Dr Christopher Rollason: BILINGUAL CULTURE BLOG

By a curious synchronicity, two heavyweights of Indian Writing in English (IWE), Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, have, in the first half of 2008, published historical novels almost simultaneously. In addition, both novels have been placed on the longlist for the 2008 Booker Prize (which Rushdie's own Midnight's Children has effectively won three times over, having been voted "Booker of Bookers" for the prize's 25th and then for its 40th anniversary). Comparison thus invites itself: while my personal opinion is that Ghosh's historical vision impresses while Rushdie's disastrously fails, I shall await with interest the full-length studies that will no doubt appear comparing the two novels in detail.

Both are beyond doubt historical novels in the acceptation first popularised by Walter Scott, although there are immediate significant differences between the two writers' projects. Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence alternates between the Mughal empire under Akbar and the Renaissance Italy of Machiavelli, linking the two via the appearance of a Florentine wanderer, Mogor dell'Amore, at Akbar's court in Fatehpur Sikri and the presence in Florence of Qara Köz, a Mughal princess with magical powers. Ghosh's Sea of Poppies narrates a more recent period, namely earlier nineteenth-century India in the time of the East India Company: it relates India to the wider world since its theme is the transporting of indentured labourers and convicts to the island of Mauritius on the ship Ibis, and offers a remarkably broad canvas of characters - from the low-caste Bihari ox-cart-driver Kalua and Deeti, the woman he rescues from a sati, through Baboo Nob Kissin, pen-pushing clerk and flamboyant devotee of Krishna, to Paulette, Bengal-raised daughter of a French botanist, and Zachary, a deceptively white-seeming freedman mulatto from Baltimore who becomes the vessel's second mate.

It is new for Rushdie to attempt a fiction set back so far in the past, unless one counts the Arabian dream chapters of The Satanic Verses; Midnight's Children has been read, and with good cause, as a historical novel, but it deals with the recent past. Ghosh, by contrast, has already explored a (somewhat later) period of imperial history in Asia, starting from the late nineteenth century, in The Glass Palace. A further structural difference is that Sea of Poppies is the first part of a trilogy (incidentally a popular novelistic convention in the Bengali tradition), and its narrative is therefore unfinished, whereas Rushdie's is (I would say thank goodness) a single, self-contained narrative.

Generically, both are somewhat complex and difficult to define in a nutshell; a degree of experimentalism is common to both, as too are painstaking research and studied intertextuality. Rushdie's degree from Cambridge was in history, and Ghosh's training was as an anthropologist: these novels show the two at pains to demonstrate their research skills, with lengthy bibliographical credits appearing at the end of both. Rushdie, indeed, goes as far - in earnest or in play – as to blur the fiction/non-fiction divide by listing his historical sources in alphabetical order, over a six-page bibliography which might more aptly grace a straightline academic study.

The Enchantress of Florence marks Rushdie returning in force to the genre with which he made his name, magic realism: his previous novel, Shalimar the Clown, had used magic-realist effects fairly sparingly, but here the fantastic Thousand-and-one-Nights-type tricks pile up, if anything tediously, starting from the moment when Akbar magicks an imaginary woman into becoming his favourite wife. The novel's fantastic elements coexist rather awkwardly with spoonfuls of dubiously digestible factual material - topographical data on Fatehpur Sikri that might seem straight out of a Lonely Planet guide, historical information about Florentine politics or Central Asian warfare that has all the vitality of a medieval chronicle. Historical novel thus meets fantasy in a fiction that might recall Scott's The Talisman, the neglected masterpiece admired by Edward Said that also depicts the East-West encounter; but Rushdie, alas, falls far short of Scott.

