[In the following essay, Brush examines Desai's articulation of the largely neglected European emigrant to India in Baumgartner's Bombay, emphasizing the multiple marginalization of the protagonist's character.]

In her essay, ‘Writing the Immigrant Self: Disguise and Damnation,’ Canadian critic Aritha van Herk identifies the various stories which are often told in the literature of immigrants: ‘There is first of all the overt story. Then there is the much more complex and multi-foliate covert story’ (van Herk, p. 177), which she also refers to as the ‘story under the story’ (van Herk, p. 175). The overt story of European immigration into India has been told many times, in numerous novels about the British presence in India, articulating what van Herk identifies as the ‘tempting illusion’ (van Herk, p. 178) of the overt story. What Anita Desai does in Baumgartner's Bombay is to take the covert, predominantly untold experience of European immigration into India, and articulate that through the experience of a German Jew, Hugo Baumgartner. She gives a voice to an aspect of the experience of European immigration into India which has generally been effaced, ignored, and excluded from official records—the ‘silenced story’ (van Herk, p. 185).

Desai's concern with the experience of a German living in India comes partly from her own part-German upbringing, and was given a focus through an Austrian Jew living in Calcutta. Following his death, Desai was asked to translate letters of his, and at first she believed them to be little more than ‘affectionate little notes’ (Jussawalla, p. 174). Once she realised that they were actually heavily censored correspondence from one of the World War II concentration camps—reflected in Lotte's realisation that ‘Each one [was] stamped with the number: J 673/1’ (p. 230)—their silence allowed Desai to create a story around the man who had died:

there was no information about them—the man was dead, I couldn't question him—I began to think a great deal about it and felt the need to supply them with a history, so I invented a history for this figure whom I had seen but not known.

(Jussawalla, p. 175)

Desai takes the few dislocated pieces of information she has concerning this man's life, and what she then learns about them, and writes a possible history for him. Desai's realisation that there were no official records of the internment camps that the British set up in India made it all the more important for her to undertake this project (Jussawalla, p. 175). It was the tiny pieces of information—van Herk's ‘fragments’ (van Herk, p. 185)—which pointed to a larger, untold story. After discovering these fragments, Desai invented a story to fill what she perceived as an absence, a silence. The difference between Desai's text and other historiographic texts which construct fictional lives for figures in history, is that Desai chooses a figure who is firmly on the margins. She tells the immigrant experience, not through the major events of recorded history, but through a man whose life is dictated by a history over which he has no control.

Hugo's dislocation, which identifies both his experience as an immigrant in India and as a Jew in pre-war Germany, is represented principally in terms of language. The dislocation experienced through language and as a result of difference in language seems to be a highly significant factor in the writing of the immigrant experience. For Hugo, this dislocation occurs on several levels and begins when he is ‘at home’ in Berlin. As a child, Hugo's first language is German, and his cultural identification is constructed through this initial language. As Elaine Y. L. Ho puts it, in her recent article on language and identity in the novel, ‘German is Baumgartner's first language, the language of his identity and cultural filiation.’

Hugo's experience at the Jewish school which he is forced to attend highlights the sense of dislocation which will plague him throughout his life. Hugo cannot easily understand the Hebrew which is taught at his new school (p. 49); it is a new language for him, and not one with which he readily identifies—even though it is being taught as the language of ‘his own people.’ Here, in the Jewish school, he is also cruelly treated by the other children:

The boys who shared a wooden bench with Hugo spent the morning trying to shove him off so that he had to grip the edge of the seat to keep from falling off. ‘Was ist los, Baumgartner? What's the matter?’ the teacher asked. ‘Is it the bathroom you need already?’ and the children grew pinched and blue in the face with laughter.

(p. 37)

He is sneered at for not understanding the lessons, and his marginality is confirmed for him in this sense of being an outsider, of not having access to the knowledge and language of others. He is doubly marginalised in Berlin: his ethnic background isolates him through the growing influence of Nazism; a strange language and the cruelty of children isolate him when he is placed in a Jewish school, making him marginal even within his own community.

