Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English 9789004292598, 9004292594

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Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English

Costerus New Series Editors C.C. Barfoot László Sándor Chardonnens Theo D’haen

VOLUME 210

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cos

Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English By

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931016

issn 0165-9618 isbn 978-90-04-29259-8 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-29260-4 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

In memory of my father, the composer George Draga

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction Metamorphoses of the Self on the Border between ‘East’ and ‘West’

1

Chapter One Writing in English: A Performative Act in Contemporary Indian Fiction

33

Chapter Two Changes and Challenges in the Novel Form: From Myth to Performance to Nomadic Textuality

63

Chapter Three Intercultural Epic in Performance: Peter Brook and Girish Karnad

87

Chapter Four Reperformed Traditions: Indian Theatre and Its Contemporary Avatars

105

Chapter Five Repositioning Scheherazade: From Storytelling to Performance in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

123

Chapter Six Storying the Fatwa: From The Satanic Verses to Haroun and the Sea of Stories

143

Chapter Seven Migrant Identity Performance Politics in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

161

Chapter Eight Writing the Unspoken: Exclusion and Arundhati Roy’s Écriture Féminine in The God of Small Things

189

Chapter Nine Performances of Marginality in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

205

Chapter Ten Postmodern Scheherazades between Storytelling and the Novel Form: Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain

227

Chapter Eleven Performance, Performativity and Nomadism in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain

243

Conclusion

259

Bibliography

265

Index

283

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is greatly indebted to my mentors at the University of East Anglia (Ralph Yarrow, Lyndsey Stonebridge, John Thieme and Vic Sage), to my friends (especially Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi, Helen Smith and Eugenia Loffredo) and to Literature and American Studies faculty members. They made me feel very welcome and intellectually stimulated at UEA and in Norwich, where I had lots of research and teaching opportunities. I am truly thankful to Vikram Chandra for accepting to be interviewed by me and for spending a relaxed and very inspiring afternoon over a lovely cup of chai in Washington DC, when I understood much more about how stories shape the world for us and how they turn us into better people. Many thanks to my professors and colleagues at the University of Bucharest for the many ways in which they supported me throughout this project: Ileana Baciu, Monica Bottez, Alexandra Cornilescu, Mihaela Irimia, Rodica Mihăilă, Mădălina Nicolaescu, Octavian Roske, Monica Pillat-Saulescu, Bogdan Ştefanescu and Radu Surdulescu. While helping me shape my ideas and enabling me to get study leave from my job as a lecturer in order to complete my research in the UK, these wonderful people – the list of names here is not exhaustive and can only be alphabetical – have also taught me that estrangement from home and return to it, in some form or other, always go together. My Romanian and British students, whose questions and comments greatly inspired my research, have meant a lot to me. Elena Stoican and Lucia Grosu, two of the best participants in my ‘Indian Identities’ MA class in Bucharest, who continued what we started together in their academic careers, deserve a special word of gratitude. I am immensely indebted to my family (my husband Dan, my mother Ana and my son Victor George) for being there for me in so

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many different ways that matter and for constantly reminding me that one must stick to the things one believes in. Last, but not least, I am extremely grateful to Cedric Barfoot for his patient and careful editing of this book.

INTRODUCTION METAMORPHOSES OF THE SELF ON THE BORDER BETWEEN ‘EAST’ AND ‘WEST’

In the issue of The New Yorker for 23 and 30 June 1997, in anticipation of the country’s fiftieth anniversary of independence, dedicated to Indian fiction, Salman Rushdie published a new short story entitled ‘The Firebird’s Nest’.1 Written soon after the author’s relocation to America, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ can be read as a summary of the main topics that had interested Rushdie up to that point in his career as a novelist. As I will further suggest, it can also be seen as emblematic of some of the main preoccupations of contemporary Indian fiction in English at that moment. Rushdie, present in the issue with this story and with an article on the current status of Indian fiction in English,2 was to many people an authority in the matter. He was not only born in 1947 (almost at the same time as independent India), but he was also the author of Midnight’s Children. Since 1981 when it was published, the novel has been read as the most significant fictional account of postindependence India. The autobiographical element – based on the fact that Saleem, the narrator who spells out the story/history of his nation, was born at the same time as free India and very soon after Rushdie himself was born – contributes to this identification.3 Midnight’s 1

Salman Rushdie, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, The New Yorker, 23 and 30 June 1997, 12227. 2 Salman Rushdie, ‘Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!’, ibid., 50-61. 3 In A Tall Story: How Salman Rushdie Pickled All India, an interview he gave for the programme ‘Arena’, on BBC 2, in 1982, Salman Rushdie mentioned that the autobiographical element in Midnight’s Children was inspired by a family joke: that Salman’s birth (two and a half months before independence) had made the British leave India. The modelling of the narrator’s figure on the novelist’s personality is also indicated by the choice of Saleem’s name, very close to Salman’s, as Anuradha Dingwaney shows, quoting Rushdie (Chapter 20, ‘Salman Rushdie’, in A History of

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Performance and Performativity

Children was also an important turning point in Indian writing. It confirmed the transformation of English, often seen as the bequest of the former colonial empire in India, into an indisputably Indian literary language. The anniversary issue of The New Yorker looks back to that and draws a parallel between the birth of America’s postindependence literature, also written in a non-British variety of English,4 and the 1997 moment, when India celebrated a similar event. At the same time, the issue signals the originality and the local colour of this relatively new school of writing. This is also suggested by its cover, which features a picture of the Hindu god Ganesha, the patron of storytellers, the remover of obstacles in Indian tradition, standing for the revival of the rich mythical traditions of India in contemporary narratives. The issue exhibits a festive attitude towards Indian fiction. As part of the celebration, it features a picture of the most important contemporary Indian novelists writing in English: Vikram Chandra, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Kiran Desai, Ardashir Vakil, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, along with the Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera.5 The variety of writing styles represented by this group is impressive: from realism (as represented by Rohinton Mistry and also Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh in some of their novels) to more subjective fictions of the female self (Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy) and digressive storytelling that mixes Indian tradition with contemporary developments of the novel form (Vikram Chandra). They are all grouped around Salman Rushdie, identified as the father figure of the group. In his introductory article to the issue, entitled ‘Declarations of Independence’, with the significant lead-in subtitle ‘Why are there suddenly so many Indian novelists?’, Bill Buford notices that most of the authors featuring in the New Yorker group photograph as a compact old family of friends, met on the occasion of this group picture for the first time. The reason that they all came to London for the photo shoot from very different parts of the world (none actually Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, London: Hurst, 2003, 308). 4 Bill Buford, ‘Comment: Declarations of Independence’, The New Yorker, 23 and 30 June 1997, 8. 5 The New Yorker, 23 and 30 June 1997, 118-19.

Introduction

3

from India) was to make a statement on contemporary Indian writing in English, currently produced and read all around the world.6 Despite the contrived nature of the photograph, however, it is the aim of this New Yorker issue to suggest the emergence of a whole new body of literature, whose audience success is on the rise. From the group, two authors, apart from Rushdie, are particularly singled out in the issue. One of them is Arundhati Roy, whose novel The God of Small Things was already famous at the time and was to win the Booker Prize later that year. The novel is analysed in an article by John Updike.7 The other is Vikram Chandra, another Bombay author, like Rushdie, now resident in the United States, represented in the issue by his story ‘Eternal Don’.8 The story anticipates Chandra’s recent novel Sacred Games9 and is representative of his manner of writing through its elaborate detective plot and intricate storytelling patterns. Starting from this particular moment of celebration of Indian fiction in English as a world-recognized body of literature in its own right, this study will focus on some of the works of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Chandra as writers who practise a particular kind of myth-oriented fiction, which occupies one of the most visible positions in contemporary Indian writing. This fiction is essentially about India and reads the present through the lens of myth, which is what, traditionally, Indian theatre and storytelling have always done. At a time of increasing world-wide popularity, this kind of Indian fiction in English negotiates between one of the most important Indian traditions – the mythical background of the epics, preserved in written form, but also, importantly, in storytelling and the theatre – and the content and formal requirements of the contemporary novel. I will aim to show that this act of negotiation is mediated by the concepts of performance and performativity, which make it possible to bridge temporal gaps (between mythical tradition and the present), but

6

Buford, ‘Comment: Declarations of Independence’, ibid., 7-8. John Updike, ‘Mother Tongues: Subduing the Language of the Colonizer’, The New Yorker, 23 and 30 June 1997, 156-61. Arundhati Roy’s photograph is on page 157 in the issue. 8 Ibid., 130-34. 9 Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, London: Faber and Faber, 2006. 7

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also geographical and cultural ones (between the various backgrounds addressed by this writing in English). My primary material will be four novels which I consider representative of this myth-oriented trend in contemporary Indian fiction: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children10 and The Satanic Verses,11 Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things12 and Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain.13 In order to point out the influence of the Indian tradition of theatrical practice upon the themes, attitudes and techniques used in this fiction, I will read these novels starting from intercultural performance practice. The primary performance material I will examine consists of Peter Brook’s and Girish Karnad’s hybrid theatrical work, situated on the meeting ground between Indian and European traditions in the theatre. I will use a comparison with theatrical performance that draws on Indian tradition in order to show that identities in contemporary mythoriented Indian fiction in English, positioned in the process of estrangement from and return to India, are reshaped in performance and storytelling, which both traditionally draw on myth. As the emphasis falls on becoming rather than on its end, the textuality of these novels is also performed in the processes of writing and reading. Rushdie’s short-story ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ plays an important part in the symbolism of the anniversary issue of The New Yorker, which matches the recognition given to its author. It seems fair to say, as I hope my analysis below will show, that the story displays some of the major themes and ideas of contemporary Indian fiction in English. Moreover, it is written in such a way that it compels the reader to participate in the writing of the text – which we can qualify as a texte scriptible in Roland Barthes’ sense,14 a text which opposes the 10

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981), London: Vintage, 1995. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988), Dover, DE: The Consortium, 1992. 12 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, London: Flamingo, 1997. 13 Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 14 Roland Barthes defines the writerly text (texte scriptible) in opposition to the realist text of the classical novel (the readerly text, texte lisible) in the following terms: ‘The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which 11

Introduction

5

conventions of realism and is widely open to interpretation. According to Wolfgang Iser, indeterminacy is a crucial category to take into account when discussing the interaction between a text and a reader. In the process of meaning-creation, the reader becomes active, fills in the gaps in the text through personal interpretation and thus brings the text to life – or, actually, performs the text.15 Compared to Rushdie’s characteristic ironical use of language and his usual critical precision aimed at political issues, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ not only allows for multiple, dynamic interpretations, but also opens up an allegorical reading (suggested by the anonymity of the characters) to a wider mythological one. The text cultivates polysemy to suggest a fluidity of meaning related to the motif of dance. It displays a condensed summing up of intercultural themes, motifs and ideas that also signal a recognizable Indian connection. Therefore the story provides an implicit critical assessment of contemporary Indian writing in English, which supplements Rushdie’s critical article in the same issue. ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ is a melting pot (or alchemical oven, as its explicit fire symbolism suggests) of Rushdie’s creation. It also contains themes and obsessions of contemporary Indian authors following (or considered by critics to be following) in Rushdie’s path. An analysis of this story will be my starting point in an attempt to suggest that present-day Indo-Anglian authors16 display a growing tendency to move from a static view of identity and, further, from an exilic situation of crisis – which can be read as a repeatable pattern of estrangement and return – to a dynamic perception of the travelling self, always in a process of movement and becoming. Together with the performativity of language, performance of identity contributes to the way in which the boundaries of the self placed in perpetually reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.’ (Roland Barthes, S/Z [1970], trans. Richard Miller [1974], New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, 5.) 15 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989), Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 5-10. 16 In The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English, New Delhi and London: Heinemann, 1971, Meenakshi Mukherjee uses the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ to refer to authors of Indian origin who write in English, as contrasted to ‘Anglo-Indian’, a term with a more complicated history, which she narrows down to refer to English authors writing about India (9-16). This distinction has been less used in recent years.

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changing cultural in-betweenness are negotiated in contemporary Indian fiction in English. As these two concepts will be pivotal in the methodology used in this study, I will now discuss the way they will be used. In the following preliminary considerations I will outline a few possible approaches to this primary material, which converge in contemporary Indian fiction in English. Indian storytelling between performance and performativity As Henry Sayre describes it, performance is generally understood as ‘a specific action or set of actions – dramatic, musical, athletic, and so on – which occurs on a given occasion, in a particular place’.17 The meanings of performance can therefore range from that of the accomplishment of an act to a virtuoso display of skill, the exposure of conscious artificiality or a notable public event. More recently, performance art differs from theatrical performance. In the former performers perform themselves in order to make a statement about the society, as opposed to the latter in which they perform characters whose identities they borrow for a limited period of time, in front of an audience. Irrespective of that, however, Richard Schechner understands performance as any cultural event with implications for all participants.18 Like narrative, performance tells a story; but, as Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow notice, whilst an essential feature of narrative is ‘to locate and activate the impulse to narrate – telling the story of meaning’, in theatrical performance meaning is always embodied: ‘the fundamental of drama is to enact and embody that story.’19 This act of embodiment is an act of knowledge through the particular, local experiences of the body which can give both performers and spectators access to liberating experiences such as the Aristotelian catharsis or the rasa experience described in the Natya

17

Henry Sayre, ‘Performance’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, 91. 18 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, London: Routledge, 1988; cf. Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow, Consciousness, Literature and Theatre: Theory and Beyond, London: Macmillan, 1997, 129. 19 Malekin and Yarrow, Consciousness, Literature and Theatre, 126.

Introduction

7

Sastra.20 The two concepts are similar in some ways, yet different in others. Aristotle in his Poetics defines catharsis as purification or cleansing of negative feelings triggered by an extreme experience of great pity, sorrow, laughter, or any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal, restoration and revitalization for living.21 Rasa translates as ‘essence’ or ‘flavour’, defined aesthetic experience in the Natya Sastra. It is a harmonious (rather than violent) ‘transformation of behavioural state’ accompanied by ‘an intuition of wholeness, the aesthetic experience of not merely receiving a given configuration, but actively participating in its creation, in the enactment of meaning. Here seeing is an activity in its own right.’22 It is important that the Indian tradition implies an active participation of the audience in the process of meaning-production, which also exists in storytelling. There is traditionally in Indian culture an overlap or, rather, an ever-present dialogue between dramatic and epic forms, shown as early as in the Natya Sastra. It is in the syncretism of traditional Indian performance, which brings together dance, music, gesture and verbal expression that the inseparability of storytelling and performance originates. As one of the contemporary re-interpreters of traditional Indian performance, K.N. Panikkar points out, ‘theatre is basically storytelling’.23 It is on this progressive, narrative structure of performance that Panikkar bases his theory of the theatre of transformation. This means temporarily transforming the actors into the characters embodied through the shamanic act of inhabiting the mask, filling up with its spirit, and then killing it off at the end of the performance.24 It also means transforming the audience, by inviting 20

The Natyasastra (A Treatise on Ancient Indian Dramaturgy and Histrionics ascribed to Bharata-Muni) (1951), trans. Manomohan Ghosh, Calcutta: Granthalaya, 1967. I shall spell it as Natya Sastra in my main text (as used by Ralph Yarrow in Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom, Richmond: Curzon, 2001). The Natya Sastra is considered the oldest surviving text on stagecraft in the world, believed to have been authored by Bharata-Muni some time between 200 BC and 200 AD. 21 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath, London: Penguin, 1996, 10. 22 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 114-15. 23 K.N. Panikkar, in ‘Folk Philosophy in K.N. Panikkar’s Poetic Theatre of Transformation’, an interview with K.N. Panikkar by Erin B. Mee, The Seagull Theatre Quarterly, 7 (October 1995), 61. 24 Girish Karnad describes the actor’s initiation into inhabiting the mask in his play The Fire and the Rain (Agni Mattu Malé), inspired from an episode in the

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people to identify with the characters on stage and feel the same emotions. Consequently, performance and storytelling – both enacted in the presence of an audience and often mixed together – can be powerful ways of acting upon the society. Their power comes primarily from their capacity to embody and materialize the story that is being told through a combination of traditional procedures (gesture, song and poetic text) and thus bring the usual mythical material of the story closer to the audience’s perception. The theatre can become a space of consciousness where the body is ‘the channel for “spiritual” expression’.25 But if all theatre can be ‘a space for the extension of being’,26 as Yarrow puts it, it is profitable for the discussion that will follow (in view of my focus on contemporary Indian fiction in English) that Yarrow further suggests that traditional Indian theatre represents an enhanced version of theatrical space. I shall use the term ‘performance’ in the sense of this theatrical model of embodied meaning-production that is essentially dynamic and functions on the basis of establishing connections between the text and its contexts and audiences. Given the context of the body of writing I will be looking at, I will use the model of Indian theatrical practice and aim to show that its attitudes and techniques influence contemporary Indian writing – in particular the authors I am interested in. The term ‘performativity’ in literary criticism is derived from J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. According to Austin, as compared to constative language, which reports on aspects of the reality around, performative language makes events happen:

Mahabharata. Arvasu, a Brahmin who wants to be an actor in a ritual play meant to bring about the rain, will embody the demon-god Vritra and is instructed by the Actor-Manager in the following way: ‘Here. This is the mask of Vritra the demon. Now surrender to the mask. Surrender and pour life into it. But remember, once you bring a mask to life you have to keep a tight control over it, otherwise it’ll try to take over. It’ll begin to dictate terms to you and you must never let that happen. Prostrate yourself before it. Pray to it. Enter it. Then control it’ (Girish Karnad, The Fire and the Rain, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, 52). 25 Ibid., 134. 26 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 1.

Introduction

9

To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) the words ‘I name &c.’. When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it. What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance or, for short, ‘a performative’. The term ‘performative’ will be used in a variety of cognate ways and constructions, much as the term ‘imperative’ is. The name is derived, of course, from ‘perform’, the usual verb with the noun ‘action’: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying something.27

Austin’s concept of performativity – which, however, comes with its set of contradictions – is of particular relevance to contemporary Indian fiction in English that makes conscious use of the performativity of the storytelling tradition in India, but also of the tradition of Indian theatrical performance. An analysis of the word ‘performative’ will be necessary in conjunction with its cognate term ‘performance’. In the theoretical section of this study I will challenge Austin’s belief that these two concepts are incompatible (one of the above-mentioned contradictions) and will use them as main theoretical tools in my analysis of fiction. I will assume the working hypothesis that there is a degree of performativity in all fiction, since, besides telling stories, fiction triggers the reality of those stories into being. The fictional worlds of novels are created through performative language. Performativity is significant in contemporary postcolonial fiction. It raises the problem of identity from a perspective that is national and individual at the same time: the already established tradition of the former Empire writing back to its centre.28 In the context of postcolonial literatures in English, the narrative literature produced on the Indian subcontinent or by Indian diaspora writers living in different parts of the world is 27

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, 6-7 (Austin’s italics). 28 According to Salman Rushdie, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, The Times, 3 July 1982, 8, reprinted in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991, London: Penguin/Granta, 1991, a phrase taken over in postcolonial criticism, for instance in the title of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s book The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 1989.

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highly performative. This can be partly traced back to the Indian tradition of the epic, represented by foundation narratives such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Contemporary Indian fiction in English stands out not only through its quality, but particularly through its interest in reformulating – or performing – in a contemporary key, themes, motifs and structures originating in these traditional epics in its voicing of contemporary concerns. Language contributes to this through its performative function. Reconfigurations of storytelling in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ To return to Rushdie’s story ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, we can read it on at least three different levels: a level of myth (dominated by the rich symbolism of the firebird); a level of narrative (that recalls, but also challenges not only Rushdie’s own fiction-writing techniques, but also the Indian tradition of oral storytelling he relies on); and a level of performance (in which metamorphoses occur as the bodies change masks or layers, some of them coming out of chrysalides, some merging with other bodies, some, like the firebird’s, turning into light). Similarly, as I will go on to show, we can analyse the novels discussed in this study (Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The God of Small Things and Red Earth and Pouring Rain) on the same three levels of myth, narrative and performance. I will use an analysis of Rushdie’s short story to indicate the main directions in which this book will proceed. ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ is an allegory of a possible postcolonial erotic scenario. It is also an allegory of storytelling, an initiation journey into writing oneself and one’s life as a story. The Indian Mr Maharaj, an impoverished prince, brings to his drought-exhausted country an American woman who is left unnamed. This woman – ‘a child of a big city, a foreigner, no virgin’29– is an intruder, an insult to the marriage traditions of the land. She brings drought (which we can interpret as the death of tradition), but she is also a ‘rainmaker’ (a messenger of new life). Her relationship with Mr Maharaj, described by Rushdie through a whole poetry of the four elements, is a relationship of opposites: fire and rain, sacrificial purification and eternal life. Rushdie reverses the colonial conquest pattern: the 29

Rushdie, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, 122.

Introduction

11

woman, not the man, is the Westerner who brings to the ‘other land’ the fertilizing power of civilization. As analysts of myth such as Mircea Eliade would put it, the rain she brings is a male symbol in primitive mythologies. Here the man is instead projected as the feminized oriental other, connected to the female, birth-giving earth associated with the female womb.30 However the symbolism of the story is much more complicated than this, as the text’s fluid body grows and changes towards the end. The characters – projected as types, as carriers of the distinctive signs of their cultures rather than as people with individual psychologies – are there to signify a wider movement from univocality to hybridity and, in this story, from allegory to mythical thinking. This movement is symbolically encoded by the dance of the firebird – reminiscent of the Phoenix,31 but also of Shiva Nataraja, the Hindu god often represented as enclosed in a circle of destructive, purifying fire. He recreates a formerly corrupted world from its own ashes, through dancing.32 As expected, this inversion of traditional power relations within the couple leads to the dissolution of the relationship: in the story the man dies consumed by flames and the woman returns to her foreign land. This inversion stresses the potential for new life associated with the woman, about whom we learn that she is pregnant. The connection with Shiva implied by the fire symbolism and the centrality of dancing 30

Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. I: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 3-55. 31 The Phoenix is ‘the Graeco-Roman name for a mythical bird, imagined to be of gorgeous plumage. The name was used loosely for a variety of fabulous creatures from Egypt to China.’ Pliny and Herodotus mention the phoenix and he draws a brief history of its different European associations: in the Roman Empire it symbolized the apotheosis of the emperor; in Roman Christianity (Christian catacombs and later) it came to be related to the resurrection of Christ; ‘the Chinese feng or feng-huang, another mythical bird with brilliant plumage is called a phoenix by western writers’ (according to Hall’s Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art, London: John Murray, 1997, 38-39). Rushdie’s use of the bird resurrected from its own ashes in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ – a story about crossing cultural boundaries – is obviously meant to hint at the multiple cross-cultural associations of this symbol. 32 See for example a bronze figure of Nataraja (Dancing Shiva in a Ring of Fire), from Tamil Nadu, Southern India, Chola Dynasty, around AD 1100, The British Museum: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/ixbin/goto?id=OBJ5702, 2000 (accessed 25 June 2005).

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foregrounds the Shiva/Shakti dyad as an instance of perfect equality between the masculine and the feminine in the act of creation. In his dancing form, as Nataraj, Shiva appears in his feminine hypostasis – the creative one. Both female characters in the story are involved in an act of creation: through dancing, the death of the sister is projected into the eternity of myth, whilst the American woman, as she returns, knows that ‘the new life growing within her will be both fire and rain’.33 Like her, the text, full of a wealth of mixed cultural references, alluding to mixed cultural traditions, is also pregnant with hybrid meaning. The text grows from the beginning to the end like a living body, making itself ready for consumption by the fire, as, towards the end, the mad Miss Maharaj claims ‘I am the firebird’s nest’.34 The firebird symbolizes hybridity as it stands for both air and fire and also for both ‘East’ and ‘West’: At the dancers’ head, tallest of them all, fiercely erect, showing them how, is Mr Maharaj’s sister, over sixty years old, but still the greatest dancer in the state. Miss Maharaj has seen the newcomer, but makes no acknowledgement. She is the mistress of the dance. Movement is all. When it’s finished, they face each other, Mr Maharaj’s women: the sister, the American. What are you doing? A dance against the firebird. A propitiatory dance, to ward it off. The firebird. (She thinks of Stravinsky, of Lincoln Center.) Miss Maharaj inclines her head. The bird which never sings, she says. Whose nest is a secret; whose malevolent wings brush women’s bodies, and we burn.35

The association of fire and the bird stresses the flight (or the movement, the dance) rather than the materiality of the bird’s body. Miss Maharaj, the American woman’s main enemy, identifies herself with the firebird. Towards the end of the story, she reasserts the sacrificial function of the fire by letting herself burn to death, together with her brother. At the same time, the text of the story consumes other narratives in order to perform something new: the dance against 33

Rushdie, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, 247. Ibid., 246. 35 Ibid., 124. 34

Introduction

13

the firebird is reminiscent of Shiva, but also of the Phoenix reborn from its own ashes – like the text that regenerates itself – and of Stravinsky and the Lincoln Center. We can also read this as a ‘transformation’ or recontextualization of the well known sati trope: the wife follows her husband on the funeral pyre. Gayatri Spivak interprets this custom as an example of the difficult position of the ‘third-world woman’ caught in the apparently insoluble conflict between two worlds.36 One could argue that Rushdie suggests a way out of this trap through a symbolical identification between the woman who burns to death and the one who goes away carrying new life. As new hybrid meaning emerges at the contact of different cultures, their initial incompatibility is transcended in the new text born, like the Phoenix, from the ashes of the old. In death, Miss Maharaj makes a statement about her culture, which she protects at the expense of her own life and thus reinstates the endogamous power of caste. This ritual death by fire is also a rebirth in an androgynous hypostasis: the brother and sister become one in the flames that consume, but also remodel them, as in an alchemical oven. They symbolically renew the strength of their culture, like Shiva who, having destroyed a corrupt universe through fire and renewed it through dance, becomes one with his wife Parvati (Uma, Shakti). They become Shiva-Shakti, the masculine principle reunited with the feminine one in a stronger whole.37 But at the same time, in the American’s womb, the child of the hybrid couple will continue their 36

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discusses sati in her controversial essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313. Spivak argues that the subaltern can never actually speak because subaltern narratives are always subordinated to hegemonic ones. She uses the example of sati, which is seen in Hindu culture as a way for the widow to attain a greater freedom from the cycle of reincarnations through death, whilst the British criticism of this practice regards it as barbaric. Spivak qualifies this as a controversy between the ‘white man’ and the ‘brown man’ over the destiny of the ‘brown woman’ and shows that the latter has no agency and is caught between two different patriarchal discourses which completely exclude her from public discourse: she is the ‘“third-world woman” caught between tradition and modernization’ (306). 37 See, for example, Androgynous Form of Shiva and Parvati (Ardhanarishvara), India, Tamil Nadu, Chola Dynasty, 14th century, The Art Institute of Chicago: http:// www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_India/pages/India_4_lg.shtml (accessed 25 June 2005).

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union on a different level. In its attempt to preserve the purity of Hindu culture, the Shiva-Shakti principle – the masculine and the feminine as one – is also, paradoxically, hybrid. It is a potential of new life in a different shape, at a different stage in the evolution of humanity. Ethnic belonging is relativized through hybridity. As the story ends, we are urged to remember its beginning, and, especially, its striking epigraph: Now I am ready to tell you how bodies are changed Into different bodies. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, translated by Ted Hughes It is a hot place, flat and sere. The rains have failed so often that now they say instead, the drought succeeded. They are plainsmen, livestock farmers, but their cattle are deserting them. The cattle, staggering,

migrate south and east in search of water, and rattle as they walk. Their skulls, horned mileposts, line the route of their vain exodus. There is water to the west, but it is salt. Soon even these marshes will have given up the ghost. Tumbleweed blows across the leached grey flats. There are cracks big enough to swallow a man. An apt enough way for a farmer to die: to be eaten by his land. 38 Women do not die in that way. Women catch fire, and burn.

This apocalyptic imagery is hard to locate geographically, but from the name of Mr Maharaj and the scarce details regarding his whereabouts we gather this must be India. Or, rather, it is a fragment of India converted into a kind of transitory space, forever situated between a motherland and an otherland. In such a space, identities are defined only as processes, not as stases. The epigraph announces that the story is about change, or metamorphosis. As metamorphosis happens, according to Ovid’s epigraph, in the body, the story is announced to be about bodies changing into other bodies. ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ is a story about changing locations and hybrid identities, which has an impact on bodies – challenged and relativized, increasingly fluid in the continuous interplay of fire, water, air and earth. 38

Rushdie, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, 122.

Introduction

15

Metamorphosis and performative patterns in contemporary Indian novels In ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, Rushdie resumes the symbiosis of performance and storytelling that can be found in his novels (especially Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses). This symbiosis describes a cyclical pattern of estrangement from and return to the motherland and its traditions by virtue of which myth becomes a liberating space of consciousness, where rigid categories and boundaries are transcended and through which, ultimately, identity is metamorphosed. The theme of metamorphosis, present in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, but also in the novels this book will be discussing, plays a crucial part in imagining the processes of becoming involved in migration. Metamorphosis is the central theme in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ and it is related to exile, as suggested by the epigraph from Ovid (who is, through his life and work, one of the most celebrated cultural authorities on the topic). The version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Salman Rushdie chose as a source is Hughes’ selective translation entitled Tales from Ovid:39 the epigraph to a story relying on reinterpretations of myths is taken from a translation of a classical text that is itself heavily interpreted. Even a superficial comparison of Hughes’ translation and any other (see, for instance, those by Sir Samuel Garth and John Dryden40 or Horace Gregory41) will reveal that Hughes’ version of Ovid’s text is an adaptation rather than a faithful translation. This is rendered in contemporary verse full of imagery accessible to today’s reader and relevant to contemporary experience. Hughes’ Introduction insists on the fact that Ovid was an adaptor of myth, who sacrificed accuracy to thematic purposes: Why the world should have so clasped Ovid’s versions of these myths and tales to its bosom is a mystery. As a guide to the historic original forms of the myths, Ovid is of little use. His attitude to his material is like that of many later poets who have adapted what he presents. He 39

Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the ‘Metamorphoses’, London: Faber and Faber, 1997. 40 Metamorphoses by Ovid, trans. Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al.: http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.1.first.html (accessed 20 June 2005). 41 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. with an Introduction by Horace Gregory, New York: Viking, 1958.

16

Performance and Performativity too is an adaptor. He takes up only those tales which catch his fancy, and engages with each one no further than it liberates his own creative zest.42

In doing so, as Hughes suggests, Ovid places himself at the starting point of a long series of further adaptations of myths. Hughes’ proclamation of Ovid as one of the first practitioners of adaptation might have been the reason behind Rushdie’s choice of epigraph. Hughes himself, in his creative translation, is one of these adaptors. So is Rushdie, who, in quoting Hughes’ Ovid, connects the past to the present (and, further, the atemporality of myth to the linear temporality of contemporary fiction). Moreover, by resorting to a Western source, Salman Rushdie, the most celebrated postcolonial writer, urges us to connect traditions from different parts of the world. As the text of ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ suggests, probably his purpose is to show that they are, in fact, not very different. Hughes also draws our attention to the fact that Ovid’s name is intrinsically connected to the idea of exile. But Ovid is not just the poet who, in his iconoclastic cultivation of passion, wrote indiscrete poems and was sent by Augustus, the dictator, safely away from the centre of the Roman Empire. In the larger picture of his life, exile is not just geographical, but also historical and psychological: Ovid was born the year after the death of Julius Caesar and flourished in the Rome of Augustus. He completed the Metamorphoses around the time of the birth of Christ, was later banished for some unknown offence against the Emperor, and spent the last 10 years of his life in exile at Tomis on the Black Sea.43

The poet writing on the cusp of two eras gives full expression to the inner crisis of exile. In her book The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature, Irina Grigorescu Pana (born in Romania, where Ovid’s place of exile, Tomis, is situated) uses Ovid as the epitome of the exiled poet who turns nostalgia into erotic longing:

42 43

Hughes, Introduction to Tales from Ovid, viii. Ibid., vii.

Introduction

17

A phrase from Wright, ‘love is like a foreign land’,44 spells out poetically the basic equation ‘love is exile’ that has since Ovid’s ‘exile and eros’45 embraced both terms in the space of a double itinerary. Exile and love name sentiments of displacement and dis-positioning, as well as a nostalgia for an object of desire situated elsewhere, generated by the Other: lover, alien, landscape, lost home, imagined horizons of becoming. But if love is like a foreign land, the foreign land is no less like love, and tales of exile are also amorous narratives: refigurations of lacks, with the lost, or not yet found, object of desire and nostalgia occupying centre stage in the protagonists’ adventure.46

In this first paragraph of her book on Australian literature, Pana positions Ovid in the centre of a significant amount of literature on exile. As such, she points out his unexpected relevance to Australian literature, in which exile, ‘the Australian arch-theme’, compensates the scarcity of Australian love poetry.47 By extension, Ovid’s themes are seen as relevant to the whole postcolonial space, inevitably concerned with exile. Their relevance emerges not only in the ‘what’, but also the ‘how’ of his writing. Having written his Metamorphoses before his exile to Tomis (where the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto came into being), Ovid knows that there is no return home (and, indeed, he dies at Tomis). He also knows that, had there been a return, he would not have been the same person returning to the same land. Rushdie understands the concrete, bodily metamorphosis implicit in exile in a similar way as he challenges the fixity of the body as a location of identity in his earlier novels. In Midnight’s Children, close to the beginning of the novel, we see Saleem’s body disintegrating under the impact of history: 44

Judith Wright, ‘The Man Beneath the Tree’, in The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. Jennifer Strauss, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 108, quoted in Irina Grigorescu Pana, The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature, Berne: Peter Lang, 1996, 9. 45 See Betty Rose Nagle, The Poetics of Exile: Program and Polemic in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto of Ovid, Brussels: Latomus, 1980; A. Bartlett Giamatti, Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984, 70-86, quoted in Pana, The Tomis Complex, 9. 46 Pana, The Tomis Complex, 9. 47 Ibid., 12. The best known Australian work on Ovid’s exile, which Pana discusses in a chapter of her book, is probably David Malouf’s novel An Imaginary Life, New York: G. Braziller, 1978.

18

Performance and Performativity Please believe that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug – that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)48

The ‘six hundred and thirty million particles’, reminiscent of India’s population at the time, transmit the allegorical message of the novel: Saleem is the representative of the Indian nation and takes upon himself the destiny of his nation, crumbled by Partition.49 But, as his body is crumbling, he resolves to fight forgetfulness and let his body turn into the narrative that will preserve his memory. Even though not explicitly, Rushdie seems to allude here to the well known Indian creation myth of Purusha, from whose disintegrating body the world is believed to have been made.50 Thus, very early in the story, Rushdie 48

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 37. This allegorical reading of Midnight’s Children has been associated with generalizations such as Frederic Jameson’s controversial article ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, which argues that ‘All third-world texts are necessarily … allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories …’ (Social Text, 15 [Autumn 1986], 69). Aijaz Ahmad’s reply in his article ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’ (Social Text, 17, [Autumn 1987], 3-25, reprinted in his book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [1992], London and New York: Verso, 2000, 95-122) attacks Jameson for the reductionism of his ‘national allegory’ concept and for his sweeping use of the category of ‘Third-World Literature’. 50 In Hindu mythology, Purusha is the primordial being from whose body the world is believed to have been born. He is ‘a cosmogonic figure, a creative source, the primeval male who envelops the whole earth and who represents totality’ (Margaret and James Stutley, A Dictionary of Hinduism: Its Mythology, Folklore and Development 1500 B.C.-A.D. 1500, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977). As Adil Jussawalla shows in his Introduction to his edited collection of New Writing in India, metaphors of ‘dismemberment and dislocation’ have been visible in literature written in all Indian languages since at least the 1970s. Jussawalla sees in 49

Introduction

19

places Midnight’s Children under the sign of mythical narrative. If Purusha’s body gave birth to the world, Saleem’s crumbling body turns, as Midnight’s Children progresses, into text, into the components of the diegetic world of the novel. Just as ‘things – even people – have a way of leaking into each other’,51 Saleem and Padma start negotiating a story meant to turn death into new life – or metamorphose the history of India’s post-independence crumbling into a story with a positive outcome, turn the waste into growth. In its aim to preserve life, Saleem’s act of narration identifies with Scheherazade’s storytelling for survival at the beginning of the novel. Whilst the good use of time for storytelling is threatened by fast bodily disintegration (‘If my crumbling, over-used body permits’), a two-way interchange of story into flesh and of flesh into story is established through the metaphor of swallowing: And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.52

Swallowing is a metaphor of the incorporation of the details of life into the body of the story, which grows on this basis. Yarrow reads this passage as a ‘post-Independence gloss on the old story of the One and the Many: the desperation for an ideal unity in a country which was created from the opposite’.53 This implies Midnight’s Children is, as its opening page announces, a novel that sets out to perform the this a symbol of the recent divisions of caste and of the country reflected in literature (New Writing in India, London: Penguin, 1974, 32). 51 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 38. 52 Ibid., 9-10. 53 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 142.

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Performance and Performativity

Indian paradox of identity and diversity. Therefore this novel about the many details of India becomes an appropriate source for an epigraph to a chapter on the cultural politics of contemporary Indian theatre. A continuum is established in the passage just quoted between the storytelling act and Saleem’s body which is spent in the process. Later on, various developments in the narrative are associated with the loss or damage of some of his bodily parts. He notes, ‘after a curious accident in a washing chest I became a sort of radio’.54 The drainage of Saleem’s sinuses brings about the loss of his telepathic capacity.55 Further, his emasculation paradoxically enables him to become a father. Yet fatherhood is symbolically granted through storytelling. His wife Parvati’s new Muslim name, Laylah – ‘night’ in Arabic – suggests an implicit connection with Arabian Nights.56 Like Scheherazade’s stories, children of the night, Saleem’s son is, allegorically, the story itself. The last pages of Midnight’s Children gradually turn into streamof-consciousness, which brings back random bits and pieces of memory that mirror Saleem’s final disintegration – ‘pieces of my body are falling off’.57 As Saleem dies, the text he has fathered grows, following the regenerative principle of storytelling alluded to by the number ‘one thousand and one’: Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numberless marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.58 54

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 166. Ibid., 304. 56 Ibid., 415. The original Arabic title of Arabian Nights is Alf Laylah wa Laylah (The One Thousand and One Nights). 57 Ibid., 462. 58 Ibid., 463. 55

Introduction

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Like the son who is not Saleem’s son, the text is not always what it seems: in the last chapter entitled ‘Abracadabra’ (which can be read as a metafictional comment about the magic of storytelling) the narrator acknowledges that there is a lot of lying in it – a function of the performativity of language to create realities as credible as the ‘reality’ that is, ‘it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred’.59 At the same time, the text is not complete: there are gaps in it, like the cracks in Saleem’s body. These gaps must be filled by the reader, symbolically represented in this novel by Padma, who tries to cure Saleem by looking after him and even marrying him eventually. Listener figures of similar importance (such as Saira) can be found in Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, where storytelling – and therefore the narrator’s survival – is conditioned by the contribution of an interested audience. An analogy is possible between the impact of the Indian tradition of oral storytelling on these authors and Western theories of reading as performance. Both emphasize the audience’s role in the process of meaning-production, whether we mean the audience of oral storytelling in Indian tradition or the readership of contemporary Indian fiction in English. If Midnight’s Children imagines writing and reading as performative acts, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ spells out more clearly, in the condensed form specific to short stories, an issue which has also been implicitly characteristic of Rushdie’s previous writing: that of the body which exceeds its own limits through performance and metamorphosis, as it becomes a site of storytelling. In Midnight’s Children Saleem’s body becomes story; in The Satanic Verses migration is perceived on the level of the body, through the metamorphosis of the two actors, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, into an angelic/devilish hybrid as they land on the British shore. In their case, the change brought about by migration affects their bodies. Metamorphosis – the major theme in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ – is not new to Rushdie. It is the effect of the crumbling of Saleem’s body (mirroring the crumbling of his country) in Midnight’s Children and the effect of relocation from one country to another and the spatial projection of local perceptions in The Satanic Verses. This focus on the body as text through performance is also present in the 59

Ibid., 443.

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Performance and Performativity

novels by Roy and Chandra that I will examine. There is, however, a difference in the ways bodies are perceived in these more recent texts and the ways changes affect them. This is similar to what happens in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’: metamorphosis is no longer used to indicate the turning of a state into another state, as in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, but to emphasize the process of becoming that connects them. This emphasis on process is true especially of Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a novel about travelling across time and space to overcome all boundaries. Mythicization and migratory patterns: estrangement and return The novels that constitute the primary material analysed in this study focus on the cyclical movements of geographical and textual estrangement and return embedded in narrative discourse. Negotiation between a motherland and an otherland or more generally between a margin and a centre is a constant preoccupation of postcolonial literatures, positioned between a former margin and a former centre of the empire to which they are writing back. Whilst this postcolonial project of writing back to the centre usually consists of an emancipatory series of actions that are meant to conquer the centre, I would now like to focus on the effects of this encounter (the ‘East’/‘West’ encounter, as Rushdie calls it60) in conditions of return, which involves a difference in the knowing subject who has assimilated the experience of exile. Therefore, the return marks a spiral rather than circular movement; it is repetition with a difference. It seems appropriate to study this pattern of estrangement and return along the model described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), which significantly draws on Indian culture. Eliade describes the perception of life in ‘archaic societies’ as ‘a ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others’61 and maintains that time evolves along two dimensions: one is homogenous and linear and characteristic of modern non-religious humanity; the other, specific to religious humanity (homo religiosus), is heterogenous and is in its turn divided into profane time (linear), and sacred time 60

According to the title of Salman Rushdie’s volume of short stories East, West, London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. 61 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), trans. Willard R. Trask, New York: Pantheon, 1965, 5.

Introduction

23

(cyclical). In the order of the sacred, every significant event is seen as a repetition of an initial, mythical moment placed outside time, in illud tempus. This periodical, ritual ‘abolition of time’62 underlies Eliade’s understanding of time in Hindu epics and, more generally, in an imagined mythical ‘East’ traditionally opposed to the historical ‘West’. Time is negotiated between the inevitably linear flow of history and the urge to abolish this flow and always go back to previous, archetypal moments of origin. This also influences the understanding of human character: In epics, we witness the metamorphosis of a historical figure into a mythical hero: Mahabharata and the Homeric poems: at least one of the heroes’ parents is divine. This historicity doesn’t resist the corrosive action of mythicization.63

‘Mythicization’ is a reduction of all historical events to certain preexisting mythical patterns, which has tended to be put down to his rather essentialist approach to mythical thinking. Eliade’s perceptions provide useful metaphors for decoding mythical influences in contemporary fiction, yet we should be careful with the generalizations he makes in his theory of ‘archetypes and repetition’. These are no longer understood in the same way in contemporary comparative studies of cultures, which fundamentally take into account their local specificities. Whilst defending Eliade’s ‘Search for the Centre’ as a personal and intellectual quest that was necessary at the time he was writing, Carl Olson points out that most critics accused Eliade of subjectivity in his selection of data in favour of his generalizations and of lack of awareness of historical and cultural specificity.64 Yet, Eliade’s enthusiastic comparativism and his perceptiveness in tracking similar patterns of thought in remote cultures does in a sense what twentiethcentury European theatre does when it looks to Asian models to capitalize on embodiment rather than text in performance. Similarly, if we tackle Eliade’s approach to comparing cultures and religions from 62

Ibid., 34. Ibid., 42. 64 Carl Olson, The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade: A Search for the Centre, London: Macmillan, 1992, 8. 63

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Performance and Performativity

a performance-oriented perspective, the danger of essentialism is avoided. In her study of the political potential of myth, Wendy Doniger takes over Eliade’s mission as a comparative historian of religions but disagrees with Eliade’s lack of historical sense, his past-oriented understanding of myth and his concept of the archetype.65 Eliade’s theory of myth should certainly be used cautiously, especially in view of the Frazerian and Jungian models that influenced him at the time he was writing. Doniger opens up the comparative study of religions to the needs and discoveries of a plural globalized world, seeing in myths ‘political lenses’66 that provide opportunities to draw bridges between cultures rather than operate reductive assimilations, to liberate and celebrate difference rather than control and homogenize these cultures. Therefore, with the caution imposed by the awareness of the cultural constructedness of all myths, we can use Eliade’s assumptions as a starting point in a reading of the way in which contemporary Indian fiction in English uses the Indian mythicization of history as a contrasting element through which the encounter with a different, Western view of time takes place. When studying the way fiction uses myth, it becomes important to draw some similarities and distinctions between myths and fictions, which are both stories. Doniger starts from the assumption of an inherent structural similarity – ‘all myths are stories, but not all stories are myths’ and chooses as a working definition one of the several possible options whose existence she acknowledges: ‘myth is a story that is believed’, yet this very belief depends on the awareness of the fact that there is massive evidence that some myths are lies. Doniger distinguishes between a meaning of myth as a ‘false statement’, current ‘in casual parlance’ and perceived as opposed to ‘truth or reality or fact or history’,67 and a meaning current in the history of religions, where myth is truth.68 Doniger sides 65 Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 52 and 106. 66 Ibid., 18. 67 This is the meaning given by Roland Barthes to myth in Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers, London: Vintage, 2000. Barthes proclaims in the last part of his study, entitled ‘Myth Today’, that everything can be a myth (Mythologies, 107-59). The contemporary world is in a continuous process of myth-production through the ‘semiological system’ of myth (Mythologies, 111). 68 Doniger, The Implied Spider, 2.

Introduction

25

with the latter and compares myths with metaphors, which are ‘simultaneously real and unreal’,69 necessary tropes in a comparative endeavour which is, like metaphor itself, an act of translation: ‘In fact, metaphor and translation are English derivatives for related Greek and Latin words for the same thing: “bringing across” (Greek phor, Latin fero, latus – “to bring”; Greek meta, Latin trans – “across”).’70 Myths are translations in many ways – hence their comparison runs the risks of inaccuracy true of all translations – but so are migrant identities. Doniger’s etymological discussion of metaphor and translation with a view to defining myth sounds strikingly similar to Rushdie’s definition of migration in a conversation with Günter Grass in 1985, in which he comes back to defining migrant writers as ‘translated men’ as he first did in ‘Imaginary Homelands’ in 1982: If you look etymologically at the meaning of the word ‘metaphor’ and the word ‘translation’ it turns out they mean the same thing. Translation, from Latin, means ‘to carry across’. Metaphor, from Greek, means ‘to carry across’ .... People are also carried across, ... and I formed the idea that the act of migration was to turn people somehow into things, into people who had been translated, who had, so to speak, entered the condition of metaphor, and that their instinctive way of looking at the world was in that more metaphorical, imagistic manner.71

For Rushdie, this act of translation spells out migration in the sense in which it happens in The Satanic Verses, where Saladin and Gibreel are ‘translated’ between two poles – that is, physically removed from India to England. Migration is a shock that physically metamorphoses them into different people and from which there is no escape other than death (for Gibreel) or return to India (for Saladin). But to Doniger, like translation – an act doomed to eternal imperfection which however is done all the time – myth (another form of metaphor, but this time a dynamic one) draws its narrative power from the 69

Ibid., 3. Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (1982), in Imaginary Homelands:Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta and Penguin, 1991, 17. 71 Salman Rushdie in ‘Fictions Are Lies That Tell The Truth: Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass in Conversation’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael R. Reder, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, 77. [Rushdie’s italics.] 70

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Performance and Performativity

tension inherent in its cultural status as a true story, even when it is known to be false. Seen in this perspective, translation (‘bringing across’ meaning), like migration (bringing people across geographical boundaries) opens up infinite possibilities of meaning-production that do not have to stop when one location (the motherland) is changed for another (an adoptive ‘otherland’). The act of translation can be repeated again and again, it can become a process rather than a state. Thus compared to The Satanic Verses, where the negative experience of exile (symbolized by negative metamorphoses) triggers either death (for Gibreel) or return to India (for Saladin), ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ brings a wider, positive perspective. Even though at the end of the story the American woman returns to her country, the child she bears suggests that her story becomes a hybrid, more complex text, in which the process of meaning-production has not yet been closed. In ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ we can read the foregrounding of organized movement through dancing – ‘Movement is all’72 – as a statement of the need for progress, whilst the drought is the opposite: lack of development, being stuck in a deadlock. This central dancing scene in the story is a symbolic moment of recognition in the development of human culture that processes have become more important than states. If we associate this with the fact that ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ is a story about travelling and hybrid identities, the message Rushdie is trying to convey through this story could be read as one that in Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s terms privileges deterritorialization over reterritorialization. What becomes important is not to move from one place to another, supposedly better one, as migrants do, but to escape being connected to one particular place and, in general, to escape roots and limitations, as nomads do. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate the ‘migrant’ and the ‘nomad’ in A Thousand Plateaus as follows: The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory .… If the nomad

72

Rushdie, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, 24.

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27

can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant.73

For Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad trajectories matter more than points on them, just as, in Rosi Braidotti’s new millennium reinterpretation of nomadology from a feminist perspective, ‘the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become’.74 Having written about a certain kind of uprootedness in Midnight’s Children – the historical dislocation which accompanied Indian independence and the Partition – and another one, related to migration and spiritual crisis in The Satanic Verses, in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ Rushdie explores nomadism as an existential option, which he associates with metamorphosis, as does Braidotti’s book, whose title uses metamorphosis to describe the nomad’s becoming. Both nomadism and metamorphosis replace static notions of identity by processes: as one is always on the move, the multiple layers of selfhood are shed in the act of continuously becoming something else. Such a shift of emphasis is possible in the space of myth, which at this point acquires an additional meaning to the two I have already mentioned. I have quoted Doniger to define myth ‘as a story that is believed’, which has a deep cultural resonance, and mentioned the fact that Doniger herself acknowledges the other, opposite meaning of myth, signalled by Barthes in Mythologies: that of a reductive, false statement, which is opposite to historical, realistic truth. Ralph Yarrow discusses a third meaning of myth as a generative state of consciousness, a particular form of poesis that operates across cultures. Yet the space on which he draws in order to develop this theory is that of Indian theatre. Yarrow points out the intrinsic performativity of Indian myth, whose origin he finds in its liminality: Myth … crosses borderlines: it is itself a liminal situation. That is to say, it operates at the junction of different ways of understanding and classifying. It is evidence of a vision which shifts across the borders, which is capable of holding many possibilities of significance in play simultaneously .… Awareness in this condition displays an important 73

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone, 1988, 380-81 (Deleuze and Guattari’s italics). 74 Rosi Braidotti: Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity, 2002, 2.

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Performance and Performativity paradoxical quality …. It retains its ability to record with great precision, but is able to free itself from attachment to conventional categories and to suspend the normal febrile desire to close off the indeterminate by allocating it to a single system. If myth and what the Greeks called poesis (making) emanates from 75 this condition, it is not surprising if its essence is performative.

This understanding of myth highlights its liberating quality which – paradoxically, as the author emphasizes – is opposed to the conventional categorical thinking promoted, as we know, by most institutionalized religious practice. Myth as a state of consciousness transcends these limiting, prescriptive categories and becomes a source of the greatest freedom. The liminal performativity of all myth, arising from its being an instrument of knowledge, is increased in Hinduism by the fact that religious practice is essentially performed. Moreover, as Yarrow remarks, the Western distinction between ‘positive’ (traditional) myths and ‘negative’ ones (advertisements, cartoons, cinema, the pop icons of the contemporary world) does not hold in India. Mythic gods or heroes such as Rama and Krishna are here ‘role models’, ‘part of the web of life’, they live and interact with people to the extent that they feature in cartoons and are alluded to in political speeches. The participation of the divine in everyday human life is part of the borderline-crossing capacity of myth, of its function as a catalyst in the process of knowing the world. If myth is conservative in content, it is ‘liminal, subjective, interactive’ and ‘transgressive’ in ‘its mode of operation’. Yarrow sees this processoriented, fluid, liminal, border-crossing nature of myth as a proof of what he calls its ‘dual status of preservation and transformation’.76 He also suggests that myth provides ways of understanding the world, especially in situations that involve crossing boundaries. Whilst this observation immediately applies to intercultural theatre, I would like to use it in my discussion of the use of myth in contemporary Indian fiction in English. In its dual capacity to preserve and to transform, myth ensures a connection with the past – or, rather, with that eternal present situated outside time, Mircea Eliade’s illud tempus – but also transforms the present by looking at it through the lens of this past. 75 76

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 40-41 (Yarrow’s italics). Ibid., 41.

Introduction

29

Rushdie writes about migration in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, yet he writes about it in a performative way, as I will show in this study: he opens up the concept to the wider possibilities of a nomadic selfhood in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’. Vikram Chandra’s novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain displays a nomadic approach to the process of estrangement from and return to one’s country and culture of origin in a way that is clearer and more detached than in the case of other writings about migration. In the process of re-actualizing traditional, mythical narratives, the narrator needs to step into the role, observe certain rules and be aware that his story has no value unless the audience has been fully absorbed. The instructions that Hanuman – the patron god of poets, but also of performers – gives Sanjay (the previous life avatar of the storytelling monkey) as to how he should proceed with his story are a very good example of that. In addition to their belonging to an implied metafictional discourse that can be followed through the novel, these instructions serve as stage directions. They contain suggestions reminiscent of Natya Sastra about setting and attitudes and even guidelines that an actor-narrator could follow to win the audience over to his side: ‘No’, I said, shame-faced. ‘I was just going to tell it straightforwardly, you see.’ ‘Don’t you know this yet? Straightforwardness is the curse of your age, Sanjay. Be wily, be twisty, be elaborate. Forsake grim shortness and hustle. Let us luxuriate in your curlicues. Besides, you need a frame story for its peace, its quiet. You’re too involved in the tale, your audience is harried by the world. No, a calm storyteller must tell the story to an audience of educated, discriminating listeners, in a setting of sylvan beauty and silence. Thus the story is perfect in itself, complete and whole. So it has always been, so it must be.’77

Valuable instructions are given here on the importance of framing in the art of storytelling. Framing (like staging, isolating the makebelieve on a stage, away from the ‘real’) is an important strategy in The Arabian Nights, on which much contemporary Indian fiction and theatre base their inspiration. But it also emerges through a whole set of metafictional comments in a pure theatrical environment such as 77

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 24.

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Performance and Performativity

Girish Karnad’s play Naga-Mandala. The distinctions between what happens on stage (or in the world of the narrative) and what happens in real life is there, yet it needs to be emphasized sometimes precisely because Hinduism conceives of the world as maya and lila, which is also what the theatre is. Whilst it is important to delimit the boundaries between reality and make-believe in order for the narrator to be able to articulate a coherent story that would persuade the audience, the truthfulness of the story (whether it exists or not, as with myth) will never be questioned if the story is well performed, because then it will be a valid alternative to the world. The novels of Rushdie, Roy and Chandra that I will analyse in this study share a concern with ways in which displaced identities are reshaped through the reinterpretation of narrative and performative structures originating in myth. Analysing them along with examples of actual theatrical performance illustrates that the two modes are not only intrinsically connected in Indian culture, but they are also inseparable in the construction of the contemporary self, confronted with situations of concrete or symbolical exile through a re-reading of Indian myths. Peter Brook’s and Girish Karnad’s reinterpretations of the Mahabharata rewrite Indian myth from different perspectives. Still, they share a keen comparative awareness of crosscultural themes, motifs and theatrical techniques derived from Indian tradition. Salman Rushdie’s novels Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses are now canonically situated between postcolonial writing and mainstream British fiction. In them, identity performance in actual or symbolic migrancy is perceived as spatial or temporal alienation from an authentic version of Indian cultural, myth-derived identity. I will follow the evolution of this topic from Rushdie to Arundhati Roy and Vikram Chandra, representatives of a younger generation of writers. Chandra and Roy share Rushdie’s focus on identity performance and can, in certain ways – though less in others – be considered his followers. I will focus on the ways in which their different approaches to the performative dimension of storytelling affect the dynamic of identity in their novels Red Earth and Pouring Rain and The God of Small Things. As I have already suggested, in Chandra’s case one further step forward is made towards a freeing of both the self and the writing from boundaries in a nomadic narrative. The novel promotes a desire for freedom from the defining determinism of place

Introduction

31

(motherland/otherland oppositions) through nomadism as deterritorialization, understood as an ongoing process rather than as an option for the right state. As identity is refashioned along nomadic lines, the textuality of the narrative also changes as contemporary and mythical meanings are negotiated through the mediating function of performance. Metamorphosis as a metaphor in contemporary Indian writing in English operates on multiple levels: language (the challenges of writing in English whilst recording the rhythms and additional meanings springing from Indian languages); style and content (inspired from the Indian foundation epics and changed to voice contemporary concerns); identity (through migration or simply travelling, changing place – experiences which change the self); genre (the novel form as it was imported into Indian literature from Europe, but changed in ways that are culturally specific to Indian writing); text (which embodies the hybridity of the stories as different cultural backgrounds meet, but also as a result of the mixture of genres). Finally, against the background of the Indian tradition of storytelling and performance, the text continually changes from performance into story and back. It is delivered by a narrator who is also a performer and who tells the story as if an audience were present and contributing to the storytelling process. In what follows I will expand on these different types of metamorphoses. I will first establish the theoretical backbone of my study by discussing the implications of the performativity of contemporary Indian fiction in English and of the Indian tradition of storytelling and performance as inseparable entities upon the current practice of Indian novel writing. I will then focus separately on the narrative and performative aspects of this writing, grounding my theoretical findings in the primary texts used.