Generically, Amitav Ghosh has in the past used magic realism more sparingly than Rushdie - discreetly in his first novel The Circle of Reason and fused with non-realist genres such as science fiction and ghost story in The Calcutta Chromosome, but elsewhere not at all. Sea of Poppies begins as if it is going to be magic-realist, with the young Bihari woman Deeti "seeing" the apparition of a two-masted ship, a "vision not materially present in front of her" (Ghosh, 7) on the Ganga outside the opium factory in Ghazipur; but this premonition of the Ibis turns out - like the voice from the dead near the beginning of Vikram Chandra's otherwise realist novel Sacred Games - to be the book's sole approximation to magic realism. Nonetheless, it somehow does not feel quite appropriate to categorise Sea of Poppies unqualifiedly as straight realism, for – a shade disconcertingly till the reader gets used to it - this novel's dominant register is comedy. In the past it is Rushdie rather than Ghosh who has been associated with the comic, yet here, and despite the presence of such self-evidently severe themes as sati, labour exploitation and racially skewed justice, the timbre of Ghosh's writing is resolutely light and ludic - as, to cite but one instance, in the bizarre moment when Baboo Nob Kissin discovers that Zachary is labelled in the vessel's log as "black" and exultantly concludes he must be a manifestation of Krishna, the Black Lord. This strong presence of the comic in Sea of Poppies is likely to disorient some of Ghosh's critics in the world of postcolonial studies, but others may conclude that he is working within a tradition of Bengali humour and that the comedy is a means of highlighting the resilience and resourcefulness of the ordinary person in the face of oppressive structures.

Intertextuality is certainly a key feature of both novels. In The Enchantress of Florence, the magic powers of Qara Köz recall similarly gifted women figures from other magic-realist novels - Sierva Maria in Gabriel García Márquez's Del amor y otros demonios / Of Love and Other Demons or Blimunda in José Saramago's Memorial do Convento / Baltasar and Blimunda. Mogor dell'Amore's conversations with Akbar may remind the reader of the similar exchanges between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino's Le città invisibili / Invisible Cities, while the emperor's love-relationship with his (at least in the novel) imaginary wife Jodha echoes Adolfo Bioy Casares' La invención de Morel / The Invention of Morel, whose narrator falls in love with a computer-generated woman. In Sea of Poppies, the Ibis recalls multiple moments from Herman Melville's maritime writings, resembling the vessels of Moby-Dick in its mix of ethnic origins, "Benito Cereno" in its past as a slave-ship, and "Billy Budd" as a locus of on-board class violence; Lewis Carroll - a favourite in Bengal - is present in a Calcutta banqueting sequence (Ghosh, 232) that evokes his Mock Turtle and his "beautiful soup" in its "hot tureen"; and the IWE tradition too is paid homage to in a trial for forgery that recalls the one in R.K. Narayan's The Guide. It remains to be seen, however, which out of Rushdie's and Ghosh's intertextual practice is the more productive.

Meanwhile, the two novels certainly converge in demonstrating a rich exuberance of language. In Rushdie's narrative, however thin or flat the story, the writing has the denseness and inventiveness that its author's readers have come to expect from him, but it does not present any real innovations on his previous practice. Ghosh, by contrast, breaks new ground: while The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide certainly had their share of non-English lexical items, Indian or more generally Asian, Sea of Poppies in numerous places piles up the Indian (Bengali or Bhojpuri) or lascar-pidgin terms to the point where some readers might begin to get confused. Here Ghosh's practice resembles that of Vikram Chandra in Sacred Games, with its accumulations of Bombay argot; and Ghosh, like Chandra, has chosen to meet readers halfway by placing a glossary, not in the novel itself but on his official website. Amitav Ghosh has said before now that one day he will write a novel in Bengali, and whether this novel and the trilogy it will be part of it form a staging-post on that road remains to be seen.

