The Other in South Asian Religion, Literature and Film

Perspectives on Otherism and Otherness

Diana Dimitrova, Diana Dimitrova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317937319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book introduces the term "otherism" and looks at the discourse of otherism and the issue of otherness in South Asian religion, literature and film. Itexamines cultural questions related to the human condition of being the "other, " of the process of "othering" and of the representation of "otherness" and its religious, cultural and ideological implications.

The book applies the perspectives of ideological criticism, theories of hybridity, orientalism, nationalism, and gender and queer studies to gain new insights into the literature, film and culture of South Asia. It looks at the different ways of interpreting "otherness" today. The book goes on to analyze the ideological implications of the creation of "otherness" with regard to religious and cultural identity and the legitimation of power, as well as how the representation of "otherness" reflects the power structures of contemporary societies in South Asia.

Offering a well-thought-out reflection on important cultural questions as well as a deep insight into the study of religion and "otherness" in South Asian literature and film, this book is a pioneering project that is of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies andSouth Asian religions, literatures and cultures.

Part I
In “other” lands

Diaspora, religion and literature

1 The religion of coolitude

Rashi Rohatgi

Coolitude poetry draws a clear line between now and then, here and there, us and the other: the sea-journey by which labourers left their Indian homeland for better opportunities across the globe. India is not ‘here’, but the idea of India is something that has survived the journey, most potently in religious stories. In these reconstructive, forward-looking poems, India is a subjective other, filtered through Hinduism, indenture and 100 years of history in a new nation.

Khal Torabully,¹ a Mauritian poet and theorist, coined the term ‘coolitude’ for an attitude he saw emerging in Mauritian poetry dealing with the indenture experience.² It was an attitude that considered the experience of the indentured labourers, pejoratively called ‘coolies’ by the plantocracy, as something with which to be engaged and, now that indenture was over, from which to be gained. Coolitude takes the voyage of the migrants as the starting point in Indian labour diaspora history, viewing the journey as one in which people encountered one another as they began to encounter their new world. The labourers were crossing the caste-effacing black waters, and Torabully insists that as early as the voyage they were able to begin reconstituting their own identities. Those who went through the month-long journey together formed strong bonds, the transformative potential of which Torabully highlights as the first step in a multiple reconsideration of identities. To Torabully, ‘the chief characteristics of coolitude are, to sum up, the redefining of “India,” of the relation to India, to other cultures, in the setting of their adoptive homelands. A cross-cultural vagabondage/cultural vagrancy is definitely at its heart’, ³ and coolitude

broadens the concept of the ‘Indian abroad’ or the Indian Diaspora into the consciousness of a mosaic, complex vision, acknowledging the traumatic and constructive potential of the voyage/exile. It entails of the inclusion of Indianness into a mosaic poetics, which involves an interweaving with ‘otherness/alterité’.⁴

For Torabully, understanding one's coolitude involves understanding that one has a new language that is different and gleaned from various others, reflecting in the Bakhtinian sense, the author's multiple identities.⁵

Many writers of the Indian labour diaspora, Mauritian or not, engage in this complex reconfiguring of identities. Some of them self-consciously engage in coolitude; some may not have heard the phrase ‘coolitude’, but exemplify it nonetheless. In the Hindi poetry of writers such as Abhimanyu Unnuth, Shrinivasi, Kamal Prasad Mishra, Nand Kishore and Kashi Ram Kumud, we see a network of coolitude which spans the globe. As they engage in cross-cultural vagabondage, the history of the voyage ties them together, but deeper bonds, also shape the way these writers define identity. This chapter looks at one aspect of the ‘inclusion of Indianness’ to which Torabully refers: a Hindu understanding of self and identity that runs through coolitude poetry. Here, we trace the importance of religion in these diasporan renderings of mosaic poetics.

Diaspora and coolitude

We can see the aforementioned poets engaging with questions of identity in their work, but why, with experiences of indenture varying so much by destination, should we read them as a diasporic set? Anjali Prabhu's Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects provides a rare analysis of the concept of diaspora with specific reference to an Indian labour diaspora, in this case in Mauritius.⁶ In it, she responds to recent frustrations with the concept of diaspora as too vague, agreeing that the lack of utility in the idea of diaspora obscures our understanding of the specificities of the Mauritius situation. She notes that hybridity has, in the postcolonial imagination, become almost synonymous with, and certainly simultaneous to, the idea of diaspora. Diasporas are defined by their hybridity, and hybrids are explained with reference to their diasporic (and therefore multicultural) origins. She distinguishes two distinct concepts in hybrid-diaspora which she refers to as ‘diaspora’ and ‘creolization’: the first implying ‘a certain fixed-ness’ of underlying nationality. Of the second, she writes:

Creolization, then, as a theoretical stratagem was seen to release notions of diaspora from this essentialist one. Stuart Hall explains the new vision of diaspora, which I qualify here for clarity as creolization, implicitly opposing it to the previous one: ‘… diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all cost return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea.’

