Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  In A Passage to India, E. M. Forster expresses the fear I had before I went there, of India as dangerous—or at least dangerous to the Westerner. You could say it is India that kills his Mrs. Moore. Dr. Aziz impetuously befriends her as an “Oriental” when they first meet in the mosque, but I’d argue it’s her distinctly Christian charity that she relies on to guide and sustain her. With the echo in the Marabar cave reducing all sound to sameness, “poor little talkative Christianity” becomes only “boum,” and Mrs. Moore spirals into her strange and permanent withdrawal—not gentle lassitude but numb disengagement. The vastness of India, or least the sense of that vastness, annihilates order, individuality, and purpose. Even as sturdy a character as the Englishman Cyril Fielding welcomes the relief he feels upon reaching Venice in being able to recognize its “beauty of form” and “Mediterranean harmony.” In contrast, the “idol temples and lumpy hills” of India, remain for him always a little menacing and confusing.

  I, too, had a kind of Mrs. Moore moment on a visit to the temple of Kanchipuram south of Madras. After getting beyond the beggars and the pigeons outside it, and lingering over the erotic carvings of the playful gods on the exterior walls, I passed through the temple portal (my equivalent of the entrance to Forster’s cave) into a dark interior courtyard, redolent with incense and the heavy smell of jasmine garlands. A rush of sound made me look up to see bats swooping and screeching over my head. Terrified, I spun around and hastened towards the entrance. My friend, alarmed at the stir I was causing, called out that I needed to keep to the right around the image of the deity in the womb of the temple—that’s a tenet of Hinduism, to do pradakshina, or circumambulation, always keeping the sacred object to the right. But I didn’t care. I needed to get out of there.

  As I describe my hasty retreat, it seems closer to Adela Quested’s bolt down the hill from the cave than to Mrs. Moore’s quietly borne claustrophobia. But it’s really not accurate to compare myself to either. The bats unnerved me for a moment; then I continued on my travels. India, as my friend had foretold, was indeed the most “foreign” place I had ever been to. The mix of faiths, the heat, the crowds, the languages for which I didn’t know words or grammar or even scripts, the cows and elephants and monkeys seen along the roads: all this was unprecedented in my experience. But that being said, it did not seem remote or difficult. Cyril Fielding’s experience to the contrary, Indian temples seemed no more idolatrous and Indian hills no lumpier than did the features of culture and landscape I’d encountered traveling in Italy. In fact, India seemed to me to have much in common with Italy. So much vibrant life in both these parts of the world is visibly lived in the streets rather than hidden behind the stolid fronts of houses as in England. India seemed exuberant, and I felt exuberant being there. Someone puts up a corrugated roof and calls it a barbershop. People talk readily to you, and you can talk to them. Of course, I was a tourist—being catered to as a tourist, nothing more. I don’t lose sight of that. But the way I felt, especially after so much pre-trip apprehension, was wonderful. Though I took in strange sights, I did not feel a stranger. The world seemed safe to me. I was someone, it turned out, that felt more at home in it than I would have ever imagined.

  WHEN I returned home, the reading project continued. More Rushdie, more R. K. Narayan, more Anita Desai, the discovery of such authors as the Parsee novelists Rohinton Mistry and Bapsi Sidhwa, the worldly Pakistani Sara Suleri, who was then writing both memoir and criticism, the Sri Lankan novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, who in A Suitable Boy had relocated and rewritten Pride and Prejudice. Indian authors were beginning to be more generally read and written about, so I found myself at once on the cusp of things and in the stream of literary fashion. By 1995 I felt I had read enough and perhaps knew just barely enough about Indian culture to propose teaching a course at Brooklyn College on Indian English fiction. A Comp Lit course on Literature of India had been offered in the past by Professor Rahman, but he had recently retired and no one in the department had more background than I did. Still, I felt trepidation. How could I, someone who had spent only a month in India, knew no Indian languages, and had read only a few books on Indian history and religion and perhaps two dozen novels by Indian English authors, dare to profess knowledge of this field? And to do so, moreover, at a time when identity politics made it problematic to be a white person in any way presuming the ability to speak for people of color?

  My first syllabus was a cautious one, frontloaded with English authors already incontestably within my purview. I had taught Kipling, Forster, and Orwell in other courses, but now the focus became their relation to India, their engagement with its culture, their inevitable British, one might say Orientalist, perspective. When Kipling turns his enervated Anglophile Muslim, Wali Dad, in the short story “On the City Wall” into a fanatic, frothing at the mouth and beating his breast raw during Mohurrum, is this not saying scratch a Muslim and find an atavistic beast? When Forster mystifies the experience of Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested in the Marabar caves, leaving vague the causes of their breakdowns, is he not contributing to the image of India as overwhelming and indefinable? And even though the British characters in Orwell’s Burmese Days are detestable, his lisping Indian character Veraswammi is craven. But postcolonial critics such as Rushdie and Suleri explore these issues, and we read them as well.