Once Hugo gets to India, the speaking of German takes on new significance. His friend, Lotte, is someone who in Germany he would never have met (p. 65). They come from very different classes and backgrounds—he finds it hard even to believe that they both came from Berlin (pp. 66 and 208)—yet she becomes his friend partly because of their common language: ‘But what did it matter—she spoke German, had his language, nicht wahr?’ (p. 66). They also share the changes in their language which come from having lived so long without speaking it. Hugo knows that his German is not so good anymore, but he also knows that Lotte's is worse, and he can take some comfort from that (p. 95). He sees their ‘kinship’ (pp. 66 and 95) in the sunburnt rings on her neck—in the effect of the Indian sun on the fair skin of a European—and it is their common experience, as well as their common language, which cements the link. His first words to her—in German—‘How came you here?’ (p. 95), ascertain the extent of their common experience, the one thing he knows they must share; the experience of immigration, of ‘how, and why, you came here.’

But Hugo has since lost the desire to speak German as an end in itself. His time in the camp, with pro-Nazi as well as German-Jewish detainees, has distanced him from his first language to such an extent that, by the time he is living in Bombay, his language of ‘cultural filiation’ (Ho, p. 96) means very little to him:

it was years since he had ceased to crave the sound of his own language, the feel of it on his tongue … Gradually, the language was slipping away from him, now almost as unfamiliar as the feel and taste of English words or the small vocabulary of bastardized Hindustani that he had picked up over the years. It was only Lotte who kept him in touch with the German tongue—but that was not why he went to see her. He saw Lotte not because she was from Germany but because she belonged to the India of his own experience.

(p. 150)

The German language is now, for Hugo, something which connects him with the fear and persecution of Nazi Germany, and which eventually prompts Farrokh, the café owner, to push him into taking responsibility for the young German, Kurt.

Hugo lives so long in India that, inevitably, his language changes to accommodate the everyday realities of his life there. Yet even after having lived there for fifty years, which language to use is still a source of confusion for him: he ‘mumbled “Good morning, salaam,” and went down the steps into the street with his bag, uncertain as ever of which language to employ. After fifty years, still uncertain. Baumgartner, du Dummkopf’ (p. 6). He cannot be understood speaking his first language, German, so his language becomes a hybrid, a mixture of English and various Indian languages. It is not the language of a community, like German or Hebrew; it is a language adapted to the pressures of individual need and survival:

He found he had to build a new language to suit these new conditions—German no longer sufficed, and English was elusive. Language sprouted around him like tropical foliage and he picked words from it without knowing if they were English or Hindi or Bengali—they were simply words he needed: chai, khana, baraf, lao, jaldi, joota, chota peg, pani, kamra, soda, garee … what was this language he was wrestling out of the air for his own purposes? He suspected it was not Indian, but India's, the India he was marking out for himself.

(p. 92)

The language Hugo is speaking is the language of his own India, the language he needs to survive in a country where every language is unfamiliar and unintelligible to him. He is right when he says that it is not Indian, but India's, and, more specifically, it belongs to Baumgartner's India—Baumgartner's Bombay—the country and life he has constructed for himself. Van Herk writes of the ways immigrants ‘write themselves,’ constructing their experiences like a fiction (van Herk, p. 174). Hugo not only writes his own story; he constructs and speaks the language in which that story is told. Hugo fashions a language for himself, which reflects his own experience, and in this respect it is highly individual. Designed to facilitate communication with the ‘mainstream,’ with the community around him, Hugo's language serves to isolate him further by virtue of its individuality. He is dis/located by the language he speaks, identified as an outsider—a firanghi—and isolated within the India of his own experience, that of the immigrant.

Hugo's sense of otherness—constructed, in part, by his dis/location in terms of language—stays with him throughout his life. From the first impressions of his place on the margins in his German school at Christmas (p. 36), to his experiences in India, Hugo remains an outsider, aware of his own separation from the mainstream, his isolation from community, and his place as a marginal figure. Yet while Hugo is fashioning for himself a highly individual and focused language, designed to deal with the world as he finds it, others are treating him, not as an individual, but as a representative of one group or another. To the Nazis in Germany, he is a Jew; to the British in India, he is a German; and to those he meets and deals with in his everyday life in India, he is a firanghi. Hugo is defined from outside himself, in relation to particular communities, and treated as part of various groups. These ‘blanket’ definitions are not well thought out, and take no account of his individual situation or needs.

This type of thoughtlessly broad definition is painfully evident in the treatment of German nationals by the British government in India during World War II. Baumgartner spends six years in a British internment camp, detained because he is a German national. No distinction is made between those ‘Aryan’ Germans who support the Nazi government, and those German Jews who, like Baumgartner, are in India to escape persecution under that very regime (p. 106). The British authorities unwittingly recreate within the internment camp a microcosm of the situation in Germany. Hugo, then, imaginatively recreates his father's Berlin furniture showroom while he is in the camp (p. 124); with the help of Julius, another detainee, he returns to the protected world of his childhood, and also to the persecution he experienced there, which forced him to leave. After spending so long in the camp, Hugo comes to feel that it is really the Germany he left: it felt as if ‘Deutschland, the Heimat, was alive here, on this dusty soil, in the incredible sun, even if it no longer lived in its native home’ (p. 127). Despite his efforts to escape his life in Germany, Hugo is forced back into the world that he left, with all its conflicts and anger.

