Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels

Nadia Butt

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110387117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book places transcultural memory in the South Asian cultural and literary context. Divided into two parts, the book first defines transcultural memory in the age of globalised modernity both as a theory and social practice. Then it examines contemporary Indo-English novels from India and Pakistan with the theoretical and methodological tool of transcultural memory to shed new light on the connection between memory and modernity, and memory and South Asian cultures in the wake of new social and political transformations on the Indian subcontinent. A special focus on commemorative tropes in the novels not only show the possibility of a dialogue with different versions of the past, but also how such a dialogue shapes processes of remembrance between and beyond borders. Hence, the books comes up with alternative ways of reading the Indo-English novels, divesting the concept of (trans)cultural memory from its Euro- centrism and claiming it as equally significant in comprehending the new configurations of memory and modernity in non-Western locations.

1 Introduction: Rewriting the Past – Memory, History and the Indo-English Novel of the 1980s and 1990s

The novel has become the leading hero in
the drama of literary development in our time
precisely because it best of all reflects the
tendencies of a new world still in the making; it
is, after all, the only genre born of this new world
and in total affinity with it. (Bakhtin 1981, 7)

[The novel] tells us there are no rules. It
hands down no commandments. We have to
make up our own rules as best as we can, make
them up as we go along. (Rushdie 1991, 423)

The emergence of a global literature
signals a decisive world-historical turn: the
prospect that modernity is not merely a
transient or provincial Western phenomenon,
but instead has become the universal and
perhaps permanent condition of humanity and
therefore the inevitable subject of any literature
that would represent contemporary existence.
(Valdez Moses 1995, xii)1

The emergence of the Indo-English novels (see Afzahl Khan 1993) of memory by writers from the Indian subcontinent defines new literary developments in the genre of contemporary fiction in English, and is the focus of this study. The partition of the subcontinent into two separate nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the waves of globalisation in the post-partition era are conducive to shaping the literary imagination of the writers from this region - imagination which goads them into recollecting the individual and collective past of different ethnicities and cultures in the face of political change in their writings. In fact, political revolutions on the twentieth-century Indian subcontinent provide the backdrop to the literary representation of transcultural memory, which underlines the dynamics of cultural reconfigurations across national and cultural borders in the domain of fiction. By emphasising the representation of worldwide cultural Communications in examining narratives of memory, I highlight the phenomena of “overlapping territories, intertwined histories” as Edward W. Said observes (1994 [1993], Ch. 1, 3 - 61).2 It is in light of Said’s interpretation of ‘territory and history’ that I elaborate not only the theory of transcultural memory, but also introduce different ways of defining memory and memory cultures in the works of writers from the Indian subcontinent.

In pre-partition times, prominent novelists from the subcontinent such as R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao or Ahmed Ali treated historical memory in their narratives apart from the ethnic differences of Indians. However, the eventual rise of a national movement and the consequent spread of communalism put an end to such perceptions of a common history and changed the map of what had been a colonially united India. Narayan’s trilogy Swami and Friends (1935), for example, set in pre-independence days in India, in a fictional town called Malgudi, recollects the story of a ten-year-old school boy at Albert Mission School whose life is dramatically changed when Rajan, a symbol of colonial super power joins the school; Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), named after a small village in South India, is a text of the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s that takes as its central concern the participation of the village in the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi; or Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) nostalgically chronicles the passing of the traditional Muslim aristocracy in light of encroaching British colonialism in the early twentieth century. These examples demonstrate that the political is always intertwined with the private in the fiction of the 1930s and 1940s when the Independence Movement was gathering momentum in the subcontinent. The novelists, previously preoccupied with a mutual memory of colonial India, however, were compelled to experience a ‘split’ in memory after the partition of the subcontinent into two separate nation-states in 1947 and later a third one, Bangladesh, in 1971. How the genre of memory fiction engages with such a sudden ‘split’ in an earlier mutual memory is one of my central concerns here. In the memory novels in English in the post-partition period, major writers such as Amitav Ghosh from India and Bapsi Sidhwa from Pakistan wrestle with ‘divided memories and histories’ in order to ask the reader if it is possible to ‘divide’ centuries’ long mutual cultural heritage by merely dividing territory into two new nation-states. Ghosh raises the question in his novel The Shadow Lines (1988): “How can anyone divide memory?” (2005 [1988], 214) whereas Sidhwa’s narrator in Cracking India (1988) inquires: “Can one break a country?” (2006 [1988], 101). Because of their associations with a common history in their narratives of memory, I have brought the Pakistani and Indian novelists writing in English under the umbrella term of ‘Indo-English’ (see Rao 2004,1-31)3 to address their distinct treatment of memory and history from a variety of perspectives.