CHAPTER ONE WRITING IN ENGLISH: A PERFORMATIVE ACT IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN FICTION

As mentioned at the beginning of the Introduction, The New Yorker issue of 23 and 30 June 1997 marked fifty years of Indian independence with a celebration of the current international success of contemporary Indian fiction in English. Through the selection of some of the most representative novelists, Indian fiction in English is designated as a body of literature in its own right and, in doing so, also draws attention to the significance of their writing in English. In this act of celebration, this particular issue of the prestigious American literary periodical performs an almost symbolic act of recognition. The editorial written by Bill Buford bears a particular significance. Buford is an emblematic figure in the history of the critical reception of recent Indian fiction in English, whose opinion would almost automatically have a strong impact upon readers. In 1997 he was fiction editor of The New Yorker, but had until 1995 been the editor of Granta, the prestigious Cambridge University magazine he turned into a quarterly. Granta had for a while been a forum for postcolonial literatures, in which Salman Rushdie and other Indian writers had published widely. In his editorial, Buford stresses the important role played by Indian writers on the contemporary literary stage and considers 1981, the year Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children first came out, to be the turning point of Indian letters – internationally, if not so much in India itself. As Buford puts it, Midnight’s Children ‘made everything possible’ as it ‘showed Indian writers that great novels could be fashioned from Indian stories, with an Indian sensibility and a distinctly Indian use of the English language’.1 Whilst the important 1

Buford, ‘Comment: Declarations of Independence’, 6-8.

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part played by Midnight’s Children in bringing Indian fiction into the limelight cannot be doubted, Buford capitalizes on Rushdie’s towering presence in order to point out two crucial features of Indian writing in English as a whole, which are the sources of its originality. One is its ‘Indian sensibility’, which coexists with its internationalism and brings about an innovation in content that singles out Indian writers among other novelists writing in English. The other is a ‘distinctly Indian use of the English language’, which suggests that the English of Indian writing is no longer the former colonizer’s language, but a new literary language in its own right. In noticing the coexistence of these two features, Buford implies that the challenge faced by Indian writing in English – of having to reconcile a content and a form coming from very different backgrounds – has finally been met. I would like to argue that this ‘Indian sensibility’ is a matter of performance, a statement of attitude that results in a performative use of the English language. This, in turn, relies on the coexistence of performance and performativity. In the discussion that will follow I will attempt to prove this coexistence, whilst rebutting J.L. Austin’s position that the two categories are mutually exclusive. I will argue that contemporary Indian fiction in English performs Indianness for a worldwide English-reading international audience, whilst also raising issues about it as seen from home. In this fiction, performance and performativity merge as catalysts of the process of novel writing through reinterpretations of myth. I will start my analysis by looking into Buford’s observations on Indian writing in English in more detail and I will relate this to language performativity. Writing in English The question of writing in English is one that Buford adapts to serve his conclusion: that an incipient Indian literature is taking shape (or, perhaps, is consciously being shaped by this particular issue of The New Yorker) in a way reminiscent of the early post-independence struggle of American literature to find its own voice. While pointing out the variety and originality of the literature written by these writers, Buford also describes their use of English in the following terms: What can you say about Indian fiction? Too much and too little. You can point to both its extravagances and its spareness. It can be fabulist, realistic, chatty, mad, or wildly eccentric. There are qualities in its

Writing in English

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language that you won’t find elsewhere: sometimes its use is more exacting – more precise, more clearly articulated – than the language might be in the hands of a British or American author, almost as if the language were slightly anachronistic, of a different and more disciplined world. At other times, the language seems to be intentionally cliché-driven (full of phrases that are grist to the mill, if not actually stemming the tide, while champing at the bit – pull your socks up, you want to say). There is a physicalness to the language, like the physicalness of paint on canvas: the reader is always aware of it as a medium, a thing that the writer is having to work and fashion the world from. But the truth is that no one generalisation seems to characterise the fiction being written by Indian writers – in the way that a generalisation might describe a school or a trend. The truth is that what we are witnessing is not a school or a trend but something 2 bigger in scope.

Buford is doubtless right in concluding that this is ‘something bigger in scope’ than just a school or a trend. He points out that this literature, open to the reception of an international English-reading audience, appropriates a language so far associated mainly with the British and American literatures in a way that is highly original. There are ‘qualities in its language that you won’t find elsewhere’ and a ‘physicalness’ meant to fashion a world (which I shall analyse further in my argument about performativity); there is, moreover, a variety and a particularity of detail in it which ‘no one generalization’ can characterize. We could perceive this world created through a refreshed usage of what was formerly the colonizer’s language as the outcome of what, in J.L. Austin’s terms, is a performative use of language. Performative language is precisely that kind of language that creates worlds, that does actions rather than just describing them, in which ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’.3 In a way informed by a rich cultural tradition in which the English language has played an important part for a long time, these authors perform their cultural specificity, but also their diverse individualities, in terms understandable to their worldwide audiences. Having argued for the centrality of performance and performativity in contemporary Indian fiction in English, I will go on to analyse the 2 3

Ibid., 7. See Introduction, note 27.

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Performance and Performativity

ways in which they work in the recycling of mythical material in a representative part of this fiction and how the novel genre metamorphoses under their impact. The 23 and 30 June 1997 issue of The New Yorker certainly does not offer an exhaustive picture of this situation, but is relevant as it exemplifies the coexistence of performance, performativity and myth in contemporary Indian fiction in English. The reconciliation of the ‘Indian’ content with the English language is a matter of performance, carried out through language performativity. The coexistence of performance and performativity are central in Indian tradition, which relies heavily on theatrical and narrative reinterpretations of myth. This theoretical section will open questions about these issues that I shall further examine in my analysis of primary texts. Buford’s positive assessment of contemporary Indian fiction in English is meant to foreground a question which is actually the focus of the whole anniversary New Yorker issue: ‘But what does it mean to be an Indian novelist today?’4 Questions regarding the status of the novel in general and of the Indian novel in English in particular – language questions and genre questions – also constitute the concern of some of the writers featured in the issue. In the context of The New Yorker, the comparison between American literature and Indian literature in English – both written in non-British varieties of English which, however, started as bequests of the former British Empire – suggests that it is fair to address the language issue first. Rushdie’s article ‘Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!’ feeds into this as it draws a vast, lead-in picture of what the author calls ‘the oriental scene’.5 The celebrated father-figure assumes his own centrality in the picture, as well as the ‘Rushdie-itis’ that seems to have infected all contemporary Indian fiction, including Rushdie himself. He mentions and briefly characterizes the main modern and contemporary world-famous authors originating from India or Pakistan (such as Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, G.V. Desani – a particular precursor of Rushdie and Roy in his use of language, Ved Mehta, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anita Desai, V.S. Naipaul, Bapsi Sidhwa, Githa Hariharan, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy and Kiran 4 5

Buford, ‘Comment: Declarations of Independence’, 6. Rushdie, ‘Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!’, 50-61.

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Desai). But, most importantly – and partly in his own defence – he frames all of this in the light of the language issue or of what he calls an ‘unexpected and profoundly ironic conclusion’: This is it: The prose writing – both fiction and non-fiction – created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen ‘recognised’ languages of India, the so-called ‘vernacular languages’, during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning ‘Indo-Anglian’ literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The true Indian literature of the first postcolonial half-century has been made in the language the British left behind.6

In 1997, one can talk about an already strong tradition of writing in English in India. The first attempts date back to the nineteenth century, but the first important moment is probably represented by ‘The Big Three’ – Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao, the three ‘pioneers of Indian fiction’ as John Thieme calls them7 – in the 1930s. Raja Rao is the first Indian author who famously discusses the difficulty and the implications of the language challenge and of having to inhabit its different logic and style: One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word ‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.8

6

Ibid., 50. John Thieme, Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary, London: Arnold, 2003, 29. 8 Raja Rao, Foreword to Kanthapura (1938), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, vvi. 7

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Here Rao points out the ambivalent relationship of the Indian author to the English language. He stresses the need to forge an original Indian style, suitable for the expression of Indian meaning, moving in the rhythm of Indian thought – with all the cultural and psychological differences implied – in this formerly alien language. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties, Rao’s own example of writing in English foregrounds the practice as one worth pursuing and as a legitimate right of Indian culture. As Vikram Chandra put it more recently in an interview, ‘we’ve paid the price and the language is ours’.9 Rushdie defends the legitimacy of Indian writing in English and of his own writing. Even though he acknowledges the ‘musical’ presence of all the other Indian languages in the consciousness of Indian authors writing in English,10 he sees it as a great advantage that ‘English has become an Indian language’ and that this conveys on their works an aura of lingua-franca cultural neutrality’.11 He was proudly describing the phenomenon as early as the moment he coined the concept of ‘the Empire writing back to the centre’12 which has, ever since, become emblematic of postcolonial writing as a whole. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, which he co-edited with Elizabeth West,13 makes a rather strong statement in that respect by including only one translation – from the work of the Pakistani writer Saadat Hassan Manto, originally written in Urdu. The almost exclusive focus of the anthology on Indian writing in English stands proof of Rushdie’s belief that this is the most important body of writing produced on the subcontinent. At the same time, however, one can see in this an ideological choice indicative of the anthologists’ distance from India. Amit Chaudhuri expresses a different opinion as he tries, as editor of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, to bring to the attention of an international audience (in English translation) some names of Indian authors writing in languages other than English. 9

Vikram Chandra, in ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’ with Andrew Teverson, Wasafiri, 37 (Winter 2002), 6. 10 Rushdie, ‘Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!’, 57. 11 Ibid., 54. 12 See Introduction, note 28. 13 The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, eds Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, London: Vintage, 1997.

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Chaudhuri’s opinion differs from Bill Buford’s friendly American critical view in the latter’s wish to associate, or at least compare, all successful enterprises with the American way. It also differs from Rushdie’s opinion. Chaudhuri begrudges this celebration of English as the preferred language of Indian literature. Whilst not denying the value of Indian literature in English (well represented in the last section of his anthology), Chaudhuri looks down upon the commercial drive he sees behind it. In the introduction to the Sunetra Gupta entry in his anthology, for instance, he describes the young Indian author as ‘one of the few genuinely talented writers to have emerged from that aggressively marketed group of practitioners called “Indian writers in English”’.14 Moreover, in the final paragraph of the ‘Modernity and the Vernacular’ section of his Introduction to the anthology, he denies the comparison between the beginnings of postcolonial Indian literature in English and American literature. He also disapproves of the common tendency of current criticism to reductively situate contemporary Indian literature under the wide umbrella of postcolonial literatures and forget all about its specificities. The use of English is a factor whose importance cannot be denied: The position of English, in India, is both inescapable and ambiguous, an ambiguity that is perhaps insufficiently mapped in its fiction and criticism. It is a unique ambiguity; for it is misleading to compare the way English is used in India, by a small but substantial group, not all of its members by any means well-to-do or privileged, with the space that the language occupies in, for instance, Africa or America. Moreover, to say that English is now an Indian language – while that may be true – requires all kinds of qualifications and a careful reexamination of that claim; for English is not an Indian language in the way it is an American language; nor is it an Indian language in the way that Bengali or Urdu, for instance, is one. The position and meaning of English in India is still on the verge of becoming clear; it is still part of a process that is far from being complete. But to understand, fully, the story of the English language and its most 14 The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), ed. Amit Chaudhuri, London: Picador, 2002, Sunetra Gupta author entry, 582. (Published in the United States in a slightly revised version as The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, London: Vintage, 2004.)

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Performance and Performativity profound impact and extraordinary outcome in India in the past 150 years, one has to turn, paradoxically, from English and the issue of colonialism to the vernacular languages and indigenous history.15

The comparison with Bengali and Urdu is worth bearing in mind while reading Rushdie’s article in The New Yorker, as Rushdie uses the example of Urdu (his mother tongue) to support precisely the opposite argument: But my own mother tongue, Urdu, which was the camp argot of the country’s earlier Muslim conquerors, was also an immigrant language, forged from a combination of the conquerors’ imported Farsi and the local languages they encountered. However, it became a naturalised subcontinental language long ago; and by now that has happened to English, too. English has become an Indian language.16

It is true that Rushdie’s argument is built on analogy and that Urdu is related to Hindi, whilst English is not. Also, Bengali – a language with a strong literary tradition – is left out of his equation. However, in comparing the two foreign languages grafted onto the Indian stock and bringing cultural diversity along, Rushdie celebrates the internationalism and worldwide accessibility of contemporary Indian writing in English. The fame of his own writings is partly due to their being in English. To this we must add a broader thematic positioning of contemporary Indian fiction, with its focus on travelling, nomadic identities situated beyond the strict boundaries of national culture. The performative quality of this fiction and the fact that it operates within a storytelling-performance-myth triad whose terms are continually renegotiated and renewed contribute to Rushdie’s – and other Indian authors’ – exploration of identity within a wider temporal frame than the Western novel has tended to do. The performance/performativity duality When he coined the term ‘performative’ to refer to utterances that do not just describe the doing of an action (as constatives do), but actually do the action,17 Austin refused to associate performative 15

Ibid., Introduction, xxii. Rushdie, ‘Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!’, 54. 17 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 6. 16

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utterances with theatrical performance. To him, ‘a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy’.18 He calls the language used on stage ‘parasitic’ and suggests that the theatre as make-believe is a space where words cannot do things, but only pretend to be doing them. In the Introduction to their volume Performativity and Performance – which, as the title suggests, explores the similarities between the two notions, rather than the differences emphasized by Austin – Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick take over Derrida’s reading of Austin in ‘Signature Event Context’: For, finally, is not what Austin excludes as anomalous, exceptional, ‘nonserious’, that is, citation (on the stage, in a poem, or in a soliloquy), the determined modification of a general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – without which there would not even be a 19 ‘successful’ performative? Where Austin, then, seemed intent on separating the actor’s citational practices from ordinary speech-act performances, Derrida regarded both as structured by a generalised iterability, a pervasive theatricality 20 common to stage and world alike.

Parker and Sedgwick’s volume explores, through a number of diverse essays on performance and performativity, the blurring of the line between the theatre and the world, which Derrida cancels through an enlarged concept of ‘citation’. If Austin supports his distinction between performativity and performance by pointing out that an actor does not necessarily love or hate the person being addressed on stage, Parker and Sedgwick show that we do not always mean everything literally in everyday speech either.

18

Ibid., 22. Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 325. 20 Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance, New York and London: Routledge, 1995, 4. 19

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J. Hillis Miller’s book Speech Acts in Literature21 critically reviews the trend in literary theory its title indicates. He starts with Austin and examines Jacques Derrida’s and Paul de Man’s deconstructionist approaches. Performativity becomes a liberating tool in literary theory, shifting the emphasis from static categorical thinking to a more dynamic, change-sensitive discourse. In the realm of postcolonial criticism, Margareta Petersson’s Unending Metamorphoses: Myth, Satire and Religion in Salman Rushdie’s Novels discusses Rushdie’s evolution from Grimus through Midnight’s Children and Shame to The Satanic Verses and his reaction to the fatwa in which he treats fiction ‘as action’, as ‘a collection of performatives’.22 She points out that fiction is meant to create its own reality that should not be subject to the laws of history but which has the potential to subvert history and thus she uses the concept of performativity to defend Rushdie’s position. However, little has been done regarding the possible common ground between performativity (understood in terms of the speech-act theory) and theatrical performance in fiction. In Speech Acts in Literature, Hillis Miller deems Austin’s 1955 Harvard series of lectures How to Do Things with Words (published posthumously as a book in 1962) as ‘a great work of ironic philosophical speculation’, but also, more bluntly, as a narrative ‘of a peculiar failure’,23 as ‘the report of an intellectual catastrophe’.24 As Hillis Miller shows, Austin, an established Oxford professor who gave a series of scientific lectures – composed in what he calls constative utterances – ends up producing a set of performative utterances which famously perform an ‘act of foundation’. As Hillis Miller maintains: ‘How to Do Things with Words is the inaugural, founding document of a new branch of philosophy, the theory of speech acts.’25 However, this is not what Austin claimed he had in mind when he gave his series of lectures. He stated, with superior modesty, that he was only 21

J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 22 Margareta Petersson, Unending Metamorphoses: Myth, Satire and Religion in Salman Rushdie’s Novels, Lund: Lund University Press, 1996. 23 Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, 11. 24 Ibid., 12. 25 Ibid., 23.

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continuing what grammarians and philosophers had already started, namely the analysis of a phenomenon that was ‘very widespread and obvious’.26 Meant as a piece of constative, scientific discourse, Hillis Miller argues, How to Do Things with Words unwillingly displays its own performativity. Hillis Miller insists on the failure of Austin’s work to communicate its intended meaning and aims to criticize Austin for his inconsistencies and his way of complicating – or ‘bogging down’ – his own argument through endless and ultimately useless distinctions. Hillis Miller also implies, through the use of the illocutionary force of his own argument, that the sharp distinction Austin draws between constatives and performatives is actually not that sharp. It greatly depends on intention, context, audience and many other circumstances by virtue of which the boundaries between various types of discourses, defined by exertion of rigid categories, are not as strict and immutable as Austin would have liked them to be. Austin believed in the Cartesian separation of ‘each ego from all the others’ and a ‘world’ drawn in sharp contours, clearly distinguished from art, a world which believed in ‘the notion that fictions (“literature”, “poetry”) are “etiolated”, parasitic or representational, verifiable truth-telling’.27 In fact, according to J. Hillis Miller, even as he was trying to defend his traditional views, Austin creates, through discovering performative utterances, the very means to deconstruct them. If, for Austin and his canonical peers, the main function of literature is a mimetic one – to represent a certain original (‘world’, ‘reality’ etc.) – it is the concept of representation itself that changes and, with it, triggers a significant change in the understanding of literature. In fact, this change is registered most visibly in the theatre, which, as compared to fiction and poetry, is more directly engaged with make-believe and with the old metaphor of the world as a stage. Eastern influences on European theatre attempt to show the opposite of what Austin maintains: that performance can cause realities into being, therefore there is a performative dimension of theatrical language. In avant-garde theatre, what is important is not to achieve a certain ideal or required state of character, but to enter the 26 27

Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 1. Ibid., 60.

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process out of which character emerges and to further explore it. For Antonin Artaud, considered the initiator of Asian practices on the European stage, starting from the example of Balinese performance, character is not to be achieved, but rather transcended. Theatre – life itself rather than a representation of life – is to Artaud ‘not an individual life, that individual aspect of life in which CHARACTERS triumph, but the sort of liberated life which sweeps away human individuality and in which man is only a reflection’.28 Performance is endowed with a capacity to negotiate – to loosen the boundaries and to trigger alchemical transformations – between the opposite values characteristic of ethical, ideological or religious discourse, representative of good and evil. Therefore the stage becomes in Artaud’s theatre of cruelty – and later on in the theatrical practice that drew on it – a ‘nontheological space’, which has dethroned the authoritative power of the logos, as Jacques Derrida puts it: The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance. The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the ‘creator’. Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the ‘master’.29

Derrida’s use of the concept of representation is imbued with an ambiguity that is essential in the changes occurring, throughout the twentieth century, in the status of literature (and, more generally, art). 28

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti, London: Calder and Boyars, 1970, 116. 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference (1978), trans. Alan Bass, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 235.

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‘To represent’ means ‘to be the delegated representative of’ some original (the people, divinity, the monarch). The corresponding adjective (and derived noun) is ‘representative’. Yet it also means ‘to represent fictionally and aesthetically’, in an artistic medium that does not necessarily have an original and, therefore, is not necessarily mimetic. The corresponding adjective in this case is ‘representational’. If in the former case representation is intrinsically connected to the primary logos Derrida talks about, in the latter, since it exists in its own right, it is not.30 Austin’s understanding of performative language takes the first meaning for granted, as, indeed, Austin believes in established authority, the logos, the law. The followers of his speech act theory, however – including Derrida himself – notice that this theory holds great potential not so much in representing a reality that is, but particularly in creating alternatives to it. Hence, a slippage occurs in the meaning of representation from the first usage to the second one. It is precisely in literature, which Austin ruled out from the field of performative language, that speech act theory made a career. The aim of J. Hillis Miller’s book is to rebut Austin’s categorical and repeated rejection of literature. He argues that the greatness of Austin’s discovery lies in its capacity to provide the tools for an entirely opposite take on the matter. The main such development, according to Hillis Miller, is provided by Derrida: Derrida, on the other hand, already belongs to the age of cyberspace. For him, as I shall show, the self is multitudinous and variable, permeable, remade from moment to moment by speech acts. Felicitous speech acts are parasitic on infelicitous ones, on literature in fact, rather than the other way around. All those presuppositions of the print age about the self, about social institutions, about the hierarchy of creatures, about gender, class, race, and about literature on which Austin’s thinking depends are put in question by Derrida, including even the exclusion of animals from the realm of beings able to execute happy performatives .... The Cartesian self of the age of the book is now being replaced by the televisionary or cinematic or Internet ‘self’ who dwells within a new transnational regime of telecommunications. That regime is a place of spectral, fleeting, impermanent selves 30

I am indebted to Vic Sage for drawing my attention to the implications of this distinction.

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Performance and Performativity created and decreated by media. In those media the distinction between fact and fiction, real and imaginary, no longer firmly holds or no longer holds in the same way as it did in the era of the printed book.31

Hillis Miller’s account of the evolution of the concept of performativity shows that this concept makes a career in literary criticism, in view of its applicability to literature. As the view of the self changes, the emphasis shifts from given categories to categories of the performative, which increasingly dominate the world as the distinction between reality and its representations is blurred. As Hillis Miller pleads for the relevance of Austin’s performatives to literature, further studies – such as those collected in Parker and Sedgwick’s volume Performativity and Performance32 – take the debate into the more specific realm of the theatre, where the two concepts in the title (seen by Austin as opposites) are shown to coexist and complement each other. Ralph Yarrow agrees with theatre theorists and practitioners such as Keir Elam, Mike Alfreds and Max Stafford-Clark in defining speech acts in terms of ‘language as performance’. In Indian tradition, speech prevails over written language; hence the oral transmission of major texts like the epics and the Vedas.33 In such instances, the power of speech to express the truth is never questioned, given the status of the Hindu scriptures as itihasa. Words in the theatre generate forms of action that involve complex interactions between actors and characters. Consequently, all theatrical activity (and, as the book suggests, Indian theatre particularly) is defined by the potential of ‘doing something to someone’.34 Or, as Austin would have put it (even though only outside the theatre), as the instance where things can be done with words.

31

Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, 61. Parker and Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance, 136. 33 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 35. 34 Ibid., 99. 32

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Performativity and textuality: towards a theory of reading as performance As pointed out earlier, performance and performativity are complementary categories in contemporary Indian fiction in English. To examine their implications on the textuality of written fictional texts, I will propose that in this fiction performance and performativity contribute to the creation of a dynamic text that communicates meaning through an incorporation of orality. This involves the reader in the process of storytelling, a textual enactment of the Indian tradition of the storytelling dialogue between an oral storyteller and an audience who listens and participates in the storytelling process. The theory of speech acts is commonly used in readings of literature that place the source of literary meaning in the reader rather than the text or in the relationship between the reader and the text. Stanley Fish’s reader-response criticism proposes the notion of ‘interpretive communities’ whose joint endeavour is essential in the act of meaning-production. However, even though Fish argues that the interpretation of each text depends on the reader and the knowledge he/she shares with one or more communities, he still emphasizes the author’s intention as the main foundation on which the interaction between the text and the reader is based.35 Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics highlights the importance of interpretation. He imagines the process of reading as an act in which gaps in the text are actively filled by the reader, whose individual perspective activates each particular potential perception of the text: ‘The act of reading is therefore a process of seeking to pin down the oscillating structure of the text to some specific meaning.’36 According to Iser, the reader is expected to participate in the textmaking process and interact with it by making decisions on its potential meanings and by enriching its content.37 In his essay entitled ‘Writing Reading’, Roland Barthes shows that the act of reading and the act of writing are very related to each other. To Barthes, any writing process is preceded and followed by a process 35

Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, 1-4. 36 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989), Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 8. 37 Ibid., 9.

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of reading. The former is performed by the author and the latter by the reader, who experiences the text as an incomplete collection of potential meanings that need to be actualized and filled in: Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?38

Barthes’ ‘Writing Reading’ was first published in 1970. In the French literary world surrounding the practice of the nouveau roman, a whole wave of theory developed around the relationship between the text and the reader, meant to challenge the older assumption that the author’s intention was the main source of meaning in the text. The most spectacular and probably best-known manifesto for the autonomy of the written text is Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’.39 As he announces that the text has an independent life of its own once it is out there and open to new interpretations through reading, Barthes signals the fact that the ‘text’ of reading is not the same as the ‘text’ of writing. Each of them are versions of a ‘performative text’ which is brought into presence by every reading in a way similar to the way in which, in the theatre, every night’s performance is different from any other. Performance establishes a form of communication between what is happening on stage and the world outside it. This may be the world of the audience, the context, the real world or a transcendental world of spiritual experience. Apart from what happens in the act of performance itself, there are also contextual elements that go into the process of making meaning as part of this dialogue between performance and the real world. These two components do not overlap, but correspond in many ways, to the point where theatre can be an active society-changing factor.40 As I have also shown in the 38

Roland Barthes, ‘Writing Reading’ (first published in Le Figaro Littéraire, 1970), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, 29 (author’s italics). 39 First published in Manteia, 1968 and reprinted in a number of volumes among which The Rustle of Language, 49-55. 40 This is very much the case with contemporary Indian theatre that favours ‘a largely Marxist version of consciousness, positioned within the postcolonial context with (for example, Utpal Dutt, some of the writing of Bharucha and much of the debate

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previous subsection, performative language is an effective realitycreating tool in both theatrical performance and literature, despite Austin’s position that the two concepts are incompatible. Such connections with what is commonly defined as ‘reality’ are crucial in the very definitions of the work of art. Iser points out that ‘we recognize in literature so many elements that play a part in our own experience’, which are ‘simply put together in a different way’ in the text as a function of the text’s indeterminacy.41 However, despite that fact, he shows that a literary text … differs from any text presenting an object that exists independently of the text. If a piece of writing describes an object that exists with equal determinacy outside it, then the text is simply an exposition of the object. In Austin’s terms, it is a ‘constative utterance’, as opposed to a ‘performative utterance’, which actually creates its object. It goes without saying that literary texts belong to the second category. There is no concrete object corresponding to them in the external world, although of course they produce their objects out of elements to be found in the external world.42

It follows from the above that what Austin vetoes – the performativity of literary texts – ‘goes without saying’ for Iser on account of the autonomy of such texts from the extratextual world, which, unlike non-literary texts, they do not represent. Iser acknowledges the capacity of literary texts to create their own reality – their performativity, as well as their dynamic potential for meaningproduction – whilst recognizing that such a text-generated reality is still based on elements brought from outside the text. This ‘outside’ of the text – with direct reference to performance – is defined by Henry Sayre as a source of ‘disruptive forces’ that contribute to the completion of meaning: reported in six years of the Calcutta-based Seagull Theatre Quarterly); perfectly reasonable on many levels as a strategy to counteract e.g. Schechner’s or Brook’s alleged cultural piracy or modern Orientalism, or to support various kinds of consciousness-raising’ (Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 144). Such theatre functions within the framework of a wider project of emancipation from former colonial assumptions and is meant to change society in that respect. 41 Iser, Prospecting, 7. 42 Ibid., 6.

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Performance and Performativity … a good way to think about performance is to realize that in it the potentially disruptive forces of the ‘outside’ (what is ‘outside’ the text – the physical space in which it is presented, the other media it might engage or find itself among, the various frames of mind the diverse members of a given audience might bring to it and, over time, the changing forces of history itself) are encouraged to assert themselves.43

Sayre’s ‘text’ is in a wider sense the text of performance, which includes both verbal and non-verbal means. But the same observations can be extrapolated to literary texts in general. The link is suggested by the Derridean connotations of Sayre’s terms. This outside of the theatrical text involves a general context to which the audience belongs, but also issues related to the present moment quality of theatrical practice. All performance is changed by the interaction with the audience and the contextual details of each particular representation. If the theatre can tell stories through embodying them, the stories in their turn can also perform meanings through embodying them in the bodies of their texts. A theory of reading as performance applied to contemporary Indian fiction in English could make use of Iser’s description of the reading process as performance. Such reading comes close to the relationship between an oral storyteller and his audience in praesentia in the tradition of Indian storytelling. This tradition is used explicitly by Rushdie in Midnight’s Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories and by Chandra in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. In these novels the audiences (Padma, Haroun, Saira and other characters) participate in the making of the story by asking questions and bringing in material from outside the frame of the story. If we talk about fictional texts, the extratextual reference Sayre refers to as the ‘outside’ in the passage just quoted could be interpreted as the contextual knowledge the reader contributes to the text of the story. Through the reader’s active participation not only in the reading, but ultimately in the writing process, the gaps of meaning in the text are filled and each reading becomes an individualized experience. Reading like this reminds us 43

Henry Sayre, ‘Performance’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, 94.

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that every theatrical performance is always different from any other, as the potential messages delivered on stage vary depending on the context, audience response and other factors brought about in the present of the performance. Hence, every reading can differ from other readings if the text is open enough – that is, if its degree of dynamic indeterminacy, in Iser’s sense, is high enough – to allow it. If this is true, how does performativity affect the making of fictional texts? French poststructuralists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida go even further in asserting the free play of textuality and reading as the main source of meaning production and at the same time dethroning the importance of authorial intention (as also suggested by Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’). The author’s function in the process of meaning-production becomes secondary to the interplay between the text and the context. Moreover, in Of Grammatology, Derrida famously signals the absence of any extratextual reality on which the text might be based: ‘il n’y a pas de horstexte’ (‘There is no outside-the-text’).44 This implies that the founding assumption of the realist novel – that there is a reality this kind of narrative aims to mirror – is not justified, since both the reality and its mirrored representation are texts. Therefore reading becomes the performance of an intertextual act in which the text of reading is not the same as the text of writing, while, at the same time, le hors-texte – the reality outside the text which represents the reader’s baggage, the perspective from which the reader will approach the text – is also a text, on an equal footage with the text of the reading. Therefore the text turns from a given product into a fluid process in the making or, to use Roland Barthes’ terminology, it turns from ‘work’ to ‘text’. Barthes draws a distinction between an older understanding of the ‘work’ as a static given and the more fluid, dynamic ‘text’ in the following terms: The difference is as follows: the work is a fragment of substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for example, in a library). The Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (though not reproduce term for term) a distinction proposed by Lacan: ‘reality’ 44

Jacques Derrida, ‘… That Dangerous Supplement …’, in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1976), Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 158.

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Performance and Performativity is shown [se montre], the ‘real’ is proved [se démontre]; in the same way, the work is seen (in bookstores, in card catalogues, on examination syllabuses), the text is demonstrated, is spoken according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse (or rather it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself to be so); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work which is the Text’s imaginary tail. Or again: the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production.45

If the work is given in a supposedly final version once and for all, the text is always a dynamic process in the making, a ‘methodological space’ of movement that relies on the potential of language for meaning-production. It allows for a perpetual negotiation of meaning between what is apparently stated and what is left unstated, yet is there precisely through its absence. ‘The text is plural’, as Barthes shows, it ‘depends not on interpretation, however liberal, but on an explosion, on dissemination’; it depends on ‘the stereographic plurality of the signifiers which weave it (etymologically the text is a fabric)’ and exists not through reasserting a code, but as difference. Through its plurality, the text manifests a potential for dissent from established codes or laws, which the work represents. It has a plural or demonic texture opposed to the monologism of the law, which, through its very plurality, it continuously challenges.46 The demonic text opposes the unchangeable monolithic nature of the law – that impenetrable law of an unspecified nature, set in stone, which can never be bent, as in Kafka’s story ‘Before the Law’ on which Derrida bases his essay with the same title.47 Unlike the law, this kind of subversive text is not fixed, but in a perpetual process of change. It is precisely because of this unsettled subversive nature that the text – invested as it is with the potential also to say what at first sight it appears not to be saying – is set in opposition to the law.

45

Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ (first published in Revue d’esthétique, 1971), in The Rustle of Language, 57-58 (Barth’s italics). 46 Ibid., 59-61. 47 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

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Derrida’s concept of the supplement – which ‘intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of’48 – opens a theoretical framework for discussing this capacity of the text to also be about what it apparently is not. The concept, theorized in an essay that starts by discussing Rousseau’s condemnation of writing ‘as destruction of presence and as disease of speech’49 is importantly connected to the subversive traces of speech in writing. This supplement of spoken language present in the written text accounts in Derrida’s view for the capacity of writing to incorporate a subversive voice, whose function is to deconstruct the meaning in the text. This satanic voice in the text can always be activated as an argument against the law. It represents a perpetual potential menace to the univocal meaning of the law, which, once dismantled, cannot be restored. The debate between orality and the written is an important one in Barthes’ work as well. Barthes shows in Writing Degree Zero that writing manifests a difficulty in communicating meaning which speech does not. The statement is certainly true of the readerly text, the repressive text of the law. In order to be able to engage in an act of communication, the writerly text – which is never finished, therefore allows for a free play of signification which opens up a possibility for speech to dwell within writing – can communicate through incorporating speech.50 Thus the text becomes a text with a mask: we can call it a demonic text (subversive, plural, multiple as opposed to ‘the law’ which is monolithic), which says what it does not say at the same time. In contemporary Indian fiction in English, of which Chandra is a good self-conscious example, the authors’ use of themes and techniques of the Indian theatrical tradition and of the oral storytelling tradition of India involves a particular approach to the textuality of the written text. This opens up the texts to a virtual kind of audience participation: the text reflects the implied presence of a storyteller and a listener whose dialogue is alluded to throughout the narrative. As I have already indicated, explicit examples of this are to be found in Red Earth and Pouring Rain, but also in the dialogue between Saleem 48

Derrida, ‘… That Dangerous Supplement…’, 145 (Derrida’s italics). Ibid., 142. 50 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 19-20. 49

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and Padma in Midnight’s Children or the careful planning of the storytelling process between Sanjay and Abhay – the storytellers – and Hanuman and Ganesha – who give them guidance as to how to tell a good story.51 As this fiction relies on the reinterpretation of previously told stories, the original text is performed by the new one. Thus, meaning in the new text is formed on two levels. One level is reinterpretative of the past and consists of an evocation of an original story, which is to a certain extent exemplary and is performed in contemporary guise (through a contemporary language and contemporary characters). The other level is present-oriented and has to do with a critical reinterpretation of the language in which the story is told or, more specifically, with the appropriation of the English language for the purposes of conveying meaning related to the concerns of contemporary Indian writing. It also implies a reinterpretation of ‘the law’ formulated in this language. As these two levels of meaningformation through reinterpretation interact, the text is about what it says, but also about what it does not say. As I will show in my detailed analysis of fictional texts, in all four novels there is a surface discourse undermined by a deeper one. Whilst the former level is where the main story is told, the latter is the level of subversion, where the categories that we see at work on the surface are unveiled and questioned. This past/present alternation, visible in all the novels discussed, is mediated by the storytelling continuum in Midnight’s Children and Red Earth and Pouring Rain, whose structures are mainly determined by an alternation of an immediate ‘now’ when the story is performed and a ‘then’ when the real/historical events are assumed to have taken place. In these two novels, which are about storytelling par excellence, the spiral development of the storytelling makes the connection between a level of myth and a level of the present. A similar mediation happens through character reduplication in The Satanic Verses and The God of Small Things, where main characters feature in couples: Gibreel and 51

See, for example, Hanuman’s advice that, in order to keep his young audience enthralled by his stories more than by the competing pleasures of cricket, Sanjay should make sure he tells them a good story. This implies a frame narrative and a complex – rather than ‘straightforward’ – plot, based on ‘wily’, ‘twisty’ and ‘elaborate’ digression (Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 23-24).

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Saladin in the former and the twins in the latter. These couples are both oppositional: angel/devil, female/male, but also, in both cases, sane/insane. They are therefore representative of an ongoing dialectical transformation of one pole into another and as such highlight a level of debate between what is acceptable and what is not, between the law and its subversion. One good example of the practice of demonic textuality is The Satanic Verses, a novel about the dangerous incorporation of subversion into the law and about the ensuing confusion. Gibreel (deliberately wavering between his two identities, Gibreel-the-actor and Gibreel-the-archangel) merges this overlapping of revelation and acting precisely by translating everything into camera-eye perception: Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments, spectator. When he’s a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he’s floating up on a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he’s swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he’ll try a dolly shot, tracking along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or hand-held with the help of a steadicam he’ll probe the secrets of the Grandee’s bedchamber. But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen … And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: ‘Go ask Gibreel’, and he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in alarm, who, me? I’m supposed to know the answers here? I’m sitting here watching this picture and now this actor points his finger out at me, who ever heard the like, who asks the bloody audience of a ‘theological’ to solve the bloody plot? – But as the dream shifts, it’s always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere spectator but the central player, the star …. yes, yes, he’s not just playing the archangel but also him, the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, 52 coming up the mountain when he comes.

‘P.o.v.’ (here rendered as an exclamation, ‘pee oh vee’) is filmic jargon for ‘point of view’, meant, as it seems, to suggest Gibreel’s hallucinatory view of things. In this light, Gibreel’s name acquires 52

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 108 (Rushdie’s italics).

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new filmic significances itself (since it contains the word ‘reel’). At the same time, the spelling suggests a rendering of its oral, colloquial nature, and thus arrests the moment of performance in the body of the written text. This is a way of pointing out the subversive nature of the text, which, in its depth, says more than it appears to be saying and points to a necessary understanding of multiplicity that is the focus of the whole novel. It can also be argued that the same focus on multiplicity is highlighted by the last words of the quote make reference to the American popular song ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes’. Like the ‘Paper Moon’ song in the RSC production of Midnight’s Children, this mixture of hallucination and makebelieve in the vision of Archangel Gibreel (the double of Gibreel the actor) is one more ironic comment on the make-believe nature of his revelation. This is an important function of the performativity of the text. Jacques Derrida comments on the similarity of fiction and laws as regards structural construction: The rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of ‘nonfiction standard discourse’ and its fictional ‘parasites’, are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional. Not that I assimilate the different regimes of fiction, not that I consider laws, constitutions, the declaration of the rights of man, grammar, or the penal code the same as novels. I only want to recall that they are not ‘natural realities’ and that they depend upon the same structural power that allows novelesque fictions or mendacious inventions and the like to take place. This is one of the reasons why literature and the study of literature have much to teach us about right and law.53

J. Hillis Miller uses this particular point made by Derrida to support his own argument in Speech Acts in Literature about ‘the role of literary study in the investigation of ethical and political commitment, the role of “speech acts in literature”’.54 If, to Hillis Miller, all 53

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988, 133-34, quoted by Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, 63-64. 54 Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, 64.

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literature is performative, so is any discourse that takes shape in language. Derrida’s argument about legal discourses can be extended to religious ones, which, at least in some cases, are also invested with the value of law. The more so is the case with Islam and its unquestionable emphasis on the law. The central dance scene in Rushdie’s short story ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ – in which ‘Movement is all’55 – can be read as a metaphor of that demonic subversion of the law, of whatever nature it may be, through movement, which nomadic texts endeavour to express. The close readings in the following chapters will set out to show that the novels discussed in this study use performance and performativity to construct an alternative discourse, which can express a surface meaning and its subversion at the same time. This is done through a performative use of language that can accommodate double meaning: a dynamic text with a mask that comes on and off, thus allowing a higher degree of polysemy. Towards nomadic texts? Recent, more dynamic representations of identity caused by reconceptualizations of exile as a nomadic condition have triggered an interest in a dynamic refashioning of textuality. The selection of contemporary Indian fiction in English discussed in this study provides examples of how this happens, as I began to show in my Introduction by mentioning the distinction drawn by Deleuze and Guattari between the migrant and the nomad. Here I shall take the discussion one step further in order to examine the impact of this refiguration of identity on the making of the texts. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (a horizontally spreading structure, opposed to the verticality of trees which stand for chronological evolution), it can be argued that the kind of contemporary narrative discussed in the previous subsection – which incorporates speech through borrowing from the tradition of Indian oral storytelling – is an open, non-totalizing whole, whose every node can be connected to any other. Its component narratives are not fixed; they are proliferating ‘lines of flight’, as Deleuze and Guattari would call them: ‘There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those 55

Rushdie, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, 124.

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found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines.’ These lines of flight, like ‘nerve fibers’56 responsible for supporting a structure and pumping life into it resemble the traditional Indian model of numberless interlocking narratives that continuously grow from each other. In Indian culture, this dynamic pattern is well established through storytelling. The foundation narratives, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are a background source of a storytelling tradition considered to provide a complete summary of all potential human experiences. Such dynamic storytelling is at home in Hindu culture, where multiplicity is a central principle: Hindu mythology is essentially a Trinitarian system that branches into the many stories of hundreds of gods. As Yarrow points out, the origin status of the foundation epics implies that, as they are reputed to contain everything, most Indian performances (hence most stories) are assumed to originate in it.57 But, more importantly, the epics provide a generative model that contains the seeds of numberless potential ongoing narratives: ‘This is the realm of archetypal narrative, of narrative and narrating as the story of stories, the articulation of how we make sense and of the ways in which we produce variants of sense.’ Yarrow links this to performance and shows that this generative model is capable, in its inherent dynamism, of producing a ‘co-existence and coherence of levels, modes, dynamics’ more successfully than ‘linear (written) form’ can.58 This dynamism was developed over long centuries of practice in the Indian tradition, from the Kathasaritsagara, the classical collection of the ‘ocean of stories’. In it, stories operate dynamically, like lines of flight whose point is not to get somewhere, but to keep the process going. Through performativity, which accommodates oral storytelling in the written novel form through the reality-creating capacity of language, and through the use of performance techniques, a transition is made between a migrant understanding of identity and a nomadic one. This traditional dynamic pattern of storytelling is appropriated by contemporary Indian fiction in English for the purpose of its main 56

See John Lechte, ‘Rhizome’, in Key Contemporary Concepts: From Abjection to Zeno’s Paradox, London: Sage, 2003. 57 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 36. 58 Ibid., 42.

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topics, which require such dynamism. If, among the four examples this study examines, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is probably the text that exemplifies the coexistence of performance and performativity most completely, Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain is the most significant nomadic text. Its nomadism goes further than the level of the content and can be seen at work in the making of the text. The lines of flight drawn by storytelling reproduce a pattern of spiral return (which is always return with a difference). The protagonist of this nomadic trajectory is Abhay, the Indian student who has returned from America and now has to redefine his homeland through storytelling. Within the storytelling process he negotiates his nomadic self between America and India. The storytelling journey shared by Sanjay and Abhay brings together European and Oriental stories within a continuum of interlocking narrative threads. These stories complement one another in a complex series of patterns of similarities and differences experienced in initiation journeys. At the end of the novel, even though both characters fail, what is left of their efforts is the web of stories, stretching across continents and centuries, in a never-ending ritual of storytelling. This ritual is stronger than people, since its dynamic nature spells out the meanings of life and death beyond the characters’ individualities. The main topic of the novel is storytelling itself, which – given Chandra’s self-consciousness as an author – is sprinkled with metafictional comments. These are made by important Hindu gods: Hanuman – the god of power and strength, the rescuer figure in the Ramayana, Ganesha, the patron of poets, the elephantheaded god who wrote down the Mahabharata as dictated by Vyasa (with whom Rushdie’s Saleem identifies), and Yama, the god of death. The fluidity of identities, drawing on the Indian belief in reincarnation, is staged within this continuous storytelling process, in which a multitude of Scheherazades engage. Yet in the end the inevitable truth of death asserts itself. All that is left of people, Chandra implies, is their stories. This emphasis on the journey rather than the fixed points on it results in a strategy of escaping the binary motherland/otherland opposition in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. This is not the case to the same extent in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, which are importantly stories of migration, nor is it in The God of Small Things,

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where the characters are aware of the unsurmountable distinctions between the former colony and the centre of the empire (see the Ipe family’s Anglophilia and Chacko’s failure to save his marriage with an Englishwoman to whom he continuously feels he can never measure up). In Red Earth and Pouring Rain, however, the spiral storytelling pattern is the main tool through which these sets of dichotomies are overcome. Stories grow from the frame narrative, complicating its linearity into a whole network in which narratives and images ‘give birth to other stories’59 through a dialogue with that outside of the text that, in this case, is the tradition of oral storytelling. Chandra comments on the importance of orality and the active role of the audience in the storytelling process in the following terms: I think for me it’s really illuminating to see how people use stories. And what I mean by that is that a story I tell today is similar, but not necessarily the same thing that my grandfather was telling, you know. Here is this narrative coming back to me through somebody else’s interpretation. I guess it’s narcissistic in some sense, but it’s very engaging. The monkey in Red Earth realises that he’s telling his story, but it changes as it goes on and then you’ll have to let it go. I think it’s a great pleasure to me in hearing what people have to say. Sometimes it’s strange, because story connects back to history. I got letters from several descendants of James Skinner. And that was amazing because, you know, people who were part of the story that I was telling wrote to me, that’s pretty moving.60

Chandra emphasizes the continuity of the storytelling process, as well as the thin line separating the reality of the story that is being told from the reality ‘out there’. His description of the overlap between stories, histories and the audience’s input, this participation of the whole world in the making of a story, is made possible by a blurring of boundaries and a flexibility characteristic of nomadic thinking. In her work Nomadic Subjects, which creates a cartography of the nomadic, particularly female self in terms derived and expanded from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, Rosi Braidotti defines nomadism as 59

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 11. Vikram Chandra, ‘“Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XL/2 (June 2005), 13. 60

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‘not fluidity without borders but rather an acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries’.61 Movement in space, across spatial and identity borders, triggers therefore the fluidity of those borders and ensures the process of continuous becoming of the self that characterizes contemporaneity. The process of redefining identity as a matter of becoming through figurations and mappings within changing boundaries determines changes in the body, as the title of Braidotti’s book Metamorphoses suggests. The nomad thinks through the body, but the body keeps changing. The Ovidian suggestions of the title also bring us back to Rushdie’s ‘Firebird’s Nest’, where change of place and culture projects through changes in the body. As it consists of transformations in the body and experimentations with masks or identity hypostases, nomadism is a form of performance. Braidotti defines nomadism as ‘vertiginous progression toward deconstructing identity; molecularization of the self’.62 Its performative nature also reflects in a plural text that allows for a dynamic unsettling of meaning, of the kind signalled by Barthes. Nomadic texts display what we could call a nomadic textuality, a ‘situated form of heterogeneity’ characterized by the fact that ‘each text seems to grow from another’.63 Braidotti sees this multiplicity as characteristic particularly of women’s writing and of what women represent in culture. Hence she uses the female dimension as emblematic for an intellectual attitude connected to subversion, movement and change. This subversive positioning of the female presence also characterizes a certain dimension of Hindu culture, precisely because of that principle of multiplicity I highlighted. Traditionally, women do not hold a strong position in Hinduism and they virtually have no tradition in the theatre.64 Yet Yarrow makes an observation on Indian culture which is similar to Braidotti’s on the culture of the new millennium: he notices the strong emergence of women in 61

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 36. 62 Ibid., 16. 63 Ibid., 17. 64 There is, however, a Hindu dance tradition that involves women – devadasis, sometimes called temple prostitutes. They gained respectability in the early twentieth century.

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contemporary Indian theatre, despite their complete absence in traditional forms where female parts were interpreted by male actors. This was due to an understanding of the female as representing ‘the realm of the flowing, the uncontrollable, that which escapes boundaries’.65 Braidotti relies on similar assumptions of the complexity and subversive nature of the female presence in culture when she notices that the feminist movement, which ‘has provided stability amid changing conditions and shifting contexts’, can be considered a telling example of intellectual nomadism.66 In theorizing a discursive/textual nomadism that can better express the ‘molecularization of the self’ which she sees as characteristic of the new millennium, Braidotti extends this metaphor of the fluid female continuum beyond the boundaries of the feminist movement per se and shows that it provides ways to reflect what she calls ‘my desire for nomadism, that is to say, my desire to suspend all attachment to established discourses’.67 From the novels discussed in this study – which all explore various kinds of performance in order to break free from established discourses, the discourses of the law (of whatever kind this law may be) – the one that comes closest to the use of a subversive female cultural and discursive presence is Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Roy uses a writing technique similar to the French project of écriture feminine in order to escape patriarchal discourses responsible for the creation of categories of exclusion such as gender, caste and class. If Rushdie pushes the boundaries of storytelling into the realm of the physical through metamorphosis in Midnight’s Children and especially in The Satanic Verses, Chandra’s text is above all nomadic. However, all these alternative modes of writing – meant to record meaning in movement rather than stasis – represent various forms of performance in language, as this study will indicate.

65

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 92. Ibid., 18. 67 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 18. 66

CHAPTER TWO CHANGES AND CHALLENGES IN THE NOVEL FORM: FROM MYTH TO PERFORMANCE TO NOMADIC TEXTUALITY

One of the most important implications of writing in English by writers who originally come from a different linguistic background – in this case, one of the Indian languages – is its impact on the novel genre. This chapter will be dedicated to a theoretical discussion of this impact, while in the following chapters I will further explore it in relation to individual works. The challenges faced by the novel in the particular case of contemporary Indian fiction in English also need to be positioned within the wider context of traditional definitions of the novel in its original European space and their reception by contemporary Indian authors. This imported genre meets the already established South Asian epic tradition, which interacts with the novel form and with the English language in the context of Indian literature to appropriate and enrich the genre. The novel as a genre: tradition and challenges In The Rise of the Novel, a standard text on the novel genre, Ian Watt locates the emergence of the novel somewhere in the early eighteenth century and in tight connection with realism. The moment when the term ‘novel’ starts to be used in opposition to ‘the prose fiction of the past, … that of Greece, for example, or that of the Middle Ages, or of seventeenth-century France’,1 realism is identified as ‘the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the early eighteenthcentury novelists from previous fiction’.2 But then the real debate starts as Watt admits that definitions of realism vary widely from the 1

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), London: Pimlico, 2000, 9. 2 Ibid., 10.

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very beginning. Even though the issues are technical rather than epistemological – the novel deals with ‘all varieties of human experience’, so its ‘realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’– the actual problem is that of the ‘correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates’.3 Watt shows that certain characteristics of the novel remained in place throughout its development – such as its replacement of the ‘universals of classicism’ with concrete stories about individual people, bearing individual, realistic names, who discover the world through their senses; its time-awareness which replaced earlier timeless stories or artificial conventions such as the unity of time in ancient tragedy; its aim to give authentic accounts of the actual experiences of the individuals; its referential use of language etc.4 Watt admits that previous narratives had also attempted to be truthful to life, but the ‘mutation’ brought about by the novel form as practised by Defoe and Richardson consists of a major foregrounding of what he calls ‘formal realism’, defined as ‘the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in any other literary forms’. Watt insists on the fact that, at the specific historical moment when it appeared, formal realism met the demands of and was accessible to a large audience, which accounts for its development. However, as regards the claim to truth, he admits that formal realism is a mere convention, which is not necessarily either more or less truthful than previous fictions. He even holds this conventional nature responsible for what he calls ‘the rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works which is current today’5 and implies that subsequent formal modifications in the novel form were due to attempts on the part of the novelists to meet this distaste.

3

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 11-30. 5 Ibid., 32. 4

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The main problem of realism is that, despite its ambition to hold the mirror up to reality, it is as conventional as other forms that do not make the same claim. In the light of Watt’s argument that realism cannot be divorced from the novel form, the question is whether the crisis of realism is also a crisis of the novel. Novels, however, have continued to be written even after the turn of the twentieth century, when realism massively gave way to alternatives. Modernist and postmodernist debates over the nature of reality and the ways in which novels have challenged the traditional requirement of holding the mirror up to life have contributed to great changes in the novel form. The novel has generally moved from the assumed objectivity of formal realism to faithfully rendering the author’s subjective perceptions.6 More recently, theorists of the novel such as Margaret Anne Doody go as far as to widen the boundaries of the genre and claim that the novel is by no means a product of the development of a bourgeois society in eighteenth-century Europe (or rather Britain), but ‘has a continuous history of about two thousand years’.7 Doody’s title, which uses the concept of ‘the true story’ – central to fictional realism – ironically, affirms a critical position 6

An example could be Virginia Woolf’s 1925 radical redefinition of life as a subjective ‘luminous halo’, opposed to a traditional neatly arranged ‘objective’ ‘series of gig lamps’ (‘Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’) in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, one of the texts in which she introduced the stream of consciousness technique and thus aimed to abolish the rule of the chronological plot in fiction (Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader, London: Hogarth, 1925, 189). An even further departure from realism, supplemented by self-irony and an emphasis on the fact that what the novel says should not be believed is provided by endless examples of postmodern selfreflective fiction. An example of how this happens could be Umberto Eco’s comment in ‘Postscript to the Name of the Rose’: ‘I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence’ (Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, London: Secker and Warburg, 1989, 67). 7 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996), New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997, xvii.

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which maintains that narratives written in the classical age which focused on individuals placed in well-determined temporal frames were also novels. Consequently, Doody, unlike Watt, draws no real distinction between the novel and the epic or the medieval romance as she claims that the continuities between these forms are more relevant to the definition of a genre than the differences. The emergence of such radical revisions of what used to constitute commonly held beliefs on one of the most popular literary genres could be related to the fact that the boundaries of this genre have been continuously widening up lately. This got to the point where literary works placed in ‘Fiction’ sections in bookshops meet with questions as to whether they have a real claim to being called novels or not. Vikram Chandra has such a story to tell about the early reception of Red Earth and Pouring Rain: Before Red Earth was published, I was in Delhi and my editor there took me to a party, it was somebody else’s book release, and a guy who was the editor of a very powerful literary newspaper in India walked up to me carrying a copy of Red Earth – he was the first person in my life who did this and that was my first book – you know, he walked up to me with Red Earth in his hand and he said ‘I’ve been reading this, but is this a novel?’, because, to him, it didn’t do what a novel should have done.8

The difficulty in deciding whether Red Earth is or is not a novel comes from its intricate structure, its many digressions and stories within stories that grow from each other endlessly, whilst the plot is secondary. Chandra, a self-conscious author who studied creative writing with John Barth and Donald Barthelme, is very interested in theoretical and practical debates around the novel form. Even though he admits the eighteenth-century European origin of the novel, he also believes that the common assumption that the novel is ‘about the individual, the Western individual, that very sort of eighteenth-/nineteenth-century post-Enlightenment individual’9 should be challenged. He opens up a 8

Vikram Chandra, ‘“Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XL/2 (June 2005), 8. 9 Ibid., 7.

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different perspective on the novel form and the traditional rule that it should be true to life by maintaining that a vivid debate around reality should prevail over claims regarding the form in which this should be done: ‘it seems to me that if you can’t write a novel about India then you should write something else, which would be one of the possible solutions to a problem that I don’t think really exists: you can use these models which have existed for some time to see what happens if you put them in the modern context, as people always do.’ What this ‘something else’ should be is ultimately a matter of personal choice. Chandra chooses to draw on the Indian oral storytelling tradition and imagines the synchronic spread of many narratives within the same horizontal level of potential enactments, as well as the dialogue between the storyteller and his audience, in a way that is very powerful in contemporary culture: through the Internet. He thus reinterprets the traditional Hindu belief that the world is maya by stating that ‘reality is just virtual reality on infinite bandwidth’.10 He also recreates the storytelling dialogue, with the teller and the listeners interacting in praesentia, by making his email address public and thus welcoming feedback from his readers. In this he reinstates the importance of speech through writing. As I will show in Chapter Ten, the incorporation of oral stories into the written discourse, from which they are rendered back through speech, is a central narrative strategy in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Indian alternatives to the novel form Contemporary Indian novelists are arguably among the most successful practitioners of the genre nowadays. They are positioned on the common ground between the European tradition of the novel – with its relatively short history in India, where it is considered one of the imports brought into the country by the British rule – and the Asian narrative tradition. As K. Ayyappa Paniker shows, this tradition encompasses the foundation epics (most importantly the Ramayana and the Mahabharata), which clash with the novel tradition in many ways. One of the most obvious is the fact that the sense of space in the epics prevails over the sense of time:

10

Ibid., 8.

