Postcolonial Yearning

Reshaping Spiritual and Secular Discourses in Contemporary Literature

A. Sen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137340184
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Anglophone postcolonial studies has been characterized by its secular nature. Yet as the first generation of scholars grapples with mortality, a yearning for spiritual meaning is emerging in many texts. This study synthesizes the sacred language used in these texts with critical theory in order to create a holistic frame for interpretive analysis.

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Travel Writing and Cultural Tourism: William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives and Pankaj Mishra’s An End to Suffering

Abstract: My first chapter speaks to the limitations of certain literary genres by illustrating how the conventions of travel writing ensure that spiritual belief remains an object of study for the secular subject. The ethnographic impulse embedded in the travel conventions used by Dalrymple and Mishra constrain the spiritual traditions they examine turning them into catalysts for their narratives’ self-consolidating secular visions. Consequently, although their focus on spirituality aligns them with the other narratives discussed in this book, their representations of sacred spaces remain confined to a secular language and symbology. The rest of my book provides a response to this chapter by illustrating what a spiritually interventionist reading can effect.

Sen, Asha. Postcolonial Yearning: Reshaping Spiritual and Secular Discourses in Contemporary Literature, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137340184.

Travel literature has always been the most interdisciplinary of genres alternately performing as cultural ethnography, history, and fiction. In the words of well-known travel writer Pico Iyer:

I really think the definition of a travel writer is someone who would never think of himself or call herself a travel writer, partly because he or she doesn’t want to live in boxes and partly because what is bringing the energy and life to the work is what each of them is bringing from other fields. That’s to say, I think of Bruce Chatwin as an anthropologist principally; I think of Jan Morris as an historian; Paul Theroux is really a novelist more than anything and his trips are business holidays through which he conducts research between novels. And V.S. Naipaul has more or less exploded the very distinction. (2006)

Despite differences in their respective audiences and methods, travel writers and anthropologists have more in common than is usually suspected. Both, for instance, “deliver the exotic to an audience unlikely to follow them to places they have visited but likely perhaps to follow their exploration of them” (Wheeler, 1986, p. 52). In traditional ethnographies of non-western cultures religion often appears as a set of unchanging customs and practices that reinforce distinctions between the primitive non-west and the progressive west. As Renalto Rosaldo notes, “Classic norms of ethnographic composition had a significant role in reinforcing the slippage from working hypotheses to self-fulfilling prophecies about unchanging social worlds where people are caught in a web of eternal reoccurrence” (1989, p. 42). In this context, Edward Said’s analysis of the unchanging “structure of attitude and reference” that makes up allusions to empire in the European novel (Culture and Imperialism, 1993) can easily be extended to the genre of travel literature examined in Mary Pratt’s Imperial Eyes and Transculturation (1992), which looks at how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the world went (and go) about creating the ‘domestic subject,’ of Euroimperialism, how they have engaged metropolitan reading publics with (or to) expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few” (p. 4). Connections between the ethnographic and the literary are also made in the collection of essays Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, which aims “to introduce a literary consciousness to ethnographic practice by showing various ways in which ethnographies can be read and written” (Marcus, p. 62). More recently, the 1998 edited collection of essays Tourists with Typewriters looks at postmodern, feminist, and queer influences on contemporary travel narratives.

This chapter examines the effects of ethnographic norms and structures, both traditional and modern, on representations of spiritual and secular worlds in the works of two travel narratives: Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra. The first attempts to reclaim spiritual traditions that are fast falling into disuse, while the second tries to refigure medieval Buddhism for a contemporary context. While Nine Lives tends to fit into “the informational tradition of a broadly constructed travel writing, the purpose of which was to incorporate a particular reality into a series of interlocking informative orders—aesthetic, geographic, numerological, and ethnographic—such writing typically presented itself as ‘natural’ effacing the control and conditions of its production” (Clifford, 1986, p. 4), an End to Suffering is closer to the more contemporary genre of “travel writing as memoir” (Holland and Huggan, 1998, p. 14). However, despite these structural differences, the ethnographic impulse in both works ultimately constrains their depictions of the sacred and reinforces barriers between secular and spiritual discourses instead of transforming them. Consequently, despite their focus on spirituality, Dalrymple and Mishra’s literary representations of sacred spaces ultimately reinforce their own secular epistemologies.

