Reviews, Vol I, Issue IV
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| Somdatta Mandal |
Somdatta
Mandal (SM) is Professor of English at the
Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati,
Santiniketan, India. Her areas of interest are contemporary fiction, film and
culture studies, Diaspora studies and translation. A recipient of several
prestigious awards and fellowships like the Fulbright-Pre-doctoral Fellowship,
Fulbright Visiting Teaching Fellowship, Charles Wallace Trust & British
Council Fellowship, Rockefeller
Residency Fellowship at Bellagio, Salzburg Seminar Fellowship, Shastri
Indo-Canadian Faculty Enrichment Fellowship, she has been published widely both
nationally and internationally. She has written two academic books, edited and
co-edited more than twenty books and journals, and published scholarly articles
and book reviews both in India and abroad. She has received a Sahitya Academy
award for translating short fiction and has also been awarded the Meenakshi
Mukherjee Memorial Prize 2014 by Indian Association of Commonwealth Literature
& Language Studies (IACLALS) for the best scholarly essay published between
2012-2013.
Prof. Mandal spoke to me
via e-mail while she was in the US and I was in India on multiple contours of
theory, texts and contexts related to diaspora*.
Ajay K Chaubey (AKC): Since Man’s arrival on earth is a consequence
of his dispersal from heaven, How far do you agree that man bears the seeds of
Diaspora since its genesis?
SM: Whether
we believe in the idea that man was actually expelled from heaven or not, it is
true that since time immemorial, the nomadic nature of man in earlier times
carried with it the urge to migrate. This was because of survival, search for
food, and suitable habitation. In the case of the origin of the concept and the
etymological meaning of the word ‘diaspora’ of course, we have the mythological
story from the Old Testament when the
Jews were forcibly thrown out of their homeland and like seeds, they were
scattered in different places of Egypt. In their minds, they always nourished the
desire to return to their homeland. It was only during the last two decades of
the twentieth century that postcolonial scholars and critics started using the
term ‘diaspora’ without any religious connotation and use it in a broader sense
for people who have undergone transnational migration.
AKC: Is migration of people within
their own country regarded as a category of Diaspora? If “yes”. How far? And if
“No”. Why not?
SM:
Migration is always undertaken for two purposes, either voluntarily for
financial reasons or involuntarily due to forced political conditions. In both
cases the situation is similar as within the country as well as outside the
country. For a large multilingual country like India movement from one state to
another and settling down in another part of the country by a particular
socio-linguistic group bears with it all the essential tropes that define
diasporic existence, namely nostalgia for homeland, bonding within their own
community and living in ghetto-like state, trying to maintain contact with root
culture through food, clothing, language etc. The refugees from erstwhile East
Pakistan who settled in West Bengal after the partition of India still prefer
to maintain their own enclaves, language and customs. In recent times novels
like Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head
which speaks about the Khasi versus non-Khasi life in Shillong is a good
example of an author settling in a different part of the country. Having grown up and lived most of her life there,
Anjum Hasan does a brilliant job in grasping the laid-back nerve of the city,
something that people over the years have associated Shillong with.
AKC: The pre-colonial diaspora was
labour diaspora what Robin Cohen classifies in his magnum opus, Global Diasporas
(1997). The ancestors of Naipaul were also sent across black sea in the same
pursuit. In what context do you see the migrants and their modus operandi in post-colonial Diaspora? How far postcolonial diaspora
differs from the pre-colonial Diaspora?
SM: We
all know that after the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, the
plantations around the world were in dire need of manual labour and that was
when the ‘girmits’ or indentured labour from India (the ancestors of Naipaul
for instance) were sent to places like Guyana, West Indies, Fiji, Mauritius and
other places. Though not by force, most of these illiterate workforce did not
have any idea where they were being taken and they all nurtured the desire to
come back after five years when the contract period would be over and after
they would be able to amass sufficient amount of money by then. In reality, of course,
it never happened and very few of them ever came back. Therefore, the people
belonging to this class of labour diaspora along with their descendants suffered
from nostalgia for their homeland much more than those who voluntarily went to
lead better lives. Many of these girmits considered themselves suffering a
period of banishment like Lord Rama in exile and they neither acculturated well
in the new environment in which they lived but clung on to their old traditions
as much as they could. A House for Mr.
Biswas serves as a good example of this.
As
for the voluntary diasporics, though they suffer from occasional pangs of
nostalgia for their homeland too, they are much keener to acculturate in the
host land as ‘model minorities’. Financial stability and better living
conditions deter them from ever returning to their original homeland. For the
people belonging to the petro-dollar diaspora, earning money to remit home
becomes the main objective of their living in the diaspora and as a result, the
demographics of their hometowns have changed significantly. But unable to enjoy
the benefits of the new diasporic space, they go on slogging in inhuman
conditions and so everything is not always rosy for them.
