My teaching of Commonwealth/Third World/Postcolonial/South
Asian/Indian literature is deeply influenced by my consciousness of my
cultural and linguistic differences from the host society, Canada.(1)
These differences structure my consciousness and make me aware of the
culture-specific meanings that often escape cultural outsiders.(2) As a
South Asian Canadian who received her first graduate degree in English
literature from an Indian university, I became acutely conscious of the
contribution of commonplace allusions to the texture of meanings in a
literary text since I had to learn these meanings by going to
encyclopedias and other "extra-literary" sources. I will never
forget being stymied by the word "barbecue" that I encountered
for the very first time in Gone With the Wind, read during my
undergraduate days in India. The short, and several, explanations in my
Shorter Oxford Dictionary didn't help since it was such an alien
concept for me, a teenager growing up in a vegetarian family in a small
central Indian town where vegetarians formed such an overwhelming
majority that the one and only market lacked a meat store.(3) My father,
who had earned a Master's degree in English in the mid-30s, was
also unaware of the word as well as the ritualistic nature of the
activity it denotes for those familiar with North American culture.
He told me not to bother to decode such cruxes when I read English
language texts but to move on with the text. His theoretical advice was
that everything in the text was not understandable, or worth
understanding. He also advised me to skip the narratorial comments and
long descriptions of any kind, things that, according to him, slowed
down the unfolding of the plot. I suppose that must have been the
pedagogical ideology that he was subjected to at Forman Christian
College in Lahore in the mid-30s.
My encounter with such enigmas in the text made me aware very early
on in my study of literature how important culturally coded meanings
are. This awareness has made me wary of theories that speak of
"universality" and "autonomy" of literature. For, as
several Third World writers and critics have suggested,
"universality" in such theoretical exercises has really come
down to a demand that the literary work not contain any references to
the local or regional, since the New York- or London-based critic cannot
be bothered to waste time acquainting him/herself with Yoruba myths or
Indian scriptures (Mukherjee, "Vocabulary").
One result of this lack of desire on the part of the majority of
Euro-American critics writing on non-Western texts has been a paucity of
readings that bring out the culture-specific meanings of these texts.
What we have, instead, are readings and theorizations that focus on a
homogenized "postcolonial" text whose postcoloniality remains
constant across cultural and geographic distances. In the name of
"postcolonial" texts and "postcolonial" theories,
current critical work brings out the "resisting,"
"parodic," and "allegorical" aspects of the
"postcolonial" text, but only in relation to the imperial
"center." Fredric Jameson's "Third World Literature
in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" and Ashcroft's,
Griffiths', and Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back provide
quintessential examples of such an approach.
Such universalizing frameworks are beginning to be questioned after
almost a decade of academic hegemony enjoyed by them. Recent critiques
have focused on postcolonial theory's "ahistorical and
universalizing deployments, and [its] potentially depoliticizing
implications" (Shohat 99). If there is a common thread in these
writings, it is their assertion that a single theory, whatever its
pedigree, is incapable of coming to terms with the multiplicity and
heterogeneity of the world's cultural and social formations (Ahmad;
Mukherjee, "Exclusions"; McClintock; Shohat). As McClintock
suggests, what we need is not yet another single term to substitute for
"post-colonialism" and its variants but "rethinking the
global situation as a multiplicity of powers and histories which cannot
be marshalled obediently under the flag of a single theoretical term, be
that feminism, Marxism, or post-colonialism" (97).
Moving from singularity towards multiplicity would mean dismantling
the current canon of "Postcolonial literature" and the rubric
under which it is taught. It seems to me that monolithic theories
proposed by Jameson or Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin are determining
what texts will be selected for teaching and how they will be taught.
One does not have to go further than to check a few Departmental
calendars and recent issues of journals in the field to discover that a
canon of "Postcolonial literature" has evolved that is heavily
androcentric and biased in favor of texts that can give back the
analysis based on proving "parody" and "nationalist
allegory." The critical work being published on this canon is
predictably concerned with demonstrating intertexuality or the search of
the "colonized" for authentic identity and lost history.
