This paper was published on pp 309-318 of EFL and Art: Learning English with all our senses : selected papers from the XXXV FAAPI Conference / compilado por Mario López Barrios ; edición a cargo de Elba Villanueva de Debat ; Daniel Fernández; Deborah Krainin. - 1a ed. - Cordoba : FAAPI, 2010. EBook. ISBN 978-987-26208-0-6

Anita Desai’s The Village by the Sea: Trapped between Two Discourses or Inhabiting a Th ird Place? (Panel: Perspectives on Postcolonial Literat ure)

Florencia V. Perduca, MA

I.E.S. en Lenguas Vivas “J.R. Fernández” Universidad del Litoral

Can a post-colonial character, a writer and a novel be trapped between two contending discourses and thus be silenced? If so, can any of them, as subalterns, speak? (Spivak,1985). In The Village by the Sea (1982), a multilayered novel written in English and yet full of signs of Indianness, by German-Bengali writer Anita Desai, Hari starts an initiatic trip in search of his own individual and cultural identity and is at the crossroads between Indian tradition and Western modernity in post-independence India. Hari’s in-betweenness synecdochally represents the liminal space of the non-native writer and the Indian English novel, since it is a site of struggle for the recovery of the voice of the formerly oppressed, displaced and dispossessed. Can the voice of a character, a writer and a novel be ever truly recovered? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian postcolonial theorist and Marxist critic, is particularly concerned with this in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985), in which she explores the condition of the postcolonial subject as a “silenced” being who can not become the agent of discourse, since s/he is trapped between the voices of two contending cultures (coloniser/colonised; East/ West, etc). To develop her argument on the inability of the postcolonial subject to speak, Spivak analyses colonial debates on the practice of Sati, or widow self-immolation, in India to illustrate her point that the combined workings of colonialism and patriarchy make it extremely difficult for the subaltern, in this case the brown woman, to articulate a point of view. “The British abolition of it [Sati] has been understood as the case of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ . Against this is the Indian nativist statement ‘the women wanted to die ’. These are examples of ventriloquist complicity. One never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness: one cannot put together a voice” (1985: 126). Gayatri Spivak argues that these widows are burnt since Satis are absent as subjects, and she reads this absence as emblematic of the difficulty of recovering the voice of the oppressed postcolonial subject.

Yet, in a later revisionist essay in her book The Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999: 296), Spivak questions her own tenets: “Between patriarchy and development, this is the subaltern woman’s situation today […] within the two contending versions of freedom, the constitution of the subject in life is the place of the differend”. Within this line of argument, Homi Bhabha (1994: 126), and Claire Kramsch (1993: 233), echoing his words, have asserted that subaltern people can speak, and that a native voice can indeed be recovered in an “interstitial” or “third place”. As Bhabha (1994:127) puts it, “in the third space of enunciation, as the assertion of difference in discourse, the transformational value of change lies in the re-articulation of elements that are neither the one nor the other but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both”. Indeed, this third place is “itself defined as a place of in-betweenness. We have to view the boundary not as an event but as a state of mind as a positioning of the subject in the intersection of multiple social roles and individual choices” (Kramsch, 1993: 26, 234). So were does voice lie in a displaced sudra (Dallapiccola, 2002: 178) such as Hari, in a German- Bengali writer such as Anita Desai and in an Indian novel written in English such as The Village by the Sea? Is voice silenced by being torn between two contending discourses or is it empowered by being inscribed in the in-betweenness of a “third place”?

The Village by the Sea (1982) delves into post-independence rural India’s march towards industrialisation, its increasing westernisation, and the many tensions and crises this has brought into the life of the old and the new generations, particularly within the agrarian population, or members of the sudra caste. The incoming factories initially appear to bring in new opportunities for locals, who soon see through the mirage of progress and acknowledge themselves as unskilled potential workers. This challenges who they are and who they want to become, both as individuals and as a culture. So, as Spivak proposes (1985: 121), “let us now move to consider the margins of

the circuit marked by the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, men and women among the illiterate peasantry. On the other side of international division of labour from socialised capital, can the subaltern speak?” Subaltern, to refer to the economically dispossessed within capitalistic society, is a term borrowed from the work of Gramsci and adopted by a well-known group of Indian Historiographers, The Subaltern Studies Group, (Spivak and Guha, 1998: 20) seeking to recover the voices of the silenced peasantry, suppressed under imperialism. A study of the The Village by the Sea reveals how, when faced with the impact of modernity and the irreversible sweeping change in the form of a fertilizer complex, the elder and the younger sudras react differently. The former show considerable apprehension while the latter evidence gradual resilience. Yet, can the young generation, ‘the subaltern of the subaltern’, voice out this necessity to adapt to the changing times without betraying tradition? Can they possibly honour the past without betraying themselves and their future?

