Vol 7 No 2

Editorial, Vol. VII, No. 2

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Nostos

 Maria-Ana Tupan, University of Alba Iulia, Romania

The word “desire” suggests a distance between the appetitive subject and the object commanding attention, that possession does not remove. The newly acquired “asset” may fill a collector with pride, or serve utilitarian ends in the absence of any sense of empathetic identification or admiration. A case apart, and a more redeeming one, is what René Girard calls “triangular desire”, induced by a mediator’s influence: desire according to another, opposed to desire according to oneself (Girard 4). The object is not desired for its unmediated appeal, but for what it represents in the eyes of a third party that dictates the table of values and carries the staff of institutionalized authority. In time, India was alienated into an empty sign of imperial prestige ( “jewel in the crown”), a target of religious conversion invested with the mandatory mission of prophesying Christianity (the “star in the east”), the application ground of ideological experiments carried out by reformists, such as Madame Blavatsky and her American theosophists, etc. Even the “Indomania” of eighteenth- century Germany has been interpreted as a symptom of compensatory Narcissism under the occupation of French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies (Germana 10).

The opposite of desire is the mirror scene, or the anagnorisis of spiritual dissent or affiliation. India is recognized as racial cradle and origin of the European linguistic community. Analogies are sought out among India’s foundational myths, spaces of knowledge or of symbolic representation. The phenomenon exceeds by far the significance of a search for an Arcadian past triggered by the alienating effects and psychological pressure of technological progress in the advanced civilizations. Actually, in the later nineteenth century Indian thought was being perceived as tangent upon the latest scientific theories. The remark was made by Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu, whose notebooks jotted down during his studies in Vienna and Berlin (at Humboldt University, named after one of the founders who had been enthralled by The Bhagavad Gita) add up to a ”biographia literaria” of about twenty thousand pages. This encyclopaedic work, which gives a comprehensive picture of emerging theories in all disciplinary fields, includes references to Rudolf Clausius and Heinrich von Helmholz, who elaborated on the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy). Indian cosmogony, alternating creation and regression of the universe to an immaterial form of existence, a vibrating nothing which nowadays is called quantum singularity or indestructible structure of information, was not the only Indian correlative of the rapidly changing scientific picture of the universe:

He, the One and Undifferentiated, who by the manifold application of His powers produces, in the beginning, different objects for a hidden purpose and, in the end, withdraws the universe into Himself (Svetasvatara Upanishad: Ch.4) (our emphasis).

In Eminescu’s time Romanian culture was oriented to the German-speaking world, maybe because the country was enthusiastic over the recent ascension of the Hohenzollern dynasty. It was in this space inhabited by scholars who had earned the reputation of being the ”Indians of Europe” (De Careil 102) that the young student appropriated Indian philosophy to the point where it was allowed to shape his own world outlook. The protagonist of his poem Hyperion travels back in time, absorbed by the thirst of the Demiurge who draws things back to Himself. His beloved is a Blue Flower who dies to the world of matter and acts as the poet’s mediator to a transcending one of meditation, as in Novalis. Death restores humans to their true selves, while the loss of kingdoms (whether in King Lear or in the recent revolutionary events in Paris) breeds thoughts on the vanity of the world, which is deception, a dream of eternal death. Poetry is an objectified form of the mind, a revelation of the essential Self (Tat tvam asi). Love brings disappointment like everything else in an illusionary world. His beloved is no Maitreyi (The Bruhadaranyaka Upanishad), Yãgnavalkya’s philosophically-minded wife, but a sensuous creature, born in the likeness of Kãtyãyani, Yãgnavalkya’s mundane wife, who blames him for sinking into deep thoughts, and meditating on the Assyrian fields …

Hindu philosophy comes to mind many times, as we survey the ideas that shaped the cultural history of the West since the eighteenth century to the present.

German and English Romanticism shared a web of metaphors in response to India emerging from behind the veil through enhanced cultural ties. The proccess of self-realization and progress to the supersensuous domain, which is central to the Krishna myth in The Bhagavad Gita, out of which Novalis drew his rapidly disseminated “blue flower motif”, preceded the Hegelian growth of the mind philosophy, while the Wordsworthian “recollection in tranquillity” motif is analogous to the Purusha/ Prakriti dichotomy. The connection is more explicit in the soul/ Over-Soul relationship in Emerson’s poem and essay of the same title, where he echoes “the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us” (Goldberg 32). P.B. Shelley, the author of Lines to an Indian air, used both representations: Epipsychidion, to which the soul returns, and the female alter-ego associated with the blue air of the dawns (I arise from dreams of thee).

Heredity as destiny was perceived as a modern version, decked with biological evidence, of the ancient belief in metempsychosis, which, acording to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 8), preserves features of previous incarnations, by writers who thematized the topic (Robert Montgomery,Theophile Gautier, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Mihai Eminescu, Liviu Rebreanu …). The solipsism of the self shut up in a dream of the world (Walter Horatio Pater,” Conclusion” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance) induced by the senses, the illusionary nature of the world of experience (”for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were” – Ch. XIII of Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy) bridged Vedic thought and the late nineteenth-century school of physiological psychology (pragmatism), which fuelled the synaesthetic poetics of the impressionists and of the aesthetic decadence. In The Bhagavad Gita, Rudolf Steiner saw the “unified plan of world history”, as in it mingled three spiritual streams: Veda, Sankhya, Yoga (Steiner 1).

