Abstract
In Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, the protagonist Saladin Chamcha, born Salahuddin Chamchawala, undertakes a journey to England in order to escape his Indian identity and refashion himself as a “goodandproper Englishman”. In my article I read this journey of Chamcha through the prism of other similar journeys towards England and “Englishness”, which recur frequently in the past 200 years of Indian history. By highlighting the common elements that underline these different journeys, I seek to examine the desire to become “English” that they manifest and which forms an important, though critically neglected, facet of Indian middle-class self-fashioning under the colonial impact. The Satanic Verses, written four decades after India formally ceased being a colony of Britain, is central to this project because it is not only one of the most nuanced representations of the middle-class Indian desire for Englishness but also simultaneously an exploration of the sociocultural cul-de-sac to which this desire ultimately leads.
At the heart of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is a trajectory of exile which also peculiarly resembles a journey of homecoming. Born in Bombay but disgusted with “the confusion and superabundance of the place” (Rushdie, 1989/1988: 37), 1 one of the novel’s two protagonists, Saladin Chamcha, longs for England — “that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation” (37) — which he considers to be his true cultural home. The subsequent journey to England that Chamcha undertakes at the age of 13 becomes for him a journey between cultural essences and an odyssey that covers the “immeasurable distance” (41) from “Indianness to Englishness” (41). This journey to Englishness is, however, far from unique in the cultural context of postcolonial India. In fact, Chamcha’s fantasy about turning himself “English” reflects a prevalent strand of postcolonial Indian self-fashioning. This strand can be traced back to the early decades of the nineteenth century and is most prominently evident in the autobiographical writings of such twentieth-century Indian authors as Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Dom Moraes. 2 Curiously, in spite of its popularity, little critical material is available on what we might term “Indian self-fashioning as English”. Indeed, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is perhaps the only substantial and definitely the most comprehensive critique available on this peculiar form of postcolonial Indian self-reconstruction. The lack of a robust critical understanding of the phenomenon of Indian self-fashioning as English has meant that this aspect of Rushdie’s seminal novel has remained underexplored. The objective of this paper is therefore twofold. The first aim is to trace the contours of Indian self-fashioning as English so as to add nuance to our understanding of the processes of Indian middle-class identity formation under the impact of colonialism and its legacies. The second is to study The Satanic Verses as a meditation on the postcolonial Indian desire for “Englishness” by reading the character of Saladin Chamcha in relation to such historical figures as Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Nirad C. Chaudhuri who, like Chamcha, undertook the journey from Indianness to Englishness.
The contours of “Englishness”
Before we focus on individuals who undertook the journey to “Englishness”, it is important to try to understand the notion of “Englishness” from within the context of colonial India. At the most rudimentary level, perceptions of Englishness among colonized Indians were characterized by certain physical markers that identified the ruling elites as a distinct class of people. According to historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, the most obvious of these differentiating marks were the white skin of the colonizer along with the peculiarities of his Western clothing and the trappings of his Christian faith (1992: 158). However, it is important to note here that most colonized Indians, including those who had received a Western-style education, did not make any sharp distinctions within the colonizing class itself. Indeed, the differences between terms like “English”, “European”, and “Western”, with their corresponding geographic locations, remained remarkably fuzzy for Indians throughout the colonial period. Girija K. Mookerjee, in one of the earliest studies of colonial Indian perceptions of Europe, notes that Indians did not usually distinguish one European country from the next and one European people from another, in spite of participating in and often cannily manipulating the Franco-British rivalry that unfolded in the subcontinent during the eighteenth century (1967: 15). This tendency to conflate terms like “Europe” and “England” is also echoed by Nirad Chaudhuri who writes in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) that while he was growing up in the early years of the twentieth century, he could conceive Europe only as a “corona” of England — and “England” itself signified not only England but also Scotland, Wales, and Ireland (Chaudhuri, 1964: 109). 3 The tendency to conflate these distinctions is also noted by Raychaudhuri, who writes that in colonial India, “[t]he terms “British” and “English” remained for the most part surrogates for “European”, except where a more specific meaning was stated clearly” (1992: 158). Since the paper is primarily concerned with this provincialized notion of “Englishness” as found in the discourse of the Western-educated, colonized Indian middle class, I use terms like “English”, “British”, “European”, and “Western” interchangeably and make no practical distinction between the specific notion of “Englishness” and the more generalized notion of “Westernness”.
