The ghost train moves in during the blackest phase of night – on some battlement in Cyprus, in the days of Othello, a sentry would have called it the second watch. Black visages gaze at me, eyeless; a chain clanks somewhere in a lost corner of a dungeon dream. The night’s distemper which I have to face, night after night, started even as I wrote my thesis. A harmless piece it was: ‘The History of Cocoa in Ghana.’ Who would have thought it could land me in this soup? In this city of spires and shabby scholars in worn-out tweeds, squeaking away on worn-out bicycles, guys don’t know where it is! You’ve got to say ‘Gold Coast, now Ghana’. Friends suddenly become vocal, the slobs: ‘Should be ships making slave-runs between de lines here. Should be slave stations on dis brown cocoa-coloured page of yours, stations with names like Elmina and Ouidah, Komenda and Akwida. De word “slavery” doesn’t figure in your friggin paper!' I could’ve told them a thing or two about slavery – after all I was born in the bloody place! Gold Coast slaves were preferred, because the ones from Biafra was stubborn and prone to suicide. Slaves actually believed that at the other end of the Atlantic white savages would be waiting to eat them up! I could have passed on these nuggets, but all they were keen on was settling old scores, with black ram tupping white ewe once again. I shook my head, I wanted that doctorate from Oxford real bad. Now this: apparitions surfacing from nightscapes – black visages with bloodstains where the eyes should have been.
Narayan, R. K. “Toasted English, “The Writerly Life: Selected Non-Fiction,” ed. S. Krishnan, Viking, 2001, pp. 267-270.
Published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
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Critical Biography
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Mondal, Subarna. “R. K. Narayan.” Indian Writing In English Online, 21 Oct 2022 , https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-k-narayan-subarna-mondal/.
Chicago:
Mondal, Subarna. “R. K. Narayan.” Indian Writing In English Online. October 21, 2022. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-k-narayan-subarna-mondal/.
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (1906-2001) is one of the three most prominent Indian novelists in English (the other two being Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand) in late colonial and early post-colonial India. Born on the 10th of October, 1906, in Madras, Tamil Nadu, in British India, Narayan studied in the Maharaja College of Mysore, and worked as a school teacher for a brief span of time before writing his first novel Swami and Friends in 1930.
It is in his very first novel that Narayan creates his famous Malgudi, a fictional town in Southern India that forms a constant setting for all his fifteen novels and most of his six short story collections. Malgudi as a literary space evolves with Narayan’s writings and his life: from a sleepy little town of Swami and Friends, it gradually grows to become a more settled space where the middle-class populace resides and socialises in The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945). These three semi-autobiographical works reflect Narayan’s perception of his surroundings that gradually changes with time. From cricket matches to disrupted friendships, from the heady days of youth to a settled happy married life to the loss of his beloved wife – Narayan’s Malgudi, in this trilogy, charts the most turbulent years of his life.
Malgudi also traces the changing lives of a populace that was coping with and reacting to a succession of baffling fluctuations. While Narayan’s trilogy along with The Dark Room (1938) and Malgudi Days (1942) are set in a colonial space where the freedom movement is in full swing, The Financial Expert (1951), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), and The Vendor of Sweets (1967) are written at a crucial juncture of Indian history when the nation, like the fictitious Malgudi, is a newly (re)invented place, a hastily constructed melting pot of Indian and English milieu that the countrymen had to come to terms with.
In fact, during Narayan’s most prolific phase, India was going through major political and economic crises. Food scarcity, rising population, a listless economy, poor infrastructure, and four successive wars–World War II that ended in 1945, India’s war with China in 1962, and two consecutive wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 brought about an all-pervading gloom that eclipsed the initial euphoria of the post-independence years. Going against the tendency of his contemporary authors to brood over the prevailing conditions, Narayan continued to write of the everyday existence of ordinary Indians in his own ingenious comic ironic tone that rarely verged on being acerbic – a tendency which also earned him much caustic criticism. While Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak criticises his cultural compliance to an indifferent international reading class in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), Shashi Tharoor does not spare Narayan in a deferred obituary published in The Hindu where he mentions “the banality of Narayan’s concerns, the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose, and the shallowness of the pool of experience and vocabulary from which he drew” (2001). Undoubtedly, his scope was limited and he refrained from an outright censure of British rule, except in Swami and Friends and Waiting for the Mahatma. According to Paul Brians this itself was a deliberate political stance that Narayan had adopted as a form of silent resistance against the colonial regime (60). He concentrated on the daily oddities of Malgudi-dwellers, their professions, their leisure, and their love for folklore and mythology.
Folklore and mythic stories formed a significant part of Narayan’s childhood as he was brought up by his grandmother who provided him with a healthy dose of the magic of fables. This love for tales that were simple yet fantastic is perhaps what made him dare to choose a difficult and an unconventional career during 1930s: that of a writer. Further, the decision to write in English made him confront the added problem of dealing with Western readers whose minds were already swarming with images of sadhus, and cobras, and black magic when it came to visualising his country. It is this challenge which Narayan met with considerable success. As Olivia Manning states in The Spectator:
From Sirajudowlla to the curious monsters of Mother India, the Indian male has been presented to the British female as a tyrannical horror, a nightmare in the home. Mr. Narayan has changed him for us into a human being (qtd. in Imaging Malgudi, Ahluwalia 1).
The long-held extreme views of torture, violence and villainy that most Indian men were attributed with by the East India Company’s collective memory smarting in the aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny were furthered by contemporary issues such as child marriage, female infanticide, and Sati. Narayan, to some extent, mitigated this stereotypical image by humanising India through Malgudi. Narayan’s popularity in the West is based on his ability to depict the people of this newly independent country in all their diversity, inhabiting a society which is complex and multi-layered.
Narayan’s first three novels – Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937), and The Dark Room (1938) were all published in London, with the help of his friend and admirer Graham Greene (1904-1991). Swami and Friends, the first novel in his semi-autobiographical trilogy is about Swaminathan, a six-year-old boy and his gradual evolution as he journeys as a student from Albert Mission School to the indigenous Board School. From fascination for cricket and an internalising of British values and education to an understanding of how deeply attached he is to his grandmother and her tales, Swami and Friends is a bildungsroman where the protagonist after his brief encounter and awe of everything British, realises that he cannot resist the pull of his own culture and his own roots. Swami’s English-learning experiences and those of witnessing the Indian freedom struggle are straight out of Narayan’s own life (My Days, Narayan 1974). The novel may well be an autobiography of any reader belonging to Narayan’s generation growing up under similar bewildering circumstances, oscillating between two different worldviews.
In Swami’s outburst against Christian teachings and his consequent expulsion from Albert Mission and his subsequent admission to the Board School of Malgudi, in his realisation of cricket and its values as a meaningless charade, in his oscillation between a choice of losing his friend Rajam and being true to his newly found belief, are rooted the basic dilemmas of an adolescent Indian male and his responses to colonialism. This dilemma is well-expressed in Narayan’s use of the English language in this work. The author’s use of Standard English Language with a third person narrator proceeds along with the characters’ use of English with a distinct Indian hue giving the readers a taste of Indian English.
The Bachelor of Arts continues the semi-autobiographical account of the author. In Chandran’s tale one finds a depiction of Narayan’s journey from the adolescent restlessness of Swaminathan in Swami and Friends to the restraint and maturity that Krishna strives for and ultimately achieves in The English Teacher. Sharing apparent similarities with “Araby” in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), The Bachelor of Arts has a tongue-in-cheek approach to a coming-of-age novel. Chandran, the protagonist, falls in love with Malathi at first sight and is determined to overcome the narrow age-old customs of caste and class to marry her, as he ponders,
[s]uppose, though unmarried, she belonged to some other caste? A marriage would not be tolerated even between sub-sects of the same caste. If India was to attain salvation these watertight divisions must go–Community, Caste, Sects, Sub-sects, and still further divisions. He felt very indignant. He would set an example himself by marrying this girl whatever her caste or sect might be (1978, 97-98).
Failing to acquire the love of his life, Malathi, (whose opinion or voice we do not hear even once in the entire novel) for differences in horoscope, Chandran leaves home, feigns to be a sannyasi, survives by begging in a distant village, then comes to his senses, and returns to Malgudi. Much in the spirit of “Araby”‘s profound conclusion “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity” (Dubliners, 38), Chandran’s deep understanding of life is stated thus:
Long after the babble of the crowd on the sands had died, and darkness had fallen on the earth, Chandran’s voice was heard, in tune with the rumble of the flowing river, narrating to Mohan his wanderings. He then explained his new philosophy, which followed the devastating discovery that Love and Friendship were the veriest illusions. He explained that people married because their sexual appetite had to be satisfied and there must be somebody to manage the house. There was nothing deeper than that in any man and woman relationship (198).
However, his first sight of Susila dispels all his dark opinions on the institution of marriage and shatters all his resolutions of remaining a celibate for life:
At this moment the girl slightly raised her head and stole a glance at Chandran. He saw her face now. It was divine; there was no doubt about it. He secretly compared it with Malathi’s, and wondered what he had seen in the latter to drive him so mad…. For the rest of the journey the music of the word “Susila” rang in his ears. Susila, Susila, Susila, her name, music, figure, face, and everything about her was divine. Susila, Susila- Malathi, not a spot beside Susila; it was a tongue twister; he wondered why people liked that name (258).
Thus ends a realistic comic-ironic depiction of a bachelor’s adventure, an adventure only to be taken up later by Krishna in The English Teacher. However, Chandran’s desire for love marriage and his refusal to succumb to the dictates of astrology, suggest the beginning of a generation that was attempting to step out of the traditional kinship networks so important in the Indian marriage market. As he raves at his mother, “To the dust-pot with your silly customs” (118).
The Dark Room, on the other hand, is an exploration of this same marital institution from the perspective of a woman. The most uncharacteristic of Narayan’s work, The Dark Room is a bitter tale of a disillusioned housewife, Savitri, who walks out on her philandering husband only to return to the confines of the same stifling household, burdened with the realisation that she will never be able to transcend the fear of being a lonely working woman for life. Unlike his other works, Narayan does not conclude this novel on a note of peaceful acceptance of the vicissitudes of life – a factor responsible for Narayan’s popularity amongst critics of the West – as rightly pointed out by Teresa Hubel in (114). The Dark Room offers us no consolation. Savitri remains lonely at the end. But she nevertheless realises the futility of trying to live up to her name – Savitri – the mythical archetypal woman of the Mahabharata, a figure exploited by the nationalist patriarchs of the time to safeguard the image of a selfless Indian woman readily sacrificing herself at the altars of a patriarchal society.
William Walsh detects a note of hysteria in this work of Narayan. He considers The Dark Room a “much less appealing one … It shows … at certain places a wash of unabsorbed feelings. There is a touch of hysteria in the novel …” (43). This reading perhaps misses a note of desperation in this story of Savitri that is in keeping with contemporary volatile debates around women’s issues. In The Dark Room, Teresa Hubel finds echoes of the concerns of the All India Women’s Conference, a major wing of Indian nationalist movement of the 1930s. She states, “[i]t is significant that he [Narayan] chooses to centre Savitri’s revolt on those two issues from the 1930s … the demand of middle-class women for work outside the home and their efforts to move beyond the discourse of the selfless heroine” (124).
