Space in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day

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國立中山大學外國語文研究所

碩士論文

阿妮妲．德賽《白日悠光》中的空間論述

Space in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

研究生：林雅晨 撰

指導教授：張錦忠 教授

中華民國 九十八年七月

For the most wonderful people I met during school days

Space in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Abstract

This thesis examines the spatial representations of India as respectively a

nation-state, a colony, and a member of the third-world countries in modern history in

Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day. According to Henri Lefebvre, space is

simultaneously a part in the production and a product. An abstract space has a goal in

homogeneity; however, the realization of spatial plan is usually interfered by different

ideologies. The flow of the entangling ideologies embedded in the novel is embodied

in the family house, the modern city, and the imagination of India as a tourist

attraction. Chapter One applies Cathy Caruth’s traumatic theory to demonstrate the

family house as a symbol of the dominating Hindu nationalist discourse. The

separation of the Das family is taken as an allegorical representation of the Partition.

Recollecting the traumatic past, the Das encounters repetitively the crisis of identity

caused by the separation and the diversity of discourses. The Hindu nationalist

discourse has occupied the family house as the position of articulation. The

authoritative discourse promotes the establishment of India as a nation-state through

excluding the elements of difference. In addition, the colonial design of establishing

New Delhi as a modernist capital reflects the British government’s plan to assimilate

Indian colony. Chapter Two applies Michel Foucault’s theories of power and space to

analyze first British governmentality in making the new capital a homogeneous space

and, secondly, the potential resistance generated from the variety of local cultures.

Eventually, New Delhi exhibits itself a synthesis of the modern and the tradition, of

the western and the local. Chapter Three explores Indian intellectuals’ dilemma of

cultural identity in diaspora. As Rey Chow indicates, the third-world intellectuals

articulate for the marginalized; however, the minor of the minor has still been left in

the dark. While the diplomat Bakul decides to tell the foreigners only the glory of

India exclusive of the socio-political calamities, the local reality is estimated as

dispensable for the first-world imagination. Furthermore, the Eurocentric grand

narrative embedded in the third-world studies locates the diasporic’s recognition of

India oscillating between homeland and tourist attraction.

Key words: Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day, space, trauma, memory, homogeneity,

diaspora

論文名稱：

頁數：97 頁

系所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所

畢業年度及提要別：九十七學年度第二學期碩士學位論文提要

研究生：林雅晨

指導教授：張錦忠教授

論文提要：

阿妮妲．德賽《白日悠光》將近代印度呈現為民族國家、殖民地、和第三世界國

家。本文探討其中空間再現的議題。列婓柏荷(Henri Lefebvre)主張空間具有生產

之過程與成品兩個層面。抽象空間有同質化的傾向；空間計劃的執行卻往往受到

其他意識形態的干擾。小說中意識形態的流動具現化為宅院、現代城市、以及旅

遊敘事中的印度。第一章援引克如斯(Cathy Caruth)的創傷理論說明宅院如何成為

印度民族主義主流論述之象徵。達斯一家的分崩離析被視為國家分裂的寓言。達

斯一家每每在憶及傷痛的過去時，因各人處境、想法的歧異而面臨認同危機。印

度民族主義論述因長駐宅院而握有發言權。藉由排除歧異，權威論述推動建設印

度為民族國家。其次，英屬殖民政府塑造新德里為現代化首都。此舉反應其同化

殖民地的計劃。第二章採用傅柯(Michel Foucault)的權力與空間理論分析英屬政

府將新都建設為同質空間的統治策略；與之抗衡的則是由地方文化的多樣性衍生

出的勢力。最終，新德里成其為兼備西方現代性與地方傳統的都市。第三章討論

離散的印度知識份子面臨文化認同的困境。周蕾指出第三世界知識分子為弱勢族

群發聲，卻無法為弱勢族群中的弱勢階級發聲的窘境。小說中的外交官巴谷為了

滿足第一世界的異國想像，對外宣傳印度的傲人成就卻拒談社會政治方面的難

題。此時，印度的真實面已從外交言論中抹除。進而言之，第三世界研究底下潛

藏的歐陸中心論述使得對印度的認知不斷擺盪：在離散情境下，印度究竟是家鄉

抑或一處旅遊勝地。

關鍵字：阿妮妲．德賽、《白日悠光》、空間、創傷、記憶、同質、離散

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter One The Family House: Monument of Traumatic Past ………………19

Chapter Two Dual Cities: Colonial Design and Local Reality …………………41

Chapter Three “Eternal India” in Diaspora: The Dislocation of Culture ………61

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………84

Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………88

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Introduction

General Background

The first half of the twentieth century is the most tumultuous period for India.

The two World Wars and the shrinking of empires liberated British colonies in South

America, Africa, and South Asia. The history of modern India1 is a record of endless

conspiracies, riots between communities, and wars between racial groups. In the

process of spreading its business all over India, East Indian Company (EIC)

confronted the revolt from local Indians in the second half of the nineteenth century.2

A Concise History of Modern India shows that the imperialist exploitation of material

and labor gradually became the British’s main financial support. To ensure stable

profit from the Indian colony, English government recruited a military force to

suppress the mutiny, and later on sent off a group of governors and officers. In 1858,

the British government in Calcutta served as the dominating power in India. Twenty

years later, Queen Victoria became the coronate Empress of the United Kingdom,

whereas India was claimed to be the most precious jewel in the crown. In 1911, the

government, being aware of the rising protests, decided to build a new capital named

New Delhi in the neighborhood of the ancient capital Old Delhi. Starting from

commercial exploitation, through militant suppression, to political governmentality,

the colonization of the British Empire has revealed its ambitious determination to

develop India as British territory overseas.

As for the Indians, the colonizer put its violent invasion into practice in various

layers. The revolt against the British colonialism never ceased. During the two world 1 The perception of India is mostly of geographical significance—a combination of late 20th century

Pakistan and Hindustan—rather than political construction. The politically united organization is not set up until the government of British Raj. In addition, the inhabitants in India are mostly consisted of Hindus and Muslims.

2 The revolts activated by local Indian against Britain’s commercial exploitation are called Indian mutiny.

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wars, the trend of nationalism influenced Indian revolutions. Britain’s

governmentality, on the contrary, declined due to the exhaustion in the Continental

wars. To postpone the inevitable independence of India, the British government and

the Muslim’s became alliance in coping with the independent revolution wedged by

Hindu nationalists. In the 1940s, the military force of the British shrank and was

unable to hold back its colonies’ request for independence. The establishment of the

Republic of India and the partition of Pakistan happened almost at the same time.3

Most Muslims emigrated to Pakistan; those lived in the eastern part of India

aggregated in the western half of Bengal and made it a battlefield of racial conflict. In

1972, when the riot reached its peak, the Muslim inhabitants separated themselves

from India Republic and built a nation: Bangladesh.

Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, Delhi in 1937, ten years before Indian

Independence. As a daughter of Toni Nime of German origin, and D. N. Mazumdar, a

Bengali businessman, Desai speaks German, Bengali, and acquires Urdu, Hindi, and

English from her multiethnic community. At the age of seven, Desai began to write in

English, and published her first story two years later. She was educated in Delhi at

Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School and Miranda House, Delhi University, where

she received a bachelor degree in English literature in 1957. In the next year she

married Ashvin Desai, a businessman. They had four children, two sons and two

daughters. Their daughter, Kiran Desai, inheriting her interest and talent in literature,

won the 2006 Booker Prize for her second novel: The Inheritance of Loss. Desai has

lived in New Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and other Indian cities since the 1950s. She

has taught at Girton College and Smith College in England and at Mount Holyoke

College in the United States. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at

3 The Independence was issued in the midnight of August 15, 1947, and the Partition was announced

earlier in the evening of the previous day.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Desai’s best-known novels include Fire on the

Mountain (1977), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and Clear Light of

Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), each of which was

shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was made into a film by Merchant Ivory

productions. Her children's book, The Village by the Sea (1982) is awarded the

Guardian Children's Fiction Award. She has been a member of the Advisory Board for

English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi.

Desai is noted for her sensitive portrayal of the inner life of female characters.

Most of the Indian women are victims of conventions. Disciplines of caste system,

gender discrimination, and religions command women’s sacrifice while there are

conflicts between self-interest and familial, sometimes social, profits. Without

constructing complex and fantastic plot, Desai probes into the consciousness and the

inner monologue of characters. Neeru Chakravertty points out that Desai, as a second

generation Indian writers of English, “has been intimately associated with the realm

of the introspective, psychological novel and a metaphysical inquiry into the

existential dilemma of human beings” (2). N. R. Gopal observes that the difference

between the pre- and post-Independence Indian writers lies in that the former has their

main concern on “socio-economic and political realities of Indian life” while the latter

focuses on the exploration of “the psychological and sociological strains in the social

and individual life” (1). Asha Kanwar regards Desai’s concerns on existential

dilemmas similar to that of Virginia Woolf’s.

Inner struggles, senses of discontent, and desperate cravings for comfort are the

central themes in Desai’s early novels. The female protagonists in Cry, the Peacock

(1963), Where Shall We Go this Summer? (1975), and Fire on the Mountain are

entrapped in family rules taking the form as marriage. Realizing their being misfit and

excluded, the protagonists no longer fight for their family’s approval, but either

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self-exiled to a remote places, or retreat to inner space, or both. Self-alienation and

self-exile indicate the characters’ inability to follow the social, or familial conventions.

In other words, they suffer from the unharmonious relationship between the outer and

the inner world, the “existential dilemmas of life” (Chakravertty 2).

In the mid-1980s Desai started to look more closely at the life of the unprivileged.

In Custody is Desai's ironic story about literary traditions and academic illusions. In

her later novels Desai dealt with German anti-Semitism, the demise of traditions, and

Western stereotypical views of India. Desai put her own German half of the parental

heritage in the background of Baumgartner's Bombay (1987). In the story a retired

Jewish businessman has escaped the Nazis to India in his youth and stays there in

poverty. In the end, he only finds out his being a stranger in post-independence India.

The novel is a powerful literary embodiment of Desai’s claim that East and West are

parallel, not contrasting, worlds. In Journey to Ithaca (1995) Desai examined the

nature of pilgrimage to India. In Fasting, Feasting, the confrontation of American and

Indian culture ends up with disaster consequences. Whether Desai’s characters live on

the banks of the Ganges or amidst the excesses of Massachusetts, they cannot find

meaningful personal relationships other than their own solitude. In The Zigzag Way

(2004), her most recent novel, Desai departed from her familiar territories and set the

story of identity and self-discovery in the twentieth century Mexico. In Fasting,

Feasting and The Zigzag Way, Desai gives her answer to critics who have concluded

that her characters are usually westernized middle-class professionals and therefore

their problems are more close to those of Western readers than to the majority of

Indian people.

Desai’s protagonists are outsiders of their family and society, and cannot help

adopting escapist ways while facing boredom and challenges from reality.

Geographically, they stay away from cities; temporally, they prefer returning to the

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early adolescence and childhood, the time when a prosperous dream of a satisfying

future was not yet lost. Imagination of the past offers release and comfort;

impossibility to return makes present reality even hostile. Themes like tensions of

family relationship and the alienation of middle-class women constantly appear in

Desai’s novels. However, her characters are not completely local or traditional

Indians. Some of them are the Anglicized Indian bourgeoisie, a class flourishing

during the reign of Britain. Both Desai’s father and husband belong to Anglicized

Indian bourgeoisie.

Published in 1980, Clear Light of Day has its story in temporal double frames:

the 1970s’ and the 1940s’ Old Delhi. In 1940s, when the second generation of the Das

family were in their childhood, the political condition of the country was also in a

transition. After the death of their parents, who spent most of the time on social

activities and were unable to pay attention to the children’s psychological needs, the

children found out the difficulty to keep the family together. The eldest son Raja went

after Hyder Ali, their neighboring Muslim landlord and later Raja’s father-in-law.

Hyder Ali’s family emigrated to Old Delhi right before the independence and partition

riots. Tara married Bakul, a diplomat who was going to initiate his internship in

Ceylon. Bim stayed in their family house to take care of demented aunt Mira and the

youngest, retarded brother Baba. Aunt Mira died before long. Bim realized she was

the one left to shoulder the responsibility to run the family business.

Twenty years later, Tara and Bakul go back from Washington to India for both

regular diplomatic mission and Raja’s invitation to attending his daughter’s wedding.

Tara assumes the gathering to be a family reunion. However, Bim still resents for

Raja’s abandonment of their family, children dream and affection. Besides, Raja dose

not send her the invitation. Baba would not attend the wedding if Bim refuses to go.

In addition, Baba can hardly step out of the house; the environment outside appears to

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be so cruel that Baba can not afford to confront it. The family house serves as a

protection for Baba. As for Bim, the house is a responsibility and a symbol for buried

past. Tara finds the house maintains as it was when they were children.

Through recollecting the past and meditating on the present situation, the

characters compare pre- and post-Independence India. The narrative on political

turmoil and on psychological dilemma reveals Desai’s perspective on the intertwined

reflection of personal and political issues. Instead of taking the position of a

nationalist to display the viewpoint of the Indian majority, the novel sets differential

elements in a family to demonstrate that regardless of the varieties, there are strong

connections among Indian peoples.

Like Desai’s other fictions, Clear Light of Day combines psychological portrait

of the characters with the description of natural environment. For instance, Bim’s

sense of uneasiness embodies in the cat trapped in a tree; she tries to avoid talking

about the humiliating events, and keeps covering the ground with rose petals which

soon blown away by the morning breeze. Almost everyone has secrets to hide; their

past, if it is a good one, makes their present shabby or, if it be shameful, makes them

prefer not to recall it anymore. More often, the social condition and the psychological

condition are not coincident. The alienation of individual from the society are

presented here as an outdated desire for heroism, the unfulfilled yearning for parental

affection, and the inability to cope with the environment outside. In other words, it

poses an issue on the incompatibility between the personal conscious and the public

institutionalization. While confronting unbearable events, the characters’ instinctive

reaction is passively withdrawn to the psychological world, a world constructed of

imagination functioning as protecting shield. The inner exile is a form of escapism.

The family house as a private space, in a degree, stands for the psychological

enclosure.

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Literature Review

Shouri Daniels in his article “Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day” compares the

novel to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End instead of to A Passage to India in terms of

characterization, figuration, and the use of images. Both the themes of Clear Light of

Day and Howard’s End are centered on the house and its protagonists, the two sisters

differentiating in inner sensibility. The use of “the domestic to suggest the larger

social fabric” (Daniels 107) implies their allegorical representation. A shared

characteristic of drawing symbols from inner as well as from outer world is popular

among psychological realism novels. And finally, the categorization of both novels as

comedies of manners displays Daniels’s intention to put Desai’s novel in the position

as equal to English novel written by Anglo people. His concern of the final harmony

and cliché ending as traces of English tradition is arguable, yet the observation of the

moral dimension, which serves strong affinity between Tara and Bim, even a

connection between Bim and Aunt Mira, could have further examination. Indian

women’s sacrifice of self-realization is praised as the expression of morality and

responsibility. Nevertheless, on the one hand, Tara’s escape from familial catastrophe

could be excused for her sympathy to Bim. On the other hand, the lack of moral

consciousness is a shared feature for all the male characters, except Baba. The way of

interpretation supports furthermore Daniels’s categorization of Clear Light of Day

comedy of manners.

Baba exemplifies potential resistance against totality in Cindy LaCom’s

“Revising the Subject: Disability as ‘Third Dimension’ of Clear Light of Day and You

Have Come Back.” LaCom criticizes the homogenizing impulse in the building of a

nation. The differentiation of self and other is necessary because “bodies out of bound

are understood to have the potential to determine the project of nationalism” (LaCom

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142). For him, the disable body resembles Homi Bhabha’s “the Third Dimension”

(LaCom 139). Like Daniels’s article, LaCom’s finds the national concern in the

narrative of familial events. When identity is an “access to an image of totality,”

Baba’s disability, which is beyond the binary opposition and is thus transgressive,

serves a “site where identity is negotiated” (LaCom 140). Baba’s fluid identity poses

in the center of, and simultaneously a view outside the struggle of the Indian and

Western values, the former presented by Bim and the latter Tara. LaCom asserts

furthermore that Baba “lives in a semiotic world, resisting entry into the symbolic”

and “resists inclusion” (143).

Arun P. Mukherjee’s experience of teaching postcolonial literatures in Canada

sharpens his concern with particular cultural codes behind the homogenized tag

“postcolonial” (193). For Mukherjee, “universality” is problematic. Except the

experience of colonization, there are few similarities between postcolonial literatures

in South Asia, Africa, and South America. Mukherjee naturally takes the role of

“cultural insider” when introducing Clear Light of Day to the Canadian students who

would have risked self-constructing other cultures based on exotic allusions (196).