In colonial India, it was from the early nineteenth century onwards that the idea of foreignness associated with the tell-tale physical markers of the colonizers’ Englishness began to be problematized. Indian exposure to the colonizer was radically reshaped once India’s first institute of Western higher education, Calcutta’s Hindu College, opened its doors to “native” students in 1816. Western education in turn gave birth, first in Bengal and then in the rest of India, to an English-educated middle class 4 which was characterized from its inception by adoptions of some of the crucial outward signs which had earlier distinguished the colonizer from the colonized. 5 By the end of the nineteenth century, the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay was writing about how elements of “foreign” Englishness were fast becoming channels through which English-educated Indians were culturally defining themselves: “The stamp of the Anglo-Saxon foreigner is upon our houses, our furniture, our carriages, our food, our drink, our dress, our very familiar letters and conversation. He who runs may read it on every inch of our outward life” (1969: 137). The transformation wrought by the English education, however, ran far deeper than the outward life. It produced what Raychaudhuri describes as “jagged discontinuities with earlier patterns of perception and, to some extent, even emotions” (1992: 161). The novel perceptions and emotions acquired through an English education added up to a whole new Weltanschauung, which now came to complement physical markers to form a more complex image of Englishness.
In a study of the psychological aspects of the colonial encounter, Ashis Nandy has explored this “English” or “Western” Weltanschauung in detail. He also identifies the early nineteenth century as the time “when two sides in the British–Indian culture of politics […] began to ascribe cultural meanings to the British domination” (1983: 6). And according to Nandy, this worldview came to be characterized by a belief “in the absolute superiority of the human over the non-human and the subhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or the progressive over the traditional or the savage” (1983: x). Hence, from the nineteenth century onwards, Indian self-fashioning as English meant not just the adoption of the colonizers’ dress and habits, but also an internalization of the “Western” worldview so as to become more and more like the ruling class. As Nandy explains:
In the colonial culture, identification with the aggressor bound the rulers and the ruled in an unbreakable dyadic relationship. The Raj saw Indians as crypto-barbarians who needed to further civilize themselves. It saw British rule as an agent of progress and as a mission. Many Indians in turn saw their salvation in becoming more like the British, in friendship or in enmity. (1983: 7)
Nandy’s use of the phrase “in friendship or in enmity” is interesting because he locates this desire to “become more like the British” as not merely limited to some unregenerate anglophile collaborators but also among the middle-class nationalists who started gaining prominence during the late nineteenth century. Nandy argues that the majority of middle-class nationalists in India never deeply questioned the set of sociocultural values that was prioritized by the worldview bearing the imprint of “the West”. Rather, theirs was an effort “to reorder Indian culture in response to and as part of these colonial categories” (1983: 18).
Importantly, in this nationalist project of “reordering Indian culture”, the Indian masses, untutored in the virtues of “Englishness”, were perceived by the middle-class leadership more as obstacles than as sources of support. Consequently, the middle-class nationalist leaders, even while claiming to represent the masses, felt deeply alienated from them, an estrangement which was often combined with the sense of contempt and fear (see Sarkar, 1983b: 36−37). As Ranajit Guha’s study on anticolonial mass mobilization in India reveals, even Gandhi, who could connect with the masses better than any previous Indian middle-class nationalist leader, was deeply distrustful of spontaneous popular uprisings and did not conceal his disgust for the “habitual indiscipline” of the subaltern classes (see Guha, 1997: 139−43). Unsurprisingly, such contempt for the masses was still more conspicuous among Indians who wore their anglophilia on their sleeves. Indeed, a sense of disgust toward the subaltern populace of India, their traditions, and their ways of life, is one of the most identifiable features of Indian self-fashioning as English.
The normative pattern of Indian self-fashioning as English
As was noted in my introduction, the complex matrix of desires, fears, and loathing that animated Indian self-fashioning as English produced a singular pattern which is frequently encountered as underlying the life trajectories of a number of middle-class Indians. The earliest manifestation of such a pattern is perhaps most readily identifiable in the life and career of the nineteenth-century Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824−1873). Dutt, who was an early student of the Hindu College, was profoundly impressed by the canons of Western literature and the charms of the English language, and it is to this that we can trace the roots of his desire to become English. An essay that he wrote as he entered his thirties makes evident the intense admiration that Dutt developed for English during his college days:
I acknowledge to you, and I need not blush to do so — that I love the language of the Anglo-Saxon. Yes — I love the language — the glorious language of the Anglo-Saxon. My imagination visions forth before me the language of the Anglo-Saxon in all its radiant beauty; and I feel silenced and abashed. (1965: 533)
The radiant “visions” before which Dutt stood silenced and abashed were, however, not merely that of the English language. His essay also includes visions of an England that was conjured up by his readings of English literature, and that evoked in him an equally reverential admiration. This is amply evident in the following letter that Dutt wrote to his friend and fellow student, Gourdas Basak:
You know my desire for leaving this country [India] is too firmly rooted to be removed. The sun may forget to rise, but I cannot remove it from my heart. Depend upon it — in the course of a year or two more — I must either be in England or cease “to be” at all; — one of these must be done. (Dutt, quoted in Murshid, 2004: 33)
For most of his career, Dutt was to remain engaged in this effort to live in England. It was, however, not until he was nearing 40 that Dutt was finally able to arrive in London, where he stayed for a couple of years before moving on to live in Versailles in France.
