Perspective: Exile Literature and the Diasporic Indian Writer

Displacement, whether forced or self-imposed, is in many ways a calamity. Yet, a peculiar but a potent point to note is that writers in their displaced existence generally tend to excel in their work, as if the changed atmosphere acts as a stimulant for them. These writings in dislocated circumstances are often termed as exile literature. The word “exile” has negative connotations but if the self-exile of a Byron is considered, then the response to that very word becomes ambivalent. If a holistic view of the word “exile” is taken, the definition would include migrant writers and non-resident writers and even gallivanting writers who roam about for better pastures to graze and fill their oeuvre. World literature has an abundance of writers whose writings have prospered while they were in exile. Although it would be preposterous to assume the vice-versa that exiled writers would not have prospered had they not been in exile, the fact in the former statement cannot be denied. Cultural theorists and literary critics are all alike in this view.

The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness.’ Where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees – these border and frontier conditions – may be the terrains of world literature. (Bhabha 12)

The diasporic production of cultural meanings occurs in many areas, such as contemporary music, film, theatre and dance, but writing is one of the most interesting and strategic ways in which diaspora might disrupt the binary of local and global and problematize national, racial and ethnic formulations of identity.(Ashcroft 218)

The multivoiced migrant novel gave vivid expression to theories of the “open” indeterminate text, or of transgressive, non-authoritative reading. (Boehmer 243)

In an interview with Nikhil Padgaonkar for Doordarshan, Edward W. Said reflected on the condition of exile:

I think that if one is an intellectual, one has to exile oneself from what has been given to you, what is customary, and to see it from a point of view that looks at it as if it were something that is provisional and foreign to oneself. That allows for independence—commitment—but independence and a certain kind of detachment. (Said 13)

John Simpson in The Oxford Book of Exile writes that exile “is the human condition; and the great upheavals of history have merely added physical expression to an inner fact” (Simpson “Introduction”). Indeed it is so if exile is taken to be identical with self-alienation in the modern, post-Marxist, Brechtian sense of the term. Physical mobility often heightens the spiritual or psychological sense of alienation from the places one continually moves between. The world, in existentialist terms, appears absurd and indifferent towards one’s needs. In such a situation one cannot help but feel like an outsider. Therefore, it is well agreed that exile is a part of the human experience. Many a Shakespearean play has in it exile in the form of banishment and it dates back even before the time of Pericles of Athens. As for writers of yore there is Ovid whose hyperbolic lamentation on being exiled from Rome for publishing an obscene poem forms part of his Tristia I. There is Virgil whose Aeneas leaves Troy urged by the ghost of his wife thereby displaying the writer’s predicament.

The effect that exile has, not on the writers’ work, but on the writers themselves seems apparently paradoxical at first. Exile appears both as a liberating experience as well as a shocking experience. The paradox is apparent because it is just a manifestation of the tension that keeps the strings attached and taut between the writer’s place of origin and the place of exile. Whatever may be the geographical location of the exiled writer, in the mental landscape the writer is forever enmeshed among the strings attached to poles that pull in opposite directions. The only way the writer can rescue oneself from the tautness of the enmeshing strings is by writing or by other forms of artistic expression. The relief is only a temporary condition for no writer’s work is so sharp a wedge that can snap the strings that history-makers have woven. Even if a writer consciously tries to justify one end, simultaneously, but unconsciously, there arises a longing for the other. Therein lies the fascination of exile literature.

Prominent in exile literature are the works of writers who were made to flee their countries by oppressive regimes. Two of the Russian writers namely Gorky and Solzhenitsyn form an amusing pair of victims of political exile. Gorky’s works—especially his communist manifesto Mother—incited the Tsarist regime as much as what Solzhenitsyn’s works—like The Gulag Archipelago – did to the Communists when they came to power. Such is the dichotomy of world politics faced by the writers. If not politics then there are racial segregation, religious discrimination, and war that force writers to flee from their countries. The First World War saw a large exodus of writers who felt that they could not write in wartime Europe as they have previously written. The Second World War saw the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. Thomas Mann wrote from his refuge in Chicago to Hermann Hesse in Germany about the uprooting and also mentioned that Europe would be a different place after the war (Simpson 227). As it turned out, the whole world became a different place as soon as Enola Gay flew over the sky of Hiroshima. What these writers benefited from their exile was freedom of speech but they could never forget the shock of their original expulsion. They always believed that it was their right to be home, yet those who were privileged to return home, were often disappointed with the changes. At home few friends remained and they missed the society of like-minded intellectuals that they had formed during the time and in the place of their exile. Once-an-exile becomes forever-an-exile and the works of such writers hold the verve of their restlessness.