The two levels of consciousness theorised by Henri Bergson in Les données immediates de la conscience – the ”moi” immersed in the here and now of immediate experience and the ”moi” of memory that discovers patterns and meaning in recollection – go back to the often quoted allegory of the two birds (one hyperactive, collecting food, the other watching it eat in perfect composure) in The Mundaka Upanishad. In the age of quantum mechanics and polyvalent logics, analogies increase by geometrical progression. The schooling of Svetaketu in The Chandogya Upanishad, VI (Sections 8 to14) upon the existence of what cannnot be perceived by the senses is realised in the form of a parable. The disciple wants to know the nature of the ultimate reality, and his father practises a sort of midwifery. Let the disciple think of salt dissolved in water. Such is the essence of the universe which cannot be seen but pervades all things. The disappearance of melting salt and its recovery through evaporation has a modern correlative in David Bohm’s ink experiment (Pratt: web) whereby he demonstrated the existence of an implicate order enfolded into the viscous fluid of a turning cylinder, an operation similar to the turning of a glove inside out. The American physicist concluded: “[I]n the implicate order the totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space (and time)” (Bohm 172). The explicate order of the physical universe we live in is only a lower dimensional surface appearance…Access Full Text of the Article

Early America, American Theosophy, Modernity—and India

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Mark L. Kamrath, University of Central Florida, USA

Abstract

The history of East-west relations in general and between America and India in particular is one of cultural, literary, and philosophical encounter. Using a post-colonial and postmodern theoretical lens, this essay charts American intellectual constructions of India from the colonial period to the present, with an eye on how American transcendentalists, theosophists, and Hindu spiritual leaders negotiated Hindu and Christian belief systems. It argues that over time, as individuals and cultures came into contact with one another, the historical assimilation of their religions testifies to the dialectical, syncretic nature of modern belief.

[Key words: Philosophy, religion, East-West, theology, modernity, transcendentalism, post-colonial approach, postmodernism]

“For we have seen his Star in the East, and are come to worship him”

–Matthew II. 2, Bible

Early American contact with India

India has long been a source of fascination to the West, dating back to 1492 and Christopher Columbus’s plan to reach the East Indies and its riches by sailing westward over the Atlantic Ocean and establishing trade. Similar to how the “New World” was imagined by Europeans, over the centuries American travelers, missionaries, and writers have each looked to India with different motives and represented its history, people, and culture in a variety of ways.

During the colonial era, observes Susan S. Bean, “American merchants and their customers were familiar with Indian products,” including various spices, teas, and cotton and silk goods (Bean 31). As early as 1711, for instance, newspapers such as the Boston News-Letter regularly advertised “Hollands for Shirtings and Sheetings, fine Cambricks, Musings, India Chints” (1711: [2]) and “Garlix, Sugar, Cotton, India Counterpanes, & c” (1716: [2]).Booksabout India were published in Londonand also part of the commercial exchange.

In terms of non-commercial interest in India though, Cotton Mather’s pamphlet India Christiana. A Discourse Delivered unto the Commissioners for the Propagation of the Gospel among the American Indians which is accompanied with Several Instruments relating to the Glorious Design of Propagating our Holy Religion in the Easter as well as the Western Indies. An Entertainment which they that are Waiting for the Kingdom of God will receive as Good News from a far country(1721) was among the first to represent India or the East, like the wilds of America, as a territory needing the word of God and spiritual salvation.

Several decades later, after the American Revolution, India was largely viewed through the eyes of missionaries, British travelers or military personnel, and other figures and depicted as an object of cultural marvel, appropriation, or conquest. To be sure, newspapers provided accounts of the East India Company, and oriental tales increasingly appeared in periodicals in the 1780s and 1790s. Publications such as Donald Campbell’s A Journey Overland to India, partly by a Route never gone before by any European (1797) intrigued American readers with accounts of shipwreck and imprisonment with Hyder Alli, along with other adventures.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, India became a major focus of missionaries. A sermon on February 26, 1809, by the Reverend Claudius Buchanan (1766-1815) of India at the Parish Church of St. James in Bristol,England, for the benefit of the “Society for Missions to Africa and the East” ran into no less than twelveAmerican editions. Entitled “The Star in the East,” it explained how the “ministry of Nature” led three eastern wise men to Jerusalem to honor Christ’s birth and how such prophecy was foretold in the “ancient writings of India” (Buchanan 4-5).In addition, some American editions added an appendix entitled “The Interesting Report of the Rev. Dr. Kerr, to the Governor of Madras, on the State of the Ancient Christians in Cochin and Travancore, and an account of the Discoveries, made by the Rev. Dr. Buchanan of 200,000 Christians in the Sequestered Region of Hindostan.” By 1812, the publication was expanded and retitled as The Works of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, LL.D. Comprising his Christian Researches in Asia, His Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India, and his Star in the East, with Three New Sermons. To Which is Added, Dr.Kerr’s Curious and Interesting Report, Concerning the State of Christians in Cochin and Travancor, Made at the Request of the Governor of Madras.

In India around this time, Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), a Brahmin who alienated himself from his family because of his willingness to forgo traditional beliefs and who pushed for social and religious change, published A Defence of Hindoo Theism in reply to the attack of an advocate for idolatry at Madras, along with A Second Defence of the monotheistical system of the Vedas. In reply to an apology for the present state of Hindoo worship (Calcutta 1817). According to Joscelyn Godwin, Roy was “the first Brahmin to fall under the spell of Enlightenment ideas, and the first emissary from India to the West” (Godwin 312). He upset Christian missionaries because while he admired the teachings of Jesus and the gospels, he also embraced Islam and Hinduism. His actions, however, might also be understood in light of what Homi Bhaba calls a strategy of “hybridity,” a position in which the colonized subject takes on the values and language of the colonized in order to subvert them (Bhabha 112). In that sense, Roy was accommodating Christian colonizers by sanitizing Hinduism through the lens of Western monotheism…Access Full Text of the Article

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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

Indo-Greek Culture and Colonial Memory, or, Was Alexander a European?

