Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels 9783110367355, 9783110378191

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Nadia Butt Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels

Media and Cultural Memory/ Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung

| Edited by Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning Editorial Board Aleida Assmann · Mieke Bal · Vita Fortunati · Richard Grusin · Udo Hebel Andrew Hoskins · Wulf Kansteiner · Alison Landsberg · Claus Leggewie Jeffrey Olick · Susannah Radstone · Ann Rigney · Michael Rothberg Werner Sollors · Frederik Tygstrup · Harald Welzer

Volume 20

Nadia Butt Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels |

ISBN 978-3-11-037819-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036735-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038711-7 ISSN 1613-8961 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: “Improvised Memory” by Faiza Butt Typesetting: Konrad Triltsch Print und digitale Medien GmbH, Ochsenfurt-Hohestadt Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

I told you the truth… Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, exaggerates, minimises, glorifies, and vilifies, also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own. (Salman Rushdie) [W]e go back, all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. (V. S. Naipaul) They keep pulling things out of the past, each memory like a grappling hook bringing up a question. (Shashi Deshpande) Memory, Ji Bai would say, is the old sack here […] Out would come from the dusty depths some knick-knack of yesteryear. (Moyez J. Vassanji) We are only what we remember, nothing more […] all we have is the memory of what we have done or not done. (Romesh Gunesekera) What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. (Gabriel García Márquez)

Acknowledgements I welcome the opportunity to acknowledge the many (for the most part unreciprocated) debts which the pursuit and consummation of such a work entails. The research upon which this thesis is based was carried out for more than three years. During this period, I have incurred the debt of several institutions and persons. Research for this thesis was generously funded from January 2006 to January 2009 by the Friedrich-Naumann Foundation, a German political institute of liberal politics. I am deeply indebted to the Foundation for supporting my doctoral studies which I would never have been able to complete otherwise. I am also indebted to the “Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität” for financing my participations in international conferences in Malta, Canada and Italy as a researcher (April 2003 – November 2005) and PhD student (November 2005 – February 2009) at the University of Frankfurt, which gave tremendous impetus to my research. The greatest debt of all I owe to my PhD supervisor Prof Dr Frank SchulzeEngler for supporting and guiding me indefatigably in every stage of my project. Thanks to his critical eye for academic precision and excellence, I have been able to complete my work in its best possible manner. Without Prof Schulze-Engler’s constant encouragement and supervision, I might have faltered in the very first phase of my doctoral programme. I also express my profoundest gratitude to Prof Dr Astrid Erll for her inspiring comments on the theoretical chapters of my thesis and especially for polishing the discourse of memory and modernity in the transcultural framework in my work. It is because of Prof Erll’s international networks of memory studies that I had the chance to present my research findings on transcultural memory at different academic platforms of European universities in addition to the opportunity to do research on transcultural and transnational memory in the Department of English as a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford in August 2014, shortly before the publication of my manuscript. I am extremely grateful to my second supervisor Prof Dr Robert JC Young from the University of Oxford/University of New York, for his valuable suggestions in different phases of writing the thesis and his willingness to offer academic support in all kinds of situations. Prof Young is one of my greatest inspirations for pursuing a career in Anglophone Literatures. Chapters of my thesis have been presented in Prof Schulze-Engler’s Doctoral Colloquium at the Department of New Literatures in English and Culture, which gave me the chance to receive detailed criticism on various aspects of my work in progress. In fact, the Research Colloquium of Transcultural Literary Studies Frankfurt under the auspices of Prof Schulze-Engler, which is a unique research

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group of its kind, also helped me a great deal in discussing important theoretical concepts that I developed in my thesis. I am indebted to Doreen Strauhs, Carla Müller Schulzke, Jenny Diederich, Claudia Perner, Ellen Gürkermeyer, Cosima Wittmann, and Michaele Moura-Kocoglu for their input and valuable feedback on my drafts. Thanks are also due to my former colleague Dr Arno Keller from the Friedrich-Naumann Foundation office Pakistan for nominating me for the scholarship of the Foundation. Also, to my mentor Dr Johann-Volker Peter for his enormous help in drafting my PhD proposal and for explaining different research methodologies to me. I am thankful to a number of friends, among them Dr Sissy Helff for her productive criticism on my chapters and thought-provoking analysis of my close readings, Dr Karin Ikas for her most useful suggestions on my project outline, Dr Vera Alexander for making me a perennial optimist, and Stefan Heinzel for alleviating my academic anxieties. Above all, I am deeply grateful to Dr Silia Kaplan for proofreading my entire manuscript closely, and to Dr Alison Lowry for advising me on style and syntax. At the same time, I am very grateful to my two students, Sayma Khan for looking up numerous sources for me in the Frankfurt University library and Christina Jatzko for changing the entire manuscript according to my publisher’s style sheet. My deepest gratitude of all also goes to my mother Kishwar Sultana Mir who always urged me to read Urdu and English literature throughout my school and college years in Lahore, to my late father Iftikhar Butt for introducing me to the English classics at an early age, and to my motivating sisters Uzma Syed, Alia Hassan, Ayesha Hammad and Faiza Butt for supporting me throughout the ups and downs of my university life in Pakistan and Germany. Last but not least, many thanks to my partner Christian Balzarek for his understanding, support and cooperation in the process of writing. Nadia Butt Frankfurt am Main 28th February 2015

Contents 

Introduction: Rewriting the Past – Memory, History and the Indo-English Novel of the 1980s and 1990s 1

Part One  Memory and Transculturality 15 . From cultural memory to transcultural memory 15 . Transcultural memory as a social practice in the age of globalised 20 modernity/modernities . Rethinking memory and modernity/modernities 29 . Towards a theory of transcultural memory 37  Literature and Transcultural Memory 39 . Rethinking memory and literature 39 . The ‘novel of memory’ and East-West encounters 54 . The transcultural novel of memory

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Part Two  Novels of Political Memories: Partition and Reconciliation 59 . ‘Chutneyfying’ Memory and History: Mapping transcultural India in 59 Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) 59 .. Introduction: Re-membering private and public histories .. ‘Pickling Time’: The transcultural saga of India 60 .. Between history and memory: Re-collecting cultural plurality in the subcontinent 65 .. Pakistan and purity: partition and beyond 68 .. The art of chutney, history, memory and autobiography 70 .. Conclusion: ‘Chutney’ as a commemorative trope 72 . ‘Imaginary nations’: Storytelling and transcultural recollection in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988) 73 .. Introduction: Partition as a historical predicament 73 .. Ethnic divisions in the name of nationalism: The role of storytelling and transcultural memory 74

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.. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. ..

Contents

Storytelling as a mode of intertwined memories and histories of 77 India’s dispersed ethnicities Religious and ethnic fissures: ‘Cracking’ as leitmotif in Lenny’s transcultural recollections 79 Stories from rural areas in the wake of the national movement in the 83 cities Caught in the myths of ‘national borders’: Genocide, eviction and loot as the order of the day 86 Beyond the borders of ‘imaginary nations’: The triumph of the IceCandy Man over political barriers 88 90 Conclusion: Re-membering as reconciliation Inventing or recalling the contact Zones? Transcultural spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) 91 91 Introduction: Shadows of imaginary and remembered spaces A trip down memory lane: Representation of space in the vicissitudes of time 93 95 Cross-cultural practices of imagining space and place Tracking the past in the present: The events of 1964 as a struggle with silence 99 ‘Going Away’ and ‘Coming Home’ – Seeking transcultural spaces on a 103 disintegrating subcontinent Conclusion: Beyond the spatial metaphors of ethnic hatred 106

 Novels of Private Memories: Through the Looking Glass 108 . Fictions of transcultural memory: Zulfikar Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) as an imaginative reconstruction of the self in multiple worlds 108 .. Introduction: An autobiographical novel of individual and collective memory 108 .. Exile and return and the literary imagination of Ghose 109 .. The fictions of transcultural memory: Reconstructing the self in a world-within-a-world 111 .. Phase one: Recollecting entangled histories of the self 114 .. Phase two: Translating the self amid cultural diversity and interdependence 119 .. Phase three: Re-discovering India as a landmark of time and memory 123 .. Conclusion: Modernity, memory and self-identity 129

Contents

. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. ..

Phantoms of generational memory: A transcultural portrait of family 130 histories in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Shards of Memory (1995) Introduction: India and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 130 Travelling into the past of four generations 132 Spectres of generational memory: The construction of generation in 134 the age of travelling cultures The Master as myth and memory over generations 137 The location of transcultural memory in Henry’s family 142 chronicle Conclusion: The riddle of generational memory 145 Between Calcutta and London: The ambivalence of transcultural 146 remembering in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992) Introduction: A tale of two cities 146 147 ‘Ambivalence of things past’ ‘Countries of the mind’: Imaginary homelands and beyond 151 From the prism of transcultural memories: The enigma of the arrival 158 and departure Conclusion: Travel and cultural translation 162

Part Three 

Rerouting and Remapping: The Indo-English Novel of Transcultural Memory after 2000 167 . Dialectics of ‘roots and routes’ in Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return (2002) 169 . Mnemonic maps and scraps in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002) 174 

Conclusion: ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’

185 Bibliography Primary Sources 185 Secondary Sources 186 Online Sources 202 202 Film Sources Index

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182

1 Introduction: Rewriting the Past – Memory, History and the Indo-English Novel of the 1980s and 1990s The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it. (Bakhtin 1981, 7) [The novel] tells us there are no rules. It hands down no commandments. We have to make up our own rules as best as we can, make them up as we go along. (Rushdie 1991, 423) The emergence of a global literature signals a decisive world-historical turn: the prospect that modernity is not merely a transient or provincial Western phenomenon, but instead has become the universal and perhaps permanent condition of humanity and therefore the inevitable subject of any literature that would represent contemporary existence. (Valdez Moses 1995, xii)¹

The emergence of the Indo-English novels (see Afzahl Khan 1993) of memory by writers from the Indian subcontinent defines new literary developments in the genre of contemporary fiction in English, and is the focus of this study. The partition of the subcontinent into two separate nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the waves of globalisation in the post-partition era are conducive to shaping the literary imagination of the writers from this region – imagination which goads them into recollecting the individual and collective past of different ethnicities and cultures in the face of political change in their writings. In fact, political revolutions on the twentieth-century Indian subcontinent provide the backdrop to the literary representation of transcultural memory, which underlines the dynamics of cultural reconfigurations across national and cultural borders in the domain of fiction. By emphasising the representation of worldwide

 Moses adds on the same page, “[T]he very existence of a single and hegemonic Eurocentric conception of literature is rendered obsolete, in so far as Western literature itself becomes part of a larger body of work that is truly global, hybrid, and cosmopolitan.”

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cultural communications in examining narratives of memory, I highlight the phenomena of “overlapping territories, intertwined histories” as Edward W. Said observes (1994 [1993], Ch. 1, 3 – 61).² It is in light of Said’s interpretation of ‘territory and history’ that I elaborate not only the theory of transcultural memory, but also introduce different ways of defining memory and memory cultures in the works of writers from the Indian subcontinent. In pre-partition times, prominent novelists from the subcontinent such as R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao or Ahmed Ali treated historical memory in their narratives apart from the ethnic differences of Indians. However, the eventual rise of a national movement and the consequent spread of communalism put an end to such perceptions of a common history and changed the map of what had been a colonially united India. Narayan’s trilogy Swami and Friends (1935), for example, set in pre-independence days in India, in a fictional town called Malgudi, recollects the story of a ten-year-old school boy at Albert Mission School whose life is dramatically changed when Rajan, a symbol of colonial super power joins the school; Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), named after a small village in South India, is a text of the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s that takes as its central concern the participation of the village in the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi; or Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) nostalgically chronicles the passing of the traditional Muslim aristocracy in light of encroaching British colonialism in the early twentieth century. These examples demonstrate that the political is always intertwined with the private in the fiction of the 1930s and 1940s when the Independence Movement was gathering momentum in the subcontinent. The novelists, previously preoccupied with a mutual memory of colonial India, however, were compelled to experience a ‘split’ in memory after the partition of the subcontinent into two separate nation-states in 1947 and later a third one, Bangladesh, in 1971. How the genre of memory fiction engages with such a sudden ‘split’ in an earlier mutual memory is one of my central concerns here. In the memory novels in English in the post-partition period, major writers such as Amitav Ghosh from India and Bapsi Sidhwa from Pakistan wrestle with ‘divided memories and histories’ in order to ask the reader if it is possible to ‘divide’ centuries’ long mutual cultural heritage by merely dividing territory into two new nation-states. Ghosh raises the question in his novel The Shadow Lines (1988): “How can anyone

 Said calls for a new understanding of culture and imperialism in the contemporary global scene by drawing upon the concept of intersecting territories and histories. He argues: “We need to see that the contemporary global setting – overlapping territories, intertwined histories – was already prefigured and inscribed in the coincidences and convergences among geography, culture, and history that were so important to the pioneers of comparative literature” (1994 [1993], 48).

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divide memory?” (2005 [1988], 214) whereas Sidhwa’s narrator in Cracking India (1988) inquires: “Can one break a country?” (2006 [1988], 101). Because of their associations with a common history in their narratives of memory, I have brought the Pakistani and Indian novelists writing in English under the umbrella term of ‘Indo-English’ (see Rao 2004, 1– 31)³ to address their distinct treatment of memory and history from a variety of perspectives. The Indo-English novel first received global attention with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and its worldwide recognition through the Booker Award. The novel has not only given voice to the Indians and their history, but generated international awareness among writers and readers that India has to tell her stories from the pre-and post-partition debris of memory. As Rushdie states in Midnight’s Children, “There are so many stories to tell, too many, an excess of intertwined lives, events, miracles, places, rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane” (1981 [1995], 9). An important aspect to which Rushdie draws our attention is the interaction of historical and individual forces in fiction through the filter of memory. The oeuvres of writers with heterogeneous ethnic, religious and social backgrounds from the Indian subcontinent such as Bapsi Sidhwa, Amitav Ghosh, Zulfikar Ghose, Sunetra Gupta or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are replete with political as well as private remembrances as their narrators/protagonists go down memory lane, for these literary artists are resolved to present ‘their version of the past’ in our fast changing present, flooded with travel and cultural translation, and transnational and transcultural phenomena. This is why, despite discussing the Indo-English novel with a special reference to the events and the effects of partition, and to the experience of exile and expatriation on the psyche of the writers, I place it in the global setting to gain a broader perspective on the writers’ approach to the connection of the subcontinent with other histories and civilisations, for example, with Africa in the memory narrative of Moyez J. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) or with the USA in Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants (1988) or with Europe in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992). Pakistani critic Tariq Rahman points out that unlike the more established field of Indian literature in English (see also Verma 2000),⁴ which has pioneers such as Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, Pakistani writing in English has a longer tradition in poetry with only two major novelists of international renown: Bapsi Sidhwa and Zulfikar Ghose (1991, 1– 14). However, Pakistani journalist and  Rao uses the term Indo-English for Indian and Pakistani novelists for “whom partition is the matrix of the plots.”  For details on the historical and literary development of Indian writing in English besides Tariq Rahman, see K. D. Verma, 2000.

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short-story writer Muneeza Shamsie highlights that a significant number of Pakistani first and second generation expatriate writers in the last thirty years such as Nadeem Aslam, Adam Zameenzad, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid as well as their senior counterparts Tariq Ali, Aamer Hussein and Sara Suleri have drawn the attention of the reading public to issues concerning post-partition Pakistan as well as Pakistani diasporic communities abroad (1998, xxi–xxxi). Since writers such as Ghose and Zameenzad claim themselves to be writers with multiple or no cultural belongings, the identity of a ‘true’ Pakistani writer remains a disputed terrain. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s opinion on Indian literature in English that its “history is scattered, discontinuous, and transnational” (2003, 25 – 26) can also be applied to Pakistani writing especially when the roots of most of Indian and Pakistani writers are dislocated as well as relocated. Meenakshi Mukherjee’s classification of the Indian novel in English gives us an overview of historical developments in the genre of the novel in English on the Indian subcontinent. According to Mukherjee, the Indian novel in English since the 1920s has passed through three different phases,⁵ which are the phases of the historical novel (1920s–1930s), the socio-political novel (1930s–1940s), and the novel of self-identity including the ‘psychological novel’ (1950s and 1960s) (Mukherjee 1971, 21). Viney Kirpal chooses to address novels of the 1980s and 1990s to emphasise different trends and innovative narrative strategies in Indian fiction since she considers these phases to be the most important in the history of the Indian novel. She highlights that “politics – national and international” (1990, xvi) is the central theme of the novelists of the 1980s and 1990s who are the major focus of this study. Kirpal claims that Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was vital in initiating a ‘new’ phase of Indian writing in English (1990, xvi) as it was after its publication that novelists were inspired to examine the relationship between national issues and the individual from a broader horizon (see also Riemenschneider 2005, 20 – 41). They looked back on the issues of the freedom struggle, the Independence Movement around 1947, the partition in 1947, the Emergency in India from 1975 to 1977, the India-China War in 1962, the India-Pakistan Wars in 1965 and 1971, the fall of Dhaka and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 in order to tackle these issues from the vantage point of our changing perception of cultural and national differences pervading the private and public sphere.

 For a detailed discussion on the representative Indian English novels of the 1930s and 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and 1980s and 1990s, see Leela Gandhi, “Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s,” Shyamala A. Narayan and Jon Mee, “Novelists of the 1950s and 1960s,” and Jon Mee, “After Midnight: The Novel in the 1980s and 1990s” (Gandhi 2003, 168 – 192; Narayan 2003, 219 – 231; Mee, 2003, 318 – 336).

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A considerable number of novels from this particular phase take into account contemporary politics as central to individual, family, community and nation. For example, Clear Light of Day (1980) by Anita Desai centres on a family in the throes of the partition of India in 1947, and Shame (1983) by Salman Rushdie is concerned with the downfall of Pakistan under the yoke of a corrupt ruling elite in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, Indian writers were once again inclined to set the individual, family and community into a political context to address important political issues in the contemporary subcontinent within the realm of fiction. Beethoven Among the Cows (1994) by Rukun Advani deals with the Babri Mosque crisis⁶ between Hindus and Muslims in 1992 (among many other political topics) in narrating the story of two brothers, whereas The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy sets the story of twins against the backdrop of communism in India in 1969 and the state-sponsored perpetuation of the Hindu caste system. On the Pakistani side, Ghose and Sidhwa, writing in the 1980s and 1990s, were engaged with the repercussions of the partition on the various ethnicities of the subcontinent in order to affirm that the political invariably dominates the private sphere. They recollect the roots of political tension between India and Pakistanin their fiction with the aim of reminding the reader to overcome cultural clashes, which only cause more hate and violence. If we throw a cursory glance at the novels of the 1980s and 1990s (see Singh 1991; Devy 1994, 7– 18; Shukla and Shukla 2002, 131– 141), we notice that a number of novelists present different accounts of history in the fictional domain. While exploring their accounts of history, we encounter the representation of ‘shared memories’ or ‘intertwined memories’ in fiction with which this study is concerned. I argue that it is through these ‘shared memories’ in fiction that the writers take into account present-day cultural complexity and plurality in their writing in the wake of “disjunction and difference in the global cultural economy” (Appadurai 1996, 27– 47). In other words, their treatment of memory reflects worldwide cultural transformations on the societal and communal level. Thus, memory acts as a mode of bridging a) territorial (physical) distances and b) historical (abstract) divisions. By focusing on memory as a narrative and thematic device in fiction, my aim is to explain how the selected Indo-English novels interrogate the idea and practice of memory as an individual and collective experience. At the same time, I attempt to point out how a survey of these novels demands that we ‘rethink Eu-

 Hindu extremists in 1992 demolished a famous sixteenth-century mosque to build a Hindu temple in its place. The demolition of the mosque led to one of the worst ethnic crises between Indian Muslims and Hindus in post-independence India.

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rocentrism’ (see Shohat and Stam 1994, Ch. 1, 13 – 54) in our increasingly transcultural world, that is, a world of enormous cultural interaction and exchange, a world in which Europe and its ‘Others’ are no longer locked in their isolated spheres, but are bound to influence and prevail upon each other. Therefore, this study attempts to revise the more established definitions of the memory novel by introducing the theory of transcultural memory. For the aim of this study is to grasp the implications of mnemonic processes in the narratives of East-West encounters from a different angle, and to broaden the horizon of interpreting the genre of the memory novel itself in contemporary times. The fiction of the 1980s and 1990s represents the most fertile as well as the most important phase of the Indo-English novels of memory. The narrator and the narrated characters in these narratives look back critically thereby rewriting the past and history. It is important, however, not to look at these representations only in terms of ‘colonial’ or ‘post-colonial’ memories as many cultural theorists, such as Simon Featherstone (2005, 167– 200), tend to do, but rather as memories rooted in global cultural forms of blending and borrowings, transcending and crossing-over the centre-periphery divide that is thought to be central by post-colonial theorists in their approach to literature. Frank Schulze-Engler warned back in 1992 that postcolonial theory reproduces “the very same binary opposition between ‘Europe’ and its ‘Others’ that it actually seeks to overcome” (1992, 322). It is with the goal of thinking beyond such binaries that Arjun Appadurai also clarifies that the “new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models” (1996, 32). In short, memory narratives demonstrate a space of interconnected memories rather than a world in which the West needs to be seen as set apart from the rest of the world. The publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the 1980s also coincided with a sudden popularity of postcolonial theory and discourse, mainly initiated by the book The Empire Writes Back in 1989 by Australian writers Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffins. Writers from the subcontinent, like writers from other former colonies, were being discussed within the historical frame of colonisation and decolonisation. In this way, “postcolonial literature” set itself “as a homogenous body of literature” which “defines through the effects of colonialism” (Schulze-Engler 1992, 322). Being aware of the pitfalls of postcolonial theory, Robert JC Young chose to introduce “tricontinentalism” (2001, 204) as an alternative term in his ground-breaking work Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) in order to emphasise the transnational locations and the political implications of the discourse of colonialism and imperialism. However, the term ‘tricontinentalism’ neither stripes the postcolonial theory of its focus on necessary cultural difference and opposition, nor does it elaborate on the pres-

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ent-day flow of cultural images across borders. In other words, the term is likely to interpret the world in clear-cut categories rather than challenging these very categories, which transcultural theory aims to define as porous and changing. Despite the worldwide popularity of postcolonial theory in international academia and especially the implied ‘political’ agenda of postcolonial theorists, this approach tends to ignore more contemporary political issues in the novels from India and Pakistan because of their constant stress on linking every political theme, however contemporary, to the times of colonisation or the anti-colonial struggle, hence, ignoring a variety of cultural dynamics present in the age of rapid cultural change. Therefore, instead of postcolonial theory, I have chosen to develop and take up the theory of transcultural memory in this study in order to analyse issues of contemporary politics in the selected fiction from the perspective of present-day cultural encounters and conflicts with the goal of embracing a new paradigm for examining memory and history in the Indo-English novels. The emergence of the Indo-English novel signifies a literary turn as the Indian and Pakistani writers choose English as the medium of expression rather than their native languages. This turn cannot be easily rendered as “the Empire Writes Back” (see Ashcroft et al. 2004 [1989]), for it deals with a more complex cultural scene today that carries a distinct mark of important developments in literary and cultural theory such as ‘globalised modernity,’ ‘multiple modernities,’ ‘transculturality’⁷ and ‘transnationalism.’ In effect, the very term Indo-English is suggestive of a cultural development embodied in the tradition of writing in English on the subcontinent, but at the same time alludes to a distinct development in the works of distinguished novelists who are keen on ‘writing’ India, Pakistan and Bangladesh against the backdrop of broad cultural communications, and beyond the restricted sphere of (post)colonial cultural trajectories. Consequently, the term Indo-English in the present context carries an entire history of cultural encounter and not merely the role of Empire and colonialism in literature from the subcontinent as popularly imagined. Pakistani critic Sara Suleri’s reflections on ‘English India,’ however, also lead us to revise the rhetoric of ‘English India’ in terms of the British colonisation of the subcontinent alone. Suleri contends: English India is not synonymous with the history of British rule in the subcontinent, even while it is suborned to the strictures of such a history. At the same time, English India is not solely a linguistic concept, a spillage from history into language, one that made difficult oppositions between the rhetorical and the actual. The idiom of English India expresses a disinterest in the continuity of tense, so that the distinction between colonial and postcolonial histories become less radical, less historically ‘new.’ In the context of colonialism,

 For more definitions of transcultural modernities, see Butt 2009, 167– 179.

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English India represents an ambivalence that addresses the turning point of such necessary imbrications as those between the languages of history and culture; of difference and fear. As a consequence, its trajectory is extensive enough to include both imperial and subaltern materials and in the process demonstrates their radical inseparability. (1992, 2– 3)

In fact, it is a complete simplification to claim that the label Indo-English is only reminiscent of India’s (and now Pakistan’s contact) with the British. In contrast, the term refers to the subcontinental writers’ attempts at interpreting contemporary cultural communication in fiction via a global language. The adoption of English by these writers is not a mere consequence of their interaction with the British and their language or their expatriation in an English-speaking country, but rather a result of their yearning to attribute a local aura to a global language. This is why various writers from the subcontinent, both at home and abroad, use English in distinct ways to make us aware not only of the various flavours and varieties of English, but also of their experiments with English itself in the narrative. Many of these writers incorporate the syntax of everyday speech, or use indigenous words and phrases in their texts. Often, in an effort to articulate place, character, or experience, they employ a certain subcontinental English diction that is marked by a specific jargon. Some of these writers prefer to use a standard, formal version of the language, while others experiment with the normative register and attempt to use the language in brave new ways thereby imparting a new linguistic dimension to English as a lingua franca. While rejecting the coinage of Commonwealth Literature for non-British writers, Rushdie highlights how writers writing in English outside Great Britain and the US have actually contributed to broaden the horizon of the very term ‘English literature’: I think that if all English literatures could be studied together, a shape would emerge which would truly reflect the new shape of the language in the world, and we could see that Eng. Lit. has never been in better shape, because the world language now also possesses a world literature, which is proliferating in every conceivable direction. The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago […] it’s time to admit that the centre cannot hold. (1991, 70)

For several writers from the subcontinent, particularly those who have left their native lands after partition, the act of writing becomes a way to reclaim their homeland and identity. As a result, to use Jaina C. Sanga’s words, “[T]he notion of memory figures prominently in such narratives” (2004, x). These writers attempt to record the predicament of displacement, celebrating and at times questioning the act of straddling two cultures and coping with new worlds in a language that is now a unique artefact of ‘local and global’ reproductions. Cypriot critic Stephanos Stephanides even addresses this recent phenomenon in terms of

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the “translatability of memory in an age of globalisation” (2004, 101– 115) to shed light on cultural memory and the New Literatures in English (Walder 2000, 149 – 168) from the perspective of worldwide cultural transactions. While tracing historical and literary developments of the Indo-English novel, it is highly important to keep in mind that Indian tradition, before or after the partition of the subcontinent, is a “mixed tradition” (Rushdie 1991, 67). It is a fallacy to imagine the Indian cultural fabric in terms of cultural singularity, although the ideals of cultural singularity were seminal to the Ideology of Pakistan and its followers, propagated by the leader of Muslim League Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which led to the creation of a separate state for Indian Muslims. In other words, hodgepodge is the most conspicuous dimension of Indian culture and civilisation. It is justified to say that being an Indian is to possess many identities, even though the creation of Pakistan in 1947 was aimed to dismiss such conceptions of Indian culture. Being a Hindu or a Muslim in India does not mean that one cannot belong to the communities of Christians, Parsees or Sikhs at the same time, a fact central to Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In effect, India has always been a site of heterogeneous cultural contacts because centuries of invasions have woven foreign influences into the very fabric of the ‘indigenous’ culture. These heterogeneous cultural contacts are conspicuous in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980) and Zulfikar Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992). Thus, these texts bring out the complexity and dynamism inherent in the Indian ethos in pre- and post-partition times. This study demonstrates that the heritage of mixing has, in fact, leaked into the novel from the subcontinent. This heritage of mixing has already been addressed by Raja Rao in his foreword to Kanthapura (1938) in the following words: “We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us” (1992 [1938], v) and by E. M. Forster in his novel A Passage to India (1924): “Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing […] India is not one, there are ‘a hundred Indias’” (1961 [1924], 135). Like Ghose, Rushdie considers partition and the creation of Pakistan in the name of Islam to be the beginning of new political challenges in the history of the subcontinent, not because of the constant political instability in the region with Kashmir as a bone of contention between India and Pakistan, but because it propagates false notions of cultural ‘purity’ which are antithetical to India as a domain of multiple religions and ethnicities long before the advent of the Mughal or the British Empire. For Rushdie, India is, indeed, a rendezvous for cultural crossing and cultural mixing, and a fertile ground for East meeting West, which is also one of the central preoccupations of the novelists analysed in this study from India and Pakistan. He believes, “Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at another times, that we fall between two stools”

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(Rushdie 1991, 15). Hence, the writers from the Indian subcontinent, anchored in social and cultural mixing, are inclined to understand cultural plurality as part of their cultural heritage, of their life-world which eventually manifests itself in the transcultural memory of the main characters in their oeuvres.⁸ The fictional texts selected here for analysis under the theoretical framework of transcultural memory are not, of course, intended to define in any comprehensive way the enormous output of literary writing from the Indian subcontinent, nor are they necessarily representative of the often varied elements of a particular writer’s oeuvre. Exemplary works have been chosen to both highlight certain significant phases in the history of the Indo-English novel such as the 1980s, 1990s and 2000 onwards, and to enable a manageable discussion on the role and function of memory in the fictional worlds of the authors created in Anglophone literatures of the Indian subcontinent. With the help of transcultural memory as a theoretical and a methodological tool, I attempt to set out the grounds for a systematic analysis and interpretation of the various metaphors and images of memory in fiction. *** This study, divided into three parts, aims to elaborate upon the theory of transcultural memory with reference to contemporary Indo-English novels of memory. In Part One, Chapter Two, “Memory and Transculturality,” transcultural memory is defined in five different ways in light of current research before discussing it as a social practice in the age of globalised modernity. My aim is to highlight first its uses both as a theory and a practice in the present-age of technological advancement, and, second, to connect theory and practice in order to examine memory fiction as it resonates with new cultural realities. With reference to the recent debate on memory and modernity, I explain why there is a need to place and understand memory in the era of multiple modernities, and to comprehend the ‘making of modern memory’ vis-à-vis transcultural phenomena. Chapter Three, “Literature and Transcultural Memory,” investigates the connection between literature and transcultural memory. To support my point, I allude to a number of novels by writers from the subcontinent that deal with memory as a central metaphor or leitmotif for depicting cultural and ethnic intersections such as Moyez J.Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989), Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants (1988), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980). In light of these narratives, the transcultural novel

 James Joyce once told his friend Frank Budgen that for him “imagination was memory” (Budgen 1970, 187).

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of memory is defined as a reflection of twentieth-century cultural and political transformations. Part Two comprises six close readings of memory novels, as my objective is to apply the theory of transcultural memory to literature in more detail. It contains two separate sections entitled “Novels of Political Memories: Partition and Reconciliation” and “Novels of Private Memories: Through the Looking Glass” so that a systematic approach to the various facets of memory in the fictional narratives could be developed. As I analyse the novels of memory from the 1980s and 1990s, I trace the impact of the partition and national conflicts, exile and expatriation, and diaspora and displacement on twentieth-century individuals and societies to explore how these individuals and societies remember within the world of fiction. I am aware that, in most of the novels in this study, political and private memories tend to overlap. My separation of these different forms of memories into two broad sections is for purposes of clarity of discussion and of the isolation of key issues for closer examination. In the section “Novels of Political Memories: Partition and Reconciliation,” I discuss the functions of transcultural memory in the work of three novelists to track the effects of partition on the various ethnicities of the Indian subcontinent. In the first close reading chapter, “‘Chutneyfying’ history and memory: Transcultural India in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981),” the connection between history and memory as embodied in the metaphor of ‘chutney’ is highlighted to map the odyssey of transcultural India in the novel from pre- to post-partition times. By focusing on the culinary images of chutney and pickle, used profusely in the novel, the art of autobiography and intertwined memories is explored in the development of the plot. The second close reading chapter, “‘Imaginary nations’: Storytelling and transcultural recollection in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988),” concentrates on the twin significance of storytelling and transcultural memory. I argue that Sidhwa regrets the demise of the multiethnic subcontinent in the wake of the national movement as her child protagonist recollects scattered stories of partition victims. The third close reading chapter, “Recalling or inventing the contact zones? Transcultural spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988),” negotiates the concept of transcultural spaces in the flashback narration with a special focus on the spatiality of memory. My main argument is that the narrator/protagonist seeks a transcultural space through the prism of memory to make sense of the ‘shadows’ of geographical and national borders set against the backdrop of the partition of India in 1947 and the fall of Dhaka in 1971. In the section, “The Novels of Private Memories: Through the Looking Glass,” three other novelists are investigated to demonstrate how private memories are tied to the processes of globalisation, rendering a complex dimension

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to the practice of individual and collective memory of cosmopolitan persons and transnational communities. In the fourth close reading chapter, “Fictions of transcultural memory: Zulfikar Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) as an imaginative reconstruction of the self in multiple worlds,” it is contended that the three parts of the novel, which are based on three reincarnations of the same person in South America, Europe and the subcontinent, depict self and memory as fiction. Because his self depends on an unreliable memory for asserting its reality, the truths of the self remain ambivalent for the narrator/protagonist whose memories are situated in multiple cultural landscapes. In the fifth close reading chapter, “Phantoms of generational memory: A transcultural portrait of family histories in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Shards of Memory (1995),” the focus is on generational and transcultural memory to discuss how shared memories unite four generations of the protagonist’s family whose members move between India, Europe and the US. In the last close reading chapter, “Between Calcutta and London: The ambivalence of transcultural remembering in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992),” the female protagonist’s struggles with her ambivalent sites of memories, encompassing two different cities, cultures and communities, are critically analysed. It is argued that, while standing at the crossroads of her life, the female protagonist uses memory as a means to come to terms with her fading past and fleeting present, set in Calcutta and London, as well as with her plural cultural belongings. In Part Three, Chapter Six, “Rerouting and Remapping: The Indo-English Novel of Transcultural Memory after 2000,” some light is shed on the constellation of transcultural memory in the two recent Indo-English novels such as The Point of Return (2002) by Siddhartha Deb and Kartography (2002) by Kamila Shamsie. The concluding Chapter Seven, “Overlapping territories, intertwined histories,” postulates the significance of the transcultural approach to contemporary novels of memory and its flexibility to address broader twentieth-century issues in the domain of fiction.

Part One

2 Memory and Transculturality 2.1 From cultural memory to transcultural memory A common memory […] is an aggregate notion. It aggregates the memories of all those people who remember a certain episode which each of them experienced individually […] A shared memory, on the other hand, is not a simple aggregate of individual memories. It requires communication. A shared memory integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember the episode […] into one version […] Shared memory is built on division of mnemonic labor. (Margalit 2002, 51– 52)¹ The complex of practices and means by which the past invests the present is memory: memory is the present past. (Terdiman 1993, 8)

With Maurice Halbwachs’ mémoire collective (1992), Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne (Wuttke, 1979), Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989, 7– 24),and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s cultural memory (Jan Assmann 2006, Ch. 1, 1– 30; Jan Assmann 2011; Aleida Assmann 2011), the connection between memory and culture has come a long way. Different perceptions of memory in a variety of cultural setups have actually opened up new, exciting avenues within the field of memory studies since its emergence in the humanities in the 1980s (Erll 2011 [2005]). With the exception of Warburg, Nora’s focus on national French memory in line with Halbwachs’ legacy of collective memory and Raphael Samuel’s ‘theatres of memory’ (1994; 1998), cultural memory tends to have a strong national focus besides having a solid Eurocentric framework. Nevertheless, more recently, prominent proponents of cultural memory seem to realise that “the dynamics of cultural memory cannot be studied within the bounds of one culture or society, but rather migrate between and across such boundaries in a way that requires the development of new models and concepts” (Vermeulen and Craps 2012, 224). It is because of such a realisation that recently coined notions such as ‘pros-

 Although Margalit has differentiated between two forms of collective memory, common and shared, for my purposes, I only focus on his notion of shared memory, which he defines as requiring communication. Since I also choose to define transcultural memory fundamentally as shared memory, it is the former notion of memory to which I come back later in the chapter.

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thetic’ (Landsberg 2004), ‘cosmopolitan’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002), ‘multidirectional’ (Rothberg 2009), ‘global’ (Assmann and Conrad 2010), ‘transcultural’ (Crownshaw 2013) and ‘travelling memory’ (Erll 2011a) have vividly surfaced in the discourse. Interestingly, despite locating it in the age of globalisation, the idea of cultural memory and its various offshoots within the fast-growing field of memory studies still remains, for a significant number of theorists such as Aleida Assmann, Rothberg or Landsberg, solely a mode of reading Western histories and their traumatic pasts. For me, the new turn in memory studies (Bond and Rapson 2014) with a focus on transcultural and transnational memory (De Cesari and Rigney 2014) directs us to examine memory networks across national and cultural borders from a broader perspective, involving not only non-Western cultures and literatures, but also their overlapping with the West and its literary heritage, which Marianne Hirsch terms as “connective histories” (2012, 21). If we aim to understand Western history in relation to world history, it is significant to keep in view how the historical events on distant soils, such as the Indian Mutiny in 1857 or the partition of India in 1947, which is the main focus here, make us perceive parallel traumatic histories in the non-Western context. Thus, such comparisons tend to help us establish wider networks of memory combining the West with Asia, which are discussed with the theory of transcultural memory in this book. At the same time, since the age of globalisation and modernity have witnessed the rapid movement of peoples, cultures, products and images across borders, memory needs to be seen from the angle of cross-cultural encounters – Eastern and Western.² As we are living in the ‘shared world of modernity’ (Schulze-Engler, forthcoming), we are very likely to find memory as an artefact of transcultural and transnational relations around the world. Therefore, modernity and globalisation remain a fundamental strand of the discussion of memory and culture in the following chapters. It is in light of this phenomenon that the theory of transcultural memory is going to be defined below in the South Asian cultural and literary context in five broad ways. First, against the background of Frank Schulze-Engler’s idea of ‘shared modernity’, transcultural memory is defined as ‘shared memory’ or ‘intertwined memory’, located in, what Said has termed, “overlapping territories, intertwined histories” (1994 [1993], 48) as mentioned before. By discussing memory with reference to the spread of worldwide modernity, my aim is to show that memories

 This is a categorical division that Edward Said has vehemently deconstructed in his monograph Orientalism (1979 [1978]), but I use it as a heuristic tool as East/West connections remain a key element in today’s discourse about globalisation.

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should not merely be seen as a means to glorify the past or national histories as Nora’s followers seem to believe. Neither should it be the sole way of mourning nor forgetting as some critics of memory studies might argue (see Winter 1995 and Ricoeur 2006 [2004]). Therefore, in my context, it is treated as a source of analysing the overlapping cultural connections of the carriers as well as inheritors of memory in heterogeneous cultural setups. Above all, the goal of this approach is to see how these carriers and inheritors of memory view territorial and cultural history as more “entangled rather than oppositional” (Sturken 1992, 5) in the wake of globalised modernity, which ultimately bridges the gap among people of diverse ethnic groups due to technological revolutions and increasing mobility of individuals and cultural products. A case in point is the old and the new generations’ memories of the partition of India. As the old and the new generations in present-day India and Pakistan undergo the experience of ‘their’ modernity, creating new mindsets, they tend to read ‘shared memories’ of the divided subcontinent not necessarily in terms of cultural difference and antagonism, but rather in terms of ‘shared sites of memories’ (see Hebel 2008, 47– 60). Second, thinking along the lines of Aleida Assmann’s coinage of Dialogisches Erinnern (dialogic memory), transcultural memory is defined as ‘dialogic memory’ in this study. Assmann’s model of Dialogisches Erinnern, as opposed to the monologic character of national memory of European nations, is supposed to look at united Europe sharing a common history and memory (2013, 196 – 197). Although Assmann locates dialogic memory in transnational Europe, I choose to place it in the new nation-states of India and Pakistan in particular, and the interconnected Asian and Western history in general. My definition of dialogic memory, however, has another dimension. I argue that, besides disputing the hegemony of national borders, dialogic memory as transcultural memory not only presents the carrier or bearer of memory as having a dialogue with the past, present and future. But more importantly, it shows how the media of memory such as letters, photographs, maps, diaries, heirlooms, memorials or monuments often reveal different interpretations of shared memory and thus already contain different views of the past, set in disparate cultural and historical landscapes. Out of these different media, autobiography or semi-fictional autobiographies perhaps best represent the idea of dialogic memory. Two classical examples of transcultural memory as dialogic memory are recent autobiographies: Vikram Seth’s Two Lives (2006), spreading across India and Germany, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s My Nine Lives (2004), spreading across Europe, Asia and America. By rendering transcultural memory as dialogic memory, the aim is once again to highlight the ‘shared world of modernity’ – or ‘second modernity’ (Beck and Grande 2010, 409 – 433) in which cultural connections beyond borders are considered to be an unavoidable reality.

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Third, transcultural memory is treated as counter memory, a phrase used in depth by George Lipsitz in his book, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (2006 [1990], see also Davis and Starn 1989), since it not only resurrects silenced as well as forgotten histories, but also challenges the more dominant ‘national’, state-sponsored histories.³ It is through transcultural memory in fiction that the reader gets the ‘other’ side of the story or ‘other’ memories; in short, ‘alternative’ memories. In order to understand the idea of counter memory, it is significant to keep in mind that in both India and Pakistan, the partition of India in 1947 and the subsequent atrocities, the fall of East Pakistan from West Pakistan as Bangladesh in 1971, and the legacy of partition in the form of enmity between India and Pakistan with Kashmir as the bone of contention are treated in state-sponsored school, college and university books as dark memories that need to be either suppressed or forgotten; however, if remembered at all, they should be described in grand terms, which ironically means ignoring the individual loss during these critical moments in South Asian history. The novels of transcultural memory, however, show us both sides of the story in order to re-collect, document and preserve what the ‘dominance of a singular history’ seeks to dismiss or erase. Fourth, transcultural memory is described as ‘multidirectional memory’, to use a phrase from Michael Rothberg (2009), to highlight the jagged borders of memory and identity. Like multidirectional memory, transcultural memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (2009, 3), especially as it encourages us to “think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction” (2009, 5). Furthermore, like multidirectional memory, transcultural memory also aims to show how “remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites” (Rothberg 2009, 11). Now the question arises if transcultural memory is only a synonym for multidirectional memory. The answer is in the negative. Since his model of multidirectional memory is oppositional to competitive memory of the Holocaust, Rothberg’s concept stays tied to the traumatic pasts of European history vis-à-vis the US/African history of slavery in general and the Holocaust in particular. The concept of transcultural memory, on the other hand, chooses to link memory to the new condition of globalised modernity and the interactive cultural histories it engenders. It looks de-

 The idea of counter history is, however, also used by Marianne Hirsch (see Hirsch 15 – 16 and 243 – 247, 2012).

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cidedly at non-Western memories and addresses histories that are not necessarily bound up with the questions of racism, slavery or trauma. Lastly, I define transcultural memory as offering a hermeneutical circle of organic carriers (first generation) and artificial inheritors (second generation) of memory. These carriers and inheritors are not necessarily migrating from one continent to the other, but are, rather, constantly experiencing a new approach to a mutual, shared past. This model of memory is particularly suitable to the South Asian memory literature that is not strictly confined to the paradigm of migrant memory,but also explores how the new generation interprets ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 2012 [1997]), particularly in the cosmopolitan cities of India and Pakistan. After inheriting ‘divided’ and oppositional histories of pre-and-post partition India from the old generation as a direct witness of the partition trauma and its legacy, the new generation tends to approach memory differently especially in the wake of the digital revolution on the subcontinent. In the South Asian context, ‘postmemory’, instead of being an inheritance of trauma, is more about ‘renegotiating’ and ‘redefining’ historical processes, namely, the Indian partition, on the part of the generation born after the partition. Within the discourse of cultural memory, transcultural memory has been increasingly looked upon as a new term for migrant memories with a strong focus on travel in terms of individuals and groups. There is no doubt that memories of migrants are a site of transcultural memory, but it is to be noticed that cultural interactions are no longer merely a sphere of migrants. Instead, the circulation of images through a variety of mediascapes, especially Facebook and Twitter, are already reshaping and reconstructing our connections with the mutual past and history regardless of whether or not we are travellers or migrants (see Garde-Hansen 2009, 135 – 150). Having defined the concept of transcultural memory in five broad ways in light of recent turns in the field of memory studies in the last years, I will adhere to, in my close reading chapters, the first definition, that is, transcultural memory as ‘shared’ or ‘intertwined memory’ – a memory of overlapping ‘territorial’, ‘personal’ and ‘political histories’ – despite the fact that the other four definitions surface as well. While reviewing the different aspects of transcultural memory, some scholars might ask if the term memory alone or cultural memory may serve the same purposes that the theory of transcultural memory claims to serve. Now, the ‘dynamics of globital memory field’, suggested by Anna Reading, already indicates dissatisfactions with using only the term ‘memory or cultural memory’ and reveals an awareness of the coexistence of the digital and global in the discourse of memory. Reading argues that “new media ecologies and virtually globalized memories require a paradigm shift to a new conceptualization of mediated mem-

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ory with a concomitant epistemology” (2011, 241). Because of the increasing dominance of digital technology in the space and place of memory, and because of the resulting ‘connective turn’ that Andrew Hoskins names as “an emergent digital network memory” (2009, 92), cultural memory is replaced with transcultural memory in this study. Transcultural memory is understood as being deeply rooted in the present despite drawing upon the past for its inspiration; at the same time, it is also claimed to be profoundly influenced by ‘modernity at large’ (see Appadurai 1996), especially because globalisation is dominating almost every aspect of our present existence as well as our conception of the past. Thinking of memory as transcultural instead of cultural does not entail dispensing with a notion of the urgency of cultural memory with its focus on interpreting different kinds of cultural pasts. Rather, the concept of transcultural memory alerts us to the need for a form of comparative thinking that, like memory itself, is not afraid to traverse fixed borders of ethnicity and nationality. Instead of relying on memory as a space of binary opposition, of ‘us’ and ‘them’ images, transcultural memory seeks to engage with the new networks of remembrance. In short, the transcultural turn in memory studies seems to advocate memory as open ended, and thus opposes the more restrictive uses of memory. It is through the tool of transculturality that we are able to develop deeper insights into the connections of memory across and beyond the West in Anglophone literatures.

2.2 Transcultural memory as a social practice in the age of globalised modernity/modernities Memory is partial, allusive, fragmentary, transient, and for precisely these reasons it is better suited to our chaotic times. (Lee Klein 2000, 138) [M]odernity today is global and multiple and no longer has a governing centre or master narrative to accompany it […] Modernity has travelled from the West to the rest of the world not only in terms of cultural forms, social practices, and in situational arrangements, but also as a form of discourse that interrogates the present. (Gaonkar 2001, 14)

A most cursory glance at the theories of globalisation from the 1990s onwards in the humanities testifies that globalisation is mostly discussed in tandem with

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modernity (Featherstone et al. 1995).⁴ It is even justified to proclaim that globalisation is modernity writ large or to view modernity as a global condition. According to Arjun Appadurai, there are three “global flows” (1996, 27) today: The flow of migrations, the flow of capital and the flow of information in the face of modernity, which have, indeed, revolutionised the cultural scene to such an extent that cultural transformations are now integral to the period of rapid change. Hence the emphasis on the ‘trans’ in current anthropological, sociological and literary criticism with reference to culture, nation and society, such as transcultural (see Welsch 1999, 194– 231), translocal (see Appadurai 1996, 27), transnational (see Bryceson and Vuorla 2002, 3 – 30), transdifference (see Schulze-Engler 2006a, 123 – 132), or transmigration (see Schiller et al. 1995, 48– 63) – concepts which serve as a critique of present-day acts of cultural encounters. Alastair Pennycook, therefore, proclaims, “Notions of the transcultural, transnational and translocal present a way of thinking about flow, flux and fixity in relation to location that move beyond both dichotomies of the global and local, and dialectics between global homogenization and local heterogenization” (Pennycook 2007, 44). The Oxford English Dictionary defines transcultural as: “Transcending the limitations or crossing the boundaries of cultures; applicable to more than one culture; cross cultural” (Simpson and Weiner 1989, 393). In the present context, ‘trans’ refers not only to a blurring of social and national boundaries in the wake of an increase in different kinds of cultural interactions all the over the globe (Schulze-Engler 2001, 49 – 64), but to a kind of interaction and exchange between cultures that makes us dismiss the notion of culture as a pure entity. In elaborating on transculturality as a puzzling form of culture today, German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch declares: “Every concept of culture intended to pertain to today’s reality must face up to the transcultural constitution” (1999, 199). Thinking along Welsch’s lines, the term transcultural goes beyond the intercultural and multicultural perspectives by deconstructing the eighteenth-century concept of single cultures, the origins of which he traces back to Johann Gottfried Herder. According to Welsch, both interculturality and multiculturality, in their efforts to establish communication and coexistence between communities whose culture they basically continue to regard as coherent, fail to challenge the traditional view of cultures as “isolated spheres or islands” (1999, 196). On the other hand, transculturality takes into account both “the inner differentiation” of modern cultures and their “external networking” (Welsch  In the opening chapter of the book, Globalization, Modernity and the Spatialization of Social Theory: An Introduction, Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash suggest modernity in the plural, highlighting: “The range and pluralization of responses to modernity means that it may well be preferable to refer to global modernities” (1995, 3).