As Michael Fisher (2004) points out, Indians had been regularly travelling to Britain in various capacities from the seventeenth century onwards. However, what makes Dutt’s attempt to locate himself in the metropolis unique is its close interconnection with his attempt to become English. This attempt is characterized by Dutt’s adopting some of the most identifiable physical markers which conventionally distinguished the colonizing Europeans as foreigners in the eyes of the native population. For instance, Dutt consciously broke away from the traditions of his orthodox upper-caste Bengali Hindu family, took to wearing Western clothes, converted to Christianity, and married successively, within the span of a few years, two “English” ladies. 6 However, his most important effort to forge a new English identity was his writing of English poetry, which he believed would earn him a place among the canonical English poets, whom since his college days he had so ardently venerated.
Dutt’s best achievement in English was the long poem entitled The Captive Ladie, which was published in 1849. Soon after its publication, Dutt ceased writing in English and chose Bengali as his creative medium. This has been interpreted by critics as a “nationalist turn” in Dutt’s career, marked by a return to and recovery of his “indigenous culture and tradition” (R. Chaudhuri, 2003: 54; Naik, 1982: 25). Dutt is here portrayed as being something like a prodigal son who, after initially wasting his creative energy in fruitless imitation of the English, came back to his “true” native identity to compose the renowned Bengali epic Meghnadbadh Kabya (1861) and earn an everlasting place in the history of Indian national literature. However, this reading of Dutt’s career is not really sustainable. In fact, I would like to argue that Dutt’s apparent “return” to his indigenous culture and tradition represents a peculiarly complex aspect of Indian self-fashioning as English rather than a simple turning away from the project of becoming more like his cherished “Anglo-Saxons”. To begin with, it was after his composition of Meghnadbadh Kabya, which apparently marks the high point of his recovery of “Indianness” (A. Chaudhuri, 2008: 41), that he was able to fulfil his childhood dream of leaving for England. Hence, we are faced here with a paradox where a cultural “homecoming” to Indianness gets translated into a physical journey that takes Dutt from India to England. Moreover, the epic Meghnadbadh Kabya, which retells the story of The Ramayana, also problematizes the notion of “return”. Dutt’s work in fact turns the Hindu epic on its head by foregrounding the traditional villain Ravana and his son Meghnad as the real heroes. As Nandy argues, for Dutt, Ravana and Meghnad represented all the virtues that were prioritized by the “Western” value system, including masculine vigour, commitment to technology and secularism, and a hedonistic lust for life (1983: 20). Ravana and Meghnad thus appear in Dutt’s epic as icons of Englishness who far outshine the hero Rama and the Indian cultural tradition that he represents (Bisi, 1966: 25). In fact one begins to glimpse the element of disgust, which I had earlier identified as an aspect of Indian self-fashioning as English, in the kind of intense loathing that Dutt expresses towards Rama, the hero traditionally revered by the Hindu masses: “I despise Rama and his rabble but the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination” (Dutt, quoted in Seely, 1991: 137).
Interestingly, Dutt’s turn to his indigenous culture and tradition was guided by the advice of an Englishman by the name of John Drinkwater Bethune, a law member in the Governor General’s council stationed in India. On reading The Captive Ladie, Bethune insisted that Dutt should “employ the taste and talents, which he has cultivated by the study of English, in improving the standard and adding to the stock of the poems of his own language” (Bethune, quoted in Murshid, 2003: 89). This advice to Dutt was not that of a literary critic to a budding poet. Rather, it was the advice of a patronizing colonial officer, engaged in a civilizing mission, to a colonized subject whom he expects to learn from the English and then use that knowledge to manifest his “own” identity in his “own” language rather than pretend to be English. Bethune’s refusal to accept Dutt as an “English” poet would remain symptomatic of the kind of response that future anglophone writers from India would receive from metropolitan readers. Indeed, even in the twentieth century, metropolitan readers would, like Bethune, demand that the works of Indian authors should be read as “authentically” Indian and “exotically” different from their own familiar cultural conventions. 7 Consequently, for an Indian to desire to identify her or himself as part of an English sociocultural milieu would always remain buffeted by the injunction that s/he remain quintessentially Indian.
However, a more obvious stumbling block for the middle-class Indian desirous of being regarded as English was skin colour. As mentioned above, for the colonized subject white skin was one of the most prominent markers of the colonizers’ Englishness. By the nineteenth century, whiteness also became a key element in British perceptions of self-identity (see Mohanram, 2007). With the white body playing such a crucial role in defining English identity both for the colonizer and the colonized, it was imperative that an attempt to become English should also involve an attempt to become white-skinned. Dutt’s own efforts to fashion himself as English tripped over this epidermal barrier once he arrived in England. 8 Indeed, according to his biographer Ghulam Murshid, the main reason why Dutt moved on to France within just two years of his arrival in England was that he was deeply unsettled at being called a “damned nigger” in the streets of London after spending a lifetime trying to make himself culturally part of English society (2004: 223). Half a century later, another Bengali writer, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, would expend a considerable amount of intellectual energy in trying to think through this problem of whiteness while being engaged in a similar effort to become not only English but also a part of England.