Despite dealing effectively with contemporary issues and dilemmas and despite receiving good reviews, Narayan’s first three works did not do well. As Narayan famously speaks of his predicament: “Good reviews, poor sales, and a family to support” (qtd. in Sen 2004, 125). Under such adverse circumstances, desperately seeking publishers in India and abroad, Narayan finally managed to publish his articles and short stories fortnightly in a leading Madras daily, The Hindu, from 1938. The following year, Narayan’s wife, Rajam, died of typhoid. Narayan struggled with the twin burden of the loss of his wife and the loss of his readers in war-ridden England. Consequently, a series of three short story collections Malgudi Days (1943), Dodu and Other Stories (1943), and Cyclone and Other Stories (1945) were published by Narayan’s own publishing house in India, named Indian Thought Publications. Many of these stories had already been published in The Hindu.
Narayan states in his introduction to Malgudi Days (Indian reprint, 2005) that in his short stories there is “almost invariably the central character [who] faces some kind of crisis and either resolves it or lives with it” (viii). An astrologer who manages to escape his past, a doctor who would not lie, a dog who refuses to abandon his master despite being mistreated, a postman who loves reading others’ letters, or a retired office guard who is petrified of opening a registered post – Narayan’s short stories are teeming with oddities. His plots remain simple yet captivating, with a fair share of their focus on the underdogs of the society. Although depicting a clearly identifiable South Indian milieu, Narayan surprisingly manages to prove through these very stories that India is a culturally diverse nation space. In fact, to Narayan, Malgudi does not merely represent India in a microcosmic form, but it can be a place in any part of the world:
I can detect Malgudi characters even in New York: for instance, West Twenty-third Street … possesses every element of Malgudi, with its landmarks and humanity remaining unchanged – the drunk lolling on the steps of the synagogue … the barber, the dentist, the lawyer and the specialist in fishing hooks, tackle and rods, the five-and-ten and the delicatessen … all are there as they were, with an air of unshaken permanence and familiarity (Malgudi Days, Narayan 2005, viii).
It is perhaps for this untiring fascination with humans and nonhumans that Narayan continued to be a keen observer of the life around him and an expert chronicler of their everyday existence.
His other collections of short stories An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947), Lawley Road and Other Stories (1967), and later Under the Banyan Tree (1985) were mostly reprints of the first three collections. While Under the Banyan Tree was published by Viking Press, An Astrologer’s Day and Lawley Road were published by Eyre & Spottiswoode and Hind Pocket Books respectively. Earlier, Eyre & Spottiswoode had also published the third of Narayan’s semi-autobiographical trilogy, The English Teacher in 1945. Unlike The Dark Room, The English Teacher presents an almost perfect picture of an idyllic married life of Krishna and Susila, only to be abruptly punctuated by the death of Susila. The novel ponders over the possibilities of life after death, the problems of a mechanical education system, and the politics of the kitchen through a study of ordinary yet highly eccentric characters. And all this is done in Narayan’s characteristic simple disarming prose. Susila’s character, for instance, is drawn with all its believable and relatable contradictions. She is parsimonious, but does not grudge added expenses for the old housekeeper. She tries to “get through Ivanhoe … and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare” (2022, 59) while imbibing “many sensible points in cooking and household economy” (2022, 39) from her mother-in-law. She is a complete contrast to her predecessor (the elder daughter-in-law) in the family who “would never allow a remark or a look from my [Krishna’s] mother to pass unchallenged” being the daughter of a “retired High Court Judge” (2022, 40). Narayan, thus, offers us a brief glimpse of the functioning of a typical Indian middle-class family with the familiar mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law trope so popular, unfortunately, even today. Pitting one woman against another in a situation where ironically both women are victims of the same stifling customs is a motif touched upon in The Guide and The Painter of Signs as well. The English Teacher was an instant success selling thousands of copies. Narayan had tapped on the English taste for the idiosyncratic and had satisfied their curiosity about the pious East to a certain extent.
The English Teacher was followed by Mr Sampath- The Printer of Malgudi (1949), The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), and The Guide (1958). The last three works were published by Methuen, London. While Mr Sampath traces the rise and fall of a printer, Mr Sampath, as his career spans from the world of print to the world of the celluloid, The Financial Expert is the story of a financial wizard Margayya. The novel is pervaded by Narayan’s characteristic comic ironic tone with a touch of subtle pathos. While Margayya fleeces unsuspecting customers and amasses wealth only to be ruined by his own son, Babu; Mr Sampath is himself the architect of his own fall.
In Waiting for the Mahatma, Narayan depicts Gandhi as a character who visits Malgudi. The novel, however, is again a charting of the career of Sriram, a high-school pass-out – his love for Bharati (a staunch follower of Gandhian principles), his involvement with extremists, his consequent imprisonment and his reunion with Bharati as India moves towards its partition in 1947. Mr Sampath, Margayya, and Sriram, like many of Narayan’s protagonists, are flawed yet human, and it is not difficult, at times, to identify with them.
The Guide, his next venture, traces the journey of a self-centred tourist guide, Raju, who has no real love for the place he belongs to and yet is compelled to fast for his community at the end. Before the publication of The Guide, Indian readers were not as receptive to Narayan as the English, the Russian, and the American readers (Ahluwalia 9). While Narayan’s works were by then being published in America by the Michigan State University Press and Viking (followed by Penguin, which took over Viking), the gaps between these foreign publications and their Indian reprints reflect the relative indifference of the Indian readers in relation to their Western counterparts. Ahluwalia in Imaging Malgudi (2019) observes:
The first three novels – Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, and The Dark Room – were published in India after a gap of nine, twenty-eight, and twenty-two years, respectively. The gap reduced to single digits of nine, seven, and six in the next cluster of three novels – The English Teacher, Mr. Sampath, and The Financial Expert (8).
It is Narayan’s The Guide that made a perceptible difference in his Indian readership. The Guide won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1961 and was adapted on screen in 1966. The figure of the truant young man transforming into a sadhu to perform the rites of expiation on behalf of his people, continued references to drought (a frequent occurrence in India), the developing town of Malgudi with relatable figures, and perhaps the appearance of a powerful woman character, Rosie/Nalini, who, unlike Savitri of The Dark Room, could free herself from the clutches of patriarchal expectation and could move from “strength to strength” (The Guide 2005, 222), finally appealed to the Indian mind.
Yet, a number of Indian critics were left unimpressed by Narayan’s works. Malgudi, to them, remained a fictitious town that had little to do with the multi-layered reality of India at a crucial historical juncture. Malgudi, according to them, was too simple a space to depict and critique the complex series of colonial happenstance and neo-colonial alteration that shaped India. Shashi Deshpande, for instance, in R.K. Narayan: A Personal View (2007), equates Narayan’s writing to the act of “sending flat stones skimming over the surface of a still pond” (67). Kanaganayakam in Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (2002) reminds us that “[a]part from Waiting for the Mahatma which deals specifically with the politics of Indian National Congress and the career of Mahatma Gandhi … the politics of decolonization have hardly ever been foregrounded in his work …” (40).
On the other hand, British authors like Graham Greene and Jeffrey Archer were staunch supporters of Narayan’s work. Greene compares Narayan with Chekov in his ability to coalesce humour and pathos and his complete freedom from the temptation of making subjective statements (Ram and Ram 2001). For Greene, it is this objectivity, this ability to describe people and incidents with minimum authorial intervention, that makes him an engaging author for the West. These attributes of his works gradually grew on the Indian sensibility as well.
A common dilemma that plagued the Indian sensibility of the time was explored in Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets. The novel brings forth a common paradox of a typical Indian torn between his attachment to wealth and his commitment to the Gandhian principle of frugality and distaste for excess. On the one hand, Jagan never owns “more than two sets of clothes at a time” (9) and eats only “stone-ground wheat … with honey and greens” (10), on the other hand, he hoards “free cash” that comes from selling sweets “after six o’clock” that is “entitled to survive without reference to any tax” and is “converted into crisp currency at the earliest moment” (14). Jagan’s obsession over his son’s diet, his eccentric decision of a complete renunciation of salt and sugar, and his extreme efforts for procuring the hide of dead animals for his footwear, provide generous scope for the comic. But the comic is tempered with an understated pensiveness as we witness his affection for his insensitive son Mali, the reminiscences of his conjugal life and his ultimate capacity to let go. The comic in Narayan becomes effortlessly profound as we spontaneously respond to the weaknesses and flaws of these individuals of Malgudi, a place that has by this time expanded to Lawley Extension, South Extension, and the New Extension giving rise to a number of “newer colonies” (Vendor of Sweets 17).
By the time The Painter of Signs was published in 1977, Malgudi “was the base for a hydro-electric project … jeeps and lorries passed through the Market Road … The city had a new superintendent of police … Policemen were posted every few yards” and “pedestrians and vehicles” choked the once-leisurely-paced streets (12). Like the shifting geography of Malgudi, the changing patterns of an individual’s love life are also addressed in this novella. From Chandran’s inability to marry Malathi because of a mismatched horoscope in The Bachelor of Arts to an idyllic conjugality in The English Teacher to the more complex companionship in The Guide where relationships are mostly transactional, The Painter of Signs brings forth a pronounced clash between two opposed views on romance and marriage- that of Raman’s grandmother and that of Daisy, Raman’s love interest.
Raman is caught between two worlds–a literary world that he inhabits through his reading of English authors, and the actual world, the complex social milieu of Malgudi that is a part of his real existence. Narayan, through this work (along with The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher), maps how an ordinary Indian middle-class man, with his distant but constant exposure to the West, deals with or reacts to these shifting perspectives on love, partnership, and marriage. On the contrary, Daisy, the strong-willed female protagonist of the novel, is more resolute and has a clearer insight about the reality that surrounds her. At the end, it is Daisy who questions and challenges the age-old patriarchal beliefs that even most of the womenfolk of Malgudi (like Raju’s mother and Raman’s grandmother) have internalised, not realising that they have also been victims of unresponsive and unfeeling men for generations. “I can’t live except alone” is what Daisy says–doing away with the age-old fears that a single woman carries within her (179).
Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), partly shift from human narratives and ponder on our anthropocentric complacency that takes the hierarchical positions of humans and non-humans for granted. In the introduction to A Tiger for Malgudi, Narayan observes, “… with a few exceptions here and there, humans have monopolized the attention of fiction writers. Man in his smugness never imagines for a moment that other creatures may also possess ego, values, outlook and the ability to communicate…” (7).
While A Tiger for Malgudi speaks of the adventures of a live tiger, his friendship with a man he calls “Master” and his ultimate peaceful settlement in Malgudi zoo, The Man-Eater of Malgudi is much more layered, as it deals with dead animals. The novel begins with the ominous appearance of Vasu, an evil characterwho disrupts the otherwise complacent and harmonious existence of Malgudi, especially the existence of a printing shop owner, Nataraj. Vasu is a taxidermist by profession. The word “taxidermy” has its roots in the Greek words “taxis” and “derma” which literally means “arrangement of the skin”. Vasu arranges the skin of dead animals and accrues profit from them and it is Natraj’s attic that he chooses as his workspace. Throughout the novel he bullies Natraj and makes his life a living hell.
A harmless peace-loving character being relentlessly bullied by a trouble-maker is common in Narayan’s work. But what is new in The Man-eater of Malgudi is the staggering number of deaths that the text speaks of. Animals are killed in hordes. The novel reeks of blood and tanned skin. Vasu’s career of hunting, killing, flaying and preserving animal skin is described in detail. The man himself explains:
… one takes a lot of care to bleed the animal, and only the skin is brought in … The paws and the head are particularly important … Bleeding, skinning and cleaning … we pack, or rather pickle, the skin in tins of salt immediately after flaying (50).
