I have never found one among them [the Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.¹

—Macaulay, qtd. in Majumdar 10:83

“Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?”

“It would be a good idea.”²

“El hombre en el umbral” brings into sharp focus the issues of colonialism and foreign domination that are present in a less obvious way in such other Borges stories as “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” and “El milagro secreto.” The choice of venue this time is British India,³ a choice that is interesting because India was one of the most thorough of the Western experiments in colonialism in the Third World⁴ and because its struggle opened the way for the movement to dismantle the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese empires in Africa and Asia. The story was first published in La Nación in 1952, five years after the independence (and partition) of India. Written under the tutelage of Kipling, the story's politics are far removed from the politics of Kipling's narratives of India.⁵ In this story Borges and Bioy are situated in some relation to the memory and narrative of colonial rule; the exact nature of that relation is what will be unraveled here.⁶

The story consists of two parts, the second much more extensive than the first. The first is a brief paragraph describing a conversation in Buenos Aires between the narrator,⁷ Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Christopher Dewey of the British Council. The second is Dewey's account of his search for a kidnapped British official he calls David Alexander Glencairn, which is divided into three parts: the story of his mission, then the story told him by an old man sitting in a doorway, and a brief final paragraph describing Dewey's encounter with the mad judge and with the body of “Glencairn.” I shall discuss the old man's story first, then return to consider the frame narratives situating Dewey, Borges, and Bioy.

The old man in the threshold says: “El hecho aconteció cuando yo era niño. No sé de fechas, pero no había muerto aún Nikal Seyn (Nicholson) ante la muralla de Delhi” (614) [The event occurred when I was a child. I do not know about dates, but Nikal Seyn (Nicholson) had not yet died before the walls of Delhi]. As is usual with Borges, the historical reference is precise. John Nicholson was one of the leading officials in the British colonial administration during the Dalhousie and Canning administrations, known to his fellow officers (because of his cruelty to the native population) as “the autocrat of all the Russias” (Majumdar 10: 348). Hibbert describes him thus:

Nicholson had arrived in India in July 1839 and had served as a young infantry officer in the Afghan War. Since then, however, most of his time had been spent in civil appointments, principally in the Punjab where he stamped out lawlessness in the districts under his control with the utmost severity, pursuing criminals personally and displaying their severed heads upon his desk. His strange and forceful personality so impressed the natives that numbers of them worshipped him as their spiritual guide and deity, falling down at his feet in reverent submission.⁸

(292–93)

Nicholson was active particularly in the Punjab around Amritsar (mentioned in the story) and Ferozpur. Called to Delhi to aid in the crushing of the mutiny of the Indian units of the colonial army in 1857, he died in an attack on the sepoys by the Delhi city wall on 14 September (Dodwell, Indian Empire 6: 195)⁹ and was later termed “the Hero of the mutiny” (Majumdar 9: 600).

Nicholson was also the proponent of a bill legislating torture in cases of rebellion and had this to say about such remedies:

As regards torturing the murderers of the women and children: If it be right otherwise, I do not think we should refrain from it, because it is a Native custom. We are told in the Bible that stripes shall be meted out according to faults, and if hanging is sufficient punishment for such wretches, it is also severe for ordinary mutineers [sic]. If I had them in my power to-day, and knew that I were to die tomorrow, I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them with a perfectly easy conscience.¹⁰

(Majumdar 9: 600)

Yet the anonymous Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Nicholson describes him both as a “severe ruler” and as “eminently just,” quotes Lord Roberts as saying that he was “the beau idéal of a soldier and a gentleman,” and reports that “the natives worshipped him as a god under the title of Nikalsain.” One of his officers is quoted at length as saying:

He was a man cast in a giant mould, with massive chest and powerful limbs, and an expression ardent and commanding, with a dash of roughness; features of stern beauty, a long black beard, and a deep sonorous voice. There was something of immense strength, talent and resolution in his whole frame and manner, and a power of ruling men on high occasions which no one could escape noticing. His imperial air, which never left him, and which would have been thought arrogant in one of less imposing mien, sometimes gave offence to the more unbending of his countrymen, but made him almost worshipped by the pliant Asiatics.¹¹

(19: 657)

In Kipling's Kim, the Ressaldar, who was loyal to the Crown during the Mutiny in 1857 and fought against his own people, sings the “song of Nikal Seyn before Delhi—the old song” (93): “Wail by long-drawn wail he unfolded the story of Nikal Seyn (Nicholson)—the song that men sing in the Punjab to this day. … ‘Ahi! Nikal Seyn is dead—he died before Delhi! Lances of North take vengeance for Nikal Seyn’” (93).¹²

The reference to Nicholson in the Borges story is more than a casual one, since the picture of the domineering British official painted by the old man in the threshold closely resembles that of the cruel sadist, his desk decorated with the severed heads of his victims, reported in some of the accounts. The physical description of “Glencairn” in the story reads:

Una sola vez lo vieron mis ojos, pero no olvidaré el cabello muy negro, los pómulos salientes, la ávida nariz y la boca, los anchos hombros, la fuerte osatura de viking.

(612)

Only once did my eyes see him, but I will never forget his raven black hair, prominent cheekbones, avid nose and mouth, broad shoulders, strong Viking bone structure.

This closely matches the description given of Nicholson in the encyclopedia article, as does the story of the “peace” established by the stern ruler:

El mero anuncio de su advenimiento bastó para apaciguar la ciudad. Ello no impidió que decretara diversas medidas enérgicas. Unos años pasaron. La ciudad y el distrito estaban en paz; sikhs y musulmanes habían depuesto las antiguas discordias y de pronto Glencairn desapareció.

The mere announcement of his coming sufficed to pacify the city. This fact did not prevent him from decreeing various decisive measures. Some years passed. The city and the district were at peace; Sikhs and Moslems had laid down their ancient discords and all of a sudden Glencairn disappeared.

On the annexation of Punjab he [Nicholson] was appointed deputy commissioner of Bannu. There he became a kind of legendary hero, and many tales are told of his stern justice, his tireless activity and his commanding personality. In the course of five years he reduced the most turbulent district on the frontier to such a state of quietude that no crime was committed or even attempted during his last year of office, a condition of things never known before or since.