Chaudhuri (1897−1999), who first received international recognition with the publication of his life story Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, is referred to in The Satanic Verses as one of Saladin Chamcha’s important predecessors who had traced out a journey to England and to Englishness, which Chamcha was trying to replicate:
He [Chamcha] had been striving, like the Bengali writer, Nirad Chaudhuri, before him — though without any of that impish, colonial intelligence’s urge to be seen as enfant terrible — to be worthy of the challenge represented by the phrase Civis Britannicus Sum. (398)
The Latin phrase, declaring oneself to be a British “citizen” or a peer of the colonizer and not just a colonized “subject”, appears in the dedicatory passage of Chaudhuri’s Autobiography addressed “to the memory of the British empire” (v). The motto more explicitly spells out the ambition to belong to an English community, which we have already identified in Dutt’s career. In fact, much like Dutt, Chaudhuri’s desire to be recognized as an Englishman who is an equal of the colonizing “Anglo-Saxons” can also be accredited to an early exposure to English literature within a colonial setting. In his Autobiography, Chaudhuri relates how even as a child he was intimately familiar with the names of Milton, Burke, and Shakespeare. These authors’ works were reverentially displayed at his parents’ house in a glass-fronted cabinet along with “two volumes of the poetical works of the first modern Bengali poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt” (28). However, the book which had the strongest impact on young Chaudhuri and shaped his desire to identify himself as English and be a part of an imagined England was Palgrave’s The Children’s Treasury of Lyrical Poetry (1914), wherein he encountered poems like Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”. As Chaudhuri writes:
[O]ur hearts warmed up with a faith that could be described as the inverse of Rupert Brooke’s. He was happy in the conviction that if he died in a distant land some part of that foreign soil would become for ever England. We had the feeling that if we died in England what would become for ever England would be a little foreign flesh, and with that faith there was happiness in perishing in an English glade, with the robin and the wren twittering overhead. (126−7)
This desire to make his “foreign flesh” a part of England was combined in Chaudhuri by an almost visceral disgust for the Indian masses, culturally unexposed as they were to the transforming effects of English values. The disgust was further intensified when Gandhi made efforts to bring the Indian masses to the political centre stage and pit them against that very British rule which Chaudhuri believed had made and shaped “all that was good and living within us” (v). As the latter puts it:
I always had a profound distrust of indisciplined [sic] mass movements. […] It is true that the masses of India, both Hindu and Muslim, had a simple morality and piety. Mahatma Gandhi shared it, but he did not realize that this was their regenerate side, and they had an unregenerate side always prone to violent action. (1987: 34)
To distinguish himself from this “indisciplined” mass and identify himself as one who belongs with the “civilized” colonizers, Chaudhuri made copious use of Friedrich Max Müller’s theory which claimed that the colonizing Europeans and the colonized Indians both came from the same white-skinned Aryan race that had migrated from their original homeland in central Europe in two different directions — north-west towards England and south-east towards India. 9 Though largely discredited now (Thapar, 1996: 6), this particular racial theory enjoyed tremendous popularity among Indians during the early twentieth century (Raychaudhuri, 2002: 8). To Chaudhuri, who learnt about the theory as a young child, it proved that as a descendant of the same Aryan race there was little difference between him and the colonial masters who ruled over India. It consequently established for him beyond doubt that irrespective of his brown skin, which he attributed to the effect of the tropical sun, he was in fact white. 10
Along with this singular effort to overcome the race barrier, which otherwise denied him Englishness within the colonial context, Chaudhuri also sought to emphasize his English identity by trying to control the publication process of his works in the metropole. Again, much like Dutt, Chaudhuri’s desire to become part of an English socio-cultural milieu began not with a journey to England but with an attempt to establish himself as an English author with a metropolitan readership. Chaudhuri was, however, keenly aware of the fact that the metropolitan publishers who would mediate his access to an English audience would invariably expect him to play the role of an Indian native informant. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, with its minutely detailed description of a childhood spent in India, shows Chaudhuri cleverly playing along with this expectation. Indeed, near the end of the book he even makes the startling claim that he is the quintessential Indian — l’inde c’est moi (518) — whose life story is the story of modern India. Yet, a reading of his second English autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, which dwells upon the publication process of Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, reveals how Chaudhuri was also simultaneously trying to underplay his connection with India. As Chaudhuri writes in Thy Hand, he was determined “not [to] give the book [Autobiography] to an Indian publisher” (1987: 870) and even more importantly not to give it to “two well known [metropolitan] publishers who published books about India” (1987: 899). Chaudhuri explains that this was because “I did not wish my book to be regarded as one of special Indian interest, but to be read by ordinary English readers of serious books” (1987: 899). His autobiography was finally accepted by Macmillan, who, as Chaudhuri triumphantly informs, were “publishers of Kipling and Hardy” (1987: 900) and up until that point in time “did not publish books about India” (1987: 900). How successful Chaudhuri was in getting recognition as a canonical “English” author from “ordinary English readers of serious books” remains an open question. However, it is worth noting that in his efforts to convince others about his Aryan whiteness he singularly failed. As Chaudhuri himself reports, when he first visited England shortly after the publication of the Autobiography, he was teased in the streets of London because of his skin colour and taunted as an “African” (1959: 125).
