ISSN 0970-1443
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Volume LXXXV (No. 3 & 4)
July-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
The Vedic Path
Quarterly Journal of Vedic,
Indological & Scientific
Research
Peer-reviewed Research Journal
ISSN 0970-1443
Registration no. 29063/76
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Guide to Indian Periodical Literature
Originally published as The Vedic Magazine
form 1906 to 1935
and thereafter as The Vedic Path
Editor: Prof. Shrawan K Sharma
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Quarterly Journal of
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Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India
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Contents
The Vedic Path
3
The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Some Reflections on the Application
of Indian Poetics
M.S. Kushwaha
3
Whose Cultural Studies? :
Some Reflections on Indian
Perspectives on Cultural Studies
Sudhir Kumar
12
Intersecting lines of Caste, Class and
Gender : A Study of Bama’s Karuku
Deepti Dharmani
43
Transgressing the Forbidden:
A Study of ‘A Friend’s Story’
Saurabh Kumar Singh &
Gyaneshwar Pt. Singh
54
Gynocritical Perspectives on
Bapsi Sidhwa’s the Pakistani Bride
Sunita Jakhar
67
Undermining the Conventional Trends:
A Study of Satish Alekar’s
The Dread Departure
Sudhir Nikam &
Madhavi Nikam
76
Rooted Cosmopolitanism: A Note on
Tagore’s Contemporary Relevance
Syed Ali Hamid
83
Problematizing Diasporic Identities:
A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s
The Namesake.
Randeep Rana &
Preet Saxena
90
Kâtyâyan and Sulbasutras:
A Study in Identity
Nidhi Handa
103
Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to
Die: A Renewed Perception of Life
Charu Sharma
110
Arab Chameleons: Transnational
Identity in The Cairo House
Ebrahim Mohammed
Alwuraafi
121
Traces of Democratic Ideals in
Vedic Polity
Renu Shukla
137
Excruciating Portrayal of Humanity in
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way to Go
Sanjiv Kumar
144
Darwinism in George Meredith’s
The Egoist
Ramit Samaddar
155
Oblique Use of Language in
Pinter’s The Birthday Party
Dinesh Panwar
175
Cosmopolitanism in Rohinton
Mistry’s Family Matters
Manoj Kumar
187
M.S. Kushwaha
Some Reflections on the Application of Indian Poetics
Not only the opponents but also the advocates of Indian poetics
insist on the need of applying it to modern or western texts, though
their motives are far different. The opponents argue that Indian poetics
is the product of a literary culture which is not only confined to India
but which also no longer operates even in this country. How can it
apply to a western text which originates from a different cultural context?
On the other hand, the advocates of Indian poetics hold that the
theories propounded by Indian poeticians are universally valid; it is
another matter that they had not applied them to complete texts. The
two recent collections of essays - East West Poetics at Work, edited
by C.D. Narasimhaiah (New Delhi, 1994) and Indian Poetics and
Modern Texts, edited by P.K. Rajan and Swapna Daniel (New Delhi,
1998) — are obviously intended to demonstrate the applicability of
Indian literary theories. While the former includes about twelve essays
on the application of Indian poetics to modern/western texts, the latter
is exclusively devoted to this task. There are also full-length studies on
the application of the rasa theory to western texts. Of these mention
may be made of J.B. Paranjape’s Old Lamp for the New: A Study
of William Faulkner’s Novels in the Light of Rasadhvani Siddhânta
(New Delhi, 1982), Rama Kant Sharma’s Hardy and the Rasa Theory
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(New Delhi, 1997), and Priyadarshi Patnaik’s Rasa in Aesthetics
(New Delhi, 1997) wherein all rasas are illustrated with examples
from western literature. Similarly, Vakrokti has been applied to various
English poems in Shrawan K. Sharma’s Kuntaka’s Vakrokti
Siddhânta: Towards an Appreciation of English Poetry (Meerut,
2004), and auchitya theory to Shelley’s poetry in Archna D. Tyagi’s
A Study of Shelley’s Poetry in the Light of Âcârya Ksemendra’s
Aucitya Siddhânta (New Delhi, 2008). In fact, there is no point in
contending that Indian poetics cannot be applied to modern or western
literature simply because it is based on Sanskrit literature or represents
a specific literary culture. A literary theory, worth its name, always
transcends the time and place of its origin. It is concerned with matters
which are common to all literatures. Indian poetics, too, is no exception.
It deals with questions of universal significance. Of its six major theories,
the rasa is concerned with the emotive content, while rîti, alamkâra
and vakrokti are related to form. Dhvani centres on meaning, while
aucitya underscores the general principle of propriety in the
employment of not only various elements of a literary work but also
literary theories. Obviously, there is nothing peculiarly Indian about
these theories except the fact that they have developed in India. The
three topics with which Indian poetics is concerned — content, form
and meaning -- constitute every work of literature.
John Oliver Perry’s allegation that Indian poetics represents
‘religious view’ or ‘a Hindu value system’ is grossly misconceived1.
For one thing, he singles out only rasa-dhvani theory, and associates
it with ‘spiritual experience -- that of bliss’. The spiritual experience, it
may be pointed out, is a universal experience, not circumscribed to
‘religious view’ or ‘a Hindu value system’. Secondly, the rasa theory
has been ‘spiritulized’ by its commentators, especially Bhatta Nayaka
and Abhinavagupta (and his followers); Bharata’s own approach is
down to earth. There is nothing spiritual about his theory of rasa,
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Path on the Application of Indian Poetics
Some
Reflections
5
which is firmly grounded in human psychology. In fact, the theories of
Indian poetics are purely literary; they have nothing to do with religion
and ethics.
It may also be observed that Indian literary theories have their
analogues in western critical thought. There is discernible resemblance
between the alamkâra theory and figures of speech or tropes, rîti
and the concept of style, and Vakrokti and the concept of ‘deviance’
in stylistics. Of course, there is nothing like rasa in western aesthetics,
but the centrality of emotions in a work of art is recognised by western
aestheticians and critics like I.A. Richards2. The Rasa theory’s emphasis
on the emotional impact of drama finds a parallel in Aristotle, and its
objective to communicate a distinct emotional experience finds an
echo in Tolstoy who proclaims: “Art is that human activity which consists
in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs,
the feelings and also experiencing them”3. Dhvani, which propounds
that meaning in poetry is suggested, not stated, finds its forceful allies
in the French Symbolists4. Aucitya is called prepon in Greek and
decorum in Latin, and is discussed by both Aristotle and Horace.
There are actually no borders in the realm of literature. The
literature of one country is read and appreciated in another country.
Speculations on literature are equally of a universal character. At the
same time, it is also true that no theory, however comprehensive, can
cover all literary works. Like the Creator of the world, a true writer
follows no set guidelines5; all genuine literary works are marked by
novelty and freshness. And this is a never-ending process. Hence an
ultimate and all-embracing theory of literature is an impossibility.
The trouble starts when a literary theory begins to stake
absolutist claims. And this happened in the history of Indian poetics. It
is marked by a search for the ‘soul’ (âtman) or essence of poetry.
Alamkâra, rîti, dhvani, vakrokti, aucitya — all by turns, claimed
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themselves to be defining principle of poetry. Though rasa was
conceived originally as one of the components of drama6 (though most
important), later, when coupled with dhvani, it was enthroned in the
form of rasa-dhvani as the final and foremost theory of literature.
And since rasa has no counterpart in western aesthetics, this theory
was considered the most distinctive Indian aesthetic theory. This also
accounts for the fact that rasa-dhvani theory is more often applied
than other Indian literary theories which, except aucitya, are easier to
use. Auchitya, of course, is not a theory with fixed determinants (though
Ksemendra tries to mount it as a theory) but a general principle which
is based on discrimination and discernment (viveka), and hence very
difficult to apply7.
I have argued elsewhere8 that the rasa-theory is basically
concerned with performing arts like drama, and it cannot be applied
to other genres in its original form. And even in the case of drama, it
cannot be applied alike to all kinds of dramatic compositions. S.C.
Sengupta, for instance, applies the rasa-theory to Hamlet, and comes
to the conclusion that “the predominant state is Aversion (jugupsâ)
but it is strengthened and enriched by other mental states, and the
total affect is not merely revolting (bîbhatsa) but tragic – a concept
for which there is nothing corresponding in Indian poetics”9. Similarly,
in his application of the rasa-dhvani theory to Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart, Madhusudan Pati discovers that “whereas in the
first section a neatly orchestrated body of the bhavas generates a
refined feel of karuna as the controlling mood, there is a certain
dichotomy at work in the later sections not allowing any particular
emotions to intensify into a state of calm joy”10. These scholars, of
course, are interested in exploring the possibilities of the rasa-theory
without sacrificing the integrity of the text. Other scholars, who are
intent on demonstrating the applicability of the theory, end up by naming
vibhâvas, anubhâvas, sancâribhâvas, sthâyibhâva and the
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Path on the Application of Indian Poetics
Some
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7
corresponding rasa. This tendency is deprecated by the noted Sanskrit
scholar, G.K Bhat who states: “What is absolutely necessary is to
guard against the mistake the Sanskrit critics have made. The
commentators of Sanskrit poetry and drama have indulged themselves
in discovering and locating the vibhâvas, anubhâvas, and vybhicâribhâvas in literary pieces on which they were commenting and then
naming the rasa”11.
This tendency of naming persists also in the application of
other Indian literary theories. Here, for instance, is an exposition of
the following passage from Macbeth in the light of the vakrokti theory:
Besides this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking off;
And pity, like a naked new born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. (I.vii.16-24)
The exposition follows:
Duncan’s virtues are likened to angels and pity to a ‘naked
new born babe’ and ‘heaven’s cherubin’. Both these figures
of speech constitute sentential figurativeness. The expression,
‘trumpet-tongued’ being a case of metaphorical transfer, is an
example for lexical figurativeness. Adjectives like ‘meek’,
‘clear’, ‘deep’, ‘naked’, ‘new-born’, ‘sightless’, ‘horrid’, etc.
enhance the force of expression and hence are instances of
lexical figurativeness manifesting in qualification
(viœesanavakratâ). ‘That tears shall drown the wind’ is a
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hyperbole and hence another instance of sentential
figurativeness. Thus, in short, this passage, noted for its force
and beauty, is a clear case of figurativeness of lexical,
grammatical and sentential levels12.
I have selected this passage specially because it has been
commented upon also by Cleanth Brooks in his book, The Well
Wrought Urn, from another angle — that of paradox13. Though both
the scholars are motivated by their theoretical standpoints, there is a
world of difference in their treatment. While the vakrokti exponent is
content with locating various types of vakrokti in the passage, Cleanth
Brooks tries to relate the composite image of ‘a naked new born
babe’ to the central theme of the play.
Nevertheless, a theory, however ingeniously applied, cannot
exhaust the meaning of a text. And a genuine critic is primarily
concerned with the text, not with the theory. For, “literary criticism”,
as the noted Hindi-critic Namwar Singh rightly observes, “is not the
same thing as poetics at work or poetics in action”14. Literary criticism
is a direct encounter with the text. “Words in poetry”, says F.R. Leavis,
“invite us, not to ‘think about’ and judge but to ‘feel into’ or ‘become’
— to realize a complex experience that is given in words”15. He even
goes to the extent of proclaiming that “By the critic of poetry I
understand the complete reader: the ideal critic is the ideal reader”16.
This reminds us of the Indian concept of sahrdaya. The word
‘sahrdaya’ etymologically means ‘one of a kindred heart’ or ‘one
with the heart’. In either case, the emphasis is on the heart, not on the
mind. The concept of sahrdaya is further elaborated by Abhinavagupta
when he states that “sahrdayas are those whose mirrors of the minds
are cleansed of all impurities by their constant study of literature, and
who are thus capable of identifying themselves with whatever is
described in a literary work”17. The two qualities which are stressed
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Path on the Application of Indian Poetics
SomeVedic
Reflections
9
here are the capacity for identification (tanmayîbhâvanâ) and freedom
from mental impurities. In fact, the purity of mind is the pre-condition
of identification. And the mind cannot be pure unless it is emancipated
from the hold of pre-conceived notions and ideas. A text has to be
approached with an open and receptive mind. It is only in such a
mind, which resembles a clear mirror, that the full meaning of the text
is reflected.
But this does not imply that the study of Indian poetics is
useless. It is an independent discipline (úâstra), and offers valuable
information about the ways a literary text is constituted. It deserves
more attention than structuralist or post-structuarlist theories which
are not directly concerned with literature. But Indian literary theories,
like all other theories, should be studied for clarity of understanding,
not as ready-made canons of literary criticism. It should not be
forgotten that literary theories are dependent on literature, not vice
versa. To judge a literary work in terms of a theory is therefore nothing
but a Procrustean exercise18.
As I have said earlier, literature cannot be bounded by any
theory. Like the charm of a youthful maiden19, a literary work is more
than the sum total of its constituents. In fact, every work of literature,
like a living organism, is unique, and demands an individual response.
To enter into the spirit of a literary text, the critic will have to be a
sahrdaya or he should, according to Râjaœekhara (Kâvyamîmamsâ,
chap. IV), possess the bhâvayitrî pratibhâ (the intuitive power to
grasp and unveil the poet’s meaning). In either case, mere learning is
of no account20. Hence genuine critics are as rare as genuine poets.
Notes and References
(Endnotes)
See Absent Authority: Issues in Contemporary Indian English
Criticism (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1992), 189-90.
1
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2
See for details, Gupteshwar Prasad, I.A. Richards and Indian
Theory of Rasa. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2007.
3
What is Art?, tr. Pevear, Richard and Volokhensky, L. Penguin
Books, 1995.
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SomeVedic
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12
See C. Rajendran, “Vakrokti as Poetic Art: A Study in
Shakespeare’s Macbeth“, Indian Poetics and Modern Texts, eds.
P.K. Rajan and Swapna Daniel (New Delhi: S.Chand and Company,
1998), 149.
13
4
See for details, Rayan, Krishna. Suggestion and Statement in
Poetry, London: The Athlone Press, 1972.
5
In his Dhvanyâloka (III.42) Anandavardh ana compares the
poet with the creator (prajâpati): “In the boundless realm of poetry,
the poet alone is the creator, as it pleaseth him, so doth this world
revolve” (K. Krishnamoorthy)
6
See Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (London:
Metheun, 1960), chap. II (“The Naked Babe and the Cloak of the
Manliness’’). Brooks concentrates only on the second half of the
passage, beginning with “And pity, like a naked new born babe”.
14
Namwar Singh, “Ânandavardhana Reading the Mahâbharata’’,
East West Poetics at Work, 167.
15
The Common Pursuit (Penguin Books, 1952), 212-13.
16
The Common Pursuit, 212.
17
Dhvanyâloka-Locana, I. 1.
See Bharata, Nâtyaúâstra, VI.10.
7
Even such an astute critic as F.R. Leavis could err in this matter.
In his Revaluation (pp. 171-72) he criticizes the use of imagery in the
second stanza of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” on the ground of
propriety, but his charges are convincingly rebutted by Desmond KingHele in Shelley: His Thought and Work, 215-16.
8
See M.S. Kushwaha, “The Validity and Scope of Rasa as a
Critical Concept”, East-West Poetics at Work, ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah
(New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994), 77-87.
9
S.C. Sengupta, “Hamlet in the Light of Indian Poetics”, Indian
Poetics and Western Thought, ed. M.S. Kushwaha (Lucknow, Argo
Publishing House, 1988), 248.
10
Madhusudan Pati, “Things Fall Apart: An Enquiry into Rasaconfiguration”, East-West Poetics at Work, ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah
(New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994), 210.
11
Rasa Theory and Allied Problems (Baroda: M.S. University,
1984), 64.
After completing the paper I came across a statement by Sir W.
Temple (Of Poetry) which reinforces my viewpoint. He says: “The
truth is, there is something in the genius of poetry too libertine to be
confined to so many rules; and whoever goes about to subject it to
such constraints loses both its spirit and grace, which are ever native,
and never learnt, even of the best masters”. Cited, An Anthology of
Critical Statements, ed. Amaranatha Jha (Allahabad: The Indian
Press, 1931), 48
18
19
I have borrowed this analogy from Ânandavardhana
(Dhvanyâloka, I. 4) who has used it to characterize his concept of
dhvani.
20
Ânandavardhana (Dhvanyâloka, I.7) makes a similar statement
about dhvani: “It cannot be understood merely by the knowledge of
word-meaning and grammatical rules. It is understood only by those
who have an insight into the true import of poetry”.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Sudhir Kumar
Whose Cultural Studies? :
Some Reflections on Indian Perspectives on Cultural Studies
The present essay is an attempt to configure, contextualize
and critique the coordinates of what may be termed as Indian
perspectives on cultural studies in the context of the growing trend of
establishing and validating the Euro-Americo-centric (dis-)courses of
cultural studies in the departments of literary and humanistic studies in
Indian universities. The prevalent pedagogy of cultural studies is a
kind of neo-imperialism that perpetuates the stranglehold of dominant
western theories/discourses in Indian universities and excludes the
Indian perspectives and worldviews from its purview.
Introduction: Gandhi and Cultural Action
We may begin by what Gandhi wrote in one of his last notes
found among his papers after his assassination on 30.01.1948:
I will give you a talisman: Whenever you are in doubt, or
when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following
test: Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man
(woman) whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the
step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him (her).
Will he (she) gain anything by it? Will it restore him (her) to a
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Whose
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control over his (her)own life and destiny? In other words,
will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving
millions? Then you will find your doubts and you self melting
away (Tendulkar 89).
One can hardly ignore the fact that the textuality of this
Gandhian talisman is grounded in a performative cultural politics that
has been the touchstone of sanskriti (culture), swaraj (freedom) in
its widest sense) and sanskritik karma (cultural action) in Indian
contexts. The significance of Gandhi’s talisman is that it translates
sanskriti (culture) into performance of ethical action or duty known
in Indian contexts as dharma(duty), sadachara (action based on
truth), paropakara (well-being of the other), and nishkama karma
(selfless, detached action) keeping the poorest human at the centre of
his swaraj (freedom).
Thus, Gandhi ties the issue of culture and cultural action for
swaraj (freedom- political, economic and cultural) to the condition of
the “hungry and spiritually starving millions” in India. Needless to say,
the Gandhian talisman that addresses the economic as well as spiritual
poverty rampant in the present times may have served as the “moolmantra or cardinal principle” to be practiced by all those who wield
power( social, political, economic and cultural) in the postindependence India but are in the grip of selfishness, self-doubt and
self-aggrandizement. It is worth noticing here that Gandhi translates
the propriety of culture and freedom, which may largely be theoretical,
into the practical domain of the performance of ethical action in order
to empower the poorest and the weakest. Gandhi seems to warn the
Indian academics engaged with project of Cultural Studies in India:- “
An academic grasp (of Indian culture) without practice behind it is
like an embalmed corpse, perhaps lovely to look at but nothing to
inspire or ennoble.” (Young India 277) In other words, Gandhi’s
insistence on the selfless performance of ethical action for the welfare
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of all, which connotes “lokasangraha” of the Gita (or sarvodaya in
Gandhian terminology) lies at the centre of the Indian culture. The
Gita also points to the ceaseless performance of selfless or detached
ethical actions for the universal welfare which is the characteristic feature
of Indian culture:
Controlling the sense organs with the mind, he who commences
the Yoga of action with the organs of action, unattached, is
held to excel, O Arjuna! ( The Gita 3.7)
Always do prescribed work; work is superior to inaction.
Indeed, even life in the body is impossible without working.
(The Gita 3.8)
….At least, to promote the welfare of the world, you ought to
do works.(The Gita 3.20)
….just as the ignorant work with attachment to that work, so
should the wise work, unattached, seeking the world’s
integration.(The Gita 3.25)
It is important to remember here that Gandhi through his
‘talisman’ translates the sacred yet practical idea of nishkama karma
(detached action/work) and lokasangraha (work/action for universal
well-being and solidarity of human beings which is akin to Gandhi’s
idea of sarvodaya) into the terms of moral economy of the so-called
secular and mundane politics. By placing the poorest (both in material
and spiritual terms) at the centre of his political, social and cultural
praxis, Gandhi blurs the distinction between sacred and secular actions,
or between political and cultural actions. Similarly, Gandhi’s act of
cultural translation of such moral/spiritual values as satya (truth),
ahimsa( non-violence or love), karuna (compassion), sewa (service)
and samyama (self-restarint) into his vision of value-based politics
manifest in the multiple forms of swaraj (freedom), satyagrah (truth-
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Whose
Cultural
15
force), swadeshi (love of the immediate neighbour or true indigenism)
and sarvodaya( universal welfarism) speaks volumes of his holistic or
integrated vision of life- in which there is no separation between the
secular and the sacred. In the Gandhian world-view, the vision of true
freedom or swaraj will remain merely a caricature of good society or
a chimera at best, if does not mean the social, economic and cultural
freedom of the poorest and the weakest in our society. That is why,
Gandhi’s talisman tells us about the practical method to perform actions
without selfishness and self-doubt for the true empowerment or allinclusive progress of human beings.
Reading Sanskriti as Culture: Indian Perspectives
While Gandhi was all for the decolonization of mind through
the realization of cultural swaraj, he always welcomed the confluence
of cultures and the assimilation of the best available in other cultures:
“Preservation of one’s own culture does not mean contempt for that
of others, but requires assimilation of the best that there may be in all
other cultures”.(Young India) Gandhi , no doubt, celebrates a form of
cultural hybridity which is a natural corollary to the processes of contact
(and even conflict) of cultures in the global contexts; but this cultural
hybridity is worthless if it fails to inspire the human beings to be good
humans and do good to their nation and the world at large:
The Indian culture of our times is in the making. Many of us
are striving to produce a blend of all the cultures which seem
today to be in clash with one another. No culture can live if it
attempts to be exclusive. There is no such thing as pure Aryan
culture in existence today in India. Whether the Aryans were
indigenous to India or were unwelcome intruders, does not
interest me much. What does interest me is the fact that my
remote ancestors blended with one another with the utmost
freedom, and we of the present generation are a result of that
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blend. Whether we are doing any good to the country of our
birth and the tiny globe that which sustains us or whether we
are a burden the future alone will show( Harijan).
This is why Gandhi’s vision of sanskriti (culture) may justifiably
be located in the discourses of cultural studies in India as it continues
to challenge and inspire its pundits as well as practitioners.
The usage of sanskriti (culture) is a fairly recent phenomenon
in western and Indian contexts. Sanskriti (culture), in the Indian
contexts, refers to a multidimensional process through which human
beings refine, purify and re-form their actions in accordance with the
existing moral values. Agyeya, the prominent cultural critic and
modernist Hindi writer, raises some very important points in this regard
in his essay-”Sanskriti Ki Chetana” (“Consciousness of Culture”):
In the pre-modern times, the ideals and values did exist; but
they were not designated as “cultural ideals/values” as sanskriti
or culture was not understood as an isolable and isolated (and
quite narrow also) concept in India. In India, there was no
need to designate the ideals and symbols that influenced the
growth of human character as “sanskriti or culture” because
they were the constituents of “dharma”(duty). In entire world
history, nowhere dharma(duty) has been conceptualized in
such all-inclusive and all-embracing terms ( and this conception
of dharma still holds except for those Indians who are immersed
in the influence of western education) as has been done in
India. (Bhagavad Gita Bhashya of Sri Shankaracharya)
In this way, dharma (duty) is “the ethical law or substratum
that holds the actions of the entire society” (Agyeya 69). The
Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu) also describes the ten points of
dharma (duty) which are also the co-ordinates of sanskriti (culture)
in the Indian context. To re-orient Manu’s discourse in consonance
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Cultural
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with the changed times, it can be affirmed that all the members of civil
society should follow or try utmost to follow the ten-point dharma
(duty) in order to ensure peace and true progress in the world: “The
ten points of dharma (duty) are dhriti (patience), kshama
(forgiveness), self-control dama (self-control), not stealing asteya
(stealing), shaucha (purification), indriya nigraha (mastery of sensory
powers), dhee (wisdom), vidya , truth satyam (learning) and lack of
akrodha (anger). (The Manusmriti VI.92).
Can we possibly ignore the significance of these values, as
inscribed by Manu in his conception of dharma (duty) that lies at the
centre of Indian world-view of sanskriti (culture) in the present
contexts of extreme greed, consumerism, naked dance of violence,
environmental degradation and spiritual and material starvation? In
the Indian tradition, Ashoka (272-232 B.C.) was, perhaps, the first
Indian ruler who used the languages really spoken and understood by
the masses to publicize, through the installation of the multimedia of
rock and pillar edicts/inscriptions throughout his vast Mauryan empire,
the performance of ethical dharma (duty) which lies at the centre of
Indian Sanskriti (culture): “….Practicing dharma is good. But what is
dharma? Dharma means abstinence from sin; performance of many
good deeds and the pursuit of values such as compassion, charity,
satya and purity….I got this message inscribed so that people could
follow it accordingly and it might remain permanent. Whosoever
practices it will consecrate her/his life.” (Ashok Ke Dharma Lekha
89)
The exclusion of Indian voices/perspectives on culture and
society in the existing courses of “Cultural Studies” in Indian universities
necessitates the search for an alternative project of Cultural Studies
which includes the visions and world-views of those Indian thinkers/
writers who tried to understand the possibilities of swaraj (freedom)
for “the hungry and starving millions” of India as envisaged by Gandhi.
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Needless to say, Gandhi expects those who are struggling for “swaraj”
to follow the path of satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), satyagraha
( truth- power or soul-force) and swadeshi (love of the neighbour)
which are the foundational values of Indian culture. It would be
worthwhile to remember that the recent non-violent movements in
Egypt and Tunisia were also inspired by Gandhi’s ideals of truth, nonviolence and non-cooperation with forces of injustice, which, according
to him, are the primary values of Indian culture.1
Sanskriti(Culture) and Sahitya (Literature): Inside and Outside
the Text
In the Indian context, a literary text has always been considered
as a sanskritik (cultural text). Perhaps no other language of the world,
save Sanskrit, offers the etymological and discursive connectivity
between the signifiers of literary text (kriti), language (sanskrit), the
process of purification (sanskar) and culture (sanskriti). That is why
an average Indian student of literature is familiar with the inevitable
and inseparable connection between sahitya (literature) and sanskriti
(culture) as manifest in most of the Indian texts of literary theories.
This may also explain why a student in India may not bother much
about the much-talked-about cultural studies?—much to the chagrin
of her university-based teacher whose heart and mind often overflows
with latest theories imported from France, U.K. or U.S.A! Her
familiarity with the Indian perspectives on kriti-in-sanskriti/ ‘sanskritiin-kriti’(text-in-culture/culture-in-text), in fact, saves her from being
crushed under cartloads of imported theories of the so-called “Cultural
Studies”2. In fact, whenever we experience aesthetic pleasure (that is
rasa) in our critical examination of meanings of literary or cultural
texts from different perspectives of caste, gender, class, race, language,
power-relations, spiritual and psychological issues, we are doing some
serious cultural studies business. Culture as represented in a text
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(sanskriti-in-sahitya) may contest, resist or protest against the culture
outside the text.
Such values as duty(dharma), interdisciplinarity,
pluralism(diversity), unity, harmony, and well-being of all (loka-mangal
or kalyana) have always characterized and connected the coordinates
of sanskriti(culture) and sahitya(literature) in India right from
Bharata’s Natyashastra(c 5th Century B.C.) to Kshemendra (11th
century A.D., the author of Auchityavicharacharcha), Mammata
(11th century A.D., the author of Kavyaprakasha), Acharya
Vishwanatha(14th century A.D., the author of Sahityadarpana) to
Premchand’s Sahitya Ka Uddeshya (1936)- to cite only a few
examples:
He then thought: “I shall make a fifth Veda on the Natya with
the semi-historical tales (itihasa), which will conduce to duty
(dharma), wealth (artha), as well as fame, will contain good
counsel and collection (of traditional maxims), will give
guidance to people of the future as well, in all their actions,
will be enriched by the teaching of all authoritative works
(shastra) and will give a review of all arts and crafts (Bharata
03).
This teaches us duty (dharma) to those who go against duty,
love (kama)to those who are eager for its fulfillment, and it
chastises those who are ill-bred or unruly, promotes selfrestraint in those who are disciplined, gives courage to
cowards, energy to heroic persons, enlightens men of poor
intellect and gives wisdom to the learned.( Bharata14-15).
In order to critically appreciate how writing or composing
sahitya (literature) is a sanskritic (cultural) action in Indian context,
one may replace the word ‘natya’, (drama) ‘kavya (poetry) with
sahitya (literature). The cultural and political purpose of literature is
further explained by Bharatamuni in Natyashastra:
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It will (also) give relief to unlucky persons who are afflicted
with sorrow and grief or (over)-work, and will be conducive
to observance of duty as well as to fame, long-life, intellect
and general good, and will educate people( Bharata15).
Hence I have devised the drama in which meet all the
department of knowledge, different arts and actions( Bharata
15).
In his important treatise on the significance of auchitya
(propriety) of literature, Auchityavicharacharcha, Kshemendra holds
that auchitya (appropriateness or propriety), which is the soul of
literature, is contingent on, inter alia, on such ethical/cultural/political
co-ordinates of meaning represented in a text as desha (nation), kal
(time), swabhava (subjectivity), sattva (being, essential nature, nobility
of character etc.,), tattva(truth), abhipraya( intended meaning),
awastha (the state of being), vichara (thoughts), sarsangraha
(essence or wisdom) and so on. Likewise Mammata also lays due
emphasis on the values associated with cultural materialism and the
moral and political economy of life in his discourse on the purpose of
kavya or sahitya (literature) in his Kavyaprakasha:
Poetry leads to fame, procurement of wealth, knowledge of
the ways of the world, cessation of the inauspicious, immediate
bliss par excellence and imparts advice in the manner of a
beloved (Kavyaprakasha 05).
Poetic imagination, proficiency resulting from a study of the
world, sciences, poetical compositions and the like, practice
under the guidance of those who know poetry- these constitute
(conjointly) the cause of its origin( Kavyaprakasha 07).
Similarly, Acharya Vishwanath in his Sahityadarpana (The
Mirror of Composition) tells us that the purpose of literature is to help
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us attain purusharthas (the four cardinal principles of life), namely,
dharma (duty), artha (wealth), kama ( love) and moksha (liberation)
(The Sahitya-Darpana or Mirror of Composition of
Vishvanatha,01) And what Premchand, an eminent twentieth century
Indian writer/cultural thinker, says about the significance of literature,
in his presidential address delivered in the first session of Progressive
Writers Association at Lucknow (U.P.) in 1936 seems to echo the
views of Bharata, Kshemendra, Mammata and Vishwanath on the
ethical and cultural significance of literature :”Only that literature passes
off as true literature on our touchstone that has sublime thoughts, ideas
of freedom, essence of beauty, soul of creativity and light of the realities
of life- that which engenders constant dynamism, struggle and unease
in us and does not make us sleep any longer because our incremental
sleep is a sign of death. (Sahitya Ka Uddeshya 16)., This is also why
Premchand defines sahitya (literature) primarily as a “criticism of
life”( (Sahitya Ka Uddeshya 2) that gives us “good taste”, “spiritual
and mental fulfillment”, “power and dynamism”, “ love of the beautiful”,
“ true determination and strength to conquer the difficulties of life”
((Sahitya Ka Uddeshya 4.) In other words, the processes of writing,
reading and relishing literature have always been considered as
interconnected cultural actions in Indian aesthetic/cultural tradition. In
this sense, anyone engaged in writing or reading sahitya (literature) is
also performing a sanskritik (cultural action) in accordance with the
Indian perspectives on what is fashionably called today- cultural
studies.
Some Reflections on Culture, Language, Knowledge and Power
The word which signifies “culture” in Indian context comes
from Sanskrit, that is, sanskriti which implies minimalist theory but
maximalist ethical action for its existence. Before we discuss sanskriti
in the Indian context , let us begin with a brief analysis of the “culture”
and “cultural studies”. Whereas in its early phase the word “culture”
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( from Indo- European root- “kwel”- to revolve or move around and
subsequently from Latin, colere- to cultivate, to inhabit) referred to
the dynamic process of cultivating, protecting and tending something,
in modern times, it primarily signifies (i) a general process of intellectual,
spiritual and aesthetic development ( for example, cultivation of taste
in music, literature, films, philosophy, painting and other arts, fine arts
and humanities) (ii) a particular way of life, whether of a people, a
period, or a group ( which makes it applicable to almost all human
activities). That’s why Raymond Williams considers “culture” to be
“one of the two or three most complicated words in the English
language”( Raymond 76).
Moreover, the complications inherent in the word “culture”
grow further as it has had an uneasy and difficult relationship and
interaction with “civilization”(Latin, civis-citizen) which is generally used
to describe an achieved state or condition of organized social life
(Raymond 48). It is interesting to note that Raymond Williams, who
was one of the pioneers of Cultural Studies, does not even include
Cultural Studies (not to speak of defining it) in his important book,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which was
published (in 1976) in the heydays of the project of Cultural Studies.
(Raymond, 80) Broadly speaking, the project of Cultural Studies
includes, inter alia, the analysis of connections between culture / cultural
productions and power. Stuart Hall in his essay ‘The Work of
Representation’ aptly defines Cultural Studies as “a cluster (or
formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of
talking about forms of knowledge and conduct associated with a
particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society.”
On the other hand, the multiplicity of meanings associated
with the word “sanskriti” (generally considered a synonym of “culture”),
as have already been discussed above, gives us a clue to the maximalist
idea of sanskriti ( also spelt as samskriti) in the Indian tradition. The
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polyvalent term-sanskriti refers to the performativity of an individual
or a group or an institution in the process of attaining purification,
improvement and preparedness as is evident from its meanings–
”making ready”, “preparation”, “perfection”, “formation”, “hallowing”,
“consecration”, “determination”, “effort”. (Monier-Williams 1121)
Another cognate but equally loaded signifier which is etymologically
as well as epistemologically tied to sanskriti in Indic wisdom tradition
is samskara which refers to “putting together”, “forming well”, “making
perfect”, “purification”, “adornment”, “making ready”, “preparation”,
“forming the mind, training, education”, “correction, purity” etc.
((Monier-Williams 1120). Similarly, kriti as a constituent of “sanskriti”
refers to “ the act of doing, making, performing, composing”, “activity,
action, creation, work”, “literary work” etc.( (Monier-Williams 303).
That is why the Indian concept of “sanskriti” always suggests the
desirability of having an “ethical turn or transformation” in our lives in
order to realize that attainment of consecration, purity, preparedness
and readiness (in all walks of life) which should be visible through the
actions of individual or an institution. This “ethical turn” in literary and
cultural studies is , at present, being considered an important event in
the western theory. If we discursively and methodically put together
the interrelated significations of sanskriti, samskara and kriti, as
underlined above, and explain them with textual and contextual
illustrations (culled from literary, folk, philosophical, cultural or historical
sources) in an easily comprehensible narrative/language, we are
engaged with Indian perspectives on cultural studies. It is worthwhile
to quote Agyeya( 1911-1987), an eminent Indian writer(Hindi poet,
novelist and critic) in connection with the Indian perspective on
sanskriti (cultural studies):
Sanskriti (culture) is primarily the name of a value-based vision
and all other factors influenced by it. It includes all those
factors which formulate and determine the relationship between
society, individual and family, characterizes division and utility
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of labour and capital, and all our connections with all being
and objects. Sanskriti (culture) represents, regulates and reassesses these connections and is also an expression of them.
In other words, sanskriti is simultaneously their foundation
and effect.( Agyeya59)
He further elaborates the performative or action-oriented
aspect of the value-based vision called sanskriti in the Indian context:
Indian sanskriti (culture) is basically a dharmik (duty-based)
sanskriti. Moreover in the Indian context the word “sanskriti
(synonymous with culture) may be said to be the result of our englished
education. It will, however, be more appropriate to say that in the
context of India, dharma or duty has been the foundation of sanskriti
and what is known today as ‘sanskriti’ is only an extension of the
performance of dharma (duty) (Agyeya 11).
Let us also see how modern Hindi poet Shamser Bahadur
Singh dialogically deals with sanskriti (culture) in terms of ethical action
which is directed to empower the most deprived people in his poem‘ Baarh- 1948(The Flood-1948)’:- “Culture is not this life/ Culture is
an expression/ of / the sanskriti of future/ which lies in the roasted
grams, Jainendra Kumarji,/ which Mahadeviji has been distributing
among the flood-victims” (Singh 82-83)
It is the centrality of dharma (duty) in the discourses of sanskriti
in Indian contexts that Gandhi underlines in Hind Swaraj(1909), and
afterwards in his famous ‘talisman’(1948). To him, true civilization
means ‘good conduct’, ’observance of morality’ and
‘duty’:”Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man
the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are
convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our
mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati
equivalent for civilization means “good conduct” (Gandhi 53).