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Tuhin Bhattacharjee, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal

Abstract

Alexander’s conquest of northwest India in the fourth century BCE was often cited by the British in post-Enlightenment England to trace their own identity as conquerors back to the Greeks. Taking a revisionist approach, this paper endeavours to show that the invocation of Alexander’s memory to legitimize European hegemony over the Indians was enmeshed in imperialist ideology and involved a distortion of the past. The contexts and motives of the two types of colonization, the Greek and the British, were fundamentally different. The state of Greek thought in Alexander’s time could not have sustained the notional binary between India and Greece, ‘reason’ and ‘unreason’, to justify a thoroughly hostile form of colonization. The Greeks engaged constructively with the cultural life of the Indians, and the resultant Indo-Greek civilization involved a rich fusion of Indian and Hellenistic influences. Modern European historiography has been extremely averse to acknowledging any fruitful dialogue between ancient Greece and non-Western cultures. This paper will strive to locate the genesis of Indo-Greek culture in the complex intermingling of ancient peoples and ideas.

[Keywords: Alexander, ancient Greece, Indo-Greek, imperialism, historiography]

Introduction: Ideological Contexts

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837/2004), Hegel defines history as “none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom” (Hegel 19). In this teleological view of history, India is ahistorical, in other words not part of the dynamics of rational progress that is essential for the self-manifestation of the Spirit. The tensions that have driven European rationality from its Greek beginnings in the polis through the evolution of the free human subject to the upheavals of the French revolution have been lacking in India. So lost has India been since ancient times in the “Substantial Unity” of the Brahm (or brahman) that everything has been “stripped of rationality” (141) and “the Spirit wanders into the Dream-World, and the highest state is Annihilation” (148). Comparing India with the “almost unearthly beauty” to be found in women – “a transparency of skin, a light and lovely roseate hue … in which the features… appear soft, yielding, and relaxed” – Hegel claims that “the more attractive the first sight of it had been, so much the more unworthy shall we ultimately find it in every respect” (140). The spread of Indian culture is “only a dumb, deedless expansion”, since Indians “have achieved no foreign conquests, but on every occasion vanquished themselves” (142). Just as “Alexander the Great was the first to penetrate by land to India”, the English are now “the lords of the land”, for it is the “necessary fate” of Asia to be subjected to Europeans (ibid.).

Hegel was not alone in this regard and many of his European contemporaries reiterated this stance. The alleged absence of an argumentative tradition in India coupled with the perceived lack of an independent self-consciousness gave Europeans a model, a projected Other, against which they could define their own rational (hence, superior) selves. It is intriguing that even Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society in 1784, who was otherwise so enthusiastic about a common Aryan heritage between Indians and Europeans, does not fail to privilege Europe when it comes to what he considers to be useful knowledge. He remarks that “whoever travels in Asia, especially if he be conversant with the literature of the countries through which he passes, must naturally remark the superiority of European talents: the observation, indeed, is as old as Alexander” (Jones 3). As in Hegel, the time of Alexander’s conquest is cited to give validity to British claims. In Jones’ view, therefore, Aristotle seems perfectly in the right when he “represents Europe as a sovereign Princess, and Asia as her handmaid” (12). Jones’ approach was, nevertheless, by and large sympathetic towards Indian culture. In the later decades, England’s colonial strategy towards India was to become far more rigid. Edmund Burke prosecuted Warren Hastings on charges of misgovernment; Hastings was allegedly too sympathetic to the natives.

The ideological construction of an undeveloped India became a vehicle for justifying its annexation by Britain as part of ‘the white man’s burden’. In his highly influential History of British India, James Mill (1858) reiterates the Hegelian view of India as a land mired in its past, in its fantastical legends, and therefore, as a place devoid of any sense of history. Only an external, superior power could shake it out of its perpetual stupor. Mill infers from his research that the Indians have never been fit to rule themselves, and that the Indian civilization has never prospered except under foreign rule. Here too, Mill supports his claim by invoking the memory of Alexander. He quotes Captain Francis Wilford, who contributed several articles on Indian history in the journal Asiatic Researches:

“According to Plutarch, in his life of Alexander, Chandra-Gupta had been at that prince’s camp, and had been heard to say afterward, that Alexander would have found no difficulty in the conquest of Prachi, or the country of the Prasians, had he attempted it, as the king was despised, and hated too, on account of his cruelty” (Mill 136).

Going on to highlight the natural passivity of Indians, Mill remarks that they “have always allowed themselves to be conquered in detail” (141) and that they now need the British to infuse in them a sense of history and help them attain a higher level of civilization. For the utilitarian Mill, the measure of civilization is scientific progress, an aspect in which he sees the Indians as singularly lacking. He writes:

Exactly in proportion as Utility is the object of every pursuit, may we regard a nation as civilized. Exactly in proportion as its ingenuity is wasted on contemptible and mischievous objects, though it may be, in itself, an ingenuity of no ordinary kind, the nation may safely be denominated barbarous (105).

The overblown literary style of the ancient Hindus is therefore nothing more than the extravagant outpourings of a barbaric race: “It has several words to express the same thing. The sun has more than thirty names, the moon more than twenty” (63). Mill dubiously claims that this excessive verbosity contrasts with the clarity of Greek and Latin which supposedly have “one name for everything which required a name, and no more than one” (64).

Mill never visited the subcontinent. He derived his supposed objectivity of ancient India by reading “the scattered hints contained in the writings of the Greeks”, from which he concluded that “the Hindus, at the time of Alexander’s invasion, were in a state of manners, society, and knowledge, exactly the same with that in which they were discovered by the nations of modern Europe” (107). The intervening two millennia had passed by without leaving a trace on Indian culture, Mill inferred. The British must therefore step in to complete the ‘civilizing mission’ that Alexander had left unfinished. They should, however, maintain an appropriate distance with the natives lest they too get stuck up in the quagmire of Indian traditions. Unlike Jones’ belief in a shared tradition between the ancient cultures of Asia and Europe, Mill defined the two cultures in terms of binaries which he thought he derived from the Greek distinction between rational and irrational, progressive and static, nomos and physis.