(Encyclopaedia Britannica 19: 657)

Even the question of the “pliant Asiatics” worshipping Nicholson as a god is somewhat more equivocal in the old man's story of the judge whom Dewey calls “Glencairn”:

Cuando se pregonó que la reina iba a mandar un hombre que ejecutaría en este país la ley de Inglaterra, los menos malos se alegraron, porque sintieron que la ley es mejor que el desorden. Llegó el cristiano y no tardó en prevaricar y oprimir. … No lo culpamos, al principio; la justicia que administraba no era conocida de nadie y los aparentes atropellos del nuevo juez correspondían acaso a válidas y arcanas razones. Todo tendrá justificación en su libro, queríamos pensar, pero su afinidad con todos los malos jueces del mundo era demasiado notoria, y al fin hubimos de admitir que era simplemente un malvado. Llegó a ser un tirano y la pobre gente (para vengarse de la errónea esperanza que alguna vez pusieron en él) dio en jugar con la idea de secuestrarlo y someterlo a juicio.

(614)

When it was announced that the queen was going to send a man who would carry out the law of England in this land, the least recalcitrant were happy because they felt that law is better than disorder. The Christian arrived and was not long in acting corruptly and oppressively. … We did not blame him at first; the justice he administered was not familiar to any of us, and the apparent excesses of the new judge were perhaps due to valid (if arcane) reasons. Everything must be justified in his book, we wanted to believe, but his affinity with all the evil judges in the world was too obvious, and we finally had to admit that he was simply a scoundrel. He turned into a tyrant, and the poor people (to avenge the mistaken hope they had once deposited in him) began playing with the idea of kidnapping him and bringing him to justice.

Thus the devotion that Nicholson inspired in the “pliant Asiatics”—according to the British sources—is revealed in the old man's story as the vain hope that the subject people feel until they meet their man.

Furthermore, Nicholson's main area of activity was focused on the city of Amritsar, and according to Dewey the story of Glencairn took place in the Punjab (616), though he initially equivocates and says condescendingly: “La exacta geografía de los hechos que voy a referir importa muy poco. Además, ¿qué precisión guardan en Buenos Aires los nombres de Amritsar o de Udh?” (612) [The exact geography of the events I am going to tell matters very little. Besides, what exactitude can the names of Amritsar or Oudh have in Buenos Aires?]. Of course the difference between Amritsar in the Punjab and the native state of Oudh or Avadh (now Uttar Pradesh) matters a great deal, not least in the fact that there is repeated reference in the story to the unpeaceful coexistence in the city of Sikhs, Moslems, and Hindus, which would be true of Amritsar but not, say, of Lucknow in Oudh.¹³

The “A or B” structure is used again a bit later in the story when Dewey doubts whether the old man can be a reliable informant about something that happened only recently (in the period between the world wars): “Nuevas de la Rebelión o de Akbar podría dar este hombre (pensé) pero no de Glencairn. Lo que me dijo confirmó esta sospecha” (613) [This man could give news of the Mutiny or of Akbar (I thought) but not of Glencairn. What he said confirmed this suspicion]. The old man of course could have lived through the events of the 1857 Mutiny (and the cruel repression that followed), but the second possibility is offered as a red herring: the old man could hardly offer testimony about Akbar, the great Mogul ruler of India from 1556 to 1605.¹⁴ (Unless, however, the old man is “ageless,” as implied in the stereotypical description: “Los muchos años lo habían reducido y pulido como las aguas a una piedra o las generaciones de los hombres a una sentencia” [613] [The many years had reduced and polished him like the waters a stone or the human generations a saying]).¹⁵ This time, though, the “A or B” structure, in which B is an obvious red herring, shows Dewey the dupe of his own stereotype: the event that the old man narrates happened not in his childhood during the Mutiny, nor in the distant past; it is happening right here, right now, and everyone knows it but Dewey.¹⁶

“Amritsar” is one clue to the contemporaneity of the story. Though the city played an important role in the history of the Mutiny of 1857, it was equally important in the history of the twentieth-century movement toward independence, a movement unexpectedly reinvigorated with the passage of the Rowlatt Acts of March 1919. It was at Amritsar, on 13 April 1919, that British troops massacred a peaceful Indian crowd in a square called Jallianwalla Bagh, an event that Sir Valentine Chirol called “that black day in the annals of British India” (qtd. in Fischer 179). Louis Fischer remarks: “For Gandhi it was a turning point. Indians never forgot it” (179),¹⁷ and even Philip Mason, usually an apologist for British rule, acknowledges: “After Amritsar, the whole situation was changed. Government had been carried out with the consent of the governed. That consent was now changed to mistrust” (288). Though the dates of Dewey's residence in India are not given in the story except in general terms (“entre las dos guerras” [612] [between the two wars]), even that lack of precision indicates that he visited Amritsar after the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh. If he reads “Amritsar” in the book of history as referring exclusively to the events of the Mutiny (or to Nicholson), he is indeed a poor observer (or reader) of the history of his own time.¹⁸

Dewey is also distracted as an observer by his assumption that India is a land of the spirit where politics has no place. Thus, he observes after coming to the house where “Glencairn” is being tried that “en el último patio se celebraba no sé qué fiesta musulmana” (613) [in the last patio I know not what Moslem festival was being celebrated]; the “no sé qué” is interesting, since it acknowledges his ignorance of Moslem religious customs yet also reveals his mistaken idea that the “fiesta” taking place inside is a religious one. In fact, he interrupts his telling of the old man's story several times to inform his listeners of the comings and goings in the house: first, “unas mujeres … entraban en la casa” (614) [some women … were entering the house], then “unas personas … se iban de la fiesta” (615) [some people … were leaving the festival], and then finally, and most tellingly, after the old man has finished his story:

Una turba hecha de hombres y mujeres de todas las naciones del Punjab se desbordó, rezando y cantando, sobre nosotros y casi nos barrió.

(616)

A crowd composed of men and women of all the nations of the Punjab overflowed, praying and singing, pushing against and almost trampling us.

The old man has already said that people of all the faiths of the region were involved in the trial:

Alcoranistas, doctores de la ley, sikhs que llevan el nombre de leones y que adoran a un Dios, hindúes que adoran muchedumbres de dioses, monjes de Mahavira que enseñan que la forma del universo es la de un hombre con las piernas abiertas, adoradores del fuego y judíos negros, integraron el tribunal, pero el último fallo fue encomendado al arbitrio de un loco.

(614–15)

Scholars of the Koran, doctors of law, Sikhs who bear the name of lions and who worship a single God, Hindus who worship a multitude of gods, monks of Mahavira who teach that the universe has the form of a man with his legs crossed, fire-worshippers and black Jews made up the tribunal, but the final judgment was left to the determination of a madman.

