A shaping of connections

At a time when English Literature's place in the canon was unquestioned, it was indeed a battle to get the academy to accept other literatures as disciplines worthy of study. JUNE GAUR talks to Anna Rutherford, one of the pioneers who led the effort to locate Commonwealth literature in the academy and give it respectability.

Anna Rutherford, doyen of Commonwealth Literature and Post- Colonial Studies, was in Mysore recently to attend the Second International Conference of The Asian Australasian Association for the Study of Australasia (AAASA) on India-Australasia Connections. Ms. Rutherford, Founder-Editor of Kunapipi and Director of Dangaroo Publications, Australia, is a prolific writer, critic, editor and art-lover. Her books include, A Shaping of Connections, (1988), Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire and From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial (1992).

June Gaur: How did you become interested in the subject of Commonwealth Literature?

Anna Rutherford:

THAT actually goes back a long way. I grew up in Newcastle which is by the Pacific Ocean. in Newcastle they have small swimming- pools and beaches and one swimming-pool had a big map of the world raised onto this charmed circle, a small thing you could swim around and not down, and you could swim from one part of the world to another. And when I was learning to swim my father took me there and he said, "Now swim to Africa." So I paddled, as a four-year old, to Africa. And then he said, "Now swim to India," and I promptly reached what was then called Bombay. And then he said "Now swim to Ceylon," which is now Srilanka, and finally Australia, which was home. When he asked, "So you think you can go to England?", I said "No, it's too far". I had to wait one more year, when I was a better swimmer at five than I was at four, to get to England. So I grew up knowing there was a world around me in the swimming-pool.

And another thing, at that time, was Kellogs Cornflakes, which, I'm sure, is international - if you bought enough packets, you could get a book and in the book there was a map of the world and each country had a page and each time you bought a packet of Kellogs Cornflakes, you would get a small sticker to put in where India was, where Africa was, where Australia was. And I had that book, too.

So those were my beginnings and interest in what was there in this other side of the world. And, of course, I grew up under the empire and I was told that - well actually, I wasn't told that because I went to a Catholic school and the most important thing was not Empire Day but Saint Patrick's Day. But we were part of the Empire and I did not think we really were part of the Empire. I was always curious. There were pictures in the book and they seemed to be mythical pictures to us because we did not have those things, you know, they did not exist. The world, they supposed, was their little world and Europe, and we could place all their world in Europe, and I decided was not my world.

So that was the beginning - the small swimming pool and Kellogs Cornflakes - that made interested and made me decide I wanted to see the world. And when we got to Europe, it was finally because we would see something and we would say, "It is just like in the history book." We had not seen it - it was like the Africans when we talked of apples and they said, "Madam," and I said, "Yes?" And they said, "Madam, what is an apple?" and I said "It's a fruit. If you do not see it, it is a mythical object."

So that was the beginning. I've always been curious and I wanted to see what the world was like, not what the history book told me it was like, and the history of books were written by the British, as we know.

Tell us something about your struggle to establish Commonwealth Literature as the third major area of writing in English.

We were told about the Commonwealth and everything else like that and I was lucky because, at the University I went to in Denmark, there was a remarkable woman. She was a Dane - a gold-medallist at Copenhagen, a gold-medallist at Cambridge and she became the head of the first women's college in Australia at Melbourne University. She was a woman of vision and she finally went back to Denmark and she introduced Australian Literature, Canadian Literature and Indian Literature. She died the year after I went to Denmark and so I took over. This happened in 1968, which was the time of the Student Revolution in Europe and the students wanted to throw out the old (and perhaps it is not a bad idea, it happens everywhere where people stay in jobs and it is not fair to the students). So the students were on my side and we introduced African and West Indian and whatever else we could think of that was part-ruled by the Empire over which the sun never set. Well it has set now.

