Between Madras and Chennai: Narratives of belonging in a postcolonial city

Abstract

Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new reality of Chennai, to what extent they see the city producing a standardized experience, and how the fictional characters corroborate or contest institutional change. In the process, the texts are brought to converse with the postcolonial desire for cultural autonomy, its mediation by a nativist agenda, as well as the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in such a desire. The texts betray the inadequacies of the new name as a stable container of cultural meanings and propose an idea of the city that is internally incoherent and multi-experiential.

Introduction

The supposed postcolonial correction of history, as in the renaming of Madras as Chennai in 1996 to make the new name feel and sound native, is an exercise fraught with contradictions and spillages. Since the moment of recognition that sought to make Chennai, rather than the European-sounding Madras, the container of its citizens’ values, these citizens remain ambivalent about the city’s colonial past while being multi-layered in their cultural expression. Unfortunately, Chennai’s naming and its vicissitudes have been elided in academic discussions around urban literature, in contrast to the way cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi have been explored. However, recent times have witnessed a significant, if not substantial, output in the production of fictional narratives on Chennai, T. S. Tirumurti being the most representative author in this genre. These authors offer up the city to their readers as a site of identity formation as well as countercurrents subverting the same. That said, while scholarship around Chennai’s developmental expressions boasts of a decent body of social sciences research (Srivathsan, 2004; Hancock, 2008; Arabindoo, 2016; Tripathy, 2017; Gerritsen, 2019), that interest has not found resonance among literary critics.

More than any cultural expression (with the exception of cinema), literature is unrivalled in rendering the city as a heterotopic space with multiple viewpoints (Beswick et al., 2015: 792). In that spirit, this article seeks to understand Chennai through narratives, which we believe is a productive way of imagining and experiencing its multivocality and open-endedness. It is also an engaged way of discovering the city’s conflictual and contradictory character. The paper is not intended to create a binary of colonial Madras and postcolonial Chennai, but to explore how they intersect, contest, and complement each other as well as the histories they carry. The texts discussed here show the futility of reducing the complexities of human life to mere nomenclature and how the imagined reality of each label for the city converses with the other. They address the nativist or nationalist associations of Madras/Chennai in a delicate manner without creating a dualistic mode of thinking. The responses are subtle, yet loaded, and bring to light the unevenness in an otherwise straightforward name change, and the way the experiential life of characters spills out of the names and labels.

In fictional representation, the city emerges as a living entity with its own emotions (anger, anxiety, and frustration), memories, and nostalgia as well as the way these elements play out in everyday life. Even then, there is an inherent problem with the city as a source of national literature, because in the postcolonial Indian imaginary, it is the rural which is the authentic space of culture. The city in contrast occupies a place of transgression where national virtues and values are eroded — “a space where anxieties about urbanity, modernity […] converge” (Tickell and Ranasinha, 2018: 299). The Tamil saying Kettum pattinam ser (If ruined, go to the city), a piece of advice freely given to rural people, captures this sentiment (Venkatachalapathy, 2004: 15). Though it is not exactly a comprehensive rejection of the city, it does betray an uncertainty around the city as a space of fulfilment and highlights its deceptive character as well as the alienation and ennui it engenders.

India’s experiment with the city and urban planning was deeply imbricated in its freedom struggle and contributed to conflicting notions of an ideal India. If Gandhi saw authentic India in its villages, Nehru was suspicious of the capacity of villages to usher in India’s progress and sought expertise from abroad to build modern cities (Rudolph and Rudolph, 2010). While the city was modern and promised opportunities and fulfilment, it also involved an erosion of old values as in the movement from communitarian ways of life to individualistic ones. Long before its rechristening, Chennai, like most other Indian cities, was shaped by its role as a space of surplus productivity. After economic liberalization, Chennai rediscovered itself as a medium that could convert foreign capital into goods and services for an interconnected world economy even as the desire for globalization went hand in hand with the awareness of cultural difference. This simultaneous globalization and localization, moving forward to attract global capital and going backward to find an authentic identity, was not unique to Chennai and followed the lead of Bombay’s conversion to Mumbai a year earlier.

The change from Madras to Chennai was not an unambiguous assertion of nativism and localism. If colonial Madras held traces of the European past and was a constant reminder of the city’s derivative nature, thus making it a threat to the evolution of an organic community of people, the new name Chennai was not native in a strict sense of the term. The pre colonial source of Chennai (derivative of Chennapatnam, a town near Fort St George) for postcolonial recognition as a label of authenticity is as illusory as Madras, given that both Madras and Chennai are non-Tamil in origin. If Madras or Madraspatnam was named after the Madra or Madeira or Madeiros family of San Thome area (Muthiah, 1992: 3; Ghosh, 2012: 24; Kapur, 2019: 6), Chennapatnam was derived from Chennappa, the father of the Telugu-speaking local governor Damarla Venkatappa (Ghosh, 2012: 24; Kapur, 2019: 6). Historian J. B. P. More problematizes it further by arguing that Madras was not derivative of Madeira or Madra, but a Tamil word “medu” and “medurasapatnam”, a fact he believes was not known to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government when it changed the city’s name to Chennai (Warrier, 2014).