Finally and inevitably, the reader of both novels has to ask the questions, "what is this book about?" and "was it worth reading"? Last-ditch defenders of Rushdie will no doubt respond that his latest book is a significant exploration of the East-West meeting and of cultural pluralism as - it could be argued - evinced in observations of the type: "There is no particular wisdom in the East ... All human beings  are foolish to the same degree" (Rushdie, 286), or: "discord, difference, disobedience, disagreement, irreverence, iconoclasm, impudence, even insolence, might be the wellsprings of the good" (Rushdie, 310). Whether, however, such gnomic observations stand up in the context of this novel's one-dimensional, tinsel narrative with its accretions of clichés and stereotypes both eastern and western, dry-as-dust chronology and box-of-tricks magic realism, is quite another matter. Amitav Ghosh, meanwhile, while also signifying "miscegenation and mongrelism" (Ghosh, 442) in terms that might appear to parallel Rushdie, succeeds - as Rushdie does not - in pushing his fictional practice into new dimensions of formal and linguistic experimentation while, most importantly, telling a moving story that embodies the capacity of ordinary folk to survive and celebrate despite the oppressive incursions of power. It may sound subjective, but while when I turned the last page of The Enchantress of Florence I concluded I had not been able to identify with a single character for a single minute, when Sea of Poppies came to an end I was genuinely sorry, while also more than pleased that I will meet Ghosh's characters again in the second instalment. Who then is going in the right direction, Rushdie or Ghosh? The Enchantress of Florence seems to me one of Rushdie's least interesting novels, a damp squib on a par with Grimus and Fury and a great disappointment after the return to form of Shalimar the Clown; while I read Sea of Poppies as the work of a Ghosh at the height of his powers, surprising and charming his readers on the level of the page while maintaining a constant human commitment. The war may be on between the flashy gyrations of the postmodern and a surprisingly flexible and resistant Indo-Anglian realist tradition: the Booker judges' verdict may offer an inkling of where things will move next on the fraught terrain, with its increasing globalised burden, of Indian Writing in English.

WORKS CITED

Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray, 2008.

Rushdie, Salman. The Enchantress of Florence. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.

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See also my earlier blog entries on the 2 novels - Ghosh: 28 May 08; and Rushdie -

31 Mar 08

PANEL ON “HISTORY AND THE SOUTH ASIAN NOVEL WRITTEN IN ENGLISH”,

20^th EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON MODERN SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES,

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER, JULY 2008

Report by Christopher Rollason, Ph.D (Metz, France) – July 2008

From 8 to 11 July 2008, the city often described as England’s “Capital of the North” played host to the 20th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (ECMSAS) (cf. entry on this blog for 14 Jul 08). The University of Manchester’s Humanities Building was the backdrop to this vast event, whose participants were also regaled with an official reception in the city’s superb Victorian Town Hall and, suitably enough, a conference dinner at the Lal Qila restaurant on Manchester’s fabled ‘Curry Mile’. The conference ranged across remarkably wide swathes of South Asian studies, from ‘Political economy of Bangladesh’ to ‘The Sanskrit tradition in the modern world’, taking in history, sociology, economics, fine arts, popular culture, regional studies and more. So enormous an event, split as it was into almost forty panels, each one virtually a conference within the conference, could not usefully be summarised by any one participant: the present writer will therefore describe only a small portion of the elephant, and will concentrate on teasing out the significance of Panel 13 (capably and sympathetically organised by <<Nicole Weickgennant of Manchester Metropolitan University), whose subject was ‘History and the South Asian novel written in English’.

The rubric of the panel was clear: the theme of debate was the modern (20^th and 21^st  century) English-language novel as practised by writers from India/ South Asia and their diasporas, in its relation to history, whether of the region or also of the wider world. The panel consisted of 14 papers and took place over the last two days of the conference, 10 and 11 July 2008. The  authors of the papers - subcontinental/diasporic, European or North American – were mostly literary scholars, but other disciplines – translation studies, history – were also represented. The discussions following each sub-panel of two to four papers were as lively as they were passionate, and a strong sense of camaraderie was generated among the participants as the two hard-working days unfolded.