Dewey, then, is duped by his own certainties of the roles played by the colonizers and the colonized; he cannot tell a religious festival of whatever creed from a trial and execution. He is a victim of what Francis Hutchins has called the “ideology of permanence”: “The certainty of a permanent Empire in these years, however, seemed to increase in proportion to its fragility, and to serve for many people as a defense and retreat from reason long after the course of events had proved its impossibility” (xii).

In El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria [The Gauchesque Genre: A Treatise on the Fatherland], Josefina Ludmer has discussed the conflict in the gauchesque works in Argentine literature between two laws: the written law of the nation-state and the oral law of the gaucho community (227–36). A similar conflict is set up in this story, between the “justice” of the British Raj (which is presented as unjust, arbitrary, and cruel) and the “justice” of the people's court.¹⁹ What is interesting in the latter instance is the recourse to a judge who is literally insane. The subterfuge depends on a knowledge of the British system of justice, which will not punish an insane man for casting judgment (or for carrying out the death sentence, since the madman serves both as judge and as executioner). Yet it also plays in an astute way with the colonizers' stereotypes of the Indian people as childlike, irrational, and more than a little bit mad.

The notion of a law so universal and so transparent that it would be obvious even to a madman implies also that the community shares notions of right and wrong and can communicate them (even to an inquiring British official). First, then, the colonized community must find unity, even if it is the temporary unity of the oppressed against the colonial power; thus, even Dewey sees representatives of “todas las naciones del Punjab” at what he first took to be a Moslem religious festival.²⁰ Second, the old man must discover a “pedagogy of the oppressed,” a way of communicating this universal sense of right and wrong to his obtuse British interlocutor. The narrative strategy he adopts has almost a fairy tale structure at first: “El hecho aconteció cuando yo era niño. No sé de fechas. … El tiempo que se fue queda en la memoria; sin duda soy capaz de recuperar lo que entonces pasó” (614) [The event took place when I was a child. I know nothing about dates. … The time that has gone remains in memory; no doubt I am capable of recovering what happened then]. Later, though, he makes clear that his story, though archetypal in structure, has gone from generals to particulars: “En esta ciudad lo juzgaron: en una casa como todas, como ésta. Una casa no puede diferir de otra: lo que importa es saber si está edificada en el infierno o en el cielo” (615) [In this city they judged him, in a house like all the others, like this one. One house cannot differ from another; what matters is knowing whether it is built in hell or in heaven]. Moral absolutes thus reestablished (on a universal level, and therefore no longer as the property of the colonial power), he ends his story and the body is revealed. Thus the story closes with a mute writ of habeas corpus: “You shall have the body,” he seems to be telling Dewey, “but take the story with it.”

Of course the narrative devices employed in the story are familiar to readers of the Arabian Nights. Thus, the nesting of narratives through what Todorov calls “hommes-récits” [story-men] and the spinning out of the story until some action can be accomplished behind the scenes (in this case, the execution of “Glencairn”) are typical “Oriental” stratagems. Even more important, though, is the British stereotype of Indian “guile,” a stereotype that played an important role in the misunderstandings between the two peoples (Nandy 77, 110, 112, and passim). This “guile,” which Nandy prefers to call “a fluid open self-definition” (112), was part of a literary stereotype used in characterizations of Indians by Stevenson (in The Master of Ballantrae, in which the Indian servant does not let on for most of the novel that he speaks English), Kipling,²¹ and many others. Interestingly, the same concept was often used to characterize Gandhi, whom Nandy finds often compared to Charlie Chaplin (104),²² though Nandy prefers to point to what he calls Gandhi's “political and psychological shrewdness” (49). (Orwell asserts much the same thing when he says of Gandhi that “inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person” [463].)

An old man clad in traditional garb sitting in a doorway, who possesses sufficient guile to delay and educate his British listener with a story (or with a reinterpretation of history), and whose story tells of a subject people's discovery of the evil of the foreign invaders and of the stratagems employed to reassert traditional judicial and ethical authority: the description closely matches that given by exasperated British officials who dealt with Gandhi. Winston Churchill's comment is the most famous, on “the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy's palace, there to negotiate and to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor” (qtd. in Fischer 277). That Gandhi would never have condoned the execution of a British official, however corrupt, or have entrusted the case to the judgment of a madman, does not prevent defenders of the British Raj from seeing his nonviolence as a subterfuge or something worse. Thus Percival Griffiths writes:

We are not concerned with the history of that sterile [noncooperation] movement, nor with the terrorist activity which naturally grew out of it. It is doubtful if noncooperation or its successor, civil disobedience, advanced self-government by a single day. On the other hand, it engendered a racial bitterness, which has fortunately disappeared since the transfer of power, and a disregard of law and order which has left an enduring mark on the youth of India.

(83; see also 73)

Thus, the “man in the threshold,” despite his obvious differences from Gandhi, functions in the story as the projection of British paranoid self-doubt (Nandy 100) in the face of the self-rule movement, a condition born of what we could call (after Hutchins) the “disillusion with permanence.”

One of the tasks that British education set itself in India was the implantation of a Western idea of a linear progression in history. Chatterjee has studied the impact of this model on the thought of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894), an important Bengali man of letters. Bankimchandra's task, according to Chatterjee, was to separate myth from history (59), to foster the “knowledge of its own history” that for him was national consciousness (58), to create pride through historical writing (82; see also Nandy 23).²³ Chatterjee sees Gandhi's critique of modern civilization as extending to this progressive ideology and its obsession with history (86, 93–94, 97), while Nandy asserts that Gandhi “rejected history and affirmed the primacy of myths over historical chronicles” (55). Nandy sees a conflict between two different models for thinking about the relation between past and present: “If for the West the present was a special case of an unfolding history, for Gandhi as a representative of traditional India history was a special case of an all-embracing permanent present, waiting to be interpreted and reinterpreted” (57). Of course the extent to which Gandhi was a “representative of traditional India” is open to debate, but what is significant for “El hombre en el umbral” is the willingness of militants for self-rule to use the “all-embracing permanent present” of Mother India²⁴ to mobilize the subject people and to frustrate and ultimately drive out the occupying power.²⁵

To return to Dewey's first description of the old man:

A mis pies, inmóvil como una cosa, se acurrucaba en el umbral un hombre muy viejo. Diré como era, porque es parte esencial de la historia. Los muchos años lo habían reducido y pulido como las aguas a una piedra o las generaciones de los hombres a una sentencia.²⁶

(613)

At my feet, motionless as an object, a very old man was curled up in the threshold. I will describe what he looked like because it is an essential part of the story [historia]. The many years had reduced and polished him like the waters a stone or the human generations a saying.