Just like the Satis, trapped in the dichotomy of whether or not to immolate themselves (Spivak, 1985), Indian younger generations, as portrayed in The Village by the Sea, are silenced by two contending discourses. Appropriating Spivak’s terms, the children in the novel are trapped between the imperialist promise ‘white men will save brown children from brown men ’ and the nativist statement ‘the children want to reject change ’. This paralysing duality is what keeps Hari throughout the first four chapters of the novel stagnant, silent and absent as a subject, since he is always in two minds due to the stasis that this generates: “What should he do? Should he take the part of the factory and try to find work in the new manner brought to them from the distant city? Or must he stand beside his fellow villagers and fight for the right of farmers and fishermen to earn their living by the traditional ways?” (VBS: 99). Hari cannot find a discourse that could empower him to break free from “their dark, gloomy house and the illness and the hopelessness that surround them like the shadows of the night” (67). The introductory chapters in the novel (VBS: 1-102) connote this duality in the very texture of the narrative by means of foregrounding the vivid colours, pleasant sounds and lively movement of the village (7-9, 21-25, 32-33) and contrasting these with the dull colours, discordant sounds and lack of movement of Hari’s house (5, 7, 66, 71). Even nature appears to be in sympathy with Hari and his apparently inescapable condition.

Thus, at this point, dwelling on the village merely by the sea, trapped in such binarity, becomes useless to Hari, and he starts inwardly articulating his own discourse “everything belonged here, everything blended together—except for himself…he could not settle down to belonging. He had to soar up in the sky instead of being tied to the earth” (VBS: 59). The only way out of postcolonial duality for Hari is to inhabit an “interstitial” or “third space of enunciation” (Bhabha, 1994: 5), and to apply the Indian integration of opposites (Keay, 2002: 54) to come up with a new hybrid discourse of his own that would allow him to speak out his mind: ‘brown children can save brown children without wanting to reject change ’. This is evidenced in his decision: “he would have to go to Bombay, a rich city, a great city with people who had jobs, earned money and made fortunes” (VBS: 68). As Kramsch puts it (1993: 234), “growing into one’s own is by essence recognising the faultlines in the social fabric. This also means acknowledging differences within oneself and giving voice to feelings of being forever betwixt and between, no longer at home in the original culture”. Hari’s enlightening decision may come as no surprise in the novel, and how it works, since his exile is subtly hinted at throughout these chapters by the resourceful use of motifs such as the “pariah floating kites” (VBS: 18-19, 59), the “birds flying out of the shadow” (4, 59) and the “roaring sea and wind” (4, 18, 60), which connote the novel’s central theme of adaptation to the flow of change for survival.

However, upon his arrival in Bombay, Hari will be recurrently trapped between conflicting discourses and will try to articulate his own voice out of them. Yet, two instances are central to the story and pivotal to his identity (re)construction. One is Hari’s looking forward to seeing “the Kala Ghoda, the black horse” (VBS: 116) in the central square of Bombay, which he imagines as “great black horse as a kind of deity, a god” (118) only to find that “it was taken away when the British left. The people of Bombay did not want to see a foreign ruler after independence, not even a stone one”. This leaves him “in gravest disappointment, for he would dearly have liked to see the emperor upon his horse” (119). It is worth mentioning that Kala means ‘black’, but it is also used to refer to time, fate and destiny. Besides, it is the name of Shiva, the destroyer of evil (Dallapiccola, 2002: 107). This play of the signifier may metaphorically suggest that the meaning of Hari’s life, and his culture’s, will be resignified. Indeed, the emblematic empty pedestal symbolically stands for decolonisation. Hari’s initial reaction to the Kala Ghoda points to how starving sudras are completely unaware of the true breadth of their changing reality. Yet Hari is not trapped for long in the dichotomy of whether or not to pine for the conqueror, since as Homi Bhabha (1985: 32) rightly observes, “the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference”. This will soon have an effect on Hari

“even the empty pedestal began to look ominous, the absence of he Emperor’s statue began to look a kind of message to Hari” (VBS: 135).

