” blondes protected their “sexual empires” as
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though the insignificant dramas of trivial television programs mimic the historically
significant circumstances of British imperialism in India, for example.
Roy seems to suggest that the caste prejudice that occurs in The God of Small
Things is somehow unstoppable; it is simply innate; it is simply an extension of centuries
of colonialism. Such terrible things occur out of, “Feelings of contempt born of inchoate,
unacknowledged fear—civilizations fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of
powerlessness” (292), all of which are tied up in the rationalizations of empires through
which it was the duty of the powerful figures of history to serve the suffering of the
powerless, of children, women, and lower castes. It was their duty to fight the benevolent
civilizing mission of colonialism. Thormann argues that in The God of Small Things,
“Global inequality is aligned with the local inequalities that determine and limit the
possibilities and choices of the characters,” so that they inevitably act out with “brute
force” and in so doing, enjoy that “power, the underside of law” (304). Velutha’s
traditional father, “torn between loyalty and love” mortgages his own son’s life under the
obligation of his mortgaged glass eye, paid for out of kindness by Mammachi. Baby
Kochamma, disgraced by Marxist demonstrators—among whom Velutha is sighted—is
insistent upon revenge, because to her, the marchers demonstrating for higher wages are
the same as those violent Naxalites photographed for the paper. To get to Velutha, she
uses Estha and Rahel as pawns and tricks them into accusing him of crimes he did not
commit and she also uses her nephew Chacko’s grief as a catalyst, “Chacko breaking
down doors was only the sad bull thrashing at the end of Baby Kochamma’s leash. It was
her idea that Ammu be made to pack her bags and leave. That Estha be Returned” (305).
It is easy to pin it all on Baby Kochamma, because Chacko’s sadness over the loss
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of his only daughter, over losing her only weeks after being reunited with her for the first
time since she was an infant, is poignant. It is easy to sympathize with his anger.
However, on the other hand, Chacko is also tied to many of the novels worst aggressors.
In the very name Uncle, he is tied to the Orangedrink Lemondrink man who violates
Estha. For example, when they leave the Abhilash Talkies, Ammu calls Estha’s
molester, “uncle.” She gently tells her son, “Estha, you stay here with Uncle. I’ll get
Baby Kochamma and Rahel” (104). Furthermore, the police officer at the Kottayam
police station that takes Estha’s testimony against Velutha—the testimony that makes
Velutha “disappear”—is also an uncle, as evidenced by Baby Kochamma’s instructions,
“all you have to do is to go with the Uncle with the big meeshas. He’ll ask you a
question. One question. All you have to do is say ‘Yes’” (302). Additionally, Chacko is
the only man in the novel with power and privilege: his Oxford education, his pickle
factory, his property rights. He is a Big man. And yet, still, it is impossible to read The
God of Small Things and not feel sorry for Chacko, who loses his ex-wife a second time,
who loses his daughter a second time, who loses everything including the business that
Mammachi gives him. In the end, the local Marxist labor leader, Comrade Pillai, who
Chacko mistakes for a friend, capitalizes on Chacko’s personal grief and uses the scandal
within his family to rile up the employees of Paradise Pickles to burn down the factory
for the sole purpose of advancing his political career.
Then who is to blame? Certainly not Ammu, Estha or Rahel, who have no rights
to property, no locus standi—or as the twins say over and over again, “No Locusts Stand
I” (56). After all, the evidence bears out their innocence: Estha is Returned, Ammu is
expelled from the house and dies alone, and Rahel loses her other half. Poor Sophie Mol
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cannot be blamed either. After all, she is taken by the river. Similarly, Margaret
Kochamma can hardly be blamed for her anger. After losing both her husband and her
only child, she never even hears the whole story. Mammachi appears a victim too:
beaten with a brass vase by her husband, old and nearly blind, she loses the pickle factory
that she created from the ground up to Chacko’s indiscretions.
Even the servant, Kochu Maria, who seems to enjoy the desperation of all of the
people she serves, can hardly be considered guilty of anything. Her name alone, Kochu
Maria, literally means “little” Maria and throughout the novel her concern that people
would take advantage of her lack of education makes her a sympathetic character. How
sinister could Kochu Maria be? She is a woman who feels small simply because “Rahel
told her than an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon”
and, because she unknowingly “laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat
called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose” (163).
She is a woman who remains certain that when Estha reenacts Julius Caesar and falls
backwards onto his bed declaring, “Et tu, Kochu Maria?” he is saying something like,
“Kochu Maria, You Ugly Black Dwarf” (163). Kochu Maria is so small, literally and
figuratively that she feels as though she, “couldn’t stop wearing her kunukku because if
she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook’s job...she was a Syrian
Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan” (162). She could not
possibly be blamed.
So then, even Baby Kochamma, who seems sinister as she avenges her own
dishonor, is also portrayed as someone too damaged to carry all of the guilt for what
happens in the novel. Just by having the name “Baby,” she is portrayed as someone
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small. As the narrator proclaims, “Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but
everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to
be an aunt” (4), and though she claims to have surrendered herself to a loveless life, she
hurts every day as she carries her torch for Father Mulligan even long after he, himself,
has died. Must she bear the brunt of responsibility for what happens?
Perhaps there can be no certain answer to the question, “Who is to blame?”
After all, what stands out most about Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is the
way the novel breaks down absolutes, blurs the boundaries between easy dichotomies of
Right and Wrong, and questions traditional assumptions, just like the many unmixable
mixes that convalesce despite themselves throughout the novel. Estha and Rahel can read
each other’s thoughts. For example, “She [Rahel] remembers (though she hadn’t been
there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha at the Abhilash Talkies” (5),
and “He [Estha] couldn’t hear himself think for the noise. Trains. Traffic. Music. The
Stock Market” (16) that Rahel brings back to Ayemenem with her after so many years
away.
What is so beautiful about The God of Small Things is the way that it focuses on
something small and something beautiful, even if it should not be. When Estha and
Rahel, themselves transgress the love laws, when they reach out to one another to touch
each other in ways that siblings should never touch it is also beautiful, even though it
transgresses every law that lays down order in the West as well as the East. The narrator
explains:
But what was there to say.
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Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted
together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the
base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle
of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over.
Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only
that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved.
And how. And how much. (310-11)
I would argue that this is what postcolonial novels do. They break the rules, they
transgress boundaries, and they blur the distinctions between Right and Wrong. Though
it flies in the face of order, what happens between Rahel and Estha is also beautiful.
Roy writes, “In the midst of a bloody military coup, for instance, you could find
yourself fascinated by the mating rituals of a purple sunbird, or the secret life of a captive
goldfish, or an old aunt’s descent into madness. And nobody can say there isn’t truth and
art and beauty in that” (Power Politics 7). Isn’t there also beauty to be found in Ammu,
in the unmixable mix as she carries within her, “The infinite tenderness of motherhood
and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber” (44)? One might ask if Ammu’s defiance is
meant to represent a transgression against Western media, if it defies the power structures
of a fierce global economy, or, if perhaps it is just like the “cheap coincidence” when she
hears the words of The Rolling Stones’ song “Ruby Tuesday,” “Cash in your dreams
before / They slip away / Dying all the time / Lose your dreams and you / Will lose your
mind” (313-14), coming out of her tangerine transistor radio just as she makes the
decision to meet with Velutha for the first time? With so many metaphors that have their
roots in Western film and music, so many references to Western popular culture, it is
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difficult not to say that “for practical purposes in a hopelessly practical world,” perhaps
Roy does suggest that every tragedy that takes place in the novel can be traced back to a
random coincidence.
And yet, the novel ends with the single paragraph, “Tomorrow.” It ends Ammu’s
promise to Velutha to return the next day. She keeps her promise even though the next
day is a dangerous one and even though the cost of their meetings has already begun to
climb to unaffordable heights. Though that tomorrow will bring madness for Ammu and
her children, the fact that the novel ends at that moment of hope suggests that there is
something beautiful in Ammu’s defiance of the Love Laws: “the laws that lay down who
should be loved and how. And how much.” The last word of the novel suggests that
despite the consequences, Ammu’s affair with Velutha is in some ways worth it and that
loving him, crossing the line, threatening the order of things, and transgressing is worth
the cost of every tragedy to come after.
It is through the romance that blossoms between Ammu and Velutha that The God
of Small Things is most defiant. As a whole, the novel works against those Western
novels popular at the height of imperialism, the Imperial Romance. Adbul Jan Mohamed
describes this genre as one in which “the villains are always the dark, evil natives” and in
which “civilized societies” are pitted “against the barbaric aberrations of an Other” (91).
Mohamed explains that such interracial romances “always end with the elimination of the
threat posed by the Other...to justify the social function of the dominant class and to
idealize its acts of protection and responsibility” (91). With the inter-caste relationship
examined within the pages of The God of Small Things, the opposite happens. If Velutha
is characterized as dark and evil by those within the novel who uphold caste divisions and
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class distinctions (Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, for instance), Roy makes it clear
that Velutha is truly the reverse: gentle, kind, compassionate, intelligent, paternal, and
good. In the end, there is nothing threatening about Velutha. The threat lies elsewhere.
