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Choosing to inhabit the realworldAnita Desai & Shahrukh Husain aa School of Oriental and African Studies ,University of London ,Published online: 15 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Anita Desai & Shahrukh Husain (1989) Choosing to inhabit thereal world, Third World Quarterly, 11:2, 167-175, DOI: 10.1080/01436598908420164

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LITERARY FEATURE REVIEWS

Choosing to inhabit the real world

Anita Desai*

The Shadow Lines

Amitav GhoshLondon: Bloomsbury. 1988. 246pp. £12.95hb

Amitav Ghosh won much acclaim for his first novel, The Circle of Reason(1986). Although unabashedly derivative and almost plagiaristically shadowingSalman Rushdie's celebrated novels, Midnight's Children (1981) and Shame(1983), it had about it an exuberance of fantasy, a gusto of the imaginationand many memorable and vivid passages that made one feel that here was awriter who had unfortunately allowed himself to go astray. Next, thereappeared in Granta a piece that was obviously based on his own experiences asa student of anthropology researching in Egypt; he chose to be plainly realisticbut showed a wit, humour and sophistication of style that were like the flashof an original and distinctive gift emerging from the troubled ocean of inter-nationalism, magical realism and literary borrowings.

In his second novel, The Shadow Lines, Ghosh has abandoned that inter-nationally popular 'magical realism' and made the more modest, less ambitiouschoice of old-fashioned realistic narrative, with only a touch or two, at theend, of Rushdie's method of addressing the reader directly and weaving hisown experiences into the fictional ones. It is by comparison with his first booka curiously flat, muted and quiet work but it has qualities that are not imitativeand are entirely his own.

The settings are Calcutta, London and Dhaka, the characters both Indianand English: much scope for international dazzle, but Ghosh eschews scene-painting and if he does mention the cotton-man of the Calcutta streets, thesweet seller of Dhaka or the coffee bars in London, it is because they belongto his story, and not for their effect. He does not have any interest in paintingdifferent worlds for us—on the contrary, he makes them so similar that onehas scarcely any sense of passing from one culture over the border into another.Since the theme of his novel is that there are no borders, that lands andpeoples would blend if it were not for history, the somewhat dull monochromeof his landscape has its reasons.

The narrator's grandmother, originally from Dhaka when it was the capital

* Anita Desai's novel, Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) was reviewed in Third World Quarterly 11(1)January 1989, pp 167-8.

TWQ 11(2) April 1989/ISSN 0143-6597/89. $1.25 167

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of East Bengal, has been persuaded to revisit it now that it is the capital ofEast Pakistan.

. . . She wanted to know whether she would be able to see the borders between Indiafrom the plane. When my father laughed and said, why, did she really think the borderwas a long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other, like it was in aschool atlas, she was not so much offended as puzzled . . . 'But if there aren't anytrenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, what's the difference, then?And if there's no difference, both sides will be the same: it'll be just like it used to bebefore . . . What was it all for then—Partition and the killing and everything—if thereisn't something in between?'

Her more sophisticated granddaughter, Ila, who flies regularly from onecountry to another, her father being a diplomat, and goes to internationalschools in various glamorous capitals of the world, sees differences in thelands but hardly those that matter; what she notices is that, in Cairo, 'theladies is way on the other side of the departure lounge'. The narrator cannotcomprehend such a blase attitude: for him the mere words 'Underground','Holborn', 'Brick Lane' contain a sensual delight that he rolls upon his tonguelike toffees or cigarette smoke. He has been schooled in the romance of other-ness by his older cousin, Tridib, a somewhat enigmatic figure who has travel-led everywhere and can talk learnedly of 'Mesopotamian stelae, East Europeanjazz, the habits of arboreal apes, the plays of Garcia Lorca . . . ' Unfortunately,the narrator fails to convey to the reader his compelling aura; we have simplyto take his word for it since Tridib never quite comes to life. When he dies—apointless, violent death that can be interpreted as a martyrdom or hushed upas an unfortunate mistake—he fades out of our minds rather like an old photo-graph in an album. The Price family in London, who hold such a fascinationfor the little Bengali boy in Calcutta, likewise suffer from a dampness thatprevents them from catching fire in our imagination. Their fortunes are ratherimprobably linked to those of the Bengali family and Tridib's affair with theEnglish girl, May, is so vaguely sketched that it hardly stands out as an eventfrom the surrounding monochrome.