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Even Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who worked for the dismantling of
the inhumane caste-system, caused by the perversion of sanskriti in
the Indian contexts, highlighted the importance of such important texts
as the Upanishadas which are the repository of cultural/civilizational
values or insights that may be used in the reconstruction of the existing
caste-based, highly iniquitous social order: “ But I am told that for
religious principles as will be in consonance with Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity it may not be necessary for you to borrow from foreign
sources and that you could draw for such principles on the
Upanishads.” (Ambedkar 78) Ambedkar protested against the
degenerated state of Indian culture that nourished the existed castesystem. He held that the demand for swaraj(freedom) is futile without
social and cultural reconstruction of Indian society and that “… the
emancipation of the mind and the soul is a necessary preliminary for
the political expansion of the people.( Ambedkar,,44)”. Needless to
say, one may easily gauge how Ambedkar’s oppositional cultural
politics is grounded in the search for an alternative egalitarian sanskriti
(culture).
Like Gandhi Sri Aurobindo also highlights how practice of
dharma (duty) and harmony between the temporal and the timeless
characterize the Indian culture :”India’s central conception is that of
the Eternal, the spirit here encased in matter, involved and immanent
in it…” (Aurobindo)3Contrary to what we call the Indian perspective(s)
on cultural studies which are grounded in duty(dharma), celebration
of diversity in unity, and ethical action(karma or sadachara), even
the recent books on Euro-Americo-centric “Cultural Studies” betray
the writers’ obsession with theoretical jargon and critical sophistry.
For example, Gary Hall and Claire Birchall have recently (2009) edited
a book entitled- New Cultural Studies which has appropriately been
subtitled as- Adventures in Theory. In order to democratize the
discourses of cultural studies in India, there is an urgent need to include
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multiple Indian perspectives (as represented in the visions of such
Indian thinkers/cultural critics as Raja Rammohan Roy, Ramkrishna
Pramahamsa, Swami Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda, R.N.Tagore,
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Maulana Azad, Jotiba Phule, Tilak, Gandhi,
Sri Aurobindo, Pandita Ramabai, B.R.Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh,Lala
Lajapat Rai and others)on culture and society in the framing of courses
of Cultural Studies in Indian universities.
Gandhi and Tagore on Culture and Language:
Writing about the students’ role in the non-co-operation
movement in Young India of 1 June 1921, Mahatma Gandhi states
the importance of cultural swaraj (that is, decolonization of the mind))
and cultural action in the context of India’s non-violent struggle against
colonialism highlighting the interconnections between language,
literature, culture and power which are relevant even today:
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my
windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to
be blown about in my house as freely as possible. But I refuse
to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s
houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave. I refuse to put the
unnecessary strain of learning English upon my sisters for the
sake of false pride or questionable social advantage. I would
have our young men and women with literary tastes to learn
as much of English and other world-languages as they like,
and then expect them to give the benefits of their learning to
India and to the world, like a Bose, a Roy or the Poet himself.
(Barker)
It is interesting to note that Gandhi’s metaphorical use of the
“house” ,”walls” and “windows” in the first two sentences of this oftquoted statement foregrounds a characteristic feature of Indian culture,
that is, its “openness” to multi-cultural discourses resulting in what
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may be termed as “cultural pluralism”. Without undermining the
significance of cultural pluralism, Gandhiji makes it contingent on the
crucial issue of India’s swaraj or freedom- cultural, political and
economic. While engaging himself with Tagore on the issues of imposing
“English studies” on Indian students and their participation the NonCooperation Movement, Gandhiji questioned the disproportionate
importance and power made available to an Indian subject who is
interpellated through the discourses of the English language and the
English studies:
The Poet does not know that English is today studied because
of its commercial and so-called political value. Our boys think,
and rightly in the present circumstances, that without English
they cannot get Government service. ..Hundreds of youths
believe that, without a knowledge of English, freedom for India
is practically impossible. The canker has so eaten into the
society that in many cases, the only meaning of Education is a
knowledge of English. All these are for me signs of our slavery
and degradation. It is unbearable to me that the vernaculars
should be crushed and starved as they have been. (The
Mahatma and the Poet 64)
The continuing relevance of Gandhiji’s critical appreciation of
the political economy of the English language and its location in the
colonial (as well as the postcolonial) discourses of power cannot be
overemphasized. What is to be emphasized here is the fact that there
is not even a trace of hatred for the English language and literature in
Gandhiji’s oeuvre. His writings and speeches give ample evidence of
his rasanubhuti (aesthetic relish) of English literature and language.
He was fond of quoting from the works of such eminent English writers
as Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Tennyson, Newman, Blake, Gray,
Shelley, Wordsworth, Ruskin and Carlyle among others. Gandhiji and
Tagore both were well versed with the English language. But both of
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them in their writings and speeches expressed their dislike for an India
where the predominant use of English by the intellectual and the political
elite might breed a culture of mimicry and amnesia.
R.K.Narayan in his novel, The English Teacher (first
published in 1946), represents the resistance to the hegemony of
English through a dialogue between Krishna, a lecturer in English and
his colleague Mr Gajapathy, Assistant Professor of English: “Mr
Gajapathy, there are blacker sins in this world than a dropped vowel.”
…I drove home the point: “Let us be fair. Ask Mr Brown if he can say
in any of the two hundred Indian languages: ‘The cat chases the rat’.
He has spent thirty years in India.” (The Mahatma and the Poet 6364) It is worthwhile to remember here that Tagore and Gandhi both
had a vision of India in which India’s cultural freedom rests on the
increasing usage of Indian languages by the Indians at the local and
the national levels. The objective of national integration can be realized
only when the native Indian languages are used and promoted in all
spheres/activities of the nation and the translational traffic between
Indian languages and literatures is accelerated- as suggested by Gandhi.
Whereas the decentering of English from the nucleus of power is
constitutionally and culturally desirable, it may continue to exist in India
as the link language and also as a language of global diplomacy and
commerce.
The present-day Education system of India (at all levelsprimary, secondary and higher) still largely prescribes what Paulo Freire
(1922-1997) called the “pedagogy of the oppressed” as it is invested
with an overt Euro-Americo-centric utilitarian or narrow, economistic
vision of education that caters to the demands of the global economy.
Using Freire’s discourse one may well consider India “a dependent
society” without its own voice: “The dependent society is, by definition,
a silent society. Its voice is not an authentic voice, but merely an echo
of the voice of the metropolis- in every way, the metropolis speaks,
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the dependent society listens…” (Narayan 06) Gandhiji contests this
hegemony of the so-called global economy, which poses as global
culture, over the local as well as the national culture. That is why he
also reiterates the seminal significance of the various Indian languages
(that is, “vernaculars” as they are generally considered even in a postcolonial context in India) that enable the people of India to understand
and disseminate the varied forms of the cultural and the national
imaginary:- “But I would not have a single Indian to forget, or be
ashamed of his mother-tongue, or to feel that he or she cannot think
or express the best thoughts in his or her own vernacular”( The
Mahatma and the Poet 64).
One can easily gauge the extraordinary power wielded by the
linguistic elite who are the latter-day Macaulay’s acolytes in social,
political, economic and cultural domains in India. According to the
Census of India Report (2001), “fewer than a quarter of a million (2.5
lakh) people speak English as their first language in India” (Freire,
09).4 In other words, only a microscopic minority of 0.228% people
speak English as their first language in India whereas there are more
than 43% people (that is, more than 352 million people) in India who
are the native speakers of Hindi alone. Though written in English, the
Constitution of India does not include English among the twenty two
languages of India listed in its Eighth Schedule. The official
language(Articles 343-344) of the Union of India is Hindi while English
is to be used for official purposes only for a limited period( fifteen
years). Article 351 of Indian Constitution envisages that:
It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the
Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium
of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of
India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without
interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions
used in Hindustani and in other languages of India specified in
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the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or
desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and
secondarily on other languages (Census of India ).
It is, indeed, a travesty of constitutional propriety that no Central
Government in the postcolonial India could enforce the language policy
as directed by the Constitution of India. Ironically enough, what the
Bollywood film industry could easily do with regard to the language
policy and national integration was never seriously taken up by any
Government in India.
Even in a global context, the worldwide number of the native
speakers of English is about 350 million whereas the number of native
speakers of Hindi is more than 352 million in India only. . (Shorter
Constitution of India) Contrary to the popular myth that proficiency
in English is the determining factor for the growth of national economy,
one can well cite the fact that English is not the national language of
seven out of ten largest economies of the world. (McArthur ,03) Have
we completely forgotten how Tagore and Gandhi both advocated the
use of Indian languages in all kinds of national work including education,
judiciary, legislation and public administration? In his essay-”Asantosh
Ki Pahali Pirhi” (“The First Generation of Discontent”), Agyeya,
the prominent Hindi writer and cultural critic, articulates the anguish of
an Indian intellectual who remained deprived of his own “language” in
the so-called independent, postcolonial India: “I received education
but I did not receive the language which is the basis of education…
When I must be thinking in my own mother tongue, I was cramming
the vocabulary of a foreign language; when I should have been proud
of my own identity, I was proud of my capacity to put on carry the
borrowed plumes. (economywatch.com)”
While delivering his first lecture in English in India on 9 February
1919 in Madras( now Chennai) on ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’,
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Tagore expressed his views on the significance of Indian languages for
the realization of cultural decolonization and dissemination of sanskriti:
It is needless to add that, along with those languages in which
lies stored our ancestral wealth of wisdom, we must make
room for the study of all our great vernaculars which carry the
living stream of the mind of modern India. Along with this
study of our living languages, we must include our folk literature,
in order to truly understand the psychology of our people and
the direction towards which our underground current of life is
moving….We must not imagine that we are one of these
disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come for us to
break open the treasure trove of our ancestors and use it for
our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future
our own- never continue our existence as the eternal ragpicker at other people’s dustbins (Agyeya 32-33) .
Have not most of our modern, university-based, Indian
intellectuals been reduced to being “the eternal rag-pickers” at the
dustbins of Euro/Americo-centric knowledge? One cannot help
appreciating Tagore’s farsightedness which is exhibited when he
castigates the contemporary English-centric Higher Education system
which ruthlessly victimizes those Indian students (who are now in
millions!) who fail to attain proficiency in English: “What a terrible
waste of national material to cut off all higher educational facilities
from the thousands of pupils who have no gift for acquiring a foreign
tongue, but who also possess the intellect and desire to learn.”(Tagore
32).
Unfortunately enough, even those students who excel in higher
education at various Indian universities and colleges and get high
positions, are , in Tagore’s words, “condemned to carry to the end
the dead load of dolorous dumbness?(Tagore 61) because of our
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total neglect of Indian languages as carriers of national culture. It is
worthwhile to remember here that neither Tagore nor Gandhi were
speaking as narrow nationalists or nativists. Tagore cautions us in no
uncertain terms lest he should be misunderstood as a cultural chauvinist:
“Let me state clearly that I have no distrust of any culture because of
its foreign character. On the contrary, I believe that the shock of such
forces is necessary for the vitality of our intellectual life”(Tagore 54).
In the same speech Tagore gives a fitting reply to the peddlers of
perpetuating the colonial model of higher education even today who
cite the fact that there are no textbooks in Indian language to justify
their position. Tagore rightly said “… unless higher education is given
in the vernacular languages, how are textbooks to come into existence?
We cannot very well expect a mint to go on working if the coins are
refused circulation”(Tagore 32-33). English-centric education is, to
Tagore, a kind of mouse-trap which denied cultural freedom to the
trapped Indian students: “The fact is, it was nearly a hundred years
ago when we first entered our English school, and we have not been
able to get out of it; we have got the same kind of shelter in it as the
mouse in the trap- it threatens to be so everlasting”(Tagore 15).
Thus, Tagore and Gandhi both in their views on “cultural swaraj
or freedom” reinforced the connectivity between language, culture
and power. Another contemporary of Gandhi and Tagore, Sri
Aurobindo, did not mince words when he critiqued the mimicry
exhibited by the colonized Indians through the use of English in their
conversation:”When a Maratha or Gujarati has anything important to
say, he says it in English; when a Bengali, he says it in Bengali….
English is being steadily driven out of the field. Soon it will only remain
to weed it out of our conversation.” (Prakash 24)
In his important essay- “Search for an Identity”, prominent
Indian writer in Kannada, Professor U.R. Ananthamurthy also criticizes
the cultural/literary mimicry of the west by the contemporary Indian
writers who, according to him, are the victims of English education:
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While Indian dance and music are uniquely Indian, why does
contemporary Indian literature takes its bearings from the
literature of the West? Are we really a nation of mimics, victims
of English education which has conditioned the faculties of
our perception so much that we fail to respond freshly to the
immediate situation in India?... And our reaction against the
West- isn’t it often emotional, while intellectually we remain
bound to western modes of thought? (Ananthamurthy 106)
Ananthamurthy also cautions us about the dangers of
essentializing India if its culture is envisioned merely as religious/spiritual
or metaphysical. In Indian contexts, sanskriti (culture) has always
been pluralistic marked by a symbiotic existence between different
world-views. Ananthamurthy rightly says:
The great Indian tradition was not merely spiritual and
devotional and devotional: we had the materialist Lokayukta
School, the Sankhya System, and Jainism and Buddhism which
were atheistic. It is a tradition of intensely conflicting world
views, yet our revivalists prefer to select only one aspect of it.
Isn’t this debilitating romantic strain in us also due to our
obsession with the west? (Ananthamurthy 112).
Ananthamurthy, therefore, questions the westernized Indian
intellectuals who tend to lay the complexities of Indian culture on the
proverbial Procrustean bed of western rationality and scientific reason:
That is why we don’t understand the complex pattern of ancient
Indian thought, its daring subjectivity, caught as we are in the
narrow confines of western scientific rationality. In his simplicity
the peasant still keeps alive the mode of thinking and perception,
which at the dawn of human civilization revealed to the sages
of the Upanishads the vision that Atman is Brahman.
Shouldn’t we prefer the so-called superstition of the peasant
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which helps him see organic connections between the animal
world, human world and nature surrounding him to the scientific
rationality of western science that has driven the world into a
mess of pollution and ecological imbalance?( Ananthamurthy
110)
Of all the nationalist leaders, it was Dr Rammanohar Lohia
who addressed the language-question in the postcolonial India in the
context of Indian culture and society. According to him, the power
structures in postcolonial India execute “daily repression” through the
“weapon of language”. The ruling elite “speak in a language which the
masses do not follow. The peasants, workers, agricultural labourers,
shopkeepers, clerks and such other illiterate masses thereby develop
an inferiority complex. This is the root cause of India’s degeneration.”
Empire may have perished politically; but the imperishable empire of
the English language continues to render millions of Indian students
voiceless victims in the post-independence India. Lamenting the
condition of Indian education system that continues to perpetuate the
hegemony of the English language at the cost of creativity and growth
of a vast number of Indian students, Dr Lohia, in his essay, “Banish
English” aptly says:
From his cradle to the grave an Indian is obliged to study
various languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit, Arabic,
Persian, and so on. Due to this ceaseless struggle to command
the intricacies of a foreign language, his study of geography,
history, economics, chemistry, mathematics, and other sciences
hardly attains perfection. His entire life is wasted on learning
the English language. Unendingly trying to refine his language,
he hardly tastes of depth of a subject. This is why our study
of science, economics, politics, history, geography and other
subjects is nothing but a cheap imitation. It lacks any
monumental contribution…. The Indian student is fettered to
the chain of English. His mind is rusting. (Lohia 15).
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That is why, Aijaz Ahmad, an eminent culture-critic, in his
essay- ‘Disciplinary English: Third Worldism and Literature’, roundly
criticizes the neo-imperialistic relationship between Indian universities
and their American and British counterparts :”First, so fundamental
and even genetic is the relation, indeed the dependence, of the Indian
university upon its British and American counterparts that knowledge
produced there become immediately effective here, in a relation of
imperial dominance, shaping even the way we think of ourselves.”
(Joshi 209)
Another culture-critic, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, in her essay,
‘Fixing English: Nation, Language, Subject’ takes a critical look at the
continuing hegemony of English in India:
…. the preserve of English in India is guarded by interests
predominantly defined by ideology, region and
class….Therefore ‘English’—not simply the language, but the
locus of a set of values loosely termed ‘westernization’—must
be viewed within an essentially conflictual social dynamics….
With this curious function—of imposing an equality of handicap
on learners from all regions –English finds its most powerful
raison d’etre in India…. Finally, and in a sense subserving
these opposed interests , is the fact that English is the asset
enjoyed by the English –speaking upper classes; the lack of it
is a handicap suffered by the rest, traditionally known as the
masses. It has thus constituted the most visible divide between
the ruling classes and the ruled.( Rajan 14-15)
Even Swami Vivekananda, one of the most articulate cultural
thinkers/activists of modern India, understood the dangers of cultural
mimicry and deracination that may be the result of the imposition of
English on Indian students:
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The language in which we naturally express ourselves, in which
we communicate our anger, grief or love etc- there cannot be
a fitter language than that. We must stick to that idea, that
manner of expression, that diction and all. No artificial language
can never have that force, and that brevity and expressiveness,
or admit of being given any turn you please, as that spoken
language…And language is the chief means and index of a
nation’s progress….What is the use of creating an unnatural
language to the exclusion of the natural one? Do you not think
out your scholastic researches in the language which you are
accustomed to speak(ing) at home? … The language in which
you think out philosophy and science in your mind and argue
with others in public – is not that the language for writing
philosophy and science? (Vivekananda 82-83)
Thus, the perspectives of such cultural thinkers/critics as
Gandhi, Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Rammanohar Lohia, Swami
Vivekananda, U.R.Ananthamurthy, Aijaz Ahmad and Rajeshwari
Sunder Rajan on the intersections between culture, language,
knowledge and power show a “family resemblance” yet such
discursive interconnections involving the Indian world-views are not
generally explored in the field of cultural studies in Indian universities.
Thus, the essay as a whole aims at critically analyzing the search
for Indian alternatives to cultural studies which are embedded in the
Indian discourses of sanskriti (culture) and ethical action. And while
we are engaged in the search for alternatives, we should, as Gandhi
rightly said, continue to keep all our “windows open” to let in all kinds
of noble ideas and values for our cultural enrichment and have our feet
firmly planted in our soil. Only then the vision of sanskritik swaraj
can be realized.
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Notes
1
It will not be out of place to mention here that the activists in
Egypt and the Tunisia who were in the forefront of the recent nonviolent revolution made good use of Mr Gene Sharp’s Gandhian
pamphlet-”198 Methods of Nonviolent Action” which inspired them
to overthrow the oppressive regimes through Gandhi’s weapons of
satya and ahimsa. Professor Gene Sharp, Professor Emeritus of
Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, is a wellknown Gandhian whose books have become the handbooks for
strategizing the non-violent non-cooperation movements in many
countries of the world in recent times (Burma, Bosnia, Estonia,
Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia). Some of his important
books are- Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power: Three
Case Histories, (Foreword by Albert Einstein), Ahmedabad,
Navjivan, 1960; Gandhi As A Political Strategist With Essays on
Ethics and Politics, New Delhi, Gandhi Media Centre,1999; The
Role of Power in Nonviolent Struggle, Boston, The Albert Einstein
Institution,2000; The Politics of Non-violent Action (3 Vols), Boston,
Porter Sargent, 1973; Self-Liberation, Boston, The Albert Einstein
Institution, 2009; From Dictatorship to Democracy, Boston, The
Albert Einstein Institution, 2010 (First Pub. In 1993 in Burma);Also
see The Hindu, February 18,2011,p.7 and The Times of India,
February 9, 2011,p.17. For Gandhi’s increasing relevance to the field
of cultural and postcolonial studies, please see- Robert Young,
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, Blackwell,
2001) and White Mythologies: Writing History and the
West,London,Routledge,2004(First pub.1990); also Leela Gandhi,
Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press,1998.
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2
Cultural Studies as an interdisciplinary approach to cultural
texts started in Britain in the late 1950s with Richard Hoggart (The
Uses of Literacy- published in 1957 ) and Raymond Williams (Culture
and Society-1780-1950, published in 1958) in the vanguard. It was
institutionalized with the founding of the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies(CCCS) by Richard Hoggart in 1964.
In 1968, Left-wing British sociologist and cultural critic , Stuart Hall,
(The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the
Left, published in 1988) became the Director of the Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies and was largely instrumental in
giving Cultural Studies its present theoretical turn by importing insights/
theories of structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism and theories of
power. Ironically enough, even after more than fifty years of its
existence, Cultural Studies does not have a specific methodology or a
specific area of interest. In a way, there is nothing that falls outside of
the scope of Cultural Studies- which is its strength and weakness both
for its supporters and detractors. Cultural Materialism and New
Historicism are also intriguingly associated with Cultural Studies- at
times making its theoretical field full of critical cant and jargon. Dazzling
theoretical sophistication and linguistic manoeuvres related to cultural
studies may easily be seen in Homi Bhabha(The Location of
Culture,London,Routledge,1994,)and Gayatri Chakravarthy Spivak
(In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New
York,Routledge,1988).
3
Even in the contemporary theories of Cultural Studies
ideological interconnections between language and power figure
prominently. See Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and
Practice, London, Routledge,2000, pp.66-95. Barker elsewhere
aptly says-”Language structures which meanings can or cannot be
deployed under determinate circumstances by speaking subjects. As
such, language is implicated in forms of power, with cultural politics
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operating at the level of signification and text.” (See Chris Barker,
Making Sense of Cultural Studies: Central Problems and Critical
Debates, New York, Routledge,2002.p.22).
4
Paulo Freire, ‘Cultural Action for Freedom’ in Eye,
Vol.4.No.4.July-Sept. 1997, p. 7. Similarly, for the role of the colonial
and the postcolonial power-structures in framing and implementing
an Education System in India that perpetuated the hegemony of the
English language and culture please see: Gauri Vishvanathan, Masks
of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1989; Svati Joshi(Ed.), Rethinking
English: Essays in Literature, Language and History, New Delhi,
Oxford University Press, 1994;Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan(Ed.),The
Lie of The Land: English Literary Studies in India, New Delhi,
,Oxford University Press, 1993. It is interesting to note that the critique
of language, knowledge and power offered by Gandhi and Tagore
contains the major insights present in the works of contemporary
postcolonial critics.
Works Cited
Agyeya, S.H. Vatsyayana. Kendra Aur Paridhi, New Delhi, National
Publishing House,2005,(first pub. 1984).
Agyeya, S.H. Vatsyayana. Khule Mein Khara Peda,(Ed.
Nandakishore Acharya), Bikaner, Vagdevi, 1999.
Ambedkar, Dr B.R. ‘ Annihilation of Caste’ in Dr Babasaheb
Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches” Vol.1,
Mumbai,Education Dept. Govt. of Maharashtra, 1989.
Ananthamurthy, U.R. “Search for an Identity: A Viewpoint of a
Kannada Writer” in Sudhir Kakkar (ed.) Identity and
Adulthood, New Delhi, Oxford University Press,1979.
40
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Aurobindo, Sri. The Foundations of Indian Culture, Pondicherry,
Sri Aurobindo Ashram,1992, first published serially-19181921.
Ashok Ke Dharma Lekha (Ed. Janardan Bhatt), New Delhi,
Prakashan Vibhaga, Soocahn Aur Prasarana Mantralaya,
Govt. of India., 2000.
Barker ,Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and
Practice(London,Sage,2000) and Making Sense of Cultural
Studies: Central Problems and Critical Debates, London,
Sage, 2002.
Bhagavad Gita Bhashya of Sri Shankaracharya,Chennai,Sri
Ramakrishna Math,2002.
Bharata , Natyashastra,(Ed. And Tr. By Manmohan Ghosh), Varanasi,
Chowkhambha, 2007.
Census of India, Issue 2003.
Gandhi,M. K. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Ahmedabad,
Navjivan, 2009.
Hall,Stuart (ed.) Representation, London, Thousand Oaks,1997.
Kavyaprakasha or the Poetic Light, (Tr. by R.C.Dwivedi), Delhi,
Motilal Banarasidas,1977.
Kshemendra, Auchityavacharacharcha, (Ed. Dr. Ramashankar
Tripathi), Varanasi, Chowkhambha Krishnadas Akadami,
2006.
Lohia, Dr Rammanohar. ‘English And The People’s Languages in India’
in Dr Rammanohar Lohia, Language, Hyderabad,
Rammanohar Lohia Samta Vidyalaya Nyasa,1986,First
Published,1956.
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McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Guide to World English, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Monier-Williams, William. M. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Delhi,
Motilal Banarasidas, 2005.
Narayan, R.K. The English Teacher, Madras, Indian Thought,
2004(first pub. 1946).
New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory, Hyderabad, Orient
Blackswan, 2009
Prakash, Indu. 23 July 1894. Quoted in Sisirkumar Mitra, The
Liberator: Sri Aurobindo, India and the World, Delhi, Jaico,
1954.
Rajan, Rajeshwari Sunder . (Ed.), The Lie of The Land, New Delhi,
Oxford University Press, 1993,pp.14-15.
Sahitya Ka Uddeshya, Gorakhpur,U.P. Premchand Sahitya Sansthan,
2000.
Singh, Shamsher Bahadur. Pratinidhi Kavitayein, New Delhi,
Rajakamal Paperbacks, 1990. (Translation mine).
Shorter Constitution of India (ed Dr Durga Das Basu), Nagpur,
Wadhwa and Co. 2003.
Tagore,R.N. The Centre of Indian Culture, New Delhi, Rupa and
Co. 2003.
Tendulkar D.G., Mahatma, Vol.VIII, New Delhi, Publication Division,
Govt. of India, 1969.
The Laws of Manu,(Trans. Wendy Doniger), New
Delhi,Penguin,1991.
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The Mahatma And The Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi
and Tagore 1915-1941 (Compiled and Edited by Sabyasachi
Bhattachrya), New Delhi, National Book Trust, 2008,
The Sahitya-Darpana or Mirror of Composition of Vishvanatha
(Tr. by J.R.Ballantyne and P.D.Mitra), Delhi, Motilal
Banarasidas, 1994.
Vivekananda, Swami. My Idea of Education, Kolkata, Advaita
Ashram,2009.
Williams , Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society, New York, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Young India, September 1, 1921.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Deepti Dharmani
Intersecting Lines of Caste, Class and Gender:
A Study of Bama’s Karuku
Woman must write herself … writing is precisely the very
possibility of change, the space that can serve as the
springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement
of a transformation of social and cultural structure. (Helene
Cixous 879)
Bama has suffered multiple hegemonies as a woman, dalit
and therefore poor and as a Christian Indian. Bama’s Karuku
structured like a novel besides being an “autobiographical intervention
as a speech act,” (Anderson 121) is a bare, bald but bold account of
a Dalit woman’s struggle against the hegemonic structures. Karuku
besides being a projection of the intersection of gender, caste and
class and a collectivist discourse is also a critique of the hegemonic
western feminism. Though written, the piece has an exceptional orality
for the demotic and colloquial language. The informality of narrative
style, the unconventional use of grammar and spellings and the
circularity in the narratology lend the writing a vocality which makes
itself heard clearly without any circumlocution. Thus Bama’s work
“not only breaks the mainstream aesthetics, but also proposes a new
one which is integral to her politics” (Holmstrom xi). The work is
structured into nine chapters representing gestation, pregnancy and
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labour, as the narrator forms a new identity by drawing a new vision,
and thereby may fit into the gynocentric model. However the issue of
sexuality that the mainstream western feminist thought is so obsessively
occupied with, is markedly missing and there are no undercurrents of
suppression or repression even. Though the autobiography has several
stories embedded in the narrative as a pointer to the patriarchal
oppression of women, Bama’s chief preoccupation is to expose the
patriarchal order that works through social institution of family, police,
system of education and church. Thus this writing “does not accord
with the theory of patriarchy which puts the father at the centre of the
family and culture” (Anderson 130) but writes about the fathers
rendered vulnerable by social institutions more powerful than the family.
Therefore the gender critique is embedded in the critique of caste
which happens to be the critique of the hegemony of class. As such
any translated work of a woman writer from the so called third world
is an effort to carve out a space at varied levels: at the level of a still
colonized sphere within the decolonized world and at the level of post
colonization.
Since during her speech acts the writer is all set to break the
silence and suppression of her voice as well as the voice of the
subaltern, the metaphor of mouth becomes central to her works: In
signifying power the mouth is perhaps richer. “It is not just grinding
maw for food but as the bodily organ of the voice, it expressly
communicates the entire self, in its innerness and outerness”( Anderson
124). It speaks with fullest power. Haaken on the other hand was
aware of “the potential for silencing within this dynamic of speaking
out”(Parker 113).
The metaphor of mouth works at three levels. First it is the
metaphor for speech and speech is emblematic of empowerment.
Second, mouth is associated with the function of eating and as such
represents both consumption and a desire to consume. Many critics
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have examined how “the powerful are characterized by their eating
and the powerless by their not eating the act of eating”(Anderson
124). Thus food often becomes central metaphor for life’s imperatives
be it family sexuality, oppression, death and transformation. Food as
the organizing element of the discourse of the oppressed and especially
of women is exhibited in innumerable writings of women and often of
men. Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own had focused on the
materiality of food to argue its impact on the mind and its creativity.
Third mouth represents the hegemonic powers that have for centuries
silenced the subaltern. Both the acts of speaking and eating are therefore
ways to empowerment.
Foregrounding the power equations in this manner Bama has
ascribed both the colonizing as well as decolonizing potential to mouth.
This duality is embedded in the title. Karuku is the double-edged ,
sword- like sharp palmarya leaf endowed by nature with teeth to tear
the skin of the oppressor. The writer at once seems to be pointing out
the multivalence of the paradigm of caste with the class inherent in it,
and gender that act as two -edged sword and by inversion points out
to the oppressed their teeth to fend themselves. Duality works yet at
another level. Bama in Karuku has used both singular and plural first
person pronouns in her discourse. While Rich found “a political
problem” in using “we” and “you” for “representativity”(Anderson
125), Bama employs both, besides ‘I’ while giving her first person
accounts of experiential reality. While the first becomes a part of her
aesthetics foregrounding her politics, the second gives orality to her
discourse. Bama’s use of first person pronoun has an inference of
“you” as the addressee, her use of interrogatives as a part of her
rhetoric and her repeated use of “I do not know” structures, for
example twice in the first chapter, are an abandonment of what Mason
calls “the Western obsession with the self” and the hegemonic
dichotomy of one and the other and her identification with the other
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without any impositions and finalities. In combining all these linguistic
strategies Bama is presenting her autobiography as a collaborative
project which acknowledges the role of the witness, their capacity for
understanding and their vulnerability. As an uncompleted statement
and non totalizing account Karuku seems to be giving a new ethical
dimension to the politics of feminism.
The narration begins with the description of the native village
through the evocative elemental imagery. Having described the
abounding floral and water resources the author describes the wind
and breeze that sweep the earth and the gleaming light of the sun that
“wakes up in the east.”(3) and sets in the west: “ To look at the light in
the western sky was like looking upon revelation of God” (3-4).
Significantly Bama’s village has the east- west dichotomy as sharp as
that in the world structure. After this description follows the description
of the elemental beings which are so frightening that “The merest glimpse
would induce fever, frightful diarrhea and eventual death” (5). Thus
come from the mouth of the author the stories of grit of Bondon the
stealer. Bondon fears not any of the peys or even the deity of the
Muniyaandi temple or the deadly snakes, but would hide in fear at the
possibility of being seen by the caretaker ahead of him. Thus combining
the realistic with the fantastic (a feature also found in the writings of
the Afro-American) Bama sets the stage of man-made hierarchies
and goes on to describe the minutest distinctions within human society
on the basis of caste/class and religion. The lowest of the low the
paryas live next to the cemetery. The life of the outcast, the untouchable
is thus metaphorically worse than a death like situation. Bama’s
description is microcosm of what Ardener called the world structures
with several muted groups within the muted groups. The topography
of the village is a sharp reminder of the topography of Loraine as
described by Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye. The east-west
dichotomy, the structure of the houses and the direction of human
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movement are also alike. Here the movement is always unidirectional
- from the east to the west and never the vise versa. One can draw
another parallel and that is of the compulsive minor criminality in the
oppressed group. Stealing of money and food is not a greed- oriented
act but has been described as a circumstantial imperative and a mode
of resistance to the controlling powers. The idea is best illustrated in
her short story collection titled harum scarum saar. The politics of
power is exhibited in the Pongal gifts exchanged between the Parayals
and the Ayyas. Often “tastes and distastes for food are constructed,
articulated and enjoyed as part of the project of constructing and
presenting the self” (Lupton 129). But in this story “pongal” the refusal
to take food gift as an act of resistance to the hegemonic power is at
last endorsed by the erstwhile servile father followed by the cattle as
they too refuse to eat the landlord’s gifted stale food. Gender
intersection is noticeable in the men’s self- determinism in contrast to
the woman’s subordination when she takes the order for the ragi to be
cooked. In the case of Bondon the stolen food is a desire for equality:
“Food symbolizes what we desire and what by imagination we
transform, giving meaning to life” (Stowell13). The gift of banana in
the story “freedom” is in sharp contrast to the stale unnutritional food
rejected by Subramani and thus strengthened he takes courage to run
away.
In Karuku Bama has added a sequel to some of her chapters,
which seemingly act as appendages but are thematically an integral
part of the text. These sequels are a mode of foregrounding the essential
concerns and often adding philosophic dimensions to the brief episodic
or rather anecdotal text. The first chapter for example has three stories
— of Bondon, Kaaman and Nallanthanga. The first is that of the stealer
which underlines the already discussed concept. The second story of
the ‘Jack of all Trade and Master of None’/ highlights the patriarchal
compulsion of man to settle in a fixed trade to be able to get settled in
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a family. And the third story presents woman both as a victim and a
victimizer with the social tendency to idolize the dead victim. The last
story with all the suicidal attempts shows the virtual impasse for the
poor to redeem themselves in utter poverty and by inversion points
out the need for education for survival — the mode adopted by the
writer herself. Here in this story too food is central as return of
Nallanthanga is on account of her inability to feed her seven children
in the severe drought and her utter humiliation when her sister in law
turns her ravenous children out after plucking the food from the little
ones. The over crossing of gender role divisions by Kaaman and the
victimization by a women readily assert the need to revisit and revise
the Eurocentric feminist theorization.
Bama gives so exhaustive a discourse on food often running
into a whole paragraph that she seems to be accepting hunger as an
essential condition of the untouchables. Even her first acquaintance
with this human evil comes in the form of a food item, vadais offered
by their elder as a gift to a Naiker. The old man carrying the doubly
wrapped packet by the string while himself doubling up meekly,
reverently and shrinkingly makes the narrator when a child laugh — a
laugh only to be transformed into terrible sadness, anger and fury.
Four unspoken questions arising consecutively in the mind of the
retrospective adult narrator reflect on the torment of
unspeakability:”How was it that these fellows thought so much of
themselves? Because they had scraped four coins together, did they
mean they must lose all human feelings? What did it mean when they
called us “Paraya” ? Had the name become so obscene? But we too
are human beings” (13).
The response to this inhumanity, contempt and ugliness is in
sharp contrast to that of the older generation. Patti’s reply: “these
people are maharajas who feed us our rice. Without them, how will
we survive? Haven’t they been upper caste from generation to
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49
generation, and haven’t we been lower caste / Can we change this?”
(14). The negative rhetoric of the interrogatives is a testimony of the
negativism, passivity and fatalism of the oppressed that renders them
voiceless.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty while talking about decolonizing
feminism raises the issue of “theorizing and practicing anticapitalist
and democratic critique in education, and through collective struggle”
(113). While both Karuku and harum scarum saar uphold the
redemptive value of education, Bama uphold the spirit of resistance
more through the resilience shown by women through collectivism in
both the works. The story “chilli powder” can be cited as an example
how the food item is used as a tool against the oppressor. The illiterate
rural woman knows the need to speak out: “these days if you do not
speak up, they will fart right into your mouth,” (Bama 4)Bama’s
indictment of the convent that represents the two most sought after
liberating/redeeming agencies / religion and education is severest so
much so that the gender issue so essential an aspect of the work gets
slightly decentred.