Instead, it is those who protect “generations of breeding” (244) and the policemen who
enforce the laws who appear barbaric. Far from legitimizing the systems that enforce the
caste system and declare “the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And
how much,” Arundhati Roy unveils their injustice. Civilized society looks uncivilized,
the dominant class appears crude and unsophisticated, and those demonized for their
otherness do the work of god, the god of small things.
Roy convinces the reader that despite the costs, Ammu’s act is an act of bravery, a
threat to the structured order of things. The ending of The God of Small Things is entirely
contrary to the order of a film like The Sound of Music in which everyone escapes, in
which everyone is loved, and everything ends well. Ammu’s single act of defiance,
despite all of the trouble it causes, goes to the heart of what is most important in The God
of Small Things. Roy shows us that even those most fragile can break the rules and they
are to be celebrated for their bravery, even if that bravery is reckless, even when that
bravery does not seem worth the price.
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“I am the Walrus”: Mass Media and the Struggle for Identity in
The Buddha of Suburbia: A Conclusion
We were proud of never learning anything except the names of
footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics of “I am the
Walrus”
—from Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia p. 178
I am He as You are He as You are Me
And We are all together…
I am the Eggman
They are the Eggmen
I am the Walrus
GOO GOO GA JOOB
—opening lyrics of The Beatles’ “I am the Walrus”
How does one address the many frustrations of feeling in between cultures and
simultaneously write about the freedoms, insights, and celebrations that come out of this
distinctly intermediate position? Is it possible to balance so many objectives at the same
time? Is the struggle to write about a marginalized culture truthfully and honesty even
possible? How does one examine cultural identity without falling into the abyss of the
artificial, the offensive, or the insincere? Such questions are crucial to a writer like Hanif
Kureishi who has argued that efforts to portray only positive images of ethnic minorities
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require “useful lies and cheering fictions: The writer as public relations officer, as hired
liar” (Sammy 64), roles that Kureishi himself has refused to play. Given that The Buddha
of Suburbia is a novel set not in India, but in the West—in the South London suburbs and
in the city of London—this chapter asks not only about what it means to be postcolonial
in a world without formal empires, but also asks what it means to be Indian outside of
India in such a world. In his essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie addresses
this very question. He goes on to ask:
How can culture be preserved without becoming ossified? How should we
discuss the need for change within ourselves and our community without seeming
to play into the hands of our racial enemies? What are the consequences, both
spiritual and practical, of refusing to make any concessions to western ideas and
practices? What are the consequences of embracing those ideas and practices and
turning away from the ones that came here with us? (17-18)
In The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi seems to address Rushdie’s questions one by
one by representing a furiously vast array of Indian characters: some of whom refuse to
assimilate to Western culture, some of whom want change for themselves and their
communities, and some of whom are eager to reject the traditional values of their Indian
culture in favor of Western values. Kureishi’s characters often voluntarily assume new
identities and try them on for size and these different Indian identities are celebrated.
In many ways, The Buddha of Suburbia is a novel that takes this dissertation full
circle. In Chapter One, for instance, I noted that in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic
Verses, the character Gibreel Farishta confides carefully to a friend that in the white,
British society in which they have come to live, the dominant class need only “describe
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us…and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (174). By contrast, in The Buddha of
Suburbia, Kureishi’s Indian characters examine the power of the dominant class by
manipulating the Indian stereotypes perpetuated by Western media—and subsequently,
the powerful pictures they construct—in an effort to redefine, re-imagine, and reinvent,
what it means to be “Indian” in England. In equal turns, Kureishi’s characters seek to
embrace, as well as challenge these stereotypes to reveal just how easily identity can be
exploited, faked, and conjured.
Accordingly, Elizabeth de Cacqueray explains that Kureishi’s references to works
of world literature, British television and English pop music, express his characters’
identities and work within the principle of “tell-me-what-you-read/listen-to” and “I’ll-
tell-you-who-you-are or what-you-are-feeling” (170). In a text saturated with allusions to
Western media—from the British tabloid The Daily Mirror (14, 113, 153) to Italian
Vogue (250); from Voltaire’s Candide (10) to Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (20);
from the plays of Anton Chekhov (114, 201) to those of Tennessee Williams (92); from
Westerns with John Wayne (83, 183) to cinema featuring Orson Welles (118); from the
poignant British comedy Steptoe and Son (6, 20) to the lowbrow Candid Camera (20);
from Tamla Motown (176) to Jefferson Airplane (190)—it is the song, “I am the
Walrus,” from the Beatles’ 1967 album Hello, Goodbye (though only alluded to briefly)
that may just emerge as the perfect metaphor for all of the characters in The Buddha of
Suburbia as they examine their identities and reinvent themselves.
Through what Jörg Helbig describes as “a frantic ‘stream-of-nonsense,’ crammed
with bizarre images and word-play” (79), “I am the Walrus” deconstructs distinctions of
meaning, knowledge and identity until they are reduced to mere gibberish, “GOO GOO
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GA JOOB.” Based largely upon Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,”
which appears within Alice in Wonderland, “I am the Walrus” includes the refrain, “I am
the eggman/They are the eggmen,” which recognizably recalls Carroll’s famous
character, Humpty Dumpty, whose philosophy on language is summed up, Helbig
explains, “in his personal doctrine: ‘When I use a word it means what I choose it to
mean’” (80). Helbig concludes that, “What ‘I am the Walrus’ is all about is the urge to
dissolve not only meanings, but any kind of borderlines, categories, and hierarchies” (80),
which is precisely what the novel The Buddha of Suburbia aims to do.
It goes beyond simply examining what it means to be postcolonial in a world
without formal empires, or what it means to be “Indian” in England and does something
unique and crucial: it seeks to redefine what it means to be British in such a world. The
novel’s protagonist cynically and aptly makes readers aware of this intention when he
says, “Yeah, sometimes we were French Jammie and I, and other times we went black
American. The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were
always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it” (53). Bart Moore-Gilbert talks of the
novel’s “increasingly serious and self-conscious process of negotiation with...
‘Indianness’” (“Hybridity” 202), but one thing that becomes increasingly more clear to
this reader is how that “process of negotiation”—to borrow Moore-Gilbert’s phrase—is
deliberately explored in order to begin a process of negotiation with Englishness.
The first lyrics of the Beatles’ song, “I am the Walrus,” “I am he as you are he as
you are me/ And we are all together” get right to what is most critical to Kureishi and his
novel. Though that particular lyric from “I am the Walrus” may very well resonate with
all of the characters in The Buddha of Suburbia, it is especially apropos for the
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protagonist, whose first words as the narrator of the novel parallel the song’s opening
line, as he introduces himself by name and declares that he is “an Englishman born and
bred, almost” (emphasis mine 3). The juxtaposition of his name, Karim Amir—a name
which is recognizably Indian—against the fact that he is an Englishman establishes the
psychological tension of both “belonging and not” (3) from the very first sentence of the
novel. He goes on to admit:
I am often considered a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having
emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care—Englishman I am (though not
proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is
the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not,
that makes me restless and easily bored. (3)
While Karim reminds us from the outset of the novel that he knows no home aside from
the South London suburbs where he was born and raised, he also characterizes himself as
“funny,” as a “new breed” (3), as an Englishman who belongs to two cultures and two
continents and knows only one. The son of an Indian-born, Muslim father and a white,
working-class, British-born mother, Karim Amir is adolescent, bisexual, biracial, and
bicultural. Karim is “he” and “you” and “me” all rolled into one, the epitome of a person
caught “between” identities.
Though he considers himself an Englishman, Karim is also aware that the
conventional notion of Englishness in the sixties and the seventies did not include its
New Commonwealth citizens, “I was sick too of being affectionately called Shitface and
Curryface, and of coming home covered in spit and snot and chalk and wood-shavings”
(63). The opening of the novel establishes that there is a clash between the way Karim
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sees himself and the way others see him, as he argues, “Englishman I am (though not
proud of it)” (3), as if to suggest that he both embraces his Englishness and proudly
stands outside it. He brazenly argues, “Fuck you, Charles Dickens, nothing’s changed”
(63). Why would he want to identify with the boys who, “held chisels to our throats and
cut off our shoelaces” or the kid who “tried to brand my arm with a red-hot lump of
metal” or the one who “pissed all over my shoes” (63) or with any number of other
English boys who perpetrate endless offenses against him because of the color of his
skin. Even his nickname, “Creamy” (85), exemplifies his multiple identities, as the color
of his skin is lighter than his father’s, but also racially distinct from what was then
described as traditionally English.
