Literature, Films and the Indian Diaspora - ELSA online Meet, 28 February, 2021

 

Literature, Films and the Indian Diaspora

ELSA online Meet

Sunday, 28 February, 2021

In terms of variety and depth, the ELSA meeting provided a rich fare of thoughts and ideas related to the theme in question. Erudite and interesting presentations on Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding by Dr. Pramila Chawla,  Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs Sen’s” by Dr. Manju, Poems of Reetika Vazirani by Dr. Lisha Sinha, novels of Balli Kaur Jaswal by Ms. Anjali Singh, fiction of Amitav Ghosh by Mr. Saurabh Agarwal, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss by Dr. Anindiya Polley, Anita Desai’s Voices in the City by Dr. Rajan Lal, Salman Rushdie and Diaspora  by Ms. Dhruvee Sinha,” Nissim Ezekiel’s “Naipaul’s India and Mine by Prof. Ghosh,” among others, followed by an intensely interactive session, made the meet vibrant. It was a delight to have amongst us Dr. Deena Padayachee from Durban, South Africa, Dr. Padmini Peters from Perth, Australia and Geneivive Ray, Zimbabwean poet from U.K. gave a truly international fragrance to the event. Prof. Ghosh welcomed the participants. He stated in his opening remarks that the term ‘Diaspora’ had various connotations as may be averred from Rushdie’s passage from “Imaginary Homelands”:

"But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death."

 

In order to understand the notion of Diaspora and all that it entails, one really needs to reconstruct a narrative from the fragments as Rushdie states. In this context Prof. Ghosh cited Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

                          

             My Experience as a South African Diaspora Writer

 

Deena Padayachee

 

I am a fourth generation South African Indian. My ancestors were ‘exported’ by the British empire as indentured labourers to South Africa from Tamil Nadu from 1860. Others were sent to South Africa from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other parts of southern and northern India. The indenture system replaced slavery which was outlawed by the British in 1833.

 

My parents had less than primary school education but they had a deep sense of Indian culture and traditions. Respect, dignity, sense of honour, civilised behaviour and dress were firmly rooted in their souls. This has changed a great deal among many South Africans.

 

South Africa, like many imperial countries,  institutionalised racial discrimination. Apartheid was legalised by South African law. Irrational laws and a lack of rational law can stoke the absurd in people. I spent most of my life shackled by these irrational, racist laws. Most of the world instituted a cultural, economic and intellectual boycott of Apartheid South Africa. The Apartheid education system that we were subjected to ensured that many South Africans became colonised caricatures of the conquistadors.

 

This had a deep psychological impact on the melanin enriched. Those who are ashamed of themselves will reject their roots.So it is fairly commonplace for those who are genetically Indian, including veteran coconut Indian journalists and academics to say, in the most risible way that they are not Indian. Those who do not respect themselves are often disrespectful towards those who look like them.

 

The rampant uncivil behaviour promoted by the Apartheid government made me write about what I saw. I transformed my thoughts into poems and short stories that were rejected by most Apartheid South African publishers but were published largely in the USA. The well-resourced mainstream publishing houses and bookshops are still largely dominated by the conservatives privileged by Apartheid.

 

In April 1987 I published a volume of poetry called A Voice from the Cauldron.

Inevitably, writers who wrote against racists were seen as ‘subversives’ by the racists.

  

G  A  U  N  T  L  E  T

 

I saw a dog with white hairs and pink skin

attempt to cross busy, frenetic, non-white, narrow Randles road

early that morning... near where Barnes road meets it,

Not far from Charles Hugo primary school,

Dr Pather’s surgery and Sydenham pharmacy.

My attention was riveted by its old head,

its terrified face:

Fear enclosed it, permeated every hair.

As my car slowly approached, it looked for a second at me.

 

Please God, spare me this torture.

I do not want to look at myself

in the manacled, cold, granite, segregated university,

in the minefield of Apartheid laws and restrictions,

the tyrant's maze of obstacles, traps and terror,

 

I remembered my uncle's face in Pinetown

As a huge, uniformed, brassy white policeman

bore down on him...

like a giant crocodile bearing down on a shackled deer.

 

The hound looked the other way, went forward a little,

stopped,

as a roaring, death-dealing truck blasted past his nose.

He knew that in this world he is weak

And the strong kill orgasmically.

 

Then he bounded over to safety, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I prayed that my friends and I would also survive the Apartheid gauntlet.