  From the British writers, I moved to Indian ones, though still with a foothold—theirs and mine—in familiar literary terrain. R. K. Narayan’s early novel The English Teacher, in which, among other themes, a young teacher in an English-language Indian secondary school wrestles with his relation to English literature, offered a chance to explore the cultural legacy of colonialism. There’s a wonderful scene in which the protagonist is just trying to get through the class hour—what teacher doesn’t know that feeling?—and starts to read King Lear aloud to kill time. The language soon draws him in and so engages his imagination and emotions that he loses consciousness of everything but its beauty and power. At the end of the book the protagonist leaves the English school to teach in a Hindi school for young children, but the novel has made its complex statement about the abiding imprint of his English education. I also taught for the first time Rushdie’s extraordinary Midnight’s Children, a novel that for all the ways it plays with Hindu mythology, Mogul emperors, and Bombay cinema, among the myriad influences in its epic sweep, has a deep interplay with English literature. The protagonist Saleem Sinai is oedipal Hamlet and impotent Tristram Shandy as well as resilient Ganesh and the enigmatic Buddha.

  I’m sure one strong reason I was drawn to Indian writers was because they loved books with connections to a faraway England much the way I had as a girl in Southern California. I had read David Copperfield and imagined an inviting land of rooks and village greens. R. K. Narayan writes about the primer he had as a child. “A is for apple pie,” it begins. “B bit it, C cut it.” He could understand B and C but had no idea, nor had his teacher, what an apple pie was, or, indeed, an apple. Perhaps, they speculated, an apple pie was like an idli, an Indian rice cake. Narayan came to love England and its apples through his reading.

  And he himself, writing in his lucid English prose about his Indian sweet vendors, taxidermists, English teachers, bharatanatyam dancers, and guides, became someone difficult to categorize. The Indian Chekov, early critics called him, because of his nuanced portrayal of ordinary lives. I think of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s arrogant assertion in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” (a document that argues for the adoption of English as the language of instruction in the Indian school system) that “a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” and I wonder to what shelf he would have relegated Narayan. Or Rushdie. Or any of the Indian novelists writing in English that I was reading and teaching. Notwithstanding Macaulay’s aim to “form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” English-educated Indi
ans (never so docile as hoped for) had always been refused admittance to the British “club.”

  For “club” substitute “canon,” and you come to the major cultural and curricular debate of the 1980s and ’90s. By the time I began teaching my course on Indian English fiction, the work of postcolonial critics, challenging exclusive notions of Britishness, was recasting authors not just from India but from all parts of the former British Empire, where the language remained though the colonizers had departed, as just as legitimately part of English literature as, say, John Milton or James Joyce. “Commonwealth Literature does not exist,” Salman Rushdie had asserted as the title of a 1980 essay. His position in the essay is that he does not want to be ghettoized. Writing in English, he not only claims his place as an English author but also contends that English literature written by Indians and other Commonwealth writers is the English literature of the moment. “It’s our turn now,” he radically proclaims. Not to be the Indian Chekhov. Or Indian Dickens. But to contribute works of great originality and gusto. “The Empire Writes Back,” the title of one critical survey, became a rallying cry. And Indian authors were at the forefront of the charge.

  I still have my copy of the June 1997 fiction issue of The New Yorker, which was entirely given over the Indian authors. The cover shows two khaki-clad white explorers, a man and a woman, coming upon a temple statue of a portly Ganesh, who sits peering down his elephant trunk at a book held between his hoofs against his round belly. The issue’s table of contents, a mix of generations and of genres, features essays, fiction and poems by Rushdie, Kirin Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chauduri, G.V. Desani, Max Vadukul, Mihir Bose, Vijay Seshadri, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, AK Ramanujan, Chitra Banerjee Divakauni, Jayanta Mahapatra, and Shamin Azad. And this list, of course, merely suggests the depth of field. “These days,” says Rushdie in his essay within the volume, “new Indian writers seem to be emerging every week. Their work is as polymorphous as the place.” He further contends, “Indo-Anglian literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The true Indian literature of the first colonial half-century has been made in the language the British left behind.”

  THAT I have taught a course on Indian English literature nine times over the last sixteen years, which is far more often than I have taught my supposed specialty of Victorian fiction, seems to me really quite remarkable. In addition to offering the course several times at Brooklyn College, I taught it five years in a row at NYU (1996-2001) as part of a Brooklyn College-NYU faculty exchange program. The NYU undergraduate curriculum included courses with a general focus on post-colonialism, but no one else had at that point developed a concentration on India.