The writers whose work was analysed in detail in the various papers (others of course being mentioned in passing) were: from India and its diaspora, Mulk Raj Anand, Amitav Ghosh, Manju Kapur, Rohinton Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao,  Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie; and from Pakistan, Kamila Shamsie. The selection of authors may certainly be considered representative, in terms of period, geographical location and gender, though one may note the absence of, say, Vikram Chandra, Shobha Dé, Anita Desai or Vikram Seth. Certain key works, significantly enough, were examined in more than one paper: Ghosh’s ‘The Shadow Lines’ (in three), Mistry’s ‘A Fine Balance’ (in two), Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ (in two) and, inevitably, the one that – at least for many in the west - started it all, Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’. Thematically, many of the papers criss-crossed over time and space, and it therefore seems best here to summarise them in their chronological order of delivery.

The historical theme was challengingly introduced by Raita Merivita-Chakrabarti (La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia and University of Turku, Finland), who spoke on ‘History and Historiography in (Post-Emergency) Indian Novels in English’, focusing on ‘Midnight’s Children’ and a number of its successors and arguing that the models of history adopted by the novelists concerned tend to subvert and question the domimant notions of historiography emanating from the West, notably the idea of linear progress. This orientation was echoed by Susmita Roye (University of Bristol, England), whose paper (‘Salvaging the “Past” from “History” and Etching it into “His Story”: Stories of Rushdie’s Saleem and Ghosh’s Tridib”), explored the tension in ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘The Shadow Lines’ between the canonic events of the official history of South Asia and the more personalised, incomplete but intensively lived experiences of the protagonists. Still exploring Rushdie, Jenni Ramone (Newman University College, Birmingham), in ‘Happy Endings: Rushdie’s History of Kashmir’) examined a more localised strand of South Asian history – in, once again, ‘Midnight’s Children’ and also in Rushdie’s more recent ‘Shalimar the Clown’- showing how those two novels foreground Kashmir as a metonym for both communal politics and a threatened subcontinental tradition of diversity.

Next, moving out into a wider area of comparative studies, John Schwetman (University of Minnesota – Duluth, USA) offered, in ‘Prejudicial Encounters: Race, Caste and Extrajudicial Killings in Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” and William Faulkner’s “Light in August”’, a side-by-side analysis of Roy’s Booker-winning novel and Faulkner’s US classic, showing how both narratives, albeit written by non-subalterns, dramatise the plight of the subaltern (Dalit and African-American) in societies (Kerala and the American South) where an allegedly compassionate Christianity is a major component of the dominant order. Also concerned with India’s interaction with the wider world was the paper by Kumar Parag (University of Allahabad), ‘Exile, Alienation and Identity Crisis in V.S. Naipaul’s “Half A Life”’, in which, tracing the odyssey of Naipaul’s failed-writer protagonist Willie Chandan from India to England to Mozambique, he read the Nobel laureate’s novel as emblematic of a fractured and hybridated postcolonial identity.

The Dalit/subaltern theme was again highlighted in the next two papers. Rajeshwar Mittapalli (Kakatiya University, Warangal, India), in ‘Subaltern Subjectivity and Resistance: Dalit Social History in Postcolonial Indian Fiction in English’, showed how the official narrative of state-sponsored Dalit emancipation is challenged and exposed in the pages of three novels by non-Dalits – ‘The God of Small Things’ (again), Mulk Raj Anand’s ‘The Road’, and Rohinton Mistry’s ‘A Fine Balance’. The last-named novel was taken up in more detail in the contribution of the panel organiser Nicole Weickgenannt (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance”: Dalits, Subaltern History and the Emergency’, in which she read Mistry’s novel as a narrative of both Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and of an alternative history foregrounding the marginalised community of Dalits. The notion of alternative historiography received further support from the following paper, ‘Scripting the Unwritten: “Little History” in Indian Fiction’, by Meenakshi Bharat (Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, India), which, drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s celebrated postmodernist critique of “grand narratives”, focused on how a number of postcolonial novels, especially Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines”, choose to home in, not on the “big” events of Independence and Partition, but on “lesser” moments such as the 1963-1964 Calcutta/Dhaka riots described by Ghosh, thus questioning the dominant official narratives of South Asian history.