The Indo-English novel first received global attention with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and its worldwide recognition through the Booker Award. The novel has not only given voice to the Indians and their history, but generated international awareness among writers and readers that India has to tell her stories from the pre-and post-partition debris of memory. As Rushdie states in Midnight’s Children, “There are so many stories to tell, too many, an excess of intertwined lives, events, miracles, places, rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane” (1981 [1995], 9). An important aspect to which Rushdie draws our attention is the interaction of historical and individual forces in fiction through the filter of memory. The oeuvres of writers with heterogeneous ethnic, religious and social backgrounds from the Indian subcontinent such as Bapsi Sidhwa, Amitav Ghosh, Zulfikar Ghose, Sunetra Gupta or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are replete with political as well as private remembrances as their narrators/protagonists go down memory lane, for these literary artists are resolved to present ‘their version of the past’ in our fast changing present, flooded with travel and cultural translation, and transnational and transcultural phenomena. This is why, despite discussing the Indo-English novel with a special reference to the events and the effects of partition, and to the experience of exile and expatriation on the psyche of the writers, I place it in the global setting to gain a broader perspective on the writers’ approach to the connection of the subcontinent with other histories and civilisations, for example, with Africa in the memory narrative of Moyez J. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) or with the USA in Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants (1988) or with Europe in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992).

Pakistani critic Tariq Rahman points out that unlike the more established field of Indian literature in English (see also Verma 2000),4 which has pioneers such as Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, Pakistani writing in English has a longer tradition in poetry with only two major novelists of international renown: Bapsi Sidhwa and Zulfikar Ghose (1991,1-14). However, Pakistani journalist and short-story writer Muneeza Shamsie highlights that a significant number of Pakistani first and second generation expatriate writers in the last thirty years such as Nadeem Aslam, Adam Zameenzad, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid as well as their senior counterparts Tariq Ali, Aamer Hussein and Sara Suleri have drawn the attention of the reading public to issues concerning post-partition Pakistan as well as Pakistani diasporic communities abroad (1998, xxi-xxxi). Since writers such as Ghose and Zameenzad claim themselves to be writers with multiple or no cultural belongings, the identity of a ‘true’ Pakistani writer remains a disputed terrain. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s opinion on Indian literature in English that its “history is scattered, discontinuous, and transnational” (2003, 25 - 26) can also be applied to Pakistani writing especially when the roots of most of Indian and Pakistani writers are dislocated as well as relocated.

Meenakshi Mukherjee’s classification of the Indian novel in English gives us an overview of historical developments in the genre of the novel in English on the Indian subcontinent. According to Mukherjee, the Indian novel in English since the 1920s has passed through three different phases,5 which are the phases of the historical novel (1920s-1930s), the socio-political novel (1930s-1940s), and the novel of self-identity including the ‘psychological novel’ (1950s and 1960s) (Mukherjee 1971, 21). Viney Kirpal chooses to address novels of the 1980s and 1990s to emphasise different trends and innovative narrative strategies in Indian fiction since she considers these phases to be the most important in the history of the Indian novel. She highlights that “politics - national and international” (1990, xvi) is the central theme of the novelists of the 1980s and 1990s who are the major focus of this study. Kirpal claims that Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was vital in initiating a ‘new’ phase of Indian writing in English (1990, xvi) as it was after its publication that novelists were inspired to examine the relationship between national issues and the individual from a broader horizon (see also Riemenschneider 2005, 20 - 41). They looked back on the issues of the freedom struggle, the Independence Movement around 1947, the partition in 1947, the Emergency in India from 1975 to 1977, the India-China War in 1962, the India-Pakistan Wars in 1965 and 1971, the fall of Dhaka and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 in order to tackle these issues from the vantage point of our changing perception of cultural and national differences pervading the private and public sphere.

