Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction 1847180493, 9781847180490

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Literary Secularism

Literary Secularism Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction

By

Amardeep Singh

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction, by Amardeep Singh This book first published 2006 by Cambridge Scholars Press 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2006 by Amardeep Singh All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-049-3

For Samian

“I am not a Hindu, Nor a Muslim am I; I am this body, a play Of five elements; a drama Of the spirit dancing With joy and sorrow.” —Kabir

The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy. —William Blake

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements.............................................................................................x Chapter One The Critical Tradition and the Modern Novel: from Daniel Defoe to James Wood.....................................................................................................1 Chapter Two George Eliot: British Secularism, Jewish Assimilation, and Daniel Deronda...........................................................................................25 Chapter Three Holy Water, Fluid Modernity: Rabindranath Tagore and Hindu Reform..............................................................................................46 Chapter Four Diasporas and Promised Lands: Ireland, Israel, and Joyce’s Ulysses............................................................................................71 Chapter Five The Elusive Ideal of Secular Writing: V.S. Naipaul and Literary Secularism in India ..................................................98 Chapter Six The Ambiguous Relationship Between Men and Angels: Salman Rushdie's Daemonic Secularism .........................................................117 Chapter Seven The Myriad Failures of Religious Law: the Uniform Civil Code Debate and Indian Feminism.....................................136 Chapter Eight Literary Secularism After 9/11: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow ................155 Works Cited....................................................................................................176 Index................................................................................................................183

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Literary Secularism began as a Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University, and I am first and foremost indebted to my advisors and teachers from that institution. The project was initially inspired by a Victorian literature seminar with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Michael Valdez Moses, Irene Tucker, William David Hart, Ian Baucom, and Srinivas Aravamudan all gave vital support and suggestions early on. At Lehigh, I am indebted to a number of colleagues and students who have provided excellent intellectual community, especially Jan Fergus, Robert Rozehnal, Lawrence Silberstein, Michael Raposa, Seth Moglen, Elizabeth Dolan, David Hawkes, Scott Gordon, Erangee Kumarage, Vicki Miller, Tom O’Connor, Christina Hoffmann, and Colleen Clemens. At the School of Criticism and Theory, Vincent Pecora, Sander Gilman, and Dominick LaCapra helped me rethink the project towards its current direction. Many friends have also helped this project along in various ways, including Ajantha Subramaniam, Vincent Brown, Julian Meyers, Pramod Mishra, Nihad Farooq, Timothy Burke, Michael Bérubé, John Holbo, Sharleen Mondal, Laura Carroll, Scott Eric Kaufman, Lara Bovilsky, Amitava Kumar, Shuchi Kapila, Daniel Itzkovitz, Tejaswini Ganti, Deepika Petraglia-Bahri, Sangita Gopal, Melba Kuddy-Keane, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Bakirathi Mani, and Patricia Ingham. Also, I am grateful to my many friends and interolocutors on the internet—many of them anonymous—for always pushing me to explain my ideas as clearly as possible. Above all, I am grateful to the loving support of my family and to the nurturing patience of Samian Kaur.

CHAPTER ONE THE CRITICAL TRADITION AND THE MODERN NOVEL: FROM DANIEL DEFOE TO JAMES WOOD This is surely the true secularism of fiction—why, despite its being a kind of magic, it is actually the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity. —James Wood, The Broken Estate

As a starting point for thinking about secularism in literature, no literary critic is more helpful than James Wood. In this statement from his introduction to The Broken Estate, Wood is confidently secular in a way that might be taken as representative of much modern thinking about literature. In identifying modern fiction as “the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions,” Wood presumes that whole categories of modern literature—where the novel is held to be the most important—contribute to a broad secularizing project in accord with the aims of liberal nation-state planners, and modern science and social theory. It is a position for which one can find ample support. There are, for instance, any number of examples of writers and critics who have spoken out directly against religious orthodoxies in their works–one thinks of James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and, more recently, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and V.S. Naipaul. Against this array of canonical writers (some of them newly canonical) who have publicly affirmed a secularist perspective, the number of expressly religious serious writers is quite small– figures like G. K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis are among the best respected of twentieth century writers who were avowedly religious, but even their status is somewhat less than canonical. And writers (many of them from outside Europe) who do publicly identify with specific religious traditions–such as Israel's A.B. Yehoshua or India's Khushwant Singh—have heterodox or heretical relationships to their religious traditions. Still, Wood's view of fiction is such a broad generalization that it practically invites doubt. Do novels really work that way upon readers (i.e., to destroy religious belief)? Are the novelists themselves aware of this phenomenon? Through close, careful reading and a respect for historical context, one finds a more complex truth. The literary secularism Wood describes is a real phenomenon, which crosses national as well as religious boundaries, but it is not as stable as a political platform. If anything, the secularism of modern literature is a nuanced, complex phenomenon, as many of the great writers named are deeply haunted by the fabric of religious upbringings they have only partially disowned.

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Admittedly, the question about secularism in literature could start at a much more fundamental level than Wood's “slayer of religions.” Basic questions could be raised, for instance, about what exactly is meant by the “secular” and “religious,” terms which are widely contested in religious studies, the sociology of religion, and even theology. There are many frames within which this course of inquiry might be located, including the sociology of Max Weber, political philosophy in the vein of Marx's “On the Jewish Question,” as well as broad trends in philosophy, such as the controversy over Nietzsche’s “death of God.” This is not to mention the problem of cross-cultural comparison, in which postcolonial theory and the Subaltern Studies school of historiography would figure strongly. But in all of these there is a severe danger of diverting an investigation of a question of literary form through sociology, politics, or theology. James Wood is a better start because he takes a clear, straightforward approach to the problem, emphasizing the formal properties of literary works, especially in fiction. Through engaging Wood's ideas about the secularism of fiction, a course emerges through which at least some of the above questions about literary secularism can be addressed substantially, without the exclusion of politics or history. The goal is to dispense with excessive framing, and get right into the argument. Though statements like the above suggest a very muscular approach to secularism in the novel, a second glance reveals that Wood's own relationship to religion in literature is quite a bit more complex. Despite his emphasis on secularism, at several moments in his essays Wood expresses hostility to secularization, faulting nineteenth-century critics like Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan for opening the gateway to secularization, but unconsciously. Wood prefers writers to be either openly religious or openly atheist, against those who occupy the in-between space of Matthew Arnold’s “religion of culture.” 1 But literature thrives on ambiguities; there are dozens of examples of major writers in the nineteenth as well as twentieth centuries whose works as well as lives reflect a nuanced, ambiguous relationship to religious texts, themes, and institutions. In the Indian tradition, this sense of ambiguity can be found as far back as the boundary-crossing Bhakti poets of the late Medieval period—chief among them Kabir. In England, such ambiguity is especially interesting in the Romantic Poets, whose verses reflect a profound secularization of ethos, even while retaining (especially in Blake and Wordsworth) a prophetic sensibility deeply connected to Christianity. This phenomenon has, however, been amply discussed, in M.H. Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Poetry, 2 as well as in the subsequent exchange with J. Hillis Miller in the pages of Critical Inquiry.3 It has not, however, been 1

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, 49. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Poetry. 3 J. Hillis Miller, “Tradition and Difference.” Diacritics Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 1972, 6 13. 2

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discussed as extensively in the modern novel, which is what I therefore propose to do here. Through close readings of novels by George Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, V.S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie, I will argue that the apparent firmness of these authors’ respective models of secularism and secularization is undone, along four lines. The first is mimetic: each of these novelists represents the continued power that religious communities and institutions have in the modern world. It may not be the determining or the only available world-view, but all of these writers suggest that it continues to be a viable one. The second is more structural: the deep co-imbrication of modern, secular discourses such as nationalism and individualism with particular religious traditions inflects the form of the narratives themselves. This need not be a matter of emulating the shape of religious scriptures; in Eliot's Daniel Deronda, for instance, a seemingly conventional heterosexual marriage plot between Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda is diverted by the latter's discovery of his connection to Judaism. The third point of interaction between the secular and the religious is essentially thematic: one sees the continued reference to religious scriptures, narratives, and metaphors in all of these works, even as the authors seem to be transforming classical religious icons (such as the Hindu image of “Sita,” the devoted wife) through modern recontextualizations. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, through their assertion of creative will as literary authors, novelists assert a measure of power over religious scriptures, producing texts of human rather than divine provenance. This final point might seem obvious, but it is a live issue for many writers; the question of the location of authorship becomes the core issue in the dream-fragments in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Theologians and anthropologists such as Diana Eck and Karen Armstrong4 have in recent years questioned the received wisdom that there is in modernity a decisive, universal movement towards secularization as a historical event with a definite end. A non-teleological concept of modernity is also present in the works of the authors in this study: the secular and the religious exist in an intimately antinomian, mutually defining opposition in many aspects of cultural life, including literature. In Joyce's Ulysses, for instance, Biblical allegory impinges on the secular engagement with Irish nationalism. Similarly, a kind of sacralized spirituality is central to Rabindranath Tagore's conception of an independent Indian nation in Gora. The social and intellectual worlds of Subsequent essays in the same exchange, including Abrams' “The Deconstructive Angel,” and Hillis Miller's “The Critic as Host,” rapidly move away from the question of religious influence, and into fundamental questions of language and signification. 4 Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, especially Chapter 7, “Is Our God Listening: Exclusivism, Inclusivism, and Pluralism.” Karen Armstrong discusses this theme in a number of different places, but a good starting point might be A History of God: The 4000 Year History of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

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England, Ireland, and India are in fact rather closely tied together, through the shared history of colonialism, the problematic of nationalism, and the conflicted rise of individualism as a dominant mode of defining social identity.

The Emergence of Literary Secularism in the Critical Tradition To begin with, Wood's critical secularism is placed in plain view in the introduction of the book, where he sketches a theory of fiction. Let us return to the quote above, this time including the preceding paragraph for full context: Nevertheless, the reality of fiction must also draw its power from the reality of the world. The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief, and is therefore a kind of discretionary magic: it is a magic whose existence it is up to us, as readers, to validate and confirm. It is for this reason that many readers dislike actual magic or fantasy in novels. . . . Fiction demands belief from us, and that is demanding partly because we can choose not to believe. However, magic—improbable occurrences, ghosts, coincidences—dismantles belief, forcing on us miracles which, because they are beyond belief, we cannot choose not to believe. This is why almost all fiction is not magical, and why the great writers of magical tales are so densely realistic. The gentle request to believe is what makes fiction so moving. Joyce requests that we believe that Mick Lacy could sing the tune better than Stephen's father. . . . It is a belief that is requested, that we can refuse at any time, that is under our constant surveillance. This is surely the true secularism of fiction— why, despite its being a kind of magic, it is actually the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity. Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to make its case. Belief in fiction is always belief “as if.” Our belief is itself metaphorical—it only resembles actual belief, and is therefore never wholly 5 belief.

This is a refreshingly strong claim. For Wood, the emergence of the novel in particular marks a transition from the dominance of absolute Biblical narratives (authored by “God”) to the much more contingent world of fiction. Fiction is a kind of storytelling invented by writers whose authorship is specified and (eventually) advertised, and where belief in the worlds created in its pages is strictly notional. It may be that at moments in the passage quoted above Wood's rhetoric is excessive; it is hardly self-evident that fiction is the “slayer of religions” and the “scrutineer of falsity.” The claims can, however, be tested in novels themselves, as well as cross-referenced against the critical tradition. Starting with the latter project, I will briefly survey the ideas of some major 5

James Wood, The Broken Estate, xi-xii.

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literary critics for whom secularization has been an important theme. My discussion below, I should say, goes considerably beyond Wood: in my readings of critics like Ian Watt, Northrop Frye, and T.S. Eliot, I am less interested in establishing literature's role as an engine of secularization than I am in tracing how modern literature came to be a primary site where secularism as a philosophical and political program is expressed. I am, in other words, looking at secularization as a story that unfolds primarily within literature, but in parallel with philosophical, cultural, and political phenomena. Wood's account of the secularization of literature rhymes quite well with Ian Watt's Weberian account in The Rise of the Novel, though it also shares some of the problems in Watt's argument. Watt's idea of secularization depends on his distinguishing between two eighteenth-century works, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and William Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Though the two novels are formally quite similar (and Bunyan predates Defoe by some years), Watt argues that Defoe's novel should be properly understood as the first truly modern novel because of the “secularization of [Defoe's] outlook,” which is for Watt closely shaped by the progress of historical events in England at the time: The relative impotence of religion in Defoe's novels, then, suggests not insincerity but the profound secularisation of his outlook, a secularisation which was a marked feature of his age—the word itself in its modern sense dates from the first decades of the eighteenth century. Defoe himself had been born at a time when the Puritan Commonwealth had just collapsed at the Restoration, while Robinson Crusoe was written in the year of the Salters' Hall controversy, when, after the last hopes of Dissent in a compromise with the Anglican Church had been given up, even their effort to unite among themselves proved impossible. In The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s hero meditates on the ebbing of the Christian religion throughout the world; it is a bitterly divided minority force in a largely pagan world, and God’s final intervention seems 6 remoter than ever.

Watt's historical reference points are undeniably important, but his conclusions are questionable. In effect, the events he mentions represent the failure of the Dissenting churches to organize themselves effectively against the Anglican Establishment. But they don't speak to the true decline of the authority of the Establishment in the early and mid-nineteenth century, which was linked to nothing else than the continued expansion of the Dissenting churches, and with that expansion a probable increase in the prevalence of a strict form of expressive religious piety in everyday life.7 As in the United States, English secularization was by and large an event initiated by the proliferation of 6

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 82. This history is well described in lay terms in Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It is also detailed more technically in chapter 2 of Monsma and Soper’s The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies.

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competing religions, not the straightforward diminishing of religion as a whole.8 More importantly, England’s secularism or lack thereof doesn’t determine Defoe’s own attitude—far from it. Watt has to acknowledge, at times uncomfortably, the pervasiveness of Puritan ethics and theology in Defoe’s novel. Though his actions are not always harmonious with a strict interpretation of Puritan religious principles, Crusoe is haunted by a sense of “original sin,” quotes scripture relentlessly, and is evidently dependent on his faith and “blessings from Providence” for his survival. Watt's distinction of Defoe from Bunyan primarily on the basis of Defoe's greater investment in the material world (material acquisition) and in productivity thus seems only partially correct, and the “secularization” he insists on is driven more by historical events than it is on the evidence in the text. It may be that it is unnecessary to pose a sharp distinction between the two forms of Puritan prose-writing, or to assert a clear connection between the rise of the novel and the idea of secularization as presented in Watt. Watt's distinction between Defoe and Bunyan does not, in short, hold. Both of the authors named are situated at a critical distance from the Establishment, and are interested in defining religion separate from Church doctrine. And while Defoe is considerably more secular in terms of his use of characterization and his relatively contained use of Biblical reference, neither are truly “secular” in the sense implied by inventing a world devoid of God's involvement. If we are looking for what Wood calls the “fiction's true secularism,” we are not going to find it in these early eighteenth-century novels. A stronger sense of secularity can be found in the writing and criticism of Romanticism, beginning in the latter years of the eighteenth century, and continuing through the early nineteenth century. As the literary movement unfolds in parallel with the Enlightenment, it is certainly a time of breakthroughs for secularism, especially in the domain of philosophy. But even here, the story is not so simple. A number of recent theorists in the sociology of religion, most prominently Talal Asad,9 have put forth arguments rethinking the hard line between pre-modern and modern discourses of religion. While premodern and early modern periods may not be as straightforwardly “religious” as is commonly thought, close scrutiny of the true heterogeneity of the modern era, with the continued prevalence of superstition and myth even in quite secularized contexts, as well as the emergence of “substitute” discourses such as nationalism, suggest that European modernity may be “secularized,” but it is not unambiguously “secular.” A literary critic who points in this direction in his approach to Romanticism is Northrop Frye. In The Secular Scripture, Frye lays out the idea of two literatures operating in parallel with each other, one “high”—Establishment 8

See the discussion of Thomas Jefferson and the role of the evangelical churches in achieving disestablishment in Virginia in Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, 30-31. 9 See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 1-4.

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literature, in both of its senses—and the other “low,” popular, and irreverent (“secular” in its Latinate sense, worldly). Frye's use of typology and his “archetypal” thinking, though often problematic, do address the issue of literary secularism conceptually. Frye affirms the border between secular literature and Biblical (or high mythological) storytelling, but argues that the two have been coexistent throughout European literary history, going back as far as Homer. Early in The Secular Scripture, Frye marks a distinction between the “serious” narratives a society tells about itself—its “high” mythology (this includes religious and scriptural narratives), on the one hand—and, on the other, the lighter narratives found in folktales and romance. An obvious example of high mythology is certainly the Bible, but equally important is the type of myth defined by Plato in The Republic—myth as an allegory, used to explain abstract concepts to sub-abstract minds.10 Myths are also the key explanatory (rationalizing) component of rituals, which are widely present in secular aspects of life, including secular narratives (romances take forms that are ritually prescribed) and dramas (which are presented ritually). Romance, on the other hand, is exemplified by first Chaucer as well as Shakespeare, as a countervailing narrative format. The import of this distinction between romance and myth for Frye is the way it opens insight into the paradoxes and complexities of the great Romantic poet, William Blake, especially given Blake's simultaneous secularizing and prophesying tendencies. Frye solves one aspect of the Blake problem via his distinction between secular romance and mythical/religious storytelling traditions that exist in parallel with each other historically: Meanwhile, an early absorption in Blake had expanded in two directions. One direction took me into the Bible by way of Milton: this is to be explored in another book. The other direction was on that connected Blake with two other writers in particular, Spenser and William Morris, both writers of sentimental romance. So Spenser, Scott, and Morris appeared as three major centers of romance in a continuous tradition, and these once identified, other centers, like the tales of Chaucer and the late comedies of Shakespeare, soon fell into place. This left me with a sense of a double tradition, one biblical and the other romantic, growing out of an interest in Blake which seemed to have contained 11 them both.

It's a rather different way of framing literary history than the “great tradition” espoused by critics like F.R. Leavis and Harold Bloom, which sees a direct line from Shakespeare, Milton, to Blake. For Frye, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser— 10 Arguably this particular deployment of myth is still in use in our own, current age. Rationality itself continues to be dependent on mythical shapes—and is still used in many contexts as part of managing (or ruling) large masses of people. 11 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, 6.

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even William Morris—fall on one side, while Milton and the Bible fall on the other. Blake, at the end of this era in literary history, collapses the two traditions in his poetry, using his verse to perform hieratic as well as romantic functions. Frye's understanding of Blake is unique in that he never claims that Blake is a secularizer, in part because his system does not require any teleological movement towards secularization. Frye's understanding of secularization in general is probably not so different from that seen in Watt, Weber, or for that matter Wood. But his understanding of how secularism works in literature is in fact radically different: The secession of science from the mythological universe is a familiar story. The separating of scientific and mythological space began theoretically with Copernicus, and effectively with Galileo. By the nineteenth century scientific time had been emancipated from mythological time. But in proportion as the mythological universe becomes more obviously a construct, another question arises. We saw that there is no structural principle to prevent the fables of secular literature from also forming a mythology, or even a mythological universe. Is it possible, then, to look at secular stories as a whole, and as forming a single biblical vision? This is the question implied in the ‘secular scripture’ of my title. In the chapters that follow I should like to look at fiction as a total verbal order, with the outlines of an imaginative universe in it. The Bible is the epic of the creator, with God as its hero. Romance is the structural core of all fiction: being directly descended from folktale, it brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as the epic of the 12 creature, man’s vision of his own life as a quest.

I find it intriguing that Frye's language is so close to Wood's at some instances (“fiction as a total verbal order, with the outlines of an imaginative universe in it”), while his meaning is clearly different. For Wood, in the passage I quoted above, modern fiction is a secularizing force because of the way it creates a world that is believed in by the reader voluntarily and contingently. For Frye, belief is essentially irrelevant. What counts is form, and in this instance he is arguing that the form of Romance is not in fact so different from that of the “Epic of the Creator,” the Bible. The difference between the two narrative genres is really to be found in their subject. Though I believe Frye means to strengthen the secular tradition in literary history, his phrasing introduces a powerful possibility for secular/religious crossover. 13 12

Ibid., 14-15. In that sense, Frye is quite different from Romantic critics like M.H. Abrams, who in The Mirror and the Lamp uses related language to describe the advent of Romanticism. But while Frye considers the changing relationship to religion one of the key elements of Romantic thought, Abrams gives this important theme fairly short attention: 'The paramount cause of poetry [in Romanticism] is not, as in Aristotle, a formal cause, determined primarily by human actions and qualities imitated; nor, as in neo-classic 13

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With the continued prevalence of what M.H. Abrams called “natural supernaturalism,”14 Romantic poetry is often only softly and ambiguously secular. While the movement is often seen as dominated by radical figures like Blake and Keats, it also produced the pro-Establishment writer Coleridge, who published a pamphlet on this subject in 1837, called On the Constitution of Church and State.15 But the process of political secularization experienced revolutionary advances through the middle years of the nineteenth century, leading to the enfranchisement of all religious minority groups (culminating in the enfranchisement of the Jews, in 1856), the decriminalization of atheism, and the advent of secular public education (with the founding of London University and, much later, the Education reforms of 1870).16 The latter half of the nineteenth century also, incidentally, saw the advent of the specific word “secularism,” as a pragmatic political invention of the reformer George Jacob Holyoake.17 The change in the culture was palpable, though the complete divorce of religion from the social agenda was still in doubt in the writings of a number of prominent intellectuals. Wood describes this phenomenon and this moment in his essay “The Broken Estate,” which represents Wood's most substantial engagement with the question of literary secularism. Wood does not particularly dwell on Europe's social and political transformations up through the middle of the nineteenth century, and approaches Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan in a rather unforgivingly theological manner: But the moment at which Jesus became the hero of a novel, of a 'prose-poem,' he also became fictional. The old estate broke. Jesus lost his divinity, became only an inspiring fantasist. We may wonder what use Jesus is if he is a figure no different from Socrates on the one hand and Daniel Deronda on the other. Why should we heed his difficult words, what is the flavor of his command once the criticism, a final cause, the effect intended upon the audience; but instead an efficient cause—the impulse within the poet of feelings and desires seeking expression, or the compulsion of the 'creative' imagination which, like God the creator, has its internal source of motion' (22). 14 This phrase was echoed by Edward Said in his characterization of the Romantic movement in Orientalism, where he argued that the continuing religious frame of mind in Romanticism can be contrasted to the more scientific, contemporaneous discourse of Orientalism. 15 See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, 61-62. 16 See Monsma and Soper, especially 124-128. 17 This was first brought to my attention by Talal Asad, who describes it in a footnote in Formations of the Secular (23). I have confirmed it via Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and its Critics. Holyoake articulates his idea of secularism in The Principles of Secularism [1870], which is available online: .

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Chapter One taste for his authority has evaporated? Secularists perhaps relish that point in intellectual history at which Christianity loses its theological prestige and begins to fall into the secular ranks. Yet, intellectually, a new pettiness was the first replacement of the old, divine Jesus, and it is hard not to lament the passing of actual belief when it is replaced with only a futile poetry. Christianity was not, of course, shoveled away, it was coaxed into sleep by nurses who mistakenly thought that they were healing it. Indeed, it might be said that in the last forty years of the nineteenth century, until Nietzsche's decisively canceling work began to dominate, the feeblest evasions and weak-mindedness passed for theological thinking. Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold are the chief nurses of the sleep of nineteenth-century Europe, and in their work one finds much false 18 medicine.

What is initially surprising about this passage is Wood's reference to the “flavor of [Jesus'] command,” and his seeming self-distancing from the “secularists,” amongst whom it ordinarily seems proper to place him. But even here, Wood is not particularly hostile to the finality of secularization, which for him was made definitive by Nietzsche, and which evidently continued without pause through the twentieth century. No, what irks him is the “false medicine” of Arnold and Renan, who espouse views about the rationality of religion and its moral necessity that today might seem “conservative” (in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold supported the Anglican Establishment as an essential component of the best in English culture), but which were intended as political buzzwords rather than rigorous theological concepts. For Wood, the true tragedy is not Nietzsche's rejection of God (and of Jesus), but the secularization of the Biblical narrative, such that it becomes merely another kind of novel.19 We see the fulfillment of the phrasing in the earlier quote about fiction as the “slayer” of religion. For Wood, the novel destroys strong belief as a matter of form, by introducing the option of the provisional, non-committal type of belief that is typical of a reader's approach to a Dickens novel. Once that way of reading—which is also a way of being—comes to dominate, it subsumes all other kinds of narrative. Frye might disagree. In Frye, religious and secular classes of narrative expression have a tense, possibly even competitive relationship with each other, but it is unlikely that one can ever destroy the other. Other objections might arise from Wood's own examples in the passage just quoted. For instance, it's interesting that he mentions Daniel Deronda, whose ethical development—away from a secularized Christianity and into devout Judaism—is among the most complicated in English language literature. For Deronda, eponymous hero of Eliot's final novel, the advent of true belief in Judaism is always social (and rational) in some sense, but, as a property of Deronda's maternal Jewish 18

James Wood, The Broken Estate, 259. Interestingly, in Wood's second book of criticism, The Irresponsible Self, he describes Coleridge as doing something rather similar, only he doesn't seem as bothered by the aestheticization of the Bible in Coleridge's works as he is by that in Arnold. 19

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heritage, it is also shown to be decidedly not voluntary. It is curious that Wood cites Deronda as the key example of what happens when Jesus falls into fiction, since Deronda is hardly a “secular” figure (unless Judaism and secularism are identical for Wood; but that formulation would raise other problems). In my own close reading of Daniel Deronda in chapter 2 of the present study, I find that the protagonist's Judaism is encoded in the novel before he himself learns of it, and in a rather unusual way. Eliot marks Deronda's difference in the way she represents his face (and especially his nose) as somehow different from the aristocratic “Mallinger nose” seen in the portraits on the wall of his adoptive father's house. Through Deronda's struggle with the conflicting demands on him as both an English gentleman and a person of Jewish descent at a time of rife anti-Semitism, Eliot's novel plays with the idea that Jewish difference might in fact be central to the main stream of English life in the 19th century. She questions the racialization of Judaism common in nineteenth century life throughout Europe, and foregrounds its living religious traditions, which are “still throbbing in human lives.” Her aim is to further the cause of British secularism, not by disposing of religious traditions and communities, but by humanizing Judaism through its first realistic literary representation—by a non-Jew—in modern European literature. Other examples of writers who challenge the hard line between the secular and religious functions of fiction come from outside of Europe, and by implication, outside of the Christian tradition. Wood, like many English critics before him, does not seriously concern himself with many non-European—or even non-Christian—writers.20 In the cases of colonial Ireland and India, the question of secularism is complicated by the religious impositions associated with colonialism. In the Irish case, the effect was to suppress the dominant religious tradition of the society by imposing an Anglican Establishment (“The Church of Ireland”) whose goal was in direct alignment with the economic and cultural interests of continued British dominance. In the Indian case the religious imposition was considerably less, though it did grow throughout the early nineteenth century, only to decline in a dramatic way after the Rebellion of 1857, which led to the passing of secularizing laws, of which many continue to be practiced after Indian independence. In both the Indian and Irish cases, it is impossible to speak of the “natural” development of political or cultural secularism, though many intellectual historians have retroactively discovered important pre-colonial experiments with religious tolerance. Moreover, the development of laws pertaining to the rights of individual and minority groups in light of the religious beliefs of the majority after independence in both states has been deeply affected by the earlier history of colonial intervention in the 20

More recently, Wood has written incisive reviews of books Monica Ali's Brick Lane, V.S. Naipaul's letters Between Father and Son, Zadie Smith's Wihte Teeth, and Salman Rushdie's Fury. All of these reviews are compiled in the volume The Irresponsible Self.

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religious practices of the “natives,” in both Ireland and India. No one is more difficult to place along the scale of religiosity or secularism than the poet and critic T.S. Eliot. Bucking the modernist trend towards secularization, Eliot's life in the late 1920s and 30s seemed to be driven by a reaction to secularism rather than by a positive interest in furthering it. He published several controversial essays that directly advocated the Establishment of the Anglican Church in England, along the way criticizing secularism in England, and even, in one infamous instance, expressing a somewhat antiSemitic bent.21 And his attitude to literature seems, on the surface, to support this anti-secularist turn, as when he writes that “the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over natural life.” And yet, I believe Eliot should still be called a secularist (of Arnold's sort, not James Wood's), particularly in regards to his contribution to literary criticism. Even as he complained about Secularism, Eliot continued to advocate a form of it as a mode of reading, understanding, and ordering literature. As is well known, Eliot quietly converted to Anglicanism in 1927, abandoning the faith of his father and grandfather, both of whom were accomplished Unitarian ministers in Saint Louis, Missouri. While some critics and biographers have questioned how devout an Anglican the author of The Waste Land could actually have become in five short years,22 the truth of Eliot’s religious convictions will always be unknowable—though placing the event in context is helpful. Though it was a private conversion ceremony, the conversion soon became public knowledge, as Eliot announced his interest in Anglicanism (if not his conversion per se) in the famous preface to the 1928 collection, For Lancelot Andrewes. There he declared himself, "classicist in 21

See Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Julius argues that anti-Semitism was central to T.S. Eliot's aesthetic project, using a small amount of primary evidence and a great deal of inference. The argument won over a number of critics, including The New Yorker's Louis Menand, but other critics criticized Julius's account of Eliot, accusing Julius of alternately of exaggeration and of saying nothing new (Eliot was criticized for his anti-Semitic remarks and early poems as early as 1935). One example of a particularly strident critique of Julius is James Wood's “T.S. Eliot's Christian Anti-Semitism,” from The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. As I mention, the strongest evidence against Eliot is found in a few poems published before 1920, and in one lecture/essay that appeared in 1933. The evidence of anti-Semitism from the poems seems incontrovertible, though potentially minor, as the great body of Eliot's writing comes later, and does not reflect explicit anti-Semitism. And the evidence from After Strange Gods is real, and disturbing. The quote is as follows: “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely to be either fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” 22 Lyndall Gordon,T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1999).

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literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-catholic in religion.” As his thinking developed, it began to be clear that Eliot's turn to religion was largely a reaction against the negating tendencies of much modernist writing on religion and English secular “culture.” In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot argued that a conservative Anglicanism—and not the atheistic liberalism of peers such as Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell—would be the best and only bulwark against the twin evils of Fascism and Communism. While the essays on social theory and politics from the 1930s have been largely erased from the Eliot tradition because they failed to have much impact at the time, the latter engage the complex relationship between reading and belief, including the problems that arise from attempting to read the literature of secular modernism from the standpoint of belief. Eliot’s literary criticism has had an immense impact on the constitution of literary criticism as an academic field in the twentieth century. Initially, his critical output was instrumental in the early formation of the New Criticism. And as volumes such the recent Close Reading anthology23 show, the influence of Eliot and New Critical methodology remain, invisibly woven into the fabric of secular reading practices that are taught and practiced to this day. Several of Eliot's essays in literary criticism address the question of the role of religion in modernism specifically, which is only fitting. In “Religion and Literature,” one of the more compelling essays in this line, Eliot expresses his frustration with the secularism of the modernist movement, but nevertheless continues to affirm it in his own critical appraisal of the British literary tradition. Eliot begins the essay by defining a scale of religiosity, which begins with overtly theological writing, including the Bible as well as the key theological writers of the Church (he mentions Jeremy Taylor with regard to Anglicanism). This writing is to be thought of as sacred in the direct sense; mere appreciation of its literary value is insufficient because it is inappropriately secularized: “Those who talk of the Bible as a 'monument of English prose' are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.”24 Here, one notes the similarity to Wood's response to secularization in Matthew Arnold, quoted above (“But the moment at which Jesus became the hero of a novel, of a 'prosepoem,' he also became fictional”), a similarity which is not accidental. For while Eliot and Wood differ in the surface content of their response to religion, the form of the response—their resistance to unconscious secularization—is quite similar, and similarly contradictory. The most significant contradiction in Eliot's critical response to secularism is in fact rather congenial—he embraces a thoroughly secular concept of literary value despite his stated disavowal of secularism. It happens when he addresses the category of “religious poetry,” which has traditionally remained rather 23

See Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia, Eds., Close Reading. (2003). T.S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature.” In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 98.

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marginal in the English tradition: “For the great majority of people who love poetry, 'religious poetry' is a variety of minor poetry: the religious poet is not a poet who is treating the whole subject matter of poetry in a religious spirit, but a poet who is dealing with a confined part of this subject matter: who is leaving out what men consider their major passions, and thereby confessing his ignorance of them.”25 Surprisingly, here Eliot agrees with the critics who would call these religious poets “minor,” since their writing seems to spring from a “special religious awareness,” rather than the “general awareness which we expect of a major poet.” By requiring a “general awareness” of major poets, Eliot contradicts his own interest in furthering religious literary criticism, and supports the interests of literary secularism. It's not quite that simple. Later passages in the same essay reinflect his comment about the “general awareness.” Eliot argues that there are some religious poets who are minor, but there are also some “great religious poets” (he names Dante, Corneille, and Racine). These writers combine a “special religious awareness” with a “general awareness,” but it is worth noting that none of these three writers are his contemporaries, and none are English. Finally, Eliot lists a third type of religious literature, the output of modern writers such as G.K. Chesterton, which he dismisses as a form of religious propaganda. This type of literature is too self-consciously religious, too instrumental: But my point is that such writings do not enter into any serious consideration of the relations of Religion and Literature: because they are conscious operations in a world in which it is assumed that Religion and Literature are not related. It is a conscious and limited relating. What I want is a literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian: because the work of Mr. Chesterton has its point from appearing in a world which is 26 definitely not Christian.

What Eliot is looking for is “great” literature that demonstrates that the world is in fact Christian. He wants to be able to see signs of unconscious religiosity, signs that confirm what he believes to be true—signs, in short, of England's positive Christianity in a “general” (universal and secular) framework. So what does “secular” mean to him? Perhaps Eliot wants secular literature to occupy something akin to the role of the unconscious in a Freudian model of the psyche. The conscious mind wears Christianity on its sleeve, but there is also an unconscious area, at times unformed, that preexists any crude ideological packaging. This is what he wishes to see in the modern writers he admires— writers of the calibre of Shaw, Woolf, and Joyce. But with the exception of Joyce, the unconscious adherence to belief is simply not there, and “the whole 25 26

Ibid., 99. Eliot, Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 100.

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of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over natural life.”27 It is worth noting that despite Eliot's complaints about secularism in modern literature, his influence has a critic has been based on his secular judgment. Followers of Eliot's critical method as disparate as I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis have generally claimed Eliot as a supreme influence in a wholly secular way. They generally ignore Eliot's various religious investments; Leavis's famous “great tradition,” controversial as it is, is essentially a secular book-list. The subsequent Anglo-American critical tradition, though it has not been free of occasional bigotry or narrow-mindedness, has been more or less straightforwardly secular until the advent of some recent challenges from critics like Wood. However, even if the mainstream of Anglo-American literary criticism remained somewhat complacently secular through the New Criticism and into the early writings of poststructuralism, some strong challenges to literary secularism can be found in writings from Anglophone regions outside of England. Two such sites are Ireland and India.

Literary Secularism in Ireland and India Indian and Irish writers in particular wreak havoc on the categories of the secular and the religious. The sources of the complication are many. For one thing, since ideas of the secular are deeply intertwined with—dependent upon— the local concept of “religion,” differences in religious culture need to be considered. The role of religion in public life in a Catholic country is different from that experienced in Protestant or Hindu contexts. Both Catholicism and Hinduism are, traditionally, “embodied” faiths, heavily oriented to practices such as the Communion, or ritual cleansing in Hinduism. The difference in the experience of religion changes the possible parameters of secularism and secularization in ways that are not always easy to map. There are also major differences in the history and structure of religious institutions, where Ireland and England seem to have much in common, and where India—without a centralized “church” or a history of intra-religious sectarian wars—is sharply at odds. However, what may end up being the most important factor for our purposes is India and Ireland's shared experience of extended colonial occupation, which deeply marked their experience of religious freedom. In both contexts, the imposition of foreign religious authority was an essential part of the colonial establishment, and consequently, the religious identity of the local majority became an essential component of the nationalist movement. In Ireland the imposition of an Anglican “Church of Ireland” with preferential treatment for Irish Protestants was particularly destructive, and lasted nearly two 27

Ibid., 104.

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centuries. The incursion was less severe in India, where no definitive religious authority was imposed, and where religious missionaries only began to play a significant role beginning in the early 1800s. Interestingly, between 1855 and 1870, the era when secularizing reforms internal to England were reaching their peak, similar reforms were enacted in the colonies in support of religious freedom. Ireland in 1869 saw the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, leading to equal rights for the Catholic majority, 28 while in India the 1857 Mutiny led to the implementation of a series of “personal” laws designed to protect local religious traditions from British rule.29 Though latter years of British colonialism in both England and Ireland were marked by a “hands-off” attitude to religion on the part of the colonial authority, the atmosphere of tolerance was not enough to fend off violent struggles at the moment of independence of both nations, leading to political Partitions along religious lines, which continue to scar Ireland, as well as the entire Indian subcontinent. The complex nexus of political and religious concerns led to diverse responses by Indian and Irish writers, which I will consider in turn, beginning with India. Just as the historical emergence of literary secularism in England is a long and twisty road, there is no simple progress from “secular” to “religious” in modern Indian literature. Early Bengali writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, show the strong influence of Hindu myths and narrative strategies, but the Bengali Renaissance also produced Sukumar Ray and Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee, both of whom were self-consciously “modernist” and highly secular in orientation. Other writers in the modern Indian canon, writing in a dozen or so languages all over the Indian subcontinent, have shown quite various responses to religion in their work. R.K. Narayan appears to be quietly spiritually inclined, while Khushwant Singh and Qurratulain Hyder are determinedly secular, even as they deal intensely with religion as a social and 28

For more on the Church of Ireland, see T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin, Eds., The Course of Irish History, Fourth Edition. (Lanham, Maryland: Roberts Reinhart, 2001). As I will discuss in Chapter 4, the status of the Catholic Church in the Nationalist movement of Joyce's day was complicated by the Church leadership's betrayal of the Irish leader Parnell after his divorce scandal in the early 1880s. Afterwards, the 'Republicans' adopted a fairly secular posture, defiant of both Church and State. This posture is Stephen Dedalus's in the early chapters of Ulysses, and it is also explored in the famous dinner scene in the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist. 29 See Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, The Wheel of Law: India's Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context (2004). Jacobsohn links the reforms initiated in the wake of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 to the crisis of Indian secularism that erupted in the early 1990s, following the razing of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. Among other things, his constitutional analysis his helpful because it introduces a distinction between 'positive' secularism, which is aimed to ameliorate the human rights conditions in a society, and 'negative' secularism (the U.S. model), which aims to erect a wall between Church and State. I will discuss this at greater length in Chapter 5, with reference to V.S. Naipaul and secularism in India.

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intellectual problem in modern India. But of all the modern South Asian writers who precede the postcolonial emergence of V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, it is Rabindranath Tagore who is the most important and most difficult to place. With his independent education, his facility in both Bengali and English, and his participation in the nationalist movement from an early era, no writer is more important to defining the idea of “literary secularism” than is Tagore. But Tagore's writings also pose a difficult problem of interpretation along the religious/secular axis. Though Yeats, Tagore's first western champion, saw the Indian poet as a lyricist with elements of spirituality, Yeats never truly understood the subtleties of Tagore's relationship to spirituality or religion. Tagore was for his early western readers a kind of esoteric Indian saint, whose naïve lyricism made him seem all the more suspect to readers less tolerant of spiritualism than Yeats. But the influence of Yeats on subsequent interpretations of Tagore's work has been so powerful that most readers, even today, question Tagore's relationship to religion. In light of Tagore’s biography and other contextual writing, it becomes clear that Tagore was in fact decidedly “secular,” though this label requires critics to deemphasize the discourse of belief in favor of that of social identity and caste. In the latter framework, Tagore's novels and essays are decidedly secular, as Tagore relentlessly criticizes both Brahminical religious orthodoxies and social caste in his many novels, plays, and essays. In chapter 3 of Literary Secularism, I show how Tagore's critique of religious orthodoxy even extends to nationalism, which he sees as a terrible modern substitute for the discourse of religion in the modern European nations. This critique comes in its most direct form in Tagore's 1917 lectures on nationalism (collected in the volume Nationalism,30 and in the 1909 novel Gora, in which the caste-obsessed protagonist is torn apart when he realizes he is in fact adopted; his blood is European, which completely invalidates his sense of caste-identity. As I have already indicated, many late colonial novels of literary secularism engage the tension between national identity and religion. This interest overlaps with the question of the relationship of religious identity with an idea of “blood” heritage along racial lines. As critics like Sander Gilman have noted, English Jews were often represented in racial terms, and certainly, ethnic identity is a huge part of the constitution of the idea of caste in the Hindu tradition. Both Eliot and Tagore make a plea for secularism by choosing protagonists whose blood-inheritance transgresses religious and racial lines. It is also seen in Joyce's Ulysses, with the famous characterization of Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew who has (repeatedly) converted to Christianity, without ever fully disavowing his Judaism. In contrast to Tagore, who was always in some sense a Hindu (albeit an unusual kind of Hindu), James Joyce is an unambiguous secularist. The 30

Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917).

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inimitable Stephen Dedalus, protagonist of both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, states his feelings about religious orthodoxy with a famous phrase: “I will not serve.” But these words, like so much of Joyce's best imagery, take their force from theological tradition—“I will not serve” refers to the Biblical incident of Satan's rejection of God. Notably, when Stephen makes this statement near the end of Portrait of the Artist, he speaks in English rather than Latin (or Irish, but that's another matter). The translation of the Biblical Non Serviam says something about both Stephen's and Joyce's interests in the efficacy of language in its everyday, secular context. One of the reasons Stephen turns away from Catholicism, it seems, is the transcendent irrelevance epitomized by the continued use of Latin, which might also be described (literally) its failure to enter the saeculum of the modern. In translating Satan's language in the Bible to an English epithet, the content of Stephen's rejection of the Church is reinforced by the form of its enunciation. At the same time, Joyce's “I will not serve” is in some sense weakened by its association with religious discourse—it is a rejection of the Church in the Church's own terms (if not its literal language). And this is a familiar pattern in both Portrait of the Artist as well as Ulysses, where Joyce develops an extended metaphor of Ireland as the “Promised Land” through several sections of the novel. Though the metaphor is occasionally deployed quite seriously—in effect, sacralizing Irish nationalism—in some instances it is also satirized, and its sacramental qualities are deflated. One such satirical moment is the parodying of the Citizen at the end of the “Cyclops” Episode. Another is Stephen's “Parable of the Plums” at the end of the “Aeolus” episode. In these passages, Joyce mocks the apparent masculinity of Imperialist conquest and the apparent impotence of Dublin's dominance by the Catholic Church. Beyond the mere textual influence of religious metaphors, in Ulysses Joyce also engages religious identities and beliefs as a social and political problem in modern Ireland. It is not an accident that Stephen's co-protagonist in Ulysses is an Irishman of Jewish descent, who faces considerable hostility from colleagues and strangers alike in the course of his wanderings around Dublin. Joyce uses the experience of Bloom to identify an alternative to the revivalist and nativist ideas of Irish identity, which tend to emphasize racial purity as well as a premodern past that bears little resemblance to the problems besetting Ireland in the present day. Bloom is an Irishman by affiliation and acculturation rather than blood, and in his experience of Dublin he is Joyce's quintessentially modern, quintessentially secular man. The complexity of Joyce's literary secularism is a helpful model for that seen in the work of numerous writers in the postcolonial world. With Indian writers especially, a secular attitude faces a significant number of obstacles. Religious discourse is widely prevalent in India's public life, and religious identity continues to play a fundamental part in how individuals are identified socially (this identification extends to the level of naming; most names are marked by

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religious origin and social caste). The struggle of postcolonial Indian writers to identify themselves both socially and artistically as secularists is in some sense a mirror of the struggles of the Indian state to define exactly what secularism means on its own terms. For V.S. Naipaul, despite his frequent fierce attacks on religious orthodoxies (both Hindu and Muslim), “literary secularism” is in fact an elusive ideal, which unravels at certain crucial moments in his body of work. Naipaul is a writer of Indian descent who derives considerable freedom of perspective from his status as a member of a “displaced” community in rural Trinidad. As such, the strong secularism of Joyce and other European writers is readily available to him, and in his early works Naipaul embraces it, offering sharp criticisms of religious orthodoxies in the Islamic world as well as those of Hindu India and its diaspora. However, somewhere near the mid-point of his career, Naipaul's work began to take a more self-reflexive tone, and his relationship to religion changes. In essays such as “Prologue to an Autobiography,”31 Naipaul begins to directly engage his struggle with Hindu rituals, symbolism, and social caste. Naipaul also began to reflect seriously on the profession of the writer, which had appeared to him early on as the secular profession par excellence. But, as my close reading of his memoirs, travel narratives, and essays will reveal, the Brahminical religiosity Naipaul has striven to expunge from his persona is in fact closely tied to his conception of the writer's life. Most troublingly, many of the weaknesses of Naipaul's model of literary secularism have reemerged in his recent comments on communal politics in India, where Naipaul has expressed sympathy for the actions and beliefs of Hindu extremists. In contrast to Naipaul, Rushdie's upbringing in a liberal Muslim household in Bombay did not result in the kind of traumatic scarring that troubles Naipaul so much. Rather, Rushdie's challenge—like that of so many contemporary writers and thinkers—is to assemble two seemingly divergent critiques into a single line of thought. On the one hand, Rushdie aims to present a model of western multiculturalism, which is inclusive of religious difference, and respect for religious minority rights. The postmodern form of Rushdie's novel seems to be especially well-suited to this project—as the decentered and pluralistic frame of the novel seems to mirror in form what Rushdie wants to say thematically. In parallel with the pursuit of a literary and philosophical hybridity, however, Rushdie aims to sharply criticize the growing culture of religious intolerance, in the West as well as in the Middle East, especially within Islam. To this end, Rushdie adopts a strong secularism, which requires a clear demarcation of “battle lines” between those who defend individual rights in line with western liberalism, and those who are complicit with theocracy. But these two parallel projects can be self-canceling, and ultimately Rushdie's literary secularism in The Satanic Verses is not quite as stable or sure31

V.S. Naipaul, Finding The Center: Two Narratives (1984).

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footed as it might seem. In my reading of The Satanic Verses, I argue that it is in fact impossible to decide whether Gibreel Farishta's dreams of himself as the Archangel Gibreel are symptoms of his own unconscious desires, or actual interventions from a divine agent (God or Shaitan). The undecidability of Gibreel's will points to the limits of any assignation of agency in fiction; the character's agency is always defined by the will of the author. But that very blurring of the line between self and other (or self and author) also blurs the lines between religious and secular worlds. This blurring is one that has been discussed at some length in the ongoing debates over secularism in India, many of which refer to the famous line near the end of the novel, uttered by the character Zeenat Vakil: “Battle lines are being drawn up in India today . . . Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.” Some writers, Meera Nanda and Kumkum Sangari among them, have amplified this perspective in their works. Others, including Partha Chatterjee, Akeel Bilgrami, and Madhu Kishwar, have argued that this model of “hard” secularism, imposed by the state on a reluctant populace, is both ethically questionable and probably doomed to failure. In a separate chapter, I work through some of the critical issues in the Indian debate over secularism in the “uniform civil code” debates. I find that, while the “soft” secularists are certainly correct in identifying a strategy for sustaining secularism, in the long run the interest of human rights—and women's rights especially—requires a concept of secularism based not on the interests of religious groups, but on justice in the liberal universalist tradition. After postcolonial India, it seems appropriate to meditate at least briefly on the crises in secularism that have been unfolding around the world since 9/11. For questions about religious freedoms are being discussed nearly everywhere, from the Middle East, to Europe (with its growing Muslim minority population), to the United States, to Southeast Asia. Two specific focal points have been chosen in light of two especially remarkable works of literary secularism that have appeared in recent years—Turkey (Orhan Pamuk’s Snow) and the United States (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America). Both are experimental works of fiction, and neither propose solutions to extremely fraught and complicated social situations in their respective national contexts. The dark, apocalyptic tone of both novels illustrates how bad the situation has become, and reminds the reader how essential it is to continue to find new imaginative routes to engage the problem of secularism.

Full Circle: James Wood's The Book Against God By way of concluding this introductory discussion of literary secularism, it might be profitable to return to James Wood, who, in his recent novel The Book Against God, has explored these issues in a rather more nuanced way than he has in the critical writings discussed earlier. The conflict between “hard”

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secularism and “soft” secularism as philosophical positions form the core problem for the novel’s protagonist—and impacts his political strategies, his intimate interpersonal ethics, as well as the narrative form itself, forming the core concern of the text. According to some reviews of the novel, 32 The Book Against God is somewhat autobiographical, and while one should be careful in referring to biographical interpretations, the parallels between the upbringing of Wood's protagonist Tom Bunting and Wood's own experience as a child in an Evangelical Anglican household are striking. Wood does not shy away from offering some traces of that memoir in the latter sections of “The Broken Estate”: “My childhood, which was a happy one, was spent in the command economy of evangelical Christianity. Life was centrally planned, all negotiations had to pass by Jesus' desk.”33 Several passages in Wood's novel The Book Against God closely mirror Wood's autobiographical experience. Tom Bunting's father, Peter Bunting, is, at the start of the story, a vicar in a small town in northern England. The novel is really Tom Bunting's elegy for his father, whose death marks the core event of the plot. As importantly, it is a confession of the protagonist's unique ambivalence towards religious belief, the shades of which only emerge in the latter chapters of the book. It begins with Tom Bunting's memory of his father's model of a religious being seamlessly merged with everyday life: I had a happy childhood, I'm sure of it. I loved the vicarage, even the church. It was painful to witness my widowed mother having to abandon the vicarage this summer for a bungalow in Durham. Now that little church is vacant, vicarless, while the idiot bishop decides who should fill the post. I suppose I should take the bishop's tardiness as a compliment to my father's irreplaceability. . . . He dispensed a Christianity that was inseparable from life. The rhythms of the village, and of the seasons, were also the rhythms of my father's ministry: rising Easter, and sun-favoured summer, and census-gathering Christmas, when, as if in mimicry of the story of Caesar Augustus, all the villagers came to be counted 34 and for once the church was truly full.