 

In 1991 I was asked by the publisher, Macmillan Boleswa, to write a booklet for secondary schools in Swaziland about AIDS. It was an account which brought to life the hazards that people faced in the course of their daily lives because of the AIDS pandemic. I decided to use a pseudonym, Alex Mpanza, for the book, A Taste of Melting Chocolate.

 

In 1991 I was awarded the first Nadine Gordimer short story prize for my short story, The Finishing Touch. It is about an Indian man who decides to change his name to a white name so that he can get a business licence. Muthusamy Kuppusamy became ‘Michael Cooper’. The Congress of South African Writers published my collection of short stories, What’s love got to do with it? in 1992.

Within a few weeks of the book being published, I was attacked and stabbed at my home by a gang of intruders who demanded nothing and stole nothing.

In 1993 the South African Writers’ Circle gave me the Quill award in acknowledgement of my 1992 book. The English Academy of Southern Africa awarded my short story anthology the Olive Schreiner prize in 1994.

 

This was followed by a deluge of what can only be described as a tsunami of terror. Our land was expropriated by the Ballito municipality for low cost housing. When we resisted, our family home was burned to the ground in a mysterious fire in 1995. Our family business, Umhlali Saw Mills was burned in 1996 and we literally lost just about everything. My own family fell apart after that, the spouse divorced me and fled to the UK with our little children.

Many other difficult things occurred as well.

 

I was unable to write any more books after that. My poems still get published regularly in Glomag in Chennai, India.Thank you once again for letting me share my writing with you.

“Naipaul’s India and Mine” : Nissim Ezekiel’s 

Counter-Narrative to Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness*

 Nibir K. Ghosh

In the July 5-11, 1987 issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India, Pritish Nandy, the then Editor of the Weekly, had hailed V. S. Naipaul as “the world’s greatest living author.” Irked by what seemed to me to be an unqualified lavish praise I had, unhesitatingly, dispatched a letter to Pritish which he, very sportingly, published in the August 2-8 issue of the Weekly. In the letter I had drawn the Editor’s attention to the spirit behind Hamlet’s advice to Polonius: “Use every man after his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity – the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty” (Hamlet Act II Sc. ii). I had pointed out that it was “gracious indeed that such praise be heaped on a writer of Indian origin whose myopic vision observes nothing in this vast and complex country except the ruins of a ‘wounded civilization’ shaded by an ‘area of darkness.’ He has unblinkingly described the country of his origin as a ‘decaying civilization, where the only hope lies in further decay.’” I pointed out how Naipaul’s discovery of India had revealed to him only pathetic creatures incapable of understanding his simplest problems. I could discern the rather inhumanistic trends in Naipaul’s writings. His disgust for the ‘South Indians’ was occasioned by the way they “lap up their liquidized food.” His notion of the ‘Bengali’ as “insufferably arrogant and lazy” derived from his brief encounter with a ‘Paan seller’ in Calcutta. His obsession with the theme of ‘public defecation’ seemed to deprive him of the ability to see his country in human or historic terms.

A few months after this exchange with Pritish Nandy, I fortunately came across an essay by Nissim Ezekiel titled "Naipaul's India and Mine" in the anthology called New Writing in India edited by the poet, Adil Jussawalla. Till then my familiarity with Ezekiel had begun and ended with “The Night of the Scorpion” which I had read during my school days.

Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) mentions at the beginning of his extraordinarily brilliant essay how he intended to counter the image of Naipaul’s India as portrayed in his An Area of Darkness with his own. “Naipaul’s India and Mine” not only reaffirmed the grounds on which I had corresponded with Pritish Nandy but also made me an ardent admirer of Nissim Ezekiel who had the courage to demolish Naipaul’s distorted myths about India. And with all seriousness of purpose I set out to explore how Ezekiel handled the issue of his essential Indianness in his own poetry. Imagine the thrill I experienced when some years later, while making a presentation on Ezekiel’s poetry at an All India English Teacher’s conference, I saw among the audience in the room none other than Nissim Ezekiel himself. He sat among other participants and delegates, engrossed in his solitude and listened to what I had to say about his poetry. I was overawed by the amazing simplicity of the man who enjoyed the privilege of being the poet's poet among the foremost writers of verse in English in India and yet who couldn’t care less for his own celebrity status. The completely unassuming posture of this celebrity and his love for mingling with all in a spirit of anonymity reminded me of Naipaul’s statement in An Area of Darkness:

To be an Indian in England was distinctive, in Egypt it was more so. Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and waited a special quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality. Again and again I was caught. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd…recognition of my difference was necessary to me. I felt the need to impose myself, and didn’t know how (43).  

