Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora 1443868779, 9781443868778, 9781443873437

Citation preview

Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora

Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora

Edited by

Sandhya Rao Mehta

Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora Edited by Sandhya Rao Mehta This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Sandhya Rao Mehta and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6877-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6877-8

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Foreword .................................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Revisiting Gendered Spaces in the Diaspora Sandhya Rao Mehta Part I: Reading Gender Chapter One ............................................................................................... 16 Gender and the Indian Emergency: Representation of Women in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Gemma Scott Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 35 Communal Violence and Women at Home and in the Diaspora in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Sanchari Sur Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 52 Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions Tulika Bahuguna Part II: Writing Gender Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 68 Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood Monbinder Kaur Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 89 Diasporic Mobility and Identity in Flux in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Stephanie Stonehewer Southmayd

vi

Contents

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 104 Gendered Diasporic Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Elizabeth Jackson Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 119 Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season Shashikala Muthumal Assella Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 134 Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora Priyanka Sacheti Part III: Performing Gender Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 148 The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman: A Close Reading of Neel Haldar in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies Uma Jayaraman Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 163 Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context: Abha Dawesar’s Babyji Harshi Syal Gill Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 180 Something is Happening: Narrating Queerness in the Films of Karan Johar Margaret Redlich Contributors ............................................................................................. 196 Index ........................................................................................................ 199

PREFACE

This collection of critical essays locates itself at the intersection of gender and diaspora studies, exploring the multiple ways in which gender is expressed, explored, interpreted, written about, and performed in the literature of the Indian diaspora. Theoretically underpinned by various studies on diaspora privileging hybridity and transnationalism framed within the discourse of feminist and queer theories, this collection brings together a number of ways in which heteronormative experience within the diaspora is resisted, challenged and questioned. Referencing such iconic works from the Indian diaspora as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, this anthology also includes chapters on Attia Hosain, Abha Dawesar, Amulya Malladi, Anita Rau Badami, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Kiran Desai. Some of the essays also use other South Asian writers such as Monica Ali and Bapsi Sidhwa to compare the diasporic experience in similar settings. Framed together, these essays point to ways in which gender is negotiated within the political and public sphere by questioning established narratives and predilections of accepted social conventions within the nation and in the diaspora. It also identifies ways in which women affect transformation within their social contexts and create agencies through processes of acculturation within diasporic spaces. The process of exploring queer spaces is investigated through characters for whom matters of emasculation and feminisation remain significant markers of selfhood. This anthology also investigates the way in which gender is performed through Indian film scripts set in the diaspora, pointing to ways in which the liberatory aspect of queerness finds expression within the imaginative settings of foreign lands. Gender is also found and performed in everyday situations of cooking and clothing, both conventional chores associated with women, who are then able to transform such tropes to align them with continuing identity formations. This collection is divided into three sections. The first section, entitled “Reading Gender”, includes essays which reflect the way in which writers of the Indian diaspora approach contexts within the nation to re-define significant ways of approaching politics and gender. Thus Gemma Scott’s essay discusses the feminising of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in India by Salman Rushdie in his path-breaking novel Midnight’s Children. Scott’s

viii

Preface

argument that Rushdies’s diasporic position enabled a re-interpretation of Emergency historiography which more usefully centred Gandhi’s own use of female positions to foreground her role as the nation’s caretaker, points to ways of gendered narrative which successfully challenge established history. Sanchari Sur, in her essay “Communal Violence and Women at Home and in the Diaspora in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Night bird Call?”, uses the historical episode of the attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, by state forces to flush out Sikh extremists and the resulting anger by Sikhs around the world, to suggest ways in which female characters negotiate trauma, loss and exile in ways that empower them within the nation as well as in the diaspora. Tulika Bahuguna’s essay “Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions” similarly articulates the contrasting attitudes to Muslim conventions of the veil by diasporic writers such as Attia Hosain, for whom the spaces viewed as representing repression and silence take on diametrically different meanings when involved in the lived experience of everyday life. The second section of this collection, entitled “Writing Gender”, brings together multifarious ways in which women occupying marginal spaces within the diaspora transform, define and reflect themselves through the tropes of labour, cooking and clothing. Monbinder Kaur’s essay “Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood” explores the way in which hybridity allows for the female body to process the multiplicity of diasporic experience through a fragmented experience which allows for hybridity. The process of attaining selfhood is at the core of Stephanie Stonehewer Southmayd’s and Elizabeth Jackson’s essays on V. S. Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri respectively, each one of them compared to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Both these essays, “Diasporic Mobility and Identity in Flux in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men” and “Gendered Diasporic Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”, centre around the creation of female diasporic spaces through positions of disadvantage, often using labour as a unifying strategy for self-definition. Exploring the culinary routes to identity, Shashikala Muthumal Assela examines how South Indian curries become expressions of cultural conflict in her essay “Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season”, and Priyanka Sacheti’s reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novels and short stories through her contribution “Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora” traces the relationship of female characters with clothing, examining the ways in which their clinging and removing of select pieces of clothing testify to the gain, loss and re-gain of diasporic identities as they are being processed by female subjectivities.

Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora

ix

These negotiations are the unifying theme of the third section of this anthology, entitled “Performing Gender”. The essays in this section speak to the ways in which gender is explored, lost, created and re-created within imaginary spaces which allow for exploration of sexualities. Uma Jayaram’s essay, “The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman: A Close Reading of Neel Haldar in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies” examines the effect of diasporic displacement on an aristocratic ruler forced into exile. Haldar’s journey to destitution, Jayaram suggests, enables him to rediscover his lost masculinity in a process in which his fall from grace is, in many ways, also a process of feminising him. Sexuality as a site for experimentation and play is also brought out by Harshi Syal Gill’s “Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social, and Cultural Context: Abha Dawesar’s Babyji” where, tracing the cultural and religious origins of queerness in the classical Indian tradition, the author narrates a character’s adolescent sexual experiments, a process which ends with the realisation that India can no longer be the site for such explorations, as a result of which the protagonist decides to move away from the country. The notion that queerness is best played out outside the Indian space is also brought out by Margaret Redlich’s examination of the way in which gay relationships are investigated in Indian films in her essay “Something is Happening: Narrating Queerness in the Films of Karan Johar” as she reiterates the way in which diasporic spaces make possible a more fluid and effortless negotiation of queer identities in Bollywood cinema, which, when showcased within the nation, still creates furore and agitation. Gender is written about and performed within a context of displaced communities, it is suggested, in ways that question and resist traditional interpretations allowing for an engagement with non-traditional versions of family and relationships, but only when enacted outside the geographical space of the Indian nation. This collection, thus, attempts to bring together diverse ways of examining gender in Indian diasporic fiction. It brings together a variety of approaches with which to negotiate identities and create new selves. Including the works of senior academics, emerging scholars, as well as those outside academics, such as playwrights and journalists, this anthology of critical essays provides fresh perspectives on the role of gender in the Indian diaspora, allowing for new interpretations of established texts as well as introducing lesser known writers. While recognising the theoretical bases of constructions of gender and diaspora, this anthology also reflects on individual works of fiction in the firm conviction that the text is the ultimate representative of narrative. While fiction celebrates, interrogates, examines and places gender firmly at the

x

Preface

centre of diaspora studies, it is to the individual works that we turn to contextualise the predicament and the possibilities of diaspora. This collection would not have been possible without the support, cooperation, and patience of all the contributors. I would like to thank them all for sharing their work in this anthology. I would also like to thank Ayesha Heble for her help in proofreading the chapters, Adrian Roscoe for his generous foreword, Sanjiv Mehta for typesetting the manuscript, and Cambridge Scholars Publishing for accepting this anthology for publication.

FOREWORD

Diaspora and its complex literary issues, while receiving modern scholarly attention, are not of course entirely new. Whenever, historically, people left home and hearth to begin new lives across the world, diasporic concerns came into play. This often brought about interesting questions. If they were writers, how would they capture the new landscape, culture and climate? How would they preserve the culture and values left behind? Indeed, would they even want to do this? How would they begin to see themselves in relation to the motherland and what from it would they still cherish and want to preserve? What social and moral change would the new environment engender? Fundamentally, what threat would it all pose to identity? And would it matter anyway? Such questions, presumably, were as important in remote centuries for Romans settling in Gaul or Malta and Normans settling in Britain, as for the British themselves settling in India, North America and Australasia, Spaniards settling in South America, Frenchmen in Senegal, Germans in West Africa. And now for Indians settled all around the globe. Literary criticism acknowledges that amidst the modern upsurge of modern literature in English, India has been remarkable for the quantity and quality of its output, with many of its writers now global household names. While much critical attention has been paid to writers working in India itself, less attention (with exceptions) has been paid to writing, and especially women’s writing, from across the Indian diaspora. Hence the timely appearance of a volume that explores this literature, and specifically gender issues within it, from a feminist point of view. The essays in this collection examine these concerns as they arise in various different contexts. Issues of identity, mobility, communal violence, masculinisation, kitchen politics, sexual realisation, and even clothing, all come under penetrating and revealing scrutiny. Timely and relevant, I am sure that this collection will add to the growing scholarship on the rich area of the Indian diaspora as it establishes itself as an important part of global literature. Professor Adrian Roscoe

INTRODUCTION REVISITING GENDERED SPACES IN THE DIASPORA SANDHYA RAO MEHTA

The ubiquitous image of knitting, stitching, quilting and cooking as a metaphor for the experience, and the narration of diaspora links it to the perceived feminine task of collecting, remembering and documenting memory and images of the past. While the choice of moving from one physical location to another is primarily seen to be a male one, as evidenced by much sociological research, the onus of retaining memories of home, of recreating them within new contexts and ultimately acting as cultural harbingers of homeland culture, remain vividly feminine. The challenges inherent within this contradictory situation is central to current discourses of the diaspora, reflecting as it does, the problematics of gendered roles within an act which remains outside the agency of women. While diaspora as a historical and contemporary condition has embraced issues of transnationalism, globalisation, hybridity, and multiculturalism, the intersection of gender and diaspora and the way these have impacted each other has been less explored. Linked to the notion of diaspora as a heteronormative experience, the focus on feminine as well as queer subjectivities within the discourse of transnational migration points to multiple ways in which issues within diaspora studies remain deeply normative. Increasingly, such normative practices are being resisted and women’s perspective on the question of diaspora and its associated concerns increasingly focused upon. In its literary manifestations, the site within which the diasporic subject is placed has been extensively, but problematically, explored in ways that privilege the heterosexual male experience, silencing those outside its reach. As Sneja Gunew, for example, asks, “While diaspora often evokes a homeland, how do women writers assert, negotiate, and contest multiple, political ideas of home across time, history, and geography?” (8). Tracing early studies on diaspora to subsequent work on feminism, this chapter explores the routes

2

Introduction

which enabled gender to become a central focus in diaspora studies, suggesting that a sustained study of the multiple ways in which gender impacts diaspora creates spaces in which normative practices could be challenged. It also suggests that, rather than focusing on overarching definitions and theories which could link diverse experiences, diaspora studies are increasingly pointing to ways in which individual experiences of travel and migration are rooted in particular contexts and that no theory would adequately reflect the complexities of diaspora in the contemporary context.

Defining Diasporas Diaspora as an evolving concept can be traced to the early work of William Safran, who defined the diaspora as referring to a community which was historically dispersed and shared a common desire to return to the homeland. The Jewish, Armenian and Greek movements were seen to represent such definitions which retained the binary division of the diaspora as adhering to a homeland/hostland dichotomy, with the primary emotions associated with such a movement being those of loss, memory, and an inextricable link to the past. Subsequent interpretations, as those of Robin Cohen, elaborated on the notion of travel and suggested that diasporas could be divided into various categories based on the impulses which began the travel. Thus his divisions of victim, labour, trade, and colonial diasporas, while widening the group of communities which could be included in the experience of diaspora, still divided travel into ethnicities and binaries of us/them and travel as going “away” from the homeland (18). Recognising the forces of globalisation and transcultural travel, Kachig Tölöyan, in his inaugural issue of the journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies in 1991, emphasised the idea of the diaspora as being stateless, thus associating it with transnationalism: “The term that once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes works like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (4-5). Subsequent work on globalisation and migration studies widened its scope by underlining the complex nature of travel within the global North and South and, often, within it. James Clifford referred to the complexity of the term by warning that “we should be wary of constructing our working definition of a term like ‘diaspora’ by recourse to an ‘ideal type’” (306) as certain types will then be more or less diasporic than others. Brian Axel’s use of the term “diasporic imaginary,” while focusing on the violent basis of diaspora, also points to the

Revisiting Gendered Spaces in the Diaspora

3

movement away from origins to a space where specific conditions of time and context determine the new community: “the diasporic imaginary, then, does not act as a new kind of place of origin but indicates a process of identification generative of diasporic subjects” (412). This is further asserted by Brubaker for whom it is important “to treat diaspora not as a bounded entity but as an idiom, stance and claim” (1) moving away from place of origin primacy: “In sum, rather than speak of ‘a diaspora’ or ‘the diaspora’ as an entity, a bounded group, an ethnodemographic or ethnocultural fact, it may be more fruitful, and certainly more precise, to speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices, and so on” (13). Some of the most influential work surrounding the changing concept of diaspora revolved around the cultural studies of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, with an increased focus on travel, migration and identity formations being seen as fluid and transforming. Hall’s suggestion that cultural identities are best seen as evolving and developing challenged the assumption of a fixed diasporic identity, allowing it to be seen as a process rather than a historical fact: The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference, by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (235)

Hall’s focus on developing diasporic identities, rather than focusing on a common national experience which, while helpful in the colonial struggle, did not evoke the realities of developing social realities, was also voiced by Paul Gilroy’s famous metaphor of the ship on the sea as evoked in his Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness which did much to point to diaspora as an evolving concept by showing that those affected by the experience of forced migration displayed links to England as well as to Africa, thus questioning the nostalgic desires for home which had marked earlier studies on the diaspora. Vertovec subsequently suggested that diasporic experience should be viewed “by both structure (historical conditions) and agency (the meanings held, and practices conducted, by social actors)” (24). The complexity of the term “diaspora” soon allowed for the term to be used in various cultural, social, economic and ethnic contexts, all of which remained largely patriarchal.

4

Introduction

Gendering the Diaspora Referring to the state of African Diaspora Studies, Tina Campt and Deborah Thomas observe that work on the African diaspora still revolves around issues of travel, migration and homeland at the expense of more “expansive” notions, leading to re-asserting binary positions. This has various limitations for the study of diaspora: Such analytic formulations often deploy notions of origin and authenticity that impede a deeper appreciation of the more complex dynamics that undergird diaspora. Moreover, such frameworks can privilege the mobility of masculine subjects as the primary agents of diasporic formation, and perpetuate a more general masculinism in the conceptualization of diasporic community. (2)

While the definitions of the diaspora as a static, historical moment of Jewish dispersal as suggested by Safran and Cohen have been reviewed and revised to include multiple migrations and establishment of transnational networks, the masculine underpinnings of this metanarrative are clearly implicit. Thus, Gayatri Gopinath in her iconic book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures outlines the inherent patriarchy of the etymology of “diaspora” as indicating a dispersal, a scattering of seed, with the associated metaphor of the land left behind as the static, unchanging root and the seed which has travelled being seen as capable of transformation and regeneration. Quoting Stephan Helmreich, Gopinath suggests the usefulness of acknowledging “[t]he patriarchal and heteronormative underpinnings” (5) of diaspora which establishes the primacy of patriarchal practices of the term. This is a point also made by Kira Kosnick who suggests that the androcentric metaphor of dispersal privileges “male procreation and patrilinear descent” (123). The distinction between diaspora as fact or process marks the point at which feminist studies could enter the debate and allow it to move beyond its concerns with race and ethnicity, linking the experience of travel with those individual, feminine voices which could not be meaningfully associated with earlier definitions. Linked with the rising activism of feminist work in the developed world as well as their questioning by feminists of the developing world, this focus on individual experiences of travel, migration and belonging assumed a more gendered perspective, particularly following the works of Chandra Talpade Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander, who focused on the limited way in which the feminist agenda had hitherto taken up the mantle of protest on behalf of women of colour, assuming that the complexities of women around the

Revisiting Gendered Spaces in the Diaspora

5

world were all similar and not differentiated by ethnicity, colour, race or social classes. This led to an increased focus on the narratives of women migrants as well as attempts at developing sustainable theories which would provide the required terminology to deal with women’s experience within the diaspora. Thus, Anthias and Yuval-Davis explore the interconnections between sexualities and diaspora, while Sara Ahmad et al. investigate the way in which race, class, gender and sexuality intersect with notions of home and uprooting, and how differences addressed by feminists articulate the uprootings and formations of home (1-4). Avtar Brah’s investigation of “diasporic spaces” through the linkages of home, border and diaspora “covers the entanglements of genealogies of dispersal with those of ‘staying put’” (83), allowing for the complex notion of “home” to be problematised within feminine contexts. Gopinath also voices the notion that feminism has not adequately addressed the issue of how the nation is defined by heterosexuality and that the diaspora carries the burden of traditional patriarchal assumptions with it. While earlier studies attempted an essentialised study of gendered diaspora based on continuities of shared experiences, subsequent works focused on the divergent ways in which travel and migration affected different communities in specific ways. The rise of feminist works, particularly those which challenged western discourses, allowed for a sustained study of the role of women within the diaspora as well. Chandra Talpade was one of the first scholars to point to the need to move away from sweeping statements on third world feminism: The relationship between "Woman"—a cultural and ideological composite Other constructed through diverse representational discourses (scientific, literary, juridical, linguistic, cinematic, etc.)—and "women"—real, material subjects of their collective histories—is one of the central questions the practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address. (334)

Linked to diaspora, this connection between the stories of “real women” and their experience of a hitherto patriarchal social movement became an important way of questioning and resisting metanarratives of migration. An important question which arises in this context is whether diaspora provides agency to women who emerge from a nationalistic narrative into a transnational experience or whether women find themselves further marginalised in the new society owing to factors of race and ethnicity beyond the challenges of gender. While women have traditionally been identified with the nation and glorified as the custodians of cultural heritage, the role which they played in the process of travel and migration to a new land remains a rich area of investigation. Within the nationalist

6

Introduction

narrative, women have been viewed as the arbiters of social morals. As Partha Chatterjee suggests of the national movement in India, “[t]he home was the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality” (239). Just as women were at the centre of national identities, the diaspora too accords such homemaking roles to the immigrant woman, who, thus defined, begins to enact them using multiple strategies of food, dress and forms of labour. If women are literally responsible for the reproduction of the nation in biological terms (YuvalDavis) even in the diaspora, such spaces are replete with possibilities of acquiescence, resistance and negotiation, although largely determined by particular conditions of class, race and other specificities. As women continue to be associated with the retention of memories and homes, as well as, by association, the arbiters of family values and cultures even within new geographical locations, the process and extent to which these roles are performed is a significant point of investigation. As notions of creating new homes are seen to primarily fall on the shoulders of women in the diasporic family, the existing silences of female experiences within the narrative and process of diaspora need to be articulated. Anita Mannur suggests that “[w]omen are frequently (but problematically) associated with positions within the domestic cultural economy and charged with maintaining the edifice of home life” (17) and maintains that diaspora’s expectation is toward “a faithful reproduction of Indianness” (17). In many ways, gender becomes an important consideration for the diaspora as women are not only seen to be retainers of cultural identities but are actually responsible for physical reproduction in the homeland as well as the new land. They are also seen as pivotal in establishing new boundaries based on ethnic and national identities and “as participants in national economic, political and military struggles” (AlNajie 120) even when outside the nation. The centring of women as an integral part of definitions of family was one that was long accepted by, not only the nation, but also within the context of migration and diaspora. As Kira Kosnick shows, all family re-unification programmes within the United States were determined with only the normative heterosexual relationship within marriage being considered authentic until 1990, thus limiting definitions of gender and the family to those accepted by the nation state (Kosnick 123). Studies by Anthias and Yuval-Davis and Mohanty and Alexander also dwell on the legitimacy of heteronormative identities to the state which prioritises images of women as symbols of the nation. This normative expectation has travelled with the diaspora for, as Al-Ali suggests, “[d]iasporic anxieties around issues of preservation and

Revisiting Gendered Spaces in the Diaspora

7

temporal continuity often focus on cultural-biological reproduction, and are linked to this, by a need to control sexuality, particularly the sexualties (practices and desires) of women” (125).

Queering the Diaspora An important development within studies of feminism and sexuality has been the inclusion of queer studies within the diaspora. In many ways, in spite of protestations to the contrary by critics who resist the link between the queer and the diaspora sharing exclusivist positions, the potential marginalisation of the queer and the diaspora within normative communities has allowed for a sustained exploration of gendered identities within diasporic spaces. Thus, if diaspora has the same connection to the nation as the queer to the heteronormative society, the resistance to both definitions would allow for a layered discourse of multiple aspects of gender studies. Kosnick suggests that “differential sexual desires and nonnormative family formations in migration processes and diasporic life” (125) have yet to be integrated into emerging studies of diasporic societies. Meg Wesling, however, warns against the common analogy of the queer and diasporic subjects being twins, suggesting that the queer would “subvert gender normativity” in the same way that the diaspora would trouble “geographic and national stability” (31). Gayatri Gopinath’s path breaking study of queerness within the diaspora addresses the lacunae in the research on sexuality and nation, pointing to the fact that traditional feminism does not adequately address the way in which nationalism is based on heteronormative sexualities and “the ways in which nationalist framings of women’s sexuality are translated into the diaspora, and how these renderings of diasporic women’s sexuality are in turn central to the production of nationalism in the home nation” (9). Gopinath’s study of queer films made by Indian filmmakers illustrate the way in which feminine subjectivities of the queer often struggle to locate themselves within traditional definitions of home, nation and the diaspora, capable of being expressed only “through the latent homoeroticism of female homosocial space” (25).

Diaspora and Literature While gendered spaces within the diaspora have become central to the study of migration in transnational and globalised contexts, its literary manifestations, voicing various concerns, approaches and attitudes to the representation of this complex experience, are equally varied in treatment

8

Introduction

and range. While theorists link feminist concerns with concepts of marginalisation, hybridity, identity and race, literary critics have more commonly called for increased focus on specific tales of travel which allow for women to voice their own particular situations outside the established framework of gender studies. Thus Vijay Agnew suggests that undocumented feminist narratives succeed in erasing the anonymity of women and give them agency as they narrate their life tales: “Feminists’ ‘alternate archives’ give us access to the everyday lives of women. These archives supplement academic methodologies such as oral histories, interviews, and ethnographic studies. Together, these methods and various forms of evidence shatter anonymity and create a better understanding of what internments, migrations, escapes from danger and violence, and refugee status really mean” (8). In “Diaspora and Cultural Memory”, Anh Hua links writing with the art of quilting, both of which are gradual processes, achieved over a long period of reflection: “Quilting is an activity that has conventionally been done by women, and which has been devalued by masculinist art theorists as ‘craft’ and not ‘high art’. Both quilting and writing require time, patience and imagination, and creativity” (192). She goes on to show how the remembering and collecting of stories of the past allow women to articulate the ways in which their negotiations with race, culture and patriarchy were affected. Women scholars, like those who are engaged in quilting, she says, are better equipped to express the events of daily life as lived by millions of families within the diaspora. The articulation of distinct experiences within specific forms of diasporic experience emerges at the centre of narratives of women who attempt to move beyond the limits of socially and culturally constructed identities. Whether the diaspora offers such liberatory spaces is much debated, for the process of writing is itself a struggle for those who have not had a voice. Maria Ng illustrates this as she speaks of writing her memoirs which could not begin at the beginning the way conventional, male traditions of narration did, for, “this linear progression is a narrative that bears no resemblance to the constantly shifting perspectives that present themselves as one reviews one’s life and tries to make sense of events, of commissions and omissions, of departures and arrivals. It does not reflect the perpetual conflict between the nature of representing/writing and remembering” (34). Sneja Gunew views this conflict within the female artist, of being at once the author as well as the subject of a tale, as symptomatic of the predicament of the female diasporic voice. The trauma of using patriarchal language which narrated the original journey in order to show personal struggles in a new land is problematic for the woman narrator who needs to create new ways of expressing her predicament of

Revisiting Gendered Spaces in the Diaspora

9

belonging. Susan Friedman’s comment that “it is writing by women that takes gender as its focus that most clearly highlights the complexities of diaspora and reveals the omissions and hidden assumptions in debates about ‘the new migrations’”, points to the complexity as well as the significance of focusing on women’s narrative within the diaspora (Parker 3). Linked to studies which dwell on the narrative of gendered spaces within the diaspora includes the notion of gender as performance as articulated by feminist studies such as those of Judith Butler. Based on Simone De Beauvoir’s distinction between sex and gender, that “[o]ne is not born but becomes a woman,” (519) Butler underlines the connection between gender and identity: “In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). The performative aspect of gender, when linked to identities within the diaspora, allows for a negotiation which the gendered subject projects into new contexts. Often, such negotiations take the form of tropes such as clothing and food which are conventionally tied to feminine experiences, re-locating them in contexts which allow for new ways of exploring diasporic identity. Using Brubaker’s suggestion that the diaspora be seen as a “category of practice,” Sukanya Banerjee notes that this notion could be used to “underline how diasporas both reflect and are forged through a panoply of practices—indeed through intimate practices that become the ground for contesting and consolidating notions of identity and difference” (11). Based on the cultural work of Ketu Katrak, Anita Mannur shows how, what she calls “culinary citizenship” allows for the creation of diasporic identities though food. Using cook books as well as narratives which revolve around food, Mannur shows the way in which displacement and identity are articulated and negotiated, with food as a symbolic centre of diasporic experience, particularly in so far as it projects the nostalgic memories of the way home is remembered. “Culinary discourse,” for Mannur, “sets in motion an extended discussion about the imbricated layers of food, nostalgia and national identity” (28). Thus, while, as seen earlier, women have been seen to be the arbiters of national identities, “[d]iasporas produce their own version of this gendered logic by repeatedly insisting that the task of the female Indian immigrant subject in diaspora , or in this case, the cookbook, is to be vigilant about the faithful reproduction of Indianness” (17). The way in which such expectations are accepted, resisted or modified by the diaspora remains an area rich in creative and critical potential.

10

Introduction

One of the most notable features of gender and diaspora studies appears to be the questioning and sceptical reception of essentialised gendered narratives which overarch as depicting a universal experience. Campt and Thomas, in their collection of critical essays of writing in the African diaspora, aim “to relinquish any claim to a universal or shared definition of diaspora” (3) as any hegemonic narrative which seeks to explore the complete range of diasporic experience would be required to be reformulated. Parker suggests that monolithic approaches to diasporic narratives should be avoided and credence given to specific tales of particular communities focusing “on the diversity of diasporic experience” (2). It is a point made by Gunew as well, who derides the attempts at making homogenous statements around the labels “South Asian” and “woman”, privileging, instead, the way in which religion, language, even generation reads into the complexities of individual experiences and narratives of diaspora. Susan Friedman voices similar concerns that much of the writing on migration assumes a certain amount of homogeneity in terms of its focus on national origins at the expense of other realities such as gender, sexuality, language and class, among many other variables, and suggests a less “reductionist” approach to the exploration of migration and literature (17, 23). Sam Naidu concurs that the spaces newly occupied by the diaspora are heterogeneous and varied in many ways: “…I identify not only some of the similarities that may partially be ascribed to some ‘notional’ origin within a specified geographic region, but also how these writers who have migrated to the far corners of the globe are confronted with geographic, climactic, culinary, linguistic political and economic differences” (369). The multiple ways in which gender is situated within the discourse of the diaspora in contemporary studies point to the need to privilege individual experiences and specific contexts over generalised portrayals of gendered diasporas. While the intersection of feminist and migration studies have effectively resisted the metanarratives of travel, belonging and identity, the gendered spaces within the diaspora itself need to be explored for their potential to formulate identities which both resist as well as talk back to the centre. As all experiences of travel differ from one another, as do all narratives of diaspora, the implicit danger of allowing sweeping representations of gendered diasporic experiences is evident. As Campt and Thomas suggest, narratives of the diaspora can only be those of “individuals and communities situated very differently within a given diasporic formation”, (2) paving the way toward unpacking specific diasporic experiences, including those which concern themselves with issues of gender and sexuality. Emerging work on diaspora thus rejects a

Revisiting Gendered Spaces in the Diaspora

11

monolithic approach in recognition of the many approaches to the notion of diasporic subjectivity. By giving agency to the gendered spaces within the global diaspora, literature allows for complexities of hitherto marginal voices to be articulated and explored.

Works Cited Agnew, Vijay. “Introduction.” Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home. Ed. Vijay Agnew. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005. 3-18. Print. Ahmed, Sara, Claudia Castaneda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller, eds. Uproutings/Regroupings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2003. Print. Al-Ali, Nadje. “Diasporas and Gender.” Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities. Ed. Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin. London: Zed Books, 2010. 118-22. Print. Alexander, Jacqui M. and Chandra Mohanty Talpade eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Anthias Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds. Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1993. Print. Axel, Brian Keith. “Diasporic Imaginary.” Public Cultures 14.2 (2002): 411-28. Web. 12 July 2014. Banerjee, Sukanya, Aims McGuinness and Steven C. Mckay. eds. New Routes for Diaspora Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Print. Brah, Avtar. “Ain’t I a Woman?: Revisiting Intersectionality.” Journal of International Women’s Studies. 5.3 (2004): 75-86. Web. 14 Aug. 2014. Brubaker, Rogers. “The ‘diapora’ diaspora.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. 28.1 (2005): 1-19. Web. Feb. 12 2014. Butler Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31. Web. 12 Aug. 2014. Campt Tina and Deborah A. Thomas. “Gendering Diaspora: Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and its Hegemonies.” Feminist Review. 90 (2008): 1-4. Web. 6 Aug. 2014. Chatterjee, Partha. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. Ed. Kum Kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. 233-53. Print.

12

Introduction

Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology. 9.3 (1994): 302-38. Print. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge 1999. Print. Friedman Susan Stanford. “The ‘New Migration’: Clashes, Connections, and Diasporic Women’s Writing.” Contemporary Women’s Writing. 3.1 (2009): 6-27. Web. 13 June 2014. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. London: Duke University Press, 2005. Print. Gunew, Sneja. “Serial Accomodations: Diasporic Women’s Writing.” Canadian Literature. 196 (2008): 6-15. Web. 15 Aug. 2014. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. Identity: Community, Culture, and Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. 1990. Print. Hua, Anh. “Diaspora and Cultural Memory.” Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home. Ed. Vijay Agnew. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005. 191-208. Print. Kosnick, Kira. “Diasporas and Sexuality.” Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities. Ed. Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin. London: Zed Books, 2010. 123-27. Print. Manalansan Martin F. “Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies.” International Migration Review 40.1 (2006): 22449. Web. 13 July 2014. Mannur, Anita. “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora.” MELUS. 32.4 (2007): 11-31. Web. Aug. 12 2014. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Anne Russo and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indianna University Press, 1991. 51-80. Print. Naidu, Sam. “Introduction: Women Writers of the South Asian Diaspora.” Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations. Ed. Parvati Raghuram, Ajaya Sahoo, Brij Maharaj and Dave Sangha. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008. 368-91. Print. Parker, Emma. “Introduction: Unsettling Women.” Contemporary Women’s Writing. 3.1 (2009):1-5. Web. 14 June 2014. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 1.1 (1991): 8399. Print.

Revisiting Gendered Spaces in the Diaspora

13

Snowden, Kim. “Gendered Multiplicities: Women Write Diaspora.” Canadian Literature. 196 (2008): 178-201, 203. Web. 12 Feb. 2014. Tölölyan, Khachig. “The Nation State and its Others: In Lieu of a Preface.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 1.1 (1991): 45. Print. Vertovec, Steven. “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora,’ Exemplified Among South Asian Religions.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 6(3), 1997: 227-99. Print. Wesling Meg. “Why Queer Diaspora?” Feminist Review. 90 (2008): 3047. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.

PART I READING GENDER

CHAPTER ONE GENDER AND THE INDIAN EMERGENCY: REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN GEMMA SCOTT

Abstract Salman Rushdie’s fiction has often been criticised for its representation of women, particularly by feminist literary critics. In Midnight’s Children the female villain, “The Widow”, is consistently demonised, largely by invocation of female gendered subject positions and cultural stereotypes, which has, unsurprisingly, often proved unpopular. Given Rushdie’s diasporic position and the assumed perspective of an observer, a question which arises is whether there is a more positive way in which to view Rushdie’s manipulation of gendered images here. The novel deals with the political Emergency in India; the demonised widow is a reflection of its imposer, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This chapter will examine Rushdie’s gendered representation of the Emergency and The Widow particularly, largely as a result of his self-avowed cultural displacement making possible an alternative reading of history. It will also consider Gandhi’s own manipulations of aspects of female gendered identities, notably the nationalist image of “Bharat Mata”, and suggest that Rushdie’s depiction of these be viewed more positively. Furthermore, this chapter will explore the way in which the demonising serves as a form of resistance—to Gandhi, in particular, and the Emergency more broadly. Given the repression of civil liberties (with which Rushdie’s novel powerfully deals, particularly in the form of the period’s coercive sterilisation programme), and the neglect of these in historiography and even collective memory, this chapter will foreground the writer’s diasporic position and argue that Rushdie’s representation is in fact a vital

Gender and the Indian Emergency

17

contribution to resistance and to disrupting official narratives of this history. Keywords: Salman Rushdie, diaspora, gender, women, Indira Gandhi, Emergency, power, sterilisation

Introduction On June 26th 1975 Indira Gandhi declared an internal State of Emergency in India. The declaration followed rising unrest in the country during the previous year, notably through Jayaprakash Narayan’s opposition to Gandhi’s Congress and subsequent student (amongst other) movements. Following an investigation into allegations of electoral misconduct, the Allahabad High Court convicted Indira Gandhi of two counts of malpractice, and her electoral position was deemed void on June 12th. As a result of what Gandhi felt was this “deep and widespread conspiracy” and the subsequent “challenging of law and order” she imposed the Emergency, transforming India into a one party state with the ability to rule by decree (Gandhi, Speeches and Writings 177-178). This was unequivocally to safeguard her own interests as well as, allegedly, those of the country’s order, unity and functioning. In the days following the declaration, authorities arrested and detained without trial much of the political opposition and other dissenters, and imposed stringent press censorship. Over the next nineteen months, the government embarked on schemes of slum beautification and family planning, which in the political climate of emergency enforcement, descended into the mass demolition of thousands of homes and the forced sterilisation of millions of citizens.1 These events are central to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The novel particularly focuses on Indira Gandhi’s role in the Emergency and the sterilisation programme that ensued, which has been described as more “intensive and aggressive than any other birth control programme in India” (Soni 141). In his non-fictional work, Rushdie has made it clear that his reasons for charting a broad history of India, for “handcuffing” protagonist Saleem to the nation, were to represent Indira Gandhi and her actions during the Emergency. In his introduction to the Folio Society edition of the novel, he describes his trip to India in 1975 which served as his inspiration for Midnight’s Children. He asserts: Just after my return from India, Mrs Gandhi was convicted of electoral fraud, and one week after my twenty-eighth birthday she declared a State of Emergency and assumed tyrannical powers. It was the beginning of a long period of darkness which would not end until 1977. I understood

18

Chapter One almost at once that Mrs Gandhi had somehow become central to my still tentative literary plans (ix).

Clearly Rushdie holds this trip as an important inspiration for the novel. During the trip, Rushdie observed the events leading up to the declaration of the Emergency as a visitor, with a self-professed sense of cultural displacement informing his perspectives, observations and critiques. He observed the Emergency similarly, both culturally and physically distanced from events. Rushdie’s diasporic perspective, this study will argue, is central to the novel’s resistance to the internal events of the Emergency.

“We are a Nation of Forgetters...”: Gender and Marginalisation in Historiography In the historiography of independent India, this period of Emergency has been relatively unexplored. As Emma Tarlo notes in her pioneering study of sterilisation and demolition, it has “slipped through the net” of academic disciplines, often being perceived as too contemporary to warrant historical attention, yet too far in the past for other study (2). Accusations of dictatorship that inevitably followed this implementation of a one party state, along with the constitutional suspension of civil liberties and freedom of speech, fit uneasily within nationalistic renderings of India as the world’s largest democracy. One result of this has been the “enormous political effort [that] has gone into wiping out the Emergency as a live memory” which Ashis Nandy has identified as being propagated by Congress and non-Congress parties alike (qtd. in Tarlo 21). On behalf of the Congress party, in power during the Emergency, this has largely been done by adopting a defensive standpoint that places blame for all Emergency excesses on the shoulders of Indira Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, who rose spectacularly to power during this period as head of the Youth Congress. Whilst he was no doubt a key figure, Sanjay cannot be blamed for an entire programme, yet this has become “part of the party’s official history” (Mehta, xiv). Journalist Sumanta Banerjee has seen the events staged by the BJP government around the twenty-fifth anniversary of the declaration of Emergency as a similar attempt to marginalise its more oppressive and controversial aspects in national history, instead confining it to the realms of commemorative memory. He wrote in 2000 that Indira Gandhi “would have had a hearty laugh at the acrobatics being indulged in by both the perpetrators and victims of the Emergency alike” (Banerjee 2205).

Gender and the Indian Emergency

19

In historiography and other scholarship, there has also been a tendency to gloss over the period as a mere mishap. As one sociologist has noted, an enormous amount of “intellectual energy and vigour” devoted to work on India since independence has been influenced, if not driven, by a strong “national concern with the Indian polity” (Gupta 20). Francine Frankel, for example, writing around the same time as Rushdie, claimed that India, “virtually alone among the new nations, retained a deep commitment to principles of parliamentary democracy during the three decades after independence” (3). Another commentator asserted India to have moved “unwaveringly” since independence to become “one of the world’s most stable parliamentary democracies” (Stern 180). The Emergency, declared in the dead of the night, eliminating parliamentary functioning and placing Indira Gandhi in an arguably authoritarian position, can have no place in such positive hegemonic conceptions of the nation. With little critical work devoted to the Emergency generally, even less attention has been paid to one of its key facets, the sterilisation programme. As with other aspects of the regime, the existence of coercion in the form of incentives and disincentives for sterilisation, the state’s use of brute force and the horror stories of operations gone wrong, do not fit with the historical construction of the democratic, benevolent Indian nation and government. This is the first glaring absence in the historiography of the Emergency which clearly begs further enquiry, and which Rushdie’s novel directly speaks back to. The narrator Saleem consistently writes against the historiographical trend of marginalising the Emergency period. He is well aware that “we are already forgetting”, with newspapers talking of Gandhi’s “political rebirth” (355). Preserving his memories of the nation which culminate in the events of the Emergency into chapters in the pickling factory, he describes them as “thirty jars...waiting to be unleashed on the amnesiac nation” (460). Rushdie’s ability to negotiate the official national narrative of the Emergency, to reveal an alternative to the rest of the nation, comes in part from his position as a diasporic writer. In his essay Imaginary Homelands he characterises himself as belonging to a group “who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths” (5). This cultural displacement, and Rushdie’s subsequent acknowledgement that even his version of India is “no more than one version of all hundreds of millions of possible versions”, is integral to his ability and desire to challenge the official narrative of Emergency events (10). He depicts a BBC interview given by Indira Gandhi in which “the official version of the State of Emergency was well expressed”, where she asserted that claims that “bad things had happened...forced sterilisations,

20

Chapter One

things like that” were “all false” (14), and he stresses that “literature can, and perhaps must, give lie to official facts” (14). Rushdie’s diasporic position is central here. By his own admission, his sense of displacement and hybridity serves to facilitate his disruption of the official narrative and negotiation of the hegemonic conceptions of the benevolent and unwaveringly democratic nation state, which have elsewhere pushed other Emergency narratives to the periphery. Certainly, Midnight’s Children is the first of several fictional depictions of this period from writers within the Indian diaspora which have sought to challenge this official version of events and depict aspects of the Emergency which have not been analysed at length in scholarship.2 The second glaring absence in Emergency historiography is the lack of attention given to gender. This chapter will proceed from Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s claim that “the question of gender irresistibly poses itself” in relation to Gandhi’s position (109), as well as to investigations of Emergency power and policies more broadly, and forced sterilisation particularly. Joan Wallach Scott was one of the first to articulate the productive capacities of gender as a category of analysis for all histories, not only for narratives on women, by emphasising the importance of reading social, political and economic histories as gendered.3 Crucially, Scott argued gender to be a “primary way of signifying relations of power” (1067), a key “field within which or by means of which power is articulated” (1069). Such ideas, of gender being a key mode of analysing historical power relations, have flourished in postcolonial scholarship. This has been much influenced by Edward Said’s pioneering work Orientalism, which analysed the discursive construction of colonial power relations through the binaries of Orient and Occident, feminised oppressed colony and masculinised ruling coloniser.4 Particularly in the historiography of India, scholars have built upon Said’s reference to the gendered nature of this power binary to demonstrate the ways in which gendered images and discourses were fundamental to British colonial power, to the nationalisms that contested it and to the emergent independent nation.5 Despite its flourishing application to the historiography of colonial India, gender has not been used significantly as a platform from which to investigate the politics and events of the Emergency period. Questions of gender are unequivocally “posed” by the Emergency. Given Scott’s broader arguments, its imposition by a female entrenched in a dynastic based power and with the sterilisation of bodies and destruction of family homes, the role of gender is clearly evident. However, few scholarly works, besides Sunder Rajan’s few pages on Gandhi, have taken up these

Gender and the Indian Emergency

21

issues of gender. That is, besides Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children. The figure of “The Widow”, representing Indira Gandhi, is demonised consistently throughout the novel and gendered images and concepts are foregrounded in this demonisation (as well as throughout the narrative), reminding readers of the oppressive and harmful consequences of Gandhi’s Emergency rule. Moreover, the sterilisation programme, represented in the novel by The Widow’s drive to halt the reproduction of the children of midnight, is also foregrounded, depicted in detail and in distinctly gendered terms, with a particular emphasis on its impact on Saleem’s conception of himself as male. Thus it is through the use of these gendered images that Midnight’s Children exposes Emergency excesses and displaces its official narrative. However, others have taken issue with this use of gender, and many have specifically criticised the vilification of Gandhi through cultural stereotypes of womanhood in the text. This, combined with other aspects of the narrative, has prompted critics to condemn Rushdie’s presentation of women and treatment of gender in the novel, and indeed, elsewhere in his canon. Inderpal Grewal and Chau Verma’s interpretations are particularly well known, and are often drawn on as evidence for Rushdie’s “anti-woman” stance. Whilst Grewal praises Rushdie’s focus on the fragmentary and the marginal, particularly manifest in the novel’s form and structure, she argues that Shame’s actual depiction of women remains “so problematic” (124). Others have made similar observations about the individual female characters in Midnight’s Children. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, for example, allows for no way to read the novel’s stereotypical depictions of the feminine as anything other than negative. She claims that Rushdie’s “hostility in the foregrounding of her [Indira Gandhi’s] widowhood must remain inexplicable except as a culturally conditioned misogyny” (113-114). Grewal’s main issue with Shame, that “the narrator’s voice, a male one, is the only one that’s heard”, is clearly applicable to Midnight’s Children. For Grewal, this facet absolutely “undermines the feminist project of the novel” (125). Others have sought to read this silence in a more positive (or at least less absolutely catastrophic) light. Nalini Natarajan, for example, allows for the minor role which women play in the narrative voice to be less damning, by “foreground[ing] her marginality as a strategy of reading” (400). Analysing the various forms of femininity reflected in the novel, she is attune to Rushdie’s disruption of idealised norms of womanhood that serve national consciousness and needs. However, she fails to connect these disruptions to Rushdie’s anti-Emergency dialogue; instead, she defines them as evidence that, “in contemporary India,

22

Chapter One

poverty drives women to present a different kind of spectacle” (405). As an overarching theory to explain the more negative or stereotypical aspects of Rushdie’s female characterisation, this is clearly flawed; is the spectacle of The Widow a result of development and poverty? The answer must be no; whilst poverty affects some women in the novel, thus influencing their gendered performances, it is not universally applicable to all of the female characters. Nicole Weickgenannt, in her essay on the use of the “monstrous” in the novel in relation to women, aligns Rushdie’s text with feminist historiography at large in the way in which they both “seek to open up spaces where complex and contradictory histories can be delineated” (68). It is, for Weickgenannt, only “Saleem’s paranoia” which “frequently spills over into misogynist remarks and characterisations” (74). However, given the number of negative experiences Saleem has at the hands of the novel’s women and The Widow in particular, it would be fair to argue that his fear of ‘too many women’ is more rational than paranoid. Moreover, as this study seeks to foreground, to dismiss the novel’s invocations of negative cultural manifestations of womanhood, to simply write them off as the result of the narrator’s mental instability, does not allow room for them to emerge as an effective critique of Gandhi and the Emergency. In fact, much of the criticism on this novel that accuses Rushdie of being anti-women actually abounds in the discursive and ideological practices that uphold binary gender relations. Viewing the depiction of a widow with green and black hair as nothing more than the cultural stereotype of an evil female witch entails a failure to critically think outside of culturally constructed gendered images. Furthermore, there exists a distinct tendency to conflate all female characters in the novel. Nicole Weickgenannt continues to argue that, in his paranoia, “Saleem effaces women’s individuality by imagining them as a powerful cosmic force...as a collective entity” (75). She is not alone in this interpretation that tends to group together the novel’s women. Neil Ten Kortenaar, listing Saleem’s fears, also includes the fear of “widows like Mrs Dubash, Indira Gandhi and Reverend Mother” (115). The conflation of the novel’s women here is problematic. Does Saleem, in an act of misogyny, uncritically group these women together and oppress their individual femininities? I would argue that this is not the case, and is rather a shortcoming in the novel’s existing criticism. To take Kortenaar’s conflation of the novel’s widows, Reverend Mother is formidable and presents a definite threat to men, especially Aadam Aziz. However, there is an unequivocal element of comedy in her character, particularly in her catchphrase “whatsitsname” which is starkly absent in the case of The

Gender and the Indian Emergency

23

Widow. She is also a well-defined mother figure, shaping her daughters’ lives and actively caring for them; however, this is again absent in the representation of Gandhi. Each female character in the novel is distinct. They have their own identities (speaking generally and in terms of gender), and this misogynistic practice of conflating Saleem’s women seems to be a tendency in the novel’s readings, rather than in the text itself. Literary criticism has thus failed to explain Rushdie’s representation of women and invocation of female gendered identities in a way that is not merely misogynistic. Thus, there exists a gap in scholarship which this chapter seeks to address. In analysing the presentation of women in the novel, this study argues that the more hostile depictions of woman, mother and widow are not a result of uncritical and brazen misogyny, but carefully, and successfully, constructed resistance to Indira Gandhi and her leadership during the Emergency.