Narrator Tom Bunting's description of his father's religious practice is surprisingly complimentary, given how corrosive his own atheism is in his personal life. Tom sees his father, Peter Bunting, as inhabiting Christianity “that was inseparable from life,” rather than as a source of dogma or oppression. Elsewhere, he indicates that though his father's status as a Christian is never really in doubt, Peter's belief is soft rather than hard: “Peter, the supposed believer, the great parish priest, the former lecturer in theology, aerated his faith 32 See for instance Alice K. Turner's review in The Washington Post (June 15, 2003), or Richard Eder's review in the New York Times (July 2, 2003). 33 James Wood, The Broken Estate, 265. 34 James Wood, The Book Against God (New York: Picador, 2004), 53.

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with so many little holes, so much flexibility and doubt and easygoing tolerance, that he simply disappeared down one of these holes.”35 In the sense that his religion is “full of holes,” motivated more by a concept of social order and responsibility than it is by a desire to affirm strong belief, Peter Bunting might be similar to the late nineteenth-century writers (Arnold and Renan), about whom Wood writes so critically in “The Broken Estate.” And indeed, there is considerable anger and resentment in Tom's feelings for his father, which seem to be oriented to his frustration with his father's holey faith. If the first half of The Book Against God is an image of a proud atheist, the second half of the novel undermines the same atheism as a kind of social, ethical, and philosophical failure. Tom Bunting's character, which had initially seemed to embody a kind of philosophical honesty (he was the only one who seemed to be serious about the problem of God), soon comes to seem riddled with holes. When he is not railing against his father, Tom Bunting is a graduate student in philosophy at University College London, habitually unable to complete his dissertation. Instead of writing it, he's developed at length a private “Book Against God,” in which he plans to definitively dismantle the theological arguments of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, who argue for the presence of God through the back door of negative theology. But the excerpts of the “Book Against God,” when they are finally inserted in the novel, tell a much more idiosyncratic story. Tom Bunting's book is not a decisive and brilliant work of philosophy, but a hyper-elaborated, obscure, but still personal confession of his feelings for his girlfriend Jane. Against Tom Bunting's atheism, which demands the confinement of religion to a single philosophical problem, in which one is either absolutely devout or an atheist, a series of counter-examples show a much broader role for religious experience in everyday life, sometimes through rituals that are not even explicitly religious. For instance, Tom observes that Jane has a mystical relationship to music, which requires her absolute commitment, and a ritualized kind of performance not so different from praying. Ritual means commitment, which Tom rebels against wherever he finds it (be it his professional advancement, his romantic life, or his understanding of himself as an individual). When she plays, she raises her head and closes her eyes, and seems to leave the world a little, to be alone with her notes in almost religious silence. I have sometimes to struggle with selfish resentment—resentment that she is so free, that she can so easily slip out of reality, that she cannot take me with her, that she seems almost to be at prayer (which as a secularist I am bound to disapprove of). We do indeed differ on religious matters, though Jane is so mystical that we have never really argued about the subject. She pities me a little, I think, for having no God to believe in. But if Jane does believe in God, then, as far as I can tell, He is 35

Ibid., 49.

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really little more than a bearded old patron of music, a male saint Cecilia. 'A note,' she once said to me, 'is an extraordinary thing. It wasn't created by humans. Humans reproduce it; they borrow it and lend it to each other, by using 36 instruments.'

In the reference to the external Truth of the musical note, Tom Bunting suggests a theological center to Jane's musical universe. Passages like this hint at a longing for a kind of religious basis of experience suggesting that Tom Bunting's atheism is either unsustainable, or a very elaborate kind of selfdeception. Tom Bunting sees the advantages of a positive relationship to religion too clearly, and is evidently paralyzed by atheism. It cracks open in the final paragraphs of the book, which ends with Tom’s lament for his losses—of his father, and of his childhood—that is strikingly similar in form to a confessional: Oh father, there were days so exciting when I was a little boy that each morning was a delicious surprise, a joy adults can only mimic when they are fortunate enough to make a long journey by night and rise in an undiscovered place in the 37 morning and see it in the first light.

In a not-entirely unpredicted twist, Wood's Book Against God ends with its protagonist reaching, haltingly for the faith he thought he had lost. It's an ending that humanizes and restores Tom Bunting, but it also seems to undo the hard line between belief and unbelief that Wood draws in essays like “The Broken Estate.” Wood's opening to the possibility of a restorative role for religious faith at the end of his novel ties the book to other the other primary texts in this study. Like Wood, nearly all of these writers tell powerful stories of the loss of faith at some point. George Eliot, for instance, had such an experience early, leading to a major falling out with her religiously devout father, when as a young woman she decided she would no longer attend church. James Joyce's fall from Catholicism is even more famous—or perhaps, notorious. Tagore and Naipaul's respective struggles with Hinduism are also noted, as is Rushdie's struggle with Islam. What these writers and their works have in common, despite their myriad cultural differences and chronological spread, is the sense that the loss of faith is not the end of the story for literary secularism. The rise of the individualist framework, in which authorship and narrative agency are defining aspects of literary production, are challenged by the continued prevalence of religious texts and religion as a social identity in their respective works. In Wood's case in The Book Against God, that excess comes from Tom Bunting's feelings for his father, which are in some unconscious way responsible for his antipathy to 36 37

Ibid., 84. Ibid., 257.

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Christianity. Another example of this is in Naipaul's work, where Naipaul's strong desire to establish himself in the secularized occupation of the “writer” (a desire evident in the themes of Naipaul's early novels, as well as in his memoirs and essays) is undercut by the almost primordial attachment to a concept of Hindu caste and ritual. In both Wood's and Naipaul's cases, the continued influence of religion enters the story as a kind of psychic trauma. A similar reading might be applied to Gibreel Farishta's turn to schizophrenia in The Satanic Verses, though the parameters are somewhat different because of the postmodern form of Rushdie's novel. The readings I provide in the following chapters do not provide a definitive exploration of the theme of secularism in modern literature. Many other authors might merit chapters, including writers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Ajeet Cour, or Marilynne Robinson. My goal here is to show that the history of literary secularism has led, not to an ending (literature as comprehensively secularized), but to an extremely heterogeneous present free from telos. Secularization never ended as a historical process—nor will it end; it is still in process, in Europe (where debates about religion in public life have been extremely important in recent years), in the United States (a highly religious country with a thoroughly secularized public sphere), and elsewhere. As in history, so in literature. With every generation of modern writers—indeed, with every novel written—the struggle for literary secularism is rewritten, reinvented as if for the first time.

CHAPTER TWO GEORGE ELIOT: BRITISH SECULARISM, JEWISH ASSIMILATION, AND DANIEL DERONDA

But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearning after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

For most 20th-century writers, secularism is simply available—an available choice, if not always a straightforward one. But for Mary Ann Evans, who published as George Eliot, it required a difficult negotiation, which started on January 2 1842. That was the day she told her father and her former teacher and mentor Maria Lewis, that she would not go to church. She was twenty-two years old, and had been raised as an enthusiastic and devout member of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. Mary Ann grew up in a middleclass household in Nuneaton, which is located in the Midlands district of Warwickshire. Her primary formal education came first from the school run by Maria Lewis and then at a girl's school run by Baptists in Coventry. After her mother's death when Mary Ann was sixteen, Maria came to have a disproportionate influence in her life, but that influence would not prove to be lasting. Something drove Mary Ann to read works outside of a strictly theological framework. She developed ideas about everything—a sense of broad-mindedness and general curiosity that would serve her well in her capacity as a novelist. But most pressingly, her readings led Mary Ann to some transformative ideas about religion. Her biographers believe her biggest influence away from the Church was a book she bought, and probably read, in 1840. The book was An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of Christianity, by Charles Hennell. Between Hennell and the personal influence of the freethinkers Charles and Cara Bray, Mary Ann came to believe that Jesus was essentially a very pious man who was murdered for his beliefs, but that none of the miracles or supernatural powers ascribed to him can be proved to have occurred (such as the Virgin Birth). The institution of the Church might therefore be an admirable institution for the social good it can do, but for her its official system of beliefs was false. An intense internal battle

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lasting probably over two years led Mary Ann to make her proclamation. Her father took it very poorly, certainly in part because it represented a betrayal on Mary Ann's part. But part of Robert Evans' frustration and anger came from his perception that her absence from the social world of the Church would make it very difficult for her to marry. At any rate, he withdrew all support, and even left it ambiguous where May Ann should live, and who would support her financially. She wrote a letter to him in an attempt to explain herself. Kathryn Hughes, a biographer, describes it as follows: It is an extraordinary document for a girl of twenty-two to write—intellectually cogent, emotionally powerful. She starts by making clear the grounds for her rebellion. She assures him that she has not, contrary to his fears, become a Unitarian. Nor is she rejecting God, simply claiming the right to seek Him without the clutter of manmade dogma and doctrine. As far as the Bible is concerned, 'I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.'1

It is, as Hughes says, a remarkable thing for a young woman to say in 1842, but it is also remarkable in light of the style of Eliot's novels, which rarely employ such combative rhetoric. Eventually her brother Isaac and her sister-in-law Sarah interceded on her behalf, and her father reinstated her into the family life. Still, the whole of the family was in turmoil as a result of Mary Ann's refusal— tensions amongst the various Evans siblings were high, and her father Robert Evans was agitated. But that is just the beginning of the story. The period of rebellion ended when Mary Ann reversed herself, and agreed to go with her father to Church some five months later. Her views on religion had not in the least changed, but clearly her sense of ethical action had. Mary Ann herself wrote it out in a letter to Sara Hennell some 18 months later. In the letter, she describes her elation at her mental release from religious orthodoxy as the stridency of a young mind: “When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.” But the sense of conviction in antireligion, which is no less strong than the missionary’s own conviction, fails to live up to its promise: Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body and that we 1

Cited in Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, 51-52.

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27

cannot in the majority of causes, wrench them away without destroying vitality. 2

The episode raises a specific question about the nature of Mary Ann's relationship to the Church, but more than that it provokes a series of questions about the nature of individual belief, women's agency, and ethical action. On the one hand, it must be admitted that part of the reason for the force of the pressure brought to bear on Mary Ann stemmed from the values of the time that limited the ways in which women might publicize their views or take actions to substantiate them. A similar kind of softened stance is to be found espoused by characters in several of George Eliot's novels, most famously Dorothea Casaubon of Middlemarch. Dorothea gives up the life of public activism in favor of a smaller, more domestic range of influence—a realm of “unhistoric acts,” as Eliot memorably puts it at the end of that novel. It is an ending that rings true, in the sense that Dorothea's possibility of contributing meaningfully to the political life of her age is clearly hampered by the fact that women cannot vote, let alone hold elected office. But the story of Mary Ann Evans' reversal on her decision not to go to church is about more than the mere limitations of gender, as Mary Ann's letter to Sarah Hennell proves. There are traces of George Eliot's later prose style, especially in the interest in the organic “living body” of society that is referenced in the definitive final sentence quoted above. Mary Ann Evans sincerely believes that her own lack of belief in the doctrines of the Church does not require her to reject it publicly. Such public rejection fails to expose the beliefs of her family and friends as false; rather it registers as a wound to the collective “truth of feeling.” Further, her refusal destroys her access to community and vastly reduces the sphere of positive influence she can command. Her attempt to express herself freely and with complete honesty therefore has the perverse effect of reducing her real freedom. This was not the end of Mary Ann Evans' struggle with religious values, and in another crisis she in fact chose to respond to the request for compromise quite differently. As is widely known, Evans made the decision to live with George Henry Lewes despite the fact that he remained legally married to another woman. In that circumstance, Mary Ann (who called herself Marian Lewes) did not compromise in the least. As a mature woman Marian Lewes remained, effectively, outside the Church as a matter of conscience. But for much of her career as a novelist she refrained from directly attacking religious institutions, and in fact expressed considerable respect regarding the religious beliefs of her friends. In her final novel, Daniel Deronda, Eliot's interest in religion develops in a surprising direction, as the male protagonist of that novel moves steadily towards an embrace of conscientious Judaism based at once on belief and on blood inheritance. That turn of events will be the central subject of this chapter. 2

Ibid., 54-55.

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There is a strong continuity between Mary Ann Evans' rhetoric about religious beliefs as very much alive in community in her letter of 1842 and the idea, explored in Daniel Deronda, of Jews as a community of individuals for whom belief was “still throbbing.” In both cases, Eliot/Evans argues that worldliness (the secularization of the conscience) can be a double-edged sword. It denies the absolute authority of religious texts and institutions, but it simultaneously remains open to the possibility that those institutions can contribute to the greater common good as limited social actors. Secularization is a way of becoming open to the world and challenging institutions and authorities, but that openness can also entail respect for potential for good in the institutions and authorities that are being challenged. Eliot’s struggle through these issues, and her discovery of the importance of the “truth of feeling” in her life, is an important precursor to the mode of literary secularism she would develop in her later novels.

The Literary Image of the “Jewish Face” in Historical Context The Jewish thread of Eliot's novel has been attacked (or ignored) by many critics since its publication, but it has in recent years come to be recognized as an important intervention on behalf of English Jews at a key transitional moment for the community. According to historian David Feldman,3 the 1870s was a critical moment for English Jews. It came after the removal of Jewish Disabilities—laws that prevented Jews from voting or working in professions that required a Christian oath—but before the large waves of immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe reset the image of Jewish identity. As importantly, Eliot writes her novel in the wake of the rise of Benjamin Disraeli, a converted Jew, to the Prime Ministership in 1871. Her novel questions the potentially positive value of the idea of religious community and poses the revelation of personal belief as potentially transformative. It attacks the question of secularization from both ends, and suggests that secularism from within a religious minority can appear to mean something different than it does from the perspective of a religious majority. One of the most ambitious aims of Eliot's novel is her attempt to move the representation of English Jews beyond the rhetoric of race. At the time, race, rather than religion, was the dominant explanation of Jewish difference, and it entailed a wide array of stereotypes with which the reader is only too aware. Eliot aimed to humanize Judaism by creating a sympathetic, genteel protagonist, without denying the possibility that devout Jews might wish to continue to their primary orientation to the world through the lens of Judaism. Though this conscious desire might seem to work against the idea of universal values, Eliot 3

David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 18401914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

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argues that the choice to identify oneself as different within the framework of a common humanity can be a prerogative of a secular humanist project. At the time of Eliot's writing, the positive racialization of Jews was actually in a period of relative decline. As Feldman points out, anti-Semitism in England remained relatively mild in comparison to the extents it reached in France (with the Dreyfuss Affair) and Germany. 4 However, despite the decline in external restrictions against Jews, the cultural marginalization of Jews was still very much in effect in many segments of English life. Many English representations of Jews in the 1870s are characterized by fears of racial contamination, a widespread paranoia about extra-national penetration by Jewish converts, and moral and erotic ambiguity. The “Jewish Body” Sander Gilman identifies in the German racial science of the time undoubtedly also exists in some form in popular images in England (indeed, many of Gilman's examples in The Jew's Body refer to English figures, including Jack the Ripper and Benjamin Disraeli). These images unerringly mark Jews as threateningly foreign and also often racialize them as “black” and “oriental.” The overlapping of the Jew as foreign, black and Oriental is particularly suggestive, as it echoes the racial logic of English Imperialism, then at its apex. Perhaps ironically, all three of these attributes clustered particularly densely around the baptized Jew Benjamin Disraeli, who served as Prime Minister in 1868, and then again between 1874 and 1880, and who was himself responsible for popularizing the rhetoric of "imperialism" in important ways. Eliot's novel responds to the representation of Jews in the world she knows best, that of the other novelistic images of the Victorian era. Eliot knew the novels of people like Dickens, Trollope, and even Disraeli, quite well; all of them (including even Disraeli) actively participated in the trafficking of Jewish stereotypes of miserliness, contamination, and amorality. These earlier (and, in the case of Trollope, contemporary) figures led Eliot to create unprecedented characters like Mordecai Cohen and Mirah Lapidoth, Jews who adhered to none of the stereotypes. Since the larger history of literary images of Jews in English literature has been amply chronicled by writers like Michael Ragussis and Anne Aresty Naman,5 here I will concentrate on just one facet of this history of representation, that of the representation of the Jewish face. English writers of the nineteenth century write about the faces of Jewish men with intense fascination. At times, it is a horrified fascination, as if the fabricated veneer of the Jewish gentleman conceals a suppressed monstrosity. But there is also a degree of awe and admiration, even in the writing of those not entirely sympathetic to the idea of Jews moving freely in English society. The Jew's face is exciting, mobile, alien, beautiful, and displaced all at once. 4

Ibid., 1-3. See Anne Aresty Naman, The Jew in the Victorian Novel: Some Relationships Between Prejudice and Art. See also Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion.

5

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The method of this section is in part inspired by the trace of nineteenth century racial science in the mouth of a late twentieth century American antiSemite, who claims, "If you can blush you're not a Jew."6 The epithet's deadly conjunction of affect registered on the face, the overtones of complexion, and the epistemology of racial-religious difference, points to an image not unlike that of Anthony Trollope's Ferdinand Lopez, a shamelessly opportunistic antihero, whose face in The Prime Minister is utterly affectless and carefully anatomized by the narrator. In the wide array of nineteenth century representations of Jewish faces, minor Jewish characters and villains are figured as unmistakably Jewish, but the “close-ups” of the faces of more central Jewish characters tend to involve a much more complex problem of representation. Nevertheless, the faces represented by nearly all writers except Eliot do reproduce prevalent stereotypes about Jews. Eliot too foregrounds the face, though she does so in order to challenge the dominant pattern of representation. An early image of the Jew's face appears in Scott's 1820 novel Ivanhoe. It is Rebecca's father Isaac, in his first appearance in the text, wandering into the great hall of Cedric “the Saxon”: His features, keen and regular, with an aquiline nose, and piercing black eyes; his high and wrinkled forehead, and long grey hair and beard, would have been considered as handsome, had they not been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race, which during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable.7

Isaac's features are “regular,” almost “handsome,” but for the peculiar marks (which are not named) of his peculiar race. To the extent that these marks are read by Scott's narrator as unmistakable, and to the extent that they are inextricable from the history of Isaac's “race,” the image here is somewhat more discrete than many mid-century images of Jews which are considerably more ambiguous. Scott's ambivalence about his subject here is hardly unique, but the coordinates of the Jewishness of Isaac's face are distinct. Isaac's nose, eyes, forehead, and hair all defined and marked as non-Jewish, while his particularly "Jewish" features remain unmarked.8 6 Mary Ann O'Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush, 2. 7 Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 45. 8 In contrast, Rebecca's face is much less defined in terms of its Jewishness or nonJewishness. Rather, Rebecca's entire body is described when she first appears—in thickly Orientalist language: "Her form was exquisitely symmetrical, and was shown to advantage by a sort of Eastern dress, which she wore according to the fashion of the females of her nation. Her turban of yellow silk suited well with the darkness of her complexion. The brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed

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Appearing on the scene not too long after Ivanhoe, the face of the young, dandyish Benjamin Disraeli was thought to be particularly striking in appearance. Foreshadowing late-nineteenth century pre-Raphaelitism and the cult of decadent style most famously embodied by Oscar Wilde, Disraeli's dandyism seems to be an experiment in demonstrating aristocratic stylishness regardless of his access to aristocratic social privilege. Some of Disraeli's most famous appearances are recorded by his biographers as highlights of his travels in the Orient, while other episodes mark his presence in London. Having walked down a London street in a particularly outrageous outfit, he told William Meredith, “The people made way for me as I passed. It was like the opening of the Red Sea, which I now perfectly believe from experience. Even well-dressed people stopped to look at me!” 9 Early biographers were taken aback by this self-aggrandizing, religiously-inflected joke: We feel, as we read this account, that the fellow was shaking his sides with laughter. What an image it was, that of the Red Sea, and how characteristic of the man to make use of it! We can visualize the scene - this one self-possessed, foppish, ironical Israelite going up Regent Street, between two walls of nearly petrified Gentiles! Such a young man does not need our sympathy. We need his.10

Warmly appreciative of Disraeli's gall, Leon Vincent's image of one Israelite and two walls of Gentiles reads Disraeli the way many contemporaries did—as a characteristically Jewish, and yet also utterly exceptional, individual. But aside from dress and showy manners, the young Disraeli's face is legendary in these early texts; writers express considerable fear and astonishment at his anomalous beauty. Here is a witness of one of his first political speeches, made while running for a House of Commons seat in 1835, N.P. Willis: Disraeli has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem a victim to consumption. His eye is as black as Erebus, and has the most mocking and lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of scorn that would be worth of Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearl, and the protrusion of her sable tresses, which, each arranged in its own little spiral of twisted curls, fell down upon as much of a lovely neck and bosom as a simarre of the richest Persian silk, exhibiting flowers in their natural colours embossed upon a purple ground" (Scott, 93-94). There is an emphasis on certain aspects of her physiognomy, in the following order of detail: complexion, eyes, nose, teeth, hair. But rather than emphasizing Jewishness of her face, Scott compares her hair, in the purplest of prose, to Persian silk. 9 From the Diary of William Meredith, as cited in Bradford's Disraeli, 32. 10 Leon H. Vincent, Dandies and Men of Letters, 257.

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Chapter Two heavy mass of jet black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's."11

Like Scott's image of Isaac, N.P. Willis's image of the young Disraeli bears an emphasis on anatomical completeness—Willis makes the rounds of complexion including the eyes, mouth, and hair. The emphasis on the "jet black ringlets" of Disraeli's hair12 plays against the snaky dynamism of his "scornful" mouth. Something of these ringlets seems to point backwards, from a secularized and converted standpoint, to the pyot (prayer-curls) Disraeli might have worn as a practicing Jew at a continental Yeshiva.13 And yet the suggestion of pyot here is ambivalent, possibly even unconscious. Rather than reading for the Disraeli's Jewish birth, or insisting on Disraeli's racial difference, N.P. Willis disperses the name of that difference and inflects his shock at Disraeli's difference with a decided sense of awe. Several decades later, Anthony Trollope creates a Jewish infiltrator named Ferdinand Lopez with a Disraeli-esque scowl in The Prime Minister. Written immediately after the beginning of Disraeli's second rise to the Prime Ministership in 1874, The Prime Minister marks the instability of Jewish cultural identity created by Disraeli's disturbance at the top rungs of English society. As Michael Ragussis has discussed, Trollope writes several novels in the 1870s with Jewish criminals in key roles, the most important of them being The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Way We Live Now, and The Prime Minister. Conversion is a factor for many of the Jews populating these Victorian novels, mainly because conversion tends to cause anxiety for the majority community. No one is actually seen to convert to Anglicanism; conversion in Trollope is simply a device by which Jews have succeeded in infiltrating English society. Michael Ragussis observes a pattern that is directly evident in Trollope's Prime Minister: It is 'said,' 'supposed,' and 'suspected' of persons that they are Jewish, for in this world there is no Jewish badge, and Jewish origins are hidden, suppressed; Jewish identity often seems without substance, the product of whispers and rumors, sometimes no more than mere fabrication, so that the most meaningless detail of one's life can lead to the erroneous charge of Jewish identity. . . . In this way the signifier 'Jew' circulates freely, in the possession of any person to 11

Ibid., 259. Awe at Disraeli's hair is not limited to this one passage; there are quite a number of citations in biographies of Disraeli. See, for instance, Sarah Bradford's Disraeli, 76. 13 Dan Cohn-Sherbook, The Blackwell Dictionary of Judaica (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 419. The singular of pyot is pays. According to Cohn-Sherbook, the practice is based on Leviticus 19:27. 12

Literary Secularism bestow on any other person of questionable (especially foreign) origins.

33 14

In The Prime Minister, the force of the gossip around Jewish difference attaches itself to Trollope's Ferdinand Lopez. For while his presumed Jewish origins are at the center of the plot of the novel, Trollope never specifically verifies Lopez's actual birth in the text. Rather, the accusation of Jewishness is simply flung at Lopez with an escalating violence until it peaks, and then transforms, with Lopez's marriage to Emily Wharton. Initially, Lopez is described in fairly neutral terms as a “probable Jew,” but as he begins to succeed in his courtship other men in the novel begin to refer to him more darkly. He becomes "that greasy Jew adventurer out of the gutter,"15 and a "nasty Jew-looking man".16 It is also this moment in the novel that Lopez's "swarthy colour and false grimace and glib tongue"17 are for the first time described. Importantly, after the marriage, the word “Jew” usually embodied in some way (“greasy”; “black”), scarcely appears at all. The Jew's body as potential contaminant gives way to the Jew's body in action. Lopez becomes "scornful" and "scowling,”18 "begrudging,”19 a "shameless, fraudulent swindler,"20 and a "scoundrel.”21 However, when he is first described by the narrator of The Prime Minister, Ferdinand Lopez has a very different mouth, and seems scarcely swarthy, or scowlish at all. But the form of the portrait has a good deal in common with N.P. Willis's image of Disraeli: He was certainly a handsome man — his beauty being of a sort which men are apt to deny and women to admit lavishly. He was nearly six feet tall, very dark, and very thin, with regular, well-cut features indicating little to the physiognomist unless it be the great gift of self-possession. His hair was cut short, and he wore no beard beyond an absolutely black moustache. His teeth were perfect in form and whiteness, . . . But about the mouth and chin of this man there was something of a softness, perhaps in the play of the lips, perhaps in the dimple, which in some degree lessened the feeling of hardness which was produced by the square brow and bold, unflinching, combative eyes. They who knew him and liked him were reconciled by the lower face. The greater number who knew him and did not like him felt and resented, - even though in nine cases out of ten they might express no resentment even to themselves, - the pugnacity

14

Cited in Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 242. 15 Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister [1871], 126. 16 Ibid., 112. 17 Ibid., 123. 18 Ibid., 261. 19 Ibid., 402. 20 Ibid., 450. 21 Ibid., 593.

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34 of his steady glance.22

As with the Willis image of Disraeli, the references to the face are striking. Trollope describes the “regularity” of Lopez's features almost entirely in the negative: his face would not register with a physiognomist; he has cut hair, and no beard. Lopez's negativity is a classic figuring of a Trollopian “crypto-Jew”23: his features are surprisingly straight (no crooked nose), he is surprisingly tall (not hunchbacked). He seems to be absolutely not irregular. Trollope then describes Lopez in terms of the extremeness of some of his features—teeth and hair, both of which are unusual because of the absolute contrast in color (white and black). At this point, Trollope's eye moves down, and the clarity of the earlier image dissolves in favor of a softening, dimpling mouth. The initial eroticism in Trollope's image (a beauty that "men are apt to deny and women to admit lavishly") is sharply undercut by a litany of features that produce an almost entirely incoherent, irresolvable image. Lopez's face does not hang together, but with its hard-soft, straight-fuzzy, features, is rather a type of textual collage. The “straight, not crooked” elements, which read as attractive at the beginning of the paragraph, are overridden by the much clearer image of the “bold, unflinching, combative eyes” and “pugnacity” that dominate the latter part of the paragraph. At the end of this paragraph, there is almost nothing left to like about Lopez's face. By way of contrast, and to enhance the objectivity of these observations, it might be helpful to compare Trollope's representation of Lopez's face with the first physical description of Lopez's (Christian) friend, Everett Wharton: Everett Wharton was a good-looking, manly fellow, six feet high, with broad shoulders, with light hair, wearing a large silky bushy beard, which made him look older than his years, who neither by his speech nor by his appearance would ever be taken for a fool, but who showed by the very actions of his body as well as by the play of his face, that he lacked firmness of purpose.24

Where Trollope accounts for Lopez's teeth, hair, eyes, lips and dimple in great detail, the noble-born Everett is marked as simply a “good-looking fellow.” Also, some traits, such as the beard, distinguish him, perhaps ironically, from Lopez. But his most important attribute might be “the play of his face,” a phrase which suggests mobility of features, though it describes very little physically. Everett's “play” is a way of loosening him from the strictures of Trollope's moral image-making; Everett is to be forgiven if he has not yet found “firmness of purpose,” but Ferdinand Lopez's soft points prove to be diabolical. 22

Cited in Moneypenny and Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 1, 11-12. 23 The “crypto-Jews” of Trollope's 1870s novels are explored by Ragussis. 24 Trollope, The Prime Minister, 50.

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Daniel Deronda: “More than English” The representation of the Jewish face is at the core of Eliot's novel as well, though here it takes on a slightly different hue. Where novelists such as Trollope and Scott offer an image of the Jewish face as a mark of absolute (racial) difference, Eliot creates a representation of a Jewish face that aims to indicate a depth of moral feeling. While the pattern created by earlier writers might lead us to predict that Eliot will mark the face of her Jewish protagonist as a sign of his difference, in the novel Eliot self-consciously reverses that trope. The reversal starts with Daniel Deronda’s backstory—he was raised by an English gentleman named Sir Hugo Mallinger, but discovers at age 25 that his biological parents are continental Jews. Long before he has concrete knowledge or even strong suspicion of this, Deronda nurtures a knowledge of Jewish culture seemingly as a result of chance encounters with Jews in London. The revelation of Judaism has the potential to have tragic results (or, as in Trollope, be the source of scandal), but is instead, in Eliot's narrative, a formative and constructive opportunity for Daniel Deronda. Deronda's physiognomy is as exceptional as that of the other Jewish faces we have seen, but it gains from what Eliot aims to convey with it. Rather than simply commenting on static religious difference, Deronda's face is the site of his ethical struggle as well as his pursuit of self-knowledge. For before Deronda learns of his heritage directly, his relationship to Judaism is performed by his face, in scenes of complective discoloration and blushing at moments where his identity is hotly at issue. It is by repeatedly blushing that Deronda gives the lie to the anti-Semitic stereotype of affectless, shameless Jews, but Deronda's blush also represents the kernel of his difference. At the novel's conclusion, Deronda's Jewish difference precludes him from participation in the novel's major heterosexual marriage plot—a plot that would point him towards Gwendolen Harleth—and reorients him for a different kind of fate. Most importantly, Eliot's novel argues that Deronda engages in a free choice when he claims his Jewish difference publicly, and that such a choice in fact shows his full inclusion and belonging in the mainstream of liberal English culture. In other words, even as Deronda develops as a Jew he simultaneously develops as an Englishman. It is an early instance of hybridity: Deronda is at once a version of a prevailing representation of “the Jew” and a completely original fiction, at once classically “straight” and strikingly different, at once Englishman and Jew. In the first detailed description of his face in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot focuses on the non-resemblance of Daniel Deronda's nose to the English noses in the Mallinger family portraits. As with the first image of Lopez in Trollope's novel, Deronda's nose is compared to a portrait of Sir Hugo Mallinger's nose, which has been given "something more than justice" (166). Deronda's face, the passage leads us to understand, has no shade of Mallinger-ness about it; the passage points away from a conventional sort of revelation, in which Daniel

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might turn out to be the illegitimate child of Sir Hugo. As with Lopez, Daniel Deronda is defined at least partially negatively, and this lack of pointing can be thought of as in fact a shadowy reference to his Jewish lineage. But unlike Trollope's Lopez, Eliot's narrator follows up the image with lavish admiration: "Still he was handsomer than any of them, and when he was thirteen might have served as model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable of boys." Another similarity between Deronda and Lopez is the way their Jewish parentage seems to direct the sensibilities of both characters long before the narrative is posed to reveal the truth of their birth. With Lopez, the closest the narrative comes is the throwaway revelation that his father was a traveling jewelry peddler (Trollope, 501). Given the role of the "Jew jewellers" Messrs. Harter and Benjamin in Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds, this may be as good as a confirmation of his parentage—and yet it is not a confirmation, and no confirmation of his religious identity is ever given in the novel. Finally, the early (pre-revelation) image of Daniel Deronda shares with Lopez an unfinished, “softened” quality, although it does not figure on Deronda's face, but rather his gender identification: This state of feeling [Sir Hugo's paradoxical affection stemming from Deronda's non-resemblance to him] was kept up by the mental balance in Deronda, who was moved by an affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine. (322)

If Deronda's religious identity is torn between Anglicanism and Judaism, does his “feminine” aspect come from his Jewishness or his Anglicanness? Deronda's later "throbbing" with Jewish-religious feeling under the tutelage of Mordecai might be read as the passive position described here, but his assumption of the reins of the leadership of the Jewish community with the aim of organizing a national homeland seems to stem from an "inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine" that is the antithesis of passivity. It is in visually intense characterizations like these, which both share with and significantly depart from other representations of the Jew's face, that simple racial explanations of Deronda's Judaism are most directly challenged. The complexity of Eliot's mapping of religious difference to Deronda's face might even be evident in the very first scene of the novel, in which Deronda crushes Gwendolen Harleth's winning streak at the gaming table with a powerful ironic look: There was a smile of irony in his eyes as their glances met; but it was at least better that he should have kept his attention fixed on her than that he should have disregarded her as one of an insect swarm who had no individual physignomy. Besides, in spite of his superciliousness and irony, it was difficult to believe that he did not admire her spirit as well as her person: he was young, handsome,

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distinguished in appearance - not one of those ridiculous and dowdy Philistines who thought it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look or protest as they passed by it. (11)

The reference to the “Philistines” that Deronda does not here resemble points to Matthew Arnold, who in Culture and Anarchy links “Philistinism” with English middle-class “Hebraism,” ignoring the influence of actual communities of Jews practicing “Hebraism” on Protestant English culture25. The layers of meaning that go into Deronda's supercilious look are linked to this chain of meaning, as Deronda disapproves of the narrow amorality of gambling (we later find out that speculative commodities trading supports the Harleth family's fortune). The irony of the passage plays on the circularity of Arnold's categories, ironically marking Gwendolen, in this scene of "dull, gas-poisoned absorption," as the Philistine—and Daniel as the Jew. The inclusion of the pristinely beautiful, unquestionably English heiress Gwendolen Harleth in the metaphoric web of “Jewish” signifiers, is strengthened by background details that begin to surface. The Harleth family fortune, we learn, came into being with Gwendolen's grandfather, who owned a plantation in the West Indies. This is somewhat distasteful to the aspiring Gwendolen, and it seems "to exclude further questions" (24). Almost immediately following the disintegration of Gwendolen's luck at the gambling table, that same fortune is annihilated by irresponsible financial speculation. Here it might be the Harleths that are coded as aspiring Jews, who have made their money by a highly lucrative, if morally dubious, type of work26, and who are now attempting to marry into “society” on the fumes of their former fortune. Speculation on global commodities is of course precisely the manner in which Lopez attempts to make money and establish himself in England in The Prime Minister, though for him it proves to be more a fatal addiction than the passport to Parliament he desires. The difference of Daniel's face is first described at length when he is looking at the portraits in the Mallinger house, wondering if he might be, “under the rose,” a descendent of that house: In Sir Hugo's youthful portrait with rolled collar and high cravat, Sir Thomas 25 The absorption of religious difference in Matthew Arnold will be dealt with in the discussion of Lothair and Culture and Anarchy in the next chapter. 26 Though Eliot's representation of Jews diverges substantially from 'type', she does figure a stereotypical, gambling, money-obsessed Jew in Mirah's father Lapidoth: "The imperious gambling desire within him, which carried on its activity through every other occupation, and made a continuous web of imagination that held all else in its meshes, would hardly have been under the control of a protracted purpose, if he had been able to lay his hand on any sum worth capturing." (787) With the rhetoric of the "web" of control that the concept of money exerts on the mind, Lapidoth is very similar to Eliot's earlier, non-Jewish themed, Silas Marner.

38

Chapter Two Lawrence had done justice to the agreeable alacrity of expression and sanguine temperament still to be seen in the original, but had done something more than justice in slightly lengthening the nose, which was in reality shorter than might have been expected in a Mallinger. . . .But in the nephew Daniel Deronda the family faces of various types, seen on the walls of the gallery, found no reflex. Still he was handsomer than any of them, and when he was thirteen might have served as model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable of boys (166)

Daniel's perceives himself in the hall of Mallinger portraits through a process of serial misprision. First, Sir Hugo's classic English expression and temperament are misrepresented by a nose slightly too long. What is encoded in the aberration does not stem from an indiscretion on Sir Hugo's part: the painting of his nose signals neither a “Hebrew” profile nor any Pinocchial excess of the libido. Rather, the comic indiscretion only points to the disjunction that is Daniel's own face, which has nothing of agreeable Mallinger alacrity, but rather a marked beauty of a different order. In the space of the same chapter Daniel's beauty is cast in terms that eschew overtly feminine27 traits, and that rise out of an image of soft receptiveness into the clear cut of a sharp profile and a hard line: The voice, sometimes audible in subdued snatches of song, had turned out merely a high barytone; indeed, only to look at his lithe powerful frame and the firm gravity of his face would have been enough for an experienced guess that he had no rare and ravishing tenor such as nature reluctantly makes at some sacrifice. Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled with tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible firmlygrasping hands, such as Titian has painted in a picture where he wanted to show the combination of refinement with force. And there is something of a likeness, too, between the faces belonging to the hands—in both the uniform pale-brown skin, the perpendicular brow, the calmly penetrating eyes. Not seraphic any longer: thoroughly terrestrial and manly; but still of a kind to raise belief in a human dignity which can afford to acknowledge poor relations. (186)

As with much of Eliot's rhetoric of beauty both in this novel and elsewhere, Deronda's physical attributes are integrated into the whole package of his talents, his ethical orientation, and his expressivity. Eliot places his "lithe powerful frame" and his temperamental gravity in a relation of structural dependence with his singing voice. But Deronda's manly gravitas is inflected by the exoticism of the painting and the painter to which his face is compared. Though Deronda fails to resemble in the genealogy of Mallinger portraits, his

27

Or, as Boyarin would put it, "femminine" (see the introduction of Unheroic Conduct).

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features are figured as proper to Renaissance painting—Titian in particular28. This reference to Titian may seem to have little direct bearing on the epistemology of Deronda's religious difference, and may even be a way of marking Deronda's nose as more noble in the Roman sense than Jewish in the “nostrility” sense29. However, when read with reference to Deronda's "uniform pale-brown skin," the “Italian” resonance of Titian marks Deronda as somehow racially other—as in the sense of Trollope's provocative phrase: "some inferior Latin race," or Mr Bult's comparable characterization of Daniel Deronda's Herr Klezmer (whose Jewishness may be read in his name30) as "a Pole, or a Czech, or something of that fermenting sort." (241) Eliot's research into European Jewish life and her intimacy with Jews like the scholar Emanuel Deutsch (who provided the model for Mordecai in her novel) gives her access to some sense of how Jews see each other. For even while Deronda draws attention in the “Anglo” world for his looks and his look, 28

Which is not to say that his resemblance to a Titian painting stems from his likeness to an 'Italian' subject, as Simon During suggested at a talk at Duke University given in March, 1999. I would argue that the reference to Titian has little bearing on Deronda's Jewishness or Christianness. In fact, the 'Italian' signifier in Titian characterizes Deronda in both a literary and a semi-racialized sense. The figuring of his masculinity and authority intersects with his pale-brown skin in crucial ways; that intersection is the subject of the next section of this chapter. 29 Gilman, The Jew's Body, 128. 30 Klezmer otherwise carries few Jewish traits, nor does his face register as recognizably Jewish—he reads more strongly as German. There are two exceptions, one being his bizarre, ironic response to Mr. Bult's inquiry about his putative "pan-Slavism," to which Klezmer replies, "'No, my name is Elijah, and I am the Wandering Jew' (242). The other interesting passage is the narrator's description of his face: Herr Klesmer being a felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite, with grand features, brown hair floating in artistic fashion, and brown eyes in spectacles (242). With Klezmer, Eliot appears to be inverting and extending prevailing anti-Semitic signifiers out of recognition, with an overall effect of general subversion. Where does the Jewish face end and the Slavic face take over? What does a German Jew look like? To enrich this inversion there are also a whole array of Jew-encoded faces in the novel, though most of them are not at all likely to be 'real' Jews. There is Grandcourt, whose affectless, "flaccid" face strongly resembles Trollope's Ferdinand Lopez (111). There is also the shady Mr. Lush, with his black hair of "frizzy thickness (122). Finally, there is Lydia Glasher, with her dark, statuesque features: "An impressive woman, whom many would turn to look at again in passing; her figure was slim and sufficiently tall, her fact rather emaciated, so that its sculpturesque beauty was the more pronounced, her crisp hair perfctly black, and her large anxious eyes also what we call black" (144).

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he is recognized as possibly Jewish by the Jews he meets in Europe, something Deronda finds unsettling. The most striking incident of apparent recognition occurs when Deronda is traveling alone in Frankfort, and goes to visit an Orthodox synagogue. Deronda makes eye contact with an elderly (Jewish) man, who disrupts Deronda reverential experience of the Hebrew service: [H]e felt a hand on his arm, and turning with the rather unpleasant sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring, he saw close to him the whitebearded face of that neighbour, who said to him in German, 'Excuse me, young gentleman - allow me - what is your parentage - your mother's family - her maiden name?' Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling: he was inclined to shake off hastily the touch on his arm; but he managed to slip it away and said coldly, 'I am an Englishman.' (368)

At this point in the novel, Deronda has no sure knowledge of his parentage. So the anxiety of the scene, indirectly presented in the “unpleasant sensation” of the man's touch, may have as much to do with the fact of his personal doubts about his origins as with the imputation that his mother is a Jew. But the genealogical confusion embedded in the Englishman/Jew distinction here (Are you a Jew? [No,] I am an Englishman) may be less revealing than the mediating function of Daniel's body as it is located between the two mutually exclusive identities currently in play. For with What is your parentage? and the technically unrelated answer I am an Englishman comes from a person touching another, and a strong sensation of repulsion and resistance. Eliot casts this in general terms ("the rather unpleasant sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring"), but every one of Deronda's encounters with Judaism plays on embodiment and affect, suggesting the complexity signified by Jewish religious practices and beliefs for Daniel in this portion of the novel. When Daniel walks into a Jewish-owned secondhand book store in London, looking for Mirah's lost brother, he meets the man who is later identified as Mordecai. Mordecai stops him in the middle of a sale, and causes another moment of anxiety: 'You are perhaps of our race?' Deronda coloured deeply, not liking the grasp, and then answered with a slight shake of the head, 'No.' The grasp was relaxed, the hand withdrawn, the eagerness of the face collapsed into uninterested melancholy, as if some possessing spirit which had leaped into the eyes and gestures had sunk back again to the inmost recesses of the frame; and moving further off as he held out the little book, the stranger said in a tone of distant civility, 'I believe Mr Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir.' The effect of this change on Deronda - he afterwards smiled when he recalled it - was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary had found him deficient and given him his congé. (387)

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It is striking that both of these scenes of inquiry involve men grasping hold of Deronda. Jews who read his face as Jewish clearly want Deronda to be Jewish, so the physical component, the grabbing, in both encounters also functions as an invitation. However, this passage differs from Deronda's encounter with Kalonymos in the Synagogue, in that Mordecai's question is explicitly along racial lines. Deronda's answer is therefore also more explicit—he gives a meek, embarrassed negative, accompanied by a telling discolouration, which is followed by Mordecai's withdrawal of his hand. It is the fact that Deronda “colours” here, in reaction to being addressed as a Jew, that makes this passage in particular the crux of Eliot’s reworking of Deronda’s religious and national identity. “Colour” suggests both the registering of affect (a blush) and a darkening of Deronda's already dark complexion—it alludes self-consciously to that complexional difference. But Deronda’s blush is, it must be said, no more slippery than the conventional erotic blush that populates much nineteenth century writing. In Telling Complexions, Mary Ann O'Farrell traces the course of the blush through nineteenth century English fiction, from Jane Austen through Henry James. O'Farrell reads the blush in the novel as both a "somatic act of confession," a sign of shame and embarrassment at forbidden pleasures, and also a way of expressing pleasure itself. Perhaps the most enabling aspect of O'Farrell's reading of the blush is the way its particular deployment in the novel is a form of writing the body. That is to say, for O'Farrell, the blush is a specifically linguistic invention that is also the most emphatic form of embodiment possible in nineteenth-century fiction: [A]s an act of interpretation, identifying the blush entails imagining it as the writing of the body, and, thus, as the product of somatic agency, a means to dispel the alternative fantasy that the obdurate body is obstinate in its refusal to speak. The blush can seem, then, to partake of both body and language— supplementing language with an ephemeral materiality—and novelistic usage would even suggest that, by means of the blush, body and language are identical and simultaneous in function and effect (O'Farrell, 3)

If for O'Farrell's blushing protagonists, “the body” specifically denotes a desiring body that is implicitly English, for Daniel Deronda, the blush is a “writing of the body” the content of which is Jewish difference. But even though Deronda's blush is a pointedly “Jewish blush,” even a “Jewish closet blush,” one that is unique to his face, it trades on the constitutive indeterminacy of the concept of race in Eliot's novel. Indeed, since the blush is so profoundly involved with expressing what cannot be put into words, it may be the case that Daniel Deronda's blushes all come to throb with a common “blood,” which is to say, the meaning of the verb “to colour” is determined by its use in other instances in the novel. The novel, in short, develops a discourse of "colouring," that refers as one of its essential meanings, to eroticized Jewishness. The Mediterranean faces in Daniel Deronda are visual synonyms for each

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other. Every "refined" Jew in the novel has a complexion and a profile indistinguishable from a Spaniard or an Italian. Eliot's narrator has a great deal of affection for the complexion she sometimes calls "pale-brown" (as in the Titian passage above), and sometimes "olive." But most tellingly, the word she uses is "rich." Rather than working up a familiar gothic axis of pale beauty and its dark, violative antithesis, Eliot structures the entire poetics of light and texture in the novel on a scale between rich (as in dark) and poor (pale). When Deronda “colours,” it can be read along the color-texture spectrum put in place elsewhere in the novel—his darkening is an enriching of tone that moves him away from the barren territory of pallid, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon gentry and towards a much more active, Mediterranean indeterminacy. 31 The event is the more striking because of the unusual work the word "colour" does in becoming an active verb in passages like the one above, with an agency and, it seems, an agenda of its own. Before long Daniel Deronda no longer feels the need to draw back when Jews touch him and invite him into their community. Preceding his awareness of his Jewish lineage, Deronda begins to have an erotically charged relationship with Jewish religious culture, specifically mediated through Mordecai and partly through his love-interest, Mirah. Judaism, he discovers, is not an esoteric relic from the past, but "something still throbbing in human lives,” which is to say, a theologically and culturally dynamic way of being modern: But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearning after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world; and in the idling excursion on which he immediately afterward set out with Sir Hugo he began to look for the outsides of 31 A powerful instance of this is the rich scene of Daniel's return to Mirah and Mordecai's apartment after meeting his mother in Genoa:

It has to be admitted that in this classical, romantic, world-historic position of his, bringing as it were from its hiding-place his hereditary rumour, he wore - but so, one most suppose, did most ancient heroes whether Semitic of Japhetic - the summer costume of his contemporaries. He did not reflect that the drab tints were becoming to him, for he rarely went to the expense of such thinking; but his own depth of colouring, which made the becomingness, got an added radiance in the eyes, a fleeting and returning glow in the skin, as he entered the house, wondering what exactly he should find. (746) After discovering his Jewish lineage, Daniel's complexion goes from indeterminate to proudly significant—a marker of 'depth'. It is part of the same network of meaning as the Biblical references which Eliot uses in describing the simplicity—and conventionally English quality - of his attire. All the same, Eliot continues to refer to his Jewishness in terms of "hereditary rumour."

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synagogues, and the title of books about the Jews.32

Though it is almost a casual passage, this is one of the most important and memorable defenses of the religious minority experience in the entire novel. For Eliot, Jewish difference is not a minor matter of theology, but a vital—and irreplaceable—“vesture of the world.” The explorations of the texture of this difference for a mainstream readership alone makes the novel a unique contribution to Victorian literature’s representation of Jews. But of course, Eliot wants to do still more. The end of the novel marks a move from a covert, racialized inscription of Jewishness on Daniel's body to that of an open discourse of Jewish community, which anticipates Benedict Anderson's concept of the nation as an “imagined community.” This transformation is accompanied by a rapid increase in the instances where Deronda blushes or “colours.” These later colourings occur not in response to the entreaties of other Jews, but as a result of various forms of less benevolent presumption. Though they are in some sense less loaded, the later colourings remain complex events. For instance, when he “colours” in response to his mother's suggestion that he must be in love with a Jewess to be so keen on committing to Judaism, it is both Deronda's realization of a desire he had not articulated and an expression of embarrassed resentment at his mother's crude pragmatism. Also, when Gwendolen, having just watched her husband drown, prematurely figures her life with Deronda in it, Deronda again “colours.” “Colouring” expresses both his foreclosing of Gwendolen's romantic designs on him and points to his recent revelation, the content of which he is not yet prepared to share with her. In their conversation, the hint is expressed as geographical uncertainty (a hint of Deronda's nationalist plans): "'I am quite uncertain where I shall live,' said Deronda, colouring.”33 Deronda “colours” yet again when Sir Hugo dismisses Deronda's anxiety over his grandfather's chest in Mainz: "I hope you are not going to set a dead Jew above a living Christian."34 Finally, Deronda “colours” significantly when coming out as a Jew to Gwendolen. Only here, his colouring seems to stem not so much from what he cannot say to her as from the excess of what she communicates to him: "'A Jew!' Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping through her system. Daniel coloured and did not speak.”35 This moment can be read against the other three scenes between Daniel and Gwendolen I have discussed—his shattering, ironic glance at her at the gambling table, their exchange of blushes at Diplow, and finally his hint to her at Genoa. In each of the earlier scenes, there is the communication of an ethical idea from Daniel to Gwendolen, accompanied by a 32

Daniel Deronda, 359. Ibid., 701. 34 Ibid., 719. 35 Ibid., 802. 33

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certain erotic current she responds to in turn—with a blush. But in this final announcement, Daniel points to his own image rather than hers, to a meaning that does not include her. In place of blushing, after she says “A Jew,” Gwendolen has only the movement of a "confused potion." The circuit of meanings is irreparably closed to her. It is in this scene with Gwendolen that Deronda makes his most explicit statement of intent regarding his nationalist intentions. The idea of Israel is certainly strong in his conversations with Mordecai, but there it is generally Mordecai speaking. Moreover, when Deronda announces his plans to his mother in Genoa, he speaks more in terms of “community” than of “nation.” If Deronda accesses Judaism through Mordecai, receiving it almost passively, nationalism is specifically Deronda's invention. He does hint at his design when he meets Kolynomos in Mainz, 36 but it is to Gwendolen (who has come to depend upon his attention and moral guidance with analogous passivity) that he fully expresses his dream: 'I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there . . . The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty: I 37 am resolved to begin it, however feebly.'