Bama shows how the church and the convent are in consensus
with the society at large to keep the dalit at the lowest ebb and that it
was not only the Hindu system but the Christian organizations that too
were inhuman to the untouchables. Discrimination and exploitation of
children on the ground of caste continued at all levels. They were
publically humiliated. She narrates episode after episode to point out
how the caste-based stereotypes were created and imposed to insult
the untouchable. She seems to be exploding the conception that sees
conversion of the Dalits as a way to form an alternate identity:
“Although they (dalit christians) form a majority of the Christian
community, they have been a suppressed majority” (Webster 118)
“They have made use of Dalits who are immersed in ignorance as
their capital, set up a big business, and only profited their own castes”
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(69). While the adolescent Bama was able to resist in the public, she
loses her voice in the convent school. Bama while acknowledging the
governmental affirmative programmes, points out the isolationist
tendencies among the school administration to humble the studious
dalits: “All the same, every now and then our class teacher would ask
all the Harijans to stand up either at the assembly, or during the lessons
…We felt really bad then...hanging our heads in shame, as if we had
done something wrong. Yes, it was humiliating.”(18)At last Bama in
rage said that she did not want special classes but realized she could
“not get rid of the caste business easily wherever she went” (19,
italics mine). She lost her temper and challenging them “head on” “stood
her ground. I managed to get my way at last….” (19). The retrospective
narrator sums up the whole situation: “because I had the education,
because I had the ability, I dared to speak up for myself” (19). Soon
she started taking pride in resisting. At her first place of work she
enjoyed standing up to the authorities and teaching them with some
skill and success. And it was in such a mood she decided to become
a nun to help is notable that made her think the even after death caste
difference does not disappear: “ Wherever you look, however much
you study, whatever you take up, caste discrimination stalks us in
every nook and corner and drives us into frenzy,”( 23). Again, “Is
there never to be any relief? It does not seem to matter whether people
are educated or not” (24). Bama realizes that the worst part of this
discrimination is that the oppressed has internalized their self worth.
This is the worst injustice. “It is we who have to place them where
they belong and bring about a changed and just society where all are
equal”(24). Bama gives numerous examples to show how the upper
class builds hegemonies and use both verbal and nonverbal languages
to maintain them.
However she is well aware of the other shortcomings. In
chapter three of the book through an account of the bloody conflict
between the two low castes and through the projection of the petty
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Intersecting
lines of Caste, Class and Gender: A Study of Bama’s Karuku
51
jealousies she explores the socio psychological factors and the reasons
why the low castes remain low. The hierarchical caste order in the
social system is self- maintaining. The lower caste would like to move
up but the upper caste would resist this movement and thus the
hierarchies remain unchanged. The police instead of maintaining law
and order play a partisan role to safeguard and strengthen the cause
of those who can fill their bellies and swell their pockets. Bama’s
cognizance of the material conditions in the neocolonial setting is by
subversion her plea for the economic betterment of the downtrodden,
and education though rendered ineffective at times seems to be one of
the most self actualizing remedies open to them. (Mental firmness does
not match the influence and authority that money power wields. To
continue their empowerment in spite of impediments, the subaltern
require resilience, which would come neither from education nor from
formal religious order. While the conformist oppressive religious order
“orphaned “ her, made her a “mongrel dog” (67) “ I could not act or
speak or even eat independently” (96), “ nobody was allowed to
think differently or speak differently”(98). She learns to identify with
the poor and understands the problematic of “Dalit poor”, “poverty
of the Dalits” and “the poorest of the poor Dalits” (68). Here she
realizes the essence of “bhakti”. Her observation of the riches, greed
and hypocrisy of the religious order and experience of the poverty of
their mind and heart makes her realize that “God was not with them”,
and that “we should speak up about what we believe. That is being
true to oneself”(91).While the stifling system silences them, teaches
them to shut their eyes, shackle their arm, “Dalits have come to realize
the truth… they have become aware that they are too created in the
likeness of god…urging them to reclaim that likeness” (94). The ninth
chapter is the culmination of Bama’s new vision. Though with wings
clipped she finds her self- resolved to move forward slowly, step by
step. “I have courage; I have a certain pride. I do have a belief that I
can live; a desire that I should live.” She concludes “it is possible to
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live a meaningful life, a life that is useful to a few others. I comfort
myself with the thought that rather than live with a fraudulent smile, it is
better to lead a life weeping real tears” (104). “Dalits continue to
revision and refashion their religions not only to make them more
intentionally and fully liberative but also to tap their transformative
therapeutic potential more fully” (Webster 118). Bama’s experiences
as a woman and her observation of the experiential reality of women
that includes the issues of girl’s education, wife battering, sexual
exploitation and humiliation, women labour and wages, her restricted
movements, the burden of motherhood etc. – all construct her feminist
vision while at the same time her work seems to be highlighting the
resilience, strong motivation and unfaltering spirit of women to
overcome all the hurdles and survive through solidarity in the most
unpatriarchal condition without male protection and man’s earning.
Dalit women are doubly dalit. Her autobiography takes up the
problematics of dalit both as a noun and adjective. Most significantly
her feminist vision has the otherness as the primary attribute of selffulfillment.
Works Cited
Anderson, Linda. “ Autobiography and the feminist subject” The
Cambridge Companion to Feminist to Literary Theory.
Ed.Ellen Rooney. USA: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Bama. harum scarum saar & other stories. Trans. N Ravi Shanker.
New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2006.
—- Karuku. Chennai: Macmillan India Ltd., 2000, xi (all subsequent
references to this text are from this edition.)
Cixous, Helen”The Laugh of the Medusa”, trans. Keith Cohen and
Paula cohen, Sign : Journal of Women in Culure and
Society. 1976, vol. 1. No. 4.
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Intersecting
lines of Caste, Class and Gender: A Study of Bama’s Karuku
53
Holmstrom, Lakshmi Trans. “Introduction” Karuku. Chennai:
Macmillan India Ltd., 2000.
Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage Pb
Ltd. 1996.
Parker, Emma. “You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the
novels of Margaret Atwood” Modern Critical Views:
Margaret Atwood. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chalsea
House Publishers, 2000.
Stowell ,Phyllis and Jeanne Forster. Appetite: Food as Metaphor.
USA: BOA Editions Ltd., 2002,
Mohanty,Chandra Talpade . Feminism without Borders:
Decolonizing Theory, Practicing
Solidarity. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2000.
Webster,C B. Religion and Dalit Liberation. Delhi: Manohar,1999.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Saurabh Kumar Singh & Gyaneshwar Pt. Singh
Transgressing the Forbidden:
A Study of ‘A Friend’s Story’
In India sexuality is conceived strictly in terms of the binaries
of heterosexual/ homosexual (gay and lesbian) beings. Living in a postMarxian world we can not think of anything ‘apolitical’. The dominance
of heterosexist discourse which eliminates homosexuality to the extent
of non-existence involves intricate web of sexual politics. Indians often
observes homosexuality as perverse ‘other’ of heterosexuality. In a
system of binary opposition (good-bad; right-wrong; constructivedeconstructive; nature-culture; black-white) the ‘other’ is the inferior
opposite of the dominant discourse It is abnormal, pathological,
unnatural and abhorable. It is used as a justification to send them to
mental institutions. Even those women who defy certain so called
gender prescriptions regarding attire and dress and exhibit desire to
perform masculine identified acts, and even those who find comfort in
wearing pants are accused of being homo (in this case lesbian). The
dominant entity through their heterosexist discourse constantly
strengthens and perpetuates itself by self definition, often in opposition
to ‘other’. Needless to say that such discourses function as ways of
legitimizing and validating some entities against some ‘others’ to silence,
control, or domesticate certain elements which are seen as powerful
threats to the very existence of dominant entity.
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Lesbians are vulnerable to the violence faced by all women
i.e. sexual harassment, rape, and child abuse. But the most important
fact is that lesbians not only have to contend with violence as women,
but also as lesbians. In this connection, in the specific Indian context,
we find that epistemic root of the violence faced by lesbian is in the
denial of their very existence. Lesbianism is often considered to be a
“Western import”, and allegedly restricted to the urban elite of the
Indian society. Further, lesbian sexuality cannot be perceived from
woman’s name, physical features or social practices, and a woman
can choose (or not) to reveal her sexual orientation. Some lesbians
might indicate their sexuality by adopting masculine clothes and
behaviour and thus subvert the gender equation. Some reveal it through
impassionate friendship, and others do not exhibit their sexuality at all.
These instances constitute the notion that lesbian women are not
‘identifiable’. In a patriarchal society where heterosexuality and control
over woman’s sexuality have become the norms, how can one even
imagine the existence of subversive force of lesbians? In this dire
situation then, for a lesbian to assert her sexuality becomes difficult. It
is obvious that a woman who has an intimate sexual relationship with
another woman implicitly challenges male control over her sex life at
least. And this leads to the emergence of violent misogynists. It does
not mean altogether that other women do not face misogynist violence,
but to state that when lesbian women ‘transgress’ the patriarchal
boundaries on sexuality, the reason for violence differs.
But resistance to the power generated by the discourse and
hence counter-discourse which erects a strong parallel discourse, is
very much inherent in the very nature of discourse. In this connection
all the lesbians and gays are highly indebted to Michel Foucault’s multi
volume History of Sexuality (1976-1984) and his powerful argument
that especially ‘deviant’, that is non heterosexual, forms of sexuality
play a prominent role in the organization of culture. Though any sort of
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‘perversion’ is actively marginalized, it is discursively central in the
sense that all the efforts to put this so called ‘perversion’ in negative
light paradoxically keeps it in the centre of attention. Foucault gives
more important to body than the individual. He argues that “the
individual is not to be conceived of as a sort of elementary nucleus…
on which power comes to fasten… In fact, it is already one of the
prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain
discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as
individuals” (quoted in Mills 2003: 19). Here Foucault’s emphasis is
not to see individual as a stable entity, but the discursive processes
through which bodies are constituted. Foucault, in an essay entitled
“Nietzsche, genealogy and power”, suggests that the body could be
seen as “the inscribed surface of events”, that is, political events and
decisions have strong material effects on the body which can be
analyzed. He views body as “the illusion of a substantial unity” and “a
volume in perpetual disintegration”. In this way he points out that what
seems most solid is, in fact, constructed through discursive meditation.
For him the task of genealogical analysis “is to expose a body totally
imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the
body” (Foucault 1991: 83). Body is historically and culturally specific
entity. It is viewed, treated and experienced differently depending on
the social context and the historical period. It leads to the assumption
that bodies are always subject to change and can never be regarded
as natural. Rather bodies are always experienced as potentially
mediated through different social construction of the body.
Foucault further argues that in the 19th century, we witness an
attempt to silence the discussion of sexuality and restrict sexual
practices. But this repression was, in a way, ineffective. This seeming
repression of sexuality and sexual discussion itself had an unintended
effect: increase the desire to speak about sexuality freely and increase
the pleasure gained from transgressing and violating these taboos. He
writes:
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…if sex is repressed, that is condemned to prohibition, nonexistence and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking
about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A
person who holds forth in such language places himself [/
herself] to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he [/
she] upsets established law; he [/she] somehow anticipates
the coming freedom. (Foucault 1981: 6)
Obviously this is a paradoxical yet effective analysis of the
repression of sexuality. Indeed it focuses on liberalized aspect of
sexuality. It has motivated and paved the way for the people of 21st
century to go for unfettered expression of sexuality.
Feminism can well be said to be the first movement that spoke
about sexuality in specific terms. For the first time it seemed to raise
its voice for all women folk in the world. It is a movement that raised
a common female front against the overbearing patriarchal oppression.
But, during 1970’s we find many voices expressing their dissatisfaction
with this version of feminism that they saw as nothing but one more
agency shaped by the interests of the dominant groups within the
movement: heterosexual, white, middle class, and college educated.
Consequently, many groups that could not comply with this, gradually
broke away to formulate their own versions of isms. These isms
included Black feminism, Chicana feminism, and, most importantly
Lesbian feminism. To lesbian feminists the mainstream feminism did
not take up the issues related to the traditional views of same-sex
relations. As a consequence these lesbian feminists turned their back
on mainstream feminism and pursued its own separate path. With the
publications of Jane Rule’s Lesbian Images (1975) and Lillian
Faderman’s comprehensive Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic
Friendship and love Between Women from the Renaissance to
the Present (1981) lesbian criticism definitively established itself.
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Lesbian is a term that denotes to describe sexual and romantic
desire between females. It refers to both: the women who identify
themselves as having the primary attributes of female homosexuality,
and to describe characteristics of an activity related to same sex desire.
In this connection Lillian Faderman writes:
“Lesbian” describes a relationship in which two women’s
strongest emotions and affections are directed towards each
other. Sexual contact may be a part of the relationship to a
greater or lesser degree, or it may be entirely absent. By
preference the two women spend most of their time together
and share most aspects of their lives with each other.
(Faderman 1981: 17-8)
But the constitution of lesbian identity has been a debatable
issue. Any woman’s emotional/erotic inclination towards other woman
may be already firmly in place at birth, even though it might begin to
manifest itself during or after puberty. From this perspective lesbianism
is simply programmed into some of women in the same way as
heterosexuality is installed into others. On the contrary, for the many
radical lesbians of early 1970’s, lesbianism was a matter of choice. It
has been hailed as a strong anti-patriarchal choice. It is also a matter
of socialization “d of the individual experiences that some of women
go through and that ultimately turn them into lesbian entities. This socially
driven view of lesbianism, focusing on the power relations that inform,
structure, discipline and adjudicate on sexual preferences, treats
sexuality as part of a larger social identity. Thus sexuality becomes the
subject of power-mediated power norms and cultural definitions. In
Charlotte Bunch’s essay “Lesbians in Revolt,” we could clearly sense
the echoing of anger against the cultural politics of her time and how
she, together with her peers found hope by idealizing the whole notion
regarding lesbian:
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To be a lesbian is to love oneself, woman, in a culture that
denigrates and despises women … lesbianism puts women
first while society declares the male supreme. Lesbianism
threatens male supremacy at its core. When politically
conscious and organized, it is central to destroying our sexist,
racist, capitalist, imperialist system… lesbians must become
feminists and fight against oppression, just as feminists must
become lesbians if they hope to fight male supremacy. (Bunch
1975)
This angered statement of Bunch clearly manifests its voice
for that sort of lesbianism which was regarded as a “choice” the women
should take in order to liberate themselves from the bloody clutches
of male domination. It can well be considered as the best weapon to
exercise full freedom.
Lesbian experiences are not singular but plural. This plurality
of lesbian experience is well defined by Cheryl Clarke in these words:
“ However there is no one kind of lesbian, no one kind of lesbian
behaviour and no one kind of lesbian relationship” (Clarke 1966: 156).
Despite the seminal works written by Giti Thadani (Sakhiyani) and
Ruth Vanita (Same Sex Love in India) which illustrate the recovery
and discovery of lesbian histories from ancient texts and archaeological
sites, same sex love is still considered to be an idea imported from
west, thus a greater need is required to illustrate the inherent complexity
of a lesbian experience from Indian literary text(s). In Indian literature
we have several novels dealing with lesbian relationship”Machali Mari
Huai (written in Hindi by a male author, Rajkamal Chaudhari, as early
as in 1966), Geetanjali Shree’s Tirohit (2001), and Manju Kapur’s A
Married Woman (2002), we have some stories written by Ismat
Chughtai” Lihaaf and Crooked Line, but as far as drama is concerned
we have a few literary texts to cite as an example and illustration. In
this perspective kudos to Vijay Tendulkar who emerges as the first
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ever dramatist after Indian independence who ventures to voice this
neglected and unrecognized piece of human species i.e. lesbian in his
master text A Friend’s Story.
A Friend’s Story is a unique play in the sense that it presents
the male perspective of the 1940’s on lesbianism. It emerges as a
powerful text that depicts lesbianism with deeper insight. The statement
of Rajkamal Chaudhari regarding his novel Machali Mari Huai can
well be applied to it: “Lesbianism is not the subject of this novel, but
only a subject proposal” (Chaudhari 1966: 11). Likewise the texture
of this very drama aims to provide a very beginning point for lesbianism
to begin with. For the subject matter Vijay Tendulkar takes recourse
to the real story of a woman whose promising career came to an end
after her affair with a young woman turned into a great scandal.
Tendulkar’s three-act play fictionalizes the life-changing moments in
Mitra’s struggle to cope with being “different” or “other.” Here,
Tendulkar chooses not to focus primarily on Mitra’s love affair but
rather on her friendship with the central character and sometime
narrator, Bapu. Their friendship goes through a succession of quick,
dramatic growth spurts that reveal the complexity of friendship and
show that which Bapu ultimately comes to represent: a homophobic
society that keeps its blinders on to naturalize straight relationships as
the norm, even if this should lead to a tragic end.
Tendulkar’s Mitra as a potential lesbian character does not
account for any compulsion or choice or based on outer circumstances
but it accounts for physical hormonal imbalance. While growing up
she looks around and perceives herself to be different from other
folks around her. As a lesbian identity is not necessarily immediately
apparent from woman’s name or physical features and she can choose
or not to reveal her sexual orientation, Mitra chooses to exhibit her
sexual inclination. She accepts it up to a point, then allows herself to
flow with the spirit, and lets herself go. She is totally unlike any typical
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female entity. She is stubborn in nature and desires to do whatever
she wants to do. She is reckless. As Bapu the narrator of the story
says: “The other girls were the helpless, touch-me-not kind. But there
was a masculine vigour in Sumitra Dev’s stride and speech. She was
carefree; her laughter came in loud bursts. She had eyes which met
you in straight combat. Her broad forehead suggested intelligence.
Her entire personality had a natural, aggressive masculinity, but a figure
irresistibly attractive to men” (Tendulkar 2007: 419).
Shrikant Marathe (Bapu) is the only character in the drama
who tries to understand her. He tries to know her. In due course of
conversation she reveals to him her sexual inclination. She says; “My
mother used to say, I had hoodwinked God to be born a girl. I was
always with the boys. Used to play all their games from marbles to
gillidanda. Even kabaddi” (422). Right from the very beginning Mitra
and Bapu cements a mutual bond. This bond is so solid that MItra
does not reveal her unique sexual orientation to anybody but to Bapu.
She becomes philosophical in putting her dilemma. She puts it
existentially: “Who makes us the way we are and sends us here? Why
are we what we are? Why do we become our own slave? (424) She
knows this bitter fact that she is an anomaly. When her family members
are not accepting her how can such a hostile society validate her
existence? But in order to survive one has to find somebody to share
the deep personal feelings. And Bapu is there for her rescue. She
discloses to him her own story in the form of another story. She says:
…knowing fully well that she yearned for the company of
men, but not for ‘that’ kind of relationship. When she met that
boy, she felt no physical thrill, no flutter of excitement, her
heart didn’t miss a single beat. But the boy felt it all and took
it for granted that the girl did too. She found the whole thing
rather bizarre. She asked herself why she didn’t feel the way
other girls did. Why did I feel so completely at home in the
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company of men? Why did I never feel shy? Why did I feel so
much at ease in putting mu hand round their shoulders? Why
did I find it strange when I sensed a man’s excitement? Men
were good company, but their ways with women seemed weird
and unpleasant (431-32).
But this relationship is not as straight as it seems to be. Tendulkar
in order to bring about the desired goal of his dramaturgy deliberately
diminishes the background details of place and setting to intensify
Bapu’s and Mitra’s tense and often contradictory interior states. When
Mitra ultimately reveals him what she is, Bapu is lost in a reverie, “Do
such women exist? Are they born like that or do they get conditioned
as they grow to be what they are? Is it an ailment or a human trait of a
particular kind? What would happen to Mitra? It was bizarre, repulsive
and abhorrent” (434). This is a unique state of mind of Bapu. Bapu
sincerely wants to be friends with Mitra, yet he is repulsed by her
(nature). He helps her but his heterosexist idea never considers her
love normal. Mitra’s frustrated desire for fellow thespian Nama is the
culmination of her longing, “That night, while the love scene was on,
the love scene was on, things came to a head. I lost control. Her
touch... her very desirable body in my arms… she moved away as if
she sensed it…. That night, I saw myself in a flash of lightning. I knew
I didn’t want a man. I need a woman. I’m different, different” (440).
This naked confession feels like a slow suffocation that ultimately leads
to self-destructive acts. Now the ending has begun.
Nama’s involvement with Mitra is confusing. She is fond of
Mitra, likes being with her, but the relationship is burden for her. She
finds it difficult to cope with it. But she cannot totally reject Mitra. As
she shares her unique predicament to Bapu, “Well, I like Mitra as a
friend. I …I like many things about her. But Manya Dalvi is a different
matter altogether. I mean, there is no comparison. What I mean is I’m
not able to say what I mean … the truth is –I … I think … I don’t
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know what I mean. I’ll go” (460). To me Nama can be taken as a
potential bisexual. Nama beautifully casts herself in the theoretical
formulations given by Adrainne Rich’s conception of ‘instinctive
bisexuality’ as opposed to ‘compulsive heterosexuality’ and Ann
Koedt’s scientific delineation of the fact that it is the clitoral sex instead
of penetrative vaginal sex that provides orgasm. It is quite possible
that Nama is enjoying clitoral sex in the company of Mitra and
penetrative vaginal sex in the company of Manya Dalvi. In a way she
is ‘doubly privileged’. Whatever be the matter, but this much is clear
that Nama’s case is very strong for bisexuals, lesbians and pan sexuals.
The invisibility of lesbians finds its full manifestation in the
narrative technique of the “ghosting of lesbians” or “apparitional
lesbianism” a term used by Terry Castle in her work, The Apparitional
Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture published
in 1993. Here she gives the concept of “self-ghosting” through which
a lesbian can disguise herself in her private space in this homophobic
society. Certainly Mitra does not fall in this category as she is not the
victim of self-ghosting. Mitra can well be implanted in the category as
suggested by Shormishtha Panja in her essay, “The Ghost Who Talks:
Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian and Gender Discourse”:
The lesbian threatened the moral, sexual and psychological
authority of men and the response of hostile men (and
patriarchal women) was to ‘ghost her’. Hence, the conjunction
between lesbians and apparitions seemed apt----- – they were
both seen as diabolic. The ghost’s image also drained the
lesbian of her carnality and denied her erotic force” (Panja
2006: 47).
After Mitra rejects the Hindu-identified character Pande’s
advances, he calls her variously “frigid” and “lesbian bitch,” thus
revealing the deep hypocrisy embedded in a religious system that at
once worships women deities and also cultivates same-sex (male)
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bonding and platonic love. Other male characters (including Pande
and Dalvi) reveal the deep contradictions inherent in patriarchal society;
they don’t know what to do with their simultaneous desire and fear
for an independent, strong woman like Mitra, so they violently assault
and demonize her. In her vertiginous descent, the play reminds its
audience that there is no place for Mitras (lesbians/others) in a violently
homophobic world.
Unfortunately, while the friendship between Bapu and Mitra
is central to the play, it often feels forced. Bapu’s many audience asides
tell too much and take away from the power that a more subtle showing
might have realized. Bapu’s asides unnecessarily sidetrack from a story
already filled with complex psychological details that are apparent in
the character’s actions: hesitations, uncontrolled rages, and humiliations,
to name a few. And, while Bapu clearly stands for that part of society
that is more willing to understand a woman like Mitra, the audience is
never sure why he really sticks around her. She constantly assails him
with contemptuous words, calling him at different times a “worm,”
“Milksop!,” “poor Bapu, “poor thing” and a “Chickenheart”; and after
he has been beaten to a pulp defending her, she barely blinks, asking
condescendingly, “Did the baby get beaten up?” (452) Tendulkar never
really shows why Bapu invests in a one-sided friendship, leaving the
audience with a skeleton of a friendship that seems only to serve the
purpose of reducing complex emotions to an essentialized critique of
patriarchal society. Perhaps, however, Tendulkar only sketches the
friendship precisely to show more dramatically Mitra’s plight: no one,
not even the person who is faithful as a friend, will understand her.
Perhaps, too, Tendulkar’s play must tell more than show to open
audience’s eyes more dramatically to a society that enacts violence
against those deemed unworthy of belonging to it.
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Finally, Mitrachi Goshta’s message is bold, but not overly
rendered as an ideal. Whereas the real Mitra lived as a spinster into
old age, the fictional and tragic Mitra reminds us that the world still
isn’t ready to shelter human life in all its diversity and complexity. The
emerging lesbians and lesbian discourses and their visibility is a
barometer of any society’s openness. They are not merely alternative
identities but they are a great impetus for social reconstruction. Though
they are marginal but they forcefully remind the fact that any sort of
forced conformity should be resisted. They voice the possibility of
human lives as multiple; selfhood as several; communities as voluntary
and various. The slogan ‘unity in diversity’ must involve not only the
coexistence of plurality of groups, but also by the plurality of identities
it allows individuals to assume. Otherwise we should be ready to face
the tragic consequences of losing many (others) Mitras by accomplished
acts of committing suicides.
Works Cited
Bunch, Charlotte. “Lesbian’s in Revolt.” In Lesbianism and the
Women’s Movement: Diana Press, 1975.
Clarke, Cheryl. “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance.” In Feminism
and Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic
Friendship and Love Between from the Renaissance to
the Present, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1976. Trans. Robert
Hurley. Vol. 1 Suffolk: Penguin, 1981.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. In The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin, 1991.
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Mills, Sara. Discourse, London: Routledge, 2004.
Shormishtha, Panja. “The Ghost Who Talks: Terry Castle’s The
Apparitional Lesbian and Gender Discourse.” In Lesbian
Voices, Canada & the World Theory, Literature, Cinema.
ed. Subash Chandra. New Delhi: Allied Publisher, 2006.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Sunita Jakhar
Tendulkar, Vijay. A Friend’s Story, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2007.
Gynocritical Perspectives on
Bapsi Sidhwa’s the Pakistani Bride
The feminist issues of unbalance and inequality between the
sexes was first discussed by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of
the Rights of Women (1792).Virginia Woolf in A Room Of One’s
Own (1929) too surveyed and raised similar questions .Feminist wave
became more powerful with the release of Simone de Beauvior’s The
Second Sex (1949).Kate Millet in Sexual Politics (1970) emphasised
that sex is biological and gender a social construct.Significant
contribution in this direction was made in the works of Toril Moi’s
Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth
Century Literary Imagination (1979).Feminism as a stream of study
became specialised and systematic .Phallocentric and gynocriticism
became demarcated .Phallocentric premises based on ‘woman’
presented in literature by male writers from their point of view.It is
presumed that feminist era ended in the 1970’s and post feminist era
began in 1980’s .Women’s closeness to nature cannot be denied since
ancient times.The affinity between women and environment developed
into ecofeminism . Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing create this type of
specialisation.The French coined ‘ectriture feminism’ for feminine
writings.
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According to N.Krishnaswami et. al. gynocriticism is,”a french
term that refers to criticism exclusively preoccupied with the motivation
, production, and analysis of writing by women on women”(p.153).In
the essay , ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ Showalter manifests
that ,’’the first task of gynocritic criticism must be to plot the precise
cultural locus of female literary identity and to describe the forces that
intersect an individual woman writer’s cultural field’’ (Lodge 343).Thus
a gynocritical reading of The Pakistani Bride would be ‘palimpsest’(1)
in nature .Patrocinio P. Schweickart says ,”today , the dominant mode
of feminist criticism is ‘gynocritics’ , the study of woman as writer , of
the ‘history , styles , themes , generes, and structures of writing by
women ; the psychodynamics of female creativity…”(Lodge 445).A
gynocritical reading of The Pakistani Bride reveals that women are
prisoners and victimised in the sex-role paradigms of Islamic society
.Feminine feelings of powerlessness and subjugation paver way for
revolt .The locale at the beginning and end of the novel is ‘an isolated
hill town inhabited by Pakistani Islamic tribes. The tribal code of laws
and punishment prevail here .Cut off from progressive civilization the
way of living , conduct and thinking is archaic. The society,
phallogocentric(2) or patriarchal.
The novel opens up, sensitively depicting the subordinate
position of women and epitomising the male (even as a child ) the
controller of sexual , and physical power .Resham Khan , unable to
pay back the loan hands over his daughter , Afshan to Qasim’s father
. Afshan is treated more like a commodity than an individual . First
Qasim’s father thinks of marrying Afshan as he had only one wife but
in a “twinge of paternal conscience” (Sidhwa 8) he gets Afshan married
to Qasim who was only 10 years old . On the wedding day she
discovers that she was married to a boy ,“Are you my husband ?”
(Sidhwa , 9) she asked unbelievingly and Afshan did not know whether
to laugh or cry .She accepts her fate and her relation towards Qasim
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was more like a mother than a spouse.Here marriages are decided by
the menfolk and the women have no say in it .They silently accept and
harmonise with the situation as if destined to.
Marginalisation of females is a regular feature of Pakistani
society as males prefer to keep their women away from the eyes of
menfolk.Qasim snubs Nikka ,“don’t ask a hill-man anything about his
womenfolk , understand? I would slit your throat
….”(Sidhwa,36).Strangely all vulgar and disgracful terms are
connected to one’s mother and sister,“… incestuous lover of your
mother , lover of your sister , son of a whore ...”(Sidhwa,42).
In the ambience of the city of Lahore watching Zaitoon Miriam
says,”she’ll (Zaitoon) be safe only at her mother-in-law’s ….a girl is
never too young to marry”(Sidhwa,53).Thus , the moment a girl reaches
adollescence , marriage in the eyes of the society , is ths summum
bonum of a woman’s life as Semone de beauvoir writes in The Second
Sex ,“marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by
society”(Beauvoir,445).The man is supposed to be the possessor of
a woman .A woman is discouraged from developing her individuality
.She is reminded that she is different from men.Miriam instructs Zaitoon
after her menstruation , “you are now a woman.Don’t play with boys
and don’t allow any man to touch you.This is why I wear a
burkha…”(Sidhwa,55).
In Islamic tradition a woman is not even allowed to enter a
mosque to offer prayers.“the men …. Gathered in mosques … the
women … prayed silently for the duration of the call carrying on with
whatever they were doing , stirring the pot I the kitchen or breast
feeding the baby”(Sidhwa,58).
Qasim on his visit to a brothel witnesses an inhuman scene . A
pimp was forcing a prostitute to do contortions for dance movements
.The tired and fatigued woman unfortunately could not display her
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sexuality,“the woman continued her monotonous , mechanical spasms
,one hip jerking higher , jaws dribbling spittle ….A man obscenely
shaking his body called to her as to a monkey (Sidhwa , 65).Infact
this instruction is not to guard her honour but for extorting money.
Chapter 10 opens up with the statement ,“marriages were the
high points in the life of the women”(Sidhwa , 88).The Islamic houses
have the zenana , exclusive quarters for women where they can roam
around freely without veils and burkhas.It is during a wedding Qasim
gives his word to Misri Khan , his friend from his native place. Without
even asking for Zaitoon’s opinion he fixes up her wedding .Miriam
was sensitive to realise it , she quips ,“how can a girl , brought up in
Lahore , educated – how can she be happy in the mountains?Tribal
ways are different , you don’t know how changed you are ….They
are savages . Brutish , uncouth , and ignorant ! She will be miserable
among them”(Sidhwa, 93).
Inspite of constant warnings from Miriam about Zaitoon’s
unhappy future Qasim goes ahead with his decision .Even Zaitoon
complies without putting up a question .Zaitoon repected her father’s
decision and ,“a blind excitement surged through her “(Sidhwa, 96).On
Miriam’s advice ,“tell your father you don’twant to marry a tribal .We’ll
help you”(Sidhwa , 98).Zaitoon expresses her inability to cross her
father .
Carol , the American wife of Farukh wrote to her friend Pam,“I
love Lahore…. I don’t feel programmed ! The people are kind and
hospitable. I ‘m having a ball” (Sidhwa , 108).But this was a veneer
.Farukh often accused Carol of , “displaying your honky-tonk pedigree
! You laugh too loudly . You touch men ….Don’t you know if you only
look a man in the eye it means he can have you?” (Sidhwa ,
108).Farukh’s jealousy touched madness. He always asked her, of
her routine in his absence.Farukh’s reactions show the vulnerability of
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a woman without a male’s presence to shield or protect her.He
suspected other men of taking advantage of Carol’s westernised
lifestyle in his absence.A “… male is fortunate in having opportunities
for releasing his impulse to domination and the fury of his frustrated
ego , because he always has a wife whom he can treat as an inferior”
(Mill , John Stuart , 40).
Mushtaq , anotherr officer was attracted to Carol. Watching
them in a compromising position the three tribesmen broke out into
boisterous laughter and mischievous catcalls .Carol feels humiliated at
the male gaze.“The obscene stare stripped her of her identity.She was
, a female monkey , a gender opposed to that of the man – charmless
, faceless , and exploitable “(Sidhwa , 120).
Farukh hurts Carol for her brazen behaviour . Carol while
interrogating Zaitoon about marriage in the officer’s mess is struck by
Zaitoon’s diffidence . Farukh’s unkind remark ,“our women ,
particularly the young girls , are modest , you know “(Sidhwa,
133).This remark not only hurts her but also alienates her , the phrase
‘our women’ definitely excludes non-Pakistanis and in this particular
context Carol.Zaitoon begins to cry as Qasim reveals about her
separation from real parents during partition days. Carol builds up a
female bonding and sisterly concern for Zaitooon and tries to comfort
her by giving her a shawl and eatables.
Mushtaq , who was familiar with the tribal culture was aware
that for tribals , “a wife was a symbol of status , the embodiment of a
man’s honour and the focus of his role as provider . A woman is seen
only in relation to a man . She has no existence of her own as Gilbert
and Gubar comment in The Madwoman in the Attic , to be selfless
is not only to be noble , it is to be dead.
Zaitoon , instinctly senses the ‘savagery and harshness’ of the
tribal people.Her background and education in Lahore makes her
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revolt and she tells Qasim , ``that jawan at the camp , Abba , I think
he likes me.I will die rather than live here’’(Sidhwa, 157).Qasim’s
severe reprimand quietens Zaitoon and she becomes ‘selfless’ .She is
ready to marry and live with Sakhi . After marriage a girl cannot maintain
her individuality , ``their is a unanimous agreement that getting a
husband – or in some cases a ‘protector’ is for her the most important
of undertakings….She will free herself , from the parental home ,
from her mother’s hold ; she will open up her future not by active
conquest but by delivering herself up , passive and docile into the
hands of a new master”(Beauvoir , 352).Zaitoon’s tantrums and
reclusive behaviour are unwelcome in the family. Yunus Khan warns
Sakhi , ``she requires a man to control her”(Sidhwa, 170).Wife
battering is accepted , Sakhi not only beats Zaitoon ,``you are my
woman! I’ll teach you to obey me!”(Sidhwa , 172-173) but also
Hamida his mother . After this particular incident Zaitoon was
convinced that she may not live long.
A woman’s existence is discerned in accordance to the service
she can render to a man.A pathetic phase of women’s marginalisation
begins with marriage. A woman is visuaised as a medium to gratify
sexual pleasures to a man.“Slowly Carol had begun to realise that
even among her friends , where the wives did not wear burkhas or live
in special , women’s quarters , the general separation of sexes bred an
atmosphere of sensuality . The people seemed to absorb it from the
air they breathed “(Sidhwa , 112).Though Carol came from a highly
liberated background but she also understood that ,“men here expected
subtlety from women”(Sidhwa , 112).
During Carol’s affair with Mushtaq , she never realises that
,“he was having a fling , merely killing time’’(Sidhwa ,179).But she
least realised that his attraction towads her was due to,“long separation
from his family , his need for a woman in the loneliness of his remote
posting”(Sidhwa, 180).Inspite of being slapped by Carol , Mushtaq’s
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attitude does not change . For Mushtaq , Carol was only a sex object
. He no longer found her sexually provocative .“… in every age ,
woman has been seen primarily as mother , wife, mistress and as sex
object in their roles in relationship to man”(Ferguson 4-5).
In the hills Zaitoon did not have the freedom of moving around
unwatched . Sakhi furiously beat her up abusing her as, “you dirty ,
black little bitch , waving at those pigs ...”(Sidhwa , 185 ).Zaitoon had
to beg for mercy and on that particular night Zaitoon resolves of running
away as,“ she knew that in flight lay her only hope of survival. She
waited two days , giving herself a chance to heal”(Sidhwa,
186).Nothing cannot be pressurised and sublimated beyond a certain
point. Here Zaitoon’s life takes a U-turn , courageously she runs away
in a land totally unfriendly to her. Instead of showing concern for the
agonised lonely woman , the society adds fuel to the fire. In society a
woman is respected only if there is a husband to stand beside her but
the runaway zaitoon antagonises her husband and unsupported in this
particular situationis raped in another village.She was cornered like a
‘flustered hen’ and a man whispers to her ,“you can’t escaape us , my
dove “(Sidhwa , 214).Even at this point Zaitoon does not give up she
continues her chase in search of her promised land. After her own
rape at Lahore ,“abandoned and helpless , she had been living on that
charity of her rapists …and on theft”(Sidhwa, 231).
Meanwhile Carol in her room with Farukh feels ,“ women the
world over , through the ages , asked to be murdered , raped ,
exploited , enslaved , to get importunately impregnated , beaten-up ,
bullied and disinherited . It was an immutable law of nature . What
had the tribal girl done to deserve such grotesque retribution?”(Sidhwa
, 226).Carol remembered her Pakistani women friends who were
superficially westernised but looked sad perhaps this sadness is due
to the staunch narrow mindedness of Islamic societies towards women.