In Kafka’s short story The Departure the protagonist mentions that he can reach his goal by “getting out of here.” When asked what his goal was he gives a memorable riposte: “Out of here – that’s my goal” (Quoted in Simpson 96). Many writers get out of their native land because either the weather does not suit them or the society does not suit them or they just get out in search of the springs of Hippocrene for their muse. R. L. Stevenson preferred to live in Samoa because he enjoyed health in the tropics. P. B. Shelley was the quintessential radical. Even before his elopement with Mary Godwin he showed signs of his radicalism by publishing a tract called The Necessity of Atheism for which he was expelled from Oxford. Eventually the conservative English society forced him to leave England. Shelley’s exile from society was so acute that in one of his letters to Mary he expressed his desire to desert all human society. He wrote, “I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea, [. . .] and shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world” (Quoted in Simpson 216). On the other hand Byron’s was a self-exile into the continent in search of the fire to keep his muse’s torch burning. He even participated in the Greek War of Independence because England did not provide him with such a stimulating atmosphere in which to write.
Exile in the form of migration has been the cause of emergence of a large number of writers who have given direction to the progress of English literature. Irish-English writers like G. B. Shaw and W. B. Yeats have produced works that have become landmarks of English literature. Joyce in his novel The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man writes: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. [. . .] I shall try to fly by those nets” (Quoted in Simpson 258). Similar was the case with American-English writers like Henry James and especially T. S. Eliot who in his poems expressed his observations about the rootlessness of modern life. As intellectual exiles from America to Europe, they were fleeing from what they perceived to be the provincialism of America and its intellectual barrenness. They fed the European sense of cultural superiority due to their restlessness and incipient exilic predicament. In this regard their exilic condition, apparently, appears to be weak when compared to that of Conrad. Joseph Conrad was born in Poland but had to spend a part of his childhood with his family exiled in northern Russia. He went on to seek refuge first in France and then in Britain. He knew little English till the age of twenty years, yet, when he made his home in Canterbury, Kent, in England he had a considerable amount of English works under his name. D. H. Lawrence did a bulk of his writing while traveling. Such was the case with Katherine Mansfield – first she was away from New Zealand and then she was away from England. The cases of Hemingway and Isherwood, who migrated from the continent to the New World, are still more poignant for they became distinctly established as American writers.

Internal exile is another form of exile that many writers face. Perhaps it is the most damning of all exiles for in this case the exiles stay in their own country and yet are alienated. The Russian writer Dostoevsky looks back in his autobiography on the effect of his Siberian sentence thus: “I had been cut off from society by exile and that I could no longer be useful to it and serve it to the best of my abilities, aspirations, and talents” (Quoted in Simpson 180). In fact it was the colonial powers that made most people aliens in their own country – firstly through linguistic displacement. It is in this colonial context that the native writers spawned the various sub-genres of English literature. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao, who established Indian-English literature, were all subjects of the British rule in India. Even after the colonized countries got independence, writers of many of those countries still faced a state of exile—either because of dictatorship in their countries, or because of racial persecution, or because of ethnic cleansing, or because they chose to migrate. African-English writers like Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ngugi wa Thiongo’, Wole Soyinka, and Ben Okri all found themselves in some sort of exilic state.

The Indian-English writers, notably, Raja Rao became an expatriate even before the independence of the country; G. V. Desani was born in Kenya and lived in England, India, and USA; and Kamala Markandaya married an Englishman and lived in Britain (ref. Mehrotra 180, 186, 226). Nirad C. Chaudhuri preferred the English shores because his views were not readily accepted in India. Salman Rushdie’s “imaginary homeland” encompasses the world over. The Iranian “fatwa” phase has added a new dimension to Rushdie’s exilic condition. Colonial and post-colonial India are divisions that are now more relevant to a historian than a littérateur because Indian-English literature has transcended the barriers of petty classifications and has become almost become part of mainstream English literature. A major contribution in this regard has been that of the Indian writers, like Rushdie and Naipaul, who live as world citizens – a global manifestation of the exilic condition. Indian-English writers like Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Sunetra Gupta, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Hari Kunzru have all made their names while residing abroad. The non-resident Indian writers have explored their sense of displacement—a perennial theme in all exile literature. They have given more poignancy to the exploration by dealing not only with a geographical dislocation but also a socio-cultural sense of displacement. Their concerns are global concerns as today’s world is afflicted with the problems of immigrants, refugees, and all other exiles. These exilic states give birth to the sense of displacement and rootlessness.

The Indian diaspora has been formed by a scattering of population and not, in the Jewish sense, an exodus of population at a particular point in time. This sporadic migration traces a steady pattern if a telescopic view is taken over a period of time: from the indentured labourers of the past to the IT technocrats of the present day. Sudesh Mishra in his essay “From Sugar to Masala” divides the Indian diaspora into two categories – the old and the new. He writes that:

This distinction is between, on the one hand, the semi-voluntary flight of indentured peasants to non-metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam, and Guyana, roughly between the years 1830 and 1917; and 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. (Mishra 276)

Especially after Indian independence the Indian diasporic community has acquired a new identity due to the processes of self-fashioning and increasing acceptance by the West.