This destruction in the name of preservation leads Sundhya Walther to observe that “[b]y positioning the state’s ideology of conservation and Vasu’s ideology of preservation as ideologically linked, the novel calls nonhuman animal bodies into service to represent the violence of the dominant drives of postcolonial modernity …” (77). She reads the text as a critique of colonial appropriation of nonhuman bodies as a consequence of capitalist expansion. By situating The Man-Eater of Malgudi within the wider context of Nehru’s policy of animal conservation from the 1950s as a significant marker of ownership and unity of the newly independent state, Narayan, according to Walther, critiques and brings forth the failure of this project (2015, 80).
Vasu’s futile exercise of creating permanent artefacts from animal skin which is itself perishable is also comparable to Narayan’s futile efforts at preserving Malgudi, a peaceful harmonious space of Swami and Friends, that undergoes disturbing changes with time (as is evident in Malgudi’s enthusiasm to use Kumar, the elephant, as a trophy in processions that could fetch cash for the building of their temple). Malgudi has become as acquisitive and as “ugly” as Vasu – and thus Narayan’s failure to preserve his imagined India unruffled by caste, gender and religious discriminations. The work is peopled by upper-caste Hindus with no significant place for the outsiders. However, this highly insular space is finally contaminated by the stench of rotten animal carcasses that seem to linger even at the end of the novel (the stuffed cub, for instance). The novel concludes with Nataraj carrying a “little bit of Vasu that has become a part of him” (Cronin 1989, 33). The end of The Man-Eater of Malgudi is predictably dark, ambiguous and dystopic.
Narayan’s last two novels Talkative Man (1986) and The World of Nagaraj (1990) are centred on financially secure complacent men residing in Kabir Street with dreams of becoming successful writers – one a serious journalist and the other the author of a magnum opus on Narada (ambitions that remain unrealised) – till their peaceful life is disturbed by outsiders who enter their lives and change them forever.
Apart from this by-now-familiar plot of Narayan, Talkative Man, though hilarious in parts, is sketchy and lacks depth. But what is intriguing in the novella is that the reader is never sure as to who the actual ‘talkative man’ is. Is it the narrator, TM himself? Or is it the mysterious man, who calls himself Dr Rann from Timbuctoo who imposes himself on the narrator and the station master? Or is it the intimidating ‘talkative woman’ from Delhi in search of her coquetting husband, the supposed Mrs Rann? The novella explores the fascination and tyranny of tales. From TM’s constant small talks in the Town Hall reading room and the Boardless Hotel, to the tall talks of Mr Rann from Timbuctoo, to the recollections of the formidable Mrs Rann’s past life that TM is compelled to listen to- the reader of Talkative Man is alternately exasperated and amused by the ‘ancient mariners’ of this text (TM describes himself as Coleridge’s wedding guest when he cannot escape the grip of the recounting of Mrs. Rann’s past love life).
It is the figure of a compulsive storyteller that Narayan constantly evokes in many of his works. Nataraj’s printing shop, the Town Hall, the Boardless Hotel, the broad steps around the pedestal of Sir Frederick Lawley’s statue, Bari’s stationery shop, and Jayaraj’s studio are some of the spaces where stories are created, myths revisited and strange theories formulated. Narayan had once likened Mysore to an ancient Greek city, “[v]ital issues, including philosophical and political analyses, were examined and settled by people … on the promenades of Mysore” (Krishnaswami 2017). Narayan recreates this compulsive habit of weaving tales, preaching high philosophy, criticising government policies and spreading gossips in the shops, parapets, and restaurants of Malgudi streets and the pyols laid in the front yards of its households.
Nagaraj, the protagonist of The World of Nagaraj is also assailed by a similar compulsion. His ambition is to produce a work of epic proportions whose hero will be the sage Narada, the compulsive story-teller and trouble-maker. Narayan’s evocation of the figure of Narada may be a subtle dig at his own creative vocation. Like the mythical Narada, the author carries so many tales and news snippets in his head that he is compelled to share or else his head would crush under the burden of untold stories and unsung heroes (Talkative Man 2020, 1).
Nagaraj desires to belong to this world of story-tellers. Thus, his search for the Narada lore leads him to visit a gambling Pundit and a bungling stationer. But his artistic pursuit remains unfulfilled as the ever-elusive Narada escapes him, not only because of inept advisors but because of a crisis in the form of Tim, his brother’s son, who arrives in his Kabir Street home and disrupts his peaceful family life and his noble quest for the Narada opus.
Narayan, unlike Nagaraj, contributes significantly to the body of Indian myths. Srinath notes that “Narayan, more than any Indian novelist except Raja Rao, has been inspired to a considerable extent by the Puranas, not merely in the ingenious way one of the legends is adapted in The Man-Eater of Malgudi but also in the art of story-telling” (419). Being raised in a Tamil Brahmin family and staying in close proximity to a grandmother who was a storehouse of ancient lore, Narayan internalised Hindu myths spontaneously. But Nandini Bhattacharya, while discussing the use of myth and reality in Narayan’s The Guide, rightly points out that in the present hybridised Indian space, it is no longer possible to use myths in a straightforward manner (Bhattacharya 2004). Thus, we have the Sitas and the Savitris of Malgudi households, the river Sarayu, the elephant Kumar worshipped in the temple of Malgudi, the snake dance of Rosie reminding us of Natraj’s crowning glory, the numerous mentions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that are direct references to Indian myths that coexist with growing technology, interest in commerce and an increasing thrust on individualism that are part and parcel of a modern Malgudi life.
Narayan in his essay “The World of the Storyteller”, the opening chapter of his Gods, Demons and Others (1964), speaks of his belief in this coexistence:
Everything is interrelated. Stories, scriptures, ethics, philosophy, grammar, astrology, astronomy, semantics, mysticism, and moral codes – each forms part and parcel of a total life and is indispensable for the attainment of a four-square understanding of existence (4).
In Gods, Demons and Others Narayan retells stories the Indian Puranas. He narrates the tales of Yayati, Draupadi, Nala, Savitri, Shakuntala, Harishchandra and Sibi from the Mahabharata along with stories of Viswamitra, Ravana, and Valmiki from the Ramayana. From the Tamil epic Silapadikharam, he retells the tale of “The Mispaired Anklet”. Narayan’s taste for the comic-ironic is evident in his rendition of these tales – a tone he adopts even in his retelling of the epics The Ramayana (1972) and The Mahabharata (1978). He does not set himself up to the task of reinterpreting the epics and the Puranas as they appear in his writings. His approach is playful yet profound with a sharp insight that lends a fresh tone to the already-familiar episodes of these age-old literary texts.
Narayan’s last published work The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories (1992), revisits the motifs that he had been preoccupied with in his long writing career–a storyteller in an anguished search of stories, a devoted husband in perpetual fear of his wife’s impending death, and a slice of Narayan’s great-grandmother’s biography – her dogged search for her philandering husband and her complete submission to him after he returns. We find traces of Savitri, Nagaraj, Daisy, Natraj, TM, Swami, Rosie, Raju, Krishna and the unnamed Mrs Rann in this work – numerous memorable and forgettable characters who dot our everyday lives and who appear in the pages of Narayan so effortlessly.
Both his fiction and his non-fiction such as Next Sunday (1960), My Dateless Diary (1960), My Days (1973), Reluctant Guru (1974), Emerald Route (1977), A Writer’s Nightmare (1988), A Storyteller’s World (1989), and The Writerly Life (2001) deal with a fascinating array of topics and characters. They range from a postman to the archetypal storyteller, from cows and milk to the landmarks of Mysore, from educational policies to his own anguished days as a student. All this is done with a subtle mix of humour and irony and a complete absence of didacticism.
Often compared to authors like Chekhov, Faulkner and Maupassant, Narayan was the recipient of the A C Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan awards. A tireless chronicler of small-town Indian ethos in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, Narayan’s constant search for the minutest plotlines in the local streets and markets he frequented ended on the 13th of May 2001–the day he died in Chennai at the age of 94.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahluwalia, Harsharan Singh. Imaging Malgudi: R K Narayan’s Fictive Town and its People. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
Bhattacharya, Nandini. R.K. Narayan’s The Guide: New Critical Perspectives. Worldview Publications, 2004.
Brians, Paul. Modern South Asian Literature in English. Greenwood Press, 2003.
Cronin, Richard. Imagining India. Macmillan, 1989.
Deshpande, Shashi. “R.K. Narayan: A Personal View”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 42, no. 2,2007, pp. 65-71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989407078591.
Hubel, Teresa. “Charting the Anger of Indian Women through Narayan’s Savitri.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 1,1993, pp. 113–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26284399.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. 31-38. Collector’s Library, 2005.
Kanaganayakam, Chelva. Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002.
Krishnaswami, Narayan. 2017. “An Author’s Story.” The Times of India, January 15, 2017. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/an-authoraposs-story/articleshow/56544856.cms
Narayan, R.K. The Bachelor of Arts. Indian Thought Publications, 1978.
Narayan, R.K. The English Teacher. Indian Thought Publications, Indian reprint 2022.
Narayan, R.K. The Guide. Indian Thought Publications, Indian reprint 2005.
Narayan, R.K. Malgudi Days. Indian Thought Publications, Indian reprint 2005.
Narayan, R.K. The Man-eater of Malgudi. Penguin Books, 2010.
Narayan, R.K. My Days: A Memoir. Viking Press, 1974.
Narayan, R.K. The Painter of Signs. Indian Thought Publications, Indian reprint 2014.
Narayan, R.K. Talkative Man. Indian Thought Publications, Indian reprint 2020.
Narayan, R.K. A Tiger for Malgudi. Allied Publishers, Indian reprint 1995.
Narayan, R.K. The Vendor of Sweets. Chennai: Indian Thought Publications, Indian reprint 2021.
Ram, Susan and Narasimhan Ram. 2001. “R K Narayan: India’s greatest writer, illuminating the human condition through small-town life”. The Guardian, May 14, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/may/14/guardianobituaries.books.
Sen, Krishna. Critical Essays on R K Narayan’s The Guide. Orient Longman, 2004.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Srinath, C. N. “R. K. Narayan’s Comic Vision: Possibilities and Limitations.” World Literature Today, vol. 55, no. 3,1981, pp. 416–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/40136551.
Tharoor, Shashi. “Comedies of Suffering”. The Hindu. July 8, 2001. http:// hindu.com/2001/07/08/stories/13080675.htm
Trivedi, H. C. and N. C. Soni. “Short Stories of R.K. Narayan.” Indian Literature, vol. 16, no. ¾,1973, pp. 165–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24157228.
Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation. Allied Publishers, Indian reprint 1995.
Walther, Sundhya. “The Nation’s Taxidermist: Ungovernable Bodies in R.K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 4, 2015, pp. 74-89, https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.84.4.06
Read R.K. Narayan on IWE Online
Fifteen YearsShashi Deshpande, “Where do we belong? The ‘Problem’ of English in India”, Kunapipi, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 65-84.
Published with permission from Shashi Deshpande.
Tiny cherubs of joy paddle the air. Must I mention their preposterous wings? No: I sit. I pull the door shut, the cubicle expands like feathers. The girl walks in, hesitates. I watch her stop her shoes next door, the bottoms of her frayed blue jeans. (I’m trying not to make a sound.) She bends down, places paper on the seat, carefully sits. Her shoes face forward, the jeans fall to her feet. I listen, then, to the sound of fabric falling down to the floor of the stall. The girl is gone. I pull on her jeans, shoes, underwear. Again, the sound of God’s snake hissing: sudden breasts on my chest. Outwards I soften. Stubble falls from my face. A cleft of African violet swells with the sea. My lifeline lengthens. My seat fills out. I feel my smell change – spicy, mysterious, so sweet I gag for fear.