Bruce Lincoln (1989) has shown how the repeated invocation of select moments from the past can be used to construct social identities. By repeatedly referring to Alexander’s conquest, the British tried to identify themselves as the last in a long tradition of European conquerors. This claim to an Alexandrian heritage was, however, deeply enmeshed in British colonialist ideology and, to use a phrase by Romila Thapar (2007), was ‘historical memory without history’ (Thapar: web). This memory was founded on the belief in a shared European connection with Alexander, a view entirely anachronistic. As Gotthard Strohmaier puts it, “The Greeks were no Europeans” (cited in Toner 16). Strohmaier refutes a widely held misconception that there is an exclusive cultural continuity between ancient Greece and modern Europe. Europe as a cultural and political entity is a modern construct that took shape after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in the fifteenth century. The ancient Greeks never saw themselves as Europeans. Moreover, it is not just Europe that can claim a cultural continuity with antiquity; the interactions between ancient Greece and non-Western cultures, as Martin Bernal (Bernal 210) has influentially shown, have been no less potent. In fact, Britain had hardly any connection with the Mediterranean world until it became a part of the Roman Empire. The invocation of Alexander’s memory in an attempt to legitimize British hegemony over the Indians was, therefore, spurious and involved a distortion of the past. In order to revise such narratives, it is important to look back and read the interactions between ancient cultures in the light of current theoretical perspectives…Access Full Text of the Article

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Marvelous India in Medieval European Representations

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Corin Braga, Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania

Abstract

To the Europeans, throughout the Middle Ages, India represented a fabulous country, a realm of wonders, an “oneiric horizon” (Jacques Le Goff). By using varied traditions inherited from Antiquity, the Fathers of the Church, the encyclopedists (from Isidore of Seville to Brunetto Latini or Vincent of Beauvais) or the authors of extraordinary travellogues peopled this imaginary land with a marvellous flora and a monstrous fauna, as well as strange human races. A (psycho) analysis of these fantastic figures (dog-headed men, one-legged ones, men with eyes, nose and mouth on their chest, hermaphrodites, pygmies, giants, Amazons, cannibals, etc.) would uncover the fantasies, scare, frustrations, unconscious complexes, prejudices and stereotypes that the Europeans projected on the figures of some “others”, whom they situated at the antipodes of Europe – not so much geographical, as cognitive, moral, cultural and spiritual, antipodes.

Keywords: European medieval tradition; Fabulous India; Marvels of the East; Monstrous Races.

The Church Fathers and the encyclopedists of the European Middle Ages saw India as a fantastical rather than a real land. In that age, on the so called T-O maps of the world (Terrarum orbis), India lay at the antipodes of Europe. On these maps, representing the known world (Europe, Asia and Africa, as a disc surrounded by the river Okeanós), Europe and Africa each occupied a quarter of the disc, with Asia occupying the remaining half. India, in its turn, occupied the southern half of Asia, therefore a quadrant of the oïkoumènê. Attribution of a quarter of the known world surface to India goes back to Ctesias, who, as Strabo commented, assumed that “India equals in grandeur the rest of Asia as a whole.”[1] Other authors were still more enthusiastic: Onesicritus, according to Strabo again, stated that India “made up the third of the inhabited world”[2], an estimation that was taken up by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia[3] and by Solinus in his Collectanea rerum memorabilium.[4]

These global approximations, whose role is mnemonic rather than systematising, were taken up by almost all the mediaeval mythographers and geographers who dealt with India. As graphic plans of the world seen through the Christian religion, T-O maps were not at all interested in the practical representation of distances and connections. These world maps offered a simplified description of India. Starting with Isidore of Seville, who set the standard image of India[1] for several centuries, some descriptive traits were kept from the whole ancient tradition, being relentlessly and stereotypically reproduced. India became an asset of mediaeval science, but mostly as a name and as a malleable, abstract graphical space, capable of garnering study-room fantasies, rather than a physical geographical reality that might provoke real journeys.

Most medieval treatises and encyclopedias rehearse the same composite sketch of India, reduced to a few characteristics taken from the classical geographers. Firstly, India continues to occupy a fourth of the oïkoumènê and half of Asia (see Fig. 1: Isidore of Seville[5], Etymologiarum, 7th century, Ed. Augsburg, 1472). As T-O maps of the world face east, India covers the top right-hand orbiculus section on the map, contained between the two perpendicular radii going from Jerusalem (the center), follow the diaphragm line eastward, i.e. from the Nile southward. This geometrical simplification, framing India within two classical continental demarcation lines, stretches over a huge territory, which, in modern geography, belongs to other areas and continents. Medieval “India” included three large regions that the Church doctors used to call: Higher, Minor or Intra-Ganges India, which corresponds more or less to the present-day Indian peninsula; Lower, Major or Extra-Ganges India, i.e. Indochina and present-day Southeast China; and Middle India, or the space stretching between the Nile and the Indian peninsula.

Thus India’s arc of a circle starts from the higher cardinal point of the terrestrial orb, from the east, where lies the earthly paradise, going all the way to the cardinal point situated to the right of the orb, the south, on the level of the sources of the Nile, more precisely the “Mountains of the Moon”. This is the arc of the circle directly opposed to the section occupied by Europe. Posidonius and Solinus[6] stated that India is diametrically symmetrical with Gaule, while Eratosthenes[7] and Martianus Capella[8] surmised that the circumnavigation of the oïkoumènê would lead from Spain to India. On T-O maps, which reduce the terrestrial three-dimensional globe to a flat projection, India becomes nothing less than the Antipodes of Europe, with one of them resting on the south-east, and the other on the north-west arc of the terrestrial disc…Access Full Text of the Article

[1] ”L’Inde égale en grandeur tout le reste de l’Asie”, in Strabon, Géographie, II, 5, 5, Texte établi et traduit par Germaine Aujac, Paris, Les belles lettres, 1969, tome II, p. 83-84.