This complicates the carrying capacity of Chennai as a repository of Tamil values. How do the city’s denizens traverse the intended change and the spilt reality, and how do they form a community around the new name? Will it lead to the disappearance of Madras in people’s lives or will the old name always come to haunt the official and seemingly coherent label Chennai? In the popular imagination, Madras refers to the old-world charm of the Raj, whereas Chennai evokes cultural and linguistic pride as well as economic growth, planning, and infrastructure development in order to give the people a sense of belonging. Though changing the name of a place can be an act of disciplining and an effort to regulate the human experience of place, the latter continues to be a contested terrain. As mentioned above, we do not intend to project Madras and Chennai in exclusive terms or as air-tight compartments; nor do we see them in temporal sequence. Both Madras and Chennai may or may not capture the unique experience of the people and so could be inadequate labels.

Since our objective is to locate the postcolonial city between the colonial and postcolonial naming and later to explore how the fictional characters contest that easy separation and respond to that change, we ground our ideas on the texts written after 1996, when Madras officially became Chennai. It is believed that the texts produced in this period have a better awareness of ways of belonging (conditioned by various performative practices such as political and intellectual discourses) and developing subjectivity vis-à-vis the spectre of the past and the promise of the future. For the sake of convenience, selected texts that present Chennai as the fictional habitus are dealt with, and, quite predictably, this means a concentration on the works of T. S. Tirumurti (the most conscious chronicler of Chennai), and also of T. Murari and K. Srilata. The questions that guide the essay are: how does Chennai as a conceived and lived city borrow from and interrogate the colonial residues in the sphere of everyday culture and how does it mediate the fictional characters and their experience of the city? What does it mean to experience the city in the interstices of past and present, the West and India, Madras and Chennai, and what does such a possibility lead us to?

The West and its others

Populist political regimes often manufacture authentic indigeneity to create certain types of consciousness. Thus, experienced in a prescriptive way over a period of time, a label becomes indistinguishable from its connotations to such an extent that “associations get codified within the name” (Kapur, 2019: 7). At the same time, a city may evolve and change its character through settlement or new modes of economic production, thus becoming alienated from its past. For A. R. Venkatachalapathy, Madras and Chennai are two ways of imagining the city and those who question the change to Chennai suffer from colonial hangover (2006: 4). However, Murari expresses ambivalence or even angst when he writes of “Chennai, a city once called Madras, arbitrarily rechristened by our politicians” (2004: 50). That means there is no single way of belonging and experiencing. The administrative change of name does not lead to the complete transfer of meanings and memories and is often confronted by experiences and encounters that subvert the institutional order. As Mary Hancock argues, the change to Chennai “placed the city within the context of Tamil singularity” (2008: 44). This singularity is contested by the authors discussed in this paper as they insert themselves into the evolving values of the place.

The plot in Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue (2002) starts to unfurl when Rajan returns from the US after completing an MBA at Wharton. If his wish to take a sabbatical so as to develop clarity about his future seems normal from his perspective, his parents will not rest until Rajan secures a job and more importantly marries an Iyer Brahmin girl. His relatives are relieved to have found Gayathri as the quintessential Iyer girl of good traditional upbringing. However, it is just a matter of time before the stereotype of the Iyer girl is punctured by revelations of her lifestyle that make America-returned Rajan squirm in discomfort. After some intricate developments, a semblance of normalcy is restored, one that is disturbed by unending indecisions — whether Rajan will go back to the US or whether his French friend Dominique should take up her new assignment in Paris or New York. The suspense leads to a situation engineered by his grandmother, Paati, proposing the idea of Rajan marrying Dominique. The novel ends not with the marriage but with its probability when both Rajan and Dominique choose to go to the US, albeit on different assignments.

The Clive Avenue of the eponymous novel is a fictional street, convincingly evoked to create a habitat for its diverse residents drawn from various parts of the country/world. It is worth speculating on what could have been the compelling need for Tirumurti to have invented a street and given it a distinctive character, in a possible futuristic time and yet-to-be place where Iyer Brahmins can find themselves at home with Europeans, north Indians, civil servants, and film stars. Perhaps it is a subtle attempt to undermine the rigidity of postcolonial geography that promotes exclusivity, and to give the author freedom to create a world outside of Chennai’s official map. It is a matter of debate if the hybrid space of Clive Avenue can proffer authentic postcolonial subjects, or would reduce postcolonial experience by excluding people who do not have the freedom to experience in-betweenness. That said, postcolonial geography remains a fluid space that produces agentic subjects even as it creates a normative template privileging one attitude over another. Postcolonial geography in itself does not promote anything, but in its usual avatar it does propose an authenticity around nativism that sees one kind of subject as pure and another as diluted, an idea which Tirumurti takes to task.