Thayil, Jeet. “How to be a girl.” English. Penguin, 2003, pp. 17-18.
Published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
Read Jeet Thayil on IWE Online
Questions of the 'State' of the 'Art'
Published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
Rushdie, Salman. “Hobson-Jobson,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, Granta House, London and Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 81-83.
Image: The 1903 edition of Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive by Henry Yule and AC Burnell, edited by William Crooke.
Salman Rushdie on IWE Online
Critical Biography
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Chakraborty, Abin. “Mahesh Dattani.” Indian Writing In English Online, 16 Sept. 2022, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/mahesh-dattani-abin-chakraborty/ .
Chicago:
Chakraborty, Abin. “Mahesh Dattani.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 16, 2022. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/mahesh-dattani-abin-chakraborty/ .
Winner of the Sahitya Akademi award in 1998, Mahesh Dattani is one of the foremost Indian playwrights writing in English. Born to Gujarati parents in Bengaluru on 7th August 1958, Dattani studied in the local Baldwin Boys’ High School, an English medium Christian missionary school where his only brush with theatre came in the form of a typical Christmas pageant in which he performed as an angel without dialogues. He then went on to study at St. Joseph’s College in Bengaluru and it was during his college years that he was introduced to Bangalore Little Theatre which significantly contributed to his subsequent immersion in theatre in its varied forms. Dattani wrote his first play in 1986 and has since continued his stellar journey in theatre and films, not just as a playwright, but also as an acclaimed actor, director, and screenplay writer. While his choice of language, his themes, and set-designs set him apart in various ways from other contemporary or older Indian playwrights, what links him to his predecessors is a shared vision of the social responsibility of the artist and a commitment to serious theatre. His plays therefore offer piercing insights into various modes of exploitation and marginalisation, ingrained in different urban spaces, both within and outside the family and operating along both material and discursive axes. It is this consciousness that enables Dattani to explore subalternisation in urban spheres, especially along the lines of gender and sexuality.
Ranajit Guha defines subalterneity as “the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society, whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or any other way” (Guha, ‘Preface’ vii). The plurality of determinants which Guha’s definition foregrounds not only transcends mere economism but encapsulates the diverse processes through which subordination is ensured. While the question of class and the consequent problems still remain hauntingly palpable, classes themselves are fissured by conflicting forces of gender, community, and caste . and such forces are dexterously used by dominant discourses to perpetuate and consolidate processes of disempowerment that push the subalterns onto the margins. The post-independence nation-space is therefore marked by not only the exploitation of peasants and labourers or the massacre of Dalits, but also the ongoing marginalisation of religious minorities, subjugation of women across various classes, and the victimisation of sexual subalterns. However, Guha does not mention the issue of sexuality and the consequent production of ‘sexual subalterns’ (Bhaskaran 8) who are subjected to, on account of the pervasive dominance of the discourse of patriarchal heteronormativity, both social ostracisation and institutional discrimination, which are themselves conditioned by the differences of class, sex, race, nationality, region and such other determinants. What Dattani manages to do is to expand the horizons of postcolonial subalterneity itself by drawing our attention to the plural and diverse problems confronting these sexual minorities, along with subalternised women and religious minorities, who are subjected to an emotionally and at times physically traumatic crises of identity. Dattani’s plays highlight the fluid and dynamic modes through which heterogeneous individuals are subjected to varied forms of subalternisation which menacingly lurk beneath the veneer of sophisticated urban middle class families to which he himself belongs. As he notes:
I think the old cliché about writing what you know best holds good for any work or for any art (drama or literature). I think one has to be true to one’s own environment. Even if I attempted writing a play about the angst of rural Indian society, it wouldn’t ring true, it would be an outsider’s view – I could only hope to evoke sympathy, but never to really be a part of that unless I spend a lot of time there. I think there are enough issues and challenges in urban Indian society (the milieu I am a part of) and these automatically form the content of my work. (Multani 156-157)
This is evident from his very first play, Where There is a Will, (1986), which interrogates established patriarchal structures with a remarkable comic zest, and was written at a time when Dattani and his friends were staging European and American plays with their group, Playpen. It gives way to a more sombre and critical approach to power-structures and injustices undergirding families and societal networks in most of his other plays. Final Solutions (1993), for example, explores the subalternisation of Muslims in the context of Hindu fundamentalism, by focusing on the family of Ramnik Gandhi and their history. Similarly, in plays like Tara (1990), Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), and Thirty Days in September (2001), it is the relationship between siblings and other family members that forms the crux of the dramatic conflict and serves to highlight the varying modes of the subalternisation of women. While such plays use the generic features of family drama, they also end up problematising the very notion of the family in many ways. Though the dynamics of family structures have been explored by other playwrights, what distinguishes Dattani in his choice of themes is his ability to venture into uncharted territory by exploring such hitherto unexplored issues as homosexuality, transgender identities, sexual abuse of children and so on in plays like On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), Seven Steps around the Fire (1999), and Do the Needful (1997). While the new millennium has seen other playwrights exploring such issues, Dattani was a pioneering figure during the 1990s in his exploration of alternate sexualities and the kind of subalternisation that sexual minorities were and still are subjected to. It is this exploration of what he once termed “invisible issues” (Multani 156), such as the subalternisation faced by homosexuals and transgender communities or the silence that shrouds the issue of sexual abuse of children even now, that endows Dattani’s plays with a unique radicalism.
Dattani is fully conscious of this radicalism and his responses to several questions regarding his choice of such subjects make us aware of his commitment to serious theatre and his sense of responsibility as an artist. As he explains to Erin B. Mee:
My own political stand came because I started doing theatre, not because I had something political to say and I used theatre as the platform – just the reverse. Since I’ve realized the potential of theatre as an agent, if not for social change, at least for reflection, I can’t be frivolous about it any more. Unless I have something strong to present, I wouldn’t write. (Multani 158)
If we apply these insights in the context of the urban middle class setting of Dattani’s plays, we realise that while most of his characters, in terms of class, do not necessarily belong to subaltern groups, the considerations of gender and sexuality often push them into subaltern positions in specific critical contexts. So while someone like Kamlesh in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is very much a part of an upwardly mobile urban middle class, his identity as a closeted homosexual man locates him as a subaltern within the dominant heteronormative discourse exclusively on account of his sexual identity. At the same time, the same Kamlesh can act as a dominant character while using the caretaker for his sexual gratification. Similarly, while Alka and Dolly in Bravely Fought the Queen can be seen as subaltern characters who are humiliated and abused by their oppressive and indifferent husbands, they also play the role of the dominant characters in relation to the beggar woman who keeps visiting their houses and whom they are always eager to drive away. Even if the woman in question is financially independent she may still be subjected to domestic violence or sexual abuse within the space of ‘home’ and may thus be pushed into a subaltern position. It is this fluid multifaceted subalterneity within urban metropolitan spheres that Dattani so scrupulously and uncompromisingly continues to highlight. One can also cite in this context such figures as Hardika in Final Solutions or Baa in Bravely Fought the Queen. As someone who nurtures entrenched hatred of Muslims based on her experiences during the Partition, Hardika is part of the dominant discourse of majoritarian fundamentalism through which characters like Bobby and Javed are subalternised. At the same time, Hardika herself had been a victim of patriarchal subjugation after her marriage when she was incarcerated in a room for sharing a table during lunch with her Muslim friend Zarine. Likewise, while Baa herself had been physically abused by her husband, once she becomes the widowed matriarch of the family, she herself instigates violence against her daughter-in-law Dolly without any sense of the irony involved. Such duality is actually indicative of the “interpellated” nature of characters such as Baa who act as agents of the same discursive structure of patriarchy which had originally victimised them. The same pattern can also be seen in case of Bharati in Tara, who had given birth to Siamese twins – Chandan and Tara — who shared three legs between them. A surgery was scheduled to separate them and it was medically more viable to attach two legs to the daughter instead of the son. But along with her father it was Bharati who had pressured the surgeon to attach both legs to the son even though there was greater likelihood of rejection. In the process both her children ended up as cripples even though attaching the second leg to Tara could well have given her a more fulfilling life. Bharati here ends up acting as an agent of patriarchy against her own daughter and contributes to her subalternisation from her infancy. While she is able to initially use her father’s wealth and political power to generate greater agency for herself within the marriage, the failed surgery and her own subsequent guilt push her into a zone of acute vulnerability, eventually resulting in her own nervous breakdown. It is these fluid movements within the structures of power which Dattani so scrupulously maps.
Such subalternising processes generally come to the foreground in his plays through the orchestration of dramatic conflicts,, combining the typical suspense and climactic unraveling associated with detective stories. Interestingly, all such twists and turns and the corresponding crises generally take place within the domain of a typical urban middle-class family whose façade of normalcy or prosperity is progressively shattered. Such progression either occurs owing to a gradual intensification of fissures embedded in everyday reality or the convergence of unexpected circumstances. The domestic space thus goes on to become a microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosmic space of the nation-state where various forces such as patriarchy, communalism, and heteronormativity keep colliding with individual desires in manifold ways. Here again, Dattani explores what Aparna Dharwadker calls the “typology of home” as “the testing ground of…social and political relations” (269-70). In the process, Dattani helps refashion the space of the home, continuing a pattern initiated by his predecessors such as Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, G.P. Deshpande, Satish Alekar, and Mohan Rakesh, and thereby releases the ‘unhomely’, the ‘other’ that inhabits the assiduously crafted but unacknowledged niches of our homes, society and nation. One might refer here to the misogynistic violence unleashed against Dolly by her husband Jiten after being instigated by his mother in Bravely Fought the Queen, the suicide of the minister’s son Subbu on his wedding night because of the murder of his beloved Kamla, a eunuch in Seven Steps around the Fire, or the generational trauma faced by both Mala and Shanta because of sexual abuse at the hands of a family member in Thirty Days in September. These are all examples of such irruptions of the uncanny which destabilise the facades of domestic familial bliss. It is in this sense that the formal aspects of his plays become entwined with their thematic thrust, which not only aids in his dramatic quest for a critical, hybrid Indianness, at once moored in its boundless pluralities and critical of its own limitations, but also renders possible the emergence of those subalternised characters and voices who endow his plays with their distinctive radical energy. Whether it is Dolly’s anguished imitation of her spastic daughter’s uncoordinated movements, the surreal scene where Subbu embraces the dead Kamla, dressed as a bride, on a separate level of the stage, or the scene between Kamlesh and Ed/Prakash where they express their mutual love which the world cannot see – these are illustrative of those uniquely evocative moments which Dattani distinctively creates in his plays.
This distinctiveness is also evident from the multi-level sets that Dattani often uses in his plays through which we are introduced not only to the hierarchised spaces within bourgeois homes and the subalterns located therein, but also to those peripheral spaces that lie beyond the purview of bourgeois homes, as something of a mote in the eye – a presence you seek to erase but are unable to overlook because of the discomfort it creates. Again and again, such spaces and the voices associated with them intrude into ordinary homes and upset the comforting delusions of peace and harmony we try to cling on to. One may refer here again to the beggar woman, wrapped in tarpaulin, outside the home of the Trivedis in Bravely Fought the Queen or the caretaker or the gardener who fleetingly enter the space of the bourgeois homes before retreating beyond the space of representation. In Final Solutions, Dattani also uses the space of the stage to switch between time periods and thereby implicate the traumatic past into the troubled present, as well as suggest the continuity and accretion of violence within the structures of family, home, and the nation. While Dattani remains aware of the forces of subalternisation that exist within bourgeois homes in terms of gender or sexuality or religion, he is also aware of those that lie beyond the pale of bourgeois homes or those whose voices remain outside the idiom of that discursive matrix within which he himself is located as an author. Therefore, he repeatedly reminds us of the silences and occlusions that are built into his own plays, despite their forays into hitherto unchartered territories. This self-conscious appraisal of his own limitations enables him to implant those precise elements which the careful reader or mindful spectator may use to raise other questions that may force us to re-orient our perceptions or re-configure our spaces. As Dattani states, “It’s only when you are left hanging in the air you start to question your own personality, perceptions…the theatre is a collective experience and the audience have to finish in their own heads what the playwright began” (Nair).