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Performance and Performativity The Mahabharata, the puranas, the Jatakas and the tales collected in Kathasaritsagara, Vetalapan-cavimsati, etc., may be said to ignore the dimension of time in preference to that of space. This is not so much because kingdoms and landscapes are involved in the narrative, but because even time is treated in terms of space. In Ramayana, for instance, the journey of Rama from Ayodhya to Lanka, through the banks of the Ganga, the Dandaka forest, the Janapada, Kishkindha etc. is primarily marked by movement across space, although nominally a passage of fourteen years is also to be accounted for with a certain degree of indifference.11

Paniker shows that the main Indian foundation narratives are, by virtue of this emphasis on space rather than time, significantly about initiation journeys. The exemplary character of these journeys is projected into some sort of mythical universe where time does not matter, but space is invested with an important symbolism: The sense of place in Mahabharata is more acute than the sense of time. The proverbial saying is that ‘time is endless and the earth is vast.’ The vastness of the earth is more fully accounted than the endlessness of time. Time is endless in the sense that everything has to be evaluated in terms of eternity, or time outside time. This is not only the sense of time in Asia, but also the world’s idea of the Asian sense of time. The battle of Kurukshetra could be located in any century, for the question of right and wrong is of all time; but Hastinapur is Hastinapur, and Indraprastha is and has to be Indraprastha. Like time in a fairy tale, events always take place ‘once upon a time’. But the locale is more specific, and is not meant to be tampered with.12

This ‘flexible understanding of chronology’, as the author puts it, means that, even though the historical dimension cannot be completely dismissed (especially as far as the impact of British colonisation is concerned), it is traditionally measured against a mythical eternity – what Eliade calls illud tempus opposed to linear historicity, an archetypal dimension of time capable of regenerating itself, situated at the beginning, but also at the end of all historical

11

K. Ayyappa Paniker, ‘The Asian Narrative Tradition’, Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Kollam, Kerala, India, VII/2 (July-December 1999), 30. 12 Ibid., 31.

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evolution.13 Such a cyclical temporal pattern which excludes evolution would match Paniker’s spatial view of the epic: since temporal evolution is not an issue, nor is plot development one. Instead, the epics develop a digressive structure that gives more value to the act of pondering on the significance of the present moment, which prevails over temporal evolution. This comes in contrast with the European novel form, which is expected to be very precisely situated in a particular historical time and place. Views held by people like Eliade and Paniker, however, whilst verifiable with reference to the epics, need to be nuanced when it comes to more recent narrative genres that have developed in India. Chandra draws attention to the fact that the historical dimension, even though secondary in the epics, is not disregarded in all Indian narratives, especially since the experience of the British domination brought about a Western concept of linear history. Chandra expresses concern towards the prejudiced belief that there is no ‘realist’ approach to life in India and it needs to be invented as a prerequisite of modern progress: But people will insist on it. Because I think at the end of postEnlightenment, in the postcolonial universe, you’re very shaky about your connections to reality, because you’ve been told – and it’s funny because within the Indian universe this sounds like an accusation against India – that we have no connection to reality, that we are fuzzy-thinking and emotional … 14

This attempt to prove the Indian writers’ ability to write realist fiction in order to counteract the colonial prejudice about the Orient’s irrationality is an endeavour akin to Rushdie’s ‘writing back to the centre’. It involves engaging in a cultural dialogue with the former metropolis that is meant to take place in equal terms, yet preserve the cultural specificity of each. One of the responses consists of Indian versions of realism, practised not only in fiction – Rohinton Mistry would be one exquisite example – but also in the theatre (Ralph 13 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), trans. Willard R. Trask, New York: Pantheon, 1965, 34. 14 Vikram Chandra, ‘“Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, 13.

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Yarrow mentions Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, G.P. Deshpande and others as practitioners of a kind of ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ theatre of a realist nature, which uses ‘western’ models of dialogue and action15). Yet reality does not always necessarily mean realism. In an interview with Chandra, Andrew Teverson notices that Chandra’s writing has ‘a very real context’, which in his novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain consists of the actual historical events on which the story is based. As a film student at Columbia University, Chandra discovered in the University library a biography of the eighteenthcentury Anglo-Indian soldier Captain James ‘Sikander’ Skinner and, fascinated by it, he left film studies to write this novel. Whilst filmic imagery is present in the novel, thus doing justice to Chandra’s other vocation – an element Chandra shares with Rushdie as a Bombay author – realism, on the contrary, is not the most immediate feature the reader notices in this intricate storytelling web, whose characters are mortals, animals and gods who mix in a most natural way. Chandra’s claim to realism invites a multiple set of redefinitions: of reality, of realism and of the novel itself. As the author puts it: Certainly, it is mad life that hurts us into poetry. And thank the gods for that. But, one should remember that even that first experience, that hurt, is a fiction. What we experience as the ‘real’ is a patchwork of reconstructions, suppositions and plain guesswork, a lot of it based on prior experience and conditioning. The problem – or exciting puzzle – for the artist is how to recreate the feeling of that fluid dream on paper, or canvas, or in sound. There was a moment when science, or some of its early devotees, believed that transparent observation was possible, and from that early belief came the convention called ‘Realism’. The problems with this convention soon became clear, and it’s quite odd to me that some people, including some Indian writers and critics, argue that Realism is the only way to represent the real. It seems to me that Realism is no more real than any other mode of representation, and often is less so. A mere listing of physical detail says exactly nothing about that fluid dream, about what it feels like to be alive. Often, a Gothic tale, or a magic-realist one, or a science16 fiction fantasy, catches that vivid dream with precision and acuity. 15 16

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 59. Chandra, in Teverson, ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’, 5.

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Here Chandra draws attention to the fact that reality can be depicted credibly in ways that are not technically realist. He also points out the fictional nature of history, which, projected against the background of Indian culture, adds itself to the understanding of reality as maya and lila, illusion and playfulness. In fact, his personal writing philosophy relies on these concepts and reconciles them with the present of his writing through an analogy with computer games, which also create alternative realities. In this sense, he adopts a definition of reality coming from a computer game website which he admits as a good description of his own approach to fiction-writing: ‘What is reality other than virtual reality on infinite bandwidth?’17 In the interview with Andrew Teverson, Chandra points to a problem inherent in the very concept of realism: since reality is a ‘fluid dream’ which is very difficult to know objectively, mimetic representations inevitably run the risk of being inaccurate. Instead, he argues in favour of alternative, non-realist ways of telling stories, whose claim to truth (very important in realism) comes second to their capacity to give a sense of the ‘fluid dream’ of reality. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain, in fact, Sanjay engages in a Scheherazade-like act of storytelling for survival required by the Hindu god of death Yama and promises to tell his audience ‘The Big Indian Lie’.18 The claim to truth works differently in Hindu India as compared to the European tradition of the novel form. This Hindu narrative tradition operates on three different levels. First, there are the written texts, such as the foundation epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – which account for what is traditionally believed to represent the historical beginnings of the race. Second, there are an impressive number of written collections of stories that go back a long time and circulate across cultures. Many of them – Kathasaritsagara, Panchatantra and the Puranas – are connected to The Arabian Nights, which draws most of its stories from Persia and India. Third, there is the Indian tradition of oral storytelling which continuously reinterprets all this. Whilst credibility is a crucial issue, usually verifiable by checking the presence of certain events in the Ramayana or the

17

Chandra, ‘“Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, 6. 18 Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 17.

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Mahabharata – ‘if it has happened, it’s there, they say’19 – it very often has no connection to real historical events. In fact, lies are sometimes more credible than the truth. Rushdie draws on this in a 1985 interview with Günter Grass significantly entitled ‘Fictions Are Lies That Tell the Truth’. He defines storytelling as being precisely the art of telling a good credible lie, a common practice in a tradition such as the Indian one, where most stories are an ‘Arabian Nights kind of stories’: … the kind of context in which I began to think was one in which it was accepted that stories should be untrue. You know, the idea that fiction should be a lie, that it should be a wonderful story. That horses and also carpets should fly was expected. And the belief was that by telling stories in that way, in that marvellous way, you could actually tell a kind of truth which you couldn’t tell in other ways.20

Rushdie discusses his position with respect to the tradition of European novel writing and its audience’s expectations. The discussion is a very interesting one as the two authors – who had been compared to each other in terms of their handling of reality21 – are symbolically representative of two different novel writing traditions: the European one and the emerging postcolonial one. Assuming the latter position, Rushdie responds to Grass’ definition of the act of writing as a filtering of the knowledge of the world through the artist’s sensibility by emphasising the pleasure of storytelling: Is it a question of telling stories, then? Because it seems to me that the reason, the thing that made me become a writer was this: a desire simply to tell stories. I grew up in a literary tradition. That’s to say that the kind of stories I was told as a child, by and large, were 19

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 43. Salman Rushdie, ‘Fictions Are Lies That Tell the Truth: Salman Rushdie and Günter Grass: In Conversation’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, 75. (Originally published in The Listener, 27 June 1985, 14-15.) 21 Patricia Merivale, for example, analyses the influence of Grass’ magic realism on Rushdie and the similarities between Oskar and Saleem resulting from this in ‘Saleem fathered by Oskar: Midnight's Children, Magic realism, and The Tin Drum’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995, 329-46. 20

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Arabian Nights kind of stories. It was those sort of fairytales. But beyond that, the kind of context in which I began to think was one in which it was accepted that stories should be untrue. You know, the idea that fiction should be a lie, that it should be a wonderful story. That horses and also carpets should fly was expected. And the belief was that by telling stories in that way, in that marvellous way, you could actually tell a kind of truth which you couldn’t tell in other ways. And so I grew up assuming, again, that that was the normal way of telling stories, and found myself struggling when I began to write seriously in the context of a literature which had for a long time formed a sort of opposite view about what a novel was. That’s to say, a novel should be mimetic, it should imitate the world, obey the rules of naturalism or of social realism. So I find myself constantly struggling with the fact that my assumptions are opposite to the assumptions of many people in the West, for whom fantasy or the use of the imagination is exceptional. For me it seems to be normative.22

Indebted as he may be to the Indian tradition – and, indeed, to his father, who created for him a world of ‘many fairy-tales’23 – Rushdie, however, makes a point of stating in Haroun and the Sea of Stories that this was not the only source of his storytelling urge, his ‘gift of the gab’.24 In the first essay of his 2002 volume of essays, Step Across This Line, entitled ‘Out of Kansas’, Rushdie talks about his first short story, called ‘Over the Rainbow’, written in Bombay when he was ten. The story was inspired by The Wizard of Oz, which Rushdie calls ‘my very first literary influence’.25 Step Across This Line announces an urge to transcend the limits and explore the beyond. One cannot fail to connect this to Rushdie’s own description of his mission as a writer whose fate is to be uncomfortable: he believes it is the job of the intellectual to speak against power, rather than to be on one side or another.26 ‘Out of Kansas’, with its celebration of storytelling, is, no doubt, an appropriate start to a collection of essays with this title.

22

Rushdie, ‘Fictions Are Lies That Tell the Truth’, 75. Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002 (2002), London: Vintage, 2003, 3. 24 Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, London: Viking, 1999. 25 Rushdie, Step Across This Line, 3. 26 Salman Rushdie, Interview with Alastair Niven, Barbican Theatre, 25 January 2003. 23

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Like Chandra, Rushdie also addresses the crisis of the novel in terms which open it up to the input of new, alternative, non-European, non-novelistic material of the kind used by contemporary Indian authors. However, for Rushdie this employment of non-linear narrative patterns, of storytelling modes alternative to the Western novel form, does not imply that most of his novels escape the rules of the genre. In fact, again like Chandra, he believes that the novel-genre should be redefined. In the same volume of essays, Step Across This Line, he strongly defends the novel genre against George Steiner’s proclamation of its death: There is, in my view, no crisis in the art of the novel. The novel is precisely that ‘hybrid form’ for which Prof. Steiner yearns. It is part social enquiry, part fantasy, part confessional. It crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries.27

Moreover, in the issue of The New Yorker of 23 and 30 June 1997, Rushdie claims the novel form for Indian writing. He celebrates the hybridity of the contemporary Indian novel, its capacity for allinclusiveness and its prolific use of storytelling. In an interview with Alastair Niven which took place at the Barbican Theatre on 25 January 2003, as part of the series of events organized around the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie acknowledged the importance of oral storytelling as his main source of inspiration. The most striking feature of these stories is the secondary role of the plot. As opposed to the lesson given by the caterpillar to Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – good storytelling depends on the steady pursuit of its plot – Rushdie comments that ... in India this is precisely what the Indian oral storyteller does not do. He makes pauses, plays music, four or five different stories are going on at the same time, like Chinese boxes, inside stories. This makes the story more enjoyable. If the ordinary storyteller fails to hold an audience, he knows that he is lost. So his purpose is to keep the

27

Salman Rushdie, ‘In Defense of the Novel: Yet Again’, in Step Across This Line, 58.

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audience there, interested. You can’t do this in written form just as you do it orally, but you can learn from it.28

Here Rushdie acknowledges the importance of the tradition he is coming from, but also the disparity between oral and written forms, which he bridges by imitation. The tension between the written novel form and the rhythms and different plot structure and emphasis of the Indian oral storytelling tradition is an important factor which alters the conventions of the novel genre. In his writing (especially in Haroun and the Sea of Stories) Rushdie takes on board conventions of the oral, which mix with the conventions of the written, compelling the reader to work out the tension between them and make decisions during the reading process. Arundhati Roy also employs orality in her mixture of English with words from the local Indian language (in her case Malayalam) and uses the language of children and poetic language. The structure of The God of Small Things is also double: on one level chronology is obeyed and the story is conventional and acknowledges the social status quo; on the other, digressive, level, the story is retold from a different perspective, which changes the emphasis of the plot. Roy explores the circularity of time in Indian storytelling by resuming previously narrated moments in a spiral movement of repetition with a difference. It is only at the end of the novel that the reader can work out the chronological order of events and make full sense of the plot. The conclusion of the novel does not follow logically from the sequence of events, but from the digressions. In doing this, Roy compares the act of writing to that of designing a building – with the keen awareness of structure an architect would show: To me the architecture of the book is something I worked very hard at. It was like designing a building … the use of time, the repetition of words and ideas and feelings. It was really a search for coherence – design coherence – in the way that every last detail of a building – its doors and windows, its structural components – have, or at least ought to have, an aesthetic, stylistic integrity, a clear indication that they belong to each other, as must a book. I designed it.29 28

Rushdie, Interview with Alastair Niven. Arundhati Roy, in ‘An interview with Arundhati Roy’ by Taisha Abraham, ARIEL XXIX/1 (January 1998), 90-91. 29

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This passage, which sounds strikingly similar to Henry James’ ‘house of fiction’ metaphor,30 indicates Roy’s strong belief in the importance of structure. Despite her interest in writing individual, people-oriented ‘small’ stories rather than stories of epic proportions about India,31 Roy is clearly aware both of the tradition of the ‘well-written’ novel and of the well-built solid system of the Indian epics. But she is also faithful to the principle expressed by the epigraph from John Berger – ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one’ – which points to the fact that good stories are there for retelling. She therefore retells her own story in the novel and thus, through an ingenious use of written and oral storytelling strategies, puts forth a very strong social message, which I shall discuss in my analysis of the novel. Orality is present in Chandra’s writing in an even more openly dramatized way: the events in the novel are framed in an Arabian Nights-like narrative in which the telling of the stories is conditioned by the assumed physical presence of an audience who contributes to it, gives immediate feedback and may sometimes change the course of the story. I shall further explore how this affects the way in which the textuality of the novels is performed in Chapter Eleven of this book. The prevalence of digression over linear plot in traditional Indian narratives gives time a special, different quality. Digression opens up the performative potential of storytelling. It stops the narrative flow in order to make the listener ponder on the significance of events or relate the story to other stories. This is also how the theatre operates: every performance exists historically among many others, but it is also unique and only happens as such in the present. Similarly, traditional storytelling may repeat the same story every time, but the quality of each present enactment is different and the digressions and parallels with other stories may also be different. In order to further explore the way in which contemporary Indian fiction in English negotiates its 30

‘The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will’ (Henry James, Preface to Portrait of a Lady [1881], London: Penguin, 1986, 45-46). 31 ‘Eventually for me, The God of Small Things is not a book specifically about “our culture”, it’s a book about human nature’ (Roy in Abraham, ‘An interview with Arundhati Roy’, 91).

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position between novel-writing and the oral storytelling tradition I shall now look at the way in which storytelling draws on its main source, myth, and how this background knowledge is transmitted into the present. Mythical sources of storytelling and of the novel ‘There is no more absorbing story than that of the discovery and interpretation of India by Western consciousness’, Mircea Eliade says at the beginning of his book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom.32 For Eliade, this interest originates in the fact that experiments with various aspects of Indian culture, as revealed to European scholars, ‘answered to the most pressing needs of Western culture’.33 As he says this at the end of the Sixties, very much in the line of an archetypal, essentialist approach to religions, Eliade is contemporary with – even though actually opposed to – the beginnings of postmodernism. Postmodernism attacks essentialist thinking even in the case of rewritings of stories with archetypal value. Yet it is actually as fond of such stories – even though in different ways – as the trend in the history of religions represented by Eliade is. An example of this revival of the interest for traditional – and in this case also non-European – storytelling can be seen in the work of John Barth, who greatly inspired Chandra. Barth rewrote the frame narrative of The Arabian Nights in the first story of his tripartite volume Chimera, entitled ‘Dunyazadiad’34. In it, he challenged the stability of the original through experimental devices. The most effective is probably that of the author-figure in the text, a projection of Barth himself co-operating with distressed Scheherazade who has run out of inspiration. The traditional storytelling dialogue in Arabian Nights is relativized through this author-figure’s performance as Scheherazade, the storyteller. The actual character Scheherazade is left on the surface of the storytelling act, which she merely delivers, but does not actually create. At the same time, the stories she tells Shahryar masquerade as the original stories of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights. Her uninhibited American English language of the 32 Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969, xiii. 33 Ibid., xiv. 34 John Barth, Chimera, New York: Random House, 1972.

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early Seventies replaces the original, as indicated by the quotation from the Quran – an emblem of the authority of the Arabic original, which opens The Arabian Nights. As the title suggests, the narrator of the frame story is a witness character, Dunyazad, Scheherazade’s sister, whose original marginality in The Arabian Nights is here redeemed as the main point of view. This retelling of a story with mythical status (not very far from Scheherazade’s position of the postcolonial narrator, mentioned in my Introduction in relation to Saleem Sinai35) is once removed from the eternal repetition of similar archetypes proposed by Eliade. The reinterpretations of myth in contemporary Indian fiction in English therefore emerge in a favourable worldwide context. The link between contemporary narrative and myth is provided by the performance of character and the performativity of language. Together, in rewriting myth, they perform a double function: on the one hand, myth is reinstated through performative language, which triggers reality into being; on the other hand, through performance, essentialism is avoided (since, on stage, the same production is never the same twice). This is true of all performance; however, Indian theatre represents a heightened version of this, given the wide mythical framework in which the whole universe is seen as performative. Contemporary Indian writing breathes new life into the novel genre through performances of Indian traditional stories which are brought into the present. In this tradition, the truthfulness of a story is not measured, as in the European realist novel, against some kind of ‘objective’ reality, but in terms of their correspondence with or mirroring of episodes in the epics. In the Hindu background, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are believed to be itihasa (‘thus it was’).36 Their claim to truth and their value as exemplary narratives would never be questioned by anybody. The Arabian Nights does not claim the same foundational status as the epics do in this tradition. Yet its stories are equally popular in India (where many of them are believed to have originated) as minute pearls of Muslim wisdom and captivating storytelling. Somewhat 35

Introduction, 29. See Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 39, but also Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 28.

36

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paradoxically, they came back into the limelight in India at the time of the Raj, from Europe. There, the collection had been made famous by Antoine Galland’s first translation into French, from which the first translations into other European languages were derived.37 Ever since, the collection has been a kind of exotic emblem of the ‘East’, but also of the Orientalist attitudes of the ‘West’ towards it. In that respect it concurs with Kathasaritsagara, the five-part collection of the ‘Ocean of the Streams of Stories’, to which Rushdie alludes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a reference to the dynamic circulation of popular stories, which never disappear. In the Indian context, storytelling is the medium through which myth survives; hence, the quality of time in all stories is conditioned by this spiral recycling of material coming from the space of myth, with which storytelling audiences come in contact very often. As a result, traditional India lacks the contrast between historical chronology and the atemporality of myth that is felt in the Western background. Yet there are important connections between myth and various forms of storytelling in the Western tradition as well. Frank Kermode discusses the evolution of the novel form against a background of mythical thinking and particularly stresses the different quality of time. As he shows in The Sense of an Ending, Western perceptions of myth are characterized by an ‘apocalypticism’ which belongs to ‘rectilinear rather than cyclical views of the world’.38 This is importantly related to the structure of the Bible as ‘a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning (“In the beginning…”) and ends with a vision of the end (“Even so, come, Lord Jesus”); the first book is Genesis, the last Apocalypse.’39 Kermode makes a distinction between chronos (historical time) and kairos (significant time, time marked by an important event, such as the birth of Christ)40. It is between these two different temporal dimensions that the relationship 37 Galland published the Sindbad stories in French in 1701, then published Volumes I and II of Les Mille et une nuits in 1704 and then the other volumes, ending with the twelfth in 1717 (Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, London: Penguin, 1994, 16). The first translation into English was made by Jonathan Scott from Galland’s work and was published as Arabian Nights Entertainments in 1711 (ibid., 22). 38 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 5. 39 Ibid., 6. 40 Ibid., 45-47.

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between myths and fictions as varieties of the narrative genre is negotiated. In The Sense of an Ending, Kermode explores this relationship, seeing the opposition between myths and fictions in terms of different cognitive aims: Myth operates within the diagram of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus.41

Kermode’s view of myths as stable representations of the absolute and fictions as relative representations of everyday life focuses on Western culture. He uses the term ‘apocalyptic’ having the Bible in mind as a ‘familiar model of history’.42 In contrast, Margaret Anne Doody describes the novel as a much more impure, hybrid genre than it is usually thought to be. She traces its evolution back to the antiquity, when she shows that narratives dealt with the individual as well, and sees Kermode’s claim that the novel replaces mythical thinking in the West as rather excessive: ‘In twentieth-century criticism the Novel is seen as not only displacing but also replacing myth, or religious narrative, or rather religion – customarily, Christianity – itself. A book like Frank Kermode’s A Sense of an Ending (1969) is based on that assumption.’ 43 To Doody, myth and the novel are not narratives which turned into each other, but which have always coexisted and interacted. In a sense her view of the European novel comes close to Indian culture, where there is no significant distinction between myth and history as far as their claim to truth is concerned. As Yarrow points out, ‘Myth … can be thought of as a kind of historical narrative (in Indian tradition the epics are thought of as itihasas, which implies just this)’.44 What is important is 41

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 5-6. 43 Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 3. 44 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 99. 42

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that in both traditions there are negotiations between myths and other forms of narrative, which is what Chandra notices when he agrees with Doody’s theory of the novel.45 However, Hindu myth, more than European myth, is open to enactment in the present moment, as ‘the Vedas offer a consistent view of the performative structure of creative acts, and it is not surprising that this perception underpins epic literature and is transferred into theatre’.46 Thus the perception of kairoi in Indian culture is much more intense due to the performative quality of myth, which makes it ‘part of the fabric of everyday life’.47 In An Introduction to Hinduism Gavin Flood studies the origins of this performativity. He defines Hinduism as a religious practice rather than a religious belief, based on the law of dharma (moral duty):48 What a Hindu does is more important than what a Hindu believes. Hinduism is not credal. Adherence to dharma is therefore not an acceptance of certain beliefs, but the practice or performance of certain duties, which are defined in accordance with dharmic social stratification.49

Flood sees the origin of this in the concept of the sacred in Hinduism, in its being relational rather than substantive: There is nothing in Hinduism which is inherently sacred. The sacredness of time, objects or persons depends upon context and the boundaries between the sacred and the everyday are fluid. A ritual dance performer who is possessed by a god one day, mediating between the community and the divine, will the next day be simply human again …. The sacred in Hinduism is mediated through innumerable, changing forms which bear witness to a deeply rich, religious imagination, centred on mediation and transformation.50

45

Chandra, ‘Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth’, 8. Ibid., 38. 47 Ibid., 41. 48 Dharma, moral and religious duty, law, custom, righteousness (according to Margaret and James Stutley, A Dictionary of Hinduism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, 76). 49 Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 12. 50 Ibid., 9-10. 46

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Because of this relational understanding of the sacred, Hindu belief is performed in ritual. Gods are embodied by humans who try to understand them and learn about them. Transformation makes the connection between a human level and a transcendental one and also marks a superior stage in the process of acquiring knowledge. The rich and diverse Hindu polytheism is subordinated to the unifying authority of brahman (‘the essence of the cosmos, the absolute’51), or, sometimes, of a different supreme god. All the many other gods are local, detailed manifestations of this supreme universal spirit – hence they are embodiments of local knowledges and experiences. As Gavin Flood puts it, The term polytheism can be applied to Hinduism in so far as there is a multiplicity of divine forms, from pan-Hindu deities such as Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesha to deities in regional temples, such as Lord Jagannath at Puri, and deities in local village shrines. These deities are distinct and particular to their location; the goddess in a shrine in one village is distinct from the goddess in a different shrine. While most Hindus will regard these deities as distinct, many Hindus will also say that they are aspects or manifestations of a single, transcendent God. Some Hindus will identify this transcendent focus with a specific God, say Krishna or Shiva, and maintain that the other deities are lower manifestations of this supreme God. Other Hindus will say that all deities are aspects of an impersonal absolute and that deities of mythology and the icons in temples are windows into this ultimate reality. What is important is that the deities as icons in temples mediate between the human world and a divine or sacred reality and that the icon as deity might be seen as a ‘spiritualisation’ of matter.52

Whilst, as in most religious discourses, there is an understanding of the divine in terms of one supreme immutable essence, this essence in Hinduism is known to people in many local manifestations. This is why, more than other institutionalized religions, Hinduism lives through stories retold over and over again and is open to performance. Its emphasis on ritual stands proof to this.53 Theatricalized ritual brings the gods among people, humanizes the divine and makes it 51

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 14. 53 Ibid., 3. 52

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accessible. It is the function of the theatre to bridge this gap. As Yarrow emphasizes, Indian theatre operates on the assumption that its purpose is to ‘extend the range of human capacity and experience, to operate on the borderline between the “human” and the “divine”’.54 This liminality triggers the performance of the human and the divine through each other. Ways of interpreting myths through performance have been finding their way into the Western consciousness as Eastern theatrical techniques are imported more and more into the Western theatre. From a comparative perspective informed by this intercultural approach to the theatrical, Malekin and Yarrow define myth as ‘a fluid category merging into both history and literature’, endowed with the ‘liberating power’ of ‘spirit in performance’.55 Rather than just an archetypal story of origins, myth is a space of consciousness and meaning formation where identity is performed. As myth is renewed in performance, the performing self is renewed through selftranscendence, which puts it in contact with the experience of the absolute.56 This, in one sense, transforms Eliade’s myth of the eternal return. Renewal of time and of the self through a direct experience of the wholeness of myth and through a reconnection with the state of potential which underlies all transformation is achieved through performance. It is through this performative nature and the repetition with variations it entails that Eliade’s definition of myth as eternal return to the same archetypal, essential forms becomes meaningful in the contemporary idiom of today’s Indian fiction in English. His theory of ‘archetypes and repetition’ in primitive societies rests on the assumption that ‘a certain metaphysical valorisation of human existence’ is always fundamentally projected along similar patterns.57 Eliade’s distinction between a general pattern of history as repetition, which functions in primitive societies, and the Indian case, where this eternal return to mythical patterns is justified by a refusal of history highlights the importance of samsara, the chain of subsequent 54

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 20. Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow, Consciousness, Literature and the Theatre: Theory and Beyond, London: Macmillan, 1997, 100, 102 and 126-50. 56 Ibid., 100. 57 Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, ix. 55

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reincarnations. As each reincarnation atones for the karma accumulated in the previous life, history brings suffering. The temporality of history is a fall from the graceful atemporality of myth; hence the need for renewal. Joseph Campbell, Eliade’s disciple, takes over the idea of the eternal return to the same archetypal forms at the beginning of his book The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. As early as his title, however, Campbell announces an approach to the divine as manifested through ‘masks’. This is opposed to ‘an order of fixed forms that appear and reappear through all time’.58 Campbell’s intention is to justify comparison between religions, under the assumption that they are all various accounts of the same story. Even though his approach to myth is, like Eliade’s, rather essentialist (through the theory of the monomyth), the notion of the supreme divinity appearing in the guise of different ‘masks’ – whilst reminding us of Hinduism – brings a suggestion of performativity which prefigures more recent approaches. Eliade’s view that history is repetition sees it as developing in a cyclical rather than linear pattern. Assuming its imperfection and the normality of suffering, human life mimics the perfection of the gods in ritual, which acquires further aesthetic dimensions in sacred theatre.59 In the latter, life is imagined as a re-enactment of stories of gods, in the hope of coming as close as possible to the desired initiated status. If we read this through that kind of self-transcending performance that elevates the human to the level of the divine60 rather than in a strictly essentialist ritual sense, Eliade’s ‘eternal return’ can be used as a useful ground for comparing cultures that display equally performative features. This is Wendy Doniger’s position as she disagrees with Campbell’s ‘static monomyth’,61 yet brings the Indian mythological background as an argument for bridging gaps between cultures. Speaking from a postcolonial position and in the light of the postmodern critique of comparative analyses,62 Doniger notices the appropriateness, rather than the reductive essentialism, of comparing 58

Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, London: Vintage, 1962,

3. 59

Ibid., 95-104. See note 54 above. 61 Doniger, The Implied Spider, 65. 62 Ibid., 64. 60

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myths in a postcolonial world. She considers that myths should be political bridges rather than instruments of ghettoization: We should use the postcolonial consciousness not to exclude Western scholars from the study of non-Western myths, which merely contributes to the ghettoization of the Western world of ideas, but to show how myths (and the comparative study of myths) can be used as ghetto-blasters in our own society as well as in the world at large – that is, to blast apart the ghettoes of ideology.63

This remark suggests that relevant similar details should travel across cultures and provide grounds for dialogue. In noticing this Doniger implicitly justifies the position of intercultural performance and of contemporary Indian fiction in English, which mix specifically Indian details with wider global references. This is a possible interpretation of the scene in Midnight’s Children where the bishop finds a solution to Mary Pereira’s query about the colour of Jesus by choosing the colour blue – Krishna’s colour – in order to convey the common message of love: ‘God is love; and the Hindu love-god, Krishna, is always depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue; it will be a sort of bridge between faiths ....’64

Even though Rushdie’s advocacy of syncretism may include a somewhat satirical comment on the similar discursive constructivism of all religions, it also sums up their similar message: that of uniting, not dividing people. Whilst arguing in favour of comparison, Doniger pleads for rigour in the light of a thorough knowledge of the context. She sees the grounds of such comparison to be not essentialism, but, on the contrary, the multivocality of myth, its ‘ability to contain in latent form several different attitudes to the events that it depicts’, so that each telling may ‘draw out, as it were, the attitude that it finds compatible’.65 This celebration of multivocality and latent forces that can be activated as required argues in favour of the performative nature of myth, which consists primarily in its capacity to act as a go63

Ibid., 74. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 103. 65 Doniger, The Implied Spider, 84. 64

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between story between worlds. Performance makes it possible for mythical stories to travel across cultures and to be reformulated in order to answer contemporary needs and to be relocated in different geographical spaces. As I have tried to show in these theoretical considerations and as I shall further discuss on the basis of individual texts, myth – traditionally the main source of inspiration in the Indian narrative tradition – is crucial in at least part of contemporary Indian fiction in English. It is an important source of originality for this fiction within the wider context of the contemporary novel in English. The mythical material is tuned to the requirements of contemporary subject matter by means of performance – a gesture that also has a long tradition behind it in contemporary Indian theatre. Performativity, in its turn, is a category that reflects performance on the level of language. In what follows I will look at the sources and methods provided by traditional Indian theatre for contemporary retellings of Indian myth and at the ways in which it can come hand in hand with language performativity.

CHAPTER THREE INTERCULTURAL EPIC IN PERFORMANCE: PETER BROOK AND GIRISH KARNAD

A distinctive feature of the way in which the novel form is tackled in contemporary Indian fiction in English is the use of performance and performativity. They mediate the recycling or translation of mythical narratives retold and repositioned in a contemporary context. Having discussed this in theory, in what follows I shall turn to the selection of primary texts on which my study focuses to see how they reflect the ways in which contemporary storytelling takes place through performances of myth. The first instance to be examined will be that of the traditional merger of narrative and performance in contemporary theatrical performances of Indian epics on both sides of the intercultural debate. This chapter will be dedicated to the narrative dimension of performance in Peter Brook’s international production of The Mahabharata and in a few examples of Girish Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’. Both draw on stories from the Mahabharata – the main storyline in the former case and a few marginal stories in the latter – which are made relevant to the present-day realities in which their audiences live. In the next chapter, these two case-studies will be approached from a more direct performance-focused perspective. This will be the prelude to an analysis of the interaction between the contemporary novel form and traditional Indian storytelling in contemporary Indian fiction in English, foregrounding the role played by performance and performativity in this interaction. Storytelling through performance in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata Nowhere is the Indian tradition of storytelling more alive than in the theatre. From the Natya Sastra to K.N. Panikkar’s theatre of transformation, the theatre has been drawing on the Hindu epic

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heritage. Stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are still the main sources of Indian performance forms.1 The contemporary stage characteristically retells parts of these stories in dramatized form. Panikkar’s thanathu, ‘theatre of transformation’, is a form of theatre which the author identifies as ‘our own’, but also as ‘the extreme point of imagination’, ‘the discovery of the self’. It recreates myths from discrete elements of folk culture. Within this mythmaking process, the actor communicates a story as he transforms into a character. This kind of theatre, defined by Panikkar as being ‘basically storytelling’,2 retells mythical stories which are made accessible to today’s audiences and is contrasted with another strand of the contemporary Indian stage, which shuns mythic themes through ‘realist’ work. As in realist fiction, the focus is on middle-class experience, gender issues etc., showing ‘a greater commitment to scripted dialogue’, so that ‘text functions here in a more traditional manner’. This kind of work belongs to a trend of post-1950’s dramatic writing that uses mainly western models of dialogue and action. This category includes the theatre work of people such as Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, G.P. Deshpande and Mahasweta Devi. The problems addressed, whether seen from an ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ perspective, are either recognizably ‘Indian’, or they take up ‘universal’ issues observed from an Indian perspective.3 This commitment to reality through realist theatre practised on Indian grounds resulted from the contact between Indian theatre and Western cultural models. An outcome of the same contact as seen from the opposite perspective was Peter Brook’s 1985 production of The Mahabharata, which sprang from a wish to open up the ancient epic to a contemporary worldwide audience. In The Shifting Point, Peter Brook confesses his fascination and explains his choice of the main storyline. The production’s focus on an account of the conflict between the related clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, rather than 1

See, for example, the recent TV series in Hindi in 94 episodes made from the Mahabharata, directed by B.R. Chopra, released on video in 2002, see Intelligent India Enterprises, 2005: http://www.intelindia.com/mahabharat/mbondvd.htm (accessed 20 June 2006). 2 Panikkar, ‘Folk Philosophy in K.N. Panikkar’s Poetic Theatre of Transformation’, 61. 3 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 59.

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one or several of the side stories, is due to the director’s intention to introduce his international audience to the quintessential Indian epic (with which an Indian audience would have been familiar). Brook sees in the Mahabharata not only ‘one of the greatest works of humanity’, open to all audiences, Indian and worldwide alike, but also a story which can only be told as it ‘passes through the man of today’.4 In other words, it is not the ancient nature, but rather the newness, the contemporariness of the old epic that fascinates him. This fascination was the source of the twelve-hour theatrical representation premiered at the 1985 Avignon festival in France and turned into a five-and-ahalf-hour film version in 1989. Both are based on a script by JeanClaude Carrière. They start with the dialogue between the storyteller Vyasa and the Boy – an embodiment of the implied audience – which contains the following memorable exchange of cues: VYASA: I’ve composed a great poem. I’ve composed it all, but nothing is written. I need someone to write down what I know. BOY: What’s your name? VYASA: Vyasa. BOY: What’s your poem about? VYASA: It’s about you. BOY: Me? VYASA: Yes, it’s the story of your race, how your ancestors were born, how they grew up, how a vast war arose. It’s the poetical history 5 of mankind. If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else.

We recognize in this the traditional oral storytelling dialogue on which the novels discussed draw and which emphasizes the role of the audience in the process of meaning-production in the story. The ‘turning into someone else’ effect reveals the principle of transformation in Panikkar’s theatre: as the actor identifies with the character’s story, he becomes the character, that is, someone other than he initially was. This also reminds us of the principle of metamorphosis signalled in Rushdie’s story ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ as 4

Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration 1946-1987, London: Methuen, 1987, 160. 5 Jean-Claude Carrière, The Mahabharata: A Play Based upon the Indian Classic Epic (1987), trans. Peter Brook, London: Methuen, 1988, 3.

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symptomatic of the evolution of nomadic selfhood. Narratology acknowledges the fact that one of the main functions of stories is to ‘manufacture identities’. As Mark Currie points out, the narrative nature of identity is a common argument against the idea of identity as a given: … identity is not within us because it exists only as narrative. By this I mean two things: that the only way to explain who we are is to tell our own story, to select key events which characterise us and organise them according to the formal principles of narrative – to externalise ourselves as if talking of someone else, and for the purposes of selfrepresentation; but also that we learn how to self-narrate from the outside, from other stories, and particularly through the process of identification with other characters. This gives narration at large the potential to teach us how to conceive of ourselves, what to make of 6 our inner life and how to organise it.

The telling of our own story is therefore not just a descriptive process, but also a formative one. Just like the Boy in Brook and Carrière’s Mahabharata, as we narrate, we become different people. This belief that identity exists within the stories that create it is an important principle behind the act of narrating. It is also in story form that national histories and national cultures are spelt out. The obvious references here would be Homi Bhabha’s overquoted Introduction to Nation and Narration, which conceives of the ‘totality’ of the nation as the ‘conceptual object’ constructed within narrative discourses,7 and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which points to the necessary act of imagination behind the formation of national consciousness.8 However, in Indian culture, narrative constructions go back a much longer time. They exist before the formation of a national consciousness under the pressure of and as a reaction to colonialism. As the ubiquitous presence of the foundation epics shows, all meanings are constructed in narratives. Frame stories generate other

6

Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, London: Macmillan, 1998, 17. Homi Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Nation and Narration, New York and London: Routledge, 1990, 3. 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), London and New York: Verso, 1991, 5-7. 7

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secondary narrative threads, which emerge from the main storylines as digressions, meant to explain and to comment. Whether the audience comes with a previous knowledge of the subject matter or not is important. In her comments on Peter Brook’s production inspired from the Indian epic, Mallika Sarabhai – the only Indian actress in this international cast – describes the overwhelming importance of the Mahabharata in the following terms: .

‘Maha’ in Sanskrit and in most Indian languages means ‘great’. ‘Bharata’ is alternatively defined as either the race that lives in India, or mankind, because we think that everyone originally came from India. So the Mahabharata is really ‘the great India’, or ‘the story of 9 mankind’, the story of the original men and women, our ancestors.

This story of mankind provides a representation of history, showing the evolution of a race in time. In the epic, history and myth collapse in the narrative flow, as the audience is carried away by the process of storytelling. The function of theatrical performance is to cut through this flow of events, to stop the unfolding of history in order to make comments on its momentary understandings and, indeed, to construct a more general meaning. Vyasa is not only the poet in the Mahabharata, but also a crucial character in his own story. Without him, the story would have ended, as the flow of generations would have stopped. These last words spoken by him point out two very important things. Firstly, the audience is explicitly invited to identify with the Boy and with this story ‘about him’, to make it their own. They should do what Brook did: read it as a contemporary story, as it ‘passes through the man of today’. Secondly, this is a poetic history, which greatly depends on interpretation for the completion of its meaning. Staging is one such form of interpretation. The act of representation is double here: it consists of showing (on stage) and of telling. Apart from Vyasa, many characters, at times, make their own attempts at telling stories. Thus stories grow from each other in a rhizomatic network of significance that opens up a space of negotiation on stage, where the main 9

Mallika Sarabhai, ‘Actors’ Perspectives’, in Peter Brook and ‘The Mahabharata’: Critical Perspectives, ed. David Williams, London and New York: Routledge, 1991, 99.

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storyteller is not the only storytelling character. This principle, which governs the transmission of epics, makes them very powerful at the present moment of their retelling. The Sanskrit epic is the main subject of most forms of traditional Indian theatre. It is also a strong example of the connection between performance techniques and storytelling in this tradition. Brook draws on that, as he makes a point of insisting on one of the main things he learnt through research in India, namely that performance is a dramatized form of storytelling: ‘We have always considered a theatre group as a multi-headed storyteller, and one of the most fascinating ways of meeting the Mahabharata is through the storyteller.’10 Brook emphasizes the amazing opportunity to encounter the multiple possible views on the same succession of events as expressed in the dynamic logic of storytelling. The theatre group as a ‘multiheaded storyteller’ projects spatially what happens to a story transmitted from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, across centuries. The story changes according to the temporal location and personality of each individual storyteller and develops into so many different forms in the process. In performance, the story unfolds on stage. The multiple views upon it become synchronic rather than diachronic. As regards the Mahabharata’s contemporary audience, this association of storytelling and performance must be one of the fundamental sources of the present-day relevance of the epic. JeanFrançois Lyotard claims that, in postmodernity, narrative knowledge is superior to the celebrated scientific knowledge of modernity.11 He acknowledges the proliferation of stories in our highly mediatized society. Storytelling – even though different from the forms practised in traditional societies – is our present-day way of experiencing the world. It has become increasingly accepted that it is through stories that we build – or ‘manufacture’, to use Mark Currie’s expression – our identities.12

10

Brook, The Shifting Point, 162. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. 12 Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, 17-32. 11

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The modern Western reader trying to get hold of the entire epic encounters various difficulties. Most of them are connected to the enormous length of the epic. The contemporary English-language reader can usually get hold of abbreviated versions only, which are still felt to be too long. An illustrative attempt to reconcile the length and digressive structure of the epic with the freedom of choice and the right to actively participate in the making of the story expected by modern audiences was made by V. Lakshmanan, who created a site which unfortunately is no longer available. Lakshmanan built up a hypertext version, with links allowing the audience free access to the digressions. He motivated the form of his website by commenting on the incompatibility between the making of the epic and the linearity of the book format. He contrasted this linearity with the capacity of the hyperlinked text to bring together the book-like diachronicity of the main storyline with the synchronicity of the digressions of which the epic is full: The Mahabharata has been translated into English several times, but with the size of the translations (8-11 volumes each), few laymen ever read the whole thing. There have been accessible short retellings of the story, but these suffer from one crucial drawback. The Mahabharata to most Indians who have heard it narrated to them is not a single story but a whole bunch of stories, each of which is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. We hear the stories at different times, and being familiar with the skeleton of the epic, fit the pieces as we see fit. That sort of telling is not possible with a book. With a book, you have to maintain a linear narrative, where one thing leads to another. You can choose either to digress or to tell the original story. You cannot do both. Thus, people who tell the Mahabharata story make compromises. R.K. Narayan tells the bare-bones skeletal story but omits the myths and aura of the epic. Rajaji tells the pious story but dodges the unpleasantness. William Buck keeps almost everything and loses the story.13

13

V. Lakshmanan, The Mahabharata, 1997: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bridge/ 1771/ Desh/Mb/node2.html (accessed 15 August 2002). It is interesting to think of the role played by analogies with the Internet in Vikram Chandra’s writing, which I will discuss in detail in the section dedicated to his novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain in Chapter Ten.

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This ‘jigsaw puzzle’ characteristic, different from the linearity of Western narratives, has to be read in terms of a different logic. The sequentiality of a book does not quite fit it. The solution which Lakshmanan finds is one inspired by the Internet-conditioned character of postmodern culture. But, more than that, it also seems to be much more faithful to the spirit of the epic itself: Think of it this way. You have a personal storyteller telling you the story. Every time you come to a link, you can either ask the story teller to tell you that story or to continue with his old. And the next time he tells the old story, you can ask him to tell you the myth he glossed over the last time. You can even jump into one of the sideshows straight away. It is your epic: choose what you want to hear! And the next time around, choose something different. If you are not familiar with the skeletal story of the Mahabharata, just read the first sections of each chapter. Then, once you get the gist of the story, come back and read a few of the myths that go into the main story. Then, read the myths that those myths link up to. When you are feeling adventurous, go to the Table of Contents and click on a random link. You are guaranteed a good story wherever you start. If you are a glutton for punishment, or if you want to read the story as a linear narrative, just keep clicking on the Next button and reading the next section. The reason I don't recommend that method is that you might miss most of the aura of the epic. You might even lose the thread of the story! In fact, you will often find the digressions more interesting than the main story. You will find many of them selfcontained. Oftentimes, you may have heard the story before, just not known it was part of the Mahabharata. This story is not meant to be read in one sitting, from start to finish. You are not meant to untangle the tangled threads of parentage and lineage, of who fathered who and who is whose heir. The reason these nice folks are fighting a war is because everybody alive then had different opinions on these niceties. Instead, the story is meant to be discovered in pieces. Start wherever you want, and go where your fancy takes you. Then, maybe, you will understand why Indians have loved the story of the Bharatas for thousands of years and why the story has taken root wherever in Asia that it has traveled. Enjoy.14

14

Ibid., ‘How to Read the Mahabharata’.

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These hyperlinks fulfil the part of digressions and possible choices of narrative direction in the traditional story. They comment on the main storyline episodes. They also allow the reader to make choices, to contribute to the story in a way that simulates its oral retellings. In Brook’s production, which focuses on the main storyline, digressions are symbolically introduced by Vyasa, the storyteller. An important issue raised in relation to Brook’s The Mahabharata was that of legitimacy. When we tell stories, whose stories are we allowed to tell? Is such an act of performing as ‘the Other’ a remainder of Orientalist attitudes? Brook’s famous production, with its international cast, meant to bring the Indian epic into the Western world, has repeatedly been attacked by critics coming from backgrounds closer to the Mahabharata. Among them Rustom Bharucha’s standpoint is one of the most vehemently stated. The British director, as he puts it, wanted to ‘celebrate a work which only India could have created but which carries echoes for all mankind’.15 However, Brook’s act appeared to some critics as an appropriation by the metropolis of the cultural heritage of a space which once formed part of its territory. Similar acts have been performed by playwrights or stage directors coming from India itself, such as Girish Karnad, with his ‘theatre of roots’. Karnad also draws on the Mahabharata and, by translating his own work into English, he opens it up to a panIndian and international audience. Both Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and Girish Karnad’s theatre of roots plays (of which I will later focus on Naga-Mandala, Hayavadana and The Fire and the Rain) are products of their authors’ view of performance as an alternative way of telling mythical stories. Both are inspired by myth, more precisely from the Indian foundation epic, the Mahabharata. Both look at the story and challenge it in staging. Both have in mind different – more than one – audiences, with different expectations. Rustom Bharucha describes Brook’s production as one of the maestro’s ‘intercultural experiments’, ‘one of the most blatant (and accomplished) appropriations of Indian culture in recent years’, a trivialization of Indian heritage, a production dominated by a ‘conceptual fuzziness’, suffering from the Western obsession of 15

Brook, Foreword to Carrière, The Mahabharata, xvi.

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telling a story from the beginning to the end, whilst the purpose of traditional Indian performances is ‘to dwell on specific moments in the story, so that its minutest details can evoke a world of sensations and truth’.16 Bharucha stresses the difference of emphasis between the Western interest in the development of action, which urges the quick flow of events, and the Eastern pleasure derived from pondering on the meaning and the intensity of the moment. But, clearly, this could not have been helped, given the fact that the epic was supposed to be presented to a Western audience (unaware of the Mahabharata) for the first time. Therefore, the emphasis on the events themselves, rather than on their meaning, was an audience-determined requirement. One cannot help noticing one obvious departure from the Indian context Brook claims he represents. His production makes as much use as possible of the props of traditional Indian theatre. The most obvious source is Kathakali, through Chloé Obolensky’s carefully designed costumes and set. But it is the act of storytelling itself, so central to Indian drama, that takes place in a different, non-Indian way. While telling his story, Vyasa does it in words, which are comfortably in French and English. There are a few references to the Indian performance language of gestures. The scene when Shiva Nataraja, the dancing creator-destroyer of the universe, shows himself to Arjuna is one of them. However, these are not the main tools of the storytelling process (as it is staged in Kathakali and in most of Indian performance), but additions to the main storytelling line. This may be one compromise that Brook had to make for his production to be accessible to his Western audience. But in doing this in order to get the ‘flavour of India’, Bharucha implies, Brook sacrifices the very nature of Indian performance. The director defends his production by foregrounding the international quality of the epic. In this sense, he comes close to Girish Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’. Selective retellings of the Mahabharata in Girish Karnad’s plays Performance is an alternative way of telling mythical stories, as Karnad implies in his ‘Author’s Introduction’ to Three Plays.17 16 Rustom Bharucha, ‘A View from India’, in Peter Brook and ‘The Mahabharata’: Critical Perspectives, 229-35. 17 Girish Karnad, ‘Author’s Introduction’, in Three Plays: Naga-Mandala, Hayavadana, Tughlaq, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995, 3.

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Storytelling, in its turn, as Karnad’s work suggests, is a way of staging and contextualizing performance. The interaction between narrative and performative ways of expressing a story is explored in both form and content in his plays. In tune with K.N. Panikkar’s awareness that traditional Indian theatre is characterized by a very important epic dimension, Karnad goes through a period of estrangement from and return to this tradition. Before rediscovering the theatrical tradition of his native Karnataka – Yakshagana – and, later, the Keralan genre of Kathakali, he infers the power of Indian theatre, paradoxically, during his encounter with the European other. As Karnad confesses, his decision to become a playwright started as he was watching a Bombay production of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which to him felt like ‘an emotionally or even a physically painful rite of passage’. It was therefore an encounter with otherness that triggered a heightened understanding of his own cultural background. Strindberg’s stress on his character’s individualism, his ‘laying bare the inner recesses of human psyche’,18 was, in the young playwright’s mind, strangely associated with his own cultural and personal search for individuality. He later remembers this association when, as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he rediscovers the Indian myth of Yayati and – like Brook, who retells the Mahabharata as filtered through today’s sensibilities – is struck by its contemporaneity. The myth, a side story in the epic, mirrors Karnad’s inner struggle between his belonging to India and his wish to go out and see the world: … looking back, I am amazed at how precisely the myth reflected my anxieties at the moment, my resentment with all those who seemed to demand that I sacrifice my future. By the time I had finished working on Yayati – during the three weeks it took the ship to reach England and in the lonely cloisters of the university – the myth had enabled me to articulate to myself a set of values that I had been unable to arrive at rationally. Whether to return home finally seemed to me the most minor of issues; the myth had nailed me to my past.19

The subject of Karnad’s first play, Yayati (a story about sacrifice, old age and the difficulties of self-realization) was written in Kannada, 18 19

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3.

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his native language. He never translated it into English, as he did his later plays. However, this first play signals the overall theme of Karnad’s whole career. It marks a search for identity in conditions of geographical and cultural exile. This feeling of exile is expressed through the adoption of English as a second language for his plays, after they are first written in Kannada. Years later, during his period of office as the director of India’s Nehru Centre in London (2001-2004), Karnad re-experienced exile from a different position and reconsidered it, with hindsight. In his career myth is a crucial means of exploring and staging character. It provides a performative lens through which the world is filtered, a way to dig into the darkest corners of the human psyche, as if in search of the original self whose avatar the character is. If Brook’s all-inclusive, abridged version of the great Indian epic was daringly meant for a rather abstract world audience, Karnad addresses at least two audiences (which are also placed in an oppositional relationship): an English-speaking audience and a Kannada-speaking one. The issue of audiences also has an impact on the choice of subject-matter. If Brook retells, in performance form, the main storyline of the epic, Karnad, in his 1998 The Fire and the Rain, picks up a less known, even marginal episode from it, the myth of Yavakri. This rather marginal myth is an account of the failure of ascetic practice (so cherished by Vedic thought) as a way to true knowledge. For all the pure knowledge he obtained directly from the gods, by doing penance for ten years in the forest, when he comes back, Yavakri is proven by the love of his youth, Vishakha, to be ignorant of the many other knowledges of this world. Does Karnad reduce a myth which comes from the sacred source of Indian theatre, the Mahabharata, to a trivializing modernization through this choice of subject-matter? Apparently, this tale of a failed initiation was suggested to the playwright – looking for inspiration in the consecrated fountain of knowledge of the great Sanskrit poem of the world – by his own failure to acquire the full knowledge of the Mahabharata. This is how he describes his discovery of Yavakri’s myth in his ‘Preface’ to the play: The myth of Yavakri (or Yavakrita) occurs in Chapters 135-38 of the Vana Parva (Forest Canto) of the Mahabharata. It is narrated by the ascetic Lomasha to the Pandavas as they wander across the land

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during their exile. I have met Sanskrit scholars who were unaware of the existence of the myth: it is easy to lose track of a short narrative like this in the tangled undergrowth that covers the floor of that epic. I first came across the story of Yavakri and Paravasu, while still in college, in C. Rajagopalachari’s abridgment of the Mahabharata. That Rajaji, confronted with the stupendous task of abridging the world’s longest epic to about four hundred pages, should not have discarded this seemingly peripheral tale is a tribute to his sensitivity and judgment. It was fortunate for me that Rajaji did not do so, for the moment I read the tale, I knew it had to be turned into a play. For the next thirtyseven years, I struggled with it, trying to fit all the ramifications of the myth within some sort of a manageable shape.20

Karnad suggests that it was the myth’s peripheral nature that drew his attention. But there was also something else. The myth is one of the digressions in the Mahabharata which interrupt the main storyline as comments, explanations or mere breaks in the flow of events. What Karnad notices about this particular one is its inherent, imperative theatricality: ‘I knew it had to be turned into a play.’ As he reinforces the authority of the text by assuming the task of what Brook calls ‘the multi-headed storyteller’ of the Mahabharata, Karnad explores, in The Fire and the Rain, the coexistence of storytelling and performance in both form and content. From the beginning, in the ‘Prologue’, characters involved in the seven-year fire sacrifice meant to bring about the rain express their belief in the theatre’s ritual function. The Actor-Manager’s monologue is a call for theatre as supreme ritual and a proclamation of the theatricality of the world: ACTOR-MANAGER

Sirs, as is well-known to you, Brahma, the Lord of All Creation extracted the requisite elements from the four Vedas and combined them into a fifth Veda and thus gave birth to the art of Drama. He handed it over to his son, Lord Indra, the God of the Skies. Lord Indra, in turn, passed on the art to Bharata, a human being, for the gods cannot indulge in pretence. So if Indra is to be pleased and bring to an end this long drought which ravages our land a fire sacrifice is not enough. A play has to be performed along with it. If we

20

Karnad, ‘Preface’ to The Fire and the Rain, ix. In a note in the ‘Preface’, Karnad refers to C. Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1951.

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This celebration of the world as make-believe, as the gods’ theatrical play, completed in the language of the theatre and reminiscent of the Natya Sastra, is supplemented by a further level of contrivance: that of the play we are witnessing, as proclaimed by one of the main characters, Arvasu: ARVASU … The play is about to begin. But you know, and brother knows, and I know that this isn’t the real thing. This is a fiction borrowed from the myths. The real play began somewhere else. A month ago. A month?… Was it really that recent? It seems ages and ages of darkness ago. You and I were going to get married. Begin a new life. And I had to meet the elders of your tribe.22

This metatheatrical comment transmits a well-known convention – the story which starts from its ending. It also transmits the fact that, if the theatre is illusion just because the world is, the play we are witnessing is a story about the theatricality of the world as illusion – and, as such, a further level of illusion. This mise-en-abîme of illusions opens up a dialogue between the theatre and storytelling, so that the two coexist and depend on each other. Storytelling and the awareness of strategies attached to it contribute to the making of theatrical character. In another play by Karnad, Naga-Mandala, there are several instances of self-referential storytelling with various functions. The first one is the frame story, built around the last trial of a playwright whose death sentence will be carried out unless he manages to stay awake for one whole night. This is supposed to be his punishment for having bored his audience with dull plays. There is, in the frame story, a character whose name is ‘Story’, a woman dressed in a colourful sari, whose cues are metafictional comments on the play. Together with the flames in the temple, also endowed with the capacity to speak, Story is there to stand living proof of the fact that ‘if you try to gag a story, another

21 22

Karnad, The Fire and the Rain, 2-3. Ibid., 4.

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happens’.23 We recognize here the motif of the ocean of stories, of the ongoing storytelling flow that cannot be stopped. This motif is taken over explicitly by Rushdie in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and by Vikram Chandra in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The story of Rani and the Naga – the King Cobra – keeps the playwright awake and thus performs the act of liberating him from his lot. This stands proof for the life-generating capacity of storytelling. In this, Karnad is faithful to his choice to draw inspiration from the tradition of oral storytelling, transmitted from generation to generation, as a proud family possession, by the women in every family: Naga-Mandala is based on two oral tales I heard from A.K. Ramanujan. These tales are narrated by women – normally the older women in the family – while children are being fed in the evenings in the kitchen or being put to bed. The other adults present on these occasions are also women. Therefore these tales, though directed at the children, often serve as a parallel system of communication among 24 the women in the family.