Most of the allusion on India is derived from “the officially sanctioned view of Indian

culture—the culture Indian government exhibits at great cost at Indian fairs”

(Mukherjee 199) presented by ambassadors and diplomats like Bakul. On the one

hand, Bakul celebrates the Taj Mahal and the Bhagvad Gita, the highly selected Indian

construction. On the other hand, he smoothly covers famine, drought, and caste wars.

Furthermore, as inference from Desai’s description, Indian government during the

Post-Partition4 period deliberately erased Islamic culture and Urdu literature.

4 Post-Independence and post-partition are actually the same, for Independence and partition happened

almost at the same time.

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Theoretical Framework

The heterogeneity of cultural identification and political ideologies is an

underflow in the novel. Desai conducts the intriguing conflict and confusion of the

multiplying forces with narrative of retrospection as reevaluation of the past, the

struggle between tradition and modernization, redistribution of power, property, and

territory during revolutions, and eventually an instinctive desire to declare the

boundary between self and other. The flow of ideology is well demonstrated. Henri

Lefebvre’s Production of Space tackles space with Marxist methods. He suggests that

space is both the subject and the object in the process of production. On the one hand,

space is endowed with power to act and to wield particular effect. Lefebvre adds that

“the rationality of space is the rationality of activity,” (71-72) not any other subset of

movements and practices. He lifts space from the base to the superstructure, which is

from the material phase to ideological one. On the other hand, space as a product is

either an object constructed according to advancing plans or a discourse perceived and

generated by a particular group of people. The ambiguity of coexistence of labor and

product in the significance of space encourages us to question the attachment of

socio-political or cultural performance to a particular place. Lefebvre’s observation on

the “predominance of visualization” (75-76) indicates the deceptive quality of the

transparency of abstract space which produces, imposes, and reinforces hegemony.

Indeed, the purposive perspective is at risk of oversimplification (Lefebvre 287-91).

Applying Lefebvre’s space theory, the following three chapters investigate the Hindu

nationalist mentality constructed from the ruin after Indian Independence and

Partition. In addition, the examination on the operation of governmentality in New

Delhi and the failure of the imperial ambition is one case in the field of spatial

analysis. Furthermore, to figure out the distance between dislocating discourse abroad

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and the local reality of India, it is necessary to analyze the difference between as well

as the connection of the representation and original object.

Modern Indian history is traumatic for clustering wars among its people, for the

oppression from foreign forces, and for the disembodiment of cultural identification.

In addition to analyzing the temporal dimension of trauma, the belatedness of

traumatic memory, Cathy Caruth reveals the incomprehensibility and the symptoms

such as numb and shock to be the essential reality of trauma. Memory as an act

reevaluates and reconstructs the past. At the very moment the traumatic event happens,

the traumatized is unable to react, not even to conceive its happening. Traumatic past

comes back, though transformed, with equal degree of intensity that the traumatized

finds it impossible to have willful access to the core of the traumatic event. Jean

Laplanche, in an interview with Caruth, clarifies the inability to assimilate the

traumatic experience with pre-existing, conventional knowledge. Nevertheless, the

encounter does not leave the traumatized intact. Laplanche elaborates Freud’s theory

that:

[T]rauma, in order to be psychic trauma, never comes simply from

outside. That is even in the first moment it must be internalized, and

then afterwards relived, revivified, in order to become an internal

trauma. (Caruth 2002:103)

The encounter with traumatic event is represented as a process of contamination

rather than transference of a sort of influential element. The moment when the

traumatic event happens and the haunting moments afterwards can be understood as

“the implantation of something coming from outside” and “the internal reviviscence

of this memory that becomes traumatic” (Caruth 2002:103). In other words, trauma is

to some extent a violent intrusion of knowledge.

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In addition to the analysis of trauma in temporal dimension which is the study of

belatedness, the analysis of spatial dimension is important as well because it

completes the former with the contesting of memories as discourses. Space is a

storehouse of floating data of knowledge. According to Pierre Nora, memory is not

merely an objective retrospection or a recollection of the past. Its significance is

already besieged by that of history which is a discourse. The interpretation and

evaluation of the past vary due to the difference of positions and viewpoints. Nora

reveals in “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” that there is only

the site or the location of memory because there is no longer the environment of

memory (7). Thus, the quest for the original truth does not exist and the memorial site

is then open to various discourses. The location where the traumatic event happens is

fetishized as a source of haunting memory. Furthermore, a wound, psychological

rather than physical, is a site of traumatic memory. The wound is a mark left by the

traumatic event, a witness bearing direct evidence which can be tracked back to the

trauma:

[I]t is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in

the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.

The truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be

linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our

very actions and our language. (Caruth1996:4)

It is worth noticing that the wound can have a voice which is unknown to the

traumatized. The wound cries out because it desires to be heard, and to be seen. The

voice requires a listener, and the traumatic experience a spectator.

Trauma constructs an environment trapping the traumatized with a shadow of the

past. When it comes to traumatic memory, the traumatized is possessed by a memory

which he or she has not yet fully experienced. He has to tell the traumatic past and

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realizes the significance of the whole event as a witness, having a glance at the event

when its impact is in decline. Otherwise, he will have been subjugated to the haunting

past. The possessiveness of a past discourse over the present one echoes Friedric

Nietzsche’s definition of “monumental history.” Both traumatic memory and

monumental history fetishize the past and have a possessive desire to model the

present with the past. As for the former, the traumatized, whether he is a survivor or a

victim, internalizes the voice from the wound and takes that voice as his own. The

latter demonstrates in a broad scale the burying of the living with the dead. It offers an

insightful observation of the government’s building of monuments to make its

discourse an authorial one. The dominating discourse violently invades the site of

memory and excludes other discourses. To sum up, traumatic memory resembles a

sort of monumental history that occupies the position of articulation and demands the

assimilation of all the other discourses.

As for the colonial design of establishing New Delhi as a modernized capital, it

is an audacious plan engendered by utopian imagination. This idea can be practiced

only through meticulous exercise of domination. Michel Foucault compares a modern

city to a microcosm of a nation. To rule a city, that is, to produce the most profit with

the greatest efficiency for the ruling class, in this case the colonizer, discipline and

regulation are necessary techniques. Foucault’s “The Docile Body” clarifies that the

significance of discipline is to develop an automatic body, individual as well as

political, through training, reformation, and assimilation. The disciplinary procedure

is well-designed to enlarge the degree of the liberty of one’s action only if one’s will

follows the ruler’s (Rabinow 181-82). Instead of appropriating body in the slavery

system, discipline produces capable and manipulative body. Regulation differs from

discipline in which the latter operates as an active modeling of the body whereas the

former practices through prohibition, correction, and punishment. With discipline and

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regulation, the governor reshapes the landscape of the city and the whole state

(Rabinow 241-42). Foucault implies that the monopoly of the governor’s will wield

over all the others. This assumption echoes Lefebvre’s social homogeneity generated

from the abstract space.

Foucault discusses the operation of power from the governor’s perspective; yet,

he does not neglect the marginalized. In opposition to the homogeneous utopia, those

unwanted and the excluded occupy a space called heterotopia. In “Of Other Spaces,”

Foucault observes that the locations of heterotopias are not merely limited to the

periphery or outside of the border. In some blind spots or at the time when the

regulating force is distracted, heterotopian space unveils itself amid the city.

According to Lefebvre, a culture generated from a certain space does not always

stick to that particular space. Rey Chow’s “Against the Lures of Diaspora” analyzes

the crisis of minority studies in terms of the hegemony of the intellectual. In diaspora

condition, it is very often that the westerner understands the Third Worlds—most of

them had been colonies—through acquiring the information from the third-world

intellectuals who emigrated, immigrated, or exiled to the western countries. It is

fortunate that the intellectuals are able to articulate for the marginalized; yet it is

unfortunate that the “minor of the minor,” being unconceivable or unspeakable for the

intellectuals, can not break the deadlock of being voiceless. The distance between the

speaking subject and the referred object, which are the diasporic intellectuals and their

native land, inevitably reduces the degree of the reliability of the truth. Those who are

marginalized in class, gender, or race are regarded as dispensable when the

intellectuals emphasize international visibility. To a certain extent, the intellectuals

reveal only those which are perceptible to the western world.

Thesis Structure

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This thesis attempts to explore the crisis in recapitulating the sense of

progressing history and the awareness of the ambiguous subjectivity of India in

modernist condition. It also explores the distance between the recognition of India as

a homeland and the perception of India as a tourist attraction reconstructed to satisfy

oriental imagination. Space is a battle field of discourse and a network of relationship.

Lefebvre indicates that places as products are constituted for particular functions, and

then, the products in turn procure a will and produce discourses. It is a blueprint of a

dominating discourse that produces mentality. But the realization of that plan in

concrete places may not fulfill the design. Space has a will that escapes the interdict

of dialectical discourses. To understand that will and its operation, one has to acquire

a probing perspective and see the panorama of the spatial politics situated on earth.

Chapter One explores the family house of the Das as a heritage of India,

especially of Hindu conventions. As Caruth’s studies imply, traumatic memory is

essentially a discourse that fits in the gap which is generated from incomprehensibility

of the pre-existing conception and the invasive discourse. As a national allegory, the

novel displays the main characters to be spokespersons of different racial, political

and religious groups. Bim stands for the Hindu people, Raja for the Muslim, Bakul for

diasporic or the westernized, whereas Tara, trying hard to appease the conflicts

between her family, situates herself in between. The impact of the family separation,

which indicates the Partition of Pakistan from India, has been enduring for decades.

As a traumatic event, it causes structural changes. The house transforms from a space

of tolerance to that of homogeneity. Previously, the second generation of the Das is

cultivated according to both their aspirations and the socio-political environment.

From 1940s onwards, the connection between people of different ethnic becomes

suspicious. The seed of Hindu nationalist hegemony germinates from the British Raj

and blooms during the Independence and Partition revolutions. Indian tradition

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embodied by with the house is an inheritance and a burden to Bim. The repetitive

presence of the apparition of Aunt Mira and the empathy with her further attaches

Bim to Hindu conventions. The family house serves as the site of memory of the Das.

Each of them acquires different discourses and in turn comprehends the past in

various ways. However, Bim takes over the house and all the responsibility, and thus

becomes the dominating voice that demanding the assimilation of all the other

discourses. In short, the family house like a monument promotes the homogeneity of

the whole nation through assimilation. In this case, myth, sacrifice, the past glory, and

even the wars are fetishized for its people.

Chapter Two proceeds to the operation of colonial design and the local resistance

enforced from the rootedness. While Bim compares Old Delhi and New Delhi with

resentment and lament, the New Delhi she refers to is not the one the British

conceptualized in the blueprint of a modernist utopia, but a synthesis between the

modern and the traditional, the colonial and the local. To promote the establishment

of New Delhi as a showcase of modernism, the British transports the elements of

western education systems, capitalist system, and nationalist thinking, and even

religion to the colony. The first generation in the novel leads a life of the British style.

The operation of discipline and regulation works in forging New Delhi as an

approximate English city. British Indian government cultivated a number of political

agents to work on the assimilation program. However, when it comes to the

perspective of the second generation, it is not hard to distinguish the embedded race

and the class discrimination. The difference between Urdu and Hindu languages, the

division between British and local clubs, and the varying position in evaluating

national hero and traitor reveal the homogeneous nationalism wielded through British

Raj to the reign of the Republic of India.

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For the design of New Delhi, the border of the city is the border of British

subjectivity. The realization of utopian imagination is always mapped as an enclave.

Wall is a mark of the tranquility within and the chaotic without. Nevertheless, the

description of the transportation reveals a potential mobility transgressing the

boundary, introducing antithesis to thesis. Suburban space incubates resisting power

which is the accumulation of the excluded, the unwanted, and the harmful. It is a

heterotopian space. Soon after the Independence of India, Hindu governors take over

the dominating power from the British. Local habitants, refugees, the poor, and the

disable swarms into New Delhi which was then suffered from firing riots. The Hindu

and the Muslim re-chart the political territory with the technique required from the

Britain. Utopian impulse continues to compromise with heterotopian pulses.

Chapter Three, inspired by Chow’s “Against the Lures of Diaspora,” examines

the distance between the speaking subject in diaspora situation and the observed

object. Bakul, one of the first groups of Indian ambassadors, insists on introducing

only the “eternal India”—the most glorious architectures and achievements—to

foreigners. As for the real situation of India including party disputes, famine, caste

wars, and so forth, Bakul leaves the issue to the local people. He aims to take the

interval homecoming an opportunity to keep in touch with the real India in case he

fails to represent the country. However, what Bakul does is looking for modernized

spots in India—shopping malls and sightseeing resorts. Other aspects of India like the

heat, underdevelopment, and inactivity are intolerable for him. The pattern of diaspora

is formulated during the British Raj. Those having professional training or education

abroad in early years come back to India which was then the British colony. They

recognize India as homeland no matter how fascinating foreign countries might be.

Bakul approves the western value without reservation due to the nature of his

vocation and cultivation. He is comparably a westernized Indian, like his daughters,

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rather. The dilemma of tradition and modernization is not a problem for him. On the

contrary, the crisis of identity and cultural conflict perform big problem for Tara when

she comes back to India. She recognizes both India and America as homes. The value

she holds oscillates between Bakul’s and Bim’s. Desai has empathy for Tara because

they share a similar situation. The concept of India for Bakul is next to a tourist

attraction. The contrast between rootedness and travelogue in post-colonial situation

challenges the bond of culture and identification to place.

Conclusion

The three dominating ideologies—Hindu nationalism, modernism, and the

totality of first-world grand narrative escorted by third-world studies—transfigure the

landscape and the demography of India. Through establishing New Delhi, the British

government displays its vision of future India as a modernized colony. After the

revolutions, Hindu-nationalist force pushes the Indian government to establish India

as a nation-state without considering the variety of its ethnicity. Furthermore, Indian

intellectuals take risks of subjugating Indian subjectivity under Euro-centric discourse

in diasporic condition. However, the variety of Indian cultures demises the hegemony

of ideologies: the modernized city exhibits a synthesis of both the western and the

Indian; Bim finally understands the house. The interaction of spaces between the

British and the Indian, Hindu and other ethnic groups, and the diasporic and the native

Indians, clarifies the discrepancy between the imaginary plan and the reality. Desai

grew up during the turmoil of independence and partition revolutions. Living in a

neighborhood consisting of various ethnic groups, Desai bears in mind a political unit

far from monoethnic or of monotone. On the contrary, her essay “The Seed of

Destruction” asserts that the essential element of modern India is its diversity. Even

though being born as a hybrid, growing up in a community with multiplying cultures,

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and moving among western countries for years, Desai claims herself an Indian and

India her homeland.

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Chapter One

The Family House: Monument of Traumatic Memory

Introduction

Most of Anita Desai’s novels and short-stories evoke characters, events and

moods by using abundant visual imagery and details, which has led to comparisons

with the modernist sensibilities of T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.

The origin of her stories, as the writer explains, is itself rooted in images. In Clear

Light of Day, the mental space of the characters and the external space are so

intricately weaved together that the description of the external space, which is often

visualized, bears implication of the condition of individual’s psychology. For one of

the protagonists Bim, the central event that string up her memory is the sickbed scene

during the illness of her elder brother Raja near the end of the 1940s riots. She was

not yet recovered from the shock of their parents’ death and was suffered from the

impending loss of family. The petals in the rose walk remind Bim of Tennyson’s

verse, “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petals,” which she had read to Raja and the sickbed

scene twenty years ago. The gesture of the petals covering the soil resembles Bim’s

imperative need to bury her traumatic past deep in the conscious. In order to shelter

herself from the traumatic past, Bim unconsciously “[puts] out her toe and [scatters]

petals evenly over the damp soil” (Desai 1980:3). The image of the rose petal bridges

a span of time and it later turns into a symbol of the traumatic past. The characters in

the novel bequeath interpretations and values to the external world. Likewise, the

external world maneuvers the evaluation and the pattern of its people’s life.

As Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space indicates, space is both a part of

the procedure and the product of production. For the former, it is a place, like a

factory, fabricates products which can be reproduced. To a certain extent, most of the

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constructions have a directing design, a two-dimensional abstract space, which

formulates the appearance and function of places. In addition, the blueprint even

models human activities in its realized place. As for the latter, the concrete

three-dimensional space as a product in that it is the realization of an idea and it bears

a certain function. However, with the flow of implanting ideologies, the space as a

product in turn serves as an essential element in the re-production of space. The

equivocal significance of space in the process of (re)production testifies the

assimilation of a certain discourse through manipulating the spatial representation.

This chapter argues that the family house of the Das, with its embedded Hindu

nationalist discourse, formulates the traumatic memory of the family members. The

memories surrounding the separation of the family are reconstructed, trimmed, and

maneuvered according to the dominating discourse embodied within the house. The

assimilation in the (re)production of traumatic memory as an allegory reflects modern

monumentalization of the tumultuous history from Hindu nationalist perspective.

