PROSE
Under alien skies
AMITAVA KUMAR'S Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate is an interesting collection of 33 extracts from distinguished writers of Indian origin — both expatriates and those domiciled in India. The book reflects on Indian writers' obsession with the West and their varied responses to it — of homage and hatred, of servility and malice, of sense of inferiority and sense of equality, of longing and belonging.
Professor Ainslee Embree, quoted by R.K. Narayan in his essay "My America", speaks of the American citizen as an erstwhile expatriate from a European or African country and anticipates the Indian expatriate of today also to become one day an American. Ved Mehta also echoes a similar sentiment by an American judge who administered to him and other immigrants the Oath of Allegiance to the United States. The Judge said: "We are a nation of immigrants such as you ladies and gentlemen who are before me as new citizens this morning. The United States has absorbed the strength of all its immigrants and the fusion of many different strains and virtues has contributed to our present strength... "
In his Introduction, Amitava Kumar says that the book is an answer to the oft-repeated question: "How does the writer of Indian origin living abroad, which in most cases means living in the West, negotiate longing and belonging?" A majority of the selected essays in Parts II and III and the Epilogue are by expatriates settled in the lands of promise and plenty. These diasporic writers record the richness and pain of displacement and loss, of movement away from their homeland. "Loss renews life," says Amitava Kumar commenting on Salman Rushdie's Gibreel "farishta" who miraculously survives a plane crash and is transported to London where the Indian migrants have already introduced changes in the English lifestyle.
Bharati Mukherjee's invention of America as a "site of newness and liberation" betokens the impulse to assimilate and the desire to resist. Yet she enjoys her acceptance by the West. Her fear of rejection is replaced by the American openness to "cultural and psychological mongrelisation". The Epilogue by Pankaj Mishra sums it all up. The idea of "home" as a delusion takes root as these diasporic writers are no longer sure what or where home is. Even the kiraana dukaans (grocery stores) in the Himachali village of Mashobra are stocked with Tropicana orange juice and Maggi soup. For Mishra, there are no pangs of betrayal of his erstwhile home in Mashobra as he moves far away into larger worlds. Meera Syal's "Indoor Language" presents the contrast between the first generation of migrants and the newer breed of British-born Indians who could absorb the English slang and ways of life with an ease that shocks their elders. The sense of belonging to the West unencumbered by one's native roots forms the core of these essays.
Indians have always had a longing for the West. Many of them have been inspired to undertake imaginary journeys to the West through their accumulated knowledge of English and English writers and personalities. Nirad C. Chaudhuri says that these ideas and associations "constituted the original capital of our intellectual and spiritual traffic with the West." Amitav Ghosh's young narrator has traversed the entire London in his imagination and stored the maps of London in his mental hard disc. While there is excitement in the writings of Nirad Chaudhuri and Amitav Ghosh about England, Salman Rushdie's story presents the pain and anxiety of a young Muslim woman seeking migration to England. The one odd inclusion in this Prologue section is Nizzim Ezekiel's poem as it expresses only a nostalgia for the past in the absence of conjuring an imaginary journey to a foreign land.
Part I is a record of early travels undertaken by a variety of Indians to the West. The shampooing surgeon Dean Mahomed's Advertisements in Brighton has neither the literary merit nor the value of a travelogue to find a place for itself in this section. Sunity Devee's account of her first visit to England is one of homage, humility and admiration for Queen Victoria. While she is overawed by Her Majesty, Tagore's "London" constructs a new identity for the Indians in England — the ingabanga — the England worshipping Bengali. Gandhi's obsession with dress and dancing, English etiquette and elocution on his arrival in England is a true account of the complex of the brown man. Mulk Raj Anand's admiration for the literary skills of English writers like T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence get dented as he discovers their lurking prejudices about the East.
Away raises many questions — interesting, but unanswered: "Is there a place like home?" "Are the expatriates of the ABCD kind or have they eschewed their ethnicity and acquired new identities?" "Has mongrelisation contributed to the culture, language and writings of the West?" "Has there been a new look into Western life and thought?"
If Edward Said's Orientalism dismantled the myth of the Orient as constructed by the Western imagination with the perception of an outsider, Away looks at Western civilization with the perception of an insider who has acquired a new identity. The book makes good reading and serves as a bridge between going away and coming home where "home" or identity is, in the words of an Editor of an English daily, "more a state of mind than a fact of biology or geography."
Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, edited by Amitava Kumar, Penguin India, p.424, Rs.395.
HEMA RAGHAVAN
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