Deronda's dream of Israel is articulated through a figure of the British Empire. Deronda's presentation of an ideology of Jewish nationalism is extraordinarily precise and well-ordered, especially given that the Zionist movement had not yet come into its own. But Deronda makes one extremely revealing reversal in the figure. For where the Jews are "scattered over the face of the globe" as a dispossessed and displaced people, the English are scattered specifically as its masters. Deronda's idea of establishing a "national centre" for the Jews seamlessly reverses the trajectory of the British Empire, which began with a national center, and then expanded outwards as that center grew more and more powerful. Deronda's Israel, then, either presumes too much (i.e., that the diaspora has sufficient economic strength and political coherence in its scattered form to rebuild its “centre”), or fails to see the power of precedent and of history to complicate narratives of self-determination.

36

"I think I can maintain my grandfather's notion of separateness with communication. I hold that my first duty is to my own people, and if there is anything to be done towards restoring or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation." (Eliot, Daniel Deronda), 725. 37 Ibid., 803.

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Conclusion: Eliot’s Literary Secularism Even with this first example, it should be apparent that the discourse of literary secularism is considerably more complex than one might have anticipated. For Daniel Deronda, Jewish identity is inscribed in his heritage and coded (often negatively and ironically) in the way Eliot defines the features of his face. And it is there as an unconscious reflex in his blush at several key moments of the novel—as an expression of the blood that Deronda himself can’t see as well as his interlocutor (or the novel’s readers). But Eliot uses the physical components of Deronda’s Jewish expression not to show the failure of Deronda’s secularism, but rather to force her English readers to rethink their understanding of what secularism might mean in England. The model of fully conscious Jewish intellectual and political action she ends with is an affirmative sign of a transformed community, which is English without assimilating entirely “into the fold.” The war for secularism is, therefore, fought on two fronts in her novel: as an internal struggle within a religious minority community, and as a mainstream social problem, where the goal is to imagine a non-homogenous national community. The other works I will explore in Literary Secularism engage with the problem of representing secularism with struggles that are no less intricate than Deronda’s—though they take us into other national contexts and other religious communities. To begin with, the issues in Tagore’s Gora move the problem of literary secularism to Bengal thirty years later, where the prevailing problems for secularism are relations between Hindus and Muslims and the persistence of caste hierarchy despite decades of “reform.” Also, the problem has an additional dimension in the 1910s in India because of colonialism. For Tagore to give the characters in his novel the space to be secular Indians is no less of a challenge than it is for Eliot. Finally, as with George Eliot, part of the story of Tagore’s approach to literary secularism is Tagore’s own public image as a “Hindu writer.”

CHAPTER THREE HOLY WATER, FLUID MODERNITY: RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND HINDU REFORM

True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. —Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism

Rabindranath Tagore would not have described himself as secular as easily as many of his contemporaries in Europe did. He was better known outside of India for his devotional poetry than for his novels and political journalism, and statements such as the one above—an argument for modernism as “independence” rather than imitation—would not have been received well. It didn't help Tagore’s case that most Europeans and Americans certainly thought of him as a kind of Guru who was the very embodiment of the Oriental, who appeared live in the flesh in quite a number of western venues beginning in the early 1910s, and continuing until the 1930s. And based on his choice of topics as well, perhaps, as his own neo-mystical temperament, Tagore didn't do a great deal to discourage this type of conception of his status or his work. But Tagore's writing, particularly on the discourse of nationalism, which he engages both in his fiction and nonfiction, is after all secular in that it is consistently opposed to religious orthodoxies of all kinds. Tagore repeatedly and directly criticizes “religion” in terms that a secular London-based writer like George Bernard Shaw might have found sympathetic. Two exemplary texts of Tagore's literary secularism are his novels from the early 1910s—The Home and the World, about the excesses of the Swadeshi movement, and Gora, which argues against caste hierarchy even amongst the reformist class of the Bengali bhadralok. Tagore's case is an unusual one for many reasons. One of the difficulties is his status as one of the very first modern writers from a non-western background to achieve substantial success as a fully bilingual, cosmopolitan writer—active in English and known in European metropolitan centers, even as he continued to play a central role in the growth and transformation of Bengali-language literature and journalism beginning in the later years of the 1800s, and continuing through the peak years of the Indian nationalist movement in the 1920s and 30s. Unlike, for instance, James Joyce, Tagore virtually never felt himself in the position of an “exile,” disillusioned and disengaged from the political and civil life of his “home.” (He did, however, experience other kinds

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of marginalization as the Indian nationalist movement progressed in the 1930s.) Tagore's career was very long; he began writing verse in the late 1870s, and became involved in nationalist politics in Bengal shortly thereafter, an involvement that would continue until his death, in 1941. But Tagore's most interesting phase, both in terms of his literary output and his political involvement, was the period between 1900 and 1920, when he wrote his most important novels, his Nobel-Prize winning poetry, as well as many key essays and lectures. The texts I am considering here (including Nationalism) are from that period, and they form an especially powerful lens through which to understand the poetics of Tagore's secularity. Tagore is, like both T.S. Eliot and Mohandas Gandhi, an ambivalent secularist, and, like Naipaul after him, an ambivalent colonial. Both Tagore and Gandhi had great hostility to orthodox Hindu institutions such as caste, but Tagore's relationship to religion is much more fraught than Gandhi's. Where Gandhi organized a mass-political movement around his own personal Hindu asceticism, Tagore's philosophy of religion came from the reformist intellectual world of the Bengali Brahmo Samaj movement, in which his family was quite prominent. In contrast to Gandhi, Tagore kept his distance from Indian nationalism, which he and the other prominent Brahmo Samajists saw as an ugly development, even though he could never fully disavow its principles. The consequences of the Brahmo influence become apparent in the close reading of Tagore's novel Gora, below. Tagore is also unique in that he favored a spiritualized approach to social order, in which one finds a rhetoric of purity against desecration, of classical beauty and idealized forms against the compromised ideas and materialism of modern life. Tagore's images of the spirit need to be looked at closely, as he uses them to criticize religious dogmas and ritualism, but also the narrow captivation by modern ideas (especially political ideas), which Tagore saw as dangerous. Nowhere is Tagore's simultaneous critique of religion and of modern politics more emphatic than in his 1917 lectures on nationalism, so let us begin a closer look there.

Nationalism, Religion and Tagore And we can still cherish the hope that, when power becomes ashamed to occupy its throne and is ready to make way for love, when the morning comes for cleansing the blood-stained steps of the Nation along the highroad of humanity, we shall be called upon to bring our own vessel of sacred water—the water of worship—to sweeten the history of man into purity, and with its sprinkling make the trampled dust of the centuries blessed with fruitfulness.1

This passage, the concluding crescendo of Tagore’s 1917 lecture, 1

Tagore, Nationalism, 28.

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“Nationalism in the West,” crystallizes the contradictions inherent in Tagore’s critiques of colonial concepts of both nationalism and secularism. Though the tone here is gently post-apocalyptic, the lecture as a whole strikes a tragic note; the general aim is to propose a theory of the modern style of territorial expansionism, a theory which would implicitly challenge both British imperialism and the dominant stream of Indian nationalism at the time. Tagore’s audience and historical moment are also key: this lecture is being given in 1917 in the United States, on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I—a war widely understood, even at the time, as the catastrophic consequence of uncontrolled nation-building. Tagore was at that point immensely popular in the United States, and completed an impressive 25 city tour of the country, with sell-out audiences at each venue. But the argument of the lecture goes somewhat against the expectations of his audience. For in this lecture Tagore joins a chorus of other intellectuals critical of the “Great War,” and reads the European territorial acquisitiveness that produced the War as a sign of the collapse of an intrinsically cannibalistic system. The war is, he implies, continuous with the power politics of Europe, and an essential and inevitable fact of the western nation-state system. While it is clear that Tagore does not support the nationalist movement, he does support—here and elsewhere—a unique concept of national culture, and with it a critique of British imperialism. There is a terminological problem here, which Harish Trivedi responds to in Colonial Transactions, where he argues that Tagore's concept of "nationalism" in the 1917 lectures in fact refers to a principle that is the equivalent, in the contemporary idiom, to "Imperialism."2 At numerous points in the text, Tagore makes it clear that the kind of "nationalism" he opposes is specifically the mechanistic, territorially-acquisitive kind.3 In contrast, an organic concept of national culture is pervasive in the text; for instance, Tagore rarely questions, either here or elsewhere, his underlying commitment to an imagined community he names “India.” National culture is evident in the history Tagore assigns the Indian subcontinent, which is inclusive of ancient Hindu traditions, the Persian/Islamic culture introduced by the Mughals, and even to an extent the Enlightenment rationality introduced and integrated by the British. India, Tagore suggests, is “accommodating.” The British are merely the latest in a long line; they too may eventually find their 2

"It is certainly easy for a reader of that vexed and impassioned book to see that wherever we should now use the term 'imperialism' Tagore had consistently employed the ill-fitting euphemism 'nationalism.' But it is far from clear that Tagore himself at that stage of his political evolution meant the two terms to be synonymous." (Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions, 63). 3 For example: "The truth is that the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of the Western nationalism; its basis is not social cooperation. It has evolved a perfect organization of power but not spiritual idealism. It is like a pack of predatory creatures that must have its victims." (Nationalism, 33)

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architecture, language, laws, and technology integrated into “India.” Tagore's attitude was often dismissed as a kind of culturalism that refused to take a decisive stand on the hard political questions of sovereignty and subjugation. But it was an important part of the conversation nevertheless. We can identify Tagore's approach as a kind of national culturalism, in order to develop a sense of its limited overlap with nationalism proper. In Nationalism Tagore attacks both nationalism and Imperialism. The inner consistency of Tagore’s critique of nationalism is in the logic of the metaphors that he deploys to condemn it. The rhetoric of organicism and fluidity is virtually overflowing in the lectures, with dozens of figures emphasizing especially nationalism’s inhuman mechanicity, its corruption, and its tendency to self-cannibalization. To give some specific examples, Tagore figures nationalism as alternately a factory, an anesthetic, an automaton, a monster, a fetish, a serpent with poison-venom fangs (41), a marionette-show and the devil itself. 4 Most importantly, however, Tagore figures the “Nation” as a God, and nationalism as a new, degraded, and extreme form of religion. This language is present throughout the text, and it is a thoroughly developed and highly consistent appropriation of a European discourse on Oriental religious practices, here deployed by Tagore against Europe itself. Tagore refers to "converts" and "fanatics" of nationalism (39), and he lambasts "[the Nation's] paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches.”5 Nationalism sacralizes itself by appropriating symbolism from actual religious communities, and even by occupying religious institutions for its own, profane ends (“blasphemous prayers”). Tagore also turns the tables on orientalist language describing Hindu “ritualism” when he bemoans the “fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” (15). Elsewhere, Tagore even describes nationalism as a kind of industrial-age savagery that devastates the individual’s organic relationship to faith: “It [nationalism] will go on in its ring-dance of moral corruption, linking steel unto steel, and machine unto machine; trampling under its tread all the sweet flowers of simple faith and the living ideals of man” (55). In contrast to Benedict Anderson, Tagore reads nationalism as primarily destructive. In Imagined Communities, Anderson argues that the emergence of nationalisms in Europe as well as elsewhere is a sign of cultural transformation, 4

See respectively, pages 16-17, 57, 51, 38, 38, 41, 58, and 57. The list could also be extended. The nation is an octopus ("its tentacles of machinery [driving] deep down into the soil"); it is an abstraction (24); it is an absurdity; it is a factory (16-17); it is an automaton (51); it is a flood (14); it is an obfuscatory and suffocating "thick mist" (28); it is a power loom (29, in contrast to the hand loom – a machine on a human scale); it is an anesthetic (57); it is sterile (35); it is bloated (34-35, this is echoed in Tagore's poem "Sunset of the Century"); it is a monster (38); it is a serpent with poison-venom fangs (41); it is a fetish (38); it is a marionette-show (58); and it is the devil (57). 5 Tagore, Nationalism, 42.

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a kind of collective, constructive project of imagination. While Tagore’s concept neither precludes nor refutes Anderson’s, the emphasis is quite different. For Tagore, nationalism is idolatry before it is imagination. It does not substitute for the “ebbing” of religious belief, but is rather a more virulent and narrow kind of religion than the “simple" (i.e., organic) faiths present in the world before its appearance. Tagore’s critique of nationalism as religion tells us a good deal about Tagore’s own understanding of “religion.” Here, his hostility is equal if not stronger in force to, his hostility to, “nationalism.” Indeed, other texts of Tagore’s (such as, for instance, the poems of Gitanjali and the novel Gora) do show him to be profoundly anti-dogmatic. But there are contradictions present in both of these critiques—Tagore's national culturalism at times oscillates between both Congress party nationalism and orthodox Hinduism. To unpack these contradictions, it might be helpful at this point to look more closely at the passage with which I began: "[W]hen the morning comes for cleansing the blood-stained steps of the Nation along the highroad of humanity, we shall be called upon to bring our own vessel of sacred water—the water of worship." In response to the idolatry, ritualism, and industrial savagery of nationalism, Tagore draws on “sacred water” that has within it the ability to cleanse the all-too-evident “bloodstains” of the modern nation. A figurative contrast is present in the passage that ends this lecture (quoted above), between the “blood-stains” of nationalism and the “sacred water of worship” that can cleanse the wound and even cure the patient. However, this contrast also contains within it a contradiction. Continuing his portrayal of nationalism as a new religion, the reference to “blood-stained steps of the Nation” in this passage locates nationalism in a religious context, hinting at a desecrated altar, or a sacred temple in which acts of ritualistic violence have been committed. At the same time, the language by which this violence can be undone is itself far from “secular”; Tagore posits not stringent renunciation of all the dangerous discourses in play (namely, religion and nationalism), but instead turns to the “water of worship.” The substance of the contradiction is, then, that elements of “religion” seem to be implicated in both the scene of nationalist violence and the proposed solution to that violence. Nationalism has associated with it a metaphorics of ritualism, idolatry, and cannibalism/savagery. Against it, Tagore posits nothing other than the “holy water” of “worship.” Tagore does not oppose the ideologies of modern nationalism or institutional religion with an equivalent, if more amicable, ideology; rather, Tagore places himself outside of any conventional discourse of religion even as he asserts the power of “worship.” The dynamic of this contradiction is not merely incidental. I read Tagore’s rhetoric of religion and nationalism as inseparable from the rhetoric of fluidity by which he represents them—water, blood, flow, and the idea of the oceanic6. 6

Since Freud in Civilization and Its Discontent makes an explicit link between the

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Water is both sacred and a metaphor for modernity for Tagore. Elsewhere in Tagore’s work, in the poems of Gitanjali, or the argumentative discourses of Gora, the image of fluidity is often threatening, as it is the engine of radical and disruptive transformations in social structure. But throughout the lectures that constitute Nationalism, water (and more importantly, the potential for flow) is also the very vehicle of regenerative social, ethical, and spiritual transformation. Though Nationalism at points may seem to be a mere polemic against industrialization, 7 Tagore’s real animus is directed against the evil of inherited prejudices, which block channels, stifle flow, and prevent the comprehension of spiritual truths. Nothing symbolizes this unhealthy sedimentation for Tagore more than the caste system. Though caste is generally understood as a social system affecting everyday life through a rigorous practice of spatial and material segregation, the Hindu caste system is arguably inseparable from Hindu religious practice. Caste is a fundamental part of what it means to be an observant Hindu, and this is true for Tagore as much as it is (or is not) for the Tagore's contemporary, the famous Dalit (or “untouchable”) politician B.R. Ambedkar.8 Tagore’s critique of caste in Nationalism is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, his reputation as an opponent of caste is quite solid. His family was one of the pillars of the reformist movement known as the Brahmo Samaj, and Tagore was himself publicly committed to the reform and abolition of caste in Indian society. But in the lectures in Nationalism, Tagore does not question the historical construction of caste as a system of domination as such. Rather, he allegorizes it as a social system developed to accommodate the different “races” present in India. It’s a rather involved history, heavily influenced by the work of Max Müller and company: Brahmins are the descendants of light-skinned Aryans who migrated to India in the long-distant past, while members of lower castes were indigenous, dark-skinned people.9 For Tagore, the caste system in “oceanic” and semi-religious psychic “drives,” it might be worth considering in an expanded version of this chapter the extent to which Tagore’s concepts of flow and the oceanic resemble Freud’s. 7 Tagore’s cynicism about technology was one of the few areas where he and M. K. (“Mahatma”) Gandhi were in general agreement. They did, of course, have profound differences with regard to how the obvious evil of industrial capitalism translated into anti-imperial politics. Importantly, both Tagore and Gandhi’s responses to the industrial revolution are as much influenced by writers like Ruskin and Morris as they are by “Hinduism.” 8 Ambedkar is famous as the author of India’s constitution and as the leader of a mass Dalit conversion to Buddhism in 1956; see Gauri Viswanathan’s chapter on the religious politics behind his conversion in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, Belief.. 9 Tagore states this even more directly in a different essay: “Of all the ancient civilizations, I think, that of India was compelled to recognize [the] race problem in all seriousness and for ages she has been engaged unraveling the most bafflingly

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its original, and ideal state, was a profound example of India’s ability to accommodate and assimilate different races without violence or bloodshed (he does not refer to power per se). Caste in its ideal form is merely a social order with a religious name. As Tagore puts it, the absorption of the Aryans produces “something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.” This reference to the United States is one of several that appear in Tagore’s treatment of caste and nationalism in this lecture; Tagore treats the U.S. as analogous to India, and in many texts written in this period maps out his ambivalences over the Indian nationalist movement through the American system. For instance, Tagore is unstinting in his condemnation of America’s “race problem,” which he describes as no less corrupt and destructive than India’s own. In Tagore’s history of the caste-system, caste became a problem when it ceased being a “loose federation,” and began to block the natural pattern of flow and transformation in Indian social life. [W]hat [India] failed to realize was that in human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever—they are fluid with life’s flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and volume. Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of expansion and movement. . . . She treated life in all truth where it is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore Life departed from her social system, and its place she is worshipping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured.10

It is significant that Tagore represents the growth of caste here as a process of sedimentation over time. Because he uses a kind of administrative rhetoric to describe the process, (“regulation” of caste difference modern political terms; “compartments,” “manufacture”), it is possible to interpret the fixing of the

complicated tangle of race-differences. Europe was fortunate in having neighboring races more or less homogeneous, for, most of them were of the same origin. So, though in Europe there were bitter feuds between different peoples, there was not that physical antipathy between them which the difference in colour of skin and in feature tends to produce. . . .At the beginning of Indian history the white-skinned Aryans had encounters with the aboriginal people who were dark and intellectually inferior to them. Then there were the Dravidians who had their own civilization and whose gods and modes of worship and social system were totally different from those of the newcomers, which must have proved a more active barrier between them than fullfledged barbarism.” (Collected English Writings Volume III, 360). 10 Tagore, Nationalism, 137-8.

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caste system as a modern event11. Though Tagore does not make the connection explicit, he marks India’s caste/race problem as akin to India’s growing “nationalism” problem, a connection indirectly strengthened by the reference to “worship.” Nationalism is a new, bowdlerized kind of religion, and this passage suggests that caste may be similar. Though caste is represented quite differently in Tagore’s novel Gora, it shares some aspects of the relationship to race evident in Nationalism. The novel, which appeared in Bengali a decade before Nationalism was published in the United States, charts the growth in consciousness of a strident nationalist “babu” (or elite, English-educated Brahmin) in the 1870s. Gora, the protagonist, turns to a rigid adherence to caste as a reaction to the threat posed to Hindu tradition by Christian missionaries. His caste-obsession, which causes great pain to many people close to him and stymies his budding romance with a Brahmo girl, is figured by Tagore as a modern invention—a reactionary pose. Tellingly, Tagore dissolves the crisis in the romantic plot of the novel through a kind of theatrical anagnorisis: at the conclusion it is revealed that Gora is not in fact a Brahmin by birth at all, but a European (like Kipling’s Kim, Gora is of Irish descent). This revelation enables Gora to marry Sucharita, but more importantly it leads to a denouement that suggests Tagore’s progressive attitude to both “nationalism” and “race.” That is to say, Gora’s revelation undoes his casteidentity, but rather than separating him from his Indian social moorings on the basis of racial difference, the revelation enables him to finally articulate a fully inclusive and functional version of Indian nationalism. In Tagore, caste is a problem that challenges the developing ideas of both nationalism and secularism. Caste complicates any straightforward story of the “derivative” emergence of Indian nationalism, because it presents a concept of social life that is fundamentally different from, and inassimilable to, liberalism and democracy. Tagore was deeply aware, perhaps more so than contemporaries such as Gandhi or Mulk Raj Anand, of the difficulty of “secularizing” Indian society through nationalist mobilization against the British. The response to texts like Gitanjali and his own ambivalence in Gora underline the complexity of Tagore’s position.

11 Tagore does not here mention the role British colonialism might have played in the solidifying of caste boundaries. Gauri Viswanathan has noted the role of both Orientalist scholarship and the advent of the British census in ossifying both communal and caste identities beginning in the eighteenth-century. (Viswanathan, “Ethnographic Politics and the Discourse of Origins.” Stanford Electronic Humanities Review Volume 5. 1, February 1996.

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Religion, Secularism, and Gitanjali In the previous chapter, I discussed the rhetoric of religion as it applies to England, focusing on representations that were in many cases external to the communities at issue. Here, I bridge the exiguous representations of religious communities with a concept of “religion” that is at once modern and indigenously “Indian.” This is not to say that there is a clear line between the reception of Tagore's translated writings and the discourse that produced them, between Tagore as an image and embodiment of Oriental subjectivity in the West, and the Tagore at home who wrote committed nationalist novels such as Gora. Tagore seems to always be in transit, between East and West certainly, but also between the image of himself produced for him by his Anglo-American readers and the image of himself he aimed to project. I find that texts that respond to Tagore as well as Tagore's own writings add to my argument. It is, ultimately, not Tagore's own individual relationship to religion that I aim to pin down, but the implications of his encounter with western discourses of nationalism, race, and Orientalism, on the colonial discourses of religion and secularism. A surprising consequence of Tagore's success in the west is his doubleinscription, as at once a “religious” and a “secular” figure. This is not so much a paradox as a symptom of the limits of the prevailing conceptualization of religion and secularity, both for Tagore and for his readers and critics. At times the double inscription is enabled by the new, dilute category of the “spiritual” that is often deployed to explain the proximity of seeming opposites. But it is also quite viable to read secularism and religion as discourses that directly collide in Tagore’s language, and are transformed—without dilution. If the categories of the “mystic” and the “spiritual” dilute the rhetorical effect of Tagore’s writing, it may be appropriate to circumvent them. Tagore is more than, or other than, a “mystic.” Recent readers of Tagore’s Bengali writing such as Amartya Sen12 argue strongly against the western image of Tagore as a mystic, with no investment in nationalist politics. As Sen and others have pointed out, when writing for an Indian audience, generally in Bengali, Tagore’s writing is considerably more historically grounded and politically direct than his poetry published in the west. The Nobel Prize committee had read virtually none of his Bengali language writing when it awarded him the Literature prize in 1913. 13 And certainly, neither the Viceroy nor the King had read Tagore’s various Bengali novels, plays, and journalistic writings when they knighted him two years later. They had no idea how fiercely 12 13

Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India.” New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997. See Dutta and Robinson, Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995): 180-187.

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critical of British imperial authority and English culture and values he was among his peers, and he did little to correct their misperception. Irrespective of the accuracy of the judgment, Tagore’s reputation as a mystic has marginalized him in contemporary, post-Orientalist accounts of the emergence of nationalism. The fact that Tagore’s writing is apparently aloof from politics at precisely the moment of the emergence of the first concerted anti-colonial politics in India (the Swadeshi [or self-rule] movement) seems to fulfill a version of Orientalism, specifically Said’s association of Orientalist discourse with an alignment of power. Said's analogy may be mapped to this particular theme as follows: Europeans are materialist because they are materially empowered; "Orientals" are mystical, timeless, and passive because they are in a subject position. Mysticism is therefore the recourse of the colonized—the “poetry of a defeated people,” as Tagore writes in 1917, quoting a Japanese critic of his own work.14 But this mapping may be a bit hasty. Though Tagore did identify at times with a concept of “spiritualism” (espoused in his 1930 collection of essays The Religion of Man), if not mysticism, and though he generally did deploy “Orientalist” tropes in his English non-fiction writings, the version of Orientalism I see operating in his work does not fully align power/knowledge and the thematics of Asian religion in a simple way. My reading of Tagore in part aims to deploy “Orientalism” not as a totalizing mode of power/knowledge, but as a discourse deployed by colonial subjects strategically15: Tagore and others used these discourses to convey arguments that were political (nationalist) and modernist in nature. I read Tagore as taking an active role in his inscription from without, as at once representing eastern “religion” (so as to protect actual Hindu religious practices and beliefs) and western “philosophy” (in the interest of critiquing British imperialism)—at once ancient purity and modern social struggle. There are significant differences between Tagore’s poetry and his prose and journalistic writings in terms of the emphasis on nationalism and the critique of institutional religion. But there is no hard-and-fast opposition. Several poems in Gitanjali explicitly criticize ritualistic religious practices, and one directly questions the materialist nature of national boundaries, while the others are lyrical meditations on the poet’s desire to discover spiritual fulfillment in the 14

"I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where I exhorted this young nation to take its stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and never follow the West in its acceptance of the organized selfishness of Nationalism as its religion . . . Some of the newspapers praised my utterances for their poetical qualities, while adding with a leer that it was the poetry of a defeated people." (Tagore, Nationalism, 23) 15 My approach to Orientalism here resembles Partha Chatterjee’s distinction, in Nationalist Thought and the Colonialist World, between the “problematic” or Orientalism, and the “thematic.” I read Tagore as accepting an Orientalist thematic, while rejecting its power dynamics.

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world around him, the material world. If the lectures in Nationalism are critical of an entity Tagore calls “nationalism” in the metaphor of religion, several poems in Gitanjali are critical of religious institutions in favor of a “religion of man.” Despite this universalism, I read Tagore’s poetry as always, at some level, linked to an actual, but still radically contestatory, relationship to Hinduism. In the context of a Hindu readership, Tagore’s is not the lyrical voice of the Mystical East, but a modernist Hinduism (or Hindu modernism), one that questions the nature of traditional religious beliefs and practices, sometimes radically, while seriously investigating the role of art in the making of national culture. In contrast, many western readers, in spite of their awareness of Tagore’s bridging of religious and secular discourses in his poetry, tend to situate him within the fold of the Christian theological tradition. Tagore rose to international fame in 1912, when his self-translated book of poems, Gitanjali, was published by Macmillan Press, with an ecstatic forward by W.B. Yeats.16 In the vast bulk of Tagore's poetry there is no reference to politics, race, or nationalism, but these issues are present in abundance in Tagore's prose works from 1900 on.17 Tagore’s poetry was an international sensation, but the discourse of the reception of the poems was both divided and complex. Most critics read Tagore, approvingly, as an ascetic and a mystic, his poetry as tapping into an ancient (and timeless) spring of spiritual truth in an era when industrialization and commerce were dominant. But while some critics read him as essentially Oriental, which is to say alien to European culture, and to the aesthetic principles of western literature, many readers had no difficulty judging Tagore by prevailing European standards. The responses to Tagore are almost as interesting as Tagore's own writing; hence I examine closely a few responses to Gitanjali with regard to Orientalist and religious discourses, before moving on to a brief consideration of the poetry itself. Since they generally avoid the question of nationalism, the issue the 16

Tagore was politically marginal to the Indian nationalist movement, especially in its latter stages. His position can be compared, productively, with that of Yeats in Ireland: a strong cultural nationalism and pride in a tradition that lived in uneasy proximity to frustration with the violent and uncoordinated means of modern nationalist movements. There are in fact many other reasons to think of Tagore alongside Yeats. It was Yeats, for one thing, who was largely responsible for the enthusiastic reception of Tagore's translated poetry received in the West upon the publication of Gitanjali—the same bubble of enthusiasm which led to the awarding of the Nobel prize to Tagore in 1913. But Tagore did a bit more than Yeats in responding to the relationship of religion to nationalism and modernity. In his prose writings (some of them written in English for western readers, much of it written in Bengali for a Bengali Indian audience) Tagore was an extremely provocative philosopher of modernity. 17 One major exception to this rule is Tagore's poem "The Sunset of the Century," selftranslated and included in Nationalism.

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poems raise for Tagore's western readers is that of the role of poetry in the modern world. Tellingly, the problematic at the center of this issue is unfailingly the distinction between religious and secular literature. It's a problem inherited from Romanticism: is the poet a secular version of a prophet, or a figure whose role in society must be utterly separate from all established institutions? While the reviewers all center in one way or another around this question, the orientation to religion in their responses varies dramatically. Both the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement hail Tagore as a prophetic figure whose Indianness and religiosity are less important than his potential regenerative impact on the modern (secular, decadent) west. Both reviews are marked by Orientalism, but the aim of both is quite similar to Tagore’s own intent: to promote the ideas present in Hindu religious writing as part of a universalist and humanist philosophy. These reviews align Tagore with western mystics such as A.E., Yeats, and Schopenhauer, all of whom write with an aim to correct what they see as the moral and spiritual failings of western civilization. The key similarity, present in both the TLS and the NYT reviews of Tagore, is their emphasis on Tagore as a Guru-like figure. This attitude is also expressed in an anonymous review of a collection of Tagore’s writings in translation, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review. In India, religion and philosophy, and what with us was [sic] the classical and the mediaeval tradition, are not in conflict. It is as if Plato had sat at the feet of Paul and Aquinas had himself hearkened to Aristotle. Our civilization, as Tagore acutely points out, has been produced within city walls. We start with the habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. . . . The individual of the European civilization strives for power; the 18 individual of the Indian civilization strives for harmony.

Some of this language (responding to Tagore’s essay “Sadhana,” included in the 1916 Bolpur edition of his collected English-language writings), is strongly reminiscent of Tagore’s rhetorical strategy in Nationalism. Interestingly, if the review is generous in identifying Tagore as a religious thinker and a philosopher alongside Plato and Paul, it consistently reads Tagore in a specifically Christian context. Earlier in the essay, the reviewer referred to the “church” in Calcutta at which Tagore “preaches”19, and it can’t be overlooked that all of the 18

Anonymous review, New York Times Book Review, December 10, 1916. Interestingly, the reference to Tagore’s church appears in a passage that strongly emphasizes Tagore’s location in Bengal and his Bengali audience. “[After the publication of Gitanjali,] [t]he church he preached in was filled to overflowing. His plays were the delight of Calcutta. His poems were as fine as Shelley’s, and he had them set to a music that was as delightful as Schubert’s. His philosophic essays were wonderful statements of metaphysical and ethical realities. His novels and stories were read throughout all 19

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philosophers named in the review are European. The review concludes with a dense formulation of Tagore’s position at the bridge of the religious and secular worlds: For, if he is not the greatest secular figure in the world, he is the one that is most worthy of our attention and our reverence today. At a time when man and man, nation and nation, ideal and ideal is [sic] so tragically divided he comes forward to tell us that not in power but in comprehension is the fulfilment [sic] of man's existence.20

The New York Times reviewer appreciates Tagore's holistic approach, and is self-conscious in disavowing complications related to Tagore’s cultural, racial, and religious difference. Tagore is read here as he himself hoped he would be— a worldly figure. Most importantly, the reviewer associates Tagore with the sacred ("reverence") even as he clearly marks Tagore as a "secular figure." But this says nothing about whether Tagore himself asked to be revered: the reviewer’s blurring of the religious/secular boundary may say more about the religiosity of the reviewer than on Tagore’s own relationship to religious discourse. In this reviewer’s interpretive framework, even verse-writing clearly outside of the frame of institutional religion should be rewarded with "reverence" if it shows signs of true “comprehension.” The Times Literary Supplement review of Gitanjali echoes this simultaneous inscription of religiosity and secularity in a somewhat similar way. The reviewer identifies the European moment in art as one of "decadence," an environment where writers have lost the ability to write with an eye to generality. The reviewer sees Tagore as a source of aesthetic and spiritual regeneration, partly for the latter's apparent intimacy with religion: [I]n reading [Tagore's poems], one feels, not that they are the curiosities of an alien mind, but that they are prophetic of the poetry that might be written in England if our poets could attain to the same harmony of emotion and idea. That divorce of religion and philosophy which prevails among us is a sign of our failure in both. . . . . But this Indian poet, without any obsolete timidity of thought, makes religion and philosophy one. He contemplates the universe as a primitive poet might contemplate a pair of lovers, and makes poetry out of it as naturally and simply. As we read his pieces we seem to be reading the Psalms of a David of our time who addresses a God realized by his own act of faith and conceived according to his own experience of life.21

The sentiment in the early part of the passage echoes the demystifying gesture Bengal. His school was taking over again the soul of India. And his personal life was that of a philosopher-saint.” 20 Anonymous revew, New York Times Book Review, December 10, 1916. 21 Times Literary Supplement, November 7, 1912; p. 492.

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Yeats makes in his figuring of Tagore in the preface to the first edition of Gitanjali: "[W]e are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image." Demystification enables recognition, through which the reviewer can comment on British poetry symptomatically, as prone to failure because of the "divorce of religion and philosophy." The TLS, like the New York Times, is not troubled at all by Orientalism, though both reviewers (as well as Yeats) do call attention to their de-Orientalizing gestures, suggesting their surprise at discovering that the poems are comprehensible as the work of a "mind" that is not in fact "alien." Continuing with his argument that Tagore's poetry offers a corrective to western decadence, the reviewer praises Tagore for harmonizing "religion and philosophy." More closely, the reviewer situates Tagore as simultaneously "primitive" and romantic ("a pair of lovers"), as simultaneously “religious” in the Biblical sense and “spiritual” in the modern, Deistic sense: "a God realized by his own act of faith." As with the New York Times, the reviewer here refuses to read Tagore as a religious writer without insisting upon both his contemporaneity and his secularism22. Both readings are predicated on a degree of separation of the categories of the religious and the secular that are quite conspicuously undone by Tagore's poetry. A quite different response to Tagore appears in The Nation, in 1916, on the occasion of the publication of the same “collected works” volume reviewed to such acclaim by the New York Times. This reviewer, Paul E. More, is steeped in “Sanskrit literature,” and reads Tagore principally in terms of his ability to represent that tradition. His general understanding of Tagore is not entirely in contradiction with the other reviews, as they share a dependence on a form of Orientalism. Just as the other responses locate Tagore at the union of religion and philosophy, in secular space but worthy of reverence, the first identity Paul E. More assigns Tagore is that of “modern Hindu.” Unlike the other reviewers, however, More finds Tagore’s engagement with European thought to be disappointing: Whatever Tagore may be, and whencesoever he draws his inspiration, he is in essence everything that ancient India, philosophically and religiously, was not. . . [A]t heart, in its inner meaning, the world of Tagore is as far from that of his ancestors as if he had been born under the sky of contemporary France or

22 Another reader of Tagore’s, Paul Nash, articulated in a letter a response that was virtually identical: “One feels about them [that] they are the thoughts that come to our minds in moments of deep feeling, to some of us quite often to others rarely, written down for us in the simplest way. . . . As to style, beauty of language, craft of any kind I am not bothered by it. I would read Gitanjali as I would read the Bible for comfort and for strength” (cited in Dutta and Robinson, 167).

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Echoing a tradition of colonial mistrust of colonized subjectivity, More reads Tagore’s deviation from the literary tradition of “ancient India” as “sly.” If the problem for many Bengali (or Indian) readers of elite writers such as Tagore is their apparent interest in “imitating” the aesthetic principles of western literature (even if that imitation may be a form of “sly civility”), More’s issue with Tagore is rather Gitanjali’s pale imitation of Tagore’s own ancient tradition. After introducing his essay with this claim, More cites several poems from Gitanjali, followed by a comparable amount of text from the Bhagavad-Gita, which he sees as presenting an “absolute contrast” to Tagore’s writing. In place of Tagore's delight in the waves of change, the alternations of birth and death, there was in the heart of the ancient Hindu a yearning to escape into a region of unchanging peace. In place of the dreaming dissolution into Nature and of waiting for her “perfume of promise,” there was a distrust of the world’s visible beauty as of a snare for the soul. In place of surrender to the lulling charm of illusion there was a temper of austere renunciation. In place of the humanitarian religion of sympathy, which is at bottom nothing more than the pis aller of a soul that has sought for spiritual things and failed to find them through inability to climb the heights, there was the ambition of the seer to transcend the world. 24

More’s denigration of Tagore is not without its insights. Indeed, though his response to Tagore’s fluidity and worldliness is negative, More grasps in a way that the other reviewers perhaps do not Tagore’s essentially modern character. More sees Tagore, not as an Oriental outside of and anterior to history, but as a writer who consciously privileges fluidity and change over “unchanging peace.” The source of his dislike is less that Tagore is imitative, either of the Gita or of the western writers he names, but rather that Tagore is too original. I share with More the sense that, despite their apparent devotionalism, the poems in Gitanjali are widely opposed to “religion.” Moreover, the poems in Gitanjali echo Tagore’s treatment of religious orthodoxy in Nationalism, which was discussed earlier. Here, the narrator is deeply preoccupied by the thought of the divine—thematized as access to truth and to love—but articulates this in a profoundly human-centered and even materialist way. Paradoxically, though religious rituals and religious texts such as the Vedas do not provide access to the divine, the poems are unmistakably grounded in a Hindu religious context. No poem in Gitanjali illustrates Tagore's critical intent more than poem XI, of which More quotes an excerpt:

23 24

Paul E. More, The Nation, November 30, 196; pp. 506-507. Ibid.

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Gitanjali XI Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in the sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil! Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever. Come out of thy meditations and leave aside the flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow. (Tagore, 1913)

In some ways, poem XI is simply arguing against asceticism, against the isolation of human experience from the everyday and natural world. It is a rhetoric familiar from Romanticism—one sees here traces of Blake’s radicalism, for instance. But the details of the Hindu ritual (“chanting and singing and telling of beads”), and the spatial opposition between the “dark corner of a temple” and the open field are particular to the Hindu context—something Tagore’s western readers seem to miss. Interestingly, the opposition here is not that of a hard asceticism contrasted with a soft Romanticism (what More describes as “dreaming dissolution”). Rather, it is posed as the distinction between “flowers and incense” and the “hard ground,” the life of everyday toil. It is not nature that intoxicates and is “soft,” but the ascetic life, caged by mindnumbing ritual. Another poem also figures the “temple” in a negative light: Gitanjali LXXXVIII Deity of the ruined temple! The broken strings of Vina sing no more your praise. The bells in the evening proclaim not your time of worship. The air is still and silent about you. In your desolate dwelling comes the vagrant spring breeze. It brings the tidings of flowers—the flowers that for your worship are offered no more. Your worshipper of old wanders ever longing for favour still refused. In the eventide, when fires and shadows mingle with the gloom of dust, he wearily comes back to the ruined temple with hunger in his heart. Many a festival day comes to you in silence, deity of the ruined temple. Many a night of worship goes away with lamp unlit. Many new images are built by masters of cunning art and carried in the holy stream of oblivion when their time is come. Only the deity of the ruined temple remains unworshipped in deathless neglect. (Tagore, 1913)

Here the tone is much more ambivalent—part tragic and part polemical. The

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temple is empty: either the worshippers have intentionally left (stopped believing), or they have been distracted away. Whatever the reason, however, it is clear that the space is no longer used; Hinduism is no longer attached to ritual spaces, acts (lamp-lighting, festivals, sacred images). The space of the temple, figured in this and other poems from Gitanjali, echoes the passage from Nationalism with which I began the first section of this chapter—with a difference. If, in that passage, Tagore figures nationalism as a temple whose steps are bloodstained, here, where the subject is itself religion, Tagore seems to be suggesting that the temple is in fact no longer central to the scene.

Fluid nations/castes/desires in Gora Tagore's Gora (1909) is often compared to Kipling's Kim (1899). Kipling's novel appeared only a decade before Tagore's, and both feature protagonists who are of Irish descent, but are orphaned in India and raised as Indians. Both are usually thought of as novels of racial passing. But if Kim is really a narrative about a spy—a person who is “essentially” British but who has exceptionally thorough knowledge of Indian language and culture—Gora is a novel about a flawed “Indian” nationalist with minimal connection to the British Raj. As a result, I believe the racial narrative of Tagore's novel is less important than the conflict between the protagonist's caste Hinduism and his desire for nationalism. Indeed, I find that Gora has more in common with some of the other novels that I discuss elsewhere: George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Joyce's Ulysses. Like Eliot's Deronda, Tagore's protagonist struggles for a coherent ethical foundation that he is unable to fully access until he learns a truth about his identity that ruptures his link to a dominant religious community. 25 Like Joyce's character Leopold Bloom, Gora is a character whose desire to envision a national community is challenged by his religious difference. Though Bloom is considerably more ambivalent about committing to the ideology of nationalism than Gora is, and is never close enough to Jewish religious tradition to be even remotely orthodox, both Gora and Bloom are enthusiastic, worldly subjects who instinctually oppose British colonialism. Tagore wrote the novel towards the end of the most active political phase of his life. By 1906, Tagore decided to distance himself from the Swadeshi (homemade/home-country) movement, which he had helped to found. Like Tagore’s later lectures on nationalism, Gora is in many ways a critique of dogmatic nationalism that itself puts forward some powerful arguments for what might be 25

Incidentally, both Gora and Daniel Deronda have been compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dutta and Robinson cite a Leonard Woolf letter in which he compares Gora to the Stowe novel (Dutta and Robinson, 155); Eliot herself makes the comparison in one of her letters (Selected Letters of George Eliot).

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termed an organic and non-militant kind of nationalism—a national culture, though without the Fanonian overtones. Though Tagore’s most emphatic critique of the populist nationalism of the Swadeshi movement, The Home and the World, would be written some years after Gora, the seeds of Tagore’s disillusionment with the ideologies of mass politics are also hinted at in this novel in the travails of its protagonist. The protagonist of Tagore’s Gora is referred to by the other characters in the novel by his nickname, which can be translated from Bengali (and Hindi) as “fair faced.” In common speech, “Gora” can also be translated pejoratively as something akin to “whiteboy.” Gora carries the secret of his outsider birth in his nickname, which points at his foreign heredity but does not pinpoint it. Until Gora is outed—as an outcaste—he is affectionately called “Gora” by his friends and by the family members who do not know the secret of his birth. The irony is, they call him by this misnomer without realizing that the misnomer is true. Until that moment, the nickname “Gora” signifies a harmless physical difference, without suggesting true outsider status. Gora is “white” in the sense that his physical complexion is fair but he is not White in the sense of being anthropologically exogamous—outcaste or mleccha. Though neither figure shared Gora’s personal life-narrative, Gora’s personality in the novel in some ways resembles both Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Raja Rammohun Roy. Bankim was a novelist (in fact, the very first Indian novelist) with fervent nationalist beliefs, who firmly believed that Indian nationalism had to be Hindu nationalism.26 Gora also resembles Rammohun Roy, the founder of the widely influential Hindu reformist movement known as the Brahmo Samaj. Roy is famous for (among many other things) coining the word “Hinduism,” in 1816.27 As a loosely arrayed set of religious beliefs and practices (some of which revolved around an open canon of texts of varying sacredness, many of which were transmitted orally, all of which varied regionally), Hindu religious traditions are very ancient. But the word “Hindu” did not become widely used until the high medieval era, and even then it was a word of Persian (rather than Sanskritic) origins: al-Hind. 28 26 Bankim’s importance bears out yet again Benedict Anderson’s association of the novel with the emergence of nationalist ideology. The twist in this case is of course that Bankim’s nationalism, though it was not directly associated with religious authority, was never a ‘secular’ nationalism. Cultures with decentered religious traditions (that is to say, religions without a ‘pope’) do not easily fit into the assumption Anderson makes, that the novel as a vernacular literary form, need be particularly ‘secular’. 27 See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, 98-103. 28 Bankim Chandra Chatterjee also commented on this in his “Letters on Hinduism”: “Search through all the vast written literature of India, and you will not, except in modern writings where the Hindu has sought obsequiously to translate the phraseaology of his conquerors, meet with any mention of such a thing as the Hindu religion. Search through

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With Rammohun Roy, Tagore’s grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore helped found the Brahmo Samaj movement, in 1823. Tagore’s family continued to remain involved with the movement, and Tagore was himself the leader of one of the factions of the Brahmo Samaj (the “Adi [or original] Samaj”) for a time in the 1880s. There is much that could be said about the importance of this movement on Tagore’s social and intellectual milieu, as well as on Tagore personally. David Kopf, who has written an influential book on the Brahmo Samaj29, is certainly right to argue that Tagore’s association with this movement may be his most important intellectual asset. There is certainly much more to it than a simple matter of orient and occident, or colonial mimicry. The question of eastern and western civilization is in play, but to a great extent it is a question that is internal to the discourse of the Brahmo Samaj. Tagore’s East/West bridging, as well as his attempt to fashion a secular writerly persona can only be understood through the history of the Brahmo Samaj. The Brahmo Samaj was the most influential Indian “reform” movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to its commitment to the consolidation and standardization of a set of practices, beliefs, and texts that constituted Hinduism, the Brahmos were involved in a number of hotbutton religious issues in nineteenth century India, particularly the movement against Sati (or widow-burning) as well as the movement to reform caste. Since the Brahmos were among the most Anglicized elite classes in Indian society at the time, their approach to religious “reform” is sometimes read as a form of mimicry—Brahmo-ism is sometimes casually described (with a grain of truth) as a kind of Hindu Unitarianism. Undoubtedly, the members of the community were exactly what Macaulay had in mind in his 1835 “Minute on Education,” which called for the creation of a class of Indians educated in English, as a necessity for more effective colonial governance. Many Brahmos did indeed work in the administration of the Empire, but, significantly, from the start the movement was also a hotbed of nationalist activity. In terms of theology, Brahmo-ism was rather like a Hindu version of Unitarianism, with a strong emphasis on collapsing Hindu polytheism into a monotheist conception of Brahma—God as a creator.30 Perhaps more importantly, the Brahmos all the vast records of pre-Mohamedan India, nowhere will you meet with even such a word as Hindu, let alone Hindu religion. Nay more. Search through the whole of that record, and nowhere will you meet with such a word as religion. The word Dharma, which is used in the modern vernaculars as its equivalent, was never used in preMohamedan India in the same sense as Religion” (cited in Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 75) 29 David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Making of the Modern Indian Mind. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 30 As Tagore himself put it in a speech he gave in the United States in 1912: 'The Brahmo Samaj movement in India is the movement for the spiritual reconciliation of the East and West, the reconciliation resting upon the broad basis of spiritual wisdom laid in the

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discouraged external expressions of devotion (dismissively referred to by the British as “ritualism”) and encouraged practicing Hinduism through “belief.” They were strongly invested in defining Hinduism as a religion, but the primary idiom available to them was derived from Protestant missionaries: faith rather than acts. The Brahmo Samaj was clearly a product of a particular form of the colonial discourse on religion, thoroughly grounded in what Partha Chatterjee might call the “thematic” of a Protestant epistemology of religion and belief. It was in some sense unthinkable in the nineteenth century to respond to the Missionaries’ critique of Hindu “rituals” with an utter rejection of the discourse of religion they proposed. In that historical context, neither caste nor polytheism seemed to have any role in “religion.”31 Thus, the leaders of the movement set out to “reform” Hinduism, using a discourse which derived as much from the Protestant Reformation as from English liberalism. “Reform” for Tagore and other Brahmos, is encoded as a religious preoccupation: if the colonial meaning of “religion” is in part a function of its deployment by Protestant colonizers, “reform” for writers like Tagore evokes nothing other than the Reformation: For us, there can be no question of blind revolution, but of steady and purposeful education. If to break up the feudal system and the tyrannical conventionalism of the Latin Church which had outraged the healthier instincts of humanity, Europe needed the thought impetus of the Renaissance and the fierce struggle of the Reformation, do we not in a greater degree need an overwhelming influx of higher social ideals before a place can be found for true political thinking? Must we not have that greater vision of humanity which will impel us to shake off the fetters that shackle our individual life before we begin to dream of national freedom?32

Quite in contrast to Matthew Arnold, Tagore sees no tension at all between the religiosity of the Reformation and the humanism of the Renaissance. In his reading of European history, they are both part of the progress of "higher social ideals" that enabled European advancement and nation-building. The Brahmo Samaj “reformation” is important to Gora because the debate over caste and the nature of religious expression at the center of Tagore's novel echoes debates within the Brahmo community. Gourmohan (or Gora, as he is generally called), is a young Bengali whose strict adherence to caste and Upanishads. There is again the same call to the people to rise above all artificial barriers of caste and recognise the common bond of brotherhood in the name of God.' (Tagore, Collected English Writings, 3:360). 31 Of course, the contemporary anthropology of religion is much better at reading practices that differ from the Protestant model. Today few would question whether 'caste' fits under the rubric of 'the religious,' since social practices such as caste are widely recognized as central to religious expression in many communities. 32 Tagore, “The Problem of India,” Cited in Tagore: An Anthology, 240.

