Orbis Litterarum 60: 145158, 2005

Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved

Dissolving Indianness: How Europeans Read

Indian Fiction
Ian Almond, Bosphorus University, Istanbul

This article intends to examine how useful or hindering a concept

of Indianness is in interpreting and teaching postcolonial Indian
ction. Set against the background of debates within contempor-
ary Indian poetics (Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, etc),
the article suggests that in order to avoid the dangers of Western
readers simply reading Indian texts as Indian versions of Western
classics, certain pre-emptive protectionist measures should be
pedagogically adopted to obtain a truer, or at least more
authentically complex account of the postcolonial text.

I once saw him standing on the ghats gesturing towards the sandy expanses
across the river. That he was saying to his companion, a slightly terried young
student, is sunyata, the void. And this, he pointed to the teeming conglom-
eration of temples and houses behind us, is Maya, illusion. Do you know what
our task is? Our task is to live somewhere in between.
Pankaj Mishra, Edmund Wilson in Benares (Chaudhuri, 2001:362363)

In the middle of Vikram Seths fourteen hundred-page epic A Suitable Boy,

we encounter the description of a bus ride taken by the protagonist and his
Urdu teacher, Rasheed:
The road, made of vertically laid bricks and little else, was cratered with holes,
and the wheels had lost all memory of their shock absorbers His knees kept
knocking the man in front of him because the back boards of the seat were
missing.
None of the regular passengers, however, thought that there was any cause
for complaint. This was far better and more convenient than a journey of two
hours in a bullock cart. (1995, p.645)

The description, like most of Seths prose, is measured, brief and

accomplished. The smells, sounds and feel of a standard Indian bus ride,
be it in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or West Bengal, are accurately conveyed.
146 Ian Almond

What is also clear, however, is that the description of such a bus ride
would be completely superuous to an Indian reader. The common
disintegration of the Indian brick road, the calm acceptance of the
passengers on the bus, require as little explanation as an umbrella or a
roundabout would in an English novel. Its presence, like many similar
moments in Seths work, conrm a fairly obvious point: that A Suitable
Boy is a novel written very much with a foreign audience in mind an
audience, at least, foreign enough as to be unfamiliar with what an Indian
bus ride actually entails.
In a sense, the title of this essay is misleading. However tempting it
might be to plunge into some passionate lament for the dissolution of the
Indian novel in English, the fact is that explicatory footnotes of this kind
are by no means new. One has only to refer to Mulk Raj Anands
Untouchable (1935), one of the so-called pillars of Indo-Anglian literature,
to nd helpful asides for the Western reader on the eating habits of
Hindus. The number of allegations levelled at R. K. Narayan for
culturally diluting the Indianness of his stories universalizing the classic
Malgudi into an easily-accessible mixture of Everyman and Our Town
are legion. It would be unwise to see the history of the twentieth-century
Indian novel in English as the single, unproblematic descent from a
primordial purity, the authentic expression of a national identity, to a
modern series of Westernized texts, written by Non Resident Indians for
non-Indian readers (or, as Anthony Appiah denes the postcolonial: a
relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers who
mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the
periphery (1991:348).
All of which does not mean to say that no change is taking place and
that novels such as Ghoshs The Shadow Lines, with its specic allusions to
Proust, Rohinton Mistrys A Fine Balance, with its dedication to Balzac
and its Yeatsian title, not to mention the Austenesque goings-on of A
Suitable Boy,1 are not becoming easier to read for a non-Indian audience.
In reading English translations of the nineteenth-century Bengali stories of
Rabindranath Tagore, one is startled at the way the marriages of nine-
year-old girls to men old enough to be their fathers are announced without
the slightest urry of surprise or comment. Tagore, writing for the Bengali
bhadralok of the 1890s, clearly felt any explanation was unnecessary.
Dissolving Indianness 147

