Annotating Salman Rushdie

Reading the Postcolonial

Vijay Mishra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351006569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How does one read a foundational postcolonial writer in English with declared Indian subcontinent roots?

This book looks at ways of reading, and uncovering and recovering meanings, in postcolonial writing in English through the works of Salman Rushdie. It uses textual criticism and applied literary theory to resurrect the underlying literary architecture of one of the world's most controversial, celebrated and enigmatic authors. It sheds light upon key aspects of Rushdie's craft and the literary influences that contribute to his celebrated hybridity. It analyses how Rushdie uses his exceptional mastery of European, Anglo-American, Indian, Arabic and Persian literary and cultural forms to cultivate a fresh register of English that expands Western literary traditions. It also investigates an archival modernism that characterizes the writings of Rushdie.

Drawing on the hitherto unexplored Rushdie Emory Archive, this book will be essential reading for students of literature, especially South Asian writing, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, linguistics and history.

Part I
ANNOTATING SALMAN RUSHDIE

In his valuable contribution to the Stephen Barney-edited Annotation and Its Texts (1991), Traugott Lawler had reminded us that writers either self-annotate if they are impulsively driven to declaring meaning to the “common” reader or, less impulsively one suspects, they simply leave us to annotate obscure references, intertextual homage and the like however we wish. The latter, of course, is not an open invitation, because both authorial intentionality and aesthetic design (and by this one means the conventions of the genre, the limits of the author’s own knowledge, the constraints of one’s own analytical procedures) are to be taken into account. In the Salman Rushdie corpus, the invitation is to examine both kinds of annotation, and we proceed with the exercise of annotating Rushdie with both impulses in mind, and both, as Lawler reminded us, “validate” the principles of critical annotation. Before I turn to Rushdie’s self-annotations, it is useful to look at an instance of a list of words and phrases that a translator would want annotated and explained. The Emory Rushdie Archive carries one such list for The Moor’s Last Sigh (30/9).¹ The list has been made by the Portuguese translator of the novel, Paulo Henriques Britto. Although Rushdie’s annotations are not given, the list gives us an insight into those words and phrases that a common reader may want explained. There are some like masala, garam masala (343), khazana (128), beedis (130) channa (131), baap-ré (135), chhota peg (138), crorepati (159), kulfi (206), ek-dum (244), dosa (249), bhaenchod (256), khalaas (275, 376), dhabas (287), laad sahibs (287), kofta (297), keema (297), one-paisa (302), chor bazaar (312), bhangra (354), rutputty (355) and acha (376), which are either hobson-jobsons or part of Indian colonial jargon also found in the OED, or are common Indian food. Does one annotate them or examine them as part of a larger argument about Rushdie’s use of colonial language? On the other hand, other terms on the list would require annotating or translating through equivalent words in the corresponding social idiolect of the receptor language, in this case Portuguese. The list here would include jhunghunna (124, 330), nimbu pani (138), bewaqoof (138), lafanga (149), asli mirch masala (221), baccchis (222), dupatta (223), motu-kalu (230), muggermutch (242), funtooshed (253), om mani padme om (260), pranam (260), salah (262), bas (269), jopadpatti shacks (302), bhaiyyas (302), bakvaas (334), maza (353), Doordarshan (364) and pagalpan (377). Except for a few of the words and phrases – asli mirch masala, muggermutch, for instance, which do require annotating – most of the others are self-annotated. But even when they are self-annotated, there are matters of interpretation that require a closer look.²