[2] ’Inde ”fait le tiers de toute la terre habitée”, in Strabon, Géographie, XV, I, 12, Traduite du grec en français, à Paris, de l’Imprimerie Royale, 1819, tome Ve, p. 13.

[3] Pline l’Ancien, Histoire naturelle, VI, 59, Texte établi, traduit et commenté par J. André et J. Filliozat, Paris, Les belles lettres, 1980, p. 33.

[4] Julius Solinus, Collectanea rerum memorabilium, Iterum recensuit Th. Mommsen, Berolini, Apud Weidmannos, 1895, p. 184.

[5] Reydellet, 1984 ; Livre XII, Texte établi, traduit et commenté par Jacques André, 1986.

[6] Julius Solinus, op. cit., p. 183.

[7] Strabo related that, according to Eratosthenes, ”if the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean were not an obstacle, we could travel by sea from Iberia to India: it would be enough to follow the same parallel and to cross the rest of the [globe’s] section, once the distance defined above is over [the distance India-Iberia by land]” (”si l’immensité de l’océan Atlantique n’y faisait obstacle, il nous serait possible d’aller par mer d’Ibérie jusqu’en Inde : il suffirait de suivre le même parallèle, et de parcourir la section [du globe] qui reste, une fois ôtée la distance définie ci-dessus [la distance Inde-Ibérie par terre]”). Géographie (1969), I, 4, 6, p. 170-171.

[8] Martianus Capella, The Seven Liberal Arts, vol. II The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, Translated by William Hanis Stahl and Richard Johnson with E. L. Burge, New York, Columbia University Press, 1977, p. 230-231.

Transforming Men: The Anglicisation of Bengali Masculinity in the Colonial Era

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Saswata Kusari, Sarada Ma Girls’ College, West Bengal

Abstract

During the colonial era, when the British were in control of the administration of Bengal, they launched discourses meant to convince one and all about the drawbacks of Bengali men. In such discourses, the body of Bengali men became a countertype to the emerging ideals of masculinity prevailing in Europe in the nineteenth century. With ardent belief in the narratives popularised by the Colonisers, many Bengalis sought to reconstruct their manliness in order to fit into the normative model of masculinity. The paper, therefore, is an exploration of the ways in which Bengali masculinity went through processes of radical masculinisation during the 19th century till the independence; and how proximity to English language and culture shaped up the imagination of Bengali men.

Key-Words: Masculinity, Orient, Sexuality, hyper-masculinity, heteronormativity

Jobe Charnock and the Rise of Calcutta

It was during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I —also known as the age of discovery—that the British started to vie for more prudent economic circumstances concomitantly tinkering with the idea of broadening their dominion all around the world. The British started their sojourn in India, especially in Bengal, with the hope of substantial economic proliferation. The obsession with the ‘exotic’ native lands of Asia and Africa is very much prevalent in British culture if we carefully read literary texts and other historical documents of the period. For instance, Andrew Marvell (1681) wrote in ‘To His Coy Mistress’:

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain

The reference to the rubies found on the banks of the Ganges clearly reveals that the West was unambiguously aware of the healthy economy that prevailed in the east; and the seed of the desire to usurp these lands was probably planted during the late 16th and the early 17th century. The dream was starting to take shape as a realistic scenario after Jobe Charnock came to the village of Sutanuti on 24th August, 1690 (p.23). Calcutta, back then, was a ‘barbaric’ village, and Charnock, against all odds, dreamt of setting up his business there. Perhaps, deep in his mind, he also envisioned making Calcutta a city of note. Though Charnock did not live long (in fact, he died in 1692) to realize his dream, the British had found a strong footing, fromwhich they would rule this country for more than two centuries.

Educating the ‘Brutes’

For a century or so the British were happy doing business in this country. However, the victory at the battle of Plassey gave them an immense boost as they started fostering the dream of ruling India unanimously. In the year 1813, the East India Company was dissolved andthe British Empire started a large-scale expansion of their territory. The Christian missionaries were already coming in, as the British were looking for a cultural overhaul of the native land which they considered primitive and unsophisticated. The intention was undoubtedly to reduce the ‘uncouthness’ of the natives by proselytising them. For the purpose of this paper, I would be focusing on some of the projects taken up by the British (along with Christian missionaries), especially by T.B Macaulay, that played a major role in transforming Indian cultural spectrum. In 1835, Macaulay published his notorious Minute on Indian Education where he proposed to refurbish the education system by introducing advanced and more scientific studies through the English language. However, Macaulay’s project was never as benevolent as he tried to make it look. It was laced with colonial prejudice; an attitude which, in Edward Said’s words, can be called ‘Orientalism’. Macaulay was so prejudiced against the Indian/Oriental culture that he literally ignored the presence of the treasures that Indian literature contained back then. He [Macaulay (1835)] famously quipped in his Minute:

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education. (para 10)

With his belief in the superiority of the Western literature and culture, Macaulay planned to circulate their cultural values amongst Bengalis. His main purpose, however, was to create a class of Bengali men who would perpetuate the ideology of the Colonisers amongst the native folks by rendering themselves as weak and ineffable. These men were later known as the babu class who, Macaulay imagined, would be brown in colour but white in taste. In short, he wanted to create slaves out of those Bengali men by training them in Eurocentric knowledge.

Macaulay was not content merely by advocating such an overtly prejudiced and arbitrary academic system; he went on to define Bengali men in his own inimitable style. Sudipta Sen (2004), in his essay “Colonial Aversions and Domestic Desire”, quotes Macaulay:

“…the physical organisation of the Bengali is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour- bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance.” (Sen: 49).