This state of aairs inspires two sets of distinctly separate yet related
questions for the teaching (and publishing) academic: rst, is there still an
Indianness to Indian ction, some essential, irreducible quality which
brings disparate writers such as Ghosh, Mistry and Seth together? Or is it a
Wittgensteinian trick of language, something which only exists because we
have invented a word for it? Given the increasingly international status of
Indian ction, is there still a centre and a periphery and is one still writing
for the other? Do Indian writers in English, resident and non-resident, still
have outside inuences? Where would this outside be? The second set of
questions, in many ways, would be the same, but pedagogically applied: is
the word Indian, the question of Indianness useful in teaching
postcolonial ction? Does its classroom presence engender novel thought
trains and fresh perspectives, or does it transform the study of literature
into a series of sociology/anthropology seminars? If not an examination of
national identity, exactly what is the point of teaching postcolonial ction?
Why read these texts, why persuade others to read them?
Certainly, the example of the annotated bus ride in A Suitable Boy
suggests one thing, that a host of socio-anthropological assumptions lie
beneath the desire to provide such explanations, and basically invoke the
age-old question of whether there is a common human nature or not.
Narayan famously insisted his ctional town of Malgudi could be situated
anywhere, even in New York. In the preface to one book of stories, he even
describes several possible Malgudi candidates, including the owner of a
delicatessen on 23rd street and a drunk who slept on the steps of a local
synagogue (1996:viii). Other writers, such as Raja Rao or Upamanyu
Chatterjee, are perhaps not so keen to re-inscribe the characters of their
novels into a common humanity.
In a simpler world, one might almost say that there are two types of
Western-friendly Indian texts: explicatory and revelatory. They each
concern explanations or asides to help the non-Indian reader understand
what is going on, but otherwise lead o in very dierent directions.
Revelatory moments in Indian texts seek to throw light on the actions or
utterances of a character, or on the contours of a certain situation by
revealing the latent familiarity, the hidden humanity of the thing described.
At the beginning of Seths bus ride, for example, a parting mother and
daughter keep the bus waiting for twenty minutes. To drive o without
them we are told, would have been unthinkable. The other passengers,
148 Ian Almond

thoughthey were now getting impatient, would never have allowed it

(p.644). This is what the revelatory type of Western-friendly text does it
reconnects the unfamiliar phenomena (a bus waiting half an hour for a
mother to say goodbye) to a Western, recognizable sentiment the
communitys moral sense of obligation to the individual concerned.
Revelatory explanations, springing as they do from a fundamental
humanism, banish otherness by making us see how Indians are really
people like ourselves, with basically the same fears, the same loyalties, the
same virtues and vices. They supply humanistic, recognizable motives for
the occurrence of even apparently alien gestures in order to explain away
their strangeness.
What one might term explicatory texts, on the other hand, also aim to
inform the unfamiliar reader about the practice or character concerned,
but with the object of arming their dierence; explicatory asides do not
attempt to connect the subject caste violence or a belief in astrology to
some recognizably Western sentiment or phenomena, thereby re-inserting
Indian culture into a global family of human values (and thereby implicitly
representing Indian ction as another branch of that infamously capital-
ized phrase World Literature). On the contrary, their explanation of the
events for the non-Indian reader removes the mystication but leaves the
Otherness intact. In Mistrys A Fine Balance, three villagers who refuse to
hand over their blank ballot papers to the upper caste head of the village
die violent painful deaths hung upside down from a tree, whipped and
urinated upon, red hot coals are pushed against their genitals and then
stued into their mouths. The violence is horrifying, and delivered in terse,
Spartan prose, without comment. When they are dead, the upper caste
thakur says of them:
the father is more to blame than the son. His arrogance went against
everything we hold sacred. What the ages had put together, Dukhi had dared to
break asunder; he had turned cobblers into tailors, distorting societys timeless
balance. Crossing the line of caste had to be punished with the utmost severity,
said the Thakur. (Mistry: 180)