It is interesting to note that the history of diasporic Indian writing is as old as the diaspora itself. In fact the first Indian writing in English is credited to Dean Mahomed, who was born in Patna, India, and after working for fifteen years in the Bengal Army of the British East India Company, migrated to “eighteenth century Ireland, and then to England” (Kumar xx) in 1784. His book The Travels of Dean Mahomet was published in 1794. It predates by about forty years the first English text written by an Indian residing in India, Kylas Chunder Dutt’s “imaginary history” A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 published in 1835 (ref. Mehrotra 95). The first Indian English novel, Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife, was to be published much later in 1864. It shows that the contribution of the Indian diaspora to Indian writing in English is not new. Also interestingly, the descendants of the Indian indentured labourers in the so called “girmit colonies” have predominantly favoured writing in English, the lingua franca of the world. The likes of Seepersad Naipaul and later Shiva Naipaul, V. S. Naipaul, Cyril Dabydeen, David Dabydeen, Sam Selvon, M. G. Vassanji, Subramani, K. S. Maniam, Shani Muthoo, and Marina Budhos are significant contributors in that field.

V. S. Naipaul’s characters, like Mohun Biswas from A House for Mr. Biswas or Ganesh Ramsumair fromThe Mystic Masseur, are examples of individuals who are generations away from their original homeland, India, but their heritage gives them a consciousness of their past. They become itinerant specimen of the outsider, the unhoused, for the world to see. Their attempts at fixity are continuously challenged by the contingency of their restless existence – a condition grown out of their forefathers’ migration, albeit within the Empire, from India to Trinidad. Naipaul’s characters are not governed by actual dislocation but by an inherited memory of dislocation. For them their homeland India is not a geographical space but a construct of imagination. Their predicament can be explained in Rushdie’s words: “the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity” (12). The novels of the older generation of diasporic Indian writers like Raja Rao, G. V. Desani, Santha Rama Rau, Balachandra Rajan, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Ved Mehta predominantly look back at India and rarely record their experiences away from India as expatriates. It is as if these writers have discovered their Indianness when they are out of India. Obviously they have the advantage of looking at their homeland from the outside. The distance affords them the detachment that is so necessary to have a clear perception of their native land. In that sense, through their writing, they help to define India.

Makarand Paranjape notes “that instead of worshipping the leftovers and relics of a now inaccessible homeland as the old diaspora of indentured labourers did, the new diaspora of international Indian English writers live close to their market, in the comforts of the suburbia of advanced capital but draw their raw material from the inexhaustible imaginative resources of that messy and disorderly subcontinent that is India” (252). These writers record their away from India experiences and even if they look back at their homeland it is often in an elegiac tone rather than with nostalgia. Paranjape explicates this point in considering the novels of Rohinton Mistry (251). Ultimately Indian writers in the West are increasingly identifying themselves with the literary tradition of the migrant writers of the world. Rushdie says that “Swift, Conrad, Marx [and even Melville, Hemingway, Bellow] are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Ram Mohan Roy” (20).
The modern diasporic Indian writers can be grouped into two distinct classes. One class comprises those who have spent a part of their life in India and have carried the baggage of their native land offshore. The other class comprises those who have been bred since childhood outside India. They have had a view of their country only from the outside as an exotic place of their origin. The writers of the former group have a literal displacement whereas those belonging to the latter group find themselves rootless. Both the groups of writers have produced an enviable corpus of English literature. These writers while depicting migrant characters in their fiction explore the theme of displacement and self-fashioning. The diasporic Indian writers’ depiction of dislocated characters gains immense importance if seen against the geo-political background of the vast Indian subcontinent. That is precisely why such works have a global readership and an enduring appeal. The diasporic Indian writers have generally dealt with characters from their own displaced community but some of them have also taken a liking for Western characters and they have been convincing in dealing with them. Two of Vikram Seth’s novels The Golden Gate and An Equal Music have as their subjects exclusively the lives of Americans and Europeans respectively.

Two of the earliest novels that have successfully depicted diasporic Indian characters are Anita Desai’sBye-Bye Blackbird and Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man. These novels depict how racial prejudice against Indians in the UK of the 1960s alienates the characters and aggravate their sense of displacement. Bharati Mukherjee’s novels like Wife and Jasmine depict Indians in the US – the land of immigrants, both legal and illegal – before globalization got its impetus. Salman Rushdie in the novel The Satanic Versesapproaches the allegory of migration by adopting the technique of magic realism. The physical transformation of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha after their fall from the bursting jumbo jet on the English Channel is symbolic of the self-fashioning that immigrants have to undergo in their adopted country. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in her novel The Mistress of Spices depicts Tilo, the protagonist, as an exotic character to bring out the migrant’s angst. Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines has the character Ila whose father is a roaming diplomat and whose upbringing has been totally on foreign soils. She finds herself as much out of place in India as any foreigner. But when she conjures up the story of her doppelganger Magda being rescued by Nick Price from Denise, it shows the extent of her sense of rootlessness. Amit Chaudhuri in his novel Afternoon Raag portrays the lives of Indian students in Oxford. Similarly, Anita Desai in the second part of her novel Fasting, Feasting depicts Arun as a migrant student living in the suburbs of Massachusetts. The important point to note is that in a cosmopolitan world one cannot literally be a cultural and social outsider in a foreign land. There are advantages of living as a migrant – the privilege of having a double perspective, of being able to experience diverse cultural mores, of getting the leverage provided by the networking within the diasporic community, and more. But it is often these advantages that make diasporic Indians, especially of the second generation, encounter the predicament of dual identities. Such ambivalence produces existential angst in their psychology. The world simply refuses to become less complex.

The diasporic Indian writers of the first generation have already established their credentials by winning numerous literary awards and honours. But recently the ranks of the second generation of Indian writers in the West have swelled enormously and many among them have won international recognition. Meera Syal, who was born in England, has successfully represented the lives of first generation as well as second generation non-resident Indians in the West in her novels Anita and Me and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Hari Kunzru in his novel Transmission traces a part of the lives of three diverse characters Leela Zahir, an actress, Arjun Mehta, a computer expert, and Guy Swift, a marketing executive – traversing through Bollywood, the Silicon Valley, and London. Sunetra Gupta has shown with candor both the unpleasantness and the pleasantness of intercultural relationships through characters like Moni and Niharika from her novels Memories of Rain and A Sin of Colour. Jhumpa Lahiri’s book of short stories Interpreter of Maladiesand her novel The Namesake convincingly illustrate the lives of both first generation and second generation Indian migrants in the US. This is possible because big issues like religious intolerance and racial discrimination are no longer the main concern of these writers. What matters now in the current world are the small things. Little, unacknowledged things gain enormous importance in changed circumstances. It is here that the differing reactions by Indian, Western, and diasporic characters towards similar situations are found to differ only superficially. It demonstrates that the inner needs of all human beings are the same. Alienation is a part of the experience of the Indian diaspora and even if people are at home in any part of the world it does not mean that they will not become victims of the sense of alienation. Increasing acceptance into the host society does not indicate that that the diasporic characters can feel at home. Social alienation is replaced by metaphysical alienation.

Bibliography

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. London:

Routledge, 2002.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Chaudhuri, Amit (ed.). The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, London: Picador, 2001.

Dharwadker, Vinay. “Formation of Indian-English Literature” from Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Ed. Sheldon Pollack, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Ghosh, Amitav. “The Diaspora in Indian Culture” from The Imam and the Indian: Prose

Pieces, New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers and Permanent Black, 2002.

Kumar, Amitava (ed.). Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, New York:

Routledge, 2004.

Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna (ed.). An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English.

New Delhi: Permanent Black Publishers, 2003.

Mishra, Sudesh. “From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora” from An

Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English, Ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Triple Ambivalence: Australia, Canada, and South Asia in the

Diasporic Imagination” from Journal of the Department of English, Volume XXXII, Numbers 1 & 2, Eds. Sanjukta Dasgupta and Jharna Sanyal, Kolkata: Calcutta University, 2005-2006.

Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands” from Imaginary Homelands: Essays and

Criticism 1981 – 1991, London: Granta Books, 1991.

Said, Edward W. “Reflections of an Exile.” Biblio: A Review of Books,Volume IV, Number 11 & 12. Ed. Arvind N. Das. New Delhi: Brinda Datta, Nov-Dec 1999.

Simpson, John (ed.). The Oxford Book of Exile. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.

Where Shall We Go This Summer

Price:   Rs. 60

ISBN:  81-222-0088-5

Author: Anita Desai   

Pages:  157

Part- 3

Edition: Hardcover

Volumes:   7

Published: 7thprinting-2001

   Times of India rightly describes the novel as,-“ Skilful dramatization...the narrative is precariously perched between myth and social reality...for the talent itself, as the novel evidences, is exceptional in its innate sensibility and awareness of the craft of fiction." There is no doubt that Anita Desai has a distinguished style of writing.  Use of adjective, rich vocabulary, long complex sentences, hyperbole in this novel revivifies the readers in surroundings of sea beaches, natural beauty of village and villager’s magnificence at Manori  Island in Mumbai. The book Where Shall We Go This Summer is dedicated to her husband Ashwin Desai has three parts . There is a symbolic query of women protagonist to go to such place where she can get answers of her miseries--which shows lack of suitability in city life- however novel ends with happy note with the treatment of cultural agony. The center character Sita feels frustration in suffocative environment of a four walls flat life in Mumbai. Raman and Sita- husband and wife have incompatible temperaments and attitudes towards life. Raman – her husband is busy in his job. He fails to fulfill her wife’s expectation. Hence, Sita remains lonely even after marriage. Sita -middle-aged woman represents a world of sensitivity, high ambition, emotion, confusion and feminine sensibility while Raman is very firm and practical, he never hesitates- everything is clear to him and simple. Like earlier novels, this novel also illustrates the cultural agony of woman -loneliness, alienation, nostalgia, up rootedness, loss of Identity, lack of communication in married life - Deasi's experience of disorders and agony caused by marriage.

Like Maya in Cry, the Peacock- Sita is motherless. However, her father is a freedom fighter but always surrounded by his friends, always busy with his chelas and patients. She yearns to have the attention and love. In lack of mental and emotional company -most of the times, Sita feels herself as an ignored personality since childhood. Desai once again shows the glimpses of repressed childhood neurosis in this novel too which makes Sita disappointed and nostalgic. Childhood memories bewilders her psyche to go back to her father escaping city life of Mumbai-- reality and responsibilities of adult and mature life. In order to spend her days at Manori island to which she considers as the land of miracle -to get treatment of her problem in her fifth pregnancy about seven month with her four children -she moves towards Manori island- a beautiful sea beach full with abundant natural and rustic beauty.

 On the contrary, Raman is unable to understand –Sita as a sufferer from pessimism, worry and anxiety with which Sita reacts against every incident. Menaka her daughter wants to make her career in Medical -Science. In order to pursue her career she writes a letter to her father Raman without informing Sita to fetch them from Manori to Mumbaiu. However, Sita does not want to return home but when Raman comes and clears the situation to face reality of life, to give birth to child as she can not keep it in her womb forever as per her abnormal wish. Sita does introspection of her husband’s quality, her behavior and attitude towards her and decides to go back happily to Mumbai with her children and husband- her family.

Bye- Bye Blackbird

Publisher - Orient Paperbacks. 
Price: Rs. 60
ISBN:         81-222-0029-X
Author: Anita Desai     
Pages:         230
Part- 3
Edition: Hardcover
Volumes:   5

Published: 5thprinting-2001

Bye-Bye Blackbird (1971) -Winner of Sahitya Academi Award focuses on Desai’s experiences of the traumatic life of the Indian Diaspora. In this novel, we find theme of East and West encounter - different philosophical outlook- what really is the difference between marital displacement and the feeling of up rootedness in alien country is penned through the emotion of Desai. Desai portrays Indian-the blackbirds with tough time in England. In this novel, Adit and Sarah –husband and wife have different mind-set adding to Diaspora sensibilities. Adit and his friend Dev represent emigrant’s different feelings, situations, and the treatment of different issues related to Diasporas. Desai attempts to capture the very essence of culture and tradition of India as well as  London.                                                            

There are three parts of the Novel- First- Dev’s arrival and his experiences in London and longing for India. Novels begin in London’s background.  Adit Sen - from India has a good job of travel agent in London and lives a happy and satisfying life with his English wife Sarah. He loves London’s splendid, grand materialism, whereas his friend Dev who comes England to Adit for some studies at ‘London School of Economics’ and subsequent employment values Indian spiritual culture. Dev misses badly Indian morning, mother’s prayer and a cup of tea from mother. However, Adit- an Indian soul  is full of dreams and aspirations to rise as rich with high status, wealth, and power in London .He thinks gold is scattered everywhere like Sarah's hair  in London . He does not want to go back to India for clerical government job . He loves wearing tweed on a foggy November day. He likes Convent Garden Opera House with its chandelier like a hive of fireflies. He likes girls there and dancing with them. He likes thatched cottages and British History and reading the letters in The Times. While living in London Dev becomes nostalgic for every little and ignored thing in India.He talks about puja to the rising sun and strictly instructs Adit to live with the Indian values. Moreover, Adit likes pub, economic freedom, social freedom, reading posters in the tube, walking near Thames, ravens- mad black witches croaking and raving which he can not get at Calcutta. On the contrary ,Dev fills with disgust with western culture philosophy-‘eat drink and merriment’ and calls London a ‘Jungly city'. Dev appreciates natural divine beauty of Himalayan hill station, Simla or Mussoorie or Darjiling and other little towns. While in London everything is new to Dev beyond his Indian imagination and experience. 

 Adit finds London as land of opportunity where he came to adventuring it. To be exact, Adit and Dev are friends’ but Adit loves London and its Culture, prosperity, facility which he can not find in India Whereas Sarah is fascinated by eastern culture, music, food and religion. Adit loves Sarah, she is from England. Adit lives as a tenant at Emma Motiff’s House who is interested very much in Indian culture but jealous lover of India.  The reason why Emma Motiff loves India is She had been engaged to a young British soldier who had served in India and died there of dysentery and was buried in Ambala. She had his letters and gifts wrapped in Cashmere shawl for thirty years. Emma feels alienated and lonely living inside her lonely shell and shares some happy moments with Sarah (who has the same feeling born out of cultural dilemma) to talk on Indian great Indian artists and its great and soothing and peaceful culture.  Emma Motiff arranges inauguration of ‘Little India Club’ with joining of all the Indian immigrants in auspicious presence of Swami.

Sarah being the wife of Adit Sen- sometimes thinks as she does have any existence at all-whether she is English or Indian, whether she is married to Adit Sen having his identity or she has her father’s identity as Sarah Rose common James? By marrying Adit-an Indian Sarah is alienated from her own country’s people. Desai’s use of narrative technique with stream consciousness symbols and imagery is wonderful. The complexity of modern Indian culture is presented with what exactly is the difference between marital displacement and the feeling of uprootedness in an alien country.

Despite of positive impression of England on Adit, he admits nostalgic reveries of his native land. Adit longs for native-Calcutta food. He lives in England but is a sufferer of cultural dilemma-a complicated worrying thinking of people. As a result, with bagful gifts to his family members Adit wants to go India by air as he had a bad experience of travelling by Sea among Muslims who were going to Mecca. On the other side, Dev manages to find a job and thus decides to stay in London forgetting insult, hurt and humiliation in public and private places .He forgets insult,feeling of unwanted person, and being called a 'wog'. At the end Adit yearns to be in India.He longs for Calcutta food and people and on  account of declaration of war by Pakistan in India  Adit happily moves to India  with his pregnant wife Sarah saying bye bye to Blackbird-Indian immigrants. Thus, Expatriation of the individual is a persistent theme in Anita Desai’s novels.

Voices in the City

 Publisher - Orient Paperbacks

     Price:  60                                           

     ISBN:  81-222-0053-2

    Author: Anita Desai   

   Pages:  257

    Part- 4

    Edition: Hardcover

    Volumes:   7

   Published: 9thprinting-2001

                                                   

Anita Desai like her first novel  Cry the Peacock (1963) wins the Sahitya Academy award for her second novel too-Voices in the City (1965) concentrating on the theme of occurrence of displacement after marriage. Be it Maya in Cry, the Peacock or be it Monisha in Voices in the city – both are not able to free themselves from old accustomed, traditions, beliefs and feelings that repress their self-expression and are an obstacle to their talent, endurance and their self-control. In fact, Maya in Cry, the Peacock and Monisha in Voices in the City are well educated, emotional sensitive, self-conscious women. But they are not able to revolt against tradition and this becomes one of the major reasons as change does not come until their death. The eternal silence of these two characters Maya and Monisha can be called as surrender to the diverse socio- cultural circumstances categorized as the silence of despair, anger, protest, agony, cultural duality or combinations of all having deep agonizing experience in the process of settlement in a new place as one undergoes to cultural dilemma and panic feelings of displacement.

Background of novel is set in Calcutta. Calcutta served as the capital of India till 1911. Many people are from Calcutta among several Nobel laureates have contributed to the arts, the sciences, and other areas. Calcutta the principal commercial, cultural and educational centre of East India is described with the images of Howrah, Choringhee, and Grand Hotel, Victoria Memorial etc. There is ample evidence of culture of Calcutta displaying food (non vegetarian pan), cloth (sari, dhoti), place, language (Bengali), tradition (Kumkum, red Sari), religion (Durga Puja) etc. According to Hindu mythology we are now in Kali-Yuga -the fourth stage of the cosmic time frame which will eventually lead to the final dissolution of the universe. That is the reason this is called as Kaliyug. The old name of Calcutta is Kali-kata.  In Hinduism, Kali is the most ferocious deity form with destructive power -standing with one foot on the thigh, and another on the chest of her husband, Shiva. The voice of city Calcutta -is voiced as a city of ‘death’. Anita Desai's matchless, sharp and meticulous narrative technique of art to portray each and every little feature of the scene, manner of walking, speaking, wearing clothes - an image as if it is happening right now in front of us-around. Calcutta is the city of Kali.

The novel Voices in the City (1965) a story of a psychological problem of a Bohemian family-Arun, Nirode, Monisha and Amla and their mother. The story revolves around the cultural change of city Calcutta and its repercussion on them. Voices in the City is divided into four separated chapters dealing respectively four major characters- Nirode, Monisha, Amla, and Mother. Arun (sent to England for higher studies) is a successful person who achieves glorious awards and bright opportunities to move further in life. However, Nirode feels envious due to pessimistic opinion of childhood days spent with Arun under father care. It leads severe friction in his life. Niride, Monisha and Amla are the victim of personal suffering who needs guidance, direction and inspiration to satisfy young hopes and aspiration in cultural sphere of metropolitan life. Mother has very formal, distant relationship with their children because of her extra marital affair with major Chaddha. Nirode is obsessed with her unfair relationship and considers her a she-cannibal as she has an affair in Kalimpong which itself is a consequence of dissonance in husband-wife relationship.

The novel begins with Nirode’s frustration, disappointment and hopelessness towards life. Nirod is financial weak who wants to get the chance to start up a new carrier as an editor of vastly artistic little periodical ‘Voice’. Like boss-as editor of ‘Voice’, Nirode allows him to grow professionally to become tender towards his beloved friends to make his relationship comprehensible and organized- Sonny (son of Jamindar who loves dogs and whose father is fond of owning leopard), Professor (who is an old man, writes school text, teacher of primary school, wears dhoti.), Jit Nair (who has the brilliant prodigy of Southern university and has come to Bengal to assert himself amongst the renowned artists and litterateurs. Jit is married to Sarla, mourns over his lost days often.)Dharma (married with a woman who is simple, cultured, wears red Sari, Kumkum marked hair. Dharma is only the man whose criticism and advice Nirode takes seriously), David (Whose company Nirode likes very much) and discuss on painting, fable from Panchtantra ,Picasso ,eminent poets, love for Tagore’s Gitanjali, creative writing, non vegetarian food (i.e. meat ball, pulaos ) Nirode however, dislikes dogs at Sonny’s home but likes Bengal Pan. Nirode loves historical places in Calcutta and has a good discussion with Sonny’s father on comparison between greatest classical artists and contemporary artists reminding Mumtaz and Jahan Ara begam.  In company of his good friends he feels serene and surprisingly cheerful at work with promising good career advancement. Nirode finds her mother’s letter but Nirode's relationship with his mother is a love-hate relationship.

While his elder sister, Monisha is married to Jiban lives out a traditional Hindu life. Monisha is misfit in her husband’s home. After marriage, Monisha is subjected to serious nature of loneliness and lack of communication leading displacement problem. Also difference between the two person and two family background and incompatible temperament results displacement. Monisha's husband Jiban is captivated in conservative culture. He believes that a woman’s most important roles besides child bearing are cooking, cutting vegetables, serving food and brushing small children's hair under the authority of a stern mother-in-law. Monisha is childless woman. Jiban is never with her; always he is busy with his middle rank government job earning money for his joint family. He ignores her newly married wife’s desires and expectations. As a result, Monisha feels deserted. Her diary shows as she is imprisoned in four wall of conventional culture of her matrimonial family. She desperately yearns to have her own baby. Due her Gynecological problem she can not have a child and suffers from severe mental disorder- Claustrophobia like Maya in Cry, the Peacock . She is alienated from his mother as well as her husband. Monisha experiences difficulty in transforming from old atoned mental, emotional framework into the changed new identity. Monisha is the reflections of misbehave and domestic violence by her husband and family. No one is there with Monisha to think of her agony and solve problem. Her sister Amla is a commercial artist in Bombay who does not find ways to life in Bombay and returns Calcutta and falls in love with -Dharma. As Monisha is not able to become mother she is blamed as a thief of gold necklace at her own home by her husband and mother-in-law that was unbearable for her. She experiences hurt and humiliation in Jiban's world. To get relief from disturbed mental condition; to find emotional treatment she seeks solution in detachment theory of Gita and ultimately finds no way of survival. These all cruel realities of life as a self -punishment caused her to commit suicide. Similarly, Nirode’s frustrate, disappointed mind becomes hindrance in the path of peace and hope which ultimately pushing him in blind valley of death.  In the words of Salman Rashdie in Imaginary Homelands: Essay and Criticism: “Sometimes we feel straddle two cultures; at other times. That we fall between two tools”.

Work Cited

Desai, Anita. Voices in the City. Delhi, Orientpaperbacks, 2001.Print

Rashdie Salman, Imaginary Homelands: Essay and Criticism: 1981-1991 Diaspora

Cry, The Peacock

                                                     
   Publisher- Orient Paperbacks.

Price:   Rs. 50

ISBN:  81-222-0085-0

Author: Anita Desai   

Pages:  218

Part- 3

Edition: Hardcover

Volumes:   9

Published: 9thprinting-2001

As a novelist, Anita Desai began her career with Cry, The Peacock (1963) which carved a niche to be the first psychological novel in English Literature winning Sahitya Akademi Award. Cry, The Peacock is mainly concerned with the theme of occurrence of displacement after marriage – a major cause of disharmony between husband and wife relationship. Desai looks in to the reasons for displacement after marriage and illustrates how such two extremes, two incompatibles get married and how their union leaves an agonizing effect on family. Part one of the novel begins with Maya’s psychological tension with death of her pet dog Toto – bad sign of her fortune. The background of Novel is set in Delhi and Luck now. Delhi is the place where Maya lives after marriage. There is cultural diversity in Delhi sharing its borders with Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Haryana. Desai presents different temperament of husband and wife to be responsive to the behavior patterns which cause severe problem of loneliness and alienation leading to agonized end- death. Desai uses imagery, symbol simile, metaphor, alliteration, allegory, anastrophe, antagonist, aphorism, irony, periphrasis, oxymoron, unity and other figure of speeches to reflect the effect of poetry.  Sunday Telegraph ,U.K. says- a poetry novel . Has a great sense of place.

The novel is a story of young, hyper sensitive, motherless, lovelorn, Maya (who spends her maiden days under extreme love and care of her father) and her husband Gautama- friend of his father. Cry, the Peacock is in fact, the’ cry’ of Maya for her husband’s love - physical, mental and emotional. Maya compares her agony with peacock justifying the ‘title’ of the novel. Cry for ‘mating’ of the peacocks in the wild signifies desperate desire to give and get ‘love’ even on account of death. Maya is nature, art and literature lover -poetic and energetic while Gautama is - an advocate by profession , realistic, insensitive, rational,  detached and philosophical who is never able to realize the emotional and sensitive world of Maya. Maya bored with Gautama’s official work and monotonous life in Delhi gets frustrated, depressed and hysterical. It is a cultural shock for her to be physical alone; alienated even after marriage and as a result she becomes nostalgic. Gautama never understands and appreciates her wife’s wishes, fear, hopes and expectation. Hence, Maya feels lost in her thoughtful world- rejected, dejected and deserted -trying to find what the meaning of human life is? She co-relates her problems with nature, pets, arts, literature, astrology, plants, animals and people around her to find solution of displacement after marriage.

Maya has the mind frame of certain death in her fourth year of marriage as per the prophecy of priest astrologer –Albino. Thus, alienated from all side, Maya is frightened and suffering from loss of identity, existentialism nostalgia, rootlessness. As a result, she becomes severe patient of Megalomania, Schizophrenia, Hallucination and other psychic disorders. Gradually, the matrimonial thread gets weak and breakable-Maya has no hope; no possibility to save her married life. Maya experiences herself like a leaf flying in the storm without knowing where to find rest and solace.In this severe climax of agony, Maya kills her husband and commits suicide.

This is atrocity of Metropolitan city Delhi which results cultural agony as lack of communication, disappointment, cultural dilemma, frustration, hopelessness, nostalgia, rootlessness – the causes of displacement after marriage are present in between husband and wife.

Name of the novel and characters are symbolic. Peacock cries out sensing a danger or threat to communicate each other for joy, calling out for a mate's attention to inform the danger with vivacious sounds. Mating of the peacocks in the wild signifies desire with death. Intellectual detached ‘Gautama’ is related to Gautama Buddha whereas meaning of Sanskrit word ‘Maya’ is strong desire for worldly pleasure - an illusion whose controller is Lord Krishna. Those who surrender to Krishna are able to surmount illusory energy.

                                                         Work Cited

Desai,Anita. Cry, The Peacock. Delhi,Orientpaperbacks,2001.Print

Touch 

I m swinging in between you and me.

where is my inner power to feel you? 

satisfying sense with soft ,polite form?

giving some drops of water in dried desert ? 

wandering in blind forest of chaos from ages

send me messenger of love to make me feel you .

or make me understand your signals as you are within me. 

O Lord! you are imbibed in everybody in everything in whole. 

But why I want to find you as my own? 

Waiting to know you from you . 

Touch me whole to relax my unstable soul ! 

my unstable soul! my unstable soul! 

  The Expression 




                

               Some times ago Varun and his family were looking for a girl for marriage; they went to a home of their so –called relative. Vasudha brought tea for them in a tray, half tea was in the cup and half tea had fallen in tray. Besides, visible corner of the tray were too dirty. When Varun’s mother and sister went to meet Vasudha in the kitchen ,they saw Gas stove(a fireplace), and kitchen both were not cleaned and wiped from several days, it was very maladroit. Bright granules of sugar  and scattered tea granule with white drops of milk had been dispersed haphazardly telling the personal note of Vasudha who was standing in front of them with a continuous look  at Varun's Sister. Normally, it is taught to girls how to stand before someone ,how to look at any one and how to speak. Girls are not supposed to  look continuously  at anyone.Moreover,on the floor shoes and slippers  were kept  next to the uncovered serving plate and open cooked food. Except this there were domestic Pests – Cockroach, lizards, ants all were existent in kitchen without anyone’s fear. The bedroom too was without curtain, where clothes were scattered in haphazard way. Precious silk coat and other costly garments were bitten by mice . Broken threads of ill-treated clothes by mice were seen all over the room. Dirty and without washed clothes were dumped in a corner of the room. In the courtyard, dry clothes seemed to be frozen with wire; dust was lying on the wire such as those were spread over several years. In addition with this some pairs of shoes of Vasudha were lied  chaotically. One shoe was lying in the east corner of the courtyard and second shoe of the pair was lying in west corner of the courtyard.

                 However,  Biodata of Vasudha spoke her as  a teacher of well-known, famous English medium  school but  from the functioning of kitchen and disordered household things it was quite clear that how her personality and  the way of thinking was? She did not posses perfect way to prepare the food in a manner that keeps the kitchen clean and can be called a “tea is made” as tea making includes preparation of tea with the organized kitchen and serving skill with timely polite gesture, humble facial expression and a good body language . In short, she expressed her personality  by her behavior without uttering even a single word. 

                  Thus, execution of  any work is the manifestation of  emotions,thoughts and feelings. In education system, it is very important to teach attitude, outlook, facial expression and body language for execution of any daily work. It is only the manner of execution of getting  any  daily-work done which can be considered as the reflection of someone’s personality and thoughts. Also, this is the execution of work which tells how intelligent, educated, and polite the person is? It can be applied in case of women of particular standards. For instance, if the execution of work is compared with a well educated, learned woman and an uneducated woman, we find that both do the same work but there can be a major difference in performance of both of the women. An educated learned woman is probe to perform her work in best organized ways with positive attitude, facial expression and body language whereas unlearned woman performs every work in haphazard and avoiding ways. A woman is the first teacher of child, the center of family who inculcates good values in  family members and in others around  by her every activity whether it is mute or expressed. Therefore, the execution of work in perfect way is most important thing in daily course of life.