Recalling the earlier reference to the ‘unhomely’, it might be argued that the task of interrogating personalities and perceptions also entails an encounter with the ‘other’, the ‘double’, and considering the focus on bourgeois homes, this ‘other’ is precisely the ‘subaltern’, inside and outside the home, whom Dattani repeatedly foregrounds, either through direct portrayal or through a strategy of presence-in-absence that proves to be all the more disconcerting.
We may refer here to the character of the seventy-five-year-old former Devadasi, Chenni amma, in Dance like a Man (1989), from whom Ratna sought to learn forgotten compositions and arts of ‘abhinaya’. However, her father-in-law strenuously objects to such an association, on account of the moral stigma attached to devadasis, and neither permits Ratna to continue her training with her nor allows her to come to the familial home. Victims of earlier patriarchal structures, such as former devadasis, thus act as the silenced ‘other’ in opposition to which the good middle-class woman must shape her identity. This is not to suggest that Ratna becomes free from patriarchal constraints at the expense of Chenni amma – instead both women continue to struggle against patriarchal impositions, one to retain her individual identity both as a performer and a married woman, and the other to free herself from moral stigma and the attendant material deprivation. The homeless Chenni amma occupies that silence which constitutes the successful middle-class home of Jayaraj and Ratna and thus raises critical questions regarding the moral basis of such homes and by extension such nation-spaces. The nation-space also demands codified performances of masculinity in accordance with conventional gender roles and Jayaraj’s choice of dance as a profession not only goes against such orthodox gender roles but also heightens inter-generational conflicts within the family – a recurrent theme in Dattani’s oeuvre. As Sindhu Nagaraj remarks in a recent review in The Hindu, “The patriarchal figure, Amritlal…does not like his son, Jairaj, becoming a dancer — something he considered a female profession. Decades later, we still find ourselves asking the same questions on the stigmas that prevail in society” (Nagaraj, 17 December 2021). This parallels a similar focus on the collapse of the family and the familial home in other modern realistic plays of the post-Independence era of which Dharwadker remarks:
The disintegration of the home points to a fundamental conceptual flaw which destroys the nation…These are conscious allegories of the crisis of secular nationhood in India, which is an important referent in the postcolonial theorizing of the nation. (Dharwadker 307)
Foregrounding the cacophonous silences generated by orthodox discourses of class, creed or gender, Dattani allegorises the different ways in which the secular nationhood of India is threatened by the dominant discourses and the attendant parochialism. The death of Ratna and Jayaraj’s first-born thus becomes a telling commentary on the systematic erosion of the idealised hopes and expectations of a postcolonial nation-state.
In this context, it is also worth analysing Dattani’s choice of English as the language of dramatic communication and the politics in which such a choice is invariably implicated. Dattani’s English plays do not suffer from those stifling artificialities that choked the early efforts of some of his predecessors such as Asif Currimbhoy or Nissim Ezekiel. Instead, he writes with a confidence and fluidity that confirms the position of English as another Indian language that is part of our lived experience in all its bristling multiplicity and unabashedly defends his right to perform Indian theatre in English in such ways that they may truly become, in his own words “metaphors for life” (Multani 171). A brief example from Tara may serve to illumine the nature and extent of this confident artistry:
Tara: This is Chandan.
Chandan: Hi.
Roopa: Hi. And you’re twins? Funny, you don’t resemble each other.
Chandan: Not all twins are peas in pods.
Roopa: (not understanding). Huh?
Chandan: Two peas in a pod. That’s something we aren’t.
Roopa: Uh, yes. Yes. Very funny.
Chandan: Is it? I didn’t think so.
Roopa: You know – two peas in a pot. Isn’t that funny?
Tara: (observes she hasn’t understood). Oh, yes of course. (Nudges Chandan) Very funny. Two peas in a (distinctly) pot. (Dattani: 1, 336-337)
Such a sequence highlights the ease with which Dattani weaves his English dialogues, without either deliberate affectation or ostentatious anxiety of Indianness. He even makes room for humour and banter based on such misuse of language that serves to highlight class-identities and the role of the English language as a marker of locational and occupational privilege (or the lack thereof) as an integral aspect of characterisation. Linguistic dexterity also becomes evident in those scenes where the otherwise bleak discussion at times becomes lightened through the use of humours, such as in the following excerpt from A Muggy Night in Mumbai:
Kamlesh: …For the first time in my life I wished I wasn’t gay.
Ranjit: Oh, come, dear fellow. At some point or another we all wish to be something we are not.
Kamlesh: Of course I don’t feel that way anymore. I realized where that feeling was coming from. The psychiatrist I was seeing.
Sharad: Oh no! Every Wednesday morning, right? And I thought you were seeing another man!
Kamlesh: I was. Only a straight homophobic psychiatrist. (Dattani 69)
This is precisely why Sudeep Sen, while reviewing a production of Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen in England, remarks that “Dattani writes with a pungency that is skilfully disguised, employing language that resorts to clarity and sharpness, one that pushes the limits of the spoken word and the pregnant silences in between” (Sen 1996).
It is not as if Dattani is unaware of the difficulties of such a choice. In the preface to the first volume of his collected plays, he categorically states, “I now realize that I am practising theatre in an extremely imperfect world where the politics of doing theatre in English looms large over anything else one does” (Dattani: 1, xiv). While on the one hand the remarkable commercial success of Dattani’s plays obviously testifies to their appeal across a wide cross-section of Indian audiences, on the other hand, it is also undeniable that a large section shies away from his plays because of the fact that his chosen language as English is still riddled with implications of class, privilege, and location (Rukmini S., 2019). At the same time, one also has to acknowledge that Dattani’s plays target a primarily metropolitan educated urban middle class audience whose hypocrisy and sophisticated veneer hide entrenched ideological and discursive frameworks that ensure the perpetuation of those processes of subalternisation that he so assiduously critiques. It is in acknowledgment of this particular reality that Dattani writes in his preface:
I love it when I am confronted with remarks such as ‘Your plays are preaching to the converted. You should do Final Solutions in the villages’. Such prejudice! How can anyone be so blind to their own remarks? Assumptions galore that cityfied English-speaking people are all liberal-minded and villagers are communal and bigoted. Worse is when that particular remark is followed by ‘It would make sense in Hindi or Kannada’. Meaning, ‘We are not bigots, it’s those bloody vernacs who need to think about all this.’ That too in the same breath as professing to be liberal-minded and secular! (Dattani: 1, xi)
It is by taking the exploration of subalterneity within the households of such avowedly ‘liberal-minded and secular’ people that Dattani breaks new ground and adds a distinctive dimension to his own brand of postcolonial theatre.
This exploration also leads to the generation of what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublics” which operate as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser 66-67). According to her analysis, such counterpublics not only contribute to the “widening of discursive contestation” but also as “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” in the face of dominant, exclusionary and exploitative practices. Dattani’s plays are also remarkable for their representation of such counterpublics which we keep witnessing in several different plays. Whether it is the congregation of queer characters in Kamlesh’s flat in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai or the intervention by the eunuchs in Seven Steps around the Fire or the playful interaction between Bobby, Javed and Smita in Final Solutions – Dattani repeatedly manages to foreground counterpublics that challenge dominant prejudices based on gender, creed or sexual orientation. Particularly significant are the moments of affection and intimacy, shared by queer characters on stage: be it Ed and Kamlesh in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai or Subbu and Kamala the eunuch in Seven Steps around the Fire. Such moments defamiliarise heteronormative notions of love and intimacy and serve to emphasise those “oppositional interpretations” and “widening of discursive horizons” (Fraser 66-68). Furthermore, the staging of queer desire and intimacy as dramatic spectacle also serves to foreground some of those emancipatory potentialities and utopian energies which often constellate within counterpublics. These features not only underscore Dattani’s own identity as a stalwart postcolonial playwright but also represent post-independence urban Indian theatre.
These qualities serve to ensure the abiding popularity of Mahesh Dattani, once credited by the late Alyque Padamsee as someone who gave “sixty-million English speaking Indians an identity” (qtd. in De 2001), as a playwright, not just in India, but in countries such as the UK, the USA, Canada, Sri Lanka, and the UAE (Ali 2005; De 2001). He continues to surprise his audience and readers with his sheer versatility as he explores such utterly diverse issues as the Partition (Where did I Leave my Purdah – 2012), the anguish of terminal cancer patients (Brief Candle – 2009) or even the life of inspiring figures such as Kalpana Chawla (The Girl who Touched the Stars – 2007) and their impact on others. In all of these explorations, however, Dattani’s sensitivity towards issues related to gender, patriarchal violence, and the trauma of unspeakable secrets of the past remains constant and it is this insightful exploration of the manifold facets of the human predicament that ensures his continued relevance.
Works Cited
Ali, Firdaus. “Play it Wright, Mahesh”. July 20, 2005. Indiacurrents.com. Accessed on 17.05.2022. < https://indiacurrents.com/play-it-wright-mahesh/>
Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. Vol. I & II. Penguin, 2000-2005.
______. Brief Candle: Three Plays. Penguin, 2010.
______. Me and My Plays. Penguin, 2014.
De, Aditi. “The Drama in Mahesh Dattani’s Life”. 2001. N.p Accessed on 17.05.2022. < https://www.mansworldindia.com/currentedition/from-the-magazine/drama-mahesh-dattanis-life/>
Dharwadker, Aparna. Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory and Urban Performance in India since 1947. University of Iowa Press, 2005.
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. Social Text. No. 25/26, (1990). 56-80.
Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”. Subaltern Studies, I. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Oxford UP, 1982, pp.1-8.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge, 2006.
Multani, Angelie, ed. Mahesh Dattani’s Plays: Critical Perspectives. Pencraft International, 2011.
Nagaraj, Sindhu. “Dance Like a Man keeps time to inherent family tunes”. The Hindu. 17 December, 2021. Accessed on 17 May 2022. <https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/theatre/dance-like-a-man-keeps-time-to-inherent-family-tunes/article37978517.ece>
Nair, Anita. “Mahesh Dattani – The Invisible Observer”. N.p. N.d. 10 August 2011. <http://www.anitanair.net/profiles/profile-mahesh-dattani.htm>.
S, Rukmini. “In India, who speaks in English, and where?” Mint. 14 May 2019. Accessed on 6 July 2022. < https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html>
Sen, Sudeep. “BRAVELY FOUGHT THE QUEEN – reviewed by Sudeep Sen”. June 1996. N.p. Accessed on 17 May 2022. < https://www.bordercrossings.org.uk/bravely-fought-queen-reviewed-sudeep-sen>
Read Mahesh Dattani on IWE Online
Dance Like A ManLiterary ambidexterity is fundamentally a discourse on the virtues of knowing two languages and writing well in both. In a vast and complex country like India, these languages would mean one’s mother tongue and the language of interaction. In my case, they would mean Khasi, the language of my tribe, and English.
Heard and spoken since birth, the mother tongue is of fundamental importance to creative literature. This also relates to the nature of creative writing and the need for communication.