For Rajan, Clive Avenue was like a village, “an ancient black-and-white photo” (2002: 29), and one that remains constant amid postcolonial changes. By making Clive Avenue a microcosm of an ideal Chennai and naming it after a colonial figure, the author is creating cosmopolitan potential for an otherwise colonial space and interrogating the postcolonial haste in renaming places. Even if he cannot but call Chennai by its new name, he can certainly exercise his creative licence to invent an avenue. This imagined geography liberates the author from being hyphenated with the ethnic and racial dimension of Tamilness, offering him the possibility of being in Chennai while not being of Chennai. His characters traverse multiple lands and locations and revel in their incapacity to belong to a place entrenched in nationalist and separatist narratives. Bill Ashcroft et al. refer to this “disrupted, non-essentialist in-betweenness” as the hallmark of decolonized subjecthood (1989: 218). This sentiment is made manifest in the effortless ease with which Tirumurti’s characters choose to migrate from one place to another to the extent that they appear diasporic in their own land.

Often the grandeur and charm of colonial architecture and its spatial domination makes way for the chaos of a postcolonial city. The latter is often too glad to grab the opportunity to convert everything historical to people’s everyday needs. This is how Tirumurti’s narrator records his impressions of the change, when he describes the Moore Market after it was ravaged by fire:

The vendors of old books, costume jewellery […] ran with whatever they could grab while the crackling fire ate away their earnings. Later, they shifted to the pavements in front of the Grand Town Hall and colonized it with their tin and cement structures. The cold, imposing Town Hall — the grand Victoria Public Hall — was swamped with wine shops and hawkers selling plastic wares, pressure cookers and stainless steel tumblers. Rajan Wine Shop. Muthu Wine Shop. Arumugam Plastics. Kali Body Works. (2002: 2; emphasis added)

This is a fascinating account of the way colonial space is vernacularized by postcolonial economic practices and the towering colonial structures get transformed to something anti-aesthetic, immersed in the trappings of daily life struggles. The sonority of the Hall makes room for something that is noisy and visibly ugly, and no less colonizing than the colonial architecture, with the added layer of the everyday vengeances of livelihood. This is an inversion of the official version of development that promises to bring planning, sanitization, and so forth to make cities attractive to global investors. What we actually get is a motley of informal practices such as hawking that defies the desire to be a global city. Tirumurti advances a radical side of the city by highlighting the forthright business practices of the informal economy which have replaced not only the aura of the old place but also the character of the old world with something that relates to baser human needs. Or is it that the cold indifference of colonial architecture, however majestic, cannot compensate for the warmth of life and livelihood of a vulgar type, the latter exhibiting a kind of postcolonial retribution in recolonizing (or decolonizing?) the vacated colonial space?

A little later the author tells us, through the focalization of the milkman Balan, of his affective understanding of place as distinct from space on a map:

Balan surveyed Clive Avenue again. Funny name, Clive. Weren’t all British relics being changed into national relics, preferably Tamil relics? Edward Elliot’s Road had become Dr. Radhakrishnan Road, Mowbray’s Road was now T. T. Krishnamachari Road . . . Even Madras had become Chennai. So why had Clive Avenue still remained Clive Avenue? Not that this bothered the residents. In fact, they were secretly relieved. The British were not bad chaps provided they kept a distance. Once someone from the Avenue asked the Madras Municipal Corporation about Clive Avenue. The officials had checked their files and replied that it was not on their records. The street didn’t exist. So how could one change the name of a British relic that didn’t exist? (2002: 10; emphasis added)

Clive Avenue exists outside of institutional recognition. Ashcroft (2001: 153) talks about the lack of fit between a place described in English and the place as experienced by the colonized. That said, at a time of international travel and globalization where experience is multiaccentual, an English name need not be seen as an alien marker given the fact that housing complexes or new settlements often flaunt their non-Indian names and organize the experience of people around those names. By treating British, national, and local names as relics, the author probably cautions us about the vagaries of time and how time changes the way something is remembered. What we see here is that the formal linguistic change does not change anything in terms of one’s understanding of oneself apropos of place. Place goes much deeper than mere label, implying the futility of such changes that remain formal and not part of experience. In a way, the street is symbolic of a self-sufficient place of emotional fulfilment and plenitude and the idea that human experience is not constrained by city names, or may just have some superficial relation with them.