If we fuse these two prejudices of Macaulay—regarding education and Bengali men— his intentions become obvious. He wanted to project Bengali men as weak and effeminate; a bunch of brutes who would never be able to become their own masters and who are in need of divine benevolence to take them out of their misery. In order to perpetuate his belief, he had a system in place— a system of education— that methodically convinced Bengali men of their alleged inferiority. The Anglicisation of the Educational spectrum was indeed a garb of benevolence underneath which the British were planning to fulfil their political imperative. Therefore, it is obvious that Macaulay’s projects were Orientalist in assumptions, as they posited the natives as uncivilised creatures and promised to bring them out of their slumber through an arbitrarily imposed education system…Access Full Text of the Article

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Representations of India in the Female Gaze: Four Women Travellers

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Maureen Mulligan, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Abstract

This paper will explore the question of how recent Western women travel writers represent India, while comparing this post-colonial gaze with that of writers during the colonial past. We will consider the work of two female writers from each period and discuss how their view of the country shows their personal sense of alienation, both within the foreign culture they encounter and, as women, with regard to their own culture. The writers are Fanny Parkes: Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes, 1850 and Emily Eden: Up the Country: Letters from India, 1866; contrasted with Dervla Murphy: On a Shoestring to Coorg, 1976 and Robyn Davidson: Desert Places, 1996.

[Keywords: Women’s travel writing, India, Colonialism, Post-colonialism, alienation, gaze]

Within the general theoretical outlook of Said’s Orientalism, we shall consider to what extent these writers actually challenge many of the preconceptions readers today have of writers of a specific historical and cultural moment. The particular situation of the woman writer, both in the period before female emancipation and in the post-war context of popular feminism, also influences the way Western women approach the East, and India in particular, in terms of their reasons for travel, their desire to become part of another culture, their sense of identity when travelling, and their attitude towards their native society. The idea of the special importance of the “interior journey” has dominated recent women’s travel writing, at the expense of an objective approach to the country visited. Similarly, Holland and Huggan have commented on the importance of travel writing due to its “defamiliarizing capacities” (1998 viii) and this ability to consider a foreign culture from an alienated perspective is one of the great merits of the genre.

Carl Thompson argues that women’s travel writing in the colonial period had a different focus from that of men’s:

[T]here is a greater tendency for women travellers to concern themselves with domestic details, and with the minutiae of everyday living arrangements […] This narrative focus is often closely bound up with a keen interest in the conditions of life for women in the cultures that they visit, an interest which can embrace topics ranging from the fashions adopted by foreign women through to the social roles they must perform and their legal and political status (Thompson 186).

Thompson goes on to affirm that “Many women travel writers in the imperial era take up a more conspicuously humanitarian position than their male counterparts, evincing in their travelogues a greater concern with the plight of native peoples, and especially with the plight of native women” (ibid: 193), though he points out that this did not necessarily imply any opposition to empire, as this concern often went no further than criticism of native practices that went against Western values, such as suttee or polygamy, rather than questioning the nature of the colonial project and its negative effects on local people.

Tim Youngs and Glenn Hooper also touch on the “defamiliarizing” capacity of travel writing when they refer to the concept of “othering” in quoting Trinh T. Minh-ha who has argued “Identity is largely constituted through the process of othering” (in Robertson 15), and go on to clarify, “It is a process that can evolve within societies, but which is especially evident transculturally, at the point of contact, when our sense of Self is most under threat, frequently in need of reassurance, and likeliest to resort to binary modes of discourse as a form of defence” (Youngs & Hooper 5). We can see examples of this process of Othering in the context of foreign women in India in all the texts referred to below.

Any discussion in the 21st century that deals with foreign, especially British, historical views of India inevitably begins with reference to the Orientalist discourse of Edward Said, whose writings transformed the debate about how Westerners view the East. Said was very aware of the importance of India in the British colonial project:

(B)y the late 19th century India had become the greatest, most durable, and most profitable of all British, perhaps even European, colonial possessions. From the time the first British expedition arrived there in 1608 until the last British viceroy departed in 1947, India had a massive influence on British life, in commerce and trade, industry and politics, ideology and war, culture and the life of the imagination (Said, 1993: 160).

Elleke Boehmer is another valuable voice on historical perspectives of views of India: she writes

(U)p till the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, perspectives on other lands continued to be directed through prisms of inherited tropes: Utopia, or the lawless wilderness; the Noble Savage or the unregenerate Primitive; the Garden of Eden or the Holy City; and Britannica as regnant over all. The interlinked symbolic codes of imperial writing created a textual environment which, while interactive, was also self-repeating, and often self-enclosed. The enclosedness mirrored the insularity of the arguments legitimating Empire (Boehmer 45).

The present paper looks at two moments in the history of Western accounts of India. Firstly in 1839, Emily Eden, the sister of the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, and Fanny Parkes, the wife of a minor official, offer two contrasting versions of their experiences travelling under the auspices of the East India Company. Secondly, in the second half of the 20th century, Dervla Murphy, with her small daughter, and Robyn Davidson, with camels and nomads, travelled in India independently, looking for the authentic experience of travel off the beaten path…Access Full Text of the Article

A Deconstructive Perspective of India in the French Gaze in Tasleema Nasreen’s Farashi Premik (The French Lover)

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Baijayanti Mukhopadhyay, Banwarilal Bhalotia College, Asansol

Modhurai Gangopadhyay, Bidhan Chandra College Asansol

Abstract

Our paper discusses the [mis]representation and the imaginary notions of India constructed through the European gaze in Tasleema Nasreen’s Farashi Premik or The French Lover. As the protagonist Nilanjana Mondal begins her search for love and independence far away from her home, in Paris, she feels herself continuously trapped within a prison-house of European gaze—where her motherland India is simply a barbaric land of beggars, poverty and prostitutes. It doesn’t take her long to realise that the French have a subconscious awareness that the Indian culture and civilisation is in some ways, far better and older than theirs and their gaze is an attempt to mask this schizophrenic fear behind a superiority complex. It is easy to give in to this gaze, like many of Neela’s Indian fellow diasporic Indians in Paris do, but much more difficult to deconstruct it, but that does not mean Neela would not try.