Salman Rushdie, born exactly half a century after Chaudhuri, writes in his essay “Imaginary Homelands” that his “freak fair skin” (1991a: 18) helped him to have a “relatively easy ride” (1991a: 18) when he reached Britain from Bombay, driven by his own version of an imagined England. Yet in his desire to belong to a “dream England” we find an echo of the same pattern that underlines the life trajectories of both Dutt and Chaudhuri. Rushdie too, like Dutt and Chaudhuri before him, writes about his early exposure to English literature and about “gr[owing] up with an intimate knowledge of, and even sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England: a dream-England” (1991a: 18). Yet, born in June 1947, just a couple of months before the complete dissolution of the Raj, Rushdie also grew up with an acute awareness that “the dream-England is no more than a dream” (1991a: 18). This England, gleaned from the pages of Enid Blyton and Billy Bunter, and reinforced by images of test matches at Lord’s (1991a: 18), was an illusion which, though it continued to propel Indians like him to try to find a place as an equal in an English sociocultural milieu, was no longer sustainable. This awareness has strongly pervaded the genre of Indian English fiction since the 1980s, when Rushdie’s generation of anglophone authors came to the forefront. In this literary landscape we often encounter forlorn figures like Arjun (Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, 2000) or Jemubhai Patel (Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, 2006), who, after lifelong striving to be English, find themselves socially redundant as the Raj disappears and the previous colonial relationships change form. Both Arjun and Jemubhai represent the aporia that underpins the Indian desire for Englishness, but neither of the novels in which they appear proposes a way out of the cul-de-sac represented by Indian self-fashioning as English. Indeed, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is one of the few post-1980 Indian English fictions which depict a character who successfully transcends the aporia of his English self-fashioning to open up new possibilities of postcolonial identity. It is to this novel that I now turn.
The absent cause of an implacable rage
The narrative strand dealing with the life and career of Saladin Chamcha, born Salahuddin Chamchawala, in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses retraces the already familiar outline of the phenomenon of Indian self-fashioning as English, but gives it a parodic slant. For instance, the pleasure of becoming acquainted with English literary texts is replaced in the Saladin Chamcha story with the pleasure of chancing upon a wallet full of “[p]ounds sterling, from proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet” (35). However, the “crisp promises of pounds sterling” (37) that Chamcha finds inside the wallet are similar to the promise that individuals like Dutt or Chaudhuri found inside the covers of their books of English verses — the promise of a utopian England overlaid with the possibility of removing oneself from the perceived sordidness of an Indian reality and becoming transformed into a superior and more civilized species of human being. Hence, Chamcha’s determination, after finding the wad of “magic billfold” (37), to “escape Bombay, or die” (38), almost exactly reiterates the sentiment that informed Dutt’s letter in which he wrote that he “must either be in England or cease ‘to be’ at all” (Dutt, quoted in Murshid, 2004: 33). The problem that the brown Indian body poses to such a dream of belonging to “the fabled country of Vilayet” is also presented in The Satanic Verses with a parodic twist. Thus, Chamcha’s professional identity in England shuttles between being a faceless voice artist, who makes products like garlic-flavoured crisps, baked beans, and frozen peas speak in advertisements, and the hero of a television series who has the protean body of an alien with neither a fixed shape nor a fixed colour.
The uneasy relationship that Indian authors trying to be English establish with their English readers and metropolitan publishers is reflected in Rushdie’s novel through the failed marriage between Chamcha and his wife Pamela Lovelace. As I have already noted, the process of transforming oneself into an Englishman crucially hinges on being accepted as an equal and a peer by others who are English. For Chamcha, this entire question of being accepted as “English” by the English comes to rest on his being acknowledged by Pamela, who, with her name echoing the title of the classic English novel by Samuel Richardson and her “hearty, rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England” (180), personifies for him the idealized metropole to which he wants to belong. In his desire to transform himself into an Englishman, Chamcha therefore believes “that if she d[oes] not relent then his entire attempt at metamorphosis would fail” (49−50). The irony in Chamcha’s relationship with Pamela is that her acceptance of Chamcha is predicated on the very Indian identity that he seeks to deny. Indeed, as Pamela’s lover, Jumpy Joshi, observes, Chamcha’s whole appeal to English women rests on the fact that he can appear as “everybody’s goddamn cartoon of the mysteries of the East” (174). This is again a familiar paradox, whereby an Indian author trying to fashion himself as English invariably finds his attempt undermined by an implicit injunction to remain “Indian”.