Set in modern India during Independence revolutions and post-Partition situation,

the novel presents both private event and national affairs. Desai’s description of the

varieties in the Das family reminds the reader of a diverse identification of Indian

people. The narrative of personal event and the critique on national affair are engaged

in allegorical relationship. In “Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational

Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson claims that the association of individual’s and nation’s

representation in third-world literary works is allegorical:

All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in

a very specific way: they are to be read as, what I will call national

allegories . . . particularly when their forms develop out of

predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the

novel. (319)

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Jameson invites the reader to see the national situation in the third-world text, to

discover third-world novelists’ concern for political difficulties. The assertion of

allegorical structure opens up the analyses of modern Indian history in the novel. The

first is to parallel the traumatic memory of the Das with the traumatic history of

modern India. The calamity both the family and the nation encounter is followed by

changes of relationships, most obviously alienation and the lack of sense of safety

generated from redistribution of the territory and of the people. The main narrative on

the familial separation substitutes and uncovers at the same time the partition of the

nation which serves as the background in the text. The characters can be roughly

divided into three groups: the first-born Raja and the neighboring the Hyder Alis stand

for the Muslims; Bim and the first generation in the Das represent the Hindu;

moreover, Tara and her husband emigrating to other countries play the role of

expatriates. The second is to examine the politics of articulating individual’s traumatic

memory which is authorized in the novel while elevating to the national scale.

“Monumental history” is the term Friedrich Nietzsche adopts in “Of the Use and

Disadvantages of History” which connotes a demand of the authorized for the

conformity of dissimilar discourses. Those that are different from the modeling

discourse can only be assimilated; otherwise, they can only be excluded.

The family house situated in the center of the novel cultivates a discourse of its

own that reconstructs and formulates the traumatic memory, which is an interpretation

of the separation of the family. Memory in the novel is already a discourse, a

dominating discourse that is possessed by the Hindu nationalist. First of all, this

chapter considers memory as a discourse. Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and

History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”5 speculates on “site of memory” which displays the

5 According to Nora, there is an ambiguity with the French word mémoire which connotes “memory”

and “history” at the same time.

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semantic boundary of the memory which is actualized with objects and space, and is

continuously challenged by political discourses. However, “memory” in common use

has been besieged and seldom rids of the influence of history. Cathy Caruth’s

traumatic studies analyze that the association of the symptoms and the essential

elements of trauma primarily lie in the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event. It

is the gap of knowledge that invokes ghosts and covers the unhealed wound. The

trauma, which the second generation of the Das is incapable of dealing with, haunts

them every time when they pay visits to the house. The second half of this chapter

proceeds to examine the monumentality of the house. With engravings of childhood

memories and wandering apparitions, the family house to a certain extent embodies

the monumentality of the Das’s traumatic memory. On the one hand, the

establishment of monuments implies a yearning to memorize the past as if the

monument itself introduces the past to the present. On the other hand, monument

marks the end of a certain event. It demonstrates both the discontinuity and the

connection between past and present. However, not all versions of memories share a

privilege to be displayed in that monument. The monument with its spectacular design

and engravements exhibits a standardized version of memory. The monument is

meant to build for historical events with greatness in intensity. Other versions of

memories are eliminated, distorted, or transformed to meet that standard one. To sum

up, the monumental house stands for the traumatic memory of India which is the

hegemonic discourse of the Hindu nationalist.

Memory as Discourse

Clear Light of Day presents complicated familial affairs of the Das with

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retrospective narrative. As its epigraphs6 allude in Emily Dickinson’s and T.S. Eliot’s

poems, memory functions as a storeroom keeping the experience of the past events;

yet, the past dose not retain as it had been. What can be recalled is a memory that is

“renewed, transfigured,” and represented “in another pattern.” Reading the novel is

like diving into a memory. Unlike most of the autobiographical fictions composed in a

chronological order, Desai deliberately divides the novel into four groups of

fragmented narratives: Part One and Part Four serve as the 1970s’ frames of the

1940s’ memory. On her discovering tour to the family house, Tara finds the clusters

of images and sounds so distracting that people can not communicate without

impediment. Tara’s husband, Bakul, also finds out some changes in Tara. Every time

she comes back to the family house, his efficient and optimistic wife disappears. She

becomes a timid, little girl like she had been twenty years ago. The house marks itself

out as a place that makes the transition of time. It preserves tracks toward traumatic

past and haunts Tara. The memory of the family separation is traumatic for the Das.

After the separation and right before the impending family reunion, Tara and Bim

argue over the long-buried past. The family house, with the first generation’s

phantoms, haunts the second generation. In the center of the house lies the deadly

attraction of the well. Bim responds the call and becomes the spokesperson of the

traditional Hindu nationalist India.

Time passes when all the events that happened have their particularity and could

never happen in another time and space. Only the experience is registered and

preserved in one’s mind, either the consciousness or the unconscious. In retrospective

thinking, a number of images are recalled from that storeroom and reconstruct

6 Desai quotes Emily Dickinson’s verse in the epigraph: “Memory is a strange bell— / Jubilee and

knell—,” which tells the reader memory is one theme of the novel. She also quotes a few lines from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “See, now they vanish, / The faces and places, with the self which, as / it could, loved them, / To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.” The past is represented as phantoms: elusive, yet come back with other forms and patterns.

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silhouettes of the past. Mieke Bal’s assertion on memory emphasizes the discontinuity

of time: it is the impact of the past event that extends to the present, not the exact past.

Bal elaborates a viewing experience of modern art that associates with memory:

[M]emory is an act . . . its situatedness in the present through an

engagement with the past. To give the viewing experience over to time

by interfering with time and by endorsing what time dose to it is a way

of researching the past in the present. (181)

The key word “situatedness” eradicates the presence of the past. All the material

under discussion is drawn to the present phase. The representation of past is precisely

a creation, a reconstruction according to the imagination that based on the shadow of

the past. In addition, the concept that “memory is an act” implies the existence of a

figure and an action heading to the past without which memory is not possible. In the

context, Bal deconstructs the appropriation functions through viewing, listening, and

other forms of representation of experience.

The remnant of the past usually comes back in the form of clusters of images.

“Act” and “situatedness” have a hint on the spatial circumstance of memory.

According to Pierre Nora, memory differentiates from history due to their alternating

perspectives: the “absolute memory” is an objective evidence of the past while history

is itself a discourse. Memory reconstitutes the remnant images of the past instead of

representing the past as it was. It serves as a “storehouse of a material stock of what it

would be impossible for us to remember, an unlimited repertoire of what might need

to be recalled” (13). The data stored in memory includes concrete events, senses,

feelings, and opinions. It amounts to great quantities and keeps increasing all the time,

but the reason that some data escape recollection has little to do with its quantity.

Actually, only things or objects that make sense can be registered and reserved in this

storehouse. Another reason making things beyond recall is that the texture of memory

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is neither even nor chronological. Nora assumes memory is “no longer a retrospective

continuity but the illumination of discontinuity” (16). Memory creates a dimension in

which the order of things is outside the linear time that dominates the physical world.

Memory poses between consciousness and the unconscious, and its order should be

the association between things, if there is any. Nora’s assumption that the “[memory]

attaches itself to sites” (22) serves as spaces in the position of producer. The site is not

simply a geographical location. The site indicates a spatial dimension in which the

things that pass have left particular track. The track transgresses the limit of time: it

brings the past to the present, and even the future. Ironically, “[there] are lieux de

mémoire, sites of memoire, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real

environments of memory” (7). In short, every thing that past was buried except the

tombstone, the track dispersed with memory.

Nora exquisitely delineates the differential significances of memory and of

history. “Memory,” Nora asserts, “is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying

us to the eternal present” (8), which displays in the engravings of the past in everyday

life. He continues, “[memory] takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images,

and objects”; therefore, it is “absolute” (Nora 9). However, the absolute memory can

exist only when the past it relates to is an absolute past which always opens up to

interpretations. Since the track and the past present as symbols and the connotative

significance, the signifier and the signified, there is a bar in the middle between the

track and the past as both a link and a division. It is a division because the signified is

absent, transformed, and lost long ago while the signifier is always present. It is a link

because of human beings’ need to acquire knowledge from accumulating past. The

attachment of interpretation to memorial tracks makes memory a discourse. History,

on the contrary, is essentially a dictatorial discourse that besieges absolute memory

(Nora 9). History marks the break of the past from present and future; its

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understanding of time as discontinuity frankly claims the death of the past. History

imposes certain ideological thinking on “absolute,” “concrete,” and assimilating

memory by moving its position to one’s own, while emptying its association with its

environment, and refilling it with an ideology. Archives and ancient items preserved

in museum were once memory, but the owner and the visitor of the museum turn them

into expressive history.

The paradoxical relationship between memory and history blurred their

borderline; ultimately, the most recognized memory is not “true memory” but history

(Nora 13). As he indicates, “if history did not besiege memory, deforming and

transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de mémoire”

(Nora 12). Here, site (lieux) is not limited to a location or an object. Any scene, any

scent, any thought, and any person that associate to past events serve as sites of

memory. Inferred from his idea, sites of memory have been sorted out, and then

surrendered to interpretation. In other words, there is no longer memory but

interpretations.

In addition to Nora, Benjamin and Kristeva make valuable efforts on the study of

the constitution and the pattern of memory, especially their analyses of Proust’s Á la

recherche du temp perdu, which demonstrate the transition from “true memory” to

memory in common sense and the surfacing of memory from the unconscious to the

consciousness. The beginning chapter of Kristeva’s Time and Sense introduces her

analyzing apparatus. “Movement One” to “Movement Eight” display the

transformation of memory from the primal, objective substance to the interpretative

discourse on desire.7 Kristeva regards recollection of things past as a return of the

7 The sections “Movement One: Simply a ‘luminous patch’” and “Movement Two: The

Transformation of the Death” reveal a discursive path of the primal substance to become memory material. “Movement Three: I Happen to Taste a Madeleine” and “Movement Four: Incest and Silence—The Disappearance of Two Female Names” investigate the implicit association between the desirer, the desired, and the substitute of the desired object, all such things are compressed into a

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dead from its buried ground. The reviving past transforms into a degrading form. Just

like death makes apparition or skeleton from a human, the passing event leaves its

residue such as the warmth, the smell of a lifeless object, or merely a word called

madeleine. Simply the smell of madeleine brings up tons of messages. It is in a sign

covering the desires, emotions, feelings with single signifier, madeleine. The

luminous patch, the stain glass, the color of flowers, like the smell of madeleine,

weave together by Proust and produce no more memory than meaning. In short,

Kristeva’s conception of memory through reading Proust echoes Nora’s assertion that

the site of memory is in itself a site of discourse.

Benjamin reads in Proust’s novel the operation of memory from the perspective

of the person who experiences the event. Memory functions not as a magical power

that invokes the dead from unvisited cemetery, but a rejuvenation medicine rescuing

people from further assault of time. Proust’s book of memory here appears to be a

record of the character’s revisit, re-experience of the past reconstructed simulating to

its original condition.8 To mediate the present to the past, the sensual experience like

smell acts as an agent; yet, the agent itself is far from the content of memory,

Benjamin explains:

No one who knows with what great tenacity memories are preserved

by the sense of smell, and smells not at all in the memory, will be able

to call Proust’s sensitivity to smells accidental. . . . [M]ost memories

single word—madeleine. “Movement Five: An Exquisite Pleasure Without a Cause” suggests the trace of memory lies not in the external world, but the inner world of a person. “Movement Six: Desire and the Visible” implies the separation of sensational feeling and meaning; “Movement Seven: A Substitution Stabilizes the Effervescence—Aunt Léonie for Mamma and the Balance of Blasphemy” the replacement of desiring object to meet morality; “Movement Eight: The Recollection Is a Cascade of Spatial Metaphor” clearly points out the emptying of memory substance and the imposing of discourse, be it political or psychological. See Kristeva’s Time and Sense (New York: Columbia UP, 1996) 3-22.

8 Kristeva regards that the experienced does not go back to the past in the memory, but transports the past, decaying on the way, to the present moment; Benjamin tends to preserve the circumstance of the past and endows a person the mobility traveling to the past time.

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that we search for come to us as visual images. Even the free-floating

forms of the mémoire involontair are still in large part isolated, though

enigmatically present, visual images. (1986:214)

The sensual experience, Benjamin asserts, displays like a net catching images from

involuntary memory whose bottom disperses “the materials of memory no longer

appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly,

indefinitely and weightily” (214). The materials sorted out resemble part of the past,

not its panorama; those that have been filtered through and those that remain in the

obscure bottom layer are nevertheless crucial elements in reconstructing the past

reality. The standard to decide whether to filter off or through lies in the texture of the

net.

“Involuntary memory” takes place with one’s spontaneous perception and

reaction to external events; thus, it is the result of the interaction of the external and

one’s inner realities. Weaving one’s memory is to fit it in the network of

meaning/relationship in consciousness. One perceives particular messages that can be

classified by his recognition system. However, the material constituting one’s

consciousness is regulated by the principle implanted from the outside world. Thus,

the ideology circulating in the external has been taken as a self-activated rule of the

inner world. The net serves as a ready apparatus in offering the person a version of the

past reshaped according to his charted wish. The past in retrospection is an

embodiment of a temporal utopia. Out of this nostalgic urge, Proust recollects

materials from the past and reconstructs a resembling circumstance of his growing

back. Benjamin regards the concept of time in Proust’s work as circular and

“convoluted” which makes the rejuvenation possible (211). Proust’s true interest rests

“in the passage of time in its most real—that is, space-bound-form, and passage

nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without”

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(Benjamin 1986:211). In this way, Benjamin’s comprehension is a remote

correspondence of Nora’s discussion on memory and history. “There are lieux de

mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real

environments of memory” (7). Nora’s lieux de mémoire indicates that the recollection

is at most an assimilation of the past; more often, it is a distortion.

In Clear Light of Day, the rose walk, the koels’ calling, the grey-haired figure in

the garden, and even a glance of the drawing room open up a door to a world existed

long ago. Memory, which is besieged by history in common sense, acts in producing

meaning from these tracks. Each character has a particular position when articulating

his or her memories. The family house becomes a database within which the flows of

discourses of the characters interact, fuse, and collide with each other. On revisiting

the crumbling family house, Tara considers that “everything, everything that she had

so hated as a child and that was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of

some dull, uninviting provincial museum” (Desai 1980:20-21). Tara notices

resemblance of the past in the house regardless of some obvious changes. Hatred is

there because Tara still bears in mind her being neglected and abandoned by her

parents who had spent most of the time in social activities in clubs or in their drawing

room. However, she is glad to see that the rose walk is maintained as if it never

changes. She indulges in the childhood scene of walking in the garden with her

mother. Responding to the sites of memories, Tara reactivates different memories

respectively. She wedges verifying interpretation on her childhood memory. When it

comes to Bim’s memory, it entangles interpretations other than Tara’s. Bim reads

history book, corrects students’ papers, and transcribes Raja’s Urdu poems in the

house. She sees the dull and the dismayed in the house, too. However, when walking

along the rose walk, she recalls most of the time the well at the back that had drawn a

cow, and the pining away of Aunt Mira. Compared with Tara, Bim is more certain of

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her interpretation of memory because she recognizes herself as a part of the house that

sees, experiences, and survives all the calamities. Every time Bim talks about their

past, Tara always feels a grasp on her by Bim, the “rough, strong, sure

grasp—dragging her down, down into a well of oppression, of lethargy, of ennui”

(Desai 1980:149). In other words, when Tara’s discourse of the past collides with

Bim’s, Tara loses her control over the memory but succumbs, being possessed by

Bim’s discourse.

Traumatic Memory of the Das

The traumatic event of the Das begins with the mother’s death caused by

diabetes. Before long, the father died in a car accident, then Tara married her out, and

the running away of Raja to be with the Hyder Alis. Finally, Aunt Mira died of despair

more than of delirium. Deep down in the death and departure lies a mode that

happened long ago. A bride-like cow was drowned in the well and rotted there. Its calf

pined and died. People in the house were so shocked that no one dared to lift the

corpse out of the well, not even to talk about it. Privately, they expected “a hereditary

illness . . . to re-emerge” (Desai 1980:108). The children have the same reaction when

the separation takes place. They pretend their parents are leaving for everyday

activities. When it comes to the departure of Raja and Tara, Bim starts to plan the

future education and career immediately. At the very moment the traumatic event

happens, people do not properly mourn for the dead; sometimes, they do not even

recognize the happening of traumatic event.