As stories are usually told by women, a woman must embody them in Naga-Mandala. Apart from being a cherished human activity, storytelling seems to be an independent reality in its own right. Narrative structures generate each other, responding to people’s need to explain the unexplainable. The awareness of the narrative thread which leads everything to a destiny-driven conclusion is maintained by the existence of stories-within-the-story. Such is Kuruddava’s story about the magic root which gave her a husband in her youth. This story comes up with a promise of fulfilment for Rani and triggers the main plot of Karnad’s play. Another potential story expected by the audience is the one of Rani’s confession. This expectation is fulfilled in an unexpected manner as Rani tells and does not tell the truth at the same time. This missing story is replaced by a myth: Rani, whose name means ‘queen’, becomes a goddess.25 Karnad’s earlier play, Hayavadana, is also inspired by a secondary story in the Mahabharata. It is an elaborate exploration of the 23

Karnad, Naga-Mandala, 25. Karnad, ‘Author’s Introduction’, in Three Plays, 16-17. 25 Karnad, Naga-Mandala, 59. 24

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meanings of masks and of the mask/head dichotomy. In the frame narrative, the man-horse, Hayavadana, introduces events on stage as a substitute-figure for the elephant-headed god Ganesha, protector of the theatre, remover of obstacles. This introduces a tone of parody which, throughout the play, will govern all representations of the divine through the character of goddess Kali. Kali triggers the development of some important events in the play, even though, ironically (and we recognize here Karnad’s tongue-in-cheek contemporary voice), she always seems sleepy and bored. This play is more explicit in its exploration of performance and storytelling techniques and their capacities to become one with and even create what counts as reality. In spite of the initial parodic tone, the main storyline is a tragic one, ending in a double death and a sati. The main topic of the play is akin to the one in Naga-Mandala: that of the married woman, divided between husband and lover. In both cases, the woman finds herself in a socially unacceptable position. Padmini’s story is governed by the supernatural, as in Naga-Mandala. Here, the goddess Kali grants Padmini the revival of Devadatta, her husband, and Kapila, his friend, who beheaded themselves in Kali’s temple out of jealousy. But Kali’s intervention does not solve all the problems, as Padmini, in her confusion, mixes up the heads. From now on, the play concentrates on an important identity question: what makes human personality, the head or the body? The original story is Indian and originates from Kathasaritsagara. But Karnad, as he points out himself, also uses a later interpretation of it by Thomas Mann, called ‘The Transposed Heads’. So the answer to the identity question departs from the traditional one given in Kathasaritsagara – ‘since the head represents the man, the person with the husband’s head is the husband’.26 In terms of the perception of head and body as a continuum in Indian culture, it is implied that the characteristics of the body are dictated by the head. The Western reworking, however, complicates the issue by adding an awareness of the fact that the head and the body are not necessarily always in harmony. As such, the transposition operates a change which inevitably results in inner conflict.

26

Karnad, ‘Author’s Introduction’, in Three Plays, 13.

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Karnad’s version of Hayavadana’s story opens it up, once again, to a double audience. This kind of double, perspective-aware writing – even available in two languages – brings on stage a visible instance of writing on the border. This is what contemporary Indian fiction in English does as well, perhaps even more explicitly. This subsection has detailed the use of storytelling in Indian theatre using as examples the works of two theatre practitioners – Peter Brook and Girish Karnad – who rework India’s epic tradition from different positions. If Peter Brook is a director who challenges the European theatrical tradition through his reinterpretation of Indian epic, Girish Karnad is an Indian playwright who rediscovers the epic traditions that survive in the theatre of roots that he revives. What the two of them have in common, despite their different backgrounds, is the rediscovery of the theatrical potential of traditional Indian epic and storytelling – or, rather, the potential of any story to yield material for performance. They both restate the importance and the contemporary validity of a tradition that has survived in India for centuries: that of the merger of storytelling and performance. In what follows I will aim to show that this merger, as much alive today as ever before, has an impact not only on the ways in which storytelling is refashioned in contemporary performance, but also on how this refashioning changes contemporary performances of Indian myth and further reflects in contemporary Indian fiction in English.

CHAPTER FOUR REPERFORMED TRADITIONS: INDIAN THEATRE AND ITS CONTEMPORARY AVATARS

The Natya Sastra of Bharata is not only a treatise on dramatic art, but also a rich collection of philosophical and psychological principles. Bharata’s name significantly invests him with the universality of legend, as it simply means ‘actor’ in Sanskrit. Of divine origin, the theatre is believed in Hinduism to have been given to people as a medium for the performance of meditations on the meaning of existence. Its function was also moral and didactic: to educate the inferior castes, who did not have access to the Vedic scriptures. Emphasis on the transformation of character is central and it is in the storytelling dimension of the theatre that this transformation occurs. To quote him at length this time, this is how K.N. Panikkar describes the theatre of transformation: And while looking at the whole picture of theatre – modern, past, folk, traditional, everything, I started getting the idea that our theatre is not conflict oriented, as is generally understood, it is definitely transformation oriented: Theatre is basically storytelling. The actor while communicating the story transforms into a character and further in the process of elaboration of a situation passes on from one bhava to another. Here it is not a linear process that takes place in the theatre of transformation. The actor takes a curvature in interpreting the character as well as the bhava. The whole process is known in the tradition as anukirthanam – celebration of the mood by stretching it only to enhance the ultimate rasa. This basic nature of theatre is found even in day to day life where the common folk communicate life situations.1 1

Panikkar, ‘Folk Philosophy in K.N. Panikkar’s Poetic Theatre of Transformation’, 61.

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The reference to common folk suggests a dialogue between the stage and the audience. Transformation is meant to be communicated to the audience and thus to accomplish the above-mentioned didactic function. Panikkar opposes transformation-oriented theatre to a theatre of conflict (the latter corresponding to the more action-oriented European theatre). The concept of transformation shifts the focus from events to character: it is the transformation of the actor into the character that underlies performance, rather than Stanislavskian character-building. This happens through storytelling, the process in the course of which the actor transforms into the character and passes from one bhava (emotional state) into another. Storytelling focuses on what happens on the level of the character’s inner life rather than on the succession of events. In Indian theatre, each character is built along a certain specific feature or concept, which represents its ideal, archetypal nature. As the actor transforms into the character, that particular feature should be mastered very well. Characters are then placed together to compose one whole allegorical being. The five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata emerge within such an allegorical project. Each of them is ascribed a certain dominant feature, the same throughout the epic, determined by the god who fathered each of them. Yudhishthira, Kunti’s first born, is the son of god Dharma, hence his unfaltering sense of justice represented by this god survives even his weakness for dicing. Bhima, the second born, is the son of the wind god Vayu so he is ‘strong as thunder’. Arjuna, son of Indra, king of gods, is ‘the perfect warrior, born to conquer’. The twins born by Madri, Pandu’s second wife, Nakula and Sahadeva, are the sons of the Ashwins, ‘the twin gods with golden eyes’ and they are ‘inseparable, as patience and wisdom’.2 Together, they make one complete whole, the five brothers who must share everything, like the five fingers of a palm. Their marriage to a unique wife, Draupadi, re-establishes their original union in their mother’s womb. This allegorical togetherness turns them into a complex, powerful being and allows for a complex psychology which is relevant to today’s audience.

2

Carrière, The Mahabharata, 19.

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‘West’ performing ‘East’ in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata A discussion of the function of performance in the storytelling/ performance dialogue in intercultural theatre, placed as it is on the border between Eastern traditions and Western ones, could start from an analysis of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata. Brook’s adaptation will be an example of actual performance of an Indian traditional epic addressed to a worldwide audience, which in this study will serve to extend an analysis of performance in contemporary Indian fiction in English. I shall further analyse the use of performance and performativity in the contemporary narrative discourse in English, which equally targets a worldwide audience. As Brook confesses, his interest in the Mahabharata arose as he was watching a demonstration of Kathakali for the first time. This struck him as an instance of telling a mythical, exemplary story, known to the audience and yet worth re-experiencing. Brook’s admiration – even though ‘without understanding’ – led to further exploration. This first call for initiation into the unknown was the beginning of his project: The day I first saw a demonstration of Kathakali, I heard a word completely new to me – ‘The Mahabharata’. A dancer was presenting a scene from this work and his sudden first appearance from behind a curtain was an unforgettable shock. His costume was red and gold, his face was red and green, his nose was like a white billiard ball, his fingernails were like knives; in place of beard and mustache, two white crescent moons thrust forward from his lips, his eyebrows shot up and down like drumsticks and his fingers spelled out strange coded messages. Through the magnificent ferocity of the movements, I could see that a story was unfolding. But what story? I could only guess at something mythical and remote, from another culture, nothing to do with my life. 3

Brook’s encounter with the complex gestural psychology of Kathakali – what Zarrilli calls the ‘performative body-consciousness’ of Kathakali actors4 – aroused his interest in further exploring the Mahabharata. His production drew a lot of inspiration from this 3

Brook, The Shifting Point, 160. Phillip B. Zarilli, Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play, London: Routledge, 2000, 66. 4

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‘magnificent ferocity’ of Kathakali costumes, techniques and language of gestures. It was the expressivity and mobility of visual detail, the ‘fluidity and oppenness’ of Kathakali imagery,5 that Brook borrowed from Kathakali. Mallika Sarabhai, the interpreter of Draupadi, and, famously, the only Indian in Brook’s international team, confesses the experience of re-acknowledged familiarity that an Indian audience will have whenever watching representations of the epic: In India we are brought up with the Mahabharata. It is the source of our popular heroes and heroines, our bedtime stories, our parables on morality, our values. You can go into a very remote area of North Eastern India, for example, where there are still tribes which haven’t really changed in hundreds of years, and they will sing songs to Krishna, or perform stories with characters from the Mahabharata. On the other hand, you could go to a completely different part of the country, and they will do puppet shows or traditional shadow puppetry with these same characters. So in India it is very difficult to escape these stories anywhere, in any epoch, in any art form.6

Any Hindu member of an Indian theatre audience would recognize a story from the Mahabharata. But, more than that, what we have here is also one of the main principles of Indian theatre: if all theatre is repetition (it repeats on stage, night after night, a script which is unpredictably varied through individual performance), Indian theatre is a particular, acknowledged repetition of something already known, but enjoyed precisely because of this. When retelling the stories from the Mahabharata, people change them and are changed by them. Brook himself stresses the fact that the epic is always perceived ‘as it passes through the man of today’.7 This indicates a very important difference between possible audiences watching a Mahabharatainspired production. A Hindu audience would be familiar with the 5

Chloé Obolensky, the production’s costume and set designer, mentions: ‘For me the interest of collaborating with Peter Brook stems from his wish not to fix an image, but to preserve in scenographic terms the same possibility of evolution that the actors and even Jean-Claude Carrière have at their disposal’ (‘Fluidity and Openness: Chloé Obolensky interviewed by Georges Banu’, in Peter Brook and ‘The Mahabharata’: Critical Perspectives, 72-73). 6 Sarabhai, ‘Actors’ Perspectives’, in ibid., 99. 7 Brook, The Shifting Point, 160.

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content and would expect variations and digressions. For a Western audience, the Indian epic requires initiation into something new. Within the context of intercultural performance, traditional Indian theatrical techniques provide tools, meanings and a language relevant to the experience of their contemporary audiences. Many European theatre researchers and practitioners are interested in this as they are looking for alternative means of expression. Indian theatre attracts the European imaginary because it displays ‘a conception of form as dynamic’ and a ‘continuity between “reality” and “illusion”’.8 It is a theatre of fluid forms, reflecting fluid, nomadic identities. Ralph Yarrow proposes a table of correspondences that can be drawn between possible answers given by Eastern theatre and the Western problems they seem to apply to: ‘western problematics’ reality identity/meaning language/truth political/social structures

‘eastern characteristics’ liminality plurality physicality transcendence9

In most of these cases the Western problem with given, unique solutions is answered in terms of an Eastern aesthetic option for plurality. Whilst this is very useful for my argument here, it is important, however, to point out the need to historicize this set of dichotomies. They would certainly have been true at a time when the Western world was characterized by monocultural, essentialist views; more recent, multicultural versions of the globalized world display a more complex understanding of differences. However, the Indian plural world vision found its own difficulties in the political arena when confronting itself with Hindu nationalism. Once one accepts the plurality of identity and meaning, there is no identity crisis and no point in searching for meaning as an absolute. Once reality has been defined as equivalent to illusion, as maya, continuous change, life feels less oppressive. This does not imply a state of passive acceptance of things as they are. On the contrary – as shown by Krishna’s teaching of karma to Arjuna in the Bhagavad8 9

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 9-10. Ibid., 20.

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Gita, which will come later on in the present analysis – it means engaging in the act in full awareness of its transitoriness, as well as the ability to see that everything is subject to change, irrespective of the fruits of our acts. For Yarrow, ‘Peter Brook’s and Jean-Claude Carrière’s truncating of the Mahabharata’ is ‘one example of what can happen’ when one tries to understand the other through already-known paradigms: ‘We can only deal with so much otherness, it seems; so we ignore what we find particularly uncomfortable and recuperate other aspects into more familiar paradigms.’10 Such attempts to make a foreign culture familiar lead Brook’s production – which intends to preserve the authenticity of the Mahabharata and yet to make it accessible to Western audiences – to sometimes fall into the trap of seeking effects reminiscent of some Shakespearean plays. The spectacular battle scenes and tragic monologues (such as those delivered by Dhritarashtra’s wife, Gandhari, played by Mireille Malouf) involve an Aristotelian, cathartic dimension of tragedy. The involuntary association with Shakespeare’s history plays, with all their deep feeling of time and even similarities with King Lear (the suffering produced by exile) or Macbeth (the rage of hatred and revenge) is, to Rustom Bharucha, a sign of Brook’s insufficient directing insight: he ‘has failed to provide his actors with modes of representing emotion that belong to the “epic”’.11 Brook’s historicizing effects are interpreted as a strong misunderstanding of the cyclical, ritual meaning of the performance of myth as it functions in Indian theatre. However, this was precisely Brook’s intention: to capture a different perception of time, as inspired by Indian traditional art forms. He was fascinated by how life in India ‘flows with the majestic slowness of a great river’, while ‘at the same time, within the current, each atom has its own dynamic energy’.12 He felt challenged to tell the Indian story to non-Indian audiences – a gesture of increased efficiency, as the original version is translated from French into English. He describes his endeavour as an attempt ‘to suggest the flavour of India without pretending to be what we are not’, to 10

Ibid., 34. Bharucha, ‘A View from India’, in Peter Brook and ‘The Mahabharata’: Critical Perspectives, 240. 12 Brook, The Shifting Point, 161. 11

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‘celebrate a work which only India could have created but which carries echoes for all mankind’.13 Conceptual differences between the Hindu epic and Brook’s production certainly cannot escape a more attentive reading. First of all, the way in which time is managed on stage is different. To what extent Brook is guilty of trespassing the boundaries of cultural specificity and legitimacy, of which Rustom Bharucha so vehemently accuses him of, is still a question of open debate. To be sure, Brook’s production opened the eyes of Western theatre to alternative ways of staging, which were a source of new life. We should compare Brook’s interpretation with certain characteristics of the Mahabharata itself, the role it has played in Indian culture throughout ages and its function in India today to further explore the grounds of Brook’s choice. Important changes occur in character building. Despite the closeness to the Indian spirit Brook sought, one cannot help noticing a pattern of psychological development reminiscent of a Western Bildungs impulse. Yudhishthira’s journey departs from the Indianness of the epic, where the character is an ideal type that must be embodied as faithfully as possible. Indra’s son, the wisest of men by birth, comes to wisdom as he advances through the twelve years of exile in the forest (staged like penance rather than acceptance of the Hindu concept of dharma). The hero in disguise, as he appears to Kitchaka during the thirteenth year of penance, has evolved as a character and has won over himself to such an extent that now he is no longer to be defeated at dice by anybody. In Indian theatre, the character’s multiple facets are revealed to the audience one by one, in the course of events. The audience, together with the actors, is initiated through transformation into understanding the character types, as suggested by the use of masks (as facial elaboration) and costumes in Kathakali. The character is meant to be recognizable and his/her appearance and gestures must be symbolic, interpretable. As V. Lakshmanan introduces his hyperlinked version of the Mahabharata to reflect the innumerable digressions of the epic, he insists that: In Sanskrit dramatic form, unlike in Western literature, the emphasis is not on development of character. The characters in the Ramayana or 13

Ibid., 162.

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Even though the effects may seem the same at first sight, character evolution is not the main focus of the original version of the epic. What predominates here is the Hindu belief that character – a god or a hero – is whole from the very beginning, and life experiences do not add features, but discover those features which have not been manifest so far. It is to this aim that seclusion in the forest is meant to reveal Yudhishthira as truly Dharma’s son. It is at this point that Carrière’s script operates an act of cultural translation by proposing a concept of character that evolves in a plot. However, the challenge of the production is precisely this encounter between a Western contemporary view of identity (in a present when identity is in crisis) and an Eastern stability of identities as types. The two understandings are revealed through each other as they meet in Brook’s production and prove precisely Brook’s point: that the Mahabharata is a quintessentially Indian creation, yet it is relevant to all mankind. Of all the episodes of the production, the Bhagavad-Gita is most directly concerned with the process of knowledge across boundaries that Brook engages with. This dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna takes place before the great battle at Kurukshetra, meant to decide which of the two related clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, will reign over the land which belongs to both. There is, in Brook’s production, an implied debate between the meaning of sacrifice as it is accepted by European tradition and the way Krishna explains it to Arjuna. Arjuna is the warrior who sees himself in the concrete situation of having to raise his arm against his cousins. He feels tempted to give up and let himself be killed rather than being involved in a fratricidal battle. Krishna, who is himself unable to choose between the two parties, lends his armed warriors to Duryodhana, leader of the Kauravas, and agrees to drive Arjuna’s chariot. At this point, he lectures the hero on the meaning of karman (the act with its 14

Lakshmanan, The Mahabharata (accessed 15 August 2001).

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consequences). The Bhagavad-Gita is the most comprehensive synthesis of Indian spirituality, the most significant debate on the question of option and freedom of choice. This pondering on the meaning of the act is also, famously, an example of the deferral of action because of the endless debate engaged on its meaning. This is why Brook’s dealing with the whole Bhagavad-Gita so quickly that it is ‘over before one is even aware of it’15 is one of the main points of Rustom Bharucha’s attack on Brook. Bharucha justifiably points out that this philosophical poem is actually the most important section of the Mahabharata. In Brook’s production the weight of the philosophical debate is sacrificed to a foregrounding of the spectacular battle-scenes, meant to carry the plot forward. This does not mean, though, that the centrality of the Gita episode is also sacrificed, but that its meaning is slightly altered with the intention of broadening it up for a world audience. In the Gita, Arjuna is expected to lead his army to victory. As Krishna explains to him, this is his dharma, his moral duty.16 But he faces the contradiction between his individual morality – based on the doctrine of the karman – and the obligations imposed on him by life and society. Krishna, Vishnu’s avatar –who, in his human hypostasis, drives Arjuna’s chariot – reminds him of the Upanishadic teaching. The opposition between life and death is only apparent – since life is no more than an exterior form – but to give up one’s own law means giving up one’s dignity, which would result in enormous suffering and in a great sin. Brook’s Mahabharata stages dharma in the context of a comparison between the Indian background of the traditional epic and the worldwide background of at least some of his audience. In this light, what is most important in Krishna’s teaching is the doctrine of sacrifice. The sacrifice which Krishna requires of Arjuna is not the narrow sacrifice of magic ritualism, according to which a material offering is brought to the god in exchange for some sort of personal 15

Bharucha, ‘A View from India’, 248. Gavin Flood insists on the inevitability of dharma, a Sanskrit term which comes close to the meaning of the English term ‘religion’, but also incorporates the ideas of ‘truth’, ‘duty’, ‘ethics’, ‘law’ and even ‘natural law’: ‘It is that power which upholds or supports society and the cosmos; that power which constrains phenomena into their particularity, which makes things what they are’ (An Introduction to Hinduism, 11).

16

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advantage. It is a sacrifice that the hero is supposed to offer mentally to the supreme principle, without making it his own, without relating it to his ego in any way. This emphasis in Brook’s production on the necessity of sacrifice for the sake of a superior, divine moral order would remind a Western audience of the doctrine of offering one’s life as a living sacrifice to God in Protestant Christianity. It can also be understood as teaching a practice of temporary detachment from this world by acknowledging its status as maya. At any rate, it places the emphasis on individual choice and responsibility as opposed to submission to a general set of rules applicable to everybody within the moral frame established by a certain religion. The political implications of this come close to the meaning of Roy’s ‘small’ versus ‘big’ things and to Chandra’s effort to reposition the individual on a meeting ground between the Western novel form and the Indian community-oriented storytelling tradition. To a worldwide contemporary audience, this individual emphasis expresses the need to question and transcend sweeping conceptual limitations imposed by rigid ideologies. In Brook’s production, despite possible problems arising from an excessive Western re-reading of the Gita, the strong point is the use of the epic-performance merger which underpins The Mahabharata. The poem is summarized, with Krishna himself narrating the content of his own sayings. This is an apparently artificial technique. However, it manages to express the core meaning of the epic in a way which, even though somewhat didactic, is still challenging enough to be remembered and related to the events on stage by an audience confronting it for the first time: KRISHNA: changing his tone To reply to his question, Krishna led Arjuna through the tangled forest of illusion. He began to teach him the ancient yoga of wisdom and the mysterious path of action. He spoke for a long time, a very long time, between the two armies preparing to destroy themselves.17

There is a very strong feeling that the action is arrested by this narrative, third-person singular intervention. The ‘long time’ taken up by Krishna’s teaching introduces a different, transcendent dimension 17

Carrière, The Mahabharata, 160.

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to the events and counts as the main moment of assessment and pondering on plot development. It is very effective in recasting the function of the Gita as an instance of plot assessment rather than a philosophical meditation on the function of dharma. As such, it successfully performs its function of addressing a double audience, coming from two different cultural backgrounds. Tradition and innovation in contemporary Indian theatre: Girish Karnad’s ‘Theatre of Roots’ Girish Karnad’s interest in the theatre was initially aroused, as he confesses, by his encounter with Strindberg’s work. Brook’s international production of the Mahabharata was the creative result of a western director’s encounter with the Indian epic, an artistic product that came from a culture different from his. A similar encounter with ‘the other’ – Karnad’s contact with European theatre – triggers his interest in how his own country’s cultural past could be used to address contemporary issues. Karnad’s path progressed in a direction opposite to Brook’s, yet the experience was similar: the rediscovery of one’s own tradition through the encounter with something coming from an entirely different cultural space. He is part of a trend represented by other playwrights such as Habib Tanvir, K.N. Panikkar, Badal Sircar, etc. Though sometimes accused of nationalistic, pan-Indian constructions of authentic Indianness (to the extent that there can be an issue of ‘authenticity’ in a hugely diverse country such as India), Karnad creates, as Sumitra Mukerji puts it, ‘a healthy tension between tradition and contemporaneity’.18 Karnad’s theatre is about the contemporary world and contemporary people by way of his reinterpretations of classical Indian stories and theatrical techniques and forms such as Yakshagana. He also enters the debate around the legitimacy of intercultural theatre through the Kannada/English bilingualism of most of his plays. We see in the modern language and gestures of the characters that, apart from a linguistic translation, there is also a temporal and cultural one for the benefit of his audiences. The play The Fire and the Rain is a meta-theatrical discourse on performance, a practical demonstration of what it means to set up 18

Sumitra Mukerji, ‘Encounters with Cultures: Contemporary Indian Theatre and Interculturalism’, The Seagull Theatre Quarterly, 4 (December 1994), 3-18.

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various roles for oneself and to enact them. Arvasu, the fire priest’s brother, a Brahmin, wants to be an actor. For him, the joy of life is the joy of acting: ARVASU I’ll never be learned like father or uncle. I shan’t ever conduct the fire sacrifice like Paravasu or perform penance like cousin Yavakri. All I want is to dance and sing and act. And be with Nittilai.19

Arvasu’s association of acting with the intensity of his love for the hunter girl transmits a kind of Artaudian message about acting as more than life, as ‘life itself’ paroxistically pitched at ‘the strength of an epidemia’.20 Even though Artaud’s metaphor of the plague is more violent, in the surrealist key, similar propitiatory meanings are attributed to the theatre as a very intense experience. Later, when Arvasu is preparing to act in the ritual play which accompanies the fire sacrifice, acting is explicitly presented as a lesson about the meaning of life. This is discussed in terms of character and technique (how to give life to a mask). Nittilai tells Arvasu that she is glad he will play the demon Vritra, from whom he can learn how to change for the better, rather than the god Indra, who cannot be a model because immortality locks him in a stasis: He is immortal. When someone doesn’t die, can’t die, what can he know about anything? He can’t change himself. He can’t – can’t create anything. I like Vritra because even when he’s triumphant he chooses death. I always wonder – if the flowers didn’t know they were to fade and die, would they ever have blossomed?21

NITTILAI

This meta-theatrical debate between immortal, immovable archetypal characters and characters who evolve is challenged here through the suggestion that meaning depends on movement and change. Karnad’s understanding of character, informed by his encounter with Western theatre and its interest in psychology, is quite similar to Brook’s humanized versions of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Karnad 19

Karnad, The Fire and the Rain, 7. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti, London: Calder and Boyars, 1970, 10-17. 21 Karnad, The Fire and the Rain, 51-52. 20

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opposes his mortal characters to the divine beings they enact in the play-within-the-play. Life to Nittilai appears as a succession of invaluable opportunities to change for the better. The blossoming flowers are also a metaphor of acting as the supreme way of enjoying the present moment to the full. This again reminds us of Artaud’s theory of the theatre as the most intense life experience. However, as much as Karnad might have been aware of Artaud when he wrote this play – and he certainly was – he also makes use of the subtle nuances and flavours of the rasa theory. This is suggested by his plastic encoding of life experience, addressed in more than one sense, as in the analogy with the blossoming flowers. Nittilai’s words point out the importance of the fact that character in the theatre should be the product of performative creativity. Character should not be just reproduced, but negotiated between the actor and the mask. The Actor-Manager explains this to Arvasu: ACTOR-MANAGER

Here. This is the mask of Vritra the demon. Now surrender to the mask. Surrender and pour life into it. But remember, once you bring the mask to life you have to keep a tight control over it, otherwise it’ll try to take over. It’ll begin to dictate terms to you and you must never let that happen. Prostrate yourself before it. Pray to it. Enter it. Then control it.22

This is a reference to the fact that in traditional Indian theatre – of which Kathakali, with its quasi-monastic acting schools, is a good example – the actor trains to become the character. Inhabiting a mask is also a lesson about human identity: while acting, one is supposed to identify with the mask. But it is also about being possessed by the demon of the mask; hence, it becomes a lesson about power. Arvasu’s instruction by the Actor-Manager makes reference to this special treatment. But in Karnad’s complex symbolism, the dangers inherent in the mask’s own life prefigure dramatic events in the play. The ‘killing of the mask’ predicts Nittilai’s death, hence the sacrifice of Arvasu’s love. Karnad uses the multiple technical possibilities offered by the mask in order to explore issues related to human identity and individuality. In theatre forms such as Kathakali or Yakshagana mask 22

Ibid., 52.

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is ‘the face writ large’. It is a stronger perception of the face, an attempt to present it as something other than it is rather than an attempt to hide the face, as in European theatre or carnival. The mask is the sign of the character, the recognizable visual representation of his/her type. Karnad’s earlier plays Naga-Mandala (1988) and, even more explicitly, Hayavadana (1971)23 go deeper into this issue. The main topic in Naga-Mandala is a quid pro quo, a case of substitution. Deserted by her new husband, Appanna, Rani is advised by the old blind woman, Kuruddava, to feed him a magic root (of which Kuruddava gives Rani two pieces), which would make him forget his concubine and fall in love with her. After she tries out the smaller piece with no effect, Rani, frightened by the bloody froth the bigger piece gives to her curry, throws it into the anthill where a King Cobra lives. The King Cobra – embodiment of the dark forces – falls desperately in love with Rani and, taking the shape of her absent husband, starts visiting her at night. When the real husband notices her pregnancy, he drags her before the village Elders. Advised by her night-time lover, Rani chooses to take the ordeal by the cobra, which means that she must put her hand into the anthill and speak the truth. When the King Cobra, in the guise of her husband, describes the requirements of the ordeal to her, Rani is scared by the realization of her limited access to the logic of her situation: NAGA: No, it won’t bite. Only, you must tell the truth. RANI: What truth? NAGA: The truth. Tell the truth while you are holding the cobra. RANI: What truth? Shall I say my husband forgets his nights by

next morning? Shall I say my husband brought a dog and a mongoose to kill this cobra, and yet suddenly he seems to know all about what the cobra will do or not do? 24 NAGA: Say anything. But you must speak the truth.

The strange way in which Naga presents Rani with the necessity of acting the right way, under threat of death, suggests that speaking the truth does not necessarily imply knowing the truth. The act of saying what turns out to be the truth is a self-creating act, a reality brought 23 24

Karnad, Three Plays, 19-65 and 67-139. Karnad, Naga-Mandala, 54.

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into being by the utterance itself, which does not depend on any previous knowledge. The truth depends on the ritual act of voicing it; therefore it is an instance of performative language, of triggering realities into being and, in so doing, creating a particular version of those realities. At the moment of the ordeal, Rani does not know what she is going to say. But the words come to her mouth as she is holding the cobra (as we know, the transfigured body of her actual lover), with all the truth-creating power of ritual discourse. Even though she does not yet know the full meaning of what she is saying, the more knowledgeable audience realizes that she is speaking the truth: RANI: Since coming to this village, I have held by this hand, only two… APPANNA: (Triumphant.) There. She admits it. Two, she says. Two! Who are they? RANI: My husband and… APPANNA: And – say, who else? RANI: And this Cobra. (Suddenly words pour out.) Yes, my husband and this King Cobra. Except for these two, I have not touched any one of the male sex. Nor have I allowed any other male to touch me. If I lie, let the Cobra bite me. (The Cobra slides up her shoulder and spreads its hood like an umbrella over her head. The crowd gasps. The Cobra sways its hood gently for a while, then becomes docile and moves over her shoulder like a garland. Music fills the skies. The light changes into a soft, luminous glow. Rani stares uncomprehending as the Cobra slips back into the ant-hill. There are hosannas and cheers from the crowd.) ELDER I: A miracle! A miracle! ELDER II: She is not a woman. She is a Divine Being. 25 ELDER III: Indeed, a Goddess – !

The paradoxical nature of the truth Rani speaks – the simultaneous voicing of both her fidelity and her infidelity, which both she and the crowd do not fully grasp – relies on a paradox: the cobra she is holding by her hand is and is not her husband at the same time. His identification with Appanna is an illusion granted by his capacity to take on Appanna’s appearance; but, apart from this appearance – or 25

Ibid., 58-59.

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this mask – nothing else is similar between him and Appanna. However, after the ordeal, part of Naga’s features are transferred, by virtue of public recognition, upon Appanna. He finally becomes his wife’s lover. But, paradoxically, it is her first love encounter with her husband which bestows upon Rani the revelation of what the truth actually is. We can see this as she asks her husband to let their son perform the ritual cremation of the Cobra – who dies strangled in her tresses – which one is supposed to do only for one’s own father. The double ending gives the audience a choice between an orthodox resolution of the conflict and an unconventional one. The former implies Naga’s death and ritual cremation; the latter implies, on the contrary, his living forever hidden in Rani’s dark hair and, also, the possibility of Rani’s departure from the myth of innocence implicit in Indian culture. Her discovery of sexuality transforms her into a modern, mature woman, fully aware of her needs and desires. But the double life she assumes, sealed by her tacit acceptance of the double ending, places Rani under the sign of ambiguity and double identity: she is and yet she is not Appanna’s true wife, just as her son is and is not Appanna’s. On the level of possible interpretations of the story, this doubleness suggests the alternative possibilities in interpreting the plot from the perspective of Karnad’s double (Indian and worldwide) audience. From Karnad’s plays, Hayavadana is probably the one that most directly addresses identity issues through masks. As Karnad represents them on stage, the two male characters in Hayavadana are both masked. When transposition occurs, the actors only have to change masks, the theatrical signs of their heads. The real change, however, occurs in Padmini’s mind. Padmini, the only character in the trio who wears no mask, is also the most complex one in the play, to the point where the two male characters and the events in which she is involved can be read as projections of her desires, of her confusion, of the cataclysmic changes in her perceptions. Her experience significantly surpasses what is expected of her role in the play. As Brian Crow and Chris Banfield notice: In many ways, Hayavadana is Padmini’s story: from her first appearance she is on stage virtually throughout. She also has no mask, implying that our perception of Kapila and Devadatta is to be through her eyes. Padmini is in pursuit of an unattainable ideal in which the

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respective qualities she esteems in each of her lovers are combined: she wishes to have her cake and eat it.26

Crow and Banfield point out the psychological complexity beyond Padmini’s theatrical function, which implies that the play can be read as an account of her development. But, whilst Karnad’s interest in psychology and character development is arguably a borrowing from Western theatre, his use of myth acts as an important reference point. The theatrical universe is also subordinated to the changes occurring in Padmini’s consciousness. Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’ is a theatrical project engaged on a journey of self-discovery by reading the present through the lens of myth. Myth puts one in contact with one’s origins and, thus, with one’s sense of identity. As he describes the experience of writing his first play, Yayati, on the ship to England – on his journey towards his encounter with Western culture – Karnad feels ‘nailed’ to a past understood in terms that are not historical, but mythical. As Karnad points out, ‘the Hindu mind, with its belief in the cycle of births and deaths, has found little reason to chronicle or glamorize any particular historical period’. As ‘it was the Muslims who first introduced history as a positive concept in Indian thought’ and the encounter with Britain that made him aware of his relationship with ‘his past’,27 Karnad sees Hindu myth as more appropriate in the performance of Indian identity. He thus contrasts myth to a historical sense introduced by the Muslims in India and reinforced by the British.28 Performance of oneself within the frame of myth gives one access to a more complete understanding of the significance of the present moment. This is in fact related to a pattern of circularity which is more strongly defined in Indian culture and which I shall detail more in my analysis of fiction. In performance, myth is made relevant to contemporary life in a way that is free from any reductive essentialism. In Karnad’s case, this 26

Brian Crow with Chris Banfield, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 150. 27 Karnad, ‘Author’s Introduction’, in Three Plays, 7. 28 This particular understanding of history as an import opposed to Hindu myth is part of Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’ project and should be understood in an aesthetic sense. Different understandings of history can see it as repetition of mythical instances (see Eliade and Campbell) or as a series of particular moments that offer the possibility of transformational, liberating restagings of myth in performance.

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encounter with one’s origins (or one’s roots) takes place through theatrical writing. With Brook, it comes from the challenge posed by India’s foundation epic and achieved through a reworking, in a worldaccessible artistic idiom, of the Mahabharata, which thus becomes an epic of the world. The same process can be noticed in the contemporary Indian novels in English with which this study is concerned. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie projects myth – actualized through storytelling – against the shock of the history of post-independence India. In The Satanic Verses, he opposes the generous polysemy of Hindu myth to Islamic monotheism and the rigid mooring in history that comes along with it (also suggested by Karnad in the earlier quotation). In the double plot – outlined by the story and by its structure – of Roy’s The God of Small Things a similar refusal of linear historical teleology and its tragic dénouements takes place as history is contrasted to a different dimension of time. This dimension is invested with the circularity of myth and with the significance of kairos. It is here, rather than in the main linear storyline, that events are invested with meaning and all conclusions are drawn. In Chandra’s ‘big Indian novel’ Red Earth and Pouring Rain – where identity formation spans generations through samsara – freedom from the many forms of bondage of life on earth is achieved through a nomadic understanding of time and space. The self is taken away from the limitations imposed by the life span corresponding to a single incarnation and positioned within the wider, atemporal frame of myth, where it is performed in the spiral process of storytelling. One can draw a parallel between the transformative aspects of classic Hindu theatre and the metamorphoses of traditional forms in intercultural theatre, which I have approached through the examples of Brook’s and Karnad’s works. The strength of performance lies in its capacity to make potential, universal meanings relevant to the present. Through performance, mythical narratives are brought into the present and transformation makes room for psychological development. This fluidity of categories established in performance manifests itself as what I shall further discuss as the emergence of nomadic thinking in contemporary Indian fiction in English.

CHAPTER FIVE REPOSITIONING SCHEHERAZADE: FROM STORYTELLING TO PERFORMANCE IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

If the traditional Indian merger of storytelling and performance operates in contemporary intercultural theatre, it will be the task of the following chapters to show that it is also very much at work in contemporary Indian fiction in English. I will use Salman Rushdie’s rewriting of the archetypal storytelling dialogue in The Arabian Nights as a starting point of this discussion. This chapter will examine the ways in which the Indian tradition of storytelling as performance reflects in Saleem Sinai’s performance of his narrator-function in Midnight’s Children. Saleem is engaged in an act of storytelling for survival and – like Scheherazade, who, by maintaining the narrative suspense that determines her curious listener Shahryar to prolong her life until a perpetually deferred end of the story – he uses performative language in order to create an alternative fictional world in which he will continue to exist after his death. Scheherazade and Indian myth in Saleem Sinai’s storytelling In Indian culture, the perception of history as linear does not actually appear before national consciousness begins to form in reaction to the British rule. Linear history – history as development – is rather a Western import, to be contrasted to older, cyclical patterns of thought. It is perceived as part of a new idea of modernity, in pursuit of emancipation from Britain and of equality with it. As Aruna Srivastava points out, this is one of the main conflicts in Midnight’s Children: ‘As he writes the novel, Saleem wrestles with a chronological view of history, passed on by the ruling British and now part of the Indian national consciousness, and (to him) a more ephemeral, (Mahatma) Gandhian, mythical view of history – properly

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and traditionally Indian, but suppressed by more “progressive” ideas about history and its relation to time.’1 Midnight’s Children is about the history of India immediately after it gained its independence. It is therefore an historical novel. Srivastava’s discussion of the interaction between history and myth involves a positioning of Rushdie’s novel in the wider context of Indian culture, caught in the dilemma of shaping a national consciousness and writing its history in terms imported from Western cultures. These terms need to be reconciled with the mythic understanding of time characteristic of the various traditions of the subcontinent. It is part of a wider postcolonial project to use narrative in order to rewrite a history that used to be written from the metropolis and which now needs reassessment. Midnight’s Children has often been read as a fictional demonstration of the allegory of individual biography as national history. I do not aim to provide another in-depth analysis of this overdebated issue (even though some references to it will be necessary). I will, instead, look at the novel in terms of its use of the Indian epic and storytelling tradition as strategies to address questions regarding personal identities at a time when national identity is being redefined. In Rushdie’s partitioned India, personal identity cannot be simply defined as a given. It is rather the continuously changing outcome of a dynamic process, unfolding between a perceived distant mythical wholeness that precedes national awareness and the still-present need of emancipation from Britain. In later writings, such as ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, the opposition tends to melt in favour of a more complex multiple perception of the dynamic nature of identity. Nevertheless, we can still talk about a kind of anti-identity, an identity defined by ‘what I am not’ to the same extent that it is defined by ‘what I am’. In Midnight’s Children, this duality splits the self, resulting in inner exile from oneself and, by extension, from one’s history. If migration is alienation, the return to the motherland completes the cycle of exile in which identity is formed. As the title of Rushdie’s collection of stories East, West suggests, ‘East’ stands for India as opposed to Britain. But ‘East’ and ‘West’ are also abstract opposites, points of reference in the staging of that ‘India of the mind’ which the author describes in 1

Aruna Srivastava, ‘“The Empire Writes Back”: Language and History in “Shame” and “Midnight’s Children”’, ARIEL, XX/4 (October 1989), 63.

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Imaginary Homelands.2 The fact that the title of Rushdie’s collection of stories features a comma (rather than an ‘and’) between the two concepts suggests that they are not necessarily different concepts (as the ‘and’ might suggest), but similar, almost interchangeable ones, as indicated by the comma which places them in an appositional relation. In his fiction, as well as in his essays, Rushdie rejects fixed identities. Identities in his novels are mobile, they change as characters change places, and they do so all the time. In Midnight’s Children, the characters’ pilgrimage from Kashmir through Amritsar to Agra, Bombay, Delhi and Pakistan represents an itinerary of exile. There is a certain feeling of not belonging to any particular place which announces a nomadic perspective that, as I shall try to show further on, increasingly characterizes more recent Indian writing in English (such as Vikram Chandra’s). This itinerary reflects the country’s inner fragmentation, which is just as alienating as exile from one’s country. Spatial fragmentation reflects the inner fragmentation of the self. In Midnight’s Children, this inner fragmentation will be deepened by India’s post-independence Partition, reflected in the dissolution of Saleem’s body into text. Under these circumstances, the only possible means of salvation is storytelling. The novel spells out the model of storytelling for survival, explicitly based on the tradition of Arabian Nights. This reliance on storytelling produces, at the same time, the opposite effect: the geographical panorama and the general encyclopaedic drive of the novel project an idealized, positive (even though sadly unreal) vision of national unity. While telling stories to Shahryar, Scheherazade has in mind not only the storyteller’s aesthetic aim of charming an audience, but also a more pragmatic one: she must postpone her death sentence. She does this by gradually replacing Shahryar’s world of cruelty and ruthlessness by a tale-framed world of reconciliation and forgiveness. Her stories all have a didactic value, as they end with moral teachings that the audience is expected to follow. There is one moral teaching crowning all the others in Scheherazade’s conclusion to the cycle of one thousand nights and a night, which ends the king’s excessive act of power – that of taking revenge on all the virgins in the kingdom for his former wife’s infidelity. When Scheherazade’s storytelling ends, 2

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10.

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Shahryar gives up his plan to kill her, as he has by now fallen in love with her beauty and wisdom. Saleem mimics Scheherazade in his storytelling for survival. He is engaged in a process of self-discovery through narrative and, as such, of initiation and identity formation (or, rather, identity destruction, since the novel is a kind of inverted Bildungsroman). He further identifies with some of the characters featuring in Arabian Nights, such as Aladdin, ‘voyaging in a fabulous cave’.3 He also seems to be trying to convey a moral teaching such as Scheherazade’s, directed at his real and implied audiences. The success of this teaching is ensured by the seductive capacity of the text. As the relationship between Saleem (the narrator) and Padma (the audience) shows, storytelling is an act of seduction and response to seduction. Like Padma, the real reader is seduced by Saleem’s narrative, being actually the target of his extra-diegetic hints. The moral teaching that Saleem directs at his audience works through a parallel between the decaying state of the narrator’s body and the current situation of post-independence India. The rhythm in Saleem’s narrative (reflecting the night/day alternation as recorded by Scheherazade’s storytelling strategy of postponing death), mirrors the construction of the narrative. As Saleem’s body disintegrates, the narrative grows. It defies the passage of biographical and historical time by an atemporal, myth-related time of its own, whose meaning can be preserved in the thirty-one chapters (or chutney jars) of the novel: Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning – yes, meaning – something.4

To this end, personal biography, myth and national history are mixed up in a dramatized interaction between a narrator and a listener in love with each other. As they negotiate the diegetic world of the novel, they mimic the creation of the world through the love of primordial 3 4

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 194. Ibid., 11.

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couples in the Indian pantheon, such as Vishnu and Lakshmi, Shiva and Parvati, Rama and Sita. This Hindu background interacts with the Islamic tradition of storytelling as represented by The Arabian Nights through the Saleem-Padma couple, a version (in inverted gender terms) of the Scheherazade-Shahryar one. But in Rushdie’s postmodern discourse their love is marked by the inevitable suspicion of a parodic intentionality directed at all that is traditionally sublime, but at the same time by the failure arising from Saleem’s impotence. Both dimensions reflect on Saleem’s nation as he identifies with it. If love is creation, impotence is death. As foreseen by many parodic instances in the novel – such as Saleem’s incapacity to father his own son, being replaced by his changeling brother Shiva – Saleem’s death at the end of the novel suggests, on a sad note, the death of India’s pre-independence hopes. In the wake of Fredric Jameson’s famous and much criticized theory of individual biography as allegory of national history in thirdworld texts,5 we might be tempted to look for a parallel between the two. However, Saleem’s Purusha-like disintegration into the component parts of his story suggests the creation of a narrative universe through a primordial sacrifice. It also suggests that this universe – post-independence, post-Partition India – is falling apart. Unlike Scheherazade, who, through storytelling, earns her chances for a future life, Saleem tells a story about fragmented India which grows from his own disintegrating body. This demonstrates Rushdie’s pessimism about the direction in which post-independence India has travelled, moving from the promise of unity afforded by the Midnight’s Children Conference to the nightmare of the Widow’s ‘Emergency’. Padma is the implied audience of Rushdie’s novel and the necessary listener of Saleem’s storytelling. She is both a positive, reliable help and a comic figure. She is the necessary listener-figure who gives sense to storytelling as a struggle for survival, like Shahryar in Arabian Nights. However, Saleem and Padma’s dialogue is a source of parody, because of the inversion of genders between the original narrator and listener, Scheherazade and Shahryar. The power relation 5

Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (Fall 1986), 65-88.

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between the two is also inverted. Padma is – at least in places – the strong one, the protector; Saleem is the weak one. Saleem’s life is not only prolonged by his own narrative construction, but seems to have never existed outside various discourses (stories, myth and the almost equally artificial history of contemporary India). However, such discourses must be addressed to someone. In the absence of an audience, storytelling becomes pointless: It has been two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life. For two days, her place at the vat of mango kasaundy has been taken by another woman – also thick of waist, also hairy of forearm; but, in my eyes, no replacement at all! – while my own dung-lotus has vanished into I don’t know where. A balance has been upset; I feel cracks widening down the length of my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn’t enough. I am seized by a sudden fist of anger: why should I be so unreasonably treated by my one disciple? Other men have recited stories before me; other men were not so impetuously abandoned. When Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, dictated his masterpiece to elephant-headed Ganesh, did the god walk out on him halfway? He certainly did not. (Note that, despite my Muslim background, I’m enough of a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, and actually I’m very fond of the image of trunk-nosed, flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!)6

This episode mentions Ganesha (here called Ganesh) – son of Shiva and Parvati, who become characters in Rushdie’s novel – the patron of storytellers and the protector of all artistic activities, with whom Saleem (rather than Padma) shares not only the enormous nose, but also the propensity to narrate. Within the continuum of storytelling, Hindu and Muslim traditions come together through the figures of Scheherazade and Ganesh. This scene is emblematic for the significance of the act of storytelling. Rushdie comments on this scene – a conscious use of the Sanskrit epics – as it reveals Saleem’s unreliability as a narrator in his ‘Errata’ article in Imaginary Homelands.7 The fact that, according to tradition, Ganesh is supposed to sit at the feet of Vyasa and take down the Mahabharata (rather than Valmiki and the Ramayana, as the novel has it) is an ingenious way of 6 7

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 149-50. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 22.

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stressing the fact that, as compared to the perfection of myth, today’s stories can only be faulty. The unquestionable truth-value of the Mahabharata as itihasa – whose relevance for the whole world Brook celebrates in his production – cannot be matched by Saleem’s story or by India’s contemporary history. Both are highly contrived and subject to an irreversible ‘cracking’.8 The novel’s world is a make-believe projection of the narrator’s self, of his urge to swallow lives and realities and to give them back to the audience in narrative form. The stories take shape out of Saleem’s body, which disintegrates in the rhythm of his narrative. The narrative is thus performed rather than told. Body language symbolically supplements verbal language. The telling of an important or painful event often damages Saleem’s body, who tells his reader: ‘Please believe that I am falling apart.’9 Rushdie’s narrative discourse often resorts to body metaphors. Even the setting of events follows the same logic according to which the universe is a projection of the body of its creator (or, here, narrator). The city of Bombay is described in anatomic terms, imagining its whole population as concentrated within one single, hungry body: ‘Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it’s actually a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India.’10 This anatomized geography is supplemented by the frequent concentration of ideas and feelings in metaphors of food. Related to specific Indian dishes, these metaphors construct a parodic, exotic, highly marketable, orientalizing version of India: What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza pickle works … nevertheless, while 8

The metaphor of cracking has also been used by other contemporary Indian authors writing in English to refer to Partition. An example is Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel originally published as Ice-Candy-Man (London: Heinemann, 1988), renamed Cracking India by the American publisher (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed, 1991). 9 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 37. 10 Ibid., 159.

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we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by little, even the harmonies of my parents’ autumnal love went out of tune.11

It is in this culinary register that the novel ends, in tune with the central metaphor of history preservation (Rushdie’s ‘chutnification’ of history12): the thirty pickle-jars standing for the chapters of the novel and also for each of Saleem’s years. As a matter of fact, there is a thirty-first jar, a potential one, which ‘cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place’.13 It corresponds to Saleem’s thirty-first year of life, which is never going to take place because he will die before. Saleem’s identity is spelled out in patterns of identification coming from the storytelling tradition. Besides Scheherazade and Ganesh, another model is Ibn Sina, ‘master magician, Sufi adept’, whose name is obviously related to Saleem’s second name. Saleem’s wish to bring together Hindu and Muslim traditions, suggested in the passage quoted above, is maintained here through a mixture of references. The masks of human identities are represented in language by people’s names, which become signs of human destiny, or, in Hindu terms, of their karma: Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles. Sinai contains Ibn Sina, master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his power of acting-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration – Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-ofrevelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert – of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end.14

11

Ibid., 330. Ibid., 460. 13 Ibid., 462. 14 Ibid., 304-305. 12

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These names are masks that the narrator puts on to grant a kind of polycultural legitimacy to his story. By tracing his name back to various Eastern and Western origins, Saleem points out that his identity and the narrator function only exist as a patchwork of masks collected from different cultures, religions and communities. The critical implication of this masquerade is that these masks, however, never come together as a coherent whole. The ambiguity of signifiers has crucial implications for the staging of identity. This fragmentary status, supplemented by a fragmenting body, is Saleem’s family inheritance. If Saleem’s life, body and national history are all made of fragments, just as fragmented and split on various temporal levels is his narrative. The only guarantee of coherence comes from Padma, through love. Padma’s presence is vital to the story, as no story can exist without its audience and there can be no wholeness without love: ‘Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,’ I wrote and read aloud, ‘I have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz remained the sheet’s victim, I have become its master – and Padma is the one who is now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe glimpses of myself – while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose, frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralysed – yes! – by love.’15

Rushdie’s narrative is supplemented by a pervasive irony, which combines the theatrical function of the Fool (in whose guise he casts his narrator in Midnight’s Children) and his postmodern awareness as a Western author. It may not be a historical problem that Indians are ‘a nation of forgetters’,16 as this capacity to overlook the linear succession of events keeps them in touch with the atemporal memory of myth. But the fact that Indian history appears as no more than mere play is worrying. Politics is a form of play – not just lila, the universe as the gods’ play, but the authorities’ play with people’s lives, as denounced in the novel with reference to Indira Gandhi’s (the Widow’s) self-proclaimed ‘Emergency’. Rushdie does not examine 15 16

Ibid., 121. Ibid., 37.

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political chaos from a deterministic perspective, but proposes a model of history as a restaging of myth: events are read as ritual transformations (or degradations) of exemplary atemporal deeds. Shiva, Saleem’s changeling brother, who bears the name of the Hindu god of creation and destruction, is – through his leftist political convictions – the main emblem of Rushdie’s anti-Congress attitude. It is in this restaging of myth that performance and performativity become visible features of Rushdie’s writing. Intercultural epics: storying myth through performance in Midnight’s Children Saleem’s story is an implicit study of identity performance within a hybrid historical and mythical discourse. The two dimensions converge in the novel against the background of traditional Indian culture in which the time-scheme moves between the cyclical and the linear. Analyses of Rushdie’s use of performativity – even though not of performance – have been made before. One of them is Margareta Petersson’s study of myth, satire and religion in Rushdie’s fiction.17 Petersson, who writes after the fatwa, focuses on Rushdie’s use of the performative dimension of language as a way to demonstrate that the author’s attitude to myth and religion is not offensive. She claims that this is so because those sentences that had been read as constatives (in which the distinction true/false exists) should actually be seen as performatives (in which such a distinction does not hold and which are entitled to the status of what she calls ‘fiction as action’).18 Petersson takes over the main tenets of speech-act theory – primarily Austin’s view of language as made of constatives and performatives – in order to show how language expresses attitudes. Practically all sentences in a language can function as performatives, Austin shows, as sentences that do not aim at describing a reality, but at creating (or performing) one. Therefore, it is of vital importance to acknowledge the fact that fiction constructs truth in a way that is different from that of non-fiction. As Petersson argues, Only in the non-fictional text, could one meet the writer face to face, or as a reader be on the same ontological level. In fiction, on the other 17 18

Petersson, Unending Metamorphoses, 136. Ibid., 11-17.

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hand, disguise and pretence prevail. Here the writer is said to conceal himself behind different narrators and characters. In order to analyse the relation between writer and reader, narratologists have constructed an extensive apparatus of narrative technique, where the real writer and reader are separated by several instances of fictional and implicit correspondence.

Petersson disagrees with the New Historicist overlap of history and fiction and argues that, in fact, there is a difference between the two, which comes from the speaker’s attitude. So, if Rushdie called Ibrahim ‘the bastard’ in a fictional text, it is not the same as if he had called him so in a non-fictional one. She uses Rushdie’s performative use of language as an argument against the charge that his fiction (especially The Satanic Verses) represents an offence against Islam. Her argument that fiction is fundamentally different from non-fiction as regards the construction of truth is to be found in a comparison between Rushdie’s essays, which are unequivocal, and his novels, which, as pieces of literature, are more prone to ambiguity (though one may spot what one sees as recognizable truths in them). Petersson, however, warns that we should be aware of the fact that ‘on a deeper level all texts are constructs and thus ultimately fictional’.19 Language performativity, however, is supported by other levels of performance in Midnight’s Children. Aware of rasa aesthetics, Rushdie – who in Midnight’s Children relies heavily on body metaphors and body activities in the development of history – advances his famous theory of the ‘chutnification’ of feelings. This theory is put in practice by characters such as Reverend Mother, Aunt Alia, Amina Sinai and Mary Pereira. It becomes one of the main organizing principles of the novel, whose chapters are, as is repeatedly said, jars in which history is pickled. Each of these jars stands for one year of the narrator’s life. They symbolically conflate a Western linear history (measured in years) with a specifically Indian perception, that of the organic experience of art through the rasa effect. The symbolic function of the pickle jars extends even further than that: even though they stand for years that follow one after another, they can also be seen simultaneously on the pantry shelf where they are stored. This suggests the effect of Rushdie’s performative approach to storytelling: 19

Ibid., 17-18.

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while the story goes on, made as it is of events which come one after another, the performative cuts into the diachronic order of the events. Storytelling is subject to the rule of ‘what happened next’ (repeatedly invoked by Padma, the listener to the story). Performance – which is here a kind of metafictional dimension added to the narrative – urges the listener to stop and think (as in Brecht’s epic theatre, which influenced modern Indian performance starting from the 1950s) of the significance of what is happening at the present moment. Thus, performance opens up the possibility of multiple levels of meaning and calls the reader to reflect upon the significance of events. It also induces a different way of reading, which makes the reader go back in circles all the time, looking for references to events that would happen many pages later, or metaphors that make sense only after the cycle is completed, at the end of the novel. As such, Midnight’s Children needs to be read (or performed) several times, from the various perspectives that it opens, for its meaning to be fully revealed to the reader. In Chapter One I suggested a possible theory of reading as performance on the basis of reader-response criticism and poststructuralist theories of textuality. I used Wolfgang Iser’s engagement of the reader in the process of novel-writing through the act of filling in gaps in the text.20 I also referred to Roland Barthes’ theory of the reader ‘looking up from the book’ and thus adding an exterior, personal perspective which contributes to the writing of the text.21 Since the literary text is a performative one in the sense of its reality-creating capacity, it engages a relationship between the stage and an ‘outside’ of performance, which, as Henry Sayre, is also a text. This ‘outside’ of the text introduces a performative oral dimension which plays a subversive part in the text, by allowing for a plurality of meaning which challenges the apparent meanings in the text.22 In Midnight’s Children, this plurality is performed in the course of Saleem’s bodily disintegration, which allegorically mimics the partition of his country and one of the Indian creation myths and also parallels and supplements his verbal narrative discourse. This physicality of the text achieved through the implication of the body 20

Iser, Prospecting, 9. Barthes, ‘Writing Reading’, 29. 22 Sayre, ‘Performance’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 94. 21

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adds a pronounced visual dimension to the story, organizing it not only according to the linear, chronological temporality that usually characterizes narrative, but also in the spatialized, visual terms of theatrical performance. Performance makes action more immediate and gives the reader the impression of direct participation. It makes events more credible. As Rushdie identifies with Saleem, the reader is invited to identify with Padma, and thus take part in the representation of the narrative act. The most obvious level of performance is that of the narrative act itself. Saleem plays several parts in the novel. First of all, he is the narrator of his personal history, in which he features as the main character. But, as the latter is identified, through allegory, with the history of post-Partition India, the narrative simultaneously unfolds on two different levels – the personal and the collective one. Saleem becomes, at the same time, a historical chronicler. He narrates history in full awareness of its being narratively constructed and of its being just another fiction. Whilst claiming that all reality is a question of perspective, Saleem confesses that what he is speaking about, apart from himself, is his own version of India, which he does call ‘my India’. This comes close to that ‘India of the mind’ that Rushdie mentions in Imaginary Homelands. In fact, it is the country he is writing about, the imagined space which is staged and which exemplifies Rushdie’s theoretical principles and attitudes. Such an attitude is the one voiced by Saleem: ‘In my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.’23 The most important performance-related element of Saleem’s narrative is his Arabian Nights-inspired dialogue with Padma, which I analysed above in relation to the ways in which the story is told as a reversal of the Scheherazade-Shahryar relationship in Arabian Nights. What needs to be mentioned at this point is the effect of this negotiation of the storytelling act on the construction of narrative meaning. Padma performs the part of the traditional audience that listens to oral storytelling in praesentia. She also contributes to the story through immediate responses that belong to the same order of 23

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 211. Salman Rushdie’s essay ‘“Errata”: Or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children’ (Imaginary Homelands, 22-25) stresses the right of the narrator to forge his own subjective history, whose ‘truth’ is different from anybody else’s.