In keeping with the notion of subverting hard and fast cultural distinctions—an
idea celebrated in the lyrics to “I am the Walrus”—it is noteworthy that Karim is both
happy to play the middle and desperate to blend in. On the one hand, he says, “I felt it
would be heart-breaking to have to choose one or the other, like having to decide between
the Beatles and the Rolling Stones” (55) and later that, “although I hated inequality, it
didn’t mean I wanted to be treated like everyone else” (149). On the other hand, he is
consistently apprehensive about fitting in. He admits, “...as a rule I cared fanatically
about the way I looked, and behaved as if the entire world had nothing better to do than
constantly observe me for slips in a very complicated and private etiquette” (40), a
confession which is further evidenced by his attempts to keep up with the latest trends by
studying Melody Maker and New Musical Express (8), magazines devoted entirely to the
music industry. Celia M. Wallhead argues, “The power of the media in the West...is
shown by the way all the characters’ aspirations are formed through their favourite
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medium, or by the fact that they exploit a certain medium to fulfill their objectives or to
create an identity (76). Fittingly, many of the allusions to Western media that Kureishi
employs in regards to his protagonist reinforce Karim’s own identity; they take up
multiple objectives, escape easy genre classification, and inform other media: Karim
reads about fashion in magazines committed to popular music, for example, he enjoys the
work of Norman Mailer (62)—who is as much a journalist as he is a novelist, as much a
playwright as he is a film director—and by his own admission, he finds it difficult to
decide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. All of these allusions underscore
Karim’s feelings of “inbetweenness.”
If there is any doubt as to whether or not media constitute meaning in Karim’s
life, one must only note how Karim feels connected to the rest of the world through
media. At one point in the novel, Karim compares his mind to “a kind of cinema for
myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through” (217) and at another point, Karim
wonders, “If the secret police ordered you to live in the suburbs for the rest of your life,
what would you do? Kill yourself? Read?” (145). The power of media in Karim’s life
can be evidenced in part by that simple question, because Karim does, in fact, escape
through books and movies and television when he believes he will live in the suburbs
forever. He describes the enormous window to the world that media provide, right from
his tiny, seemingly insignificant bedroom in the hardly spectacular landscape of the
South London suburbs. Karim pronounces:
I read Norman Mailer’s journalism about an action-man writer involved in
danger, resistance and political commitment: adventure stories not of the distant
past, but of recent times. I’d bought a TV from the man in a chip shop, and as the
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black-and-white box heated up it stank of grease and fish, but late at night I heard
of cults and experiments in living, in California. In Europe terrorist groups were
bombing capitalist targets; in London psychologists were saying you had to live
your own life in your own way and not according to your family, or you’d go
mad. In bed I read Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes I felt the whole world
was converging on this little room. (62)
Karim’s description of the entire world collapsing in upon itself in the middle of the quiet
nights in the South London suburbs through the mediums of journalism, television and
magazines only seeks to underscore his own disillusionment with the circumstances of
the real world that surrounds him. At one point Karim describes his mother as “tired.
She reminded me of the real world. I wanted to shout at her: Take that world away!”
(18). That such a world can so easily be forgotten simply by turning to novels and
television and pop music underscores the power of media in the first place. In fact, when
Karim rushes to move from the suburbs to the city, it is important to note that he takes
only a handful of disparate items, including: “twenty records...Tropic of Cancer and On
the Road, and the plays of Tennessee Williams” (92), because for Karim, mass media
hold the greatest capital value, they stand to demonstrate who he is as a person and who
he aspires to be.
Similarly, Kureishi gives us Karim’s father, Haroon who is jaded after years of
trying to assimilate, of masking his Indian accent, of “trying to be more of an
Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous” (21). Even his in-laws refuse to call him by
his Indian name, “He was always ‘Harry’ to them, and they spoke of him as Harry to
other people. It was bad enough his being an Indian in the first place, without having an
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awkward name too” (33). After concluding that, “The whites will never promote us...Not
an Indian while there is a white man left on the earth...they still think they have an
Empire when they don’t have two pennies to rub together” (27), Haroon defiantly decides
to embody the foreign stigma that living in England for most of his life has failed to strip
away and constructs an identity in keeping with the preconceived expectations of
socialites in South London, with the fixed philosophies fostered by the Western media’s
fascination with Eastern enlightenment, with karma, nirvana, tantra, mysticism, gurus and
salvation as well as magic carpets, camel rides, and 1001 Arabian Nights.
Kureishi satirically demonstrates that in order to pander to these expectations,
Haroon even dresses the part. At one point in the novel his outfit is compared to the
styles emulated by the Beatles, when he sets out of his house wearing “a red and gold
waistcoat and Indian pyjamas,” and Karim notes that he, “was probably the only man in
southern England at that moment (apart, possibly, from George Harrison)” to be dressed
in such a way (31). Haroon’s resemblance to one of the Beatles is no coincidence. In her
book Karma Cola, Gita Mehta traces the relationship between the Westerners, who
flocked toward India to find salvation and the Beatles’ sojourn in India in 1968, during
which time they studied transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Given that the Beatles had already begun to incorporate the Indian sitar in their music and
that the press was likely to follow the Beatles anywhere they traveled, it is no surprise
that through the Beatles India captured the imagination of a vast Western audience.
Mehta writes, “The Beatles discovered India escaping from America” (67) and notes that,
“People are apt to follow their heroes…and follow they did, rushing for mantras…” (68).
The fact that Haroon chooses to dress by replicating a style that the Beatles’ borrowed
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from India and subsequently perpetuated throughout the West by being photographed in
such clothing during press releases and on television appearances, is only part of the ruse,
part of his image-making technique, part of what helps his followers belief that he is the
real thing. Mehta calls this “mythological osmosis” and also “rock and roll” (200).
Additionally, Haroon consults books on everything from Buddhism, Sufism, and
Zen (5) to Christmas Humphreys (the British barrister turned Buddhist) (20), reads
translated volumes of Confucius (30), co-opts enlightening phrases and meditations from
yoga books, and regurgitates and reinterprets it all for a spellbound audience of
businessmen and suburban housewives, “hissing his s’s and exaggerating his Indian
accent” (21) along the way. Ironically, the Indian identity that Haroon adopts as he begins
to speak on Eastern enlightenment in no way resembles his own identity, when as young
man he left Bombay for England. If Haroon is what he reads, by de Cacqueray’s “tell-
me-what-you-read and I’ll tell-you-who-you-are” formulation, he is, perhaps, a walking
caricature, a generic “Oriental.” Conversely, if Haroon is, as Wallhead suggests, simply
manipulating popularized impressions of Eastern enlightenment, then there is no doubt
that he is enjoying every minute of his mystical routine. While it is never clear whether
or not Haroon’s identity as a spiritual leader is genuine, what is clear is that Haroon
successfully co-opts an image enabled by media and makes it his own. It is also clear,
that he is more successful as a “Buddha of suburbia,” than he is as an Indian immigrant
trying to blend in with his British contemporaries.
Rather than suffer the jabs of party guests who poke fun at his expense: “Why has
our Eva brought this brown Indian here?”; “And has he got his camel parked outside?”;
“No, he came on a magic carpet” (12), Haroon takes ownership of these stereotypes,
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perpetuated by comic books and empire films, by embracing them and using them to
enchant his audience. Karim explains, “The candle industry was stimulated, Venetian
blinds were lowered, Indian sandalwood stinkers were ignited and put in flowerpots, and
a small carpet was put down for the Buddha of suburbia to fly on” (32). Still, while
Haroon rejoices in his role as a sage and in the attention he receives in that regard, it is
unclear whether he is to be taken seriously as a guru or not. On the one hand, the women
in his life seem unconvinced by his Indian pajamas and suburban guru act. His wife
refuses to participate in his charade, even though he “wanted her to be with him, to
witness him being respected by others” (6). Furthermore, while Eva, the woman Haroon
eventually takes as his mistress, introduces him to the guests attending her party as her
“good and deep friend Haroon” who will “show us the Way. The Path” (13), there is a
sense that even she sees right through his adopted persona: “Eva also insisted on Dad
improving his service: she got him to consult esoteric library books early before work”
(115). On the other hand, Karim’s friends seem enchanted. Charlie insists, “Your father.
He’s the best. He’s wise” (14) and Karim’s friend Helen, mesmerized by Haroon’s
routine, claims, “Your father looks like a magician” (31).
And yet Karim’s childhood friend, Jamila argues that, “He’s a complete phoney”
(72) and his Auntie Jean and Uncle Ted dismiss Haroon’s behavior arguing that, “Your
mum’s told me all about what a caper your dad’s been leading over in Beckenham” (44).
Even Karim himself wonders whether or not his father is just “a renegade Muslim
masquerading as a Buddhist” (16):
I wanted to see if Dad was a charlatan or if there was anything true in what he was
doing. After all, he’d impressed Eva and then done the difficult thing—knocked
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Charlie out. His magic had worked on them and I’d given him the “God”
moniker, but with reservations. He wasn’t yet fully entitled to the name. What I
wanted to see was whether, as he started to blossom, Dad really did have anything
to offer other people, or if he would turn out to be merely another suburban
eccentric. (22)
In the end, Kureishi never forces the point. Waddick Doyle suggests that perhaps
Haroon’s true identity lies somewhere between that of a “suburban eccentric”—a walking
caricature—and the real thing. He asks, “Is he a charlatan trading on the gullibility of
Westerners’ craving for the exotic Indian Other (just as he once craved Englishness)?”
and asks at the same time, “Is he also wise and compassionate and Buddha-like and
sincere?” To both questions Doyle responds, “Without a doubt” (111). Can Haroon
rejoice in a media-constructed stereotype and help his followers at the same time? Sure.
