Amitav Ghosh

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Rushdie's Children

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SOURCE: “Rushdie's Children,” in Nation, Vol. 265, No. 9, September 29, 1997, pp. 36–40.

[In the following essay, Kumar analyzes the reception to and importance of Indian writers who write in English, using Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome as his primary examples.]

“India: The Fiction Issue” sang the cover of The New Yorker at the newsstand run by a Gujarati man inside Penn Station. On the bright cover, topped with turmeric sunset hues, sat a stone Lord Ganesha browsing through a couple of books, the task made easier because He has more than two hands. And emerging from a thicket, dressed for a safari, were a white couple, mouths agape.

This has been the season of the discovery of India—presumably because it is the fiftieth-anniversary year of Indian independence and not because India, under World Bank/I.M.F. dictates, has introduced wide-scale “structural adjustments,” exponentially increasing the commercial traffic between India and the United States. (Jesse Helms, whose conservatism is old enough to deserve an anniversary of its own, congratulated an Indian-American audience recently for its enthusiasm for U.S. capitalism: “Everything that you good friends who are citizens of this country of ours have worked for—opening the Indian economy and improving relations—is coming to pass.”) Welcome to the literature of the New Economic Policy.

I grew up in India under the stultifying shadow of the nationalist myth that we were all the children of Mahatma Gandhi. Now, if The New Yorker is to be believed. we are all the children of Salman Rushdie. A bit extreme, perhaps, but indulge me, dear reader. For we live in an extreme world. And one of the features of this world is that publications from Western metropoles have the power to be the god of all things—especially things from the famished, resourceful regions of the Third World.

In one such powerful venue, The New York Times, the publication of Rushdie's Midnight's Children was characterized as “a Continent finding its voice.” The Delhi-based critic Aijaz Ahmad remarked caustically, “As if one has no voice if one does not speak in English.”

In the editorial introduction to The New Yorker, Bill Buford repeated the same fiction, talking of what he calls “Indian fiction” as the literary output in only one language, English, and that too by recent, mostly expatriate, authors. In his own survey of Indian writing in the same issue, Rushdie rather briskly and a bit disingenuously inrushes away post-independence writing in other languages of India as not being as “strong” or “important” as the literary output in English during the same period. “Admittedly,” he says, “I did my reading only in English, and there has long been a genuine problem of translation in India.” But this confession isn't intended as a genuine qualification, it would seem and it only inoculates his judgment against further inquiry. No mention is made of the explosion of Dalit (literally, the oppressed referring to the untouchable castes) writing in Marathi, for example, which represents a radical rewriting not only of the canon but of the very notion of the literary.

Like the Times, Buford reduces the history of writing in India—in at least eighteen other languages but also in a variety of other contexts, not the least of which was the nationalist movement—to one single publication in the West, as cozily close to the present as the year 1981, the year “that Salman Rushdie published Midnight's Children, a book that … made everything possible.”

Even if that were true, such a contention would beg the question: Why is it so? Or, what does it say about the historical invisibility of others and their languages? But Buford's statement isn't true. Even if we take novels written only in, say, Hindi or Urdu, around the singular event of the partition of India in 1947—the event that constitutes the bloody underside of what we're celebrating this year—very little that has been written in English in India approaches the eloquent expressions in those novels of the woes, the divided hopes, or the numb, demented silences of 10 million uprooted lives.

And yet there is an undeniable force to several new novels written in English by Indian novelists. How are we to read them outside the ignorant and self-congratulatory rhetoric of Western publishing? How can we frame this writing with issues that join, rather than separate, them from other milieus both in India and the world?

Arundhati Roy's moving first novel, The God of Small Things, has created a publishing sensation not only in the West but also in India—where, of course, some gods fare far better than others. But, this is not a novel about those gods that dwell in temples or mosques. The violence at the heart of the novel has nothing to do with, for instance, the demolition in 1992 of a mosque by right wing Hindu zealots in the Indian town of Ayodhya. The communal frenzy in Hindu-Muslim riots had led the historian Gyan Pandey to comment that violence in Indian historiography is often “written up” only as “aberration” and “absence.” So that an interrogation of an experience like the trauma of Ayodhya makes it essential, as the critic Rustom Bharucha has put it, to produce another kind of historiography, one that “do[es] not neutralise the necessity of writing, but acknowledge[s], nonetheless, the gaps and holes in it.”

I invoke the Ayodhya violence here because Roy engages the recall of—rather, the recoil from—violence and the difficulty of ever articulating its trauma. Her novel is set in a small town in Kerala where the police inspector taps the breasts of a divorced, upperclass woman, in front of her small children, when she comes to inquire after her jailed lover, a Communist worker from an untouchable caste. The policeman uses his baton to touch Ammu's breasts: “Gently. Tap tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing out the ones that he wanted packed and delivered.”