Where Ghosh excels is in detecting and conveying those unspoken, unmen-tioned concepts on which societies are built and in which they show theiruniqueness. His account of the joint family in Dhaka that is riven in two bythe petty quarrelling and jealousies of the women who 'began to suspect eachother of favouring their own children above the rest, of purloining the bestlittle tid-bits of food from the common larder, and so on . . . ' will be instantlyrecognisable to any Indian reader. One sees how accurate, how exact his un-derstanding of Indian society is in lines such as: 'Among the women I knew,like my mother and my relatives, there were none, no matter how secluded,who were free from that peculiar, manipulative worldliness which came fromdealing with large families—a trait which seemed to grow in those women indirect proportion to the degree to which they were secluded from the world.'

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This extraordinary piece of 'inner knowledge' shows that it is not only towomen writers one must turn for subtle insights into the family structure, theweb of relationships, sticky and sweet, clinging and trapping.

His intuitive understanding of this society goes deeper than such insights,however, and touches upon the roots of its being. The narrator (who seemsmore canny and worldly as a child than he does when he grows into an ingenu-ous youth) stands staring at a stagnant pool beside which factories and shantiescluster and watches women 'squatting at the edge of the pool, splashing withboth hands to drive back the layer of sludge, scooping up the clear waterunderneath to scrub their babies and wash their clothes and cooking utensils'.Beyond that are some hillocks of 'some black and gravelly substance' on whichsmall figures move, picking up rubble and dropping it into their sacks. 'Theyare perfectly camouflaged, like chameleons, because everything on them, theirclothes, their faces, their skin, was the uniform matt black of the sludge'. Whendiscovered, the child is snatched away with the cry 'Don't look there, it's dirty!''I went willingly,' he says. 'I was already well-schooled in looking away, thejungle-craft of gentility,' but he knows that pool of sludge, that hill of rubble:

was palpable everywhere in our house: I had grown up with it. It was the landscapethat lent a note of hysteria to my mother's voice when she drilled me for examinations;it was to these slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn't study hard I wouldend up there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn'tuse them like claws to cling to what we'd got, that's where we'd end up, marooned inthat landscape . . . it was that landscape that seethed beneath the polished floors of ourhouse; it was that sludge that gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.

Such insights, described in a prose that is intelligent and controlled—andembellished by many elegant accuracies like 'that comfortable lassitude whichwe call a sense of homecoming'—make one grateful that Ghosh has chosen toinhabit the real world rather than the artificial land of fantasy, and makes onewatch his development as a novelist with high expectations.

Passive disorientation: Indo-Anglian journeys

Shahrukh Husain

Sare Mare

S K Walker

London: Pandora Press. 1987. 173pp. £3.95pb

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The Tiger's Daughter

Bharati Mukherjee

London/New York: Penguin. 1987. 210pp. £3.95/$6.95pb

Amritvela

Leena Dhingra

London: The Women's Press. 1988. 176pp. £3.95pb

That Long Silence

Shashi Deshpande

London: Virago Press. 1988. 196pp. £4.50pb

The Middleman and other stories

Bharati Mukherjee

New York: Grove Press. 1988. 197pp. $15.95hb

Yatra (The Journey)

Nina Sibal

London: The Women's Press. 1987. 324pp. £10.95hb/£5.95pb

The authors of these six works of fiction are women of Indian origin: LeenaDhingra and S K Walker are resident in Britain, Bharati Mukherjee lives inNorth America, while Shashi Deshpande and Nina Sibal currently live andwork in India. Reviewed together, their experiences of life within and outsidethe subcontinent highlight the cultural hegemony of India, within whichmay be found characters both familiar and bizarre to the uninitiated reader.Yet, they converge and interact with an ease and tolerance which defies Wes-tern conceptions of reality, while creating a montage of contrasts and similar-ities which is wholly true to Indian life.

Interestingly, each of the five novels under review focuses on a journey ofsorts and it is in India itself that each narrative unfolds. Accordingly, theconcluding line of S K Walker's novel Saré Mare encapsulates something ofthe impetus of the woman at the centre of each novel:

'She was a Traveller looking for Freedom and Love.'

Cliché though it is, the line expresses the sense of 'otherness' which alienateseach woman from her environment, whether this is an international metropolisor the obscure Panjabi village of Saré Mare, the locale of Walker's first novel.