With the missing statue, the novel comes to connote the end of paralysis for Hari and his people as a whole. And this is reinforced by the sweeping winds of change that will start blowing and which will be materialised in the coming of the monsoon (181-186, 193-197, 215). This is precisely when Hari’s life starts flowing, since he starts working at the Sri Krishna Eating House and is apprenticed to a watch mender, Mr. Panwallah. Yet since nature in the novel is fused into character and theme, the pattern of the ceaseless monsoon winds and rain will also be used in order to convey the incessant thoughts and the tumult in the mind of Hari, once again trapped in a dichotomy: “Now his head filled with the thoughts of that first night in Bombay […] should he keep the watch-mending he was learning from Mr. Panwallah and with saving the money to take home? Or should he take part in that fairy tale of world of cars, servants, holidays, money and freedom?” (VBS: 194). Yet against Hari’s duality, there emerges a supplement, a further “third space” that grows in the interstices between cultures. And as the monsoon comes to an end, so will Hari’s confusion and doubts: “So Hari the fisherman, Hari the farmer will have to become Hari the poultry farmer or Hari the watch-mender” (VBS: 209). Hari seems to be already assimilating the lesson that Mr Panwallah will soon teach him: “Learn, learn, learn –so that you can grow and change. Things change all the time, boy, and if you want to survive, you’ll have to change too” (210-211). So Hari’s decision to “come back home when the monsoon is already over, after Coconut Day” (213), or Shravani-Purnima, a ceremony to propitiate god Varuna, responsible for maintaining the universal order (Yule, 2004: 59) will signal that there will be cultural continuity and order despite change. Thus, the “text articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility (Spivak, 1985: 124). And within this new order, and new cycle, the ´subaltern´, in this case Hari, will truly have a voice that will allow him to constitute himself as a subject. “He knew he could make choices and decisions now. He had known he belonged to Thul and that he would go back. It was wonderful to choose what you would do in life, and choose he would ” (VBS: 212).

The question now arises whether or not the author and the novel are trapped between two contending languages and cultures. The answer will depend on how language, symbols, particularly those conveying Indianness, and narrative technique are read. At this point it, is relevant to discuss how the novel works, how as shown so far, “the post-colonial construction of language is not a simple binary contestation but a centrifugal process of coming into being” (Tiffin and Lawson, 1994: 42). As Gayatri Spivak (1999: 271) rightly observes, “a text must traffic in a radical textual practice of differences” for the subaltern to articulate their voice in the historical fabric. Even though the novel is written in Standard English, it is not about people speaking English. We know that Hari speaks “Hindi or “Maharati” (VBS: 147) and that in Bombay he cannot understand those speaking “Tamil” (148). Indeed, the two people who actually do speak English at times, Sayyid Ali and Mr. de Silva, are both marked in the novel as “the Sahib” (176, 140), an English speaking person (Yule, 2004: 315). In fact, the novel appropriates English to provide a literary representation of Indianness that will inscribe cultural difference. This further shows in the lavish use of untranslated Hindu terms, some of them explained in the glossary at the beginning of the book, others, particularly those foregrounding distinctiveness, left unexplained inviting the reader to do extra-textual research. These unglossed words are metonymic of the untranslatability of cultures and of languages as sites of struggle and difference. The Village by The Sea actually retells the story of people who are referred to as bai or bhai (VBS: 22-5) in Thul, Alibagh, and Gurajat (24), or in Goa, Marashtra and Gowalia (145); some of them living in zopadpattis (186) wearing dhotis, saris, turbans (117), while eating their chapatis (24), or treating themselves with jalebis (225) on bullock carts, cycle ricksaws, hand-carts (115). It also portrays a multicultural India that practices Catholicism (54), Parsism and Hinduism (214); worships Rhada, Krishna, Rama, Sita, Nala, Damayanti (38), Ganesha (215), Lakshmi (249); celebrates Coconut Day, or Shravani-Purnima, (214) Diwali (237, 246-49) and performs pujas (1-3, 260).