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the oral. They add meaning to the text of Saleem’s narrative by checking it against the reality of the hors-texte. As she takes the narrative in, she stops the narrator when she gets bored or when she does not think that what he says is very important. She is an uneducated woman and is not ashamed of it. For her, Saleem is important and she takes good and loving care of him. But in her hierarchy of values his vanity of ‘writing-shiting’ is secondary to more concrete aspects of life such as food. She is not pleased when her cooking goes wasted (‘Eat, na, food is spoiling’; ‘Okay, starve starve, who cares two pice?’24). This point of view is incorporated in Saleem’s story as cooking and pickling metaphors (such as the central one of pickling history) are taken on board by Saleem as he goes on with his story. Saleem knows that his story ‘has her by the throat’ and acknowledges her vital importance as an audience and as a muse to his storytelling. Padma is a catalyst in the storytelling process and wants to see it progressing. She tries to hurry Saleem, who keeps abandoning the narrative for digressive comments: ‘But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next.’ In this, she performs the role of readers who expect such narratives and whose primary interest is in causological plot development: ‘“At this rate”, Padma complains, “you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth”.’ She thus reminds Saleem of the tyranny of linear history, from which he wants to escape into the safer order of myth, with its higher meanings. However, at the same time, Padma, through her interruptions and questions, turns Saleem’s story into an act of performance. She challenges his sophisticated philosophical meanings and demands that what he says should make sense to her. Performance must be alive in the present moment when the narrative act is performed and of which we are reminded by the narrative present tense used by Rushdie’s narrator. Saleem acknowledges her complaints and makes an attempt at explaining the aesthetic flavours of art revealed through the rasa effect by referring to cooking, an analogy readily understood by Padma:

24

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 24.

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Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. ‘Things – even people – have a way of leaking into each other’, I explain, ‘like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin’s suicide, for example, leaked into old Aaadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise’, I intone earnestly, ‘the past has dripped into me … so we can’t ignore it …’ Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. ‘To me it’s a crazy way of telling your life story’, she cries, ‘if you can’t even get to where your father met your mother.’25

Padma’s uninhibited expressions of disappointment adjust Saleem’s storytelling method and thus point to the fact that there are many ways of telling a story and many meanings that can be attached to it. Whilst this metafictional comment on Saleem’s story/history introduces a New Historicist doubt as to the existence of one official version of history (which is the point of Rushdie’s criticism of postindependence India), it also stresses the fluid and adjustable nature of storytelling and qualifies it as an act of performance. In his performance of the narrator function, Saleem comes close to the function held in Indian theatre by the Fool – vidusaka – as a unifier of opposites, an eraser of boundaries beween the high and the low, between canonic order and anti-canonic subversion, between consciousness and the unconscious. The vidusaka is an important connector between the world of the stage and the audience, who are the target of the moral message voiced by the truth-speaking Fool. In the Indian Kutiyattam, this connecting function is more explicitly enacted, since the vidusaka is also endowed with the capacity to translate from one language into another. He is endowed with transformative power. He is also a translator from the language of gestures into the language of words and uses his body as well as language in order to communicate the artistic message. The Fool is a liminal, transitory figure par excellence: he is both joyful and sad, both happy and unhappy. His function, almost irrespective of the time and space he is attached to, is similar. Kapila Vatsyayan describes the Indian vidusaka in terms that evoke a Bakhtinian image of the Fool in the European carnival: a ‘communicator between high and low, past

25

Ibid., 38.

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and present’, providing ‘a strong basis of commonality amongst seemingly heterogeneous forms throughout India’.26 Saleem’s Fool-like masquerade also involves another kind of mask, the stylistic one, or stylistic pastiche. Part of the strategy used by Rushdie to this end is that of placing Saleem in the good tradition of Fools in literatures in English, who manipulate not only the truth, but also their audiences. One of the most important aspects is the Sternean intertext, one of the many in the cross-cultural mélange that this novel is. This is what Vic Sage refers to as ‘the method of the book: a pastiche of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the classical instance of the self-conscious narrator who has his listener “by the throat”, who plays with “discours” and “histoire”, who mixes up the creation myth with the narrative technique, while at the same time claiming that he is giving a historical account’.27 Saleem uses his right as a Fool to afford to make mistakes with respect to many historical events happening in contemporary India, as Rushdie confesses in his ‘Errata’ essay. Even though it deals with historical events, the purpose of Midnight’s Children is not historical in the conventional sense. Time – placed at the intersection between two very different traditions – is supplemented by a ‘somewhat Proustian’ purpose. The boundary between cyclical and linear time blurs as events are reconstituted through flashbacks of memory. Saleem’s somewhat debatable foolery of lying about things that really happened is not to be blamed so much on his unreliable memory as on his – or the author’s – wish to ‘write himself’, by ‘cutting up history to suit himself’.28 Like a genuine Fool, Saleem patches his motley identity together out of bits and pieces of his country’s history, which he does not always remember in the right way. But, on the performative level – that is, on the level of attitude – his discourse speaks the truth. A similarity can be pointed out here between Saleem’s truth, which is often different from the historical one – therefore establishing an equal relationship between the text and the 26 Kapila Vatsyayan, Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1980, 26. 27 Vic Sage, ‘The “God-Shaped Hole”: Salman Rushdie and the Myth of Origins’, HSE (Hungarian Studies in English), XXII (1991), 13. 28 Rushdie, ‘“Errata”: Or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children’, in Imaginary Homelands, 24.

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hors-texte, that is presenting both storytelling and history as texts – and Girish Karnad’s Naga-Mandala, where the ultimate truth is a function of language performativity when it comes to proving Rani’s innocence.29 The kind of truth that Rushdie is interested in is not exactly historical truth, but what he calls ‘imaginative truth’, that truth which holds in his own imaginary homeland, his ‘India of the mind’30. He looks for the significance of the latter in a wider context, where history touches upon myth. Saleem integrates history and myth in a self-conscious narrative that tells the history of the nation in conjunction with the story of the self. He calls himself an ‘incompetent puppeteer’,31 who plans to manipulate people, but fails. He ends up being manipulated himself by the disappointing history to which he is ‘handcuffed’. His unreliability can be read as a narrative reflex of that ‘God-shaped hole’,32 an allegory built of the sum total of the many hole-images in the novel (and in much of Rushdie’s writing in general). These are: the perforated sheet, the hole in the clouds and what Saleem calls, talking about his grandfather Aadam Aziz, ‘the hole at the centre of himself (which is also my) failure to believe or disbelieve in God’.33 They all perform a sense of lack which is central in the novel and which exists on at least three levels on which Rushdie’s criticism works: religion, history and politics. As a storyteller/puppeteer, Saleem benefits from stronger privileges than most metafictional narrators. He arranges the setting of events and their chronology according to a logic that exclusively follows his own subjective perspective. Saleem’s puppeteer function affects the construction of the other characters, who participate in his biographical/historical narrative. These characters play a part in Saleem’s personal narrative rather than participating in the succession of events. It is relevant to look at Rushdie’s ordering of the diegetic world as a function of Saleem, the puppeteer. Events are staged in the outside world that build up (or deconstruct) his personality, feature by feature. For instance, the famous upper ‘drainage’, shortly followed by 29

Karnad, Naga-Mandala, in Three Plays, 54. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10. 31 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 65. 32 See note 28 above. 33 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 267. 30

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the lower one – Saleem’s sinus operation which deprives him of his gift of telepathy and his sterilization as part of Sanjay Gandhi’s campaign – are projections of historical events in Saleem’s life. Identity is relational as it takes shape out of the series of events and images of external people that participate in its making. Saleem’s performance of his narrator function is validated through his enactment of various role-models, of which the most important are Scheherazade – the embodiment of storytelling for survival, taken over by postcolonial writing – and Ganesh – Vyasa’s amanuensis in the Mahabharata, the patron of storytellers. Starting a universecreating narrative under the aegis of Ganesh is, for Saleem, an empowering fact. It grants success to the signifying power of his narrative to create alternative realities, or, in this case, an alternative historiography based on performativity. This is the more so as Saleem consciously assumes a mission similar to that of the elephant-headed god: that of opposing writing to forgetfulness by telling the history of his India as Ganesh wrote down the Mahabharata. Ganesh is a figure who ensures continuity in the Aziz family. Saleem’s (or, actually, Shiva’s) son, Aadam, not only bears his grandfather’s name (the name of origins in another tradition, the Christian one), but also inherits from the Azizes (who so far have been distinguished by their prodigious noses) the sign of Ganesh in the form of his elephant-like ears. Symbolically the son of Saleem and Shiva at the same time – with nose and knees as their characteristics, standing for perceptiveness and physical power – young Aadam’s huge ears may demonstrate a change of attitude. This emphasis on listening may involve a silent, pessimistic acceptance of a reality which cannot be changed and which in the classic Indian tradition is maya. As such, it essentially depends for its existence on the perceiving subject. The mirroring relationship between myth and history in Midnight’s Children is reflected in the narrative through the mediation of performance. The background of Hindu myth is represented through some of its important figures such as Hanuman and Ganesh. Hanuman (the patron god of poets, from the Ramayana) dancing conflates a suggestion of righteous warfare with the symbolism of Shiva Nataraja, the creator of a renewed universe from the ashes of a destroyed corrupt one by dancing. Saleem, who symbolically creates the world of the novel through his body-discourse, identifies with both. This

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ironic projection of politics as dance – moulded on an episode from the Ramayana which features Hanuman and his army of monkeys – connects to history as a hilarious, ludic activity. History is not the solemn discourse that it is supposed to be: Watch him now as he arrives at this turret – his territory; as he hops chatters runs from corner to corner of his kingdom, rubbing his rear on the stones; and then pauses, sniffs something that should not be here… Hanuman races to the alcove here, on the topmost landing, in which the three men have left three soft grey alien things. And, while monkeys dance on a roof behind the post office, Hanuman the monkey dances with rage. Pounces on the grey things. Yes, they are loose enough, won’t take much rocking and pulling, pulling and rocking… watch Hanuman now, dragging the soft grey stones to the edge of the long drop of the outside wall of the Fort. See him tear at them: rip! rap! rop!… Look how deftly he scoops paper from the insides of the grey things, sending it down like floating rain to bathe the fallen stones in the ditch!34

This scene is implicitly a sharp comment on the status and functioning of Indian politics as the lofty myth is reduced to ridiculous masquerade. Hanuman turns into a mere puppet, whilst the heroic pursuit of the monkey army in search of the beautiful chaste Sita, Rama’s wife, kidnapped by the evil Ravana, here becomes an inverted allegory of the vain attempts to save an endangered India. This is how it would work in terms of Ramayana symbolism, yet in Midnight’s Children the mythical reference is undermined by the awareness of a communal theme to which Rushdie draws our attention: that of the Muslim businessman under attack by the Hindu crowd. The immediacy of the narrative is increased by the use of the present tense, which collapses the difference between the historical present and myth, enhances the parodic effect and capitalizes on the performative nature of both history and myth. This becomes a crucial issue in The Satanic Verses, which, especially in the wake of the fatwa, can be read as a narrative study of the performativity of both historical and mythical discourses.

34

Ibid., 85.

CHAPTER SIX STORYING THE FATWA: FROM THE SATANIC VERSES TO HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES

In Rushdie’s fiction, the criticism of fundamentalist discourses plays a very important part. One way in which this criticism is expressed is through an implicit debate between myth and institutionalized religion. In terms of the discussion in the present study, the two categories are even in opposition: if we take that particular view on myth which imagines it as a space of freedom, where the boundaries of everyday limitations can be overcome, it is to these limitations that religious institutions correspond. The fatwa episode, with which The Satanic Verses has come to be correlated, can be read as an instance of performative language, whereas Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which followed, was Rushdie’s return to the redemptive and life-giving power of storytelling in response to the fatwa. The subject matter of the main storyline in Rushdie’s fatwa novel The Satanic Verses announces what Rushdie, to the present day, identifies as his major intellectual mission: to wage war against all forms of excessive authority.1 If the subject of his attack in The Satanic Verses is what in the novel is called the religion of Submission, which is in many ways reminiscent of Islam, the fact that Rushdie’s understanding of Islam is a lot wider is proved a few years later in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Here Rushdie changes the focus of his attack to Hindu and Christian forms of fundamentalism and presents Islam (more specifically, one particular version of Islam in medieval Moorish Spain) as more inclusive and tolerant.2 The non-specificity of 1

‘It is the job of the individual to speak against power, not to be on one side or the other’ (Salman Rushdie, pre-show talk with Alastair Niven on the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, London, Barbican Theatre, 25 January 2003). 2 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

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the object of the author’s criticism is meant to state that when extremes of power-exertion are reached and excessively rigid ideological discourses are at work, there is no real ethical difference between them. Therefore one cannot objectively argue in favour of any ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ religion and, despite the interpretations that gave rise to the fatwa, Rushdie certainly did not. Performativity and the fatwa: The Satanic Verses The episode of the fatwa once again raises the issue of narrative ownership, also posed in relation to Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata: what/whose stories are we entitled to tell? Rushdie explores storytelling as redemption in this novel in relation to a bigger challenge than history – the challenge of religion and intolerance. It is useful to read The Satanic Verses in the light of its religious background and the controversy it caused, whilst analysing the ways in which the function of storytelling develops as compared to Midnight’s Children. The ways in which religious discourses affect identity will be discussed around the fundamentalism debate, in the light of Rushdie’s belief in fiction as a valid alternative to history. This belief, present in Midnight’s Children, is challenged in The Satanic Verses. Here, narrative levels and perspectives multiply, allowing for a more complex questioning of the validity of received ideas. In The Satanic Verses, the fluid quality of storytelling is enhanced by the two characters’ status as actors. To a great extent, both their public and private lives are performed. Performance influences their perceptions of important identity-related issues, such as religious belief and practice, agency, national belonging and the motherland/otherland relation. Rather than being fixed, unquestionable entities, all these are placed under the sign of fluidity which dominates life as acting. Consequently, there is a degree of theatricalization in the perception of religious beliefs (Hindu and Muslim in this novel). Gibreel Farishta’s acting in the Bollywood genre of ‘theologicals’ suggests that both the theatre and religion are forms of enactment. So is, in terms of a bold postmodern assumption (but also according to the Hindu concept of the universe as lila, the play of gods) life itself. Theatrical performance is one of the means

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through which Rushdie challenges the rigidity of fundamentalist discourses in The Satanic Verses. In February 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa, it was as if The Satanic Verses had generated an instance of self-fulfilling performative language. Rushdie and his publishers were sentenced to death for ‘the book entitled The Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet and the Koran’ and ‘all zealous Muslims’ were called to ‘execute them quickly’.3 The fatwa produced a huge wave of demonstrations in the whole Islamic world, during which people were indeed killed. It also came close to starting a political conflict between Iran – which assumed the mission of standing for the cause of Islam – and Britain, which was, at the time, hosting the culprit. It built a whole myth around Salman Rushdie, who became the author pursued by the fatwa, as well as the author of the book believed to stand in opposition to the Holy Book of Islam. That book, however, had received an impressive amount of praise (it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it obtained the Whitbread Prize for the Best Novel and Germany’s Author of the Year Award in 1989). It raised an impressive crosscultural debate about what the act of writing meant, what a novel was supposed to achieve by its mere existence. It reformulated old questions about the legitimacy of any relationship between art and politics. Last, but not least, since it appeared to be the climactic point in the career of a very trendy author, this book would also have run the risk of marking a decline in the author’s career. The debate was centred around the validity of word-made realities. Amir Taheri, an Iranian journalist, author of Spirit of Allah – a biography of Ayatollah Khomeini – explains the reasons why an allegedly miswritten book would have had such a strong impact on the Islamic world: The fact that Rushdie propagated his heresy in a book is of especial significance to Muslims. Islam is the religion of the book par excellence. Few cultures hold the written and printed word in so much respectful awe as Muslims, even though the vast majority are illiterate. When a Muslim wants to clinch an argument he says, ‘It is written’. 3

From The Observer, 19 February 1989, reprinted in The Rushdie File, eds Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990, 84.

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Taheri goes on to show that the mass reaction to the case was largely due to its being interpreted within the wider framework of international religious debate. Whilst liberal Muslim intellectuals would have sided with Rushdie, ‘the majority of Muslim poor, who feel their religion and culture have been humiliated in the West for too long, are unlikely to consider the complex issues involved in this very complex case’. 4 The reaction of the international Islamic community was very strong and implied an unprecedented manifestation of linguistic violence, a wave of negative metaphors, a whole linguistic fight over naming The Satanic Verses, or, rather, calling it names. The ‘blasphemous’ book was referred to as a bunch of ‘satanic-minded comments about Islam and our religious leaders’, showing Rushdie’s fall from ‘grace as a writer with a good knowledge of Islam to something like total moral degradation’,5 ‘a negative satire on life’,6 an ‘indecent vilification of the Holy Prophet’,7 a ‘crime against human decency’.8 In India, the affair was immediately projected onto Hindu/Muslim schisms. In Midnight’s Children Rushdie had already attacked these disagreements as having caused the failure of the ‘Indian dream’ of independence. The Rushdie File – Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland’s recording of the Satanic Verses world debate – includes a 4

Amir Taheri, The Times, 13 February 1989, reprinted in ibid., 94. Originally published in the Iranian literary newspaper Kayhan Farangi, translated in The Independent, 21 February 1989, reprinted in ibid., 23-24. 6 Professor Syed Ali Ashraf, Director General, Islamic Academy, Cambridge, in a review published in Impact International, 28 October-10 November 1988, reprinted in ibid., 24. 7 Syed Shahabuddin, The Independent, 6 October 1988, reprinted in ibid., 42. Syed Shahabuddin, at the time an opposition MP in India, was the main voice who argued for the banning of Rushdie’s novel in India, a measure which was taken on 5 October 1988. 8 Syed Shahabuddin, The Times of India, 13 October 1988, reprinted in ibid., 49. 5

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section entitled ‘The India Connection’.9 This section basically sets Syed Shahabuddin – an ambitious Muslim MP, member of the opposition Bharatya Janata Party, who immediately called on the government to ban the book – against a whole group of Hindu journalists who, whilst noticing the book’s criticism of Islam, do not particularly condemn the author because of it. However, the increasing unpopularity of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress Party, coupled with the awareness of the electoral importance of India’s one hundred million Muslims, led to the book’s banning in India soon after its publication in Britain. Rushdie put a considerable amount of effort in defence of his book, on which he insists in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton.10 The memoir is built around the traumatic fatwa episode, which is seen, with hindsight, as recasting his whole personal and literary life in a different light, to the point where the author is forced to reinvent himself as a different person. This is what the title of the memoir – bearing the name Rushdie adopted while in hiding, a conflation of Conrad’s and Chekhov’s forenames – suggests. Rushdie claims that his writing about Mohammed is based on his belief in the prophet’s being a spectacular historical figure, the only prophet who existed fully in history. His establishment of a new religion was an event of crucial importance for the world. Rushdie is fascinated by the fact that this religion is rooted in history, as compared to what can be perceived as the cyclical, ritual, other-worldrelated nature of time in Hindu tradition. The author holds a degree in history from Cambridge and had already explored its fictional potential in Midnight’s Children. The historicity he claims for The Satanic Verses, however, is more complex, as characters cross historical levels in Gibreel’s dreams, in his agonies of lost faith. In his essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’, written in 1982 (which gave its title to the 1991 volume),11 Rushdie talks about the multicultural 9

The Rushdie File, 36-53. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton, New York: Random House, 2012. 11 The text of ‘Imaginary Homelands’, in a version that differed very little from the final one published in the volume with the same title, was originally a talk at a literary conference held at the Commonwealth Institute in London in March 1982, as part of a ‘Festival of India’, which included events throughout that year. This version was entitled ‘The Indian Writer in England’ and it has a very slightly different text. It subsequently came out as ‘Imaginary Homelands’, in The London Review of Books, 7 10

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background of the city of Bombay he came from. His perspective, further enlarged by his migrant status, encompasses a multiplicity of views, free from rigid categories, which he attributes to India as a whole, or, rather, to his own version of India. He considers himself part of ‘that generation of Indians who were sold the secular ideal’: One of the things I liked, and still like, about India is that it is based on a non-sectarian philosophy. I was not raised in a narrowly Muslim environment; I do not consider Hindu culture to be either alien from me or more important than my Islamic heritage. I believe this has something to do with the nature of Bombay, a metropolis in which the multiplicity of commingled faiths and cultures curiously creates a remarkable secular ambience. Saleem Sinai makes use, eclectically, of whatever sources he chooses. It may have been easier for his author to do this from outside modern India than inside it.12

In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie projects this ‘multiplicity of commingled faiths’ against a historical background. He sees in it the reason for the Partition of India and, further, for the misfortunes that befell the nation and its allegorical representative, Saleem. Midnight’s Children does not address religion as a main issue, but there are comments on it especially in relation to historical developments, which are deeply affected by religious conflict. Structurally, however, the book is organized according to the logic of the polytheistic multiplicity of Hindu mythology. The one thousand and one children of the midnight hour are, many of them, identified with Hindu gods. Rushdie opposes the pluralist mindset symbolized in Midnight’s Children by Hindu polytheism to communalism, the ‘politics of religious hatred’ which keeps India apart.13 He further expands the idea in his discourse, which borrows a great deal from the digressive art of traditional Indian storytellers in both Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses.

October 1982, 18-19, before being published (with the original title) in the conference proceedings volume The Eye of the Beholder, ed. Maggie Butcher, London: Commonwealth Institute, 1983, 75-83. I am indebted to John Thieme for this reference. 12 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 16. 13 Ibid., 27.

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Rushdie’s essay volume Imaginary Homelands ends with four essays that encourage a reading of the whole volume in the light of the Satanic Verses scandal. The first two especially – ‘In God We Trust’ and ‘In Good Faith’ – perform the defence gesture, with Rushdie featuring somewhere in between the position of the reverent Indian raised in a Muslim milieu and the atheist for whom there is no God other than his art. This position is romantically and somewhat simplistically upheld in the four essays. The last two essays – ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ and ‘One Thousand Days in a Balloon’14 – particularly depart from logical objectivity. In a rather poetic, allegorically illustrated, heroic, self-victimizing way, they proclaim the sacred status of books and the privileged alternative-world-making condition of literature, especially the novel in the postmodern age. These essays gave rise to further criticism of the author’s standpoint. Not only Muslims, but also Western journalists who initially were on Rushdie’s side noticed the writer’s persistently irreverent position visà-vis the fatwa and all that it represented. In the first of these essays – originally published in 1985 and entitled ‘In God We Trust’ – Rushdie notices an invasion of the political sphere by religion at the time. He highlights the pluralist aesthetic potential of Hinduism as a model of becoming based on multiple rather than monolithic thinking. Rushdie further talks about his attempt to fill up ‘that emptied God chamber’ left after his sudden loss of the Islamic heaven with ‘other dreams’ – or, in his capacity as a writer, with other stories. In this account, we recognize Gibreel’s experience in The Satanic Verses, where Hinduism seems to be a priceless source of inspiration. Rushdie denounces conventional religions of ‘submission’ (and in this slot he includes not only Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well) as man-made power-inflicting constructs (as maya, worldly illusion in Hindu tradition). Hinduism,

14

In the 1991 edition of Imaginary Homelands, ‘One Thousand Days in a Balloon’ replaced ‘Why I Have Embraced Islam’, the essay that appeared in the hard-cover edition a year before. Laurel Graeber comments on this as an instance of an ‘impassioned’ speech that replaced what was a ‘capitulatory essay’, thus suggesting that Rushdie had significantly changed his attitude as he gained more distance from the fatwa (Laurel Graeber, ‘New and Noteworthy’, 21 June 1992, The New York Times online archive: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DE103 0F932 A15755C0A964958260 [accessed 25 November 2006]).

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on the contrary, is an integral part of life in India, beyond the powerdriven impositions of Western faiths: The overwhelming fact about life in India is that this vast multitude of deities co-exists in everyday life with the doubly vast multitude of people. You bump into gods in the streets. You jostle past them, you step over their sleeping forms. They take your seat in the bus. What I mean is that these gods are no abstractions. They are as real to the faithful as their families and friends.15

Hindu deities are not locked in an abstract heaven, but they exist in people’s lives. An infinitely diversified population of gods supplements a human population. Storytelling contributes to this. Humans and gods negotiate their existence on the same territory through stories, ritual theatrical performance, popular cinema. This makes Hinduism more appealing to Rushdie’s literary plan than other spiritual backgrounds. Hindu religious practice reminds one of the Indian oral storytelling tradition in that it is transmitted orally and negotiated from one generation to another, even from one person to another.16 Going on to explain that political dimensions have recently been attached to Hinduism, Rushdie considers that the often-mentioned Hindu revivalism is the result of a political meaning forced upon a religious background. In contrast, Islam, intrinsically a state religion, cannot be separated from its political implications and has to be formally imposed upon the people and acknowledged by them. This is why Rushdie, coming from a Muslim background, can hardly avoid political issues, in spite of his loss of conventional faith.17 In the second essay, ‘In Good Faith’, written in 1990 – specifically meant to defend The Satanic Verses against the fatwa – Salman Rushdie explains the novel’s plot in the light of such an enforced political reading of it. This is a rather unusual thing for an author to

15

Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 380. Rushdie, however, changes his attitude in the 1990s, possibly, at least in part, as a reaction to the fatwa. Hints of this can be noticed earlier, for example in his critical comments on Shiv Sena in ‘The Riddle of Midnight’, in Imaginary Homelands, 3132. 17 Ibid., 376. 16

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do, which shows to what extremes one may be pushed by the threats of religious fundamentalism): The Satanic Verses is the story of two painfully divided selves. In the case of one, Saladin Chamcha, the division is secular and societal: he is torn, to put it plainly, between Bombay and London, between East and West. For the other, Gibreel Farishta, the division is spiritual, a rift in the soul. He has lost his faith and is strung out between his immense need to believe and his new inability to do so. The novel is ‘about’ their quest for wholeness. Why ‘Gibreel Farishta’ (Gabriel Angel)? Not to ‘insult and abuse’ the real Archangel Gabriel. Gibreel is a movie star, and movie stars hang above us in the darkness, larger than life, halfway to the divine. To give Gibreel an angel’s name was to give him a secular equivalent of angelic half-divinity. When he loses his faith, however, this name becomes the source of all his torments. Chamcha survives. He makes himself whole by returning to his roots and, more importantly, by facing up to, and learning to deal with, the great verities of love and death. Gibreel does not survive. He can neither return to the love of God, nor succeed in replacing it by earthly love. In the end he kills himself, unable to bear his torment any longer.18

In this account, Rushdie aims to prove the innocence of the book in the face of the accusation of anti-Islamism brought against it. So Chamcha’s return ‘to his roots’ (as a returning migrant rather than as a nomad who overcomes all rootedness) should – as a panoramic perspective on the book would encourage us to do – be taken with a pinch of salt. Also, even though ‘the love of God’ Rushdie mentions can be assumed to be the love of the Islamic monotheistic God, we have, however, sufficient ingredients in The Satanic Verses to read it in ways different from those which Rushdie tries, in this particular argument, to manipulate us into doing. We may see it – and in this acknowledge the book’s containment of its own defence – not as a debate between faith and the loss of it, but, rather, as a study of a division in the text which Rushdie chooses to address through the performativity of Hindu practice. This demonic text, which contains in its texture both assertion and denial, which at the same time says what 18

Ibid., 397-98.

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it does not say will be the object of my analysis in the following section. Gibreel’s loss of faith – or rather of his comfortable selfpositioning in the universe, supported by his numberless ‘divine’ identities within the screened Hindu pantheon of Bollywood cinema – is the result of a dislocation which, unlike Saladin, he never manages to overcome. At the moment of denial – his furious pork-eating display of anger – an obsessive passion for Allie arrives to fill the gap left by his lost faith. The actual nature of people’s need to believe in absolutes – whether religious doctrine, love, nationalist ideology or ethnic belonging – is challenged. As he abandons the multiplicity of his previous existence symbolized by the numberless Hindu gods he had identified with in theologicals, Gibreel is lost. This process is completed by his acceptance to play the archangel Gibreel in ‘Whisky’ Billimoria’s film. His identification with his namesake archangel is not a fortunate revelation-type experience, but rather counts as blasphemy in the Islamic system of significations. Paradoxically, his encounter with a very strict, doctrinal belief projects in his mind as obsessive love. Given Allie’s name, reminiscent of both Allah and Al-Lat (the supreme pagan goddess who actually fights with the new unique God for supremacy), this love is a symbol of misapprehended religion and a Luciferic attempt to possess the divine. As he moves from the performance of Hindu gods (a central act within Hindu ritual practice) to the performance of the Muslim archangel, a blasphemous act, since Islam does not accept any performance of the divine, Gibreel’s loss of faith triggers a loss of his capacity to perform himself, ending in death. Gibreel’s double, Saladin, is cast in the role of the devil in the monotheistic scenario of the novel’s symbolism. He enacts a version of the Romantic motif of Lucifer, the fallen angel who becomes the Devil, causing endless confusion in the world. Saladin, in his turn, also experiences a simplifying stage, which somewhat mirrors Gibreel’s reduction of the many Hindu meanings to the supposed univocality of Muslim monotheism. He wants to inhabit – or conquer, possess – one country or another, the motherland or the otherland, but he does it in a way that rejects conformity to a law he does not agree

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with.19 Also an actor, Saladin is, to some extent, consumed by a vain postcolonial migrant’s desire to be better than the former colonists. His strong ambition to ‘conquer Britain’ engulfs even his personal life, as his wife Pamela identifies herself as ‘bloody Britannia’ in the system of Saladin’s feelings. This makes him guilty of an excess of power which results in his destruction of Gibreel, but also nearly triggers his own destruction. In his case, Saladin’s grasp of multiplicity is greatly misused as he speaks in many voices in order to further confuse nightmare-ridden, love-stricken, defeated Gibreel. Unlike Gibreel, however, his salvation comes from his return to India and the more fulfilling relationship – purged of vain migrant ambitions – with Zeeny. One of the most important dimensions of this ‘quest for wholeness’ that Rushdie declares The Satanic Verses to be is a cunning displacement of the emphasis from politics to psychology. The two characters can be read as different facets of the same conflictual self. They are even called, during their metamorphic fall from the sky, ‘Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha’.20 This identity overlap complicates the postcolonial migrant’s predicament by dramatizing inner conflict. Conflictual identity is fluid, dynamic, in formation, or, in fact, in performance. Over the fatwa through storytelling: Haroun and the Sea of Stories To Rushdie himself, as well as to his supporters, the fatwa was the result of reductive interpretations of the representation of the Prophet in The Satanic Verses. The novel, however, is a lot more complex in its concern with hybridity and transformative performances of identity. It also brought about a spectacular turning point in Rushdie’s career, which consists of an expansion of the use of performativity from that of an implicit technique to an explicit subject matter of his writing. We can see this evolution in his more recent books. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories – fashioned in a fairytale manner, which Rushdie dedicates to his son – he rewrites, within the constraints of the much safer discourse that children’s books offer, the concerns of The Satanic Verses. 19 20

See the kipper episode, in Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 44. Ibid., 5.

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Haroun and the Sea of Stories21 was the first book that Rushdie wrote after the Satanic Verses affair. It was another book about transformation, designed to give the impression that it was metamorphosing all the time22 and announcing a long-term interest in the theme of metamorphosis, taken on board again in ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ in 1997. The metamorphosis motif is particularly important as a concrete projection of Rushdie’s wider interest in transformation under the impact of travelling across cultures. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a tale about storytelling, made of other tales, in the Arabian Nights tradition. Despite its looking like a fairytale, it is a modern, troubled, fragmented narrative, finally unified by the continuity of storytelling. It can also be read, as Madelena Gonzalez suggests, as an instance of ‘literature as therapy’, with reference to the fact that the novel was written in the way it was as its author was trying to overcome the trauma of the fatwa.23 As I will argue, Haroun and the Sea of Stories translates most of the main themes and motifs of The Satanic Verses, using fairytale ingredients to emphasize a different, partly therapeutic functionality. Haroun is actually built, I argue, as a direct response to the words of the fatwa. It re-enacts them in meaning-inversion games, and thus it annihilates their power to express meaning. It is the performative function of language – that of creating realities, even the reality of their own denial, as happened with The Satanic Verses – that this book plays on. It would be in terms of the same allegorical power of a world built through the power of language – as God made this world and as the Ayatollah uttered his sentence – that the previous book would be defended. This second book, written in response to a rigid set of attitudes, challenges rigidity itself. It would be a fluid book of tales, based on the metaphor of the sea of stories, which Rushdie takes over from the traditional Kathasaritsagara. I would like to take Haroun and the Sea of Stories as an example of how a novel can be adapted to fit the tradition of Indian oral and written storytelling, theatrical storytelling and Indian myth in order to 21

Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), London: Viking, 1999, 11. Interview with Sean French, The Observer, 25 September 1988, reprinted in The Rushdie File, 8. 23 Madelena Gonzalez, Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005, 33. 22

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perform contemporary selfhood. The way in which Rushdie wrote his book for children lays bare some of the specificities of the way in which the novel form interacts with other forms of narrative in contemporary Indian fiction in English, as an important act of cultural performance. The title of Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories comes from the eleventh-century Kashmiri collection of stories Kathasaritsagara – which means ‘the ocean of the streams of stories’. Kathasaritsagara is written in Sanskrit and is considered to have influenced The Arabian Nights. In his Companion to The Arabian Nights, Robert Irwin uses the ‘oceans of stories’ metaphor in his third chapter, where he discusses the circulation of stories across cultures. Irwin rejects reductive nineteenth-century diffusionist notions which claimed that ‘aspects of culture start from a single source and spread from there to other civilizations’.24 He does, however, give India a lot of attention, both as a source and as a recipient of widely circulated stories, some of which went into The Arabian Nights. India is traditionally believed by scholars to be the place where ‘all great stories began’.25 Contemporary Indian fiction draws on this tradition of storytelling, its vitality, its ongoing, self-generating quality, as well as the awareness – expressed by Chandra in Red Earth and Pouring Rain – that ‘all stories have in them the seeds of other stories’.26 Haroun dramatizes the act of oral storytelling and celebrates the storytelling tradition in India. Storytelling becomes a self-legimitizing act through the many references to The Arabian Nights and the Indian tradition of the Ocean of the Streams of Stories. It is also mapped out as an actual country called Alifbay (Hindustani for ‘alphabet’), in which cities are named by letters. The Ocean of the Streams of Stories becomes an actual ocean, sailed by a luxury ship called Arabian Nights Plus One, which carries the storyteller and his son towards the fulfilment of their story. Further, the book dramatizes the infinite life of words and their endless potential to create meaning and even their own references.

24

Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, London: Penguin, 1994, 68. Ibid., 65. 26 Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 113-14. 25

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The protagonists Rashid and Haroun live in a city ‘so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its own name’27 (the post-fatwa crisis of naming, that is, of identity). In this city, only Rashid is happy, because he has the gift of storytelling and his wife Soraya’s beautiful singing. But, one day, Soraya leaves him for another man, called Mr Sengupta (a very common Indian name, suggesting conventionalism). The event – which reminds us of Rushdie’s being left by his then wife, after the fatwa – is the beginning of a long journey for the rescue of meaning. Haroun, the son, feels guilty for his father’s loss of ‘the gift of the gab’, which he blames on his repeating Mr Sengupta’s cue, ‘What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’.28 So, he joins his father in what turns out to be an initiation into the true function of storytelling. Finally, order – initially disrupted by the black magic of evil language – is restored in the world and Soraya comes back. At the end, at home – in the formerly sad city, which in the meantime has remembered that its name was Kahani (Hindustani for ‘story’)29 – Rashid tells a story which is entitled ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’. This is a clear reference to the fact that Rushdie (whose name is surprisingly similar to Rashid’s) has, all this time, also been telling his own life-story through Rashid’s voice. Or, rather, he has been (re)telling the story which, by virtue of a regrettable confusion between language-made, discursive realities and historical ones, had been mistaken for the emblematic story of his life (that of The Satanic Verses and the fatwa). His other justification for doing this, apart from his drawing on Indian tradition, is to be found in the performativity of language. This is used, in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, for more than just the characters’ dialogue. It is enacted, embodied, literally put on stage through a partial transfer of the storytelling process into the words, actions and behaviours of characters which stand for the very words and notions the story uses in its unfolding. Rushdie challenges the ritual and performative function of language manifest in religion, on which Khomeini’s fatwa is based. The author sublimates its negativity through storytelling. 27

Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 11. Ibid., 20. 29 According to Salman Rushdie’s glossary at the end of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, ‘About the Names in this Book’, derived from Hindustani words (222-23), ‘Kahani means story’ (223). 28

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Haroun’s cue, the summing-up of the eternal inter-generational conflict which the story tries to solve – ‘What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’ – is embodied by two unusual characters, whose role in the plot is instrumental in guiding the protagonists: Butt the Hoopoe and Iff the Water Genie. As Catherine Cundy remarks, they are the projections of a linguistic cliché: ‘“No ifs, no buts”: the standard parental response to a child’s questioning of authority’30 – and, in this context, of Rushdie’s own questioning of it. Most names of persons and places in the story are derived from Hindustani words chosen from the paradigm of speech/silence-related notions, explained in a glossary at the end of the book. The protagonists’ initiation journey takes them to the rival countries of Gup (‘gossip’) and Chup (‘quiet’), whose inhabitants, the Guppies and the Chupwalas, stand (in good Swiftian manner) for the poles of the debate between the free speech ideal and the silencing power of absolute authority. What makes the difference is how the two parties treat their spies and prisoners: while Chupwalas have their mouths sewn up, Guppies, if they ever catch a spy, ask him to write ‘I must not spy’ a thousand and one times and thus have his guilt exorcized in language. Even the sentimental plot – a necessary ingredient in any rescue story – is a rescue story in itself. It involves Prince Bolo (from the verb bolna, ‘to speak’) and Princess Batcheat (from baat-cheet, ‘chit-chat’). The villain’s name is Khattam-shud (‘completely finished’, ‘over and done away with’ – a word also used in The Satanic Verses to reflect the strength of Gibreel’s dreamy experiences).31 Khattam-Shud’s power relies on a tongueless black ice monster hidden in his castle, whose name is Bezaban (‘without a tongue’). There is a character named Mudra (whose name denotes one of the encoded gestures used in traditional Indian theatre forms, particularly Kathakali), who actually speaks Abhinaya (the name of this language of gestures). The setting of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is based on a series of assumptions that the author had made in writing The Satanic Verses. One of them is that of the artificiality of cities: when depicting 30

Catherine Cundy, ‘Through Childhood’s Window: Haroun and the Sea of Stories’, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D.M. Fletcher, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994, 337. 31 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 122.

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London, just as Jahilia, Rushdie says, he was ‘writing about a sense of the city as an artificial, invented space which is constantly metamorphosing’.32 Similarly, Haroun constructs the fantastic geography of the country of Alifbay (‘alphabet’) and the sad city, finally named Kahani (‘story’), with its mapping of human feelings, conflicts and desires (the Dull Lake, the Mist of Misery, the Moody Land). Here, ‘politicos’ use storytellers to get voted and people are divided by the Gup (‘gossip’, ‘nonsense’)/Chup (‘silence’) dichotomy. The desert metaphor refers to the trial the hero must undergo, a pilgrimage in search of stories (like the pilgrimage to Mecca, in search of true meaning in The Satanic Verses). At the end, rain – a sign that ‘the city has finally learnt how to have fun’– restores fertility through storytelling. This modern fairy-tale marks a shift of emphasis from content and historical reference to the capacity of language to be about itself, about its own world-creating potential. For Rushdie, it represents a personal engagement with the world-threatening terms of the fatwa, with the how rather than the what of one’s attitude against fundamentalism and terrorism. This is a turning point, a bridge between two stages in Rushdie’s creation.33 The first is what we could call a reality-oriented stage, which examines history, politics and religion as external discourses that inform people’s understanding of the real. This stage is represented mainly by Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses and also, to some extent, by the earlier Grimus. We could argue that the second stage is a self-reflexive one – which also deals with interpretations of reality, but as filtered through individual subjectivity and, more explicitly, through Rushdie’s own authorial consciousness. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie’s ironic self-pastiche, and, to a certain extent, Fury reflect this selfconscious turn. The latter stage directly dramatizes a performative feature of language: the fury which the words carry along with their 32

Ibid., 9. In an interview with Madhu Jain published in India Today, 15 September 1988, together with a review of The Satanic Verses also written by Madhu Jain, Rushdie said that he saw Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses as parts of a trilogy (of which Grimus was also, to a certain extent, part, with its differently expressed metaphysical concerns). He added: “With the last one, I have come to the end of the first movement in my work” (The Rushdie File, 38-39). 33

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meanings, and which can change reality into something unrecognizable. We can read Haroun beyond its immediate significance as a book about redemption by translation of the highly disputed powerstruggles in The Satanic Verses, as well as of the accompanying fundamentalist meta-discourse which labels it as heresy. The book does more than that. The sea of stories metaphor points to the fact that, when a story is told, the content – never new in folk tales – is, after all, not that important. What really matters is the dynamics of the storytelling process. In the book, Rushdie maps out a whole world, brought to life by his act of pushing the performative nature of language to its utmost limits. Not only is language made to create its own referential reality, but it also has a life of its own. This elaborate allegory dramatizes the language of storytelling, turning words into characters and making them act for themselves. It thus de-activates the fatwa, it turns the death sentence around to read like a rescue story – which here becomes the rescue of meaning – so that the act of storytelling becomes possible again.

CHAPTER SEVEN MIGRANT IDENTITY PERFORMANCE POLITICS IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S THE SATANIC VERSES

Performance, performativity and fiction in The Satanic Verses If Midnight’s Children is a novel which primarily interprets history through storytelling and in which performance is tightly connected to the narrator function, The Satanic Verses is par excellence the result of Rushdie’s extensive experimentation with performance and performativity in fiction. The novel also problematizes exile – through performance – in a way that tests out the possibility of nomadic thinking versus return as possible solutions to it. The epigraph from Daniel’s Defoe’s The History of the Devil announces this intention: 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 or 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.1

This epigraph can be interpreted as an invitation to read the novel as an allegorical confrontation between angelic and demonic characters, a general confrontation between good and evil and, even further than that, between an angelic (monosemantic, easy to decode) discourse and a demonic (plural, polysemantic) one which may say one thing on the surface and another on its in-depth level. In the previous chapter I discussed Rushdie’s demonic text in The Satanic Verses. Here I would like to examine more the ways in which such a discourse is performative and how it connects to performance as a general 1

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, [ix].

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principle of character construction in the novel and as a general method to put forward the major issues addressed in the novel. The epigraph describes the ‘wandering’, ‘unsettled’ condition of Satan – who is in perpetual movement, ‘without any fixed place’ – in terms that introduce it as an instance of nomadism. Being Satan means not being God, being bad rather than good; yet it also means being placed in a mobile oppositional position to the fixed centre of authority. Nomadism in the Defoe quote represents a tragic, undesirable condition – the refusal of rest – given to Satan as punishment for his attempt to usurp divine authority. But, if we consider the fact that Defoe is one of the founders of the novel form, Rushdie’s dialogue with him at a time when there is a need to search for alternatives to the genre opens up an exploration of the demonic as a possible source for such alternatives. The demonic is not just bad, but also rebellious and therefore productive of change. Attempts to rebel are made by the two overlapping main characters – Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha. Yet the solution to their wanderings in search of meaning is not an eternal option for movement (or nomadism), but a re-establishment of fixity and stability, found either in death (in Gibreel’s case) or in return to India (in Saladin’s). In what follows I will examine the reasons why and the ways in which Rushdie addresses the monumental dispute between univocal and plural discourses in the novel through the topos of return. I shall explore this through the use of the concepts of performance and performativity in a reading of the novel that will start from that instance of language performativity which, in its misinterpretation of Satanic Verses (accused of precisely what it fails to sustain) made the novel world-famous: the fatwa. The Satanic Verses is fiction which exercises autonomy from a referential world/history/‘reality’, and, at the same time, it interacts with reality through performative language. Moreover, the two main characters in The Satanic Verses are actors. As a result of this, a lot of the events in the novel are filtered through their theatrically trained eyes. As events are presented from their shared points of view, they are shown rather than narrated. This justifies the use of cinematic and hallucinatory effects in character delineation and the development of events.

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Read in the wake of the fatwa, The Satanic Verses is an instance of performative language creating a reality that triggers Rushdie’s sentence to death by Ayatollah Khomeini. The episode is an instance of fiction’s losing its claim to the autonomy from reality under the impact of political oppression. Yet Rushdie’s interest in challenging historical truth and its contrived nature can be seen in his earlier novels. In Midnight’s Children and Shame, the claim to truth – Rushdie’s versions of the recent history of India and Pakistan – is softened through the use of irony, narrative unreliability (such as Saleem’s unfaithfulness to historical truth) and the mixture of fact and fiction. However, it can be argued that The Satanic Verses represents a stage in Rushdie’s career where he turns away from his focus on history to what he claims is mere fiction, make-believe, alternatives to reality brought into being through the performative function of language. History, seen through a metafictional prism, is a supporting structure for the development of Midnight’s Children, but becomes secondary in The Satanic Verses in favour of a study of transformation: The Satanic Verses is very big. There are certain kinds of architecture that are dispensed with. Midnight’s Children had history as a scaffolding on which to hang the book; this one doesn’t. And since it’s so much about transformation I wanted to write it in such a way that the book itself was metamorphosing all the time. Obviously the danger is that the book falls apart.2

Transformation, a function of performance, is thoroughly explored in the novel. It takes many forms: performance as role-play (as Saladin and Gibreel are actors), metamorphosis (Saladin’s change into a devil and Gibreel’s into an archangel) and psychological evolution or decline. Performance is reinforced by performativity through realitycreating language (an immediate example being Gibreel’s jealousy and madness triggered by Saladin’s phone calls in a changed voice). I shall use Sedgwick and Parker’s view of performance and performativity as inseparable categories, as well as Hillis Miller’s theory of the performativity of fictional language. I shall read The 2

Rushdie interviewed by Sean French, The Observer, 25 September 1988, reprinted in The Rushdie File, 8.

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Satanic Verses as a work of performative fiction, aiming to address history directly, rather than an interpretation of history or even a narrative that is ‘handcuffed to history’ (as is Midnight’s Children). Whereas Midnight’s Children is about historical developments and the ways they affect people’s individual lives, The Satanic Verses is a text which brings a more active challenge to history. However, we know from Midnight’s Children that, if fiction exists by virtue of a structured discourse constructed in language, which proposes a version of make-believe that depends on an act of seduction between a storyteller and an audience, so does history. Saleem Sinai certainly mixes and heavily alters, through personal additions and omissions, these two kinds of narrative discourse as he spins the story of his life. Rushdie implies that religion is also a discursive construction and so he both contradicts Austin’s assumption about the performativity of divine language3 and triggers the fatwa. As compared to other discursive constructions, religion is certainly invested with a special claim to truth, which counts as absolute for those who believe in it. But, as regards the way in which language works in the construction of its discursiveness, religion is not very different from fiction, history or, indeed, any other discourse. In suggesting this in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is actually very effective precisely because, in a very Austinian fashion, he denies the performativity of his discourse, whilst, on the other hand, he heavily relies on it. In his defence of the novel he claims that what he wrote was fiction, therefore all associations with historical episodes from Mohammed’s life are out of place. If fiction is make-believe, so is history, since we have access to both through discursive mediation. I would like to argue that, in maintaining this position in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie actually conflates the concepts of performance and performativity, which J.L. Austin held so fiercely apart in How to Do Things with Words. The effect this has on the relationship between historical personality and fictional character (namely, the relationship between the prophet Mohammed and Mahound in the novel) is a contradictory one. If Mahound performs Mohammed, this means he is 3

In the Christian faith, the Logos had the power to create the world, so divine language – language that creates reality par excellence – is a heightened form of performative language.

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not Mohammed, but just his fictional alter-ego. Yet in the discursiveness of his story this makes no difference to the discourse, as it proposes an alternative to truth which may, through its illocutionary force, count as the truth. Yarrow points out that, if traditional Indian theatre relies on narrative (most of it drawing on stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata), oral storytelling, in its turn, contains an important performance component. It is in this enactment of the story by the professional storyteller that the formative function of stories lies, so that: The interaction between narrative (even the prospect of narrative) and receiver stimulates our sense-making capabilities; oral performance functions as a deliberate part of the process by causing specific changes in the receptor mechanism and thus affecting the quality of what is received: the listeners listen better and hear more, and this is a model for the effects of performance as understood in Vedic thought, in which, clearly (as in the best renderings of Shakespeare) the sound and rhythm of the words is not in the least arbitrary.4

There is a need to distinguish at this point between the attitude to narrative and the theatre in Hinduism – where they are forms of praising the divine – as opposed to Islam, which is more strictly monotheistic and therefore has its reservations regarding the freedom of these artistic practices. In The Satanic Verses, Gibreel’s glory as an actor depends on his enacting of the gods of the Hindu pantheon, but the moment he identifies himself with the archangel Gibreel, he is lost. In Islam, enacting the prophet is not permitted, whilst in a Hindu context it is legitimate to push the merger of storytelling and performance as far as possible. I will try to show that what Rushdie does in The Satanic Verses, instead of putting his story on stage, is to use the ingredients of the storytelling process and the language involved in it as active, living participants in the plot rather than just a means of telling it. Thus, as his characters perform their roles in the story, the performativity of the narrative engages the audience in a dialogue with the text in which the act of reading becomes an act of 4

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 35.

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negotiating between the meanings in the text and those gaps mentioned by Iser which need to be filled with material coming from the outside. The novel – a writerly text which engages its audience par excellence – thus both is and is not guilty of the blasphemy it was charged with; it both is and is not a retelling of the foundation of the Islamic faith. The impact of Bollywood cinema on The Satanic Verses Midnight’s Children is a novel that can be discussed primarily in terms of the theatricality of traditional storytelling in India. Storytelling in The Satanic Verses is further dramatized, simultaneously operating in three settings, through three main narratives. The first one is that of contemporary Britain, on whose shore Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha land from the hijacked plane Bostan AI 420. An India of the past is also subjectively recalled here in the memories of each of the two main characters. The second setting is that of the contemporary Indian village Titlipur. Its inhabitants, urged by the modern prophetess Ayesha, go on a pilgrimage to Mecca in search of salvation, counting on a new parting of the Arabian sea. The third setting is seventh century Jahilia, Rushdie’s name for Mecca, also ‘a term used by Muslim writers to indicate the period of darkness before Mohammed’s divine mission’.5 It is in Jahilia that the actual story of Mahound takes place. The coexistence, interactions and interconnections of these three narratives make extensive use of imagery, techniques and symbolism derived from cinema. The use of cinematic devices in the overlapping and interference of images is legitimated by the fact that the two main characters are actors. One of them (Gibreel) sings the famous tune from the 1959 Raj Kapoor film Shree 420: ‘My shoes are Japanese,/ These trousers English, if you please./On my head, red Russian hat;/ my heart’s Indian for all that.’6 This song comes very early in the novel to set the grounds for a discussion of ethnicity and nationality which is crucial in The Satanic Verses and which I shall approach in more detail later. What Gibreel exposes in the song from Shree 420 is 5

Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘“Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar”: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, 194. 6 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 5.

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the essentially performative, carnivalesque, contradictory nature of sweeping meta-individual categories such as ethnicity and nationality. The song suggests, in ironic key, that, as the two actors literally ‘plunge’ into Englishness, this cannot be anything else than a matter of wearing the right trousers, of performing in the right mask. The significance of the number 420 in Indian culture is still primarily to be understood in relation to the 1860 Indian Penal code. It designates the section on small-scale fraud and confidence tricks.7 Rushdie alludes to this as he ironically interprets the two actors’ survival as a confidence trick played on death and on the British immigration authorities. The strictness of the law is thus relativized in this cinematic performance. Gibreel and Saladin evolve throughout the novel from being clear-cut types, like Bollywood’s celluloid stock characters, to exhibiting very complex psychologies, like the manyfaced nature of actors’ personalities. There is a dialogue between acting styles, in which the identities of the two actors are performed. This is what mainly happens in Indian cinema. Bollywood pictures most often display a variation on a rather limited number of types (the hero, the belle, the villain etc.). The other style aims at building a fixed, realistic, believable, accomplished person on stage who should resemble real life people as much as possible, without stage fright getting in the way of the true-to-life overall aim of this approach. There is a negotiation here between ‘character building’ according to ‘the Stanislavski system’ – through techniques implying a thorough technical preparation leading to a faithful, true-to-nature enactment of art8 – and the Indian tradition of the theatre of transformation, in which an actor trains to perfect his performance of a certain role throughout his career. The latter is more or less what Gibreel does and also the assumption on which the Bollywood formula is largely based. In The Satanic Verses, character is made more complex by the contribution of cinematic techniques 7

Aravamudan, ‘“Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar”: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’, 191. 8 In his book Building a Character (London: Methuen, 1968), Constantin Stanislavski develops a complex theory on the physical art of acting by examining the various aspects (dress, bodily movement, plasticity of motion, diction, singing, intonation, speech etc.) that an actor must take into account in order to become more like the character. The conclusion to the whole set of technical instructions is that the greatest artist we know is still nature, which actors should aim at imitating as well as they can.

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(such as close-ups, flashback, character developing on several levels simultaneously). Moreover, imagery and the plot are constructed in terms of the logic of cinema, as I will show further on. The first chapter of the novel pictures Gibreel and Saladin’s extraordinary fall from heavens onto the shores of England. Through the explicit allusion to cinema, Rushdie invites us to decode the story that follows as we would decode a film. We should be looking not for faithful representations of reality, but, rather, for escapes from it into performance. This is, famously, the function of the majority of Indian popular films. As the story goes on, we discover the connections of the two characters with various instances of the acting industry. Saladin Chamcha is just a voice actor on BBC radio, deprived of the privilege of showing his face. This casts the condition of the uprooted immigrant as an actor manqué, who hates both India and England equally. He is forced to wear a demonized mask (of the immigrant who does not look English) which he can only avoid by hiding his face altogether. Gibreel, on the contrary, is an important Bollywood star. As an actor, he builds success on the basis of his good looks. We notice the evolution from the beginning of his career, when he was wearing masks to embody Indian deities. He is now nationally famous and directly connected to the Bollywood film industry, which rejoices in the genre of ‘mythologicals’,9 or ‘theologicals’, as Rushdie prefers to call them. Besides the main characters’ lives and careers, Rushdie draws extensively on Indian cinema. The Bollywood film industry repeats a limited number of formulae, with the hero, the heroine and the villain caught up in similar patterns of romance and danger. Very little variation is permitted, as otherwise the audience’s expectations would no longer be satisfied.10 As in the case of Indian theatre, film audiences derive pleasure from recognizing the story rather than from being surprised by its novelty. With reference to the status of Indian cinema as an institution in the 1950s, Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy point out what the traditional view consists of:

9

Salmon Rushdie, ‘Mythologicals: The God Factory’, in India Today, 31 May 1997, 70-73. 10 The Bollywood Story: Indian Cinema since 1923 and Hindi Cinema Today, produced and directed by Paul Sen, presented by Shashi Kapoor, BBC 2, 1989.

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The formula, as dictated by exhibitor and distributor, called for one or two major stars, at least half a dozen songs, and a few dances. The story was of declining importance. It was conceived and developed toward one objective: exploitation of the idolised star. The subject matter, with increasing concentration, was romance. An overwhelming number of Bombay films now began with the chance acquaintance of hero and heroine, often in unconventional manner and novel setting. In backgrounds and characters there was strong bias toward the glamorous. Obstacles were usually provided by villainy or accident, not by social problems. Dance and song provided conventionalised substitutes for love-making and emotional crisis.11

The language in which the Bollywood formula works is, according to this view, very clearly organized around a few ingredients which are repeated and recombined and which usually come from mythical stories. This is what happens in early films such as Dadasaheb Phalke’s 1919 Kaliya Mardan, featuring Phalke’s daughter Mrinalini – the first Indian woman to have acted in a film as the boy Krishna – or in a later one such as V. Shantaram’s 1947 Shakuntala, or even a more recent, late 1980s television series such as Ravi Chopra’s The Mahabharata. The audience’s participation depends on familiarity with the subject matter, in the absence of which identification would not be possible. For Rushdie, the Bollywood film industry is a rich source of imagery. Just as realism does not tend to be associated with popular Indian cinema, Rushdie’s ironical account of this threefold adventure of the satanic verses should not be mistaken for ‘the truth’. Of the three narratives in The Satanic Verses, the one in which cinema is most emphatically used, both as a source of imagery and as a structural principle, is the one related to Mahound, particularly in the sections ‘Mahound’ and ‘Return to Jahilia’. ‘Mahound’ introduces the characters who are going to participate in the satanic verses debate in a way which reminds one of stage/script directions. The dreamer, Gibreel, hates his mother for having nicknamed him farishta (‘angel’). But he enacts this anger by dreaming of himself (or casting himself) in the most radical angelic hypostasis, that of archangel Gibreel, who brought Mohammed the revelation. The dream makes its debut on the 11

Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1963, 148.