And, it is essential that readers recognize that Haroon is deeply fulfilled after letting go of
the little blue dictionary he always carried, from which he suffered to learn a new word
everyday, because, as he’d say, “You never know when you might need a heavyweight
word to impress an Englishman” (28). It is imperative that readers appreciate what
Haroon gains by liberating himself from his own desire to assimilate, from his own
longing for acceptance.
In direct contrast to Haroon is Karim’s childhood friend Jamila who seems intent
on changing the world. Though Jamila would never admit to embracing a stereotype of
her Indian identity, her own image certainly mirrors those represented in media by her
favorite authors and musicians. The daughter of Indian shopkeepers, Jamila is proud of
her Indian heritage and the fact that she defines herself as a feminist, as politically active
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and rebellious. After being educated by the librarian who worked next door to her
parents’ shop and who had spent time as a missionary in Africa, Jamila decides that
“Miss Cutmore really wanted to eradicate everything that was foreign to her” (53) and
makes a conscious decision to cast off “all that ‘old, dull, white stuff’ they taught you at
school and college” (95) in favor of educating herself. However, there is evidence that
Miss Cutmore’s instruction inspired Jamila to be transgressive in the first place. Karim
explains, “Jamila received the highest-class education at the hands of Miss Cutmore, who
loved her. Just being for years beside someone who liked writers, coffee and subversive
ideas, and told her she was brilliant had changed her for good” (52-3). While Miss
Cutmore’s history as a missionary raises alarms, it is clear that she does expose Jamila to
a great works of literature, foster her love for learning, and give Jamila a strong
educational foundation on which to build.
In fact, even at the tender age of thirteen, Jamila reads Baudelaire, Colette and
Radiguet, listens to Billie Holliday, and dreams of becoming Simone de Beauvoir (52).
Though Miss Cutmore may have spoken to Jamila’s parents, “as if they were peasants,”
Karim admits, “She drove me mad by saying Miss Cutmore had colonized her...Jamila
was the strongest-willed person I’d met: no one could turn her into a colony” (53). In
keeping with her strong-willed personality, Jamila finds herself in and identifies with
what Karim refers to as “her post-Miss Cutmore books: the ‘classics’ as she call them,
Angela Davis, Baldwin, Malcolm X, Greer, Millett” (95). Karim explains, “We lived in
rebellious and unconventional times, after all. And Jamila was interested in anarchists
and situationists and Weathermen, and cut all that stuff out of the papers and showed it to
me (82). In other words, Jamila clearly engages with media to learn about what is
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happening in the world politically and to become involved in the political movements
discussed in the papers and in world news. This is further emphasized by the fact that she
identifies with authors who embrace their minority status in efforts to enact social
change. Karim explains that Jamila felt as enriched by the feminist poetry that she tacked
upon her walls—Christina Rossetti, Sylvia Plath, and what Karim sarcastically refers to
as the “other vegetarians”—as she did by the music of Aretha Franklin “and the other
mamas” (95), all feminists who write about empowerment, and respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Though one could argue that Jamila’s identity is as self-consciously constructed
out of Western media as Haroon’s, she embodies an entirely different media “type” as
she works feverishly to revolutionize both her traditional Indian culture and the changing
ethnic landscape of England. Through Jamila, Kureishi both depicts and challenges
certain Indian stereotypes, mainly that of arranged marriage, about which Mark Stein
aptly notes is “almost a cliché in Indian writing in English” (126). When Jamila’s father
undertakes a hunger strike to coerce her into a marriage, Kureishi, using his entire host of
characters, carefully manages to present all sides of the arranged marriage debate. In the
first place, he gets readers to sympathize with the very weight of Jamila’s dilemma by
representing her father, Anwar’s, fierce traditional beliefs—which are fittingly
underscored by the fact that Anwar has no interest in Western media whatsoever as he
stares “directly in front of him as he always did at the television screen, except that it
wasn’t on” (59)—and also the dire consequences of disobeying him. Anwar’s “I won’t
eat. I will die. If Gandhi could shove out the English from India by not eating, I can get
my family to obey me by exactly the same” (60) attitude is both cheeky and deeply
troubling. Jamila is ever aware that her father may very well die from his hunger-strike,
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leaving her mother, Jeeta—“who knew nothing of the outside world” (51)—completely
alone.
Secondly, Kureishi addresses the concern that by depicting an arranged marriage
in the first place he is playing into the hands of the Indian communities’ racial enemies
by allowing Jamila to voice her own concern about how her father’s behavior might
appear to a British public already harboring a host of negative feelings toward the Indian
community. After all, Karim himself addresses the commonly held image of “swarms of
Indian peasants who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s” of whom the public said,
“they were not familiar with cutlery and certainly not with toilets, since they squatted on
the seats and shat from on high” (24). So, it is no surprise that when Karim asks if he can
share her dilemma with his friend Helen, Jamila’s response is characteristically ardent,
“Yes, if you want to expose our culture as being ridiculous and our people as old-
fashioned, extreme and narrow-minded” (71), a sentiment which is echoed later in the
novel, when we see the arranged marriage through the eyes of Tracey, one of Karim’s
theatre colleagues, who objects to a character that Karim develops based upon Anwar and
his hunger strike.
Tracey argues, “I’m afraid that it shows black people...As being irrational,
ridiculous, as being hysterical. And as being fanatical” (180), while Karim notes that their
conversation is “suddenly between ‘minorities’” (180). In this way, the conversation
between Karim and Tracey—like Jamila’s own cautionary objection to the idea that
Karim would share this deeply shameful set of circumstances with a cultural outsider—
comes to represent any voices that might object to Kureishi’s development of a character
like Anwar in the first place. Kureishi raises point and counterpoint himself. As Tracey
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states her reservations about the character, Karim continuously interjects to remind her
that his character is based upon “One old Indian man” and that, “It’s not a fanatical
hunger-strike. It’s calmly intended blackmail” (180). In this way, Kureishi toes the line
between critiquing traditional Indian values and portraying positive images of Indian
ethnicity; he voices any anticipated concern over the idea of depicting an arranged
marriage himself.
Thirdly, Kureishi turns the entire notion of arranged marriage inside-out and
upside-down when Jamila eventually decides to consent to her father’s demands, not
because she intends to obey her father, but because as Karim explains even her decision
to enter into an arranged marriage is subversive:
I kept thinking to myself, Typical Jamila, that’s exactly what she would do, as if
this were something that happened every day. But she was marrying Changez out
of perversity, I was sure of it ... Marrying Changez would be, in her mind, a
rebellion against rebellion, creative novelty itself. Everything in her life would be
disrupted, experimented with. She claimed to be doing it only for Jeeta, but there
was real, wilful contrariness in it, I suspected. (82)
Though Jamila’s decision to agree to an arranged marriage is made in part out of self-
preservation—to save her father’s life and to protect her mother’s interests—it is also
made out of her desire to deconstruct the entire convention. Stein explains that the
“stereotypical notion of an arranged marriage is undermined through Jamila’s creativity”
(127). Stein has a point about Jamila’s rebellious embrace of the arranged marriage, but
circumstances have the last word when her husband-to-be arrives and he, Changez, is not
“the rippling physical specimen” (81) Anwar had expected. Anwar exclaims, “‘I want
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some boy who can climb a ladder! Plus I need someone to carry boxes from the
wholesaler. When Changez arrives he can run the shop with Jamila. I can take that
woman’—he meant his wife—‘out somewhere beautiful’” (79). Anwar’s hopes are
dashed when he sees Changez, and the physical deformity in his arm, for the first time
and when Changez admits, “Business isn’t my best side, yaar, not my best. I’m the
intellectual type, not one of those uneducated immigrant types who come here to slave all
day and night and look dirty” (107). One wonders where Changez might have seen such
a type in the first place if not for Western media. Jamila, herself, could not have planned
it better.
Finally, we see the arranged marriage through the eyes of Jamila’s new husband.
Naive and good-natured, as evidenced by his favorite novels and films, what he calls “the
classics,” but which are all light-hearted and adventurous: P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur
Conan Doyle, and Westerns with Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper, or John Wayne (83)—
Changez goes through a series of hard and fast changes after marrying Jamila. Karim
jokes:
If you think books don’t change people, just look at Changez, because
undreamed-of possibilities in the sex line suddenly occurred to him [as he read
Harold Robbins, known for including graphic sexuality in his novels], a man
recently married and completely celibate who saw Britain as we saw Sweeden: as
the goldmine of sexual opportunity. (96)
And, later, when Karim uses Changez as the basis for a character in a play, the staged
Changez, Tariq, arrives at London’s Heathrow airport, “having been informed in Bombay
by a race-track acquaintance that you merely had to whisper the word ‘undress’ in
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England and white women would start slipping out of their underwear” (188-89). The
real Changez is savvy enough to recognize that Jamila will never desire him sexually, so
he agrees to let her move into a commune on her own, but later is relieved to be invited to
join her, which he does. There, he eventually transforms from the patriarch of their
family, as he would be in India, into a maternal figure as he eventually cares for the baby
that Jamila has with another man. In this way, the marriage between Changez and Jamila
becomes nearly unrecognizable as a traditional, Indian, arranged marriage. If there is
someone who suffers most, perhaps it is Changez, who at one point says, “This is too
Western for me...Here, in this capitalism of the feelings no one cares for another person”
(215). He enters into the arranged marriage with all of the most conventional intentions
and winds up with a father-in-law who despises him and a wife who rejects him.