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espousal of “Hinduism” can be traced to a challenge from a British missionary in a local newspaper article. Gora begins his intervention by responding33 to the charges the missionary makes against Hinduism in a local newspaper. In this public exchange, “Hinduism” first takes root in Gora’s thinking as a commitment to Indian national culture. Moreover, the exchange introduces a link between national culture and print-culture which recurs throughout the novel. Gora develops as a series of very involved arguments about the nature of caste and nationalism between Gora and his friend Binoy on one side (both of them caste Hindus), and several members of a prominent Brahmo Samaj family, on the other. Importantly, the primary interlocutors in the debate are two women in that household, Sucharita and Lolita. The rising intensity of the argument also coincides with the flowering of heterosexual romantic plots between the two men and the two women. Both plots seem destined to end tragically, since the fact that the two women belong to the reformist Brahmo Samaj (and therefore oppose caste) means they no longer keep caste and are therefore off-limits for observant Brahmins. Because the primary participants in the debate over religion and nationalism are in love with each other, the rhetoric of desire inflects the image of nationalism in the novel. The two plots—nationalist and romantic—are so intimately connected that they are effectively inseparable. Take, for instance, Binoy’s description of his love for Lolita: [Binoy] 'My heart is too full Gora. I know you may not be interested but I cannot rest until I have told you all that is in my heart. I do not know what it is; I cannot judge whether it is right or wrong, but I am certain it is something that cannot be trifled with. I have read a lot about it in books and, until now, thought I knew all about it. It is like seeing the picture of a pond or lake and presuming that one can swim quite easily. But now that I am plunged into water, I know instantly that one can’t fake swimming.' 34

Binoy describes “love” as a feeling of fullness that is also a feeling of submersion. The reference to learning about it in books is familiar and also more important than it might seem, since in Gora’s analysis, the element of the book is in fact determining. Hidden in Gora's rather cerebral description of desire is a comment about the spread of print-culture in colonial India: [Gora] 'I can assure you, all that effusion about women in English books has its basis in nothing else but sexual desire. . . . The impulse which makes your mind hover around Poresh Babu’s house [where Sucharita and Lolita live]—like the 33 The debate between Gora and the missionary in the newspaper directly echoes a public historical debate that occurred between Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and a Christian missionary in the 1850s. 34 Tagore, Gora, 84-85.

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moth around a flame—that impulse is called ‘love’ in English.' 35

These references to learning about “love” from [English] books raises serious questions about the role of love in the context of colonial education. Gora describes the “impulse” (dismissively) as a characteristic of English books, rather than a universal emotion, and “love” as an English word (though there are in fact numerous ways of expressing “love” in Bengali!). This line of thinking suggests that the romantic plot of this novel is influenced by the genre in which Tagore is writing (i.e., the novel, a European form). It also suggests that the desire Gora describes (“that impulse is called ‘love’ in English”) is in an idiom that is English in provenance. It's an immense claim to make: his friend experiences love, but Gora, while respecting the honesty of the claim, argues that the emotion itself may be a discursive effect of colonialism. All of this comes to a head in Gora’s response to Binoy, where he directly associates Binoy's love with his own rubric of nationalism: [Gora] So far you were quite content with what you read in books about love for a woman—I too know about love for one’s country only from reading books. When you actually experienced such love, you knew immediately how much more real it is than what the books had told you. . . . Similarly, once love for my country becomes so overwhelmingly evident to me, I too will not be able to escape. That day it will draw to itself all my wealth and life, all my bones, marrow and blood, all my sky and light—everything. While listening to you I was slowly getting some small idea of how wondrously, how unambiguously manifest, bright, the true image of my country will be—how mightily powerful its joy and its sorrow, which can bound over life and death in a moment like flood-waters.36

Gora paints a very calculated resemblance between nationalism and desire for women, and at this point in the story unhesitatingly chooses the former. Note the echo here of Gora’s earlier language of luminosity (a moth around a flame), as well as Binoy’s language of fluidity. There is a significant distinction, however, between Binoy’s figure of love as a disturbing sense of immersion in a pool when one cannot swim, and Gora’s image of nationalism as a flood. Gora’s image is active, total, and apocalyptic, while Binoy’s is personal and subjective. An individual is transformed by submersion in a standing pool; entire communities will be affected by a flood. Though Tagore often avoids directly engaging issues of gender roles, the women characters are central in the narrative of emergent nationalism in Gora. Gora originally responds to Binoy's attraction to women as an example of a love-object that is not his ideal, since Gora's ideal is the nation. But as the novel develops, and as the romance between Gora with Sucharita blossoms, it begins 35 36

Tagore, Gora, 11. Ibid., 87.

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to appear that Gora's desire for a nation—Bharatvarsha—can only be unlocked through his love for Sucharita. Her intelligence, her civility, and her fortitude all directly symbolize the image of national culture Gora has been striving to understand. Following a pattern Sangeeta Ray outlines in her book EnGendering India,37 Sucharita is constructed by Gora as a metonymy for a nationalist discourse that generally circulates among men. However, in contrast to Tagore's later novel The Home and the World, which is the focus of Ray's reading, Gora's female characters are neither innocent of nor unaware of the way this metonymy exploits women. The women in this novel are active interlocutors who willingly contribute to the emergent discourse (even though the public aspect of their participation is problematic) rather than passive objects described by men. In an echo of Daniel Deronda, Gora's true descent is made clear to the reader quite early on, but when Gora finally learns the secret of his heredity, it is shattering. The fact that he is of Irish descent means that Gora’s aspiration to maintain a strict caste-regimen, which is exactly what frustrates his attraction to Sucharita, is null and void. Because of blood, he can never be a proper Brahmin; instead he is mleccha (outcaste). If anything, it is Sucharita’s prerogative, now, to reject him, but she doesn't. She overlooks an aspect of his identity she would find distasteful, and shows consistency to Brahmo Samajist ideals (these ideals were actually constantly being challenged, as most Brahmos found castesnobbery difficult to dislodge). The blood-narrative in this novel is resolved, happily, in a successful romance. At the same time, Gora realizes that his potential relationship to nationalism is only strengthened by the revelation of his birth. Because of this turn of events, I do not read Gora as a narrative about blood so much as a commitment to an ethical ideal38—a national ideal that is realizable when entrenched social and conceptual barriers are overcome. Rather than allow the truth to ruin him, for Gora the eradication of caste can enable access to a national community (and, as I mentioned, a love-object), which had previously seemed inaccessible: Today I am Indian [Bharatiya]. Within me there is no conflict between communities, whether Hindu or Muslim or Christian. Today all the castes of India [Bharat] are my caste [Bangla: jaati amar jaat], whatever everybody eats is my food. I must tell you I have visited many districts of Bengal, have accepted hospitality from the lowest caste of villagers . . . but I never could really become one with them. It was as if I carried around me some invisible gap of separation,

37

Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Woman Nation in Postcolonial Narratives, 93-95. This echoes my reading of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which turns on a similar “adoption” plot. There also, Deronda’s coming out as a Jew is not so much determined by blood as by his education into a Jewish belief-system and a commitment to the ethical ideals of Judaism.

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which I could not cross.39

Because of his foreign birth Gora cannot be a caste Hindu; but because Gora is not of Indian descent, he can, paradoxically, call himself an Indian. The [Bengali] language of this passage is significant, especially the word Tagore uses (here as well as elsewhere) that is translated as “caste.” “Jaat” is one of two Bengali (and Sanskrit) words that can be translated as caste; the other word, “Varna,” is the term that appears in the Vedas, and is the form of vertical caste associated with the caste-system at its most rigid. “Varna” etymologically means “color”; when applied to people it means “caste.” But the word Tagore uses, “jaat,” is equally translatable as caste, race, or birth. It’s effectively an ingroup/out-group designation which does not allow for a hierarchy of difference, and makes all difference—as difference—equivalent. In other words, the difference between a Bengali Brahmin and a Brahmin elsewhere may be one of jaat—but so is the difference between an Irishman and an Indian, or that between a European and an African. The slipperiness embedded in Tagore’s idea of “jaat” finds its way into Tagore’s Nationalism, where Tagore translates it—as “caste”—in such a way as to make “jaat” synonymous with the discourse identified in the United States as “race.” In those lectures, which I cited near the beginning of this chapter, Tagore maps India’s caste problem quite directly to the American race problem. There is much to criticize in this gesture. To begin with, it is largely ahistorical. Secondly, Tagore shows a tendency to justify social dominance through physiological differences (skin color), when this association may in fact be spurious: is it really true that Indian Brahmins are, on the whole, lighter skinned than other castes? And is this difference really attributable to outside birth? Tagore’s shift of emphasis to the injustice of both the American and the Indian systems does little to hide the fact that the version of the “race” story he tells is itself implicated in the construction of caste difference—just as nineteenthcentury race theory was indispensible to America’s post-bellum racial woes. At the same time, Tagore’s critical alignment of caste and race can be read as a unique response to prevalent colonial racism: for Tagore, the distinction between an Indian and a white person (English or Irish) was no more or less important than that between a caste-Hindu and a Hindu of a different caste. In the novel itself, however, the alignment of caste and race divisions does nothing to allay the real psychic pain caused to the characters by caste transgression. And Gora’s (and Tagore’s) attempt to declare the discourse of caste entirely archaic was unlikely to succeed. Attempts to eradicate caste discrimination by subsequent generations of leadership in independent India have met with only mixed success. To this day, Indians struggle in a maze of caste conflicts, which that are frequently antagonized by governmental attempts at remedial action via 39

Tagore, Gora, 475.

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affirmative action “reservations” in education and jobs. While the reservations system has positively impacted the lives of many members of formerly untouchable groups, the very extensiveness of the reservations system has actually served to solidify caste identity in ways that its early advocates could not have anticipated. The most famous of these controversies is the 1991 implementation of the Mandal Commission report, which expanded reservations to the point that nearly 50% of all government jobs and university admissions slots are reserved for members of “scheduled” and “backward castes.” Of course, Tagore would have been horrified to see the persistence of caste in independent India. For him, as for James Joyce, the paramount question was always the status of the individual creative mind. In works like Gora and Gitanjali, the emergence of conscious thought and the apprehension of the truth of social relations depend to a great extent on the individual’s ability to secularize his or her perspective. Though Joyce was a very different writer, his major works chart a parallel trajectory towards literary secularism.

CHAPTER FOUR DIASPORAS AND PROMISED LANDS: IRELAND, ISRAEL, AND JOYCE’S ULYSSES

It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Beginning of Joyce's Secularism: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce's turn away from all forms of religious and external political authority was more radical than that chosen by nearly any other author in this study. Writers like Jean Genet and D.H. Lawrence may have lived more radical lifestyles, but few writers were as rigorous in their choice of institutional rejections, and almost no one was as public about it for as long as Joyce was. For a concrete example, biographer Richard Ellmann describes how Joyce rejected the Church's “interference” in what he called his “matrimonium,” and lived with Nora Barnacle for 25 years before they legally married on a visit to England in 1931. Joyce also refused to allow his son Giacomo to be baptized (though according to a biographer Joyce's aunts apparently had it done in his absence). And perhaps most famously, Joyce's distaste for the authoritarian climate of Ireland (due as much to the presence of England as to the Church) led him to leave as a young man, and spend his adult life in “exile.” Ironically, despite Joyce's exile—from both the Catholic Church and Ireland—his writings remain, as Cranly puts it in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “supersaturated” with images of the discourses he rejected. In Stephen Dedalus's direct struggles with his religious beliefs, one sees a close image of Joyce. According to Ellmann, many of the incidents narrated in Portrait of the Artist, as well as (to a lesser extent) Ulysses, were based on events he himself experienced. Stephen's epigrammatic statements of commitment at the end of the novel have become strongly identified with Joyce's own “real life” views, and there is little reason to challenge the association. That said, there is a significant difference between Joyce's voice and Stephen's regarding temperament. According to most biographical accounts, Joyce in his daily life was full of humor, excessively social (as an adult), and

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relatively light-spirited; while Stephen, in his appearance in the two novels, is generally sullen, alienated, and gloomy. Portrait of the Artist doesn't exactly demonstrate the secularism it describes (that privilege is reserved for Leopold Bloom), but I start with it because it shows Joyce's crisis of personal faith, and provides the aesthetic blueprint for his later worldliness. To begin with, Stephen’s dramatic rejection of church and nation is clearly the climactic revelation of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using as my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.1

Notice that Stephen's refusal of the church accompanies his refusal of the Irish nation—they are, in Joyce’s mind at least, closely linked, though not identical. Another moment at which this coupling occurs is in the phrase uttered early in the novel (when Stephen is still a child), where Stephen's father describes the Irish as a “Priestridden Godforsaken race!” The first two terms cancel each other out: father Simon Dedalus seems to imply that the absence of God in Ireland seems to be indexed to the presence (or overabundance) of priests. But the third term in Simon’s rant, the word “race,” remains present as a kind of riddle for Irishness. The Irish “Race” remains alive in Joyce, recurring at the very end of Portrait of the Artist (“the uncreated conscience of my race”), and then again at certain critical moments in Ulysses (as in Bloom's avowal of his belonging to a “race”—but one which is Jewish rather than Irish). Though nation and church are coupled as sources of authority in both Mr. Dedalus's epithet and the younger Stephen's statement of exile as a strategy, it is nevertheless important to remember the real distinctions between the two concepts. The nation is a modern construct; it is an idea that Joyce is interested in at least insofar as it offers an alternative to British colonialism in Ireland. Joyce, to be sure, rejects the mystical, backwards-looking ideals of the Celtic revival, and is deeply critical of the militant republicanism he would represent in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, but it's nevertheless certain that Joyce has a concept of Irish nationhood in mind, which continues to have a place of prominence in the imaginations of his main characters. In contrast, the Church is for Stephen (and for Joyce) an object of pure contempt from a rather early age. And yet, Joyce's writing remains “supersaturated” with religious imagery. In this, Joyce is quite similar to Salman Rushdie, though he perhaps differs from George Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, and V.S. Naipaul. It is important to remember that Stephen’s refusal of the church and the 1

Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 243.

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nation, and his insistence on expressing himself “as freely as [he] can” doesn’t lead to simple liberation. The secular world doesn’t present itself to him as a clear alternative to the worlds he wishes to disavow. Rather, Stephen is forced to organize his resistance as a kind of intense negativity (“defence… silence, exile, and cunning”). Stephen's three masters (the Church, the British Crown, and the state of Ireland) are so overwhelming that a modern mode of consciousness is likely to remain stunted as long as it is under their authority. Also, Stephen's cold voice of refusal comes at the end of a long struggle, whose outcome is by no means guaranteed. Throughout the central part of the novel (sections III and IV), Stephen oscillates between a sense of complete piousness and grace (as in, the passage after his confession) and complete degeneracy and sinfulness. At his darkest, Stephen visits prostitutes and has nightmares about hell that cause him to vomit upon waking; at his brightest and purest Stephen is almost saintly. Young Stephen is, in short, captivated by Christianity; his whole world is shaped by it. Even his wildest oscillations are structured by Catholic rhetoric, and his poetic imagination is driven by Catholic imagery. Portrait of the Artist is a narrative of secularization that is extremely attentive to the individual consciousness. It is the narrative of Stephen's struggle with his soul. Few other works of modern literature are so aggressively poised against religious institutions. But few also have equally compelling images of individuals who are almost completely formed by religious experience. Stephen's intellect and emotions are thoroughly attuned to the language and ritual life of the Church; he is extremely susceptible to the smell of incense, the sight of the altar, or the words of the Priest at confession. He only learns of his destiny outside of the life of the church through the murmurings of “instinct”; no rational/linguistic discourse would be stable enough or reliable enough to direct him. The idea of redemption from sin has for Stephen a profound spiritual attraction. And while Stephen's rejection of the Church is never perfect (his turn to neo-Platonic philosophy is motivated by a set of concerns that are profoundly Catholic), there is no doubt that it takes him, finally, completely outside. It is simply wrong, in my view, to see Stephen as continuing to be a crypto-Catholic, or an “inner” Catholic. Stephen uses all of his force of will to express his rejection of servitude—once made, the step carries the force of decision. Of course, before he is ready to publicly express it, Stephen feels an internal awareness of his need to leave his Jesuit education and the enclosure of a future life of as a priest behind. Of particular importance in these early “quickening” is his sense that his calling is to “encounter the reality of experience,” which directly entails a spatially uncloistered existence: Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or piety, quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The chill and order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the cold of the morning and filing down with the others to early mass and trying vainly to struggle with his prayers

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The brunt of Stephen's reaction here is to the sterility of monkish discipline. But more importantly, perhaps, there is the pull of the world beyond, which represents “reality” for Stephen but also the possibility of art. The weaving of these two of these desires (that is, to experience reality and to produce art) together with a passion for the modern experience of unbounded urban space, that comprise the blueprint of the secularism that would later come to full fruition in Ulysses. Stephen's concept of exile becomes Joyce's; Joyce's selfexiling from Ireland leads him to write one of the first great, secular diasporic novels of the twentieth century.

The Secularization of “Diaspora” “Diaspora” is a secular term with religious roots. In its contemporary usage it is one of the keywords of postcolonial criticism, a discipline of profoundly secularist orientation. Though the Greek word “diaspora” is translated into English as “dispersion,” in much postcolonial writing (both literary and critical), it has a more precise meaning: diaspora is the decentering of a territoriallybounded idea of national culture through wide-ranging transnational migration. Importantly, these patterns of transnational migration, which were a major consequence of the colonial project, have not in fact resulted in the utter dissolution of the relationship between culture and territorial belonging. If anything, dispersed peoples have often tended to create an intensified longing for, and a clarified image of, “home.” Dispersion, though it is essentially the narrative of a loss of home, seems to be an especially powerful way of motivating a desire for a home that is territorially-grounded, an idealized image of place that is almost always named the “nation.” In contrast, the historical concept of “diaspora” refers to the dispersion of the Jews across Europe, which began nearly two thousand years ago. Importantly, the word came to have this association through both Jewish and Christian religious texts: though the threat of dispersion is present in the Hebrew Bible (or Torah), “Diaspora” only comes to refer to Jews through its appearance in the Christian New Testament3. In its modern usage, the OED locates the entry of 2

Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 157. More specifically, the Greek word 'Diaspora' appears in the New Testament three times, two of which refer exclusively to Jews. But the origin of the New Testament concept of dispersion is rooted in the Hebrew Bible in the divine threat of dispersion that accompanies the inscription of the Commandments (Deuteronomy 28:25). I should add that this scriptural reading of the origin of the term 'diaspora' is further complicated by the fact that the historical event widely accepted as the moment that created the “Jewish diaspora” was in fact a non-scriptural (possibly even a secular) event, as it post-dated the events of the Torah: the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E.

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“diaspora” into the English language in the 1870s specifically with reference to Jewish dispersion4. While a thorough history of the Judeo-Christian concept of diaspora is beyond the scope of this essay, what is apparent from this limited account of the religious etymology of the word is that the Judaic significance of diaspora is quite different from its postcolonial counterpart. For European Jews before the advent of Zionism, dispersion was a scriptural narrative and a spiritual condition, not specifically oriented around a concept of nationalism centered on the production of modern nation-states. However, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a relationship between the two concepts of diaspora begins to be evident in the link between the biblical narrative of the “Promised Land” and the Zionist plan to colonize Palestine. It is not, however, a link that is immediately evident in much Zionist writing, where religious Judaism is seen as a hindrance to the progressive Jewish cause. Leaders of the Zionist movement such as Theodor Herzl were highly assimilated Jews, generally less interested in religious observance than in achieving social parity as Europeans through self-government; the Israel they had in mind was to be a “secular” nation-state5. Herzl, for instance, hardly refers to Jewish scripture in his extremely influential manifesto of Zionism, Der Judenstaat (The Jew's State). Rather than faith, Herzl specifically emphasizes modern industry and commerce in his imagining of the colonization of Palestine, devoting large sections of his manifesto to outlining the process of Europeanizing the proposed Jewish settlement. He makes the derivative quality6 of his scheme clear by proposing that a "Jewish Company" (modeled after the East India Company) be formed prior to the formal establishment of a Jewish state. When Scripture does come up in Herzl's text, it is part of a rhetoric aimed to persuade Jewish readers not to read it, or at any rate, not to allow their 4

Coincidentally, the emergence of “diaspora” as an English word referring to Jewish dispersion was contemporaneous with the birth of the first phase of the Zionist movement in Germany. 5 The evidence for this is manifold, but one very direct instance of this is passage in The Jew's State where Herzl considers both Argentina and Palestine as possible locations for a Jewish state. He opts for Palestine not for reasons of divine sanction but for practical reasons—it will be easier to rally Jews who do believe in the 'promised land' (Herzl, 148). For a fuller sense of the significance of Herzl in the context of the fin de siecle Zionist movement, see Berkowitz. 6 Here I am thinking of Chatterjee. Daniel Boyarin has made the connection between Zionism and anticolonial movements explicit in "The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry," though Boyarin focuses on Zionism as specifically a form of 'mimic' colonialism. Here, my reading of the movement aims to be somewhat more forgiving of Zionism in some ways, since critics such as Chatterjee have pointed to the ways in which a utilization of the rhetoric of the colonial authority (in the case of India) was a necessary, even a productive part of the anti-colonial struggle. Applied to Zionism, it therefore seems possible to read the movement as simultaneously para-colonial and anticolonial.

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relationship to the gentile world to be dictated by un-modern adherence to divine Commandments. It is in this spirit that Herzl comments, "If we do manage to leave Mizraim7 once more, we will not forget the fleshpots." Though he here adopts the famous passage from the Exodus narrative of the Pentateuch (Exodus 16:3), he completely reverses its meaning. An important element of my reading of Ulysses below, the phrase “fleshpots of Egypt” has been widely interpreted by both Jewish and Christian readers of Exodus as a symbol of corruption in bondage: the Israelites, in their exile the desert, long to return to servitude in Egypt because of the material comfort it offered. Heedless of the dangers of the parallel, Herzl uses the same image of liberation from bondage (though here “Egypt” is actually Europe) to suggest that the colony he envisions will not be lacking in modern amenities.8 In short, though it is structurally indebted to the scriptural concept of “Eretz Yisrael,” the divine sanction for the Jewish return to Palestine, Herzl's reference to scripture enters his argument as a sardonic disavowal of any identification with beleaguered Israelites or other biblical figures. Though Zionism is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, widely understood as an exemplary instance of religious nationalism,9 in its original manifestation Zionism was a discourse that aimed to distance itself from religious Judaism. The ambivalent relationship to religious texts and practice that characterize Herzl's Zionism is widely present in the character of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Bloom repeatedly engages the problem of Zionism, where it is closely tied to the discourses of colonialism, racial others, and the images of the Orient that enter through Bloom's consciousness through an extremely heterogeneous range of stimuli. In Ulysses, however, Zionism's alignment with colonialism is 7

“Mizraim” is Hebrew for “Egypt.” The paragraph that immediately precedes the passage I quote is as follows: "Those who have seen something of the world will know at the present time the little everyday customs are transplanted quite easily to all sorts of places. Indeed, the technical achievements of our time, which this plan would like to put to use for all humanity, have been used up to now mainly in the context of these little things. There are English hotels in Egypt and on the mountain peaks in Switzerland, Viennese cafes in South Africa, French theaters in Russia, German opera houses in America and the best Bavarian beer in Paris. If we do manage to leave Mizraim once more, we will not forget the fleshpots" (Herzl, 186). 9 I define “religious nationalism” as a variant of nationalism as a collective imagining of shared space that derives its warrant from sacred texts, specifically the earthly geography described in those texts. This clearly has had a significant influence on Zionism and has much to do with the entrenchment of Israeli nationalism in the present day. But it also has been a factor in India, where the Vedas are used by the Hindu right to justify everything from high-caste privilege to the 1991 razing of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The dependence of specifically modern religious nationalism on sacred texts is linked to the mass circulation of versions of those texts in print culture, as well as the circulation of an interpretive symbology of those texts through electronic media. 8

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dramatically reversed; for Bloom, Zionism may be less the colonial enterprise envisioned by Herzl than an anticolonial struggle. As such, it has close parallels to the quite different anticolonial movement that is Irish nationalism, which is profoundly important to both Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. In the Messianic language of the passage from the “Circe” episode quoted at the beginning of this essay, both discourses are present. In the midst of a long series of impersonations, Bloom announces the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy in distinctly New Testament tones ("My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is at hand"). What is striking is that Bloom uses biblical rhetoric (as much derived from the Gospels as it is from the Pentateuch), to lead his audience not to Palestine, but to “Nova Hibernia”—New Ireland. A diasporic image of return, in other words, inflects the liberation ideology of Bloom's Irish nationalism, which as an anticolonial movement would seem to differ from Zionism because it is already geographically grounded (in Ireland). Irish nationalism, one assumes, is already at “home.” There is, nonetheless, an Irish diaspora with both religious and secular dimensions operating in Ulysses, in at least three ways. First, as a nationalist text written by Joyce in exile, Ulysses itself may be an Irish diasporic artifact. Aside from the fact that it was written entirely abroad, the deep commitment to the details of Dublin's street geography and the close, affectionate memory of the material and sensual experience of the city are classic marks of a diasporic construction of home. The Irish diaspora is also present in the myriad references in the text to Republican militants and other Irish nationalists forced to operate abroad (such as the Fenians Stephen Dedalus meets in Paris), as well as the frequent references to Dublin residents who have moved to America. Finally, the central thematic of wandering, figured in the two characters' experience of Dublin, allegorizes the inability to return to a national and cultural home. Both Ireland and Palestine are versions of the “Promised Land” in Ulysses. Only, which “Promised Land” is to be Bloom's, Palestine or Dublin? Where in geographical space will “Bloomusalem” flower? In what follows, I examine in greater detail the mutual dependence of scriptural and secular images of the “Promised Land” in diasporic nationalisms that are sometimes Jewish/Zionist, sometimes Irish-Catholic/Republican, and sometimes both at once. More generally, I intend to consider the interaction of religious discourse with a secular form of nationalism in a postcolonial framework. For while the marginalization of scriptural textuality and religious practice in the writing of Theodor Herzl and others is a fact that many Jewish cultural critics have noted, the role of religion in modern narratives of national liberation has not been discussed sufficiently in postcolonial criticism to date. Joyce's Ulysses was written at a critical moment in the historical development of both nationalist movements,10 so it is not unreasonable that 10

The two decisive moments occurring as Joyce writes are 1) the Balfour Declaration of

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Joyce would think to marry Zionism and Irish nationalism. On the Jewish side, Ulysses presents in Leopold Bloom an image of a Jew who yearns for a version of “home” defined partly by his straightforward (and secular) desire for the revitalization of his family life, and partly by a desire (that may be transhistorical) for spiritual protection in the fold of Judaism. While the precise content of Bloom's “faith” remains elusive, there is no denying the lyricism of Jewish religious metaphors in Joyce's novel, or the potential belonging to community they signify. Though Joyce is commonly thought of as an ardent critic of both religious institutions and nationalism, recent critical biographies have suggested that his world-view was strongly and positively shaped by these discourses. There are, for instance, numerous connections in Joyce's personal and intellectual biography to Zionist thought. Neil Davison has pointed to Joyce's close involvement with European Jewry around the turn of the century, a moment when many European Jewish artists and intellectuals were attempting to forge a “national” consciousness. Both Davison and Ira Nadel (in Joyce and the Jews) give detailed accounts of Joyce's complex response to Zionism. It is known, for instance, that Joyce owned a copy of Herzl's Der Judenstaat as well as Sacher's Zionism and the Jewish Future as he wrote Ulysses11, and that he at times in his letters and conversations compared the plight of the Irish to that of the Jews (11). Davison argues that Joyce's book is actively involved in the Jewish creative process, even if the Jewish culture celebrated in Ulysses is a nationalism of eclecticism, hybridity, and cosmopolitan belonging rather than a monocultural adherence to "old wisdom" (128). While European Jewish culture and national aspirations are certainly a prominent aspect of Ulysses, Irish nationalism is in fact more prevalent in terms of the sheer density of historical names and reference points given. Though Ulysses remembers Irish nationalism before 1921, when the Irish Free State came into being, the book articulates a sophisticated critique of colonialism in line with those produced by much later authors from very different colonial contexts: authors like Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie. Particularly with regard to Irish nationalism, Ulysses is a postcolonial text, a novel that foregrounds the experience of colonial subjects, expresses strong anti-colonial sentiments, and yet is widely aware of the problems posed by dependence on a derivative form of nationalism to end English rule in Ireland. But the discourse of religion in colonialism also transforms the postcolonial narrative of struggle in key ways. For instance, in "James Joyce and Mythic Realism," Declan Kiberd powerfully describes Joyce's attention to the imposition of language as a tool of colonial management and, from the reverse perspective of the colonial subject, 1917, where the British Empire grants Jewish settlers certain privileges; and 2) in Ireland, the dramatic Easter Rising of 1916. 11 Davison, 129.

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the deprivation of one's native tongue as the most oppressive violence of that form of subjugation.12 To language, the participation of the Anglican Church in political colonization adds the discrediting and prohibition of indigenous faiths (both pre-Christian and Catholic) to the list of Irish woes. Echoing the sentiments of Benjamin Disraeli, Joyce places the imposition of religion alongside the imposition of language among the most deeply tragic consequences of colonialism13. This is not a new theme: Irish critics such as Kiberd, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and many others, are only too aware of the colonial nature of religion in Ireland. But while the deep (and perilous) attraction of the “master's” language has been widely discussed by postcolonial writers and critics all over the world, the consequences of the equally gripping set of desires represented by colonial religion (for Joyce, this is Anglican Protestantism) has not. Bloom's invocation of both Irish nationalism and Zionism is highly idiosyncratic. His idea of "Bloomusalem" personalizes the political referent, spinning the allegories of religion and nationalism he alludes to away from the abstract entity of the nation, and towards his personal feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and humiliation. Moreover, Bloom's juxtaposition of the two discourses is complicated by the location of the passage in a series of “trials” in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, trials that Bloom repeatedly fails. Because of these factors, it would be easy enough to read Ulysses conventionally, as a polemic against both the church and the nation. Certainly Bloom's messianic pronouncement is ironic in the sense that it mocks his own delusions of grandeur, which are virtually indissociable from his many public humiliations and abjections in the text. But my intention is something other than a reading of Joyce as a writer who equates modernity with secularism, and nationalism with religion—while relegating all of these discourses to the scrap heap of history. Religion and nationalism have a great deal of power over the paradigmatically “modern” subjects in Joyce's book, but this only becomes evident through a careful reading of the web of associations in which these 12

Declan Kiberd, “James Joyce and Mythic Realism,” in Inventing Ireland, 327-355. Other important postcolonial readings of Ulysses are Duffy and Cheng. Though Cheng's argument is the more straightforward, I find Duffy's deployment of Gramscian rhetoric of hegemony and contestation to be a particularly effective way of reading the novel's political ambivalence: "Ulysses . . . is not a manifesto for postcolonial freedom, but rather a representation of the discourses and regimes of colonial power being attacked by counterhegemonic strategies that were either modeled on the oppressor's discourses or were only beginning to be enumerated in other forms. . . . We may . . . discern in Ulysses, the novel read by metropolitan critics since its publication as the capstone-text of the western (and hence imperial) modernist tradition, rather a blueprint for the staging of the confrontations between the discourses and the material forces at odds in any anticolonial struggle" (Duffy, 21).

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discourses are situated in the text—their location in the novel's network of discourse: positions, people, ideas, events. An exciting aspect of reading a novel of intense heteroglossia such as this is that it is never a closed text. Dominant themes take shape not through Joyce's grand design but through careful mappings, the alignments and polarities that emerge through association to events in the text as well as its myriad intertexts. Irish nationalism and Zionism become parallel discourses not because of any strong (i.e., causal) historical connection, but through Joyce's articulation of them as linked in the figures of Bloom and Stephen (and sometimes in Bloom alone), defining each in terms of the other, relationally. This mutual dependence points to a concept of nationalism that is not circular so much as reciprocal.

Fleshpots And the children of Egypt said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full, for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger. (Exodus 16:3; emphasis added)

If the Jewish Diaspora came into being because of the military defeat of the Jews and the destruction of their most sacred temple, the image of dispersion is equally active in the book of Exodus, which predates that event. A passage such as the above suggests a link between the two events especially well, as the Israelites here are comparing their state of deprivation as a freed people to the more reliable material conditions of their captivity. They represent their time in Egypt as one where they had access to "flesh pots"—readily accessible meat, and the vessels in which they were cooked. Notably, the Israelites do not identify the "flesh pots" as their own; nor do they specify what meats were cooked in these pots. 14 The image is one of lost luxury, but, as I suggested above, it is also easy to read it as a luxury that was corrupt—a bribe for the Israelites to remain uncomplainingly in bondage. 14 The Hebrew for "flesh pots" may be transliterated as "al-ciyr habaasaar." "Ciyr" (pot/pots) and "habaasaar" (of flesh) are distinct words. Thus far, I have not located a commentary on the phrase that indicates that it has any particular significance in this passage. That is to say, the particular diction of "flesh pots" has not been remarked upon as being particularly odd or perverse. Walzer cites the Midrash on this phrase: "It does not say . . . 'when we did eat from the flesh pots,' but 'when we sat by the flesh pots.' They had to eat their bread without meat." (Midrash Rabbah: Exodus 16:4; cited in Walzer, 36). In other words, the Midrash gives the phrase added complexity, building on the distinction between sitting by a pot and having access to its contents, and the seeming anomaly that the Egyptians would have ensured that their servants were well-fed. As Walzer summarizes it, "They smelled the meat, but didn't taste it, and what they longed for in the desert was their longing in the house of bondage" (Walzer, 36).

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The phrase "flesh pots" also appears in Ulysses, and its usage throughout the book is clearly derived from the above passage from the Book of Exodus.15 The allusion to Exodus contained in the phrase, though sometimes oblique, provides a useful preliminary example of the redeployment of biblical images of dispersion in Ulysses for anticolonial ends. "Flesh pots" (as "fleshpots") appears at least three times in the novel, though its meaning is transformed in both Bloom's and Stephen's minds in ways that sometimes amplify the sense of loss and desperation expressed by the Israelites in Exodus, and sometimes radically, and perversely, transform it. The first instance of the phrase is Stephen's: My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other devil's name? Paysayenn. P.C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques, et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen.16

The most apparent mode of Joyce's recontextualization of the biblical text is the ironic. In this passage from “Proteus,” "fleshpots" appears in the context of Stephen's memory of his days as a wayward student in Paris. The "fleshpots" here refer to food, just as they do in Exodus, though it is not in the context of pleasure or excess, but rather the third-rate lung stews ("mou en civet") Stephen used to eat in public houses in Paris—literally, pots of cheap meat. This passage is one in a long series of meditations on Stephen's unwholesome dispossession in his Paris life, but it is unique in that here Stephen identifies as a biblical Israelite (and therefore, indirectly, as a Jew) when he ruefully invokes the phrase "fleshpots of Egypt" to represent a scene of grotesque consumption. Though the thought is a fleeting one, a brief moment in the “Proteus” episode, Stephen's invocation of "fleshpots of Egypt," when few direct parallels between his own experience and the Israelites’ are readily apparent, is a form of harsh self-criticism. It is simultaneously a reading of the biblical intertext; Stephen is profoundly critical of the shortsightedness of the Israelites in Exodus17. 15 In part, I am relying on Gifford’s Annotated Ulysses when I make this assumption. But the OED, in its entry for "flesh-pot," also suggests that the allusion to Exodus always remains close to the surface when this rather obscure phrase is invoked. Notably, OED suggests that the word "flesh-pot" is rarely used by itself; rather, the standard usage since the Renaissance has been "flesh-pots of Egypt." Walzer, in responding to this phrase in Exodus and Revolution, also notes its presence in Don Quixote: "The meaning [of 'flesh pots'] has been stable for a long time now: cf. The passage in Cervantes' Don Quixote where Sancho Panza is riding away from Camacho's 'splendid feast and festival,' leaving behing 'the fleshpots of Egypt, though in his heart he took them with him." (Walzer, 156n). 16 Ulysses 3.177. 17 In the context in which this passage is situated, it is no coincidence that Stephen has this thought very shortly after one of the most directly 'atheistic' passages in this phase of

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The unwholesomeness of Stephen's first use of "fleshpots" grows when he reuses the phrase, this time in conversation, in the midst of his rambling, esoteric “Shakespeare” lecture in “Scylla and Charybdis.” In this second usage, however, "fleshpots" no longer refers to food at all, but to Shakespeare's Cleopatra, whose opportunism and sexuality Stephen easily dismisses in the course of a speculation on the real identities of Shakespeare's various heroines and villainesses: "Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cresside and Venus are we may guess."18 In coming to refer to the body of a woman, the word "fleshpot" has lost the substance of its particular referent in Exodus. As with much of the lyrical fodder that appears in the novel, the phrase is put into play as pure language. The secondary associations of "fleshpot" accompany it to its new meaning: along with the Egyptian-Oriental connotation seems to come an image of grotesque excess. As "fleshpot," Cleopatra loses her status as a human character in a play. Instead, she becomes (it is not a felicitous image) a sexual vessel, a “pot” of female “flesh.” Bloom's reference to Exodus' “flesh pots” undergoes the same contraction to "fleshpots," and in many ways mirrors Stephen's usage of the word. But the significance of the phrase to Bloom is markedly different, and its usage leads in a trajectory particular to Bloom's unique experience of Dublin. Here, “fleshpots of Egypt” is a phrase that independently enters Bloom's mind in his own analysis of food: Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for three pence. Jack Fleming embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now. Fleshpots of Egypt. He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets.19

As with Stephen's first invocation of "fleshpots," Bloom's use of the phrase points to cheap eating: Christmas dinner for threepence. In and of itself, the reference is blander than either of Stephen's invocations to the phrase, as it seems to point neither to his own spiritual dispossession nor to an anxiety about the book, the dialogue in French from Taxil's Life of Jesus (3.169-72). In the larger context of the 'Telemachiad', the first three episodes of the book, this criticism of the Israelites echoes Stephen's internal criticism of the Jews in the previous episode. There, Stephen defends the Jews against the vulgar bigotry of Mr. Deasy, only to find himself contemplating with disdain the Jewish bankers he remembers from Paris: "On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. The swarmed loud, uncouth, about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures" (2.364367). Stephen's invocation of certain anti-Semitic tropes in his image of Parisian Jews is balanced by a turn to their 'derivative' status, to which Stephen is sympathetic. 18 Ulysses, 5.883. 19 Ibid., 5.548.

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female sexuality. First and foremost, Bloom's "fleshpots of Egypt" seems to be a meditation on the instability of gambling, on the general slipperiness associated in Bloom's mind with speculative forms of capitalism. However, in the context of Bloom's memories of the Seder, the Jewish Passover ritual, that are interspersed in Ulysses, "fleshpots" can point directly—that is, without the linguistic play driving Stephen's double-reading of the word—to an aspect of Bloom's Jewish heritage. This is because the standard Haggadah itself reinflects the phrase "flesh pot" to mark the debauchery and corruption characteristic of the Pharoah's regime.20 "Fleshpots of Egypt," as a quotation from a text from Jewish ritual that itself interprets and cites Exodus, suggestively invokes the Jewish narrative of exile and dispersion, even if many of those references may not be immediately apparent to Bloom himself. Also evident in the same passage is a more subtle resonance of "fleshpots of Egypt," associated with Bloom's incipient Oriental bath. In the context of Bloom's bath, "fleshpots" is no longer an image related to either a Jewish or Christian mythology of disenfranchisement. Rather, Bloom's "fleshpots of Egypt" points to nothing other than Islam—via the public baths Bloom is about to enter: "He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths." The fact that the bath is described as a ritual, religious practice that is coded here as Islamic may be incidental in some ways (to actual Islamic practices, for instance), but it is not at all an incidental end-point in the chain of associations invoked by "fleshpots of Egypt." In its trajectory through Ulysses, "fleshpots of Egypt," leads from Moses to contemporary Egypt, from scriptural Judaism to fin de siècle Orientalist representations of Islam. "Fleshpots of Egypt" is a small pool of resonances, one of literally hundreds in Joyce's novel. Perhaps most importantly, it is a term of the cross-religious and cross-cultural discursive world the novel aims to explore: "fleshpots" has connotations that are sometimes Jewish, sometimes Christian, and sometimes Orientalist/Islamic. The development by accretion of a network of cross-cultural associations around the phrase is a way in which Joyce bridges these and other discourses: past and present, event and allegory, Europe and the Orient, to name just a few of the most important pairings. Secondly, the constant transformations and polysemic possibilities in the phrase "fleshpots of Egypt" provide a perfect example of the play of referent and signifier in the novel. And finally, the decidedly unfaithful style of Stephen and Bloom's redeployments of the phrase suggest Joyce's challenge to the moral authority of the biblical text. This latter theme will become especially important in the reading of the crossing of nationalism and religion in Bloom and Stephen's respective deployments of the “Promised Land” narrative that follows. 20 In other words, Joyce does not have to redirect the phrase; the doubling of its meaning is already occurring in the Haggadah.

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The Promised Land [Bloom] Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race.21 [Stephen] I call it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums.22

As a function of its status as a diasporic text, the discourse of nationalism in Ulysses is generally allegorical. But Joyce is sensitive both to the creative possibilities of allegory and the ways in which the idealization allegory enables can also stretch the truth, sometimes with catastrophic effects. The most prominent allegory in the text, which alludes to both diasporicity and the territorial grounding of nationalism, is the biblical narrative of the “Promised Land.” Interestingly, Jewish and Irish nationalism are allegorized as the Promised Land, though the referents of the allegory are markedly different for Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. The “Promised Land” is for both characters a found image, deriving initially from a particular external stimulus, which in this case is a newspaper. Then, in response to triggers both external and internal, both Stephen and Bloom transform the image of the “Promised Land,” producing narratives quite different from the ones they initially encounter. Though “Promised Land” has divergent referents, and is expressed differently both in substance and in tone by each character, the split significance of the Promised Land transforms the discourses of both religion and nationalism in key ways. To begin with, however, as Promised Land, the Dublin (and Ireland) Joyce portrays does not appear especially promising. The available narratives of national liberation are narrow: both the rhetoric of Celtic revival and the linguistic revival of Gaelic are vexed projects. At its worst, Irish nationalism is represented by the militant rhetoric of the Citizen in “Cyclops,” as utterly unwilling to allow the specter of religious difference to contaminate the nationalist narrative. In the Citizen, Joyce represents a version of Irish nationalism that is at once assertively Catholic and hopelessly nostalgic and out of touch, with a dangerous and unproductive underpinning of anti-Semitism as well as virulently anti-English sentiment. The Citizen invokes "God and Mary and Patrick" as he blesses a round of beer (12.1504), and dismisses Bloom when the latter invokes inarguably Christian ethical principles such as the caution on unwarranted moral judgment (“Judge not, lest ye be judged”), as well as the imperative to love one's neighbor (12.1238, 12:1490-1500). Stephen singles out the inconsistencies of Irish extremism for mockery in his 21 22

Ulysses 4.219-220. Ibid., 7.1058.

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satirical “Pisgah Sight of Palestine or a Parable of the Plums.” The fact that he and the newspapermen he converses with in “Aeolus” rely on the image of the “Promised Land” is especially important, as it is an example of the dependence of the Irish nationalist narrative on a religious allegory, an allegory that is neither precisely Catholic nor even properly Christian. In contrast, the “Promised Land” narrative, as it is initially manifested in Bloom's mind in “Calypso,” is triggered by his encounter with Jewish nationalism, and is associated with the religious nationalism of the emerging Zionist movement. In a sense it is a simpler deployment of Palestine, as it refers, for Bloom, to actual Jews. Complications do enter in, however, as Bloom struggles with stereotypical images of both Jews and the Orient that are a part of his social conditioning as a European subject at the turn of the century. It is almost impossible for Bloom, though he is of Jewish descent, to eradicate the strong impulse to see Jews as “ancient” and the East as a land of the past. Rather like famously “self-hating” Jewish writers of early twentieth-century Europe (many of whom had also either been baptized or advocated it to encourage accelerated assimilation), Bloom sees the Jewish community through a mainstream lens, 23 and resists placing himself within the frame. The “Promised Land” first enters Bloom's mind in the novel through an advertisement for a Zionist settling scheme in a newspaper used by the Butcher to wrap Bloom's pork kidney in “Calypso.” In his internal response to it, Bloom turns it into a depressing image of decay, an image of the Jewish people stripped of productivity and vigor, struggling to remain intact. Stephen, on the other hand, invents a “Parable of the Plums” to satirize Irish nationalism using an image of two elderly Catholic nuns looking out on Dublin, metaphorically rendered as “Palestine.” This language is inspired by Stephen's experience at the newspaper office, where he hears the recitation of an Irish nationalist speech that makes use of the Exodus metaphor as an argument for Irish independence. The two versions of the “Promised Land” could not be more different. One vision (Bloom's) concerns communities of Jews scattered across Europe, while the other (Stephen's) refers to Irishmen struggling with English colonialism. Bloom's vision is tragic and disturbed; Stephen's is cynical and bawdy. Bloom's imagery is decidedly literal (though it extends in numerous metaphoric dimensions in Bloom's mind), while Stephen's “Parable” is allegorical and entirely fictive. And yet, as the images echo throughout Ulysses (especially in “Circe” and “Ithaca”) a set of correspondences emerges, aligning the two images towards each other—just as Bloom and Stephen seem to be oriented 23

Sander Gilman's essay, "Nietzsche's Jew," suggests that the Nietzsche's image of European Jewry was 'tripartite', constituted by 1) "the ancient Hebrew", 2) the "archetypical wandering Christian . . . weak and destructive," and 3) "the Jew as contemporary, the antithesis of all decadence, self-sufficient and incorruptible" (from Jewish Self-Hatred, 206; cited in Davison 125).

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towards each other as displaced and wandering spirits. Bloom's first musings on the “Promised Land” occur quite early in Calypso, his first appearance in Ulysses. He is at the pork butcher's, getting breakfast, and while waiting he begins to idly read one of the “cut sheets” there for wrapping meat. Although the exact name of the newspaper from which the sheets are derived is never specified, it seems to be a Jewish-themed paper.24 The sections Bloom focuses on are the advertisements, Zionist advertisements in particular: "the model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was" (4.156). The passing mention here of the prominent London Jewish advocate and proto-Zionist Moses Montefiore is troubled slightly by the absence of a predicate in the sentence that follows it: “I thought he was [what?].” Because Bloom never fills in the object, this moment of the indeterminacy of Moses Montefiore's identity only produces a further textual indeterminacy. One can surmise that the identity intended here is Italian, since “Montefiore” sounds Italian; Bloom is perhaps surprised to understand that Montefiore is not only Jewish, but also that he is involved in a planting scheme in Palestine. Walking out of Dlugacz's Pork Butchery, Bloom glances at the wrapping of his pork kidney, and reads the following advertisement: Agendath netaim: planters' company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. . . . Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.25

The language of this passage is partly an accurate citation from the advertisement ("Excellent for shade, fuel, and construction"), and partly Bloom's impressionistic recreation of it. The images of bountiful crops ("immense melonfields") echo some of his mildly pornographic musings about the voluptuous woman he had been standing behind in the line at the pork butcher's (4.175-80), and are of a piece with the general thematic emphasis on fecundity that has been prevalent thus far in the episode. Bloom dismisses the planting scheme out of hand—"nothing doing"—but is nevertheless impressed 24 The centrality of the newspaper is particularly appropriate, given the importance of nationalism to Ulysses. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities posits a national print-culture as a major material precondition of a shared sense a national space. What's interesting about the role of the newspaper in Bloom's case is the fact that it appears to be a Jewish newspaper, with advertisements soliciting investment in colonizing schemes. Bloom may work for a major city paper, but the first thing he reads on this particular morning is a paper with an interest in a differently constructed national space—Israel. 25 Ulysses 4.191-6.