[Keywords: India, French, gaze, Neela, Benoir Dupont, European, oriental]

                                                  “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”

                                                                       —Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire  

                                                                                     of Louis Bonaparte”

The Europeans’ view of India, Indians and everything associated with the subcontinent can be summed up exactly in the quote above. The tendency of Europeans has always been to speak and write in stereotyped and dehumanizing ways about “The East”, in order to construct an imaginary other and India too has been no exception to this golden rule—as Edward Said’s “Orientalism” makes it clear. According to Said, the “rational west” has to be distinguished from the “irrational” oriental countries like India, simply for the purpose of the construction of an European identity that is superior to non-European cultures like India, which have always been portrayed as inferior, regressive, primitive and irrational— which is amply borne out by Kipling’s portrayal of Indian characters and his unforgettable comment loaded with colonial overtones – “… East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”. India no longer remains a geographical entity, rather it becomes an European invention— a land of “romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes …” ( Said 1). At the same time, India was seen as an oriental land of wish-fulfillment, as Jimmy Porter, the hero of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger points out in his process of “looking back” with longing and nostalgia at the days of India’s colonization:

All home-made cakes and croquet, bright ideas, bright uniforms. Always the same picture: high summer, the long days in the sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell of starch. What a romantic picture. Phoney too, of course. It must have rained sometimes. Still I regret it somehow, phoney or not” (I/6).

It is in the light of this ever pervading desire mixed with disgust that has always framed the European gaze and it has been further incensed by the “us-verses-them” contest that we, in this paper, would analyse the (mis)representation of India in the eyes of the French in Tasleema Nasreen’s Farashi Premik (The French Lover).

The French Lover is the tale of a woman’s search for love and independence in Paris, far away from her home. The plot centres around the protagonist Nilanjana Mondal, a young Bengali woman from Kolkata who moves to Paris after her marriage to Kishanlal, a Punjabi restaurant owner in Paris. After the breaking up of her marriage she meets Benoir Dupont, a blonde, blue-eyed handsome Frenchman, and is swept off her feet. What follows is a passionate and sexually liberating relationship with Benoir which ends with her realisation that they both love the same person—she loved Benoir, Benoir too loved himself and only himself and she was nothing but an exotic taste for him.

During her long stay in Paris, Neela is continuously confronted by the European’s [mis]conception about her motherland—they consider it to be an exotic yet uncultured civilization full of poverty, beggars, hunger and diseases. As Greenblat explains, we define our identities always in relation to what we are not—who must be demonised and objectified as “others” (Selden 164) The “unruly” and the “alien” are internalized “others” who help us consolidate our identities; their existence is allowed only as evidence of the rightness of the established order. That is exactly the reason why the Europeans have always sought to hide their fear of an alien culture behind the mask of a superiority complex. For the French, as Neela comes soon to realise, the poor India is the real India. This attitude of the French towards India surfaces when Neela watches a documentary film on India broadcast by a French channel with some of her French friends. The documentary begins with a close-up shot of an empty broken tin plate which diffuses into the picture of naked and bare-feet starved Indian children begging for alms and returning at the end of the day to a dirty unhygienic slum. It is also interesting to note that before his visit to India, Benoir had got himself vaccinated against almost all diseases known to medical science because, according to him, “We Europeans need it” (162) and in spite of the vaccinations, he says that he considers himself lucky to have come out hale and hearty from a disease-ridden country like India There is a reference to yet another documentary on India in the novel—on the life of prostitutes in India and their agitation for their rights causing Benoir to remark:“Holy Earth! There are so many prostitutes in your country, Neela!!”( 278).

Though the word “gaze” literally means an exchange of looks, in the post colonial perspective, it can be taken to mean a gaze that gives primacy to the European look. Thus, when talking about India in the European “gaze”, the word “gaze” actually is the look which denotes the dominant position of the European who controls the Orient as an object of desire and deceit. Thus India is always the object of the gaze—she can never look back, because she has no subjectivity. On the contrary, India and the Indians are expected to model themselves according to the Occidental gaze. The interesting point is that usually the Indian is co-opted into the occidental point of view.

The European gaze is a kind of whirlpool, into which many Indians, including Kishanlal, Sunil, and Choitali had already been sucked in. Comparing Paris to Kolkata, Kishanlal once says: “Do you think this is your dirty Kolkata that I have to wash my hands and feet every time I come home from outside? Ha Ha!” (30). Again, during her visit to Sunil and Choitali’s house, Neela notices that their baby daughter Tumpa does not respond at all to Bengali words. Choitali and Sunil inform her that Tumpa does not know Bengali, she has only been taught French. Since, according to her parents, two languages might confuse the child, they had stuck to French and had decided to leave out Bengali because “of what use would that language [Bengali] be of to her?”(44). Kishan’s view about the Bengali language is also no better; according to him, Neela shouldn’t be proud that she had been a Bengali major in her graduation, because “What can you do with your degree of Bengali literature? Would you be able to earn a Franc with it? You can’t.… So stop showing me your temper”(55). Actually, in spite of being Indians by birth, the European gaze towards their motherland had been thrust on them and they had begun to see India, Indian culture and Indian languages with the spectacles of disgust that the French had lent them, because, after all, it is far easier to swim with the current than against it…Access Full Text of the Article

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The Image of India & Hinduism in William Jones’ “Hymns” to Hindu Deities

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Bidhan Mondal, Kalyani University in West Bengal, India

Abstract

William Jones’ hymns to Hindu deities of India use ideas of translation and originality in order to provide a poetic and cultural space where the hymn syncretically demonstrates both a British and Hindu religious exegesis. A few fundamental questions arise: how was Hinduism represented? Who was representing it? From what sources were the poets gaining their impressions and understanding of religion? In what way were religion, in general, and the poet’s representation of it specifically received? Jones’s importance in my thesis lies in the fact that it would be utterly impossible to answer any one of these questions without mentioning his name and giving some account of his life and works. Drawing upon Michael J. Franklin’s Sir William Jones: Selected Prose and Poetical Works and Romantic Representations of British India, I want to emphasise Jones’ syncretic tendencies within the multi-cultural and multi-faith environment of metropolitan India rather than in the ideals of European Enlightenment.