Gender and Resisting the Emergency Throughout her time as Prime Minister and particularly during the period of the Emergency Indira Gandhi was pragmatic in her gendered performances. She strategically drew on cultural constructs and images of femininity to bolster and defend her position and her politics. Judith Butler has theorised gender as a “stylized repetition of acts”, an “identity constructed in time” (“Performative Acts” 912); a performance constructed by gestures and “ongoing discursive practice[s]” (Gender Trouble 33). Gandhi’s own “discursive practices” proliferated during the Emergency period. An active speaker in any case, with the political opposition imprisoned and stringent press censorship in operation, Gandhi’s personal speeches and writings were the voice of the Emergency. It has been noted that in her position “as a woman autocrat, she could use symbols and images denied to her male counterparts” (Guha 495), yet Gandhi’s use of these symbols and images has not been thoroughly analysed. In Rushdie’s fictional representation, however, they are explored, displaced and explicitly resisted. Gendered subject positions saturated much official speech and writing during Gandhi’s early career, as she drew on that powerful cultural image of Indian Nationalism, “Bharat Mata”, making abundant public references to her childhood, family and domestic life.6 With rising opposition throughout 1974 and 1975, culminating in the Allahabad ruling against her, Gandhi’s integrity was consistently under question. Following these doubts with the aggressive and arguably dictatorial imposition of

24

Chapter One

Emergency rule, there emerged a distinct need for explanation and defence of her actions, to India and the world. Significantly, it was through the evoking and consolidating of these typically female gendered images and discursive practices that she advocated the Emergency and her position at its head. As Sunder Rajan highlights in her analysis of Gandhi’s personal politics, “the acceptable face of leadership is service, it denies power, stresses sacrifice, and positions the hierarchy of public duty and private affections to give primacy to the first” (8). Gandhi consistently articulated herself in this submissive and servile manner. In her first speech following the declaration of Emergency rule, she defended it on the grounds that “all my life has been in the service of our people” (Speeches and Writings 177). She consolidated this by (rhetorically) asking audiences to allow her actions to speak; for example, “May I ask for your continued cooperation and trust in the days ahead?” (178), and in a speech in the Lok Sabha stressing, “I respectfully and humbly request that the opposition try and help in this positive effort” (my emphasis 190). Given the fact that this particular speech was delivered a month after the proclamation, with most members of the opposition imprisoned, it is safe to assume that the purpose of this request was the projection of humility and servility rather than a genuine plea for cooperation. The “positive effort” to which Gandhi is, in the above quotation, imploring the opposition to cooperate in was the establishment of discipline, the oft parroted need of the hour during the Emergency: law and order. In Midnight’s Children, the first significant appearance of The Widow comes in the form of Saleem’s fevered dream, which sees the demonic “green and black” character viciously hunting the children of midnight. Far from being an image or atmosphere of law and order, the scene is utter chaos. This sense of disorder is created by the lack of punctuation in these paragraphs, the rhythmic, almost hypnotic repetition: “no colours except green and black the walls are green the sky is black”, and the culmination of the actual chase and crescendo in the rhythm of the prose where the children are “torn in two in Widow’s hands...rolling rolling halves of children” (208). This powerful early impression of The Widow is a clear subversion of the official rhetoric of law and order being created by Emergency governance. Here instead, it bears absolute disorder, obliterating all functioning, paralleled in the lack of formal and narrative structure. This clearly corresponds to Rushdie’s emphasis on the fragmentary, which is central to his diasporic disruption of events into a multitude of versions (“Imaginary Homelands” 10). Moreover, this part of the text clearly speaks back to the projection of a servile, humble and submissive figurehead—Gandhi in the role of The Widow—which is in

Gender and the Indian Emergency

25

direct opposition to this image. Instead, she is assertive, oppressive and ruthless. Rushdie continues to subvert Gandhi’s perpetuation of herself as serving the order of the nation as he gives this role over to his narrator. Whilst Saleem attempts to bring order and sense to the events through his narrative, “woman” is consigned to the role of disruption instead of service, as he claims: “you can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them in a stroke” (185). The notion of servility in regards to Gandhi is also brought under scrutiny in the novel as Saleem visits his Uncle Mustapha. He describes his dedication to The Widow as follows: If Indira Gandhi had asked him to commit suicide, Mustapha Aziz would have ascribed it to anti-Muslim bigotry but also defended the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally, performed the act without daring (or even wishing) to demur. (391)

This not only undermines Gandhi’s claims to be servile by explicitly exposing her position as master but also calls into question the very nature of servility and the extent to which it manifests as complete coercion. Clearly, there is no space for “respectfully” or “humbly” in the relationship that The Widow as Gandhi has with those who serve her. The typically feminine identity of mother and caregiver (I conflate the two here, as Gandhi often does in her discourse, as does Rushdie in his resistance of it) were also central to Gandhi’s public image. Throughout her time in office she published on her own experiences of mothering her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv, publicly proclaiming motherhood to be a woman’s highest fulfilment (Gandhi, Speeches and Reminiscences 41).7 Gandhi consistently drew on this gendered position and rendered the relationship between herself and the public during the Emergency as that of a mother caring for a sick child. A semantic field of health and illness ran throughout official addresses, with countless references to the “paralysis” that faced the government from the opposition and thus warranted Emergency rule (Gandhi, Speeches and Writings, 178, 181, 190, 227). She explicitly consolidated this rhetoric in one broadcast, asserting to have felt that: ...the country has developed a disease, and if it is to be addressed, it has to be given a dose of medicine, even if it is a bitter dose. However dear a child may be, if the doctor has prescribed bitter pills for him, they have to be administered for his cure....So we will give this bitter medicine to the nation. (228)

26

Chapter One

Here, Gandhi clearly situated the nation in the position of an ill child, Emergency measures as the cure, and herself as the benevolent care giver restoring health. She secured this analogy firmly in terms of the gendered identity of mother and the Indian national identity of Bharat Mata, following it with the insistence that she too was pained by this sickness: “Now when a child suffers the mother suffers too” (228). She used this image consistently throughout the Emergency, right until the calling of elections in January for March 1977, as she pointed to the “abnormality” of the nation prior to the declaration and implored that as it was now “being nursed back to health, we must ensure there is no relapse” (302). When Saleem reveals The Widow’s nefarious plan, the “smashing, the pulverising, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight” (427), he explicitly contradicts her projection of herself as a caring mother; as he tells his listener, “Yes Padma: Mother Indira really had it in for me” (421). Rushdie removes some of the value traditionally associated with motherhood by emphasising the fragility of the role, largely by the sheer quantity of mothers that Saleem has in the novel—Amina Sinai, Vanita Winkie, Mary Pereira and Reverend Mother, to name just a few. Keeping open the question of Saleem’s parentage, allowing multiple women to occupy the position of this mother serves to undermine some of the traditional natural authority of the role, and in turn the authority that Gandhi drew on in her powerful rhetoric of herself as mother of the nation. Furthermore, through this multiplicity of mothers, Saleem directly displaces the traditional power structure of the mother-child relationship: Child of an unknown union, I have had more mothers than most mothers have had children; giving birth to parents has been one of my stranger talents—a form of reverse fertility beyond the control of contraception, and even of The Widow herself. (243)

Saleem undermines Gandhi’s role as public, national mother by disrupting the very concept, and later in the novel he also attacks her role as personal mother. He describes the elevation and multiplication of Sanjay Gandhi and his Youth Congress followers as being in opposition to natural ideas of birth and mothering, as “certain unelected Sons of Prime Ministers...had acquired the power of replicating themselves” (395). Here, Rushdie taps into widespread fears, surfacing towards the end of the Emergency, regarding the growing influence of Sanjay Gandhi. He uses to full force the popular idea that her public mothering of the nation was playing second fiddle to her personal role as mother to Sanjay who, unqualified and inexperienced, rose spectacularly during the Emergency and became

Gender and the Indian Emergency

27

heavily involved in the carrying out of sterilisation and beautification policies.8 As well as explicitly writing back to Gandhi’s appropriation of the gendered identity of mother, Rushdie disrupts her care-giving image. Rather than being the mother of the nation healing its ills, The Widow in the novel serves to inflict illness and harm. The “bitter medicine” that The Widow administers is all bitter and no medicine, and rather than curing any national ailments, her actions are represented as ruinous. Physically and emotionally, Gandhi’s Emergency actions, epitomised in her attack on the children of midnight, are depicted as disempowering and destructive. In direct dialogue with and resistance to Gandhi’s own rhetoric, Rushdie situates this representation firmly within a discourse of medicine. Saleem describes the attack thus: Ectomy (from, I suppose, the Greek): a cutting out. To which medical science adds a number of prefixes...Masectomy tubectomy vasectomy testectomy. Saleem would like to donate one further item, free gratis and for nothing, to this catalogue of excisions; it is, however, a term which belongs properly to history, although medical science is, was involved. Sperectomy: the draining out of hope. (437)

Here, Gandhi’s image of carer is directly inverted; she causes harm and ill rather than heals. Her attack, the “ectomy”, results in the destruction of Saleem, as he reveals early in the narrative that having been “subjected to drainage above and drainage below” by The Widow, he is “falling apart...My body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history...has started coming apart at the seams” (37). Given Saleem’s embodiment of the nation from birth, “handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country,” his physical destruction at the hands of The Widow is representative of Gandhi’s destruction of the nation (9). The very characterisation of Gandhi as The Widow is crucial to Rushdie’s resistance of her leadership and the Emergency. Rushdie draws on powerful cultural connotations of Hindu widowhood, conceived in some popular imaginings not only as a woman’s tragic loss of husband, but as her destructive power and capacities over men. He also taps into a long and contentious history of the practice of Sati, the sacrificing of a Hindu widow following the death of her husband. Saleem’s treatment by women in the novel, and his fears regarding this, link directly with these ideas about the destructive capacity of women. This is prevalent throughout the text, as he claims, “what leaked into me from Aadam Aziz, a certain vulnerability to women” (275). It is this power and destruction at

28

Chapter One

the hands of the feminine which propels the novel’s events and around which Saleem’s story pivots: Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to The Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called and (erroneously in my opinion!) gentler sex. (404)

Again, I would argue that this emphasis on woman’s destructive power acts not as an instance of misogyny, but as a form of resistance. Gandhi consistently evoked the stereotypical stance of “woman-as-victim”, projecting, alongside the images of motherhood, service and domesticity, a discourse of victimisation and vulnerability. Speaking particularly in the wake of the declaration of the Emergency, she consistently referred to the opposition’s “dastardly attack[s]” (Speeches and Writings 177) and the way in which “baseless and false allegations, even abuses, were hurled” at her (226). Clearly, this is directly challenged in Midnight’s Children, as Saleem takes the place of the vulnerable victim, abused and attacked by Gandhi as The Widow and by other women in the novel. The importance of these gendered subject positions to Gandhi’s public and political identity is clearly attested to by her own reaction to the novel. Rushdie recounts the response in his introduction to the Folio Society edition of Midnight’s Children. In 1984, Indira Gandhi launched a legal case against both writer and publisher, “claiming to have been defamed by one single sentence” (xiv). Rushdie provides us with the sentence in question: “It has often been said that Mrs Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through neglect, of his father’s death, and that gave him an unshakeable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything” (xiv). Rushdie is quick to note the absurdity of her taking issue with this one sentence (during the legal case, she declared this to be her one and only complaint), when the novel at large unapologetically and consistently exposes and condemns her for many Emergency malpractices and violations of human rights, most notably forced sterilisation. This episode clearly indicates the importance of these relationships and the identities of mother, wife and widow to Gandhi; it shows them to have been essential to her public image and political power. Rushdie’s subversions of Gandhi’s performative and discursive manipulations of gendered identities are important for analysing and resisting that power. His writing back to her invocations of benevolent femininity is particularly crucial given their insincerity and her actual noninvestment in the category of woman. Despite consistently evoking stereotypically feminine symbols in her Emergency rhetoric, she staunchly

Gender and the Indian Emergency

29

distanced herself from any kind of female solidarity or efforts for India’s women. She stated: “I am not a feminist. I am simply doing a particular job and would do it wherever I was placed” (qtd. Ali 152). Throughout the Emergency, although Gandhi spoke at a number of women’s conferences, she consistently opened her addresses by denouncing the events, in one instance with the statement that, “I am a bit allergic to such conferences” (Speeches and Writings 523), and in another she chided them as “repetitive and costly” (753). She also consistently advocated general rights and criticised any lone focus on women, for example urging that “the under-privileged in the world are not only the women....Don’t think that men are liberated by any means” (525). Given her non investment in the position of women and her use instead of female gendered identities to cement and articulate her personal power and the politics of the Emergency, it is particularly worrying that Gandhi advocated the most destructive of the Emergency policies, sterilisation, on the basis of such gendered subject positions. She officially promoted the Emergency sterilisation campaign on the grounds that it “redresses the balance of the sexes...giving women greater control over their lives and children a chance of a better life” (605). Problematically, she continued to draw on feminist notions in her public recommendations of coercion and compulsion. In one address in April 1976, following the National Population Policy which officially sanctioned states to implement sterilisation by force, she stated: “those who oppose any element of pressure ought to remember that conservative groups once argued that forcing them to send their girls to school was a violation of their rights” (605). Thus Rushdie’s subversion of Gandhi’s image of the benevolent female also serves to undermine this aspect of the Emergency. The farcical nature of the state’s official justification of mass, coercive sterilisation is further emphasised in Saleem’s reinterpretation of the policy, not as one of real investment to, as Gandhi claimed above, improve the lives of women, but instead as a means to cement personal power and eliminate dissent and threat. During the Emergency in the novel, Saleem describes the cry in the magician’s ghetto that “they are doing nasbandi (sterilisation)” (429), but reveals that “all of this has been a smoke screen” (430). The chaos and arrival of government officials in the ghetto simply allows for Shiva to capture Saleem and other children of midnight for The Widow. It is this act of kidnap that inaugurated the “civic beautification and vasectomy programmes” and they are rendered as no more than “diversionary manoeuvre[s]” for the quashing of dissent from the children of midnight (432).

30

Chapter One

As we have seen, the negative implications of The Widow serve Rushdie’s purpose of resisting Indira Gandhi and the Emergency, but elsewhere in the novel, there emerge presentations of women that are more explicitly positive, notably in the character of Padma. Some have interpreted Padma as an essentialised representation of (stereo)typical femininity and domesticity: longing “to create a typical family unit with Saleem...characterised as the stereotypical, simple, home-oriented woman, continually attempting to woo Saleem through her exhibition of domestic qualities such as food preparation” (Upstone, 269). It seems inadequate to interpret this relationship as the woman-wooing-with-food versus manbeing-wooed-with-food when Saleem is the one in the business of dealing with food and “preserving”. Moreover, Padma is actually far from being such a simple beacon of domesticity. She is an incredibly complex character, strong and assertive, “bullying” Saleem and his narration “back into the world of linear narrative” (38). Moreover, as the narrative progresses and Saleem’s cracking body becomes weaker, it is her “musculature” and wide hairy forearms that support him, literally and in narrative terms: “these days...it’s to those muscles...that I’m telling my story” (270). Nor is her femininity restricted to that of a simple, homeoriented woman. Padma is actively sexualised in Saleem’s depiction of her as desirable and sexually powerful as he describes his impotence: I can’t leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds her right leg around my waist, inclines her head towards mine and makes cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear. (39)

She may not be successful in straddling Saleem, but she manages to successfully straddle the gendered binaries, as her character embodies aspects of both stereotypical masculinity and femininity. It is significant that Rushdie makes this complex female, who is not confined to the domestic realm, arguably the most important character in the novel, as the narrative is close to collapse in the period of her absence from the factory. She is invested with equal importance to the memories that make the content of the text, as Saleem describes his position as “the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild God of memory and the Lotus Goddess of the present”(150), and manifests his anxieties when “in her absence, my certainties are falling apart” (166). The complexity of this characterisation clearly discounts any arguments regarding an inherent misogyny in the novel.

Gender and the Indian Emergency

31

Conclusion Rushdie has poignantly deployed literature as a means to disrupt official views and present us with alternative histories. He argues that the writer of imaginative fiction and the politician are natural enemies, each fighting to put forth their own versions of reality. In his essay “Imaginary Homelands”, he is keen to emphasise literature’s role in resistance, claiming that: Description itself is a political act...it is clear that redescribing a world is the first step towards changing it. And particularly when that state takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized. (13) The Emergency has certainly realised a political distortion of reality and an official narrative of events, which Rushdie is able to negotiate and undermine from his diasporic perspective and his commitment to the “provisional nature of all truths” (“Imaginary Homelands” 12). The general “forgetting”, which has taken place on a wide scale, makes Rushdie’s novel of resistance to the Emergency crucial. It is important that we do not dismiss the characterisation of The Widow and the treatment of Gandhi in the novel as authorial misogyny, or as a result of a paranoid narrator. Doing so would entail removing a large aspect of the novel’s politicised resistance. This chapter has demonstrated some of the ways in which Indira Gandhi used gendered images and identities to consolidate and project her personal power, and justify the Emergency and its policies. Further, it has examined how Midnight’s Children directly speaks back to Gandhi’s use of these gendered identities, inverting them and resisting the Emergency through this inversion. The character of The Widow, drawing on culturally conditioned stereotypes of women, serves therefore as a carefully constructed “political act”, a “redescribing” of the history of the Emergency that has not appeared in historiography. This study, whilst countering accusations of misogyny in Midnight’s Children and emphasising some distinctly positive representations in the novel, has argued that Rushdie’s text creates a carefully constructed, and effective, gendered critique of Indira Gandhi and India’s political Emergency.

32

Chapter One

Notes 1. For further elaboration on the events during the Emergency, see E. Tarlo. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Print. See also chapters 22, 23 & 24 in R. Guha. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. London: Macmillan, 2007. Print. 2. Further examples include Arun Joshi’s The City and the River (1994) and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1999). 3. See J. W. Scott. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”. American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053-1075. Web. 8 May 2013. For a fuller discussion of the changes in gender theorising in this period, and the profound influence of Scott’s article on the discipline of History and beyond, see the chapter “Gender, Post Structuralism and the ‘Cultural/Linguistic’ turn in History” in L. Downs. Writing Gender History. London: Hodder Education, 2004. Print. 4. See E. Said. Orientalism. 1978. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print. 5. See particularly M. Sinha. Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Print. See also S. Banerjee. “Make me a Man!”: Masculinity, Hinduism and Nationalism in India. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Print. 6. See, for example, the government published pamphlet, Indira Gandhi: Prime Minister of India. The text here focuses on Gandhi’s early childhood years, domestic life and filial relations more so than on her political career or credentials. The pamphlet also contains a series of photographs, which open with images in her youth accompanied by Gandhi and her father, Nehru, consistently evoking the importance of family in her power. The importance of concepts of Mother India to her political image is also evidenced here, as amongst the portraits and snapshots of Gandhi is an image of the figure Bharat Mata by Tagore (21). 7. One collection of speeches and publications, published in early 1975, for which Gandhi had written a signed foreword includes a chapter dedicated to depicting her family life and role as mother. See pp. 37-44 of Indira: The Speeches and Reminiscences of Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. Print. 8. For further discussion see V. Mehta. The Sanjay Story. 1978. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2012. Print.

Works Cited Ali, Tariq. The Nehrus and the Gandhis: An Indian Dynasty. London: Pan Books Ltd, 1985. Print. Banerjee, Sumanta. “Serenading the Emergency.” Economic and Political Weekly 32.26 (2000): 2205-06. Web. 1 Dec. 2013.

Gender and the Indian Emergency

33

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. —. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 900-12. Print. Downs, Laura Lee. Writing Gender History. London: Hodder Education, 2004. Print. Frankel, Francine. India’s Political Economy 1947-1977. Surrey: Princeton University Press, 1978. Print. Gandhi, Indira. India: The Speeches and Reminiscences of Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. Print. Grewal, Inderpal. “Salman Rushdie: Marginality and Shame.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. D. M. Fletcher. Amsterdam: Radopi, 1994. 123-44. Print. Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. London: Macmillan, 2007. Print. India. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Indira Gandhi: The Prime Minister of India. New Delhi: 1968. Print. —. Speeches and Writings of Indira Gandhi, 1972-1977. New Delhi: 1984. Print. Joshi, Arun. The City and the River. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1994. Print. Kortenaar, Neil Ten. Self, Nation and Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 2004. Print. Mehta, Vinod. The Sanjay Story. 1978. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2012. Print. Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Print. Natarajan, Nalini. “Woman, Nation and Narration in Midnight’s Children.” Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Ed. Janet Price and Margret Shildrick. New York: Routledge, 1999. 399-412. Print. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. 1981. London: Pan Books Ltd, 1982. Print. —. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1992. 9-21. Print. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print. Scott, Joan Wallach. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053-1075. Web. 8 May 2013. Soni, Veena. “The Development and Current Organisation of the Family Planning Program.” India’s Demography: Essays on the Contemporary

34

Chapter One

Population. Ed. Tim Dyson and Nigel Crook. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1984. 141-58. Print. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Upstone, Sara. “Domesticity in Magic Realist Fiction: Reversals of Representation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 28.1/2 (2007): 260-84. Print. Verma, Charu. “Padma’s Tragedy: A Feminist Deconstruction of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Feminism and Recent Fiction in English. Ed. Sushila Singh. New Delhi: Prestige, 1991. 154-62. Print.

CHAPTER TWO COMMUNAL VIOLENCE AND WOMEN AT HOME AND IN THE DIASPORA IN ANITA RAU BADAMI’S CAN YOU HEAR THE NIGHTBIRD CALL? SANCHARI SUR

Abstract In the majority of ethnographic research, Indian women are portrayed as passive victims of violence and, due to a variety of cultural taboos, many women choose not to answer back to these claims directly because they risk dishonour in their communities.While ethnographic research seeks answers from traumatised victims, a fictional text can recreate or reimagine events, freeing authors from the scrutiny of factual accounts and offering a myriad conflicting, paradoxical and, at times contested responses to these events. I explore a fictional account of the 1984 antiSikh riots in India and its resonance among Sikhs in Canada in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006), and argue that a woman’s differential responses to trauma have to be understood in the context of her gendered upbringing and socio-historical circumstances that are temporal and contingent. Through the character of Bibi-ji, this chapter shows the ways in which trauma crosses religious and national borders, and opens up possibilities for envisioning changing national and religious allegiances in the background of violence. Keywords: trauma, women, Canada, India, Indian diaspora, Sikh identity, communal violence, Indian diasporic literature

36

Chapter Two

Alienation in the Old and New Diaspora Diaspora theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Brian Keith Axel, Vijay Mishra and Stuart Hall refer to the idea of the homeland left behind as an imaginary homeland created by the migrant in the diaspora. I make a distinction between “old homeland” and “new homeland,” where “old homeland” refers to the assumed place of origin (India), and “new homeland” refers to the diaspora (Canada).1 While Ahmed, Mishra and Hall posit that an imaginary old homeland is created by the diasporic subject in the new homeland in order to alleviate feelings of alienation due to racism, Axel offers his notion of a “diasporic imaginary” (1) where the imaginary homeland is not a reference to the old homeland that pre-exists migration. Instead, Axel uses the example of Khalistan for Sikhs, where Khalistan refers to a third new homeland, separate from the “old homeland” or the current “new homeland”. It is also important to note that while Mishra and Axel use the term “diasporic imaginary,” both theorists use the term differently in their theorisations. Mishra uses it to refer to an imaginary “old homeland,” while Axel uses it to characterise an imaginary “new homeland” that exists only as a possibility or as a desire to create one. In the creation of an imaginary homeland, whether old or new, all four theorists refer to a “feeling” or “affect” component within diasporic subjects. In reference to the “affect” component, Ahmed writes of communities in the diaspora that come together based on the sharing of “grief” for the loss of an imagined (old) homeland (141). She argues that “affective communit[ies],” are produced by the “feeling” of “loss” that brings diasporic subjects together in the new homeland (141). According to Ahmed, the feeling of loss is an imagined loss, where despite the “feeling” that is experienced by the diasporic subject, the subject is unable to name that loss (140). Mishra also refers to this feeling of “loss” (423), where diasporic subjects create an imaginary (old) homeland in order to “preserve that loss” (423). The “loss” refers to the loss of an imagined old homeland, which the diasporic subject is unable to come to terms with in the new homeland. Citing racism as a reason, the diasporic subject stays in this alienation and refuses to become a part of the national ideal (Ahmed 142). The subject, thus, forms an attachment to the feeling of loss. However, according to Mishra, the loss is connected to the trauma of a single moment when the migrant was “wrenched from” his old homeland (423). Mishra believes that this “moment” is transformed into a “trauma” of absence, where the trauma is “a sign of loss” (423). Since this absence is not fully symbolised by the subject, the subject represses the absence

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

37

into a loss. While Ahmed views the “loss” of an imaginary (old) homeland as an imagined loss of a beloved (140), Mishra maintains that the loss is a repression of a feeling of absence (423). Axel and Hall, on the other hand, theorise about a feeling of alienation that rises out of violence against the migrant’s community.2 Alienation produces in the diasporic subject a need to create an imaginary homeland, whether an imagined old homeland (in the case of Hall), or an imagined new homeland (in the case of Axel). Edward Said’s theory of metaphorical exile in the diaspora can be used to explain this feeling of alienation. “Metaphorical exile” refers to a state of mind where the subject construes himself/herself as an outsider within his homeland, real or adopted (52). A person can be in a metaphorical exilic state of mind both in the homeland and in the diaspora. While Said’s theory is based on Palestinians displaced by force, feminist theorists like Gayatri Gopinath, Annanya Bhattacharjee, Mandeep Grewal and Sara Ahmed aim to specifically theorise the experience of women in the homeland (India and South Asia) and the Indian diaspora. According to these theorists, women experience a sense of displacement in the homeland because of patriarchal attitudes towards females. This sense of displacement can be explained through Said’s sense of metaphorical exile. However, even though Gopinath points to metaphorical exile among women in India due to patriarchal ideologies, it can be argued that both men and women can experience a metaphorical exilic state of mind due to their position in society, irrespective of their gender status.

Exile and representation in diaspora Anita Rau Badami explicitly reveals this sense of metaphorical exile in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? through her portrayal of ethnic and religious minorities in India, such as the Sikhs, who experienced a sense of displacement and alienation due to the communal violence that targeted them following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. According to Axel, “a set of official and unofficial [Indian] policies ha[ve] been implemented [against the Sikhs] since the early 1980s…that has effectively positioned [them]…at a point of marginality beyond the reach of national and international human rights jurisdiction” (416). Axel specifically refers to Operation Blue Star, where in the siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, the Indian army fired upon innocent pilgrims, many of whom were women and children. These violent events in the history of India indicate that, similar to Axel’s and Hall’s postulation of alienation experienced in the diaspora due to racist violence, religious and

38

Chapter Two

ethnic minorities in India can also experience alienation through violence committed against them. Grewal, Gopinath and Bhattacharjee explain the alienation of Indian women in the diaspora through the idea of double displacement. Since a woman is metaphorically displaced in the Indian homeland due to patriarchal attitudes towards females, scholars argue that a physical displacement in addition to her metaphorical displacement adds to her sense of exile, where she is both in physical and metaphorical exile. Grewal, Gopinath and Bhattacharjee talk of “added burdens” in the new homeland, which adds to the diasporic subject’s alienation. Due to a fear of the “alien culture” of the new homeland (Ramanujam 147), the diasporic subjects often end up alienating themselves further. In order to escape from this feeling of alienation, the diasporic subject reconstructs an imaginary homeland. Steven Vertovec in “Religion and Diaspora” points to religions that can represent diasporas by themselves. Using Robin Cohen’s examples of Judaism and Sikhism (189), Vertovec argues that since members of these religions are “considered to comprise discrete ethnic groups…marked by their religions” (10), these groups can be considered to represent separate diasporas. Vertovec’s view aligns with Axel’s postulation that diasporic Sikhs all over the world imagine Khalistan as their imaginary homeland, regardless of being in a new or old homeland (426). In Vertovec’s findings, he also discovers that “following migration [,] women play…[a] key role…in reproducing religious practice” in the diaspora (15). Vertovec holds women responsible for carrying religion over to the diaspora. Here, Vertovec echoes Hall’s postulation that the diaspora can be a site of “becoming”. Women, then, are responsible for how they reproduce and transform religion in the diaspora. According to Vertovec, a Sikh diasporic subject will not transform his Sikh identity in the diaspora, unlike other religious minorities. As my analysis in this chapter reveals, however, Badami’s novel contradicts Vertovec’s findings; we find tolerant Sikhs turning towards militancy in situations of communal strife. Thus, Badami’s fiction opens up alternate ways of addressing the transformation of Sikh identity in the diaspora.

Communalism, Violence and Women in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? looks at the lives of three women— Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo—in the background and aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and other violent events as precursors and

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

39

results of the assassination. While the narratives of Bibi-ji and Leela contrast life both in India and abroad (in Vancouver, Canada), Nimmo’s narrative focuses on life in Delhi, India. Badami portrays the changing religious identities both in India and abroad for Bibi-ji and Leela, while focusing on Nimmo’s changing religious identity within India. Nimmo’s narrative stands out due to the difference in the kind of displacement she faces. While Bibi-ji and Leela are physically displaced from their homelands due to their husbands’ career and life choices, Nimmo’s physical displacement is a result of the violence and cross border mass migration following the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Bibi-ji and Leela experience a displacement that is slightly voluntary in nature, while Nimmo’s displacement is forced, which leaves her with emotional scars deeper than either Bibi-ji or Leela. At the same time, Leela also stands out for the trauma she carries of being a “half and half” (74). As the daughter of a high-caste Hindu Brahmin father and a “casteless German” mother (77), who is growing up in a traditional Brahmin family in India, she experiences alienation within her family. Ceaseless taunting by her Hindu relatives at home results in her sense of metaphorical exile as a child. In this metaphorical exile, Leela’s mother’s unexpected accidental death comes as a welcome respite, and allows Leela to make a choice of taking ownership of her father’s religious identity while still a child (87). Bibi-ji’s trauma, on the other hand, is almost second-hand. The loss of her mother and sister (in the same cross border migration where Nimmo loses her family) takes place while Bibi-ji is in Vancouver with her husband (54-55). Bibi-ji’s trauma rises out of her guilt and helplessness from being unable to save her family from the instabilities of the Partition. For the scope of this chapter, my discussion will analyse the ways in which Bibi-ji negotiates her national and religious identities in the background of violence against minorities both in India and its diaspora in Canada. The institution of family features prominently in Badami’s novel in the formation of a woman’s religious identity. Premilla D’Cruz and Shalini Bharat point to the family as one of the primary sites for gendering processes that help shape a woman’s personal, political and communal identities (167). D’Cruz and Bharat assert that family, being the first institution that a child comes into contact with, is key in shaping the desires and identities (self, political, personal, religious) of the child through processes that emanate from both the male and female members of the family (168). Peter van der Veer points out that the family cannot be the only force acting on the formation of religious and national identities of children. Instead, there is a need to look at the larger “political

40

Chapter Two

economy” that the family is a part of (257). Political forces also play a major role in the early development of identities (religious and national) of both men and women, according to van der Veer. The importance of both the familial and the political is illustrated well in this novel. In Bibi-ji’s case, her childhood desires are shaped by the dreams of her father (as a result of his unsuccessful journey to Vancouver on Komagata Maru) and the teachings of her mother. Bibi-ji spends her childhood and her teenage years in Panjaur, a tiny village described by Badami as “a dot in that landscape of villages scattered across the fertile plains of West Punjab” (3). With her visions restricted to the small village life, Bibi-ji listens to her father “open-mouthed even though she had heard the story [of Komagata Maru] a hundred times already…” (12). She dreams of going to Vancouver after countless retellings of the story of her father’s failed journey in 1914. Due to the dreams shaped by her father, she plans and prevents her sister from being chosen by her prospective husband from Canada. On the day of her sister, Kanwar’s, bride-viewing [Bibi-ji] looked down at her sister’s face…and was filled with sudden envy. It would be Kanwar, after all, who would go to the country that [Bibi-ji] had dreamt about ever since she could remember. But Canada… was her fate. She was the one who longed for Abroad. She wished that this man who was causing such a flutter in the house was coming for her. Why, she thought, a single look at me and he would demand to marry me like all the other men have. An idea crept into her mind. Why not give him the choice, why not let him see both of us sisters and decide? (Badami 27)

Here, we can see Bibi-ji demonstrating agency through her deliberate attempt to win Kanwar’s prospective groom for herself. Although only sixteen, Bibi-ji desires Canada as “her fate”. She wants “Abroad” for herself. In her choice of Canada, Bibi-ji does not recognise that although she makes this decision consciously, the desire for the preference has been inculcated in her as a child through her father’s desire. Her father’s retellings transferred his desire to reach Canada into his daughter, where he reminded Bibi-ji, almost without fail, of how he was “almost there” (11). She fails to recognise that her desire is not her own, but a desire that has been relocated from her father to herself. However, even in her failure to recognise her second-hand desire, Bibi-ji rejoices in her deliberate plan to steal her sister’s prospective groom, and escape to “Abroad,” a land spoken of nostalgically by her father. The complexity of this desire for the unknown highlights the complexity of women’s desire for change. In this relocation of desire from father to daughter, Badami shows that desire can be fluid, and has the ability to move from one person to another. Bibi-ji’s

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

41

desire is a product of her father’s dreams, and not her own dream. In this instance, Bibi-ji’s agency is a reflection of somebody else’s choice. Therefore, keeping in line with D’Cruz and Bharat, Bibi-ji’s desire is shaped by her father’s desire. While Bibi-ji’s desire for the unknown “Abroad” (Badami 27) turns her into a diasporic subject, Bibi-ji’s mother helps to shape her religious identity. While her mother professes the equality of all religions, Bibi-ji is constantly aware of her own religious identity as a Sikh. In the village of Panjaur, for instance, Bibi-ji often prays to a Hindu holy “stone”: [A] holy stone, believed by the Hindus of the village to harbour a powerful goddess, reared out of the earth. It was smeared with turmeric and vermilion and someone had scattered flowers around it… [Bibi-ji] touched the stone, earnestly whispering a prayer, as she and Jeeti often did together. As a Sikh she already knew that she was not supposed to worship idols and stones and pictures, but her mother had said that gods from all religions were holy and it would not hurt to pray to them now and again. (7-8)

Bibi-ji’s awareness of her religious identity as a Sikh is strong as a six year old, even as she prays to the holy Hindu stone. Her belief that all religions were equal, a belief stressed upon by her mother, indicates that despite holding onto a strong Sikh religious identity, her mother also taught Bibi-ji to be tolerant of other religions in the village. Similarly, Badami makes a reference to another young Sikh girl, Jeeti, whose religious rituals mirror those of Bibi-ji’s. This implies that both girls, who come from Sikh households, have been conditioned by their parents to uphold a secular outlook towards all religions, especially in their village where people from three different religions—Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam—reside. However, the contradiction between the parents’ beliefs about the equality of all religions and the living arrangements within the village hint at the complexity of communal beliefs within this rural community. Badami points to the segregation of living arrangements within Bibi-ji’s village pre-partition days based on the religions of the people of the village: “The house in which Bibi-ji…lived with her parents and Kanwar was as unassuming as its surroundings. One of a small cluster of Sikh and Hindu houses, it was separated from the Muslim homes by fields of swaying sugar cane” (3). In this instance, there appears to be a sense of equality between Hinduism and Sikhism. The separation of Hindu and Sikh houses from that of Muslim houses suggests a conscious segregation of the villagers based on their religious identifications. Badami points not only to the institution of family in shaping the religious

42

Chapter Two

identity of their children, but also to the institution of social community that shapes this religious identity, as is the case with Bibi-ji. While on the one hand, the Sikh villagers believe in the potency of all religions, on the other, the villagers wilfully keep a distance between their community and the communities of the Muslim others. Bibi-ji’s belief in the equality of all religions is confined to her regular prayers offered to the Hindu stone, while her identification as a Sikh is unquestioned even by herself. This contradiction between belief and practice implies the existence of an “Us versus Them” mentality in this pre-partition village in 1928. Therefore, even as a six year old, Bibi-ji does not mistake her mother’s tolerance for other religions as a divorce from Sikhism, but as a tolerance that does not challenge her religious identity as a Sikh. Tolerance, then, can exist only in the condition where separate religious identities are not under attack. Thus, Bibi-ji’s religious identity is not shaped as a secular identity, but as a strong Sikh identity with a tolerant outlook. With her religious identity firmly in place, Bibi-ji’s transformation from a rural to an urban woman is a result of her own desire for change; a desire that is supplemented by her husband’s desire for a wife who can fit into life in Canada. In other words, Bibi-ji’s search to create a new identity works in tandem with her husband’s desire for the same: [Pa-ji] would cover several sheets of paper with impassioned essays on the history of the Sikhs in North America. He seemed to be obsessed with his community, and underlined the richness of Punjabi traditions and culture. Then, in seemingly direct contradiction, he would write that she should learn English ways, should become a modern woman so that she would be able to settle into life in Canada. [Bibi-ji]… was confused—what exactly did he want her to be? A traditional Sikh or an English mem? (32-33)

Pa-ji, Bibi-ji’s new husband, insists that his young wife imbibe the best of both worlds (traditions of a rural Punjabi Sikh woman and the ways of an urban English-speaking woman), implying the differences that exist between the two worlds. Badami portrays Pa-ji as a firm believer in his religion. At the same time, she also complicates Pa-ji’s religious identity by incorporating “contradiction” into his desire to transform his wife into a person who can straddle both the traditional (Sikh) and the modern (Canadian) worlds. This desire refers back to Vertovec, where he asserts that the Sikh diaspora is a representation of a discrete diaspora (10). Therefore, Pa-ji’s allegiances lie with a Sikh identity that has adapted itself to Canadian demands. The integration of two different identities (Sikh and Canadian) by Pa-ji implies that he does not believe in sticking to one identity or the other, and uses his Sikh and Canadian identities to suit

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

43

his desires and needs. For Pa-ji, being modern does not imply being separated from traditional, religious Sikh ideals, but modification of the self according to the national ideal of the country he inhabits. His Canadian national ideal, then, refers to Hall’s theory of diaspora as a site of “becoming” (394). At the same time, Pa-ji’s need to assimilate exposes Pa-ji’s insecurities of being an Other in Canada. Pa-ji is candid about his otherness and wants to protect his wife from being subjected to such otherness. In his endeavour to protect his wife, he instructs Bibi-ji to imbibe “English ways” so that she can transform into a westernised woman. His intentions are not to create an inner struggle within Bibi-ji. Instead, he hopes that his instructions will help Bibi-ji overcome such struggles when she joins him in Canada. However, despite his intentions, his insistence creates a constant struggle within Bibi-ji; a struggle she negotiates through her religious identity as a Sikh. In Canada, however, Bibi-ji does not display a sense of alienation or additional burdens as postulated by feminist critics like Gopinath, Grewal, Bhattacharjee, Ramanujam and Ahmed. Instead, Bibi-ji uses her newfound business sense and freedom to run Pa-ji’s business. She refuses to take credit notes, unlike her husband, and makes use of the newcomers that litter her and Paji’s apartment: [H]er apartment upstairs…had become a stopping place for newcomers…Pa-ji believed in running an open house. Anyone was welcome…[Pa-ji said,] ‘People helped me when I came here, and this is my way of paying back. We are strangers in this land and have nobody but our own community to turn to’…Pa-ji had said nothing when she stopped taking credit notes, even though she knew that the grumblings and the mutterings from the customers had reached him. But on the matter of their house guests she knew he would not budge. However, there were other ways of dealing with the endless train of people wandering through their home… The women understood this and made themselves useful…without being asked. It was the men who lounged around…. ‘They need to be kept busy…. They can help in the shop’ [Bibi-ji said to Pa-ji]… ‘Yes… you are right,’ Pa-ji sighed and gave up. (42-48)

Bibi-ji once again displays an agency that is at odds with the views of the aforementioned feminist critics. Just like she takes her fate into her own hands back in India, in Canada, Bibi-ji manipulates her husband in ways that she knows will be profitable to their business. She displays her inner strength at being able to take control of an unfamiliar situation. Bibi-ji’s display of business acumen and her desire for change allows her to take control of both her husband’s business, as well as matters undesirable to their existence in Canada (such as the presence of unwelcome guests in her

44

Chapter Two

house). In this case, Bibi-ji chooses family over community, despite her strong religious identity as a Sikh. In this choice of the personal over the larger Sikh community, Bibi-ji demonstrates the importance of her personal desire over her husband’s desire. It is worth noting that this allegiance to the personal over the community is possible due to her husband’s support in her decisions. On the other hand, in his desire to provide newcomers with a place to stay, Pa-ji displays his own sense of “feeling” like a stranger (47). He insists to Bibi-ji that Sikhs are strangers in Canada. By positioning himself as a stranger in Canada, Pa-ji echoes Ahmed’s “melancholic migrant” (140). The migrant, here, is Pa-ji and he is unable to integrate himself into the national ideal of his adopted country. His melancholia at an imagined “loss” (140) is reflected in his desire to mark the Sikh community as his family in an alien land. The loss that Pa-ji refers to is an underlying nostalgia for his Sikh community back in India, a community that he wants to recreate in Canada. Pa-ji’s extension of the Sikh community as family refers to Ahmed’s “affective community” (141), where Pa-ji insists that the new homeland is not home, in any sense: “[Pa-ji said to Bibi-ji,] ‘People helped me when I came here, and this is my way of paying back. We are strangers in this land and have nobody but our own community to turn to’” (47). Through his assertion that the Sikh community is an extended family in the diaspora, Pa-ji shows how Sikh communities crystallise around migrant anxieties of beginning anew in an alien land. Despite his earlier demonstrations of being an assimilated Sikh through his letters to Bibi-ji (Badami 32-33), Pa-ji’s own sense of alienation is evident in his desire to maintain his ties with his community in “this land.” Pa-ji’s “paying back” demonstrates his desire for a second imaginary home within Canada in the form of an extended Sikh community. However, I want to argue that this second imaginary home within Canada is not a reference to Axel’s “imaginary homeland,” or Khalistan (421). Here, Pa-ji’s desire does not reflect those of militant Sikhs who insist on Khalistan (Axel 421), which comprises of a separate piece of land, but a desire to build a hospitable Sikh community or an “affective community” of Sikhs in Vancouver. Pa-ji’s desire can be read through Mishra’s lens of “old diaspora,” where he writes about Indian “diasporas of exclusivism” that wanted to create relatively “self-contained ‘little Indias’” in the diaspora (422). Therefore, Pa-ji wants to create a second home where he can coexist with his Sikh brethren as well as with other Canadians. Similar to Pa-ji, Bibi-ji also facilitates the formation of an “affective community” of diasporic South Asians in Vancouver through the restaurant, Delhi Junction. She chooses this name deliberately to represent

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

45

the multitude of ethnic identities that exist both in India and in the diaspora: Bibi-ji felt that they needed to have a broader appeal, so they settled on The Delhi Junction Café….On one wall she hung lithiographic prints of the ten Sikh gurus…painting of the Golden Temple…maps of India and Canada, pictures of Nehru, Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Marilyn Monroe, Meena Kumari, Clark Gable and Dev Anand. On another wall were clocks displaying the time in India, Pakistan…Vancouver, England, New York, Melbourne and Singapore….Bibi-ji had chosen the menu items carefully, making sure that neither beef nor pork were included so as not to offend any religious group. (Badami 59-61)

This recreation of a shared community by Bibi-ji is similar to Pa-ji’s desire for community as an extended family. At the same time, Bibi-ji is interested in catering to more than just the Sikh community for economic reasons. Bibi-ji’s decision to fill the walls of her café with pictures that have an appeal to both Canadians and Indians shows her desire to cater to the different religious and ethnic groups in Canada. She also decorates the walls of the café with clocks that display times in both India and Pakistan. This shows that Bibi-ji is sensitive to Indo-Pak differences, and wants to promote harmony among her Indian and Pakistani customers. She also displays a good business sense in attracting different kinds of customers to the café. She deliberately chooses her menu items that are religiously inoffensive to both Hindus and Muslims. Bibi-ji displays a conscious effort to bridge any such segregation in the diaspora. For Bibi-ji, the café acts as a neutral zone where she offers free advice to new immigrants (60) and brings about a feeling of a secular community where Muslims and Hindus, as well as white Canadians and non-white Canadians can tread as equals. In this conscious choice of a neutral zone, Bibi-ji’s character challenges Gopinath’s notion of doubly displaced women in the diaspora. Instead of being doubly displaced, Bibi-ji creates a second homeland within this physical displacement that keeps any form of alienation at bay. Bibi-ji demonstrates herself to be secular when she chooses to hold onto parts of her religion that are non-militant or non-violent in nature. Despite embracing her husband’s “made up” family history (203), she does not approve of her adopted son’s embracing of the militant aspects of Sikhism. Bibi-ji’s disapproval is evident in her open contestation of Pa-ji’s decision to educate Jasbeer in the militant aspects of Sikh history: ‘What did [Jasbeer] do this time?’ Pa-ji asked... ‘He took a kitchen knife to school. He said he wanted to be like your father[,]’ [replied Bibi-ji.]

46

Chapter Two A guilty look crossed Pa-ji’s face…‘A few days ago he wanted a kirpan, like the one in my father’s photograph.’ ‘Your fake father’s photograph,’ corrected Bibi-ji. (205)

A kirpan (or, a dagger) is one of the physical markers of Khalsa Sikh men (Axel 418). However, Pa-ji does not subscribe to the violent, militant aspect of Sikhism, unlike Khalsa Sikhs (Axel 414), identifying himself, instead, with the category of non-militant Sikhs. In this example, Pa-ji’s guilt rises from the misinformation about his own family history that he provides to Jasbeer. The man in the portrait that Pa-ji claims to be his father is a photo of a Khalsa Sikh that Pa-ji picks up from a roadside vendor (203). By imbibing a Sikh identity that is not part of who he is, Paji’s pretence reveals the deception and the duality of his own Sikh identity. While he claims to be a Sikh proud of his religion, history and heritage, Pa-ji uses photographs of other people to lay claim to a history that he is not a part of. In this self-creation of a Sikh identity, Pa-ji shows his own insecurities as the Other in a foreign land. His need to use a made up history shows his desire to be respected among his own community in Vancouver, which is also an “othered” community in the diaspora. Pa-ji negotiates his otherness in a new land through his claim to a false selfhistory which reflects Hall’s theorisation of diaspora as a site “of becoming” (394). Pa-ji strives to become a new person through his creation of a false historical identity. The diaspora, then, acts a site of transformation for Pa-ji who uses a false past to build his present and, potentially, his future. The complexity of Bibi-ji’s religious identity becomes evident in her visit to India to celebrate “the martyrdom of Guru Arjun Dev” (310). As Axel notes, for the Khalistani Sikh subject, the Sikh martyr is of importance. The martyr becomes a symbol for heroism and takes away the connotations of violence from the “tortured body” (414). Even though Bibi-ji is not a Khalistani Sikh subject, she engages in the celebration of Guru Arjun Dev. For her, Guru Arjun Dev represents a Sikh hero, and not the violence of martyrdom attached to his tortured body. Moreover, her choice to visit the Golden Temple under risky circumstances shows her personal agenda to rid herself of the guilt of having failed her niece Nimmo in the upbringing of Jasbeer (311). Bibi-ji visits the holy city of Amritsar in the background of Operation Blue Star. Due to her unawareness of the impending military action by the Indian state, she disregards the advice of her relatives (315). Bibi-ji insists on staying at the temple with Pa-ji during that period. She hopes that through such outward acts of devotion towards her religion, she will be able to overcome “her sins” (311). Her personal agenda also reflects back

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

47

upon her selfish desire to steal her sister’s prospective groom, along with her “surreptitious” cutting of the ends of her hair (35), even though it went against her religion. Therefore, Bibi-ji chooses to practice her religion according to situational and personal need, rather than from her inner sense of loyalty towards her religion. Bibi-ji’s desire to turn towards militarism after Pa-ji’s death (337) also highlights her lack of judgment of the consequences of supporting violence. As Axel notes, the self aligns itself with the violence of Khalsa Sikhs in order to alleviate the minority status heaped upon them by the Indian state (425). Bibi-ji, too, aligns herself with the violent Khalsa subject, seeking to transform Pa-ji’s death into martyrdom. Bibi-ji’s changing allegiances point to the fickle nature of her own religious identity. In Pa-ji’s absence, she strives to overcome her personal loss through an attitude of revenge. She assigns blame for his death to the Indian state and the Hindu majority, rather than resign herself to his death. Through calls for revenge, she hopes not only to overcome the trauma of her husband’s death, but also to avenge his death. In her decision to break away from Pa-ji’s previous tolerant influence where he did not support the cause for Khalistan, Bibi-ji demonstrates her own agency. She joins other members of the Sikh community in a rally against the Indian Commission in Vancouver: ‘I wish to join the rally too,’ Bibi-ji said…surprising herself…Dr. Randhawa arrived again…He had been right after all, she told herself. The Indians had humiliated the Sikhs and they had killed her Pa-ji. It was now a question of defending the faith, the thing that gave them, as a tribe, a face and a distinction. (337, 343)

Just as she had acted on an emotional impulse at her sister’s bride viewing, here again Bibi-ji allows her emotions to take over. Instead of abiding by “her” Pa-ji’s non-violent disposition, she chooses violence to assuage her grief over his death. Despite her earlier disapproval of Dr. Randhawa and his views on Khalistan, she welcomes him into her home, and uses violence to reason away Pa-ji’s violent (albeit accidental) death. Bibi-ji’s reasoning is skewed by her grief, and in this grief, she allows the militant part of Khalsa Sikh identity to become a part of her religious identity. Allegiance towards religious identity, then, depends on the situational (here, Pa-ji’s death) and personal (Bibi-ji’s decision to support the Khalistani movement), rather than being determined by her allegiance to the dominant identity of the community at that moment of crisis. Even though the Sikh community in Badami’s narrative largely calls for allegiance towards the Khalistani movement, it is only the violence of Paji’s death that triggers Bibi-ji’s shifting allegiance from being a non-

48

Chapter Two

Khalistan supporter to being a Khalistan supporter. Religious identity, then, is at the mercy of personal emotions, rather than the emotions of the community. Bibi-ji turns towards anger as a way to overcome the effect of loss that she experiences. While Ahmed refers to an imagined loss of a beloved (140), Bibi-ji’s loss is a reference to the actual loss of a beloved. In this actual loss, Bibi-ji’s motivation to alleviate her feelings is stronger than a desire for an imaginary homeland, Khalistan. Her desire to fund the Khalistan movement does not lie in the desire for another homeland. Rather, her decision is based on personal motivation based on revenge for Pa-ji’s death.