Traumatic memory differentiates from other sorts of memories because of the

impediment in the production of knowledge. A complete traumatic experience

consists two phases: first, the direct confrontation at the very moment traumatic event

happened and, secondly, the later awareness of that traumatic event. What we

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generally call trauma is neither the point of happening nor of experiencing, but the

interval in between. At the first moment, the traumatized is unable to respond not

merely because of the intensity of that event, but also because of its

incomprehensibility. The traumatized is totally in the dark of what has happened. As

Caruth declares:

Central to the very immediacy of this experience,9 that is, is a gap that

carries the force of the event and dose so precisely at the expense of

simple knowledge and memory. The force of this experience would

appear to arise precisely, in other words, in the collapse of its

understanding. (1995:7)

Essential, the cause of trauma is the limit of one’s ability to know. The tension in that

gap is explosive. A void in the closure of discourse invites desperately substitutive

interpretations for experience. In an interview with Robert Jay Lifton, Caruth agrees

with Lifton’s statement that numbness is crucial to the experience for confrontation

(1995:131), and with Freud’s assertion that trauma “occupies a space to which willed

access is denied” (1995: 152). The immediate numbness and shock are merely

temporal escape from the harm of trauma, they can not rid off that trauma for good. In

other words, the immediate reaction is nothing but a set of symptoms accompanying

protective mechanism of the traumatized. In the novel, the phantoms of the parents

coming back to the drawing room haunt Tara; the letter that renounces sibling

affection, though had long been hidden, comes up in front of the sisters to be read out

again. The incomprehensibility, Caruth says, “in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot

be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge . . . and thus continually returns, in

its exactness, at a later time” (1995:153). The real object does not hide itself, but the

9 The “experience” here means encounter, not indicates a fully understand, consciously undergoes an event.

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people then could not look at it directly because either the significance of the

traumatic event is too vague, or the impact on one’s emotion is too strong that the

defense mechanism switches on automatically to avoid further injuries. The

traumatized is incapable of recognizing trauma; even the associated events appear to

be vague. The inability to articulate has been regarded as a symptom of trauma.

Nevertheless, traumatic studies clarify that symptom is not a side effect or an impact

of trauma; symptom is trauma itself. Even though the significance is too obscene and

obscure to be fitted in the semantic structure in one’s consciousness, the gap that

makes up of shock and numbness is also dangerous for the traumatized. The void is

waiting for, even actively inviting, interpretations. The traumatized has to make sure

that a further serious damage will not happen, because being left in the dark is as

horrible as being injured. Consequently, the symptom which is a shelter in the

beginning equates with the trauma itself because of the void of knowledge.

When it comes to the association of the experience subject and memory, a person

has the mechanical reaction to claim a piece of memory his own, and the right to give

it certain interpretation. In other words, the person possesses his own memory. In the

case of traumatic memory, one does not consciously revisit or re-experience the past.

Traumatic memory inhabits a dimension unknown both temporally and spatially. It

has its power, out of the darkness corner of one’s mind, over the rationality. It

impedes the procedure of meaning production. As for traumatic memory, the relation

between the owner and the owned is converted. The subject is possessed and will

continue being haunted by the memory of the traumatic past:

The pathology consists . . . solely in the structure of its experience or

reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time,

but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who

experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an

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image or event. And then the traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted,

simply, as a distortion of reality . . . . (Caruth 1995:4-5; italics original)

The traumatized, driven by an instinct to ensure safety from assimilating experience,

is meant to be haunted by repetitive traumatic past. In other words, the crisis the

traumatized encounters is a semiotic one. He or she must invoke and encounter, being

haunted by that very event again, in order to have real experience from that repetition.

In the process of working through traumatic memory, the traumatized undergo great

changes in the structure of conception, at least, to re-diverse the relation of the

possessive and the possessed.

On analyzing the articulation of one’s trauma, it is necessary to question the

possibility of speaking the unspeakable. The trauma of Bim is unspeakable. She

stands as the central figure of the family, shouldering up the responsibility of taking

care the Das staying in the house. The will of their father maintains in Bim’s living

patterns: preserving the Hindu-centered tradition. The father stopped Raja from

entering into a Muslim school the time inter-racial conflict at its climax. Though

declaring he would not have stopped Raja if the riot had not happened, the father is

the one who reveals the profound hatred of Hindu and Muslim toward the other, not to

mention that toward a suspicious traitor/converter. The authorial narrative of the

father is a homogeneous discourse. What happened is a realization of their father’s

foresight. Raja ran away from his Hindu friends, who turned out to spying on him as

if he is a prisoner, and lost all connections with the Alis; nevertheless, Raja is

eventually accepted by the Alis. Raja’s identification with the Muslim enraged Bim.

The letter issued by Raja announces his inheritance of Hyder Ali’s property and

responsibility along with which it reminds Bim her duty to pay the rent. It directly

cuts the affectionate connection between the family members, and replaces that

relationship with commercial bond. That is enough for Bim to claim Raja’s betrayal

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and exterminates his membership in the house.

Processing the traumatic memory in terms of the limit of comprehensibility helps

the traumatized to act out, but not infallibly to work through their trauma. Bim’s

reaction of denying her connection with Raja is instinctively out of the mechanism of

self-protection. The wall of the house wards off, actively or passively, almost all the

unwanted events. Her traumatic memory is a history of building up a wall to prevent

further injury. In addition, the positioning in the family house also compels Bim to

complement the discourse of homogeneity. In other words, the memory of those that

staying in the house appropriates with a central ideology, roughly speaking, Hindu

nationalist mentality. It is cultivated by the phantoms of the first generation, by a pile

of Romanticist poems, by the envy toward neighboring Muslim mansion, and by the

mystic desire of cremation by the Jumna River near by. The resentment and hatred

toward the dissimilar are symptoms of the traumatized; yet the symptoms are also

transfigurations of that trauma. Bim is possessed by a particular symptom. The impact

of the traumatic events does not end here. The discourse embedded in Bim’s narrative

of traumatic memory passes on and assimilates others.

In the practice of articulating, the traumatized shares that trauma by turning the

listener as a spectator to the experience subject. Bal implies that the experience of the

storyteller transports to the listener through a mediating text whereas the former

restricts the perception of the latter:

[T]he personal narrative of memory becomes an institutional force,

almost oppressively telling you how to read: an act of shaping other

people’s memories. The intimacy gives way to the pressure of public

culture. (174)

When the traumatic event happens, Tara dose not understand what had happened to

the rest of her family during the Partition riots. She leaves the house both for marriage

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which she has wished for since her childhood and for escaping from further

disillusionment. Through the conversion with Bim, Tara gradually grasps the idea of

the remnant of Raja’s dream of becoming a hero, the cruelty of reality for Baba, the

despair in Aunt Mira’s life, and the sacrifice of Bim. Half-reluctant, Tara becomes a

spectator, and partly the experience subject, of Bim’s discourse on the past as the

traumatic memory. Of course, Tara has her own narrative on the traumatic event she

had encountered during that calamity. Getting shocked and numb, succumbing and

then escaping, Tara leaves the gap of knowledge empty. Trapped in the repetitive time

anchored on the traumatic past, Tara accepts Bim’s critique on that traumatic event

which replaces the original event. As a result, Bim’s discourse, that is her version of

traumatic memory, turns out to be the compelling version and eliminates others.

Monumental History and Traumatic Memory

The family house of the Das serves as a symbolic space of traumatic memory.

Like a monument, the house is strongly expressive for the past, yet limited to one

interpretation. The crucial reason that makes the house a haunting place is a sort of

mentality that monumentalizes the traumatic past. It turns the significance of the

family house from a commodity and a storeroom of “absolute memory” into a

fetishized discourse. Bim keeps the setting of the house as it had been with slight

modification: she takes the father’s room as well as his family responsibility. Bim is

aware of that, for her family, she has become a part of the house:

All these years she had felt herself to be the center—she had watched

them all . . . returning, landing like birds, folding up their wings and

letting down their legs till they touched solid ground. . . . That was

what the house had been—the lawn, the rose walk, the guava trees, the

veranda: Bim’s domain. . . . Bim, who had stayed, and become part of

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the pattern, inseparable. (Desai 153)

Bim occupies the central position of her family’s homecoming pattern, the position of

the house which is the only solid thing compared to migration and journey.

Furthermore, Bim is represented as having close connection with Hindu tradition, and

with the first generation of the Das, especially Aunt Mira; she is the voice of the

house. When it comes to making the decision for the family, Bim is always

dominating. Raja has left Bim the right to make decision for the financial and housing

affairs. Bakul asked for Bim’s permission to marry Tara as if she is the head of the

family. Not to mention the retarded Baba who dependents on Bim to take care of his

daily life. Bim claims that “[she has] to make up [her] own mind, and [Baba’s]”

(Desai 1980:154). Within her domain, she dominates all the operation of discourses.

The importance of history lies in the instructiveness that promotes the production,

if not regulation, of knowledge. The greatness in the history indicates more of the

intensity than of the quality. The production of knowledge in trauma shares

similarities of that in monumentalism. In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History

for Life,” Nietzsche examines the repetitive sense of time. The pattern of memory in

trauma meets that of the “monumental history” rather than that of “antiquarian

history.” Although the past is highly estimated, for the former, only some historical

events are ritualized and exhibited. The latter regards all past events to have equal

importance. Comparing the repetition of time in traumatic memory and that in

monumental history, we find out that the traumatized is trapped in the haunting past

whereas the monument insists in displaying the past as a model, continuously

demanding for the re-emergence of that greatness.

To some extent, monumental history is an ideology that affects the present with

an archaic evaluation. It does not deny the importance of the present, yet endorses a

purpose to represent the greatness, glory or catastrophe of the past. Nietzsche

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illustrates the philosophical thinking in monumental history:

[I]t will always have to deal in approximations and generalities, in

making what is dissimilar look similar; it will always have to diminish

the differences of motives and instigations so as to exhibit the effectus

monumentally, that is to say as something exemplary and worthy of

imitation, at the expense of causae: so that . . . one might . . . call it a

collection of “effects in themselves”, of events which will produce an

effect upon all future ages. (70)

Monumental history serves as an “effect in itself” without taking the linkage with the

cause into account. Function is more important than the significance. With the

establishment of a monument, the representation of the past can be united—through

negotiation, coercion, or oppression—to a single one. As a result, to produce one

monument, one has to dispense a sum of historical narratives. Monument grants a

sense of security because the embodiment of a memory ensures its stability. The

establishment of monument is to a certain extent the manipulation of the politics in

memory and history.

The “situatedness” in the present, or the milieux de memoire for Nora, is totally

stripped out and is replaced by an institutional production of knowledge. Likewise,

Andreas Huyssen “[T]he only monument that counts is the one already imagined as

ruin” (Huyssen 197). It is very ironic to formulate the present when renouncing the

present. The monument must not have connection to the present whose vitality and

instability undermine its authority (Huyssen 199). In the monumental history, the

greatness of the past is fetishized, so does the traumatic event with its intensity in the

traumatic memory.

When Tara confesses to Bim that she feels sorry for deserting Bim when the bees

attacked them, Bim tells her that she almost forgets that event. Though released, Tara

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is still impelled by the need of “[asking] for forgiveness and understanding, not

simply for forgetfulness and incomprehension” (Desai 1980:150). What Tara really

feels sorry for is that she escapes during the happening of the serial traumatic events.

However, since Raja had blamed on Tara for Bim’s injury, she has assumed her

situation in the conspiracy victimized Bim. It is neglected that Tara was a victim in

that attack. Raja’s words combined with Bim’s narrative traumatize Tara deliberately.

Traumatic memory is substituted by an authorized discourse, and it keeps on haunting

the family with a forged redemption. As Nietzsche indicates:

Monumental history is the masquerade costume in which their hatred

of the great and powerful of their own age is disguised as satiated

admiration . . . and muffled in which they invert the real meaning of

that mode of regarding history into its opposite. . . . [T]hey act as

though their motto were: let the dead bury the living. (72)

The idea echoes Huyssen’s: though the goal of building monuments is always

redemption, the ambivalent strategy—re-member the dismembered in order to

dissolve again—sways between forgetting and memory, and confines itself in a

tightened closure of discourse. The family house exhibits a space with engraved

messages which are supposed to be recollected from the past. Trauma takes the

position of the other that the traumatized would not, and can not, access. The void in

the gap of knowledge is left to be taken. The space which is capable of representing

traumatic memory is the monument: it asks the spectator for their subjectivity.

Standing for an idea larger than human is the reason for monument’s grand design.

The crisis of modern India is the indulgence in the establishment of a nation-state.

The spatial representation of the house in Clear Light of Day is a hegemonic historical

discourse. Hindu nationalists occupy the position to articulate and to build up their

authorial discourse. The manipulation of monumental history is dangerous to the

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development of India. The monumental seduction brings not the redemption, but the

further exploitation by the dominating discourse (Huyssen 199). When the greatness

is made up of exclusion and manipulation, when people always look back, setting the

model in the past, history will have been trapped in repetitive haunting of the past.

Conclusion

At the end of the fiction, Bim has an insightful consideration on the family

relationship. She realizes that diversion of identification does not separate the family.

A shared memory that connects them displays itself as the essential truth of India:

her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as

well as her whole family with all their separate histories and

experiences—not binding them within some dead and airless cell but

giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, and food to

make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new

lives . . . . (Desai 1980:182)

Not until then does Bim release herself from the obsession with her family’s

conversion to the Hindu traditional, to the rootedness. Freed from bond, she accepts

the value, the life, and the experience her families have. She realizes the connection

among the family members is not a coercion of assimilating identity, but tolerance and

memory which will survive the interference of varieties. Likewise, Tara positively

recognizes the connection between Bim and herself even though other people see only

their differences. She admits they “have everything in common. That makes [them]

one” (Desai 1980:162). The connection has its common cultural memory and the

mutual understanding that goes beyond difference of position.

Desai shows compassion toward both the Hindu and the Muslim. She envisions

the ideal future of India, at least the India portrayed in 1970s in Clear Light of Day, to

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be a re-united family of people with diverse ideals and tendencies. Tara looks forward

to taking the family reunion as an opportunity to make up their relationship. For India,

an optimistic solution can be understood as establishing a nation embracing the

varieties. However, a desire for homogeneity like the fatal attraction of the well lying

in the house desperately eliminates dissimilar elements.

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Chapter Two

The Duel Cities: Colonial Design and Local Realities

Introduction

From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, India had presented itself as a

great part in the economic and social reformations of the British Empire. It provides,

on the one hand, abundant sources of material and labor enabling the industrial

societies to catch up with the step of technological development and, on the other

hand, a sufficient market for Britain to export the surplus of production, even that of

manpower engendered by the replacement of machine and overseas factory for British

labor. Britain exploited material and marketing profit for four centuries, during which

its position had changed from a mere imperial trading company, the EIC, to a colonial

governor, taking the local affairs of Indian colony into the discussion of British

domestic council. When Queen Victoria became the coronated Empress of India in

1858, after the appeasement of Indian mutiny, India was charted as the territory of the

British Raj. British social laws, culture, and frontier explorers were transported, with

cargos and military forces, to India. Britain considered establishing India in order to

facilitate ruling. Not until 1911, when the riots in Calcutta were too frenetic to tackle,

did the British government came up to the idea of building a new capital in south-west

Delhi. New Delhi was meant to substitute the ancient capital Old Delhi while

retaining the same, if not with additional, grandeur. Moreover, the Britain had a

design to make New Delhi a showcase of modernist capital to demonstrate the

achievement of British Empire.

This chapter investigates that the homogeneity in the Britain’s utopia

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imagination10 and the destined collapse of the colonial determination due to local

resistance. British government with the homogeneous mentality assimilated different

elements in Indian colony through meticulous operation of governmentality. In

establishing New Delhi to be the new capital, the British government expresses its

determination in colonizing the Indian colony. Michel Foucault indicates:

[Cities] with the problems that they raised, and the particular forms

that they took, serve as the models for the governmental rationality that

was to apply to the whole of the territory. (Rabinow 241)

In other words, the whole Indian territory should observe New Delhi as a destined

future out of the colonial design. Desai does not focus on the description of the

cityscape of New Delhi; nevertheless, the operation of the governmentality can still be

detected from the manipulation of the Independence and the Partition. In Part One of

Clear Light of Day, Bim compares the rigorous New Delhi and the decaying Old

Delhi with lament and resentment. The New Delhi that Bim described to the

contemporary 1970s was not the exact city the British colonizer wanted it to be, but a

synthetic space generated from the confrontation of British modernization and Indian

traditional cultures. This chapter explores, on the one hand, Britain’s governmental

techniques in establishing New Delhi as the show case of modernist city in India

colony, and the resisting power embedded in Old Delhi as a symbol of the local

heterotopian space on the other.

Colonial Design of Modernist Utopia

Colonialization as well as imperial exploration is the realization of a 10 In analyzing the utopia imagination in textual space, Louis Marin takes Thomas More’s Utopia to

exemplify the travelogue transforms “geographical inscription into discourse.” The places that are constructed to resemble the circularity in the transformation include America, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Calcutta, and Portugal. Among them, Calcutta and Ceylon were parts of Indian territory in the sixteenth century, and had been British colony respectively from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. See Marin’s Utopics (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanity Books, 1984) 42-48.