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1999, 197) due to global migration and communication. As Welsch writes, “Cultural conditions today are characterized by mixes and permeation” (1999, 197). Further, since mixes and permeation have made our identities hybrid, it is increasingly difficult to describe something as entirely foreign or entirely our own. After many scholars’ discontent with theories of bicultural, acculturation, intercultural and multicultural in the last decades, the transcultural concept has gained international acceptance (McIntyre-Mills 2000; Naficy 2007, xiii–xv) and is gradually developing in the field of memory studies. Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz developed the concept of transculturation as early as 1940 to argue for a replacement of the term acculturation in sociology and ethnography. According to Ortiz: [T]he word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation. (1947, 102– 103; emphasis in the original)

Since Ortiz’s original conception of the term and developments, several scholars such as Schulze-Engler or Welsch have tried to review transculturation as transcultural or transculturality to detach the concept from its original colonial and nationalistic contexts and propose its use in contemporary settings (Hoerder et al. 2003; Taylor 1991, 101). German sociologists Dirk Hoerder, Yvonne Hèbert and Irina Schmitt, also redefine transculturation in new light as “the process of individuals and societies changing themselves by integrating diverse cultural life-ways into dynamic new ones” (2005, Ch. 13, 11– 17). Citing from David Thelen, they declare that transcultural history and lives imply that [people], ideas and institutions do not have clear national identities. Rather, people may translate and assemble pieces from different cultures. Instead of assuming that something was distinctively American, [Canadian, German, French …], we might assume that elements of it began or ended somewhere else. (Thelen1992, 436)

In order to highlight the transcultural as a wider concept, Virginia H. Milhouse, Molefi Kete Asante, and Peter O. Nwosu claim: “Whereas culture may have the capacity to free us from the dictates of nature […] the merit and capacity of transcultural is to free us from the conventions and obsessions of culture itself” (2001, ix). Therefore, Schulze-Engler, from a literary studies perspective, suggests a change in our approach to culture, arguing that “transnational and transcultural connections have long since become the lived reality […] shaping modern liter-

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ature in ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ settings alike” (2000, 375 – 376). For Alastair Pennycook, the transcultural seeks to address the ways in which cultural forms move, change and are reused to fashion new identities in diverse contexts. This is not, therefore, a question merely of cultural movement but of take-up, appropriation, change and refashioning. (2007, 6)

Pennycook believes that ‘transcultural flows’ refer not merely to the spread of particular forms of culture across boundaries, but rather to the “processes of borrowing, blending, remaking and returning, to processes of alternative cultural production” (2007, 6). It is the very ‘process of borrowing and blending’ that is vital to the theory and practice of transcultural memory. The hermeneutics of the transcultural is grounded in the fluid character of our age as cross-cultural relations are increasingly inevitable all over the world. In light of these relations, this study aims to establish that by focusing on the social practice of transcultural memory, we are able to address not only the diversity of contemporary cultures and life-forms, but are ready to take into consideration the significance of ‘connective histories’ in the realm of memory fiction as an effective media of memory. Unlike a number of popular theories such as postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism or post/neo-Marxism, inter or multiculturalism, the transcultural approach to literature is relatively new (Schulze-Engler 2006b, 41– 53; Huggan 2006, 55 – 61). Yet, it does not mean that the theory of transculturality is devoid of history. The roots of the transcultural, in fact, can be traced back in almost every history of a nation, Western or non-Western. Before and after the Norman Conquest 1066 until 1200, for instance, there was no such thing as a unified English culture while England was constantly experiencing Icelandic and Viking, Latin and French, Germanic and Celtic social, cultural and linguistic influences (Carter and McRae 1997, 6). Similarly, despite having one of the oldest cultures and civilisations of the world, Indian culture has never displayed cultural uniformity in its long history due to centuries of foreign invasions and conquests determining its social fabric. Hence, transculturality purports cultural transcendence and fusions as fundamental to ancient or modern societies because cultures have always been in contact and in dialogue with each other. Transculturality, thus, ought not to be taken for a neologism in critical theory but should rather be seen as a more ‘pragmatic turn’ in the field of cultural and literary theory⁵ (Huggan2006, 56 – 57). This ‘turn’ is all the more crucial in

 Graham Huggan claims that the “transcultural turn” can be identified fairly easily by a number of dominant characteristics: “1. the recognition that ‘culture’ can no longer be contained, if it ever was contained, within discretely bounded units; 2. the tendency to see ‘difference’ as an

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“the global ecumene of modernity” (Hannerz1996, 44– 55), a landscape of discrepant globalised modernities, which calls for a transnational and transcultural understanding of cultural developments and organisations. That is why Ulf Hannerz describes social and cultural conditions of modernity by proclaiming:”[As] the civilization of modernity enters into contact with other cultures, changes and refractions result, so that one may see it alternatively as one increasingly internally diverse civilization or as multiple modernities” (1996, 44). Against the backdrop of multiple modernities, transcultural memory as a social practice can be defined as a kind of remembering that places memory in multiple temporal and territorial landscapes. However, I also treat it as a potent theoretical concept to elaborate on the diverse ways and forms of remembrance in literature. Hence, as a theory it helps me not only to think beyond the spheres of a particular culture, but more importantly offers to deviate from the more familiar practice of associating transculturality with colonial travels as established by Mary Louise Pratt in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992, 6). In fact, mobility of individuals or cultural products is not a mere consequence of colonialism and imperialism but actually a condition of modernity. This new condition of modernity stipulates a re-evaluation of all kinds of ‘purity’ concepts of culture, based on nationality or religion to assert cultural mixings at the micro and macro level. Therefore, the concept of transcultural memory contests traditional notions of cultural, national or religious identity. In discussing twentieth-century movement and migration, Edward W. Said reminds us: No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. (1994 [1993], 336)

James Clifford’s reading of movement and mobility under the title “The Pure Products Go Crazy” in his treatise on ‘the predicament of culture’ further articulates the dynamics of our transcultural era. Clifford states:

ontological principle that overrides, or perhaps better underscores, the specificity of cultural differences; 3. the emphasis on transnational and/or diasporic socio-political alliances and cultural formations, often global in scope, anti-imperialist in intent, and created or consolidated through the new media and other modern communication system; 4. the countervailing acknowledgement of a hierarchy of globalised modernities in the contemporary late-capitalist world order – an order in which obvious questions of unequal access to technology and the conspicuously inequitable distribution and ownership of resources are brought repeatedly to the fore” (2006, 56 – 57).

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This century has seen a drastic expansion of mobility, including tourism, migrant labour, immigration, urban sprawl. More and more people “dwell” with the help of mass transit, automobiles, airplanes. In cities on six continents foreign populations have come to stay – mixing in but often in partial, specific fashions. The “exotic” is uncannily close. Conversely, there seem no distant places left on the planet where the presence of “modern” products, media, and power cannot be felt. An older topography and experience of travel is exploded. One no longer leaves home confident of finding something new, another time or space. Difference is encountered in the adjoining neighbourhood, the familiar turns up at the end of the earth[…]”Cultural” difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and art is thrown in doubt. (1988, 13 – 14)

While Clifford interprets ‘the predicament of culture’ in terms of extensive cultural ‘collisions and commotion’ (see also Clifford 1991, 7– 8), the idea of the ‘transcultural predicament’ in the present context, which the theory of transcultural memory wrestles with, is indicative of today’s much more complex phenomena of cultural entanglements, rootless histories, and “intertwined roots and routes” (Clifford 1997, 4).⁶ Our virtually integrated world allows no country or culture to stay aloof from external or global influences. As “the entities we routinely call cultures are becoming more like subcultures within this wider entity” (Hannerz 1992, 218), it is possible that many of us are faced with the necessity to live with multiple identities to come to terms with our present time that is simultaneously “local and global” (Robertson1992, 164– 181). Anthony Giddens reminds us: Place has become phantasmagoric because the structures by means of which it is constituted are no longer locally organized. The local and the global, in other words, have been inextricably intertwined. Feelings of close attachments to or identification with places still persist. But these are themselves disembedded: they do not just express locally based practices and involvements but are shot through with much more distant influences. (1991 [1990], 108)

This is the reason why, when we lay emphasis on the social practice of transcultural memory, we are compelled to focus on contemporary “cultural complexity” (see Hannerz1992, Ch. 5, 126 – 169) in relation to the dialectics of ‘intertwined memories’ in the ‘global spread of modernity’. These ‘intertwined memories’ sig-

 Clifford argues that travel needs to be understood in the context of globalised modernity and not merely in the context of colonised conquest of the world. For him, travel emerges as an increasingly complex range of experiences: “practices of crossing and interaction that have troubled the localism of many common sense assumptions about culture and translation […] Dwelling was understood to be the local ground of collective life, travel a supplement; roots always precede routes” (Clifford 1997, 3).

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nify global cultural forms, which are a unique mixture of different countries and cultures, ethnic and communal bonding, and Western and non-Western territories and histories. The concept of transcultural memory engages with the theory of multiple modernities to unfold the consequences of modernity in Western or non-Western contexts, to situate modernity in a world of enormous cultural intermingling, and lastly, to demonstrate constant cultural metamorphoses on the local and global level (Featherstone 1995, 169 – 187). Since I treat both the theory and the social practice of transcultural memory in our contemporary times as a tool for bringing out the significance of ‘intertwined memories’ in the medium of the memory novel, I choose to focus on the reality of evolving cultural trajectories in the age of worldwide cultural contacts within the domain of fiction. Thus, reality and fiction, as well as text and practice, are likely to converge and coalesce in this study. As the debate of globalised modernity is indispensable to the theoretical ramifications of transcultural memory, I believe, it is important to keep in view its dual significance: first, the all-pervasive ‘modern’ as a critique of the present; second, the ‘globalisation of modernity’ as a reconfiguration of past, present and future. In the face of cultural transfigurations during which new social realities are continuously coming to the forefront, we should not imagine transcultural phenomena as a threat to pure autochthonous cultural roots, but rather as the very process and act of cultural development and evolution. The focus on transcultural processes urges us to rethink traditional conceptions of social truths across national and geographical boundaries. Every age creates its own reality in light of current social structures (see Berger and Luckmann 1966). In the present age of widespread travel and translation (Spivak 1999, 17– 30), movement, mobility and cross-cultural relations through varied mediascapes are a response to the demands of globalised modernity and to the phenomena of rapid cultural reproductions. Thus, the social practice of transcultural memory, as particularly represented in memory narratives, leads us to speculate on the various facets of our “runaway world” (see Giddens 2002). When we establish that transcultural memories tend to have a global character as they can exist within individual communities or groups, countries or continents around the world, we must not overlook the significance of transnational communities and their memories, which possess manifold links to their homelands and thereby include a variety of cross-border experiences in their memories as well. Transnational processes can be seen as an integral part of the broader phenomenon of globalisation, marked by the demise of the nation-state and the growth of cosmopolitan cities. Out of six close readings in this study, all of which are based on novels about political and private memories,

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the phenomenon of transnationalism surfaces in some texts as one of the most prominent thematic dimensions. In the works of Ghose, Gupta and Jhabvala about private memories, a refutation of nationalism and the nation-state on the one hand, and preoccupation with transnationalism on the other, serves as a subtext to the main text, which consists of stories of transmigrants, cosmopolitans, or local individuals with a global horizon. However, novels by Sidhwa, Rushdie and Ghosh about political memories also depict a process of ethnic and cultural interaction, cutting across national and geographical borders. Thus, novels of both private and political memories show a certain preoccupation with transnational processes within the narrative frame. In theorising the practice of transcultural memory, the discourse of transnationalism is referred to in order to contest the parameters of national, political and cultural borders in today’s “deterritorialized age” (Basch et al. 1994; Appadurai1991, 191– 210), for memories are not determined by local or national frameworks alone, but rather are globally constructed as people, no longer nationbound, trespass national boundaries all the time as a result of global change in the political and cultural spheres. However, Anthony D. Smith argues that ‘a global culture’ in a transnational scenario cannot contain memories since it is not connected to any specific time and space. While negotiating the rise of transnational cultures with reference to memory and identity in his essay “Towards a Global Culture?”, Smith infers: Unlike national cultures, a global culture is essentially memoryless. When the ‘nation’ can be constructed so as to draw upon and revive latent popular experiences and needs, a ‘global culture’ answers to no living needs, no identity-in-the-making. It has to be painfully put together, artificially, out of the many existing folk and national identities into which humanity has been so long divided. There are no ‘world memories’ that can be used to unite humanity; the most global experiences to date – colonialism and the World Wars – can only serve to remind us of our historic cleavages […] The central difficulty in any project to construct a global identity and hence a global culture, is that collective identity, like imagery and culture, is always historically specific because it is based on shared memories and a sense of continuity between generations. (1990, 179 – 180; emphasis in the original)

It is a complete misconception to believe that a global culture is stripped of memory or that people having a global culture are timeless entities to whom memory is an alien concept. To deem transnational relations or a global culture – as the most essential strand/s of transcultural memory – devoid of memory, is to read them in a rather narrow manner. In reality, the global forms of modernity have opened people to diverse cultural connections that originate from diverse historical settings and backgrounds. In the light of this observation, it is justified to say that ‘global memories’ only exist in their various localised forms as Daniel

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Levy and Natan Sznaider postulate in response to Smith’s thesis (2002, 88) and in their treatment of the Holocaust memory as a “paradigmatic case for the relation of memory and modernity” (2002, 93). Also, Benjamin Schmidt acknowledges the significance of global memories of ‘memorable matters’ in far-flung places by charting the ways in which geography has created them (2013, 223 – 252). We may interpret transnational phenomena as a new analytical framework for understanding the social practice of transcultural remembering. In effect, transnational individuals and communities provide valuable insights into transcultural remembering vis-à-vis individual and collective memories, and local and global recollections. Aihwa Ong observes: Trans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something. Besides suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital, transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour and imagination that are incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capital. (1999, 4)

Just as the realities of the ‘local, transnational and global’ phenomena are significant to the individual and collective understanding of the mutual, shared past, so too are the simultaneity of these realities in the practice of transcultural memory. The simultaneity of these very realities distinguishes and differentiates transcultural memory from the domain of cultural memory where nation tends to surface as a major focus. In this way, it moves forward from the framework of any ‘one particular culture, ethnicity or territory’ to situate itself within many cultures, ethnicities or territories, and above all to foreground the evolution of contemporary social systems. Transcultural memory is not only more multivalent than cultural memory, but is also a vivid reflection of our changing relationship to time and space especially when “speed is a defining feature of modernity” (Andersen2007, 32).

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2.3 Rethinking memory and modernity/modernities The challenge to modernity comes in redefining the signifying relation to a disjunctive “present”: staging “the past” as symbol, myth, memory, history, the ancestral – but a past whose iterative value as a sign reinscribes the “lessons of the past” into the very textuality of the present that determines both the identification with, and the interrogation of, modernity: what is the “we” that defines the prerogative of my present? (Bhabha 1991, 219) Modern historicity hinges upon both a fundamental rupture between past, present, and future – as distinct temporal planes – and their relinking along a singular line that allows for continuity. (Trouillot 2003, 44)

According to Anthony Giddens, “‘[M]odernity’ refers to modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. This associates modernity with a time period and with an initial geographical location, but for the moment leaves its major characteristics safely stowed away in a black box (1991 [1990], 1). Before I address the question as to what modernity is and which charachtersitsics of modernity are believed to be concealed in ‘a black box,’ let us first examine the connection between memory and modernity. The connection between memory and modernity has been debated in a considerable number of monographs such as in Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal collection of essays Future Past: On the Semantic of Historical Time (2004 [1979]), Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (2013 [1975]), Kevin D. Murphy’s Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (2000), and most particularly in Matt K. Matsuda’s The Memory of the Modern (1996). A preoccupation with nineteenth-century France as a place of revolutions, affecting the entire European continent and its rapture with the past, is noticeable in Peter Fritzsche’s Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (2004) which dramatises the years 1789 – 1815 as engendering the metaphor of modernity; a similar engagement with the memory crisis of “the long nineteenth century” in the wake of modernity after the French Revolution is again conspicuous in Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993) which illustrates this point with the help of literary and psychological texts. The most common feature in

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all these diverse monographs is not merely placing memory and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth century as the ages of political, economic and cultural revolutions and upheavals, but associating Western ‘space’ (particularly in the works of Murphy and Matsuda) with a ‘singular’ notion of modernity. Thus, the ‘cosmopolitan turn’, recently proposed by Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande as being indicative of diverse forms of modernity, is entirely absent (2010, 409 – 443). In the same vein, a significant number of anthologies such as Negotiating Culture: Moving, Mixing and Memory in Contemporary Europe (Modernity and Belonging) (2006), edited by Reginald Byron and Ullrich Kockel, and The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (2001), edited by Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout, tend to limit the phenomenon and notion of modernity to a specific region, namely Europe as the dominant ‘centre’, without acknowledging the possibility of the spread of modernity throughout its ‘peripheries’ (see also Schwarz and Radstone 2010, 41– 174). These works are, indeed, vital in generating an exciting discourse of modernity within the field of memory studies, but a large majority of them focuses too heavily on the national framework, in particular the treatise of Matsuda as he claims: “A truly historical project must be attentive to the ways in which ‘memory’ is not a generic term of analysis, but itself an object appropriated and politicized. Or, equally nationalized…” (1996, 6). Further, none of the works acknowledges the potential of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000a, 2006; Therborn, 1995) with the aim of relocating modernity beyond Western history and culture. In addition, Fussell and Matsuda never choose to reframe modernity and its advent beyond the major phases of Western history. However, in order to widen the horizon of the memory and modernity debate, some treatises aim to challenge the national parameters of modernity by highlighting the transnational dimension of the modern phenomenon such as Scott McQuire’s Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (1998) which highlights “the emergence of the transnational global flows” (1998, 6) in its inquiry about memory and modernity, or Russell J.A. Kilbourn’s Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (2010), which seeks to shed light on the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. In their seminal introduction to the collection of essays Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (2013), titled “On the Early Modernity of Modern Memory,” editors Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers underline ‘hybridity and diversity’ as a significant characteristic of modern memory. They rightly suggest that if we wish to understand both modern and pre-modern memory in Europe and beyond, we need “an alternative way to think about the history of memory,

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not as unchanging or linear, but as a cumulative and fluid process, in which new ways of engaging with the past constantly emerge and often end up in coexistence with older practices” (2013, 23). By moving forward from the Eurocentric perception of modernity and memory, my aim is to show that, amid global flows, modernity does not have a fixed location anymore and there is no longer an unbridgeable chasm between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ because in reality ‘the Rest’ has always been a part of the West and vice versa (Featherstone 1995, 10). David Washbrook’s analysis of the ‘intimations of modernity in South Asia’ particularly addresses the paradox of modernity to demonstrate the problematic of comprehending modernity as a singular, Western phenomenon (2009, 125 – 148). While celebrated sociologists like Max Weber set forth a specific European model of modernity that they had been familiar with (1973, 340 – 343), the contemporary interconnectedness of the world naturally requires a redefinition of the Weberian school’s distinction between the ‘West and the Rest’ especially when modernity ‘unbound’ is travelling as fast as people and their cultures across national and cultural borders. While deconstructing Western modernity, Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, therefore, argue that several theories of modernity have “drawn on a very narrow range of national experiences (e. g. England/Britain in the economic realm, France in the political domain and Prussia/Germany in the field of bureaucracy), which are presumed to be universally valid or, at least, a model to be replicated in other regions of the globe” (2010, 412). Since globalisation and modernity have already demystified the myth of the West as the global ‘centre’ by actually “Provincializing Europe” (see Chakrabarty 2000, 3 – 26), we tend to encounter the world not in terms of rigid binaries, but in terms of “floating territories” (2000, 1– 7), to use a phrase from Michael Cronin. The transcultural view of today’s world, in fact, makes us reckon with the idea of multiple modernities, which traces processes of modernity in cultures outside the Western world and maps out the ways in which every culture undergoes its own process of modernity (Chatterjee 1997).The age of globalisation has further confirmed that there is no uniform modernity, which could convincingly manifest current cultural reconfigurations. For this reason, it is debatable if modernity in the singular (Jameson2002), or the ‘Western conception of modernity,’ can accurately and fully describe the complexity and diversity of the world today, which bears testimony to the phenomena of ‘entangled histories’ and ‘intertwined memories’. The very stress on the spread of memories over multiple cultural landscapes is, indeed, a significant dimension of modern memory, which is missing in the fundamental works of memory and modernity by Fussell, Winter, Terdiman or Matsuda, for example. In discussing the Weberian topography of the ‘West and the Rest,’ Schulze-Engler in his study of the New Literatures in English suggests ‘a shared

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world of modernity’ so that we are able to examine the influence of globalised modernity on Western and non-Western societies alike: If it is true that modernity has been globalized, it is also true that it can no longer be understood from any one location. Not only its institutions have become disseminated throughout the world, but its meaning has also become, if not dispersed, at least decentred, and the only productive way of approaching an adequate understanding of modernity in the contemporary world would seem to be one of initiating dialogue between the various experiences of local modernity. There is more than enough evidence that this dialogue among the shared worlds of modernity began a long time ago. (forthcoming)

In order to refute the very idea of associating ‘modernity’ with the ‘West’, a number of terms dealing with modernity have emerged in the last years. Sociological theories of “reflexive modernization” (see Beck et al. 1994), of “high,” “late” or “radicalised modernity” (see Giddens 1991, 10 – 34 and also Giddens 1991 [1990], 50) and of “First and Second modernity” (see Beck 1997, 333 – 381) contest more established notions of modernity as a stable “Enlightenment project” (see Habermas, 1992 [1987]).⁷ The emergence and the phenomenon of the globalisation of modernity are treated in this study as a comparative framework for establishing the significance of transcultural memory in our contemporary world. In this regard, Marshall Berman’s observations about modern environments are, indeed, noteworthy. Berman maintains: Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. (1998, 15)

While Berman invites our attention to the ‘paradoxical unity of modernity’, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar opts for “alternative modernities” to make us “recognize and problematize the unavoidable dialectic of convergence and divergence” (2001, 17) in the recent cultural scenario. Because modernity is becoming increasingly “liquid and ambivalent” (Bauman2000), Shmuel N. Eisenstadt posits that the idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the present world and to explain the history of modernity is to see it “as a story of continual continuation and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural pro Philosophers like Jürgen Habermas have expressed disillusionment even with the Western Enlightenment as a paradigm of modernity while declaring it an unfinished project. For Habermas, the defects of Enlightenment can only be made good by further enlightenment (Habermas 1992 [1987]).

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grammes” (2000a, 1– 29). According to Eisenstadt, one of the most important implications of the term ‘multiple modernities’ is that modernity and Westernization are not identical: The undeniable trend at the end of the twentieth century is the growing diversification of the understanding of modernity, of the basic cultural agendas of different modern societies – far beyond the homogenic and hegemonic visions of modernity prevalent in the 1950s. […] All these developments of multiple modernities, or multiple interactions of modernity – and, above all, to attempts at ‘de-Westernisation,’ depriving the West of its monopoly on Modernity. (2000, 24)

While negotiating transcultural memory, it is interesting to trace the formation of modernities as conceptualised by Eisenstadt with reference to the phenomenon of globalisation (see also Eisenstadt 2000b). This is the reality I seek to examine in the selected fiction in my study. I highlight how the breakdown of colonial rule and legitimisation of traditional political structures in the South Asian region have given way to a surge of modernity that might be similar to Western institutions, but are completely different from Western processes of modernity. For example, the key dimensions of modernity in the subcontinent may turn out to be the same as in any other region. Nevertheless, the outcome of modernity is bound to have its own dynamics against a distinct religious, historical, cultural and political backdrop. In other words, there is no way of being ‘not modern’, but only ‘other ways’ of being modern. These ‘other ways’ of being modern are, in fact, reflected in the transcultural memories of the protagonists/narrators in the selected novels: these memories capture the advent of the modern in the political, social and cultural domains from an individual perspective but also within the respective communities, which are at the crossroads of past and present. These ‘other ways’ are conspicuously absent in the present discourse of memory and modernity. In fact, “the four paradoxes of modernization” (1992, 33 – 40), differentiation, rationalisation, individualisation and domestication, proclaimed by Dutch sociologists Hans van der Loo and Willem van Reijen, are shaped and reshaped in every culture according to its socio-political exegeses. Hence, the theory and concept of transcultural memory, rooted in more than one form of modernity (Wittrock2000, 31– 60), gives us a chance to avoid cultural relativism, which is clearly reflected within the realm of fiction. Furthermore, it gives us the opportunity to examine the memory of changing patterns of cultures in our contemporary times as fictionalised in the framework of the novel from a variety of angles. Consequently, ‘intertwined memories’ in fiction embody the very character of our changing world, demanding from us to redefine both ‘the art of memory’ and ‘memory cultures’ in the realm of literature.

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The idea of transcultural memory further postulates, however, that in the age of globalised modernity two approaches to memory need to be negotiated; first, the new ways of reading the affinity between past and present from the perspective of globalised modernity in cultural theory, and, second, the focus on the global and local construction of memories, which are hitherto never envisaged in the medium of memory, namely the novel. The following paragraphs discuss these two approaches in detail. First, in our fast changing times, ironically, the present is as rapidly slipping into the past as the past into the present. As Simon During suggests, “We live in a society in which the present is said to dominate the past to an unprecedented degree, and yet in which the past is everywhere” (2005, 55). In such a state of affairs, the disassociation between past and present is increasingly reduced. However, Anthony Giddens and Svetlana Boym provide some of the strongest arguments for the belief that the past is altered as a result of changes in the experience of time. Giddens argues that for modern societies, “[R]eflexive self-regulation is manifested as history” – a history which is the self-aware “maintenance of sociality in all its forms, in a modernity that has achieved a wholly new organization of space and time” (1994, 203). For Boym, nostalgia for the past is “a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.” Thus, it is a “result of a new understanding of time and space” (2007, 7– 18). Further, nostalgia is “not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it… [and] is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well” (Boym 2007, 8). While Giddens and Boym point to a renewed comprehension of the past in the face of modernity, Appadurai seeks to suggest that modernity does not allow us to return to the past out of sheer nostalgia since the past is paradoxically pervading the present as much as the present is permeating the past in quick successions. By using the example of American immigrants, he draws our attention to this phenomenon as follows: The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued… [P]ostindustrial cultural productions have entered a postnostalgic phase. (Appadurai 1996, 30 – 31)

Whereas Fritzsche laments the disjuncture of the past after the French Revolution, which created exiles and strangers who were “stranded in the present, and as a result came to read contemporary history as dispossession” (2004, 56), Appadurai chooses not to elaborate on the melancholy of memory in the present. Instead, he emphasises that, in the current ‘postnostalgic phase’ (Boym 2001), the past acquires a special emotional, social and political reso-

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nance as it is not only closely bound up with the myriad facets of the present, but is continuously flowing into it. I would like to add that the changing texture of the present offers a possibility to scrutinise our affinity with the past from a transnational and translocal perspective. In contrast to Terdiman’s treatment of nineteenth-century memory which betrays a fear of a memory crisis as a result of breaking from the past, such a perspective understands the present as generating a space of modern memory. In this context, the past is not “a foreign country” (Lowenthal 1985)⁸ as it is inextricably intertwined with the present and the future. This is particularly the case if the past has been experienced by the carriers or inheritors of memory in more than one culture and country. As deterritorialisation has already ‘unbound cultures’ as well as nations, “travelling cultures” (see Clifford 1992, 96 – 116 and Clifford 1997, 17– 46) with their flickering images and products in media, and people, with their distinct cultural practices whether at home or abroad, are more likely to recollect from a broader temporal and spatial horizon. Thus, individual or collective memories are inclined to have a global rather than merely a ‘local or indigenous’ framework. Since novelists from the Indian subcontinent are confronted with a cultural fabric in constant flux, they feel a compulsion as creative artists and social critics not only to restore a wide-ranging variety of the past as repositories of transcultural memory in their novels, or to come to terms with the multidimensional present, but to picture “hybridity, impurity, intermingling […] Mélange […] hotchpotch” in the wake of “how newness enters the world” (Rushdie 1991, 394), for the arrival of newness defines current acts of cultural translations (Clifford 1998, 679 – 694). My usage of transcultural memory attempts to enunciate how the individual disputes traditional history and encounters modernity in memory cultures from the perspective of past and present, and ‘native and foreign’ cultural belongings. In this way, the debate surrounding modernity as ‘newness’ is vital to our understanding of transcultural memory and imagination in the present times. Second, today’s cultural scene confirms to us that memories are locally as well as globally constructed, as mentioned before, which implies that they are not limited to a group or a community in our contemporary world, but rather tangentially connect various continents, countries, cultures and peoples in the mental maps of the rememberers. These memories also reflect a change in our perception of time and space in the age of globalised modernity where the  David Lowenthal seems more concerned with the paradoxical relationship between past and present as he claims: “It is no longer the presence of the past that speaks to us, but its pastness […] The more it is appreciated for its own sake, the less real or relevant it becomes” (Lowenthal 1985, xvii).

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gap between time and space is increasingly exacerbating. This notion is described by Koselleck as the gap between the space of experience and horizon of expectation in his seminal essay “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity” (2004 [1979], 9 – 25). Furthermore, the spread of globalised modernity has unfurled a scenario in which, as Appadurai has already warned, memory practice on the individual or collective level is not merely about nostalgia, such as the Indians’ nostalgia for united India. Instead, such a practice reflects the dynamics of ‘inherited’ and ‘imagined’ memories, that is, memories of the old and the new generation in India and Pakistan: the former are tied to physical bodies, and thus, are organic memories, whereas the latter are artificial memories, represented by (new) media. Hence, the transcultural memory of the old and new generation draws upon the new means of understanding ‘connective cultures and histories’, impelling them to reconcile with plural cultural belongings despite being confronted with ‘divided’ territories and cultural heritage. Moreover, when today’s individuals and their communities, whether at home or abroad, are at the cross-roads of more than one cultural belonging, the social practice of transcultural remembering tends to contain varied individual and collective social truths. Such phenomena draws our attention to the ways in which memory today, with its global character, has a new role to play in the midst of cultural ‘disjunctions and difference’. Just as imagination has become a social practice and has acquired a new dimension in the ethno-, techno-, finance-, media- and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1996, 31– 33), so too has memory or memory literature, which often implies a critique of our increasingly transcultural world. Keeping these two approaches towards memorisation in view, it is justified to ascertain that today we cannot escape from the transcultural reality in the domain of cultural memory discourse because culture, like memory, tends to transcend boundaries due to the fact that clear-cut boundaries between cultures are hard to maintain in today’s global mélange. In the practice of transcultural memories, today’s culture seeks a common space, which is an open, heterogeneous space like the space of globalisation. This space of heterogeneity (Game 1995, 196)⁹ invites us to consider that the work of transcultural memory is neither

 For more insight into this perspective on memory, see Ann Game, “Time, Space, Memory with Reference to Bachelard.” Game points to a ‘non-exceptional’ mode of counter-knowledge for the human sciences with sources in Gaston Bachelard and the poetics of the imagination. Drawing on Bachelard’s poetics of space, she argues for a sort of knowledge that passes through, not the mediation and publicity of the Kantian categories, but instead through the immediacy and privacy of memory traces. While exploring memory motifs in Proust and Bergson, she contends that “memory in Proust is spatial, but that this space far from being the abstract given space of metaphysics, is qualitative and heterogeneous” (1995, 196).

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purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined, but a space of contestation as well as reconciliation in which individuals seek to annex the global into their own practice of the modern.

2.4 Towards a theory of transcultural memory The most prominent and useful trait of the theory of transcultural memory is that it opens up new space from which to think about the past. Thus, it permits us to re-read homogenised histories that construct belongings as fixed, and essentialise cultural, ethnic, national, religious or racial differences. In fact, inherent in the theory of transculturality is the reality of contemporary cultural fusions, which prevents one from imagining the world into the binaries of a ‘centre’ and a ‘periphery’ or of ‘colonialists’ and ‘anti-colonialists’. In this way, it invites us to ‘rethink Eurocentrism’ since the Eurocentric approach (Shohat and Stam 1994, 2)seems to map the world in a cartography that centralises modernity as the ultimate European heritage. The new phenomenon of globalisation of modernity testifies to the spread of modernity all over the globe and also makes us witness how Europe’s ‘others’ undergo their distinct experience of modernity in the wake of travel and migration and information and digital technology. The theory of transcultural memory is, therefore, placed against the backdrop of globalised modernity/modernities to read cultural plurality in the face of a borderless world, a world in which “territories cannot really contain cultures” (Hannerz 1996, 8), and to ultimately claim that modernity in the plural illustrates the transcultural dynamics of our era. This is the current state of cultures in relation to the practice of remembering which I seek to address in my close readings chapters. I aim to look at the fictional representation of cultural encounters through memory practices in the medium of the novel as a potent mnemonic instrument. Hence, not only do I develop a theory of transcultural memory in light of recent sociological, literary and cultural theories, but I use it as a methodology to read South Asian Anglophone memory novels. I aim to demonstrate that as the central characters in the selected novels by Rushdie, Sidhwa, Ghosh, Gupta, Ghose and Jhabvala recollect the past, set in different countries and continents, and cultures and histories, their practice of memory serves as a mode of representing worldwide cultural mélange and mixing, which Pennycook refers to as processes of “borrowing, blending” (2007, 6). With regard to this observation, transcultural memory, both as a theoretical and methodological instrument, helps us see the present-day cultural reconfigurations across fixed national borders.

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The selected memory novels offer different methods of reading cultural histories in the age of globalised modernity as the fictional characters hover in the in-between spaces of past, present and future. Further, these novels narrate ‘intertwined memories’, that is ‘shared memories’ (see Zelizer 1995, 214),¹⁰ as they show a journey of fictional characters from the ‘native or local’ cultural belongings to an increasingly transcultural awareness. It is because of such an awareness that a diachronic itinerary through memory practices, which I regard as a cultural shift – a change in cultural perceptions and preoccupations, can be traced in these novels. In this way, these novels initiate a new discourse on culture, which invite the reader to rethink the ideas of pure culture, localism and nationalism. Thus, these novels carry the inscriptions of their characters’ complex perspectives – perspectives that are simultaneously shaped by transcultural memory and imagination. To sum up, by drawing upon the transition from the first (Eurocentric) modernity to second (globalised) modernity, the theory of transcultural memory highlights alternative methods of approaching shared memories along non-Western borders, namely South Asia, either in relation to the West or to its multiple ethnicities. Also, the theory of transcultural memory aims to show not only a change of attitude towards the past, but also the impact of modern technological and scientific revolutions worldwide on the ways of remembering the past. Since the borders of memory and culture are increasingly porous in the face of such cultural encounters and transformations, transcultural memory demonstrates the connection between memory and modernity from a broad angle. The close reading chapters in the second part addresses this connection within the framework of the Indo-English novel in order to show how transcultural memory in fiction presents a new perception of memory and modernity in the global age.

 Barbie Zelizer stressed “the shared dimension of remembering” back in 1995 (see Zelizer 1995, 214).

3 Literature and Transcultural Memory 3.1 Rethinking memory and literature The connection between memory and literature (e. g. see van Grop and Musarrat Schroeder 2000; Vervliet and Estor 2000; Middleton and Woods 2000; Mageo 2001, 11– 33; and also Nalbantian 2003)is increasingly discussed as the field of memory studies is growing in different directions. In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (2010), the editors Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning have devoted a section to “Literature and Cultural Memory” in which Renate Lachmann discusses ‘mnemonic and intertextual aspects of literature’; Herbert Grabes seeks a connection between ‘cultural memory and the literary canon’ and Max Saunders between ‘life-writing, cultural memory and literary studies’; Birgit Neumann engages with ‘the literary representation of memory’; and last but not least, Ann Rigney focuses on ‘the dynamics of remembrance’ by examining ‘texts between monumentality and morphing’ (Erll and Nünning2010, 301– 356). All of these approaches confirm not only the fact that there is a solid connection between memory and literature, but also that ‘memory in literature’ can be interpreted and approached from a variety of perspectives and angles (see also Erll and Nünning 2005, 265 – 298). Drawing upon different literary contexts, Erll and Nünning, in their essay “Concepts and Methods for the Study of Literature and/as Cultural Memory,” have already demonstrated and summarised the manifold relationship between literature and memory. Based on work done in literary studies, they emphasise three concepts that can describe the relationship between literature and memory: “These basic concepts are 1) the memory of literature, 2) memory in literature and 3) literature as a medium of collective memory” (Erll and Nünning 2006, 13). Whereas the memory of literature signifies that individual literary texts are a memory of previous texts and extends itself to the idea of intertexuality, memory in literature refers to the ‘staging of memory’ in different literary genres such as the Bildungsroman, the adventure novel, the autobiography, the epic, and the travelogue, to name but a few. In her book Memory in Culture (2011 [2005]), Erll traces yet another way of addressing literature as a medium of cultural memory by highlighting three central intersections between literature and memory. These are, first, condensation, which refers to “the creation and transmission of ideas about the past”; second, narration as a “ubiquitous structure of creating meaning”; and, third, the use of genres “as culturally available formats to represent past events and experience” (Erll 2011 [2005], 145). These intersections are not only an interesting way of looking at literature as a mediator of memory,

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but, more importantly, of understanding how the transmission of ideas about the past, narrative structures and the use of different genres, as Erll argues, invite us to grasp memory in the domain of fiction as ‘giving meaning to our pasts’. In their introduction to the European Journal of English Studies (2006), titled “Literature and the Production of Memory,” Erll and Ann Rigney address literature as a ‘medium of remembrance’, as ‘an object of remembrance’, and as a ‘mimesis’ of memory (2006, 111– 115). (It is their notion of ‘mimesis of memory’ to which I will come back in the following paragraphs.) Thus, it is clear that the multipurpose nature of literature as cultural memory is too wide-ranging to be encompassed by one analytical framework. In order to seek a connection between literature and transcultural memory, I choose to look at literature, first, as a mediator between oral and written histories in the form of stories, which are transmitted from generation to generation in the form of ‘transgenerational’ memory¹; and, second, thinking along the lines of Erll and Rigney, I look at literature as producing transcultural memory, thereby establishing ‘how societies remember’ (Connerton 1989) in relation to a heterogeneous cultural ethos ‘within’ a society as well as ‘outside’ of it, as is the case in India. These two notions are going to be developed in the following with examples from South Asian Anglophone literature: First, literature provides literary artists ample room to remember in ‘the frames of fiction’, say novels and stories, what the older generations have experienced and what they aim to hand over to the new generation in the form of stories that are absent from historical archives. Attia Hosain’s Bildungsroman Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) recollects the pre-partition domestic spheres of aristocratic, Urdu-speaking, Indian Muslim households with a special focus on women behind the veil (or women in the purdah quarters of their houses as segregated from male members of the family), social prejudice against women, as well as women who are bound to the tradition of arranged marriage and who turn out to be victims as well as rebels of strict gender hierarchies. These stories of Muslim households might be heard from a member of the older generation who witnessed the customs and traditions of upper-class Muslims in united India, particularly in the city of Lucknow. Alternately, a literary text such as this can evoke memories of that historical period and convey insights into the social system of that time; in short, it can ‘invent’ memories of that bygone era. Hence, literature connects us to the past by making us take part in the  It is especially true as the tradition of storytelling has been central to the production of literature as transcultural memory in Indian literary history since time immemorial with the two oldest Hindu religious epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, written in the form of stories highlighting the eternal war between good and evil (with good ultimately defeating evil).

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lives of fictional characters coming from a certain historical epoch. Not only do we cross temporal borders through memory, but we also undergo the experience of reliving the Indian Muslims’ ethos that got either lost or scattered after the partition and that the advent of modernity in the wake of the digital revolution in South Asia has transformed radically. For instance, purdah quarters are no longer a part of upper-class Muslim households in India or Pakistan today. Second, literature is vital in producing and constructing (trans)cultural memory, which Erll and Rigney term as ‘the mimesis of memory’. A mere glance at the novels produced during both pre-and post-partition India immediately reveals the role literature has in ‘the making of memory.’ For example, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975) not only recollects colonial India and independent, modern India, but also ‘produces’ memory of those hidden encounters that have escaped common memory or history, that is, the sexual, forbidden encounters between the Indians and the British. The affair between an Indian prince and the discontent wife of a British officer in colonial India is interestingly set parallel to the British narrator of the novel and her affair with her married landlord in independent India. By crossing temporal, geographical and cultural borders, Jhabvala’s novel shows how different memories, spreading over two distant countries and cultures, can ‘converge and coalesce’ into a single site of memory (see Rigney 2005). Rethinking the connection between literature and transcultural memory demonstrates that not only South Asian Anglophone literatures but, even more broadly, the New English Literatures also have their distinct art of representing and addressing memory: Asian British or Black British literature documents cross-border memories mostly in the Bildungsroman such as Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996) or Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996), just as the Asian American novel does, for example, in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989) or Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003). While looking at the portrayal of different cultural, historical and ethnic overlapping in the examples given, the reader will notice that South Asian memory literature either represents ‘transgenerational’ memory, or plays a role in ‘producing memories’ (Erll 2011b, 3) in the wake of modernity. In short, it is with the tool of transcultural memory that writers are able to challenge the sacrosanct borders of ‘culture’, ‘social norms’ and ‘ethnicities’ as is the case in Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, as well as the boundaries of time and space as is the case in Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust; thus, attributing this literature a quality of ‘world literature’ or ‘global literature’ that deals with memory and its transmission and production as an ongoing process.

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3.2 The ‘novel of memory’ and East-West encounters Keeping in mind ‘the global turn’ in memory studies, this chapter redefines the category of ‘memory novel’ in order to introduce not only different ways of reading it, but also to show how a critical analysis of the twin concepts of ‘memory of literature’ and ‘memory in literature’, mentioned above, reveal Asian and Western overlapping in terms of culture and history through memory practices as well as narrative techniques and patterns. The main focus in the following is how the Indo-English novel as ‘memory of literature’ extends itself to the techniques of the Western memory novel, and deals with ‘memory in literature’ as ‘plural’ and ‘liquid’. It is highlighted that ‘the global turn’ in memory studies has not revolutionised the genre of the memory novel, but also challenges it with new concepts such as the transcultural and transnational. A number of recent treatises (Fussell 2013 [1975]; Antze and Lambek 1996)interpret the memory novel solely in relation to the European wars (Erll 2003) to commemorate the heartrending experiences of the victims of genocide and, in particular, the Holocaust, showing the ‘connectivity of (European) memory’, which is also a major focus of this study but with a crucial difference. Since most of the recent studies about memory novels have a strong European focus, just as the theory of cultural memory, as mentioned before, I set out to negotiate the theme of East-West encounters amid “global flows” (Appadurai 1996, 29) in my selection of memory novels. My aim is not to undermine the significance of studying memory in relation to traumatic pasts, but more importantly to bring out the connection between Europe and its ‘Others’, following Warburg’s perception of Europe as a ‘memory atlas’ and showing its connection with Asia. These connections are examined, however, not only on the thematic level, namely, on the level of reading parallel traumatic pasts, but also on the level of literary traditions, namely, how the non-European memory novel draws upon the narrative techniques of European writers. Hence, by deviating from a more prevailing approach in the field of memory studies and memory literature, I discuss the Indo-English novels of memory in order to map out a new odyssey of remembrance about interrelated and conflicting cultural histories, ultimately cutting across fixed national borders in the present age through the filter of memory. For example, the memory narratives selected in this study demonstrate a struggle with the memory of personal and collective upheavals such as the Imperial atrocities, the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two nation-states in 1947, the consequent displacement of six million people, and the genocide of three million Hindus and Muslims during the partition riots. At the same time, these narratives reflect not only new mindsets, but also reveal how globalisation and digital technology shape and construct Pakistani and Indian perceptions of a mutual past; consequently, how they rene-

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gotiate transcultural memory in the face of the media boom today, creating solid means of communicating information and data worldwide among different peoples and cultures. While looking at the Indo-English novel in relation to the Western memory novel, we notice a fine intertwining of the notions of ‘memory of literature’ and ‘memory in literature’. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for example, mirrors Marcel Proust’s technique of representing memory as the sum total of existence (see Proust 1934 [1922]) whereas Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines refracts Joseph Conrad’s treatment of past and present as impressions on the writer’s imagination (Conrad 1986 [1916]). In Zulfikar Ghose’s novel The Triple Mirror of the Self, memory shapes the psyche of the protagonist just as it does for James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1969 [1916]). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novels Heat and Dust and Shards of Memory vividly reflect the Joycean preoccupation with “silence, exile and cunning” (Gooneratne 1983) as Jhabvala has claimed herself. Yet another Indian novelist, Sunetra Gupta, is declared by all her critics a “true heir to Virginia Woolf” (Kirkusreviews.com 2010). Her novels Memories of Rain and Moonlight in the Marzipan are reminiscent of Woolf’s dexterous rendition of the stream-of-consciousness and flashback techniques in Mrs Dalloway (2007 [1925]) and To the Lighthouse (1992 [1927]). While the characters in Woolf are more immersed in the problems of a particular culture, Gupta’s characters are more entangled in cross-border and cross-cultural issues. Lastly, Sidhwa’s Cracking India represents the child and its past, amid the multicultural city of Lahore, after the fashion of Charles Dickens’ art of inventing the child protagonist in Oliver Twist (1992 [1838]) and Great Expectations (1992 [1861]). The selected novelists in this project, thus, employ the techniques of various well-known Western writers in their own distinct way, representing East-West encounters in memory fiction from the angle of our new times that hold testimony to a borderless and more fluid world (Ohmae 1990, 180). Examples of East-West encounters surely abound in the novels about colonial India such as in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1993 [1901]) or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1961 [1924]), but in the present world these encounters have entered a different phase, which require a different theory and methodology to fully comprehend their ramifications. While looking at the Indo-English novel as ‘memory of literature’, it is a misconception to pigeonhole subcontinental writing in English strictly in terms of an Eastern or a Western canon. Instead, we need to examine the Indo-English novel as a mixture of Eastern and Western literary traditions, which actually renders it a medium of transcultural memory. Richard Cronin argues:

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The paradox of the English Indian novel is that it is the only kind of Indian novel that there is, and that it is scarcely Indian at all […] English Indian novels have more in common with each other than with novels set in India written in any of India’s native languages. (1989, 5)

Cronin is justified in claiming that Indian writing (or in the present context Pakistani writing) in English enjoys more similarities with each other by virtue of its language and literary techniques than with novels written about India in any of its vernaculars. However, we cannot ignore the fact that ‘the English Indian novel,’ as Cronin names it, is a unique catalyst of cross-cultural communication. For example, despite its association with the Western form of the novel, the novels of Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai or Bapsi Sidhwa, to name a few, clearly demonstrate a number of influences from Urdu and Indian local literatures, not only in terms of themes and subject matter but also in terms of style, syntax, rhetoric and imagery. For example, the influence of kitschy Bollywood plotlines as well as the melodrama of Bombay talkies is evident in Rushdie’s grand narration. Similarly, the impact of renowned Urdu poets all over the subcontinent, like Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Allama Iqbal, and novelists, like Qurryat-ulAin Haider and Ismat Chugtai, are noteworthy in Desai’s and Sidhwa’s literary imagination. In fact, Desai and Sidhwa have already testified that their literary imagination is profoundly influenced by a variety of cultural and linguistic sources. Desai grew up speaking German, Urdu, Hindi and English just as Sidhwa grew up with Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi and English. Consequently, their narration embodies the richness of their social background and crystallises their immersion in more than one cultural and linguistic heritage. Before starting my close readings of these novels, a brief survey of the most representative memory novels from the 1980s and 1990s by writers from the Indian subcontinent demonstrates ‘how’ and ‘why’ their protagonists go down memory lane to capture Asian, African and European cultural encounters, which are especially intriguing for writers between cultures. In fact, the constellations of memory also make us rethink the older paradigm of East-West encounters in the present context, since it not only encompasses Eastern and Western civilisations, but also includes the African connection, predominantly in the works of Canadian-based Indian writer Moyez J. Vassanji. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) is a significant example of transcultural memory. Vassanji’s work deals with Indians living in East Africa, but his major concern is how memory affects the present and how personal and public histories can overlap. Born in Nairobi and raised in Tanzania, Vassanji’s parents were part of a wave of Indians who immigrated to Africa. The Gunny Sack tells the story of four generations of Asians in Tanzania who moved to East Africa in the early 1900s. Part One of the novel, entitled “Ji Bai,” begins with the central

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protagonist Salim Juma who is an exile from Tanzania. He opens up a gunny sack bequeathed to him by his beloved grandaunt Ji Bai. It is an ancient sack, the “Shehrbanoo” of the Indian and African settlements, nicknamed “Shehru.” The narrator recollects: “Memory, Ji Bai would say, is the old sack here […] Out would come from the dusty depths some knick-knack of yesteryear” (Vassanji1989, 3). Inside it, he discovers the past – his own family’s history and the story of the Asian experience in East Africa. Its relics and artefacts bring with them the lives of Salim’s Indian great-grandfather Dhanji Govindji and his Muslim wife Fatima and their extended family. Dhanji Govindji arrives in Matamu – from Zanzibar, Porbander, and ultimately Junapur – and has a son, Husein, with an African slave named Bibi Taratibu. Part two of the novel is named after Salim’s mother “Kulsum,” who marries Juma, Husein’s son. As stories tumble from the gunny sack, we come to know that, after her husband’s death, Kulsum moves with her children to the city Dar es Salaam and rows “ashore to Dar es Salaam harbour with [their] trunks rattling with memories” (Vassanji1989, 84). The title of Part Three, “Amina,” is the name of Salim’s great unrequited love, and is also the name of his daughter. When militant Amina returns from New York to her hometown in Africa and is arrested by the repressive government, Salim chooses to go into exile. He leaves his wife and daughter with the promise that he will send for them, knowing that he will not. The novel ends with Salim alone with the last memories coming out of the gunny sack, hoping that he will be his family’s last runaway. Vassanji’s protagonists are constant seekers of unknown lands out of necessity or curiosity, but they are always pained to say good-bye to their much loved past and territory. Salim reflects: “Running away. Wanderlust. Having come to this theme yet once again, memory plays a trick on me. From her corner Shehru throws a wink at me” (Vassanji1989, 65). By employing the gunny sack literally and metaphorically to narrate a family memoir and Salim’s coming-of-age story, Vassanji unties “a broken world, the debris of lives lived” (1989, 135). The novel, thus, offers not only a possibility to move on from the bygone generations or to “bury the past” (Vassanji1989, 5), but also acts as a means to communicate the yesteryears and to document generational and collective memories. Salim highlights: “I too have run away, absconded. And reaching this grim basement, I stopped to examine the collective memory – this spongy, disconnected, often incoherent accretion of stories over generations” (Vassanji1989, 66). While demonstrating his “union with the past” (Vassanji1989, 93), he conveys that the past is never dead: “Now the dead speak, from the depths of the gunny sack, Shehrbanoo speaks” (Vassanji1989, 93). The very title ‘the gunny sack’ promises the story of a great heritage as it means a sack used for travelling. In addition, the title represents the dynamics of mixed identities and histories in the novel. The au-

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thor employs it as a tool for the discovery of his protagonist’s familial heritage as he traces his ancestry from India to Africa. However, the novelist also looks upon the gunny sack as a symbol of hybrid memories and transnational histories throughout the novel, declaring: “Wisps of memory. Cotton balls gliding from the gunny sack, each a window to a world …Asynchronous images projected on multiple cinema screens” (Vassanji 1989, 112). Further, the sack represents memory as a book of family secrets and hushed histories (Vassanji1996). As a result, the novel commemorates the hopes and dreams, and fears and disappointments, of Indian migrants in Africa as embodied in the gunny sack – the ones who arrived as migrants and the ones born to them. The novelist aims to preserve fading memories of runaway individuals in his fiction, and attempts to connect the distant past to the present of displaced families in the age of travelling cultures and communities. It is important to keep in mind that, in the development of the plot, Vassanji seeks to redefine race relations and the hidden past of migrant Europeans, Asians and Africans simultaneously. As Salim Juma mediates on the mystery of the gunny sack, and thereby his own genealogy², he reminds the reader: Ji Bai opened a small window into that dark past for me. She took me past the overgrowth into that other jungle. And a whole world flew in, a world of my great-grandfather who left India and my great-grandmother who was African, the world of Matamu where India and Africa met and the mixture exploded in the person of my half-caste grandfather Huseni who disappeared into the forest one day and never returned, the world of a changing Africa where Europe and Africa also met and the result was even more explosive, not only in the lives of men but also in the life of the continent. (1989, 135)

While the metaphor of the gunny sack in Vassanji’s novel invokes hidden memories and histories, Boman Desai’s novel The Memory of Elephants (2000 [1988]) introduces us to a memory machine that depicts the magical workings of mind and memory. The central protagonist Homi Seervai, a young Indian scientist working in America, invents a memory machine called memoscan to relive the most intense moments of his past, mainly his love relationship with an American woman, Candace Anderson. However, the machine makes him plunge into the past of his family and his country, India, in short, into the collective unconscious. The past overwhelms him to such an extent that he loses his consciousness and goes into a coma. After his hospitalisation in America, he is sent to his  Vassanji’s presentation of the past is never crystal clear. In one of his interviews he confesses that “the past in [The Gunny Sack] is deliberately murky to some degree. I did not see, nor wanted to give the impression of, a simple, linear, historical truth emerging. Not all of the mysteries of the past are resolved in the book. That is deliberate. It’s the only way” (Kanaganayakam 1991, 22).