Dewey's problem here is a conflict of paradigms. His Western concept of history (and this description is, he says, “parte esencial de la historia,” with all the resonances of that last word) cannot cope with this figure from the “all-embracing perpetual present” except as someone who is outside of human history as it is taught in the British schools. So Dewey sees the old man as a figure from the world of myth, as a representative of “traditional” (ageless, eternal, ahistorical) India. But because he needs to have it one way or the other, he is not prepared for the truth, which is that the old man has something to tell him about “Glencairn,” his own mission, himself, and the present time.²⁷

Now to return to the first paragraph of the story, which serves as a sort of narrative frame. It reads:

Bioy Casares trajo de Londres un curioso puñal de hoja triangular y empuñadura en forma de H; nuestro amigo Christopher Dewey, del Consejo Británico, dijo que tales armas eran de uso común en el Indostán. Ese dictamen lo alentó a mencionar que había trabajado en aquel país, entre las dos guerras. (Ultra Auroram et Gangen, recuerdo que dijo en latín, equivocando un verso de Juvenal.) De las historias que esa noche contó, me atrevo a reconstruir la que sigue. Mi texto será fiel: líbreme Alá de la tentación de añadir breves rasgos circunstanciales o de agravar, con interpolaciones de Kipling, el cariz exótico del relato. Este, por lo demás, tiene un antiguo y simple sabor que sería una lástima perder, acaso el de las Mil y unas noches.

(612)

Bioy Casares came back from London with a strange dagger with a triangular blade and a handle in the shape of an H; our friend Christopher Dewey of the British Council said that arms like that were common in Hindustan. This declaration encouraged him to mention that he had worked in that country in the period between the wars. (Ultra Auroram et Gangen [Beyond the Dawn and the Ganges] I remember he said in Latin, misquoting a line from Juvenal.) Of the stories he told that night, I will venture to reconstruct the one that follows. My text will be faithful: may Allah save me from the temptation to add brief circumstantial details or to exaggerate the exotic character of the tale with interpolations from Kipling. The tale, besides, had an ancient and simple flavor that it would be a shame to lose, perhaps that of the Arabian Nights.

Dewey's error in quotation of a line from Juvenal's tenth satire is most interesting. In the initial reported conversation with Borges and Bioy, the sight of the dagger leads him to memories of Hindustan and then to Juvenal. By an association of ideas here, Dewey's ability to identify the dagger authorizes his memories, among them the quotation, yet the error in the quotation threatens to unravel his authority, as the narrator quietly notes. The original passage in Juvenal reads:

Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque Auroram et Gangen, pauci dinoscere possunt vera bona atque illis multum diversa, remota erroris nebula. quid enim ratione timemus aut cupimus? quid tam dextro pede concipis, ut te conatus non paeniteat votique peracti?

(10.1–5)

In every land, from furthest west (Cádiz) to furthest east (the Ganges), few only can discern true blessings from their counterfeits, clear from all mist of error. For what do we with reason fear, covet with reason? What do you undertake with foot so right, with a start so lucky, but you rue your attempt and the success of your desire? (Mayor trans. 2:65)

Dewey remembers the verse as referring to travel beyond [ultra] the bounds of the known world, whereas Juvenal refers instead to the known world within marked limits (Cádiz in the west, the Ganges or the place of dawn in the east). “Usque” here means “as far as” or “up to” those thresholds. Within the world as he knew it, Juvenal sees the realm of error and self-deception; the whole of this satire is concerned with those who err when they overreach, whether as warriors, as rulers, as scholars, or in hopes of good health or good fortune. As one example of such an overreacher Juvenal cites Alexander, who, though he did not reach the Ganges, reached the Indus, but in the process lost all:

Unus Pellaeo iuveni non sufficit orbis, aestuat infelix angusto limite mundi, ut Gyari clusus scopulis parvaque Seripho; cum tamen a figulis munitam intraverit urbem, sarcophago contentus erit. mors sola fatetur, quantula sint hominum corpuscula.

(10.168–73)

For Pella's youth one globe is all too small; he chafes, poor soul, in the narrow bounds of the universe, as though pent in Gyara and tiny Seriphus; yet, let him once set foot in Babylon that city of brick, and a stone coffin will satisfy his every want: death and death alone betrays the nothingness of men's puny frames, what dwarfs our bodies are.

(Mayor trans. 2: 118)

Alexander's example is recalled in the story in association with David Alexander Glencairn. Dewey comments: “Los dos nombres convienen; porque fueron de reyes que gobernaron con un cetro de hierro” (612) [The two names are appropriate because they were those of kings who ruled with scepters of iron]. Going beyond the narrow limits of one's world is rash and dangerous, then, as the new empire-builders discover in the story. The “manifest destiny” that Juvenal speaks of is of being content with one's own lot, with one's own world:

‘Nil ergo optabunt homines?’ si consilium vis, permittes ipsis expender numinibus, quid conveniat nobis rebusque sit utile nostris.

(10.346–48)

Is nothing then to be sought by our vows? If you wish my counsel, leave the gods themselves to decide what is meet for us, what can promote our welfare.

(Mayor trans. 2: 172)

Dewey's lapsus, then, is linked with his having overreached himself and with the excessive and rash nature of the British adventure in India.

Where does that leave Dewey's interlocutors? Bioy is present here simply as intermediary, as traveler and collector, and of course in light of the theme of the story it is interesting that he should have just returned not from India but from London, that great emporium of objects from the colonies.²⁸ Borges is there only to correct Dewey's Latin and to record one of his many stories in written form, or so he says. In fact, though, he turns the tables on Dewey, since he reveals himself as the superior Latinist, despite the fact that he was largely self-educated and did not have access to the British tradition of the classical education.²⁹ Similarly, his pledge not to change Dewey's story by adding “circumstantial details”³⁰ or cribbing from Kipling gives away his conviction that Dewey is guilty of both offenses.³¹

Dewey tells Borges and Bioy a tale cribbed from Kipling. He was not really ever there (in the sense that his perceptions were so clouded by his preconceptions that he could not see around him), as Borges slyly points out when he corrects the quotation from Juvenal. But even subtler is the implication of the story, which though cribbed from Kipling is most unlike that author's work in its politics.³² For the story that Dewey relates—or that “Dewey” is used as a mouthpiece to relate—is one that tells of the end of British colonialism in India, as surely as that colonialism ended in the Gandhian campaigns of the 1920s and particularly during the Salt March (see Fischer 274 and Nandy 62–63 on Gandhi's breaking out of the colonial mind). And though the tale is told through stereotypes (“circumstantial details”)—the dutiful British soldier, the sly old Muslim, the tyrannical British officer—the old man's “guile” is not contemptible as so often in Kipling; it is not the justification for colonial rule but the means of undoing that rule. “Quit India,” it says in all clarity. The old man may look to Dewey like that “naked fakir” that Churchill saw in Gandhi, but he is the one who is controlling the narrative.