AKC: What are the factors behind dynamics
of Diaspora that has resulted in a progressive journey from labour and victim
Diaspora to academic, economic, or technocratic Diaspora?
SM: At
the beginning of the twentieth century, Indians wanting to immigrate to the
west had to face plenty of problems, as the policies of the governments were
not conducive for such migrations. For example, let me mention the tragic Komagata Maru incident when Indians who
were British nationals were denied to land in Vancouver in Canada fearing the
browning of the nation and were sent back to India to be tortured there by the
British administration once again. Later the scenario changed when in 1965 the
US government passed the new immigration act and since then there has been a
regular stream of white collared professionals entering and settling down in
that country. Though they faced discrimination in certain circumstances, their
experience can in no way be compared
to the people of labour diaspora.
AKC: What type of paradigm shift has
been caused by political treaties, compromises, multiple socio-economic deals
and Military agreements in diasporic writings?
SM: Though many
countries have given permission to people seeking political asylum at different
periods of time, the same has not been reflected much in literary writings.
Probably, like all refugees or victims who suffered from the trauma of
partition, these diasporic individuals prefer to remain silent about their
past. We find issues
of cross-cultural conflicts/dilemmas especially in areas where difference in
generations, gender and sexuality intersect. Needless to say the more recent
voluntary diasporic subjects are different from those Indians whose lives were
mapped by exile, mass migration and economic emigration.
AKC: During my short span in the UK, I
found that Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationals were residing in disguise of Indians.
Even, I found many Indian restaurants owned by them. What is the position of Indian Diaspora as
compared to Pakistani and Bangladeshi Diaspora in the West after 9/11
insurgencies?
SM: Belonging to
the Indian sub-continent, Bangladeshi and Pakistani diasporic nationals are
often clubbed together in the UK as belonging to the South Asian group, of
which Indians form the largest contingent. One has to remember here that a sort
of racism by the ruling Brits pervades multicultural British society even
today. Novels by Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Atima Srivastava, Meera Syal and
others amply testify this phenomenon. We have to keep in mind the different
nature of migration of these various South Asian groups and the reason for
their settling down in the UK. For instance, Bangladeshi persons (then from
undivided region of East Bengal) have been going and settling in Britain for
quite a long time and they went primarily from Sylhet and Noakhali districts of
that country to work as lascars in ships and later settled in the East End
district of London. Many of them later took on the job of cooks and ayahs and
helped in the flourishing of the restaurant business. As for Indian restaurants
run by them, the lure and taste of ‘curry’ and ‘chicken tikka masala’ that
entices the British palate is their USP and the Britishers are either unable or
not simply bothered to distinguish between genuine and fake identities of the
South Asians who run the businesses. Another fact has to be kept in mind.
Unlike in the United States, the number of Indians and Pakistani migrants in
the UK are much more in number, because these countries were part of the Commonwealth
and under the British imperial rule. As far as we can make out, the division of
South Asian Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Britain is operational
more on religious lines, than on nationality. Also a lot of South Asians settled
in the UK has undergone multiple migrations after being evicted from some
country in Eastern Africa.
AKC: Younger authors are also writing
a lot about India like Rushdie and Naipaul but unlike them, they are slightly
positive about India. How are they different from the other younger diasporic
writers in the perspectives of India?
SM: Examining the themes of exile, identity,
longing, displacement, race relations, rootlessness, and ultimately acceptance
is the staple stuff of most novels on the diasporic experience. In order to
make sense of his present state, the writer revisits the past by taking
recourse to memory and imagination. Most diasporic writers
feel nostalgic about their homeland. I feel Rushdie and Naipaul are exceptions.
In the gifted
writers, the cross-cultural conflicts/dilemmas are generally disrupted and complicated
in productive ways, especially in areas where differences in generations,
gender and sexuality intersect – as in Meera Syal in Britain, Jhumpa Lahiri in
the USA. This points to a trend or a pattern in the future of Indian diaspora
also. Both Syal and Lahiri write from their own experiences of living
abroad as a second-generation immigrant in multicultural society. An Indian by
descent, the Kenyan-born, Tanzania-raised, US educated, and a Canadian by
citizenship since 1978, M.G. Vassanji is a writer who falls somewhere in
between the two categories. Like Neil Bissoondath and Michael Ondaatje, he is
an Indian expatriate separated from the subcontinent by generations. Most
diasporic writers try to juxtapose their homeland and the hostland in their
works. In their fiction the plots and characters usually in some way or the
other link India as well as UK or the US. The novels of Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, or Sunetra Gupta are good
examples of such transcultural interface.