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hometown Bombay to recover his long-term memory of more familiar places, which the memoscan has damaged according to the doctors. Fantastic though the framework may seem, the novel is neither fantasy nor science fiction, but rather a vivid representation of three generations of Parsees, the eternal exiles from Persia, living in Navsari and Bombay. Furthermore, the memory-based narrative is a nostalgic but lucid portrayal of the Parsee diaspora beginning with the fall of King Yezdigard III, the grandson of Khushrow II, the king of kings, at the hands of “looting Arabs” (Desai 2000 [1988], 17) in the battle of Qadisiya in 636 A.D., and the consequent demise of the four centuries long empire of the Sassanidian dynasty in Iran. Desai places the twentieth-century Parsee family saga amid a fantastic family history and collective memory; thus, he starts and ends the novel with the great religion of the prophet Zoroaster, the founder of the Parsee religion Zoroastrianism. Desai even names his novel after the most decisive moment in the battle of Qadisiya when the Iranians lost the battle to the Arabs because an Arab soldier blinded an Iranian elephant, causing the animal to disrupt the Iranian troops. His novel is actually among very few works of fiction that commemorate the Sassanidian dynasty in Iran with a magic realist narration. With the help of his invention, the memoscan, Homi is surprised to relive first-hand the experiences of his living and dead family members, friends, relatives and distant ancestors: “How could I possibly recall scenes in such vivid detail that I’d never witnessed? That I couldn’t possibly have witnessed?” (Desai 2000 [1988], 18). In fact, memory images flicker on the canvas of his mind with such frequency that it becomes almost impossible for him to separate dream from reality, and past from present. He even feels that the memoscan makes him witness the future, too. While remembering his beloved Candace, he asks himself: How could it be? An issue of Cosmopolitan on the bathroom floor provided the answer. It was dated October 1971, weeks after my admission to Aquihana Hospital, weeks after my misfortune with the memoscan, even weeks after we’d flown to Bombay on September 5. I was not only not recollecting anymore, but projecting into the future. I was watching her in the present in her bed in Aquihana from mine in Bombay despite the separation of thousands of miles and a time difference of nine and a half hours (afternoon light played on her blinds; night blacked out my window). Over the white noise provided by the running water and air I pieced it together. “For us,” Einstein had said, “the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, albeit a stubborn one”[…] This absolute state might be compared to the ocean in which a drop of water becomes not lost in the ocean but the ocean itself – or to the collective unconscious, the repository for the record of the universe, resident in all sentient beings, adjunct of individual memory, into which I’d unwillingly tapped when I’d probed the vault of my own memory, stranding myself in limbo between the absolute and the commonplace, in

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which diffuse state I could drop in at whim and will on the unsuspecting universe. (Desai 2000 [1988], 351– 352; emphasis in the original)

The novel is divided into five parts; each part is named after one of Homi’s relatives, with the last part depicting the reconciliation of Homi with his fantastic machine. After revealing the story of the Parsees’ bloody encounter with the Arabs in Iran, the memoscan starts scanning the life story of Homi’s paternal grandmother “Bapaiji” (Banubai) who died at the age of ninety-five with a life-long wish to become a man out of ‘penis envy’. It is Bapaiji who actually shakes Homi by affirming that she is no longer a delusion that he is fighting: “When you plugged yourself into your memomemomachine, whatever you call it, you cut into the Memory of the Soul. You have said it yourself, the brain is like an iceberg, the tip holding the living memory, the submerged the Memory of the Soul, the Memory of the Dead – the Memory of Everything Else!” (Desai 2000 [1988], 32). Once he is convinced of the reality of his invention, he goes on exploring the closed chapters of his relatives’ lives. He then meets his maternal grandmother “Granny” (Mehru) whose life is replete with rosy memories from Cambridge and Darjeeling. The saga of transgenerational memory begins to unreel as Homi also encounters his parental and maternal grandfathers Hormusji and Rustomji who both died before he was born. He moves on to relive the lives of his parents in the next parts entitled “Mom and Dad” with his eyes feasting on their experiences in Edinburgh, and his brother “Rushi” whose life in Chicago helps him understand his dilemmas better before he finally repeats his own past in Aquihana in the last part of the novel entitled “Homi.” He arrives at the conclusion that the practice of transcultural memory helps him to resolve a number of family mysteries, and provides him with a way to discover and rediscover the individual and collective past: “Each recollection set off a hum of rediscovery countering the drum in my temples, as if I’d unexpectedly recognized an old friend” (Desai 2000 [1988], 104). From Iran to India, from India to America and to Scotland and England, Homi’s family journey is an exciting illustration of disaporic memory and imagination but, more importantly, of technological storage of memory (see Van House 2008, 295– 310).³ Hence, the narrative presents the metaphor of memory as a moving machine and as a mode of presenting overlapping territories and histories. Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things (1997) is as much a tale of political conflicts surrounding the rise of the communist party, of the Hindu caste system, and the advent of modernity in India as it is about the memory

 Van House uses the term technologies of memory as an important concern for memory studies.

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of everyday events and interwoven lives. Roy’s first chapter of the novel “Paradise Pickles & Preserves,” reminiscent of Saleem’s ‘pickling of memory’ in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, not only sets the tone of the story as a trip down memory lane but prepares us to witness a family history that is inextricably intertwined with the social and political conditions of a historical period. While writing the story of a Syrian Christian family, Roy sets it in India’s multi-layered history in order to highlight how a deliberate resurrection of the past “from the ruins” (1997, 32) suddenly becomes “the bleached bones of a story” (1997, 33). Accordingly, the small objects of memory, like “remains of a burned house – the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture” (Roy 1997, 32), simultaneously map the narrative of an individual, a family, a community, a history and a country. Roy declares: [I]t could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendancy, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut […] before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a tea bag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. (1997, 33)

Set in Kerala, India in 1969, The God of Small Things is based on seven-year-old twins Rahel and Estha who are born to a wealthy Christian family. The twins are taken care of by a number of major characters such as their beautiful mother, Ammu, who has left a drunkard husband; their Marxist uncle, Chacko, still hoping for the return of his English wife Margaret and daughter Sophie Mol, who have left him; their troubled great-aunt, Baby Kochamma, struggling to fight against the demons of her age; and the courageous Velutha, a member of the Untouchable caste. When Chacko’s ex-wife Margaret and daughter Sophie Mol return unexpectedly for Christmas, the quiet veneer of the entire household is disastrously ripped apart. Sophie Mol accidentally dies by drowning and at the same time Velutha is murdered by the police due to Baby Kochamma’s false accusations. The novel effectively shifts between two time periods: Rahel’s presentday trip home to see her quiet, haunted twin brother, and a December day twenty-three years earlier, the tumultuous day that tears the family apart. Since the narrative moves between two stories – the story of Rahel’s return to Ayemenem, and the “recollected” storyline that happened before her return, the novel follows a cyclical and not a linear narration. According to French critic Èmilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas, the plot is woven around the process of recollec-

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tion and “rememoration” (2007, 143)⁴. She argues that the moment of Rahel’s return is treated as the beginning of a process of rememoration that gradually allows the story to unfold: Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still tea-coloured puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-coloured minds. (Roy 1997, 10)

While recalling a variety of (dis)connected events twenty-three years ago, showing the connectivity of memory, Rahel almost reinvents and reconstructs everything in order to cope with the burden of past calamities in the present. Just as memory repeats, selects and modifies events and episodes, so does Rahel who always imagines memory as a permanent smell in one’s mind: “Like old roses on a breeze” (Roy 1997, 6). Like Rahel, Estha’s memory, darkened forever by the gruesome memory of Velutha’s murder, is also “steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man” (Roy 1997, 12). In fact, the spatiality of memory is central to the memory-based structure of the novel. Rahel’s and Estha’s past, still frozen in the house in Ayemenem, is never imagined to be preserved like Mammachi’s pleasant pickles in pectin and vinegar but, instead, is constantly decaying in the shadows of family tragedies. Roy points out: “It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there […] As permanent as a Government job” (Roy 1997, 16). However, Estha and Rahel return to their childhood haunts at the age of thirty-one, that is, the house, the river, the old school, the church, and Comrade Pillai’s printing press with a faded communist flag, not just to revisit the abandoned spaces of memory but also to solve the riddles and mysteries of the “world, locked out for years” (Roy 1997, 15). The History House in the novel is, in fact, the most vivid illustration of transcultural memory. Their uncle Chacko has told the twins, whom he calls “HalfHindu Hybrids” (Roy 1997, 45), about the History House, an abandoned house on the other side of the river – a house that actually belonged to an Englishman, Kari Saipu, who had “gone native” (Roy 1997, 52) and committed suicide when his young lover’s parents took the boy from him. According to Chacko, they are all a family of Anglophiles, a fact embodied and embedded in the History House: “Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history,

 According to Baneth-Nouailhetas, “Rememoration is a deliberate reconstruction and revision of the past to give meaning to the present and the future.”

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and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside” (Roy 1997, 52). The History House actually connects the twins not only to the memory of colonial India, but it virtually takes them to the heart of their forgotten ancestors ‘gone native’ from a distant past. The History House, thus, becomes a museum of entangled memories in the twins’ imagination: They smelled its smell and they never forgot it. History’s smell. Like old roses on a breeze. It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes. (Roy 1997, 55)

This is the house in which dreams are “captured and re-dreamed,” in which past, present and future merge into each other: “Where in the years that followed, the Terror (still-to-come) [the murder of Velutha] would be buried in a shallow grave. Hidden under the happy humming of hotel cooks. The humbling of old communists” (Roy 1997, 306). By emphasising the spatiality of individual and collective memory as embodied in the House, Roy sets out to bring home to the reader how history crushes an individual with its dictates. After Velutha’s “blind date with history” (Roy 1997, 282), and with the Touchable Ammu, he realises that “History’s twisted chicken would come home to roost” (Roy 1997, 283). In other words, he would never escape the brutal laws of history and of love, which eternally brand him a Paravan. With Velutha’s death, the twins and their childhoods are lost forever. Accordingly ‘the big god of history’ devours ‘the god of small things Velutha’ and along with him all those individuals who stand for small things as has been the case in Indian cultural history. Nevertheless, Roy’s imagination is not limited to the representation of history alone as a domain of the more powerful, or to use memory to connect the past with the present. Instead, it is extended to examine the new identities of the twins and their suppressed emotions for each other, showing a connection between memory and emotions and shared and imagined memory: Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream. She has other memories too that she has no right to have. She remembers, for instance (though she hadn’t been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches – Estha’s sandwiches, that Estha ate – on the Madras Mail to Madras. And all these are only small things. (Roy 1997, 2– 3)

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The shared taste and smell of memory also dominates the entire narrative. Rahel even imagines the present as memory in construction: “A magical, Sound of Music smell that Rahel remembered and treasured. Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity” (Roy 1997, 99). At the same time, she is aware that it is through the tool of memory that a certain meaning can be sought in the chaotic present. The recurring smell of memory is simply used to convey both as a clue to the key event and as a symbol through which deeper emotions are narrated. The themes of transgenerational memory and history, and identity and family relationships are also recurrent in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (2000 [1980]), which recollects the political, social and domestic landscape of Delhi in pre-partition India, much like Ali’s novel Twlight in Delhi (1940). Set in Old Delhi, the novel is a story of a middle-class Hindu family around the time of the partition. The novel is divided into four sections; the first and fourth sections are located in the present novelistic moment, and the two middle chapters are memories of the summer of 1947, which changes the political course of their country as well as the future relations of all family members. While fighting the ghosts of her family’s past, the central female protagonist Bim (Bimla) recollects: “Nineteen forty-seven. That summer. We could see the fire burning in the city every night –” (Desai 2000 [1980], 43). Desai builds the two central chapters up to a dramatic pitch by weaving together the political and personal past of the Das sisters, Bim and Tara, whose reminiscences and reconciliation constitute the plot. Bim, Tara, Raja and Baba are the children of an idiosyncratic couple. After the death of their parents, Raja moves to Hyderabad and marries the daughter of his old Muslim neighbour and landlord, Hyder Ali, whom he has always idealised, even though it is a time when Hindus and Muslims are killing each other all over the subcontinent. Tara marries Bakul and has two daughters, whereas Bim chooses to stay in the old house together with their autistic brother Baba and widowed aunt Mira instead of having her own family. The novel is mainly concerned with a reinterpretation of past events that have cast a strange spell on the present life of every character. The past of the family determines not only family relationships but also makes the family members, especially Bim and Tara, re-examine their associations with Indian history and collective memory. Bim lives under the illusion that the past can never come back to haunt her, especially the time of the Hindu-Muslims riots in 1947: “I’m so glad it is over and we can never be young again […] Terrible, what it [summer of 1947] does to one – what it did to us – and one is too young to know how to cope” (Desai 2000 [1980], 43). As memories of the summer of 1947 – the time of the partition of India, the extermination of Muslim families in Old Delhi,

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and the breakdown of ties between Hindus and Muslims – rush back, Bim is compelled to accept that the past persists no matter how one struggles to bury it in the deepest recesses of the mind. She even declares to her sister Tara: ‘Old Delhi does not change. It only decays. My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen […] And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened long ago – in the time of the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Sultanate, the Moghuls – that lot’[…] And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer, I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away – to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back’. (Desai 2000 [1980], 5; emphasis in the original)

The central bitterness in the family mainly originates from Bim who decides never to forgive her favourite brother Raja for deserting her and Baba during the partition riots. She locks herself deliberately in the museum of her memories while pretending that she has chosen a life free of the burdens of the past. However, as she revisits the past with Tara and thinks it over in the empty spaces of the house, she is ready to open her eyes in the ‘clear light of day.’ She finally realises that she cannot escape the rancour of political or personal memories; consequently, the only way to deal with them is to reconcile with them against all odds. As Bim is convinced that the house she has decided to live in forever is, in fact, a cemetery of memories like Old Delhi itself, she decides to cleanse the house: “Everything seemed ancient and bent. Everything seemed to have gone into eclipse. The house would need a thorough cleaning” (Desai 2000 [1980], 147). One of Bim’s major mistakes in life is that she stays on in her childhood house to nurse her brother and at the same time to discard traditional ways of living for women. However, like rusty memories in the novel, the old family norms and cultural values begin to age her. Because Bim resides in the old house so long, Tara is convinced that she has become an inseparable part of the same pattern. “But the pattern was now very old. Tara called it old. It had all faded. The childhood colours, blood-red and pigeon-blue, were all faded and sunk into the muddy grey browns of the Jumna river itself. Bim, too, greyhaired, mud-faced, was only a brown fleck in the faded pattern. If you struck her, dust would fly. If you sniffed, she’d make you sneeze. An heirloom, that was all” (Desai 2000 [1980], 153). Bim’s moment of truth arrives when she actually imagines her house and city not as a hub of family wounds but an epicentre of old and new experiences, and, above all, of shared memories: With her inner eye she saw how her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as well as her whole family with all their separate histories and experiences […] That soil contained all time, past and future, in it. It was dark with time, rich with time. It

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was where her deepest self lived, and the deepest selves of her sister and brothers and all those who shared that time with her. (Desai 2000 [1980], 182)

All novelists examined in this chapter employ memory not only as a means to connect past and present, as well as heterogeneous cultures and continents, in their imagination but also as a mode to encompass modern life styles and realities in their narratives, especially as the fictional characters dispute tradition and encounter modernity. Recurrent notions of ‘intertwined’, ‘shared’, ‘dialogic’ memory surface clearly in the novels discussed briefly above as do the notions of ‘counter’, ‘multidirectional’, ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘postmemory’ as enumerated in defining transcultural memory in the opening chapter of this book. One particular aspect of memory, however, still surfaces more vividly in all of these novels, that is, transgenerational memory vis-à-vis shared memories as the novelists weave a fine tapestry of different generations’ struggles with the personal, familial and collective past. Hence, transcultural memory in these novels becomes a modern metaphor of rewriting the past in light of the present exegeses, endowing the traditional notions of place and space, culture and identity, and community and society with a new dimension altogether.

3.3 The transcultural novel of memory The Indo-English novels of memory from the 1980s and 1990s have been discussed in this part of the book as mnemonic narratives in which a variety of transcultural patterns surface in tandem with memory processes. But now the question arises whether, in light of these narratives, it might be possible to create a more generic term than ‘the transcultural novel of memory’ that could be applicable to contemporary literatures in English in different cultural contexts. Before I come back to the term ‘the Indo-English novel of memory’ at the end of the book in connection to more popular terms, it is useful to shed some light on the genre of the transcultural novel of memory since the term ‘transcultural novel’ has recently been touched upon with reference to global literature and the move of the ‘transcultural’ from the social sciences into the field of literary studies (for more definitions of the transcultural novel, see Sommer 2001; see also Helff 2009, 75 – 90; Ascari 2011; Pultz Moslund 2010). First, the transcultural novel of memory clearly represents new forms of cultural exchange and communication in heterogeneous social circumstances through the vessels of memory, an idea that has been addressed in detail previously. However, it is only one part of the definition. The transcultural novel of memory is not a mere reflection of present-day cultural trajectories within the

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frames of memory, or solely a literary representation of memory. Rather, it is about the fuzzy relationship between ‘factual and fictional’ as well as ‘imagined and invented’ memory that writers as critics of ‘national’ and more ‘dominant’ histories venture into creating, exploring, investigating and even experimenting. The transcultural novel of memory, hence, is precisely about the paradoxes of memory, which is as much reliable as unreliable, and as much real as imagined, as we experience within individual or group memories. The twin dynamics of fact and fiction, invention and imagination, or reliability and unreliability do not render the transcultural novel of memory an ambivalent genre altogether. Instead, it is a more flexible form of novel in which the interplay between culture and memory takes on complex forms, just as the notions of cultural belonging and identity, and memories inherited, carried or transferred. Furthermore, the interplay between fiction and invention, or imagination and (un)reliability intrinsic to the transcultural novel of memory makes us aware that truth and fiction are inextricably intertwined in the discourse of memory, and that fiction is able to give impetus to truth rather than falsifying it as Wolfgang Iser postulates (1993). Mieke Bal also reminds us that since memory is influenced by social forms, narratives and individual acts of interventions, “memory is always open to social revision and manipulation. This makes it an instance of fiction rather than imprint…” (Bal 1999, xii). As the writers of the transcultural memory novel transgress space and time, borders and nations, they tend to transform as well as challenge more traditional concepts of history and community as well as culture and cultural identities in their fictional worlds, thus, aiming to narrate their idea of truth and reality, which are memories’ truth, to use a phrase from Salman Rushdie. I now add that the transcultural novel of memory is about memories’ truth as well as paradoxes. Second, by functioning as a mediator between ‘nations’, ethnicities, individuals and communities, the transcultural novel of memory is a repository of unrecorded histories, untold stories and forgotten memories. Now, the critical triangle of allegedly lost history, story and memory as preserved by the transcultural novel of memory appears too farfetched at first glance, but if we look into it deeply, we notice that this new emerging genre actually ‘records’ and ‘documents’ fictionalised accounts of the individual and communal past that remain absent from ‘national’ records or historical archives. Therefore, the transcultural novel of memory needs to be seen as a more potent term than migrant, multicultural, intercultural or minority novel that tends to narrow down the sphere of interpreting cultures of globalised modernity within the domain of fiction – an idea raised again in Chapter Six in this book. By transgressing the more conventional notions of history, story and memory, the transcultural novel of memory creates a site of intersecting, disparate histories, and above all, of cultural trans-

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gressions. It is to be noticed that constant reoccurrences of ‘transgression, transformation and translation’ in the present discourse of the transcultural novel, however, are more than mere “reversal, inversion, revision, subversion or opposition. They actually involve hybridisation, and the mixing of categories” (Jervis 1999, 4; cited in Pennycook 2007, 41), producing different ways of thinking of culture and its ‘others’ today within the frames of fiction. The following close reading chapters shed light on the practice of transcultural memory in Indo-English fiction to negotiate cultural and political ‘transgressions, transformations and translations’ in the individual and political spheres. As the fictional characters in the selected novels go down the tunnel of time and recollect the individual and collective past in disparate cultural landscapes, their memories refract global cultural networks in our fast changing world. Hence, the social practice of transcultural memory in the realms of memory narratives makes us envisage the emergence of new spaces and sites of memory, where interactions and interlocking histories display a new dynamics of remembering the past. In addition, as writers between cultures aim to cross cultural barriers through their fiction, their works represent cultural networks across fixed cartographies in addition to highlighting memory’s connectivity across generations, people and nations. The transcultural novel of memory, thus, provides a useful framework for such a connective approach.

Part Two

4 Novels of Political Memories: Partition and Reconciliation 4.1 ‘Chutneyfying’ Memory and History: Mapping transcultural India in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) Is history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories? (Rushdie 1983, 23) Today’s collective memories suggest that history has been reconstructed to suggest a more orderly view of the past, which ultimately, helps to legitimate the present. (Pennebaker et al. 1997, vii)

4.1.1 Introduction: Re-membering private and public histories Salman Rushdie¹’s Midnight’s Children (1995 [1981]) is an individual’s and India’s coming-of-age story, a tale of the pre- and post-partition generations, an autobiographical Bildungsroman, and above all, a unique illustration of the connection between ‘national’ history and personal memory, that is, the overlapping and mixing of political and individual lives. Rushdie aptly uses terms like “the chutnification of history” (1995 [1981], 459) and “the pickling of time” (1995 [1981], 459) to explain his treatment of history and memory in the novel as his protagonist Saleem Sinai traces, documents and preserves his story of transcultural India for posterity. Saleem claims: “One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates […] I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 461). In this way, Saleem confirms to us that since

 (Ahmed) Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947. He went to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King’s College, Cambridge. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to England, where he worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His major novels are Grimus (1975), Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005), The Enchantress of Florence (2008) (see Harrison 1992).

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history is a matter of ‘taste,’ he has composed the ‘chutney of private and public histories’ in light of his distant and recent memories. The novel is the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai who narrates his tale to his lover Padma in a pickle factory in Bombay, although the novel is set in both India and Pakistan. Before succumbing to death at the age of thirty-one, Saleem is determined to narrate the events that occurred thirty years before his birth and thirty years after; consequently, the story stretches over sixty years, covering the years from 1915 to 1978 and spanning three generations of Saleem’s family. Born at midnight on 15 August 1947 at the precise moment of India’s Independence, his life mirrors the ups and downs of India as a new nation-state. Indian critic R. S. Pathak describes “the interplay of personal and national histories” as “the most significant feature of Midnight’s Children,” the inextricable intertwining of “the public and the private strands” as giving the novel its coherence, and “the interaction of historical and individual forces” as having “made the narrator what he is” (1992, 123). However, it is not just the interplay of these forces that is central to the novel as Pathak emphasises, but the intertwining of factual and imagined histories and myth and memory in Saleem’s magic realistic narration. Saleem explains: “‘Things – even people – have a way of leaking into each other’ […] ‘the past has dripped into me so we can’t ignore it’ […] As history pours out of my fissured body…” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 38). It is the ‘leaking of things and people’ that Saleem highlights, from the beginning to the end of his autobiography, in order to highlight the changing cultural trajectories on the Indian subcontinent in the wake of the partition. This chapter, therefore, seeks to underline the transcultural saga of India with the aim of shedding light on the connection between history and memory, cultural clash and encounter, paradigms of cultural mixing and purity, and last but not least, the intertwining of personal and ‘national’ auto/biographies within the realm of Rushdie’s fiction.

4.1.2 ‘Pickling Time’: The transcultural saga of India My focus on the theme of history and memory with reference to the metaphor of ‘chutney’ gives me ample opportunity to elaborate not merely on transcultural encounters but on the ambivalence of Saleem’s magical life as he warns us in the very opening of his fictional memoir: “(T)here are so many stories to tell, too many, an excess of intertwined lives, events, miracles, places, rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 9). Furthermore, Saleem reminds the reader: “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 109).

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While investigating the relationship between memory, text and subjectivity, Paul Auster has, therefore, argued that memory cannot simply be conceived as “the resurrection of one’s private past, but as an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history – which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from” (1988, 39). By weaving tales out of ‘nations’ and ‘generations,’ Rushdie’s narrator seeks to portray “Indias of the mind” (Rushdie 1991, 10) as well as India as a space of constant cultural and political transformations, in particular India’s struggle with its myriad cultures, communities, religions, languages and classes. The “chutnification of history” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 459) is, indeed, a process of preserving these transformations, and ironically changing these ‘transformations’ in the process of preserving. However, it also suggests that India itself changes people, a conspicuous characteristic of the Indian landscape in Forster’s A Passage to India, where the echo in the Marabar Caves makes the central female protagonist Adela face the bitter and painful truth of her loveless relationship with the British Magistrate Ronny in colonial India. It is significant to keep in view that the metaphor of ‘chutnification’signifies a sense of mixing not merely in terms of history and memory, but also childhood and adulthood, and purpose and purposelessness, as Saleem tries to come to terms with the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan with Kashmir as a disputed territory, the two wars between the two newly created nation-states and his eventual migration to India after losing his family and fortune in the war of 1965 in Pakistan. While examining the conceit of ‘chutney,’ the question arises why Rushdie has used a culinary image to describe the complex process of history and memory and to what extent it can be taken for a sign of cultural plurality and its challenges. Before addressing this question, we may at first presume that ‘chutney’ seeks to define India as a mishmash of ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ cultures and histories, which are as much interactive as oppositional. Because of chutney’s complex culinary history spanning across many centuries, I would briefly mention what chutney is in the Indian context. It is a “term applied to a variety of spicy relishes and condiments in Indian cookery. The term itself is an anglicized form of the Hindi word chatni […] Conceptually, they [chutneys] blur the neat distinction made in Western cooking between preserves and pickles” (Weaver 2003, online source). Furthermore, it is important to know that “chutney styles are strikingly different in various parts of the country and among different religious groups” (Weaver 2003, online source). Rushdie attempts to capture in the body of ‘chutney,’ thus, the dynamics of cultural overlapping on the one hand, and the abuse of cultural mixing in the wake of the Independence movement in 1947, on the other. The idea of chutney is, however, variably defined in literary criticism on Rushdie. In his chapter, “‘The Chutnification of History,’” Ralph J. Crane argues: “J. G.

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Farell and E. M. Forster use the Indian situation, particularly the political clash between East and West, to ask questions about British civilization. Rushdie, in contrast, uses Midnight’s Children as a metaphor for world civilization, not just Indian or British civilization” (1992, 171). By branding Rushdie’s novel as a metaphor for ‘world civilization,’ Crane, in reality, does not seem to focus on the original impulse behind Rushdie’s preoccupation with East-West encounters in his fiction. The author’s intention is not to represent the ‘history of the world,’ but ‘India’ as a hodgepodge of several cultures and languages, in short, to use ‘chutney’ as a powerful trope of transcultural dynamics, inherent in the Indian ethos. In Rushdie’s fictional realm, ‘chutney,’ indeed, literally represents the mixture of raw materials or ideas, but metaphorically, the diverse traditions of India. Commenting on Midnight’s Children in one of his interviews, Rushdie maintains: My view is that the Indian tradition has always been, and still is, a mixed tradition. The idea that there is such a thing as a pure Indian tradition is a kind of fallacy, the nature of Indian tradition has always been multiplicity and plurality and mingling… I think that the idea of a pure culture is something which in India is, let’s say even politically important to resist. So the book comes out of that, that sense of a mixed tradition. (1988, 35)

Another critic, Mita Banerjee, applies Rushdie’s metaphor to the novels of Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Bharati Mukherjee in her analysis of the writers’ treatment of history in fiction with the help of intercultural theory. While elaborating on the metaphor, Banerjee contends that ‘chutney’ is based on the concept of hybridity and cultural syncretism (2002, 21). She highlights that “postmodernism and postcolonialism converge in the figure of the chutney: the epitome of hybridity not only in a metaphorical, but also in a literal sense” (2002, 32). Banerjee is justified to the point that the image alludes to the impossibility of cultural purity in India; however, her constant preoccupation with its interpretation in terms of postmodern and postcolonial theory makes her connect ‘chutney’ to the timeframe of postcoloniality or postmodernity. On the contrary, I argue that it is a forceful metaphor of contemporary cultural transactions in the age of globalised modernity, a metaphor which should be seen beyond the sphere of postcolonial or postmodern theorists, who tend to conflate notions of cultural translation with the time of postmodernity or ‘colonialism’ and ‘its aftermath.’ Conversely, we need to view the metaphor as an illustration of cultural fusions in India in our fast changing world as a new phase of Indians’ encounter with ‘their modernity’ without strictly restricting it to the phenomena of Empire and its consequent fall. The ‘chutnification of history,’ I argue, points to the representation of cultural hybridityagainst the backdrop of contemporary cultural communication on the subcontinent as Rushdie maps the politics of new nation-states in light of India’s past and present.

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On a broader level, ‘chutney’ needs to be understood as a symbol of modern² ity and of newness in India. Newness, as echoed in Chamcha’s words in The Satanic Verses: “How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?” (Rushdie 1989 [1988], 8) also describe the dynamics of ‘newness as modernity’ in Midnight’s Children as it presents a phase in Indian history in which the old meets the new. Recollecting Nehru’s historical Independence speech, Saleem cites excerpts to indicate the beginning of his individual history in relation to India’s creation as a new nation-state: “At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom […] A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance…” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 116). By narrating the saga of Indian modernity in his novel of memory, Rushdie also attempts to define a fundamentally different mode of historical discourse. Along the same line, Indian critic Dipesh Chakrabarty calls for “a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across culture and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous” (1992, 32). Through Saleem, Rushdie creates a unique narrative that is meant to supersede the dominant, hegemonic conception of history; hence, such a narrative rewrites history via an unreliable memory to deconstruct the monopoly of chronological history or a singular history of personal histories. The trope of ‘chutney’, however, also posits the process of what Roland Robertson terms as “glocalization” (1995, 25 – 44) in the face of political change on the subcontinent. I contend that the novel, despite being excessively discussed as a postcolonial text par excellence (Kortenaar 2004, 12), also takes note of the phenomenon of ‘glocalization’ as the narrative demonstrates the Indians’ struggle with integrating global political movements like communism or nationalism, to name a few, into their current political system. Among many other examples is the example of the magicians’ ghettos, where Indian communists like Picture Singh make an effort to stand for the Indian version of communism without actually caring for Mao’s or Lenin’s. Similarly, the adoption of English as a world language by midnight’s children is steeped in Indian vernacular and street slang; as a result, Rushdie localises English to depict the formation of ‘local’ and ‘global’ trajectories in contemporary India. In light of these observations, the ad-

 A large bulk of criticism on Rushdie is engaged with postmodern reading of Rushdie’s work which actually does not shed adequate light on the importance of modernity discourse in analysing Rushdie (see Hussumani 2002; also Birch 1991, 1– 7).

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vent of modernity in India is an important dimension in the representation of plural histories and memories in the development of the plot. Yet another Indian critic, K. Raghavendra Rao, in his essay “The Novel as History as ‘Chutney’: Unriddling Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” claims: “What we get in the novel, then, is the chutney but not the history of the ‘chutney’” (1985, 157), highlighting that Rushdie has plenty of “myth […] but no history” (1985, 159). In his view, the idea of chutney as a transforming device, in fact, suggests the demise of history, and asserts the reality of those myths and fictions that have devoured history; consequently, history is replaced by myth. Rao seems to be influenced by Roland Barthes’s view that “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made” (1996, 5 – 19). Barthes argues that in myth, all history evaporates and all you end up with is a “beautiful object” and you never wonder where it comes from (1996, 151). Myth might be imagined and interpreted as an antidote to history, but Rushdie does not aim to surpass history with myth as Rao establishes in light of Barthes’s rhetoric of myth and history; instead, the novelist attempts to show the connection between myth and history to render voice to those realities that are absent from historical archives. To me, Rao, like Crane and Banerjee, does not embrace a broad approach to the representation of history and memory as well as myth and the narrative self in the novel. The metaphor of ‘chutney’ is not likely to declare the death of history or the replacement of history by myth, but rather demonstrates a relationship between the two through the filter of ‘intertwined memories’, which not only traverse the borders of ‘national identity’ and ‘nationalism’ but actually challenge these notions. While interpreting the ‘conceit’ of chutney, we have to take into consideration how the novelist conveys that just as ‘chutney’ translates various flavours into a bitter-sweet mélange, so too does Saleem translate histories and myths, and memories and stories into his autobiography to encompass various facets of India and Indians. According to Rushdie: “It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained” (1991, 17). Hence, translation serves as a recipe for modernity just as ‘chutney’ acts as a mode of newness in the fictional autobiography of Saleem. By tracking additions and subtractions in traditional cultural patterns in the transitory phase of a nation, ‘chutney’ symbolises the translation of culture and ethnicity in the subcontinent with the birth of new political myths and the consequent emergence of two nation-states on the world map. As a mode of translation, it embodies, however, both fusions as well as fissures in the pre-and post-partition subcontinent as Saleem’s narrative traces episodes of corporation and conflict between Hindus and Muslims.

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4.1.3 Between history and memory: Re-collecting cultural plurality in the subcontinent A number of critics like Peter Burke and Patrick Hutton discuss “history as social memory” (Burke 1989, 97– 113) or “history as art of memory” (Hutton 1993, 30) to introduce alternative ways of reading the past through the mode of memory as well as to give a different perspective on the uses of history in relation to memory. In contrast, Rushdie introduces the ‘chutnification’ of history and memory to attribute a new dimension to a conventional historical discourse and to chronicle ‘memory’s truth’ in his historical account. While David Price focuses on the “use and abuse of history” (1994, 91– 107), Rukmini Bhaya Nair declares “history as gossip” (1999, 49 – 68) in the novel. In the same vein, Ronny Noor complains of the “misrepresentation of history” (1996, 7– 8) whereas David Lipscomb contests the very genesis of history (1991, 163 – 189) in Rushdie’s narrative, thus, confirming history as an enigma in the novel. Whether this history is reliable or not is beside the point. Rather, the central question is how it affects Saleem and his fellow midnight’s children in reconciling with political upheavals, which seek to erase common histories to replace them with the legacy of ethnic and national hate. Ultimately, by taking history into his own hands, Saleem strives to rescue ‘his-story.’ As Saleem moves between history and memory in his flashback narration, ‘chutney’ suddenly connects him not only to the idyllic past, but also to the discovery of post-partition India under the tyrannical ruler Indira Gandhi (1966 – 1977, 1980 – 1984). After his adventures carry him thousands of kilometres, from the city of his birth to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Delhi and at last back to Bombay, he becomes completely absorbed in the art of making ‘chutney.’ The Braganza pickle factory owned by his former ayah gives him the chance to finally ‘literally’ and ‘imaginatively’ preserve his memories: “[B]y day amongst the pickle vats, by night within these sheets, I spread my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clock” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 38). He hopes that the ‘chutney’ of memory, which gives him a sense of orientation in both the present and the future, will make his son Adam Aziz, the representative of the second generation of the midnight’s children, realise the purpose of his father’s existence, even though he is not his real father. Saleem reasons out: And while chutney – the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira had made so perfectly; the grasshopper – green chutney which is forever associated with those days – carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green medicine men. I said: ‘My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I’m telling my story for

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him, so that afterwards, when I’ve lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgement, character … it all starts with memory … and I am keeping carbons’. (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 210)

The notion of cultural exchange and antagonism is vividly echoed in the imaginary midnight children’s conference on both sides of the political divide. Despite being the victims of their circumstances and unjust times, they are a mirror of their country, and hence a personification of transcultural India in Saleem’s imagination. When they meet in the parliament of Saleem’s brain, he notices that “the children, despite their wondrously discrete and varied gifts, remained, to my mind, a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity, and I see no point in dividing them now” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 229); however, he infers that ‘the many headed monster’ is susceptible to irresolvable religious, linguistic, ethnic and racial conflicts. While witnessing internal chaos among the midnight’s children, Saleem is convinced that it is folly to imagine children as an embodiment of innocence, unity and fraternity. Instead, it is wiser to judge them in terms of disparity and corruption: Children, however magical, are not immune to their parents; and as the prejudices and world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I found children from Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian ‘blackies;’ there were religious rivalries; and class entered our councils […] In this way the Midnight Children’s Conference fulfilled the prophecy of the Prime Minster and became, in truth, a mirror of the nation. (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 254)

Rushdie, thus, not only celebrates the multiplicity of Indian cultures and communities in his novel, but also makes us aware of the challenges of a plural society in the face of modernity. Indian cultures are represented and symbolised by the midnight’s children’s battles against each other in their attempts to achieve a certain kind of supremacy, which deeply perturbs Saleem: “Do not let this happen! Do not permit the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us to come between us!” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 255). A dominant sense of duality in the forms of Saleem and Shiva, nose and knees, snakes and ladders, alpha and omega, pure and impure or history and memory alludes to the presence of hybridity intrinsic in Indian culture with Saleem as its ideal personification and propagator. Rushdie has himself specified the ideals that Midnight’s Children celebrates in the following manner: ‘My’ India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity: ideas to which the ideologies of the communalists are diametrically opposed. To my mind, the de-

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fining image of India is the crowd, and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once. (1991, 32)

While declaring hybridity as the most prominent dimension of his portrait of India, Rushdie also emphasises: “There are as many versions of India as Indians” (1995 [1981], 269). This is why, despite losing faith in the pluralism of India after its partition, Saleem seeks to place himself “amid ancient and modern, between India Gate and the Secretarial buildings, my thoughts teeming with (Mughal and British) empires and also with my own history” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 390). For him, even the old tune about his hometown Bombay “Star of the East/With her face to the West” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 93) refers to the meeting of East and West on Indian territory. While remembering the peepshow hawker Lifafa Das, with pictures of Eastern and Western icons from history as well as popular culture in his curious machine, Saleem narrates: “Lifafa Das’s had altered his cry from ‘Dilli dekho,’ ‘Come see Delhi!’ to ‘See the whole world, come see everything!’[…] is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected too?” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 75). This notion of encompassing the entire world within India overwhelms Saleem to such an extent that throughout the novel he remains preoccupied with India’s histories as “many cultured,” (2005, 17) to use a phrase from Dirk Hoerder. Rushdie’s sense of the self, thus, has its roots in his imagination of an India that can never be bound by notions of culture as a single sphere. Indeed, his own ‘Indianness’ is reflective of multiple identities, which is evident in the opening of The Satanic Verses as well: “‘Oh my shoes are Japanese,’” Gibreel sings, translating the words of a Hindi film Shree 420 (translated as Mr 420, 1955) song into English: “‘These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that’” (Rushdie 1989 [1988], 5). For Rushdie, India’s national culture is “based on the principle of borrowing what-ever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest” (1989 [1988], 52). Therefore, Rushdie resists having a monolithic sense of Indianness by letting Saleem declare his cultural identity as one that is “at once plural and partial” (1991, 15). Saleem’s Anglo-Indian heritage is also clearly reminiscent of a legendary Bollywood classic film about a courtesan called Pakeeza (or Pure) (1972), directed by Kamal Amrohi, in which the mother of the central female protagonist, reborn in her daughter as Pakeeza, literally meaning pure, is conspicuously Anglo-Indian with golden hair, a product of the secret union of a British man and an Indian woman. Named after a Moghul prince, Saleem compares himself to Moses, Ganesh, Scheherzade and asserts his immersion in the Bible, Hindu mythology and the Koran to not only portray his homeland as a site of heterogeneous cultural transactions, but more importantly to express

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his being as a vivid personification of India’s rich cultural heritage. Saleem is an Indian-by-choice although he does fight a war against the Bengalis on the Pakistani side. Thus, for both Saleem and his creator Rushdie, being Indian always means being many things. However, Saleem’s actual dilemma begins when he has to choose between old and new and pure and impure ‘national’ identities.

4.1.4 Pakistan and purity: partition and beyond Throughout the novel, Saleem deplores the partition and the creation of Pakistan as a prologue to the permanent political and cultural chaos in the subcontinent. He reminds the readers at the very beginning of his story that millions of Muslims, including his grandfather Adam Aziz, a Western-educated medical doctor, supports Congress and detests the political aspirations of the Muslim leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah and his political party the Muslim League, which he deems to be based on separatism. Consequently, he rejects their idea of creating a country in the name of God. Saleem proclaims religion to be the glue holding Pakistan together because religion was virtually used in toto to put together heterogeneous ethnic groups from different provinces, such as the Punjabi, Baloochi, Sindhi, Pushtoon, Kashmiri, and Bengalis, under an invented national identity. However, twenty-four years after independence, the Bengali-speaking East Wing of the new Pakistani state waged a successful war of separation and created Bangladesh in 1971, which Saleem highlights as a cultural and political predicament. Consequently, the ideology of Pakistan ultimately failed because it declared for Muslims a nation of their own while ignoring their ethnic and linguistic differences from each other (see also Ali 1984).³ The plague of ethnic riots in Karachi, as Rushdie discusses in his non-fiction work, are another sad consequence of attributing a singular national identity to divergent ethnic groups in Pakistan (Rushdie 2003, 321). As Saleem does not believe in becoming pure to become ‘a new man,’ he is already alienated from his family. He knows that Pakistan “the land of submission, the home of purity” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 406) appeals to the imagination of those who tend to deem purity as a unique cultural ideal. Saleem’s parents declare: ‘We must all become new people,’ in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s […] his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-

 For further perspectives on the politics of the 1980s in Pakistan, see Ali 1984.

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like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds. (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 310)

Saleem’s grandmother, known as Reverend Mother, for instance, prefers to move to Pakistan even against the will of her husband in order to embrace purity in its entirety. But for Saleem, the years in Pakistan are fraught with emptiness, which he calls “Four years of nothing” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 292) as these are years “… away from Divali and Ganesh Chaturthi and Coconut Day” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 292), in short, cultural and religious rituals and festivals he enjoyed as everyday existence in Bombay. In rejecting the myth of Pakistan as a separate state only for Indian Muslims, Saleem does not attack Islam per se but its exploitation at the hands of politicians with ulterior motives. Although Saleem is originally the son of a Christian man and a Hindu woman, he remains a Muslim to the end of his life. He even converts Parvati, the witch, to Islam and gives his Muslim surname to his Ganesh-headed son who is in reality the son of Hindu parents, that is, Parvati and Shiva, named after the gods from Hindu mythology. He thus exhibits a mixture of ethnic and religious origins in his self as well as in his son and both of these characters ultimately embody the cultural condition of India. The sheer abuse of Islam is only illustrated in his depiction of Pakistan, literally meaning ‘the land of the pure,’ for Islam is no longer a cultural identity, but a political cover for the new nation-state, which the corrupt ruling elities choose to exploit for their alterior motives. In Pakistan, Saleem is confronted with new kinds of dualities, which immediately call to mind fanaticism and fundamentalism as these dualities are often nothing more than pseudo-religious and cultural clichés. A constant conflict between the stereotypes of the sacred and the profane, for example, makes him loath his existence in Pakistan: “Sacred: purdah-veils, halal meat, muezzin’s towers, prayer-mats; profane: Western records, pig-meat, alcohol” (Rushdie 1995[1981], 318). Saleem is, however, as much disillusioned with modern-day India, ruled by the dictatorial democrat Indira Gandhi, as he is with Pakistan as a new nationstate. He is unable to worship Indira as the ultimate God of India because he believes in transculturality as the foremost Indian reality. He adds: “But I was brought up in Bombay, where Shiva Vishnu Ganesh Ahuramzada Allah and countless others had their flocks…” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 438). Just as he refuses to reconcile with ‘Pakistan as purity,’ he rejects ‘India as Indira.’ When Saleem is locked in the Widow’s Hostel during the Emergency in India, he is suddenly cut off from his memory once again: “Here I record a merciful blank in my memory […] there is no chutney or pickle capable of unlocking the door behind which I have locked those days!” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 433). Saleem’s physical and psychological fissures begin to grow lethal during this time as he sadly witnesses

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forced vasectomy, the demolition of slums, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the rise of the communist party and the imminent threat to secular democracy from the communalists. Jean M. Kane opines: “His chronicle alone remains as the material container of national meaning, for the nation dies with Saleem’s body” (Kane 1996, 96). Kane adds: “Just as Saleem is India, he is the chutney jar, the text, and the family, a chain of identifications that aligns each term with all the others” (1996, 99). Saleem’s untimely death makes the reader wonder if it indicates the demise of transcultural India or the downfall of monocultural Pakistan and Bangladesh. Ostensibly, Saleem, the mirror of the nation, is annihilated as he fails to rescue his country from destruction. However, his death may also suggest the end of an age and a new chapter of Indian (and Pakistani) history in which the new can be born. Since one jar in Saleem’s autobiography remains empty, there seems to be a hope that India (and Pakistan) is/are not lost to history, but rather will create a new history. Similarly, the new generation will not only rewrite and reinvent history, but may also learn from it by tasting the ‘pickles’ of Saleem’s memory. Hence, the very act of preserving the dynamics of memory against forgetting, against his “amnesic nation,” kindles a spark of hope and meaning in Saleem as well as in the reader, contrary to the contentions of many critics that the novelist portrays a bleak and hopeless picture of India. By drawing upon the paradoxes of memory, Rushdie tries to assert “the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration” (Rushdie 1991, 16). This is why the narrative never sounds nihilistic or like a dark tragedy as it constantly invents new stories, interspersed with wit and comedy, and fantasy and magical occurrences.

4.1.5 The art of chutney, history, memory and autobiography Since the formula of ‘chutney’ operates both on the narratological and metaphorical level, the novel is as much about the art of autobiographical narration as it is about history and memory in which Saleem acts as the ‘swallower’ of time, age and epoch. As Saleem engages history from a personal perspective, he posits that his version may not correspond with other historical versions of the same time: “Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on 15 August 1947 – but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 194). Because Saleem is an unreliable narrator who recalls the past with a fallible memory, he creates a fragmented history mainly from the perspective of his childhood. While negotiating childhood and the invention of fragmented memories, David Koester rightly argues:

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For any individual, memories of childhood years, overlain by other memories, fragments of memories and interpretations of later years, constitute an infinite resource for constructing ‘a childhood.’ Whether or not we accept the Freudian thesis that memory is total, that all experiences are somehow stored and variably accessible, it can be still argued that memory is infinite. For any scene, image, individual feeling, or group sentiment that one recalls, it can be recollected from an infinite number of perspectives in an infinitely divisible number of ways. (1996, 142)

Since Saleem distinctly recollects in ‘an infinitely divisible number of ways’, he proclaims that distortions are inevitable in pickling raw material just as in pickling history: “In the spice bases, I reconcile myself to the inevitable distortions of the pickling process […] The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind” (Rushdie 1995 [1981],461). He further affirms that he wants to share ‘memory’s truths’ with the reader in order to give his version of the past and to justify the mixture of reality and imagination in his narration: I told you the truth… Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, exaggerates, minimises, glorifies, and vilifies, also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own. (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 211)

While narrating his memories, Saleem highlights that “in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 270). Thus, he consciously manipulates facts of history since memory and past as constructs in any historiography are always liable to be fictional; hence, fiction should not be contested as untrue but as indispensable to the art of history and autobiography: For the first time, I fell victim to the past temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred … in short, the memory of one of my earliest crimes created the (fictitious) circumstances of my last. (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 443)

While burlesquing history in his autobiography, Saleem reminds us that his role is “of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 448), a role which gives him licence to temper fact with fiction and vice versa. In addition, Saleem underlines the tricks of memory by saying that “Reality is a question of perspective” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 165). That is why he reiterates that imperfections are bound to dominate his narration. However, it is not just imperfect memory or fictional history that is the issue, but the possibility that intertwined events and

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lives create their own fiction as well: “Every pickle-jar […] the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have pickled chapters” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 459). Senses of taste and smell during pickling not only connect him to some forgotten events and episodes from the past, but tend to mix up the difference between past and present in the process of writing down memories. He points out: “Pickle-fumes heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 166). Accordingly, he ends up intermingling past and present to such an extent that he fails to imagine time in a chronological way. Psychologists Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis rightly remark that, like the archive, “[M]emory is organized not only according to chronology, but also to chains of association which cut across time” (1973, 247). In the same vein, Sigfried Kracauer claims: “Memory does not pay attention to dates; it skips years or stretches temporal distance” (1993, 425). The development of the story is increasingly unpredictable as Saleem’s memory selects, modifies and changes past events to represent an individual vision of time and history, as well as space and place, in his circular narration. Saleem as a national allegory for his country directs the reader to imagine the creation of India not as a private fantasy or an objective fact, but as a “new myth – a collective fiction” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 112) as well as a “collective dream” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 112); India is a nation that has “five thousand years of history” but is “nevertheless quite imaginary” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 111). Later on, he adds that even freedom is a fiction in “our myth ridden nation” (Rushdie 1995 [1981], 197). While Timothy Brennan believes that any progressive vision today depends on myths of national belonging (see Brennan 1989, 1– 31), Rushdie, in reality, treats the myth of a nation as an illustration of the Indians’ perennial penchant for myth making in the private as well as public spheres. Because India is a culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse land, Rushdie is doubtful whether freedom from the British can also ensure freedom from the bigotry of communalists in modern India. To him, freedom is a myth – a far cry unless and until Indians are successful in eradicating communal and religious hatred within their territories, and are willing to retain the ‘mixed tradition of India.’

4.1.6 Conclusion: ‘Chutney’ as a commemorative trope The leitmotif of chutnification as a social, domestic and literary practice in Rushdie’s fictional autobiography draws our attention to the intricate relationship between history and memory, but more importantly to the complex and ambivalent processes of India’s as well as Pakistan’s encounter with modernity as new na-

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tion-states. Thus, the novel leaves us wondering how the divided subcontinent will come to terms with its new ‘national’ identities as India struggles with its phoney notion of family-cum-secular democracy, and Pakistan experiments with the ideals of ‘cultural purity’ after losing ‘East Pakistan’ as the new nation-state of Bangladesh. The twin tools of history and memory, hence, shed light on the broader question of reconciling with a ‘divided’ home/land in which the new cartographies of land and culture pose a challenge to the new generation on both sides of the border as to how to reinvent their ‘cultural and national identity’ in light of the political legacy of the partition.

4.2 ‘Imaginary nations’: Storytelling and transcultural recollection in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988) Memory is an action: essentially it is the action of telling a story. (Janet 1984, 229) The telling of stories is bound up with – touched by – the forming of new communities. In this sense, memory can be understood as a collective act which produces its object (the ‘we’), rather than reflects on it. (Ahmed 2000, 91)

4.2.1 Introduction: Partition as a historical predicament Cracking India – originally published under the title The Ice-Candy-Man (1988) – by Bapsi Sidhwa⁴ is a tale of the partition of India in 1947, a memory of lost childhood in pre-partition times, a fictional autobiography, a story of unrequited love and a transcultural recollection of various subcontinental ethnicities all in one. But apart from all these, the novel uses ‘the cracking metaphor of motherland’ to convey that nations are indeed “imagined political communities”⁵ and that na Bapsi Sidhwa was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1938 and raised in Lahore. She is the author of four novels: The Crow Easters (1978), The Bride (1982), Cracking India (1988), An American Brat (1993) and Water (2006). Sidhwa lives in Houston, Texas and divides her time between the US and Pakistan.  Anderson argues that nation is “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” He adds: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Quoting Ernest Gellner, he elaborates: “‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’” (Anderson 1983, 15; Gellner 1964, 169; emphasis in the original).