William Dalrymple, who has made his home in Delhi for the past thirty years, is a travel writer, historian, and journalist and also the driving force behind the now world-famous Jaipur Literary Festival or “mela.” In 2011 there were 250 authors from around 30 different countries represented here as well as a large number of bhasha and Dalit writers from India; “no less than 210 authors from 15 countries spoke to crowds of over 35,000 people.” None of the writers is paid and all the performances are free (“A Mela Comes of Age,” 2011). In Dalrymple’s words:

back in 2004, it seemed odd to me that India, which supplied so many writers to literary festivals around the world, seemed to have so few literary events of its own, other than some deadly discussion on Hindi poetry at the Sahitya Akademi, a few authors on British Council tours and the odd invitation-only event for elderly would-be literateurs at the India International centre in New Delhi. Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there. One tended to meet far more of what the West regards as the A-list Indian writers in English at the literary festival of Hay-on-Wye, in the Welsh countryside, at Cheltenham or even at New York’s PEN American Center, than one ever did in Mumbai or Delhi. (“A Mela Comes of Age,” 2011; author’s italics)

By using the classical Indian tradition of the mela or festival to revitalize the lack luster postcolonial literary scene in India, Dalrymple makes an interesting complement to the other authors discussed in this book who also seek to disengage from the colonial and nationalist traditions that inform postcolonial writing to contextualize pre-colonial spiritual traditions for a contemporary setting. However, his own position of “westerner” simultaneously fits him into the trajectory of generations of colonial writers discussed by Said and Pratt who colonize “other” cultures in an attempt to domesticate them and make them “knowable” to the western reader. His books are published by the well-known Bloomsbury Press in London, and contain analogies to famous western texts such as The Canterbury Tales, which provide a reference point for the foreign reader unfamiliar with the complexity of India’s local cultures. Dalrymple says, “as far as a curiosity in England and America about India and Hinduism is concerned, I feel thankful that it exists because it gives me a job” (“I’m No Westerner,” 2003b).

The complications implicit in Dalrymple’s hybrid position of cultural insider/outsider are manifested in the shifting perspectives found in his multiple narratives on South Asia. In City of Djinns (1993; 2003a), for instance, overt Orientalist references can be found in the choice of words like “superstition,” references to “the body” (and not the soul) continuing on in different lives, and the lovable caricatures of the author’s landlady and driver Mrs. Puri and Balvinder Singh. In his more self-conscious introduction to The Age of Kali (1998) Dalrymple pays attention to the voices of “Indians understandably touchy about criticism from abroad,” and seeks to reassure his audience that India “is an area of the world [he] revere[s] like no other” (xiii). However, he also hopes that his book will “delight and astonish,” words that are historically implicated in Orientalist representations of the Other. White Mughals (2002), by contrast, adopts a transcultural approach that moves away from these earlier texts as it became clear to the author that:

The relationship between India and Britain was a symbiotic one. Just as individual Britons in India could learn to appreciate and wish to emulate different aspects of Indian culture, and choose to take on Indian manners and languages, so many Indians at this period began to travel to Britain, intermarrying with the locals there and picking up Western ways. (xiv)

And finally in Nine Lives he announces his “job” is to educate the West about its Orientalist biases:

For while the west often likes to imagine the religions of the East as deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom, in reality much of India’s religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly as Indian society transforms itself at speed . . . . By rooting many of the stories in the darker and less romantic sides of modern Indian life, with each of the characters telling his or her own story, and with only the frame created by the narrator; I hope to have avoided many of the clichés about “Mystic India” that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion. (2009, pp. xiv–xv)

In order to achieve his objective, Dalrymple draws from his interdisciplinary background to create a new genre, which he calls a “collection of linked non-fiction stories” (2009, p. xc). This genre, which combines ethnographic with literary forms, as referenced in Writing Culture (2002) suggests a postmodern self-consciousness that foregrounds the fictionality of its narrative, even as Dalrymple adheres to more traditional norms of ethnography by implying an “objective neutrality” in allowing his characters to “speak for themselves.” However, a literary critique of Nine Lives suggests that the narrative is far less transparent than its author would have us believe. By studying the narrative framework of different stories, the narrator’s relation with his characters, and the unresolved contradictions and silences in different stories, it is possible to see how Dalrymple’s storytelling continues to be implicated in some of the more unselfconscious rhetoric of colonial ethnographic, historical, and travel accounts found in his earlier works.

More specifically, although Nine Lives differs from the self-conscious absorption of contemporary travel narratives such as An End to Suffering in that “The ‘I’ is much less present here than it was in say the City of Djinns” (Dalrymple, “I’m No Westerner,” 2003b), the reader comes to miss the lovable if caricatured characters of his earlier works. The absence of any major change between the voice of the narrator and his interviewees is in part due to the fact that with the help of the author’s friends and colleagues the interviews took place in eight Indian languages and it is these translations that make up much of the content of the book. Moreover, while the earlier stories in the collection tend to focus more on the individual interviewee, the later ones introduce a number of different characters and much more narrative commentary, which in turn, drowns out individual voices, and provides more authorial opinion. As Renalto Rosaldo points out even, “minor editorializing is an authoritative move” (1989, p. 128), and it is the details in Nine Lives that inadvertently contribute to the privileging of Dalrymple’s secular vision. The nuances that make up living speech are unwittingly lost in the creation of a seamless narrative that enables “each life” to be “a keyhole into the way that each specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India’s metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith and ritual in a fast-changing landscape” (Dalrymple, 2009, p. xv). The word choice in the latter half of the last sentence—and particularly the focus on the “persistence” of ritual suggests shades of Orientalist notions of people outside of time, while in giving the stories symbolic function Nine Lives also falls into the Orientalist trap of over-generalizing the lives of specific individuals and their cultural practices. And even as Nine Lives gives equal time to male and female interviewees, the framed stories privilege a narrative gaze, which while sympathetic also remains secular, white, heterosexual, and male, over its spiritual subjects.