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note of Shaitan’s fall. This enactment of good turning into evil and being banished from Paradise repeats the opening scene of the novel. The good/evil duality of Shaitan is dramatized by the actual split into two characters who, we are told, in fact are one: Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha. This merger of the two characters which represent one split personality challenges Manichean binaries and announces the ending in which the winner is not the angel – who remains the same and is killed by the inflexibility of his beliefs – but the devil, who in the meantime has changed and has learnt something. Their journey of discovery, like the journeys of many other characters in the novel and like the fall of Defoe’s Satan in the epigraph, is the experience of exile. Even though for them exile is chosen, it is connected to a tragic split in the self, a kind of generalized rebellion that makes Saladin curse both India and England with similar vehemence. The attitude of the self-defensive exile who will resist adaptation to the new country is represented in the novel by the extreme image of the exiled Imam who keeps the curtains shut to keep ‘the evil thing’ – the undesired otherness of the country which he has come to inhabit – outside his home.12 The almost allegorical proportions and emblematic visual quality of this image places it in the range of the novel’s cinematic images. The ending of the novel – Saladin’s return to India – actually confirms the Imam’s belief that exile is not a desire to explore the world, but ‘a dream of glorious return’.13 Even Rosa Diamond’s adventurous youth in Argentina, with her filmic sentimental memories of Martin de la Cruz – whose surname hints to a suggestion of love as pilgrimage, the journey with a meaning – would have no such meaning in the absence of her deathbed account back in England. Rosa’s husband Henry, who exemplifies the principle of British colonialism – ‘Wherever the English settle, they never leave England’14 is even less an exploration for new meaning, but rather more a search for the confirmation of the already known glory of the Empire. The wanderings of all the characters in search of various versions of meaning overcome certain boundaries, but preserve others by maintaining the tension between an 12

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 206. Ibid., 205. 14 Ibid., 153. 13

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oppressive ‘here’ and an idealized ‘there’ which reflect deeper ideological contradictions. The desire for return suggests the characters’ surrender to a subliminal desire for the oppressive safety of the law – as in Derrida’s analysis of Kafka’s story ‘Before the Law’15 – rather than the uncomfortable restlessness of the demonic rebellion that they have initially started. As he contemplates the nightmare of his obsessions spread out in front of him, Gibreel expresses the split within himself in visual terms. He imagines watching all this in a moving picture, with himself, according to the same doctrine of contraries, as both spectator and player. The other characters seem to be mere pawns, positioned by the controlling onlooker in their right places in the landscape of Jahilia. They are described with poignant visual details and suggestions that create, as in stage directions, a horizon of expectations. Such details bring the setting to life, as, for instance, in the case of Abu Simbel in a close-up of Jahilia which is gradually brought to life: Jahilia today is all perfume. The scents of Araby, of Arabia Odorifera, hang in the air: balsam, cassia, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh. The pilgrims drink the wine of the date-palm and wander in the great fair of the feast of Ibrahim. And, among them, one wanders whose furrowed brow sets him apart from the cheerful crowd: a tall man in loose white robes, he’d stand almost a full head higher than Mahound. His beard is shaped close to his slanting, high-boned face; his gait contains the lilt, the deadly elegance of power. What’s he called? – The vision yields his name eventually; it, too, is changed by the dream. Here he is, Karim Abu Simbel, Grandee of Jahilia, husband to the ferocious, beautiful Hind. Head of the ruling council of the city, rich beyond numbering, owner of the lucrative temples at the city gates, wealthy in camels, comptroller of caravans, his wife the greatest beauty in the land: what could shake the certainties of such a man? And yet, for Abu Simbel, too, a crisis is approaching. A name gnaws at him, and you can guess what it is, Mahound Mahound Mahound.16

Legitimated by the logic of dreams, there is, against this carefully set background, which creates a feeling of something hanging in the air, a whole confusion of values which keep turning into each other at short 15 16

See Chapter One, n.47. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 95-96.

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notice. In the process, the boundary between good and evil is dramatically blurred by doubt, already defined as the opposite of faith earlier in the novel. Mahound thinks he has had a revelation commanding him to include the satanic verses in the recitation. But then he wakes up with the acute consciousness of the verses having been inspired by the devil. We see him wrestling with the angel, who then turns into the devil himself. At the end of the episode, the adepts of the religion called Submission ‘must submit to being sequestered in the most wretched, hovel-filled quarter of the city’.17 Within the surreal logic of dreaming, this convoluted dynamic of values is psychologically motivated by the shock experienced by Gibreel, the actual trigger of all this dream-work. His loss of faith contradictorily (even though maybe not according to dream logic) casts him in the role of his namesake, the archangel Gabriel. The fear by no means arises from the fact that the Bollywood actor – who has so often embodied Hanuman or Ganesh – might experience any shyness at the idea of enacting divinity. His stage fright comes from the uniqueness of the role, its tyrannical monosemantic nature. It is as if the actor – so used to embodying multiple performed selves, to changing masks – is suddenly asked to be the self. The cause of his dramatic loss of balance is that, under such circumstances, his words and acts might weigh infinitely more than they would have in the fluid milieu of Hindu-inspired film. This is the effect obtained, through highly visual, cinematic imagery, in his dream of a powerful descent from the sky, in his chariot, with the whole universe contaminated by his schizophrenia, as some sort of cosmic split: He thought of himself as moving along a route on which, any moment now, a choice would be offered him, a choice – the thought formulated itself in his head without any help from him – between two realities, this world and another that was also right there, visible but unseen .… The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to treat him for schizophrenia; the splitting was not in him, but in the universe. As the chariot began its descent towards the immense, tidal roar that had begun to swell below him, he rehearsed his opening line – My name is Gibreel Farishta and I’m back – and heard it, so to

17

Ibid., 125.

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speak, in stereo, because it, too, belonged in both worlds, with a different meaning in each ...18

The verb ‘thought’ here assumes a perlocutionary force, since it is as a result of this act of thinking that the splitting is transferred from Gibreel’s troubled mind onto the whole universe. Reality and dreaming (or the other world, where Gibreel is not the actor, but the archangel) are reduced to such flashes of perception. They continuously change into each other with cinematic speed, revealing a troubled mind whose complete breakdown is easy to foresee. This can be read as a reworking of Rushdie’s longstanding interest in the theme of splitting, also present in Midnight’s Children in the parallel between the disintegration of Saleem’s body and that of his country. We also notice here Gibreel’s desire to be back within the boundaries of the law, to be spared the confusion of having to make choices, which announces the ending of the novel as a confirmation of return. The three narratives in The Satanic Verses, though at first sight entirely disconnected, are brought together within Gibreel’s consciousness. In his infatuation with power, he experiences revelation in terms that would perfectly fit the codes of popular Indian cinema: The Supreme Being keeps away; what keeps returning is this scene, the entranced Prophet, the extrusion, the cord of light, and then Gibreel in his dual role is both above-looking-down and belowstaring-up. And both of them scared out of their minds by the transcendence of it. Gibreel feels paralysed by the presence of the Prophet, by his greatness, thinks I can’t make a sound I’d seem such a goddamn fool. Hamza’s advice: never show your fear: archangels need such advice as well as water-carriers. An archangel must look composed, what would the Prophet think if God’s Exalted began to gibber with stage fright? It happens: revelation. Like this: Mahound, still in his notsleep, becomes rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his centre .… The dragging again the dragging and now the miracle starts in his my our guts, he is straining with all his might at something, forcing something, and Gibreel begins to feel that strength that force, here it is

18

Ibid., 351.

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Performance and Performativity at my own jaw working it, opening shutting; and the power, starting within Mahound, reaching up to my vocal cords and the voice comes. Not my voice I’d never know such words I’m no classy speaker never was never will be but this isn’t my voice it’s a Voice.19

This visceral account of revelation as demonic possession in Gibreel’s enactment of the archangel role renders a highly spectacular staging of faith. Through the powers of “his voice” uttering the Logos, everything, even God, is performance, or, closer to Indian philosophical terminology, maya, illusion. In this staging of Logos we recognize the demon in the mask about which the Actor-Manager warns Arvasu in Karnad’s The Fire and the Rain: if an actor is not careful of the rituals which surround his relationship with the mask, the demon of the mask may take possession of him and this may have destructive effects. This demonic masquerade further affects the text. The text becomes demonic (that is, subversive) by incorporating orality. The demonic voice in the text is and is not his voice, as it affirms and denies the meaning of its message at the same time and thus subverts and questions the truth of the revelation. The cinematic perception intervenes in the fragmented, syncopated rhythm of the internal monologue that describes Gibreel’s mystical dissolution into Mahound’s being. In the ‘pee oh vee’ scene that follows there is an intended blurring of boundaries between acting and watching, pretending and being, assertion and make-believe. Different historical moments come to be mistaken for each other on the fine line between illusion and revelation, written and spoken language. The tension between such opposing poles leave room for a plurality of meanings which is achieved technically by means of a quick succession of images, pronominal personae and points of view that, again, belong to the realm of film. Characters, both stock and realistic, develop along complex patterns of reduplication and thus reflect the discursive tensions around which the novel is built. Gibreel/Saladin, Hind, Ayesha, Mishal and others exist on more than one of the levels of the story at the same time. The prophet’s wives are mirrored spatially by the twelve prostitutes in the brothel called ‘The Curtain’ – an implicit theatrical engagement in a dialogue between varieties of virtue 19

Ibid., 111-12 (Rushdie’s italics).

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situated on the opposite sides of the law. Through a successful use of cinematic effects, narrative linearity is broken by unexpected transitions from one narrative to another, whilst, on each level, the respective story goes on undisturbed. The success of this technique is ensured by the fact that reduplication governs not only the construction of characters, but also the symbolic network in The Satanic Verses to a greater extent than in Midnight’s Children. We can speak of a double temporality, a double geography and, most importantly, of double psychologies. Characters’ reduplication is indicated in various ways, names being the most obvious. They can be read, as suggested by the ironic account of the evolution of Gibreel’s career as an actor playing in ‘theologicals’, as masks assumed on behalf of various characters represented. It is also (as in Midnight’s Children) as avatars of their historical predecessors that other double names, featuring on parallel temporal levels, are explained: Hind, Ayesha, Mishal. A geographical name with legendary connotations such as Mount Cone adds itself to the picture. This kind of repetition mainly affects female names. This suggests a kind of ritual, circular reiteration of similar motifs, such as the demonic and grotesque connotations associated with women in Rushdie’s fiction. The words Mahound utters little before his death – ‘Writers and whores. I see no difference here.’20 – are not without significance: both categories of people challenge the straightforward discourse of the law through what they do or write. The power of writing to defer the moment of meaning-production, thus opening up a possibility for multiple meanings to succeed each other at various moments, is actually represented by the subversion of the satanic verses which demand the presence of the female deities within the law. The embodiment of different characters projects onto the actor’s own personality, so that the various roles he goes through become objects in the making of his self, or, in a mythical sense, avatars: ‘At any rate, you’ll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that’s God’s stuff, too.’21 This fragment, like the 20 21

Ibid., 392. Ibid., 17.

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dream scenes above, states very clearly one of the main ideas (and also structural principles) of the novel: that there is no real distinction between the theatre/cinema and reality, nor is there any between the two of them and religion. Performativity shifts levels and contexts, so that the poles of various pairs of opposites continuously turn into each other in the fluid, ever-changing rhythms of performance. Cinematic techniques represent one of the means through which the text of the novel appears to be always in the making, metamorphosing all the time. If the scaffolding for Midnight’s Children was the chronological ordering of historical events (which is very present in the novel despite the distance taken by the act of storytelling), The Satanic Verses is structured on the basis of a performative model that draws on the transformative possibilities of cinema. The ending of the novel plays with the formulaic ending expected in the Bollywood tradition, meant to widely satisfy the expectations of its audiences in an ironic key suggested by the signalled constructed nature of the scene: ‘He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea.’22 The law seems to be ultimately confirmed rather than challenged, through a reassuring option for return as the happy ending of all adventures, yet this scene is highly staged. It is significant that Rushdie the storyteller, in some early stage of his evolution, wished to be an actor. In an interview given to Christopher Bigsby in 1992, Rushdie defines himself as ‘quite an excitable person’, ‘patient about writing but usually impatient about life’, who, in the wake of the fatwa, had to ‘learn to become patient’, to ‘let go of what you can imagine to be a very large amount of anger’. The author goes on to explain this by actually discussing the balance he managed to strike in his career (and life as well, for that matter) between ‘being a novelist’ – which imposes solitude upon one’s life – and his older desire to become an actor.23 This is what best accounts for his pleasure for public readings (and also, we might add, for interviews, as he did a lot of them, even during his period in hiding). But we can also detect a similar audience-oriented creative impulse in the taste for theatricality and spectacular effects that significantly informs his whole novel-writing 22

Ibid., 546. Christopher Bigsby, Writers in Conversation, Volume One, Norwich: Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies, 2000, 314-16. 23

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technique and grasp of language. The Satanic Verses is in many ways a turning point in Rushdie’s development of a performative approach to storytelling, as compared to the much more narratively informed Midnight’s Children. Falling from high heavens onto the shores of England: the performance of Britishness in The Satanic Verses Rushdie’s performative analysis of England in The Satanic Verses represents it as Vilayet, a plural text with many facets which Gibreel and Saladin set out to translate, colonize or ‘tropicalize’, as Gibreel’s distorted dream has it towards the end.24 This representation of exile as an inverted colonization of the centre by the former colonized is even backed up by early postcolonial theory: Rushdie literally quotes from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: ‘“The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor” (Fanon)’.25 The fact that on the same page the confusion brought about by England during the same act of conquest is counteracted by a quotation from the Quran that confirms Gibreel’s angelic mission points out the similarity between politics and religion as ideological discourses. This point – also made by Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things, as I will show further on – extends the discourse of postcolonialism outside the political arena and reveals an even more important need for a decolonization of the mind which the reference to Fanon may also be intended to evoke.26 Reduplication is the technique used by the author to problematize a debate which is central in the novel: between fundamentalist religious and nationalistic discourses (whether ‘authentic’ or adopted). Subjected to similar forms of doubt, these two categories of belonging are very important, since it is through them that the identities of the two main characters are negotiated. Sometimes, it is felt that, even though they are not exactly interchangeable, these two categories 24

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 354. Ibid., 353, quoting Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove, 1963, 53. 26 In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon shows that the greatest obstacle in the emancipation of ‘the black man’ is not so much ‘the white man’, but the black man’s own internalized inferiority complex (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove, 1967, 12-13). It follows from here that a change in the mentality of the oppressed must be the first step to take in order to fight oppression. 25

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sometimes exclude each other. When he leaves for England, Saladin is accompanied by his mother’s advice: ‘Don’t go dirty like those English,’ she warned him. ‘They wipe their bee tee ems with paper only. Also, they go into each other’s dirty bathwater.’27

This lamentation over the lack of British cleanliness, according to maternal prejudice, would stand in immediate opposition to the Muslim obligation to wash oneself five times a day, before every prayer, imposed by the Quran. Also, Saladin counts as purely English when he acts on the radio, as his face cannot be seen and his accent is a perfect disguise; yet Zeeny unmasks him: ‘You know what you are, I’ll tell you. A deserter is what, more English than, your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don’t think it’s so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache.’28

Such a slippage happens when Saladin, as he falls from Bostan and is seen rather than just heard by the authorities, is taken for an illegal immigrant and, as a result of a performative effect of naming by the immigration authorities, finds himself in the guise of a goat. This grotesque appearance is perceived as a metaphor of the Devil, springing from the above comment turned on its head. This spells out an ethnic conflict which Saladin has never experienced directly before. As goat-like horns start growing at his temples, his breath becomes sour and he finds himself producing goat’s excrement. While ‘performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of his unwarranted humiliation’,29 Saladin repeatedly wonders if he has not actually landed not in England, but in hell: ‘This isn’t England,’ he thought, not for the first or last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced towards the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding 27

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 39. Ibid., 53. 29 Ibid., 160. 28

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aeroplane and that everything that followed had been some sort of after-life. If that were the case, his long-standing rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look pretty foolish.30

Since his constructed, idealized vision of England seems to have ceased to work for him, Saladin sets off to build a substitute, which appears as a rather unattractive after-life space. Gibreel, whose status is that of a proud Indian actor, never dreams of leaving his country until he meets Allie. He is then overwhelmed by such love that his entire universe is shaken. Mistaking absolute love for absolute religion, he starts dreaming of himself as the archangel and forgets he is an actor. His performance, acceptable when it comes to representations of Hindu gods on screen, does not conform to the Muslim canons. At this point, having betrayed the expectations of his admirers, Gibreel is lost. Rushdie’s purpose in both cases is deeply ironical with respect to both Indian and English nationalisms, as we know them under Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership and Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism. However, both Saladin’s undesired masquerade as a goat, which he cannot escape, and Gibreel’s dreams of being rather than playing, are projections of an essentialist cast of mind. Such essentialism is precisely what Rushdie’s writing is aiming to deconstruct: the boundaries of set categories become relative as they are rephrased in performative language. In The Satanic Verses, reduplication is mainly enacted within the Gibreel-Saladin double, since the two characters, whose origins, ages and professions overlap, go through similar experiences. Gibreel, in his various hypostases, embodies not only the struggle between doubt and belief, but also the tensions between Hindu polytheism and Islamic monotheism. Saladin is the protagonist of another quest, which raises the issue of the nation and ends up as a cyclical movement from India to Britain and then back to India. Within these complex patterns of evolution, the performance of Britishness goes through various stages. The other kind of performance, that of the religion of Submission, with its alchemical processes of transmutation from angel into devil and back, plays an important part in it. In The Satanic Verses, re-enactments of sacred discourses and the performance of Britishness are two theatrical acts which coexist and 30

Ibid., 158.

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interact with each other. These can be read as disguised forms of lovehate discourses of appropriation of the land of exile by the GibreelSaladin angel-devil schizophrenic couple, which embodies the migrant hybrid, split self, in continuous metamorphosis. This attempt fails, ending up in Gibreel’s death and Saladin’s return to India, after an initiatory process which redeems him from his fallen angel status. In Gibreel’s schizophrenic crisis, his own consciousness becomes the battlefield, the stage of the encounter between the performativity of Hindu practice and the strict monotheism of Mahound’s law. But, as suggested by the dream sequences through which Gibreel goes, it is also the stage of the battle between acting and revelation. The dramatization is further enhanced by the conflict between Gibreel and Saladin. They enact, in a performative English language, a diasporic Britishness whose constructed nature is continuously exposed in the novel. The picture Rushdie draws of the Indian diaspora in London does not strike one as that of a very coherent community, nor does Saladin ever fit in it any more than among British-born people. I have argued that The Satanic Verses relies not only on theatrical devices and techniques, but also on a theatrical and cinematic perception of the world. The two protagonists, both actors, enter the stage in a kind of rhythmical triumphant march, tailored after the rigours of Indian film singing and celebrating rebirth into Britishness: ‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Takathun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again ...’31

This highly parodic tone signals the fact that, from the very beginning, the novel sets out to unmask the constructed nature of all forms of oppositional thinking – religious fundamentalism and neo-colonial dichotomous mentality alike. The performance of an alternative to the meaning of the Quran through the apocryphal story of the satanic verses is translated into European terms through a cognate story, the romantic motif of the fallen angel, punished by God for having tried to

31

Ibid., 3.

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take his place. Both are emblematic examples of radical stances against the abuses of absolute power. Saladin, the more critical and ambitious of the two actors who land on the English shore, refers to England in a sarcastic tone that deconstructs the alleged superiority of the metropolis, which must be conquered, but which at the same time denounces his own crisis of displacement: England was a peculiar-tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it. He discovered that he was a bloody-minded person. ‘I’ll show them all’, he swore. ‘You see if I don’t.’ The eaten kipper was his first victory, the first step in his conquest of England. William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.32

For Saladin, his hatred of England is, however, the very reason why he wants to live in England, upon which he projects at least some of the features of his motherland, India, which he equally loves and hates: Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won’t get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back.33

This paradoxical mirroring mechanism of love-hate relies on a whole set of inversions expected from Saladin, given his newly acquired ‘devilish’ condition. However, the Manichean extremes of this reduplication touch in a double temporality, a double geography and, most importantly, double psychologies and double feelings. Love and hatred coexist and justify each other. In the light of Austin’s distinction between constative and performative language, it is the performative dimension of the storytelling discourse that accounts for the make-believe effect. Rushdie plays upon this difference between the constative and the performative in The Satanic Verses. Rather than reporting Saladin and 32 33

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 35.

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Gibreel’s fantastic fall from the heavens, Rushdie chooses to show it, to have it performed by way of the songs they intone and their bodily metamorphoses. As such, the narrative intermingles with performance, which dramatizes the angelic-devilish interplay around which the novel is constructed. Gibreel’s halfway state of dream is a liminal one, which corresponds to the liminality of identity constructed on stage – in between illusion and reality – but also to migration. The liminality of migration, alongside the multiple-layered religious discourses that are active in the novel, is represented symbolically as a state of hanging in the air (or in the hijacked aircraft Bostan) in between good and evil. Migration, a condition that particularly necessitates re-stagings of identity, is represented as hanging, geographically and politically, in between India and England. It is in order to question this unsettled, always changing, metamorphosing condition of migration that Gibreel and Saladin, the angel and the devil, melt into one angelic-devilish character. The demonization of the immigrant suggested by the metamorphosis of the angel into the devil is a projection of surviving colonial representations in the account given to Saladin by the other ‘creatures’ in the police van that take him away from the beach: ‘But how do they do it?’ Chamcha wanted to know. ‘They describe us’, the other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’34

In the world of dreams, however, clear oppositions are preserved, just as in religious discourse: Gibreel is the angel and Saladin is the devil. The latent conflict between Saladin and Gibreel is an enactment, on the individual level, of the story of the nation. We see the underlying conflict between the colonizer and the colonized in their sharing of the same object of desire: the feminized space of India, the colonized country. The two rivals mime friendship, pretending that they are indeed sharing the recognition they both want. Refusing the position of the colonized subject, he dares to look upon the formerly colonized land, India (represented by Gibreel as he enacts the whole pantheon of Indian gods) from the perspective of the colonizer, with 34

Ibid., 168.

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whom he wishes to identify. His identity crisis comes from the splitting of his personality between his English and Indian selves. While being unable to fully identify with either, Saladin dreams of a love that is explained in the novel as the actor’s wish for the love and appreciation of the others. The exile’s displacement is translated as the actor’s awareness that, in assuming so many different identities, he is actually losing sense of who he is. More deeply, on the postcolonial stage, he wishes to possess the country that he lost as a migrant, but which he wants to control from his newly acquired metropolitan perspective. This crisis projects onto Gibreel, whom he envies for both his Indianness and his ‘divine’ love affair with Allie. Since he wants to possess what Gibreel possesses, Saladin resolves to destroy Gibreel. He does so, in tune with the devilish role he performs in the novel, precisely by way of mimicry. He uses his power to change his voice over the telephone in order to induce, through a successful use of the perlocutionary power of language, Gibreel’s doubts about his beloved’s faithfulness and, thus, to destroy him. In Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the ‘ambivalence of colonial discourse’, conflict appears to be dissimulated as friendship in a strategy of colonial masquerade. The common project is to construct the narration of the centre and that of the margin as they are seen through each other’s eyes. The conflict is preserved in postcolonial times, since the centre/periphery opposition, though officially cancelled in the political sphere, is maintained in the cultural and economic one. In his introduction to Nation and Narration Bhabha describes contemporary internationalism as a multiple, transnational mirroring of nations and spaces (or of nation-spaces): ‘America leads to Africa; the nations of Europe and Asia meet in Australia; the margins of the nation displace the centre; the peoples of the periphery return to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis.’35 The liminality of the nation, the need to perform the nation on the border that separates it from another is part of the double perception of nationhood itself, in spatial and temporal terms. As Bhabha maintains, nation seems to be at the same time aiming at centrality and at the emancipation of the margin. In this sense, the emancipating 35

Bhabha, Introduction to Nation and Narration, 6.

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postcolonial nation officially overcomes the status projected via colonial mimicry, defined by Bhabha as … the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference .… Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the other as it visualises power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalised’ knowledges and disciplinary powers.36

Such ‘“normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers’, Saladin chooses to face quite early in his life. He is pushed by a desire for emancipation that partially arises from the conflict with his father, followed by his denial of the culture he has so far belonged to. His decision to be English, to conquer England and show her people that he is just as good as them implies consciously assuming some of the projections that constitute that “reformed, recognisable Other” via colonial mimicry. Performance as role-play (whilst aiming at becoming reality-creating performativity in Austin’s sense) is, to begin with, a survival strategy in the new chosen country. Saladin earns his living by use of his easily changeable voice, a powerful method of identity relocation via role-play. But he actually goes through a very deep identity crisis, whose main grounds lie in his split between a motherland and an otherland. Saladin’s need for love and his desire to possess is explained on the psychological level, by his vulnerable emotional condition as an actor. His room reveals to its bewildered visitor – Jumpy Joshi, whose affair with Saladin’s wife, Pamela, places him in an even more direct relationship of mimetic rivalry with Saladin than Gibreel is – his wish for love as unfulfilled desire:

36

Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 86.

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Chamcha’s room struck the sleepless intruder as contrived, and therefore sad: the caricature of an actor’s room full of signed photographs of colleagues, handbills, framed programmes, production stills, citations, awards, volumes of movie-star memoirs, a room bought off the peg, by the yard, an imitation of life, a mask’s mask. Novelty items on every surface: ashtrays in the shape of pianos, china pierrots peeping out from behind a shelf of books. And everywhere, on the walls, in the movie posters, in the glow of a lamp borne by bronze Eros, in the mirror shaped like a heart, oozing up through the blood-red carpet, dripping from the ceiling, Saladin’s need for love. In the theatre everybody gets kissed and everybody is darling. The actor’s life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it sees. The desperation there was in him, Jumpy recognised, he’d do anything, put on any damnfool costume, change into any shape, if it earned him a loving world. Saladin, who wasn’t by any means unsuccessful with women, see above. The poor stumblebum. Even Pamela, with all her beauty and brightness, hadn’t been enough.37

This highly unrealistic room preserves the memories of Saladin’s life, staged theatrically, using the techniques assimilated in so many years of practice. This room, which reveals what could count as the set of an actual theatre of consciousness, can also be interpreted as a symbolic microcosm of the whole novel. Indeed, it lays bare the nature of theatrical staging, which, apart from a rich range of masks and props, amounts to nothing but illusion. Saladin’s memories are also illusions, which suggest a life of masquerade. This brings us back to the classical image of the unhappy clown who wears a half-laughing, halfweeping mask. Jumpy Joshi makes comments on the room with Pamela, with the sadness required by the assumed knowledge of Saladin’s death. He points out the illusory nature of his dreams: ‘He was a real Saladin,’ Jumpy said. ‘A man with a holy land to conquer, his England, the one he believed in. You were part of it, too.’ She rolled away from him and stretched out on top of magazines, crumpled balls of waste paper, mess. ‘Part of it? I was bloody Britannia.’38 37 38

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 174. Ibid., 175.

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Compared to Midnight’s Children – in which the storytelling process is mainly directed as a continuous dialogue between Saleem and Padma – dramatization in The Satanic Verses is more complex. The narrator figure appears directly, as a master-character who comments on the facts in a Brechtian way, as in the fragment above. Apart from that, the story is told alternatively from Saladin and Gibreel’s perspective. The storytelling process is negotiated in the continuous shift of perspective between the two, whose relationship is dramatic in all senses. Given the motivation in terms of dream, the subjective perspective goes so far that the whole series of events seems to be happening in the two main characters’ minds only. This impression is also supported by the ambiguity that governs the revelation scene. As we see at the end of the section ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’, the survivors of the pilgrimage testify to having actually seen the waters of the sea parting. They blame their failure to cross to the other side on their own worthlessness. The only exception is Mirza Saeed, who from the very beginning has denied the possibility of any miracle happening. What is interpreted as a miracle is in fact an effect of performativity: the pilgrims’ faith makes them see what they want to believe. Miracle is constructed by personal consciousness, as the episode implies. This is also what Saladin, at the end of the novel, finally at peace with himself, is, for a moment, tempted to believe: He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water’s shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.39

Even though he resists the temptation of creating another fiction (a gesture with an aesthetic effect, as it happens right at the end of the novel) Saladin decides that his newly acquired stability relies on 39

Ibid., 546-47.

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Zeeny. This emotional return to the motherland is, therefore, relational – or, we might actually say, relative and constructed through personal choice. Yet, in this performance of Britishness versus Indianness, the death-return evolution of the Gibreel-Saladin double is mirrored in Rushdie’s narrative discourse through the prevalence of traditional Hindu mythical thinking (with its cyclical perception of time) over the Islamic version (grounded in linear, historical time). Saladin’s return transcends failure in terms of the cyclical logic of ritual, according to which the end is always a new beginning. Gibreel’s death is a metaphor for his excess of imagination and of his incapacity to escape the forces of historical determinism. In returning to India, Saladin has overcome a state of crisis for performance which has so far been his survival strategy. He makes a choice, which – if we give Rushdie’s ubiquitous ironical rhetoric the benefit of the doubt – no longer belongs to the escapist realm of dream, but also fails to overcome boundaries in terms of a nomadic thinking for which the plural text of the novel shows great potential. This choice proposes a real life solution which closes the circle of migration and/as metamorphosis through return (with a difference) to a (now different) motherland.

CHAPTER EIGHT WRITING THE UNSPOKEN: EXCLUSION AND ARUNDHATI ROY’S ÉCRITURE FÉMININE IN THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

Storytelling or, rather, the retelling of stories, is an efficient indirect way to subvert established beliefs or, indeed, to rephrase stories that have already been told in ways that reproduce the views of oppressive systems. An example of this is Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I interpreted in my Chapter Six as a transposition of the distorted fatwa-informed reading of The Satanic Verses into the language of children’s fairytales. If Rushdie turns political conflict on its head through storytelling, Arundhati Roy uses various tellings of the same story to problematize the condition of women, as well as to question the validity of various ideologies in The God of Small Things. The story Roy tells in The God of Small Things is delivered in an English language modified through personal use. Criticism often sees in this a practice she inherits from Salman Rushdie. In the 23 and 30 June 1997 issue of The New Yorker, John Updike discusses The God of Small Things at length in his article ‘Mother Tongues’. Updike shows that, even though their use of language may enlist these authors ‘in a foreign if not enemy camp, that of the colonizer’, the way they use English is highly personal and creative. English is not just an adopted language whose global nature has to be acknowledged, but it is now made to express meanings that are not of the colonizer, but of contemporary postcolonial culture: ... phrases and whole sentences of Malayalam, sometimes translated and sometimes not, seep into the book’s English, whose mannerisms – compound and coined words, fragmentary sentences, paragraphs a word or a phrase long, whimsical capitalization – underline the eccentricity of the language in relation to the tale’s emotional center. Estha and Rahel, male and female dizygotic twins who serve as the

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Updike draws the readers’ attention to one of Roy’s most striking point-of-view devices. The world is seen through Estha’s and especially Rahel’s eyes as they grow up, with an emphasis on change as triggered by the growing-up process. It is also capable of bringing concepts into the concrete as they are expressed by the animistic logic of childhood: ‘Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons.’2 In this, like Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, Roy reworks the classical convention of the Fool who, under the assumption of madness, is the only character allowed to speak the truth. In The God of Small Things, it is the children who speak the truth and, even though punished every once in a while, they get away with it in the end. But it is in the comments underlying the main story that Roy makes her most important points. I would like to suggest that Roy uses an alternative form of writing in order to build a discourse parallel to the main storyline, through which the latter is subverted. Roy’s personal treatment of language, in places, can be argued to be functionally equivalent to the French 1

Updike, ‘Mother Tongues’, 156 (for the particular issue of The New Yorker, see the Introduction, n.7). 2 Roy, The God of Small Things, 3.

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écriture féminine project. Even though developed in a different historical context and for different purposes, unrelated to either the leftist political agenda in France in the 1970s, in which Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray wrote, or to the women’s emancipation movement (to which she does not subordinate her militant activities), Roy proposes a form of writing which can be interpreted as very similar in intention to écriture féminine. The écriture féminine project was an attempt to transcend the rigidity of Western dichotomies, rational logic, hierarchies and linearity. Hélène Cixous’ writing not only theorizes this discourse, but also exemplifies it. Her style is convoluted, with many repetitions, coming back to previously discussed points to accumulate arguments rather than supporting each step at a time. Yet, she claims that such discourse, built on women’s multiplicity of drives and transferred into language as unmediated as possible, is a very powerful political tool, because it offers a working means to escape the reductive categories of traditional patriarchal thinking. In her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous launches a consciousness-raising call to ‘writing woman’, by which she understands writing through the body: ‘Write your self. Your body must be heard.’3 In this, she assumes that, first of all, there is – at least in women’s case, if not in men’s – no real separation between self and body. She bases this on a seemingly romantic concept of a female language coming directly from the body, which, however, offers the advantage of the simultaneity of multiple meanings impossible in objective, step by step rational argument: She doesn’t ‘speak’, she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materialises what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she’s saying, because she doesn’t deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when ‘theoretical’ or political, is never simple or linear or ‘objective’, generalised: she draws her story into history. 3

Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997, 350.

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Despite an apparent lack of control – or rather the fact that, being like performance, it has the capacity to both show and tell – écriture féminine is a coherent narrative project. It is meant to rescue a femalegendered truth from previous silencing by the smothering weight of the law. In it, Cixous sees an honesty not to be found in the prescriptive rules of the patriarchal system: There is not that scission, that division made by the common man between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text, bound as he is by his antiquated relation – servile, calculating – to mastery. From which proceeds the niggardly lip service which engages only the tiniest part of the body, plus the mask.

For all the apparent essentialism of her observations, Cixous proposes an avoidance of essentialism through a recording of multiplicity. She does not deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking.4 She pleads for a discourse that would not be stuck in strict categories, but would express meaning without losing its fluidity and dynamism. Writing the body means building the female subject (and, by extension, the marginalized, the outcast) outside the patriarchal law, breaking the captivity of tradition. It implies assuming an identity out of personal choice, developed in an alternative narrative that subverts the law. Repression is turned into writing through the liberating act of self-performance. The woman faces herself as she has been constructed by the law and turns the darkness attached to her – because of her breaking of patriarchal stereotypes – into a new beginning. Cixous stresses that ‘The Dark Continent [with reference to Africa, but by extension to the female principle] is neither dark nor inexplorable’.5 It is in this act of creative translation of her own darkness into a source of infinite imagination and creativity that the woman’s resources are to be found. This is what the allegorical Medusa figure signifies. In asserting a commonplace truth – the discovery of beauty is dependent on the courage to look her in the face – Cixous shows the need for representation:

4 5

Ibid., 351. Ibid., 354 (Cixous’ italics).

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You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.6

Roy follows Salman Rushdie in using a language endowed with performative, world-creating (and also world-changing) capacities. Even though she rebukes the anxiety of influences, she is widely seen as continuing Rushdie’s project of ‘conquering English’7 through her use of words from Malayalam or her own created words, portmanteaux, babytalk and poetic language. She aims to transcend reductive categories, big labels and binary oppositions as they are inscribed in language. In this she makes a gesture similar to écriture feminine, which, in its attempt to escape the Western mind/body dichotomy, both says and does not say what it means. Through its ambiguity, however, écriture feminine tells a story which, in its expression of multiple viewpoints, has a better claim to objectivity and truth. It is on a similar use of language ambiguity that Roy bases her fictional criticism of Indian society. In the light of her more recent work, one can read Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things as a fictional enactment of her political beliefs. As she repeatedly says in interviews, essays and public readings, these beliefs have always informed her life and writing.8 Despite her rather spectacular fame especially after she won the Booker Prize, Roy refuses association with trendy Indian novelists such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, authors of the ‘great Indian novel’, of totalizing narratives drawing on the ancient epics. She does not write about ‘big mother India’. It is the ‘small things’ in people’s lives (as the title of her novel points out) that she is interested in. The small/big topics opposition is, to her, an opportunity for anti-nationalist criticism, and, further, for criticism of any ‘ism’, of all extreme ideological positions. The God of Small Things is a novel about Kerala in that it is, as its title shows, a novel about the ‘small things’ (or the prevalence of detail over ‘big’ words, categories or systems of all sorts) in Kerala. 6

Ibid., 355. Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, 17. 8 On her public reading within the Arthur Miller Centre Literary Festival at UEA Norwich, 16 October 2002, Arundhati Roy stated that she had always been ‘a political animal’. 7

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Beyond the forced stratification and inequality maintained by caste and similar substantive views on being that have run in Indian society for centuries, Arundhati Roy looks at a complex web of exclusions. She analyses them in her treatment of this tropical Romeo and Juliet story,9 showing that, actually, they are equivalent in their reduction of human beings to the simplified features of their ‘guilt’. Exclusion, of some kind or another, affects most of the characters in the novel. Ammu, the ‘divorced daughter from an intercommunity love marriage’, steps from one ‘guilt’ into another, and, finally, trespasses caste boundaries in her affair with Velutha. Her twins, Estha and Rahel, defined by Baby Kochamma from the very beginning as ‘doomed, fatherless waifs’,10 separated after ‘the Terror’, never find their place anywhere and become ‘Quietness and Emptiness’.11 Their incestuous reunion at the end of the novel, twenty-three years later, their sharing of ‘hideous grief’12 in breaking the Love Laws whose victims they are, is a form of resistance to barren conformity. But it is also a desperate attempt at finding wholeness. Baby Kochamma, the living embodiment of such conformity, despite her eager wish to punish the others (or precisely as proven by that) is stuck in an old passion for Father Mulligan. For his sake she converted to Roman Catholicism and let herself become a bitter old lady. Mammachi and Papachi’s couple reflects the cruelty of traditional patriarchal power relations, with repeated beatings accepted with submission and a complete lack of communication. Both the excluded and their excluders thus share some form of marginality, as they are all victims of prejudice and their example exposes the tragic consequences of ideological constructions taken literally. About religious institutions and their power to separate rather than unite people, by ‘wearing each other down’ in a worldly struggle for power, Roy has a lot to say. This is another point of convergence between her political message and Rushdie’s. She even places Marxism – the secular, materialist ideology par excellence – among religions, as both ideologies and religions are power discourses: 9

Tirthankar Chanda, ‘Sexual/Textual Strategies in The God of Small Things’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, XX/1 (Autumn 1997), 38. 10 Roy, The God of Small Things, 45. 11 Ibid., 236. 12 Ibid., 328.

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A lot of the atmosphere of The God of Small Things is based on my experiences of what it was like to grow up in Kerala. Most interestingly, it was the only place in the world where religions coincide, there’s Christianity, Hinduism, Marxism and Islam and they all live together and rub each other down. When I grew up it was the Marxism that was very strong, it was like the revolution was coming next week. I was aware of the different cultures when I was growing up and I’m still aware of them now. When you see all the competing beliefs against the same background you realise how they all wear each other down. I couldn’t think of a better location for a book about human beings.13

This corruption of religion by politics results in a collapse of the primary purpose of both. Their rigid, binding categories limit thought more often than free it. They are used to rule the majority out rather than help them pursue their interests and wishes. Of all forms of exclusion, the most powerful in India is related to caste.14 In her novel, Roy discusses caste around the character of Vellya Paapen, Velutha’s father. In a world with a Hindu background, where Christianity and communism are supposed to be instruments of freedom, they, however, make no difference for Paravans. The 13 Jon Simmons, The Arundhati Roy Web: http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/ roy/tgost2.htm (accessed 15 June 2005; Roy’s underlining). 14 The caste system, which originates in the Hindu background – but pervades the whole society, irrespective of religion – dates back earlier than 1000 BC. It originates in the four classes (varna, meaning ‘colour’): brahmin, kshatrya, vaishya and shudra (priest, warrior, peasant and serf). These classes are believed to have emanated from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of the primeval man (Purusha, the original selfsacrificial deity, through whose dismemberment the world took shape in Vedic mythology). They have persisted as the fundamental structure of society up to our days. Even though the boundaries are no longer so strict and it is believed that, despite a bad karma in a previous life, one can rise up the social hierarchy through personal merit, caste is still considered an important inborn feature, which cannot be easily overlooked. There are around 3,000 castes and 25,000 subcastes in India, although these fall into the four main types. The ‘untouchables’ (also known as ‘dalits’ or ‘paravans’) are placed outside the caste system. (Simmons, ibid.: http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/tgost6c.htm). As Rama Sharma points out, although caste discrimination was outlawed in India over four decades ago, the concept is still present, more strictly in South India than in the North (Bhangi. Scavenger in Indian Society. Marginalization, Identity and Politicization of the Community, New Delhi: MD Publications PVT, 1995, 13). Joining a different caste or marrying outside one’s caste is still severely judged by people.

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castelessness of Christianity proves to Roy to bring nothing more than a reformulation of caste separation, as history proves: They were made to have separate churches, with separate services and separate priests. As a special favour they were even given their own separate Pariah Bishop. After Independence they found they were not entitled to any Government benefits like job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates, because officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all.15

Exclusion is deeply internalized, which results in excessive feelings of gratitude and obligation for the smallest attention coming from higher castes. It distorts the most natural emotions of human beings. It is as a result of such gratitude for Mammachi’s encouragement of Velutha’s early carpenter talents and for her paying for his own glass eye that Vellya Paapen, seized by ‘the Terror’ of having seen the unimaginable happen in the History House, goes to Mammachi and turns in his own son. It is for similar convictions, even though from a different position, that Comrade Pillai (the local communist leader) does the same and Baby Kochamma asks Estha to lie in order to protect her own lies. Caste, the epitome of exclusion, originates in the culturally constructed pure versus polluted opposition, and so does gender. The Ammu/Velutha couple stands for this double gender-caste exclusion. At the same time, the thwarted Anglophilia exhibited by Chacko (Ammu’s brother) demonstrates a deeply misunderstood dependence of the Syrian Christian aristocracy on approval by the former centre of the empire. This leads to a partly unconscious, but very present selfexclusion of the postcolonial culture from power, as a result of an internalized inferiority complex. Crisis in the self, as Julia Kristeva shows, is the origin of the category of abjection, which underlies the pure/polluted opposition. Abjection is a kind of narcissistic crisis, an identity disturbance of both the same and the other. The abject is ‘the violence of mourning for an object which has always already been lost’, a resurrection 15

Roy, The God of Small Things, 74.

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which has gone through death (of the ego)’. It is a denial of the other within oneself and, thus, of whoever does not conform to the established artificial categories which, in conditions of crisis, govern the self. The abject will thus be repressed, hidden, denied. Such a death of the ego might be literally illustrated by Baby Kochamma’s programmatically ‘backwards-lived’ life, but also by the killing of hope in any potential or real form of revolt. It is not by chance that Velutha, the excluded Untouchable – also identified, in Ammu’s dreams, with the God of loss – marches in the Marxist demonstration with a red flag in his hand. Excessive revolt becomes a form of loss, as its cause is doomed to failure by the system from the very beginning. Once one is placed outside the boundaries of accepted communal values (and therefore in a virtual state of death), one has no choice other than to embrace abjection, to give up one’s hopes of social recognition and rebuild an image of the self on its basis. Abjection is ‘a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms the death drive into a star of life, a new significance’.16 The excluded, having nothing left to lose, will build a life ‘outside the Play’ which, in denial of the life of the community, will amount to symbolic – and even real – death. It is this proud acceptance of marginalization that underlies Ammu and Velutha’s love. Despite their end in death, their union is victorious. It is, as the end of the novel indicates, not a sign of the loss of a yesterday, but a symbol of the living power of ‘tomorrow’. So is the twins’ act of love a sublime recovery of the lost blissful oneness they used to share in their mother’s womb. This recovery of the hidden meanings of abjection requires a different kind of discourse. Even though Roy states she has no feminist political agenda, the Western project of écriture féminine may be, as I have previously suggested, a relevant term of comparison. In the introduction to the ‘Body’ section of their volume Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, the editors place écriture féminine historically in the following terms, which associate it with a certain stage in the evolution of the body/mind debate: ‘At the heart of the movement that is called 16

Ibid., 45.

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l’écriture féminine (founded by several women writers in France, including Cixous and Irigaray in the mid-1970s) is a refusal to accept the traditional Western separation of mind and body.’17 This distinction, at least as perceived in the contemporary, post-Cartesian West, has a religious foundation. Christianity, in all its stages, has seen the body as the opposite of the mind and, more seriously, of the spirit. This resulted in various attempts to repress the body. Such repression, at one point, came into conflict with more recent humanist views of the human being and his/her place in the universe. This probably explains the attraction of Romantic philosophy for Oriental systems of thought and, later, the wider twentieth-century interest in alternative ways of living and thinking. Most of these came from the East and offered a more flexible approach to the body/mind dichotomy than Christianity did.18 The status of the body in Hindu culture is different. As Barbara A. Holdrege maintains, the Brahmanical tradition constitutes an ‘embodied community’. This is to say that ‘its notions of traditionidentity are embodied in the particularities of ethnic and cultural categories defined in relation to a particular people (Indo-Aryans), a particular sacred language (Sanskrit) and a particular land (Aryavarta)’. As such, the body becomes ‘a site of central significance that is the vehicle for the maintenance of the social, cosmic and divine orders’.19 It is therefore in the body that experiences begin. The body – submitted to social and ritual constraints meant to maintain its purity – is a site of transcendental experience. But, unlike Christianity, which, with a view to attaining similar levels of purity, insists on the separation of body from mind, Hinduism sees the two as inseparable. They constitute – as Holdrege points out – a ‘psychophysical continuum encompassing both gross physical constituents and subtle psychic faculties’.20 Love-making is conditioned by them. Kama Sutra 17 Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997, 343. 18 Christian ‘heresies’ like Manicheism or Gnosticism do not function on the basis of the same strict separation of body and mind. 19 Barbara A. Holdrege, ‘Body connections: Hindu discourses of the body and the study of religion’, in The International Journal of Hindu Studies, II/3 (December 1998), 341. 20 As Holdrege shows, the Tantric tradition, for instance, develops a whole philosophy of the transcendental potential of the body by imagining it as ‘a subtle physiology

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is an attempt to grasp the eternal through an experience that is primarily aesthetic, rather than merely sensual. This is why the act of love must be preceded by intellectual and artistic stimulation.21 In Roy’s Kerala, Christianity and Hinduism coexist. Paradoxically, the mind/body conflict is reformulated so that they become mutually supportive in their treatment of both caste and gender. As previously shown, the castelessness of Christianity deepens the exclusion of outcasts. The illicit union between Ammu, a brahmin woman, and Velutha, an outcaste, violates the rules in force in both backgrounds, Hindu and Christian. But in Roy’s writing it transcends them both. The sublime consummation of their love is celebrated in the final chapter, which, even though subsequent to the two characters’ deaths, becomes the conclusion. Besides its privileged positioning as the last (therefore conclusive) chapter, the love scene is also written differently from the rest of the novel. It gives up on the ironical tones of Roy’s text throughout the novel, especially the fragments which are told in the children’s language, full of double-meaning. Roy’s option here is for an ambiguous poetic language which also directly expresses the author’s own position and which I shall compare with écriture féminine. Roy’s ways and aims are different from Cixous’. However, the aesthetic features of the écriture féminine – disregard of chronological order, circularity as opposed to linearity, poetic, non-rational logic, the rhythms of the body inscribed in the text – are present in Roy’s novel. They are particularly obvious in two chapters which break the reality of the novel and propose an alternative dimension of it, possible only in the order of dream. These are Chapter 11, ‘The God of Small Things’ (which, for good reasons, gives the title of the book as well) and Chapter 21, ‘The Cost of Living’ (the last chapter, the novel’s coda). These two chapters are supplemented by a kind of appendix to Chapter 20, ‘The Madras Mail’, which narrates the story of Estha’s ‘Return’ to his father. This appendix, starting on a new page, also records a bodily experience – the twins’ belated re-encounter in incestuous lovemaking – which, like all the other ones, breaks the constituted by a complex network of channels (nadis) and energy centres (cakras) and the serpentine power of the kundalini’ (ibid., 346-47). 21 Vatsyayana, The Kama Sutra, trans. Sir Richard F. Burton, London: Penguin, 2123.

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‘Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.’22 The scene that most closely suggests functional similarities between Roy’s writing and écriture féminine is that of Ammu’s dream of the God of Small Things, also called the God of Loss. Her dream of lack and sorrow boldly conceives of an alternative version of divinity (the only god of Ammu’s love). In Hinduism, whilst there is one unique, abstract universal spirit, Brahman, each small thing in the world has its own god. Each such god is one of the many manifestations of the supreme universal spirit. Ammu’s god is onearmed, the lack possibly pointing to a similarity between outcastes and women with respect to the Law.23 He leaves no footprints on the shore (a clear reference to Velutha’s outcaste status). He stands for the only chance, albeit a short-lived one, left for Ammu after she is placed outside the law and, therefore, outside any promise of forgiveness. This dream brings Ammu an awareness of her body, which, never discovered before, now emerges as her only hope, all she has left. This is soon followed by her moment of recognition, in the bathroom mirror. Instead of her own image: … the spectre of her future appeared in it to mock her. Pickled. Grey. Rhumy-eyed. Cross-stitch roses on a slack, sunken cheek.

This moment bears strong similarities with the recognition of beauty under the assumption of ugliness described by Hélène Cixous as the revelation of the laugh of the Medusa. It may seem that Roy attributes an opposite meaning to Ammu’s case: what she sees in the mirror, instead of her beautiful body, is a spectre of ‘Age and Death’. In the chronological, logic-driven succession of events in the novel, this is the faithful representation of her future. In the plot, as the circular structure of Roy’s writing will have it, this moment of recognition triggers the dénouement. It is during this careful examination of her body, of its youth and of the madness of 22

Roy, The God of Small Things, 328. Freudian psychoanalysis analyses women under the sign of a castration complex which, as Cixous shows, is used in order to debilitate women, to ‘makes us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack’ (‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 354).

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wasting it, of the ‘cold feeling on a hot afternoon that Life had been Lived’24 and, therefore, there is no danger in defying death, that the final scene is made possible. The use of oxymoronic associations – an écriture féminine feature, through its poetic nature – gives powerful expression to Ammu’s attitude regarding her position outside the law: ‘The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.’25 The twins’ union in Chapter 20, ‘The Madras Mail’, prefigures the novel’s coda. The structural and symbolic similarities of the two illicit love-making episodes integrate these two only accomplished couples in the novel within a similar matrix of identification. Both couples share experiences of exclusion which bind them together. Estha and Rahel’s encounter in the dark re-establishes their androgynous oneness in their mother’s womb. This fulfils them in a way that the world denies them through a whole set of abstract concepts, capitalized in Roy’s ironic discourse against patriarchy and its ‘Love Laws’. The scene is depicted in allusive terms, based on repetition of obsessive babytalk patterns: ‘Not old. Not young. But a viable dieable age.’26 Lovemaking is alluded to poetically, with an emphasis on the symbolic meanings of the gesture rather than on what actually happened: But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honeycoloured shoulder had a semi-circle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.27

The power of this passage is triggered by its constant denial of the expectations it creates. The sentence ‘But what was there to say?’ suggests the impossibility to articulate an overwhelming experience in 24

Roy, The God of Small Things, 222. Ibid., 44. 26 Ibid., 327. 27 Ibid., 328. 25

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language. Roy avoids conventional discourse. The sentences that follow start with the word ‘only’, whose strength lies in the constant denial of its meaning. Far from emphasizing a lack of content, this stresses, on the contrary, the overwhelming abundance of content in the scene. In doing this, Roy attempts to describe a bodily experience – ruled out by the Law, therefore situated outside logical discourse – in terms of the body. In this, she ‘writes the body’, she ‘lets the body be heard’ by using a language which breaks grammatical rules and thus suggests a break in the Law. Through this kind of language used to describe bodily experiences, identities are performed, through bodies, outside a repressive Law. Chapter 21, ‘The Cost of Living’, bears the same title as Roy’s 1999 volume which contains her two essays, ‘The Greater Common God’ and ‘The End of Imagination’. The former is about the Sardar Sarovar dam project and about the people it displaces. The latter is a plea against India’s becoming a nuclear state. This betrays the sharp criticism hidden behind the poetic language of the last chapter of the novel. Like the twins’ encounter in the dark (separated from the rest of Chapter 20 through a paragraph break), the scene depicted in Chapter 21, ‘The Cost of Living’, is also placed outside time. It is formally the end of the novel and, hence, its conclusion, even though, as we know, it is not the end of the story. In this final scene, Roy literally uses a bodily discourse to express Ammu’s denial of Velutha’s attempt to prevent, through words, what in the order of the Law would be their undoing. If Velutha asks for an explanation in language, Ammu replies in a way which, in Hélène Cixous’ terms, would be called writing through the body: ‘Ammukutty… what is it?’ She went to him and laid the length of her body against his. He just stood there. He didn’t touch her. He was shivering. Partly with cold. Partly terror. Partly aching desire. Despite his fear his body was prepared to take the bait. It wanted her. Urgently. His wetness wet her. She put her arms around him. He tried to be rational: What’s the worst thing that can happen? I could lose everything. My job. My family. My livelihood. Everything. She could hear the wild hammering of his heart. She held him till it calmed down. Somewhat.

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She unbuttoned her shirt. They stood there. Skin to skin. Her brownness against his blackness. Her softness against his hardness. Her nut-brown breasts (that wouldn’t support a toothbrush) against his smooth ebony chest. She smelled the river on him. His Particular Paravan smell that so disgusted Baby Kochamma.28

This opposition between two different discursive orders states nothing new. It alludes back to previous points already made in the novel: Velutha’s tender diminutive for Ammu the child, meant to replace the forbidden protectiveness of touching; the taboo over the Paravans’ untouchability; Baby Kochamma’s racist comment on the Paravans’ smell. As the reader is reminded of all these, the same story is retold, through bodily rhythms emerging in sheer poetry: They lay under the mangosteen tree, where only recently a grey old boatplant with boatflowers and boatfruit had been uprooted by a Mobile Republic. A wasp. A flag. A surprised puff. A Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo. The scurrying, hurrying, boatworld was already gone. The White termites on their way to work. The White ladybirds on their way home. The White beetles burrowing away from the light. The White grasshoppers with whitewood violins. The sad white music. All gone. Leaving a boat-shaped patch of bare dry earth, cleared and ready for love. As though Estha and Rahel had prepared the ground for them. Willed this to happen. The twin midwives of Ammu’s dream. … Once he was inside her, fear was derailed and biology took over. The cost of living climbed to unaffordable heights; though later, Baby Kochamma would say it was a Small Price to Pay. Was it? Two lives. Two children’s childhoods. And a history lesson for future offenders.29

28 29

Ibid., 334-35. Ibid., 335-36.

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This different perspective allows for a powerful comment on the story we already know. The already happened is destabilized, it is reperformed through a change in the temporal order, which comes close to the subversive aims and non-rational logic of the écriture féminine. Through its ending, the novel appears to claim the inevitability of death, whilst Roy’s two essays – as expected from such pieces of social activism – plead for ways of fighting against it. But in fact, the novel, by ending the way it does (with the word ‘naaley’, ‘tomorrow’) proposes an optimistic interpretation. Roy, in fact, states this plainly: I think that one of the most important things about the structure is that in some way the structure of the book ambushes the story. You know, it tells a different story from the story the book is telling. In the first chapter I more or less tell you the story, but the novel ends in the middle of the story, and it ends with Ammu and Velutha making love and it ends on the word ‘tomorrow’. And though you know that what tomorrow brings is terrible, the fact that the book ends there is to say that even though it’s terrible it’s wonderful that it happened at all.30

Roy’s novel thus proposes two different plots: one developed by the story and one developed by the structure. Whilst the former is a sad, dejected narrative of death and defeat, the latter – the structure ambushed by Roy’s contemporary Indian performance of écriture féminine – is a powerful criticism of this and an uninhibited celebration of love and freedom. By looking at things from a different spot in the development of events, Roy foregrounds individual revolt. As suggested by the final scene, she chooses individual fulfilment – performance of the self outside the Law through a personal use of writing similar to écriture féminine – over the comfortable act of rehearsing socially prescribed roles.

30

Simmons, The Arundhati Roy Web: http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/ tgost4.htm (accessed 15 June 2005).