Each of these characters manipulates a stereotype propagated by Western media:
Haroon stops trying so desperately to be accepted as an Englishman to play into the
hands of the British expectations fostered by media; Jamila refuses to be “colonized” and
cultivates a rebellious streak out of the very literature, poetry and music of
empowerment; to reinforce his role as head of the house, Anwar embraces the stereotype
of the stern Indian patriarch, rejects Western values and instead behaves “like a Muslim”
(64); to remain close to his wife, Changez does the opposite and drops his role as a
traditional husband in a traditional arranged marriage, noticing that England is a very
different place from the one he imagined while reading Sherlock Holmes; and, of course,
Karim becomes an actor, a profession which seems to be in his blood given that one of
his father’s siblings edited a movie magazine and that, as he says, “Once when I was
seven or eight, Dad told me he thought I should become an actor” (23). Thus, Haroon
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plays a guru, Jamila plays an activist, Anwar plays Gandhi, Changez plays nursemaid,
and as Karim searches for where he truly stands amidst his many possible identities, he
takes his father’s one time advice and literally becomes a professional chameleon.
Like Saladin Chamcha in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Karim is willing to live
his own life—to borrow Judith Mishrahi-Barak’s term—as “a hermit crab” (93), whereby
Karim embodies one identity or personality after another, the way a hermit crab moves to
inhabit one shell until it outgrows it and searches for an alternative. In The Satanic
Verses, Chamcha notes that each “self” he tried on “had seemed reassuringly temporary.
Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next,
one Saladin by another” (64). While Karim relishes in his ability to assume new identities
as one might try on new outfits, the process of acting is not always cause for celebration.
Eva, usually so supportive of all of Karim’s endeavors, at one point, suggests, “Actors,
Karim, are convivial company. They put on funny voices and do imitations. But they
have no personality” (206). To a certain degree, Eva’s words ring true as we watch
Karim lose himself in roles that resemble almost everyone in his immediate circle:
Anwar, Changez, and Jamila, each in turn, “I am he as you are he as you are me/ And we
are all together” and so forth and so on, as the song goes.
Many critics have argued that the theater, the world of the stage, that performing
serves as the key metaphor for The Buddha of Suburbia. Moore-Gilbert, for example,
explains that, “the key metaphoric structure of reference in the novel is, of course, the
theatre” (“Hybridity” 202). Alamgir Hashmi notes “playing moves the plot, and
searching for a character becomes both a structural and symbolic device” (26). And,
Gayatri Spivak reminds readers to “notice that Karim, as he learns performance from
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British and American directors is being asked to be ‘Indian,’ or to portray migrants
favorably” (148). Such critics are right to point out that, through theater, Karim’s cultural
identity is tested. He learns that he is often judged by his appearance only, he learns that
ethnic minorities are often relegated to the same marginalized status and community, and
he learns that regardless of the roles he is given or the directions he is made to adhere to
in performing such roles, the quest to appease every side (the white community as well as
his own community) is often impossible to achieve.
There are several poignant examples. For instance, Karim is deeply offended by a
fellow actor, who, in a jealous rage after Karim is cast in a radical, theater troupe,
suggests, “If I weren’t white and middle class I’d have been in Pyke’s show...Obviously
mere talent gets you nowhere these days. Only the disadvantaged are going to succeed in
seventies’ England” (165). Karim is further agitated when, after meeting for the first
rehearsal with this group, he swiftly realizes that he has, indeed, been cast specifically to
portray an ethnic minority. For example, when he offers to create a character modeled
after his white friend, Charlie, he is reminded, “We need someone from your own
background...Someone black” (170). Karim finds this unnerving, noting, “I didn’t know
anyone black, though I’d been to school with a Nigerian” (170). Berthold Schoene argues
that, “Karim’s specific individual difference remains unacknowledged by Pyke; in fact, it
is erased as a negligible detail of little import” (121). Notably, Karim cynically admits,
“Two of us were officially ‘black’ (though truly I was more beige than anything)” (167).
To Karim, his specific ethnicity is a detail of considerable magnitude and he finds that in
the theatrical world he must consistently distinguish himself as Indian, not black.
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I quite agree with critics like Moore-Gilbert, Hashmi, Spivak, and Schoene, who
point out that such moments—which take place in the world of the theater—are quite
important to The Buddha of Suburbia. The very fact that all of the members of his cast
fail to distinguish marginalized cultural groups as unique and distinct certainly raises
compelling and thought-provoking ideas about cultural representation. However, what I
find even more extraordinary are the ways in which allusions to media up the ante in
regards to questioning cultural representation. What these critics overlook are the defiant
ways in which Karim uses the theater to revise, re-imagine, reconstitute or reclaim the
offensive Indian stereotypes that are disseminated by Western media. Cynthia Carey
points out that Kureishi exploits the theater as a space where “recovering a dignified and
authentic identity requires a constant battle with wrong perceptions, racial clichés and
imitated behavior” (121). In the context of his acting career, embodying a character is
often emotionally and politically painful for Karim; however, it is also empowering. In
his roles, he can be subversive and defiant as he is in his first role as an actor, in the part
of Mowgli in a staged production of Kipling’s imperialist The Jungle Book.
In this role, Karim is cast, as the director Shadwell unsympathetically reveals,
because he is, “An actor who’ll fit the part” (140). Shadwell goes on to suggest, “In fact,
you are Mowgli. You’re dark-skinned, you’re small and wiry, and you’ll be sweet but
wholesome in the costume” (142-43). When Shadwell patronizingly wonders whether or
not Karim is familiar with Kipling’s work, Karim replies, “Yeah, I’ve seen the film”
(140). By the time The Buddha of Suburbia was written, there were at least two Western
film versions of The Jungle Book: a live-action film, shot in 1942 and the Disney
animated adaptation, released in 1967. Though it is unclear to which film Karim refers,
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what is clear is that while Shadwell thinks of The Jungle Book quite academically, Karim
thinks of it in its more popular version. If Karim does intend to refer to the animated
version of The Jungle Book, then the fact that Shadwell takes himself, perhaps a bit too
seriously, is only further underscored by the fact that Karim equates The Jungle Book,
and subsequently the role he is cast to play in the staged version, as a cartoon.
That Shadwell will later decide that racially, Karim does not, in fact, entirely fit
the part of Mowgli is foreshadowed in this same scene when first—after an unsuccessful
attempt to speak to Karim in an Indian dialect—Shadwell exclaims:
What breed of people two hundred years of imperialism has given birth to. If the
pioneers from the East India Company could see you. What puzzlement there’d
be. Everyone looks at you, I’m sure, and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how
interesting, what stories of aunties and elephants we’ll hear from him. And
you’re from Orpington. (141)
Secondly, Shadwell specifically addresses the subject of Karim’s ethnicity, suggesting
that Karim’s destiny is “to be a half-caste in England...belonging nowhere, wanted
nowhere” (141). Shadwell’s remarks about the disparity between Karim’s brown skin and
his upbringing in the South London suburbs as well as his observation that Karim is “a
half-caste” consistently serve to mock and undermine the director every time he insists
that Karim was given the part of Mowgli “for authenticity and not for experience” (147),
particularly when Shadwell concludes that in order to adequately embody the role of
Mowgli, Karim must fake an Indian accent and darken his already dark skin in order to
“play” Indian.
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Though critics like Doyle point out that the “Indian boy as imagined by...Kipling”
is “colonialist, if not racist” (113), Karim reconstitutes Kipling’s words by making them
his own, as he does when he is content to reconfigure the language of The Jungle Book to
make it relevant to his own life, as he does when he refers to himself as Mowgli and
Jamila as Shere Khan in their adolescent pursuit of one another, “I watched Jamila, and
pressed my nose to the glass and made a range of jungle noises. I was Mowgli
threatening Shere Khan. But she didn’t hear me” (51). Similarly, when Shadwell insists
that Karim develop a demeaning mock-Indian accent and parade around on stage wearing
nothing more than a loin cloth and brown boot polish—“shit brown cream” (146)—to
darken his skin, Karim, at first, protests. He begs Shadwell to reconsider the costume and
the accent claiming, “I feel wrong in it. I feel like together we’re making the world
uglier” (146), and claims that, “It’s a political matter to me” (147). But when Shadwell
refuses to entertain Karim’s objections to stay true to Kipling’s original text, asking
Karim, “Where was our Mowgli born?” and “What accent do they have in India?” and
finally reminds Karim that he has been “cast for authenticity and not for experience”
(147), Karim takes matters into his own hands and asserts his own political agency over
the role by “suddenly relapsing into cockney at odd times” (158), effectively changing
the politics of the play entirely. By slipping in and out of his mock-Indian accent, Karim
asserts his own agency over the part. Karim effectively pokes fun at both Kipling’s
original colonialist vision and simultaneously exacts revenge against Shadwell. Schoene
notes that in the end, “Shadwell’s strategy backfires. Rather than further clarifying what
is already commonsensically obvious to him, his (re)production becomes a parody and
Karim’s central performance some kind of farcical ethnic drag act” (121). Rather than
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trying to portray Mowgli in the purely “authentic” way that Shadwell envisions, Karim
exposes Kipling’s Mowgli as well as Shadwell’s directorial rendering of the accent, the
costume, and the ethnicity as artificial as well as blatantly Orientalist.