The subaltern theme recurred in a different context, indeed being returned to its origins (it was first used in its modern sense as a military metaphor by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci) in the contribution by Talat Ahmed, a historian from the University of Leeds (England), ‘Sepoys and World War One: A subaltern perspective’. Eloquently testifying in her paper to the value of literature for historians as a source of historical evidence, she analysed Mulk Raj Anand’s novel of World War I, ‘Across the Black Water’, as a fictionalised account of the complex experiences of Indian sepoys as foot-soldiers ‘defending’ one enemy (the colonial oppressor) against another. This was followed by a paper - “’To build or to destroy”’: History and the individual in Manju Kapur’s “A Married Woman”’, by Christopher Rollason (independent scholar, Metz, France) - focusing on a more exclusively subcontinental event (nonetheless located in Kapur’s novel in a wider context of globalisatio), namely the destruction by Hindu militants of the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya in 1992. This contribution showed how this novel’s text underscores both the objective status of the city of Ayodhya as an emblem of Indian pluralism and the appropriation of that same city by the Hindutva tendency as a politically charged locus of communalism.

Major Indian historical events returned to the fore in the paper by Kamayani Kaushiva (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi), ‘Editing the “gaps” and “silences” in “historical truth” of Partition through “memory’s truth”’, which, like Susmita Roye’s, examined the Rushdie-Ghosh dyad of ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘The Shadow Lines’, showing how the two novels privilege heterogeneous and disparate accounts of history over the official totalising versions. Next came the panel’s sole paper entirely on Pakistan, ‘Karachi as a Map: Kamila Shamsie’s “Kartography”’, by Dalia Said Mostafa (University of Manchester), which examined the multiplicities and complexities of that country’s biggest metropolis as revealed in Shamsie’s novel. This was followed by a re-examination of major components of modern Indian iconography, featuring Anand once again, this time in the company of R.K. Narayan: Sejal Sutaria (Monmouth University, New Jersey, USA), in ‘Writing the Mahatma: Literary Renderings of Gandhi and his India by Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan’, showed how the two fictions, Anand’s ‘Untouchable’ and Narayan’s ‘Waiting for the Mahatma’, both embody, yet endeavour to resolve, Indian tensions over tradition and modernity. Finally, in the panel’s closing paper, Letizia Alterno (University of Manchester), in ‘Re-constructed history in Raja Rao’s “Kanthapura”: Dynamics of Hindu Nationalism and Anti-colonial Politics’, offered a reading of Rao’s famous Gandhian novel in terms of Homi Bhabha’s concept of liminality, suggesting that the narrative of resistance in ‘Kanthapura’ offers an alternative notion of historical dynamics that permits a specifically Indian interpretation of history in the modern period.

All told, the papers of this panel, while diverse in their subject-matter and ranging widely over modern subcontinental history, may be said as a group to have thrown up, or indeed shared, certain underlying concerns. One may here identify: interest in the smaller and more personal areas of historical experience as opposed to totalising ‘grand narratives’ (though it is hard to see how one can narrate the modern subcontinent without referring to Independence and Partition); identification of autochthonous models of history that are diverse and heterogeneous in contrast to both triumphalist Western and homegrown nationalist-communalist discourses; and, perhaps most important for the convergence of literature and history, the privileging of non-linear, indeed traditional Indian forms of narrative. The debates will continue, and conference and panel offered a fruitful contribution to them. Meanwhile, the present report is humbly offered as, in its way, the “little history” of a panel whose work and discussions have helped to enrich the ongoing greater history of modern South Asian studies. 

Photos:

Below are a number of images of different moments in the panel, featuring, among others,

Rajeshwar Mittapalli (5 and 6), Letizia Alterno (3 and 4) and Christopher Rollason (1 and 2).