CHAPTER NINE PERFORMANCES OF MARGINALITY IN ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

Arundhati Roy addresses important issues such as exclusion on the basis of gender and caste by looking at them from the microscopic level of everyday life rather than the macroscopic level of history. She addresses the lives and issues of powerless common people in two different registers – that of literature and that of activism – in which similar concerns are voiced through different functions of performative language. Roy’s rhetoric of the ‘small things’ In The God of Small Things, marginalization is performed through references to ‘small things’. This concept, which becomes very powerful in her writing, is – somewhat paradoxically – borrowed from Jawaharlal Nehru’s self-contradictory nationalist rhetoric. In ‘The Greater Common Good’, an essay against dam-building as a largescale project which damages the lives of thousands of people in India, Roy refers to Nehru’s main political line regarding the matter: In the fifty years since Independence, after Nehru’s famous ‘Dams are the Temples of Modern India’ speech (one that he grew to regret in his own lifetime), his footsoldiers threw themselves into the business of building dams with unnatural fervour. Dam-building grew to be equated with Nation-building.1

In note 4 to ‘The Greater Common Good’ in The Cost of Living, Roy mentions Nehru’s later rephrasing of his own ideology: 1

Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (‘The Greater Common Good’ and ‘The End of Imagination’), London: Flamingo, 1999, 15.

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Performance and Performativity In a speech given before the 29th Annual Meeting of the Central Board of Irrigation and Power (17 November 1958) Nehru said, ‘For some time past, however, I have been beginning to think that we are suffering from what we may call ‘the disease of gigantism’. We want to show that we can build big dams and do big things. This is a dangerous outlook developing in India … the idea of big – having big undertakings and doing big things for the sake of showing that we can do big things – is not a good outlook at all.’ And ‘… It is… the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power, which will change the face of the country far more than half a dozen projects in half a dozen places.’2

Roy uses Nehru’s correction to turn the rhetoric of Indian nationalism on its head and to denounce this ‘disease of gigantism’ as a highly flawed concept, based on a false assumption of Indian unity. Whilst India only defined itself as a nation state in contrast to the British occupation, the post-independence totalizing discourses of the nation have tended to sacrifice the interests of common people to the allegedly greater cause of ‘mother India’. In her essays, Roy is hugely critical of this attitude displayed by the state authorities. Far from acknowledging it as a necessity imposed by the requirements of modernization, she reads in this sacrifice of individuals for the ‘greater common good’ a reflection of the institutionalized prejudice represented by the caste and subcaste system: A huge percentage of the displaced are Adivasis (57.6 per cent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar dam). Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled 3 Castes and Tribes it’s about 60 per cent. If you consider that Adivasis account for only 8 per cent and Dalits another 15 per cent of India’s population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic ‘otherness’ of their victims takes some of the pressure off the Nation Builders. It’s like having an expense account. Someone else 2

Ibid., 104. Ibid., 106. These ‘poorest people’ are scheduled castes and tribes, i.e. former untouchables according to the official terminology used by the Government of India. In endnote 19 to ‘The Greater Common Good’, Roy refers to GOI, 28th and 29th Report of the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, New Delhi, 1988-89.

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pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. India’s poorest people are subsidising the lifestyles of her richest.4

Roy’s ‘small things’-centred discourse – meant to speak in favour of such people, easily sacrificed to the ‘greater common good’ – becomes a powerful tool in shifting the emphasis from sweeping discourses of power onto the importance of the individual and the local. If caste is one important marginalized category in India, gender is another. When asked whether she has a feminist agenda, Roy is usually faithful to her general rejection of ‘big’ categories. However, whilst getting around direct questions about her treatment of female characters in The God of Small Things, Roy says that her reason for not wanting to talk about it is that her book is finished and out there: ‘My book is my case, I have no further pleas to make.’5 It will therefore be up to the book and its reception by its audiences to make the respective point. As I will argue, the book seems to make it. Through Ammu’s stifled revolt and Baby Kochamma’s and Mammachi’s resigned oppression, Roy suggests that the structures of Keralan society will grant women and untouchables no insider position. Therefore, even though only a couple of generations later, one must perform one’s outsider role as a vantage point (the way Roy herself does) and speak from there. Performative language in The God of Small Things In expressing the naiveté of childhood, Roy lays bare the performativity of her fiction writing. Before writing this book, Arundhati Roy did get some training in performative discourse by writing the screenplay for two films, both directed by Pradip Krishen: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1988) and Electric Moon (1992). Writing for the screen seems to have given her a feeling of how to allow her characters more freedom than is usually the case in fiction. Theatrical and filmic performance is represented explicitly in the novel. The former is represented mainly through Kathakali, which I shall look at more closely further on. The latter occurs especially through The Sound of Music, with ‘Clean children, like a packet of 4

Ibid., 21. Taisha Abraham, ‘An Interview with Arundhati Roy’, ARIEL, XXIX/1 (January 1998), 92.

5

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peppermints’, where ‘They all loved each other’.6 The film provides a very effective pretext for Roy to criticize racism, present as part of the Keralan mentality. Through the white norm represented by the von Trapp children and, more directly, by Sophie Mol (who mirrors the snobbish Anglophilia of the Ipe family), Roy deconstructs the whole mechanism of internalized inferiority complexes, as the film is filtered through Estha and Rahel’s perception. The characters in The Sound of Music are everything the twins are not and should never dream of being: And then, in the minds of certain two-egg twin members of the audience in Abhilash Talkies, some questions arose, that needed answers, i.e.: (a) Did Captain von Clapp-Trapp shiver his leg? He did not. (b) Did Captain von Clapp-Trapp blow spit-bubbles? Did he? He did most certainly not. (c) Did he gobble? He did not. Oh Captain von Trapp, Captain von Trapp, could you love the little fellow with the orange in the smelly auditorium? He’s just held the Orangedrink-Lemondrink man’s soo-soo in his hand, but could you love him still? And his twin sister? Tilting upwards with her fountain in a Lovein-Tokyo? Could you love her too? Captain von Trapp had some questions of his own. (a) Are they clean white children? No. (But Sophie Mol is.) (b) Do they blow spit-bubbles? Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.) (c) Do they shiver their legs? Like clerks? Yes. (But Sophie Mol doesn’t.) (d) Have they, either or both, ever held strangers soo-soos? N … Nyes. (But Sophie Mol hasn’t.) ‘Then I’m sorry’, Captain von Clapp-Trapp said. ‘It’s out of the question. I cannot love them. I cannot be their Baba. Oh no.’ Captain von Clapp-Trapp couldn’t.7

6 7

Roy, The God of Small Things, 105. Ibid., 106-107.

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The Sound of Music, whose educational purposes in the eyes of the Anglophile Ipe family are obvious, given its display of stylish behaviour and the fact that Estha and Rahel are taken there ‘for the third time’,8 is replicated by real-life situations built around the twins’ need to be loved and the scarcity of love around them. Their carefully prepared encounter with their English cousin, Sophie Mol, is described in terms of an on-stage/off-stage performance in Chapter 2, ‘Pappachi’s Moth’.9 This chapter is a detailed study of the numberless meanings of performance (language, games, social roles, education, jobs, politics, religion, morality, love) which inform the twins’ childhoods, showing that the world often functions in terms of an immense theatre metaphor. The exchange of cues between Ammu and Rahel around the Orangedrink-Lemondrink man upon Ammu’s finding him sweet with Estha and Rahel’s ‘careless’ answer ‘So why don’t you marry him then?’, is a real Austinian demonstration of how performative language works, how it does things. The fatal materiality of careless words which, once spoken, cannot be taken back, is perceived by Rahel with a frightening intensity: Rahel froze. She was desperately sorry for what she had said. She didn’t know where those words had come from. She didn’t know that she’d had them in her. But they were out now, and wouldn’t go back in. They hung about that red staircase like clerks in a Government office. Some stood, some sat and shivered their legs.

Rahel’s reaction to Ammu’s scolding (‘Frightened eyes and a fountain looked back at Ammu’), recorded twice, builds up a cumulative effect which emphasizes the seriousness of the situation as the little girl perceives it. As a result of what Ammu says (‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you a little less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less’),10 Rahel takes ‘the sadness of Ammu’s loving her a little less’11 as a fact which she would have to live with. Language similarly becomes reality in the terrible scene of 8

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 175. 10 Ibid., 112. 11 Ibid., 115. 9

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Estha and Rahel knocking on the door of the room Ammu is locked in after her affair with Velutha is discovered. She tells them ‘Go away! You’re millstones round my neck.’ The result is that ‘they went’.12 The ensuing disaster of Sophie Mol’s death (by water, where millstones count as heavy weights which prevent floating, therefore bringing about death) follows from the logic of the novel’s performativity, so that Ammu’s angry words come true. The world of the novel is depicted in the language of childhood which, in its innocence, takes figurative or exaggerated meanings for proper ones. The legitimacy of babytalk (through the children’s point of view) is the main rhetorical excuse for using the performative potential of language. The unspoken in language, through writing, is unveiled, with all its tragic consequences. Performativity as role-play on various levels is also translated into childish language, with Estha replying to Kochu Maria’s reminder of his outsider status ‘This isn’t your house’, in a heroic Julius Caesar-like manner ‘Et tu? Kochu Maria?’13 Such instances cast, in fact, a very strong criticism upon the theatricality of a life full of convention, where people are forced to assume class and caste divisions as absolutes and their lives are ruined by them. Similarly, in the station scene, when Estha is sent away, he hears Ammu’s promise that she will come and take him as soon as she gets a job and replies ‘But that will be never!’ This becomes, in the general order of things, the expression of truth: By ‘never’ he had meant Not Ever. But that’s how the words came out. But that will be never! For Never they just took the O and T out of Not Ever. They? The Government.14

The logic of children’s games, in which figurative meanings are taken for literal ones, is extended onto the whole universe of the novel. Beyond the referentiality of language, the twins dream of a world 12

Ibid., 291. Ibid., 83. 14 Ibid., 323. 13

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where being born on a bus entails a lifetime of free bus rides and being killed on a zebra crossing entitles one to a free funeral. They also dream of ‘proper punishments’,15 that is, of a just world when retribution worked evenly. Repetitive phrases haunt the novel, some of them becoming refrains or leit-motifs. They remind one of nursery rhymes (‘Not old./ Not young./ But a viable die-able age’16) or of ritual incantations meant to recreate, within the circular logic of a novel, the realities they depict over and over again, with the obsessiveness of haunting memory (‘Things can change in a day’; ‘Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered’; ‘The God of Loss. The God of Small Things’ …; ‘A little less her mother loved her’17). Punctual memories of traumatic moments, with gestures supplementing language, are sometimes depicted with an immediate performative effect: ‘Someone threw a small stone at her [Rahel], and her childhood fled.’18 Words are loaded with meanings in the twins’ curious, language-aware exploration of the world. Words are singled out through breaking up, fusion and modified spelling, implying emphasis in their pronunciation (‘Prer NUN sea ayshun’; ‘Ei. Der. Downs’; ‘Lay. Ter’; ‘Margaret Kochamma told her to Stoppit. So she Stoppited’19). In an interplay between written and spoken language that triggers associations with Rushdie’s plural demonic text whose meaning is a function of perspective,20 words are almost attached personalities of their own: ‘Boot was a lovely word. Sturdy was a terrible word.’21 They are invested with the meaning of philosophical concepts, denoting ideas, feelings and attitudes through labelling and capitalization (‘the What Will Sophie Mol Think? Week’; ‘Loved from the Beginning’; Chacko’s ‘Oxford Moods’ and ‘Reading Aloud’ weeks,22 etc.). This awareness of the individuality of words is enhanced by the bilingualism of the world Estha and Rahel inhabit and, consequently, by their own preference for speaking English – a distorted version of 15

Ibid., 327. Ibid., 3. 17 Ibid., 32, 19 and 136. 18 Ibid., 127. 19 Ibid., 58, 105, 246 and 141. 20 The ‘pee oh vee’ scene in Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 102-103. 21 Roy, The God of Small Things, 153. 22 Ibid., 136, 135 and 54. 16

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Baby Kochamma’s conformist Catholicity: ‘She made them write lines – “impositions” she called them – I will always speak English, I will always speak English, I will always speak English.’23 Despite this, however, Malayalam words are also singled out as names (as some of them actually are) or concepts (veshya = prostitute, velutha = white, vellya = old, kochu = young, mon = little boy, mol = little girl etc.). Apart from working as aide-mémoires and attention catchers, these words punctuate the flow of the narrative and give a rhythm to the storytelling process. The fact that they are not always translated in the text creates a tension between them and the rest of the discourse, which is in English. Performative imagery abounds in the novel, so that the telling of the story is very much supplemented by showing. The description of Rahel’s wristwatch, with the time painted on it, is symbolic of arrested time, stuck in rigid, narrow-minded Keralan tradition. A contrast is deliberately created, in the context, between ‘time’ and ‘Time’, bringing in a matter of personal, present-moment point of view, enhanced on the optimistic side by the red plastic sunglasses: Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place). Her yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses made the world look red. Ammu said they were bad for her eyes and had advised her to wear them as seldom as possible.24

Through fresh, striking imagery and unusual associations of words and meanings (Christianity ‘seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag’; the Plymouth with ‘the sun in its tailfins’; Margaret Kochamma’s ‘bottled London smells’25), the whole world of the novel is depicted here as a highly artificial show. Political exhibitionism (in the Inquilab Zindabad demonstration of which Velutha is part) contributes to the making of History ‘in live performance’,26 whose validity is equally subject to questioning. Within this wealth of 23

Ibid., 36 (Roy’s italics). Ibid., 37. 25 Ibid., 33, 35 and 266. 26 Ibid., 309. 24

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performance imagery, Kathakali – the traditional art form in Kerala par excellence – provides an aesthetic grid through which Roy encodes the wider meanings of the events told in the novel. Kathakali symbols and structures in The God of Small Things In his book Kathakali Dance-Drama, Phillip Zarrilli quotes a paragraph from The God of Small Things: ... the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.27

This paragraph is from Chapter 12 of the novel. The chapter is entitled ‘Kochu Thomban’, from the name of a ritual elephant who, in the meantime, has grown up, just like the twins: He wasn’t Kochu Thomban any more. His tusks had grown. He was Vellya Thomban now. The Big Tusker.28

The elephant seems to stand for the majestic, indifferent changelessness of tradition: he has been there all the time, he has witnessed and performed the same rituals for years, unlike the twins, who have been away. This chapter comes right after the one entitled ‘The God of Small Things’, where Ammu has the strange dream of the one-armed man, driving her to the blind fulfilment of her fate. This does not wait too long to manifest itself in the sentence uttered by Chacko, mad with grief for the loss of his daughter and taking revenge on her: ‘Pack your things and go.’29 After this, in Chapter 12, we jump years ahead 27

Ibid., 229. Quoted by Zarrilli, Kathakali Dance-Drama, 3 (Roy’s italics). Ibid., 228. 29 Ibid., 226. 28

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in time and we witness a scene apparently unconnected to anything else: Rahel and Estha, back in Ayemenem, attend a Kathakali performance. The function of this chapter might, like that of digressions in traditional Indian storytelling, be to stop the storytelling thread and ponder on the meaning of events. Whilst the story has by now become too painful for the reader to take any more, our attention is temporarily moved to something completely different. We are offered a break in the story about human beings we have been listening to so far, by plunging into one of those archetypal Great Stories revived by Kathakali. Roy’s discussion of the circularity of storytelling, which Kathakali resumes from wherever it may suit the moment of performance, works as an aesthetic and political comment on her own writing. We could also see it as related to her staging of Kathakali in the novel. Just as the Great Stories of gods are without secrets, so are the Small Stories of human beings, one of which she has just been telling. In a world rigid with convention, there is only one possible dénouement to an act of trespassing. When writing about this, one can only follow a similar circular pattern, reiterating outcomes we already know will follow from certain deeds. Even in the act of glorifying revolt, one reiterates the strength of convention in stifling it. However, as I argued in the previous chapter, the structure, through the final episode ending in the word ‘tomorrow’, performs another pattern, which contradicts this reiteration of convention. The role of Kathakali in The God of Small Things is much more significant than it may appear in Chapter 12, ‘Kochu Thomban’, which is dedicated to it. Placed almost in the middle of the book (Chapter 12 out of 21 – the inversion of the total number of chapters, of the whole, just as the God of Small Things is the inversion of God), this chapter forces us to stop and think. This is a climactic moment of tension in the novel. It also offers us a bunch of structural and symbolic models of interpretation, through which we can rethink our whole reading of the novel so far. By this moment of climactic tension, the reader has had time to piece together enough of the fragments of this anti-chronological, convoluted narrative, to figure out what happened from the beginning to the end on that terrible day back in 1969. The Kathakali scene is an embedded narrative, which reflects back on the whole – or, in dramatic terms, functions in the way many play-within-a-play structures operate.

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The capacity Kathakali performances have to bring legend into the present draws Roy’s readers’ attention to the fact that, before going on to the unfolding of events, it is time to ponder on their meaning so far. This is precisely the pattern followed by most traditional Indian drama: the basis of action is rendered by a narrative pattern, from time to time interrupted by digressions meant to further elaborate on the meaning of the scene which has just taken place. In Kathakali, as Zarrilli points out, this happens by means of the alternation of sloka and padam: Kathakali plays interweave two major types of poetic composition: 1 The narrative sections of the text set in third-person, usually composed in Sanskrit metrical verses known as sloka (or the slightly different form known as dandaka) and sung by the onstage vocalists. 2 The first-person dialogue and/or soliloquy passages (padam) composed in a mixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam as dance music for delivery and interpretation by the actors.30

This alternation is meant to create a balance in performance, by first situating it within the context of one of the traditional Indian epics, the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, and then by creating a proper environment for dance and poetry to manifest themselves. The fact that the padam are in the first-person singular, as opposed to the thirdperson voice of the narrative frame, offers the opportunity for subjective, individual comment. This singles each performance out in the context of many dramatic performances based on the same stories, told and retold again and enjoyed, as Roy notices, precisely because of this. Thus, rather than progressing along a linear trajectory, as it would in most Western theatre, the plot of Kathakali dance-drama is linear only in places. Most of the time it moves according to a circular pattern, with the events sometimes interrupted and resumed again after some circular, ritual celebration, some cyclical return to the “through line” of the text’.31 One can detect a similar circularity in Roy’s organization of her novel. The distorted chronology blurs narrative linearity. Instead, we 30 31

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 64.

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are told a story of fragments, starting in medias res, with Rahel’s return years after the main events happened. The story then stops for the Kathakali performance and is resumed afterwards, finally ending with an instance of sheer poetry, whose function is similar to that of the padam in Kathakali. Chapter 21, the last, entitled ‘The Cost of Living’ is, chronologically, not the dénouement, but the climactic point which will trigger the disaster we already know about. It performs a challenge to similar, conservative beliefs. As Zarrilli points out, the scores of Kathakali performances are often made of many more scenes than we get to see especially in the present-day versions, drastically adapted and shortened for tourists, who would not pay their money to see something lasting one whole tiring night.32 Significantly, Roy’s Kathakali players stop at the temple before the performance, in order to ‘ask pardon of their gods. To apologize for corrupting their stories.’33 The corruption of tradition for tourist purposes but, at the same time, its interactive coexistence along with modernity is suggested much earlier in the novel, by the image of the Kathakali dancer on the ‘Paradise Pickles and Preserves’ billboard on the roof rack of the skyblue Plymouth. The whole image looks like a fairytale illustration, whilst its eclectic nature – reminding one of Rushdie’s ‘chutnification of history’ – has a lot to say about how taste results from very sophisticated combinations: On the Plymouth roof rack there was a four-sided tin-lined, plywood billboard that said, on all four sides, in elaborate writing, Paradise Pickles & Preserves. Below the writing there were painted bottles of mixed-fruit jam and hot-lime pickle in edible oil, with labels that said, in elaborate writing, Paradise Pickles & Preserves. Next to the bottles there was a list of all the Paradise products and a kathakali dancer with his face green and skirts swirling. Along the bottom of the Sshaped swirl of his billowing skirt, it said, in an S-shaped swirl, Emperors of the Realm of Taste – which was Comrade K.N.M. Pillai’s unsolicited contribution. It was a literal translation of Ruchi lokathinde Rajavu, which sounded a little less ludicrous than Emperors of the Realm of Taste. But since Comrade Pillai had already printed them, no one had the heart to ask him to redo the whole print order. So,

32 33

Zarrilli, Kathakali Dance-Drama, 40. Roy, The God of Small Things, 229.

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unhappily, Emperors of the Realm of Taste became a permanent feature on the Paradise Pickle labels.34

This image signals the invading commercialism which uses all possible emotional means of persuasion for its own purposes. Thus, Kathakali provides the most appropriate commercial for pickles. It also provides the best tourist emblem of Kerala, used by the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation, welcoming newly arrived passengers in the airport with ‘a kathakali dancer doing a namasté’.35 But it is also an emblem of the whole Keralan society Roy is writing about. The elaborate aestheticism governing food is similar to that of Kathakali, the most famous artistic product of the region. This is enjoyed by its audiences of connoisseurs in terms of similar pleasures of an educated taste, through rasa (the audience’s tasting of the aesthetic pleasure provided by the performance via the bhava (states of being) that the actors go through. Communism, the strongest political orientation in Kerala, is present with all its clashing mixture of rigid conservatism and alleged classlessness. This is represented by the ubiquitous figure of Comrade Pillai, who feels his approval is necessary everywhere. Full of nationalist zeal, he congratulates the twins for their longlasting interest in ‘your Indian culture’ at the Kathakali performance.36 But he seems to have forgotten all his egalitarian principles when Velutha, the guilty untouchable, seeks shelter with him. Kathakali dedicates its approach to character to exploring the heroic. Thus, all characters tend to be gods and/or heroes. Protagonists fight evil and are usually victorious, even though sometimes they are defeated. Yet, something is always won, as proven by the sacrificial dimension of any bloodletting occurring in the battles fought in the plays. Indeed, if blood is the substance of life, then its sacrificial spilling corresponds to the destruction of evil for life to be possible again. Roy points out the irony of this heroic dimension. Whilst using a lot of Kathakali reference and symbolism, she uses the heroic in an inverted way. The most heroic character in her story – who seriously challenges the givens of society by both loving a woman he should 34

Ibid., 46-47. Ibid., 139. 36 Ibid., 237. 35

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never dream of touching and by marching in the streets with a red communist flag – is Velutha, the untouchable. It is Velutha’s blood that is spilled in the novel. But the heroism of this spilling – and this is where Roy’s message comes through – lies not in its capacity to purge the universe of evil, but in its blatant, revolting injustice. Denied access to the heroism of divine beings (green-coloured in Kathakali), Velutha’s protest can only be short-lived and it is quickly silenced. Also, in the overall order of things, the break operated by the Kathakali performance in the normal course of events gives access to a different order of things just for a brief moment. After that, the make-believe is over and the strict social order is back in place, as ‘The Kathakali Men took off their make-up and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one with breasts.’37 Roy’s description of this type of humanity which she calls ‘the Kathakali Man’ sees him as inseparable from the stories he enacts. His freedom lies in the flexibility of his stories, which are vivid organisms, where all his psychological complexity comes from: To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up with them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf.38

As the description of the Kathakali Man goes on, we find out that he is ‘the most beautiful of men’, because ‘his body is his soul’ and that he tells stories with his body. A similar bodily beauty to that of ‘the Kathakali man’, communicating meanings that his mouth was not allowed to communicate, is, as the twins seem to remember, Velutha’s. The emphasis on the aestheticized body prompted by the Kathakali performance points out the centrality of the body in the whole novel. Bodies appear in a variety of hypostases: the beautiful body (Ammu 37 38

Ibid., 236. Ibid., 229-30.

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watching herself in the mirror and discovering, by contrast, the ugliness of her fate); the sick body (Ammu, later on in the story, as she is disfigured physically, emotionally and mentally by the disease triggered by the unjustness she has been treated with); the body in pain (Velutha’s once untouchable, then horribly tortured body after he is caught by the police); the ugly body (Baby Kochamma’s fat physical appearance, which mirrors the ugliness of prejudice, increasing with age, of which she is emblematic); the body in love (proclaimed in the final scene as a plea for a transcendence of mean social constrictions, sublimating Ammu and Velutha’s bodies – subject to various kinds of torture in the previous scenes – into an apotheotic triumph, beyond the temporality of the novel). The way in which all this bodily imagery operates comes from a traditional Hindu background of which Kathakali is emblematic. Hinduism assumes the continuity of body and mind, which can only mirror each other. Ayurvedic medicine always sees them in conjunction. The patient is treated as a whole, which also includes his/her various states of being along the cycle of reincarnation. However, Ammu and Velutha’s union transgresses some central Hindu codes. Through the tension created between these codes and the status of this cross-caste union outside marital boundaries, Roy is at odds with both traditional Hinduism and traditional Christianity. In this sense, the punishments suffered by the characters – especially Ammu and Velutha, but also Baby Kochamma (‘guilty’ of her misplaced love for Father Mulligan) can be interpreted, in Hindu terms, as a rightful result of their excesses, of their trespassing the law of dharma. The Hindu law of moral duty, dharma requires every individual to act in accordance with the position which is rightfully his/hers by birth. It is one of the strongest arguments in favour of the maintenance of the caste system up to this day. Whilst being aware of the presence of this tension in Keralan mentality, Roy, at the same time, spots an even more serious source of conflict in the hybridity of this mentality. Against the age-old Hindu background, Christianity, coming in various layers, introduces the Western body/mind and body/spirit opposition, which sits uncomfortably with their traditional continuity in Hinduism. A third ideological discourse, that of Marxism – whose materialist outlook implies the primacy of the body over the spirit – further

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confuses the perspective. Since Marxism is practised by upper-class members of the society (such as Chacko, who blatantly misunderstands it, as Roy suggests), it serves the purposes of this upper class and, paradoxically, maintains an already existing status quo instead of challenging it. The victims will thus be the same categories of people whose marginality is maintained by both Hinduism and Christianity: the women and the untouchables, represented by Ammu and Velutha. The body as a site of performance of conflicting ideologies is used by Roy in order to further expose their damaging effects on the level of ‘small things’, that is, in the lives of individuals. The particular Kathakali night described in Chapter 12, ‘Kochu Thomban’, is dedicated to the story of the encounter between Karna and Kunti, the rejected son and the sorrowful mother in the Mahabharata. Though Karna is a hero, the Sun god’s son, he is also one ‘whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone’,39 who fell victim to ‘Love Laws’.40 This story from the Mahabharata thus becomes a reformulation of the story of thwarted childhood we have been reading about, which is also about ‘Love Laws’ and their effects on people. But it is also, as I have suggested, an allegory of the given structures it depicts. Myth and the discourse of ‘small things’ In one of her many descriptions of her novel, Arundhati Roy says that The God of Small Things is ... a story that examines things very closely but also from a very, very distant point, almost from geological time and you look at it and see a pattern there. A pattern ... of how in these small events and in these small lives the world intrudes. And because of this, because of people being unprotected, the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest core of their being and changes their life.41

39

Ibid., 232. Ibid., 233. 41 Jon Simmons, The Arundhati Roy Web, http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/ roy/ (accessed 20 June 2005). 40

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The small/big things opposition which pervades the novel is obviously acknowledged here. Whilst carefully studying this pattern of intrusion of the world into people’s ‘small lives’, Roy designs various strategies of resistance to this negative change triggered by ‘the world’. She protects her characters by building parallel levels of narrative, alternative spaces where fulfilment – most importantly through love – is possible. Such spaces, placed outside the temporal succession of events in the novel, are Estha’s room and the History House, where the two accomplished love scenes take place. In my section on Narrative I argued that a certain manner of writing, personal to Roy and similar to the écriture féminine project, contributes to that effect on the technical level. I would like to suggest that Roy’s intention of subverting and transcending the conventional level of her plot relies on myth as a space of freedom where fulfilment is possible outside definitions of conventional morality. In the Christian/Hindu encounter Roy stages in the novel meanings are performed as functions of individual experiences. However, Roy makes experience more personal by locating it in the body. It is the bodies that punishments affect. Some of the most terrifying images in the novel feature Velutha’s broken body in Estha’s nightmarish act of recognition42 and Ammu’s body, similarly broken into pieces by Chacko in Rahel’s dream.43 But it is also in the body that fulfilment – or the denial of it – takes place. The novel can be read as a collection of stories of unfulfilled love couples, with two exceptions: Estha and Rahel on the one hand and Ammu and Velutha on the other. Even though placed under the sign of transgression, these couples reach fulfilment through reasserting a form of initial unity reproducing their primordial oneness inside their mother’s womb in the former case and a shared condition of extreme marginalization in the latter. Even though placed outside the Law, being both highly transgressive, these two couples are the only ones who transcend the limitations of the contingent through the act of love. They also feature in the only two instances of actual lovemaking in the novel, which both transcend the level of the physical towards a spiritual level that remind us of the principles of Tantra. In the Hindu background, even though strictly regulated by limitations that these 42 43

Roy, The God of Small Things, 318-20. Ibid., 225.

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two couples break, physical love is one of the few ways of touching the purely spiritual that is accessible to human beings. As Gavin Flood puts it, “Sex in a ritual setting and the transformation of desire for a spiritual purpose is an ancient practice in Indian religion, stretching back at least to the time of the Buddha, and mystical union with the absolute has been compared, in the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad to the joy of sexual union”.44 In Tantric practice, physical union was a symbolic representation of the union of Shiva and Shakti, the male god and the female goddess, the most important divine couple in Hinduism. The representation of all male Hindu gods as complemented by their female counterparts represents creation as the result of the union of these two opposite principles. Union in love as the epitome of fulfilment is projected into the space of mythical absolutes in an understanding of myth as bridging gaps between cultures, in Doniger’s sense, as well as in terms of an androgynic Shiva-Shakti harmony. Projecting her narrative against a background which, Christian as it may be, is implicitly aware of this Hindu presence which still severely regulates society, Roy reads the two traditions through each other and thus, both of them, against their grain. She does it through the example of Ammu’s life, in which meaning emerges within the narrative discourse throughout the novel, but mainly in the two scenes of fulfilled lovemaking. Ammu’s dream of the God of Small Things, also called the God of Loss, admits an alternative version of divinity, a subjective embodiment of her repressed desires and a compensation for her sense of failure. This allegorical figure seems to be modelled along the Hindu idea that each small thing in the world has its own god, which is one of the many manifestations of brahman, the supreme spirit of the universe. This one-armed god – the lack possibly pointing to a similarity between outcastes and women with respect to the Law45 – who leaves no footprints on the shore, stands for the only

44

Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism, 190. Freudian psychoanalysis analyses women as suffering from a castration complex which, as Cixous shows, is used in order to debilitate women, to ‘makes us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack’ (‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 354).

45

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chance, albeit a short-lived one, left for Ammu after she is placed outside the law and, therefore, outside any promise of forgiveness. It is also an attempt at creating an alternative mythology for abjected people. Placed under the sign of a lack with respect to a commonly accepted hierarchy of values, Velutha is projected into a mythical space of non-being where the respective hierarchy no longer applies. This dream brings her an awareness of her body which, never discovered before, now emerges as the hope of a new beginning. It also brings her a desire to dominate her pain and transcend her condition: That afternoon, Ammu travelled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to fight the shadows that flickered around him on the floor.46

Ammu’s dream of the God of Small Things in Chapter 11 in the novel is alluded back to in Chapter 15, entitled ‘The Crossing’. If in Chapter 11 the supernatural dimension in which the God of Small Things appears is justified by the logic of dream, Chapter 15 is a direct projection into myth. The character who features here is and is not recognizable as Velutha. The symbolic projections of his untouchability in Ammu’s dream (‘He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors’47) gain an even more fantastic materiality (‘He left no ripples in the water. No footprints on the shore’). At the same time, the symbolism of his nakedness announces his exposure to the whims of his fate (‘Naked but for his nail varnish’48). Together, these two chapters act as the novel’s coda through being written in the same kind of poetic, symbolical language and in terms of a similar logic. In The God of Small Things, the most direct allusions to the mythical background of India are made in the Kathakali scene in Chapter 12, which reproduces, in an artistic key reworked for the benefit of tourists, the ancestral structures of the Indian society: ‘The Kathakali Men took off their make-up and went home to beat their 46

Roy, The God of Small Things, 215. Ibid., 216. 48 Ibid., 289-90. 47

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wives.’49 The ‘Great Stories’ retold in Kathakali performances are, in one sense, liberating through their power to connect the contingent to an absolute transcendent level. But in another sense they are not, as they also bind people to traditional structures of belief, of which ideologies are born and which can become dangerous when taken to the extremes. There is, however, one kind of mythical thinking which is liberating in a way that transcends rigid dichotomies through its dynamic freshness. Children’s animistic approach to the world is often performed through children’s language as an alternative to grown-up speech. This actually stands for children’s freshness of perception and wonder before the miracles of life as opposed to grown-up rigid limitation to preconceived patterns of thought. As seen through Estha and Rahel’s eyes, the ‘small things’ in the world have a marvellous, secret life of their own, independent from the adults’ imprisoning mentality. This applies even to the limitations imposed by such mentality, become living principles of the universe in the children’s imagination: ‘Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons.’ The rhythm of the world is expressed through incantation-like leitmotifs, a kind of protection against the cruel one-way development of linear history (‘Not old. Not young. But a diable-viable age’50). The world is full of wonders which only children can see, beyond its cover of sadness: toads are ‘yearning, unkissed princes’51 and jam recipes can become secret recipes for happiness (as suggested by Estha’s pleasure-inviting personal addition to the banana-jam recipe which he copies out: ‘Hope you will enjoy this recipe’52). Even the unbearable sadness that takes hold of Estha after he is forced to betray Velutha is given an animistic embodiment in the guise of the ‘uneasy octopus’ which lives inside him.53 The baby bat that witnesses Sophie Mol’s funeral is, to Rahel, a symbol of things which, left out of hand, turn into something completely different from and much bigger than what they initially were (‘The baby bat flew up into the sky and turned into a jet plane 49

Ibid., 236. Ibid., 3. 51 Ibid., 187. 52 Ibid., 196. 53 Ibid., 12. 50

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without a crisscrossed trail’54). This prefigures the increasingly growing importance attributed to ‘the Loss of Sophie Mol’.55 But, through its blindness (‘Bats, of course, are blind’56), the baby bat also embodies the blindness of destiny to which the twins fall prey. The fresh perspective through which the plot is filtered on a parallel level of childish perception is an escape strategy in that, by reenacting an unjust world through the lens of innocence, it exorcizes the terrible impact of the tragic events in the novel. It thus denounces the revolting meaning of these events much more strongly than direct criticism. Arundhati Roy uses performativity in her treatment of language to capitalize on detail as seen through the two children’s eyes and then to contrast that detail to the great picture of injustice that the novel depicts.

54

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 267. 56 Ibid., 312. 55

CHAPTER TEN POSTMODERN SCHEHERAZADES BETWEEN STORYTELLING AND THE NOVEL FORM: VIKRAM CHANDRA’S RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN

Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a good example of how contemporary Indian fiction in English draws on retellings of mythical stories in its own version of the novel form. I will now aim to read it as a rhizomatic text – which abolishes the authority of one structural centre and establishes infinite connections between its component narratives – and further as a nomadic text. Chandra makes conscious use of the Indian tradition of oral storytelling, where stories grow from each other, in a way which, through analogies with the Internet and through a handling of textuality that corresponds to nomadic thinking, the traditional Indian storytelling continuum is made relevant to the present. In this chapter I shall focus on the mechanisms of storytelling, whilst in the next I shall analyse more the performative and nomadic ways in which storytelling takes place. Chandra’s encounter with cultural ‘otherness’ happened in the United States. During his MA and MFA programmes, under the influence of John Barth and Donald Barthelme, Chandra began to experiment with postmodern techniques. His writing exhibits recognisable postmodern features, identified, for example, by Andrew Teverson as self-consciousness, ‘the element of “kitsch” that creeps into certain narrative strands’, ‘the multiple-layered voices of the narrators that suggest, not storytelling, but storytelling about storytelling’ and ‘the detailed engagement with new technologies’. But, in the same interview with Teverson, Chandra insists on defining his position as more importantly connected to the Indian storytelling tradition, whilst the postmodern elements are simply a matter of coincidence:

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Performance and Performativity Oh, you can call it postmodern if you want. But each of those characteristics you speak of is also quite easily found in traditional [Indian] storytelling.’1

The genesis of the novel is the object of an exciting account on Chandra’s personal website of how life and stories can mingle in ways that leave no visible difference between the two. As a student of the Film School at Columbia University in New York, he came across the autobiography of Colonel James ‘Sikander’ Skinner, a legendary nineteenth-century soldier, born of an Indian mother and a British father. This book inspired Red Earth and Pouring Rain. To write it, the author left film school and worked as a teacher of creative writing, a computer programmer, software and hardware consultant. The novel was published in 1995 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for fiction. Chandra’s inside knowledge of the world of computers contributed to the writing of the novel on which he was working. The novel’s structure is tightly related to the intricate, always expanding web of connections which constitutes the Internet, to the point where for the author reality is ‘virtual reality on infinite bandwith’.2 When he started teaching creative writing at George Washington University, then at Berkeley, Chandra also engaged on a nomadic pattern of life replicated by many of his characters: he divides his time between Mumbai, where his family lives, and the United States.3 This accounts for the strong interest in travelling identities in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The previously discussed novels by Rushdie and Roy display a circular, or rather spiral, narrative pattern. They do not pursue a linear development, but come back upon the same points several times, redefining their understanding of the world. Chandra’s Red Earth goes further. Through the multiplicity of stories that grow from each other in what aims to be a never-ending process the novel comes close to what Deleuze and Guattari call that ‘principle of multiplicity’ by virtue of which the multiple ‘ceases to have any relation to the One as 1

Chandra, ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’ with Andrew Teverson, 6. Vikram Chandra, ‘“Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, 6. 3 See Vikram Chandra, http://www.vikramchandra.com/vc/pages/biography.aspx (accessed 10 June 2005). 2

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subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world’.4 In what follows I shall examine the ways in which this principle of multiplicity works. Red Earth and Pouring Rain develops a model of circular narrative derived from the Indian tradition of oral storytelling, which also inspires Rushdie and Roy. This model relies on an understanding of time as cyclical, which triggers a cyclical approach to storytelling in terms of which the emphasis is not on individual stories, but on the continuity of the storytelling process. The novel follows the Arabian Nights framed narrative pattern both structurally and thematically, even more closely than Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It is made up of stories told by Sanjay, the white monkey who regains his human consciousness from a previous life and Abhay, the American-returned Indian student who fails to readjust to Indian realities. The storytelling plot is triggered by the fact that Abhay, who cannot find his place at home any more and is upset by his American girlfriend Amanda’s decision to leave him, loses his temper and shoots the white monkey who has stolen his jeans. The monkey lies in a coma for nine days, tended by Mrinalini and Ashok, Abhay’s parents. He then wakes up to the shock of having regained the human consciousness of his previous incarnation as Sanjay Parasher, a Brahmin who had lived in the nineteenth century. When Yama – the Hindu god of death – comes for Sanjay again, an Arabian Nights-like plot is initiated: in order to try to postpone his death sentence, Sanjay must tell stories that would capture and maintain the attention of his audience. Encouraged by Hanuman and Ganesha, Sanjay takes the challenge and signs a contract with Yama. This contract binds the storyteller to please his audience, which thus plays a very important part in his redemption process. The audience’s interest and even cooperation in the storytelling act are vital, as maintained by the Indian oral storytelling tradition and the tradition of The Arabian Nights. However, as compared to the original Arabian Nights, where Scheherazade does save herself through storytelling, the outcome is more complicated here. Chandra uses a double-hero convention somewhat similar to Rushdie’s in The Satanic Verses. The pretext is that Sanjay is too weak to assume the whole load of the storytelling 4

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8.

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act. In order to atone for having shot the white monkey and thus improve his karma, Abhay joins in, even though he is not by any means an experienced storyteller. He is forced to train as he goes along. This turns the storytelling race for Sanjay’s life into a very complex initiation journey during which Abhay – like the Boy in Jean-Claude Carrière’s script inspired from the Mahabharata – becomes someone else. He enjoys telling stories more and more and at the end of the novel, when Sanjay dies, Abhay takes over the process of keeping storytelling alive. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré shows that, in this double-hero convention, Chandra takes over the ‘stereoscopic vision’ of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (the twin heroes who represent parallel universes). It is possible to argue that Sanjay and Abhay – like Gibreel and Saladin – represent two different facets of the same personality. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain, they exemplify versions of similar identity crises located in India’s colonial past in Sanjay’s case and in the present of storytelling in Abhay’s. In his nineteenth-century life story, Sanjay suffers from an eye disorder which gives him double vision. This, Ganapathy-Doré maintains, stands for ‘the migrant writer’s point of view’, which is double by virtue of a culturally determined hybridity.5 This double vision projects onto the parallel narratives told by Sanjay and Abhay, which interact and complement each other as they progress. They are both initiation journeys. In the process of telling them, the two narrators change. If Sanjay’s story implies a journey back in time, Abhay’s is projected spatially, as an exploration of America. Both journeys involve encounters with otherness. In Sanjay’s case, his past incarnation functions as a pretext for problematizing episodes in the colonial history of India. In Abhay’s case, a similar positioning takes place in the present, in the geographical and cultural space. The temporal level and the spatial one complement each other in the good tradition of Asian narrative. The linear chronology of the former and the horizontal, rhizomatic nature of the latter converge in a spiral narrative which is communicated to the reader with periodical returns to the ‘now’ moment of the storytelling competition. 5

Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, ‘The Story-Teller’s Voice in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, XIX/1 (Autumn 1996), 107108.

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The interchange between storyteller and audience is reinstated every time by the magic word ‘Listen’, which has the power of a mantra, a magic invocation meant to lure the audience into the world of the story, as Vikram Chandra describes it: ‘Listen’ is a very old formula in the Indian context – the Indian epics often start their stories, and their stories-within-stories, with ‘Listen’. As soon as this formula is used, the storyteller and the listeners are drawn into an erotic exchange, a magic circle that can only be complete and alive if everyone plays their parts properly. The storyteller must of course tell a good story, and the listeners must listen acutely and intelligently, with their senses and mind and ego focused. The storyteller must be as good as he or she can be, but for this he needs an ideal listener. Once the storyteller says ‘Listen’, we are within the sacred space of ritual. Like all ritual, this one can fail, and be merely empty. But if the storyteller and the listeners perform properly, then the narrative conventions and the language they exchange can take them beyond convention and formulae. Then they will recreate themselves and the world within the space of fiction.6

This is the scenario enacted, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain, by Sanjay and his listeners and, similarly, by Chandra and his readers. It is through the magic of storytelling that a writer can turn death into life or forgetfulness into remembrance. ‘Listen’ as a magic formula that triggers the storytelling process also draws our attention as readers to the fact that these stories are supposed to be oral. Yet we read them and, before that, Sanjay the storyteller does not tell his story, but types it, as he cannot speak. As storytelling should be performed orally in front of an audience of children (the best listeners of stories), what he types is read aloud in a solemn ritual atmosphere that reminds us that Sanjay’s life depends on it: I looked around. Mrinalini was seated just outside the door, ready to read out the typed sheets to my little allies in the courtyard. Ashok and Abhay sat next to each other, behind the desk. Saira sat next to me, on the bed, holding sheets of paper and spare rolls of ribbon. I could hear the birds outside, in their thousands, and see the leaves on the hedge beyond the window, turned gold by the setting sun. 6

Chandra, ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’ with Andrew Teverson, 5.

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Performance and Performativity ‘All right. Listen …’7

Sanjay’s typing, read aloud to his audience, but also written down by Chandra so that we can read it, problematizes the relationship between written and oral forms of language and therefore different narrative forms: epics retold as oral stories to audiences who are present in the storytelling process but also the readership of Chandra’s novel. Writing causes a deferral of meaning (as opposed to the immediacy of speech) and thus justifies the story’s perpetual return to previous points for clarification. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is an exploration of the narrative writing process along several different lines, which also reflect the author’s own individual itinerary as an NRI (‘non-resident Indian’) practitioner of the novel form. To represent a hybrid, travelling version of Indianness, Chandra uses a similarly hybrid form. Even though he is very interested in the novel form and its evolution as a bourgeois genre meant to make a statement about the society and the individual’s position in it, he approaches this genre from the perspective of Indian storytelling. In this tradition, all narratives are about the self and its position in the universe. But there is no understanding of the Indian individual outside the boundaries of the community. In the post-Cartesian West, on the contrary, the individual exists as an entity in its own right, in interaction with the society, but independent from it.8 This model is becoming more and more of a challenge in modern India, but it is still placed in a conflict with the traditional community commitment. Chandra has experienced both understandings of individuality directly and is interested in expressing a reality faithful to both. He constructs a hybrid narrative about the encounter of different cultural spaces between which his characters move, technically placed between the Western novel genre and the Indian storytelling tradition. Such experimentation with storytelling, Chandra says, is ‘a way of 7

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 24. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt connects the emergence of the novel to the Cartesian cogito as follows: ‘[Defoe’s] total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy’ (Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 15).

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structuring the contours of myself. The way that I experience myself in the world is through this kind of narrative.’9 Unlike storytelling, however, the novel form, which the modern author is forced by contemporary publishing conventions to obey, comes as a set of restrictions in the way of this storytelling continuum. Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, with its intricate story-within-a-story pattern, is about the negotiation between different narrative forms, explicitly acted out as the main storyline progresses. For Chandra, the novel – by which he means primarily the realist novel, a specific product of Western society at a certain stage of social development – is ‘about individuals who existed not in an epic universe, but in a bourgeois universe, and call on the conventions of realism as that kind of novel calls on them’.10 The epic universe Chandra mentions is that of the Indian storytelling tradition, informed by the tradition of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This tradition exists in a highly community-based society in which the individual does not matter in isolation, but only as part of a larger social/family/ethnic group. Therefore, the task of writing about the individual connected to the modern novel genre becomes, in the Indian context, writing about the community and, sometimes, about the whole of India. Red Earth and Pouring Rain challenges the narrative tradition which it addresses by first of all reasserting space – India, where all things happen and where, once arrived, Abhay is engaged in a whole series of events none of which would have befallen him elsewhere. Secondly, the temporality of storytelling is challenged. It is challenged by the rule of samsara, the cycle of reincarnations, which motivates the main character’s migration along the axis of time as SanjayParasher-the white monkey. At the same time, Sanjay’s desperate attempt to postpone death through storytelling, clearly located in the historical present, also defies it through the journey back in time. This journey turns history into storytelling – chronos into kairos, chronological time into meaningful time – which is the way of making it accessible to present-day listeners.

9

Chandra, ‘“Virtual Realities on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, 7. 10 Ibid., 8.

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The flow of stories-within-stories of which the novel is made is triggered by what could be considered a conflict, inherent in Chandra’s fictional endeavour. It is a conflict between the Indian tradition of the storytelling continuum, whose rhizomatic nature is repeatedly recalled by the magic word ‘Listen!’, and the novel genre – to which, by the pressure of convention, his book is pinned down, whether it fits within its limits or not. Within the time-framework of the novel, the original impulse towards the linear is replaced by the rhizomatic lateral direction of spread. Chandra connects storytelling and the novel through what he calls ‘an online community’. This online community is the closest equivalent to the traditional storyteller’s listeners in today’s global world, where distances are shrinking. Encouraged to respond to an email address of the author made available in the blurbs of his works, his audience is expected not only to assume the act of reading more consciously, but also to expand the identity study of Chandra’s fiction into the ‘real’ world: An online community is a very different thing from what existed before – the actors can change appearance and gender, disappear and reappear under a different guise, exist simultaneously in different geographies. But the distance between author and audience is compressed, vanished. What also interests me particularly is the ability to provide the experience of immersion, of providing a ‘continuous dream’ that the reader/player can lose themselves in.11

Internet communication mimics a real-life rapport in between the novelist and his readers. It opens up the boundaries of the novel to the flexible possibilities of storytelling. The notion of ‘community’ is redefined, as it is no longer culturally specific. Besides such formal issues concerning the delivery of the story, Chandra’s polemic with the novel genre concerns, as I have already pointed out, the individual. Since ‘there is no individual in India’ and the community – usually understood as the family – prevails, there could be no pre-modern Indian novel. Even though the novel seems to be so central to Indian literature nowadays, it has to compromise (as Chandra implies) between an extremely popular Western genre and a

11

Chandra, ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’ with Andrew Teverson, 7.

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narrative tradition which spans centuries, but has nothing to do with the novel form as such. Symbolically, the deferral of meaning which arouses from the interplay between the oral and the written also stands for the process of cultural translation necessary as we move from one historical age to another and from one geographical space to another. Sanjay’s story is a retelling of his life, an act of fragmentary remembrance, with elements of the history of his country. Chandra treats this in terms of an ironical symbolism which challenges, through its materiality, the idea that national and ethnic identities are inborn categories. Sanjay swallows the English letters and sacrifices his tongue to Yama in order to be able to speak English. English has become, through adoption, but at the price of centuries of colonialism, one of the Indian languages. However, his Englishness is bound to remain a hyphenated one – a matter of performance – as he tells Abberline, a London policeman who does not really see his point: My name is Parasher. You are not English. I am. But I am Indian. How can you be English, if you are an Indian? It is precisely because I am an Indian that I am English.12

Sanjay emphasizes his right to Englishness and, by extension, to the English language in which Chandra’s novel is written. The status of English in Chandra’s writing is negotiated through this right, which – as in the case of all the other works here discussed – opens it up to both a pan-Indian audience and a worldwide one: Well, I’m writing for an Indian audience. Or, more precisely, an imagined circle of readers who use the English that I do. So my assumption is that they understand the language that I use, that they too have used it in the schoolyard, have twisted it in their nursery rhymes, and imagine and experience their world – at least in part – through this English. Which is not to say that the colonial history of this language is forgotten. But that we’ve paid the price, and the language is ours. Sanjay swallowed English. It has travelled through his flesh. He has been transformed by those little metal letters, and he 12

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 576.

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This appropriation of English in order to construct a variety of Englishness, the Indian one, strongly relies on the performativity of this – or any – language. As suggested in the dialogue between Sanjay and Abberline quoted above, after he swallows the letters, Sanjay physically appropriates the English language and, through this, becomes, in an important sense, English. As regards the storytelling process at this stage, though, it is significant that the exploration of the meanings of English implicit in the novel, through Sanjay’s encounter with his own Englishness, goes hand in hand with metafictional comments on the technical requirements of a story (or, rather, of a real ‘ocean’ of stories) about hybrid identities. The rhizomatic structure of the book is further complicated by the grafting of Englishness onto Indianness (a possible way to describe Sanjay’s experience) or, technically, of the English language onto the web-shaped structure of Indian storytelling. In keeping with this double meaning, Chandra organizes the narratives in the novel in an alternating pattern, as Sanjay and Abhay share the narrator role. The stories they tell are organized in five parts which recall the five-part structure of the Panchatantra: The Book of War and Ancestors, The Book of Learning and Desolation, The Book of Blood and Journeys, The Book of Revenge and Madness, The Book of the Return. These narratives are the two characters’ life stories, crossed, on a deeper mise-en-abîme level, by the life stories of other people they meet. The several layers of narrative (‘before’, ‘now’ and ‘after’) correspond to various narrative voices. This results in a continuous change of perspective. The third layer, narrated by Abhay’s parents (who are teachers, therefore are entitled to a superior claim to knowledge) is that of What Really Happened – a translation of the Sanskrit word itihasa – and associated with the Mahabharata. On the other hand, it challenges the relationship between history and fiction in terms of their claim to truth. As the embedded stories proceed, the history of British colonization in India is rewritten from the individual perspectives of the characters involved in these stories. 13

Chandra, ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’ with Andrew Teverson, 6.

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Great emphasis is placed on storytelling technique and skill. With a view to attaining his goal of saving Sanjay through luring Yama into the storytelling labyrinth, Hanuman explains how a good story works. An intricate pattern is always necessary: ‘Straightforwardness is the curse of your age, Sanjay. Be wily, be twisty, be elaborate. Forsake grim shortness and hustle.’14

According to Ganesha, a good story is one that mixes various elements in the right proportions. He describes successful storytelling in terms of a well-balanced mixture of feelings, like ingredients in an elaborate meal: Grief. Love. Love. Love for the lover, love for the mother. Love for the land. Comedy. Terror. One tremendous villain whom we must love also. All the elements properly balanced and mixed together, item after item, like a perfect meal with a dance of tastes.15

Culinary associations (a tropology used by Rushdie and Roy as well) with symbolic meanings operate in terms of rasa, the aesthetic theory of flavours exposed in the Natya Sastra. Successful aesthetic achievement within the storytelling process depends on the right combination of flavours, as in gastronomic performance. Rasa theory is the aesthetic correlative of the initiation of traditional Indian performers. Inspired from the complex Indian cooking and expressed in terms such as ‘taste’ and ‘flavour’, rasa, the aim of performance, is defined by Yarrow as ‘a psychophysiological condition in performers and receivers which marks a transformation of behavioural state’.16 Rasa creates an aesthetic bond between performers and the audience – hence Chandra’s emphasis on it in the metafictional comment on the art of storytelling quote earlier, where the audience’s pleasure is a crucial issue to be taken into account. Referring to the sixth chapter of the Natya Sastra, Schechner describes rasa as the way in which, in Indian art, different emotions can be so arranged that the feelings of the audience and of the 14

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 24. Ibid., 124. 16 Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 115. 15

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performers can be enjoyed. Of the nine rasas,17 even the horrific ones are good, as they are like pepper and hot spice that combine with other ingredients to give the taster pleasure.18 The aesthetic interchange of meaning between the storyteller and the audience – in which the storyteller, like a good cook, mixes flavours in amounts measured in accordance with the pulse of the audience in order to arouse and maintain their interest – depends crucially on the audience’s feedback, which may trigger adjustments in the storytelling process. This happens often in Red Earth: when the audience is not pleased the storyteller is asked to alter the proportion of some of the ingredients. For example, Abhay draws Sanjay’s attention to the excess of ‘martial stuff’ in the story about Benoit de Boigne purely on account of the composition of the audience: ‘These kids belong to a different world, they are a different generation. Too much more of that and they’ll go back to cricket.’19

From the many characters that emerge in the stories embedded in the frame narrative, two can be interpreted as historical projections of various stages in which Abhay finds himself on his initiation journey. One of them is Benoit de Boigne, the French adventurer attracted by unknown, exotic lands. For him, India is a version of the Orient as imagined by European literary creations, with ‘turbaned warriors and princesses in distress’,20 which has little to do with the actual place he encounters when he goes there. As a result, even though he settles in India for quite a long time, he never develops a feeling of really belonging there. His journey of discovery – and self-discovery – ultimately takes him back home, according to a circular pattern which predicts the one Abhay is engaged in. But, like Abhay, he does not feel he belongs at home any more either, as the journey has altered his identity: ‘de Boigne took his children and returned to Chambery (with 17

Sringara, Hasya, Karuna, Raudra, Vira, Bhayanaka, Bhibhatsa, Adbhuta and Santha, see http://www.indiainternational.com/nrityaaradhana/rasa.html (accessed 10 February 2005). 18 Richard Schechner, ‘One of the Few Handcrafts Left …’, dialogue with Anjum Katyal on theatre theory and practice, The Seagull Theatre Quarterly, 4 (December 1994), 13. 19 Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 46. 20 Ibid., 28.

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the slightly dazed eyes of one who has journeyed far to find a home and has returned in self-exile).’21 De Boigne is a returned traveller who no longer finds his place at home, as he has become a stranger to his compatriots and to himself. He finds himself forever wavering between his ideal of the Orient and his incapacity to understand it. Unlike Abhay, he is not given the opportunity to redeem himself through storytelling. His death finds him uttering ‘exotic blasphemies’22 and undecipherable sentences in foreign tongues. His return journey is a failed one, as he metamorphoses into someone even he cannot recognize. His attempts to perform himself, which go through various stages of experimenting with foreignness, fail to add up to a whole and remains a mere collection of unrelated masks. The other character that could be interpreted as a projection of Abhay’s own crisis of displacement in his pattern of estrangement and return is George Thomas. Through the first-person narrative we get a much closer and more self-oriented perspective on his story than on de Boigne’s. George Thomas is also animated by a strong desire to travel to faraway lands. Travelling is to him the only way to reach selffulfilment: ‘always I felt a little empty, a little absent, as if something was missing; always I thought of places I could go where everything would be new’; ‘I had crossed oceans to escape the strangling constriction of home to find a shining fiction called Adventure.’23 He travels as a sailor to various countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. Of all these countries, India impresses him the most and he decides to stay. Unlike de Boigne, who remains lonely and isolated, Thomas engages in relationships with people and shows interest in learning from his encounters with varieties of otherness. Such an encounter is the one with Guha, an old solitary tribesman covered in animal skins. Although they do not share a common language, the two men belonging to different cultures learn to interact in a way that proves enriching to both. This is an extreme form of experiencing otherness and having to come to terms with it through performing it, even becoming it:

21

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44. 23 Ibid., 88 and 94-95. 22

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I dressed like Guha, even wearing feathers and stones. I learned some of his language, the words for leaves, insects, fruits and animals, for fear and danger, and we spoke to each other in fits and starts. Sometimes, in camp, at the end of the day, he would sing, raising his eyes towards the red glow between the trees; I understood some words, grasped some small fragments of what he offered to the sky, but even if I had understood nothing there would have been no mistaking the wonder in his voice, the awe and the good humour. In return, I sang him songs I remembered from my childhood.24

This experiment of becoming the Other prefigures Sanjay’s struggle to become English. However, unlike Sanjay, who remains stuck in his impossible struggle to identify with what he is not and is punished for his excessive desire by being reborn in an inferior state, George Thomas maintains his freedom. He does not grow to belong in India any more than de Boigne does. But, unlike de Boigne, whose main trajectory is one of back and forth movement between a motherland and an otherland – literal estrangement and return – Thomas never stays in one place for too long. He does not develop any stable relationships to either places or people. In identifying himself as Indian and never going back home, he makes a choice similar to de Boigne’s. But, unlike the latter, Thomas never returns home, but assumes his acquired otherness as a valid part of his hybrid self. In this, he also assumes the fact that there is no actual return home and, consequently, there is no home other than the one he carries within himself. We could argue that Thomas is thus more successful than de Boigne in developing a nomadic mindset. Similarly, as he changes through storytelling, Abhay learns to detach himself from the bondage of emotions that in the past had led him to act on impulse – a detachment of which Sanjay had not proved capable in his previous life. Abhay assumes Sanjay’s experience and carries on the constructive process of storytelling after Sanjay’s death. Sanjay’s story may be read as a glimpse of India’s colonial past, as his previous life ended in 1889. His destiny is strangely related to the British, as the legend of his birth reveals. This reminds us of the personal biography/national history allegory. To a great extent, 24

Ibid., 94.