However, Chamcha’s story is significant not because of the way it revises the recognizable script of a middle-class Indian trying to become English, but because of the way it attempts to go beyond this well-worn script to reveal new kinds of postcolonial identity. To see how his story does this and explore what new forms of identity it reveals, I begin by focusing on the motive that Rushdie ascribes to Chamcha for trying to become English. Chamcha starts realizing his dream of belonging to England when his father, Changez Chamchawala, “out of the blue, offered him an English education” (39) and accompanies him on his journey to London — his journey “from Indianness to Englishness” (41). Once in London, Changez insists that everything on the trip be paid with the money that Saladin had found in the wallet in Bombay. Forced to be thrifty, the latter tries to smuggle into his hotel room a roast chicken, bought from a cheap food joint, by hiding it inside his mackintosh:
Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth of an implacable rage which would burn within him, undiminished for over a quarter of a century; which would boil away his childhood father-worship and make him a secular man […]; which would fuel, perhaps, his determination to become the thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, goodandproper Englishman. (43)
This important scene portrays in miniature the conflict that structures Chamcha’s self-fashioning: his desire to be English (reflected in his attire of double-breasted serge mackintosh) being undermined by the metropolitan gaze (of dowagers and liftwallahs), makes him acutely embarrassed at the inappropriateness of what he is carrying inside his clothes — a cheap roast chicken, a brown-skinned Indian body, both fused together in the term “chicken-breasted”. Central to this scene and indeed to Chamcha’s whole life story is “the birth of an implacable rage”, which gives him the determination to “boil away” the filial connections that tie him to India, and become instead a “goodandproper Englishman”. This rage is, of course, a magnified version of the disgust and contempt that we have already encountered as underlying the English self-fashioning of Dutt and Chaudhuri, and is centred on a very specific image of India — an India that is impotent, inferior, degenerate, and uncivilized. It is this hateful image of India that acts as the fulcrum supporting the attempt to become English — an attempt informed as much by the desire to approximate oneself to a mental image of an idealized Englishman as by the desire to separate oneself from a mental image of a dystopian India. But, this hate-filled core around which the attempt to become English crystallizes, ultimately reveals an abyss in which the rage-inducing idea of India regresses eternally. In the novel, the roast chicken scene therefore acts as a mise en abyme that opens into a bottomless pit where the birth of Chamcha’s implacable rage, his desire to be separated from India, and his determination to become English, are caught in an endless series of reflection and reiteration. On going back a few pages from the one that describes the incident in the lift as Chamcha’s life-changing moment, we read the story of Chamcha’s father confiscating the wallet full of pounds sterling from him. The reader is presented here with another scene which alludes to the same set of emotions and the birth of the same steely determination in Chamcha to transform himself into an Englishman:
Changez Chamchwala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself. […] The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of Trafalgar roar. (36−37)
Almost as soon as this incident is narrated, one reads of another event in Chamcha’s life which proffers yet another cause of his rage and yet another reason for his removing himself from his native land. This time, a bony stranger who molests Chamcha on the beach outside his house performs a role similar to the father who bullies and humiliates the son. The structure of the scene, however, remains the same: Chamcha feels degraded because of an adult male, and his helplessness and embarrassment give rise to an intense loathing for his country of origin and a desire to remove himself to England:
It seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had come to revile about his home town, had come together in the stranger’s bony embrace, and now that he had escaped that skeleton, he must also escape Bombay, or die. He began to concentrate fiercely upon this idea […]. He dreamed of flying out of his bedroom window to discover that there, before him, was — not Bombay — but Proper London itself. (38)
This continually differing reinscription of the reason for Chamcha’s outrage does not reveal any core cause that might explain why he tries to turn himself into an Englishman with such a vengeance. In the narrative, each of these incidents operates as mutually replaceable pegs on which Chamcha hangs his resentment towards his father, his home town, and his native country. But since they are replaceable, with each incident of humiliation and embarrassment immediately and incessantly giving way to another, they neither reveal the origin of Chamcha’s resentment nor justify his English self-fashioning that is apparently based on this elusive but unflinching resentment. This lack of justification becomes evident when the middle-aged Chamcha, after a long absence from India, once again confronts his father Changez and tries to blame the latter for what he has been “compelled” to become:
He came to accuse […]. He came to avenge his youth […]. Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child-self, rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have become. (69)
The seriousness of these allegations is, however, made trivial by the causes that sustain them — a wallet containing pounds sterling confiscated by his father when he was 13 and a roast chicken he was made to carry inside his mackintosh as an adolescent (68). Whatever significance these stories of deprivation might have had in the distant past, they have long since become insignificant anecdotes which can no longer be used to validate either Chamcha’s self-imposed exile from India or his turning himself into an Englishman. Changez Chamchawala points this out to his son in no uncertain terms: “Face it, mister: I don’t explain you anymore” (69).