Shifting Identities in the Diaspora Bibi-ji’s story shows the ways in which religious violence crosses borders despite the differing locations in Amritsar, India, and Vancouver, Canada. She suffers in Amritsar after the immediate impact of her loss of Pa-ji, and then in Vancouver, her loss travels across space (as she is unable to let go of the trauma of Pa-ji’s death). She uses her financial power for revenge on behalf of militant Sikhs in Canada, giving in to a war mentality in hopes of inner peace. Communal violence, then, creates a space of instability for women, whether in the homeland or the diaspora. At the same time, Badami’s complicates the notion of national belonging for women by moving her female protagonists from India to Canada. Bibi-ji’s character demonstrates that it is possible to be both a Sikh and a Canadian. Through the fictional representations of Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo, the novel shows how the dynamics of class, caste, religion and location can function in the background of communal violence, and trauma as a result of that violence. While my analysis shows (in part) the ways in which communal violence subsumes nationality, religion, class, caste, gender and space (homeland versus diaspora), the difference lies in the ways in which the characters deal with the trauma of communal violence. Then, it is important to note here that through both ethnographic research and the study of fictional representations, it is possible to open up debates about the coexistence of religious minorities within the national imagination of both India and its diaspora. However, while fictional narratives may be considered limiting in their authenticity, they can allow a circumventing of the ethical question of inflicting further trauma upon victims through a researcher’s desire for that same authenticity.

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

49

Notes 1. For more information on the definitions of diaspora as well as additional analysis of this novel see “Introduction” in Sur, Sanchari, "Communal Violence, Trauma and Indian Women: Fictional Representations of Women in Manju Kapur's A Married Woman and Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?". 2. Sikh migrants often carry a desire for Khalistan from the old homeland of India to the new homeland of United States, Canada or Britain.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Melancholic Migrants.” The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 121-60. Print. Axel, Brian Keith. “The Diasporic Imaginary.” Public Culture 14.2 (2002): 411-28. Print. Badami, Anita Rau. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print. Bannerji, Himani. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press and Women’s Press, 2000. Print. Basu, Amrita. “Hindu Women’s Activism in India and the Questions it Raises.” Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia. Ed. Patricia Jeffrey and Amrita Basu. New York: Routledge, 1998. 167–84. Print. Bhattacharjee, Anannya. “The Habit of Ex-Nomination: Nation, Woman, and the Indian Immigrant Bourgeoisie.” Public Culture 5.1 (1992): 1945. Print. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur, eds. Theorizing Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print. Bryjak, George J. “The Economics of Assassination: The Punjab Crisis and the Death of Indira Gandhi.” Asian Affairs 12.1 (1985): 25-39. Print. Chakraborty, Chandrima. Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011. Print. Crossette, Barbara. “India’s Sikhs: Waiting for Justice.” World Policy Journal 21.2 (2004): 70-77. Print. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Print.

50

Chapter Two

D’Cruz, Premilla, and Shalini Bharat. “Beyond Joint and Nuclear: The Indian Family Revisited.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 32.2 (2001): 167-94. Print. Freitag, Sandria B. “Contesting in Public: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Communalism.” Contesting the Nation. Ed. David Ludden. New Delhi: OUP, 2005. 221-31. Print. Fox, Richard G. “Communalism and Modernity.” Ludden 235-49. Gopinath, Gayatri. “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion.” Theorizing Diaspora. Ed. Jana Braziel and Anita Mannur. MA: Blackwell, 2003. 261-79. Print. Grewal, Mandeep. “Mass Media and the Reconfiguration of Gender Identities: The Bharatiya Nari in the United States.” Gender, Technology and Development 7.1 (2003): 53-73. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Braziel and Mannur 233-46. Ludden, David, ed. Making India Hindu. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. Mishra, Vijay. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora.” Textual Practice 10.3 (1996): 421-47. Print. Ramanujam, Bindignavle. “The Process of Acculturation Among AsianIndian Immigrants.” Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis. Ed. Paul Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1997. 13947. Print. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. Print. Sanyal, Usha. In the Path of the Prophet: Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and the Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama’at Movement in British India, c. 1870-1921. Diss. Columbia University, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Print. Sarkar, Sumit. “Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva.” Ludden 270-93. Print. Sarkar, Tanika, and Urvashi Butalia, eds. Women and Right-Wing Movements: Indian Experiences London: Zed, 1995. Print. Schlesinger, Ben. “The Changing Patterns in the Hindu Joint Family System of India.” Marriage and Family Living 23.2 (1961): 170-75. Print. Schermerhorn, R.A. Ethnic Plurality in India. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978. Print. Singh, Narinder. Canadian Sikhs. Napean: Canadian Sikhs’ Studies Institute, 1994. Print.

Violence and Women at Home in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

51

Singh, Pritam. “The Political Economy of the Cycles of Violence and Non-Violence in the Sikh Struggle for Identity and Political Power.” Third World Quarterly 28.3 (2007): 555-70. Print. Sur, Sanchari. "Communal Violence, Trauma and Indian Women: Fictional Representations of Women in Manju Kapur's A Married Woman and Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?" (2011). Diss. McMaster University, 2011. Web 5 July 2013. Van der Veer, Peter. “Writing Violence.” Ludden. 250-69. Vertovec, Steven. “Religion and Diaspora.” Paper presented at New Landscapes of Religion in the West Conf. School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, 27-29 Sept. 2000, 1-45. Web. 5 July 2013.

CHAPTER THREE PURDAH AND ZENANA: RE-VISIONING CONVENTIONS TULIKA BAHUGUNA

Abstract This chapter begins by looking at how purdah (the traditional Muslim covering) has been traditionally, sociologically and anthropologically defined to unearth the negative connotations that come embedded within its definition and description. It also looks at how literary scholarship has created convenient binaries like male and female, tradition and modernity while reading texts which are particularly Muslim in their orientation and setting. Owing to such a body of scholarship, a set of convenient and formulaic binaries defines purdah as being oppressive, restrictive and controlled as opposed to its presumably liberated, independent and selfdependent counterpart. These categories, then, are thought to be mutually exclusive. Examining various social and political institutions, such as the family, haveli, educational institutions and necessities of purdah since before the time of partition, particularly by writers in the diaspora, this study engages with various cross-currents between what is understood by tradition and modernity through representative literary texts. The debates between the two most important and often polarised characters in the diasporic writer Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column and Nazir Ahmed's The Bride's Mirror explicate a colonial and (de/non)colonised subject respectively, pointing to ways in which traditional acceptance of feminine spaces could be re-considered. This is done through an analysis of Attia Hosain’s disaporic orientation exhibited in her works, which drives her characters to problematise the nature of the traditional binaries and social customs.

Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions

53

Keywords: purdah, zenana, Muslim feminism, Muslim education, colonised subject, Sunlight on a Broken Column, The Bride’s Mirror

Traditional Notions of Purdah: An Introduction Speaking in the context of Victorian fiction, critic Nancy Armstrong rightly identifies the problem of literary theory in general, and feminist criticism in particular, when it comes to the interpretation of a text and its context in simple binaries which suit public readership and confirms their existing idelologies. She asserts that “[w]e are taught to divide the political world in two and to detach the practices that belong to the female domain from those that govern the marketplace. In this way, we compulsively replicate the symbolic behaviour that constituted a private domain of the individual outside and apart from social history” (Armstrong 9). Her work is exceptional because she helps to identify the root of the problem from which most feminist literary criticism draws its sustenance. This kind of exploration has been largely useful as it successfully focused on the binaries drawn between the male and female, framed as they are in the public and private spheres respectively. While this has been helpful as a mode of interpretation, it has also increasingly come to dominate the literary sphere, problematising the way in which religious institutions have often been dismissed as being repressive, largely in a western literary context. While it may be useful to question religious and cultural institutions for their ability to define the feminine, there seems to be a tendency to impose pre-conceived notions of freedom upon societies without a real understanding of the reasons and the implications of such conventions. As such, the postcolonial subject, a woman in this case, has become a passive subject over whom much of the discussion surrounding feminist independence has revolved, often without the acquiesence of the subjects themselves. In this way, postcolonial readings of Indian contexts can be seen to be limited as well as limiting in their ability to focus on the complexity of such cultural conventions as that of purdah and zenana. To a certain extent, the diaspora makes it possible to re-interpret such institutions, given the experience given by distance, to provide distance to a contentious discussion. In this study I will contest the stereotypical readings of purdah and zenana as tools for oppressing and restricting women through two novels: Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column and Nazir Ahmad’s The Bride’s Mirror. Through a discussion on the kind of criticism readily available on these two novels, I will attempt to show that such a reading is reductive, and is based on the imported western models of feminism and

54

Chapter Three

perhaps, out of tune with contextual readings of the novel. This would help us see how these two authors have internalised socially prevalent attitudes to the culturally established Islamic conventions of the veil and restrictions to physical spaces.

Purdah: Seclusion or Independence? It is interesting to look at how various critics, sociologists and writers have defined and described purdah. While Eunice de Souza defines it as “not just the burqa...but the elaborate codes of seclusion and feminine modesty used to protect and control the lives of women” (Souza xi), Jasbir Jain and Amina Amin define it as the “dividing line between tradition and modernity” (Jain vii). Reading culture in this light, they begin to read zenana as “the physical segregation of living space” (Papanek 9) or as a “shorthand for Indian women’s imprisonment” (Burton 8). Even though these views are widely accepted , they are partial and, therefore, flawed. Firstly, purdah, as the above-mentioned quotations portray, is not only a code of behaviour and modesty restricted to women but to men as well and cannot be “comprehended solely from the perspective of [women]” (Papanek 72). Even men are asked to “cast down their eyes and guard their private parts” (Papanek 23). Secondly, it would be a homogenising claim to look at purdah and zenana as tools of “oppression” used by men to “control” women. This reading renders women as passive receptors with no agency at all. As few sociologists have suggested, zenana could be looked at as a private space which a woman controls and purdah as “a logical supplement to the use of enclosed living spaces that enables women to move out of these spaces in a kind of portable seclusion…the burqa can be considered a liberating invention and is seen in this way by many women themselves” (Papanek 10). Thirdly, zenana is not just a physical space but a world in itself, a “separate world” (Papanek 4). Literary scholarship, however, has created convenient binaries like “male” and “female”; “tradition” and “modernity” and it is through these binaries that they read the literary and cultural texts. The quotation I started with substantiates this, as critics have been trained to think of the “male” and “female” worlds as mutually exclusive categories. By doing this, they reinforce the very ideas they seek to contest. By locating “political power primarily in the official institutions of state”, they “proceed as if there is no political history of the whole domain over which our culture grants women authority” (Armstrong 26). The separate worlds that men and women inhabit “relates most closely to the division of labour…yet the

Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions

55

separation is accompanied by a higher degree of mutual dependence between men and women” (Papanek 192). The most widely available and popular criticism on Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column largely supports my contentions. Even though fraught with debate, the dominant view on zenana and purdah define them as oppressive categories that “erase selfhood” and become symbols not only of “conservatism and backwardness” but also “a means of stunting individual growth and development”(Jain vii-viii). While the images and iconic representations of women who have cast off their purdah or who have crossed the threshold are looked upon as heroic, those who have not, are seen as victims of their socio-religious conditioning. Sunlight on a Broken Column is a well-known and a much translated novel. It is an important piece of work as far as Indian writing in English is concerned. It not only talks about the partition of the country but also vividly depicts the social life which preceded that watershed event. It is as much about the ruin of aristocratic ways as it is about the westernisation of the Indian society. Through myraid characters, the plot is about the clash of values in a Muslim milieu and how lives kept changing until the partition of the country. Although it is Laila's perspective which is the most dominant, she is not the only one battling this schism of intellectually invigorating ideas and a traditional upbringing. It is as much about the author, Attia Hosain herself—a girl who wants to feel uncomfortable following the imposition of socio-religious norms, because her western education teaches her to do so, but finds herself more sympathetic to traditional interpretations of culture. One notices a rebellious streak in Hosain’s protagonist Laila who constantly refers to zenana as a restrictive space. Let us first look at the physical description of the women’s quarters which is seen to be “selfcontained with its lawns, courtyards and veranda’d rooms” (Hosain 18). This space was inhabited by her aunts Abida and Majida, her cousin Zahra and Laila, along with Hakiman bua and other servants. The men’s quarters were inhabited by Baba Jan, his servants and ocassional visitors, such as Uncle Mohsin or Baba Jan’s friends. As Papanek suggests, “The allocation of labor in a purdah society is the counterpart of the allocation of living space. Women work inside the house and courtyard at tasks which include food preparation, cleaning and maintenance of house and possessions, child care, handicrafts such as spinning, sewing, weaving and embroidery” (28). While it is aunt Abida who takes care of the estates in the absence of male members of the family, she conforms to her traditional duties. Far from being an “oppressed” woman relegated to the “margins of erasure” (Jain i) she comes across as a woman who is in control of her situation and

56

Chapter Three

emotions in spite of being in purdah. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah aptly theorizes: “Actually women in Muslim households invariably had great influence and a much greater say in household affairs than menfolk. The fact that they observed purdah did not mean they were nonentities, though I know this is the general impression in the West and, like many other impressions, it is an erroneous one” (Souza 423). Even though it is an autonomous unit in itself, the life within zenana is based upon a great level of social interaction. The purdah system also encourages female interaction in various ways including imparting education. The relationships formed with the kin and other visitors often remain life-long friendships. The small household activities have been described in great detail, be it either the dyeing of dupattas or preparation of delicacies. The domestic space is bustling with activity even when there is a death in the family. The interaction with servants is also one that is of warmth and caring. Zenana, in spite of being a space meant to uphold the traditional values of honor and respect, is accommodating of characters like Mushtari Bai, who was often consulted for teaching manners and etiquette to girls. It is again a sweeping generalisation that many critics make that a woman cannot step out of the zenana. Even though “the freedom struggle led to the formation of purdah clubs enabling women to get together; there were purdah hospitals and even purdah parks” (Jain 6), it is not only these social places that women were dependent on for meeting others. They undertook journeys, whenever necessary, to meet their friends and relatives. Laila herself tells us about the theatre which they used to go and visit. Sultan Jehan Begum clears away most of the misconceptions that surround the zenana: “women are not prisoners in any sense of the word, nor are they pining behind their latticed windows, as we are sometimes led to believe by writers of fiction. They visit freely amongst each other, and their visits are not confined to the passing of a few senseless platitudes that generally mark conversation of Western women making afternoon calls upon each other. They do not ‘call’, they go for a visit of several hours or even days” (Souza 237). The relationships with servants are often like that of the kin. Even though Nandi challenged Uncle Mohsin, she is accepted back in the household and is not scolded by Aunt Abida at all. It is her father who asks her to go away and not her employers. Purdah is observed with certain individuals. We are told that in front of old servants like Karim Ali and Jumman, aunts did not observe purdah. Zahra and Laila do not observe purdah in front of Uncle Mohsin, Asad and Zahid. Papanek observes: “For Muslims, purdah stresses the unity of the kindred vis-à-vis the outside, since it is observed only before males who are outside the

Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions

57

trusted circle of kinsmen” (62). This substantiates the fact that zenana is not a rigid space or a category, as many critics portray, but rather a porous one. Apart form this, women had a legitimate right to property even though they worked in the domestic sphere. Laila too inherits her father’s share of property and is included in the discussion about the family’s future at the time of partition. Even though Laila does not acknowledge it, she was given a “liberal” western education and was allowed to wear nontraditional dresses. Every woman in the household is educated, even if it is in Arabic, Urdu and Persian. Consciously distancing herself away from the lessons of “tradition” that her Aunt Abida asked her to abide by, Laila confesses that her aunt “was part of a way of thinking I had rejected” (312). Throughout the text, Laila’s dissent has been illustrated as owing to her western education, as against the traditional education that her cousin Zahra receives. It has been emphasised by the author and over-emphasised by the critics that these two sisters are quite different from each other, often contrasting in their opinions and responses towards incidents in their lives. It would be interesting to examine this issue in greater detail. Sarla Palkar, in an essay entitled “Beyond Purdah: Sunlight on a Broken Column”, comments, “Laila is often critical of Zahra’s character and her attitude towards things, but Zahra’s limited outlook on life is also a commentary on the damaging effects of purdah culture on a woman’s psyche and personality” (113). Another telling comment comes from Jameela Begum: “Western education has fostered in her [Laila] the desire to question existence rather than passively accept the trials of life as Aunt Abida does” (Jain 210). Laila as well as critics have been critical of the characters who accept a traditional way of life and have romanticised the rebel in Laila and Nandi, a servant girl. I will follow a similar trajectory that feminist criticism follows in its critical evaluation of the text. Laila internalises the stereotypes constructed by her western education. The kind of English education introduced in India was primarily a literary education wherein cultural stereotypes were created by the British to justify their cultural superiority over the natives. Gauri Vishwanathan, in “The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India”, successfully establishes that such a “liberal” education made them feel that the “‘ignorance and degradation’ required a remedy not adequately supplied by their respective faiths” and that “such comparisons served to intensify the search for other social institutions to take over from religious instruction the function of communicating the laws of the social order” (378). Needless to say,this was a false and biased view propagated by the colonisers who conveniently overlooked the fact that “Islam...[had] given

58

Chapter Three

them [women] such legal rights and privileges as are not enjoyed by the women of even the most civilised and advanced countries...more than thirteen centuries ago” (Souza 226-7). This explains Laila’s aggressive reactions towards other people in the novel. It is her dismissive attitude towards Zahra’s education, which she does not quite acknowledge as adequate just because it is not western but traditional and religious. Yet it is Zahra who reminds Zahid that “Shias or Sunnis, we are all Muslims” (56), a lesson of unity which, as Zahid points out is different from what western education has taught—“hate each other and love us” (56). Laila does not understand Zahra’s acceptance of an arranged marriage and tells her that “I won’t be paired off like an animal” (29). However, the scene of Zahra’s bethrothal is actually quite different from the way Laila sees it. Far from being treated as “a bit of furniture to be sold to the highest bidder” (30), we see Aunt Abida’s insistence that Zahra be present while the discussion of her marriage and her bethrothal is being carried out. Despite Uncle Mohsin’s dismay and arrogance, she reminds him that “the walls of this house are high enough but they do not enclose a cemetry” (21). She herself points out that Aunt Abida was still unmarried because Baba Jan “found no one good enough for her” (22). This justifies that women were indeed not “paired off like animals”. It is quite clear that Laila refuses to see the good in her culture. In her support for Nandi, which comes quite naturally to her, being a rebel herself, she gives her blind support without bothering to inquire whether Nandi was actually at fault or not. Her “blinded” (28) response to Uncle Mohsin is not appreciated by her elders, especially Aunt Abida, who reminds her to “never forget the traditions of your family no matter to what outside influences you may be exposed” to (Hosain 38). It is, however, not for disobedience to patriarchy but for her manners that her aunt Abida scolds her, when she reminds her, “Laila, do you remember the day you did not answer when the sweeper woman said ‘salaam’ to you?...I made you apologise to her…remember, good manners are the truest sign of good breeding. Tomorrow when he [Uncle Mohsin] comes you will apologise to your uncle” (38). Rather than seeing this incident as a reminder of the social custom of paying respects even to the servants, who belong to a lower class, or a mark of culture, feminists see this as a subservience to patriarchy. Laila constantly misreads Zahra and blames her for Asad’s pain in his unrequited love. Zahra’s outburst after hearing of the firing on Muharram, and Asad’s possible death, does not, in any way, prove her love for him. It is Laila who assumes that they are in love when she sees them together. It can also be assumed that Zahra could be repudiating him for she is the one who who reminds Asad and Zahid to go

Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions

59

out of the Zenana on the night before the Muharram procession. She also shows her annoyance over his being “like a mongerel dog; kick it and it comes back, its tail between its leg” (70). Her anger while making this statement is quite apparent, which belies any understanding of her being flirtatious with Asad, as Laila contends. Laila confesses that she does not like Sylvia Tucker, her classmate who teased her at school, “Wear a burqa, then even your toe-nails won’t show...Can’t you be trusted alone...who is your boy-friend?” (52). It is this criticism of her culture that she has internalised and seeks to break away from. She talks rudely to Begum Wahid and Mrs. Wadia when they are gossiping about a Muslim girl who has run away with a Hindu boy. Her deep immersion in western education comes to the forefront when she says, “After all, there have been heroines like her in novels and plays, and poems have been written about such love” (134). Not only her hatred but even her love is deeply influenced by her education. Her own affair with Ameer begins like a typical Victorian romance. This is exactly what critics refer to, in the context of the colonial subject internalising the binaries and prejudices that the British created. This explains why Zahra is never able to rebuke Sylvia, in spite of the hatred she has for her. Her intolerance for traditional customs and modes of behaviour and her constant criticism makes Zahra exclaim, “But why do you want to fight with me? What have I done to harm you?” (30). This brings out a sharp contrast between the way a colonial subject genuinely tries to accommodate the representatives of the colonial rule and how those representatives fail to reciprocate. We are told that Baba Jan had been friendly with “Englishwomen in long, laced, ruffled dresses” (32). We also infer from various conversations that Mrs. Martin has been a regular guest in their house, who at one point of time depended upon Baba Jan’s family for her salary as Laila’a teacher. On the one hand, Laila distances herself from Zahra and Aunt Abida. On the other, she sees through the facade of “modernity” practised by Uncle Hamid and his wife. Yet one needs to acknowledge that casting away of traditional modes of behaviour, such as observing purdah and maintaining the distinctions between the zenana and mardana, has only made characters like aunt Saira, Mrs. Lal, Sita and, post-marriage, Zahra merely social butterflies. In an attempt to make themselves “modern” and “liberal”, they become ill at ease with the system they inhabit because they have lost out on the value, warmth and security that the tradition gave them. Yet Laila is full of contempt even for them. People like her find themselves displaced precisely because of their education: “The conflicting values of the world that I lived in with my aunts Abida and Majida and the one I lived in now made me so full of doubts and

60

Chapter Three

questions, I retreated more and more within myself” (201). Clearly, Laila does not come across as a reliable narrator, since she “sway[s] and bend[s] backwards thinking you are flexible and being fair, but you really are unsure” (124). Barbara Metcalf in “Reading and Writing about Muslim Women in British India” confesses that she found The Quran and Hadith “strikingly different” because, in spite of talking about a “crucial difference” between the men and women in terms of their roles, it made no distinction between the essential nature and potential of men and women. She says, “the assumption that any patriarchal system must posit notions of a distinctive female nature, of male-female complementarity and, hence, of ‘opposite sexes’ is clearly wrong” (7). As opposed to the commonly held stereotypes about a purdah society (denying the female sex any education and means to develop their personalities or causing them any psychological harm), Metcalf suggests that “Thanawi [an early twentieth century religious scholar] demonstrated none of the nineteenth century European pseudoscience that suggested that too much study was detrimental to girls” (7). She also expresses her surprise when Thanawi includes “Eve as a model of true repentance”(8) and not temptation. She also emphasises the fact that the book, owing to its egalitarian values, gave no indication of the fact that it was meant to be read only by the girls and addressed issues pertaining to the whole community and not just to women. A similar attitude informs Nazir Ahmad’s The Bride’s Mirror. Set in Delhi, it is the story of two sisters, Asghari (one with sound judgement of mind) and Akbari (the spoilt one), who, owing to the differences in their attitudes, are shaped in completely different ways. However, the novel is not so much about stereotyping women, as is commonly believed, but about contesting those stereotypes, which explains why it instantly became a best-seller. It comes as no surprise that Ahmad believes that respect for a person is influenced not by one's gender but one’s attitude. With her tact and intelligence Asghari turns fortunes in favour of her family and Akbari treads the opposite course. From the first line of its Preface, the novel talks about the family as a unit, sustained by the efforts of both the parents, emphasizing the fact that “the world is like a cart which cannot move without two wheels—man on one side and woman on the other” (Ahmad 7). Yet he does not mean that women should stay within the domestic space and not step out. He lauds the achievements of women in the public sphere as well, naming a few who have “administered the affairs of nations—of the whole world, not of a little home or a family” (8). In an amusingly conversational style, he asks women to acquire not only religious knowledge but other as well, such as management of accounts

Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions

61

and other skills that they can employ “during their time of need” (10). The emphasis throughout the book is on self-dependency and cooperation. After a long rebuking narrative, he advises women, “learn to read, and while you are seated behind a purdah you make a tour of the whole world. Get knowledge, and without going outside the house you may become acquainted with what has happened in all the ages” (15). The details of household work, on the washing of clothes, careful handling of ornamnets and recipes; how a girl should conduct herself show that the author has studied domestic life very carefully and minutely. Throughout the book, the author has emphasised the need for cooperation in keeping a house, not only between a husband and a wife but also between a mother and a daughter. “Mothers can teach in the course of conversation what a schoolmaster cannot teach in years of tuition” (16). In other words, the management of the household rests largely upon a woman’s shoulders. In this way, “domestic fiction mapped out a new domain of discourse as it invested common forms of social behaviour with the emotional values of women” (Armstrong 29). The female virtues exemplified by Asghari, the novel’s protagonist, are replicated in Mehmuda, Asghari’s sister-in-law. Asghari provided an ideal and a paradigm for middle-class women to aspire to become virtuous, not through their wealth or beauty but through their disposition, skills and individuality. She began to represent an individual’s value in terms of her “essential qualities of mind” (Armstrong 4). By telling Husnara that “in this world we ought to extend our social intimacies as far as possible” and by convincing her mother-in-law that “there is no sense whatever in letting a family drift into bankruptcy through hankering after display” (170, 176) she articulates the need for reform, and curbing of expenses incurred on a marriage by the parents of a girl, which were essentially a manifestation of aristocratic decadence. Seeing the family as a microcosm of the whole society, she reminds her mother-in-law that “if we all agreed, we might put a stop to every expense which is superfluous” (177). It not only meant a reformation of a family but consequently of a society which linked happiness and success with money, a practice that Islam thoroughly criticised and warned against. It is in this way that a body of writing comes up and addresses specifically a female audience by being close to the domestic sphere in its representation. Looking at Nazir Ahmad’s portrayal of “life in Delhi a hundred years ago” (Ahmad cover page), one sees a society based on a social contract. It required a woman’s consent and the success of such a contract was based primarily upon the female: “the man brings his earnings home, and lays them down before the women, and they, with their woman’s wit, make the money go so far, by economy and good management, but the credit and

62

Chapter Three

respectability of the family defy reproach” (7). It is clear that far from being passive victims, women are active agents in this social contract. In fact, Asghari works actively to keep her family intact, away from the forces that might disrupt its functioning. She manages to get Mama Azmat out of her way through the intervention of her father-in-law, which she achieves by writing to her brother. She attends to her domestic affairs quite well, which helps her to accumulate enough funds for Mehmuda’s marriage. She manages to bring her sister Akbari and her husband back into the house. Willingly refusing a bigger trousseau than her sister she explains, “why should anything be done which will cause a breach between two hearts?” (57). Also, “a high degree on the interdependence between the man and women in psychological terms…also means that there is a high premium on marriage and family life” (Papanek 198). Advising his daughter on married life, Durandesh Khan writes, “marriage is beginning of a new world…they should submit themselves to pull this burden…in perfect amity and concord. For what is the alternative? Angry quarrels and disputes…make the world’s hardships ever more and more distressing” (Ahmad 61). The mere length of the letter is enough to tell us that domesticity is no easy business and needs a lot of tact and skill. Despite the hard-work that its upkeep entails, domesticity is seen as a refuge from the harsh economic world outside. Asghari, working within the bounds of the tradition, comes across as a modern individual, who reasons things out, even the traditions that she willingly follows. She is a storehouse of advise that concern not only the household but the public sphere as well. From the beginning we are told that she regularly corresponds with her father through letters. She does not blindly follow the tradition, stifling herself, as is commonly assumed of women treading the traditional path. Stressing matrimony as a mutual contract, she tells Tamasha Khanum that “my city is where he is with whom my life is bound up” (154). Her anxiety about visting her husband, who lives far away, is borne mainly from the fact that “if I do not go my home will be wrecked for my whole lifetime” (155). She decides to go and help her husband get rid of the unwanted influences in his life and reminds him again of his duty towards his family. The domestic space is vivid in its descriptions. Social relations fill up the zenana. Relatives visit each other on various ocassions. Maternal aunts come and resolve conflicts so that family as an institution can be preserved. Not only are the sexes interdependent but there is an interdependence even amongst the members of the same sex. The domestic set up is also dependent upon the servants for their comfort. In both the novels under scrutiny, one is able to see the dependence on servants to buy things

Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions

63

from the market since the women of the house are in purdah. This can be validated by the fact that Asghari waits for the right moment to oust Mama Azmat, since she knows that the debts that the family has incurred have all been brought about by the servants on behalf of the family. The domestic space also intervenes and influences the functioning of the public sphere. Through her wisdom, tact, and fruitful advice, Asghari manages to secure employment for her husband, and later for her brotherin-law as well. In another incident, we see Tamasha Khanam helping Asghari’s family “settle matters” (87) with Hazari Mal, the money lender, through her husband’s contacts. Akbari’s marital discord often sends her husband to her maternal aunt’s house. Even while Asghari is busy arranging Mehmuda’s match in Husnara’s family, we see close kinship relations between Husnara’s mother and her aunt who discuss and advise each other on significant issues such as marriage proposals. Asghari also becomes a small enterpreneur with her school, which imparts not only religious education but also practical skills of domesticity. Her instruction also includes lessons on history, geography and maths. It is interesting to note the way she teaches her students various things while making them play, thereby creating and developing an interest in the learners. In spite of being a woman in charge of the domestic sphere, we see her depth of knowledge not only in religious affairs but affairs that dominate the public sphere. When Safihan voices a commonly held assumption that she “cannot bring [her]self to believe that a woman by nature can do king’s work” (141), Asghari corrects her that a woman in a public sphere “does exactly the same things that men do who are kings” (141). Contrary to what one might expect, Asghari is quite accommodating, understanding and respectful of a society which works on different principles from hers. She does not, as the colonisers often did, demonise the “other”. Neither does she idolise and hero-worship them. She draws a logical parallel in the Queen of Bhopal, who like Victoria, learned “the laws and regulations under which the country was governed” (143). Another striking feature of this episode is the way in which Asghari dimantles the traditional argument that purdah is something which is understood only and mostly in terms of a physical veiling. As already mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, purdah is a mode of behaviour which can be practiced with or without the veil. Asghari tells Safian about a village where the women did not observe a physical veil, a burqa, and yet “observed such a modesty and propriety of demeanour” (143).Yet it is not a story of blind, selfless devotion that we see here. A comfortable space accorded to women is accepted by them, not as a burden but in a way in which they actively

64

Chapter Three

engage with it and seek to change and improve upon their way of life. In other words, it is a world in itself. In a number of ways, “this book shows very well that in Hindustan women who keep purdah have considerable influence in the affairs of the household; and when the effect of education falls on intelligence and virtue, that influence can be the cause of extremely desirable results” (Ahmad 202). If one remembers that men and women complement each other, they would be able “to maintain the family’s status in the world outside” (214). This justifies the point that “those cultural functions which we automatically attribute to and embody as women—those , for example, of mother, nurse, teacher, social worker, and general overseer of service instituions—have been just as instrumental in bringing the new middle classes into power and maintaining their dominance as well as economic take-offs and political breakthroughs we automatically attribute to men” (Armstrong 26). Attai Hosain throughout the text is struggling with the (dis)comforts of her western education and her diasporic standpoint which lead her to examine these concepts in a more nuanced way. Our trained habits of creating binaries, even while viewing culture as a text, “makes it so difficult for us to see the relationship between the finer nuances of women’s feelings and the vicissitudes of a capitalist economy run mainly by men” (Armstrong 27). It would be apt to conclude, in a more selfreflective way, that “as the official interpreters of the culture past, we are trained, it appears, to deny the degree to which writing has concealed the very power it has granted this female domain” (Armstrong 27). Looked at in this light, the domestic sphere or zenana then transforms itself into a “counterimage” of the public sphere, a mini-culture (and not necessarily a counter-culture) within the larger framework; a microcosm within the macrocosm. Given Hosain’s diaporic standpoint, she is able to arrive at conventional systems of society with the experience of the outsider, reading a traditional context in a way which creates explored nuances rather than blind acceptance. In contrast, Ahmad’s contextualising of such Islamic conventions read into the wider way that tradition could be examined by being part of the society itself.

Works Cited Ahmad, Nazir. Trans. G. E. Ward. The Bride's Mirror. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 1899. Print. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Poltical History Of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions

65

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Burton, Antoinette M. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1994. Print. De Souza, Eunice, ed. Purdah: an Anthology. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print. Hasan, Zoya, ed. Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994. Print. Hosain, Attia. Sunlight on a Broken Column. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1961. Print. Jain, Jasbir and Amina Amin, eds. Margins of Erasure: Purdah in the Subcontinental Novel in English. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd., 1995. Print. Metcalf, Barbara. "Reading and Writing about Muslim Women in British India." Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and State in India. Ed. Zoya Hasan. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994. 6-14. Print. Palkar, Sarla. "Beyond Purdah : Sunlight On A Broken Column.” Margins of Erasure. Ed. Jasbir Jain and Amina Amin. New Delhi: Sterling Pub. Pvt. Ltd. 1995. 57-66. Print. Papanek, Hanna and Gail Minault, eds. Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia. Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1982. Print. Vishwanathan, Gauri. "The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India." The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft et al. New York: Routledge, 1995. 431-37. Print.

PART II WRITING GENDER

CHAPTER FOUR BLURRING BORDERS/BLURRING BODIES: DIASPORA AND WOMANHOOD MONBINDER KAUR

Abstract Hybridity often brings a perception of borderless existence which simplifies the process of crossing national boundaries of language and culture. This crossing is commonly accompanied by both personal and familial clashes, disputes, proclaimed or rejected experiences. Diaspora is both a physical condition of dislocation and a postmodern intellectual notion expressing an existential loss. Important to diaspora is the way in which gender identities are formed, with women negotiating traditional expectations and contemporary realities of the adopted land by blurring external borders through a systematic blurring of physical bodies, to carve out a new identity of their own. Diaspora means a rendezvous with diversity which may be of cultures, languages, histories, people, places or times. This paper is an attempt to detect the burdens created by the shifting roles of diaspora, especially for women and the way in which they are expressed in the literature and society of the Indian diaspora. This chapter traces the ways in which diasporic literature handles these issues by analysing the works of four diasporic writers: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, Kiran Desai and Bapsi Sidhwa. By focusing on the ways in which female characters are projected on the literary canvass by Indian writers of the diaspora, this study aims to examine the central concerns of womanhood that affect and influence the feminist narrative. Keywords: diaspora, borders, migration, exile, refugees, assimilation, multiculturalism, hybridity, gender

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

69

Introduction The body is not a natural thing; on the contrary, it is a culturally coded socialised entity. —Braidotti 238

Contemporary research has marked diaspora as a term, both complex and subtle, which captures various phenomena predominant in global discourses including exile, adaptation, borders, migration, “illegal” immigration, repatriation, multiculturalism, and hybridity. In modern society, the malleability of the self with the surroundings and new places is becoming commonplace. Migration is not a new phenomenon and existed even in early human cultures, as evident from various ethnographical studies. The movement of people and acculturation was not free from conflict and violence. Immigrants have suffered the agonies of isolation and up-rootedness for generations and their tales have become part of diasporic writing. As Baumann states, “the idea of diaspora has been celebrated as expressing notions of hybridity, heterogeneity, identity fragmentation and (re)construction, double consciousness, fractures of memory, ambivalence, roots and routes, discrepant cosmopolitanism, multi-locationality and so forth” (313). Diaspora has undergone many classifications, with different thinkers and theorists assuming a diverse plethora of opinions, often focusing on what has been seen as “old” and “new” diaspora. The “old” and the “new” Indian diasporas reflect the very different historical conditions that produced them. The first one was born out of colonialism and the latter formed due to changes that have taken place in the modern age. Both share different perceptions—the “old” diaspora often created a break from the homeland while the new migrations have given a degree of connectedness between the diaspora and the “homeland” which was unthinkable in earlier times. The changing political and social set up forces people to select between the “routes” and the “roots”, leading to the creation of their own space and voice their inbetweenness. However the newer group, embarking as it does on a new path in the evolution of a re-invented self-image and identity, is subject to the immediate social and political environment. The self-image is also subject to responses to the rejection and oppression experienced by their community earlier. Gilroy famously noted that “[c]hanges in South Asian communities’ understandings of themselves affect their culture in a number of ways, including cultural formation, reproduction and dissemination” (50). Tölölyan viewed diaspora as a term denoting “a larger semantic domain that include words like immigrant, expatriate,

70

Chapter Four

refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (5). The various debates seen above make it clear that diasporic experiences are heterogeneous in nature, as pointed out by Hall, who states that diasporic experience is, “defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (235-36). He further states that “[d]iasporic identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235). The agonies of isolation, the collective memory of a “homeland”, a sense of exile and loss always haunt them. They are forced to live between two worlds due to their feelings of up-rootedness: between the imaginary and the real, the past and the present and the virtual and the material.

Diaspora: Emerging Issues There is no doubt that diaspora is central to the understanding of the contemporary world. As people are uprooted and dispersed throughout the world, questions emerge related to their identities, the routes of their migrations, their attachment to “home”, their positions within the “host” society, their relationships with one another, and their desire for “integration” or “return”. Cultural hybridity, according to Clifford, has substituted concepts like ethnicity, nationality, nationhood, boundaries and identity. Diasporic subjects are carriers of a consciousness which provides an awareness of difference and this sense is a basic aspect of self-identity for diasporic subjects. According to Hall, diasporic consciousness forms a part of the work of identity production and reproduction through transformation and difference. Displacement creates alienation of vision and a crisis of self-image in the displaced. That is why immigrants form their own diasporic communities in the host nation. Some pertinent questions which need to be addressed in this context are: do differences between the sexes produce different perspectives on what constitutes diasporic identity? Does this disparity result in the co-existence of competing diasporic identities or imaginaries that are tied to sexual and gender identity? Does the distance between the home/land left behind and the new home offer an opportunity to break with the past and with tradition? To what extent can we speak of “gendered” diasporas? Diasporic writing itself is an offshoot of those immigrants who have had access to education and literacy. Proportionately, this has led to a number of writings which question the limits of diaspora. This writing focuses on discrimination, nostalgia, identity and a sense of belonging and even

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

71

discusses new issues of diasporic existence. What are the intergenerational issues that cause diasporas to evolve over time, to move toward or away from assimilation into the mainstream culture of the present home? How and why do diasporas redefine themselves? In what ways does “diaporic identity” perform a gate-keeping function that includes but also excludes? How are diasporic identities contested? How do we “problematise” or critique diaspora? These and many other questions need to be answered to understand the term diaspora and the complex issues associated with it.

Women in the Diapora: Literature Review While literary studies of diaspora concentrate on the problems and predicament of the diasporic community, the problems faced by the women affected by these geographical shifts remain comparatively unexplored. Diasporic literature requires analysis in terms of specific ethnicity and gender—of author and/or primary characters. In this review of the literature, a brief discussion on the Indian-American diasporic experience is followed by exploration of more specific scholarship on the writings of diasporic Indian women writing in English. Within diasporic literature, immigrant psychology and identity formation is a theme frequently explored in scholarly research with much primacy on the psychological impact of shifting identities. Indian Diasporic Writing: Rewording the Literature of the Indian Diaspora and Writers of The Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Source book, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, begins with an introduction to the very problematic concept of diaspora itself. The volume brings together fourteen essays on the writings of people of South Asian extraction. In an ethnographical study focusing on South Asian Americans, Rayaprol tries to portray the crucial process of the gendering of diasporic identity and the ways this is enacted through religious ideologies and institutional practice. The study is based on fieldwork at the Sri Venkateswara temple, an Indian Hindu institution that was founded in Pittsburgh in 1977, where women play a very active role in the formal organisation of the temple and its activities. Therefore, they are key agents in the reproduction and reconstruction of “culture” and “tradition”. Women's roles as “cultural custodians” due to migration increases and a greater participation in immigrant religious and ethnic institutions can be witnessed. This study provides valuable documentation of gender ideologies and practices through an ethnographic study based on South Asian Americans. This study is helpful in understanding the shifting roles

72

Chapter Four

of women which can then be applied in literary works of diasporic novelists. Bose writes that “the range of diasporic transnational practices is not monolithic but instead governed by differences in class, gender, race, sexuality, and a host of other distinctions” (125). He also says diaspora “disrupts [a] tidy view of nation, narration, and belonging” (119). Levitt et al., while discussing the immigrant experience and perspective, talk about the idea of difference and its importance that was ignored by early transnational migration scholarship. They also refer to multiple elements of individuality within the group, including “the ways in which transnational migration is gendered” (568). Viewing differentiation on an ethnic level, the authors stress the fact of difference, particularly how men and women experience migration differently: “[G]ender is a central organizing principle of migrant life” (568). Abraham writes that diasporic women often find themselves to be a member of multiple cultures at the same time. Women are not only members of their ethnic group; they are also new members of the main culture of the host country. While playing both the roles, they negotiate gender positions within each sub-group. The expectation of behaviour from self and other fluctuates, creating a difficult balancing act for diasporic women: “As an ethnic minority, South Asian immigrant women…have to cope with semi permeable boundaries that allow them…to partially internalize the norms and values of the dominant culture while being simultaneously excluded by the dominant group from total membership in that culture” (198). Espin observes that social sciences consider conditions of migration as a sociocultural, economic, religious, political phenomenon but fail to see it as individual development. Her goal is to add another dimension to understand how experiences affect the individual, specifically by “using the medium of personal narrative of the psychology of migration” (10). She asserts that although the contradictions involved in immigrant experiences (specifically for women) can lead to emotional or other problems, most immigrant women “manage to survive and emerge from the emotional struggle” (10). The anthology Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora, compiled and edited by the Women of South Asian Descent Collective in Berkeley, California in the year 1993, tests the very different types of writing including fiction, autobiography, theory, and the very idea of "Indianness". Its sixty-six contributors include first, second and third generation women of South Asian descent who currently reside in the United States. It is a collective demonstration of the creativity and astute political sensibilities of a young generation of diasporic South Asian women, born in the late 1960s and 1970s, growing up outside their place

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

73

of origin, articulating their identities as “women of colour” and as “South Asian”. The selection includes writings of renowned scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Indira Karamcheti on issues relating to gender dynamics within the diaspora. They try to focus beyond the two limited categories of “assimilationalist” and “traditionalist” approaches while talking about family, sexuality and community. There are also articles by high school students like Tesha Sengupta and Sajani Patel. The narrative begins with a section entitled “Lighting the fire beneath our homes” and ends with a section titled “Our feet found home”. The anthology further focuses on cultural/political associations other than an affiliation to one's country of origin which problematises diasporic literary production and consumption. Lau points out that the travel from East to West is uniquely represented by diasporic women authors: “It is a move from the known to the unknown….It may be a traumatic journey” (247). Lau also finds exploration of identity issues within South Asian women’s writing to be dominant as “the search for self-identity is portrayed as confusing, painful, and only occasionally rewarding” (252). Joshi talks about “diaspora”, which is shown to be linked to immigrant experience, where, “The act of migration” and the psychological-cultural issues are related. She discusses, at length, the lives and trials of immigrant Indians by selecting novels such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake, Adarshir Vakil's One Day, Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife and some others. Her main intention is to read the problems faced by the characters in new lands due to the breakdown of inter-racial marriages signifying the larger uneasy relationship between the immigrant and the country of adoption. However, Joshi fails to touch upon the lives of women characters and terms their problems to be psychological and their action to be a neurotic fantasy signifying violence.

Changing Identities With the passage of time, issues among the diaspora saw many changes as these groups began to assert themselves socially and culturally. One of the most important issues which were thus explored by the new migrants involved the matter of the preservation of identity. Here questions such as how the community should be known and how the younger generation would react to established identities was most commonly discussed. Wherever South Asians have migrated, they have carried with them the values of their “homeland” and created a new life for themselves in a different social context. Immigrants bring with them the tradition of their homelands which often seem to be in dichotomy with the western culture of the metropolitan spaces which they come to inhabit. The concept of

74

Chapter Four

identity being tied to the politics of place is a traditional notion, so diasporic identities are not bound within a dialectical context of being between “here” and “there”. Rai and Reeves cite Zhang as noting that “[d]iaspora is the process of crossing and re-crossing multiple borders of language, history, race, time and culture [which] must challenge the absolutism of singular place by relocating their identity in the multiplicity of plural relationships” (4). The pressures and attempts at resistance have brought about considerable changes in the identity of South Asian diasporic women’s lives. The position of women within the community was repeatedly distorted by conventional images and ethnocentric opinions about women. The new diasporic culture, in comparison with the western values of independence and individuality, was seen as denying women a new identity. As a result, the creative output of diasporic writers, especially women, can be seen as an effort to document their struggle to re-define their identity and shifting roles in the new land in relation to the old. The term “South Asian” functions as an umbrella term while the differences ethnically, culturally, religiously within the term “South Asian” are vast. Works of fiction are principally products of a unique individual’s imagination. The creative works of Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bapsi Sidhwa and Kiran Desai are representations of facets of the lived experience and concerns of each author which she documented as significant to lives other than her own. This paper is an attempt to detect the shifting identities of women and the burdens created by these shifting roles of diaspora. The writers explored here are mostly concerned with the relationship between image, identity, culture, power, politics and representation. Their novels resonate with the predicament of diasporic visions. Their writings draw attention to the way displacements have determined cultural exchanges between communities and shaped new identities in an increasingly mobile world. They often, through their characters, highlight the dilemma of women occupying different kinds of communities. While male migrants look for better opportunities to improve life, the question which arises naturally is, what are the pre-migration expectations of women? To answer this question we can focus on Mary John’s comment: "It is my belief that a good many postcolonial women, including self-identified feminists, find themselves gazing and going westwards for reasons that cannot be rendered intelligible in the language of a presumed or proposed international feminism alone" (16). These women writers choose to focus their writings on their experiences of life as diasporic women. Any

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

75

journey that entails physical displacement is bound to result in identityshifts in terms of the individual’s subjectivity.

Space and Shifting Gender Roles In a society where women are allowed little recognition as individuals, where they exist and are defined in relation to the men to whom they belong, having an identity of their own is often impossible. Women in general are marginalised in the name of cultural traditions and religion and have to strive hard to earn respect, dignity and worth, whereas men are born with them. The patriarchal system specifically seeks to control women through cultural traditions and rules. Men are considered as individuals and women are thought of as bodies. A person is defined by an identity and it impacts whatever he or she does; from the relationships they form, to the work they do and everything in between, an individual’s identity is related to race, class and gender. Being part of a diaspora, far from one’s roots, culture and home, also becomes a significant cause of dissatisfaction and thus a core issue in the exploration of diaspora studies. Alienated individuals have often been described in modern literature as outsiders, but diasporic novelists like Mukherjee, Divakaruni, Sidhwa and Desai show both the pleasures and the pains of being in a diaspora through their novels. In recent writings, diasporic women writers show how changes in terms of location or national identity are generally depicted as providing significant opportunities for women to challenge and revise culturally-inscribed gender roles. These writers try to show how culturally displaced women appropriate the uncanny so as to engender new identities and assert the value of individual female experience. Women writers situate their female characters in resistance against culturally constructed norms that aim to control their bodies and sexually objectify them as symbols of male honour. Their work reflects how a female body is viewed in a society where women’s position, their roles, their dress, and their behaviour are decided by men, at both national and domestic levels. Their works reflect the struggle of women in claiming their space within the restrictive enclosures imposed on their lives. Their female characters battle through difficult times to emerge as confident women. Struggling with a series of social and cultural issues, the female figures from across the chosen works present different views on how female sexuality and bodies become central in the examination of their female identity. Women learn, from sexual awakening, sexual victimisation and sexual discrimination, of the gendered oppression that works through their bodies.

76

Chapter Four

While the complexity of immigrant life witnesses cultural collision as well as problems of adjustment, the common targets are usually women who are often forced to reflect stereotyped roles according to patriarchal expectations. Expatriate communities look upon their women for the preservation and continuation of ethnicity. Women themselves seem to subscribe to such a construct and fall easy prey to multiple patriarchies. A noteworthy feature in the present diaspora life and writing is the emphasis on hybridisation while coping with the demands of multiple patriarchies. Emerging writers are endeavouring for a more sensitive and realistic insight into the complications of being feminine and try to fictionalise the multiple cultural tensions of diasporic life resulting in multiple identities. Diasporic women are trapped between patriarchies, often conflicting; they seem to develop confused identities. An interesting aspect of this study is to dwell on how well these women immigrants are constantly “preprepared”, through exposure to narratives of popular culture, to negotiate identity within complex and shifting perspectives created by changes in both, geographies and economics. Women are expected to be answerable for familial, social relationships, as well as for preservation of religious and cultural traditions. They are expected to bear and rear children, as well as instil traditional values in them. This keenness brings in multiple patriarchies which exist today due to class, caste, community, religion and racial interconnections. In a hierarchical society, women are oppressed, not only by men, but by these multiple patriarchies which force them to question their relation to power. In order to cope with these challenges, women unconsciously grow multiple identities, even confused personalities. Therefore, the works of most of these novelists focus on the cultural adjustment of the immigrants—as individuals as well as part of ethnic groups/communities. Their novels consist of many examples showing how the women protagonists try to cope with the problem of identity crisis by acquiring multiple disguises/identities. Take for example Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine, the protagonist of which undergoes several phases of identity construction: Jyoti, Jasmine and Jane. Likewise in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, the protagonist lives a life of multiple identities: Nayan Tara, Bhagyavati, Tilottama and Maya.