What the non-Indian reader is given, in eect, is the basic minimum of

information to explain the Thakurs cruelty. There is no switch of
perspective, no change of viewpoint; the anthropological tone of the
technique decreases the mystery but leaves the alien feel intact. One only
Dissolving Indianness 149

has to compare the representation of the caste-system in Mistry to that in

A Suitable Boy, to see how dierently two authors have tried to convey a
fundamentally Indian practice to the non-Indian reader. Far from being
bewilderingly cruel, unjust and horrifying, the caste-system in Seths book
is hardly ever directly commented on; the one element in the practice that
Western readers might relate to that of class, and the snobbishness
accompanying awareness of it is foregrounded in Seths novel so as to
give the whole book (for the European reader) a distinctly nineteenth-
century feel. Reading the struggles of Lata against the maternal wishes of
Mrs Mehra, one can see how Seth has made a tale of arranged marriage in
Uttar Pradesh accessible to a Western audience by selecting precisely those
elements that would remind readers of similar scenes from Austen,
Thackeray and Trollope. If, in an explicatory text such as A Fine Balance,
the caste-system is introduced to the unfamiliar reader as a cruel, alien
dogma, a revelatory text such as A Suitable Boy shows how the caste
system actually expresses sentiments and protests universal to the
human spirit. If the representation of caste in one book cuts o India from
the rest of the world, in the other it reconnects it with more universal
elements in marriage traditions from all around the globe the frustrations
of ospring, the ardent wishes of parents, the preoccupation with material
advancement, etc.
Of course, there is no exclusively revelatory or explicatory work. Indian
texts in English, in their attempt to present the nuances of an unfamiliar
culture to Western readers, will employ both stratagems depending on
their particular aims. If the violence and atrocities of A Fine Balance often
feel alien and unreal, the struggles of Mistrys protagonists against such
injustices takes on a much more comfortably humanistic feel.2 A text such
as A Suitable Boy or Raja Raos The Serpent and The Rope will make use
of both explicatory and revelatory modes, depending on the unfamiliarity
being described. In Raos case, hardly a reference to India or Hinduism
goes by without some attempt to connect it to an aspect of European
history the Holy Grail is originally a Buddhist relic (1995:67),3 the
Kings of Baux, we are told, are descended from an Indian mage (p.127),
whereas Buddhism is linked specically to a wide variety of European
belief-systems including Neoplatonism, the Druids and various Christian
heresies (Nestorian, Albigensian, Cathar) (p.302). The Rhone ows like
the Ganges (p.389), Paris is a kind of Benares turned outwards (p.52),
150 Ian Almond

and both Valery and Baudelaire are seen as being more Indian than
French. The Indo-Aryan project of Raos book for that is what The
Serpent and The Rope essentially is seeks to melt the Otherness of India
for the Western reader by constructing a common spiritual tradition for
East and West. There is a commonly-used expression from the Sanskrit
vasudhaiva kutumbakum, all the world is one family. Paris and Benares,
the Ganges and the Rhone, even Brahmins and the English upper classes,
all become distant cousins in The Serpent and the Rope. Only when India
becomes coloured with something other than Hinduism Islam, for
example does Rao suddenly switch registers, describing Bombay as a
barbaric city (p.44), sitting in unholy territory[except for] the Hindu
area, where you almost felt you were back in Benares (ibid). The
presentation of ones parent culture to the reader, it would seem, seldom
escapes the unconscious drift of ideology.
There is another, more fundamental reason why such terms as
revelatory and explicatory, however pat and convenient they may be
in their description of Indian ctions user-friendliness for the non-Indian
reader, quickly reveal their limitations on closer inspection. The limited-
ness stems from their reliance on a crisp, clear division between the Indian
and the non-Indian, a distinction between native culture and outside
codes, a dierence that is not only dissolving but was never very clear. Of
all the various texts which have made this point, Arvind Krishna
Mehrotras The Emperor Has No Clothes (1982) stands out as the most
insistent and persuasive in its conviction that the frame of reference for a
literary text should not be coterminous with the countrys political
boundary (Chaudhuri, p.460). For anyone unfamiliar with contemporary
Indian poetry, the essay is a dicult one to begin. It is essentially a reply to
one of Mehrotras peers, R. Parthasarathy, on the work of another
(English language) South Indian poet, A. K. Ramanujan, and the reader is
immersed in a familiar family quarrel: What is Indian poetry? What does it
mean for an Indian to write poetry in English? For Parthasarathy, the
object of Mehrotras ire, the answer is clear:
[Ramanujans poetry] is the heir of an anterior tradition, a tradition very much
of this subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and Tamil, and which
have been assimilated into English. Ramanujans deepest roots are in the
Kannada and Tamil past, and he has repossessed that past, in fact made it
available, in the English language. (Chaudhuri, p.461)
Dissolving Indianness 151