Zaitoon was miraculously saved and only the news of her death makes
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the tribal men swell with pride.“Misri Khan’s massive shoulders
straightened . He thrust his chest forward and his head rose high . It
was as if a breeze had cleared the poisonous air suffocating them and
had wafted an intolerable burden from their shouldres”(Sidhwa , 244).
Goodman , W.R , Literary Theory , New Delhi : Doaba , 2007.
Through the story of Zaitoon , Sidhwa poignantly reveals that
a man in the society is not only physically strong but also a master
manipulator in the power game. Though a woman is neither physically
stronger nor manipulates the power game but , the grit and courage
shown by Zaitoon’s khudi (will power ) might be a harbinger of a
change in society. Here Sidhwa seems to reiterate Iqbal’s philosophy
of life based on will power which says:
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Harmondsworth : Penguin,
1983.
khudi ko kar buland itna ke har takdeer say pahalaykhuda banday say poochay bata teri raza kya hai? (Heighten yourself to such majesty
That before every turn of fate
God himself asks man
Tell me what do you wish?
Notes
1
A women’s fiction can be read as a double voiced discourse
containing a ‘dominant’ and ‘muted’ story .Gilbert and Gubar call a
‘palimpsest ‘Showalter Elaine ,``Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”,
Modern Criticism and Theory , Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood,
New Delhi : Pearson , 2007.
2
In literature the term phallogocentric (coined by Jacques
Derrida) can be applied to novels in which male characters have the
upper hand and the female characters are sex objects.The more macho
features of Hemingway novels might be called phallogocentric.
Works Cited
Fergusson, Mary Ann. Images of Women in Literature . Houghton
Miffin : Co-Boston, 1973.
Mill, John Stuart .“The Subjection of Women” .Women’s Liberation
and Literature ,ed. Elaine Showalter . New York:Harcourt
Brace , 1971.
Sidhwa, Bapsi. The Pakistani Bride. New Delhi :Penguin, 1990
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Sudhir Nikam & Madhavi Nikam
Undermining the Conventional Trends:
A Study of Satish Alekar’s The Dread Departure
Satish Alekar is one of the most innovative playwrights who
have shown a new direction to the contemporary Indian theatre.
Alekar’s Marathi play Mahanirvan was translated by Gauri
Deshpande as The Dread Departure in 1989. The play deals with
the death of the breadwinner of a middle-class family and its impact
on his wife, son, and the neighborhood. The death is presented on
ceremonial, psychological, and social level. Alekar has lived in Shanivar
Peth, a Pune locality which is very close to a crematorium. Watching
the funeral processions passing his house over the years, he experienced
the sick atmosphere of the locality. He saw the people imprisoned in
their vicious conservative circle. Through The Dread Departure,
Alekar has raised questions against the conservative rituals, human
relations, and social establishments touching the stark reality of the
society.
The play begins with the death of Bhaurao in the early morning.
Listening to the cry of his wife Rama, the neighbors excitedly show a
special interest. As Bhaurao’s son Nana is out of the city, they have to
wait for him. The soul of Bhaurao talks with Rama and Nana. The
dead Bhaurao denies to be cremated in the electric crematory, insisting
on the old and the traditional method. With the great difficulty, Nana
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secretly keeps the dead body on the loft and proceeds for the ritual
for the thirteen days. Meanwhile, it is discovered that Rama has fallen
in love with a man whose identity is not yet revealed. Just like Hamlet,
Nana is hunted with the identity of the person. Discovering Bhaurao’s
body rotting, Nana cremates it in the old crematory by giving bribe to
the watchman.
Alekar has introduced a new sensitivity and thoughtfulness in
his analysis of changes in values, life-style and culture in the society.
He has presented the society trapped in the conflicts of tradition and
modernity. The gap in two generations is psychologically analyzed.
The Dread Departure is like a journey of a man from his death to his
funeral. A person dying in his sleep is natural fact but telling about his
death to the living one and consoling his wife is shocking and serious.
A widow’s yelling after the death of her husband is natural but singing
on such occasion is unnatural. It is a custom to tell the news of death
to the relatives but telling it with delightful face is surprising. The play
gives shocks to the readers by introducing the events like the widow
eating an apple in presence of her dead husband, neighbour’s singing
while tying the pyre, decorating the pyre with balloon, a dead body
complaining about its inconvenience, gossiping, singing, fighting of the
neighbors while waiting for the relatives, entry of the son playing prison’s
base to see his dead father, dead body denying to be cremated in the
electronic crematorium, keeping the body on the loft for thirteen days,
the dead person eating rice balls as a crow, stitching the finger of the
dead person all these incidents break the conventional norms of the
society.
Bhaurao is physically dead but although the neighbors are
alive, their conscience is dead; their senses are frozen. While dancing
around Rama, they describe themselves as, “We are upright folk and
neighbourly / Who’ll be eating their bread with honey” (09). They do
not understand the contradiction in this description. These so called
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gentlemen while instructing the duties to the widows also mention to
see her ‘convenience’. Although their life style is modern, their thoughts
are rotten, conservative and backward. They believe in male
domination. The middle-aged neighbor while telling about the necessary
things for funeral, shows materialistic attitude. The intention behind his
instructions is that the body should be burnt early so that they can take
bath before the water disappears. They are never ready to go out of
the track of their daily routine. Their consolation of Nana is nothing
but a dry, emotionless formality.
Traditionally, after the funeral, there are two rites to be
performed: one is offering the rice balls to a crow and the other is the
thirteenth day feast. If the crow touches the rice balls, only then it is
considered that the dead’s wishes are fulfilled and he has left this world
satisfactorily. This event has an ironic connotation in the play. The son,
who does not care for his living father, is keen to feed the crows so
that the father’s soul could get a release. On the thirteenth day feast,
all the neighbors enjoy and it becomes a kind of celebration. Alekar
thus criticizes the contradiction, hypocrisy and hollowness in human
behaviors.
Alekar makes psychological analysis of man-woman relation
in the specific age with declining sexual power. Bhaurao realizes his
declining sexual power. In the same night, he experiences intense sexual
urge of Rama. He becomes restless to know this truth and dreams as
if he is slipping over the mossy road, while Rama is supporting him.
Although Rama realizes the physical and psychological changes in
Bhaurao, she does not make him conscious of it. However, Bhaurao
accepts the fact. While Rama tries to support him, he says, “How can
you hold me after my end? … you aren’t there” (03).
Rama always tries to understand Bhaurao’s emotions and
makes him comfortable. In the morning when she realizes that Bhaurao
does not wake up, she says, “Now you are being naughty! … You
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wait! I’m going to tickle you now!” Then Bhaurao reacts, “What!
You’re going to tickle me? Now? Bright and early in the morning?”
(06) Their dialogue consists of hidden sexual urge which is expressed
in form of words. The neighbor who peeps in at the window says,
“Look at that! Now that’s what I call true love! Right in the open, in
bright daylight!” (06) The remark made by the neighbor expresses the
problems of the couple living in a small house supporting their physical
needs.
The play mocks the traditional belief about unique and sacred
relation between husband and wife. Rama sees in her empty square a
man younger than Bhaurao immediately after ten days of Bhaurao’s
death. Rama even does not protest against his frequent visits to Bandu’s
mother. Bhaurao imagines Rama as Mrs. Joshi while making love to
her. He is always obsessed with various kinds of fears. Always worried
for his beautiful wife, he suspects her character and dreams of the
relation between Rama and the neighbours. The reason behind such
fear is his relation with Bandu’s mother. Rama who has leaded a
suppressed life gets a great mental relief after his death.
Nana is very possessive of his mother. When he realizes his
mother’s attraction for the ‘third-from-the-left’, he becomes restless
to realize the presence of other man in Rama’s heart. Nana expresses
his mental conflict, “I am afraid, Bhau. Afraid of us becoming Hamlet.
This ‘suit and shade’s uncle’, O my prophetic soul, is going to be your
bane” (47). Rama asks Nana to invite the man for the thirteenth day
feast. She does not mention the man as one who has picked up and
carried the bier. Just as Shakespeare’s Hamlet suffered from ‘Oedipus
Complex’, Nana also goes through the same emotions. He utters with
rage, “Let me track down this murderer, this assassin, and I will burn
you both on the same pyre! Bloody pimp! Kill my father and marry
my mother, will you? You wait” (48). Nana always tries to get rid of
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this complex. The play makes a brilliant analysis of the changing ethos
of the twentieth century middle class family.
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drumbeat begins. The audiences suddenly become conscious with
Nana’s dialogue. Their illusion of reality is immediately shattered and
they become aware of watching a play. In the second act, when the
curtain is raised, a tambura is strummed as Nana’s face is illuminated
by a single small oil-lamp. Nana sings, “May darkness be dispelled /
from the farthest. /May the world be illuminate / by the sun of its
essence” (29). With this song while the audiences become conscious,
Bhaurao further says, “There’s the bell, folks, /of a man’s demise”
(29). Bhaurao makes the audiences conscious that they are watching
a play. Illusion is considered a soul of drama. Alekar makes use of
anti-illusionist devices to bring the audiences out of traditional belief.
He makes them conscious that they are sitting in the theatre and it is
not an event from real life.
Although some critics have found the impact of Brecht on
Satish Alekar’s plays, but Alekar makes it clear that he had read Brecht
after writing The Dread Departure. In spite of Alekar’s clarification,
one finds a number of elements of epic theatre in this play. Brecht
rejects the Aristotelian concept of tragedy as an imitation of reality
with a unified plot and a universal theme which establishes an
identification of the audience with the hero. He proposes that the illusion
of reality should be deliberately shattered by an episodic plot, by
protagonists who do not attract the audience’s sympathy. By producing
‘alienation effect’, he jars the audience out of their passive acceptance
of modern capitalist society as a natural way of life, into an attitude of
critical understanding of capitalistic shortcomings. In the play, the
audience is not involved with the characters and events. Alekar has
deliberately used theatrical devices to shatter the illusion of reality so
that the audience may think objectively about the events and episodes
on the stage. The play follows narrative mode rather than the traditional.
Narrating after his death, the central character is trying to know the
reactions of his family members about himself, which is very shocking.
Just as Bhaurao starts thinking objectively about the world around
him, the audience is also alienated to think independently. Alekar has
effectively achieved the alienation effects by using various technical
devices. Hence Alekar’s claim that he read Brecht after writing this
play is not convincing. It is not a mere coincident to use all the parallel
technical devices of epic theatre and absurd theatre in his play.
As the interruptive device, Alekar makes uses of hymn songs
so that the audiences might interpose their judgment on the episodes
presented dramatically. Instead of identifying with his part and losing
himself in it, Bhaurao helps destroy stage illusion by putting himself at
a distance both from the character he portrayed and the situation in
which he was involved. Since human being is the object of inquiry,
Alekar wants to show man not as a consistent or integrated whole but
as contradictory and changing. His concern is not a gesture or set of
gestures in which a whole social situation can be read. He makes the
audience aware from something ordinary, familiar, immediately
accessible into something peculiar, striking and unexpected. Alekar
wishes to accentuate the contradiction or the tussle and tension of
opposing forces in every sphere of life- the individual, family and society.
At the end of the first act when Bhaurao is not ready to burn
at the new crematorium, Nana says, “Burn! Burn! Some one burn this
heavy load of my dead father off me. Let his skull crack in the fire like
a rifle shot. Relieve me. Release me. Help me, someone! At least,
drop the curtain” (28). Immediately the curtain comes down and the
The Dread Departure presents contradictions of
contemporary life in different shades. Although the play seems to be
holy outwardly, it is, in real sense, a womb of diverse ideologies. On
every step, one finds a harsh criticism of religion, tradition, social norms
and system of various human tendencies. The location of the play is a
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lower middle class locality in Pune and the characters represent their
class. It projects a panorama of hollow society, outdated values, and
cruel bureaucracy.
Satish Alekar has taken a revolutionary step by writing a play
on the much neglected topic like death. His anti-established mode is
reflected through depiction of hollowness in personal and social
contradictions, meaningless values and religious conservatism. The
play gives a feeling that Bhaurao is singing a song of this nation and the
neighbors who are enjoying the feast of basmati rice on ‘thirteenth
day’ are the representatives of opportunist and mean tendencies in the
society. The death of Bhaurao spreads a mood of celebration. When
the neighbors sing a song on the thirteenth day feast, it gives a feeling
that Bhaurao is a symbolic representative of the common masses of
India and the neighbors are the representatives of the mean and shrewd
politicians.
Works Cited
Alekar, Satish. The Dread Departure. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Syed Ali Hamid
Rooted Cosmopolitanism:
A Note on Tagore’s Contemporary Relevance
It is difficult to write on a cult figure like Tagore; a man who
was the first Asian to get the Nobel Prize and the only Indian to get it
for Literature; the founder of Santiniketan, a man who wrote about a
thousand poems, eight short story collections, a dozen plays, eight
novels and, of course, writings on religion, philosophy, education and
society; one feels overawed and weighed down with the burden of
existing work on him. In addition to this, are the various labels applied
to him; a humanist, internationalist, educationist, a mystic carrying the
stamp of approval of W.B.Yeats, a philosopher who tried to evolve a
synthesis of the East and the West, one of the pioneers of the inclusive
concept of India and much more. But no Indian can be ignorant of
Tagore; after all, our national anthem has been written by him.
It is quite fashionable to call Tagore an internationalist. I’m
not sure if the label fits him. Tagore, I believe, always remained rooted
in the Indian ethos. Let us not be carried away by his translation of
Gitanjali which perhaps was done with the western readers in mind
who saw India as the land of mysticism. His use of words like ‘thou’,
‘thy’ to address God was also a product of this intention, resulting in
making the tone formal and less open to multiple interpretations than
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the original Bengali version. In our own tradition of Kabir, Meera and
the Sufis, God is addressed in rather intimate terms. In the ghazal, for
instance, it is sometimes difficult to say whom the poet is addressing,
the beloved or God. The idea was that one could achieve union with
the creator through love, not fear. Tagore belonged to the Indian
tradition but he was aware of two things. First, that in the western
tradition, love for the beloved and divine love are two distinct things.
Second, he was also aware of the problems and, if I may say so, the
demands of translation. The act of translation does not only involve
linguistics and culture, it is also a political act. These two factors,
accompanied by the historical situation of his time, as well as the liberties
one may take while translating one’s own work, contributed to the
end result. Had his tone been informal, and the poem could carry the
multilayerdness in the English translation, our dear friend Yeats would
definitely have been baffled by it, to say the least. It definitely goes to
Tagore’s credit that at a time when the British empire was going strong
and people in the colonies were being influenced by western ideas
and ideals, he made our philosophy and mysticism popular in the west.
concept, whereas internationalism is an artificial and parasitic
concept.
(Paranjape, 246)
Let me return to the label of internationalist that has been applied
to Tagore. Bhalchandra Nemade in his essay “Sahityateel Deshiyata”
(translated as “Nativism in Literature” by Arvind Dixit) observes:
An “international” literature without native reference does not
exist. Even in Comparative Literary Studies such
internationalism is not acceptable. In these studies one native
style, movement, or trend is compared with another native
style, movement, or trend. If native elements are ignored, the
comparisons become trivial. Comparatists often remind us
that there are no universal literary systems. Even theoretically,
internationalism without nativism as its basis is impossible
because nativism is a multi-layered, descriptive and real
He goes on to say that “Right from the days of Nehru, we are
hatching the egg of such an ‘internationalism’ that only such chickens
as designed by the western countries come out of it” (253). It is true
that Tagore imbibed western ideas, but his attempt was to bring about
a blend of the east and the west. Tagore was influenced by Rammohan
Roy, Brahmo Samaj and the national movement. He was a nationalist
without the accompanying rhetoric of patriotism; a person who was
against the traditional orthodoxy and the caste system and one who
also realized the importance of science and scientific temper in order
to build a modern India. In Four Chapters(Char Adhyay), the
hero(Atin) remarks, “The patriotism of those who have no faith in that
which is above patriotism is like a crocodile’s back used as a ferry to
cross the river. Meanness, unfaithfulness, mutual distrust, secret
machination, plotting for leadership—sooner or later these drag them
into the mud at bottom. That the life of the country can be saved by
killing its soul, is a monstrously false doctrine that nationalists all over
the world are bellowing forth stridently. My heart groans to give it
effective contradiction”. He was as much attracted to Shakespeare
and the romantic poets as ha was to Kalidasa. His national spirit did
not make him denounce everything western. His attempt was to project
Indian society and culture as inclusive; to discover some similarity in
difference. It would, therefore, be more appropriate to call him
cosmopolitan, a person who believed in the notion of
vasudhaivakutumbakam. Perhaps, that is why he named his
university ‘Visva Bharati’.
I would not like to succumb to the current trend of studying
past writers, and that too Indian, from the point of view of
postmodernism. Such blind application of western concepts only lead
to superficiality and can, at the most, be confined to those Ph.D theses
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that are being churned out only for the sake of getting degrees. In the
west, postmodernism evolved out of modernism and there were certain
factors responsible for it. In the Indian context, we cannot jump directly
into uttaradhuniktavaad without passing through adhuniktavaad.
So, I will not talk about the postmodernist elements in Tagore.
In one of the most oft quoted songs, prescribed in the syllabus
of many schools in our country, Tagore defined his idea of freedom.
“Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls”, is sufficient proof of his vision not only about free
India but a free world which has transcended the confines of narrow
and false nationalism; where we move forward ‘without fear’ towards
perfection; where we devote ourselves to the search for truth
accompanied by the ‘clear stream of reason’, coming out of ‘the dreary
desert sand of dead habit’. Real freedom, according to Tagore, was
not merely political freedom, but an inner freedom—from prejudices,
from fear and from, what he calls, ‘dead habit’. Such thoughts remind
us of Gandhi’s concept of real swaraj, or real home-rule, which
according to him is ‘self-rule or self-control’.
Now, the question at hand: What is the relevance of Tagore
today? How did Tagore address the fundamental issues and dilemmas
facing India and the modern world? Questioning the relevance of
Tagore is like questioning the relevance of Shakespeare or Premchand
or Ghalib. That Tagore has withstood the test of time is sufficient proof
of his contemporary relevance. While talking about Ghalib, a friend of
mine remarked that had Ghalib lived today and wrote the following
couplet, a fatwa would have been issued against him:
humko maloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat lekin
dil ke khush rakhney ko Ghalib ye khayal accha hai.
(I know the truth about heaven
It’s a good ploy, Ghalib, to keep us happy.)
The problem of religious orthodoxy leading to intolerance has
become even more pronounced in our time and it is the shrinking
liberal space that is the cause for concern, as even some of the socalled liberals have their own hidden political agenda. It is at such
junctures that writers like Kabir and Tagore assume greater
importance. His idea of, what Uma Das Gupta calls “compassionate
humanism and culture in India and the world”, an inclusive culture
based on coexistence of opposites, is what we need today. His
portrayal of religious conservatism as a reaction against western ideas
and its conflict with the reformist Brahmo Samaj in Gora is a case in
point. When, at the end of the novel, truth is revealed to Gora, he
realizes that “Today, I am really an Indian. In me there is no longer any
opposition between Hindu, Mussalman and Christian. Today every
caste is my caste, the food of all is my food”.
Writers have responded to social problems in different ways.
A poet like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, whose centenary is currently being
celebrated, took the path of strong protest against injustice and
oppression. He advocated the path of revolution and overthrow of
the despots to bring about social change. Other writers have focused
on human suffering and pathos of the oppressed. Tagore is a reformist,
who wanted to free India from the narrow confines of religious
orthodoxy and expand the liberal space which was, and is, the need
of the hour. While the path of revolution can be considered to be
more relevant and applicable to countries under the rule of despots,
dictators and monarchs (as is being witnessed in some countries of
the middle east), it is the reformist path which is more suitable for
nations like India, where democracy has established itself and has
become a way of life. It is in this context that the poetry and ideas of
Tagore assume greater significance. His faith in Hinduism did not prevent
him from appreciating the positive aspects of other religions and his
respect for all religions is also how we define secularism today. He
demonstrated through his writings that our ancient philosophy and
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culture is basically inclusive and secular. It is this concept of ‘Indianness’
that in the true sense defines the Indian spirit.
this statement. A good and genuine writer is always ahead of his time.
The Urdu poet Majaz said:
It is as undesirable to blindly ape the west as it is to mindlessly
condemn it. It is, however, rather unfortunate that these are the two
ways in which we largely respond to the west. There are some for
whom all the ills of society, esp. our changing sexual morals, are the
result of western influence and they denounce it in no uncertain terms.
This has also led to the revival of religious orthodoxy, both Hindu and
Muslim, which has, in turn, led to conflict between the two communities
instead of confrontation with the west. There are others who are so
much carried away by the west that they blindly imbibe and adopt
western attitudes and way of life to the extent of considering their
native tongue as inferior to English. In this context also, the ideas of
Tagore are very much relevant today. Tagore had his feet firmly planted
in the terra firma of Indian philosophy and spiritualism, but he was
open to the dynamism of the west. He was aware of the dehumanizing
effect of industrialization and that is why he emphasized the importance
of man’s harmonious relationship with nature. He was of the opinion
that one should have an open mind for accepting the truth, whatever
its source. His concept of ‘Visva Bharati’ or a world university was
based on these two principles: man’s harmonious relationship with
nature, and the interaction between different cultures, including those
of the east and the west. It is this approach towards the west that
would be most desirable in this era of globalization and rapid advances
of science and technology. His ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, as I would
prefer to call it, is perhaps the answer to contemporary man’s existential
dilemmas and search for identity in this largely capitalistic world, where
the cult of the individual has taken a heavy toll on human relationships
and where consumerism is fooling us to live in a world of make-believe.
Ezra Pound once remarked, “Literature is news that STAYS
news”(165), and the literary output of Tagore amply demonstrates
zamaane se aage to badhiye ‘Majaz’
zamaane ko aage badhana bhi hai.
(Move ahead of the times ‘Majaz’
The world has to be moved forward.)
It is, undoubtedly, Tagore’s faith in Indian spiritualism, his fusion
of the ideas of the east and the west, his revolt against religious
orthodoxy and belief in secularism that contribute to his contemporary
relevance. The poetry, plays and ideas of Tagore are not only relevant
to our nation today, they continue to appeal to readers all over the
world and it is his ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ that is the main factor for
the timelessness of his literary output.
Works Cited
Gupta, Uma Das & Anandarup Ray. “Introduction”, Rabindranath
Tagore and His Contemporary Relevance,
www.parabaas.com (special Rabindranath Tagore section).
Web.
Nemade, Bhalchandra. “Nativism in Literature” in Nativism: Essays
in Criticism, ed. Makarand Paranjape, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1997. Print.
Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading in Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations and Proverbs, OUP, 2001. Print.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Four Chapters, tr. Rimli Bhattacharaya,
Shrishti, 2002. Print.
Tagore, Rabindranath. Gora, tr. Sujit Mukherjee, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1998. Print.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Randeep Rana & Preet Saxena
Problematizing Diasporic Identities:
A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
The paper is an attempt to critically analyze how the issues
related to identity, culture and empowerment in the representations of
diasporic experience in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Diasporic
writing is the outcome of variance between dislocation and relocation,
a lost sense of belongingness and alienation, not only from the original
home but also from the self. Almost all the Diasporic writers have
exhibited an irresistible concatenation to their homelands. These writers
often feel deprived and alienated from their roots, language and culture.
They, “straddle two cultures; … fall between stools, suffer from a
triple dislocation, comprising the loss of roots, the linguistic and also
the social dislocation”( Salman 15). Simultaneously, their writings exhibit
an ardent avidity to assimilate and belong to their adopted culture and
society.
During the 1980’s, under the impact of globalization and
liberalization there was a rapid increase in human migration and
expatriation to both, developed and developing countries across the
world. Diasporic writings, an offshoot of migration and expatriation,
search for the lost roots in dislocation, alienation and homelessness.
The thrust of this genre is to derive consolation or to experience
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empathy with the vanished homeland or a strong craving to reclaim
the lost homeland.
Diasporic literature, intends to probe the loss that has
occurred, acceptance and rejection suffered and a perpetual struggle
of the immigrants to establish identity in the host country and at the
same time, to preserve the lost contact. These immigrants experience,
“ pain and agony of homelessness, displacement and relocation, the
split between the native homeland and the adopted nation, the bicultural
pull between the donor and recipient cultures and the emotional
fragmentation between two identities” ( Sharma 127).
In the postcolonial context the dilemma of identity returns as
an importunate questioning of a hyphenated, decentred and fractured
existence in the frame and space of representation. According to
Deepkumar J. Trivedi, “ Problems of nation, identity, national identity,
individual identity etc. are the recent needs, that have emerged, which
were never experienced by the mankind in the past” (20). Identity,
thus, becomes the central part in the investigation of diaspora ,
particularly diasporic identity which, being multilayered is based on
the history of immigration. Diasporic literature investigates identities
forged in the crucible of multiple cultures, cities and races rather than
just ‘home’ and the’ alien land.’ Diasporic literature as Meena
Alexander avers, “is writing in search of a homeland” (4).
Jhumpa Lahiri ,a diasporic writer, born of immigrant Bengali
parents and settled in USA,shot into fame with the award of Pulitzer
prize for her Interpreteter of Maladies (2000), a magnificent collection
of short stories, exemplifies her dilemma of dual identity in her debut
novel, The Namesake(2003). In this work, she encapsulates the sociocultural dilemma, conflicts and complexities of assimilation suffered
by an Indian Hindu Bengali family, the Gangulis, living in America for a
span of over thirty years. Lahiri has artfully delineated the, “ cultural
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and emotional dislocations suffered by them in adopting to their new
environs”( Mehrotra 149) .
,what Abdul JanMohamed called the, “specular border intellectual”
(Nayar 199).
The present paper aims to highlight the dilemma of divided
identity experienced by Gogol, son of immigrant Indians, Ashok and
Ashima Ganguly, who goes through an ordeal of living a double life
that is illusory and self deluded. To add to it, the awareness of his
leading a double life makes him all the more insecure and
uncomfortable.
Gogol, a perplexed and ambivalent young man, is averse to
all that is Indian, particularly to his pet name ‘Gogol’ given to him by
his parents. In Bengali practice, the “pet” name is used within the
family, the “good” name in the outside world. But, Gogol is ignorant of
its significance. As a young boy he doesn’t detest his name, but as he
grows older his name becomes for him an abominable cape. His pet
name, “Gogol sounds ludicrous to his ears, lacking dignity or gravity.
What dismays him most is the irrelevance of it all “( Jhumpa 76).
Apart from Jhumpa Lahiri, other diasporic writers such as
David Dabydeen, Hanif Kureshi, Bharti Mukkerjee and Timothy Mo,
to name a few, have discussed the problems of dual identity and roots.
Their writings articulate the two invariables of their experience, exile
and homeland.
Gogol, faced with a paradox, seems to be oscillating between
two locations, the country of his origin i.e. India and his birth place i.e.
America. He is trapped between, “a de-terriorialization (the loss of
place) and a re-territorialization (finding a new place)” (Nayar 193).
The problem with Gogol is that, he cannot disconnect from his root
and at the same time cannot assimilate in his place of birth and feels
lonely even amidst the ocean of human beings. Quite often the ‘new
land ‘ or new cultural environment doesn’t accept him fully and he is
left in a state of limbo or nowhere. Victor Ramraj has rightly commented
that, “ though linked by shared homelands and shared history of
uprooting, these diasporic communities are not homogeneous or
monolithic entities” (216). Gogol negotiates a new space, caught
between two cultures.
Identity in diasporic writing means a spilt-consciousness. This
split consciousness creates an interesting condition for Gogol, who,
standing at the border of two cultures ,Indian and American, looking
critically at both, neither assimilating nor combining either of them , is
He hates any questions pertaining to his name. His
misunderstanding is further complicated by the enigma of his name.
He detests his very name because it is neither American nor Indian:
He hates having to tell people that it doesn’t mean anything
“in Indian .” He hates having to wear a nametag on his sweater
at Model United Nations Day at school. He even hates signing
his name at the bottom of his drawings in art class.He hates
that that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing
to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but
of all things Russian. He hates having to live with it, with a pet
name turned good name, day after day, second after
second…. At times his name, an entity shapeless and
weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically,
like the scratchy tag of a shirt he had been forced permanently
to wear. (Jhumpa 76)
He was unhappy with his name because children taunted him,
teachers in the school mispronounced his name and the name that
defines a person’s individuality and identity ultimately becomes a
burden for him.
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After discovering that his namesake was a severe depressed man,
mentally unstable,” queer, and sickly creature”(Jhumpa 91) who,”
starved himself to death.”(Jhumpa 100) Gogol feels betrayed by his
very parents. His name torments him with feelings of ‘difference’ and
embarrassment.
Ironically as he grows older, he doesn’t want to go to the
kindergarten after knowing that he will no longer be Gogol but ‘Nikhil.
Now, he is angry because he doesn’t want a new name. “He can’t
understand why he has to answer to anything else. “Why do I have to
have a new name?” he asks his parents, tears springing to his eyes…He
is afraid to be Nikhil, someone he doesn’t know” (Jhumpa 57). Finally,
he manages to be called as Gogol at the school. But, his happiness is
short lived as he encounters a grave question regarding his sense of
belongingness.
On his visit to a graveyard on a school tour regarding a project,
he comes across tombstones of certain immigrants to America. Like
his class fellows he too desperately searches for an Indian name but
fails to find one. He is shocked to discover that his name is not even a
Bengali name and condemns his parents. “How could you guys name
me after someone so strange? No one takes me seriously”
(Jhumpa100). This reminds the reader of Draupadi in Meena
Alexander’s Manahattan Music , where, Draupadi asks: “ Why
couldn’t they have named me Dorothy? That name would have hung
better on me” (8).
According to Parmod K.Nayar, “Dorothy/Draupadi is here
expressing an anxiety- of merging unobtrusively into her new landscape.
Her name isolates her as ‘different’, while what she seeks is assimilation”
(206). This is applicable to the sorry state of Gogol as well.
Gogol is brought up in two cultural backgrounds; he is taught
and familiarized with Indian customs, beliefs, food habits. Similarly, he
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is brought up in the American cultural environment. His upbringing is
bi-cultural. In the occasional family get together he is reminded of his
Indian cultural background and heritage despite his trying hard to free
himself from this stiffening Bengali environment. His parents expect
him to lead a life based on Indian values and customs and maintain his
Indian identity. According to his parents he could not be an American,
no matter how hard he tried. Due to his twin cultural environment,
Gogol suffers from a sense of emotional and sociological dislocation
as he can neither completely engross himself in American culture nor
rupture ties with his inherent Indian mores.
This sense of estrangement is evident on his school trip to the
graveyard. Here he rues the absence of his the graves of his ancestors.
He is shocked and , “ old enough to know that there is no Ganguli
here. He is old enough to know that he himself will be burned, not
buried, that his body will occupy no plot of earth, that no stone in this
country will bear his name beyond life”(Jhumpa 69). Gogol appears
to be sailing in two boats sailing in the opposite direction. Each of the
boats pulls him in and he is always torn between the two.
Gogol, a bye-product of twin culture craves hard to escape
his own past and his desire to escape his past becomes more obvious.
Manjit Inder Singh states, “The attachment to one’s centrifugal
homeland is countered by the yearning for a sense of belonging to the
host country and its culture, thus triggering a process of moving from
one cultural existence to another, albeit ambivalently in an attempt to
assimilate and integrate”(53). But Gogol, instead of assimilating and
integrating in his adopted culture is trapped between the pulls of two
opposite cultures and doesn’t know to which he belongs. He is unable
to embrace American culture due to the confusion arising from two
opposite worlds.
Even his parents, having espoused the American culture are
not completely assimilated rather, not allowed to assimilate, into the
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fold of the host country. Time and again they have to tolerate the
burden of the Indian Lineage of their parents and grandparents. There
are plentiful incidents in this narrative that reflect the egotistical outlook
of the Americans. Mrs Merton mocks at a painting drawn by Gogol
of his mother with a ‘bindi’ on her forehead and calls it a ‘spitting
image’. Similarly, during their visit to an American departmental store,
the salesman disregards Gogol’s parents, as they speak Indian English
and prefer to direct his discussion to Gogol, who speaks American
English. Kallen rightly states, “ it was not only unrealistic but cruel and
harmful to force new immigrants to shed their familiar, lifelong cultural
attributes as the price of admission to American society”(qtd in Salins
1).
It is relevant to mention that Gogol is not a displaced citizen
or an immigrant; He is the son of immigrant parents. He is and will be
an ethnic minority in the states. His name doesn’t make any difference
and he is referred to as ABCD or an Asian-American. This makes
him to hate his dual identity.
Jhumpa Lahiri, in one of her interviews with The Atlantic
stated:
The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially
for those who … grow up in two worlds simultaneously…I
think that for immigrants, the challenges of exile, the loneliness,
the constant sense of alienation, the knowledge of and longing
for a lost world are more explicit and distressing than for their
children. On the other hand, the problem for the children of
immigrants that with strong ties to their country of origin- is
that they feel neither one thing nor the other.
His name constantly reminds him of his alienation from the
American society as he cannot be assimilated in the American culture
for he is and will be an ethnic minority here.
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Gogol appears to be torn between two nations, India and
America, between two names, Indian and Russian, two value
systems,traditional Indian and Modern American. Jhumpa lahiri
poignantly portrays the pain of the second generation immigrants, who
are without any ‘land’ of their own. They only live in a land , which
they own by birth, but to which they never belong .
Similarly, Gogol is leading a divided life engulfed between dual
personality, he is Gogol for his parents , who want him to inculcate
and incorporate Indian culture and traditions. It is only when he
changes his name to ‘Nikhil’ he feels to be the part of American society.
Now as ‘Nikhil’ he for the first time feels as an American and becomes
a part of its culture, his birth place. Once ‘Nikhil’ he ceases to be an
Indian.
His sense of belongingness to America is so strong that he is
willing to lead a dual identity i.e. he remains Gogol for his parents at
home and is ‘Nikhil’ to the world. As he is ‘Nikhil’ therefore, it is easy
for him to avoid his parents. His twin names affirms the multitudiousness
of his diasporic identity and it is easier for him to ignore his parents, “
to tune out their concerns and pleas”(Jhumpa105). He feels like a
perpetual outsider. During his high school days he distances from his
Indian roots and avoids other Indo –American students, does not
accept India as his ‘home’ but as ‘India’ as viewed by his American
friends.
As Nikhil, he is more and more fascinated towards American
society. The window of this glittering world is now open to him :
It is as Nikhil, that first semester that he grows a goatee,
starts smoking camel lights at parties and while writing papers
and before exams, discovers Brain Eno and Elvis Costello
and Charlie parker. It is as Nikhil that he takes Metro-North
into Manhattan one weekend with Jonathan and gets himself
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a fake ID that allows him to be served liquor in New Haven
bars. It is as Nikhil that he loses his virginity at a party at Ezra
Stiles, with a girl wearing a plaid woolen skirt and combat
boots and tights.(Jhumpa105)
He is swayed by this glitterati and he shirks work, tell lies,
make excuses, feels like a free bird and detests his very home. “He
didn’t want to go home on the weekends, to go with them to the pujos
and Bengali parties, to remain unquestionably in their
world”(Jhumpa126), rather he prefers New York, the place his parents
fear . His alienated self dissuades him from his family .
He is fascinated by the American lifestyle of Maxine’s Family,
and becomes so deeply immersed in them that he tends to neglect his
own family. The only thing that holds him back is his Bengali instinct
that makes him realize that, “ his immersion in Maxine’s family is a
betrayal of his own “( Jhumpa141).
Gogol always feels stretched and straddled between twin
identies in his effort to adjust as Gogol or Nikhil. For his parents
Gogol could never be an American as in front of them he doesn’t feel
like Nikhil. There was constant feeling of a lost sense of belongingness
which made Gogol believe that he was not American or Indian and
was persistently spanning fences stretching identies. This dichotomy
of belonging to nowhere is central to diasporic literature. This duality
develops in him a sense of insecurity of being exposed. Though he
asked his parents not to address him Gogol , “the fact of it troubles
him, making him feel in that instant that he is not related to them,not
their child”(Jhumpa106).
Despite an ongoing physical and psychological conflict of being
grilled in the counterpulls of dislocations and locations, one ray of
hope for Gogol is always there,i.e. his parents ,whose significance he
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realizes only after the sudden demise of his father and his mother’s
decision to return to India.
The reversal in his life takes place only after his father’s death
as he is a born Indian. His social or psychological condition may change
according to the conditions but, one condition he could c never change
was his lineage. After facing many hiccups in his relationship with
Moushumi and emotional setbacks in life he feels dejected, rejected,
isolated towards the end of the novel. The thought that his parents are
to perish one day and with them he would also loose his name and
identity makes him apprehensive. He cannot expunge the reminiscences
of his past- his name, his parents and his Indian legacy because these
realities have formed his persona.