And in 1971 I thought, you know, you had an equal place for English Literature, and equal place for American Literature, but Commonwealth Literature was a poor relation. And I thought why should it be a poor relation? It is bigger than the rest of them anyhow and it has its own history, its own culture. And so there I did have to fight a big battle. I had the students on my side but I had to get the external examiners on my side too - teachers who thought that enough was enough, Australian and Canadian and Indian was enough. And I said "No, it's not enough." I wanted equal-equal Commonwealth, equal-American, equal-British. It was a battle that lasted six months, with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. But eventually I won the battle and so, even to this day, English Literature is compulsory and Commonwealth is compulsory (and it is very popular), and that is unusual when you consider it is a foreign country.

But it was a very hard battle. And they said, Oh, what do these countries have to offer and I said, They (the British) have been going around saying these countries have no culture at all. It surprises me why, if these countries had no culture, they stole all their cultural objects and put them in the British Museum. Why would they steal them if they did not have cultural value? And so I said, Oh, really? I think the British Museum is the biggest monument to robbery the world has ever known.

I was teaching in Denmark, which is very homogenous. Scandinavians are a very homogeneous group of people - they all speak the same language and they are all very tall and blue-eyed. They are kind and they have given me a good life, but if you had anything to say about them, I would say they were smug - they thought they had the best culture. So then, I had to teach my students that there were many cultures and theirs was not necessarily the best. There was good and bad in all of them. And so I used to send my students out - some went to Australia, some to Nigeria, some to Zimbabwe. And I said, "Now you will find out what it means to be a minority and a very visible minority, and that it has another culture. All is not good, but all is not bad either, same as in Denmark."

They came back and they contributed too and the classes were always successful. They were excited and it did open up another concept, another world, and they were richer people because of it. I have to say it is a different setup from here. The teachers choose which subject they are going to teach semester to semester. And the students decide which one they would like to go to. There is not the same hierarchy, to be perfectly honest, hardly any hierarchy between the teachers and the students - they are all on a first-name basis.

In your preface to A Shaping of Connections you have described the establishment of Commonwealth Literature as "a great imaginative leap." Yet you say you have always had problems with the word "Commonwealth," and in 1992 you came out with From Commonwealth to post-colonial. Could you please explain?

In 1974 the Association (ACLALS) was formed and it was called Commonwealth Literature. The notion of Commonwealth, I suppose still exists. In reality it does not exist (in my opinion, of course) and I have always had that problem with Commonwealth because, if you look at countries around the world - and you have got rich ones of the old Empire, you have got poor ones, poor materially, and I will stress the fact materially, and so I did not really think it was a Common Wealth. It did not sit comfortably with what I felt. When I did the book, From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, the term Post-colonial had come into existence, and it was the first stage in Post-Modernism. Post -Colonial just is how we can deconstruct - you know, we can deconstruct and leave it there; but you can reconstruct and that is what we are trying do.

You know one of things Prof. A. N. Jeffares said at the first Conference, and it has always struck me, (he was a man of vision and he was responsible for introducing these literatures and founding the Association), but he said "You know, there are many great things in Commonwealth Literature but the writers in the Commonwealth must remember that they must be understood in London and New York." And my reply to that was that the writers in London or New York, do they have to be sure they have to be understood in Waggawagga in Australia or Anugu in Nigeria. So there was a demand for one side to understood it all even though they did not and the other side not to. And now that is all changing. Like Ngugi, he now writes in his own language first for his own people and then, as he is a strong writer, they translate it into English, otherwise we all cannot read it. It is true you write for your own people first and I would read an Australian novel in the way you would never read it; you would read an Indian novel in a way I would never read it. It does not mean it is not a valid reading, it just means we have different readings. I discovered that in Nigeria when I was teaching in class and it was a short story and it was obviously a rich setting. The women were sitting round by the fire, knitting or chatting or doing something, and the men were out hunting. And at the conclusion of the story, I asked the students whether they were rich or poor, and they said they are poor and I asked Why? and they said, because the men have to go out and hunt for food. It is a different concept, you know.