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by the "idea behind it." Though it may be indirect, the "idea behind it" Bloom is thinking of here is none other than the principle guiding Jewish colonization in Palestine, which is to say, Zionism. Though Bloom's response to the commercial aspect of the planting scheme described here is dismissive, his mentality shares with Herzl's a strong emphasis on the mechanics of the project: how much money, how much labor—how much profit. Like Herzl, Bloom is a pragmatist, a planner, and a performer. Unlike Herzl, Bloom at this point in Ulysses has little room in his crowded mind for grand nation-building narratives. However, these narratives will play a role, as Bloom's performances in the “Circe” and “Cyclops” episodes indicate. For a few moments, Bloom continues to walk, his thoughts freely wandering: the speculative details of Mediterranean farming26 are interspersed with snatches of real memories and images of people he knows in Dublin. But then a cloud begins to eat away at the sunlight, leading his thoughts also to cloud: A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far. No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could life those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world. Desolation.27

The cloud that triggers this spiral of despair is probably exactly the same cloud that depresses Stephen Dedalus as he looks out of the Martello Tower in “Telemachus,” though it acts quite differently on Stephen28. That a minor 26

At this time, I have not been able to locate a reference to the probable source for the text of the newspaper clipping Bloom looks at. According to Berkowitz, however, it does seem likely that the appearance of such a clipping would have been not strictly chronologically accurate; Zionist agricultural ventures in Palestine did not begin to develop seriously until the 1910s. 27 Ulysses 4.218-225. 28 My thanks to Ian Baucom for pointing this out to me. Besides the timing of the cloud's appearance (shortly after 8 in the morning), the fact that the same language appears in both Stephen and Bloom's minds as the cloud appears may be the strongest evidence of this. Here is Stephen's version of this: "A cloud began to cover the sun, slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was

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metereological event such as the appearance of a cloud has a powerfully negative effect on Bloom in particular can be read as merely one among many instances in Ulysses of the power of chance. In particular, as a moment (among many) where Bloom is deeply emotionally affected by a very minor event, it may be simply an example of Bloom's celebrated, errant subjectivity. However, given the direct citations from both Genesis and Exodus in the passage, the appearance of the cloud may also be something more—something biblical. That is to say, the cloud may be read as a reference to the passages in Exodus where God appears to the Hebrews as "a pillar of cloud" (Exodus 13:21) as he leads them out of Israel and through a number of difficult circumstances before finally landing them in Canaan. But if the biblical cloud is a sign of God as a fixed point, an undeniable sign of divinity, the cloud in this passage seems to be the opposite. Joyce's cloud marks the diminishing of light (blocking access to that ancient, sometimes divine, source of truth and hope—the sun) and the onset of confusion. The reversal of the function of the cloud on Bloom in this way is part of Joyce's widespread rebuttal of biblical textuality as a channel by which to access the divine.29 As Bloom ponders Palestine, the contemporary trigger ("Agendath Netaim") switches registers, becoming historical and textual. In his clouded thoughts, the precise geographical region of the Middle East Bloom thinks of as so horrifyingly barren becomes less important than language describing the sites in question in the Pentateuch. Much of Bloom's language here derives particularly from Genesis, especially the references to Sodom, Gomorrah, and Edom. The negative, punitive image of decimation that dominates certain episodes of Genesis overwhelms Bloom, detached from any moral or narrative trajectory. When his thoughts begin to move toward the people who live in the “dead land,” Bloom's recall of the biblical images turns toward Exodus. Here, Bloom's revulsion at the idea of a dead land leads him to begin to reject an apparently dead people: “The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity.” But the reference to the Israelites is fleeting; Bloom's thoughts return almost irresistibly to images of a mixed fruitfulness and multiplication: “multiplying, dying, being born everywhere.” This is the other Exodus—the Israelites prospering and multiplying despite of the punishments of Pharoah, and open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.” (Ulysses 1.248-53) 29 Alternatively, it can be read as a metaliterary intervention similar to Salman Rushdie's cameo as 'God' in The Satanic Verses. There, Rushdie poses himself as 'God', the creator of the universe that is his novel, and demands that his protagonist "stop fooling around with some flatfoot blonde," and instead begin earnestly pursuing his divine/angelic mission. Transferred to the universe that is Ulysses, the cloud then becomes Joyce, intervening in the uncomplicated “morning” thoughts of his protagonists (both of them), redirecting them.

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despite the hardships of the desert. 30 The distinction between the people who belonged to the dead land—the Jews—and the land itself, is an important moment of bifurcation in Bloom's consciousness. If this distinction is to grow in force in Bloom's mind as the novel progresses, he will have to come to terms with the prevailing image of Jews as an ancient, persecuted people. The direction it seems to lead in is an image of the Jewish people that is largely “diasporist,” defined as a community by the experience of exile. Ultimately, in this passage, the image of life is not enough to restore buoyancy—the sequence ends as he hits rock bottom, with the most extreme image to appear in Bloom's thoughts in this part of the novel: "the grey sunken cunt of the world." How to read this image? On the one hand, Bloom's image of decay embodied in women—specifically, in a slang term for female genitalia—has an associative connection to Stephen's volatile, disturbing images of female sexuality, some of which appear in response to his “cloud” experience in “Telemachus.” As importantly, it can be read as a "feminization" of the Jewish people. Neil Davison, for instance, suggests that Joyce's skepticism about Zionism is filtered through his exposure to the Austrian Zionist Otto Weininger, whom Davison describes as a classic "self-hating Jew."31 Stephen construes an image of the Promised Land in the “Aeolus” episode that in many ways mirrors Bloom's image in the passage above. However, to a lesser extent, Stephen's “Pisgah Sight of Palestine” also echoes a quite different recollection of Exodus of Bloom's, which is important because it also appears in “Aeolus.” In contrast to the passage cited above, here Bloom seems to have only a minimum of affect associated either with his identification as a Jew or with the pain recorded in the Exodus narrative. If the earlier Bloom was susceptible to a dramatic mood shift because of the appearance of a cloud, this is the ruminating Bloom, chewing through a prodigious amount of material. Bloom's citation of Exodus is triggered by the sight of a typesetter at work: He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that. maNgiD kcitraP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. 30

Bloom reconsiders these images later in Ulysses, to much happier effect: "High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman, home and houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim. Wealth of the world" (Ulysses, 8.635-6). 31 From Neil Davison: “Bloom's ‘old woman’ metaphor represents the womanliness of the Jews through an allusion not only female, but of female decrepitude – ‘grey sunken cunt of the world.’ It would thus appear that Joyce perceived Weininger's own selfhatred, and built a similar attitude into Bloom's own ‘Jewishness.’ But this is not the case. Rather, the implication throughout Ulysses is that Bloom's self-deprecation comes not from a ‘Jewish nature,’ but from a lack of a strong, unified identity, which pivots on his denial of his own Jewish identity” (Davison, 145).

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It's significant that Bloom begins this train of thought because he associates the typesetter's backwards reading with Hebrew, particularly because Hebrew orthography will play an important part in the cultural exchange between Stephen and Bloom in the “Ithaca” episode. Here, the particular context that “Hebrew” invokes for Bloom is his memory of his father's reading of Hebrew from the Haggadah at Passover. Bloom's memory is, notably, erratic; he remembers the Hebrew for the Shema prayer before realizing ("No, that's the other") that it actually does not appear in that prayer. He does, of course, remember directly from the Haggadah a line that comes from Exodus ("out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage"; compare to Exodus 13:3-4). Bloom's train of thought closes with his recall of the Chad Gadya chant that closes the second seder of the Passover ritual, followed by a quick moral interpretation: “Justice it means but it's everybody eating everybody else. That's what life is after all.” Stephen's image of the Promised Land is triggered by a more direct invocation of it. Professor MacHugh recites from memory a speech delivered by John F. Taylor, an Irish barrister. Taylor's speech33 was a response to Gerald Fitzgibbon, over the subject of the revival of Gaelic then being proposed: My chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses. . . . And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me . . . Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.34

This is part of a debate about language, but Taylor's melodramatic rhetoric 32

Ulysses 7.205-13. According to Gifford, this (actual) speech was delivered in 1901. 34 Ulysses, 7.828-850. 33

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makes it clear that the stakes are much higher—the general relationship of Ireland to English colonial power. The reference to the Exodus narrative is quite direct and extensive (in contrast to the “Agendath Netaim” advertisement that triggered Bloom's first recollection of the language of Exodus). However, Taylor maps the conflict between Pharoah and the Israelites to a contemporary setting, honing in on the discourse of Imperialism in a way the Exodus narrative does not ("our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys . . . furrow the waters of the known globe"). The particular invocation of modern events— urbanization, expanding commerce, globality—fundamentally transforms the Exodus narrative from a display of divine might and absolutist morality to the new moralism of Capital. When he satirizes Taylor's speech with his own vision of the Irish “Promised Land,” Stephen twists the allegory to his own taste, inventing two 53 year old Dublin women ("Dublin vestals"), who take plums up to the top of Nelson's pillar (i.e., Mt. Pisgah). The pillar in question is topped by a statue of Admiral Horatio Nelson, a shining symbol of English naval power. Through indirect association, Nelson has already been referred to by the Professor because of his part in ensuring the collapse of "the catholic chivalry of Europe" in the naval defeat of Napoleon at Trafalgar (Ulysses 7.566). Although Stephen's satire is partly an attempt to mock the inflated anti-colonial rhetoric of Taylor's “Exodus” speech, the choice of Nelson as one object of derision certainly fits the Professor's view of things. Perhaps more surprisingly, for all the bare arrogance of his blatant reversal of Professor MacHugh's breathless national allegory, Stephen in fact barely manages to make his point. At first, Stephen's narrative is preoccupied with the monetary details of the Vestals' picnic— probably reflecting a financial obsession stemming from his own dire penury. Then, Stephen's “Parable” is interrupted by a bored-seeming Professor ("Vestal virgins. I can see them. What's keeping our friend?"). Finally, Stephen gets to the substance of his story, where his Dublin "vestals" eat plums at the top of the pillar: —When they have eaten the brawn and the bread and wiped their twenty fingers in the paper the bread was wrapped in they go nearer the railings. . . . —But they are afraid the pillar will fall, Stephen went on. They see the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines' blue dome, Adam and Eve's, saint Laurence O'Toole's. But it makes them giddy to look so they pull up their skirts… ... —And settled down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue of the onehandled adulterer. —It gives them a crick in their necks, Stephen said, and they are too tired to look up or down so to speak. They put the bag of plums between them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with their handkerchiefs, the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the plumstones slowly

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Three things happen: they look down but it makes them giddy; they look up but it hurts their necks; and finally they give up on taking in the scene, and simply eat plums. Looking down, the two women have a strategic perspective on Dublin—rather like the bird's eye view of a map. In contrast to their day-to-day perception of the city, from the top of Nelson's pillar the city is at once at somewhat of a distance and widely accessible in all directions. It is the unmediated Dublin, the “Promised Land” of the Irish nationalist dream. Importantly, the main landmarks the "Vestals" identify are the surrounding Catholic churches—signifying an Irish Catholic difference. Of course, they cannot look for long, because the view "makes them giddy." They sit, and instead look upward at the statue of Nelson, the supreme symbol of British superiority—over both Ireland and Europe. It's unclear what part of the statue they can actually see, however, and the awkwardness of their perspective on Nelson is represented in Stephen's verb, "peering." Here Stephen also throws in a note of insult directed at Nelson, "the onehandled adulterer," referring to an aspect of the history that the two women probably do not know. Ultimately, they have as little interest in hurting their necks for a view of the symbol of power—as seen from below—as they do in looking down at the city below. Though he turns away from Nelson, in the final gesture Stephen takes the sexually provocative reference to adultery and redirects it onto the women themselves. Utterly disregarding either narrative available to them at the top of the pillar, they seem to simply eat plums. In the language in which he describes their eating, Stephen redoubles the casually insulting language he has used to describe the women throughout his story: the plumjuice "dribbles" out of their mouths (earlier, they "waddled" up the stairs of the pillar). In the coup de grâce, Stephen marks how they "spit the plumstones slowly out between the railings." Through the sexual connotation of plumstones (testicles), and a general sense of post-coital satiety this image is as lurid as it is packed: the scene alternately invokes homoeroticism, fellatio, autoeroticism, and cannibalism. Unlike many of Stephen's other visions of female sexuality, however, the scene he describes is remarkably peaceful. The dominant sexuality represented here is, if anything, autoerotic, as the women seem to be completely satisfied by the consumption of their plums. Neither the imperial "adulterer" nor the domes of Irish Catholic saints interest them beyond an idle flirtation. The meaning of Stephen's satire is obscure to his audience until he finally names the satire, or rather, double-names it: "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums." The dual naming of the story is an important indicator of its multiple targets—Catholic church, the British Empire, and the Irish “nation.” 35

Ulysses, 7.1000-1030.

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The first title is from the episode in Deuteronomy (34:1-5), where Moses climbs Mount Pisgah and views the Land promised to his ancestors and to him, only to be told by God that he will not be permitted to enter. A "Pisgah Sight of Palestine" in Joyce's anti-colonial reading, becomes the sight of a land— specifically, a nation space—which the viewer will never get to own. The second title points to the general parody of Christian themes in Stephen's story, present in the identification of the women, who are clearly substandard Catholic subjects, as "vestals," as well as in the naming of Nelson as an "adulterer." In general, a parody such as this one might in fact omit all reference to the Jews, much in the way the Exodus narrative was historically “Protestantized,” for instance, by the Puritans in early New England. However, the fact that Bloom has invoked Exodus, both in this episode and in an earlier episode, with Jews and Judaism as the specific referent in his thought, complicates the narrowly textual reading. Stephen's image of Palestine strongly connotes Bloom, who we may think of in much the same position as the two women atop Nelson's pillar, although not entirely by choice. That is to say, Bloom is neither English nor comfortably Irish, though he certainly aspires toward the latter identity. Like the women in Stephen's Parable, his mind is distracted from the two idealizations by sensual matters.

The “New Jerusalem” The image of the “Promised Land” is slightly more oblique in the argument between Bloom and the Citizen in “Cyclops.” Bloom maintains his resistance to the concept of Zionism, while nevertheless assertively claiming his Jewish identity, his Irishness, and a grounding in Christian ethical principles. The episode is important to my reading of religious nationalism in the novel because it features such a direct and unconflicted example of Irish nationalism in the Citizen. The Citizen's articulation of nationalist principles, however, is dependent biblically on Old Testament metaphors of exile and redemption that follow in the vein of the discussion amongst newspapermen in Aeolus. Unique to this particular episode, however, is the Citizen's equally active association of Jews with Englishmen as the source of Irish difficulties. The style of the “Cyclops” episode presents complexities which I do not attempt to resolve here. Part of the difficulty of the episode is the presence of a first-person narrator whose precise identity is not made clear in the episode itself. Following the Odyssean parallel, Joyce's narrator appears to parallel the Cyclopes in the cave in the ninth episode of the Odyssey, only this narrator is evidently less evil than the head Cylcops, Polyphemus, clearly represented in Joyce's version as the Citizen. As a member of the Cyclops species, however, the narrator of Joyce's “Cylcops” is, nevertheless, still threatening to Bloom.36 36

See Gifford, 314.

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The outsider perspective provided by the narrator is undercut by numerous lengthy parodic sections that appear at random in the text in response to themes evoked in the conversation, and which are the product of no human characters' perspective at all. The split in voice produces an unstable narrative surface that is at times recalcitrant to close reading along ideological lines; my reading here focuses on the narrator's relatively linear version of the story, at the expense of the parodies. Even this extraction of linear narrative segments is not simple: the interjection of the narrator's perspective in the course of narration makes it difficult to ascertain the text's response to the Citizen's treatment of Bloom. At times, the Cyclopean narrator dismisses the Citizen's most egregiously inflated or untenable claims. For instance, after the Citizen dreams aloud at length about the resurrection of Irish naval power, the narrator observes: "Moya [nonsense]. All wind and piss like a tanyard cat. . . .As much as his bloody life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled multitude in Shanagolden" (Ulysses, 12.1311-14). Here, the narrator deploys the Citizen's own strategy of using the Irish language to fortify his deflation ("Moya"), and also interjects telling details about the Citizen's relationship to Irish militancy (the Molly Maguires). At other moments, however, the narrator seems as annoyed by Bloom as the Citizen, and accepts the anti-Semitic rhetoric that is rife in the episode. The tension between Bloom and the Citizen is immediate, as much created by differences in temperament as by racial/religious stereotypes or ideological difference. Before Bloom even enters Barney Kiernan's pub, the Citizen is irritated by Bloom's repeated appearance on the street outside the pub. Bloom is looking for Martin Cunningham about an advertisement, but is nervous about entering the pub because of the Citizen's unfriendly dog, Garryowen. Bloom does enter the pub when the Citizen invites him in: "Come in, come on, he won't eat you" (12.409)37, and the discussion quickly turns to Irish nationalist history. The text of “Cyclops” does not reproduce the arguments that transpire in the pub; particularly lacking are Bloom's responses to some of the Citizen's grandiloquent claims about Irish nationalist heroes and the evils of the English. The narrator summarizes the train of the argument through paraphrases such as this one: So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish language and the corporation meeting and all to that and the shoneens that can't speak their own language . . . and Bloom putting in his old good with the twopenny stump that he cadged off Joe and talking about the Gaelic league and the antitreating league and drink, the

37

The reference to the likelihood of Bloom's being eaten is a reference to the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey—the Cyclops eats Odysseus' men and threaten to eat Odysseus himself.

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curse of Ireland.38

If the narrator and the Citizen are often unfair to Bloom in their responses to the latter's claims, and misinterpret his actions, Bloom also seems to repeatedly misread the direction of the discussion in the pub. The Citizen here is emphasizing the centrality of the Irish language to Ireland, to which Bloom apparently responds sympathetically by invoking the Gaelic league. In a characteristic move, however, Bloom, apparently motivated by the fact that they are both “leagues,” then brings up the “antitreating league,” a league founded to reduce excessive drinking in pubs. 39 Social missteps such as this invocation of sobriety amongst drunk nationalists (though it is unclear as to whether Bloom here actually says aloud, "Ireland sober is Ireland free"), as much as the difference represented by his Jewish heritage, set him on a collision course with the Citizen. In this episode, the Citizen is the primary site at which narratives of Irish and Jewish nationalisms cross one another. In his attacks on Bloom, the Citizen repeatedly mistakes the Jewish role in various Irish events, and at times inappropriately uses Irish (or merely Catholic) rhetoric when referring to Jewish cultural and religious concepts. One example of this might be his dismissal of Bloom's invocation of Jesus ("Some people can see the mote in others' eyes but they can't see the beam in their own" [12.1237]), with a reference to the Irish diasporization: “Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today of four, our lost tribes?” (12.1240-1). In part, this pattern of unattributed appropriation fits the Citizen's personality: he is painfully ignorant of non-Irish and non-Christian perspectives, and is possibly unaware that the "lost tribes" he invokes might be properly a Jewish image before an Irish. More importantly, however, these mistakes continue and deepen the chiastic relationship between Irish and Jewish nationalisms that are evident in episodes such as “Aeolus.” Early in the episode, the men in the pub discuss a current event, the conviction of a swindler (selling false passage to Canada) on the basis of testimony from a Jew. The involvement of a Jew here (who is notably not the swindler) easily turns into a discussion of Jewish swindling, which the Citizen caps with xenophobic statements reminiscent of Mr. Deasy: "Those are nice things, coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs. . . . Swindling the peasants . . . and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our house" (12.1140-50). The Citizen's reference to “bugs” is almost incoherent, since there has been no mention of insects anywhere in the episode, but it seems to refer to the Jews mentioned previously. However he shifts registers as he proceeds, and the line “We want no more strangers in our house,” is an epithet for the English 38 39

Ulysses, 12.679-84. Gifford, Ulyssses Annotated, 337.

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invasion.40 This conflation of two unrelated groups of "strangers" complicates the Irish nationalist/Zionist paradigm I have been developing, as it poses Jews as a threat to Irish nationalism, rather than an allegorical model. Zionism is directly discussed when Bloom asserts his Jewish identity some moments later. What is striking about his claim is, first of all, that it immediately follows his assertion of Irish nationality. If he is Irish by nation ("A nation is the same people living in the same place" [12.1423]), he is Jewish by race. Race for Bloom is a matter of a shared history of persecution. Most powerfully, Bloom asserts Jewish persecution as a matter of immediate importance in the present: —And I belong to a race too, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant. . . . Robbed. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle. —Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the Citizen.41

For a moment, Bloom actually seems to echo the Citizen in his use of fiery, somewhat inflated rhetoric. His emphasis on immediacy ("This very moment. This very instant") seems to refer not to the conversation at hand so much as his own thoughts earlier in the day about Palestine as a "dead land," and Jews as a non-modern people. The assertion here refutes those claims, possibly driven by Bloom's own difficult experience in the pub thus far. When Bloom leaves the pub to find Martin Cunningham, the tone turns ugly. Lenehan, one of the newspapermen from Aeolus, starts a rumor that Bloom has in fact left the pub to redeem his (non-existent) bet on a horse. Bloom becomes the scapegoat for the poverty of the pub-drinkers, refusing to share a drink with them, or to let them in on his apparent new wealth. But in what may be the oddest twist of all, Bloom becomes the scapegoat for the failures of the pubdrinkers' own Irish nationalism, as the narrator reports: So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gob, that puts the bloody kybosh on it if old sloppy eyes is mucking up the show.42

Here, John Wyse (generally not sympathetic to Bloom) insinuates that Bloom is in fact involved with the most famous (and, arguably, the most effective) Irish nationalist politician of the day, Arthur Griffith (who founded Sinn Fein in 40

Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 195. Ulysses, 12.1467-73. 42 Ulysses, 12.1572-6. 41

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1901). The logic is again somewhat incoherent—it's unclear why Wyse might be dissatisfied with Griffith's performance in 1904. Further, it is almost absurd that he associates Bloom, an ordinary newspaper ad-seller of no particular stature, with an eminent statesman and politician. In the stretched logic of the pub, Bloom's show of Jewish nationalist spirit (even if it is a non-Irish nationalism that also stops short of actively espousing Zionist ideology) has enabled the drinkers to see him as an Irish nationalist as well—even if a corrupt one—pouring the poison of "jerrymandering" and the politics of compromise into the leader's ear. But because he is also a Jew, Bloom's advice is and must be tainted; Bloom will only muck it up.

Conclusion: Diaspora, The Promised Land and Postcolonial Criticism The crossing of the two images of the “Promised Land” is a powerful crystallization of the vastly heterogeneous discourses that are juxtaposed in Joyce's novel. The intersection is, in the “large” architecture of the novel, represented by the meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. As such, the “promised land” is also an intersection of a bitter satire (Stephen) and a tragic feeling of displacement and desolation (Bloom). And it is the intersection of archaic religious orthodoxy with omnivorous, irreverent, and modernist eclecticism. Thirdly, the “promised land” is the ground on which a member of a dominant, global religious hierarchy (the Catholic Church) can meet a partial member of a marginal and extremely maligned one (the Jews). The ground of the intersection is also the ground of the intersection between “Greek” (Stephen Dedalus) and “Jew” (Leopold Bloom). The image of the “Promised Land” has been invoked in social struggles throughout the world, from diaspora Jews in Europe, to AfricanAmerican civil rights activists, to advocates of Palestinian rights in the present day. But the utilization of the “Promised Land” as a universal image of liberation, as with the narrative of “Exodus” more generally, is by no means uncontroversial. The public debate between Michael Walzer and Edward Said, for instance, on the ethics of universalizing the term has been an important example of the dangers of interpreting Exodus as a “universal” allegory. Indeed, following Jonathan Boyarin's critique of the debate, my intent here has been neither to prescribe “Exodus” as a postcolonial redemption narrative nor to deny its historical importance as a metaphor, even an imprecise one. In spite of its limitations, the metaphor of the “Promised Land” continues to be important to a postcolonial mode of reading because of its emphasis on liberation and space, on the centrality of territorialization in the struggle against colonial authority.

CHAPTER FIVE THE ELUSIVE IDEAL OF SECULAR WRITING: V.S. NAIPAUL AND LITERARY SECULARISM IN INDIA

We can forget about the temporal scheme and about the pathos of the oedipal son; underneath, [Bloom's Anxiety of Influence] deals with the difficulty or, rather, the impossibility of reading and, by inference, with the indeterminacy of literary meaning. If we are willing to set aside the trappings of psychology, Bloom's essay has much to say on the encounter between latecomer and precursor as a displaced version of the paradigmatic encounter between reader and text. —Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight

Naipaul’s Slant on History Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew who converted to Anglicanism, was fond of describing himself as the blank page between the Old Testament and the New. It doesn’t sound quite as momentous to say it, but there is a Naipaulian correlative: V.S. Naipaul is the blank page between the ethos of British colonialism and that of the postcolonial intellectual. He is at once a latecomer to the colonial world, especially the genre of colonial travel-writing (“Conrad had gone everywhere before me”) and a precursor to a new kind of transnational writing,1 to be taken up and extended by writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Caryl Phillips. And Naipaul is in-between in a more personal way too, influenced by his father's struggles with language and self-representation as well as that of the metropolitan world of writers and publishers he encountered in London. His writings are often strikingly “readerly” in the sense that they quite often focus on characters who are themselves engaged in scenes of reading. But 1

On Naipaul’s transition from a colonial to a postcolonial sensibility, see Rob Nixon, London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Nixon reads Naipaul’s first work of nonfiction, The Middle Passage (1964) as the key work in this regard.

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if colonialism and influence are two powerful themes in Naipaul’s work, there is also a third, less discussed, site of entanglement in the writing, and that is the tension between Naipaul’s secularism (or atheism) and a sense of religious identity as a Hindu. This tangled relationship to religion is hinted at in some of his novels, but is palpably present in his more recent nonfiction works. Needless to say, Naipaul’s ambivalent relationship to secularism is closely imbricated in both of the other, more familiar, stories of a writer “in between.” Our purpose here is to aim for a balanced look at Naipaul’s controversial comments regarding secularism in India in particular. Naipaul’s anti-secular comments will be explored in detail, but so will aspects of his writing that might paint a more sympathetic portrait. Even after close reading, some aspects of Naipaul’s writerly persona remain troubling and self-contradictory, reminding one that the posture of secularism can at times be abused. On the matter of secularism in India, Naipaul has made numerous statements that bring his commitment as a secularist into question. Naipaul has usually identified himself as a secularist and a modernist interested in observation and narrative rather than “ideas,” and he generally resists any kind of categorical fixity—whether it be national, religious, or ideological. He begins the “Prologue” to Beyond Belief, for instance, with a strong disclaimer in this vein: “This is a book about people. It is not a book of opinion. It is a book of stories.” And he directs the reader to see his nonfiction work specifically as a travel narrative, presuming an aura of objective neutrality: So in these travel books or cultural explorations of mine the writer as traveler steadily retreats; the people of the country come to the front; and I become again what I was at the beginning: a manager of narrative. In the nineteenth century the invented story was used to do things that other literary forms—the poem, the essay—couldn’t easily do: to give news about a changing society, to describe mental states. I find it strange that the travel form—in the beginning so far away from my own instincts—should have taken me back there, to looking for the story; though it would have undone the point of the book if the narratives were falsified or forced. There are complexities enough in these stories. They are the point of the book; the reader should not look for “conclusions.”2

Note again the directive comment—do not look for arguments in this book, and don’t think of marking my position. But the insistence on the turn to narrative nevertheless falls flat, for two reasons. First, Naipaul’s directive Prologue fails to acknowledge the often deep intimacy between arguments and stories: good arguments frequently derive their force from their narrative qualities. And secondly, through his turn here to the travel narrative genre as a kind of alternative to more overtly politicized forms of writing (such as journalism), Naipaul overlooks the numerous ways in which travel narratives have always 2

Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted People,, xii.

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been ridden with ideological baggage, as Mary Louise Pratt and others have discussed. 3 Because Naipaul’s non-fiction writings so frequently move between personal and social reflections, this chapter will explore Naipaul's relationship to religion and secularism at both levels. In terms of broad social issues, Naipaul has recently been accused of being an ally of communalists in India, and his support for the BJP as a political party and the RSS hostility to Islamic civilization in South Asia poses a serious problem for an attempt to claim him as a secularist. For instance, he seemingly endorsed the illegal destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 by right-wing Hindu mobs. This event led to widespread riots around the country, and more than a thousand deaths. But Naipaul is quoted as saying: “Ayodhya is a sort of passion. Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity.”4 Statements such as this are highly irresponsible, since they can just as easily be used to endorse all manner of extremist religious and political activity. Indeed, one could well imagine an observer saying this of Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s: full of “passionate intensity.” But this explicitly communal voice in Naipaul’s writing is relatively new. Historically, Naipaul's hostility has been against all kinds of religious fanaticisms, including Islamic, Hindu, and Christian varieties. While the hostility to Islam and Islamic fundamentalism is now consistent, a close look at Naipaul's autobiographical writings and his writings on India reveal a strong sense of dislike for Hindu rituals and religious beliefs as well. Along these lines, one thinks of the protagonist of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), mocking the Brahminical ritualism of his wealthy in-laws soon after marriage: “Idols are the stepping-stones to the worship of the real thing. . . They are necessary only in a spiritually backward society” (Biswas, 130). Mr. Biswas’s dabbling with Hindu reform movements such as the Arya Samaj (closely related to the Brahmo Samaj with which Tagore was associated) leads to a direct confrontation with the family’s hierarchy, and results in humiliation. Similarly, the protagonist of the comic novel The Mystic Masseur (1957), Ganesh Ramsumair, is an aspiring author and mystical entrepreneur, who learns to mimic the postures of a holy man theatrically and for commercial as well as political advantage. Naipaul has a great deal of fun with Ganesh, nowhere more so than when he has him author two books in close succession—What God Told Me, a religious confession, and Profitable Evacuations, an essay on constipation. The juxtaposition of the two 3

See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (New York: Routledge, 1992). Also see Nixon, London Calling, 32. 4 Quoted in William Dalrymple, “Sir Vidia Gets It Badly Wrong.” Outlook India, March 15, 2004. Accessed online at: http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20040315&fname=Naipaul+%28F%29 &sid=1&pn=1.

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radically different titles is Naipaulian comedy at its best: the material world brings mystical idealism back to earth with a jolt. Like Eliot, Naipaul adoption of a secular world-view seems instinctual and ingrained. It’s more a temperament than it is an adopted ideology, and is so strong that it seems to undercut Naipaul’s recent problematic public comments. Which brings us back to the Hindu right. Here it’s important to note initially that Naipaul’s positive embrace of the Hindu right may be new, but his hostility to Islamic culture goes back thirty years or more. In books like India: A Wounded Civilization and the more recent Reading and Writing, Naipaul attacks the history of Mughal dominance in South Asia prior to the British. He argues that the Mughal era was a period of desecration and waste, a kind of dark ages dominated by a religious obsession rather than a flourishing period for arts, business, architecture, and cultural blending. Naipaul dismisses writers like Kabir, Amir Khusrav, Ghalib, and Iqbal, and shrugs at the extravagance of Mughal architecture, posing it against the poverty of those who lived outside the walls of the palaces. In this vein, Naipaul even recoils against the Taj Mahal because of the fact that it may have been built with slave labor: “the Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people.”5 Finally, and most importantly, against the enlightened rule of some Mughal emperors, Naipaul vividly narrates a rather idiosyncratic account of the sacking of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar in the sixteenth century, where he speculates: “Many men would have been killed; all the talent, energy, and intellectual capacity of the kingdom would have been extinguished for generations. The conquerors themselves, by creating a desert, would have ensured, almost invited, their own subsequent defeat by others” (6-7) In fact, Naipaul's vision of a blindly destructive Islamic incursion is not at all accurate, as the historian William Dalrymple shows in a recent article in Outlook India (“Sir Vidia Gets it Badly Wrong”; March 15, 2004). Dalrymple examines recent scholarship that explores the true complexity of the Hindu civilization at Vijayanagar including its demise, before complicating Naipaul’s claims about the character of Indo-Islamic civilization in the late medieval era. On Vijayanagara, Dalrymple draws on the work of Phillip Wagoner, and argues that the city-state was itself to a considerable degree Islamized: Far from being the stagnant, backward-looking bastion of Hindu resistance imagined by Naipaul, Vijayanagara had in fact developed in all sorts of unexpected ways, taking on much of the administrative, tax collecting and military methods of the Muslim sultanates that surrounded it—notably stirrups, horseshoes, horse armour and a new type of saddle, all of which allowed Vijayanagara to put into the field an army of horse archers who could hold at bay the Delhi Sultanate, then the most powerful force in India. (Dalrymple, 2004) 5

Quoted in William Dalrymple, “Sir Vidia Gets It Badly Wrong.” (2004)

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The interaction between the Muslim “invaders” and the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara was much greater than Naipaul’s account allows, extending to the kinds of clothing worn by the Hindu kings there. Moreover, Dalrymple argues that Hindu-Muslim hybridity was a “two way street,” showing the manifold ways in which Islam in the Indian subcontinent adopted elements for Hindu culture and, to some extent, even religion. Most importantly, once the kingdom was defeated by the Delhi sultanate, Hindu arts and crafts were not annihilated by the Mughals, as Naipaul suggests. Instead, the artists were reemployed on major projects at Mughal centers like Bijapur and Fatehpur Sikri, where the detail-work is written in Hindi script rather than Persian, and where Gujurati-Hindu sculpture graces the gardens of the palace. Naipaul's description of the Mughal-Islamic presence in India is, in short, as Dalrymple puts it, “jaundiced,” and this jaundiced hostility has only intensified in Naipaul's recent comments on this and related questions. Finally, the concern one has with Naipaul’s image of the Mughals is also applicable to his two sizable books on Islam outside of India, where he expresses severe, strident criticisms of Islamic history and the Muslim world. For Naipaul, global Islamic fundamentalism amongst the “converted peoples” is especially devastating because it leads to violence against local history, language, and literature. To be fair the characterizations of madmen, prophets, and revolutionaries, alternately as "hysteria" or "fanaticism," are found in many of Naipaul's works dealing with non-Muslims in Trinidad and Latin America. One thinks, for instance, of the many narratives in his 1994 book A Way in the World that foreground ideological or racial obsessions. Or perhaps the explorations of terroristic violence in Half a Life and, earlier, The Killings in Trinidad. In Naipaul’s historical analysis, fanaticism—whether Islamic or ethnic or “postcolonial”—produces rigid convictions again and again ruin the prospect of modernization of backward societies. In the aforementioned Beyond Belief, Naipaul describes the dangerous ability of religious partisans to erase history and destroy distinctions in space: Indonesia and Pakistan become extensions of Arabia, and their local histories become debased. But there's some confusion in Naipaul on this point, as the erasure of the past can also be a sign of modernization (or indeed, secularization). 6 Even if he harbors certain egregious anti-Muslim sentiments, it is far from 6

Amitav Ghosh alludes to the modernism of the new Islamic movements in his Naipaulian nonfiction work, In an Antique Land. At one point he encounters an Imam during his studies in Egypt. The Imam can’t fathom the idea of the Hindu custom of cremating one’s dead, and attacks it as “primitive,” much as an unreconstructed western anthropologist might have, fifty years ago: “’Why do you allow it? Can’t you see that it’s a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you permit something like that? Look at you: you’ve had some education; you should know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these things?’” (Ghosh, 1992, 235).

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clear that Naipaul has ever been a devout Hindu. Indeed, in the very same book where he inveighs against the Mughal Empire, and laments what he sees as a thousand years of cultural and religious subjugation in the subcontinent, Naipaul also robustly attacks Hindu fatalism as it operates in Indian politics in the midst of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. While Naipaul attacks Islam’s destructive ferocity, Hinduism's waste lies in its tendency to promote an attitude of passive acceptance, which is encapsulated in the conversion of Mohandas Gandhi’s politics into a kind of state religion in independent India. In the domain of literature, Naipaul sees Hindu fatalism most directly expressed in the writing of R.K. Narayan, whose statement that “India will go on” becomes a kind of index to a litany of failures Naipaul sees in early Narayan novels like Mr. Sampath, which ends in the eponymous protagonist’s withdrawal, following the failure of his various worldly endeavors. Naipaul reads Narayan as resorting to an unfortunate kind of mysticism, which combines a misuse of Gandhi with a timeless Hindu passivity: Gandhian nonviolence has degenerated into something very like the opposite of what Gandhi intended. For Srinivas nonviolence isn’t a form of action, a quickener of social conscience. It is only a means of securing an undisturbed calm; it is nondoing, noninterference, social indifference. It merges with the ideal of self-realization, truth to one’s identity. These modern-sounding words, which reconcile Srinivas to the artist’s predicament, disguise an acceptance of karma, the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm, which tells us that we pay in this life for what we have done in past lives: so that everything we see is just and balanced, and the distress we see is to be relished as religious theatre, a reminder of our duty to ourselves, our future lives.7

Here Naipaul is performing somewhat of a tricky operation. He takes a literary narrative written in the 1930s that invokes Gandhi, and applies it to the political situation of the 1970s—as something timeless, though the meaning of Narayan’s novel in 1940 and its meaning in 1975 must be two separate things. Another questionable move is the mis-translation of “karma,” which strictly speaking refers to deeds and duty; the emphasis on past lives is somewhat of a western misinterpretation of the concept. Karmic fatalism may indeed be an unfortunate state of mind, but it’s unclear whether it refers to the western idea of Hinduism of Hinduism per se. For Naipaul, it becomes clear, the problem is not just Gandhianism in decay, but the continued prevalence of a religious mentality in general, and he develops this in detail in his second book on India, India: A Wounded Civilization. Here, Naipaul gives many examples of religious customs and traditions stifling schemes for modernization and development. Gandhianism isn’t his primary target so much as Hinduism, though Gandhi seems to provide a symbolic alibi 7

Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization, 15.

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for a wide array of archaic beliefs. What’s more, Naipaul clearly doesn’t like the unmodern aspects of Gandhi himself, though he acknowledges the historical importance of the independence movement he led. The kind of circumscribed, parochial thinking Naipaul criticizes in Narayan’s novels is in Gandhi’s own writing in the latter’s autobiography, My Experiments in Truth, and Naipaul fixates on Gandhi’s failure to represent his life in London with any degree of specificity: Though Gandhi spent three years in England, there is nothing in his autobiography about the climate or the seasons, so unlike the heat and monsoon of Gujurat and Bombay; and the next date he is precise about is the date of his departure. No London building is described, no street, no room, no crowd, no public conveyance. The London of 1890, capital of the world—which must have been overwhelming to a young man from a small Indian town—has to be inferred from Gandhi’s continuing internal disturbances, his embarrassments, his religious self-searchings, his attempts at dressing correctly and learning English manners, and above all, his difficulties and occasional satisfactions about food.8

In effect Naipaul condemns Gandhi’s failure to see the world outside his own circumscribed, ritual-oriented experience. This comment gains force in Naipaul’s account because he clearly values his own travel narratives on just the opposite quality—their ability to see the world as it really is, without personal baggage. And while the critique strikes home, and clearly rhymes with similar kinds of imaginative lapses Naipaul sees in Narayan as well as in the numerous other ways Gandhi’s ideas and image have been appropriated in India, this rhetorical success is not the end of the story. For even as he bemoans the corrosive effect of Hindu traditions in public life in independent India, Naipaul’s more personal writings concede a continued intimate, if not strictly voluntary, connection to them.

Going Within, Going Back: Naipaul’s “Prologue” In “Prologue to an Autobiography,” Naipaul describes his experience of Hinduism as a space of complacent enclosure associated with ritual practice. For Naipaul this is effectively the traditional and ritualized Hinduism of his family life in Trinidad, a theme which recurs often in many Naipaul texts (from A House for Mr. Biswas, to the recent essay "Reading and Writing"). It is a religion in the family and of the family, markedly Hindu and even markedly Brahminical. And it is frustrating to Naipaul because it prevents modernization and independence of thought and action, the independence that is essential to defining oneself as a writer. And while Naipaul works hard to distance himself 8

Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization, 86-87.

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from the baggage of his Hindu background in early books like An Area of Darkness, in “Prologue to an Autobiography,” that experience presents itself as a kind of blot on Naipaul’s secular self. But at the beginning there was little in the way of ambivalence, just an unblinking hatred of linguistic blindness, inexplicable ceremonies, and his father’s “appetite for Hindu speculation”: I came of a family that abounded with pundits. But I had been born an unbeliever. I took no pleasure in religious ceremonies. They were too long, and the food came only at the end. I did not understand the language—it was as if our elders expected that our understanding would be instinctive—and no one explained the prayers or the ritual. One ceremony was like another. The images didn't interest me; I never sought to learn their significance. With my lack of belief and distaste for ritual there also went a metaphysical incapacity, this again a betrayal of heredity, for my father's appetite for Hindu speculation was great. So it happened that, though growing up in an orthodox family, I remained almost totally ignorant of Hinduism. What, then, survived of Hinduism in me? Perhaps I had received a certain supporting philosophy. I cannot say; my uncle often put it to me that my denial was an admissible type of Hinduism. Examining myself, I found only that sense of the difference of people, which I have tried to explain, a vaguer sense of caste, and a horror of the unclean.9

It’s notable that even in this statement of strong unbelief, Naipaul finds himself unable to fully extricate himself from the Hindu fold, as his uncle accepts his rejection as “an admissible type of Hinduism.” Moreover, Naipaul is willing to explore the trace of ritual sensibility that lingers on in his own orientation to the material world. He goes on explain his revulsion at mundane practices he finds to be unclean: It still horrifies me that people should put out food for animals on plates that they themselves use; as it horrified me at school to see boys sharing popsicles and Palates, local iced lollies; as it horrifies me to see women sipping from ladles with which they stir their pots. This was more than difference; this was the uncleanliness we had to guard against.10

In effect, Naipaul is admitting the unconscious power of certain taboo behaviors that have the same force on him as on any orthodox Hindu. He is not trying to exorcise himself of the feelings. Rather, he is conceding that he is helpless to his feeling of repulsion at the sight of lollipop-sharing or ladle-sipping—while affirming that he continues to find these practices repulsive. To contemporary sociologists of religion like Talal Asad, these confessions of the body are as much “religion” as a conscious declaration of faith—religion as a disciplinary 9

Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, 32-33. Ibid., 33.

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practice of the body, or a habitus. 11 In a later chapter of An Area of Darkness, Naipaul credits Gandhi with being able to see the ills of Indian society. This might seem odd given Naipaul’s bitterness about Gandhi in India: A Wounded Civilization, and indeed there seem to be some claims about Gandhi in this work that are contradicted by his later work. But Naipaul is driving a different point in An Area of Darkness. Here, he argues that Gandhi was able to see India clearly, in large part because he too was an outsider: He looked at India as no Indian was able to; his vision was direct, and this directness was, and is, revolutionary. He sees exactly what the visitor sees; he does not ignore the obvious. He sees the beggars and the shameless pundits and the filth of Banaras; he sees the atrocious sanitary habits of doctors, lawyers, and journalists. He sees the Indian callousness, the Indian refusal to see. No Indian attitude escapes him, no Indian problem; he looks down to the roots of the static, decayed society. And the picture of India which comes out of his writings and exhortations over more than thirty years still holds: this is the measure of his failure. He saw India so clearly because he was in part a colonial. He finally settled in India when he was forty-six, after spending twenty years in South Africa. There he had seen an Indian community removed from the setting of India; contrast made for clarity, criticism and discrimination for self-analysis. He emerged a colonial blend of East and West, Hindu and Christian.12

For Naipaul, the problem isn’t so much the Hindu religion as it is a generalized sense that Indian society is thoroughly wiped out. It’s Gandhi’s experiences abroad that enable him to inject fresh ideas into the social fabric. Some of those ideas—the Gandhian emphasis on compassion, and respect for the downtrodden—clearly come from the Christian context: It needed the straight simple vision of the West; and it is revealing to find, just after his return from South Africa, how Gandhi speaks Christian, Western, simplicities with a new, discovering fervour; 'Before the Throne of the Almighty we shall be judged, not by what we have eaten nor by whom we have been touched but by whom we have served and how. Inasmuch as we serve a single human being in distress, we shall find favour in the sight of God.' The New Testament tone is not inappropriate. It is in India, and with Gandhi, that one can begin to see how revolutionary the now familiar Christian ethic must once have

11

See Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion for an example of an anthropological approach to religion beyond the (Christian-centered) orientation to expressions of “belief.” Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 12 Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, 73.

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been.13

Naipaul isn’t implying that Gandhi had actually converted to Christianity, but rather that his “ethic” is informed by his exposure to Christian rhetoric. The argument seems a bit speculative, for while Gandhi certainly knew quite a number of devout Christians in England, he quotes many different scriptural traditions freely in his various essays and speeches. Whether he is arguing that India desperately needed a crypto-Christian Gandhi to come in as an “outsider” in order to shake up the old religious mores of Hindu society, or that Gandhi himself had fallen prey to a kind of religious fanaticism, it’s clear that Naipaul’s approach lacks symmetry. There is no shade in the face of the Naipaulian gaze; all the societies he studies seem equally symptomatic. Moreover, there is a steadfast sense that religion is responsible for the slow, troubled emergence of real modernity in the Indian outlook, and that religious practices are so engrained as to be unchangeable.

The Naipaulians Who Go Beyond Naipaul: Ghosh and Kumar Greater symmetry with regard to religion specifically can be found in the work of writers who have acknowledged the influence of Naipaul on their development as writers, especially Amitav Ghosh and Amitava Kumar. Along with symmetry, there is a clear sense of mission in these writers’ works that challenges Naipaul’s passivity. For some Indian literary secularists, at least, the task of the writer is not merely to diagnose the problem but to participate in some fashion in resolving it. Ghosh both acknowledges Naipaul and distances himself from him in an essay on communalism and the responsibility of the writer that he wrote in the wake of the deadly riots that took place in Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The essay was written in 1995, and reprinted in Ghosh’s recent volume of essays, Incendiary Circumstances: Years before, I had read a passage by V.S. Naipaul that has stayed with me ever since. I have never been able to find it again, so this account is from memory. In his incomparable prose, Naipaul describes a demonstration. . . . To his surprise, the sight fills him with an obscure longing, a kind of melancholy; he is aware of a wish to go out, to join, to merge his concerns with theirs. Yet he knows he never will; it is simply not in his nature to join crowds. For many years I read everything of Naipaul’s I could lay my hands on; I couldn’t have enough of him. I read him with the intimate appalled attention that one reserves for one’s most skillful interlocutors. It was he who first made it

13

Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, 74.

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In a way this is a very Naipaulian passage. For Naipaul himself frequently marks the turning points and literary figures who made it possible for him to conceive of himself as a writer. Just as Naipaul read Conrad and wanted to do what Conrad did, Ghosh reads Naipaul and wants to do what Naipaul does. But with a difference: I remembered that passage because I believed that I too was not a joiner, and in Naipaul’s pitiless mirror I thought I saw an aspect of myself rendered visible. Yet as this forlorn little group marched out of the shelter of the compound, I did not hesitate for a moment: without a second thought, I joined.15

This is a key moment for Ghosh—one of the critical ethical revelations that informs his project as both secular and ethical. For Ghosh, there is no contradiction in choosing the life of the detached, secular writer while also contributing to movements that further the cause of social justice. And yet, at the same time Ghosh’s novels and nonfiction books have responded to the challenge of identifying as a fully secular being in the South Asian context. Here religious identity is personal—it is marked in one’s name, in the texture of one’s family life, and of course, on the body. Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and In an Antique Land both contain powerful revelations of the intimacy of both religious identity and the “veil” it casts over secular selfdefinition. For the secular intellectual at the contemporary moment, Ghosh argues, there is always a certain anxiety about the failure of one’s own secularity, which comes from within: That particular fear has a texture you can neither forget nor describe... It is a fear that comes out of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world- not language, not food, not music-- it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.16

For Ghosh, the aspiration to secularity is perpetually fraught in spaces where religious identity is always associated in some way with violence. Whether it is Sikhs in 1984 or Hindus in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1964, the friend or neighbor can instantly be recoded as a communal enemy. And given that instability, the “war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror” (the war with one’s neighbour and oneself) forces the secular intellectual to consider the 14

Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances, 197. Ibid., Incendiary Circumstances, 198. 16 Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, 204. 15

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ways he himself is implicated in a social order whose secularism continues to be contingent. Another difficulty with secularism besetting writers in the South Asian context is the problem of elitism. The recent surge in communal sentiments has been accompanied by an unprecedented shake-up of the political system. The old Nehruvian Congress Party structure—controlled by English-speaking, “secular” elites—has been replaced by a much more tumultuous multi-party political landscape, in which Communists and the Hindu right have emerged as major players. In such an environment, English speaking writers in particular have to acknowledge that their distance from the new mass-movements is partly a function of their elite background. Amitava Kumar responds to this problem in particular at several moments in his recent quasi-Naipaulian travelogue, Husband of a Fanatic. In the following passage, he defends his interest in a certain Hindu extremist named Jagdish Barotia: I am not sure whether I would ever, or for long, envy Mr. Barotia’s passion, but I find myself sympathetic to his perception that the English-sepaking elite of India has not granted the likes of him a proper place under the Indian flag. Once that thought enters my head, I am uneasily conscious of the ways in which I found myself mocking Mr. Barotia’s bigotry by noticing his ungrammatical English. Like Mr. Barotia, I was born in the provinces and grew up in small towns. For me, the move to the city meant that I learnt English and embraced secular, universal rationality and liberalism. Mr. Barotia remained truer to his roots and retains his religion as well as a narrower form of nationalism that went with it. His revenge on the city was that he also became a fanatic.17

For the cosmopolitan Indian writer from a non-cosmopolitan background, the experience of resentment that so drives Mr. Barotia is not so terribly alien. Kumar here marks his secularism as clearly tied to the metropolitan life he chose to live, and he can see how Mr. Barotia’s parochial Hindu chauvinism might have been his own fate had circumstances been different. Kumar sees the commonalities he has with his “fanatic” neighbour; this is an admission that neither Naipaul nor the left critics of communalism are keen to admit. Of course, revelations like these about the challenge of sustaining a secular outlook in the face of changing discursive norms in the Indian subcontinent are nothing compared to the personal challenge Kumar faces as the husband of a Pakistani Muslim woman. These challenges are political, familial, and in some ways extremely intimate—and they force Kumar to confront the limits of his sense of religious identity. For in order for his wife’s family to accept the marriage, he is required to nominally convert to Islam and take on a Muslim name. The strangeness of the experience leads Kumar to the following Naipaulian meditation: 17

Kumar, Husband of a Fanatic, xxiv.