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tionalism can at times divide people before uniting them in distinct nations. I argue that, within the frames of a fictional autobiography, Sidhwa has translated the oral art of storytelling into a memory narrative by using the narrating voice of a five-year-old child protagonist. Since the novel recalls the pain of old wounds so that they may finally be healed, I aim to highlight that the practice of transcultural memory as reconciliation remains fundamental to Sidhwa’s narrative. The novel is the first person narration of a little girl, Lenny, who commemorates the forgotten cultural scenes of Lahore, a city pulsating with life, but sadly also a city which loses its lustrous multi-ethnic ambience after the partition. Like Sidhwa herself, Lenny lives in Lahore, is a Parsee and is stricken with polio at an early age. She enjoys spending time with Ayah, her nanny, along with Ayah’s admirers in Queen’s Park at Warris Road. Among them, Lenny tracks the transition of the Ice-candy-man, Ayah’s devout lover, through the roles of ice-cream vendor, bird seller, cosmic connector to Allah via telephone and, finally, his degeneration into a pimp. Thus, through Lenny, Sidhwa highlights the transformation of a simple man amidst political crises. While the story tracks violence against women through the character of Ayah and the camp of ‘fallen women’, it also shows the distortion of masculinity as embodied in the character of the Ice-candyman in the aftermath of partition and the new waves of ‘national’ politics. Hence, by remembering stories of ordinary individuals in a Bildungsroman, Sidhwa questions the ideologies of nationalism and national identity.

4.2.2 Ethnic divisions in the name of nationalism: The role of storytelling and transcultural memory A considerable number of novels have been written on the horrors of the partition holocaust on both sides of the border, affirming the centrality of the partition in Indian and Pakistani writers’ literary imagination as well as collective memory: Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1994 [1957]), Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (1975), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999) depict the Indian perception of the traumatic experiences during the division of the subcontinent. What distinguishes Sidhwa’s novel, however, is the representation of the partition through the Parsee imagination (Singh 1996, 166) on the one hand, and the Pakistani perspectives on the Hindu-Muslim divide on the other. In effect, the Pakistani perspective on partition events is so marginalised due to the lack of Pakistani writers writing in English that for many, presentday India seems to have suffered the partition trauma and not the Indian Mus-

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lims now living in Pakistan with a ‘new national identity’. Sidhwa pinpoints this dilemma in a conversation with David Montenegro: The main motivation grew out of my reading of a good deal of literature on the partition of India and Pakistan […] what has been written has been written by the British and Indians. Naturally, they reflect their bias. And they have, I felt after I’d researched the books, been unfair to the Pakistanis. As a writer, as a human being, one just does not tolerate injustice. I felt whatever little I could do to correct an injustice I would like to do. I don’t think I have just let facts speak for themselves, through my research I found out what the facts were. (1991, 35 – 369; emphasis in the original)

To address this very injustice, Sidhwa recalls stories of people from different social classes in her memory narrative, particularly the underclasses, not simply to broaden the spectrum of the partition discourse in literature, but to highlight the tragedy of losing one’s roots and means of survival altogether as a result of forced migration and religious intolerance; in short, the dark experience of starting from scratch in the face of political modernity. These waves of political modernity are beyond the understanding of non-political figures as they are not directly involved in such movements at all. In this way, Sidhwa challenges the modern notion of glorifying and celebrating ‘national’ identity at the cost of millions of miserable, dislocated families and communities. Against this backdrop, I argue that the novelist employs the twin modes of ‘story’ and ‘memory’ to describe the consequences of ethnic conflict and national prejudice in order to shed light on the bloody politics of 1947 and the Indians’ encounter with a new political chapter on the subcontinent, posing different kinds of cultural challenges with new cartographies of land and nation. It is through Lenny’s recollections that we are reminded of India’s myriad ethnic communities, their intertwined histories and their eventual evacuation from the native territory to the newly created nation-states within the Indian subcontinent. It is important to focus on the art of storytelling in relation to transcultural memory, especially when storytelling is a primary means of social memory. In fact, stories are the major resources by which social memory operates. According to Roger C. Schank, “Human memory is story-based. Not all memories are stories. Rather, stories are especially interesting prior experiences, ones that we learn from” (1990, 12). Furthermore, Lenny’s practice of storytelling is tantamount to regenerating the past and creating a dialogue between the past and the present, which is a persistent theme in the stories. In this regard, John D. Niles argues: [S]tory-telling helps the members of a group maintain an awareness of how the present is a result of past action. It can thus help groups maintain their identity without institutional

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amnesia, thereby relating their past history to the present state of things and preparing the way for an imagined future that may be a more blessed state. (1999, 54)

While Niles highlights the role of past, present and future in storytelling, Sidhwa’s narrator Lenny connects past and present in her tales to evoke lost memories and hidden histories of partition victims. By remembering a loss of place and community, Sidhwa sets out to establish how waves of nationalism destroy social-historical affinities between divergent ethnicities and how the partition puts an end to the cultural and communal unity of the subcontinent for good. Since it virtually led to a nationalism of lamenting, Aijaz Ahmad declares partition as: the biggest and possibly the most miserable migration in human history, the worst bloodbath in the memory of the subcontinent: the gigantic fratricide conducted by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communalities. Our ‘nationalism’ at this juncture was a nationalism of mourning, a form of valediction, for what was witnessed was not just the British policy of divide and rule, which surely was there, but our own willingness to break up our civilizational unity, to kill our neighbours, to forgo that civic ethos, that moral bond with each other, without which human community is impossible. A critique of others (anti-colonial nationalism) receded even further into the background, entirely overtaken now by an even harsher critique of ourselves… No quarter was given to the colonialist; but there was none for ourselves either. One could speak, in a general sort of way, of ‘the nation’ in this context, but not of ‘nationalism.’ In Pakistan, of course, there was another, overriding doubt: were we a nation at all? Most of the left wing, I am sure, said ‘No’. (1992, 118 – 119)

Like the Urdu novels of Khadija Mastoor, Abdullah Hussein, Qurrat ul Ain Haider and Intizar Husain in the 1950s and 1960s, Sidhwa’s fiction comes out of that refusal to forgive what the Indians and Pakistanis themselves have done and are still doing, in one way or another, to their own polity in the name of ‘nation’ (Renan 1990, 8 – 22). If the novel depicts nations as ‘imagined communities’, it also hints at the irony of inventing and creating nations⁶, which led to the worst genocide on the Indian subcontinent. Lenny’s memories of the politically divided subcontinent are redolent with painful episodes as she recalls nation-wide suffering and tragedies of innocent people at the time of the partition. Consequently, despite her light and playful tone, memory and pain often seem to be inextricably linked in the novel; as Fred D’Aguiar has already proclaimed: “Memory is pain trying to resurrect itself” (1995, 138). According to Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Sidhwa responds to “partition as a traumatic event” (2005, 177). However, at the same

 The long-standing and obvious links between nationalism and culture are one of the standard themes of theories of nationalism (see Gellner 1994, 63 – 70; also see Hutchinson 1987).

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time, Lenny’s memories are also profoundly punctuated with wit and humour throughout the novel. I argue that Sidhwa does not seek to merely highlight the grimness of the partition itself, but the heroism of the people coping with it in their limited and innocent ways. It is such an art of presenting and addressing partition that actually sets the novel apart from other fictional works on the partition. Sidhwa’s fine sense of humour is especially conspicuous when Lenny revives the lost cultural scenes of Lahore in her story along with the sadly transformed lives of her fellow Indians around her, even though she acknowledges change and mutation as a hallmark of modernity and, in particular, of modern existence on the Indian subcontinent. Furthermore, Sidhwa’s aim is not to use memory as mourning within the realm of fiction, but rather to convey how memory might kindle the hope of coming to terms with a shared past: in short, the hope of recognising not divided but ‘shared memories’.

4.2.3 Storytelling as a mode of intertwined memories and histories of India’s dispersed ethnicities The mode of storytelling is evident from the very beginning when the child narrator/protagonist tells the reader: “My world is compressed” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 11),making the reader at once plunge into her safe haven, which is closely connected to the political battles around her. Ayah (called Shanta) is introduced to us as a beautiful, eighteen-year-old robust Hindu woman who is constantly surrounded by her Muslim, Sikh and Hindu admirers. The Ice-candy-man, “a raconteur” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 29), is the centre of her fans even though “[h]e’s not the kind of fellow who’s permitted inside” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 37). Since the novel takes the form of a Bildungsroman, storytelling can be understood as a part of Lenny’s growing up in terms of both political and sexual consciousness. While speculating on her propensity to tell tales, she confesses at the same time that a certain awareness and understanding of the world has perhaps compelled her to tell stories: “Is that when I learn to tell tales?” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 88). Thus, storytelling serves as a bridge to unite the child’s world with the multidimensional adult world. While discussing storytelling in modern society, Reimund Kvideland maintains: As a social activity storytelling is based on a given worldview. It is our take on the one hand to bring this worldview to light through analysis, on the other to analyse the function of storytelling, as for instance, the function of propagating its own understanding of the world. (1990, 21)

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While narrating the story of India’s various ethnicities, Lenny begins to feel that her life is increasingly not only inseparable from the politics of her time, but also that she is always right in the middle of it. At times, she comes face to face with Gandhi, and other times, she is chanting slogans with the children’s procession for Hindustan or Pakistan, depending where the pitch of the voice is stronger. While portraying the Ice-candy-man, she underlines how politics and politicians preoccupy every character: Sometimes he quotes Gandhi, or Nehru or Jinnah, but I’m fed up with hearing about them. Mother, Father and their friends are always saying: Gandhi said this, Nehru said that. Gandhi did this, Jinnah did that. What’s the point of talking so much about people we don’t know? (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 38)

Ayah voices a similar concern. When she gets to know about the Hindu-Muslim trouble in Calcutta and Delhi from her Pathan admirer Sharbat Khan, she says lightly: “What’s it to us if Jinnah, Nehru and Patel fight? They are not fighting our fight” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 84). Lenny’s story reveals a wide chasm between the world of ordinary Indians and politicians of that period as she articulates a layman’s involvement as well as distance from political engagements. While it is claimed that Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah are influencing everyone’s imagination, Lenny asks herself the simple question of whether politicians can understand the predicament of the common man before deciding his destiny. This is, in fact, one of the most perturbing strands in Lenny’s transcultural recollections. In her essay, “Why I Write,” Sidhwa highlights: In Ice-Candy-Man I stressed a central concern – the evil done in the name of religion by politicians, and located the ordinariness of the people who so mercilessly preyed on the victims of Partition. (Sidhwa 1996, 31– 32)

By presenting a rift between Rogers and Singh, the neighbours of the Sethis, at one of the dinner parties, Sidhwa, for example, tries to shift the historical focus away from Jinnah and the Indian Muslims for dividing India. She believes that the Hindus and Hindu leaders are equally to blame for pushing the Muslim League to struggle for Pakistan and for jettisoning a great cultural continuum, thus, providing the reader with both sides of the story. When Singh accuses the British of dividing India, Rogers retorts: The Cabinet Mission proposed a Federation of the Hindus and Muslim majority provinces. Jinnah accepted it; Gandhi and Nehru didn’t! […] They refuse to hear, or see that Jinnah has the backing of seventy million Indian Muslims! Those arrogant Hindus have blown the last

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chance for an undivided India […] Gandhi and Nehru are forcing the League to push for Pakistan! (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 71)

In telling the story of India’s different religious and ethnic communities and their violent split in the wake of nationalism, Lenny also clarifies the role of Parsees, the followers of the Prophet Zarathustra, in Indian politics and describes their attempts to stay in the no-man’s land of politics in the wake of the Freedom Movement. At the Jashan prayer to celebrate the British victory in the Second World War, the president of the Parsee community, Colonel Bharucha, warns his people: “There may be not one but two – or even three new nations! And the Parsees might find themselves championing the wrong side – if they don’t look before they leap!” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 46). In effect, the Parsees, “expelled from Persia by the Arabs thirteen hundred years ago” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 46), were not only pro-British, but were sympathetic to all ethnic groups in India.⁷ For example, the Sethi household in the novel has Hindu and Muslim servants who are treated as part of their family and who they help as members of their own community. Lenny’s mother even smuggles petrol to transport her Hindu and Sikh friends to their ‘new homeland’ on the other side of the border. Lenny emphasises the liberal attitude of her community while declaring that, as Parsees, they celebrate all festivals, “Christmas, Easter, Eid, Divali. We celebrate them all” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 78) just like the Parsee children have “Hindu, Muslim, Parsee and Christian jokes” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 104). For the Parsees, naturally, it was unthinkable to stand for a new, single nation state on the Indian subcontinent, since not only had they always stood for cultural hodgepodge, but they also embraced multiple cultural connections as part of their ‘Indianness’.

4.2.4 Religious and ethnic fissures: ‘Cracking’ as leitmotif in Lenny’s transcultural recollections The metaphor of fragmentation is conspicuous in Lenny’s private as well as public world: once she recollects a nightmare in which “men in uniforms quietly slic[e] off a child’s arm here, a leg there” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 31). She feels as if the child in the nightmare is herself. She imagines her Godmother stroking her head as they “dismember” her: “I feel no pain, only an abysmal sense of loss – and a chilling horror that no one is concerned by what’s happening” (Sidhwa

 For more details on Sidhwa’s preoccupation with overlapping religious and national boundaries in her fiction, see Ross 1995, 362– 367.

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2006 [1988], 31). We encounter another incident of ‘fragmentation’ when Lenny makes her brother Adi pull her doll until it is torn into two halves. This is a repetition of the Hindu Banya being torn into two halves by the Muslim ruffians she witnessed in the Shalmi area, where the Muslims set all the Hindus on fire by spraying their buildings with petrol. The dismemberment of Lenny’s body in her nightmare as well as the assault on the Hindu Banya’s body in real life are a clear allusion to the vivisection of India. Lenny questions whether it is possible to come to terms with the partition of India by asking: “India is going to be broken. Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is?” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 101). She ruminates on the absurdity and cruelty of dividing India into two parts at the cost of depriving people of their cultural roots, reducing them to poverty and misery, and above all sending them into exile in their once native territory. Like Lenny, and echoing the character of grandmother in Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines, Ayah also attempts to imagine the partition of India in her own way by suggesting that “They’ll dig a canal […] This side for Hindustan and this side for Pakistan. If they want two countries, that’s what they’ll have to do – crack India with a long, long canal” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 101). However, ‘imagined’ nations are to come into being without marking the land with canals or trenches. When it becomes clear that the partition is unavoidable, Lenny tries to visualise the province of Punjab as a torn place, pondering: “Will the earth bleed? And what about the sundered river? Won’t their water drain into the jagged cracks? Not satisfied by breaking India, they now want to tear the Punjab?” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 124). As a little girl, she is haunted by territorial and communal fissures, which permeate every aspect of her life. Lenny charts the gradual emergence of communal discord in urban India through Ayah’s throng of admirers from heterogeneous ethnic backgrounds. Amid all sorts of partition conflicts, the Hindu Ayah and her multi-ethnic throng of admirers (the gardener Hari, the cook Imam Din, the Zoo-attendant Sher Singh, the Ice-candy-man and the Masseur) represent the basic unity that existed among the various religions of India for a considerable period of time. According to the Indian critic, Jagdev Singh, “The Ayah is undiscriminating towards all and it is in this that she becomes a symbol of the composite culture that India is” (Singh 1996, 170). However, as events roll towards the partition, the group of Ayah’s admirers begin to dwindle; they lose their admiration for Ayah and start taking an active part in killing, looting and assaulting each other like their countrymen all over India. Eventually, Ayah, the most apolitical figure, also becomes an ethnic figure; subsequently, she is abducted and molested by the same group of fans:

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It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves – and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all encompassing Ayah – she is also a token. A Hindu. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 101)

It is a historical fact that at the time of the partition, the Sikhs decided to join the Hindus, believing that Muslims would have been intolerant towards them if they had chosen to live in their new country created in the name of Islam. It is Ayha’s lover Masseur who tries to remind his Muslim friends that “the Sikh faith came about to create Hindu-Muslim harmony!” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 140). He avers to everyone at last: “In any case, there are no differences among friends […] We will stand by each other” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 140); nevertheless, in the partition commotion, the Masseur is butchered and left in a street in a gunnysack by his own Muslim friend, the Ice-candy-man, out of sheer jealousy for having a love affair with a Hindu Ayah. Sadly, Masseur’s ideal of united India dies with him, and so does Ayha’s dream of uniting with her Muslim lover. Lenny’s story takes a new turn in the tumult of partition as people and circumstances undergo a complete transformation, especially when all Hindus and Sikhs leave Lahore. Queen’s Park, where Lenny and Ayah spend their afternoons, has always been a mélange of people, each with a distinct complexion, dress, symbol and attire, but as India is about to be ‘cracked’, a sad kind of monotony and fear permeates the landscape after their expulsion: The garden scene has depressingly altered. Muslim families who added colour when scattered among the Hindus and Sikhs, now monopolize the garden, depriving it of colour. Even children, covered in brocades and satins, cannot alleviate the austerity of the black burkas and white chuddars that shroud the women. It is astonishing. The absence of the brown skin that showed through the fine veils of Hindu and Sikh women, and beneath the dhoties and shorts of the men, has changed the complexion of the queenless garden. There are fewer women. More men. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 249)

Lenny’s memory is not only located in the diverse landscape of Lahore, but also its dying cultural scene. A sense of longing in her story for a vanished past, a bygone childhood and above all a multi-ethnic persona of the subcontinent, in general, and her hometown, in particular, increasingly dominates the narrative as she tries to reconcile with new social, cultural and political realities that resonate in the city of her birth: Beadon Road, bereft of the colourful turbans, hairy bodies, yellow shorts, tight pajams, and glittering religious arsenal of the Sikhs, looks like any other population street. Lahore is suddenly emptied of yet another hoary dimension: there are no Brahmins with castemarks – or Hindu in dhotis with bodhis. Only hordes of Muslim refugees. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 187)

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When all Hindu and Sikh ethnicities are gradually banished from Lahore as the area of a new nation-state of Pakistan just as the Muslims are expelled from Amritsar as the area of the new nation-state of India, the entire cultural fabric of the liveliest city of the subcontinent conveys nothing but dreariness.⁸ Due to its long history of cosmopolitanism, it was famously said that: ‘One who has not seen Lahore is not yet born’; however, in the face of nationalistic fervour, the cultural and social scenes of a cosmopolitan city are bereft of their old glory. Subsequently, cultural bareness looms large as different ethnicities are put into closed cultural spheres.⁹ Lenny remembers when Lahore, a city of gardens and colour, began to burn. She asks herself: “How long does Lahore burn? Weeks? Months?” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 148) while thinking over the sad fate of her Hindu neighbours, the Daulatrams and the Shankars, who fled from their houses. While remembering the partition, the novelist also evokes the colourful portrait of Lahore¹⁰ as the older habitat of subcontinental ethnicities – a portrait which is fast slipping out of collective cultural memory as the new generations can never have any memory of other ethnicities or cultures in that territory. Even the Hindu and Sikh street names, as the very last reminder of their association with the city, are increasingly being replaced by Muslim names in the post-independence era. According to Uma Parameswaran: “All partition novels are efforts to do just this – to hold to what memory insists on relinquishing” (1995, 339). The more Lenny recollects, the more erratic is her memory. At this stage, the fallibility of memory tends to occupy Lenny’s imagination, just as Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children proclaims. She tries hard to recollect the partition trauma as meticulously as possible despite memory lapses. Nevertheless, fact and fantasy often intermingle in her acts of recall; as along this line, Schank indicates that “memory does not know the difference between reality and fantasy” (1990, 133). Lenny narrates: Despite all the ruptured dreams, broken lives, buried gold, bricked-in-rupees, secreted jewellery, lingering hopes … the fire could not have burned for months and months […] But in my memory it is branded over an inordinate length of time: memory demands poetic license. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 149)

While commenting on the trope of memory in the novel, Nandi Bhatia explains that the refusal to impose coherence on the narrative through fragmentary epi-

 For more details on the twin histories of Lahore and Amritsar, see Talbot 2007, 151– 185.  For further perspectives on the literature of partition, see Talbot 1995, 37– 56.  For a detailed view of the various aspects of pre-and post-partition Lahore, see Sidhwa 2005.

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sode is part of a storytelling technique that can only rely on memories to evoke the past: Memories themselves being fragmentary and changing, the narrative too, as a consequence, veers between bits and pieces of the lives of various characters and presents the past not in fixed or static terms but once that makes itself open to reinterpretation, every time an untold story is inscribed onto it. (2002, 204)

Sidhwa is criticised by Alamgir Hashmi for falsifying as well as exaggerating the history of the partition in her novel. He claims that “Ice-Candy-Man concerns the Partition events of 1947, and is more interesting for its characterization, developing narrative techniques and the child’s point of view than what it actually has to tell about the events” (1989, 126). Admittedly, at times the historical landmarks in this novel do appear misleading. The early reference to Gandhi’s intention “to walk a hundred miles to the ocean to make salt” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 36), for example, is wholly out of its historical time-scale. Gandhi’s salt march to Dandi Beach took place in the early months of 1930, not in the early months of 1947. However, this is far from being a case of invalid historical detail; rather, memory is playing a part here – what Lenny is told and what she remembers hearing first-hand creates its own reality as is common with our childhood memories. Consequently, this reference to Gandhi is a truth for Lenny even if it is historically inaccurate. Because of memory’s unreliable, selective and episodic features, Barbara Hardy reminds us: “Memory chooses, omits, adds, edits and collaborates with invention, exploration and disguise” (1975, 61). Sidhwa is not interested in documenting political facts in her novel, but their effect on people’s lives. Since the narrative is a recollection and a story of memory, she offers a fine combination of legend and folklore, myth and mythmaking, and fact and fiction to express the emotional impact of a historical event on the various generations of India.

4.2.5 Stories from rural areas in the wake of the national movement in the cities Sidhwa highlights the discrepancy in perceptual notions of nationalism and ethnic difference among rural people as compared to city people during the child protagonist’s journeys to a Punjabi village. By recollecting their stories, she seeks to demonstrate how ethnic tensions travel from city to the countryside, eventually enveloping every region like an all-devouring fire. While ordinary rural people could not imagine considering members of another ethnicity as enemies, the city radicals from a different ethnic community already begin to target

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them as foes as noticed in Ayah’s group of admirers mentioned before. By portraying the contrast between Lenny’s first and second visit to her cook Imam Din’s village Pir Pindo, a Muslim village thirty miles east of Lahore, Sidhwa traces the widening gulf in the rural areas between ethnic groups before moving on to illustrate communal conflagration in the cities. When Lenny visits the village just before the formidable partition with Din, she finds Muslims and Sikhs believing that the rivalry between different ethnic groups is only prevalent in the cities. “If need be, we’ll protect our Muslim brothers with our lives!” says the Sikh priest Jagjeet Singh. The village Chuadhry (head) of Pir Pindo adds: “[O]ur relationships with the Hindus are bound by strong ties. The city folk can afford to fight… we can’t […] To us villagers, what does it matter if a peasant is a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Sikh?” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 65). Nevertheless, the magnitude of ethnic conflict during the civil war demonstrates that all concepts of brotherhood and comradeship among Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims in the village are bound to be overshadowed by hate and cruelty. After a year only, the second visit to Pir Pindo familiarises Lenny with the spread of hatred among Sikhs against the Muslim peasants. This time she goes to Dera Tek Singh, another village next to Pir Pindo with other Muslims, to take part in Baisakhi, the day of celebrating the birth of the Sikh religion and the wheat harvest, where Lenny notices that the Sikh youth show disgust with Din’s grand-nephew Ranna even in the atmosphere of fun and laughter: We ride the merry-go rounds with metal seats and the seesaws. And despite the gaiety and distractions, Ranna senses the chill spread by the presence of strangers, their unexpected faces harsh and cold. A Sikh youth whom Ranna has met a few times, and who has always been kind, pretends not to notice Ranna. Other men, who would normally smile at Ranna, slide their eyes past. Little by little, without being aware of it, his smile becomes strained and his laughter strident. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 114– 155)

Without actually taking side with any political group or even participating in politics, simple villagers fall prey to political separatism, especially children and women from both Muslim and Hindu communities. As the majority of Muslims allegedly ask for Pakistan, the Hindus and Sikhs become determined to massacre them for their imagined political mischief. The plight of Ranna’s friends is symptomatic of the tension which the arrival of the radical Sikh sect ‘Akalis’ (which literally means the Immortals) in the village Dera Tek Singh has generated. As bloodshed in the name of religion and ethnic difference becomes a glaring reality, the priest Singh begins to express his fear of Sikh attacks to his Muslim friend Dost Mohammad, the nephew of Imam Din:

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They [the fanatic Sikhs] talk of a plan to drive the Muslims out of East Punjab […] To divide the Punjab. They say they won’t live with the Mussulmans if there is to be a Pakistan. Owlish talk like that! You know city talk. It’s madness… It can’t amount to anything… but they’ve always been like that. Troublemakers. You’ll have to look out till this evil blows over. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 116)

The patterns of communal relations between Lenny’s first and second visit to Pir Pindo are, therefore, poles apart. The Akalis seem to have not only harassed the villagers but also the city dwellers. It is in this supercharged atmosphere that Lenny listens to the Akali leader, Master Tara Singh, visiting Lahore. Addressing a vast congregation outside the Assembly chambers he shouts: “We will see how the Muslim swine get Pakistan! We will fight to the last man! We will show them who will leave Lahore!” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 143). The Muslims shout back: “So? We’ll play Holi-with-their-blood!” The impending Holi festival of the Hindus and Sikhs, when everybody splatters everybody with coloured water and coloured powders, is replaced by “people splattering each other in blood” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 144). Thus even the most enjoyable cultural practices like Holi also fall prey to political hatred and chaos as a consequence of people vacating the ancestral hometown and going into exile on the same soil. Lenny reminisces that, contrary to the radio news, Muslims are bluffed into staying and are assassinated as a punishment for creating Pakistan, especially during the attacks on Muslim villages near Amritsar and Jullundar. Consequently, millions of Muslims do not know where to go and how to leave their lands and the graves of their ancestors. When the soldiers ask the villagers to vacate the village to go to Pakistan, they remain puzzled and ask the soldiers: “Is Pakistan already there?” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 118) as if a few miles away from their ancestral home a new paradise called Pakistan were awaiting while in reality only a refugee camp is their fate on the other side of the artificially created frontier. The villagers, however, resist forced migration and question the cold decision of the soldiers. The necessity of inventing a new nation has baffled the cultural psyche of village people especially because they believe in the land they till, and not in artificially created national and geographical borders. Lenny hears them saying on her last visit to the village: “We cannot leave. What face will we show our forefathers on the day of judgment if we abandon their graves? Allah will protect us!” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 207). While narrating the massacre of Ranna’s family as well as his entire clan, Sidhwa reveals the mindset of the village people and the politicians’ disinterest in their troubles in order to remind us of the sacrifices of ordinary Indians, Hindus and Muslims as a result of the deeds of the politicians. Lenny recollects:

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And while the old city in Lahore, crammed behind its dilapidated Mogul gates, burned, thirty miles away Amritsar also burned. No one noticed Ranna as he wandered in the burning city. No one cared. There were too many ugly and abandoned children like him scavenging in the looted houses and the rubble of burnt out buildings. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 218)

When Ranna succeeds in reaching the India-Pakistan border, he has a chance to save his life, for stepping on the right border by choice or by accident becomes the only reality after the division of India. Ranna’s grim fate symbolises the hideous and gruesome face of nationalism in the South Asian politics. Since it is a nationalism of mourning and regret, and farewell and loss as Ahmad has previously explicated, Ranna’s misery is a morbid resolution of the partition saga.

4.2.6 Caught in the myths of ‘national borders’: Genocide, eviction and loot as the order of the day Despite articulating the afflictions of Muslims and giving the Pakistani perspective on the partition in the novel, Sidhwa questions the need for creating a new national identity through the child narrator. By telling tales of people from every religion and class, she highlights the myths of nation and nation building, which led to the loss of millions of lives. While Homi Bhabha declares that nationalism is by definition ambivalent (1990, 3), John McLeod interrogates the myth of nationalism to highlight a complexity intrinsic in the notion of nation: Although the myth of the nation might function as a valuable resource in uniting a people in opposition to colonialism, it often does so by ignoring the diversity of those individuals it seeks to homogenise – created out of gender, racial, religious, cultural differences […] this does not simply reflect a political failure on the part of the newly independent nations, but perhaps reveals a problem inherent in the concept of the nation itself. (2000, 103; emphasis in the original)

This was precisely the problem with Indian nationalism. Religion or ethnicity could not unite people as Indian politicians at that time strongly believed, but ties to the land and communities they had grown up with. As the plot develops, the sudden existence of Pakistan keeps the Muslim villagers surprised as well as confused. Just as they express wonder at embracing a new national identity, Lenny has similar feelings: “I am Pakistani. In a snap. Just like that” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 150). These succinct dialogues bring out the superficiality of giving an Indian Parsee or an Indian Muslim a Pakistani identity. Lenny narrates: “A new nation is born. India has been divided after all. Did they dig the long, long canal Ayah mentioned?” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 150). Nations as imagined communities

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are hard to imagine for an apolitical figure like Ayah. She does not see any sense in connecting to people she has never met and stay alien from those she has known all her life. This is exactly what Benedict Anderson refers to in elaborating his thesis on the invention of nations.¹¹ While discussing political modernity in South Asia, Dipesh Chakrabarty takes a step forward. He understands imagination and nationalism as concepts loaded with ambivalence, arguing imagination “as inherently heterogeneous category” which “in the end makes it possible to see the political as something that constitutes a ‘one’ or a ‘whole’” (2000, 178). Lenny’s birthday coincides with the birth of Pakistan and, due to the magnitude of this historical event, no one could remember or pay heed to it. On her birthday, she sits around the radio along with her family to listen to the celebrations of the new nation. Jinnah’s voice, inaugurating the Constituent Assembly sessions on August 11, says: ‘You are free. You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in the State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the State…etc. etc., etc. Pakistan Zindabad!’ (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 154)

Sidhwa quotes the censored lines from Jinnah’s speech about the separation of state from religion in present-day Pakistan because Jinnah’s People’s Republic of Pakistan, a secular state for the Muslims of India, has already been renamed by a succession of dictatorships as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Today, most people in Pakistan staunchly believe that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam, but Jinnah was never an Islamist. He established a separate state for the Muslims to protect the political, social and economic rights of the Indian Muslims in a Hindu-dominated subcontinent and not solely for the purpose of preserving religious rights.¹² His words are as much caricaturised at home as his political image in the Western and Indian media. Therefore, Sidhwa intends to reportray him in her narration in order to clarify his real motives behind his struggle for Pakistan. In the wake of religious persecution, people like Hari are worried about their uncertain future. Consequently, Hari decides to become a Muslim to be able to stay where he is just like Lenny’s sweepers, the Motis, convert to Christianity from untouchable Hindus. In the middle of ethnic aggression and violence, Hari becomes

 See Anderson 1983, 25. For a critique of Anderson’s thesis, see Chatterjee 1986, Ch. 1, 19 – 22; Also see Chatterjee 1996, 214– 225; Chatterjee 1993, Ch. 11. 220 – 240; Hobsbawm and Ranger 2000 [1983]).  For more details into the ideology of Pakistan and Jinnah’s secular vision, see Ahsan 2000 [1996], Ch. 24, 251– 253, and Ch. 28, 284– 295.

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Himat Ali, “removes his bohdi and becomes a Muslim. He has had his penis circumcised” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 172). Thus, partition reduces man to a plaything of religion and ethnicity. Common men like Hari and Moti are forced to adopt a new religion and a new national identity, however preposterous. Gradually, people around Lenny from various social and religious backgrounds begin to drift apart with Lahore turning into a refugee camp as the Muslim refugees flood the city and especially the Punjab west of Lahore. Lenny recollects: Within three months seven million Muslims and five million Hindus and Sikhs are uprooted in the largest and most terrible exchange of population known to history. The Punjab has been divided by the icy card-sharks dealing out the land village by village, city by city, wheeling and dealing and doling out favour. (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 169)

Lenny’s transcultural recollections are replete with city and community images as she tends to treat space and place as unique artefacts of memory. In fact, she recalls the detriment of place and community repeatedly to demonstrate the consequence of partition for all ethnic, religious, and social groups as well as for the generations to come. The reader is, thus, reminded of the fact that territories need to be seen as sites of memory as these territories were once the habitats of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs alike, for not only do they reflect the aftermath of partition but the presence of its legacy. For example, the common cultural heritage of the province of Punjab, now having half its part in Pakistan and half in India, is a constant reminder of creating walls among people against their will who, despite following different religions, actually had a common culture and language, namely Punjabi.

4.2.7 Beyond the borders of ‘imaginary nations’: The triumph of the Ice-Candy Man over political barriers Religious and ethnic aberrations, central to the plot development, are lucidly mirrored in the character of the Ice-candy-man. The same Ice-candy-man who claimed before the partition of India: “‘So what if you’re a Sikh? I’m first a friend of my friends […] And an enemy to their enemies […] And then a Mussulman!’” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 131) abducts Ayah from Lenny’s house, makes her a prostitute and then forces her to marry him after converting her to Islam. He repeats this same pattern of violence by throwing grenades into the houses of his Hindu and Sikh friends after witnessing the massacre of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs in the train from Gurdaspur. However, despite his monstrous transformation, Lenny remains fascinated with him as a man of flesh-and-blood who is strangely moulded by Indian politics.

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Thus, it is difficult throughout the novel to imagine him as a perfect villain or a victim. It is clear that the Ice-candy-man commits the worst kinds of war crimes, but even then he remains an enigma for the reader as he seems to hover endlessly over the newly created borders of his old country in the name of ‘love’. Sidhwa’s treatment of women in the novel has been addressed by a considerable number of critics such as Deepika Bahri (1999, 218), Jill Didur (2006, 68), Ambreen Hai (2000, 379 – 420), to name a few, but not many have addressed the treatment of masculinity, or male bodies in the discursive articulation of nationalism in the public sphere with the exception of Kavita Daiya whose article “Postcolonial Masculinity: 1947, Partition Violence and Nationalism in the Indian Public Sphere” investigates, what she calls, ‘suffering masculinities’ (2006, online source). Examining the discourse on the literature of partition, it is quite apparent that masculinity or male bodies as caricaturised as well as demonised by the partition upheaval does not appear to be as crucial a discussion as feminism or the female body. According to Daiya, it is notable in the novels of partition that men often become symbolic national icons such as Saleem in Midnight’s Children or Jugga in Train to Pakistan; hence, “it is through their suffering masculinities [that] they index the violence of both communalism and elite nationalism” (2006, online source). She argues that just like Saleem and Jugga’s male bodies become both witness and victim of the violence of nations and nationalism, so too does the ‘body of the Ice-candy-man’ which transgresses borders and border controls as he “disappears across the Wagah border into India” (Sidhwa 2006 [1988], 289) once Ayah has gone to her family in Amritsar. Daiya is justified in saying that, in contrast to Saleem and Jugga, even though the Ice-candy-man violates the body of Ayah, “the irony is that by doing so, he loses control on his male identity, thus becomes a ghost of his real self and identity which dies during the partition violence” (Daiya 2006, online source). This very death of self and identity, synonymous with the fall from innocence, is painfully noticed by Lenny for whom the story of the Ice-candy-man ends as tragically as her favourite Ayah. In this way, in Cracking India, Sidhwa remembers not only the violent territorial splitting of 1947, but also its historical continuity in the national sphere of India and Pakistan as new nation states with a special reference to the physical and emotional destruction of the Ice-candy-man, who heroically challenges and dismisses the myth of ‘fixed national borders’ in spite of committing dark deeds. In doing so, Sidhwa communicates a powerful critique of the limitation of the nation as an imagined community. However, by allegorising the male body as nation and as suffering masculinity, my aim is not to underestimate the specificity of women’s experiences of sexual and gendered violence, but rather to illustrate how women’s and men’s bodies can be seen as subject to violence in con-

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nection with each other. In other words, thinking along Daiya’s lines, it is important “to expose the pressures of nationalism on the lived experience of gendered embodiments” (2006). The border rifts and ethnic disparities, which transform the Ice-candy-man into a monster and then a fakir, fail to stop him from following his desires and wishes for a Hindu woman. Even though he is a broken man, he triumphs over national-cultural boundaries to fulfil his dreams, however fragile, and elevate his status as a man of courage. Since territory, border and nation lose their significance for him, he ignores the artificial tokens of nationalism to stay loyal to his feelings of love and devotion. Despite the vortex of violence that follows partition and eventually sucks up Ayah and her admirer as it rips apart other lives, Sidhwa stays true to her characters: they refuse to give up on their ideals or to turn into tragic symbols, all of which brings home not merely the horror of what they have survived, but the strength of their characters. That Ayah is compelled to leave for India after her molestation by an Indian Muslim also highlights the hollowness of Jinnah’s pompous promises in his speech that the new state of Pakistan does not discriminate against anyone on the basis of religion and that the nation’s flag also represents minority rights. Hence, the gulf between the needs of the common man and the national aspirations of politicians remains a central preoccupation in Lenny’s story, a story which reveals that the politicians not only betray the masses but actually give them false hopes under the guise of political modernity in South Asia.

4.2.8 Conclusion: Re-membering as reconciliation Cracking India is a major contribution to the growing list of partition novels which continue to emerge from the Indian subcontinent. However, through her marginalised narrator and through the experiences of many marginalised characters in her novel, Sidhwa renders voice to hitherto silenced victims of India and Pakistan; and in so doing she tells ‘other versions’ of her country’s history. By telling tales of a traumatic episode in South Asian history, she also remembers the survival of community; as Victoria Aarons postulates: “Telling stories enacts a deeply ingrained history of bearing witness to the survival – if only in memory – of a community” (1996, 2). Through her child protagonist, Sidhwa focuses on the afflictions of the partition generations to commemorate and preserve their sufferings and sacrifices, implying that India and Pakistan¹³, despite being ‘enemies in heritage’, are ‘commun-

 For more perspectives on Pakistani culture and modernity with special reference to India, and on contemporary Indo-Pak diplomatic relations, see Butt 2004a, 2004b.

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ities of memories’. Hence, remembering is not only a means of bringing them together, but also a way to reconcile with the bitter past as well as the legacy of cultural prejudice. Sidhwa seems to hope that the practice of reminiscing about mutual memories of the division of the subcontinent might make the older and newer generations “re-examin[e] the history of the partition” (Butalia2000, 276) and replace half a century of hatred with friendship. Above all, it might encourage them to revive their ‘intertwined memories’ by exchanging lost bits of their ‘stories’ so that the growing gulf between quarrelling ethnic communities on both sides of the border could finally be bridged.

4.3 Inventing or recalling the contact Zones? Transcultural spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) Memory mediates spatial transformations […] Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it. (Certeau 1984, 85 – 86) Space has a history. (Burgin 1996, 40)

4.3.1 Introduction: Shadows of imaginary and remembered spaces Space as a place of contact as well as conflict is an important dimension in the fictional realms of Amitav Ghosh.¹⁴ In fact, space, imagined or remembered, seems to have a profound influence on the novelist and his protagonists in many of his major works.¹⁵ By recalling and imagining the interplay between private and political lives, Ghosh ventures to build bridges between disparate peoples, locations, ethnicities and communities in his narrative – to exhibit the dy-

 Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and grew up in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. His other novels include The Circle of Reason (1986), In an Antique Land (1993), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), Sea of Poppies (2008), and River of Smoke ( 2011).  The Circle of Reason (1986) spreads across India, the Gulf region, Algeria; The Shadow Lines (1988) across India, Bangladesh and the UK; The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) across India and the US; The Glass Palace (2000) across Burma, India and Malaya; and The Hungry Tide (2004) across the Sundarbans, the islets of the Ganges delta that lie south of Calcutta and just east of the West Bengal/Bangladesh frontier.

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namics of “overlapping territories, intertwined histories” (Said 1994 [1993], 48) in our increasingly interconnected world. The novel takes place largely on the newly-created Indo-Pakistan border. It spans three generations of the narrator’s family, spreading across East Bengal, Calcutta and London. Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, the novel portrays two families – one English, one Bengali – known to each other from the time of the Raj, as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator travels between Calcutta and London in 1981 to tell the story which contains multiple stories of his grandmother Th’amma, and his grandaunt Mayadebi, of his uncles Tridib and Robi, of his cousin Ila, and of May Price, a family friend in London. All these stories-within-stories are united by the thread of memory as the novelist treats memory as a driving force of the narrative. The narrator, Indian-born and English-educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of the Second World War to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.¹⁶ Hence, from his maps of memory, we learn that Tridib was born in 1932 and had been to England with his parents in 1939, where his father had received medical treatment. May Price, with whose family they shared a close relationship, had begun a long correspondence with Tridib in 1959. Unfortunately, Tridib lost his life in a communal riot in Dhaka in 1964 while May was on a visit to India. Examining connectedness and separation, the author uses the fate of nations (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) to offer observations about a profoundly complex political conflict in the post-partition subcontinent between two major ethnic communities of Hindus and Muslims. By spreading the story over diverse geographical and national landscapes in which memory and imagination reinvent historical reality, Ghosh highlights how the ‘shadows’ of imaginary and remembered spaces haunt all characters in the novel as they struggle to narrate their personal and collective histories to each other. At the same time, these ‘shadows’ in the form of ‘national boundaries’ not only manipulate private and political spheres, but also demonstrate an individual’s lifelong struggle against artificial borders, which are imposed upon the space of home, territory, and motherland.

 The Shadow Lines was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The fragmentary narrative unfolds the narrator’s experiences in the form of memories which move backwards and forwards. The novel is set against the backdrop of major historical events such as the Swadeshi movement, the Second World War, the partition of India, the communal riots of 1963 – 64 in Dhaka and Calcutta, the Maoist Movement, the India-China War in 1962, the India-Pakistan War in 1965 and the fall of Dhaka from East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

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In order to bring out the irony of dividing ancient cultures and civilisations by drawing borders and giving a new name to a piece of mutual territory, Ghosh portrays the sinister smoke screens of nationalism, hitherto unknown on the Indian subcontinent before the partition in 1947, through the all-pervasive metaphor of ‘shadow lines’ in the novel. However, the trope of ‘shadow lines’ points not only to the ambivalence of the construct of nation and national borders, but more importantly to the grey realms of imagination and memory in narrating historical truths. Consequently, both imagination and memory, I argue, remain central to the representation of imaginary and remembered spaces in the novel.

4.3.2 A trip down memory lane: Representation of space in the vicissitudes of time A significant number of critics have conceptualised transcultural processes in geographical and metaphorical terms such as Mary Louise Pratt, Elleke Boehmer, Peter Hulme or Stephen Greenblatt; in particular, Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja theorise these processes through the notion of Third Space. A focus on the spatial dimensions of these concepts makes us consider the role of space construction in initiating a transcultural negotiation. Space, as many critics have argued, does not merely provide a background for cultural configurations; rather, it is an essential part of cultural and political transformations. In Ghosh’s fictional realms, however, local and global, seen and unseen space is perceived and imagined in the narrator’s ritual of memory as a fundamental facet of individual, national, familial, and communal metamorphoses. In Ghosh’s fiction, space is not merely remembered as an imaginative construct but is represented as a domain of political and cultural encounters, which actually shapes the connection of different characters with territory and location. Hence, space is represented as a dynamic arrangement between people, places, cultures and societies. As James Clifford points out, “space is never ontologically given. It is discursively mapped and corporeally practiced” (1997, 54). According to Clifford, space is composed through movement, produced through use, and is simultaneously an agent and a result of action or practice. Therefore, we need to make a distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place.’ The difference and connection between space and place have been examined by a number of cultural and postcolonial critics. According to Bill Ashcroft, for example, “space” is the creation of colonialism, which virtually dislocated the colonised; “place” in contrast is the pre-colonial perception of belonging in time, community and landscape – a perception that postcolonial transformation strives to retrieve, if in the “delocalised,” that is, “spatialised” form of global consciousness (2000, 15).

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A similar distinction can also be identified in diasporic Indian writing in English: ‘place’ is often seen as the concrete manifestation of home, culture, and community before the arrival of the colonial rulers, whereas ‘space’ is seen as the colonial construction of the land as open and raw, to be conquered by the Western coloniser. Consequently, ‘place’ frequently functions as the grounded opposition to colonial ‘space.’ However, this kind of perception of space focuses on the perpetuation of essential cultural difference and opposition, and above all ignores a variety of cultural dynamics active in the construction of space and its role in transcultural processes in the age of worldwide global cultural transactions. The construction of space in Ghosh’s novel does not simply manifest territorial struggles, which tend to preoccupy the postcolonial theorists (e. g. Kumar 2007); rather, it serves to show the interplay between local and global influences, national and transnational reconfigurations and above all the search for community and alliances that cut across boundaries of cultural and ethnic identity. While Pratt and Ashcroft address ‘space’ and ‘place’ more specifically in terms of colonial and postcolonial tensions, my interpretation of “transcultural spaces” (Thomas 1996, 3) in the present context does not focus on the transactions between the coloniser and the colonised, but on geo-political strife as well as harmony among divergent ethnic groups in India in contemporary times. In my analysis of the novel, mapping transcultural spaces is a tool to speculate on the dynamics of ‘space’ and ‘place’ in one of the most crucial periods of the history of the subcontinent. Ghosh and his narrator as “a chronicle” (2005 [1988], 110) recollect this particular time to make sense of the reality of distance and space against the political crisis of 1964 in the subcontinent. However, the narrator attempts to understand space not merely as a bone of contention of territorial conflict and cultural clash, but instead, as a point of connection and conjunction, too. The transcultural dimension is important to understand the representation of space in the novel because Ghosh’s narrator makes the reader imagine space above the narrow confines of a singular culture, nation, territory and community. I use the notion of space in relation to the transcultural theory to negotiate different representations of space in the novel such as imaginary, remembered and national. Furthermore, I argue that this notion sheds light on an individual’s and his community’s strife with national ideologies as reflected in the narrator’s and Tridib’s construction of space and place. Inhabiting a world of human, geographical and political barriers, the narrator and Tridib have a vision – a vision of constructing a free space beyond all temporal and spatial constraints (in a world without binaries). This contentious space is theorised in this chapter as a transcultural space – a space of cultural and ethnic transactions where characters seek to overthrow artificial boundaries to come to terms with the reality of cultural and political transformations. Moreover,

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transcultural spaces also refer to the cross-cultural practices of imagining or remembering space and place in the novel. While going down memory lane, the narrator, like Tridib, tries to inhabit a transcultural space in order to achieve a complete sense of freedom and liberty since these constructs are central to every character’s story in the novel. However, as demonstrated by Tridib’s killing in an act of ethnic violence, national uprising as a legacy of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 pushes the characters from the old and new generation to the brink of tragedy. Since the narrator contests artificial divisions of the subcontinent as well as ‘colonial or postcolonial’ cartographies, the novel presents a transcultural space through the imagination of the narrator and his most influential relative, Tridib. This space is visualised not only as a space of human and cultural encounters, but of overlapping histories and territories, shifting countries and continents, where different people, cultures, nations and communities communicate above the ‘shadow lines’ of social, national and territorial barriers. Hence, the idea of transcultural spaces in the novel highlights the role of national ideologies in shaping personal memory and collective history. Lastly, transcultural spaces also point to the cartographic imagination of the Bengali community. According to Meenakshi Mukherjee, cartographic imagination is peculiar to Bengali imagination: “Whether as a result of a relatively early exposure to colonial education or as a reaction to it, real journeys within the country and imagined travels to faraway places outside national boundaries have always fascinated the Bengali middle class” (2000, 137). Thus, a deep fascination with distant space and place characterises the narrator’s and his family’s imagination in both parts of the novel.

4.3.3 Cross-cultural practices of imagining space and place Spatial practices work on a variety of levels in the novel such as telling stories and events, evoking the role of imaginary and real places across distant cultures and communities, watching fading photographs, reading maps and old newspapers, reminiscing about forgotten episodes of mutual bonding, and playing childhood games. The narrator claims that he has learned the practice of imagining space and place from his alter-ego, Tridib. While reminiscing about him, the narrator reveals that it is Tridib who has given him “worlds to travel” and “eyes to see them with” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 20). It is Tridib who triggers in him a longing to imagine familiar and unfamiliar places in memory and imagination. In short, it is Tridib’s gift of imagination that kindles in the narrator a desire to travel around the globe. Both have a penchant for studying maps to develop and discover their unique sense of travelling to places without any kind of

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mental and physical border or barrier. Tridib has even suggested to the narrator to use his “imagination with precision” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 24) in order to voyage into unknown spaces. He once said to the narrator that one could never know anything except through desire “that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 29). The narrator finds it sad that his globe-trotter cousin, Ila, on the other hand, has no concept of place because she could not invent a place for herself but relies on the inventions of others: I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more nor less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 21)

Instead of ever making an effort to understand him, Ila despises the narrator for having a dreamy view of distant places, for she could never believe in space as a human construction but looks upon it as a given reality. She dismisses the narrator’s practice of imaginary space construction as a mere indulgence in fantasy: It’s you who were peculiar, sitting in that poky little flat in Calcutta, dreaming about faraway places. I probably did you no end of good; at least you learnt that those cities you saw on maps were real places, not like those fairylands Tridib made up for you. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 23 – 24)

The narrator realises that lla is trapped in a static zone even though she has travelled to different regions of the world. The problem is that Ila perceives the present without ever seeking its affinity with the past, especially since memory is not crucial to her conception of space and place. She is unable to see the past through memory or imagination whereas, once the narrator has seen the past through Tridib’s eyes, the past for him “seemed concurrent with its present” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 31). The narrator points out: Ila lived so intensely in the present that she would not have believed that there really were people like Tridib, who could experience the world as concretely in their imagination as she did through her senses, more so if anything, since to them these experiences were permanently available in their memories. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 29 – 30)

Although Ila wants to enjoy a sense of bonding with the narrator, she simultaneously tends to look down upon himfor inhabiting middleclass suburbs of

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Delhi and Calcutta where no events of global importance ever take place, “nothing that sets a political example to the world, nothing that’s really remembered” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 102). The narrator is confused because he has always viewed the world as a mosaic of interconnected places. Calcutta for him is as much a part of London as London is a part of Calcutta, especially when all places are borderless space in the process of memory, like hues of the same picture. Moreover, he is surprised to find out that Ila has no understanding of events outside of England, the colonial motherland: I began to marvel at the easy arrogance with which she believed that her experience could encompass other moments simply because it had come later; that times and places are the same because they happen to look alike, like airport lounges. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 101)

He confesses that many events of global importance might have taken place only in England, but this does not mean that the history of his country should be sniggered at. He recollects how his land has undergone untellable political calamities while confessing his perception of England only as a homeland of imagination, maintaining, “I knew nothing at all about England except an invention. But still I had known people of my own age who had survived the Great Terror in the Calcutta of the sixties and seventies” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 103). Since he apprehends space as a cultural “artifact” (Shields 1997, 197), he cannot, like Ila, imagine place as a closed container, independent of human subjectivity and agency. Time and again, the narrator underlines the role of memory and imagination in ‘inventing place’ because he wants to be free of other people’s fabrications of space and place. In other words, he strives to read space above all kinds of artificial borders to imagine its dimensions in his own way. As a school boy, the narrator conjured up a picture of London that was so vivid in his imagination that he could recognise places by the mere mention of their names when he visits London years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head: [t]he Tridib who had pushed me to imagine the roofs of Colombo for myself, the Tridib who had said that we could not see without inventing what we saw, so at least we could try to do it properly … because … if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 31)

The narrator is also deeply mesmerised by an imaginary space like Tridib’s ruin which he discovers at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. In 1959, when Tridib was twenty-seven and May Price nineteen, they had begun a long correspondence but they met for the first time in that ruin in Calcutta in 1964. Tridib had expressed in his last letter to May that he wanted them to “meet far away from friends and relatives – in a place without a past, without history, free, really free, two people

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coming together with the utter freedom of strangers” (Ghosh, 2005 [1988], 141). In fact, Tridib epitomises the narrator’s as well as every other character’s desire to overcome the ‘shadow lines’ of borders and distance – ‘shadows’ which seem to devour the characters’ aspirations for freedom – in order to inhabit a space of cultural and human contact. Despite ending as a story of unrequited love, Tridib and May’s relationship is the most awe-inspiring experience in the narrator’s memories because their vision of love and bonding is constricted neither by national fervour nor by the racial hatred which plagued the different ethnicities of divided India. In the course of remembering yet another particular spatial practice, the narrator points out that space, at times, can carry inexplicable marks of time. While recollecting Ila in London, he explains how he was suddenly haunted by the ghosts of time in the cellar of the Prices when he was playing ‘Houses’ with her – a game he had actually played with her in their ancestral home in India. At that moment, he experienced time past as almost suspended in space: Those empty corners filled up with remembered forms, with the ghosts who had been handed down to me by time: the ghosts of the nine-year-old Tridib, sitting on a camp bed, just as I was, his small face intent, listening to the bombs; the ghost of Snipe in that far corner … the ghost of the eight-year-old Ila, sitting with me under that vast table in Raibajar. They were all around me, were together at last, not ghosts at all: the ghostliness was merely the absence of time and distance – for that is all that a ghost is, a presence displaced in time. (Ghosh, 2005 [1988], 178)

While witnessing the ghosts of time in the presence of Ila, which are the ‘ghosts of memory and imagination’ simultaneously, the narrator experiences a rush of shared memories overwhelming his entire being. Real places in his recollection appear to be as much imaginary as real. This is the reason that there is a constant play on reality and imagination in the narrator’s transcultural consciousness, whether he is at home or abroad. For the narrator, reality lies not in the obvious, but in what is evoked and understood by the ‘shadows’ of memory and imagination over changing laps of space and time. It is imagination alone which can portray a lucid and an enduring picture of reality. Hence, the narrator gives more emphasis to the creative aspect of imagination in uncoiling memories even though both imagination and memory are an irresolvable mystery to him, as is the murder of Tridib. Furthermore, the transcultural space of memory presents a panorama of interconnected histories as Indian and English, and Indian and Bengali family stories are entangled in the larger collective history.