The essay “Naipaul’s India and Mine” foregrounds the unique quality of Ezekiel’s  Indianness. Unlike many poets who revel in the non‑personal notions of India – its glorious past, its mysticism, cultural or historical nostalgia, and exoticism – Ezekiel’s primary concern is not the India which appeals to the West, but the India to which he can, and does, truly belong. What he holds against Naipaul is not his “condemnatory judgements” but his callous indifference in taking note of reality. Ezekiele states: “My quarrel is that Mr Naipaul is so often uninvolved and unconcerned. He writes from the point of view of his own dilemma, his temperamental alienation from his mixed background, his choice and his escape.”

*For an elaborate view see: Nibir K. Ghosh. “The Matrix of Indianness and Nissim Ezekiel.” Mirror from the Indus. Authorspress, 2020. pp. 132-148.

                         Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Mrs Sen’s’: 

                     A Tale of Pangs and Pains of Exile

Manju

Diasporic is an adjective which is derived from ‘Diaspora’ which means scattering of seeds. However, today the primary understanding of ‘Diaspora’ relates to the dispersion of people rather than seeds. Diaspora is closely associated with the notion of exile of those who are removed from one’s homeland due to certain reasons and a desire to go back to it. Human dispersion and formation of diasporic community is integral to the colonization itself. During colonization the white Europeans settled in different countries but this dispersion was different from the dispersion of colonized subjects as it had a different meaning for them. A huge number of people migrated from colonized countries to the Europe and literature produced by these displaced people reflects the displaced condition of its author therefore diasporic writings expectedly inform about the pain of exile and a nostalgia to reunite with the homeland which has been lost. It forms the keynote of Diasporic literature. The same sense of exile and nostalgia for the homeland is observed in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short story ‘Mrs Sen’s’.

Jhumpa Lahiri who was born to Bengali parents migrated from Calcutta when she was just two years old. She very aptly portrays the unique location as an author writing from marginality. This story is narrated by an American boy named Eliot. It tells the time Eliot spends with his Bengali baby sitter whom Eliot only knows as Mrs Sen. She is the wife of Mr Sen who has migrated from Calcutta to America to seek a job in the University. Her name is very crucial for her identity as it refers not to something what she herself is rather refers to her husband Mr Sen who remains occupied most of the time in his work while Mrs Sen feels uprooted. For her this migration from Calcutta to America has been a painful uprooting from her homeland. To fill the sense of lack she attempts to cling to the tiniest details of her lost home and tries to recreate it by cooking Bengali dishes and rereading the letter that she receives from her people occasionally. This attempt by Mrs Sen of creating her Bengali space in American Compartment makes a cocoons of isolation and she remains cut off from the reality outside. Mrs Sen’s inability to free herself from her homeland results into a psychological breakdown and marks the dark diasporic conditions.

Dr. Manju, Associate Professor, UILAH, Chandigarh University

Rushdie as an Indian Diasporic Writer

Dhruvee Sinha

Diaspora can be viewed as a geographical shift that a person goes through- when they belong to a particular country (the one they owe their lineage to), but migrate to a different country, a different part of the world. Even within the definition of the word "migration", a number of nuances and human destinies overlap. If you are an ordinary citizen, you may still get accepted but more often than not, diasporic writers are viewed with suspicion. They must justify and excuse their fragmented vision of a lost country in their work, which forces them to find a past in the broken mirrors, some fragments of which have been irretrievably lost. This is true in the case of the British intellectual of Indian origin Salman Rushdie who says: it may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss. This consideration of the writer in exile, whether it is a matter of a choice or a ban, is a suspicion commonly applied to all migrant writers, subject to a specific classification in world literature. This was the concept of Weltliteratur enunciated by Goethe who had this desire to bring together writers who have gone beyond their original context, to that of World Literature; writers like Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Hanif Kureshi, Timothy Mo (all of whom are from different countries but settled in Britain).