The Indian poet, writing in English, is the expression, the recovery, of an

anterior tradition. Parthasarathy sees Indian poetry in English, in many
ways, as the reformulation, in a more recent, alien tongue, of a more
distant, primordial Indian (or at least Kannadan/Tamil) essence. The rest
of Mehrotras essay forms a multifaceted response to this, a ridiculing of
the simplistic geological analogy which Parthasarathy uses to describe the
deposits of Indias traditions. Mehrota mocks the way his colleague sees
Tamil/Kannada in the lower strata, and English in the upper; for example,
each time the Indian poet writes in English he descends into Tamil/
Kannada with a Davy Lamp (Chaudhuri, p.461). Mehrotras opposition
to his peers national frame of reference for understanding a South Indian
poet is not ideological, nor historico-anthropological, nor even decon-
structive, but linguistic: the innitely elusive phenomena of multilingual-
ism, says Mehrotra, are simply too enigmatic to allow talking about
anterior traditions in a bilingual poet. The idea that an Indian poet
writing in English (or, for that matter, a Czech or Irishman writing in
French) uses his second, supercial language to express the deeper, more
ancient deposits of the rst is simply the wrong way of understanding how
writers who command more than one language write. Lovers of Ada and
Pale Fire will be interested to learn it is Nabokov whom Mehrotra cites as
the destructive argument against Parthasarathys geological analogy. The
Anglo-American interlingua of Nabokovese (p.466), the bewildering
play of Russian and English syntax beneath Nabokovs prose, announces
the impossibility of any national compartmentalization of language and
provides Mehrotra with the central metaphor for what an Indian poem
should really be: not the expression of a national essence or anterior
tradition, but rather a space, a construct, housing two or more ways of
seeing (p.467). If this all sounds rather Heideggerian like the Lichtung or
clearing in which beings freely manifest themselves it should come as no
surprise to nd a fairly substantial quote from Introduction to Metaphysics
inserted into the text (albeit somewhat incongruously next to a quotation
from I. A. Richards). Inevitably, this kind of opening is the alternative
Mehrotra oers to the expression-of-a-deeper-essence hermeneutic: no
customs-like probing to check for hidden Indianness, then, but rather an
ideology-free expanse where the literary work can unveil itself upon the
reader, unforced and unbridled by constraints of nation or region. He cites
Octavio Paz approvingly: the space created by critical action, the place
152 Ian Almond

where works meet and confront each other, is a no-mans land in our
countries (p.460). This no-mans land is precisely where Mehrotra would
like to read (and write) the Indian poem.
Does this no-mans land exist? There is no place on the literary planet
that does not belong to somebody. Where would we be able to teach an
Indian poem (indeed, any poem) on such free and open terms? The
question brings to light the pedagogical implications of Mehrotras ideal of
criticism as an open space, and asks us to consider more practically what
the classroom dangers are in teaching Indian ction. One could tentatively
suggest two risks present in any course on Indian literature. The rst would
be that attempting to have the students respond to the texts as openly and
spontaneously as possible (omitting any pre-teaching or prejudicing
background intros), might result in students simply reading the texts
Indian versions of similar themes in their own literatures Mistry as a
kind of Dickens, Ghosh as a Bengali Proust, Seth as a transplanted
Austen, All About Hatter as an Indian Ulysses, etc. In the opening pages of
William Walshs Commonwealth Literature, the prose of Ram Mohan Roy
is introduced to us as vigorous [and] Victorian (1973:1), Madhusudan
Dutt as a lesser, romantic Byron, Sri Aurobindo as a writer of
Tennysonian lyrics and Vivekananda (somewhat baingly) as Francis-
can yet reminiscent of Carlyle and Ruskin at their most vatic (p.4).
Although Walshs intentions are noble he is trying, after all, to have the
English reader relate to a previously shunned tradition of letters the
outcome is what every authentic teacher of postcolonial ction dreads: an
understanding of Indian literature based on exclusively Anglocentric
terms, an annihilation of the quiddity, or at least the otherness, of Indian
literature, so that each member of its newly-arranged canon becomes
nothing more than a provincial, second-rate response to the centre. The
consequence is almost a kind of Bhabhaesque mimicry, a dierence that is
almost the same, but not quite, a collection of Ersatz English texts
(Bhabha, 1993:86).
In taking extreme measures to try and avoid this, the teacher runs into
the second danger: an overemphasis on the Indianness of the texts, a
concentration on and constant pedagogical reminder of the attributes that
make these texts dierent from the Tennysons, Austens and Joyces they
may remind us of at the best this can mean running after a ghost, at the
worst a course of action ultimately turning any examination of Ghosh,
Dissolving Indianness 153