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profit-oriented utopian imagination. The Britain sailed out either to discover or to

create an overseas paradise. The significance of utopic impulse could be divided into

the active desire for a new world and the passive escapism to avoid present condition.

Utopia poses itself in an excursive or diverse branch outside the chronological

development of history. In other words, Utopia is not the natural result of the

development of history. Instead, it is something beyond formulation of natural laws

because it is planed, well-organized to assemble the desiring elements and to exclude

the unwanted ones. The wall is a crucial element in utopia imagination. The wall

fences the desired and wards off the unwanted, and it ensures that the closure of the

system is a stable one. Utopia is such a homogeneous society that any intrusion of

difference would destroy it.11

The characteristics of utopian imagination mark India as an overseas paradise for

exploitative British Empire. To a certain extent, New Delhi is the realization of the

modernist utopia promoted by the British Raj. It is a foreign place with diverting

history outside the linear pattern of British domestic history. The most eminent feature

of this utopia is the artificial design within the border as an enclave. The city is

oriented from a two-dimensional blueprint regardless of the demography and the

socio-political condition, and is to be realized in the corporeal three-dimensional

space. Abstract space which presents itself with maps has “homogeneity as its goal”

(Lefebvre 287), that is, the hegemony of the discourse of British modernization. The

new city, as a product, is endowed with tons of messages to support the British

domination. The deceiving transparency of British hegemony is practiced with the

institutionalization of education, economic activities, and social behaviors. In Clear

11 Marin Mentions that the “harmonious totality” in utopic description is a consequence of neutralizing the contradictory poles (53-54). For Isaiah Berlin, the stability of a utopia results from the perfection of the people and the system:” there is no need for novelty or change; no one can wish to alter a condition in which all natural human wishes are fulfilled.” See Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Vintage, 1992) 20.

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Light of Day, the two time frames, the 1940s and the 1970s, neither provide direct

evidence of the operation of the Britain’s ruling techniques, nor represent the exact

image of the city generated from the governor’s plan. Nevertheless, since city space

accumulates messages in buildings, human activities, and social lives which serve as

the tunnel of time, the cityscapes allow the reader to recollect and to reconstruct the

imperial vision.

Steven Legg in his Spaces of Colonialism analyzes how British government

constructed New Delhi to be a showcase of modernist city. He declares that:

New Delhi can be read as a space of sovereignty in at least three respects.

Firstly, the capital transfer marked an undemocratic decision by the ultimate

authorities in the Empire to construct a new city. Secondly, the landscape

aesthetic of the city represented the “peaceful domination” of the Indian

people. Finally, New Delhi has masterfully exerted its sovereignty over

colonial urban historiography, establishing itself not only as a landform of

utmost academic importance, but also as a self-contained city with

sovereign boundaries and a clear distinction from the neighboring city of

“Old Delhi.” (Legg 29)

The domination over the Indian people is “peaceful” because the sovereignty is

“ultimate” and overwhelming. New Delhi is taken over by such an imposing power

that marks it out as a highly developed and fully controlled domain. The plan of the

establishment of New Delhi reveals it a centralization center; moreover, the plan

implies a tendency of homogeneity. On the one hand, the relocation of the capital in

New Delhi clarifies the crisis of British government in Calcutta before 1911. The riots

in Calcutta forced the British government to rethink the mode of governmentality as

well as the local reality: conflicts between different ethnic groups, wars between

castes, and even the mutiny against the British government. The result of establishing

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a capital of western style instead of compromising to the local Indian circumstances

was a further step towards the homogeneity of the western. On the other hand, the city

design declares the Britain’s determination to recapture the homage from Indian

people through setting a model for the rest of the colony.

Foucault analyzes the domination of institutions that formulate and assimilate the

individual. His “Docile Bodies” illustrates that the taming of the body has a goal to

endow the subjected the greatest capability and flexibility to serve the conductor. The

control claims a certain space, a group of people, and finally a particular model for the

target body. The methods, “which made possible the meticulous control of the

operation of the body” and “which assured the docility-utility,” are what Foucault

names disciplines (Rabinow 181). In appearance, it is the body which is analyzed,

reconstructed, and redefined to be enlisted in the production. Body, visible and thus

carrying messages, can be deceptive (Lefebvre 287). Tracing back and exploring deep

down to the ground, Foucault’s essay demonstrates that the manipulation of the mind,

not the body, is the very cause to all the consequential effects. The meticulous and

continuous exercise of the taming skills working in the mind will come out with the

body (Rabinow 183-84). Fulfilling requirement of the two presupposing skills,

discipline is undoubtedly issued out with institutional organizations.

The most apparent instance of discipline, even to the lexical degree, is the

operation of the mission school. The “sober, disciplined missionary school” (Desai

1980:124) run by the missionary ladies communicates the value of academic studies,

athletic bodies, domestic craftsmanship, and, most of all, obedience. Bim gets used to

and feels free to the set of evaluation. Desai does not clarify what kind of heroine Bim

wanted to be until the unveiling the western educational institute in Part Three

(1980:126). The names—Nightingale and Joan of Arc—remind us that the

educational material are chosen to formulate a group of ideal citizen. Tara, on the

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contrary, thinks the requirements at school alienating and horrifying. As she implied

twenties later that she had enough of the austere discipline:

I couldn’t have stood college—not Indraprastha College, just down the

road, no further. And the high walls, and the gate, and the hedges—it

would have been like school all over again. I couldn’t have borne

that—I had to escape. (Desai 1980:156)

The trained mind of Bim regards Tara an “anti-social misery,” and the misery, like a

disease, is “contagious” (Desai 1980:125). Education institutionalizes the conception

of the colonized. The western-centered mentality issued with the constant allusions of

English verses of the Anglo and the American poets like Byron, Tennyson, and Eliot.

The verses communicate the value of democracy and the universality of humanity.

However, democracy and the postulate of universality inevitably lead to the worship

of western enlightenment, and eventually of the government wielding such a set of

political philosophy.

City, as the model of a country, is a matrix of discourses, a tremendous

institution. The social activities of the upper-middle class, such as the match-making

picnic in Lodi Garden, were still taking place in New Delhi in the 1940s when the

riots were at hand. Enclosed by circular Connaught Circus, the Connaught Place was

known for the market, the movie theater, the bookstore that sold English books, the

American Army who came there for refill during the war, and the travel agency

providing services for international traveler after the Independence and the Partition.

The Misra brothers’ wives went to New Delhi, because they “wanted the new life,

they wanted to be modern women” (Desai 1980:151). In addition, the wives “cut their

hair short and give card parties, or open boutiques or learn modeling,” as the western

women did (Desai 1980:151).

On the contrary, Old Delhi was the concentration for the marginalized and the

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excluded. When the Hindu in Delhi district wanted to spend time with friends or to

talk about business, they went to the cinema in Kashmere Gate and non-English club

like the Roshonara. Moreover, it is very ridiculous that even the old-fashioned was

sent to Old Delhi:

In [the Misra sisters’] case, it was the husbands who were too modern,

too smart. They played golf and they danced and gave cocktail parties.

Imagine, poor Jaya and Sarla who only ever wanted to knit them

sweaters and make them pickles. They soon came home to Papa and

Mama—were sent home, actually. (Desai 1980:151)

The modern and the traditional are separated even though they are members of the

same family. It is very clear that modernization and westernization had become a new

paradigm in classification.

In the description of the early childhood dreams of the second generation of the

Das, Desai adopts western items and figures to portray the children’s desires for the

other. The prototype of the hero for Raja is precisely the Romantist hero, Byron, to

whom he projected the climax of his future. The pink roses that Tara and her mother

dreamed of in the Hyder Alis’ garden are compared to “the flounced skirts of English

dolls” (Desai 1980:102). Tara always longs for curly “golden locks of fairy-tale

heroines”; though golden is too much, she wants her hair at least to be curly (Desai

1980:118). As for Baba, he is, after the moving out of the Hyder Alis, totally

fascinated to the gramophone endlessly releasing American pop-music. Even though

the influence of western culture could be detected from the main characters’ thoughts,

words, and behaviors, the most demonstrating representation would be the

disciplinary design to promote and to sustain the governmentality.

In addition to discipline that models the citizen, regulation plays a great part to

ensure the homogeneity of the city. Regulation expels the insufficient, the excessive,

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and the different. Those who can not fit in the model are either excavated or cast

outside of the boundary. In the novel, there is a hedge with the gardens of the Hindu

and of the Muslim at either side. On the side of the Hindu there are disease, mental

disability, infertility, and an obsession with the past. Those are unwanted elements for

the British government. On the other side of the hedge, which is of the Muslim, the

glory in language, fine arts, and economics are left aside for the urgent need of safety.

The suspicious atmosphere generated from the inter-racial conflicts hovers over the

hedge. What is worth noticing is that both the Hindu and the Muslim inhabited in the

suburban; they are excluded outside the city.

During the Independence and the Partition, the regulation forces including the

police and the military were all out to support the curfew enacted by the British

government who was prepared to hand the dominating power to the Indian Congress

Party, later the Indian government. Mostly constituted by the Hindu, the Indian

government proved itself a proper successor to the British government. Refugee

camps were set up to concentrate rather than shelter the Muslim waiting to be escorted

to Muslim inhabitants. The double regulations—the one kept out the non-western

elements and the other excluded the Muslim from the territory which is once their

homeland—display the British government and the Indian government’s shared goal

in homogeneity. They also confirm the British’s achievement in disciplining the

colony.

Heterotopias as Local Realities

The resisting forces are embedded in the suburban space, the unnoticed corners,

even the spectacle when the regulation forces are in decline. Poverty, disease, and

elements of difference are excluded from the urban space and, gathering together,

form a voice quite opposite to the domineering propaganda. The realization of utopia

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imagination in New Delhi is a symbol of the British government’s

modernization-oriented policy of Indian colony. Desai represents the decadence of the

Old Delhi both in the spatial dimension, and the temporal consideration:

Old Delhi dose not change. It only decays. [Bim’s] student tell [her] it

is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping

graves. . . . [N]othing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened

long ago—in the time of the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Sultanate, the

Moghuls—that lot. . . . And then the British built New Delhi and

moved everything out. Here [they] are left rocking on the backwaters,

getting duller and greyer . . . Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes

away—to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They

don’t come back. (Desai 1980:5)

In this narrative, Old Delhi symbolizes the underdeveloped, the outdated, and the

immobile in India. It is compared to a cemetery in which the glorious and the great

are buried and are dead. In addition, most of the resource and the energy were sent to

New Delhi; not much thing was there to maintain or to regenerate the achievement of

the ancient capital. Though it has the monumental function that records and preserves

valuable philosophy, art, and culture, the kings were gone, and the promising young

people has been leaving. Bim resents that no matter how often the expatriates visit

India, they don’t come back, just becoming travelers.

For the Indians, New Delhi was a foreign element occupying the central part of

the country. New Delhi was leveled with England, Canada, and even Middle East. It

stands for the British by the British government. Built in Delhi district, New Delhi

absorbed most of the resources and attention, making its neighboring city parish. The

conflicts weaving out through the whole India had their roots in the center. The

British threat from within was an obvious target for the protesters. To divert the

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resisting power, British government manipulated the contest between the Hindu and

the Muslim. The strategy—to divide and to rule—did work to diminish the intensity

of Hindu protests. Likewise, exclusion and alienation in regulation reflected the

British’s fear of the revolts from the local. However, the marginalized and the

excluded were not disappeared; the resisting forces of the local Indian gathered

outside the city revitalized, representing themselves counter-discourse to the

dominating modernist discourse.

“Of Other Spaces,” Foucault’s essay on spatial representation of power system,

displays the undercurrent institutionalization of culture formulation. He points out that

the attachment of ideas to spaces is a myth that makes up various kinds of

oppositions:

[We] may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification

of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of

oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices

have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard

as simple givens: for example between private space and public space,

between family space and social space, between cultural space and

useful space . . . All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of

the sacred. (Foucault 1986:23)

The analysis of a ritualized perception of space highlights the subjective links

between space and the additional values. That New Delhi is the realization of the

westernized, modernist utopia, and that other places stand for the counter-discourse of

utopia are generated by the myth of binary opposition. For local Indians, New Delhi

as a utopia was arguable. With diverse values and conditions, different groups of

people have various versions of utopia. The garden of the Hyder Alis is a miniature of

a utopia for the Das: Mrs. Das and Tara envy the blooms of roses; Raja wishes to be a

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member of the Muslim poets and scholars gathering in the afternoons in the garden.

Nevertheless, there is always a wall dividing the utopia and the reality which claims

the opposition of the discourse and the counter-discourse. According to Foucault, the

counter-discourse to utopia is heterotopia that is existed in reality,

and that are formed in the very founding of society-which are

something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in

which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the

culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places

of this kind are outside of all places . . . Because these places are

absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about,

I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (1986: 24)

Quite opposite to the homogeneous utopia, heterotopias perform itself with

multiplicity and heterogeneity. In appearance, the city planning of New Delhi

illustrates the determination of the British colonizer to build a modernized capital, a

vision of the future, of the westernization. Actually, the cultivation of the western

value negated the local culture of India. The significance of the Jumna River—a

sacred river that contained the live and death of the Indian—was sorted out, and was

commodified by the scientific analysis. With the water and mud of the Jumna River,

the Britain made up a religion of modernity, of Western enlightenment. Life, myth,

and political philosophy of the Indian were substituted by the regulative power of the

British colonizer. However, in the suburban district which is the margin and the blind

spot of the social law, the excluded and the unwanted elements celebrated their vitality.

Old Delhi is the embodiment of the Foucauldian heterotopias in the novel.

The description of Old Delhi portrays multiple facets of modern India. The

ancient capital’s corruption implies the discontinuity of Indian sovereignty and culture

which is unprecedented. The ancient capital functions as a storehouse of the past of

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India. Apparitions wandering in the old house deepen the incomprehensibility of the

city and imply its powerlessness of returning to the circuit of history:

[Tara] could not free herself of them, or this shabby old house that

looked like a tomb in the moonlight, a whitewashed tomb rising in the

midst of the inky shadows of trees and hedges, so silent—everyone

asleep, or stunned by moonlight (159).

Old Delhi as well as the other part of India leads a life knowledgably inaccessible for

the Britain. It is a space of heterogeneity beyond regulation and discipline. The

presence of India with its primitivism and irrationality challenges the colonizer’s

confidence in promoting modernity.

The existential dilemma a person encounters between the trends of

modernization, sneaking in with imperial exploitation, and of nostalgia for tradition is

exactly the difficulty India faces. Aunt Mira and Bim separately take up the roles of

traditional India: the former for its antiqueness and the later nostalgia. Aunt Mira—a

widow deserted by her husband’s family, finding a shelter in her cousin’s house, and

was eventually left behind—is an embodiment of India with its dry, unfavorable,

outmoded conventions. She is a property of her husband’s family, an item that dealing

with housing works, being debased until the Das finds her useful as a babysitter and

an elder company to their children. She is not bright, not worth respect as the children

expected, and, for the children, can barely reach the standard of either a wife or a

mother. Nevertheless, the new life in the Das family fulfills Aunt Mira’s need to

become desirable. She projects her image on that of a bridal cow which is graceful,

abundant, and motherly to a baby bull. Traditional Indian is graceful and abundant in

itself until the fatal call of the modernization and westernization that drown it in a

well and leave it rotten there.

Bim resembles traditional India with a comparably modern face. She grew up in

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a Hindu family, learned English poetry with her elder brother, self-educated in Urdu,

and at last decided to study and then to teach Indian history. In other words, she is of

the local party in contrasting to the westernized, and to the expatriate, parties. Bim

lamented the decay of Old Delhi, the ancient capital in which the ghost of Aunt Mira

lingered and disappeared if one tried to look at it directly. Bim knew in heart that the

family members share the same destiny and each of them was eventually going to end

in the black well. One might question the possibility for Bim to accept and to enter

into the modernist stage. At the end of the fiction, when realizing her attachment to all

her family members, be them with traditional custom or with modernist life-style,

Bim apprehended that the diversity of her family was natural and unavoidable. Thus,

she conceives an integrated vision of promising India comprising of its multiplicity in

race, religion, cultural identification, and so forth.