As a practitioner of poetry, I believe in a poet who is a witness, one with the seeing eye, a retentive memory and the innate instinct to catch the soul of his generation. My own poetry is deeply rooted, and I see my role as a poet as that of a chronicler of subjective realities. In my poems, I have talked of leaders lording “like the wind” and fickle “like Hindi film stars changing dresses in a song.” I have talked of my impoverished land and with sardonic humour, of real people who are at once individuals and types. I have tried to capture the changing times, aspects of my culture and issues on the fringe.
But chronicling realities is not an end in itself. Pablo Neruda believes that a poet should always live close to his people: “I have gone into practically every corner of Chile, scattering my poetry like seed among the people of my country.” Neruda is pointing up the poet’s need to communicate with his people. If the foundation of a poet’s art rests on his people’s life and character, then what better audience is there than them? And if the audience is his people, then what better language is there to communicate with them than his mother tongue?
I, too, wish to address my people directly. I would like to tell them of the colossal threat to our land posed by the ceaseless flood of humanity and the growing aggressiveness of migrants. I would like to speak to them about the perils of terrorism and the greater peril of lawmen turning into terrorists. I would like to tell them of the absurdity of trying to deny their roots and the anarchy that follows in forgetting their own identity. I would like to talk of our great festivals, of Weiking, and the vitality of their part in our social life:
Weiking! Weiking!
Spring is back, begin your whirling motions
and let our life live on.
…
Whirl on, whirl on,
what if some of us
sneer at us for fools?
We are not here to pay obeisance
to the gods for a plentiful harvest
(do we ever have a harvest now?)
whirl on, whirl on to a time
when women stood by their men
and men were tigers guarding
their homes with jealous swords.
(“Weiking”: self-composed)
But most of all I would like to remind my people, as a poet raconteur, of the virtues of their ancestors’ ways and the necessity of perpetuating them. I would like to talk of our myths and legends and let those who will, cull lessons from them:
Faraway
from the year dot
Ren, the Nongjri fisherman,
Ren, the beloved of a river nymph
Ren, who loved so madly
who left his mother and his home
to live in magic depths
also left a message:
“Mother,” he had said,
“listen to the river,
as long as it roars
you will know that I live”.
(“Ren”: self-composed)
Symbolically, Ren is asking later generations to listen to the sound of his people’s life. But the sound of a people’s life and their ways can be voiced only through the mother tongue. The mother tongue is the sound of life itself, and in this sense, writing in it would mean for me helping the sound of my people’s life grow stronger.
Czeslaw Milosz and his poem “My Faithful Mother Tongue” have only strengthened this conviction. But the shocking reality that Milosz discovers about his mother tongue, as “a tongue of the debased, / of the unreasonable, hating themselves” is unfortunately true of the Khasi language as well. As Milosz again puts it, “perhaps, after all, it’s I who must try to save you [mother tongue].”
It is in trying to do this that literary ambidexterity can also play a critical role. It is neither desirable nor profitable to keep one’s writings confined to one’s language or the language of interaction.
A native author’s work with any literary merit must be brought to the notice of other literatures. As Neruda suggests, it does not matter if one’s poems have sunken their roots deep into one’s native soil; it does not matter if they are born of indigenous wind and rain or have emerged from a localized landscape. If they are worth their salt, they must “come out of that landscape … to roam, to go singing through the world …”
To do this, the author must be able to translate his work into the language of interaction. But if he is not ambidextrous in this sense, then his work must risk lurking forever in the dark recesses of his own small world.
On the other hand, if he writes only in the language of interaction, he must be able to translate his work into his mother tongue or risk being cut off forever from the heart and minds of his people.
The need to avoid these risks is, to quote Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” of my poetry as a bilingual poet. The desire to be read and understood by my people makes me wish to write in Khasi. But how can one write in a language whose writings are, without being read, frowned upon as biblia abiblia by the educated elite? Therefore, though most of my poems begin in Khasi, my immediate ambition is to exhume them, as it were, from the crypt of Khasi literature and get them tested through English journal publications. That is how the scribbled pieces in Khasi are simultaneously translated into English, and the Khasi thoughts are often directly transformed into English compositions. And so, driven by circumstances and supported by literary ambidexterity, the creation of every one of my poems becomes essentially the birth of twins.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in Poetry International, on April 13, 2006.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Bhattacharya, Saradindu. “Agha Shahid Ali.” Indian Writing In English Online, 09 Sept 2022, <indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/agha-shahid-ali-saradindu-bhattacharya/> .
Chicago:
Bhattacharya, Saradindu. “Agha Shahid Ali.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 9, 2022. <indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/agha-shahid-ali-saradindu-bhattacharya/> .
Agha Shahid Ali was born in Delhi in 1949 into a well-educated, liberal Shia Muslim family where Urdu, Kashmiri and English were spoken and poetry in these languages was frequently recited. He spent his early childhood in Srinagar and attended an Irish Catholic school there. He obtained his Master’s degree in English from the University of Delhi, following which he migrated to the United States of America and earned his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 1984. Subsequently, he also earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Arizona and pursued a career in academics, starting at Hamilton College, New York in 1987 and then moving to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he headed the MFA creative writing programme. He also taught a creative writing programme for poets and writers at the Warren Wilson College and for graduate students at the New York University. He was a visiting professor at Princeton University and held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, SUNY Binghamton, Baruch College, and the University of Utah. During his brief but fruitful career as an academic and poet, Ali received fellowships from several prestigious organisations – the New York Foundation of Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council of Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Ali died of brain cancer in 2001, the same ailment to which his mother had succumbed only a few years before him.
As an expatriate Kashmiri forever yearning for home, Ali identified himself as an American poet writing in English who was “imbued with … permutations of Hindu, Muslim and Western cultures” (Benvenuto 267). Ali acknowledged that “a proclivity to mourn historical loss was an inescapable part of his temperament” (Benvenuto 266), but also “resolutely refused to embrace the role of victim that could so easily have been his” (Ghosh 318). Ali’s early collections of poems, A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), and A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), are marked by the lyricism that informs all of his work. They also reveal a culturally hybrid poetic persona as adept at invoking figures like Medusa and Eurydice from Greek mythology as at referencing Begum Akhtar and Emily Dickinson. Ali’s cosmopolitanism as an artist is evident from the fact that he translated the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Urdu poems into English in The Rebel’s Silhouette (1991), and edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). He experimented with Western poetic forms such as sestinas, villanelles and canzones, as well as wrote original ghazals in English in his last collection of poems, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003).
One of the major themes in Ali’s poetry is nostalgia for an irreversibly altered homeland. Ali treads the tightrope between sentimental longing and resigned awareness in capturing through his poetry the sense of loss caused by the state of being in permanent exile. This is evident in one of his best known poems, “Postcard from Kashmir”, in which Kashmir becomes both the site and the product of re-presentation, available to the speaker only in and as a picture postcard. The sublime beauty of its landscape “shrinks” to a “neat four by six inches”, and his “home” becomes commercially marketable as a souvenir that can be posted to him by mail. The poem sets up a series of contrasts that suggest the impossible contradictions that thwart any possibility of ever returning to Kashmir in its prelapsarian state, untouched by violence: thus, the speaker holds “the half-inch Himalayas” in his hand and wryly observes that when he revisits Kashmir “the colors won’t be so brilliant, / the Jhelum’s waters so clean, / so ultramarine”. The interplay between vastness and smallness, darkness and light, familiarity and strangeness, proximity and distance, reality and image, is distilled into the final metaphor of the poem:
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped. (29)
The poem employs a spatial imaginary that operates on the principle of inversion – while the mighty Himalayas are scaled down to mere inches that can be held in the palm, reductively situating the sublime landscape of Kashmir within an easily measurable, two-dimensional postcard, the negative acquires a disproportionately large dimension within the abstract, subjective domain of memory and defies any attempt at containment or translation. Ali deftly uses the central image of the picture postcard to suggest how memory itself is ultimately only a story one chooses to re-construct in certain ways; in this instance, his memory of Kashmir, based on his own personal association with the land as his “home”, is fundamentally ruptured by the socio-political turmoil that lies beneath the surface of the “overexposed” beauty of the place, beyond the frame of the photograph, so to speak. The fact that Kashmir is, and will continue to be, accessible only as a text – and a generic one at that, if one considers the predictable, replicable format of the picture postcard – points to the paradox of “belonging” to it. In his analysis of the poem, Matthew Nelson draws attention to the effect of double estrangement achieved through the premise of receiving a picture postcard of “home” from a tourist: “The receipt of such a postcard alienates further, even as it evokes whatever alienation already preceded it. Loss of home is thus figured … as a form of failed sociality” (938). Thus, while the speaker does not shy away from declaring his “love” for Kashmir, he is also painfully aware that this is “the closest [he will] ever be to home”. What is notable about Ali’s poetic craft is that he manages to defamiliarise a popular “sign” of Kashmir – the stock image of its iconic mountains and rivers captured in a picture postcard – and traces it back to an unattainable origin (the “giant negative” that is still “undeveloped”), thus suggesting the inadequacy of both personal memory and popular representation, and offering what Joseph Donahue calls “a psychologically acute anatomy of loss”. The openness of the postcard as a text that can be “read” by anyone en route to its intended recipient also points to the nature of this loss: it is a loss of meaning, since the visual signs with/through which Kashmir becomes identified in the popular imagination also, paradoxically, signal the erosion of “homeliness” from its territory in the psyche of the expatriate subject.
The emotional truth of the disruptive violence experienced by native Kashmiris is often captured by Ali through his use of imagery, at once appropriate for its fidelity to the natural setting and cultural milieu of his poems and striking for its ability to invoke sensory perceptions in unsettling ways. For instance, in “A Dream of Glass Bangles”, the speaker recounts the scene of a midnight raid on his house (which, in the context of Kashmir, could be any household), wherein the comfort and safety of the parents sleeping “warm in a quilt studded / with pieces of mirrors” (32) is suddenly intruded upon by the army surrounding the house. The elemental nature of the imagery employed here – the bangles on the mother’s arms as “waves of frozen rivers”, the army “pulling icicles for torches / off the roofs” and “set[ting] the tips of water on fire”, the air into which the father steps out “a quicksand of snow”, and ultimately the sound of “a widow smashing the rivers / on her arms” (32-33) – combines paradoxical ideas of heat and cold, solidity and fluidity, and thus not only coveys the traumatic impact of the incident on the speaker’s psyche, but also suggests the vulnerability of the interior space of “home” to the precarious environment outside. The deliberate lack of specificity in the poem in terms of where, when, and why this incident took place, points to the pervasiveness and normalisation of violence, while the encoding of such violence in terms of elemental imagery draws attention to the essential unnaturalness of such an order of things. In a sense, both the speaker (presumably a child at the time of the “action” of the poem) and the reader bear witness to the subjective trauma caused by the violent breach of the sanctity of “home”, while simultaneously also recognising the symptomatic nature of such trauma, since this could be any Kashmiri family in any house.
The Kashmir of Ali’s poems is imbued with an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty and melancholy, its social order rendered fragile by the tremendous stress imposed by state-sponsored violence on fundamental human relationships. For instance, “The Floating Post Office” opens with a suspenseful scene where the local residents of Srinagar anxiously await the arrival of the shikara (a kind of gondola) that functions as a kind of postal service. The speaker voices the collective anticipation of the assembled crowd:
Has he been kept from us? Portents
of rain, rumors, ambushed letters . . .