Yet, oddly enough, this move too was anticipated by Kipling. In “On the City Wall,” the British narrator addresses his audience after he has been duped by his beloved, the prostitute Lalun, and her friends into rescuing the disguised political prisoner Khem Singh: “Of course you can guess what happened? I was not so clever. When the news went abroad that Khem Singh had escaped from the Fort, I did not, since I was then living this story, not writing it, connect myself, or Lalun, or the fat gentleman of the gold pince-nez, with his disappearance” (329). Dewey is less than nothing, though: he neither lives the story nor writes it. He is a witness too dim to see what is happening before his very eyes, too steeped in prejudice to see things for what they are. Yet years later in Buenos Aires he still has an air of superiority about him (“¿qué precisión guardan en Buenos Aires los nombres de Amritsar o de Udh?”), an air quite undeserved as it turns out. For once again, speaking to Borges (who knows quite well the distance from Amritsar to Oudh), he does not know to whom, or about what, he is speaking.

In “On the City Wall,” Kipling argues that Indians will never be capable of self-rule (4: 305) and makes fun of British sympathizers with the self-rule movement: “Overmuch tenderness of this kind has bred a strong belief among many natives that the native is capable of administering the country, and many devout Englishmen believe this also, because the theory is stated in beautiful English with all the latest political color” (4: 306). Here the rewriting of the political message in Borges's version is clearest.³³ The stereotypes that Dewey uses to process his experience in India—or his reading of India, if, as I suspect, he was never really there—include notions of Indian spirituality, detachment, and timelessness, and these lead him to accept the authority of the old man in the threshold, at the same time that he convinces himself that the old man is telling him a tale of long ago, of the Mutiny or of the Mogul invasion. That is to say, the old man knows how to use British stereotypes of India against Britain, and at the same time to educate the earnest young British official in the iniquities of British rule. What Josefina Ludmer has called “las tretas del débil” [the snares of the weak] in her essay on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz describes the process that is happening here.³⁴

Of course that same process marks the frame tale. Borges, by correcting Dewey's Latin, does not merely establish himself as the better Latinist. He discredits Dewey as a narrator and more subtly shows that Dewey's “experience” of India is in every way derivative: Dewey was no more in India than Borges or Bioy were, and his Argentine friends at least have the advantage of postcolonial detachment from the British Raj (and perhaps identification up to a certain point with the colonized subjects). The conversation in Buenos Aires restates the one in the uncertain Indian city, and once again Dewey is denied all authority.

One other element of the story that becomes clearer when it is compared with “On the City Wall” is the extent to which Borges has suppressed domesticity. The encounter between the British soldier and the representative of the self-rule movement in the Kipling story is mediated through the prostitute Lalun, her servant Nasiban, and several other characters; indeed the story is cast initially as a love intrigue. In the Borges story all mediation (and in this particular rewriting that means particularly all female mediation) is excluded from the face-to-face encounter between Dewey and the old man. Dewey is distracted by what he assumes is a religious festival going on inside the final patio, just as the narrator of “On the City Wall” is distracted by the love intrigue, but Dewey's distraction is still the stuff of public history, given the extraordinary degree of fusion between the religious and the political in the most dramatic years of what Chatterjee calls “the Gandhian intervention in the politics of the nation” (155).³⁵

The contrast with Borges's earlier story/essay of India, “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (1936) [“The Approach to Al-Mutasim”], is instructive. “Almotásim” is assembled out of the same materials as “El hombre en el umbral”: readings of Kipling and Burton, of Eastern religious texts (especially here of Farīd od-Dīn ‘Attār's Conference of the Birds), and of the British press. Yet “Almotásim” is a story wholly concerned with Eastern mysticism, whereas “El hombre en el umbral” uses the religious elements to make way for the political revelation. One sentence is particularly interesting in “Almotásim”:

Algún inquisidor ha enumerado ciertas analogías de la primera escena de la novela con el relato de Kipling On the City Wall; Bahadur las admite, pero alega que sería muy anormal que dos pinturas de la décima noche de muharram no coincidieran.

(418)

Some inquisitor has enumerated certain analogies between the first scene of the novel and Kipling's story “On the City Wall”; Bahadur recognizes them but alleges that it would be very strange if two portraits of the tenth night of Muharram did not coincide.

“On the City Wall” has a much closer relation to “El hombre en el umbral” than to “Almotásim,” precisely because of the political intrigue, and indeed “El hombre en el umbral” is fashioned as a sort of reply to the Kipling story, a reply in which the subaltern is given voice.

In one sense, though, Borges is already up to the same tricks in 1936 that he uses to greater effect in 1952. He calls attention to the origin of Almotásim's name, which is that of one of the Abbasid caliphs (417), a maneuver that has the effect of calling attention to Bahadur's own name: Bahadur Shah II ruled Delhi at the time of the Mutiny, while “the Company Bahadur” was the first name used for British “paramountcy” or colonial rule in India (Spear 203–14). Similarly, the reference to the tenth day of Muharram may refer tangentially to the battle of Arcot, fought on that day in 1751, a battle in which the British established themselves over the French as the prime colonial power in India (Mason 27). But the historical references in “Almotásim,”, if that is what they are, do not connect with each other in a rich thematic web. Between 1936 and 1952 much happened, both in the development of Borges's ideas about the representation of reality and in that world outside of his fiction: India and Pakistan were independent, Gandhi was dead at the hand of an assassin, and those facts, too, were “parte esencial de la historia.”

In “On the City Wall,” the Westernized Indian Wali Dad says to the narrator: “India has gossiped for centuries—always standing in the bazars until the soldiers go by. Therefore—you are here today instead of starving in your own country, and I am not a Muhammadan—I am a Product—a Demnition Product. That also I owe to you and yours: that I cannot make an end to my sentence without quoting from your authors” (4: 310–11).³⁶ Thus, quotation—or interpolation, as Borges calls it in the first paragraph of “El hombre en el umbral”—is the mark of colonial language par excellence,³⁷ and yet consciousness of this vicious habit may be a first step toward breaking out of the colonized mind.