The fact that the residents hardly cared about the British name reveals the complexity of placeness that may or may not change its associations amongst people. Moreover, by creating a street which does not exist in the record, the author is trying to create a place outside of institutional history, thus defying nativist aspirations. In another context, Nilufer E. Bharucha has argued that the name change to Mumbai and the rise of the Shiv Sena led to the city’s degeneration and changed its character (2016: 624). Stuti Khanna too records Rushdie’s impression of Bombay being more inclusive than Mumbai, the latter name being an expression of regional chauvinism (Khanna, 2013: 7). Tirumurti is not given to making statements and so keeps everything within reasonable critique. Even as the city administration wishes to mark its difference from Western residues by changing the name formally and hoping for a substantive change in terms of people’s consciousness, the postcolonial city continues to take Western values and practices as aspirations. The fact that every Indian city looks up to foreign capital, technology, and conveniences, establishes that the West remains a point of difference and deference. In fact, Indian cities compete with one another in attracting foreign capital, marketing themselves as cosmopolitan while advertising their public spaces, night life, tourism destinations, among others. In Clive Avenue, when a minister from Tamil Nadu visits Europe and gets introduced to milk-dispensing machines, he wants to “replicate it in Madras. Madras had to keep up with the times” (Tirumurti, 2002: 8). This could be interpreted as a linear understanding of history that pits the anteriority of India against the futuristic West. However, the fact is that Tirumurti provides us with lead characters whose doubts and convictions are rarely conditioned by this linearity.

Tirumurti’s Chennaivaasi (2012), published after a gap of a decade since his first novel Clive Avenue, is another city novel, one that traces the ways to become a Chennaivaasi (literally a Chennai resident). Ironically, though, most significant is the journey of Deborah, a Jewish American girl who comes to Chennai to discover herself and in the process becomes a Chennaivaasi. What the author is implying is that being a resident of Chennai is not the same as being a Chennaivaasi; the latter involves participation and a deep understanding, to the extent of losing oneself to discover what it means to belong. If we see in Clive Avenue the tribulations of Rajan and Dominique and their moments of doubt before they decide to leave Chennai for the US, here Ravi and Deborah come from the US to settle in Chennai and complete the cycle of Tirumurti’s quest for belonging. In a complex way, the novel also answers the postcolonial dilemma of where home is by bringing Deborah to Chennai. In doing so, Tirumurti implies that an orthodox city like Chennai can be constricting as well as liberating, and may force a person to turn inward so as to find answers from within. What is more, if the present generation learns to reconcile to spatial experiences by creating a contact zone that bridges the East with the West, Appa’s decision to leave for the US bespeaks the futility of finding an authentic native space. Both Appa and Deborah transcend the idea of space being characterized by localism, exclusivity, and authenticity.

When Deborah goes to Luz with Kamala athai to experience the real Chennai, the city is expressed as follows: “Pedestrians, cycles, autorickshaws, cars and PTC buses fought for space. Closer to Luz Corner were street hawkers who occupied more than half the street” (2012: 73). The city is made real by creating an atmosphere of chaos, the un-city city, meaning a reversal of Western associations of order. It is by losing and finding herself amongst a million people that “Deborah was well on her way to becoming a Chennaivaasi” (2012: 74). To belong to Chennai, one goes through trial by fire, finds order within chaos, and locates the idea of the city at the “interstice of what is the norm and what is deviation” (Tripathy, 2017: 251). But even as Chennai remains geographically distant from the West, it is not too far in quotidian discourses. The remoteness of space is bridged in everyday conversation when Deborah speaks with her neighbours in Chennai: “Cities like Montana, New Jersey, LA, San Jose, Palm Beach, Houston, Phoenix and Baltimore were named as though they adjoined Chennai” (Tirumurti, 2012: 75). This is how space is contracted to make Chennai contiguous to Western cities, thus calling into question nativists’ desire for a city of their own. This authorial intention of rearranging space refuses to spatialize difference; it could also hint at the irrelevance of geography as a marker of culture.

Tirumurti is a master craftsman, developing his plots like a detective novelist and delving deep into the characters with the ease of a psychoanalyst. And yet, he is not intrusive. Instead, he allows the reader to decode the text in ways that are not explicitly expressed. In both the novels, the author portrays white girls (one French and another American) who dazzle with their skin colour and yet struggle with traditional demands of caste and religion-based marriages. Similarly, both Rajan and Ravi are Western-educated, though with different attitudes to familial responsibility, and have to navigate conflicts arising out of notions of purity and tradition. The pangs of love are tested not only by reluctant family members but also by what we might call the spirit of the city that is as much caring as intrusive, as much friendly as indifferent, as much warm as hostile. Tirumurti is not unnecessarily didactic or preachy; he lets his characters be, and allows their habits to condition them, all the while creating opportunities for them to rise above these conditions. Both his novels experiment with new geographies of emotions, test the boundaries of pure and impure, and revel in the limitlessness of the liminal.