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4.3.4 Tracking the past in the present: The events of 1964 as a struggle with silence The narrator simultaneously portrays a series of political incidents in Calcutta and Dhaka to bring out the enormity of the central tragedy in his narration. It started with the disappearance of Mu-i-Mubarak, the hair of the Prophet Mohammed, from Hazratbal Mosque in Kashmir in 1963 and its recovery in 1964. In one of the riots in Khulna, a small town in the distant east wing of Pakistan, a demonstration turned violent on the 4 January 1964. This demonstration is “branded in [the narrator’s] memory” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 222) because it is during this demonstration that Tridib lost his life. While recollecting an individual’s sacrifice and his community’s struggle with senseless political and national barriers, the narrator states: Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose – have already lost – for even after all these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of an imperfect memory. Nor is it a silence enforced by a ruthless state – nothing like that: no barbed wire, no check-points to tell me where its boundaries lie. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 213)

The narrator has a twin motive in narrating from the sources of memory: first, to communicate the lurking political turmoil beneath the tender veneer of his childhood years in post-partition India; and secondly, to save his memories from slipping into the realm of forgetting. The struggle with silence is not only a struggle with recollection, but also a struggle with the fading past in the fast changing present. In 1979, the narrator recollects the events of 1964 involving his friend Malik because he is determined not to let “the past vanish without trace; I was determined to persuade them of its importance” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 217). The narrator uses memory not merely to comprehend the individual and collective cultural past that has been confounding him for fifteen long years, but also to figure out ‘what’ and ‘how’ to remember. Perhaps this is the reason that the narrative reflects a constant process of introspection; as Louis James proclaims, “For if Circle of Reason is about knowledge, The Shadow Lines is about knowing” (James 1999, 56). The novel as a work of commemoration and reminiscence is an attempt not only to evoke the memory of the ethnic riots of 1964 and to mourn the death of innocent people, but also to pay tribute to someone who dreamed of a borderless subcontinent. The narrator recollects:

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[b]y the end of January 1964 the riots had faded away from the pages of the newspapers, disappeared from the collective imagination of “responsible opinion,” vanished without leaving a trace in the histories and bookshelves. They had dropped out of memory into the crater of a volcano of silence. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 226)

The narrator is surprised to find out in his study of old newspapers that the riots in Khulna and Calcutta never even made the newspaper headlines, but became a mere bottom page story. At this point, the narrator starts the “strangest journey: a voyage into a land outside space, an expanse without distances; a land of looking-glass events” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 219). He is deeply disturbed to know that the newspapers of 1964 in India have not given enough emphasis to communal violence in Dhaka and consequent riots in Calcutta. He comes to the sudden realisation that the distance of twelve hundred miles between Srinagar (Kashmir) and Calcutta, and “Dhaka being in another country,” could be used as a reason to keep people in Calcutta in the dark. This piece of news leads the narrator to discover a momentous truth, that is, national frontiers create a false sense of distance and reality. In other words, national borders generate an illusion of cultural and historical differences. It is the illusion of cultural and historical differences he seeks to address in remembering his family in relation to the English, Indian and Bengali political histories. The narrator also meticulously recollects trouble in Dhaka and Calcutta simultaneously as political tensions in these two cities coincide with each other. When Muslims poisoned the water of Calcutta in 1964 as a protest against the communal crisis in Dhaka as rumoured by word-of-mouth, the narrator felt at that time that “our city had turned against us” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 199). Due to the terror of riots, he could not even trust his Muslim friend Montu. He remembers fear suddenly filling the familiar spaces of his native city: It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world – not language, not food, not music – it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 200)

However, the irony is that Indians are ultimately compelled to shed borders and barriers because abstract concepts of nationalism can never replace human bonding. The grandmother’s orthodox Hindu uncle Jethamoshai, for example, has never let the shadow of any Muslim pass over him in all his life, but after the partition, when he has almost lost his senses, he is happily looked after

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by a Muslim family. Jethamoshai claims that his fate is tied to his land whether his land is transferred to his enemies or not: Once you start moving you never stop. That’s what I told my sons when they took the trains. I said: I don’t believe in this India-Shindia. It’s very well, you’re going away now, but suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere? What will you do then? Where will you move to? No one will have you anywhere. As for me, I was born here, and I’ll die here. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 211)

By showing the connection between space and individual memory and collective history, the novel depicts how nationalism invades private lives and how political histories shape personal memories. The novel, thus, powerfully portrays how nationalism invades our lives whether we fight it or not, and how it determines human relationships. In fact, the interconnectedness of space, history and memory also direct the narrator to rediscover the dynamics of territorial distance and cultural difference. While commenting on Ghosh’s logic of drafting the politics of space in the novel, Mukherjee makes a pertinent comment: Amitav Ghosh would like to believe in a world where there is nothing in between, where borders are illusions. Actually three countries get interlocked in Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines – East Pakistan before it became Bangladesh, England, and India – and people of at least three religions and nationalities impinge upon one another’s lives and deaths. It is very much a text of our times when human lives spill over from one country to another, where language and loyalties cannot be contained within tidy national frontiers. (2008, 181)

The narrator as a historian and Tridib as an archaeologist seem to complement each other in the novel as a narrative of memory. The narrator declares that even years after his death, Tridib seems to be watching over him as he tries “to learn the meaning of distance. His atlas showed me, for example, that within the tidy ordering of Euclidean space, Chiang Mai in Thailand was much nearer Calcutta than Delhi” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 227). Thus, time and distance, like space and place, appear to be a mystery that the narrator has to decipher in order to relive and repossess his fast disappearing past. Due to a long silence within and without with respect to the individual and communal crisis of 1964, it takes the narrator “fifteen years to discover” that there was a connection between “my nightmare bus ride back from school and the events that befell Tridib and others in Dhaka” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 214; emphasis in the original). The narrator wonders at his stupidity for finding the truth only after such a long time: I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there existed another reality… I could not have perceived that there was something more

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than an incidental connection between those events of which I had a brief glimpse from the windows of that bus, in Calcutta, and those other events in Dhaka, simply because Dhaka was in another country. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 214)

Despite condemning the masses’ obsession with the ‘shadow lines’ of hatred and hostility caused by national sentiments, the narrator also shows how ordinary people try their best to seek mutual sympathy among various ethnic groups of the subcontinent. As in the wake of partition and later on during the trouble in Dhaka in 1964, there were innumerable cases of Muslims in East Pakistan giving shelter to Hindus and Hindus sheltering Muslims. “But they were ordinary people, soon forgotten – not for them any Martyr’s Memorials or Eternal Flames” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 225). However, he feels compelled to consider that some people, like his grandmother, not only believe in drawing lines as a part of their faith but also in respecting them with blood. The narrator eventually arrives at the conclusion that “there was a special enchantment in lines” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 228) as the pattern of the world. Therefore, ordinary people are enchanted with borders, with “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983, 15) no matter how much of “an invented tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2000 [1983], 1– 14) these borders and imagined communities are. The narrator concludes: They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland. What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony – the irony that killed Tridib. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 228)

Tridib’s death as a looming tragedy in the riots of 1964 is central in triggering the narrator’s memory and compelling him to compose a family memoir. While underlining his profound association with Tridib as an embodiment of freedom, the narrator sheds light on space and place as subject to divisions and differences where there should be no border or barrier. The narrator, hence, seeks to demonstrate the irony of his relative’s sacrifice. He highlights that Tridib, a staunch believer of inventing and producing a transcultural space, gave his life away to save human lives, but the borders stayed where they were. His death saved May but not his aunt’s uncle, Jethamoshai, for whom he had actually travelled from Calcutta to Dhaka. Because Jethamoshai was a Bengali Hindu and not a Bengali Muslim, he fell prey to fanatic Muslim Bengali nationalists despite Tridib’s attempts at rescuing him.

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4.3.5 ‘Going Away’ and ‘Coming Home’ – Seeking transcultural spaces on a disintegrating subcontinent The titles of two separate parts in the novel, ‘Going Away’ and ‘Coming Home’ point to the dilemma of space and place for the people of contemporary India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. When the narrator’s grandmother tries to explain that, in the past, coming and going from Dhaka had never been a problem and that no one ever stopped her, the narrator, as a school boy, jumps at the ungrammatical expression of his grandmother and wonders why she could not make a difference between coming and going: “Tha’mma, Tha’mma! I cried. How could you have ‘come’ home to Dhaka? You don’t know the difference between coming and going!” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 150). At this juncture, the narrator tries to share with the reader his belief that a deep-rooted confusion and chaos exists in the psyche of partition victims who faced an era of barbed wires and checkpoints within their old territory. The narrator infers: Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a journey which was not a coming and a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 150)

The narrator is, at the same time, particularly concerned with the predicament of dogmatic Indian nationalists who are obsessed with drawing lines and shutting doors on each other despite the fact that, historically, they were all one people. ‘Going away’ and ‘Coming home’ in the past was something one could achieve on the subcontinent without risking one’s life, for Dhaka and Calcutta were places to enter without showing any passports or identity card. The narrator states: [t]he simple fact that there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that map, where the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the invented image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking-glass border. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 228)

The narrative undercuts imagined differences between the newly created nation states on the subcontinent by emphasising similarities between Dhaka and Calcutta through the recurrent leitmotif of the mirror. It becomes clear to the reader that the ‘looking-glass border’ only attempts to create a mirage of otherness but only sees itself reflected. Experimenting with a compass on Tridib’s old atlas, the narrator makes some startling discoveries. He notices that, even though he “be-

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lieved in the power of distance” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 222), he could not help ignoring that Calcutta and Khulna, despite national barriers being created between the two cities, “face each other at a watchful equidistance across the border” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 226). Consequently, he is convinced that ‘border,’ however tangible, is a shadow of the mind; it is as fictive as it is real since human imagination can never perceive it as a fixed historical fact. Just as Tridib and Ila have their own practices of inhabiting social and political space, so has the narrator’s grandmother Th’amma. Having a primordial view of nationalism, the grandmother equates native space with freedom and honour. According to Th’amma, who has a nationalist mindset, Ila has no right to stay in England because she is not a ‘national’ there even when questions of national identity have undergone a radical change in an era of transnationalism. She questions furiously, “What’s she doing in that country?” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 76) and reasons out: She doesn’t belong there. It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. … War is their religion. That’s what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you have to achieve for India, don’t you see? (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 76; emphasis in the original)

After her retirement in 1962 as a headmistress from a public school where she worked for twenty-seven years, the grandmother begins to feel nostalgic about her house in Dhaka. She has reached a stage in her life where she cannot suppress old memories of her ancestral home any longer. She sadly recollects how her ancestral house was divided with a wall between two brothers, her father and her uncle Jethamoshai. The reader thus first encounters the partition of domestic space, a partition that is repeated on a national level with the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The grandmother reminisces: They had all longed for the house to be divided when the quarrels were at their worst, but once it had actually happened and each family had moved into their own part of it, instead of the peace they had so much looked forward to, they found that a strange, eerie silence had descended on the house. (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 121)

Because the grandmother is convinced of the reality of borders, she asks her son before flying to Dhaka if she would be able “to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 148). When her son laughs at her question and taunts her if she thought that “the border was a long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other, like it was on the school atlas”

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(Ghosh 2005 [1988], 148), she retorts: “But surely there’s something – trenches perhaps, or soldiers, or guns pointing at each other, or even just barren strips of land. Don’t they call it no-man’s land?” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 148). She ends up questioning some of the fundamentals of her definition of nationalism: But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, where’s the difference then? And if there’s no difference, both sides will be the same; it’ll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catch a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without anybody stopping us. What was it all for then – the partition and the killing and everything – if there isn’t something in between? (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 148 – 149)

By highlighting the fact that even after the partition there might not be any ‘difference’ between the two regions across the border, the novel questions the ideology of nationalism through temporal and spatial images. One of the paramount characteristics of the ideology of nationalism is that it defines itself in opposition to other countries across the border (see Renan 1990, 8 – 22; Gellner 1994, 63 – 70; Hutchinson 1987). Ghosh criticizes the division of the subcontinent by challenging and contesting the “myth of nationalism” (e. g. Sethi 1999) on the Indian subcontinent, which has erected walls among heterogeneous ethnicities under the false guise of freedom and liberty. When Tridib’s brother Robi recollects Tridib’s death in Dhaka fifteen years later in a Bangladeshi restaurant in England, he bitterly expresses the cynicism towards the new nation states which is seminal to Ghosh’s view of the present-day subcontinent: And then I think to myself, why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It’s a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide memory? If freedom was possible, surely Tridib’s death would have set me free. (2005 [1988], 241)

By recollecting the events of 1964 and their role in shaping private and public spaces, Ghosh gives a new perspective on personal and historical memory. Even the development of a story “becomes a commentary on the ways in which histories get constructed” (Singh 2005, 163). This broader notion of history is, indeed, a recurring theme in Ghosh’s writing, as noted by Brinda Bose: “Ghosh’s fiction takes upon itself the responsibility of re-assessing its troubled antecedents, using history as a tool by which we can begin to make sense of – or at least come to terms with – our troubling present” (2001, 235). As the story develops, the strands of space, memory, history and nation are woven into each other within a family chronicle. Bose adds: In Ghosh’s fiction, the diasporic entity continuously negotiates between two lands, separated by both time and space – history and geography – and attempts to redefine the present

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through a nuanced understanding of the past. As the narrator in The Shadow Lines embarks upon a journey of discovery of roots and reasons, the more of the one he unearths leaves him with loss of the other. He is forced to conclude that knowing the causes and effects of that history which he had not fully apprehended as a child was not an end in itself. The metajourney that this novel undertakes follows the narrator – as he weaves and winds his way through a succession of once-imaginary homelands – into that third space where boundaries are blurred and cultures collide, creating at once a disabling confusion and an enabling complexity. No story – or history, for that matter – can be acceptable as the ultimate truth, since truths vary according to perspectives and locations. (2001, 239)

By introducing the idea of ‘third space,’ Bose draws our attention to the core of Ghosh’s perception of transcultural space and place in evoking history and memory. Ghosh’s narrator narrates various conceptions of nation and nationalism by tracking their effects on his family members, hence highlighting ordinary people’s confrontations with spatial hurdles such as ambivalently carved geographical borders and the imagined communities within them. The narrator’s family history and their connections with people of ‘other’ cultures and ethnicities confirm that cultures communicate in the “third space” (see Schulze-Engler 2009, 149 – 168) no matter how intensely the communalists strive to undermine such connections and communications. Consequently, the narrator ultimately understands Tridib’s death as both a sacrifice and an irony.

4.3.6 Conclusion: Beyond the spatial metaphors of ethnic hatred Priya Kumar considers The Shadow Lines to be a testimony of loss and memory since the text compels us to concede “the past-in-presentness of partition as a history that is not done with, that refuses to be past” (1999, 201). Although The Shadow Lines has been widely discussed and addressed in literary criticism as another novel of partition, it needs to be highlighted that it focuses more on the plight of the Bengali diaspora (e. g. Chakrabarty 1996) than on the legacy of the partition trauma per se. However, by tracing a contrast between personal memory and political history and between the space of communal interactions and the space of barbed wires, Ghosh’s narrator offers different ways of reading the larger political design of the fate of three nations – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – in light of his family chronicles. Transcultural spaces, which the narrator and Tridib wish for themselves and for their country, remain allusive as ‘shadows,’ shrouding the mysteries of border and distance. The structure of the novel is as much evocative of space and memory as it is of imagination. The narrator’s movement back and forth in time and space is not merely a structural device, it also serves as a reminder that the past

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lives in the present and that the present is shaped by the past or, as the novelist puts it, the past seems “concurrent with the present” (Ghosh 2005 [1988], 31). The flow of time in different cultural and national settings further demonstrates that the lines dividing space and place are as shadowy as lines dividing past and present. Therefore, the narrator is determined to map out a transcultural space in the realm of imagination, just like his uncle Tridib, in order to penetrate the shadows of illusory and fictive demarcations so that one could think beyond the spatial metaphors of ethnic hatred and thus be able to heal wounds of the past with the new conception of interconnected histories, histories which encompass disparate people, cultures, civilisations, and countries. Thus, Ghosh’s fictional narrative renders voice to silenced stories of ordinary individuals to commemorate their sacrifices as well as express ideals for the subcontinent as a meeting ground of cultural and ethnic contact.

5 Novels of Private Memories: Through the Looking Glass 5.1 Fictions of transcultural memory: Zulfikar Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) as an imaginative reconstruction of the self in multiple worlds Already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false. (Luis Borges 1970, 42– 43) What is remembered is a creation of the remembered. (Geary 1994, 19)

5.1.1 Introduction: An autobiographical novel of individual and collective memory Zulfikar Ghose’s¹ semi-autobiographical novel The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) represents fictions of transcultural memory. By focusing on the fictional(ising) nature of memory in the face of our fast changing world, my aim is to examine the central character’s reinvention of the self in diverse cultures and continents – the self that is as much imaginary and fictional as it is real in the flashback narration of the novel. Fictions of memory vis-à-vis the transcultural phenomena point to the Janus-faced nature of the mnemonic processes in the development of the plot, processes that resonate with the narrator/protagonist’s fantastic experiences in heterogeneous cultural landscapes. These experiences begin to take the form of contradictory stories once he recollects them in a new country and continent, leaving him in a state of constant doubt about the reality of his past. Hence, I claim that memory and fiction are not only indispensable to the narrator’s tales of multiple cultural encounters, but also pervade his perception of self and identity throughout the novel.  Zulfikar Ghose, born in 1935 in Sialkot, India (now Pakistan), is an American-based writer of Pakistani origin. After the partition of British India, he moved to England and then to the United States in 1969. He lives in Texas and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His other fictions include The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967), The Incredible Brazilian: The Native (1972), The Beautiful Empire (1975), A Different World (1978), Crum’s Terms (1975), Hulme’s Investigations Into the Bogart Script (1981), A New History of Torments (1982), Don Bueno (1983) and Figures of Enchantment (1986).

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The Triple Mirror of the Self is a complex novel because it is a novel-within-anovel. By employing memory patterns in structuring the narrative, Ghose invites the reader to witness his character’s journey to three continents and cultures as well as three lives that he is destined to live as a migrant man. The three parts of the novel, entitled ‘The Burial of the Self’, ‘Voyager and Pilgrim’ and ‘Origins of the Self’, portray the narrator/protagonist’s constant struggle with various versions of the past in rediscovering his self-identity in an era of globalisation and modernity (Carton 2002, 181), which has revolutionised the old norms of both self and society, as Anthony Giddens’s detailed treatise on the inquiry of the modern self also testifies. Giddens argues: “The reflexivity of modernity extends into the core of the self” (1991, 32).² According to Adrian Carton, “Globalisation has created fertile ground for the articulation of mobile, split, multiple identities to explain or illustrate sites of resistance to dominate hegemonies, to offer a ‘third space’ in which to confront the static binaries of modernity” (2002, 181). In order to challenge the more traditional notions of memory, self and identity, Ghose treats his narrative, written in the first and third person narration, as a chronicle for documenting ‘shared memories’, which cut across geographical, ethnic, and cultural borders.

5.1.2 Exile and return and the literary imagination of Ghose Part One of the novel is set in Brazil and introduces the narrator/protagonist as Urimba Pons, Part Two shows a new transformation of Urimba as Jonathan Archibald Pons in America, and Part Three takes us to pre-partition India where Urimba/Pons is Roshan. According to Chelva Kanaganayakam, “In the process of creating three micro-narratives rather than a unified narrative that preserves sequentiality and linearity, Ghose essentially problematizes the relation between fiction and autobiography, the public and the private, mimesis and counter-realism” (1993, 174). In the following analysis of the novel, however, these parts are treated as three distinct phases of transcultural memory. The memory of the partition of India in 1947 makes Urim/Pons/Roshan understand two fundamental riddles of his eventful existence: first, the reason for his journey west, and second, a state of constant exile. For Ghose and his pro-

 While discussing modernity as a post-traditional order, Giddens adds: “Modernity, it might be said, breaks down the protective framework of the small community and of tradition, replacing these with much larger, impersonal organisations. The individual also feels bereft and alone in the world in which she or he lacks the psychological supports and the sense of security provided by more traditional settings” (1991, 33).

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tagonist, the division of the subcontinent is like a fall from Eden that can never restore the lost home since it condemns one to a life of eternal wandering. In fact, Ghose was deeply affected by the communal tension and the horrific partition riots to which he frequently refers in the novel. He expresses his anguish in the following words: To be living in the country you were born in and to be told one morning that it is not your country is a devastating experience […] The partition coincided with a very serious illness of which I almost died, and so that time remains in my mind as if I had experienced a symbolic death. One way or another, I’ve always been writing about it. (Shamsie 2001)

The theme of exclusion and the consciousness of having no cultural roots preoccupy Ghose’s imagination as a writer travelling between East and West. In a conversation with Reed Way Dasenbrock and Feroza Jussawalla, however, he declares that he does not write about a particular culture at all: “All I do is to record some images that present themselves and then attempt to discover the imagery that must follow to complete a formal structure that is pleasing to my imagination” (1989, 144). In the preface to his second novel, The Murder of Aziz Khan, Ghose writes: By the time I was seven, in 1942, when I went on the longest train journey of my life, from Sialkot to Bombay, I had seen almost all of the Punjab that one can see from a railway carriage. In later years I was to see beautiful landscapes in other parts of the world, but those earliest impressions of the world in the Punjab were, if I may use a phrase which sounds a little grand, lodged in my soul […] The train to Bombay took me to an exile from my native environment to which so far there has been no end. (1967, i)

Exile as a mental image as well as a concrete phenomenon permeates Ghosh’s nonlinear narration in which memory unfolds enigmatic histories of his narrator/protagonist, consisting of experiences of exile from “one continent to another” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 4) after a final farewell to his ancestral territory. While discussing exile and the narrative imagination, Michael Seidel reminds us that “an exile is someone who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another” (1986, ix). According to Edward W. Said, however, exiles straddle more than one culture which allows them to enjoy a broader cultural understanding of both: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal. (2000a, 86; emphasis in the original)

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As a narrative of exile and return, the novel is almost like an epic poem which stages a dialogue between the self and memory. By portraying the narrator/protagonist as someone constantly shaped by his various memories, Ghosh creates a fictional autobiography of a migrant man in order to shed light on the importance of remembering in his various incarnations. As a traveller to different cultural settings, the narrator/protagonist, however, tends to (re)invent the past to understand it from the perspective of an adopted country or culture; as Mary Chamberlain and Selma Leydesdorff infer: Migrants, perhaps more than many people, are made by their memories of their birthplace, their homeland, those left behind – interruptions in their life narratives that require resequencing, remodelling and reinterpreting as the new comers incorporate and surpass their pasts. (2004, 228)

5.1.3 The fictions of transcultural memory: Reconstructing the self in a world-within-a-world The notion of memory in relation to the narrator/protagonist’s susceptibility to reconstruct the self and identity in today’s world confirms many of the recent findings of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, according to which memories are always “complex constructions – not literal recordings of reality” (Schacter 1996, 10). Just like individual memories, cultural memories should be seen as “imaginative reconstructions of past events” (Schacter 1996, 101). They are “not simply activated pictures in the mind but complex constructions built from multiple contributors” (Schacter 1996, 209). In light of this view, memory should be conceived of as being “dynamic, changing, and plural” (Eakin 1999, 98). Such perspectives raise a couple of very important questions which I deal with by using examples from the novel that address various functions of memorisation. For example, what is the relation between ‘memory and reality’, ‘memory and imagination’ and ‘memory and fiction’ in an era of rapid technological development? What is the role of transcultural memory as a social practice in the age of globalised modernity, in which the gap between space and time, and past and present is increasingly compressed? As I have already observed in theorising transcultural remembering, recent approaches to individual and cultural memory have tended to emphasise not only its socially-constructed nature, but also its fictional(ising) aspects. In his influential account of the creation of an autobiographical self, Paul John Eakin, for instance, illustrates the constructive nature of autobiographical remembering and “the fact that our sense of continuous identity is a fiction, the primary fiction of all self-narration” (1999,94). Upon closer analysis, the notion of having

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a singular, fixed identity, thus, turns out to be nothing but “a fiction of memory,” (1999, 95) that is, an imaginative (re)construction emerging from a subtle interplay between past and present. Memory novel or memory fiction is itself a way to picture and portray the imagined and remembered past. According to Wolfgang Iser, fictional texts can create new images and new meanings of a shared past by combining and configuring the real and the imaginary, the remembered and the forgotten, the widely accepted and the hitherto unknown. However, as Iser’s treatise on the interplay between the fictive and imaginary has already established, fiction is indeed a very complex term³ (1993, xv) that can easily generate confusion. On the one hand, the word fiction can designate a novel or a literary narration of imaginary events, and on the other, fiction can refer to any presumption known to be at variance with fact, but conventionally accepted for practical purposes. In the present context, I set out to consider the meaning of fiction in the latter sense to examine the multifarious character of memory in the present-day world as represented within the domain of the novel. It is noteworthy that an imaginative reconstruction of the self requires a reevaluation of its truths. To trace these truths through the filter of memory, Ghose’s narrator/protagonist is preoccupied with rewriting the self. Psychologist Mark Freeman defines the concept and practice of “rewriting the self” as “the process by which one’s past and indeed oneself is figured anew through interpretation” (1993, 3). To emphasise the fictions of memory in determining aspects of the self in literature, he invites the reader to: Consider the countless distortions and falsifications to which recollections are subject. Consider as well that even in the absence of these, one is inevitably remembering selectively, and perhaps conferring meanings on experience that did not possess these meanings at the time of their occurrence. Consider finally that one will no doubt be weaving these meanings into a whole pattern, a narrative, perhaps with a plot, designed to make sense of the fabric of the past. How are we to escape the conclusion that these narratives, however much they might aspire to depict the lives of real people, are anything more than fictions – ‘mere’ fictions, as some might have it – that may be interesting and fun to read but ultimately suspect in regard to understanding human lives? Moreover, if indeed the process of rewriting the self cannot help but culminate in fictions, in selective and imaginative literary constructions of who we have been and are, how

 In the preface of his book The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, Wolfgang Iser states, “Context-bound, fictions in general elude clear-cut definitions, let alone ontological grounding. Instead, they can be grasped only in terms of use. As their use is potentially manifold, fictionalizing manifests itself in constantly shifting modes of operation in accordance with the changing boundaries to be overcome” (1993, xv).

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are we to escape the conclusion that we ourselves are ultimately fictions? (Freeman 1993, 8; emphasis in the original)

The narrator in The Triple Mirror of the Self deals with this very conflict with which the self is confronted, that is, how far we ourselves are ultimately fictions in rewriting or reconstructing the self via memory and imagination. While the act of constructing the past has a markedly fictive dimension to it, Ghose makes us challenge the concept of self as a fixed entity in an era of worldwide cultural intersections. John R. Gillis is, therefore, justified in saying: “We need to be reminded that memories and identities are not fixed things, but representatives or constructions of reality, subjective rather than objective phenomena” (1994, 8). He also points out that “we are constantly revising our memories to suit our current identities” (Gillis 1994, 3). Ostensibly, the novel, centred on different protagonists, is divided into disjointed parts as the main action takes place in the geographically disparate lands of South America, Europe and Asia; in reality, however, these parts, set in distant continents and cultures, are a manifestation of three lives of the same man. The running thread of memory, in fact, unites his plural lives as he leaves his native land in the ‘East’ and starts his ‘journey to the West’. When he travels, his cultures travel with him, thus each time when he steps into a new world, he sees a new image in the mirror of the self. Soon these aspects of the self, coterminous with the three phases of his existence become his destiny as he lives with multiple identities and cultural loyalties. The Triple Mirror of the Self is, thus, not merely a mirror of the self but a mirror of today’s cultures in the age of enormous cultural overlapping. In my analysis of the novel, transcultural remembering is treated both as a schema of narration and an analytic device to trace the “reworking of the self through memories” (see Hacking 1995).⁴ The narrator/protagonist’s sudden transitions between the past and the present in the novel reflects the ambivalence of remembering opposing worlds as well as the mind’s uncanny prowess to generate memories of far-flung regions that may or may not be true, as he claims himself. In his every new incarnation, he charts the course of his present and future existence in light of true or false memories. In this way, memory shapes his present life

 Like Mark Freeman, Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory (1995), argues that we create our identities by reworking our memories. Due to memory’s multiple roles and functions in determining the self, spiritual battles are fought, not on the explicit ground of the soul or the self, but on the terrain of memory. Ghose’s protagonist’s multiple ventures into various continents also assert that a reworking to the self is also an exploration of its metaphysical truth.

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by connecting him to a past which is as much real as unreal for him since he can never be sure of its existence or location; therefore, Harold Pinter rightly postulates: “The past is what you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember” (quoted in Adler 1974, 461– 465). At times, the same past is, paradoxically, “present past” (Terdiman 1993, 3 – 47) as he has a simultaneous vision of three continents, three lives and three selves; consequently, the past remains integral to the formation of his self-identity. Frederick Wyatt rightly infers that “the sureness of ‘I was’ is a necessary component of the sureness of ‘I am’” (1964, 41). Ghose’s narrative also asserts that memory and the construction of the self are concurrent processes. Israel Rosenfield even argues that memory is synonymous with a complex sense of the self. He proclaims: My memory emerges from the relation between my body (more specifically, my bodily sensations at a given moment) and my brain’s “image” of my body (an unconscious activity in which the brain creates a constantly changing generalized idea of the body by relating the changes in bodily sensations from moment to moment). It is this relation that creates a sense of self; over time, my body’s relation to its surroundings becomes ever more complex and, with it, the nature of myself and of my memories of it deepen and widen, too. When I look at myself in a mirror, my recognition of myself is based on a dynamic and complicated awareness of self, a memory-laden sense of who I am. (Rosenfield 1993, 8)

For Ghose, memory is not as a reservoir of facts, but an interior act of creation that cannot be tested by exterior facts because these facts are already nothing at the time memory functions. Ghose’s attack on the conventional sense of memory as a record of facts is most evident in his Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965), which, as a declared autobiography, one might expect to be a record of facts. However, he warns the reader of this book that “memory […] is false,” that “memory […] has a way of confounding, blending, missing, distorting, obliterating, inventing images” (1965, 19). Consequently, Ghose’s autobiography is ultimately a fiction because memory, like imagination, invents or creates. Like imagination, memory invents patterns of continuity in the self and in the world by blending the real and the imaginary when forging connections between events, people, places, things. In their mutual power to select, assemble, interrelate facts (real and imagined), and intimate some pattern, both imagination and memory create art, especially ‘the fiction of self’, in the novel.

5.1.4 Phase one: Recollecting entangled histories of the self Part one ‘The Burial of the Self’, written in the first person, is based on the first incarnation of the narrator/protagonist which takes place in the magical city of

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Suxavat where the natives name him after “the immigrant tree: Urimba, the scattered one” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 3). The type-name already introduces to us his migrant condition in multiple worlds. Urimba, addressed as Urim, is fated to reincarnate as he is “the scattered one;” thus, Urim symbolises the image of man in today’s “deterritorialized world” (Appadurai 1996, 37), “where places are no longer the clear supports of our identity” (Morley and Robins 1993, 5). Ghose connects such an image of man to the eternal conflict between illusion and reality as symbolised by the mirror image and Urim’s first love Horuxtla. Urim describes her as “the daughter of illusions” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 3), “a child to [his] 47 years” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 10) who, like his changing self, always changes roles, compelling him to review his lost past in various habitats as he states: Should all the coincidences of my life, the vagaries of circumstance that exiled me from one continent to another until I arrived at this still centre […] lead to my possession of Horuxtla […] You! I say to myself, what has become of you surrendering to the unwilled choices! […] You escape from one region to another, slipping into areas of denser shadows, and begin to believe the body is at last flattened like a leaf on the muddy bed of a drying river. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 4)

In the very opening of the novel, we are made aware of the narrator/protagonist’s ventures and exiles into many continents before coming to Suxavat, and the possibility of continuing such a life. He feels that in his many existences, time, like his self, is also a matter of invention, either time past, present or future. In Ghose’s fictional realms, time and memory are always subject to change as is made clear in the narrator/protagonist’s various reincarnations. However, he asserts that his mind has a tremendous power to imagine past, present and future not as separate segments of time but as inextricably intertwined like his “flashbulb memories.”⁵ This extraordinary capacity of the mind to ‘invent’ and ‘construct’ assists him to recognise the mystery of his multiple selves: My mind has an uncanny capacity to transform an imagined future into an accomplished past; and I know, too, that I am quite capable of pretending that what has already happened has not yet happened and is something I wish to occur in the future. In the grammar of self-deception, I change tenses by the hour. What has become of you! I have lived so long in so many worlds that it is not merely a trick of the imagination to have the sense of not having been born yet; […] The mind cannot surmise what former incarnations comprise the layers of one’s flesh, there is awareness only of the present desire, a longing for the burial of the self. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 4– 5)

 The term flash-bulb memories seeks to convey the notion that certain types of vivid memories preserve knowledge of an event in an almost indiscriminate way, rather as a photograph preserves all the details of a scene (see Brown and Kulik 1977, 73 – 99).

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Before we finally reach the last part, which is set in undivided India, we are reminded in part one and two of the novel that the journey of the narrator/protagonist’s self begins and culminates in India at the time of the partition. Nevertheless, he alludes to the haziness of his origins because his memories, located in plural worlds, always play tricks with him. He reiterates his many incarnations besides the multidimensional pattern of his existence to emphasise ambiguity and complexity of the process of memory and recollection, which results in the generation of ‘marvellous fictions’: I will say nothing of the memories that invaded my mind then. Life in America, in European cities, in India – I will say nothing of the history of passions which may well be the sum of a confusion of dreams with their conversion of dull events into marvellous fictions and their disguising of pain into the grotesquely masked creatures at a Kathakali dance that I may or may not have seen on a wooden platform one autumn evening in a park in Madras. The images forced before my eyes were like a confession […] How could I have witnessed those killings on Mohammed Ali Road, an improbable name for a street, I have not left this muddy abode under the rain forest […] I do not remember being in the streets where knives sprang up in the air. I do not remember being anywhere. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 6)

The more he tries to escape from his past, the more it impinges on his imagination. Soon the memory images of East and West begin to intermingle in his imagination to such an extent that he fails to read landmarks dividing these two worlds. For example, while still in Suxavat, before moving on to narrate the story of the self in California, London and Bombay in Part Two and Three of the novel, he recollects a Canadian poet whom he has once told that he is going to India. At this recall, he is suddenly confused as he is in Brazil and not in India. Yet, he hears echoes of his native land somehow within the domain of a foreign land: So far west, it is uncertain the territory is still Brazil. But the suburban train, is it not Bombay, going from Sion to Victoria Terminus? Foolish man, go stand under the rain! No, I do not remember dreaming, I never dream […] It is impossible. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 7)

This practice of remembering discrepant worlds makes the narrator/protagonist witness the present running parallel to the past in his memory and imagination. As his individual and cultural past always overshadows the present, it eventually leads him to look upon the past as a centripetal and centrifugal force in the present. Horuxtla, however, serves as a connection between his past and present despite being a symbol of illusion and deception. The narrator recalls: [the] moment of hallucination that possessed me as I lay in a cousin’s house in Karachi after the flight from London when I awoke dripping in a darkened room and saw the figure

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of a girl […] make a phantom appearance and then elude me for nearly thirty years and finally stand before me in the person of Horuxtla. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 17)

Horuxtla strikes in him a disturbing phantom of remembrance he is unable to recollect as true. While remembering the past from his youth, the very name Horuxtla echoes a forgotten landmark of time that contains origins of the self and identity in different city-and-timescapes. This realisation also hints at the inception of his journeys to different continents of the world. He infers that his travels have triggered the memory process especially as he moves farther away from his native land. Ultimately, Horuxtla invokes in him a memory that finally beckons him to his roots in India: I could not call the region Horuxtla, I suddenly realized. This great range of mountains already had a name, which I remembered. It was of Indian origin though somewhat altered by the European conquerors of the region […] There was no Horuxtla. The name echoing in my brain was not Horuxtla. Staring at the high peaks, in a land of origins, the sound I heard was The Hindu Kush. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 97; emphasis in the original).

The narrator/protagonist highlights to the reader that, in the wake of experiencing an interconnected world, the constantly evolving self calls for a revision of the notions of native or singular identity just like the infallibility of culture as a single closed sphere. In the midst of “global cultural flows” (Appadurai 1996, 30), his memory as a subtle connection between past and present, and native and foreign cultures leads him to reorient his approach towards his individual and collective cultural past. However, he is well aware that it is not possible for him either to revive the entire pageant of his past or to assert the validity of every fragmentary memory episode. Consequently, memory is bound to be as much reliable as unreliable; in other words, as much fictive as real. Nevertheless, he is convinced that the powers of memory are indeed a key to solve the riddle of the self. This power of memory compels him to speculate on the various contradictory dimensions of his self and identity that are as diverse and plural as the continents and cultures in which he has been living. He repeats: This is the force of memory, I almost said aloud, this is a collection of disturbing dreams submitted to some celebrated seer with the hope of receiving from him an interpretation that would solve the complex riddle of the self. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 75)

In this phase of memory, we are introduced to ‘The Mirrored Man’, Jonathan Archibald Pons, the character who is the central focus in Part Two of the novel. Pons, as the hated ‘other’ of the narrator/ protagonist, is always in conflict with him. He is travelling on a foundation grant from the United States, pursuing

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anthropological research, but the narrator/protagonist can never understand the nature of his research. Despite his unending loathing for the American Pons and for what he represents, Pons remains his mirror image. Even the last time he sees Pons is “like the first, in the mirror of a hotel lobby” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 52). In fact, the figure of Pons indicates the dilemma of the narrator/protagonist’s overtly conscious self. Psychologist R.D Laing has already claimed that the self-conscious person is caught in a perennial dilemma: “He may need to be seen and recognized, in order to maintain his sense of realness and identity. Yet, at the same time, the other represents a threat to his identity and reality” (1990, 113; emphasis in the original). The narrator/protagonist always emphasises the doubling of his self and identity by using the mirror as a metaphorical device. This doubling is not only a fine assertion of the Jungian model of the self, but of memory’s trick to juggle with fact and fiction whenever he remembers the self in discrepant landscapes. In the wonderland of Suxavat, he is often reminded of some hidden truths of the self that he needs to figure out in order to come to terms with the reality of his adventurous life: I seemed physically to enter other states of being which were not my own immediate being and yet which belonged to no one other than myself. I realized that this was the force of memory. There was a part of my mind which was always engaged in the preservation of identity by relaying to my consciousness fragments of brilliant images that were stored in my memory. But I recognized that some of the images were not unique to my experience. My memory was also the repository of fabulous fictions of the self. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 75)

The connections between the Jungian archetype of the self and Ghose’s preoccupation with distinct symbols of the self are unmistakable, especially in Jung’s example of the correct ego attitude toward the polarity of an instinctual versus a spiritual expression of an archetype, in which he establishes that “the self is a mirror…when you relate to your own (transcendental) centre, you initiate a process of conscious development which leads to oneness and wholeness. You no longer see yourself as an isolated point on the periphery, but as the One in the centre” (Jung 1996, 427). Like Ghosh’s narrator in The Shadow Lines, Ghose also employs the leitmotifs of maps and mirror to articulate his perception of space and memory as well as self and ‘other’ in his narration. By elaborating the mirror metaphor in relation to the self, place and culture, Ghose is simultaneously concerned with the theme of illusion and reality, on the one hand, and with how the artist imagines reality and by doing so constructs new images of cultural reality, on the other. Ghose’s narrator/protagonist gives his audience an example of a hologram, saying “There you have perfect proof that the artist is the inventor of reality and that reality is only an illusion”

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(1994 [1992], 79). Thus, he is at times the author himself and at another the subject of his own story in describing the nexus between the self and memory. The Triple Mirror of the Self, therefore, often hinges on metafiction as Ghose aims to address the narrator’s struggle with reality parallel to the narrator/protagonist’s strife with the multiple truths of his self and identity. While leaving Suxavat, Urim is at once overwhelmed by the echoes from the past again. The events from the present conjure up images from the past, attributing a larger-than-life dimension to his fragmented memories. He recollects the time of the partition without directly mentioning India or British rulers, but by focusing instead on the tragic incident at Jallianwala Bagh where thousands of innocent freedom fighters along with a huge rally of innocent people were shot dead by the British policemen at the command of General Dyer, known for his brutality. In fact, the narrator wants to show the reader that he is unable to seek connections in his memory. Instead, he draws upon disjointed episodes from the remote past to narrate the account of his life as a man between cultures and histories: On one such occasion, there was a continuous firing of a succession of guns, producing in my mind the image of a crowd of people forced into a small clearing and massacred. I could still see nothing, but a picture seemed to be lit up before my eyes of a crazed English general commanding his soldiers to shoot at a crowd trapped in a square, and I was about to pity myself for having begun to hallucinate when I remembered a name, General Dyer, and saw in that moment a golden temple, and was filled with another sensation, as if a terrible past had begun to heave out of that jungle’s darkness, giving me the impression that I stood upon layers of centuries which were projecting fragmented mirror images of one another through cracks in the humus. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 87)

The narrator/protagonist contains within himself the time and history of centuries. As he begins to travel around the world, he fears being cut off from his lost Indian past during his cultural and mental transformations in the present, especially when the present prompts him to reinvent the self in each new temporal, spatial and cultural domain. However, as he is a living epitome of historical and cultural metamorphoses, he is always confronted with a present that is entangled with a multivalent past, composed of his “many-cultured” (Hoerder et al. 2005, 17) histories.

5.1.5 Phase two: Translating the self amid cultural diversity and interdependence Part Two of the novel ‘Voyager and Pilgrim’, set in America, portrays yet another journey of Ghose’s narrator/protagonist to a new continent and culture. This

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time, Urim is translated into a man of letters from California, renamed as Jonathan Archibald Pons, the professor of literature. The resuscitation of a past in the present, as manifested by an imaginative reconstruction of the self in the process of remembering, brings to mind the idea of the translation of self and culture, for both “translation and memory are marked by a boundary-crossing and by a realignment of what has become separate” (Iser 1996, 297).⁶ As the narrator/protagonist is constantly moving between past and present, and between East and West, translation, in terms of names, culture, history and language, occurs as a new understanding of temporal and spatial truths of his entire being. For example, in Part Two, Chapter Ten, entitled ‘You’, the narrator recollects how in his reincarnation in England, his name Shimmers is translated into English as “brightness, a light as something that shimmers” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 179) and how this translation reminds him of a lost fragment of his past in India when the same Shimmers is called Roshan, which also means shimmers in his native language. He narrates a joke among friends about his name: ‘Zinalco Shimomura’ – an amalgam signifying a Spanish gypsy, for such were his features, black hair and sunburned copperish skin, and birth in the Orient, though not in Japan as the second name, with deliberate intent, misleadingly suggests. The oriental part was his mocking rendering of the nickname he had acquired when he lived in England: Shimmers. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 121)

In this phase of memory, the narrator/protagonist comes across a bundle with a name Urim. This is one half of his self that keeps haunting him in his second incarnation as a professor of literature in the second part of the novel. The novel once again reflects elements of metafiction. The narrator/protagonist becomes the author of his stories, making the reader forget the authorial presence momentarily. However, he has a mysterious feeling in the process of an imaginative reconstruction of the self that some kind of power outside his self and comprehension is narrating his story. He remains uncertain whether it is the power of the past, of memory or of translation. Eventually, he holds a text in his hand which he calls ‘The Burial of the Self’: What’s more, I was present in the text, making an appearance in a city called Natal and a somewhat convenient exit from a frontier town called Xurupà. I can testify that I have never been to either of those two places […] I place my own name between quotation marks be-

 Wolfgang Iser, however, refers to memory as mythmaking while tracing a connection between memory and cultural translatability, maintaining that “Memory as an agent that interlinks what is different – be it the difference between past and present or between cultures – assumes kaleidoscopically changing shapes in accordance with what it is called upon to perform” ( 1996, 297).

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cause I do not accept that I am the person represented. And yet, the use of my name is not a coincidence; and though the ludicrous person seen to bear my name performs actions that I never did yet I know that Urim was thinking of me when he invented that person. What is more, he was thinking of me maliciously. It will be asked: Why? To reveal the secret of his true self, that is why! To make sure that at least one person – I – would know, and reveal to the world, his identity. Vain man, thinking only of himself! (Ghose 1994 [1992], 120; emphasis in the original).

He finds himself repeatedly in a dream-like state when he goes down memory lane. However, these dreams are a mixture of strange and demonic figures, at times almost crossing over into the realm of nightmares. Memory is, thus, never a leisurely sojourn in a dream world for him; rather it manifests itself as an enigmatic maze of dreams and nightmares. Although he has lived a culturally rich life, he never uses memory simply to romanticise and glamorise the past, but rather to track the ups and down of his migrant condition in distant continents. In fact, the novel traces a reliving of the past which evokes mixed sentiments in the memoirist; as David Lowenthal observes, “[T]his reliving is followed by dreams and nightmares,” for reliving consists of “nostalgia and self-aggrandizement, risk and disappointment” (1985, 3 – 34). Aware of the ambivalent nature of his fragmented memories, the narrator/ protagonist feels a compulsion to reconstruct (in the capacity of an artist who is a creator of stories, and a migrant who is a weaver of plural cultural belongings) the past according to the needs and demands of the present. It is not only the past-ness of memory but its present-mindedness that causes awe and wonder in him as the mind always invokes memory episodes according to present exigencies. In other words, current necessities are projected onto the past in order to make it translatable into the present. This mutuality ultimately determines the nature of the past invoked. It is the present, located in many worlds simultaneously as is the past, which makes him challenge the individual and cultural reality in the wake of an increase in cross-cultural relations all over the globe. For him, there is no one ultimate present and no one final past. In fact, by exploring different facets of his self in light of both past and present, he tries to makes sense of his cultural transfiguration from youth to old age. English language and English presence in India preoccupies Ghose’s narrator/ protagonist in almost every chapter of the novel. It remains a fond memory which goads him into discovering his connections with distant cultures and civilisations and eventually “a third aspect of the self, being” (1994 [1992], 124). A consciousness of the third principle is supposed to elevate him above the conventional division of time and space by allowing him to inhabit plural worlds. Furthermore, the third aspect of the self and being seems to refer to the odds and ends that his remembered and current self has been confronted with in the modern ‘age of speed’. At this

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stage, he takes into account an aspect of the self, a being having a detached existence, as another trick of memory. He discloses to the reader: A charming sentimentality had me bemused for a moment as I pondered the phenomenon of the divided self. My body was voyaging towards England. My mind throbbed with pulsations as it received impressions of the world’s novelty. But […] there was a third aspect to the self, being, which could assume a detached existence, as though it resided on a shore now become foreign. And this being, bound within time and space of fixed and unchanging dimensions, was one of many successive beings that the mind was constantly called upon to judge as a legitimate representative of the self. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 124)

For the narrator/protagonist, if America is “the land of myth and legend” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 134),England is another homeland of imagination. He remembers how his journey from India to England proves to be a journey from fantasy to reality. Therefore, during his first visit to England, he feels that “his world was elsewhere” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 158) as he has constantly been pushed and pulled by the power of disparate worlds that he is eager to explore. Nevertheless, America has more surprises in store for him. While Urim/Pons is in America, he claims to be overwhelmed by the vastness of the land, and he ultimately perceives America as a combination of Eastern and Western elements. Land and its massiveness is something that continuously fascinates and impresses Ghose’s protagonists in his Brazilian trilogy as well. In effect, a sense of land always looms large in the protagonists’ acts of recall since space and place, in the form of country and continent, whether lost or regained, native or foreign, serves as a backdrop for the art and practice of memory. The development of the plot demonstrates that the interplay between the fictive and imaginary, and the real and illusory, is fundamental to all reminiscences in the novel, regardless of whether the memories being narrated are private or political memories. The reader is continuously reminded of the mind’s propensity to weave fictions in the narrator/protagonist’s pursuit of truth. Thus, the past, experienced in far-off regions around the world, along with the contradictory cultural memories acquire an illusory dimension in the process of recollection. Just as the past and present tend to blur together in his imagination, so too does the thin line between fact and fiction constantly get blurred. He proclaims: Though the pursuit of truth may be no more than a succession of conjectures in which the mind weighs speculative fictions, I have most excitingly this to relate, that in pursuing my researches on three continents, picking up a lump of clay here or a bit of granite there somehow to bring together the various discovered fragments to sculpt the figure of the man whom I sometimes believe to be my adversary, sometimes my nemesis, and occasionally my friend,

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that as the shape has become both monstrous and perfectly beguiling, I have finally found myself confronting the man who might have been real. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 193– 194)

The narrator/protagonist’s constant strife with a variety of civilisations in three distant continents, that is, Asia, Europe and America, demands from him a new approach to history and memory as well as to unravel multiple puzzles of the self. He finally apprehends that the image of the man he has been constructing in his journeys to distant lands like America and England culminates in his native land India: [I]n pursuing my researches on three continents […] I have finally found myself confronting the man who might have been real. It came to me in an old Moghul palace […] in the heart of India, where I found myself in a hall of mirrors and suddenly perceived the true identity of my man, knew at last what the story was that I had to tell, the fiction that there was to invent yet of the century that was all but dead and become a memory. It was then that I realized that I must concern myself only with that language which would rediscover, oh, not some miserable truth which is but a paltry thing, but the precise detail embedded in the florid, passionate, miraculous and infinitely elusive figures that haunt memory, to reinvent the idea itself of reality after discovering that reality, poor thing, has no existence at all. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 194)

Ghose as a novelist and critic between cultures seems to be profoundly interested in the role of fiction and reality in literature. While explaining the connection between reality, memory and fiction in his treatise on the ‘fiction of reality,’ Ghose argues: “Two sorts of reality present themselves at any given moment: the immediate surfaces of things around one, and the objects of memory; with the latter are mixed one’s emotions, thoughts and the whole complex of intellectual matter which contribute to making one’s identity distinguishable from another’s” (Ghose 1983, 132). The novel demonstrates that facts and fictions, as well as self and society, are liable to be interpreted in light of one’s erratic memories especially when objects of memory are always the invention of our imagination.