My problem with this canon and its interpretation is that in its
desire to establish the parodic intertexuality of non-European texts
with European ones, it overlooks the parodic and nonparodic functions
that the text may be performing in the place of its origin. On the other
hand, in their focus on the colonizer/colonized binary, such
interpretations fail to notice that the "colonized" may also
be an internal colonizer. Thus, Raja Rao's valorization of
Brahminical culture in The Serpent and the Rope has remained
unproblematic for critics who have seen the work as an assertion of
"Indian" culture and "Indian" identity. Similarly,
the androcentrism of Achebe's or Soyinka's texts is a topic
one seldom hears about (a graduate student of mine recently encountered
much harsh criticism when she read a feminist paper on the absence of
the mother in Achebe's novels).
My subject position as an Indo-Canadian makes me very sensitive to
the homogenizing tendencies of literary and critical discourses. India,
as I have known it, is a multicultural, multiracial, and unequal society
and Indian texts are marked by the tensions that are produced when
multiple discourses compete for domination. My consciousness of
India's plurality also means that I am generally suspicious of all
a priori homogenizations.
I have felt that postcolonial theory, the dominant critical theory in
the field at the moment, overlooks the diversities within any society on
the one hand, and, on the other, the diversities across postcolonial
societies when it tries to speak of them all in terms of the
colonizer/colonized binaries. In terms of pedagogy, postcolonial theory
allows teachers and critics to speak about "Postcolonial
literature(s)" in the singular and design and teach omnibus courses
called "Postcolonial literature" that incorporate works of
authors from far-flung regions of the world. Bringing together these
works is justified in terms of their use of a common language, English,
and a "common" experience of colonialism. Such a stance, in
its privileging of commonalities, deemphasizes differences or erases
them outright. The commonalities, which have been identified as loss of
identity in the form of lost history, lost languages, and lost
traditions, internalization of the colonizer's values, search for
authenticity, forging of new identity, and cursing the colonizer, to
name the more prominent ones, are highlighted at the expense of
differences as well as other possible commonalities such as ethnic and
religious tensions, gender oppression, poverty, and economic
exploitation. The choice of commonalities, I am suggesting, is arbitrary
as well as unconvincing.
This omnibus Commonwealth/Postcolonial course militates against my
desire to teach in ways that bring out the text's affiliation with
the literary tradition it is a part of on the one hand, and, on the
other, its engagements with the discourses and ideologies of the society
it emerged from. For, the moment one tries to teach individual texts in
terms of cultural and literary traditions and specific social realities,
the rationale of a unitary Postcolonial/Commonwealth course that brings
together what are called "five regions" by Canadian
Departments of English is called into question. The rationale, whether
stated or unstated, is based on the premise that the literatures of all
these five "regions" harbor commonalities and that these
commonalities will be brought out as we study their texts in contiguity.
The moment one wants to explore a text in terms of its engagement with
and representation of "a" social reality, one begins to swim
against the predefined directions that a priori constitute "the
postcolonial" as undifferentiated.
In my pedagogical practice, I have tried to move away from the
omnibus Commonwealth/Postcolonial course that packs the "five
regions" into one and design courses that focus on a single region,
or, at most, two. I feel that the rationale that supports the omnibus
course is based on two apriori assumptions that haven't been
analysed rigorously. The first is that postcolonial societies are
similar because of their "shared" experience of colonialism
(Mukherjee, "Exclusions"). The second piggybacks on the first,
and implies that because the societies are similar their literatures are
as well. Since I believe that the social formation of each postcolonial
society is unique and has to be studied on its own terms, I am opposed
in principle to the omnibus course that preempts an inquiry into
individual social formations and individual literary traditions.
Unfortunately, it is the omnibus course that is entrenched in the
majority of Western universities and it is very difficult to argue for
space for five or more separate courses under the
Postcolonial/Commonwealth rubric when even the one or two omnibus
courses are resented by the protectors of the canon.
