Negative Capability

Last weekend at Dayanand College, in the ancient city of Ajmer, I was invited by Pradeep Trikha and Anurag Sharma to participate in the IV Biannual International Literary Conference on the Challenges of Multiculturalism and Diversity. I spoke on the fiction of Sophie Cunningham and Aravind Adiga. Here’s part of my plenary, adapted:

“I was born in Kenya, my mother Goan, my father Anglo-Indian. The packed their bags and left Bombay, their birth city for better prospects in East Africa, and then later, after the Mao Mao rebellion, to the UK, before migrating to Australia. Their story as economic refugees from a Christian minority group in post-Independence India is one of religious marginalisation that I hope some day to write.

The division of identities on religious grounds is being revived nationally and globally, as the Bengali critic Amartya Sen describes with such perception in his book, Identity and Violence:

“The politics of global confrontation is frequently seen as a corollary of religious or cultural divisions in the world. Indeed the world is increasingly seen, if only implicitly, as a federation of religions or of civilisations, thereby ignoring all the other ways in which people see themselves. Underlying this line of thinking is the odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorised according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning.” Prologue xii

Sen argues for the pluralistic perspective, the construction of identities across many forms of difference, the celebration of difference as a means to thwart violence. There is an inherent violence in the migrant experience. It is physically, culturally and psychically unstable. Deprived of language as a home, it is characterised by nostalgia, displacement, and by absence as much as the desire to recoup or return. The migrant is the ultimate maker of fictions; the one who becomes someone else.

I hope to consider writing my parents’ story, one day. There may come a time when I am ready to write it, and when those who read my work are disposed to reading it. There is a caste-based hierarchy in Australian literature: a white private-school elite, a self-perpetuating coterie whose subjects, stories and themes are white. There are people writing in the darkness, as Aravind Adiga’s characters are living in the darkness. We are like Shankara the half-caste who explodes a bomb in the grounds of his Catholic boys school, the violence giving his identity a meaning, or like Keshava the hoyka, who travels with his brother from Gurupura village to try his luck in the streets of Kittur, only to end up beaten and deranged. Easy to dismiss or exclude, occasionally ridiculed, we survive and continue our projects on a trickle of literature board support.

People speak about the attacks on Indian students in Australia occurring as a consequence of their economic exploitation, but let’s not forget racism. Racism as a form of intolerance is real,  existing in all communities, undermining the equal opportunities of people from all socio-economic backgrounds. In every country I have lived in I have experienced racism. When you speak about racism it’s easy to be accused of being paranoid. It’s a word that makes academics and intellectuals uncomfortable, but I believe it needs to be raised and talked about objectively, in the interest of reform. Because if we cannot openly acknowledge our flaws as a community, we will never be able to bring about real change.  As India needs to address, I believe, the conflicted problems of equal access to education and prosperity in order to move away from what remains a feudally-based social order, Australia needs to stop being tight-lipped and defensive about its racial anxieties. Migrant writers are tired of being forever grateful for being given the opportunity to start a new life. What we would like to see is the right to contribute on an equal basis to the cultural and literary identity of our adopted home. 

In The White Tiger, it could be said that Adiga exploits the form of magic realism to construct a social message. As one aspiring to a higher social status, Balram’s soliloquies are split, he sees the darkness and he glimpses the light. While I waited at Jaipur Junction station for the superfast train to Ajmer, which, as it turned out,  did not arrive, before me was the railway track splattered with human faeces, and urine, and there was a small, sweet rat climbing the rails. I looked into the puddles of liquid and could see no light. I was reading Adiga, standing up as there was nowhere to sit, and I thought of Kristeva’s notion of the abject, as a crisis to our psyche, and how powerful that becomes in a country like India. How India gives us the light in darkness, the darkness in light, a depth of perception that has influenced so much of Eastern spiritual thinking, a depth which is not one of a temporal Western philosophical or historical order but rather one which is cyclic, like history, repeating and renewing itself. As my mind syncretically entertained these notions, at last, a slow train arrived, and among the weary crowds a bright-faced girl stood before me about to board. By the way she was dressed I sensed that she could speak English. I asked where she was going and she said to Kerala, which is a two-day journey. She was carrying a plastic bag containing food and drink and she was brave, I thought, to be travelling on that train for two days. When I told her that I lived in Australia, she said that many of her clients were from Australia. This piqued my curiosity as to her profession. If she were in business, why would she be catching such a slow train? I guessed, as it turned out, correctly, that she must have been working in outsourcing.

Speaking to that young girl from Kerala who works in outsourcing, notwithstanding the disparities between our languages and cultures, after coincidentally reading Adiga; noticing human faeces on the railway track; observing the dirty puddles devoid of reflections; considering the abject crisis that Kristeva writes about in Powers of Horror, that loss of the distinction between subject and object, between self and other, was at once a complexity and a synchronicity that I found immeasurably rich.

Such abundance, I believe, exists, in the multiple narratives of cultural and religious diversity. “

'There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.'