5.1.6 Phase three: Re-discovering India as a landmark of time and memory Part Three ‘Origins of the Self’ is set in India at the time of its partition and this time the protagonist is called Roshan, meaning light in Urdu and Hindi (the national languages of now independent India and Pakistan). The protagonist is, thus, transfigured into an Indian version of the Anglicised Shimmers who is introduced to us as Urim in Part One and Jonathan Archibald Pons in Part Two of the novel. The reader is suddenly thrown to the Eastern front from the far-flung

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lands of Brazil and California. The subcontinent, surrounded by the greatest mountain ranges, becomes the landmark of time and memory. This phase introduces us to Roshan’s first encounter with a loss of home and a sense of exile, following his transnational and transcultural adventures as already documented in Part One and Two of the novel. According to Kanaganayakam, “[T]he entire novel moves towards this section” (1993; 172). In contrast to the previous parts, memory acquires a strong political dimension in Part Three, since the novelist sets Roshan’s story in the most crucial phase of India’s struggle for independence from the British rule. The political past of the pre-partition subcontinent comes alive as fourteen-yearold Roshan recollects political debates about the division of his homeland into Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan as a consequence of the imperial policy of divide and rule. As a Muslim himself, he tries to understand Hindu nationalism against Muslims’ obsession with partition but could not make any heads or tails of it since his best friends in the neighbourhood and at school are Hindus and Sikhs. However, the rivalry between Hindus and Muslims on a political scale is also reflected in private life when Roshan feels disgusted with the idea of touching the penis of his Hindu friend Chandru in a harmless game, or is dismayed when a Hindu boy fancies his younger sister Zakia. Both these domestic episodes represent the nation-wide influence of the political separatism that political leaders have injected into the independence movement. During the time of partition, Roshan, a handsome teenage school boy, is depicted as someone profoundly influenced by the British presence in India, particularly since he is not only in love with English literature but “The English were a mystery to him” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 198) at school, which was run by Italian Catholic missionaries. The idea of creating a separate homeland for Muslims and Hindus, and the freedom struggle led by Gandhi⁷ (see Fischer 1997 [1951]) and Jinnah⁸ (see Wolpert 2002)is mainly transmitted to him through his elders. At several dinner parties at his parental home, he has encounters with the  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948) was the main political and spiritual leader of the Indian Independence Movement. He initiated resistance through mass civil disobedience, based on the rules of non-violence. He mainly focused on the goal of Swaraj – self-rule for India. For more details, see Fischer 1997 [1951].  Jinnah rose to prominence in the Indian National Congress for propagating Hindu-Muslim unity. Differences with Mahatma Gandhi led him to quit the Congress. He then took charge of the Muslim League and started fighting for the political rights of the Muslims. Disillusioned by the failure to build coalitions with the Congress, Jinnah embraced the goal of creating a separate state for Muslims. As Governor-General of Pakistan, Jinnah led efforts to rehabilitate millions of refugees, and to frame national policies on foreign affairs, security and economic development. For more details, see Wolpert 2002.

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Hindu-Muslim rivalry besides mounting tension among various sects in pre-partition India through a group of guests, coming from diverse religions and ethnic communities. Roshan recollects: Mr Samudra seemed to have made a resolution to seize anything spoken by Mr Richardson as if it constituted British policy and to attack it. ‘That’s precisely it!’ he shouted. ‘Divide and rule, that’s your game. We want to call ourselves Indians and you insist that we continue to call ourselves Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.’ Mr Richardson held up a hand and with the index finger of his other hand began to tick off each of the fingers. ‘And Parsee and Christians, not forgetting the aspirations of the Maharashtrans, the Tamils, the Gujaratis!’ He held up the two hands and brought them together with a sharp clap, adding, ‘Oh the problem is not just religious, but within each religion one of language and caste.’ Pointing an accusing finger at Mr Samudra, he said, ‘Do you blame the Crown if a Brahmin won’t shake hands with an untouchable?’ “ (Ghose 1994 [1992], 221) ‘Independence is only Hindi-pendence,’ Anwar-bhai mocked, expressing a common Muslim fear ‘Your Jinnah,’ Tilak Singh said, ‘wants to cut the Punjab in half. Why, the man does not even speak Punjabi!’ (Ghose 1994 [1992], 224)

Ghose highlights the absurdity of cutting India into two halves throughout the last part of the novel. For Roshan, like millions of his fellow Indians, it is the forced expulsion from one’s home/land that cannot be retrieved. Quoting a guest at Roshan’s parental home Mr Samudra among others, Ghose makes the reader reconsider the motives behind the creation of Pakistan where Roshan has to migrate after the partition: Partition was inevitable. A grave mistake, cutting the country in two. What minority guarantees can you have? Why, it would be freedom for all! Ha, a fool’s freedom. You and your Pakistan. Then what do you want, a parliamentary democracy? Very nice, very pious to want democracy when it perpetuates Hindu rule. India is Hindustan. Then give us Pakistan. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 319)

Jinnah and Gandhi are depicted as politicians with a narrow vision. Both are incapable of overcoming the dilemma as well as predicament of the common man in the throes of the partition. Their politics seems to harm rather than rescue the masses and their territory. Commenting on Jinnah’s and Gandhi’s political strategy, Ghose states toward the end of the novel: Gandhi wants Hindu-Muslim brotherhood but he is himself proclaimed a Mahatma, emphatically a Hindu saint. Muslims will never follow a Mahatma and if he doesn’t live up to Hindu expectations of Hindu exclusiveness the Hindus will kill him. Jinnah wants a state where people are equal and free but instead he will lay the foundations for religious fanaticism and create a country in which he himself would be better dead than alive. ‘Contraries, my friends,’ Anwar-bhai concluded, ‘everything happens by opposites. Gandhi’s

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love of peace will create a civil war, Jinnah’s love of law will fuel that civil war, and each man’s high principles will spawn a race of barbarian. (1994 [1992], 320)

In the midst of discussions on the independence movement in relation to the new ideology of freedom and nationalism, Roshan makes an effort to see an India beyond political boundaries and beyond the insular adult vision. In other words, he preoccupies himself with the soul of India that he considers the “soil of his self’s origins” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 225), but this soil of his self’s origins falls victim to insurmountable ethnic tension and conflict that ends up in dividing territory and history, and above all centuries-old cultural memories. This is the reason that these divided memories, cast by the partition of India, always pervades his realm of memory in his future incarnations as Urim and Pons in the garb of ‘shared memories’ or ‘intertwined memories’. Roshan is finally pushed into the vortex of partition brutality, a painful memory that is soon indispensable to the memory of lost home: ‘Communal violence?’ Roshan heard a voice ask, echoing his own apprehension. Some small misunderstanding sometimes led to Hindus and Muslims killing each other by the hundreds followed by one group fleeing to a safer district. But the humanity that was fleeing from Bombay was clearly of mixed religious composition, for he could recognize Sikhs and Hindus and Muslims in the procession. For once, they were all running from, what had happened? Nazi submarines, mutiny, who knew the truth? How quickly the Indians had learned to run from the place he had made his home! A rumour in the air, and he was on the road. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 295)

Roshan’s two love affairs as a teenager with a twenty-seven-year-old Hindu primary school teacher, Miss Bhosle, and a twenty-two-year-old Christian, one Miss Alicia Miranda, constitute the most exciting as well as the most painful episodes of Part Three. When he recovers from a severe beating by Miss Bhosle’s brothers as a punishment for having a liaison with their sister as a Muslim boy just at the time of partition, Roshan is awakened to a different world. His ideal of a united multicultural India is shattered. Eventually, the power of memory seizes Roshan when he recovers from a physical beating by a Hindu. This experience matures his sensibility towards temporal and spatial worlds and political and social truths as if he were not only born again but also ready to be reincarnated: His senses were sharper than before, and his capacity for knowing the world he inhabited had intensified. His memory was so vivid, he sometimes felt himself present again in some past event and was astonished, when he realized he had only been remembering, at the reappearance of forgotten tastes and smells. Sometimes it seemed the remembered event was not one from the past but from the future, but that, he was convinced, was merely a confusion in his brain[…] He had no system of reckoning time. It was almost as if he

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had been cast outside the dimension of time and could only float among random appearances of images of events that claimed to be his reality. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 303)

At this juncture, memory and imagination begin to preoccupy him as Roshan cannot separate fact from fiction in the remembered events nor can he situate memory in any time frame. While travelling and migrating later in life, the memory of partition, along with the memories of childhood, begins to flow into his present life in distant places of the world as he tries to understand the story of his life. When he attempted to focus on the present it dissolved instantly into the past and he fell into the habit of re-enacting events in his memory with such an obsession for minutiae that the particular events seemed to be happening for the first time and it was a surprise to discover at its conclusion that he had been lying in a bed and only dreaming about the past. Sometimes the discovery of his condition seemed merely an imagined event. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 304)

However, despite memory’s magical spell on him, conventional divisions of time become entirely redundant as he does not live within the past or the present any longer but within the past, present and future simultaneously: “Whether it was a past or a future moment, or merely the eternally self-deleting present, seemed vastly irrelevant” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 305). The reader realises that this is the stage where memory actually begins to draw upon fictions since, at this very stage, he loses hold of the usual time-space demarcations. While differentiating between interior time and exterior time to discuss ‘nomads of the present’, Alberto Melucci defines inner time as “multiple and discontinuous,” arguing that “Different times exist together in inner experience; they succeed, intersect with and overlap one another” (1989, 107).⁹ The partition of the subcontinent amid the turmoil of independence, in fact, disrupts the conventional clocks for Roshan by thrusting him into a state of timelessness. It is in this state of timelessness that he is driven to coin his self and identity with the help of his imagination each time from scratch by repossessing lost vestiges of a remote past. The train journey from India to the newly created Pakistan, another symbol of the narrator/protagonist’s many journeys into different continents, makes him consider the need to recollect and invent the past once it is gone, depending on whether it figures into his mental-map as real, imagined or fictive¹⁰ (see Schmidt  Melucci highlights, “The passage between inner times is discontinuous and marked by interruption. Inner times are unpredictable; they can suddenly irrupt into each other as an event that interrupts routine” (1989, 108, emphasis in the original).  For more insight into the models of fiction and reality see Schmidt 1984, 253 – 274.

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1984, 253 – 274). Once he is expelled from his own land due to an unavoidable political-cultural revolution, he feels a necessity to preserve the cultural past in his memory so that he can view it in later years as a starting point of his evolving self and identity, no matter how (un)reliable his recollections are. The narrator/protagonist’s final confrontation with his moment of truth leads him to reflect on the dialectics of overlapping histories, territories and memories. As he bears witness to the grandeur of the geographical locations he grew up with, he manages to fathom his migrant condition as well as the various landmarks of time from Europe and Asia, which permeate the domains of his vast imagination. Your father is calling to you to look. But you are already seeing and in your mind you are looking at more than you can see because what you are seeing you will re-vision many years later when you come to stand on the banks of the Thames, the mystery of primeval water with its source in the Himalayas, and there is a throbbing within you because your father has said he is taking you to the mountains, it is as if the blood that pulsed within the heaving surface of primeval water and you are certain that the Indus is within you. (Ghose 1994 [1992], 341)

Soon land, border and country turn out to be myriad shades of transcultural memory, which is as much fictional as real since place and space, located in time past or time present, seem to be a figment of the imagination especially when the mind is engaged in evoking long-forgotten episodes from a dull and distant past. The narrator/protagonist looks at the Hindu Kush, “The head of India” (Ghose 1994 [1992], previously associated with Horuxtla in his prior incarnation and known as the land that no invader from the outside could ever conquer¹¹ (see Brouillette 2007, 169). Ultimately India, “[T]his land of origins – this crunched up vertically thrusting land of suggestive distortions in exile” (Ghose 1994 [1992], 343), draws Roshan into an unbreakable bond with his past and his native land: it is only through this bond that he recognises some meaning in his many journeys and travels to strange countries and continents around the globe.

 According to Sarah Brouillette, “The Hindu Kush appears as both a marker of absolute origins, as its walls form a surface of light that reflects Roshan’s image of himself, and the impossibility of those origins (2007, 169).

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5.1.7 Conclusion: Modernity, memory and self-identity In the fantastical life of Urim/Pons/Shimemers/Roshan, the division of the Indian subcontinent as a fundamental political revolution in the history of India, now divided into two independent nation-states, proves to be the prologue to the act of remembering multiple worlds and their eternal antagonism and interconnectedness. After the eventual loss of home/land, Roshan develops a deeper consciousness of self, history and memory. Change seeps into his private and public spheres from the channels of communal politics, and the advent of modernity in the face of the partition is soon integral to his renewed understanding of his individual and collective cultural past. He arrives at the conclusion that once the self is cut off from its origin, it begins to undergo a life-long process of translation despite the fact that translation is always coupled by its double, the untranslatable; it is reincarnated again and again as it travels to a new country and a culture, and thus is always a fiction and a myth. However, it is a kind of a fiction and a myth that is always in the making and is in perpetual search of its origins and its final reality. Therefore, while recollecting transcultural phenomena in his every new incarnation, the narrator/protagonist strives to reconcile not only with his plural lives in the age of cultural transgressions but the triple mirror of the self in a world-within-a-world.

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5.2 Phantoms of generational memory: A transcultural portrait of family histories in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Shards of Memory (1995) Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. (Benjamin 1968 [1955], 98) Within the family, the lifetimes of the generations are not watertight. On the contrary, there are many gateways between them. Each generation has one foot in the history which formed its predecessor and one in its own history and time. (Attias-Donfut and Wolff 2005, 453) The family is a privilege site of memorial transmission. (Hirsch 2012 [1997], 32)

5.2.1 Introduction: India and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala India has always loomed large in the works of British writers before and after the British Empire in the subcontinent (Booker 1997, Ch. 1, 23 – 55), but in the fictional domains of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,¹² India becomes passion and disappointment, dream and nightmare, illusion and reality. The works of Jhabvala have been compared to early twentieth-century Anglo-Indian authors such as Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Paul Scott as well as late twentieth-century Indo-Anglican writers such as R.K. Narayan and Anita Desai. These two different perspectives, in fact, point to Jhabvala’s distinct status in the gallery of writers, writing about East and West encounters both as an outsider and an insider.¹³ As a Jewish refugee who was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1939, Jhabvala, however, has always been an objective cultural critic of her three adopted homelands: England, India, and the US. The early phase of her novels about India To Whom She Will

 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, Germany in 1927. Having received her MA in English literature from Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1951, she married an Indian Parsee architect Cyrus H. Jhabvala and moved to India. She wrote several novels, short stories and screen plays. In 1974, she received a Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust (1975). At the same time, she is also well-known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions. Jhabvala died in New York City on 3 April 2013 at the age of 85 (see also Anderson 2009).  David Rubin is, nevertheless, highly critical of Jhabvala’s perception of India and Indians. He considers her in league with “those novelists who for the most part regard India with the critical and often indignant eye of the superior (if lonely) outsider” (Rubin 1986, 77).

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(1955; republished as Amrita, 1956), The Nature of Passion (1956) and The Householder (1960) depicts a newcomer’s passion for India with a romanticised portrayal of Indian family life, whereas her later Indian novels A Backward Place (1965), A New Dominion (1972; republished as Travelers, 1973), and Heat and Dust (1975) give a more ambivalent and complex picture of India as she focuses less on Indian domestic life and more on the experience of Europeans in India. The reaction of Indian critics to Jhabvala’s work is split between those who see novels such as Heat and Dust as culturally biased, negative portraits of India and those who see her as a culturally sensitive observer whose view of India is perceptive and honest.¹⁴ In 1975, when Jhabvala migrated to New York City, she entered a new phase of her fiction. She moved away from an interest in India and Indians to an interest in the effect India has on Westerners although she continued to explore the themes of exile, the search for home and the Indian ‘swami’ from her previous novels about domestic life in India. Her novel In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), based on three generations of German-Jewish émigrés in New York, is at once a departure for Jhabvala, whose move to New York brought about a rekindling of her childhood memories in Europe, and a re-examination of many of the themes she had explored in her Indian novels. In both her novels, In Search of Love and Beauty and Three Continents (1987), the figure of the guru emerges just as in many other novels and short stories. These fraudulent gurus take the form of a ‘psychospiritual’ therapist named Leo Kellerman in the novel In Search of Love and Beauty, and a bogus Eastern mystic named Rawul in Three Continents, both of whom prey on gullible seekers of spiritual meaning in their lives.¹⁵ Through the theme of the guru appearing in different guises in her works, Jhabvala consistently interrogates the way India, and frequently India’s more dubious guru figures, act on Westerners, particularly women in her Jane Austen-like comedies of manner.¹⁶

 For example, Vasant A Shahane speaks of Jhabvala’s constant sneering at the expense of India, as depicted in the attitudes, postures and gestures of the characters in Heat and Dust (Shahane 1988) whereas Yasmine Gooneratne pays her glowing tribute in a treatise on Jhabvala’s art of fiction (Gooneratne 1983).  Fritz Blackwell discusses the changing image of the Indian swami in all of Jhabvala’s novels and short stories, establishing the thesis that the change in the image of the Swami from being a nice man, a truly positive spiritual power to his being selfish, shrewd, hypnotising and sex-hungry is due to the changed vision of the novelist (Blackwell 1977, 6 – 13).  Laurie Sucher compares Jhabvala’s works with Jane Austen. She highlights: “As with Jane Austen, critics tend to speak of Ruth Jhabvala’s ‘cool,’ and even ‘cold,’ ironic distancing. Yet – and I would argue that the same is true of Austen – the irony masks, even heightens, a deep core of feeling. If the cynic is a disappointed idealist, the ironist is a disappointed – that is, experienced – romantic” (Sucher 1989, 7).

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Jhabvala’s novel Shards of Memory (1995) ties together many of the themes present in her later fiction as she constructs a narrative based on four generations of a single family with ties to England, India, and the US, and who are all linked to a spiritual figure known only as the Master. This chapter focuses on phantoms of generational memory as the main protagonist in Shards of Memory chronicles transcultural histories of his family members.

5.2.2 Travelling into the past of four generations Shards of Memory is a novel about collective and generational memories, a story of transnational families and communities, an epic of refugees, exiles and émigrés, a tale of marriages made and remade, but above all, it is a saga of four generations, spreading over various cultures and histories just as their multiple memories stretch over diverse countries and communities. Jhabvala once again addresses the themes of family and history through the premise of a set of old papers. It is a method she already employed in many books and screenplays years ago, including Heat and Dust, in which a woman discovers her late stepgrandmother’s scandalous letters and goes to India to investigate them. The novel traces a double-time plot that makes for an exciting reclamation of the past. We bear testimony to the past of the dead generation, surreptitiously leaking into the present in the form of fragmented memories. From a cache of scraps and scrawling, the novel traces the lives of mysterious, rootless characters who have constantly been searching for something in their memories to make their lives more meaningful. The title of Jhabvala’s novel Shards of Memory, in fact, provides its own frame of reference. The novel, with a narrative structure delicately poised on the fine line between comedy and tragedy, is a study of the complex process of memory showing that the repetition of ‘the longest memory’ is not necessarily tied to trauma, as the Freudian followers might argue, but is connected to family failures and jokes, and mutual hopes and disappointments. Divided into two parts entitled ‘Antecedents’ and ‘Legacy’, the novel moves back and forth in time and space as different characters narrate their memories. The story revolves around a family’s relationship with a guru whose impact on the family echoes over four generations, but whether this spiritual advisor is a charlatan or a true holy man is never completely clear. The novel opens with a young man named Henry, sitting with his grandmother, called by the name of Baby, in her Manhattan townhouse in order to uncover his family’s past involvement with the Master and his spiritual movement. We come to know that Elsa, Baby’s mother, marries an Indian poet, Kavi, but spends her later years with

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her lesbian lover Cynthia in London. Baby marries Graeme Howard, a wartime captain in the army and begets Renata. Later on, Renate falls in love with Carl, an idle German idealist and gives birth to Henry. Even though Graeme sends Henry from New York to London to be educated in a British school, Elsa and Cynthia make him the Master’s heir against his grandfather’s will. After a car accident in London that kills Elsa and Cynthia and cripples Henry, he returns to New York, takes up the Master’s work and makes Vera, a family friend’s daughter, his assistant. There is even a resurgence of interest in the Master after Henry publishes a book on his teachings and takes over the movement. Jhabvala also introduces a parallel plot through Henry’s family friends Mme. Richter and M. Richter, Russian refugees in New York after the Russian Revolution, their daughter Sonia, granddaughter Irina and great-granddaughter Vera. Whether Henry is the son of the Master or Carl, and whether Vera is the greatgranddaughter of the Master or not, remains an insolvable mystery at the heart of the novel as Jhabvala deliberately plays tricks with roots of identity as with the genealogy of her characters. Just as ‘races’ and cultures are mixed and at times intertwined in the novel, so are memories and origins, identities and ‘nationalities’, making the reader imagine the twentieth-century individual as a product of his multidimensional past, set in various civilisations, rather than a mere artefact of a ‘pure’ culture or country, Eastern or Western. Henry’s documentation of the history of his family not only unfolds surprising ‘facts and fictions’ of his family members, but also makes the reader witness events of global importance such as the First and the Second World Wars, the fall of the British Empire, the independence of India, the Communist Revolution in Russia, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and the effects of these events on the lives of people from India, Russia, Britain, Germany and the US in a comic and tragic way. Thus, the strands of generation, family and memory in Jhabvala’s fictional domain reflect present-day cultural fusions across diverse geographical and temporal zones on the one hand, and the making of global memories on the other. Although it is noteworthy that Jhabvala’s German-Jewish heritage has never occupied a central place in her work, one of her favourite themes, the way ‘odd shards and fragments of the past’ affect the present, echoes in the individual’s and his/her family’s constant struggle with a distant and fading, and at times distorted and dead, past. By drawing upon memory as a conduit between the old and the new generations, the displaced characters in her novels from heterogeneous backgrounds try to dig bit by bit into the fast-fading past. Jhabvala thereby uses memory as an effective tool to demonstrate an exile’s and a wan-

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derer’s exploration of the past in a new country and culture.¹⁷ In books like In Search of Love and Beauty, Three Continents, Shards of Memory and East Into Upper East: Plain Tales From New York and New Delhi (1998), Jhabvala writes about the post-Nazi generations of European refugees and immigrants in America. She often enlivens this gloomy subject by sending some of her characters to India on farcically doomed quests for spiritual wisdom, giving the reader the feeling of drifting along with her characters, from one continent to another, across several decades.

5.2.3 Spectres of generational memory: The construction of generation in the age of travelling cultures In the fictional realms of Jhabvala, generational memory particularly links distant countries and their political history such as India, Russia, Britain, Germany and the US together as these countries form the background of individual and collective memories of four generations whose members are mostly refugees, émigrés, exiles and expatriates. Thus, ‘generation’ and ‘memory’ are central to the progression of the plot as much as the theme of family and geography. The very notion of ‘generational memories’ indicates generation and memory as a social phenomenon, which Maurice Halbwachs’ thesis on collective memory has already affirmed (1992), for both generation and memory emerge as well as develop in a social and collective framework. Halbwachs’s approach is particularly interesting for the study of transcultural families whose members may associate themselves with different, perhaps conflicting frameworks, but it also helps to comprehend the mnemonic dynamics resulting from the interaction of various generations within a family. Halbwachs notes: “No matter how we enter a family – by birth, marriage or some other way – we find ourselves to be part of a group, where our position is determined … by rules and customs independent of us that existed before us” (1992, 55). Hence, family memory as a

 If Jhabvala is fascinated with the process of memory and discovering the past, she is equally charmed with the practice of inventing memories. Her autobiographical work, for example, My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past (2004), is a book filled with “invented memories,” as the author has commented, and thus, an intriguing book of invention and memory. Nine accounts of autobiographical fictions are linked to portray a rich life, filled with searching, from London to Delhi, from Hollywood to New York. It is at the same time nine variations on the theme of exile as Jhabvala has experienced herself. Hence, she is profoundly preoccupied with the fate of displaced individuals especially the destiny of refugees and émigrés in her fictional oeuvres about East and West encounters.

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specific kind of collective memory is a typical intergenerational memory that is constituted through ongoing social interaction and communication between children, parents and grandparents. In this way, it has the ability to construct and reconstruct the distant and near, the shared and unshared, the lost and forgotten past. In light of these reflections, it is interesting to add yet another dimension of Halbwachs’ approach to families, namely, how they function as “mnemonic interactions” that can mediate, transmit, and transform cultural traditions (1992, 83). As (re)constructs of a family unit, family memories, interestingly, tend to fall into the domain of what Jan Assmann defines as communicative memory, with its focus on everyday life, instead of cultural memory, with its focus on mythical events of the past, as the fundamental foundation of a community (2008, 109 – 118). However, it is intriguing how family memories as part of communicative memory are also likely to translate into the larger concept of cultural memory due to “the transnational circulation of memory” as can be seen in case of Royal families today (Erll 2011c, 312). Karl Mannheim claimed back in the 1920s that generation is a social creation rather than a biological necessity (2000 [1936], 276 – 322). He also felt that the romantic idea that generations uniformly embodied a ‘spirit of age’ was insufficient and argued strongly for recognising the specific historical and sociological processes that gave an age cohort the sensibility of being different from their predecessors. “It is also with Mannheim that generations become mnemonic communities. They are defined by their common reference to certain past events, by their shared anchorage in a specific historical period” (Erll 2014, 388). Astrid Erll, however, reminds us that Mannheim does not include transnational travels in his reflections despite the fact that the media in the 1920s was busy connecting the war generation across nations when Mannheim was writing down his thoughts (2014, 389). In light of Erll’s observation, I would like to point out that it is in the later British and American Anglophone fiction such as Hanif Kureishi’s story My Son the Fanatic (1994) or Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) that Mannheim’s notions of generation and generationality come back to mind as immigrants are beginning to be imagined and defined in terms of ‘the first, second and third generation’ in cultural discourse. By highlighting their social characters, I aim to treat ‘generation’ and ‘memory’ in the novel as products of overlapping private and global histories in order to negotiate ‘generational memory’ as a vivid reflection of moving cultures; in other words, of ‘the transit lounge of culture’ (Clifford 1991, 7– 8) where “transcultural flows create alternative spaces of cultural production” (Pennycook 2007, 47). My argument is that the interplay between intergenerational relations and personal lives among four generations of the family in the novel sheds light

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on the interconnectedness of our contemporary world, but more importantly on the shared memories of the characters. These shared memories conspicuously refract the transnational connections of the fictional characters. It is because of the transnational aspect in the novel that my emphasis is not on a historically-labelled, single generation such as ‘the partition generation’, ‘the lost generation’, or ‘the communist generation’, but rather on four generations of a family as representatives of today’s cultural and ‘national’ transgressions, and of global histories and shared memories. In other words, the dynamics of intergenerational exchange of memories mediates broader global processes, for the four generations in the novel are not only bound up with events of global importance, but are also active and passive agents during these events. Furthermore, the members of each generation embody the aftermath of political and historical transformations in various societies: for example, Kavi is exiled from India after the partition of the subcontinent, the Richters have lost their home after the Russian Revolution and the Kopfs and Kellers have become émigrés after the Jewish Holocaust in Germany. In this way, ‘shards of memory’ are not merely fragments of memory, but shards of Indian, British, German, Russian, and American displaced generations that have been struggling to reconcile with new cultural and ‘national’ identities as cultural outsiders in their adopted homelands. Jhabvala weaves an intricate tapestry of collective and generational memories-cum-individual history to preserve the archives of a family that is slowly dying out just like the partition generation or the Holocaust generation. Like her characters, she treats memory as an inheritance of previous generations that the new generation is unable to discard without actually coming to terms with it. For Henry, as the collector of family memories, the practice of remembering helps him to keep alive the family history and its traditions as well as those legacies that the great-grandparents have considered to be a sui generis. However, as a member of the new generation in the novel, the protagonist feels a mixture of association and alienation as he digs into the generational memory. In the process of digging, he is unsure how to embrace and at the same time escape the past of his ancestors who seem to rule his present from their graves and at times appear more alive than dead. Commenting on the reality of the living and dead generations, G.M. Trevelyan reminds us: The most familiar and certain fact about life […] the quasi miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow. (1949, 13)

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While recording and sharing generational memories, Henry is deeply fascinated by intersecting histories and cultures of his family members, making the reader notice how history, geography and culture are likely to converge in Jhabvala’s fictional realm as a result of migration and mobility of people across borders. As Said claims: [T]he world’s geography has changed so definitely as to make it nearly impossible to attempt reconciliation between history and literature without taking account of the new and complex varieties of historical experiences now available to us all in the post-Eurocentric world […] [W]hat of the world has changed so drastically as to allow now for almost the first time a new geographical consciousness of a decentred or multiply-centred world, a world no longer sealed within watertight compartments of art or culture or history, but mixed, mixed up, varied, complicated by the new difficult mobility of migrations, the new independent states, the newly emergent and burgeoning cultures? (2000a, 470 – 471)

By virtue of such cultural mixtures, the characters in the novel keep shuttling between the cosmopolitan cities of New York, London and New Delhi, confirming that “movement itself has become the theme of our age” (Freemann 1995). It is the movement of characters across fixed borders that make them unique and compelling as well as mysterious and complex. As they travel so do their memories, which keep travelling over generations, decades and locations, rendering family memory “a dynamic, context-dependent construction that can change considerably over time as well as according to different settings and audiences” (Erll 2011c, 313).

5.2.4 The Master as myth and memory over generations The Master and his nameless movement unite four generations of Henry’s family in the form of both myth and memory. The transmission and perpetuation of this myth from generation to generation is a prominent strand of transcultural memory in the novel. The Master’s influence on the family generations elaborates not only the theme of the Indian swami in the narrative, but also acts as a leitmotif of multiple cultural connections of the family. The saga of generational memories first reported by Baby in the first person narrative, and then reiterated in the third person, is also a saga of family models and myths that revolve around the Master. These models and myths appear to be highly ambivalent for the new generation that has not experienced them first-hand, but only as a construction and a fiction of their predecessors. Consequently, the past of the dead generation seems to be shrouded in mystery to the new generation because it is distant and fading into oblivion. While highlighting the connection between memory and myth making, Paul Thompson posits:

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“Mystery is a catalyst of myth; and when the mystery is repeated in more than one generation, it can become a particularly powerful family script” (1993, 35). However, in addition to mystery, the all-pervasive irony in the novel becomes increasingly pungent and stringent as Henry explores his family history and its connections to the mission of a fake master. Despite being the most opportunistic and materialistic character among them, the Master is worshipped in his family as a torch bearer for those who aim to achieve the so-called spiritual heights in the material age of capitalism and consumer culture. The most discussed movement of the Master in the four generations seems to originate in India – India, as a home of gurus and mystics since time immemorial, being an especially fascinating site for idle Westerners with a huge fortune as Jhabvala implies in her narration. Reminiscent of the ways of Moses, the magician, Jesus, the healer and Mohammed, the saviour, the Master claims to be the supreme pundit of ‘human head and heart’. The Master has cleverly prognosticated to be reborn as someone in order to glorify himself, expressing his faith in the Hindu belief of karma (reincarnation) and transmigration of souls. Hence, Henry, who is born on the same day the Master dies, is declared by his great-grandmother and great-aunt to be the Master’s successor, whom the Master has already prophesised to be his heir so that the new born could carry on with his mission and keep the myth of the Master as messiah intact. Such fake aspirations, unfortunately, trap Henry into a lifelong mission and compel him to see life through the eyes of a hypocrite. Not only does Jhabvala play with the unreliability of transcultural and generational memory in the novel, but she also questions the validity of the Master’s past through an unconventional family’s odyssey. Henry discovers that the Master founded his cult when he started practising meditation in the caves of the Himalayas at the time of the Independence Movement in India and the consequent fall of the British Empire on the subcontinent around 1947. This is further confirmed by Baby’s husband Graeme Howard and father Kavi, who have both encountered him in India but in completely different situations. However, Henry reveals that the Master’s autobiography is full of conflicting versions of his origins: In one, he was born in Tifilis, the son of a shoemaker, and as a child had caused such a sensation by speaking in tongues […] that he had been sent for by the Czarist court at St. Petersburg. In another, as the son of a prosperous horse-dealer, he had accompanied his father’s caravan to Kabul where he had encountered a mysterious emissary and followed him back to his Tibetan monastery to be initiated in secret doctrines. (Jhabvala 1995, 188)

The nonlinear narration of Jhabvala gives impetus to the theme of fake gurus and fading memories of all her characters, intensifying the readers’ doubts about the nature of truth with regard to the portrait of the Master as a hypocrite, as well as

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family history and memory. The hypocrisy of the Master’s mission is obvious when he describes himself as someone who enjoys “mystifying or downright fooling people” (Jhabvala 1995, 186). Interestingly, Jhabvala uses the portrait of the Master not only to bring out her unconventional characters’ foils, foibles and idiosyncrasies, which are the sum total of their existence, but more particularly, to expose their luxury of indulging in such myths. In short, despite the elusiveness of the Master, his followers, like Henry’s family members, remain the most fervent devotees of the Master in order to fill their lives with his nameless mission and to stand for his allegedly grand ideals. Jhabvala’s tone is inundated with irony as she describes the origins of the Master’s vision, which is a hotchpotch of abstract oriental philosophies and mystic principles sold to duped Westerners. She informs the reader that the Master presents his rules as based on ancient manuscripts long hidden in monasteries; these were so far up in the Himalayan mountain ranges that they were inaccessible to every human foot but his own – who had been transported there by means he was not ready to reveal, or did not judge others ready to receive. (Jhabvala 1995, 162)

While elaborating the image of the Master as part of a family’s generational memory and describing the globalisation of his mission, Jhabvala, in reality, criticises the vacuity of the life of rich Westerners who need spiritual movements and masters to make their life richer. Moreover, she satirises the tendencies of Western women to ‘exoticise’ and glorify a swami of presumably Indian origin no matter how pretentious and ostentatious he is. At the same time, by ‘de-exoticising’ the ‘exotic’, she, ironically, seems to ‘re-exoticise’ the ways of Henry’s family members as constant travellers between cultures and continents with a deliberate emphasis on the distant, the far off and the un-known; in short, she seems to brood upon the ‘exotic’ as something vague and ambivalent, lost in time and space, which only the practice of memory can revive. According to Chris Bongie, a certain kind of loss “generates exoticism […] That is why categories of thought such as modernity/tradition, civilization/savagery, Same/Other, presence/absence” (1991, 5) occurs in his discussion of the exotic, whereas for Clifford, the ‘exotic otherness’ is fast melting into the present-day cultural transactions (1988, 13 – 14). The phenomenon of de-exoticization is treated interestingly in the domain of Jhabvala’s fiction, especially because Jhabvala herself has undergone the experience of exoticising ‘the exotic’ and then witnessing its slippage into a more familiar, as embodied in her early novels, which focused on ‘exoticising’ India whereas the later works dismissed such a notion. While exposing the lack of rationality on the part of Westerners, Jhabvala tends to muse upon the Master’s ‘duplicity’ particularly while depicting Cynthia

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and Elsa’s dedication to the mission of the Master out of sheer idleness; additionally, they even go so far as to create a global cult out of the baseless sayings of the Master. Elaborating on Elsa and Cynthia’s hollow but idealistic notions, Jhabvala points out that Kavi meets Elsa for the first time at a party in thirty-five-yearold Cynthia’s house in London, where women have come to hear him recite poetry. Everyone was happy because all the people there in Cynthia’s drawing room were spending themselves and their money for something in which they believed. For some it was world peace- no more wars; for other socialism or communism- enough for everyone to eat; for others it was independence from colonial rule – all nations free to develop their own great spirit; for some vegetarianism – no more killing; and of course there was the Master’s message, which promised not only a better world but a better Man. (1995, 18 – 19)

Saturated in irony and comedy, Jhabvala’s narrative portrays all of the Master’s cohorts as confused as Elsa and Cynthia, the two central female proponents of the movement. The silence of the novelist resonates louder than words as Jhabvala deliberately never makes it clear to the reader what the Master’s mission actually is; whether it is a call to a total immersion in Dionysian pleasures or to the attainment of spiritual heights remains a riddle. Ironically, all of the cohorts and family generations are feverishly engaged in something they are unable to define as true; consequently, they choose to stay lost in the Master’s obscurantism and obfuscations. This attributes a profound ambivalence not only to the portrait of the Master, but also to all his disciples for cherishing vague philosophies, which might have originated in the more ‘exotic’ part of the globe. Moreover, the way both Elsa and Cynthia work on the Master’s new publications to promote his message imparts a comical dimension to his entire character, especially when Baby recollects that for the past twenty years Elsa and Cynthia have been quarrelling about the accuracy of the Master’s vague manuscripts. Despite ridiculing Westerners for their profound fascination for and dedication to the swami, the novelist does not refrain from criticising the swamis too as persons of ulterior motives in the guise of spirituality. While discussing the role of the swami in Jhabvala’s fiction, Indian critic Rekha Jha, for example, concludes: Jhabvala is confirmed in her opinion that Swamis are humbug and motivated by commercial interests rather than spiritual ones. These charlatans dupe the westerners who are surfeited by their own materialism and some wealthy Indians too. She appears intrigued that western rationality does not see through such duplicity. (1990, 84– 85)

To bring out the darkest sides of his character, Jhabvala highlights how the Master has exploited Mme. Richter who enters the Kopfs and Keller’s family as Elsa’s

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piano teacher. It is also through Mme. Richter that the most authentic account of the Master’s early years comes to Henry as the Master lived for four years for free in the wealthy Richter household before the Russian Revolution: She was a Russian, a refugee of the Revolution; from a rich and cultured family in Moscow, she was now supporting herself by giving piano lessons, to whatever daughters of good family she could find in New York. Mme. Richter belonged to a group who met to study and practice the teaching of their spiritual Master; and it was she who first really understood Elsa and opened up for her that other world Elsa had failed to find through music. (Jhabvala 1995, 13)

On her death bed, however, Mme. Richter speaks bitterly of the Master after having being convinced of his betrayal but to no avail. Ironically, the run-down house where she dies cursing him, is ultimately converted into the centre for the Master’s work when Renata buys it with Henry’s inheritance and transfers the headquarters of the Master’s movement there. Hence, in the fictional world of Jhabvala, myth and mystery, and memory and legacy are not only enmeshed and entangled with each other, but are given a larger-than-life dimension in the family chronicle. At the same time, the Master is once again intertwined with all of them, with Henry as well as with Vera’s family, due to the conversion of Mme. Richter’s rooming house into the “World Centre of the Movement.” The central irony of the novel is doubly intensified when the old house of needy Mme. Richter as the new centre of the Master’s Movement is recreated after the fashion of wealthy Cynthia’s house, which had been the hub of the Master’s activities in London years ago. While working together on the Master’s paper translating from different languages, Henry and Vera decide to discard the myth of the Master, but Henry’s idle parents convert the myth into an undying legacy, in short, an ‘invented tradition’. Accordingly, ‘shards of generational memories’ take a new turn as Henry withdraws from the shadows of the Master at a time when no seed of a newborn in the family is yet conceived to carry the name of its ancestors and to keep the myth of the family guru intact. However, as his parents hang his towering picture in gilded frames next to the Master on the walls of the centre of the Movement’s headquarters, the photos of the Master and Henry “slip into the icons of family frames” (Hirsch 2012 [1997]). Thus, these ‘family photos’ not only persevere and perpetuate ancestral history, but also become almost tangible tropes of generational memory.

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5.2.5 The location of transcultural memory in Henry’s family chronicle When Henry’s grandmother Baby begins to recollect the origins of the Movement, she complains of her fading memories, but decides to begin the generational account of her mother’s family the Kopfs and Kellers, the German immigrants, based in New York, and her father’s family, the Bilimorians, based in Bombay, to illustrate the profusion of her memories as well as diverse cultural correspondences of her family members. Jhabvala narrates the multidimensionality of family recollections in order to capture and represent in fiction the twentieth-century cultural realities of relocated individuals. Also, she subtly shows the effects of political turmoil on family members from disparate cultural landscapes, which actually causes expulsion from their native territory to unknown territories: Kopf and Bilimoria: New York via nineteenth-century Germany, and Bombay – here already you can see how mixed up everything is going to be, apart from the jumble inside my head. But these two families never really met – let alone mingled except of course through me in whom they have come together, producing (as everyone will tell you) an average sort of person. (Jhabvala 1995, 10)

Baby has an interesting mixture of German, Indian and English ancestry, but she claims: “Although I have an Indian father, I could be taken for any little Jewish lady of a certain age” (Jhabvala 1995, 10), drawing Henry’s attention to the cultural and biological cross-over among his family members. Baby’s memories actually connect dispersed stories of her family members,¹⁸ set in different cultures, histories and civilisations, who are brought together into a family memoir through the figure of the Master. As Baby describes her German grandmother and mother and Indian father, her memories take the form of memorieswithin-memories, highlighting East-West encounters of four generations of her family. Baby’s narration of intergenerational memories also unfold the tale of migrant families in today’s “deterritorialized age” (Appadurai 1996, 37) in which identities are as much subject to change and mutation as roots and origins. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, therefore, remind us that “cultural identity is at once deterritorialized and reterritorialized” (1988 [1980], 141– 143) in contemporary times. According to Baby’s fragments of memories, Elsa encounters Baby’s father on her trip to London to meet the Master, who has mysteriously taken off for somewhere else. Baby’s father, actually called Hormusji Bilimoria but nicknamed Kavi (literally meaning poet), is a member of a wealthy Parsi family

 For a more detailed analysis of stories and memories see (Hampl 1999, 21– 37).

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from pre-partition Bombay who never retraces his ancestral roots despite his utter longing for his homeland. Renata remembers how, even at the age of eighty, Kavi is deeply moved to hear Indian songs in his favourite Indian restaurants, reminding him of his lost home in the state of exile and stirring the memory of a place to which one cannot return. Since homeland has become an imaginary location of comfort after living away from it for a considerably long period of time, the immigrant characters in Jhabvala’s fictional realms, such as Kavi, have already embraced dual identities to come to terms with their immigrant condition. She highlights this duality in a witty manner by narrating how Kavi’s poetry, fraught with sentiments about his exiled condition, usually beginning with “Oh Kavi, an exile on the banks of the Thames…” (Jhabvala 1995, 17) changes to “Oh Kavi, an exile on the banks of Hudson…” after his move from London to New York. But in spite of this longing, he cannot go home like most of the refugees and immigrants in Jhabvala’s novels as she herself claims, “Once a refugee, always a refugee” (Jaggi 2005, online source). In this regard, Amitava Kumar infers: As the fiction of so many contemporary Indian writers reveals, our memories as Indians are also memories of movements across different countries and continents. We have built our homes in Britain, in Burma, in South America, in the Caribbean, and in North America. If our past was all these places, can we be nostalgic for only one place? Can we be nostalgic for a place that never was? (2002, 7)

According to Baby, Graeme and Cynthia are deeply fascinated with India despite their Englishness, which can be one reason for their devotion to the Master as a guru from the Himalayas and particularly Graeme’s attraction for Baby: When anyone is as English as the Howards – that is, Graeme and his aunt Cynthia – they usually have ties with India that go back for generations; and in the future years Graeme often blamed this particular line of his ancestry for the attraction he felt towards me. (Jhabvala 1995, 35)

Baby tells Henry that despite the fact that Graeme was her alienated husband throughout her life, “the fact remains that Graeme was Renata’s father, and it was through him that the Anglo-Saxon strain was added to the stock of Kopf-Keller and Bilimoria” (Jhabvala 1995, 38; emphasis in the original). When Renata recalls the Indian restaurants where Kavi used to take her during her pregnancy, Jhabvala ironically suggests that it is probably in the Indian restaurants that Renata too becomes imbued with India. She seeks a connection with a distant civilisation she has never experienced as her own but only vicariously through her Indian grandfather; however, the implied message is that Henry might perhaps

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be the Master’s son due to Renata’s intimate encounters with the Master, who is known to be a womanizer. Jhabvala states: Perhaps it was because of being steeped in this atmosphere during the last months of her pregnancy that Renata gave birth to a remarkably dusky little boy. Or he may have been a throwback to his Bilimoria ancestry, bypassing the Kopfs and Kellers, the English Howards, and Carl’s Protestant German family. (1995, 79)

Henry’s appearance as well as his triple family name is an interesting example of mixed cultures, ethnicities and histories as is the case with his grandmother Baby. He is finally called “Henry Hormusji Graeme Howard,” carrying his Indian and English ancestries but surpassing the German one from his father’s side. Despite Henry’s dark skin signalling his Indian ancestry, Graeme is happy to take Henry for a thorough Englishman because it is easier for him to accept his grandson’s dark complexion and slightly slanting eyes as distinguishing an English spirit for him than “Renata, who looked so English and wasn’t” (Jhabvala 1995, 81). Jhabvala, thus, once again deconstructs ‘the construction of race’, colour and ancestry in her narrative, demonstrating how histories and origins are becoming increasingly ‘impure’ in the twentieth century. Clifford’s thesis on the “predicament of cultures” (1988, 13 – 14) already asserts that cultural ‘impurity’ is, indeed, the fundamental feature of our present age of worldwide cultural contact and collision. As cultures and continents corroborate in the characters’ memories in the novel, it is evident that “territories cannot contain cultures” (Hannerz 1996, 8). The novel illustrates the perception of old and new generations towards a mutual past and memory. Although the Master is represented as a common denominator of collective memory, his image as a guru also symbolises generational differences, commonalities and conflicts. The Master has, indeed, cast a spell on successive generations in the family; however, the new generation, represented by Vera and Henry, is not ready to embrace the past of dead generations as an asset. Both Henry and Vera are more willing to immerse themselves in new times that demand a dismissal of fake spiritual figures trying to befool innocent people with wealthy backgrounds. Even though Henry has been engaged in preserving the Master’s memory throughout the novel, he also tries at the same time to escape the phantoms of the past as well as the menacing intergenerational memories which have been haunting him since his adolescence. In other words, if he is fascinated with multiple cultural belongings, as particularly surfaced in the process of chronicling the memories of his family members, he is also struggling to free himself from burdening myths and memories of his forefathers to experience a present without the shadows of the past, like his counterpart Vera:

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Henry envied Vera her ability to shake off the effects of the Master’s papers the moment she had finished her day’s work on them. Perhaps this was because her relationship to the Master was quite simple – she hated him. He may have been her great-grandfather but she carried no trace of him; whereas Henry, who was probably not his son, looked out into the world through the Master’s slanting hooded eyes. (Jhabvala 1995, 161–162; emphasis in the original)

Jhabvala’s art of memory in the novel is as unconventional as her art of presenting history and generational records within the domain of fiction. She presents various versions of the family’s past through her unreliable narrators, whose stories take odd and unexpected turns as their recollections and remembrances fade. As a writer between cultures and continents, Jhabvala indulges in inventing memories and family histories, or fictionalising the identities and origins of her characters. While narrating generational memories, she never articulates the truth to the reader in black and white in order to stretch his or her imagination about a story of twentieth-century families amid rapid social, political and cultural revolutions. This is the reason that ‘truth and reality’ are as shadowy as ‘memory and myth’ in her fictional realms while different narrators recollect the past from the vantage point of exile and migration. In her essay “Myself in India,” Jhabvala describes her art of fiction in the following manner, The classic definition for me of the writer’s life is that is laid down by James Joyce: ‘Silence, exile and cunning.’ This I interpret for myself to mean that I must keep my mouth shut, stay aloof from the world around me carry on my business like a thief in the night, pillaging what I need and hoarding it in the secret recesses of my imagination to make of it what I can. (Jhabvala 1972, 31)

Hence, Jhabvala’s treatment of memory in relation to the intergenerational chronicle in the novel remains not only elusive but a riddle and an invention at the same time. For the novelist not only constructs characters through their unreliable memories, but also introduces the absent character of the Master, who seems to go on living in people’s memories outside Henry’s family after the works of the Master have attracted global attention.

5.2.6 Conclusion: The riddle of generational memory Henry’s family history can also be read as a history of diverse cultural transactions, for the family members of four generations associate themselves with distant civilisations as part of their life-worlds. By writing a fictional family memoir, Jhabvala takes us on a journey into these life-worlds to shed light on her characters’ plural cultural belongings in the face of cross-cultural marriages made

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and remade just as their newly acquired identities. As the dislocated characters relocate themselves, they are impelled to rediscover the past in order to come to terms with their changing perception of shared memories and histories stretching over almost a century. The characters in the novel, whether from India or England, Russia or the US, hence, inhabit changing grounds as they are confronted with shifting identities and colliding cultures. By focusing on the family of refugees, émigrés and exiles from heterogeneous cultural landscapes and their ramblings about a fading past, Jhabvala directs the reader’s attention to the ‘scraps’ and ‘shreds’ of generational memory in a tale of cosmopolitan individuals whose memories demonstrate multiple ways of remembering the individual and collective past.

5.3 Between Calcutta and London: The ambivalence of transcultural remembering in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992) The power of the moment is not realized in the immediate perception but only later, in the imagination. The epiphanic imagination fills in the details that memory neglects and creates a unity out of fragmentary ‘dead’ details from the past. (Nichols 1987, 74) [I]n general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it – the present, that is to say, must have become past – before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future. (Freud 1927, 1)

5.3.1 Introduction: A tale of two cities This chapter examines transcultural memory as an ambivalent process in Memories of Rain (1992) by Sunetra Gupta,¹⁹ a London-based writer of Bengali origin.