Chamcha’s failure to convincingly pin the cause of his Indophobia on his father, and his inability to explain the rage and hatred that apparently “turn[ed] him into what he might not have become”, ultimately dismantle his English identity by revealing its empty core. But this dismantling does not immediately follow the encounter between the father and the son. Rather, it is through his relation with Gibreel Farishta that Chamcha works his way out of his rage. In a climactic scene inside the blazing Shandaar café, Farishta finally rescues Chamcha both physically and spiritually and carries him “along the path of forgiveness” (468), dissolving his unshakeable contempt and lust for vengeance.
In the novel, while Chamcha is being rescued by Farishta, he suffers a heart attack, and following the thematic protocols of the novel where to die is to be born again,
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this near-death experience leads to a new phase in Chamcha’s life. He leaves behind England and the lure of Englishness with which that dream country had beckoned him since childhood, and comes back to his father to care for him in his illness. As the text makes clear, this return displaces his English self-fashioning and Chamcha begins a new process of self-transformation:
[a] process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most surprising and paradoxical product of his father’s terminal illness. His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils, now seemed very remote, even irrelevant, like his stage-name. […] [He] return[ed] to Salahuddin. (534)
However, this return of Saladin to Salahuddin in its turn raises a few significant questions. For instance, if Chamcha’s journey to England was a journey from Indianness to Englishness, does his return journey to India bring him back full circle to some sort of Indianness? Or does it propel him altogether beyond the two poles of Indianness and Englishness and open up a new cultural space to inhabit? As I show in the concluding section, Rushdie’s novel offers only ambiguous answers to these questions.
The aporia of eclecticism
Chamcha’s return, and the new kind of self-fashioning it initiates, crucially involves an acceptance of his mother tongue. Previously, to escape his connections with the subcontinent and to fashion himself as English, Chamcha had not only given up Urdu but had also made diligent efforts to scrub off the Bombay lilt from his English. “Now Salahuddin found better words, his Urdu returning to him after long absence” (530). Here, we are again brought back to the archetypal trajectory of “return and recovery” that I referred to at the beginning of this article — the trajectory traced by Michael Madhusudan Dutt in the mid-nineteenth century when he gave up English to start a literary career in Bengali. As noted before, Dutt’s “return” was not a simple sloughing off of his English identity and a recovery of his “true” indigenous self. Similarly, Chamcha’s return is also not effected by a straightforward rejection of his “old English life” as “false” and a recovery of a homogeneous and “pure” self. Interestingly, in The Satanic Verses, this essentialist notion of a “pure” self, which becomes “corrupted” and “false” when one tries to consciously fashion one’s own identity, is most persistently adhered to by Changez Chamchawala — the father to whom Chamcha ultimately returns. Thus, when Chamcha tries to make himself English in the metropole, his father repeatedly writes to remind him that “[a] man untrue to himself becomes a two-legged lie” (48), while all the time urging him to return to his “true” nature by coming back home. Chamcha’s final homecoming, though it results in his accepting his father, is, nevertheless, marked by a rejection of the latter’s philosophies on true selves and essential natures. Rather, Chamcha finds his guide in Zeeny Vakil, the art critic and the author of the book “on the confining myth of authenticity, that folkloric straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism” (52).
This eclecticism, which Vakil describes as underlined by the tenet “take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest” (52), is not a synthesis of disparate cultural elements with an indigenous core. Indeed, there is no “pure” or “true” Indian essence that can be reached behind these catholic cultural choices. As Vakil puts it, “Why should there be a good, right way of being a wog? That’s Hindu fundamentalism. Actually, we’re all bad Indians. Some worse than others” (52). As such, when Chamcha turns away from his efforts to become English, he does not return to his one “true” Indian self. Rather, “Saladin felt hourly closer to many old, rejected selves, split off from himself as he made his various life choices, but which had apparently continued to exist, perhaps in the parallel universes of quantum theory” (523). His English self is not altogether lost but becomes one of these many selves, which momentarily gets discarded because of the new choices he makes in his life. However, it continues to exist and remains available to him just as his old Indian selves had continued to exist even after he had shed them in London. This anti-essentialist concept of cultural eclecticism effectively dismantles the central conflict that animates Indian self-fashioning as English — a conflict between the consciousness of being English “inside” and the fact of being located in an “outside” that is epidermally, geographically, and culturally non-European. In its turn, this eclecticism opens up a new set of problematics. I would like to conclude this paper by briefly gesturing toward some of these novel conflicts and contradictions that accompany the acceptance of multiple cultural selves and Chamcha’s return to a homeland marked by cultural heterogeneity.