Desai, Rushdie and Narayan into a series of sociological/anthropological

seminars. All too often, the misuse of theory and cultural studies
terminology (as opposed to genuinely original and thought-provoking
theoretical approaches) aids and abets this process, turning the creativity
of postcolonial writers, their stories, novels and poems, into endless
examples of Third-World post-imperialist discourse-formation. This is not
to deny that the investigation of what Bhabha calls the processes of
subjectication made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical
discourses is not a worthy one (p.67), but simply that such an approach
does not deserve to be foregrounded as the exclusive concern of a work of
literature. Or more bluntly, as a student on one of my courses once told
me: If I hear the word national allegory or identity in this class one
more time, Ill scream!
Can one oscillate between these two extremes? Indeed, is a via media
possible between a transparent, easily appropriated sub-canon of World
Literature and an articially opaque, inimitably Indian tradition of letters,
an approach that would see novels and poems as essentially anthropolo-
gical documents, written rst and foremost to express a culture rather than
participate in any transnational examination of ideas? It is dicult to see
what kind of Heideggerian space we can make for the foreign reader of
Indian ction to genuinely respond in All About Hatter will always have
Joycean echoes for readers familiar with Ulysses, just as my own (Turkish)
students cannot read the stories of Narayan without thinking of Aziz
Nesin (and just as I, personally, cannot read the stories of Tagore without
thinking of their gloomier counterparts in those of Chekhov). How can we,
as students and teachers, take o our Kantian spectacles and grasp what is
truly dierent in Indian ction, past and present, without committing
ourselves to some ridiculous, essentialist quest for Indianness? How can
we, as students and teachers, open ourselves up to the postcolonial text on
its own terms, without fearing that some elements in our genuine,
unprepared responses may well be unconsciously stereotypical and
appropriative?
If there is an answer to these dilemmas, it certainly does not lie in
abandoning the space Mehrotra proposes, the Lichtung which would allow
multiple ways of seeing, but rather in proposing some minor protectionist
modications. The economic connotations of the term protectionist are
intentional just as there is no genuinely free market unless certain
154 Ian Almond