He wonders:
The givers and keepers of Gogol’s name are far from him
now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different
sort of departure ,in order to dwell, as his father does in a
separate world…. Without people in the world to call him
Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli
will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and
so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise
provides no sense of victory, no solace. It provides no solace
at all. (Jhumpa289)
In the end Gogol feels the metamorphosis in his inner self
which urges him to recover his lost sense of belongingness.
Gogol, a second generation immigrant, nee Lahiri, could never
assimilate; he became an exile in the country of his birth. That is what
haunts him again and again. His is a frustrated effort to make reasonable
contact with any one of the cultures in which he finds himself, Indian
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by birth ,American by education, he remains unable to relate to any
one culture.
He is constantly moving about in search of an identity and is a
victim of a sense of loss, disintegration and displacement. . He is,
“haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back”
( Rushdie 10).
Gogol, living a dual life, amidst the swirl of meaninglessness
all through the novel realizes towards the end that he is part and parcel
of an Indian heritage by birth, accordingly, his parents have a right to
give him a name be it a pet name.
After his father’s unexpected demise he comes across Nikolai
Gogol’s volume and his act of reading this volume is indicative of his
reassimilation to his familial past and realization of his lost self by
redeeming his lost sense of belongingness. He endeavours to propitiate
the implied strain experiencing in the gambit of his anew composed
self by the climax.
In an interview with Washington Post, Jhumpa Lahiri
remarked, “Naming is everything, a way to claim identity, to pass on
notions of love tradition and hope.” Jhumpa lahiri empathizes with
Gogol in his homecoming. In spite of the physical and psychic struggle
involved in being dislocated and relocated across the two continents,
the ultimate feeling Gogol gets is positive i.e. to move forward. His
homecoming signifies the relationship of an individual to a community
and the manner in which family/ community cohere through social rituals
and practices.
Thus, through Gogol’s predicament, Lahiri is able to present
and reflect the twinge, the agony and inadaptability particularly of the
second generation immigrants to adjust in an alien environment. This
twin identity she encountered is reminiscent of the emotions of children
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born in an alien land. With penetrating insight she reveals not only the
defining power of names and expectations bestowed upon us by our
parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully,
come to define ourselves in this fine world.
Works cited
Alexander, Meena. Manhattan Music. San Francisco: Mercury
House, 1997. Print.
Chotiner, Issac. “ Jhumpa Lahiri.” The Atlantic, 18
March.2008.web.18 march 2008.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2003.
Mehrotra, Ranjana. “Straddling Two Cultures: A Study of Biculturalism
in Jhumpa
Lahiri’s The Namesake.” Post Independence Indian Writing in
English. Ed. Anju
Bala Aggrawal. New Delhi : Authors Press, 2008. 147-156. Print.
Nayar,Parmod Kumar. Postcolonial Literature:An
Introduction.New Delhi: Longman, 2008.Print.
Ramraj,Victor J. “ Diasporas and Multiculturalism.” Ed.Bruce King
New Nationalism And Postcolonial Literatures. Oxford :
Claredon Press.1996.214-217.Print.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta
Books,1992.Print.
Salins, Peter D . Assimilation, American Style- Multiculturalism
and Ethnic Relations.
BNET. CBS Interactive,Feb1997.n.p.Web.23Mar.2011.
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Sharma,Charu, and Priyanka Sood. “ Hyphenated India : Reading
Women in Diasporic Writings.” Trends in Indian English
Literature. Ed. T.S. Anand .
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
New Delhi : Creative, 2008. 124-34.Print.
Singh,Manjit Inder. “ Boundaries, Margins, Slippages: The Nation in
Diasporic Imagination.”
DES Journal of Social Sciences and Languages II(2001) : 49-59.
Print.
Nidhi Handa
Kâtyâyan and Sulbasutras:
A Study in Identity
Trivedi,Deepak Kumar. Indian Diasporic Literature
:Theory,Themes and Problems.
Rohtak: Shanti Parkashan.2009. Print.
Wiltz,Teresa. “The Writer who began with a Hyphen:Jhumpa Lahiri
between Two Cultures.”Washington Post,Oct,2008.
n.p.Web.15 April 2008.
There has been a debate among the scholars over the issue
of the identity of Katyayan and sulbasutras. The scholars have various
views and opinions formed in their own ways on the basis of the material
available scriptures. To some scholars Kâtyâyan was the son of
Sage Yajyayvlakya and his second wife, Kâtyâyani (Œastri 02). They
hold that it was he who wrote Œrotasutra of the Yajurved. The
Skandpuran holds that Maharishi Kâtyâyan was the author of
Vedaòstra. It has also been mentioned that he had perfect knowledge
of yajña which especially abounded with his views on yajña. There is
one more reference in Skandpuran which states that Maharishi
Kâtyâyan wrote many relevant books not only for his own œakha but
for other œakhas also. It was for writing for other œakhas he became
famous by the name of Parasar, the performer of good deed for
others. For this very reason, he was also known as Brahabricharya
Singh (Œastri 02). There are other references which establish
Maharishi Kâtyâyan’s identiy. In Ashvalayansrvanukram Bhasya
at a place it has been stated that he was the disciple of six gurus
(Œastri 02) . This has been reaffirmd in Sarvanukram Bhaœya also.
In this regard the Skand Puran states differnetly. It unfolds that
Maharishi Kâtyâyan was the disciple of a single guru (Œastri 02).. It
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also unfolds that it was he who founded Vastupada Tirth and
Mahaganapati Pith in the region of Vatnagar(Varodra). On the basis
of above opinions and references, it can be concluded that there
were three Kâtyâyan. The account of Kâtyâyan’s identiy given by R
C D Sharma and Brij Behari Chaubey in their respective works also
confirm this view.1
that the sûtrakar was before three thousands year. His works are as
given below:
As far as the time of Kâtyâyan, the writer of Œrotasûtra of
Yajurveda is concerned, it is uncertain. However, according to the
Sutragraòth of Gemini and Úrotasûtra graòth of Kâtyâyan, these writers
belong to two different periods. Their common styles and explanations
bring them very close. There are many sûtras of Gemini which merely
look like the translation of the Úrotasûtra of Kâtyâyan. For example
Kâtyâyan first formulated the sûtras of various opinion and thereafter,
with the help of the proved opinion or theory he, in order to have the
knowledge of the aòusthan, wrote the sûtras without opinion or
theory. Gemini too formulated the sûtras in the same fashion. Thus, in
spite of the fact that they have common features, there is no definite
answer to the question: who is ancient ? However, taking into account
the sûtras of Baûdhâyana and ¸pâstamb which lack seriousness of
meaning, it can be said that they do not belong to the ancient time. The
scholars hold that they belong to the tenth or eleventh century before
Vikram Samvatsar. This lack of seriousness of meaning would not
have been in the work of Bhagvan Kâtyâyan. Hence, Kâtyâyan, who
was known as Vatrik, was a different thinker. Bhandârkar and
Vilvalker ascertain that he was in the fourth or fifth century before
Vikram Samvatsar.
7- Chhâgalaksana
8- Pratigyâ sûtra
9- Anuvâkasamkhyâ sûtra
10- Caranavyuh
11- Úrâddhkalpa
12-Ðulbam
13- Istakapurana
14- Pravrâdhyâya
15- Mulyaddhyaaya
16- Unchhœastra
17- Nigam
18- Yajnaparœve
19- Hotra
20- Prasvotthnam
21- Trikandika sûtra
22- Katyayan Smrti
23- Upgrantha sûtra
24- Pratipadam
25- Anupada
26- Kratusañkhya
27- Manik sûtra
28- Mantrabhrantihar sûtram
29- Yajuravidhân
30- Ukthaúastram
31- Karmpradipa
32- ªigyajuúam
33- Parisañkhya
34- Gºhaysangrah
35- Pratiharâ sûtra
36- Swaravyañjanm
37- Sâvitra
38- Mantrajyoti
It is now obvious that there can be no similarity between the
Kâtyâyan of fourth or fifth century and the Kâtyâyan of the tenth or
eleventh century B.C. (Œastri 07) This shows that there were two
different persons. According to the above argument it becomes evident
1- Úrotasûtra
2- Úradhakalpa
3- Paraskargrh sûtra
4- Riskasarvânukarma sûtra
5- Úuklayajuh Sarvânukram 6-Yupalaksana
39 Mantradipikâ
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Let me here take into account the time of the composition of
Kâtyâyan’s Úulbasûtra also in order to ascertain the age of Kâtyâyan
. Vagiúa Úastri in his preface to Baûdhâyana’s Úulbasûtra says, “It is
indisputable that Baûdhâyana was not the first propounder of
Úulbasûtra , rather -before him there were many acaryas who had
already composed Úulbasûtra” (bag and Sen03).
The interpretation of Âpastamb sûtra also decide the age of
Kâtyâyan’s Úulbasûtra The king of Karvind is of the opinion that
there are many sûtras like those of Kâtyâyan in the composition of
other Acaryas. The holds that he there are acaryas who accept the
series of contents in the same fashion as Kâtyâyan has done. Unlike
Kâtyâyan these acaryas have described the sûtras in accordance
with their own age and tradition. For example suparnaciti, one of the
sukla yajurvedis and droòa are such important vedis. In droòas, the
author of citi wrote in the úrotasûtra as is described in úulbasûtra
for existence. They are described in the same way in úrotasûtra as in
úulbasûtra. In the same way, Baûdhâyana and Âpastamb have done
it.2 Thus taking into account the above discussion it can be concluded
that Kâtyâyan is the propounder of úulbsûtra and belongs to much
earlier time than that of the other acaryas of úulbasûtra.
Úulbasûtra and Kalpasûtra:In Vedic literature the Kalpsûtra possesses an important place.
It contains actions and describes them serially. It has theoretical
knowledge and this is why it is called kalpana œastra. In Kalpasûtra,
we have prayogaœastra also which has practical knowledge. They
have fortnight yajnas. Here the author includes 18 appendices
separately which deal with the subjects unexplained before. The author
had an apprehension in his mind that the inclusion of these appendices
in the main text could spoil the order of the contents. Hence, he
composed them separately.
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The Kalpasûtra can be divided into four parts-úrota sûtra,
gºahasûtra or smârtasûtra , úulb sûtra and dharma sûtra. In his
introduction to, Baûdhâyana úulbasûtra, Vagiœa Œastri also divides
kalpasûtra into four parts. He holds that there are four types of
kalpasûtra –œrota, grha, dharma and œulb - in relation to each veda.
There sulbasûtras are considered under úrotasûtra. Later in his
introduction to Âpastamb úulbasûtra, Acarya Narsingh also comments
upon kalpasûtra and holds that it has practical knowledge. In
Kapardibhâºya the word ‘kalpa’is replaced with the word ‘úûlba’.
This is discernible in the form of œrota, sulba, grha, pitra and megha.
Here it is palbable to think that úulbasûtra too is a kind of part of his
composition.
In fact, the úulbasûtra are under kalpasûtra. They are the
integral part of the text like the appendices of Paòini. Paòini’s
appendices–gaòapath, dhâutupath, uòâdikitasûtra and
linganuúâsan are in no way separate from the main text and it is
fitness of things to call these five of sûtras, vârtik and bhâºya, the
grammar. The appendices of sûtras should be considerd a the very
part of the text everywhere and so úulbasûtra falls within kalpasûtra.
By encountering the sutras, as has been done above, it is
estimated that there are three sûtras – Kâtyâyan’s sûtras,
Baûdhâyana’s sûtras and Âpastamb’s sûtras and each branch has
úulba sûtra. Vadhul, mânav, metrayaòa, vârâh, maúak, and
úulbasûtra are also available there. (Sharma 10)
In fact úulbasûtra facilitates the performer. This we can
explain by the giving the example of the practical knowledge of
mathematics which is important in the yoga part of yajña. There are
three branches of Mathematics- Arithmetic, Algebra and Geometry.
Unless a person knows mathematical device, he cannot make
yajñakund, it is a general conception. But by composing úulbasûtra,
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Kâtyâyan has made this performance so easy that a person without
knowledge of mathematics can perform the yajna.
Notes
1
The first Kâtyâyan was one who propounded Kâtyâyan
œakha in the Úukla Yajurveda. He was the propounder of the Úrutarisi
and Vedaúakha . The second Kâtyâyan was the son of Sage Yajnavalak
and Kâtyâyani. He wrote 18 appendices. He was the Vaiúvamitra
Katyakail of Viúvamitragaòa within Katagòa. In the appendix of the
third. sûtras, “Pratijansûtra” he says about himself to be the disciple
of Kausik tradition. Kâtyâyan, the propounder of úakha is the chief
Angirasabrahaspatya kâpeya of Angiragaòa within Kapigaòa The third
Kâtyâyan is one who gave (vºatti) commentary on Panini’s sûtras
and is therefore known as vatrik which means commentator. In the
Kathâsaritasâgar he is mentioned by the name of Vararuci .There is
a reference in which Kâtyâyan of Yajyavalakya and Kâtyâyani is
treated as an incarnation of Sankara’s gana, Puspadanta. He is also
treated by the name of Œrutadhara there. Here it is worth noting that
there is difference between Vararuci and Vararuci, the son of Kâtyâyani.
This means that they are two different persons. This clearly shows
that Kâtyâyan, the writer of the appendices is different from Kâtyâyan,
the commentator who belongs to Bhragugaòa of Vatasayanagaòa .
Dr. R.C.D. Sharma, Kâtyâyan Sulbasutram (New Delhi, Nag
Prakashak 1994). 05
The personality of Kâtyâyan has been a matter of great
controversy among the scholars. There is no difference of opinion
regarding Kâtyâyan’s authorship of KSS and the Vajprat. Therefore
to a person like Kâtyâyan, a reputed Yajurvedin, it was an imperative
to lay down the rules of accentuation and grammarian.
(Svaraskaratisthapaita) Kâtyâyan’s ealier than Panini a great
grammarian. In the colophons of the three bare MSS of the tent.
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Vrdhacarya is said to be the author of Bh.S (bfr o‘)kpk;kZizohr
f=dqf.MdkHkkf’kd lw=e). Here it certainly refers to Kâtyâyan who was
esteemed as a great Acarya among his disciples. Due to his Excellency
in the science of accentuation and grammar he was also reverently
called as Bhagvan among his disciples. Prof. Brij Behari Chaubey,
Bhasikasutra of Maharsi Kâtyâyan with the commentaries of
Mahasvamin and Anantabhatta”, 36.
2
It has been in the parïiÌta,” K³ty³yana sulbs¿trem
sutrantraiah sah samyatravlokan.”
Works Cited
Chaubey, Prof. Brij Behari. Bhasikasutra of Maharsi Kâtyâyan with
the commentaries of Mahasvamin and Anantabhatt
Œastri, Œridhara Katiya Parisista daskam , nd.
Sen, S.N. & Bag, A.K. The Úulbasûtras .New Dehli: Indian National
Academy, 1983.
Sharma,Dr. R.C.D. Kâtyâyan Úulbasûtram .New Delhi, Nag
Prakashak 1994.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Charu Sharma
Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die:
A Renewed Perception of Life
Veronika Decides to Die (Portuguese: Veronika decide
morrer) is a novel by one of the world’s most distinguished author
Paulo Coelho. Like all Paulo Coelho books this book too teaches its
reader certain things about life, things that we always knew but never
really thought would matter much. In this book Veronika Decides to
Die, the topics Paulo Coelho deals with are of the kind which our
society finds unacceptable and unmentionable, such as insanity and
suicide. Coelho deals with these issues with such excellence that makes
his readers take a closer look at and re-evaluate their own lives and
urges them to consider how fragile and short life is. Even though the
title invites the reader to consider why Veronika decides to die and
how she attempts to kill herself, the novel actually depicts how after
her failed suicide attempt Veronika learns to live.
The main character of the book Veronika isn’t happy with her
life, not because she is deprived of something in her life: “She was not
killing herself because she was a sad, embittered woman, constantly
depressed” (Coelho 6). She had everything she could wish for. She is
a young girl in her twenties, having boyfriends, loving family, a good
job but still she finds her life full of endlessly meaningless routine which
she hates like anything but still follows as she has nothing else to do.
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She realizes that nothing is going to change for her and life is the same
yesterday, today and would be tomorrow too. To her life somehow
has lost its meaning. She values her beauty, and yet deep inside she
knows that it has no real value. She knows that as she grows older her
charms will gradually fade away; she would suffer from various illnesses
every now and then, and even her long-cherished friends would leave
her: “She would gain nothing by continuing to live; indeed the likelihood
of suffering only increased” (Coelho 6). She believes that she had
spent her life to the full extent: “At twenty-four, having experienced
everything she could experience – and that was no small achievement
– Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That
is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion”
(Coelho 7).
So one cold November morning she takes an overdose of
sleeping pills in order to stop her life which, according to her, is not
worth living. But her suicide attempt fails and she is taken to Villete,
the most controversial local mental hospital in Ljubljana the capital of
Slovenia. As she regains consciousness, she realizes that her suicide
had not been successful and after recovering she would have to go
back to her routine life and live it on the terms of others, spend it for
pleasing all and meeting their expectations. But later she is told that
although she is alive, her heart is now irreparably damaged and she
has only seven days to live. Waiting for her death to come, she realizes
that time has lost all meaning. All that is left for her to do is to wait for
the day, the minute and the second when she will finally close her eyes
forever. It is here that Veronika discovers waiting for death is immensely
harder than taking her own life. But then she feels that as she has
nothing more to lose or gain so she should to live the next seven days
or the last seven days of her life to the fullest. And it is during this
period she realizes that life is vibrant and invaluable.
But there is one thing that Veronika does not know that she is
the subject of a psychiatric experiment conducted by the Villete’s head
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psychiatrist Doctor Igor “to discover a cure for insanity” (Coelho 67)
because “he knew that failed suicides tend to repeat the attempt sooner
or later. Why not use her as a guinea pig, to see if he could eliminate
the Vitriol, or Bitterness, from her organism?” (189). He considers
Veronika “a heaven-sent opportunity in the shape of a would-be suicide;
he was not going to lose this opportunity for all the money in the
world” (Coelho 67). Therefore he fakes upon her the news of her
near death i.e. when he tells her that she is about to die in a week. To
add the colour of reality to his prophecy he uses some drug with
which he manages to stimulate the effects of heart attacks and impress
upon Veronika, the shrinking days of her remaining life. Actually there
had been absolutely no damage to her heart and no problem with her
health, but Dr Igor makes up this story to make Veronika realize the
meaning and lost importance of her life. He wants her to find the lost
thirst for life. He wants to prove that the cure to bitterness, the cure to
the apathy, the indifference people feel towards life lies in an awareness
of life itself because he knows “the great problem with poisoning by
Bitterness was that the passions – hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm,
curiosity – also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while, the
embittered person felt no desire at all. They lacked the will either to
live or to die” (Coelho 81). And so he observes how Veronika behaves,
and how she lives from that point onwards. Dr. Igor’s trick works and
gradually Veronika starts seeing the world around her with new eyes.
In the constant awareness of life, she begins to re-evaluate her life.
During her confinement in Villete, she realizes that she has nothing
more to lose and can therefore do what she wants and be who she
wants without having to worry about what others think of her, because
nobody criticizes a madwoman: “She was now experiencing something
she had never dreamed of: a mental hospital, madness, an insane asylum,
where people were not ashamed to say they were mad, where no one
stopped doing something they were enjoying just to be nice to others”
(Coelho 35-36). So in her last few days she indulges in all that she
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had deprived herself of, like playing the piano, her desires, openly
displaying hurt, anger, love and frustrations that she kept contained
inside for her twenty-four years. In this state of being alive, with each
second passing, she discovers what was wrong with her past life.
During her stay at Villete, Veronika’s life changes to a great
extent. She begins to question her existence and ideas about life. Her
presence there, especially the fact that she just has a week to live,
affects all of the mental hospital’s patients. She meets several other
inmates who unknowingly make a big impact on her life, and as her
spirit awakens she in turn, though unconsciously, begins to make a
visible difference to their lives. Every person Veronika meets at Villete
changes her view of life; since her life is changing and she is gaining a
new vision of life, her wish to die gradually disappears. Now Veronika
wishes to have a chance to live in an altogether different manner
compared to the way she lived in her past, because meeting Villete’s
patients taught her something important that she didn’t know living
around normal people, people who have become so habitual of
behaving in a typical customary way that they have forgotten their
uniqueness. She finds new sense of freedom, independence, free from
any compulsions or duties, commitments which did not exist in the
sane world. In the asylum she gets a chance to meet three most
important characters of her life who serve as a medium for her selfreflection: Zedka, the depressed housewife; Mari, the lawyer who
gave up her dreams when she came to suffer from panic attacks; and
Eduard, a schizophrenic artist who has spent his life denying love. All
these three people have their own stories of coming to Villete and
after reader their story the reader certainly feels and shares their
experience and realizes that these three are just normal, while the
outside world identifies them simply as mad people. These three
persons become the reason where Veronika understands that the every
second of existence is worth living; it is a choice that we make between
living and dying.
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During her first conscious night in the asylum, she meets Zedka.
Though married with children Zedka had become obsessed with a
former lover, frantically but unsuccessfully searched for him, and was
even prepared to give up her family, her children, everything for him.
She was convinced that he was also desperately looking for her.
Veronika learns from Zedka that some patients pretend to be mad in
order to do exactly what they want. But Zedka’s futile search led to
depression and finally she was admitted in the asylum. She experiences
“astral” (Coelho 45) journeys during the course of her treatment and
explores the world around herself in a way that was strange by all
standards. She becomes a friend to Veronika and on the day of her
release, she leaves her with the thoughts of inexhaustible and reasonless
love. She makes Veronika realize that the deep inner desires that are
rooted within us form a hidden but an essential part of our personality.
Such desires should be understood and analyzed without fail. The
fear of things going wrong, reaction of others, of society, parents,
husband, wife etc should not prevent one’s soul to enjoy freedom and
do whatever he likes. So during the last days of her life Veronika
decides to discover herself, her dreams, her joys, her desires, her
love, her sorrow, her pain, her hatred. She allows herself to live
completely because she might not have another chance: “She felt like
going over to the piano in the lounge, and celebrating that night with a
lovely sonata she had learned at school. Looking up at the sky, she
had an indescribable sense of well-being, as if the infinite nature of the
universe had revealed her own eternity to her” (Coelho 57). On the
other hand, Zedka decides to leave her depression in the asylum but
carries with her all other sorts of madness which now will be normal
for her and others. She says:
When I came here, I was deeply depressed. Now I’m proud
to say I’m mad. Outside I’ll behave exactly like everyone
else. I’ll go shopping at the supermarket, I’ll exchange
trivialities with my friends, I’ll waste precious time watching
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television. But I know that my soul is free and that I can dream
and talk with other worlds which, before I came here, I didn’t
even imagine existed. (Coelho 148)
Veronika also meets Mari, a member of the Fraternity (a group
of longer standing members, who could have left several years ago,
but stay at the expenses of the state due to the hospitals familiarity,
and who behave like dangerously violent insane persons whenever
there is a government inspection). Mari, a successful lawyer, enters
the asylum as a panic attack patient. Though her state is completely
curable, she decides to stay back at Villete which she had avoided
earlier due to her illness. Before coming to Villete Mary had “decided
to give up the tedious, unending job of being a lawyer in order to
dedicate the rest of her days to working for some humanitarian
organization” (Coelho 103). She wanted to go against the norm of
being a successful lawyer and live life to the fullest by fulfilling her
cherished desires. She wanted to work for the starving children of El
Salvador who “were forced to live on the streets and turn to prostitution”
(Coelho 103). As she says: “When I was still a young lawyer, I read
some poems by an English poet, and something he said impressed me
greatly: ‘Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that
merely contains’” (Coelho 180-81). But when she couldn’t stand up
against the societal norms she started having panic attacks and
consequently bowed down before the societal pressure and prevalent
beliefs. And thus she was thwarted from becoming “the fountain that
overflows” (Coelho 180-81). But now learning from her own
experience she teaches Veronika to push herself beyond her boundaries
and urges her to experience highest pleasure. She urges her to be true
to her own self instead of getting bogged down by other people’s
opinions and fancies. She makes Veronika understand that “her parents
would still have loved her, but, afraid of hurting them, she had not
dared to pay the price of her dream, the dream that was buried in the
depths of her memory. . . .”
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“Veronika had known since childhood that her true vocation
was to be a pianist” (Coelho 85). Through her own story, Mari helps
Veronika recognize “the hundreds of other Veronikas who lived inside
her and who were interesting, mad, curious, brave, bold” (Coelho
62), Veronikas she could love. In the end, inspired by Veronika’s
courage to live each day as it comes, Mari decides to leave the asylum
and follow her heart and free her soul by working for the children of
war-torn Sarajevo. She asks: “‘Where is my soul?’ Mari asked again.
‘In my past. In what I wanted my life to be. I left my soul captive in
that moment when I still had a house, a husband, a job I wanted to
leave but never had the courage to.....the death of that young girl
made me understand my own life’” (Coelho 155).
Veronika’s life changes when she meets Eduard, a
schizophrenic, whose madness was, according to the doctor’s report,
beyond cure. Being the son of a diplomat, he had seen all comforts in
life but his road accident changes his life .He gets inspired by the lives
of great visionaries such as Jesus Christ, Darwin, Freud, Columbus,
and Marx “whose ideas had shaken the world, people with their own
vision of an earthly Paradise” (Coelho 165) and desires to create his
own visions of paradise through his paintings. But this leads him to
have “endless arguments with his family” (Coelho 132) because his
parents want him to become a diplomat while he desires to become a
painter. Finally he is enveloped with such “powerful feeling of guilt that
he had felt incapable of doing anything” (Coelho 132) and ultimately
ends up in the asylum as a schizophrenic. When Veronika meets Eduard
he is seen as inching towards the point of dying of hunger because he
has stopped eating. But when Veronika creates music on the piano,
he listens to her as if he is under some magical influence. On her part,
Veronika “had finally realized her dream: to play with heart and soul,
for as long as she wanted and whenever the mood took her. It didn’t
matter to her that her only audience was a young schizophrenic; he
seemed to understand the music, and that was what mattered” (Coelho
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102). Each night Eduard waits for her to play and looses all his sorrows
and worries in the rhythm of the notes. The playing of the piano by
Veronika in a starry night with only Eduard for company is touching.
Eduard falls in love with Veronika and the story gets more interesting
for us to know if she would live. Eduard is the person who incites the
understanding of life in Veronika. Though he doesn’t do anything,
Veronika gets sexually awakened before him and surrenders herself
completely before him. Unlike others, Eduard does not judge her and
it is only the feelings of love and tenderness that she could see in his
eyes. Veronika had concealed her hidden desires even from herself till
now and now with this newfound freedom of Villete she begins to
experience all the things she never allowed herself to experience. And
when she has just about twenty-four hours left for death as per Doctor
Igor that she realizes life. She says to the doctor:
I want to ask two favours. First, that you give me some
medication, an injection or whatever, so that I can stay awake
and enjoy every moment that remains of my life. I’m very
tired, but I don’t want to sleep. I’ve got a lot to do, things that
I always postponed for some future date, in the days when I
thought life would last for ever. Things I’d lost interest in, when
I started to believe that life wasn’t worth living. (Coelho 127)
And her second favor would be:
I want to leave here so that I can die outside. I need to
visit Ljubljana Castle. It’s always been there and I’ve never
even had the curiosity to go and see it close to. I need to talk
to the woman who sells chestnuts in winter and flowers in
spring. We passed each other so often, and I never once asked
her how she was. And I want to go out without a jacket and
walk in the snow, I want to find out what extreme cold feels
like, I, who was always so wrapped up, so afraid of catching
a cold.
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In short, Dr Igor, I want to feel the rain on my face, to smile at
any man I feel attracted to, to accept all the coffees men might buy for
me. I want to kiss my mother, tell her I love her, weep in her lap,
unashamed of showing my feelings, because they were always there
even though I hid them.
I might go into a Church and look at those images that never
meant anything to me and see if they say something to me now. If an
interesting man invites me out to a club, I’ll accept, and I’ll dance all
night until I drop. Then I’ll go to bed with him, but not the way I used
to go to bed with other men, trying to stay in control, pretending things
I didn’t feel. I want to give myself to one man, to the city, to life and
finally, to death. (Coelho 127)
By convincing that her death is eminent, Doctor Igor has
managed to shock Veronika making her want to live, respect life and
above all enjoy it, something which life is actually meant for. She always
wanted to do things which fascinated her and now she wants to go out
of Villete to taste them all and to know what life all about is. She not
only falls in love with Eduard with all her heart and emotions for the
first time but also enjoys it. When she sheds her sexual inhibitions and
bares herself and her innermost desires to Eduard she manages to
free him and meets a Veronika she did not know all her life, yet it
existed in her all this time. On the other hand Veronika’s tragedy inspires
Eduard to enjoy what life had to offer today and he starts believing
that her appearance in the asylum is a signal to him to return to Belgrade.
Later he sets them both free by escaping from the asylum and embracing
love thereby finally “drawing Veronika back into the world” (Coelho
100). And this is evident when Veronika expresses her heartfelt thanks
to Eduard for giving meaning to her life as he swears that he will paint
her before she dies. She says: “‘Look at my face. . . . Remember it
with the eyes of your soul, so that you can reproduce it one day. If you
like that can be your starting point, but you must go back to painting.
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That is my last request’” (Coelho 185-86). Veronica now fully grasps
the meaningfulness of her life.
At all points in the book the reader identifies with Veronika.
Everyone in this world is so busy playing safe and so busy keeping
others happy by doing things that are required of them that they stop
living for themselves, lose the essence of life: Wanting to be different,
according to Dr Igor, becomes a serious illness only when “you force
yourself to be the same as everyone else. . . . It’s a distortion of
nature, it goes against God’s laws, for in all the world’s woods and
forests, He did not create a single leaf the same as another” (Coelho
153).
But everyone around wants to be like everyone else, to go
with the ongoing trend, when it comes to mannerisms, looks, and
even pattern of thinking. People are so busy being like each other that
they cease to have an individual identity. As Dr Igor says: “when
everyone dreams, but only a few realize their dreams, that makes
cowards of us all” (Coelho 129). The book establishes this fact. As
each character comes face to face with his or her own mortality, they
are forced to look back on their lives and scrutinize their failed dreams:
Deaths in Villete tended to happen suddenly, without giving
anyone time to think about it, or after a long illness, when death is
always a blessing.
The young woman’s case, though, was dramatic because she
was so young and because she now wanted to live again, something
they all knew to be impossible. Some people asked themselves ‘What
if that happened to me? I do have a chance to live. Am I making good
use of it?’ (Coelho 101)
Readers gain a renewed perception of life after going through
Veronika decides to die. Through the story of Veronika’s remaining
days Coelho encourages the reader to believe in hope and follow his
or her own dream without the fear of being seen as mad. He presents
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a cruel reality that sometimes life does not seem to be worth living:
“Any drastic change in life could trigger depression – moving to another
country, losing a loved one, divorce, an increase in the demands of
work or family” (Coelho 49). People get married for love but at the
end get divorced. Everyone gets old and everyone gets afflicted by
several illnesses and finds oneself incapable of taking care of one’s
self. But in spite of all of these, Coelho makes us believe that there are
still small wonders in life like falling in love, stopping to smell the roses
and playing with a baby that make all the other miseries and complexities
of life bearable. As Mari says: “everything that happens in our life is
our fault and ours alone. A lot of people go through the same difficulties
we went through, and they react completely differently. We looked
for the easiest way out: a separate reality” (Coelho 138). And even
though everything in this world must come to an end, it is the journey
and not the ending that counts. As Dr Igor says about Veronika: “She
would consider each day a miracle, which indeed it is, when you
consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each
second of our fragile existences” (Coelho 191). Coelho encourages
readers to look within to find our real selves we have forgotten or
hidden from ourselves to keep pace with the hustle-bustle of our lives.
Veronika learns this fact when she lies in Villete, waiting for her date to
die. An awareness of death encouraged her to live more intensely.
Works Cited
Coelho, Paulo. Veronika Decides to Die. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa.
London: Harper Collins, 1999.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Ebrahim Mohammed Alwuraafi
Arab Chameleons:
Transnational Identity in The Cairo House
Identity is an extremely complex concept and a simple definition
of what it refers to is difficult to find. However, definitions are provided
here. Identity is “people’s concepts of who they are, of what sort of
people they are, and how they relate to others” (Hogg and Abrams
2). “Identity,” Parekh writes, “basically refers to how one identifies
and defines oneself in relation to others” (132). As it is clear from
these two definitions, identity often refers to a sense of belonging to a
social category or group. This understanding of identity as relational
means that identity is not something fixed as one’s relation in the society
is always changing. In other words, identities are constantly producing
themselves anew under political, religious and social circumstances,
which, sometimes, are not chosen deliberately.
Writers on Arab American identity differ enormously in their
perception of Arab American identity. Some, to quote Lisa Suhair
Majaj, believe that the “Arab-American identity is in essence a
transplanted Arab identity” that is supposed to preserve its Arab culture
and language and remain involved in the Middle Eastern affairs. Another
group believes that “it is intrinsically American and should be understood
in relation to the American context and American framework of
assimilation and multiculturalism” (Hyphenated Author). It is true that
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an Arab American can manage to work both sides but, according to
Majaj, “there tends to be a discernable orientation towards one or the
other side of the hyphen”(ibid). In this paper, I argue that there is
another type of Arab American identity that belongs and at the same
time does not belong to either side of the hyphen and assumes a
cosmopolitan or transnational dimension and Serageldin’s The Cairo
House is a case in point.
The well-known theorists in transnationalism are Basch, GlickSchiller, and Blanc. They admit that in the recent years there has been
a change in the nature of immigration. This change is mostly attributed
to globalization which has resulted in advancement in communication
and other technologies. This implies that unlike before, immigrants
today are in a position to maintain links with their home country. Their
identity is, therefore, a product of both the home and the host country,
which means that they exhibit characteristics that span multiple national
boundaries. Transnationalism is a concept that has developed in
immigration scholarship as a result of these changes in immigration.
Transnationalism has been defined differently by different
scholars. But the one that Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and
Christina Szanton Blanc offer is relevant to support the cultural
conditions that postcolonial theorists have been delineating as multiplicity
of identities. They define transnationalism as:
the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of
origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism
to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields
that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders….An
essential element of transnationalism is the multiplicity of
involvements that transmigrants sustain in both home and host
societies. ( Basch 8).
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In other words, transnationalism is a simultaneous sense of
connection to multiple countries, cultures and national identities. In a
transnational perspective, the focus is on how contemporary immigrants
maintain familial, economic, cultural, as well as political ties across
international borders making home and host society a single arena of
social action.
Taking into considerations these definitions, the present paper
examines Serageldin’s The Cairo House from a transnational
perspective. It also attempts to expand the definition of transnationalism
beyond the idea of an immigrant merely maintaining simultaneous ties
to more than one national identity to capture those moments in which
the immigrant does not feel a part of either. The significance of this
analysis comes from the deviation that Serageldin conducts from other
Arab American writers. In other words, while most Arab American
writers still explore the themes of cultural dislocation, the conflicts of
assimilation, and portray their characters as torn between respecting
their family traditions and the freedom that America provides, The
Cairo House goes beyond this conventional portrayal of immigrant
experience to explore immigrants’ allegiance to more than one culture,
language, and nation. Consequently, she deterritorializes the definite
national and cultural identities suggesting that individuals cannot confine
themselves within the narrow concept of national and cultural
boundaries in this globalized world. Her novel demonstrates that
identities, due to the development of technologies, transportation, and
global connections between people, are becoming more transnational,
cosmopolitan and global.
As mentioned above, transnationalism is a process by which
immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link
together their societies of origin and settlement through the creation of
cross-border, and inter-continental networks. Serageldin’s novel
stresses the flow of people coming and going on the borderland and
thus blurring the national boundary and suggesting hybrid and
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transnational identities. It emphasizes not only the experience of
immigrants who leave somewhere called home to make a new home
but also the endless process of comings and goings that create familial
and cultural ties across national borders. Her characters find themselves
part and parcel of the two homes and at the same time they feel alienated
in both. The novel’s movement across multiple geographical locations,
including London, Paris, Cairo, Jedda and finally New Hampshire,
renders the borders between these locales fluid and permeable, and,
by extension, makes the concepts of national belonging malleable and
open-ended. By depicting an ongoing and inconclusive suspension
between several locales The Cairo House, through dealing with the
in-between world of immigrants and negotiating questions of identity
and belonging in a transnational context, shows how transnationalism
facilitates the articulation of dual and in-between identities for some
Arab Americans.
Samia Serageldin was born in Cairo, educated in Europe and
immigrated to the United States in 1980. She lived through, and
witnessed, first-hand, the political and social turmoil of the Nasser’s
regime and the disruption that followed. Her novel, The Cairo House,
follows the life and memories of her protagonist, Gigi, through those
years and the ones that followed when she moved to France and then
to America. Gigi’s life has been divided between Africa, Asia, Europe
and America and, therefore, seems to be a compelling representation
of a transnational identity. The fact that the novel opens and ends on
the board of aeroplane explains this type of identity which,
paradoxically, lives nowhere and everywhere and exemplifies the
current ease in the movement of bodies and information across the
globe.