Significantly, Wali Dad, Kipling's Westernized colonial who becomes “converted” back to Islam by the religious and political excitement associated with the particular feast of Muharram when Khem Singh escapes from prison, is described for the last time near the end of the story: “On returning to Lalun's door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically, and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, ‘Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain’ as I stooped over him” (4: 336). A moment later the narrator sees “a man … bending over a corpse” in the square by the mosque (4: 336). When Borges rewrites this story in “Hombre en el umbral,” the “man at the threshold”³⁸ recovers his dignity, and the corpse in the patio is British. He might have said with Wali Dad, “I cannot make an end to my sentence without quoting from your authors,”³⁹ but the quotation in this case marks the distance from the world of the original.

Notes

1. Cf. Bertrand Russell in 1916: “We in England boast of the Pax Britannica which we have imposed, in this way, upon the warring races and religions in India. If we are right in boasting of this, if we have in fact conferred a benefit upon India by enforced peace, the Germans would be right in boasting if they could impose a Pax Germannica upon Europe. Before the war, men might have said that India and Europe are not analogous, because India is less civilized than Europe; but now, I hope, no one would have the effrontery to maintain anything so preposterous” (Why Men Fight, 104).

2. I cannot find a published source for this famous quip. Even if it may be apocryphal, Gandhi's attitude toward Western civilization was indeed that it would be a good idea; see Chatterjee's analysis of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (1909), in which Gandhi says that modern civilization is “a civilization only in name” (85ff.). Similarly, in 1920 Gandhi wrote: “By Western civilization I mean the ideals which people in the West have embraced in modern times and the pursuits based on these ideals. The supremacy of brute force, worshipping money as God, spending most of one's time in seeking worldly happiness, breath-taking risks in pursuit of worldly enjoyments of all kinds, the expenditure of limitless mental energy on efforts to multiply the power of machinery, the expenditure of crores on the invention of means of destruction, the moral righteousness which looks down upon people outside Europe,—this civilization, in my view, deserves to be altogether rejected” (Martin Green 5), and in 1924 he wrote: “There is no such thing as Western or European civilization, but there is a modern civilization, which is purely material” (Iyer 293).

3. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the one that Borges knew so well, opens with the following dedication: “Dedicated by Permission to His Majesty George the Fifth King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas Emperor of India and to William Howard Taft President of the United States of America” (1: v). The possession of India is here one of the principal attributes of the British king, indeed it is because of India that “king” becomes “emperor,” that “kingdom” becomes “empire.”

4. Of the many works I consulted on British India, the best account of the British attempts to shape the colonized people is Francis Hutchins's Illusion of Permanence.

5. There are many studies of Kipling's representation of India; I have found particularly helpful those by Rao, Moore-Gilbert, and Paffard.

6. Berveiller has already suggested some sort of relation between Kipling's struggle for an English identity and Borges's own situation when, after commenting on Conrad's internationalism, he says that Borges associates his own case with that of “the Eurasian Rudyard Kipling, for Kipling, having being born an Anglo-Indian in Bombay, therefore wanted to be all the more English [and] was devoted to Englishness. Did not [Borges's] own Argentineness proceed from comparable circumstances?” (271). The problem of Borges's relation to British culture is, however, strangely out of focus in Berveiller's discussion.

7. The narrator is unnamed but seems to be Borges by virtue of his friendship with Bioy and his interest in Kipling and in things British.

8. Another account that makes Nicholson sound almost like a model for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is given by Michael Edwardes in Red Year. In addition to further details about the native “worship” of the god “Nikalseyn” (especially 49–50), he gives the text of a song on Nicholson's death (179–80) and a theory on Nicholson's latent homosexuality (see especially 237, note on the “sexuality of imperialism”).

9. Collier (246–64) gives quite a full account of Nicholson's last weeks, presenting Nicholson as a larger-than-life hero. See especially his account of Nicholson's charge on the Lahore Gate of Delhi: “All his life he had subdued both mind and body to his iron will; now it was inconceivable he could not spur other men on the path to glory. His mighty frame fought through the press, until he towered at their head. Eyes blazing, he turned to face them” (261). Hibbert is much more critical of Nicholson's actions at Delhi, which he presents as rash and irresponsible (301–9). A heroic painting of the storming of Delhi by W. S. Morgan shows Nicholson urging his men on with sword upraised (Edwardes 45).

10. For examples of the excruciating tortures that were actually applied, see Majumdar 9: 591–602.

11. Nicholson is shown without the beard in Edwardes, Red Year 48. A more heroic image (with beard) is given in Edwardes, Battles of the Indian Mutiny 21.

12. The spelling of Nicholson's nickname in the Borges story matches Kipling's (Nikal Seyn) and not the encyclopedia's (Nikalsain), thus suggesting that Kipling is the more important source here. However, Kipling gives little of Nicholson's story and indeed was reproached by his contemporaries for not writing directly on the Mutiny (Rao 16). His passing reference to Nicholson in Kim depends on his readers (including Borges) knowing much more about Nicholson, and about the Mutiny of 1857, than is told.

13. The reference to Oudh in the story is fully as interesting as that to Amritsar, though I pursue the latter in greater detail here. At the time of the Mutiny, Oudh (or Avadh) was as important a center of unrest as the Punjab, and there were great battles between the insurgent and colonial armies for possession of Lucknow (see Edwardes, Battles of the Indian Mutiny 57–149; Hibbert 216–66, 347–66; and Majumdar 9: 536–48, 636–37). During the twentieth-century struggle for independence, Oudh did not take as central a role as it had during the Mutiny, partly due to the cozy relationship between the British and the Nizam of Oudh; see, however, Shahid Amin on Gandhi's activities in the Gorakhpur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1921–22. If Borges's intention, then, is to find a city or region that played an important role in both the Mutiny and the struggle for independence, Amritsar is a much more appropriate choice than Oudh.

14. See Sylvia Molloy's comments on another of these narrative disjunctions, the information in the story that the literature of Uqbar “never referred to reality, but instead to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas or Tlön” (432): “The story is guided by a description of one of the two imaginary regions, brought out of a literature in which they serve, in turn, as referents. Mlejnas is cast aside, already without force in the text” (Letras 170). The same technique is used at the opening of “Tema del traidor y del héroe” [“Theme of the Traitor and of the Hero”]: “La acción transcurre en un país oprimido y tenaz: Polonia, Irlanda, la república de Venecia, algún estado sudamericano o balcánico. … Digamos (para comodidad narrativa) Irlanda; digamos 1824” (496) [The action takes place in a stubborn, oppressed country: Poland, Ireland, the republic of Venice, some South American or Balkan state. … Let's say (for narrative convenience) Ireland; let's say 1824].