Do you agree with the view that it is no longer important to study the humanities?

Today most people seem to be interested in making money and very little else and the Humanities remain the poor relations among all the others. I was interested when the Vice-Chancellor of Mysore University said that the British were relaxing the rules to bring in more Indians if they were computer experts. But of course if you were in Humanities you would have no chance. And it seems to me that this is another form of colonisation. It was Enoch Powell who said "I will bring you doctors and nurses from the West Indies", which he did and then of course we had the famous speech about the rivers of blood. It is like bringing in foreign workers into those lands that need them - that "to those lands who need workers, workers shall be given." It is not really India choosing to go there, it is them saying We will bring you in, we will deal well with you. But once you are of no use, they do not want you. It is like the foreign workers were brought into Europe and Australia after the war when they needed workers to run the machines. They brought them from the South, from Italy and Yugoslavia and all those places and now there is unemployment and they want to send them back. So I would not celebrate the fact that Indians who are computer experts have been given special treatment.

I grew up in a very poor suburb in the town in which I lived. We did not have very much money and now we are a richer community than we were then. But we were a richer community in in terms of humanism when we were poor.

Nobody seems to care now. I went to a big demonstration in Birmingham - 70, 000 of us demonstrated to break the Chain of Debt. They are supposedly giving gifts but the interest is so enormous. It is no use having a mechanical mind without a heart and it seems to me they are taking the heart out of life by leaving the Humanities out. Science is vital, of course. But so are the Humanities. That is my feeling.

You come to India very often. What is it that interests you most here?

People say to me, "What is India like?" And I say, "Well, how can you tell what India is like? It is like saying, "What's Europe like?" multiplied many times over. Because it is a remarkable thing to me to think you are a population of a billion and you still remain a democracy. It is a remarkable achievement because there is such diversity and variety in the cultures all within the continent, or sub-continent, as they call it. I have kept coming back to India and particularly to Mysore and this time of course I am here especially because there is an attempt now, a definite movement, to establish an Asian Australasian Association for the Study of Australian Literature and there is no better place to to establish it than in Mysore. Because you have had two men of vision, C. D. Narasimhaiah and H. H. Annaiah Gowda, and they have, between themselves, led to a great interest in Australian literature. They have held seminars at their own expense, they have brought writers here. If you ask someone from outside of India who is interested in post-colonial literature, "Where should I go for Australian literature?" they would say immediately, "To Mysore."

In Kunapipi, you've created a space for upcoming writers and artists from the former Commonwealth countries. Can you tell us how the Journal got started and about your experiences as Editor?

In 1971, I formed the Regional Branch of ACLALS, the E-ACLALS. I had a captive audience of three hundred people in front of me and I thought it would be a pity if they went away without doing anything. And I thought, "How can I get them together?" We could have a newsletter but how would we pay for it? And then I thought, I could make them all members. So they paid a small amount of money and they got the Newsletter. We did it all by hand; we did not have the technology and it was all voluntary. We just hoped the accounts would balance at the end of the day and if they did not, I would put my own money into it.

And then, in 1978, I thought I would start a Journal and I was a bit like Mr. Micawber - I did not have any money, but I hoped that something would turn up. My aim was always for it to be international and inter-disciplinary, and particularly, to encourage the Arts. So it was not just Poetry and Fiction, it was also Criticism and also artists and photographers because I think the visual is so very important. As I said, if you have not seen an apple, how do you teach a child what an apple is?

I have organised exhibitions in various places, and Festivals; put artists and writers on the cover of the Journal and carried articles on them. And this is an important thing for me in addition to all the big names - Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, you name them.

I have published people who have never been published before. People who would buy to read about Doris Lessing and Walcott would also read the others, and get to know about them and many of those people would go on to great books.

Chandini Lokuge, for instance - she is a Sri Lankan Australian - she had not published anything. I published her short stories and now, she has had a book published by Penguin.

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