AKC: The prevalent conditions of “New
Diaspora” are much more different from that of “Old Diaspora”. What difference
do you find in both the Diasporas?
SM:
The formation of
the Indian diaspora according to Amitav Ghosh “is not merely one of the most
important demographic dislocations of modern times: it now represents an
important force in world culture” and can be classified, according to the
critic Sudesh Mishra, as the ‘sugar’ and the ‘masala’ diaspora. There is also a
distinction to be made between the old and the new diasporas. “This
distinction,” according to Mishra, “is between, on the one hand, the
semi-voluntary flight of indentured peasants to the non-metropolitan plantation
colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam,
and Guyana, roughly between the years 1830 and 1917; and on the other the late
capital or postmodern dispersal of new migrants of all classes to thriving
metropolitan centres, such as Australia, the United States, Canada and
Britain.” This same classification is termed by other critics as ‘forced
diaspora’ and ‘voluntary diaspora’. Another critic and scholar, Vinay Lal,
reiterates the same idea by calling it ‘diaspora of labour’ versus ‘diaspora of
longing’. For most of the old diasporic writers, there is an unease of the
dislocated and the deracinated who either by choice or by compulsion have
abandoned home in the country of their birth for a home in their adopted
country. For the migrants of choice, on the other hand, the situation is
totally different. They prefer to live in a kind of cosmopolitan globalised
world where the markers of their borderless state have often to be invented.
AKC: There are many authors like
Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, Jeet
Thayil who live in India but they have pen-pictured the “exotic tales” of dark
side of India. What is your assessment of this type of writing? (a) Politics for
prize-winning (b) desire to seize popularity by being negative about the nation
or (c) because of being more realists?
SM: First and
foremost, none of them are diasporic writers. Instead, they reside in India. But it is true that almost all
Indian English writers wherever they are physically located, along with their publishers, have a latent
wish to win some sort of a prize from the western
world – be it a Booker, or a Commonwealth or a Nobel. The noted Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy
had once remarked, “A lot of new writers who get the kind of attention that Rushdie gives them are
writers who write for export. It is a shame that in the whole world only Indian writers in English write for export.” It
is true that exoticism sells. Though
India is no longer perceived in the west to be a land of princes and snake charmers and naked fakirs, nevertheless
the reality of India at present times is what probably
motivates these writers. When Arundhati Roy wrote The God of Small Things in 1997,
the theme of the novel highlighted in the dust jacket cover of the New York
Random House edition was the caste system in India where the love between a
person of a higher caste and an
untouchable was the main focus. After all, like any other multinational consumer product book
production is also dependent upon marketing hype. Balaram Halwai becoming rich
through improper means in The White Tiger
is part of the present reality in India. I do not understand why some critics
lay blame on Aravind Adiga for being
negative about the nation. When a novel like An Obedient Father was published by
the diasporic Indian American novelist Akhil Sharma in the United States
several years ago and even won
a prize, the judges thought that the novelist had given a true picture of India with its dubious
politicians and bureaucrats in Delhi. We feel ashamed to admit that the Indian protagonist of
the novel was a man who raped his own daughter, kept on living with her, and even attempted to sexually abuse his
granddaughter. Even Bharati Mukherjee, who claims to be recognized
as a mainstream American
novelist, wrote about the reality
of a resurgent India of contemporary times with its call-centers and urban problems and sexual abuse of
young women in her latest novel Miss New India. She depicted a true
picture of the nation as of now and I
don’t feel she was aiming at popularity
by being negative about India. In fact she sees the book as a stand-alone novel and last part of her trilogy
comprising of Desirable Daughters and
The Tree Bride.
AKC: There are many South Asian
authors who prefer to settle down in the “other” world rather than in the First
world viz. Uma Parameswaran, Vassanji, Mistry, Ondaatje and Shyam Selvadurai in
Canada; Suneeta
Peres da Costa, Yasmine
Gooneratne and Chandani Lokugé, Samantha
Sirimanne Hyde in Australia; Amulya
Malladi and Tabish Khair in Denmark; Sujata Bhat in
Germany; Manjushree Thapa and Taslima Nasrin in India and Shehan Karunatilaka in Singapore. Do you think that that the First Worlds-the
UK, the US and France and etc. are not safer in the backdrop of 9/11 attacks in
the US, 7/7 in the UK and, of late, Charlie
Hebdo attacks in France? Please comment.