While it may not be possible for teachers of
Postcolonial/Commonwealth/Third World literatures to demand more space,
given our marginalized position in English Departments focused heavily
on the study of British literature, it is necessary that the hidden
assumptions of the omnibus course be brought out in the open. Its
single-minded focus on commonalities among postcolonial societies and
literatures and its strategies of reading, which privilege parodic
intertextuality of some postcolonial texts with Western texts,
necessarily prevent an engagement with the cultural apparatus - the
totality of the symbolic resources of a culture - that informs a
literary text. And its silent exclusion of texts that may not be about
the anticolonial struggle or may not employ parody of Western texts
reinforces the assumption that all postcolonial societies have similar
concerns and similar mindsets.
I believe that the kind of attention I want to pay to a literary text
is not possible in the format of the omnibus course that flits from
region to region, leaving little time or room to explore intracultural
intertextualities and linkages of other kinds than works from one social
formation have. I have come to believe strongly that the cultural
context is an integral aspect of the literary text and neither its form
nor its content can be grasped without paying attention to the former.
When postcolonial critics focus on comparisons and commonalities, they
overlook the fact that the postcolonial texts do not speak only to the
empire but that they are also in conversation with those on the home
territory. That is, as "strategic [and] stylized answers" they
participate in all the other discourses of their society and situate
their own discourse by taking a position against or for these
oppositional or friendly discourses (Burke 1). I believe that the
omnibus course, first through its selection and exclusion of texts and
then through the kind of themes and formal strategies it chooses to
highlight, forecloses the possibilities of inquiry into the engagement
of the text with local realities.
For example, how are we to find commonalities for unique Indian
institutions such as sati and untouchability? Conversely, how is our
understanding of the temple-mosque dispute that is currently raging in
India and threatens its dissolution enhanced by our comparative studies
based on the premise of colonial domination? As Anne McClintock has
suggested, postcolonial theory leads to "an entranced suspension of
history, as if definitive historical events have preceded us, and are
not now in the making" (86).
Since history is not a closed book, and since it neither began nor
ended with the era of colonialism, I feel that there is no substitute
for studying a literary text in its own socio-historical context. When
several literary texts from the same area and tradition are studied
together, the recurrence of socially shared narratives and shared
cultural assumptions links them for us in various interesting ways.
Such a pedagogical and interpretational ideology implies that a
critic must bring to the text an extratextual knowledge about the
multiple discourses circulating in a society rather than rely solely on
the text. In pedagogical terms, this stance means that the text should
be situated on an ideological spectrum - not universally, but in the
context of the cultural ideologies operating in the place of its
production.
I find that a good number of my Canadian students have very little
knowledge about the geographic region known as the Indian sub-continent,
except for some well-worn stereotypes learned from high school text
books and Hollywood movies. Most of them do not know anything about
ancient or modern Indian history, religions, or cultural traditions and
customs. Such lack of basic knowledge on their part demands that I
contextualize the text for them by talking in detail about things such
as the epics Mahabharata and the Ramayana, independence and partition,
contemporary social, political and cultural trends and films and other
popular media. As Gerald Graft has noted:
What a teacher is to say about a literary work [is] something that
hinges on matters of purpose, context, and situation that are not
pregiven either in literary works themselves or our experience of them.
If works of literature "speak for themselves," they do so only
up to a point, for their authors were not aware, and could not have been
aware, of the kinds of situations in which their works would later be
read and taught and the different problems of comprehension and
appreciation these situations might occasion. (255)
I have already engaged with the "purpose . . . and
situation" of my teaching in my earlier discussion of my problems
with the purpose of the omnibus Commonwealth/Postcolonial course and the
premises that support it. The "context" of teaching, I think,
has to do with taking into account the fact that an Indian text taught
in India will need a different pedagogical and interpretive strategy
than when it is taught in a different land and to a different body of
students.