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This novel is reminiscent of those English novels that centre, in the manner ofElizabeth Gaskell, on the goings-on of a small village and its obsession withconformity, or of a black American settlement in the style of Zora NealeHurston et al, with its quirky population of itinerants and marginals spicingup the lives of the bonafide residents. It is also genuinely picaresque, consistingas it does of a series of incidents strung together loosely from the viewpoint ofthe picaroon, Asha. As she grows from child to adolescent, Asha rompsthrough the village and out of it—sometimes alone, at other times with herheadmaster father—enjoying forbidden company, lying her way out of awk-ward situations, tolerating, then finally repelling the bewildering advances of'kissing Grandfathers in the western tradition' (p 128). At seventeen, havingspent the night with a clownish Sikh boy newly arrived from Pakistan followingPartition, Asha is banished by her family to a nearby town while they decideher fate. Living with her preoccupied father, Asha at last finds a way of assert-ing complete power over her own body. She denies it food and turns anorexic,revelling victorious in its consequent physical malfunction: phenomenalweight-loss, amenorrhoea, boils and sores. 'But this ravaged condition maskedmany things—a feeling of rage, rejection, hatred and betrayal' (p 166), untilAsha eventually discovers that 'She had lost the way of coming back to herpeople' (p 172). Asha's departure to England for further studies is thereforeher last hope of personal survival.

In contrast, Tara Banerjee, the title character of Bharati Mukherjee's secondnovel, The Tiger's Daughter, laments her exile to school and university in NewYork: 'On days she had thought she could not possibly survive, she had shakenout all her silk scarves, ironed them and hung them to make the apartmentmore "Indian". She had curried hamburger desperately till David's stomachhad protested' (p 34). Returning home after seven years as Tara Cartwright,married to writer, David, she becomes uncomfortably aware of the enormousdifferences of attitude that have grown between her and the Calcutta groupshe has regarded through the years as her kindred spirits: 'She was home in aclass that lived by Victorian rules, changed decisively by the exuberance of theHindu imagination.' But ' . . . a vision, not necessarily benevolent, hidden byflowers and lizards, smiled at her audacity, then quickly retired' (p 34). Thisfeeling of passive disorientation, brilliantly conveyed by Mukherjee, is amarked feature of all the novels under review although it may derive fromdifferent sources.

Mukherjee incorporates letters into the novel in order to communicateTara's sense of 'otherness', a device shared by Leena Dhingra in Amritvela.Tara writes to her husband, reporting the trivia of the mundane, striving toconceal her sense of alienation from both of her bases, for to articulate it is toacknowledge that she is dispossessed. Tara's husband, like so many strangersto India, wants her 'to take a stand against injustice, against unemployment,hunger and bribery'. Yet, 'Tara knew she could never tell David that the

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misery of her city was too immense and blurred to be listed and assailed oneby one. That it was fatal to fight for justice; that it was better to remainpassive and absorb all shocks as they came' (p 31). Mukherjee's novel is tightlystructured and skilfully crafted. She summons vivid, rounded characters, thenquickly, ruthlessly, discards them when they have furthered her narrative. Buteach character is crucial to the whole structure of her novel, anchored firmlyin the real world around her: rioting workers, affluent industrialists, cravenjournalists and powerful politicians. Through this world moves Tara in a nearcatatonic state, reacting in prescribed fashion to events around her. As Tara'spersonal pace quickens in anticipation of a mysterious calamity that will hurlher out of her apathy, Mukherjee brings the curtain down on a powerful anddisturbing finale.

Leena Dhingra's first novel, Amritvela (startlingly close in content to TheTiger's Daughter), tells of Meera's journey back to Delhi—a journey she hopeswill clear away some of the bewilderment of alienation experienced during heryears in Europe and her marriage to Martin. Excerpts of Meera's letters to anunknown friend punctuate Dhingra's novel. 'I am getting increasingly con-fused,' one begins, ending thus: 'The India I am encountering is switched offfrom the India I want to meet and to which I can't find the way, and I feelboth that I have betrayed and . . . been betrayed' (p 118). Meera's need is forthe space and isolation in which to decide her future. Yet, she resists makingher choices under pressure, preferring to search indirectly for her answers,through re-living memories and rekindling old friendships in order to resurrectexperiences with her long-deceased parents, with whom she believes lies thevital clue to her present identity. Amritvela is an elegant novel, diary-like inthe arrangement of its content and emulating in its tempo the unhurried, fatalis-tic rhythms of India. And it is through achieving pace with Mother India'sprimordial rhythms that Meera's quest reaches its optimistic conclusion. Amrit-vela is enjoyable for its style and observations, its wit, its humour and its extra-ordinary pathos. Meera, with her mind flung open to direct discourse with herenvironment, listens to India telling her about its poverty, its matriarchalmythology and its diverse societies—three themes which appear, vis-à-vis theirfemale protagonists, to form the leitmotif of all the novels reviewed here.

The contrast between the rich and the poor, the claustrophobic intimacy ofrelations—some practically unknown—and the onus upon women to preserve aloathed status quo detrimental to their own well-being, are emphasised in mostof these books. The overwhelming sense of personal displacement is invariablythe most powerful theme in the novels. It is therefore with profound validitythat Mukherjee frames the question, 'How does foreignness begin? Does itbegin right in the centre of Calcutta...' or indeed wherever else home maybe? Certainly, the feelings of disorientation and obsessive self-denial expressedby Deshpande's central character, Jaya, in That Long Silence, would point tothe 'foreignness' of home.

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In That Long Silence, Shashi Deshpande looks uncompromisingly from theinside at the problems confronted daily by the working-class women ofBombay and the penury-stricken high-caste women of rural India. Jaya, well-educated and intelligent, is married to Mohan, a successful executive from alesser background, who has availed himself through fair means and foul, ofthe vast potential for vertical mobility in India. He makes it to a prestigiousresidential area of Bombay, while Jaya, ostrich-like, evades knowledge aboutthe secret of his success. An incipient writer, Jaya seizes upon motherhood andwifehood to justify her lack of success in writing—a move ratified, even sancti-fied by her society. Jaya's bleak view of life is reflected in the other novelsunder review, where women move in a welter of inhibition, bewilderment andaimlessness as if all sense of identification with a goal has been wrested fromthem. Each combats in her own silent war this very sense of displacementwhich is somewhat easier to comprehend when it is induced by contact withignorant foreigners.

In The Middleman and other stories, her compelling second anthology ofshort fiction about the US immigrant experience, Bharati Mukherjee speakssuccinctly through the mouth of a PhD student, Panna Bhatt, watching acomedian joke about Indian women: 'It's the tyranny of the American dreamthat scares me. First you don't exist. Then you're invisible. Then you're funny.Then you're disgusting. Insults, my American friends will tell me, is a kind ofacceptance. No instant dignity here.' (The Wife's Story', p 26). But the severenarcissistic disturbance that comes from being downgraded in one's own milieuis infinitely more difficult to bear, substantiated as it is by the male-disseminated holy scriptures of a once matriarchal religious philosophy.

You women . . . must remember that you are the symbol of original sin and weakness.It is because of you that the Gods and Saints were misled from their righteous pathand began to serve Mammon and you. The Vedas in their wisdom have given youtwenty-five years in a man's life, to serve him, to bear children to him and to obey himso that his name perpetuates, but then men must also abandon you to follow the pathof God. Although you are weak and sinful and lead man astray from God, today, inhis name, I am ready to bless you so that you can partake of his bounty.

While the injunction upon men to don the garb of celibacy after twenty-fiveyears of marriage is easily disregarded by the majority of Hindu men, theenslaving cult of wifehood is so deeply ingrained as to have infiltrated even aliberal, Westernised mode of behaviour.

This cross-cultural life-style is most clearly depicted in the novels of ShashiDeshpande and Nina Sibal, both residents of India and both writing ofheroines who live mainly in India. Deshpande talks of Jaya's early marriage,describing with amusement the young woman's failure to take seriously hersister-in-law's criticisms, simply because, never having seen her mother tend toher father's clothes, she does not regard the ordering of her husband's clothesas any part of her own wifely duties. But this neglect of such duties changes as

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she quickly recognises the security of cloaking her own needs and potentialfailures with her husband's more important ones. Similarly, Krishna of Sibal'sambitious novel, Yatra, an independent law lecturer, married to a like-mindedbarrister, finds herself constantly humiliated by a close politician friend of herhusband's family. On one occasion, she finds herself at the centre of a familycrisis for asking him to return the keys to the wardrobe of her guest room.Forced by her husband to apologise, Krishna is subjected to further vitupera-tion from the politician:

'I know lots of women like you. Don't think you're unique. There's hundreds like youwho don't recognise their long-term interests, who don't know how to look after theirhusbands or their husband's families, which is the duty of a woman. It is the only thingwhich makes a woman's life worthwhile. But you don't know anything about that.You're selfish, pushing your own self forward. "See me! See me!" you cry out.'