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There was a phrase of V.S. Naipaul’s, from his novel The Mimic Men, that came back to me, ‘… the convert, suspect to both the faithful and the infidel.’ It was a precise, evocative description, and it touched on a fear inside me, a fear that arises from the feeling that one does not belong anywhere. But there was no danger of my claiming that space for myself; I did not think of myself as religious. Mine was a more secular claim about how different religions are a part of our lives and that, especially in the context of the Indian subcontinent, the fact of mixed influences as well as historical co-existence is indubitable. I wanted to echo the sentiment that I had heard voiced by the writer Intizar Husain: ‘I am a Muslim, but I always feel that there is a Hindu sitting inside me. . . I still feel that I am an exile who wanders between Karbala and Ayodhya.’ Husain was born in India and migrated to Pakistan after Partition. He lives in Lahore and is one of Pakistan’s leading writers. I was struck by the beauty of his words, and his sense of sublime rootlessness.18

In some sense, Kumar’s act of conversion (which is “real” because of its social consequences—even if it is not the sincere conversion of a devout believer) is the most radical experience of secularity imaginable. Like Daniel Deronda in Eliot’s novel, Kumar has to confront the limits of his intellectual sense of tolerance as he experiences a change in his fundamental social identity through the experience. The “sublime rootlessness” he sees in Intizar Husain’s words is a powerful metaphor for both the deep implication of Hindu and Indo-Islamic cultures in the Indian subcontinent, and the challenges Kumar faces as he travels across it. Though both Kumar and Ghosh affirmatively invoke Naipaul in their introspective writings, their articulation of a troubled secular literary sensibility differs from Naipaul’s in one important way. Both Kumar and Ghosh are directly self-conscious about the limits of their ability to be utterly detached. At times, the writer is implicated merely by the accident of a name or heredity. But even where the “joining” the cause of social justice or secularism is seen as purely elective, the disavowal of total detachment is one of the key components of literary secularism. Though Naipaul experiences much of the same doubt and internal struggle described by Ghosh and Kumar, he insists upon his detachment despite evidence to the contrary. For Naipaul, this detachment is tied up with a discourse of writing as a profession of “purity” or “nobility,” but upon reading closely one sees that these terms are themselves derived from religious experience.

Secularism in a Sentence: Naipaul’s Writerliness As a way of gaining a deeper understanding of Naipaul’s slippery relationship to literary secularism, it may be helpful to look closely at one of 18

Ibid., 210.

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Naipaul’s autobiographical engagements with Hinduism. We could just as easily turn to one of the autobiographical fictions (like A House for Mr. Biswas), since the line between fiction and autobiography is frequently arguable: so many of the plots revolve around events like the discovery of literacy, the hunger for education, the explosion of print-culture, father-son conflicts, and of course the moment of departure from the marginal society for the metropolitan center. But for the purposes of simplicity, it might make sense to stay with a text that is clearly marked as autobiographical, Naipaul's 1982 "Prologue to an Autobiography." And within that text, which is roughly about 70 pages in length, I’ll focus on the question of religion through Naipaul's concept of the sentence. For Naipaul, it is the sentence that is the key to the existence of the writer, the entity that defines him over anything else. I'll look at just a few carefully crafted but telling sentences where Naipaul foregrounds this atomistic core of writerly effort, with an eye to the growing incursion of the Hindu background into the scene of writing. The first sentence describes Naipaul's situation as he wrote the very first sentence of his first book, Miguel Street, in the early 1950s: It is now nearly thirty years since, in a BBC room in London, on an old BBC typewriter, and on smooth, 'non-rustle' BBC script paper, I wrote the first sentence of my first publishable book.19

By placing himself so pronouncedly at the BBC, Naipaul establishes himself at one of the great centers of the modern media, and as completely separate from his Trinidad background. Note how often he repeats the acronym in the sentence above: "BBC room" (secular space), "BBC typewriter" (secular equipment, modern technology)20, and "BBC script paper" (modern medium). The BBCentrism of this passage raises a question about authorship—did the BBC write the novel, or did Naipaul? The sentence itself answers, with its turn to the declarative: "…I wrote the first sentence." But context returns subtly—it's not the first sentence of his first short story ever, but the first sentence of his first publishable book. This first sentence of Naipaul's “Prologue to an Autobiography” isn't the beginning of Naipaul's story, so much as it is the beginning—or prologue—to a publication history. Even though it is evidently the BBC that makes Naipaul's jump into a career as a writer possible, the actual act of writing requires the implication of oneself 19

Naipaul, Finding the Center, 3. It's intriguing to think of the centrality of the typewriter here, given its contested status in the halls of the 'serious' writer in 1952. Elsewhere Naipaul talks about how he found using a typewriter very natural. In this he wasn't especially unusual, but perhaps the typewriter belies his obsession with writing as a "noble thing," as a vocation separate from all others. 20

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in one's own history. As Naipaul writes later in the same essay (the theme is echoed often), “To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave. Actually to write, it was necessary to go back. It was the beginning of self-knowledge” (34). It turns out that the key to self-knowledge for Naipaul here as elsewhere is his father, and as the "Prologue" moves forward it comes to feel more like a post-script to his father's career than as the prologue to his own. It is Naipaul's father who transmits the "vocation" of writing to his son. And it is his father's failure as a writer that is the core of the story here, just as it is in A House for Mr. Biswas. The reasons for failure21 are multiple and somewhat overdetermined—a mix of colonial marginality, lack of formal education, and the pressures of Hindu family life. What is not mentioned is how the son, who inherited his father's vocation, managed to avert his father's fate. What is striking in all of this is the importance of the Hindu religious and social framework to Naipaul despite his avowed distance from the religion. To begin with, Naipaul's father was expected to become a Pandit, and his turn to writing seems to be marked as an only partial escape from that calling: "It was a version of the pundit's vocation" (54). Writing, as a form of solitary and detached work that nevertheless carries the burden of representation for an entire community, does seem to be a possibly secularized version of a priesthood. But how secular is it? Naipaul's father signs his weekly column with the Trinidad Guardian with the byline, “The Pandit,” and writes more or less consistently about the Hindu community in Chaguanas. Naipaul also repeatedly describes his father's career in terms of a kind of spiritual quest22, which is in some sense continued in Naipaul: From the earliest stories and bits of stories my father read to me, before the upheaval of the move, I had arrived at the conviction—the conviction that is at the root of so much human anguish and passion, and corrupts so many lives— that there was justice in the world. The wish to be a writer was a development of that. To be a writer as O. Henry was, to die in mid-sentence, was to triumph over darkness. And like a wild religious faith that hardens in adversity, this wish to be a writer, this refusal to be extinguished, this wish to seek at some future time for justice, strengthened as our conditions grew worse in the house on the street.23

21

This failure is also everywhere evident in the volume of recently published letters called Between Father and Son. Seeparsad Naipaul repeatedly suggests they collaborate on volumes, or asks his son in London for help in finding publishers. But Vidia clearly has his eyes on his own career. 22 "The Hindu who wants to be a pundit has first to find a guru. My father, wanting to learn to write, found MacGowan. It was MacGowan, my father said, who had taught him how to write; and all his life my father had for MacGowan the special devotion the Hindu has for his guru." (Finding the Center, 55). 23 Ibid., 31-32.

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It can’t be an accident that Naipaul’s metaphor for the desire to be a writer he cultivated in the wake of his father’s failure is of “wild religious faith that hardens in adversity.” Writing is for Naipaul the surest means of asserting his individualism and leaving a mark upon the world, but in some ways the desire for it follows the contour of profound religious faith. The root of Naipaul’s father’s failure, in this account, is his incomplete disavowal of his religious identity as a Pandit. Some of the passages in the “Prologue” describing his father’s relationship to religion resemble the sections of A House for Mr. Biswas above, in that they describe the tension between a reformer affiliated with the Arya Samaj and his orthodox family: The family, with all its pundits, were defenders of the orthodox Hindu faith. My father wasn't. Later-- just ten years later-- when we were living in Port of Spain and our Hindu world was breaking up, my father was to write lyrically about Hindu rituals and Indian village life. . . . He belonged, or was sympathetic, to the reforming movement known as the Arya Samaj, which sought to make of Hinduism a pure philosophical faith. The Arya Samaj was against caste, pundits, animistic ritual. It was against child marriage; it was for the education of girls. (“Prologue,” Finding the Center, 66)

But as with Mr. Biswas in Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical novel (and as with Gora in Tagore’s novel), reformers must eventually decide on which side of the fence they stand. In Tagore’s Gora, the protagonist is forced to leave the fold of his conservative milieu once his heritage is revealed, but in Naipaul’s father’s case, what follows is humiliation that leads to psychic dissolution. In the “Prologue,” the key moment for his father Seepersad Naipaul’s struggle with his identity comes when his father begins to be pressured to participate in a goat sacrifice. Initially he responds lightly, and goes so far as to publish a satirical story on the trend of Trinidadian villagers to sacrifice goats in response to paralytic rabies, rather than have their cattle vaccinated. But then he receives a threatening letter from family members demanding that he participate in the ceremony, and quietly gives in. The ritual sacrifice he participates in draws him into the world he had tried to reject against his will: My father. . . is, it might be said, a little to one side: a man who (unknown to Rodin) had been intended by his grandmother and mother to be a pandit, now for the first time going through the priestly rites; a man in white, garlanded like the goat with hibiscus, offering sacrificial clove-scented fire to the image of the goddess, to the still living goat, to the onlookers, and then offering the severed goat's head on a brass plate.24

Here Naipaul's father is ostensibly being honored for his participation—he is garlanded like a pandit. But beneath the screen of white, the aspiring journalist 24

Naipaul, Finding the Center, 69.

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is roughly in the position of the goat, forced to acknowledge the authority of a power outside of himself. The authority can be described as Kali, as his patriarchal family hierarchy—or, in a Durkheimian reading, as both25. In a way it's not the goat whose sacrifice is being foregrounded here, but his own. In Naipaul's version of the event, the embarrassment of primitive ritual linked to the slaughter of the goat becomes simply a side-story to his father's failure to insist upon his right to be modern, to define himself separately from the expectation of the Hindu social structure. Needless to say, within Naipaul's nuclear family the incident is entirely suppressed; Vidia Naipaul, the son, only finds out about it when an American journalist sends him a clipping many years later. This incident, central to Naipaul's “Prologue,” demonstrates the repeated marginalizations of the subject from his own narrative. This marginalization consists at one level of Seeparsad Naipaul forced to participate in a Hindu ritual, to be Hindu against his wishes and contrary to his idea of himself as free from religion. But it is also echoed formally in the grammar of the text as a whole, from the title (“Prologue to an Autobiography”) to the character that is at its center (Naipaul's father takes over the text of the autobiography). Seeparsad's marginalization in life seems to prefigure Naipaul's marginalization in narrative. Naipaul reads this incident as the beginning of his father's fall into what he calls “hysteria” (“He looked in the mirror one day and couldn't see himself. And he began to scream” [70]). The failure of the writer to sustain his secularism in an adverse situation leads necessarily to his failure as a writer, and even as a psychically coherent individual. If Naipaul's father is at the displaced center of Naipaul's autobiographical narrative, how then does Naipaul himself manage to assert a secular persona as a writer? At some point in this transmission the form and the content of the message has undergone a fundamental transformation. Sometimes the text suggests that the transmission is only partial and contingent, as in the following passage where Naipaul acknowledges the transmission of hysteria alongside the vocation as a whole: And what is astonishing to me is that, with the vocation, he so accurately transmitted to me—without saying anything about it—his hysteria from the time when I didn't know him: his fear of extinction. That was his subsidiary gift to me. That fear became mine as well. It was linked with the idea of the vocation: the fear could be combated only by the exercise of the vocation.26

But more often than not Naipaul simply glosses over the break between his father and himself, erases or defers the "fear of extinction" referred to here in the interest of a career, a publishing history, and the stamp of BBC authority. The inconsistency makes it difficult to escape the conclusion that the hysteria he 25

Emile Durkheim explores the idea of "effervescence" in the conclusion to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 26 Naipaul, Finding the Center, 72.

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attributes both to his father and to himself is an inevitable by-product of his marginal origins. But the anguish of marginality and the authoritarian demands of Hindu family life and ritual are thoroughly commingled. Moreover, the attempt to escape the Hindu world, and become a writer, is repeatedly marked as a version of nothing other than a religious vocation. And finally, even that limited form of self-determination is undermined by the coerced goat sacrifice described in the text. The epigram with which I began this chapter was Paul de Man’s review of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. And the chain of readers inherent in my use of De Man (De Man reading Bloom reading how great writers read each other) seems fitting to my reading of Naipaul as well. In Naipaul, as in Bloom, the world is full of writers learning to read, and whose anxiety stems from the fear that the only story they have to tell is someone else’s. In Naipaul the familial anxiety takes on a unique hue because Naipaul’s father is both the model of the secular writer whose story becomes the stuff of the son’s fiction (and autobiography), while at the same time he is the unwitting transmitter of the pre-modern bubble of Hindu ritualism. And though it may be tempting to dwell on the themes of broken paternalism and familial psychology that may be tied to Naipaul’s use of the word “hysteria,” what is really at issue here (as De Man argues with regard to Bloom) is the relationship between reader and text. In Naipaul, the reader seems to desire secularism, while the text (the precedent) demands religious authority. And if reader-text relationship has to be one of indeterminacy and negotiation in De Man, it may be so here as well. In Naipaul, I have been arguing, unconscious religious influence competes with fierce acts of secular refusal—of reading against the religious grain.

Conclusion Naipaul’s support for the Hindu right is in diametrical opposition to the entire South Asian literary community, which has been consistently critical of the communalization of politics in the various nations of the Indian subcontinent. It is, perhaps, the biggest reversal of literary secularism we have seen in the chapters thus far, and it might rank with T.S. Eliot’s seemingly implausible turn to Anglo-Catholicism in the late 1920s—though it also needs to be noted that Naipaul has never personally claimed to be a practicing Hindu, and has at times strenuously criticized the anti-modern or premodern elements of Indian public life after independence. Moreover, Naipaul’s more autobiographical writings express confusion as well as anger about the role of Hindu ritual in his father’s psychic collapse, and put Naipaul’s latter-day support for anti-secular cultural politics into question. And finally, the many writers who claim Naipaul as an influence have, in the recent generation, adopted some of his stylistic and formal techniques in the interest of an intellectual agenda that looks quite different from Naipaul’s.

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In contrast to Naipaul, Salman Rushdie has declared his allegiance to secularism both in South Asia and the west in utterly unambiguous terms, and has described the line between religious nationalism and secularist politics as akin to “battle lines.” Given the violent fallout from his novel The Satanic Verses, such language seems appropriate, even prescient. But as with Joyce, the unambiguous secularist agenda is somewhat complicated by Rushdie’s postmodern appropriation of Islamic theology in the actual text of his novel.

CHAPTER SIX THE AMBIGUOUS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEN AND ANGELS: RUSHDIE'S DAEMONIC SECULARISM

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is made profane" —Karl Marx

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is a key text for the problems of contemporary literary secularism in England. The differences from some earlier explorations of the problem of secularism are clear—the novel aggressively insists on its contemporaneity—and yet there are also a number of ways in which Rushdie’s text keeps the dilemmas of earlier historical eras clearly in view. This mingling of the present and the past is very much of a piece with the novel’s formal postmodernism, and opens the way to a deconstructive reworking of ideas from Blake and Milton as well as medieval Islamic theology. And The Satanic Verses is a suitable closing text to the story of Indian literary secularism in particular—taking, as it does, the problem of national identity and transforming them at the beginning of a new globalized era. And while this chapter will address in some sense all of these issues, the center of our attention will be the conceptual inventions in the novel itself. The greatest of these inventions is Rushdie’s idea of secularism as daemonic, imbued with a wild energy that derives from outside the self, that relies upon an indeterminate agency, and that is, above all playful, decentering, and creative. Daemonic secularism is, in short, what secularism looks like in a postmodern novel, and the problems it provokes for ethics and identity are also those provoked by postmodernism more generally. With its connections to entities that are alternately satanic and angelic, daemonic secularism challenges a straightforward understanding of what it might mean to adopt the identity of a secular Muslim immigrant in contemporary Great Britain. However, Rushdie ultimately resolves the crisis through a turn to twin concepts of liberal secularism that are stripped of the earlier complexities. Rushdie’s own background is, as is well known, a secular one. He asserts both his atheism and his affectionate relationship to Islamic culture in a number of essays and interviews. And in “Is Nothing Sacred?,” the final essay in Imaginary Homelands, he indicates that he is a moderate when it comes to his distance from religion:

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Here Rushdie indicates his proximity to writers like James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist describes a similar turn to a concept of aesthetic beauty after falling away from the enclosure of religious life. Rushdie also stresses the importance of cross-cultural awareness when he references the role of religion in India, where William Gass’s comment does not seem to apply. Indeed, given recent events in the United States, many observers might suggest that Gass’s association of religion with the irrelevant science of astrology is premature there as well. The Satanic Verses is born of a personal secularism, which is developed in several passages where the word “secularism” is deployed in the novel itself to describe Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, the two protagonists. But in some important ways, the novel also engages the question of what secularism means at broader, socio-political levels. One of these is British national secularism following the influx of South Asian immigrants (many of them Muslims) to England, and the other being the crisis in global Islamic religious institutions that followed the rise of a newly radicalized Islam in the 1970s and 80s. The aspirations of Rushdie's novel to represent a new, multicultural London, is a cultural direct challenge to British majority culture, along the lines of Eliot's Daniel Deronda, with Rushdie’s Muslims at times experiencing the same ethical dilemmas experienced by Jewish characters such as Daniel Deronda in the England of the 1870s.2 1

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 416. See Talal Asad's convincing account of the history of race/ethnicity British politics from the 1960s leading to the public burnings of the novel as well as Ayatollah

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The literary secularism of The Satanic Verses is expressed in three powerful themes: the individual's drive to know more than what is given, the desire to act independently of structures of authority, and finally, the desire to create narratives that express one's individual genius. The last, the desire to be the author of one's own script, is closely linked to the narrative aims of Rushdie's own text, and is therefore explored in the novel with a high degree of selfreflexivity. But of course, each of these themes is comprehensively challenged by the book’s own “daemonic” spirit: Saladin Chamcha’s mischievousness, and Gibreel Farishta’s own angelic/diabolic dreams and hallucinations. Because of the daemonic arc of Rushdie’s novel, human agency is hard to identify, and creative inspiration ultimately seems to come partly from outside—from the Other, who may or may not be identifiable with God. At this point, it seems important to define the “daemonic” in more detail. It is a term which I am appropriating in part from William Blake’s idea of the “Demon,” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I use the Greek orthography to indicate some separation from the specifically Christian theological idea of “demons,” and instead emphasize a broader concept of non-divine, non-human agency that may be in the world separate from established notions of good and evil. In the section of his poem called “There is no natural religion,” Blake writes: That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel & Spirit & Demon. . . . As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various) So all Religions & as all similars have one source / The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius.3

To a great extent this is simply the anti-theological kernel that is at the heart of Romanticism: the “Poetic Genius” as the greatest expression of human individuality. While the idea of “genius” is very human, it remains tied, both in Blake and in Rushdie, to “Angel & Spirit & Demon”—the realm of entities close to, but not equivalent to, God. Blake's choice of the word "genius" to represent the human creative spirit is also suggestive, given the Arabic etymology (“djinn”) of the word "genius.” In addition to Blake, Rushdie derives his conceptual framework from the antinomies of Islam. The image of evil as represented as “shaitan” derives directly from the Quran and other Islamic sources,4 as well as the book of Isaiah Khomeini's Fatwa. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993). 3 William Blake, “All Religions Are One.” Accessed online at: http://www.mtsu.edu/~socwork/frost/god/blake.htm. 4 The primary text other than the Quran that most influences Rushdie's representation of

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in the Old Testament, Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil, as well as John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Quranic “Shaitan” interacts, and is sometimes interchangeable with, the Christian and English “Satan” of the King James Bible, as well as Blake and Milton.5 There are of course important distinctions between the Muslim Shaitan and the Jewish and Christian Satans that populate Rushdie’s novel. Shaitan in the Quran is sent out of Paradise because he is too proud to prostrate himself before human beings. In contrast, though pride is also extremely important in the story of Satan's Fall both in Isaiah 14 6 and as narrated in a poem like Paradise Lost, it is Satan's jealousy of the power and authority of God that takes center stage in the early books of the Bible. However, Rushdie’s “shaitan,” as it enters Gibreel Farishta’s mind, is less a function of pride than it is possible schizophrenia: As once the thirteenth-century German monk Richalmus would shut his eyes and instantly see clouds of minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on earth, dancing like dustspecks in the sunlight, so now Gibreel with open eyes and by the light of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his adversary, his—to give the old word back its original meaning—shaitan.7

Again, note the closeness to medieval Christian theology even alongside Rushdie’s clearly Arabic/Islamic terminology. Moreover, there is here again the tension between the idea of Shaitan as a smaller, immanent presence in the world (“clouds of minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on Muhammed is, according to Ziauddin Sardar, the Sirah—collection of hagiographical stories about Muhammed. MM. Ahsan and A.R. Kidwal, Eds. Sacrilege and Civility: Muslim Perspectives on the Satanic Verses. Leicester: Islamic Foundation Press: 278). 5 With the reference to his being made of clay, the “Shaitan” who appears in Quran 7:11 resembles that of Isaiah 45. Here is the Quran: “"We created you [Adam] and gave you form. Then We said the angels: 'Prostrate yourselves before Adam.' They all prostrated themselves except Satan, who refused to prostrate himself. 'Why did you not prostrate yourself when I commanded you?' He asked. 'I am nobler than he,' he replied. 'You created me from fire, but You created him from clay.'” (Quran 7:11) 6 “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! for thou has said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides to the sides of the pit. They that seek thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners? . . . But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcase under feet.” (Isaiah 14) 7 Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 331.

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earth”) against the stronger idea of Shaitan as representing transcendent evil focused on a single being. For Gibreel Farishta, it is clearly the latter that is Shaitan, embodied in Saladin Chamcha. But Gibreel falls, and arguably it is the non-metaphysical kind of “Shaitan” that becomes the core of the novel’s humanism at the end.

“Secularism” and the Daemonic in The Satanic Verses While The Satanic Verses is structured by sacred narrative (especially the Quran), it is also urgently motivated to locate and represent the world in secular terms—as centered around human individuals defined by the mastery of agency and the right to authorship. To some of Rushdie's critics on the left, the binarism of “secular” and “religious” is debilitating. Rustom Bharucha, for instance, may agree with Rushdie substantially on questions of law and civil rights (including Rushdie's right to free speech), but he is nevertheless critical of Rushdie for what he perceives as an oversimplified concept of religion and secularism: “The realist is that battle lines in the immediate context of India's political culture can no longer be so simplistically defined, as the opposition to communalism needs to be aligned with a far wider spectrum of political affiliations and contradictions.”8 I'm quite sympathetic to these criticisms in many ways; indeed, they echo some of the major arguments I have been making throughout this project. But though the novel may appear to present a simple binaristic secularism, the idea of daemonic secularism at the heart of the narrative proves to be considerably more complex. Rushdie’s own use of the word "secularism" is partly to blame for the misreading of his approach. In his occasional deployment of the word in the novel, it does connote the straightforward adoption of western culture, modernity, and freedom from religion. And in trying to argue that his book is not in fact "about" Islam, Rushdie, in an early defense of his book, disavowed responsibility for any religious themes or representations in the novel. In his “Open Letter to Rajiv Gandhi,” for instance, Rushdie argues that the parallels between his book and the historical events narrated in the Quran are stretched: The section of the book in question (and let's remember that the book in question isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, 8

Rustom Bharucha, In the Name of the Secular, 4. And in response to Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, which aggressively takes post-Ayodhya communalism to task, Bharucha stingingly writes: "As moving and affectionate as his requiem for India's secularism is, in his masterfully written The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), I have to admit that it is most meaningfully read through the filter of nostalgia. Rushdie's criticism of contemporary India is cast in a timewarp, and as such, is almost as redundant as that stuffed old dog-on-wheels 'Jawaharlal', who is trundled through the last pages of the novel, an object of pathos rather than derisiion" (Bharucha, 5).

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Chapter Six love, death, London and Bombay) deals with a prophet—who is not called Mohammed—living in a highly fantastical city made of sand . . . He is surrounded by fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own first name. Moreover, this entire sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at that. How much further from history could one get?9

But here it is Rushdie's disavowal that seems stretched. Muslim critics of the novel have responded incredulously to statements such as these10: surely, they argue, even if the novel's prophet is named “Mahound” and not Mohammed, the resemblance is important and inarguable. Also, the hundreds of other parallels, direct quotations from the Quran,11 and the replication of early Islamic history are so widely present as to make the grounds of his disavowal seem disingenuous; a stronger principle is Rushdie’s insistence on the “fictionality of fiction” at the beginning of “In Good Faith.”12 Other have argued that, even if the events in question are narrated as a "dream," surely it is no different in substance or intent from the rest of the book—which is also a dream insofar as it is a work of fiction. Rushdie’s later accounts of the novel better acknowledge the antagonism to fundamentalist Islam that drives the text. Essays like “A Thousand Days in a Balloon” and “Is Nothing Sacred?” are somewhat less polemical and more introspective. The following passage from “Is Nothing Sacred,” for instance, 9

Salman Rushdie, “Open Letter to Rajiv Gandhi,” reprinted in Appignanesi and Maitland's The Rushdie File, 44. 10 For instance, Syed Shahabuddin, one of the primary instruments in generating momentum to ban the book in India and a member of India's Parliament, writes: "Is any more evidence required in the face of your frank admission: 'I have talked about the Islamic religion subjects which are off limits and that includes God, includes prophets?' That is what you have said. The very title of your book is suggestively derogatory. In the eyes of the believer of the Qur'an is the Word of God, and you plead innocence of the possible Muslim reaction. You depict the Prophet whose name the practising Muslim recites five times a day, whom he loves, whom he considers the model for mankind, as an imposter, and you expect us to applaud you? . . . You cannot take shelter behind the plea that after all it is a dream sequence in a piece of fiction." From Impact International, 18/21, November 1988: 17-18 (Cited in Ahsan and Kidwai 153). 11 Some examples: the ghost of Rekha Merchant daemonically exhorts Gibreel to disregard the Quranic version of Shaitan in favor of a blurred version of the universe, in which "Shaitan is only an attribute of God": "This notion of the separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam, O, children of Adam, let not the Devil seduce you, as h expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from them their clothing that he might show them their shame—but go back a bit and you see that it's a pretty recent fabrication" (Satanic Verses, 323). Other direct quotes from the Quran also tend to refer to the question of the nature of Shaitan (Satanic Verses, 336, 353). 12 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 393.

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seems to resonate with the idea of the daemonic as a novelistic prerogative following the collapse of the Communist “antinomy”: It seems probable, too, that we may be heading toward a world in which there will be no real alternative to the liberal-capitalist social model, except, perhaps, the theocratic, foundationalist model of Islam. In this situation, liberal capitalism or democracy or the free world will require novelists' most rigorous attention, will require re-imagining and questioning and doubting as never before. "Our antagonist is our helper," said Edmund Burke, and if democracy no longer has communism to help it clarify, by opposition, its own ideas, then perhaps it will have to have literature as an adversary instead.13

Here secularism and theocracy are triangulated with capitalism and the idea of the novel. For Rushdie, it is the novel that should ideally be the “helpful antagonist” to globalized capitalism, not theocracy or fundamentalist Islam. In that the spirit of capital is a profoundly secular one, Rushdie’s vision of the role of literature seems daemonic just as the voices in Gibreel Farishta’s head are daemonic. For Rushdie, the daemonic function is very much a mode of resistance. At this point, let us turn to look more closely at how the idea of secularism functions in novel itself, which is partly expressed through the plot of the book and partly through a direct engagement with the term “secularism” itself. Rushdie’s use of the term is complex; early in the novel, "secularism" is fragmented and personal—hardly a state of modernity or enlightenment situated as a property of an entire society, such as that found in Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Both Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha undergo formative experiences that are marked as moments of the emergence of "secularism" at a personal level. Both are raised as Indian Muslims in Bombay, and both characters have somewhat minor relationships to their Islamic background. That said, Gibreel does have a more intense relationship to religion than Saladin. Gibreel’s universe is so rich with spirits, many of which pull one away from orthodox Islam. As a young man he believes in “God, angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or lamp-posts” (21-22), and he comes to believe in the “metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome,” theosophy, and so on (22-23). The sheer eclecticism of Gibreel’s religious investments might not be an issue amongst bohemians in the west, but it forebodes trouble in India’s more conservative waters. Importantly, both Gibreel and Saladin become actors, a profession that, in the eyes of characters such as Saladin’s father (Changez Chamchawala), is inherently daemonic. For Changez, acting undoes the separation between identity and performance, the distinction between human and the angelic/divine, 13

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 422.

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between one religious community and another, as well as all distinctions between human, alien, robot, and animal—something that this is especially pronounced in the case of Saladin and his “Aliens Show.” The daemonic is also apparent in Gibreel’s early acting career, where he establishes himself in Bombay cinema by playing the parts of Hindu deities in “theologicals,” films dramatizing epic narratives from the Vedas. As his success grows, the novel indicates, he is increasingly identified by his audience with the religious figures he represents, despite the fact that his personal religious affiliation is not Hindu but Muslim. This aspect of Gibreel’s life grows increasingly at odds with his off-screen existence, which is decadently sexually promiscuous. Meanwhile his main nourishment in terms of literature comes in the form of daemonic texts (22-23), which come back to haunt him in the form of his various dreamsequences later in the novel. The conflict does not seem to have an effect on Gibreel’s own relationship to religion until he falls ill, and discovers that he no longer has any faith in God. The supernatural intervention of his illness is a form of moral punishment (by God, or by the narrator who impersonates God): the more egregious the dissimulation, the more violent the Fall. If acting is one way of expressing the daemonic in the novel, film is another. The two are clearly related—Gibreel is a film actor, after all. But film, because it has a more complex visual interface and involves multiple producers, has elements that go beyond the level of straightforward impersonation. In addition to the central role film plays in Gibreel and Saladin’s careers (for Saladin, it is as television), the daemonic aspect of cinema is especially pronounced in Gibreel's dreams, where he finds himself in the role of the archangel Gibreel; it is also extremely important in the narration of the apocalyptic scene in London that is the novel's climax. Specifically in the dream-sequences involving the conflict between Gibreel and Mahound, the narrator is attentive to the divergence between the spectator's eye and the protagonist on screen. Because of the shifting line between point of view, subject, and object, no one individual is entirely in control of what he or she does. But even as it diminishes human agency in favor of a machinic eye, film has the capacity to create a powerful aura of reality—the aura of truth. It's unclear whether it is the uneasiness produced by his hollow filmic apotheosis or the sexual dissolution it enables that is specifically punished when Gibreel is made to suffer physical collapse and severe illness. The only thing that is clear is that Gibreel’s recovery is enabled by his completely eradicating all vestigial or real investments in the divine. Though later events prove Gibreel's loss of faith to be unstable, as soon as he revives, he intentionally breaks a Muslim dietary law by eating pork. The narrator identifies the act not as blasphemy or transgression, but as “secularism”: But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith.

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On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing vehicles the slip. . . He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig’s trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.14

The onset of "secularism" is here like the end of a long (indeed, life-long) fast, and Gibreel treats it as an orgiastic event. The effect, especially by the end of the passage, is grotesque. Gibreel's secularism is the opportunity for excess—an over-stuffed mouth, the hemorrhaging of all order and propriety. The role of sexuality here is hard to define though it is relevant; certainly the appearance of Alleluia Cone in Gibreel's life at precisely this moment cannot be read as merely coincidental, the text of this passage and others that figure Gibreel's psychic state on the question of belief emphasize a thematics of the body that is structured more as an open/closed machine than it does the thematic of heterosexual desire. In other words, if there is a reference to sexuality in this passage in particular, it is as a subtext of Gibreel's body's radical openness. Saladin Chamcha's “fall” into secularity is quite different, and the meaning of the word “secularism,” when it is applied to him in the novel, is in some ways more complex. If Gibreel's fall into “secularism” is punishment for his performance of religious identities on film and subsequent renunciation of God, Saladin's story is of his emergence from the grip of a controlling father and generally claustrophobic family life. Alongside this, however, Saladin's “secular” rebellion against his father is thematically linked to his selffashioning: Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth of that implacable rage which would burn within him, undiminished for over a quarter of a century; which would boil away his childhood father-worship and make him a secular man, who would do his best, thereafter, to live without a god of any type; which would fuel, perhaps, his determination to become the thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman. Yes, an English, even if his mother had been right all along, even if there was only paper in the toilets and tepid, used water full of mud and soap to step into after taking exercise, even if it meant a lifetime spent amongst winter-naked trees whose

14

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 29-30.

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Secularism for Saladin is the key component in his aspiration to be a self-made individual, but it clearly carries significant baggage. Secularism is, first, the weapon he uses to rupture the influence of his father. The association here of Saladin's filial bond with his relationship to religion is in part cultural, as religion in South Asia is generally rooted both in family and community. But it is also a specifically Islamic religious tradition. In a somewhat separate register, Saladin's repudiation of family and faith is a key moment in the shaping of his immigrant identity, which is figured in the novel as at once heroic, daemonic, and pathetically incomplete: “A man who set out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role, according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations.”16 There is a trace of the ridiculous about Saladin's aspiration to become a “goodandproper Englishman.” But if secularism is as simple as insisting upon a formal rupture (with religious community and with family), this passage makes clear that Saladin's hopes of assimilating into English life are not that simple. Saladin and Gibreel's transformations are one of the novel's strategies for forcing a confrontation between religion and the secular world. At the beginning of the novel, when the Saladin and Gibreel fall out of the exploded Bostan, they emerge transformed. Saladin has the properties of a devil, while around Gibreel's head a halo appears. This is a physical transformation similar in many ways to other magical transformations that occur in Rushdie's novels, the most famous of which being Saleem Sinai's “midnight's children's conference” nose, which becomes a kind of transmitter for a thousand different children born in the hour after Indian independence. These elements of magic realism/ surrealism, since they have become commonplace features of post-War (and especially postcolonial) literature, often pass unnoticed by critics. Unlike the Midnight's Children magic, however, the transformations of Saladin and Gibreel have a distinctly religious inflection. As the novel progresses, the nature of the author of the transformation of the two characters remains in some ways undetermined, though certain telling clues are dropped. There is a strong suggestion that the "miracle worker" is Satanic at the end of the first chapter: "Who am I? Let's put it this way: who has the best 15

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 43. The complete passage: "A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role, according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive. Or, consider him sociopolitically: most migrants learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves" (49). 16

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tunes?" (10) And indeed, the novel favors the Satan-like Saladin Chamcha for his association with the politics of cultural resistance. If the inscription of difference on Saladin's body is an arbitrary external determination (like race), his marked difference makes him neither “good” nor “evil.” Through transvaluation, Saladin's difference becomes a symbol of resistance: Calibanic blackness. The nature of Saladin’s difference is also debated by the characters themselves, most memorably by Muhammad Sufyan, who poses the question in terms of the different perspective on metamorphosis to be found in Ovid and Lucretius. For example, the great Lucretius tells us, in De Rerum Natura, this following thing . . . ‘Whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers . . . that thing … by doing so brings immediate death to its old self.’ However, poet Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: ‘As yielding wax . . . is stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet is indeed the same, even so our souls . . are still the same forever, but adopt In their migrations ever-varying forms.17

In philosophical terms, the Lucretian logic is a kind of constative equation, that looks like this: Outside Change = Inside Change. In contrast, the Ovidian logic is more of a principle of constancy. While the Lucretian principle may describe the dominant thrust of Saladin’s experience best (he “chooses Lucretius over Ovid” [297]), the Ovidian idea of wax-like constancy might resemble the novel's larger philosophical agenda more closely. More simply, it is not hard to see how the split between Ovid and Lucretius is a figure for the migrant’s dilemma, which is, in this section of the novel, being dramatized in the split between Saladin and Gibreel. But what must be dealt with in this dilemma is the continuous problem of agency: who is making Saladin and Gibreel change? Since it seems impossible to read it as a result of simple personal creativity, the only compelling explanation is that it is daemonic. Saladin's arbitrary transformation has important implications for the nature of narrative operating in the novel as a whole. Whether it is God or Shaitan who makes the intervention, the aspect to underline is that the agency intervenes: he changes the shapes of his characters' bodies, gives them strange dreams, and appears before them at certain choice moments to keep them in line. Not only does this author/narrator figure play as God in the sense of manipulating the threads of narrative, he also creates characters that are fully aware of him. Clearer, yet still partially ambiguous, answers to the question of narrative agency are manifested in the first-person narrator's repeated appearances in the text. One man's breath was sweetened, while another's, by an equal and opposite 17

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 285.

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mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they imagine there would be no side-effects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let's be clear: great falls change people. You think they fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im—. (133)

Here, the narrator identifies himself as "Higher Powers," and strongly suggests that his experience has been one of "fall." But later, when the narrator appears physically to Gibreel (in a form generally resembling Salman Rushdie himself), he presents himself as "Ooparvala," the one from above, namely God himself. This passage, along with several others like it, raises the question of the presence of the duality, only to refuse to answer it: "Who?" As narrator, and moreover, as author, the intervening presence seems to be both God and Shaitan at once. The author poses as God, insofar as he is both the creator of the narrative universe as well as the source of all daemonic movement within the story. In the novel's rhetoric of originality, that alone is enough to establish authorship as daemonic (and here, specifically Satanic): authorship is an act of pride, an inarguably derivative language act that nonetheless claims singularity. And of course, this paradoxical God-complex of authorship is closely linked thematically to the idea of Saladin's immigrant self-making. The narrator is God in the world of the novel, but is he also God in the formal, theological sense? It is not immediately clear, since the Quran figures as a source of textual authority in The Satanic Verses that alternately supports and competes with the impulses of its conflicted main characters. The most pronounced of these moments of the Quran as a moral and epistemic authority may be Gibreel's recourse to passages from it just after having been called to task by the direct vision of "God" in Alleluia Cone's apartment. As he walks through the streets of London, he uses the Quran to explain his apparent invisibility to ordinary people: And because the relationship between men and angels is an ambiguous one—in which the angels, or mala'ikah, are both the controllers of nature and the intermediaries between the Deity and the human race; but at the same time, as the Quran clearly states, we said unto the angels, be submissive unto Adam, the point being to symbolize man's ability to master, through knowledge, the forces of nature which the angels represented—there really wasn't much that the ignored and infuriated malak Gibreel could do about it.18

Unfortunately, while his citation of this passage does reveal to Gibreel an explanation of his limited ability to make his presence felt, he utterly misses the 18

Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 336.

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point of the passage he cites. That is to say, the passage (Quran 7:11) in question is the one in which the angel Iblis is sent down from Paradise for his failure to be “submissive” to Adam. Gibreel's failure to see the dangers of his pride in a contest with humankind is a way of marking his inevitable Fall— which in the literal idiom of the novel is represented as a descent into madness. In passages like this, the Quran enters in as a justification for Gibreel's increasingly bizarre behavior, but it does not provide a definitive moral code or rationale even though it poses as an absolute, "strong" idea (“What kind of idea are you?”). The narrator’s status as a God in the novel is one facet of the “daemonic,” and the textual influence of the Quran, fragmentary and polyvalent as it is, is another. The major consequence of the novel’s appropriation of the Quran as a literary influence is that its "author," Mohammed, is foregrounded as a poet who is haunted by his aspiration to absolute authority. This is a blasphemous and yet affectionate deployment: Mohammed is, if not infallible, a poet and writer just as he (Rushdie) is. Rushdie's representation of Islam, and in particular of Mohammed and the Quran, is in another way responsible, not to the Quran, but to narrativity. This leads us to the part of The Satanic Verses that is generally considered the most blasphemous, the dream-sequence in which the verses Gibreel delivers to Mahound are found to be spurious, sent by Satan. The agency responsible for the revelation is questionable—Mahound has to force Gibreel to open his mouth, with the implication that the verse in question seems to come from within Mahound, even if it is channeled through Gibreel. The issue of the episode's historical validity is a significant one, as it is central to a moderate, pro-Islamic reading of the novel's approach to representation. There does not appear to be a definitive answer (or even a definitive probability) as to whether the episode in question is historically accurate. Early medieval Islamic scholarship19 was divided over whether the specific verse from “The Star” ("They are the exalted birds, whose intercession is to be desired"20) was part of 19

The names that are most often cited, both by critics sympathetic to Rushdie (Aravamudan) as well as by Muslim writers opposed to the novel, are at-Tabari and Ibn Sa'd (Aravamudan lists these writers as a single individual). M.H. Ahsan, in Sacrilege and Civility: Muslim Perspectives on the Satanic Verses Affair, examines at-Tabari's citation of the "Satanic Verses" story, and surveys some of the story in Orientalist scholarship. Toward the end of his essay on the "Verses," he writes: "It is unfortunate that an eminent historian like at-Tabari mentioned this story in his Ta'rikh and did not make any comment on it. It is to be noted that early Muslim historians although meticulous in their isnad sometimes acted like a 'tape-recorder', recording anything that came to their knowledge from a sound and apparently reliable source" (Sacrilege and Civility, 138). 20 In the novel, Mahound recites the first ten or so verses from 'The Star' in language that is virtually identical to the translation of the Quran I have been consulting (N.J Dawood),

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Mohammed's initial revelation, subsequently recanted. But since the medieval era the episode has never been mentioned in Islamic scholarship, primarily because the formalization of the Hadith in Islam requires that accounts of the life of Mohammed that are inconsistent with his status as God's Messenger be declared inaccurate. Though it is true that this (hagiographic) mode of reasoning makes no pretense of humanizing Mohammed on this point by allowing fallibility, western/ Orientalist scholars who have referred to the story derive their accounts from the aforementioned Islamic historians, not from primary sources.21 All the Islamic theological responses to Rushdie’s novel I’ve read cite Rushdie’s provocative use of the “Satanic Verses” story as the prime instance of blasphemy. There is no good reason to question that judgment, but for our purposes it is somewhat immaterial. What is of more value here is to state Rushdie’s intent in secular terms: what Rushdie aims to do is nothing less than transform the value of religious narrative. From an absolute truth, Mohammed's prophecy becomes the starting point of an idea of representation that will only be complete once that which was “present” becomes text. Rushdie’s novel secularizes Islam by tempting it to enter the play of human language, all the while hinting that it was always already there. Within a secularist view of history, of course, it is undeniably the case that “religion” has been tied to issues of cultural politics, nowhere more so than in the fraught climate of present day United Kingdom, where religion, race, and class are often aligned in divisive ways. Thus does Rushdie explain that his use of the bastardized name “Mahound” as an example of a transvalued signifier is comparable to the reversal of derogatory terms relating to race. “Mahound” is: the demon-tag the farangis [foreigners] hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain-climbing, prophet motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil's synonym: Mahound.22

It is clear (and surprisingly, unremarked) that his use of “Mahound” in the landscape of cultural appropriation is one way in which Rushdie aligns himself ending with the “Satanic” verses in question: "'Have you thought upon Lat, Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other? . . . They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed' (114). Compare to Dawood's 'correct' translation of the verses: "Have you thought on Al-Lat and Al-'Uzza, and on Manat, the third other? Are you to have the sons, and He, the daughters? This is indeed an unfair distinction! They are but names which you and your fathers have invented: God has vested no authority in them. The unbelievers follow but vain conjectures and the whims of their own souls, although the guidance of their Lord has long since come to them" (Quran, 53:11-22). 21 Some of the key figures are William Muir, Theodor Noldeke, and W. Montgomery Watt (Muhammad at Mecca). See Ahsan, 132. 22 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 93.

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positively with the experiences (and frustrations) of Muslim immigrants in Britain. It seems to be a sign that England is so marked as secular spatially that it does not recognize the transformed Saladin as evil in a literal sense; cultural difference as evil is a metaphor. Evil in contemporary England, in other words, is an ungrounded, and therefore especially malleable, rhetoric. In contrast, fanatics in “Desh” (which in the novel includes India, and to an extent, Iran) do propose a literal meaning of “evil,” which is to say, unbelief. On the other hand, however, it seems that Rushdie's England does have use for a religiouslydefined idea of the sacred, even if this proves to be ephemeral, or worse, delusional. Despite the novel’s fervent secularism, people of devout faith (and from several different religious backgrounds) seem to appear on every page.

Satan, Secular Space, and Embodiment Narrative is a way of organizing discourse that is spatial as well as temporal. The conceptualization of secularity in a narrative like The Satanic Verses therefore requires an account of the spatiality of the terms I have put in play: religion, the daemonic, and the figure of Satan. With regard to the concept of space operative in the novel, the daemonic is effectively nomadic, which is to say, it is an agency that sublimates the grounded, replacing ordered place with a relentless openness. The emphasis on unbounded space may be read as part of the novel's use of the daemonic as a critique of Orientalism; in addition to challenging the boundaries between human, animal, and spirit, the centrality of nomads, migrants, and vagabonds to the novel challenges rigid boundaries between East/Oriental and West/Occidental. Moreover, this reorientation of space may raise questions about the location of the “secular,” which according to prevalent metropolitan myths about itself and its others is exactly parallel: Eastern/religious and Western/secular. But the suggestion of “battle lines” between religious and secular realms, which appears towards the very end of the book,23 is in fact quite complex. The haunting of secular space by religion (frequently in its daemonic form) figures in geographical and topographical space in dozens of places, from Alleluia Cone on the top of Mount Everest to the image of Jahilia in Gibreel's dreams. The paradoxical impossibility of secular space is expressed as a logic of the human body, which is represented as both always already fallen (corrupted and corruptible), and also, at the conclusion of the novel, as possessing a moving, daemonic integrity. Orientalism is present as a subtext from the very beginning of The Satanic Verses, which opens with an epigram from Daniel Defoe that defines the Devil as ungrounded and placeless. The citation of Defoe, from his History of the 23 "Battle lines are being drawn up in India today . . . Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on," Satanic Verses, 537.

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Devil, Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste of air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.24

Even by itself, this conceptualization of Satan lends a powerful coherence to two disparate themes of The Satanic Verses. Throughout his 1726 work, Defoe takes painstaking effort to find order in the paradoxes of the Biblical and Miltonic ideas of Satan, attempting at every moment to understand Satan's mind as essentially human in form, and his intents as human in motivation. For Defoe, Satan's exile forces him to be a nomad, which suggests sympathetically the plight of actual human migrants. In addition to being deterritorialized, Defoe's Satan loses access to concrete form—he is dematerialized, confined to "an empire in the liquid waste of air." Interestingly, in the chapter from which Rushdie excerpts this passage, Defoe in fact enumerates some earthly comparisons to Satan, human beings who live in a similar state of vagabondage: "the hordes of Turkey, who, in the wild countries of Karakathay, the deserts of Barkan, Cassan, and Astracan, live up and down where they can find proper" (History of the Devil, 73). Tellingly, the closest human analogues to Satan are nomadic Orientals! This association is indicative of Defoe's spatial ordering of the world: what is outside Europe are the "wild countries" and “deserts”— nothing but air. If Europe (or merely England) is “home,” bounded and delimited space, everything outside is unbounded waste. Rushdie's selective excerpting of Defoe's History of the Devil changes the emphasis, making Satan more abstract, marking him as essentially placeless and disembodied rather than simply a figure for the oriental other. The theme of nomadism described by Defoe is recapitulated in Gibreel's dreams, in the representation of Jahilia25, a city built of sand. Jahilia's citizens are all new subjects, their identities potentially quite ephemeral. The description of Jahilia as a city of "newly invented permanence" is contrasted, in a moment of metacommentary, with the condition of modern migrants: These people are a mere three or four generations removed from their nomadic past, when they were as rootless as the dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was home. —Whereas the migrant can do without the journey altogether; it's no more

24

Daniel Defoe, History of the Devil, 73-74. In Arabic this is a powerful term that symbolizes unbelief both spatially (Jahilia is a place of unbelief), and temporally (the word refers to the entirety of the time prior to the inception of Islam). 25

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than a necessary evil; the point is to arrive.26

The nomads resemble Defoe's ungrounded Satan quite closely in their relationship to spatial fixity. In contrast, Rushdie's modern migrant is multiply grounded (not groundless); while a nomad has no intrinsic relationship to home, a migrant makes new homes wherever he or she may go. Migrants, in their striving to stay close to the earth, do not closely resemble the drive towards sublimation that is one attribute of the daemonic. In contrast to Jahilia are the various mountains of the novel, images of extremely solid earth that seemingly represent fixity, but ultimately are themselves ephemeral. Mountains, like icebergs, like sand, are unstable: "A mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated—nearly—into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted" (303). For Alleluia Cone (Allie), a mountain-climber who is also Gibreel's lover, Everest is a space that both represents access to the sacredness of the absolute (a religion in which the mountain is the only written text), and also the daemonic which threatens to sublimate all its aura of solidity and certainty into air: What Allie did not tell Gibreel was that the sherpa's prohibition had scared her, convincing her that if she ever set her foot again upon the godless-mountain, she would surely die, because it is not permitted to mortals to look more than once upon the face of the divine; but the mountain was diabolic as well as transcendent, or rather, its diabolism and its transcendence were one, so that even the contemplation of Pemba's ban made her feel a pang of need so deep that it made her groan aloud, as if in sexual ecstasy or despair.27

The mountain figured in this passage is paradoxical beyond even its stated doubling of the "diabolic" with the "transcendent." Indeed, Allie's Everest is at once a "godless-mountain" and a site at which she has experienced the "face of the divine." The diabolic (or daemonic) aspect of the mountain seems to derive from the very singularity of the experience of the sacred that it potentially offers to those who, like Allie, believe in its power. The paradox of the unthinkable ephemerality of the living experience of the divine produces a sense of lack that, in Allie's case, is expressed bodily in the idiom of "sexual ecstasy or despair." Allie reveals her motivations for climbing the mountain a few pages later in a conversation with Gibreel: 'Why I really went up there. Don't laugh: to escape from good and evil.' He didn't laugh. 'Are mountains above morality, in your estimation?' he asked seriously. 'This's what I learned in the revolution,' she went on. 'This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't say just when; stands to 26 27

Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 93-94. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 303-304.