Since my Canadian students know very little about Indian history,
literatures, religions, gender relations, and construction of the self
in India, I become a narrator myself, recounting the shared narratives
of India that are embedded in the literary text. This tale telling is
educational both for me and my students. It makes me conscious of the
unconscious interpretive activity that I bring to bear on texts from
India whereas my students learn about the culture-specific nature of
literary language. The point is brought home to them when we discuss
that what to them is the crystal clear textuality of a Canadian work
becomes opaque to readers uninitiated in Canadian history, literature,
and culture when they come across expressions such as "two
solitudes," "the maple leaf," "the great white
north," "survival," "the garrison mentality,"
and many others like these.
My aim as a teacher, then, is to acquaint my students with the
allusive nature of the text. These allusions are not just to literary
texts but, as I have said elsewhere, also to "collectively shared
knowledge and experiences of a society: experience of colonialism,
legends of heroes and villains, deeply-held belief systems, rhetorical
pronouncements of local elite such as politicians, businessmen, and
movie stars" ("Vocabulary" 13). I try to steer my
students away from their deeply entrenched habit of focusing solely on
the character(s) in isolation by bringing to their attention the fact
that such an isolationist move is ethnocentric insofar as they impose
their own cultural values on the behavior and motivation of the
character(s). Instead, I focus on acquainting them with the total web of
significations that structure the narrative.
I would now like to focus on one particular fictional text, Anita
Desai's Clear Light of Day, and elaborate on my pedagogical
strategies as well as my students' responses. I have chosen this
text since it is widely taught and has also received considerable
critical attention. However, few of the research articles in journals
and books - focusing on aspects such as intertextuality of the text with
British literature and American pop music, "universal" themes
such as quest, search for identity, loss of innocence, and, more
recently, post-colonial "resistance" to the colonizer's
impositions - provide much help to my students in coming to grips with
the cultural premises that are embedded in the text and account for its
"Indianness."
It is these cultural premises that I am interested in exploring and
explaining to my students so that they may become aware of the
dependence of the literary text on the totality of the symbolic
resources of the culture the text emanates from. Often, it is the
questions or the interpretations of my students that alert me to the
culture-specific aspect of these symbolic codes as I had passed over
them in my own reading, unaware of my own special knowledge as a
"cultural insider" in my encounter with the text. For
instance, if the text were being taught in India to Indian students, the
teacher would not have to inform the students that the white sari of
Mira Masi signifies her widowhood. However, the Canadian students need
to be informed of this symbolism. Such realizations on our part make me
and my students aware how culture-specific literary texts are and how
important it is to know the social text if we really want to understand
the literary text.
The growth of such an awareness, I believe, ought to be the end
result of my teaching. As a teacher, my aim is to move students away
from the fake "universality" that denies differences only
because it projects its own ethnocentrism on the "other."
Polly Young-Eisendrath has defined this imperialist universalism very
well:
Our ethnocentrism, as North Americans, frequently enters into our
discussions about self-constructs of other cultures. We tend to believe
that individuality, individual freedom, and self-reflectiveness are the
truest, most valuable and least contestable aspects of sell In other
words, we universalize the aspects of selfhood that suggest personal
uniqueness and separateness. (158)
It is the "self-constructs of other cultures" - what is
worth telling, how it is to be told, what is considered a good life -
that I focus on in my classroom, in the hope that my students will
become critically conscious of their own ethnocentrism. Much of the
learning, and laughter, in my classroom, in fact, is born out of
cross-cultural encounters since my classes at York University are
increasingly multicultural and multiracial, which was not the case even
five years ago. One of the recent encounters, for instance, was on the
institution of arranged marriage. Whereas a white student admitted to
considering the institution "weird" and "funny," a
South Asian student accused her of applying a "Judaeo-Christian
framework." The point I wish to make is that the multicultural
Canadian classroom of the nineties is a deeply contested space and the
pedagogical strategies I adopt are tailored to the realities of my
classroom and may not be relevant to a monocultural, monoracial
classroom, such as the classrooms that I encountered in Canada in the
seventies and eighties, both as a graduate student and as a teacher,
where I would often be the only nonwhite.