[Key Words: Hinduism, Sir William Jones, politics and poetics of representation]

During the early nineteenth century India’s sudden geopolitical and economic importance led to a burgeoning interest in and study of its culture by British and Europeans alike – particularly on the subject of religion. As Joyti Mohan writes, because of his stature in Europe’s intellectual community, Voltaire’s writings on India were widely read and they enhanced the charm of Hinduism to begin its ascent into the intellectual mainstream of European Enlightenment thinking. There have been a number of worthy critical studies investigating India’s influence on the British literature. For example, Raymond Schwab’s pioneering The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (1958) first broached the subject by recognising and identifying the frequency with which India was a topic of literary concern. Schwab argues that “The Orient served as alter ego to the Occident” (Schwab 43), suggesting the way in which the two complemented each other, rather than competed with – or controlled – the other. As Dalrymple writes:

Beneath the familiar story of European conquest and the Rule in India, and the imposition of European conquest and the rule in India, and the imposition of European Ways in the heart of Asia….the Indian conquest of the European imagination…widespread cultural assimilation and hybridity: what Salman Rushdie-talking of modern Multiculturalism has called Chutni-fication. Virtually all Englishmen in India at this period Indianised themselves To some extent (Dalrymple 123).

Thus it is relevant to contextualise Jones’ Hymns within a framework of bi-lateral and unilateral assumptions of postcolonial theory laid out in Edward Said’s Orientalism, which views Jones as the leading architect of Britain’s imperial ideology. Warren Hastings, the governor general of East India Company, implemented a policy of ruling India on its ancient laws, according to their own ideas and prejudices. From these policies, Hastings led a sustained effort to fund and support attempts of the British to learn, read and translate Hindu mythology into English. In 1787 “The Monthly Review” exhibits such an attitude when they write that

An acquaintance with Indian literature in general might have the most beneficial     effects. It might even tend to redeem the national character, by teaching Englishmen to consider the nation of India as men, as beings entitled by heaven with the same facilities, the same talents, and the same feeling with themselves (The Monthly Review :35).

In the midst of such colonial attitude, Indian literature like the Bhagabat Geeta offered not only a way to learn about another religion and culture, but also redeem the national character from these offences in the fostering of a cross-cultural appreciation of each other’s common humanity–one sanctioned by both a British and Hindu “Heaven”. These policies find their greatest success once Jones took up the study of Sanskrit, Hindu mythology and Hindu folklore. The eleven years Jones spent in Calcutta were the most productive of his literary life, which almost singularly centred on introducing, explaining, and representing Hinduism to a British and European audience, as exemplified primarily by his composition of nine hymns to Hindu deities. While other missionaries, such as William Carey, undermined Sanskrit as “sacred nothings”, Jones prided himself upon saying that he spoke “the language of Gods” (Jones 167). In this way Jones becomes synonymous with Hinduism in the Romantic period. Sir William Jones was the pioneer of philosophical studies in India and was, finally, the first Englishman to respond poetically to the Indian setting. He is the first Westerner to render Kalidasa’s Sakuntala into English and make the Occident aware of the richness of Sanskrit to Anglo-Indian literature.

The translation of Kalidasa’s Sakuntalam by Sir William Jones in 1789 was an epoch-making event in the history of cultural relations between India and the West. Indeed its impact on history has been more profound and far reaching than even that of the French. Jones had unveiled the vistas of a new world of ideas—a new era in Oriental scholarship and historical writing as well as a new movement in the spheres of comparative philology, comparative literature, English poetry, Sanskrit poetry and Indian historical writing (Ranganathan 3).

Jones’s nine hymns to Hindu deities, which belong to the late eighteenth century, are addressed to Camdeo, Prakriti, Indra, Surya, Lakshmi, Narayana, Saraswati and Ganga. His first hymn, addressed to Camdeo, is the first view of Hindu Mythology presented in English poetry. I shall prove his mastery in intermingling East and West by suggesting that the Sanskrit word ‘Dipaka’—one of the several names of Kama—and the English word ‘Cupid’ have an original linguistic connection. The Hindu god Camdeo is no doubt the counterpart of the Grecian Eros and the Roman Cupido, but in Hindu mythology a peculiar course of events attends his life and attributes so that his very name rouses romance and beauty. This hymn recalls to one’s mind the description of love full of romantic exuberance in Swinburne’s Atlanta in Calydon. His second and third hymns are addressed to Prakriti in her two aspects: Durga and Bhabani. “Prakriti” is the cause of creation and the means of discrimination, and “Purusha”, the manifestation of the Parabrahman, assumes the body and experiences the dualities of the world: good and bad, joy and sorrow, which are the contrivance of Prakriti as “Maya”. The theme of the first of these two hymns, “The Hymn to Durga”, is borrowed from Kalidasa’s Kumarsambhavam in Sanskrit. The second hymn, “The Hymn to Bhabani”, manifests the destructive side of the Mother, the third hymn is devoted to her benevolent aspect. The conception of a female power or “Sakti” being responsible for the creation, maintenance and destruction of the universe is not uncommon in both Eastern and Western mythologies. Sri Aurobindo assigns The Mother the attributes of Wisdom, Strength, Harmony, and Perfection. Robert Graves similarly conceives of an all-powerful, all-pervading Female power in his poems, while Swinburne depicts the picture of “Aphrodite” like that of Bhabani: at the emergence of these goddesses the whole universe leaps into life (Mukherjee 87)…Access Full Text of the Article

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

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

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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

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

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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

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