SM:
I find this question of yours problematic because as
far as my knowledge goes writers who have settled down and live in Canada are
considered part of the First World. You cannot call it ‘other.’ It is true
migrants have been more suspect to state vigilance after the terrorist attacks
in events like 9/11in the US and 7/7 in UK, but we should be very careful about
not falling into the trap of essentialism. Each individual South Asian writer
has a different reason and trajectory for settling in an alien country and so
we cannot generalize. For example, many of them went along with their family
for better economic prospects, like Yasmine Gooneratne from Sri Lanka who went
to Australia or Romesh Gunesekera who went and settled in Britain after the
Civil War in his native country. Some
went for academic reasons (Tabish Khair for example, who went from his native
Bihar to Denmark, Amitava Kumar from Bihar to the United States), whereas Taslima
Nasrin had to flee her homeland Bangladesh (and now even India) because of
religious fundamentalism, and so on.
AKC: What role does Bollywood construct in gaining prevalence abroad and
re-uniting the Indian diaspora at the global forum? Do you think that Indian
Cinema is more accepted in the West than any other film industry of
neighbouring countries of India?
SM:
By its sheer number of films produced per year, Bollywood
happens to be the largest film industry in this subcontinent and thus
overshadows films produced by neighbouring countries of India. Bollywood films
are watched by an overwhelming number of South Asians both at home and abroad. Of
course the diaspora watches these products differently than the home audience.
I feel this difference is marked in two particular areas. First is the spirit
of nationalism that is inculcated in many films where dying for the nation
becomes a heroic act. This even cuts across religious lines. The second and
more significant issue is the interest showed in the west for queerness in Bollywood
films where narratives about queerness in the Indian diaspora are almost upbeat
and use the acceptance of queerness as a token for entry. For example, Karan
Johar’s films Dostana and Kal Ho Na Ho, set among the diaspora
community in America, present the possibility of joy, hope, and acceptance for
an Indian gay man. In contrast, Bombay
Talkies, Johar’s only film addressing queerness within India, deals with
the same issues while at home, shows only the possibility of a violent
confrontation with society, represented by parents, followed by a life of
loneliness, pain and lies while the spirit of India looks on and sings songs of
mourning for them. All of the recent films set within India with a prominent
gay story line have had similar bleak endings. With the advancement of
technology and simultaneous release of a Bollywood film in any part of the
world on the same day, the people of the Indian diaspora feel more connected
with the homeland now. Unlike earlier times they do not have to wait for
pirated copies of Bollywood blockbusters to reach them much later.
AKC: When you are on tour to abroad or settled there for a long time, what do
you think of your homeland? Do you realize the contours of Rushdie proliferated
by him in his tour de force, Imaginary Homelands (1991)?
SM: The
critic Avtar Brah in Cartographies of
Diaspora emphasises on the homing desire and the desire for the homeland as
recurrent themes in diasporic writing. Accordingly, she identifies four stages
in the process of assimilation in the hostland. These are the tourist phase,
the culture shock phase, the conformist phase and the assimilation phase. For
Rushdie, the role of memory, what he terms as ‘Indias of the mind’ remains the
most significant criteria. The other metaphor that he uses is that of the
pieces of a broken mirror, parts of which are lost. So, in spite of having a
desire for the homeland, when one is settled abroad for a long time, the memory
keeps on fading. As Rushdie has put it in Imaginary Homelands, the
position of ‘the exile or immigrant’ is one of ‘profound uncertainties’ The
diasporic person is at home neither in the west nor in India and is thus
‘unhomed’ (Homi Bhabha) in the most essential sense of the term. Thus the
concept and interpretation of ‘home’ becomes vital in all kinds of diasporic
writing.
AKC: To what extent do you agree that
present economic and political fluidity has converted the “nowhere presence” of
Diaspora into “omnipresence”?
SM: The
way our Indian government woos her diaspora population by observing the Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas every year and by
offering sops like PIO and OCI cards and by asking them to invest in the
country speaks a lot about their financial stability in general. On the other
hand, the overt presence of politicians of Indian origin in both the UK and the
US also speak a lot about their ‘omnipresence’. They are now a serious power to
reckon with.
AKC: What role has South Asian
Diaspora played in deconstructing the Orientalist view of the Occident?
SM: I believe that South
Asian diasporic writers see a new phase of neo-orientalism in recent fiction.
For example, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland
or Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others
where large sections of the novels are based on Kolkata fits in this sort of
agenda.
AKC: Thank
you, Prof. Mandal! It’s an enlightening discourse not only for me but also for
the pan-Indian scholars and academicians.
SM:
Welcome
Ajay. It’s worthwhile for me too.