A considerable number of novels from this particular phase take into account contemporary politics as central to individual, family, community and nation. For example, Clear Light ofDay (1980) by Anita Desai centres on a family in the throes of the partition of India in 1947, and Shame (1983) by Salman Rushdie is concerned with the downfall of Pakistan under the yoke of a corrupt ruling elite in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, Indian writers were once again inclined to set the individual, family and community into a political context to address important political issues in the contemporary subcontinent within the realm of fiction. Beethoven Among the Cows (1994) by Rukun Advani deals with the Babri Mosque crisis6 between Hindus and Muslims in 1992 (among many other political topics) in narrating the story of two brothers, whereas The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy sets the story of twins against the backdrop of communism in India in 1969 and the state-sponsored perpetuation of the Hindu caste system. On the Pakistani side, Ghose and Sidhwa, writing in the 1980s and 1990s, were engaged with the repercussions of the partition on the various ethnicities of the subcontinent in order to affirm that the political invariably dominates the private sphere. They recollect the roots of political tension between India and Pakistanin their fiction with the aim of reminding the reader to overcome cultural clashes, which only cause more hate and violence.

If we throw a cursory glance at the novels of the 1980s and 1990s (see Singh 1991; Devy 1994, 7-18; Shukla and Shukla 2002,131-141), we notice that a number of novelists present different accounts of history in the fictional domain. While exploring their accounts of history, we encounter the representation of ‘shared memories’ or ‘intertwined memories’ in fiction with which this study is concerned. I argue that it is through these ‘shared memories’ in fiction that the writers take into account present-day cultural complexity and plurality in their writing in the wake of “disjunction and difference in the global cultural economy” (Appadurai 1996, 27-47). In other words, their treatment of memory reflects worldwide cultural transformations on the societal and communal level. Thus, memory acts as a mode of bridging a) territorial (physical) distances and b) historical (abstract) divisions.

By focusing on memory as a narrative and thematic device in fiction, my aim is to explain how the selected Indo-English novels interrogate the idea and practice of memory as an individual and collective experience. At the same time, I attempt to point out how a survey of these novels demands that we ‘rethink Eurocentrism’ (see Shohat and Stam 1994, Ch. 1,13 - 54) in our increasingly transcultural world, that is, a world of enormous cultural interaction and exchange, a world in which Europe and its ‘Others’ are no longer locked in their isolated spheres, but are bound to influence and prevail upon each other. Therefore, this study attempts to revise the more established definitions of the memory novel by introducing the theory of transcultural memory. For the aim of this study is to grasp the implications of mnemonic processes in the narratives of East-West encounters from a different angle, and to broaden the horizon of interpreting the genre of the memory novel itself in contemporary times.

The fiction of the 1980s and 1990s represents the most fertile as well as the most important phase of the Indo-English novels of memory. The narrator and the narrated characters in these narratives look back critically thereby rewriting the past and history. It is important, however, not to look at these representations only in terms of ‘colonial’ or ‘post-colonial’ memories as many cultural theorists, such as Simon Featherstone (2005, 167-200), tend to do, but rather as memories rooted in global cultural forms of blending and borrowings, transcending and crossing-over the centre-periphery divide that is thought to be central by post-colonial theorists in their approach to literature. Frank Schulze-Engler warned back in 1992 that postcolonial theory reproduces “the very same binary opposition between ‘Europe’ and its ‘Others’ that it actually seeks to overcome” (1992, 322). It is with the goal of thinking beyond such binaries that Arjun Appadurai also clarifies that the “new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models” (1996, 32). In short, memory narratives demonstrate a space of interconnected memories rather than a world in which the West needs to be seen as set apart from the rest of the world.

The publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the 1980s also coincided with a sudden popularity of postcolonial theory and discourse, mainly initiated by the book The Empire Writes Back in 1989 by Australian writers Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffins. Writers from the subcontinent, like writers from other former colonies, were being discussed within the historical frame of colonisation and decolonisation. In this way, “postcolonial literature” set itself “as a homogenous body of literature” which “defines through the effects of colonialism” (Schulze-Engler 1992, 322). Being aware of the pitfalls of postcolonial theory, Robert JC Young chose to introduce “tricontinentalism” (2001, 204) as an alternative term in his ground-breaking work Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) in order to emphasise the transnational locations and the political implications of the discourse of colonialism and imperialism. However, the term ‘tricontinentalism’ neither stripes the postcolonial theory of its focus on necessary cultural difference and opposition, nor does it elaborate on the present-day flow of cultural images across borders. In other words, the term is l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Rewriting the Past–Memory, History and the Indo-English Novel of the 1980s and 1990s
• 2 Memory and Transculturality
• 3 Literature and Transcultural Memory
• 4 Novels of Political Memories: Partition and Reconciliation
• 5 Novels of Private Memories: Through the Looking Glass
• 5.3 Between Calcutta and London: The ambivalence of transcultural remembering in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992)
• 6 Rerouting and Remapping: The Indo-English Novel of Transcultural Memory after 2000
• 7 Conclusion: ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index