<?page no="0"?> Band 89 Lisa Schwander Postcolonial Romance Negotiations of Modernity in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie <?page no="1"?> Postcolonial Romance <?page no="2"?> herausgegeben von Anja Bandau (Hannover), Justus Fetscher (Mannheim), Claudia Gronemann (Mannheim), Ralf Haekel (Leipzig), Caroline Lusin (Mannheim) Band 89 <?page no="3"?> Lisa Schwander Postcolonial Romance Negotiations of Modernity in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie <?page no="4"?> Zugleich Dissertation an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Mannheim DOI: https: / / doi.org/ 10.24053/ 9783381151127 © 2026 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. 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Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de Druck: Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISSN 0175-3169 ISBN 978-3-381-15111-0 (Print) ISBN 978-3-381-15112-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-381-15113-4 (ePub) Umschlagabbildung: © iStock Pict Rider Stock-Fotografie-ID: 1248523239 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. <?page no="5"?> 9 11 1 13 2 21 2.1 29 2.1.1 29 2.1.2 40 2.2 43 2.2.1 44 2.2.2 52 2.2.3 59 3 63 3.1 66 3.1.1 70 3.1.2 75 3.1.2.1 76 3.1.2.2 88 Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . Reconceptualising and Transforming Modernity: Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Transcultural Understanding of Modernity as a Political Intervention: Two Versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Towards a Cosmopolitan Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance . . . . . . . . . . . Exotic Romance and the Modern Versus Anti-Modern Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exotic Romance, Alternative ‘Conceptual Realities’ and Cosmopolitan Visions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s Versions of Postcolonial Romance: An Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transcending the Borders of ‘the Modern’: Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Western Modernity’s Global Triumph: The Ibis Trilogy (2008- 15) and the Historical Romance Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Trilogy’s Divided World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Narrative of ‘Modernisation’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . … But Where Exactly is the Anti-Modern? The Battle Between the ‘New’ and the ‘Old’ World Reconsidered . ‘Re-Made in a More Enlightened Mould’: Character Development and the Idea of a Modernising World . . <?page no="6"?> 3.1.3 95 3.1.3.1 96 3.1.3.2 107 3.1.4 119 3.2 122 3.2.1 126 3.2.2 135 3.2.3 150 4 159 4.1 165 4.1.1 167 4.1.1.1 168 4.1.1.2 176 4.1.1.3 181 4.1.2 185 4.2 193 4.2.1 194 4.2.1.1 196 4.2.1.2 201 4.2.2 206 4.2.2.1 211 The Romance Realm: (Western) Modernity’s Banned ‘Other’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond the Borders and Boundaries of ‘the Modern’ . . The Ibis Community: A Continuation along the Indian Ocean Lines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Trilogy’s Outlook: Modernity as a ‘Train Headed for Disaster’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Other World of the Sundarbans: The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Travelling to a Pre-Modern Place? The ‘Denial of Coevalness’ in Postcolonial India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A World of Boundaries Versus Its Romance Alternative Beyond Exotic Romance and Notions of a Divided World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Romance, Interconnected Histories and a Future Beyond Divisions in Kamila Shamsie’s Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Replacing Exotic Romance with Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deconstructing Exotic Romance - Rejecting Imaginaries of Division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A World ‘Apart’: an Imperial Fantasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Seeing a Connected World to Becoming Involved Rethinking Global Feminism: Towards a Transcultural Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transcultural Romance and Shamsie’s Revisionist History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visions for a World at Peace: The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Against Classifications: Romance in Burnt Shadows . . The ‘Ghost of Konrad Weiss’: Transcultural Romance and Cosmopolitan Lifeworlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Endangered Romance: Romance Versus the Logic of Typification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kartography’s Romance of Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Love Stories and the Hope for a Reconciled Pakistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents <?page no="7"?> 4.2.2.2 216 4.2.2.3 225 5 231 6 237 6.1 237 6.2 238 (Un)seeing Connections and the Motif of the Barrier: Politicising Genre Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond a National Tale: Connecting Karachi and Connecting the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Alternative Visions to Alternative Worlds: Postcolonial Romance in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Primary Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Secondary Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contents 7 <?page no="9"?> Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Prof. Dr. Caroline Lusin, my doctoral supervisor, for her unfailing guidance and support. Her advice and encouragement have been invaluable over the course of this research. I am also deeply indebted to Prof. Dr. Graham Huggan for granting me the opportunity to study under his supervision in Leeds and for the stimulating discussions that have helped shape the arguments presented in this study. My warm thanks go to my colleagues at the English Department, especially Dr. Stefan Glomb, Dr. Philip Griffiths, Dr. Sina Schuhmaier, Dr. Annika Gonnermann, Dr. Stefan Benz and Dr. Johannes Fehrle, for their support and friendship along the way. Dr. Karin Obermeier has been a great help in proofreading large parts of the manuscript. And finally, a huge thank you to my parents and Stefan Danter for all their hours of reading, their helpful comments and their willingness to help in so many ways. <?page no="11"?> Abbreviations References to frequently quoted primary texts by Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie will be given as follows: Broken Verses BV Burnt Shadows BS Flood of Fire FoF A God in Every Stone GES The Great Derangement GD The Hungry Tide HT In an Antique Land IAAL Kartography Ka River of Smoke RoS Sea of Poppies SoP The Shadow Lines SL <?page no="13"?> 1 Introduction With Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie this study discusses two highly cele‐ brated voices of the contemporary English-language literary world. Although their writing covers a wide range of themes, each author has increasingly become associated with a distinct thematic field. While Ghosh has become a central figure in a rapidly growing ecocritical canon, Shamsie is considered essential reading for all those interested in questions of global feminism and a translocal perspective on female lives through time. Approaching the novels of both authors with these contexts in mind, one might expect that they have little in common beyond a - differently accentuated - political commitment, and wonder what should make reading them side by side worthwhile. However, this study will demonstrate that there are indeed good reasons for doing so. In developing the notion of postcolonial romance as a lens through which the novels of both authors can be approached, it allows to see that they engage with a set of related issues concerning the state - and the future - of modern life and to recognise how, in different ways, the literary category of romance plays a pivotal role in these engagements. In discussions of Shamsie’s as well as Ghosh’s works, the terms ‘romance’ and ‘romantic’ crop up at regular intervals. Critics variously draw on them to emphasise the texts’ thematic preoccupation with human love and friendship as well as with journeys, quests and adventures, their interest in anti-modern worlds, or their distinctly ‘non-realist’ mode of writing. Madeline Clements, for instance, argues that “[p]ost-2001, Shamsie continues to blend anticipated cosmopolitan ‘Pakistani’ and newly interesting ‘Islamic’ tropes and themes into romantic and Asia-centring historical English-language fictions” (127). Rehana Ahmed describes Shamsie’s Kartography (2002) as “a story of romantic tensions and personal conflict” (21), while Antoinette Burton finds, rather dismissively, that she “cringe[s] […] at the somewhat hackneyed romance plots and crossracial ‘bromances’” (76) of Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008). In a different vein, Gaurav Desai calls Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) “a romance with a lost world” (125), Manav Ratti emphasises the “dichotomy of romantic and realist perspectives” (200) in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), and Padmini Mongia maintains that The Shadow Lines (1988), Ghosh’s second novel, centres on the “power of romance - romance understood as expressive of heroic action, lonely men, and distant places” (“Geography Fabulous” 63). While these observations, taken together, confirm romance to be a “confusingly inclusive” (Regis 19) <?page no="14"?> 1 Ian Duncan, for instance, points out that romance not only constitutes the “parent term” (10) to romanticism, but has come to signify everything from “a courtly or chivalric fiction of the late Middle Ages, a fanciful or erotic or sentimental enhancement of a situation or event, any unlikely story, a love affair, highly conventionalized massmarketed novels read by women, a narrative with a quest in it, four of the last plays of Shakespeare, the American novels of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, and a supergenre containing all fictional forms and figures that is ultimately the form and figure of a transcendental human imagination” (ibid.). Likewise, introducing the Blackwell Companion to Romance, Corinne Saunders adds to her observation that romance is a “pervasive” (1) category that it is also an “inherently slippery” (ibid.) one, just like Barbara Fuchs evaluates romance as a “notoriously slippery category” (1). 2 There are, of course, occasional remarks in critical literature on the function of romance in each author’s novels, but these tend to be scattered observations made en passant rather than studies that put romance centre stage. For an exception see in particular Mongia, who reads Ghosh against the backdrop of Joseph Conrad’s work (“Geography Fabulous”). 3 This judgement is particularly influential where romance in the sense of formulaic love stories is concerned, see for instance Janice Radway’s study Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (1984). Radway’s study has contributed to shaping the romance’s reputation as a text offering private escape from an unfulfilling status quo and, in doing so, ultimately serving to uphold this status. Pamela Regis (see 1) und Emily Davis (see 1) both underline the powerful hold of this latter view, while themselves arguing against it. category that subsumes various things under a single heading, 1 they provide powerful evidence that this ‘inclusive category’ of romance somehow holds a central place in the texts of both authors. While remarks on romance aspects of individual texts hence abound, the question whether there is a particular reason why romance reoccurs throughout the writing of both authors has failed to spark sustained critical interest. In effect, critical discourse has largely remained silent about a striking feature of Shamsie’s and Ghosh’s oeuvres: the ways in which they systematically engage with established literary traditions surrounding romance and, in so doing, continuously employ romance to a distinctly political end. 2 According to commonly held views, romance and politically engaged writing do not align well. As Emily Davis points out, the idea that the “genres of the romance and the political novel function[] as two mutually exclusive and thus irreconcilable traditions” (1) is widespread: associated with an “idealized world” (Frye, Anat‐ omy of Criticism 367) and with the ‘fantastic’ rather than realistic, romance is often considered escapist and, if ascribed any political function at all, declared to have a conservative effect in appeasing and reconciling with the status quo. 3 While this view in fact mirrors some of the comments on romance quoted above - Ahmed, for instance, seems to think that Kartography’s love narrative undermines the novel’s political credentials (see 21), an evaluation which might 14 1 Introduction <?page no="15"?> 4 Huggan, for instance, explicitly stresses, “[t]hat modernity itself has helped create these inequalities is one of postcolonialism’s givens” (“General Introduction” 19). 5 This view is, of course, likewise familiar. In 1990, Anthony Giddens described modernity as a “juggernaut - a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder” (139): modernity, he argued, has created new human-made risks which are now threatening the entire globe. It also links up with Ulrich Beck’s notion of the ‘risk society’ characteristic of a new phase of modernity. Beck points out that the risks connected to modernisation processes have come to be also be at the heart of Burton’s dismissive rejection of Sea of Poppies’ ‘bromances’ - this study provides an entirely different perspective. In their large body of non-fictional writing, both authors have established themselves as vocal critics of modern politics and society who continuously point out the need for change (see for instance Ghosh’s blog, Amitav Ghosh, or Shamsie’s Offence). In his reading of Ghosh’s work, Anshuman Mondal argues that “it is probably not wise to distinguish between his [Ghosh’s] fiction and non-fiction as it is perhaps another of those artificial boundaries that Ghosh insistently interrogates, the overcoming of which constitutes one of the central threads running throughout his work” (19). This thought, at least its first part, also holds true for Shamsie’s novels: both authors’ fiction displays a similar political impetus as their more openly political texts, with many ideas in fact flowing freely between their fictional and non-fictional writing. It is in the context of this political dimension of their novels, I will argue, that romance comes to play a preeminent role in both authors’ works. The following chapters offer close readings of Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and his three novels collectively referred to as the Ibis trilogy, Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015), as well as of Shamsie’s Kartography (2002), Burnt Shadows (2009) and A God in Every Stone (2014). Bringing into focus different moments and regions of the world between the 19 th century and today, the novels provide various impressions of global modernity and critically reflect on the ways of thinking and living, the social, political and economic principles that have come to signify modernity worldwide. Their verdict is far from positive: with the history of global modernity being inseparably tied to that of colonialism and capitalism (see Huggan, “General Introduction” 19), the ways of thinking and living that have become constitutive of the modern, they stress, emerged in tandem with attempts to dominate and exploit human and non-human others. On this basis there developed a modern world which is, the novels point out, both bound up with “systemic inequalities” (ibid.), as postcolonial critics, amongst others, have argued long since, 4 and continuously furthers its own endangerment and destruction. 5 Not 1 Introduction 15 <?page no="16"?> globalised towards the end of the twentieth century. Furthermore, he stresses that the emergent risk society subordinates the debate about the distribution of wealth that was central to earlier phases of modernity to that concerning the distribution of risk (see Risikogesellschaft 26-8). 6 This view again corresponds with discussions in contemporary sociology. Zygmunt Bauman finds that “[t]he sole agencies of collective purposive action bequeathed to us by our parents and grandparents, confined as they are to the boundaries of nationstates, are clearly inadequate, considering the global reach of our problems, and of their sources and consequences” (viii). In the context of his discussion of a ‘second modernity’ in which the paradigm of nation-states and territoriality has outlived itself, Ulrich Beck has argued that political action now requires a “new political subject […]: movements and parties of world citizens” (“Cosmopolitan Perspective” 102), an aim to which establishing a “cosmopolitan perspective” in sociology can and ought to contribute (see ibid.). only do Ghosh’s novels foreground the threats to the planet caused by the ‘modern’ project of seeking to dominate and exploit nature, but Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels alike continuously attack the urge to conceptually separate the world into distinct - national, ethnic, cultural - groups which has characterised modernity worldwide. This urge, they suggest, needs to be traced back to the modern competitive spirit and the search for possible ‘Others’ to be exploited for one’s own gain. Like the continuously advancing destruction of nature, the tradition of separating and exploiting the world and its people, the novels insist, poses a threat to the very survival of the planet itself. It promotes a mentality of antagonism and conflict, which makes warfare a constant and threatening prospect in a world where modern military technology has unleashed incredibly destructive power - the danger of nuclear attacks explicitly hovers over Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Moreover, this tradition inhibits thinking in terms larger than national interests, which the novels present as a prerequisite for tackling the global problems of an interconnected world. 6 If the texts thus depict modernity as tied to social, political, and economic principles with which, to put it bluntly, much is wrong, they also suggest that it does not have to remain this way. On a more optimistic note, they insist that, if people were ready to open up their notions of what it means to be modern and to rethink how they conceptualise modernity and modern history, our modern world itself could provide us with possible paths to move on to a radically different modernity, one that would take us beyond the injustices and endangered state that characterise the status quo. While they share this general assumption, the exact reasoning of both oeuvres differs. Ghosh’s novels, I will show, set out to demonstrate that the history of modernity, particularly if we look at the non-West, has also produced ways of inhabiting the world which contrast with the dominant, ‘modern’ ones. These 16 1 Introduction <?page no="17"?> 7 Ghosh’s novels have often been associated with Bruno Latour’s scepticism about the ‘modern’ divide between the human and the non-human world, between culture/ society and nature (expressed, for instance, in We Have Never Been Modern, 1991), an association which I, too, will propose in the following chapters. 8 In this respect, my discussion relates to those of other critics who have argued that Ghosh’s novels retrieve alternative modernities from history (see for instance Mukherjee, “Second Wave” 182; or Mujumdar). ways are characterised by their tendency to connect what modernity as we know it thinks of as separate entities: they refuse to divide the world’s population into groups of ostensibly isolated nations and cultures, or, challenging another separation that Ghosh associates with modernity, to disconnect humans and their agency from the non-human realm. 7 With their emphasis on connections, his novels suggest, these alternative traditions could in fact offer solutions to many of the modern world’s pressing problems and help to produce a more sustainable and peaceful global modernity. At the same time, however, Ghosh continuously underlines that a long-standing tradition of associating modernity exclusively with the West has created a situation in which such alternative traditions tend to be simply dismissed as inherently pre-modern. As such, they are not regarded as options to be considered for future development. If, however, people were able to overcome their Western-centric understanding of modernity and reconceptualise global modernity itself as a transcultural phenomenon to which all cultures contribute and belong, Ghosh invites us to conclude, these traditions would gain a new significance. They would come into view as alternative possibilities of modern life and the potential inherent in them could be harnessed for bringing into being alternative modern futures. 8 By contrast, Shamsie’s novels propose that a ‘corrected’ understanding of modern history could by itself provoke the transition to a different modernity. Maintaining that the dominant modern way of conceptualising reality tends to gloss over the transcultural connectivity and interconnectedness of the modern world, they promote a take on history that brings into focus these connections. Such a changed perspective, Shamsie somewhat idealistically suggests, would dissolve the basis for antagonisms and us-versus-them dichotomies, which her novels depict as the main obstacle to a more peaceful and secure world. It would also awaken a sense of shared responsibilities for creating such a changed world. Thus, the novels insist that a revised understanding of modernity and modern history could herald a more peaceful and collaborative modernity. While the exact ways of reconceptualising modernity which Shamsie’s and Ghosh’s novels envision differ, they both relate, in one way or another, to a project, recently promoted by Frank-Schulze Engler as well as Elisabeth 1 Introduction 17 <?page no="18"?> 9 In fact, in developing the notion of a transcultural modernity, Schulze-Engler also repeatedly refers to Ghosh’s texts (see “Literature in the Global Ecumene”; “Strange Encounters”). However, in contrast to him, I argue that the novels I analyse foreground the tension between an existent variety of (transculturally connected) ways of inhab‐ iting the modern world on the one hand and a powerful Western-centric modernity discourse on the other hand. From this, they develop their demand that modernity should be conceptualised as a transcultural phenomenon, rather than implying that this is currently the case. In finding that, in their case, understanding modernity in transcultural terms is thus connected to an agenda of challenging the status quo, I hence depart in important ways from Schulze-Engler’s reading. Bekers et al., to move on to a transcultural understanding of modernity. 9 This project forms part of a larger endeavour by postcolonial critics to challenge the idea that the West alone produced modernity and to refute long-standing Western-centric narratives of modernisation, according to which a transition to modernity must necessarily bring forth modern societies in line with the Western model all over the world. This expectation had the effect, they argue, that alternative ways of inhabiting the modern world which diverged from this model were looked upon as anti-modern, their representatives being simply declared to have ‘not yet’ arrived in the modern age. Pointing out instead that out of different cultural contexts there emerged different ways of being modern, critics have argued for substituting the notion of a single modernity with that of modernities in the plural (see my discussion in chapter 2). Advocates of a transcultural modernity now argue that the idea of multiple modernities, while constituting an important intervention, yet runs the risk of essentialising cultural difference (see Schulze-Engler, “One Modernity” 158, 60). Stressing the “transcultural dimensions that are inherent in all projects of modernity” (Bekers et al. xiv), they draw on the work of critics such as Ulrich Beck - his critique of a ‘container theory’ of culture in particular (see Schulze-Engler, “Transcultural Modernities” 91) -, Ulf Hannerz and James Clifford to insist that cultures in the globalised world are neither territorially bounded and fixed to the borders of a nation-state, nor separate, clearly delineable entities (see Schulze-Engler, “Lit‐ erature in the Global Ecumene” 379-82). Against this background, they promote their view of modernity as a transcultural phenomenon which encompasses various “interconnected varieties of modernity or modernities” (Schulze-Engler, “Transcultural Modernities” 91). Not only does reconceptualising modernity in transcultural terms thus help to overcome a Western centrism that stubbornly prevails in discussions about how to conceptualise the modern, to do so also means to view modernity through the lens of an intellectual paradigm that highlights connections and interactions between the world’s ostensibly different parts. 18 1 Introduction <?page no="19"?> 10 He makes this point to challenge an often-proclaimed split between revolutionary anticolonial thought and postcolonialism as a project of critical revisionism (see 15). While, as I will show in detail, Shamsie’s and Ghosh’s novels subscribe to a view according to which reconceptualising modernity in transcultural terms could, in two different ways, pave the way for achieving a different modern future, they do not leave it at that. In fact, they use their narratives to actively initiate such a process of reconceptualising modernity - and it is through romance, this study sets out to show, that they do so. The following chapters read the various novels they analyse against the backdrop of the 19 th and early 20 th century historical and imperial romance as novelistic subgenres with which they actively engage. Patterns that characterise these genres are their practice of conjuring up a self-referentially marked romance realm, inhabited by exotic Others and contrasting with the ‘modern’ world, as well as their celebration of the ‘romantic’ charms of the anti-modern Other. Both Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels draw from these patterns ways of employing romance to promote and actively lead their readers towards a transcultural re-reading of modernity and modern history. As they do so, they constantly emphasise how this re-reading could help to move on to a different modern future; one which once and for all disentangles modernity from colonial histories. In discussing the connections between anti-colonial politics and the the‐ oretical, revisionist project of postcolonial criticism, Graham Huggan has suggested to understand the latter as an intellectual intervention (see “General Introduction” 12) which, like its more visibly ‘revolutionary’ counterpart, seeks to transform the world, yet intervenes in it not by armed struggle, but by challenging dominant epistemological patterns. 10 Stressing that “the grounds for continuing anti-colonial struggle are as much epistemological as they are physical and material” (ibid. 12), he underlines that for many postcolonial critics, “postcolonialism is best understood as a sustained form of intellectual interven‐ tionism, at once individually committed to the parallel pursuits of freedom and justice and collectively driven by the will to change a flagrantly unequal, unevenly developed world” (ibid.). In Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels, romance, far from being apolitical or seeking to conserve the status quo, embodies the very agenda that Huggan describes: promoting a revised understanding of modernity in order to make a transition to a different modern world possible, romance constitutes the specifically literary tool that enables the novels to pursue such a (quintessentially postcolonial) intellectual intervention through the fictions they narrate. It is this function that my term postcolonial romance highlights. 1 Introduction 19 <?page no="20"?> Followed by an in-depth analysis of my selected novels in sections 3 and 4, the next section seeks to specify and contextualise the projects that I trace in Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels. It starts by presenting the larger intellectual debate in which they are situated. In a next step, it introduces the major points of Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s respective takes on modernity and, in doing so, clarifies what exactly reconceptualising modernity in transcultural terms means in the context of each oeuvre and why this specific reconceptualisation is in each case connected to the hope of transitioning into an alternative future modernity. As I will argue that in both oeuvres this hope is inextricably tied to cosmopolitan visions that surface throughout the various novels, I will briefly comment on the notion of cosmopolitanism as a controversially discussed concept, particularly from a postcolonial studies perspective. It is against this backdrop that I then theorise the link between the question of modernity(/ ies) and romance writing on which I base the concept of postcolonial romance that governs my close readings. 20 1 Introduction <?page no="21"?> 11 In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously describe the conditions of the modern bourgeois society as one where “all that is solid melts into air” (161): “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.“ (ibid.) Marshall Berman then used this quote for the title of his 1982 study on the experience of modernisation. 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks In interrogating the category of modernity and thinking about the state - and the possible future - of modern life, Ghosh and Shamsie are not alone. As Frank Schulze-Engler notes, while from the 1970s onwards, it had seemed that ‘modernity’ had withered away as a the‐ oretical concept in a vast array of academic disciplines […], and that postmodernism had won the day in much of the humanities, in recent years modernity seems to have returned with a vengeance. Now it is the idea of postmodernity as a total break with modernity […], which seems on its way out (“Strange Encounters” 174). In fact, a whole number of critics have recently emphasised that, the seemingly different implications of the term postmodernity notwithstanding, our current times form as much part of modernity as the preceding centuries. Anthony Giddens, for instance, insists that “[w]e have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalisation” (51) and Zygmunt Bauman stresses that “[t]he society which enters the twenty-first century is no less ‘modern’ than the society which entered the twentieth; the most one can say is that it is modern in a different way” (28). In different versions, this last idea that, roughly speaking, the end of the previous millennium ushered in a new phase of modernity resurfaces in many contemporary discussions on the latter. For Bauman, what defines this new stage is its “liquid” character. By this term, he refers to a form of life in which change, brought about by the famous “melting powers” (ibid. 6) associated with modernity, 11 is no longer considered as an interim leading towards a new phase of stability, but instead has become perpetual and deprived of an expected end point (see Bauman x). Ulrich Beck’s distinction between a first and a second age of modernity likewise points to a caesura within modernity, albeit with a different focus. In discussing modernity’s different ages, he develops not only his view of an <?page no="22"?> 12 Compare my explanation in footnote 5. 13 Compare my introduction (chapter 1). emergent risk society, 12 but also stresses how, under the impression of an everadvancing globalisation, “the principles of territoriality, collectivity and frontier are becoming questioned” (“Cosmopolitan Perspective” 87) in today’s world. If the consensus that modernity is by no means over has thus led to a revived interest in examining and theorising modernity, important contributions to this debate have come from the field of postcolonial studies. Given postcolonialism’s conviction that both the social and institutional realities that have become constitutive of modernity and the ideas that surround the notion of modernity themselves are inextricably tied to colonial histories and their production of knowledge, 13 it is no surprise that a critical (re-)examination of modernity has been at the very centre of the field ever since its inception. However, the internal diversity of the postcolonial studies project (see Huggan, “General Introduction” 4) has given rise to a heterogeneous and often contradictory set of assumptions about modernity. Some critics have condemned modernity wholeheartedly and, describing it as an intrinsically and hopelessly colonial formation, simply look for ways to move beyond it: according to Walter Mignolo, for instance, “there is no modernity with‐ out coloniality” (“Imperial/ Colonial Metamorphosis” 110, emphasis in original). He maintains that modernity, while it might be able to overcome colonialism, “cannot overcome coloniality precisely because coloniality is constitutive of it - it is part of the fabric of modernity itself ” (ibid. 110, emphasis in original). Enri‐ que Dussel, too, as Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube observe, regards the “formations of modernity as grounded in the foundations of colony, where both colonialism and modernity are apprehended as dominant European projects of power/ knowledge” (8). Dussel’s discussion of modernity focuses on establishing the ‘world-system’ as the context out of which modernity arose. Seeking to move from what he calls the ”Eurocentric” to the “planetary” paradigm, Dussel emphasises that modernity is “a phenomenon proper to the system ‘centerperiphery.’ Modernity is not a phenomenon of Europe as an independent system, but of Europe as center.” (“Beyond Eurocentrism” 4, emphasis in original) While he thus attempts to rescue the “peripheral world” (ibid. 17) from its role as a “passive spectator of a thematic that does not touch it, because it is a ‘barbarian,’ a ‘premodern,’ or, simply, still in need of being ‘modernized’” (ibid.) and to show that it was indispensable to the formation of modernity, he yet understands modernity itself as the (political, cultural, ideological and so forth) formation that resulted from the “‘management’” (ibid. 13) of the world-system by the 22 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="23"?> (European) centre. As such, modernity is necessarily centred around “practices of domination and exclusion” (ibid. 19) and the ideology of Eurocentrism, and hence constitutes a formation which needs to be overcome. With his often-quoted vision of ‘trans’-modernity, Dussel therefore focuses on what he describes as a project emerging from an “‘exteriority’ […], a ‘beyond’ that transcends Western modernity” (“World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity” 165). He assumes that those cultures which were “excluded by the modern” (ibid. 178), i.e. whose indispensability for bringing into being modernity was denied by the Eurocentrism proper to modernity, have the potential to bring into being an entirely different future. Dussel argues: From this ‘exteriority,’ negated and excluded by hegemonic Europe’s modern expan‐ sion, there are present-day cultures that predate European modernity, that have developed together with it, and that have survived until the present with enough human potential to give birth to a cultural plurality that will emerge after modernity and capitalism (ibid. 179). These cultures might then lead into ‘trans’-modernity, a stage that has transcen‐ ded the limits of “simple modernity” (ibid.): they “might be able to develop in an autonomous, ‘modern,’ and creative fashion their own ‘universal’ cultures in the next stage, that is, the stage after the extinction of European-North American modernity with its claims to ‘sole’ universality” (ibid. 178). Dussel’s account leaves no doubt about the desirability of the development he anticipates: maintaining that “the future ‘trans’-modernity will be multicultural, versatile, hybrid, postcolonial, pluralist, tolerant, and democratic” (181), he turns this ‘trans’-modernity into a utopian alternative to modernity as it is. While Mignolo and Dussel base their critiques on a view of modernity as a quintessentially colonial project, others start from an entirely different understanding of modernity. For many postcolonial critics, modernity must be understood as a heterogenous phenomenon, which has produced various articulations, rather than a singular one. Their central impetus is the idea to disentangle our understanding of modernity from a one-sided association with the (imaginary entity of) the West and to challenge a long-standing narrative that equals modernisation with Westernisation. Sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt points out that the “‘classical’ theories of modernization and […] the classical sociological analyses of Marx, Durkheim, and (to a large extent) even of Weber” (1) all assume that modernising societies worldwide would necessarily follow the path established by the West. However, he maintains that “[t]he actual developments in modernizing societies have refuted the homogenizing and hegemonic assumptions of this Western program of modernity” (1). Stressing 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks 23 <?page no="24"?> that modernisation and Westernisation are not one and the same (see 2-3), he suggests replacing the idea of a single modernity with that of ‘Multiple Mod‐ ernities’. This or related projects are at the heart of many recent publications by postcolonial scholars. In an article introducing a special issue of Public Culture on Alternative Modernities (1999), Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar points out that the essays in this volume reject an “acultural theory” (15) of modernisation, which understands “the transition to modernity in terms of a set of culture-neutral operations, which are viewed as ‘input’ that can transform any traditional society” (ibid.). Instead, they argue that “modernity always unfolds within a specific cultural or civilizational context and that different starting points for the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes” (ibid.), from which Gaonkar concludes that “[i]n short, modernity is not one but many” (ibid. 16). Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube sum up this trend: “Recent years have seen the proliferation, in and out of print, of “alternative” and “early” modernities, “colonial” and “multiple” modernities, attempts to write into the concept of modernity anterior histories, multiple trajectories, and alternative patterns” (7). Among the many attempts to reject the idea of a singular modernity and a universal historical trajectory of modernisation, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provin‐ cializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) has proven particularly influential. Arguing from within a Marxist tradition, Chakrabarty seeks to make room for cultural difference within the Marxist account of the transition to capitalist modernity (see for example 92). In his somewhat againstthe-grain reading of Marx’ Capital (1867), he develops from the latter a way to counter what he calls the logic of ‘historicism’: the assumption that transitioning to capitalist modernity must everywhere on the globe follow the same trajectory and is completed only when this modernity has triumphed over and entirely extinguished all the ostensibly ‘pre-capitalist’ aspects of life (see 23). Focusing on Bengali modernity, Chakrabarty shows how this logic fails to adequately grasp the latter’s specific realities. Pointing out that “[o]ur historical differences actually make a difference” (vii), he argues that in India, capitalist modernity did not produce “classically bourgeois” (215) forms of life and did not position itself against everything that in a Western context was deemed ‘premodern’. Neither did it exclude the extended family (see 215-6), for instance, nor was it in any way incompatible with the belief in spirits and an animated cosmos (see 76-7). Yet, measured against the assumption that modernity everywhere must produce forms of ‘modern’ life according to the Western model and ‘leave behind’ everything that has no space within the latter, these aspects, which, according to Chakrabarty, form a vital part of Indian modernity, were simply 24 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="25"?> 14 Fabian defines this term as the “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (31, emphasis in original). 15 According to Chakrabarty, Capital itself allows for this alternative view: He argues that Marx’ distinction between different kinds of histories, “histories ‘posited by capital’ and histories that do not belong to capital’s ‘life process’” (50) suggests that a transition to capitalist modernity can in fact be complete while simultaneously a temporal horizon prevails which refuses to be subsumed under the logic of capital (see 64-5). These ‘precapitalist’ horizons, what Chakrabarty calls ‘History 2s’, are not entirely subjugated to ‘History 1’, the temporal horizon belonging to the logic of capital (see 65), and “in practice always modify and interrupt the totalizing thrusts of History 1” (254). As such, they accommodate different ways of inhabiting the world within capitalist modernity. read “in terms of a lack, an absence, or an incompleteness that translates into ‘inadequacy’” (32), as ‘remnants’ of a past to be superseded. Chakrabarty draws on anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s concept of the ‘denial of coevalness’ to describe this constellation: setting out to demonstrate his profession’s complicity with imperialism, Fabian argued that 19 th -century anthropologists “spatialized Time” (15, emphasis in original). Suggesting that “relationships between parts of the world […] can be understood as temporal relations” (11-2), they divided the world into a Western sphere associated with “progress, development, modernity” (144) and a non-Western ‘rest’ as its “negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition” (ibid.). This created the ‘denial of coevalness’: the paradoxical imagination that contempo‐ raries can inhabit different ages, 14 which provided an ideological justification for colonialisation (see 144). While ‘the West’ has reached modernity, the logic goes, the ‘rest’ is stuck in an earlier moment of history; being modern becomes itself a Western prerogative. Such a denial of coevalness comes to an end, Chakrabarty points out, once we acknowledge that modernity is not necessarily positioned against all that is conventionally deemed ‘traditional’: in many parts of the non- Western world, insisting on a dichotomy of modern and traditional societies simply does not work as these alternative modernities can easily accommodate some ostensibly pre-capitalist, pre-modern, aspects of life. 15 If challenging the idea of a quintessentially modern West and a ‘rest’ that is either Westernised or fundamentally anti-modern has been a central concern of postcolonial scholarship, recent developments in the theorisation of culture(s) have provided new impulses to this debate. With the notion of a “wider cultural interconnectedness” (Hannerz 7) on the rise, the imagination of a world divided into clearly separable, disconnected cultures has increasingly come under attack. Such an imagination is founded on the traditional concept of cultures as it developed in the 19 th century (see Welsch 194). With its emergence 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks 25 <?page no="26"?> 16 Hannerz suggests that culture should be used in the singular only (see 23). While there are good reasons for this, I will, for practical reasons, not entirely refrain from talking about cultures in the plural in this study. However, I do so without implying that there are clear-cut boundaries between these or that they are in any way ‘pure’. In so doing, I follow Wolfgang Welsch who, despite embracing the idea of transculturality (see my discussion further on) continues to write about ‘cultures’. befitting the age of national consolidation, this concept suggests that cultures correlate to one distinct folk and place, binding together, as one singular, uniform culture, all those belonging to this folk and distinguishing them from others (see ibid. 195). Associated with one folk, so the traditional view, each culture, then, is clearly separated from all other cultures (see ibid.). Especially in the field of anthropology, a far-going re-orientation has taken place, at the centre of which is a revision of the very notion of culture itself. Anthropology started out as a “discipline for a study of ‘other cultures,’ for the West looking at the rest” (Hannerz 4) and presupposed that the world was made up of “more or less local, bounded entities; a sort of global mosaic” (Hannerz 4). Contemporary anthropology, however, has come to question this initial project and the assumptions on which it was based. Finding that anthropology’s task must be to “cultivate new understandings of how the world hangs together” (ibid.), Ulf Hannerz emphasises the need to distance oneself from national frameworks for conceptualising culture (see 9) and to abandon the idea that culture is contained in a distinct territory or belongs to a distinct ‘people’ (see Hannerz 8, 22). He points out: That image of a cultural mosaic, where each culture would have been a territorial entity with clear, sharp, enduring edges, never really corresponded with realities. There were always interactions, and a diffusion of ideas, habits, and things, even if at times we have been habituated to theories of culture and society which have not emphasized such truths. (18) In a connected world, Hannerz maintains, it simply does not make any sense to insist on identifying pure and ostensibly separate cultures in the plural. 16 The global ‘ecumene’ - the phrase he chooses to “allude to the interconnectedness of the world” (7) - is characterised by intermixing and fluidity. This revision has important implications for the ways in which we think about modernity. If there is a worldwide process of constant cultural exchange which renders the idea of clear-cut cultural boundaries obsolete, one cannot seriously uphold the view that ‘the West’ alone transitioned to modernity while non-Western cultures remained entirely cut off from this process. Hannerz observes himself that “[i]t is obviously characteristic of the contemporary global 26 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="27"?> ecumene that there is no really distant Other, no ‘Primitive Man,’” (11) to consort with. The revision of the concept of culture thus dovetails with the postcolonial project of overcoming the one-sided association of modernity with the West. However, Frank-Schulze-Engler has pointed out that applying the new insights about culture to the debate nevertheless requires scholars to rethink their sug‐ gestions of multiple, other, or alternative modernities. Although such notions are important in their emphasis on diversifying the possibility of how to be modern, he argues, they build on essentialised notions of cultural difference (see “One Modernity” 158, 60). If we take culture(s) to be intermixed and overlapping, rather than proclaiming disconnected, incommensurable modernities, we need to think of modernity as a transcultural phenomenon which consists of a number of transculturally connected variants of modernity(ies) (see “Transcultural Modernities” 91). In adding the concept of ‘transculturality’ to the discussion on how to reconceptualise modernity, Schulze-Engler takes up a term that German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, amongst others, has promoted to capture the cultural ‘interconnectedness of the world’ that Hannerz describes. For Welsch, this term provides a useful alternative to concepts such as interculturality and multiculturality. It breaks with the idea of absolutely different cultures that are cut-off from each other which these concepts presuppose (see Welsch 196), yet without negating cultural diversity (see ibid. 203) or suggesting a “new global monoculture” (Doff and Schulze-Engler 4). In proposing that there exist several transculturally connected variants of modernity, one hence acknowledges diversity within modernity but avoids overstating the differences between these variants or losing sight of their interdependence. The various attempts to reconceptualise modernity described above may not pursue revolutionary agendas in the sense of Mignolo’s or Dussel’s projects of ‘overthrowing’ modernity; however, they, too, have important transformative effects. Whether by proclaiming multiple, alternative, or transculturally con‐ nected variants of modernities, rejecting a singular narrative of modernisation based on Western history means to dissolve cultural hierarchies which have repeatedly served (neo-)imperialist agendas. If only some, i.e. Western(ised), cultures are considered modern, while all others are deemed ‘still’ traditional, the ‘modern’ ones can claim their role as leaders of those others. This is, in essence, what the notorious idea of the ‘civilising mission’ was founded on; an idea which has resurfaced in different forms in Western global politics throughout the centuries (compare, for instance, Ulrich Beck’s reference to the “military humanism of the West” discussed in chapter 2.1.2 of this study). Consequently, rethinking what Fabian calls “chronopolitics” (144, emphasis in 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks 27 <?page no="28"?> 17 For many contemporary thinkers, including Shamsie, Samuel Huntington’s notorious thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’ is symptomatic of an age which witnesses, in Derek Gregory’s words “the violent return of the colonial past, with its split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (11). original) in the manner suggested above deprives the West of its justification for positing itself as a model for all those who want (or are told to) ‘modernise’. Moreover, if we rethink modernity through a transcultural lens, in particular, there is another way in which the theoretical work of reconceptualising modernity can effect real-world transformation. Proponents of the concept of transculturality have pointed out that the adjustments regarding the notion of culture also change how we think about identities. In the light of transcultur‐ ality, individuals can no longer be reduced to one distinct culture to which they ‘belong’ and which is thought to correlate with their nationality (see Doff/ Schulze-Engler 2). Rather than proclaiming singular cultural attachments and essentialised identities, theorists of transculturality presuppose that “we all possess multiple attachments and identities” (Welsch 198). In a world of transcultural connectivity, classifying and categorising people becomes much more complicated, if not downright impossible. A revision of modernity that re-assesses the latter as a transcultural phenomenon thus brings with it that we think about the inhabitants of the modern world in a new, more open and less essentialising way. In so doing, it makes it impossible to view the modern world through a ‘clash-of-civilizations’-lens. 17 The idea that the globe’s population can be dissected into distinct groups, which each display a singular and homogenous cultural identity and move along their isolated cultural trajectories is simply incompatible with understanding modernity as a global transcultural phenom‐ enon. On the very basis of this incompatibility, a transcultural understanding of modernity can function to dissolve enmities and to usher in a kind of global interaction between both individuals and collectivities, which, to anticipate my discussion of Edward Said’s famous argument further on in this chapter, takes us beyond long-established “politics of confrontation” (Culture and Imperialism 19). Although it is not aimed at ‘overcoming’ modernity, rethinking the ways in which we conceptualise modernity thus also implies a change away from the status quo. Indeed, this intellectual project, too, works towards establishing alternative modern futures, ones that take modernity beyond its colonial legacies. For Ghosh and Shamsie, I will argue in the following, it is this potential that makes them locate a call for re-conceptualising modernity at the very heart of their literary engagements. 28 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="29"?> 2.1 Reconceptualising and Transforming Modernity: Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon I have started out by arguing that both Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s texts work towards changing the ways in which we think about modernity and that, in both cases, these endeavours are guided by the conviction that doing so can help to bring into being a radically new modernity. I have also argued that, more specifically, this conceptual change they work towards centres on establishing a view of modernity as a transcultural phenomenon, although what exactly this encompasses in each case differs. The various engagements with modernity in the field of postcolonial studies described above provide the intellectual context in which Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s oeuvres move. In fact, my analyses will show that several of these approaches overlap in one way or another with these authors’, particularly Ghosh’s, view on modernity. As the following chapter introduces these views and specifies what precisely a transcultural reconceptualisation of modernity means and how it can lead to a radically new modern future in each case, it will also clarify how they are positioned in relation to the theoretical debates outlined above. 2.1.1 A Transcultural Understanding of Modernity as a Political Intervention: Two Versions Throughout his writing, Ghosh continuously challenges the idea of an in‐ trinsically and exclusively Western modernity. His extended essay The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) contains some remarks on historical developments form early modernity onward which both critique and trace the coming into being of the one-sided association of modernity with the West. He points out that the culture of innovation central to early modernity in fact emerged through an act of transcultural collaboration, assembling contributions from all areas of the globe: In the sixteenth century, for instance, innovations in weaponry and fortifications traveled very quickly between Europe, the Middle East, and India. The same was true of ideas: early botanical works, like the seventeenth-century Hortus Malabaricus, were often produced in collaboration by Europeans and savants from elsewhere. A continuous cross-pollination of ideas occurred in mathematics too (GD 94, emphasis in original). Early modernity, he insists, was characterised by an intensified transcultural exchange of knowledge and technology (see ibid.); it was by no means a “‘virus’ that spread from the West to the rest of the world” (ibid. 95), but rather “a 2.1 Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon 29 <?page no="30"?> 18 Compare also Mondal’s argument about the universalism Ghosh ascribes to the ‘metaphysics of modern meaning’ (see 42; 84), to which I will come back in section 3 of this book. 19 Considering that Ghosh constantly promotes a view of the world that acknowledges transcultural interactions, it is important to stress that evoking the notion of a Western (version of) modernity does not mean that the latter developed without cultural exchange between those cultures referred to as Western and non-Western respectively, nor that there are solid boundaries between these. ‘global and conjunctural phenomenon,’ with many iterations arising almost simultaneously in different parts of the world” (ibid.). In arguing that there is nothing intrinsically Western to modernity and that the Western model was only one among several variants of early modernity, he explicitly describes early modernity as a transcultural phenomenon. However, he finds that a characteristic feature of the Western model was, right from the start, its desire to gloss over the very transcultural exchange and collaboration involved in the development of modernity (see ibid.). It simply denied other cultures’ contributions and their own variants of early modernity, claiming modernity and the forms of knowledge and life it produced solely for itself. With Europe’s colonial hold over the world expanding, Ghosh argues, Western modernity was then gradually able to ensure that its narrative of history became universally accepted and its own variety of being modern set the bar upon which everyone’s modernity worldwide was measured. In sarcastically arguing that “the Time-God of modernity[] has the power to decide who will be cast into the shadows of backwardness - the dark tunnel of time ‘outworn’ - and who will be granted the benediction of being ahead of the rest” (GD 70), Ghosh points to the emerging temporal order Johannes Fabian described, in which simultaneously existing cultures were arranged from backward to modern, creating a hierarchy in which the modern, i.e. Western, ones appeared automatically superior and offered themselves as a model to those ‘behind’. 18 Not only was previous exchange denied and global history re-imagined as innumerable separate cultural trajectories running side by side; this new order also had the effect of discouraging further influences from what were now considered anti-modern cultures. If we follow Ghosh’s oeuvre, the development he analyses in The Great Derangement is what set the modern world on a destructive path. As modernity came to be exclusively associated with the West and its variant of modern life, 19 a way of living and thinking tailored to the colonial endeavours of the time became the model for modernity worldwide. Scholarship on Amitav Ghosh has often pointed out that he associates ‘being modern’ with a way of making sense of the world founded on dichotomies, separations and borders 30 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="31"?> 20 This novel, whose title references Joseph Conrad’s novel The Shadow Line (1916), centres on the partition of the Indian subcontinent and its devastating consequences. In a striking paragraph, the narrator reflects on the absurd endeavour of seeking to disconnect places and people which remain nevertheless “bound to each other” (SL 286): “They had drawn their borders, believing in the pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland” (SL 286). In fact, the term ‘shadow lines’ has become a byword for Ghosh’s attention to ‘modern’ separations and their consequences in various areas, see for instance Pablo Mukherjee’s paragraph entitled “Tracing shadow lines” (Postcolonial Environments 112). 21 Compare Latour’s argument in We Have Never Been Modern (1991). Latour maintains that ‘the moderns’ claim their difference from the ‘premoderns’ on the basis of their having recognised the realm of humans and that of non-humans as “two entirely distinct ontological zones” (10). Yet Latour argues that ‘the moderns’ themselves have contributed to merging these zones; they have caused “hybrids of nature and culture” (10) to proliferate, which are “[h]uman because they are our work” (50) and “[n]atural because they are not our doing” (ibid). Such hybrids show themselves, for instance, in the “ozone hole story, or global warming” (ibid.), which “link in one continuous chain the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, scientific and industrial strategies, the preoccupations of heads of state, the anxieties of ecologists” (11). Hence, he concludes, (see for instance Mondal 12, 19; P. Mukherjee, “Second Wave” 182). Not only does Ghosh’s oeuvre continuously challenge these, but it also suggests that they are themselves expressive of an essentially colonial approach to the world that pivots around attempts to dominate and exploit nature and fellow humans alike. When Pablo Mukherjee argues that “[a] significant amount of Ghosh’s creative and critical energies have been devoted to disenchanting the divisive and destructive borders and boundaries propagated by colonial and post-colonial modernity” (“Second Wave” 182), this comment can be, firstly, applied to Ghosh’s expressed discomfort with a world tending to divide its people and space along artificial lines. The creation and partitioning of nation-states are examples of this tendency, which he has interrogated most famously in his novel The Shadow Lines (1988); 20 another one is the very insistence on juxtaposing an ostensibly isolated modern cultural realm of the West with an anti-modern rest that his discussion in The Great Derangement foregrounds. In both cases, Ghosh’s texts suggest, it gives evidence of a society which builds up hierarchies and encourages competition and exploitation. However, Mukherjee’s comment can, secondly, also be applied to Ghosh’s attempt to dissolve more profoundly ontological boundaries which he locates at the heart of (Western) modernity. For instance, it captures Ghosh’s scepticism, reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s, towards a ‘modern’ attempt to entirely disconnect humans and their agency from the material world that surrounds them. 21 This worldview, Ghosh indicates, 2.1 Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon 31 <?page no="32"?> the moderns have never been ‘modern’ in the ways they claim to be; they are in fact unable to conceptualise and understand the world they have co-created and inhabit. Ghosh’s novels have often been read along with Latour (see for instance Schulze-Engler, “Strange Encounters” 179 or Trexler 213) and in The Great Derangement, he explicitly refers to the latter (see for instance 68). 22 Compare also Manav Ratti, who emphasises the “acute sensitivity to the integrity and logic of ‘local’ cultural and religious traditions, away from the hegemonies of modernity” (202) that Ghosh’s texts demonstrate. 23 He leaves no doubt about the “mainstream obsession with pursuing the goal of controlling and manipulating nature” (Global Modernity 33) as well as the destructive power of nationalism in modern Asia. is one that makes people assume it is possible to dominate nature without repercussions. It is thus in various respects that the one-sided association of modernity with the Western model empowered a way of thinking and living that threatens the peaceful coexistence on and indeed the very survival of the planet itself. However, although Ghosh suggests that the Western model has over time become the singular model of modernity worldwide and, as such caused large parts of the globe’s population to adapt to its ways (see GD 108), it is a central assumption of his oeuvre that this model was never able to “capture, contain, or erase the plural ways of being in the world” (Mondal 84), as Anshuman Mondal points out. 22 In fact, Ghosh insists that the ways of inhabiting and making sense of the modern world that were characteristic of the non-Western ‘iterations’ of early modernity have continued to exist through the centuries. While they are now marginalised and widely ignored, he attributes distinct characteristics to them from which follow that they could in fact offer positive models for creating a future beyond the conflictual and endangered status quo. In this suggestion, his perspective overlaps in many ways with an argument recently presented by Prasenjit Duara. In The Crisis of Global Modernity. Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (2014), Duara argues that the climate crisis proves the dominant model of modernity based “on conquest of nature and driven by increasing production” (Global Modernity 279) on the one hand, and on dissecting the world into nations which each pursue individual interests and politics on the other hand, to be both unsustainable and unable to lead us away from the disaster that looms on the horizon (see ibid. 19). He explicitly argues, for instance, that we have to acknowledge the fact that our histories and possible future on this planet “are shared” (58) and that “[g]lobal sustainability requires a cosmopolitanism that is able to transcend the nation” (Global Modernity 19). Against this backdrop, he points out that the history of modern Asia as a ‘networked region’ in fact encompasses not only the dominant ‘modern ways’, 23 32 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="33"?> 24 See in particular the volume by Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho (2014), compare section 3 in this book. 25 Again, just as much as the notion of a Western modernity does not negate connections with non-Western cultures, Asian traditions should not be understood as cut-off from cultures beyond Asia. 26 The proximity to Duara’s thoughts that suggest themselves here should not come as a surprise: himself a former student of Duara’s, Ghosh wrote an enthusiastic review where he praised The Crisis of Global Modernity as a “provocative meditation on the but also alternative possibilities that might help to move on to a more sustainable form of life and society. Duara, too, returns to early modernity and, likewise regarding it as a “polycentric” (ibid. 89) global phenomenon, he describes an Asian variant of early modernity - or, rather, an Indian Ocean variant - which strikingly differs from (Western) modernity as we know it. Here, we encounter a world where a larger translocal and transcultural connectivity was very much acknowledged and indeed encouraged. Along with many scholars of the Indian Ocean world, 24 he highlights that the Indian Ocean region was characterised by a high level of cooperation, fluid boundaries and a vivid and largely peaceful exchange among its various cultures (see ibid. 80). Duara argues that what he calls ‘traditions of dialogical transcendence’, such as Buddhism or Confucianism, played an important role in the region. These traditions contributed significantly to making this variant of early modernity different from the Western one with its orientation towards boundaries and exploitative practices. They fostered both an interhuman interaction which functioned along principles incompatible with the nation-centric, competitive modernity we now face and a considerate approach towards nature. Despite the gradual expansion of Western modernity into the region, Duara insists, those historical particularities never got entirely lost. He points out, for instance, how opponents of nationalism have consciously evoked an “alternative cosmopolitanism drawn from Asian traditions” (ibid. 33) or how Daoist groups have developed an agenda of environmental commitment that is “compatible with historical Daoism’s sacralization of nature” (ibid. 44) In several ways, these traditions leading from an alternative non-Western early modernity to today appear as promising alternatives to the dominant ways of our time. The novels analysed in section 3, I will show, also juxtapose the established ‘modern’ ways with an alternative connected to traditions which lead from an Asian early modernity to today. 25 Like Duara, the novels insist that these alternatives provide powerful correctives to a modernity whose exploitative practices towards nature and humans has brought the world to the verge of collapse. 26 Where Western modernity has created separations and borders both 2.1 Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon 33 <?page no="34"?> resources that Asian traditions can offer to a world in which the dominant models of economy and governance have proved catastrophically dysfunctional” (see Ghosh, “Prasenjit Duara”). In a similar way, he promotes these resources in his fiction. on a material and on a conceptual level, these traditions privilege connections: tendencies to dissect the world’s human population into distinct and unrelated groups or to disconnect human agency from its non-human surroundings are absent from them. Absent, too, are human attempts to either dominate their fellow humans or to elevate themselves to masters over nature. Against the background of the positive visions they take from these traditions, the novels constantly emphasise that the one-sided association of modernity with the West has served to simply dismiss these alternatives as remnants of the pre-modern past. By declaring them to be something inherently ‘backward’ and hence irrelevant to the modern moment, a model of modernity based on separation and conquest ensured and continues to ensure that it stays the only ‘imaginable’ one. Parallel to Mark Fisher’s recent observations about the impossibility to even think beyond capitalism, this model “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (Fisher 8), in this case of how to be modern. It is here, however, that Ghosh’s novels also see a chance for change. If one both remembered that such traditions sprang from early modernity as a trans‐ cultural and polycentric formation and took seriously the idea that, as Hannerz and others have argued, in a connected world there are no entirely cut-off cultural realms and ‘no really distant Other’, such alternatives could no longer be associated with the pre-modern. Instead, they would themselves appear as one among several interconnected variants that together make up contemporary modernity. The latter would thus itself be re-conceptualised - along the lines of Ghosh’s account of early modernity - as a transcultural phenomenon. These alternative practices would lose their marginal status and come into view as part of a whole pool of options for modern ways of thinking and living. In being thus taken seriously as options for shaping a new modern future, they could counterbalance (Western) modernity’s problematic sides and its negative effects. Both the awareness of the world’s fundamental connectivity and the collaborative, as Duara emphasises, cosmopolitan approach that characterises them could spread around the world and, in so doing, herald a more wholesome modernity. It should be clear from this outline in what sense establishing an understand‐ ing of modernity as a transcultural phenomenon is the central manoeuvre in Ghosh’s oeuvre upon which the possibility of alternative modern futures hinges. In his case, such a revision means to challenge the singular place of the West in the production of modernity and to foster an idea of modern life - and of modern futures - which accommodates and is open to influences from all 34 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="35"?> existent traditions. Moreover, the specific approach towards the world which Ghosh associates with Asian/ Indian Ocean traditions and which he seeks to bring into the pool of acceptedly modern ways of thinking and living is itself an example of what a world could be like that acknowledges and fosters trans‐ cultural connectivity. If these traditions came to have an impact on modern life worldwide, this would be another sense in which a transcultural understanding of modernity would prevail and set the world on a new track. While Ghosh’s ideas thus centre on this distinct revisionist project, his assumptions about and engagement with modernity also align him with some other of the theoretical positions I have introduced. My close readings will show that his attempt to open up our understanding of what it means to be modern and to bring non- Western alternatives into view as modern ways of life in their own right parallels Chakrabarty’s: it, too, challenges the idea that being modern required people to abandon all ostensibly traditional aspects of life. It is thus no coincidence that several critics have either explicitly read Ghosh against the background of Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (see for instance Forter; compare my discussion in chapter 3), or, by arguing that Ghosh challenges a dichotomy of modern reason and ostensibly premodern, superstitious ways of thinking (see for instance Ratti 18; Mondal 52) attested Ghosh with a project that notably reminds of the latter critic’s. Interestingly, in some respect, Ghosh’s approach also reminds of Enrique Dussel’s project. Like Dussel, Ghosh suggests looking beyond the borders of Western modernity as a formation tied to colonial practices and finds in those realms beyond a highly promising alternative from which he, like Dussel, hopes that a new modernity can at some point arise. This explains why Dussel’s ‘trans-’modernity, too, has been repeatedly evoked as a framework for describ‐ ing Ghosh’s critical take on modernity (see for instance Martín-González 7; Hoydis 94). However, despite these parallels, the previous discussion has shown that Dussel and Ghosh in fact start from entirely different assumptions about modernity. True, they both reject a “position that conceptualizes modernity as an exclusively European phenomenon” (Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism” 18, emphasis in original). Yet, Dussel’s emphasis on the world-system as the context for the emergence of modernity and his interpretation of modernity as a project of world ‘management’ contrasts with the perspective that Ghosh’s works provide. As shown, the latter point out that modernity emerged as a transculturally connected polycentric phenomenon which also accommodated decidedly non-colonial and non-exploitative ways of living and thinking and seeks to undo the subsequent monopolisation of the signifier modern by the West. While both Ghosh and Dussel thus envision a future trans-/ modernity 2.1 Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon 35 <?page no="36"?> that incorporates what is excluded from modernity in its current form, they do so based on two very different sets of ideas. Ghosh hence starts from the problem of a Western-centric modernity dis‐ course and insists that overcoming the latter would allow us to inhabit modern‐ ity in a more sustainable and peaceful way. Shamsie’s oeuvre, however, centres on a different problem and suggests another sense in which a transcultural rereading of modernity could function as a possible exit route from an undesirable status quo. For her, the main benefit to be expected from a transcultural perspective on modernity is this perspective’s capacity to undo imaginaries of cultural difference and antagonisms between groups of people handed down through generations. As I will show, her texts suggest both that the tendency to produce such imaginaries and antagonisms is a defining feature of modernity in its current shape and that overcoming this tendency is our best chance to make the modern world a safer and more accommodating place. Proponents of the transcultural idea have long since pointed to the transforming effect of the latter in general: Conceptions of culture are not just descriptive concepts, but operative concepts. Our understanding of culture is an active factor in our cultural life. If one tells us (as the old concept of culture did) that culture is to be a homogeneity event, then we practise the required coercions and exclusions. […] Whereas, if one tells us or subsequent generations that culture ought to incorporate the foreign and do justice to transcultural components, then we will set about this task, and the corresponding feats of integration will belong to the real structure of our culture. (Welsch 200, emphasis in the original) This idea that a shift about how we think about culture - and cultural identities - will deeply affect the social world we inhabit is indeed central to Shamsie’s works. In fact, she envisions a shift which far extends the one that Welsch describes above: in her writing, rethinking the world, and modernity in partic‐ ular, through a transcultural lens is not simply a matter of incorporating the foreign but of actually giving up thinking in terms of the foreign and ‘one’s own’ entirely. It is a question, in the words of feminist critic Sara Ahmed, of moving beyond the “opposition between common and uncommon, between friends and strangers, or between sameness and difference” (180). It is in this context that a transcultural re-reading of modernity, or rather of modern history, can bring into being a modernity radically different from the version we currently face. Shamsie’s particular critique of modernity displays many parallels to the ideas of Edward Said. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said points to a paradoxical development connected to modern imperialism. While imperialism 36 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="37"?> 27 Benedict Anderson, for instance, points out that “new-emerging nations imagined themselves antique” (xiv) and points out that “[t]he objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists” (ibid. 5) constitutes one of the paradoxes surrounding nationalism. 28 See also Clements’ discussion of, amongst others, Shamsie’s work in Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective (e.g. 15-17). In observing this revival, Shamsie finds herself in good company. Paul Gilroy, for instance, points out, that “the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ might be thought of as having brought the slumbering civilizational giants of Christendom and the Orient back to life” (After Empire 21) and actually “consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale” (Culture and Imperialism 407) and irrevocably “made the world one” (ibid. 4), it simultaneously brought about a “rhetorical separation of cultures” (ibid. 43). Central to imperialism was the insistence that cultures must be regarded as essentially different and hermetically sealed off entities. This doctrine occluded how much seemingly local histories had become interdependent as a very consequence of imperialism itself. Its rhetoric of separation, Said emphasises, was imperialism’s “worst and most paradoxical gift” (ibid. 407) to the modern world. It caused people to reduce one another to representatives of an essentially different ‘type’, to whom they conceived themselves to be in a relation of competition and enmity. It thus brought to life a thinking in terms of ‘us versus them’ which, manifesting itself in a nationalist rhetoric of difference as well as in larger notions of ‘civilisational’ difference between ‘East’ and ‘West’, is tied to “a murderous imperial contest” (ibid. 43). It led to an embattled state with periodically erupting conflicts, which the world, made up of “one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehend fabric” (ibid. 21), Said argues, “simply cannot afford […] many more times” (ibid). Shamsie’s texts likewise present an - erroneous - assumption that the world and its people can be divided into separate, clearly demarcated cultures as a significant factor in the emergence of an increasingly explosive and fragile globe. They, too, emphasise how much global modernity relies upon us-versusthem dichotomies and on establishing essentialising categories of different (cultural) ‘types’ of humans with ostensibly disconnected histories. Like Said, they explore this on the level of nationalist discourses and their projection of an allegedly stable national identity backward in time, 27 as well as, primarily, on the level of large-scale cultural identities clustered around the categories of ‘East’ and ‘West.’ The latter, they suggest, are often discussed in form of a proclaimed civilisational clash between the Muslim versus the non-Muslim world - a notion which has experienced a revival in the aftermath of 9/ 11. 28 Also 2.1 Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon 37 <?page no="38"?> Derek Gregory speaks of the ‘colonial present’, in which the “imaginative geographies of civilization and barbarism that were mobilized by the White House to wage its war on terror” (259) echo those of the colonial past (see ibid. 71). 29 Gilroy specifies his use of ‘conviviality’ as referring “to the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere. I hope an interest in the workings of conviviality will take off from the point where ‘multiculturalism’ broke down” (After Empire xi). He argues that the concept’s distance from notions of “closed, fixed, and reified identity” (ibid) makes it particularly valuable. See also Clements (10), who likewise connects Shamsie to Gilroy. like Said (and in ways already familiar from Ghosh) they associate the very idea of fundamentally disconnected cultures with a will to dominate those who hence need to be declared as Others. In fact, across the different historical moments from the early 20 th century up to the post-2001 moment that Shamsie’s various novels centre on, they foreground the devastating effects that this thinking in terms of categories and essentialised identities has produced. They emphasise how breaking the world down into, as Sheldon Pollock et al. put it, “a League of Nations with ten thousand fractious and anxious expansion teams” (580) paves the way for a ruthless egoism, which declares the suffering of those not belonging to ‘us’ to be none of ‘our’ business. Moreover, they demonstrate how understanding (cultural) difference in essentialist and confrontational terms creates a climate of suspicion which makes what Paul Gilroy calls a ‘convivial culture’ connected to “the ability and the desire to live with difference” (After Empire 3) unlikely. 29 Against this backdrop, the novels’ conclusions are clear: in an increasingly connected world, proclaiming separate, essentially different cultures creates a spirit of antagonism and conflict and leads to a dangerous spiral of violence when, in fact, cooperation, solidarity and interest in each other’s well-being are needed. Just like the problem that Shamsie’s writing centres on corresponds in many ways to Said’s observations in Culture and Imperialism, the possible remedy it envisions also visibly resembles the latter’s approach. Said makes a case for the transformative power of a revisionist take on history - a take which foregrounds connections. He sets out to write “intertwined and overlapping histories” (Culture and Imperialism 19), which are designed to change not only our attitudes towards the past, but also the ways in which we think about the future (see 18). By drawing attention to those overlapping experiences and cultural interdependences which made up the modern world, he seeks to make a clear cut between ‘us’ and ‘them’ impossible and to complicate notions of singular and fixed (cultural) identities. In so doing, he hopes to ultimately take away the very ideological basis on which people classify, rank and dominate one 38 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="39"?> another (see ibid. 408) and bring into view the possibility of a different world: a world which promises, as his last chapter is evocatively called, “Freedom from Domination in the Future” (ibid. 341). Said’s revisionist historiographic project thus amounts to a political act. Starting from the idea that resistance to imperialism, “far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human history […] based on breaking down the barriers between cultures” (ibid. 260), his rewriting constitutes, as Graham Huggan sums up, a “self-consciously revisionist” (“General Introduction” 14) engagement with history. By showing connections, it seeks to pave the way for a new paradigm of global human interaction in which violent conflict and domination have no space. On this basis, Said’s work suggests, we might be able to bring into being a modern world that has left behind the legacies of colonialism. Shamsie’s novels discussed in section 4, I will show, likewise start from the assumption that a ‘revision’ of history can serve to challenge the separations and categories modernity has installed. Their central premise, like Said’s, is the idea that fostering an awareness of the transcultural and interconnected character of modernity and modern history will lead to a shift in the ways in which humans approach one another, which, in turn, could bring into being a fundamentally different modern world. Such an awareness would force people to give up the habit of positioning a modern, civilised ‘us’ against a barbaric ‘Other.’ It would also guide them towards recognising the global sources of many seemingly local problems rather than tracing them back to ostensibly culturally intrinsic reasons. The transformed modern world that arises on the horizon is thus one in which cultural difference is not perceived as suspicious or as something to be done away with, nor as a distancing factor that makes ‘us’ have nothing to do with ‘them’. It is a world defined by an acute sense of the necessity for transcultural collaboration and the shared responsibility for attempting to make the globe an accommodating place for all. My discussion will demonstrate that the novels both contribute to establishing a revisionist account of history that foregrounds connections and provide visions of what a society that takes seriously the implications of such an account could be like. They are, so to speak, constantly explaining the hope that drives the interventions in which they are themselves engaged. In Shamsie’s case, what I describe as her efforts towards establishing an understanding of modernity as a transcultural phenomenon thus captures a project that differs from Ghosh’s; one which takes her much further away from engagements with modernity such as Enrique Dussel’s or Dipesh Chakrabarty’s. Where Ghosh’s centres on challenging views that see the West as the sole producer of a singular modernity in order to empower traditions that are 2.1 Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon 39 <?page no="40"?> otherwise ignored as backwards, hers focuses on establishing a connected and transcultural paradigm of modern history. In this process, Shamsie’s novels, too, explicitly reject narratives that separate a modern West from a disconnected rest. However, they do so in the context of their larger attempt to promote their revised paradigm of modern history. It is to the latter, rather than to neglected traditions, that Shamsie ascribes the potential to bring about a transformed modern world. While Ghosh and Shamsie thus envision two different roads towards change, my discussion yet suggests that the results that both projects work towards resemble each other strikingly. 2.1.2 Towards a Cosmopolitan Paradigm In their different ways, both oeuvres’ reconceptualisations of modernity and modern history are aimed at creating a situation in which human interaction worldwide is no longer ruled by the idea of exploiting or dominating an alleged ‘Other’. Instead, they envision a world society in which people connect irrespec‐ tive of national or cultural categorisations and where global collaboration and a responsible dealing with what is now recognised as one single world rule the day. In both cases, their attempts to implement a transcultural understanding of modernity are hence guided by distinctly cosmopolitan visions, whether they draw these from past and present ways of life originating from Asia (Ghosh’s case) or conjure them up as an ideal society built on a new acknowledgement of shared histories (Shamsie’s case). In tracing cosmopolitan ideas in Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s oeuvres, I am not alone: critical discussions often point to cosmopolitan positions that run through both authors’ novels. Yet, this claim never stands on its own; critics always hasten to specify the version of cosmopolitanism they associate with the respective texts, distinguishing it from other possible interpretations of the concept. Shao-Pin Luo, for instance, associates Sea of Poppies with a “‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’” (“Way of Words” 378), which, she argues, strikingly differs from a Eurocentric, elitist variety. Sanjukta Poddar, as well, sees in River of Smoke a distinct historical version of cosmopolitanism peculiar to the prenational Indian Ocean world (14). Likewise, Pei-chen Liao argues that Shamsie’s novels are examples of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’. Critical cosmopolitanism, she points out, “rather than celebrat[ing] the borderless world and diversity under globalization” (Liao 266), does not “buy into” these ideas. Instead, it is committed to a project of political change, seeking to confront imperial politics, borders and classifications (see ibid. 277). Ahmed Gamal, in reading Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows along with a novel by Mohsin Hamid, suggests differentiating “between 40 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="41"?> the ‘imperial’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ paradigms with regard to the global project as an historical extension of capitalist modernity” (602). While “imperial designs are driven by the will to control and homogenize” (603), postcolonial cosmopolitanism arises as a “liberating strategy” (605) that - here he quotes Revathi Krishnaswamy’s observation - positions itself “against all forms of totalization and homogenization” (Krishnaswamy qt. in Gamal 605). Madelene Clements, finally, draws on Paul Gilroy, pointing out that the “ordinary (nonelite, decentred, anti-racist and humanist) cosmopolitanism” (10) that Gilroy develops echoes through Shamsie’s and other novels she analyses. The fact that these critics find it necessary to define the shape that the cosmopolitan project takes in each author’s oeuvre and defend its capacity for political change is no coincidence. Cosmopolitan(ism) is indeed a controversially discussed term. Particularly from a postcolonial studies perspective, it is looked upon with suspicion. Capturing, in its basic definition a state of “belonging to all parts of the world” (“Cosmopolitan”) and of being “free from national limitations and attachments” (ibid.), the notion of the cosmopolitan, like that of modernity, has often been evoked in ways that aligned it with the European colonial project. Walter Mignolo, for instance, shows how so-called cosmopolitan politics as a “set of projects towards planetary conviviality” (“Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis” 721) used to converge with the idea of the civilising mission. In discussing Immanuel Kant’s contribution, he argues that, while one can easily agree with the “ideas of justice, equality, rights, and planetary peace” (ibid. 736), this version of cosmopolitanism is inseparable from Eurocentric positions. “Kant’s cosmopolitanism presupposes that it could only be thought out from one particular geopolitical location: that of the heart of Europe, of the most civilized nations” (ibid. 735) and hence assumed that “the entire planet eventually will be organized by the terms he has envisioned for Western Europe” (ibid. 736). Today as well, the idea of cosmopolitanism is often evoked to reassert a form of philosophical universalism that emanates from ‘the West’ and creates a normative model of what every society should be like (see Robbins 2; Mignolo, “Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis” 739). In discussing the ‘cosmopolitan paradigm’ he attributes to second modernity, Ulrich Beck points out, for instance, how the cosmopolitan project often amounts to defending human rights through a highly questionable “military humanism of the West […] founded on an uninterrogated world monopoly of power and morality” (“Cosmopolitan Perspective” 85). In effect, it all too easily represents “the old-fashioned aims of imperialist world politics” (ibid. 86). At its worst, then, cosmopolitanism comes down to the 2.1 Modernity as a Transcultural Phenomenon 41 <?page no="42"?> 30 Another prominent point of critique levelled against the idea of cosmopolitanism is that the latter has, in many cases, become a by-word to celebrate the stance of a jet-setting global elite without loyalties, see, for instance, Timothy Brennan’s argument in At Home in the World (1997) (e.g. 37). While suggesting a different view himself, Bruce Robbins observes that cosmopolitanism has often appeared as a “luxuriously free-floating view from above” (1). Such an elitist cosmopolitanism, my close readings will show, is also criticised in Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s oeuvres. 31 Robbins here explicitly positions himself against the idea of cosmopolitanism signifying detachment and a non-situated way of being in the world (3). very pressure towards cultural homogenisation and the desire to dominate that Ghosh and Shamsie position themselves against. 30 This history, however, does not mean that we must entirely dispose of the cosmopolitan idea, nor does it make a capacity to think and act beyond the nation or an otherwise limited category of belonging in any way less necessary. As Sheldon Pollock et al. have pointed out in introducing a Public Culture special issue on cosmopolitanism, there is not one single agreed-upon interpretation of the cosmopolitan project (see 577). In fact, they insist, if we open it up to the multiple ways in which “people have thought and acted beyond the local” (ibid. 586), cosmopolitanism can be understood on very different terms than those of a cultural and philosophical universalism. The history of the non-Western world, in particular, provides examples of lived “cosmopolitanisms” (ibid. 584, emphasis in the original); of people who did not think in terms of or organise their lives along exclusivist national categories. On a related note, Bruce Robbins suggests that focusing on “actually existing cosmopolitanism” (3) brings a version of cosmopolitanism into view which means above all an alternative way of attachment: instead of proposing a choice between an ”ideal of detachment” (ibid.) or attachment to a singular place or culture, a cosmopolitan stance is founded on the recognition that we are, in a globalised world, in fact “connected to all sorts of places” (3) and acknowledges “our complex and multiple belonging” (ibid.). 31 It is, in fact, a “reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance” (ibid.). Moreover, Paul Gilroy points to a version of ‘lived cosmopolitanism’ which explicitly amounts to challenging continuing oppressive and discriminatory structures. Not only does he promote a “[c]osmopolitan conviviality” (After Empire 9) which starts where ideas of absolute difference and of “closed, fixed, and reified identity” (ibid. xi) are questioned, but he also traces an existent “[c]osmopolitan solidarity” (ibid. 89) that surfaces around the world. This solidarity is based on a “translocal commitment to the alleviation of suffering” (ibid.), suffering which is caused, for instance, through the effects of racism. Resisting ethnic absolutism without negating difference, this cosmopolitan solidarity constitutes in fact a “solidarity 42 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="43"?> 32 However, as Barbara Fuchs points out, contrasting definitions offered by different critics add to the confusion: she points out that critics disagree not only about what romance encompasses, but also “about whether it is a genre or a mode (1)”. The latter view has been influentially promoted by Northrop Frye, who reads romance as a specific ‘mode’ connected to wish-fulfilment and idealization, which often includes a nostalgic longing for the past (see ibid. 6). of the slightly different” (ibid. 88), which Gilroy regards as a vital tool for moving beyond the legacies of Empire. It is a cosmopolitanism understood in the sense of these latter critics, as an alternative to singular and fixed concepts of belonging and as a way of actively embracing a commitment to foster the well-being of the earth and its inhabitants beyond borders, that runs through Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels. In this form, it is central to the new modernities they ultimately seek to usher in. A cosmopolitan paradigm under whose banner exploitative practices and a disinterest in the suffering of others give way to solidarity and cooperation appears, so to speak, as the expected result of their respective transcultural re-conceptualisations of modernity. And in both cases, it is through romance that the novels work towards establishing the transcultural understanding of modernity they advocate and that they introduce the cosmopolitan visions they attach to it - how exactly, the following discussion will outline. 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance If romance constitutes a ‘confusingly inclusive’ category, this is not least due to the term’s long history, in the course of which its semantics repeatedly shifted. 32 The term emerged in the 12 th century to designate texts written in verses that told stories of chivalric love and adventure (see Fuchs 4) and centred on their linguistic quality of being written not in Latin but in the vernacular: it derives “from the expression ‘mettre en romanz,’ which means to translate into vernacular French” (Krueger 1). Romances developed at medieval courts (see ibid. 2); through Chrétien de Troye, they became closely linked to the stories surrounding King Arthur (see ibid.). These stories contributed to the association with chivalry and love that became characteristic of the genre, and they provided a model for subsequent romances. While this is the original context in which the term romance appeared, once established, it came to denote not only its medieval namesakes, but was transferred onto other texts perceived to be in some way related to the original phenomenon. It was retrospectively used to describe classical Greek and Latin texts which had “in part provided the medieval romanciers with their material, and certainly shaped their imagination” 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 43 <?page no="44"?> 33 In a paper entitled “Avatars of Amadis: Magical Realism as Postcolonial Romance”, Christopher Warnes also suggests the term ‘postcolonial romance’. While he, too, develops his argument against the backdrop of the tradition of historical and imperial romances, his understanding of postcolonial romance as a category that equals magical realism is much broader than the notion I suggest, see my discussion in chapter 2.2.3, footnote 58. 34 He stresses that “both Richardson and Fielding saw themselves as founders of a new kind of writing, and that both viewed their work as involving a break with the oldfashioned romances” (9-10). It was indeed common for 18 th -century writers to distance themselves from the romance, which they regarded as an outdated form, characterised by a ‘fanciful’ approach to reality (see Price 269). For a critical take on this distinction see later on in this chapter. 35 See also Duncan, who argues that modern culture turned romance into “a symbolic form prior to itself ” (10-11). (Saunders 1, emphasis in original), as well as texts following the medieval romances, amongst others a substantial group of Renaissance romances. From the 18 th century onwards, with the development Ian Watt famously described as ‘the Rise of the Novel’, a phase in the history of romance began which made it particularly interesting for Shamsie’s and Ghosh’s writing. In the context of a self-consciously modernising culture in the late 18 th and early 19 th -century West, I will demonstrate, romance acquired a new meaning and function. It is out of an engagement with this specific meaning and function and the use to which a number of 19 th and early 20 th -century authors from Sir Walter Scott onwards subsequently put romance, that both authors’ versions of postcolonial romance take shape. 33 In outlining a tradition of ‘exotic romance’ and its implications for conceptualising modernity, I will show that it is by self-referentially playing with and adapting these traditions that Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels develop their new forms of romance fit to their own political agendas. 2.2.1 Exotic Romance and the Modern Versus Anti-Modern Imagination Ian Watt points out that the 18 th -century novel presented itself as a new form which differed from earlier prose fiction - romances - in its adherence to the “aim of verisimilitude” (Watt 33) and its focus on modern reality. 34 In this context, romance came to be increasingly defined by its quality of providing a contrast to this ‘realist’ novel: it now denoted both the “realm of ‘fancy’” (Ferris, “Historical Romance” 297) and a “superseded literary form” (ibid.) connected to a past, anti-modern age. 35 This ascription, which turned romance into something to sneer at for some, made it attractive for others, causing the enormous 44 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="45"?> 36 Corinne Saunders explains, “the root of the word rightly implies the fundamental influence of the romance genre on the period. In the reactions of writers and artists against the Enlightenment, and the growing emphasis on the individual, nature, the affective and the sublime, medievalism and romance narrative more generally played formative roles” (6). 37 Romance, as Duncan maintains, came to signify the “genius loci of the last age, to be preserved in the print-medium of the modern nation-state as its native essence” (4, emphasis in original). 38 Ferris points out that these historical romances at first overlapped with gothic ro‐ mances. Only “by the end of the century [] when historical romance became ever more inflected by a historicist-antiquarian sense of the past as historical difference” (“Historical Romance” 300), they “took pains to establish their historical credentials” (ibid. 305). 39 The fact that Waverley is often described as a (historical) romance (see for instance Dekker 29ff; Warnes 11ff) may at first surprise given George Lukács’ famous claim that Waverley, in portraying the downfall of gentile society, marks the beginning of the realist historical novel. Lukács praises Scott’s “artistic faithfulness to history” (62) as “an extension and application to history of the creative principles of the great English realist writers of the eighteenth century” (ibid.). He argues that whereas in earlier novels set in the past “history is […] treated as a mere costumery” (19), “Scott’s greatness lies in his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types” (35). In interest in the romance at the time which the name ‘romanticism’ reflects. 36 The cultural movement known as the ‘romance revival’ dedicated itself to retrieving medieval and renaissance romances, to editing them as well as to creating new texts modelled on the patterns of these existent ones (see Duncan 4; Ferris, “Historical Romance” 296; Robertson). The authors’ interest in the romance sprang from a newly awakened fascination with the past in the context of the formation of nations and the search for ‘tradition’, 37 as well as from a dissatisfaction with the new restrictions on the imagination perceived to be set by the novel form. Ina Ferris explains that a “desire for a broader novelistic canvas than that offered by prevailing forms of fiction” (“Historical Romance” 300) led authors to demonstratively turn to a revived romance form and, along with this, to a different reality than the contemporary modern one: the past. Merging the past with a zone of imagination, the first texts explicitly calling themselves ‘historical romances’ emerged. Inaugurated by Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance (1762) (see Ferris, “Historical Romance” 296), the historical romance “approached the past as a zone in which the ‘liberties’ of fiction could find free play” (ibid. 298). 38 Drawing on “standard romance plots and tropes” (ibid.), it established a pattern that proliferated around the turn of the 19 th century. Building on this development, Walter Scott then published Waverley (1814) and, in so doing, created a different version of historical romance. 39 Like Leland, 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 45 <?page no="46"?> categorising Waverley as a historical romance, however, critics foreground the central place that romance aesthetics hold in Scott’s narrative depiction of historical change. 40 See also Anthony Jarrells (118), who emphasises that towards the end of his essay, Scott suggests the category of ‘modern romance’ for writing that combines aspects of both categories. 41 Compare also George Dekker, who locates the Waverley model at the beginning of an international tradition of historical romances which depict the “overthrow of a heroic society by the modern post-feudal state” (41). Dekker argues that this model depends on a pair of binary oppositions that structure the contrast between modern and Scott ties the past to the sphere of romance, evoking familiar tropes of love and adventure. However, while those first texts that explicitly called themselves historical romances were entirely set in the past and enjoyed their freedom from ‘realism’, Scott embeds the anti-modern past within the modern diegesis, the fanciful within the ‘realistic’ framework (see for instance Makdisi 85). Scott himself, in his “Essay on Romance” (1824), offers a definition of romance which explicitly positions the latter against the novel. He argues that the romance constitutes “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents”, whereas the novel is “a fictitious narrative, differing from the romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society” (Miscellaneous Prose Works 129). 40 It is, however, by combining these two forms in a single text which then semanticises its juxtaposition of a romance and a ‘realist’ sphere that Waverley expresses its distinct view of history. Famously transporting the reader back to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, a time Sixty Years Since from the narrator’s point of view as the text’s full title stresses, Waverley presents this as an excursion into the pre-history of modern Britain. It confronts its readers with a time where a pre-modern Scottish ‘Otherness’ - embodied by the Highlanders - was not yet “streamlin[ed]” (Moretti 40, emphasis in original) into the culturally homogenous, modern British nation. Stating in the postscript that the purpose of his tale is that “of preserving some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction” (Waverley 376), and to present to future Scottish generations “some idea of the manners of their forefathers” (ibid. 377), the novel depicts the journey of Englishman Waverley from the - already modern - England into the Highlands. This journey, taking him “ever backwards in time” (Makdisi 81; see also Moretti 37-8), transports him into a strikingly different “land of romance” (Waverley 116). As Saree Makdisi shows, the “Highlands- Lowlands opposition enables (and simultaneously rests upon) a matrix of other essentializing dualisms” (85) such as “the fanciful and the realistic, the wild and the tame, […] the heroic and the quotidian, the youthful and the mature” (ibid). 41 46 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="47"?> traditional societies, such as “natural” versus “artificial”, “liberty/ wilderness” versus “order/ boundaries”, “sublimity” versus “correctness” (47). He maintains that “although not peculiar to historical romance, these recurring polarities are definitive and even constitutive of the genre: for, in retrospect, they would seem to demand expression in a kind of fiction which yokes together novel and romance, romance and history” (ibid. 48, emphasis in original). 42 Saree Makdisi points out that, in contrast to what Scott claims, at the moment of Waverley’s publication, the “colonialisation” of the Highlands was far from complete. Scott’s presentation of the Highlanders as essentially backward, he argues, in fact justifies their subjection (see 76) and, in so doing, makes the novel complicit in a colonial process of national formation (see 80). In Makdisi’s reading, Scott’s romantic gesture of “celebrat[ing] the preor antimodern at the moment at which that eradication is just beginning” (ibid. 10) hence illustrates a mechanism that Makdisi regards as characteristic of romanticism: it, paradoxically, contributes to an imperialist expansion of a singular ‘culture of modernity’ through its very opposition to this expansion. Waverley hence plays out the contrasting pairs of romance and the ‘realistic’ to juxtapose an anti-modern Highland culture with a modern, disenchanted and homogenous British culture. With its approach to Highland culture, Waverley visibly combines a romantic desire to preserve an ostensibly threatened anti-modern Otherness with an ultimately imperialist view that rationalises the latter’s extinction as a necessary step facilitating historical progress. 42 On the one hand, the protagonist, as well as the novel on the whole, exhibits a fascination with the Highlanders’ romance charm: Waverley gets involved with the heroic struggle of the Highlanders, is mesmerised by the premodern customs he encounters, and falls in love with clan chief Fergus Mac-Ivor’s sister Flora. On the other hand, the novel constantly stresses the need to ‘overcome’ romance and all desire for it (see also Makdisi 94). While it introduces Waverley as “warm in his feelings, wild and romantic in his ideas” (Waverley 62) and shows how this disposition draws him towards the Highlanders, it then, in the manner of a “prototypical Bildungsroman” (Makdisi 94, emphasis in original), “chronicles his growth and development from the immaturity and romance of youth to the steady rationality of adulthood“ (ibid. 94-5). In fact, this development manifests itself foremost on the level of Waverley’s friendship and love relations. Towards the end of the novel, Waverley feels “himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh, that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced” (Waverley 312). What he describes as ‘real history’ is a course of events in which he not only returns from the Highland rebels to the side of the English crown, but also gives up his love for Flora to get married to the less exciting Rose Bradwardine from the Lowlands. As Franco Moretti points out, this union “between the man from England and the woman from 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 47 <?page no="48"?> 43 For a reading that emphasises the novel’s celebration of progress see also Katie Trumpener, who finds that Waverley’s ending “comes to look unduly optimistic, giving the violence of history a retroactive meaning, a purpose and alibi” (148). 44 Ina Ferris argues that Scott has “a complex and troubled response to historical change even as [he] affirm[s] its fundamental direction” (Achievement 119); Makdisi points out that the novel’s “will to colonize” (97) is “partially undermined” (ibid.) by its desire for an alternative to modernity, and Anthony Jarrells (see 112) firmly rejects Lukács’ claim that Waverley constitutes a “renunciation of Romanticism” (Lukács 33). 45 See also Marianna Torgovnick’s argument about ‘the primitive’: “Is the present too materialistic? Primitive life is not - it is a precapitalist utopia in which only use value, never exchange value, prevails. Is the present sexually repressed? Not primitive life - primitives live life whole, without fear of the body. Is the present promiscuous and undiscriminating sexually? Then primitives teach us the inevitable limits and controls placed on sexuality and the proper subordination of sexuality to child rearing” (8-9). the Lowlands estate” (40) constitutes “a miniature of a national union based on the agreement, the mutual desire of the more ‘civilized’ spaces” (ibid.). It embodies the decision to leave both Highland culture and romance ‘behind’ in order to move on to a homogenous national community built on the extinction of ‘Otherness’. 43 Yet, as several critics have argued, Waverley does not entirely affirm this celebration of progress either: the latter is continuously tempered by the novel’s nostalgic regret at what is getting lost - even while Waverley itself contributes to justifying this loss as a necessary one. 44 With the Waverley model’s juxtaposition of an anti-modern romance sphere on the one hand and a ‘modern’ culture on the other, Scott created a literary pattern that lends itself to what Chris Bongie calls the “exoticist project” (5). This project starts from the perception of modernity as a “story of loss” (ibid.). Inextricably tied to a Western-centric understanding of modernity according to which modernisation necessarily means flattening out cultural difference, it feeds on anxieties surrounding the global expansion of (Western) modernity. In annihilating plural ways of living (see Bongie 3), contemporaries come to fear, this expansion will create a “world without horizons, essentially lacking in mystery, out of which nothing new can arise” (ibid. 3). Against this, exoticism presents, by means of the literary imagination, a “possible refuge from an overbearing modernity” (ibid. 17). By “posit[ing] another space, the space of an Other, outside or beyond the confines of a ‘civilization’” (ibid. 4-5), it provides a nexus of culture, people and geography, which it depicts as distinctly antimodern. The exotic hence emerges as a realm on which all that is ostensibly getting ‘lost’ in the process of modernisation is projected (see 5), exciting, yet always essentially different, uncivilised and ultimately backward compared to ‘us’. 45 48 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="49"?> 46 Walter Scott’s texts are often described as a model for writers of imperial romances in general, who then “adapted the romance genre to the exotic settings often depicted in accounts of late Victorian imperialism” (Hultgren 645-6). What connects the ‘late imperial romance’ with Waverley more specifically, however, is its nostalgic quality: McClure argues that in earlier imperial adventure fiction, “the relation between romance and imperialism was a symbiotic one” (10) as the foreign setting appeared to provide endless opportunities for heroism and unfamiliar encounters. It was only towards the end of the 19 th century that authors started to get uneasy about the possible homogenising effects of Western imperialism (see ibid. 10-1) and, once again, expressed a ‘romantic’ nostalgia for the about to be extinct premodern difference. See also Patrick Brantlinger, who argues that the literature of the day now had an “elegiac quality about it” (42) and associates it with the desperate “attempt to reclaim a waning heroism and adolescent romanticism before the frontiers shut down” (38). While romanticism in general, and Scott’s portrayal of an earlier, more diverse moment in the history of an emerging unified British national culture in particular, stand at the beginning of the anti-modern exotic tradition, it is almost a century later that the exoticist project gains full speed. At the turn of the 20 th century, many contemporaries feel that Western imperialism, at its peak at this moment, threatens to cause the “complete dissolution of exotic horizons” (Bongie 18). They anticipate a world entirely deprived of places of anti-modern difference and opportunities for heroism and adventure (see McClure 11), - a world “given entirely, and hopelessly, over to modernity” (Bongie 18) in which “there’s no room for romance anywhere” (Arthur Conan Doyle qtd. in McClure 11). In this atmosphere, a successor of the Waverley model rises to prominence, adding a new variant of ‘exotic romances’ to the canon. With novels such as H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) or E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), what John McClure described as the ‘Late Imperial Romance’ has come into existence. 46 Arising out of the sensation that the ‘exotic horizons’ are dwindling, the late imperial romance reacts to this threat by desperately defending the idea that islands of anti-modern difference still exist. Where the historical romance lin‐ gers on the pre-national past, the late imperial romance, for instance, “dispute[s] imperialism’s capacity to rationalize the world utterly, pointing to the stubborn persistence of ungridded zones within and beyond the frontiers of empire” (McClure 12). By hence suggesting that, imperialism notwithstanding, pockets of exotic Otherness prevail, these texts, too, make room for journeys, like those of Haggard’s imperialist trio or Conrad’s shipping crew, into an exotic, antimodern world of cultural alterity still endowed with the dangers and attractions of romance. Like Waverley, they offer a diegesis structured around the ‘denial of coevalness’ as they contrast a world devoid of romance with one defined by 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 49 <?page no="50"?> 47 On the desert romance see also Dannenberg. 48 E.M Hull’s The Sheik (1919), for instance, builds on the motif of a rape in whose aftermath the victim falls in love with the perpetrator. Although the Sheik ultimately turns out to be English and not, as readers are led to assume, the ‘dangerous Arab’, it: they differentiate between “the West represented as zone of relative order, security and secularity, [and] the non-Western world as a zone of magic, mystery and disorder” (McClure 8). Against this background, Wendy Katz points out, they feature the Westerners’ escape from the modern world “to a remote locale, the implicit character of which recalls a time past and even an earlier stage of human development” (32). In so doing, the late imperial romances express the same ambivalences as the historical romance in the tradition of Waverley. As John McClure points out, these texts, “in their determination to preserve the non-Western world as the locus of magic and mystery, […] perpetuate a western tradition of ‘othering’ the subjects of imperialism” (12). Hence, while they dread the effects of an expansion of Western modernity and an annihilation of difference, they simultaneously provide a justification for the latter by conjuring up an essentially anti-modern, uncivilised Other. In the late imperial romance, the attractions that the exciting but dangerous anti-modern exotic worlds hold for the Western imagination thus manifest themselves in these worlds’ potential for providing a scene for heroic male adventures and expeditions. Almost simultaneously, however, there arises a second version of exotic romances set in the non-Western space, which focuses on a female protagonist’s journey and puts the - likewise exciting and dangerous - love adventures with the exotic ‘Other’ centre stage (see Teo 68 ff.). In some ways, the two components of Waverley’s encounter with romance, his romantic attraction to Flora and his involvement in a military adventure, hence diverge into two different, gendered narrative patterns in the late 19 th / early 20 th century. Hsu-Ming Teo has analysed a tradition of “Loving the Orient” (Teo 27), in which the Orient is constructed as “a place of barbarism and savagery but also, paradoxically, as a space of sensuousness and opulence, sexuality and romantic love” (ibid. 6). She has shown that this tradition, while leading back through the centuries (see 27 ff.), booms and takes on a distinct shape with the early-20 th -century ‘desert romance novel’ (see 69). 47 In the latter, Teo argues, the “Orient became a place for strong-willed imperialist women to experience romance as well as imperial adventures” (ibid. 85). Rather than offering ‘tame’ love stories, desert romance novels tend to capitalise on the “figure of the dangerous Arab” (ibid.) as a hypermasculine aggressor, in whose very aggressiveness the texts locate, somewhat disconcertingly, the promise of a sensuality that a more ‘civilised’ Western culture ostensibly lacks. 48 Just 50 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="51"?> Teo points out that “it is still significant that the white women, who are desired by other white men, find themselves irresistibly attracted to the Arab persona” (85) in desert romances like The Sheik. Even though these texts tend to avoid the scandal of miscegenation, she finds, they still put the charms of the exotic centre stage. 49 This genre’s tendency to affirm the ‘civilising’ impact of the West is particularly visible in the contemporary variants of Orientalist romance novels which Teo discusses. In these texts, which like their predecessors develop love stories between Western women and Arab men, “British imperialism’s Christianizing and civilizing mission of the nineteenth century lives on […], hybridized with strands of the American national mission to bring liberty, democracy, and modernity - especially in the form of liberal feminism - to the developing postcolonial world” (Teo 10). The independent Western heroine, thanks to her own liberal attitude, manages to re-educate the unenlightened Arab man and turn him into a suitable partner for herself. The male protagonist hence moves away “from an original position of Islamic Otherness” (Teo 234) and “becomes de-Orientalised, Westernized or Americanized, and incorporated into the Western body politics” (ibid.), where he becomes a loving spouse and a good citizen. like their ‘male’ counterpart, these female adventure plots depict a - still existing - exotic world as a source of excitement and threat alike. In so doing they, too, contribute to the process of Othering which ultimately justifies the ‘civilising’, ‘modernising’ impact of the West and the extinction of the very ‘exotic’ difference they are themselves fascinated with. 49 The historical and the imperial romance, whether in providing a ‘male’ or a ‘female’ version of an adventure plot, thus display a shared pattern. They both draw on familiar romance tropes to conjure up an exotic, anti-modern nexus of culture and space that they present as simultaneously attractive and lacking in its difference to a singular possible version of ‘modern life’. These traditions of exotic romance and their implications, I will argue, are what makes romance such an interesting category for Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s attempts to move beyond dominant concepts of modernity. The notions of modernity on which exotic romances are founded and which they express are in fact the very ideas Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels challenge. As shown, these 19 th -and early-20 th -century texts reduce modernity to one distinct (Western) way of life, whereas they associate other, co-existing ways with a pre-modern age. In so doing, they suggest that a one-sided proliferation of the former and a gradual extinction of the latter constitutes the necessary, ‘natural’ way forward, however much they themselves may bemoan this process. Not only is this precisely the effect of a Western-centric modernity discourse that Ghosh’s critique focuses on, but the exotic romance imagination also establishes the separatist paradigm of modern history that Shamsie criticises. In suggesting essentialised anti-modern and modern cultural realms, the politics of exotic romance deny the ‘interconnected histories’ that Shamsie’s novels, in line with 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 51 <?page no="52"?> Said, regard as characteristic of the modern world. Furthermore, these politics foster the very process of Othering, founded on a concept of cultures as static and clearly delineable entities and of people as exemplars of cultural difference, which Shamsie seeks to abolish. Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that an important element of both authors’ postcolonial romance - in ways chapter 2.2.3 will elaborate on - consists in evoking these traditions from a highly critical point of view, conjuring them up only to challenge what they represent. 2.2.2 Exotic Romance, Alternative ‘Conceptual Realities’ and Cosmopolitan Visions While exotic romance becomes, so to speak, a shorthand for the set of ideas Ghosh and Shamsie reject, it is not exclusively of interest for establishing the very notions both oeuvres criticise. In fact, the challenging approach to the traditions described above is only one side of the authors’ wider engagement with them. In setting the romance realm explicitly against the (early Western) novel’s ostensibly ‘realist’ depiction of the modern world, the exotic romance tradition also provides both authors with a literary form to visibly develop alternatives to the dominant way of conceptualising modernity, modern reality and modern history which the ‘realist’ novel is tied to. Against Watt’s claim that the novel’s, in contrast to the romance’s, “primary task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience” (13), others have pointed out that the novel is by no means faithful to a somewhat transhistorical human experience. Its ‘realism’ is in fact limited to a very specific - and new - experience. Fredric Jameson, for instance, argues that [t]he novel plays a significant role in what can be called a properly bourgeois cultural revolution - that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism. The ‘objective’ function of the novel is thereby also implied: to its subjective and critical, analytic, corrosive mission must now be added the task of producing as though for the first time that very life world, that very ‘referent’ - the newly quantifiable space of extension and market equivalence, the new rhythms of measurable time, the new secular and ‘disenchanted’ object world of the commodity system, with its post-traditional daily life and its bewilderingly empirical, ‘meaningless,’ and contingent Umwelt - of which this new narrative discourse will then claim to be the ‘realistic’ reflection (Political Unconscious 138, emphasis in original). 52 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="53"?> 50 While in earlier texts the presence of Muslim characters was not unusual, she argues, it became “almost a definition of the kind of ‘Novel’ meant in The Rise of the Novel that we must meet no Muslim characters” (293, emphasis in original). As the preceding quote indicates, Doody moreover argues that Watt’s definition of the novel is far too narrow: she finds that what he describes is only a very specific version of the genre (see 287). By suggesting a more encompassing understanding of the latter, she ultimately argues for collapsing the distinction between the romance and the novel as two separate genres altogether. 51 In The Great Derangement, Ghosh himself has made a point related to Jameson’s and Doody’s arguments. He maintains that the realist novel coproduced the dominant modern version of reality. By reducing agency solely to humans and limiting its scene to a clearly bounded (national) space seemingly disconnected from the world at large (see 59), the novel introduced the very separations he sees typical of the version of modernity installed along with Western colonialism. Commenting in a sidenote explicitly on romance, he argues that all that which did not fit this modern ‘reality’, now defined as the ‘improbable’, was banned to “those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as ‘the Gothic,’, ‘the romance,’ or ‘the melodrama’” (24). For someone like Ghosh, who does not agree with Western modernity’s view on the world - he points to the “irony of the ‘realist novel’: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real” (23) -, these ‘outhouses’ thus prove interesting precisely in their potential to re-introduce what the realist novel has banned. See my discussion in section 3. If, in Jameson’s view, the novel’s ‘realism’ is inextricably tied to modern capitalist culture, Margaret Ann Doody likewise challenges the generalised idea of a superior ‘fidelity’ of the novel expressed by Watt. Instead of accepting the claim that the novel alone is true to human experience per se, she argues that earlier fictions than the one described by Watt - romances - were also true to human experience, albeit a different one (see 184). In her account, the emerging realist novel, defined above all by its “ability to exclude” (ibid. 292, emphasis in original), seems committed to a project of ‘reprogramming’ to a new bourgeois and, she stresses, national culture committed to “shutting out aliens” (ibid. 293). 50 Doody now maintains that romance provides an escape for all those who “could not be happy with the conceptual ‘reality’ on which domesticated Realism was founded” (ibid. 294), allowing them to develop their own alternative ‘conceptual realities.’ 51 In a similar way, chapter 2.2.3 will argue, a self-referentially marked romance realm provides Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels with a space to circumvent the ‘conceptual reality’ centred on borders and separations that they seek to replace and to insert the alternative visions, particularly those surrounding cosmopolitan ideals, that they each pursue. In fact, research on Waverley in particular has often explicitly emphasised how the text’s romance gives rise to a vision that competes with its seemingly affirmative take on the idea of extinguishing ‘Otherness’ in order to ‘progress’ 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 53 <?page no="54"?> 52 The two papers I refer to in the following in fact both briefly remark on Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies as a recent historical novel in Scott’s tradition, which centres on a “world in which national borders or communities mean very little” ( Jarrells 112; see also Marx 199). 53 To some degree, this argument overlaps with Fredric Jameson’s, who claims that, in late capitalist culture, romance provides an opportunity of “sensing other historical rhythms” (Political Unconscious 91). to a modern, homogenous national community. 52 Anthony Jarrells, for instance, finds that in Scott’s fiction “[r]omance skirts the edges of what would later be called ‘realism’ yet maintains the possibility of an other world, distinct from but simultaneous with what Scott’s Enlightenment forbears referred to as ‘commercial society’ and the national borders that contained it” (113). Romance, in other words, introduces “the local” (ibid. 116) that “resists assimilations (and containment)” (ibid.) into the novel, which otherwise has no space within a form dedicated to promoting a homogenous modern national culture (see 116-7). As Jarrells argues, through Scott’s insertion of romance, “[t]he ‘modern’ form that Scott takes from England - the early realist novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and especially Henry Fielding - is ‘compromised’ by local materials: the ‘tales, illustrative of ancient Scottish manners’ and the ‘traditions’ of local districts” (ibid. 117). 53 Through this “local as romance feature” (ibid. 122) Scott’s novels, in particular the later ones, do not only bemoan a soon-tobe-lost Scottish difference, but they also allow to bypass “the nation and the homogenizing narratives of empire grounded in national history to imagine the possibility of a world based on and defined by difference” (ibid. 122). They thus project, via their romance realms, a possible alternative to the homogenising (imperialist) national history into the future. Although not explicitly commenting on Scott’s use of romance, John Marx likewise finds that the historical novel in Scott’s tradition “offers both a prehistory for the nation and a counter-discourse” (200). In Scott’s novels, the desire for the national union between England and Scotland competes with an alternative one: Marx argues that “[e]ven as bonds among Scots and Englishmen, Saxons and Normans anticipate British union in Scott’s fiction, the way his characters collaborate across ethnic, religious and linguistic lines suggests their interest in transnational alliance” (see 191). He points out that the juxtaposition of institutionalised and uninstitutionalised unions functions as a means through which Scott’s novels contrast an exclusive conception of the nation with a more inclusive take on community which accommodates difference (see 196): Edward settles down with Rose Bradwardine in a marriage that promotes to wed English core to Scottish periphery, but he pines for the pleasures of exotic commerce 54 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="55"?> 54 See also Alex Watson’s observation that “the material that Scott displays in his margins retain a latent capacity to complicate and undermine the British union” (114). 55 He explains that he seeks to “align[…] what I take to be the ‘theoretical realism’ fundamental to the forms of knowledge and value that contract (and insurance more generally) exists to secure with the ‘suppositional,’ ‘abstract,’ or ‘exchangeable’ types of character, object, and social encounter that recent novel theory has discovered in an eighteenth-century novelistic discourse” (32). He draws attention, for instance, to “the London criminal class, whose ‘culturally representative type’ is Defoe’s Moll Flanders” (ibid. 45). with Flora MacIvor. […] Even as history dooms the clan, it elevates characters who live to bridge populations, to forge cosmopolitan friendships, to fall in love with enemies of their home nations and to collaborate with strangers of all sorts. (192) Despite their centrality, however, the “daring cross-ethnic alliances of the plot never translate into institutionalized bonds” (ibid. 196). Yet, the mere existence of and desire for them, Marx concludes, demonstrate that Scott’s historical novels toy with possible alternatives to the culturally homogenous community as a model for the future. He finds that they “leave[] open other possibilities for imagining future social organization than those engendered by the rise of a homogenized English nation” (196) 54 - and it is precisely through romance that they do so. Both Jarrells and Marx thus show that the Waverley model simultaneously expresses a desire for and a hope to evade a world ordered into separate, internally homogenised (national) communities. In yet another reading of Waverley, Ian Baucom further contributes to bring‐ ing into view the historical romance’s potential for thinking beyond established modern ways. Baucom suggests that the realist novel that arose in the 18 th century is tied to the “triumph of an abstract, speculative, hypercapitalized modernity” (33). It introduces a process of abstraction into fiction which has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade. The slave trade, he argues, particularly through its practice of insuring ‘slave cargo’, reduced humans to an abstract representation of a set amount of money: “[i]ndeed what we know of the trans- Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violences it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of becoming a ‘type’: a type of person, or terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money” (ibid. 11). This dehumanising logic of typification, Baucom maintains, is at the bottom of what he calls the novel’s ‘theoretical realism’ (32), a mode of representation which employs characters as an exchangeable stand-in for an abstract category. 55 However, according to Baucom, this logic of abstraction also produced a distinct counter-discourse. He develops this argument based on the example of the Zong court case, a case about slaves 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 55 <?page no="56"?> who had been intentionally drowned. In exclusively discussing whether the insurance had to pay, this case exemplifies the triumph of abstraction. However, Baucom stresses that the trial simultaneously caused a contrary antislavery discourse to form, which was built on “the figure of the interested historical witness” (33) who suffered with the individual, ‘singular’ dead (see ibid.). He argues that the trial hence also testifies to the emergence, internal to a Euro-Atlantic modernity, of a testamentary counterdiscourse on and of modernity: a recognizably romantic counterdiscourse; a melancholy but cosmopolitan romanticism that sets itself, in Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre’s evocative phrase, ‘against the tide of modernity’ (33). This counterdiscourse, Baucom argues, also found its way into literary form, manifesting itself, at least to some extent, in Scott’s Waverley. Although Scott’s Highlanders represent themselves a form of ‘type’, Baucom points out that Waverley does not affirm the logic of typification. Through the ways in which it evokes the dead and extinct ‘forefathers’, it asks its readers to sympathise and identify with them (see 279). At least for a moment, it displays a “cosmopolitan interestedness” (296) which is at odds with the process of abstraction - even if it then gradually gives up this interestedness and “moves on to inhabit a liberal modernity cleansed of the ‘ghosts issuing forth’ from the past” (282). Baucom concludes that the novel’s initial stance exemplifies what he terms “melancholy realism” (33) in contrast to ‘theoretical realism’: a form which makes visible the violence of typification itself by foregrounding the suffering Other (see 233). Where Jarrells and Marx highlight the historical romance’s potential for imagining a (modern) future that is not built on the desire to abolish difference, Baucom thus traces in Waverley’s romance an - at least temporary - cosmopolitan concern for the individual suffering human. This concern explicitly resists the dehumanising practice of typification and, in its cosmopolitan dimension, does not stop at cultural or national borders. Discussions of postcolonial fiction, too, repeatedly refer to Waverley. Drawing on critics such as Baucom and Jarrells, two recent studies on the postcolonial historical novel have argued that engaging with the Waverley model allows the genre to envision alternative futures by revisiting the past. Maintaining that postcolonial historical fiction offers Critique and Utopia alike, Greg Forter claims that it “engages in the utopian project of constellating alternative, postnational futures, which the genre locates in the unrealized residues of a past that persists within yet disrupts the ‘homogenous, empty time’ of colonial modernity” (Critique and Utopia 2, emphasis in original). These ‘unrealized residues’ are embodied in the alternative, ‘local’ and cosmopolitan visions that 56 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="57"?> 56 Forter’s study (Critique and Utopia) also contains one chapter on Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and one on Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, to which I will come back in my respective analyses. In particular his argument concerning Sea of Poppies, which connects the novel to Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, has some points in common with my own (see section 3 of this book). 57 Dalley suggests the term ‘allegorical realism’ to capture the ways in which the singular character and collectivities point to each other, without one or the other becoming the dominant category (see 33-41). In so doing, he explicitly distances himself from Fredric Jameson’s controversially discussed reading of “Third-World Literature” as an allegory of the nation, in which he argues that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” ( Jameson, “Third-World Literature” 69, emphasis in original). Instead, Dalley draws on Doris Sommer’s discussion of romance novels that promote the formation the Waverley model’s romance realm produces. Forter argues that the genre “retrieves from the dustbin of history […] the counterstories of aspiration and solidarity that the colonial and neo-colonial projects have occluded, repressed and sought to write out of the historical record” (ibid. 5). By developing stories of transnational and anti-imperialist solidarities and networks, postcolonial historical fiction thus brings such ‘unrealized residues’ to life and, in doing so, comments on the possibility of a different world to come (see ibid. 6). 56 The second study, by Hamish Dalley, modifies Baucom’s argument to suggest that postcolonial historical novels draw from the Waverley model a representa‐ tional strategy on which their potential for ‘utopia and critique’ is founded. Instead of regarding ‘theoretical realism’ and ‘melancholy realism’ as two different forms, Dalley maintains, one should read them as two parts of a dialectically connected whole and accept that one cannot occur without the other. Dalley insists that violent, dehumanising logic of typification is in fact central to historical novels like Waverley. Not only does their very allusion to history depend on presenting characters like the dying Highlanders as representatives of their group, he argues, but the idea that the extinction of the (cultural, racial, ethnic and so forth) Other constitutes the acceptable “side effect of progress” (ibid. 23) is moreover constitutive of the genre as inaugurated by Waverley. However, at the same time, Dalley finds that the practice of conjuring up the individual sufferer’s fate in order to represent an abstract group in the first place necessarily undermines the very logic of typification. This practice has the effect that novels like Waverley indeed display the stance of ‘cosmopolitan interestedness’ underlined by Baucom in their focus on the ‘singular’ dead. Dalley concludes that Waverley’s representational strategy entails “a dialectic between typification and singularity, producing a two-sided process of signi‐ fication that oscillates between exemplifying collectivities and affirming the irreducibility of the unique human subject” (16, emphasis in original). 57 This 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 57 <?page no="58"?> of Latin American postcolonial nations through their focus on the union of “starcrossed lovers who represent particular regions, races, parties, economic interests, and the like.” (5) Sommer argues that these novels refuse to create a one-directional process of signification, in which the lovers simply stand for the political development. Instead, “the rhetorical relationship between heterosexual passion and hegemonic states functions as a mutual allegory” (Sommer 31, my emphasis), in which each component “helps to write the other” (ibid. 42). simultaneous subscribing to and resisting processes of typification, abstraction and categorisation inherent in the form itself, Dalley argues, opens a space for critique that postcolonial historical novels in the Waverley tradition make use of. While they draw on ‘typification’ themselves, the “disruptive counterlogic of singularity” (ibid. 200) simultaneously enables them to take a stance against the lack of interest in the fate of those Others who were sacrificed on the road to ‘progress’. Ultimately, they end up advocating a cosmopolitan sympathy and an interest across difference in human suffering and, in so doing, position themselves explicitly against imperialist designs. Although Dalley does not stress Scott’s engagement with romance, his discussion hence also points towards an element in Waverley that makes the novel an important point of reference for attempts to think beyond modern nationalist and imperialist divisions. With its juxtaposition of a realist and a romance sphere, the Waverley model hence provides more than merely a literary form which implies that being mod‐ ern is the privilege of certain cultures and which features essentially different, modern or anti-modern human types. If we follow the studies described above, its romance has also traditionally enabled authors to develop cosmopolitan visions for conceptualising and inhabiting the world in new ways. A similar case can and has in fact been made for the imperial romance, in particular in its female adventure plot version. Here as well, the desire for exotic difference that produces the ‘Oriental Other’ as the opposite of ‘us’ in the first place, at times inadvertently takes these texts beyond the idea of essentialised difference from which they start. As this desire translates into a transcultural love plot, Teo points out, “the formal plot demands of the genre of romance fiction” (10) have the effect that “cultural commonality and shared human interests and emotions are often emphasized instead of ineluctable difference” (ibid.). Hence in this case, too, the texts’ romance, while affirming the necessity to ‘Westernise’, tentatively builds up a different vision. Subverting its first impetus to a certain extent, romance simultaneously encompasses a refusal to essentialise cultural difference and promotes something akin to Gilroy’s ‘cosmopolitan conviviality’. 58 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="59"?> This subtone of the ‘Loving the Orient’-tradition, I will show, is something that Shamsie’s postcolonial romance, in particular, capitalises on. 2.2.3 Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s Versions of Postcolonial Romance: An Outline Against the backdrop of the exotic romance traditions and their ideological implications described above, Shamsie’s and Ghosh’s novels display a selfreferential engagement with romance, which explicitly politicises their literary discourses. The novels discussed in section 3, Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy and The Hungry Tide, I will show, entirely adapt the patterns of the historical and the imperial romance; yet they do so to a highly subversive end. The novels exceed‐ ingly draw on romance tropes to distinguish, so it seems, between a modern (Western/ ised) world and an exotic anti-modern realm that contrasts with the latter. The Ibis trilogy appears to depict the triumph of modernity, inaugurated by Western colonialism, over an enchanted, anti-modern Indian Ocean world, which it regards, à la Waverley, with a romantic nostalgia for the soon-to-be lost difference. The Hungry Tide evokes the contemporary Sundarbans as an exotic space that has somehow, to borrow McClure’s expression, ‘stubbornly resisted’ modernisation and hence provides the stage for a dangerous but reviving adventure of the ‘modern’ metropolitan protagonist. However, rather than subscribing to the division between the modern and the anti-modern and their own romanticisation of the latter, my close readings will show, the novels recreate the discourse of exotic romance with a highly ironic and critical impetus. This discourse serves them to foreground, in fact to mockingly imitate, the ways in which the dominant, established version of modernity associates all those that do not correspond to its own model with premodern romance. Notions of ‘noble savages’ and of a ‘pre-rational’ superstition are constantly evoked within the texts’ exotic romance worlds. Yet, it would be wrong to conclude that Ghosh’s texts participate in the very “Orientalist mythmaking” (Suleri 181) the inversion of which Sara Suleri has described as the “burden of postcolonial writing” (ibid.). Instead, we have to acknowledge Ghosh’s conscious replication of exotic tropes: the texts demonstrate to the reader that the only category Western modernity has for ways of thinking and living that depart from its own tradition is that of exotic remnants of the premodern past. Ghosh’s depiction, chapter 3 argues, has to be read against the backdrop of what Graham Huggan describes as ‘strategic exoticism’: a way of adopting “exoticist codes of representation” (The Postcolonial Exotic 32) in a subversive manner, through which these codes serve to challenge, rather than 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 59 <?page no="60"?> 58 In claiming that Ghosh’s postcolonial romance seeks to move beyond the dichotomy of romance and realism, my discussion reminds in some ways of Christopher Warnes’ argument (mentioned in footnote 33). He points out that magical realism challenges the differentiation between romance and realism constitutive of the historical and imperial romance and, on this basis, suggests understanding magical realism as Postcolonial Romance. Drawing on Jameson’s account of the ways in which the ‘realist’ novel attuned its readers to a new ordering of the world, he maintains that “[t]o the list of processes Jameson identifies as being enacted by realism we must add that of othering, including the specific form of othering that involves defining and hierarchizing what is real and what is not” (14). It is against this backdrop that magical realism reselects what counts as real and, in so doing, ultimately “calls into question the culturally selective terms on which the category of modernity itself is constructed” (ibid.11). My understanding of postcolonial romance is narrower than Warnes’, who uses it synonymously with magical realism: a play with established romance tropes is a sine qua non of postcolonial romance as I develop it in this study. Nevertheless, his analysis of the ways in which postcolonial romance re-negotiates the very category of modernity corresponds in many ways to my reading of Ghosh’s project. affirm, the logic out of which they are born. In a similar manner, Ghosh’s exotic romances display a ‘strategic romanticism’. While the novels thus evoke the dichotomy of a pre-modern romance realm and a modern ‘realist’ sphere, their central impetus is precisely to collapse this dichotomy. They gradually make us realise that their ostensibly exotic other worlds are in fact ill-contained within their anti-modern space. Their exotic veneer notwithstanding, they provide possible models of inhabiting a modern world. Reminiscent of Waverley, their romance realms accommodate an alternative way of conceptualising and organising the world which, the novels highlight, is anything but essentially antimodern. It is through creating such a contradiction between the very dichotomy they evoke themselves and the conclusions they invite that the novels develop their political force. Incessantly reproducing the ‘denial of coevalness’ constitutive of exotic romance only to suggest the absurdity of this idea, they work towards overcoming normative and Western-centric concepts of modernity. It is on this basis that their selfreferential and mockingly ironic engagements with the traditions of exotic romance ultimately suggest viewing modernity as a transcultural phenomenon; a phenomenon with several coexisting options from which we can choose in which direction we want our modernity to develop. 58 While Ghosh’s novels hence inscribe themselves into the exotic romance model in order to subvert the very romance/ realist, modern/ anti-modern dis‐ tinction on which it is founded, Shamsie’s postcolonial romance, section 4 will argue, diverges into two separate, yet interconnected manoeuvres. One centres on deconstructing the exotic romance imagination and, in so doing, resembles 60 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="61"?> Ghosh’s approach: as described, the remedy Shamsie’s novels suggest for moving on to a different modern world is replacing a separatist understanding of modern history with one that acknowledges transcultural connections and global interdependences. As I will show in my close readings, Shamsie visibly alludes to the framework of exotic romance, whose ‘modern’ protagonist travels to an ‘anti-modern’ space of romance enchantment and encounters the cultural Other. In so doing, she draws attention to the idea of hermetically sealed off cultural spheres, ostensibly caught up in their respective modern and antimodern worlds, which she seeks to overcome. Like Ghosh’s, her romanticism is ‘strategic’ here and, like in Ghosh’s case, the novels invite readers to challenge these views they conjure up. The plots in general and the protagonists’ lives and experiences in particular belie the image of a world composed of disconnected and incompatible cultures, people and places, an image which the novels gradually reveal to be the construct of a decisively imperialist cultural matrix. Presenting and deconstructing exotic romance hence allows them to reject a paradigm that positions separate histories of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In contrast to this critical take on romance, the second manoeuvre consists in recuperating from exotic romance a way of employing romance as a positive tool for expressing Shamsie’s connected view of the world, as well as the hope for a more peaceful world to come that she attaches to this view. Critics from Marx to Baucom, Dalley and Teo, I have shown, trace in exotic romances or in their crosscultural love and friendship plots a ‘cosmopolitan interestedness’, a ‘human commonality’ and a refusal to categorise and typify. Putting such notions centre stage, Shamsie develops a new romance version out of exotic romance. In what I will call the novels’ transcultural romance, or their romance of connections, they position a visibly marked romance alternative - now transcending exoticism - within the more traditionally ‘realist’ discourses of their historical narratives. In these romance alternatives, they develop their visions of what a world could be like if people acknowledged the fundamental connectivity of the modern world and embraced a global responsibility that arises from this connectivity. Shamsie’s engagement with romance thus works towards implementing a transcultural understanding of modernity in two ways simultaneously. Firstly, the novels’ deconstruction of exotic romance carefully uncovers and hence guides readers towards acknowledging those connections and interdependences which, the novels suggest, a modern world tied to colonialism tends to deny. While they hence contribute themselves to developing such a revised historical perspective, their recurrence to ‘transcultural’ romance, secondly, continuously advocates the positive effects that such a different understanding could have on 2.2 From Exotic Romance to Postcolonial Romance 61 <?page no="62"?> the world. In so doing, they insist that the kind of revision they promote is not just worthwhile, but imperative. Despite the different reflections from which they start and the different ways in which they engage with the traditions of the historical and the imperial romance, both authors’ oeuvres thus employ romance in pursuit of a different modernity; one that transcends the reliance on borders characteristic of the status quo. Whether focused on overcoming a one-sided association of modernity with the West or on rejecting the idea that history diverges into innumerable culturally/ nationally specific disconnected histories, the use of romance hence fulfils a similar function in Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s novels: it is aimed at developing the kind of intellectual interventions which Graham Huggan regards as characteristic of the postcolonial project. Not only is it clearly motivated by the “will to change a flagrantly unequal, unevenly developed world” (Huggan, “General Introduction” 12) that drives such postcolonial interventions, but romance in both oeuvres also centres on efforts towards doing away with established oppositions and separations. Such efforts, too, have been described as a postcolonial gesture par excellence. Asking, “What is the Postcolonial? ”, Robert Young reflects: Western knowledge was organized philosophically through binary oppositions which had the effect of demonizing or denigrating what western people often term the other: instead of master/ slave, man/ woman, civilized/ uncivilised, culture/ barbarism, modern/ primitive, colonizer/ colonized, the postcolonial seeks to develop a different paradigm in which identities are no longer starkly oppositional or exclusively singular but defined by their intricate and mutual relations with others (15). As I will show in detail in the following analyses, the idea of creating a new modernity based on such a ‘different paradigm’ runs, in different ways, through each of the romance interventions that Ghosh and Shamsie pursue. It is their situatedness within the intellectual traditions of postcolonialism that my term postcolonial romance brings into focus. 62 2 Modernity and Postcolonial Romance: Preliminary Remarks <?page no="63"?> 59 The result is a text whose status as either fiction or non-fiction is notoriously ambiva‐ lent: Gaurav Desai describes it as “at once a travelogue, a detective story, a romance with a lost world, and an anthropologist’s attempt to write a dialogic ethnography” (125) and Anshuman Mondal finds that it is an “unclassifiable text. Even its non-fictional status is uncertain” (11). 3 Transcending the Borders of ‘the Modern’: Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh One of Ghosh’s most extensively discussed texts, In an Antique Land (1992), is loosely based upon his experience during a fieldwork trip he undertook as part of his doctorate in social anthropology. 59 The text describes the Indian narrator’s research-based journeys to Egypt, where he sets out to study local village life as well as the “intertwined histories” (IAAL 339) which, engendered by the prospering Indian Ocean trade, once connected India with Egypt. While doing his research, however, the narrator gains some unexpected insights into his own present. He realises that his being from India primarily sparks one reaction: the desire to find out where the ‘Indian difference’ ranges in relation to Egypt’s place on a scale from ‘backwardness’ to ‘modernity’. He finds that the Egyptians he talks to have “constructed a certain ladder of ‘Development’ in their minds” (IAAL 200) which makes their own situation seem “shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time” (ibid). The West, by contrast, appears as the epitome of modernity: as he is told, in the West, they are “advanced” (IAAL 235): “they’re educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs’” (ibid.), all of which appear as highly desirable tokens of the West’s modern status. As he comes to realise, the idea of this ‘ladder of Development’ has farreaching consequences. It causes people to be ashamed of all practices that differ from those of the West: the village Imam, for instance, bluntly refuses to talk to the narrator about his intricate knowledge of traditional medicine, simply declaring that “the future” (IAAL 192) lies in injections. It also engenders an aggressive atmosphere of cultural competition: despite his own fascination with the history that connected and merged Indian and Egyptian cultures, the narrator unwillingly finds himself caught up in an argument with the Imam about whose culture is more like the West, and hence more advanced. Ultimately, this conversation somehow turns into a competition over whose country is superior to the other in producing ‘modern’ military technology. In retrospect, the narrator observes that he and the Imam had become <?page no="64"?> 60 See also Leela Gandhi who comments on the “costs which attend the telos of modernity” (68, emphasis in original) that this passage underlines: as she points out, “[r]eading world history, with unconscious Hegelian determinism, as an inexorable journey to the West, the Imam can only comprehend Ghosh’s difference (religious, cultural, racial) as a lack. Reciprocating in kind, and protesting India’s ‘prior claim to the technology of modern violence,’ Ghosh concedes the certain victory of History over dialogue” (ibid.) Similarly, Julia Hoydis observes that the “price paid for modernity are not just lost folk practices like the Imam’s healing skills but the loss of a language of intercultural accommodation and compromise” (206). delegates from two superseded civilizations, vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence. […] I was crushed, as I walked away; it seemed to me that the Imam and I had participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that had linked us: we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all the others in which people once discussed their differences. We had acknowledged that it was no longer possible to speak, as […] the thousands of travellers who had crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages might have done: of things that were right, or good, or willed by God; it would have been merely absurd for either of us to use those words, for they belonged to a dismantled rung on the ascending ladder of Development. Instead, to make ourselves understood, we had both resorted, I, a student of the ‘humane’ sciences, and he, an oldfashioned village Imam, to the very terms that world leaders and statesmen used at great, global conferences, the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning; he had said to me, in effect: ‘You ought not to do what you do, because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs.’ It was the only language we had been able to discover in common. (IAAL 236-7) The very idea of the ‘ladder of Development’ has caused a constant fear of finding oneself behind those now perceived as one’s competitors. 60 This passage, like the text in its entirety, has attracted much attention for the insights it provides into Ghosh’s engagement with modernity. Taking up the narrator’s phrase of “the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning” (IAAL 237), Anshuman Mondal sets out to interrogate what kind of category modernity constitutes in Ghosh’s oeuvre. Mondal argues that the insertion of the complex word ‘metaphysic’ here is a bold stroke which confirms that by ‘language’ Ghosh does not mean a particular linguistic formation […] but rather a rationale, a general system of ideas and an ensemble of knowledge that enables a particular way of thinking and being which encompasses all aspects of experience. As such, it extends to the ways in which we think about space and time - the coordinates of our experience - as well as everything in space or time. This universalism enables the ‘metaphysic of modern meaning’ to become the common reference point 64 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="65"?> for all people despite their differences, but paradoxically it is a universalism that is tied to a particular location - the West - at a particular moment in time, namely the ‘modern’ period. (42, emphasis in original) Mondal makes a point here that is central to my close readings in the following chapters as well: he emphasises that for Ghosh, ‘the modern’ is anything but a somewhat ‘neutral’ temporal category. Instead, it constitutes a specific pattern of thinking, an entire ‘rationale.’ This rationale, although originally tied to the West, becomes the only possible version of being modern for people all over the world. All ways of thinking and living which depart from it - and Ghosh’s work continuously underlines that the world of the past and present alike accommodates many such ways - are associated with the pre-modern and viewed as remnants of an outdated way of life. This situation appears a deplorable one in In an Antique Land, as well as in Ghosh’s entire oeuvre: not only does it exemplify the mechanism of cultural imperialism, but this ‘rationale’ is also tied to a whole number of conceptual separations and borders, of which the insistence to demarcate Egyptian from Indian culture regardless of the region’s longstanding transcultural connectivity is a case in point. As such, it tends to promote a competitive rather than a collaborative world order. In the Ibis trilogy and The Hungry Tide, the following chapters show, Ghosh foregrounds the very problem the Imam episode centres on through literary form itself: by recreating, within these novels, the patterns of the historical and the imperial romance, he draws attention to a world in which ‘to be modern’ has come to be exclusively associated with certain ways of living and thinking which originated along with Western imperial capitalism. Not only this, adopting these established literary patterns allows him both to criticise the ways that have come to stand for the modern and to emphasise the disastrous consequences of forcing everyone to adapt to them. Ultimately, evoking the literary traditions of these romance genres functions to advocate a process of rethinking that leads towards dispensing with the ‘ladder of development’: the texts work towards a world where the way ‘forward’ seems no longer predefined by the West. In such a world, so the conclusion they invite, it would indeed once again be possible to select what is “right” or “good” (IAAL 236-7) from among all existing possibilities across historical and cultural difference instead of simply orientating oneself towards what has successfully established itself as the ostensibly most ‘advanced’, ‘progressive’ way of life. The effect of this would not only be to, once again, turn modernity itself into a truly transcultural phenomenon, it would also elevate a distinct lifeworld that is based on acknowledging and fostering transcultural connectivity to a ‘modern’ variant in its own right. 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh 65 <?page no="66"?> 61 Many critics have argued that the ‘ocean paradigm’ is central to the trilogy (compare chapter 1.3.2). Isabel Hofmeyr, for instance, explicitly calls Sea of Poppies a “selfconscious Indian Ocean epic” (“Universalizing the Indian Ocean” 723). See also Martín- González’ discussion of the Ibis trilogy. 3.1 Western Modernity’s Global Triumph: The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition Ghosh’s three novels Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015), collectively referred to as the Ibis trilogy, are set between the years of 1838 and 1841. They largely take place in various parts of Asia, reaching from the Indian subcontinent to China, as well as on the waterways that connect these Asian locations both with one another as well as with the African island of Mauritius. With the trilogy thus centring on the very Indian Ocean realm that the narrator of In an Antique Land studies, 61 its vast geographical scope mirrors its large and constantly expanding character cast. Rather than offering a singular and chronologically narrated story that centres on a limited and consistent group of protagonists, the trilogy’s narrative focus constantly shifts: the three novels each put a select group of its characters centre-stage, around whose individual stories their plots subsequently evolve. While thus narrating many different stories at once, the trilogy yet ensures that its various story lines, as well as its three novels, notably form a connected whole. The fact that its unofficial name evokes the ‘Ibis’ as a reference point for all three novels is no coincidence: right at the start, Sea of Poppies introduces an ex-slave ship by this name, which is transferred from Baltimore to Bengal after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 put an end to the transatlantic slave trade. Once arrived in Bengal, the Ibis is to fulfil its new function of transporting indentured labourers to Mauritius. This second journey, at the heart of Sea of Poppies’ narrative, brings forth a heterogeneous, transcultural group of characters who, despite being scattered over the entire Indian Ocean region, are henceforth connected by the “bond of the Ibis” (FoF 439, emphasis in original). Although the trilogy’s characters are by no means limited to those of the Ibis community, the latter plays a crucial role in establishing a certain degree of narrative continuity across the novels. The Ibis community not only re-appears throughout the trilogy, it also serves to establish links between the otherwise confusingly disparate character casts and stories: gradually, the trilogy allows the reader to trace all important characters back to some of the community’s members, with whom they are somehow acquainted or related. 66 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="67"?> 62 Sanjukta Poddar has pointed out that Ghosh, in focusing on a well-documented moment of history, combines exhaustive historical detail (see 10) - the trilogy continuously alludes to historical characters and sources within its narrative - with his insistence on fiction’s imaginative freedom. The latter enables Ghosh to insert a more optimistic vision into the narrative, which “allows subalterns a degree of agency and succour that history cannot” (15). This view also corresponds with my reading of the trilogy. 63 See for instance Forter (“Atlantic and Other Worlds” 1328-9 and Critique and Utopia 30- 1); Baumgarten (380); Hoydis (335); Ganguly (22-26). While many of these critics merely mention Scott’s visible influence on the trilogy, Greg Forter and Debjani Ganguly also comment on how Ghosh engages with Scott’s model: Ganguly maintains “far from illuminating a stadial view of historical development typical of the nineteenth-century historical novel, Ghosh succeeds in laying bare the imperial underside of the very emergence of this modern historical consciousness that invested so heavily in the idea of uneven development and in chronologies of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced” (36). Forter, to whose argument I come back in chapter 3.1.3, points to the ways in which Sea of Poppies “retrieve[s] from the past the seeds of utopian futurity, which […][it] locate[s] in the heterogeneous, inassimilable traces of life-worlds that the secular-modern traduces” (Critique and Utopia 34). While these observations partly overlap with some of mine, none of these critics remark on the ironic distance that the trilogy creates to the format it seemingly embraces, as I will argue throughout the following chapters. If the Ibis community is one of the factors that holds together the various narrative threads of the trilogy, another one is its thematic focus on opium. Sea of Poppies chronicles the increased cultivation of opium in India under British rule and the manifold changes this brings to life in Bengal - in fact, many of the Ibis community’s members find themselves onboard because the enforced opium cultivation has deprived them of their means of sustenance. River of Smoke and Flood of Fire then trace the path of opium further: they foreground how the lucrative trade in opium, particularly its distribution to China, increasingly brings European merchants to the region, and describe the Chinese attempt, ultimately futile, to put a stop to the growing influx of the drug in the course of the events known as the First Opium War. 62 Throughout, the trilogy’s engagement with the Western-dominated opium production and trade and its consequences serves as a lens to bring into view the drastic transformation that the Indian Ocean region underwent in the course of a few centuries following the intrusion of Western powers and imperial capitalism. Not only do the characters’ own lives all in one way or another testify to these ongoing transformations, but the trilogy also provides, in presenting its characters’ observations, a detailed account of the setting and its history, which allows to contrast the pre-colonial Indian Ocean world with that developing under Western influence. As several critics have remarked, Ghosh’s narrative of historical transfor‐ mation notably reminds of the writing of Sir Walter Scott. 63 As explained in 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 67 <?page no="68"?> detail in chapter 2.2, with Waverley (1814) and the successive novels, Scott established a distinct literary format for narrating the transformations towards a modern word. Waverley depicts the Scottish Highlands as last remnants of a dying, exotic pre-modern world, on the verge of being destroyed by a nascent modernity connected to England and the Scottish Lowlands. Building on a newly formed reputation of romance as a form “alien to modernity” (Duncan 13), Scott ties Highland culture firmly to the sphere of romance, thus signalling to the distinctly ‘anti-modern’ presence it embodies in the otherwise ‘modern’ form of the novel (see ibid. 9). As Saree Makdisi has pointed out, in developing the cultural Other confined to a “Wordsworthian ‘spot of time’” (85) which only just eludes the ever-expanding grid of modernity (see ibid.), Scott’s historical romances played a significant role in bringing into existence the anti-modern exotic. This exoticism suggests some cultures and people to be essentially antimodern, considering modernity to be defined precisely by its difference from these ‘exotic’ cultures. Modernisation, in this case, means extinguishing cultural alterity: in Waverley, the Scottish Highlands transform into a modern place at the expense of their distinct Highland character. The space can be preserved either in its original state of anti-modern difference, accessible through the magic of a spot of time, or else utterly destroyed in a ‘fall’ into the modern; in either case, modernization amounts less to a transformative process than to a spatiotemporal annihilation and reinvention (Makdisi 94). The historical romance of the Waverley model thus depicts modernity as being inextricably tied to one distinct cultural formation. Difference from the latter, by contrast, appears, through the lens of the text’s romantic exoticism, as a signal of the pre-modern and, as such, bound to disappear in the process of modernisation. It is this process that the historical romance foregrounds by centring its own plot development on the gradual demise of its romance world. In the Ibis trilogy, the following chapters will show, Ghosh pointedly repli‐ cates this pattern on the global stage. What the modernising forces of England and the Lowlands are to Scott’s Scottish Highlands, the ‘modernising’ West seems to be to Ghosh’s Indian Ocean setting: the trilogy visibly follows Waverley in depicting a romanticised, exotic, dying local world, which gradually gives way to the ‘modernising’ influence of a culture foreign to the place. In so doing, it presents the moment of the Opium War, akin to Waverley’s Highland rebellion, as the last resistance of this distinct local world. However, I argue that Ghosh uses the Waverley model in a highly subversive manner: where the trilogy seemingly subscribes to the dichotomy of the modern and the antimodern of the Waverley model and ostensibly embraces the latter’s modern 68 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="69"?> 64 True, parts of the ‘dying world’ in fact correspond, as Paul Stasi puts it, to a ‘traditional’ world “itself laced with violence and coercion” (337). There is, for instance, the untouchable Kalua, whose place in the caste system makes him a social outcast and continuous target for cruelties, or the character of Deeti, widowed at the beginning of the plot, to whom tradition provides the choice between a second marriage to her rapist brother-in-law and the practice of sati. However, as my discussion in chapter 3.1.2.1 will show, the trilogy notably refuses to depict the entirety of this ‘dying’ world in such terms. On the contrary, it locates in it the beginnings of an alternative modernity which, had it not been cut short by Western imperialism, could have led into a modernity radically different from the status quo. standpoint that looks back upon an anti-modern Otherness connected to the realm of romance with a mixture of longing and contempt, readers would be ill-advised to take this at face-value. By constantly over-stating its own exotic imagery and romantic tropes, the trilogy creates an ironic distance to its very own depiction, making its efforts to reduce local life to romance recognisable as a convention it ridicules rather than a view it subscribes to. In narrating the historical processes it depicts through the framework of the Waverley model, it is enacting how a distinct, Western-originated way of life claims its monopoly on being modern by reducing all alternatives to itself to charming but slightly ridiculous remnants of a different world, to the essentially antimodern. Taken on with such an ironical distance, the format of the historical romance allows Ghosh to invite conclusions that entirely reverse its original ideological outlook. Throughout, I demonstrate, the trilogy actually rejects the view that its dying non-Western world is essentially ‘anti-modern’, let alone inferior to its victorious counterpart 64 - or, for that matter, that this world was ever entirely ‘superseded’ at all. Rather than tracing a ‘natural’ process through which an ‘outdated’ way of life gives way to a ‘more advanced’ one, the trilogy makes us realise, it is presenting something else: it is chronicling how a distinct way of living and thinking, connected to the demands of Westerninduced imperial capitalism, gradually comes to count as the embodiment of modernity worldwide, outdoing alternative possibilities of what ‘to be modern’ could have meant. The central critical impetus that drives the trilogy is precisely to criticise and transcend this narrow understanding of ‘the modern’. At once writing a historical romance of the Waverley model and creating an ironic distance to the very ideas it evokes, Ghosh’s endeavour has to be read, along the lines of Graham Huggan’s ‘strategic exoticism’ (see The Postcolonial Exotic 32), as a ‘strategic romanticism.’ Arguing that postcolonial authors cannot escape their embeddedness within a global cultural field that capitalises on notions of exotic difference and, in doing so, perpetuates imperial power configurations, Huggan yet finds that “in a postcolonial context, exoticism is 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 69 <?page no="70"?> 65 In so doing, he argues for a more nuanced view than that which, for instance, Timothy Brennan develops. Brennan entirely rejects the potential for political resistance of postcolonial texts: in his critique of the ‘Third World Writer’, he argues that postcolonial authors tend to fulfil precisely the role the West wishes them to fulfil. They play “an intermediary role, the role of ushering-in, critiquing the West, usually in acceptable ways, citing strange names, retelling hidden histories, and doing all this pedagogically” (41), ensuring that actually “matters of taste [are] left untouched” (ibid. 36). 66 See also Paul Stasi, who argues that Sea of Poppies’ description of the factory constitutes “the clearest image of the world-capitalist system” (335) that connects the different characters, as well as Greg Forter’s observation that Ghosh foregrounds how “the factory is organized around principles of a Tayloresque precision” (Critique and Utopia 52). effectively repoliticised” (ibid. ix). 65 He describes ‘strategic exoticism’ as “the means by which postcolonial writers/ thinkers, working from within exoticist codes of representation, either manage to subvert those codes (‘inhabiting them to criticize them’, Spivak 1990a), or succeed in redeploying them for the purposes of uncovering differential relations of power” (ibid. 32). The following chapters trace how exactly the Ibis trilogy ‘inhabits’ the codes of the historical romance in order to subvert them: after briefly demonstrating how it playfully sets itself in dialogue with the historical romance, they analyse the ways in which Ghosh adopts - and adapts - the different components of the Waverley model: its ‘narrative of modernisation’ (chapter 1.2) and its conjuring up of a romance realm (chapter 1.3). They point out how, in Ghosh’s hands, the ‘codes’ of the historical romance serve to develop a critique of what has come to count as ‘the modern’ and ultimately work towards opening up our concepts of modernity to include, rather than position themselves in opposition to, those life practices and ways of thinking that make up the trilogy’s romance world. 3.1.1 The Trilogy’s Divided World With the exposition of Sea of Poppies already, Ghosh visibly conjures up the cosmos of the historical romance with its dichotomy of an exotic, antimodern world and a modern sphere embodied in foreign cultural influences. In introducing to its setting, for instance, Sea of Poppies provides an evocative description of the opium factory of Ghazipur: “The walls of Ghazipur’s opium factory were partially obscured by mango and jackfruit trees but the British flag that flew on top of it was just visible above the foliage” (SoP 8). The factory itself constituting an emblem of modern capitalism, 66 this embodiment of modernity bears the British flag, suggesting an inextricable link between modernity and the Western presence that establishes itself in the region. By further highlighting 70 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="71"?> 67 See for instance Gabriela Muri. She points out that the individuals’ inability to use and structure their time as they see fit is often considered a characteristic of modern capitalism. The ‘rule of the clock’, she maintains, hence continuously features in critiques of modern civilisation (see 79-80). that the factory is surrounded by wild, recognisably non-Western flora which literally seems to try and reclaim the space, Sea of Poppies points to a struggle between the local, exotic world and the foreign, intruding modernity. Ghosh further develops the motif these pages build up by emphasising the factory’s close proximity to the church: “The English church was nearby and the passage of the day was marked by the ringing of its bell” (SoP 94). Not only does the English church evoke associations of missionary endeavours and attempts to impose Western (‘modern’) ways onto the non-West, but its bell also explicitly introduces the rule of the clock, one of the defining characteristics of the modern capitalist world. 67 In describing how this bell serves to structure the day for the entire village, the trilogy emphasises how the carefully measured time of the colonisers takes over and alters the local lifestyle. Moreover, Sea of Poppies’ first chapters carefully introduce a temporal rhetoric of ‘old’ and ‘new’ ways, showing how the British system gradually transforms the region. They draw attention to the transition to monoculture that brings an end to “the old days” (SoP 30) of subsistence agriculture, which are increasingly supplanted by a literally evoked ‘market’ system: the novel informs the reader about people’s predicament that “now, with the sahibs forcing everyone to grow poppy, no one had thatch to spare - it had to be bought at the market, from people who lived in faraway villages, and the expense was such that people put off their repairs as long as they possibly could” (ibid.). In stressing that it is ‘the sahibs’ who enforce this market system and end those ways explicitly described as ‘old’, the trilogy suggests that the region undergoes a prototypical narrative of capitalist modernisation through Western influence. Surrounding Ghazipur’s factory and the British ‘outposts of progress’, how‐ ever, there is, its gradual changes notwithstanding, an entirely different, almost enchanted world. Sea of Poppies’ opening line states that “[t]he vision of a tallmasted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day”, but that “she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny” (SoP 3). In so doing, it introduces its protagonist Deeti’s worldview as one steeped in the belief in cosmic forces and pre-determined destinies. In subsequently describing her certainty that the constellation of stars under which she was born determines her fate, the novel strengthens this first impression. Deeti is sure of her bad prospects in life: with “her fate being ruled by Saturn - Shani”, she has to bear with “a planet that exercised great power on those born under 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 71 <?page no="72"?> its influence, often bringing discord, unhappiness and disharmony” (SoP 31). With this depiction of the very first character it introduces, the Ibis trilogy creates a world of exotic, anti-modern romance à la Scott. Drawing attention to Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), the successor of Waverley whose subtitle is The Astrologer, Ian Duncan describes how astrology and romance merge and become semanticised as the pre-modern in the historical romance: “[a]strology, in short, is the cosmology of romance. Both astrology and romance name the symbolic order of a pre-revolutionary nature of supernatural connections” (127). If Deeti’s beliefs thus associate her, within the world of the historical romance, with the ‘pre-modern’, the trilogy further underlines this association: in moreover introducing Deeti with eyes “that made her seem at once blind and all-seeing” (SoP 5), Ghosh playfully evokes the mythical figure of the blind seer to further situate the character within a distinctly pre-modern romance cosmos. Deeti’s belief system that defies the rational, ‘disenchanted’ cosmos of (Western) modernity - and of the realist novel -, is by no means limited to her character but is in fact shared by many of the trilogy’s protagonists. The members of Raja Neel’s family, for instance, take their business decisions based on omens. His father agrees to invest in English businessman Benjamin Burnham’s opium deals because he spots a mouse underneath the latter’s seat and, “[a] mouse being the familiar of Ganesh-thakur, god of opportunities and remover of obstacles, the old zamindar had taken the visitation to be an indication of divine will” (SoP 87). In a similar vein, Shireenbai, wife of merchant Bahram from Bombay, insists that “the day and the hour of Bahram’s departure would be dictated by her astrologers” (RoS 117-8). If the trilogy thus visibly subjects its Asian characters to the pattern of exotic romance, it further strengthens the association of the non-Western world with pre-modern romance by having the plot lines that surround the latter partly go along with the exotic beliefs of its characters. As Deeti will in fact join the very ship she saw, the Ibis, and as this will indeed change her life, the trilogy here subjects its own story-telling mode to the cosmology of romance, according to which stars can correctly anticipate the ways of the world: through characters and plot itself, Ghosh emphatically recreates the romance world of the historical novel tied to the Asian setting. With the trilogy thus creating a modern world - tied to Western influence - and a romance world set against the latter, my central argument in this chapter is, as stated, that it challenges us to rethink, rather than accept, this categorisation. While this becomes evident, above all, through the alleged ‘narrative of modernisation’ that the trilogy presents (see chapter 3.1.2), its first evocations of this divided modern/ romance world already give an inkling that 72 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="73"?> 68 I hence agree with Greg Forter’s claim that, the first impressions that the trilogy may - strategically - evoke notwithstanding, “Ghosh neither ironizes nor condescends it creates this dichotomy in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner. There is, from the start, an unmistakably playful element to it. The trilogy’s introduction conjures up tokens of modernity in such density and such prototypical images - the clock, the factory, the national flag - that it seems to actually ask its readers to notice its own humorous overdoing of the effort to evoke a modern context. Moreover, in connecting, as described, the transition from sustenance economy to a market economy in the region with the image of a physical market where people now must purchase the goods which they used to produce themselves, it invites readers to smile at the way it plays out the different dimensions of meaning that surround the word market. If it thus tacitly ridicules its own effort to establish a modernising setting, it toys with its exotic world even more notably. With comical formulations abounding - the trilogy refers, for instance, to a river that flows into the Ganga as “the holy Ganga and its karmanegating tributary” (SoP 202), Ghosh creates a certain ironic distance to the exotic realm he builds up. This humorous, ironic approach to his exotic world culminates in the character Baboo Nob Kissin, who, raised as the heir to a temple’s custodian to a devotee of Sri Krishna, is also the most distinguished representative of a non-Western belief system. He falls in love with his uncle’s widow, Ma Taramony, and is left, upon her untimely death, with the prospect of his body becoming “the vessel for [her] return” (SoP 173). Taking his swelling body as a sign of his transformation, Baboo Nob Kissin appears as a rather absurd figure throughout. Having waited for a sign of the beginning transformation ever since, for instance, he finally mistakes the sound of an “old penny-whistle” (SoP 151) for that of a flute, thinking to recognise Lord Krishna’s instrument. There could hardly be a more profane instrument than the penny whistle and in linking this of all instruments to Baboo Nob Kissin’s high hopes, the trilogy foregrounds its own humorous approach to the character. In fact, in explicitly stating that the other characters see “something absurd in the gomusta” (SoP 140), the trilogy self-referentially underlines how its creation of an exotic realm constantly leans towards the absurd. If, as I have suggested, Ghosh’s depiction constitutes an example of ‘strategic exoticism’ or romanticism, the trilogy is by no means making fun of a world that defies the certainties of Western rationality when it presents us with absurdly distorted ‘exotic’ figures such as Baboo Nob Kissin. What it is mocking are the very conventions of presenting such a world within imaginaries of the antimodern exotic that it gestures towards. 68 Combined with the exaggerated, self- 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 73 <?page no="74"?> towards” (Critique and Utopia 55) the belief in a “life-world animated by the secularly inexplicable” (ibid.). referential attempts to create an intruding ‘modern’ world as it is conventionally imagined, the overstated and ironically broken exoticism serves as a first indication that the trilogy adopts the codes of the historical romance in a highly subversive manner: rather than to assert a differentiation between a modern and an exotic realm, it employs them to bring the exclusionary mechanisms to our attention that are at work in defining what counts as a modern, ‘grownup’ approach to the world. In fact, once we become aware of how the trilogy ‘inhabits’ the codes of the historical romance with its modern versus antimodern realms from a subversive and critical point of view, it becomes also possible to grasp how the oftentimes ‘absurd’ presentation of its exotic world serves not merely to showcase the ironic distance with which the trilogy treats its own depiction: it is simultaneously a way of playfully - ironically - recreating Waverley’s ultimately ‘realist’ perspective on its romance alternative. In providing, right from the start, a slightly comical rendition of its exotic romance realm, the trilogy pointedly imitates, or rather takes further and exaggerates, the Waverley model’s way of looking ‘back’ upon its romance world from the standpoint of the ‘modern’ observers (located, in the case of Waverley, 60 years ahead) and their ‘realist’ approach to the world: these observers, although delighted upon encountering a charming Otherness, are sure to be superior in their rational, disenchanted, ‘realist’ approach to the world. Here, again, the depiction of Baboo Nob Kissin is a case in point. The trilogy constantly explains the beliefs of its ‘exotic’ character away by providing a profane, ‘rational’ reason for what it depicts. While Baboo Nob Kissin himself takes his swelling body and his increasingly feminine looks as a sign of his transformation being under way, the text leaves open whether we choose to go along with the character’s own interpretation: alternatively, we are free to believe that he is simply putting on weight and letting his hair grow to allow himself to assume that the prophecy is fulfilling itself. Similarly, telling of his sudden and unexpected appearance onboard a ship, the trilogy contrasts two varying interpretations for this occurrence: The sepoys and lascars stared open-mouthed at the apparition that had suddenly appeared before them - it was as if some supernatural being had risen out of the sea to levitate above the ship. The skies too seemed to conspire in casting a heavenly light on the suspended figure - for just at that moment an opening appeared in a bank of clouds, allowing a beam of sunlight to shine down upon the swing. (FoF 508) 74 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="75"?> 69 See for instance Makdisi (94-5) or Lukács’ famous discussion of Waverley, compare my discussion in chapter 2.2.1. Baboo Nob Kissin’s arrival appears as a supernatural phenomenon and the observers take it to announce a heaven-sent messenger - yet the trilogy provides a disappointingly profane explanation: he is actually taken onboard via a swing lift operated by the lascars. The trilogy seems to wink at its readers, leaving a ‘rational’ way out, conspiring with them in their shared superior, ‘modern’ worldview. Yet precisely this conspiring and this dismissal of the very non- Western figures it depicts has to, once again, be recognised as an ironic gesture towards a convention the trilogy criticises rather than embraces, as a ‘code it inhabits’ in order to subvert it. And this ‘inhabiting’ of the Waverley model and its codes opens a space for a thorough critique of what has come to constitute modernity as well as for a suggestion to re-define the very meaning of the term. 3.1.2 The Narrative of ‘Modernisation’ Against the backdrop of my argument that we have to read the trilogy as a tongue-in-cheek recreation of Scott’s Waverley model, I want to take a closer look on its engagement with the historical romance’s particular way of narrating a region’s transition to modernity in this subchapter. As described (see chapter 2.2.1), in Waverley, Scott captures the ‘historical progress’ he connects to the Highlands’ modernisation through two different dimensions of the novel’s narrative. Firstly, Waverley stages a battle between two incompatible ways of inhabiting the world, embodied in the parties of the military conflict it centres on and the settings it associates with each. In so doing, it shows how the ‘modern’ cultural formation triumphs over its ‘anti-modern’ competitor. During this battle, it demonstrates, a dying transcultural realm gives way to the culturally ‘streamlined’ world ordered along nation-states. Secondly, Waverley underlines its narrative of modernisation through the development of its protagonist. With his turn from siding with the Highlanders towards re-joining the party of the English crown, accompanied by his ‘growing out’ of romantic sensibilities, Scott’s hero Waverley undergoes a process of formation that stands for the large-scale historical changes the text foregrounds: the demise of its romance world on the march towards ‘progress’. 69 In depicting the non-Western area’s transformation under Western influence, the Ibis trilogy visibly replicates and toys with both dimensions of Scott’s narrative of modernisation. In so doing, however, it gradually demonstrates that it is in fact not employing it to trace a region’s departure into an inherently progressive age but to critically highlight 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 75 <?page no="76"?> 70 The space of the Ibis and the characters surrounding the Ibis community constitute an important exception to this pattern, through which Ghosh explicitly provides a countervision to the trilogy’s dominant ‘narrative of modernisation’ as I argue in chapter 3.1.3.2. that a way of life it associates with exploitative practices tied to Western imperialism and capitalism has come to constitute the sole possible version of modernity worldwide. 3.1.2.1 … But Where Exactly is the Anti-Modern? The Battle Between the ‘New’ and the ‘Old’ World Reconsidered Critical readings of one or all the novels that constitute the Ibis trilogy have often pointed to a transcultural vision they entail and to a particular variant of cosmopolitanism that arises from them: Shao-Pin Luo argues that Sea of Poppies embraces a “‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’” (“Way of Words” 378), which differs from Eurocentric, elitist versions by providing a “‘cosmopolitanism from below’” (ibid.). This serves, Luo argues, to draw attention to historically existing interconnections between various non-Western places (see ibid.). San‐ jukta Poddar relates Ghosh’s narrative in River of Smoke to Akhil Gupta’s attempt to retrieve an alternative to contemporary globalisation by “positing a[] […] paradigm of global contact which includes economic and cultural exchange actualised in vastly different conditions, prior to the formation of the hyphenated entity - the modern nation-state” (14). It is through alluding to such a paradigm, Poddar argues, that Ghosh’s novel develops its specific cosmopolitanism (see 15). Indeed, the non-Western, pre-national cosmopolitan‐ ism and the transcultural interconnectivity these critics describe runs through the entire trilogy, appearing as a central characteristic of the ‘original’ Indian Ocean World. While thus continuously evoking these notions, the trilogy, however, faithful to Scott’s model, clearly associates its cosmopolitanism and transculturality with one side of the narrative’s divided world: rather than showing the cosmopolitan paradigm to be in full bloom, the trilogy confines it to the ‘dying’ realm that continuously loses ground to its ‘modernising’ Westernintroduced alternative. 70 Cosmopolitan lifeworlds appear to be present only as anti-modern ‘spots of time’, on which the trilogy seems to look - along the lines of the Waverley model - with romantic nostalgia, already anticipating their gradual disappearance. In foregrounding, within its ‘dying’ world, the history of transcultural exchange and peaceful co-habitation of people with different languages and different backgrounds especially in the water-bordering cities of its setting, the trilogy emphasises a historical particularity of the Indian Ocean region which 76 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="77"?> 71 See, for instance, Isabel Hofmeyr, who connects Ghosh with the historical research on the Indian Ocean, arguing that “[f]or Ghosh the cosmopolitanism of the older diasporic networks offers a counterpoint to the narrowness of the modern nation-state system” (“Universalizing the Indian Ocean” 723). Sanjukta Poddar, too, explicitly connects the pre-national cosmopolitanism she traces in River of Smoke to the historical research on the Indian Ocean cosmopolitan world and Martín-González describes the “Indian Ocean as a matrix for transcultural connections” (5). In fact, several critics have associated the trilogy more generally with an ‘oceanic turn’ in literary and cultural studies, which posits oceans as a sphere that transcends and challenges national separations (see for instance Martín-González 7-8 or Greg Forter, Critique and Utopia 30). I will return to this reading in chapter 3.1.3.2. 72 Sheriff emphasises that China, as the region’s greatest power, differed strikingly from European colonial powers precisely in accepting these principles. He underlines that, in contrast to European invasions, Chinese expeditions from early 15 th century onwards served to “obtain symbolic acknowledgement of China‘s cosmological centrality, rather than to impose military or political domination” (“Globalisation with a Difference” 34). recent scholarship on the latter has confirmed. 71 Historians have brought the pre-colonial Indian Ocean realm into focus as a highly interconnected space which functioned on principles radically different from those that govern the globalised world that subsequently took shape: describing it as a privileged site of the “dialogue between civilisations” (Sheriff, “Introduction” 2), they emphasise the “translocal, polyethnic and polycultural characters of society” (Ivanov 210) that developed from a dense network of mercantile connections. Particularly along the coastlines, the century-long history of trade brought forth new, distinctly cosmopolitan societies: foreign merchants interacted with local people, intermarried, learned their languages, and in the process their own languages were affected. Many intermarried with local women, and some settled down to form new cosmopolitan maritime communities (Sheriff, “Globalisation with a Difference” 23). Not only do scholars describe these transcultural interactions as an outstanding characteristic of the region’s pre-colonial past, but they also emphasise the distinctly peaceful practices of trading peculiar to the latter. Exchange largely functioned without anyone trying to take control of the ocean; each party stayed attuned to the “accepted etiquette of the Indian Ocean” (Sheriff, “Globalisation with a Difference” 34) not to impose military control on smaller powers and to respect the flow of trade. Abdul Sheriff explicitly highlights the “old Indian Ocean principle of tolerance, respect for all religions, socio-cultural integration and common economic interests” (ibid. 40). 72 All these accounts emphasise, however, that the region’s peaceful and cosmopolitan past gradually came to an end with the onset of European 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 77 <?page no="78"?> interventions. The fifteenth century initiated the “‘Vasco da Gama epoch’ in Indian Ocean history” (Sheriff, “Introduction” 3) that entirely transformed the place. Europeans “brought the state with them, and eventually the Westphalian system of exclusive, compact, territorially-bounded sovereign states that was quite alien to the Indian Ocean tradition” (ibid.). European presence had the effect of replacing the concept of multiple and fluid identities with a new understanding of singular and ethnicised identities (see Palat 67), interrupted a lively transcultural exchange and ultimately replaced the system of peaceful connections with one of political competition and domination. The Ibis trilogy presents the time of its setting as the final moment of this - extended - shift towards the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’ in the region - a shift which it depicts, in the typical manner of the historical romance, as the defeat of an old, dying world by its foreign and ‘modern’ counterpart. Ghosh evokes this Waverley-like dichotomy most notably through the spatial impressions he provides. In chronicling the advent of the first Opium War, the trilogy introduces a number of merchants and travellers who, coming from all corners of the world, move around the Indian Ocean region. Through their accounts, it repeatedly includes descriptions of various cities, whose location on the waterways ensures that they have been involved in the trade across the Indian Ocean for centuries. These descriptions continuously draw attention to the ways in which a pre-national, cosmopolitan and transcultural paradigm is increasingly endangered through the changes introduced by the ‘modernising’ West, as the latter gradually comes to transform the region. Parsi merchant Bahram from Bombay, for instance, offers an account of the city of Malacca which draws attention to the region’s interconnected, cosmopolitan past. He describes Malacca as “one of his favourite cities: he liked the location, the severe Dutch buildings, the Chinese temples, the whitewashed Portuguese church, the Arab souq, and the galis where the long-settled Gujarati families lived” (RoS 65). Malacca appears as a transcultural space where different influences have merged to give the city its distinct shape. Its architecture itself testifies to a history of peaceful conviviality and intermingling of people from different parts of the world. Notably, the architectural traces also include cultures from Europe - even Europeans, now eager to dominate, were, it seems, once ‘absorbed’ by the cosmopolitan, transcultural melange of the city. In describing the character of this space, Bahram’s report also informs us, however, that Malacca belongs to an ‘old’, vanishing world. Comparing Malacca to the newly emerged Singapore, constructed under British supervision, he emphasises that what he values about Malacca is at odds with the social organisation the 78 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="79"?> 73 For a related discussion on the trilogy’s juxtaposition of Malacca and Singapore see Martín-González (109). 74 Studies of modern nationalism, most prominently Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), have shown how the emergence of the national idea went along with people imagining ‘ethnic’ communities into being where there was no sense of community before. In the context of his reflections on modernity, Zygmunt Bauman likewise emphasised that ethnic community became propagated through the nationstate: “the nation-state promoting the principle of ethnic unity overriding all other loyalties was the only ‘success story’ of community in modern times or, rather, the sole entity which made the bid to a community status with any degree of conviction and effect. The idea of ethnicity (and ethnic homogeneity) as the legitimate basis of unity and self-assertion has been thereby given a historical grounding” (173). British imperial power seeks to install and which is consequently bound to become the dominant way of the time. 73 He is certain that Singapore would soon overtake Malacca in commercial importance. This evoked mixed emotions in Bahram: he had a suspicion that this British-built settlement would not be an easygoing place like the Malacca of old, where Malays, Chinese, Gujaratis and Arabs had lived elbow to elbow with the descendants of the old Portuguese and Dutch families. Singapore had been so designed as to set the ‘white town’ carefully apart from the rest of the settlement, with the Chinese, Malays and Indians each being assigned their own neighbourhoods - or ‘ghettoes’ as some people called them. (RoS 67; my emphasis) It is Malacca’s lack of borders and separations and the absence of a spatial order that mark one group as rulers that makes it entirely different from the British system. Instead of letting people live ‘elbow to elbow’, the British construction sets the ‘white town’ apart in an insistence on white supremacy. Moreover, it carefully segregates the population along lines of ethnicity. In so doing, the British insist on ordering the space according to what becomes the dominant - modern - way in Europe in the course of the 19 th century and eventually worldwide: that of the national community based on the idea of ‘ethnic’ homogeneity. 74 In stressing Bahram’s conviction that Singapore will ‘overtake’ Malacca, which is explicitly called ‘of old’, the trilogy once again draws attention to its own recreation of the Waverley model, ostentatiously establishing its nostalgic take on a once prospering ‘pre-modern’ cosmopolitan conviviality that is gradually marginalised by the separations introduced through the ‘modernising’ influence of the West. That the cosmopolitan city of Malacca is part of a dying world is confirmed in the changing shape of Canton. In Canton, a cosmopolitan world has already mostly vanished. Centre of China’s trade with the West and, as such, the place on which the Chinese attempts to control the influx of opium centred, Canton has 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 79 <?page no="80"?> 75 For the politics of language in the trilogy see for example Luo (“Way of Words”). expelled all foreigners from the city centre and relocated them to a distinct space, Canton’s “‘Fanqui-town’” (RoS 193), at the time of the trilogy’s setting. We learn that the desire to “keep all aliens at bay” (RoS 400) is, however, quite foreign to the history of the city: Canton looks back upon centuries of letting newcomers add their contributions to the city. It was only after discovering that the Dutch were secretly building a fort to take control over the city and hence introducing a new European national aggression that Canton changed its policies (RoS 400). One of the trilogy’s many travelling characters, Robin, describes in a letter how Zadig Bey, another “inveterate traveller” (RoS 69), confronts him with Canton’s past: the true surprise of Canton, he said, is that its streets and lanes are strewn with reminders of the presence of Aliens. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘even the city’s guardian deity is a foreigner - an Achha in fact! ’ ’Impossible! ’ I cried, but he insisted that it was so and to back it up he pointed his spyglass in the direction of a mandir nearby: it was the temple of the goddess Kuanyin, who is said to have been a bhikkuni from Hindusthan, a Buddhist nun who chose not to become a Bodhisattva […]. And that too was not the end of it: Zadig Bey’s finger rose again to point to another roof, which belonged, he said, to a mosque - one of the oldest in the whole world, having been built in the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammad himself! (RoS 397) The topography of Canton turns the place, like Malacca, into a symbol of transcultural connectivity. The architecture brings together traces of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, which all merged in the city. Not only does this description thus provide a vision of religious syncretism, but the polylingual code of the passage also aesthetically underlines the transcultural sphere that the city constitutes. 75 Moreover, the ‘Accha’ guardian deity that astonishes this visitor - Accha being the locals’ name for merchants from the Indian subcontinent - is a distinct sign of a time when people sought shelter in cultural diversity rather than being hostile towards it. Once again, Western influence is responsible for destroying a transcultural world to which the idea of ethnic, cultural, or national separations is entirely alien, albeit in a different way than in Malacca. In the case of Malacca, it is the powerful position of the British that enforces the transcultural alternative’s marginalisation as it allows them to decide what future cities will be like and which one will matter. In the case of 80 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="81"?> 76 In fact, the trilogy repeatedly emphasises the Chinese quickness to respond and adapt to Western aggressive ways where necessary (see for instance FoF 557). 77 Many critics explicitly suggest that there had already formed an Indian Ocean early modernity built on the connectivity that had characterised the region for centuries. Stephen Rockel, for instance, traces a “unique East African Modernity” (109), which developed based on the Indian Ocean trade and which “predated the later imposition of colonial modernity associated with colonial capitalism and the influence of Christian missions” (ibid). Isabel Hofmeyr even calls the Indian Ocean the “site par excellence of ‘alternative modernities’” (“Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean” 13). See also Duara (Global Modernity 80). Canton, however, it is the Chinese people’s way of reacting and adapting to the West in an attempt to avoid their defeat that leads to a similar effect. 76 Through the way it depicts its ‘battle between two worlds’, the Ibis trilogy thus seems to invite us to interpret the process it narrates as a straightforward case of a region’s, admittedly forceful, transition to modernity. However, reading the trilogy against the backdrop of the Indian Ocean scholarship makes one alert to the ways in which Ghosh in fact constantly complicates this interpretation. For many critics, the Indian Ocean region is a particularly interesting object of study because they associate its peaceful world of the past with the possibility of an alternative modernity: rather than understanding the transformation under Western influence as the triumphant arrival of modernity in the region, scholars of the Indian Ocean world have suggested that these changes in fact cut short the region’s possible transition to its very own modernity. With its transcultural realm and the absence of a system of competing nation-states and colonial relations of domination, they argue, the Indian Ocean world was itself on the verge of entering a modernity that strikingly differs from the one based on the division into nations and distinct ethnicities that the Western powers introduced and that gradually came to define modernity worldwide. 77 Against this backdrop, they highlight how the unfulfilled historical potential inherent in the history of the Indian Ocean world can serve to reform the modern world we know. Ravi Palat maintains that excavating the Indian Ocean principles can “provide[] an alternative perspective on some of the more intransigent problems of the contemporary world” (46). Prasenjit Duara, in turn, asks, “[i]f […] modernity catalyzed only some aspects of early modern forms, what other aspects may be catalyzed or developed in this globalized era? ” (Global Modernity 89) and suggests that the connectivity of the early modern world, particularly the pre-colonial Indian Ocean region, can posit something against the ‘misrecognition’ surrounding the nation-state (see ibid. 100-2). By this term, he describes what he considers a central problem of global modernity: the tendency of nations to imagine themselves to be exclusively responsible for their 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 81 <?page no="82"?> own well-being and to overlook how much, on a shared planet, all need to pull together to ensure a future (see ibid. 19). As he argues, “sustainability requires a cosmopolitanism that is able to transcend the nation” (ibid.) - and the precolonial Indian Ocean world provides a model for such a cosmopolitanism. If one returns to the Ibis trilogy with this discussion in mind, one cannot but notice that, its old/ new, modern/ anti-modern rhetoric notwithstanding, it likewise presents an Indian Ocean realm which is anything but essentially backward or anti-modern. In fact, its ‘battle between two worlds’ turns out to be fought between two alternative possible ways of inhabiting a globalised, modern world, rather than between the modern and the anti-modern. And like the scholars quoted above, the trilogy clearly upholds the potential of the Indian Ocean ways for creating a more peaceful and sustainable version of modernity. In describing the events surrounding the Opium War and the different parties’ behaviour in it, it provides a clear judgement on its two competing worlds. It consistently links the ‘old’ cosmopolitan Indian Ocean world with a socially and ecologically responsible scheme of action which considers the world in its entirety, whereas it connects the ‘new’ Western-introduced ways with their national and cultural separations with a logic of seeking individual benefit at the cost of others. Ghosh has elsewhere described the nation-state as a political structure “inherent to the nature of which is the pursuit of the interests of a particular group of people” (GD 159) and the Ibis trilogy suggests a similar evaluation of the national idea. In depicting its two distinct ways of life in this way, the trilogy creates not merely a - as I argue later on - deliberately schematic juxtaposition of a desirable and sustainable model and its bleak alternative. It also develops an explanation as to why the Western system wins that challenges the idea of the latter being ‘naturally’ more advanced. What causes the Westernintroduced alternative to triumph and to subsequently establish itself as an embodiment of the future, the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’, the trilogy invites readers to conclude, is simply its being more suitable to an aggressive, competitive climate it has itself engendered. Not sharing the competitive orientation of what subsequently became our modern world seals the Indian Ocean paradigm’s fate as a marginalised, ‘dying’ formation. In portraying the Western separatist and nation-centric paradigm, Ghosh continuously underlines that the latter is suited to a world oriented at imperial competition and exploitation. The description of Fanqui-town, Canton’s foreign enclave, for instance, illustrates the aggressive demeanour he ascribes to the nation-state: the foreign merchants live in so-called ‘factories’, which, divided along national lines, turn into microcosms of nation-state (RoS 184). The factories lift flags which, as Robin reports, are “larger than any I have ever seen”, 82 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="83"?> 78 In capturing the Western paradigm of modernity through phallic imagery, Ghosh moreover adds a distinctly gendered dimension to his discussion of an alternative model of modernity: while he emphasises, along with feminist thinkers such as Anne McClintock, how much nationalist and imperialist politics rely on a patriarchal gender order, I will show in chapter 3.1.3.2 that he explicitly associates the possible modern world that could develop out of the peaceful, cooperative and connected Indian Ocean traditions with a matriarchal gender order. 79 The trilogy further underlines this point by contrasting the British merchants’ situation with that of their colleague Bahram and his pointed lack of a nation-state: living himself in a factory which has “no flag of its own” (RoS 197) and which, assembling a heterogenous group of merchants from the Indian subcontinent, suggests a “yet unmade Achhasthan” (RoS 204), Bahram notes that, in contrast to Innes, who can rely on the British marine, “he, Bahram, had no such surety” (RoS 349). 80 Elliot is one of many historical figures Ghosh incorporates into his narrative (see Poddar 12). and whose poles, being “immensely tall”, resemble “gigantic lances, plunged into the soil of China” (RoS 194). The phallic, violent image of lances penetrating China thus draws attention to the nation-state’s possessive claim, mirroring the earlier Dutch attempt to conquer the city that led to the emergence of Fanquitown in the first place. 78 Throughout, the trilogy traces the national orientation of the Western-introduced ‘modern’ ways back to an aggressive and ruthlessly egoist pursuit of one’s own profit. In stressing that the British merchants go through with their illegal opium deals because they know they can “count on being backed up by British gunboats” (RoS 349), the trilogy underlines not only that the British state prizes its own economic benefit - after all, a lot of British revenue depended on the opium trade - above the Chinese people’s health, but also suggests that the very function of the nation-state is securing its members’ advantage on a competitive world stage. 79 Using its character Robin as a mouthpiece, Ghosh unmistakably condemns this self-interestedness at the costs of others: when the foreign merchants are kept prisoners within Canton after disregarding the ban of the opium trade and the British representative Captain Elliott comes to their help, 80 Robin compares Elliott to a “dacoit leader marching into a courtroom and demanding the immediate and unconditional release of his gang” (RoS 525). The words ‘gang’ and ‘dacoit’ leader powerfully discredit this use of the national community: the text likens its inconsiderate self-interest to robbery and crime. In contrast to this unfavourable depiction, the Indian Ocean tradition appears entirely devoid of aggression and the kind of thinking that positions one group’s interests against those of others. An observation Neel makes, the former Raja who becomes part of the Ibis community’s uprooted character cast and ends up in Canton, provides a concise image for the differences the trilogy ascribes 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 83 <?page no="84"?> 81 His fictionalisation notwithstanding, in content and tone, Ghosh sticks close to the original, which goes: “Let us suppose that foreigners came from another country, and brought Opium into England, and seduced the people of your country to smoke it, would not you, the sovereign of the said country, look upon such a procedure with anger, and in your just indignation endeavour to get rid of it? Now we have always heard that your highness possesses a most kind and benevolent heart, surely then you are incapable of doing or causing to be done unto another, that which you should not wish another to do unto you! ” (Commissioner Lin, n.p.) to the two paradigms. Talking about a new British rocket that constitutes a deadly weapon, Neel points out that “[o]f course the Chinese have had rockets for centuries, but apparently they’ve only ever used them as fireworks, not for military purposes” (FoF 334). What simply served to aesthetically delight in the peaceful Indian Ocean world, the British have now re-modelled to fulfil its deadly function within their imperial war. Most of all, the trilogy underlines the contrast between these two competing systems by juxtaposing its British players with the character of commissioner Lin, modelled after the historical figure Lin Zexu, to whom the Qing emperor assigns the task of ending the opium trade. Where the ‘modern’ characters promote the self-interest of individuals or restricted groups and regard their surroundings as means to their private profits, commissioner Lin advocates a socially and ecologically responsible approach to the world considered in its entirety. Ghosh provides, for instance, a slightly adapted, fictionalised, version of a letter the historical figure Lin sent to Queen Victoria (see also Poddar 10). In this letter, Lin advocates an ethics which refuses to accept that we must care about the consequences of our actions only insofar as they affect those within the borders of ‘our’ nation. He writes: Suppose those of another nation should go to England and induce its people to buy and smoke the drug - it would be right that You, Honoured Sovereign, should hate and abhor them. Hitherto we have heard that you, Honoured Sovereign, whose heart is full of benevolence, would not do to others that which you would not others should do to yourself. (RoS 571) 81 This attitude that Lin ascribes to Queen Victoria is in fact entirely at odds with the ethos of Western modernity as depicted in the trilogy. The use of the term ‘benevolence’, both in Ghosh’s version and in the original, is significant as it embeds Lin’s reminder within the peaceful Indian Ocean traditions: Prasenjit Duara draws attention to the manifesto of the Asian Solidarity society, which, created in Tokyo around 1907 to revive the region’s historical connectivity, stated that “[t]he various races in this region had self-respect […]. They rarely invaded one another and treated each other respectfully with the Confucian 84 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="85"?> virtue of benevolence” (qdt. in Global Modernity 250; my emphasis). At the same time, however, Lin’s phrasing evokes a whole number of associations ranging from the ‘Golden Rule’ of Confucianism and its Biblical equivalent to the Kantian categorial imperative. If Lin’s approach thus tentatively dissolves the borders between East and West, the trilogy once more underlines that, while it juxtaposes Western modernity with an Indian Ocean alternative, this alternative itself is precisely defined by its cosmopolitan character and its embrace of transcultural exchange. What is at stake is the contrast between a system built on (national) separations and imperial competition and one that does not think in terms of borders and particularistic interests, not between essentialised visions of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ ways. Not only do the Commissioner’s ethics underline a caring approach towards humans beyond borders, his considerate treatment of others also extends to the non-human world. Seeking for a way to destroy the huge quantities of opium the Chinese officials have confiscated, Lin comes up with a plan: he has his men dig up trenches and fill them with water, into which he then throws the opium after mixing it with salt and lime so that it dissolves in the water. From there, it is then drained into the rivers. However, as he fears that his action could possibly have a damaging effect on flora and fauna, he “sits down to write a poem - it is a prayer addressed to the God of the sea asking that all the animals of the water be protected from the poison that will soon be pouring in” (RoS 561, emphasis in original). Although he as well does not entirely manage to circumvent the risk of harming nature, the mere fact that he includes animals into his considerations and does what he can think of to prevent harm makes him notably different from the inconsiderate destruction of nature Ghosh ascribes to the imperialist powers’ competitive world. In narrating the battles of the Opium War, the trilogy emphasises how the Western powers destroy their surroundings: “[w]hen the smoke cleared they saw that a section of the raft had been demolished. Within moments dead fish began to float up from below, clogging the river’s surface.” (FoF 525) By taking up, an entire novel later, the motif of ‘animals of the water’, the trilogy reinforces the contrast between Lin’s approach and the one that the Western powers introduce. As anticipated by the changing structure of the cities and Bahram’s premo‐ nition that Singapore will ‘overtake’ Malacca in importance, by the end of Flood of Fire, the Indian Ocean alternative is, like Waverley’s Highland culture, entirely marginalised. While traces of the peacefully connected and sustainable Indian Ocean paradigm are ubiquitous in all three novels (see also chapter 3.1.3), the trilogy’s narrative thus spans the process through which the competitive and aggressive ways connected to Western imperial capitalism establish themselves 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 85 <?page no="86"?> 82 It is important for my argument in chapter 3.1.3.2 to stress that the trilogy suggests that the cosmopolitan world is in fact not entirely vanishing: it is ‘dying’ only in so far as it ceases to be the dominant, influential paradigm according to which politics and economics, for instance, function. 83 I have pointed out before that the narrator studies those histories which, being “Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim” (IAAL 339), constitute as the dominant paradigm in the region. 82 Significantly, commissioner Lin, prime representative of the Indian Ocean ways, is “removed from his post, […] and that too in a deeply insulting manner […]: no forewarning, no notification - just a letter to a junior to indicate that he had been replaced” (FoF 399-400). Like Lin himself, the social mode for which he stands comes to be replaced, as an observation of one of the sepoys positioned in Canton underlines. This soldier finds that “to his disbelief, […] the Chinese were launching rockets. All of this was new: the improved gunnery, the rockets - how had the chootiyas learnt so much so fast? ” (FoF 557) What they have ‘learned’ is to re-consider their use of rockets for aesthetic purposes only and to adapt to the aggressive, destructive ways of the West. Far from chronicling “the progress we have made” (Waverley 375), the trilogy forces readers to notice, it thus depicts a process in which the Indian Ocean region had to adapt to the Western-introduced ways and, in so doing, depart from what might have offered an alternative, less socially and ecologically damaging historical pathway into a different possible ‘modern’ future. The changes it chronicles hence constitute not an inevitable, ‘natural’ process of modernisation, but a development in which one model of an emergent modernity triumphs over another one by sheer force - and subsequently proclaims to be the natural embodiment of modernity worldwide. These insights require readers to assess the trilogy’s constant allusions to the Waverley model in new ways. The trilogy has, so to speak, made them aware of the highly ironic way in which it ‘inhabits’ this model: by (ostensibly) suggesting that we understand the historical process it depicts as one of modernisation, we can now see, it mockingly reflects on the state in which ‘being modern’ has become - wrongfully - limited to the model that triumphed. Once we submit to this resemanticisation of the ‘modern’, modernisation indeed means adapting to these, as the trilogy suggests, harmful ways of the imperial West. While it pretends to do precisely this, to submit to a now hegemonic conceptualisation of modern life, the trilogy in fact denaturalises this very conceptualisation and encourages a re-evaluation of the very terms on which we construct the modern. As mentioned, preceding the Ibis trilogy, Ghosh has established his interest in the Indian Ocean region’s special past in In an Antique Land.  83 In this text, 86 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="87"?> a distinctly transcultural amalgam. In fact, In an Antique Land is not the only one of Ghosh’s remaining texts which posits the Indian Ocean realm’s connected past against modernity as we know it, as Aparna Mujumdar’s discussion of Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace (2000) demonstrates. Her observation that “Ghosh implies the connections between one South Asian city and others to draw attention to the alternative ways in which native subjects responded to and participated in global cultural and commercial contexts before the colonial state established its hegemony over these paradigms” (173) also reminds of the Ibis trilogy. So does her remark on the multicultural dynamics the novel ascribes to the pre-colonial city of Mandalay (see ibid.), and on Saya, one of the novel’s protagonists, who she describes as a character who “maps the precolonial networks of commerce and epistemological exchange” (ibid.). 84 Inderpal Grewal finds that Ghosh creates the past as “in fact, a utopian time and place” (187, see also 180). In a similar vein, Gaurav Desai notes that Ghosh seems determined to render a positive version of the old world he depicts, which leads to a rather partial juxtaposition of a peaceful precolonial world and a destructive European influence (see 135). Desai, however, is prepared to defend “Ghosh’s creative use of nostalgia” (132) by arguing that it needs to be situated in the context of attempts to create visions for a desirable future (see 140). too, the arrival of Western colonial powers beginning in the late 15 th / early 16 th century appears as the central rupture in the region’s history. It is then that a world whose “networks appear to have been wholly indifferent to many of those boundaries that are today thought to mark social, religious and geographical divisions” (ibid. 278) gradually gives way to a new era in which intertwined histories came to be “partitioned” (ibid. 339) and a distinctly peaceful world came to an end. Throughout, In an Antique Land promotes the Indian Ocean principles as an ideal that strikingly contrasts with the ‘modern’ globalised world that emerged in its aftermath. Many critics have highlighted these tendencies of the text; however, they differ in their verdict: whereas some charge Ghosh with whitewashing history and glossing over the more problematic aspects of this past, 84 Anshuman Mondal makes a case for reading Ghosh’s idealised depiction of the pre-colonial era as “a deconstructive ruse that enables him [Ghosh] to shed a critical perspective on modernity“ (106). A similar dynamic is at play in the Ibis trilogy: in juxtaposing its two worlds, I have shown, the Ibis trilogy likewise provides a highly idealised rendition of its perishing realm, contrasting it with an almost demonised alternative. Here as well, the exceedingly developed contrast fulfils a distinctly political function, serving to develop such a ‘critical perspective’ on what has come to constitute modern life. In the light of the positive, desirable alternative that the Indian Ocean world constitutes, it appears all the worse that ‘the modern’ has come to be defined exclusively by its Western competitor. The very reason for the Indian Ocean alternative’s marginalisation, its general avoidance to position ‘one’s own’ interests against those of one’s human and non-human surroundings, presents it as a highly attractive model to 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 87 <?page no="88"?> 85 A number of critical readings have drawn attention to the character of Zachary. While his transformation has not gone unnoticed (see e.g. Martín-González 145-6), these readings tend to discuss him primarily with a focus that differs from that of my close readings. Jacob Crane, for instance, argues that Zachary “acts as a surrogate throughout the novel for black Atlantic memory” (5) and finds that the character serves to establish a connection between the ‘Black Atlantic’ paradigm and the Indian Ocean (see also Martín-González 147). a reader whose late modern world threatens to collapse under its own divisions and the exploitative practices pursued for centuries. 3.1.2.2 ‘Re-Made in a More Enlightened Mould’: Character Development and the Idea of a Modernising World In taking up the motif of a struggle between an ‘old’ and a ‘modern’ world through which Waverley develops its narrative of modernisation, the trilogy hence turns out to be presenting something very different from an innocent, somewhat historically necessary passage into a more ‘advanced’ age. It critically highlights how Western-originated ways of life and social organisation - which the trilogy depicts in highly negative terms as ways oriented at individual profit at the cost of others - establish themselves as the embodiment of ‘the modern’ worldwide. ‘Modernisation’, so the conclusion the trilogy invites, becomes a euphemism for the region’s re-orientation towards these ways at the expense of their more socially and ecologically responsible alternative. Its presentation of the character of Zachary Reid, I will argue in the following, serves the trilogy to further underline, in a humorous and self-referential way, its particular, sarcastic re-interpretation of the historical romance’s ‘narrative of modernisa‐ tion’. Where Scott uses his protagonist Waverley’s development from a dreamy, romantic youth to adulthood to underline the historical ‘progress’ towards an enlightened, rational modernity that his narrative traces throughout, the Ibis trilogy playfully connects its character Zachary and his changing persona to the process of modernisation. In so doing, however, Ghosh employs him to make a mockery of the very ideas conventionally associated with this process and to underline the trilogy’s bleak re-interpretation of what ‘modernisation’ actually means in its historical context. With Zachary, one of the Ibis community’s members, the trilogy presents a character who undergoes a complete transformation in the course of the plot. Mixed-race son of a former Maryland slave and her master, he initially reaches out to his fellow humans without any concern for cultural and racial borders or rank, and continuously stands up against imperial injustices. 85 Throughout 88 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="89"?> the journey onboard the Ibis, he tries to mitigate the effects of the first mate Mr Crowle’s tyrannical rule by supporting the latter’s victims. When Crowle sends Jodu, one of the lascars onboard, on a mission to do some repair work on the Ibis’ bowsprit during a storm, the task must lead to the unexperienced man’s death, as Mr Crowle very well knows. Zachary not only directly disobeys his superior in coming to Jodu’s rescue, but he also risks his own life to save Jodu’s. His words “‘[t]he hell with you, Mr Crowle; I’m not going to stand by and see a man lost’” (SoP 445) establishes Zachary as a man with social backbone, defying hierarchies and ready to sacrifice his own career to live up to his sense of justice. At the end of Flood of Fire, however, his character traits have become entirely reversed. He has abandoned all considerations for others and has supplanted feelings with instrumental calculi serving to ensure his own economic advantage. In this context, Ghosh employs a conversation between Zachary and his former lover Mrs Burnham to have Zachary comment on the kind of ‘type’ he has come to embody. ‘Oh Mr Reid,’ she whispered. ‘What has become of you? What have you become? ’ He was not slow to retort. ‘I have become what you wanted, Mrs Burnham,’ he said. ‘You wanted me to be a man of the times, did you not? And this is what I am now; I am a man who wants more and more and more; a man who does not know the meaning of ‘enough’. Anyone who tries to thwart my desires is the enemy of my liberty and must expect to be treated as such.’ (FoF 582) His self-characterisation as a person who wants ‘more and more and more’ identifies him as the prototypical capitalist subject, who is not interested in anything but the accumulation of wealth. The emphasis on ‘liberty’ moreover echoes 19 th -cenutry liberalist discourses, which the trilogy constantly conjures up as the rhetoric through which the opium merchants defend the continuation of their morally questionable trading practices. As Juan-José Martín-González points out, “Zachary’s degeneration represents the rise of capitalism at its most extreme” (146). Significantly, Zachary himself links his new persona to a specific mode of ‘the time’: the development from a social being who stands up against injustices and is willing to risk his life for others to a purely egoistic capitalist who sees others solely as a means to economic gain is described in terms of 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 89 <?page no="90"?> 86 Simultaneously, the claim that Zachary becomes a ‘man of the times’ can be read as a swipe at the neo-liberal orientation of our own 21 st -century present. In an interview, Ghosh remarked that he wrote Sea of Poppies “at a time when this kind of capitalist ideology was absolutely in its ascendency, when it was thought that the market was God. Within this context, it just baffled me that people could not see that, for free traders, the first major testing ground was opium. In the name of free trade, over tens of millions of people were poisoned” (“Networks and Traces” 34). Martín- González’ reading of the Ibis trilogy highlights the ways in which its discussion of Victorian imperialism comments on contemporary issues (see e.g. 122, 145-7). Likewise emphasising how Sea of Poppies’ critique of 19 th -century liberalism merges with one of contemporary neo-liberalism, Eddy Kent stresses the neo-Victorian mode of the novel. However, the term ‘neo-Victorian’ is difficult in this context because it perpetuates the very Western-centric approach to history that Ghosh positions himself against. overcoming a state of the ‘past’ and adapting to the current times - of becoming ‘modern’. 86 Not only does the temporal rhetoric parallel the one through which the trilogy describes how cities ‘of old’ are replaced by those more fitting to ‘the time’, but Zachary’s personal transformation also notably echoes the largescale historical transformations the trilogy describes. The ways in which his individual social consciousness gets lost match the development in which a social world surrounding characters like Lin becomes ‘outdated’: those who display a sense of social responsibility and cosmopolitan concern for others are increasingly pushed aside, leaving the ‘modern’ stage to those driven by ruthless self-interest and an overwhelming sense of competition. If these parallels already suggest that we have to understand Zachary’s transformation as an allegory of the trilogy’s critical take on ‘modernisation’, Ghosh goes through great length to direct the readers’ attention to this wider significance he attributes to the character’s transformation. With Zachary’s very name, the one remembered by the Lord, charging him with meaning and alerting readers to a possibly elevated role he plays in the trilogy, Ghosh specifies this role through the character of Baboo Nob Kissin. The trilogy repeatedly emphasises that the latter insists on believing that Zachary heralds the coming end of the current cycle of time (see for instance FoF 258). In different ways, it thus humorously invites its readers to connect Zachary’s personal development with the largescale transition to the ‘new age’ it depicts. In fact, these self-referential comments on the trilogy’s way of associating the character with its ‘narrative of modernisation’ do not stand alone: Ghosh moreover embellishes Zachary’s transformation with a number of details which, evoking familiar accounts of modernising societies, explicitly describe his transformation as his personal modernisation. To begin with, Ghosh carefully intertwines the emergence of Zachary’s exploitative, capitalist persona with 90 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="91"?> 87 Foucault argues: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes a responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Discipline and Punish 202-3). a process of sexual disciplining that the trilogy unmistakably signposts as a process of modernisation. This becomes visible primarily in his interaction with Mrs Burnham. Wife of one of the English merchants, Mrs Burnham takes a vivid interest in Zachary’s life after her husband hires him to refashion their boat, which gradually develops into a secret affair between the two. Early on in their acquaintance, Mrs Burnham explicitly insists that Zachary give up masturbating in order to become ‘modern’: she explains to him that “[i]n the conquest of this disease, says Dr Allgood, lies the difference between primitive and modern Man” (FoF 119). This remark already connects his evolving sexual constraint with discourses of modernisation, pointing towards established accounts that foreground the repression of sexuality as characteristic of bourgeois modernity. Ghosh, however, takes this further: the trilogy’s fictional presentation of the process under which Zachary ‘disciplines’ himself visibly alludes to Michel Foucault’s analysis of modern disciplinary societies. While readers are aware of the fact that Mrs Burnham constantly watches him with her spyglass while he is working and living on the Burnhams’ boat, always visible from their house, for Zachary, the fact of his visibility comes as a shock. It is the sudden arrival of their daughter, who is not only perfectly informed about his whereabouts, but also lets him know that her mother “was watching you with her bring-’emnear, from her bedroom window. I saw her’” (FoF 37) that makes him acutely aware of his audience. For Zachary, this information creates a situation akin to Foucault’s inmate of the Panopticon, who, although he can “never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; […] must be sure that he may always be so” (Discipline and Punish 201). As Foucault describes, this prompts a process of intense self-disciplining, 87 which leads, in Zachary’s case, from repressing masturbation to giving up his sexuality entirely. Referencing Foucault’s panopticon serves as a playful indication that Zachary has now entered the ‘modern’ realm. As the story proceeds, Ghosh takes this association of Zachary’s personal transformation with familiar accounts of modernisation further. In an idiosyn‐ cratic semanticisation of the word ‘spending’, Ghosh simultaneously connects Zachary’s developing sexual restraint to an awakening economic greed. While the affair between Mrs Burnham and Zachary unfolds, Mrs Burnham regularly refers to his orgasms as ‘spending’: she encourages him to “spend when and 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 91 <?page no="92"?> where you will” (FoF 195) and asks him not to “deny yourself a proper spending” (FoF 222). Having established this connotation, the text then links Zachary’s growing denial of his sexual gratification, described as a lack of ‘spending’, to his desire for capitalist accumulation: And sure enough, just as Mrs Burnham had predicted, his mounting anxieties began to work a slow but steady change in him; he started to see why it was more important to hoard than to waste, he understood why accumulating was more important than spending, and slowly he came to be filled with a great disgust for the life he had led before - a life of profligacy and poverty, in which he had wasted his mind and body in pointless pursuits, squandering his essences, bodily and spiritual, in fanciful imaginings […]. (FoF 251) The passage explicitly links the idea that ‘accumulating was more important than spending’ to his bodily ‘wastes’. Here, the economic connotation that the word ‘spend’ tacitly carries all the while comes out into the open and the sexual discourse visibly overlaps with an economic one: Zachary’s sexual disciplining goes hand in hand with what Max Weber famously described as the development of the modern capitalist individual’s work ethic: “accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save” (Weber 172). The trilogy’s presentation of Zachary’s sexual disciplining process thus underlines how he turns into an individual embodying the Weberian ‘modern’ capitalist ethic, literally following the motto with which Zygmunt Bauman captures the core of Weber’s analysis: “saving above spending” (158). He has become the modern capitalist par excellence. As Zachary gradually replaces his sexual ‘spending’ with capitalist accumu‐ lation, the latter comes to replace not only the initial ‘disease’ but any sexuality at all. As such, his desire for riches becomes in fact a replacement of his affair with Mrs Burnham. When Zachary watches an auction, Ghosh again uses the ambiguous notion of ‘spending’: […] this was where he belonged; there was nothing he wanted more than to be amongst the players, lavishing his unspent energies upon the pursuit of wealth. By the time the last lot of opium was sold Zachary was drenched in sweat: when he looked at his watch, he could not believe that the auction had lasted only forty-five minutes. He felt drained; no less spent than he was after a bout of love-making. Only in bed with Mrs Burnham had he felt such a fierce onrush of passion. (FoF 275) He channels all his now repressed sexual passion into his economic adventures. The modern man’s passion, Ghosh sarcastically comments, is to be found only in the field of economic gains. Significantly, the trilogy previously developed 92 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="93"?> 88 Compare also Katherine Hummel, who observes, somewhat relatedly, that Zachary “exchanges his passion for Mrs Burnham for opium in its abstract, commodified form” (578). 89 The trilogy in fact evokes this association in underlining Mrs Burnham’s shock in the face of what she has ‘created’ (see the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter). the relationship between Mrs Burnham and Zachary as a love affair which, far from providing mere sexual gratification, involved strong feelings, at least on Zachary’s part. Against this background, his economic greed also replaces his human interest in Mrs Burnham as a lover. 88 Zachary’s way of rechannelling his sexual energies into a capitalist ethos is ultimately another facet of his way of abandoning caring inter-human relations in favour of his exploitative approach towards others in the course of his ‘modernisation process’. With its depiction of Zachary’s transformation, the trilogy self-referentially demonstrates, it thus playfully alludes to the Waverley model’s way of employ‐ ing its protagonist’s development to illustrate the transition to modernity that it narrates. Yet, appearing in exaggeratedly negative terms as an almost Frankensteinian genesis of a monster of modernity, 89 his transformation clearly does not lend itself to reading it, in the Waverley spirit, as the ‘growing up’ of humankind. Instead, it once again shatters any idea of modernisation as progress. In fact, just like Zachary’s transformation underlines the trilogy’s negative evaluation of what has come to constitute ‘the modern’, it also serves to stress its suggestion that in the global context it provides the idea of ‘modernisation’ is ultimately nothing but a euphemism for the world’s often forceful assimilation to a Western-originated way of life. The trilogy conjures up a familiar rhetoric that embeds Zachary’s ‘modernisation’ process within a spatial discourse. With Mrs Burnham consistently asking him to “conquer the primitive who lurks inside you” (FoF 245), it already hints at an imperial geography that guides her idea of modernisation: the primitive, as Johannes Fabian has shown, constitutes “a category, not an object of Western thought” (18), and, as such, intertwines temporal - the pre-modern - and spatial - the non-West - relations. Zachary’s own words underline the spatial imagination inherent to the notion of modernisation to which Mrs Burnham adheres: ‘It is yourself you must thank, Mrs Burnham,’ said Zachary. ‘It was all your own doing, wasn’t it? It was you who decided that I needed to be re-made in a more enlightened mould. It might have been better for both of us if you had left me to languish where you found me. But you chose instead to rescue me from that dark, unnameable continent - and now it is too late.’ (FoF 582) 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 93 <?page no="94"?> 90 In doing so, he echoes a well-established trope, prominently evoked, for instance, in Joseph Conrad’s description of the Congo as the “Heart of Darkness”. In The Hungry Tide, chapter 3.2 will show, Ghosh evokes Heart of Darkness as a major intertext, hence referencing a novel which forms part of what John McClure described as the late imperial romance genre. The word choice ‘re-made in a more enlightened mould’ openly evokes the idea of historical progress, according to which an enlightened modernity replaces a ‘dark’, archaic age. In having Zachary describe Mrs Burnham’s endeavour as the attempt to rescue him “from that dark, unnameable continent”, Ghosh connects the metaphor of dark and light standing for the temporal categories of the modern and the pre-modern to the spatial imaginary of Africa as the ‘dark continent’. 90 Modernity is reduced to the ostensibly ‘white’ parts of the world. In fact, the trilogy underlines the spatial dimension that imaginaries of modernity often entail through combining Zachary’s modernisation with its own sarcastic gesture of ‘rescuing’ him from the ‘dark continent’: Zachary’s ideological re-orientation goes along with a transformation of his outward appearance and the change of categories to which he is assigned that turns him from ‘black’ to ‘white’. The trilogy thus mockingly reproduces the very discourse Mrs Burnham’s talk alludes to. Zachary first signs up on the Ibis in Baltimore as a carpenter meant to refit the ship to her new function of transporting ‘coolies’. “[L]isted as ‘Black’” (SoP 13), he is initially excluded from all higher ranks. However, due to lucky coincidences and a lack of alternative candidates, he soon advances “from the merest novice sailor to senior seaman, from carpenter to second-in-command, with a cabin of his own” (SoP 15). Expirate Serang Ali, who is determined to turn Zachary into a “pukka sahib” (SoP 23), further advances his ascent up the social ladder: taking him through a meticulous process of bodily cleaning, dressing him in the clothes of deceased ship mates and fitting him out with a watch, he sends Zachary on shore, where he passes as a white man. Experiencing an unknown respect and interest by people who would otherwise not even have looked at him, Zachary starts to enjoy his new persona, walking around “with a grin on his face and the word ‘gentleman’ ringing in his ears” (ibid.). It is this new guise that allows Zachary to board the Ibis again, in Calcutta, as the second mate, glossing over his origins and passing as one of the few white gentlemen on board. This identity becomes the prerequisite for him claiming a place with the white, Western capitalists and for starting to “hoard” in the first place. Within the first pages of the trilogy, Zachary has thus transitioned from being categorised as ‘black’ to being read as ‘white’. 94 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="95"?> 91 Westernised as in conforming to the stereotypical imaginary of the quintessentially white Westerner. Equating Western with ‘whiteness’ is of course as problematic as attributing it with an intrinsically ‘modern’ quality, yet it is precisely these problematic imaginaries that Ghosh - once again sarcastically - alludes to with the story surround‐ ing Zachary. 92 For an overview of the discussion about Ghosh’s scepticism against the various ‘shadow lines’ connected to modernity see chapter 2.1.1. He has become symbolically Westernised, 91 anticipating his later ‘modernising’ change in character towards the Western, exploitative model. Obtrusively framed as a ‘modernisation process’, Zachary’s transformation hence constitutes a highly playful adaptation of the historical romance’s devel‐ oping protagonist. As such, it serves as another means to underline the trilogy’s sarcastic assessment of what ‘being modern’ has come to signify worldwide: adopting a way of living and thinking antithetical to socially responsible behaviour, caring-interhuman relations and transcultural solidarities - and one in which the West is seen as the spearhead of progress. Just like the battle between the ‘old’ and the ‘modern’ world, Zachary’s transformation, the second strand of the trilogy’s ‘narrative of modernisation’, thus once again provides a highly critical evaluation of ‘the modern’ and suggests that it is anything but an ‘innocent’, ‘natural’ category of time. 3.1.3 The Romance Realm: (Western) Modernity’s Banned ‘Other’ After focusing on the ‘narrative of modernisation’ that the Ibis trilogy develops, my analysis now turns to the ways in which Ghosh’s creation of a romance realm functions to advance his modernity critique. The previous analysis has shown the trilogy’s conclusion that, with the demise of the Indian Ocean cosmopolitan world and its potential for leading into a modern future of its own, ‘being modern’ has become inextricably tied to a spirit of seeking individual profit and of exploiting one’s surroundings. Along with this, the trilogy emphasises, it has also come to signify proclaiming and producing national and cultural divisions that befit the world’s new orientation towards competition and domination. In discussing Ghosh’s oeuvre, critics have repeatedly argued that these divisions are in fact indicative of a more general compulsion to think in terms of boundaries and separations that his texts associate with the ‘modern rationale’. 92 Indeed, as the following close readings will show, the Ibis trilogy invites a similar conclusion. Through its use of romance, it connects the formation that eventually establishes itself as ‘the modern’ with an insistence to demarcate 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 95 <?page no="96"?> 93 As mentioned before, this reminds of Bruno Latour’s diagnosis on modernity. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour argues that to be ‘modern’ means to deny what he calls ‘hybrid networks’ between the realm of humans and that of non-humans. He argues that ‘the moderns’ claim their difference from the ‘pre-moderns’ - a differentiation which is also made with regard to one contemporary world along the lines of Fabian’s ‘denial of coevalness’ - on the basis of their having recognised these realms as “two entirely distinct ontological zones” (10). In so doing, however, they overlook how much in particular the modern world has mixed up these two zones. 94 This has of course not escaped critics’ attention. Binayak Roy observes, for instance, that “Sea of Poppies explores alternative ways of constructing the world based on connections that dismantle the rigid binaries and empiricism of Western modernity” (52). and separate that is not limited to arranging humans into distinct ethnic and cultural groups. In the trilogy, ‘being’ modern also means to adopt a view that regards the human sphere as entirely cut off from the non-human one, elevated from the latter by its exclusionary claim to agency. 93 This view, too, the trilogy evaluates as a symptom of the exploitative, colonial orientation of the new, ‘modern’ way of life. Where the division and classification of humans - and, by extension, cultures - prepares the subjection and exploitation of fellow humans, the dualism of human agents and non-human non-agents suggests that humans can exploit and dominate nature without repercussions. Through its use of romance, the trilogy thus once again underlines and criticises what ‘being modern’ has become limited to. 3.1.3.1 Beyond the Borders and Boundaries of ‘the Modern’ In numerous passages, this first subchapter will demonstrate, the trilogy presents ways of living and thinking that go against the border-logic described above, which refuse either to adhere to the divisions of the human world or to accept the idea of a radical gulf separating the human from the nonhuman sphere. 94 However, wherever it alludes to such ways, it stubbornly connects them to its romance world. I have started my discussion of the trilogy by pointing out that it strategically, and subversively, ‘inhabits’ the codes of the Waverley model where romance signifies the anti-modern. Against this backdrop, Ghosh semanticises romance for his critique of an exclusivist and normative understanding of modernity. In depicting ontologies and lifeworlds which dissolve the aforementioned borders and separations exclusively through the lens of romance, the trilogy finds a way to point out, through its literary form, that the connection-oriented alternative has no space within the way of life that successfully establishes itself as the modern. Wherever such lifeworlds 96 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="97"?> that highlight connections continue to exist from the moment of the trilogy’s setting onwards, they tend to be positioned outside the acceptedly modern realm. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh has claimed that, with the establishment of the ‘modern’ realist novel, all those ideas that do not align with the declared ‘reality’ of this new form - and the version of modernity it embodies - are banned to the ‘outhouse’ of romance (24). In likewise ‘banning’ its border-crossing moments to romance, and at times doing so in a self-referential, humorous manner, the trilogy mockingly stages how an established version of modernity simply confines these to the anti-modern. What counts as modern remains limited to an exploitative and domination-oriented paradigm. For a first impression of the ways in which the trilogy binds all boundarydissolving ontologies to its romance realm, I will focus on the depiction of the Ibis and her movements. I have mentioned that the romance world Ghosh creates is tied to the belief in an animate cosmos, in the rules of stars and destinies. Developing this animate romance world further, the trilogy also evokes the notion of ships being alive. New on board the Ibis, Jodu describes the ship as follows: The lascars’ word for this space was faná, or hood, as in the outspread crown of a cobra - for if a ship were to be thought of as a sinuous, living creature, then the head was the exact part to which the fana would correspond […] Jodu was familiar with the word fana, and he had often wondered what it would be like to live and sleep inside the skull of the great living creature that was a ship. (SoP 196, emphasis in original) Not only is the Ibis repeatedly called ‘living’, but the different parts of the ship also correspond to different parts of an animal. This, further underlined by the association with a bird established through the name ‘Ibis’, elevates the ship from dead to living matter. Indeed, the lascars’ view of the Ibis as a living creature corresponds to that of other characters: “Bibiji, said the serang, the timbers of the Anahita may have changed hands, but her spirit will always belong to you and your family. Ships are like horses, Bibiji; they remember the people who rear them.” (FoF 429, emphasis in original) If the characters variously insist on the vitality of ships, the trilogy itself goes along with this idea. It is “the shudder of the Ibis’s awakening” (SoP 388, emphasis in original) that announces the beginning of the journey: “[t]he hawsers that connected the Ibis to the steamtug drew tight and a tremor ran through the schooner as if she were waking suddenly to life, like a bird startled out of a long night’s sleep” (SoP 386-7, emphasis in original). The ship seems to literally turn into a living being as prefigured by her name. 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 97 <?page no="98"?> 95 See also Katherine Hummel who has argued that “the Ibis trilogy resonates strongly with the recent material turn in ecocriticism” (564, emphasis in original). The focus of her article lies, however, on the agency of opium within the trilogy. With ships coming to life, Ghosh here builds up a motif which, from the ‘realist’, ‘modern’ perspective that conventionally determines the outlook of the historical romance à la Waverley, clearly belongs to the animate anti-modern romance world of magic and superstition. While he thus unmistakably connects the notion of the Ibis as a ‘living creature’ endowed with the ability to act for herself with the sphere of romance, Ghosh simultaneously creates, from underneath the Ibis’ romance veneer, a new materialist challenge to the idea that agency belongs exclusively to humans. 95 In The Great Derangement, he attacks the “Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being” (31, see also 63-4) and the Ibis’s journey clearly calls this dualism into question. In fact, a close reading of this journey reveals that the trilogy constantly and purposefully ensures that its allusions to romance and its critique of a view that attributes agency exclusively to humans converge in the context of the Ibis. As she moves through the waters, the Ibis continuously illustrates that human agency is embedded within other forces that actively shape the world. Repeatedly, her materiality serves as a focal point through which the combined effect of wind, water and human labour becomes manifest: the events along her journey appear as a joint product of all these actors, rather than as the result of the human factor alone. As such, they serve to illustrate what Jane Bennett describes, with reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as an assemblage: she argues, bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogenous assemblage. What this suggests for the concept of agency is that the efficacy or effectivity to which that term has traditionally referred becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts (23, emphasis in original). Ghosh thus employs the Ibis and her journey to challenge the idea that agency is a human prerogative and to disturb the traditional subject/ object dichotomy. In so doing, he points to an ontology which, in taking the non-human seriously as an active force to bear with, cautions against attempts to dominate it: “Why advocate the vitality of matter? ” (ix), asks Bennett - “[b]ecause my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (ibid.). Throughout, however, the trilogy does not present such an ontology in a 98 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="99"?> 96 The characters themselves underline this role of the ship in retrospectively comment‐ ing, for instance, that “the bond of the Ibis was like a living thing, endowed with the power to reach out from the past to override the volition of those who were enmeshed in it” (FoF 439, emphasis in original); or in reflecting, “‘[t]he Ibis - it has tied us all together in strange ways, ne? ” (FoF 365, emphasis in original). somewhat ‘neutral’ way, but tied to its romance codes. It turns the Ibis not merely into a living being; it likens her to a quasi-mythical force, which, in assembling the Ibis community and keeping it alive, works as an agent of destiny. 96 And significantly, the very occurrences through which the trilogy dissolves the boundaries between human actors and non-human non-actors are also those which allow the Ibis to appear as such an agent of destiny in the first place: they always underline her assistance in bringing into being the Ibis community. The trilogy plays out a mechanism through which it immediately reclaims all nonhuman agency that surround the Ibis for its romance world. The decidedly nonexploitative approach to the world that might follow from acknowledging this agency has no space within the ‘realist’, i.e. ‘modern’, sphere of its narrative. A first example of such a romance-embedded evocation of non-human agency is connected to the moment in which Jodu joins the Ibis. The trilogy stresses how the ship actively claims its passenger. After Jodu falls asleep on his boat, it comes loose from its moorings and is about to collide with the “ocean-going ships that were using the incoming tide to make their way to Calcutta” (SoP 147). Jodu just avoids being killed by jumping into the water and, in so doing, saves his life but sacrifices his boat. Having hence destroyed his means of sustenance, he spontaneously joins the Ibis. The following passage narrates these events. The Ibis was almost upon him when the flapping of her foretopsail roused him; the sight that met his eyes was so unexpected that he could not immediately respond: he lay motionless in the boat, his gaze locked on the protruding bill of the vessel’s carved figurehead, which seemed now to be bearing directly down on him, as if to snatch him from the water like prey. (SoP 147, emphasis in original) Describing how the Ibis’ ‘figurehead’ is about to ‘snatch’ Jodu and likening her, with the ‘flapping’ of her sails, to the bird her name suggests, the passage ascribes a distinct intentionality to the ship. In this context, it stresses both that the Ibis has laid a claim on Jodu and underlines that she does not want him dead, emphasising the ‘warning’ that her sail-wings give to him. While the passage thus serves to gesture towards a possible reading of the Ibis as a living being in pursuit of a plan (although not without creating a certain distance to this reading most notably through its insertion of the words ‘as if ’), it simultaneously functions to draw attention to the many different forces - human and non- 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 99 <?page no="100"?> human - that work together in the course of action it describes. The Ibis’ ‘attack’ on Jodu, we gather, is the joint effect of the crew’s attempt to steer the ship and of the incoming tide; his close escape is a co-product of the gust of wind that causes the ‘flapping’ of the Ibis’ sails in the first place and of Jodu’s own decision to jump into the water. All these heterogenous actors together produce the outcome that Jodu is alive but deprived of his boat. The conditions under which he joins the Ibis come into being through a formation where “the locus of agency is […] a human-nonhuman working group” (Bennett xvii). The romance narrative surrounding the Ibis accommodates a new materialist de-centring of human agency, and, looked at it the other way round, this de-centring is mediated exclusively through the code of romance. This way of intertwining two manoeuvres, that of turning the Ibis into an agent of destiny who takes an active influence on the lives of those onboard and that of having her and the events that surround her testify, in a new materialist spirit, to the agency of various non-human elements, runs through the entire description of the journey. With a “tidal phenomenon” (SoP 358) deciding when the Ibis can weigh anchor, the trilogy stresses that “[i]t was no human agency but rather a quirk of the tides that was responsible for fixing the date of the Ibis’s departure” (ibid.; my emphasis). This start of the journey thus explicitly emphasises the agency of the non-human realm. It also, however, perfectly lends itself to a reading of those onboard being forced onto some prefigured path and thus finding themselves in the hands of some ‘greater force’ beyond their own will. The coupling of a new materialist argument with romanticising gestures culminates, towards the end of Sea of Poppies, in a passage that describes a storm to which the trilogy repeatedly returns. Here, the Ibis in fact seems to once again explicitly intervene in the journey to fulfil its role in ‘binding’ the Ibis community together. Under the cruel regime of the overseers onboard, several of the characters that come to form the Ibis community have to fear for their lives. When Kalua, Deeti’s husband, is trying to resist a flogging that would kill him, the Ibis comes to his rescue: As the first, furious chimes were ringing out, another swell took hold of the vessel, tipping her sharply on her side. One of the guards was knocked down as he tried to rise to his feet, and the other, who had been working his way towards Kalua, slipped sideways so that the bulwark caught him in the belly. He lingered on the deck rail for a moment, with half his body hanging overboard, clutching wildly at the slippery stanchions. Then, almost as if to shake him off, the Ibis dipped her flank still further, and a lapping crest of turbulence reached up to claim him for the deep. (SoP 497, emphasis in original) 100 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="101"?> 97 Scott introduces Waverley as “warm in his feelings, wild and romantic in his ideas and in his taste of reading, with a strong disposition towards poetry” (Waverley 62) and emphasises that he is “readily interested by a tale bordering on the romantic” (ibid. 61); compare my discussion in chapter 2.2.1. The Ibis’ movements actively interfere in the battle: just like she ‘snatched’ Jodu, she now actively ‘shake[s] off ’ Kalua’s pursuers. While the ship thus seems to fulfil her role as an ‘agent of destiny’, ensuring that none of the community’s designated members gets lost, the trilogy simultaneously points out that what is happening is the result of a compound of various phenomena working together: the rising wind, the sea, the material shape of the ship and the human bodies on it become literally one system without boundaries, an assemblage where agency depends on various factors. As the human fight onboard thus literally merges with the natural phenomenon of the developing storm, the Ibis can save Kalua’s life. Once again, a human-nonhuman assemblage becomes inseparably intertwined with the trilogy’s romance narrative. If, as I argue, the trilogy’s way of constantly ‘banning’ all border-transcending stances to romance wants to be understood as a reference to these stances’ place within - or rather outside - established conceptualisations of the modern, the depiction of the character Paulette Lambert serves an important function in this respect. It is with her that the trilogy makes most evident that, in confining its border-crossing moments to romance, it is actually imitating and drawing attention to a distinct pattern of representing and interpreting the world. A further member of the Ibis community and daughter of a French botanist who came to Calcutta to explore the local flora, Paulette embodies an approach to the world that challenges two established ‘modern’ borders at the same time. Her way of life opposes a radical separation between the human and the non-human realm as well as between humans along a cultural divide, in particular along the imperial one of ‘East’ and ‘West’. In so doing, it could not be more remote from the domination-oriented, destructive ways the trilogy associates with the Western powers. Once again, the trilogy ties her refusal to subscribe to established conceptual borders and separations to its romance realm. However, it does not associate her, like the Ibis, with a romance world of living things and predetermined destinies but choses a different way to reclaim Paulette and her worldview for its romance world: it turns her into a character whose ‘romantic’, sentimental disposition affiliates her, like Scott’s protagonist before his transformation, 97 with the romance, and as such the ‘antimodern’, realm within the trilogy. However, in achieving this effect by depicting her attitudes and desires refractured through romantic clichés, it does so in a notably exaggerated manner that asks us to recognise its own romanticisation 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 101 <?page no="102"?> 98 See also S. Singh, who similarly points to the romantic “‘theory of education’” (282) of Paulette’s father. of Paulette and her views as a - mocking - reproduction of a convention. Rather than presenting a ‘truth’ the narrative subscribes to, the romance association of Paulette functions to illustrate how the ‘modern’ form of the realist novel represents the very views she embodies exclusively within the exceptional realm of romance. Throughout, the trilogy constructs Paulette as the prototypical representative of a romantic spirit. Through the description of her childhood, for instance, readers gain insight into the education she received: 98 […] Paulette heard his words as though they were being spoken by her father, in French: … a child of Nature, that is what she is, my daughter Paulette. As you know I have educated her myself, in the innocent tranquillity of the Botanic Gardens. She has had no teacher other than myself, and has never worshipped at any altar except that of Nature; the trees have been her Scripture and the Earth her Revelation - She has not known anything but Love, Equality and Freedom: I have raised her to revel in that state of liberty that is Nature itself. If she remains here, in the colonies, most particularly in a city like this, where Europe hides its shame and its greed, all that awaits her is degradation: the whites of this town will tear her apart, like vultures and foxes, fighting over a corpse. (SoP 143) Not only do the principles of her education build on the prototypically romantic juxtaposition of nature as a place of liberty and innocence and a corrupt - Western, i.e. modern - civilisation, but in reminding of Henry Thoreau’s Walden (1854), her fathers’ chosen retreat to nature moreover echoes one of the most famous of romantic gestures. Abounding with clichéd phrases like ‘worshipping at the altar of nature’, the passage exaggerates the romantic mode it ascribes to Paulette and her late father to such an extent that readers simply have to take notice of the mocking undertone of this description. This is mirrored in a later passage where, again sharing Paulette’s perspective, we learn that her father’s education was indeed fruitful. She shares his passion for nature, carefully tending plants on a ship, and delves in fantasies of love, the object of which is Zachary whom she met on the Ibis: She had remembered how, on reaching Mauritius, she had gone to the Botanical Gardens at Pamplemousses, to wait for Zachary; she remembered her joy when she found the garden abandoned and overgrown - this, it had seemed to her, was an Eden after her own heart, where she would happily await her Adam. She had decided that theirs would be a romance to surpass even that of Paul and Virginie, whose fate had so 102 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="103"?> often moved her to tears - for their love would be freely and willingly consummated. Here, in this garden, she would joyfully take Zachary into her arms and they would be wedded under the stars, in body and in soul, on an island of their own imagining, far from the imprisoning imperatives of the world, their fates decided only by their own volition, their bodies joined together by that ecstatic, vital urgency that was the true and pure essence of life itself. (FoF 366-7) According to Paulette’s ideas, ‘true love’ is possible only in the context of an antimodern world that the romantic garden, ‘abandoned and overgrown’, embodies: a wild place of nature that constitutes a literal locus amoenus detached from civilisation. Moreover, the fact that her model of romance is that of ‘Paul and Virginie’, the famous couple of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s 1788 romance novel, stresses not only her sentimental disposition, but also testifies to her delight in romance reading. This, a notable echo of Waverley’s love of poetry and chivalric romances, further associates her, from within the ‘codes’ of historical romances, with the realm of anti-modern romance rather than with a modern ‘realist’ take on the world. By playfully overdoing its romance mode, the trilogy thus mocks its own endeavour to turn her into a romantic, overly sentimental dreamer who fails to associate herself with the ‘modern’, matterof-factly and ‘realist’ stance. If one, however, refuses to get diverted by the extensive romance mode, it becomes apparent that the very passages that establish Paulette’s and her late father’s romance association, like in the case of the Ibis, continuously signal to their embodying a promising alternative to the ‘modern’ borders and the paradigm of exploitation the trilogy criticises. Their approach towards nature, for instance, significantly follows a distinct credo. Paulette reflects that for her father, the gardener’s task was that of “communicating with forms of life that were necessarily mute and could be understood only through a careful study of their own modes of expression” (RoS 83). Moreover, for him, “the love of Nature had been a kind of religion, a form of spiritual striving: he had believed that in trying to comprehend the inner vitality of each species, human beings could transcend the mundane world and its artificial divisions” (ibid.). Her father’s emphasis on the ‘inner vitality’ of the non-human world and its different representatives’ own ‘mode of expression’ makes the boundaries between human and non-humans appear, to take up Bennet’s phrase “a matter of degree rather than kind” (68). Significantly, the trilogy has him trace his approach towards nature back to his desire to move beyond the ‘artifical divisions’ of the world that surrounds him. In so doing, it explicitly highlights the challenge to modern boundary-thinking that both father and daughter 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 103 <?page no="104"?> 99 In fact, Paulette’s reading choice as well stands not only for romance, but is also of interest in its very overcoming of such ‘artificial divisions’: in a different context, Anshuman Mondal has argued that “it is probably not wise to distinguish between his [Ghosh’s] fiction and non-fiction as it is perhaps another of those artificial boundaries that Ghosh insistently interrogates, the overcoming of which constitutes one of the central threads running throughout his work” (19). In The Great Derangement, Ghosh explicitly refers to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre as an example of an author who paid no attention to the convention of separating literature from science, thus suggesting his texts as an alternative to this specific ‘modern’ boundary (see 70). 100 In likewise comparing Paulette’s father and Fitcher, Juan-José Martín-González rightly points out that “Fitcher Penrose represents just another agent of Victorian imperialism. His quest for plant specimens is solely motivated by a mercantilist drive and his naturalist activities consist basically of plundering Chinese botanical treasures for their western consumption” (115). represent. 99 Furthermore, a revealing comparison between Paulette’s father and her current employer Fitcher underlines that the former’s boundary-dissolving stance goes along, as Bennett suggests, with avoiding an approach that seeks to dominate, exploit and draw profit from the non-human world. Whereas Fitcher, likewise a gardener, “looked upon Nature as an assortment of puzzles, many of which, if properly resolved, could provide rich sources of profit” (RoS 83), her father’s desire to approach nature as an equal ‘partner’ clearly forbids such behaviour and offers an alternative to the ‘modern’ tendency towards exploitation. 100 In fact, Paulette’s and her father’s desire to transcend the ‘artificial’ divisions of the world describes not merely their scepticism towards the human/ nature dichotomy. It also captures their attempt to ignore those divisions humans have erected among themselves. It is no coincidence that her father, in the passage quoted earlier, fears that ‘the whites’ will tear Paulette apart. Firstly, Paulette constantly defies the order of exclusionary, clearly pre-defined cultural or national identities: in Sea of Poppies, she boards the Ibis as one of the local in‐ dentured labourers (compare my discussion in chapter 3.1.3.2). When found out, she refuses to regard this as an act of impersonation that disguises her French identity and asks, “Is it forbidden for a human being to manifest themselves in many different aspects? ” (SoP 515), thus showcasing her rejection of national categorisations. Secondly, the Lamberts’ escape from modern civilisation into nature goes hand in hand with their escape into a transcultural community - and hence from the ‘artificial’ national and ethnic divisions of a modernity formed to suit imperial endeavours. Paulette grows up with her father and her ayah, whose son - Jodu - is like a brother to her, the children spending “their infancy lying head-to-head in her arms” (SoP 69). Her childhood home thus seems to mirror the Indian Ocean spirit ‘of old’ rather than the ‘new’ ways. 104 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="105"?> 101 For this fantasy as an established trope compare, for instance, Lars Gertenbach et al. who point out that the contemporary cultural imaginary often conjures up a romanticised version of ‘true community’ and of a harmonious social life that it associates with pre-modern times, offering these as a utopian alternative to a cold, alienated modern society (see 10). If its evocation of Paulette’s childhood constitutes another one of the trilo‐ gy’s boundary-transcending moments, it also provides one more illustration of the ways in which it stubbornly presents these through a romanticised framework. It stresses, for instance, that “Paulette’s eyes misted over at the thought of those childhood years, when she and her father had lived with Jodu and Tantima, as though their bungalow were an island of innocence in a sea of corruption” (SoP 144). In so doing, it has Paulette stylise this home, in a typically romantic fashion, as an enclave from the modern, capitalist and exploitative world around them. Her notion of an “island of innocence” (my emphasis) depicts the transcultural lifeworld in the spot of time-manner that Saree Makdisi identifies as the typical romantic gesture of resistance against the ‘modern’ world (see 12). Moreover, the overly harmonic vision of their transcultural family at whose memory her eyes ‘mist over’ shows her to dwell in clichéd romanticising fantasies of a lost communal harmony. 101 Language and style of the passage again playfully exaggerate, and thus foreground and ridicule, its efforts towards presenting Paulette’s divergent concept of society as that of a romantic dreamer who doubtlessly connects with the romance rather than the ‘modern’ realm. If Paulette’s border-crossing seals her fate as a character associated with the sphere of romance and the anti-modern rather than that of the realist and the modern, the trilogy inserts an attempt to rescue her from the romance world into its narrative. In fact, Ghosh seems to mockingly suggest, the very make-up of the trilogy as a text ‘inhabiting’ the codes of the historical romance with its ‘modern’ perspective that is responsible for her being banned to romance in the first place requires this rescue. As I have shown in chapter 3.1.1, the trilogy’s recreation of the Waverley model relies on positioning a non-Western antimodern world against an intruding, foreign Western modernity. The inclusion of a Frenchman’s daughter, a ‘Western’ character, in the romance world hence threatens to disturb this neat dichotomy and to undo the contrasts on which the historical romance relies. Against this backdrop, Ghosh playfully gestures towards an attempt to bring the binary back in order through ‘de-romanticising’ and ‘re-Westernising’ Paulette at the same time: after her father’s death, Paulette is put into the care of Mrs Burnham, who seeks to re-educate Paulette in ways that anticipate her later attempt to ‘re-make’ Zachary. Not only does the trilogy 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 105 <?page no="106"?> 102 Ghosh displays “The Ibis Chrestomathy” on his website, where he provides explanations for many of those expressions used in the trilogy whose origin or meaning might be unfamiliar to the reader, framed by a narrative about the trilogy’s character Neel’s obsession “with the destiny of words” (“The Ibis Chrestomathy”). Yet, as Forter rightly argues, a conventional function of a glossary is only “part of the story” (Critique and Utopia 63): Ghosh emphasises that he focusses on Indian Ocean words that migrated “from eastern waters towards the chilly shores of the English language” (“The Ibis Chrestomathy”). Thus framed, the Ibis Chrestomathy turns into a fictional document that testifies to a world of transcultural exchange and connections which Ghosh primarily associates with the Indian Ocean region, but which he also relates to the possibility of an - as yet unrealised - alternative modernity different from the imperialist version the Ibis trilogy traces elsewhere (compare the discussion in the next subchapter). cast an ironic glance at her endeavour when it describes Paulette as a “mem‐ sahib-in-the-making” (SoP 156), but it also has Mrs Burnham teach Paulette: “‘Sentiments, my dear Puggly,’ she said sternly, ‘are for dhobis and dashies. We mems can’t let that kind of thing get in the way! ” (SoP 286) Being ‘rational’ in contrast to ‘sentimental’ or ‘romantic’ becomes the distinguishing characteristic of the memsahib. Through Mrs Burnham’s word choice, dismissing ‘sentiments’ to the arena of ‘dhobis and dashies’, Ghosh connects her dismissal of Paulette’s romantic attitude to an imperial ‘East’/ ’West’ dichotomy. Not only does her code-switching systematically ascribe sentiments exclusively to the ‘native sphere’ to such an extent that she feels English words unfitting, but the meaning of the words she chooses is also suggestive. In a glossary to the Ibis trilogy, 102 Ghosh explains the context: ‘debbie’ is the Hindi word for Goddess, which acquired the connotation of an illegitimate mistress (“The Ibis Chrestomathy”) in its English use, whereas ‘dashie’ is “said to be derived from devadasi (temple dancer), hence the frequent pairing debbies and dashies” (ibid.). The sentimental, romantic approach that Mrs Burnham denies Paulette appears thus as the fitting context for women explicitly associated with non-Western traditions and surrounded by the lure of exotic difference, rather than for a Frenchman’s daughter. The latter, so Mrs Burnham’s comment suggests, should give up her border-crossing stance and firmly and exclusively associate herself with ‘the West’ and, hence, the ‘realist’ and modern realm of the trilogy. However, the fact that Mrs Burnham’s constant code-switching itself undermines the strict Western/ non-Western separation that she seeks to uphold underlines that the trilogy in fact entirely ridicules her views. 106 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="107"?> 3.1.3.2 The Ibis Community: A Continuation along the Indian Ocean Lines My discussion in chapter 3.1.2 has shown that the trilogy traces the process through which the Western-introduced, exploitative way of life with its orien‐ tation at boundaries triumphs over its Indian Ocean alternative and establishes itself as the sole possible version of modernity worldwide. In so doing, the trilogy points out, this way of life undoes the Indian Ocean’s potential to lead into a distinct modernity of its own. Against this backdrop, the argument that this final part of my analysis develops may surprise at first. I will show that Ghosh in fact inserts into the trilogy a narrative strand that develops precisely this forfeited potential and gestures towards the coming of age, rather than the demise, of the very modernity in the Indian Ocean tradition which, according to the trilogy’s own account, has been cut short. Centred on the Ibis’ journey and the formation of what I have called the Ibis community, the trilogy juxtaposes its main narrative of historical transition with a second historical possibility that embodies such a very different departure into a modern - now defined in radically new terms - future. If this seems to stand in unresolved tension with its parallel claim that modernity has become reduced to the nation-centric, separatist model with the events it depicts, Ghosh conjures up this alternative history in such a manner that it ultimately functions to underline, rather than undermine the trilogy’s conclusion that modernity has come to be reduced to a Western-introduced system. I will show that the trilogy combines two endeavours: on the one hand, it continuously foregrounds its own project of turning the Ibis’ journey and the emergent community onboard into an allegory of its alternative historical account in which an Indian Ocean tradition leads into a modern future. On the other hand, however, it simultaneously uses its romance aesthetics to recognis‐ ably thwart this project: Ghosh plays out a deadlock situation in which whatever the trilogy uses to conjure up this alternative modernity immediately functions to reclaim it for its own romance world and, as such, for its anti-modern realm. In so doing, he mockingly showcases the futility of any attempt to present, within his chosen literary format, a modernity that does not correspond to the imperialist, separatist paradigm but continues along the Indian Ocean lines. The trilogy demonstrates, once again through its literary form, that regarding such an alternative as a version of modernity remains ‘unthinkable’ in the light of the normative model of what ‘being modern’ means. In depicting the Ibis’ journey as a historical transition, it makes us realise, it presents us with a thought experiment which, from the established ‘modern’ perspective that the historical romance embodies, must remain precisely that: a counterfactual fiction that 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 107 <?page no="108"?> 103 Anupama Arora both emphasises the outstanding role of ships for colonial empires (compare further on in my main text) and stresses that the Ibis simultaneously provides the locus of an “act of resistance that functions as a ‘counterflow’ to colonialism” (38), suggesting “a world of possibility imagined outside of categorical boundaries of race, class, and nationality (ibid. 37). In a similar vein, Forter argues that “Ghosh emphasizes how the repressive conditions aboard ship at once typify colonial relations on the Indian Ocean and provide the basis for resistant solidarities and alternative modes of social organization” (Critique and Utopia 29, see also 51). Martín-González suggests reading the Ibis as a heterotopia, a “counter-site[]“ (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 24) which is “inserted in structures of Western imperial domination but prone to provide possibilities of transgression and generation of new hybrid identities” (Martín-González 86). See also Hoydis (334), or B. Roy (eg. 54; 56) Moreover, my own findings in the previous chapter that the Ibis disturbs a view of agency as an exclusively human property - the very view the trilogy associates with Western modernity - further signals to her being more than simply a representation of the latter. belongs to the realm of romance rather than to reality. Wherever Indian Ocean traditions (or similar ways that transcend ‘modern’ borders and boundaries) continue to exist after the Western version of modernity has established itself as the global model for modernity worldwide, they are denied their status as equally modern ways of life. It is this conclusion that the trilogy invites by both evocatively suggesting an alternative paradigm of modernity and denying it. If I have repeatedly emphasised that the trilogy’s allegedly ‘dying world’ is actually not getting entirely extinct in the trilogy’s diegesis, this manifests itself foremost in Ghosh’s depiction of the Ibis. As many critics have argued, the Ibis constitutes, right from the start, a highly ambiguous space: 103 judging from its function and the rules aboard, it clearly constitutes an emblem of Western, imperial modernity. Anupama Arora points out that “[s]hips were, as Linebaugh and Rediker put it, the ‘engine[s] of commerce, the machine[s] of empire’” (28) and the Ibis certainly qualifies as such a machine. Not only does she embody globalised trade - more specifically trade in humans -, she also is a space of rigid racial and ethnic separations and hierarchies. The Ibis is “sailing with an all-lascar crew which means that only her officers will be ‘European’, as they say here” (SoP 321) and one of her first rules is that “in matters of marriage and procreation, like must be with like, and each must keep to their own” (SoP 500). While the Ibis thus embodies the ‘modern’ separations the trilogy traces, it is precisely on the ship that the very transcultural bonding and merging typical of the ‘dying’ Indian Ocean tradition are actually, the official rules aboard notwithstanding, very much alive and kicking. If the Ibis thus comes to stand for the very possibility of a non-national, borderless modernity that the Indian Ocean world originally embodied, this is no coincidence. Critical readings of the trilogy have often linked it with 108 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="109"?> 104 See for instance Jacob Crane, Juan-José Martín-González, Anupama Arora (22-3), Greg Forter, (Critique and Utopia 3-2), or Binayak Roy (54). 105 Greg Forter, Jacob Crane and Juan-José Martín-González, for instance, all discuss the Ibis trilogy against the background of Gilroy’s analysis. 106 The lascars have attracted the attention of various critics; Anupama Arora, for instance, describes them as “the ultimate border-crossers as they float from ship to ship, between national borders, shore and sea in search of work” (27). See also, for example, Luo (“Way of Words” 380). a broader ‘oceanic turn’ in literary and cultural studies. 104 Foregrounding the ocean as a borderless realm, this turn implies “reject[ing] the nation as both ground and unit of historical understanding” (Forter, Critique and Utopia 32) and brings into focus a distinctly “maritime modernity” (Crane 3), which privileges the idea of the transnational over that of the national (see ibid.). Paul Gilroy’s study on The Black Atlantic (1993) is one of the foundational texts for studies on maritime modernity and an important point of reference for those critics discussing the Ibis trilogy in the context of the oceanic turn. 105 Characterising the ‘Black Atlantic’ as an inherently transcultural formation which embodies a “Counterculture of Modernity” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 1) produced under the conditions of the latter, Gilroy explicitly includes ships into his discussion. Describing ships as “chronotopes” (ibid. 4) which, located within the borderless, open sea, transcend the boundaries of modern nation-states and challenge essentialist concepts of cultural or ethnic difference, Gilroy argues that they constitute “micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity” (ibid. 12). Jacob Crane rightly points out that the Ibis relates to Gilroy’s image of the “ship in motion” (see 2): the impressions the trilogy provides of life aboard, in particular with relation to the lascars and those who will form the Ibis community, underline that this hybridity that Gilroy describes can, true to the image of the ‘ship in motion’ prosper on the Ibis. We get a first idea of this through Zachary’s reflections on the lascars. While he first thinks of them as “a tribe or nation” (SoP 14), he soon comes to realise that “they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakenese” (ibid). 106 The Indian Ocean here explicitly replaces national belonging: despite their different backgrounds, the lascars form a new, distinctly non-national community. The new language they develop underlines this fact, Laskari - that motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 109 <?page no="110"?> 107 It is important to add, however, that it is not only on the Ibis that the trilogy includes elements into its narrative that signal to a renewal, rather than a demise, of the Indian Ocean transcultural and cosmopolitan paradigm. In fact, the motif of newly emerging transcultural character bonds and of exceedingly romanticised transcultural friendships to which I point in the following sporadically but regularly reappears in all the different story lines - often connected to a given character’s journey on one of the other ships that feature in the trilogy. If I limit my discussion in this subchapter to the Ibis and the community forming aboard, this is because the narrative around her is both where these elements occur, by far, at the highest concentration and where the trilogy provides insights on how and to what effect it employs these elements. Hindusthani pulwars and English snows - yet beneath the surface of this farrago of sound, meaning flowed as freely as the currents beneath the crowded press of boats. (SoP 108) Scholars like Benedict Anderson have highlighted the significant role that a shared language played in forming a sense of national community (see 44). Laskari, by contrast, comes to embody the transcultural, transnational ‘community’ of the Indian Ocean which scholars have stressed and which the trilogy repeatedly conjures up (compare chapter 3.1.2.1). Yet in this case, it is not limited to increasingly outmoded spaces and characters but appears to be constantly formed anew within the oceanic realm and the ‘modern’ space of the Ibis. The fact that the very transcultural realm that the trilogy shows to disappear on land actually prospers and renews itself among the lascars provides the first indication that the Ibis’ journey somewhat goes against the dominant version of history the trilogy otherwise depicts. While this dominant version traces the decline of a transcultural world in the course of the region’s Westernisation, sugar-coated, from the historical romance’s perspective, as ‘modernisation’, the Ibis constitutes a space that leads to the new formation of such connections within a realm explicitly associated with modernity and movement rather than stagnation and a bygone age. 107 While Ghosh mentions the lascars’ formation of a new, transcultural realm rather en passant, with regard to the Ibis community, I will show, he puts such a process of transculturation centre stage and explicitly attributes it with a broader, historical significance. It is through the way in which the trilogy depicts the formation of this community that it guides us towards reading the Ibis’ journey as its attempt to formulate a counter-history to the changes it depicts on land: the journey, readers gradually realise, comes to stand for a transition to modernity which does not mean adapting to one distinct culture’s ‘rationale’ but consists in a process of transcultural collaboration and exchange. As a result, this transition does not bring forth the dominant, Western- 110 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="111"?> 108 In evoking, through the Ibis, a modernity that does not extinguish the transcultural, cosmopolitan world of its romance realm, Ghosh in fact builds on the potential of Scott’s model that critics from Anthony Jarrells to John Marx have highlighted (see my discussion in chapter 2.2.2). They point out that Scott’s historical romances, while they celebrate the process through which Otherness gets extinguished as historical progress, simultaneously allow to project a different scenario into the future; one that is not built on ‘overcoming’ a romance world but actually circumvents homogenisation and bonds with the ostensibly anti-modern. In analysing Sea of Poppies, Greg Forter likewise connects the novel to this potential of Scott’s form. He argues that Ghosh draws on the latter to create an alternative to a strict opposition between the pre-modern and the modern, thinking into being a modernity which, in line with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s suggestion, does not need to overcome all that is ‘traditional’. This form, Forter argues, enables Ghosh to extract “from the past the seeds of utopian futurity” (Critique and Utopia 34), to dig up pre-colonial solidarities as well as ways of thinking that go against the secular orientation of Western modernity. While my own argument overlaps in some ways with Forter’s, I think it crucial to combine these insights with showing that the trilogy then in fact uses its romance aesthetic to undermine the very project of evoking an alternative modernity and, in doing so, emphasises the power of exclusive, pre-conceived and Western-centric notion of what ‘to be modern’ means. centric paradigm that divides humans according to cultural, ethnic or national categories. 108 Forming along the journey, the Ibis community includes a number of the indentured labourers who are kept in cramped conditions down in the ‘dabusa’ under deck. Among them are Deeti, the very first character the trilogy introdu‐ ces, Paulette, who, as mentioned, managed to get aboard unnoticed, the two prisoners Neel and Ah Fatt to whom I will return later on, as well as Zachary. Parallel to the Indian Ocean region’s departure into the ‘new’ age that the trilogy depicts in its dominant narrative of modernisation, it emphatically describes this journey as the characters’ transitioning into the ‘new’. It constantly emphasises how, particularly for the passengers below deck, the journey constitutes an epochal cesura, leading them irrevocably away from their past. The trilogy calls the Ibis a “vehicle of transformation” (SoP 440) and describes her journey as a passage towards the “void of the Black Water” (SoP 387). In stating that “neither death nor birth was as fearsome a passage as this, neither being experienced in full consciousness” (ibid.), it further compares the journey to the great liminal watershed moments in each person’s individual life. While the parallel motif of transition thus invites us to read these personal changes, as in Zachary’s case, as an allegory of the large-scale historical processes the trilogy captures, the characters’ transitions into ‘the new’ in this case yet precisely fail to match the latter - or, rather, point towards a different historical process. Instead of a world of (national and cultural) separations emerging in the course of the ‘transition’ that the journey signifies, what comes into being is a 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 111 <?page no="112"?> 109 For a similar observation see Martín-González, who adds to his discussion of the Ibis ‘family’ that “Amitav Ghosh scholarship has repeatedly noted that the author’s use of the metaphor of the family constitutes his move away from the category of the nation” (105). 110 Deeti’s dominant role in the ‘fami’ in fact further establishes the kind of ‘modernity’ that the Ibis community comes to embody as a counter-vision to an imperial paradigm with its inherent ties to patriarchy (for this link, see for instance McClintock 6). While the core of this family consists of Deeti’s and Kalua’s descendants - the first one of them significantly being a ‘son of the Ibis’ (see later on in my discussion) -, the fact that the ‘family shrine’ includes the various members of the Ibis community and registers them as “Tantinn” and “uncle” (RoS 15) demonstrates that the extended family, as they understand it, includes the entire Ibis community. It is, after all, no coincidence that the members of the ‘dabusa’ earlier on refer to themselves as “ship-siblings” (SoP 372): from its start, the journey is associated with the emergence of a new family. new transcultural formation: ultimately, the characters all manage to evade their fate as indentured labourers or prisoners and come to constitute the new Ibis community - or ‘family’ as they come to see themselves. In a conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ghosh has pointed to his use of families as an alternative to the nation: I know that for myself this is a way of displacing the ‘nation’ - I am sure that this is the case also with many Indian writers other than myself. In other words, I’d like to suggest that writing about families is one way of not writing about the nation (or other restrictively imagined collectivities). (Ghosh and Chakrabarty 147, emphasis in original) In the Ibis trilogy, the family indeed becomes a way of ‘not writing about the nation’, 109 or, more precisely, not writing about the transition towards a ‘modern’ world ordered along national lines. Ghosh continuously underlines the trans‐ cultural nature of the emerging family. In her new family home, for instance, Deeti, once “appointed the matron of the dabusa by common consent” (SoP 447), has become the new matriarch of this family or this ”[f]ami” as the trilogy takes on Deeti’s wording (RoS 3). 110 In this role, Deeti’s “trumpeting a reveille in the strange mixture of Bhojpuri and Kreol that had become her personal idiom of expression” (RoS 4), attributes not merely a distinctly transcultural identity to her; her linguistic mixing moreover comes to characterise the community in its entirety. Even the name of the new family humorously captures the way in which the family formation stands for a process of transculturation rather than for the one of separating and border-drawing that drives the region’s transformation. When Deeti’s husband Kalua enlists on the Ibis, those taking down his name distort it twice. Baboo Nob Kissin, whose “tongue tripped on the final diphthong” 112 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="113"?> (296), first transforms ‘Madhu’ to ‘Madho’. Then the English pilot who writes down the names mishears Baboo Nob Kissin and once again changes the name to ‘Maddow’. Similarly, the name he gives as his father’s name, ‘Kalua’ (he exchanges his and his father’s name in an attempt to disguise his identity), transforms into ‘Colver’ after the pilot desperately wonders, “’[b]ut how on earth am I to spell it? ’” (ibid.). The story of the name itself figures as a foundational narrative of the new family: Later, within the dynasty that claimed its descent from him, many stories would be invented about the surname of the founding ancestor and the reason why ‘Maddow’ occurred so frequently among his descendants. While many would choose to recast their origins, inventing grand and fanciful lineages for themselves, there would always remain a few who clung steadfastly to the truth: which was that those hallowed names were the result of the stumbling tongue of a harried gomusta, and the faulty hearing of an English pilot who was a little more than half-seas over. (SoP 297) As the family’s name has symbolically preserved various cultural influences, it serves, along with Deeti’s language, to mark the Ibis community - or family - as a distinctly transcultural formation. Its coming into being thus constitutes a process of becoming that explicitly contrasts with cultural homogenisation and rejects the notion of an ostensibly homogenous nation as an expected end point. In another passage, the narrative connects the formation of the Ibis com‐ munity to a storm. In so doing, it adds a further element which suggests that this process of family formation embodies an alternative version of the historical transition into a modern world. In describing this storm that allowed an imprisoned part of the community’s members to escape from the Ibis (the very storm that saves Kalua), Ghosh conjures up a symbolically charged image. With his famous reading of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, Walter Benjamin established the trope of a storm as an image for the idea of historical ‘progress’ (see 392). Benjamin observes that Klee’s painting depicts an angel looking backward. Although the angel desires to stay, “[t]his storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is this storm” (ibid, emphasis in original). In associating the storm that assists the ‘fami’s’ formation with “the power of change, of transformation” (RoS 20), the trilogy, like Benjamin, suggests understanding the storm as an image of historical change. However, it also diverges in significant ways from the original image. Rather than describing the storm as blowing ‘forward’, it pictures it as a gigantic oculus, at the far end of a great, spinning telescope, examining everything it passed over, upending some things, and leaving others unscathed; looking for new 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 113 <?page no="114"?> 111 Interestingly, at one point of his argument Duara as well refers to Benjamin’s reading of Klee (see Global Modernity 68-9). possibilities, creating fresh beginnings, rewriting destinies and throwing together people who would never have met (RoS 21). Ghosh significantly substitutes an image of a storm blowing in one direction with that of a hurricane: its circular movement, bringing ‘fresh beginnings’, yet without necessarily losing all traditional elements, captures the trilogy’s alternative understanding of historical change. Connecting “linear, tunneled histories” (Global Modernity 52) that proclaim a singular forward movement to national historiography and the idea of distinct cultures moving along separate historical trajectories, Prasenjit Duara has suggested that these are responsible for glossing over a world of connections and exchanges: 111 he argues that we have to account for the fact that “histories are shared” (ibid.) and promotes the idea of “circulatory histories” (ibid.) that challenge national, ethnic and cultural borders. Likewise, the trilogy, instead of depicting history as a linear movement from one point to another, here insists on ‘circulatory histories’. Rejecting the linear model of a one-way street towards approaching a singular, ‘modern’ way of life, it connects historical change to the process of remixing, of transculturation through ‘throwing together’ a heterogenous lot of characters. The coming into being of this alternative modernity thus appears not as the singular achievement of one specific culture - or of an imagined cultural sphere like that of ‘the West’ - to which others have to adapt, but as a result of transcultural exchange. Through the ways in which it links the ‘fami’s’ genesis to a motif of transition and historical change, the trilogy thus constantly draws attention to its own attempt to provide, via the narrative of the Ibis community, an alternative account of modernisation: one that does not mean cultural homogenisation and that in turn results in an alternative modernity which is neither based on separating the world into competing, sealed off cultures and nations, nor restricted to the distinct cultural paradigm originated in the West. However, Ghosh does not leave it at that. In the previous subchapter, I have argued that the trilogy imitates the ways in which the established version of modernity ‘bans’ all border-crossing moments to anti-modern romance. In line with this pattern, it once again employs its romance realm to bring before the readers’ eyes that, according to the ‘modern’ perspective that it - strategically and ironically - inhabits, such a transcultural modernity is a contradiction in terms. Readers cannot but notice that the very aspects the trilogy emphasises to mark the Ibis community as a representation of an alternative, transcultural and borderless 114 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="115"?> 112 For a more detailed description of Chakrabarty’s positions see my discussion in chapter 2. For a critical reading of the Ibis trilogy against the background of the latter compare also Forter’s analysis of Sea of Poppies. Forter, as stated before, explicitly refers to Chakrabarty’s proposition to rethink the concept of historical transition and time and argues that the novel undermines conventional distinctions of the modern and the premodern (see Critique and Utopia 59). modernity in fact reconnect it paradoxically with the trilogy’s anti-modern romance realm. This modernity’s very divergence from the established version of modernity causes it to be ‘automatically’ situated within the anti-modern. This mechanism can be seen, for instance, in the context of the trilogy’s description of the ‘fami’s’ approach to the world being one that moves beyond a dichotomy of ‘modern’ reason and ostensibly pre-modern forms of beliefs. In Provincializing Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown that the Western insistence that to be ‘modern’ depends on taking on a rational stance at the cost of all ostensibly ‘pre-modern’ beliefs does not accurately describe the modern reality of many parts of the non-Western world. He draws on an anecdote about Indian Nobel laureate physicist C.V Raman taking a ritual bath to prepare for a solar eclipse to underline that the latter’s modern, scientific attitude easily combined with an approach to the world that Western modernity dismisses as pre-modern superstition (253-4). Chakrabarty emphasises that such scientists were modern although they “did not need to totalize through the outlook of science all the different life-practices within which they found themselves and to which they felt called” (254). Significantly, the trilogy suggests that for the Ibis family, too, believing in the rule of “stars, planets and the lines on their palms” (RoS 20-1) does not stand in any conflict to a “rational” (RoS 21) outlook on the world and their adherence to science (ibid.). Ghosh hence visibly turns them into representatives of a an alternative modernity that is emphatically not formed on the basis of a normative, Western-centric model but instead explicitly accommodates the ostensibly pre-modern in ways that Chakrabarty shows to be typical of Bengali modernity. 112 While it is their very ease in combining these approaches to the world that makes them signal to an alternative paradigm of modernity, it is, however, also this combination that re-claims the family inevitably for the trilogy’s romance realm. As shown, any association with ‘astrology’ is, according to the historical romance, a certain marker of the pre-modern (see chapter 3.1.1). An alternative modernity, one that transcends Western notions of the modern but is modern nevertheless, the trilogy indicates, remains unrepresentable from within the chosen literary format. Alongside this comparatively subtle strategy of staging the ‘automatic’ reclamation of the Ibis’ modernity’s particular characteristics for its romance 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 115 <?page no="116"?> 113 See for example Eswaran or B. Roy (61). 114 Compare footnote 78 in this chapter. realm, the trilogy also resorts to obtrusively romanticising gestures in its evocation of this modernity. If the idiosyncrasy of the Indian Ocean modernity is precisely its emphasis on peaceful transcultural exchange and cooperation, the trilogy allegorically expresses this through the excessively developed motif of transcultural bonding among the Ibis community’s members. In so doing, however, it depicts these bonds, in an echo of its presentation of Paulette, through an exaggeratedly romanticising lens. The friendship between the two prisoners Neel and Ah Fatt is a case in point. One the former Raja fallen from grace, the other a drug addict from Canton, their intimate friendship has gained much attention for the counter-vision to the imperial version of modernity built on border-drawing and (national) competition it entails. 113 Indeed, the relationship between the two characters that starts to develop in their shared prison cell and continues to strengthen on the Ibis foregrounds intimacy and mutual care where the ‘modern’, Western-introduced ways seek to separate and dominate. In describing how Neel selflessly takes care of Ah Fatt’s neglected body, the trilogy explicitly underlines the fact that this takes place between foreigners: “[t]o take care of another human being - this was something Neel had never before thought of doing, not even with his own son, let alone a man of his own age, a foreigner.” (SoP 340) Ghosh juxtaposes their friendship with the imperial approach of one of the trilogy’s most hateful characters, Bhyro Singh, who disdains the prisoners, one because he was a filthy foreigner and the other because he was a fallen outcaste. And even worse, if possible, was the fact that the two convicts appeared to be friends and that neither seemed to want to overmaster the other: to Bhyro Singh this was a sign that they were not men at all, but castrated, impotent creatures - oxen, in other words. (SoP 400) By means of contrast, Ghosh shows how these prisoners - or the trilogy’s transcultural bonds more generally - provide a political alternative to a system built on borders, separations and the desire to overmaster humans and nature embodied in the imperial approach (see also Eswaran 5). This manifests itself in particular in Bhyro Singh’s dismissive remark on their lacking masculinity, which dissociates them explicitly from an aggressive imperialism and the gender ideology associated with the latter. 114 While the caring, intimate relationship that forms between them thus takes the connected, borderless and non-exploitative ways of the Indian Ocean into 116 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="117"?> 115 Compare my introduction (chapter 1). 116 As mentioned, such bonds are not limited to the characters of the Ibis community. The friendship between Neel and Ah Fatt is mirrored, for instance, in that between Havildar Kesri and the English Captain Mee, which the narrative weaves into its storyline surrounding the Opium War. While often a former friendship is “forgotten when those officers rose in the ranks […][,] that was not the case with Kesri and Mr Mee: over the years their bond had grown closer and stronger“ (FoF 26). The elevation of their friendship to something beyond the ordinary culminates in Captain Mee’s exclamation, “I doubt there’s another pair of men in the battalion who know each other as well as you and I” (FoF 179). The unlikely bond that forms between Mrs Burnham and Shireen, merchant Bahram’s (eventually widowed) wife, constitutes a female equivalent to these male friendships: they feel that “even though they knew very little about one another, it was as if they understood each other perfectly” (FoF 420). All these friendships follow the pattern described above: while they suggest a renewal of transcultural connections and, as such, an alternative to the dominant historical process that the trilogy captures, their depiction in overly idealistic, sentimental terms enacts their dismissal to antimodern romance. the future, one can hardly overlook that the trilogy depicts their relationship in overly sentimental terms. In describing, for instance, an embrace between the men in which “there was more intimacy than he[Neel] had ever known before” (SoP 358), it creates the kind of clichéd bromances Antoinette Burton (see 76) complains about. 115 Yet, in the context of my close analysis of Ghosh’s strategic romanticism, it is now possible to read this ‘bromance’ not as an artistic ‘failure’ as Burton seems to suggest, but as a semanticised motif: it functions to highlight Ghosh’s - ironic - ‘banning’ of the alternative modernity he sketches to romance. In ultimately having Paulette of all people, the very character whose attraction to ‘anti-modern’ romance Ghosh constantly underlines, note that “there was a tenderness in their attitudes that seemed scarcely conceivable in a couple of criminal transportees” (SoP 379), the trilogy takes its own, playful and self-referential way of reclaiming the couple for its romance world to a peak. 116 Exceedingly romanticising the individual transcultural bonds is, however, only one facet of the ways in which the trilogy surrounds the Ibis community with strategic, self-referentially romanticising gestures. In fact, the narrative comes up with a gesture through which it reclaims the entire Ibis family - and with it the very alternative modernity they embody - for its romance world at one sweep. Central to this is the depiction of the family’s coming into being. The preceding section (3.1.3.1) has already provided a first impression of the ways in which the trilogy connects the formation of the community, emphasising the Ibis’ helping hand, to a romance world of prefigured destinies and things coming to life. To this, Ghosh adds a further layer that once and for all connects the community’s formation to romance: in depicting the narrative of transformation 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 117 <?page no="118"?> in the course of which it forms, the trilogy notably replicates stock elements of what Northrop Frye described as a romance storytelling mode. Frye maintains that at the romance’s “structural core is the individual loss or confusion or break in the continuity of identity” (Secular Scripture 104). This is centred on the ‘theme of descent’, enacted by “[t]he descending hero or heroine […] going down into a dark and labyrinthine world of caves and shadows which is also either the bowels and belly of an earth-monster, or the womb of an earthmother, or both” (ibid. 119). In the trilogy, Ghosh humorously replicates this motif. Not only does the journey amount to the passengers’ transitioning into a new, transcultural lifeworld as well as to them forming a new identity, but the spatial configuration of the Ibis also corresponds precisely to this romance fantasy. The migrants have to stay in the “dabusa”, below deck, from where they are only allowed to exit once their transformative journey has been completed. They thus descend into the belly of the living being that is the Ibis. Moreover, Ghosh explicitly turns the Ibis into the parent (‘earth-mother’) of the new transcultural family to come through Deeti’s first impression of the ship. It was now that Deeti understood why the image of the vessel had been revealed to her that day, when she stood immersed in the Ganga: it was because her new self, her new life, had been gestating all this while in the belly of this creature, this vessel that was the Mother-Father of her new family, a great wooden mái-báp, an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come: here she was, the Ibis. (SoP 373, emphasis in original) With the Ibis becoming the mythical ancestor of the new community, Ghosh complements this wooden parent with Deeti’s function as “the matron of the dabusa by common consent” (SoP 447). If the trilogy thus alludes to Deeti’s and the Ibis’ shared parentage to the Ibis family, a conversation between Deeti and Kalua about her pregnant body develops this further: She saw the flash of his teeth in the darkness and knew he was smiling: Yes, yes, it’s the little one, kicking. No, she said, not kicking - rolling, like the ship. How strange it was to feel the presence of a body inside her, lurching in time to her own movements: it was as if her belly were the sea, and the child a vessel, sailing towards its own destiny. (SoP 480) Ships and the baby are not only similar in their movement, they become one and the same; Deeti’s baby is as much a descendant of the Ibis as it is of its human father Kalua. In line with Frye’s observation that “[t]he birth of the divine hero […] is often symbolized by the conjunction of a divine bird and a human woman” 118 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="119"?> 117 Again, Aparna Mujumdar’s reading of The Glass Palace brings into focus an interesting parallel. While she as well stresses that the novel draws attention to a view that “regards Europeans as harbingers of modernity in the region” (172), she also traces “other modes of being, cultural configurations, social and economic occupations and practices, [sic] in the novel, [sic] that suggest a particularly native and local modernity as well” (172). In particular the novel’s “references to people’s movements across local and regional boundaries” (174), she argues, “indicate alternatives to Eurocentric modernist modes of being” (ibid.). Here as well, one could argue, Ghosh has the Indian Ocean past ‘prosper’ and develop into an alternative modernity. (Secular Scripture 118), the wooden ‘bird’ Ibis appears as a second father figure for the ‘fami’’s future generations. Thus depicting the emergent family through a whole number of romance motifs, the trilogy leaves no doubt where this family is to be located according to the established ‘modern’, ‘realist’ dichotomy that the historical romance embodies: it is hopelessly tied to the anti-modern. The trilogy hence emphasises a clash between its attempt to depict lifeworlds that continue along the Indian Ocean tradition as transcultural, alternative modernities and its way of - ironically - reproducing the perspective of what has established itself as ‘the modern’ worldwide. Through continuously sliding back into its romance mode whenever it diverges from the worldviews and social order on which this established modernity is founded, the trilogy enacts the latter’s refusal to accept the possibility that any ways beyond its own could possibly be modern, too. With this complex literary manoeuvre, Ghosh has it both ways: on the one hand, he challenges us to consider the possibility of a modernity which, building on Indian Ocean traditions, is entirely different from modernity as we know it. 117 On the other hand, he simultaneously highlights how much a normative model of modernity tied to the traditions of living and thinking that Western imperial politics have spread around the world inhibits the very idea of this modernity. It ensures that, even where the Indian Ocean traditions might continue into the present and could, in theory, provide an urgently needed corrective to ‘the modern’ in its current state, they are dismissed as anti-modern, backwards ways of life. 3.1.4 The Trilogy’s Outlook: Modernity as a ‘Train Headed for Disaster’ Recreating and adapting the framework of the historical romance thus allows the trilogy to express its harsh verdict on the modern world. Rather than chronicling the ‘progress’ towards a more ‘advanced’ age, the trilogy uses this framework to foreground how an aggressive, competitive system based on borders and boundaries and originated in the context of the Western imperial 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 119 <?page no="120"?> project came to embody modernity worldwide. In order to play a part in this newly arising competitive world system, it suggests, others adapted to the so‐ cially and ecologically destructive Western ways - or else became marginalised and were no longer regarded as truly contemporary. If this provides indeed a bleak outlook on the state of the world, the trilogy explicitly underlines its fatal vision through the storyline it builds up around Zachary. Through Baboo Nob Kissin, the trilogy presents Zachary’s development as a sign of the approaching apocalypse: Zachary’s incantatory repetition of the word ‘want’ sent a shaft of illumination through Baboo Nob Kissin: he remembered that Ma Taramony had always said that the present era - Kaliyuga, the age of apocalypse - was but a time of wanting, an epoch of unbounded craving in which humankind would be ruled by the demons of greed and desire. It would end only when Lord Vishnu descended to the earth in his avatar as the destroyer, Kalki to bring into being a new cycle of time, Satya Yuga, the age of truth. Ma Taramony had often said that in order to hasten the coming of the Kalki a great host of beings would appear on earth, to quicken the march of greed and desire. And it struck Baboo Nob Kissin suddenly that perhaps Zachary was the incarnate realization of Ma Taramony’s prediction. (FoF 258) Baboo Nob Kissin concludes that Zachary embodies the end of the current cycle of time, basing this assumption on the latter’s openly manifest greed. Reading this passage alongside a different one suggests that the trilogy offers Zachary as a symbolical harbinger of apocalypse because, with his transformation towards ‘the modern’, he embodies the ways in which a good part of the world came to orient itself towards (Western) modernity’s destructive ways. Baboo Nob Kissin’s vision of apocalypse is founded on precisely this development. Juan-José Martín-González rightly argues that “Baboo Nob Kissin’s prophetic voice […] anticipates a global landscape in which both East and West will become participants in the exploitation of world resources at the expense of the underprivileged” (145). The character explains that “we are in Kaliyuga, the epoch of apocalypse” (FoF 509), in which [i]t is the destiny of the English to bring about the world’s end; they are but instruments of the will of the gods. […] Dekho - look: inside that vessel burns the fire that will awaken the demons of greed that are hidden in all human beings. That is why the English have come to China and Hindustan: these two lands are so populous that if their greed is aroused they can consume the whole world. Today that great devouring has begun. It will end only 120 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="121"?> when all of humanity, joined together in a great frenzy of greed, has eaten up the earth, the air, the sky. (FoF 509-10, emphasis in original) The age is coming to an end; destruction is near because the entire world becomes ‘contaminated’ by English - the imperial nation’s - greed and aggression. Zachary serves as a stand-in for this destruction because he, as a character in the novel, embodies this ‘consequence of modernity’: its pressure on alternative ways of life - cosmopolitan solidarities in particular - to give way to the Western-originated form of life in order to be part of the dominant, ‘modern’ group. With this fatal diagnosis on the global spread of the Western-originated model of modernity, the trilogy fictionally expresses a conclusion that resembles the one Ghosh comes to in his essay The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Starting from the omnipresent threat of climate change and suggesting that it has to be regarded as a consequence of the ‘modern’ way of life, Ghosh describes “Asia’s centrality to global warming” (GD 87) through sheer “numbers” (ibid.): This is because certain crucial aspects of modernity would not have become apparent if they had not been put to an empirical test, in the only continent where the magnitudes of population are such that they can literally move the planet [….]. What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. (GD 92) In a similar vein, Prasenjit Duara, summing up the argument he develops in The Crisis of Global Modernity, describes modernity as a “train headed for disaster” (“Duara on the Crisis”): he explains that “[t]he rise of Asian powers, particularly China and India will, if they continue on the path of the competitive growth treadmill, drive the final nail in the coffin of a sustainable planet.” (ibid). Again, a global continuation along the established ‘modern’ path seems to bring disaster. Duara’s discussion, however, also offers a glimmer of hope: he insists that next to the proclaimed ‘modern’ ways, “these civilizations have older traditions and large populations who still live close to nature, albeit with increasing vulnerabilities” (ibid.), and makes a case for re-orienting towards such alternative traditions. The Ibis trilogy, too, I have shown, strongly advocates the potential of ways of thinking and living which are located, in Manav Ratti’s phrase “away from the hegemonies of modernity” (202). Yet, while it continuously emphasises that there is nothing essentially ‘backward’ to them, it uses its romance aesthetics to underline how they are now, with the historical transition it narrates, leading a shadow-existence as modernity’s Other, marginalised and deemed unworthy to consider for any serious thoughts about how to shape the - modern - future. 3.1 The Ibis Trilogy (2008-15) and the Historical Romance Tradition 121 <?page no="122"?> 118 In fact, some of the characters of The Hungry Tide reappear in Ghosh’s later novel Gun Island (2019), among them Kanai and Piya. Besides being connected through their character casts, the novels also overlap in their thematic interests. Not only do they both include sections set in the Sundarbans, they also, for instance, both explore - and transcend - the limits of Western rationality. In order to avoid ‘apocalypse’, so the conclusion the Ibis trilogy invites, what is ‘banned’ to its romance realm must be granted a space within ‘the modern’: we need to move beyond Western-centric visions of modernity and re-conceptualise modernity itself as a transcultural phenomenon which encompasses much more than one single way of inhabiting and interpreting the world. It is then that a modernity that continuous along the peaceful Indian Ocean traditions becomes an actual, ‘thinkable’ possibility and that the transcultural, cosmopolitan and non-exploitative Indian Ocean paradigm could thus lead into an entirely new modern future of its own. 3.2 The Other World of the Sundarbans: The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition Ghosh’s fifth novel, The Hungry Tide (2004), is set in the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest area in the Bay of Bengal that stretches from India to Bangladesh. As large parts of the forest emerge from water only at low tide and the currents constantly re-shape the land, human habitation is limited to a group of islands, a situation to which the islanders pay tribute by referring to the area as the ‘tide country’. Two visitors to the region serve as focal characters in the novel. One is American scientist Piya, whose research on a rare species of dolphins leads her to India, the country of her parents’ origin from which she has grown entirely detached. The other is Kanai, well-travelled founder of a translation business in Delhi. Having spent some time with his aunt and uncle in the tide country during his childhood, he returns, years later, at his aunt’s insistence to receive a manuscript his late uncle Nirmal bequeathed to him. These characters’ missions coalesce not only with one another’s, mainly due to Kanai’s romantic attachment to Piya, but also impinge on the local fisherman Fokir’s life. Acting as their guide to the tide country, Fokir introduces them to a world where humans are at the mercy of their natural surroundings and the futility of human attempts to conquer nature becomes blatantly obvious. While the travellers experience the realities of the tide country at first hand, Kanai simultaneously learns about the history of the place through Nirmal’s manuscript - until their journey takes a tragic turn, ending with Fokir sacrificing his own life to save Piya’s during a cyclone. 118 122 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="123"?> 119 For a detailed discussion of the political background see for example Pablo Mukherjee (Postcolonial Environments 110) or Divya Anand (28-33). 120 For postcolonial ecocriticism see for example Huggan/ Tiffin or P. Mukherjee Postcolo‐ nial Environments, which both include a discussion of The Hungry Tide. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin explicitly argue that postcolonial ecocriticism centres on the “conflicts that arise when different forms of advocacy are brought together, e.g. by examining the social, cultural and political factors at play in the eviction of local (indigenous) people from nature reserves and wildlife parks” (13). Among the varied critical discussions that The Hungry Tide has sparked, a couple of themes continuously re-occur. One is the novel’s take on an ecological dilemma it foregrounds in both its past and present-day narrative (see for instance P. Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments 110-4; Anand; Kaur; Hoydis 302): Nirmal’s diary centres on a real-life occurrence, the historical Morichjh-pi incident of 1979. It tells the story of refugees who, originally from Bangladesh, fled from a camp in central India where they were kept under inhumane conditions and settled on an island of the tide country, seeking to form a community that would accommodate people regardless of culture, nationality, religion or caste. However, clashing with the government’s insistence to keep the space a natural preservation area devoid of human settlement, 119 the refugees’ dwellings were brutally destroyed, and many inhabitants raped or killed in the process. The devastating effect of the official dogma to ensure environmental protection regardless of its human costs can also be seen in the contemporary tide country as Piya and Kanai experience it: they increasingly recognise the locals’ vulnerable position, caught up between the forces of nature on the one hand and preservationist policies on the other. In fact, The Hungry Tide has become a canonical text of postcolonial ecocriticism by now. 120 Critics have emphasised the nuanced stance through which Ghosh argues for a considerate treatment of one’s natural surroundings while simultaneously challenging well-meant, often global, agendas aimed at the protection of nature for being oblivious to local subaltern realities. The Hungry Tide is praised for proposing a transcultural environmentalism sensitive to human and non-human needs. Rajender Kaur, for instance, points out that central to the text is an acknowledgement that “the human is part of the ecological and not outside or opposed to it” (132), showing that the novel refuses to portray humans as disconnected from and in control of nature. A second theme that continues to gain critical attention is the novel’s interest in translation and transculturality. Various readings pursue “one of the key notions of the novel: namely, the problem of linguistic transfer” (Meyer 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 123 <?page no="124"?> 121 For the theme of translation and language see for example Rollason (87-91), Hoydis (304-7), Talib (132-5). 122 See for example Hoydis (321-3), Rollason (e.g. 100), Kaur (137). 123 The Shadow Lines is the title of one of Ghosh’s earlier novels, published in 1988. In critical discourse, the title has come to serve as a metaphor for the boundaries established by the social and political, as well as ontological framework which, according to Ghosh’s oeuvre, has come to signify modernity worldwide (compare my discussion in chapter 2.1.1 and in the preceding chapter on the Ibis trilogy). Pablo Mukherjee, for instance, explicitly uses the expression ‘shadow lines’ in his discussion of The Hungry Tide (Postcolonial Environments 112). Shakti Jaising likewise argues that “[l]ike Ghosh’s celebrated novel The Shadow Lines (1988), The Hungry Tide exposes the negative consequences of boundary-making” (75). 152), which manifests itself most visibly in Kanai’s profession. 121 Likewise, The Hungry Tide’s transcultural vision, which takes it beyond the idea of disconnected cultures and, ultimately, beyond the notion of a globe split into different cultural realms, has been the focus of many studies. 122 Not only does the refugee community of Morichjh-pi constitute a distinct alternative to a world divided along ethnic or cultural lines (compare my discussion in chapter 3.2.2), the novel moreover presents the blend of various cultural and religious traditions as a defining characteristic of the Sundarbans. Based on the novel’s portrayal of the Sundarbans as a place entirely different from the world Piya and Kanai inhabit - its re-embedding of humans within nature on the one hand and its transcultural connections on the other hand -, several critics have related the novel to Ghosh’s ongoing project of challenging ‘Shadow Lines’, the separations he associates with the way of living and thinking that established itself as ‘the modern.’ 123 Noting that “[i]n The Hungry Tide, Ghosh seems to offer a way of thinking beyond the East and West divide and between the subjectobject duality of western philosophy” (137), Rajender Kaur draws attention to the novel’s attempt to transcend various separations which ‘the moderns’ take for granted. In a similar vein, Pablo Mukherjee argues that the novel’s “elites learn that their imagined liberalism is in fact hobbled by the logic of boundaries that their modernity has bequeathed them” (“Second Wave” 183), thus explicitly connecting the text’s border-crossing to Ghosh’s challenge to (a certain version of) modernity. A point of critique frequently levelled against the novel concerns the strongly exoticist, romanticising tone that governs Ghosh’s depiction of the Sundarbans and its inhabitants. Focused on Fokir, critics have charged Ghosh with idealising “the trope of the ‘authentic’ peasant” ( Jaising 85), while others read the character’s “sacrificial death” as a sign of the text’s reducing the subaltern to an “aestheticized political ideal” (Li 275). I will argue that such readings grasp 124 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="125"?> 124 In an article, Frank Schulze-Engler, too, has read The Hungry Tide against the backdrop of the discussion surrounding attempts to overcome Western-centric concepts of modernity. However, for him the novel in fact shows one-sided, Western-centric conceptions of modernity as a thing of the past: he argues that Ghosh describes the “specific mode of modernity that has evolved in this part of India” (“Strange Encounters” 181) and foregrounds the “multitude of transnational and transcultural connections that link this Indian modernity to modernity at large” (ibid. 173). This conclusion is, to my mind, prematurely optimistic. His reading fails to account for the ways in which the novel systematically embeds its non-Western world within a ‘strategic romanticism’ and, in so doing, indicates how - status quo - what counts as ‘modern’ positions itself in opposition to the very alternatives Ghosh promotes. Rather than as a reality, I argue, a transculturally revised understanding of modernity appears as a desirable vision in the novel. 125 As my discussion will show, many critics have commented on some romance aspect of the novel. Some discuss the text’s rejection of a romanticised ideal of the ‘native’ Other (see Huggan/ Tiffin 205; Kaur 131), others comment on the notable dichotomy of romantic and realist perspectives Ghosh evokes (see for instance Ratti 200; compare also the discussion on the melodramatic aspects of the novel in P. Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments 129), or on the recurring motif of romantic love and attraction (see for instance Rollason). However, these critics mention Ghosh’s use of romance only briefly and do not further trace the novel’s way of engaging with the literary tradition of exotic romance. the text’s functioning only partially. Critics who take issue with the text’s romanticised, exoticised rendition of the tide country in fact fail to take into account how The Hungry Tide, as much as the Ibis trilogy, systematically - and critically - engages with an established literary tradition of exotic romance, employing the latter for its critique of exclusionist conceptualisations of ‘the modern’. If the novel employs the Sundarbans for providing an alternative to a modern world of borders and boundaries, it also vehemently challenges the idea that those ways of living and thinking foreign to the Sundarbans - the ones oriented at various boundaries - constitute the sole possible version of truly modern life - and along with this the sole ‘realistic’, ‘enlightened’ approach to the world. Like the Ibis trilogy, The Hungry Tide promotes the need to part with normative, Western-centric conceptions of modernity, to grant non-Western traditions of inhabiting the world, in this case of the Sundarbans, a space within the acceptedly modern realm and to take them seriously in the epistemological and ontological approach to the world they embody. 124 It is precisely in its project of opening up conceptualisations of modernity and modern reality that the novel brings into view a valuable alternative to a world centred on borders and boundaries whose destructive effects Ghosh’s texts constantly foreground. And once again, the following close readings will show, it is a self-conscious play with romance that constitutes the central strategy for this project. 125 Criticising that 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 125 <?page no="126"?> 126 For the imperial romance see for instance McClure or Chrisman and compare my discussion in chapter 2.2. Fokir appears as an exotic figure par excellence hence overlooks the extent to which the novel consciously evokes such romantic imaginaries only to challenge the motifs and categories they entail. Where the Ibis trilogy toys with the historical romance connected to Sir Walter Scott and its narrative of modernisation, The Hungry Tide draws on the tradition of the imperial romance. 126 Constituting a branch of adventure fiction that features a journey into a foreign locale, the imperial romance gained popularity as a genre during the 19 th century. Like the historical romance, it suggests a world divided into a modern and an anti-modern, exotic sphere. The genre arose, especially in its late-19 th -century form, out of a fear that Western imperialism was about to spread a singular ‘modern’ culture across the entire world, dissolving all “exotic horizons” (Bongie 18) and leaving no “room for romance” (Arthur Conan Doyle qtd. in McClure 11) anywhere. Its authors reacted to this fear by imaginatively re-enchanting the foreign lands they present: while ‘the West’ appears as a zone of order, rationality and modernity, the non-Western setting turns into an exotic spot of anti-modern difference within an otherwise modern globe (see McClure 8). Defined precisely by its resistance to order and rationality, this spot then provides the disenchanted ‘modern’ protagonists with their desperately needed space of romance and spiritual renewal (see ibid.). In depicting the journey of its two metropolitan characters into the ostensibly exotic tide country, The Hungry Tide visibly plays with this pattern. Yet, where the imperial romance subscribes to the modern/ anti-modern divide it evokes, The Hungry Tide replicates the genre’s conventions with an ironic distance, employing them to criticise an exclusivist understanding of modernity in postcolonial India and to insist on the necessity to alter the latter. 3.2.1 Travelling to a Pre-Modern Place? The ‘Denial of Coevalness’ in Postcolonial India In the imperial romance, the exotic realm beyond the borders of a rational modernity provides the modern characters with an opportunity for adventure which their own world no longer offers, and, as such, constitutes a space where they can prove themselves. The expectation of finding such a space motivates the journey of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899) and, translated into a treasure hunt and the chance to retrieve a lost brother, 126 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="127"?> 127 Kanai has of course grown up in India and lives in Delhi, but the novel continuously underlines his association with the West and the global (see later on in this chapter). In having Kanai conceptualise Tibet as a place of exotic Otherness, Ghosh foregrounds the character’s association with Western cultural imaginaries. comes true for the search party of Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh alludes to this genre convention in playfully framing Piya’s and Kanai’s journeys as those of two distinctly modern characters who venture into the anti-modern romance world of the tide country. Their professional lives mark the travellers as prototypes of modern subjects: while Piya embodies the rational scientist, Kanai, whose thriving translation firm has turned him from simple translator into “more of a businessman than anything else” (HT 198), evokes the figure of the neoliberal capitalist. Kanai’s attitude towards the tide country, in particular, mirrors the expectations of earlier imperial romance travellers. After convincing Piya to take him along as an interpreter, Kanai’s reaction gives away his motives for wishing to go: He made a fist and punched it into his open palm. ‘Thank you! ’ But this display of enthusiasm seemed to cause him some embarrassment, for he added, affecting nonchalance, ‘I’ve always wanted to be on an expedition. It’s been an ambition of mine ever since I learnt that my great-great-uncle was the translator on Younghusband’s expedition to Tibet.’ (HT 232) Caught off guard in his show of emotions, Kanai is forced to admit his longheld ambitions to embark on an adventure. His desire to go on an ‘expedition’ replicates Marlow’s childhood dream to “lose myself in all the glories of exploration” (Heart of Darkness 8), searching for the “blank spaces” (ibid.) that evade the grid of modernity. Taking his ancestor’s involvement in the British military campaign in Tibet as a model for his own journey underlines Kanai’s craving for a space of mystical Otherness, which Tibet, home to the Dalai Lama, conventionally promises in Western imagination. 127 The fact that the reader is aware of Kanai’s attraction to Piya and knows that the prospect of being with her at their remote destination adds to his enthusiasm only serves to underline the romanticised idea that Kanai builds up of their journey: the tide country, as a space exempt from modernity, promises charms that his mundane existence in the ‘civilised’ world does not offer - and these include the possibility of a romantic attachment. To Piya as well, the tide country seems to promise all that her science-driven, modern life is short of. While Kanai’s attraction to the place mainly stems from the air of adventure and heroic action he associates with it, for Piya, it constitutes a space of anti-modern romance in a different sense. Having oriented 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 127 <?page no="128"?> 128 See also Evelyne Hanquart-Turner’s reading of the novel, according to which the search for a pure, prelapsarian world turns the novel into “a quest for paradise, albeit a transformed notion of paradise” (74). 129 This is in fact another typical motif of the imperial romance, compare for instance the eroticised Zulu body in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. 130 In a passage I will discuss in detail in chapter 3.2.3, Ghosh echoes Conrad’s vision of “the horror”. This has not escaped critics’ attention. Julia Hoydis, for instance, finds “Conradian reminiscences” (302) in the novel. Shao-Pin Luo remarks that “Piya’s scientific expedition inevitably reminds one of other river journeys: It mirrors Bernier’s travels in India referred to in the novel, and it even has the classic moment of an encounter with ‘the horror’ (300), when a tiger is killed in the deepest jungle village” (“Intertextuality” 161). However, after mentioning the novel’s intertextual references, these critics do not continue to explore Ghosh’s evocative dialogue with the texts alluded to. Indrajit Mukherjee’s paper “The Hungry Tide: Amitav Ghosh’s Heart of her entire life towards science and treating her workplace as a ‘field’ which, in order to remain as such, depends on “the exclusion of intimate involvements” (HT 112), Piya appears as a character struggling to find personal happiness and to form meaningful interhuman relations. Her secluded experience with Fokir and his son on their fishing boat, by contrast, offers the peace and interhuman connectivity her own life lacks. She is determined to find her anti-modern Eden in this space. When she wonders, “[w]hat greater happiness could there be than this: to be on the water with someone you trusted, at this magical hour, listening to the serene sound of these animals” (HT 157-8), the combination of several emphatically positive expressions - happiness, magical hour, serene sound, trust - draws attention to her romanticised ideas. Imagining Fokir’s youth, she conjures up another idealised view on life in the tide country: [t]here were many children, many playmates for little Fokir, and although they were poor their lives did not lack for warmth or companionship: it was a family like those she had heard her father talk about, in which want and deprivation made people pull together all the more tightly. (HT 158) Piya develops a vision of a warm pre-modern community not yet spoilt by the cold ratio, hectic and competition of modern life. 128 For Piya, as well as for Kanai, the tide country constitutes a romanticised alternative to modern life. In her case, this translates into a romantic attraction to Fokir - the very feelings she normally denies herself now surface in what Pablo Mukherjee fittingly describes as her “eroticization and exoticization of difference” (Postcolonial Environments 132). 129 Despite the text’s obvious Conradian references, the dialogue that The Hungry Tide builds up with texts such as Heart of Darkness has not been thoroughly interrogated. 130 In the context of another one of Ghosh’s novels, The Shadow 128 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="129"?> Darkness” is no exception: despite its title, it fails to trace the ways in which Ghosh plays with the established tradition of the imperial romance. 131 Mongia emphasises that Ghosh uses travel and adventure to call into question ideas of national community and national borders (see “Geography Fabulous” 64). For Mongia’s discussion of Ghosh and Conrad compare also her article “Between Men”. 132 In fact, through its engagement with Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire (1670) as one of the “other river journeys” (Luo, “Intertextuality” 161) alluded to, the novel offers a meta-textual commentary on its own dealing with the imperial romance. Pablo Mukherjee describes an episode in The Hungry Tide where Nirmal reads out Bernier’s Travels to Horen, one of the local fishermen, highlighting that “Horen keeps interrupting the narrative with his own ‘text’, his intimate knowledge of the territory that Bernier writes about” (Postcolonial Environments 122). These interruptions, I suggest, mirror the ways in which Ghosh continuously and subversively ‘interrupts’ the imperial romance genre with the changes he makes. Lines, however, Padmini Mongia offers an insightful commentary on Conrad as a “ghost hovering over Ghosh” (“Geography Fabulous” 60). Although she does not explicitly pursue the implications of Ghosh’s romance use for his reflection on what counts as ‘the modern’, she identifies the Conradian adventure of mapping the world as a theme that echoes through Ghosh’s work and locates both authors’ interests within a tradition of romance: The power of romance - romance understood as expressive of heroic action, lonely men, and distant places - is exerted not only in the worlds that Conrad created in his fictions and lived out in his own seafaring days. It is that same power that I see in Ghosh’s writing, even as I am acutely aware of the ways in which Ghosh revises the idea of romance that compelled writers such as Conrad. (ibid. 63) In tracing a notion similar to my reading of The Hungry Tide as an imperial romance, Mongia observes that Ghosh employs the adventurous romance traveller in The Shadow Lines to achieve a very different effect than Conrad. 131 In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh likewise departs form the tradition he evokes in important ways. While the ‘original’ imperial romance subscribes to the dichotomy of a modern rational civilisation and an anti-modern exotic romance world, Ghosh ridicules the imaginary of the genre tradition he toys with. Associating his protagonists with careers that have come to stand like no others for a disenchanted modern lifestyle, for instance, Ghosh almost overfulfils the genre’s need for recognisably modern protagonists. In exaggeratedly emphasising the characters’ modernity, Ghosh, in a manner familiar from the Ibis trilogy, serves the tradition with a self-ironic wink, creating a critical distance to the motif he evokes. 132 Moreover, as he provides insights into the protagonists’ perceptions through an internally focalised narrative, Ghosh in fact foregrounds their romanticised views in ways that make them seem absurd. 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 129 <?page no="130"?> Just as the text makes fun of Kanai’s desire for an adventure, increasing the ridiculous impression he makes even further by emphasising his pretended ‘nonchalance’, it tacitly mocks Piya’s exceedingly positive vision of life in the tide country. By stressing her idealisation of ‘want and deprivation’, for instance, the novel cautions its reader against taking her vision at face value: her strangely positive re-evaluation of suffering serves to highlight her falsely romanticised picture of the space. Not only does The Hungry Tide, in its mocking engagement with the imperial romance tradition, secretly ridicule its protagonists’ romanticising take on the tide country, it also explicitly underlines that their approach towards the latter embodies an - untenable - tendency to divide one’s contemporary world into separate spheres of the modern and the anti-modern. If the imperial romance presents its romance realm as a space ‘outside’ the grid of the modern, Ghosh draws attention to this split time/ space configuration through Kanai. In a conversation with Piya, Kanai claims: ‘I’m not the kind of person who dwells on the past,’ he said. ‘I like to look ahead.’ ‘But we’re in the present now, aren’t we? ’ she said with a smile. ‘Even here, in Lusibari? ’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said emphatically. ‘For me Lusibari will always be a part of the past.’ (HT 198) In his analysis of traditional anthropology, Johannes Fabian coined the term of the ‘denial of coevalness’ (compare my discussion in chapter 2): he argued that anthropologists used to expose a “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (31, emphasis in original). In a prime instance of the ‘denial of coevalness’, Kanai relegates Lusibari, a town in the tide country, to a different time than the one he inhabits. Taking this further, he even denies it any possibility of ever entering the present. Similar to Scott’s Highlands (see Makdisi 94), the tide country becomes a space which seems more likely to perish than to become modernised; the local population appears to be forever separated from modernity. The divided time-space configuration that the imperial romance implicitly builds up is here made explicit through a character’s voice. As such, it turns into a concept ready to be criticised: Piya’s retort - she seems unaware that her overly romanticised view on the tide country similarly turns it into an anti-modern space - rejects Kanai’s temporally divided world by insisting on their shared present. The passage challenges a modern-versus-anti-modern 130 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="131"?> 133 For a related comment see Luo who argues: “Ghosh’s version of history coincides with Chakrabarty’s in its insistence that, instead of being anachronistic, primitive, and archaic, the histories and contemporary realities of non-Western worlds are parallel to and simultaneous with European time” (“Intertextuality” 158). 134 Fabian states that “[a] discourse employing terms such as primitive, savage (but also tribal, traditional, Third World, or whatever euphemism is current) does not think, or observe, or critically study, the ‘primitive’; it thinks, it observes, studies in terms of the primitive. Primitive being essentially a temporal concept, is a category, not an object, of Western thought” (17-8, emphasis in original). rhetoric by exposing the paradox inherent in an imagination that divides a contemporaneous world into different ages. 133 By moreover pointing out that Kanai’s ‘denial of coevalness’ is in fact representative of Kolkata’s metropolitan view on the tide country rather than a personal idiosyncrasy, The Hungry Tide turns its own engagement with the imperial romance tradition into a comment on the debate about India’s postcolonial modernity. The novel draws attention to an imaginary line that goes right through India, dividing it into a modern and an anti-modern part. Kolkata’s urban population despises the inhabitants of the tide country as primitives, ‘rustics.’ Significantly, Kanai’s first stay in the tide country was a punishment known as to “‘rusticate’” (HT 14): pupils who misbehaved at school were “sent off to suffer the company of rustics” (HT 15); the educational system thus teaches the children a clear hierarchy according to which the urban ranks unmistakably higher than the rural. Johannes Fabian emphasises that concepts such as ‘primitives’ or, by extension, the novel’s ‘rustics’ are to be understood primarily in temporal terms. 134 And indeed, it is precisely in order to appear ‘modern’ and hence ‘advanced’ in history, that people distance themselves from the ‘rustics.’ As shown, Kanai’s insistence that he is “not the kind of person who dwells on the past” (HT 198) corresponds to his care to distance himself from the tide country. Through Piya, the text reflects on this constellation: Piya understood too that this was a looking-glass in which a man like Fokir could never be anything other than a figure glimpsed through a rear-view mirror, a rapidly diminishing presence, a ghost from the perpetual past that was Lusibari. But she guessed also that despite its newness and energy, the country Kanai inhabited was full of these ghosts, these unseen presences whose murmurings could never quite be silenced no matter how loud you spoke. (HT 220) In order to assure himself of his modernity, Kanai needs to persuade himself and others that he has left Lusibari ‘behind’: he claims to have literally overtaken it on his road to modern success. The image of the rear-view mirror captures the ways in which the temporal and geographical dimensions overlap: what is 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 131 <?page no="132"?> 135 The original Globe was built by the acting company Shakespeare belonged to and many of his plays were first performed there. 136 The depiction of Kanai’s cosmopolitanism corresponds to a version of elite cosmopoli‐ tanism that differs strikingly from the ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ that the Ibis trilogy promotes. See also my discussion of cosmopolitanism in chapter 2.1.2. geographically elsewhere connects to Kanai’s, or more generally Kolkata’s, past. In remarking on the ghosts that cannot be silenced, however, Piya acknowledges that it is precisely Kanai’s own connection to the place that make his effort to distance himself from the latter and to insist on his own modernity all the more urgent. While the tide country thus stands for anti-modern India, ‘modernity’, the novel asserts, is reserved for urban India, albeit not any modernity but a pointedly metropolitan one which associates itself with the world, i.e. the West. Watching a performance of a local myth, Kanai expects “to be bored by this rustic entertainment: in Calcutta he was accustomed to going to theatres like the Academy of Fine Arts and cinemas like the Globe” (HT 105). The cinema’s name links it to the London Globe Theatre - a place connected to the memory of William Shakespeare like no other - 135 and thus underlines how much ‘modern’ India associates itself with a European tradition. Modern entertainment must be oriented towards the West; the antidote to the tide country is a realm that presents itself as disconnected from Indian traditions. In fact, Ghosh employs his character presentation and constellation to further underline, and criticise, that being modern means orienting towards the West in contemporary India. In choosing an American scientist of Indian descent and a Kolkata businessman as his travelling characters, Ghosh departs from the category of Western travellers typical of the imperial romance. By then binding the protagonists’ ‘modernity’, from their first appearance on, to their estrangement from the local, particularly the rural area, he sarcastically replicates the dominant discourse that associates modernity solely with the West. The narrative opens at ‘Dhakuria’ station in Kolkata, where Kanai and Piya are waiting for a train to Canning. Providing “the only rail connection to the Sundarbans” (HT 4) the platform appears, through Kanai’s eyes, as the gateway into the ‘anti-modern’ world of the tide country. The novel silently ridicules Kanai’s efforts to appear ‘modern’ by accentuating his ‘worldliness’. His “wheeled airline bag with a telescoping handle” (ibid.) seems carefully chosen to underline his cosmopolitan outlook. 136 Emphasising that this bag, “along with his sunglasses, corduroy trousers and suede shoes […] suggested middle-aged prosperity and metropolitan affluence” (HT 4-5), the narrative exposes Kanai’s consciously designed appearance. His urge to appear modern 132 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="133"?> 137 See also Pablo Mukherjee, who offers a similar reading, emphasising that Piya and Kanai “embody a metropolitan and cosmopolitan separation from suburban Calcutta and, later, from the Sundarbans” (Postcolonial Environments 115, emphasis in original). instantly draws him to Piya as “the one other ‘outsider’ on the platform” (HT 4). It is her being an outsider, being removed from the taint of the anti-modern, that makes her attractive to him. Watching her, he reflects: despite her silver ear-stud and the tint of her skin, she was not Indian, except by descent. And the moment the thought occurred to him, he was convinced of it: she was a foreigner; it was stamped in her posture, in the way she stood, balancing on her heels like a flyweight boxer, with her feet planted apart. Among a crowd of college girls on Kolkata’s Park Street she might not have looked entirely out of place, but here, against the sooty backdrop of the commuter station at Dhakuria, the neatly composed androgyny of her appearance seemed out of place, almost exotic. (HT 3) What makes Piya stand out in Kanai’s eyes is her demeanour and her style, which similarly identify her as foreign. In presenting Kanai’s perception, the novel merges foreignness with modernity: Piya’s foreignness manifests itself in her self-confident, unfeminine, ‘androgynous’ appearance. Since these signals, however, simultaneously align her, like Shamsie’s Vivian in A God in Every Stone (see chapter 4.1.1.1), with the prototypically modern ‘New Woman’; being a foreigner and being modern have literally become inseparable. By claiming that this foreign/ modern appearance makes her ‘almost exotic’, Kanai’s reflections turn the notion of the exotic, normally reserved for anti-modern difference, on its head. Being tied to Piya’s presence in this specific location, however, this reversal only serves to enhance the dichotomy between her distinctly modern appearance and the space they are entering: right from the start, the latter appears as a realm where what sticks out as different is not the anti-modern, but the modern. Piya, clearly, belongs to the modern, cosmopolitan ‘Park Street’, whose difference from Dhakuria station becomes manifest in the station’s English name. Associating himself with Piya is thus another way of showing that he, Kanai, belongs to a world apart from the tide country. 137 The novel further accentuates the assumed correlation between modernity and detachment from ‘traditional’ India through Piya’s family background. Her current ‘modern’ identity is built on a process of ‘leaving behind’ a place attributed to the past, albeit in her case not based on her own, but on her father’s decision. Although she was born in Kolkata to Bengali parents, having grown up in Seattle, she does not speak any Bengali, and her familiarity with her parents’ culture is restricted to a few scattered pieces of memory. Ghosh traces this state back to her father’s insistence to ‘get on in the world’. After moving to the USA, 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 133 <?page no="134"?> 138 In Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, for instance, the character constellation clearly establishes the dichotomy of a rational modern and an irrational romance sphere, confirming the ‘modern’ characters’ superiority due to their advanced reason. Here, the white men manage to convince a group of “astonished aborigines” (86) that they are Gods by tricking them into mistaking a removable set of teeth for a show of magic. The spectators’ reaction - one gives a “prolonged howl of terror” (ibid.) while another says, “‘I see that ye are spirits’” (ibid.) - demonstrates their ‘irrational’ beliefs. While these, along with their ‘uncivilised’ customs which include human sacrifice, appear as constitutive elements of the novel’s romance imagination, Haggard juxtaposes their reaction with the rational explanation of the Western travellers. Measured against the knowledge of the white men, the fears and beliefs the inhabitants of the fictitious Kukuanaland display are ridiculed as naïve superstitions. Being Western, i.e. modern, means having access to superior, rational judgement. “[w]here others sought to preserve their memories of the ‘old country’, he had always tried to expunge them. His feet were in the present, he had liked to say, by which he meant they were planted firmly on the rungs of his company’s career ladder” (HT 87). In wishing to distance himself from the ‘old’ country, her father extends Kanai’s denial of coevalness from the tide country to all of India. Piya thus developed into the person Kanai recognises as ‘modern’ as a consequence of her (family’s) orientation towards the West. In presenting his modern characters exclusively as those who have become ‘worldly’ and, as such, pointedly ‘unindian’, Ghosh turns a seemingly light-hearted engagement with his characters into a biting critique of a Western-centric modernity concept. The fact that Ghosh’s particular way of recreating the imperial romance tradition serves to draw attention and to criticise a tendency to dismiss a rural, non-Westernised India as anti-modern can also be seen in the novel’s repeated hints that both Piya and Kanai insist on regarding the tide country as a space ruled by “some kind of superstition” (HT 153). In the imperial romance, a derogatory depiction of the ‘anti-modern’ realm as one that lacks a scientific, rational and disenchanted approach to the world conventionally accompanies, paradoxical as it may seem, the idealisation of the ‘anti-modern’ realm: the very quality that allows the ‘modern’ characters to project their desires onto this realm - its alleged location outside the modern world - also causes them to look down on it and dismiss it. 138 Piya and Kanai display the same ambiguous sensations towards the tide country: while they, as shown before, at times construct it as an Edenic counter-version to their own world, they are also convinced of their own superior rational knowledge and refuse to see the inhabitants as anything else than irrational beings or to take their views seriously. Repeatedly, the novel points out that the metropolitan characters dismiss Fokir’s warnings of the dangers that the tide country’s nature poses to humans as ‘absurd’. Told to spend the night in the sheltered part of the 134 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="135"?> boat to prevent a tiger attack, Piya refuses: “[t]here was a cumulative absurdity about these propositions that made her smile” (HT 98). Her condescending bemusement is mirrored in a similar scene that passes between Fokir and Kanai, who likewise does not acknowledge the warning: “[t]he thought of this, a tiger coming down to the water’s edge in order to watch their progress across the mohona, was just far-fetched enough to make Kanai smile” (HT 321). Through Piya’s and Kanai’s insistence on their superior judgement, Ghosh thus visibly hints at the established imaginary of the simple-minded, anti-modern savage, who becomes the foil against which the modern protagonists can manifest their superior reason. However, instead of confirming Piya and Kanai’s superior modern rationality, the novel makes fun of their arrogant assumptions. The narrative forces us to recognise the metropolitan characters’ reasoning, despite their certainty of its superiority, as simply inadequate. Their rationality depends on considering nothing but human intentionality worthwhile, whereas a worldview where tigers, winds and waters are a force to be reckoned with appears as part of ‘superstitious’ beliefs. As I will show, this second view, however, is precisely what is needed to do justice to the ecosystem of the tide country that Ghosh portrays. Piya and Kanai’s ostensibly superior reason with their insistence on human exceptionality entirely misjudges the realities of the space they have entered. Throughout, The Hungry Tide thus mockingly recreates the model of the imperial romance in order to challenge the very views it conjures up through adopting the latter’s framework: that there is a line that divides one contemporary world into a modern, Western-affiliated sphere and an antimodern one devoid of global, i.e., Western, influences; that this line goes right through postcolonial India, separating areas like the Sundarbans from the metropolitan centres; and that the ‘anti-modern’ parts of the world, lacking the rational, scientific attitude of its counterpart, fail to adequately deal with reality. 3.2.2 A World of Boundaries Versus Its Romance Alternative Ghosh’s distinct adaptation of the imperial romance tradition functions, how‐ ever, not merely to foreground and criticise how much the ideas of modernisa‐ tion and Westernisation have become one and the same in postcolonial India. It also gives room for a reflection upon what exactly these ways of living and thinking that count as modern - and their ostensibly anti-modern counter-part - are like. As I have argued throughout the preceding chapters, a recurring theme of Ghosh’s oeuvre is its critique that, with the one-sided association of modernity with the West, ‘being modern’ has come to signify subscribing to 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 135 <?page no="136"?> 139 As mentioned, John McClure traces the popularity of the late imperial romance genre back to the authors’ fears concerning the “romance-eroding effects” (2) of modernity and its alleged spread through imperialism. Texts like Conrad’s accordingly testify to a critical view on the imperial project and imperial rationality. However, even if its extension to all parts of the world was a cause of regret for these authors to which they reacted with the imperial romance imagination, Western ‘civilised’ rationality still appears as superior, enlightened way of thinking in the texts produced (see McClure 12). all kind of conceptual boundaries. While Ghosh’s works insist that, particularly in the non-Western world, alternatives to this border-logic can be found, they underline how the self-declared ‘moderns’ simply dismiss these as unrealistic fantasies connected to an anti-modern cultural logic. It is this constellation that The Hungry Tide, like the Ibis trilogy, brings into view through juxtaposing a modern with an anti-modern sphere of exotic romance. In providing insights into its protagonist Piya’s psyche, the novel gives a first impression of how much the ‘modern’ world relies on boundary-drawing. I have mentioned that Ghosh traces Piya’s desire for romance back to a notable discomfort with her own world. In so doing, he both presents the novel as a faithful recreation of the original imperial romance with its somewhat conflicted relationship with modernity 139 and creates a framework that allows to bring into focus the problems he associates with those ways of living and thinking that have come to stand for ‘the modern.’ As described, the novel emphasises Piya’s desire for warm, meaningful interhuman connections she lacks. Moreover, she is constantly shown to yearn - in the typical manner of the late imperial romance protagonist (see McClure 19) - for some spiritually fulfilling sense in life: when she tries to count herself lucky that her research provides her with “an alibi for a life” (HT 127), the fact that it becomes an ‘alibi’ rather than a reason yet marks science as an inadequate substitution for what Piya is looking for. Describing herself as a character with no “idea of what her own place was in the great scheme of things” (HT 35), she reveals her desire for such a ‘great scheme’ that provides her with a certain role, demonstrating her dissatisfaction with the disenchanted worldview her modern profession stands for. However, the roots of her desire to escape the modern world, as the novel demonstrates them, also point to a more specific problem than that connected to familiar tropes of a spiritually impoverished and cold modernity. What she struggles with in particular, the novel suggests, are the “artificial divisions” which her ‘modern’ world has installed, as one character of the Ibis trilogy puts it (see chapter 3.1.3.1): it is her inability to situate herself within a society which insists to categorise people along cultural/ national separations and leaves no space for identities that 136 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="137"?> 140 For a related discussion of Piya’s discomfort with the world she inhabits see Meyer (152-3). 141 Compare, for instance, the articles by Meyer, Luo (“Intertextuality”) and Rollason. transcend the latter, it gradually transpires, that makes her desire an alternative world in the first place. 140 The novel constantly stresses how her family background leaves her illequipped for a world conceptualised along national and cultural borders. Having been “the little East Indian girl” (HT 74) at university, she is referred to as “the American” (HT 259) in India. When she reflects that subsequently in the Sundarbans, “in a place where she felt even more a stranger than elsewhere” (HT 34), her appearance causes the forest guards to deny her the status of a foreigner, she appears overwhelmed by interactions that constantly submit her to an illfitting system of classifications. In this context, her feeling that she has no ‘idea of what her own place was in the great scheme of things’ appears in a new light: beyond being an expression of her desire for a somewhat higher order, it can be read as a comment on the sensation that her modern world and its categories do not hold a place for her. It is this sensation that plays an important part in her desire to escape into anti-modern romance. Significantly, it is with Fokir that she feels as if “she was a person to him and not, as it were, a representative of a species, a faceless, tongueless foreigner” (HT 71) - the ostensibly exotic realm she has entered allows her to circumvent the borders and categories she otherwise faces. Piya’s discomfort with the classifications and categories that her world provides in fact offers one possible explanation as to why the novel links her to the Duino Elegies. As others have shown before, 141 The Hungry Tide draws heavily on German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s oeuvre, with his Duino Elegies (1923) serving as a privileged intertext. The lines “the animals already know by instinct we’re not comfortably at home in our translated world” assume the function of a leitmotif and appear several times in the novel. Critics have pointed out multiple ways in which the quote relates to the novel’s thematic interests. It brings into focus, for instance, the novel’s reflections on - and a certain regret for - a world in which the act of translation with all the inevitable distortions involved in trying to transfer contents across cultures (see Hoydis 305) constitutes the sole option to “communicate, however, imperfectly, across human-made barriers” (Rollason 91). Yet beyond a narrow interest in the theme of translation, these lines also suggest a profound unease with the world constructed by and mediated through human language and culture - even more so in the German original, which uses the word ‘gedeutet’ where the English version by Alfred Poulin uses ‘translated’ rather than ‘interpreted’ 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 137 <?page no="138"?> 142 Sandra Meyer suggests reading the Duino Elegies as “a meta-commentary which emphasizes the alienation and powerlessness of the human being in a world in which the arbitrary system of language is the only tool of communication available” (159) and Tuomas Huttunen argues that Ghosh foregrounds the “linguistic and epistemological alienation of humans from their circumstances and from one another” (122-3), finding that “[t]he capability of language to represent emotions and the encounter with the other is increasingly in doubt in recent work by Ghosh” (ibid.). 143 Tuomas Huttunen makes a related point: reading The Hungry Tide through the lens of Levinas’ philosophy, at the centre of which he sees a “criticism of the ontological assumptions of Western philosophy” (123), he emphasises Ghosh’s “outright distrust of language as the builder of ontological totalities like nations, religions, sciences, social classes, and subjectivities, and as incapable of transcending them” (124). 144 The local myth of Bon Bibi features repeatedly in the novel. It tells the story of the goddess Bon Bibi: Bon Bibi rescues the boy Dukhey from the demon Dokkhin Rai, who, in order to capture his victims, takes on the guise of the tiger. Based on this incident, (see Meyer 154-5; Talib 135). 142 In showing how the novel associates the quote with several characters, Sandra Meyer explicitly connects it with Piya’s state of mind (see 152), arguing that Piya is by no means ‘comfortably at home’ in the human world and often “seems to prefer animals to human beings, or at least thinks of them as being more honest and more social beings” (153). Indeed, Piya is shown to constantly yearn for what she - romantically - imagines as an ‘intuitive’, ‘natural’ way of existing and communicating. She envies, for instance, the dolphins’ way of “circling drowsily, listening to echoes pinging through the water, painting pictures in three dimensions” (HT 159) and their leading a life “where simply to exist was to communicate” (ibid.). In the light of my above analysis, the dolphins’ advantage seems to be that they do not have to mediate their experience through ill-fitting concepts. 143 Piya’s discomfort with a ‘gedeuteten Welt’, I would argue, hence comes down to her inability to situate herself within a ‘modern’ interpretation of the world that insists on dividing the latter into distinct and mutually exclusive nations and cultures. While the reasons for Piya’s desire to escape into a world of exotic romance thus bring into view how the acceptedly modern world conceptualises cultures as separate, delineated entities, the tide country, centrepiece of the novel’s ostensibly ‘anti-modern’ realm, stands out in the contrast that it provides to the world Piya inhabits. She is used to national and cultural separations; the tide country is devoid of such divisions: introduced through Nirmal’s astonished observation of an “other world, where it was impossible to tell who was who, and what the inhabitants’ castes and religions and beliefs were” (HT 79), it appears as a space where the usual separations are not in place. In the mantra connected to the goddess Bon Bibi, the tide country’s local goddess, the transcultural melange manifests itself. 144 Watching Fokir pray, Piya notes that his actions “looked very 138 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="139"?> Bon Bibi becomes the saviour of the “pure and righteous” (HT 105) and upholds the laws of the forest. 145 These characteristics of the tide country have been discussed at length - see for example P. Mukherjee (Postcolonial Environments 124), Kaur (134), or Rollason (95). 146 For a detailed discussion of the politics in the Sundarbans see for instance Anand (28-33). much like her mother’s Hindu pujas - and yet the words seemed to suggest otherwise” (HT 152, emphasis in original), containing, as they do, calls to Allah. This syncretism of the Bon Bibi mantra features repeatedly in the novel. Nirmal as well is “amazed” (HT 246) when he first hears the prayer: I’d thought I was going to a Hindu puja. Imagine my astonishment on hearing these Arabic invocations! Yet the rhythm of the recitation was undoubtedly that of a puja […] the language was not easy to follow - it was a strange variety of Bangla, deeply interpenetrated by Arabic and Persian. (HT 246, emphasis in original) Being familiar with the languages, Nirmal is able to confirm the linguistic hybridity of the mantra, which could not be more different from the sphere of neatly separated cultures and languages that make up the ‘translated world’ that Piya struggles with. The tide country appears as a place where it is, in Nirmal’s words ‘impossible’ to distinguish one culture, language or nationality from another. 145 If the tide country as a whole functions as a counter-space to cultural and national separations, this culminates in the island of Morichjh-pi. Manav Ratti, for instance, reads the latter as “a literally and figuratively new space that is alternative to the exclusionary violence of the nation-state” (200). Indeed, the stories of those who seek refuge on the island draw attention to the fatal consequences of national and religious demarcations. Originally from Bangladesh, the people assembling on the island have suffered from the joint violence of religion-, casteand nation-based separations: as ‘Dalits’, ‘untouchables’, they were excluded within Bangladesh by Muslims and Hindus alike (HT 118). Once they had fled to India, the state again ostracised them, this time on national grounds, taking them to a place far away from the tide country “more like a concentration camp, or a prison” (HT 118). 146 For these people, Morichjh-pi becomes a haven where they intend to settle in a manner that explicitly disregards the ‘artificial’ borders that the modern world has installed: “we’re tide country people” (HT 164-5, emphasis in original) they tell Fokir’s mother Kusum when she joins them, disentangling their feeling of home from the concept of nation. Kusum’s feeling of communality with them, although 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 139 <?page no="140"?> 147 As mentioned, many critics have remarked on this function of the tide country, compare the beginning of my section on The Hungry Tide as well as the following discussion. My contribution is hence not aimed at merely showing once again that the novel conjures up such an alternative, but at demonstrating how and to what effect it embeds the latter within its play with the imperial romance tradition. 148 See in particular Trexler (especially 213) and Schulze-Engler (“Strange Encounters” 179-80). On Ghosh’s engagement with Bruno Latour see also my chapters 2.1.1 and 3.1.3.1. she has grown up in the Indian part of the Sundarbans, further underlines an alternative, non-national approach to home: ‘I listened to them talk, and hope blossomed in my heart; these were my people, how could I stand apart? We shared the same tongue, we were joined in our bones; the dreams they had dreamt were no different from my own. They too had hankered for our tide country mud; they too had longed to watch the tide rise to full flood. (HT 165, emphasis in original) The common point of reference for them is not a nation but the tide country in its entirety. The community of the Morichjh-pi settlers, more than anything, makes the tide country appear as an alternative to a world dividing its population into national, ethnic or culturally distinct, demarcated groups. However, the tide country’s significance is not limited to its potential for providing a counter-space to the ‘artificial separations’ of Piya’s ‘modern’ world in the field of cultures. In fact, it gradually turns out to constitute an alternative to boundary-drawing and separations in multiple aresa. 147 Frank Schulze-Engler has rightly remarked on the “boundary-blurring landscape of the Sundarbans” (“Strange Encounters” 181) as a “‘hybrid’ zone” (bid.). Indeed, introduced as a space where there are neither clear “boundaries between land and water” (HT 7), nor “borders […] to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea” (ibid.) as the landscape is itself in constant flux, the very first impression we get of the Sundarbans’ geography takes on a larger meaning: it anticipates its later description as an exemption from the border-centred world of (Western) modernity. In fact, just like the tide country challenges the social (cultural, national etc) separations and categorisations that modernity has brought forth, it also challenges separations on a more profoundly ontological level. Several discussions have linked The Hungry Tide to a Latourian challenge to the “supposedly distinct entities, nature and society” (Trexler 220) and the subject/ object dichotomy on which the - self-appointed - ‘moderns’ rely. 148 Through its presentation of life in the tide country, it, like the Ibis trilogy, emphatically rejects the idea that agency is reduced to humans or that it can be traced back to human intention alone. Adam Trexler, for instance, observes that 140 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="141"?> 149 For a - differently accentuated - discussion of the novel’s take on science see also Schulze-Engler (“Strange Encounters”). He, too, draws on Latour to describe “the complex hybrid web constituted by scientific research, nature, culture, and politics” (ibid. 179) that the novel develops. The Hungry Tide gives “a palpable sense of things beyond human control” (212). In the novel, he argues, nature, in the form of tigers and weather phenomena, “exert[s] an agency that is irreducible to humans’ wishes” (ibid). He concludes that “[o]ne of the most important achievements of The Hungry Tide is the way it shows the agency of humans and nonhumans in the same framework” (ibid.). In so doing, the novel dissolves what Ghosh depicts as one of modernity’s fundamental separations. Focusing on the role of water in the novel, which constantly reclaims and transforms the land, Divya Anand argues that Ghosh uses water as the agent that rewrites the social matrix of the Sundarbans in the novel. Water is both motif and agent, shaping not only the story but also the geography and history of the land. The unusual agency of water is highlighted here - its potential to act, as well as to move from object/ other position to that of the subject and, in doing so, reverses the object/ subject status of the characters (23). Through its very title, Anand points out, the novel draws attention to its refusal to separate the human from the non-human realm. She argues: “[t]he immanence of animality and the human capacity for consciousness and cognizance are woven together through the metaphor of hunger in the novel. Differences of all kinds, between people, between species, and between nature and all that is deemed nonnatural, are overhauled in the novel at various occasions through the material presence of water” (40). In a similar vein, Jens Martin Gurr maintains that the novel adapts its form to its ecological concern. He argues that its “landscape, so fundamentally both land and water, is in many ways really the key protagonist of the novel” (74). This undermining of the subject/ object as well as the character/ setting divide emphasises that humans are by no means masters over nature in the ecosphere of the tide country. On the contrary, as Rajender Kaur points out, the novel is clearly “sensitive to the symbiotic codependency of the human and nonhuman creatures that inhabit the particular bio-space of the Sundarbans” (128); a co-dependency which manifests itself above all in Fokir’s life. As a fisherman, he is acutely aware of his being at the mercy of nature: while he is on his boat, weather and water can threaten his life at any moment. As it thus decentres human agency through its depiction of the tide country, The Hungry Tide also explicitly includes science into its reflections. 149 In a new materialist spirit, the novel re-writes the history of scientific research. It rejects the idea of autonomous human subjects who explore a world of passive nature, 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 141 <?page no="142"?> 150 Trexler sums up a central feature of Latourian actor-network theory in simple terms: “many things are needed to produce scientific ‘facts’” (209). Karen Barad’s “agential realist ontology” (139), which proposes that “phenomena are the ontological insepara‐ bility/ entanglement of intra-acting ‘agencies’” (ibid., emphasis in original) builds on a similar premise. Barad describes the Stern-Gerlach experiment as one of the canonical experiments in the field of quantum physics to show that scientific results do not solely stem from intentional human efforts, but instead “depended on a convergence of other factors” (ibid. 164): this particular experiment brought results only when exposed to the breath of one of the scientists, who regularly smoked cheap, low-quality cigars rich in sulfur (see ibid. 164-5). In presenting an experiment whose outcome depended on the scientist’s “tobacco habit coupled with his relative impoverishment” (165), she shows how scientific findings depend on ‘intra-actions’ to which even seemingly unrelated issues such as social politics contribute. The Hungry Tide similarly makes it impossible to trace scientific findings back to intentional human efforts alone. of ‘things’ which, being merely ‘objects’, exist in an entirely different realm than the researchers with their subject position: through Piya’s experience in the tide country, the novel continuously stresses the view that scientific findings themselves depend on a combination of various human and nonhuman agencies which are inseparably intertwined. 150 Adam Trexler observes that “Piya’s agency is reconstructed as she is joined to a network of scientific things, with the binoculars, a boat, the river, and wildlife” (213). Stressing that “[t]he precise, scientific observations that are delivered through the binoculars are irreducible to Piya’s unaided gaze” (ibid.), he reads Piya’s gadgets as an important element through which the novel underlines that human and nonhuman factors intertwine in scientific research. The effect is, Trexler points out, that the “findings of the system are far beyond her control” (ibid.). In fact, just as much as her results depend on her binoculars, they depend on the contribution of the water’s inhabitants. When she is finally able to make an important discovery concerning the behaviour of the rare species of dolphins she studies, she has to acknowledge that, to her surprise, it was “not her own intention that had brought her here today” (HT 142): as she accompanies Fokir on his crab-fishing routes, she concludes that the crabs are actually responsible for her findings. In thus reevaluating the sources and the coming into being of scientific knowledge, the novel employs science to once again challenge a dichotomy of human agents and non-human non-agents. While the novel thus continuously challenges the borders and boundaries of (Western) modernity, it ties this challenge exclusively to the setting of the Sundarbans. In so doing, it correlates it precisely with what it has introduced, via its ironic recreation of the imperial romance tradition, as the realm associated with the anti-modern. Creating this correlation must again be read as a semanticised, strategic literary choice: Ghosh is once again mockingly staging 142 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="143"?> 151 In the chapter on the Ibis trilogy, I have related Ghosh’s depiction of the Ibis community to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s discussion in Provincializing Europe (2000). He maintains that the idea that being ‘modern’ necessarily means replacing all ostensibly ‘pre-modern’ forms of approaching the world through reason and rationality fails to do justice to the shape that modern life took in many parts of the non-Western world. Indeed, an important element of Ghosh’s attempt to move beyond Western-centric notions of what it means to be modern is to challenge the well-established dichotomy of reason and superstition as the line that ostensibly distinguishes modern from ‘backward’ people. For a similar point about The Hungry Tide see also Manav Ratti’s concept of the postsecular and his discussion of the novel in this context (see 18-21). the very refusal of the established, Western-centric version of modernity to accept ways of living and thinking that depart from its own logic of boundaries and borders as equally modern approaches to the world that he constantly criticises. In fact, the novel employs the character of Fokir to foreground its own, semanticised play with form: Fokir, I will show, is both notably constructed as a representative of a possible non-Western, alternative way of being modern, one which circumvents the borders and separations of the established version of modernity, and, precisely in this function - thoroughly exoticised. I have already pointed out that Fokir is central to the novel’s emphasis on seeing the human and non-human realm as co-dependent and related rather than two spheres apart. Beyond that, he also embodies the dissolution of cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries that is characteristic of the tide country on the whole: as it is through his recitation that we are introduced to the polylingual and syncretic mantra of Bon Bibi in the first place, his own transcultural identity is highlighted early on. Furthermore, Ghosh turns him, like the Ibis community, into a representative of a possible non-Western, alternative modernity by emphasising that he challenges the border which demarcates reason, rationality and scientific facts from their alleged opposites - the ‘irrational’ sphere of beliefs and superstition, myths and stories: 151 Piya gradually realises that her luck in regularly spotting the dolphins is not merely an effect of the crabs leading her there; Fokir is also consciously taking her to places where he knows the dolphins are bound to appear at a certain hour of day. Asked why he knows about the dolphins’ dwelling place, he traces his knowledge back to his mother’s beliefs: ‘I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know about this place. […] As for the big shush, the dolphins who live in these waters, I knew about them too, even before I came here. These animals were also in my mother’s stories: they were Bon Bibi’s messengers, she used to say, and they brought her news of the rivers and khals. They came here during the bhata, my mother said, so they could tell Bon Bibi about everything they had seen. During the jowar they scattered to the ends of the forest 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 143 <?page no="144"?> 152 This motif re-occurs in the description of other characters from the tide country. The sexual encounter between Kusum and Horen is a particularly striking example as Ghosh describes their love-making in terms of the movement of water: “It was as if the barriers of our bodies had melted and we had flowed into each other as the river does with the sea. There was nothing to say and nothing to be said; there were no words to chafe upon our senses: just an intermingling like that of fresh water and salt, a rising and a falling as of the tides” (HT 364). and became Bon Bibi’s eyes and ears. This secret her own father had told her, and he had told her also that if you could learn to follow the shush, then you would always be able to find fish. (HT 307, emphasis in original) By pinpointing the dolphin’s location at ‘bhata’ - ebb tides - and ‘jowar’ - rising tides -, the story endows Fokir with the necessary knowledge for his own fishing, which in turn proves essential for Piya’s research. With Piya making a path-breaking observation at the spots to which Fokir leads her, a clear distinction collapses between the forms of knowledge creation conventionally recognised as ‘scientific’ and various forms of traditional knowledge, including orally transmitted stories and forms of spiritualty; ‘rational thinking’ and ‘superstition’ do no longer function as binary opposite pairs. However, like in the case of the Ibis community, the novel plays out a mechanism through which whatever identifies Fokir as a representative of an alternative to Western modernity constantly reclaims him for its romance world. Not only does his very reference to myth turn him, within the genre conventions of the imperial romance, into the perfect fulfilment of the exotic specimen the modern traveller encounters, The Hungry Tide moreover repeatedly presents his difference from conventional modern ways of life mediated through romantic tropes. His refusal to consider himself disconnected from nature, let alone as her master, for instance, is depicted in such a way as to conjure up familiar tropes of the ‘noble savage’s’ privileged access to nature. Piya explicitly highlights the fisherman’s intrinsic connection to the elements, which appears almost magical. “It’s as if he can see right into the river’s heart” (HT 267), she comments to Kanai. In fact, this exotic depiction of Fokir is not restricted to Piya; it similarly features in his mother Kusum’s declaration that “the river is in his veins” (245, emphasis in original), which literally merges the character with the river. 152 Likewise, if his recitation of the story of Bon Bibi displays his transcultural identity, and, in so doing, contributes to distinguishing him from Western modernity as depicted in the novel, The Hungry Tide constantly exoticises this very recitation. Not only does the notion of the forest Goddess per se evoke the idea of ‘pre-modern’ beliefs, the novel also repeatedly presents Fokir singing about the Goddess in a way that notably echoes established literary traditions surrounding exotic romance. 144 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="145"?> 153 Even the character’s name contributes to this exotic framing. Drawing on Sir William W. Hunter’s A Statistical Account of Bengal (1875), Divya Anand traces the name Fokir back to ‘fakir’, a term referring to forest guides who led expeditions into the forest. Meant to ensure the safety of the travelling party, fakirs were thought to have won the favour of the forest deity (see 24). By calling his character Fokir, Ghosh thus plays with the exotic expectation surrounding the figure of the fakir. An interest in folk songs came to be a key element of the late-18 th -century ‘romance revival’ (see Duncan 8) as scholars searched for ‘original’ cultures whose extinction they were increasingly worried about. Not only did the highly successful Ossian forgery by James Macpherson (1761) claim to be a translation of ancient Gaelic folk songs collected by the author, but in Waverley, Walter Scott also captures the endangered, romanticised Highland culture first and foremost in song. In its depiction of Fokir’s singing, or rather Piya’s reaction to it, The Hungry Tide displays striking parallels to Waverley. Piya reflects: The melody surprised her, for it bore no resemblance to any Indian music she had ever heard before - neither the Hindi film music her father liked nor the Bengali songs her mother had sometimes sung. His voice sounded almost hoarse and it seemed to crack and sob as it roamed the notes. There was a suggestion of grief in it that unsettled and disturbed her. (HT 98-9) Sung in words Piya does not understand, the song takes on an almost elegiac quality and deeply affects her. Similarly, during his stay with the Highland chief Fergus Mac-Ivor, Waverley accompanies his host’s sister Flora to a remote spot with a cascade nearby whose scenic beauty suggests the notion of the sublime. There, she sings to him a Highland folk song which strongly moves Waverley: Indeed the wild feeling of romantic delight, with which he heard the few first notes she drew from her instrument, amounted almost to a sense of pain. He would not for worlds have quitted his place by her side; yet he almost longed for solitude, that he might decypher and examine at leisure the complication of emotions which now agitated his bosom. (Waverley 118) Piya’s experience with Fokir appears as an echo to the sensations of this earlier protagonist: both find themselves within surroundings they perceive as almost magical, sublime; in both cases the songs’ alien sounds evoke strong emotions in the listeners. The ‘suggestion of grief ’ further associates Fokir’s singing with the romantic lamentation for endangered worlds. Modelling his own character after the historical romance’s exotic characters, Ghosh draws attention to the ways in which he creates Fokir as the perfect fulfilment of anti-modern romance. 153 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 145 <?page no="146"?> Several critics have taken issue with the novel’s exoticised rendition of Fokir. Reading Fokir as an “innocent who possesses a stable, mystical connection to nature” ( Jaising 82-3), Shakti Jaising compares Fokir to Velutha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), who similarly appears inherently connec‐ ted to a river. She sees both characters reduced to a “symbol of lost wholeness” (81) and charges Ghosh with “paternalism” (85) on account of his exoticised vision. In his discussion of these same novels, Victor Li focuses on the motif of the subaltern’s death and reads the latter as a strategy through which the novels secure an idealised concept of an alternative life “heterogeneous to hegemonic modernity” (290). He criticises Ghosh’s reduction of the subaltern character to a political ideal which, in order to be effective, depends on staging his death, as only “the subaltern’s death or disappearance enables the subaltern to fulfill the ideal role of the resistant and inappropriable other” (277). Li argues that “[w]hat we have in the novel is a ‘last of the Mohicans’ scenario in which the ‘authentic’ subaltern dies so that the idea of subalternity may live on in a non-subaltern future” (290), thus criticising Ghosh for myth-making and appropriating the subaltern figure. While Li and Jaising correctly describe Fokir’s characterisation in the novel, at least one side of it, they both overlook what I regard as a pointedly self-referential, ironic dimension of Ghosh’s romanticised presentation of Fokir and the tide country on the whole. Rather than mistaking the novel’s romance imaginary for naivety, readers should credit the exotic depiction with a function of critique it fulfils in the novel. In its depiction of the character, the novel relies on familiar, cliched notions to such an extent that its exotic, romantic visions have to be recognised as a conscious play with established imaginaries of the authentic ‘primitive.’ Far from indulging in a straightforward, naïve romanticisation, the novel provides a reflection on a romantic imagination. If the novel presents Fokir, and with him the tide country and the alternative it embodies through the framework of exotic romance, Ghosh’s romanticising discourse merges with the “meta-exoticism” (The Postcolonial Exotic 77) Graham Huggan influentially attested to postcolonial literatures: it becomes a meta-romanticism that criticises the imaginary it evokes. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan choses The God of Small Things to develop his notion of ‘meta’-exoticism, precisely the novel whose ostensibly uncritical idealisation of subalternity the above readings criticise along with that of The Hungry Tide. He emphasises that the novel both displays and implicitly ironises its own lushly romantic images, its metaphorladen languages, its transferred Conradian primitivist myths. […] Roy’s, like Rush‐ die’s, might be seen then as a strategic exoticism, designed to trap the unwary reader into complicity with the Orientalism of which the novel so hauntingly relates. It is 146 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="147"?> 154 Pablo Mukherjee comes to a similar conclusion. He as well draws attention to the critical and meta-textual (see Postcolonial Environments 121) content of Ghosh’s seemingly exoticising gestures: “Ghosh, like Roy before him, takes on an additional set of problems - ones concerned with the issue of the mimetic or representational - as an important focus of his creative task. How can one write about the massacred refugees without evoking the myths about original, organic, and continuous connections with the forest and the tigers that is, after all, the stuff of many a ‘deep’ ecological dream? ” (ibid. 114) He foregrounds the novel’s extensive descriptions of the folk theatrical form of the Jatra as a particularly ‘exotic’ moment, albeit attributing a distinctly critical function to it (see ibid. 127). also to some extent, also like Rushdie’s, a meta-exoticism. (The Postcolonial Exotic 77, emphasis in original) In analysing Roy’s exoticism, Huggan grants her an - at least partly - critical agenda. Rather than taking the text’s exoticism as an uncritical repetition of familiar tropes, he suggests, it has to be seen as a reflection on the metropolitan marketing of India through the lens of the exotic. In a similar way, Ghosh’s rendering of Fokir as the idealised primitive - along with that of the entire tide country as a realm of anti-modern romance - should be read as a way of confronting readers with the self-declared modern world’s refusal to regard ways of life that break with its own ontological and social boundaries through anything but the framework of exotic romance. Whoever considers, for instance, human agency to be embedded with a number of other agencies or finds that scientific knowledge has not rendered spiritualism obsolete, Ghosh comments via his literary presentation, is dismissed to a realm beyond the ‘modern’ and the ‘realistic.’ 154 Hence, it would be a mistake to take the novel’s exoticisation of the borderless alternative at face value. Just like the text ironically recreates the imperial romance’s insistence that modern protagonists must qua definition be Western(ised) and, in doing so, draws attention to exclusivist conceptualisations of the modern in postcolonial India, it ironically exoticises the Sundarbans’ difference. As I will show later on, the text actively challenges the exoticised rendition of Fokir, a point the above critics significantly fail to mention. Li is hence correct in seeing Fokir as a representative of “subalterns who choose not to surrender their way of life through assimilation into a hegemonic modernity” (288), as well as in observing that the novel connects these subalterns with “alternative ways of being that not only mark the limits of our knowledge but also offer us other forms of knowledge from which we have much to learn” (289). Also, as shown, it is indeed through highly romanticised images that Ghosh alludes to such ways of living and thinking which transcend the acceptedly ‘modern’ ways. However, complaining that the novel employs an 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 147 <?page no="148"?> idealised version of the - ultimately dying - subaltern, rendered through exoticised, romantic images means to overlook that it is only by doing so that Ghosh’s modernity critique comes full circle. Indeed, in arguing that we have a “last of the Mohicans” scenario (290), Li makes an observation that is more to the point than the author seems to realise. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels published between 1823 and 1841, are often described as texts written in the tradition of Scott, which hence constitute further examples of the exotic romance tradition (see for instance Dekker 44). Li thus captures precisely how Ghosh replicates this - romantic - gesture of nostalgically viewing the about-to-be-extinct anti-modern, yet he fails to acknowledge this as a strategic choice central to the novel’s critical impetus, rather than an artistic blunder. If the novel’s - strategically - exoticised presentation of Fokir thus serves to highlight the condescending attitude with which the established version of modernity approaches alternative ways of living and thinking, its depiction of Kanai’s deceased uncle Nirmal in fact adds another facet to this discussion. Like Fokir, Nirmal is central to the novel’s dissolution of boundaries. He, for instance, repeatedly challenges the separations that divide the human sphere from that of nature. In a passage where Kanai explains Nirmal’s idea of ‘historical materialism’, The Hungry Tide playfully conflates Nirmal’s Marxist materialist stance with a new materialist merging of those spheres: ‘For him [Nirmal] it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories - of a kind.’ (HT 282-3) Nirmal’s idea of everything being connected radically rejects what Latour described as the ‘modern’ impetus of purification: the insistence to regard the realm of humans and that of non-humans as “two entirely distinct ontological zones” (10), and to see nature and culture as entirely disconnected. In fact, Nirmal’s insistence on connections closely resembles Latour’s mentioning of a view which assumes “[t]hat a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law” (5); the very view which has become “unthinkable, unseemly” (ibid.) according to ‘the moderns’. Moreover, the novel’s description of Nirmal himself supports the very vision it ascribes to its character: associating Nirmal repeatedly with a bird, Ghosh playfully employs him to blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Not only does the passage above liken Nirmal to a magpie, but Kanai also remembers his childhood impression that “Nirmal had put him in mind of a long- 148 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="149"?> 155 Manav Ratti rightly points out that “Ghosh structures the dichotomy of romantic and realist perspectives through the characters Nirmal and his wife Nilima, respectively” (200): the novel indeed accentuates Nirmal’s dreaminess by contrasting him with his wife who is described as “ever practical” (HT 80). 156 Moreover, the idea that a rational, probable, fact-driven approach needs to be distin‐ guished from the fabulous world of imagination is in itself a construct of the ‘moderns’ that Ghosh’s oeuvre challenges: Mondal, for instance, situates the idea that fiction is ‘untrue’ within the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment (see 21) and argues that Ghosh’s oeuvre repeatedly collapses the distinction between fact and fiction, ‘story’ and scholarship. 157 Omendra Kumar Singh, for instance, argues that the description of the tide country and of Morichjh-pi in particular explicitly alludes to the island of Utopia in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) (see 247). legged waterbird - maybe a heron or a stork” (HT 25). And just like the character challenges the separation of nature and culture, he also takes the reader beyond the idea of separate cultures and nations: it is, after all, mediated through his fascinated report that The Hungry Tide narrates the events on Morichjh-pi. With Nirmal thus being another one of the novel’s characters who transcend the separations that ‘the moderns’ have installed, the novel continuously gestures towards a view that, on the very basis of this transcending, refuses to take Nirmal seriously. Parallel to its construction of Fokir as an exotic, superstitious and anti-modern figure, it evocatively constructs Nirmal as an overly romantic dreamer (see Meyer 158; Ratti 200), and seemingly dismisses his attitudes as fantastic constructions of someone whose imagination runs wild. 155 The passage above, for instance, pointedly juxtaposes ‘facts’ and ‘stories’. Thereby, it associates a view where entities such as the weather and humans appear as disconnected with the world of facts, whereas it situates Nirmal’s competing vision according to which these things are connected within the fabulous world of stories. This again has to be read as an ironic enactment of the ways in which ‘the moderns’ ban all ways of thinking that transcend the borders they hold dear to the world of fabulous imagination, of romance. 156 The novel also seemingly dismisses the political vision of a social world devoid of the usual boundaries as well as of particularistic, egoist interests that Nirmal develops through his account of Morichjh-pi as ‘unrealistic’, ‘romantic’ fantasies: several critics observe that The Hungry Tide depicts Nirmal’s enthu‐ siastic description of a kind of social revolution embodied in the island as wishful thinking. 157 Not only that, by repeatedly connecting Nirmal’s political vision to the character’s fascination with Rilke and the latter’s idea of transformation, the novel further enacts a condescending attitude towards his views: in her study of the intertextual links between The Hungry Tide and Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Sandra Meyer points out that for Rilke, “poetry is regarded as a means of overcoming 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 149 <?page no="150"?> current problems of society and showing ways out of a devastating situation - at least on a symbolic level” (156). Her addition ‘at least on a symbolic level’ proves to be crucial for The Hungry Tide. In a footnote, Meyer refers to Hans Dieter Zimmermann, describing the latter’s observation that “writers such as Rilke were regarded solely as artists. Their political attitudes or ideas concerning new forms of living were consequently hardly ever taken seriously - were thought to be the daydreams of some crazy artist.” (Ibid.) It is to a similar notion of daydreaming and imagination that the novel suggestively reduces Nirmal, not least through highlighting his association with Rilke. Where ‘the moderns’ cannot exoticise those who display worldviews and ideas that diverge from their own border-logic - after all, Nirmal is a highly educated intellectual and, as such, irreducible to the ‘rustics’ - The Hungry Tide suggests, they resort to a different technique: they turn them into hopeless idealists who express fantastic visions rather than a realist engagement with the world. The novel thus depicts Nirmal as a leftist dreamer with the same ironic distance with which it also treats its self-referential exoticisation of the tide country’s other inhabitants. In both cases, the novel’s alleged dismissal of its characters serves to underline how a distinct way of living and thinking - one that emerged in the West - has come to claim a monopoly on ‘being modern’ and on engaging with the modern world in a ‘realistic’ way. 3.2.3 Beyond Exotic Romance and Notions of a Divided World I have described the ironic way in which Ghosh writes himself into the tradition of the imperial romance; how he employs it to imitate - and criticise - how Western modernity associates all that diverges from its own ontological certainties or societal organisation with anti-modern/ fanciful romance. While critiquing through irony is a subtle approach, which, in order to be effective, depends on the readers’ becoming aware of the text’s distance to the imaginaries it evokes in the first place, The Hungry Tide also openly criticises the romance it constructs: several passages directly discuss the romance imaginary in order to take its characters, and with them its readers, beyond the visions it builds up. Reminiscent of Shamsie’s emphasis on the protagonist Vivian’s distorted vision and her gradually developing ability to see properly in A God in Every Stone (see chapter 4.1.1.2), The Hungry Tide subjects Piya to a process of awakening from romance. In the course of her journey, Piya increasingly comes to question her own romantic framing of the tide country. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin rightly point out that it is a “lesson Piya has to learn: not to regard Fokir as a ‘noble savage’ living in harmony with his environment in order to 150 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="151"?> 158 For a comment on the learning process of the novel’s Western(ised) elite see also P. Mukherjee (Postcolonial Environments 129). 159 Matti Bunzl sums up that scholars like Arjun Appadurai and Ulf Hannerz emphasise the need to “see all of the world’s groups as part of the global integration effected by late capitalism, a circumstance that not only renews attention to power differentials but necessitates the effective abandonment of particularized investigations of supposedly isolated peoples” (xxv). persuade herself of their shared environmentalist ideals” (205; compare also Kaur 131). In fact, quite early on, the narrative gives rise to some scepticism concerning Piya’s exotic imagination. While listening to Fokir’s song, the most exceedingly ‘exotic’ among her experiences, she reflects that “[s]he had thought that she had seen a muscular quality of innocence in him, a likeable kind of naïveté, but now, listening to this song, she began to ask herself whether it was she who was naïve” (HT 99). While, at this stage, she only cautiously hints at the possibility of her own misjudgement, towards the end of the novel, this amounts to a fully-fledged revision of her views. Learning about the hardship of Fokir’s childhood years, Piya grows ashamed of her romanticised notion of the ‘simple’ life: “Piya remembered the family she had imagined for Fokir: the parents she had given him and the many siblings. She was shamed by her lack of insight.” (HT 218) These realisations testify to her awakening from her previously cultivated romance imagination. In fact, Ghosh underlines her changed attitude by explicitly having her part with the idea of an enchanted world. Looking around Fokir’s boat, she suddenly sees it through new eyes: Looking at these discarded odds and ends in the light of another day, she saw it was not the boat but her own eyes that had infused them with that element of enchantment. Now they looked as plain and as reassuringly familiar as anything she had ever thought of as belonging in a home. (HT 339) Piya acknowledges that the assumed romance of her surroundings, rather than being an inherent quality of life in the tide country, was a product of her partial vision. As soon as she allows herself to become familiar with the place, the magic recedes: she has come to accept the tide country as a veritable reality of contemporary, modern life, guiding the reader to similarly abandon their romance mode and to follow her revised judgement. 158 Piya’s - and the reader’s - awakening from romance includes replacing the myth of ‘anti-modern’ spaces detached from the modern world, propagated by the imperial romance, with an awareness of global connections that leave no space untouched. Just like a recent generation of anthropologists sought to part with a notion of an exotic Other ostensibly disconnected from the larger world, 159 Piya 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 151 <?page no="152"?> 160 Several critics have remarked on the “Conradian reminiscences” (Hoydis 302) of this passage, see for instance Hoydis (ibid.); Luo (“Intertextuality” 161) or Trexler (214). However, they do not analyse the intertextual reference and its effects in detail. 161 On tigers in the Sundarbans see for instance Anand (26). has to give up her idea of the remote, isolated tide country and to become painfully aware of her own connection to the problems she observes there. An intertextual reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) accentuates this. 160 Stopping by on one of the Sundarbans’ islands, the travellers witness a gruesome scenario: the tigers of the Sundarbans, acting differently to anywhere else, attack humans regularly, causing an enormous death toll. 161 After several tiger-inflicted deaths among both population and cattle, the islanders have now caught a tiger and lynch the animal in anger. Watching them in shock, Piya is unable to understand their emotions and sees in them nothing but savages. In an echo of Conrad’s character Kurtz, Piya and Kanai discuss their impressions: It was like something from some other time - before recorded history. I feel like I’ll never be able to get my mind around the -‘ Kanai prompted her as she faltered. ‘The horror? ’ ‘The horror. Yes. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to forget it.’ ‘Probably not.’ ‘But for Fokir and Horen and the others - it was just a part of everyday life, wasn’t it? ’ ‘I imagine they’ve learned to take it in their stride, Piya. They’ve had to.’ ‘That’s what haunts me,’ said Piya. ‘In a way that makes them a part of the horror too, doesn’t it? ’ (HT 300) Heart of Darkness presents Kurtz’s ‘horror’ as an expression of an unspeakable insight into the depth of the human psyche that only the space devoid of civilisation makes visible. In contrast to Kurtz, who recognises the horror in the Western ‘uncivilised’ behaviour in the Congo, Piya, however, simply associates the Sundarbans as the ostensibly anti-modern space with the ‘horror’ of lacking civilisation: viewed through Piya’s eyes, ‘the horror’ becomes characteristic of a place ‘before recorded history’, where the enlightened dogma not to cause animals to suffer has not yet arrived. For Piya, Fokir and the other inhabitants of the tide country, who she previously idealised as figures of a pre-modern idyll, now become representatives of the Sundarbans’ lack of civilisation. Tellingly, it is after this encounter that Piya turns to Kanai, feeling “suddenly grateful for his calm, urbane presence” (HT 299): the modernity he stands for appears as the antithesis to the ‘horror’ she has witnessed. 152 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="153"?> 162 Published as an essay in 1986, the scene later became part of In an Antique Land in a revised version. In his essay “The Imam and the Indian” 162 , Ghosh reflects precisely on this way of re-contextualising the notion of Conradian horror. He muses on his position as a non-Western anthropologist, describing that, were he a Westerner, he as well could have gone off to what were said to be the most terrible places in the world that month, to gaze and wonder. And then perhaps I too would one day have had enough material for a book which would have had for its epigraph the line, The horror! The horror! - for the virtue of a sheet of glass is that it does not require one to look within. (“The Imam” 12, emphasis in original) In these lines he sharply criticises an insistence on the ‘horror’ of ostensibly underdeveloped places. This conclusion, Ghosh underlines, depends on a West‐ ern background that allows the viewer to travel freely and deny any unpleasant connections that link their lives to problems in those parts of the world on whose exploitation their own privilege is founded. Describing this distinct rereading of ‘the horror’ as a refusal to direct one’s attention to oneself, Ghosh points to the Westerners’ own responsibility for what they experience abroad - a responsibility that the simple association of a scene with pre-civilisational horror entirely obscures. In setting Piya right and denying her the simple solution of ascribing the scene she has witnessed to an archaic, pre-modern people, The Hungry Tide takes up this criticism: it similarly challenges the view of a ‘horror’ disconnected from the modern world, replacing it with one that, coming closer to Kurtz’s original horror, is in fact a result of modern politics. Continuing their conversation about ‘the horror’ they have witnessed, Kanai’s voice serves as a corrective to Piya’s one-sided views: Kanai snapped shut the notebook: ‘To be fair to Fokir and Horen, I don’t think it’s quite that simple, Piya. I mean, aren’t we a part of the horror as well? You and me and people like us? ’ […] ‘That tiger had killed two people, Piya,’ Kanai said. ‘And that was just in one village. It happens every week that people are killed by tigers. How about the horror of that? If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be called a genocide, and yet here it goes almost unremarked: these killings are never reported, never written about in the papers. And the reason is just that these people are too poor to matter. We all know it, but we choose not to see it. Isn’t that a horror too - that we can feel the suffering of an animal, but not of human beings? ’ 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 153 <?page no="154"?> 163 See for instance Kaur (130-2) or Anand (34-6); compare also Schulze-Engler’s discus‐ sion of the tiger incident (see “Strange Encounters” 180-1). ‘But Kanai,’ Piya retorted, ‘everywhere in the world dozens of people are killed every day - on roads, in cars, in traffic. Why is this any worse? ’ ‘Because we’re complicit in this, Piya, that’s why.’ Piya dissociated herself with a shake of the head ‘I don’t see how I’m complicit.’ ‘Because it was people like you,’ said Kanai, ’who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard for the human costs. And I’m complicit because people like me - Indians of my class, that is - have chosen to hide these costs, basically in order to curry favour with their Western patrons. It’s not hard to ignore the people who’re dying - after all, they are the poorest of the poor. But just ask yourself whether this would be allowed to happen anywhere else? (HT 300-1) Kanai’s line of argument entirely devaluates the reasoning behind Piya’s idea of pre-modern horror. Instead of reading the scene they have witnessed as a sign of unenlightened savagery cut off from the time-space of modernity as Piya does, he maintains that it has to be seen in the context of a complex network of international actions and power configurations. The passage refuses to treat the incident as a problem connected to one isolated society’s worldviews. Ghosh thus alludes to the split time-space of the imperial romance only to prove it wrong; there is no place disconnected from the modern world. Like the Western anthropologist who fails to direct his glance towards himself, Piya has to learn to relate her own sphere of life to the killing of the tiger. As others have shown before, the novel forces not only its protagonist, but also its readers to recognise precisely this relation that connects the ‘horror’ with global politics. 163 It repeatedly reaffirms Kanai’s insistence that the villagers’ angry lynching of the tiger must be traced back to international efforts at wildlife preservation which entirely ignore the local population. In several passages, the novel pointedly juxtaposes the extraordinary death toll of the Sundarbans’ tigers with the international endeavours to save the species. It describes a paradoxical state where supporting animal lives seems to go along with a complete lack of concern for endangered human lives. Nilima, for instance, tells the child Kanai of efforts to dig pools for tigers, which suffered from the shortage of water in the Sundarbans: “Just imagine that.’ said Nilima. ‘They were providing water for tigers! In a place where nobody thinks twice about human beings going thirsty! ’” (HT 241) Her indignation underlines the failure to think about human suffering as well. With Kusum’s point of view, Fokir’s mother who died during the Morichjh-pi massacre, the novel provides an insider perspective of 154 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="155"?> 164 In this endeavour, The Hungry Tide visibly resembles Shamsie’s Kartography discussed in chapter 4.2.2 of this book, whose engagement with romance achieves a similar effect. the victims Kanai described. Almost starved by the government that insists on keeping the space uninhabited, she comments that the worst part was hearing them say that our lives, our existence, were worth less than dirt or dust. ‘This island has to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its animals, it is a part of a reserve forest, it belongs to a project to save tigers, which is paid for by people from all around the world.’ Every day, sitting here, with hunger gnawing at out bellies, we would listen to these words, over and over again. Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their names? […] it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil. No one could think this a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived - by fishing, by clearing land and by planting the soil.’ (HT 261-2, emphasis in original) The ‘horror’ surrounds no longer those rebelling against misguided preservation politics - the ‘uncivilised’ who have not yet learned to avoid causing pain -, but the spearhead of progressive politics. In suggesting that those people who are in a position to determine the course of politics might be entirely oblivious to the consequences their decisions have for those who actually face them, the text comments on the complexities of a globalised world whose connections are almost impossible to grasp in their entirety. By collapsing the imperial romance framework with its split geographical realms, Ghosh takes his readers beyond the exotic imagination that obscures this complexity and forces them to at least try and think of the world as one connected whole. 164 Further undermining its exotic imaginary, The Hungry Tide repeatedly pro‐ vides impressions of Fokir which visibly conflict with the romanticised figure that the novel builds up in the context of its ironic allusions to the tradition of the imperial romance. While Fokir’s perspective remains untold - another tribute to this tradition and its refusal to grant a voice to ‘the native’ - Ghosh carefully de-exoticises him nevertheless. Whereas the exotic imagination centres on characters who are bound up with one remote place and oblivious of the wider world, Ghosh creates Fokir as a migratory character. Far from being Lusibari born and bred, Fokir turns out to have been constantly on the move with his mother. Stressing that the notion of migration is ubiquitous in The Hungry Tide, Pablo Mukherjee rightly describes this as an “important strategy through which naïve nostalgia about ‘roots’ is avoided” (“Second Wave” 182). Indeed, Fokir’s 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 155 <?page no="156"?> 165 Divya Anand pursues a similar argument. She shows that Ghosh empowers Fokir by foregrounding the latter’s familiarity with the tide country and its fauna, which make Kanai and Piya, their technological advantage notwithstanding, “dependant on Fokir to navigate the waters” (24). The novel thus resists “the stereotypical patronization of him as the noble savage or the innocent villager or even the epitome of an ecological pioneer” (ibid.). Anand as well points to the central moment of the storm, arguing that “a reversal of role occurs, which culminates in the storm and Fokir’s death” (39). 166 This reversal of roles is all the more striking as the novel repeatedly stresses that Kanai treats Fokir like a child and, in so doing, replicates the popular colonial trope that relegates non-Western people to a previous stage of historical development. Not only does Kanai address Fokir in a “loud, hearty voice, attempting friendliness” (HT 209) and hence treats him like an intimidated child, but he also repeatedly “inadvertently addresse[s] Fokir as tui, as though he were indeed a child” (HT 319, emphasis in original). With Piya becoming the child, this imperial hierarchy is turned upside down. migratory status does not go well with the idea of the ‘authentic’ peasant and thus challenges us to question this depiction. Furthermore, the novel makes it impossible to uphold a vision of Fokir as a naïve and childlike character. Ghosh endows him with accurate scientific knowledge and, in effect, entirely unsettles the hierarchies of the imperial romance. During the cyclone in which the novel’s plot culminates, Fokir ties Piya’s and his own body to a tree. In so doing, he carefully chooses the location so that the tree’s trunk can act as a shield for the human bodies. When the eye of the storm passes over them and the wind shortly pauses, Piya notices him frantically looking for a new shelter. It is only when the storm takes up again that she understands why: The wind was now coming at them from the opposite direction. Where she had had the tree trunk to shelter her before, now there was only Fokir’s body. Was this why he had been looking for a branch on another tree? Had he known, right from the start that his own body would have to become her shield when the eye had passed? (HT 390) Along with realising that Fokir has voluntarily sacrificed himself to save her, Piya comes to appreciate Fokir’s intimate knowledge of the working of cyclones. While she, the scientist, was entirely unaware of the fact that the storm was merely giving them a break, he anticipated the turning of the wind and searched for a space that would shelter them once the storm took on anew. 165 This reversal of hierarchies of knowledge, emphatically undermining the idea of an exotic, irrational pre-modern character, translates into a reversal of roles in general: the image of Piya and Fokir on the tree powerfully challenges the idea of the childlike exotic figure. His body now encompasses Piya’s, who is in a quasiembryonic posture helplessly pressed against his torso. It is not Fokir who is the child now, but Piya. 166 156 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="157"?> 167 Rajender Kaur makes a similar point. She argues: “Ghosh seems to offer a way of thinking beyond the East and West divide and between the subject-object duality of western philosophy which is presented most strikingly in the tidal storm scene where Fokir saves Piya’s life in a sacrificial embrace” (137); compare also Rollason (94, 100) for a related discussion. 168 For the discussion on the cyclone in the Ibis trilogy compare chapter 3.1.3.2. There, I refer to Prasenjit Duara’s juxtaposition of linear and circular time in order to bring into focus how the cyclone comes to embody an explicit counter-model to the linear temporality of Western modernity. In his discussion of The Hungry Tide, Pablo Mukherjee draws attention to the cyclone as a temporal pattern, too, albeit in a different manner. He argues that “[d]isparate chronological points […] are all strung together by a variety of discourses - some autobiographical, some historical, some pedagogical, others poetic and still others fictional. The history of the Sundarbans, like the climate, is literally cyclonic” (Postcolonial Environments 130, emphasis in original). In fact, alongside its rather bleak assertion of how modernity tends to be stub‐ bornly posited against its ostensibly anti-modern, non-Western(ised) Others, the novel tentatively imagines a different scenario. Through character development and newly forming character bonds, The Hungry Tide sketches the possibility of a world that overcomes the dichotomy of the modern and the ‘anti-modern’, and its corresponding pair of the West and the non-West. Tied to their tree during the storm, Piya and Fokir become an image for this possibility. 167 The Westernsocialised character and the ‘exotic’ literally merge into one shared system: Their bodies were so close, so finely merged, that she could feel the impact of everything hitting him, she could sense the blows raining down on his back. She could feel the bones of his cheeks as if they had been superimposed on her own; it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one. (HT 390) Like in the Ibis trilogy, it is once again the trope of a cyclone that serves as a counter-image to the idea of separate cultures with disconnected histories as well as to a concept of historical time that assumes that a modern cultural stage renders a traditional, anti-modern one obsolete: 168 in ‘fusing together’ Piya and Fokir, the cyclone symbolically merges the boundaries between East and West and combines what previously appeared as the modern and the antimodern spheres. Indeed, after witnessing Fokir’s death and awakening from her very own exotic romance, Piya acts in a way that embodies an entirely revised conceptualisation of the ‘modern’ - one that overcomes an established Western-centric bias. Piya is determined to officially acknowledge Fokir’s share in her research on the dolphins. Seeking to avoid presenting her findings in the tradition that silences non-Western contributions, she envisages a large-scale project which she plans to “name [….] after Fokir, since his data are going to 3.2 The Hungry Tide (2004) and the Imperial Romance Tradition 157 <?page no="158"?> 169 Compare also Julia Hoydis, who argues, somewhat relatedly, that “[t]he general possibility of transcending cultural barriers remains a fragile and utopian one” (324) in the novel. For a comment on the novel’s utopian dimension see also Pablo Mukherjee (Postcolonial Environments 121), who likewise stresses that authors such as Ghosh, where they imagine “commonalities and ways of belonging in the ravaged postcolonial environments” (ibid.), simultaneously “acknowledge the considerable forces invested against these redemptive possibilities” (ibid). See also Meyer (158) and Rollason (100). be crucial to the project” (HT 398). Post mortem, Fokir, and with him the very forms of knowledge which, according to conventional Western accounts, point to a pre-modern age, are explicitly granted a space within the ‘modern’ realm of science. Piya’s reflections hence both actively collapse a normative, Westerncentric understanding of ‘the modern’ and redefines the history of modernity as a transcultural, collaborative project. The modern/ anti-modern dichotomy that the novel challenged all along seems finally overcome. However, while it hence includes this hopeful vision, the novel immediately ensures to prevent us from misreading its general outlook in overly optimistic terms. In fact, it warns us that the changing conceptualisation of modernity that the connection of Piya and Fokir embodies is, status quo, nothing but a hopeful vision. While stressing the two characters’ merging, the passage quoted above explicitly describes this as something located outside the possibilities of their lives: the storm gives them “what life could not”; its effects embody an ideal that appears to be, so far, beyond reach within ‘real life’, a view that the novel underlines through Fokir’s subsequent death. The Hungry Tide hence visibly ties the possibility of a modernity reconceptualised in transcultural terms, one that no longer reduces ‘the modern’ to a singular way of living and thinking and associates all divergence from the latter with the anti-modern, to a far-away future. It constitutes, in essence, a utopian scenario, 169 whose actual realisation depends on the large majority of people undergoing the very process to which the novel submits its protagonist - as well as its readers: that of moving beyond influential, normative concepts of what being modern means and parting with the habit of relating everything else to exotic romance. Graham Huggan has pointed to a “revived interest in utopian thinking in postcolonial theory and criticism” (“General Introduction” 17), provoked by the desire to show that a different future is possible and, by doing so, to work towards this future (see ibid.). It is in the sense of such visionary thinking, rather than of a portrayal of the status quo, that the novel develops its glimpses of a reconceptualised modernity - and it is in order to get us closer to this new modernity that the novel engages with exotic romance and its imaginaries. 158 3 Romance in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh <?page no="159"?> 4 Romance, Interconnected Histories and a Future Beyond Divisions in Kamila Shamsie’s Novels The previous section argued that Ghosh draws on established literary traditions of exotic romance to criticise that modernity has become inextricably linked to a distinct way of living and thinking which emerged in the context of Western colonialism and which insists on dividing the world and its people into neatly separated entities. This version of modernity, his novels suggest, has supressed an alternative possibility of modern life, embodied primarily in the Asian past. Where modernity as we know it seeks to divide and exploit, this alternative promotes transcultural connections and cooperation. Throughout his novels, I have shown, Ghosh pursues a radically revised understanding of ‘the modern’ - one which once more accommodates such alternative ways of life and, in so doing, empowers them to radically transform the dominant social and political realities of the contemporary moment. Shamsie, the following chapters will show, similarly advocates a process through which global modernity could potentially reshape itself, likewise promoting a paradigm of connections as opposed to a world of divisions and conflict. The path towards change that her novels suggest, however, differs from that of Ghosh’s fiction. While Ghosh, in the tradition of Prasenjit Duara, conjures up an alternative social world to provide a model for the modern future he envisions, Shamsie’s novels seek to transform modern society through an intervention along the lines of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993). By revisiting various episodes of modern history through a self-reflexively applied romance lens, they challenge the common notion of the world being ‘naturally’ divided into disconnected nations, cultures and areas: they constantly underline that historical processes have linked different areas and people and produced a world of transcultural connections and global interdependencies. And like Said, Shamsie explicitly suggests that accounting for such connections might instigate a process of rethinking our behaviour towards others and our ways of acting in the world, on the basis of which a radically different modernity could emerge. An episode from her fourth novel Broken Verses (2005) provides a first impression of Shamsie’s constant efforts to connect ostensibly separate entities. Coming across the word ‘current’ in her dictionary, the novel’s protagonist summons up scattered pieces of information that feed into her personal under‐ standing of currents: <?page no="160"?> 170 This image used to evoke historical processes strongly reminds of the cyclones in Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy and The Hungry Tide, discussed in chapters 3.1.3.2 and 3.2.3, through which Ghosh rejects a national paradigm of history and culture in favour of a view that acknowledges the centrality of transcultural processes akin to Duara’s concept of ‘circulatory histories’. I knew the currents of the oceans included the Agulhas, the Hunboldt [sic] and the Benguela, I knew currents move in gyres, clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere. I knew the Poet had told me, years ago, that if we could only view the motion of currents as metaphors for the gyres of history - or the gyres of history as metaphors for the motion of currents - we’d know the absurdity of declaring the world is divided into East and West. I knew my mother’s voice at the beach, cautioning me against undercurrents. (BV 24) Right at the centre of her associations with the word are the meditations of ‘the Poet’, her mother’s former lover and her own cherished father-figure, killed some years previously under Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq for his dissident stance. By citing the Poet’s words, and in particular by embedding them in the protagonist’s thoughts about the literal meaning of currents, the passage conflates the circular movement of water with the ‘movements’ of history. In claiming that accepting currents as metaphors for the ‘gyres’ of history would dissolve the categories of East and West, the passage suggests to see history itself as a vortex that constantly sucks in places and people, shuffling them up and making any clear-cut boundaries between ostensibly different cultures contained in their areas impossible. 170 Understanding history as a process of transculturation, the Poet indicates, serves as a corrective to the geopolitics of division that colonialism installed. In expressing his hope for overcoming established divisions, the Poet sketches an agenda that is at the very heart of Shamsie’s narrative endeavours. As Bruce King rightly argues, across her different novels, “Shamsie is always a writer of political fiction” (149). Much of her political effort is directed against essentialised notions of national, cultural, ethnic, or religious difference that serve, as the protagonist of Kartography (2002) puts it, to reduce people “from individuals to members of some group that our group is at odds with” (Ka 223). In her more recent novels this theme mainly appears in the shape of a civilisational clash between ‘the Islam and the West’, which, in the aftermath of 9/ 11, has become a frequent trope of discourses surrounding the ‘War on Terror’ (see in particular Clements 5). In her essayistic piece Offence: The Muslim Case (2009), Shamsie explicitly rejects Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of incompatible civilisations. Shamsie maintains that 160 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="161"?> 171 Shamsie’s novels, Madeline Clements maintains, consistently subvert stereotypes (see 12) and “reconfigure Muslim being and belonging in today’s global world as complex, challenging, and always multidimensional” (15). in this world where the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, we have to understand that Muslims are not a monolith that can be placed on one side of a divide, lobbing grenades at the West but, rather, that the fault-lines within Islam are so deep that the illusion of a united ummah (community of the faithful) is no more than an illusion” (Offence 15, emphasis in original). Arguing vehemently against an “‘Islam vs the West’ prism” (ibid. 5), Shamsie points out that Muslims are anything but a homogenous group. This essay, like her oeuvre at large, 171 thus explicitly intervenes in a discourse that tends “to separate individuals of different faiths into opposing categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’; to position Muslims and Arabs as premodern or […] ‘uncultured’ in relation to the West” (Clements 5). Throughout her fictional and non-fictional texts, as the Poet suggests, revisiting history proves central to these kinds of intervention against essentialising difference and categorising people. Besides the us-versus-them dichotomies and confrontations between groups of people conceiving of one another as ‘Others’ that Shamsie criticises, how‐ ever, her novels also depict idealised versions of characters approaching each other without categorising their counterpart. Cara Cilano claims that Shamsie foregrounds a “‘human’ identity” (Contemporary Pakistani Fiction 1) in Burnt Shadows (2009) which functions as a distinct counter-concept to national divi‐ sions and conflicts. This reading overlaps with Madeline Clements’ finding that the protagonists of the various novels she analyses tend to discover “a shared humanity” (15) in their “encounters with cultural others” (ibid.). The fact that the novels thus position a conciliatory vision of people recognising their ‘shared humanity’ against histories of division is interesting in the context of the debate of the space reconciliation should have - or not have - within postcolonial politics. Describing efforts to overcome former enmities, reconciliation is a controversially discussed term in postcolonial theory (see Huggan “General Introduction” 15). Reconciliatory politics are often suspected of glossing over continuing inequalities and promoting politics of accommodation instead of change. Materialist critics in particular have thus bluntly rejected them as ‘anti-liberationist’ (see ibid. 16). However, reading Shamsie’s novels against the backdrop of Said’s work brings into focus how Shamsie’s optimistic vision, although reconciliation “seems, initially at least to be so profoundly at odds with the field’s revolutionary credentials” (ibid. 15), is in fact firmly rooted within a postcolonial agenda of working towards change. 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie 161 <?page no="162"?> 172 He declares, for instance “I have called what I try to do ‘humanism,’ a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics” (Orientalism, 25 years later n.p.). 173 For the contemporary critique of humanism in more general terms compare the discourse of critical posthumanism (see for instance Hayles), which focuses more In Culture and Imperialism, Said highlights a contradiction inherent in modern imperial histories. While imperialism “consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale” (407), it simultaneously established the notion of separate, disconnected cultures and identities, thus denying the actual transcultural connections it had itself engendered: “[t]hroughout the exchange between Europeans and their ‘others’ that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, each “quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident” (Said, Culture and Imperialism xxviii). This pattern, Said argues, runs through modern history, continuously lending force to violence on the grounds of separatist discourses (see ibid. xix, 43). Against this background, Said proposes a revisionist account of history which brings into focus the connections and interdependencies between ostensibly separate cultures and peoples and which, he argues, constitutes itself a form of de-colonising resistance: he maintains that resistance, “far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human history. It is particularly important to see how much this alternative reconception is based on breaking down the barriers between cultures” (ibid. 260). Stressing accordingly that his “principle aim is not to separate but to connect” (ibid. 15), Said develops the ‘contrapuntal’ approach which Culture and Imperialism applies both to literary texts and history. Reading contrapuntally offers a comparative perspective which allows to “think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant […] all of them co-existing and inter‐ acting with others” (ibid. 36). A contrapuntal reading of imperial histories thus ultimately shows “Western and non-Western experiences as belonging together” (ibid. 337). In so doing, it serves to complicate clear-cut divisions and cultural essentialisms on which nationalist as well as imperialist rhetoric builds as it brings into view a complex, global network of cause and effect. Said has repeatedly insisted on calling his own intellectual project ‘human‐ ist’. 172 In so doing, he evokes a concept which has, of course, been attacked on various grounds. From a postcolonial perspective, objections focus on humanism’s tendency to present European values as universal, as well as on the derogatory attitude towards non-Europeans which it oftentimes displayed and through which it effectively excluded them from the category of the human it posited (see Siddiqi 76-7; Bové 271). 173 Calling Said an “anti-humanist 162 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="163"?> extensively on revising the singular place that humanism attributes to the category of the human and seeks to overcome the dichotomy between the human and the nonhuman. 174 Matthew Abraham argues that Said’s insistence on the term ‘humanism’ is meant to position himself in opposition to “those who believe that human effort no longer matters in shaping the political” (5). He sees in Said’s work “[a] New Humanism, a humanism that is more than humanism. This sort of humanism recognizes the necessity of confronting the power and possibility of human choice, the embrace of human agency and alternative futures, and the human reconciliation made possible by that embrace” (6). 175 Huggan makes this point in engaging with Paul Bové’s enthusiastic reading of Culture and Imperialism. Bové argues that “this book is an effort at reconciliation between historical combatants who now must see their shared experiences, their common histories, who must, indeed, write and produce the stories of what they have shared and continue to share. It is also a book that enacts hope, not because the current situation of ethnic cleansing and deportations is a hopeful one; on the contrary, this is a book of humanist to the last” (85), Yumna Siddiqi shows, however, that Said hopes to take Western humanism beyond its limitations: in engaging with Frantz Fanon’s work, she argues, he seeks to develop a “new humanism” (Siddiqi 77) which is ”is truly universal” (ibid.) and “refashioned for truly liberatory ends” (ibid.). Rather than perpetuating colonial divisions and hierarchies, this new humanism works towards reconnecting what has been wrongly separated. In fact, Said describes humanism as “the only, and, I would go as far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history” (Orientalism xxii). 174 His contrapuntal approach illustrates in what ways his ‘humanist’ endeavours can serve to overcome such ‘inhuman’ practices. He explains that “[b]y looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories, I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility” (Culture and Imperialism 19). His revisionist approach to history thus constitutes itself an act of political intervention designed to work towards a future that moves beyond the history of conflict which has dominated global modernity since its inception; his intellectual project merges with an effort at reconciliation. True, as Huggan stresses, Said vehemently rejects reconciliation in the sense of accommodation or moral compromise (see “General Introduction” 14). Yet, reconciliation emerges as the “utopian horizon” (ibid) of Said’s “sustained imaginative effort - a self-consciously revisionist attempt to narrativize shared histories and experiences which, moving beyond naturalized histories of conflict and antagonism, position themselves strategically against the automatic and repeating gestures of a ‘politics of blame’” (ibid.). 175 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie 163 <?page no="164"?> hope precisely because hope is what is needed most and because Said’s understanding of shared experience calls forth narratives of common history that are themselves the best hope for overcoming the stories of conflict, separation, and radical purity or identity that horrify the world and form the morbid and deadly cultures of radical nationalism” (267) While agreeing with these general points, Huggan explicitly rejects Bové’s attempt to position Said’s humanist vision against a critical postcolonial stance. 176 Compare also Greg Forter, who maintains in the very title of his 2019 study that ‘critique and utopia’ constitute intertwined endeavours in a whole number of postcolonial historical novels. Shamsie’s novels share with Said not only his critique of imaginaries of separation, they are moreover committed to a similarly ‘self-consciously re‐ visionist’ engagement with history, with reconciliation arising as a future possibility towards which this engagement works. 176 Continuously asking their readers to acknowledge, along with the characters, that “the earth is in fact one world” (Culture and Imperialism 6), the novels attach a hopeful vision to such acknowledgments: they allow us to expect that these might lead people to form global solidarities which take the world beyond its history of exploitation and domination. In analysing Shamsie’s novels, critics have often pointed out that she develops a version of cosmopolitanism which, like Said’s humanism, takes the term beyond a problematic history (see e.g. Liao, Gamal, Clements; compare my discussion in chapter 2.1.2). While the idea of cosmopolitanism has often been invoked to justify (neo-)imperial projects of drawing from (Western) cultures alleged human universals, in her works, cosmopolitanism functions as a “liberating strategy” (Gamal 605) that seeks to take the world beyond colonial and imperial histories. The rejection of reified, divisive identity concepts and the global solidarities which, as the novels insist, may arise from an awareness of transcultural histories, are expressive of this cosmopolitan vision. In constantly foregrounding overlooked historical intersections and entanglements themselves, the novels thus work towards changing the way in which people world-wide approach one another from, as Ahmed Gamal suggests (see 602-3), an ‘imperial’ to a ‘cosmopolitan’ paradigm. If this is an agenda that connects all three of the novels discussed in the following chapters, they all pursue this agenda primarily through the language of romance. Besides remarking that Shamsie’s fiction is always political, Bruce King notes that, at the same time, “the kind of narrative she tells and the ways of telling are unlike those of most political novelists” (149). In fact, her novels not only consistently present visibly romanticised characters, love plots and adventurous journeys into the unknown, but these various facets of romance provide the tools for her critique of a world that ignores its connectivity in various respects. As the following readings will show, Shamsie, like Ghosh, repeatedly evokes 164 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="165"?> exotic romance to conjure up what she seeks to distance herself from: in disconnecting an anti-modern realm from the modern world, exotic romance serves as an extreme example of the epistemic pattern she targets. While her novels, particularly A God in Every Stone (2014), thus present and deconstruct exotic romance, they also develop a second version of romance. With this second version, Shamsie’s oeuvre, in contrast to Ghosh’s, displays an emphatically positive use of romance: transformed into what I call transcultural romance, or, in the case of Kartography, ‘romance of connections’, a - de-exoticised - romance sphere comes to embody Shamsie’s revisionist take on history. This take, along the lines of Edward Said, foregrounds shared histories and breaks down the barriers between cultures in pursuit of a hopeful vision for a different world. 4.1 Replacing Exotic Romance with Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) It is difficult to miss the central place that history holds in a A God in Every Stone (2014). Largely set in Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province of British India at the time, the novel is divided into two sections, each tied to a distinct historical event. While the plot of the first section unfolds against the backdrop of World War One, beginning in 1914 and leading up to 1916, section two re-opens in 1928 and ends with the events known as the Qissa Khwani bazaar massacre of 1930, a brutal British reaction against non-violent resistance to their rule. The plot is structured around three journeys of Englishwoman Vivian Spencer, two of which take her to Peshawar, where her life intersects with that of the two Peshawari brothers Qayyum and Najeeb Gul. With Vivian, Qayyum and Najeeb serving as alternating focal characters through the larger part of the novel, their experiences are at the centre of the plot; only at the very end do the perspectives the narration provides extend to encompass those of two Peshawari women, Zarina and her sister-in-law Diwa, who cross the other characters’ paths. However, A God in Every Stone not only provides a historical setting and connects its characters’ lives to large-scale historical events - Qayyum, for instance, fights for the British World War One troops and later joins the resistance movement -, but moreover stresses its protagonists’ own fascination with history. Vivian’s journeys are motivated by an archaeological quest: a first trip takes her to the site of Labraunda, an ancient Karian sanctuary, where she joins her father’s Armenian friend Tahsin Bey on an excavation. This sets her on the tracks of a mysterious silver circlet which Scylax, the legendary adventurer 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 165 <?page no="166"?> 177 In an essay where she reflects on photographs and historical testimony, Shamsie moreover juxtaposes the “official version of […] history” (“The Missing Picture” 10) with what she calls the “category of ‘missing pictures’ - those either lost or never taken to begin with” (ibid. 12). In fact, she connects her project in A God in Every Stone with the impulse to counterbalance the ‘missing picture’. Referring to the Qissa Khwani bazaar massacre, she points out that, as “photographs that show the massacre don’t exist” (ibid), she engaged on a literary project of creating the picture of those “whom the camera turned its lens away from” (ibid. 13). and explorer, is said to have received in recognition of his services to Emperor Darius in the 6 th century BC. Continuously referenced as a treasure to be found, the circlet and its history as it is gradually pieced together in the narrative figuratively embody an idea that is central to the entire novel: that of blurring the lines between and connecting across cultures. Indeed, it is no coincidence that their pursuit of the circlet is what connects the heterogenous group of characters in the first place. Vivian’s search for this circlet not only symbolises her lasting attachment to Tahsin - the two become lovers during their joint work -, but it also brings her to Peshawar and links her to the brothers. Najeeb, still a young boy at the time of Vivian’s first visit, seeks her out as a teacher and comes to share her fascination with history, particularly with Scylax and the circlet. Retrieving it becomes their joint project, and Najeeb actually succeeds in finding it, only to lose it again in the turmoil of the massacre, where it finally comes into Diwa’s possession. If, on several levels, the novel foregrounds an engagement with history, Shamsie appears particularly interested in the oversights of historiography. With its focus on 1930 Peshawar, A God in Every Stone subscribes to a familiar postcolonial project of telling what is omitted from official colonial records, the urgency of which Shamsie explicitly underlines in the novel’s postscript. There, she compares the official death toll of the massacre - thirty, according to the British report - with the number of 123 victims counted in the report of the Indian National Congress. 177 While A God In Every Stone thus challenges the distortions of a colonial historiographic record, it simultaneously targets the omissions of a patriarchal record through its focus on and play with female perspectives. Being concerned with ‘setting the record straight’, the novel yet shows a trait which, at first glance, seems to sit uneasily with its serious political commitment: it continuously draws on familiar romance tropes and depicts visibly romanticised relations between characters. However, far from running counter to its political agenda, this use of romance serves precisely what I identify as the novel’s overarching project, alluded to through the circlet and its history: that of dissolving imaginaries of division, in particular the ideas of East and West as separate spheres. In so doing, it ultimately works 166 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="167"?> 178 See, for instance, Saree Makdisi (125). towards a more ‘human’ world, towards “Freedom from Domination in the Future”, as Said evocatively calls his last chapter of Culture and Imperialism. As the following reading shows, by both deconstructing exotic romance and building up transcultural romance, A God in Every Stone engages with romance in various ways, thereby tackling its project from two opposite directions simultaneously. 4.1.1 Deconstructing Exotic Romance - Rejecting Imaginaries of Division The short passage set in Labraunda, which serves as a preamble for Vivian’s two subsequent journeys, evokes the familiar motif of a distant land of anti-modern romance. As the site of an excavation, Labraunda is, for Vivian, exclusively defined by its belonging to the past. The first glance that the novel offers of its protagonist suggestively shows her amidst archaeological remnants: “Vivian Rose Spencer was almost running now, up the mountainside, along the ancient paving stones of the Sacred Way, accompanied by an orchestra of birds, spring water, cicadas and the encounter of breeze and olive trees.” (GES 9) A character who literally walks across ancient ruins is, of course, a typically romantic image 178 and in these opening pages, Shamsie continuously alludes to the notion of a romanticised space defined by its opposition to the modern world. The landscape with ruins offers an idealised locus amoenus. The elements of this landscape - cicadas, olive trees, the ‘Sacred Way’ unmistakeably distance the place from the profane normality of Vivian’s home. The language in this section of the novel underlines Vivian’s enchantment: the tone takes on an openly poetic quality in its metaphorical expressions. The “orchestra of birds” complements “a maze of broken columns taller than the tallest of men” (GES 10) while the sky provides “a rosy-fingered dawn” (GES 11). If we follow Vivian’s emotions and perceptions, her journey to Labraunda seems to have taken her to an antimodern land of exceptional charms, just like the one that numerous protagonists of exotic romances experienced before her. For Scott’s Waverley, for instance, the ‘anti-modern’ Scottish Highlands with their “wild beauty” (Waverley 117) provide an unspoilt, primordial “Eden in the wilderness” (ibid.), a scenario that notably resembles Vivian’s sensation at Labraunda. When for Vivian the space ultimately provides the attractions of romantic love, embodied by her Armenian 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 167 <?page no="168"?> 179 Vivian initially finds Tahsin attractive in his very difference to her (significantly, he is “the Turk” to her in these first pages of the novel) and thus turns him into the exotic Other that romance protagonists conventionally encounter and fall for during their travels (compare, for instance, Waverley’s feelings for Flora, quoted in chapter 2.2.1 of this study). However, in the course of their acquaintance and Vivian’s development, he loses his exotic status as she ceases to think of him as a representative of a nation or culture different from her own (see my argument in chapter 4.1.2). co-archaeologist Tahsin, Labraunda has turned into the prototypical land of romance. 179 Vivian’s trip from London to Labraunda anticipates her two later journeys to Peshawar, which are at the centre of the novel. With these journeys to the colonial realm, A God in Every Stone again evokes the motif of a journey into the land of anti-modern romance, but this time it explicitly extends the anti-modern topos to encompass the living population of Vivian’s destination. However, in tying this romance imaginary firmly to Vivian’s perspective, Shamsie, like Ghosh, conjures up a distinct pattern of thinking only to reject it. By having Vivian recreate the familiar tropes of exotic romance, according to which modern protagonists set off on a journey which takes them “ever backwards in time” (Makdisi 81) towards a land of anti-modern romance where they encounter essentialised ‘Others’ defined by their difference to ‘us’, Shamsie draws attention to the imaginary of a world divided into disconnected parts. Far from subscribing to Vivian’s construction of Peshawar and its people, however, the novel continuously undermines it, revealing it as an imaginary produced by - and consolidating - modern imperial culture. Building on John McClure, who calls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “a kind of meta-romance: a quest for the very conditions that make romance possible” (14), A God in Every Stone can be understood as a meta-romance in a more deconstructionist sense. It constantly interrogates how and to what effect a space and people come to be depicted as disconnected from the modern world in the first place and seeks to draw attention to the connections thus occluded. 4.1.1.1 A World ‘Apart’: an Imperial Fantasy From the moment that she finds herself in British India, Vivian happily turns the people she meets into living tableaus of former times. On first seeing Qayyum, she rejoices at having found a personification of antique figures familiar from the tales she encountered during her studies: Qayyum, “lying down with his hands behind his head” (GES 70) appears to her as 168 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="169"?> 180 See my discussion in chapter 2. Fabian coined this term in his discussion of the anthropological discourse in order to capture the “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (31, emphasis in original). 181 Bongie’s exoticism, produced by a yearning for “another space, the space of an Other, outside or beyond the confines of a ‘civilization’” (4-5) that embodies modernity is by no means restricted to the 19 th century. Marianna Torgovnick argues that the idea [a] statue of Herakles brought to life - broad-shouldered and crinkle-haired, every bone chiselled. More like a Greek hero of antiquity than any Greek she’d ever seen. But then the man woke up and turned his head towards her and - God forgive her - her heart had been struck with a cold joy: this was the Monophthalmus, the singleeyed man of India of whom Scylax had written. (GES 71) While Vivian, in a striking instance of the ‘denial of coevalness’ that Johannes Fabian described, 180 associates Qayyum with an entirely different epoch, the passage suggests that she stubbornly overlooks all evidence of Qayyum being in fact from the very world and time she inhabits. It is precisely his missing eye, which she takes as a sign of his belonging to a different time, that unmistakable situates Qayyum within her own present: as we know from the sections told through his perspective, he lost his eye in the battle of Ypres and is currently on his way back home from the war. The way Vivian stubbornly dissociates Qayyum from modernity corresponds to her approach towards Peshawar at large. Shamsie underlines repeatedly how Vivian, even after returning to London, defends her vision of Peshawar as a bubble exempt from modern history: Unchanging Peshawar. That had been Viv’s mantra all through the previous years in London as Mary and her parents frowned at newspapers carrying stories of Gandhi and Civil Disobedience; whatever might be going on in the rest of India the Frontier was a place apart, Viv insisted. (GES 220; my emphasis) Ostensibly oblivious to and untouched by everything that happens in the world around it, Peshawar becomes Vivian’s perpetually anti-modern ‘place apart’. However, A God in Every Stone constantly undermines Vivian’s construction of Peshawar by tracing it back to a mechanism similar to the one that Chris Bongie described in his study on the exoticist imagination. Bongie suggests that exoticism constitutes a way of coping with modern life perceived as a “story of loss” (5). With modern imperialism seeking to globalise one single way of life, he argues, a feeling of nostalgia arises, a yearning for the ostensibly lost difference. Exoticism, in creating ‘Others’ disconnected from modernity, provides an imaginary escape from the latter. 181 Along similar lines, the novel 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 169 <?page no="170"?> of the ‘primitive’, in contrasting with everything ascribed to modern life, functions as a utopian antithesis to the latter (see 8-9) and points out that, throughout the modern age, the ’primitive’ has served as a foil for all kinds of projections. Moreover, Graham Huggan’s discussion of the alterity industry identifies ‘the exotic’ as a highly sought after commodity today: postcolonial authors are expected to cater to exoticist assumptions, creating an ostensibly ‘authentic’ impression of cultural difference (The Postcolonial Exotic) and, in so doing, reassure the reader that spaces outside the grid of a an allegedly homogenous modern civilisation still exist. Shamsie’s critical take on the exoticist imagination thus targets a highly contemporary issue (see also Clements 127). indicates that Vivian’s anti-modern Peshawar is the product of her desire to escape a modern world from which there is no escaping. Tellingly, her first journey to Peshawar takes place after she witnesses the horrors of World War One, the emblematic manifestation of the destructive powers unleashed in the modern age, and suffers a mental breakdown while nursing injured soldiers who have returned from the war. The journey to Peshawar represents a desperately needed chance to escape this modernity: when Tahsin sends her an enthusiastic letter about a new excavation site on the outskirts of Peshawar, Vivian takes the opportunity to leave behind her job as a nurse and gladly sets off for Peshawar. In telling her mother that she wants to go there because “there’s more past than present there” (GES 42), she gives away her hope of finding not only a welcome diversion from the war in the world of archaeology, but of encountering a place that appears entirely disconnected from modernity; an anti-modern refuge. In order to have Peshawar fulfil this function, the novel indicates, she then freely moves between viewing the city as ‘stuck’ in Greek antiquity and insisting on the essentially anti-modern, exotic difference of Peshawari culture. In fact, in presenting Vivian’s perception of the foreign space, A God in Every Stone continuously marks it as a product of Vivian’s imagination. Regarding Vivian’s reflections on Peshawar’s inner city, for instance, the novel suggests that she, to conjure up her anti-modern refuge, wilfully deceives herself into seeing a ‘place apart’ that corresponds to ready-made notions of exotic difference. Divided by walls from the surrounding quarters where the British colonisers live, the inner city belongs to the local population. Seeing Kabuli Gate, the entrance into the ‘Walled City’, as “a doorway into a world entirely unlike the one she was leaving behind” (GES 260), Vivian constructs this place as an enclave of Otherness in a modern world. In this context, the novel makes visible that Vivian’s perception is guided by her ideas of what an exotic world should be like: But then the Victoria drove though the arched gateway of the Walled City and Viv rose out of her seat, exclaiming loudly at the glorious colour and noise and exactly-what- 170 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="171"?> 182 This reliance on preconceived ideas is characteristic of the exoticist imagination. As Torgovnick points out, “[t]o study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original metaphoric status to control perceptions of the primitive - images and ideas that I call tropes.” (8) Her description of the primitive imagination thus visibly corresponds to Shamsie’s reflection on Western representations of ostensibly exotic cultural difference in the novel. you-want-it-to-be-ness of it all. Birds beating their wings against dome-shaped cages, children sucking on molasses pebbles, sugar-cane sellers slicing whistling sounds out of the air to attract buyers, water-carriers with spines curved beneath animal-skin sacks filled with liquid. Pyramids of peaches and plums in wicker baskets, carpets draped over balconies and branches, clothes lines strung between top-floor windows with men’s clothes hanging from them (Native men of all ages could be seen craning their necks in the hope some female garment might have accidentally or - why not believe this? - deliberately been placed in view). There weren’t in fact any men craning their necks but she would say there were when she and Tahsin Bey found themselves in each other’s company again. (GES 78-9) Vivian conjures up an idealised version of cultural alterity which fulfils her hope for an alternative to the modern world. Not only is there no sign of modern industry or warfare, but this is also a world abundant with orientalist clichés. The descriptions of the noisy and chaotic marketplace, of distinctly ‘oriental’ goods and of an atmosphere loaded with sexual tension create a domesticated exotic space that moves within the parameters of Western preconceptions. 182 The passage leaves no doubt that Vivian is not at all interested in any attempt at objective description; on the contrary, she seeks the “exactly-what-you-wantit-to-be-ness” of the anti-modern exotic. This becomes most obvious in her acknowledgement that she will turn Peshawar into the prototypical Oriental place of “sexual promise” (Teo 5) she wants it to be, even if the evidence is missing. Moreover, the passage does not merely draw attention to Vivian’s biased perception; it invites readers to view this perception as part of a distinctly colonial mindset: the fact that Vivian is driving through the Walled City in a Victoria, a vehicle whose very name evokes the Queen who was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, subtly situates Vivian’s views within the colonial project. Interestingly, a later passage that describes Vivian’s radically altered views on the place (see further on in this chapter) has her walking through the city, a contrast that further underlines the significance of her first chosen mode of transportation. If Vivian’s exotic imagination thus creates ‘Others’ according to a set of fixed (colonial) tropes, A God in Every Stone points to the role of literature in forming 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 171 <?page no="172"?> 183 Kipling’s Kim (1901), for instance, is one of the novels that John McClure analyses under the heading of the late imperial romance. He shows how texts like Kim insist on depicting the non-Western realm as a space that preserves its charms and difference from the modern world, defending it as an area where romantic alterity is still possible (see 24-5). In Burnt Shadows, Shamsie explicitly makes an intertextual reference to Kim, see chapter 4.2.1. these tropes as well as the idea of a divided world in the first place. In fact, it references not just any literature, but historical and imperial romances in particular; the very patterns the novel replicates itself. When colonial officer Remmick cautions Vivian not to venture into the dangerous mountain area of the North-West frontier, warning her of frequent battles there, this provokes a perplexingly inadequate reaction: [Remmick’s] words had struck at something inside her. Kipling’s Peshawar! The North-West Frontier! Where even the finest hotel in town was a whitewashed barracks, a reminder that the world of guns lurked beneath every veneer. It was immensely comforting to know oneself in a world in which battles followed the template laid down in books of adventure and valour. The words ‘Khyber Pass’ sat on her tongue, fizzing with romance. (GES 84) Given her previous experience with war, it seems surprising that Vivian should rejoice at the “world of guns” that the North-West-Frontier promises. Yet, the passage emphasises that her reading of Rudyard Kipling’s fiction, which ties the North-West frontier firmly to romance, has shaped her idea of the region. Imperial literature, and imperial romances in particular, have suggested Peshawar, or rather its surroundings, as a space of romantic escape from the ‘modern’. 183 Relying on Kipling’s account of the place, she has found a way to distance the battles she encounters in the outer regions of Peshawar from the ‘modern’ horrors she wants to escape: romance battles signify a form of harmless heroic adventure in an exotic world rather than the mass-destruction connected to imperial warfare. In disconnecting their non-Western settings from modern realities, fictions of exotic romance, Shamsie suggests, have created the notion of a place and people ‘apart’. While, in the examples described so far, Vivian’s insistence on Peshawar’s exotic alterity allows her to project her desires onto the place and the people living there, making them appear equally attractive to her, this sensation is in fact paired with a very different one. In depicting Vivian’s attitude towards Peshawar, the novel underlines how easily the notion of a fascinating antimodern ‘Other’ can tip into its negative mirror image: that of an uncivilised barbarian whose alterity needs to be abolished. Right from the start, Vivian’s 172 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="173"?> 184 Johannes Fabian draws attention to this mechanism: he maintains that anthropologists “spatialized Time” (15, emphasis in original), suggesting that “relationships between parts of the world […] can be understood as temporal relations” (11-2). Fabian captures this imaginary in the metaphor of a “stream of Time” (17), on which all living societies are placed according to their degree of ‘development’, “some upstream, others downstream” (ibid.). This allowed to divide the world into a Western sphere associated with “progress, development, modernity” (144) and a non-Western ‘rest’, linked with the former’s “negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition” (ibid.). As such, this imagination of time helped to justify colonialism; as Fabian puts it: “[i]n short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics” (144, emphasis in original). 185 In being, as such, exempt from the ‘global stream of time’ that Fabian describes, they function, Makdisi argues, as a “disruption of the spatio-temporal logic of moderniza‐ tion” (13). view on the ‘place apart’ wavers between fascination with its anti-modern dif‐ ference and contempt for its lack of modernity. Having just arrived, for instance, Vivian remembers her former teacher’s insistence that “it was important to watch one’s workmen on digs in Foreign Parts because they could teach one how to understand man as he once was - how he functioned, how his brain worked in past times” (GES 81). Alluding to a racialised theory of evolution, which claims that ostensibly ‘primitive’ peoples represent an earlier, and as such, inferior, stage in the history of human development, the novel illustrates how exempting a nexus of space and people from modernity can serve to create a hierarchical relation that justifies domination. 184 Indeed, running through the conversation of the English protagonists is the notorious claim of the ‘civilising mission’: when Remmick maintains, “we are here to civilise” (GES 144) and calls Vivian’s project to teach Najeeb her “civilising mission” (GES 90), the readiness with which she accepts Remmick’s term for herself demonstrates how quickly the ‘difference’ of an otherwise charming exoticism can take on the meaning of ‘backward barbarity’. The novel thus emphasises that Vivian’s imaginary Peshawar arises both out of a desire to escape modernity and serves to justify a - quintessentially modern - imperial project. In so doing, A God in Every Stone points to a paradox regarding the romantic imaginary of an anti-modern Other that reminds of Saree Makdisi’s discussion of Romantic Imperialism. By positioning itself in opposition to a culture of modernisation, Makdisi argues, romanticism created primarily anti-modern ‘Others’ who were defined by a ‘timeless’ alterity (see Makdisi 13). 185 However, at the same time, romanticism stands at the beginning of a shift to a new discourse of Otherness built on time: reconfigured as ‘pre-modern’, ‘Others’ now come to be defined by their alleged backwardness. According to Makdisi, this shift marks the beginning of what Said described as ‘modern Orientalism’: a 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 173 <?page no="174"?> 186 Said argues that the Orient has always constituted a space where the West located its ‘Other’. Orientalism as a style of domination, however, emerged only in the late 18 th century (see Orientalism 3). This modern Orientalism ultimately “destroyed the Orient’s distance, its cloistered intimacy away from the West, its perdurable exoticism” (ibid. 92, emphasis in original), turning it into something ‘knowable’. Makdisi now maintains that this shift must be understood foremost in terms of a newly arising temporal imagination: modern Orientalism created a disenchanted version of the ‘Other’ by simply associating the latter’s difference with an earlier stage of development (see 116). 187 John McClure’s reading of imperial romances likewise testifies to this process. He stresses that the division into the modern and the anti-modern spheres that character‐ ises the genre, while created out of a desire to resist the spread of an ostensibly singular modern culture through imperialism, ultimately serves to justify an imperial agenda (see 4-5). version of ‘Otherness’ which explicitly serves to justify (neo-)colonial politics of oppressing the ostensibly inferior people (see Makdisi 116). 186 Makdisi’s discussion hence shows that what arose out of an attempt to resist modernity subsequently transformed in a way in which it then, paradoxically, promoted imperial endeavours in the name of modernity. 187 Vivian’s Janus-faced take on Peshawar that turns the city simultaneously into a place of yearning and holds it in contempt illustrates precisely these contradictory impulses. It is in the arena of gender that Vivian’s delight with the anti-modern most consistently tips into the assumption of a lack - and it is also here that the novel most visibly rejects this assumption as a fantasy serving imperial domination. The notion of an overly sexualised East that charms her, for instance, simulta‐ neously causes her to fear that Peshawari men, who she considers to be prone to violence, oppress and violate their women at will. Not only that, Vivian also puts any ‘progressive’ attitudes beyond Peshawar’s society. Writing to Najeeb about changes in women’s rights in England, the introduction of women candidates in parliament, she insists that this must “all seem[] very odd” (GES 180) to him, expressing her certainty that a Peshawari local could not possibly have heard of feminism. The same goes for Peshawar’s women: guided by her convictions of an essentially anti-modern culture, Vivian constructs them as passive victims. Seeing a woman in a Burqa, she reflects, “[t]he figure in white hurried away, before remembering that she was a woman of Peshawar and nothing in her behaviour should call attention to itself ” (GES 148). According to Vivian, the woman she watches plays along in her own oppression. Throughout, Vivian regards the issue of female emancipation as the dividing line between her own ‘modern’ world and Peshawar’s ostensibly backward society. Peshawar as a ‘place apart’ now appears in need of Western guidance. The novel itself, however, entirely rejects her reasoning. It constantly compli‐ cates the clear-cut dichotomy of a feminist England where women lead liberated 174 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="175"?> lives and an inherently oppressive Peshawar. The self-assuredly feminist stance that Vivian displays in the passages quoted above in fact contrasts with her earlier readiness to accept the role of the submissive daughter in need of male guidance. In the first half of the novel, her father’s opinion settles all political matters: his negative judgement on the Suffragette movement “set[s] her right on the issue” (GES 79), and her entire behaviour seems guided by an effort to “please papa” (GES 78). What is more, in Tahsin, she chooses her father’s friend as her husband-to-be; a man senior to her in age who serves as a second fatherfigure, thus promising the intellectual lead of an older and more experienced man. Ironically, it is her very submission to male authority that causes her lover’s premature death later in the novel: after she unwittingly discloses information about Tahsin to an agent of the British War Office, this information falls into the wrong hands and Tahsin gets shot. Towards the end of the novel, however, she has emancipated herself from male authority figures and becomes increasingly sceptical of her father’s views, thinking condescendingly about “[d]ear Papa” (GES 220), who clings to an outdated worldview. Significantly, the novel pins this change in her down to a distinct moment. On her first journey to Peshawar, Vivian figuratively turns into a ‘liberated’ woman: having set off on her journey, she changes her looks in a distinct way. Her “V-shaped neckline which was an inch beneath the base of her throat, the short skirt, the flesh-coloured stockings, and most of all the short ‘Castle Bob’ hairstyle which Viv had daringly acquired during the seavoyage” (GES 70) make her a perfect likeness of the iconic ‘new Woman’, an emblematic challenge to traditional gender roles in the West. In connecting this semantically loaded transformation to the journey, the novel indicates that Vivian actually needs to leave her home behind in order to be able to emancipate herself from her father. In so doing, it undermines the idea of a somewhat inherently liberating Western world, showing instead that the latter is itself firmly tied to patriarchal structures. And just as it challenges Vivian’s construction of the West as a space of gender equality, the novel eventually also complicates her ideas of an East entirely devoid of feminist ideas (see my discussion in chapter 4.1.1.3). Challenging the clear-cut dichotomy that Vivian creates is, however, not the only way in which the novel rejects the idea of Peshawar as an oppressively patriarchal place in need of Western guidance. It also stresses that imperialism, far from being the solution, is at least partly to blame for the oppressions that the women of Peshawar face. Feminist critics underline not only how deeply 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 175 <?page no="176"?> 188 See for instance Anne McClintock, who argues that “[i]mperialism cannot be fully understood without a theory of gender power” (6). imperial power structures are intertwined with those of gender, 188 they also stress that the interplay of global and local power structures has produced “multiple, overlapping and discreet oppressions” (Grewal and Kaplan 17). These affect different women’s lives with varying intensity. In a similar vein, A God in Every Stone suggests that Vivian’s insistence on Peshawar being an exotic place disconnected from the world at large renders her unable to see how gender power is in fact negotiated in ways that constantly intersect with the imperial power configuration that connects her hometown London with Peshawar. While its protagonist is oblivious to these intersections, the novel constantly draws attention to them, putting them centre-stage through its play with perspectives. As mentioned, in large parts of the narrative, the only perspectives the text provides are those of Vivian, Qayyum and Najeeb; Peshwari women are strikingly absent as focal characters. As the reader realises with hindsight, Diwa and Zarina have repeatedly appeared throughout the plot. However, the narrative has deliberately kept them in the anonymous space of unnamed female characters - figures in white - whose fates and views of the world it omits. When the final pages of the novel suddenly grant a space to their perspectives, this unexpected turn brings the previous absence of these perspectives to the fore. Thus highlighted, the fact that it is the colonised women’s voices that are silenced throughout larger parts of the novel while both the Englishwoman and the colonised men get a voice draws attention to the overlapping oppressions that these women face. In claiming that gendered oppressions merely arise out of the anti-modern place apart, Vivian replicates a narrative which glosses over complex global relations and justifies colonial domination. It is hence through its take on gender, in particular, that the novel juxtaposes Vivian’s attempt to disconnect Peshawar from the modern world with its own insistence on a connected world. 4.1.1.2 From Seeing a Connected World to Becoming Involved A God in Every Stone does not merely undermine Vivian’s perception of Peshawar and thus deconstruct the imaginary of a place disconnected from the modern world; it also emphasises a process of formation during which she overcomes her exotic imagination. Reminiscent of a typical Bildungsroman, the novel has her departure from home trigger a process of intellectual growth. This process includes her emancipation from male authority figures described above. 176 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="177"?> 189 It is no coincidence that Vivian’s awakening resistance to patriarchal structures and her overcoming of exoticising, colonialist visions go hand in hand: as I will show later on, this resistance ultimately develops into a distinct version of feminism which the novel promotes as a means for anti-colonial resistance. However, as a recurring motif surrounding eyes and vision indicates, what A God in Every Stone is most interested in is Vivian’s gradually awakening ability to see a connected world and the effect it ascribes to this facet of its protagonist’s formation. 189 From the start, the novel foregrounds a problem concerning Vivian’s vision, cautioning the reader against taking her perceptions at face value: during the excavations at Labraunda, for instance, she reflects that “[s]he had yet to become accustomed to the light of this part of the world - brilliant without being harsh, it made her feel she’d spent her whole life with gauze over her eyes” (GES 10). This, as well as her attempt to “brush some irritation out of her eye” (GES 11), draws attention to some obstacle impeding her vision. Another passage then subtly connects Vivian’s initial failure to ‘see properly’ with the inability to see connections between parts of the globe which the modern world has declared to be disconnected. Having just arrived in British India, Vivian looks out of the window of her train to find that her view on the landscape is impeded by the sun which, blinding her, causes her to squeeze her eyes. As a result, what Vivian sees is only a distorted “negative” of her surroundings: Brightness scythed through the air into Viv’s eyes as the train trundled out of the fortified entrance to the bridge; a dark imprint of river, hills, fort behind squeezed eyelids. What the negative couldn’t reveal was this: two rivers running parallel to each other in one body of water - the blue of melted snow running down from the Himalayas, the brown of silt and turbulence racing across from Kabul. Progressing side by side until they passed beneath the Campbellpur Fort and merged. (GES 65) Her vision is reduced to the outlines of the most striking landmarks. The details of the landscape, however, are lost on her. Where she sees only an ‘imprint of river’, there are in fact two different rivers, coming from geographically distant regions, which merge into one. In particular with the Poet’s metaphor in mind, the movements of water, of different streams running into each other and becoming one appear as a distinct counter-image to a world divided into compartmentalised areas. The fact that the two regions from which the rivers come constitute the two different nation-states of Nepal and Afghanistan today render this counter-image all the more powerful. Vivian’s oversight concerning this instance of two apparently separate entities merging is telling: it 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 177 <?page no="178"?> 190 In fact, the novel develops the motif of vision not only in relation to Vivian; it also features prominently in Qayyum’s story: having initially internalised an imperial division according to which England is necessarily better, he as well undergoes a process of ‘cleansing’ his vision. The loss of his eye and its replacement by a glass-eye, which literally requires him to readjust his sight, symbolically underline this process. corresponds to her limited view on the world according to which spaces, people and cultures correspond to neatly ordered and divided categories. Towards the end of the novel, Shamsie explicitly ties Vivian’s optical failures to her exoticised rendition of Peshawar as a ‘place apart’: A hat of melons, a bouquet of peacocks. In another time she would have viewed these sights with delight at their Oriental colour. But the melon-seller was standing beneath the burnt remnants of a Union Jack; the peacock carrier was walking towards Kabuli Gate through which the armoured cars and troops had rushed in. This was the world she was now in. Or perhaps she’s been here all along, unseeing. (GES 263; my emphasis) Walking through Peshawar, Vivian admits that she might have actively closed her eyes from everything that did not fit her exotic ‘template’. With hindsight, she attributes her own delight at the ‘Oriental’ sight, the ‘exactly-what-youwant-it-to-be-ness of it all’, to a state of being ‘unseeing’. Now, however, she acknowledges the evidence which confirm that Peshawar belongs to the modern world: the remnants of the Union Jack, pointing both to the system of colonial domination and to the resistance this provokes, and the armoured cars which fail to correspond to the version of battles ‘laid down in books of adventure and valour’. Her former idea of Peshawar being a ‘place apart’ now appears as a product of her blindness; being finally able to transcend the framework of exotic romance, she has learnt to see. 190 Building further on the motif of vision, the novel suggests that along with Vivian’s newly acquired ability to see a connected world comes the ability to see something else: the eyes of the Buddha. Statues of the Buddha and references to his eyes are ubiquitous in A God in Every Stone. A passage describing a statue once prominently placed in Peshawar’s surroundings, for instance, mentions the Buddha’s “serene eyes observing everything” (GES 81). Each of the characters comes to pay attention to these eyes at different moments in the narrative and the novel in fact builds up a pattern through which the characters’ acknowledgement of these eyes indicates that they have developed a distinct attitude: A God in Every Stone repeatedly refers to the story of king Asoka, who “ruled with blood and fire” (GES 110) until he suddenly became affected by the suffering he witnessed and turned into a follower of the Buddha, henceforth “inscribing stones with his belief in peace” (ibid.). In this context, it associates 178 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="179"?> 191 Madeline Clements likewise draws on Gilroy in her reading of South Asian Muslim Fiction, which includes an interpretation of Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Moreover, her reference to Nederveen Pieterse’s Ethnicities and Global Multiculture helps to contextualise the effect that A God in Every Stone ascribes to Buddhism: she argues that Pieterse “defines cosmopolitanism ‘broadly, as perspectives and sensibilities that stress human bonds and interconnectedness across cultural and political boundaries’, and identifies these as common to various religions”(13) including Buddhism. Buddhism with a stance similar to what Paul Gilroy described as “planetary humanism” (After Empire 4). ‘Planetary humanism’, Gilroy maintains, is based on “a translocate commitment to the alleviation of suffering” (ibid. 89). 191 A character’s readiness to look the Buddha in the eye and to return his gaze comes to coincide with this character’s development of such a stance. For Qayyum, for instance, looking in the Buddha’s eyes causes an experience reminiscent of Atoska’s: seeing “all of Vipers there in his eyes, every dead soldier” (GES 139), he decides to join the peaceful resistance movement and to work towards a world where scenes like the one he remembers can be avoided. Against this background, the fact that the novel correlates Vivian’s developing ability to ‘see’ a connected world with her ability to ‘see’ the Buddha’s eyes - both being similarly expressed through the motif of vision - is significant. A God in Every Stone suggests that the new, connected vision that Vivian has acquired causes her to develop a concern for others beyond the constraints of national or cultural borders. In so doing, it brings into view the hope that it attaches to the efforts towards creating an awareness of the world’s interconnectedness which drive its own narrative. As Vivian’s process of formation thus both draws attention to the novel’s deconstruction of the imaginary of a divided world and comments on the positive social effects that this deconstruction might have, it becomes a plot element through which the novel self-reflexively describes its own project. A God in Every Stone draws attention to the varying speed with which the characters note the eyes of the Buddha. Najeeb is captivated by them right on first seeing a statue of the latter as a boy: “He had spotted, and been struck by, the faint, unexpected pupil in the eye of one of the tall Buddhas - one round of the Museum and he’d already worked out that was unusual. For a long time he remained motionless, studying it” (GES 85-6). Najeeb’s immediate response to the eyes of the Buddha is no coincidence: Najeeb, whom Qayyum describes as “a boy who learned without being told to always walk on the left-hand side of a man who had lost his right eye” (GES 231), appears as a character with a natural gift for empathy and a deeply rooted desire to prevent the suffering of everyone he faces. The fact that he befriends the stranger Vivian right away displays his disregard for national and cultural divisions as well as for 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 179 <?page no="180"?> 192 Interestingly, with Qayyum and Najeeb, the novel in fact conflates its emphasis on a concern for others that transcends national or cultural borders with one that transcends species boundaries: Najeeb’s care for his fellow humans mirrors the attention he pays to a dead rabbit, to which the novel returns repeatedly (GES 50), and Qayyum’s decision to renounce violence goes along with his attempt, described in minute detail, to rescue a fly that is about to drown in an inkwell (GES 111). If the stance the novel associates with the Buddha reverberates with humanist ideas in the sense of Gilroy or Said and Shamsie repeatedly highlights how he reminds the characters of an essential “humanity” (GES 226), the novel emphasises that the kind of ‘humanism’ it promotes does by no means encompass a disregard for other species. colonial hierarchies and suggests that he thinks in terms of the larger “‘human’ identity” (Contemporary Pakistani Fiction 1) which Cara Cilano sees reflected in Shamsie’s works. 192 While Najeeb notices the Buddha’s eyes on first sight, Vivian, theoretically familiar with the statue and its eyes long since, only comes to properly ‘see’ them towards the very end of the novel: Only in the deep-set eyes of the starving Buddha did something else emerge, a humanity beyond all other humanities. How much younger she had been fifteen years earlier when the centaurs and Tritons and fish-tailed bulls had arrested her more than this face of suffering, these fragile ribs encasing the strongest of all hearts. (GES 226) In contrast to Najeeb, Vivian had to slowly ‘learn’ a state of mind in which she becomes affected by the suffering of those whom she does not immediately regard as part of her in-group. The fact that she is now susceptible to the Buddha’s outlook on the world indicates that, along with recognising the world as a connected whole, she has learned to look at those around her not as ‘Others’ disconnected from her own world, but as fellow humans whose suffering must be prevented. Indeed, Vivian’s new ‘commitment to the alleviation of suffering’ across the borders of cultures, areas and nations manifests itself in a specific version of feminist engagement that she ultimately develops. In the light of such intersecting oppressions as described, feminists have often called for a project that transcends borders and forms transnational alliances which challenge gendered and imperial oppressions alike. Chandra Mohanty, for instance, suggests that feminists all over the world should connect based on “a notion of feminist solidarity” (Feminism without Borders 3) and commit to a decolonizing agenda. Together with other advocates of ‘transnational feminism’, Mohanty distances herself from a version of global feminism which promotes liberation through Westernisation. This is a version which, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan point out, “[c]onventionally […] has stood for a kind of Western cultural imperialism” (17). As such a model makes us blind to the ways in which 180 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="181"?> 193 Leading “an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)”, this figure appears diametrically opposed to Western women who, by contrast, appear “as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions” (Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes” 337). global power configurations play into the very oppressions which women face and in fact perpetuates what it seeks to eliminate, alternative ways of getting globally engaged need to be found. These must both do justice to the variety of female living conditions and avoid replicating structures of oppression. As the following subchapter shows in detail, in the course of her process of formation, Vivian alters her feminist stance in a way that converts it precisely from an imperialist global feminism to an anti-imperial solidarity that showcases her desire to support women’s struggles regardless of national belonging. By acknowledging the world’s interconnectedness, she has realised that tackling the ostensibly local problem of gendered oppression requires joint effort towards translocal change. Through discussing the ways in which Vivian’s feminist ideas develop along with her awakening awareness of the world’s connectivity, the novel thus suggests that overcoming exotic romance is itself a prerequisite for any attempt to fight the various structures of oppression that surface in the modern world. 4.1.1.3 Rethinking Global Feminism: Towards a Transcultural Solidarity As previously mentioned, while seeing Peshawar as an anti-modern place apart, Vivian thinks of Peshawar’s women as submissive beings who have no will of their own. Her views thus correspond to the trope that constructs ‘third world women’ as victims famously criticised by Chandra Mohanty. 193 A passage that depicts Vivian’s thoughts when forced to wear a burqa in order to travel during her first visit foregrounds her initial approach towards feminism: The rage she felt on behalf of the women of the Peshawar Valley as she sweltered beneath the voluminous burqa dispelled any ambivalence she might have started to feel about Indian demands for self-rule. All these Indians talking about political changes when really what this country desperately needed was social change. Why should they be allowed independence when they only wanted it for half the population? And, what’s more, her back ached. (GES 218; my emphasis) 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 181 <?page no="182"?