15. Cf. Suleri: “An astonishing development in the narratives of Anglo-India is the rapidity with which the British understanding of the dynamics of Indian civilization atrophied into a static and mistrustful interpretation of India as a locus of all things ancient, a backdrop against which the colonizing presence could not but be startled by its own novelty” (33).

16. On the importance of stereotypes to colonialist discourse, see Bhabha, “The Other Question.” Bhabha considers such stereotypes in light of Freudian ideas on fetishism.

17. For further details, see Fischer 179–84 and Dodwell, Indian Empire 765–70. One odd note: though Fischer says that the Amritsar massacre was a “turning point” in Gandhi's political development, Gandhi's own writings in 1919 mention it only tangentially, since Gandhi was preoccupied at the time with lapses from the discipline of nonviolence by demonstrators in Ahmedabad. One of Gandhi's few references at the time to the massacre at Amritsar is in a letter to J. L. Massey, dated 14 April 1919: “Though the events at Amritsar are, so far as I can see, unconnected with satyagraha and my arrest, I feel sure that had I been able to proceed to these places [Delhi, Amritsar, and Lahore], the awful occurrences could have been avoided” (219).

18. Amritsar is also mentioned in Kipling's “Miss Youghal's Sais” (in a volume of stories often mentioned by Borges, Plain Tales from the Hills) as the site of one of the first adventures of Detective Strickland: “His crowning achievement was spending eleven days as a faquir or priest in the gardens of Baba Atal at Amritsar, and there picking up the threads of the great Nasiban Murder Case” (32).

19. This notion of a law distinct from and more powerful than British colonial law seems to derive here, oddly enough, from Kipling, particularly from the Jungle Books. See Noel Annan's essay, “Kipling's Place in the History of Ideas,” in Rutherford, Kipling's Mind and Art, for a discussion of Kipling's concept of law (especially 109).

20. Note that the Punjab was partitioned between India and Pakistan when self-rule came, and that its place in postcolonial India is still a contested one, as witnessed by the frequent clashes over the issue of Sikh independence or autonomy. The “unity” the story speaks of is purely a matter of historical conjuncture, of opposition to the British Raj when it manifested itself in particularly cruel ways.

21. Cf. Suleri on the lama in Kim: “The sale of information and the economy of colonial knowledge … is by no means beyond the ken of the ‘otherworldly’ lama. He not only understands the structure of oppression, but furthermore has an intuitive knowledge of the price that very literally accompanies such a reality” (122).

22. Interestingly enough, Borges's single reference to Gandhi in the Obras completas places Gandhi and Chaplin in close proximity: “¿Quién iba a atreverse a ignorar que Charlie Chaplin es uno de los dioses más seguros de la mitología de nuestro tiempo, un colega de las inmóviles pesadillas de Chirico, de las fervientes ametralladoras de Scarface Al, del universo finito aunque ilimitado, de las espaldas cenitales de Greta Garbo, de los tapiados ojos de Gandhi?” (222) [Who dares ignore that Charlie Chaplin is one of the most secure gods in the mythology of our time, a colleague of the motionless nightmares of Chirico, of the fervent machine guns of Scarface Al, of the finite but limitless universe of the zenithal back of Greta Garbo, of Gandhi's covered eyes?]. Louis Fischer's biography includes a photograph of a meeting between Gandhi and Chaplin (276).

23. Nandy studies the same “newly created sense of linear history in Hinduism” (26) in the thought of Swami Dayanand Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda (both active in the late nineteenth century).

24. Chatterjee gives a wonderful account of Nehru's problems in getting used to these mythic formulations (146–57).

25. Besides the review of Chaplin's City Lights, there are a few other passing references to Gandhi's life and thought in Borges's works (see Balderston, Literary Universe, 58), none of them very profound. However, it would have been impossible for Borges and Bioy to be altogether immune to Gandhian influences, because Victoria Ocampo considered herself a Gandhian, published articles in Sur and elsewhere on India, and sponsored visits to Buenos Aires by Rabindranath Tagore, Lanza del Vasto, and others associated with the Gandhian movement (see King 34, 60, 103, 138, 179, 197). Borges gives his own impression of Tagore in a funny note in El Hogar, which opens: “Hace trece años tuve el honor un poco terrible de conversar con el venerado y melifluo Rabindranath Tagore” (Textos cautivos, 139–40) [Thirteen years ago I had the rather terrible honor of conversing with the venerated and mellifluous Rabindranath Tagore].

26. In chapter 1 I mentioned that the same phrase is used to describe the old gaucho in “El Sur.” Thus, in the broader outlines of Borges's work, the question posed by “El hombre en el umbral” is not only the conflict between East and West but one between traditional (eternal, ageless) cultures and historical ones, and he sees Argentina as also caught up in this conflict. But, as noted before, the same sentence, when inscribed in a different context, can mean quite different things, a lesson we learned from Pierre Menard.

27. Once again, here is Chatterjee: “To Gandhi, then, truth did not lie in history, nor did science have any privileged access to it. Truth was moral: unified, unchanging and transcendental. It was not an object of critical inquiry or philosophical speculation. It could only be found in the experience of one's life, by the unflinching practice of moral living” (97).

28. There is perhaps a hint of envy on the narrator's part for Bioy, who had the means in the 1940s and 1950s to travel, which Borges did not, and perhaps also a note of condescension for Bioy, who has gone all the way to London to bring back that most criollo and most borgeano of objects, a dagger! Bioy insisted, by the way, in a conversation in July 1991 that he never bought a dagger in London or anywhere else and says that the whole story, and Christopher Dewey himself, were invented by Borges. I have not been able to confirm Dewey's existence or career by other means; the British Council in London could not grant access to personnel records in April 1991, and later in the same year the British Council in Buenos Aires was still putting its records in order after the renewal of relations between Britain and Argentina.

29. Borges began studying Latin at the Collège Calvin in Geneva (“Autobiographical Essay,” 214) and later continued with a priest in Majorca (Jurado, 33).

30. For a full discussion of this technique, see Balderston, El precursor velado 29–41.

31. Kushigian fails to note the irony of this statement, calling the use of details and local color “two unforgivable offences, personally odious to Borges” (36). Molloy's comments are more to the point: “It should be clarified that the story he reconstructs does not disdain either the brief circumstantial detail or interpolation. The paradoxical invocation names two techniques frequently employed by Borges: perhaps those that provide him—as writer or as reader—the greatest pleasure” (Letras, 171).

32. There is a large and important body of criticism that explores the subtleties and contradictions of Kipling's attitudes toward the empire, including essays by Edmund Wilson and George Orwell in Rutherford, Kipling's Mind and Art, and Rao, Rudyard Kipling's India. I do not wish to oversimplify the issues involved in the debates here, but clearly Kipling, even in his more critical moments, was still an apologist for the empire.

33. Note Borges's reservations about Kipling's ethical stance even in this comment on Kim: “Kipling inventa un Amiguito del Mundo Entero, el libérrimo Kim: a los pocos capítulos, urgido por no sé qué patriótica perversión, le da el horrible oficio de espía. (En su autobiografía literaria, redactada treinta y cinco años después, Kipling se muestra impenitente y aun inconsciente.)” (733) [Kipling invents a little Friend of All the World, the free spirit Kim; a few chapters later, spurred on by I know not what patriotic perversion, he gives him the horrid profession of spy. (In his literary autobiography, written thirty-five years later, Kipling reveals himself to be unrepentant and even unconscious)]. But compare with this later remark from the Introducción a la literatura inglesa: “Cuentista, novelista y poeta, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) se impuso la tarea de revelar a sus distraídos compatriotas la existencia del dilatado Imperio Británico. Esta misión tiene la culpa de que muchos lo juzgaron, y aún lo juzgan, por sus opiniones políticas, no por su genial labor literaria” (Obras completas en colaboración 846) [Short-story writer, novelist, and poet, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) set himself the task of revealing to his distracted compatriots the existence of the vast British Empire. This mission has the drawback that many people judged him, and judge him even today, for his political opinions, not for his brilliant literary work]. Note that in the earlier comment, Borges does not rigidly separate aesthetic from political judgments. For Kipling's unrepentant backward view, see Something of Myself (e.g., 45, 212).

34. Ludmer is perhaps overly optimistic about the possibilities of communication by the oppressed in a colonial society, and it should be remembered that in the last years of her life Sor Juana sold her library and stopped writing. On a similar limit-situation, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (on widow-sacrifice). Another useful reflection on these issues is R. Radhakrishnan's “Negotiating Subject Positions in an Uneven World.” My debt to Radhakrishnan is considerable, since the argument of this chapter came to me during the presentation of his 1989 Modern Language Association paper on Gandhi and Nehru (now published as “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity”).

35. Cf. Nehru: “I used to be troubled sometimes at the growth of this religious element in our politics. … I did not like it at all” (qtd. in Chatterjee 151).

36. Sandra Kemp says of Wali Dad that he “speaks and writes in the English tradition but cannot ‘live’ in it” (22). The phrase that Wali Dad is marking as a quotation from an English author, “Demnition Product,” is not actually an exact quotation but a new phrase invented on the abundant models provided by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby for use of the American slang term “demnition” for “damned,” “damn,” and “damnation.” In the Dickens novel, the character Mr. Mantalini, who had changed his surname from the original Muntle in an attempt to make a successful name for himself as a London dressmaker (106–7), uses the words “demd” and “demnition” at least once in almost every sentence he speaks. See, for instance, his use of “demnition miserable” (176), “demnition discount” (365), “the demnition gold and silver” (365), “the same little engrossing demnition captivater” (368), and “demnition sweetness!” (494). In his final appearance in the novel, having “gone to the dogs,” he says of himself: “It is all up with its handsome friend! He has gone to the demnition bow-wows” (703). What is interesting in Wali Dad's use of the term is his creative application of Mantalini's word to himself as the Product of a colonial establishment, thus emphasizing the links between a dependent economy and a psychocultural condition.

37. Borges's own contribution to the notion of “postcolonial discourse” is most notable in his 1950 speech “El escritor argentino y la tradición” [The Argentine Writer and Tradition], included in later editions of Discusión. For a discussion of the uncanny parallels between this Borges essay and an essay from the 1870s by Machado de Assis, “Instinto de nacionalidade” [“The Instinct of Nationality”], see Davi Arrigucci. At a conference on Borges at Pennsylvania State University in April 1991, Edna Aizenberg gave a fascinating paper on the appropriation of certain ideas and techniques from Borges in various African and Middle Eastern postcolonial writers; her study of this topic is forthcoming.

38. Another sense of this phrase is given by Kipling's sister, in her memoir of being left with her brother as boarders in England: they felt, she says, “almost as much as on a doorstep” (qtd. in Nandy 66). This phrase reminds us of another context in which people find themselves on thresholds: as foundlings. Note the various displacements suffered in the notion of being “on a threshold” or “in a doorstep.” Freud significantly called this sense of estrangement a “liminal state”; see Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” for a discussion of how “discursive liminality” is characteristic of modern notions of “writing the nation” (295–97).

39. Compare Borges to Irby (and many other similar declarations in other interviews): “Todo lo que yo he hecho está en Poe, Stevenson, Wells, Chesterton y algún otros” (Encuentro con Borges, 37–38) [Everything I have done is already in Poe, Stevenson, Wells, Chesterton, and some others]. Chatterjee notes the same concern with imitation in the early Bengali nationalist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, who wrote: “One cannot learn except by imitation. Just as children learn to speak by imitating the speech of adults, to act by imitating the actions of adults, so do uncivilised and uneducated people learn by imitating the ways of the civilised and the educated. Thus it is reasonable and rational that Bengalis should imitate the English” (qtd. in Chatterjee 65). Gandhi also acknowledges the impact of the West, but his analysis does not stop where Chattopadhyay's does: “Everyone of the Indians who has achieved anything worth mentioning in any direction is the fruit, directly or indirectly, of western education. At the same time, whatever reaction for the better he may have had upon the people at large was due to the extent of his eastern culture” (qtd. in Nandy, 75).

Works Cited

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Dodwell, H. H., ed. The Indian Empire, 1858–1918, with Additional Chapters, 1919–1969. The Cambridge History of India, vol. 6. Delhi: S. Chand 1969.

Fischer, Louis. The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950.

Griffiths, Percival. Modern India. 4^th ed. New York: F. A. Praeger, 1965.

Hutchins, Francis G. The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim: The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 4, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.

———. “On the City Wall.” In Black and White. The writing in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 4. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920. 302–39.

Ludmer, Josefina. El genero gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1988.

Majumdar, R. C., ed. British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance. The History and Culture of the Indian People, vols. 9–10. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan, 1963–65.

Mason, Philip. The Men Who Ruled India. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Orwell, George. “Reflections on Gandhi.” In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. 463–70.

Spear, Percival. India: A Modern History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.