“The Nun’s Story,” which is Dalrymple’s self-confessed favorite, begins the collection and is perhaps the most deserving of attention because of its difference from the others. Mataji and her friend Prayogamati are the spoilt daughters of wealthy Jain families who despite family opposition join the Digamabara order of monks and nuns. Ironically, Prasannamati Mataji uses the patriarchal analogy of marriage as a civic institution to justify her own decision—“it is the same as when a girl gets married and she has to give up her childhood and her parents’ home: if she does it in exchange for something she really wants, it is not a sad time, but instead a very joyful one” (p. 22)—thus, making use of and also subverting a traditional societal norm to justify her unconventional choice.

In the same way, she embraces the patriarchal religion¹ that she chooses without any acknowledgement of the ways in which it disempowers her. In her idealization of the western notion of “freedom of choice,” she never questions the sexist underpinnings of her religion; instead, she mimics the same neutrality that Dalrymple claims in allowing his characters their own voices. When Mataji meets the author the presence of a naked Jain monk in the office who acts as chaperone reinforces the idea of her as a sexual rather than spiritual being.² Although Jainism traditionally believes in a split between sex and gender enabling the accommodation of someone being born “male” but having “female” desires, the reverse is rarely mentioned within the Digambara tradition (Zwilling and Sweet, 1996).³ Consequently, Mataji’s close friendship with her friend Prayogamati is not threatening to the order in the way in which Dalrymple’s presence is. The heteronormative narrative gaze of the story also renders the possibility of an intimate relationship between the two women invisible.

Despite the hardships she undergoes, Mataji always finds life joyful until her best friend gets TB and commits “Sallekhana.” Prasannamati Mataji describes the practice thus:

It’s the ritual fast to death. We Jains regard it as the culmination of our life as ascetics. It is what we all aim for, and work towards as the best route to Nirvana. Not just nuns—even my grandmother, a lay person, took sallekhana . . . Suicide is a great sin, the result of despair. But sallekhana is a triumph over death, an expression of hope . . . We believe that death is not the end, and that life and death are complementary. So when you embrace sallekhana you are embracing a whole new life—it’s no more than going through from one room to another . . . With suicide, death is full of pain and suffering. But sallekhana is a beautiful thing. There is no distress or cruelty. As nuns our lives are peaceful, and giving up the body should also be peaceful. You have the Tirthankaras’ names on your lips, and if you do it slowly and gradually, in the prescribed way, there is no pain; instead there is a gentle purity in all the privations. (“Nun’s Story,” p. 5)

However, the pain she witnesses watching her friend’s slow death disrupts Mataji’s idealized notion of “sallekhana” being a peaceful practice. It also questions the idea of individual choice embedded in the practice. Prayogamati says, “she would prefer to give up her body rather than have it taken from her. She said she wanted to die voluntarily, facing it squarely and embracing it, rather than have death ambush her and take her away by force. She was determined to be the victor, not the victim” (p. 24). Yet the process of dying that she suffers shows how little of it is under her control. Significantly enough, although it is her guruji who must agree to her taking the vow of sallekhana and monitors her treatment, he himself is absent during much of her illness while it is Mataji who takes care of her. Although these discrepancies are not commented on by either Mataji or Dalrymple, they do enable Mataji to ask the doctors to go against the tenets of her faith and give her friend injections for her malaria. They also undercut the integrity of Mataji’s faith by highlighting her attachment to Prayogamati.

Mataji’s friendship with Prayogmati contradicts Jain faith, which believes in revulsion toward this life, and attachment to death, and causes her own suffering. After her friend’s passing, she decides to commit sallekhana herself. However, her decision to do this and her guruji’s assent remain shrouded in mystery. While her guruji assents to Prayogmati’s decision because he knows she does not have long to live, there are no signs of Mataji being ill. Moreover, as she tells the narrator, there is no guarantee that she will meet her friend in another life. Explaining her decision to the narrator, she repeats the spiritual rhetoric she had previously used: “it is a good way—the very best way—to breathe your last, and leave the body. It is no more than leaving one house to enter another” (p. 27). And yet the pain that Prayogmati suffers and that Mataji describes in such painstaking detail disrupts the conventional pieties of Mataji’s rhetoric calling into question modernist notions of agency and choice.

The narrator’...