Murari is another author who in The Small House (2007) knowingly makes his characters engage with the city even as they succumb to and interrogate various associations of Chennai. During an evening party, Murari creates a continuity between the Raj and the Taj: “The British Raj lingered on here in the Taj Hotel” (2007: 17). The hotel had halls named after Dupleix and Clive, reminding the guests of their rivalries and Chennai’s dependence on its colonial masters to experience modernity, comfort, and luxury. Unlike the in-between life of the novel’s characters or the life lived by ordinary people, such hotels excel in grand names as a mark of distinction: “Hastings, Rippon, Wellesley, Curzon from among the pantheon of our British conquerors, or else they leapt back a thousand years to evoke forgotten glory — the Chola Room, the Pallava Hall, the Pandava Suite” (Murari, 2007: 17). Murari’s character Khris Malhotra, the industrialist, always travels in connection with work and is a frequent flyer to New York, Paris, New Delhi, Tokyo (2007: 24). Whenever he returns to Chennai, he thus integrates the postcolonial city with the cities around the world.

More than Khris’s adventure, Murari’s novel traces the journey of Roopmati (Khris’s wife) from a palatial bungalow to the small house. Even when she is part of an elite habitus and lives in a world of glitter, she does not belong there. That is to say, there are multiple experiences within the postcolonial city. Her experience of Madras Central station, designed in Gothic style by George Harding, offers insight into the conception and delivery of colonial spaces. She tells us how the same terracotta with white trimmings that gave the station its character also gave her “a sense of eternal continuity” (Murari, 2007: 128). This implies that history and an evolution of ideas and experiences cannot be compartmentalized with labels, and perhaps that Madras cannot be separated from Chennai. But if Madras Central was modelled on St Pancras in London (Murari, 2007: 128), the present reality created a space for crowds and families sleeping on the floor and so was a symbol of “the complex fabric of the country” (Murari, 2007: 128). Murari shows readers how the present evolves out of the past and how the colonial double as in the train station produces a postcolonial potpourri in its crowd and chaos. Murari is perhaps proposing that the present’s break from the past is never complete, and that the past murmurs on through the present.

Chennai and its ambivalence

Now the question arises as to how the postcolonial city affects the way people imagine their place. Put simply, how do the authors discussed here respond to the city’s subjection to political and cultural forces, and to what extent do their characters conform to or resist them? The questions take us to the performance of subject formation that complicates the delivery of Chennai’s postcolonial difference. Regardless of the supposed postcolonial break, Chennai as lived experience continues to be contested and so remains an irredeemably liminal space. It finds itself amongst a complex web of reality “constituted by the tensions and contradictions between the global, national and the local concepts and practices of urban space” (Varma, 2012: 14). Tirumurti breaks free from the tyranny of nativist assertions of spatial control by calling a street Clive Avenue and sees no contradiction between the apparent cosmopolitan character of the place and the inner core of traditional values. In this connection, Ashcroft argues that “the postcolonial city not only focuses the dis-identification with the nation but hosts the ultimate disruption of the east and west binary” (2011: 499). However, it must be added here that Chennai does not reflect an unambiguous collapse of that binary because, as we argued above, Chennai’s integration within the world economy was conditioned by an overpowering desire to assert its difference.

Chennai is thus the past and future of Madras, at least on an institutional level. The reason the name Madras had to be sacrificed was the realization that even as it stood for old values, its articulation through a Western name did not agree with native difference. Chennai was an ironic compromise as a carrier of both foreign and local values, particularly when the local can be invoked for culture and identity. By vernacularizing the street in terms of the lifestyle of characters, introducing characters like Paati (who is much more progressive than others) and a foreign family, Tirumurti ruptures the exclusivity of colonial assumptions and the localist demand for purifying the former colonial space. Clive Avenue is a transgressive space where taken for granted and age-old beliefs are challenged, not by educated modern characters like Dr Sundaram or Wharton returnee Rajan, but by the old grandmother. In other words, change evolves out of tradition. Modern values keep coming not in a disruptive fashion bulldozing everything that is religious or organic, but through conversation and back and forth movement. Tirumurti can produce complex characters with aplomb, so much so that they never get tired of evolving and surprising us with fresh ideas, as when they break free from the exclusivist demands for nativism and in the process expand the scope of postcolonial experience.