Besides language and local imagery, Indian texture and style also convey theme and articulate Indianness. There are two layers of meaning in the novel, that of the surface structure, or plotline written in English, and that of the deep structure with its many linguistic allusions and Indian references, which operate as the very points of entry into cultural meaning. Yet the novel’s narrative technique works on an “interstitial place”, and this is precisely what re-signifies and re-semanticises the text, shifting the emphasis from the external to the internal world, or what lies beneath. As Anita Desai puts it, “reality is merely the one tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface ocean; and truth, the remaining nine tenths of it that lies below the surface” (Ray,1978: 5). This is conveyed by the fusion of man and nature, the integration of opposites, as already discussed when analysing Hari’s trip, and above all, by the use of circularity, which strikes the keynote of the novel: there will be cultural continuity despite change. This is powerfully connoted by the novel’s

ending with the same cultural practice, the puja, an act of worship for preservation and well-being (Dallapiccola, 2002: 157), with which it starts. The puja is initially practised by Lila— since her ailing mother and drunken father are silent, absent subjects— but it is finally performed by the mother, suggesting that tradition will not ‘fall apart’. Moreover, the mother speaks at this point, since she storytells the origin of ancestral legends and cultural practices and, in doing so, she (re)inscribes them. In her appropriated space of enunciation, the mother speaks of Diwali, (VBS: 248) the festival of the lights (Dallapiccola: 62), in which the worshipping of gods and goddesses, such as Lakshmi, the Goddess of Prosperity, Luck and Wealth (Dallapiccola: 122) and Ganesha, the god of Wisdom and the giver of success in all undertakings (Dallapiccola: 80), and her narratives the (hi)story of her nation. Diwali also coincides, in the novel, with Hari’s homecoming, whose name actually means “fire”, the “sun” and “lightning” (92), connoting the beginning of a new cycle of life for the family and for decolonised India as a whole. Hari’s return has also been anticipated in the non-linear, actually circular, path of his journey which has been signalled by the motifs of the “spiralling kites” and “migrating birds” (VBS: 179, 252-7) and reinforced with the recurrent images of the “watch” and the “wheel turning” (210, 211, 257), which for time, progress and fortune. Besides, the strong presence of Sayyid Ali, the ornithologist, first in Bombay, and then in Thul, studying the behaviour of “migrating birds during the monsoon” (VBS: 178), metaphorically stands for India´s necessity to understand that young generations may need to fly away during the harsh times to be able to survive, only to come back strengthened and renewed.

The Village by the Sea is dense with cultural signifiers which reveal, or unveil, the absence which lies at the point of interface between two cultures. As the author puts it, there is a “fictional level and a non-fictional level underneath her novels” (Ray, 1978:5). Hari, and his outer and inner trip, synecdochally stands for the second generation that has to be displaced to forge a new hybrid identity within a dismembered decolonising country; and his parents represent the first generation that needs to rearticulate subjectivity after years of silence. Both generations change from darkness, stasis, binarity and silence to light, action, in-betweenness and voice. Needless to say, this starts to unfold as from the turning point in the novel: the missing Black Horse or, better put, Indian independence and decolonisation, and comes full circle when the sweeping monsoon , symbolising the destruction of the old system and the birth of a new India, brings in the role reversal of all characters, and paves the way for Diwalis and pujas, or cultural continuity to take place. As Anita Desai (Ray, 1978: 5) herself puts it, “artistry is the use of imagery to carry theme forward, to unite structure, to create the feeling of wholeness, seeing a novel as a pattern or a design”. Anita Desai’s appropriation and hybridisation of English enables her to articulate Indianness by means of conveying “the Indian holistic conception of nature, the universe and the human being, and the Indian belief in transcendence through change, particularly in the circular integration of opposites” (Keay, 2004: 113). Through her narrative technique, Desai positions herself within the borderlands of language and culture, a “third place” in which the ‘subaltern can speak’, a space of enunciation which dialogically articulates cultural difference inscribing hybridity.

References

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