The manipulation of the British enhanced the conflicts between Hindu and

Muslim become tangible, and moved them from center to periphery of the territory

during the revolutions. Wall ensures the stability of the power structure and safety of

different racial groups. Mr. and Mrs. Das, playing bridge and visiting clubs very often,

were not members of those British Clubs; the clerk in Hyder Ali’s library and Aunt

Mira felt uneasy about Raja’s frequent presence in Hyder Ali’s house. The line

between races, at least for the first generation, was unable to cross. Ironically, when

building a wall to ward in a new social order, the British broke the some of the old

borders. The ruling of the British pushes from center to most of the colony through

education and law to discipline and normalize the colony. Afterwards, during the

revolutions, the boundaries were rebuilt by the local people on purpose to eliminate

the British governor. Race, in the beginning, does not serve as the essential element to

direct the blueprint of the political boundary. The Indian Republic, taking New Delhi

to be its ready capital, was meant to embrace the variety of the religious and racial

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groups in the subcontinent. However, the impact of nationalism which came to India

along with the political enlightenment during the British Raj has claimed for building

a homogeneous political organization, a nation-state.

After Britain’s moving out, the dialectic power structure as a problem soon

transfers from the British government to the Indian government. The transition of

sovereignty was followed by a new set of riots. After a short period of semi-anarchy,

the battlefront of discourses moves from center to the periphery, and the national

enemy turns from the Britain to the Muslim. The Muslim who left their property in

India, under the surveillance of Hindu government was problems to the Hindu

governmentality. Hyder Ali moved out to Hyderabad before the revolution. Most of

his estates were sold for next to nothing. However, it is the rented house that causes

lasting clash between Raja and Bim. Desai poses the house in a very intriguing

position. First, the ownership of the house is not correspondent to the right of usage.

Secondly, the ownership of the house is legally, not without question, handed from a

Muslim to a Hindu. In addition, those who survived from hazardous migration from

Hindu provinces threaten the production of Indian as a nation-state. The demand for

homogeneity launched again wars between opposing racial and religious groups. The

relocation or the re-charting of Indian political geography is mainly based on the

redistribution of population. Through the parallel narratives of the present situation

and the nostalgic reminisce of the past, Desai reveals the transformation of India from

a fusion of multiplicity to an approximate nation-state. From colonial period to

post-Independence, India remapped its cultural, migration territory as its

politico-geographical one.

Before accessing the core issue of India’s condition, it is inevitable to encounter

some essential questions: what is India, and who represents India? If it is true that the

identity of individual person is a construction of his or her memory, would it be also

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true that the identity of a nation its history? What kind of history is it that counts at the

present and determines the future of a nation/colony, the history of the colonizer or of

the colonized? The answers to these questions lie in the incompatibility between the

imagined homogeneous space and the concrete space that contains flows of ideologies.

Foucault agrees with Bachelard that “we do not live in a homogeneous and empty

space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps

thoroughly fantasmatic as well” (Foucault 1986: 23). The essential reality of India is

its diversity and multiplicity.

Tara, coming back to the old family house in Delhi after the migration to western

modern cities, encounters the difficulty in taking a position between the life-style in

traditional India and the principle of western world. She assesses India with idea

derived from the western. Tara surprisingly understands that Bim is not that neat and

ordered as she had perceived. The servants there in the family house are not in the

right place; the rooms are kept as they had been when there parents are alive;

everything here is in a mess. The homeland with its tradition is not an ordered,

disciplined, comprehensible place as the western countries. However, she has seen not

merely shift of historiography, the residential redistribution, and local people’s revolt

against the British government. She has also seen the diversion and fusion of cultures,

each of them has its own precious value.

The Synthetic Space

Fredric Jameson reads third-world literature as national allegory, and the

situation of separation of the Das family is allegorical to the Partition of the nation.

The revolution against British domination follows the European mode: patriotisms

and nationalism was escorted by the pursuit for independence and liberation. The

establishment of an independent nation-state covers a plan to split this country into

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parts. The forces that drive the Das away from their house are the same that shatters

the country: except that the former are concrete, tangible, and practical while the latter

are constructed by deliberate calculation and panoramic estimation. The function and

spectacle of a space reflect the operation of power. The British government with it

sovereign power experimented modernization on Indian colony. It evacuated the

religious myth, social conventions, and local people from the new capital and refilled

in the city space with modernism and western social order. The ruling class extended

the control from general structure to the very detail of the reining field. They needed a

complete system to execute the power structure, in order to put everything in regular

track. In fact, power structure consists of two parties: the liberal individuals and the

subordinated. In this case, the British who has the power confirms the situation with

all the possible policies, and the Indians who wields revolutionary activities as riots

and incorporation movements. Nevertheless, the dialectical relations of the dominant

and the resistance inevitably develop the space of interlocution, and a negotiation

in-between that relocates the racial, the political, and the cultural boundary.

Situating south-west to Old Delhi, New Delhi occupied most of the resources

and attention from the colonial governor. As a side-effect, the activities and the

development in Old Delhi shrank due to the centripetal urbanization in its

neighborhood. Yet the eventual realization of the colonial design is a synthetic city:

“Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they

describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping

place” (Desai 1980:5). The prosperity with disorder is the achievement of the

combination of the modernist plan and the operation by local people. The new capital

is a synthesis of the utopia and the heterotopias. Foucault says:

I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these

heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which

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would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a

placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal,

virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there

where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself,

that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the

utopia of the mirror. (1986: 24)

In other words, New Delhi can be comprehended as the combination of a perfect,

abstract, “placeless place” and an inventive, existent, heterogeneous space.12 Tara,

Bakul, and their children visit India and many other countries. When coming home,

they bring modernity to the enclosed, adding the traditional Indians with hue western

enlightenment. Desai portrays Dr. Biswas and Old Misra as the first generation

expatriates. The Indians had training overseas came back to India with altering sense

of evaluation toward their native culture and tradition.

Even during the British Raj, there were still discourses wield over India other

than discourse of Euro-centric ideology. The collapse of the city border signifies the

transition of domineering power—the degrading British government is replaced by

rising forces of the Hindu and the Muslim. The New Delhi that Bim mentioned is a

synthetic space rising from the fusion of the modern and the traditional, the material

and the spiritual, conflicts. The political center has never been a void during the

power transition because of the continuity of the colonial parliament as the legacy of

British Raj. Aside from the majority of Hindu population, the Indian governors do

take the varieties of language, religion, race and class into consideration while

conducting the law of domination.

When being examined by Bakul—apparently represents a brilliant face of India

12 The comparison of New Delhi to the Foucauldian mirror is ambiguous: for the later, subject and

object in the reflection are identical and coexisted, a simultaneity existence; as for the former, the design and the realization are not highly identical.

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made up by the government to exhibit in metropolitan states—Tara simply retrieves to

the timid, hysteric Indian girl. However, she sometimes recognizes herself as part of

India with pride. She wishes Bakul and their children see her messed up with the

Indian fellows in a feeling of free and ease. A westernized India-born Indian Tara is.

The conflict of Tara’s ambiguous identity dissolves when the gathering of Bim, Baba,

and Tara’s daughters brings up an epiphany that having a clear cut between the

western and the Indian is not necessary. The diversity and the transformation of India

are naturally the Indian present, and will be a part of Indian history.

Clear Light of Day is published in 1980, a few years after the independence of

Bangladesh. The present events in the novel, approximately taking place in 1970s, are

ironically focused on a coming family reunion after a long interval of separation for a

marriage of Moyna, hybrid of Hindu and Muslim,13 one member of the third

generation of the Das family. The serial reactions have prolonged impact even in the

twentieth century southern-Asian situation. Independent revolutions appear to be the

immediate cause of all the following drastic conflicts. Yet there is a far cause for the

retaining conflicts: the multiplicity and heterogeneity of race, religion, and culture.

People in the Indian subcontinent had never established a united political organization

before British Raj. Instead, India had been recognized as a fusion of its inhabitants

regardless of their varieties.14 Following the allegorical implication of the novel, one

consequential interpretation of the family reunion could be a promising redemption.

Indians will gather together with certain degree of understanding and compromise.

Conclusion

13 The intermarriage between Hindu and Muslim is very exceptional during the revolutions. 14 Hindu is the majority among Indian people and claimed they right to rule India. This majority

mentality leads to an inference that the independence of Pakistan, under the manipulation of the British, is a betrayal to India. On the other hand, the Muslim emigrants who left their properties and estates suffer from religions as well as racial intolerance.

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The contrasting conditions of the New Delhi and the Old Delhi manifest first, the

determination of building a modernist city as a superior substitute for the previous

political and commercial center Calcutta, and secondly, the resisting forces of the

local culture. By relocating the government and political resources to New Delhi, the

British reconstructed a colonial history which was an extension of English history. In

appearance, the development of history braked in Old Delhi. Deserted but not totally

excluded, Old Delhi represented the real life—mostly riots and protests instead of

order and discipline—in India rather than that of the imperial imagination. New Delhi

was built to facilitate the domination of India, and to practice the divide-and-rule

strategy to weaken the protesting power from the Hindu. Now it resembles the

remnant of English government and its plan to build a simulating metropolitan city in

the third-world. After the Partition, Britain’s prosperous vision of hegemony is

terminated and replaced by Indian multiplicity and heterogeneity. The exclusion of

different element, the executive of hegemony endures till the last moment of Britain’s

domination.

Eventually, Indian Independence and the Partition of Pakistan redistribute the

population and draw a set of new boundaries as a thesis that invites challenges and

relegates the conflict from center to the periphery. Politico-geographical distribution

is improper, outdated in post-colonial period. The map of Indian migration, including

Hindu, Muslim, and so forth, represents the trail of culture and trauma, the

elimination and establishment of boundary. The destined partition can be analyzed

from a viewpoint other than trauma studies, that is, from cultural study and diaspora

study. The actions of the family embody the qualities such as dissemination,

heterogeneity, and hybridity of Indian culture, not to mention Indian people. Land

remains, but the map changes from time to time, and the people are always on the

move. The mapping of the Indian is of mobility, the tension between its extensive and

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contractive motivation which can be traced up to the internal as well as external

diaspora.

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Chapter Three

“The Eternal India” in Diaspora: The Dislocation of Culture

Introduction

Bakul and Tara, the main characters in Clear Light of Day, go back from

Washington to India every three years to keep contact with their relatives and, for

Bakul, not to fail the diplomatic mission. One afternoon, in a gathering with the

Misras, one older brother of the Misras asked Bakul how he coped with the questions

on the political situation in India. Bakul’s answer involves a division between

diplomatic exhibition and the repressed, confined reality. Bakul said:

What I feel is my duty, my vocation, when I am abroad, is to be my

country’s ambassador. All of us abroad are, in varying degrees,

ambassadors. I refuse to talk about famine or drought or caste wars

or . . . political disputes. . . . I refuse to discuss such things. “No

comment” is the answer if I am asked. I can discuss such things here,

with you, but not with foreigners, not in a foreign land. There I am an

ambassador and I choose to show them and inform them only the best,

the finest. (Desai 1980:35)

The representation of India splits into two contradictory discourses: the diplomatic

propaganda releasing by Indians abroad, the “ambassadors,” and the local reality

which should be kept among Indians. Bakul regards “local politics, party disputes,

election malpractices, Nehru, his daughter, his grandson” to be oblivious matters

while comparing with “eternal India” which includes “[the] Taj Mahal—the Bhagavad

Gita—Indian philosophy—music—art—the great, immortal values of ancient India”

(Desai 1980:35). Ironically, the “eternal India” is a totality of selective items for the

whole—temporally as well as spatially—India while the present calamity is

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intentionally neglected.

The fracture between the narrative and the object reveals the compromise of the

minority to the grand narrative. Critics of the post-colonialist studies sort out the term

“Third World” to categorize the newly-established, decolonizing, countries. While

Indian intellectual adopt that term and estimate India as one of the third-world

countries, they consciously or unconsciously locate India in the place of “other,” an

antithesis and a complementary narrative to the first-world discourse. The shift of

speculating perspective generated by the encounter of different ideologies has a

consequence of the dislocation of home, the reform of identification politics.

This chapter examines Bakul’s diplomatic discourse in terms of the intellectual

hegemony in diaspora. The resorting to monumentality, the ancient glory, falls short in

explaining the diversion of discourses. It is, according to Rey Chow, rather a result of

“the lures of diaspora” upon intellectuals in diaspora condition. This chapter also aims

at exploring the transitive position of India in the post-colonial period by examining

the construction of modern Indian history as well as of its identity. Nationalism

besieges Indian people’s essential concept of subjectivity. Would it be Indian history

or English history that the Indians inherit? Though Desai declares her intention to

portray the psychic life of individual Indian (Jussawalla 167), Clear Light of Day

nevertheless can be read as a political text in post-colonial studies on modern Indian

history. Taking the history from British Occupation to post-Independent/post-Partition,

period as its background, Clear Light of Day reveals the unsteady social situation as

well as tumultuous political condition. The oppression, if not the attraction, of the

western evaluation edges the traditional India to a negligible corner. Even after the

Independence, the authority tends to recognize India as a modernized institution. As

for the India which is mythic, inactive, and having its philosophy of life deeply-rooted

in sufferings, the authority decides to prove it with the real life of Indian people

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instead of transcribing it with languages other than Indian languages. Modern India is

internally established by the British as well as the multiple ethnic and religious groups

while externally an illusion constructed by a conspiracy of the British and Indian

reigning powers.

There is discontinuity in the development of the mode of production in modern

India from peasant economy to industrial factories. While the colonizer extends the

western modes of production and culture, his history with political discourse also

extends to the colony. The collision between the First and the Third Worlds finds a

stage in literature—novel, to be specific—in which the life and culture of the

colonized are retained. Third-world literature preserves a viewpoint and particular

evaluation with which the colonized continues to articulate a history other than that of

the colonizer. Jameson points out the double perspectives in the third-world literature.

Bhabha’s theory echoes Jameson’s colonial observation with assertions on “split

truth” or “double frames” in colonial novels. Walter Benjamin asserts “there is no

document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”

(256). It suggests the equalization of the colonized history to England’s periphery

history. The assimilation of colony with the dominating discourse and the

implantation of the colonizer’s history are problematic.

The main issue of Clear Light of Day is focuses on the struggle of the characters’

identification with various cultures—including that of the colonizer, the colonized,

and the Indian people migrated outside Indian subcontinent. Identity serves as a

hetero-genealogical space of cultures. Identity is a battlefield in which confrontations

happen, especially during colonial and post-colonial period. The fundamentalist

identification, including race-oriented identity or the religion-oriented identity, is a

myth. Desai reveals the identity crisis of modern Indian from different perspectives.

Home is the name of the place in which an attachment is (re)built. Bim is thinking

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their family house is deserted; Baba has never left the house; Tara is confused with

her instinctive reaction to the life in Delhi. They share a sense of belongingness

therein their family house.

India encounters a great change in signification in post-colonial period. For the

diasporic Indian, the significance of India as homeland becomes one of the tourist

attractions for the cosmopolitan travelers. From Indian independence revolution to the

post-Partition, Indian people has encountered the crisis of identification. The inability

to answer the question “who am I” would not have been an urgent problem for them if

they had decided the crucial element of their identity performance. However, nothing

can be stuck to when it comes to the issue of identity. For example, the fundamentalist

racists, religious fanatics, and political fanatics prefer to equate identity with race,

religion, and political tendency. The falsity of the equation becomes detectable only

when the encounter of different groups happens. Without discovering difference, one

does not have to prove with whom one is identified. Identity is, in a way, an action of

taking side. One is included in the black community; at the same time, one is

excluded by the white, and the yellow, and the red. One could convert to be a

Christian, or one would be classified as heretic. Binary opposition works on the

imperialist discourse about identity; but not anymore when proceeds to colonial, not

to mention post-colonial, period. There are some primal thoughts about identity:

“identity as a wound” (Spivak 1995:147); identity as meeting spots of cultures (Gates

2); moreover, “identity is territory” (Wise 295). To be brief, identity is to some extend

a space, a battlefield of power.

Cultural identity is no less space-based 15 than ethnic-based. Culture is a

performance of a particular space in which the histories of its people accumulate and

15 The “space” here does not indicate a fixed location or place. I should put the term “community” instead. Yet, I do want the emphasis the spatial dimension in correspondence to the temporal dimension.

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mix. Cross or pass between different cultures brings anxiety for the loss of one’s own

cultural memory, an inheritance that has to be handed down from generation to

generation. Identity thus bears culture as its own right and duty.

The Lures of Diaspora in Diplomatic Discourse

The intellectual hegemony implies the operation of class consciousness limiting

knowledge to the privileged which is cultivated by the dominant to sustain the

division of social classes. As a result of institutionalization and discipline, the

hegemony also ensures the stability of socio-political situation. Chow’s “Against the

Lures of Diaspora” suggests that the production of knowledge in Asian studies risks

the intellectual hegemony. The hegemony of knowledge is not a new issue.

“Intellectuals and Power,” an interview between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,

displays the overwhelming power of the intellectual to define and to claim the

privilege over knowledge (Lotringer 75). What makes Chow’s observation valuable is

the re-discovery of the erased distance which veils the truth and of the totality of the

upper-middle class.