Serageldin divides her novel into three parts. The first one is
entitled “Photographs,” the second “Exile,” and the third, “Return.”
The first part narrates Gigi’s childhood in 1960s Egypt. When she
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was nine years old, her family was subjected to sequestration decrees
by Nasser’s regime. Her family’s properties, money and jewelry were
all confiscated. Thus, Gigi is seen as a character whose background is
very complicated. Like many of the first generation of Arab-Americans,
she suffered from political and social oppression and alienation in her
own country.
The second part of the novel narrates her life in exile bringing
to the fore the fragility and shallowness of her cultural attachment to
the West. After her marriage to Yussef, both leave for London to
study. However, her marriage with Yussef was not successful. After
coming back to Egypt, she could not stand her life with Yussef and,
therefore, runs a way to France and marries Luc. Both leave to New
Hampshire hoping that in this neutral place they can build their new
home. The third part recounts Gigi’s life during her last visit to Egypt in
1990s. Everything has dramatically changed since Sadat’s introduction
of Open-Door Policy. Most of the family houses have been rented to
American companies that turned them into offices. She, now more
than before, finds herself a foreigner in her own home. Unable to
adjust in new Egypt, she goes back to America. Throughout the
chapters of the last part, Serageldin portrays the dilemma of becoming
a stranger in one’s home––a common phenomenon among immigrants
returning homes.
Gigi’s description of her childhood shows her as a sheltered
child who lived in an idealistic world of her own. Her “memories of
early childhood,” writes Serageldin, “are those of a happily hybrid
culture: Egyptian cuisine and French governesses; English schools and
Nubian doorkeepers; celebrating the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice
and licking Italian ices on the beach” (“The Coming Out of the
Chameleon” 134). Gigi also asserts that the cuisine in the family house
“may have been more or less cosmopolitan, but the spirit of hospitality
was an uncompromisingly Egyptian” (25). It is clear that the first seeds
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of Gigi’s transnational identity have started a long time before the
beginning of her wandering life. In other words, her foreign education
and multicultural upbringing have surely helped shaping her new identity.
For this reason, she felt alienated in her homeland in her childhood.
Unlike her strong relationship with her French nanny, Gigi was alienated
from the Egyptian servants who worked in their house. She even was
weak in Arabic. Moreover, she used to read only in French. When
advised by her father to read Mahfouz, she could not identify with his
characters or settings and found them “depressing” (45). In fact, one
can feel the big cultural gap between her world and Mahfouz’s, which
is a true representation of the Egyptian society. She remarks that on
passing by “some of these back alleys,” she would bury her nose in a
French novel “avoiding the sight of the beggars; of the carcasses of
meat hanging on hooks in front of the butcher shops; of the flies on
children’s faces; of the peasant woman sitting cross-legged on the
railway station platform, suckling a baby on one swollen bare breast”
(45). The social and political situation of her family made her, to use
Mona Russell’s words, “retreat into the world of books” (Russell 2),
a world that exists only in her imagination. Thus the description of her
childhood shows her as an alienated subject at odds with the
surrounding world and without any attachment to her original home.
The issue of home and belonging is provoked in the novel’s
prologue in which the questions “where do I belong? Where is this
chameleon’s natural habitat?” (2) are posed by the protagonist.
From the beginning of the novel, the reader discerns Gigi’s feeling of
uncertainty related to where her true home is. Gigi, a first generation
Arab American, struggles to figure out which world she belongs to.
She is not quite sure where she belongs or where she wants to belong.
These questions reveal Gigi’s dilemma: she is at midway, standing at a
dividing line. They also show that her ties to a specific home have
started to wear away. Transnationalism thus sets the tone for the novel
as a whole.
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The setting immediately shifts from the aeroplane to the airport,
the perfect meeting point of different worlds, cultures and nationalities.
According to Gigi, it is the most suitable place for those who assume
various identities:
For those who have more than one skin, there are places
where the secret act of metamorphosis takes place, an
imperceptible shading into a hint of a different gate, a softening
or a crispening of an accent. For those whose past and present
belong to different worlds, there are places and times that
mark their passage from one to the other, a transitional limbo:
like airports. (1).
The airport symbolizes the flow of people coming and going
on the borderland that blurs the national boundaries and suggests
hybrid and transnational identities. The development of new
technologies and transportation play a vital role in mobilizing people
from one world to another and in negotiations between different
cultures. Here the connection between different peoples, ideas and
ideologies are faster. By representing her characters at the crossroad
where both local and global spaces meet and constant negation
between different aspects of lives appear, Serageldin depicts a
transnational space for the Arab immigrants in the United States.
Gigi’s transnational identity is embodied in the image of the
chameleon––an image that occurs throughout the novel and makes
the transnational identity one of the leitmotifs in the text––that attracts
the reader in the first page of the novel. Defining the true chameleons,
Serageldin writes:
But the true chameleons are the ones who straddle two worlds,
segueing smoothly from one to the other, adjusting language
and body language, calibrating the range of emotions displayed,
treading the tightrope of mannerism and mores. If it is done
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well, it can look deceptively effortless, but it is never without
a cost. There is no hypocrisy involved, only the universal
imperative underlying good manners: to do the appropriate
thing, to make those around you comfortable. For the
chameleon, it is a matter of survival. (1-2).
The perfect symbol suggests invisibility, changing skin and the
idea of metamorphosis. Whenever Gigi goes, she tries not to be known
or recognized like a chameleon that hides itself in a bush when danger
is expected. She uses this technique more than once in America and
describes herself as one; for she “had tried to blur her edges and lose
her accent” since she came to New Hampshire (142). Serageldin,
herself, admits certain elements in common with her heroine. She writes:
There was no room in this brave new world for my memories
of jasmine and dust. I locked away my photograph albums of
Egypt in the attic and blended into my new environment like a
perfect chameleon. Friends who knew me for years barely
knew where I was born. There was no hypocrisy involved;
only the imperative to compartmentalize in order to survive.
(“Live in Interesting Times” 8)
The image of blending and mixing is significant here. Like a
chemical solution that results from heterogeneous mixture of two or
more substances in which the molecules or the atoms of the substance
are completely dispersed. Hence blending suggests fusing of the past
and present identities to produce one that belongs to neither, an identity
which has its own characteristics and qualities. Furthermore, the image
of the chameleon does not mean assimilation in the new environment
but rather an embrace of all cultures and identities as the chameleon
changes its skin to match the different colours of the surroundings.
That is what Gigi has done during her movements between the four
continents––Africa, Asia, Europe and America. Wherever she finds
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herself, she starts to wear a new skin that match the new environment.
This experience has led Serageldin to write: “you shed your skin as
you shed your clothes. The French express it so well, that the skin is
one more garment like any other: one can be comfortable in one’s
skin, or not. I am comfortable in my skin, only I have more than one,
and sometimes I try them on one at a time, feeling for the best fit”
(Love is Like Water 80).
In fact, Gigi is the epitome of what one may call the transnational
subject. She cuts across the cultures of London, Paris, Cairo, Jedda
and finally New Hampshire, but is nevertheless displaced in––and
belongs completely to––all. When asked by a couple from Minneapolis,
who were with her on the plane, where she comes from, she answers
“I live in New Hampshire” (2). She comments on her answer saying:
“It is not evasiveness, nor even the instinct to resist being pigeonholed. It is only that any answer I give will be just as incomplete and
misleading, so this is as good––or bad––as any other” (2). In other
words, she knows that she has no home and whatever answer she
may give is insufficient. It becomes clear that she neither belongs to
America nor to Egypt but rather her home is an imaginary one situated
in “no-man’s-land” without defined geographical boundaries.
To be at home and not at home at the same time is a permanent
feature of the transnational world as it seems to be of continual concern
to writers like Serageldin who neither complain about homelessness,
nor offer nostalgia as a way to cope with the feelings of loss.
Homelessness, thus, becomes a necessary condition of life in a
transnational world. Though, in New Hampshire, Gigi has “made
friends, even made a place of sorts for herself in the community….There
was no place in this world of snow capped steeples and ice hockey
for the memories of dust and jasmine” (141). In another place she
says, “I could never feel at home in a land-locked place without a
great river or a sea, a waterfront” (174). This shows her inability to
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adjust in the new surrounding as well as her longing for her original
home. But when she reaches Egypt, she feels alienated. “It feels strange
to be home and yet not home, to be the guest and the landlord at the
same time; to look out of the window at a familiar view and then
return back to an unfamiliar room” (149). “I felt as if I didn’t belong
here, as if I spoke the language but didn’t understand it” (212). Again
she yearns for New Hampshire. “Suddenly, for no special reason, I
was homesick: for snow, rain, changing skies, pure air, for a long walk
on a fall day…for freedom from watchful eyes, for anonymity, an
uncomplicated existence” (211).
This way Serageldin has been able to break down the
conventional notions of home and national belonging to depict a more
complicated version of contemporary identity. Gigi’s ambivalent attitude
towards her home leaves her shuttling constantly between the USA
and Egypt, enacting physical and ideological negotiations of both
cultures. Her nostalgia for the other side of the hyphen, as well as her
discomfort in both, has left her a foreigner in both. This shows how
Serageldin has revised the concept of a stable home, replacing it with
a more fluid and flexible form of cultural and relational identification,
indicating in the process why these concepts are valuable to
transnational Arab-Americans. It also shows how Serageldin revises
the concept of home with its characteristics of comfort, rootedness,
and security to invest it with more complex and problematic properties
such as inconvenience, displeasure and hollowness. For Gigi, home is
where she is not and this is one of the main challenges of a transnational
identity. Gigi’s irreversible fragmentation is deeply rooted in the
geographical, manifesting itself in her sense of not fitting in either cultures
or countries despite the apparent ease of her transnational movement.
In this way, transnational unbelonging replaces a secure and
unproblematic national belonging, creating a space of negotiation that
constantly revises traditional notions of diasporic identity.
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Immigrants’ transnational identity is usually displayed through
the exhibition of behaviour that connects them to two or more nations.
A good example is when immigrants perceive their sense of belonging
to both the host country and home country to be similar. During her
last visit to Egypt, Gigi starts getting the same old feelings as if she had
never gone away. Like true Chameleon, she realizes that once she has
blended into a new environment, it becomes difficult to imagine herself
anywhere else. Her life in New Hampshire “seemed so far away, another
world,” (182) and “The past ten years seem like an interlude, a
sharp zig in the flat line of experience, a detour around an
insurmountable bump in the road” (201). However, with the
approach of the end of her stay in Egypt, she wonders: “How can I
give up what I have been looking for, waiting for, for so long? How
can I leave, now that I feel I have come home?” (202). But this does
not last long for she suddenly feels an urge to leave for America. Despite
her feelings of belonging in Egypt, Gigi finds her bed in America.
Resisting her cousin’s insistence to stay, she confesses, “I would go
back because I had made my bed, I must lie in it” (230). Though “a
few days before I could not imagine leaving; now I felt there was no
place for me here. I had been gone too long. I should claim what was
mine, tie up loose ends, and leave” (213). What is strange about her is
that her intention of returning to Egypt is to claim what was hers. Now
she is going to America to claim what is hers. However, she never
severs her ties in Egypt completely. This is shown by her disagreement
with her uncles and cousins to sell the Cairo house. “It did not occur
to anyone that, precisely because I had been uprooted, I needed to
know that the house would be here for me to come home to” (222).
Despite the availability of multiple physical homes for Gigi, she avoids
committing herself to one location, thus, as mentioned earlier, finding
in her transnational identity a means to negotiate multiple homes.
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For a transnational person national boundaries are always
invalid. The original and host societies stop to be two different entities
and rather become the same. So at the end of the novel, when Gigi is
on the plane going to America, she declares: “I can neither say that I
am going home, nor coming from home” (232). Gigi’s declaration
reminds one of A. D. Hope’s poem “The Death of the Bird” in which
he writes: “Going away she is also coming home” (70). The two sides
of the hyphen become the same. “There is no destination; ‘here’ and
‘there’ are the same” (232). She becomes “like one of those weeds
that do not develop deep roots; they grow everywhere and are native
nowhere, You are a human weed without the roots, You are a piece of
human trash that America collects from all over the world” (Karlin).
So Gigi’s case heralds the formation and development of a new home
characterized by transnationalism that does not necessitate choosing
either here or there but instead facilitates transitions between the two
and enables a character like Gigi to simultaneously connect with and
be connected to both worlds. The statement: “There is no destination;
‘here’ and ‘there’ are the same” (232) is the first sign of Gigi’s
acceptance of her transnational identity and her full understanding of
herself within/without each of these homes.
Finally, Gigi’s transnational identity provides her with the critical
powers to assess each of the two cultures from a detached, more
objective vantage point. In her last visit to Egypt, she surveys the new
political and social conditions with a sharp eye. She criticizes “the
terrifying cacophonous chaos of Cairo traffic” regarding it “a
microcosm of the Egyptian society” where rules are observed only
when enforced by the authorities (152). She expresses her
dissatisfaction with the social obligations and engagements she has to
fulfill every day if she lives in Cairo and regards them as obstacles to
her success to achieve an autonomous identity. She “could not imagine
keeping up on that frantic treadmill…. So much of it appeared
unnecessary to me, a cycle of escalating social obligations that could
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not be broken without throwing the slacker out of the social orbit
altogether…. I knew I could not live that way” (212). She criticizes
Egypt’s lack of “freedom…anonymity, an uncomplicated existence”
(211). Finally, she admits that there is no future in Egypt.
Gigi’s criticism extends to include her dissatisfaction with her
second home, America. She criticizes the racist attitudes of Americans
towards Arab embodied in her colleague Toussaint. During a trip to
Luxor, Toussaint’s behaviour with souvenir vendors irritates her. He
assumes a haughty character and plays “the role of great white tourist”
(200). Being with the poor vendors gives him the opportunity to “rise
above his real-world self and feel his existence justified merely as a
member of a taller, fairer, finer altogether superior race” (200). At the
same time, she is annoyed by the persistence of the vendors to sell
their goods. The situation confuses her: “I cannot decide which I wish
to disassociate myself from urgently: Toussaint’s obnoxious sense of
superiority, or the grinning vendors’ lack of self-restrain that fuels it”
(200). This shows that her detached critical perspective of the two
cultures is the outcome of her cosmopolitan overview that furnishes
the viewer with the space to pose probing cultural questions, thus
reaching a higher level of self-understanding in the process.
It can be concluded that transnationalism offers Arab American
immigrants, at least Serageldin, a form of resistance to the hegemonic
discourse of American nationalism. In this sense, transnationalism may
open up opportunities for ethnic individuals and communities to move
beyond the either/or options of assimilation or non-assimilation in order
to survive. The novel, therefore, is a call for Arab Americans to avoid
being the victims of discrimination by adopting a multiplicity of identities.
Furthermore, by comparing The Cairo House with other texts by
Arab Americans, one find that Serageldin, while sharing many of the
same thematic concerns as her contemporaries, is departing from them.
Although assimilation, return to the homeland, home, and identity
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remain central focuses in her work, her rendering of these themes is
completely different.
So, The Cairo House is a novel that celebrates the cultural
hybridity resulting from globalization and the interconnectedness of
the modern world providing a new vision for conventional immigrant
experiences. Serageldin is aware of the existing problems of cultural
diversity in the multicultural United States, and she argues that the
struggle to grasp a transnational identity becomes an urgent issue for
Arab immigrants. While she presents Gigi as someone who is confused
about her identity, she also presents her as a prototypical transnational
agent who lives between two different worlds with the possibility of
creating multiplicity of identities. In other words, by presenting Gigi at
the crossroad, Serageldin depicts a transnational space for the Arab
immigrants in the United States. The novel also reveals Serageldin’s
attempt to construct for her character an identity that transcends national
and cultural borders. In order to achieve her goal, she positions her
characters in-between different cultures where transformation takes
place, deconstructing the fixed notion of identity. Her method in doing
so is very simple: portraying her protagonist as a ‘transmigrant’ who
maintains multiple relationships with different people that connect them
to two or more nations. The novel also adds a new dimension to the
Arab American identity. Its depiction of this transnational connection
widens the scope of the Arab American identity which is constantly
pushed towards either side of the hyphen.
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Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. New
York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. “From
Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational
Migration.” Anthropological Quarterly 68 1 (1995): 48–
63.
Hayward, Maysa Abou-Youssef. “An Interview with Samia
Serageldin.” Studies in Humanities 30 1&2 (2003): 85-90.
Hogg, Michael and Dominic Abrams. Social Identifications: A Social
Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes.
London: Routledge, 1988.
Hope, A. D. “The Death of the Bird.” Collected Poems, 1930-1970.
Sydney, London,
Melbourne: Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1972.
Majaj, Lisa. “The Hyphenated Author: Emerging Genre of ‘ArabAmerican
Literature’ Poses Questions of Definition, Ethnicity and Art,” Al Jadid
265 (1999): http://www.aljadid.com.
Mikhail, Mona. “A Review of The Cairo House by Samia Serageldin.”
The Middle East Journal 55 3 (2001): 514-516.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures.
London: Routledge, 1989. Print.
Parekh, B. “Reasoned identities: A committed relationship.” Identity,
ethnic diversity and community cohesion. Ed. M. Wetherell,
M. Lafleche, & R. Berkeley. London, Thousand Oaks, CA,
New Delhi and Singapore: Sage. (2007).
Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. Nations
Unbound Transnational Projects, Postcolonial
Serageldin, Samia. The Cairo House. New York: Syracuse UP, 2000.
............ Love is Like Water and Other Stories. New York: Syracuse
UP, 2009.
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............”Live in Interesting Time.” NC Writers Network Newsletter
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
(September/October 2000): http://www.thecairohouse.com/
livetime.html
............”Coming Out of the Chameleon.” Scheherazade’s Legacy:
Arab and Arab
American Women on Writing. Eds. Susan Muaddi Darraj. London:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.
Renu Shukla
Traces of Democratic Ideals in Vedic Polity
Being citizen of the largest democracy in the world and being
fascinated by the modern ideas of equality, liberty and fraternity,
freedom of thought and speech it has been a subject of keen interest
for most of us to look back into the vast canvas of History and find
out the origin of such ideals in Ancient Indian Polity. There are number
of scholars, who believe that monarchy was the only form of
government known to Indians in Ancient period. They credited west
for the light of democratic ideals to the people of this world but a
careful survey of the Ancient Indian Administration completely explode
this theory and make it clear that refined democracy of today is a
product of History-an outcome of centuries of political thinking,
experiments and experiences.
Democracy as it is known is a government of the people, by
the people, for the people. In such a government public participation
in state administration is desirable. Unlike the monarchical states in
republics people play a vital role in the administration of the state and
their approval is the most determinant factor in policy matters. Thus
any form of government in which participation of public in state affairs
is ensured can be defined as a republican state. In such government
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people may delegate power to a single man or to a group of selected
men (Laski, H., 1968, 210). Therefore different form of non
monarchical government such as oligarchy, aristocracy, democracy
etc. can be labelled as republic (Altekar112). Today India is the largest
democracy in the world but in general monarchical system had been
prevailed here throughout the ancient period. Vedic age is not an
exception. The historic battle of ten kings with Sudâs, frequent
occurrence of the term ‘Râjan’ in Vedas prove that monarchy in which
gana (Sharma, R.S., 1959, 89-90; TM, XIX.14.2; SB, II. 5.1, I.1.2;
RV, IV.35.3; VII. 96.8; TB, I. 62.3; TB, I.8.6.4; SB, XIII.2.8.4. In
every case members of gana are descendents of the same ancestors.)
was a political unit being under a single ruler, was the most prevalent
form of government.
It is quite true that Vedic resources do not provide any clearcut evidence of Democracy or Republics but a careful study of Vedic
literature suggest that republican ideals were known to Vedic people
and even the monarchical form based the enthronement of royalty on
popular acceptance which indicates towards their own distinctively
democratic character. The objective of this paper is to make an attempt
to seek the seeds of democratic traditions deeply embedded in the
monarchical system of Vedic polity.
In Rigveda we come across terms like gana, ganapati or
jyeshtha, which are considered as the non-monarchical terms in later
times. The use of these terms in Vedas clearly indicates that there are
some elements which can be regarded as republican in this monarchical
system.¼RV, II.23.1. x.kkuka Rok x.kifra gokegs A dfoa
dohukeqieJoLre~ AA T;s”Bjkta Ckzã.kka czã.kLirA vk u%
‘k`.oéwfrfHk% lhnlknue~AA) The word ‘gana’ has been used 46
times in Rigveda, 9 times in Atharvaveda and at sevaral places in the
Brahmanas.) The chief of Jana was known as janasya goptâ, vishpati,
janasya râjâ, ganânâm ganapati and grâmni (Jha, & Shrimali 126)
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Every title is reflective of the importance of general public in Rig Vedic
polity.
When we proceed further hereditary kingship (AB, II.12; SB,
V.3.1-3) seems to be the normal system but there is clear evidence
that when the situation demanded it, viœah (settlements), who
constituted the râshtra (national unit), could elect a worthy monarch
of their own choice from among the members of the royal family or of
the nobility (the râjânyas) (AV, III.4.2). In Vedic literature
representatives of the people like the charioteers, the smith and the
grâman is have been designated as King makers (Râjaksita) (AV,
III.5.6-7). These representatives and samiti elected the king in all
probability (AV, V. 19. 15; VI. 88. 3). As the time went on gradually
in Vedic period itself kingship was becoming hereditary but even after
the establishment of the hereditary principle of succession, the election
was held, when the regular heir was afflicted by some disease (N, II.
10) or when the regular line had become extinct.
The spirit of the constitutional monarch in ancient India, which
contained the flame of democratic light can be visualised in the subtle
metaphysical concept of ‘rita’, ‘vrata’, ‘satya’, ‘dharma’ and
‘danda’ (Mishra, S.N., 1976, 255). The protection of the people
was the sacred duty of the king. He was expected to rule according to
Dharma and was known as ‘Dharmasya Goptâ’ i.e. the protector of
the Dharma (law) (AB, VIII). In Rigveda, dharma is used for custom
(RV, III.17.1), moral, law (RV, VII.89.5) and duties in general (RV,
X.56.3) and in the sense of what is right (RV, VIII.98.1) . The
Brihadâranyaka Upnishada says- ‘Dharma is the Kshtra of the
Kshtra; therefore, there is nothing higher than Dharma” (BU,
I.4; II.15). Vedic god, Varuna was said to be the regulator of their
conduct according to Dharma (RV I.25.10). His temporal counterpart
i.e. the king was expected to do and speak only which is right (TB,
I.8.10).
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‘Rita’ is another wonderful concept of Rigveda, which
designates “Order” through the meanings “truth” and “right”. It
governed and regulated the nature, Gods and men (RV, I.1.8; I.2.17;
I.23.5; III.1.18; III.2.26; IV.2.23; IV.51.52; IV.23.8; IV.51.7-8).
Sin resulted from the violation of ‘rita’, or ‘order’. Rita was binding
on Gods and mortals alike including King. ‘Vrata’ was the divine
ordinance (AV, XVIII.1.5) and the king was its upholder (dhrita vrata)
(SB, V.4.4.5). The power of learned Brahman as Œrotriyas was also
an important check on the royal authority. Brahma has been described
as the source of the kshatra (SB, I.4.11; AB, VII.19). The king had
no authority over them as Soma was considered as their king (VS,
X.18; TS, I.8.12; KS, XVI; MS, I.6.9; SB, V.3.3)
In Rig-Veda three important administrative authorities are
described as purohit, senâni and the grâmni (RV, X.62.11; 107.5).
A king could not rule without their assistance. Purohit was the most
prestigious one and was a cognizable check over the authority of the
king down to the later Vedic period (AGS, III.12). Ratnins have also
become very important during this period and were given the same
title-Râjkrita which was given to workers of metal, the charioteer, and
the Grâmani earlier (TB, I.7.3). They were also described as the
bestower of state (Râshtrasya Pradâtâran) (AB, XII.9; ADS,
II.10.25.10). In later Vedic literature we come across the terms like
‘sachiva’ and ‘amâtyas’ which have been used in the sense of ministers
(Pa, III.2.95). All these authorities exercised a powerful check on the
authority of the king.
In an attempt of revealing the existence of the republican
elements in Vedic polity one has to keep an eye over the role of some
important assemblies called ‘vidatha’ ‘sabhâ’ and ‘samiti’. vidatha
seems to be the earliest of the Assemblies, with a wide range of activities
including secular (RV, II.1.4) religious (RV, I.60.1; II.39,1; III.1,1)
and martial (RV, V.59.2) functions. Although the constitution and
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powers of the vidath are not clear (Sharma & Sharma 43-56) but it
has ensured the autonomy to the people of gana by its multifarious
activities.
Sabhâ and samiti were two more prominent and powerful
bodies in the Vedic Period. These assemblies formed an essential
feature of the government and stood beside the King as the mode of
expression of the will of the people. Though, the scholars like Ludwick
and Zimmer have different opinions regarding the structure and functions
of the ‘sabhâ’ and ‘samiti’ but the Kings presence in the ‘samiti’
clearly referred to; and there seems to be no doubt that both the
organisations possess an important place in the Vedic polity. Numerous
passages referring to them clearly indicate that both these assemblies
exercised considerable authority and must have acted as healthy checks
on the power of the king. They have been regarded as daughters of
Prajâpati (AV, VII.12,1).
From Vedic Literature we gather clear impression that sabhâ
was an independent institution. It was a gathering of the elect, probably
the elders (SYV, XVI.24) and the privileged nobles (RV, II.24.13;
VII.1.4; X.71.10; IV.2-5). The ‘sabhâpati’ (VS, XVI,24) and
‘sabhâpâla’ (TB, 7.4.6) were its president and marshal respectively.
To a king the co-operation of the ‘sabhâ’ was equally desirable. It
was attended by the king feudatories (CU, V.3.6; SB, III.3.5-14),
Great importance was attached not only to concord between the King
and the Assembly, but also to a spirit of harmony among the members
of the Assembly (AV, 7.12)
Samiti was the Central political assembly and was larger than
sabhâ. It was the regulatory assembly of the political power (Gopal
42) and was closely associated with the king. The samiti could elect
a king (AV, VII.88.3), banish him and re-elect him (AV, V.19.15).
The king was duty bound to attend the deliberations of samiti (RV,
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IX.92.6) and it seems to be a great challenge for him to keep the
Samiti pleased and of one mind with him (lekuks eU=% lfefr% lekuh
lekua eu% lg fpRres”kkaA lekua eU=ekfHk eU=;s o% lekusu oks
gfo”kk tqgksfeAA RV, X.191.3; AV,VI.64). There are prayers for
eloquence and outshining the rivals in the samiti by its members (AV,
VII.12.1; XII.1.56). In the concluding hymn of Rigveda great
importance was attached not only to a concord between the King and
Assembly, but also a spirit and harmony among the members of the
samiti (la xPN/oa la on/oa la oks eukafl tkurkEk~A nsok Hkkxa
;Fkk iwosZ latkukuk miklrsAA RV, X.191.2 ). It is not impossible to
argue that the hope and the desideratum expressed in the hymn refers
to the deliberative and administrative activity of a republican state
(Altekar 116).
Besides monarchies there are traces of the existence of
republics in the Vedic period. As Drekemier points out whole India
was not monarchical in Vedic age. There were some republics also
(Drekmeir 277). The existence of republics in sixth century B.C.
suggests that they have originated centuries earlier. In the Aitareya
Brâhmana (AB, VIII. 14) there is a reference to different types of
states like râjya, bhaujya, vairâjya, sâmrâjya flourished in different
provinces of the country, with different titles used for their king.
According to Altekar, vairâjya denoted a republic, a state which had
no king. Pânini and classical writers have mentioned the existence of
number of republican states in North-west part of India (Number of
Âyudhjivi samghas and other communities are mentioned in
Ashtâdhyâyi, Sutras and in the writings Greek writers. (Mishra, 2038, 72-89). The numerous references of republics Ashtâdhyâyi proves
that the sangha form of government was popular in North-west region
at the time of Pânini and as it was the most Aryanised region of India
it supports the idea of Aryan origin of Democratic ideals.
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Viewing together all these things clearly reveals that there are
traces of republican trend in the monarchical governments of the Vedic
age. The Vedic king did not possess unlimited powers. The references
of administrative authorities like purohit, senâni and the grâmni, the
concept of rita, vrata, satya, dharma and danda, the title râjkrita
which was given to chariot builders, the workers of metal, the charioteer,
the grâmani and later on to ratnins suggest that they have acted as
healthy checks on the power of the king. The dynamic role of the
assemblies like sabhâ and samiti in the Vedic polity can be regarded
as an inclination towards the republican trend. However in the later
Vedic period with the geographical expansion of the state power and
the king’s direct participation in administration, the role of the people’s
importance in deliberations and policy formation could not continue.
Works Cited
Altekar, A.S. State and Government in Ancient India, Delhi. 1962.
Drekmeir, C. Kingship and Community in Early India, Stanford,
1962,
Gopal,L. Prachin Bharatiya Rajnatik Vicaradhara, 1999.
Jha, D.N. & Shrimali, K.M. (Ed.) Prachin Bharat ka Itihas, Delhi,
1981.
Laski, H., The Foundation of Sovereignty as quoted by Mukherjee,
S.The Republican Trends in Ancient India, Delhi, 1968.
Mishra, S.N. Ancient Indian Republics, Lucknow,1976.
Sharma, R.S., Aspects of Political ideas and Institutions in Ancient
India, Patna, 1959.
Sharma, J.P., ‘The Question of the Vidatha in Vedic India’ J.R.A.S.
of Great Britain and Ireland, 1965.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Sanjiv Kumar
Excruciating Portrayal of Humanity in Upamanyu
Chatterjee’s Way to Go
The new world order characterized by a marked emphasis
on globalization and multiculturalism, has largely transformed entire
sociology, economy and polity at global as well as national level. The
concept of vasudhaiva kutumbkam has now got a different
connotation when it is appreciated in terms of opportunities of economic
growth irrespective of the threats it poses to the integrity of humans.
In the wake of globalization, human advancement is now measured
through newly defined parameters which take into consideration all
material assets and objects an individual possesses and ignore the
essential element of humanity. The external as well as inner construct
of humans is now guided by seemingly fascinating but afflicting
consequences of globalization i.e. growth in the reforms period of
economic liberalisation, Information and Communication Technology,
and unrestricted movement across boundaries. Indulgence in the blind
race of upward social mobility leads the people to ignore the traditional
moral and ethical codes, cultural practices and a life style marked with
austerity and sacrifice. The present generation is hypnotized by the
dark spirits of economic globalization to the extent that the darker
side of the picture is generally backgrounded so much so that the
glamour of page 3 celebrities, soap opera, mall culture, BPOs and
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soaring apartments take precedence over the real issues like poverty,
human trafficking, missing children, sexual harassment at work place,
the wider gap between rich and poor, plight of farmers, violation of
human rights and displaced people. Today, even literature and media
have equally been glamourised as in the race of Target Rating Point
(TRP), TV channels are more obsessed with the reality shows devoid
of any fraction of reality than with the programmes highlighting the
concerns of larger citizenry. Ironically, the popular programmes like
Big Boss (where the triviality predominates), Comedy Circus (where
comedy signifies vulgarity), Crime Reporter (with sharp focus on love,
sex and murder), Rakhi ka Swyamvar (ridiculing the practice of
personal choice in marital affairs) and intermittent commercial breaks
to advertise the products of MNCs, hardly ever appeal to the millions
of poors, underprivileged sections and subalterns in general. Detailing
the negative effects of globalization through television, Kameshwar
Singh remarked “it is having an adverse impact on our family life,
mainly through television and technology. Television lessens the amount
of time that families spend together. It also exposes children to new
value systems, makes them grow up faster and gives them a thirst for
consumer goods. Its disturbing impact on family and the drastic erosion
of traditional social life is a matter of concern for all of us.” (The
Times of India)
Similarly, the postmodern Indian English Literature which
generally foregrounds the scintillating picture of modern humanity,
identifies itself with glitterature, twitterature or chick-lit. However, the
rich heritage of Indian novel in English is somehow kept alive by the
new generation of novelists like Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Chetan
Bhagat, Aravind Adiga and Upamanyu Chatterjee. The present paper
attempts to study Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way to Go as a novel
portraying disorientated Indian society where individuals follow the
contemporary idiom of growth and ignore the sanctity of social
institutions like family and marriage.
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The sequel to Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel The Last Burden,
Way to Go is a just account of humanity devoid of warmth, love,
sacrifice, fellow feeling and made-for-each-otherness. Starting with
the catchy sentence “FOR NOT HAVING LOVED ONE’S DEAD
father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more,”
(Chatterjee 03). The novel portrays the degeneration of the people in
the age of globalization, urbanization, consumerism and economic
liberalization. Jamun, the protagonist of the novel, is preoccupied with
the search for his lost father whom he misses a lot—sometimes out of
love and at other times, out of sense of duty of a son towards a father.
Though his stay with his father had never been pleasant, he comes to
realize as to how his father’s presence engaged and absorbed him.
On being left alone in his father’s house, he reminisces the moments
when “they had all (his entire family) lived together under one roof as
one large, unhappy family…on Jamun’s return to the city of his mother’s
death—for that is how he had come to think of it, forever polluted.”
(29)
The novelist introduces Jamun as the representative of
wastelandish character of lower middle class characterized by the
obsession with upward mobility, erosion of traditional values and
diluting sociological institutions like marriage and family. The increasing
urbanization and consequent dirt, squalor, congestion and unhygienic
living conditions form the setting of the novel. In his seminal book,
Sunil Khilnani brings to the fore the disasters of extensive movement
of people towards the cities either for employment opportunities or
for the better education of their children. Khilnani comments:
India’s cities are hinges between its vast population spread
across the countryside and the hectic tides of the global
economy, with its ruthlessly shifting tastes and its ceaseless
murmur of the pleasures and hazards of modernity. How this
three-cornered relationship develops over the next decades
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will decisively mould India’s future economic, cultural and
political possibilities (Khilnani 49).
For him, India’s cities present the panorama of the entire
historical compass of human labour, from the crudest job of stonebreaking to the most sophisticated financial transactions, export-import
transactions, services and corporate ownerships. Similarly, Way to
Go brilliantly puts forward the contradictions of growth by highlighting
the sordid environ of emerging India at the wake of our entering into
the select nations priding themselves on resisting financial recession
and volatile market practices. The novel touches upon the successes
and failures, hopes and despairs, past and present, traditional and
modern, and nature and culture. Present day Indian scenario reflects
upon the contradictions which are “…intimately and abruptly pressed
against one another, and this has made the cities vibrate with agitated
experience. All the enticements of the modern world are stacked up
here, but it is also here that many Indians discover the mirage-like
quality of this modern world.” (Khilnani, 109)
The disillusioned denizens of the suburban slums are picturised
in the novel with a set of imagery symbolizing darkness, gloom and
frustration. Upamanyu Chatterjee presents the stark realities of
contemporary urbanizing India when he gives an account of the
disappointed people opting to commit suicide by putting their necks
on the railway tracks. He satirises the essential gloominess prevailing
among the present generation posed with the new set of challenges in
the context of globalization. He observes:
How couldn’t they recall the shitters on the tracks, two
hundred million of them every morning? Surely, just when it
was too late, at the last absolute nanosecond, realizing that
they’d been resting their chins on month-old turds, they
changed their minds; just before their skulls became blood
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and mincemeat, they wept and climaxed out of fear and
depression at how sinfully they had abused the gift of life. (16)
realized and an idea of the family idealized and then made real brick
by brick.” (201)
Way to Go is generally regarded as a novel marked with dry
humour and emotionless extravaganza of crumbling institutional
structures—social, economic, familial and individual. The novel exhibits
a country of a billion plus with a quarter of a million people who are
really insignificant and non-existent. Jamun’s tale represents the odds
of locating an individual in the meandering complex of human existence.