Profiles of the Writers Bharati Mukherjee's personal experience as an expatriate forms the main source of her writings. In her earlier work, Mukherjee dealt with cultural encounters between India and the United States but later, her

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

77

works shift to other multicultural encounters that took place in the United States. Her first novel The Tiger's Daughter, published in 1971, had strong autobiographical overtones. Mukherjee creates a vivid and complex tale of dislocation and transformation that takes place at the border of two cultures. She advocates that through adaptation, adjustment, assimilation and acculturation, immigrants can overcome the trauma of displacement and alienation. She believes in the possibility of multiple belongings for a person. In her interview with Vignisson, she says, “I am [a] woman with a series of countries. It is necessary for me to put down roots wherever I land and wherever I choose to stay”. It is in this context that her novel Wife can be understood. Wife is the story of an Indian wife, Dimple Dasgupta married to an engineer, Amit Basu, who is residing in the United States. She faces many challenges in the new community and is burdened by an obligation to be an obedient woman. For her, it is a constant fight between the bonded and enchained Dimple, who wants freedom and love, and the obedient wife she had been culturally trained to be. Being brought up in an upper middle class orthodox setting, she has lead a protected life throughout and, as expected of a girl from a traditional Hindu family, is shy, docile and submissive. For Dimple, the agency for “freedom” is marriage, as imbibed in her mind, for a limited freedom would be accorded to her at that point. So she starts awaiting marriage with all her fantasies fed by magazines and films: “Marriage would bring her freedom…Marriage would bring her love” (Mukherjee 3). Mrs. Basu was not happy with the name Dimple, so it was changed to “Nandini” which she finds strange, “old fashioned and unsung” (31). Dimple, conscious of her physical attributes, craves attention from Amit. The passion and fulfilment that Dimple thought “would become magically lucid on her wedding day” (9) eludes her once she is married, as Amit, her husband fails her mentally, emotionally and physically. She tries to be both Sita and Rambha, the ideal wife and celestial angel, and to bring a change to her life. She starts dreaming of freedom with the news of their going to the United States which defines a new concept of independence which she finds tempting. But, again, she faces disillusionment as, instead of interacting with the “real” America, she takes shelter in the “reel” America. Amit controls her totally and wants her to interact with people but is apprehensive about her becoming too American. For many of these young brides, the responsibility of balancing tradition with modernity also becomes a “painful struggle” (Ranjan 123). Dimple also goes through the same struggle. She just moves from one patriarchal setting to another in a new form in a new land. She is doomed to her world of fantasies hiding her yearnings from her husband. The lack

78

Chapter Four

of communication between the two strangles and obstructs Dimple’s voice and destroys her sensibility. She has nightmares of violence, of suicide and of death. She is fascinated with Milt Glaser, the exotic other, who makes her feel good, but she does not have the courage to find a foothold for herself because her strings are in her husband’s hands and he lets them loose according to his own ego and convenience. Indeed, the husband becomes an adversary for Dimple as he does not allow her to live her life in terms other than his own. Torn between the struggle of self to go out and to adapt, her struggle is limited to her fantasies, a symbolic struggle to adaptation. She can change and shift her role only in her dreams, where she finds herself to be completely free to do anything. Constantly living in a forced identity causes a torn self. Her fight to control herself, to renounce and confine her natural instincts of sensuality, dreams and expectations from marriage would have been simple if she had remained in India. America and its open society make her refashion her “self”. But being frustrated, bewildered and unable to handle the conflict, she stabs Amit seven times, thus setting herself free from him and the vows of her marriage. Whether this is an act of courage or cowardice has been heavily contested. A critic like Inamdar believes that the self-efficiency which comes from within oneself is lacking in Dimple. He comments “Dimple in Wife symbolized the predicament of a voice without articulation and without a vision. Such characters are visionless because they are voiceless; they are rootless because they are shootless” (39). However, the main problem with Dimple is that she wants to be loved by others but she does not even love herself and cannot accept the various roles which she could potentially assume in her life. Mukherjee’s novels are an interesting study in the progression of women from “feminine” to “female”, as stipulated by Elaine Showalter. Her women characters are sensitively portrayed and therefore, are best appreciated in their psychological depths. Her women characters suffer from a lack of cultural identity and are also victims of social subjugation, specially racism and sexism. Her characters are drawn from all parts of the world with different ethnic, religious and cultural preoccupations. They remain fragmented selves, torn between desire and reason, social and psychic identity and without security and autonomy for self. Mukherjee writes about India from the perspective of being an outsider in India and also writes about the West as one who is an outsider in the West, much in the way that her characters seem to see themselves. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award winning author and poet settled in the United States. Born in Calcutta in 1956, she left India and went to live in the United States at the age of nineteen. Her writings have

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

79

been published in more than 50 magazines, including Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Her poems talk about South Asian women’s experiences of coming to live in America. In 1991, she helped to establish Maitri, an organization in California which helps South Asian women who have suffered marital abuse. Arranged Marriage (1995), The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001) are two of her short story collections. Her novels include The Mistress of Spices (1997), Sister of my Heart (1999), The Vine of Desire (2002). Her novels and other works depict the many shades of immigrant experience and focus on the complex lives of Indian women struggling with cultural restraints to carve out an identity of their own. As a person who moved away from her homeland, for Divakaruni, writing seems to be a way of recollecting the country of her birth and as an outsider now, she tries to peek into the inside details with openmindedness and neutrality. Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices is a seemingly simple tale that is shot through with special effects. The protagonist, Tilottama (Tilo), is a young Indian woman who immigrates to the United States, runs an Indian grocery store in the distressed part of Oakland, California, falls in love with Raven, a handsome young Native American, and attempts to build a life of love with him. By constructing a narrative with an uncanny landscape in which her characters function, Divakaruni contrasts the reality of life in Oakland with the unlimited potential of a truly multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic America through her strong protagonist. As Tilo strives to define herself as South Asian and American, she develops multiple levels of consciousness that manifest themselves in both, her experiences and her subsequent relationships with her racial and sexual identities. Espin's comment can be applied to Tilo’s character here that migrants cross borders; they also cross emotional and behavioural boundaries. When a person’s circumstances change and they have to assume different roles, identities see a fundamental change as well (Espin 445). Although living in America, Tilo is incapable of pure selfperception, and sees herself through the eyes of those around her. Her own opinion becomes secondary, as if it were a marginal perspective, resulting in various and often conflicting but simultaneous visions of her identity. Initially she lets these perceptions of herself created by others dominate her thinking. She is, in fact comprised of the numerous identities that other people had ascribed to her. Her numerous identities are replete with contradictions. Tilo's fluidity of identity also translates into a fluidity of identification, for her gift is her ability to read into the lives of all those who enter her store. Ironically, she has the deepest vision for the

80

Chapter Four

innermost selves of all others, yet is still incapable of actually understanding herself. Later in the novel, Tilo observes the contrasting roles played by some of her female patrons around her, with some fulfilling the traditional submissive role of the South Asian housewife, with patriarchal dominance and instances of domestic abuse, and others who are young, sexualised and flirtatious patrons who come to her store. These are the two extremes of the sexuality of South Asian women that Tilo encounters, and she herself begins to fall into these contrasting roles in perceiving her own sexuality. Tilo begins to see herself as she believes others do: "a bent woman with skin the color of old sand, behind a glass counter that hold...sweets of their childhoods” (5). Tilo describes herself as possessing an "old woman voice" (71) and an "old woman body” (114), covered in "creases and gnarls" (5) and layers of wrinkles like "old snake skin” (51). She is not seductive but rather matronly, repressing any sexual desire; she is silent in her opinions and offers advice only when asked. In her behaviour in the store, Tilo typifies the traditional submissive Indian woman and she is perceived to be so by her various patrons. But her sense of passion and her ability to seduce are clearly evident in her relationship with Raven. Raven appeals to Tilo's sexual side, creating emotions in her that she had never experienced before. There is big change in her when they finally consummate their love. Tilo appears as a highly knowledgeable and sensual lover, and her sexuality is in stark contrast to the older asexual woman from the spice store when Raven touched her hand for the first time. She was not able to articulate this feeling: "What words can I choose to describe it, this touch that goes through me like a blade of fire, yet so sweet that I want the hurting to never stop” (70). Here, the novelist is suggesting the possibility of simultaneous selves, as if Tilo had another younger and more sexualised identity that existed (albeit unexpressed) along with the asexual identity of the older woman. The novel closes with Tilo renaming herself Maya, which "can mean many things. Illusion, spell, enchantment, the power that keeps this imperfect world going day after day” (317). Tilo chooses a name that "can mean many things", a name that embodies the multiplicity of her identities, the many layers of consciousness that lie within her and she confidently now moves in her new world, simultaneously playing out all these multiple roles. This is a liberation which is shared by another writer whose concern with the diasporic experience is varied and complex. Bapsi Sidhwa, hailing from South Asia, who lives in the United States, has written about the lives of the Zoroastrians in particular and the people of South Asia in general in many of her novels. At the time when Sidhwa

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

81

decided to become a novelist during the 1970s, there were hardly any women writing English fiction in Pakistan. Sidhwa moved to America with her husband in 1983. Living in America has been a liberating experience for Sidhwa but her love for her country of birth, especially her city Lahore and her Punjabi identity, is strongly felt by her. In her interview with Bachi Karkaria she claims, “I am a Parsee first, then a Pakistani, specifically a Punjabi. I am a woman simply by gender. I don’t feel American at all. My consolidated 3-P identity has enriched my writing” (Singh 3). Sidhwa’s experience of living both in Pakistan and America has also enriched her understanding of social issues concerning Pakistani women in both societies. For example, her portrayal of sexual repression in Pakistani society works as the backdrop in most of her novels. Sidhwa’s observation of this social attitude towards sexual relationships in Pakistani society stems from her experience of living in the United States, a country which allows comparatively greater freedom in such matters. She has written about the Zoroastrians, their ethos and the challenges faced by the community. Thus, by attempting to focus on the lives of the Zoroastrians she has written about women and on themes such as marriage, violence, migration, acculturation and expatriate experiences at large. An American Brat is a bildungsroman. The plot is narrated in terms of the expatriate experiences of Feroze Ginwalla, a Pakistani girl, belonging to the Parsee community from Lahore. The plot revolves around the protagonist’s growth to maturity. The political and social situations in America and Pakistan are set in contrast. However, the impact of American free society, consumerism and the liberties women enjoy are so strong that she chooses to remain in America and become an American. The novel is set in the 1970s, when fundamentalists in Pakistan were making their mark during the regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Zia ul Haq. The fear of increasing fundamentalism drives Feroza Ginwalla’s parents to send her to America. Zareen, Feroza’s mother, is progressive and feels that “[t]ravel will broaden her outlook, get this puritanical rubbish out of her head” (Sidhwa 14). Thus, the novel presents the journey and expatriate experiences of Feroza whose role and identity will change her in the new land. Feroza’s negotiation with American culture begins with her arrival in New York. Her humiliating experience at the immigration counter does not discourage her; rather it releases her from shyness and mental rigidities. She overcomes the discomfort brought on by the customs officers’ questioning. Her homelessness suddenly becomes privileged at this point. The absence of a fixed locality is a cause for celebration and the exiled condition is romanticised by her. From being

82

Chapter Four

passive and an introvert, Feroza begins to love American consumerism and breathes the sweet air of liberty. Her perceptions and attitude to life begin to change as she gradually becomes bold and strong enough to face any eventuality and declare her independence. It is a stage of transition and in-betweenness of being a South Asian and American. The very act of negotiating with American society is poignantly depicted in the novel. Feroza grows into adulthood, learns to drive, drink and dance, knowing that she can never dream of such liberties back at home in Lahore. A girl who had never answered the phone at home is seen flirting in America. She proves that nothing is more valuable than one’s freedom. The change in her is the result of her negotiation with the demands of the society. However, her three-month stay turns out to be for about four years and her parents are shocked when she declares she is getting married to a Jewish boy. She is unwilling to go back to Lahore; with the intention of extending her visa, she gets admission to a college. During this period, she learns more about the American way of life. Her friend Jo teaches her how to dress and speak like an American. She also learns about the presence of the poor, the destitute, alcoholics, thieves, shoplifters and drugs addicts in New York. However, distancing herself from her uncle-cum-tutor, she leads an individual life. Feroza completely adopts an American lifestyle. She acts, talks and dresses like an American girl. She learns to drive, drink, dance and use American slang. The shy and conservative Feroza turns into a confident and self-assertive girl. Often, she flirts with Shashi, an Indian pursuing his studies in Hotel Management. However, their intimacy does not mature into a relationship. Ultimately, she decides to marry a Jew, but that marriage does not take place. Her visit to Jo’s family, her experiences as a bartender, her flirtation with Shashi and sudden attraction to David Press, illustrate the dilemma and the challenges she faces in the supposedly open society of America. The novel talks specifically of Feroza’s understanding of her own and others’ cultures that distance offers. The interaction of traditional culture with the culture of an adopted alien land brings about a transformation in the personality of a person. The experiences of such people are shaped by economic positions, personal skills and political relationships between the country of origin and the one adopted. Migration leads to separation, yet it can be seen as a reincarnation in a new place marked by a new culture, different adjustments and an opportunity to re-define oneself. The female characters in this novel appear as strong individuals as those of Kiran Desai's Man Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance Of Loss (2006), which deals with social, political, and economic problems of the people of contemporary society in

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

83

India, on the one hand, and the social and psychological problems faced by Indian immigrants in America and England on the other. The novel explores various aspects of society, such as immigration, repressive systems of class and government, violent insurgency, isolation and identity, while basically capturing the dichotomy and duality of existence. The Inheritance of Loss opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong, on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Desai describes the feelings of her characters caught between two cultures—Eastern and Western. She portrays the confusions, bleak prospects and the emotional trauma characterising immigrant lives uncertainly hanging between two contradictory worlds. Migration touches each of the characters and often becomes a question of belonging. Caught between two worlds, the characters negotiate a new social space. The judge, educated in England about English laws, returns to India in 1947 only to feel like a foreigner, both in England and at home. Father Booty, a Swiss missionary priest, is deported from India after living there for more than two decades because he neglected to renew his papers. Displacement from Nepal makes Gyan, another character, also suffer from uncertainty and he faces the problem of identity as he loves Gurkhaland but does not fight for it. His love for Sai is also ambivalent and uncertain. Biju is an undocumented worker in America. The Nepalese people, who made up 95 percent of the population around Kalimpong and Darjeeling in the mid1980s when the novel is set, are legally considered foreigners even though they are Indian-born, thus further complicating the ongoing struggles of those who do not belong. Sai, the female protagonist is a victim of circumstances. Due to the death of her parents in an accident in Russia she has tasted bitter feelings of separation and displacement. Her father was a space scientist, living in Russia, while she herself was living in Darjeeling in a convent. Loneliness becomes a part of her life with the loss of her parents when in the convent. She was left with an old relative who himself was lonely and withdrawn from life and was of no support. Sai finds solace for her emotional cravings in her romantic involvement with her tutor Gyan, who becomes a peculiar soul mate. Her harsh experiences at the convent and her difficult family situation make her into a confident and independent girl. She saw many contradictions when she was in the Christian convent in Dehradun. She experiences hybridity by reading Lochinvar and Tagore, along with economics and moral science. Desai shows the influence of western culture as: “cake was better than laddoos, fork spoon knife better than hands, sipping the blood of Christ and consuming a wafer of his body was

84

Chapter Four

more civilised than garlanding a phallic symbols with Marigolds. English was better than Hindi” (Desai 30). Sai speaks English with an English accent and manners, celebrates western holidays like Christmas, eats English food, and lives in Cho Oyo, which is a fairly nice home, with some modern conveniences. Gradually, she becomes a westernised Indian growing up in a bicultural household. Sai’s first tutor was Noni, the spinster who lives with her widowed sister, Lola. Noni and Lola, like Sai, follow the lifestyle of the westernised Indian class. They greatly admire British culture and adopt as many English customs as possible. They grow western vegetables like broccoli in their garden, they wear only Marks and Spencer underwear, drink English tea, eat English jam and pastries, love manor house novels, and have the complete works of Jane Austen. This obsession with British culture is due to Lola’s daughter, Pixie, who lives in England and works for the BBC. Mrs Sen, a neighbour of Lola, whose daughter MunMun lives in the United States and works for CNN feels proud of the fact. Both the ladies quarrel over the issue of the superiority of each country, America and England. Instead of identifying with their Indian culture, these women take on a western identity so completely that they battle against their fellow Indians in favour of western cultures they can never truly join. Being an expatriate herself, Desai comprehends the kind of mental agony and physical sufferings one has to undergo when one settles in an alien land. She is quite certain that people should not be discriminated against one another on the basis of race, skin-colour and culture. Sai has several roads on which she travels, though she never leaves the continent of India. Towards the end of the novel she knows she belongs to the country whose hold she has doubted. Sai experiences romance, friendship, trust and betrayal and learns her lesson in romance with a young tutor who has conflicting loyalties. She learns to cope with compassion and rejection, and to comprehend the reasons for prejudice; she learns as well that to accept the prejudice she has come to comprehend is a continuation of that prejudice. Sai’s and Gyan’s relation does not last for long as they fight and shout unspeakably cruel and stereotypical remarks at each other. Referring to the oppressive upper class, Gyan shouts at Sai, calling her a slave to western ideas. Sai’s strength is illustrated through her association with Gyan, in which she fully proves to be his equivalent. All along their encounters, Sai seems truthful to her feelings, and ensures that she does not give in due to love or soft feelings. Furious with him for his loyalty to the GNLF, she confronts him in order to make her points clear. Although finance was her main challenge, it doesn’t stop Sai from dreaming about an independent life. She is restless and longing to

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

85

participate in the world around her: “She’d have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she’d be trapped forever in a place whose time had already passed” (74). Desai portrays a strong new woman in contemporary India who has the capability of creating an independent life in a challenging society characterised by poverty, political instability, violence and corruption.

Social and Cultural Significance of the Female Body Torn between the conflict of duty and self-fulfilment, women find their bodies to be the battle ground upon which traditional values and modernity come to clash. The novelists mentioned above create characters willing to and capable of recognising and challenging oppressive customs that hinder their progress. While commenting on diaspora as a social phenomenon, Chandra Talpade Mohanty speaks of “feminism without borders” in which diaspora is border-crossing. She argues for a transcultural, feminist identity that seeks the simultaneous plurality and narrowness of borders and the emancipatory potential of crossing through, with, and over these borders (Mohanty 2). Characters in recent fiction by women writers often question their position within society, challenging the traditional roles assigned to them and (re)constructing their identities. The migrant women’s experience depicts the process of assimilation and alienation, not only from the transnational perspective, but also from the perspective of gender. The protagonists set out on a journey of self-discovery and their struggle is no longer against a patriarchal male figure but against the societal norms and patriarchal structures that hinder their progress. The issues that occupy these writers are no longer feminist or chauvinistic, but the socio-political issues of everyday life. For migrant women, diaspora, and circumstances related with it, present various challenges and consequences. They have to position themselves in the adopted land but also need to face the patriarchal confrontation of both the nation and the homeland. In fact, as Keya Ganguly states, “immigrant women are subjected by the double articulation of discourses of cultural difference and patriarchy” (48). As migrant women are uprooted from the places that structure their social position, they need to readjust themselves to the new configuration of the host nation, after undergoing a change of class as well. While adapting to the new host land, women are ambiguously constrained by the constant tussle between homeland and host-land. Women are also trapped within the reproduction of patriarchal values. The cultural tradition brought forward with them, in a way, preserves the patriarchal values in

86

Chapter Four

the host land. Women may emerge in the new land facing issues of discrimination and alienation which will restrict the process of incorporation of the self to the host land. Clifford comments that the new land can provide two possibilities—either opening new roles that free women from the old world’s patriarchal values or create a new patriarchal structure. They not only need to adapt and change but also need to endure the responsibility of being the preservers of traditions within the diasporic household. The experiences of both men and women differ as the men engage themselves with the individualism of American society while the women need to be preservers and act as reminders to the men of their cultural background.

Conclusion Mukherjee, Divakaruni, Sidhwa and Desai’s characters move beyond a duality and toward a condition that is more complex and layered. In place of a “double consciousness”, the women of these novels develop multiple selves, resulting in identities which are neither unified nor hybrid, but rather fragmented. As women perceive both their race and sexuality through new and different lenses throughout the course of their stories, they come to realise that the notion of a singular identity is a fallacy, and that the reality of the South Asian diasporic experience is the indeterminacy of multiplicity. This multiplicity is a significant plight for the characters, for, as their different sets of consciousness contradict each other, women are left uncertain as to the nature of their identities and uncertain of their place in the new society. Yet paradoxically, it is this very condition of multiplicity that provides the means by which the conflict of consciousness can be resolved for the characters. The women that these diasporic novelists created are capable of living in a world in which the individual exists not as a unified “one” but rather as “many”, bound by no borders and being infinite in the possibilities of creating and inventing identities through multiple changes of “body”.

Works Cited Abraham, Margaret. “Model Minority and Marital Violence: South Asian Immigrants in the United States.” Cultural Psychology of Immigrants. Ed. Ramaswami Mahalingam. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006. 197-216. Print. Baumann, Martin. “Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison.” Numen 47.3 (2000): 313-37. Print.

Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood

87

Bhatt, Sheila, Preety Kalra, Aarti Kohli, Latika Malkani and Dharini Rasiah. Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora. San Fransisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2008. Print. Bose, Pablo Shiladitya. "Home and Away: Diasporas, Developments and Displacements in a Globalising World." Journal of Intercultural Studies 29.1 (2008): 111-31. Print. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print. Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Mistress of Spices. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. Print. Espin, Oliva M. Women Crossing Boundaries: A Psychology of Immigration and Transformations of Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. Ganguly, Keya. “Migrant Identities: Personal Memory and the Construction of Selfhood.” Cultural Studies 6.1 (1992): 27-50. Print. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonanthan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222-37. Print. Inamdar, F A. "Immigrants Lives: Protagonists in The Tiger’s Daughter and Wife." The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Critical Symposium. Ed. R. K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1996. 39-43. Print. John, Mary E. Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print. Joshi, Rita. “Nations and Alienations: Diaspora in Recent Indian Fiction.” India International Centre Quarterly 31.1 (2004): 83-93. Print. Lau, Lisa. “Making the Difference: The Differing Presentations and Representations of South Asia in the Contemporary Fiction of Home and Diasporic South Asian Women Writers.” Modern Asian Studies 39.1 (2005): 237-56. Print. Levitt, Peggy, Josh DeWind and Steven Vertovec. “International Perspectives on Transnational Migration: An Introduction.” International Migration Review 37.3 (2003): 565-75. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print. Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. New York: Hyperion, 1976. Print. Nelson, Emmanuel. Indian Diasporic Writing: Rewording the Literature of the Indian Diaspora and Writers of The Indian Diaspora: A Bio-

88

Chapter Four

Bibliographical Critical Source book. London: Greenwood Press, 2000. Print. Pawliczko, Ann Lencyk. "Historical Background of Emigration from Ukraine." Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide to the Homeland and Its Diaspora. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 113-18. Print. Rai, Rajesh, and Peter Reeves, eds. The South Asian Diaspora: Transnational Networks and Changing Identities. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Rayaprol, Aparna. Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Sidhwa, Bapsi. An American Brat. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993. Print. Singh, Randhir Pratap. Bapsi Sidhwa. Delhi: Ivy Publishing House, 2005. Print. Tölölyan, Khachig. “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (1991): 37. Print. Vignisson, Runar. “Bharati Mukherjee: An Interview with Runar Vignisson.” SPAN Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 34-35 (1993). Print. Zhang, Benzi. “Beyond Border Politics: The Problematics of Identity in Asian Diaspora Literature.” Studies in the Humanities 31.1 (2004): 6991. Print.

CHAPTER FIVE DIASPORIC MOBILITY AND IDENTITY IN FLUX IN V.S. NAIPAUL’S THE MIMIC MEN AND MONICA ALI’S BRICK LANE STEPHANIE STONEHEWER SOUTHMAYD

Abstract This chapter examines the concept of mobility in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and suggests that, while Naipaul’s text is marked by a pervasive sense of paralysis, Ali’s novel indicates that mobility—whether social, financial, or physical—is readily available to the hard-working South Asian immigrant. Brick Lane, furthermore, implies that access to upward mobility is gendered: in contrast with her male counterparts, who remain unhappily mired in their social stations by their misguided political activities, the female South Asian immigrant’s focus on labour and entrepreneurship allows her to achieve success and happiness. I argue in this study, however, that this gendered mobility comes at the expense of political participation, solidarity, and action. Ali accordingly hints in the text that in contemporary neoliberal Britain, in which all political efforts are doomed to failure, the gendered South Asian immigrant is offered only a limited route, founded on bourgeois entrepreneurship, to arrive at her own happy ending. Keywords: Brick Lane, The Mimic Men, diaspora, gender, South Asia, immigration, upward mobility, labour, neoliberalism, entrepreneurship

Introduction Published in 2003, Monica Ali’s wildly successful novel Brick Lane recounts the story of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman who moves to

90

Chapter Five

London for an arranged marriage with Chanu. While Nazneen is at first too frightened by her alien surroundings to leave her cramped Brick Lane apartment, Ali’s novel charts her growing physical and social mobility as she embraces her adopted home and its work ethic, and the changes that these forms of mobility enact in the protagonist’s character. From frightened and uncertain immigrants, over the course of the novel, Nazneen and Razia assume new cosmopolitan identities as multicultural entrepreneurs. In exploring diasporic identity in Brick Lane, it is productive to compare the novel with a text that has functioned as a pioneering work of South Asian diasporic fiction in the West, as well as the standard by which a great deal of other diasporic writing is evaluated from the West: V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. Indeed, not long after the publication of Brick Lane, Ali herself compared her work with Naipaul’s, writing in the Guardian that “For V.S. Naipaul, ‘finding the centre’ has been an important part of his journey as a writer. Taking my first steps as a writer, I could argue, has involved the inverse process: seeking out the periphery”. When compared with Ali’s text, The Mimic Men offers insight into certain changes in South Asian diasporic identity we see enacted in the more recent novel. Although my focus here will be on Ali’s text, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to Naipaul’s novel at certain relevant junctures to elucidate the complex connections both works make between identity, mobility, and the South Asian diaspora. In many respects there is a world of difference between The Mimic Men and Brick Lane— not least because they each represent different branches of the South Asian diaspora, with Ali depicting the Bangladeshi community in Britain and Naipaul focusing on the diasporic Indians populating his Caribbean landscape. But much of the dissimilarity in their writing can be seen in the ways in which the authors each represent a vastly differing diasporic world in their work. While Naipaul’s novel depicts a world marked for the diasporic protagonist by a sense of shipwreck, paralysis, and uncertainty, Ali’s text indicates that, for all of the bleakness and disorder of her Brick Lane streets and flats, a place in the world can be eked out for those upwardly mobile few who have worked strenuously to merit it. If, however, the fiction of V.S. Naipaul should be read as—to reframe Fredric Jameson’s “national allegory” argument—“diasporic allegories” (Mishra, 92), then Brick Lane can likewise be understood as allegorising the current diasporic condition. Although some members of Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi community have objected to their representation in the novel (Greer), the text received glowing reviews among mainstream media outlets, particularly in terms of its apparent power to explain and define the South Asian diaspora in England in ways that non-South Asian audiences could

Mobility and Identity in Flux in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane

91

easily understand. In the reviews that precede the 2003 Black Swan edition of the text, for example, a journalist for the New Statesman writes, “I...feel more informed about the people who are my next-door neighbours than I did before I read this book.” Author Margaret Forster, meanwhile, says that the work “[took her] into a life and culture [she knew] little about.” Even if works of diasporic fiction should not necessarily be understood en masse as allegorical or representative, it is fair to say that, like Jameson’s ‘third-world texts,’ they often are. The narrative of upward mobility in Brick Lane—as chronicled through heroine Nazneen’s progress into bourgeois subjectivity, accompanied and encouraged by the fairy godmother-like Razia—suggests that the novel can most constructively be read as an allegory for the journey of the immigrant Other toward achieving financial success and upward social mobility. Drawing on Fay’s assertion that it “needs to be reconsidered as a multi-layered concept” (65), I will first examine mobility in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane as an idea that is social, physical, and spatial in nature and argue that these mobilities are of the utmost importance thematically in Brick Lane. I will then compare the story’s “trajectory toward a sense of liberation” (Cormack 707) with the feeling of paralysis that permeates The Mimic Men, in an effort to map some of the changes in mobility and identity that have been witnessed in the South Asian diaspora and the diasporic genre. I will subsequently consider the novel’s gendering of upward class mobility, and suggest that Razia, Nazneen’s best friend, is a representative of the state and a “donor figure” who, by upholding labour as the only route to upward mobility and denying subversive political thought in the community, actively helps usher Nazneen into the bourgeois class and the market economy. While Nazneen seems by the end of the novel to have “found herself,” at least in the sense of having entered the labour market and thus a state of bourgeois subjectivity, her new identity as successful multicultural entrepreneur nonetheless comes at a significant price to her community, as any semblance of a strong political voice in Brick Lane is ultimately foiled or silenced.

Old and New Diasporas In “[B]ordering Naipaul” and “The diasporic imaginary,” Vijay Mishra elucidates some of the principal differences between what he terms the old/exclusive diaspora,“[creating] relatively self-contained ‘little Indias’ in the colonies,” and the more hybrid new/border diaspora, for which the “overriding characteristic is one of mobility” (422). Although the

92

Chapter Five

diasporic communities in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane show some similarities in their old-diaspora inertia, the latter work ultimately concludes in upward social mobility and a freedom of physical and spatial mobility for Nazneen. In contrast, Ralph Singh, the depressed protagonist of the first novel, appears to remain paralysed, even downwardly mobile, in his transition from politician to anonymous hotel guest. We can nevertheless see that some members of the Brick Lane community initially possess the exclusivist attitudes of Mishra’s old diaspora. Nazneen’s husband Chanu explains that the other residents of Brick Lane “all stick together because they come from the same district...they think they are back in the village” (Ali 28). Although Chanu is prone to hyperbole, characters like Mrs. Islam, and even Razia at first, are decidedly uncomfortable “mixing with all sorts” (29). Socially, then, it would appear that the Brick Lane immigrants are unwilling to be mobile in the sense of moving outside their ethnic community to form relationships. Further, Chanu says, “[they] are peasants. Uneducated. Illiterate. Close-minded. Without ambition” (28). If Chanu is correct in his assessment, then the community is also not socially mobile in the sense of its participation in the labour market; without education or ambition, how is the Bangladeshi immigrant to achieve upward mobility? This attitude of passive inertia also extends to Nazneen: “nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne” (16), she thinks soon after her arrival in London, in a rejection of the agency she does not initially believe she can achieve. This sense of immobility in the diasporic community extends to the spatial and physical spheres. In The Mimic Men Ralph Singh tells us that he is unable to move: a “return to my island and to my political life is impossible” (10). His community of former colonial politicians is poor, anonymous, and unhappy, trapped in “the final emptiness” (11) of London and paralysed by “the dreams of [their] previous nonentity” (12). In Brick Lane Nazneen likewise encounters tremendous difficulty in embracing a physical mobility outside the confines of the flat, as a result of her own sense of inertia and Chanu’s unwillingness to encourage her to leave their building without him; although she longs, for instance, to visit the neighbouring tattoo lady, whose appearance fascinates her, she finds herself too frightened to do so (19). Like Naipaul’s colonial politicians, the immigrants of Brick Lane, in particular Chanu, are confined in a spatial sense to London, victims of “Going-Home-Syndrome”; as Dr. Azad comments cynically, “they will never save enough to go back….Every year they think, just one more year. But whatever they save, it’s never enough” (32). Trapped within a country in which they feel unable to set

Mobility and Identity in Flux in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane

93

down roots and to be mobile in either the social, physical, or spatial sense, the Bangladeshi immigrants appear to be poor illustrations of mobility. By the end of Brick Lane, however, it becomes clear that some great change has occurred in certain members of the community. From an olddiaspora-style paralysis, these characters have assumed the mobile aspect of the border diaspora—what Mishra terms “the site of hybridity, change, [and] ‘newness’” (190). In her defeat of Mrs. Islam and refusal to return to Bangladesh, it seems that we are meant to understand that Nazneen, no longer passive and fearful but confident and outspoken, has discovered her agency and therefore her capacity for upward social mobility. This can especially be seen in Razia and Nazneen’s participation in “Fusion Fashions,” which, as its name implies, sells a kind of sanitised hybridity wherein a white woman can wear a traditional kameez paired with a Western-style flared salwaar (394). Razia and Nazneen’s new company allows both characters greater independence, as they no longer need to rely on middlemen like Chanu or Karim for income; from anonymous migrant wives of the periphery, they have assumed the identities of ambitious and upwardly mobile businesswomen. Likewise, some of the children of the Brick Lane immigrants, such as Razia’s daughter Shefali, are set to attend university, thereby taking the first steps toward upward social mobility, presumably carrying their families along with them in their ascent. Brick Lane itself appears to have undergone a symbolic transformation throughout the course of the book. From an old-diaspora-style recreation of a Bangladeshi market, by the end of the novel it bears a “mixed-blood vitality” (396), signalling the neighbourhood’s newfound diaspora hybridity. As well, money has begun to flow into the community, hinting strongly at the sense of upward mobility so prevalent in the text: as Chanu exclaims when he and Nazneen pass a fancy new restaurant in the neighbourhood, “All this money, money everywhere. Ten years ago there was no money here” (252-3). Just as diasporic identity is in flux for Nazneen in the novel, so is the diaspora itself in a feverish state of transformation. This freedom of mobility extends to the spatial and physical realms for Nazneen. At the beginning of the novel she is fascinated by the figure skaters she watches on television, in particular their apparent liberty of feeling and physical mobility, which present a stark contrast to her own sense of imprisonment and immobility: “The couple broke apart. They fled from each other and no sooner had they fled than they sought each other out. Every move they made was urgent, intense, a declaration” (36). By the denouement of Brick Lane, however, we see Nazneen dance wildly to a pop song, traverse London on the metro to meet her lover, and navigate a

94

Chapter Five

riot zone, indicating her growing ease of movement outside her apartment building. Spatially, too, she has developed more mobility in her freedom to move from one country to another. She tells Chanu that she may visit him in Bangladesh (490), but ultimately, as she tells her daughters, “Staying or going, it’s up to us three” (480). Nazneen’s mobilities—social, physical, and spatial—reveal her to have transformed into a cosmopolitan bourgeois subject through the course of the novel, meeting at least several of the traits associated with cosmopolitanism as outlined by Szerszynski and Urry: …cosmopolitanism requires one to have: extensive mobility, whether that is corporeal, imaginative or virtual; the means to consume en route; a curiosity; a willingness to take risks; an ability to map one’s own society; semiotic skill to interpret images of others; and an openness to other people and cultures. (qtd. in Basi 24-5)

In other words, as Alastair Cormack points out, Nazneen has grown into a person much like Monica Ali herself: “She has become a new manifestation of the sovereign bourgeois subject who could, should she so desire, write a realist novel” (713). In Brick Lane, then, we see a thematically significant transition among some of the central characters, from a Naipaul-esque insecure immobility to a confident, cosmopolitan and upwardly mobile feeling of movement and liberty. This diasporic allegory indicates that a relatively happy ending (signalled crucially by the achievement of a labour-driven mobility) is possible for the immigrant Other in her adopted country, or is for those willing to embrace this kind of cosmopolitan bourgeois identity.

Mobility and the Diaspora Mobility is inevitably tied to processes of power, as “[m]obility and control over mobility both reflect and reinforce power. Mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship” (Sheller 258). Monica Ali effectively demonstrates the (im)balance of mobility, agency and power in the novel through her representation of disparities in upward social mobility; she does so, however, in a somewhat surprising way. Contrary, perhaps, to expectations that the realist Brick Lane would reflect the reality of migrant women’s frequent downward mobility and migrant men’s comparative upward mobility (Willis and Yeoh, qtd. in Cresswell and Uteng 5), many of the principal male characters show little to no mobility by the denouement of the novel: Karim becomes a political leader, then fails in his mission to unite the immigrants (ironically, his

Mobility and Identity in Flux in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane

95

efforts end in a riot that tears apart the community); Chanu, meanwhile, arrives in Britain with big dreams, but leaves for Bangladesh after taking a series of increasingly humiliating jobs. In contrast, Nazneen, Razia, and Shefali, in starting a business and entering university, and accordingly participating in the market economy, seem to be on the verge of upward social mobility and assume vibrant new multicultural identities. Physical mobility, as well, is difficult for Chanu. Ali emphasises this sense of paralysis in the text, writing that “he often spent the day prostrate on the sofa without dressing, or pinned to the floor beneath his books” (184). Chanu’s books and ideas, she indicates in this passage, prevent him from taking action by literally forcibly weighing him to the ground. While Karim is mobile and physical in a way that Chanu is decidedly not, his failure to promote solidarity among the Brick Lane immigrants points ultimately to his lack of mobility and agency. To a certain extent this gendering of mobility puts into question Bruce Robbins’ assertion in Upward Mobility and the Common Good that narratives of upward mobility “can be justly juxtaposed to ‘the common good’” (235). At least in the case of Brick Lane, the good stemming from Nazneen’s upward mobility seems to be rather more selective and gendered than it is common. Chanu’s inertness is even more interesting when seen in the context of what it represents: This theme of male immobility should also be contrasted with the fact that [t]he male body is culturally performed as a more mobile body, while the female body becomes more restricted and spatially circumscribed. Socialisation of boys and girls often produces a distinctive embodied habitus and ‘bodily hexis,’ to use Bourdieu’s terms, in which boys have more latitude for movement, activity, travel across space, and risk-taking, while girls tend to be enculturated into more sedentary activities, more circumscribed uses of space, and greater risk aversion. (Sheller 259)

As with her portrayal of Bangladeshi and British female labour, which, as Michael Perfect has shown, reverses the results found by Naila Kabeer in The Power to Choose, Ali’s representation of male and female mobilities does not entirely cohere with the body of research around gender, mobility, and labour. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that, at least in the market for informal labour, that is, temporary or part-time labour, migrant women are indeed the preferred employees, making up two-thirds of the informal labour market work force in developed countries (Dawson 132). Several theories exist as to why this may be the case: a “supply-side” argument is that women’s working lives are often halted by childrearing, so employers may be unwilling to lavish time or money on their career

96

Chapter Five

development, thus forcing women into low-paying part-time jobs; and “demand-side” arguments include the “radical labour market” idea that “it is of significant advantage to ‘capital’...to have permanently available an unskilled, lowly paid element in the workforce” (Crompton and Sanderson 84). Women are also thought by employers to have more “flexibility” and “adaptability” than men (100)—in other words, they may be willing to put up with being treated more poorly (i.e., paid less and in worse conditions) than male employees. The characterisation of Chanu in Brick Lane seems mainly to confirm, rather than undermine, these stereotypes: he turns down a job washing dishes, displaying his unwillingness to adapt to his diminished status in the racist society, and, in contrast to Nazneen and Razia, leaves for Bangladesh rather than learn how to negotiate this society. So, in the country of adoption where the migrant’s only avenue for upward social mobility seems to be through low-paying unskilled labour, a female migrant may actually find more success than her male counterpart in the informal labour market. Of course, the jobs available in this market are also widely considered “women’s work”, doubly hindering the male migrant from finding a position in this labour market. Unfortunately, as Tina Basi argues, “The more women perform ‘women’s work’ the more invisible it becomes, and thus women become excluded from men’s conceptions of culture and history” (17). By gendering upward mobility and presenting women’s informal labour as the focus of the novel, Ali would seem to thereby render the latter more visible within the wider cultural discourse around work. In fact, this labour, arguably presented here as the only way that the migrants can achieve upward mobility, becomes, for better or worse, the crux on which the entire upward mobility narrative turns in the novel. After all, Nazneen’s garment work leads to her introduction to Karim and to her eventual financial independence in the shape of her business with Razia, both of which are constructed as deeply significant events in the formation of her agency and identity, and thus in her first steps toward upward class mobility. In the upward mobility narrative, Bruce Robbins writes, an uncertainly eroticised “Older Woman” or donor figure, who serves as a sort of mouthpiece for the state, often appears to help the striving hero, usually a younger man, attain a higher station in the social hierarchy. In Rousseau’s Confessions, Robbins says, this character is Madame de Warens; in Brick Lane, it is Nazneen’s friend Razia, who, echoing one of the central themes of the novel, constantly stresses the importance of labour and the work ethic to the achievement of upward mobility. The relationship between Nazneen and Razia is interestingly similar to those found in nineteenth

Mobility and Identity in Flux in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane

97

century upward mobility narratives, which “specialize in ‘unnatural’ love—provisional, frustrating, often unconsummated matchups that do not aim at or end in marriage, reproduction, or heterosexual union of any sanctioned or enduring sort” (Robbins xiv). Razia, who is widowed midway through the novel, conveniently allowing her to find work against her husband’s wishes, is likewise ambiguously (or “unnaturally”) eroticised and gendered, with a “man-sized mouth” (Ali 68) and with there being “nothing feminine about her face” (72), wearing shapeless trousers and keeping her hair short. The relationship between her and Nazneen, in which each acts as a source of support and a confidante for the other, is in some ways more akin to an equitable marriage or partnership than Nazneen’s relationship with Chanu. Razia also ultimately steps in to fill the traditionally masculine bread-winning role Chanu and Karim leave behind, functioning both as a source of money and upward mobility with the creation of their garment company: we are told that “[w]ithout Razia there would be no money at all, because Karim had disappeared… [Nazneen] prayed to God, but He had already given her what she needed: Razia” (484). Razia has provided Nazneen with her true entry, only hinted at earlier, with her sweatshop work for Karim’s uncle, into the world of capitalism as a competitive bourgeois labourer, and Nazneen’s gratitude takes on a near-amorous aspect in this passage. In her practical and largely optimistic attitudes toward multiculturalism, labour, and British society, Razia often seems to operate in the text as a stand-in for the nation state at its most positive and inclusive—a role, Robbins claims, that this “Older Woman” character almost always fulfils in upward mobility narratives, “representing a version of society, whether existent or utopian, that would be ‘sustaining’ both for the protagonist and in general” (28). She tells Nazneen, for instance, that “if you don’t have a job here, they give you money. Did you know that? You can have somewhere to live, without any rent. Your children can go to school. And...they give you money. What would happen at home?” (Ali 73). In this passage Razia, working as a sort of spokesperson for the state, both educates Nazneen about the benefits of the welfare state and sells an idealised vision of the developed society that is placed in stark contrast to the developing society at “home”. Likewise, in her Union Jack shirt and salwaar pants, Razia seems to represent the possibility of a confident fusion of British and Asian identities, endorsing the officially multicultural positions of countries like Canada and Britain. Notably, it appears that exclusivism is incongruous with upward mobility in Brick Lane; only once Razia embraces this racial “fusion”, after previously rejecting it with Mrs. Islam, can she flourish and

98

Chapter Five

begin a business of her own. Ironically, even when Razia uncharacteristically speaks against British society, saying, “Look at how much these English are paying for their kameez. And at the same time they are look down onto me. They are even happy to spit on their own flag, as long as I am inside it. What is wrong with them?” (394), it is notable that Fusion Fashions, which inspires her outrage in this scene, is later her garment making company’s first client. Although, in her role as the voice of the multicultural nation state, she chastises those racist British citizens reluctant to embrace multiculturalism and hybridity, she also appears unwilling to challenge the hypocrisies of a nominally multicultural Britain. Again and again, Razia upholds the importance of labour in the novel, a value that Ali also upholds in linking it so closely to upward mobility and conventional ideas of success and power. After her husband dies, one of Razia’s first statements to Nazneen is, “I can get that job now” (139). Her other activities, such as taking English classes and re-decorating her apartment so that it “loses the feel of a settler camp” (353), further indicate her drive toward upward mobility and some form of assimilation into British society, thus presenting an example for Nazneen to follow. This is in marked contrast to the male characters in the novel, whose focus is far less on labour than on political theory and action, which are problematically framed here as predominantly male pursuits. While Nazneen takes an interest in Karim’s group, she seems far more drawn to Karim than to his ideas, as when reading the group’s anti-imperialist newsletters becomes for her “a sweet and melancholy secret, caressing the phrase with her eyes, feeling Karim floating there, just beyond the words” (243). In contrast, Chanu, at least after he quits his job as clerk at the council, stops speaking of promotions and begins to address such varied issues as the legacy of colonialism, assimilation, and class conflict. Although these speeches are often intelligent and convincing, Ali seems to play them for laughs; when, for instance, Chanu talks about the colonial exploitation of Bengal, he is described somewhat pathetically as “rehearsing the evening’s lesson” (185-6), as if he were an actor reciting a set of lines, not a man justifiably angered by imperialism. His speeches are moreover often rewarded with boredom, in the case of Nazneen, or anger and irritation, as in the case of Razia, Shahana and Mrs. Azad. In addition, we see that the job Chanu wanted to take upon his arrival to Britain would have been in the political realm: “I had ambitions...I was going to join the Civil Service and become Private Secretary to the Prime Minister” (34). The mutability of Chanu’s political aspirations and beliefs, in his transition from mimic man to anti-colonial intellectual, seems in Brick Lane to be presented

Mobility and Identity in Flux in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane

99

counter-intuitively as evidence of the flimsiness of Chanu’s ideas, rather than as the moral and intellectual progress of a thoughtful character. Similarly, Karim is far more interested in social justice than in labour, often encouraging Nazeen to stop sewing in order to listen to his speeches. Unlike Chanu, whose interest in politics is of a more sedentary intellectual type, Karim is a leader and activist. Like Chanu, however, Karim’s political beliefs are somewhat false and mutable, and are assumed and removed as easily as the “Panjabi-pyjama and a skullcap” he takes to wearing after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (376). Even the racism that Karim and his group were seemingly assembled to combat is discovered to be practically non-existent: “[The racist demonstrators] weren’t anything,” he tells Nazneen at the riot (475). The real menace is the migrants’ political group itself, it would appear, in the shape of the Bangladeshi gangs whose existence Karim had previously denied, and who ultimately take over the anti-racist march and transform it into a violent riot. Karim’s group has actually facilitated this disunity, rendering his claim of promoting a sense of unity and identity among the migrants pathetic and laughable. As with Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men, then, Karim and Chanu are failed politicians: their social mobility is downward, and they are paralysed by their own social impotence and inability to shape their identities to neoliberal Britain.