We are offered this in the first pages of the book. The rest of the novel is not only a keen, unremitting revelation of the jagged edges of the holes in memory, it's also a nearly visible attempt by Ammu's two little kids, a pair of dizygotic twins, to grasp the meaning of those events and the words that surround their mother. Words like “illegitimate children” and “veshya” (whore). That long journey leads to the slow madness of language and to silence, to deaths from lonely griefs, and the sweet, small, bitter consolations of incestuous caring.

Writing about the traditional Indian dance form Kathakali, Roy says “the Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. … You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't.” In The God of Small Things, you know “who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.”

It is possible that the novel can't tell more because it discovers its own postcolonial heart of darkness in caste violence and the humiliation of domestic abuse. (“The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.”) But, perhaps connected with that is also the possibility that Roy refuses to hope for anything beyond the horror she contemplates. Those who had fought are now dead; those who are alive only happen to be survivors. The untouchable barely speaks in the narrative, and it's likely that when the story is over, all you can remember of him is his glittering smile. The subaltern with perfect teeth.

The subalterns in Amitav Ghosh's latest novel, The Calcutta Chromosome, are even more mysterious, represented by shadowy, occult figures in Calcutta and New York City of the near future. Our uncanny subalterns are preoccupied with the search for a unique chromosome with links to the discovery of the malarial parasite; their meetings and intrigue take place as much in the margins of colonial history as in the postmodern dimensions of cyberspace. In this novel too, language leads to ritual madness, as surely as the fever and delirium that results from the onset of malaria. The result is a history lesson fringed at its edges with a hallucinogenic glow.

In the year 1902, a British doctor, Ronald Ross, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery—in the summer of 1898, in Calcutta—that the malarial parasite is carried in the stomach of the anopheles mosquito. The Calcutta Chromosome raises suspicions: Were there others in India, unlettered but savvy, who actually handed this information to Ross? Were they members of a secret society with their own designs about using Ross to find out more? These are the questions posed by a fast-talking L. Murugan (“Morgan” to you), whose speech is spiked with American colloquialisms; and it is Morgan's bizarre search through the lanes of history and the bylanes of Calcutta, mobbed with disturbing coincidences, that keeps one turning the pages.

Ghosh is in equal parts a historian and a novelist. Consider his fine piece on the Indian National Army in The New Yorker double issue. His third book, In an Antique Land, an engaging weave of archival research and travel writing, was excerpted both in Granta magazine and in Subaltern Studies VII, a collection of academic writings on South Asian history and society. The Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh's fourth novel, is an intelligent thriller and reflects both those affiliations—with a twist.

The critic Franco Moretti, commenting on the ideology of detective fiction, writes that the genre “enacts the antithesis between life and property and between life and individuality: to have one, it is necessary to give up the other. Kafka's inexorable law is already at work, but detective fiction cannot see the Castle that promulgates it.”

Ghosh's novel stumbles into that trap too. Even while calling into question the claims and certainties of Western science, The Calcutta Chromosome finds redemption only in the tyranny of the secret society and its mysterious, mystical silence. And Morgan, in what is a disheartening representation of the interrogative, Nietzschean intellectual, is condemned at the end to syphilitic dementia and the terror of isolation.

Is that cringing figure in any sense an approximation of the modern Indian writer in English? Let us first ask the question: Who would make that writer cringe?

As we learn in Suketu Mehta's report, published in a Granta special issue on India, the rise to prominence of the right-wing Hindu party Shiv Sena in Mumbai has been based on its demonization of minorities, who are seen as foreigners. A part of that nativist ideology is also the wholesale rejection of the English language—and hence of these writers. But? Mehta tells us, the real condition for writers' isolation is not the contempt in which the right wing would hold them but their insulation from the consequences of their actions. Rushdie's victimization is an exception that pretty much proves the rule.

In the previous decade or 50, magical realism has become more and more a tool of the expatriate writer, the N.R.I. (in Indian bureaucratese, Non-Resident Indian). It has only compounded, in my opinion, the distance of exile. Of course, there have been advantages. In Rushdie's hands, magical realism has freed the language from the rigidities of an official Babu English, and it has fed the appetites of the narrative on the delights of the imagination. Nonetheless, it has given the writer illusory shortcuts to the heart of history. Not only because it is easier to write a poem than to organize a march in a slum torn by a Hindu-Muslim riot but also because the real as a difficulty or challenge becomes merely a textual affair and not a social one.

We need more reports that carry the burden of the present in all its urgency. More intellectuals like K. Balagopal, a scientist and human rights worker on behalf of Andhra peasants, who writes in English and Telugu. Or Mahasweta Devi, a prolific writer of fiction and drama, who has also written valuable journalism in both Bengali and English on the condition of Santhal tribals.

I end by quoting Devi because her example poses a challenge not only to writers but also to readers of Indian writing: “Why should American readers want to know from me about Indian tribals, when they have present-day America? How was it built? Only in the names of places the Native American legacy survives.” That is a lesson I want to keep in mind when I teach novels by Roy or Ghosh or Devi to students at the University of Florida. In this town it sometimes seems that the only thing that makes another man my brother is that we root for the same football squad and piss warm beer on the other team, named after a Native American tribe that today doesn't even have a truck named after it.

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