Furthermore, Kureishi applies his characteristic narrative topspin in regards to
Karim’s performance so that each character present at the production of The Jungle Book
reacts to it differently and their opposing voices raise numerous concerns about ethnicity,
identity, political responsibility and representation and they respond not only to Karim’s
performance or to Shadwell’s questionable direction, but also to Kipling’s original text.
On the one hand, Karim’s mother “wept with pride,” and his Auntie Jean “laughed a
great deal” (156). For them, Karim’s costume is not an issue of political importance and
Karim notes, “The key to impressing Mum and Auntie Jean, and the best way to keep
their tongues off the risible subject of my loin-cloth, which inevitably had them quaking
with laughter, was to introduce them to the actors afterwards” (156). On the other hand,
to Haroon and Jamila, Karim’s costume and his depiction of Mowgli are of great political
significance.
Karim’s father is outraged at the performance and explosively reacts in a rage at
what he calls this “Bloody, half-cocked business” and he angrily condemns Kipling’s The
Jungle Book for being prejudicial: “That bloody fucker Mr. Kipling pretending to Whity
he knew something about India! And an awful performance by my boy looking like a
Black and White Minstrel” (157). Sangeeta Ray suggests that, “Kipling’s identity as a
respected imperialist writer is attacked by Karim’s father who reduces Kipling to a
sycophant, and British imperialists to an undifferentiated mass—‘whity’” (234). It is
important to notice that Haroon’s aversion to Karim’s performance is confined to the
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material that Karim reenacts and to what he looks like upon the stage; it is a matter of his
“looking like a Black and White Minstrel” (with a painted body instead of a painted
face), a matter of the boot polish darkening Karim’s skin. Haroon problematizes
Kipling’s role as the imperialist writer and, Eva pins her anger on Shadwell, who insisted
upon darkening Karim’s skin, “Eva turned and gesticulated towards me, as if she were
taking him [Shadwell] to task for something he’d done to me” (157). However, neither
one of them lays the blame on Karim. They think of him as the victim of prejudice rather
than the opposite.
Conversely, Jamila blames Karim for his own political naiveté and his complicity
with the performance. For Jamilia, it is not just about the fact that the play is, as she says,
“completely neo-fascist” (157), it is that the whole portrayal on Karim’s part is
“disgusting, the accent and the shit you had smeared over you. You were just pandering
to prejudices...And clichés about Indians. And the accent—my God, how could you do
it? I expect you’re ashamed, aren’t you?” (157). She hardly listens when Karim replies,
“I am, actually.” Instead, she suggests, “you’ve got no morality” (157). In this sense, she
denounces him for being a part of the production in the first place and suggests that by
agreeing to the accent and the loin-cloth, he aligns himself with both Kipling’s and
Shadwell’s vision, ignoring his own agency—the lapsed accent and all—entirely.
Ironically, it is only Changez, the most recent immigrant to England, who “had chuckled
all through the show.” He says, “Good entertainment...take me again, eh” (157), perhaps
because to him, the production rang so false, that he was hard-pressed to take it seriously.
No matter what his reason for enjoying the play, it is Kureishi’s ability to look at the
production from every ideological angle—as if through a kaleidoscope—that makes The
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Buddha of Suburbia so adept at imbuing a text as familiar as Kipling’s The Jungle
Book—and perhaps the film version to which Karim refers—with new and transgressive
meanings.
In a novel like The Buddha of Suburbia, so full of references to Western masss
media, from literature to magazines to television to film, Western pop music alone
emerges a powerful landscape through which the notion of what it means to be British in
a world without formal empires is explored and examined and so to focus only upon the
world of the theater would be to miss a great deal. Jörg Helbig argues that, “The Buddha
of Suburbia electrifies the social momentum reflected in pop music” (81). Furthermore,
Moore-Gilbert explains that, “popular music plays a role in building wider kinds of
communities...which might provide a template for more productive relations between
different ethnicities in contemporary society” (Hanif Kureishi 116-17). Indeed, in The
Buddha of Suburbia music becomes a medium of cross-cultural exchange and socio-
cultural evolution, where both high and low, margin and center meet. The novel takes
into account a diverse and vast array of music, from jazz to hippy funk, psychedelic rock
music to punk. In fact, The Buddha of Suburbia is so infused with references to popular
music—from Ella Fitzgerald (53, 116) to David Bowie (68, 118, 247), the Rolling Stones
(10, 14, 55, 118, 153, 247, 249) to the Third Ear Band (10), Bob Dylan (6, 134, 238) to
Pink Floyd (8, 14, 15, 48), Louis Armstrong (25) to Cream (10, 176), Otis Redding (88)
to the Beatles (9, 10, 14, 20, 31, 55, 85, 118, 178, 249)—that it almost seems like a novel
set to a soundtrack. When reading Kureishi’s novel, one can practically hear the slip of a
diamond stylus between the grooves of an old LP.
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Indeed, it is important to note how Karim’s parents—each from such disparate
ethnicities—met for the first time at a dance where everyone from Glenn Miller and
Count Basie and Louis Armstrong all played together (25). To further emphasize how
different his parents were—not just in their ethnicities, but in their upbringings—Karim
explains how his father initially moved to England to further his education, “Like Gandhi
and Jinnah before him, Dad would return to India a qualified and polished English
gentleman lawyer and an accomplished ballroom dancer” (24). In the meantime, it was
while practicing his ballroom dancing that Haroon, “first laid eyes and hands on a pretty
working-class girl from the suburbs called Margaret” (25). That Haroon was the upper-
crust gentleman and Karim’s mother, Margaret, was from a lower-class family turns
traditional expectations of the interracial and intercultural couple on its knees.
In keeping with Haroon and Margaret’s relationship, Helbig suggests that, “The
recurrent theme of pop music, for instance, deliberately dissolves the traditional
borderline between popular and high culture” (80) and Rita Felski explains that,
“Furthermore, the new ideologies and lifestyles disseminated by the mass media are
blurring the rigid distinctions between classes” (37), as in the case of Margaret and
Haroon, where music blurs the line between upper- and working-classes. Additionally,
that they should meet in a setting where Glenn Miller, a white, American jazz musician
and bandleader played with Louis Armstrong and Count Basie, two black, American jazz
musicians is equally significant, because as Moore-Gilbert explains, jazz is “perhaps the
first major instance of ‘cross-over’ between musical cultures with different national or
‘ethnic’ origins” (“Hybridity” 197). As a greater illustration of the cross-cultural, cross-
class, jazz-induced relationship between Haroon and Margaret is the portrayal of their
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children. On the one hand there is Karim’s brother Allie, who “had decided to become a
ballet dancer and had to go to an expensive private school” (19). In severe contrast is
Karim, who at one point talks about his rougher education saying, “we disrupted all
lessons; we were fighters; we never carried no effeminate briefcases since we never did
no homework” (178), in a different class entirely than a private school for ballet.
When Karim’s own brother, Amar, who “called himself Allie to avoid racial
trouble” (19), congratulates Karim for landing a role in a television soap opera, he
surprises Karim when he says, “Television is the only medium I like” (268) and then
points out that Karim’s most recent theatrical role was somehow too synthetic, “It was
idealistic. The politics got on my nerves. We all hate whingeing lefties, don’t we?”
(267). Allie goes on to warn Karim to remember where he comes from. He says:
They should shut up and get on with their lives. At least the blacks have a history
of slavery. The Indians were kicked out of Uganda. There was a reason for
bitterness. But no one put people like you and me in camps, and no one will. We
can’t be lumped in with them, thank God. We should be just as grateful we
haven’t got white skin either...Let me say that we come from privilege. We can’t
pretend we’re some kind of shitted-on oppressed people. (267-68)
Ironically, what Allie fails to recognize is how mass media continue to “lump” people
like himself and Karim in with the rest of the oppressed peoples of the world on a much
larger scale. Television moguls see their dark skin and conflate them with slavery,
immigration, and with marginalization. Karim’s own television roles include playing a
taxi driver (235) and the son of an Indian shopkeeper (259) and he is consistently
photographed for magazine and newspaper articles “beside barbed-wire” (228). Even in
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his latest role in a television soap opera which “would tangle with the latest contemporary
issues...abortions and racist attacks, the stuff people lived through but that never got on
TV” (259), Karim will be another Indian teenager whose parents own a convenience
store. It is images like these that people like Karim and Allie work so hard to contradict
in their own lives.