The Avenue is a cul-de-sac and has eight bungalows, making it an elite space of taste, lifestyle, and old-world charm. It is both a real and imaginary place; it has enough reality checks in the form of garbage problems and tax officer demands, but it also has a kind of phantasmatic character with its bungalows and non-Tamilian residents. To complicate Tamilness and localism, the Sundarams’ house is called Sabarmati, named after Gandhi’s ashram, though other bungalows which sprang up later are given English names such as The Cascade and Moonlight, Sanskrit names such as Dayadhra and Gokulam, and the Tamil one Thenaruvi. In this way, a place is created where Western, Indian, and Tamil values coexist. If one facet of postcolonial desire is to create a name one can relate to, the same desire grapples with the larger national sentiment as well as the temptation of English names to create an environment where residents can (mis)recognize themselves as living in a hybrid zone. The postcolonial urge for newness and autonomy does not mean removal of the colonial past, but rather “selective retrieval and appropriation of indigenous and colonial cultures to produce appropriate forms to represent the postcolonial present” (Yeoh, 2001: 459). For every desire to go native, there is an equal compulsion to reappraise and appropriate the Western, because it articulates a longing that is not exclusivist.

For Tirumurti, Chennai itself is a liminal space, in between caste-consciousness and cosmopolitanism, intensely local and global at the same time. If his characters betray no fear of the West (as in living peacefully with foreign families or falling in love with non-Indians) and have no qualms about Western connection (as in foreign travel and foreign degrees), there is an equally strong motif of anxiety and doubt. Unlike the period immediately after independence, when the desire for political and cultural autonomy was pronounced, here, that divide is “increasingly recognized to be blurred and interpenetrating” (Chambers and Huggan, 2015: 784). When Rajan is struggling to collect two of his massive bags at the airport, the author makes a tongue in-cheek observation: “That was the price for travelling to the US […]. That, AIDS and the American accent. Rajan had managed to avoid them all, well, almost all since he couldn’t help pronouncing ‘important’ ‘impartant’. Many paid the price only to acquire an American accent. Otherwise their trip was a waste” (Tirumurti, 2002: 27–28). By reducing American experience to flimsy pronunciation and AIDS, the author shows an element of play implying that these are non-issues and perhaps have no bearing on one’s experience. He also captures the effortless ease with which many “Good Chennai Brahmins began punctuating their sentences with “‘Jesus Christ!’ All this in four days” (Tirumurti, 2002: 28). By questioning the uncritical acculturation strategies adopted to fit into the Western cultural template, Tirumurti highlights the popular transferability of culture-specific expressions and yet questions that naivety.

Outside of this trivialization, the West provides a space of liberation and creates a perfect environment for individualism looking for expression, fulfilment, and meaning. It is rather intriguing that Rajan finds salvation in the US: a way to be born again and “to discard the yoke of a Brahminical upbringing” (Tirumurti, 2002: 74). But if we thought Westerners have a radically different way of looking at life and that all of them are dyed-in-the-wool individualists, we have Dominique whose worldview is closer to that of Rajan’s parents. Indeed, her Christian upbringing comes to make common cause with Indian conservative culture. When Rajan flippantly takes a broadside against the girl-seeing ceremony, Dominique puts it in perspective: “these are not traditions but symbols of tradition […] I sometimes worry when I see guys like you trying to be pseudo-rebels. Be rebels with substance” (Tirumurti, 2002: 77). Here again we have a new perspective coming from progressive individuals that problematizes the easy associations of Hinduism with orthodoxy or the West with freedom. Later Gayathri, Rajan’s bride, surprises him by saying, “I am not sure whether we have evolved enough to start pooh-poohing what our ancestors have tried to put in place” (Tirumurti, 2002: 97). This statement is all the more intriguing because Gayathri is a “meat-eating, cigarette-smoking, disco-loving, virgin Iyer girl” (2002: 101) who goes about these non-normative gender and caste habits in Chennai itself, thus blurring the difference between India and the West.

Tirumurti produces two kinds of West, the first that of the external realm seen through the convenience of individualism and sexual morals, and the second its work ethics and professionalism (2002: 106). In the process, he introduces two types of responses to the West, one of slavish imitation and the other of substantive engagement and understanding. If some Indian characters see the US as the land of AIDS and sexual promiscuity, Deborah’s father has no less a stereotypical understanding of India when he cautions Deborah about Indians burning their widows and watering their backsides like plants (Tirumurti, 2012: 32–33). In Chennaivaasi, Amma says while trying to dissuade Ravi from marrying Deborah, “We are not Americans. We are Indians. There can’t be any compatibility on this score” (Tirumurti, 2012: 61). That said, it would be naive to believe that Tirumurti addresses postcolonial reality through the East–West binary. The fact of the matter is that all his characters, at least the major ones, go through moments of doubt and knowledge, convictions and uncertainties, because like the author himself, they are products of multiple ways of knowing and so go through moments of torture in privileging one idea over another.