 Sunetra Gupta was born in Calcutta in 1965 and wrote her first fiction in Bengali. Her father loved travelling so her early years were spent moving between Ethiopia, Zambia and England. When she was eleven, the family returned to Calcutta, a city which continues to inspire her writing. She now lives in Oxford. Gupta is the author of four novels: Memories of Rain (1992), The

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I argue that the all-pervasive ambivalence in the novel, set in Calcutta and London, is the outcome of an inherent conflict in the memories of the female protagonist. By focusing on the topography of these cities, I aim to elaborate on the complexity of present-day cultural encounters as represented in the novel. Like the novel The Shadow Lines by another Bengali writer, Amitav Ghosh, discussed before, the city is not a mere prop in Gupta’s narration, but the centre of her characters’ memories and dreams as well as hopes and disappointments. However, not only does Gupta narrate a tale of two cities within the realm of her fiction, but also of two individuals, one English and one Bengali-Hindu, to demonstrate their distinct approaches to their shared memories – to a mutual past as it lives on in the present. Since the novel is about a woman’s dauntless confrontation with gender hierarchies and cultural taboos, Shashi Tharoor is justified in claiming that Gupta’s Memories of Rain presents “a rewriting of Medea” (Tharoor 1992, 3). The novel tells the story of Calcutta-born Moni (or Monideepa) who is on her way to India on her daughter’s sixth birthday after being disappointed with her infidel husband; however, the stream-of-consciousness narrative blends memories and images, providing not just the history of a lost love, but also of Moni’s struggle with the demands of two different cultures. As Moni goes down memory lane, we learn that she falls in love with her brother’s friend Anthony in Calcutta, a visitor from the Europe of her literary imagination. After her marriage with Anthony, she moves to England in the hope of living a more luxurious life than in poverty-stricken Calcutta. But ten years later, Anthony’s infatuation with his London-based beloved Anna compels Moni to dissolve her marriage and rethink her cultural belongings, which turn out to be as much mixed as her cultural roots.

5.3.2 ‘Ambivalence of things past’ Gupta creates an interior monologue in narrating her heroine’s coming-of-age story, which is composed like a deep conversation with the past. According to Sarah Curtis, Gupta’s “interest lies in the inner worlds her characters inhabit, although she indicates that their dilemmas stem in part from the social pressures to which they conform” (1999, 26). In Memories of Rain, she interweaves the past and present in the story initially set in monsoon-ravaged Calcutta, and later in misty, unpredictable London, against the background of Moni’s transcultural

Glassblower’s Breath (1993), Moonlight into Marzipan (1995), A Sin of Colour (1999) and So Good in Black (2009).

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predicament. The entire novel takes place within the span of a single day, making the reader piece together the different phases of the main female protagonist’s multiple lives with shards of her memory. Moni recollects the past to relive her youth in Calcutta in the form of incomplete stories, which flash through her imagination like scenes from a film flickering on the cinema screen. Because of a constant movement back and forth in time and place, the narrative does not follow a linear order, but instead the order of Moni’s remembering. Consequently, the novel is almost structured like a photo album in which narrative patterns serve as snapshots of time and of memory. The cultural setting of all Gupta’s novels is one of expatriation, transculturalism, modernity and globalisation. All five of her novels, Memories of Rain, The Glassblower’s Breath (1993), Moonlight into Marzipan (1995), A Sin of Colour (1999) and So Good in Black (2009), span different locales and continents, containing narratives that travel through time and space. Furthermore, these novels reveal perspectives that reflect the characters’ dislocations from their homes and that conflict with their ideals of far-off places. To Monika Fludernik, Sunetra Gupta “provides a particularly interesting example of cosmopolitan hybridity” (1998, 276) especially as her narratives are based on the stories of globetrotters. In one of her interviews, Gupta asserts that writing for her is an essentially spiritual exercise: “I am not involved in any political movement and my main interest is to try to uncover human conditions” (Rediff.com 2006). In the same interview when asked if she belongs to a group of contemporary writers who have sort of ‘globalised’ Indian literature, she underlines that her work often has a transnational setting. She adds: “My characters are really not representative of a particular culture and essentially explore various issues that cut across geographical boundaries” (Rediff.com 2006). Indeed, as the novel keeps moving back and forth across different temporal and spatial zones, the notion of culture beyond fixed borders appears to be a major preoccupation for Gupta. Gupta’s stream-of-consciousness narration, which at times runs without punctuations, is almost a narrative poem on love, romance, family and betrayal in which the borders between memory and dream overlap as much as those between illusion and reality, or territories and personal histories. Such a narrative technique seems to be chosen to emphasise the fleeting dimension of memory and of memory practice, and at the same time, to match the psychological upheavals of her characters. In Gupta’s “dreamlike narration” (1994, 289), the reader, in fact, keeps sailing with Moni in intersecting temporal and spatial zones as she ruminates on her experiences from childhood to youth. Before catching a plane to Calcutta, she recollects the past not solely for making sense of her fragmented world, but also for stocktaking. As she remembers various events and episodes, she begins to reconsider her illusions about English history, literature

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and films back home, and above all her imaginary construction of a ‘distant’ civilisation in relation to a more familiar one. The narrative complexity of the novel lies in the fact that the whole novel is a juxtaposition of disjointed aspects of a woman’s unfinished journey to real and imagined places. By recollecting small events and episodes from the past such as, in the opening of the novel, an English woman’s encounter with pigeons at Oxford Street which leads Moni to think of her grandmother’s notion of pigeons back home, the novelist prepares the reader for a complex treatment of cultural and territorial cross-overs in the novel. By brooding over banal everyday events, Moni tries to understand frictions as well as connectivity in divergent cultures. At the same time, she seeks to read the present in light of the past to reconsider her own cultural fictions from the perspective of a broader cultural sensibility. Ambivalence becomes an increasingly conspicuous strand in Gupta’s narration as her novel sets up a series of binary oppositions, the conflict of which ultimately leads to Moni’s inability to associate herself with a singular cultural identity. These binary oppositions are, however, not merely confined to the construction of identity but to a considerable number of other aspects in her eventful life, to name a few: her idealised memories of Calcutta and the reality of the middle class life she has escaped; her romanticised Western education in India and the banality of English life as she experiences it after her migration to England; the identities that other people, like Anthony and her brother, have tried to impose on her and her own ideals for who she is; Moni’s perception of Anthony when she falls in love with him in India and the man he turns out to be once they are in England. These conflicts also mirror the deeper conflicts between Moni’s two homes that are presented in the novel: Calcutta and London. Interestingly, these cultural and territorial dichotomies, however strong, never stay intact in her imagination, but rather keep fusing into each other, sometimes taking the form of an idealised past, sometimes a bitter present. It is because of the constant fusion of these dichotomies that Moni keeps vacillating in her approach to the trajectories of place, culture and marriage throughout the novel. Since the narrative embodies as well as pieces together various stories out of memory fragments, it also sets out to negate chronology as already observed above. Each part of the novel begins with the present and after a series of trips down memory lane, comes back to the present at the end. As a result, a profound sense of ambivalence dominates the narrative from the beginning to the end. Ambivalence is, however, not just a prominent trait of Moni’s memories in the novel, but also a characteristic of Gupta’s writing. Amit Chaudhuri is of the view that dealing with Gupta’s writing means that one has to be prepared to engage with the complexities and difficulties her writing presents, or even challenges the reader with:

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She is a writer who seems to demand two distinct, seemingly irreconcilable, aesthetic responses; it is as if she inhabited two distinct cultural spaces, or spoke with two voices […] Gupta’s world is a hybrid one; her writing is preternaturally sensitive to the trajectory of individual lives, of migrations across continents, of lower-and middle-class post-partition Bengali culture, but it is also open to excess, to stereotype and archetypes, to the vague, intense longing of the feminised, adolescent imagination. These psychological dichotomies mirror the two cultures, Bengali and English, that have shaped, vivified and also fractured, Gupta’s sensibility, thus, in which nothing is ever finally resolved. (1999, 28– 29)

Since ‘nothing is ever finally resolved’ in Gupta’s sensibility, as Chaudhuri points out, Gupta’s narration remains an enigma – yet it is an enigma or a riddle that actually sheds light on the challenges of today’s transcultural encounters in her fiction. This is especially true as her characters try to violate cultural stereotypes or reconcile with multiple identities. In effect, her deeply sensitive characters, whose ‘psychological dichotomies’ not only mirror the duality of two cultures, but more significantly a journey from fixed notions of ‘other’ cultures to a transcultural understanding, are constantly engaged with notions of home and exile, and arrival and departure. However, the most crucial dilemma surrounds the notion of return and homecoming. Moni’s return to her hometown leaves the reader with an unanswered question: Can one really return in the real sense of the word? Although Ashima in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) and Chanu in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) also return to their homeland, the idea of return in general and homecoming in particular in Gupta’s fictional domain is not only a muddle but is fraught with contradictions, rendering return and homecoming a disputed terrain altogether for migrants and expatriates like Moni As Moni’s memories unfold the complexity of inhabiting disparate worlds, she is continuously struggling to define the reality of these worlds to write her story. Memories themselves are an act and in the context of this novel, they are an “act of telling stories” (Eakin 1999, 98). Edric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs even proclaim that memory as a “retrospective imagining involves the story as a basic mnemonic act” (2003, 15). The narrative is both an interior flight into Moni’s consciousness and a chronicle of her inner strife with a fast-fading past, conjuring up Calcutta, like London, as another imaginary homeland which seems to be lost to her, and which she has to ‘re-imagine’ and ‘re-collect’. Thus, people and places remain inseparable in her memory and imagination, evoking the significance and influence of place on human emotions and bonding over a certain span of time and space.

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5.3.3 ‘Countries of the mind’: Imaginary homelands and beyond Steeped in Bengali culture, especially the Calcutta of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (see Mandal 2006a, 154– 168), which is critically recreated in the novel, it is clear that Gupta, like her heroine Moni, cannot forget the city which she has left behind. Somdatta Mandal notices that an “acute Bengaliness pervades this novel, especially the expression of Moni’s anguished passion and dark thoughts, articulated through Tagore’s songs” (2006b, 165). The storyline reveals that countries, in Moni and in Anthony’s imagination, are a matter of invention like the memories themselves that invoke and construct images of these countries. Hence, the protagonists Anthony and Moni’s lives, lived on ‘familiar as well as unfamiliar’ territories, represent a conflict with ‘countries of the mind’²⁰ as they are caught in diverse yet interconnected cultural setups. The transnational setting of the novel is a unique illustration of the diasporic imagination, but more importantly of ‘imaginary homelands’ and their clash with reality. The theme of imaginary homelands, originally put forward by Salman Rushdie in the 1980s as a strong metaphor to describe the fragmented vision of the migrant abroad, reflects a preoccupation with ‘Indias’ and ‘Englands of the mind’ (Tindall 1991, 10) in the development of the plot. To track the process of her characters’ strife with their ‘imaginary homelands’, Gupta concentrates on heterogeneous cultural and geographical landscapes to demonstrate their fusion as well as antagonism. Apparently, the novel addresses the plight of a sheltered, naïve woman once she crosses the borders of her homeland; however, on a deeper level, this dilemma is a consequence of her dreams and fantasies about distant lands. As I have mentioned in my close-reading chapter on Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, cartographic imagination is a vital aspect of Bengali sensibility. Mukherjee highlights that real journeys within the country and imagined travels to faraway places have always fascinated the Bengali middle class: Publishers claim that the sale of travel books in Bangla ranks second only to that of religious books, and even a casual tourist would confirm that Bengalis outnumber travellers from any other single region of India. (2000, 137)

Through the tunnel of Moni’s memories, the novel stages the spatial imagination of the Bengali community in Calcutta, which has a propensity to explore unfami-

 For more insight into the writer’s mental construction of a country and the significance of place in her writings, see Tindall 1991.

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liar territories. While recollecting her fascination for unknown places, Moni muses over: a new land, unfamiliar trees, hills that do not know your name, wanderlust, I know not where the wide road runs, nor what the blue hills are, but the road calls, and the hills call, and oh, the call of a star, wanderlust, the curse of their race … (Gupta 1992, 157– 158)

Since Moni is aware that it is itself a privilege for masses of her countrymen to live in the West, she is profoundly sceptical about going back all the time. She recalls her brother, envying her exaggeratedly for choosing London as her second home: “[H]e said flatly, you will stand above the Thames, you will see the Big Ben… but no back to Bengal for you” (Gupta 1992, 178). However, Moni cannot help confessing how the idea of ‘the new land’ has excited her in the past and how she has envied friends moving to America. Upon her return, she is worried about frustrating everyone’s hope in her well-being in London besides bringing disgrace to her family as a divorced woman who is rejected by her English husband after ten years of marriage. Ironically, the experiences of travel and migration do not provide Moni with a key to ‘a world of absolute perfection’ as she has imagined under the influence of her family and community, but rather presents several kinds of social and emotional challenges. Despite her disillusionments and disappointments with ‘newness’ in terms of country and society, Moni strives to come to terms with a novel perception of ‘strange’ cultural encounters. Hence, ‘memories of rain’ are not only memories of love gained and lost, but are memories of re-discovering the sense of home and belonging at home or abroad in our contemporary times that have rendered home and belonging a shifting concept (Mukherjee 1993, 140 – 149). Consequently, ‘memories of rain’ hinge on conflicting emotions as Moni evokes fragmented episodes from the past throughout the novel, episodes which direct her to develop a deeper understanding of her past actions as well as history. In this context, Paul Connerton’s remarks are noteworthy: he claims that “our past history is an important source of our conception of ourselves; our self-knowledge, our conception of our own character and potentialities, is to a large extent determined by the way in which we view our own past actions” (1989, 22). Moni has grown up idealising the English since her exposure to English education. While recollecting her college time in Calcutta, she realises that the supposed grandeur of English culture and literature, which she has wrongly associated with Anthony, is only a figment of imagination. This perpetual tug-of-war between illusion and reality remains fundamental in her memories, and is, indeed, a distinct trait of all our memories. The practice of memory shakes her

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from a dream world where travel, affluence, modernity and Westernisation repose in ‘the England of imagination’. Memory is not just a mode of reconciliation in the novel, but rather a means to rediscover the self and identity in Moni’s fictional memoir. Furthermore, Moni’s immersion in memory testifies a longing to document the past before it slips into oblivion. In the ‘tunnelling process’, to cite a memory technique from Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novels,²¹ Moni wonders at her own memories as they grip her entire imagination, drawing palpable images before her eyes from the past. In the intermittent flashes of memory, she asks herself: “And why, today, on the day that my life is to be wrung dry of all memory, why do such images steer strong in my consciousness” (Gupta 1992, 163). The images of memory increasingly dominate her mind as she fears to be cut off from her distant past, especially when she is aware that “too much distance will color memory sad sepia” (Gupta 1992, 171– 172). In this way, memory has a dual function: on the one hand, to make her rewrite the past; and on the other hand, to hold on to what is left in memory. For Moni, as a young college girl in Calcutta and a student of English literature, Anthony comes to represent a kind of sophistication that she can never associate with her improvised Bengali life. Along with the romantic poetry of Keats, Moni recollects Tagore’s verses in relation to Anthony’s image who imparts an aura of romance to her drab existence in Calcutta, besides keeping her stereotypes of the English intact. Gupta alludes to Moni’s fascination with Anthony in terms of his ‘whiteness’ as a man from a distant ‘race’ and culture. In her first encounter with Anthony, she notices his “alabaster calves” (1992, 3), and “corpse-white, muck-rinded toes” (1992, 3). People in Moni’s household refer to him as his brother’s “white friend” (Gupta 1992, 4) whereas an ordinary Indian notices him as “the white man” (Gupta 1992, 9). Even her college friends ask Moni how it is to sleep with “a white man” (Gupta 1992, 22). In fact, a play upon the virtual ‘whiteness’ of Anthony is evocative of ‘the myths of the West’ that have been lurking in the Indian cultural fabric and also in Moni’s imagination. When Moni watches the BBC serialisation of Jane Austen’s Emma, she cannot help being transported suddenly to eighteenth-century England,

 In the novels of Virginia Woolf, both the novelist and her character use a process of ‘tunnelling’ which had been described by Woolf in her journal of 1923, as a way of retrieving the past incrementally by ‘instalments.’ Woolf makes the character go on tunnelling his/her way into the picture of the past. For example, in Wolf’s quintessential memory novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), the novelist presents the tunnelling process by demonstrating three aspects of the memory process: the encoding, the storage and the retrieval of memory.

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[H]e [Anthony] watches her [Moni], as she grapples with his history, the black-and-white shadows upon the screen are his world, somewhere across the oceans, perhaps some sharp-faced white woman waits for him to return. (Gupta 1992, 58)

Not only does Moni see in her mind pictures, culled from English novels, poetry and films but she thrives off of them: “She had loved Heathcliff before she loved any man” (Gupta 1992, 177). Because, in Calcutta, the English are a mystery for her through her reading of their literature and history, she likes to imagine Anthony as an image from an English movie. She also enjoys looking up to him as another character who has come alive from Jane Austen’s romantic and surreal realm. She even thinks that across the more familiar border, a fairy-tale world of absolute fantasy is a tangible reality. Such vivid ideals about English culture and its past naturally lead to a cultural crisis within her the moment she encounters ‘the England of the imagination’ in real life. When Moni migrates to England from India, she is first confronted with the problem of communicating her cultural past to a people who have their own clichés about Indian culture and civilisation: For she had come to this island, this demi-paradise, from a bizarre and wonderful land, so Anthony’s friend called it, was it true, they asked, that they still burn their wives, bury alive their female children? And she would nod numbly, although she had known only of those children that had escaped death, whether deliberate or from disease, those that had been sent out to serve tea in tall grimy glasses in roadside stalls, or to pluck the grey hairs of obese turmeric-stained metropolitan housewives, fill the gentleman’s hookah, blow, blow until the green flame gushes, while the mother, helpless domestic, watches silently and trembles. And even these were often graven images, culled from film and fiction. (Gupta 1992, 6–7)

While recollecting her own stereotypes about Anthony and English culture, Moni begins to assess her intellectual and social development as a migrant in London,²² the city of her dreams. Despite Anthony’s role in saving her life in a poor country, she feels that she still has not been able to develop into herself in a rich metropolis like London. In fact, she had somehow managed to enhance her vocal and literary talents in Calcutta despite the fact that she was dissatisfied with everyday life there. She speculates that her host city could not offer her adequate opportunity due to her own lack of initiative in an alien environment: Had she been arrested in her development, remained the passive, attentive child, by crossing the seas to an unfamiliar country, where, despite her half-finished honors degree in English, she could not find the right words, the right expressions, to voice her opinions,

 For details on Asian women and the experience of migration in London, see Bhachu 1993, 99 – 117.

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to participate but in the most banal conversations, or was she merely passive by nature, content to sit and listen? (Gupta 1992, 14)

Moni is painfully aware that going back to embrace her past life and to take up her abandoned cultural values is the only way to escape a failed marriage. Nevertheless, she doubts the very basis of her final decision to leave Anthony. Because of Moni’s inability to return home so easily, Susheila Nasta claims that in Gupta’s narrative, return is no longer possible, and the “scraps of fragmented memory no longer provide an untroubled or celebratory route to an ‘imaginary homeland.’” Instead, the multiple layers of memory tend to guide the protagonist to revise her cultural roots. According to Nasta, memory is an instrument of inscribing the secrets of the migrant self in Gupta’s fiction. She claims: Gupta’s purpose then, is to advance a narrative poetics in which memory provides the semantic reservoir for establishing a ‘dialogue with the self.’ Its territory exists outside the temporal borders of space or the nostalgic memories of a past lost, reflecting many lives. (2002, 232)

While having a ‘dialogue with the self’ and with ‘memory’, Moni does not just worry about ‘a lost past’ as Nasta argues, but re-memorises the past from a transcultural perspective, thus, as a person with a mature cultural understanding of ‘real and imaginary homelands’. This is the reason that, while discussing the poetics of diaspora in relation to the search for home, Malashri Lal and Sukrita Pula Kumar remind us, “The literature emerging from […] diasporic experience tends to be a rememorization of the world through a backward glance” (2007, ix). Conflicting strands of memories also make Moni examine the contrast between her and Anthony’s diverse approach to their shared memories – to their mutual past as individuals between cultures. Although it is established that the novel addresses Moni’s dilemma, at the same time, it deals with Anthony’s too. The novel is reflective of an Englishman’s conflict with Indian marriage values, family taboos and cultural mores as well as his conflict with ‘the Indias of the mind’. Indian critic Debjani Ganguly, in her essay “Of Dreams, Digressions and Dislocations: The Surreal Fiction of Sunetra Gupta,” has rightly addressed Anthony’s cultural plight vis-à-vis Moni’s to highlight Gupta’s subtle art of representing cultural fusion and fissure simultaneously. She contends that emotional and cultural tensions in her protagonists from both sides of the border stem from their imaginary constructions of country and culture: The cultural encounter between Britain and India in Memories of Rain, thematised by the romantic pairing of the quintessential daughter of a Bengali ‘Bhadralok’ household Moni, and the equally stereotypical dreamy English poet-like friend of her brother, Anthony, fol-

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lows a predictable trajectory as their imaginary constructions of each other’s cultures disintegrates into a miasma of disenchantment and estrangement when they encounter the ‘real’ London and Calcutta respectively. (1996, 313)

Ten years ago when Anthony first meets Moni in Calcutta, he associates Moni with the vastness of the city that his imagination is compelled to reconcile with, just as to Moni’s mind Anthony is associated with the alleged grandeur of English history and literature: It had become clear to him then that he could not leave this putrefying city without her, that it would not be enough to cherish the beauty of their unconsummated passion, alongside his memories of this unashamed city, its gorged pavements, the tired faces of colonial buildings jostled by indifferent, insect-eyed multi storied flats, the patient streets lacerated by the construction of an underground, the smell of hot mud after a brief rain. (Gupta 1992, 38)

As Moni moves between Calcutta and London in her memory and imagination, she is not sure whether her failed marriage is a consequence of broad ‘cultural difference’, or of the passage of time itself, since with the years every marriage in any culture can change its lustre. This scepticism about her marriage and Anthony’s betrayal remains dominant in Moni’s psychic sojourns in time past and time present, imparting an unreliable quality to the fictional narrative. Accordingly, paradoxes and contradictions constantly characterise her memories. The prevalent motif of rain becomes an apt metaphor for Gupta to convey the ambivalence Moni feels in her attitude towards India as well as her relationship to Anthony. Rain is a symbol of rebirth, fertility, cleansing and rejuvenation, but in Gutpa’s fictional realms, it is the most ambivalent prop in Moni’s stories of memory. Although rain provides a backdrop to a romantic relationship between Moni and Anthony in Calcutta, Moni remembers rain not as a relief from heat, but as a natural catastrophe for the unprivileged: “From such a land Anthony had rescued her, a land where the rain poured from the skies not to purify the earth, but to spite it, to churn the parched fields into festering wounds” (Gupta 1992, 6 – 7). In yet another passage, Gupta emphasises the nauseating odour of rain: “from the damp sheets a queer alkaline odour is rising, the rain-swollen doors, that no longer close, reek of rotting termite eggs, a sea of filth laps at the walls outside” (1992, 27). For Moni, the rain is relentless, oppressive and nauseating, but also awe inspiring and sheltering as in Tagore’s songs. Hence, memories of Anthony in rain-sodden Calcutta, ravaged by the flood of 1978, are inextricably intertwined with the memories of mass misery over there. Despite having deep longings for prosperous far-off places, feelings of guilt about fleeing from the poverty, which figures centrally in her memories of Calcutta, never leave her imagination. Through Moni’s recollections, the reader gets an

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insider’s view of Bengali interpretation of English culture as well as their fascination with travel to distant places, as mentioned before. However, Moni’s brother has always criticised such journeys to the West as a bourgeois pastime, since such holiday makers do not think of the thousands of old people who die on the pavements every day. For this reason, Moni thinks that when she goes back, she can perhaps work for a charity to expunge her sins of having lived in a land of plenty and devote her life to the poor, the diseased and the hungry: She will give her life to the city that she left behind, so many years ago, before its wooing of her was complete, she had crept away, before she might have shared the deathly pain of dying desire with its forlorn streets, before the sting of a forgotten lust might have sent her stumbling into the dawn shroud of greasy walk […] she had wondered why it was only for her that love remained a dream, and when love came, she had not shared it with the city, as the others had, weeping upon the heavy grass by the lake… (1992, 109)

Out of her experience of displacement, she tends to recollect images of her native and adopted city simultaneously in order to track her entangled cultural roots. Nevertheless, she always has mixed sentiments for her hometown Calcutta as she is unsure whether she truly loves the city or if she is only sorry for its poor and miserable inhabitants. While leaving prosperous London, she cannot help but remember the pervasiveness of hunger back in Calcutta as she recollects Anthony’s beloved Anna, cutting soldiers out of toast for her daughter’s birthday party: [T]he sliced fruit laid bare to the roadside flies, unwashed thumbs pushing spiced potato mix into puffed wheat shells, to dip in tamarind juice diluted with drain water, rusty machines squeezing cane juice into grimy glasses, that was where she was taking her, what would she eat in that land of hunger, where children crammed their mouths with fetid soil to dull the burning of digestive juices against thin bare walls of their gut, in the famine of ’42 her father had seen a woman insane with hunger, racing her child to finish the bowl of food they shared, in those days they begged, not for rice, but for the thin scum of rice that prepared against the boiling pot… (Gupta 1992, 68)

Such scenes from memory accentuate Moni’s anxiety about letting herself and her British-born daughter fall into abject deprivation. This fear of falling from a better social class increasingly haunts Moni once a return to Calcutta becomes the last alternative to escape an unfaithful marriage. She is also clearly haunted by a fear of disappointment that her homeland has perhaps changed beyond recognition; hence, Moni’s return to a re-imagined Calcutta – to a Calcutta that has been significantly revised in her memory – is one way of avoiding anxiety. Consequently, as Bidisha Banerjee postulates, “[T]he Calcutta she returns to is considered the ambivalent space where she can now attempt to disrupt the binaries that have dominated her life as well as the binary of home and away” (2009, Ch. 3). At times,

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Moni celebrates the city with poetic imagery, but at other times, she curses its adversities in contrast to the economic comforts in London, leaving the reader perplexed about her associations with ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ places.

5.3.4 From the prism of transcultural memories: The enigma of the arrival and departure While she is in London, Moni’s recollections of Calcutta are deeply fractured and shadowed by the ambivalence she feels about what the home she has left behind represents for her; consequently, her memories of the past fail to give her any kind of solace. Her memories are also deeply fissured by the persistent question of what her life might have been had she not married Anthony and come to England. Due to this fissured and paradoxical nature of her memories of the past, she is not able to claim the past as her own. It is only after revising and reimagining the past that Moni is compelled to finally return to Calcutta and physically re-inhabit the spaces of that past. Although Moni is, at first, relieved to have escaped the drudgery of life in Calcutta as mentioned before, there are subtle suggestions that her relationship with the city is more complicated than she allows us to believe. Upon her arrival in London, she does not re-set her watch, so that it continues to indicate the time in Calcutta. In an extended section of the novel, she looks at her watch and imagines what might be happening in her home at that moment: [I]t was six in the morning in Calcutta, her father would be stretching his limbs in preparation for his journey to the market […] Anthony woke, you’re jet-lagged, he told her, ten o’clock, her brother swings his cloth bag over his shoulder and leaves for the day […] come back into bed, Anthony said,[…] she looked at her watch, eleven o’clock, the girls were rising from their chairs to greet the lecturer […] twelve o’clock, the curtains were pierced by a cold winter light, in Calcutta, the noon sun is caressing the pitted pavements. (Gupta 1992, 104– 105)

In this passage, the combination of Moni’s current reality with her imagined portrayal of life in Calcutta creates a temporal split between the present and the forced imposition of an imaginary present time and space upon the real present. Such a split underlines the fissure felt by Moni as she is pulled between her two homes: Calcutta, as the home she has left behind, and London as her adopted location. As the stark contrast between London and Calcutta in Moni’s consciousness becomes evident, her memories of Calcutta are revised, and despite the filth and the chaos which she still vividly recalls, she longs to return. While London is the temporary space where she endures her own colossal fissure, brought on by the

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twin assaults of patriarchal control and the pressures of cultural assimilation, it is also a space of transformation and re-education for her as she journeys between the poverty-stricken Calcutta of her homeland and the re-imagined Calcutta to which she must return: And among the dusky streets of London, she feels reproach, she had wanted to make this her home, and instead the city had remained stately and aloof, the dispassionate streets look upon her now, silent, ignoring the secret they share, and yet, ten years ago, every alleyway in Ballygunge had trembled with the heaviness of her departure, weeping puddles upon the cracked pavement they had turned away, indignant, betrayed, she will go back to them, the narrow pitted streets, cloaked in a miasma of car fumes, the dung smoke of a thousand clay ovens. (Gupta 1992, 81)

Thus, while London can offer her no solace, Calcutta is portrayed as a betrayed lover, longing for Moni’s return, however, a return filled with anxiety as well as relief, leaving the reader confused about her decision. As Moni speculates on the mediocrity of her life in England, she begins to feel nostalgic about her singing lessons at school, where she was looked upon as a conservative Brahmin for not touching beef. At that time, she had felt detached as if she were a “part of another world” (Gupta 1992, 15), but life through her memories convinces her that ‘another world’ is never her own despite trying hard to find one. While recollecting different scenes from the past, she is seized by an overwhelming desire to return to that world even though she is aware that it is no longer there, that the experimental theatre group has long been dissolved, that her brother squanders his meagre journalist’s income on alcohol, her mother arranges with her tired hands the disused limbs of her father over the divan in the living room. (Gupta 1992, 15)

Moni’s leaps into the dead, lost past are a result of her strife with a dreamless present and future. She keeps harking back to the time in Calcutta when travel and English literature were a fantasy. While studying English literature, she almost pitied her fellow students for not having a chance to travel to ‘the other world’. She thought that they would stay curtained in their trivial niches, while she “traveled through space and time with Shakespeare” (Gupta 1992, 105). Paradoxically, once she has seen ‘the other world’, she finds herself pulled toward the one she has left behind. This is the world she tries to find in her ‘memories of rain’ by invoking bits of romantic episodes from the past. Moni is always on the horns of a dilemma whenever she looks at Anthony as a dream-like husband for most of the women of her age in Calcutta, a man who not only marries her, but promises a reasonably comfortable life that she could

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never imagine having with an Indian husband. However, she remains unsure whether this should be her only consolation about a failed marriage: Why should she not be happy? The sadness of his infidelity should not cripple her, she no longer feels any attraction for him, this he is painfully aware of, she has his trust, his respect, his affectionate devotion. She has a job, translating the complaints of Bangladeshi patients to physicians, she has a life, she has a daughter, what more could life have offered her, there, behind decayed shutters, from where he had rescued her, a more faithful marriage perhaps… (Gupta 1992, 44)

Despite portraying Anthony as a disloyal husband, Gupta emphasises a profound sense of discontent in him as he constantly vacillates between love and betrayal. As he wanders among the ruins of their daughter’s birthday party after Moni has already flown to Calcutta with their child on the very day of the child’s birthday, he realises that he has become, in the space of a few hours, “an irrevocable part of an unreal past, he has been engulfed by time… he has been betrayed by those he loved most…” (Gupta 1992, 193). With such fluctuations in Anthony’s portrayal, as a mixture of hero-villain much like a typical ‘white’ character in Bollywood cinema, the reader’s sympathy towards him remains equivocal until the end. Eventually, Anthony begins to attribute his despondence not to the peculiarity of their circumstances, but to the same facet of the culture, in which marriage was perhaps merely an inevitability […] that it was wrong of him to demand from a culture where the union of man and woman was perhaps regarded as too personal, too delicate to be shared among others except in prolonged ritual, elaborate institutional revelry, and during the wedding as he sat, his hand bound in hers, insulated by thick smoke from the raucous celebration, it had struck him, once again, we are not part of this, we have been cleaved, scooped out, the rain wooden door that rattled between them and the vast troop of guests […] had seemed an impenetrable barrier as his frenzied fingers traveled among the sharp gold thread of her garment, drawing apart the moist petrifaction of her flesh, he had penetrated into the heart of a deep tropical silence. (Gupta 1992, 139 – 140)

Despite regretting Anthony’s betrayal, Moni is well aware that it is because of Anthony that she is able to assert her sexual identity, which is denied to Bengali middle class women like her in India. Her preoccupation with female sexuality is as ambivalently portrayed in the novel as her devotion to Calcutta. In fact, female sexuality is as much at the heart of her memories as people and places. Moni fears the life of a single, barren woman as much as she dreads poverty. Although Moni detests a life of marital drudgery, marriage is important to her as it is a way of asserting her femininity. Her aunt, leaving a bad marriage, as well as her unmarried English teacher, giving up marriage in the pursuit of her academic

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goals, could be seen as strong and positive female role models for Moni. Yet, quite to the contrary, she presents them as lonely, isolated and unfulfilled figures. While imagining their sexless bodies without having experienced “a man’s touch,” the barren female body becomes the metaphor for all that Moni dreads most as a woman. In short, Moni is unable to reconcile their asexuality with their femininity. Herein lies the ambivalence of her return once again. Because she cannot accept a sexually deprived life, she fears that she might wait for Anthony to awaken her back to her sexual life. And yet as the memories crowd upon her, sudden and thick, she is seized by a new fear that in the silence of tropical afternoons, she will listen, shamefully, for his footfall, the bitter hope that he will come back for her may shroud her mind… (Gupta 1992, 99)

Although at the end of the novel Moni returns to Calcutta, the site of her past, this is not a return to an ‘original, idealised and unchanged’ past. In returning to Calcutta, Moni has revised her memories and acknowledged previously unacknowledged aspects of her relationship with this place. Now, we cannot ignore the fact that Moni’s return to Calcutta does not mean that she is leaving England in order to simply embrace her traditional, middle-class life in India, but rather that she is leaving her unfaithful husband and returning to the space of a ‘new’, modern India. The ending of the novel, in particular, with a Western man falling in love with a Western woman and an Indian woman having to return to her native Calcutta is likely to strengthen the typical stereotypes about cross-cultural marriages. In other words, it could easily be argued that such an ending neatly re-establishes binary oppositions of European and Asian cultures. In response to such an oppositional reading of the text, I posit a more nuanced reading where Moni’s enhanced cultural insights and revision of her memories about her homeland allow her to chart a process of self-realisation that results in a transcultural rendition of return. Because of a constant questioning of the idea of home/land permeating transcultural memory narratives discussed in this treatise such as Ghose’s Triple Mirror of the Self or Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, it is justified to argue that these texts ultimately also suggest that the home left behind is decidedly not the final destination to which a migrant or a transmigrant is bound.²³ Consequently, the enigma of the arrival and departure as rooted in the migrant condition is not merely confined to homecoming, but rather makes us look at home as a transitory space.

 For more details on the connection between the idea of home and migration and the transcultural phenomena, see Newton 2005.

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As the novel comes to a close as an open ended story, Moni recollects the entire panorama of forgotten scenes, impinging on her imagination, at last ending with the same scene where the thread of memory has begun to spin a whole pageant of her past life in the form of fragmented images: “[T]he woman upon Oxford Street crushing ice cream cones to feed the pigeons,²⁴ they are disgorged upon the dull tarmac, Terminal Two, Departures” (Gupta 1992, 172). In this way, the narrative comes full circle in the process of memorisation and re-memorisation. As she is flying over England, she “watches the dim necklace of lights unfold below, her city, unreal city, a deserted carnival…” (Gupta 1992, 193) and London, like Calcutta, soon turns into another lost segment of the past. She realises that the boundaries between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ places are increasingly blurred as she experiences migration and expatriation: on the one hand, London has never been her real home; on the other, Calcutta, with the passage of time, has already become an alien territory. Hence, she is confronted with multiple cultural and territorial associations as her roots are ‘dislocated’ as well as ‘relocated’, and, the novel, thus, highlights how travel and cultural translation leads to a new perception of familiar and unfamiliar places, in short, of real and imaginary homelands.

5.3.5 Conclusion: Travel and cultural translation Although Gupta is mainly concerned with unravelling the inner crises of her protagonist in the form of a journey to the past, Memories of Rain demonstrates a series of journeys: mental, spatial, temporal and cultural. Moni’s journey, nevertheless, does not solely take place on a physical plane, from India to England and back to India, but is also a journey from the cultural fantasies of a young girl in Calcutta to the transformation of these fantasies in London. Ostensibly, Moni seems to have refused cultural translation by flying back to Calcutta, which is supposed to be the hub of her indigenous roots. Jacqueline Bardolph, for example, contends that Gupta’s characters “refuse to be translated persons and protect their double vision, with all the more poetic intensity as they may feel it is threatened by time itself” (1999, 358). However, Bardolph tends to ignore the fact that cultural translation does take place in the novel but on a different level. Moni manages to translate her cultural fictions into reality just as she manages to situate the ‘countries of the mind’ in a realistic frame once she undergoes a transna-

 This is also an interesting way to start and end the novel since pigeons are known for having a kind of internal compass that helps them to always find their way home.

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tional experience and is able to develop a new perspective on the ‘West’, especially English culture and history in relation to her own Indian heritage. The ambivalent ritual of transcultural remembering makes her think that culture and cultural ‘otherness’ can neither be defined in light of individual and collective cultural stereotypes nor in terms of binary oppositions, as cultures are a dynamic process of change and innovation. Therefore, despite giving up her life in London, Moni displays resilience as she comes to terms with her multidimensional past, and above all as she reconciles with ‘strange’ cultural encounters which demand a new way of negotiating cultural identities in the age of travelling cultures and communities.

Part Three

6 Rerouting and Remapping: The Indo-English Novel of Transcultural Memory after 2000 The power of memory does not reside in its capacity to resurrect a situation or a feeling that actually existed, but it is a constitutive act of the mind bound to its own present and oriented toward the future of its own elaboration […] the remembrance does not reach us carried by a temporal flux; quite to the contrary, it is a deliberate act establishing a relation between two distinct points in time between which no relationship of continuity exists. (de Man 1983, 92) Memory is often apparently incoherent, and a strange mixture of the sensory and the verbal. It offers us the past in flashes and fragments, and in what seems a hodge-podge of mental “media.” (MacDougall 1998, 12)

This chapter analyses two Indo-English novels of memory after 2000, one by a Pakistani writer and one by an Indian-Bengali writer, to examine recent developments as well as methods for representing mnemonic processes in the realms of fiction. My analysis aims to demonstrate that a number of novels by writers from the Indian subcontinent as “global cosmopolitans” (see Hawley 2003, 26 – 40), based in Britain and the US, focus on political and private histories of their characters, which they seek to document using the instrument of memory. In fact, their treatment of both history and memory shows that certain historical events, such as the partition of India into the two nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the later separation of East Pakistan as the new nation-state of Bangladesh in 1971, have shaped the literary imagination of the first generation of writers of the partition novel such as Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh differently from the newer generations of writers from India and Pakistan in the age of digital and technological advancement. In recent years, the Indo-English novel, despite being a genre of its own, has been extensively examined as part of multi-ethnic British (see Bradbury 1993, Ch. 7, 394– 448; also Stein 2004) or multicultural American literature (see Bahri and Vasudeva 1996) at the same time. It has also been seen as an emerging field of migrant writing: critics such as Susheila Nasta (see 2002, 1– 14; also Roy Sommer 2001) look upon subcontinental writing in Britain, for example, in terms of migration and diaspora, a search for home and belonging. However, I believe that a central focus on the issues of migration, diaspora, home and exile, how-

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ever steeped these terms are in notions of memory and nostalgia, and however dominant these issues are in contemporary writing in English from the subcontinent, tends to ignore the fictional representation of Indians’, Pakistanis’ and Bangladeshis’ struggle with their own past, history and memory whether they are on native soil or in a foreign country. This is why my analysis of Indo-English novels in the current chapter does not rely upon theories of diaspora, multiculturalism or migration in examining diasporic, multicultural or migrant writers since I am particularly interested in exploring political questions in the narrative from the perspective of transcultural memory rather than from these theories which, I argue, do not have as wide a scope as their proponents claim. Diasporic, multicultural or migrant approaches to literature are, indeed, highly useful in discussing concepts of home, place and roots such as in the novels of Sunetra Gupta or Zulfikar Ghose analysed in this study; however, we need to enlarge the scope of diasporic, multicultural or migrant writing in the context of the Indo-English novel by “reading our yesterdays” (Parameswaran 2003, xxxix) not simply in terms of nostalgia or a mere longing for home. Rather, the past must be understood here in terms of ‘relocating’ the history and memory of the partition in the present and, furthermore, in terms of the writers’ fictional representations of new forms of ‘global modernities’ (see Featherstone et al. 1995) in relation to the political aspects dominating the past and present. William Safran’s seminal work on diaspora continues to be a starting point for a considerable amount of research on diaspora and diasporic writing even today, although his framework heavily draws upon the connection between migration and nation (1991, 83 – 99). A similar claim could be made about Robin Cohen’s thesis, although his categories such as victim diaspora might not necessarily be based on a national framework (1997). While the overall importance of what Sudesh Mishra has called the first dimension of diaspora criticism (2006) cannot be underestimated, labeling the third or fourth generation of immigrants, who do not have any physical memory of living in their country of origin, also as diasporic writers is not particularly convincing since the country of origin may no longer constitute a part of their identity. Avoiding this pitfall, the historian Judith Brown offers the concept of “global diaspora” (2006) in order to do justice to this condition of movement in times of ‘high modernity’ (see Giddens 1991 [1990]). Despite her highly convincing concept of global diaspora, the term still is not applicable to a classic diasporic narrative such as Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), set in post-independent Calcutta, Dhaka and post-colonial England, because although it deals with the Bengali diaspora, its more significant focus is on the cross-border ethnic conflicts and growing tensions between the Hindu and Muslim Bengalis as well as the demise of Bengali culture and community after the partition of the subcontinent into the new nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangla-

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desh. Hence, the term transcultural memory, unlike the term global diaspora, is not only more flexible, but has the potential to actually address domestic, social, political and cultural issues in a variety of situations and contexts from the angle of global transformations. Just like diaspora, multicultural and migrant theories have their drawbacks: multicultural literature, despite its enormous popularity, again ties us to the concept of nation – multicultural Britain or America, for example, tends to limit us to the parameters of nation and nationalism. Similarly, migrant theory reduces the writer to the level of a constant ‘traveller.’ While discussing the problematic of terminologies in the Australian context, Graham Huggan makes an interesting observation: ‘Migrant writing’ implies impermanence, as if migrant writer had no proper place […] ‘Multicultural literature’ avoids some of these problems, only to substitute others of its own making. The term ‘multicultural’ is theoretically more inclusive than ‘migrant’ or ‘ethnic’, but it still has the ring of alterity to it. It implies a primary relationship to the nation… (2007, 115)

Avoiding the limited parameters of these terms, and highlighting instead the significance of the theory of transcultural memory, two recent Indo-English novels are discussed in the following: Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return (2002) and Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002). Not only do they portray the second and third generation’s approach to the partition of India, but, even more importantly, they reveal how the new waves of globalisation and modernity on the subcontinent are vital to the new generations’ changed approach to a common political history. Also, these novels focus on the formation of new identities in the postpartition era in relation to the various artefacts of transcultural memory within the domain of fiction. I contend that transcultural memory surfaces in the works of these writers on a narrative and thematic scale as they draw upon various objects of remembrance such as paper and digital maps besides letters and diaries. Further, they use a diverse array of literary techniques such as diary format, epistolary style, journey motif, fictional auto/biography, and Bildungsroman, among others, to not only represent heterogeneous temporal and geographical zones but also to challenge the national, religious, ethnic and cultural borders that divide individuals, families and communities.

6.1 Dialectics of ‘roots and routes’ in Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return (2002) The Point of Return (2002), by Siddhartha Deb, an American-based writer of Indian origin, is based on memories of displaced Bengali communities in Assam, a re-

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mote, northeastern province of India nestled between Bangladesh and Bhutan, where “close to fifty thousand people [are] living like refugees four decades after independence” (2002, 278). Babu, the estranged son of a Bengali veterinarian, Dr Dam, reminisces about his father’s life to understand his father’s personal, turbulent history in the wake of the partition of India in 1947. The Dam family is ethnically connected to Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, which became a separate country in 1971. When riots for secession from Pakistan begin in the 1960s, Babu’s grandparents and father succeed in fleeing to Assam from the war-torn region; however, they face innumerable obstacles in their desire to carve out a home among tribal people whose own cultural traditions were repressed by the previous British occupiers and who now regard the Dams, and Bengalis in general, as intruders. Within the memory structure of the novel, Deb reveals the anguish of ‘the lost generations’ of Bengali immigrants from the perspectives of India’s, Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s violent political histories. While recalling the predicament of his father’s family after the creation of two to three new nation-states on the Indian subcontinent, Babu highlights that the partition generation is unable to overcome the loss of home and community since the loss is registered in their minds as a permanent memory; hence, private memory, politics and family history come together in the circle of sorrow in the narrative, and, more importantly, home becomes a permanent place of return only in memory (against the bitter reality of the loss of home to the newly created country): My grandfather’s references to the home left behind as East Pakistan, decades after East Pakistan had seceded from Pakistan to become the independent nation state of Bangladesh, revealed something more than a limited grasp of geopolitical shifts. It showed that the landscape of his past would forever be permanent and unchanging, not something that was historical and therefore open to perpetual revision but a place beyond the vagaries of time. (Deb 2002, 35)

Written in the mode of a fictional auto/biography, Deb provides Dr Dam’s personal history in a chronology which, though linear, moves backwards in time, telling of events which begin in 1987 and end in 1979, as Babu, aged seventeen in 1987, recalls what he knows of his father and the events and people who have influenced him. While the first two sections of the novel entitled “1. Arrival” and “2. Departure” narrate the story of Babu’s father in the third person, the last two sections entitled “3. Terminal” and “4. Travelogue” focus more on Babu’s rediscovery of his father’s past in the first person narration; however, the novel mainly addresses territorial and emotional dislocations of Bengalis who are perennially reduced to ‘refugees,’ ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’ in the post-independence era despite striving to live a life within the parameters of official maps and state-controlled bor-

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ders. For Babu, maps become a tool for not only revisiting places but also memories. When Babu returns to his hometown ten years after the death of his father, he realises that he is unable to avoid his father’s past has and the fact that he had taken “most of his memories with him” (Deb 2002, 257). The father’s past is intertwined with his son’s over the years especially as Babu fears the same ethnic violence as his father underwent years ago. He narrates: Now that I can sit and remember with such clarity, having come home to fear after ten years, its salty taste arrives with pulsating quickness to the tongue, the premonition of a cut lip flooding my mouth […] Past and present brought face to face at last, strung out on two ends of the long run; father and son, character and narrator, the town and the self, all come together – here, now, at this whirling, dizzy point of vertigo that is the return. (Deb 2002, 229 – 230)

The son, in the role of the narrator and reminiscer, seeks to grasp ‘the point of return’ in his personal as well as his father’s history and ultimately questions whether an actual ‘return’ to one’s hometown is ever possible when, on the one hand, ethnic hatred and hostility, as legacies of the partition, proliferate under every new government in India, and, on the other, places called home are wiped out by new ‘geographical and national’ demarcations. ‘The point of return’ is also a point in memory where the past has to be rediscovered from the exigencies of the present, but it simultaneously refers to a desire to retrace one’s roots even though the places carrying these roots have been erased after the partition. In writing about the story of his father and his community, Babu, thus, reveals the predicament of the minorities of the partition generations, namely Hindu Bengalis displaced from their native land. At the same time, he also narrates his struggle with the collective past as a representative of the third generation of Bengali immigrants. The locals in his hometown Assam still stigmatise him as a foreigner just as his parents had been stigmatised back in 1971 after the fall of Dhaka; hence, generations of Bengalis are trapped in the cruel cycle of history: Where could one go back to? What had been left behind could not even be given a name. My grandparents had spoken of East Pakistan, my parents referred to Bangladesh. To me the notion of an ancestral village was quaint and distant […] I wish I could say that I learned to love it […] Instead I went through periods of completely different emotions, oscillating between a desire to blend with the town and the insiders and a virulent hatred for the place and a desire to leave it forever so that I would never hear that word, Foreigner, again. (Deb 2002, 238; emphasis in the original)

Even Babu’s most recent memories, since his return from Delhi to his hometown after ten years, are not of homecoming but of ethnic discrimination and of social

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ostracisation: “I walked with my bags, a few shards of memory, with the fear that had been the one familiar face I found in my hometown, the whispered words of the minister, the derisive reminder that I was a foreigner here” (Deb 2002, 300). The hope to blend into a new place and identity remains nothing more than a hope because borders, strangely enough, tend to be more powerful than humans. However, despite the idea of home and identity being at odds with the newly created borders, the narrator cannot help looking for home as ‘the point of return’ in the most hostile circumstances. In this way, he seeks to transcend borders in memory and imagination so that he can articulate a vision of transnational India through the medium of fiction. While the first half of the novel traces Dr Dam’s struggle with his life in a new place and his aspiration to build a house in Silchar, a small Bengali island in the state of Assam, the second half revives his fears in the wake of the killing of 1979 in Assam when the tribal people began to massacre innocent Bengalis to impose their hegemony in the region. After being tormented in every new nationstate, the Dams have become a mere plaything of ‘nations’ and ‘national borders.’ Babu’s and his father’s story, thus, demonstrates the common man’s strife with the myth of the nation and the senselessness of the border. Deb writes: You cannot be an exile in your own country. The trick is in the map in the black line drawn around the edges, from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, the political boundary that curves around the open mouth of Gujarat and peaks at Kashmir, the thin neck that broadens out to the seven sisters surrounded by China, Burma, and Bangladesh. This is the frame in which you must operate, the map hanging from the walls of dusty administrative offices, in schools and newsrooms, in atlases and encyclopedias, containing a reality where nothing changes […] “The political boundaries of India as depicted in this map are neither accurate nor correct”. (2002, 208)

The novel sets out to record not only unrecorded histories of Bengali communities all over the divided subcontinent but also to render voice to the never-ending suffering of generations of Bengalis who, after being deprived of ever locating their past, are chained to an uncertain present and future. As silent victims of their indifferent politicians, they fight their battles alone on spatial, social and cultural fronts to gain a sense of home beyond a threatening national frontier: It was not a question of roots or origins, you understand. That was not possible, not now, not fifty years after the notional ancestral village had ceded its place to the modern nation state. If we were all to do so, we whose lives are flung around in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, if we were to let loose our songlines, our routes of memory, our pilgrimage paths, we would find them faltering against the documents and borders and guns. (Deb 2002, 248– 249)

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For Babu, memory is the only means to relive and retrieve one’s roots that have been lost without leaving any trace behind, especially as he is faced with an unstable present ravaged by perpetual political unrest and ethnic conflicts. He realises that he has lived his childhood and youth in Assam without ever imagining that he belonged to a community which might be evicted or attacked in the course of time, that he might not be able to locate his past in any form on his native territory, which in reality has never been his own. While brooding over fading traces of the past in narrating his father’s memoir, he claims: Depending on person and situation, I assemble maps, photographs, and words, call on memory to furnish further details that will impart some sense of where I lived, something beyond a dim comprehension of remote beauty and even more remote violence. Over the years, memory has taken on the greater share of this burden, each step up in the world resulting in the disappearance of one more artifact from those days. But memory must deal with so much more that is flung in its path by life; it must adjust itself constantly to the headlong rush of the present into the past. (Deb 2002, 215 – 216)

By sharing his father’s memories, Babu manages to think of place in terms of a space without walls and borders that can at any time be negated by more powerful political regimes. Hence, despite being fraught with ethnic tensions, Babu’s narrative is a form of resistance as well as reconciliation. He is compelled to hold on to his past as communalists monopolise his present in order to erase his roots from his place of birth. Moreover, he recollects the past to come to terms with his ‘imaginary hometown’ and the turbulent present, consequently striving to think beyond the images of cultural difference as experienced in everyday life in Assam: I wanted to find a place for the new next to what I had carried with me for so many years, but the present had no patience with my spectral, half-fashioned memories. The town that I had invented and refashioned in words and images was caving in under the weight of this, the real, the present, the now. (Deb 2002, 254)

Memory as a ‘construction and an invention’ of the rememberer is one of Babu’s central concerns. Just as his father has a mythical conception of the past which he revives in stories, Babu also imagines the past in terms of fragmented tales. By compressing the distance between the author and his narrator, and by overlapping the third and the first person narration in the development of the plot, Deb establishes a unique approach to representing individual and familial memories in fiction in order to challenge the monopoly of ‘national history and cartography’ over personal memories:

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Memory is also about what you decided to remember, so that you can make sense of what has been irrevocably lost. That was the only way the past could be recovered, in the writing of stories in different voices, sometimes across the distance of the third person, sometimes through the eyes of the boy who lived here. (2002, 255)

Since Babu is convinced that the plight of his communities are not recorded in any history, he decides to document unremembered lives lived out in the shadows of large national histories. Furthermore, he remembers the fading yesteryears before his memory declines so that memory can speak the unspeakable in the novel: “There are only images in my mind, a scrap of scenes to be wrested free somehow, to be retained against the excesses of history” (Deb 2002, 297). He is aware that history, as the domain of the more powerful, has no room for the stories of the marginalised and oppressed ethnic groups to which he belongs: History, dragged so far from the metropolitan centres, from the rustic mainlands, will tell you nothing. In the Northeast, the way I remember it, history lies defeated, muttering solipsistically from desultory plaques put up to commemorate visiting politicians, the memorial stones fading against the brilliance of colors in the streets. History is mired in one of dirty-green tank captured from the Pakistanis in the ’71 war and set on a pedestal in front of the State Central Library, pathetic in its smallness even in childhood, its rusting gun aimed far away, beyond the hills, at some distant and ideal enemy settlement. (Deb 2002, 211)

The epistolary historical narrative almost acts like ‘counter memory’ where the narrator, as curator of archiving unremembered lives, chooses to preserve his distinct sensibility of his family’s and country’s past. Deb also employs the diary format to tell stories and narrate a family history, which actually contains within it the seeds of thousands of other stories and histories of Bengali communities all over the subcontinent. In this way, Deb’s narrative records unrecorded histories, banished from national archives, and thus ultimately exposes injustices towards marginalised Bengalis who have been constantly targeted as ‘foreigners’ despite their complete immersion in their new habitat.