Labour and Mobility Interestingly, there is a sense that Chanu, Karim and Razia are all competing for Nazneen’s affections. Certainly, Razia seems at times to wish to turn Nazneen against Chanu. When Nazneen tells Razia of Chanu’s views, Razia grumbles, “Ask him this, then. Is it better than our own country, or is it worse? If it is worse, then why is he here? If it is better, why does he complain?” (72) This is a refrain that, as spoken by upholders of the status quo, will be familiar to political activists: “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?” In the case of Karim, we never see Razia at any of the political gatherings, and Nazneen is reluctant to broach the subject of her lover with her friend. Although she obviously fears Razia’s disapproval of the affair, it is notable that the women do not often discuss Karim’s group despite its importance to the Brick Lane community. In her role as the mouthpiece of the nation state, Razia therefore problematically denies or ignores the possibility of political thought and solidarity as an avenue toward migrant agency, instead offering labour as the sole route to mobility. In this sense, at least (and whether Ali intended this characterisation or not), Razia shows the state to

100

Chapter Five

be politically non-inclusive, mirroring the reality in Britain: immigrants have made few inroads into the political arena as a result of the country’s strict immigration laws (Loury, Modood, and Teles 9), so they may very well have had to rely on labour and entrepreneurship to make their voices heard. Unfortunately, the informal labour in which many British women migrants have participated has been found to prevent solidarity rather than foster it (Dawson 133), thereby obviating the likelihood that this labour could function as a route to migrant agency and true upward mobility. However, because Ali rewards Razia and Nazneen, who have chosen the path of labour and capitalism with upward mobility and punishes Karim and Chanu with seeming failure and inertia or downward mobility, she may suggest that labour is the only avenue through which the subaltern can achieve some conventional form of success and power. Although Razia and Nazneen have taken their first steps toward upward social mobility, a strong political voice and sense of social justice seem to have been lost in the process. In her research on Chinese immigrants in France and their failure to participate in local politics, Winnie Lem has found, revealingly, that …in neoliberal regimes, petty capitalism and entrepreneurship are seen as a means by which immigrants can become integrated into host societies and disciplined into citizens. It is both encouraged by the state and often quickly taken up by migrants themselves....[U]nder neoliberalism, such strategies for promoting integration and civic participation also ultimately produce political submission and docility in the face of exploitation and lead to the erosion of the entitlements of citizenship. (8)

Although entrepreneurial labour is a valid way of achieving integration and attaining conventional ideas of success, it unfortunately seems to come at the expense of political participation. This is reflected in the downward mobility of the male characters, which is contrasted with the upwardly mobile female characters’ interest in labour. Furthermore, the plot of the novel, in which capitalism and the work ethic seem to be upheld, appears to be a necessary result of Ali’s use of realism and Bildungsroman tropes in the text. As Alastair Cormack effectively argues in “Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form”, this “realism...points toward a...traditional Western Enlightenment argument about freedom. One may overcome the problems of postcolonial identity...through transcending history and achieving self-authorship” (717). By “transcending” the ideas surrounding colonial history, which, as discussed previously, Ali shows to have symbolically weighed down Chanu in the shape of the books covering his prostrate body (184), and by embracing a

Mobility and Identity in Flux in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane

101

capitalistic route to mobility and freedom, Nazneen and Razia, now selfmade westernised bourgeois entrepreneurs, can, as Razia proclaims in the final line of the novel, “do whatever [they] like.” These troubling themes recall Gayatri Spivak’s warning against “theories, however subtly argued, that support the idea that upward class mobility...is unmediated resistance” (xii). With all political efforts in the novel doomed to failure, the bourgeois upward mobility seen in Brick Lane is toothless and devoid of a sense of resistance. As Cormack points out, however, there are some indications that the novel does not fit entirely comfortably within the upward mobility paradigm. The aforementioned line that concludes the novel cannot be taken altogether seriously after all that Ali has shown us, particularly in the passages that follow the 9/11 incident; nevertheless, Cormack writes, “in terms of the trajectory of the plot, Razia’s words must be taken more or less literally” (711). The suspicion with which a thoughtful reader will greet the conclusion may, however, cast the upward mobility narrative that precedes it in a different, bleaker light and suggest the falsity of both Razia’s statement and of an upward mobility driven solely by labour and entrepreneurship. Further, Ali’s translation of the traditional nineteenth century upward mobility story, which typically contains a white male hero, into a contemporary diasporic narrative with a South Asian female perspective, necessarily changes and subverts the realist Bildungsroman form. As Dawson tells us, all too often “[t]he experiences of women migrants are rendered invisible by dominant...discourses of male migrants” (127), and Ali’s project of inserting a female perspective into the upward mobility narrative presents a refreshing alternative to diasporic texts that otherwise silence the woman migrant. That being said, readers may finish Brick Lane wishing that, as Robbins writes, “social justice [had not been] imagined as irreducible to the rewards of the work ethic” in the novel (243). The problematic implications of some of the work’s themes indicate the pervasiveness of capitalist myths of a labour-fuelled rise to bourgeois success and a new identity as cosmopolitan entrepreneur, even in texts in which one might least expect them to appear. If mobility can be defined in part as “the capacity to organize for collective action and influence institutions” (Loury, Modood and Teles 1-2), then characters like Razia and Nazneen are, despite appearances, with their lack of a participatory political voice and their reliance on petty capitalism as a means of ascending the class hierarchy, just as powerless and immobile as Naipaul’s Ralph Singh; they are only less aware than Singh of this failure to achieve true mobility.

102

Chapter Five

Works Cited Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. London: Black Swan, 2003. Print. —. “Where I’m coming from.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 17 June 2003. Web. 13 Jul. 2014. Barber, Gardiner Pauline and Winnie Lem. “Introduction: Migrants, Mobility, and Mobilization.” Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 51 (2008): 3-12. Print. Basi, J. K. Tina. Women, Identity and India’s Call Centre Industry. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Cormack, Alastair. “Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form: Realism and the Postcolonial Subject in Brick Lane.” Contemporary Literature 47.4 (2006): 695-721. Print. Cresswell, Tim and Tanu Priya Uteng. “Gendered Mobilities: Towards a Holistic Understanding.” Gendered Mobilities. Ed. Tim Cresswell and Tanu Priya Uteng. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. 1-12. Print. Crompton, Rosemary and Kay Sanderson. “Credentials and Careers.” The Social Mobility of Women: Beyond Male Mobility Models. Ed. Geoff Payne and Pamela Abbott. London: The Falmer Press, 1990. 83-100. Print. Dawson, Ashley. “The People You Don’t See: Representing Informal Labour in Fortress Europe.” Ariel 40.1 (2009): 125-41. Print. Fay, Michaela. “‘Mobile Belonging’: Exploring Transnational Feminist Theory and Online Connectivity.” Cresswell and Uteng. 65-82. Greer, Germaine. "Reality Bites." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 24 July 2006. Web. 13 Jan. 2014. Kabeer, Naila. The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: VERSO, 2000. Print. Loury, Glenn C., Tariq Modood and Steven M. Teles. “Introduction.” Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy. Ed. Glenn C. Loury, Tariq Modood and Steven M. Teles. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Mishra, Vijay. "The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora." Textual Practice 10 (1996): 421-27. Print. —. “[B]ordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics.” Diaspora 5:2 (1996): 189-237. Print. Naipaul, V. S. The Mimic Men. London: Readers Union Andre Deutsch, 1968. Print.

Mobility and Identity in Flux in The Mimic Men and Brick Lane

103

Perfect, Michael. “The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.109 (2008): 109-20. Print. Robbins, Bruce. Upward Mobility and the Common Good. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print. Sheller, Mimi. “Gendered Mobilities: Epilogue.” Cresswell and Uteng. 257-66. Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

CHAPTER SIX GENDERED DIASPORIC IDENTITIES IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE NAMESAKE AND MONICA ALI’S BRICK LANE ELIZABETH JACKSON

Abstract This chapter compares the fictional portrayal of the migrant female experience in two novels by South Asian diasporic writers: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, both published in 2003. These two novels have been chosen because the similarities and differences between the authors and their diasporic settings enable an interesting comparative analysis. Both born in 1967, the authors are daughters of South Asian migrants to metropolitan locations in the West: Monica Ali in Britain and Jhumpa Lahiri in the United States. The chapter compares the two texts in terms of their representations of the contrasting ways in which the female protagonists, both from traditional South Asian families, struggle to reconstruct their identities in two different diasporic locations. Both encounter strong cultural pressures arising from their position as dependent women in the diaspora, and despite their internal conflicts and ambivalences, it is ultimately their individual choices which shape their identities and destinies. Keywords: ideologies, diasporic identities, Monica Ali, Brick Lane, Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, South Asian women.

Introduction Women in diasporic situations are often subjected to conflicts and experiences markedly different from those of men, experiences which are increasingly reflected in their literary writing. While some women arrive

Gendered Diasporic Identities in The Namesake and Brick Lane

105

as university students or as independent professionals and stay on, for others the element of choice in the fact of migration is limited. They often arrive in the host country as appendages of the men in their lives, as wives, daughters or mothers, and the educational levels of the women may be different from those of their male relatives. Acceptance in the culture of adoption often necessitates a change in dress code and lifestyle which challenges their sense of identity. South Asian women migrating to Europe and North America sometimes bring with them—or are expected to bring with them—traditional gender ideologies where family and procreativity are valued over the individual self. Indeed, diasporic situations can sometimes intensify the idea of men as negotiators with the external world and women as custodians of traditional culture within the home. Many diasporic women do successfully re-negotiate inherited cultural values; others cling to them defensively even while gender ideologies are changing within the homeland. Most often, their responses to conflicting gender ideologies are (understandably) inconsistent, and the resulting tensions are sensitively explored in a number of contemporary literary texts, including Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, both published in 2003. These two novels have been chosen because the similarities and differences between the authors and their diasporic settings enable an interesting comparative analysis. Both born in 1967, the authors are daughters of South Asian migrants to metropolitan locations in the West: Monica Ali in Britain and Jhumpa Lahiri in the United States. In my study, I propose to compare the two texts in terms of their representations of the contrasting ways in which the female protagonists, both from traditional South Asian families, struggle to reconstruct their identities in two different diasporic locations.

Diasporic Contexts This analysis begins with a comparison of the nature of the diasporic communities in the two texts, particularly focusing on their gender ideologies. It then goes on to explore the ways in which the protagonists respond to them, re-shaping their own identities and to some extent the nature of the diasporic communities in the process. In Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, the protagonist Nazneen migrates from a Bangladeshi village to the Brick Lane area of London’s East End in an arranged marriage at the age of eighteen. Before the wedding, Nazneen had never met her forty-yearold husband Chanu, who turns out to be kind enough, but unsuccessful, socially awkward, insufferably pretentious, and in many ways deeply unattractive. Ashima in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake also has an

106

Chapter Six

arranged marriage to a man who lives abroad, but her situation is very different. In contrast to Brick Lane’s Nazneen, a poor girl from a Bangladeshi village, The Namesake’s Ashima is from a middle-class family in Calcutta, and although her marriage too is arranged, she does at least have the opportunity to meet the prospective bridegroom and give her consent. Ashima and Ashoke meet each other in India during his visit from Boston, where he has been working on a PhD for two years, researching fibre optics. Ashima has never heard of Boston or of fibre optics, but Ashoke seems pleasant enough, so she agrees to the marriage. Nazneen in Brick Lane has mixed feelings about her husband but ends up assimilating within her community in London so successfully that at the end she refuses to return to Bangladesh with her husband Chanu. By contrast, Ashima in The Namesake falls in love with her husband fairly quickly, and they go on to have a long and happy marriage. However, she always misses India and decides to move back there after her husband’s death, leaving her grownup children behind in the United States. The women in both of these novels have children who grow up bicultural, although in both cases parental influence appears to be limited in terms of shaping cultural identity. Nazneen’s children in Brick Lane, who have never been outside of London, grow up mainly British, and Ashima’s children in The Namesake grow up mainly American, despite the family’s frequent and prolonged visits to India. The two novels differ in terms of the diasporic communities in which their characters are placed. To put it simply, the characters in Brick Lane are in a working-class, predominantly Bangladeshi neighbourhood in the East End of London, with little interaction with people outside their ethnic community. The Bengali community in The Namesake, by contrast, consists of professional men with their dependent wives and children. They too are a closely knit community, although they are geographically dispersed, each family living in a predominantly white suburban neighbourhood. While the parents in The Namesake tend to socialise mostly with other Bengalis, the children grow up American, enjoying close friendships and eventually romantic relationships with people from outside their ethnic community. Although they sometimes encounter a lack of understanding or lack of interest in their cultural background, they experience no overt racism, in contrast with the characters in Brick Lane who sometimes bear the brunt of anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre. These considerations could at least partially explain the differences between the two diasporic communities in terms of the degree of patriarchal control to which the women are subjected. All over the world it has been observed that

Gendered Diasporic Identities in The Namesake and Brick Lane

107

patriarchal oppression tends to intensify not only in situations of poverty, but also in situations of communal conflict. As the Indian academics Vasanth and Kalpana Kannabiran put it, “The growing helplessness that men experience in a hostile environment is sought to be compensated by a reassertion of power and control over women within the family” (129). Thus it stands to reason that the impoverished Bangladeshi men in Brick Lane, particularly during a time of heightened tension between ethnic groups, will feel more threatened and therefore want to exercise more control over their wives and daughters than the successful Bengali professionals in the comfortable liberal environment of Massachusetts in The Namesake.

Women’s Adjustment to Life in the Diaspora With regard to gender ideologies, there are similarities and differences between the two diasporic communities, and the female characters have various ways of negotiating them. In this respect, perhaps the most obvious element in both novels is the complete dependence of the wives “at home” on their husbands “out at work”. This is not to say that the women do not work; on the contrary, it is emphasised in both novels that female domestic labour in the diaspora is constantly demanding, absolutely necessary, and largely unnoticed. This is vividly expressed in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane which gives us concrete details of Nazneen’s daily life, including the results of her brief hiatus from domestic chores during her illness. She woke to find that: The sitting room crawled with toys, clothes, books and abandoned kitchen utensils… Nazneen picked her way across the room without comment. It gave her some satisfaction. For years she felt she must not relax. If she relaxed, things would fall apart. Only the constant vigilance and planning, the low-level, unremarked and unrewarded activity of a woman, kept the household from crumbling. (329)

Ashima in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake has a similar reaction when she returns from the hospital to find that “there are dirty dishes stacked in the kitchen, that the bed has not been made” (32). From a more privileged background than Nazneen in Brick Lane, she is accustomed to domestic help in India, and the narrative tells us that: Until now Ashima has accepted that there is no one to sweep the floor, or do the dishes, or wash clothes, or shop for groceries, or prepare a meal on

108

Chapter Six the days she is too tired or homesick or cross…. But now, with a baby crying in her arms…it is all suddenly unbearable. (32)

More assertive than Nazneen in Brick Lane, Ashima urges her husband to hurry up and finish his PhD so that they can return to India. However, she is shown to have no more control over her life than the more submissive Nazneen. On the contrary, both women are completely dependent on their husbands whose decisions about their lives are based exclusively on their own career choices. Against Ashima’s wishes, she and Ashoke end up living in the United States for the rest of his life, where his academic position after he finishes his PhD is “everything [he] has ever dreamed of” (49), while for thirty-three years her life, and particularly their family life, is nothing like what she wants it to be. Both women initially struggle with loneliness and homesickness in their new locations, but The Namesake also sympathetically portrays the more persistent sense of displacement generated by the diasporic experience for women like Ashima, for whom family ties are paramount. As grateful as she feels for the company of friends after the birth of her son, she feels alone in the new world as: These acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or aunt or uncle at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. (24-25)

In fact Ashima carries the image of pregnancy further when she relates it to the very concept of diaspora: Being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. (49)

Even thirty-three years later, at the end of the narrative, she reflects on the life that “she had refused for so many years to accept. And though she still does not feel fully at home within these walls on Pemberton Road she knows that this is home nevertheless” (280). She, for whom family has been everything, leaves her grownup children behind in the United States, returning to Calcutta, “to the city that was once home and is now in its own way foreign” (278). This contrasts strikingly with the ending of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, in which Nazneen, perhaps seeing her sister’s life in Bangladesh as a cautionary tale, actively chooses to make London a

Gendered Diasporic Identities in The Namesake and Brick Lane

109

permanent home for herself and her daughters, refusing to accompany her husband when he moves back to Dhaka. Thus, each text narrates a female character’s journey toward agency and self-determination, affirmed in the end by her active decision about where and how to make her home.

The Diasporic Community as a Source of Social Support and Social Restriction for Women Lacking a non-domestic role, the female protagonist in each novel participates in a diasporic community which provides support for wives who share their displacement and dependency. After her initial loneliness, Nazneen in Brick Lane enjoys the company of other Bangladeshi women on the council estate, despite her husband’s disapproval of her best friend Razia. Similarly, in The Namesake: The [Bengali] bachelors fly back to Calcutta one by one, returning with wives…The wives, homesick and bewildered, turn to Ashima for recipes and advice, and she tells them about the carp that’s sold in Chinatown, that it’s possible to make halwa with Cream of Wheat. The families drop by one another’s homes on Sunday afternoons. (38)

However, it is suggested in Brick Lane that if the diasporic community can be a source of support, it can also act as a means of limitation and restriction, particularly for women, who are policed much more closely than men. Indeed, despite Nazneen’s propriety and submissiveness, especially in the early years, her husband restricts her mobility and activities, ostensibly because of what people in the Bangladeshi community will say about her: “She did not often go out. ‘Why should you go out?’ said Chanu. ‘If you go out, ten people will say, “I saw her walking on the street.” And I will look like a fool”’ (45). This visibility and heightened scrutiny of women in both diasporic communities is reinforced by their clothing. In both novels the wives wear traditional South Asian clothing, while the men’s attire is more “westernised”. This supports Deniz Kandiyoti’s observation that cultural difference is “frequently signalled through the dress and deportment of women” (383), as well as Neluka Silva’s more direct assertion that the female body is “the terrain on which [group] distinctions are made visible” (23). The contradictory and often coercive nature of female clothing as cultural display is emphasised in Brick Lane, where Chanu directs his daughters to wear different types of clothing on different days. What the girls wore each day “depended where Chanu directed his outrage”:

110

Chapter Six If he had a Lion Hearts leaflet in his hand, he wanted his daughters covered. He would not be cowed by these Muslim-hating peasants. If he saw some girls go by in hijab he became agitated at this display of peasant ignorance. Then the girls went out in their skirts. (264-65)

Women’s clothing is not, of course, always a matter of patriarchal imposition. In The Namesake, for instance, Ashima freely chooses to wear saris throughout her thirty-three years in the United States, as do many of her female Bengali counterparts, particularly on social occasions (72-73, 276). The issue of veiling has become particularly controversial in recent years, with opponents of the hijab seeing it as an emblem of Muslim women’s oppression and defenders interpreting it in various ways, ranging from an expression of female “modesty”, to an assertion of otherness from “the West”, to feminist resistance to “sexualized media images” of women (Tarlo). While a fuller discussion of the ongoing debates about veiling is outside the scope of this article, it is worth noting in the context of Brick Lane that many diasporic South Asian women, too, see the veil as an oppressive instrument. Mrs Azad, for example, speaks of immigrant women who “go around covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons” (114). Fatema Jahan has rightly pointed out, however, that “veiling is not the same thing as seclusion from public life” (378). Although her case study of four British South Asian women must be taken as anecdotal because of its small sample size, it is nevertheless interesting to note that each of her interviewees “did not consider the burqa as a constraint on their participation in life outside their homes, or on their work” (378). That may be so, but we must distinguish between the selfperception of a veiled woman and the ways in which others might perceive her. This is illustrated by an incident in Brick Lane of two girls who attended a Muslim community meeting in hijab and then “upgraded to burqas” for the second meeting (279). By doing so, they appear to have rendered themselves marginal, even in the eyes of the men running the meeting. When they attempted to speak up, they were sternly told that “The Qu’ran bids us to keep separate. Sisters. What are you doing here anyway?” (285) On a more general level, Nazneen reflects on the signifying dimensions of clothing: Suddenly, she was gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well… For a glorious moment it was clear that clothes, not fate, made her life. And if the moment lasted she would have ripped the sari off and torn it to shreds. (277-78)

Gendered Diasporic Identities in The Namesake and Brick Lane

111

Here, it is clear that clothing can indeed be symbolic, but not necessarily in the way that Nazneen conceives it at this point in time. As she realises after another moment’s reflection, changing one’s clothing is much easier than changing one’s life. Nevertheless her growing awareness that a person can make choices instead of submitting to “fate” is significant, and in this sense, clothing serves as a metaphor for choice in her developing consciousness of her own agency.

Women’s Role in the Diasporic Community In each novel the female migrant’s journey toward self-determination is portrayed as long and arduous. In the case of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, it begins with the South Asian bride’s more or less explicit position as a commodity—a situation made painfully clear to Nazneen early on in her marriage when she overhears her husband describing her in a telephone conversation: Not beautiful, but not so ugly either. The face is broad, big forehead. Eyes are a bit too close together… Hips are a bit too narrow but wide enough, I think, to carry children. All things considered, I am satisfied….What’s more, she is a good worker. Cleaning and cooking and all that. The only complaint I could make is that she can’t put my files in order, because she has no English. I don’t complain though. As I say, a girl from the village: totally unspoilt. (22-23)

Despite Chanu’s complaint that Nazneen “has no English”, he discourages her from learning the language, insisting that there is no “need” (37). Although Chanu is shown to be somewhat insensitive to Nazneen’s feelings (particularly in the early years), he is never violent toward her and never overtly unkind. This is particularly evident at the end of the novel, when he does not insist that she and their daughters accompany him in moving to Bangladesh against their wishes. Moreover, if he has any suspicions about her affair with Karim, he never lets on. Thus, in some ways the novel challenges popular stereotypes about oppressive patriarchal practices in the Bangladeshi community. Nazneen’s relationships with her husband Chanu and later with her lover Karim subvert the reader’s expectations in other ways as well. Contrary to the stock situation of a woman being “rescued” from her oppressive patriarchal husband by a younger and more sympathetic lover, the young Karim’s attitudes toward women emerge, in the end, as remarkably sexist and categorical:

112

Chapter Six ‘Well, basically you’ve got two types. Make your choice. There’s your westernized girl, wears what she likes, all the make-up going on, short skirts and that soon as she’s out of her father’s sight. She’s into going out, getting good jobs, having a laugh. Then there’s your religious girl, wears the scarf or even the burkha. You’d think, right, they’d be good wife material. But they ain’t. Because all they do is argue. And they always think they know best because they’ve been off to all these summer camps for Muslim sisters.’ ‘What about me?’… ‘Ah, you. You are the real thing.’… ‘You can arrange for a girl from the village. Bring her over here.’ He was still setting out his options. ‘But then there’s the settling-in hassle. And you never know what you’re going to get. (384-85)

Thus, ironically, while Nazneen’s husband Chanu has learned over the years to see her as an autonomous individual with feelings and needs and desires of her own, her lover Karim sees her simply as “a girl from the village”. This is her place in his masculinist ideology, in which he evidently sees women as nothing more than categorical “choices” for the benefit of men. In his mind, women have no right to “argue”, a girl being “out of her father’s sight” can result in dangerous things (make-up, short skirts, “good jobs”), the putative “you” is assumed to be male, and there is always the danger of an imported bride being a defective commodity. Nazneen’s decision to end her relationship with Karim is therefore essential in her growth toward autonomy and self-determination. Although none of the female characters in either novel fits into Karim’s categories, the division of gender roles in the diaspora (at least in the first generation) is presented as unambiguous in both texts: to put it simply, the men are expected to act in the “outside world” and the women are expected to serve the men and children. This is made explicit in Brick Lane, in which we are told that the Bengali waiters at the local restaurants were “waited on themselves by wives who only served but were not served in return except with board and lodging and the provision of children whom they also, naturally, waited upon” (55). Again, the Muslim community meetings are run by the men while the women serve tea (240), and even when Karim visits Nazneen, she “dance[s] attendance” on him (300). In The Namesake, too, the men at a party “sit in the living room and discuss Reagonomics’ while the women stay in the kitchen and dining room, serving and “gossiping” (73). These traditional gender roles do not go unchallenged by more “westernised” South Asian women in the diaspora. Indeed, in her critical comments on Bangladeshi women’s preservation of cultural separateness,

Gendered Diasporic Identities in The Namesake and Brick Lane

113

Mrs Azad in Brick Lane appears to blame the situation on immigrant women themselves: Some women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in the kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English….They go around covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons, and when someone calls out to them in the street they are upset. The society is racist. The society is all wrong. Everything should change for them. They don’t have to change one thing. (114)

However, as Pei-Chen rightly points out: [This position is] not sympathetic about the problems of lower-class immigrant women who are less educated and skilled. These women often need to depend on their husbands in every respect due to language and cultural barriers. Mrs Azad seems to focus narrowly on how these women participate actively in guarding the cultural heritage and is blind to how they can, at the same time, become hostages to the patriarchal project of preserving the ethnic community as a domestic and private space. (115)

This is in keeping with the observation by many scholars and casual observers that in the homeland as well as in the diaspora, females tend to be under more pressure than males to maintain what is taken to be “cultural purity”. Although in reality no culture is ever pure or monolithic, but always diverse and multifaceted, cultural control over women is seen as fundamental to the continuity of tradition and community identity. If, as Irene Gedalof has argued, it is the female body’s capacity for birth that makes women crucial to the preservation of a particular community’s integrity and purity, traditional families in diasporic communities might be particularly anxious to arrange early marriages for their daughters. From this perspective, the example in Brick Lane of Jorina and her husband taking their sixteen-year-old daughter out of school and forcing her into an arranged marriage is, as Liao argues, “neither a singular nor an accidental case that Ali creates in fiction” (117). On the contrary, there is ample evidence that for the majority of Bangladeshis growing up in Britain, marriage continues to be “endogamous, communally focused” and not always a matter of choice for the brides themselves (Werbner 903). In addition, women’s responsibility for the organisation of the home and the socialisation of children makes them crucial in cultural—as well as biological—reproduction. Nira Yuval-Davis has argued that gender relations are at the heart of cultural debates and that social reproduction is central to cultural continuity (43). These considerations, I would suggest, are particularly prominent in diasporic situations, and The Namesake

114

Chapter Six

highlights the various ways in which Bengali mothers in the United States attempt to educate their children about the cultural traditions of the homeland: [When Gogol is five] she teaches him to memorize a four-line children’s poem by Tagore, and the names of the ten-handed goddess Durga during pujo. (54) During pujos, scheduled for convenience on two Saturdays a year, Gogol and Sonia are dragged off to a high school or a Knights of Columbus hall overtaken by Bengalis, where they are required to throw marigold petals at a cardboard effigy of a goddess and eat bland vegetarian food. (64) When Gogol is in the third grade, they send him to Bengali language and culture lessons every other Saturday, held in the home of one of their friends. (65)

Children growing up in the diaspora have various ways of reacting to these cultural expectations. In Brick Lane Nazneen and Chanu have two daughters, one of whom is compliant by nature while the other actively rebels against all efforts to indoctrinate her as a conventional Bangladeshi girl. In The Namesake the situation of second-generation female immigrants is more fully explored through the character Moushumi, who marries Ashima’s son: From earliest girlhood, she says, she had been determined not to allow her parents to have a hand in her marriage. She had always been admonished not to marry an American, as had he, but he gathers that in her case these warnings had been relentless, and had therefore plagued her far more than they had him. (212-13)

This is in keeping with the ideology of women as the primary bearers of cultural continuity and tradition—an expectation which Moushumi actively resists. At university she majored in French because: Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever. (214)

Thus Moushumi finds a way of partially escaping the conflicting cultural claims inherent in a diasporic identity.

Gendered Diasporic Identities in The Namesake and Brick Lane

115

Constructing an Identity in the Diaspora While both novels call attention to generational differences and conflicts over diasporic identities and gender ideologies, the inconsistent responses of Moushumi in The Namesake are particularly interesting because they illustrate the ambivalent position of second-generation female immigrants. There is no such ambivalence in the first generation, many of whom, even after decades of living in the United States, always consider India to be “home”. When the Ganguli family arrive in Calcutta for Ashoke’s sabbatical, they are greeted by a throng of relatives, and “within minutes, before their eyes Ashoke and Ashima slip into bolder, less complicated versions of themselves, their voices louder, their smiles wider, revealing a confidence Gogol and Sonia never see on Pemberton Road” (82). This is in marked contrast to the diasporic children who feel, on these regular trips to Calcutta, that they are “plucked out of their American lives for months at a time” (212). In Bengali class back in Boston, they “study without interest, wishing they could be at ballet or softball practice instead” (66). Sometimes they also resent their inclusion in the diasporic community itself. Gogol, for instance, has no Indian friends in college: “He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share” (119). Ironically, it is this resentful diasporic identity which draws Gogol and Moushumi together as young adults: “It’s just funny,” Moushumi observes, “that all our lives our parents raised us according to the illusion that we were cousins, that we were all part of some makeshift extended Bengali family.” (204) Having recently broken off an engagement to a white American named Graham, Moushumi tells Gogol about her relationship history. Throughout her childhood, the frequent enquiries from relatives about arrangements for her future wedding had “filled her with a cold dread” (213), and: By the time she was twelve she had made a pact, with two other Bengali girls she knew, never to marry a Bengali man… From the onset of adolescence she’d been subjected to a series of unsuccessful schemes; every so often a small group of unmarried Bengali men materialized in the house, young colleagues of her father’s. She never spoke to them; she strutted upstairs with the excuse of homework and did not come downstairs to say good-bye. (213)

A few years after college, bringing Graham home to meet her parents for the first time:

116

Chapter Six [Moushumi] prepared herself for a battle, but in fact, to her enormous surprise, her parents were relieved. By then she was old enough so that it didn’t matter to them that he was an American. Enough of their friends’ children had married Americans, had produced pale, dark-haired, halfAmerican grandchildren, and none of it was as terrible as they had feared. And so her parents did their best to accept him. They told their Bengali friends that Graham was well behaved, Ivy educated, earned an impressive salary. (216)

Upward socioeconomic mobility is, of course, a prime motivating factor for immigration and therefore an important element in diasporic culture. In this case, the fact that Graham is “Ivy educated” and earns “an impressive salary” is some compensation, in the eyes of Moushumi’s parents and their friends, for the fact that he is not Bengali. A few weeks before their planned wedding, however, Moushumi overhears Graham talking to friends about his impressions of Calcutta: To her surprise, he was complaining about it, commenting that he found it taxing, found the culture repressed. All they did was visit relatives, he said. Though he thought the city was fascinating, the society, in his opinion, was somewhat provincial. People tended to stay at home most of the time. There was nothing to drink…She listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family’s heritage, another to hear it from him. (217)

After breaking off the engagement to Graham, Moushumi embarks on a relationship with Gogol which eventually leads to marriage. That marriage, however, soon ends in divorce because of an affair Moushumi has with a (white) American. If she is portrayed as a confused and conflicted young woman, she herself has some insight into the nature and causes of her difficulties: “Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn’t love that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off” (214). The older Ashima, by contrast, displays no such confusion. Her attachment is more to human beings than to a particular place for its own sake, and this is why she chooses to return to India after the death of her beloved husband with whom she has lived in the United States for thirtythree years: She will miss the country in which she had grown to know and love her husband. Though his ashes have been scattered in the Ganges, it is here, in this house and in this town, that he will continue to dwell in her mind. (279)

Gendered Diasporic Identities in The Namesake and Brick Lane

117

With her husband no longer living and her grownup children residing in different parts of the United States, she feels a need to return to the family in India whom she has missed for so many years. Still, “having been deprived of the company of her own parents upon moving to America, her children’s independence, their need to keep their distance from her, is something she will never understand” (166). Nazneen’s situation at the end of Brick Lane is, of course, very different. She too is attached more to people than to a particular place, but the people to whom she is most attached—her two young daughters and her good friend Razia—are in London and want to stay there. Through Razia, she has also acquired a role outside the home, designing clothing and building up a business. In contrast to Ashima’s part-time job at the library in The Namesake, which is essentially a way “to pass the time” in the absence of her husband (161), Nazneen’s work is creative, fulfilling, and potentially remunerative. Christine Koggel is right to remind us that “women’s freedom and agency are not always improved when they enter the workforce because working does not necessarily alter gendered arrangements” (180). However, in this case, Nazneen’s work outside the home frees her from financial dependence on a man and thus gives her control over her own life.

Conclusion In Brick Lane and The Namesake, Monica Ali and Jhumpa Lahiri provide fictional explorations of the strong cultural pressures on the major female characters arising from their positions as dependent women in the diaspora. The novels trace the characters’ developing responses over time, noting their internal conflicts and ambivalences, but also emphasising that it is ultimately their individual choices which shape their identities and destinies. The implication is that the pressures arising from conflicts over gender ideologies in diasporic situations can be transformative as well as challenging, and that the outcome depends perhaps more on the individual responses than on the conditions themselves. (A shorter version of this article is published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in the e-book of papers from the “Diasporas: Exploring Critical Issues” conference, 2014.)

118

Chapter Six

Works Cited Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. London: Doubleday, 2003. Print. Gedalof, Irene. Against Purity: Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western Feminisms. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Jahan, Fatema. “Women’s Agency and Citizenship across Transnational Identities: A Case Study of the Bangladeshi Diaspora in the UK.” Gender and Development 19.3 (2011): 371-81. Print. Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation.” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 376-91. Print. Kannabiran, Vasanth and Kalpana Kannabiran. “The Frying Pan or the Fire: Endangered Identities, Gendered Institutions and Women’s Survival.” Women and the Hindu Right. Ed. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995. 121-35. Print. Koggel, Christine. “Globalization and Women’s Paid Work: Expanding Freedom?” Feminist Economics 9.2-3 (2003): 163-84. Print. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. London: Flamingo, 2003. Print. Liao, Pei-Chen. ‘Post’-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction: Uncanny Terror. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Silva, Neluka. The Gendered Nation: Contemporary Writings from South Asia. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004. Print. Tarlo, Emma. Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford: Berg, 2010. Print. Werbner, Pnina. “Theorizing Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004): 895-911. Web. 1 July 2014. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Print.

CHAPTER SEVEN KITCHEN POLITICS AND THE SEARCH FOR AN IDENTITY: THE MANGO SEASON SHASHIKALA MUTHUMAL ASSELLA

Abstract Amulya Malladi, an established Indian American novelist, explores a new South Asianness and a new South Indian identity through her book The Mango Season (2003). Malladi defines the new South Indian individuality through abundant use of food imagery and culinary nostalgia. This chapter examines the relevance of food and alimentary images in Malladi’s novel and their significance in the development of the characters and interpersonal relationships among and between the characters. The (re)imagining of South Indianness as opposed to the already established “Indianness” will be analysed through Malladi’s references to South Indian food patterns and specific references to South Indian traditions and habits, especially through the eyes of a South Indian American woman. This chapter argues that food habits and food imagery act as identity markers for the women characters, thereby shaping their distinctiveness with special nuances that highlight their ethno-regional affiliations. Further this chapter also strengthens the fact that food and references to food also create social, racial and sexual identities. The specific use of food to establish female individuality and food as a metaphor for emotional development and expression of characters will be analysed through this chapter, making connections with the overt references to food in conjunction to women in Malladi’s The Mango Season. Keywords: food, gender roles, South Indian, South Asian American women, diasporic identity

120

Chapter Seven

Food Imagery and the Diaspora “Food, as the most significant medium of the traffic between the inside and outside of our bodies, organises, signifies, and legitimates our sense of self in distinction from others who practice different foodways” writes Wenying Xu (2) in the introduction to her analysis of Asian American food patterns in literature. As food becomes the point of connection between the outside world and the inside world of our bodies, it also gathers spiritual, cultural and mythical connotations that are beyond meanings usually ascribed to food, such as sustenance, nutrition or gastronomic production. These multiple meanings associated with food create individualities for its consumers and transcend its principal function of satiating physical hunger. Food thus rises above its mundane function as a nutrient and becomes “cultural sustenance” (Kunow 157) in diasporic situations which in turn enables the diaspora to draw on the coded language of culture and myth expressed through food to satiate its diverse cravings. Using food references in writing has enabled diasporic authors to assert their own uniqueness more clearly through their writing. Extensive references to food (either in the title or in the book) have become a common trend among many diasporic writers who use food as a trope to explore inter-regional differences and identity issues. Despite harsh criticism directed against women writers from the Asian American community for using alimentary images1 to explore individualities and ethnic identities, food references in fiction have become an established trope among many female authors writing from the diaspora, about their own ethno-regional issues and peculiarities. Food is a memory that enables diasporic communities to recollect their specific pasts, their familiar surroundings and most importantly their roots. For the diaspora, traditional food is an essential element of their identity. Their traditions, otherwise neglected and difficult to maintain amidst host communities, find meaning and continuity through food. Therefore food becomes the trope through which they assert their individuality and their affiliations to their motherland and their familial culture. The use of and reference to food has been and is still a popular trope among South Asian American women writers who present their identities and differences through alimentary images in their work. Although food is an essential element of the South Asian diaspora’s identity confirmation because of its Otherness to American food, some of the writers have chosen food as a means of presenting cultural conflict beyond its use as an element to explore the Otherness and the exotic nature of the diaspora, as

Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season

121

in Chitra Divakaruni’s acclaimed The Mistress of Spices (1997). Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri, some of the leading figures of South Asian American women’s writing, have all used food images, and foodways to establish, negotiate and question the uniqueness assigned to South Asians in the American diaspora. In South Indian American novelist Amulya Malladi’s The Mango Season (2003) the cultural conflict between the newly-returned-to-India-yet-already-integratedin-the US culture diasporic subject and the traditional South Indian family structure is examined through references to food and food rituals in a Telugu2 Brahmin household.

Identity through Food Through this chapter, I intend to examine the relevance of food and alimentary images in Amulya Malladi’s first novel, The Mango Season. With the aid of an examination of South Indian identity as expressed through alimentary images, I will argue that Amulya Malladi uses food not only as a means of asserting a unique South Asianness, but also as a means of exploring women’s space within the diaspora and in India. I will argue that food writing not only contributes largely to the identity formation of diasporic women through fiction but also that culinary images are used by Malladi to explore a range of emotions that are either unexpressed or suppressed in women. Food writing has been largely neglected as a means of expressing emotions and women’s space within the larger society because of the trope’s commercial use as in the form of cook books and novels that use exotic details, which use alimentary images as an artistic trope of self-exploration, whether of characters or situations. I will argue that Malladi uses this neglected form to explore identities and designated spaces of and for women within a South Indian context, as well as from the point of view of an Indian American diasporic woman. In The Mango Season, Priya Rao, returning to India after seven years in the USA with the news of her engagement to an American, examines her dual identity as a young woman who has become much more comfortable with American social rules and at the same time, as a young woman born in India and brought up with South Asian ethics, values her family traditions and attachments. Her exploration takes place through a culinary journey of South Indian food, especially mangoes and pickles. The use of food, recipes and domestic gender hierarchies, not only explores Priya’s growing discomfiture with her motherland, but also the diaspora’s need to utilise the best of both cultures. Unlike Rushdie, who uses the “chutneyfication” (Rushdie 459) of history to find an identity for his

122

Chapter Seven

character, Malladi “pickles” identity/ies to define Priya’s character. Rushdie preserves Saleem’s identity in Midnight’s Children and, through Saleem, Indian history as Saleem perceives it, through the use of chutneys. For Saleem, national history and personal history get preserved with individual memories, as the spices in the chutney. While chutneys preserve different elements of the ingredients that are being chutneyfied, pickles change the taste and texture of the preserved fruit or vegetable as it ferments over a period of time. Malladi “pickles” Priya’s character, changing her identity and her definition of her own individuality through her changing emotions. Priya’s perception of her own self changes and undergoes transformations, with emotions that alter through her varying experiences. Even as Rushdie chutneyfies history on a community level, Malladi pickles identities on an individual, contemporary level. While Saleem is concerned with the ingestion of history and culture3 I argue that Priya is concerned, not with the preservation or ingestion, but with the process of preserving and hoarding of cultural memories. Pickles, though preserving ingredients change the taste and the texture of the same because of the fermenting agents used. Thus Priya preserves her identity as a South Indian American but her identity changes its texture and the initial form because of the emotions and experiences that ferment its original form. Just as no two chutneys are ever the same, the pickles are also never the same. Priya’s identity is pickled. Just as pickles become better with time, her identity too is defined and refines itself over time as she experiences different obstacles and realities. Priya therefore becomes refined and changes over the period of the narrative, since she is being reformed (as the pickles are fermented) with spoken and unspoken emotions of her family and of herself. In conversation with her fiancé before her departure for India, Priya clarifies her journey’s goal, “‘What are you looking forward to the most?’ Nick asked... ‘HAPPINESS,’ I said without hesitation” (Malladi 2). Happiness for Priya is not an emotion, but a concept which is related to the childhood memory of eating the mango stone, where one needed to fight for it. The exchange between Nick and Priya symbolises her search for the emotion ‘happiness’ and her inability to articulate it in her adopted language. She is capable of describing her need and want only through a reference to her memory of food. Food, or the memory of a particular type of food, thus becomes a substitute for an emotion. Despite her refusal to accept it at that moment, Priya takes the journey to find happiness, not in rejection, but in acceptance of her new self with diasporic contradictions. Just like the mango stone, which is “sticky” and for which she needed to fight with her sibling, Priya’s happiness is “sticky”, with emotions

Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season

123

unspoken and over played and is only derived after her fight with the people she loves the most. Food consumption and food preparation becomes a bonding experience for Priya in The Mango Season. Priya sneaks off with her grandfather Thatha (Italics in the original) to eat the “forbidden fruit” (Malladi 57), pomegranates, in an attempt to re-establish her bond with her grandfather after seven years. The fruit becomes “forbidden” because of Priya’s childhood incidents of falling sick after eating unripe pomegranates in large quantities. But in an attempt to reunite and recreate bonds, the grandfather and the granddaughter sneak out to repeat the same forbidden act. The shared act of sneaking off together therefore works on two levels in the text. On one hand it is an act to recreate the past and reignite bonds. On the other hand, it is how the otherwise stern grandfather indulges his granddaughter, and shows his love for her. Affection thus is expressed through the subversive means of indulgence in food. Further, Thatha uses food to avert a confrontation of ideas and emotions with Priya: “I don’t want to argue over something that does not concern you.... Make some avial (A south Indian vegetarian dish made of mixed vegetables cooked with coconut milk).4 You make the best avial, he ordered sweetly” (Malladi 61), making food the sustenance and substitute for emotional bonding. Food therefore becomes a metaphor for the unspoken emotional bonds between the traditional grandfather and Priya. While Priya represents the new generation, which attempts to be more vocal about their emotions, by being forthright about her rights, her beliefs and values to her family in India and through her emails to Nick, Priya’s grandfather represents the older, more traditional generation of Indians in particular and South Asians in general, who expressed their love, emotions and anger through the surrogate means of food and other related rituals of sharing domestic duties or gifts instead of being vocal about them. Instead of accepting that Priya’s argument is valid and that he is losing ground with his point of view regarding marriage and love, he orders her to make a dish, while bringing up past memories of how he enjoyed it through a reference to how Priya makes the “best avial”. The reference to food, one that is particularly flattering to Priya, placates her anger for the moment while it also makes the connection between Priya and her grandfather much stronger. Though this is an overtly sexist comment, where Thatha defines Priya’s identity through her gender, from a South Indian caste conscious and gendered social point of view, this is the best compliment he can pay Priya. Complimenting Priya on her single culinary achievement is the only way he can show her his appreciation and pride in her. Therefore through

124

Chapter Seven

his open admiration of Priya’s culinary skills Priya’s grandfather overcomes his inability to openly appreciate her spirit and her forthrightness, but nevertheless shows how much he values her. Thus food replaces emotions that are unspoken and appreciation that is unvoiced.

Alimentary Memories Amulya Malladi uses alimentary references to highlight how the staple sustenance becomes “cultural sustenance” in Priya’s extended family. Priya’s trip to Monda Market to buy the sour mangoes required to make Avakai (South Indian mango pickle) is fraught with memories. “[T]he strong smell of mango and its juices sank in. And memories associated with that distinct smell trickled in like a slow stream flowing over gently weathered stone” (Malladi 9) recalls Priya, while the same trip to buy mangoes stirs emotions of shame and hurt because of her mother’s bargaining: “and memories of my mother bartering over everything came rushing back like a tidal wave” (Malladi 10). Thus food not only evokes memories of food, it is also not exclusively evocative of happy times. Food induces emotions of fond nostalgia as well as anger and shame. Through alimentary references, Malladi therefore invokes the diasporic relationship with food, not only as a nostalgic remembrance of their past, but also as a memory that is suppressed within their diasporic settings. For Priya mangoes thus become a coded cultural experience that stirs up memories and sustains her new identity, either in acceptance or rejection of her past. Malladi further strengthens her use of alimentary images as a trope that explores diasporic sentiments through Priya’s nostalgic remembrances of goli soda, paan and other food items eaten with aunts, alone and in the company of her elders. These nostalgic recollections, brought to the front through food images, strengthen the immigrant sentiments of Priya, as well as the importance of food in the identity construction of diasporic/immigrant subjects. Food rituals such as eating together in Priya’s grandmother’s house, preparing the various mango pickles, cooking numerous meals or helping out with food preparation make Priya an integrated part of the otherwise different lives of her parents and relatives in India. Instead of “mixing” smoothly with her family like her food that she was “mixing...with [her] fingers” (Malladi 79), which is “intimate”, Priya contradicts and challenges her grandparents’ stereotypical views of America and black people. The contrast drawn between the smoothly mixed food that is intimate and the rough edges and conflicts in Priya’s and her family’s relationships also highlight the (dys)function of food in re-establishing

Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season

125

traditional beliefs such as caste and gender hierarchies in the diaspora. Even though food is used to establish traditions and traditional beliefs, the diasporic subjects are unable to follow the same rules and rituals, despite their consumption of the same traditional food. In spite of the fact that Priya is able to relate to her forgotten food rituals, she is unable to accept all the other related coded rituals that are consumed as staple beliefs with food. Her diasporic sensibilities make her question her family’s traditional values and prejudices. This discontent is further highlighted through Priya’s nostalgia for American food. Malladi uses Priya’s involvements, either in helping out or by being a mere physical presence in the ancestral kitchen and other food related activity areas to highlight her changed perspectives, her dilemma as a newly returned diasporic Indian and her emotional conflicts between her history and her present. Food, therefore, travels beyond the individual space and encompasses the larger political space where the relations between individuals represent larger social issues and concerns. Malladi’s use of food metaphors, such as sticky mangoes, turmeric stained pickles, frothy coffee and food that is mixed with the fingers, thus transcend the mere sensory imagery evoked by the references to food. For the diaspora, food becomes one of the easiest ways to express its emotions. Food not only evokes nostalgia for the diaspora, but is the only way for people who are struggling to come to terms with the expression of emotions in a new language. Since the adopted language of English is unable to express diasporic emotions which are tradition bound and defined, especially those that are not defined or are inconsistent with the adoptive country’s socio-political ethics, which are “sticky” and difficult to express, the diaspora reverts to the common diasporic code language of food to express themselves. Food references thus break the cultural barriers created when travelling between cultures, because it becomes easier to navigate the unknown with the known and the familiar. Diasporic subjects slip back to the familiar not only in search of nostalgia but also as a means of finding their own identity. For Priya the difficulty arises in negotiating this craving for an emotional niche through food and the negotiation between her adopted culture of America and her South Indian traditions. The intentional use of sensory language and food metaphors explore emotions that are strained and in abundance at Priya’s grandmother’s house. The Contents page of the novel reads like a cook book with its chapters titled “Raw Mangoes, Oil and Spices...Leftovers” (Malladi Contents page), all of which start with a recipe for a South Indian dish. The atmosphere in Priya’s grandmother’s home is measured with the

126

Chapter Seven

spicy, oily recipes that herald the emotions that are explored in the chapter. The first chapter, “Raw Mangoes”, which details how to make Avakai deals with raw emotions yet to become finite and developed with time, just like the mango pickle which is meant to be marinated for four weeks for it to be ready to eat. The emotional conflicts that are undercurrents in Priya’s grandmother’s house are not ready to be resolved in the first chapter. They get resolved in the Epilogue, where the symbolic mango pickle arrives in The United States and Nick eats the pickle. The metaphorical meaning of food, which needs to be treated with care, therefore permeates human relations creating similarities between food and human emotions. Sensory details such as pounding, peeling, chopping and cutting food items are also employed to reveal the emotional atmosphere in the novel and of the characters. Priya’a aunt Neelima (who was not accepted as part of the family because of her difference in caste) is made to “pound dried red chillies”, while Lata, the accepted and respected aunt (because of her recent pregnancy and caste) pounds “fenugreek seeds in another pestle” (Malladi 88). The spices reveal the importance or the subordinate position of individuals within the family politics. Chillies, while symbolising anger and resentment, are also a symbol of strength. It is the spice that can destroy a dish and is potent in its spiciness. Neelima is being tested for her ability to measure up to the task, while Lata is given the soothing and medicinal fenugreek seed since she is already accepted into the fold. When the kitchen becomes the space of arguments, discussions and the revelation of secrets, the characters chop vegetables, peel, cut and scrape through food items to reveal their emotional turmoil, anger and conflicts. Ruth Maxey too elaborates and critiques the use of “mangoes” and “grandmothers” as a trope in Malladi’s novel. She states that, in The Mango Season, “the putatively formulaic status [of using food references are avoided] through a subtly shifting treatment of food which focuses on regional details, [which] signals the link, for Indian women, between food and maternal discourse, inherited gender roles, and the ancestral home” (Maxey 165). The South Indian identity of the characters, especially of women, and the influence of their Telugu Brahminical background permeate the narrative, even though its descriptions of mango pickle making and other food items grant the characters’ their specific South Indian identity. Food thus becomes a mark of “cultural work”5 and transcends the boundaries of commercial or exotic fare that provide the ethnic uniqueness established in The Mango Season. It preserves the cultural identity of the female characters and preserves the ethno-regional affiliations of the female characters, affording them a uniqueness that is specifically South Indian, despite their diasporic or Indian affiliations.

Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season

127

Malladi deftly uses food and references to food to explore emotions throughout the novel. Every time Priya has an argument or a confrontation with her mother, she defies her by going out and having street food. Priya’s desire to have goli soda from the roadside vendor (Malladi 92-96) or to have ganna juice (Malladi 109) goes beyond mere food memories or nostalgia for her youth and childhood food, but is borne out of her instinctive memories of her childhood that propels her to act against her mother’s orders and wishes. Instead of having open confrontations with her mother where she would have to defy her mother’s authority and challenge her orders, Priya prefers to have forbidden food from the street vendors in a silent but potent protest against her mother’s authority. Priya’s complicated love-hate relationship with her mother, which is inexplicable in simple terms, is elaborated through her inability to have an open confrontation with her, despite her overt dislike of her mother’s overbearing presence. As Sarah Sceats argues, in relation to contemporary women’s fiction, “for many people the connection of food with love centres on the mother....” (Sceats 11). This is true for Priya too. Her connection to food and her relationship with her mother are interrelated. The love for the mother, which is overridden by the fear and the loathing for her apparent authority, is thus played out through Priya’s desire to go against her mother, through an act of defiance through food. Priya equates food, love and authority with her mother and Malladi uses these factors together to bring out the complex relationship between them using symbolic meanings associated with food and food practices. The play of dense emotions that are hidden behind gender politics and maternal authority in a South Asian context is played out through the use of food as a mode of defiance. As much as Priya is unable to break away from her food habits, she is also unable to move away from her complex relationship with her mother. Just as she desires an amiable amalgamation between her American sensitivities and her South Indian identity, she also desires to overcome her loathing, fear and love for her mother and accept her with all her faults. This reaches its culmination at the end of the novel when Priya’s mother accepts her choice of an American partner: “Ma was back to normal, bitching and moaning that I didn’t call enough and when I did, she bitched and moaned that I talked too long with Nanna and wasted my money” (Malladi 228). In contrast to Priya’s defiance against her mother, she is taken to an ice cream parlour by her brother Nate when she reveals the news of her American fiancé to her family. The ice cream parlour, which is a “cozy copy of a ‘50s Hollywood movie” which had a “jukebox, a red jalopy in a corner, and Enrique Iglesias...telling some woman she couldn’t escape his

128

Chapter Seven

love at the top of his weepy lungs” (Malladi 171), blends Priya’s diasporic identity with her Indian identity and signals her desire to soothe her family’s bruised emotions as well as her desire to stay within the parameters dictated by her mother as well as her family. She is not defiant, but has become a diasporic Indian who goes out to an ice cream parlour to have kulfi, thus staying within the parameters of her South Asian heritage but with her own twist of diasporic identity.

Food to Define Social Hierarchies While food becomes a class marker for Priya’s diasporic self, Malladi uses food to navigate the complex social hierarchies and domestic hierarchies prevalent in Priya’s family too. As John Thieme and Ira Raja state Food...cannot be divorced from its social inscriptions. Its discourses are complex semiotic systems, or metalanguages that offer vocabularies for commenting on virtually all areas of social experience. This is particularly the case in South Asia. (xix, italics in original)

Therefore food functions as a social parameter that defines and delineates spaces for women as well as the diaspora. In Malladi’s novel, the food choices and the food preparation reveal details about the caste consciousness, social status and gender politics within Priya’s Telugu Brahmin family. “Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen... Sowmya cooked and left the dishes outside where Rajni cleaned them” (Malladi 26), Priya explains about the maidservant and her role in her grandmother’s house. The subtle detail about the maidservant’s caste reveals the caste consciousness that prevails in food related rituals. Being in the same caste but not from the same state is also detrimental in the caste conscious family politics in Priya’s grandmother’s house. “‘Neelima is a very good person [...] She speaks Telugu fluently and cooks our food.’ Food was also very, very essential. But not as essential as the caste” (Malladi 34). Neelima thus becomes an outcaste based on her caste. While she is able to cook the same food, because of her “caste” she is still not acceptable because of the subtle difference between hers and their caste. While the servant can “clean” the dishes, she is not allowed to come into the kitchen or cook the meals. Food preparations thus delineate the social spaces that are prevalent in South Asian societies, especially in a caste conscious India, because the caste hierarchy demands people of only higher or similar castes prepare food for people of higher castes. Since the servant is from a lower caste, she is not allowed to take

Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season

129

part in food preparation since it will be deemed “not clean” in a caste conscious society. The recipes detailed in The Mango Season and the references to food once again reveal the caste system and food choices based on caste and religious beliefs. All the detailed references to food are vegetarian meals and the overt vegetarian choices give insights into the beliefs of Priya’s Indian family. While the elders are proud of their vegetarian, Hindu, Brahmin diet, the young, progressive generation represented by Priya and Nate defy those food parameters. Priya pines for food from “Home” which for her has become “Whole Food Grocery Store and fast food at KFC... [and] Starbucks.” (Malladi 134) She is no longer comfortable with the “alien, exasperating and sometimes exotic” (Malladi 134) India and Indian food choices. Exotic for her is not the unfamiliar, but the familiar that has become different. The difference has come about because of her changed preferences, induced by her American sensitivities. Thus Priya becomes a representative of her generation who defies the set food habits and gender norms practiced and established by elders. Nate, on the other hand has “had beef biriyani at an Iranian Cafe in Mehndipatnam and didn’t care all that much about tradition and culture” (Malladi 189). Nate challenges traditions from within the boundaries of his social order, signifying the changing power dynamics amongst the younger generation in India. Unlike Priya, he chooses his own food alternatives: biriyani, but with a difference to signal his uniqueness through his food preferences. While Nate’s food choices distinguish him from his traditional Telugu Brahmin family, signalling his non conformity with family politics and gender stereotypes that are played out through food choices and rituals, Priya’s nostalgia for “home food” strengthens her diasporic affiliations. She misses her mainstream American food such as KFC and Starbucks, because that is what America is for her. Malladi uses the stereotypes and the stereotypical mainstream imagination of aligning KFC, Starbucks and fast food chains to America to reinforce Priya’s diasporic confusions and affiliations. America for Priya is thus invoked only through the mainstream and lacks individuality, as opposed to the food rituals and choices available in her Telugu Brahmin family. This can also be interpreted as the peripheral presence of the diaspora in America, especially the non-integrated first generation of immigrants. The first generation, like Priya, is able to relate to the mainstream since the mainstream is available and accessible to them, but are unable to relate to food rituals and traditions in America because of their peripheral presence as the Other. Being the Other with different traditions, food rituals and choices, the diasporic subject is unable to understand or relate to the

130

Chapter Seven

American food traditions except for the widely available fast food choices which are devoid of nationality or ethnicity for the most part. Nevertheless, she craves the communal and the commercial, rather than the individual and the choreographed food rituals at her grandmother’s place. When in her diasporic American location, India too becomes a commercialised stereotype for Priya, as is depicted in the mainstream American imagination. India becomes restaurant food that consists of North Indian food varieties, and Hindi movies that depict either cosmopolitan urban Indian values or predominantly North Indian cultural rituals. She does not mind “living in South Bay with the Indian restaurants and Indian movie theatres in arm’s reach” (Malladi 68) and she bonds with Nick’s mother through curry powder because Nick’s mother “love[s] curry” (Malladi 70). India is stereotyped and is a clichéd presence for Nick’s mother, as much as America is for Priya. The Other is always marginalised and is related to through mainstream renditions of food and food choices. Malladi’s use of such mainstream details exposes the otherisation of the other, as practiced by both the host as well as the guest in diasporic locations. Food or preparation of food also becomes a gendered space in The Mango Season. The kitchen is always occupied by women, married, waiting to be married or evading marriage. Despite the fact that “men have to cook... [and] learned how to cook” (Malladi 44) when women “sat out” during their “period” so as to not “contaminate” anything, none of the male figures that appear in The Mango Season cook in the course of the narrative. Nate is the only male figure who occupies space inside the kitchen when he returns late from his excursion in an attempt to avoid his mother. Nate’s marginal existence, of not belonging to the family politics and of refusing to adhere to food traditions, makes him the only presence that is able to transcend the defined political spaces of men’s space (the dining room) and the women’s space (the kitchen). Therefore the kitchen is turned into a contested space where women avoid each other as well as engage in emotional confrontations, and where female figures fight their battles for acceptance and power. Malladi deftly weaves food, kitchen space and women together into a tale about women and food to elaborate on gender patterns and hierarchies, as well as gender politics and domestic power struggles that play a vital role in home versus diaspora relationships. Sowmya, Priya’s youngest aunt who is unmarried, yet waiting for the “right” marriage proposal, otherwise powerless and under the shadow of her father, asserts her identity and authority through her cooking and her kitchen: “You have to learn to cook....And if you don’t...just leave my kitchen” (Malladi 159, emphasis added). Sowmya

Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season

131

admonishes Priya’s inability to cook because it is accepted as the duty of a woman to cook. Cooking thus becomes a gendered vocation and the kitchen becomes a gendered place where women are able to assert their power. Priya’s diasporic identity and American influenced individuality make it superfluous for her to master cooking, because she is economically stable and is educated, as opposed to her Indian aunts. It also gives her the power as an individual woman who stands apart from the traditions of her family. But for Sowmya and her other aunts, it is the main mode to assert power in a male dominant, Brahmin society. While men decide who to get married to, whom their daughters should marry, how many children they are meant to have, and financial details, women decide on what to cook and how their kitchens should be. From a diasporic point of view, for Priya, this constant need to seek acceptance and approval is invalid and archaic. But for Sowmya, the most important thing when deciding her marriage partner is whether he will allow her to have a job and whether she will have her own house. These subtle details reveal prevalent gender hierarchies in the Telugu Brahmin society of which Malladi writes and critiques, and of gender roles within India, as perceived by Indian diasporic women. As Garg and Khushu-Lahiri contend, “food associated with an ethnic community becomes the quintessential marker of identity” (80). Through the use of alimentary images in The Mango Season Malladi establishes Priya’s identity, which is hyphenated and multi layered. She is Telugu as well as American. Malladi describes Telugu Brahmin food traditions and South Indian dishes of masala dosa (Rice pancakes stuffed with spiced potatoes), avial and rava ladoo (a round shaped sweet made with semolina and ghee) to assert Priya’s South Indian Telugu Brahmin identity and mark her as separate from the larger cluster of Indians and Indian Americans in the diaspora. Priya’s sensitivities, defined and changed because of her diasporic affiliations, still retain her Telugu Brahmin identity through her food choices but, at the same time, are changed to accommodate her American diasporic sensitivities. Identity thus becomes asserted and redefined through food memories and food habits. Priya’s nostalgia for “good south Indian food in America...all-out vegetarian, south Indian food” (Malladi 193) establishes her South Indianness, despite her progressive ideas as a diasporic woman and her desire to have “KFC and Starbucks”. Through Priya, Malladi melds the identity politics that separate and differentiate Indian sensibilities from diasporic needs and desires. Therefore food and references to food habits and traditions, assert the uniqueness of Priya and the other women characters in The Mango Season, and the kitchen, the main space for women to prepare food,

132

Chapter Seven

becomes the space to assert and define distinctiveness for women. Kitchen politics played out through food preparation create identities for women characters despite the strong patriarchal influence that govern the lives of these Telugu Brahmin women. Notwithstanding food and food references in the mainstream novels being analysed by Asian American critics and South Asian American literary critics as an identity marker for the diaspora or as a trope to highlight otherness and exoticism, the specific use of food to establish female identity and food as a metaphor for emotional development and expression of characters is under-discussed in the study of South Asian American women’s fiction. Malladi uses food and references to food not only as a distinctive character marker for her characters, but also as a specifically gendered identity indicator for her women and also as a vehicle to interpret their emotional development. Food, which occupies a central position in any society as a social ritual, inhabits a social role in a South Asian context because of caste, cultural and religious rituals associated with it. Malladi skilfully uses all those references associated with food to create novels about food, emotions and identity. Malladi also explores the confusions and “pickled” emotions of a diasporic woman in The Mango Season and uses alimentary images to bring forth the confusion and hybridity involved in identity formation of a diasporic Indian woman.

Notes 1. Chinese American literary critic and author Frank Chin, calls the use of food and food related rituals “food pornography”. This term first appears in Chin’s play The Year of the Dragon (first produced in 1974) where the protagonist uses Chinese food presented to the English speaking “tourists” as a form of exoticising his culture in an attempt to survive in a foreign land. Chin in his overtly prejudiced male centered analysis of Asian American women’s literature in the Big Aieeeee (1991) dismisses women writers and their attempts at discussing and presenting their culture through myths and everyday traditions of food in their fiction as “fake”. In his haste to dismiss women writers, he does not see the nuanced attempts at presenting ethnic cultures through the tropes of food and food writing that was prominent in Asian American women’s writing. 2. Variously spelt as Telugu and Telegu. A Dravidian language group which is also used to describe the group of people living in South Central India who speaks Telugu language. 3. See discussion by Mark Stein. “Curry at Work: Nibbling at the Jewel in the Crown”. Eating Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Food. Eds. Tobias Döring, Markus Heide and Susanne Mühleisen. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2003). 133-149.

Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season

133

4. A south Indian vegetarian dish made of mixed vegetables cooked with coconut milk (my definition). 5. I am using the term from Jane Tompkins. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For her, “cultural works address specific historical situations, but I argue that cultural works can preserve present ethno-regional affiliations as well.

Works Cited Chan, Jeffery Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. The Big Aieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese Literature. New York: Meridian. 1991. Print. Garg, Shweta, and Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri. “Interpreting Culinary Montage: Food in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.” ASIATIC 9.1 (2012): 73-83. Web. 26 Sept. 2012. Kunow, Rüdiger. “Eating Indian(s): Food, Representation and the Indian Diaspora in the United States.” Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food. Ed. Tobias Döring, Markus Heide, and Susanne Mühleisen. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2003. 151-75. Print. Malladi, Amulya. The Mango Season. New York: Ballantine Books. 2003. Print. Maxey, Ruth. South Asian Atlantic Literature: 1970-2010. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University. 2012. Print. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Penguin Books. 1980. Print. Sceats, Sarah. Food Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Print. Stein, Mark. “Curry at Work: Nibbling at the Jewel in the Crown.” Eating Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Food. Heide and Mühleisen. 13349. Thieme, John, and Ira Raja, eds. The Table is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2007. Print. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. England: Oxford University Press.1986. Print. Xu, Wenying. Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2008. Print.

CHAPTER EIGHT CLOTHING, GENDER, AND DIASPORA PRIYANKA SACHETI

Abstract This chapter explores the significance of traditional garments worn by first and second generation Indian immigrant women living in the United States, as represented in the novels and short stories of Indian-American authors, Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Using the characters and their choices of, and approach towards clothing in these works as examples, the chapter locates garments at a crucial intersection between gendered roles and immigrant identity politics. It interrogates whether the garments are a means to keep alive the notion of home or encode a multiplicity of selves in the context of their past and present homes and lives respectively. The short stories examined reveal firstgeneration immigrant women using traditional garments as a way to both, maintain the idea of traditions and home, as well as a way to negotiate the overwhelming challenges of their new home while the second-generation women's decision to reject the traditional garb points towards a possible assimilation into their surrounding environment. Irrespective of the garments that either generation of women ultimately choose to wear, they function as a reflection and manifestation of how women define and empower themselves, ultimately shaping the trajectories of their lives. Keywords: diaspora, women writers, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, clothing and gender, identity

Gendering Garments “As a person abandons worn-out clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within.” —Bhagvad Gita 95

Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora

135

A cursory glance at literary book covers of Indian diasporic women writers will reveal that a majority of them feature images of jewelcoloured saris, the irony being that the image of the sari often functions more as a visual byword for the authors' cultural identities rather than accurately reflecting the contents of the book. Yet, it is also undeniable that references to the sari and traditional garments in relation to the diaspora and, in particular, to women, are also strewn throughout the text, thus indicating the importance of traditional garments in representing, contextualising and reiterating the notion of an Indian cultural identity. This in turn adds to a variety of queries which seem inevitable in the context of the role of clothing in these texts. In the new land, what associations does the sari produce when the immigrant woman both wears and engages with it? Is it an ever-present reminder of home? Is it a means to keep alive the notion of home as she remembers and cherishes it? If she chooses to forsake the sari and don western clothes instead, is she repudiating her culture and traditions, being instead subsumed by modernity and western values? The sari thus functions both as a symbol of eastern versus western values, as well as a powerful reminder of home and memories entwined with it. While women in fiction generally wear simple saris for every-day use, the fancier and more elaborate ones are hidden away and brought out selectively, perhaps indicating the multiplicity of selves that the woman finds herself having to access and portray in her new home. At times, the sari and western clothes can co-exist; sometimes, it can even facilitate the passage from the old into the new. In much of the fiction of the Indian diaspora, gender plays a significant role as being the site from where the dialogue between costume and cultural identity is primarily and most intensely conducted and contested. At times, the choice of costume also dictates the direction of the lives that women will ultimately lead. The novels and short stories of Bengali-American writers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, most evocatively bring out the tensions of cultural belonging and acceptance through recurring images of clothing, particularly in the way that the sari is imagined and creatively used to indicate changing relationships with self and society.

The Hold of Tradition In Jhumpa Lahiri's short story, “Once in a Life Time”, the narrator, Hema observes that her first-generation immigrant mother avidly enjoys watching western cinema of a certain period. “She herself never wore a skirt—she considered it indecent—but she could recall, scene by scene,

136

Chapter Eight

Audrey Hepburn's outfits in any given movie,” the narrator says (231). Why indecent: why does the skirt migrate into the realm of inappropriateness? And yet, does the mother's meticulous worship of the outfits indicate a closeted desire to wear such clothes, a desire held back only because of conventions dictating the dress and presentation of an Indian woman in America? Lahiri and Bannerjee Divakaruni's novels and short stories focus on the wave of Indians immigrating to United States and establishing new homes and lives there. Lahiri trains her microscopic gaze upon the lives of immigrant Bengalis in the New England region, specifically those who arrived in the United States in the early 1960s, while Divakaruni's lens extend towards documenting the immigrant Indian community in California's Bay area. The tensions in Lahiri's work usually arise from the first generation steadfastly nurturing the idea of India being the homeland in their adopted homes, particularly, within their immediate domestic spaces while the next generation yearns to cast aside the homeland, both within their lives and their homes. In her stories located in New England, the first-generation Bengali mothers are almost exclusively found in saris, bindis, and vermillion, seemingly immune, or perhaps not permitted to succumb to western styles. In “Hell-Heaven”, a young Bengali man makes acquaintance with a young married Bengali woman by virtue of what she is wearing, specifically red and white bangles, unique to married Bengali women, and a commonly recognizable Tangail sari. In “Unaccustomed Earth”, Ruma deals with the arrival of her elderly, widowed father while still struggling to accept her mother's death. Reflecting on those items that she had kept of her mother, she notes that “of the two hundred and eighteen saris, she kept only three...telling her mother's friends to divide up the rest. And she had remembered many times her mother had predicted this very moment, lamenting the fact that her daughters preferred pants and skirts to the clothing that she wore, that there would be no one to whom to pass on her things” (17). This lack of legacy illustrates the fact that the second generation does not know quite what to do with these saris and other tangible emblems of their heritage while negotiating their relationship with what they perceive to be their homeland, the United States; rejecting them appears to be the most straightforward and uncomplicated solution in allowing them to integrate themselves into their homeland. In “Hell Heaven”, the narrator talks of going to a Thanksgiving celebration which has both Bengali and American guests, speaking of being “furious with [her] mother for making a scene before we left the house and forcing me to wear a shalwar kameez” (78). The source of her fury is that it distinguishes her from the

Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora

137

other Americans of her age when it is that group whom she identifies with, rather than the Bengalis. Lahiri's novel, The Namesake (2004) explores the significance of the sari for both the first and second generation diasporic Indian women and how it subliminally impacts the novel's narrator, Gogol, and the way he perceives these women, who happen to be his mother and wife respectively. The novel begins with Ashima Ganguli living in Boston, pregnant with her first child, Gogol. Throughout the novel, while Gogol wrestles with the notion of being an immigrant and has a contentious relationship with both his heritage and his parents, Ashima is constantly and consistently depicted as wearing “nothing but saris and Bata sandals” (65). When she goes into labour, she “is asked to remove her Murshidabad silk sari in favour of a flowered cotton gown that, to her mild embarrassment, only reaches her knees. A nurse offers to fold up the sari but, exasperated by the six slippery yards, ends up stuffing the material into Ashima's...suitcase” (2). Ashima's shyness at wearing something other than a sari and the depiction of the sari being a difficult, unmanageable garment becomes a metaphor for heritage and how her children will eventually perceive and engage with it. Later, when Gogol starts attending nursery school, she reflects that she “misses her son's habit of always holding onto the free end of her sari, as they walk together” (50) suggesting the beginning of Gogol's uprooting from his heritage as he leaves the highly traditional domestic space and enters the more public one. Yet, from Gogol's point of view, the sari is a reminder of all those things that he does not patently wish to be. Living with his girlfriend, Maxine, and her parents in their elegant New York house and telling her about her family, he observes that “she is surprised to hear certain things about life: that all his parents' friends are Bengali, that they had an arranged marriage, that his mother cooks Indian food every day, that she wears a sari and a bindi” (138). When Gogol brings Maxine home to meet his parents, he observes that his mother is wearing one of her better saris, dressed for formal company; Maxine in turn admires the material of his mother's sari, mentioning that her mother curates textiles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For Ashima, wearing her better sari functions as a means to impress; for Maxine, it is an exotic garment, far removed from the orbit of the familiar. Gogol's father's passing away becomes a turning point in the novel; when he meets his mother for the first time after his father's death, he is pained to see the white parting in his mother's hair, no more filled with vermillion, and the bare, bangle-free arms. Having become a widow, Ashima continues to maintain and practice

138

Chapter Eight

her traditions as they would be done back home; these traditions coupled with the rituals performed following his father's passing powerfully drives home the significance of family and his heritage for Gogol, which he had been denying until this point. It is at Ashima's request that he concedes to meet the daughter of a Bengali family friend, Moushumi, whom he once interacted with as a child. Upon meeting and quickly being attracted to her, he “remembers her mainly at the pujos he had attended every year, twice a year, with his family, where she would always be dressed in a sari carefully pinned to the top of her shoulder. Sonia would have to do the same, but she would always take off her sari after an hour or two and put on her jeans, stuffing the sari into a plastic bag and telling Gogol or her father to put it away for her” (200). The fact that Gogol's enduring memories of her as dressed up in a sari reflects that he incontrovertibly associates her with his heritage and that of his parents. And indeed, during their courtship leading up to their wedding, “they talk endlessly about how they know and do not know each other” (211). At their wedding ceremony, Gogol observes that it is the first time he has seen Moushumi in a sari, “apart from all those pujos years ago, which she had suffered silently” (222). Later on, she changes into a red Banarasi gown with spaghetti straps...she wears the gown despite her mother's protests—what was wrong with a salwar kameeze, she wanted to know...and when...she bares her slim, bronze shoulders...her mother manages to shoot her reproachful glances” (223). Moushumi emerges as a character intent upon delineating her identity as primarily an American woman with concessions made to her heritage in the form of the wedding and the sari; the specifically gendered mother-daughter conflict also reflects the mother's concerns regarding Moushumi resisting being solely defined by her heritage, which the mother has been otherwise intent on maintaining and reiterating in the context of her own identity. In Moushumi's case, the wedding sari assumes a larger significance and becomes a narrative in its own right in the light of the fact that the wedding and other ceremonial saris had originally been purchased for her wedding with her former American fiancé, Graham. In the event of her engagement breaking down, we learn that “the saris and blouses and petticoats [are] put away in a mothproof box” (217). During the wedding, Gogol himself observes that “two years ago, he might have been sitting in the sea of round tables...watching her marry another man….The red Banarasi wedding sari and the gold had been bought two years ago, for her wedding to Graham” (224). It clearly does not matter much to Moushumi that she marries in a sari which she had originally acquired to marry another man; it merely assumes an incidental significance. Several months

Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora

139

into the wedding, Gogol finds out that she has still kept the white wedding dress that “she would have worn after the Indian ceremony that she had planned for her and Graham….One day, he asks her why she still keeps it. “Oh, that,” she says with a shrug. “I keep meaning to have it dyed” (230). The red Banarasi wedding sari and the white dress become doubly significant, given the changing contexts of marriage for Moushimi: She had always been admonished not to marry an American...when she was only five years old, she was asked by her relatives if she planned to get married in a red sari or a white gown. Though she had refused to indulge them, she knew, even then, what was the correct answer. (213)

Moushmi then recounts the pact she had made with two other Bengali girls when she was twelve years old never to marry a Bengali man. In case of her having potentially married Graham, the red sari and white dress would have peacefully and interestingly co-existed; in marrying Gogol, she not only acquires a second-hand legacy but finds herself immured in the very situation she had consciously rejected and with someone whom she had sought to avoid. Eventually, soon after their first wedding anniversary, Moushumi bumps into an American academic whom she had admired as a teenager and almost immediately begins an affair—which eventually contributes to the dissolution of her marriage. The novel concludes by coming full circle with Ashima preparing to say farewell to a place which she has now come to accept as one of her homes. Yet, as she reflects, “though she still wears saris, still puts her long hair in a bun, she is not the same Ashima who once lived in Calcutta” (276). Ashima herself recognises that the sari is ultimately just a garment and that, while it undoubtedly represents the homeland and the traditions and cultural associations entwined with it, these exterior manifestations have been superseded by the interior psychological transformations that moving to and inhabiting another country have wrought. If Ashima chooses to steadfastly wear her saris, Gauri in Lahiri's second and most recent novel, The Lowland (2013) deliberately abandons them when she moves to Rhode Island, having married her dead Naxalite husband, Udayan's older brother, Subhash, while carrying the former's child. The way one's home can become a source of haunting unease and disruption means that Gayatri prefers to leave an otherwise beloved place and migrate to one thousands of miles away to escape her familiar world as well as the ghosts of her past. During the initial days of her life in America, Gauri remains clad in her saris; widowed just a few months earlier back in India, she had to clad herself in white, the only colour permitted for widows to wear. During his

140

Chapter Eight

visit following his brother's death, Subhash buys her a turquoise blue shawl, contravening the conventions of what a widow can wear—and when she arrives in Rhode Island a few months later, she is significantly wrapped in that same blue shawl. One may infer that she invests some kind of sentimental association with the shawl, specifically relating to Subhash; however, it eventually appears that the shawl represents essentially an escape, its blueness introducing opportunities in her life that she had not thought existed anymore for her. Reconciliation and a transition into couplehood never happen to Subhash and Gauri. In a pivotal scene in The Lowland, after returning from a party in which they have socialised with other Indian immigrant couples as a couple in their own right for the first time, Subhash wakes up the following morning to find that “...on the dressing table was a pair of scissors...along with clumps of her hair. In one corner of the floor, all of her saris, and her petticoats and blouses, were lying in ribbons...He opened her drawers and saw that they were empty. She had destroyed everything” (140). When Gauri walks in a few minutes later, he observes that “her hair hung bluntly along her jawbone, dramatically altering her face” (141). Upon being questioned as to why she has destroyed her clothes and cut her hair, she tells him she was tired of both. The destruction of the traditional version of Gauri which Subhash had been attracted to also makes him consciously aware that she had been once, and would ultimately remain his brother's wife, meaning that he could now potentially renegotiate his relationship with her. Yet, Gauri's rejection of her traditional self, or more precisely, the one she had inhabited in India, results in a rejection of the other roles thrust upon her, that of a wife and mother. Subhash and Gauri never do reconcile and ultimately, unable to bear the burden of motherhood while simultaneously striving to forge an academic career for herself, she leaves them both. Prior to her departure, when her daughter Bela visits Calcutta and they go sari shopping for her grandmother and her grandmother's maid, Bela asks her father if they might buy one for her mother. “She never wears them,” her father tells her (205). Later on, Lahiri draws attention to Gauri's uniform of black slacks and tunics and her hair, cut close, monkishly; yet, Gauri still holds to the shawl, the garment having assumed talismanic importance for her, signifying freedom.

Past Lives In both Lahiri and Divakaruni's works, saris frequently either inhabit the world of suitcases or are destined to linger in cupboards and shelves:

Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora

141

hidden, unworn, and therefore, invisible. The suitcases in particular vividly represent the displacement and migration from the homeland, with their contents, the saris, synonymous with memories of a past life; when in cupboards, saris are far removed from the ordinariness and tedium of present life. In Jhumpa Lahiri's short story, “Mrs Sen” the eponymous narrator looks after a young boy, Elliot, every day after school. Coming from a single-parent home, Elliot is drawn into the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Sen, especially the latter. Mrs. Sen is getting reconciled with her immersion into this extraordinarily different land and life and one of the sub-strands of the story revolves around her attempts to master driving and her love for fish. Seeing her through a western perspective, that of Elliot, we see her first in a “shimmering white sari patterned with orange paisleys, more suitable for an evening affair” (112) than a drizzly August evening. As the story progresses, Elliot becomes more attuned to her alternating bouts of nostalgia, when she narrates stories about her homeland, and her melancholia as she contemplates her present circumstances. Elliot glimpses Mrs. Sen every day waiting for him at the bus-stop, “her sari, a different pattern each day,” (119) fluttering below the hem of a checkered all-weather coat. As Elliot becomes accustomed to the coordinates of her uniquely hyphenated Indian-American existence, he begins to understand the sources of her melancholia. One day, when she is unable to get her husband to fetch her favourite fish, it leads her into dissolving into tears and leading him into her bedroom where she unfurls a seemingly locked rainbow of sorts from the “bureau and door of the closet, filled with saris of every imaginable texture and shade, brocaded with gold and silver threads. Some were transparent, tissue thin, others as thick as drapes” (125). As she sifts through the saris, she mourns, "When have I ever worn this one? And this? And this?” (125). Her outburst concludes with a “pile of tangled sheets on the bed. The room was filled with an intense smell of mothballs” (125). Even though Mrs. Sen wears saris on a regular basis, she is aware that these particularly heavy, elaborate saris represent festivities, rituals, and ceremonies, all emblems of a life that she has left behind and cannot access in her present one here; the reference to mothballs and their distinctive palpable scent indicates static, a life arrested. If Mrs. Sen's life appears to be that of one in statis, Sudha in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novel, The Vine of Desire, embraces a more dynamic existence. She too has left behind a past life bound by tradition and societal convention in Calcutta, where her mother-in-law threatened to abort her girl-child, forcing Sudha to flee to her cousin, Anju, who is

142

Chapter Eight

married and living in the Bay area, California. Having upended her life and unshackled earlier, binding notions of what it means to be a respectable Hindu wife and daughter-in-law, Sudha is seemingly free to shape her life into whatever she wishes it to be. During the initial months of her stay in America, she wears a sari by way of default; in one scene, when she and Anju embrace the joy of a beach, they both wear saris during their visit: “We run on the sand...our hurry makes a small wind. It is the color of our saris, which stream behind us like the eager start of a fire...Today we wear rebel red. It is a color that belongs to married women, one I have forfeited. I wear it with defiance” (Divakaruni 28). Nonetheless, Sudha still struggles to reconcile her status as a divorced woman and an immigrant in a new country. When attending a lavish party thrown by one of Sunil's affluent Indian colleagues, Anju and Sudha carefully deliberate over what to wear. As the saris emerge from the cousins' suitcases living beneath Anju's bed, Sudha mentions that they go through hers “quickly—there's only a few starched cottons in here. I had to leave all my expensive saris behind when I left [my husband's] house. Anju's suitcase, though, is still filled with her trousseau...the touch of another lifetime on my skin, to which there is no returning” (113-14). Lingering thoughts of an identity that she has sacrificed for that of ensuring an existence for her daughter, she also cannot help but consider that Anju's wedding sari, which is “sprays of gold on royal red...is out of place in this two-room apartment, its shag-haired carpet mangy from my vaccuuming” (114). For Anju, the saris represent an appreciation of the richness of her heritage which she may well have acquired to a greater degree having lived away from her homeland for many years. For Sudha, the reference to fabrics reminds her of her aborted dreams of becoming a fashion designer and the harsh contradictions of reality and fantasy. She intuits the presence of her and Anju's hidden selves in the saris, the saris vividly and tangibly representing a homeland and a life which she now realises she has figuratively and physically travelled thousands of miles away from. Yet, when she finally selects a “gray sari with a thin silver border, ambiguous enough for a woman whose marital status is questionable,” (115) Anju rejects her choice and offers her a “lovely, deep silk colored like a peacock's throat, embroidered all over with tiny gold moons” (115). Sudha's donning of Anju's gorgeous sari will have deeper ramifications than any of them realise; as she repudiates the lacklustre world of her previous life, she lets herself be open to an excitingly new one. Sudha's new life leads her to unconsciously adapt to her new surroundings. When she later goes out on a date with Lalit, an Indian-

Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora

143

American surgeon whom she meets at the aforementioned party, she wears a T-shirt and jeans, departing from the traditional sari and slipping into the casual robes of America. As her life becomes even more tumultuous and dramatic with her encountering a former suitor from Calcutta, who travels all the way to California to reclaim her, we witness her in a skirt, “red hibiscus on cotton” (333). On seeing Sudha for the first time since her climactic departure from Calcutta, he remarks, “You have changed, Sudha. That was the other thing I was afraid of” to which she retorts, “Changed how? You mean because I'm wearing Western clothes?” The novel ultimately concludes with her returning to a small Bengali town with her young daughter, Dayita, and an elderly man whom she will look after. Like Ashima, she may continue to wear saris but she ultimately has become a stronger, more defined and indeed, defiant personality than she had originally intended to be.

Coexistence The significance of the transition from wearing traditional clothes to western ones is much more important for women who are entrusted with being custodians of tradition and heritage, as opposed to immigrant men. In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage (1995), a story titled, “Clothes” primarily explores this transition. When a girl from a Bengali village, Sumita glimpses the most beautiful and expensive sari she has possibly seen, she appropriately views the colour of the pale pink sari as the “colour of transition”, (19) describing it as a “sari that could change one's life.” (20) As it happens, she wears this sari to a bride-viewing at which she impresses the Americaresiding Somesh and his parents and eventually gets married to him. During her flight to America, a journey which physically marks her transition, she feels anxiety before landing, thinking of meeting her husband, whose face she struggles to recall, and then, is gripped by the sheer terror of the new life that awaits her. In her quest to calm herself down by locating something familiar in her cache of thoughts, she recalls the suitcase in the plane cargo which contains her saris: Thick Kanjeepuram silks in solid purples and golden yellows, the thin hand-woven cottons of the Bengal countryside, green as a young banana plant, gray as the woman's lake on a monsoon morning. My wedding Benarasi, flame orange, with a wide palloo of gold-embroidered dancing peacocks. Fold upon fold of Dhakais so fine that they can be pulled through a ring. Into each fold my mother had tucked a small sachet of sandalwood powder to protect the saris from the unknown insects of

144

Chapter Eight America. Little silk sachets, made from her old saris. I can smell their calm fragrance...it is the smell of my mother's hands. I know then that everything will be all right. (24)

The saris are links to her physical home and environment and that of the natal through the presence of her mother's saris: they will function as security blankets amongst all that will shortly amaze and bewilder in her new home. Sumita continues to wear saris as she lives with Somesh and his parents; in fact, Sumita has to hide the Western clothes that Somesh purchases for her, rather than the saris. “I stuffed a towel at the bottom of the door so no light will shine through,” (25) she mentions when modeling the clothes for her husband. When she wears jeans, she is “marvelling at the curves of my hips and thighs, which have always been hidden under the flowing lines of my saris. I love the colour, the same pale blue as the nayantara flowers that grow in my parents' garden. The T-shirt is sunrise orange—the color, I decide, of joy, of my new American life” (25). A new found awareness of her physicality, coupled with colour associations of the homeland and her new home, results in these clothes playing a big role in influencing her engagement with her new life and embracing it. Somesh works in a 24-hour convenience store and yet, wishes to live independently in the future; he also desires for Sumita to work in the store alongside him and attend college. Keeping these future events in mind, he buys her a cream blouse with a long brown skirt. “They match beautifully, like the inside and outside of an almond. I really want to work in the store—stand behind the counter in the cream and brown skirt set (color of earth, color of seeds) and ring up purchases,” (26) Sumita muses; it appears that even imagining wearing these clothes is a source of empowerment. Blissful reveries segue into tragedy and we subsequently find Sumita in a white sari; she has become a widow and being scripted into upholding her native Bengali village traditions despite living thousands of miles away in America. “I kick out in a sudden rage, but the sari is too soft, it gives too easily,” (29) she says. Later, lying on the spilled white sari, she remarks, “I feel sleepy. Or perhaps it is some other feeling I don't have a word for. The sari is seductive soft, drawing me into its folds” (30). Is she willing to relinquish her new-found liveliness and agency for an identity which will negate and undermine her life? She becomes aware that even though the reason she came to America was because of marriage which included her husband and in-laws, she cannot forsake the country simply because those connections no longer exist. “I don't know yet how I will manage, here in this new, dangerous land. I only I know I must. Because

Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora

145

all over India, at this very moment, widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Doves with cut-off wings,” (31) she surmises, indicating that the loss of even the promise of agency and empowerment are unacceptable for her. In the end, she sees that “[in the mirror] a woman holds my gaze, her eyes apprehensive yet steady. She wears a blouse and skirt the color of almonds” (31). Can and does the sari elide the integration into the new land and even the relationships being forged here? One such example occurs in Lahiri's short story, “The Third and Final Continent” in which the unnamed narrator, a Bengali man newly arrived from Calcutta via London in the 1960s in Boston, makes an acquaintance with a hundred year old lady, Mrs. Croft, in whose house he rents a room. Having marvelled at the scope of changes and events she has experienced, including the first man upon the moon, he departs with the arrival of his wife, Mala from Calcutta. Prior to her arrival, witnessing an interaction between a sari-clad woman and a dog who bites the free-end of her sari, the narrator realises that he will have to both welcome and protect Mala. While his immersion into his new life as an immigrant has long begun, he becomes aware of the many challenges that await his wife. However, it is not just the new world that he has to prepare Mala for; both of them grapple with the contradictions of an arranged marriage: individuals unfamiliar with one another, yet bound by the familiar intimacies of marriage. Following Mala's arrival, as both of them begin to jointly navigate the terrain of marriage, the narrator takes Mala out one evening and they eventually end up visiting Mrs. Croft. As he stands in front of her along with his new bride, he experiences a flash of empathy for Mala and how much this new life and country must confound her; he then notices Mrs. Croft is scrutinizing Mala from top to toe: I wondered if Mrs. Croft had ever seen a woman in a sari, with a dot painted on her forehead and bracelets stacked on her wrists. I wondered what she would object to. At last, Mrs. Croft declared, with the equal measures of disbelief and delight I knew well: “She's a perfect lady! (195)

The encounter marks the first time that the narrator and Mala look at each other and smile and this contributes towards establishing a harmonious and loving marital bond.

Possibilities The first generation Indian immigrant women in the United States invest much in the garments that they wear, namely, the sari, perceiving it

146

Chapter Eight

as a living, tangible embodiment of the traditions and indeed, the country they have left behind and yet religiously and culturally still call home. Yet, in many ways, that notion of home and the life they led there is akin to a past life lived in another body. Their new home compels them to lead a sharply distinct new life to the one that they have left behind—and the garments become but a superficial aspect, ultimately dispensable. Those who stubbornly cling to the vestiges of their old life must reconcile themselves to the ever-present friction between their past and present selves; those who decide to shed their old garments and old lives must contend with the empowering and yet, overwhelming expanse of their new lives. For the second generation immigrant women, though, the sari metamorphoses into a costume, a member of the relics that populate the shrines of home and nostalgia that their parents dutifully and faithfully maintain. It is a costume that they can choose to don for a few hours or simply reject altogether. The tensions present in the spaces existing between the experiences of first and that of the second generation immigrant Indian women respectively nonetheless imbue the traditional garment with some measure of power and significance, rendering it not so entirely superficial, after all. Irrespective of the garments that either the first or second generation Indian immigrant women choose to wear, or not, it ultimately becomes a manifestation of how they perceive themselves in the arena of immigrant, gender, and identity politics—and its influence in dictating the trajectories of their lives.

Works Cited Bhagavad-Gita. Mumbai: The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 2006. Print. Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Arranged Marriage. New York: Random House, 1995. Print. —. The Vine of Desire. New York: Random House, 2002. Print. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Print. —. The Namesake. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Print. —. The Lowland. New York: Random House, 2013. Print. —. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008. Print.

PART III PERFORMING GENDER

CHAPTER NINE THE MASCULINISATION OF THE NATIVE GENTLEMAN: A CLOSE READING OF NEEL HALDAR IN AMITAV GHOSH’S SEA OF POPPIES UMA JAYARAMAN

Abstract In the Indian diasporic context, gender identities are almost always complicated by issues of race, class and caste. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies tells a story of the Old Diaspora1, and explores the ways in which the colonial presence in India and its over-vaulting ambition to control trade and industry of the region led to the displacement of people and the reconstruction of their identities in challenging ways. The characterisation of Neel Haldar in the novel succinctly captures such a moment of displacement. The novel, among other things, traces how the politics of colonial rule in the East orchestrates Neel’s awful fall from prosperity to adversity and privilege to privation that unveils the complexities of race, caste and class differences, and lays bare how these differences impact gender identities in spaces of displacement. Employing Judith Butler’s theory of “Gender as Performance” and Sigmund Freud’s concept of the “Uncanny”, this chapter explores the effects of diasporic displacement on Neel Haldar’s gender identity in order to ascertain how these experiences, in turn, inform ways in which his identity morphs in the new space he is forced to occupy. This chapter argues that his very source of entrapment ironically empowers and masculinises him. Keywords: displacement, pollution, masculinity, gender as performance, homophobia, uncanny, emasculation

The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman

149

Gendered Diasporas: The Indian Context The complexity of leaving home pointedly rests upon the ways in which the experience of staying away influences the identity of an individual. On being displaced from familiar spaces of home, the individual is dissociated, sometimes alarmingly so, from values and systems that were second nature to him/her. Very often, these values and systems become negotiable, even irrelevant, in the new space. Seen in this light, dispersal from the homeland diffuses the acquired sense of indigenous cultures. In the context of the Indian diaspora, such displacement leads to negotiations of identity within a complex web of issues relating to race, class, and caste between the two lands that the diasporic is associated with. If the state of diaspora has been induced by punishment and denotes an exilic position, then it invokes a nostalgic sense of a happier past in the diasporic consciousness. While theories of diaspora, among other things, have also explored these above-mentioned states of displacement such as exilic position (Ashcroft et al. 425), and unhappy diasporas (Mishra, 1), the main question relates more specifically to how identities morph in these situations, that is, how does the state of diasporic displacement identify and generate identities that were hitherto unperceived in the individual? Over the past three decades, thinking on gender as performance has enticed considerable critical inquiry. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman emphasise how gender becomes a “situated doing”, “carried out in the virtual or real presence of others who are presumed to be oriented to its production” (61). But when stripped of such a socialising context, it is possible for gender performance to be liberating. Judith Butler, an eminent gender theorist, argues to this effect. In her groundbreaking work titled Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), she challenges the heterosexual matrix through which gender identities are constructed and maintained. She also questions the usefulness of obligatory performances of gender within institutionalised systems of society. She highlights how the naturalisation of certain bodily acts as representing masculinity and femininity enforce the internalisation of these practices as the norm.2 For her, gender difference is sustained by “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions . . . and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them” (178). Such a collective agreement is socially instituted through interpellating individuals from birth into a subjectivated identity. Thus gender is not a matter of choice, but a condition that evolves by a rehearsed performance of identities that

150

Chapter Nine

become normalised through a process of reiteration. Such performances are self-destructive because they are mere strategies of survival within compulsory systems (177-8). In her preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler further states that her book “is written then as part of the cultural life of a collective struggle that has had, and will continue to have, some success in increasing the possibilities for a liveable life for those who live, or try to live, on the sexual margins” (xxviii). Her basic premise for challenging the heterosexual basis of discussing gender issues is that gender should not be taken for granted, nor should be policed. Secondly, she also states that one cannot claim that forms of sexual practice produce certain genders. Thirdly, she highlights how the naturalisation of certain bodily acts as representing masculinity and femininity enforce the internalisation of these practices as the norm. In the diaspora, gender identities evolve in certain predictable ways. While stepping out of homeland is likely to liberate the individual from the policed aspect of gender behaviour, the possibility of this freedom makes inherited notions and practices instatiated in him/her from birth seem less erasable. At times, these childhood drills even assume a new value when threatened. Further, spaces of diaspora are born not only when individuals step out of a geographical space called home but also when such familiar spaces are threatened by invasion of other cultures. Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee identify how the advent of British colonists into India triggered a sense of cultural involution in the Indian mind, so that reforms pertaining to gender roles in general and rights of women in particular that had been suggested by political and social thinkers of the times took a backseat in order to mobilise the Indian consciousness towards fighting in favour of time-tested codes of gender behaviour. The stories of heroism, truth, duty and fidelity from the well-known epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, and other historical and mythological stories, were re-iterated with a new concern to resist the onslaught of Western modernity. New attempts to re-think native identity to contest foreign encroachment imposed certain restrictions on women. They were to dwell in the inner sphere, sanctum sanctorum (Ghar), where foreign discourses of modernity should not be allowed to penetrate (Bahir). Woman was idolised as goddess and made responsible for the spiritual well-being of the family. While women were deified in order to resist the attempts of the British to address women’s issues in colonial India, attempts were made to masculinise men to confront the imperial ruler’s criticism of the native male as effeminate. Nineteenth Century Utilitarian philosopher James

The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman

151

Mill’s largely derisive account of Hindus in his historical account of British rule in India (1826) emphasised the inferiority of Hindu demeanour and ways of speech. Lord Macaulay’s infamous indictment of the Bengali male was couched in a similar vein: “The physical organization of Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy…His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder & more hardy breeds” (“Memoirs” 172). Mrinalini Sinha rightly argues that this colonial cliché was “tied to the entire ensemble of political, economic, and administrative imperatives that underpinned the strategies of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century” (3). Therefore, M. K. Gandhi’s initial response to the colonial theory was to call for masculinising the Indian man. More attention was paid to physical exercise, eating meat and so on. Swami Vivekananda is said to have actively supported physical strength over spiritual quest. In one of his speeches he exhorted young men to be strong first of all: Religion will come afterwards…you will understand the Gita better with your biceps muscles a little stronger…you will understand the Upanishads better and the glory of the Atman when your body stands firm upon your feet and you feel yourselves as men. (The Complete Works 687)

Subhash Chandra Bose called for militant action against the coloniser in his famous words, “give me blood, and I will give you freedom” (at a rally of Indians in Burma, July 4, 19443). This was in keeping with the Kshatriaic (manhood, or the warrior) figure. In Punjab, one of the advantages of the native community was its masculinity, which produced militants like Bhagat Singh. However, the real breakthrough came in 1930s, as Nandy highlights, when Gandhi broke the back of imperial theory about the Indian native by calling for “Abhaya” (fearlessness) in the natives (xvi). The Gandhian values were non-militant action, non-violence, and tolerance, qualities traditionally associated with women. Active resistance without fear became the slogan for Gandhi, amply exemplified in the Dandi4 march which was defined as a pilgrimage undertaken “so that I may return to the ashram with ‘swaraj’ (self-rule) in the palm of my hand” (Majumdar 150). Resistance of such calibre became a model of an alternative masculinity that rejected aggressive and violent action in order to lead to a holistic sense of masculinity. When activism and courage are liberated from aggressive and violent selves, it becomes compatible with the traditional feminine principle and evolves into the androgynous site that became Gandhi’s conception of a new self (Mondal 913-936). The new holistic sense of masculinity also had its religious sanction in the Vaishnava cult

152

Chapter Nine

of worship and more easily appealed to the common man. Robert Goldman relates the Puranic (stories relating to the gods) representation of androgyny and transsexualism in human behaviour to the pre-modern Brahmanical concept of holistic human nature. Such a sense of human nature not only salved injured emotions but also challenged the coloniser’s discomfort with non-normative sexuality. Serena Nanda argues that “when Western culture strenuously attempts to resolve sexual contradictions and ambiguities by denial or segregation, Hinduism appears content to allow opposites to confront each other without resolution” (201). However, this sense of perfectibility depends on the principle of renunciation as a feminine trait, epitomised in the mythical figure of Savitri5 whose powerlessness and vulnerability as a woman became her strength, and her steadfast love for Satyavan, her husband, was instrumental in saving his life from Yama, the Hindu god of death. Savitri then becomes the “shakti” (energy) and Satyavan assumes the identity of nationhood. Co-opting “Stri Shakti” (woman power) into the nationalist struggle for independence contributed to a new view of gender identity in colonial India. Shakti, the feminine energy, becomes an inseparable part of male entity, and this coexistence of the sexes approximates to the androgynous form of the Hindu god, ardhanaarishwara. Ardhanaarishwara, literally translates as half-woman god but signifies the able containing of female energy in the male identity, as well as the tempering of male aggression by female traits such as non-violence, temperance and patience. This notion of gender identities and relations significantly informed the cultural understanding of gender in colonial India and could be said to significantly influence gender notions to this day.