  Both at Brooklyn College and at NYU my classes invariably had a few Indian or Indian-American students, many from families living in Queens, some of whom knew a lot about Indian culture and some very little, all motivated to know more about the literature. The irony of my being their instructor did not escape me—or perhaps them, but with each successive round of teaching, I felt more flexible and adept in my approaches to the material. I grouped Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day as novels structured by metaphors of breaking and crumbling in their treatment of India’s 1947 Partition and then added Arundhati’s Roy’s The God of Small Things, another book with images of fragmentation, as soon as it appeared in 1997. I taught Vikram Chandra’s sweeping epic Red Earth and Pouring Rain, narrated by the monkey god Hanuman, and Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu, a novel focused on intersecting lives in a Bombay apartment building, among them that of Vishnu, the sweeper who lies dying on the building’s landing while ascending in his dreams of immortality to the realm of his namesake. Seeking to end the course with a work that encompassed the Indian diaspora, I taught in successive years Bharati Mukherji’s Jasmine, in which the heroine, propelled by global violence from her Punjabi village to Florida, New York, and Iowa, plays out the roles of both Kali and Jane Eyre; Anita Desai’s Fasting Feasting, two novellas focused on the constriction of women’s lives, one set in Benares, the other in Boston; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, the collection of stories, some with Indian, some with diasporic protagonists, that won the 1999 Pulizer Prize. As new works engaged me, I juggled my syllabus to make room for them, excited about the additions though always a little rueful about having to set works aside.

  And just as Shakespeare’s history plays had once taught me about the War of the Roses and Vanity Fair been my guide to the Battle of Waterloo, so now I understood more about the Amritsar Massacre, the genocide of Partition, and the war between West and East Pakistan from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or about Syrian Christianity and Kathakali dance from Roy’s The God of Small Things. I learned, too, about Indian cities—Lahore in the Punjab, the setting for Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Bombay, Rushdie’s beloved city in Midnight’s Children, and from all the books I learned about the gods and the myths and the foods and the customs and the words: namaste; chapatti; dhoti, mol. And I learned what it’s like to weave so many cultural traditions together in works that are increasingly, in Rushdie’s words, “de-centered, transnational, inter-lingual, cross-cultural.”

  I found myself on the kind of steep learning curve I hadn’t experienced since college and began to consider writing a book about Indian English fiction. A grant from the City University Research Foundation funded a return visit to India in January 2000. I wanted to travel in the South, the part of the country least explored on my earlier trip and interesting to me in being both more heavily Hindu and more Christian than the North. I especially needed to learn more about Hinduism. However cross-cultural the texts I was teaching, the great Hindu religious stories still seemed to infuse almost all of them, and I was aware how little I really understood these.

  Thus, with the grant funding a car and driver and another friend agreeing to come along, I spent a month on the road between Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai), never quite sure which name to use, old or new, as I read the passing Tamil/English, Kannada/English, Malayalam/English, and Gujarati/English road signs. We stopped in temples in Chidambaram and Madurai, ascended to the old colonial hill station of Ootacamund or Ooty, visited a game preserve and a coffee plantation in Karnataka, spent a night on a houseboat in Kerala, and watched Kathakali dancers in Cochin put on their makeup and perform for visitors. If this sounds like standard tourism, to a large extent it was, though we also met with Indian academics on their campuses and with relatives of my students back in the States, who took us into their homes and shared meals with us along with their hopes for their lives and insights about their country.

  All in all, I fulfilled the goal of the trip, which was to gain a better understanding of India’s geography, peoples, history, and cultures. As for my specific hope to deepen my grasp of religion, my knowledge grew exponentially of temples and gods and the ancient sagas performed in song and dance. I also understood better the cross-fertilization of India’s diverse traditions by one another to create what Rushdie celebrates as its “impurity.” Above the altar of an Anglican church in Madras hung a blue-skinned Christ figure standing on a lotus petal. That’s the image that lingers for me as a vibrant representation of India’s ingenious accommodations.

  By the end of that trip, though, I had reached what felt like a conclusion. For all the fascination of India’s richly intersecting strands, a month on its bad roads left me eager to get safely home and not at all sure about coming back. The book project hung in the balance, and I decided I would not pursue it. Like Cyril Fielding after all, I recognized the limits of my flexibility and understanding. I had gone a certain distance but did not have the stamina or desire to go further. I did not want to stay on in India, literally or metaphorically, beyond my tourist’s visa. To do so would not be right for me—I knew that clearly. I could travel with verve and enthusiasm, but to become a true expert on Indian culture would entail a greater commitment than I had it
in me to make. So I would remain someone passing through, culling impressions, zealous to learn everything possible, to know where I had been, but with an end date to the trip, an end to the syllabus.

  I have continued to teach Indian English literature, both regularly at Brooklyn College and once in Spring 2007 at the University of Paris VIII. The students at Brooklyn College—Jews, Christians and Muslims—are of Caribbean, Russian, German, Italian, Lebanese and African-American descent as well as South Asian; those in Paris were mostly Eastern European and North African. All have been curious about Indian culture, respectful of its layered richness, and at the same time inclined to sift the readings through their own experiences of colonization and immigration.