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Sanjay’s and his brother’s stories are linking elements between other stories, ensuring the continuity of the storytelling process, as well as the continuity of story and history. It is here that the novel’s complicated narrative web makes room for Chandra’s real life source of inspiration – the life of Colonel James ‘Sikander’ Skinner. The legendary nineteenth-century half-Indian, half-British soldier is, as Chandra acknowledges, the starting-point for his thorough narrative meditation on hybrid identities. The different realities of history – through Skinner – and myth – through Yama, Ganesha and Hanuman and also through the references to the Mahabharata – are brought together in a storytelling continuum that makes no difference between them in terms of their truth value. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain the novel form is subject to a continuous process of hybridization and metamorphosis as elements taken over from other narrative forms are brought into the genre. The book opens itself to alternative narrative forms and techniques – of which the most visible are the conventions of oral storytelling – and thus escapes the norms associated with classic realist fiction, escaping into digression in tune with the oral Indian storytelling tradition. There is however a formal ending to the plot. Despite all the efforts made by himself and by various other characters, Sanjay still dies. Saira (the little girl whose interest continuously assesses the quality of the storytelling, acting as the ideal implied listener), on the verge of dying herself, is the only one who can be saved by the power of storytelling and the reviving force of her innocence. This ending, although it seems to round the story up to where it started – in the impending threat of death which fulfils itself – is, however, an open one. Chandra’s resistance to concluding the plot the way a novel would projects it into the traditional Indian continuum of never-ending mythical stories. Thus the two forms of narrative that Chandra uses are challenged through reciprocal self-mirroring, which corresponds to a wider exploration of ways in which the novel form can be opened up to respond to contemporary issues such as displacement and nomadism. As I shall argue in my next section, performance and performativity become useful tools in an analysis of narrative technique in adaptations of Indian mythical and storytelling material to the contemporary novel form.

CHAPTER ELEVEN PERFORMANCE, PERFORMATIVITY AND NOMADISM IN VIKRAM CHANDRA’S RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN

Performance and performativity open up linguistic possibilities to practice a dynamic, nomadic textuality in which contemporary novels such as the ones discussed in this study are refashioned through the use of traditional Indian storytelling themes and techniques. I argued in my section on narrative that, of the novels discussed, Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain comes closest to being a nomadic text on both the thematic level and the textual one. Here I will examine the ways in which performance and performativity contribute to the nomadic character of the novel. To Chandra, deterritorialized definitions of identity are not symptomatic of a lifestyle characteristic of the new millennium (as they are for Braidotti), but have always existed. Chandra rejects the idea that one’s identity can be connected to a certain place identified as the homeland, since you cannot relate to places any ... more or less than you ever could. I think we have this strange idea that the premodern world was in a state of stability and unchanging religions .… I’m so sceptical about this. Every little piece of history I know within my own family and everything that I read, every piece of archaeology suggests the exact opposite. They’ve just recently excavated Roman settlements on the coasts of India .… So what are we talking about actually? I mean, in the last two or three hundred years within every part of India people have kept shifting from one place to another. You can see it in the people: you go to the South and you see certain people and certain castes and they very plainly tell you that they have come from another part and they bring with them changes and they carry these changes all over the globe. And going back even into prehistory, I think this sort of moving and shifting of

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Faithful to this belief in the nomadic condition of humanity at all times, Chandra applies it to the modern condition of the exile, as a solution to the crisis of displacement. The first example he provides is that of his own life, which he divides between the United States and India, as Abhay does, at least mentally, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Further, Chandra conceives of storytelling as a reflection of this nomadic condition of humanity in ways that seem strikingly modern, yet, he argues, have always been there in the Indian tradition. Red Earth and Pouring Rain represents a successful example of this kind of storytelling: it is a written work that actually celebrates the extraordinary richness and communicative force of oral transmission through stories that travel in time and space with the people who tell them. As the present moment of performance keeps reassessing the significance of the story that has just been told and, consequently, of the storytelling process as a whole, the characters grow through the stories they tell. The cyclical form of the novel mirrors the presence of the samsara pattern of estrangement and return, death and rebirth (before – now – then – after). As such, storytelling becomes the mechanism that governs the embodiment of the self. The self cannot be imagined outside the story that constitutes it, the narrative discourse in which it performs itself. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain, the trajectories followed by Abhay and Sanjay – which develop in space for the former and in time for the latter – reflect each other through the stories they tell. Thus, even though Sanjay, having once again trespassed the law of dharma, falls prey to Yama, the god of death, Abhay’s consciousness matures, so that, at the end, he can ensure the continuity of the storytelling by himself. Within its frame narrative modelled after the generative model of the foundation epics, the balanced five-part structure reminiscent of the Panchatantra and the Arabian Nights-like race for survival through storytelling, Red Earth and Pouring Rain directly problematizes, thematically and structurally, the performance of 1

Chandra, ‘“Virtual Realities on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, 10.

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estrangement from one’s homeland and return to it. The main characters – both in the frame narrative (Sanjay and Abhay) and in the stories-within-the-story (mainly George Thomas and Benoit de Boigne) – are engaged in long journeys of discovery and rediscovery. As they go through these journeys, each of them in search of some kind of knowledge, the most important things they learn are about themselves. These spiral journeys are nomadic trajectories which are reflected by a nomadic textuality. I shall argue that whilst the formation of a nomadic mindset depends on performance, the nomadic text in its turn is the product of Chandra’s performative use of language. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain there are many kinds of performance. Performances of myth are central and contribute to both character delineation and to the spelling out of the philosophical principles underlying the novel. The Hindu Gods Yama, Hanuman and Ganesha play crucial parts in the development of the plot as they mix with the novel’s contemporary characters and act and talk in ways that are similar to theirs. They are endowed with human psychologies and even with a sense of humour that makes them easily interact with the human characters. In this interaction, mythical concepts and philosophical principles are discussed in a conversational manner and enacted in the events that are part of the plot. Examples of this are Yama’s lecturing Sanjay on the meaning of karma and dharma, the ‘mechanical laws sewn into the great fabric of the cosmos’2 or their discussion of the law of samsara and on the importance of subjective perspective in the projection of the world as maya (‘The world is the world’, Yama says to Sanjay. ‘It is you that makes the horror’3). There are characters in the novel that are positioned half-way between the poles of the divine and the human. Some of them are guru figures, such as the woman on whom Sandeep waits, who debates on the meaning of maya as supreme knowledge of life and the universe.4 The meaning of her sayings is further explored in terms which are made relevant to modern times (‘I felt as if I were in a film’5). Another guru figure is the sadhu who, untroubled by any human fears, teaches 2

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 14. Ibid., 579 4 Ibid., 27. 5 Ibid., 57. 3

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Alexander the Great a lesson in the things that really matter in life.6 Similar wisdom is granted to female characters who, like children – by virtue of the same logic of storytelling as a world-shaping force7 – seem to possess a kind of knowledge to which male characters do not have access. This is suggested by Janvi in the laddoo episode – an instance of performative magic – or by the Witch of Sardhana when she chooses her husband. Both make choices which cross immediate life limitations (for instance in their choice of partners), informed by a deeper understanding of the world, their access to a superior level of knowledge. Characters are intimately informed by the concept of dharma (moral law), which implies one’s obligation to do one’s duty as required by one’s current position in the hierarchy of beings according to the current incarnation. An anecdote from Chandra’s research for his third book (Sacred Games, 2006) illustrates the way in which, as a result of this, the whole world becomes a huge act of performance: In relation to gangsters and … performance, I was going to say that during this research I met this young assassin in Bombay who would be hired to kill for money. And he was an interesting fellow, very intelligent and self-reflective, philosophical in a sense .… So I asked him, ‘How do you reconcile your ethical concerns with what your job is, you know? I mean, there’s this guy and you have nothing against him, you don’t hate him or anything, he’s never given you a problem, you hardly even know his name, somebody pays you money and you go and kill him. How is that justified?’ And he gave me a very clever answer, he said, ‘You know, everything’s written down by the man upstairs, God, and my part in it is written, and I just play out my part’. And that’s very clever, because it sort of plays on what Arjuna and Krishna discuss in the Gita, this idea of performativity, that we as human beings are part of this much larger play, this lila, and our job in a sense is to fulfil and engage in the parts that we’re given to perform. This is very slippery. But I think in a larger sense, getting away from that person in particular, I think we should learn that, within an epic universe, the self itself is a kind of performance .… And also your sense of who you are is constituted in a way by being observed by the community that you’re playing to, that is, your 6

Ibid., 247-252. See Girish Karnad on women’s role in transmitting stories as a way of preserving continuity in the family (Karnad’s Introduction to Three Plays, 16).

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audience. That’s why in both western epic and Indian epic the heroes are so damaged when somebody imputes dishonour to them, because it’s not something that is external, that’s stuck to you. If they damage the story that you are in the eyes of the community at large, it’s a damage to your self.8

As the world is lila, the play of gods, we are bound to play our part as well as we can, as Arjuna does in the Bhagavad-Gita, when Krishna sends him to wage war against his kin. Moral dilemmas are a question of doing one’s duty well, of abiding by the law of dharma. It is this law that Sanjay – reincarnated as a monkey for having desired to accomplish more than he could rightfully have access to – trespasses not once, but twice. Excess – like hubris in ancient Greek tragedy – turns against humans as the gods’ punishment for having risen against them. Abhay, who becomes Sanjay’s alter-ego though storytelling, suffers retribution for his own hubris (shooting the white monkey) and is saved through the stories he tells. In a sense, we can read their relationship as a metaphor of the transformation from the migrant condition into the nomadic one, constructed around the myth of samsara. Whilst Sanjay is bound to the ‘contours of his self’ as determined by embodiment in one state of being or another, Abhay is his deterritorialized self having got one stage further. The concept of lila, the play of becoming, is explored in a concretely playful way in the game of cricket. Both children and adults play cricket – another kind of performance – and they give similar importance to the game. In the last chapter of the novel, entitled ‘The Game of Cricket’, cricket becomes an allegory of the world as the gods’ play with everything, including people’s ways and destinies.9 As he retells the story of that particular episode in his life – his leaving America, urged by a strong need to go home, followed by a failed attempt to integrate Amanda in his background – Abhay sees the pattern of his life more clearly. Having gone through the initiation through storytelling that has formed the content of the whole novel, he spells out to himself the logic of his own dharma, including the necessity of his act of shooting the monkey, which is, like everything, part of the bigger picture: ‘In my lap I had a rifle, and I worked its bolt 8 9

Ibid., 14-15. Ibid., 585-613.

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back and forth. The metal was good and smooth to touch. Snick10 CLACK. I sat and waited for the monkey. I knew he would come.’ Chandra is greatly interested in dharma as ‘an all-encompassing ideology which embraces both ritual and moral behaviour, whose neglect would have bad social and personal consequences’.11 What is fascinating about dharma is the sometimes anti-moral turn that it implies on the level of the act, karman. Doing one’s duty may require making oneself guilty of deeds which appear immediately wrong, but have positive outcomes in the great scenario of the universe. This is what happens in the Bhagavad-Gita, where Arjuna is urged by Krishna to wage war against his kin in the name of his higher moral duty.12 Chandra sees the work of dharma in a much more immediate sense, as justifying acts which may or may not coincide with societal legislation. This is the case of the Bombay gangster who believed his part was written down in God’s great script and he only had to play it out. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Abhay’s criminal act of shooting the white monkey is the perlocutionary trigger of the whole narrative web of which the novel is made. Without it, the novel would have been entirely different or non-existent. As regards character development, this act – whose necessity is acknowledged at the end of the chapter entitled ‘A Game of Cricket’ – initiates Abhay’s initiation process as he fully reintegrates in India and takes over the task of keeping the story going. Children’s games are the most serious endeavour, as one may expect in a world which functions by the logic of storytelling. Children, led by Saira, are the judges of the storytelling process on which Sanjay’s life depends. Moreover, children’s serious playfulness appears in the novel as a source of knowledge as it reflects the world as lila, the play of gods. As in Roy’s The God of Small Things, children are endowed with a superior wisdom unspoiled by adult experience, which is closer to the gods’ wisdom. Hence they can be trusted with an objectivity concerning decision-making which the grown-ups lack. This authority is crucial in a world informed by storytelling, which belongs to children par excellence.

10

Ibid., 613. Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism, 52-53. 12 See my earlier discussion of Brook’s Mahabharata in Chapter Three. 11

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The spiral structure of the novel, in which stories grow out of the main support provided by the frame narrative, reflects the samsara pattern of human life as a series of reincarnations, each of them depending on the previous life’s karma. Sanjay’s evolution, his wishes and desires, his urge to move forward obeys a law of necessity which binds him, but which is dictated from outside the boundaries of human existence. An example of this is his need to define himself in relation to England, to measure up to the standard of Englishness even at the cost of losing his mother-tongue, and, in the end, even his life. This need is identified by Yama – his enemy, but also a kind of guru figure who assesses his acts for him for his benefit, as well as in the name of a universal justice – as a binding, repetitive urge to ‘finish his business’ which governs Sanjay’s life, turning him into a nomad both in space and across generations. It is worth noticing how in the respective exchange of cues official chronological history (which in colonial India identifies with the British rule) intermingles with a superior sense of destiny that governs everything: But Yama walked beside him, lightly and easily, spinning the stick in a shining circle, placing his feet delicately. ‘Really. You’re the one who has unfinished business.’ Sanjay stopped and groped about for some way to puncture Yama’s huge self-satisfaction, and finally flung a feeble dart: Why are you dressed like a clown? ‘Why, don’t you know? The whole map is red now. Everything is red. Victoria will declare herself Empress of India. Everyone is an Englishman now. Including you, but you’ve been something like that for some time. And some of them have been something like you. Old chap. The stick whistled through the air and Sanjay saw the curving black motion of Sarthey’s belt in the moonlight, and then the sharp crack, and suddenly every joint in his body seemed to ache. ‘Yes’, said Yama softly. ‘It seems there’s somebody else alive still. A friend of yours.’ London, said Sanjay. London. It’s not over yet. I have to go to London.

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Performance and Performativity Yama nodded and, before he disappeared into the heat shimmering over the ground, whispered: ‘Sanjay, you’ve been going to London all your life.’13

Considering Chandra’s lack of belief in the importance of places, Sanjay’s obsessive, repetitive urge to go to London can be identified as his failure to own his nomadic condition. He aspires to become what he is not – that is, an Englishman – and in that he forgets that his greatest strength is his nomadic capacity to transcend such identity boundaries. Sanjay’s self-exploration is an investigation of the history of his time, but also of this unwritten mythological pattern which governs it. He has the power to see the connections between the two through his visionary gift, a fictional trick which reminds us of Saleem’s gift of entering people’s heads and of double-vision. In the passage just quoted, the detective plot connected to Sarthey is a projection of Sanjay’s more complex act of investigation into the meanings of the world, but also a metaphor of the shock of history, represented by the British rule. For Chandra, history and myth are bound to co-operate in the description of events in their ‘cause and effect evolution’, since it all comes down to a matter of perspective, to darshan: I wouldn’t argue against history at all, I wouldn’t deny that sort of temporality, of cause and effect evolution. I guess to me it’s related to darshan – you know darshan, ‘to view’? It has at least two meanings: one is that of philosophical perspective or way of being, and it can also mean the sight of a god or a guru, who would travel for a long time, and the problem is to get the darshan off a certain basis. But I’m using it in the first sense, the idea that any philosophical system presents you with, presumably, an internally coherent way of seeing an aspect of reality, which is necessarily incomplete. Whichever angle you stand at will leave out all the other angles. So I think that, for me, historical temporality and mythical time exist in parallel levels perhaps? And I’m very sceptical that even within the modern times of the universe in which mankind lives now, when time is completely elastic and it stretches and bends and curves, to pretend that I can perceive it in a certain sense and only that way, even within its own sort of darshan, would be quite an incomplete way of thinking about 13

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 546.

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time. I think both ends are useful. I’m thinking about the nature of cause and effect, or sequence or pattern, the sort of acute psychological observation, the Marxist interpretation of supply and demand and poverty and power. Probably things are completely true in their own place, but so is the mythological view of the universe.14

Here Chandra brings one more proof of the relevance of traditional Indian beliefs to an understanding of the modern world. Chandra deliberately chooses detective plots for many of his stories. This may be because the detective formula is not only about investigation, about enquiring into the significance of facts, but it also functions in terms of a teleological cause-effect pattern. This contrast varies the perspective and leads to sharp conclusions. Chandra’s interest in the exploration of the connections between world-informing mythological or philosophical principles and the logic of the world in/as storytelling can also be interpreted as an interest in psychology. Andrew Teverson characterizes the stories – which ‘have the flavour of psychoanalytical case studies’ – in the collection Love and Longing in Bombay as dedicated to an attempt to understand, ‘to struggle to comprehend a character and his motives’.15 But in the light of Chandra’s parallel view of events as occurring in mythology and history, there is little difference between psychoanalytical motivation and mythological motivation. For him, stories represent experimental ways of testing out the validity of concepts, by watching them at work in people’s lives. Love and Longing in Bombay does this much more explicitly that Red Earth and Pouring Rain, in that each story is named after and explores narratively one Hindu philosophical concept (‘Dharma’, ‘Shakti’, ‘Kama’, ‘Artha’, ‘Shanti’). Red Earth and Pouring Rain, however – through its refusal of closure and projection of the storytelling process into an endless continuum to which Abhay commits – is a more direct, practical exploration of the selfregenerating power of storytelling as transcendence of contingent limitations towards a level of mythical understanding. A further, more subtle level of performance is that of the text of the novel itself. A comparison between Red Earth and Pouring Rain and 14

Chandra, ‘“Virtual Realities on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru’, 18-19. 15 Teverson, ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’ with Andrew Teverson, 6.

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Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories seems appropriate as they are both contemporary reinterpretations of the Indian tradition of oral storytelling. Both are collections of stories performed within frame narratives, which involve the interaction in praesentia between an oral narrator and an audience who can participate in the storytelling process. As opposed to Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, however, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain the fact of having set the storytelling process back in motion after the crisis caused by the explosion close to the end does not automatically imply a happy ending or, indeed, any ending at all. The novel’s conclusion hesitates between a tragic acknowledgement of the inevitable repetition of samsara (through Sanjay’s death) and Abhay’s acceptance of his forever liminal positioning between his two countries, India and America, and of the fact that, as his mixed stories also suggest, he will always be unable to choose between them. As he assumes this rootless, nomadic liminality, Abhay also takes over the main storyteller role and the novel becomes his personal first-person singular narrative. Thus he is able to crystallize the many stories into one metaphorical metafictional plot, which is reminiscent of the central idea of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. This plot is about the conflict between abusive power-exertion and the multiple conflicting strands of reality which storytelling tries to convey: When I had finished telling my story of returning from foreign lands, the noise was rising outside. There were shouts and calls, loud arguments, the frightening roar of crowds, of conflict. Since then I have tried to find out what the fight was about, and I have discovered that there were dozens of factions, a hundred ideologies, all struggling with each other, there were politics old and deep, alliances and betrayals, defeats and triumphs, revenge and friendship, the old story, you’ve heard it before, but there was one new thing, one new idea that overwhelmed everything else, and this was simply that there should be only one idea, one voice, one thing, one, one, one.

This can be read as a condensed metaphorical account of the multiplicity of storytelling set against the oppressive dictatorship of ‘one’ monolithic voice which tries to silence all the others. In the following scene – in which Saira, the main listener figure in the novel,

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is wounded by an unidentifiable ‘black point, a singularity, a bomb’16 when she goes outside to try to stop the fight – the text performs this deadly silencing principle of abusive power as an actual scene of physical violence. The text becomes multiple, dynamic, nomadic, as suggested once again in the final sentence of the novel, therefore it resists the attempt of any controlling power to murder the listener and therefore the story: ‘Then we will sit in circles and circles, saying, bless us, Ganesha; be with us, friend Hanuman; Yama, you old fraud, you can listen if you want; and saying this we will start all over again.’17 As storytelling cannot exist without an audience, saving the listener’s life depends on keeping the story going – therefore, on the previously stated golden rule that the story should be good enough to keep the audience engaged. The ending of the novel reminds us of Iser’s theory of reading as performance: meaning-production in a narrative greatly depends on the existence of an audience who fills in gaps of meaning in the text. If Iser discusses mainly written texts, Chandra engages in a complex game, moving between the written dimension and the oral one, showing that the same is true of both: we (Chandra’s readership) read about the storytelling dialogue between Sanjay and Abhay on the one hand and their audience of story-avid children on the other. Yet Sanjay types – because he cannot speak – and his written text is read out by Abhay’s parents, Ashok and Mrinalini. Meaning is deferred and re-created as it passes from the written form to the oral and various intermediate levels of interpretation contribute to the storytelling process. The ritual circularity of the process of spiral return through storytelling which has changed both the storyteller and the audience is stressed in the above-quoted fragment by the repetition of the word ‘circles’. This implicitly stated non-linearity of the novel’s plot signals a shift from an initiation journey as the one traced in Rushdie’s Haroun to a nomadic condition in terms of which the most important thing is for the story not to reach an end. It is no longer important to get from one point to another along a line that marks an evolution, but to be engaged in ongoing movement along a trajectory. Thus, Abhay’s 16 17

Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 615. Ibid., 617.

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return home does not mark the end of his story/life (as it happens with Saleem in Midnight’s Children, Saladin in The Satanic Verses or Ammu and Rahel in The God of Small Things). It is, on the contrary, a new beginning. The above-quoted ending is a perlocutionary act with ritual meanings. Like the word ‘Listen!’ which summons the audience’s attention and marks the beginning of every story within the frame narrative, the novel’s ending prolongs the act of storytelling beyond the conventional boundaries of the book and acknowledges the fact that what keeps the world going is endless storytelling. With hindsight, we no longer read the novel as the story of Sanjay and Abhay’s lives (if we were ever tempted to read it this way), but rather as a story about their stories, a narrative performance of neverending storytelling. As in Rushdie’s Haroun (which I have interpreted as a redemptive rewriting of the Satanic Verses affair through translation into the innocent language of childhood), stories in Red Earth and Pouring Rain mediate the passage from death back to life. But the fact that the ending of Chandra’s novel is left open and, furthermore, new directions are opened in which stories can develop shifts the emphasis from the result of the storytelling (the state of grace at the end of Haroun) onto the process – the storytelling journey – itself. At a point when nothing is certain, the only thing that matters is to ensure the possibility of new beginnings. As I showed in Part Two, Red Earth and Pouring Rain is made of stories that grow rhizomatically from the frame narrative. This frame narrative – whose present-moment order is periodically reinstated in the ‘… now …’ episodes in which both the narrators and their audiences exist – is a mere pretext for all these stories, which complicate its linearity into a whole network as they ‘give birth to other stories’.18 As shown above, Braidotti identifies this feature as a characteristic of nomadic textuality. This rhizomatic trajectory is dependent on the ongoing oral transmission of stories, importantly related to the performativity of the storytelling act. Yarrow shows that it is in this orality that we must seek the explanation for the indestructible connection between narrative and performance in Indian tradition, as well as in the interdependence of orality and the written text: 18

Ibid., 11.

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Narrative demonstrates by its inevitable drive towards teleology our perpetual desire to make sense, and we ‘read’ everything that happens on stage with a similar intention. Additionally in the Indian context, sound (vac) is understood as the first expression of the impetus to form. Speech emerges from sound, and, in contrast to Derrida and his followers, is perceived as the primary form of language rather than what is written down.

Yarrow sees in the orality of Indian tradition a particular supplement of meaning, strengthened by the fact that scriptural texts of the authority of the Vedas are transmitted both in written form and orally. Oral transmission means that they are ‘always essentially performed’, therefore they ‘aim to make use of the physical effects of sound and rhythm on the receivers’. 19 Whilst the overlap of reality and storytelling is a postmodern cliché which happily coincides with traditional Indian storytelling, Chandra’s emphasis is on the performative, hence reality-creating aspect of the storytelling dialogue. Red Earth and Pouring Rain, as a whole, can be read as a huge metafictional experiment in which we see the storytelling continuum changing as a result of the perlocutionary action of different factors. Thus, for instance, in the second ‘… now …’ episode, in which the storytelling contract is re-negotiated,20 three such factors are at work. The first of them is Abhay’s critical comment that the ‘martial’ story of Benoit de Boigne’s life which Sanjay has just told is not a children’s story. This warning that the expectations of the audience have not been met causes a change in the choice of subject matter, which becomes more entertainingly adventurous from this point on. Second, as it becomes apparent that Sanjay’s wound will prevent him from continuing the storytelling by himself, Hanuman – the protector of poets – suggests that a helper should step into the process. Hence, the linearity of the story started off by Sanjay spreads out into a bunch of narratives told by several storytellers: Sanjay, Abhay, Ashok and Mrinalini. The latter two, through being teachers, acquire a kind of totalizing guru function in that they sum up the philosophical meaning of the events narrated in

19 20

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 35. Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, 46-50.

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the three sections entitled ‘What Really Happened’.21 But Sanjay and Abhay, the victim and the former aggressor who come to share the storytelling act, develop a very strong bond, in which both the stories and the storytellers mirror and complete each other. As Sanjay dies in the end, he calls Abhay ‘Brother’.22 He passes the Scheherazade-like mission of telling stories for survival (this time to save Saira, the embodiment of the ideal audience) onto him and thus the novel ends openly, on an optimistic note, as the life-giving storytelling goes on. The perlocutionary trigger of Abhay’s first involvement in the storytelling process shows how the performativity of language operates. It is actually one word, ‘happy’, which comes as a revelation to Abhay in the middle of a disorderly flow of questions about America meant to challenge him to tell a story: Abhay shrugged, a look of confusion on his face. ‘Were you happy there?’ the younger boy said. ‘What?’ ‘Happy.’ Abhay’s face was blank, as if it had been wiped clean of sorrow, or joy. Then Saira came in, saw the two boys, collared them and had the both of them out of the door in a moment. The little one called decisively through the doorway, even as it closed: ‘You were happy there.’ Abhay looked after him. ‘Happy?’ he said. Then he began to type.23

The story which Abhay begins to type is called ‘A thin kind of happiness’24 and, as ‘ordered’ by his audience, it is an enactment of happiness seen from a certain perspective. Yet maybe the most important magic word whose perlocutionary force affects the whole novel, is ‘Listen’ – a kind of ‘Open Sesame’, which leads the audience from the realm of one story into another, ensuring the continuity of the storytelling process. One of the reasons why oral transmission is deemed better than the written word is that it allows the possibility of constant 21

Ibid., 120-22, 299-301, 511. Ibid., 616. 23 Ibid., 50. 24 Ibid., 51-70. 22

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transformation. As Sanjay, in his present incarnation as a monkey, cannot speak, someone (Mrinalini, the teacher, hence the guide, the helper) must read what he types for the audience to fully participate in the storytelling act. Language becomes performative in storytelling. It creates the alternative reality of storytelling through the oral impact it has on its audience. Through an analysis of performance and performativity in fiction, I have argued that the authors of the novels considered explore ways of imagining the self outside geographical and political restrictions created by binary centre-margin oppositions. The model of the nomad, engaged on a geographical and textual trajectory rather than trying to reach various points on it, seems to provide a version of the self that transcends such spatial, but also conceptual limitations. Thus, nomadic consciousness is projected in a symbolic space of transcendence constructed on the basis of a reconsideration of myth whose meanings are redefined within a contemporary frame of reference.

CONCLUSION

The death toll is still rising in the former principality of ——— after last night’s unexpected, drought-breaking downpour that caused widespread flooding in the area. It is feared that the former prince, Mr. A. Maharaj, and his sister, a celebrated classical dancer, are among the dead. However, an American woman, Mr. Maharaj’s fiancée, is confirmed as being among the survivors. Now she is flying home, and the ocean is below her. The universe has resumed its familiar shape. But her own shape has changed. Mr. Maharaj’s child will be born in America. She caresses her swelling womb. Increasing, she is both fire and rain.1

Rushdie concludes ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ by proposing metamorphosis – a change in the shape of the heroine’s body – and flight as a recipe for survival in conditions of either drought or flooding. If we read this ending allegorically and in the light of the present study, metamorphosis and flight involve a celebration of nomadism as an antidote against barren or conflictual states of cultural existence. Cultures can also metamorphose, like people, by allowing nomadism to inhabit texts in various ways. Mr Maharaj’s American fiancée’s return to her country is not another plea for America as a land of all opportunities, it is not a choice of better boundaries, of one country over another, but an escape from boundaries. As she flies over the ocean – and we know that she has not reached the end of her journey by the time the story ends – she transcends the various forms of earthly determinism in a symbolical, mythical space. She can see ‘the universe’, which ‘has resumed its familiar shape’, in a wider perspective than ever before. The world has not changed, but new ways of interpreting it have been discovered. If the ocean she is flying over is the infinite ocean of the streams of stories, her story contains them all, as she is ‘both fire and rain’. We can read the ending of ‘The 1

Rushdie, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, 127.

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Firebird’s Nest’ as an allegory of the metamorphosis of Indian fiction in English into a narrative discourse that responds to the novel form through its use of performance and performativity. It also capitalizes on storytelling as an ongoing process which allows for perpetual redefinitions of nomadic selfhood. My consideration of two sets of primary texts – intercultural performance drawing on Indian myth (Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and Girish Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’) and contemporary Indian fiction in English (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain) – demonstrates the transformations that mythic topics, motifs and character roles undergo in both cases. I have tried to show that there is a dialogue between performance and narrative forms in contemporary Indian writing that loosens the boundaries of spaces, times and genres in order to allow for freer, less deterministic figurations of the self. Indian fiction in English has a tradition in its own right and has now long been dissociated from interpretations related to the former centre of the empire and placed under the big umbrella of postcolonial literatures. Yet the fact of writing in English involves targeting a worldwide audience apart from the Indian one, a fact which is emphasized by the diasporic in-betweenness of the authors discussed. Even though Roy is not technically an NRI, but an Indian-based writer, she, like Chandra, belongs to the generation of young cosmopolitan Indian authors which the anniversary issue of The New Yorker places – with clear marketing intentions – around the personality of Rushdie’s heavily constructed towering father-figure. In fact, this writing, starting with Rushdie himself, moves away from reductive positionings within easily definable marketable categories, modelled around a centre/margin dichotomy which has by now lost its relevance in the postcolonial world. More recent critical approaches to Indian writing such as Peter Morey and Alex Tickell’s collection Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism detect an increasing anti-essentialist and anti-communalist focus that has sometimes been accused of losing the national imaginary from sight.2 Yet it is precisely in this departure 2

Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism, eds Peter Morey and Alex Tickell, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. The collection features essays by

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from essentialist categories such as nationalism that the strength of this new writing lies. A similar view was expressed by Vikram Chandra in an article written in response to the ‘cult of authenticity’ promoted by mainstream Indian critics such as Meenakshi Mukherjee, whom he calls ‘India’s cultural commissars’. Chandra pleads for the Indian writer’s freedom of inspiration as opposed to an assumed commitment to ‘authenticity’ and ‘Indianness’.3 This is the position he practises in his fiction, as do Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, despite the stereotypical views that have sometimes dominated the critical reception of their works. In my attempt to describe this writing as performative and nomadic I have made an attempt at conceptualizing this move away from exclusive totalizing discourses in favour of more flexible representations. A discussion of the history and current status of the novel genre has shown that contemporary Indian fiction in English offers various understandings of ‘reality’ that coincide with the recent developments of the genre, yet, as Chandra points out on a number of occasions, have always been present in Indian storytelling. These coincidental techniques (such as the active role of the audience involved in a performative dialogue with the storyteller, the disregard of linear chronology and the subjective approach to reality) place such writing in a liminal position between general developments in the ‘Western’ novel and an Indian-specific practice of storytelling and performance. There are metafictional and metatheatrical comments in the novels which highlight the technical aspects of the recycling of Indian traditions: Rushdie in Midnight’s Children and Chandra in Red Earth and Pouring Rain dramatize the oral storytelling dialogue, whilst Roy’s Kathakali performance in the middle of The God of Small Things addresses contemporary versions of this particular theatrical tradition of Kerala, which itself is rhizomatically derived from classical Hindu narrative discourse. Performance operates like digression in traditional storytelling (it cuts into the flow of events in

Peter Morey, Alex Tickell, Anshuman Mondal, Shirley Chew, Amina Yaqin, Ashok Bery, Elleke Boehmer and Sujala Singh. 3 Vikram Chandra, ‘The Cult of Authenticity: India’s Cultural Commissars Worship “Indianness” instead of Art’, Boston Review, February/March 2000: http://www. bostonreview.net/BR25.1/chandra.html (accessed 20 November 2006).

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order to make comments) and thus bridges the temporal and discursive gap between tradition and the contemporary audiences. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses search for ways to cross the boundaries which separate conflicting cultural spaces. However in these two novels these spaces remain separate and any attempt to unite them – Saleem’s hybrid self, the outcome of having had to ‘swallow a world’ and Gibreel’s destructive love for Allie, his ‘Other’ – ends in death. Whilst both novels are experiments in joining storytelling and performance, Midnight’s Children focuses on storytelling, in which the process of meaningproduction is negotiated between a narrator and a listener, The Satanic Verses emphasizes performance and performativity as reality-creators. Haroun and the Sea of Stories unites the two perspectives in the straightforward image of the oral storyteller whose allegorical loss of ‘the gift of the gab’ signals a crisis of content that can only be solved through revitalizing the story. Storytelling as a form of survival – a recycling of the Arabian Nights motif – is the object of Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, where it becomes a textual principle that expresses fluidity and movement. Roy’s Indian performance of a form of writing that escapes patriarchal linear rational discourse comes close to the French écriture feminine, yet is specifically Indian through the use of Malayalam words and structures which inform the children’s language. Red Earth and Pouring Rain and The God of Small Things both employ a renewed understanding of myth as a space of consciousness where limitations are transcended, as opposed to mere cultural constructs invested with cultural authority. They make use of the fluidity and liminality of mythical thinking and develop a texuality that, in different ways, escapes linear rational discourses associated with various forms of canonical authority. In Roy’s novel the bondage of social convention has to be transcended through a different, superior form of mythical knowledge, which Roy imagines through the force of transgressive love. In Chandra’s text we can read the rigid determinism of Sanjay’s fate as a symbolic representation of social forces related to colonialism and exile, whose oppressive effects are similar to the ones at work in Roy’s novel. The law of samsara, enforced by Yama, the god of death, is, despite its transcendent transgenerational nature, as binding in the story as the laws which inform

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the society. Sanjay, seconded by Abhay, fights this rigid determinism by a creative reformulation of myth through storytelling. Thus, like The God of Small Things, Red Earth and Pouring Rain uses the liminality and dynamism of mythical thinking to create a space of consciousness where textual meaning is freed from determinations of social rule, as well as from those of space and time. The positioning of the authors discussed between a specific Indian background and a worldwide context which is implicitly addressed through their use of the English language has justified the use of theoretical concepts related to myth, performance and performativity, as well as storytelling and the novel form. These concepts come on the one hand from a Western or global space and on the other from the more specific Indian background. This double, borderline positioning is an important feature of contemporary Indian writing in English and, even more, of the authors addressed, who particularly focus on contemporary rewritings of mythical narratives. Through the use of performance and performativity, which are central categories in contemporary Indian fiction in English, a revived traditional Indian mythic poetics has been reread as a poetics of nomadic textuality which reflects an interest in defining a nomadic existential condition. One significant detail has emerged in the analysis of individual works: the relevance of a feminine dimension in this discourse that pleads for the transcendence of rigid categories of thinking. Female characters play crucial parts in the works discussed. In Peter Brook’s reinterpretation of the Mahabharata Draupadi, the Pandavas’ wife, is the guarantor of their strength and unity. In Karnad’s plays, Rani, Padmini and Nittilai are independent characters with complex psychologies, who go through difficult experiences and who, within the context of the reinterpretation of myth which the ‘theatre of roots’ provides, think in ways that are very close to a contemporary cast of mind. The same is true of the novels. Padma in Midnight’s Children and Saira in Red Earth and Pouring Rain are listener figures on whose loving interest the life of the storytelling process depends as much as their lives depend on storytelling. In The Satanic Verses the female characters are directly associated with the subversion of the Law, from the female goddesses that challenge the authority of the religion of Submission to the prostitutes who bear the names of the prophet’s wives, revengeful Rekha Merchant who claims Gibreel from beyond

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the grave or Allie who causes his death. In Haroun, Rashid’s wife triggers the crisis that will launch Haroun and Rashid on their adventure: she is therefore a catalyst of the process of change, despite the initial negative connotations of her elopement. The God of Small Things is probably the text which, among the examples chosen, is most relevant with respect to the importance of the female dimension. The narrative focus on Ammu and then on her daughter Rahel, through whose perceptions the whole world of the novel is filtered, produces a complex female poetics that performs a silent subversive attitude with respect to the rigidity of the Keralan society and of patriarchal discourses in general. It also initiates the parallel plot told by the structure of the novel, which is radically different from its conventional surface plot. Such subversive attitudes have long been associated with the female presence in Indian culture, despite women’s limited access to official cultural discourses. Yarrow establishes a continuity between traditional understandings of the feminine – as either decorative and entertaining or invested with a dark mysterious complexity – and the more recent emergence of women in performance as critical subversive voices.4 Yet the value of such ‘feminine’ discourses as challenges to cultural establishments – as in the case of the écriture feminine model – lies not necessarily in the gender dimension per se, but in their capacity to destabilize rigid categorical thinking of the kind associated with patriarchal discourses. In contemporary Indian fiction in English, this departure from essentialist communalist thinking takes place through the crucial categories of performance and performativity, which facilitate a return to tradition with a difference in nomadic texts.

4

Yarrow, Indian Theatre, 86-94.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES Main works discussed Carrière, Jean-Claude, The Mahabharata: A Play Based Upon the Indian Classic Epic (1987), trans. Peter Brook, London: Methuen, 1988. Chandra, Vikram, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. Karnad, Girish, The Fire and the Rain (Agni Mattu Malé), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. ––, Naga-Mandala and Hayavadana, in Three Plays:NagaMandala,Hayavadana, Tughlaq, with an Introduction by the author, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995, 19-65 and 67-139. The Mahabharata, directed by Peter Brook, produced by Michael Propper, videorecording, London: Connoisseur Video, 1989. Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, London: Flamingo, 1997. Rushdie, Salman, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), London: Viking, 1999. ––, Midnight’s Children (1981), London: Everyman’s Library, 1995. ––, The Satanic Verses, London: Viking, 1988. ––, ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, The New Yorker, 23 and 30 June 1997, 12227. Other primary texts The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, trans. Sir Richard Burton, New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Barth, John, Chimera, New York: Random House, 1972. Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, London: Dent, 1975. Chandra, Vikram, Love and Longing in Bombay, London: Faber, 1998.

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––, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Srivastava, Aruna, ‘“The Empire Writes Back”: Language and History in Shame and Midnight’s Children’, ARIEL, XX/4 (October 1989), 62-78. Stanislavsky, Konstantin, Building a Character, London: Methuen, 1968. ––, Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage, trans. David Magarshack, London: Faber and Faber, 1950. Stevick, Philip, The Theory of the Novel, London: The Free Press, 1967. Strauss, Jennifer, ed., The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Stutley, Margaret and James, A Dictionary of Hinduism: Its Mythology, Folklore and Development 1500 B.C.-A.D. 1500, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Surdulescu, Radu, Critica mitic-arhetipala: De la motivul antropologic la sentimentul Numinosului, Bucharest: ALLFA, 1997. Syed, Mujeebuddin, ‘Midnight’s Children and Its Indian Con-Texts’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXIX/2 (1994), 95-107. Teverson, Andrew, ‘Vikram Chandra in Conversation’, Wasafiri, 37 (Winter 2002), 5-7. Thieme, John, Post-Colonial Contexts: Writing Back to the Canon, London: Continuum, 2002. ––, Postcolonial Studies: The Essential Glossary, London: Arnold, 2003. Tickell, Alex, ‘The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXXVIII/1 (2003), 73-89. Updike, John, ‘Mother Tongues: Subduing the Language of the Colonizer’, The New Yorker, 23 and 30 June 1997, 156-61. Vaidhyanathan, T. G. and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds, Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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INDEX

Alfreds, Mike, 46 American English, 37, 39, 77; literature, 2, 34-36, 39 Anand, Mulk Raj, 36, 37 Anderson, Benedict, 90 Anglo-Indian, 5, 70 Appignanesi, Lisa, 146 The Arabian Nights, 20, 29, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77-78, 123, 125, 126, 127, 135, 154, 155, 229 Aristotle, 6-7 Artaud, Antonin, 44, 116-17 Austin, J.L., 8-9, 34, 35, 4043, 45-46, 49, 132, 164, 181, 184, 209, 244, 262 Banfield, Chris, 120-21 Barnouw, Erik, 168-69 Bhagavad-Gita, 112-13 Barth, John, 66 Barthelme, Donald, 67 Barthes, Roland, 4, 27, 47-48, 51-53, 61, 134 Bhabha, Homi, 90, 183-84 Bharata, 99, 105 Bharucha, Rustom, 95-96, 110, 111, 113 Bigsby, Christopher, 176 Booker Prize, 3, 145, 193

border(line), 1, 28, 61, 83, 103, 107, 183, 191, 224, 263 Braidotti, Rosi, 27, 60-62, 243, 254 Brecht, Bertolt, 134, 186 British colonial rule in India, 2, 36, 67, 68-69, 121, 123, 170, 206, 236, 249, 250; English, 2, 36-37; literature, 30, 35; Britishness, 177-187, 24041 Brook, Peter, 4, 30, 87-96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 107-15, 116, 122, 129, 144, 260, 163, 260, 263; The Mahabharata, 87-96, 97, 107-15 Buford, Bill, 2, 33-36, 39 Campbell, Joseph, 84 Carrière, Jean-Claude, 89, 90, 110, 112, 230 catharsis, 6-7 Chandra, Vikram, 2, 3, 30, 36, 38, 53, 60, 66-67, 69-71, 74, 76, 77, 81, 114, 125, 260-61, 262; Works: Red Earth and Pour-ing Rain, 4, 21, 22, 29, 30, 50, 53, 59,

284

Performance and Performativity

101, 122, 155, 227-57, 260; Sacred Games, 3, 246; ‘Eternal Don’, 3 Chaudhuri, Amit, 2, 38-39 chronos, 79, 233 Cixous, Hélène, 191-92, 198, 199, 200, 202 Crow, Brian, 120-21 Cundy, Catherine, 157 Currie, Mark, 90, 92 Deleuze, Gilles, 26-27, 57, 60, 228 Derrida, Jacques, 41-42, 4445, 51, 52-53, 56-57, 171, 255 Desai, Anita, 2, 36 Desai, Kiran, 2, 36-37 Desani, G.V., 36 Deshpande, G.P., 70, 88 Devi, Mahasweta, 88 dharma, 81, 106, 111-15, 219, 244-48, 251 Doniger, Wendy, 24-26, 27, 84-85, 222 Doody, Margaret Ann, 65-66, 80-81 Dryden, John, 15 écriture feminine, 62, 193, 262, 264 Elam, Keir, 46 Eliade, Mircea, 11, 22-24, 29, 69, 77-78, 80, 83-84 Elkunchwar, Mahesh, 70, 88 epic, 3, 7, 10, 23, 31, 46, 58, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71, 76, 78, 80, 81, 87-103, 106, 107-

15, 122, 124, 132, 134, 193, 215, 231, 232, 233, 244, 246-47 Fanon, Frantz, 177 fatwa, 42, 133, 141, 143-59, 162, 163, 164, 176, 189 Fish, Stanley, 47 Flood, Gavin, 81-82, 222 Ganapathy-Doré, Geetha, 230 Ganesh(a), 2, 54, 59, 82, 102, 128, 130, 140, 172, 229, 237, 241, 245, 253 Garth, Sir Samuel, 15 Ghosh, Amitav, 2, 36 Gonzalez, Madelena, 154 Grass, Günter, 25, 72 Gregory, Horace, 15 Guattari, Félix, 26-27, 57, 60, 228 Gunesekera, Romesh, 2 Gupta, Sunetra, 39 Hanuman, 29, 54, 59, 140-41, 172, 229, 237, 241, 245, 253, 255 Hariharan, Githa, 36 Hillis Miller, J., 42-43, 45-46, 56, 163 Hindu, 2, 11, 14, 23, 28, 30, 46, 58, 59, 61, 67, 71, 78, 81-82, 84, 85, 87, 105, 108, 109, 111-12, 121-22, 127, 128, 130, 132, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146-52, 165, 172, 179, 180, 187, 195, 198, 199, 200, 219-20, 221-22,

Index 229, 245, 252, 261 Hindustani, 155, 156, 157 Holdrege, Barbara A., 198 Hughes, Ted, 15-16 identity performance, 5, 9, 15, 17, 20, 27, 30-31, 40, 57, 58, 61, 83, 90, 98, 102, 109, 112, 117, 120-22, 124, 126, 130-31, 138, 140, 144, 153, 156, 161-87, 192, 196, 198, 230, 234, 238, 243, 250 independence, 1-2, 19, 27, 33, 34, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 137, 146, 196, 205, 206 Indian fiction in English, 1-6, 8-10, 21, 24, 28, 29, 31, 3337, 40, 47, 50, 53, 57, 58, 63, 76, 78, 83, 85, 86, 87, 103, 107, 122, 123, 155, 227, 260, 261, 263, 164 Indo-Anglian, 5, 37 intercultural performance, 4, 28, 83, 85, 87, 95, 107, 109, 115, 122, 123, 132, 260 Irigaray, Luce, 191, 198 Irwin, Robert, 155 Iser, Wolfgang, 5, 47, 49-51, 134, 166, 253 itihasa, 46, 78, 80, 129, 236 Jameson, Fredric, 18, 127 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 36 kairos, 79, 122, 233 Kafka, Franz, 52, 171 Kama Sutra, 198-99 Kapoor, Raj, 166

285 karma, 84, 109, 130, 230, 245, 249 karman, 112, 113, 248 Karnad, Girish, 4, 30, 87, 95, 96-103, 115-122, 139, 174, 260, 263; Works: The Fire and the Rain, 95, 98, 99, 115, 174; Hayavadana, 95, 101-103, 118, 120-21; Naga-Mandala, 30, 95, 100-102, 118, 139 Kathakali, 96, 97, 107-108, 111, 117, 157, 208, 213-20, 223-24, 261 Kathasaritsagara, 58, 68, 71, 79, 102, 154-55 Kermode, Frank, 79-80 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 41, 46, 163 Krishen, Pradip, 206 Krishna, 28, 82, 85, 108, 109, 112-14, 169, 246, 248 Krishnaswamy, S., 168-69 Kristeva, Julia, 196 Lakshmanan, V., 93, 94, 111, lila, 30, 71, 131, 144, 246, 247, 248 Lyotard, Jean-François, 92 Mahabharata, 10, 23, 30, 58, 60, 67-68, 71-72, 78, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93-94, 95, 96103, 106, 107-22, 128-29, 140, 144, 165, 169, 215, 220, 230, 234, 236, 241 (see also Brook, Peter) Maitland, Sara, 146

286

Performance and Performativity

Malekin, Peter, 6, 83 Mann, Thomas, 102 Manto, Saadat Hassan, 38 marginality, 78, 194, 205, 220, maya, 30, 67, 71, 109, 114, 140, 149, 174, 245 Mehta, Ved, 36 metafiction, 21, 29, 30, 59, 100, 134, 137, 139, 163, 236, 237, 252, 255, 261 metamorphosis, 1, 10, 14-15, 17, 21-27, 31, 36, 42, 61, 62, 89, 122, 154, 163, 180, 182, 187, 239-41, 259-60 migrant, 25, 26-27, 57, 58, 148, 151, 153, 161-187, 230, 247 Mistry, Rohinton, 2, 36, 69 Morey, Peter, 260 Mukerji, Sumitra, 115 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 5, 261 Muslim, 20, 40, 78, 121, 130, 141, 144-53, 166, 178, 179 myth, 2, 3-5, 8, 10-12, 15-16, 18-19, 22-31, 34, 36, 40, 54, 68, 77-86, 87, 88, 91, 93-94, 96, 97-103, 107, 110, 120, 121-22, 123-41, 143, 145, 169, 175, 187, 220-25, 227, 241, 245, 251, 257, 259, 260, 262-63; mythology, 5, 11, 58, 82, 84, 148, 250-51 Naipaul, V.S., 36 Narayan, R.K., 36, 37, 94 narrative, 2, 6, 7, 9-10, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26, 29, 30,

31, 36, 42, 51, 53, 57-60, 64, 66, 67-69, 71, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80-81, 86, 87, 9095, 97, 101-102, 107, 112, 114, 122, 123, 124, 127-32, 134-36, 138, 139-40, 141, 144, 154, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 173, 175, 177, 182, 187, 192, 193, 204, 212, 214, 215, 221, 222, 227-41, 248, 149, 25455, 260, 261, 263, 264; narrator, 1, 21, 29, 30, 31, 78, 123, 126-41, 161, 186, 227, 230, 236, 252, 254, 262 Natya Sastra, 6-7, 29, 87, 100, 105, 237 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 205-206 The New Yorker, 23 and 30 June 1997, 1-4, 33-36, 40, 74, 189, 260-61 nomadic, 26-27, 29, 31, 40, 57, 58, 59, 60-62, 90, 109, 122, 125, 151, 161-62, 187, 227, 241, 243-257, 259-60, 261, 263, 264 novel, 1-4, 9, 10, 15-22, 29-31, 33-34, 36, 40, 42, 50, 51, 54-57, 58, 59, 62, 63-86, 87, 89, 114, 122, 123-35, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 149, 150-51, 154-55, 161-64, 166, 170, 176, 180, 182, 187, 193, 199, 202, 204, 210-13, 220-23, 22729, 232-36, 241, 243, 248-

Index 49, 251-54, 256, 260, 261, 263, 264 Obolensky, Chloé, 96 Ovid, 14-17, 61 Pana, Irina Grigorescu, 16-17 Panchatantra, 71, 244 Paniker, K. Ayyappa, 67-69 Panikkar, K.N., 7, 87-89, 97, 105-106, 115; ‘theatre of transformation’, 7, 87-89, 105-106 Parker, Andrew, 41, 46, 163 Partition, 18, 27, 124, 125, 127, 134, 135, 148 performance, 4, 5, 6-10, 15, 21-22, 23, 24, 30-31, 34, 35-36, 40-46, 47, 48-51, 56, 57, 58-59, 61, 62, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82-83, 84, 85, 86, 88-122, 123, 132-41, 144, 150, 152, 153, 155, 161-87, 192, 204, 207-209, 212, 213-20, 224, 235, 237, 241, 243-47, 251, 253, 254, 257, 260-64 performativity, 3, 5, 6-10, 21, 27-28, 31, 34, 35-36, 40-46, 47, 49, 51, 56, 57, 58, 59, 78, 81, 84, 86, 87, 107, 132-33, 139, 140, 141, 14453, 156, 161-66, 176, 180, 184, 186, 207-13, 225, 236, 241, 243, 246, 254, 256, 257, 260-64 Petersson, Margareta, 42, 13233

287 postcolonial, 9, 10, 16, 17, 22, 30, 33, 38, 39, 42, 72, 78, 84-85, 124, 140, 153, 177, 183-84, 189, 196, 260 postmodern, 65, 77, 84, 92, 94, 127, 131, 144, 149, 227-28, 255 Puranas, 68, 72 Quran, 78, 145, 146, 177, 178, 180 Rama, 28, 68, 127 Ramayana, 10, 58, 59, 68, 71, 78, 88, 111-12, 128, 14041, 165, 215, 233 rasa, 6-7, 105, 117, 133, 136, 217, 237-38 Rao, Raja, 36, 37 reader, 4-5, 15, 21, 33, 35, 4748, 50-51, 64, 67, 70, 75, 93, 95, 112, 126, 129, 13236, 190, 203, 214-15, 23035, 253 religion, 24-25, 77, 80, 82, 84, 85, 113, 114, 131, 132, 139, 143-52, 156, 158, 164, 172, 176, 177, 179, 194-95, 209, 222, 263 Roy, Arundhati, 2, 3, 22, 30, 36, 76, 229, 237, 260; Works: The Cost of Living, 205; The God of Small Things, 4, 30, 62, 75, 114, 122, 177, 189-225, 228, 248, 260, 261, 262; ‘The Greater Common Good’, 205-206

288

Performance and Performativity

Rushdie, Salman, 2-5, 9, 16, 25, 29, 30, 36-38, 40, 42, 69, 70, 72-75, 85, 189, 190, 193, 194, 211, 216, 228, 229, 237, 261; Works: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 50, 79, 101, 15359, 189, 252, 253, 254; Imaginary Homelands, 9, 25, 125, 128, 135, 147, 148, 149; Joseph Anton, 147; Midnight’s Children, 1, 4, 17-21, 33-34, 50, 59, 85, 122, 123-41, 144, 146, 147, 148, 158, 161, 163-64, 166, 173, 175, 176, 177, 186, 190, 229, 254, 261, 262, 263; The Satanic Verses, 4, 21-22, 25-26, 59, 122, 133, 141, 143-87, 189, 229, 230, 252, 262; ‘The Firebird’s Nest’, 1, 4-5, 10-14, 15, 26, 57, 61, 89, 259-60 Sage, Vic, 45, 138 samsara, 83, 122, 233, 244, 245, 247, 249, 252, 262 Sarabhai, Mallika, 91, 108 Sayre, Henry, 6, 49-50, 134 Schechner, Richard, 6, 237 Scheherazade, 19, 20, 59, 71, 77-78, 123-32, 135, 140 Seth, Vikram, 2, 36, 193 Shakti, 12, 13, 14, 222 Shahabuddin, Syed, 147 Shiva, 11-14, 82, 127, 128, 132, 140, 222, 251; Shiva Nataraja, 11, 96, 140

Sidhwa, Bapsi, 36 Sircar, Badal, 115 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 13 Srivastava, Aruna, 123-24 Stafford-Clark, Max, 46 storytelling, 2, 3, 4, 7-10, 15, 19, 20-21, 29-31, 40, 47, 50, 53-54, 57-60, 62, 67, 70, 71-79, 87-96, 97, 99103, 105-106, 107, 114, 122, 123-41, 143, 144, 150, 153-59, 161, 165, 166, 176, 177, 181, 186, 189, 212, 214, 227-41, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 251-57, 260-63 Strindberg, August, 97, 115 Taheri, Amir, 145-46 Tantric practice, 222 Tanvir, Habib, 115 Tendulkar, Vijay, 70, 88 Teverson, Andrew, 70-71, 227-28, 251 theatre, 3, 4, 7-8, 23, 28, 30, 41, 43-44, 46, 48, 50, 74, 76, 81, 83, 84, 87-89, 92, 99-100, 105, 109, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 134, 144, 176, 185, 209, 215, 260, 263; Indian theatre, 3, 4, 7, 8, 20, 27, 30, 46, 61-62, 69-70, 78, 83, 86, 88, 89, 92, 95, 96103, 105-22, 137, 157, 165, 167, 168; theatre of roots, 87, 95, 96, 103, 115, 121, 260, 263; theatre of

Index transformation, 7, 87-88, 105-106, 167 Tickell, Alex, 260 Updike, John, 3, 189-90 Vakil, Ardashir, 2 Valmiki, 128 vidusaka, 137 Vyasa, 59, 89, 91, 95, 96, 128, 140 Watt, Ian, 63-66

289 West, Elizabeth, 38 Yakshagana, 97, 115, 117 Yama, 59, 71, 229, 235, 237, 241, 244, 245, 249-50, 253, 262 Yarrow, Ralph, 6, 8, 19, 27-28, 46, 58, 61, 70, 80, 83, 109, 110, 165, 237, 254-55, 264 Zarrilli, Phillip B., 107, 213, 216

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