If there is any doubt that such stereotypes can be damaging to the psyche,
Kureishi’s text is haunted by a ghost-character, Gene—a character who is only spoken of
and who never actually appears in the novel—a West Indian actor described as, “talented
and sensitive, thin and kind and raunchy, with this beautiful face,” who killed himself by
taking pills because he, “never got the work he deserved” (201). The specter of Gene
hardly stands out in the novel, but he is referred to as a genius whose roles were confined
to bit parts:
He emptied bed-pans in hospital programmes. He played criminals and taxi-
drivers. He never played in Chekhov or Ibsen or Shakespeare, and he deserved
to. He was better than a lot of people. So he was very angry about a lot of things.
The police were always picking him up and giving him a going over. Taxis drove
straight past him. People said there were no free tables in restaurants. He lived in
a bad world in nice old England. (201).
Through media Gene literally comes to embody what it means to be stereotyped.
Because Indians are described as marginalized in the media, Gene becomes first,
marginalized in his profession and then later marginalized in his own life until he quite
literally disappears.
175
In the end, all of the characters that Karim is asked or cast to play represent some
variation of an ethnic stereotype from his patently offensive role as Mowgli to the
rejection of the role he desires to play as Anwar, from the character based upon Changez
to the small part he lands in a “television film, playing a taxi driver” (235), and finally his
pièce de résistance as the rebellious son of an Indian shopkeeper in a soap opera. With
all of the attention paid to trying to define what it means to be an Indian in London,
Kureishi resolves that such a definition or invention is impossible and thus, when
Kureishi’s white characters also manipulate the stereotypes cultivated by Western media,
Kureishi undermines media images that attempt to represent identity all together. John
Clement Ball aptly notes that in the “collapsed ‘world’ in downtown London—a world of
parody, pastiche, simultaneity, and simulacrum” Karim is no more authentically Indian in
his roles “than Charlie is authentically punk or Eva authentically artsy” (23). For
example, after moving to the city, Haroon’s mistress, Eva, surrounds herself with
members of England’s entertainment industry, “every third rate actor, assistant film
director, weekend writer, part-time producer and their friends” (134) in an attempt to
make it appear as though she fits in with her new metropolitan environment. Karim notes
that every attempt she makes to appear more cosmopolitan and sophisticated only works
to denote the opposite:
As my darling new mother (whom I loved) moved radiantly about the room
introducing Derek...to Bryan, who was a freelance journalist specializing in film,
or Karen, who was a secretary at a literary agency, to Robert...as she spoke of the
new Dylan album and what Riverside studios was doing. I saw she wanted to
scour that suburban stigma right off her body. She didn’t realize it was in the
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blood and not the skin; she didn’t see there could be nothing more suburban than
suburbanites repudiating themselves. (134)
What Karim notes here, in this excerpt, is significant in several ways. First and foremost,
he points out how very instrumental the media can be as cultural capital and in
structuring and nurturing cultural acceptance. Second, Eva’s preference for acquaintances
involved in acting, directing, and writing underscores her desire to revise her own
identity. Third, it is important to note how Karim refers to Eva’s party guests as “third
rate,” “assistant,” “weekend” and “part-time,” because they are likely anxious, as Eva is,
to be taken seriously. Finally, Karim’s awareness of Eva’s efforts to shed her suburban
identity for one more urban and sheik emphasizes both the ease and complexity of
playing a role. Though Karim notes that, “there could be nothing more suburban than
suburbanites repudiating themselves,” there is also no doubt that Eva successfully
manages to dupe a number of her party guests, whose notions of urban sophistication are
likely as superficial as those pandered by media.
Similarly, when Charlie first stumbles upon the discordant rifts, the unmistakable
edge and the unmasked fury of the sounds and style of punk music and wants to try on
that look and that anger, Karim’s concern that it would be “artificial” (132) for suburban
boys, like himself and Charlie, to masquerade as angry young men from the estates
demonstrates the dilemmas and complications of representation and identity. Back then,
in a bar rocked by aggressive musical notes without “a squeeze of anything ‘progressive’
or ‘experimental’” and full of “pallid vicious little council estate kids with hedgehog hair,
howling about anarchy and hatred” (130), Charlie notes how music has the power to
disturb, to stimulate change, to be defiant and audacious. He claims, “The sixties have
177
been given notice tonight” (131) as if to imply that music alone can change the direction
of an entire decade, but Karim warns, “It would be artificial...We’re not like them. We
don’t hate the way they do. We’ve got no reason to. We’re not from the estates. We
haven’t been through what they have” (131-32). In some ways, when Karim argues that
they “can’t wear rubber and safety-pins and all” (131) because it would be false, he
points out how dangerous it can be when identity is faked or conjured. However, it is
important to keep in mind that even though Charlie, with his white skin, can pretend to
“hate the way they do” (132), and pass for a skinhead, Karim, with his dark skin cannot.
Later in the novel, when Charlie does manage to fool just about all of England
(and become a star in the United States) with his punk persona, Karim sees right through
Charlie’s manufactured image. Like the Sex Pistols, who became a media phenomenon,
made famous through Malcolm McLaren’s savvy use of television, tabloid press and
record label shenanigans, Karim witnesses that Charlie’s success depends upon the same
trickery. Though media outlets—the papers, magazines and television programs—all
equate Charlie’s punk image with “the new nihilism, the new hopelessness and the new
music which expressed it” (153), Karim knows better than to be fooled by Charlie’s
outraged, “Can’t play, can’t sing, can’t write songs, and the shitty idiot people love us!”
attitude. About Charlie’s first television appearance, Karim notes:
...Charlie was magnificent in his venom, his manufactured rage, his anger, his
defiance. What power he had, what admiration he extorted, what looks there were
in girls’ eyes. He was brilliant: he’d assembled all the right elements. It was a
wonderful trick and disguise. The one flaw, I giggled to myself, was his milky
and healthy white teeth, which to me, betrayed everything else. (154)
178
Though Karim notices that Charlie’s punk identity is, in his words, “a big con trick”
(154)—even Charlie admits, “The music’s feeble, OK? I’m no Bowie, don’t think I
don’t know that” (247)—Karim also notices how the music changes once it goes
overseas, where the circumstances that Charlie pretends to rail against no longer exist.
Though Charlie fakes his anger over unemployment and class tensions in England, that
menace loses some of its drama in America, where it is no longer relevant.
In New York City, Charlie sells Englishness instead of rage and Karim notes, “he
was getting a lot of money for it” (247). Even Charlie’s English identity is manufactured,
“Charlie had acquired this cockney accent when my first memory of him at school was
that he’d cried after being mocked by the stinking gypsy kids for talking so posh” (247).
Schoene suggests that, “By juxtaposing syntheticity (punk) with ethnicity (Indianness) in
this manner, Kureishi demolishes the notion of any originary cultural authenticity (116).
While Schoene is certainly correct in his summation—after all Karim’s mere presence
with Charlie serves to function as “a full length mirror, but a mirror that could remember”
(251), through which Karim and Charlie see themselves in one another and recognize
who they are as well as who they pretend to be—it is, perhaps, more important to note
that in America Charlie’s accent identifies him as British, while Karim’s skin identifies
him as Indian, despite the fact that he and Charlie sound the same.
Likewise, when Haroon suggests to a magazine reporter, “I have lived in the West
most of my life, and I will die here, yet I remain to all intents and purposes an Indian
man. I will never be anything but Indian” (263), it is wrong to mistake his tone as
culturally essentialist. He is a far cry from Anwar, who Karim explains is, “Like many
Muslim men—beginning with the Prophet Mohammed himself, whose absolute
179
statements, served up piping hot from God, inevitably gave rise to absolutism” (172). I
believe that what Haroon is really suggesting at the end of the novel is that it does not
matter how he sees himself, he will always appear on the outside —as Karim does in
America—to be nothing more than an Indian man.
While throughout The Buddha of Suburbia, Karim learns to respect himself and to
embrace his own Indian heritage, it would be wrong to suggest that the color of his skin
represents his identity accurately. At Anwar’s burial, Karim looks out at the crowd of
mourners in attendance and recognizes them finally as the people he loves most. He
realizes:
I did feel, looking at these strange creatures now—the Indians—that in some way
these were my people, and that I’d spent my life denying or avoiding that fact. I
felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing, and
as if I’d been colluding with my enemies, those whites who wanted Indians to be
like them. (212)
And, at the end of the novel, when Karim takes the majority of his family out to celebrate
his new television role, Karim’s feelings at Anwar’s funeral resurface, “I was surrounded
by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time” (284). However,
Karim resolves to be something different, to somehow embrace all of the parts of himself
that make him whole. When his mother responds to one of his performances, she
contends, “But you’re not Indian. You’ve never been to India. You’d get diarrhoea the
minute you stepped off that plane...You’re an Englishman, I’m glad to say” (232). His
response, “I’m an actor. It’s my job” (212), indicates that his identity is not as simple as
his mother claims either. Karim is, indeed, “an Englishman born and bred, almost” (3).