The diasporic intellectual is the privileged class who transfers, translates, and

dominates the knowledge of their native land. With its ideology represented in the

socio-political crisis, the local value which opposes to the western ones is estimated as

dispensable for its appropriation to the major and the modern discourses. Arun P.

Mukherjee’s “Other Worlds, Other Texts,” an observation on cultural difference

obtained from the experience of teaching Canadian students Desai’s Clear Light of

Day, indicates that

Bakul’s view presents the officially sanctioned view of Indian

culture—the culture Indian government exhibits at great cost at Indian

fairs held in New York and Moscow. It is a view of culture frozen in

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the past and unable to encompass “famine or drought caste wars.” And

it is highly selective. (199)

There is always a distance between the representation and the represented object. The

former has a goal to resemble the latter to a certain degree. The representation has to

be recognized as an identical substitution even though interruptions and varieties

happen. At least, the message the representation transferred from the object to the

receiver allows the receiver to recognize the original object. In diasporic condition,

the dissemination of alien elements alien to the western world will survive at the point

of reconciliation and negotiation. An ambassador can be compared to a translator in

that his essential function is to transfer the information of his country to foreign

countries. It is impossible for him to stick to the objective representation due to

cultural difference and the limit of different sets of perception. The features which are

incompatible to the perception of foreign countries are renounced of modified to

facilitate the inter-national, or inter-cultural, communication.

Though Chow focuses on analyzing the hegemony of the intellectual in Chinese

diasporic condition, the situation she reveals in her article is shared by the intellectual

in Indian diaspora. She points out the fractures of knowledge and object in minority

studies that

these intellectuals are not only “natives” but spokespersons for

“natives” in the “third-world.” Currently, the prosperity of that space is

closely tied up with the vast changes taking place in Western academic

institutions, notably in North America, where many intellectuals “of

color” are serving as providers of knowledge about their nations and

cultures. The way these intellectuals function is therefore inseparable

from their status as cultural workers/brokers . . . (164)

To some extend, these intellectuals are those people Bakul calls ambassadors. There is

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nothing to be blamed for a country to issue out political or cultural propaganda.

However, the unequal situations of the countries importing and exporting information

determine different levels of authority of discourses. At the moment of translation, the

authentic has the privilege to sustain its diplomatic discourse while the comparatively

inauthentic is coerced or forced to compromise, to distort in articulation to satisfy the

demanding voice of the authentic, which is the western’s oriental imagination.

The distance between the articulation and the referred object differentiates

international from local knowledge due to the incommensurability of the western’s

third-world imagination. In other words, the “eternal India” in diplomatic narrative is

a camouflage like the white lie that accesses the core of the (post-)colonial narrative.

Colonial history uncovers the cultural and political unconscious of its colonizer.

Assimilation ensures the validity of the colonization. What is repressed or neglected

in domestic literature finds a new stage in foreign lands. Third World mirrors the First

World. The narcissist colonizer assimilates the colonized out of his self-duplication

desire. Without understanding the operation of the tribal, or the bureaucratic, culture

of the colonized, to reign the colony, one can only depend on military forces to

overcome the fear of the other. The colony is then an unknown, dark place; fear

towards the unknown brings about negative imagination of it as barbarious, dangerous,

and yet attractive in inviting exploration and exploitation. The most noticing instance

is Homi Bhabha’s reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which parallels Congo with

London. The tangible scenery serves as the reflection of gloomy, destructive desire:

Marlow’s inward gaze now beholds the everyday reality of the Western

metropolis through the veil of the colonial fantasm . . . . When this

discourse of a daemonic doubling emerges at the very centre of

metropolitan life, then the familiar things of everyday life and letters

are marked by an irresistible sense of their genealogical difference, a

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“postcolonial” provenance. (Bhabha 213)

The connection between the Intended and the African woman, between modern

buildings in London and tribal staves with skulls in Congo represents the metropolitan

and the colony as superimposed. To infer from Bhabha’s words, an exploring voyage

to the darkness on the atlas is also a voyage to the darkness in one’s mind. The jungle

landscape is there to be recognized as psychological landscape of the colonizer

vibrating with desire in exploiting material, labors, as well as in procuring power.

In the Das family, the impact from foreign cultures is first seen in the daily life of

the parents: they go to the English club every night; Mr. Das works in an insurance

company, an institute not common in India.16 Raja, the drastic convent from Hindu to

Muslim, sets a radical case of identity crisis during the time of the Partition.17 Bim

and Aunt Mira take side of the traditional; however, before making the decision in

teaching Indian history, Bim had accepted English education and self-educated Urdu

language and English poetry. Staying at home as a Hindu Indian is Bim’s choice. As

for Tara, she does not bear the struggle of being an Indian or a modern American

citizen in mind until the family reunion is close. Baba, who is neutral to the cultural

and political situation, is comfortably surrounded by American popular music. All

members of the family have different modes of life; nevertheless, they recognize the

belongingness to a family.18

16 In addition to Mr. and Mrs. Das, old Misra and Dr, Biswas show their willing of accepting westernization in learning modern sciences though the former failed and ended in heading toward east instead.

17 To be specific, Raja is rather a hero worshiper than a Muslim follower. He admires the spirit expressed in the poems of Byron and of Iqbal; he becomes Hyder Ali’s inheritance because the latter’s image meets Raja’s heroic imagination. What is unusual is, Hyder Ali invites this Hindu boy to their Muslim gathering and even claims Raja his own heir, taking his property and his daughter. This incidence reveals a connection between the two main ethnic groups, challenging the religious and racial boundary manipulated by the British.

18 Though ethnical origin undoubtedly counts in one’s identification, the main concern of one’s cultural identity is mainly the construction of interactions of a person with the culture in the environment one living in. That is a space, multi-layered in temporality and spatiality like a co-central structure, created by the inhabitants, with their individual features. It would be a mixture of cultural codes and modes of living.

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Representation of India in Third-world Literature

Being situated in the other as a member of the third-world countries, India has a

dilemma in submitting its subjectivity for the visibility in globalization as

post-colonial, yet ongoing imperial, phenomena. The dominating articulation is

always issued from the Western countries such as England, France, and America.

Studies on Asia, Africa, and Latin America which are capitulated with the umbrella of

area studies did not even exist until the two world wars. Fredric Jameson’s

“Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” juxtaposes the study

of literary works with that of the national history. He points out the developments of

the First World and of the Third World are inappropriate to be projected as two points

falling on one single timeline. Societies with different economic and political modes

will develop in different ways.

Jameson explains that “in the third-world situation the intellectual is always in

one way or another a political intellectual” (325) and that “a literary article could be a

political act” (327). In other words, the textual space is actually a battlefield of

struggling ideologies. All literary works are basically allegorical. What is noticing is

the Indian nationalist subject. Influenced by European Romanticism, Indian-English

novels, especially those of the members of first-generation Indian-English novelists,

bear a duty to remind Indian people the difficulty of living under the English

dominating power. While entrusting the nationalist ideology in the form of novel, the

Indian novelists carry also the European mode of nationalism in their literary works.

What is worth noticing is the differentiation in the manifestation of national allegories

in metropolitan states and in the third-world:

Such allegorical structures, then, are not so much absent from

first-world cultural texts as they are unconscious, and therefore they

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must be deciphered by interpretive mechanisms that necessarily entail

a whole social and historical critique of our current first-world

situation. The point here is that, in distinction to the unconscious

allegories of our own cultural texts, third-world national allegories are

conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective

relationship of politics to libidinal dynamics. (Jameson 330)

With an urgent need to call for the awareness of Indian for their colonial situation, the

third-world writers who intentionally presented their works as warning would not hide

the roaring gunshot.

The nation-state mentality contradicts that which constructs the mode of Indian

society. Through the reigns by Greek, Persian, Muslin, Moghul, and English, the tribal

Indians and the Indians following the laws of dominating forces basically sustain their

life-style and their individualities. Even in the British Occupation, the northern Indian

villages maintain their tribal lives only if they admit the authority of British reign. To

procure material and labor with efficient management in the colony, the governor

issues toleration of diversities. Thus, the overall domination covers quite a spectrum

of laws from the empirical regulation to tribal rule. Indian Independence is the most

sophisticated manipulation of the British Raj that assimilates the political and social

system of India, including the present Pakistan, to that of the British. England’s

strategy about the Independence was in contrast to that when the government planed

to have a permanent power over India. The Partition of India drives the Muslims to

the north-west habitation and the west half of Bangladesh. As for those Muslims

living among other ethnics, Hindus especially, are continuously aware the life-threat.

So does the Hindu among the Muslim. Indian intellects recognize that Partition is as

miserable as the split of a family. The separation of the Das family serves as an

allegory to the Partition of India.

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Jameson elaborates the colonial situation and the decolonization of the Third

World which gives rise to a particular political allegory differentiating third-world

literature from that of the First World. He opposes evaluating third-world literature

with the standard in evaluating western canon. Suggesting that it is risky of totality to

taking one standard in estimating both the first-world and the third-world novels,

Jameson is aware of the same risk in the connotation of “third-world.” He clarifies he

is “using the term ‘third world’ in an essentially descriptive sense, and objections to it

do not strike [him] as especially relevant to the argument [he is] making” (318). The

difference between the Third World and the First World lies not in the discrepancy of

time—the latter develops from modern to post-modern and the former appears still in

developing or even underdeveloped. Jameson indicates the shortcoming of applying

the same standard is damaging for “its tendency to remind us of outmoded stage of

our own first-world cultural development” (316). First and Third Worlds are not of

divert stages of one single mode. Their modes of development in economy, society,

and culture are essentially different. Thus the differential situation in the Third World

“challenges [the First World’s] imprisonment in the present of postmodernism and

calls for a reinvention of the radical difference of [their] own cultural past and its now

seemingly old-fashioned situations and novelties” (Jameson 316). The diversity in the

seemingly assimilating structure marks the sharing characteristic of the third-world

districts. The split of the two worlds basically springs up with First World’s fear of the

uncanny. Jameson indicates that

[The First World’s] want of sympathy for these often unmodern

third-world texts is itself frequently but a disguise for some deeper fear

of the affluent about the way people actually live in other parts of the

world—a way of life that still has little in common with daily life in

the American suburb. (316)

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Jameson’s study of the postmodernism is based on the struggle in adopting the

discourse of the third-world into grand narrative of the first-world. The development

of literature in the first-world during great wars is in the modernist stage. The

discovery of consciousness and the unconscious sprang up at the same time with the

exploration of new found lands. Modernism is after all a first-world history in

economics, politics, culture, art, and of course colonization. The development of

third-world literature and its impact on the definition of world literature in

post-colonial period mark the initiation of post-modernist which emancipates

literature and culture from the hold of grand narrative. However, the principle of the

developed countries has implanted in the unconscious of the colonized.

Decolonization is at most striping off the sovereignty of foreign forces; the colonized

follows an amalgamative convention composed by the custom of colonizer and of the

colonized. It would be partial if the study of English history merely focuses on

domestic affairs. The research should also involve the local issues in British colonies

overseas.

Though Jameson explains that the differential features separates third-world

literature from the literature of the First World, Aijaz Amad is worried about the

totality in categorization of world system and the overwhelming power of the theories

constituted by western scholars. To apply the first-world theory is to admit the

legislation of the totality, and therefore allows India to take the third-world position as

an “other” to the developed countries. Bim’s compare and contrast of Old Delhi and

New Delhi regard India as oppose to England, Canada, and even Middle East (Desai

1980:5). Moreover, the traces of those who have training abroad or have diplomatic

missions spread through modern countries including England, German, Russia, and

America (Desai 1980:21). India’s inferiority to those modern countries is emphasized

and exaggerated with ironic tone.

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For the intellectual, the upper-middle class, India takes its position as a member

of the third-world countries and claims legislation in minority studies. Jameson asserts

to read the third-world literary texts as national allegories. Allegorical text gains

flexibility for breaking the “one-to-one table of equivalences” (Jameson 324). The

structure of a literary text is like the structure of sign system: what is represented in

the narrative has a corresponding object. Allegory as a figurative speech diverts the

conventional process of signification to an excursion while retaining the original route.

The affinity between the text and context bears functions of assimilation and division.

On the one hand, the mediating excursion bypasses sharp comments on an event to

observations and associations of critical features of the particular event. Thus, the

private and the public issues, which are severed, can be represented in a dynamic

relationship within textual space: “the story of the private individual destiny is always

an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society”

(Jameson 320). In addition, the allegorical structure breaks the limit of text,

proceeding to the field of national discourse. The background of the novel, with its

major narrative based on the post-colonial time, enables the narrators cast a

retrospective consideration of the colonial situation, an insightful observation to those

once-incomprehensive events. On the other hand, the fluidity in the text-context

correspondence derives a resistance space in the textualization. One private event

resembles more than one political affair, and vice versa. The incomplete or prejudiced

representation of a nation with one or more characters is meant to warding off

unnecessary interruptions to guide the narrative with the author’s ideology.

Modern Indian history embodies the (ex)change of culture whereas the object of

cultural discourse moves from center to the periphery, and then hovering over the

border. The concept in viewing the third-world as a mirroring text of the first-world

(“split truth” and “double frames”) in Bhabha’s article echoes Jameson’s inspection

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on the third-world issue. Jameson questions the essence of Master-Slave relationship

as reflective and mutually dependent. He cites Hegel’s words and elaborates how the

slave functioning in making master of its exploiter:

“The truth of the Master” Hegel observes grimly, “is the Slave; while

the truth of the Slave, on the other hand, is the Master.” But the second

reversal is in process as well: for the slave to called upon to labor for

the master and to furnish him with all the material benefits befitting his

supremacy. But this means that, in the end, only the slave knows what

reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave can attain

some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is

precisely to that that he is condemned. (336)

Accordingly, the master is not absolutely supreme and powerful. The image of a

master is forged by the slave’s imagination. The slave creates his master. In like

manner, the formation of slave is the realization of a dominating mind. The British

imposed its imagination on India, and made India slavery. To satisfy the condition of

imagined master figure, the governing troops are required to be strong, elegant, and

disciplined. The impressive appearance of the British is made up intentionally to meet

the imagination of a god-like ruler.

In addition to military force, the British master took over the colony by

propaganda. The novel displays India as a reflection of England and represents the

entire nation with the diversity of its characters. Jameson’s argumentative articles on

the third-world literature as national allegory motivate post-colonial studies to

interrogate the legitimacy of frenetic nationalism inherited in a hit from Romantist

Europe. India, an independent nation, however, has never disconnected its cultural

and political coil from its substitute genitor—England. Twenty years after the

separation of the family, Bim finds out that she still remembers the poems of Byron,

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of Tennyson, and of Eliot. Years after the end of British Raj, the old Misra regrets his

misfortune of going to Persia instead of to England in his teens. Moreover, English

bred modern city New Delhi with the vitality sucked from Old Delhi, which had long

been the capital of India through reigns of various racial groups. The English

missionary of enlightenment and modernization runs on a rock in a river with such

multiple names as Jumna, Ganges, Congo, and Thames. Jameson considers the Third

World mirrors the First World. In a dialectical relationship as master and slave, the

truth of the master lies in the imagination of the slave, and vice versa. The colonial

imagination is eventually put into practice in exotic lands. Chow points out

the conscious representation of the “minor” as such also leads to a

situation in which it is locked in opposition to the “hegemonic” in a

permanent bind. The “minor” cannot rid itself of its minority status

because it is that status that gives it its only legitimacy; support for the

“minor,” however sincere, always becomes support for the center.

(168)

The propaganda of the ancient glories of India demonstrates the debasement of the

doubt of the contemporary achievement of India. Political disputes, caste system,

famine, droughts and things like that are undoubtedly repressed. When it comes to the

modern establishment of cities, institutions, and the reformation of social laws,

nobody recognizes them as parts of India. They are the legacies of British Raj;

moreover, they are not the India in the First World’s exotic imagination.

Novel that implies different sets of culture and divertive modes of life in the

colonies irritates the colonizers’ imagination of their superiority in the domination of

knowledge as an agenda, with which the power of assimilation prevails. The

awareness of the (post)colonial condition rises for that in reading third-world

literature: novel is supposed to be a genre imported from the First to the Third World,

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and naturally retains its cultural as well as literary properties as it was in First World;

yet, the novels disseminated to the Third World come up in front of the first-world

reader with an invention incomprehensive to the reader other than those with the

third-world background. Jameson elaborates:

We sense, between ourselves and this alien text, the presence of

another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes

us as conventional or naïve, has a freshness of information and a social

interest that we cannot share. The fear and the resistance I’m evoking

has to do, then with the sense of our own non-coincidence with that

Other reader, so different from ourselves; our sense that to coincide in

any adequate way with that Other “ideal reader”—that is to say, to read

this text adequately—we would have to give up a great deal that is

individually precise to us and acknowledge an existence and a situation

unfamiliar and therefore frightening—one that we do not know and

prefer not to know. (317)

Third World claims a cultural space other than the position of the first-world alliance.