These blanket definitions, ignoring the particular and specific, are the basis of the kind of ignorance which breeds racist hatred and denies any possibility of knowledge of other cultures and races, and which makes the immigrant experience one of fear and misunderstanding, and they work against Hugo at every turn. Every definition, every label which is pinned on him from outside, is an attempt to identify a group to which he can belong, to provide some form of identity and, consequently, identify the treatment he can expect. These attempts at definition, imposed by others, serve only to further isolate Baumgartner by emphasising his marginality within all these various communities.

But these blanket definitions find some parallel in the way he views those around him. Certainly in India, although he is aware of the different ethnic groups, he places them all together under the title ‘Indian’ in the same way as they refer to him as ‘European’:

Muslims killed Hindus, Hindus Muslims. Baumgartner could not fathom it—to him they were Indians seen as a mass and, individually, Sushil the Marxist, Habibullah the trader.

(p. 180)

Those whom he has anything to do with are considered divorced from their race or religion; the religious conflicts are especially hard for Hugo to understand as he thinks so little of religion, himself practising only a sort of ‘wary agnosticism’ (p. 205), even though his own exile was forced by religious persecution.

In the same way that Hugo sees the people around him as ‘Indians,’ so his identity is frequently mistaken, under the blanket of ‘European.’ Habibullah, his friend and colleague, even though he knows Hugo as well as anyone in India, does not know his background well enough to be able to make the distinction between European nationalities:

‘How? Are you not English, European sahib? Have you no European connections? You can help him with export business—’

‘Europe has had a war, Habibullah,’ Baumgartner reminded him. ‘My country is—finished. What business can I do?’

But Habibullah had no more conception of Baumgartner's war, of Europe's war, than Baumgartner had of affairs in Bengal, India.

(p. 169)

The two worlds are too far apart, and the conception by each man of the other's world is too skewed by stereotypes and broad definitions which efface difference, and ignore conflicts and different groups.

It is Hugo's label of firanghi which, indirectly, leads to his death at the hands of a young German, Kurt. When Kurt arrives at the Café de Paris, the proprietor, Farrokh, immediately thinks of Hugo as the solution to his problem of what to do with the boy, and how to get him out of the café. Farrokh assumes a link between them that will oblige Hugo to take some measure of responsibility for Kurt:

Mr Baumgartner, what can I do? Please tell me—there is a man from your country … That is the only reason I fed him … I know you, I know your country must be good country, so I gave food to the boy. Then he no pay.

(p. 139)

It is a fatal repetition of the blindness exhibited by the British during the war, detaining German Jews and pro-Nazis together, and without discrimination. To Farrokh, both Hugo and Kurt are firanghi, linked by language—‘Maybe you spick same language’ (p. 139)—so there is no further distinction to be made. To Hugo, however, Kurt is a living reminder of the horrors of the Berlin he fled as a young man, and a link with a past he has tried so hard to escape (p. 21).

Both Hugo and Kurt are aware of the specificities within the blanket definition firanghi, and that the breadth of that definition is not sufficient for their situation. While pushed together as members of the same community by Farrokh, they are both aware of their positions on either side of an old conflict, which it would be useless to try and explain to Farrokh. Although Hugo may have tried to escape his past, the persecution in Germany, it is forced back into his consciousness by the kind of labelling which makes both him and Kurt ‘German,’ rather than examining the historical and political conflicts which define Germany, and the question of German nationality.

Although Hugo is still identified as firanghi, and more specifically as German, once he receives an Indian passport, after the war, he realises the impossibility of ever returning to Germany: ‘he wondered if it meant that he would now never leave India and realized that, for all that it was a travel document, it did’ (p. 181). He names himself as ‘Baumgartner, native of Hindustan’ (p. 181), and is shocked and uncomfortable at the ‘Europeanisms that he had forgotten’ (p. 180) which he sees in Bombay. In an attempt to re/locate himself, he writes to people from his past, receiving no answer from any of them. It seems to him that ‘all of Germany might have been wiped off the face of the earth’ (p. 181). The Germany that Hugo knew has gone; the Second World War changed, for ever, the politics and society of Europe, and to attempt to return to a pre-war Germany would be impossible, and self-defeating. It is important that Hugo realises that the country he left, and which remains in his memory, is now a nostalgic and ideological construction, and not the same as the country which now exists in the same geographical location. He does so to the extent that he reacts, though not openly, to Julius's regret at not having returned ‘home’ with some scorn:

‘Oh, Hugo, why did we not go back? We should have gone back long, long ago,’ he mourned, making Baumgartner want to snort, ‘Go back where? To what?’ But he did not—it was against the rules.

(p. 211)

Although Hugo can make that distinction about Germany, he still retains a dream of Venice—the one place where he felt some (limited) sense of community within Judaism, and a sense of his own identity which was not defined by his marginal relation to a dominant group. Initially, the link is linguistic—demonstrating again the strength of language in locating cultural affiliation and identity. He notices a Jewish woman in a café reading a newspaper in Hebrew and, after talking to her, attempts to follow her to the Jewish quarter:

Hugo walked along, thinking that he might find the Jewish quarter she had spoken of; if he did not see her there, he might see other Jews. Strange, in Germany he had never wanted to search them out, had been aware of others thinking of him as a Jew but had not done so himself. In ejecting him, Germany had taught him to regard himself as one. Perhaps over here he would find for himself a new identity, one that suited him, one that he enjoyed. The air quivered with possibilities, with the suspense of quest and choice.

(pp. 62-3; my emphasis)

This ‘quest,’ his search for community and a group with which to identify himself, lasts for only an afternoon, yet he carries the memory of that moment—that one moment of identification—with him all his life. Until the moment of his expulsion from Germany, Hugo has not considered himself a Jew in any positive respect. Although others had defined him as such, his own self-definition had come from his persecution—his marginalisation—under the Nazi regime. In Venice, he gets a brief opportunity to feel defined by something positive, by association with a group of people, by a feeling of community.

Hugo identifies Judaism with the East, his German upbringing with the West, and attempts to locate his own identity in a point at the meeting of East and West (p. 64):

Venice was the East, and yet it was Europe too; it was that magic boundary where the two met and blended, and for those seven days Hugo had been a part of their union. He realized it only now: that during his constant wandering, his ceaseless walking, he had been drawing closer and closer to this discovery at that bewitched point where they became one land of which he felt himself the natural citizen.

(p. 63)

He loses that ‘bewitched point’ when he leaves Venice, leaving behind that state in which he could be a ‘natural citizen.’ The moment when his identity was, in a positive way, defined by a sense of community is something that cannot survive in India, because Hugo maintains so strong an association between the geographical, physical location of the experience, and the self-definition which was briefly offered him in Venice. Hugo hangs onto his dream of Venice, even in the face of Lotte's ridicule:

‘Venice, he says,’ she said at last. ‘Venezia—no less. As if he were a duke, or a count. You a millionaire, maybe, in your dreams?’

Baumgartner laughed, shamefacedly. ‘Only an idea, Lotte,’ he apologized. ‘Once I was there—for seven days. I caught the boat to India from there. It was so strange—it was both East and West, both Europe and Asia. I thought—maybe, in such a place, I could be at home.’

(p. 81)

It is significant that Hugo feels ‘at home’ at the point where East meets West, where he is in neither one nor the other. He is, everywhere, an outsider—in Germany (the West), and in India (the East). Only where the two meet and combine in a way which neither privileges nor excludes either one, can an outsider like Hugo make his own definition, be able to feel there is a community of which he wants to be a part and which can provide him with the identity and affirmation which he lacks elsewhere.

Despite the promise of Venice, Hugo remains a marginal figure, denied the support and identification of community—a ‘man without a family or a country’ (p. 133). This is described as having haunted him all his life, as something inevitable:

He felt his life blur, turn grey, like a curtain wrapping him in its dusty felt. If he became aware, from time to time, that the world beyond the curtain was growing steadily more crowded, more clamorous, and the lives of others more hectic, more chaotic, then he felt only relief that his had never been part of the mainstream. Always, somehow, he had escaped the mainstream.

(p. 211)

Even after thirty years in Bombay—and fifty in India—Hugo still feels that he is an outsider, someone who does not quite belong:

The life of Bombay … had been Baumgartner's life for thirty years now—or, rather, the setting for his life; he had never actually entered it, never quite captured it; damply, odorously, cacophonously palpable as it was, it had been elusive still.

(p. 214)

Although Hugo claims to feel some comfort in his marginality—he has, after all, ‘escaped’ the mainstream—along with his feeling of being outside what is ‘normal’ and, in his words, ‘crowded,’ there is also a feeling of his not being acceptable. Early on in the narrative, Hugo is described in this way:

Accepting—but not accepted; that was the story of his life, the one thread that ran through it all. In Germany he had been dark—his darkness had marked him the Jew, der Jude. In India he was fair—and that marked him the firanghi. In both lands he was unacceptable.

(p. 20)

Not only does he have to flee his homeland as he becomes ‘unacceptable’ there, but he is never fully accepted in his country of refuge, in India. Even an example of his having adapted to his new country is more important in that it sets him apart from other Germans:

‘What, on your very first day you ate curry? And you did not get food poisoning? Dysentery? Not even diarrhoea?’ Lotte had been outraged when he told her, years later. ‘Mensch, it must be like a rubber tyre, your belly.’ Baumgartner laughed, rather proudly. It set him apart from others as pale as he in this foreign land. It was one more thing, he eventually realized, that set him apart from them.

(p. 88)

Even while he may seem to be fitting in with one group, he is isolated further, by that very act, from another. To Lotte, and to other Germans—Julius and Lily, for example—Hugo has become ‘too Indian.’ He has fitted in too well. Hugo has certainly constructed a life for himself in India, so he no longer sees Bombay as exotic—certainly a typical reaction for a European—but as something commonplace, normal; it is, quite simply, the place where he lives (pp. 19-20). What becomes a problem for Baumgartner is that, however much he may regard the places and people he sees as normal, he is still singled out, categorised as different, and named by them as such:

He had lived in this land for fifty years—or if not fifty then so nearly as to make no difference—and it no longer seemed fantastic and exotic; it was more utterly familiar now than any landscape on earth. Yet the eyes of the people who passed by glanced at him who was still strange and unfamiliar to them, and all said: Firanghi, foreigner.

(p. 19)

No matter how much Hugo may consider the landscape and the people who inhabit it to be familiar, he is still marked out by the colour of his skin, and by this label of firanghi. Even the landscape is seen as rejecting him. When he enters the cave, while he is waiting for a train, the cave rejects him, spitting him out as ‘Not fit for consumption’ (p. 190): ‘Go, Baumgartner. Out. He had not been found fit. Shabby, dirty white man, firanghi, unwanted. Raus, Baumgartner, raus’ (p. 190).

From the people, there is, according to the narrative, no deliberate malice in the name firanghi. The isolation which Baumgartner experiences through such a definition is not deliberately malevolent, and it comes more from a need or a desire for separation:

Their faces sneered ‘firanghi, foreigner,’ however good-naturedly, however lacking in malice. Still, the word struck coldly and he winced, hunching his shoulders and trying to avoid the contact he knew they hated because contact contaminated.

(p. 20)

Hugo's separation comes from the reactions of those around him. They shrink from him—and he from them—because of their fear of contact, because ‘contact contaminates.’ Acceptance—that which Hugo gives and never receives—comes from a willingness to make contact, to accommodate the ways of those who are perceived as different. Hugo shrinks from contact because he knows the people hate it—he is making the effort, in a gesture which is accepting, but which denies any possibility of his own acceptance. He sees himself as infinitely accepting, as always accommodating of others, but one who is never himself accepted by those others (p. 20).

Hugo remains, throughout his life, an outsider, one who is always separate, looking in to the mainstream but never participating. His only point of connection, the only person with whom he has a lasting relationship, and significantly the one who is summoned to his side after his murder, is Lotte. Importantly, they share a common language, the experience of immigration, the dislocation which accompanies that, and the knowledge that the place they left, and to which they can never return—the Berlin of pre-war Europe—no longer exists.

Bibliography and References

Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay (London: Vintage, 1988).

Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock, Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (Jackson and London: University of Mississippi, 1992).

Judie Newman, ‘History and Letters: Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay,’ World Literature Written in English, 30:1 (spring 1990), 37-46.

Andrew Robinson, ‘Out of Custody,’ Observer, 3 July 1988.

John Spurling, ‘The Wages of Ignorance', Observer, 3 July 1988.

Ramesh K. Srivastava, Perspectives on Anita Desai (Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1984).

Aritha van Herk, ‘Writing the Immigrant Self: Disguise and Damnation,’ In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions (Edmonton: NeWest, 1991):

Paul West, ‘The Man Who Didn't Belong,’ New York Times Book Review, 9 April 1989.