Does the post-post-colonial Indian woman writing in English even have a tongue?
When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you're not in it, there's a moment of psychic disequilibrium as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
- Adrienne Rich.
Below is an essay I found in my compost pile (of things written a very, very long time ago that I hope to grow new ideas on). The piece is a youthful rant, expressing my frustration at not feeling represented in the literature of the land from whence I came while being fully aware that it made me sound like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless. My views on this topic have changed a bit, though not significantly, and since it is possible that many readers feel the same way, sharing!
Having discovered rather late that writing can still be literature if a sentence starts with 'But’ (or even 'A*hole), my introduction to Karim Amir resulted in love at first sight. Son of an English mother and an Indian father, Karim Amir, "an Englishman born and bred. Almost", was a product of British suburbia and the depravity of Hanif Kureishi's mind. Not that it was now no longer possible to swoon over Sonnet # 18 or The Chimney Sweep, but the mosey through Karim's kingdom - the pages of The Buddha of Suburbia - was for me a literary deflowering of sorts and it was great, to say the least, to finally meet one of my kind.
I would often find myself seeking solace in Kureishi. After much reading, and a little analysis (too little, some may argue), I realised that my love for Karim (and indeed Hanif) sprung from the delight of (potentially) reading the phrases 'Bum Banger' and 'Yoga Nidra' on the same page. So, as might be expected, the honeymoon soon was over and the doubts swaggered in: It was certain Hanif was a riot and it was certain he belonged to Ran-jit and Man-jit of Birmingham and Leicester... but did he, at all, belong to me?
Not that it was no longer possible now to delight in the respite that Karim (and his breed) found in pork sausages or for that matter British Pie (Yorkshire Pudding?) a.ka. "the white mother figure" who "softens the blow of political impotency inflicted on them by a colonial history" (said bell hooks, I think). No, that was not it at all. And it was not that I had entirely lost my love of Kureishi - I never could. But the time had come, the Walrus had made abundantly clear, to speak of other things. Like me and mine and who I was - Ramprasad or Sting?
But the search for other things meant the inevitable descent into the rabbit hole of Literary Hell, and in extorting the 'social, historical and political impact on and of literature’, libraries, bookstores and coffee house readings became a battlefield. Accosted everywhere by little bottles that said "Drink Me" and bushwhacked by perverse questions like "Can the Subaltern speak?" I soon found myself in The Quagmire of the Academucks, where funny little people with big brains romped gleefully around in their own faeces. So fascinated were they by the colour and texture of their neurotic excretions that they (and I, the idiot child) had failed to notice that the gas produced by their hubbub was intense and odious enough to float their boat to an intellectual space above reach, request, and certainly above relevance, to man or beast!
- Kurt Vonnegut
As soon as I made this startling discovery, I forsook what I could of the toxic argot of the neophyte in academe (to hell with words like ‘hegemony' and 'paradigm!), bagged my stuff and escaped the Fartland forever. On the way down to earth I did, however, have three mystical encounters:
1) Rushdie, who owns his very own gas station and specialises in filling God-shaped holes.
2) Ghosh, who runs what literary critic James Clifford calls the Transit Lounge of Culture', and specialises in enmeshing himself in the warp and weft of every passing stranger.
3) Seth, bless him, who runs a magic show that transmogrifies zoom lenses into wide angles and specialises in reinventing you consistently and without your consent.
I would also like to thank (without naming names) the lesser deities - the one-book wonders who write their lives for us in a single volume (thank you, thank you, thank you). And let's not forget (for everything is an experience) the happy pantheon of mediocrity - the heathen gods of re-hashed "commonwealth” literature that bewilder us with their brilliant falsehoods, and last but not least, their intrepid cohorts - the charming clan that publishes their dụng!
So, having met Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh (and a few random godlets and their pan-national pimps), the burning desire now was to meet the mortals. You know, ‘people like us’. But a new breed of Academucks had arrived, even more rabid than the first! They were shouting something about the farce of Indian English writing and how it does not deserve the centrality it has received. That it was despicable that White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy (often in the guise of Big Publishing, apparently) was getting rich(er) by claiming to have the last word on the post-colonial condition of our great nation (the world's largest democracy, no less).
How could they, screeched the Academucks, put their money where our mouth is? How could they base their theories on the works of a handful of haves in a sprawling sewer of have-nots? And it was not even like these were ordinary run-of-the-mill haves, they said, these were haves, canyoubelieveit, who frolicked in the coloniser's tongue! Can the subaltern speak, they asked - quite understandably - only in English?
But I did not cease, and I did not desist. The Academucks could no longer capsize me, and my voyage continued. I knew that somewhere in that sea of words, something (surely?) was being said about me. But where were Midnight's Grandchildren? At first, my questions were met by a stony silence, after which I was rapped on the knuckles by my friendly neighbourhood school teacher who made me write one thousand times on the blackboard: Who cares? So, I did what I had to do. I wrote a poem:
O, Me.
They made me read of jams and jellies. They made me read of sun-dried red chillis. They made me read of guavas and mangoes. They made me nitpick with hybrid langurs. And in the end, indeed I saw a spattering Beauty, a smidgen of Truth, but upon my dog (who is not uncouth), there was no Love, and less Freedom, forsooth! So the hunt will continue and the hound will not sleep until there is found a shepherd among sheep!
Now, years into the search, I wonder: are we all just wolves in sheep's clothing? Is it entirely laughable to look for anything holy in a community borne of the devil's spawn? Does not the story of the offspring of the offspring of the offspring of cognitive rape / intellectual colonisation make for a wicked psychological thriller? And so what if English was and always has been an urban elite playground? For the illegitimates that play in it, the language has few colonial associations - it is all we’ve ever known. So why is it that all we get is half-truths and part-truths and secrets and lies? Did we (poor little rich kids) by being shameless enough to exist, somehow forfeit our right to representation? Have we been bequeathed a tongue that has no voice?
Question: What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Answer, courtesy 'Renton', Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh): "F*ckin’ failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin’ the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. But we... we are colonised by wankers."
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