multinationals are controlled, certain monopolies discouraged, certain

rules of fair play respected, there can equally be no free space in the
classroom unless certain presuppositions and prejudices are rst dealt with.
Depending on the culture, students come to classes on Indian ction with
any number of strange ideas that all Indians are Hindu, that Indian
literature is all about poverty and people who live in bamboo villages, that
the British, having built a railway and a few schools, werent so bad as all
that (or, in Turkey, that the British were completely evil and that their
culture was hated and rejected by every Indian in the land), that Gandhi
was unquestionably adored by all, and so on. To change the metaphor:
before one can play the symphony of the text to the class, the teacher has
to be sure of the cultural acoustics of the classroom, so that the students
may hear the clearest possible rendition of the performance. This means,
unfortunately, having to know the culture of ones students inordinately
well; it means my having to know that when I say separatist, my Turkish
students wont be thinking of Kashmir or Assam but Kurdistan; that when
I talk about extreme nationalists, the letters appearing in my students
heads wont be BJP but MHP; that when I speak of independence struggles
against the British, the military campaigns of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, not
those of Subash Chandra Bose, will be uppermost in my students minds.
Not that such interference is bad on the contrary, it can stimulate
tremendous interest and reader empathy but it can distort, leading to
moments of complete baement when students encounter a Hindu
nationalist who writes in Urdu or a Bengali poet who declares his love
for the language of the Anglo-Saxon.
Even if we succeed in creating an undistorted space in which we may
teach our Indian or postcolonial text, the problem still remains or how
much context we should pre-teach without turning the novel or story to be
studied into a social document. Teaching literature concerning the woes of
Partition, in particular, raises this problem of methodology. Bapshi
Sidhwas Ice-Candy Man, S.H.Mantos Toba Tek Singh and Narayans
Another Community are all exemplary literary texts in their own right;
their merit is not simply documentary in the most banal, mimetic sense of
the word. An overemphasis on context on the specic historical
circumstances of the texts would relegate a sensitive meditation on
sexuality, adolescence and childhood friendship such as Ice Candy Man to
the status of eye-witness account. No-one would ever dream of reading
Dissolving Indianness 155

Tolstoys work solely as a comment on late nineteenth-century Russian

aristocratic philanthropy, or the stories of Cesare Pavese as primarily
reections of Italys post-war social and economic conditions and yet this
is the risk we run when we get carried away by the Indianness of the
Indian literature we teach.
Lets take the example of Anita Desais admirable novel, In Custody.
How are we to teach this story of a Hindu scholar who devotes his energies
and admiration to Nur, an undeserving, untrustworthy Muslim poet? On
the one hand, Desais novel is a text enmeshed in Indian history: the
gradual demise of the Urdu language in India, the sectarian attitudes of
religionists towards their cultures (the irony of Desais book, surely, being
that the only person who appreciates Nurs poetry because it is poetry
and not because it is Urdu is a Hindu). On the other hand, In Custody
also grasps bigger themes: the futility of language, the destructive solipsism
of poetry (the protagonist is brought to near ruin through his admiration
of Nurs poetic gift), the status of women artists on the literary scene of
Indian poetry, the failure of the Romantic and its peripherality in the real
world. Mehrotras open space has to be big enough to accommodate both
of these readings (and the many more as yet unmentioned) without
privileging one over the other. And the only way to do this, in the teaching
of Indian ction, is to foreground and push into student discussion from
the very beginning the act itself of selecting a framework to teach these
texts in. The teaching of Indian ction must include, in se and per se, the
problematizing of that activity; the students must never be allowed to
forget that there are multiple readings of the work they are studying,
endless pairs of dierent-coloured spectacles that they could be using to
read the text.
Wont such strategies simply bring confusion? Instead of settling down
with one approach to the novel, wont the students heads be bombarded
with a dizzying array of readings and counter readingsin Desais case, In
Custody as (simultaneously) a comment on the invisibility of women poets,
the tragedy of a man whose yearning for the sublime becomes his tragic
aw, a narration of Hindis deletion of Urdu, a study in the failure of
Indian Romanticism? The only response to this question can be that there
are desirable and undesirable modes of confusion on the one hand, there
is the perplexity that paralyzes, the bewilderment that ultimately
de-motivates and defeats the student, who feels him/herself to be textually
156 Ian Almond

adrift in a sea of contradictory readings, unable to relate or build a

meaningful rapport to any of them. On the other hand, there is a
productive confusion the possibility that, in manoeuvring between the
jostles and thrusts of dierent, even conicting interpretations, a space for
the radically new might emerge. In Derridas longstanding dialogue with
and re-examination of the works of Levinas including his famous
scepticism towards Levinas belief in an ontologically non-violent
approach towards the Other he expresses in his own fashion the idea
that the contiguity of contrasting faces of the Other may lead, through
their repeated manifestation and shattering, to that which lies beyond them
the unspeakable, unthinkable essence of the genuinely tout autre. In At
this very moment here in this work I am, Derrida writes how constant
interruption is the necessary instability that provides the conditions for
glimpsing the otherness of the Other through the broken ruins of ones
own constructions:
By interrupting the weaving of our language and then by weaving together the
interruptions themselves, another language comes to disturb the rst one
Another text, the text of the other, arrives in silence with a more or less regular
cadence, without ever appearing in its original language, to dislodge the
language of translation. (Kamuf, 1991:414)