Having said that, perhaps one insight that I can share with other
teachers of cross-cultural texts is the need to tell stories that are
only partially referred to in the text because they are the common
property of a culture. There are many such stories in The Clear Light of
Day, and they require explaining to readers who are not acquainted with
Indian culture and literature. One cluster of such stories, perhaps the
most important since it resonates throughout the text, is woven around
the Jumna river and its importance as a holy river as well as the
playground of Krishna. It begins very early on in the text. In response
to Tara's disappointment at seeing the summer-shrunk Jumna, Bim
says:
"Nothing?" she repeated Tara's judgment. "The
holy river Jumna? On whose banks Krishna played his flute and Radha
danced?"
"Oh Bim, it is nothing of the sort," Tara dared to say,
sure she was being teased. "It's a little trickle of mud with
banks of dust on either side."
"It's where my ashes will be thrown after I'm dead and
burnt," Bim said unexpectedly and abruptly. It is where
Mira-masi's ashes were thrown." (24)
There are two major cultural narratives here, and they convey deeply
charged messages to a reader familiar with Hinduism and Hindu Indian
culture. One refers to the rituals of a Hindu death, the other to
Krishna's dancing and flute-playing by the banks of the Jumna and
his flirtations with the cowgirls of Vrindavan. The reference to
Krishna's and Radha's dancing and adulterous love-making by
the banks of Jumna recalls a ubiquitous theme in Hindu Indian culture,
which encompasses medieval lyrics by Surdas and Mira, idols of Radha and
Krishna in Hindu temples, Indian sculpture and painting, Indian
classical and folk music, and, finally, Indian films and film music. The
theme, when presented straight, suggests religious ecstasy, sexual
freedom, equality of women, pastoral harmony, and an overall feeling of
plenitude. As Sudhir Kakar puts it, "In psychological terms, he
[Krishna] encourages the individual to identify with an ideal primal
self, released from all social and superego constraints. Krishna's
promise, like that of Dionysus in ancient Greece, is one of utter
freedom and instinctual exhilaration" (142).
Although my students have some idea of Krishna's association
with ecstatic dancing and singing, thanks to the popularity of the Hare
Krishna cult, in order for them to grasp the novel's utilization of
the theme, I have to tell them stories about Krishna's days as a
cowherd in Mathura and Vrindavan, particularly the stories about
Krishna's dancing and flute-playing and how Radha and the other
cowgirls were so mesmerized by them that the moment they heard the flute
beckoning them, they left whatever they were doing to join him in his
dancing, even at midnight. I cannot, of course, tell them all the
stories, given the constraints of class time, but the point I wish to
impress on them is the text's utilization of, and its dependence
on, the socially-shared narratives.
The text, however, inverts these narratives of joyous adulterous love
by pointing out their patriarchal underpinnings. While these narratives
idealize the explicit sexuality of the Krishna-Radha legend as the
allegorical rendering of the pining of a devotee for the incarnate God,
Desai's use of the legends brings out their total irrelevance to
the lived experience of Indian women. She suggests that dancing and
teaching these stylized dances celebrating the love of Radha and Krishna
is no exhilarating experience for Jaya and Sarla, the Misra sisters:
Walking up the Misras' driveway, they [Bim and Tara] could hear
instead the sounds of the music and dance lessons that the Misra sisters
gave in the evenings after their little nursery school had closed for
the day, for it seemed that they never ceased to toil and the pursuit of
a living was unending. . . . Bim stood apart, feeling a half-malicious
desire to go into the house and watch the two grey-haired, spectacled,
middle-aged women - once married but both rejected by their husbands
soon after their marriage - giving themselves up to demonstrations of
ecstatic song and dance, the songs always Radha's in praise of
Krishna, the dance always of Radha pining for Krishna. She hadn't
the heart after all. . . . After a while, the teachers, too, emerged on
the veranda. They too drooped and perspired and were grey with fatigue.
There was nothing remotely amusing about them. (30)
The emphasis on "always" in "the songs always
Radha's in praise of Krishna, the dance always of Radha pining for
Krishna," brings out the selectiveness and repetitiveness of the
thematizations utilized by the classical schools of Indian dancing,
which are all heavily focused on the theme of Radha's and
Krishna's lovemaking, carried out "always" in terms of
Krishna's flirtations and ultimate abandonment of Radha.
Desai's questioning of this art form pokes holes in the vocabulary
of high seriousness that Indian dance critics employ. Her vocabulary
seems to parody the mystical-formalistic mode of dance critics like
Ananda Coomaraswamy, Sunil Kothari, and Kapila Vatsyayan whose studies
of Indian classical dance have been published in expensive, lavishly
illustrated books: "The poor Misra girls, so grey and bony and
needle-faced, still prancing through their Radha-Krishna dances and
impersonating lovelorn maidens in order to earn their living. . . . Bim
shook her head."
As the term "always" had emphasized the frozen-in-time
quality of the form, the term "prancing" mocks those who speak
of it only in terms like "fluidity," "ecstasy," and
"gracefulness." It asks us whether watching and enacting the
same theme over and over again does not risk boredom. And it asks us to
question the disjunction between the "lovelorn maidens" and
the aging Misra sisters who must "impersonate" them in order
to make their living. The novel, by giving voice to the plight of these
aging and abandoned sisters, sets itself up in antithesis to the art
form they must practise despite the fact that it obliterates their own
sad realities. Unlike the novel, the dance has no room for women other
than "lovelorn maidens."
One can only understand the boldness of this attack if one knows
about the discursive idealizations of this dance form in the official
cultural discourses of India that occurred under the nationalist project
of manufacturing a new cultural identity. Beginning in the 40s,
nationalist cultural critics sanitized the history of India's
classical dance forms by renaming the dance as well as writing out of
its history the prostitutes and temple dancers (Devdasis) who made their
living by performing these dances for the entertainment of their rich
clients. In fact, temple dancing by Devdasis was outlawed by the passage
of a Bill in the Madras legislative assembly in 1947 in the name of
morality and national honor. The dance was then "revived"
under the aegis of "nationalization of Indian art and life and its
almost 'religious' idealization . . . was in no small measure
itself an effect of westernisation" (Srinivasan 196).
Supported by huge subsidies from the government and business patrons,
India's classical dances were given a new cultural script.
Nowadays, India's classical dancers present the eternal love play
of Krishna and Radha in opulent concert halls, both at home and abroad.
Indian dance critics comment on the "spirituality" of these
dances in expensively produced and subsidized hard-cover volumes. Their
exalted language hides the inability of the exponents of the dance form
to connect and expand their art to encompass the lives of flesh and
blood women. Desai's narrative, by bringing out the repetitiveness
and frozen-in-time aspect of these dance forms creates a dissonance in
the discursive consensus around India's high culture, which speaks
of such things as "the attainment of the Infinite," and
"absolute bliss in the Brahman" (Vatsyayan 5) etc., but not
about the plane of day-to-day life and its iniquities.
This idealized view of classical Indian art is further critiqued in
the novel in an exchange between Bakul and Bim that occurs only a few
paragraphs after the passages quoted earlier:
Elegantly holding his cigarette in its holder at arm's length,
Bakul told them in his ripest, roundest tones, "What I feel is my
duty, my vocation, when I am abroad, is to be my country's
ambassador. . . . I refuse to talk about famine or drought or caste wars
or - or political disputes. . . . I choose to show them and inform them
only of the best, the finest."
"The Taj/Mahal?" asked Bim.
"Yes, exactly," said Bakul promptly. "The Taj Mahal -
the Bhagvad Gita - Indian philosophy - music - art - the great, immortal
values of ancient India." (35)
I tell my students that Bakul's view presents the officially
sanctioned view of Indian culture - the culture Indian government
exhibits at great cost at Indian fairs held in New York and Moscow. It
is a view of culture frozen in the past and unable to encompass
"famine or drought or caste wars." And it is highly selective.
In Susie Tharu's words, this nationalist construction has produced
"an almost unbearably tasteful past and an exquisite
tradition." In it, "Women are no longer people, but goddess
spirits. And as such, not alive or growing, but sculpted by the
requirement of the emerging power" (262-63).