Individual identity has become as scarce and rare as the attempt to
locate the rudiments of demolished structures. The picture that the
novel creates before our eyes is that of an over-populated metropolitan
city where traffic has doubled, neighbours have changed and older
houses have been destroyed to make way for apartment blocks. The
people like Shyamanand who have volunteered to disappear from the
mainstream of life, could hardly survive in a sprawling city taking the
shape of the concentration camp where “gates had been walled up,
walls topped by barbed wire and everyone had looked permanently
apprehensive.” (17)
Taking a departure from contemporary Indian novelists in
English, Upamanyu Chatterjee gives due space to the themes
concerning poors and other underprivileged sections of society. In the
novel, the characters like Tekla, Vaman, Dhan Singh and Budi
Kadombini represent the millions of poor inhabiting India. In spite of
their low birth, status and restricted access to the opportunities of
globalised India, they “have a deep and immediate understanding of
power and power relationships. They know their own powerlessness
in the context of deep-rooted inequalities in economic, social, and
political structures.”1 Despite the suffocating and hostile environment,
they display a strong internal sense of power, self-confidence, and will
to persist, through various means—fair or foul. In the novel, Tekla,
maid-servant’s son, runs a brothel house in a “three-storey shack from
base to roof completely illegitimate—from electricity connection and
water pipes to building plans, as illegal and inevitable as prostitution”
(44). Similarly, Budi Kadombini’s habit to steal from kitchen also reveals
the tendency among the poors to rise high. Even the newly emerged
lower middle class consisting of the people like Jamun, Burfi and
Lobhesh Monga are observed compromising their essential human
dignity for short-term material gains. Monga, the builder, performs
certain religious rites only to beguile others. He organizes the bonfire
on the occasion of Holi festival and partakes frequent pilgrimages
only to divert the attention of the people from the crimes he commits.
He is a hypocrite who goes away soon after the bonfire (burning Naina
dead or alive) to Nasik or Ujjain or Puri, a religious journey
necessitated by some business requirement. “He (Monga) never said
no to anything; like the successful amoral businessman that he wanted
to be, he viewed every situation as a potential source of profit” (43).
With the soaring real estate business in post-reforms India, Monga
Jamun’s father invested all of his resources in constructing a
house which he could call his own, which he both liked and disliked.
On the one hand, Shyamanand took immense pride in the house that
he had built on his own crumb of earth while on the other hand; he
could sense the absurdity of his decision to sink his life’s savings in
choosing to live in a housing estate that had become a sort of
concentration camp. He relished the partial pleasure in the house for
having the company of a ‘son of his own blood’ and the barbed wires
and the cementing up of the gate giving him the feeling of security
which he considered as rare accomplishments not many of his
contemporaries could boast of. “It (house) was the grandest material
remains of his family, it was his family made concrete… both a dream
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represents the lacs of property dealers and builders who have dreamt
to rise overnight from huts to sky-touching apartments. It happens so
because the value of real estate has appreciated about two thousand
per cent in the last two decades. So, the builders like Monga believe
in the fact that, “time is money and thinking a waste of both” (49). For
Monga, “the two (religion and crime) for him were indistinguishable,
artha and dharma strolling hand in hand into one of his pilgrim
resthouses…” (110)
The title of the novel is quite relevant and significant as it largely
centres around the theme of life and death. At the time when human
values, ethics and traditional norms are losing their sanctity, Death…
was a topic that bonded together father and son. They couldn’t most
of the time tell the difference between it and suicide (34). Dr.
Mukherjee’s committing suicide, Shyamanand’s leaving the house
forever and his two sons’ contemplating to meet the death, seem to be
the only alternatives left with them. Human beings speckled mainly by
painful maladies and their expensive treatment, it is best for these
characters to think of themselves as already dead. The entire social
setup is in the grip of varied influences of globalization—be it
commoditization, consumerism, westernized life-style, mall-culture and
the widening divide between rich and poor.
The spell of economic growth has even blinded the people to
the sanctity of social institutions like family and marriage. The pious
familial relationships like parents, brother, sister, husband, wife, son
and daughter seemed to have lost their commanded reverence in the
contemporary society. Way to Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee lays bare
the stark realities of the existing socio-economic scenario, though
sometimes with an indigestible brutality. The disappointing expression
of sexual encounters in the novel add to the pervasive gloominess of
the novel. In the novel, “Jamun’s sex life dwindled to a sort of dry,
rotting peanut… the wretchedness of his carnal life and how demeaning
Excruciating
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it had always been. It was hurried, silent, stinking, dry and gave more
dissatisfaction than pleasure to its participants.” (36-37) Even Jamun’s
relationship with his own daughter delivered by ‘Kasturi to whom he
had lost his virginity,’ (29) remains vague throughout the novel. In
Kasturi’s serial called Cheers Zindagi, Chunmun the fictitious
equivalent of real Mithi, has two fathers—Sidharth, her mother’s
husband and Uncle Ashwamedha Ponytail (Jamun himself), her
biological father. While Jamun liked himself to be addressed by his
daughter as Babua or Popten, Mithi calls him Donkey Uncle. What
agonises Jamun is the fact that though he is living a barren life in the
absence of his daughter, “his character in the soap … enjoyed a sizeable
following; which his TV programme was, what he had been doing on
the morning of the last heavy downpour, what he ate and how he
maintained his health were regularly the subjects of articles in the daily
newspapers.” (92)
The mockery of human relationships is exposed when Monga
introduces Naina as his cousin whom he exploits sexually only to burn
her body in the bonfire. Similarly, Burfi, Jamun’s brother has severed
his ties with his wife and stays away from his children. He “hadn’t
touched his wife in five years except to beat her even though he loved
her very much. He loved her most when she was beaten and bleeding”
(219). The father-son relationship is shown to have become an old
myth as instead of seeking pleasure in the company of father, “Between
the brothers, whoever stayed with the father usually felt that the other
had duped him into it, had won and escaped” (61). Ironically,
Shyamanand was so excited about his sons that he “… had had painted,
in crimson capitals, the details of the apex of his life’s achievement,
namely, the names of his sons, their educational qualifications and
professional designations… (331). After getting disillusioned by his
own sons, Shyamanand considers villainous Monga as his third son
mainly because he found Jamun and Burfi quite unfilial.
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However, it is only after Shyamanand’s disappearance that
Jamun exhibits his sensitivity to the undying bond with the father and
rethinks his approach to his father when he deliberates not to let his
father feel small. In such a hostile familial environment in Shyamanand’s
household, laughter was rare enough. Madhumati, A tenant in
Shyamanand’s house, is taken aback to learn that Jamun’s—and
Burfi’s—ties with the extended family were so fragile that “they didn’t
even know the names of their maternal grandparents or their paternal
grandmother, or the proper names of even one of their dozens of
uncles and aunts….” (186)
At the time when we are all the time engaged in debating the
issues like 2-G sandal, black money in Swiss Banks, effective Jan
Lokpal Bill and role of Civil Society in initiating positive changes, Way
to Go rightly depicts the corrupt practices in government offices. The
non-seriousness and consequent failure of police to search out
Shyamanand, makes one comment that “I don’t think the police will
do anything until they have a corpse. Preferably an influential one that
can breathe down their necks (153).” With a serious crisis of basic
amenities in the densely populated cities (facing largescale
encroachments and cases of illegal construction), the novelist remarks
that “the state has simply failed to provide in the taps of its citizens
safe potable water. I personally believe that potable is a terrible word.
I immediately think of having to drink the water from a toilet bowl. But
this purifier is equipped with ultraviolet rays that—you know –treat
the water … ultra-violetically” (64). The red-tapism and rigid license
rule still prevails Indian bureaucratic system captured by Upamanyu
Chatterjee when he says that even death could not slip free of
paperwork. Burfi’s decision to sell off his paternal house makes him
undergo the trauma of complex administrative barriers just to create
avenues for the corrupt officials to make money. Burfi observes:
Excruciating
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The last two offices (notary’s and sub-registrar’s) resembled
Third World railway stations from which several hundreds
are trying to escape some awful, typical Third World
calamity—a communal conflagration, say, or the plague. At
both he expected the crowds, fed up of having to pay bribes
at every window and see their papers move only to disappear
and later reappear only upon the handing over of some more
grease—he expected the crowds at any moment to lose their
tempers and burn the hideous buildings down. (323)
The ostentatious and flirtatious life of the westernized Indian
urban population is portrayed by the novelist when birth anniversary
of Mithi who is born in November, is celebrated in March. The girl is
nourished in a way that she has no feelings either for her biological
father or his preferences. Jamun wanted to wanted to see either Mithi
or Kasturi on the eve of Holika bonfire but he consoled himself by
thinking that “Mithi wouldn’t because the bonfire clashed with her
dance class or maths tuitions or something; and Kasturi certainly
wouldn’t be able to get away from work, not for a piffling, middle
class, neighbourhood community event” (162). Jamun found that
Kasturi’s world of make believe was so remote and insulated from
her own that they simply did not connect. He was not in favour of his
daughter being made excessively fashionable. He feels irritated to
observe that “it was fashionable in school for Mithi and her friends to
detest Hindi, to find it dull and contemptible and incomprehensible”
(94).
The corporatized but exclusive education system is ridiculed
by the novelist when he asserts that in spite of India taking pride in
being the largest democracy in the world and provision of Right for
Free and Compulsory Education, a large number of children are still
deprived of better education. Besides, the children are discriminated
in the schools where “some parents and their cars were clearly more
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equal than others. The larger and more air-conditioned, the more
outrageous, the automobile, the closer to the school gates to deposit
its charges… Security and Identification. If you were a very important
parent, you didn’t…” (172). Committed to present the panoramic
view of contemporary India, Upamanyu Chatterjee mulls over the
issue like homosexuality and lesbianism, besides the most common
practice of extra-marital relationships. While finding a teacher for the
girl, the parents agree upon a female teacher in the pretext of the
Supreme Court’s recent decision that ‘women cannot rape’ (178),
which seems more a satire than a realized fact.
In Way to Go, Upamanyu Chatterjee seems to have been
caught in an intricate trap where it is difficult to foreground one issue
and background another. The collapse of institutional structures—
social, political, economic and legal, is annoying, but equally crucial
are the consequent maladies like corruption, widening gap between
rich and poor, fatal diseases like AIDS, human trafficking and
prostitution, crimes against women, familial bond, and social and
financial security. Utterly disillusioned, Madhumati rightly passes her
observation about life in the contemporary India when she remarks:
“C’est fait, done, it’s done…. Marriage, c’est fait. Children c’est fait.
Relationships, c’est fait… life too c’est fait…”(123). However,
Upamanyu Chatterjee seems to have shed some of his burden when
he proposes a way to go, though towards a gloomy future guided by
the witchcraft of globalization and its allied forces.
Works Cited
Chatterjee, Upamanyu. Way to Go. Penguin: Delhi, 2010.
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Ramit Samaddar
Darwinism in George Meredith’s The Egoist
A substantial amount of modern scholarship on George
Meredith’s magnum opus The Egoist (1879) has either implicitly or
explicitly bypassed the ubiquity of Darwinian motifs in the novel. E. A.
Robinson, conceding that ‘in The Egoist the Comic Spirit and the
evolutionary philosophy are organically united,’ cites at length the
novel’s ‘Prelude’ to argue that ‘science taken in itself . . . is no cure-all
for Meredith’ (863). Leo J. Henkin espouses that ‘passing references
to the theory of evolution and to Darwinism are to be found in [The
Egoist]’, but the novel falls short in effecting an ‘assimilation of [these]
ideas’ (205, 208). Norman Kelvin acknowledges Meredith’s
proficiency in several contemporary empirical epistemologies, yet he
overlooks the centrality of The Descent of Man in The Egoist (21939). John Goode’s opinion on the ‘evolution of egoism’ is based,
improbably enough, on a declaration that Darwinism plays a relatively
insignificant function in The Egoist (230). Donald D. Stone, while
labelling the protagonist Willoughby Patterne a ‘Darwinian prehistoric
man’, comments that ‘[t]hose who would seek answers in Science
will be informed but not enlightened’ (133). Even Carolyn Williams’s
brilliant reading of Meredith’s deployment of natural selection as the
novel’s modus operandi is concerned more with the ‘transformative
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powers of nature and less with Darwinism’ (53). And Patricia O’Hara’s
recent analysis emphasises the collaborative impact of Victorian
anthropology and mythology on The Egoist, but remains silent as to
the presence of Darwinian elements in the novel (1-24).
The key objective of the present essay is to plausibly
demonstrate what the above-mentioned critics almost unanimously
dismiss: Meredith’s indebtedness to Charles Darwin in The Egoist.
Biographers of Meredith frequently discuss his optimistic welcoming
of the precepts put forward by Darwin (Lindsay 26-58; Collie 5-8).
When The Origin of Species appeared in 1859 – that annus mirabilis
of Victorian letters which also saw the publication of The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel and the consolidation of Meredith’s powers as a
novelist – Meredith immediately and enthusiastically embraced the
theory. Partly because they paralleled ideas he had already begun to
articulate on ethical and social levels, he accepted Darwin’s conclusions
without agony or even debate. He was never concerned, as so many
of his contemporaries were, with wringing faith from doubt and
redefining the relation of God to humanity in the cosmos. Viewed in
this context, it is not extravagant to claim that The Egoist was designed
by Meredith as a tutorial lecture on Darwinian thought. My aim is to
explicate how in The Egoist the notion of Darwinism is given its full
play, so that it becomes a unifying force which infiltrates every stratum
of the novel, enmeshing its narrative artifice, dramatis personae,
linguistic machinery, and philosophical axis in the webs of ‘regression’,
‘mate choice’, and ‘hereditary laws’. These are three fundamental
concepts popularised by Darwin in his scientific bestseller, The Descent
of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Regression, in
evolutionary biology, denotes the backward trajectory of a ‘character’
to one of its previous ancestral states; mate choice is distinguished as
a key Darwinian idea that acts on an organism’s ability to successfully
(often by any means necessary) copulate with a chosen partner; and
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hereditary laws are a set of genetic tenets relating to the transmission
of inherited characteristics from parent organisms to their children.
(Endersby 69-91; Gayon 240-266).
Scripted in imitation of the five-act neoclassical drama (Kelvin
106), the novel revolves around Sir Willoughby Patterne, a baronet
and amateur scientist obsessed with finding a wife whose physical
constitution will insure the production of a male heir and thus the
continuation of the Patterne line. The main action involves Constantia
Durham’s jilting of Willoughby, followed by Clara Middleton’s
desperate efforts in extricating herself from an engagement with him,
her subsequent love affair with the sagacious academic Vernon
Whitford, and ultimately a disillusioned Willoughby’s marriage proposal
to Laetitia Dale. It should be noted that Meredith’s integration of
Darwinian strains within the diegesis of the novel never, however,
diminishes his avowed objective of offering the readers an opportunity
to comprehend what ‘pure comedy’ is. Rather the comic vision, steeped
in irony, and Darwinism work together in the novel, testifying Meredith’s
cherished belief that there is always a possibility of observing a true
dialogue and reciprocity between the spheres of literature and science.
The Egoist dovetails a number of plot events documenting
Meredith’s consistent propensity to characterise Willoughby as the
agent of regression, the ‘original savage,’ ‘male in a giant form’ (232).
Willoughby is a ‘civilized Egoist’ who inadvertently enacts a
deteriorating drift to ‘the early principle of our being’:
The Egoist is our fountain-head, primeval man: the primitive is
born again, the elemental reconstituted. Born again, into new
conditions, the primitive may be highly polished of men, and
forfeit nothing save the roughness of his original nature. . . high
up the stream, and back he goes, “in pejus,” to the early
principle of our being. . . . He has become the civilized Egoist;
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primitive still, as sure as man has teeth, but developed in his
manner of using them. (398-99)
The premise for such a portrayal of Willoughby, Jonathan
Smith surmises, comes from Meredith’s understanding of Darwinism
(54-55). Although the ostensible focus of The Descent of Man is its
radical argument for the common lineage shared by both human beings
and the apes, within the purview of that argument Darwin also furnishes
a fascinating evolutionary parable about the growth of the human ethical
faculty. Darwin rightly speculates that the advancement of mankind is
predicated on the curbing of egotistical impulses and the cultivation of
the altruistic ones. Partially modelled on the ideologies of Auguste
Comte and Herbert Spencer, Meredith’s evolutionary schema simply
extends this Darwinian teleology of human evolution to the social
domain, positing his famous hypothetical triad of ‘blood-brain-spirit’.
In the ‘blood’/ primordial phase man is monitored by animal, selfish
impulses. When he begins to exercise his powers of reasoning and
contemplation, to operate sensibly for the collective welfare of the
society, he moves into the ‘brain’/ cultured phase. The ‘spirit’/ salvation
phase is the final phase left to be attained by man. While the passage
through these interlocked phases is by and large progressive in nature,
regression is always a menacing possibility. Meredith’s depiction of
Willoughby as outwardly striking but ethically bankrupt is a casestudy
in this idea of regression; in Willoughby the narcissistic impulses of
‘blood’ has eclipsed the judicious impulses of ‘brain’.
As a representative of the species that he feels bound to
perpetuate, Willoughby thinks of himself the blueprint of all that is
better, the metonymy of Englishness and of aristocracy, and he is as
beguilingly compelled to defend and broadcast his species’ traits as to
defend his own identity. For example, in America he preens the
chauvinism that he wears like a second skin, carrying ‘his English
standard over that continent,’ and acting the part of the ‘splendid young
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representative island lord’ (23). This inordinate hubris, snobbery and
class prejudice hints at the morbid prospect of Willoughby’s misreading
of the precarious signs of regression. Concentrating on the physical
atavism of others, he is oblivious to his own moral atavism. He is
incapable of understanding that the continuation of the dysfunctional
Patterne family depends on the implementation of the egoism of ‘brain,’
instead of egoism of ‘blood’ merely concealed with a veneer of
fineness. He oddly privileges the screen of urban sophistication,
monetary opulence and bodily magnetism rather than the construction
of ethical wellbeing. And according to Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson, a
social butterfly in the novel’s fashionable world, this screen of refinement
is itself a symptom of regression: ‘Growing too fine is our way of
relapsing upon barbarism’ (449). This is pellucid in Willoughby’s
condescending attitude towards the father-son duo – Lieutenant
Crossjay Patterne and young Crossjay, both of whom are pigeonholed
by him as anathemic forces of regression.
After learning about his daring nautical adventures, Willoughby
happily invites Lieutenant Patterne to the gala banquet celebrating his
betrothal to Constantia Durham. The Lieutenant arrives but is elderly
and loathsome. Worse, he is devoid of ‘the stamp of gentleman’: ‘The
visitor was repulsive. [He] carried a bag, and his coat-collar was up,
his hat was melancholy; he had the appearance of a bankrupt tradesman
absconding; no gloves, no umbrella’ (8). Having imagined a handsome
young man, Willoughby is almost petrified by his intrepid cousin’s
physical appearance:
He had been disappointed in the age, grossly deceived in the
appearance of the man claiming to be his relative in this
unseasonable fashion; and his acute instinct advised him swiftly
of the absurdity of introducing to his friends a heavy
unpresentable senior as the gallant Lieutenant of Marines, and
the same as a member of his family! He had talked of the man
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too much, too enthusiastically, to be able to do so. A young
subaltern, even if passably vulgar in figure, can be shuffled
through by the aid of the heroical story humorously exaggerated
in apology for his aspect. Nothing can be done with a mature
and stumpy Marine of that rank. Considerateness dismisses
him on the spot, without parley. (8)
Willoughby thus right away sends him home before anyone
can steal a glance of him. But in his fixation with Lieutenant Patterne’s
symptoms of physiological regression Willoughby is ignorant of the
intimidating symptoms of his own moral regression, vanity and garrison
mentality. His omission of Lieutenant Patterne from his social circle,
which he considers as necessary to avert regression, is regarded by
the comic imps of the novel’s Carlylean ‘Prelude’ as an indication of
that very regression: ‘They perceived in him [Willoughby] a fresh
development and very subtle manifestation of the very old thing from
which he had sprung’ (9). Identical feelings are harboured by
Willoughby vis-à-vis young Crossjay, Lieutenant Patterne’s son.
Interestingly, the boy’s Christian name ‘Crossjay’ links him to the
horticultural procedure of hybridity, which Darwin states in The Descent
of Man ‘in itself gives an impulse towards reversion’ and often renders
crossbreed varieties susceptible to their ‘primitive disposition’ (16).
Young Crossjay’s many bestial traits are hence a source of acute mental
despair for Willoughby. Vernon Whitford jestingly dubs Crossjay a
‘half monkey,’ and when Crossjay injures himself by falling from a
tree, Vernon says that the boy ‘is not so prehensile as he should be.
He probably in extremity relies on the tail that has been docked’ (120).
This dictum is reminiscent of Darwin’s contention that our pelvic os
coccyx is a vestigial organ which connects us with mammalian primates
possessing tails:
In man, the os coccyx . . . though functionless as a tail, plainly
represent this part in other vertebrate animals. At an early
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embryonic period it is free, and projects beyond lower
extremities . . . of a human embryo. Even after birth it has
been known, in certain rare and anomalous cases, to form a
small external rudiment of a tail. The os coccyx is short, usually
including only four vertebrae, all anchylosed together: and these
are in a rudimentary condition, for they consist, with the
exception of the basal one, of the centrum alone. They are
furnished with some small muscles, one of which . . . is a
rudimentary representation of the extensor of the tail, a muscle
which is so largely developed in many mammals. (38-39)
Willoughby relentlessly endeavours to impede the surfacing
of devolutionary simian features in Crossjay by casting him into a
country gentleman after his own image rather than permitting him to
follow his natural instincts (that of his Marine father). But in his attempts
to mould Crossjay into an aristocratic dandy Willoughby ends up
nurturing his rowdiness, a characteristic which patently indicates the
boy’s primordial descent.
The evolutionary protocol of the novel thus presents Willoughby
as the exemplar of a species – a biological sample examined under the
magnifying lenses of ‘the Comic Spirit’ (1), a paradigm, not of the
survival of the fittest but of extermination of the anachronistic, the
effete, and the unfit. Cultivating his egoism and secluding himself from
the common mass, the self-opinionated Willoughby removes himself
almost entirely from the natural order. In this sense Willoughby is, like
the double-blossom wild cherry tree, beautiful but sterile; he is, what
Carolyn Williams claims, the Vestal of civilization (73). He is indeed,
as he says, a ‘rara avis,’ (317) but within the context of evolution this
obsolescent status is not fortunate. Darwin proclaims that rarity is the
precursor of extinction and that each variety is pressed hardest by a
new variation within its nearest kindred. Willoughby, who in his egoism
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had presumed to extinguish those who vary from him, is himself that
rara avis for whom extinction is a factual danger.
Every muted or direct allusion to the onslaughts of regression
in The Egoist is located within the framework of romance: ‘The loveseason is the carnival of egoism, and it brings the touchstone to our
natures’ (110). The narrator rhetorically characterises this ‘love-season’
as a charged occasion when men are inexplicably vulnerable to the
dynamics of primitive desires; they act like animals, frantically striving
to outsmart other men for the gratification of their erotic appetites:
Jealousy of a woman, is the primitive egoism seeking to refine
in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion
of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his
paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for rage at the
intruder. The Egoist . . . had no bleeding victim beneath his
paw, but there was the sex to mangle. (232)
Competition in love therefore converts man into a ‘raging
beast’ (231), signalling his kinship with members of less advanced
species who are likewise devoured by the monster of egoism during
the breeding cycle. For example, Willoughby behaves like ‘so complete
a donkey’ (217), displays a claw, and becomes a wild fiend when
tortured by that ‘foreign devil,’ jealousy (230); he knows that if his
egoism fails, he will feel ‘less than man,’ and when he is ‘not able to
preserve a decent mask,’Willoughby himself is ‘amazed at the creature
he had become’(288); he feels like a ‘beaten dog’ when his schemes
are thwarted by women (185). Tellingly, Darwin uses the dog as ‘an
emblem of degradation’, of less than human states in an extensive
comparison of the dog to savage man in The Descent of Man (110).
Most of the leading periodicals of the day collectively agreed
that the two chapters on mate choice in The Descent of Man constitute
the fulcrum of Darwin’s thesis on human evolution (Smith 60). Broadly
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speaking, mate choice is defined as the struggle between the members
of one sex, usually males, for the possession of a member of the
opposite sex of the same species, following intra-sexual combat (male
to male rivalry) and inter-sexual selection (female’s optimal choice of
the potential male). Illustrating this two-prongedness of mate choice,
Jonathan Smith rightly points out:
When the antlers of a buck, the spurs of a cock, or the pincers
of a lobster are better adapted for battle, that male will be
able to defeat his male rivals and to breed more frequently
with the healthiest females. . . . There is another type of
competition, which, though non-violent, is frequently of equal
or greater importance. In this competition the male tries to
impress the female with his more brilliant colour, more
handsome plumage, or more beautiful voice. Here it is the
female who selects her mate, or at the very least has the option
of rejecting those who do not please her. (61)
Moving up the evolutionary rung from unicellular organisms
to multicellular ones, Darwin discovers that male enmity is sustained
largely by exhibitions of colour, voice, and performance instead of
fighting, and consequently that the female’s importance in the choice
process is duly accentuated. According to Ruth Bernard Yeazell,
Darwin’s representations of ‘nature’s courtship plots’ are ‘stories in
which deliberate choice leads to a satisfying conclusion – stories in
which modest females successfully exercise their peculiarly female
powers of taste and discrimination’ (36-37). This mode of behaviour
is normally exemplified by birds, a group which Darwin examined
more comprehensively than any other genus. In case of mammals,
conflict among the males is more recurrent, and the female action is
much more restricted. All the same, Darwin strives to include mammals
within his project, enunciating that it would be a bizarre incongruity if
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a female mammal, with her superior cerebral prowess, did not have
the same alternatives available to female birds.
The Egoist catalogues an entertaining fictionalization of
Darwinian mate choice in terms of Willoughby’s romantic liaison with
Clara. An oft-cited instance of Meredith’s exploitation of the lexicon
of mate choice to frame Willoughby’s rumination on the courtship
process is as follows:
A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreciated
Nature’s compliment in the fair one’s choice of you. We now
scientifically know that in this department of the universal
struggle, success is awarded to the better most. You spread a
handsomer tail than your fellows, you dress a finer top-knot,
you pipe a newer note, have a longer stride; she reviews you
in competition, and selects you. . . . In complimenting you,
she is the promise of a superior offspring. . . . Consequently a
successful pursuit and a wresting of her from a body of
competitors, tells you that you are the best man. (36)
Willoughby may be ‘a deeper student of Science than his
rivals,’ but Meredith is a deeper student still. The veiled satire of this
excerpt is directed not against the discourse of Darwinism but against
Willoughby’s complacent vulgarizations of it. For Willoughby courtship
is a sport in which the coveted trophy – that ‘fairest female’ chosen to
be mate – is conferred to the fittest. That is, Willoughby’s fatuous
appropriation of mate choice depends on a set of complementary
equations: male = active, female = passive.
Explaining intra-sexual combat between males, Darwin in The
Descent of Man writes: ‘Man is the [adversary] of other man; he
delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too
easily into selfishness’ (586). Each of these traits – competition,
ambition and selfishness – is the personality hallmark of Willoughby
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and his companion Horace de Craye. Willoughby’s zeal to surpass
others is so prominent that even in love ‘it was commonly the presence
of rivals which led him to the declaration of love’ (13). He is
wholeheartedly interested in Laetitia when the company of other young
suitors provokes him to propose to Constantia, just as he is impelled
to ask Clara for marriage when he finds himself among a pack of
eager rivals. Horace too ‘was of the race of amorous heroes who
glory in pursuing, overtaking, subduing: wresting the prize from a rival
. . . . Moreover, he had been matched against Willoughby . . . two or
three times’ (219). The belligerence that develops between the two
friends over Clara is therefore a sort of a tie-breaker in a best twoout-of-three (Smith 63).
Centrality of intra-sexual selection in the process of mating is
encapsulated by Meredith through his portrayal of Clara. Like Darwin,
it is perplexing for Meredith to gauge the degree of a woman’s ability
to elect a partner or, having elected, to alter her decision. Although
Darwin perceives that throughout the animal kingdom it is the female
who wields her authority to choose a mate, there is some uncertainty
as to just how influential the female’s authority is. The male, Darwin
admits, is the more active consort, first in vanquishing his rivals and
then in displaying his charms; the female with the rarest exceptions, is
less eager than the male and, though comparatively passive, generally
exerts some choice and accepts one male in preference to others. The
female must choose some male, even if he is merely the one which is
least distasteful to her. While the females in most of the orders have
the option of rejecting any particular male, they do not have the option
of rejecting all males (Darwin 237). However, for Willoughby the
female has no right to exercise her individual will in his case because
she will be mesmerised by his charisma: “The superlative is magnetic
to her. She may be looking elsewhere, and you will see – the superlative
will simply have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot help herself;
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it is her nature, and her nature is the guarantee for the noblest race of
men to come of her” (36). Here Willoughby swings from the idea of
being praised by the ‘fair one’s choice’, with its oblique implication of
feminine autonomy and power, to the idea that Clara has been picked
for him, offered to him as an award for his ‘suitability’ in a dog-eatdog world. As a matter of fact, he yearns for a female Willoughby.
This is best evident when rather than perceiving her real nature,
Willoughby reads Clara’s countenance ‘as the mirror of himself,’ the
kind of womanly beauty sculpted to complete his own masculine type
(44). According to his idea of the essentially feminine, she must be an
overwrought inanimate vessel, a chalice, a ritual cup to decorate and
contain his ‘I’. He ‘desired to shape her character to the feminine of
his own,’ and he deems his desire is capable of achieving its fleshand-blood manifestation because to him the female is totally malleable,
the ‘waxwork sex’ (150).
Furthermore, the conceited Willoughby does not rely solely
on the magnetism of his superiority to bind Clara in wedlock. He gains
leverage by impressing her father, susceptible as the latter is to
Willoughby’s riches and wine-cellar, and by using the pretext of his
mother’s sickness. Overwhelmed by these solicitations, Clara
reluctantly agrees ‘to enter the state of captivity’ by means of ‘a binding
ceremonial’ (38). The third-person omniscient narrator wryly remarks
that ‘thus did Miss Middleton acquiesce in the principle of selection’
(38). Other characters, especially Vernon, also employ the vocabulary
of mate choice, but in applying it to characters other than Willoughby
they challenge Willoughby’s rationalised, self-interested, warped
version of it. A case in point is the conversation between Vernon and
Laetitia when the former tells the latter that ‘science condescends to
speak of natural selection. Look at these! They are both graceful and
winning and witty, bright to mind and eye, made for one another’
(310). Here the threat to Willoughby is quiet vivid for Vernon is referring
to Clara and Horace, not Clara and Willoughby.
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Darwinism appears tempting to Willoughby primarily because
it can be used as a shield to vindicate the preservation of the Patterne’s
socioeconomic position. As Darwin in The Descent of Man notes, if
mate choice operates anywhere in civilized human societies, it is in the
patrician upper classes of Europe (609). For Darwin aristocracy is a
singular case. In the rest of the human world mate choice, viewed
exclusively in physical terms, no longer operates: the battle for women
has ceased, and class consciousness has become a superseding factor
in nuptial negotiations. But aristocratic men, particularly elder sons
like Willoughby, are fortunate in their mating habits as they are free to
choose bourgeois women like Clara for their corporeal allure. The
‘three mighty qualifications for a Patterne bride’ (15) are money, health
and beauty, but Willoughby is willing to sacrifice some of the money
for the health and beauty that insure present and future confirmation of
his own superiority. The conspicuous absence of mental acquirements
and moral virtues from Willoughby’s list further indicates that he is
reading Darwin at the surface level, for Darwin categorically argues
that the attraction of elite men for the mental charms, wealth, and
social standing of women actually interferes with the action of mate
choice.
The 1870s and 80s witnessed the publication of a plethora of
scientific texts penned by anthropologists, physicians, psychologists
and biologists who unequivocally placed women on a lower
evolutionary scale in comparing their mental abilities to those of men.
Anthropologist J. McGrigor Allan, for instance, declared that ‘man’s
realm is the intellect – woman’s the affections. In reflective power
woman is utterly unable to compete with man and will always fall
short of man’ (ccvi). He went on to sputter, ‘No distinction in the
minds of men and women! Nature flatly contradicts the absurd
assertion’ (ccvii). Reiterating a similar point of view, physician Henry
Maudsley observed that ‘women cannot rebel against the tyranny of
their organization . . . they do not and cannot stand on the same level
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as men’ (467). And psychologist George Romanes avowed that ‘on
merely anatomical grounds we should be prepared to expect a marked
inferiority of intellectual power in women’ (654-55). Darwin too made
brief but censorious pronouncements on female cognitive abilities.
Elaborating upon the elementary tenets of hereditary laws, Darwin in
The Descent of Man avers that certain ‘characters’ which develop,
like secondary sexual traits, during a person’s adulthood are duly
transferred by that person to the ‘offspring’ of the same sex. Since the
‘masculine features’ of determination, reason and pugnacity emerge
during a male individual’s adulthood, they are more successfully
transmitted to his male progeny than to his female progeny, and hence
‘man has become superior to woman’ (588). Nevertheless, Darwin
also professes that these ‘characters’ are present in a mature female
individual but in a dormant form, adding: “It is indeed fortunate that
the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails in
mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as
superior in mental endowment to women as the peacock is in
ornamental plumage to the peahen” (588). Such perspectives on the
issue of biological inheritance would seem to mean that gender
disparities could be expunged by educating women in a specific manner
and at a specific time. Darwin’s response is noteworthy for its clarity:
“In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she
ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance,
and to have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point;
and then she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her
adult daughters” (588). Thus, while Darwin buttresses many gender
stereotypes of his age by offering scientific warranting for the same,
he also, as the above citation shows, emphasizes that ‘dissimilar early
training’ received by boys and girls has led to the mental feebleness of
the latter (588). The lone solution then is to educate women well. If
girls are taught from an early age safe, proper and uplifting ideas, then
the daughters of such girls would automatically acquire these good
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traits in congruence with the mechanism of the hereditary laws. What
Darwin therefore circuitously articulates is that intellectual discrepancy
among the sexes is an outcome of nurture and not nature.
When The Egoist is seen from this standpoint, Meredith’s
religious adherence to Darwinism becomes apparent. He seems to
appropriate Darwin in countering centuries-old presumptions of an
inferior female, exposing the alarming flaws inherent in the culturally as
well as scientifically approved sexiest hierarchies. He charges men for
the miserable plight of women. The narrator of the novel furiously
announces that if women deliberately ‘indulge a craving to be fools’ it
is because men stipulate ‘total ignorance’ as ‘their pledge of purity’:
men ‘have reared [women] to this pitch’ (206), and this ‘pitch’ to
which women have been forcefully raised is a signpost of the echelon
of civilization in England, for ‘by their state is our civilization judged’
(232). For Meredith, as for Darwin, women must be given the
opportunity to realise their potential otherwise their inferiority (imposed
on them by men) would persist for many generations. In a letter dated
1905 he piquantly stated:
Since I began to reflect I have been oppressed by the injustice
done to women, the constraint put upon their natural aptitudes
and their faculties, generally much to the degradation of the
race. I have not studied them more closely than I have studied
men, but with more affection, a deeper interest in their
enfranchisement and development, being assured that women
of the independent mind are needed for any sensible degree
of progress. They will so educate their daughters, that these
will not be instructed at the start to think of themselves naturally
inferior to men, because less muscular and need not have
recourse to particular arts, chiefly feline, to make their way in
the world. (Quoted in Fernando 54)
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Meredith laments that men, being the self-appointed guardians
of morality, act as despots in their command over women. According
to him, the best method to ameliorate what he calls ‘the vestiges of
rawness and grossness to be found among us’ (3) is comedy, and thus
in his seminal ‘Essay on Comedy’ (1877) Meredith expounds that the
status of women is a marker not only of civilization but also of comedy:
Where [women] have no social freedom, Comedy is absent:
where they are household drudges, the form of Comedy is primitive:
where they are tolerably independent, but uncultivated, exciting
melodrama takes its place. . . . But where women are on the road to
an equal footing with men, in attainments and in liberty .there . . . pure
Comedy flourishes. (31-32).
It implies that if English ladies of the middle and upper classes
could attain some social sovereignty, then they might be equal to their
male counterparts in more than one respect. Clearly enough, Meredith
is here more optimistic than Darwin, and his emphasis on measuring
women on the beam-balance of intellectual ‘attainments’ and social
and economic ‘liberties’ situates him much more closer to J. S. Mill,
the famed campaigner of women’s rights. In fact, when John Morley
handed Meredith a copy of J. S. Mill’s proto-feminist The Subjection
of Women in 1869, Meredith ‘eagerly seized the book, fell to devouring
it in settled silence, and could not be torn from it all day’ (Smith 74).
Lloyd Fernando has convincingly argued that Darwinism serves
as the bedrock of Meredith’s feminism: Meredith’s wish to raise women
to ‘a pedestal of greater dignity was based on the philosophy of
evolution’ (50). Hence one of the trademark aspects of Meredith’s
feminism is his depiction of women as the pointers of evolutionary
progress – not only in their marital decisions but also in their own
status within a culture. Among his major works of fiction, this idea is
fruitfully epitomized by The Egoist. At one point in the novel Dr. Corney,
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‘the popular physician of the county and famous anecdotal wit,’ (94)
discreetly remarks that women should be trained to envisage a different
picture of masculinity that radically differs form the carved-in-wood
model of manliness. Clara’s temperamental affinity with Vernon and
her ultimate selection of him as her soulmate reflects the dawn of just
such a new ideal of strength and attractiveness. When in her initial
rendezvous with Vernon Clara imagines an ascent together in the Alps,
her imagination conveys the indomitable spirit of the new species –
Vernon as the ‘new man’ and Clara as the ‘new woman’. This episode
could be productively read as an example of Meredith’s egalitarian
views on the potential of the female sex. He firmly believes that women,
if given proper scope and encouragement, have the aptitude – the
‘birthmarks of individuality’ (135) – to guide humanity to the next
stage of development. If the world could be made to venerate the true
emancipated woman over what Meredith in Diana of the Crossways
(1885) calls ‘the grossness of the overdainty,’ great strides forward
could be made (19).