The tout autre works like an utterly unreachable subtext, forever receding
before all our interpretations, while remaining paradoxically the very
condition of their possibility. Through the creation and destruction of all
our conceptions of the Other, the continual irruption of the truly Other
allows us to glimpse a very secular epekeina tes ousia: At the moment
when it erupts, the inaugural invention ought to overow, overlook,
transgress, negate the status that people would have wanted to assign it
or grant it in advance. (Kamuf, p.217). Through such a subversion of the
familiar, the completely unfamiliar may be perceived without any horizon
of expectation. In this case, the various, uctuating versions of the Indian
text be it a novel of Desais, a story of Tagores or a poem by Ezekiel
would create, by their very proliferating instability, the open space
Mehrotra so desires. A space which will not only allow the reader to
breathe, but which may also permit something radically new to emerge
from the text a new interpretation drawing on, preceded by all the
previous ones, and yet belonging to none of them.
Dissolving Indianness 157

At the beginning of this essay, the guide in Mishras story oers the
student a choice between the terrifying emptiness of sunyata and the
mendacious illusion of maya. Like the reader or writer, the teacher of
postcolonial ction also faces this dilemma when to amplify the
Indianness (the Bengaliness, the Tamilness) of a text at the expense of
reader accessibility, and when to tone down the cultural context and bring
the class attention onto more comprehensible themes. When to teach a
novel such as A Fine Balance as Indias version of Les Miserables (Ross,
1999:243), and when to emphasize the elements which make it dierent,
radically dierent, from the classic European novels of social injustice.
What I have tried to insist upon is that such choices do not have to be
exclusive of one another; that the teaching of postcolonial ction oers in
itself, perhaps more than any other discipline, an opportunity to examine
the age-old question of how we (should) read literary texts. The wandering
itinerary between maya and sunyata, far from being a soulless searching,
could well prove to be a fruitful, if at times uncertain, journey.

NOTES

1. In her essay The Anxiety of Indianness, the critic Meenakshi Mukherjee suggests
a non-Western model for Vikram Seths A Suitable Boy, a novel which many have
seen as an Indian Pride and Prejudice re-located in 1950s Calcutta, but which on the
contrary reminded Mukherjee of a Bengalitradition of long three-decker real-
istic stories about families (cit. in Bharucha and Nabar, 91). Mukherjee is
thinking of the Bengali writers Buddhadeb Bose, Ashapurna Debi and Bimal
Mitra.
2. Robert L. Ross calls A Fine Balance a metaphor that stands for human experience
and agrees with the description of its protagonists struggles as Indias version of
Les Miserables (1999, p.243).
3. For more on the latent Indo-centrism of Raos novel, see my own article Lessons
from Kipling and Rao: How To Re-Appropriate Another Culture, which appeared
in Orbis Litterarum 57:4 (2002).

REFERENCES

Almond I. 2002, Lessons from Kipling and Rao, Orbis Litterarum, 57:4.
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Inquiry, 17:345356.
Bhabha, HK. 1993, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London.
Bharucha N, Nabar V (eds) 1998, Mapping Colonial Spaces. Vision Books, Delhi.
Chauduri, Amit. 2001, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Picador,
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158 Ian Almond

Kamuf, Peggy. 1991, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Harvester Wheatsheaf,
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Mistry, Rohinton. 2000, A Fine Balance, Faber and Faber, London.
Narayan, RK. 1996, Malgudi Days, Indian Thought Publications, Madras.
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Seth, Vikram. 1995, A Suitable Boy, Penguin, Delhi.
Walsh, William. 1973, Commonwealth Literature, Oxford University Press, London.

Ian Almond teaches English Literature at Bosphorus University, Istanbul, Turkey. He

is the author of Susm and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn
Arabi (2004) and The Crescent and The Text: Postmodern Representations of Islam
From Borges to Baudrillard (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming).