Admin

The ‘Good’ European and his ‘Disinterested Mistress’: Mimicry and Aporia in John Masters

137 views

Sayantika Chakraborty, Independent Researcher, Kolkata, India

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to critique John Master’s representation of India by analyzing three of his novels and his autobiography. As a member of the Indian army, Masters lived in India for a long time in the final phase of the British Raj. He wrote great many books based on his experiences in India, and the four texts chosen for this paper are central in this regard. This paper isolates Masters’s own emotional trajectory, especially how his initial disinterestedness changes into a passionate engagement with India, which he later describes as his mistress. The underlying dualities in the autobiographical narrative are linked to those in his fictional accounts of India, since in all his writings he deliberately blurs the factual and the fictional. However, such attempts to blur binaries are critiqued from Master’s own subject position to show how notions like mimicry and interstice, in the colonial context, define not only the colonized subject but implicate his colonial superior as well who has his own ways of encountering aporias.

[Keywords: Mimicry, Aporia, Imaginary, British Raj, Colonial India, Orientalism]

‘It was awful trying to be an Indian. No one understood me.’

Bhowani Junction (Masters, 1956, p.238)

Introduction

John Masters (1914-1983) was a fifth generation English settler in India, who served in the Indian Army in the twilight phase of the British Raj in India. He was not just a soldier. He was somebody who initially felt compelled to work in the Indian Army, then gradually fell in ‘love’ with India while working in the Army, and finally decided to passionately write down his experiences in the form of ‘factual story’. In his autobiography The Bugles and A Tiger: A Personal Adventure (1956), Masters states his initial reluctance to join the Army: ‘I was destined for Indian infantry. I use the word “destined” with intent. I did not want to go to Indian infantry – I thought myself far too clever to waste my life in that backwater’ (35). However, for financial reasons he eventually joined the Army. ‘The Indian Army got more pay…And as I have said, we were broke…’ ( 37) Pages after, Masters’s attitude towards India would completely change as he would narrate his sense of rootedness in India and his newly developed love for India: ‘If there was a justification for my family’s long guestship here, for my making so free with the Indian wood in the fire…We removed many fears… I was in love with India, and she’d have the hell of a job getting rid of me’ (314). His self-proclaimed love for India would grow to such a degree that he would acknowledge his unavoidable ‘Europeanness’ to be a bar. He would describe India as his ‘lusty, disinterested mistress’, since she could not be his ‘mother’ (314).

An analysis of Masters’s autobiographical narrative would indicate how his attitude towards India changed from disinterestedness to a sort of passionate engagement accompanied by a feeling that India herself might be ‘disinterested’ in him. His artistic urge for ‘story-telling’ to a great extent derives from this new found love, and in his ‘fictional’ narratives one discovers similar emotional trajectories on the part of the protagonists. In terms of studying three of his novels based on his experiences in India – Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), The Deceivers (1952), and Bhowani Junction (1954), this paper would accordingly examine Masters’s attitude to, and representation of, India.

Critiquing Fictionalised Histories

To begin with, one of the primary aspects of Masters’s fictional accounts of India is that his narratives reveal a deliberate blending of the imaginative with the factual and autobiographical. Such a blending blurs the binary of fact and fiction and generates what Masters himself calls the ‘fictionalised histories’. In the ‘Foreword’ to The Bugles and A Tiger, Masters states: ‘This is a factual story, but not a history. Please do not pounce on me with scorn if it turns out there were seven, not eight, platoons of Tochi Scouts on the Iblanke that night of May 11th-12th, 1937.’ He adds: ‘In the course of the story I hope to have given an idea of what India was like in those last twilit days of the Indian Empire, and something more than a tourist’s view of some of the people who lived there’. If this is how he writes his autobiography which should be strictly historical, he has similar ways of dealing with the fictional. In the ‘Postscript’ to his novel The Deceivers, Masters notes:

In a story of this sort the reader has a right to know how much was fact, how much fiction. My purpose in this book, as in Nightrunners of Bengal, was to recreate the ‘feel’ of a historical episode rather than write a minutely accurate report. To do this I had to use the novelist’s freedom to imagine people and create places for them to live in… (Masters d. 80)

The risk of this deliberate mixing of history and story is manifold. Such an admixture could certainly be considered a postmodernist gesture (the famous notion of ‘historiographic metafiction’ as described by Linda Hutcheon) to indicate that both history and fiction are human constructs. However, insofar as John Masters’s own subject position is concerned, such a representation of colonial India could be read in conjunction with the colonizer’s motivated rewriting of the colonial past (Crane 3). On an obvious level, one could talk about a specific form of ‘projection’ of India on the part of Masters as he exploits and exaggerates the facts and colours them with his own imagination. For example, in his first novel Nightrunners of Bengal, the character of the Queen of Kishanpur, Sumitra, is only loosely based on the historical figure Jhansi ki Rani. Masters in this novel also exaggerates the chapati events that played an instrumental part in building up the tension in the early months of 1857 (Crane 16)….Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

The Metempsychotic Birds: An Exploration of Samuel Beckett’s Allusions to the Upanishads

297 views

Thirthankar Chakraborty, University of Kent

 Abstract

This paper discusses references made to Indian culture and philosophy in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, tracing them back to their sources via Arthur Schopenhauer. The allusions induce a rethinking of the conventional Cartesian interpretation of Murphy, and reconsider the usage of compulsive voice and situational irony within the novel from an Upanishadic point of view. The paper then analyses Waiting for Godot, and questions whether Beckett might have effaced his early allusions to Indian religious thought or could he have ironically personified the Upanishadic allegory of dualism as Vladimir and Estragon confined to a stage containing a single tree?

[Keywords: Samuel Beckett, Indian philosophy, Upanishads, dualism, allegory]

 Establishing Textual Parallels

In his German letter dated 7 July 1937, Samuel Beckett notes, “For in the forest of symbols that are no symbols, the birds of interpretation, that is no interpretation, are never silent” (Beckett 2009: 519). He writes this in a context where he appears to censure people, critics in particular, or the birds of interpretation, as being “hard of hearing” and incapable of remaining silent. This paper magnifies Beckett’s choice of words and considers whether he might have allowed these birds of interpretation to travel through his first published novel Murphy and into his later play Waiting for Godot.

In another letter dated 17 July 1936, Samuel Beckett writes that he chose to keep Murphy’s “death subdued and go on as coolly and finish as briefly as possible [. . .] because it seemed to me to consist better with the treatment of Murphy throughout, with the mixture of compassion, patience, mockery and ‘tat twam asi’ that I seem to have directed on him throughout” (Beckett 1983: 102). Whilst Murphy along with Beckett’s other works have yielded various critical exegeses vis-à-vis themes ranging from humour, ethics and aesthetics, scholars have so far largely ignored the phrase tat twam asi, loosely translated as “that you are”, originally from the Chandogya Upanishad. Based on empirical evidence from Beckett’s letters and the Whoroscope notebook, past critics have observed that Beckett adopted the phrase from the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, without intending any direct reference to Indian thought.As John Pilling notes for example, by the time Beckett began writing Murphy, his grasp of Schopenhauer had become “second nature”, so much so that he dispensed with specific references (Pilling 1992: 14). My objective, on the contrary, is to expand this Schopenhauerian influence in Murphy and have it flow into a limited tract of Indian philosophy, as discussed in the Upanishads.

First, however, it is necessary to establish empirically the relation between Murphy and Indian philosophy. One must account for the fact that there is as yet a complete lack of archival material to suggest that Beckett studied the Upanishads, although the Bangladeshi playwright Sayeed Ahmed recalls in a newspaper interview that during his meetings with Beckett in Paris, Beckett would ask him probing questions about the Upanishadic philosophy. A major advantage is that Murphy and the Upanishads are essentially works of art, not cut and dried philosophical treatises, and consequently merit a comparative literary analysis, if nothing else. Beckett is not interested in delving into ontological disputes, just as the Upanishads “would not be considered philosophical in the modern, academic sense” (Britannica).Also, Schopenhauer, who stands as a common denominator that links Beckett to Indian Philosophy, is often compared to “a wisdom writer” rather than a philosopher (O’Hara 254).

At the start of Murphy, there are several references that are directly relevant to the Upanishads. In the first chapter, we learn that Murphy visits Neary several times and sits at his feet (Beckett 1957: 3). This, as annotated in Demented Particulars(2004), might refer to the term “Upanishad”, the Sanskrit etymology of which can be translated as “sitting down near” or “sitting close to” the guru or the teacher’s feet in order to gain spiritual knowledge (Ackerley2004: 32). Thus, if an immediate parallel is to be drawn, one could regard Murphy as a character curious about the Upanishads, and could further claim that the author was at least aware of the existence of this central body of early Sanskrit text.

In addition to the general definition, the term “Upanishad” also originally meant “‘connection’ or ‘equivalence’ and was used in reference to the homology between aspects of the human individual and celestial entities or forces that increasingly became primary features of Indian cosmology” (Britannica).This second meaning markedly coincides with the fact that Murphy pedantically follows the astrological chart or “ThemaCoeli With Delienations Compiled By Ramaswami Krishnaswami Narayanaswami Suk” (Beckett 1957: 32).What’s more, the first three parts of the compiler’s name are Indian, with the suffix swami signifying “holy man”. The prefix of the first two parts from left to right are the major avatars of Vishnu – Rama, from the Ramayana, and Krishna, from the Mahabharata – while the third, Narayana, is an alternative name for Vishnu, the preserver of the cosmos in Hinduism. The Vaishnavas or the monotheistic followers of Vishnu regard their God as the personification of the Brahman, the all-pervasive self beyond verbal grasp, or the tat from tat twamasi, a concept immediately relevant to Murphy’s design as a character.

To further this heuristic approach, Neary’s ability to stop his heart in “situations irksome beyond endurance” is relevant, added to the hand gestures that he practices corresponding to murdras (3). As annotated by Chris Ackerley, “the relation between heart rate and respiration permits the individual to exercise some control by means of sustained expiration” (Ackerley 2004: 32), which contextually refers to pranayama, the control of breath or vital power. In the Chandogya Upanishad (I.5), breath plays a central role, as elaborated by Max Müller, a nineteenth century German scholar of comparative language, religion, and mythology (Britannica), “The breath in the mouth, or the chief breath, says Om, i.e. gives permission to the five senses to act, just as the sun, by saying Om, gives permission to all living beings to move about” (Müller 1879: 12). Thus, having control over his breath, not only is Neary capable of stopping his heart, but he can also supposedly liberate his self from quotidian necessities such as drinking water and he can also annul “the pangs of hopeless sexual inclination” (3). What is more, Neary has acquired his knowledge of pranayama “somewhere north of the Nerbudda” (3), more commonly known as the river Narmada that runs across the central states of India. However, as far as the plot is concerned, Neary has clearly failed in his venture of suppressing his desires, which are directed instead “‘To gain the affections of Miss Dwyer’”…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

Colonized or Self-Colonizer: A Generational Journey Through Independence in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

273 views

Cassandra Galentine, Northern Arizona University, USA

Abstract

The British Raj was established in India by Queen Victoria in 1858, and Britain remained the dominant power structure until Indian Independence in 1947. Though many novels as well as works of critical scholarship attempt to capture elements of the British Empire’s presence in India and its psychological effects on the citizens of India, less attention has been paid to the comparison of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. When examining these two texts closely, it becomes clear that Forster’s novel exists as a narrative of a single moment of British Imperialism, whereas Roy’s novel presents a multigenerational approach to describing effects of the British Empire. These different perspectives and historical contexts affect the characters’ ability to transcend the continuous cycle of colonizer turned colonized. The juxtaposition of a colonial text composed by an English author with a postcolonial text written by an Indian author within the context of Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, provides an illuminating perspective on the evolution of the intertwined colonizer/colonized relationship and displays the potential to mitigate the lingering psychological effects of imperialism.

[Key Words: Albert Memmi, colonizer, colonized, postcolonialism, British Empire]

Introduction

Both A Passage to India and The God of Small Things were written about the British Empire’s presence in India and share similar psychological themes throughout. However, the two novels develop representations of the colonizer and the colonized through strikingly different narrative backgrounds and forms. E.M. Forster’s approach to a critique of imperialism comes from a colonial, British perspective, and addresses one brief period of time in the history of Anglo-India, whereas Roy’s text approaches the subject from a postcolonial, multi-generational narrative form. This fundamental difference between the two authors creates many crucial points of variance in the expression of the colonizer/colonized relationship when placed in comparison postcolonially. This comparison exposes the psychological effects of colonialism which are illuminated by the reactions of the Indian characters in each novel—in particular, Dr. Aziz, and the Nawab Bahadur from Forster’s text, and Pappachi, Baby Kochamma, Ammu, Rahel, and Estha from Roy’s text—to their Western colonizers and their ability or lack thereof to blend British and Indian identity.

  1. Memmi: The “mythical portrait of the colonized”

To better understand the terms of comparison, it is useful to first establish the concept of the colonizer and colonized. French-Tunisian author Albert Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, briefly addresses his own relationship with the colonization of Tunisia. His deeply personal experience with colonialism lends credibility to his text, but he then applies his experience to create a description of imperialism and its effects in general terms. Broadening the scope allows Memmi’s text to be applied to all colonial legacies beyond Tunisia. Memi’s text is useful when assessing the effects of British rule in India within Forster’s and Roy’s novels. Crucial to such an examination is Memmi’s description of the “colonized” and their reaction to a long history of colonization.

In describing the colonized, Memmi argues that much of the colonized identity is generated by the colonizer. This is what he describes as the “mythical portrait of the colonized,” to which he devotes an entire chapter (Memmi 80-89)[1] The identity that the colonizer imposes upon the colonized is the most crucial part of colonization because the threatof the colonizer and their imposed identity on the colonized results in “a certain adherence of the colonized to colonization” (88). Though this is an integral part of successful colonization, Memmi does not believe it to be the final step in the process. He states that

It is not enough for the colonized to be a slave, he must also accept this role. The bond between colonizer and colonized is thus destructive and creative. It destroys and re-creates the two partners of colonization into colonizer and colonized … Just as the colonizer is tempted to accept his part, the colonized is forced to accept being colonized (89).

Thus, Memmi suggests that the colonized must identify with the colonizer at some point. This stage is what he considers to be the final act of the colonized preceding revolt. The colonized’s acceptance of colonization is reflected through several characters in A Passage to India and The God of Small Things.Memmi’s philosophy, when applied to these characters, allows for a historical, critical approach to exploring the overarching legacy of colonialism, and whether the Indian characters from either text successfully reconcile both British and Indian facets of culture into their own personal identities, or if, in the process, the colonized characters inevitably identify with the colonizer as Memmi predicts.

  1. Forster, Roy and Mirror Civilizations

Both Forster and Roy’s Indian characters represent facets of Memmi’s critical text. However, Memmi’s description of the colonized’s affinity for the colonizer, is more easily identifiable in Roy’s text because the novel was written postcollonially and includes three generations of characters that bridge the gap of Indian independence. A Passage to India still resonates strongly with Memmi’s text, but was published in 1924, twenty-three years before India’s independence from the British Empire. This difference in historical context as well as the “moment in time” nature of Forster’s book vs. the “generational” nature of Roy’s, shows individuals within the nation of India in two different stages of colonial identity. The God of Small Things demonstrates a nation that consists of a blended conglomeration of colonizer and colonized. Roy accomplishes this by incorporating voices of a pre-independence generation, an independence generation, and a post-independence generation within her text. Contrastingly, Forster’s novel captures the British Empire and the Indian people through the European gaze and sets up a starker dichotomy of colonizer and colonized.

A Passage to India, though focused on an acute moment in history, maintains a critique of the British Empire throughout. The most prominent character and protagonist of the novel, Dr. Aziz exists as a colonized subject. His close friendship with Cyril Fielding and his eagerness to please his supposed friends Mrs. Moore and Adela is what first forms his relationship as the colonized with the colonizer. Dr. Aziz ingratiates himself with Mrs. Moore and Adela in his constant attempts to fulfil their wish to see “the real India.” Throughout the entire beginning of the novel, Aziz’s goal is to “unlock his country for her” (Forster 73). Though he is still proud of his country, Aziz attempts close friendship with Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Adela. Though Aziz becomes less of an Anglophile as the novel progresses, particularly after Adela’s rape accusation, he can be seen desiring that which is English throughout the first half of the novel…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

Manifestations of Social Darwinism in Colonial Reflections: A Study of the Writings of Sahibs, Memsahibs and Others

452 views

Iti Roychowdhury, Amity University, Madhya Pradesh, India

Amanpreet Randhawa, Amity University, Madhya Pradesh, India

Abstract

The Orient has always conjured up images of an exotic land, mystic practices, of snake charmers and tight rope walkers. Contemporary fiction reinforced these images. However, the literature of the Raj is not confined to the writers of fiction alone. A vast body of literature which is largely unexplored yet exists. This comprises the writings of the Sahibs, the Memsahibs, the missionaries and other sundry visitors to India. The present paper explores these myriad images to ascertain the designs and patterns of writings on India. The paper also attempts to explore the motives if any behind the emerging frameworks of these diverse writings.

[Key Words: Social Darwinism, Orientalism, Occidental, Imperialism, Indologists, Colonialism]

The European Renaissance ushered in a spirit of enquiry and exploration. Geographical discoveries, scientific inventions, growth and appreciation of the arts were some of its essential features. Kings and nobles vied with each other to patronize the arts and learning for which one of the prerequisites was of course large quantities of money. Colonies represented power and pelf, while the search for and acquisition of colonies also satisfied the spirit of enquiry and exploration. And so Europe went about acquiring colonies across the globe, principally in Africa and Asia. The first dictum of Colonialism of course was that the colonies existed for the good of the mother country and the second, that the natives were an inferior people. However, the European Renaissance also swept in the spirit of humanism, which mandated dignity of man as man. Britain in particular prided itself on its spirit of justice and fair play. The dilemma therefore was how to reconcile the imperialistic motives with humanistic ideas. Kipling makes a sardonic interpretation of the dilemma by calling it ‘ the white man’s burden’.

Of all the colonies of the far flung British Empire, India was deemed the jewel in the crown. England gloried in the material prosperity and strategic advantage that India brought to it. India always had porous borders, and myriad visitors kept pouring into India from times immemorial. Some of them chose to make their home here. Those who went back carried with them tales of splendor and glorious riches, of magical land and exotic peoples. This in turn attracted the traders who came to India with gifts and entreaties, requesting permission to trade. The embassies of Captain William Hawkins and Thomas Roe are significant landmarks .It was the pioneering work of these gentlemen that subsequently led to the colonization of India.

The British arrival in India marked the beginning of a new kind of literature – depicting an exotic land, alien culture and inferior people. Edward Said says that the Orient was an invention of the West, whereby the West judged, studied or disciplined the East, depending upon the perspective of the viewer/ writer. For example, the image of India has been captured by 3 broad categories of writers: the writers of fiction, the reports and observations of the Sahibs (administrators), and finally, the writings of lay visitors such as the Memsahibs (wives of Sahibs), other members of the families of officials serving in India, the missionaries, etc.

The Man – Portrayal of the Indian Character

Some of the most celebrated books on India penned by the British are Foster’s A Passage to India’, Kipling’s Kim, Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown, etc. Foster’s protagonist, Aziz, is meant to represent the typical Indian – emotional, susceptible to kindness, generous, but mean, and having a way with truth. The character of Godbole is even more of an enigma. Foster does not even attempt to decipher him. It is as if Godbole is purposefully created to baffle and defy the Western understanding of Eastern character.

Another defining character in the British fiction on India is that of Kim, the protagonist in the eponymous work of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling’s Kim grew up a street urchin, and is familiar with every nook and corner of the city of Lahore. This helps him in carrying out his nefarious tasks – passing on messages, espionage and the like – typically sly, underhand things that an imperialist would expect a native to do. The Tibetan Lama in Kim is akin to Foster’s Godbole – a mystic – unearthly and unrealistic. These images of Indians are recurring- either a morally less evolved, devious, unscrupulous, lying brute, or an inscrutable mystic, communing with his pagan gods and immersed in his Eastern spirituality…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

An Early Nineteenth Century Vade Mecum for India

131 views

Sutapa Dutta, Gargi College, University of Delhi, India

Abstract

A Guide-Book for an Empire is bound to be of epic dimensions, more so if it is on India. In its length and largeness, in its depth and diversity, in its grand ambition and ambivalence, such works would inevitably reflect the geographical, political and cultural drama of a country that is so varied. There can be no clear distinctions, no acute significations even, as the tragic and the comic, the grand and the common dissolve, intermingle and produce a chaotic discursive montage of what India is. One such early work which presents India through the eyes of an Englishman is the The East India Vade Mecum of Captain Thomas Williamson written in 1810. Meant as a ‘Complete Guide to Gentlemen intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company’, this colonial archive is probably the first patient and meticulous noting down of minute aspects of life and people in India. Spread over two volumes of more than thousand pages, the author’s professed aim in undertaking this stupendous labour was for ‘public utility’, ‘with the view to promote the welfare, and to facilitate the progress, of those young gentlemen, who may from time to time, be appointed to situations under [the] several Presidencies…’(Letter to the Hon. Court of Directors of the East India Company in Vade Mecum).

[Keywords: Colonial Bengal, East India Company, India, Vade Mecum.]

About Captain Thomas Williamson we come to know from what he writes about himself in this book. The author attributes his considerable insight and knowledge to his long stay of ‘twenty years’ in Bengal. He first arrived in India in 1778 and was a Captain in the Bengal army. It is apparent that the Williamson family had spent some time in Calcutta. His father, whom he mentions also lived in India and is buried in Calcutta. By the time he was writing the Vade Mecum, he had already achieved some fame with his Oriental Field Sports, or the Wild Sports of the East, published in 1809, an extraordinary book that documents vivid descriptions and picture plates of animal hunting in India, especially tigers. As a first travel guide to India intended for Europeans, Williamson’s Vade Mecum was intended to fill up the gaps in information required by the statesmen, military men, merchants, civilians and all those who proceed to this new country. Keeping this in mind Williamson adopts an ‘easy’ and ‘familiar’ style rather than a ‘didactic style’. The guide book is meant for those who would travel to India for a long stay and will need information of the place and people of this foreign country. His guide, he claims, has been written with the purpose to provide a ‘just’ conception of the ‘characters of the natives’ in India, and would remove all doubts, prejudices and national opinions, which if allowed to prevail “must occasion every object to be seen through a false medium” (I:Preface,vii).

Williamson’s assertion that his guidebook is not a false medium is apparently a rejection of such historical interpretations which are perceived very often through the narrow and distorted glasses of western preconceptions of India. From the seventeenth century onwards especially with trade links opening up, Western imagination and curiosity were fed with fantastic stories of India’s fabulous wealth and its rich markets. European relationship with India for the next 300 years remained based on vague knowledge, assumptions and misconceptions. From the latter half of the eighteenth century as the British began to consolidate their physical territories in India there began a simultaneous process of constructing a vision of the Empire. Such a vision shaped by the contemporary Enlightenment ideal in Europe, was at once based on an imaginary construct and fashioning of the ways the British conceived of India and their role as rulers. As they undertook from the 1770’s a more detailed study of India, there began an intense cataloguing and categorising of languages, races and tribes in India to secure a better understanding of the unchartered civilization they had to administer. Warren Hastings and his coterie of Oriental scholars like William Jones, Charles Wilkins and Nathaniel Halhed with their massive scholarly endeavours of translations and texts, reasoned that their effort to impart learning would be ‘useful to the state’ and would ‘lessen the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection’ (Letter of Hastings to N. Smith, October 4, 1784, quoted in Kopf, p.18).Although there were obvious political and ideological differences between the Anglicist and the Orientalist point of view, yet both their perceptions were essentially those of the outsider. Charles Grant considered “the people of Hindostan, a race of men lamentably degenerate and base” (Grant: 71) and proposed in his Observations that “The communication of our light and knowledge to them, would prove the best remedy for their disorders” (Grant: 148-9).

Such viewpoints and scholarly enterprises reflected usually two extremes; on the one hand, there was an exuberant display of wonder and curiosity in those who saw India as a land of exotic differences. To comprehend such a mystifying entity, there was the obsessive desire to find parallels and common origins of languages, race, literature, etc. The attempt was to divest India of its strangeness and to fit it into a familiar framework that would be more comprehensible for the Western onlooker. The other extreme was to conceive India as a threat – as a land of dirt, disease and death – an exotic but a dangerous place. Throughout the eighteenth century as the British tried to contend with territorial supremacy, first in Bengal and later in the rest of the country, such contradictory tensions of differences and similarities continued to bother them. The sense of doubt, anxiety and uneasiness existed side by side as they tried to ‘master’ the land, the languages and the laws. Captain Williamson’s Vade Mecum shows this inevitable contrast between a seductive desirous India and a land which is at the same time threatening and fearsome. His insistence that the young English recruits ought to ‘know’ this land reflects to a large extent Wellesley’s ambition in setting up the Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. Wellesley’s anxiety “for the better instruction of junior Civil Servants of the Company” as they were “totally incompetent and ignorant of the languages, laws and usages and customs of India”, was with a view to “the stability of our own interest, as to the happiness and welfare of our native subjects” (Wellesley’s Minute in Council, dated 18th August, 1800 in Roebuck: xx)…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Imagined’ Indianness: Homogenized Othering as a Mimetic Response in Jane Eyre

460 views

Debarati Goswami, Independent Researcher, Virginia, USA

Abstract                                         

This paper problematises Charlotte Bronte’s historically specific, religiously biased and homogenized underrepresentation of Indianness, considering Hinduism as an exchangeable term for Indianness, in Jane Eyre and claims this homogenized Othering to be a mimetic response. It concentrates on the Self/ Other dichotomy constructed through the characters of Jane Eyre and St John, both representing the British and Christian Self, and their individual approaches of Othering Indianness which resulted in a Self/Other polarisation in the Christian Self itself. Considering Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, the objective of the paper is to study Bronte’s twofold way of homogenously Othering Indianness through Jane and St John, with an implication of doubly Othering the non-Hindu and non-Hindustani speaking Indians. It attempts to legitimize the novel as a quintessential discourse of British Selfhood besides being a mimetic response to the British social institutions which ‘constructed’ Jane as the marginalized “Other” in this autobiographical fiction.

[Keywords: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, homogenized Othering, René Girard, Theory of mimetic desire]

At a conference titled “Europe and its Others” at Essex, while articulating the European strategy of representing itself as the sovereign Self and its colonies as Others or “programmed near-images of that very sovereign Self” (Spivak b. 247) , in her essay “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak proposed:

On a somewhat precious register of literary theory it is possible to say that this was the construction of a fiction whose task was to produce a whole collection of “effects of the real,” and that the “misreading” of this “fiction” produced the proper name “India” (para. 6).

By grounding its research on the mimetic aspect of the homogenised Othering of Indianness in Jane Eyre, this paper engages itself in problematicing Charlotte Bronte’s ‘constructed’ representation of Indianness in the novel. It prefers the use of the word ‘Indianness’ to ‘India’ as Bronte’s contemptuous Othering in the novel was meant for anything representing or containing the essence of the abstract notion of the colonized, ‘coloured’ object ‘India’ rather than for the landmass with well defined geographical referents called ‘India’.

Entitled Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, during its first publication, the novel narrates the journey of an impoverished and orphan eponymous protagonist towards the attainment of her Feminine Selfhood, battling against the conventional patriarchal institutions of family, educational institution, class hierarchy, marriage and even religion. According to Margaret Howard Blom, the novel “(T)races an individual’s desperate struggle against insuperable odds to establish and maintain a sense of her own identity and to satisfy the deepest needs of her nature” (Blom 87). The reception of the novel with wide global acclamation and the erudite interpretations of its various universally appealing themes consolidated its acceptance as a canonical text. However, Bronte’s constructed narrativization of a historically specific socio-historical scenario of India through a religiously biased and homogenized Othering of Indianness, with a specific underrepresentation of Hinduism, proves to be a problematic. An attempt to discover India or Indianness through its representation in Jane Eyre is bound to lead a reader, alien to Indian history, to a factitious understanding of the nation and its socio-historical past from the viewpoint of the “master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe’” (Chakrabarty 1). This paper, thus, accentuates on the homogenous Othering of the mainstream Hindu population of India and doubly Othering the marginalised Indians primarily by homogenizing its religious plurality, multiculturalism and multilingualism which together constitute Indianness. The itinerary of this research sequentially includes a textual analysis of the underrepresentation of Indianness through the characters of Mr. Brocklehurst, Jane and St John, Jane’s Othering of Indianness as a response to the British patriarchal institutions which ‘constructed’ her as the marginalized “Other” in the novel and a psychoanalytic interpretation of her homogenous Othering of the Indianness as a mimetic act on the basis of René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.

As a quintessential discourse of Imperial subject construction, this novel has genuinely represented the British and Christian spirit and the sovereign Self through a meticulous Othering of Indianness, the paradigm of which was profoundly religious, besides being racial. As a testament to establish corroboration of this proposition one must critically focus on the denigrating words of Mr. Brocklehurst, “the black marble clergyman” (81), self-righteous and fastidious proprietor of Jane’s Lowood institution. In a Biblical reference, in her Preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, Bronte wrote, “Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil…” (xxxvii). This allusion justifies Jane’s contempt for Mr. Brocklehurst whose prime concern was to uphold the doctrines advocated by the Evangelical Anglicans in general and by the Methodists in particular (DeVere web) and who was entrusted with the responsibility of guiding Jane on a virtuous path by her aunt Mrs Reed. Like Micaiah, prophesying evil concerning Ahab, Mr. Brocklehurst despised Jane and once decried her for her lack of essential Christian virtues, in the following words:

(A) little castaway: not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien. You must be on your guard against her; you must shun her example; if necessary, avoid her company, exclude her from your sports, and shut her out from your converse. Teachers, you must watch her: keep your eyes on her movements, weigh well her words, scrutinise her actions, punish her body to save her soul: if, indeed, such salvation be possible, for (my tongue falters while I tell it) this girl, this child, the native of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut — this girl is — a liar! (81).

From the perspective of this study, the above speech leads to at least two problems and one hypothesis. First, Bronte’s intention behind making Mr. Brocklehurst insolently refer to the shibboleths of Hinduism was a dissimulation, as Jane was not the signified but a signifier representing the polytheistic population whom the British needed to ‘watch’, ‘scrutinise’ and ‘punish’ for their heathen ways and guide them to ‘salvation’. Second, the insinuation drawn from the possessive determiner ‘its’ again highlights Bronte’s racial abandonment of the belittled population by reducing their identity to a homogenous, singular inanimate object. As the religious or communal group alluded to in the speech remains unspecified, the paper assumes that those polytheistic heathens stand the possibility of belonging either to the mainstream colonized elites group or marginalised communities or even to the ethnic groups of the British colonies. The rationale behind this assumption is that Bronte refers to some of the non-white or rather non- British races in the novel, the African slaves, Persians, Turks and Native Americans, besides Indians, and so it is difficult to specify the exact community she refers to in the speech. Susan Meyer calls this European notion of colonial culture and their tendency of alienating themselves from the colonized natives as “Eurocentric idea of colonized savages” (Meyer 45). Since Mr. Brocklehurst makes an allusion to the Hindu deities, from the standpoint of this research, the paper hypothetically claims that this speech has a disparaging allusion to the “colonized savages” and marginalised citizenry of the undivided nineteenth century India who definitely contributed to the omnium gatherum of Indian culture or Indianness although they were not considered as a part of the majoritarian population…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

Indian Religions in the Roman Catholics’ Gaze: 1920-1965

97 views

Enrico Beltramini, Notre Dame de Namur University in California, USA

Abstract

How contemporary European Roman Catholicism elaborated a representation of Indian religions as spiritual and mystical, or pre-modern, is the theme of this article. After a brief summary of the Catholic Church’s recognition of the Indian religious Other in the context of the Second Vatican Council, and in particular the Church’s watershed document Nostra Aetate, this article addresses the preparatory work of French Catholic theologians and missionaries in the decades before the council, particularly in relation to theological approaches to Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

[Key Words: Roman Catholicism, India, Vatican II, Nostra Aetate]

  1. Introduction

In a personal recollection of his participation in a session of the Second Vatican Council (also “Vatican II”), arguably the most significant event in the modern era of the Catholic Church, Francis Cardinal Arinze argued that “Thanks to Vatican II, the Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to meeting other believers” (Madges and Daley 2012, 207). He did not elaborate further about the identity of those categorized as “other believers.” In this article, the notion of “other believers” is understood as a Catholic representation according to Vatican II. The Catholic construction of the religious Other, including the Indian religious Other, at the Vatican II was significant for Catholicism’s self-definition, at a time when the Church struggled to articulate a post-colonial missionary discourse and enter into dialogue with the modern world (Nostra Aetate, Part One and Five)

  1. Nostra Aetate

The “Declaration on the Relation of the Roman Catholic Church to Non-Christian Religions” Nostra Aetate (Latin: In our Time) was a major contribution of the Second Vatican Council. The original draft document was titled “Decree on the Jews.” The decree was devoted to conveying details about the bond between Christians and Jews, while decrying all displays and acts of anti-Semitism—this only twenty years after the horrors of the Shoah. During preparation, the scope of the document was broadened to address the Catholic Church’s relationships with the world’s different faiths. Nostra Aetate mentions only four world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, arranged in an order indicating increasing closeness to Christianity. On Hinduism and Buddhism, the declaration states that:

In Hinduism people explore the divine mystery and express it both in the limitless riches of myth and the accurately defined insights of philosophy. They seek release from the trials of the present life by ascetical practices, profound meditation and recourse to God in confidence and love. Buddhism in its various forms testifies to the essential inadequacy of this changing world. It proposes a way of life by which people can, with confidence and trust, attain a state of perfect liberation and reach supreme illumination either through their own efforts or with divine help (Nostra Aetate, Part Two).

Nostra Aetate is not apologetic about the truth of the Christian faith. While the declaration does not display a sense of superiority or emphasize the limitations of other religious traditions, going so far as to state that “the Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions,” it also does not indicate that non-Christian religions might be considered as ways of salvation per se.

 While inclusive of only a limited number of statements on Indian religions, Nostra Aetate stands as a document of momentous historical significance: it is the first official recognition in the history of the Catholic Church of the existence and relevance of non-Christian religions as living traditions, on which the declaration shows a convinced option for a paradigm of inclusion. In 1965, when Nostra Aetate was solemnly announced, the Church was probably ready for a substantial, official rethinking of its attitudes about other believers, thanks to the preparatory work of the previous decades in the different fields of historical theology, theology of religions and missiology, including a fundamental encyclical of pope Pius XI in terms of development of autonomous local churches. A deeper look at Nostra Aetate may help identify the issues that the declaration maintains with regard to Indian religions…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

“I am black, but my soul is white”: the Christian Neophyte and his Alienation in 19th Century Anti-conversion Anglo-Indian novels

127 views

Ayusman Chakraborty, Jadavpur University, India

Abstract

This article studies how the Christian convert is represented in three nineteenth century Anglo-Indian novels. On the basis of their attitude towards conversion, Anglo-Indian novels can be classified as pro-conversion or anti-conversion. In pro-conversion novels, conversion to Christianity is presented as a smooth transition. Anti-conversion novels, in contrast, portray conversion as a harrowing experience that shatters the mental stability of the convert. Alienation and isolation inevitably follow conversion. The three texts discussed here show how the authors highlight the alienation of the Christian neophyte to discourage proselytization. The alienation of the convert is thus strategically articulated in these texts.

[Keywords: Christianity, Conversion, alienation, Hinduism, Caste, The Missionary, Sydney Owenson, Seeta, Philip Meadows Taylor, The Old Missionary, William Wilson Hunter.]

The issue of conversion became very important in nineteenth century Anglo-Indian literature. This was not an isolated occurrence, unrelated to mainstream English literature. As Gauri Viswanathan shows, conversion became a popular subject of discussion in nineteenth century Britain. The nineteenth century witnessed progressive secularization and liberalization of British society and state. This was not a smooth passage. There was a heated debate on whether to incorporate the religious minorities like the Jews, the Catholics and the Nonconformists into the wider concept of nation. The orthodox groups like the Evangelicals insisted on the conversion of the minorities to Anglican faith before they could be incorporated. At the same time, they also called for the Christianization of the colonies. On the other side, there were those who wished to preserve religious differences. Their goal was to Anglicize the minority groups without tampering with their religious identities – to convert a Jew to a non-Jewish Jew, in the words of Viswanathan. In such an atmosphere of conflicting ideas, novels on conversion acquired added importance. Viswanathan states, “It is no accident that novels about the conversion of Hindus and Muslims to Christianity had wide popular appeal in nineteenth century England, not merely as wishful testimony to the efficacy of missionary ideology but more compellingly as exotic displacements of the pressing and often explosive issue of whether to admit Jews, Catholics, and Nonconformists into the English nation state” (Viswanathan 27).

The Novel, as Viswanathan’s study suggests, became a battleground where the pro-conversion and anti-conversion ideologies confronted each other. Indeed, on the basis of their attitudes towards conversion, novels can be classified as pro-conversion or anti-conversion. In the pro-conversion Anglo-Indian novels, conversion generally becomes, to quote Viswanathan again, “a straightforward, overdetermined spiritual movement to Christianity” (Viswanathan 28). That is, in such novels conversion to Christianity is portrayed as smooth and unproblematic. In contrast, anti-conversion novels problematize conversion. Such novels focus on the alienation of the neophyte to tacitly discourage conversion to Christianity.

This article aims to examine how three anti-conversion Anglo-Indian novels strategically describe the alienation of the Christian neophytes. In such novels a neophyte always appears as a tragic figure. Rejected by the Hindu society, he does not find place among his new co-religionists. His attempts to mingle with the Europeans always meet with rebuff. The anti-conversionist authors do not portray conversion as a joyous rebirth. Rather they portray it as a painful experience involving isolation and separation.

It is necessary to understand at the very outset why some colonial authors were so much against conversion. The stated aims of colonialism were the three ‘Gs’ – God, Gold and Glory – or the three “Cs’ – Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce. However, the conversion of the natives always induced an anxiety in the colonizers. In so far as the neophyte proclaimed the triumph of Christianity, he or she was seen as the “reformed, recognizable Other”, to use a phrase by Bhabha (Bhabha 122). However, much like Bhabha’s ‘mimic man’, the neophyte also acted as a menacing presence. This is because, united to the colonizers by a common religion (Christianity), he/she claimed like Blake’s “little Black Boy” – “And I am black, but O! my soul is white” (Blake 45). This claim challenged the colonial signifying practice by partly obliterating the barrier between the self and the other. The only way colonial authors could render the neophytes innocuous was by presenting them as failed converts. Their attitude towards the neophyte was therefore ambivalent; it oscillated between compassion and contempt. This in turn influenced the way they portrayed the neophyte and his alienation.

A few words on the concept of alienation is necessary here. The word ‘alienation’ has become so much saturated with meanings that it is difficult to arrive at a concrete definition. At best, one can provide only a working definition of the term. For the purpose of this study, we will accept the very basic definition of alienation. As Irving Louis Horowitz points out, “At its source the word ‘alienation’ implies an intense separation first from objects in a world, second from other people, third from ideas about the world held by other people. It might be said that the synonym of alienation is separation, while the precise antonym of the word alienation is integration” (Horowitz 231). Alienation, as Horowitz shows, can have both positive and negative effects – that is, can be “constructive as well as destructive” (Horowitz 233). However, as long as it is imposed from without, it generally has a destructive effect on individuals. It produces only negative feelings–the feelings of “powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement” as recognized by Seeman (Seeman 783).

The ostensible object of colonial authors in portraying the alienation of the Christian neophyte was to condemn the Hindu caste system. In this the pro-conversionist and the anti-conversionist authors were in agreement. It is interesting that the nineteenth century Anglo-Indian writers portrayed mainly Hindu converts in their novels. Despite the fact that the Muslims formed a substantial portion of the Indian population, the novelists rarely portrayed their conversion to Christianity. Now, as polytheists, the Hindus were felt to be more in need of ‘truth’ than the Muslims. After all, the Muslims also worshipped the one true god, while the Hindus were just ‘idolaters’. Islam was certainly an ‘errant faith’; but it was a monotheistic one, sometimes more rigidly monotheistic than Christianity. As T. R. Metcalf argues, “Islam in the end was a religion which commanded respect, even a covert envy, among the British in India” (Metcalf 144). But more importantly, the British were afraid of the Muslims. Unlike the pliant Hindus, the Muslims were ‘zealous’ and ‘fanatical’ in their eyes. The British feared that they had already earned the animosity of the Muslims by ousting them from a position of power. They were not ready to try their patience further. Hence, the British writers put more emphasis on the conversion of the Hindus than the Muslims…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Sacred Topoi of Mythical India in the Literary Work of Mihai Eminescu, the Romanian National Poet

253 views

Diana Câmpan, University of Alba Iulia, Romania

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore some of the main important Indian topoi that were active in the creative imaginary of Mihai Eminescu, the Romanian National Poet (1850-1889). Not very many researchers from abroad know that Mihai Eminescu developed his own philosophical approach and, by far, Indian culture caught his attention through the richness of symbols, through the complexity of fundamental theories on world cosmogony and extinction, sacred topoi and through its fruitful mythology. Not at all by chance, one of the strongest voices who studied the literary work of Mihai Eminescu from this new perspective is the Indian author Amita Bhose, who lived for several years in Romania and who decided to learn Romanian language especially for being able to read Mihai Eminescu’s poetry in the original language and to translate it for Indian people.

[Keywords: Creative Imaginary, Indian topoi, Romanian National Poet, Indian Researcher, Multiculturalism]

 Indian culture, with its exotic mythology and consecrated archetypal structures was one of the privileged Eastern landmarks in the creative imaginary of the Romanian national poet, Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889). During his Philosophy studies in Vienna and Berlin, Mihai Eminescu, who is considered to be the “last great Romantic” of the world, thoroughly studied the ancient Oriental philosophies. By far, Indian culture caught his attention through the richness of symbols, through the complexity of fundamental theories on World cosmogony and extinction, the gods’ migration between Earth and Heavens, the codes of human feelings and not least, the geographies of Paradise that were perfect for the Romantic Age escape temptations. Other sacred topoi are, for instance, Nirvana, a sky of stars seen in a mirror, the coral palace, the temple, but the most mysterious space of all is the repose or the ”ahistorical void”, a place of refuge and protection, with re-balancing virtues in which the potential state, the untriggered energeia, the One and unrepeatable have not yet received a norm or a shape but are still potentialities.

Amita Bhose, a great lover of Romanian literature translated into Bengali a volume of Eminescu’s poems and analysed the influence of mythological India on Eminescu’s work by means of a direct and academic connection to the authentic values of Hindu culture. Born in 1933, in Calcutta, Amita Bhose followed her husband (Dipak Kumar Ray, Ph.D. in Oil Geology) to Romania, in 1959. She loved Romanian people and culture so much that she decided to learn Romanian language perfectly. She started translating M. Eminescu’s poems into Bengali and she published, in 1969, in Calcutta, Eminescu: Kavita (Eminescu: Poems). Amita Bhose came back to Romania several times, and in 1971 she started a PhD programme in Philology, in Bucharest, with a thesis about The Indian Influence on Eminescu’s Philosophy. After finishing her PhD training, she became a collaborator of the Oriental Languages Department of the University of Bucharest – Romania, where she taught an optional course in Bengali language and literature. In 1978 she published her most important book about Eminescu and India, a complex study about the close connection between M. Eminescu’s literary work and the Indian philosophy and mythology.

At a careful look at Eminescu’s research, literary historians (and Amita Bhose herself) have signalled a few aspects of Indian thought and mythology that Eminescu became aware of and studied thoroughly. Thus, it is well known that during his studies in Berlin, the poet attended the Sanskrit language course held by professor Ebel, and because of his interest in Sanskrit he later translated parts of Franz Bopp’s Critical Grammar of Sanskrit Language and copied much of Bopp’s Comparative Glossary of Sanskrit Language. Eminescu did more than copy the text. He also analysed and made connections between terms, which is a proof that he knew the deep semantics of the Sanskrit word aksara (which he explains by “quod non perit, immortale”, “syllaba sanctissima”) and of the sacred syllable OUM (meaning “seed”, “essence”). He was very knowledgeable about Buddhism, as it may be inferred from his manuscripts, in which he mentions having read E. Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme Indien. He also read Bh?gavad-Gita and analysed concepts of Brahmanism, which he later used in his poems; he studied the theses of N?g?rjuna’s nihilist thought, the psycho-cosmogram with the ten circles of Mandala, he developed concepts like Nirvana, samsâra (cycle of birth and death, wheel of destiny), the world’s gold seed or matrix (Hiranjagarbha), he knew all ancient Indian gods and used them in his own work, he read several of Kalidasa’s works. Speaking about assuming Traditional Indian doctrines, Romanian ideologist Constantin Barbu notes that “the emptiness doctrine in M?h?yana Buddhism was darker and more tempestuous than Vedic hymns; for the most radical M?h?yana nihilist thinker, N?g?rjuna, also known to Eminescu, there is no: 1. cessation (nirodha); 2. origination (utp?da); 3. annihilation (uccheda); 4. eternity (???vata); 5. unity (ek?rtha); 6. multiple meanings (n?n?rtha); 7. appearance (?gama); 8. disappearance (nirgama)“ (Barbu 24).

Our intent is to analyse the Romantic perspective of mysterium tremendum shifted towards Oriental philosophical and imagological potentialities, which Mihai Eminescu appears to have used as an ontological support for the explanation of logos. We begin our analysis by accepting the idea that, for the Romantic man’s archetype, assuming the sacred is a characteristic of what Phillipe Van Tieghem calls “the inner Romanticism”, but also of the mystical experience of the creative self, mentioned with a fascinating relevance by Mircea Eliade, himself a great lover of Indian culture: “…the poet discovers the world as if he had been present at the birth of the world, as if he had lived the first day of creation. From one perspective we can say that any great poet recreates the world, as he strives to see as if Time and History did not exist” (Eliade.a: 72).

For Mihai Eminescu, loneliness and retreat to isolation in view of initiation are principles of dignity. M. Eminescu built a semantic and a deeply metaphorical bridge between what Hindu culture calls Karma (“fate”) and “the blind will to live” (a concept borrowed from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer), thus giving birth to several extremely powerful lyrical motifs. As the human being was created equal to gods and subjected to his body’s desires, he finds ways to rebel and come back to himself, to cross boundaries, to escape and protect himself against the petty exterior. Throughout Eminescu’s work, we encounter a series of professions of non commitment and return to the inner depths of the self, while craving for the grand sites of knowledge and escaping to sacred places: silence and non-sight (stopping words in thought and refusal to look at the superficial outside world), solitude, melancholy, return to the past through remembrance, reaching privileged places and states (childhood and old age, climbing the magical mountain or the temple, return to origin).

We shall try to follow the manner in which several of these concepts are reflected in Eminescu’s poetic imaginary, bringing to life the sacred topoi of Indian mythology during full European Romantic culture…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

India as Object of Mircea Eliade’s Gaze

327 views

Sonia Elvireanu, Centre for the Research of the Imaginary, Alba Iulia, Romania

Abstract

Exotism is one of the blue prints of European literature in the 20th century, says Jean-Marc Moura in La littérature des lointains. Histoire de l’exotisme européen au XXe siècle. (Moura 1). He defines this desire of the other as “the totality of Europe’s debt to other cultures” (Halen: web). Thereby he acknowledges the permanent change of Europe’s literary map though the integration of other cultures. Exotism equals a favourable or desirous perception of alteriy. This paper sets exotism in polarity to access to India as to an imagined community, pointing to orientalist Mircea Eliade, historian of religions, as an example in point.

[Key Words : Mircea Eliade, colonial India, Memoirs, Erotic Mystic]

Introduction

Pierre Halen distinguishes three types of alterity in which the West is grounded: Roman, Greek, and Bzyantine. To them Jean-Marc Moura adds a fourth, which was generated by colonial imperialism, taking the form of « ekphrastic exotism », whereby he understands the ”description of an alien art work, real or imaginary, in a piece of fiction” (Halen: web).

The founding of European colonies in India, by Portugal, England, the Netherlands spawned a rich harvest of exotic literature, especially in English and French, which included : Edward Morgan Forster (A Passage to India), Rudyard Kipling (Kim), Paul Scott (The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion , The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils, Pierre Lotti (L’Inde sans les anglais), André Chevrillon (Dans l’Inde, Sanctuaires et Paysages d’Asie), Romain Rolland (Gandhi), André Malraux (Antimémoires), Marguerite Duras (Le Vice-consul, India Song), Catherine Clément (La Reine des cipayes), Alexandra David-Néel (L’Inde où j’ai vécu). Famous are also American Louis Bromfield (Night in Bombay, The Rains Came), Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini (L’odore dell’India), Alberto Moravia (Un’idea dell’India), and German Hermann Hesse (Carnets indiens, Siddharta). Fascination with India took Romanian Mircea Eliade on a three-year journey to initiation in Orientalistics. It ascended from exterior initiation (the discovery of the unknown Oriental space), through affective intiation (revelation of love as the royal way to the absolute), to anagogic initiation (philosophy, theology, yoga).

Mircea Eliade and India

Mircea Eliade’s presence in India is not related to the traveller’s or the explorer’s curiosity but by a desire to be initiated into Orientalism, not through bookish studies but through unmediated contact.

He was only fourteen when he took up the study of Sanskrit, Persian and Hebrew. In 1928 he received a scholarship from a Maharajah to study Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy with Professor Surendranath Dasgupta. He was also initiated into Hindu theology and Yoga practices. His Indian adventure came to an end three years later, in 1931, when he returned to Romania for military service.

Upon his return, Eliade published two books about his adventure in the East : India and The Maharajah’s Library. He reports on his unusual experiences, inroads into the jungle or into the Indian metropoles, liminal experiences (moments of excitement, of anxiety, of disenchantment or shocking discoveries for the European coming from Eastern Europe, from a different culture, encounters with outstanding Indian personalities : his benefactor, Manindra Chandra Nandy, the Kazimbazar Maharajah, known in Bengali for his magnanimity, Ghandi, the leader of the movement for non-violent liberation from the British rule, poet Rabindranath Tagore, who spoke to him about the gap between the East and the West.

India is Eliade’s notebooks of the 1928-1931 period, where he jotted down his impressions, experiences and reflections. In the preface to the book, published in 1934, the author specifies that this is no travelogue or book of memoirs but off-hand jottings about the visited places, giving back a fragmented image of the Oriental space he had discoverd : ”This book is made of fragments on India ; some of them were written on the spot, others were recollections, and a third group were taken out of an intimate notebook. This is not a unitary book on India […] I chose to replace adventure with reportage, and reportage with narrative. (Eliade a. 5). Here and there description makes room for reflection or for narratives of adventures in various Oriental places.

Ceylon was Eliade’s gate of entry into India. The encounter with the jungle world is overwhelming. He is taking in the exotic landscape through hightened visual and olfactive perceptions, being overwhelmed by the abundant vegetation, dizzy with its piercing flavours. He experiences at first hand a nightmare which, to a western man, is unimaginable.

His body, the first receptacle of sensations, is almost crushed by their force which carries him from agony to exhilaration. The epithets convey this organic resonance, the ceaseless threshing of the senses: ”a breaze pervaded by the fragrance of the sapful tree trunks”, ”an atmosphere saturated with strong and ravishing perfumes” (Eliade a. 13).

The jungle is working its power over the European soul with such force as to impose itself on the young man even when he has given it up as a form of posession: ”The terrifying rush of saps makes you a prisoner, dragging you into the midst of their cruel slaughter, stirring and mocking you in your traveller modesty.”( Eliade a. 17).

The jungle is the very image of creation, the endless show of the war between life and death and of their mix, the topos of a vitalist experience of sorts, and a permanent challenge to the senses: “This act of nature permanently spewing life, senselessly, for the mere joy of creation, for the joy of breathing in the sun and crying out its victory, makes one dizzy, makes one dumb” (Ibid.).

Eliade perceives the exotic miracle through sensations, the first step in the oriental space cognition being of a sensuous nature. His body is showered by sensations before his consciousness begins to reflect on the jungle experience: ”You return to the world of men with the sense of having witnessed a miracle, something monstrous or something sacred, exceptional and irrational, which you can neither judge nor imitate” ( Eliade a. 18)…Access Full Text of the Article

You might be interested in

1 … 130 131 132 133 134 … 160