The link between immigrants in their host countries comes from their colonial past. The adjective "postcolonial" is in itself a source of questions and friction. It is the subject of endless discussions and deserves investigation in its own right. It is not in the purpose of this work to compile what has been said on the subject, even less to fuel certain fallacious polemics, which, in my opinion, come under lexical masticatory: those, for example, concerning the presence or not of a hyphen between the prefix “post-” and the adjective “colonial”. This article aims to magnify that the characteristics of writers being half and half of two things is best portrayed in the persona of Saleem, an Anglo-Indian narrator of Midnight's Children. In the sense of half-blood, he is an allegory of the arranged marriage between East and West, it is the result of what this study intends to demonstrate with the definition of adjective "transcolonial". Saleem is a transcolonial figure, very much like Rushdie himself. And it is one of the lessons of transcolonial thought to restore the balance of the relations of the monopoly of thought. Consequently, all Indian literature in English passes through the colonial, in a movement of surpassing certainly but by and with the colonial and hence becomes diasporic in a transitional sense of leaving the origin country to be scrutinised and accepted-or-approved by the host country. This is what Saleem calls "the lesson of No Escape" (p. 383). He repeats it when he admits to the reader that he is the child of an Indian woman and an Englishman, a colonial administrator whose genealogy dates back to the time of the East India Company. Saleem writes "everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form" but let's agree to the fact that there is no escape from the "from" either. Even though the diasporic writers have taken roots in a relatively newer country, they keep receding to the country they are "from".

Published in 1981, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie is considered as the initiating novel of the new Indo-English wave that has submerged the world literary landscape for more than forty years. And this is not surprising. These children of literature are all midnight children, even if they were born after the partition of India and Pakistan, even if they were born elsewhere, on another continent. They are hybrid, transcultural authors, sometimes in the proper sense but at least in the metaphorical sense. Saleem Sinai is of mixed race and religion, if above all it was created Anglo-Indian, this is obviously not by chance. He is both necessary and obligatory character, designed to force the reader to grasp the impact of colonization on India, more precisely the impact of the British presence in India, its consequences on Indian life, and especially on literature (whether it's from India or set in India, or created by a man of Indian origin). To understand what Salman Rushdie writes, we, the readers must bear in mind the fundamental characteristic of the narrator, namely his double biological heritage, literally and figuratively. This fact logically leads us to consider his point through the prism of biology, a term that must be understood, we have seen it, both literally and metaphorically. The laws of Rushdie's work, whether stylistic, linguistic, thematic, or within the realm of genre, are governed by biology- Saleem's body disintegrates as he completes the telling of history of India.

The lesson of Midnight's Children, “the lesson of No Escape”, is part of a larger system of apprehension and understanding of the world and the literature that describes it, and in which the prefix “trans-” takes on its full raison d'être. Biology, in this context and in the system of interpretations chosen here, also fits logically into the literary problematic linked to the concept of transcoloniality. The novel becomes the quintessential diasporic work by its manifestation of the living existence of the author, of his work and his reader, of their dialogical relationship, and by the transmission and transformation of the language and the language he uses. 

Dhruvee Sinha, esearch Scholar, NIT Patna

Literature, Films and the Indian Diaspora

Mainstream Indian Cinema and over-simplification of Diaspora

Saurabh Agarwal

The Indian main streams films have shown a deep penchant for the exotic locales which had fuelled the desires of the affluent class to holiday abroad. But the films made in the late 1990s and 2000s, started a trend of showing the lives of non-resident Indians living in Europe and The United States. They went to create an exuberant, glossy but falsified image of the families who had migrated abroad. The movies showed the families who had made a home in London and New York without any struggles also created unrealistic and stereotypical images of the people living there. Movies like Lamhe, Pardes, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham among several others beamed back to India images of sprawling bungalows and mansions, the heroes commuting in helicopters and leading filthy rich lives. Their transformation was sudden, with such an ease and not worthy of discussion. The only factor that could have been the cause was their reallocation. These films reinforced the thoughts of the middle-class youth that the NRI status is the only way to the achievement of their dreams.  But the Bollywood directors had never shown them that the path to the shores of their dreamland was never easy.

These movies placed the characters in fixed categories. In the film Pardes, Kishori Lal needs an Indian girl for his US-bred son Rajeev who totally disrespectful of India but Raj of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge can be completely Indian at heart. The assimilation of the culture of their new homeland is either complete or the characters have resisted imbibing the influence with all the grit. Yet the cultural conflict is superficial. Films like Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna which deals with the issues of extramarital affair and divorce remains suspended in the cultural vacuum for such issues have no exclusive reference point to the diaspora but are universal. The undesirable element of the life abroad was either shoved off beneath the carpet and the flavour of nationalism be added to glorify the diaspora who have effortlessly yet successfully charted a life in their new homeland.