180
After seeing the same play, Eva claims, “It was about this country...About how
callous and bereft of grace we’ve become. It blew away the self-myth of tolerant, decent
England” (228). The Buddha of Suburbia does this too; it blows away the myth of a
tolerant and decent England in a world without empires. Ball claims, “London continues
to project and to be associated with images of the old imperial city at the fulcrum of
world culture and political influence” (14) and perhaps he is correct in his conclusion. If
media help to perpetuate that image of England, there is certainly a need for change,
because in the media we see time after time methods of image-making that tie fashion
and style, cultural capital and pop culture to matters of race, culture, and identity to
reinforce ethnic stereotypes. Moore-Gilbert explains, “Kureishi rearticulates these
stereotypes as signs of the power of the formerly marginalized to trouble the norms and
values of the centre” (“Hybridity” 198). Similarly, Anthony Ilona points out that, from
politics “to the televisual and print media, the classroom and the playground, Kureishi
demonstrates how the principle of Othering and exclusion is woven into the fabric of the
nation with dehumanizing psychological effect” (96), but Kureishi also demonstrates as
Michael Gorra explains, “the ways in which it is possible to be English and not yet
white” (656): “I am he as you are he as you are me/ And we are all together.” Or, rather
what it should mean to be British in a world without empires. It comes as no surprise to
me that The Buddha of Suburbia takes place in the South London suburbs, where
incidentally, the Prime Meridian or Longitude Zero can be found. Robert Young
describes the scene:
At the top of this small hill, you have found yourself at the zero point of the
world, at the centre of time itself. Paradoxically, for Greenwich to be the centre
181
of the world in time it must be inscribed with the alterity of the place. Stand to
the left-hand side of the brass strip and you are in the Western hemisphere. But
move a yard to your right, and you enter the East: whoever youa re, you have
been translated from a European to an Oriental. Put one foot back to the left of
the brass strip and you become undecidedly mixed with otherness: an Occidental
and an Oriental at once. It was with a supremely knowing gesture towards the
future that in 1884, the division of the newly homogenized temporal world into
East and West was placed not in Jerusalem or Constantinople but in a South
London suburb. In that gesture, it was acknowledged that the totality, the
sameness of the West will always be riven by difference. (1)
In The Buddha of Suburbia what underlies every character’s journey on the quest for self-
discovery, is the notion that perhaps the only “character” in need of change is England
herself.
What Kureishi shows us in The Buddha of Suburbia is that the cultural landscape
of England has, in fact, irrevocably changed and this is something that all of the novels
included in this dissertation show us. As part of the Western mass media—in that they
are mass-marketed novels in and beyond the West—the novels in this dissertation use
images of mass media to demonstrate that the entire white Western world has changed.
The Buddha of Suburbia articulates, in part, the messages rendered in every novel
examined in this dissertation. Kureishi employs much of what is sacred to Rushdie in
The Satanic Verses. If, in Rushdie’s words, The Satanic Verses is a novel that asks, “You
call us devils? Very well, then here is the devil’s version of the world, of ‘your’ world”
(“In Good Faith” 403), The Buddha of Suburbia shows us an equally enticing view of the
182
world from the perspective of those marginalized for their otherness. Furthermore, by
rendering that world, Kureishi deconstructs the fixed conceptions of “Indianness”
maintained by Western media by establishing the vast diversity of points-of-view
amongst the members of the Indian community in England.
Karim, like Raju in The Guide, demonstrates what it must feel like to embody one
role after another, only to cast off his desire to live up to the expectations of others in
favor of fulfilling himself. The narrator of The Guide suggests, “For the first time in his
life he [Raju] was making an honest effort; for the first time he was learning the thrill of
full application outside money and love; for the first time he was doing a thing in which
he was personally interested” (212). And yet, both Karim’s and Raju’s true identities are
effectively erased once they are performed on stage or on film. Like Tara in The Tiger’s
Daughter, Karim feels cut off from his Indian identity and finds that media are
inadequate landscapes for exploring what it means to be Indian. Tara concludes, “It was
impossible to be a bridge for anybody” (144), just as Karim concludes that he is
uncomfortable in the role of interpreting his ethnicity for a white audience. Like
Mammachi’s banana jam, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Karim too, is
“ambiguous” and “unclassifiable” (31) and, like Roy, Kureishi uses references to
Western media to underscore significant moments throughout his novel. For Roy it is The
Sound of Music and for Kureishi it may be “I am the Walrus,” but each author uses
Western media to negotiate the political significance of Western media’s authority in
constructing powerful images of what the world should look like. Each novel shows us
that the world has in fact become—to borrow Kwame Anthony Appiah’s word—
183
“cosmopolitan.” They are asking us to notice. They are asking us to catch up. They are
asking us to listen.
184
Epilogue: The Conversation Continues
Pakistani novelist Moshin Hamid’s 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is
made up of a single monologue, through which the protagonist tells his life story to a
stranger over dinner in a Pakistani café. When asked by Terry Gross, host of National
Public Radio’s Fresh Air, why he chose to depict both characters—the Pakistani and the
stranger—through the narrator’s eyes, Hamid answered:
Well, the novel is structured the way it is—with a Pakistani man speaking to an
American who doesn’t speak back—in part, because … in the media of the world
today, we see a great deal of one side of a conversation and much less of the
other. So, in this case, by reversing that—by having the American be relatively
silent and the Pakistani speak much more—I was trying to play with that notion.
When I heard this interview, I was struck by the utter luck, the sheer coincidence, the
perfect symmetry with which this project and Hamid’s book collide. If this dissertation
tends to treat what Hamid call “media of the world” as largely Western, it is for two
reasons. The first is that, as Hamid elides world media with the American perspective,
many postcolonial authors also understand a global popular culture to be fostered
primarily by Western media empires. For such authors to complicate our understanding
of these products by recontextualizing them in cosmopolitan discourses is a way to claim
an alternative perspective on “the world” that the “media of the world” purport to
describe, and to tell stories about a genuine global dialogue so that they are heard.
The second reason that I have often cast Western media as a unified whole is
simply rhetorical. In The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr explains that, “In colonial
discourse every individual weakness has its political counterpart—uncivilized society,
185
according to this logic, being little more than the uncivilized mind and body writ large”
(76). If the postcolonial authors of Anglophone South Asian fiction that I have treated in
this dissertation are attempting to complicate the logic of colonial discourse and to
counter the rhetorical tropes that have their roots in imperialism but which still influence
our world through the mediascapes of literature, journalism, popular music, television
and cinema, then I have intentionally taken up Western media to represent all that is
dangerous about imperialism writ large for the big screen.
On Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan on National Public Radio, Kwame
Anthony Appiah warned that in the matter of cultural exchange, “Conversation is only
worth doing if you are listening as well as talking.” The authors represented in this
project not only require that we listen to what they have to say, but make us complicit in
telling their stories that open mass-mediated images produced in the West to a global
conversation. When the end of a novel is left open to interpretation, as it is in R. K.
Narayan’s The Guide, we finish the narrative simply by imagining what happens next.
There is, certainly, much to learn by listening to the members of another culture, of
hearing the other side of the conversation of which we so often hear only our version.
In his interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio, Hamid clarified his
intentions in regard to the narrative structure of the novel. He explained, “The Pakistani
character is speaking to an American character; there’s a conversation going on. And, for
me, that conversation is more what I’m about. I’m somebody who has both a Pakistani
and an American identity.” With the exception of Narayan, the authors examined in this
dissertation all have one home in India and have made another in Britain or the U.S. so
they are all very-well equipped to lay bare what a full two-sided conversation in the
186
world—rather than in “the East” or “the West”—should look like. After all, Appiah’s
cosmopolitanism implies that to be home is not be in the East or in the West, but simply
to be in the world. As these authors treat the newness of rapid and far-reaching cultural
exchange, they do so in a way that balances a tension between their celebration of such
immediate conversation—made possible through popular culture and mass media—and
their concern over its potential to fall into the traps of older forms of colonial discourse
and cultural imperialism.
This conversation should continue and it is my hope that it will reach new
audiences, speakers, and listeners not just through novels but through the mediascapes of
popular culture. Perhaps Indian-language writing, Indian television, Bollywood cinema
and All India Radio are the places toward which to look in a continuation of this project.
Such a study might reveal a different model of cosmopolitanism than the one generated
by Appiah and embraced by the Indo-Anglican writers of this project. Furthermore, such
a study would require—to borrow Rushdie’s phrase from The Satanic Verses—a different
set of “fusions, translations and conjoinings” (8) than the ones examined in these pages.
In “Times of Renewal,” Amit Chaudhuri describes the novel as “a nation metaphor” (par.
8) and, to this point, the novel has been the vehicle—both in the West and in India—for
reflecting upon large-scale questions of nation, which are consistently subject to revision
in the face of change. However, it is possible to imagine such questions of nations
reflected in other mediascapes: languages can be translated, satellite television brings
both sides of the world closer together everyday, the market for Bollywood cinema is
forever expanding, and All India Radio is available via the world-wide web. When we
turn our attention to the ways in which questions of nation are reflected in Indian popular
187
culture, perhaps it is time to ask whether or not the binary oppositions between center and
periphery, civilized and savage, East and West ever really existed or whether or not we
invented them to divide, to conquer or to reclaim the world.
188
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