The British scientific community recently paid tribute to Charles
Darwin by naming their Mars explorer ‘Beagle 2,’ in memory of
Darwin’s momentous voyage, on board the Beagle, to the Galapagos
Islands. Today Darwin’s position is secure and unassailable but a
hundred years ago, at the fag end of the nineteenth century, there
were serious detractors ready to belittle him and his theories. In
response to one such attack by Hilaire Belloc, which claimed that
Darwin is exploded, Meredith wrote a spirited defence of Darwin
which was published in G. K. Weekly in 1902 (Fernando 52). Each
novel of Meredith bears testimony to the fact that he considered Darwin
as some sort of milestone in man’s intellectual history. And The Egoist
is not an exception. Nonetheless, pretending to renounce Darwinian
science in favour of the discipline of art (or the genre of novel),
Meredith in the ‘Prelude’ of the novel writes:
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We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote;
which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the enginebox of headlong strains; and Science introduced us to our
o’er hoary ancestry – them in the Oriental posture: whereupon
we set up a primeval chattering to rival the Amazon forest
nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our
disease was hanging on to us again, with the extension of a
tail. We had it fore and aft. We were the same, and animals
into the bargain. That is all we got from Science. (2)
Certainly that is not all Meredith got from science. The
‘Prelude’ introduces his putative reading audience to an imaginative
context which unambiguously integrates the discourse of science but
does so by hemming it within multiple folds of ironic U-turns. The
novelist’s restrained irony here is not levelled against evolutionary theory
itself but against those self-deluded egoists who misuse it for their
own vested interests. The poet of evolution is a novelist of evolution
too, and in The Egoist Meredith presents a story which humorously
chronicles the intervention of three Darwinian forces – regression,
mate choice, and hereditary laws – into the ‘drawing room of civilized
men and women,’ (1), the parochial aristocracy of Victorian England.
Works Cited
Allan, J. McGrigor. ‘On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men
and Women.’ Journal of the Anthropological Society 7
(1869).
Collie, Michael. George Meredith: A Biography. Toronto: Toronto
University Press, 1974
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation
to Sex. New York: Hurst and Company, n.d.
Endersby, Jim. ‘Darwin on Generation, Pangenesis, and Sexual
Selection.’ The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Eds.
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Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2003.
Fernando, Lloyd. “New Women” in the Late Victorian Novel.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.
Gayon, Jean. ‘From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology’. The
Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Eds. Jonathan Hodge
and Gregory Radick. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Goode, John. ‘The Egoist: Anatomy or Striptease?’ Meredith Now:
Some Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Fletcher. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Henkin, Leo J. Darwinism in the English Novel: 1860-1910. New
York: Corporate Press, 1940. Kelvin, Norman. A Troubled
Eden: Nature and Society in the Works of George
Meredith.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1961.
Lindsay, Jack. George Meredith: His Life and Work. London: The
Bodley Head, 1956.
Maudsley, Henry. ‘Sex in Mind and in Education.’ Fortnightly Review
21 (1874).
Meredith, George. Diana of the Crossways. London: Russell and
Russell, 1968.
.......... ‘Essay: On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic
Spirit.’ The Works of George Meredith. London: Constable
and Company, 1909.
.......... The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1902.
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O’Hara, Patricia. ‘Primitive Marriage, Civilized Marriage:
Anthropology, Mythology, and The Egoist.’ Victorian
Literature and Culture 20 (1992).
Robinson, E. Arthur. ‘Meredith’s Literary Theory and Science: Realism
Versus the Comic Spirit.’ PMLA 53 (1938).
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Dinesh Panwar
Romanes, George J. ‘Mental Differences Between Men and Women.’
Nineteenth Century 21 (1887).
Smith, Jonathan. ‘‘The Cock of Lordly Plume’: Sexual Selection and
The Egoist.’ Nineteenth Century Literature 50 (1995-96).
Stone, Donald D. Novelists in a Changing World: Meredith, James
and the Transformation of English Fiction in the 1880’s.
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Williams, Carolyn. ‘Natural Selection and Narrative Form in The
Egoist.’ Victorian Studies 27 (1983).
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. ‘Nature’s Courtship Plots in Darwin and Ellis.’
Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1989).
Oblique Use of Language in
Pinter’s The Birthday Party
Pinter is a very gifted playwright who holds that the melody
and rhythm of speech communicate meaning as much as the content
of what is said. He also holds that spoken language is only the trip of
the iceberg of meaning and that characters frequently mean more or
mean differently from what they say out loud. He selects words and
arranges his syntax with great care, so that his dialogue has a very
particular rhythm and so that the audience share the characters
sensitivity to a meaning underlying the words. His characters speak in
everyday vocabulary, but his dialogue is very far from what you’d
hear if you tape-recorded everyday speech. He achieves his effects
by introducing pauses and silences into the dialogue that make us
aware there is more being meant than is being said. As a result we
have the same unsetting experience as the characters in his plays, and
we become agitated and nervously aware of a ferocious and unnerving
disjointedness about the dialogue. In this regard The Birthday Party
is a typical Pintereseque play. The dialogue’s are colloquial and
perfectly realistic, they are economical and tightly controlled. Cascoigne
critically points out about the play: The language of the play The
Birthday Party 1985 is, at its best, a superb disillation of ordinary
conversation, both in rhythem and content.
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The play, The Birthday Party starts with silence, if this is
held for a moment the audience will wait for Petey to speak. But
Pinter breaks the silence with words from an unseen source, so
gathering a further Curiosity.
MEG.
Pause
PETEY.
Pause
PETEY.
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
MEG.
PETEY.
Pause
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
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Well then, he can’t be up.
Haven’t you seen him down.
I’ve only just come in.
He must be still asleep.
(Pinter 9)
Is that you, Petey?
Is that you?
What?
Is that you?
Yes, its me.
What? (Her face appears at the batch). Are you
back?
Yes
I’ve got your cornflakes ready (She disappears
and reappears) Here’s your cornflakes.
(Pinter, The Birthday Party ,5-8)
Pinter uses the commonest phrases in human speech, with
extreme care and the dialogues in his plays flow like waves rising and
falling with the undercurrent of dramatic tension. For example, the
dialogue in The Birthday Party, though comic, offers a withheld threat
and makes spectators uneasy:
“MEG.
PETEY.
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Have you been working hard this morning?
No. Just stocked a few of the old chars. Cleaned
up & bit.
Is it nice out?
Very nice.
Is Stanley up yet?
I don’t know. Is he?
I don’t know. I haven’t seen him down yet.
She looks round the room, stands, goes to the sideboard and
takes a pair of socks from a drawer, collects wool and a needle and
goes back to the table.
What time did you go out this morning, Petey?
PETEY.
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
PETEY.
MEG.
Same time as usual.
Was it dark?
No. It was light.
(Beginning to dark). But sometimes you go out in
the morning and it’s dark
That’s in the winter.
Oh, in winter.
Yes, it gets tight later in winter.
Oh.”
(Pinter 10-11)
But habituated to the monstrosities of Ibsen, critics, at first,
did not understand the language of Pinter’s plays, and massacred, in
almost one voice, his first full-length play. The Birthday Party, for its
origenality of theme and dialogue, as they, were two much for them.
Scruton points out:
What is in fact pure, distilled, social utterance, was passed off
as ‘theatre of the Absurd’, whose merits were no different
from those of Eugene Ionesco. It seemed impossible that
people, real people, should speak like this, that they should
walk about the stage without once mentioning some weight of
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moral isolation, some individual suffering or tragic destiny.
Slowly, however, the public began to accept the new tones of
voice (Scruton, 37-38)
GOLDBERG. You need a long convalescence.
McCANN.
A change of air..... We’ll renew your season
ticket. (Pinter, 92)
Of course, it was a long chalk from Shakespeare. The idioms
of Pinter or Beckett were as adaptable as Falstaff’s bluster or Hamlet’s
grief. One could use them at parties, at meals, in the factory, on the
bus, one could pick up girls with them, nor did they let one down in
bed. The dramatist gave not only audience, meaning, social identity,
but also a terrible consciousness of others through the words of his
characters.
Stanley has been made into a different personality on a day, a
birthday:
In The Birthday Party Pinter has successfully created a drama
of human relations at the level of language itself. The playwright is
known less for what he intends to convey thematically than for how he
controls dramatic dialogue in order to achieve that compulsive force
his drama exercises over an international audience. “A Pinter Play’, as
Louis C. Cordon aptly points out, “exists at the level of language as
opposed to plot” ( Cordon 04). Pinter’s first full length play The
Birthday Party fulfills the condition. The play derives its humour from
verbal repetition and incongruity. Here as in Pinter’s other plays, the
plot is light and can be stated in a few words. John Russel Brown
rightly observes:” More important than story-line, for Pinter, is scope
and occasion for his characters to work through, and work out, the
potentialities of their being end relationships” (Brown,97).
True to its title The Birthday Party contains a birthday party
which does not refer casually to the birth anniversary of someone, it
does refer to the actual day of a ‘particular birth’. Stan’s birthday
party at Meg’s place registers his new birth into a new situation. The
henchmen turn Stanley into what McCann calls “a new man” (p. 91).
Stanley is reborn in the hands of these two sinister figures.
Pinter’s dramatic dialogue drives the point home:
GOLDBERG. You’ll be re-oriented.
McCANN.
You’ll be rich.
GOLDBERG. You’ll be adjusted. (Pinter, 93)
It has been shown earlier that a conscious Stanley has all along
refused to accept the day as his birthday: “This isn’t my
birthday, Meg” (Pinter, 46). On learning from Meg that it is
Stanley’s birthday, Goldberg asks not impulsively but
“thoughtfully” if they are going to have a party, then he informs
McCann. “There’s a gentlemen living here. He’s got a birthday
today, and he’s ‘forgotten’ all about it. So we’re going to
‘remind’ him. We’re going to give him a party” (p. 43). Meg
initially has no intention that there should be any party at all:
MEG.
A party?
Pause
MEG.
(her eyes wide) No.
GOLDBERG. You must have one. (He stands) We’ll have a
party, eh?
(Pinter, 42)
Goldberg’s decision is deliberate and he at once assumes
command of the lodging house, as it were. He ‘stands’ and by this
deliberate physical action establishes his confident hold.
In The Birthday Party anagnorisis, or the dramatic moment
when truth is discovered (in the play, it is when Stanley comes to
know of the arrival of the two liquidators from the organization);
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denouement, or the final unfolding of a plot – the point at which the
audience expectation about what will happen in a play is eventually
either satisfied or denied (in this play, it is Stanley’s transportation to
unknown ‘Monty’); and crisis, or the turning point of a vitally decisive
moment (here, it comes when Stanley is ushered in by McCann having
been ‘silenced’ and ‘treated-over’) are all attained by an expert dialogic
design. The characters plan their conversational strategies to achieve
inter-personal relationships which they are supposed to establish.
Through a convoluted language pattern, Pinter demonstrates how the
characters exchange cryptically meaningful ideas with one another and
how the ongoing interaction continues. Austin E. Quigley rightly points
out in this regard: “the point to be grasped about the verbal activity in
a Pinter play is that language is not so much a means of referring to
structure in personal relationships as a means of creating it” (Quigley,66)
It is highly interesting to examine the subtle ways in which
dramatic meanings are created by the playwright, dexterously
organized, consolidated, grafted and realized in The Birthday Party.
In Pinter’s drama implied meaning with an undertone of ambiguity is
quite manifest in his dialogic design through interactive processes. Pinter
has attained in this play a unique dynamism by a clever manipulation
of the exchange-pattern of the dialogue. In his lingual system he stresses
four different aspects of language – tension, intensity, tempo and
rhythm. The unit of rhythm in the context of dialogue lies in brief
exchanges amongst characters, and their subtle moves are also
precisely illustrated through lingual variations In The Birthday Party
the terse exchange-structure of the dialogue plays a vital role in creation
a tense dramatic atmosphere of menace and the absurd. Changes
from one to two-part or three-part exchange structures, in tune with
the tension underlying the action, are one of the major linguistic elements
in The Birthday Party. This causes the proceedings either to follow
slowly, or to reach a climax, or to form a contrast. The two-part
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dialogue exchange pattern at the beginning, and at the end, stand in
sharp contrast to the one-part exchange in the middle. Closely related
to rhythm is the variation of dramatic structure that is expressed by
tempo. Different rhythmic patterns create changes in the tempo of the
dramatic dialogue, either cutting down or speeding up the on-stage
activities. The movement of a conversation can be leisurely, because
of the length of the responding moves. It can also be quick with the
short and brisk responding moves. We may cite an example to illustrate
the change in movement:
MEG.
Was it nice?
STANLEY.
What?
MEG.
The fried bread.
STANLEY.
Succulent...... What about some tea?
MEG.
Do you want some tea? .... Say please.
STANLEY.
Please. (p. 27)
The passage shows that the tempo of this dialogue between
Meg and Stanley is quite leisurely. Responses are quite in
tune with the questions. But in the following set of dialogue,
the movement changes:
STANLEY.
MEG.
STANLEY.
MEG.
STANLEY.
MEG.
STANLEY.
MEG.
STANLEY.
MEG.
You haven’t heard it?
No.
(advancing) They’re coming today.
Who?
They’re looking for someone.
They’re not.
They’re looking for someone. A certain
person.
(hoarsely) No, they’re not.
Shall I tell you who they’re looking for?
No.
(Pinter, 33-34)
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Here the tempo of the dialogue has become faster and far too
rapid than the preceding quoted passage. The response-move of the
exchanges have become very sharp and poignant, revealing linguistically
that a tension has been gradually building up, and at the same time, a
latent menace is slowly developing over the thematic atmosphere. This
is where the language of Pinter’s absurd drama vertically cuts the
horizontal line of the theme, and the grotesqueness of the dramatic
situation establishes itself, having brought about an understandable
rapprochement between the form and the content. The moment Meg
breaks the news to Stanley that two visitors are about to arrive, Stanley
loses his cool – objectively demonstrated by a carefully delved dialogic
design:
STANLEY. I don’t believe it.
MEG.
It’s true.
STANLEY. (moving to her) You’re saying it on purpose....
(grinding his cigarette) when was this? .... who
are they? ..... Didn’t he (Petey) really you their
names? (pacing the room) Here? They wanted
to Stanley: come?..... It’s a false alarm. A false
alarm. (He sits at the table).
(Pinter, 30-31)
All Stanley’s action like excitedly moving to Meg, grinding his
cigarette, pacing the room are significant dramatic language to denote
the suppressed menace and mounting tension in Stanley. His sitting at
the table, as he does so, indicates beyond doubt that Stanley is nervous
and frightened too. When, after the arrival of the two strangers, Stanley
gathers from Meg that one of them is called Goldberg, he silently
responds by again sitting slowly at the table:
STANLEY. Then what are they? Come on. Try to remember.
MEG.
Goldberg.
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Oblique
Use
of Language in Pinter’s The Birthday Party
183
STANLEY. Goldberg?
MEG.
That’s right. That was one of them. (Stanley
slowly sits at the table).
(Pinter, 45)
Stanley’s gesture upholds his utter helplessness and defeat,
creating a superb theatre dialogue. When asked by Meg if he knows
them, Stanley avoids the pointed question and maintains silence.
Do you know them?
Stanley does not answer.
Stan, they won’t wake you up, I promise.
Stanley sits still.
They won’t he here long. Stan.
Stanley sits still.
(Pinter, 44-45)
Here the dialogue has been masterly handled by the dramatist.
“They won’t wake you up” is an example of a subtle irony. For
Goldberg and McCann do wake Stanley up from his slumber, in the
make-believe world he has slipped into. Similarly, irony is struck in
“they won’t be here long,” for, in actuality, even in their short stay in
the lodge, the twosome would get Stanley “reorientated” for good.
Stanley no more is to remain a nonconformist when he is taken to the
mysterious “Monty”. The dramatic sequence conveys to the audience
that the mention of the name Goldberg has unnerved and unsettled
Stanley – one of Pinter’s remarkable strategies to uncover nakedness.
Dialogic design is a crucial factor to recognize in exploring
Pinter’s theatrical stratagems, and having provided ways of enjoying
and appreciating The Birthday Party, though more often than not in a
non-explicatory manner. When the play was first presented in England
and also in the United States most of the spectators, ordinary ones as
well as the academics, tumbled against the incomprehensibility of
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actions and speeches. Yet they did not fail to notice that the play created
“sop riveting a world of its own” (Dukore, 02) with a distinctive and
rash dramatic idiom that they resolved to decode Printer’s theatrical
message. A bell was tolled over The Birthday Party in introducing
and welcoming an altogether new language-oriented drama, hitherto
unrealized. The Birthday Party launched a new drama of subtle
sensibility, underlined by the menace and the absurd, where form and
content are expertly welded into a consolidated composite unit, so
much so that the effect becomes almost akin to that of poetry – a
wholeness and universality of perfection of a highly conscious yet
articulate poetry, its force being rather aural than visual. Explaining
this true-blue poetic quality of Pinter’s drama, the famous Pinterdirector Sir Peter Hall comments: “I actually believe that Beckett and
Pinter are poetic dramatists in the proper sense of the word: they have
a linear structure and a formal structure which you’d better just observe
– don’t learn it wrong, don’t speak it wrong, you can’t, you mustn’t”
(Scott,48).
The Birthday Party often attains poetic quality in
communicating feelings, emotions and experiences of its characters.
Pinter’s acting career has helped him in writing dialogue marked by
virtuosity and excellent verbal control. When Petey introduces Stanley
to Goldberg in Act II, the latter reminisces poetically: “Humming away
I’d be, past the children’s playground. I’d tip my hat to the toddlers,
I’d give a helping hand to a couple of stray dogs, everything came
natural. I can see it like yesterday. The sun falling behind. The dog
stadium. Ah!” (Pinter, 53). Here the meaning and the dramatic effect
are closely related to the evocative power of words, which is akin to
poetry. One of the undeniable influences on Pinter is that of T.S. Eliot,
an earlier pioneer playwright who experimented in dramatic forms
during the first half of the twentieth century, especially in dramatic
language to an appreciable extent. Eliot’s influence is quite obvious in
The
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Oblique
Use
of Language in Pinter’s The Birthday Party
185
repetitions of phrases in a Pinter-play. In The Birthday Party Pinter
catches hold of a word or phrase and then repeats the same over
succeeding sentences, keeping it up in the air almost like a bobbing
ball. These chosen words or phrasal idioms, taken together with the
aptly pitched intonation of the actor, act as a unit of tonal composition
and accordingly create a feeling, a perceptible imagery or reaction in
the audience, to infuse into them an appealing communication:
STANLEY.
MEG.
STANLEY.
MEG.
STANLEY.
MEG.
STANLEY.
MEG.
Where’s my tea?
I took it away. You didn’t want it.
...... You took it away?
I took it away.
What did you take it away for?
You didn’t want it.
Who said I didn’t want it?
You did.
(Pinter, 31)
It is not what is spoken literally in the passage that matters,
what is important is to comprehend that which remains locked within
this lingual exchange, not being communicate on-the-surface, though
exercising a weighty bearing on the entire on-stage situation with a
strong sense of inadequacy of language. Listening to the dialogue we
gather that Stanley is gripped by a definite tension that has made him
peevish and woolly. Invisible menace hovers over the exchange of
words. Stanley was told initially by Meg that the tea was taken away
as he didn’t want it, yet Stanley chose to adopt silly repetitions. Not
that he was not aware that he refused to accept the tea earlier, not that
he wanted a rational answer from Meg, but that the repetitious dialogue
was just a mental process to follow through in shielding him, for the
time being, from a disturbing, gnawing fear which has already upset
his equipoise since when he heard about the two strangers inquiring
after this down and out boarding house. Such a repetitious passage at
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once confirms Pinter’s notion about the function of a stage dialogue:
“A play is not an essay..... Language..... is a highly ambiguous business.
So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.”
Brown, 12-13). Below the words spoken by Stanley Webber remains
another world-that of his obscure past-known to himself, but not
communicated to the audience. Memory of his past torments him. His
repetitions are sure off-shoots of his suppressed unsettling fear. His
questions are mere plays to gain time to get hold of himself over his
distressing fear. Pinter’s dialogue shows his use of language in
connection with search, surprise and the misty background of a
character. John Russell Brown pertinently observes: “Given that the
dramatist is concerned with eventual disclosure here, in describing his
characters’ ‘conversations,’ Pinter touches upon the dangerous, or
precarious, nature of his plays and their stunning, appalled and held
(or arrested) climaxes. From the first world spoken on stage, the hunt
is on” (Brown, 19).
Works Cited
Brown, John Russell. Theatre Language. London: Penguin, Allen
Lane, 1972.
Dukore, Bernard F. Harold Pinter . London: MacMillan, 1982.
Gordon, Lois G. Stratagems to Uncover Nakedness: The Drama
of Harold Pinter. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1969.
Quingley, Austin E. The Pinter Problem. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1975.
Scott, Michael (ed.)”Directing Pinter” (1974) in Harold Pinter: A
Selection of Critical Essays. London: MacMillan, 1986.
Scruton, Roger ‘Pinter’s Progress’, Encounter, Vol. LX, No. 1,
(January, 1983).
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The Vedic Path. Vol. LXXXV (No 3 & 4) Jul.-Sep./Oct.-Dec. 2011
Manoj Kumar
Cosmopolitanism in
RohintonMistry’s Family Matters
Etymologically the word ‘Cosmopolitan’ derives from Greek
cosmos (world) + polis (city, people, citizenry) which describes a
universal love of humankind as a whole, regardless of nation. It stands
for citizenship of the world. It refers to a taste or consideration for
cultures besides one’s own culture of origin. As far as cosmopolitanism
is concerned it contains that all humanity belongs to a single moral
community. It has also been used to describe a wide variety of important
views in moral and socio-political philosophy. The nebulous core shared
by all cosmopolitan views is the idea that all human beings, regardless
of their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to a single
community, and that this community should be cultivated. Different
versions of cosmopolitanism envision this community in different ways,
some focusing on political institutions, others on moral norms or
relationships, and still others focusing on shared markets or forms of
cultural expression. The philosophical interest in cosmopolitanism lies
in its challenge to commonly recognized attachments to fellow-citizens,
the local state, parochially shared cultures, and the like. (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Emphasizing the unity of humankind
over its division into different states and peoples, by arguing that humans
are destined by Nature to be sociable and live in harmony, Erasmus
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pleaded for national and religious tolerance and regarded like-minded
people as his compatriots. According to Kant, all rational beings are
members in a single moral community. They are analogous to citizens
in the political (republican) sense in that they share the characteristics
of freedom, equality, and independence, and that they give themselves
the law. Their common laws, however, are the laws of morality,
grounded in reason (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Cosmopolitans believe that there is a burden on all the people
to cultivate and improve humanity as a whole and to provide enrichment
in the best way that they can. This ties into ideas of brotherhood of
humanity, and how the human race is one entity that humans must all
band together to support. It is a major friend and a necessary element
of the human rights movement. As Klitou argues that a cosmopolitan
“Human identity” is as necessary for the triumph of human rights, as a
European identity is for a political European Union (Wikipedia, the
free Encyclopedia).
Cosmopolitanism shares some aspects of universalism –
namely the globally acceptable notion of human dignity that must be
protected and enshrined in international law. Thus, a “cosmopolitan
declaration of human rights” would be defined in terms of negatives
that no one could disagree upon. In addition, cosmopolitanism calls
for equal protection of the environment and against the negative side
effects of technological development. A cosmopolitan world would
consist of a plurality of states, which would use global and regional
consensus to gain greater bargaining power against opponents.
Under the influence of the American Revolution, and especially
during the first years of the French Revolution, cosmopolitanism
received its strongest impulse. During the years the terms
‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘world citizenship’ were often used not as labels
for determinate philosophical theories, but rather to indicate an attitude
of open-mindedness and impartiality. A cosmopolitan was someone
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Cosmopolitanism
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who was not subservient to a particular religious or political authority,
someone who was not biased by particular loyalties or cultural
prejudice. Furthermore, the term was sometimes used to indicate a
person who led an urbane life-style, or who was fond of traveling,
cherished a network of international contacts, or felt at home
everywhere. In this sense the Encyclopédie mentioned that
‘cosmopolitan’ was often used to signify a “man of no fixed abode, or
a man who is nowhere a stranger (Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy).
The present research paper entitled “Cosmopolitanism in
Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters” aims at tracing the cosmopolitan
features in India and Canada as depicted in Mistry’s novel Family
Matters. These features of cosmopolitanism are appearing in literature
written in English irrespective of any community. Before we deal with
the theme as it appears in the novel it would be in the fitness of things
first to encounter with the main events of the Family Matters, third
novel of Mistry, which was published in 2002 and won the Kiriyama
Pacific Rim Book Prize amongst many other honors.
The story revolves around 79 year-old Nariman Vakeel, a
former professor of English whose health is degenerating as a result of
Parkinsons(a disease of the nervous system that gets worse over a
period of time and causes the muscles to become weak and the limbs
to shake). Nariman’s youthful love affair with a Christian woman, which
led inadvertently to the death of the Parsi wife, his parents pressured
him to marry, haunts him in his declining years and sours his relationship
with his morally censorious step-children, Coomy and Jal, who are
also his primary caregivers. When they successfully execute a plan to
move the burden to his natural daughter, Roxana, her family is forced
to adjust their lives and their already strapped finances to his care.
Despite the increasing difficulties Roxana’s family faces and the
hardships resulting from ill-hatched plans to remedy them, the shift to
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their household is a moment of potential. However, the end of the
novel contains that moment of potential when Roxana’s husband Yezad
tries to escape his feelings of guilt over the death of his beloved Hindu
employer by retreating into his religion. This escape from emotion and
responsibility re-invokes the rule of strict Parsi protocol and is
complemented by the family’s shift with Nariman back to his original
home, the site of so much sadness and tragedy.
In Family Matters, Bombay has not only been treated as a
native place where he was born but as a cosmopolitan city which is a
cultural melting pot ready to accept all sorts of people who are displaced
from their natural habitat or nation or birthplace. There is an instance
in the novel where Bombay is called a religion. “Bombay is much
more than a city. Bombay is a religion” (Mistry,361). When questioned
as to how to account for the blemishes, slums or broken sewers and
corrupt politicians, the answer is:
I don’t think crime or corruption can be called a blemish.
More a cancerous tumour. When a person has a cancer in
their body, they should bloody well fight it . . . hating the cancer,
attacking it with aggressive methods is futile. Holistically, you
have to convince, your tumour, with love and kindness, to
change its malign to benign one (Mistry,361).
In the words of Rohinton Mistry “Shakespeare is like Bombay.
In them both, we can find whatever we need- they contain the universe”
(Mistry,252). He goes even to the extent of praising Bombay without
reservethe beautiful city of seven islands, this jewel by the Arabian
sea, this reclaimed land, this ocean gift transformed into ground
beneath our feet, this enigma of cosmopolitanism where races
and religious live side by side and check by jowl in peace and
harmony, this diamond of diversity, this generous goddess who
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Cosmopolitanism
191
embraces the poor and the hungry and the huddled masses,
this dear, dear city now languishes – I don’t exaggerate – like
a patient in intensive care put there by small selfish men who
wanted destroy it because there coarseness cannot bear
something so grand so fine (Mistry,215).
There is a classical example in the following situation, when,
one evening while Yezad and his shop owner Mr. Kapur were relaxing
with glasses of beer and when Yezad had finished, Mr. Kapur pours
out some beer from his own glass on to the other’s asking him to
share from his glass, saying:
you see how we two are sitting here, sharing? That is how
people now lived in Bombay. That is why Bombay has
survived floods, disease, plague, water shortage, bursting drains
and sewers, all the population pressures. In her heart there is
room for everyone who wants to make a home here
(Mistry,159).
In this passage Mistry demonstrates cosmopolitanism and
underlying humanity of a Bombay that, despite all its fanaticism and
corruption, provides a haven to all those who drift into the city,
regardless of caste, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Not only do people
share homes in Bombay, but in places like Mr. Kapur’s shop they are
also celebrating all festivals, as a means of acknowledging unity in
diversity. “Diwali, Christmas, Id, your Parsi Navroze, Baisakhi, Buddha
Jayanti, Ganesh Chaturti everything” (Mistry,159). There is an example
of Christmas, which is celebrated by the entire shop owners in their
own ways.
The Jai Hind Book Mart featured a barefoot Santa in
padmasana, an English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita open
in his lap, perched upon his nose were half-moon reading
glasses. Rasoi Stainless Steel had an aproned Santa stirring a
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large cooking utensil. The Bhagat Opticals Santa wore stylish
reflector sun-glasses(Mistry,304).
In the novel Mr. Kapur expounded on the virtues of a
cosmopolitan society and the advantage of celebrating festivals of all
faiths and religions. Moreover, there is an argument, put forth by Kapur,
which would be Mistry’s message to the so-called displaced, alienated,
marginalized people. All this is a feeling, which is there in the mind;
once the mindset is changed and we choose to establish a sense of
belongingness and commitment, a cultural acceptance, or cultural unity
can be arrived at. The following passage by Kapur elucidates this
powerful opinion. Kapur claimed his love for Bombay was special,
far exceeding what a born-and-bred Bombayite could feel. Mr. Kapur
said:
It’s the difference between being born into a religion and
converting to it . . . The convert takes nothing for granted. He
chooses, thus his commitment is superior. What I feel for
Bombay you will never know. It’s like the pure love for a
beautiful woman, gratitude for her existence, and devotion for
her living presence. If Bombay were a creature of flesh and
blood, with my blood type, Rh negative-and very often I think
she is-then I would give her a transfusion down to my last
drop, to save her life (Mistry,152).
It is a sense of belongingness that resuscitates and rejuvenates
the so-called alienated, deprived, and marginalized people. One more
condition is essential and that is a strong sense of trust. The need for
trust is explained in the following passage, which is a mundane sight in
the daily grind of a city like Bombay:
A train was leaving, completely packed, and the men running
alongside gave up. All except one. I kept my eyes on him
because the platform was coming to an end. Suddenly he
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193
raised his arms. And people on the train reached out and
grabbed them. What were they doing, he would be dragged
and killed, I thought! A moment later, they had lifted him off
the platform. Now his feet were dangling outside the
compartment, and I almost screamed to stop the train. His
feet pedaled the air. There he was, hanging his life literally in
the hands of strangers. And he had put it there. He had trusted
them. More arms reached out and held him tight in their
embrace. It was a miracle-suddenly he was completely safe.
So safe, I wondered if I had over reacted to the earlier danger.
But no, his position had been truly perilous for a few seconds
(Mistry,160).
In this vast expanse of our universe there are people who are
ready to reach out and help one another. This phenomenon is amply
elucidated when people reach out to help one another as in the train
incident:
Whose hands were they, and whose hand were they grasping?
Hindu, Muslim, Dalit, Parsi, Christian? No one knew and no
one cared. Fellow passengers, that’s all they were . . . My
eyes were filled with tears of joy, because what I saw told me
there was still hope for this great city(Mistry,160).
Here the hope for the city of Bombay does not mean to relate
it to a city only. In the novel Mistry gives another kind’s description of
the citizens of Bombay. “Bombay makes room for everybody.
Migrants, businessmen, perverts, politicians, holy men, gamblers,
beggars, wherever they come from, whatever caste or class, the city
welcomes them and turns them into Bombayites” (Mistry,159). It is
for the whole planet, which has become a global image. Problems will
be there whether one is in Delhi, Bombay or in Toronto or Quebec.
This is explicit in the following revelation by Yezad:
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His dream for an end to this ape-man commute had led him to
apply for immigration to Canada. He wanted clean cities, clean
air, plenty of water, train with seats for everyone, where people
stood in line at bus stops and said please, after you, thank
you. Not just the land of milk and honey, also the land of
deodorant and toiletry. (Mistry,137).
Mistry suggests to approach the destination of your heart’s
desire with an open mind, without high expectation, to approach it
with a sense of belongingness and a sense of acceptance. Thus the
world shall be a macrocosm of opportunities and wonder. There are
instances of Yezad’s firm belief in Parsi history and Zoroastrianism
and he used to go to the fire temple whenever he was depressed or in
doubt. Moreover his bedroom was filled with volumes about Parsi
history and Zoroastrianism. So it is faith, which keeps a displaced
going.
Mistry’s sentiments on the cosmopolitan features are best
expressed in Mr. Kapur’s observation: “Bombay endures because it
gives and it receives. Within this warp and weft is woven the special
texture of its social fabric, the spirit of tolerance, acceptance, generosity”
(Mistry,159).So it is love, adjustment, accommodation, kindness and
a positive attitude of acceptance and belongingness that family, society
and nations are built and so shall they flourish.
Like India, Canada has also become conspicuous for its
cosmopolitan features. These features are explicitly discernible in the
novel. Mistry shows Canada as a multicultural nation in which
Canadians are not of any one cultural background, race or heritage.
Canadians today reflect a vast diversity of cultural heritages and racial
groups. Mistry holds that this multicultural diversity is a result of
centuries of immigration. “The generosity of the Canadian dream makes
room for everyone, for a multitude of languages and cultures and
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Cosmopolitanism
195
peoples. In Canada’s willingness to define and redefine itself continually,
on the basis of inclusion, lies its greatness, its promise, its hope”
(Mistry,249). Mistry also comments on Canada’s multicultural policy.
It is a “policy that in the beauty of its wisdom did not demand the
jettisoning of the old before letting them share in the new” (Mistry,249).
In few, Rohinton Mistry successfully embedded the cosmopolitan
features in his novel from micro to the macro without fail. He depicts
them deeply and heartily webbed in a nice thread. He gives voices to
the feelings and emotions, tears and doubts, hopes and aspirations of
the people of India and Canada. It is indeed that both the countries,
according to Rohinton Mistry, are a cultural melting pot ready to accept
all sorts of people who are displaced from their natural habitat or
nation or birthplace. Mistry shows the multi-cultural features of both
Canada and India, which reflect a vast unity in diversity of cultural
heritages and racial groups.
Works Cited
Cosmopolitanism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online.
Netscape. 15 Dec. 2006 SOURCE <http: //
www.plato.stanford.edu/ entries /cosmopolitan/html>.
Cosmopolitanism. From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. Online.
Netscape. 17 Oct. 2005 SOURCE <http: //www. wikipedia
the free encyclopedia.com/ Diaspora / html>.
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.
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Contributors
M.S. Kushwaha, Professor of English, Lucknow
Sudhir Kumar, Professor of English (DES), Panjab University,
Chandigarh.
Deepti Dharmani, Department of English, Chaudhary Devi Lal
University, Sirsa, Haryana.
Saurabh Kumar Singh & Gyaneshwar Pt. Singh, Department of
English, Vasanta College for Women (Banaras Hindu University),
Rajghat, Varanasi (U.P.)
Sunita Jakhar, Department of English, Govt. College, Sikar (Rajasthan)
Sudhir Nikam, Department of English, B.N.N. College, Bhiwandi,
Mumbai (Maharashtra)
Madhavi Nikam, Department of English, R.K.Talreja College,
Ulhasnagar, Mumbai (Maharashtra)
Syed Ali Hamid, Professor of English, Kumaun University Campus,
Almora (Uttarakhand).
Randeep Rana Department of English and Foreign Languages,
M.D.University, Rohtak(Haryana)
Preet Saxena, Department of English, Government Degree College,
Patan Jabalpur, (M.P.)
Nidhi Handa, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Kanya
Gurukula Haridwar, Gurukula Kangri University Women Campus,
Gurukul Kangri University, Haridwar (Uttarakhand)
Charu Sharma, Deptartment of English, Kurukshetra University
Kurukshetra (Haryana)
Ebrahim Mohammed Alwuraafi
Renu Shukla, Department of A.I.H.C.A., Kanya Gurukul
Mahavidyalaya, Gurukula Kangri Univ. Girls Campus, Dehradun
Sanjiv Kumar, Department of English, Central University of Haryana
Ramit Samaddar, Department of English, Jadavpur University,
Jadavpur, West Bengal
Dinesh Panwar, Department of Professional Communication, Ajay
Kumar Garg Engineering College, Ghaziabad (U.P.)
Manoj Kumar, Department of English, Indira Kala Sangit University,
Khairagarh- 491881, (C.G.)