 

Anita Desai’s Voices in the City:

A Projection of Cathartic Metaphor in Indian Diaspora

                                                                   

Rajan Lal

In the plethora of Indian Diasporic literature, Anita Desai in her capacity as a creative artist delineates individual existential crisis, and not of masses in her own imaginary world. Her typical fictional world generally consists of   a city, a hill-station, a big house with a garden, a decadent family, and Faulknerian obsession with the past. Most of her characters are all members of an upper-class who belong to once-affluent families which later on undergo decadence and penury. Her Sahitya Academi award (1978) winning novel Voices in the City (pub: 1965) consists of three main characters- Nirode, and his two younger sisters- Monisha, the protagonist and Amla. The novel in hand exposes the existential dilemma of its protagonist, Monisha and that of Nirode, a bohemian and iconoclastic figure and of Amla. I find Calcutta in the novel as villain which destroys all the hopes and aspirations of its characters. Their cathartic voices metaphorise the unfulfilled hopes and aspirations of theirs. Monisha like Maya, the protagonist of Cry, the Peacock, is hypersensitive and neurotic. She gets married to an uncaring Bengali named Jiban. Because of the lack of psychological mutual understanding between both of them, she feels entrapped in the materialistic family and faces traditional psychic tortures being unable to bear a child. She becomes pessimistic and undergoes nihilistic turmoils. Being unable to compromise to socio-cultural traditions like Amla, she pours kerosene oil over herself and burns herself to death. Nirode, being over cynic, and desirous of being a creative writer, quits his work of a minor clerk in a newspaper and starts his own magazine but it fails after a brief run. His play is brutally rejected by publishers as Keats’ Hyperion was rejected by Tory journals- Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine (E. Albert: 321:2012). He like Dharma, a painter in the novel, goes to live on the outskirts of the city. Amla, despite facing the same dilemmatic situations of Nirode and Monisha, makes compromise to the urban ethos and keeps living anyhow.

Dr. Rajan Lal, Asstt. Professor, J.S. Hindu College, Amroha

               Balli Kaur Jaswal: A Transnational Diasporic Writer

 

Anjali Singh

 

Popularly known as Balli Kaur Jaswal, she was born to Punjabi-Sikh parents. Her father, a diplomat, emigrated from Punjab to Singapore at the age of three. Owing to her father’s job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she grew up in many countries, namely Japan, Russia, Philippines, etc. Completing her education from the USA, Australia and UK, she also lived for a year in Istanbul where she worked at an International school. With exposure to so many countries and cultures in her formative years, she defines herself having ‘hyphenated identity’.

Balli is the first Singaporean writer to win the 25,000 pounds ‘David Wong Fellowship’ for writing at the well known ‘University of East Anglia’ (a public research University at Norwich, England).

Her novels talk of Indian diaspora – the first two novels based in Singapore, the third one in Southall (UK) while the fourth one spread across Britain, Australia and India. Inheritance is the first English language novel about the Punjabi Sikh Diaspora in Singapore. It won her the award ‘Best Young Australian Novelist’ by Sydney Morning Herald in 2014. The novel runs parallel to Singapore as a nation and can be termed as ‘coming of age’ of the nation. It is a part of academic curriculum at NYU, Sydney campus.

For Sugarbread she was unable to find publisher in Singapore owing to its ‘Racial discrimination’ theme; finally, a publisher in Australia brought it in print before its debut in Singapore.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows gave her the international acclaim when Harper Collins, the publishing giant won a bid on this ‘unpublished work’ at a London book fair. They offered her a five figure sum that helped Balli quit her job and become a full-time writer.

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters is about Sita Shergill whose dying wish is to have her ashes immersed in India; the unique clause being that her three daughters need to undertake this pilgrimage together. Thus revealing her clever plan to reunite her daughters who have grown apart; to introduce them to the culture of their origin and bind them to their roots.

Jaswal is an emerging writer. Remarking on her contribution, Nandhkumar from The Hindu writes, “Jaswal is doing for Diaspora literature today what Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri did for South Asian readers when they started out in the ’90s and early 2000s.”

Anjali Singh, Research Scholar, Dr. BR Ambedkar University, Agra