6.2 Mnemonic maps and scraps in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002) In Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002), we move from the ‘borders’ of national politics in India to the realms of ethnic unrest in contemporary Pakistan, especially the Pakistan of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and from the perspective of upperclass, ‘Anglicized’ characters. The reader’s attention is drawn to the dilemma of minorities in the city of Karachi in Pakistan and their struggles with integration

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into a ‘new’ country. After the partition in 1947, Pakistan came into being with two wings – West Pakistan and East Pakistan – which were actually separated from each other by one thousand miles of Indian territory. The creation of East Pakistan as Bangladesh as a new nation-state in 1971 pointed to the dismal failure of the ideology of Pakistan, which was based on the assumption that religion alone could create and unite nations, thereby proving ethnic, cultural and linguistic similarities as stronger than a common god or religious belief in the process of creating a modern nation. The strength of the novel lies in the fact that it weaves a story of love and betrayal against the political and historical upheavals of modern-day Karachi, one of the most densely populated cities in the south of Pakistan, as the narrative moves back and forth in time, revealing the secrets of the first generation of the partition of India and the emotional crisis of the second generation. Moreover, it highlights the role of technology – especially digital maps – in re-imagining the young protagonists’ connections with their ‘shared memories,’ that is, their rosy childhood memories as well as their parents’ tangled memories that they inherited after reaching adolescence. Additionally, it underlines how ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 2012 [1997]) can be revisited as well as revised with the help of old media (letters) and modern media (the internet), both of which are absolutely vital to the development of the plot. Like Deb’s narrative of memory, Shamsie seeks to show the reader how political maps ignore one’s personal associations with home/land, and how individuals themselves have to struggle to overcome cartographic violations of one’s own country and territory. The novel is based on the teenage lovers – Raheen and Karim – whom we first meet in Karachi in 1986 when they are thirteen, thus readers get a child’s perspective on the ethnic tensions in their city. As the plot progresses, they are already twenty-two and have left home; Raheen is a student in Boston whereas Karim has moved to London. The novel, set during the time of intense political turmoil in the Karachi of the 1980s and 1990s, goes back to the year 1971 when East Pakistan declared independence from West Pakistan, and Bangladesh came into being. The creation of Bangladesh was a dark consequence of a bloody civil war between the two wings, which was allegedly fuelled by the hostile neighbour India. Shamsie reminds the reader that Pakistanis did not learn anything from the events of 1971 and merely tried to erase it completely from common memory so that the coming generations would never face the shame of losing part of ‘one’s own homeland’ to ‘one’s own people’: “‘We learned to forget’” (2003 [2002], 176). Consequently, Karachi remained in the mire of ethnic violence and religious extremism. As the novel ends with a brutal murder of the father of Raheen’s best friend Zia at the hands of unknown terrorists, the reader is left unsure whether the citizens of Karachi will ever be able to realise the dream of a stable society.

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The novel is, in fact, as much a complex love story of Raheen and Karim as it is of their parents – Yasmin and Zafar, and Maheen and Ali – who are close friends until Maheen and Ali move to London and are divorced after living abroad for some years. Since the story rejects chronology and unfolds events from past and present side by side, we learn that Raheen’s father Zafar was once engaged to marry Karim’s Bengali mother Maheen, and Raheen’s mother Yasmin was promised to Karim’s father Ali. The parents had to rematch in what they happily called ‘the fiancée swap’ and still stayed friends. But as Raheen and Karim are distanced from each other as adults, they begin to re-examine their shared memories, of their parents’ as well as their own associations with a politically divided city. Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind their parents’ partner exchange, which, she discovers, is closely tied with the violent history of their city and country, particularly the secession of East Pakistan. It is in the process of re-examining ‘the fiancée swap’ that the novel also introduces two minority groups: the first group consists of the immigrants from India, mainly from Bombay, after the partition, who are categorised as Muhajir (translated literally as an immigrant and metaphorically as a foreigner) – a name given to them by the native inhabitants of Karachi, called the Sindhis; the other group consists of Muslim Bengalis, the natives of East Pakistan. The latter is brutally stigmatised in the wake of the civil war around 1968 and 1971 and the struggle for independence of East Pakistan from West Pakistan as a large majority of them presumably asked for a state of their own. Commenting on the plight of Muhajir, Priya Kumar reminds us, “The notion of a homecoming was a founding narrative of Pakistani nationalism in particular precisely because Pakistan was conceived as a homeland for India’s Muslims” (2011, 162) Since Raheen’s father Zafar had already been discriminated against for being a Muhajir, he could not help giving up his love for Maheen who was looked upon as an enemy in the face of the secession of East Pakistan. Raheen’s uncle Asif underlines the objections felt by ‘native’ Pakistanis towards the Muhajir: “Poor Karachiites. Living in this spacious, clean city in ’47 when – whaps! Partition happens and all these immigrants come streaming across the new border, convinced of the superiority of their culture, and whisk away all the best jobs from Sindhis who’d been living here for generations’” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 223). Her father retorts to justify the rights of the so-called ‘foreigners’ “who gradually came to feel like strangers in their new homeland” (Kumar 2011, 162): Muhajirs came here leaving everything behind. Our homes, our families, our way of life. We can’t be blamed if some – mind you, some – of us came from areas with education systems that made us qualified for office jobs instead of latrine-cleaning, which is the kind of job you seem to think immigrants should be grateful for. And as for that term immigrants

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[…] I must have heard my parents say a thousand times, “we came here to be Pakistanis, not to be Sindhi.” (Shamsie 2003 [ 2002], 223 – 224; emphasis in the original)

Both Raheen and Karim are profoundly affected by allusions to such ethnic categories, even though they are aware that in their aristocratic circles, class, and not ethnic distinctions, binds the rich. Consequently, they resort to their distinct ways to make sense of the political and cultural milieu of Karachi. Whereas Raheen looks upon the map as an impersonal narrative making people live on the seams of its imagined reality, Karim chooses to be a cartographer of Karachi while living in London. By recreating the map of his city as it is increasingly drawn into violence, Karim not only tries to come to terms with the failed marriage of his parents, but at the same time seeks comfort in the thought of restoring the city in his memory by remaining loyal to official names of streets and grieving the loss of people at certain places. Furthermore, it appears that his indulgence in maps and memories helps him transcend the national and ethnic borders for which his as well as Raheen’s parents have sacrificed their love and loyalty. It is through his self-designed maps that Karim, like Raheen, “suffer[s] with the city” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 176). However, Raheen is deeply disturbed by Karim’s mapmaking practices because he appears to be substituting her friendship with some vague atlas: So what need was there for him to call the road by its official name, when he’d had no part in the naming, when he had no memories stored in the curves of its official consonants? We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget […] but over and above the jokes and stories and memories, he has maps and I don’t. He has maps and I don’t understand why. (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 65 – 66)

According to Raheen, shared memories, bound by sites, create their own maps of belonging in one’s imagination even though she is aware that “belonging is […] a dusty word” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 165); therefore, these memories ought to be seen above official names and places on a map. It is these shared memories that impart place and space a sense of warmth and identity, making them unique and distinct from all kinds of paper maps. In other words, for Raheen, memory and imagination are more powerful than the art of mapmaking. This conflict is further sharpened by two cartographies of Karachi that Karim sends to Raheen: the first one, showing a way from his home to the airport, represents Karim’s farewell to Karachi in 1987 that he could not verbally articulate. The convergence of map and memory in the first map gives Karim a chance to express grief and Raheen an opportunity to begin recovery and reconciliation.

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However, Karim’s 1990 map is not so much about grief but a reproach, which is sent to Raheen with several cuttings from the letters she has written to him in the last years. Not only is he convinced by the ‘official’ meaning of maps and places, but he is sure that Raheen has a narrow view of geography altogether. Raheen does not see Karim’s point in marking the dead on his map after reading the newspaper and looking up the names of places where they were killed as a way of mourning their death. She feels compelled to remind him that that “map is what marks you as an ex-pat and not as a Karachiite” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 133). In one of her responses, Raheen once again tries to make Karim realise that maps themselves should contain both people and memories, that the shared past matters more than a mutually agreed upon name on a map. To support her point, she posts him parts of her creative writing assignment called “Envisionable Cities (a pastiche), Cities and Imagination, and Cities and Memory,” which demonstrates the negative effects of cartography, highlighting that cartographers replace the vividness of lived experiences with the fallacy of a labelled place. Karim considers maps to be the fundamental carriers of larger spatial realities. He has always been fascinated by maps and, for him, the world is “like a giant jigsaw” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 26) where all the places are connected. Karim claims: “See: Pakistan connects to Iran which connects to Turkey which connects to Bulgaria which connects to Yugoslavia which connects to Austria which connects to France” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 26). He is, however, equally impressed with boundaries, pointing out, “Even seas have boundaries” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 26). Interestingly, maps juxtapose globalisation and regionalisation in Shamsie’s fictional frames. At the same time, maps are paradoxical as they connect as much as they disconnect people and places just as they guide and misguide their followers. Furthermore, it is the map, or to be more precise, the ‘national’ map, that forgets personal cartographies associated with space and place, which only an individual’s memory atlas can restore. Karim’s practice of mapmaking is, in fact, intertwined with his deep desire to comprehend the history of Karachi, the causes of the secession of Bangladesh and the reasons for the growing ethnic violence in his hometown. He thinks that Raheen’s father pretended that “the outlines in which they lived didn’t matter, until one day it was at his door and things inside him that he never acknowledged, never tried to deal with, came out” (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 244). During this final confrontation between Raheen and Karim on the issue of Raheen’s father having broken the engagement with Karim’s mother in the name of ‘politics’ and ‘patriotism’, Karim tries to convince her that it is not fair to accuse their parents of cowardice. Instead, they should be seen as victims of the ethnic discrimination that was prevalent throughout the entire city. This is why he argues that, unless Karachi’s citizens understand the politics shaped by cartography and the

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destructive power of the place, the city will go on struggling with violence and its people will go on deceiving each other. Convinced of his own beliefs, he sends Raheen his maps of the city so that she can “see beyond the tiny circle” she lives in (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 244). Nevertheless, Raheen rejects his approach to the city by saying that, insofar as maps are blind to the people and pasts that constitute a place, they can never resolve geographical conflicts: Eratosthenes, the grandfather of cartography, was the first man to make a distinction between scientific and literary mapmaking. Prior to Eratosthenes, no one ever said that cartography should concern itself with science and facts rather than stories […] The Odyssey was considered as valuable a tool of mapping as were the charts and eyewitness accounts of sailors and travellers. But Eratosthenes’ decision removed Homer, and all other poets, from the corpus of cartography. In the furore over this move, which lasted through generations, Eratosthenes’ greatest critic was the cartographer Strabo, who said that Homer depicted geographical truths in the language of poetry, so it was absurd to deny him a role in the realm of cartography. I loved the idea of those early cartographers […] Back then, of course, maps weren’t used for travel. They were mainly used for illustrating stories…[T]hey were about helping someone hear the heartbeat of a place […] I want you to pay attention to the stories that define Karachi, and you want to know what the name of the road connecting Girzi to Zamzama is, and how many people have died there in the last years.’ (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 180)

Shamsie seeks to treat maps of memory not merely as a space of territorial and geographical contestations, but rather as a place of love and loyalty, and peace and reconciliation, as opposed to the reality of national and ethnic prejudices haunting their parents’ generations. Although maps keep changing consistently with inconsistent socio-political conditions, it is through them that Raheen and Karim once again come closer to each other. Shamsie actually resolves the conflict over mapmaking between the two childhood lovers with a project that re-examines the system of mapping. Having recognised Raheen’s attitude towards his maps, Karim suggests: We’ll make an interactive map on the Internet. You start with a basic street map, Ok, but everywhere there are links. Click here, you get sound files of Karachiites telling stories of what it’s like to live in different parts of town. Click there, you get a visual of any particular street. Click again, the camera zooms in and you see a rock or a leaf or a billboard that means something to that street. Click, you see streets that exist seasonally, like your lunar street. Click, you see which sections are under curfew. Click, you hear a poem […] This is a lifelong project, Raheen, in a city that’s always changing […] We’ll be Eratosthenes and Strabo working hand-in-hand. (Shamsie 2003 [2002], 337– 338)

By using the Internet to realise their approach to maps and memories, space and place, geography and territory, both Karim and Raheen impart a personal and

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temporal dimension to the art of mapmaking that helps them restore shared memories beyond and above their politically divided city. In other words, these transcultural memories reflect a broader dimension of city and its inhabitants – a dimension which makes the reader and the characters think beyond the myopic vision of their city’s identity politics, ethnic and cultural rifts. In this regard, Edward J. Mallot has rightly pointed out: “Maps have long been invoked as allegedly objective representations of shared memory…” (2007, 261– 284). As their maps are infused with their own experiences of place, Raheen and Karim manage to overcome the conflict with new national and ethnic identities, which their parents’ generation could not. In this way, Shamsie’s narrative underlines not only an individual’s triumphs over geographically fixed borders, but also personal maps as preserving emotional sites of memory. Both Shamsie’s Kartography and Deb’s The Point of Return give us the second and third generation perspective on the partition of India. Unlike Rushdie’s and Sidhwa’s novels of partition, these novels do not deal with partition per se, but with how the legacy of partition has affected different ethnicities in present-day India and Pakistan. As the generation that experienced the partition first-hand is slowly dying out, we are now encountering novels on the market that tend to show the second generation’s attempts at coping with new cultural challenges in the face of modernity with the partition in the background, especially as they re-member their parents’ memories, experience home leaving and home coming, and look at the past from more than one angle, which is particularly noticeable in the recent partition novel Lost Generations (2013) by Manjit Sachdeva. Since the ‘other’ or ‘the stranger’ across the border is increasingly familiar due to the rapid circulation of information and the movement of people, the new generation is bound to look at their parents’ so-called enemies differently. By focusing on the dilemma of minorities, both of these novels present parallel patterns of discrimination: the ethnic groups of Hindu Bengali in Assam, and Muslim Bengalis and the Muhajir in Karachi are reduced to the status of foreigners and immigrants by more dominant groups in the name of political, cultural and economic power. It is interesting to notice how both of these novels by writers of two different ethnic groups engage with ambivalent routes and maps of memory in order to address the larger political realities changing the fate of individuals, families and generations. By highlighting the need to think beyond popular political divides proliferated by a state-controlled press and interest groups, they stress the significance of respecting individual experiences over such divisions. In this way, both of these novelists do not merely underscore the problems with creating lines and frontiers; they actually draw attention to the narrow horizon of official maps, limiting the expanse of space and place, thus negating and ignoring the individual

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stories and memories bound to places. Through their non-traditional mode of unfolding the past and present of the main characters, these novelists suggest alternative routes of memory, the ways of which only personal maps can manifest.

7 Conclusion: ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’ History as ‘collective memory is not an inert and passive thing but a field of activity in which past events are selected, reconstructed, maintained, modified and endowed with political meaning.’ (Said 2000b, 185) The principle that memory makes us is also the principle that we make memory. The representations of history are praxis, and are enacted as well as formulated with cumulative effect. (Tonkin 1992, 117)

The coinage of transcultural memory in this study has served both as a theoretical tool and critical methodology to investigate the overlapping of geographical, ‘national’ and cultural borders in the Indo-English novel, reflecting the phenomenon of globalised modernity from a variety of perspectives. As the theoretical and close reading chapters establish, modernity in the South Asian context embraces a vast range of individual, societal, and political issues of the present times. The carriers of memory in the selected novels show how different characters view and construct a past in the present whose boundaries are always deferred and in translation. The Indo-English novel in the twentieth century, thus, illustrates the active role of memory in tying the past to the present as well as making sense of cultures and communities of memory, highlighting that memory is a cultural activity occurring in the present and offering an alternative meaning of history – one that provides insights into the past as it lives on today. Furthermore, memory in a transcultural setting serves many purposes, from unconscious recall to a conscious recreation of yesteryears, from reconciling with what is lost to a polemic use of the past to reshape the present. Above all, the study of memory in fiction reflects the formation of present-day cultural trajectories in today’s deterritorialised era. In fact, both the theory and practice of transcultural memory discussed with reference to our deterritorialised era is not confined to ‘commemoration or preservation of national histories’; rather, it seeks to address the free-floating nature of remembering that actually dismisses the national ‘container’ and emphasises the transnational dimension in order to acknowledge the significance of individual ‘stories of memory’ across fixed borders. The focus on transcultural memory in modern times also allows us connect ‘tangled threads of the past’ to comprehend the present and the future instead of looking at the past and present as isolated spheres. It rejects the idea of a complete

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rupture between the present and past, as the modernists of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe maintained. In other words, such an approach to memory gives us a chance to look at the past, not as a distant and static terrain, but rather in terms of how it flows into the present and future. Consequently, transcultural memory, which is fluid and ever-changing, helps us discover and speculate on present-day cultural complexity, change and renewal from a deeper perspective. While engaging with the memory of various historical, political events and their impacts on private lives, a number of novels in this study narrate geopolitical, cultural and ethnic challenges on the pre-and post-partition subcontinent, whereas several other novels address issues of migration, formation of new identities, cosmopolitan individuals and transnational communities. Even though most novelists in this study recollect pre-partition India and the latter-day new nation-states of independent India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, numerous other novelists also focus on the connection of the subcontinent with Europe, North and South America or Africa in their narration. In this way, the space of memory in these novels is emblematic of historical and political transformations on the one hand, and, on the other, of cultural encounters and exchanges in our technological age – an age where the compression of time and space has generated a new perception of cultural reproductions. The transcultural approach to studying the Indo-English novels of memory, hence, leads us to examine “mnemonic constellations in the ‘global/digital’ age where increasingly new media cultures show how altered relations of time and space change the ways in which memory ‘travels’” (Erll 2011 [2005], 174). It is, therefore, justified to say that these novels show the ‘making of modern memory’ beyond Western borders. The close analyses of Indo-English novels from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000 in this study demonstrate not only different approaches to the past, but also how the past is recalled to reconnect ‘lost scraps of memories’ in the wake of the partition of India as ‘shared memories’. The literary strategies employed by IndoEnglish writers are varied, ranging from the picaresque Bildungsroman to the intimate auto/biography, from comic and tragic modes to magic realism, from diary to epistolary format, and from storytelling to interior monologues. These strategies give impetus to the practice and performance of memory, but more importantly to twentieth-century novels as repositories of modern memory. In addition, these novels exhibit the various metaphors of memory such as pickle and chutney (see Rushdie 1995 [1981] ), body as memory (see Sidhwa 2006 [1988]; see also Singh 1994 [1957]; see Ghose 1994 [1992]), space and old atlas (see Ghosh 2005 [1988]), digital maps and love letters (see Shamsie 2003 [2002]), letters and family photographs (see Jhabvala 1995; Deb 2002), rain and cityscapes (see Gupta 1992), old houses (see Anita Desai 2000 [1988]; Roy 1997), memoscan (see Boman Desai 2000 [1988]), and gunny sack (see Vassanji 1989), to name but

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a few. These metaphors of memory represent neither a mere nostalgic longing for the past, nor a particular trauma, but instead they reveal how different characters share and interpret the past from the vantage point of globalisation and modernity. Above all, they make us re-read a fragment from the past from a different filter as Douwe Draaism reminds us, “With each new metaphor we place a different filter in front of our perception of memory” (2000, 230). The Indo-English novel of memory is a fast-developing field, which has already been discussed under various rubrics such as postcolonial literature or (national) global literature, but my study offers an innovative reading and a step further towards a new understanding of the representation of memory in these narratives. My interpretation of the Indo-English novels of memory underlines that these texts demand a renewed perception not only of literary traditions and history beyond the Western canonical tradition with their distinct artefacts of memory, but more importantly of space and place in the present world where the ‘local and the global’ just as the ‘West’ and ‘the non-West’ are increasingly interconnected. Thus, reading these novels with the theoretical and methodological tool of transcultural memory provides a fresh perspective on remembering the cultural past, and broadens the spectrum of examining South Asian memory cultures and communities.

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Index acculturation and assimilation 22, 159 Africa 3, 18, 44 f,. 183 Ali, Ahmed 2 America 17, 119, 122 f., 152 Amritsar, India 82, 85 f., 89 Anand,Mulk Raj 3 Anderson, Benedict 87, 102 Appadurai, Arjun 5, 20 f., 27, 34, 36, 42, 115 art of memory 33, 65, 122, 145 artefacts of memory 40, 49, 88, 123, 169, 184 – diaries 17, 169 – digital maps 169 – letters 17, 169 – paper 169 – space and place 88 Ashcroft, Bill 6 f., 93 f. Asia 16 f., 41 f, 123, 128, 154 Assam, province of 169, 173 Assmann, Aleida 15-17 Assmann, Jan 135 autobiography 11, 17, 39, 60, 64, 70 f., 114, 183 – autobiographical remembering 111 – autobiographical self 111 – fictional 60, 72 f., 108, 111, 169 f. – national and personal 60 Babri Mosque crisis 5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 1 Bal, Mieke 55 Baldwin, Shauna Singh 74 Bangladesh – Bengali culture 151, 168 – Bengali diaspora 106, 168 – Bengali middle class 95, 151 – Bengali sensibility 151 – creation of 2, 4, 18, 68, 175 – fictional representations 73 – partition and violence 92 – representations in fiction 7, 65, 70, 169 f. – secession of 170 Barthes, Roland 64 Beck, Ulrich 17, 30–32

Bengali communities – cartographic imagination 95 – displaced 169 f. – histories of 172, 174 – in Calcutta 151 – marginalised 174 Berman, Marshall 32 Bhabha, Homi 29, 86, 93 Bildungsroman 39–41, 59, 74, 77, 169, 183 Bollywood 44, 67, 160 Bombay, India 47, 60, 65, 67, 69, 116, 142 f. Boym, Svetlana 34 Brazil 109, 116, 124 British Empire 9, 67, 130, 133, 138 – British colonialism See Great Britain 2 Calcutta, India 78, 92, 97, 99-103, 147–149, 156, 162 carriers of memory 17, 19, 35, 182 cartography 37 – art of mapmaking 177, 180 – as objective representations 180 – cartographic imagination 95, 151 – challenging the monopoly of 173 – city maps of Karachi 177 – fixed cartographies 56 – mapmaking practices 177 f. – maps of belonging 177 – memory atlas See maps of memory 177 – national cartographies 73, 75, 101, 178 – negative effects of 178 – personal cartographies 178, 180 – political maps 175 – politics shaped by 178 – (post)cartographies 95 – system of 179 caste system 5, 48, 125 – Brahmin 159 – Untouchable 49 centre-periphery models 6, 30, 37, 118 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 31, 63, 87, 106 chronicle (literary genre) – family 105 f., 141 f. – of shared memories 109

204

Index

chutney, metaphor of 11, , 59, 60 f., 65, 69, 183 – chutnification of history 59, 61 f., 65, 72 – modernity 63 cinema and memory 30 Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s 2 Clear Light of Day 5, 9 f., 52 f. Clifford, James 24 f., 35, 93, 135, 139, 144 – predicament of culture 24 f. – transcultural predicament 25 collective memory 5, 12, 15, 18, 28, 35 f., 39, 82, 134 f., 144, 182 – and spatiality 51 – as accretion of stories 45 – how societies remember 40 – in fiction 52, 132, 136 – memory of collective upheavals 42 – relation to cultural memory 15 – relation to individual past 129 – significance of partition in 74 – social framework 134 colonial India 2, 7, 40 f., 43, 61 f, 116 – memory of 51 colonialism 6 f., 24, 33, 37, 93 – British See Great Britain 2, 7, 124 – effects 6 – influence 94 coming-of-age story 45, 59, 147 commemoration 99, 182 common memory 15, 41, 175 Commonwealth Literature 8 communalism 2, 70, 72, 89, 106, 173 communicative memory 135 connective histories 16, 23, 36 connectivity of memory 20, 42, 50, 56, 149 Connerton, Paul 40, 152 cosmopolitan memory 16, 54 cosmopolitanism 12, 16, 19, 26, 30, 82, 183 counter memory 18, 174 countries of the mind 151, 162 – Englands of the mind 151, 153 – Indias of the mind 61, 155 Cracking India 3, 9, 11, 43, 73, 89 f. critical theory 23

cross-cultural encounters 9, 16, 23, 26, 43 f., 121 – marriages 145, 161 Crownshaw, Richard 16 cultural belongings – foreign 35 – mixed 147 – native or local 35, 38 – plural or multiple 4, 12, 36, 121, 144 f. cultural complexity in modern world 5, 9, 25, 183 cultural difference 6, 17, 86, 94, 156, 173 – dynamics of 101 – illusion of 100 – imagined 103 cultural heritage 2, 10, 36, 44, 68, 88 cultural memory 9, 15 f., 19 f., 28, 36, 42, 82, 111, 122, 126, 182 – as socially constructed 111 – literature as 40 – versus communicative memory 135 cultural plurality 10, 37, 61, 65 f. – in India 67, 79 cultural transactions 38, 56, 67 – diverse 145 – global 9, 94 – in fiction 37 – in technological age 183 – multiple 108 – present-day 7, 21, 62, 139, 147 – strange encounters 152 – worldwide 144 cultural transformations 5, 11, 21, 61, 93 f. Deb, Siddhartha 12, 169 f. Delhi, India 52 f., 65, 67, 78, 92, 97, 134, 171 Desai, Anita 5, 9 f., 44, 48, 52 f., 130, 183 Desai, Boman 3, 46, 183 deterritorialized age 27, 115, 142, 182 Dhaka 101-105, 168 – communal violence and riots 92, 99 f. – fall of 4, 11, 171 dialogic memory 17, 54 diary format 169, 174, 183 digital technology 20, 37, 42, 167, 175, 183

Index

displacement and diaspora 8, 11, 42, 47 – classic diasporic narrative 168 – diaspora criticism 168 – diasporic imagination 151 – diasporic writing 168 – experience 155, 157 – global diaspora 168 f. – in literature 167 – Parsee diaspora 47 – poetics of diaspora 155 – theories of diaspora 168 divided memory 2, 126 Eakin, Paul John 111, 150 East Pakistan 101 f., 167, 170, 175 – border with India 104 – fall of 18, 73 – riots of 1964 92, 99, 102 – struggle for independence 176 East-West encounters in fiction 6, 9, 16, 42–44, 62, 130, 134, 142 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 30, 32 f. Empire Writes Back, The 6 English language 8, 63, 121 epic (literary form) 39, 132 – poem 111 epistolary style 169, 174, 183 Erll, Astrid 15 f., 39–41, 135, 137, 183 Eurocentrism 6, 15, 31, 37 f. Europe 3, 17, 29 f., 123, 128, 161 – in fiction 147 European history 18, 23, 29, 42 – First World War 133 – French Revolution 29, 34 – nineteenth century 29 – Second World War 79, 92, 133 exile and expatriation 3, 8, 11, 110 f., 124, 145 f., 148, 162 – home and exile 150 – in literature 131, 167 – link with past 133 exoticism 139 expatriate writers 4, 8 fallibility of memory 12, 55, 63, 70, 82 f., 99, 117, 128, 138 family memory 134, 136 f., 170, 173

205

Featherstone, Mike 21, 26, 31, 168 flashback narration 11, 43, 65, 108 Forster, E. M. 9, 62, 130 fragmentation 79 f. Fritzsche, Peter 29, 34 Fussell, Paul 29–31, 42 Gandhi, Indira 65, 69, 92 Gandhi, Mahatma 2, 124 f. – in fiction 78 f., 83 gender hierarchies 40, 147 – patriarchal control 159 generation – as mnemonic community 135 – as social creation 135 – first second and third generations 135 – intergenerational relations 135 generational memory 12, 133-136, 145 f. – and moving cultures 135 – documentation of 45 – in fiction 138 – intergenerational exchange of memories 136 – intergenerational memory 135, 142, 144 – mutual past 144 – old and new 36 – phantoms of 12, 132 – shreds of 146 – transgenerational memory 40 f., 48, 52, 54 – tropes of 141 genocide 42, 76, 86 Ghose, Zulfikar 3-5, 9, 12, 27, 161, 168, 183 Ghosh, Amitav 2 f., 43, 147, 167 Giddens, Anthony 25 f., 29, 32, 34, 109, 168 global cultural economy 5 f. global literature 1, 8, 41, 54, 184 global memory 6, 16, 19, 26–28, 34 f., 133 globalisation 21, 26 f., 31, 33, 36 f., 109, 148, 169, 184 – age of 9, 16 – and cultural memory 16 – and our perception of the past 20 – and regionalisation 178 – global flows 21, 30 f., 42, 117 – theory 20

206

Index

globalised modernity 17, 25, 36 f., 55, 182 – age of 10, 34 f., 38, 62, 109, 111 – and cultural histories 38 – and memory 18 – debate of 26 – in literary and cultural theory 7 – influence of 32 – spread of 36 globital memory field 19 glocalization 63 God of Small Things, The 5, 10, 48 f., 51 Great Britain – British colonialism 2, 7, 124 – history and culture 8, 23, 41, 62, 67 – history and literature 156, 159 – representations in fiction 97, 154 f. Gunny Sack, The 3, 10, 44 f., 183 Gupta, Sunetra 3, 12, 43, 168 Halbwachs, Maurice 15, 134 f. Hannerz, Ulf 24 f., 37, 144 Heat and Dust 41, 43, 130 f. Hebel, Udo 17 heterogeneous cultural spaces 9, 17, 36, 54, 67, 105, 108, 146, 151 – heterogeneous temporal and geographical zones 169 Hindu-Muslim tensions 64, 74, 78, 92, 124 f., 168 – riots of 1947 52 Hirsch, Marianne 16, 18 f., 130, 175 historical archives 40, 55, 64 historical memory 2, 105 history/histories – as domain of the powerful 51, 174 – as social memory 65 – collective 95, 98, 101, 171 – conflicting 42 – cultural 18 – cycle of 171 – disparate 17, 55 – dominant 18, 55, 63 – enigmatic 110 – global 135 f. – interconnected 17, 98, 101, 107 – mutual 19, 28, 42, 65, 126, 144, 147, 155 – national 17, 55, 173 f.

– oppositional 19 – overlapping 95, 128, 135 – plural 64 f. – political 19, 101, 106, 134, 169 – reinvented 70 – transnational 4, 46 – unrecorded 55, 172, 174 – uses of 65, 105 hodgepodge 9, 62, 79 Holocaust 18, 28, 42, 133 – in fiction 74, 136 home/homecoming – and return 150, 180 – as transitory space 161 – concept of 152, 176 – home as point of return 172 f. – homeland See motherland 150 f. – imaginary 155, 173 – in literature 8, 167 – longing for 143, 168 – loss of 124, 129, 170 – questioning notions of 161 Hosain, Attia 40 f., 74 Hoskins, Andrew 20 Huggan, Graham 23, 169 hybridity 22, 35, 62, 67 – characteristic of modern memory 30 – cosmopolitan 148 – cultural 62 – hybrid memories 46 – hybridisation and mixing categories 56 – in India 66 Ice-Candy-Man 83 identity 183 – as fiction 111–114, 118 – complex forms of 55 – cultural 67, 69, 73, 142 – fictionalising 145 – formation of 114, 169 – global 27 – Jungian model of self 118 – male 89 – multiple identities 25, 67, 109, 113, 115, 149 f. – national 64, 68, 73-75, 86, 104 – origins 117

Index

– puzzles of the self 123 – reinvented 73, 119 – relation to memory 18, 24, 27, 111, 117, 119, 121 – rewriting the self 112 f. – roots of 133, 142 – shifting 146 – threat to 118 – traditional notions of 24 imagination and memory 97, 127, 150 – borders in 38, 172 – diasporic 48, 151 – homeland as imaginary 97, 122, 143 – in reconstructing the self 113 – power of 177 – reimagining the past 158 – reinventing historical reality 92 – relation to spaces 93 – shadows of 98 – transcultural 35, 38 imagined communities 73, 76, 80, 86, 89, 95, 102, 106 Imperial Eyes: – Travel Writing and Transculturation 24 imperialism 6, 24 – atrocities of 42 – policy of divide and rule 76, 124 f. independence movement 4, 61, 124, 138 – ideology of freedom 126 – turmoil 127 India 1 – caste system See caste system 5, 48, 125 – colonial See colonial India 2, 7, 40 f., 43, 61 f, 116 – communism 5, 48, 63, 70 – cultural history 51 – culture 9, 23, 66, 154 – diverse traditions 62 – history 9, 23 – independence movement 2, 4, 61, 124, 126, 138 – Indian ancestry 46, 142, 144 – mixed cultural heritage 9 f., 45, 61, 66, 68, 72 – modern 41, 161 – modernity 48, 72 – nationalism See nationalism

207

– partition See partition of the subcontinent – politics 79, 88 f. – purdah quarters 40 f. – religions 9, 61, 79, 88, 101, 104, 125 – representations in fiction 5, 7, 11, 62 f., 69, 98, 126, 130, 154, 168 India-China War of 1962 4 India-Pakistan Wars of 1965 and 1971 4, 61 Indian-Bengali writers 167 Indian Emergency of 1975 – 1977 4, 69 Indian literature in English 3 f. – diasporic 94 – globalisation of 148 – historical novel 4 – history of Indian novel 4 – new phase 4 – novel of self-identity 4 – of the 1930s and 1940s 2 – of the 1980s and 1990s 4 f. – political contexts 5 – psychological novel 4 – socio-political novel 4 Indian subcontinent 1, 4 – Anglophone literatures 10, 20, 37, 40 f. – cultural trajectories 7, 60, 63 – divided 17, 73, 76, 129 – ethnic conflicts 75, 84, 168 – ethnicities 1, 9, 11, 38, 73, 82 f., 88, 98, 105 f., 180 – history 4, 7, 9, 18, 23, 76, 94, 105, 129 – literature 167 – partition See partition of the subcontinent – political challenges 9 Indian writers 3, 5, 7, 44, 143 individual memory 12, 15, 28, 35, 47, 51, 55, 101, 111, 134, 173 Indo-English novel 1, 5, 8, 12, 38, 42 f., 167 – as medium of transcultural memory 43, 56 – as migrant writing 167 f. – definition 3, 7 – English language diction 8 – function of memory 10 – historical development 9 f. – in global context 3 – literary strategies 183 – of memory 6 f., 42, 54, 182 f.

208

Index

– significance of 7 – theme of overlapping borders 182 inheritors of memory 17, 19, 35, 136 interculturalism/interculturality 21, 55, 62 interior monologue 147, 183 intertexuality 39 intertwined lives 3, 60, 72, 141 invented tradition 102, 141 Iser, Wolfgang 55, 112, 120 Islam 9, 69, 81, 87 f. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 3, 12, 17, 41 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 9, 68, 78, 87, 90, 124 f. journey motif 169 Karachi, Pakistan 68, 174-180 Kartography 12, 169 Kashmir 9, 18, 61, 99 f., 172 Kerala, India 49 Khan, Afzahl 1 Kipling, Rudyard 43, 130 Lahiri, Jhumpa 41, 150 Lahore, Pakistan 43, 73 f., 77, 81 f., 85, 88 lieux de mémoire 15 literary and cultural theory 7, 23 literary canon 39, 43 – Western 184 literary imagination 1, 44, 74, 110, 147, 167 literary studies 22, 39, 54 literature and memory 39, 169 – literature as a medium of collective memory 39 – memory fiction See memory fiction 175 – memory in literature 39, 42 f., 182 – memory of literature 39, 42 f. – relationship between 39 f. – staging of memory 39, 183 – treatment of memory 3 f., 28, 35, 59, 145, 167 London, England 92, 96-98, 116, 133, 140 f., 147, 149, 162, 175 Lowenthal, David 35, 121 magic realism 47, 60, 183 mapmaking See cartography

177 f.

maps of memory/memory atlas 127, 178– 180 – alternative routes of memory 181 – connections between Europe and its Others 6, 37, 42 – convergence of map and memory 177 – in fiction 92, 118 – restoring city in memory 177 masculinity 74, 89 media – internet 175, 179 – modern 175 – new 19, 24, 36 – new media cultures 183 – old 175 media of memory 17, 23 – literature 39 – technological storage 48 mediated memory 20, 43 – artificial memories 36 – media reshaping the past 19 mélange 35-37, 64, 81 memoir – family 45, 102, 142, 145, 173 – fictional 60, 153 memories, types of – alternative 18 – ambivalent 12, 113, 121, 146 – childhood 71, 83, 127, 131, 175 – colonial 6 – conflicted 147 – cross-border 41 – divided 2, 126 – erratic 82, 123 – everyday 49, 135 – false 113 – forgotten 55, 76 – fragmented 70, 117, 119, 121, 132, 155 – imagined 36, 40, 51, 55, 112 – inherited 36 – intertwined 5 f., 11, 16, 19, 25, 31, 33, 38, 51, 64, 91, 126, 175 – local 27 f., 34 – non-Western 19 – personal 11, 26, 53, 59, 95, 101, 106, 122, 173 – political 11, 26, 53, 59, 122

Index

– postcolonial 6 – shared 5, 12, 15, 17, 19, 38, 51, 53, 77, 91, 98, 136, 146 f., 155, 175 f.,180, 183 – unreliable 12, 55, 63, 83, 145 Memories of Rain 3, 12, 43 memory cultures 2, 33, 35, 117, 184 memory fiction 3, 10, 23, 36, 42 f., 112, 175 – contemporary novels 10, 12 – dreamlike narration 148 – literary techniques 42-44, 50, 110, 169 – narrative structures 40, 109, 132, 148 – narratives 6, 47, 54, 74, 101, 175 – nonlinear narration 110, 138 – novels 2, 6, 11, 26, 37, 42 – technique of tunnelling 153 – transcultural novel 55 memory images – inseparable from reality 47 – of a shared past 112 – of East and West 116 Memory of Elephants, The 3, 10, 46 memory studies, field of 15–17, 19 f., 22, 30, 42 – directions 39 – focus on national framework 30, 168 – global turn 42 – memory crisis in nineteenth century 29, 35 metaphors of memory 10, 48, 54 – body as memory 183 – chutney See chutney, metaphor of – flashes 153 – gunny sack 45, 183 – memory atlas See maps of memory – memoscan 46 f., 183 – pickle See pickle, metaphor of – rain 152, 156, 183 – shards 133, 141, 148, 172 Midnight’s Children 3 f., 6, 9, 11, 43, 49, 59 f., 62-64, 66, 74, 82, 89 migrant condition 115, 121, 128, 150 – and memory 155 – arrival and departure 150, 161 – dual identities 143 – fragmented vision 151 – refugees 88, 132 f., 143, 146 migrant memory 19

209

migration 168, 183 – and nation 168 – and travel 152 – immigrants from India 176 – in literature 167 mimesis of memory 40 f. mirror – as leitmotif 103, 118 – as metaphorical device 118 – image 113, 115, 118 – of the nation 66, 70 mnemonic processes – in literature 6, 37, 39, 108, 167 – in the transmission of tradition 135 – memorisation/re-memorisation 162 – story as mnemonic act 150 – within a family 134 modern memory 29–31, 35 – making of 10, 183 – repositories of 183 modernity 21, 26, 31, 33, 148, 169, 184 – advent 30, 33, 41, 48, 129 – and cross-cultural encounters 16 – and memory 38 – as global condition 21 – as newness 35 – binaries of 109 – condition of 24 – consequences 26 – discrepant global modernities 24 – diverse forms 30 – Enlightenment project 32 – Eurocentric 31 f., 37 f. – formation 33 – global 27, 168 – globalised See globalised modernity 36 – high modernity 168 – local and global 25, 32 – metaphor of 29 – paradox 31–34 – political 75 – relation to memory 10, 28, 30 f., 33 – relation to nationalism 30 – shared world 17, 32 – singular notion 30 f. – spread of 16, 25, 37 – theory 31

210

Index

– Western 30 f., 33, 37 motherland/homeland – cartographic violations 175 – divided 73 – imaginary 122, 150 f., 155, 162 – possibility of return 150 – real and imaginary 155, 162 – representations of 73, 92, 97 Muhajir 176, 180 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 4, 95, 101, 151 f. multiculturalism/multiculturality 21, 23, 168 – multicultural literature 169 multidirectional memory 16, 18, 54 multiple modernities 10, 24, 26, 30–32 multiple worlds 12, 115, 129 museum of memory 51, 53 Muslim refugees 88 Muslim aristocracy in pre-partition India 2, 40 Muslim League 9, 68, 77 f., 132 myth – and memory 60, 137, 145 – and mythmaking 72, 83 – memory and mythmaking 137 – of India 72 – of nation/nationalism 86, 89, 105, 172 – of the West 31 – replacing history 64 Namesake, The 41, 150 Narayan, R. K. 2 f., 130 nation/nation-state 2, 27, 75, 79, 89 – as ambivalent construct 93 – conceptions of 106 – nation building as collective fiction 72 national borders 11, 17, 93, 100 – artificial 85, 92 – as invented tradition 102 – attempts to transcend 172 – challenging concept of 169 – fixed 37, 42 – problems with 180 – reality of 104 – senselessness of 172 – transcend 177

nationalism 64, 74 f., 82 f., 86, 89 f. 93, 100 f., 104, 124, 126, 169 – and masculinity 89 – and private lives 101 – as abstract concept 100 – conceptions of 106 – effects 74, 106 – ideology 105 – refutation of 27, 74, 105 Nehru, Jawaharlal 63, 78 f. networks of memory 16 – digital network memory 20 – new networks 20 New York City, United States 45, 131, 133, 137, 142 f. Nora, Pierre 15, 17 nostalgia 34, 36, 121, 168 Nünning, Ansgar 39 Ortiz, Fernando

22

Pakistan 1, 4 – civil wars 176 – contemporary 174 – creation of 9, 61, 87, 125 – diasporic communities abroad 4 – East Pakistan See East Pakistan – ideology 9, 68, 175 – monocultural 70 – nationalism 176 – representations in fiction 5, 7, 65, 68 f., 84–86, 99, 168 Pakistani literature in English 3–5 – of the 1980s and 1990s 5 – representations of the partition 5, 88 Pakistani writers 3, 7, 167 partition of the subcontinent 1 f., 5, 9, 11, 17, 42, 61, 104, 168 – and literary imagination of writers 167 – effects 3, 11, 88 – in fiction 11, 42, 52, 80 f., 83, 86, 89 f., 95, 119, 123, 127, 170 – legacy 18 f., 73, 88, 171, 180 – memories of 52, 109, 127, 168 – partition generation 136, 170, 175 – riots 42, 99, 102, 110 – trauma 19, 74, 76, 82, 106

Index

– victims 11, 42, 76, 89 f., 103 Passage to India 9, 43, 61 Pennycook, Alastair 21, 23, 37, 56, 135 photography and memory – family frames 141 – photographs as media of memory 17 pickle, metaphor of 11, 49, 59, 69, 71, 83 – pickling of time 72 place See space versus place 93 f. Point of Return, The 12, 169 f., 180 post-partition era 1 f., 8 f., 19, 169 f. – in fiction 41, 59, 65, 74, 82, 99 f. – political conflicts 92 postcolonialism 62, 93 f. – postcolonial literature 6, 63, 95, 184 – postcolonial theory 6 f., 23, 62, 94 postmemory 19, 54, 175 postmodernism 23, 62 f. postnostalgic phase 34 poststructuralism 23 practice of memory/remembering 129, 136, 139, 146, 152, 163, 184 Pratt, Mary Louise 24, 93 f. pre-independence India 2 pre-partition era 2 f., 9, 40 – in fiction 52, 59, 73, 109, 183 – politics 124 – religious tensions 125 present past 15, 29, 114, 116 prosthetic memory 16 Punjab, province of 80, 88, 110 purity, cultural 9, 24, 60, 62, 73, 144 Radstone, Susannah 30 Rahman, Tariq 3 Rao, Raja 2 f., 9 reconfigurations – cultural 1, 31, 37, 93 – transnational 94 rewriting the past 6, 19, 54, 111 f. Ricoeur, Paul 17 Rigney, Ann 16, 39–41 Robertson, Roland 25 Rothberg, Michael 16, 18 Roy, Arundhati 5, 10, 48

211

Rushdie, Salman 1, 3 f., 8 f., 35 f., 43 f., 55, 151, 167, 180 Russian Revolution 133, 136, 141 Sachdeva, Manjit 180 saga (literary form) 47, 132 – of generational memories 137 Said, Edward 2, 16, 24, 110 – overlapping territories, intertwined histories 2, 16, 92 Satanic Verses, The 63, 67 Schulze-Engler, Frank 6, 16, 21–23, 31, 106 Schwarz, Bill 30 second modernity 17, 32, 38 separatism 68, 84, 124 Shadow Lines, The 2, 11, 43, 80, 99 , 118, 147, 151, 161, 168 shadows, metaphor of 92, 98 Shamsie, Kamila 4, 12, 110, 169, 178 Shamsie, Muneeza 4 Shards of Memory 12, 43, 132, 172 shared modernity 16 f., 32 Sidhwa, Bapsi 2 f., 5, 9, 27, 43 f., 74, 83, 180 Singh, Khushwant 74 sites of memory 17, 56, 88 – emotional 180 social memory 65, 75 South Asian history and culture 16, 18, 90 – digital revolution 19, 41 – modernity 31, 33, 38, 41, 62, 64, 77, 87, 90, 182 space – as colonial construct 94 – as cultural artefact 97 – construction of 94, 96 – definition 93 – fictional representations of 94 – imagining space and place 91, 95, 97, 148, 179 f. – related to history and memory 101 – versus place 93 f. spaces, types of – ambivalent 157 – communal 106 – domestic 104 – imaginary 93, 96 f.

212

Index

– physical 158 – private 105 – public 18, 105 – remembered 93 – restricted 103 – transcultural See transculturalism/transculturality, spaces of – transformative 159 – transitory 161 – without constraints 94 spatial metaphors 107 spatial practices 95, 98 spatiality/spaces of memory 11, 20, 50 f., 56, 93, 98, 183 storytelling, art of 74 f., 77, 183 – fragmentary narrative 82 f. – stories of memory 156, 182 stream-of-consciousness literary technique 43, 147 f., 153 Sturken, Marita 17 Suleri, Sara 4, 7 Sunlight on a Broken Column 40 f., 74 swami 2, 131, 137, 139 f. Terdiman, Richard 15, 29, 35, 114 theatres of memory 15 third space 93, 106, 109 time and memory 115, 123 f. – interior versus exterior time 127 – nomads of the present 127 time and space, perception of 27 f., 34–36, 121, 183 Train to Pakistan 74, 89 transcultural memory 1 f., 7, 16, 128 – analytic device 113 – and global transformations 169 – and modernity 33 – as ambivalent process 72, 146 – as broader vision 180 – as challenge to cultural stereotypes 163 – as methodological tool 10, 19, 20, 26, 37, 41, 182 – as reconciliation 74 – as social practice 23, 24 f., 28, 111 – borrowing and blending 6, 23, 37 – definition 16–18, 20, 26, 28, 35 f., 75 – fictions of 12, 108

– functions 10 f. – illustration of 50 – in fiction 10–12, 18, 24, 38, 40, 44, 48, 54, 78, 98, 132, 138 – in memory 20, 137 – perspective of 168 – phases of 109 – practice of 23, 26 f., 56, 74, 190 – relation to literature 41 – sites of 19 – theory 6, 11, 16, 23–26, 33, 37 f., 111, 182 transculturalism/transculturality 3, 6 f., 16 f., 20 f., 24, 26, 31, 36, 60, 148 – definition 21 f. – history 22 – in fiction 62, 69, 150 – in India 62, 70 – phenomena of 10, 26, 108, 129 – role of space 93 – roots 23 – spaces of 11, 94, 98, 102, 106 – theory 7, 22, 94 – transcultural flows 23 – within cultural and literary theory 16, 23 transgressions – cultural 56, 129, 136 – national 136 – political 56 translation – and memory 120 – cultural 3, 35, 62, 120, 162 – of the self 120 transnationalism/transnationality 3 f., 6 f., 12, 16 f., 21, 24, 27 f., 30, 42, 94, 163 – analytic framework 28 – cultures 27 – definition 28 – era of 104 – in fiction 27, 124, 132, 136, 148, 151 – transnational communities 12, 26, 183 trauma 19, 132 – partition trauma See partition of the subcontinent 19, 74, 76, 106, 132 – traumatic pasts 16, 18, 42 travelling cultures 35, 46, 134, 163 travelling memory 16, 137 travelogue 39, 170

Index

Triple Mirror of the Self, The 108 f., 113, 161 Twilight in Delhi 2

9, 12, 43,

unreliable narrator

70, 145, 156

Vassanji, Moyez J.

3, 10, 44-46, 183

Western history 16 f. Western literary heritage 16 What the Body Remembers 74 Winter, Jay 17, 31 Woolf, Virginia 43, 153 world history 16 f., 62 Young, Robert J. C.

Warburg, Aby 15, 42 Welsch, Wolfgang 21 f.

6

213