Varied voices from homes away from home
Arun Gaur

Away: The Indian writer as an Expatriate
edited by Amitava Kumar. Penguin Books. Pages xxvi+399. Rs. 395.

TOO cold-bloodedly Nirad Chaudhary passed his indictment against Gandhi in early 1960s: "After bestowing fulsome praise on Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru as the uncrowned king of India and emphasising with what appeared like a licking of lips that he was a ‘Harrow boy’, ‘Cambridge graduate’, and ‘Barrister’, Mahatma Gandhi went on to declare that ‘our future presidents will not be required to know English’." Thus Gandhi himself furnished an illustration of how we "indulge in grotesque antics of alternating genuflection and defiance before the Englishman." Despite its cold-bloodedness the indictment is a neat, provocative, and even an impossibly explosive piece of dialectics. It would make many a soul turn in their graves. Much water has flowed under the bridges of the Thames and the Ganges since Chaudhary’s statement. With the erosion of the ironic edges its ambiguity has become an accepted fact in the literary and critical canon.

Through a selection from the writings of 33 figures — all well known names — the present volume seeks to examine primarily the growing relationship between the Indian expatriate and the West. As we progress through the selections, we find that the relation is no more a simple question of "genuflection and defiance". Diaspora has become much more involved.

Early Indian response to the West was typically unpleasant. No doubt Dean Mahomed could become the "shampooing surgeon" of Brighton in 1820s, and Sunity Devee, an Indian princess, could find queen Victoria "an ideal ruler, and an ideal woman", others, including Tagore and Gandhi, had bitter memories of the West. At those specific historic junctures, the nationalist leaders could not do otherwise. Subhas Chandra Bose’s Cambridge and Oxford letters of 1921 express poignantly his determination to leave the ICS: "It will be a galling thing for me to sign the covenant which is an emblem of servitude."

Some of the subsequent writings continued to air these anti-West notions. For R.K. Narayan an Indian immigrant is rootless; Anita Desai writes of plastic representations of the West as "clean, bright, gleaming, without taste, savour or nourishment," and Mulk Raj Anand calls legendary literary men of England no more than alienated "summits of mountain peaks." But there is an open acceptance too. For Dom Moraes arriving in England "was a relief and a sudden freedom." Farrukh Dhondy finds an exhilaration in the anonymity of an immigrant’s life, albeit infected with total powerlessness. Ved Mehta is ready to renounce his Indian nationality, though not without guilt. Likewise, Bharati Mukherjee would not remain a mere exile: "I need to feel like a part of the community I have adopted... The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation."

One feels that in the stories and essays of Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chaudhuri, Meera Syal, and Anurag Mathur, some of the second-generation personae have moved beyond these guilts and conflicts. Their voices have acquired braggadocio tones, their looks are boldly voyeuristic. Also, the post-colonial writers are in the process of mastering the local details of landscape — Salman Rushdie’s Nicaragua, V.S. Naipaul’s Trinidad, Amit Chaudhuri’s Oxford.

The writings represent a collective linguistic expression of writers caught up in the two worlds of India and the West. At neither of these places do events carry their distinct meanings as they are trapped in the native ideological and cultural structures, however heterogeneous they might be. The writer’s mind, in its own complexity, colludes with different structures and produces its own discourse. Amitava Kumar has conjoined these disparate, selective discourses, and has arranged them in a certain way in an attempt to pay a tribute to the centrifugal spirit of the expatriate.

Purportedly, the diaspora writings have become an instrument through which the East discovers not only the West but itself too. All the same, it remains a kind of nostalgia. Not a mere nostalgia, I suspect, but a guilt-laden search for one’s authenticity.

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