(Hall, 1993: 401) ⁷

If we think of the Indian labour diaspora as a site of creolization, then it is not the differences in the destination culture that interest us, but rather the similarities in the results of the cultural interactions. As Torabully theorizes, the sea journey away from India can be marked as the first moment of creolization, and the identity forged on the ship as the first self-representation for this diaspora. However, Torabully, in coining the phrase ‘coolitude’ sets up an internal opposition to thinking primarily in terms of creolization: coolitude's allusion to negritude implies a foundational identity of ‘coolie-ness’ parallel to the black identity put forth in the negritude movements. In Paris, the Black intellectuals who championed negritude saw the Black community described and defined by non-Black writers and thinkers and questioned the necessity of Black intellectuals to define themselves within the same framework. They wanted to re-appropriate the pejorative term ‘negre’ into a term that took pride and direction from the Black culture which had emerged. To make the term more precise, it was necessary to describe more precisely what he thought the positive attributes of ‘blackness’ were; for the early champions of negritude these were a humanism, an engagement with society for its betterment, through realistic literature and Marxist politics, and a celebration and carrying forward of the narratives and symbols of older African history and beliefs. Blackness was pan-African and indeed included, since its inception, members of the diaspora. Negritude was panned by critics as being just as racist as the European conception of blackness, based on created generalizations, still caught in the European construction of race which assumed a hierarchy.⁸ In understanding the self-representation of the Indian labour diaspora in coolitude poetry, even when we think primarily in terms of creolization, should we assume that there is an essential ‘coolie’ identity?

Prabhu tackles the issue of the essential Black identity in her work, writing that:

It is not necessarily the case that all theoreticians investigating the broad question of hybridity as creolization, intercultural interaction or any of its other forms, are necessarily creating responses to the notion of diaspora as were the creolité critics against negritude but rather that hybridity-diaspora can exist in either state, though the two types are distinguishable in a signifi-cant way [with] ‘diasporic discourses relying on a past trauma that justifies a present affiliation and solidarity, whereas creolizing discourses, even if not concerned with an actual erasure of the past trauma, direct their energies toward interaction and new connections in the present’.⁹

Indo-Mauritians once turned away from Europe and India and even other indentured labour populations in order to form a creole, hybrid Indo-Mauritian identity. They looked forward, and in coolitude poetry we can see this orientation towards the present and the future in light of the past. We can think of the Indian labour diaspora as a site of creolization which, while it contains certain underlying traits forged on the ship, looks towards the future.

To answer this section's initial question, then, we should read these poems as a set of coolitude poems because we see them oriented in a similar way from a similar foundational point. Torabully makes it clear that the ship is the founda-tional point: it was a journey on which the migrants were able to form bonds with Indians from other castes and other communities who were suffering the same hunger and oppression, and who were likewise trying to improve their lives by taking this leap of faith across the sea. While the diminishing of the importance of caste is important when we consider the unified sense of ‘Mauritian-ness’ or ‘Fijian-ness’ that resulted, underlying that caste identity was a Hindu religious identity that shaped, beyond caste, what ‘self’ and ‘identity’ meant. This religious identity was a popular Hinduism, shaped largely by Puranic stories and vernacular versions of the epics. For those migrants, exile was already a pathway once trod by Rama, and the self was shaped by its duty and its travails just as the epic characters were shaped by theirs.¹⁰ In the poetry, however, even this sense of self with its basis in popular Hinduism is shaped into new forms of spirituality which emerged in the encounter of indenture and its legacy.

Hindu ideas of the self in coolitude poetry

Abhimanyu Unnuth, Torabully's compatriot from Mauritius, is at once a poet of coolitude and a poet engaged with the religious. Unnuth is the most well-known Mauritian writing in Hindi. His works are a response to, and an expression of, Indo-Mauritian self-understanding in the years after the struggle for independence (obtained in 1968), during which unification of the community under the auspices of religion and language was instrumental in obtaining a largely peaceful independence. The poems grapple with the sufferings faced by the community's labouring ancestors as well as the meaning that such suffering can have in light of the shortcomings Unnuth witnessed in Mauritius in the 1980s: poverty, hunger, exploitation and political obfuscation. He draws upon the experience of labour in his understanding of his historical identity, seeing the shared suffering of this labour as the crux of the Indo-Mauritians' communal identity. In his poetry, Unnuth expresses the suffering of labour as giving rise to indignation, and, taking the slant of coolitude poetry, paints this indignation to be completely righteous. His poetry is a retelling of the narrative that is found in the epics, where characters must ascertain how to deal with the snags in self-realization that come from the recognition that the world outside is flawed and could, in fact, be improved.¹¹

Both coolitude and popular Mauritian Hinduism characterize the world as split into ‘us’ and the ‘other’ in which the ‘us’ is left more mysterious than the ‘other’: coolitude splits indentured society into the owners and the workers, while popular Mauritian Hinduism splits the same society into the divine and the human. The power differential is the same in both cases, and Unnuth plays with this in his work, injecting the tone of a political protest into seemingly quite personal poems. In modern Indo-Mauritian society, in which there is disenchant...