Towards Creating the Masculine: Sea of Poppies Set in colonial India, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) explores how such deeply-rooted notions of gender identity are institutionalised in both native and European cultures, and in what ways gender identity impacts the individual’s position in both private and public spheres, both at home and in the diaspora. Neel Rattan Halder, the shamed raja of Rashkali, is an inimitable instance of this complexity of displacement. The narrative traces Neel’s awful fall from prosperity to adversity, from privilege to privation, with a studied objectivity that unveils the complexities of race, caste and class differences, and lays bare how these differences impact gender identities at home and in the diaspora. Neel’s characterisation opens with a description that is reminiscent of the colonial view of the Bengali male:

The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman

153

…he was in his late twenties, and although well past his first youth he retained the frail, etiolated frame of the sickly child he had once been. His long, thin boned face had the pallor that comes from always being shielded from the full glare of the sun; in his limbs too, there was a length and leanness that suggested the sinuosity of a shade-seeking plant. His complexion was such that his lips formed a sunburst of red on his face, their colour being highlighted by the thin moustache that bordered his mouth. (Sea of Poppies 41)

His fragile frame, pale complexion and red lips are details which symbolise the institutionalised female countenance. At the same time, the suggestion that he might have sought the shade and shied away from sunlight is symptomatic of a certain lack of exposure to the harsh realities of life, more particularly, the circumstances of his estate, which in the novel, remains an unequivocal male domain. While these attributes foreshadow how he would be duped and robbed of his estate with the greatest ease by the cunning men of commerce, “the hardy breeds” such as Burnham and Nobkissin (those not native to the empire but have willed themselves into submission for commercial favours), his physical description also highlights how he is unfit to fight his battle in the politically volatile circumstances of colonial rule. In this way, the opening description of Neel Haldar presents him as an emasculated figure. To a certain extent, Neel Haldar’s characterisation is calculated to expose the fallacy of idealising the hybrid upbringing of the privileged rich. Neel is brought up to be an orthodox upper caste Hindu aristocrat but he also has the benefits of western education. While Neel’s education is in keeping with the strategy of the Haldars who had built their fortunes over a century and a half by flowing with the current of political changes in the land, his learning makes him somewhat of a “dilettante” (216) because he lacks the shrewdness that seems to have accompanied the characters of his forefathers. His tendency to flaunt his bookish knowledge makes him unpopular amongst the worldly-wise commoners in his employ, who regard him as someone with “his nose in the air and head in the clouds” (216), and the colonial traders for whom a native who pretends to equal status is undesirable. Doughty, in speaking to Zachary about Neel, hints at his distaste for the “bookish native”: (H)is father...wouldn’t have been seen dead with a book. But this little chuckeroo gives himself all kinds of airs. It is not as if he’s real nobility, mind: the Rascallys call themselves Rogers, but they’re just Ryes with an honorary title-bucksheesh for loyalty to the crown. (48)

154

Chapter Nine

Neel’s education and aesthetic bent of mind ill prepare him for the commercial world of East India Company but, as the heir to his father’s investments in the colony, he is implicated in the politics of British opium trade with China. In the absence of a role model other than his father, and ignorance about his estate’s finances, Neel follows in his father’s footsteps, not only in ways of business but in ways of leisure too. His father, oblivious of the intricacies of the opium trade in India, fondly thought of the profits from this trade as “his tribute from the faghfoor of Maha-chin” (85). Similarly, Neel, uninitiated into the politics of investing in a trade becoming increasingly contentious in the subcontinent, naively follows his father’s business practices, which bring about his downfall. Further, as a result of being brought up by his mother, who had invented an inordinate ritual of physical purification in order to cope with the Zamindar’s inattention to her, Neel carries the cultural burden of ritual purity within him. Having grown up observing the rituals, practising them becomes a moral obligation for him. For instance, the ludicrous “burra khana” that is organised in haste to find out Mr. Burnham’s new ventures with the Ibis, a tall-masted schooner that had dropped anchor at the Narrows, highlights the pathos of Neel’s entrapment within a draconian sense of ritual purity. Having been forced to skip his customary meal prior to the feast arranged for the foreign invitees owing to an internecine tussle between his kitchen’s staff over lost silverware, Neel has to sit politely at the dinner without eating. He is so hungry that he would have gladly eaten the roasted chicken meat served to the guests if he had not been in the full view of his retainers: “Neel’s eyes wandered back to the untouched bird on his own plate: even without tasting it, he could tell that it was a toothsome little morsel, but of course it was not his place to say so” (114). It is an instance of what West and Zimmerman call “situated doing” (61) in the presence of, and for the benefit of a select audience that is familiar with, and expectant of, such compliance to institutionalised behaviour. This ritual purity is a burden because he “had been brought up to regard his body and its functions with a fastidiousness that bordered almost on the occult” (198). His fears of bodily defilement include contact with human waste and all objects used in cleaning up such waste. Imprisoned in Lal Bazaar while awaiting court trial for alleged forgery, Neel is overwhelmed with the compulsion of having to share the toilet with other prisoners. When he is ready to be taken to court for his trial, the preparation for the procession highlights the sanctified place that ritual purity holds for him and his men: When it was time for him to leave, the Brahmins led the way, clearing Neel’s path of such impure objects as jharus and toilet buckets, and

The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman

155

ushering away all carriers of ill-omen—sweepers, porters of night-soil and such. Parimal had already gone ahead to make sure that the constables who were accompanying Neel to the court were Hindus of respectable caste and could be entrusted with his food and water. (218)

Upon conviction, Neel is traumatised by his sudden displacement from privileged life as the Raja of Rashkali. Nicola King, in her argument about how memory remembers the self, suggests that these narratives are often born out of “the radical break between the self who did not know what was to happen ....and the self, who, belatedly, did know” (3). In other words, the individual undergoes traumatic discovery of certain truths, and when he/she tries to reconstruct the experiences, memory is conditioned by a split self. This inner dissonance can be better explained with reference to the Freudian concept of Unheimlich. The German words, Heimlich and Unheimlich mean “homely” and “unhomely” respectively. But Freud conceives of the terms not as binaries but as dialectically juxtaposed. In Freud’s interpretation, Heimlich connotes a comfort zone for the individual, a space where his innermost secrets are safe not only from the world but from himself. The individual is said to enter a state of Unheimlich when this world collapses, revealing the individual’s hitherto safeguarded secrets not only to the world but to the self. Thus, Heimlich is the safe, concealed world, and Unheimlich is the space where the secrets of his world are exposed. The individual is frightened by the return of those very emotions and fears that had been repressed, leading to the sense of the “uncanny”. In Freud’s words, the “uncanny” is “that species of frightening that goes back to what once was well known and long been familiar” (124). It is a state which marks the return of all those anxieties that had been repressed to the extent of having been forgotten. The resurgence of these repressed emotions causes a sense of inner dissonance in the individual. Such a sense of being can be aptly applied to the situation of Neel Haldar, who lives two completely disparate lives in the course of the novel, one of privileged circumstances as the landed rich, and the other of extreme privation in the aftermath of his defamation as a forger. One of the early instances of this split is portrayed through Malati’s visit to see Neel in Lal Bazaar. She is without her veil when she visits Neel in jail, and she tells him nonchalantly that she observed the ritual of purdah6 for his family and not for herself (269). She picks up the broom and busies herself sweeping while Neel questions her about where she and their son will stay. The act of sweeping becomes a metaphor for her dismissive attitude to him which is accentuated by her rejoinder that he shouldn’t worry about them as they have made arrangements for their stay and all he needs to do

156

Chapter Nine

is to be strong and stay alive. Her parting shot to him is, “I could not bear to be a widow after all this” (271). This last statement sarcastically comments on the reduced significance of Neel in her life; he is husband in name only, upon whose death, she will become a widow. This experience of his reduced significance is only a preview of several instances that embitter him and inform his insistence on respect and ceremony during an audience with his jailers and others. However, such experiences subsequently enable him to liberate himself from the myopic perception of tradition. For instance, subsequent to his conviction in court, one of the first privileges Neel loses is the right to ritual purity; when served food like the other inmates of the jail, he is nauseated by the fact that “it…was the first time in all his years that he had ever eaten something that was prepared by hands of unknown caste” (267). It is also significant that Neel is amazed at his resistance to change and the very fact that he questions his past practices marks the beginning of his transformation in the new circumstances of displacement. This is the first of several instances of privations that follow, and questions that emerge from these experiences finally liberate him from the shackles of tradition. This ability to liberate himself from the deeply embedded traditional values is the initial source of Neel’s empowerment in changed circumstances. For instance, his reception at Alipore jail cruelly alerts him to his disenfranchised status as a convict but he is able to transform this space of incarceration to a space of empowerment. When Neel is shoved out of the van at Alipore jail, he trips on his dhoti and it is undone. The guards not only disallow him to tie it back, but also ridicule him as Draupadi7 and Shikandi. This comparison becomes an interesting allegory of Neel’s transformation in the aftermath of his defaming. While the disrobing at this time, and later in the jailer’s presence, becomes a metaphor for forcible possession of Neel’s body approximating to rape, reminding the reader once more of his feminisation, the comparison to Shikandi has a deeper significance: Shikandi, a character from the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, is said to have been the reincarnation of Amba, the eldest daughter of King of Kashi. According to mythology, Bheeshma wins her in her svayamvara8 for Vichitraveerya, the king of Hastinapura. When he learns that she loves king Salva, he allows her to return to her lover. But Salva refuses to accept her as she had been abducted by Bheeshma, and she returns to Bheeshma hoping that he would marry her. However, Bheeshma rejects her because he has taken the oath of celibacy. Amba is reborn as Shikandi to take revenge on Bheeshma for her fate. Shikandi, along with Draupadi and Dhrishtadyumna emerges from the sacrificial fire built by Drupada, king of Panchala, to take

The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman

157

revenge on Drona. Shikandi was born a woman and called Shikandini but by a miraculous exchange of gender with a yaksha (demi-god), becomes a man. In a similar vein of this transformation of Amba to Shikandi, Neel Haldar’s upbringing, which is conditioned by unquestioned obedience to rules and rituals of his caste and class, had metaphorically feminised him. In the aftermath of his defamation, he is stripped of this femininity, which is symbolised by his stripping as he climbs down from the van in Alipore jail. The remaining vestiges of pride are stripped off his back as he walks through the narrow vestibule to the jailer’s office: The butt of a spear caught him in the small of his back, sending him stumbling along a dark vestibule, with the ends of his dhoti trailing behind him like the bleached tail of a dead peacock. (287)

The metaphor of the dead peacock with a bleached tail is a symbol of destroyed pride. Stripped of fortune, class, caste, family and friends, Neel dies a metaphorical death at this moment. His belief in the invincibility of his privileged status as an upper-caste landowner in the region meets a violent death and, in its place, an unequivocal determination to establish himself as a significant individual in his own right shapes his responses to the situation in which he is placed. In his newfound status, Neel is seized by a determination not to be ignored, and when he nettles the jailer with his verbal assaults, he becomes aware of a new power—the “ability to affront a man whose authority over his person was absolute” (289). This “new realm of power” (289) is an instance of active resistance without fear that approximates the Gandhian precept of abhaya, and this pristine mental strength masculinises Neel. It enables him to overthrow strictures of class, caste and race. Neel’s life in Alipore jail reasserts a brand of human identity that rises above the ritualistic reserve of an upper caste raja’s life; first and foremost, he is able to overcome the greatest fear of his life—scatological pollution. In picking up the broom to clean the cell he shares with Ah Fatt, a fellow prisoner suffering the consequences of opium withdrawal, Neel senses the “intimations of an irreversible alteration” (323) within himself; in assuming control over the object of loathing, he is able to overcome the fetishist fear of the object that had posed a symbolic threat of castration during his confinement at Lal Bazaar. Instead, it becomes an object through which he will regain his identity. It is noteworthy that through the very act of cleaning the cell and Ah Fatt, he gains the respect and awe of fellow prisoners; they welcome him into their company and are willing to share their food with him (323), the kind of respect that he did not have from his employees at the Rashkali

158

Chapter Nine

estate. Further, in cleaning up Ah Fatt, he steps out of the accustomed role of the recipient of attention. In taking care of Ah Fatt with unreciprocated attention, Neel fulfils the role of a mother who loves her children unconditionally. With this act of tenderness towards a person who is neither kin, nor friend or countryman, Neel successfully erases the stigma of a past in which he had assumed dotage by others as his birthright. When Ah Fatt embraces Neel and calls himself his “friend” on the eve of their departure to Mauritius, the childlike words offer him utmost comfort because they are spoken at a moment when Neel is able to “value them for their worth” (342). Stripped of his title, his privileges, and dignity associated with his past life, Neel’s displacement sensitises him to the cloistered life he has led, and he begins to recognise the importance of the other people around him. In other words, his displacement from familiar spaces challenges him to look within and re-construct his identity. Such an identity is achieved after he overcomes his deep-laden, inexplicable anxieties pertaining to caste and social status, and is able to look beyond assumptions of social superiority and political immunity to understand a situation that is not of his own making, but defines a space that he must live in.

Re-creating Identities It is this complex and concrete realm of power that Neel explores in his journey on the Ibis with varying degrees of success. Boarding the Ibis as one of the transportees to a penal settlement in Mauritius, Neel has embarked on a physical journey that will take him away from home forever but he has, unconsciously at this point in time, embarked on a journey of self-discovery which will enable him to negotiate a new sense of self. When he climbs into the schooner, heavily chained at wrists and ankles, with a ‘lota’ (a container to hold water) and a small bundle of his other possessions, he is vulnerable but not emasculated. On board, he is often the target of Bhyro Singh, the Subedar (head constable), who feels a subtle undermining of his own position whenever Neel and Ah Fatt see through his strategies to turn them against each other. For instance, when Neel meets Zachary Reid on the ship, he greets him and converses with him in gentlemanly English even while wincing under the blows that Bhyro Singh showers on him to stop him from talking to Zachary. In order to have opportunities to punish him, Bhyro Singh repeatedly tries to provoke Neel to anger. Moreover, Bhyro Singh also does not like the bond of friendship between the two men. Having come close to one another over time, Neel and Ah Fatt do not try to overpower one another. This fills

The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman

159

Bhyro Singh with a homophobic dread. It seems to him as if the two men, by refusing to assert their masculinity, abuse the essence of being men: “this was a sign that they were not men at all, but castrated, impotent creatures—oxen, in other words” (384). The highpoint of such a provocation is seen when Bhyro Singh, along with Crowle, the ship’s first mate, entices Ah Fatt to urinate on Neel with the promise of a pellet of opium. Ah Fatt, still traumatised by drug withdrawal, is easily drawn into the trap and despite Neel’s attempts to sensitise him to the ruse, urinates on the latter. This incident hits them “with the force of a flashflood, sweeping away the fragile scaffolding of their friendship and leaving a residue that consisted not just of shame and humiliation, but also of a profound dejection. Once again,…they had fallen into an uncommunicative silence” (463-4). Nonetheless, this incident does not turn them against one another and is a proof of the journey that Neel has undertaken from the time of the dinner on his private boat. At this dinner, Neel had greeted his guests with a Namaste, because of his belief that a handshake would have ritually polluted him. Subsequently, when the jailer at Alipore jail slaps Neel with his left hand, he mentally notes that if he had been at home, he would have had to bathe and change because of this touch with the hand that is used to clean oneself after defecating. His survival of this unimaginable contact with body waste when Ah Fatt urinates on him marks Neel’s survival of what Freud called the “uncanny” and signifies his progress towards an identity that will finally make him one of the harbingers of the new community envisioned at the end of the novel. It is the passive resistance to violence that enables Neel to morph from the red-lipped, frail, languid and self-indulgent sensualist to a determined and mentally strong man with an alert and watchful demeanour. Once he successfully steps out of himself by relating to Ah Fatt, he is easily able to forge meaningful relationships with the people on board the Ibis. This includes Paulette, Deeti and even Nobkissin, who had been instrumental in bringing Neel to this state. His ability to identify with Deeti is the more important of his various relationships. Listening to Deeti’s songs in Bhojpuri, a language that he had grown up with under Parimal’s care, Neel has a fuller sense of his origins. Being forced by his father to stop speaking a native tongue in favour of English, which was the language of those in power, Neel had almost forgotten that he knew the language till he hears Deeti sing on board the Ibis: Listening to her now, he knew why Bhojpuri was the language of this music: because of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of

160

Chapter Nine love, longing, and separation—of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home. (399)

This spontaneous recognition of a cultural memory and its reiteration of human emotions of love, longing and separation, symbolises Neel’s escape from the stronghold of institutionalised beliefs and behaviour. He speaks to the women in the dabusa, the holding area of the boat, through the air duct of his secluded cabin in Bhojpuri that is their native tongue. He speaks to them about the divine descent of the Ganges from heaven and the reason why she was brought to Earth (399-400) that is their common cultural heritage. This recognition of his kinship with them is an important marker of Neel’s liberation from a claustrophobic past that had emasculated him under the pretext of privileged life. Armoured with this recognition, Neel Halder becomes one of the five privileged men who jump the Ibis at the end of the novel amidst a storm to make their way to liberation. In this way, he becomes a symbol of the progenitors of a new community that hopes to be rhizomorphic. The Sea of Poppies traces the journey of a young man who is caught in circumstances not of his own making, and, due to a complacent perception of his caste’s potential immunity to incarceration, he fails to fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. He falls from prosperity to adversity, and is forcibly displaced from his familiar culture that makes him lose his identity. However, this very loss of identity paradoxically empowers him in his displaced state. The empowerment even in extreme instances of privation is made possible only because of his ability to passively resist oppression through a newfound fearlessness—of scatological pollution, of losing caste or face, of material loss of his possessions, wife and son. He stands on the schooner with nothing at all in his possession but a strong sense of identity which masculinises him.

Notes 1. The novel is set in the historical context of the Old Diaspora, and fleshes out possible stories from documented history of indentured labourers who were transported form several regions of Asia to British colonies in the early nineteenthCentury when Great Britain and China were on the verge of the first Opium War. 2. For a more detailed discussion of Judith Butler’s theory, please refer to chapter 1 of my thesis referenced at the end of this article. 3. http://www.scribd.com/doc/19855244/speech-of-Subhash-Chandra-Bose. Accessed 24th June, 2014.

The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman

161

4. On March 12, 1930, M. K. Gandhi, with some of his co-workers, marched 241 miles from his ashram at Ahmedabad to Dandi, a sea-side village in Gujarat, to make salt from Sea water to show his resistance to the taxation on Salt. 5. Savitri, a princess, married a prince in exile knowing that he would die within a year of his marriage. He dies on the appointed day and when the god of death comes to claim his soul, Savitri follows him till he relents and grants her a wish. She wishes that she should have children from her marriage to Satyavan. The god of death is pleased with her love for her husband and grants her wish. 6. Customary ritual of veiling prevalent among high caste aristocratic women 7. Draupadi was the wife of the five Pandava princes. When Yudhistira, the eldest pandava prince, loses her in a game of dice to the Kauravas, Duryodana, the eldest Kaurava prince, orders Draupadi to be brought to court. He also attempts to disrobe her in court to publicly humiliate her. 8. A ritual in which high-born girls could choose their own husband.

Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Chatterjee, Partha. Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. The Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray, 2008. Print. Goldman, Robert P. “Transsexualism, Gender and Anxiety in Ancient India.” Journal of American Oriental Society 113. 3 (1993): 374-401. Web. 20 July 2014. Jayaraman, Uma. Performing Gender in the Diaspora: An Examination of Four 21st Century Novels. Diss. National University of Singapore, 7 Jan. 2013. King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Print. Macaulay, T. B. “Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal compiled from the original papers by Rev. G R Gleig.” The Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal. Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Hughes, 74 (Oct 1841-Jan 1842): 160-255. Web. 27 July 2014. Mazumdar, Haridas T. Gandhi Versus the Empire. New York: Universal Pub. Co., 1932. Print. Mill, James. The History of British India in 6 vols. (3rd edition). London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1826. 2. Web. 28 Aug. 2014.

162

Chapter Nine

Mishra, D. P. India’s March to Freedom. Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2001. Print. Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Mondal, Anshuman. “The Emblematics of Gender and Sexuality in Indian Nationalist Discourse” Modern Asian Studies 36: 4 (2002): 913-36. Web. 28 Oct. 2010. Nanda, Serena. “Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India.” Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ed. Caroline B. Bretell and Carolyn F. Sargent. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1997. 198-201. Print. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1989. Print. Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and ‘The Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth-Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Print. Swami Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Kartindo Classics. Vol 1-9. Web. 16 July 2014. West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman.“Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality Power, and Institutional Change.” The Social Construction of Gender. Ed. Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West. New York: Routledge, 2002. 125-51. Print.

CHAPTER TEN SEXUAL REALISATION IN A HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT: ABHA DAWESAR’S BABYJI HARSHI SYAL GILL

Abstract Ancient Indian texts, ranging from epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, to tales of Shiva and Vishnu, to the oldest sex manual, The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, make references, though not always conspicuous, to same sex relations and the fluidity of sexual transgression. Variously, LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) lifestyles have been condemned in modern times by society and by the law, as a crime against nature or as a deviation from divine law. However, modern Indian art genres are beginning to address the subject of LGBT relationships more directly than traditional literary sources. This chapter discusses not only the sexual awareness and realisation of the protagonist, Anamika, in Abha Dawesar’s novel Babyji, but also places her within the context of a deeply ingrained cultural heritage, where she intrinsically recognises that her sexual transgression does not conform to accepted social norms and that she has to discard and escape from the cocoon of these norms to find acceptance of her deviation. Dawesar neither condones nor condemns Anamika’s sexuality, but recognises that diaspora is essential for ultimate selfdiscovery in the imagined freer world of the West. Keywords: sexual transgression, third gender, same-sex relations, diaspora, Abha Dawesar, Babyji.

164

Chapter Ten

Introduction Ancient and medieval Indian texts abound with tales of a fluid transgression of genders, where same sex relationships and cross-sexual acts are utilised for sacred purposes, with gods and demi-gods as active participants. Such acts of transcendental pleasure are not viewed as lascivious or lewd, but rather as acts performed in the interest of maintaining a cosmic balance or, at a purely human level, as an enactment of repressed homosexual fantasies. With a deeply embedded sense of piety and devotion to these gods, it is unthinkable, in the Hindu psyche and world view, to find any critical aspect in what more discerning Hindus may coin as deviant behaviour. The Hindu view of the universe has always been tripartite in nature; in sexual terms, one can be a male, female or a neutral sex—the “third gender”, a category into which the hijra and all other forms of non-conforming sex fall. “Third gender” people, in ancient times, had a distinct place in society, even if often relegated to live in their own communities; acceptance and acknowledgment of the existence of homoeroticism were manifest through the Mughal era, which is full of tales of eunuchs who served as pleasure tools for the emperors. As a reflection of real life practices, the pleasurable aspect of homoerotic sex is also depicted in much medieval art in India, prominently the stone sculptures of Khajuraho. It was only with the advent of colonial rule that puritanical values were enforced and homoerotic practices became repressed. As a result, anti-sex views in general and homophobic attitudes in particular became prevalent in Indian society. These attitudes were further enhanced with the enactment of the British law of 1860, Section 377 of the Indian penal code, which criminalised homosexual acts, even in the case of consenting adults, making them punishable by up to life imprisonment. Britain herself decriminalised such acts in 1967, but the legacy remained in effect in postcolonial India until 2009, when these were decriminalised, only for the decision to be reversed by the Supreme Court in December 2013. This reversal can only be upturned by the government. Culturally and socially, attitudes towards homosexuality and lesbianism are based not only on the ancient views upheld through the times, but also on views prevalent at any given period in most cultures. They have constituted a different definition to different people at different times. Indubitably, despite their existence being recognised, homosexuality and lesbianism have been considered as an aberration, even a psychiatric disease, and people of the “third gender” have been forced to live on the fringes of mainstream society. With the advent of the age of sexual

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

165

revolution, recognition and acceptance is wide, even though many still suffer from homophobia and decline to embrace such relationships. Hand in hand with this recognition, many systems have had to enact legislation according civil and even matrimonial rights to couples of the same sex.

Literary Manifestations of ‘Aberrational’ Sexuality In the context of ancient scriptures, generally held attitudes and social and political upheaval, literature often stands as a mirror reflecting the changing mores and values of any given period. But even that literature is not always free; it is subject to unwritten laws and guidelines and any topic that encroaches on the sensitivities of perspectives upheld at any given point in history are often either banned or severely chastised. More often than not, there is a proclivity towards a denouncement of offending and offensive material. Who can forget the fatwa (legal judgment) that was proclaimed against Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses? Literature has been victim to such attacks through various historical periods. As far back as 1941, Ismat Chugtai’s Lihaaf (The Quilt) recounted a bold story of a young girl who sees a lesbian relationship between a begum (a woman of rank) and a female servant, happening under a quilt, even though she never divulges what actually occurred. Perhaps this was in deference to the norms and values established under colonial rule; even so the publication of this story instigated a charge of obscenity against the writer by the British government. References to lesbian literature also mention the Malayalam writer, Kamala Das’ autobiographical novel My Story and her short story, “The Sandal Trees”, both dealing with same sex desire. Another writer who has written consistently about the lesbian experience is Suniti Namjoshi, who draws, in her writings, such as Goja: An Autobiographical Myth, on her personal experiences as an avowed lesbian, and who wrestles with questions about sexual orientation and female unity in the face of discrimination and homophobia. In her dissertation Writing the Lesbian: Literary Culture in Global India, Sridevi K. Nair states: In the twenty-first century novel by women, middle-class girls and married women are shown engaged in lesbian relationships amidst the cultural socialization to embody the cultural/nationalist image of ‘woman’. Lesbian relationships do not merely function as a site of pleasure but also, crucially, as a site of critique of, resistance to, and disengagement from the very premises of the category ‘woman’. Relationships with other women offer a way for protagonists to deconstruct their own status as those who

166

Chapter Ten rely on male financial protection, which brings with it relegation to the home, and instead demand the right to work and participation in the public sphere. (14-15)

Babyji, by Abha Dawesar, needs to be viewed from the springboard of both the rich Vedic heritage and culture, as well as from the emerging literary attempts to explore the experience of sexuality in more innovative ways. These ever-evolving social and religious norms weave the fabric of a society which is integral, not only to each character in this novel, but the novel itself. Hinduism, despite its pragmatism and openness, is still a culture ingrained in age-old norms, which may have a latent place for deviations in society, but not at a socially recognised level. Babyji is a novel that remains on the fringes of political and legal margins, but the choices made by the protagonist, Anamika, reflect inherent responses, not only socially, but politically and legally, to a latently restrictive society. Babyji fits into the mould created by much preceding literature of the experimental genre, except that it is bolder in its graphic detail and more titillating. It is not only the personal story of the protagonist, Anamika Sharma but, like other literature dealing with deviations from sexual norms, is also a reflection of the subtle nuances that dictate attitudes upheld towards deviant sexuality. Within the context of personal growth, of flirtation with those at different levels of society, caste, class, gender and age, it is a biased perception of the limitations imposed by each, as well as an escape to the freedom of diaspora, into a different society and culture being seen as the only solution. In the portrayal of this cross section of society, including the rich and poor, older and younger, master and servant, Brahmin and untouchable, educated and uneducated—Dawesar draws on the rich diversity that is India, symbolically manifested in Tripta Adhikari, one of Anamika’s lovers. The same society which defines an individual with its unwritten rules and guidelines is the one which rejects a non-conforming member; Dawesar herself ultimately succumbs to the traditional and limiting ideology of non-acceptance, represented in the failure of an otherwise bold, rebellious, unconventional and often belligerent individual to fight for recognition of her lesbianism, opting rather to escape. Dawesar portrays Anamika as the focal point of numerous liaisons, discovering in each her masculine identity, her sense of power and a salient recognition, perhaps reflecting the author’s own view, that her powerful position, her prowess as a student, her superiority of race, her social status, will all be negated should her sexual preferences be revealed. Within the limitations of a perspective of herself as narrator, and based on how others interact with and respond to her, Anamika is often

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

167

presented as being too perfect and almost unbelievable. A brilliant student, she aces her studies, particularly physics; she has extreme authority and power as head prefect; she is feared by her juniors, respected by her peers and adored by her teachers, parents and others. To the reader, she is a precocious sixteen-year-old who, on the brink of adulthood, is a cross between a cold, manipulative, calculating, self-centred and promiscuous teenager, completely lacking in moral standing and an older-than-her-age adult who struggles with the concepts of caste, sexuality, loyalty and freedom that would challenge even the most mature grown up. The premise, and indeed the promise, of sexuality is determined from the very first page, as is the setting, establishing, rather purportedly, that what the story is about is unique to Delhi, where everything happens “undercover”, much like Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman, which is also the story of lesbian desire set within the unique Delhi culture. The Delhi presented in this novel is a blend of residual colonialism and Indian traditionalism, with archaic colonial views on sex, coupled with traditional arranged marriages, domestic violence and questionable positions of women. Anamika sweeps, with a wide brush, over the canvas of her childhood, of her “knowledge of the facts of life…based entirely on books, and clean ones at that” (Dawesar 3). Yet, there is immediate change following her exposure to the Kamastura, which, in conformity to the Delhi where everything happens undercover, she reads in the storeroom, just as she later conducts her affairs undercover. Anamika recognises that she is a flat-chested and an average looking teenager, probably not very attractive. She acknowledges, in response to a perceptive query by a five year old child, Jeet, whether she is a didi or a bhaiyya (sister or brother), that she is a didi, though she privately admits that she is “a Didi who maybe really should have been a Bhaiyya” (Dawesar 93). Whether it is in her day-to-day demeanour, or in her initiation into sex, with the Kamasutra as her guide, she appropriates a masculine role, indulging in often violent acts of sex. She displays a sense of ownership about her women; they are objects to “touch, like a doll, a toy” (Dawesar 226). The act of sex is an act of conquest; after having sex with the much older Tripta, she states: “I rolled off of her with the sweetest exhaustion of a man who has just hunted his dinner animal” (Dawesar 231). She further asserts her masculinity in mundane acts like putting up her feet on a wooden stand in front of a shoe-shining cobbler, or wearing Old Spice or dressing in shirts and pants; she recognises that she has been born with a gene that prefers her own sex. At one point, she says, “I decided I would avenge myself by holding hands and flirting with girls since Indian society was so holier-than-thou about having boyfriends. I

168

Chapter Ten

had never wanted a boyfriend anyway” (Dawesar 11). She even compares her love for Tripta to her love for her own mother, another manifestation of her role-identification as a male, suggesting an inherent Oedipal complex, a fascination with the mother as an object of sexual desire. The first target of Anamika’s more conscious sexual advances is Tripta Adhikari, an older woman, followed quickly by Rani, a lower-caste, underprivileged, and extremely beautiful servant, and then her classmate, Sheela. There is also a strong sexual attraction to a teacher, Mrs. Pillai, about whom she entertains fantasies without acting them out. Symbolically, Tripta, whom Anamika names India, is equated with the whole, diverse, country. Anamika’s love and passion for her represent a loyalty to her country, as she explains her choice of this name: “When I first saw you I felt the kind of love I feel for the whole country, not just for one part. For all her contradictions, her fierceness, her beauty, her rivers, and her mountains” (Dawesar 118). Initially Anamika sees her as an enigma, “correspondingly rife with possibility, rich in her meanings and bountiful” (Dawesar 6). As the relationship develops, however, paradoxically, while she decries the social traditions that force her to maintain the appearance of a ‘good girl’, she is at once offended by the modernity of Tripta, manifested in the fact that she smokes, drinks, does occasional weed and wears sexy clothes. Yet, neither the country that she is so patriotic toward, nor the namesake that gratifies her emotional and sexual lust, is enough to keep her there; she has to abandon both in pursuit of personal freedom in the United States. Tripta is a modern, cosmopolitan woman, with a career and an exhusband, who claims to be in love with Anamika. She is well aware that what she is doing with Anamika is statutory rape. Even though Anamika, as the male, is the seducer, she is still barely the age of consent. Tripta makes several superficial attempts to deny her affair, protesting Anamika’s youth and her own age, but her protests are half-hearted and she gives in to the weakness of the flesh. Emotionally, their affair is without commitment, with neither of them professing any desire for permanence. Tripta seeks justification of the affair so long as the perimeters are purely physical; she cautions Anamika that “the only way I can have this affair is if you promise me you won’t get too attached” (Dawesar 117), establishing the predominant sexuality of their liaison. Almost concurrent with Tripta, Rani is introduced as another attraction. In a somewhat contrived manner, she is not only welcomed as a member of the Sharma household, but is allowed access to the sanctum sanctorum, Anamika’s bedroom, where the two indulge in sexual activities right under the parents’ noses. In a spectrum of social status, she is at the opposite end

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

169

of Tripta’s privileged upper-class, being not only underprivileged as a servant, but belonging to a lower caste as well. Her remarkable beauty only accords her negligible benefit. Rani sees Anamika as her saviour, her prince, her knight-in-shining-armour, who rescues her from an abusive husband and offers her not only a secure position as a servant, but also a world of illicit pleasure and sensual fulfilment. Her love for Anamika is subservient, without question. She is the complete giver, as befits her social station in life. Yet even Rani maintains a subtle superiority at times, in that she is older than Anamika and often views her as a child at some levels, or a favourite toy that she is going to dress for a party. This begs the question whether her complete surrender to Anamika is the act of a mere servant or real love on her part. It is not just her position as a servant that prevents her from expressing any jealousy, it is also her ignorance of Anamika’s relations with her other lovers; rather, she feels threatened by the males in Anamika’s life and, as a result, feels protective, like Tripta, of her assumed innocence. She is the one who coins the name “Babyji” which, in one quick sweep of genius, establishes the duality of the place Anamika holds; it defines her status in one terse word. “Baby” denotes her youth and “ji” immediately and simultaneously establishes her as the “master”, as the superior of the two. Anamika experiences ultimate power with Rani and considers it her primary role to please her, despite her occasional guilt for abandoning her to visit one of her other lovers. She offers few explanations and Rani expects none. Even her attempts to accord Rani an equal social status, like when she asks her to sit on a chair and not on the floor, or invites her to join them for tea, or gives her one of her mother’s old saris, seem more for her own gratification in exhibiting a favoured object of art than displaying a true sense of equality. Rani’s servitude, her defenceless passion and love are seen as typical of why men take advantage of women, prompting Anamika to ask, “Was this how women loved? Like slaves? Devotees? No wonder men took them for granted” (Dawesar 132). She sees this attitude, however, extend across the class barrier to her mother, her aunt and other women in their social circle as well. Ironically, though, she herself has visions of having her own harem where her ‘brides’ would obey her orders. Both Rani and Tripta give freely of themselves; yet, even in a social structure which would be open to lesbian relationships, neither of them would be easily accepted, for there is too much disparity in their ages and social and class status. The third edge in the triangle, Anamika’s school friend, Sheela, as an equal, is the only one with whom an affair in an open society might be justified. Yet, it is only she who limits herself to flirting

170

Chapter Ten

on the fringes of actual coupling. Intrinsically rigid, Sheela is not as expressive of her desire as Anamika; she is the typical coy, passively coquettish female who gives, inch by inch. She is the femme provocateur who arouses Anamika to the extent of being “raped” by her, an act, however, which she easily forgives. She is perhaps the truest representation of an adolescent on the brink of discovering her sexual identity, first manifested in attraction to something familiar, someone of her own sex. As Anamika grapples with her three affairs, she recognises that, even though Rani and Tripta have, in their own way, educated her, their stance towards her has been mostly protective. It is Sheela, the natural coquette, who provides true glamour in her life, by not allowing herself to be wooed easily: “She was not swayed by my youth or my intelligence or my maturity or anything else. I always had to persuade her. She was a challenge” (Dawesar 131). It is Sheela who triggers any sense of true equality, whom Anamika can see in her future as a possible “wife”. While Anamika stands warned about not getting too attached to both Tripta and Rani, she is quite adept at distinguishing between affairs of the heart and affairs of the flesh. The latter are acceptable, even welcome, if they preclude the former. However, though driven by lust, she at least wants to believe that she is a “mental being”, that she loves Sheela, Rani and Tripta emotionally. The lack of clarity in her own mind and her lack of maturity lead her to profess to love their souls one moment, and to acknowledge to herself at another introspective moment: “I didn’t think of them as pure minds. I saw them as women. I liked their flesh. Did it detract from my love for them that I loved their bodies, not just their souls?” (Dawesar 117). While Anamika is almost mesmerised by Tripta’s depth of thought and her richness of experience, it is Sheela’s purity and innocence that she truly appreciates and admires. Fiercely defensive of her, she is enraged at Sheela’s meek submission to the lewd attention of the boys in the school, and her molestation in a bus. She decries Sheela’s acceptance of being touched by strangers as mere “eve-teasing”, as “routine, acceptable”, but herself succumbs to this ‘routine’ behaviour when she forces herself upon Sheela, even though she later goes through remorse and guilt for her act of coercion: “I was gauche, a quasi-rapist, a rake no better that the cheapads on the bus…a bumbling sixteen-year-old with grand delusions about being a philanderer” (Dawesar 211). The resulting vile act of “rape” reduces her relationships of love, friendship and even filial affection to “an orgy in the gutter” (Dawesar 295).

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

171

Anamika best sums up all her relationships, including those with the males in her life, thus: A cacophony of real and imagined lovers filled my head. They were screaming, shouting, accusing me of treachery and betrayal, infidelity and disloyalty. India and Sheela, Rani and Adit, Vidur, Chakra Dev, my mother, Mrs. Pillai, and Deepak all grievously claimed injury and showed me the damage I had done. Love in my dream was not a many-shaded thing but a single binding light. Everyone bathed in it together, without distinctions, all balanced precariously on the edge of an abyss. The compartments in my brain were erased, compassion and maternal affection paraded naked with desire, lust conjoined with admiration. (Dawesar 256)

Anamika fits the mould of a true svairini as defined in Vedic texts, in her aspirations for independence, to make a lot of money and keep a wife—in her fantasies, this is sometimes Sheela, sometimes Rani. However, quintessentially, her masculinity is akin to her patriotic sense; Tripta, then, is India, the whole of India, her body anthropomorphised into the map of India, representing a nationalistic feeling, whereas her masculinity is represented with Rani in terms of caste. She wants to model her masculinity along the lines of Vidur’s father, Adit, the patriot soldier and the hoodlum classmate, Chakra Dev, the dominant male, who blatantly flaunts his sexuality. If Dawesar’s aim is to glean support for alternative lifestyles, just the fact that Anamika is exploring and expressing her lesbian desires should not accord her automatic sympathy simply to make an anti-homophobic statement, for this would be no different than condemning her arbitrarily for being lesbian. Anamika is just not someone who can be upheld as a person with good character, lesbian or otherwise. Add to that her young age, when she is already so perfidious, and one wonders what her behaviour patterns are going to be when she develops a greater understanding of relationships. She indulges in sexual adventures with three females, feeling little, if any, remorse or sense of guilt or wronging in the betrayal of emotion, attachment and fidelity. She moves from the arms of one to the other with fluidity, even though, at times, she does question her feelings and attachments to each. However, she never grants control to any of the others in the relationships; she is very much the master; very much the predominant partner. Anamika, while subconsciously espousing an established code of conduct based on ancient scriptures such as the Gita and the Upanishads which teach us what our duty is, reels at the values of approved sexual practice perpetuated through centuries of experience as she struggles to find her own, personal identity. She argues that:

172

Chapter Ten If modern science accepted duality and measured uncertainties, what difference did it make whether I was Rock Hudson chasing beautiful boys or the village Brahmin in love with the shudra’s daughter? . . . Only feelings counted. And sensations. (Dawesar 17-18)

Even though Anamika knows inherently that her lesbianism will not be accepted by society, Dawesar never puts this knowledge to test. All the lesbian characters in the novel are connected pivotally only through Anamika; none are exposed. Rather, there is an assumption, quite accurate given the time period of the story, that an open display of such sexuality would only label Anamika as a pervert and that her only hope of being true to her nature lies in the diaspora. Rather than challenging established norms, the writer plays it safe in making her “voice” that of a young girl, whom she can take to the brink of discovery, poised precariously between an old world and a new, hopeful that she will find acceptance in the latter. Dawesar fails to present Anamika’s sexuality as a real problem, keeping it unexposed under the mantle of youth, inexperience and uncertainty, not to mention sheer luck at not being discovered. The story is set in a period when the very subject of same sex relationships was taboo and there was no national or political stand on it, other than the archaic Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Anamika recognises, very lucidly and very explicitly, that she does not subscribe to either the national and social stand on issues such as caste or the standards which are upheld regarding sexual separatism. Despite her refusal to conform to the norms of the class and society she belongs to—manifest in such things as her clothes—she upholds some of its basic sense of propriety. She grudgingly attends social functions as expected of her, even though she feels superior and separate from these gatherings; she accords respect to elders; she is revolted by the use of drugs and alcohol, to the extent that she will not even enter a liquor store. However, her idea of propriety and responsibility is often a veneer, underneath which her behaviour is quite contrary to what she projects. She is smug and overconfident about her intelligence, her kindness and her own perception of her abilities to influence others. Although she is firm in her belief that she can bring about change and is good and kind to her servant, Rani, the demarcation of where the boundaries of genuine concern for her status as an abused wife begin and her role as lover kicks in is not always clear. In this respect, her parents’, particularly her mother’s, support of Rani’s unfortunate situation is more honest and clear. Throughout the novel, there is clear representation of how cultural mores and ethics dictate how modes of behaviour are viewed and ultimately judged. Would Anamika’s actions be viewed differently in a

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

173

different age and cultural environment? She is aware that even if her sexual exploits were with the opposite sex, her very age and culture would result in the denunciation of her behaviour. She is aware that liaison with females is a deviation that, at best, would be frowned upon and at worst, severely chastised and condemned as an immoral aberration. Tripta’s attestation that “it’s normal for women to fool around. It doesn’t mean anything” (Dawesar 134) in effect, reduces their involvement to the mundane. She is the one who denies the relationship any depth, regardless of what Anamika’s perception of the relationship may be. Reinforcement of a cultural attitude is made through her more mature voice—being gay or lesbian is denounced as a “western construct. Indian sexuality is a spectrum, not binary” (Dawesar 134). She is the one who recognises that the western, binary definition of sex is limited to the physical, whereas Indian sexuality, as a spectrum, recognizes the existence of the “third gender”. The more philosophical aspect of this concept is explained by Adit: A typical Western binary construct was action versus inaction…. Westerners think that people are either doing things or not doing things. But in reality, sometimes one can do and not do at the same time. (Thus) paradox is the essence of being Indian. (Dawesar 149)

Like any other adolescent, though, she is going through her own angst, despite the illusion of adulthood with which she masks it. She is too young, too inexperienced to completely assume her inner totality, and is constantly making an attempt to recognise what her inner wholesomeness is. Her first act of lovemaking with Tripta is her entry into apparent adulthood, devoid of any accompanying emotional growth. “My coming of age was distinct and happened in a split second” (Dawesar 25) as soon as she first grasps India’s buttocks. It is as if all it takes to propel her into maturity is a physical act, which itself is neither clearly defined nor understood, but is mistakenly perceived as the preliminary requirement for entry into the next level of growing up. Throughout the novel, she has no easy answers to her questions: What is love? What are the boundaries of love? What does it mean to live life fully? What is the purpose of one’s life? How does she fit in in a society structured by class and caste? The various classes are, in a sense, amalgamated in the thread that ties her, at one end, with Rani representing the lower, unprivileged class, and at the other, the privileged class of Sheela and Tripta, with the experience of love and passion binding them. Anamika grapples with profound subjects like love, sex, soul, guilt, purity, innocence within her various relationships. There are, despite her youth and immaturity, moments of depth and

174

Chapter Ten

profound perception. She is looking for perfect love, but recognises that “love can only exist in perfection, and perfection is impossible” (Dawesar 252). For her, love “had to be total or it could not be . . . when it was less than absolute, it turned into vapour and ceased to exist altogether” (Dawesar 253). It is difficult for her to grasp the more mature, more mercurial nature of Tripta’s love, which is neither constant nor consistent. For Tripta, love embraces acceptance of Anamika for what she is. Anamika is impressed and enraptured by the mystery of Tripta’s thoughts, which to her are representative of the country India, where cultures ranging from “the Moghuls and the English, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, Coke and Pepsi, Star TV, everyone came, conquered, camped. It [was]…a tantalizing and unreachable quality that you could always glimpse but never grasp” (Dawesar 252). Such predominant sexuality, making for often uncomfortable reading, is almost not normal. A young girl who relates to the instructions of the Kamasutra, who is fascinated by the lustful Humbert in Nobokov’s Lolita, is definitely the story of a not-so-innocent teenager discovering her sexuality. In a society ravaged by class and caste distinction, there is another level of discrimination which is not so rampant, not because there is acceptance of it, but rather because it lies latent and dark under the exterior of proper behaviour as dictated by society. Anamika’s escapades with three lovers, and a mild flirtation with an older man, Adit, would raise eyebrows in any polite society; in Indian society, where ethical codes have remained largely unchallenged and have formed the core of moral existence through the centuries, despite superficial changes affecting day to day life, such a code of conduct is nothing short of being blasphemous and sacrilegious, seen to be steeped in profanity and obscenity. It is very clear that ultimately all her relationships are going to end. There is no sense of loss or emotional crisis as Anamika prepares to launch her free spirit in what she perceives as an independent world. Not once does she seek to stay in her present domestic environment, both at home and in the country, and expand the idea of social acceptance of gender variations and to demarginalise deviations from the ‘norm’. Circumscribed by what she views as a narrow world, she needs to break through the borders and seek freedom. In her list, America represents “freedom, money, independence, no social control” (Dawesar 296) while India represents “being dependent on my parents, going to sagais and social receptions, worrying what people would think, and being at the mercy of a backward society and its judgments” (Dawesar 296). The power struggle in this novel is not between the three lovers, for each is unaware of the other, but in Anamika’s own head as she progresses

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

175

through an ideological change. She correlates this struggle to the external struggle regarding caste, which is laid bare by the Mandal riots. Marginalising the issue of lesbianism, yet playing a significant role in reinforcing her decision to be part of the diaspora, are the Commission’s recommendations which limit the possibilities of her own acceptance at a good college in India despite high percentages, as many seats had been set aside for scheduled, lower castes. Some of her friends opt to stay in India, where they feel needed, but Anamika chooses to flee, because, as she says, "We are just bound by so many constraints here. Even in our choice of subjects, each decision restricts us further rather than setting us free” (Dawesar 308). Lesbian desire, however, remains central to her development and education not only as a girl—a didi who should be a bhiayya—but as an upper middle class Brahmin who is forced to question the legitimacy of the caste system with, on the one hand, its advantages, accorded best through her mastery of Rani, and at worst, for the disadvantages resulting from the Commission. It is a reminder that she is part of an elite caste which effaces any sexual identity that deviates from the mould. Because this novel only covers the span of one year in her life, it fails to set the subject in a wider context. Abandoning all her love interests, Anamika is callous about pursuing her own fulfilment. Since she is the narrator, we never can see into the hearts of the other characters who appear almost spineless. The only ones who show any spunk are Chakra Dev, with his belligerent attitude, and Sheela who, in a quietly assertive way, demands a degree of respect and sexual access based on her choice rather than Anamika’s, while paradoxically accepting being teased by boys as routine things, again endorsing such acts as being normal. Even after the “rape”, she does not relinquish her power and authority over her own body to Anamika, quietly determining the extent of touch allowed until she is a willing, consenting partner. Rani and India, on the other hand, are shown as passive, meek recipients of overwhelming male dominance, often of a violent nature, constituted in Anamika’s moves, even though both are older than Anamika and paradoxically protective of her. What is amazing is that nowhere within the span of her experience is she under suspicion by her teachers or her parents or any other member of the larger society. For all intents and purposes, she lives a life based on the dictates of the nation. No one questions her odd attachment to either Rani or India, taking her sometimes juvenile explanations at face value. So consumed are her parents with sustaining themselves in the socioeconomic environment they are part of, they often lose sight of what lies

176

Chapter Ten

under their very noses. The fact that they do, however, is a reminder of how manipulative the protagonist is. As Nair suggests: Young girls are often socialized, overtly or subtly, to fit into the model of monogamous heterosexuality whose ultimate aim is motherhood in adulthood. Much of this socialization revolves around sex, and a variety of disciplinary models are deployed to ensure girls’ ‘good’ behaviour so that they will be eligible for marriage in the future. (136)

In such a context, ‘good’ is defined as those girls who are sexually pure and chaste. Anamika is anything but. Nair further states that in Anamika’s case “lesbian relationships, initially constituted to ‘avenge’ herself against middle-class society for its ‘holier-than-thou [attitude] about [girls] having boyfriends’, however, eventually teach her the vexed issue of caste for women” (141). Yet, as time progresses, climactically with the Mandal recommendations, she recognises how fragile her rights are, both, as a female and as a Brahmin; her tenuous rights force her to assess her emotional standpoint within the wider scope of nationalism and her desire to be patriotic and she decides to escape to a more free world which will accord her rights based not on caste or class, but sheer merit. She feels fettered, despite patriotically loving the soil of which she is a product. In a final confrontation with Rani, Anamika answers her question as to why she is leaving: “it is to be free” (Dawesar 300). She acknowledges that she is a product of a gender, caste and class system which influences most aspects of life. She succumbs to the lure of the West, thinking that, there, she can overcome the barriers and limitations imposed by this system and thus be true to herself. She recognises that only by fleeing these lands does she have a hope of fulfilling her role as a lesbian and of being free to express her sexuality without the risk of condemnation. While fighting for rights, and crusading for equality within her narrow domain, she chooses not to extend that fight to recognition and acceptance of her group of “third gender” people. She chooses instead to flee and establish her identity in a foreign land where, in her innocence, she assumes it will all be alright, even though she associates the West with “loose morals and free sex” (Dawesar 208).