We encounter Tirumurti’s easy attitude towards German battleship Emden’s attack on Chennai in 1914 that would otherwise engender strong emotions about the city’s compulsory integration with the theatre of war. Going against the grain of a postcolonial jeremiad, Tirumurti plays around it and in the process reconstructs that history when he tells us that Paati, who was born the same year, was called Emden baby or Emden Ma, later shortened to Emma (2002: 31). This is the Indian way of appropriating and transforming an unpleasant experience into something that is productive by creating new names and affiliations, and so forging an intimate way of remembering history. Here, the author does not create an Indian value system opposed to the West. He tells us how, “In the US, human values were reduced to very simple, recognizable monetary units and human action into quantifiable parts” (Tirumurti, 2002: 169). Lest we imagine Indians to be immune to this attitude, Tirumurti says, “Indians were pragmatists and soon excelled at this” (2002: 169). Tirumurti’s postcoloniality is not a wilful abandonment of Western values, nor is it a celebration of their so-called modernity. Instead, it is a type of undecidability that is conscious of the lure and dangers of the West.

The India–West encounter is not one of absolute antagonism in Tirumurti’s texts: “it took some time for Madras to warm up to the idea of throwing out the British — they were decent chaps after all — but once it did, Madras was full of freedom fighters” (2002: 32). On occasion, “the Madrasis considered it a privilege to be colonized by the white Englishmen” (Tirumurti, 2002: 54). Colonization, some thought, integrated them to the world rather than leaving them encumbered by the demands of the Independence movement. What Tirumuti is attempting here is a recognition of the fragments within an otherwise coherent national consciousness, so as to pre-empt the possibility of an India–West binary. But Tirumurti knows, long after colonialism is gone, that in an act of postcolonial reversal, “Fort St George now stood colonized by bureaucrats and politicians — natives closely resembling the British (Tirumurti, 2002: 54, emphasis added). By hyphenating the colonizers with the modern-day bureaucrats, the author’s focus is not so much on the reality of independence, as on the indifference of the postcolonial replacement. The reversal, as in the conversion of Fort St George to the state’s administrative headquarters remains tokenistic while retaining the experiential distance of the colonial officers. The author is unsparing of the brown sahibs (he being one of them in real life), and their ways of creating servitude among their subordinates.

Elsewhere, the author tells us that the Tamil youth chose not to go to north India since they could not understand Hindi, and so they chose North America: “English was after all inherited from the good old British and could be tolerated” (Tirumurti, 2002: 176). However, this should not be taken as the authorial voice; rather the author is highlighting the gullible nature of the Tamil youth who were constantly manipulated by Dravidian rhetoric. Tirumurti adds that the people of Tamil Nadu alienated themselves from the rest of India while trying to isolate the north (Tirumurti, 2002: 176). Tirumurti’s postcoloniality is one where intra-country conflict is as real as the difference between the West and India. At the same time he refuses to be trapped by the East–West binary as he is wary of a north India–south India divide. He does not make anti-colonial nationalism appear morally superior; nor its postcolonial avatar legitimate. The casual way the author uses “colonists” while describing the residents of Clive Avenue (Tirumurti, 2002: 10) may appear to be a trivialization of colonialism, but is actually the way people describe any new settlement. He also makes an effort to delink colony in an everyday sense from colonialism when he uses the term to describe the slums where Chinnamma lived (Tirumurti, 2012: 146–47). Another interesting way of highlighting postcolonial playfulness is tweaking native names so as to make them easier for those culturally different. In this way, Shanmugam becomes Sam, Harvinder becomes Harry, and Janani becomes Jane (Tirumurti, 2012: 41). This is not an abandonment of native or national roots, but a postcolonial adjustment spurred both by the imperative of being seen as an insider and by a willingness to sacrifice a part of oneself for the same.