Desai's ironic uncovering of this "exquisite
tradition" is, for me, the achievement of her text. Against the
conflictless high culture's promotion by Bakul, who is
appropriately a high-ranking civil servant, the novel uncovers the
anguished history of fratricide, of partition, of religious bigotry, of
treatment and representation of women, and finally, of the destruction
of Islamic Indian culture. Raja's inability to go to Jamia Milia to
pursue a degree in Islamic studies and the inability of his sisters to
read his verses written in Urdu thematize the deliberate erasure of
Islamic culture and Urdu literature in modern India. The Hindu bias in
post-independence Indian historiography and Indian literary history are
themes that are now being written about in oppositional terms by Muslim
writers like Rahi Masoom Raza and Manzoor Ehtesham. Anita Desai's
contribution to this oppositional discourse is indeed a gesture of
tremendous integrity.
However, this oppositional aspect of the novel will remain
inaccessible to my students unless I acquaint them with the politics of
language and culture in modern India. Part of my work is done by Attia
Hosain's powerful novel Sunlight on a Broken Column, which I teach
before teaching Clear Light of Day. It describes vividly to them the
partition of the country on the basis of religion and prepares them for
the events and politics narrated in Clear Light of Day. Some stories
still need to be told by me, however. I tell them about my father's
education in English, Persian, and Urdu whereas my mother was educated,
like Bim and Tara, in English, Hindi, and Punjabi. I tell them that this
was so because of the combined impact of gender and religion. And,
finally, I tell them of my own lack of education in Urdu and of the gap
it leaves in my knowledge of my past. I tell them of major Indian
writers like Prem Chand who wrote in both Hindi and Urdu, and how their
Urdu writings have been forgotten.
The text's radical questioning of this forgetting and its
intertextualizing of such famous Urdu poets as Zauq, Ghalib, Daag, Hali,
and Iqbal can only be appreciated if we know the politics of language in
contemporary India. For Canadian students, these aspects of the text,
once explained, become illuminative of their own country's
struggles around language and culture.
The text in my classroom thus is read as a contested site, as a
"dialogic" gesture that supports or opposes the discourses
that share the social-cultural space with it. Its language, I insist, is
contextualized and its narrative weaves in several other narratives. To
read the text, then, is to read the culture, and there is no short cut
around it.
Perhaps the best description, for me, of the pedagogical process has
been given by Alice Walker in her novel Meridian. Meridian, the
protagonist, says, "I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest
people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don't
see it as a handing down of answers" (188). Walker's and Paulo
Freire's "Pedagogy of the Question" gave me the idea of
asking my students to prepare their seminar presentations around
questions that they would ask the class. I tell them that they must take
it for granted that many things in the text will not make sense to them
and they must question me and the class about those aspects of the text.
These questions evoke multiple answers in the form of
"perhaps" or "may be" from the class and often end
up with my recounting a story, which is really my life history as part
of the history of my people.
I will end with one more passage from the novel that appears quite
transparent on the surface but is really a deconstructive
intertextualization with one of the grand themes of Bengali literature
and culture. Dr. Biswas, the Bengali doctor who has been trying to court
Bim, unsuccessfully, thinks that her reluctance to marry him is caused
by her responsibility for looking after Mira-masi, Raja, and Baba:
"Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. You have
dedicated your life to others - to your sick brother and your aged aunt
and your little brother who will be dependent on you all his life. You
have sacrificed your own life for them." (97)
Desai's heroine, Bim, is shocked "at being so
misunderstood, so totally misread" (97). Desai's use of the
term "misread" once again reminds us of the power of social
texts. For Dr. Biswas's "misreading" of Bim is informed
by scores of Bengali novels and films. The rejection of marriage and
love on the part of a young woman for the sake of providing for her
family is a perennial theme in Bengali literature and has also been
rendered on screen by such talented filmmakers as Ritvik Ghatak in his
classic film Meghe Dhaka Tara.