Curtained palanquin, fetch our word,
bring us word: Who has died? Who’ll live? (207)
The spectre of fear and detection – conveyed suggestively through the setting of a scene where rain jostles with rumor and letters may be ambushed – turns civilians into potential criminals and letter-writing into almost an illicit activity subject to state surveillance. Survival hinges upon a word here and is beyond the will and control of the recipients of the letters, the grammatical tense of the verbs (“has died”, “will live”) indicating the degree of helplessness experienced by these people as they wait in the present moment. As the “postman” emerges from the “fog of death” engulfing the city, we register the habitual, ritualistic nature of the unfolding scene. This is not an aberrational, temporary state of emergency; it is an established order where oppression has been routinised and the restriction of communication is recognised as part of “the sentence / passed on [the] city”. In the context of Kashmir, the governmental authority to monitor and punish civilians through the exercise of constitutional measures such as the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) has resulted in the breach of fundamental rights of privacy, life, and justice; both here and in “A Dream of Glass Bangles”, Ali presents human suffering within what Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception, one that operates through “a suspension of the juridical order itself” (4) and creates “a zone of indifference” (23) where the distinction between the legal and the extra-legal, the norm and its abrogation, the inside and the outside is blurred. Within such a system, precarity becomes endemic to everyday life, as is evident from the dramatic tension built into this tacit, covert form of communication is conveyed through the staccato rhythm and tenuous syntax of the lines:
It came close
to reveal smudged black-ink letters
which the postman—he was alive—
gave us, like signs, without a word,and we took them, without a word. (207)
What we witness here is a situation in which life and hope are reduced to mere chance (the letter can, after all, only guarantee that the writer “was alive” at the time of writing it), where the seemingly tranquil romance of the natural surroundings (falling autumn leaves, approaching rain, the sound of a “cymbaled prayer” from a nearby temple) belies the precarious existence of the residents of Kashmir in the near total absence of basic human rights. Typical of his style, Ali uses the letter both as a prop and as a symbol, as a precious material means and as proof of survival in a police state, as well as an emblem of the quotidian forms of repression to which its bearers are subjected. Thus, the code or the language necessitated by such a form of communication (wherein the recipients are periodically given “a new password” by the postman) is described by the speaker as “blood shaken into letters, / [a] cruel primitive script” (207); the imagery combines notions of filial ties, danger, sacrifice, and violence, and thereby contextualises the subjective experience of anguish and loss in terms of a shared “saffron link to the past” (207). Such interweaving of personal feeling with political reality is Ali’s characteristic method of developing a poetic idiom that is aesthetically and culturally rooted in Kashmir, while also being invested with allusions to the extreme order of affairs that make Kashmir an extended “graveyard”. What sustains this “order” – keeps the post office afloat, as it were – is the speaker’s quiet determination to continue to write letters “alive / with love” (208), even as he recognises the mortal risks involved in such communication:
…our each word
in the fog awaits a sentence:
[…]
Our letters will be rowed through olive
canals, tense waters no one can close. (208)
While the remoteness and fragility of “home” is experienced by Ali as an intensely personal feeling, he does make oblique connections with the more specific political circumstances that have caused a violent rupture between the natives of Kashmir and their homeland. Thus, in another poem, “The Correspondent”, Ali employs the device of a dialogue between the speaker and a news reporter who has just returned from Sarajevo with “footage … priceless with sympathy” (209). The dual meanings of “correspondence” – as communication between two characters as well as analogy in terms of the conditions of civic unrest and state oppression that exist in both Bosnia and Kashmir – offer the reader a geopolitical framework to locate and interpret contemporary history. Yet, we are also told at the very outset that the titular correspondent, for whom “the world [is] his schedule”, is eager to leave. It is the construction of Sarajevo and Kashmir as newsworthy stories – where “exploding grenades” serve as the parenthetical “soundtrack”, images of burning wheelchairs and barbed-wire camps can be conveniently fast-forwarded, and the gaze of the dead is “fractured white with subtitles” – that the poem foregrounds (209-10). For the correspondent, Kashmir is a “dream” to which he “wants exclusive rights”; in the pursuit of this dream, he will, the speaker surmises, “erase/ Bosnia” and “rewind to zero” (210). Thus, both Kashmir and Bosnia emerge as substitutable signs in a global language of terrorism and trauma, even as the speaker yearns to have his “aubades” for Kashmir transmitted via satellites. What we as readers realise with the speaker is that Kashmir’s currency is only one of many “stories” vying for visibility in a mediated, networked world, one that the correspondent will need to “revamp” and “reincarnadine” as he “bypass[es] graves that in blacks and whites/ climb ever up the hills” (210). Resonating with the blood imagery used in “The Floating Post Office”, the poem reveals, perhaps with a hint of self-reflexive irony, the violence implicit in the act of imagining and consuming Kashmir as a text and its residents as characters whose “shadow[s]” can be strategically slow-motioned, fast-forwarded, zoomed into, subtitled or erased at will. Each of these poems marks Ali’s engagement with the cultural imaginary about Kashmir, rendered through modes ranging from “landscape photography’s pervasive ironies to the more radical superimposition of the body’s traces on the landscape” (Kabir 55).
Another recurrent theme in Ali’s poetry is migration and exile. Ali explores these themes via history as well as personal experience, often tracing a lineage of physical and cultural movement across borders through the merging of his poetic persona with the lingering “presence” of other characters who are imaginatively reconstructed. In “Snowmen”, the speaker traces a genealogy back into the geological past, his ancestor “a man / of Himalayan snow” who traversed from Samarkand to Kashmir with “a bag / of whale bones: / heirlooms from sea funerals” (34). The natural elements of the landscape become organically integrated into the human body and transform it into one of several components that constitute the poet’s own history. Thus, the ancestor’s breath is “arctic” and his skeleton, “carved from glaciers”, is passed down by “generations of snowmen” to the speaker himself who feels it under his own skin and promises to “ride into spring / on their melting shoulders” (34). In another poem, “The Dacca Gauzes”, the speaker refers to another heirloom his grandmother fondly remembers – the famed muslin of colonial Bengal that she once wore as part of her bridal trousseau and which was subsequently cut into embroidered handkerchiefs and given away to nieces and grand-daughters. The speaker recounts the legendary “texture” of the Dacca gauzes – known as “woven air, running / water, evening dew” – to create a text about its lingering presence-in-absence in the grandmother’s imagination (42). Thus, the speaker deliberately ends the poem with an anecdote about how one autumn morning, when “the air / was dew-starched”, his grandmother pulled her (now lost) six yards “absently through her ring” (43). The speaker also situates this familial tale within the institutionalised discourse of history, through which he has learned how during the colonial period in India “the hands / of weavers were amputated, / the looms of Bengal silenced” to make way for British textiles (42-43). Here, memory itself becomes part of a cultural inheritance based on the verbal transmission of popular stories rather than personal experience, the material object having irrevocably disappeared and becoming only a matter of mythic vernacular narrativisation. The implicit play on the etymological connection between text, texture, and textile is suggestive of the implication of the personal in the political, of the oral and the anecdotal in the documentary and archival forms of history. Ali’s “mapping of personal and collective memories onto different geographical landscapes,” observes Nida Sajid, complicates the “official recording of events … in order to interrupt their linearity and to rupture the artifice of mainstream history” (90).
It is a similar strategy of reviewing history from the margins through the lens of memory and inheritance that Ali employs in “Leaving Sonora”, where the poet of the desert must turn “deep inside himself for shade”, for “[o]nly there do the perished tribes live” (116).
Similarly, in “Poets on Bathroom Walls”, the addressee returns from the toilet “having memorized someone’s graffiti”, the anonymous red scrawls on the bathroom walls serving as a furtive code of communication between two women who, the speaker declares, should meet “despite all the world” (95). If such overlapping identities are imagined in and through the construction of a poetic “self” that is composite, derivative, and representative of a lineage, then Ali also explores the theme of alienation in poems like “Survivor”, where the speaker observes himself from a position of apparent neutrality, as a separate entity resembling him in every aspect of his daily life: opening the refrigerator at night, listening to news from Kashmir on the radio, practising his signature and answering his mail. The schizophrenic projection of his own “self” as a distinct character within the poem signals the speaker’s troubled perspective on, and the consequent lack of identification with, his own existence as the titular survivor of traumatic experience, even as he identifies the likeness between the two:
The mirror gives up
my face to him
He calls to my mother in my voice
She turns
He is breathless to tell her tales
in which I was never found (72-73)
It could be argued that the ambivalence Ali builds into the relation between his poetic “self” and its environment (comprising both human characters and setting) is a manifestation of a deep-seated sense of loneliness that makes it imperative for both the poet and the reader to recognise the necessity as well as the limitations of establishing links with the “other”. The recurrent use of images of mirrors, reflections, photographs, and dreams in these poems suggests the ephemeral nature of recorded history and personal memory, re-membered from shifting perspectives that blur the lines between the two; it also constitutes a poetic rendering of how Ali, as a Kashmiri expatriate, experiences othering both as a political phenomenon and as personal trauma that leads to a questioning of the very ideas of definite origins and singular identities.
In fact, Ali’s poetry abounds in images of desolate landscapes, offering the artistic premise to the poetic speaker to document what he perceives as significant details, but simultaneously also serving as the ground for an imaginative reconstruction of silenced histories. Thus, in “A Wrong Turn”, the speaker encounters “a massacred town” in his dream, one that has been “erased from maps” and contains only signs of abandonment – broken idols at altars, dry wells piled up with bones, cobwebbed booths, and rusted railway tracks. The possibility of “walking among the atrocities” that such a landscape might have witnessed leaves the interpretation of its history open to the speaker’s – and by extension, the reader’s – interpretation within the poetic framework of the dream setting. The fact that it is “[o]nly a wrong turn” (emphasis added) that leads the speaker to this landscape is offset by his confession that this is a recurrent detour in his dreams, implying that what he (and we, as readers) witness here is significant precisely because the poem itself exists in defiance of the “curfew on ghosts” (60).
We find a similar oblique voicing of the absent “other” in poems like “Vacating an Apartment” and “The Previous Occupant”–companion pieces, as it were, that extend the themes of migration, home and exile into the humdrum business of moving houses. In the former, the speaker imagines himself as the “ghost” who moves out “holding tombstones in … [his] hands” as the cleaners wipe away signs of his existence from the house – his smile, “his voicestains”, his posters on the walls, and his “crossed-out lines” at the corner-table – and the landlord gives the new tenants his (the speaker’s) “autopsy”, the new lease agreement (61-62). The contrast between the “efficient” ease of physical movement and the difficulty of a neat emotional disconnect with one’s habitat underlies the seemingly objective account of what is otherwise an unremarkable feature of urban living. If the speaker sees himself as the “other” in this poem, he imagines the eponymous previous occupant of the house he moves into as a lingering presence – another ghost, as it were – whose identity becomes the subject of his compulsive conjecture. It is the little things the previous tenant has left behind – a half-torn horoscope, a half-empty bottle of Flexol – that trigger the speaker’s imagination about who he might have been: “There’s enough missing / for me to know him”. In the speaker’s imagination, his thoughts “cling / in phrases to the frost on the windows” and he stares back through the mirror with “his brown eyes” (63). The mirroring of the “self” in the “other”, which is a technique Ali commonly uses, establishes an affiliation between the two strangers even as we recognise the fact that within the larger cultural code of urban mobility, they are merely replaceable “signs”; it is only through an active act of imaginative identification of/with the “other” that the speaker locates his own “self”:
Now that he’s found me,
my body casts his shadow everywhere.