She felt like a common street-walker, (p 89)

This gender-based condemnation of women, as fallen beings, sits un-comfortably with a desire for self-realisation, resulting in a profound guiltwhose defensive outlet lies in confronting wider issues such as nationalpoverty—a confrontation which in turn compounds the individual's feeling ofpowerlessness. It is possibly this guilt that leads the women of at least three ofthese novels to expect retribution in the form of 'tragedy', a 'calamity' or a'crisis'—a catalyst which will punish and absolve in one violent blow, leavingthe woman free to seek out her true self. For this reason, these novels canperhaps be most aptly described as 'working-through' novels, disgorging asthey do memories of pain and trauma lodged so long in the psyches of manywomen.

This psycho-analytic trend is particularly emphasised in the structure ofDeshpande's novel, where critical past experiences are sometimes recounted initalics and in the original words of the analysand to recreate the atmosphere ofa therapy session. A novelist of some experience, although previously un-published in the West, Shashi Deshpande succeeds in creating a central char-acter wholly convincing and true-to-life. Unsparingly, she exposes her foibles,weaknesses and strengths—all qualities demanded of a woman living in ashame-oriented society, full of contradictions, which nevertheless dictates theshaping of her personality. In Jaya's case, her explosive temper so terrifies herhusband that she succeeds in turning it inward on herself to achieve a numbnessof the soul.

Written about forty years after independence, each novel mentions the up-heaval of Partition. Success and class are heavily underscored by colonial yard-sticks. Fluency in English, a good education after the Western tradition and alight skin are all important prerequisites for the marriage market. Althoughvariety of skin-tone is a continuing obsession with many Indians, the blamefor it cannot be attributed entirely to Western values, for colour prejudice inIndia began at least with the Aryan invasions and the implantation of early

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Aryan gods in Indian soil. Vedic mythology (circa 1000 BC) invariably de-scribed its demons as black, and the earliest 'Krishnas' known to Indianmythology were black-skinned demons who had their skins peeled on defeat.It was only as recently as the thirteenth century that the Bhagavata Purana,swiftly afterwards translated into the Hindi Prem Sagar, proclaimed the darkskin of Krishna beloved, created as it was from a black hair of his dark-skinnedprogenitor, Vishnu. In his incarnation as Krishna, the most widely adoredpastoral god, Vishnu made several appearances at important junctures of hislife, always deepening to the colour of a glowing raincloud during his manifesta-tions. This honour he appears also to confer upon Krishna, the Sikh womanat the centre of Sibal's Yatra, together with the blue-god's confused ancestry.

A somewhat chauvinistic potted history according to Sikh chronicles, Yatratells of Krishna, born the white-skinned daughter of a Greek woman marriedto Paramjit, a Sikh army doctor. The likelihood that she may be the daughterof her mother's Greek lover diminishes as Krishna's skin begins to darkendramatically with significant life experiences. Unlike the mythical manifesta-tions of Vishnu, however, her deepened skin tones stay with her—a sign, pre-sumably, that human parentage is insignificant before the primordial Mother,the land. Combining magical realism with a tendency towards dizzying time-switches, Sibal is not altogether successful in reconstructing the example of thegreat epics and sagas of world mythology. Despite their massiveness, theseretain a form and chronology regularly reinforced either by a stable frame orby the ordered narrative of an aretological compilation. It is almost as ifSibal's novel has provided a locus for a vast store of miscellaneous ideas,information and observations jostling their way out of her mind. Dense in theextreme, the scope of Yatra sprawls out to encompass topics as diverse asterrorism and ecology. It shares with Deshpande's novel an alarming profusionof names and relationships which the frustratingly incomplete glossaries, chro-nologies and cast of characters only marginally amplify.

In summing up, it is fair to say that the five novels present a varied pictureof the multi-societal culture of India. They reflect, almost invariably with greataccuracy, its complexities and contradictions, exploring alternative life-stylesand escape routes. The concluding message, albeit expressed in modern andinternational discourse, is the age-old oriental one: peace comes with recog-nition of one's limitations and goals. Thankfully, today this can be translatedinto self-esteem rather than self-abnegation. Thankfully too, these works marka distinct move away from many Indo-Anglian novels of the 1960s and 1970sin which women writers were ill able to conceal their contempt for the char-acters they created.

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