On the surface, Bim's predicament appears quite similar to these
sacrificing heroines of Indian fiction and Indian cinema who abjure
marriage because of family responsibilities, and it is because of the
cultural ubiquity of this theme that Dr. Biswas so confidently
"misreads" Bim. By making Bim "reject" Dr. Biswas
because she considers him a wimp and not because she is burdened by
dependent family members, Desai parodies the sacrificial, sentimental
heroine popularized by the stalwarts of Bengali fiction and cinema. By
creating a heroine who wants autonomy rather than domestic bliss, and
having her turn down the Bengali doctor, Desai creates a new script for
Indian women at the same time that she mocks the earlier ones. There is
perhaps no other heroine in Indian literature(s) who utters words such
as Bim's with such emotional force:
She was looking down, across the lighted, bustling garden to her own
house, dark and smouldering with a few dim lights behind the trees, and
raised her hands to her hair, lifting it up and letting it fall with a
luxuriant, abundant motion. "I shall work - I shall do
things," she went on, "I shall earn my own living - and look
after Mira-masi and Baba and - and be independent. There'll be so
many things to do - when we are grown up - when all this is over -"
and she swept an arm out over the garden party, dismissing it.
"When we are grown up at last - then - then -" but she
couldn't finish for emotion, and her eyes shone in the dusk. (141)
While the emotional charge of these words is not hard for my students
to understand, surrounded and influenced as they are by feminist
theories and feminist activism, they appreciate the text's radical
stance even better when they learn about its oppositional
intertextuality with the Bengali and Hindi texts about the sacrificing
spinster who remains unappreciated by her ungrateful family members and
ends up in a sanatorium. By creating a spinster heroine who refuses to
be "read" in the framework of these discourses and by refusing
to render her, as they do, as the object of pity and guilt, Desai's
text engages in a discursive battle with the texts about sentimentalized
femininity that continue to be churned out in great numbers in India.
The terms of its battle are specific, not universal, just as the
constructions of gender and femininity are culture-specific.
My classroom, then, is a place to explore the kind of meanings that a
text generates in its place of production. Such an exploration
presupposes that human beings, both the author and her/his characters,
are social and historical beings, and their subjectivity is formed by
their response to their concrete historical situation. To the extent
that I focus on the text's relationship with the other discourses
and material realities of a society, I steer my students away from the
notions of universality as they operate in literary criticism, both in
terms of technique and themes. I see my goal as a teacher to be to wean
my students away from the ethnocentric universality that
unproblematically applies the thought and behavior patterns of a
critic's own culture to the rest of humanity, refusing to
acknowledge and/or value difference. If I succeed in making my students
aware of the universalizing tendencies of Western literary theory, I
consider my teaching to have attained its desired goal.
NOTES
1 "Commonwealth/Postcolonial literature" until 1992-93. The
1993-94 calendar has quietly dropped the dual label and adopted the term
"Postcolonial literature."
2 "Cultural outsider" and "Cultural insider" are
not biological or ascriptive categories for me. To paraphrase Simone de
Beauvoir's famous sentence about the process of becoming a woman,
one can say that "One is not born a cultural insider but becomes
one." Thus; Bash Davidson's work on Africa amply demonstrates
his cultural insider status. Having worked for more than twenty years on
U. S. and Canadian cultures, I consider myself a cultural insider
although I have been denied jobs to teach American Studies because I am
not American. From my perspective, anyone, born in whatever cultural or
racial group, has the capacity to become a cultural insider. The
tragedy, however, is that there are few scholars working on
"Postcolonial literatures" who can claim that status. As Aijaz
Ahmad says, "[R]are would be . . . a major literary theorist in
Europe or the United States who has ever bothered with an Asian or
African language" (5). Michael Sprinker also comments on "our
general and shameful ignorance of the native languages themselves - not
to mention the cultural, social, and political histories attendant upon
specific texts" (59).
3 Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1991) has thematized the subterfuges a meat eater in India has
to resort to because of the vegetarians' intolerance towards the
meat eaters.
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Mukherjee, an associate professor of English at York University in
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