Mukherjee’s article testifies the cultural codes as exclusive properties to native

readers. The textual space exhibited as a space of resistance limits the viewpoints of

the domineering power. The “alien text” grants its people uniqueness. The problem is,

for the First World, the Third World is the counterpart of its modernized, developed

facet. The studies of the Third World and its literature have a goal to understand the

reality of the First World. As a result, the third-world studies will have been

displaying as subordinate to the first-world studies. Mukherjee reveals that

as several Third World writers and critics have suggested,

“universality” in such theoretical exercises has really come down to a

demand that the literary work not contain any references to the local or

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regional, since the New York- or London-based critic cannot be

bothered to waste time acquainting him/herself with Yoruba myths or

Indian scriptures. (193)

The Third World remains inaccessible for the First World due to the lack of desire to

understand. In addition, the studies on the Third World as minority studies ensure

their positioning in the periphery. The impossibility for the Third World to articulate

mainly lies in the dominating western system’s inability to recognize the Third

World’s voice. Chow’s article reaffirms the subjugation of western ideology stealing

into the Third World’s knowledge formation:

while being fashionably skeptical of “Western theory,” these

intellectuals nonetheless revere Fredric Jameson’s ethnocentric notion

that all “third world” texts are necessarily to be read as “national

allegories” and proceed to read Chinese culture accordingly. However,

to “nationalize” “third world” cultural productions “allegorically” this

way is also to “other” them uniformly with a logic of production that

originates in the West. (172)

Though Jameson clarifies his using of the term “third world” and the tricky part which

arouses objections, his clarification functions as exhibiting the target for violent

attacks from third-world critics.

Dislocation of Culture and Negotiation

The concept of India shifts from geographical location to identity map and

relationship network. Cultural identity constructed outside of racial identification is

the crucial element in the composition of one’s self-image in post-colonial period.

That is the false equation of culture and race, religion. Mr. Das makes clear the

situation of a Hindu who wants to rush into a Muslim gathering. Aunt Mira, bound by

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social convention all her life, imagines a bless in afterlife, an eternal comfort from

sacred power that the funeral ritual spreading one’s ashes by the Jumna River will

bring up. The Misra sisters teach the courting dances for Krishna even though their

husband abandoned them long ago out of western enlightenment. One’s ethnical

background is not reflected in one’s identification without reservation. Yet it provides

an environment filled with the genes of one’s race, nourishing one with the

convention and codes.

The most astonishing conversion of identification happened right before the

separation of the Das family, so did the Partition of India. Raja, who was driven by

both the affection for Banazir and the admiration for Hyder Ali, ran away from Old

Delhi to Hyderabad, which is a Muslim inhabitant. Actually, Raja’s change of

identification from a member of a Hindu family to an inheritance of a Muslim

landowner initiated when he seen Hyder Ali riding a white horse by the riverside like

a Raj. Raja projected his ideal image to the hero-like Muslim. Moreover, he became

Hyder Ali’s frequent visitor, approached Hyder Ali’s daughter, and had his aspiration

on the study in “Islamic Studies” in a Muslim college. Raja’s father strongly protested

Raja’s decision, especially when India had been prompting the idea of nationalism

and was aggressively establishing a nation-state, a precisely Hindu-dominated state.

Desai poses a question on the object of identification. Should the Indians project

their identification according to fundamental qualities like race and gender, or should

they take identity as a construction of ideologies such as religion and politics? Mr.

Das’s reaction to Raja’s application for a Muslim college confirms the close

connection of identity with race and religion. Any change or conversion will be

interpreted as betrayal. Mr. Das tells Raja:

If you, a Hindu boy, are caught in Jamia Millia, the center of Islamic

studies—as you call it—you will be torn to bits, you will be burnt

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alive . . . . Who will do that to you? Muslims, for you trying to join

them when they don’t want you and don’t trust you, and Hindus, for

deserting then and going over to the enemy. Hindus and Muslims alike

will be out for your blood. It isn’t safe, Raja, it isn’t safe, son.’(Desai

1980:52)

Not only will the original race, the Hindu, judge Raja as a member of the Hindu group,

but will the Muslim as less a suspicious converted than a questionable intruder. A

formula of identification process operates in equate race to religion and to knowledge.

For the diasporic intellectual, the significance of India has transformed from

home to tourist attraction. Bakul kept thinking about the schedule of visiting the

relatives and going to the shopping mall. When Tara was worried about the difficulties

of her family, Bakul “was going over all the arrangements he had made for his tour of

India after the week-long family reunion in Hyderabad was over.” Like a tourist, he

planed for a vacation in India, not a home-coming journey:

He was mentally checking all the bookings he had made, the tickets he

had bought. He felt vaguely uneasy—somehow he no longer trusted

the Indian railway system or the Indian travel agencies. He was

wondering if it would not have been better to spend the entire vacation

in his uncle’s house in New Delhi. . . . Perhaps another travel

agency—not the small new one just started by his nephew on the

wrong side of Connaught Circus. . . . Or he could have taken his wife

and children to Kashmir and they could have had a houseboat holiday

together. (Desai 1980:158)

He went through the schedule and arrangement, and criticized the transportation and

the travel agency. Bakul does not care much about the underdevelopment of India. He

does not even have difficulty, like Tara, in identification between India and the

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western countries.

Such a transformation challenges the idea of rootedness and the place-bound

identity; it replaces the place-oriented identity with cultural identity. Bim closely

attaches her self-identity to the history and tradition of India, especially to the Hindu

branch. She is one of the inheritors of India’s cultural memory who has worry on the

loss of that memory. Her predecessor, Aunt Mira, takes herself as the provider, the

parental figure breeding the successors who will shoulder the whole culture and pass

it to the next generation. She “was the tree, she was the soil, she was the earth” (Desai

1980:111) that raised the second generation of the Das, and she asked powerlessly for

the affinity of the children. Finally, she haunted the house even after her miserable

death. Bim inherited Aunt Mira’s place as the provider (Desai 1980:153). While Bim

and Aunt Mira feel being excluded or being betrayed, the imagining picture of the

provider-consumer relationship transforms to be that of predator-victim relationship.

Growing trees are substituted by blood-thirsting mosquitoes, rats, lizards, snakes, and

even flames with its projecting horrifying shadows.

The truth lies in the center of the house, the embodiment of the national history.

The darkness of the colony, the darkness in the periphery is an embodiment of the

darkness in the center. The darkness of Congo resembles the ambiguous desire of the

English colonizer. Heart of Darkness incorporates the desperate yearn for material,

power, and violence in a modern city with brutal massacre in primitive jungle. The

allegorical reflection in Clear Light of Day, likewise, presents darkness in the well at

the back of the old family house. Unlike that of the exploitation crave in imperialism,

the darkness in colonialism displays an ambition to create a second England in India,

a narcissistic fancy. Modernization in India is practically an ambition in

self-duplication (Bhabha 22). However, the invasion of foreign, modern elements

which claims the center of the discourse edges the Hindu-centric discourse to the

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periphery, the minor space. The adoption of the third-world theories is an identity

politics to step on the post-colonial or global paradigm.

In Clear Light of Day, Tara’s serves as the representative instance of the identity

crisis. Tara is the one who leaves India when her parents were dead, her family breaks

into pieces, and comes back to celebrate family reunion. The moment she came back,

the family house bears different meanings for her. She was born as an Indian, a Hindu.

Home had been a space with its function of nourishment and a subject to identify with.

As a child, she was aware of the need to catch up with Raja and Bim in order to gain

the parents’ approve. India’s culture and social convention had been the nourishment

of the cultivation of her personality. Tara’s sense of belongingness struggles between

the shabby, disordered family house with its drawing room “emitting a faint pall of

the dust that seemed to stifle anyone who entered as if it were a vault containing the

mortal remains of the departed” (Desai 1980:65) and the neat, clean house in

Washington.

Desai’s position is an approximate of Tara’s oscillating one. Desai’s genealogical

background encourages critics to investigate her paradoxical position as between

cultural outsider and insider. As a member of second generation of Indo-English

novelist, Desai’s critique on the political condition discovers a passage through

psychological description. Inner struggle of individual, not meant to explore the

political turmoil of Indian; yet her taking the position as an Indian living in the time of

revolution, and the critical perspective in the novel is obvious. Born ten years before

Indian Independence, Desai’s childhood is enclosed by riots and uneasiness between

political and racial parties. Though living in United States, Desai’s critical essay,

“India: The Seed of Destruction,” reveals the concern for Indian politics. She

criticizes narrow-minded, “god-like,” politicians and approves of retaining the

diversity in Indian religion, ethnics, and culture. With the import of modernization,

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the conception of nation-state, of mono-ethnicity becomes the priority in estimating

the legitimacy of a nation. The practice of such a mono-ethnic principle borrowed

from European Romanticism appears absurd in India. Dietmar Rothermund’s Delhi,

15 August 1947 mentions Gandhi’s perception of the partition of Pakistan under the

operation of the England is in itself an anatomy on a living object.

The problem of identity formation which modern India has been facing and

which Desai reveals in Clear Light of Day is generated by the myth of ideal identity in

a mono-ethnical community. Mr. Das’s word challenges the fundamentalist equation

of race and identity. He dissuades Raja from entering the Muslim college. It is not

because Mr. Das views the Muslim as a rival, but that it is not the right time. He

explains to Raja:

If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said yes at once: yes,

all right . . . . I’m talking about the political situation. Don’t you know

anything about it? Don’t you know what a struggle is going on for

Pakistan? How the Muslims are pressing the British to divide the country

and give them half? There is going to be trouble, Raja—there are going to

be riots and slaughter. (Desai 1980:51-52)

It is worth noticing that Mr. Das would have agreed Raja’s request if the political

situation had not be so complicated. The Hindu, the Muslim, and many other ethnics

are in a harmonious relationship during the British reign. The Muslim Hyder Ali

owned most of the houses in the Hindu community; old Misra was trained by a

Persian to be a businessman when he was young; moreover, a Muslim gathering

would welcome the participation of a Hindu boy, praising him for reciting Urdu

poems.

Cultural identity marks the specificity of a particular community instead of a race.

It includes some people and excludes others. Dominick LaCapra in History in Transit

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indicates the irrationality of the conventional perception of one’s identity as

associated with an ideal mode in two ways: on the one hand, in ontological analysis,

“the key concepts of experience and identity need not be essentialized” (35). It is

constructed, and will being reconstructed, by the surroundings. The concept of

“birthright,” an equation of the fundamental qualities with the possession of other

properties, in ideological as well as in material, has become “original sin” when it

come to the issue of identity. On the other hand, in a purposeful interpretation,

identification as categorization determines one’s religious, political, and cultural

performance. A proper field in which the discussion of identity counts is then open to

the exploration of culture.

Conclusion

The hegemony of the diasporic intellectual risks the distortion and even

annihilation of the articulation of the native Indian. While the diplomat Bakul decides

to tell the foreigners only the glory of India exclusive of the socio-political calamities,

the local reality is estimated as dispensable for the first-world imagination.

Furthermore, the euro-centric grand narrative embedded in the third-world studies

locates the diasporic’s recognition of India oscillating between homeland and tourist

attraction. The negotiation of different cultures only happens where the confrontation

takes place. Tara’s struggle and final reconciliation of identifying between the western

and the Indian culture represents Desai’s concern about the mutual paradigm between

different cultures.

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Conclusion

The transition of India from British colony to the Republic of India along with

Pakistan, demonstrates the heterogeneity and the multiplicity of race, religion,

language, and culture. The separation of the Das family in Desai’s Clear Light of Day

signifies the implosion of India caused by the Hindu nationalist discourse and the

explosion by the emigration of Indians as well as the invasion of British culture.

The implosion is motivated by the yearning to establish a nation-state, a political

organization dominated by Hindu nationalist. The allegorical narrative of the Das’s

traumatic memory serves as a discourse of national history. Raja and Tara of the

second generation left the house, moving to the Muslim habitation and the western

metropolis. The partition and the following redistribution of demography are the

syndromes of India’s traumatic past. The authorial discourse for the Indian is the

Hindu-centric history. The Hindu nationalist mentality is passed from Mr. Das and

Aunt Mira to the eldest daughter Bim. The inner connection of Bim and Aunt Mira

situates Bim in the center of the house, becoming the spokes person of the family.

With her Hindu nationalist mentality and evaluation, Bim intentionally excludes the

elements alienated to the dominating discourse. She is the voice of the house that

transforms, distorts, and even forges a traumatic memory from other people’s memory

related to the particular event. The essential incomprehensibility of the traumatic past

allows the substitution of a dominating discourse to the genuine yet vague one. The

memory of the traumatic past with its tracks is fetishized and is inevitably attached to

a certain interpretation. The overwhelming power of the Hindu nationalist discourse

buries the India with its past. In other words, the family house as a monument of the

tumultuous modern Indian history that buries the present with the past. The space here

has a goal in the production of homogeneity discourse which in turn models

Lin 85

homogeneous space. The site of memory produces a Hindu nationalist discourse; and

the discourse possessing Bim and Tara subjugates the space as a product which is

incompatible to the other part of India.

As for the explosive forces in India, they are the consequential result of the

(post)colonial exploration, exploitation, and migration. The invasion and colonization

of the British confront the local culture. The counterpart of the Hindu nationalist

discourse is that of the western modernist. Through the operation of discipline and

regulation, New Delhi was meant to be established as a homogeneous utopia, a

showcase for the modernist metropolis. In addition, the British government planned to

make New Delhi a model for the whole Indian colony. The homogeneous design did

not have a correspondent practice in reality. Foucault’s assertion on heterotopias

disillusions the utopia imagination in the urban design. The Britain’s homogeneous

enclave is surrounded by Indian people and cultures which are excluded from the

urban space. The relationship between different spaces is as important as that between

space and its inhabitants. The modernist life in New Delhi and the decaying condition

in Old Delhi reveal the transition of Indian history from feudalism to the capitalism.

The New Delhi Bim mentioned is a synthesis of the tradition and the modern, the

Indian and the British. To be concise, homogeneity is but an imperialist imagination

transported from the western. As for the reality of local India, it is an accumulation of

various peoples, religions, languages, and cultures. The reality of India is the

multiplying heterotopias. Desai’s “India: The Seed of Destruction” describes the

equivocal currents of development of India:

one upwardly mobile, frenetic and charged with ambition, the other

seething with bitterness, frustration, and a hunger for a share in the

profits—have been meeting and clashing with increasing violence

through the Eighties: the air resounds with the clash, steel on steel.

Lin 86

(1991: para 10)

The collision with the diversity of local circumstances brings the monopoly of the

western evaluation—enlightenment, democracy, nationalism—to its limit.

Moreover, the Indian emigrant to other countries steps into a situation of either

assimilating into the western or positioning in-between. To have an elevated view of

the operation of power in the interaction of discourses, it is necessary to include the

diaspora. The right to define India is open to Indians in both local India and other

countries. The voice of India wants to join the global paradigm. However, the

spokesperson has to adopt the evaluation of the First World in priority. As a result, the

recognition of India as a member of third-world countries along with the British Raj

subjugates the articulation of India to the Euro-centric discourse with the minority

studies. The articulation of India either disregards or intentionally covers the calamity

which is the reflection of the immediate reality. The diasporic intellectuals modify the

image of their native land in order to gain international visibility. In addition to the

fracture between the representation of India and the referred object, the diasporic

experience challenges the place-oriented as well as the race-oriented identification.

The India colony is considered as the location of the confrontation of culture whereas

the gap between the image and the reality of India dislocates the significance of India.

The attachment between identity and the place can be stripped away but not the

connection of cultural memory. Tara and Bakul’s daughters, the third generation, still

recognize the privilege of their Aunt Bim due to the connection.

In conclusion, the monopoly and the heterogeneity represented by Bim, by New

Delhi, and by Bakul’s diplomatic discourse are marked out and challenged in the

novel. The ultimate epiphany of the clear light reveals the connection beyond race and

national border. The connection promises toleration and harmonious relationship

among people with diversity. Bim bears such a faith in mind. Desai foretells a

Lin 87

harmonious relationship among different ethnic groups with the portrait of a profound

echo between an Urdu singer and a Hindu audience. Ten years after the publication of

Clear Light of Day, Desai still worries about the limitation of the parliamentary

system in confronting the diversity of India:

In a country with such an immense and rich diversity of religion,

language, culture, and race, one might think it a natural development to

hand over authority to each cultural unit over its own way of life; held

together by a federal system, but functioning independently on a much

smaller, more manageable scale, it might finally become a dream that

works. (1991: para 12)

The diversity still exists as a problem which can not be undertaken with one single set

of policy. In a reversed thinking, the Partition did solve some problems though

generating others. Even being an expatriate Indian novelist, Desai insists in revealing

the difference as well as the connections of Indians.

Lin 88

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