Some of the more striking examples of self-annotation in Rushdie are those which make sense only if retranslated back into the source language. One such example is the nickname of Saleem, “Piece-of-the-Moon” (MC 11, 101, 107)³ which is a literal translation of cānd kā ṭukṛā, a motherly expression in Hindi-Urdu for a child, and used, to cite just one instance among hundreds, in the 1948 Bollywood film Milan by Nargis (Manju) to describe Dilip Kumar (Mohan): sac muc tum cānd kā ṭukṛā ho (“yes indeed you are truly exceptional [my beloved]”). “ ‘Piece of the moon’ my mother called me”, we read in a biographical note in the Rushdie Archive (212/4; 04–29 redacted). In the first citation (MC 11), the expression is one of a number used for Saleem; in the second (MC 101), Amina Sinai asks her husband to feel her belly: “such a big strong boy; our little piece-of-the-moon”; and in the third instance a series of associations connects “Zulfikar” (a crescent-shaped sword, “the two-pronged sword carried by Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad” [MC 61]) with “fatal moons echoed by my mother’s love-name for me, her innocent chand-ka-tukra” (MC 107). The point here is – and something that monolingual postcolonial academics don’t seem to get it – that “piece-of-the-moon”, a literal translation of cānd kā ṭukṛā, does not carry the latter’s idiomatic meaning in the vernacular sociolect. In other words, when retranslated back into the original (which is given by Rushdie himself in MC 107), the Hindi speaker does not literally translate the expression; he/she does an idiomatic or proverbial translation where cānd kā ṭukṛā does not generate “piece-of-the-moon”. It is this complex semiotics which explains why for the non-Hindi/Urdu speaker the expression, in its English translation, is quite meaningless. Is the child a moon-rock, or even a piece of cheese, the latter given that the moon is idiomatically made of cheese? For the Hindi speakers, though, a reverse translation takes them to the original cānd kā ṭukṛā which is not “piece-of-the-moon” but “apple of one’s eye”. In the Hindi translation of the novel (Priyadarśan 1997: 8), quite correctly, cānd kā ṭukṛā is given but if we were to translate this back into English the translation would not be “piece-of-the moon” unless one were using it almost as a hobson-jobson. In a parallel case, āṁk kā tārā translated into the meaningless “the star of one’s eye” (and not “the apple of one’s eye”) would then follow precisely the processes of reverse translation we have noted. Here, then, is a writer annotating with an eye to the implied ideal reader of the text who, in this instance, is a bilingual. The same principle is at work with the name of Saladin Chamchawala (literally “Saladin the spoon person”), who is called “Spoono, my old Chumch” in The Satanic Verses, where “chum” is carried over into chamcha as well. To call someone a spoon is meaningless in English although proverbial expressions such as “he should have a long spoon that sups with the Devil” or ”to be born with a silver spoon” may be metaphorically applied to Saladin. In Hindi, though, the meaning is quite clear: a chamcha (camcā) is a “yes-man or a sycophant”, which is why Gibreel Farishta calls Saladin “an English chamcha” (SV 83), reflecting as well on the “Chamcha” or servant who fed Mughal emperors with a spoon (Dhondy 1991: 74). The latter remark, for a Bombaywallah like Saladin Chamcha, has a special sting if we recall that in Bombay slang, a “sala chamcha” is the very unendearing “bastard homosexual”.⁴ As in the case of “piece-of-the-moon”, “Spoono” too as a literal translation (chamcha for spoon) requires an idiomatic retranslation of the source word by the implied ideal reader.

Sometimes self-annotation takes the form of lessons in grammar and syntax. Two instances may be cited here, the first from Midnight’s Children; the second from Shame. The three young trackers of the Pakistan “Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities” better known by its acronym CUTIA (which means bitch but also, in parts of the Indian diaspora, an arsehole when the first letter is pronounced as a palatal), refer to their older accredited tracker, Saleem Sinai, as “buddha, ‘old man’ ” which leads Rushdie (or the implied narrator) to remark:

O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word ‘buddha,’ meaning old man, is pronounced with the D’s hard and plosive. But there is also Buddha, with soft-tongued D’s, meaning he-who-achieved-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree… .

(MC 339)

“Buddha”, of course, has already appeared as one of the many nicknames of Saleem on the first page of the novel, and here it receives a fuller annotation. The Urdu word for “old man” is more commonly spelt būṛhā (or būḍhā), but buḍḍha is an acceptable variant spelling with voiced non-aspirate and aspirate cerebrals. The /d/ and /dh/ of “Buddha” (the enlightened Gautama Siddhartha) are, respectively, voiced non-aspirate and aspirate dentals. Rushdie gives it a clearer descriptive explanation than the phonemic ones given here, but the annotation is meant to use the ambiguity (the “fortunate ambiguity”) to good effect. In Shame, the word sharam (“shame”) gets an even longer annotation.

Sharam, that’s the word. For which the paltry ‘shame’ is a wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, shìn rè mìm (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance… . What’s the opposite of shame? What’s left when sharam is subtracted? That’s obvious: shamelessness.

(Shame 38–39)

“Shame” the title of the novel is thus inadequate as a translation of sharam, the Urdu word (hence written, unlike the Sanskrit-derived Hindi script, from right to left) śarm (from Persian śarm), “shame, bashfulness, modesty”. The opposite of sharam is, however, given only in English (“shamelessness”) and not in Urdu (beśaram), although the intransitive verb form sharmàna “to feel shame” (Shame 39) gets a full gloss. Later we find that sharam is also linked to Sufiya Zenobia’s ferocious violence (Shame 139). Shame is not guilt, and the distinction is in many ways at the centre of the novel. Whereas guilt creates a personal dilemma and leads to the tragic temper where responsibility is located in a self which alone must come to terms with guilt, shame is a collective, social unease about letting everyone else down. In this respect, shame does not produce the same degree of introspection and is more comfortable with the genre of melodrama than tragedy. Shame, sharam, the affect, the precognitive sign on the body (the downcast eyes, the evasive look), before reason gives it a causal connection, remains elusive, untranslatable. In Shame, Rushdie writes about untranslatable words and refers to it as a law.