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reason, that's part of the information that got abolsh, abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story. Got me? Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's going on. So how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don’t even know what it is. So what I thought was, you can either break your heart trying to work it all out, or you can go sit on a mountain, because that's where all the truth went, believe it or not, it just upped and ran away from these cities where even the stuff under our feet is all made up, a lie, and it hid up there in the thin thin air where the liars don't dare come after it in case their brains explode.'28

What begins as a discussion of good and evil (morality) becomes, as she progresses, a polemic about knowledge. This passage figures Allie's perception of the collapse of fixity in the modern era as the abolition of “truth.” Modern cities are like Jahilia, completely unfixed and yet also completely corrupted. Allie's solution to the problem echoes in one way the spatial approach of Muhammed and Moses, who experienced the divine on the tops of mountains, and in quite another way, the approach suggested by Plato in the allegory of the Cave: the truth (which is also the divine) is necessarily substanceless. One context where representations of secular space interact intensely with daemonic fluidity in Rushdie's novel is the human body. In part, the daemonic body is specifically Satanic: Rushdie's Satan is not only a “vagabond,” as Defoe puts it; figured in daemonic terms, he is the image of infinite physical malleability. Good (or God) is, in contrast, the fixed body firmly governed by the rules of social order. This body is generally mapped as male—hence the Imam's paranoid construction of a monstrous, devouring female adversary. If the religious body is the image of social organization mapped through smoothly functioning bodily organs, the daemonic body is alternately brittle (“glass”), subject to uncontrollable growths, excretions and emissions (including shit, bad breath…), or radical animal-human regroupings (manticores, etc.). Saladin’s growths and transformations early in the novel are both daemonic and Satanic (insofar as he is made to resemble Satan); similarly, Gibreel's physical hemorrhaging at the moment of the realization of his unbelief near the very beginning is another example. A counter-example to the excess exemplified by Gibreel's hemorrhaging as well as the arbitrariness of Saladin’s Satanic growths, is the image of Changez Chamchawala's dying body at the very end of the novel. Changez has myeloma, a systemic cancer that has spread throughout his skeletal system, and is untreatable because it is so totally pervasive. Also, in his final hours, Changez's body seems to hemorrhage, as he experiences severe vomiting and diarrhea, similar in many ways to the daemonic up-ending of the body that earlier afflicted Gibreel. But in response to the cancer and his own incipient death, Changez is quiet, free of moral ambiguity. His earlier religiosity, which had 28

Rushdie, The \Satanic Verses, 313.

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been a stumbling point in his relationship with Saladin, has now been replaced by an unconflicted atheism: "At no point in his dying did Changez Chamchawala speak the name of God" (531). Just as religion seems to have evaporated, so too has the tension between father and son disappeared. If Saladin's earlier rebellion was figured in terms of the rejection of faith and father at once, the deflation of his father's faith ("I have no illusions. I know I am not going anywhere after this" [529]) seems to resolve the issue and restore a filial bond. Rushdie seems to resolve the stubborn and overlapping contradictions in the novel regarding religion and secularism, the sacred and the daemonic, with a simple, grounded atheism. Saladin is so confident of his post-religious filial loyalty that he can without hesitation rebuke the Mullah who comes after his father's death to perform the Islamic ritual washing of his father's body. Saladin insists that the Mullah remove pieces of sanctified cloth being placed inside his mouth and under his eyelids. Despite this, Changez's burial is quietly, but openly, Islamic ("flowers, and a green silken covering with Quranic verses embroidered upon it in gold" [533].

Conclusion The body, as we have seen, is the central site in The Satanic Verses where the war over secularism is fought. Whether it is Gibreel’s relationship to food and sex or the Imam’s attitude to Ayesha (and to all women), the domain on which Zeenat Vakil’s “battle lines” is inevitably embodied, whether metaphorically or literally. Rushdie’s novel seems to embrace the possibility of an actual metafictional “God” mingling with angels, Shaitan, and women that populate his world, and the overwhelming thrust of the novel is the deconstruction of the concept of personal agency: a man dreams he is an Angel, and he may be right. So despite the hint about “battle lines,” Rushdie aims to leave the boundaries of the religious and secular worlds somewhat blurred. But for a host of feminist authors and critics in the thick of recent debates over women’s rights in India, deconstruction is a somewhat lower priority than the urgent demand to guarantee fundamental human rights for women. These authors do reinforce the strict separation of religious and secular worlds, though not without a host of new complications.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE MYRIAD FAILURES OF RELIGIOUS LAW: THE UNIFORM CIVIL CODE DEBATE AND INDIAN FEMINISM

Let humanism be another name for religion. —Taslima Nasrin

In the recent history of secularism as a political idea, it appears increasingly clear that women's rights are really the central material question in the contemporary debates over secularism in various parts of the world. But exactly how this has come to pass requires rehearsing some of the historical ground we have covered thus far. To begin with, political secularism can be said to be in place if a given political system enables a two-fold freedom: the freedom to reject the claims of religious authority (one’s own or another), and also the freedom to practice the religion of one's choice within the parameters of a broader social contract. Some of the issues surrounding political secularism have been alluded to earlier. For instance, as the secularization of Victorian England progressed (chapter 2), one of the key questions to be resolved was whether religious minorities such as Catholics and Jews merited full enfranchisement. With those questions resolved in the affirmative, in recent years the question has shifted to women and specifically women's bodies. Out of the many, many instances where women are at the center of the secularism problem, the cases of South Asia, Turkey, and France seem to resonate particularly well with each other. In both Turkey and France, the question that has been on the table is in a sense the reverse of the traditional pattern. The Hijab (or headscarf) has been banned in these countries partly on the principle that this particular right is actually harmful to the cause of women's rights, and the right to wear Hijab is interpreted not as a "right" but a coerced kind of requirement imposed by the community contrary to the aims of the state1. But in 1

A great deal has been written on the concept of secularism in both France and Turkey; here I will only recommend starting points. On the history of secularism in Turkey see Nikki Keddie, “Secularism and the State: Towards Clarity and Global Comparison.” New Left Review 226, November/December 1997. Accessed online at: http://newleftreview.co.uk/NLRI222.shtml. On France, see Jean Bauberot, “Two Thresholds of Laicization,” in Rajeev Bhargava, Ed. Secularism and its Critics. Oxford:

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both countries some Muslim women have been arguing for the right to wear the Hijab in universities and various forms of public office. The paradox is that a right is taken away from an individual woman who might choose to wear the Hijab of her own volition in order to assure the rights of women as a whole. From a U.S., British, or Indian perspective it seems hard to see how such restrictions further the cause of religious freedom. In the Indian case as well, secularism in the contemporary moment seems to hinge on women's rights, sometimes with the same degree of complexity and even awkwardness of the French and Turkish laws just mentioned. The current crisis in women's rights and religion has been directly debated in regard to two legal controversies in the 1980s, the Shah Bano case and the Roop Kanwar Sati case,2 though arguably it could be extended both backwards—to the debates over Sati in the colonial era and the centrality of rape in narratives of Partition— and forwards, to the violence against women in the riots that engulfed the Indian subcontinent in 1992 and 2002. By way of introducing the problem I'll explore the responses of several secular Indian feminists to the first controversy, and assess the strategic and philosophical value of their respective positions. The concerns of Indian feminists about religious law have been echoed and amplified in a number of modern and contemporary works of literature by women writers. For instance, Amrita Pritam and Urvashi Butalia have written powerful narratives3 about the centrality of women in the Partition of 1947, an event generally considered to be the “primal scene” of the communal violence, and one which has permanently scarred various South Asian experiments with secularism. More recently, Samina Ali’s novel Madras on Rainy Days explores the crisis within the Indian Muslim community, as it struggles with a traditional orthodoxy that has grown increasingly rigid even as Indian society as a whole has grown more socially liberal (without necessarily growing more tolerant of religious minority groups). And finally, the signature example of a South Asian feminist voice that has taken a strong stance against communalism is the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, whose novel Shame provoked such hostility in Bangladesh that it led to her being exiled from the country. This 1993 novel on the rising persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh in response to the destruction of the Babri Masjid is itself a powerful, if aesthetically flawed, example of feminist literary secularism in action. Oxford University Press, 2005 (94-137). 2 On the history and context of the Roop Kanwar Sati case Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 3 Amrita Pritam’s novel 1976 Pinjar (Skeleton) has been a widely influential text. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Indian Partition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) is partly a family memoir and partly a compilation of testimonials of partition violence from survivors as well as, in some cases, perpetrators of the violence.

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For Indian women writers, literary secularism is focused to a considerable degree on the particular protections afforded to women by the liberal state and its legal system—against the patriarchal and repressive values represented by either family or religious community. Individualism and the struggle to have the opportunity for creative expression is as much a desired end as it is in the writing of James Joyce or Salman Rushdie—but here it is predicated first on surviving the violence of traditional religious law, and secondly on escape.

An Introduction to the Uniform Civil Code Debate The gender dynamic in the debate over secularism in contemporary India is extremely dense, and will require some detailed background in order to unpack it. It turns on a particularity in the Indian legal system, the differential personal laws (or civil codes) that are in place for different religious communities. Personal laws pertain to questions of marriage, divorce, head-of-household status, and property rights/inheritance. Under marriage laws, the personal laws address questions such as the legality of polygamy, child-marriage, dowry, and bride-price. These laws vary by religious community; there are different "personal law" codes for Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians. These laws are technically referred to in the Indian legal system as the "Hindu Marriage Act," the "Muslim Marriage Act," and so on. The laws are presumed to govern even those people who are not in fact religious, as nearly all Indians carry with them a connection to a religious tradition embedded in their names and family background. People who insist on a non-religious affiliation, along with people whose families cross religious lines, are governed by the "Special Marriage Act." Once a person is married under a given Marriage Act, all future questions pertaining to rights within a family are governed by that act. A particularly unusual example of this in action is a 1985 Indian Supreme Court decision4 rejecting the plea of a Hindu man who wanted to take a second wife but was refused under the reformed Hindu Marriage Act. He converted to Islam, and married a Muslim woman. His second marriage was forbidden on the grounds that the laws governing his first marriage forbade it. The different civil codes are a legacy of British colonialism; most of the marriage acts were formalized by the British in the 1860s, after consulting with religious figures from the various communities as well as their own “experts.”5 4

See Farwa Imam Ali’s “Governed as one: Uniform civil code could precipitate more woman-friendly policies.” (The Week, August 10, 2003; accessed online at http://www.the-week.com/23aug10/events5.htm). 5 A good general introduction to Personal law in India is Purushottam Bilimoria, “Muslim Personal Law in India: Colonial Legacy and Current Debates.” Accessed online at http://www.law.emory.edu/IFL/cases/India.htm.

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There was no malicious or manipulative intent in these laws. And arguably, one cannot blame the British for the failures of the current system; the system was continued after Indian independence, albeit with one significant change: the Indian constitution has a non-binding directive clause urging Parliament to eventually abolish the differential laws, and adopt a Uniform Civil Code,6 for the sake of national unity. Still, one cannot forget the historical context in which the laws were drafted—they closely followed the Sepoy Mutiny (“Rebellion”) of 1857. In a sense, the British felt they needed to create a legal framework to pacify the most conservative members of India's various religious constituencies. In the 1980s and 1990s, these different marriage acts became a hot-button issue, as the movement to abolish the different civil codes, once the province of the Indian left, was adopted by the Hindu right. The Hindu Marriage Act, which at the time of independence allowed child marriage, dowry, as well as polygamy, had been reformed repeatedly since independence.7 After 1976, all of the above were outlawed for Hindus—though many problems remained (feminists have grievances about property rights, inheritance rights, custody rights, and head-of-household status rules that are still discriminatory). However, over the same period of time, no major reforms of the Muslim Marriage Act had been enacted. Issues like polygamy as well as instantaneous verbal divorce (“triple talaq”) were invoked by the Hindu right as signs of the backwardness of the Muslim community. Thus the movement to institute a Uniform Civil Code, which would ban polygamy and standardize rules for marriage and divorce along secular lines, was revived in the 1980s. It was itself not a new idea; it had been in the air at the time of independence and the framing of the constitution (1946-1948), advocated by women in particular but had been dropped on the widespread opposition of both Hindu and Muslim male leadership in the Congress. In the Shah Bano Case, in 1986 an elderly Muslim woman sued her husband to be granted “maintenance” (alimony) despite the fact that the Muslim Marriage Act doesn't specifically provide for it. Shah Bano had been divorced by her husband in a particularly Islamic method I mentioned before—Triple Talaq. It is effectively, instantaneous divorce; the husband merely says “I divorce you” [“Talaq”] three times, and the marriage is dissolved without further obligation. This form of divorce is not mentioned in the Quran, but it did become part of one tradition of Islamic Sharia law in the medieval era, and was 6

Article 44 of the Constitution of India states: “The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” Accessed online at http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-15.htm. 7 A comprehensive treatment of the reform process can be found in Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, The Wheel of Law: India’s Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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continued as the British attempted to reproduce Sharia in the Muslim Marriage Act. Needless to say, Triple Talaq is considered a fairly barbaric practice by moderate Muslims and most non-Muslims in India. Shah Bano, suing for maintenance (or alimony) won a victory in the Supreme Court, but the force of the decision was nullified by an executive order by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was attempting to maintain support amongst Muslim voters. Rajiv Gandhi's reversal of the court's decision was extremely unpopular with the Hindu majority, as it was seen as a violation of the spirit of India's laws. The opposition BJP party in particular picked up on it as a rallying cry, and cited it repeatedly as proof of the failure—the hypocrisy, they claimed—of the Congress Party's hegemonic secularism. One of the ways Indian feminists have tried to engage the conservative members of the Muslim community on this issue is to challenge the viability of Triple Talaq in the Sharia. Using references from the Quran, they have also pointed out that the Sharia does after all condone, or even require, two distinct forms of “maintenance.” According to Madhu Kishwar, a leading New Delhi feminist, at the time of the ruling the Supreme Court had already ruled on two earlier Muslim divorce cases in favor of the women plaintiffs. In one case, Justice Krishna Iyer had cited a practice called mehr as justifying his decision to grant maintenance. Kishwar defines mehr as follows: Mehr, translated as "dower," is somewhat similar to the marriage settlement that used to be prevalent in some European countries whereby the husband settled an estate on the wife as a security for her. The amount of mehr is of two kinds-prompt and deferred. Prompt mehr is that which the husband must give the wife any time she demands it. Deferred mehr is that which the wife agrees not to demand until the marriage is dissolved by death or divorce. The latter form is more prevalent in India.8

There is a further wrinkle, which has to do with another form of maintenance. Shah Bhano's ex-husband, Mohammed Ahmed Khan, had actually paid her a lump-sum amount for the divorce, during the iddat, the three-month period following the official talaq. (During that three month period, the husband is supposed to "keep the wife in his house and maintain her at his own standard of living."). Shah Bano's lawyers had argued for another, ongoing payment, the mataa, which is described in the Quran: "And for divorced women let there be a fair provision (mataa). This is an obligation on those who are mindful of God" (2.241). These are important arguments, but Kishwar, writing in the feminist magazine Manushi, did not manage to significantly alter the dynamics of the 8

Madhu Kishwar, "Pro-Women or Anti-Muslim? The Shah Bano Controversy" (1986), reprinted in Religion at the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays, 207.

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national debate. Perhaps the most influential thing she says comes later in the essay, where Kishwar articulates what would become one of the primary planks of the New Delhi left-feminist response to the question of Shah Bano and the Uniform Civil Code. While obviously sympathetic to Shah Bano's case, Kishwar was deeply concerned about the way in which the case was used to foment anti-Muslim hysteria by leaders on the Hindu right. Though the Hindu right has never been especially interested in women's rights, it seized upon the unjust elements in Muslim divorce law and decided it had a pressing interest in creating a Uniform Civil Code because Muslim women had to be saved. They effectively hijacked the issue: A similar situation prevails among Muslims today. The manner in which concern for Muslim women is being expressed today appears to Muslims more like an attack. It seems to be born not out of sympathy for Muslim women but of antipathy towards all Muslims. Muslims, being a minority community, are constantly suspect in the eyes of Hindus, and are constantly expected to prove their patriotism and loyalty to this country. They are expected happily to agree to be 'reformed' as a test of their loyalty to the Indian nation. If a Hindu resists a particular social reform measure, he is merely seen as a 'conservative'. But if a Muslim does so, he is at once accused of being a foreign agent, propped up by petrodollars, or he is asked to quit and go to Pakistan.9

Even if feminists support Shah Bano, and also the reform of the Muslim Marriage Act, the push for reform has to be done strategically. The push for the Uniform Civil Code, hijacked by the right, was in effect dropped from the platform in journals like Kishwar's own Manushi. But it also became unpopular in the broader Indian feminist movement, most notably the All India Women's Congress. What replaced it was an approach that Rajeswari Sunder Rajan describes as "culturalist communitarian" in a recent essay summarizing the role of gender in the Uniform Civil Code debates. Reforms, Kishwar and others argued, need to be made, but they need to be made by Muslims within the bounds of community. They cannot be imposed by the state. [W]omen's groups' concession to religious communities' rights to personal laws is less a recognition of the legitimacy, even less of the value, of communitarianism than a pragmatic reconciliation to the realities of the Indian situation. Thus even the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), the central leftist women's organization in the country, conceded at their convention on equal rights and equal laws (December 1995) that a two-pronged strategy would be necessary to achieve this--both common gender laws as well as reforms from within--and, specifically, that Muslim personal laws must be reformed "within the scope of Islam."10

9

Kishwar, Religion at the Service of Nationalism, 212. Rajan, “Women Between Community and State,” 65.

10

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There are two weaknesses with the cultural/communitarian argument. First, it's inconsistent with the central beliefs of left-leaning Indian feminism as a whole: in other respects, India's mainstream left feminists are very inclined to work with the state to achieve reforms. But more than that, it leaves the entire process of reform to the "Muslim community." Shortly after the Shah Bano case, a centralized board was created by prominent Muslim leaders to consider questions such as Triple Talaq and the minimum requirements for alimony, and to make recommendations to Parliament that would lead to reforms. This organization is called the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). It is an organization whose members are not chosen democratically, and whose recommendations are not automatically law. At most, one Muslim woman is invited to serve on a board of 40. And not surprisingly, after twenty years of operation, it hasn't produced any notable reforms.11 Another Delhi-based feminist theorist, Kumkum Sangari, disagreed with the cultural/communitarian argument, pointing out these inconsistencies, and the fundamental injustice of patriarchal personal laws across the board. In addition to Triple Talaq, Muslim personal law continues to allow polygamy—a practice which has since 1955 been banned for Indian Hindus. But Sangari, in her landmark essay “Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies,” (1995), is careful to indicate that she favors a reworking of the law in the interest of social justice for women and not the benefit of a particular religious community or political party. As she puts it, “Clearly, as an antiMuslim party whose past and future existence mainly depends on Hindutva, the BJP does not have the right to draft a uniform civil code.” She does put forward a somewhat more contextual approach, which nevertheless is based on fundamental human rights for women: My own position, arrived at through a questioning of certain prevailing notions of heterogeneity and specific forms of homogenization, is in favour neither of personal laws nor of a uniform civil code as it is presently projected; rather, it rests on [a] different conception of both homogeneity and heterogeneity—that is, a notion of common laws that can take into account the multiple existing axes of social differentiation in India even as they transcend such differences in the realm of rights. I envisage a set of universal and inalienable rights for all women accompanied by a legal particularism that is determined neither by religion, nor for that matter by the present categorization of family laws, but situationally, in terms of legal provisions designed to address the specificities of legal arrangements. (Sangari, 1995)

Though Sangari continues to situate her response to the uniform civil code debate with reference to “situational” differences, what differentiates her from 11

For details on the recent non-changes in Muslim Personal Law, see C.M. Naim, “Please Spare Us The AIMPLB Edicts.” Outlook India, October 7, 2004. Accessed online at http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20041007&fname=aimplb&sid=1.

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her peers is the insistence on “universal and inalienable rights for women.” As all three critics have pointed out, Hindu women have been treated only marginally better under the Hindu Marriage Act—a whole host of practices discriminatory against women are happily accepted by the leaders of the Hindu right as well as the left. Creating a Uniform Civil Code the wrong way will potentially only universalize those forms of discrimination. To some extent any debate over laws in India is partly academic, as enforcement, especially in rural areas, is quite rare. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan feels that a fully secularized concept of individual rights for women has never really matured in the Indian legal system, partly because of the emphasis on religion-based communities (which demand rights as a group, and usually receive them), but partly because the system itself is simply deeply flawed. In recent years, women who are not elites, and who have attempted to contest their conditions have often found themselves excommunicated from family society. But Sunder Rajan stops short of abandoning the idea of individual rights entirely, as in the following paragraphs: The recourse to legal remedies and the assertion of rights and autonomy by individual women are often viewed as isolating and individualizing moves, especially when posed against the affective solidarities offered by family and community. The trade-off between (gaining) legal rights or legal victories and (losing) family and community support is invariably one that must give women pause. That such choices have to be made is a problem, it is argued, arising from the liberal conception of rights as inhering in the individual. The perceived limits of individualism and liberal rights for women has been responsible for calls issued by some feminists to abandon them as failed promises and return to family and community solidarities and values. The politics of legal rights is a complex and charged issue, and not one that I wish to explore here in any depth in terms of an abstract debate. What is relevant for the present discussion is that for Indian women, the state is not in any case a readily available recourse from the problems of violence, injustice, discrimination, exploitation, or oppression experienced in family, society, or community. The laws are tardy, the police corrupt, welfare and employment opportunities negligible, and the individual's knowledge of her rights and entitlements itself vague. To speak of women as rights-bearing individuals in this context is to invoke a situation that does not exist in any meaningful way.12

In short, before any meaningful reform of Personal laws affecting women can occur, there has to be a fundamental shift in the entire legal system's approach to women. One way for this to happen, Sunder Rajan argues, is for women to be recognized as a "group" alongside other groups—such as religious-based communities, caste groups, etc. To this effect, both she and Kishwar have been 12

Rajan, “Woman Between Community and State,” 71.

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advocating an increased recognition of women as a strong identity category to be recognized by the state. Most recently, Kishwar has argued for reservations for women in India's Parliament, governing bodies, as well as schools. This would be instituted alongside the reservations for low-caste groups that are already in place in most state governments, and that is universal in India's public schools and universities. It seems like a potentially successful strategy, but the problem with it is that the emphasis on getting women recognized as a group, and on their group rights, doesn't yet have a mechanism for guaranteeing the rights of individual women, especially those who are not in a position to exploit advantages offered (if they are offered) to the group. It seems that individual rights ought to remain in the picture as the definite goal for the movement. Perhaps the approach taken by people like Sunder Rajan and Kishwar is a little too defeatist here. If blanket reforms cannot be instituted, it still seems necessary to foment and try cases on an issue-by-issue basis. The writer Githa Hariharan has met with some success on this note. In 2000, Hariharan won her case to gain head-of-houshold status after her divorce. 13 Finally, it should be said that these debates, while still alive, have in some sense been superseded by the course of events. The inflammatory power of these issues for the Hindu right was eclipsed by their movement, a few years later, to destroy a Mosque in the city of Ayodhya, which they believed had been built on the site of the birthplace of the mythical Hindu God Ram. They used the furor created by this incident to grow their political base. Though the Babri Masjid was their political obsession, the Uniform Civil Code remained in the picture—it was often mentioned in political speeches as an example of the Congress Party's soft treatment of the Muslim community. The Hindu right finally came into power in India in 1998, and one would presume they would have then tried to institute the Uniform Civil Code that they had been arguing for so many years. But they did nothing of the kind. The impasse over the Uniform Civil Code, active since 1986, remains.

Feminist Literary Secularism: Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days and Taslima Nasrin’s Shame Though one might not expect novelists to enter directly into the Uniform Civil Code debate, some recent works of feminist fiction have addressed these issues in surprising detail. Samina Ali’s novel Madras on Rainy Days, for instance, stresses the isolation of women in the minority community; the failure of the state to protect their rights; the ongoing problem of discrimination against the minority; and the flaws in the traditional patriarchal system pertaining to 13 Hariharan discusses the case in interviews on her website: http://www.githahariharan.com/interview_playingdiffroles.html

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women (including Triple Talaq, arranged marriage, and the over-reliance on traditional medicine). Ali protagonist is a young woman named Layla, whose family is rooted in the cloistered environs of Old City, Hyderabad, one of India’s oldest (and most conservative) Muslim enclaves. The city was settled more than five hundred years ago by the Qutb Shahi kings, and remained an independent small kingdom for nearly 200 years, when it was conquered via a siege by the all-powerful Mughal Empire. While the Muslim section of Old City has declined a good deal since its Imperial glory days, it remains a formidable neighborhood—with large mansions and a massive, six-mile wall surrounding the area. Within Old City, it’s not uncommon to see women in Burqas or to hear the Azan, or call for prayer, from several different Mosques. It’s also common to find the tenets of Islamic Sharia—as sanctified by the Muslim Marriage Act— still very much in force. As Ali describes it, it remains a world very much unto itself: This was a Muslim neighbourhood, where women did not leave the house unveiled, not even girls as young as six, their bodies yet indistinguishable from boys’; and where the center of men’s foreheads held a dark patch from the repeated bowing and resting of the face against the pressed dirt of the prayer sujda-ga. The largest mosque in India, Mecca Masjid, stood at the center of the Old City, its granite dome, in the distance, shimmering like glass in the setting sun, and near it, the four slender minarets of the Char Minar pointed to the four corners of the sky. (58)

To some extent, this passage is simply setting the scene. But the sense of isolation of the community and of women within that community is extremely important, as it eventually becomes clear that they have little or no connection to the institutions of the Hindu-dominated world outside the gates of the Old City. Layla, who has been largely raised in the United States, is only too aware of some of the liabilities of Islamic Law. Her mother, for example, had been divorced by Layla’s father via Triple Talaq: What he did, by Old City laws, was natural for a man, even expected. Islam itself sanctioned four wives, just as it had sanctioned divorce. So easy for a man to release himself: talak, talak, talak, the one word pronounced thrice to undo an entire existence.14

Layla’s mother is completely undone by the divorce, and becomes somewhat of a dysfunctional person. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, she wants to make sure her daughter’s future isn’t compromised by her own personal situation—so she arranges Layla’s marriage without ever publicly acknowledging that she is in fact divorced herself, as that would ruin the family’s reputation. As is common 14

Ali, Madras on Rainy Days, 78.

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in many stories about the transmission of conservative patriarchal values, it is the women in Layla’s family—first her mother, then her mother-in-law—who take it upon themselves to present a façade of total respectability to the rest of the community. It is women, also, who take on much of the burden of transmitting traditional Islamic values from generation to generation. Layla’s mother-in-law, for instance, takes it upon herself to give her new daughter-inlaw an education in the Quran: ‘A child not knowing the Qur’an is not her fault, but the mother’s, so you should not feel ashamed. It is a mother’s duty to teach Islam. The man’s domain is outside, and the woman rules the house. Without the balance, children would be lost.’ Even as I was wondering if she was chastising Amme [Layla’s mother], she said, ‘I will not neglect my duty to teach you. You will find solace in the words of Allah, Beti. And the long hours before your husband returns will pass much quicker.’ 15

Her mother-in-law has unfortunately concealed the reasons for Sameer’s absence. In fact, he is gay, and has a lover named Naveed he continues to be involved with. But when she attempts to leave him upon finding out the truth, both his family and hers remain impassive. After Layla runs away, her family is complicit in having her forcibly returned to her in-laws’ home—where she is kept under guard until Sameer finally frees her after an ugly incident of HinduMuslim communal violence shakes up the family. It is through this experience that Layla learns the true incoherence and injustice of “Old City” laws. For the same rules that require women and men to remain segregated from one another, and that require that women wear the Burqa, turn out to be somewhat lax when it comes to her husband’s offenses. Rather than ostracize Sameer, the onus is again on Layla to find a way to live with the situation—to protect Sameer and his family’s reputation. The double standard is particularly acute at the moment Layla confronts her mother-in-law: ‘Islam prohibits what you are doing,’ I said. ‘Even my nik’kah to him has automatically become void. He is unrelated to me now, to sleep in his bed is a sin, against me and against you for forcing me—imprisoning me. How can you sit here and pray?’ She raised her chin as she had that day Sameer had thrown his prayer cap at her feet, then stormed out of the house. My sin, she seemed to be saying, not hers, now that she’d passed on her duties to me.16

Again, Ali demonstrates the obsessive emphasis in this orthodox community on the performance of women’s forbearance and especially transmission. Layla’s mother-in-law had protected her son’s “shame” for years, and now that he’s 15 16

Ibid., 122. Ibid., 247.

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married, that job of protection (even from a position of subservience) has been transferred to his wife. Madras on Rainy Days is a book expressing righteous anger at the failures of a cloistered community to regulate itself given the modern social problems that affect its members. While it defines itself by the “Old City” Islamic laws governing marriage, divorce, and property rights, it fails to actually enforce them except with regard to the burdens placed upon women. Samina Ali, who has stated that many of the events described in the novel were based on her personal experience,17 is clearly frustrated with the myriad failures of Islamic family law to protect women’s rights. And yet, as with many other authors discussed in other chapters of Literary Secularism, Madras in Rainy Days remains supersaturated with references to Islamic religious ritual as well as theology. Even in her simmering rebellion, until she finds out about her husband’s sexual orientation, Layla wants very much for her marriage to succeed, and be accepted by the broader Muslim community. And she herself has some secrets she needs to expiate—her earlier affair with an American man, which led to an aborted pregnancy—and to realize this expiation Layla turns, quite sincerely, to her faith: I was looking to be pardoned for Nate, who had, from a man, taken the form of blood, then vomit from my husband’s body. From desire had come revulsion. Repelled, Sameer had said on the wedding night, he had been repelled by me, by my flesh, a baby floating in blood, draining out. . . So I stood repentant before Allah, behind my husband, bowing, prostrating simultaneously, whispering prayers, my words lapping over his, over mine, gaining strength, not a sparring at all, but a great union. Allah raheem.18

It’s difficult to imagine a more direct example of fiercely secularist and feminist writing that remains tied to a personal experience of religious faith. Indeed, at several moments of the novel, it seems clear that Layla’s anger and resentment are fueled by an ethical righteousness that comes from her own personal interpretation of Islam, rather than her experience with the west. In contrast to Samina Ali, Taslima Nasrin writes quite clearly from outside the fold of religious community, and has sadly been forced out of her home country of Bangladesh as a result of the anger of Islamic clerics. The novel Shame, published as Lajja in Bengali, was written directly in the aftermath of the razing of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India. That event led to communal riots that left more than 1000 dead in India, as well as retaliatory terrible bomb blasts in the city of Bombay—which led to a second round of riots. The 17

These comments were made publicly at a conference at Yale University in April, 2005 at which I was in attendance. 18 Ali, Madras on Rainy Days, 154.

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destruction of the Mosque at Ayodhya also led to considerable instability in both Pakistan and Bangladesh, where sizeable Hindu minorities have continued to live despite the growing Islamicization of their countries through the 1970s and 80s. In Bangladesh in particular, the persecution of the Hindu minority reached a fever pitch in response to the destruction of the Mosque at Ayodhya. The response throughout the country was for Muslim mobs to destroy the many Hindu temples—a kind of unprecedented “cultural cleansing” led by hardline Muslim groups that was only weakly resisted by the government at the time. But the destruction of so many Hindu temples and the attacks on Bangladeshi Hindus was only the latest in a long series of moves designed to reverse Bangladesh’s stated commitment to constitutional secularism, leaving the sizeable Hindu minority in a very vulnerable position. Nasrin’s novel is first and foremost a novel expressing outrage against the mistreatment of Hindus in her country. But in a larger sense it is also a novel of mourning for the disappearance of the secular country she knew and believed in. Though no one could have anticipated that the reaction to her novel would be as extreme as it was, after reading the novel a reader isn’t at all surprised to learn that the writer no longer lives in the country. It is full of long explanations of how historical events led to the crisis in December 1992, as well as seemingly endless lists of the temples destroyed, villages impacted by riots—raw enumeration of violence and suffering. This prevalence of these lists makes the book at times difficult to read, though it should be said that there is a basic narrative at the core that coherently expresses the desperation of the country’s Hindu minority—while also condemning the actions taken by the Hindu fundamentalists across the border in India. The aesthetic problem is explained partly by the circumstances in which Nasrin wrote the book, as she describes in the preface to the 1997 English edition: I was in a hurry. I did not know what to do, but I felt I must protest, and I must make this protest known to my people. The book was written almost in a trance. It was ready for the press within just a few days. I handed over the manuscript to a publisher and felt relieved. The book was published in February 1993. I was fortunate because, in retrospect, I feel it would have been very difficult for me to publish a book like Lajja in Bangladesh had there been no courageous publishers there. More than fifty thousand copies of the book were sold out in a very short time. Suddenly a government order was issued and Lajja was banned in Bangladesh. The argument in favor of this ban was that this book was a threat to social peace and tranquility, that it might endanger the relation between the two communities, and so on. After that, the events took a different turn. Pirated editions started to surface in the Indian part of Bengal. Lajja became a best seller in India on the black market. To my horror, I heard that the Bharatiya Janata party, the very people who led to the demolition of that mosque . . . took up my

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book in support of their subversive ideas.19

In some sense the seismic aftershocks of Shame in both Bangladesh and India illustrate the continued importance of imaginative literature in these societies, even at a time of political crisis. This is a book that Nasrin wrote in the immediate wake of widespread communal violence akin to ethnic cleansing, and it was so immediately popular that it continued to be circulated illegally even after being banned: people wanted, or even needed to read it. In another way, however, one can see the reactions as essentially political, from both the secular left and the communalized right (both Muslim and Hindu): the secular left accused her of pandering to the Hindu right in India, while the same Hindu right was only too happy to quote Nasrin where it suited them. (One presumes the many passages in the novel where she criticizes all manner of religious fundamentalism must have dropped out of the Hindu right’s underground, Hindi-language edition of Nasrin’s novel.) At the end of the preface from which I quoted above, Nasrin herself insists that it is a novel and not a political tract— and that the “shame” of her title is in some sense the shame she herself feels as she watches her country routinize discrimination and a pattern of violence against its religious minorities: Lajja is the testament of a writer. In this testament I have indicted my country, the ruling clique and the political parties in Bangladesh, and also the intellectuals. In the process I have indicted myself also. Lajja means ‘shame.’ I felt ashamed to see such human degradation. I felt ashamed for the government of my country, who could not come out to protect the minorities. . . . I feel ashamed of my fellow writers and intellectuals who, despite their efforts, could do little to save their fellow citizens.20

The dual emphasis on the government as well as the “intellectuals” (by which Nasrin means to include civic institutions as well as the print media) is fitting given the argument of the novel itself. Shame is a novel of literary secularism that is concerned with how a failure in secular governance in particular affects women in the religious minority. The protagonist of Nasrin’s Shame is a young man named Suranjan, whose sister is abducted and then murdered by hooligans during the height of the violence in Dhaka following the razing of the Babri Masjid. Suranjan’s family is Hindu, and nominally religious, though Suranjan considers himself an atheist with no religious identity. As circumstances get worse (even before his sister is abducted), Suranjan slips into a cycle of depression that steadily slips into despair. His sense of anomie releases Suranjan into secularist idealism (which in 19 20

Nasrin, Shame, 10. Ibid., 13.

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Bangladesh is so out of place that it comes to resemble madness), a state after a lifetime of defiance on matters of religion. As a teenager he had been in love with a Muslim girl, but her parents had demanded he convert to Islam in order to marry her (not an uncommon story). He refused. Also, again before her abduction, he’s confused by his sister’s flirtation with conversion. Unlike him, she’s young enough to have been educated in the Bangladeshi school system after Islamicization had gone into effect. As is sometimes the case with religious minorities in very religious environments, by the end of her schooling she’s had so much “religious education” that she knows Islam better than her own faith tradition. As the situation in Dhaka worsens, Suranjan comes to chafe at the curfew that limits his movement, and the disapproval his Muslim friends have of his decision to continue to be out and about despite the dangers. And he is troubled by his Muslim friends’ seeming failure to show adequate empathy for his family’s plight, or concern for the turn the country is taking. For progressive members of the majority, the riots and the destruction are merely news—talking points—while for Suranjan’s family they represent an irreversible moment of national realignment. Of course, Shame is not just a protest novel about the Islamicization of Bangladeshi politics; it’s also considered a blasphemous text that earned Taslima Nasrin a Fatwa death sentence from a Bangladeshi Imam in the vein of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s infamous edict on Rushdie. But in comparison to Rushdie’s theologically rich Verses, the vast majority of the text of Shame is in fact devoid of theological reference points. The majority of the rhetoric is straightforwardly secularist—in the sense of arguing for a militant separation of church and state—not specifically blasphemous. Take the following passage: Suranjan raised his head and said, ‘Do you feel happy only with the broadcast of religious scriptures like the Gita? Will you feel great if temple construction is permitted? The twenty-first century is knocking at our door and we are still inviting religion to guide our society and state. Better say, all basic principles of the state, society and education should be free from religious interference. Secularism of the constitution does not mean that from now on the Gita, like the Koran, should also be compulsorily read. In schools, colleges, and universities all religious functions, prayers, the teaching of religious texts and the glorification of the lives of religious persons should be banned. Also banned should be political leaders’ aid to religious activities. Any political leader participating in a religious function and patronizing it should be expelled from his party. Religious propaganda must be discontinued in the government media. No one should be asked to state his religion in his application form for a job.’21

A bit truculent, perhaps, but hardly enough, one would think, to lead to a death sentence. Admittedly, there are a few snippets of what might be deemed outright 21

Nasrin, Shame, 191.

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offensive commentary from Suranjan when he reaches the heights of dejection (“In fact, no religious scriptures can be called holy. All of them are full of shit.”), but these remain very generalized. Needless to say, all such comments in the novel are made in the voice of Nasrin’s characters—and therefore they ought not be confused with Nasrin’s own thoughts on the matter of religion. But the religious police are not known to be particularly careful close readers of works of fiction—even didactic manifestoes like Nasrin’s Shame. Once Suranjan’s sister Maya is kidnapped, Suranjan’s idealistic insistence on the absolute separation of Church and State breaks down. He realizes that Bangladeshi has marked him effectively as a Hindu whether or not he himself would choose to be known as such. He begins to think violent thoughts and dream desperately for retribution: As soon as Birupaksha left, Suranjan said, ‘Well, Debabrata, can a mosque be set on fire? ‘A mosque, you said? Are you crazy?’ ‘Come, let’s burn down the ‘Tara mosque’ tonight.’ Debabrata cast puzzled glances in turn at Suranjan and Nayan. ‘There are twenty million of us Hindus in the country. If we want, we can target the Baitul Mokarrumit mosque as well.’ ‘You never identified yourself as a Hindu. Why are you doing so today?’ ‘I used to describe myself as a human being, a humanist. The Muslims did not allow me to remain a human being. It was they who made me a Hindu.’ . . . . Debabrata whispered, ‘Suranjan, you are becoming communal.’ ‘Yes, I am becoming communal. I am becoming communal… communal.’22

In the end, Suranjan doesn’t burn down any mosques to retaliate for his sister’s abduction. Instead, he goes after a woman, just as the mob who kidnapped his sister chose to attack the symbolic heart of the Hindu community. At his lowest point Suranjan hires a prostitute that he knows to be a Muslim, takes her to a room, and physically abuses her in a sexual encounter (not severely, but enough for it to be considered a violation of her rights). It gives him no satisfaction, only a primitive kind of release—and it illustrates viscerally the degree to which religious violence in the Indian subcontinent is defined by violence against women. Not only does Suranjan become “communal” (at least in a somewhat delusional sense), he actively enters into the symbolic vocabulary of religious violence and counter-violence when he attempts to hurt the prostitute. When a person is attacked along religious grounds in an intimate and severe way, Nasrin argues, “secularism” and humanism can be ruined, even for the most idealistic, committed souls amongst us. It’s quite fitting that Nasrin’s novel ends with Suranjan’s family leaving 22

Nasrin, Shame, 222-224.

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Bangladesh for India, effectively giving up on the nation they had tried and failed to claim as their own. For within a few months of the publication and subsequent banning of Shame, Nasrin herself was forced to leave the country, or face prosecution for blasphemy. As a final note on Nasrin, it’s important to mention that her career as a “literary secularist” neither ended nor began with the publication of this novel. In fact, she has proved herself to be one the Bengalis language’s most gifted and passionate writers in the younger generation. Her newspaper columns and early poetry earned her awards in Bangladesh (even though they too were highly controversial). And she has continued to publish novels in Bengali, most of them in India, though her most recent novel was also banned in the Indian state of West Bengal for violating the sentiments of Muslims—by the ostensibly secular Communist party government.23 One particular column from Nasrin’s early newspaper days stands out as a model of her particular brand of secularism. In it, she describes how she had been attending a young woman in the hospital who had been badly beaten by her husband (Nasrin, it should be mentioned, was a practicing doctor in addition to writing; she was forced to give up her medical practice in the early 1990s, once her columns began drawing criticism from religious conservatives.) The woman explains the attacks as follows: ‘Why does he beat you?’ ‘I don’t go when he calls.’ ‘He hits you because of that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Don’t you feel angry? Don’t you want to leave him?’ ‘Why should I? The Hadith allows a man to beat his wife.’ ‘Who told you that?’ ‘My husband.’ ‘He is lying. No Hadith allows a husband to beat his wife.’ A black mark dented the wall of her belief. She looked at me with surprise. ‘But everyone says so.’ ‘They are mistaken, Ratan.’24

As she develops the story, Nasrin hints that this is going to be a straightforward case of a feminist intervention in a case of blind faith. In the vein of much liberal western writing on the distortion of Islamic traditions by demagogues, it appears that the secular doctor is educating the young woman on the meaning of her own religion. But actually the story goes in a rather different direction. When she returns to see Ratan for the final time, the husband is there, waiting for her: 23 24

See Nasrin’s website: http://taslimanasrin.com/tn_bannedbooks.html. Nasrin, Taslima Nasreen: Selected Columns, 51-52.

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‘What you told my wife the other day was incorrect. Don’t go round giving false ideas to people.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well you’ve denied the Hadith.’ He sat down and continued in an irritated manner. ‘Perhaps you haven’t read the Hadith, the Koran. . . . You’ll understand if you read all these. Don’t confuse other women by talking nonsense.’ He turned to some marked pages and read out, ‘If a man wishes to be physically united with his wife and calls her, she must come at once, even if she is cooking. . . Is that all? No, listen to this. If your wife does something shameless, banish her from your bed and beat her.’ I could not believe my ears. I took the books in my hand and saw, written in clear letters, what the man had just read. I could not believe, in this day and age, such injustice, such dishonour could be propagated in print; that society accepted these crimes in letter and spirit; that respectable people of our society follow rules of religious barbarism.’25

The column ends in a revelation, but it is perhaps not the one readers were expecting. Instead of a confrontation with the abusing husband, Nasrin herself is confronted, and forced to eat her words in at least one sense: the man apparently has direct textual support of his right to rape his wife, and beat her if she doesn’t comply. The lesson is a stark one: it’s not simply that religious fundamentalists have the “wrong” interpretation of religious tradition. In fact, many major religious traditions do support the repression of women (this isn’t a particular fixation with Islam; in another column, Nasrin delves into ancient Hindu texts that sanction the mistreatment of women). And to the extent that they do, Nasrin argues, they simply aren’t compatible with the goal of human rights for women, religious minorities—or writers. It’s a stronger and more resolute position than Samina Ali’s in Madras on Rainy Days; that novel keeps one foot within the fold of Islam26. And it is in consonance with arguments from Kumkum Sangari that the highest priority in reforming the various Civil Codes in India ought to be human rights for women. Respect for cultural difference is, these feminist secularists argue, merely a proxy for patriarchal religious orthodoxy.

Conclusion Of course, there are as many ways of conceiving of women’s rights as there are ways of instituting secularism. In recent years, several prominent Arab women writers have posited alternatives to traditional approaches to Islam, and 25

Nasrin, Taslima Nasreen: Selected Columns, 53. This continuing commitment to reforming Islam is something Ali has also practiced by participating in a series of public “protest prayers” in Mosques in the U.S. These are Friday prayers led by women, contrary to convention. More on the Islamic feminist group the Daughters of Hajar can be found at Asra Nomani’s website, http://www.asranomani.com/freedom/archives/2005/02/about_the_daugh.php. 26

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have created a movement called “Islamic feminism,” which aims to defend women’s rights within the fold. Alongside Samina Ali, mentioned above, one finds writers such as Fatima Mernissi, who questions the Hadith and received interpretations of the Koran, and Assia Djebar, who in a recent book looked closely at a number of real women’s voices in the Islamic tradition going back to the time of Muhammed.27 In Turkey, the debate takes on a particularly surreal quality. As the controversy over its banning continues to polarize the population of the country, the Hijab becomes almost a fetishized symbol, well out of proportion to its real value in Islamic theology. In the next chapter, we will look closely at Orhan Pamuk’s recent novel Snow, which overlaps somewhat with the feminist concerns of this chapter in its preoccupation with women’s rights and secularism. The turn to secularism in Turkey and, with Philip Roth, in the United States, moves us from the primary focus on the British Empire that has been at work in Literary Secularism thus far. For the final chapter, the question of literary secularism moves to the problem of globalization in the wake of 9/11.

27

See Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 55-80

CHAPTER EIGHT LITERARY SECULARISM AFTER 9/11: PHILIP ROTH’S THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA AND ORHAN PAMUK’S SNOW

No one who's even slightly westernized can breathe free in the country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they're better than everyone else and look down on other people. —Orhan Pamuk, Snow

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was a commonplace in the United States to hear that “9/11 changes everything.”1 And indeed, in the political landscape of the U.S. at least there was a pronounced rightward lurch, as many left-leaning critics stood behind the Bush Administration’s aggressive response to the attacks and supported of the goals (and methods) of the “War on Terror.” More recently, the perceived exceptionalism of 9/11 as a historical event has come under question, and the mantra that “9/11 changes everything” no longer seems quite as clear, especially to critics of the British and American administrations’ apparent circumvention of international law. But if the laws or the principles behind those laws have not in fact changed, it may be the case that there is something different in the way in which secularism is understood as a political discourse. To be specific, it appears that the Western liberal consensus regarding civil and human rights, the separation of powers, and the handling of intellectual dissent has been shaken up and realigned. Controversies over the separation of church and state, which had been to some extent resolved since the 1940s, reentered the public sphere, with intense controversies over the official display of the Ten Commandments, the teaching of Creationism in schools, and the language of the Pledge of Allegiance. The separation of Church and State is also an issue in both the abortion debate and gay rights debates, as the 1

There are too many examples of this to count. To give just one recent example, see Daniel Henninger’s “9/11 Changed Everything.” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2006, accesed online at http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/ ?id= 110008194. Henninger approvingly quotes British defense Secretary John Reid, who argues that the Geneva Conventions for the handling of prisoners of war need to be revised in light of the realities of modern terrorism.

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conservative stigma on practices such as abortion and gay marriage derives its righteous morality from the Christian framework. In the mass-media, commentators such as Bill O’Reilly have demonized the “secularists” who reject Christian values as the basis for the American legal system.2 These frontal attacks on secularism might obviate some of the subtle theoretical critiques of secularism that have appeared in recent years over the question of secularism’s association with liberalism, the European Enlightenment, and universalism. The most prominent critic of secularism in the Foucauldian vein is Talal Asad, whose Formations of the Secular3 aims to offer the definitive critique of the liberal theories on secularism and secularization articulated by Charles Taylor and Jose Casanova.4 Asad objects to Taylor’s presumption of the individual access to institutions of liberal governance the unmediated “empty time” of the modern nation-state. As Asad puts it, The distinctive feature of modern liberal governance, I would submit, is neither compulsion (force) nor negotiation (consent) but the statecraft that uses “selfdiscipline” and “participation,” “law” and “economy” as elements of political strategy. . . Taylor’s statement about participation is not, so one could argue, the way most individuals in modern state-administered populations justify governance. It is the way ideological spokespersons theorize “political legitimacy.”5

For Asad, in every modern democratic system there are many layers of mediation in play, nullifying the direct access to real power that is so central to the idea of liberalism as articulated by Taylor. If the mass-media and multinational corporations control the politicians, it isn’t clear why the liberal insistence on a separation of Church and State is still valuable. But the ground has shifted as the stridency of the right has grown in the U.S.—and as the old 2 See Bill O’Reilly, Who’s Looking Out For You? New York: Broadway Books, 2003. O’Reilly’s arguments are generally incoherent; a typical passage from the book reads as follows: “In every debate about public spirituality, the secularists spin the issue and equate God with the legal concept of religion. The two are separate, and here’s some legal proof. God is a spiritual being. Witches and Wiccans are recognized religious groups. They reject God. The United States was founded on Judeo-Christian philosophy, not a particular religion. As Madison pointed out, in order for a just society to exist, Americans must behave according to an established moral code, and they chose the Ten Commandments as a good model” (118). 3 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003). 4 See Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism” in Rajeev Bhargava, ed. Secularism and its Critics, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998 [U.S. Edition, 2005]. See also Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 5 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 3.