In Chennaivaasi, a similar ambivalence is articulated when a Chettiar lady frowns upon her two sons for fighting for India’s independence: “God knows what this independence is all about. My husband, when he was alive, made good money under the British” (Tirumurti, 2012: 143). Tirumurti thus brings nuance to every encounter: colonial/postcolonial, North/South, elite/subaltern, and West/East. He creates spaces for contact, conversation, and engagement, if not consensus. Consensus would mean the disappearance of the conflictual dimension of life. So, the postcoloniality of the city finds no contradiction between the desire to obtain a US visa and the impetus to criticize rootless American civilization (Tirumurti, 2012: 79). It is another story that athai remains unconvinced about the Americanness of Deborah’s parents, given that they came from Europe and for athai, they are “not American American” (Tirumurti, 2012: 75). The same doubt bothers the narrator in Srilata’s novel Table for Four, when she goes house-hunting in Santa Cruz and wonders if the owner Prithvi is “Indian Indian” (Srilata, 2011: 9). Tirumurti’s cities, whether in India or in the West, stand for “both continuity and break, and […] the rich tensions between these” (Chambers and Huggan, 2015: 786). He shows that cities themselves do not exist prior to the people; they become cities subsequent to human experiences and values, and yet the latter can be conditioned by the cities. Tirumurti is a master of playing around with binaries and making them irrelevant: “While he (Ravi) had grown more and more American in the US, she (Deborah) was growing more and more Tamil in India” (Tirumurti, 2012: 98). Chennai is a postcolonial city not because it resists all things European, but because it makes European values transform themselves after contact with Indian values. For Deborah, “[s]he has made up her mind about where she wants her home to be. Chennai” (Tirumurti, 2012: 265). The place of transit and liminality has become temporarily permanent. In a way, home is not necessarily connected with physical space, and this is the main reason why the protagonists feel out of place in their own city and sense home when it beckons from the US.

The same desire for liminality, a kind of postcolonial virtue given the contemporary reality, finds expression in Srilata’s Table for Four where Amma looks like Queen Elizabeth (2011: 152) and the home on Kutchery Road is called Charolotte Perkins, named after Amma’s favourite author (2011: 147). So if Chennai was intended as a city of purity, it is equally a city of experimentation. What Tirumurti suggests in his novels, another author Nirmala Lakshman does without batting an eyelid, namely by refusing to segregate Madras from Chennai: “in Chennai, though there are no visible ruins, the spirit of old Madras leaps out of unexpected corners” (2013: 12) and “whichever way you have it, this is a city that has an uninterrupted flow from the past into the present” (2013: 14). Lakshman brings complexity to the idea of being native when she mentions Tamil people’s habit of asking one another “And yoou-er native?” (2013: 17). The security coming out of being a native, or the anxiety of being an outsider, is made to confront the conflicting shades associated with such emotions. The debate over nativism is therefore not yet settled.

Conclusion

Long after the colonizers have gone, postcolonial societies continue to engage with colonialism’s cultural residues. That engagement ranges from unabashed nostalgia to uncritical rejection, and everything in between. Yet, urban experience as in the work of Tirumurti and other authors goes beyond an East–West binary and deals with conflicting responses to the West, but not without scrutinizing its centrality as the reference point for contemporary city life. Though Ashcroft et al. (1989: 9) identify place and displacement as key postcolonial concerns, they limit their scope by reading indigenous space as a site of cultural denigration and ignoring the occasional desire of the postcolonial society to recreate colonial space, albeit filled with Indian or native meanings. The Western names may create associations of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and lifestyle. Meanwhile, as Tirumurti shows us, native naming may lead to anxieties arising out of local assertion and ethnic exclusivity.

The postcoloniality of Chennai is unlike any other. While the name change signifies the desire to guide experience through a native name, what confronts such a desire is the leakage that the name struggles to contain. In supposedly liberating the city from an alien label, what was delivered was another label not quite native to the place either. It is anybody’s guess if Chennai, more than Madras, captures the intricacies of the place and people any better than Madras; or whether, in the act of changing the name, the government was betraying the hollowness of such an exercise. What is equally uncertain is the lived reality of the people and whether they developed a renewed sense of identity. Less ambiguous is the realization of place as experiential as well as locational and physical. Tirumurti’s novels are a quest for creating place, one that can deontologize physical territory and iterate human agency to produce locales to which one wishes to belong. Perhaps we will never know if the felt need was converted to an administrative change or it was the latter which sought to prescribe a way of imagining the city.

By continuously traversing the associations of both Madras and Chennai, our fictional characters establish that the city, regardless of its naming, is a space of both conformity and resistance. But does this mean that Chennai as a geography has a character beyond the people living there? Alternatively, does it constantly evolve through its people, changing its character as people change their perceptions? What the texts offer is an inwardness so as to read the city in all its contradictions and ambivalence without forcing any kind of order that would reduce the city to one particular ideology or experience. The lived city is polysemic and cannot be captured by any particular label. The interpellation of the characters in different cities is not one of surrender; instead there are brief moments of knowledge, until another situation beckons them. That brings us to the sameness or uniqueness of the cities and leads to such questions as, is the postcoloniality of Mumbai the same as that of Chennai? Is the metropolitan centre in the West the same as that of an aspirational India? The authors discussed here address these questions as they imagine humans in relation to their places, while agreeing that living the city is all about finding one’s ooru (place) within the city.