The law is called takallouf. To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words. Takallouf is a member of that opaque, world-wide sect of concepts which refuse to travel across linguistic frontiers: it refers to a form of tongue-tying formality, a social restraint so extreme as to make it impossible for the victim to express what he or she really means, a species of compulsory irony which insists, for the sake of good form, on being taken literally. When takallouf gets between a husband and a wife, look out.

(Shame 104)

The Urdu word takalluf/takallouf from Arabic takalluf (“formality of behavior” hence “Why such formality, such takalluf?” [MC 280]) signifies laws which are internal to a culture. The word allows Rushdie to spell out a principle of postcolonial/multicultural recognition (after Charles Taylor [1994]) in that the reader is required to purchase or invest in what may be called cultural capital of the other. There is a larger principle at work here because throughout the Rushdie corpus are scattered words whose meanings “unlock a society” and for which annotations are necessary.

When the ten-year old Saladin Chamchawala finds a wallet lying in the street outside his Scandal Point home, he opens it to find in it not cheap Indian rupees with no international cache but ‘‘real money, negotiable on black markets … pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water” (SV 35). The word “Vilayet” does not require annotation because its antecedent is the fabled country of which London is the capital. “Vilayet” as “Bilayut, Billait” is also a “Hobson-Jobson” (hereafter in regular font and as common noun) as in Yule’s dictionary of hobson-jobsons we read that “wilayat is the usual form in Bombay” (Yule 93–94). The word, in its Turkish use (from the Arabic welāyeh), makes its way into the OED (“a province of Turkey”) and so its general meaning may be discovered with some lexical fossicking. What is a little curious about boy Saladin’s excitement is his reference to “across the black water” which coming as it does after “black markets” may have a more sinister meaning for a reader. For the Hindi reader, a reverse translation back to the source language holds the key, as the sea as “black water” is in fact the kālā pānī. Although Saladin is a Muslim, the implied author inserts the more general Hindu fear of crossing the sea, the kālā pānī, as it meant loss of caste and for earlier migrants to the plantation colonies of the Empire, indenture and servitude. Saladin, as a Muslim, does not lose his caste, but he certainly loses belief in Islam once he makes his way to Vilayet, where he in fact eats pork.

D. F. McKenzie had referred to the exclusion of the “distracting complexities of linguistic interpretation and historical explanation” (1999: 15) in the purely scientific understanding of textual bibliography. With the postcolonial, linguistic and historical explanations are pivotal. I turn to instantiations of these at this juncture. At one point in Midnight’s Children, Saleem misses his “necessary ear” because for two days Padma, his first “reader”, had walked out of Saleem’s life. Why should he be left alone when others, notably, the god Ganesha, sat through the recitation of an infinitely greater epic and was its amanuensis. Saleem reminisces:

When Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, dictated his masterpiece to elephant-headed Ganesh, did the god walk out on him halfway? He certainly did not. (Note that, despite my Muslim background, I’m enough of a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, and actually I am very fond of the image of trunk-nosed, flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!).

(MC 149)

Hindu aficionados around the world were affronted. How could Rushdie get it wrong? Yes, Valmiki wrote the great epic, but Ganesh (Ganesha) is not the “necessary ear” of this epic; he is of the much grander epic, the Mahābhārata, where Vyasa, the narrator, recounts the story and Ganesha is the ever-patient amanuensis. Does the passage require a counter-annotation since Rushdie has already annotated both Valmiki and by extension implied that in this novel a decidedly Indian mode of composition or technique of narration underpins Saleem’s discourse? Do we need to correct this as readers have done? Do Bombayites, and Indian Muslims especially, get caught when it comes to understanding details of Hindu epics which they know only through Bombay/Bollywood talkies? Rushdie clearly took the error seriously and wrote, within two years of the publication of Midnight’s Children, an “Errata” or an “Enarratio” which he subtitled “Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children” (IH 22–25). Rushdie sees Saleem’s “error” as a symptom of remembrance over historical fact, how one’s memorial construction of events becomes more important and even more true than events as empirical fact. And so throughout the novel there are many inaccuracies – L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction: Scribes scholars and annotations
• Part I Annotating Salman Rushdie
• Part II Rushdie annotations: the classic corpus
• Select bibliography
• Index