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liberal secularist consensus is directly challenged, Foucauldian approaches that deemphasize individual agency in light of the systematic structures of power have less explanatory power. And from a pragmatic and activist perspective, the argument for liberal secularism on the basis of individual rights retains powerful ethical force. A healthy culture of political secularism need not be based on statist directives (indeed, as Orhan Pamuk’s Snow demonstrates, such an approach is riddled with problems), nor on lofty, quasi-metaphysical political concepts such as “liberty” and “democracy.” Indeed, the “overlapping consensus” between secular humanists and Evangelical Christians that was so important in the formation of the U.S. Constitution remains a quite viable concept today. As Taylor points out in his essay “Modes of Secularism,” the original idea of a “separation between Church and State” was implemented by Thomas Jefferson, first in Virginia and then nationally, as a pragmatic compromise designed to ensure a stronger union, not to assert secularist idealism. Of course, the historical example of the United States has limits, as American secularism first emerged when the most “liberal” mainstream position was Theism; direct expressions of atheism or dramatically different eastern religions were not factors. For Taylor, the overlapping consensus concept is the absolute minimum level of commonality under which contemporary secularists and the religiously devout can hope to sustain a polity at the present moment: The problem with the historical common ground is that it assumes that everyone shares some religious grounds for the norms regulating the public sphere, even if these are rather general: non-denominational Christianity, or only Biblical theism, or perhaps only some mode of post-Enlightenment Deism. But even this latter is asking too much of today’s diversified societies. The only thing we can hope to share is a purely political ethic.6

To give a practical example of “overlapping consensus” in action, imagine a radical atheist and a highly conservative Muslim immigrant in England or the United States trying to define “secularism.” They may have close to no metaphysical or philosophical beliefs in common; fundamental ideas of individual liberty, the democratic process, or separation of spheres, may not lead to any kind of fruitful discussion on how to understand the role of religion in public life between the two. All that they will share will be what Taylor calls a “purely political ethic,” which is to say, they share the desire to live in a country where they can organize their lives in peace. A religiously devout member of a minority fears restrictions on his right to practice, while an atheist fears restrictions on her right not to practice. Insofar as the two goals overlap, secularism may be possible. Attempts to insist on secularism on principle have, in recent years, lost 6

Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and its Critics, 37.

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ground to religious conservativism in both the United States and India. Critics such as Noah Feldman have even suggested that it’s the very modernist intolerance of secularist principles that has provoked and inspired the new religious movements.7 A sense that “secularism has gone too far” has hardened and politicized the religious sensibilities of many people who, in the recent past, may have had only passive or latent ties to a sense of religious community. The change in tenor is not merely American. Indeed, it now seem evident in a number of different national contexts, leading one to think that 9/11 may indeed be a marker (if an accidental one) of the globalization of the crisis in secularism. The Muslim community in the UK has grown increasingly strident in response to the joint American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the extent that Parliament has passed laws for the first time forbidding the glorification of terrorism as well as “incitement of religious hatred.”8 And, as mentioned in the previous chapter, France has moved to ban the wearing of religious scarves and turbans in schools, government jobs, and on identification cards. Subsequently, and mostly unrelatedly, France has faced widespread rioting in the heavily immigrant and Muslim suburbs of several major cities—suggesting that French concepts of national and secular identity are still in process. Moreover, in Turkey, the constitutionally mandated secularism created by Ataturk in the 1920s has also been challenged with the rise of an Islamist party to political dominance in 2003.9 Islamicization is also for the first time becoming a major political plank in previously secular countries like Malaysia10; and it is rampant in sub-Saharan Africa. It is beyond the scope of this book to respond to all of these (and other) crises in great detail. Writers have, of course, been responding to these various developments, some of them directly—one thinks of Salman Rushdie’s biting 7

See Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem, and What We Should Do About It. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005). A similar argument has been made by Ashis Nandy in the Indian context, though in Nandy’s case, the hardline secularists are also accused of importing a foreign ideology seen as essentially incompatible with the organic tolerance of Hindu culture. See “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance” in Veena Das’ anthology Mirrors of Violence. 8 See the Times of London, “Artists Win Change to Bill Outlawing Religious Hatred,” February 7, 2005. On the banning of speech glorifying terrorism, see, BBC News, “Glorification Law Passes First Test.” February 16, 2006. Accessed online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4720682.stm. 9 The Turkish AK (Justice and Development) Party won the Turkish elections in 2002. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sworn in in January 2003, ran a moderately proIslamic campaign in which he avoided the Hijab issue entirely. See BBC News, “Turkey’s Charismatic Pro-Islamic Leader.” November 4, 2002. Accessed online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2270642.stm. 10 See BBC News, “Pressure on Multi-faith Malaysia.” May 16, 2006. Accessed online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4965580.stm

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essays on the rise of creationism in schools in the Midwestern U.S.11, though others have mainly focused on expressing their discontent in their literary works. This chapter will consider two cases of literary secularism in the current global conjuncture, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. My purpose is not to pose Roth and Pamuk as secularist authors in general comparison to one another, though the word “secularist” would not be a mistaken attribution in either case. They are in fact so different from one another as authors that it’s not clear that general comparisons would be very fruitful. However, both of these specific books have certain commonalities that are worth exploring. Both books can, for one thing, be characterized as “postmodern metafiction,” in the sense that they have self-conscious narrators who are (and are not) extensions of the real author behind the text. Orhan Pamuk’s novel has “Orhan,” who follows Ka’s path to the border town of Kars to try and unravel the mystery of his friend’s murder at the hand of Islamists some years after Ka had himself gone there, ostensibly to learn about a group of “headscarf girls” who had been committing suicide after being denied the right to wear the Hijab at school. Philip Roth’s novel, for its part, has “Philip Roth,” whose childhood experience in a heavily Jewish neighbourhood in New Jersey resembles that of the real Philip Roth fairly closely. The first person narrators add a dimension of realism and narrative authenticity, which becomes all the more important given that both of these works contain counterfactual versions of recent history. Pamuk invents an incident of dramatic violence occurring at a theater in the (real) border town of Kars in eastern Turkey. In some sense the event, which will be described in greater detail below, is plausible, though it is tied to coincidences and doublings that are either highly implausible or completely metaphysical. Roth invents an alternate macro-history—a Charles Lindbergh victory in the Presidential election of 1940—in order to reflect on the myriad ways in which the American legacy of anti-Semitism is much deeper than many people think. But it also seems fruitful to read the novel, which was published in 2004, in light of the rampant violations of civil liberties in the U.S. system following 9/11. It may or may not be, strictly speaking, an “allegory,” but at the very least it provokes serious questions about the future of secularism in a United States dominated by fear of terrorism, xenophobia, and suspicion of the newer religious minorities. Both novels are examples of literary secularism at the present moment. If read as I propose to read it, Roth’s novel is a powerful critique of the real danger of an American slide into authoritarianism. Pamuk, too is engaged with authoritarianism—really two authoritarianisms that seem to mirror one another. One is the Islamist and theocratic tendency, which has emerged from the 11 Salman Rushdie, “Darwin in Kansas.” Step Across This Line: Collected Essays in NonFiction 1992-2002. (New York: Random House, 2002)

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political underground in Turkey. The other is the authoritarian face of state secularism, which seems as restrictive of personal freedoms as the Islamic fundamentalist ideology it opposes. Neither novel offers an easy solution to the problems it poses, though both suggest that deconstruction of the dialectical contest between “enemy” and “friend” (and concomitantly, “religious orthodoxy” and “secularism”), must be an essential part of some future restoration of liberal humanism.

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow Imagine a “provocative” Broadway play about the U.S. use of torture in detention centers like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In this imaginary play, a volunteer is requested from the audience, someone who preferably identifies himself as a “devout Muslim.” The volunteer is brought on stage and subjected to stage torture, as a way of shocking the audience, but also of using the horror produced by a direct representation of the real thing as an argument against the very thing it shows. But imagine that the regular actors are all tied up in the basement one night, and in their stead are diabolical CIA agents who have become obsessed with this particular play, and seen it night after night, memorizing it entirely. When the agent-actors get their volunteer, they don’t stage torture him, they really do it. There is blood, screams, and a look of utterly convincing terror on the man’s face. It’s disturbing, certainly, but few, if any audience members imagine that it could possibly be anything other than the most powerful realism (“Maybe the man in the audience was a plant,” says one woman). At the end, there is an overwhelming standing ovation; the audience is truly “moved,” and more angry at the government than ever. But of course, as they watched the torture they were completely involved in the action, enjoying it utterly. The applause is for the quality and intensity of the performance, not so much the ostensible politics of the play. The audience is roused, but what does it learn from watching this display? Possibly, nothing it wouldn’t have also known from watching an excellent fake version of the same thing. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. What might be more interesting is the theory of theater that drove the diabolical CIA agents to do what they did. Their goal, of course, was not to discourage a practice by showing it directly (which may or may not work, because of the addictive quality of the spectacle of violence), but to actually use the theater to cause harm to someone they did not like. In Snow, two mindbending works of “theater” are performed during the course of events that constitute the novel’s “present.” The first is described as a piece of moldy nationalist propaganda, “My Fatherland or my Headscarf,” in which religious fanatics plot a conspiracy and are gunned down by the noble protectors of Turkish state. Only, in the mad version of it that is actually

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performed in the novel, when the police (who are real police, acting under orders from a mad actor who has become a state official) gun down the fanatics they do not go after the actors on the stage, but the audience itself. They specifically target boys from the local religious high school in the audience, who are enthusiastically voicing their disapproval of the secularist play. The police rifles are loaded; a small secularist massacre ensues, which comes to be known as the Coup throughout the second half of the book. There are a number of different components to Pamuk’s approach to the performance of secularism in works of art. One line of thought has to do with literary medium and authority—as Pamuk’s novel defines poetry, theater, and fiction as modes of art that come with their own, medium-specific theories of power. The protagonist of the novel is a modernist, atheist poet named Ka, who visits the small town of Kars to investigate the recent spell of suicides by young Muslim girls, in protest of the state ban on headscarfs in public settings, such as public schools. After a dry spell of many years, Ka is suddenly overtaken by poetic inspiration at numerous moments in the novel. Poems come to him like spells of nausea—from something or somewhere outside of himself (something perhaps divine or daemonic). But the poems are nevertheless utterly private and personal, and are never cited or interpreted in the novel. On the question of the protagonist’s atheism there are certain overlaps between Snow and James Wood’s The Book Against God (and also, perhaps, with The Satanic Verses). For Ka is a dedicated, lifelong atheist poet who has lived outside of Turkey for many years. But he has also lost the thread of his writerly inspiration, only to find, with a shock, that he finds it again—but only after he engages in serious discussions about religious faith with the religiously devout inhabitants of Kars. For instance, Shortly after arriving in Kars in the midst of a major snowstorm, Ka is asked about what he thinks about the snow by a Sheikh whom he visits: “'The snow reminded me of God,' said Ka. ‘The snow reminded me of the beauty and mystery of creation, of the essential joy that is life.'” (96) It comes over him as an almost involuntary reflex that he can’t control or stop—rather along the lines of daemonic inspiration in Rushdie’s novel, or the haunted and symptomatic “BAG” that Tom Bunting is writing in Wood’s Book Against God. And indeed, the longer Ka stays in Kars, the more the line between his secularist convictions and the town’s religiosity come to blur. Some of his statements on the question of religious belief are in fact surprisingly ambiguous, suggesting that a kind of personal religious revelation may be in the offing for Ka: 'I grew up in Istanbul, in Nisantas, among society people. I wanted to be like the Europeans. I couldn't see how I could reconcile my becoming a European with a God who required women to wrap themselves in scarves, so I kept religion out of my life. But when I went to Europe, I realized there could be an Allah who was different from the Allah of the bearded provincial reactionaries.'

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Chapter Eight 'Do they have a different God in Europe?' asked the Sheikh jokingly. He patted Ka's back. 'I want a God who doesn't ask me to take off my shoes in his presence and who doesn't make me fall to my knees to kiss people's hands. I want a God who understands my need for solitude.' 'There is only one God,' said the Sheikh. 'He sees everything and understands everyone—even your need for solitude. If you believed in him, if you knew he understood your need for solitude, you wouldn't feel so alone.' 'That's very true, Your Excellency,' said Ka, feeling as if he were really speaking to everyone in the room. 'It's because I'm solitary that I can't believe in God. And because I can't believe in God, I can't escape from solitude. What should I do?'12

Note that Ka isn’t declaring his atheism as a matter of personal conviction. Rather, the emphasis seems to be aesthetic and somewhat idiosyncratic—he wants a God who “understands [his] need for solitude.” Oddly enough, the Sheikh accepts this approach to religion to some extent, though he either rejects or doesn’t understand Ka’s desire to be alone. And Ka adds to the confusion by suggesting that his attitude to religion and his desire for solitude are overdetermined, and therefore unresolvable. Ka’s concept of God is the exact negative of Emile Durkheim’s in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. For Durkheim, religion is an image of society and society is formed in the image of religion.13 If poetry is in Pamuk’s novel always religious (or at least, metaphysical), fiction is seen as always secular. In addition to the protagonist Ka, there is also a first-person narrator in Pamuk’s novel, named “Orhan,” who is following the trail of Ka’s experiences in the town of Kars some years later, and writing about it. Through Orhan, there is some discussion in the novel about the form of the novel. In contrast to both drama and poetry, novels are given both historical and anthropological authority—they have the power to describe the totality of a people or an event. Even if fictional, a novel is, in some sense, the most straightforwardly and widely “true” of the three literary forms. One of Ka’s interlocutors, a young man named Fazil, seems all too aware of this when he asks “Orhan” to insert a disclaimer in the novel he knows the latter is writing: ‘I did think of something, but you may not like it. . . If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.’ 12

Pamuk, Snow, 96-97. See Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995. Durkheim introduces the eminently social nature of religion in Chapter 1 (pages 22-23 of the Fields translation), then returns to it at greater length in the conclusion (422-423). 13

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‘But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, they do,’ he cried. ‘If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.’14

On the one hand, it is a mark of Fazil’s provincial simplicity—his stupidity— not to be able to comprehend the basic function of representation in art. He is a young man who was, earlier in the book at least, associated with the Islamists in the town, and perhaps his naiveté about the truth-value of “fiction” is tied to the trouble the very religious have with accepting any “representation” that deviates from the sacred, or that derives from any individual’s self-ascribed authority. On the other hand, with that naiveté comes an unmistakable respect for the work of art as a work in language that has power. The secularists in this novel are harried people, losing the battle against Islam in the countryside. The fantasy of a secularist play that becomes Absolute, and of a literary work that becomes Real, is in some sense a fantasy that the naïve view of Art (i.e., that Art is never fictional) might in fact be true after all. It is a way of thinking about representation where modern literature (which is by James Wood’s definition secular) embraces a kind of representationalist fundamentalism as the only effective way of communicating in a society in which representation is forbidden. The problem of efficacy is not just a problem for artists living in environments consumed by religious fundamentalism. Indeed, it might just be a quintessentially modern/modernist problem, depending on how it’s framed. With theater, Pamuk puts us somewhere in the domain of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, only with the secularists as Apollonian idealists and the Islamic fundamentalists as Dionysian realists whose “intoxication” comes from the destruction of all institutions of pleasure.15 Nietzsche isn’t mentioned in 14

Pamuk, Snow, 425-426. In the following passage from The Birth of Tragedy, imagine the Dionysians as Islamists: “And now let us imagine how in this world, constructed on illusion and moderation and restrained by art, the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian celebration rang out all around with a constantly tempting magic, how in such celebrations the entire excess of nature sang out loudly in joy, suffering, and knowledge, even in the most piercing scream. Let's imagine what the psalm-chanting Apollonian artist, with his ghostly harp music could offer in comparison to this daemonic popular singing. The muses of the art of ‘illusion’ withered away in the face of an art which spoke truth in its intoxicated state: the wisdom of Silenus cried out ‘Woe! Woe!’ against the serene Olympian. Individualism, with all its limits and moderation, was destroyed in the self-forgetfulness of the Dionysian condition and forgot its Apollonian principles. Excess revealed itself as the truth.” (From The Birth of Tragedy, Translation by Ian Johnston [1871; 2000]. Accessed online at: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm)

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Pamuk’s novel, though there are some references to the “play to end all plays” that are reminiscent of Nietzsche’s concept of Dionysian excess. Pamuk refrains from offering any straightforward theory of theater or aesthetics in the discourse of the novel itself, though there is an intriguing reference to Hegel: “It was Hegel who first noticed that history and theater are made of the same materials,’ said Sunay. ‘Remember: just as in the theater, history chooses those who play the leading roles. And just as actors put their courage to the test onstage, so too do the chosen few on the stage of history.’16

Sunay, the speaker here, is the mad actor/state official who orders the actors in “My Fatherland or my headscarf” to be replaced by real police, carrying loaded weapons, who shoot down the religious fundamentalists in the audience. The play is, therefore, a public spectacle that doubles as a public act. It is an artistic representation of secularism that also enables to impose it by force, and “for real,” on the residents of the town. The performance of “My Fatherland or my Headscarf” depicted in the novel is a radical reappropriation of what otherwise appears to be a rather moldy piece of nationalist propaganda. The plot is simple: religious fanatics plot a conspiracy and are gunned down by the protectors of Turkish state. Only, in Sunay mad version of it, the police who gun down the fanatics go after not the actors on the stage, but the boys from the local religious high school—who happen to be enthusiastically voicing their disapproval of the secularist play at the moment they are shot. The soldiers are real soldiers, not actors, and their rifles are loaded. A small secularist massacre ensues, which comes to be known as the Coup throughout the second half of the book. A second play is performed by the same theatrical group, which miraculously (a little suspension of disbelief is required here) puts on a second play the following day, a Turkish adaptation of The Spanish Tragedy that Sunay Zaim calls The Tragedy in Kars. Here again, the line between reality and art are blurred. In the climactic scene of this play, Kadife, the “leader of the headscarf girls” in Kars bares her head and suggests she'll commit suicide, in exchange for the opportunity to kill Sunay Zaim, who planned the secularist massacre from the previous day’s performance. Kadife does in fact bare her head, but when she shoots Zaim with a revolver that has a clearly empty clip, he does in fact die: As I have referred several times to the inspecting colonel sent by Ankara after things had returned to normal, my readers will have already deduced my indebtedness to this man and his detailed report on the stage coup; his own analysis of the gun scene confirms it was less a case of sleight of hand than actual magic. . . . There were, of course, many stories suggesting that Kadife did knowingly and willfully kill Sunay Zaim, and without his real permission; to

16

Pamuk, Snow, 199.

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refute these allegations, the inspecting colonel showed it would have been impossible for the young woman to have switched guns or to have replaced the empty clip with a loaded one so quickly. And so, despite the amazement Sunay's face registered with every shot, the fact remains that searches carried out by the armed forces, the inventory of Kadife's personal effects at the time of her arrest, and even the video recording of the performance all confirm that she was in possession of only one gun and one clip. . . . Kadife's last words ('I guess I killed him!') turned her into something of an urban legend; the inspecting colonel saw them as proof that this was not a case of premeditated murder. Perhaps out of consideration for the prosecutor who would open the trial, the colonel's report digressed to give a full discussion of premeditation, wrongdoing with intent, and other related legal and philosophical concepts; still, he wound up alleging that the true mastermind—the one who had helped Kadife memorize her lines and taught her the various maneuvers she would deftly perform—was none other than the deceased himself.17

In effect, though there’s every indication that Kadife murders Sunay Zaim after baring her head (on his orders), there’s no physical evidence to support it. The only possible conclusion is that Sunay Zaim planned this second play as a kind of elaborate suicide (a secularist martyrdom!), which fits the doublings and reversals that blur the line between the religious and secular in the novel as a whole. In Snow, the chief terrorist (“Blue”) isn’t especially violent, whereas the most passionate secularist creates elaborate justifications for acts of terrorism. Reflecting the reality of the Turkish countryside, in this town secularists are a shrinking minority, tyrannized by the religious-minded majority. For a secularist to be killed by a “headscarf girl” turns the Islamists’ pursuit of martyrdom on its head. As Sunay tells Ka earlier in the novel, justifying his mad action in the massacre of the first play: Those religious high school boys you saw in the cells today have your face permanently etched in their memories. They'll throw bombs at anyone and anything; they don't care as long as they are heard. And furthermore, since you read a poem during the performance, they'll assume you were in on the plot. No one who's even slightly westernized can breathe free in the country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they're better than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren't for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the very soldiers who guarantee their freedom.'18

17 18

Pamuk, Snow, 406-407. Ibid., 203.

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In effect, the secularists are desperate—and are increasingly forced to use antidemocratic means to support their agenda. But even a madman like Sunay Zaim probably has a point when he talks about the reign of violence and intolerance that will ensue once the Islamists take full control. But this kind of justification can only be practiced for so long before it becomes absurd. Pamuk doesn’t offer a compromise pattern or a theory of secularism that might bridge the two positions. Instead, the pattern of doubling and the destruction of the self comes to a rather dark conclusion, which is to say, suicide—Sunay Zaim’s, Kedife’s, and Ka’s. Suicide is, in Pamuk’s novel, an act of power and assertion. And it may be gendered, based on the conversation that immediately precedes the shooting of Sunay Zaim: 'May I again insist that you explain to me why you wish to kill yourself?' said Sunay. 'It's not a question anyone can really answer,' said Kadife. 'What do you mean?' 'If a person knew exactly why she was committing suicide and could state her reasons openly, she wouldn't have to kill herself,' said Kadife. 'No! It's not like that at all,' said Sunay. 'Some people kill themselves for love; others kill because they can't bear their husbands' beatings any longer or because poverty is piercing them to the bone, like a knife.' 'You have a very simple way of looking at life,' said Kadife. 'A woman who wants to kill herself for love still knows that if she waits a little her love will fade. Poverty's not a real reason for suicide either. And a woman doesn't have to commit suicide to escape her husband; all she has to do is steal some of his money and leave him.' 'Very well, then, what is the real reason?' 'The main reason women commit suicide is to save their pride. At least that's what most women kill themselves for.' 'You mean they've been humiliated by love?' 'You don't understand a thing!' said Kadife. 'A woman doesn't commit suicide because she's lost her pride, she does it to show her pride. . . . Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something . . . Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining something.'19

This passage brings us back to the concerns of the previous chapter, specifically the question of women’s rights in the face of patriarchal repression. Here, however, the oppressor isn’t the male-dominated religious hierarchy, but the male-dominated secularist state, which refuses to allow Kedife to wear her Hijab publicly. She’s announced her suicidal intentions (which she knows full well go against the ideals of Islam), and then, in the passage above, defends her decision to commit suicide with a feminist reference to women’s pride. As with many other debates in Pamuk’s novel, this one is mired in paradoxes about 19

Pamuk, Snow, 396-398.

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performativity and negation. It seems Kedife wants to commit suicide not simply to negate her life because others have restricted her self-expression, but to insist (positively) on her ability to express herself even if that self-expression has been forbidden. The act is still a performance, still theatrical, and as such is, in Pamuk’s ledger, a kind of positive assertion.

Philip Roth’s Plot Against America Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America contains some of the same logical puzzles and interpretive traps as Snow, though it is on the whole somewhat more transparent. One is Roth’s creation of a counterfactual history, in which the antiSemitic celebrity Charles Lindbergh succeeds in winning the Presidency in 1940, riding a surge of anti-war sentiment and latent American anti-Semitism. Roth’s nightmare vision stands on its own, and is given support by the Appendix to the novel, composed of true historical documents pertaining to Lindbergh. But it also pointedly resembles the Presidency of George W. Bush. There are, to begin with, entertaining parallels in the personalities of the real President Bush and the imagined President Lindbergh (both are almost comically taciturn), but it’s the serious parallels that are salient for our purposes. Lindbergh’s anti-Jewish directives lead to a state of fear and division within the Jewish community, which is also a consequence (in the real world) of the crackdown on Muslim immigrants taking place in the U.S. today under the Patriot Act. Roth’s book also mirrors some of the aspects of Jewish recognition and identity I discussed earlier, with regards to George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. Jewish recognition is a way of identifying (and stigmatizing) a religious minority, but it also, I find, operates within the community through a specifically Jewish version of W.E.B. DuBois’ “double consciousness.”

The Politics of Fear Up until it’s reversed at the surprise ending of the novel, one of the most intriguing elements of The Plot Against America is the ominous change in American society that doesn’t quite amount to fascism. Roth’s two political inventions—government programs created by the fictitious Lindbergh presidency—are the “Office of American Absorption” and a new “Homestead Act of 1942.” Both are voluntary programs, designed to assimilate specifically Jewish immigrants into mainstream American society. Both have the whiff of Nazism, without its ugly sting. The word “absorption” is particularly terrifying, as it suggests deracination by force. But as I mentioned, the two programs instituted by the Lindbergh Presidency are voluntary ones, and the Jewish community in Roth’s novel is divided internally about whether to support them. Many do, and they find good reasons for doing so (aren’t the perils of ghettoization real, after all? isn’t the difference

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between “assimilation” and “absorption” trivial?). Others—like “Philip’s” father—don’t support the measures, and find themselves constantly waiting for the other shoe to fall. They seem paranoid, and the expectation is that they are right to be so. However, in Roth’s novel, the excesses conjured by the specter of a Nazi sympathizer as an American President never quite materialize. Anti-democratic practices, such as the routine use of torture (or something approximating it) against detainees, have been naturalized. Also naturalized is the government policy of aggressive deportation against Muslim immigrants in the U.S., which subjects large segments of the immigrant population in the U.S. to life in a state of fear. As with Roth’s novel, there is nothing illegal about what the government has done with these deportations. In every case, there has been shown to be something amiss with the deportee’s immigration status—an overstayed student visa being the most common culprit. But take the case of two teenage girls in New York who were detained in April of 2005.20 The FBI held them for six weeks in detention while questioning them, based on an essay one of the girls had written for a school assignment, as well as statements one of the girls had made in an Islamic internet chatroom. After six weeks in a holding cell and intensive interrogation, it was finally decided that, chatroom Jihad notwithstanding, the girls weren’t terrorists. Nevertheless, the Bangladeshi girl (Tashnuba) and her family were all deported in June. They had been in the U.S. for thirteen years (thirteen out of Tashnuba’s sixteen years), but they were illegal, and the deportation was fully legal. As I said, the deportation of this family cannot be construed as “wrong,” but the conditions in which it occurred raise the question of whether the deportation is itself a form of punishment for Tashnuba’s strong views on Islam. Either way, the FBI’s extremely aggressive tactics produce a climate of fear in the immigrant community; people have to watch what they say, or run the risk of detainment and/or deportation. The fear of violating unspecified laws (or, following the Patriot Act, a litany of new laws), and the constant sense of having done something wrong merely by virtue of being different, do seem quite similar to the paranoid vision of America in Roth’s novel.

20

See Nina Bernstein, “Questions, Bitterness and Exile For Queens Girl in Terror Case.” New York Times, June 17, 2005. Accessed online at: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00E15FC3F5F0C748DDDAF0894DD4 04482.

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Jewish Recognition Roth’s novel brings us full circle—that is, it brings us back to the questions of Jewish recognition and identity that were at issue in Chapter 2. For the debate within the Jewish community over assimilation is as important in the late Victorian world of George Eliot’s novel as it is in the counterfactual 1940s New Jersey of Roth’s Plot Against America. Deronda’s anxious reaction to being called out as a Jew before he has fully recognized it in himself is particularly relevant here: the sense of embarrassment at being recognized as a member of a stigmatized group, the fear and humiliation that defines the dominant religious community in the eyes of the minority. Eliot’s novel is a critique of the failure of true secularism in England, and to a great extent Roth’s book is a corollary in the American context. There are scenes of Jewish recognition in The Plot Against America as well, especially in the “Loudmouth Jew” chapter early in the novel. In one particularly disturbing scene, the Roths are away from their predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, on a trip to the nation’s capital. Everywhere they go, they are seemingly recognized as Jews by mainstream (Christian) Americans, and it’s often unclear what is behind it. Perhaps it’s partly the name “Roth,” though if so one wonders why the hotel that eventually turns them out ever booked them to begin with. It might also be in their appearance; one of the most painful passages early in the book is the nine-year old Philip’s recognition that both he and his mother definitely “look Jewish”: I began to pretend that I was following somebody on our bus who didn’t look Jewish. It was then that I realized . . . that my mother looked Jewish. Her hair, her nose, her eyes--my mother looked unmistakably Jewish. But then so must I, who so strongly resembled her. I hadn’t known.21

Philip has learned to see himself the way non-Jews see him. With that realization, however, comes pain, as implicit in the capacity for Jewish recognition is the assumption that the difference that is suddenly unmistakable to Philip is something to be ashamed of. This brings us back to the scene where the Roth family visits the Washington Monument, and get into an argument with a stranger who admires President Lindbergh: The stranger took a long, gaping look at my father, then my mother, then Sandy, then me. And what did he see? A trim, neatly muscled, broad-chested man five feet nine inches tall, handsome in a minor key, with soft grayish-green eyes and thinning brown hair clipped close at the temples and presenting his two ears to the world a little more comically than was necessary. The woman was slender but strong and she was tidily dressed, with a lock of her wavy dark hair over one 21

Roth, The Plot Against America, 134.

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Chapter Eight eyebrow and roundish cheeks a little rouged and a prominent nose and chunky arms and shapely legs and slim hips and the lively eyes of a girl half her age. In both adults a surfeit of prudence and a surfeit of energy, and with the couple two boys still pretty much all soft surfaces, young children of youthful parents, keenly attentive and in good health and incorrigible only in their optimism. And the conclusion the stranger drew from his observations he demonstrated with a mocking movement of the head. Then, hissing noisily so as to mislead no one about his assessment of us, he returned to the elderly lady and their sightseeing party, walking slowly off with a rolling gait that seemed, along with the silhouette of his broad back, intended to register a warning. It was from there that we heard him refer to my father as a “loudmouth Jew,” followed a moment later by the elderly lady declaring, “I’d give anything to slap his face.”22

As is often the case with Eliot, the moment of recognition in Roth’s novel is an embodied one—though Roth’s narrator disregards what the stranger probably sees, and looks at the family, for the moment, with tenderness and sympathy rather then prejudice. However, when he throws down the slur, he doesn’t single out the differences in their appearance, but the “loudmouth” voice, which I think is central to the logic of Jewish recognition, and indeed, of anti-Semitism more broadly. It’s the voice that annoys him most; he doesn’t quite know how to shut it up. The broad cultural history of Muslims in the west is quite different from the Jewish diaspora story, and it would be dangerous to make too much of what is at best a historically arguable parallel. And yet some parallels to the contemporary Muslim experience are evident in the embodied nature of the contest over Islamic identity especially following 9/11. While traveling, many Muslims report being especially careful about what they say and the voice in which it is said, often taking extra care to enunciate in American English so as to address the fears of fellow passengers.23 As with Roth’s example, it is the incidental characteristics such as the voice, the complexion, or the physical demeanor that are read and evaluated by others. And it is in response to those types of attributes especially that the hostility to what many perceive as a dangerously foreign religious community is provoked.

Conclusion: A Renewed “Secular Criticism” In both Daniel Deronda and The Plot Against America religious identity (and in this case, specifically Jewish identity) is marked on the body in ways 22

Roth, Plot Against America, 64-65. See Neil MacFarquhar, “For U.S. travelers, 'It's a bad time to be Ahmed'.” The New York Times. Friday, June 2, 2006. Accessed online at: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/01/news/muslims.php. 23

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that are mysterious but unavoidable. These markings on the body are part of a pattern that can be seen in the various literary texts in Literary Secularism of religion entering into the lives of modern characters through involuntary allegiances and unconscious associations. These dynamics are the interpretive core of this study; they show that modern fiction can be an ideal medium in which to explore the intimate experience of religious belonging. Just as importantly, fiction is also a powerful medium by which to express resistance to the control of religious orthodoxy. James Wood is right to see an association between fiction and secularism, though as I discussed in the Introduction, his sense of modern fiction as the “destroyer of religions” overstates the case. Modern fiction is secular, and capacious enough (or dialogical enough) to accommodate the myriad psychic and social experiences of religious life that continue to permeate modernity and contribute to its richness. To a great extent literary secularism is a colonial and postcolonial problem, because it is particularly critical for writers in national contexts that are new, or in the process of being articulated, to mark their distance from religious orthodoxy. But as the works of writers from contemporary England, the U.S., and Turkey show, the idea of literary secularism is also vital—even necessary—in the broader global context. What I have been calling “literary secularism” is to a great extent merely a literary appropriation of Edward Said’s famous concept of “secular criticism,” originally articulated in The World, The Text, and The Critic more than twenty years ago. In that essay, Said defined the role of the critic as a practice of detachment and rigorous intellectual dissidence: On the one hand, the individual mind registers and is very much aware of the collective whole, context, or situation in which it finds itself. On the other hand, precisely because of this awareness—a worldly, self-situating, a sensitive response to the dominant culture—that the individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor. And because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might call criticism.24

For Said, to be “secular” is essentially equivalent to being “worldly,” which is to say, to possess a sensibility that is freethinking, cosmopolitan, and humanist. The concept has little to do directly with religion, though over the course of the essay important questions about religious experience and literature arise that have bearing on the present argument. A secular critic is a dissident at a distance both from a naturalized concept of culture (“the individual consciousness is not . . . a mere child of the culture”) and from rigidly bound modern political ideologies (Marxism) or academic methodologies (Foucauldianism) that seem to 24

Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, 15.

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discount the role of individual as “historical and social actors.” Said’s use of the word “secular” in the phrase “secular criticism” is in fact a kind of word-play, but it is word-play with important philosophical implications. For as the textual examples in this book indicate, the modern contest between “religious” and “secular” points of view is not a symmetrical one. Secularism, both literary and otherwise, has the potential to scramble the concepts and framework of religious thinking so as to make the latter permanently unstable. And yet, even as secularism seems to have the rhetorical and epistemological equivalent of the “upper hand,” secular writers and critics are also often haunted by the very religious discourse they aim to “privatize.” William David Hart, in Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, describes how this duality operates in Said’s work: Religion is an issue for [Said], unlike those who are indifferent, whom we mistakenly call secular. Secularism, in this respect, is a particular kind of relationship with religion. It is a skeptical, wary, or hostile interest. Secular thinkers are preoccupied with boundary-drawing and boundary-maintenance, with where secularism ends and religion begins. Secularism is the desire to separate and keep apart things that do not go together well such as church and state and the public and the private. It is also the desire to confound what religion holds apart. Thus secularists revel in contaminating what religionists hold as pure; they ridicule the fetish for purity, but often in the name of a different kind of purity.25

The conflicted attitude towards religion is in some sense evident in Said’s very use of the word “secular,” which he holds to be self-identical with an intelligent, modern, and humane perspective (while “religious” describes—somewhat circularly—all manner of hidebound, chauvinistic, or pre-modern thought). To conflate “secular” with “modern” or (following Rushdie) “hybrid” social identities is to confound the religious with an epistemology that seems to make the very idea of religious devotion in the modern world seem impossible. It is only one conceptual step away from the “daemonic” secularism of Rushdie’s novel. But Said’s own invocation of T.S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in “Secular Criticism” suggests that the applicability of “secular criticism” may not be as transparent as one might expect. For despite Eliot’s insistence on his hostility to what he calls “secularism,” Said reads Eliot’s conversion as itself motivated by a secular concept of religion in early modern England. It is a religion not of organic “filiation,” but of ideological and intellectual “affiliation”: His model is now Lancelot Andrewes, a man whose prose and devotional style seem to Eliot to have transcended the personal manner of even so fervent and 25

Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 11-12.

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effective a Christian preacher as Donne. In the shift from Donne to Andrewes, which I believe underlies the shift in Eliot’s sensibility from the world-view of Prufrock, Gerontion, and The Waste Land to the conversion poetry of Ash Wednesday and the Ariel Poems, we have Eliot saying something like the following: the aridity, wastefulness, and sterility of modern life make filiation an unreasonable alternative at least, an unattainable one at most. . . . If the English church is not in a direct line of filiation stemming from the Roman church, it is nevertheless something more than a mere local heresy, more than a mere protesting orphan. Why? Because Andrewes and others like him to whose antecedent authority Eliot has now subscribed were able to harness the old paternal authority to an insurgent Protestant and national culture, thereby creating a new institution based not on direct genealogical descent but on what we may call, barbarously, horizontal affiliation.26

For Said, Eliot’s religious conversion is not a rejection of modernity, but an example of the alienating effects of modernity in action. Rather than remain with the religious community of his birth, Eliot radically reimagines himself along “affiliative” lines, and appropriates a religious community that is itself defined by its “insurgent Protestant and national culture.” Even if Eliot might believe himself to be withdrawing from the vertiginous philosophical aporia of The Waste Land, Said argues that even Eliot’s conversion is nothing other than a symptom of his modernism. Said is far from the only critic to note the potential power of conversion to reorient social identities. Michael Ragussis’ important book Figures of Conversion was cited in an earlier chapter; and Gauri Viswanathan’s book Outside the Fold: Religion, Modernity, and Belief uses examples such as John Henry Newman, B.R. Ambedkar, and Pandita Ramabai to argue that religious conversion is one of the key features of secularism in the cultural sphere. There are of course limits to such arguments—it seems hard to escape the fact that both Newman and Eliot were motivated to convert by their sense that their originary religious communities (Anglicanism and Unitarianism, respectively) were not in fact authoritarian enough.27 But it is nevertheless the case that the challenges posed by Newman’s and Eliot’s respective conversions forced their peers to reconsider the meaning of religious boundaries. The voluntary act of conversion seems to be a way in which even the religiously devout can, as Hart puts it, “ridicule the fetish for purity, but often in the name of a different kind of purity.” For Viswanathan, the challenge posed by conversion is a sign that 26

Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, 17-18. Viswanathan characterizes Newman’s conversion as a kind of revolt (“a grammar of dissent”) against conformity to the Anglican majority. But Newman’s “Tractarian” movement, as well as his 1864 Apologia Pro Vita Sua make clear that Newman’s complain with the Established Church is its lapse of orthodoxy, not its overt coercion. Such textual evidence makes it hard to accept Viswanathan’s claim that Newman’s conversion is an act of “dissidence.” (See Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 48). 27

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secularization itself has perhaps been a flawed process, for reasons outlined by Matthew Arnold: The system of cultural authority that Said challenges as bearing religious overtones, even in a secular society, is a legacy of the historical moment of secularization, when the structures of official religion no longer supported the bases of political, social, and cultural power and the authority of the state gained ascendancy over civil apparatuses such as law and education. But it is not merely a question of one form of authority displacing another. If culture shares the guild features of the ecclesiastical order, this is largely because, as Matthew Arnold so persuasively argued over a century ago, culture takes over the moral purposes of religion in a civil society, and education becomes the instrument by which the moral mission of a culture is propagated. (46)

Viswanathan accepts Matthew Arnold’s famous dictum about culture as a modern version of religion as being literally true. For Viswanathan, the concept of “culture” and the coercive institutions of the state have taken over from religious institutions the role of disciplining modern subjects. We are still always in some way “inside the fold” of a limiting ideological framework or state apparatus even if we consider ourselves to be secular. But this perspective—which is closely echoed in Talal Asad’s recent arguments on secularism—is not really what Said has in mind in “Secular Criticism.” For Said, the goal isn’t to show that freedom is impossible because of coercion or mediation, but that individual intellectuals have both the capacity and the ethical obligation to distance themselves to a sufficient degree from coercive social and political institutions. Moreover, it’s important not to minimize the degree to which secularization has occurred and continues to occur in considering literary texts and other cultural artifacts. “Culture” may still have the ability to be coercive in the way that Matthew Arnold approvingly described, but even if the gatekeeper institutions of “culture” (universities, publishing, and so on) are viewed as dogmatic, they simply do not function in the same way as religious orthodoxies. To say so is to understate the degree to which the real fact of secularization allows individuals to extricate their patterns of thought from the given. The position that culture is the new religion is also of no help in responding to the distinctly modern phenomenon of the new religious fundamentalisms around the world, since it removes the hope of a viable alternative to “desecularization.” Certainly, in light of the severe challenges to political secularism that have arisen in recent years, it is more important than ever to be clear about how these terms work. While the “literary secularism” I have explored in this book frequently leads writers to aporetic moments in which religious and secular frameworks are confused, there is rarely a doubt that the goal is nevertheless to effect a form of secular representation—of the world, and for the world. There are aspects of literary texts that resist direct categorization or critical evaluation, but it is nevertheless quite clear that the

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secularism one sees in so much modern fiction does instantiate the “secular criticism” Said so eloquently articulated.

WORKS CITED

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INDEX Abrams, M.H. 2, 9, 12 Achebe, Chinua, 78 A.E., 71 All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), 171 All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), 142 Ali, Samina, 137, 144-147 Anglicanism (and "AngloCatholicism"), 7, 13, 15, 16, 20, 27, 98, 115, 172 Ambedkar, B.R., 51, 173 Anand, Mulk Raj, 67 Anderson, Benedict, 49, 60, 77, 105 Anti-Semitism, 12n, 16, 44, 49, 102, 116, 159, 167-170 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 129 Armstrong, Karen, 5 Arnold, Matthew, 2, 10, 11, 16, 37, 65, 174 Arya Samaj, 100 Asad, Talal, 6, 8, 11, 118n, 156, 174 Austen, Jane, 51 Babri Masjid, 16, 100, 137, 144, 147, 149 Bangladesh, 133, 147-154 Bannerjee, Bibhutibhushan, 16 Bhakti poets, 2 Bharatiya Janata Party, 142 Bharucha, Rustom, 121 Bilgrami, Akeel, 25, 157 Blake, William, 2, 10, 119 Bloom, Harold, 7, 115 Book Against God, 20-24 Boyarin, Daniel 74, 75n Brahmo Samaj, 59, 65, 79, 80-3, 85, 124 British Broadcasting Service, 111 Bunyan, John 6-8 Bush, George W., 168 Butalia, Urvashi 137 Caliban, 127

Caste, 46-53, 62-70 Catholicism, 15, 18, 23, 71, 73, 77, 79, 84-5, 91-5 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 21, 63, 79, 82 Chatterjee, Partha, 25, 55n, 64n, 65 Chaucer, Jeffrey 9, 10 Chesterton, G.K. 2, 14 Christianity, 4, 5, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19, 23, 27, 30, 33, 91, 130, 131, 144 Church of Ireland, 11, 16 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 12, 14 Congress Party (India), 50, 109, 139141, 144 Dalit, 64 Dalrymple, William, 101-102 "Death of God," See Nietzsche Defoe, Daniel, 6; Robinson Crusoe, 56; History of the Devil, 120, 131-2, 134 De Man, Paul, 98, 115 Desani, G.V. 21 Deutsch, Emanuel, 39 Deuteronomy, Book of 93, 114 Diaspora, 74-80, 167-170 (Jewish), 95 (Irish), 117-119, 125-6 (South Asian) Disraeli, Benjamin, 28-30, 33-34, 43, 98, Dowry, 140 Dreyfuss Affair, 37 Duffy, Enda, 79n Durkheim, Emile, 114, 162 Eck, Diana, 3 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans or Marian Lewes), 4, 25-30, 45, 56, 78, 91, 142; Daniel Deronda, 3, 1011, 27, 29, 35-44, 68, 110, 118, 169 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 12-15, 15, 16, 17, 59, 140, 172-3 Ellmann, Richard, 71-74 Feldman, David, 29

184 Feldman, Noah, 158n Feminism, 136-154 France, 37, 75, 136, 158 Frye, Northrop, 6-8, 9, 10 Gandhi, Indira, 107 Gandhi, Mohandas, 47, 51n, 103-4 Gandhi, Rajiv, 121 Gass, William, 118 Genet, Jean, 89 Gilman, Sander 17, 22, 29, 37, 106 Ghosh, Amitav, 98, 102n, 107-110 Great War (World War I), 60 Hadith, 130 Hariharan, Githa, 144 Hart, William David, 172 Hennell, Charles, 25 Herzl, Theodor, 75, 78 Hijab, 136-7, 160-167 Hinduism, 4, 20-24, 30, 46-53, 62-70, 98-116 Hindu Marriage Act, 138 Hindu Nationalism (Hindutva), 137140, 147-154 Holyoake, George Jacob, 9 Husain, Intizar, 110 Hybridity, 78 Hyder, Qurratulain, 16 Hyderabad, 144-148 James, Henry, 51 Jefferson, Thomas, 157 Imperialism, 37, 61, 112 Indian Mutiny of 1857, 15, 20, 21, 139 Ira Nadel, 97 Ireland, 5, 15, 19, 20, 23, 24, 70, 76-91 Islam, 5, 9, 25, 30, 103, 117-135, 138148, 160-7 Israel, 5, 2, 54, 55, 88, 89, 94, 107, 109, 111 Jack the Ripper, 37 Jacoby, Susan, 8 Jewish Disabilities, 36 Jews, 2, 9, 16, 22, 28-34, 35-44, 51, 53, 55, 74-91, 136, 159, 167-170 Joyce, James, 17-19, 62, 71-97; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 71-74, 118; Ulysses, 76-97 Judaism, 5, 4, 5, 14, 23, 31-36, 44, 46, 50, 53, 54, 74, 74-91, 104, 115

Index Kabir, 2 Kanwar, Roop, 137 Keats, John, 9 Kiberd, Declan, 78-9 Kipling, Rudyard 62, 77 Kishwar, Madhu, 26, 140-2 Kumar, Amitava 107, 109-10 Lawrence, D.H. 2, 89 Lewes, George Henry, 27, 35 Lewis, C.S, 2 Lindbergh, Charles, 167-170 London University, 12 Lucretius, 127 Macaulay, Thomas B., 64 Malaysia, 158 Mandal Commission, 87 Marx, Karl, 2, 117 Miller, J. Hillis, 2 Milton, John, 120 Morris, William, 8 Moses, 134 Mughal Empire, 102-103, 107 Muhammed, 121-122 Muslims, See Islam Muslim Marriage Act, 138 Naipaul, V.S. 11, 15, 19, 21, 22, 24, 98-107, 110-116; Beyond Belief, 99, 102; Mystic Masseur, 100; A House for Mr. Biswas, 104; An Area of Darkness, 105; India: A Wounded Civilization, 101; Reading and Writing, 101; A Way in the World, 102; Half a Life, 102; The Killings in Trinidad, 102; "Prologue to an Autobiography," 110-116 Naipaul, Seepersad, 112n, 114 Nandy, Ashis, 158n Narayan, R.K., 16, 103; Mr. Sampath, 103 Nasrin, Taslima, 136, 137, 147-154 Nationalism, 22, 47-51, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70-2, 76-7, 86, 92-97, 170 Nehru, Jawarhalal, 109 Nelson, Lord Horatio, 91-2 New Criticism, 13, 17, 19 New Testament, 93, 96, 131; Paul 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 13, 106, 163-4;

Literary Secularism Birth of Tragedy, 163-4 Nixon, Rob, 98n Nomadism, 130-2 Old Testament, 120; Exodus, 81-87; Isaiah, 119-120 O'Reilly, Bill, 156 Oriental, 37, 58, 62, 67, 71, 75, 102, 103, 145, 158 Orientalism, 12, 55, 56, 71, 74, 79, 158, 159 Overlapping Consensus, Theory of, 156-7 Ovid, 127 Palestine (Historical territory), 74-91 Pamuk, Orhan, 5, 2, 26, 30, 155, 159, 160-7 Parsi, 138 Partition (of Indian subcontinent), 138 Plato, 7, 57, 134 Postmodernist fiction, 117, 135, 159 Pritam, Amrita, 137 Quran, 119-125 Plato, 9, 72, 161 Postcolonial, 79, 85, 119, 122 Protestant, 20, 46, 81, 149 Quran, 117-135, 146 Ragussis, Michael, 32, 36, 173 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, 141 Ray, Sangeeta, 85 Ray, Sukumar, 16 Reformation, 81-82 Renan, Ernest 2, 13 Republican (Irish), 96-97 Richards, I.A. 19 Riots (Communal) 107-8, 147 Romanticism, 8, 9, 11, 12, 76, 145 Roth, Philip, 5, 26, 30, 159, 167-170; Plot Against America, 167-170 Roy, Raja Rammohun, 64 Rushdie, Salman, 2, 4, 5, 19-20, 24, 91, 98, 117-135, 150; The Satanic Verses; Imaginary Homelands, 118; The Moor's Last Sigh, 121n Russell, Bertrand 17 Samaj, Brahmo, 46-50, 62-65 Sangari, Kumkum, 25, 142, 153 Satan, 23, 117-135 Said, Edward, 9n, 55, 97, 171-2

185

Sati, 80, 137 Schopenhauer, 71 Scott, Sir Walter, 38-39 Secular Criticism, 171-2 Secularism 1-4, 170-5 (general); 4-15 (in literary criticism); 28-34 (in Victorian England); 136-148 (in India); 155-8 (in the United States); 164-170 (in Turkey) Secularization, 2-15, 28, 73, 102, 136, 156, 174 Sen, Amartya, 54 Shah Bano, 137, 140 Shaw, George Bernard, 46 Shakespeare, William 9, 10, 102 Sharia, 140, 160-7 Sikh, 2, 107-8 Singh, Khushwant 1, 16 Sita, 3 Swadeshi, 46, 55, 62, 78 Tagore, Dwarkanath, 64 Tagore, Rabindranath, 2, 4, 5, 17, 22, 46-70, 57, 58, 91; Gitanjali, 54-62; Gora, 62-70, 113 Taylor, Charles, 9n, 156 Taylor, Jeremy, 17 Theater, 160-7 Titian, 39 Torah, 93 Torture, 160-1 Triple Talaq, 139-145 Trivedi, Harish, 48 Trollope, Anthony, 32-34, 36 Turkey, 136, 158, 160-7 Uniform Civil Code, 5, 138-148 Unitarian, 16, 33 United States, 8, 26, 30, 52, 65, 67, 68, 86, 143, 155-8, 160-1, 167-170; Separation of Church and State, 155-8; Use of Torture, 160-1 Varna, 86 Vijayanagar, 101 Viswanathan, Gauri, 51, 53n, 173 Walzer, Michael, 97 Watt, Ian, 5-6 Weber, Max, 3, 123 Wells, H.G. 17 Williams, Raymond, 9n

186 Wood, James, 1-8, 20-24, 161, 163, 171 Woolf, Virginia 2, 19, 78 World War I, 48

Index Yeats, W.B. 20, 56, 57, 70, 71, 73 Yehoshua, A.B. 1 Zionism, 74-91