On closely examining Zeeny Vakil’s mantra of “take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest”, it becomes clear that the edict does not open up an infinite choice of cultural identities to an individual. Rather, the choices are framed by very specific spatio-temporal coordinates — a specificity suggested by Vakil’s emphasis on the “ethic of historically validated eclecticism”. What is this history that defines and delimits cultural eclecticism for an individual? For Zeeny Vakil, it is the history of India. She substantiates her thesis by invoking the “national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British” (52). Within this formulation, what kind of wardrobe of identities an individual can access is defined by his or her emplacement within the history of a particular geographical location. This means that Chamcha feels hourly closer to his many Indian selves only when he physically returns to India and once again becomes a participant in its national history.
This notion of a physical return, however, proves unsatisfactory as a conclusion to Rushdie’s treatment of the theme of Indian self-fashioning as English. Indeed, as Priyamvada Gopal points out, it is ironic that “in a novel which radically challenges ideas of origins and essences, resolution is enacted through a return, albeit to the heterogenous and constantly changing country, rather than a mythical homeland” (2009: 170). This sense of irony is sharpened if we bear in mind the kind of eclectic position that Rushdie championed as a migrant author in “Imaginary Homelands”, published only a few years before The Satanic Verses. In this essay Rushdie states:
[T]he imagination works best when it is most free. Western writers have always felt free to be eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form; Western visual artists have, in this century, been happily raiding the visual storehouses of Africa, Asia, the Philippines. […] [As migrants,] [w]e can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Rammohun Roy. (1991a: 20)
This flattening of cultural influences, where as disparate figures as Jonathan Swift, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Huguenots become equally available as cultural influences to an individual migrant (and in his essay “In Good Faith”, Rushdie states that the migrant condition provides “a metaphor for all humanity” (1991b: 394)), is made possible by imagining a world in which the postcolonial individual simultaneously belongs to all places and is consequently an heir to all histories. In The Satanic Verses, this unbounded eclecticism of the migrant as a world citizen is pitted against the spatio-temporally bound cultural mixing that Zeeny Vakil preaches, and this produces one of the key tensions in the text. Thus, although the migrant’s ability to draw from multiple cultural roots and potentially use these to transform the world is upheld again and again in the novel, it is at the same time undermined by a doubt as to whether such decontextualized borrowings are at all possible. This is best evident in the Uhuru Simba section of the novel. Simba, a prominent black activist in Britain, is arrested as a suspected serial killer, and this arrest becomes a rallying point for the migrant community. A discourse of resistance is forged by Simba’s followers, which perfectly exemplifies the unbounded cultural ancestry to which a migrant as an inhabitant of “the world” can apparently lay claim. It seamlessly merges elements drawn from the African American civil rights movement with Camus’ slogans and Enoch Sontonga’s Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Chamcha, however, remains sceptical about this attempt: “it sounded like an attempt to borrow the glamour of other, more dangerous struggles, […] [a]s if all causes were the same, all histories interchangeable” (415).
The eclecticism in which Chamcha ultimately participates through his physical return is concretely framed by national space and national history. Yet, one remains unsure whether this is the version of eclecticism that Rushdie actually wants to privilege. In an interview given to Ameena Meer just after the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie tells how he conceived the character of Saladin Chamcha as someone who acts out the possibilities and makes the choices that Rushdie himself as a migrant does not make:
[T]he decision I have made for the moment about my life is that I don’t want to go and live there [in India]. However, then it’s very interesting to have a fictional character who makes the opposite decision. You can see what happens. You send him off to do it and you don’t have to do it yourself. I think that certainly had a lot of interest for me, in the Chamcha character. (121)
Read from this perspective, the conflict between the two different kinds of eclecticism, and the different kinds of identities that they make possible, does not get resolved in The Satanic Verses. Behind Chamcha’s decision to return lurks the shadow of his author’s decision not to make that return journey, 12 and each of these decisions makes the other seem something of a compromise. When placed against the eclecticism of the migrant, the nationally-bound eclecticism seems to present too limited a choice. Though it liberates an individual from the straitjacket of “authenticity”, it ties him up with the straitjacket of national history. On the other hand, the migrant’s universalist vision lacks the historical specificity that gives cultural identities their substance. Cultural elements within this framework become too decontextualized to mean anything. The displacement of the phenomenon of Indian self-fashioning as English in The Satanic Verses thus reveals not only new possibilities of identity formation, but also introduces a note of indecisiveness that underlines and perhaps finally undermines these possibilities.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.