He’ll never, never move out of here. (64)
The poems discussed so far adequately reveal Ali’s flair for transmuting inherited memory and personal experience into art through the deft use of images and symbols that are not only apposite to his own socio-cultural milieu but also effective in situating his poetry within a larger historical context of migration and loss. While this results in an overwhelming sense of melancholy in a bulk of his poems, there are instances in his oeuvre where Ali opts for wry observation, bordering on humour, rather than the sombre reflection we encounter in his more popular poems. For instance, in “The Fate of the Astrologer / Sitting on the Pavement Outside / the Delhi Railway Station”, the poet offers no more than a pithy verbal snapshot of the titular character by way of nudging the reader to meditate on what it means to live busy, self-absorbed lives in a modern city:
“Pay, pay attention to the sky,”
he shouts to passers-by.
The planets gather dust
from passing trucks. (49)
The irony built into the use of the word “fate” in the title – the astrologer’s own fate, regardless of his supposed professional expertise in predicting the future for others, seems grim in the face of public indifference to his shouts – and the symbolism of dust gathering on his planetary charts mirroring the contrast between vehicular movement and cosmic motion aptly suggest the insular human obsession with immediate concerns. The title of this short piece, written with line breaks like the stanzas themselves, thus functions as much as art as social commentary without resorting to elaboration or overt didacticism. Similarly, in “At the Museum”, Ali uses the iconic bronze figurine of the Harappan dancing girl to speculate about the position of marginalised sections of the population (“servant girl[s]”, “soldiers and slaves”), even in a society as advanced as the Indus Valley civilisation. Thus, he wonders playfully if the sculptor deliberately polished “the ache // off her fingers stiff / from washing the walls // and scrubbing the floors, / from stirring the meat // and the crushed asafoetida / in the bitter gourd” (217). In expressing his gratitude to this “child who had to play woman” and smile at the sculptor, Ali adopts a mock-serious tone that alerts us, the readers of the history this icon embodies, to the politics of labour, its transformation into art and its appropriation into cultural discourse.
It is the same playful engagement with institutionalised history that we also witness in Ali’s revisionary poems featuring characters already well known within the canon of Western literature and culture. In “An Interview with Red Riding Hood, Now No Longer Little”, the eponymous heroine of the much-translated folktale relates how her father was “no ordinary woodsman” and how he became the owner of a timber industry – and she an heiress – by cutting down the forest and combing it for wolves, some of whom “escaped, / like guerrillas, into / the mountains” (98). The obvious possibilities of ecocritical and postcolonial readings of this account of the tale aside, Ali also re-casts Red Riding Hood as a more self-aware and candid agent of her own narrative, one who admits to getting sick of lisping “”Grandma, what big eyes you have!’” (98) and regretfully confesses:
I lied when I said it was dark.
Now I drive through the city,
hearing wolves at every turn.
How warm it was inside the wolf! (99)
The companion piece to this dark but delightful re-telling of the famous tale is “The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’”, where the wolf as speaker demands acknowledgement of his “sense of history”, clarifying that he “did it for posterity, / for kindergarten teachers / and a clear moral” (100). He also claims that he, “a forest-dweller”, knew all along where the old grandmother lived, and could have “gobbled her up” years ago if he wanted, that he knew when his belly was being filled with garbage and stones by the huntsman and ran with their weight “simply so children could laugh”; in fact, it was his “generous sense of plot”, his “perfect sense of timing” that made him act as he did (100-101). In this reversal of narrative and moral agency, Ali makes the reader revise the Western hegemonic cultural codes that have traditionally served as the interpretative framework to understand and define the category of the “human” in exclusionary, oppositional terms.
In the third piece belonging to this group, “Hansel’s Game”, Ali introduces sinister themes of sexual exploitation, violence, and murder, while retaining the same casual lightness of tone as in the previous poems. Here we encounter Hansel remembering those “happily ever after” years when he “played with every Gretel in town / including Gretel, my sister”. He, “a big boy now” already knew that the witch “had to be somewhere near” and that “she would end badly”. This familiar tale of a journey “from the womb to the grave” is given a chilling twist when Hansel reveals that he only “played innocent”:
And Gretel and I lived
happily ever after. And still do:
We have a big ice-box
in our basement
where we keep the witch.
Now and then we take portions of her
to serve on special occasions.
And our old father washes
her blood from the dishes. (102-103)
This self-conscious subversion of binaries – the child and the adult, the innocent and the wicked, the victim and the victimiser –leads to an interrogation of the ways in which we have been culturally trained to “read” stories, and prompts us to reconsider the power dynamics underlying such categories. As readers we recognise the postmodernist tendencies of such retellings (similar to those of Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt) in their capacity to draw attention to the constructed nature of such “stories”, the artifice underlying the art, even as we locate them in Eurocentric pedagogic, literary, and cultural traditions.
If Ali’s posthumous reputation rests on his ability to successfully distil his multilingual, multicultural heritage and experience into poetry that easily transcends national borders, the persistent theme of the desire to “return” to an imagined “home” – so common amongst diasporic writers of the late twentieth century as to risk becoming a sociological cliché – turns in his hands not merely into a literary theme but also an instrument of formal innovation. Malcolm Woodland reads in Ali’s practice of the ghazal as a transnational poetic form (originating in Persia, coming to India via Urdu, translated from Arabic, and finally composed in English) in his final years “a radically divided stance toward nativist nostalgia and hybridist innovation” (267). If Ali’s faithful use of the technique of the refrain at the end of every couplet of a ghazal is, as Woodland contends, a linguistic mirroring of the desire to return (as repeated phrase/text) to a point of “origin” but always in an altered context (253), one might also propose that this reflects a poststructuralist move toward the use of a sign whose meanings shift with every iteration, and a corresponding awareness on the part of the poet of the provisional, inconclusive nature of any quest for identity. It is a testament to Ali’s genius as a poet that he achieves this degree of (self-)recognition by adhering to many of the original formal tenets of the ghazal even as he articulates them in a novel (Western) context. It is fitting, therefore, that Ali should end one of his last ghazals, “In Arabic” with a reference to his own name (another convention of the form), employing a poetic persona that translates, as it were, himself into a language that he shares with his English reader:
They ask me to tell them what Shahid means: Listen, listen:
It means “The Belovéd” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic. (373)
It is this cosmopolitan artistic sensibility that imbues Ali’s work and takes it beyond the context of parochial identity politics. Resistant to the very idea of being typecast as a victim or hailed as a “nationalist” poet (Ghosh 318-19), Ali mapped his writing on a global canvas whose coordinates were not determined by his own ethnicity or physical location. Thus, we find within his oeuvre numerous poems with epigraphs and dedications to writers and texts dispersed across historical periods, cultural locations and genres, ranging from William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, G.M. Hopkins and W.B. Yeats to Emily Dickinson, James Merrill and Hart Crane, from Ghalib to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Begum Akhtar, Mahmoud Darwish to Alexander Pushkin, Edward Gibbon to Saleem Kidwai, and from Gilgamesh to the Bible and the Koran. Ali displays an acumen for seamlessly weaving these myriad influences into an intertextual web, wherein the “universal” and the “local” coexist in an imaginative spatio-temporal contiguity. Thus, in “After Seeing Kozinstev’s King Lear in Delhi”, the poet casually reflects on the history of Chandni Chowk as a globalized marketplace (where “perfumes from Isfahan,/ fabrics from Dacca, essence from Kabul,/ glass bangles from Agra” were sold) as well as its present status as a commercial hub (where beggars occupy the tombs of “unknown nobles and foreign saints”, “hawkers sell combs and mirrors”, and a “Bombay spectacular” is screened across the road from a Sikh temple). The resonance between the (post)colonial legacy of a specific locality in the city – the street through which Zafar, the poet-Emperor was led (“his feet in chains”) by the British to witness his sons’ hanging and subsequently exiled and buried in Burma – and the fate of the tragic protagonist of the much adapted Shakespearean play, extends and expands the scope of the “literary” without reproducing the privilege of the Western “canon” over its the colonial “other”. This corresponds to what Baidik Bhattacharya identifies as a characteristic of Anglophonic postcolonial writing – the impulse “to carry signs and traces of other languages under its own skin and to accommodate disparate histories, conflicting temporalities and discreet territories within its being” (26-27).
While most of his poetry is marked by lyrical brevity, there is a persistent tendency in Ali towards an imaginative telescoping of multiple histories that suggests a trans-national, epic frame of consciousness. It is useful in this context to refer to Sneharika Roy’s definition of the “postcolonial epic” as a genre that employs “a poetics of migration to articulate a politics of migrating identities irreducible to a single national form” (19). Such a “poetics of migration” manifests both as form and theme in Ali’s poetry as he foregrounds, in the context of a globalized world where migration is the accepted norm, the emotional immediacy of individual experience and memory typical of the lyric and locates it alongside the epic concern with the larger context of collective histories. For instance, in “I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror”, Ali employs the central conceit of a “mirrored continent” (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil “without forests”, and Peru “without rain”) that he visualizes as he journeys across the desert towards Utah, “passing skeletal/ figures carved in 700 B.C.” (161-63). References to “blindfolded men”, “drunk soldiers” and a “wounded republic” allude to the state of civil war and environmental crisis in many of these countries even as the elusive images, mere reflections on glass and water surfaces, ultimately vanish. Ali’s awareness of the realities of the contemporary world order is thus transformed into personal(ized) “reflections” that retain an essential lyricism as well as demand a politically engaged reading. Though Ali’s poetry does not feature grand characters and actions that can be readily identified as belonging to the traditional generic category of the epic, we do find in his writing a compulsive desire to cross borders that separate the here and the elsewhere, the now and the then, even as it is marked by a perennial (and perennially unfulfilled) urge to belong. Not surprisingly, many of Ali’s poems feature airports, thresholds that rigorously mark nationalist identities but also facilitate the crossing of borders between nations. In one of such poems, “Barcelona Airport”, the speaker declares at the security gate that he carries with him only his heart, the “first terrorist” (284). In this act of self-declaration, Ali defines the migrant poet as an emblematic figure whose art defies confinement within the material and ideological limits imposed by nation-states, and it is perhaps in this respect that Ali’s contribution to contemporary English poetry is the greatest.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.
Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems. Norton, 2009.
Benvenuto, Christine. “Agha Shahid Ali”, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 43, no.2, 2002, pp. 261-273.
Bhattacharya, Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalization. London: Routledge, 2018.
Donahue, Joseph. “Exile Returned”, Bookforum <Agha Shahid Ali’s poems are charmed whispers that can console and devastate – Joseph Donahue – Bookforum Magazine> Accessed on 29 June, 2022.
Ghosh, Amitav. “‘The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn”, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy, vol. 5, no.3,2002, pp. 311-323.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Nelson. Matthew. “Agha Shahid Ali and the Phenomenology of Postcolonial Nostalgia”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 22, no.7,2020, pp. 933-950.
Roy, Sneharika. The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh. London: Routledge, 2018.
Sajid, Nida. “The Transnational Cartography of Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry,” Rocky Mountain Review 66 (2012), pp. 85-92.
Woodland, Malcolm. “Memory’s Homeland: Agha Shahid Ali and the Hybrid Ghazal”, ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 32, nos. 2-3, 2005, pp. 249-272.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry
Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003)
Rooms Are Never Finished (2001)
The Country Without a Post Office (1997)
The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992)
A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991)
A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987)
The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987)
In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979)
Bone Sculpture (1972)
Translations
The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992)
Others
Editor, Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000)
T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986)
Rukmini Bhaya Nair, “Ode to Our Languages,” Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems, Penguin Books India, 2004, pp. 204-210.