Conclusion Within the context of a rich cultural heritage Babyji, while being vastly sexual, still elicits discussion on multiple issues. Tara Sahgal’s online review of the novel in India Today, entitled “Lolitaji’s Lesson” sums it thus: “Babyji is as much philosophy as pornography, as cerebral as

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

177

sensual”. In order to fully appreciate the scope of this book, one almost needs to be a Hindu, or at least an Indian, with all its nuances of what it entails to be one on a day-to-day basis. As Rajan, Anamika’s father, says, “The stages of life prescribed in the ancient books answer our need for knowledge, for love, for doing good to others, and for renunciation” (Dawesar 176). This is an obvious reference to and acceptance of the four prescribed stages of life, clearly marked, according to Hindu scriptures. In fact, underlying the whole story is recognition of what is integral to being a Hindu, what constitutes the very make-up of a Hindu which, based on centuries of experience and change, dictates the mores and values of existence, behaviour and decorum. Anamika accepts these codes of ethics to some extent, but ultimately feels chained by them. The attempt to escape is not purely from the bonds of political and social upheaval, largely expressed through the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, which would limit her chances at making a lot of money and being successful and powerful, but also from social standards which would not accept her lesbianism. As Deepa Mehta said in an interview with Suparn Verma after the release of her movie Fire, “Fire is about choices, the choices we make in life which may lead to alienation.” While Anamika does make a conscious choice, her choice is one which will lead not to alienation, which is almost assured in her homeland, but to acceptance, albeit in a foreign land. At a second level, Babyji is an intricate story of a master-manipulator juggling several affairs at once, succeeding in cloaking her nefarious activities from her trusting parents; hiding each relationship from the others, playing with fire. However, the narrator’s overt descriptiveness, her keen, evocative sensuousness would do a more seasoned and far more mature person proud. It is the story of exploration in which, given the age of the protagonist, despite her fantasies about Sheela and possibly Rani being her future wives, there is little question of commitment. No character in this novel offers any sense of commitment, nor is there any expression of emotional pain experienced by any character in any relationship. This lack of emotion strips each affair of any real meaning or seriousness, imparting rather a sense of being casual and mundane. At a third level, in her interaction with men, it is an interesting study of her correlation with males as diverse as Vidur, her best friend, whose "soul was the sweetest" (Dawesar, 41), Chakra Dev who is a born hoodlum and with whom she feels an affinity she doesn’t feel with any other male, and with Adit, Vidur’s father, who encourages her, along with Deepak, Tripta’s friend, to find expression for her independence and scope for her intelligence in the West. Adit, whom she sees as a national hero, being a

178

Chapter Ten

soldier, also teaches her some crucial lessons—that her society is male dominated, that subjugation of women is the norm, that there is nothing wrong in what she perceives to be a “gauche” act, that of “raping” Sheela—as “everyone goes through this experimental phase” (Dawesar 199). He also teaches her about masculine violence, something which she already practices in her approach to sex with Rani, Tripta and Sheela. Departing from the purely personal is another level expressed by the inclusion in the story of the Mandal Commission, which brings into play the class/caste system that dictates not only morality, but also social injustices. Since there is so much diversity of class and caste in the principals in the story, this becomes of huge significance, as it propels the protagonist into decisions about her life, career and future as well as her personal relationships, into embracing diaspora. Ultimately, the novel is about Dawesar’s perspective that the cultural norms of the Indian society are limiting, personally and intellectually. There is a clear demarcation of sexes—of what is acceptable and what is not. Diverse as the culture and the people of the land may be, with a rich heritage where the existence and role of “third gender” was perhaps more clearly defined and accepted than in the West, it is to this West that she wishes to escape, since in the modern world at least, it is there that acceptance lies. Dawesar does not condemn the Indian cultural value system—she simply presents it as it is; if anything, her criticism is more for the political implications of the Mandal Commission, which has resulted in a brain drain from the country. Anamika’s is the voice of protest against not only the educational limitations imposed by the Commission, but also of the barriers imposed by class and caste, of Indian women’s acceptance of their subservient role, even of molestation— manifested predominantly in Sheela, but also in Rani, who accepts domestic violence until Anamika and her family rescue her; even in Tripta, who accepts the system despite her non-conformism in that she is divorced, drinks and takes occasional weed. Yet, Anamika’s voice is quiet when it comes to fighting for recognition of her lesbianism. Tara Sahgal, in her review, further states: “And while you may never get to the place where you feel you have no choice but to fuse your desires with that of the narrator, you can see how she has grown and you can understand her”. Whether she is believable or not, and whether one detects any major growth in her or not, Anamika is definitely a spunky girl, and though one may not be left gasping for a sequel to the novel, there is definitely an element of curiosity about finding out what her life of discovery in America would be like.

Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context

179

Works Cited Chughtai, Ismat. The Quilt and Other Stories. Trans. Tahira Naqvi and Syeda S. Hameed. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996. Print. Das, Kamala. My Story. Jullunder: Sterling, 1976. Print. —. The Sandal Trees and Other Stories. Trans. V.C. Harris and C.K. Mohamed Ummer. Hyderabad: Dish, 1995. Print. Dawesar, Abha. Babyji. New York: Anchor Books, 2005. Print. Kapur, Manju. A Married Woman. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Print. Mehta, Deepa. Interview by Suparn Verma. Rediff on the Net. Oct 24, 1997. Web. 5 Feb. 2014. Nair, Sridevi K. Writing the Lesbian: Literary Culture in Global India. umich.edu. Diss. University of Michigan, 2009. Web. 2 Feb. 2014. Namjoshi, Suniti. Goja: An Autobiographical Myth. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Print. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988. Print. Sahgal, Tara. “Lolitaji’s Lesson.” indiatoday.in. July 18, 2005. Web. 7 Feb. 2014.

CHAPTER ELEVEN SOMETHING IS HAPPENING: NARRATING QUEERNESS IN THE FILMS OF KARAN JOHAR MARGARET REDLICH

Abstract This chapter underlines the argument that the Indian diaspora is far advanced in comparison with the Indian population in terms of acceptance and understanding of queer issues. In the pre-colonial era, India had a rich tradition of queer writings, but in the post-colonial times these writings are few and far between and fail to find an audience. In contrast, the diaspora has found acceptance and freedom overseas and their literature reflects that. However, for most Indians, the main source of narrative art is not writing but film. In film, texts that treat the subject seriously and from the perspective of Indians in India still struggle to find an audience, while texts that deal with queerness among the diaspora have been extremely successful. Based on selected events from the films of Karan Johar, some possible explanations are offered about the changing narratives of queerness in the Indian diaspora. Keywords: queerness, Indian films, Karan Johar, Indian diaspora, Dostana, Kal Ho Na Ho

Historical Review of Queerness in Indian Narratives Literature within India has just started to address queer issues. The 2003 book The Boyfriend by R. Raj Rao is one of the first novels to deal with a queer main character. It was followed up by Vivek and I by Mayur Patel and Hostel Room 131 by R. Raj Rao. However, Kim Arora indicates in the Times of India, that these novels have had low penetration into

Something is Happening

181

Indian society, and by extension into the Indian diaspora, with only “11,000 copies sold of all novels based on queer issues in the last three years”. Prior to the modern era, South Asia has had a long history of queerness in literature. The collection Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai brought together selections dealing with same sex love from mythological times all the way through the beginning of the colonial era. Although some scholars have debated whether all of these sources described precisely same sex love, and whether it is even appropriate to look for such ancient sources to define relationships as we do today (George, Chatterjee, Gopinath et al.), it is generally agreed that the arrival of British colonialism and the xenophobic restrictions it put on the elements of Indian society it could not easily understand, radically changed the nature of Indian literature, removing queer elements in a process of “everywhere/nowhere” formulation, where homosexuality began to be considered a secret threat permeating Indian society, but at the same time was never allowed to be officially acknowledged as a possibility (Arondekar 19). Sherry Joseph in her article in the Economic and Political Weekly manages to pull together various sources in order to create a fuller picture. She moves from the pre-colonial history of same-sex love to the ways in which the western influence on India defined and vilified it. Finally, she explains the issues facing the gay and lesbian community today, from the continued resistance to a gay identity that has led to the common term “Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM)” as distinct from gay men (Joseph 2229) to the legal issues surrounding section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which makes sodomy illegal along with bestiality and pedophilia, to the social issue of AIDs in Indian culture and the personal issues related to the importance of marriage in Indian culture, leading many gay and lesbian persons in India to have loveless marriages or else never truly be considered an adult (Joseph 2230). This repression crossed with titillation created by the colonial system has affected narrative art in a variety of ways. As Quentin Bailey argues in an article about queerness in E. M. Forster’s novels, the colonial system relied on the ideal of the perfect British man, honest, cheerful, never revealing love or emotions (Bailey 330). Bailey ties this to a societal justification for colonialism whereby, if the British fit within a perfect implacable male ideal, then they would be qualified to take up the white man’s burden. Queerness was clearly not part of this ideal. To justify colonialism, the colonisers had to deny the possibility of queerness within their own society, and to make it their job to train the societies they colonised to do the same. India inherited this attitude from its colonisers,

182

Chapter Eleven

just as it inherited the Penal Code Section 377, which makes “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” even between two willing partners, illegal. Arvind Kala’s book Invisible Minority reveals the great luxury of the queer diaspora community’s ability to openly watch these films together and enjoy these readings. It is primarily a series of interviews with anonymous gay men in India telling their personal stories, filled with accounts of private shame, secret meetings, and loveless marriages. Most shocking, and illuminating, is Kala’s own story. After 20 years of experience as a journalist in urban centres, after knowing hundreds of men over the course of his life, he did not know of one man who was gay (Kala 1). Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan arranged the collection of articles Because I Have a Voice in a similar manner with a series of personal accounts by activists, giving a slightly larger view of the political issues involved with gayness as well as their own stories, especially dealing with the struggle to make an identity in a country that has no terms for it. When queerness is acknowledged in India, society resists it. Arvind Narrain and Vinay Chandran offer extensive quotes from ten separate medical professionals in India, all advocating treatment for homosexuality, ranging from therapy to shock treatment, including a quote from a clinical psychologist: “Anyway, aversion therapy causes less tissue damage than anal sex” (Narrain and Chandran 62). One of the first novels on the Indian gay experience, The Boyfriend, describes the same picture that these non-fiction sources paint. It follows the love-story of an older gay man who has never had a love relationship, and a younger man who resists identifying himself as gay, even as he professes his love for the older man. The two of them play at marriage and commitment to each other, but ultimately the younger man gets married because “In India…[p]eople marry involuntarily, just as they bring their left hand to their arse after a crap” (Rao 221) while the older, by the end, is joking about marrying a woman in order to gain societal acceptance. In contrast, narratives about queerness in the Indian diaspora are almost upbeat. For instance, the short story collection Quarantine by Rahul Mehta, although listed as one of the best books of 2012 on GLBTQ issues (“Over the Rainbow”), describes the main character of the titular story building a life together over several years with the man he loves, and enjoying the acknowledgement and acceptance of his relationship by most members of his family. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was overturned in 2009 (and then reinstated at the end of 2013), which lead to an overall societal change within India that was reflected in popular culture. That this occurred more

Something is Happening

183

in film rather than in literature is not surprising considering that film is more accessible than literature for the vast majority of the population. India’s literacy rate as of 2010 was 62.4% according to the national census and further studies found that it may actually be closer to 52.6% (Kothari and Bandyopadhyay 714). As Sheila Nayar’s article “Invisible Representations” explains, as a country with low literacy rates, India has an oral rather than a literary tradition. And in modern times, these oral traditions are reflected in the films that are watched by an overwhelming number of South Asians both at home and abroad. Gayatri Gopinath, in “Queering Bollywood” discusses how this is particularly relevant in terms of queer cultural products. According to her, the diaspora watches these products differently than the home audience, finding additional readings as they watch them in a community while highlighting the queer elements. A quick survey of some mainstream Indian films made in Bollywood illustrates the ease with which cinema has been able to enter areas widely avoided by written texts. In recent years, there have been an increasing number of Indian films dealing with queerness. These generally fall into two categories: the artistic, or to use the Indian term “parallel cinema” films which deal with it as a serious societal issue and are barely seen by the Indian public, and the mainstream films which deal with it purely as comedy. The film Fire dealt explicitly with lesbianism, while the film My Brother Nikhil (2005) is about a gay character with AIDS. The most well-known parallel cinema film in India on the issue, Onir’s I Am (2011), which won a National Award in the year of its release, was still a box office flop (Adesara). In the mainstream, more and more films have begun to have gay side characters. Films such as Rules Pyar ke Super Hit Formula (2003) made the queer story line a pure figure of fun. The movie Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007) made it a minor plot point. While explaining why she lied that she was dating a character played by Bobby Deol, the heroine, played by Preity Zinta, says her male best friend always talked about the Deol character and had a huge crush on him, something she is uncomfortable admitting. Halfway through Karan Johar’s movie Dostana (2008), an Indian mother learns that her son is gay. She declares she will take him back to London where he will be better, but an older Indian gay man, witnessing this, stops her and cries out “Look at me! Miami or London, your son is gay! He likes men! Wake up!” This statement encapsulates Johar’s strategy for dealing with queerness in popular Indian cinema. It is a fact that must be accepted, but only in Miami or London, not in Bombay or Delhi. Homosexuality strikes at the very core of the Indian identity. By

184

Chapter Eleven

placing it outside of India, Johar allows for his films to treat the topic lightly and happily. Karan Johar's films Dostana and Kal Ho Na Ho (2003), set in America, deal positively with homosexuality, and are popular throughout India. Like Kal Ho Na Ho and Dostana, Jhoom is also set among the diaspora community, where this casual attitude is more believable, and safer to display, unlike in Rules where the Indian setting requires gay characters to be figures of fun. Kal Ho Na Ho and Dostana are part of this trend, but also supersede it as they dare to go farther than any other, while still treating the issue of being queer in Indian society as a joke. The incidents surrounding the Indian release of the film Fire (1996) about same sex love between two ethnically Indian women show what can happen when the queer possibilities of an Indian film are treated seriously. On the one hand, the release of Fire became a pivotal landmark in the creation of a queer movement in India as it led to women openly declaring themselves as lesbians while marching in front of the theatre in support of the film after it was attacked by members of the Hindu fundamentalist group Shiv Sena (Gomathy and Fernandez 198). However, showing the continued conservatism and fear of Indian society, the film was still highly censored (Gomathy and Fernandez 200) and the director herself, Deepa Mehta, stated that the characters only “resorted” to lesbianism in reaction to their situation (Gomathy and Fernandez 203). Reflecting on Joseph’s historical situating of same-sex love, Gomathy and Fernandez also mention the many homosocial situations traditional in Indian society which Fire revealed as possibly containing same-sex love, which Indian society chooses to ignore (Gopinath and Fernandez 201). There is the closeness between sisters-in-law as in Fire, or the passionately close male friendships as shown in other films, even the sexual joking and flirtation present within female only parties as shown in one of the most popular films of all time, Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994). These situations are so common in Indian society that they are shown within films as experiences the audience will relate to and their potential meaning as displays of samesex love is never acknowledged. Fire, the film shown more abroad and among non-Indian heritage audiences, was set in India. Dostana, the film embraced by Indians, at home and abroad, was set in Miami. The location of the film outside of the Indian heartland, and the location of the characters as emphatically part of the diaspora, removed these issues from the centre of Indian identity and made them entertaining, while allowing for a more sustained discussion on the notion of gender through a mainstream narrative.

Something is Happening

185

Tentative Explorations of Queerness in Johar’s Films Dostana was not the first time a queer story was accepted by audiences of mainstream cinema both at home and abroad. Kal Ho Na Ho (2004), an earlier film produced and written by Karan Johar, includes a gently accepting subplot about same sex relationships and, in fact, the entire film invites a queer reading of the relationship between the two male characters. Moreover, the audience is encouraged to identify with the younger, diasporic characters who accept this possibility, and to look down upon the older characters who struggle with it. Johar strongly positions Kal Ho Na Ho as representing a modern, increasingly mobile Indian society. Gayatri Gopinath argues it does this through “male homosexuality that marks and consolidates this newly emergent transnational Indian subject as fully modern” (Gopinath 163). Gopinath’s argument focuses on the ways in which the Indian diaspora represents itself to outsiders, using an acceptance of queerness as a token for entry. However, she does not acknowledge the ways that Kal Ho Na Ho clearly positions itself as speaking for and towards an audience still closely tied with India. This is present from the very beginning of the film, which mentions that “miles away from India, this city [New York] is infested with Indians.” This statement is made by the main character of the film, whose narration is interspersed throughout the story. Her opening introduction to the story and setting ends as she gives her name, Naina Catherine Kapur, positioning herself both as an Indian through her first and last names, and a Christian (and therefore westernised) through her middle name. The next few scenes establish the context of the film and the initial plot complications. Once these various plots have been established, Johar introduces the initial solution to them all in the person of Aman. The introduction of Aman’s character begins with Jennifer, Shiv, and Gia, all sitting down to pray for an angel to save them from their difficult situation. As Naina’s voice-over says “Dear God, if you’re listening, please send us an Angel”, the camera moves out the window of the room over to the balcony of the house next door to reveal their new neighbour, Aman, watching the family. The language used to introduce him, as well as the slightly supernatural way in which he appears above them, positions the character as superior, almost magical. Aman quickly inserts himself into the lives of Naina and her family, finally confronting Naina stating that she takes on too much responsibility and does not enjoy what she has, saying, “What is the point of praying to God if you do not appreciate the life he has given you?” Again, Johar

186

Chapter Eleven

positions Aman as speaking for God. He ends the discussion by saying, “I know [what my problem is] I am very sexy, but you are not my type,” a foreshadowing of the upcoming subplot. Johar introduces this track when Aman and Naina’s best friend Rohit meet for the first time as the young people go together to a club on “disco night”. The choice of music is an intriguing one, as it positions the character as interested in a genre tied both to gay culture, and to modern Western music (Braunstein). At the disco, for the first time, the two male protagonists, Aman and Rohit, meet. The next morning, the pivotal character of Kantaben (Sulbha Arya) is introduced. She is Rohit’s maid, never seen out of a sari or outside of an Indian household, interacting with the greater American community. Aman has brought Rohit home and spent the night in the same bed. Kantaben finds them together, and Aman reacts by waving, asking for a banana, and caressing Rohit’s face, while he asks to be introduced. As she turns to leave, Aman calls her name, so that Kantaben will turn back to see him leaning against Rohit’s shoulder. Later in the film, discussing his love for Naina and his excitement over confessing it to her, Rohit embraces Aman, saying “Today I am going to say what’s in my heart. I love you Aman! I love you”. The two men separate, revealing the maid Kantaben watching them, which Rohit still does not see. Aman, who did see her when facing away, starts blowing kisses at Rohit, who is oblivious. The scene ends with Kantaben collapsing on the couch and Rohit asking “Did you hear something?” to which Aman replies “No.” Aman, positioned as an Avatar of God, enjoys being perceived as gay, in fact courts it. He is putting his supernatural stamp of approval upon same sex relationships, eliciting a predictable response from traditional Indian society as represented by the maid. The plot progresses, with all the young characters experiencing heart break. Aman, now revealed to be dying although he told Naina he was married in order to discourage her, is eager for Rohit to get back together with Naina, leaving a message on his machine insisting that he cannot forget his first love. Naturally, Kantaben overhears. This leads to a plot movement which can only be understood through the context of Kantaban’s misunderstanding, which allows for the possibility that, not only might two South Asian men be gay, they may be committed to each other. Rohit’s father takes him to a strip club and asks if he is “normal”. But he can’t bring himself to say gay, so instead he says that “Kantaben mentioned you might be in love with someone.” This is very revealing phrasing, giving the male relationship love status, rather than relegating it to “men who have sex with men,” a definition which is still common in India (Joseph 2229). Later in the conversation, Rohit declares to his father,

Something is Happening

187

“I am in love with someone, I want to marry this person I want to have children with this person.” His father, still thinking he is talking about a man, merely asks, “Is that possible?” He seems to be struggling to understand and accept the situation, saying “In America, anything is possible; I asked for a daughter-in-law, I got a son-in-law.” The reaction of Rohit is typical of a South Asian parent of a gay man, struggling primarily with the lack of cultural context to deal with male love in India, to define a relationship that has no definition (Joseph 2230-31 and Kala 83). After this, Rohit corrects his father, but not emphatically, emphasising that he is in love with Naina, not that he is straight, or acting angry at the misunderstanding. This is not the kind of reaction experienced by the men in Kala’s book, who describe anger and fear from the parents, not just amusing confusion leading to acceptance (Kala 30, 83, 85). The key phrase here is “in America, anything is possible”. Rohit’s father is able to accept his son’s homosexuality because they are in America where anything is possible, not in India where it would be unimaginable. Later, Aman breaking into Rohit’s apartment, while his maid desperately tries to stop him, declares “I will kill myself, but I will never leave Rohit!” bringing up memories of the many Indian suicides when two men or women are driven apart (Kala 28, 29), but in a humorous fashion. After he leaves, Kantaben prays to her religious idol to always keep the two men apart. Immediately following this, Aman finds Rohit in the bathroom. Clearly, God ignored Kantaben’s request (something which is fairly unusual in an Indian movie), implying that it was unworthy. Throughout the film Kantaben has been positioned as representing the old, non-diasporic Indian community (although she, like the rest of the characters, lives in the United States). In traditional Indian narratives, this older female character, still tied to Indian roots, would be the most holy character, the one most likely to have a direct line to God’s ear. However, in this film, her traditionally Indian attitude towards same-sex love is confronted and defeated by the younger, transnational character of Aman. In a way, the presentation of the overly and mutably sexual Aman as a godly figure is a return to ancient Indian mythical standards in which figures such as Vishnu and Bhima disguised themselves as women and played with gender types without losing their otherworldly abilities and privileges (Doniger). Some authors criticised Kal Ho Na Ho for providing a typical gay stereotype (Nayar 124 and Ghosh 424). However, what they ignore is the way Johar treats queer issues as a topic for humour, while still positioning it within the narrative which legitimises it by making it a central concern of the plot. This could be seen as testing the waters for a more involved exploring of gayness in his subsequent work. Moreover,

188

Chapter Eleven

Aman, the perfect man, the angel, enjoys being thought of as gay; in fact he courts it. It is a celebration which continues in the next few films of Karan Johar.

Celebrating Queerness in Johar’s Dostana Following Kal Ho Na Ho, Johar made the film Dostana and, while Kal Ho Na Ho invites a queer reading, Dostana almost demands it. Johar is not the writer of record for Dostana, but in many ways he is still the author of it. Karan Johar has enormous power in the industry, especially over his own films; he handpicks scripts, is involved with every aspect of filming, and chooses to work with the same small group of actors (Sen). The opening credits sequence includes a photo of Johar’s father, Yash Johar, with the handwritten words “We miss you…” written next to it, then a personal note from Johar to his aunt, then another to his mother. Following Thomas Schatz’s idea of the “genius in the system” (Schatz 523-27), whether or not Johar is the scriptwriter of record, he is still the closest Dostana has to an author. While Kal Ho Na Ho delays the meeting of the two male characters until well into the story, Dostana opens with the two men meeting. They run into each other at the apartment shared by two women with whom they have just had sex. The two men meet on the balcony having breakfast and introduce themselves to each other as Sam and Kunal. The two men run into each other again trying to catch a cab, and then find they are going to the same location. The way the two characters are constantly thrown together by fate is reminiscent of the films Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayange and Dil To Pagal Hai, which introduced the idea that a couple meant to be together will meet many times until they finally start a relationship. The characters even mention that it is fate that they are both looking at the same apartment. At this point, the relationship between these two men is clearly going to be the centrepiece of the film, but it could still be perceived as the “yaari” type friendship, the sort that was valorised in the earlier film of the same name (Gopinath 289-291) as well as many others, and which can be read as either queer or straight. However, soon after their meeting, the queer interpretation is forced on both the characters and the audience. The two men walk down the street getting to know each other better and sharing a hot dog. At the hot dog stand they run into a white soldier who bursts into tears saying:

Something is Happening

189

It’s just that my boyfriend has been sent to Iraq, and I am here. We were so happy after Afghanistan. It was perfect, we were like the perfect family, and I just saw the two of you standing there, you looked so happy, you reminded me so much of us. I mean really God bless you both. I just wish you all the happiness. (Transcribed by author)

This statement is given by an American soldier, in full uniform, and it is the first time any part of the script explicitly states the possibility of queerness. America is confronting these two members of the diaspora and forcing them to acknowledge queerness within themselves. After this direct confrontation with queerness in American mainstream culture, Kunal walks away. Sam chases after and grabs his shoulder trying to convince him they should pretend to be gay to get the apartment. Kunal shakes him off but is then convinced partly by Sam’s first and most important argument, that Kunal is his brother, meaning they could never be together. The brother relationship in India can be invoked easily through naming someone in that manner, the same way the brother-sister relationship can be invoked. “Naach girls” (strippers/prostitutes) can even use this method to discourage unwanted suitors, treating them as male relatives and negating any possibility of a sexual relationship (Suketu Metha 277). This trope is often often in films to undercut homosexual possibilities. Later in the film, Sam and Kunal themselves discuss the ways in which these “yaari” relationships and others elements in Indian film can be perceived as queer. First, they discuss how the character Gabbar Singh in the movie Sholay (1975) was gay. This is a ludicrous suggestion, but interesting, as the same film contains one of the closest male to male relationships in the history of Indian cinema, that between Veer (Dharmendra) and Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) (Ghosh 209). The suggestion that Gabbar is gay is safer, as it is clearly false, while the suggestion that Veer and Jai were lovers is a valid reading. Sam then suggests the much more likely gay pair, Munna and Circuit (the gangster characters from the film Munna Bhai MBBS (2003). Kunal shoots this down pointing out they called each other brothers, but Sam argues “Even I call you brother in public.” This dialogue invites the audience to read this film in the same manner, especially as it negates Sam’s argument that he and Kunal could not be in love since they are “brothers.” The two men rush back to the apartment and present themselves as a couple. In fact, when the woman says again that only girls are allowed, Sam says they are girls, then tries again to explain using a series of euphemisms in Hindi, saying they are together, they are both together, they are special friends, and finally, in English, that they are boyfriends.

190

Chapter Eleven

There is no Hindi word for the relationship, they must use an English one, perhaps the most dramatic example of the way in which queerness in impossible in Indian culture. The same thing happens later when, after finding out they will be sharing the apartment with someone else, Kunal asks, “One-by-one, do you want to tell everyone that we are….” He cannot complete the sentence as again, there is no Indian word that will convey his meaning, and Sam has to add the word “Gay”. Again, the American openness with homosexuality confronts the Indian vacuum. Finally, the joke is repeated one more time when their potential roommate, Neha (Priyanka Chopra) appears. The two men rush off to discuss whether they are willing to pretend to be gay to a beautiful woman while her aunt tries to convey the situation to Neha. The aunt starts with “they aren’t what we are” then tries “they are ‘modern’ boys” and finally saying “they are boyfriend and girlfriend.” The aunt translates this as “it wasn’t like this in our days, boys used to like girls”. The idea of queerness as being modern ties in both to the idea that it was something brought by the British and imposed upon Indian society (Narrain and Bhan 15) and with the idea proposed by Gopinath that the characters in Kal Ho Na Ho who play with the idea of gayness are examples of modern, international Indian men. During the next sequence, in efforts to stop the other from saying the wrong thing, the men enact an erotic scene together, with Sam embracing Kunal as he tries to leave, and Kunal running and jumping on Sam when he sees the aunt overhearing the conversation. In reaction, the aunt, horrified, says in Hindi “All this isn’t allowed here. Stand straight.” For the first time, discomfort is apparent in her reaction to their relationship. However, this is only after they have performed physical acts which might be considered uncomfortably explicit between a male and female couple as well within Indian culture. The aunt, questioning them on how they met, as she might a heterosexual couple, supports this reading. Sam makes up a story, staring deep into Kunal’s eyes, saying they met in Venice. Then he says for the next few days they kept bumping into each other, again following the pattern of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayange and Dil To Pagal Hai with fate bringing them together. Sam describes his distress as Kunal turns away from him, but he kept searching, finally finding him. Their love story is told not purely in terms of sex, as the phrase “men who have sex with men” would imply, but as an actual love story involving the same emotions and magic of fate as are present in heterosexual love stories. However, considering both characters are of Indian origin and presently living in Miami, it is intriguing that the location of this love story is not India, or their current home, but rather a third location long

Something is Happening

191

considered a romantic destination within western literature. Their love story is a romantic dream as imagined by the West. The only truly gay Indian character in the film is Neha’s boss, M (Boman Irani). He is introduced to the main characters through a dinner party which, while played for laughs, is the confluence of several actual problems for the gay South Asian community. There is an expectation of loose relationships, as shown by numerous interviews conducted by Kala, which leads Neha to assume her roommates would be willing to romance her boss, despite their established relationship. There are the legal issues, as an immigration official Javier arrives in the middle of dinner to confirm they are truly in a relationship. This is of course incorrect, as in fact gay men are more often required to act straight in order to solve legal issues than the other way round. It plays into the problem suggested by Diane Raymond in her article on American television that gayness is often shown as a solution to a problem, rather than the creator of one (Raymond 107). Later in the same scene, after Sam’s mother (Kirron Kher) has arrived and reacted by fainting with horror at the idea of her son with another man, M rushes him away. He grabs and embraces him saying “Living a lie, and for others. It hurts, it really really hurts” Javier also touches him, holding his hand supportively, as Kunal stands to the side in discomfort. While played for laughs, the whole scene shows the supportive nature of the gay community, especially in a culture where most gay men are not out of the closet, even to their mothers. This is similar to the experiences described by Kala of gay South Asians who left home to live in America, finding acceptance and comfort there which they could never find within their own families (Kala 60-63). M himself breaks down, confessing his true Indian name, and that he has never told his parents of his sexuality. M, the one South Asian heritage character who has been able to fully embrace his queer identity, was only able to do so by completely rejecting his Indian heritage, even down to his name. Sam’s mother interrupts this scene, screaming “Nooooo!” She declares she will take Sam back to London where he will be better, but M stops her crying out “Look at me! Miami or London, your son is gay! He likes men! Wake up!” In one way, this is a controversial statement, acknowledging that it is not outside factors that cause homosexuality, but rather an innate essence, something directly confrontational to the attitude described in the article “It’s Not My Job to tell You it’s Okay to be Gay” in which many respected doctors within India still insist on regarding homosexuality as a disease that can and should be cured (Narrain and Chandran). But on the other hand, once again, through listing the possible locations as “Miami or

192

Chapter Eleven

London”, queerness is defined as only within the diaspora, not at home in India. The mother rushes off to Sam’s bedroom, where she sees a photo of Sam and Kunal on the nightstand, and has a vision of Kunal in grooms' garb with Sam in a bridal veil. This leads to a series of terrified visions of her son being in love with a man. This is finally resolved when Neha tells her “For the past three years your son hid the biggest truth of his life from you because he knew that you wouldn’t be pleased. You’ll be happy, but Sam? If he can live for your happiness then can’t you accept the truth for his happiness? Whatever God does is for the best, right Aunty?” As in Kal Ho Na Ho, Johar is once again giving God’s stamp of approval to homosexuality through a young, international South Asian woman over the opinions of an older, traditional South Asian one. Sam’s mom then goes to Kunal’s room to bless him. She gives the traditional blessing for a new daughter in law, before Sam comes into the room asking what she is doing. Sam’s mother apologises, saying that she had prayed for her own son’s sorrows, and finally gives her bangles to Kunal as the traditional gift of a mother-in-law to welcome a daughter-inlaw into the family. At this point she says “I don’t know if you are a daughter-in-law or a son-in-law” and finally asks him to keep the Karva Chauth fast (a traditional religious fast carried out by wives for their husbands) for her son’s well-being, then take her blessing. The two men bend down, she gives them the traditional blessing, saying “may victory be yours, may you have children,” then pauses, and adds, “forget it” (about the children). There is no cultural way for homosexuality to be addressed in Indian culture, and yet this scene does an excellent job of showing how it can be done. Although, as in Kal Ho Na Ho, it is when the question of children arises that the parent realises the limits of their acceptance, not believing such a thing could be possible. This scene effectively resolves the queer storyline.

Conclusion In Johar’s only film addressing queerness within India, Bombay Talkies, this question of children is raised in a new way. The story line of the film takes the jokes of Dostana and Kal Ho Na Ho and plays them as tragedy. Two men meet, they fall in love, their families find out, and their lives are destroyed. While Dostana built the story line along a gentle confrontation with the older generation leading to the dominance of a younger, more accepting perspective on queerness, Bombay Talkies moves past this concern in the first few minutes when the character Avinash

Something is Happening

193

(Saqib Saleem) breaks into his parents’ home, beats his father (in recompense for the many beatings he had been given), and shouts at him that homosexuality is not wrong. Immediately after this, the question of children is raised in the form of a young girl singing an old Hindi film song. This girl is the witness and companion to the two gay characters in this film, first joking with Avinash, then serenading Avinash and Dev (Randeep Hooda) as they fall in love, and finally comforting Dev as he sits with her, heartbroken. The film is part of an anthology in honour of the hundredth anniversary of Indian film, and the girl singing film songs is the only connection to the theme; the greater message all four films share is that movies are India and India is its movies. This great connection to the Indian spirit can only sit by and watch as India’s young gay men destroy themselves in misery. The films Dostana and Kal Ho Na Ho, set among the diaspora community in America, present the possibility of joy, hope, and acceptance for an Indian gay man. In contrast, Johar’s short film set in India, dealing with the same issues while at home, shows only the possibility of a violent confrontation with society, represented by parents, followed by a life of loneliness, pain, and lies while the spirit of India looks on and sings songs of mourning for them. All of the recent films set within India with a prominent gay story line have had similarly bleak endings. Johar used his films to support the gay community’s struggle for acknowledgement by making blatantly queer elements integral to the plot and through positioning his characters and stars as accepting of the gay community, and made the whole context acceptable and believable by setting the films in the diaspora community, where Indian identities have evolved, and there is therefore the possibility of hope and happiness.

Works Cited Adesara, Hetal. “Box Office: 6 Hindi Movies Fail to Make an Impact.” Business of Cinema.com. 3 May 2011. Web. 4 Feb. 2014. Arondekar, Anjali. “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1/2. (January/April 2005):10-27. Print. Arora, Kim. “Authors get bold as gay literature picks up in India.” timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Times of India, 7 Feb. 2011. Web. 4 Feb. 2014. Bailey, Quentin. “Heroes and Homosexual: Education and Empire in E. M. Forster.” Twentieth-Century Literature 48.3 (Fall 2002): 324-47. Print.

194

Chapter Eleven

Bakshi, Kaustav and Parjanya Sen. “India’s Queer Expressions OnScreen: The Aftermath of the Reading Down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.” New Cinemas: Journals of Contemporary Film 10.2-3. (2012): 167-83. Print. Braunstein, Peter. “The Last Days of Gay Disco: The Current Disco Revival Conceals its Homo Soul.” The Village Voice. 30 June 1998. Web. 7 July 2014. Doniger, Wendy. “Bisexuality in the Mythology of Ancient India.” Diogenes 52.4 (2005): 50-60. Print. George, Rosemary Marangoly, Indrani Chatterjee, Gayatri Gopinath, C. M. Naim, Geeta Patel, Ruth Vanita. "Tracking 'Same-Sex Love' From Antiquity to the Present in South Asia." Gender and History 14.1 (2002): 7-30. Print. Ghosh, Shohini. “False Appearances and Mistaken Identities: The Phobic and the Erotic in Bombay Cinema’s Queer Vision.” The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexuality in Contemporary India. Ed. Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya. London: Seagull Books, 2007. 417-36. Print. —. “Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television, and Queer Sexuality in India.” Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Ed. Ruth Vanita. London: Routledge, 2002. 207-19. Print. Gomathy, N.B. and Bina Fernandez. “Fire, Sparks and Smouldering Ashes.” Because I Have a Voice. Ed. Narrain, Arvind and Gautam Bhan. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005. 197-204. Print. Gopinath, Gayatri, “Bollywood Spectacles: Queer Diasporic Critique in the Aftermath of 9/11.” Social Text 23.3-4 (2005): 157-69. Print. —. “Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema.” Journal of Homosexuality 39.3/4 (2000): 283-97. Print. Joseph, Sherry. “Gay and Lesbian Movement in India.” Economic and Political Weekly 17 Aug. 1996: 2228-33. Print. Kala, Arvind. Invisible Minority: The Unknown World of the Indian Homosexual. New Delhi: Dynamic Press, 1991. Print. Kothari, Brij and Tathagata Bandyopadhyay. “Can India’s ‘Literate’ Read?” International Review of Education 56.5/6 (2010): 705-28. Print. Mehta, Rahul. Quarantine. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. Print. Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Print. Narrain, Arvind and Gautam Bhan, eds. Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005. Print.

Something is Happening

195

Narrain, Arvind and Vinay Chandran. “It’s Not My Job to Say It’s Okay to be Gay.” Because I Have a Voice. Nayar, Pramod K. “Queering Culture Studies: Notes Towards a Framework.” The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexuality in Contemporary India. Ed. Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya. London: Seagull Books, 2007. 117-48. Print. Nayar, Sheila. “Invisible Representations: Oral Contours of a National Popular Cinema.” Film Quarterly 57.3 (2004): 13-23. Print. “Over the Rainbow, 2012.” Booklist. 108. 12 March 2012: 5. Web. 2 Jan. 2014. Patel, Mayur. Vivek and I. Delhi: Penguin India, 2010. Print. Rao, R. Raj. The Boyfriend. Delhi: Penguin India, 2003. Print. —. Hostel Room 131. Delhi: Penguin India, 2010. Print. Raymond, Diane. “Popular Culture and Queer Representation: A Critical Perspective.” Gender, Race and Class in the Media: A Text Reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003. 98-110. Print. Schatz, Thomas. “The Whole Equation of Pictures.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 523-27. Print. Sen, Raja. “My Name is Karan Johar.” Rediff Movies. rediff.com, 19 Nov. 2009. Web. 4 Feb. 2014. Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2000. Print.

CONTRIBUTORS

Shashikala Muthumal Assella completed her undergraduate studies in English from Sabaragamuwa University, Sri Lanka and completed her Master’s degree in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham attached to the Department of American and Canadian Studies. Her research interests include contemporary South Asian American women’s fiction, food in fiction and South Asian women’s identity in contemporary cultural productions. Tulika Bahuguna is a research scholar pursuing her Doctorate from the University of Delhi on “Literary Representations of Delhi”. Her areas of interest are South Asian Literature, Urdu literature and Islamic Literature. Being a convert to Islam she likes engaging with ideas that surround the religion. She has also published various articles in academic journals. She is now known as Aisha. Harshi Syal Gill was born and educated in Nairobi, Kenya, after which she has lived and worked in Canada, England and in the United States. Following her post-graduate studies in literature, she has been a regular guest as a literary critic for the Voice of Kenya radio station and has since worked in multiple professions including teaching and technical writing. She has contributed poetry, literary articles and book reviews to several anthologies and literary magazines and recently published a poetry collection, Reflections. She is also co-author of a collection of stories, African Quilt—Stories of the Asian Indian Experience in Kenya and a play God Minus: Buddha—The Light of Asia. Elizabeth Jackson is a lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine (Trinidad) campus. She has a BA from Smith College (USA) and earned her PhD from the University of London in 2007, where she taught for several years before taking up her current position in Trinidad. Her area of research interest is South Asian literature in English, and her articles in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ARIEL and other academic journals have focused primarily on gender and cultural identity from postcolonial and cosmopolitan perspectives. Her Ph.D

Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora

197

thesis was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010 as a monograph entitled Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing, and her current research project is on literary fiction by Muslim women. Dr Uma Jayaraman is an active researcher on gender performance in the Indian diaspora and has contributed articles on the 21st century novels of the Indian diaspora. She lives in Singapore and is currently teaching as part of the Humanities faculty in a university in Singapore. Monbinder Kaur is Assistant Professor of English at Tumkur University, India. She did her M.A in English from Gauhati University (2005) and is pursuing her Ph.D from University of Mysore on Indian women writers. Her areas of research interests are literary and cultural studies, Indian writing in English, South Asian diaspora, American literature, ecocriticism and Assamese literature. She is associated with organisations like Forum of Contemporary Theory and The Society for the Study of Multiethnic Literature of the United States—Indian Chapter. Sandhya Rao Mehta has a PhD in the novels of the Indian diaspora and is currently affiliated to Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. Her research interests include postcolonial and gender studies, with particular focus on gendered diasporic spaces. She has researched and published on the Indian diaspora in Oman as well as on the literature of the Arab diaspora in the United States. She is also the co-editor of Language Studies: Stretching the Boundaries published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Margaret Redlich is completing her Master’s degree in Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Her main area of interest is Indian film. She is the Midwest Popular Culture Association Area Chair for Indian Popular Culture. She has previously been published on Racialicious.com and has presented papers at numerous local and national conferences. Priyanka Sacheti is an independent writer based in New Delhi. Educated at Universities of Warwick and Oxford, United Kingdom, Priyanka previously lived in Sultanate of Oman and the United States. She has published numerous articles on art and gender in various publications such as Gulf News, Brownbook, India Currents and Khaleejesque. Her nonfiction pieces and photo-essays have appeared in various literary journals such as Jaggery, The State, Equals, and The Aerogram. She is the author of

198

Contributors

three poetry volumes and has co-authored an English-language instruction publication. Two of her short stories have been published in international anthologies celebrating Indian immigrant writing. Gemma Scott is a PhD candidate in the History department at Keele University. Her research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, focuses on the Indian Emergency, 1975-1977. She is interested in the relationship between gender, power and disempowerment in the Emergency, particularly focusing on Indira Gandhi’s leadership and the state’s family planning programme. This historical project is interdisciplinary in its range—in dialogue with the medical humanities, and using imaginative fiction as source material. Gemma’s background is in History and Literary studies, and her broader research interests span postcolonial literatures and histories of the subcontinent. Stephanie Stonehewer Southmayd is a fourth-year doctoral student in English at the University of Toronto. Her current research interests primarily centre on the intersections of globalisation, nationalism, and labour in recent Indo-Anglian literature. Sanchari Sur is a Bengali Canadian who was born in Calcutta, India. She holds a B.A. Honours degree in English and Psychology from York University, and a Master’s degree in English from McMaster University. A recipient of the 2012-2013 R.S. McLaughlin Fellowship for academic excellence, she is a currently pursuing another M.A. in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her research interests lie in formulating a new methodological approach to trauma theory through the lens of feminist psychoanalytic discourse, while using fictional texts as points of departure.

INDEX

Abraham, Margaret 72 Agnew, Vijay 8 Ahmad, Sara 5, 35 Ahmed, Nazir 52 The Bride’s Mirror 60-64 Ali, Monica 89, 103, 104 Brick Lane 90-101, 105-117 Al-Ali, Najie 6, 7 Androgyny 152 Anthias and Yuval-Davis 5, 6 Ardhanaarishwara 152 Axel, Brian 2, 35-37, 44-46 Badami, Anita Rau 34, 35, 37 Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? 34-49 Bhagwat Gita 134 Brah, Avtar 5 Butler, Judith 9, 23, 158-149 Campt, Tina and Thomas, Deborah 4 Chatterjee, Partha 6, 150 Chugtai, Ismat 165 Cohen, Robin 2, 4, 38 Cormack, Alastair 91, 94, 100-102 D’Cruz, Premilla and Bharat, Shalini 38, 39 Das, Kamla 165 Dawesar, Abha 164, 166 Babyji 164-178 De Beauvoir, Simone 9 Desai, Kiran 83 The Inheritance of Loss 83-85 Diaspora Clothing and 9, 109, 111, 117, 135-146 Definitions of 2-3, 70-74 Gender and, 4-6, 75-76, 85-86 Hindus and Muslims in 38-42 Food imagery and 119-126 Literature and 8-11, 71-73

Old and New 35-36, 69, 92-93, 148 Queer 7, 180-193 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee 79, 138, 140 Mistress of Spices 76-79, 121 The Vine of Desire 79, 141-142 “Clothes” 143-145 Friedman, Susan 9 Gandhi, Indira 16-18 Assassination of, 38 Speeches and Reminiscences 24 Speeches and Writings 16, 23, 24, 27, 28 Gandhi, M. K 156 Garg, Shweta and Khushu-Lahiri, Rajyashree 131 Ghosh, Amitav 148, 152 Sea of Poppies 148-160 Gilroy, Paul 3, 69 Gomathy and Hernandez 184 Gopinath, Gayatri 4-7, 38, 43, 45,186, 188, 190 Guew, Sneja 1, 8 Hall, Stuart 3, 17, 19, 36-37, 42-43, 46 Historiography 16-19 Hosain, Attaia 52 Sunlight on a Broken Column 52-64 Hua, Anh 8 Hybridity 1, 3, 8, 68-70, 83, 93, 98, 132 Indian Emergency 15-31 Jain, Jasbir and Amin, Amina 54 Johar, Karan 180-193 Bombay Talkies 192-193 Dostana 183-184 Kal Ho Na Ho 185, 190-192 Kala, Arvind 182

200 Khalistan 36, 38, 44, 46-47 Komagata-Maru 40 Kosnick, Kira 4, 6 Lahiri, Jhumpa 73, 105-106, 124, 138, 140 “Mrs. Sen” 141 “Once in a Lifetime” 135-136 The Lowland 139-141 The Namesake 104-117, 137139 “Third and Final Continent” 145-146 Macaulay, Lord 151 Mahabharata 150, 156, 163 Malladi, Amulya 119, 123 The Mango Season 119-134 Mandal Commission 175, 178 Mannur, Anita 6, 10 Mehta, Deepa 177 Fire 177, 183-184 Mehta, Rahul 182 Metcalf, Barbara 60 Mishra, Vijay 36-37, 44, 91-92 Mobility and diaspora 89-116 Mobility and labour 100-103 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 4, 5, 12, 72, 85 Mondal, Anshuman 151 Mukherjee, Bharati 68, 74 Wife 74-76 Naidu, Sam 10 Naipaul, V. S. 90 The Mimic Men 91, 93, 100 Nair, Sridevi, K. 170 Nandy, Ashish 18, 150 Narrain, Arvind and Bhan, Gautam 182, 190

Index Nayar, Sheila 183 Nelson, Emmanuel S. 71 Papanek, Hanna and Gail Minault 54 Parker, Emma 9, 10 Patel, Mayur 180 Purdah 52-64, 155 Ramayana 150, 163 Rao, Raj R. 180 Rayaprol, Aparna 71 Robbins, Bruce 95, 96 Rushdie, Salman 16 Midnight’s Children 16-31, 125 Shame 21 Satanic Verses 165 Said, Edward 20, 37 Section 77, Indian Penal Code 164, 172, 181-182 Sheller, Mimi 94, 95 Sidhwa, Bapsi 68, 74 American Brat 81-82 Sinha, Mrinalini 151 Spivak, Gayatri 101 Thieme, John and Raja, Ira 128 Third Gender 163-165, 173,176 Tölöyan, Kaching 2 Vanita, Ruth and Kidwai, Saleem 181, 194 Vertovec 3, 38, 42 Vishwanathan, Gauri 57 Vivekananda, Swami 151 Weickgenannt Nicole 22 Wesling, Meg 7 West, Candance and Zimmerman, Don 149, 154 Zenana 52-64