> 194 An interview which Shamsie gave on A God in Every Stone underlines the criticism entailed in this passage. She reports that an episode from the journals of Rosita Forbes, an early-20 th -century female travel writer, served as an inspiration for the novel. Shamsie comments on “an encounter she [Forbes] has with a woman in a burqa where they both stop and turn towards each other. And in contrast to most contemporary people who will see a woman in a burqa and just say oh oppressed terrible blah blah blah, you have Resita Forbes looking at her and thinking, ‘I wonder whether it amused her to be a secret in the public world of Peshawar. I wonder if she looked at me with disdain for the freedoms she had no interest in.’ And there is a sort of thoughtfulness in what, you know, I am not assuming what I want is what she wants but I am not assuming she is completely other. There is a kind of what’s going on there…” (“In Conversation“). This effort to get closer to the person one meets, to try and allow for different wishes and to find out about them, is precisely what Vivian is missing in the passage above, which otherwise mirrors the encounter Shamsie talks about. Vivian’s approach is problematic in more than one way. In her usual manner she reduces Peshawar’s women to victims unable to feel or let alone voice rage themselves - an idea which turns out entirely inadequate as soon as Diwa’s and Zarina’s perspectives are added. Talking for ‘them’, she is sure to know what they need: 194 being rescued by the modern West. Yet, in so doing, she not only fails to enquire what it is that the women she observes want, but also, in insisting that the Indian society’s lack of gender equality makes its people unfit for independence, in fact adds to these women’s oppression. As her suggestive phrasing of ‘allowing’ independence demonstrates, her feminism merges with a colonial project. However, Vivian’s feminist positions gradually change. As she comes to see Peshawar as part of the modern world, she realises that the political context in which she moves in fact intersects with structures of gendered oppression. Towards the end of the novel, once again veiled in a burqa, she notices that, in “making her just another local woman, the burqa took away her very English right to be eccentric” (GES 261). She now perceives herself what the novel hinted at all along; that her own position within the colonial matrix of power previously served to empower her. In her discussion of Kartography, Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows, Madeline Clements argues that in all three novels, Shamsie’s “narrative outcomes are increasingly contingent on her female protagonists’ realisation that positions of isolation and introspection are both unsuitable and unethical in an interconnected globe: they must interest themselves as a matter of urgency in the worlds that exist beyond their windows” (124). In Vivian’s case, acknowledging the interconnectedness of the globe triggers a similar realisation. She now attempts to support the women she meets - more specifically Zarina - in their own struggles, an attempt which takes her far away from her former imperialism, causing her in fact to adopt a distinctly anti-colonial position. 182 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="183"?> 195 Ruvani Ranasinha shows that Shamsie continuously positions herself against the view that non-Western or, rather, Muslim cultures are per se antithetical to feminism. She underlines that Shamsie’s novels explicitly gesture towards feminist traditions within Islam. Indeed, in Broken Verses, for instance, the protagonist’s mother is part of the women’s movements that formed in the 1980s in opposition to the suppressive legislation that “the beards” introduced under General Zia in the name of Islam. In this context, she goes “to Egypt to work with women’s groups there and discover the feminist traditions within Islam which would allow her to battle the hard-liners on their own turf ” (BV 93-4). Ranasinha claims that particularly the “reminder of the pre-colonial emancipated position of women questions the linear narrative of imperial progress that says the British were responsible for emancipation of Indian women” (210). Zarina is engaged in an anti-colonial feminist project of her own. When Zarina and Diwa finally get a voice, the novel has Diwa suggestively compare them to Malala of Maiwand. As Pei-Chen Liao notes, [b]eing dubbed ‘Malala of Maiwand,’ both Zarina and Diwa remind the reader of the Pakistani feminist, Malala Yousafzai, who, being a Pashtun, is also named after Malala of Maiwand, a national folk hero of Afghanistan who rallied local fighters against the British troops at the 1880 Battle of Maiwand. Even though she was shot in the head by the Taliban, Malala Yousafzai has never stopped speaking out against the Taliban and insists on women’s rights to education, for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. (290) Evoking two female heroines at once, the name ‘Malala of Maiwand’ shapes our ideas of Zarina and Diwa in important ways. It associates them both with a tradition of feminism within Islam, thus challenging the view that the latter is per se incompatible with feminism, 195 and with a 19 th -century figure of anticolonial resistance. Zarina in particular fully lives up to the expectations of this nickname. After Diwa gets accidentally killed in the massacre upon meeting Najeeb and trying to help him recover the circlet he has found and lost again, Zarina sets out to find Diwa’s body. The novel repeatedly underlines that Diwa was “shot down by the English” and “disposed of ” by the all-male resistant movement (GES 303-4). Against this backdrop, retrieving her body is an act of combined anti-colonial and feminist resistance. And in fact, although she does not find the body, the last pages of the novel grant Zarina a feminist gesture par excellence. Having to content herself with the circlet and a blood-stained cloth, the objects Diwa carried on her, Zarina buries these relicts and decides to call her unborn daughter Diwa in order to preserve “the story of Diwa” (GES 303). She thus sets out to form a matriarchal line in opposition to the combined injustices of Diwa’s death. 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 183 <?page no="184"?> Vivian gradually turns into an accomplice of Zarina’s project. She comes across Zarina during the latter’s search and ultimately decides to align herself with her, passing on information she has gained about the body’s whereabouts. Vivian appears at Zarina’s doorstep after ignoring “the voice in her head” (GES 262) which tells her to “[s]tay out of it” (ibid.), followed by “this thought, these people are not your people” (ibid.). Overcoming a dichotomy between ‘your people and my people’, she develops a stance of feminist solidarity which literally merges with an act of anti-colonial resistance. In stressing a short but intense moment of connection between the two women, the novel underlines the bond that has formed: In the doorway she [Vivian] turns, holds up her hand to shoulder height, fingers together, palm facing outwards. Zarina doesn’t know what the gesture means, and yet she finds herself replicating it. The Englishwoman ducks her head in acknowledge‐ ment, covers herself in a burqa, and walks out into the street.” (GES 302) With the intuitive greeting that passes between the two women, the novel offers an idealised, hopeful moment of transcultural interaction. Occurring in the novel’s closing chapters, this small gesture of connecting encompasses its final hope for an alliance which may help to bring into being a future that has moved beyond oppressive structures. A God in Every Stone thus engages in a project of deconstructing exotic romance and, by self-referentially commenting on this project, makes it visible as an attempt to work towards a different world by tearing down imaginaries of division. Moving beyond these imaginaries, it suggests, may cause people to give up a disinterest in the suffering of those they previously regarded as disconnected from their own world and sphere of influence. As I will argue in the following, however, deconstructing exotic romance is only one out of two romance-related ways through which the novel pursues its agenda. Shamsie also positively recuperates romance in a different form for her project: as transcul‐ tural romance, it serves to figuratively bring into view the connections that exotic romance denies. Transcultural romance comes to embody an alternative way of conceptualising the social world, which refuses to separate people along impenetrable lines and to regard them as representatives of distinct - cultural or national, modern or anti-modern - types. 184 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="185"?> 4.1.2 Transcultural Romance and Shamsie’s Revisionist History The encounter between Vivian and Zarina described above visibly bridges what Vivian, in line with the imperialist culture of her time, has declared to be worlds ‘apart’. In fact, this is only one out of many encounters Shamsie inscribes into the plot in which people connect across cultural divides in an idealised manner, holding the ‘humanity’ of which the Buddha has reminded them higher than political divisions. Vivian’s romance with Tahsin Bey, although cut short by Tahsin’s death, hovers over the entire narrative and constitutes a prime example of this motif. Initially, Vivian thinks of Tahsin primarily as someone who represents an exciting alternative to her home and the internally focalised narrative simply refers to him as “the Turk” (GES 12). Her attraction to him thus appears as a typical instance of exotic romance. Over time, however, their relationship turns into something very different. Tellingly, the narrative voice stops referring to Tahsin as ‘the Turk’ - not least because Vivian comes to realise that, identifying with the Armenian side of his ancestry, Tahsin complicates her idea of clear-cut, unambiguous national identities. Ultimately, she cease to think of him in terms of his difference and entirely gives up her previous attempts at categorisation; Vivian has come to be attracted by the man Tahsin rather than by a mere representative of exotic Otherness. The motif of transcultural romance is by no means restricted to the lovers. Remmick’s talk of a ‘civilising mission’ notwithstanding, Vivian’s and Najeeb’s friendship likewise takes them beyond cultural and imperial divisions, making them partners in their shared search for the circlet and connecting them through a bond of mutual care and affection. Qayyum, too, experiences moments of human bonding across established cultural separations while serving in the British troops. Thinking back to the battle of Ypres, he reflects, he had never felt closer to the English than on that day. Even now, he knew hatred could never truly take root in his breast so long as he remembered Captain Dalmohy shot again and again, getting back to his feet each time as though his body were an irrelevance; and Captain Christopher, dying with Urdu words of gratitude on his lips for the sepoys who had rushed to help him. (GES 234) The proximity between the soldiers may be initiated by the experience of facing a common enemy and thus spring from a context that is entirely opposed to a peaceful vision. Nevertheless, what sticks with Qayyum is his memory of the two Captains as brave and vulnerable humans. Moreover, Captain Christopher’s gesture of switching to the language of the sepoys around him explicitly testifies to the transcultural camaraderie that has come into being in the exceptional 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 185 <?page no="186"?> 196 In Burnt Shadows, the politics of language constitute a central component of the novel’s transcultural romance, see my discussion in chapter 4.2.1. space of the battlefield. 196 His memory provides Qayyum with a lasting proof that transcending imperial divisions is possible. A God in Every Stone thus repeatedly describes idealised - romanticised - transcultural encounters between its characters, which not only take the idea of connected histories to an extreme, but also testify to a cosmopolitan transcendence of particularistic, exclusivist categorisations. These encounters notably contrast with the social mode the novel ascribes to its imperial setting at large, which appears tied to imaginaries of divisions, rigid separations and the tendency to de-humanise the alleged Other. If readers wonder at the ways in which its presentation of the dominant imperial social paradigm and the personal interactions it imagines diverge, the novel once again introduces an element into the narrative through which it self-reflexively comments on its own approach: through the motif of historiography and the story surrounding Scylax and the circlet, it draws attention to its own insistence on transcultural romance and the function it fulfils. With its characters’ search for the circlet and their attempts to trace its movement through ancient history, A God in Every Stone includes a second historical setting which it not only deals with itself, but also has its characters constantly engage with. In the context of these ancient histories and the imperial expansions that characterise them, the novel alludes to a similar rhetoric of declaring some of the world’s regions a ‘place apart’ and some of its cultures a hermetically sealed off entity of difference as emphasised in its modern-day setting. The novel frames its 20 th -century main plot with two short passages set in the 6 th century BC, which narrate episodes from Scylax’ life, written, as it turns out, by Najeeb. In these, Scylax reflects on the reputation of “his homeland of Caria, where men are barbarians but the fruit is sweet. So the Persians say” (GES 7). In demonstrating the Persian attitude on the subjected Carians and hence conveying the imperial power’s viewpoint, this discourse unmistakeably replicates the simultaneous attractions and dismissal of the ‘Othered’ land that characterises Vivian’s exoticist imagination. Against this background, the novel associates Najeeb with an approach to history which notably mirrors its own. It foregrounds his creative attempt to reconstruct stories that dwell on a transcultural exchange which accompanies the imperial histories he studies - an attempt which explicitly includes imagining romanticised transcultural encounters into being. By suggesting furthermore that this imagination is itself an act of transhistorical anti-colonial resistance, the novel hints at the 186 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="187"?> 197 Antique empires functioned of course on very different principles than the modern ones with their foundation in nationalism and national competition. Yet, the novel - again creatively - opens up a transhistorical context of cultural Othering and the possibility of overcoming this Othering that connects imperial histories of different times. agenda that drives its own engagement with modern history. 197 In line with Said’s credo that a revisionist account of shared, interconnected histories can help to overcome us-versus-them dichotomies, A God in Every Stone insists on depicting transcultural encounters as the hidden underside of imperial histories. Its revisionist history is designed to challenge the idea that something like an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ defined by their distinct, clear-cut cultural character exists and thus to dissolve the very foundations on which imperialism and any form of national, cultural or ethnic particularism build. The novel’s transcultural romance hence constitutes the kind of “self-consciously revisionist attempt to narrativize shared histories and experiences which [] mov[e] beyond naturalized histories of conflict and antagonism”” (Huggan, “General Introduction” 14) that Said suggests as a tool for moving beyond a violently divided and confrontational world. Scylax’ circlet is at the very centre of Najeeb’s creative approach to the past. In attempting to reconstruct its history, Najeeb produces an account of how it could have possibly ended up in Peshawar, which foregrounds the mixing of ostensibly separate areas and people as a side effect of expansionist histories: From Caria, Alexander took the Circlet with him to India, and gave it as a gift to Nearchus after the latter followed Scylax’ route down the Indus. After Alexander’s death, in the wars fought between his generals, Nearchus found himself on the opposite side to Seleucus Nicator who, following his victory over Nearchus’ forces at Gaza, claimed the Circlet for himself. A few years later, when Seleucus lost control over most of Alexander’s territory in India, he was forced into a treaty with the king Sandracottas who demanded the Circlet as part of the treaty terms. Sandracottas - or Chandragupta Maurya - was, as I’m sure you know, the grandfather of the great Buddhist king Asoka. When Asoka converted to Buddhism he had stupas built all across the length and breadth of his kingdom; each Buddhist stupa had a treasury, and the energy of the stupa was derived from the objects of this treasury. Is it unreasonably to think that that he might have sent the Circlet from the palace treasury to a stupa treasury? And there it stayed through the centuries as Buddhism flourished in Gandhara and beyond - until the White Huns under Mihirakula overran Gandhara, burning stupas, pillaging their treasuries. Hearing of the approach of the Huns, a bhikkuni (that’s a Buddhist nun) called Maya escaped from a stupa complex, carrying the treasure of the great Asoka, determined to save it from the marauders. She travelled 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 187 <?page no="188"?> 198 See for instance Frye (Anatomy of Criticism 367). to the Great Stupa of Kanishka, and there she met the Chinese traveller Sung-Yun. When he refused to take the Circlet to safety, she buried it beneath the Great White Statue of Shahji-ki-Dheri, trusting that the soil of that sacred place would be an even safer hiding place than its treasury if ever the Huns should attack it. And watching her was a young boy who took the story with him and kept it alive in the world until, centuries later, it reached Kallistos - but that is a story for another time. What is history without imagination, as Herodotus teaches us (GES 183-4). Although he deals with expansionist histories, he is interested not in mili‐ tary conflicts but in a developing network of transcultural connections and exchange. Handed down through history, the circlet becomes a material token of this exchange. By closing his tale with a reference to Herodotus, Najeeb not only explicitly defends the role of imagination in historiography, but he also alludes to a political agenda behind his account. In discussing the role of Herodotus in the novel, Maggie Bowers quotes Ann Ward’s observation that “Herodotus makes the earth one in his writing by eliminating distinctions between continents” while seeking to maintain “the plurality and diversity among humanity” (qt. in Bowers 187). Bowers goes on: “at the end of The Histories Herodotus imagines an alternative to the imperial history he has just narrated. He narrates a tale in which Persian King Cyrus opts for freedom in his own lands rather than the conquest of new lands. As Ward points out, Herodotus changes history to suit his desire” (187-8). In referring to Herodotus, Najeeb thus defends a way of creatively engaging with history in pursuing one’s visions. Seen in this light, his own attempt to reconstruct a different side of ancient histories, one which underlines processes of transculturation which conflict with an imperialist insistence on essentialised difference, reveals his desire for a world that overcomes divisions as well as oppressions implemented on their basis. Capitalising on the idealising, wish-fulfilling element of romance that studies of the latter tend to highlight, 198 Najeeb then inscribes his desires into history via romance. Najeeb embellishes antique history with a number of romanticised transcultural encounters which mirror those that the novel interweaves into its modern-day plot. In an episode during Vivian’s second journey to Peshawar, she returns to the museum that she used to visit with Najeeb when he was a boy. There, Najeeb is now in charge of the exhibition. Walking through the museum she notices how Najeeb arranged his exhibits: But her favourite thing of all was Najeeb’s pairing of two abraded heads of almost identical size, one Greek in features, one Indian, separated by three centuries or 188 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="189"?> more. He had laid them down in profile so they looked each other in the eye, their mouths inches apart each other. Was this an expression of his own proclivities or an acknowledgement of the passionate intimacy of Pathan men, sexual or otherwise? (GES 239) Commenting on this passage, Bowers argues that “Najeeb orders the items in his own museum according to what he was taught by Vivian. […] Najeeb thus creates an abstracted form of colonial east/ west relations, focused upon one another, at the expense of all other connections. The attention drawn to the colonial relationship diverts the colonized’s attention away from finding allies with other colonized peoples or with other nations within their own region” (191-2). While she is certainly right in drawing attention to the ‘East’/ ‘West’ framework the passage evoked, I would argue that Najeeb’s arrangement is concerned precisely with overcoming a colonial ordering of society: far from being what Vivian taught him, at least in her role as a colonial ‘civiliser’, the relation between these two figures is one of genuine interest in each other; they are facing one another. The close proximity between these two figures is not one normally expected of ruler and ruled, but, as Vivian correctly notes, of intimacy. Yet, as so often, Vivian’s failure to think outside the categories that imperialism has imposed on her causes her to partly misread what she sees. She thus mistakes this proximity as a sign of the Other’s ‘abnormal’ sexuality instead of acknowledging that Najeeb is strategically re-imagining history in an act of resistance meant to undermine colonial divisions. Najeeb’s romanticised engagement with history culminates in the final passage of the novel, which provides another fragment of Scylax’ story, narrated by Najeeb. He imagines Atossa, Darius’ widow, travelling to Caspatyrus in order to look for Scylax. As the novel repeatedly points out, Scylax, despite being the ‘entrusted’ of Darius, took side with ‘his countrymen’ in the Carian rebellion against Persia. In Najeeb’s tale, Atossa thus seeks to confront Scylax with his treason. However, at the same time, Najeeb playfully suggests a romantic attachment which, political divisions notwithstanding, connects Atossa and Scylax. The Queen honours me. All this travel, for me? I’ve always wanted to see the Indus. Now there is peace in our kingdom, and my son is on the throne, it seemed the right time. You are incidental. He smiles at the lie. She sent her best men to capture him, with instructions that he must be kept alive and brought to her. But when the message arrived to say he had been found in Caspatyrus and was too sick to survive the journey to Persepolis it was very clear what she had to do. (GES 306) 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 189 <?page no="190"?> Atossa’s readiness to travel a long distance suggest a longing and a concern for Scylax that belies her affected indifference. Moreover, the exchange between the two resembles a lovers’ teasing, an impression which strengthens at the end of Najeeb’s piece: “She is startled by the sound of her own laughter. He stands and holds his hand out to her. The Circlet may be lost but they are not so very old yet - and the world is still full of discoveries.” (GES 307) In absentia, the circlet fulfils its role one last time: it brings together those who previously found themselves on opposite sides of the imperial divide. With Najeeb’s signature, the novel then confirms his project of visibly romanticising history to be a distinctly political act: the passage is signed, “Written by Najeeb Gul, Archaeologist for V.R. Spencer, Archaeologist (Qayyum wants me to add, ‘and campaigner for the freedom from Empire for the peoples of India and Britain’.)” (GES 308, emphasis in original) While Najeeb’s dedication to Vivian already connects his tale with a symbolic gesture of friendship across imperial divisions, Qayyum’s addition explicitly associates the romanticised histories with an agenda of moving beyond confrontational politics and structures of domination and oppression. A God in Every Stone indicates that this agenda drives not only Najeeb’s revisionist historiography, but also its very own engagement with history. The notable parallels between Najeeb’s writing and the romanticised transcultural encounters that A God in Every Stone writes into its modern historical narrative suggests linking the character’s project with that of the novel at large. Moreover, the novel demonstrates that it goes along with Najeeb’s creative rewriting of ancient histories: by having Najeeb eventually find the circlet, A God in Every Stone in fact confirms his version of its history. Within the storyworld, his improbable tale of the circlet’s journey through cultures and ages indeed turns out to be correct; the novel visibly aligns itself with his revisionist account. Through the choice of her title, Shamsie further connects the novel on the whole with Najeeb’s emphasis on retrieving transcultural histories. The title’s phrase echoes through a passage of the novel: Once there was the Great Stupa, seven hundred feet tall. From every point in the Peshawar Valley men and women could look up from the dust of their days to see the pillar ringed with gold which arose from its uppermost canopy of pearls. Surrounding the Stupa, a vast monastery complex. Everywhere a traveller looked there was the Buddha, carved over and over into and around the countryside, in an age when the people of this region had the vision to find the god in every stone. His serene eyes observing everything - here carved of white stone, and there of a reddish-blue which mysteriously turned golden when the sun touched it, and elsewhere the grey of Gandhara. (GES 81) 190 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="191"?> 199 Compare also David Waterman, who describes Pakistan’s attempts to come to terms with the fact that “the Gandhara was a cradle of Buddhism” (Where Worlds Collide 8). This insight has the effect of “encouraging - even obliging - Pakistanis to acknowledge their pre-Islamic past” (ibid. 8), which, in turn, has important implications for Pakistan’s negotiation of its national identity. Digging up a Buddhist past makes it impossible to construct a narrative of an exclusively Muslim cultural realm and fosters open and multi-layered conceptions of national identity. The repeated destructions of Buddhist statues in Pakistan, which “have to do with reappropriating national space within hegemonic religious discourses” (Sarkar 188) make reminders of the nation’s culturally diverse history appear all the more urgent. See also my discussion of Kartography in chapter 4.2.2. Through its archaeological remains, the Buddha who once towered over Pesha‐ war valley testifies to the travelling of cultures throughout history. Having literally inscribed himself into the landscape, he symbolises the transcultural and syncretic history of the region. In fact, like Najeeb’s tale, the novel depicts this transcultural history with the effect of complicating us-versus-them imaginaries which define its own moment of inception. In reminding of a Buddhist tradition, the novel notably combats a tendency in present-day Pakistan to construct a culturally homogenous national identity that denies the highly heterogeneous history of the nation and excludes large parts of the population, which is in reality characterised by its plurality. 199 If the novel thus strategically revisits global histories in a way that dissolves the basis on which one group positions itself against its alleged Other, the ro‐ manticised transcultural connections between characters constitute the central tool as well as the utopian horizon of this endeavour. They are themselves playfully presented as living proofs of shared histories and, in this role, dissolve the very idea of an Other in the first place. At the same time, however, the participants of these encounters become a model for the kind of social interactions the novel hopes to foster when they continuously posit the ‘human’ identity that critics of Shamsie’s work have remarked on against a notion of insuperable cultural difference. Shamsie’s transcultural romance thus ultimately attempts a performative act: by creatively re-writing history, it seeks to create the very kind of interactions it imagines. What I have described regarding Shamsie’s engagement with history inter‐ sects in interesting ways with Hamish Dalley’s discussion of The Postcolonial Historical Novel (2014). Dalley analyses a number of texts whose reworking of the past, he suggests, “encode[s] alternative notions of community and gesture[s] towards futures that exceed the contemporary status quo” (30). To create this effect, he proposes, they creatively re-engage with the representa‐ tional strategies through which the realist historical novel traditionally relates 4.1 From Exotic to Transcultural Romance: A God in Every Stone (2014) 191 <?page no="192"?> 200 He draws on the research of critics such as Katie Trumpener and Franco Moretti. Moretti, for instance, points out that “[s]tate building requires streamlining, historical novels tell us: the blotting out of regional borders (Scott, Balzac, Pushkin), and the submission of the Gothic strongholds of old feudal privilege” (40). Trumpener argues that the historical novel “posits the moment of nationalism as a further stage of historical development: only through the forcible, often violent, entry into history does the feudal folk community become a nation, and only through dislocation and collective suffering is a new national identity forged” (142). 201 Dalley’s argumentation starts from Ian Baucom, who discusses typification as a dehumanising, reifying process (compare my discussion in chapter 2.2.2). 202 Dalley argues that they build on the “disruptive counter-logic of singularity” (200) that inevitably accompanies any ‘realist’ depiction based on representative characters. He suggests that there is no such representative character that merely represents; instead, he/ she is “best understood as entailing a dialectic between typification and singularity, producing a two-sided process of signification that oscillates between exemplifying collectivities and affirming the irreducibility of the unique human subject” (16, emphasis in original). its fictional narrative to history. Dalley points out that the emergence of the realist historical novel is firmly tied to the moment of national formation. This is mirrored in the form itself: being based on providing representational characters - characters who stand in for what these novels depict as (culturally) different types (see Dalley 15, 22) -, its depiction of history embodies itself romantic concepts of national character and cultural difference (see 24). The historical novel hence propagates a “normative sociological imaginary” (ibid. 32) that subdivides humanity into separate, delineable groups. Moreover, it tends to promote a process of national unification in which the modern nation comes into being through extinguishing types of anti-modern ‘Otherness’. 200 In so doing, it encourages a stance of being indifferent to the suffering of those declared different to ‘us’ (see ibid. 23). This, Dalley maintains, brings the destructive potential inherent in all attempts at ‘typification’ to the fore: the tendency to deny (some) humans their status as suffering individuals and to reduce them instead to representatives of an abstract Other who can be sacrificed where necessary. 201 Postcolonial authors who re-invoke the genre tradition, Dalley argues, turn its ideological implications on its head. While themselves apparently providing representative characters in line with this tradition, they simultaneously manage to take a stance against the very idea of typification itself. They constantly undermine the characters’ mere function as representatives, and, in doing so, insist on the “irreducibility of the unique human subject” (Dalley 16) to a category. 202 In effect, instead of justifying, along the lines of the traditional historical novel, a differentiation into the nation - 192 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="193"?> us - and its Other - them - they produce a contrary ‘cosmopolitan sympathy’ with those who have suffered from this differentiation throughout history. This ‘normative sociological imaginary’ which divides humanity into sepa‐ rate, demarcated groups and the indifference to the suffering of the alleged Others that Dalley describes is also what Shamsie turns against with her two forms of romance. Her deconstruction of exotic romance foregrounds, to quote the Poet of Broken Verses once more, “the absurdity of declaring the world is divided into East and West” (24), into spheres of (modern and anti-modern) cultural difference. In so doing, it attacks the very ideological framework on which typification is based. At the same time, the transcultural romance that Shamsie builds up embodies an alternative paradigm of conceptualising the social world without dividing humans into separate groups. As such, it corresponds to the disruptions which postcolonial authors, according to Dalley, cause to the typification inherent to the realist historical novel. If one considers that romance and realist writing tend to be constructed as opposite pairs, the intersections between my own and Dalley’s analyses stick out. With transcultural romance - or the romance of connections - such a disruption to an (ostensibly) ‘realist’ typification in fact gains an independent and visibly marked textual presence of its own in Shamsie’s novels. In the two novels discussed in the following chapter, the deconstructive side of Shamsie’s engagement with romance recedes to the background: here, Shamsie almost entirely concentrates on the second, positive use of romance as a self-referentially marked alternative to the idea of a world divided into homogenous, separate communities. 4.2 Visions for a World at Peace: The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) With its journey into a land of ‘anti-modern difference’, A God in Every Stone alludes to established plot trajectories of exotic romance in the tradition of Scott, Kipling, Haggard and others. In so doing, it evokes imaginaries of difference, which it then deconstructs and replaces with its alternative version of transcultural histories. Although Burnt Shadows (2009) explicitly hints at the imperial romance tradition in some episodes, the plots of Burnt Shadows and Kartography (2002) do not follow the ‘template’ of exotic romance in similar ways. However, like A God in Every Stone, these novels depict worlds that insist on separating and categorising people: both present violent histories connected to attempts to dominate - and a refusal to sympathise with - those understood as one’s national, cultural, or ethnic Other. Burnt Shadows and Kartography, 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 193 <?page no="194"?> too, inscribe into these histories a number of romanticised characters and character relations whose romance ultimately serves to challenge the imagined divisions that structure the worlds the novels present. In both novels, this challenge is connected to the hope of moving beyond the conflicts they depict. Where A God in Every Stone uses exotic romance to indicate what exactly it positions its transcultural romance against, Burnt Shadows and Kartography employ a different strategy to make visible that their romance constitutes an alternative to imaginaries of division: they develop plots which literally stage a struggle between romance and the logic of classifying, ‘typifying’, humans (Burnt Shadows) or of disconnecting parts of the world that belong together (Kartography). In both cases, a happy romance ending which the novels withhold appears dependent on people’s readiness to reconceptualise the social world. 4.2.1 Against Classifications: Romance in Burnt Shadows Burnt Shadows follows the life of its protagonist Hiroko Tanaka, criss-crossing the globe along the trajectory of her changing places of residence. In so doing, it both revisits some of the worst atrocities of recent modern history - atrocities which often directly impinge on the protagonist’s life - and develops a romantic tale of idealised transcultural friendship and love relations. The novel begins in World War Two Japan, Nagasaki, where Hiroko falls in love with Konrad Weiss, a German expatriate to whom she gets engaged to be married. However, just moments after their engagement, the nuclear bomb ‘Fat Man’, detonated by the American Air Force, hits Konrad and annihilates him entirely. Hiroko remains without family, friends or home, radiation-poisoned and with birdshaped burns on her back, the imprint of a Kimono she was wearing at the time of the detonation carved into her flesh. She sets off to meet Konrad’s half-sister Elizabeth, daughter of one German and one English parent, who lives in Delhi with her husband James Burton, reluctantly leading the life of a “Colonial Wife” (BS 35, emphasis in original). In Delhi, Hiroko not only forms a close friendship with Elizabeth, which extends, over the course of the novel, into a network of connections between the two women’s families, but she also marries Sajjad Ashraf, the Burtons’ Indian employee and a former friend of Konrad’s. After the end of the Raj, Hiroko and Sajjad, caught up in the turmoil of Partition, are forced to give up residence in Delhi and settle in Karachi. There, years later - Hiroko and Sajjad have a teenage son by now - history again catches up with them. Amidst the US proxy wars fought against Soviet influence in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Sajjad, mistaken for a CIA agent, gets shot at the Karachi docks. In the last 194 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="195"?> 203 Compare also Shamsie’s argumentation in Offence. part of the novel, Hiroko has resettled once again. Fearing a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, she has followed Elizabeth to New York, where the latter moved to after divorcing her husband. There, Hiroko witnesses the devastating effects of 9/ 11 and the climate of suspicion developing in its aftermath, a climate to which her son Raza falls victim as he - the novel’s prologue suggests - is innocently arrested as a terrorist. With Hiroko witnessing World War Two, British colonial rule in India, the bloody history of Partition on the Indian subcontinent, the Cold War, American neo-imperial politics and 9/ 11 and its aftermath, her life story points to the violence produced throughout modern history by attempts to dominate or, at worst, extinguish others. Although the novel introduces a variety of different settings and conflicts, they all illustrate endeavours to create borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a process the novel traces in each of its settings: in the context of World War Two Japan, Burnt Shadows draws attention to the population’s growing hostility towards everything and everyone ‘foreign’, in the course of which Hiroko loses her job as a foreign language teacher because there is “no need […] to learn a foreign language anyway” (BS 14). In the colonial setting of the Raj, James Burton’s behaviour in particular illustrates the ways in which the English colonisers, desiring to keep the local population subordinate, insist on being separate from them (BS 82). In depicting the partition riots, the novel underlines how “under the acid question: Are you for India or Pakistan? ” (BS 105), any pre-existing connections between people dissolve. In the context of the 9/ 11 attacks as well as the American anti-Muslim reaction, finally, the novel stresses a blind targeting of a generalised Other. While the novel thus registers the long line of violence committed in a world that insists on dividing people into separate groups throughout Hiroko’s story, Burnt Shadows challenges such divisions. Its focus on history foregrounds a complex network of cause and effect that has led to occurrences like 9/ 11 (see Kiczkowski 126), which go beyond simplistic explanations of a ‘clash’ of incompatible cultures: 203 asked about the wide chronological sweep of the novel, Shamsie commented, I was aware that conversation about 9/ 11 tended to treat it as though that date was the Ground Zero of history, as if it occurred in a vacuum, and as someone who grew up in Pakistan in the 1980s, during the U.S.-Pakistan involvement in Afghanistan and the political support given to jihad as an anti-Soviet tool, I couldn’t possibly see things that way. There were earlier stories feeding into the story of 9/ 11, so there’s no possibility 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 195 <?page no="196"?> I would write a novel that looks at that one date as if history proceeds from its but doesn’t precede it. (“A Legacy of Violence“ 158, emphasis in original) Burnt Shadows indeed develops a world whose areas and historical events are bound up with one another. The story of Hiroko’s life in fact points both to the recurring and interconnected instances of violence in modern history, and to the intermixing of cultures and entanglement of spaces in a globalised world. Against this background, the novel exceedingly and self-referentially romanticises Hiroko and the transcultural character relations that surround her, offering them as a vision of what a world could be like whose inhabitants stop clinging to notions of essentialised cultural and national identities which posit a unified ‘us’ against a hostile ‘them’. 4.2.1.1 The ‘Ghost of Konrad Weiss’: Transcultural Romance and Cosmopolitan Lifeworlds Like A God in Every Stone, Burnt Shadows provides a character whose approach to history comments on the novel’s own project. In the short section in Nagasaki, with which the novel begins, it introduces Hiroko’s first fiancé Konrad Weiss, who passionately researches “stories of Nagasaki’s turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan world, unique in Japan - its English-language newspapers, its International Club, its liaisons and intermarriages between European men and Japanese women” (BS 12). Right from the start, Burnt Shadows establishes its understanding of a ‘cosmopolitan world’ as one in which national categories and borders cease to play a role in determining human affection and bonding. This emphasis on a cosmopolitan Nagasaki appears all the more remarkable against the backdrop of the isolationism which famously governed Japan’s policies for more than two centuries up until the 1850s. Greg Forter points out that this cosmopolitan Nagasaki is in fact a byproduct of imperial histories, first brought into existence through the movement of people towards Nagasaki which started after the Portuguese erected a trading post in the 16 th century (see Critique and Utopia 211). Even during the isolationist period, Nagasaki remained Japan’s point of contact with the Western world, its port being the only one allowed to remain open for trade. Not only does Konrad’s research thus testify to processes of relocation and transculturation in world history, but the novel also attributes a distinct purpose to his research: just as Najeeb’s creative rewriting of history merges with his hope for a decolonised future, Konrad’s research is linked to his hopeful insistence on finding a world different from the one he inhabits. Coming to Nagasaki after he has left Nazi Germany and a continent fractured by nationalism and war behind, what he seeks to escape from more than anything 196 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="197"?> is a painful process of being reduced to a representative of a - hostile - nation within Europe. He tells Hiroko that his half-sister Elizabeth exclusively stresses the English side of her heritage and is notably ashamed of “what she refers to as her ‘German connections’. That’s what my father and I are reduced to” (BS 20). Nagasaki becomes his refuge from such reductions: Hiroko is sure that “Konrad had been searching through Nagasaki for a world in which they [he and Elizabeth] didn’t have to be strangers, a world in which he could have arrived in Delhi to see the sister he was finally old enough to know as an equal and not found that his Germanness, her Englishness, were all that mattered“ (BS 69). His interest in Nagasaki’s past is thus based on his desire to evade the habit of categorising and separating that he, along the novel’s general lines, identifies as characteristic of nationalist politics. It is the very same impetus that drives the novel’s own romanticised engagement with history. In an echo of Konrad’s vision, the novel then creates romanticised personal stories that challenge the exclusivist and clear-cut political identities on which the world it depicts relies. The short Nagasaki section itself introduces not only Konrad’s research and the hopes he attaches to it, but also brings his vision to life via Hiroko and Konrad’s relationship. They look forward to precisely the kind of ‘intermarriage[ ] between European men and Japanese women’ Konrad finds in history, and their love relation functions without ‘his Germanness’, her being Japanese, dividing them in the least. More than that, in describing their relation, Burnt Shadows literally merges their romance with a process of transculturation. They get to know each other through Hiroko’s work as a translator (BS 10); they fall in love as “their conversation moves between German, English and Japanese” (BS 19) and they exchange books in various languages. From the beginning, their developing love is inseparable from a process of transcultural exchange. Forter offers a reading of Hiroko’s and Konrad’s first kiss which further underlines how love and transcultural exchange become one and the same in the novel. The kiss is accompanied by Hiroko’s reflection that Konrad’s tongue “should feel repellent, but it doesn’t. Anything but. She is amazed by what her body seems to know to do in response, how this can feel both strange and yet familiar” (BS 21). Forter argues, this lingual activation of a strange familiarity is the carnal expression of the cosmo‐ politanism afforded by the tongue in its ‘articulate’ mode - the mode of translation and polilinguisticity. The French kiss brings the foreign tongue inside - without, let me stress, abrogating its otherness. It performs a beneficent erotic invasion by the stranger’s body of the self. (Critique and Utopia 217) 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 197 <?page no="198"?> 204 Forter fittingly attests Burnt Shadows an “Erotico-polyglot transnationalism whose central metaphor is that of translation” (Critique and Utopia 206). Yet, overstating the erotic component risks losing sight of friendship or filial relations which are equally romanticised in the novel. 205 The process of learning a foreign language that Burnt Shadows describes merges with a process of cultural learning. Along with their vocabulary lessons, Sajjad teaches Hiroko, for instance, the concept of the “ghum-khaur”, the ‘grief-eater’, which contrasts with the English phrase ‘to leave someone alone with their grief ” (BS 77), thus introducing her to an entirely different approach to grieving. On the importance of language and translation in developing the novel’s transcultural vision see also, for instance, Khan (63) or Gamal (606). What he describes is a perfect moment of transcultural exchange, expressed through the language of eroticism. 204 Through a recurring motif of birds, the novel figuratively underlines that their attractions to one another merge with the theme of transculturation and a resistance to national divisions. Flying through the air and hence easily crossing all kind of borders humans have erected on earth, their very mode of life associates birds as a species with a transcendence of boundaries and a state of freedom. Burnt Shadows not only builds on this association by explicitly turning birds into a leitmotif for its own search for alternatives to sealed-off cultures, languages and nations, but it also assigns them a distinct role in the protagonists’ relationship: Konrad collects his information about Nagasaki’s cosmopolitan past in notebooks, which, proof of his cosmopolitan affiliations, become a source of danger for him in the growing climate of suspicion against foreigners. He thus hides them in a tree, where, bound to its branches, they remind the lovers of birds. Having thus associated the image of birds with transcultural histories, the novel then adds another layer to its symbolism: Hiroko, aroused after their first kiss, feels “as though there are wings attached to her” (BS 22). Hiroko and Konrad’s love becomes itself tied to the bird motif and the meaning that the novel has built up around it. While Hiroko’s and Konrad’s romance forcefully ends within the first twenty pages of the novel, Burnt Shadows subsequently develops a number of friendship and love relations between the various members of Hiroko’s and Elizabeth’s families which follow the pattern set by this initial romance. Not only do many of these transcend national or cultural borders, but most of the intimate relations within these families also develop through acts of language switching and translation: Sajjad and Hiroko fall in love while he is teaching her Urdu, Hiroko’s eagerness to learn the language enabling her to enter his world in ways unthinkable for the Burtons. 205 Elizabeth and Hiroko’s intense friendship builds on their shared ability to speak German, which merges with their memories of 198 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="199"?> Konrad: without even noticing, they continuously “started to speak in German, and […] doing so felt like sharing the most intimate of secrets” (BS 70). Raza’s thoughts sum up the ways in which the characters’ affective bonds merge with processes of transculturation engendered by their picking up another language: he is aware of the weight attached to language lessons. His mother would never have met Konrad Weiss (the German man she wanted to marry! The thought didn’t get any less strange over the years) if she hadn’t taught German to Yoshi Watanabe’s nephew. And she would not have gone to India to find the Burtons if not for Konrad Weiss. In India, it was language lessons that brought Sajjad and Hiroko to the same table, overturning the separateness that would otherwise have defined their relationship. And all the tenderest of his recollections of childhood were bound up in his mother’s gift of languages to him - those crosswords she set for him late each night when he was growing up, the secrets they could share without lowering their voices, the ideas they could express to each other in words particular to specific languages […]. (BS 200) With affections tending to form in the transcultural space of translation, Burnt Shadows clearly employs the personal relations within these families to conjure up an alternative to the various lines of division and conflict the novel stresses in its different settings. These relations thus continuously replicate the novel’s original romance and, in so doing, once again reinforce Konrad’s vision. Creating a new, distinctly transcultural and transnational collective, the emerging two-family network embodies both the novel’s transcultural rereading of modern history and its hope for a different society built on the insights gained from this re-reading. Centrepiece of this network, as well as of the novel’s romance in general, is the character of Hiroko. Toying with a magical realist aesthetic, the novel turns her into an almost enchanted heroine of transcultural romance. With Konrad’s death, the transculturality attached to their relationship becomes part of Hiroko herself, symbolically underlined through the fact that the very bomb that kills Konrad simultaneously causes the bird-shaped burns on Hiroko’s back. Gohar Karim Khan points out that the “predominantly masculine sphere” (58) of nationalism leaves its mark on the female body of Hiroko (see ibid.). While this is certainly part of the meaning this image evokes, the shape of these burns adds another dimension: in the light of the novel’s established bird motif, the burns literally mark Hiroko as an embodiment of transcultural romance. In fact, just as Konrad’s vison is centred on avoiding being reduced to a national type, Hiroko has turned into a romance character who visibly resists such reductions. Stressing, for instance that “for her languages came so easily it seemed more as 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 199 <?page no="200"?> though she were retrieving forgotten knowledge than learning something new” (BS 60), the novel associates Hiroko with a somewhat transcultural identity that thwarts any attempt at classifying her. Through the other characters’ reactions to Hiroko, the novel further emphasises this: James Burton “was oddly perturbed by this woman who he couldn’t place. Indians, Germans, the English, even Americans… he knew how to look at people and understand the contexts from which they sprang. But this Japanese woman in trousers. What on earth was she all about? ” (BS 46) Hiroko refuses to become a recognisable type, continuously undermining all preconceived notions of cultural as well as gendered identities (see also Cilano, Contemporary Pakistani Fiction 227). In describing Hiroko at one point as “wheeling through the world with the awful freedom of someone with no one to answer to. She had become, in fact, a figure out of myth” (BS 48, my emphasis), Burnt Shadows comments on the ways in which it has created a romance character who embodies an alternative to the practice of categorising that dominates the social realities the novel engages with. In depicting hers as an “awful freedom”, however, the novel points out that it is her very experience of the violence embodied in (national) categorisations that reshapes her as such a character of romance in the first place. If Hiroko thus constitutes a ‘myth’-like romance figure that resists classifi‐ cation, the effect she has on people as well as her behaviour demonstrate what could be gained by moving beyond a habit of delineating distinct ‘types’ of humans. The feeling of unease that takes hold of James Burton - colonial master and patriarch - in Hiroko’s presence is well justified. Hiroko’s visit to the Burtons upsets the smooth running of their colonial household. Before her arrival, Sajjad faithfully sticks to the role of the submissive Indian servant, never challenging his masters’ opinions and eager to fulfil their every whim. With Hiroko in the room, he suddenly gives a retort to Elizabeth that was as near angry as anyone had ever heard it. It was hard to say if Elizabeth or Sajjad was more surprised at his tone after eight years during which he used only excessive politeness as a weapon against her. But they were both aware that his would not have happened if Hiroko hadn’t been standing there, disrupting all hierarchies. (BS 83, my emphasis) All systems of classifying humans collapse under the influence of Hiroko’s transcultural romance charms - and the foundation on which colonial hierar‐ chies are built collapses along with them. As Pei-Chen Liao suggests, Hiroko thus indeed embodies a version of cosmopolitanism that functions as “an actively ‘transformative’ project” (273). In fact, the novel suggests that her unclassifiable presence challenges not only colonial domination, but also the 200 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="201"?> very idea of domination as such, in whatever form it may manifest itself. For Elizabeth, for example, Hiroko’s arrival initiates a process of feminist emancipation. Listening to her, “Elizabeth almost laughed. So much for those demure Japanese women of all the stories she’d heard. Here was one who would squeeze the sun in her fist if she ever got the chance; yes, and tilt her head back to swallow its liquid light.” (BS 46) As Gohar Karim Khan rightly observes, with her unconventional appearance and behaviour, Hiroko “unwittingly becomes something of a feminist muse in Elizabeth’s life” (61), reacquainting her with “the question of her ‘wants,’ something she has not given thought to in several years” (ibid.). While Hiroko’s mere presence has the effect of unsettling established hierarchies, her own behaviour towards others further underlines the transformative potential that the novel ascribes to a rejection of categories. Hiroko refuses to “hold [people] responsible” (BS 62) for what their nations have done and constantly reaches out to whoever needs help, regardless of their cultural or national identity. In so doing, she embodies the ‘planetary humanism’ that A God in Every Stone likewise promotes (see also Clements 143). 4.2.1.2 Endangered Romance: Romance Versus the Logic of Typification If the romance of Burnt Shadows thus promotes cosmopolitan positions, Shamsie’s cosmopolitan vision is by no means identical with a version of cosmopolitanism that celebrates the ‘borderless world’ from an elite perspective and legitimises the current order of the globalised world by highlighting the opportunities it provides for a privileged few. On the contrary, as stated, this is a cosmopolitanism that clearly encompasses a transformative agenda. Indeed, in continuously developing idealised transcultural connections, Burnt Shadows makes sure that its transcultural romance is recognised as an alternative to a status quo it critiques rather than taken as an affirmation of the latter. Shamsie constantly juxtaposes the novel’s romance with the logic it seeks to supplant: the war-ridden political histories Burnt Shadows narrates are bound up with creating discernible human types as a basis for evaluating whose lives matter. Defended as “a terrible thing, but it had to be done to save American lives” (BS 62, my emphasis), the bomb becomes the overarching symbol of the violence inherent in a logic of classification that makes one indifferent to the suffering of those not part of an ‘us’. Underlining that its romance goes counter to the ways in which the modern world has by and large tended to conceptualise its society and divided it into distinct nations, peoples and cultures, the novel playfully positions its romance against a ‘realist’ aesthetic 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 201 <?page no="202"?> 206 I use ‘realist’ here with reference to Dalley’s discussion which, as mentioned, provides an important background to my analyses (see chapter 4.1.2). 207 As McClure demonstrates, imperial adventure fiction glorified imperial missions by translating “the basic imperial division of the world (metropolis and colonies or potential colonies) into a familiar romance division, with the West represented as a zone of relative order, security and secularity, the non-Western world as a zone of magic, mystery, and disorder” (8); compare my discussion in chapter 2.2.1. McClure shows how this tradition continues to influence US-American literature throughout the 20 th century. based on representative characters who mirror such divisions. 206 On the level of the family romance and its development, the novel visibly plays out a conflict between the two competing forms of representation it evokes. While Hiroko, re-emerged from the nuclear attack as a ‘myth’-like romance heroine, has become entirely detached from the divisions and categorisations that dominate the novel’s various settings, the other members of the two families lack this full-blown transformation into romance. In their description, the novel obtrusively alludes to the traditional manner of historical novels to offer characters as representative of a type, forcing the reader to take notice of this practice. With Elizabeth, for instance, the novel literally evokes the category of the “colonial wife” through the character’s own reflections: “Elizabeth picked up her cup of tea from the windowsill and felt as though she’d posed herself for a portrait, The Colonial Wife Looks upon her Garden.” (BS 35, emphasis in original) With her mocking self-observation of the perfect image which she, tea in her hand, provides, the novel foregrounds its own creation of a representational character. Her son likewise provokes us to read him as a representative character. He works for the CIA and has evocatively cast off his birth name Henry to re-name himself Harry. Thus reminding of President Harry Truman, who commanded the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Harry appears as a perfect representative of an imperial nationalism. Again, the novel emphasises its own efforts at typification, this time by associating Harry, in a manner familiar from A God in Every Stone, visibly with imperial romances - texts which rely on representative characters to depict a world divided into modern and anti-modern realms. It replicate the latter’s geopolitical imagination when Harry, flying into Karachi, feels “the surge of homecoming that accompanies the world’s urban tribes as they enter unfamiliar landscapes of chaos and possibility” (BS 148). 207 Moreover, he constitutes another one of Shamsie’s characters who are defined by their love for Rudyard Kipling: the name he chose for his daughter, Kim, is explicitly contextualised through Harry’s reflection that “[l]ong before the CIA there had been Kipling and a boy astride a cannon” (BS 185). With his work for the CIA directly following 202 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="203"?> 208 Green reads adventure tales from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) on as “the energizing myth of English imperialism” (3). He argues that they were “the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night; and, in the form of its dreams, they charged England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule” (ibid.). Even if they were not openly concerned with the empire, adventure stories served to prepare boys for their service in it (see ibid. 38). He points out that writers understood adventure stories “to be the generic counterpart in literature to empire in politics” (37), both being “a place where adventures took place, and men became heroes” (ibid.). 209 After Sajjad’s father dies, Henry insists on condoling according to the family’s tradition, as Sajjad fondly remembers when Harry, now grown-up, visits them in Karachi: “You the model of an imperial espionage story suggested by Kipling’s Kim (1901), the stories of adventures in foreign lands seem to have had the very effect on him that Martin Green associates with the adventure genre: 208 they have taught young Henry to romantically view imperial warfare as a heroic adventure and prepared him for his later career. Harry seems to have himself turned into a character representative of imperial romance. Rather than subscribing to this mode of representation it alludes to, however, the novel constantly undermines its own gestures towards typification. By selfreferentially drawing attention to its creation of representative characters, Burnt Shadows forces readers to note that these characters are in fact ill-prepared for the roles they are meant to fulfil: precisely their part in the family romance takes them beyond being such representatives. Elizabeth’s self-observation already indicates her alienation from her role as a colonial wife. It is through the rediscovery of her ‘wants’, enabled by her friendship with Hiroko, that she comes to entirely reject this role. She finds that [s]he didn’t want to be married to a man she no longer knew how to talk to. She didn’t want to keep hidden the fact that at times during the war - and especially when Berlin was firebombed - she had felt entirely German. She didn’t want to agree that the British had come to the end of a good innings (BS 100). With these insights into Elizabeth’s psyche, the type of the colonial wife dissolves into thin air - a fact that the novel further underlines by having her divorce her husband and move to New York. In Harry’s case as well, his part in the family romance prevents readers from seeing him simply as a representative of American nationalism: his behaviour shows him actively resisting national and cultural classifications and divisions. When growing up in Delhi, he becomes attached to Sajjad, which causes him to declare, “‘I’m Indian’” (BS 83), and to engage, like Hiroko, in acts of transcultural translation that endear him to Sajjad (BS 153). 209 Like the boy Henry, the adult Harry continuously 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 203 <?page no="204"?> made me teach you how to gala-milao when you came to condole with my family at my father’s death. You walked into the courtyard, took your shoes off, stood up on a divan and embraced each of my brothers like that. They all thought you were the finest Englishman in India” (BS 153). 210 After her death, for instance, Hiroko and Kim remember Elizabeth’s ninetieth birthday, when she, watching a tightly dressed male mannequin, joked about her future sex life (BS 273). dissolves categories and borders through his affection. The novel emphasises this trait, for instance, when he furiously asks his CIA colleague after Sajjad’s death, “‘You think because he was Pakistani I couldn’t have loved him? ’” (BS 241). By showing that the characters’ involvement in the family romance is precisely what takes them from being representative figures to something closer to the unclassifiable romance presence of Hiroko, the novel emphatically sets its romance sphere against the very notion of representative characters. Taking this further, Burnt Shadows in fact develops its entire plot surrounding the two-family connection as an illustration of the struggle between the two incompatible forces of typification and romance. With the family embodying the novel’s transcultural romance, the story Burnt Shadows narrates is not only the story of this family, but also that of a continuous threat to the latter: the bomb that kills Konrad in order to save ‘American lives’ establishes a pattern where reducing people to types literally threatens the existence of the romance family. While, in Konrad’s case, this is brought onto the family externally, in other cases the source of danger is located within the families themselves. The novel forces us to notice that it interferes itself with the family romance through its very own creation of representative characters: it is precisely when they fulfil their role as a stand-in for a certain, well-established ‘type’ of person that various characters repeatedly insist on divisions and classifications which function as obstacles to the family romance. In turning momentarily into a representative of the colonial wife, Elizabeth almost prevents the Hiroko-Sajjad branch of the connection from coming into existence. In telling Hiroko, “‘No good would have come of it. […] ‘You and Sajjad. How you felt about each other. It was impossible. His world is so alien to yours’” (BS 97), she reproduces the colonial discourse of essentialised, insuperable difference. In another passage, she mistakenly suspects Sajjad of attempting to rape Hiroko (BS 92), unwittingly associating herself with the prototypical memsahib and her fears of the over-sexualised ‘native’. By alluding to established colonial stereotypes, Shamsie emphasises that it is Elizabeth as a colonial wife who tries to intervene in Hiroko and Sajjad’s relationship - an identity that strikingly differs from the unconventional and rebellious woman Elizabeth embodies elsewhere in the novel. 210 204 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="205"?> 211 In his discussion of the The Colonial Present (2004), Derek Gregory evocatively asks, “[f]or what else is the war on terror other than the violent return of the colonial past, with its split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism,’ ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’? ” (11). The repeated interferences from the logic of typification ultimately stretches the two-family romance to the breaking point. Burnt Shadows ends with Hiroko and Kim, by then the only members of the two families who find themselves alive and at liberty, in a discussion. Hiroko is furious: [i]n the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he’s guilty, maybe not. Why risk it? Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb.’ The silence that followed was the silence of intimates who find themselves strangers. The dark birds were between them, their burnt feathers everywhere. (BS 362) What causes this scene is Kim’s committing an act which, in building on a nationalist ‘American lives first’ logic, takes them back to the bomb with which their families’ story began: Raza’s Afghan childhood friend Abdullah is illegally working in the USA as a taxi driver and needs to escape the USA via Canada in order to avoid being arrested. Kim agrees to drive him. On the drive, however, she comes to suspect Abdullah of terrorism and, giving in to her post 9/ 11 panic of terrorist attacks, calls the police to turn him in. As Greg Forter stresses, instead of talking with Abdullah, Kim is sure to ‘know’ him to be one of ‘them’. The novel underlines, he argues, her “interposition of a phantasm aimed at securing the total transparency of the non-Western stranger or other” (Critique and Utopia 222). Adhering to an us-versus-them dichotomy that connects the colonial era her name evokes with her own present, 211 she condemns him without any evidence of his guilt. This act, going against everything Hiroko stands for, not only endangers their friendship, but also leads to Raza’s arrest when he attempts to help his friend escape. With the image of the birds’ burnt feathers, the novel symbolically captures the damage that is done to its transcultural romance: established as a leitmotif that underlines the novel’s interest in transcultural connections and conviviality, the birds have now burst into flames - the celebrated family alliances seem on the verge of death. Rather than inviting a hopeless resignation, however, this ending constitutes a call for change. It is precisely by showing its romance to be mortally endangered by the logic of reducing people to types that the novel underlines the need for a different approach towards others: one that does not lose sight of the shared humanity that Shamsie constantly emphasises. The positive ending of 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 205 <?page no="206"?> 212 See in particular Cilano’s discussion of the novel in National Identities, as well as Herbert and Das. 213 Caroline Herbert, for instance, interrogates the path towards reconciliation that Shamsie suggests, arguing that “[t]he movement towards reconciliation between Pakistanis of different generations and different social and ethnic backgrounds that Kartography offers is one that seeks to acknowledge the discontinuities in national histories and identities” (170). its transcultural romance that the novel refuses to provide is thus transferred into the potential future of readers and characters alike. 4.2.2 Kartography’s Romance of Connections Like Burnt Shadows, Kartography develops a narrative of personal friendship and love relations in a setting dominated by violence and us-versus-them dichotomies. However, while the setting of Burnt Shadows is global, Kartography is largely set in Karachi and deals with Pakistan’s history, foregrounding the country’s ethnic and class-based divisions and conflicts. In the light of Pakistan’s highly heterogenous population and a history where “territorial nationalisms, ethnic violence and military dictatorships generated definitions that functioned as sites of enclosure, entrapment and homogenization rather than as providers of empowered belong‐ ing through and in spite of difference” (Sarkar 186), many critics find that the novel comments on the problematic issue of collective identities in Pakistan. 212 In this context, they often argue that it is concerned with the challenge of reconciling a population divided by histories of violence. 213 Indeed, as the following reading will show, the romance narrative of Kartography negotiates the possibility of reaching a post-conflict setting in Pakistan against the background of the nation’s turbulent history. However, in so doing, I will argue, it makes a more abstract point through which the novel asks to be read simultaneously as a comment on the modern world at large: like Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone, Kartography ultimately underlines that accounting for connections between groups of people who understand themselves as disconnected entities constitutes a prerequisite for working towards a more just and peaceful future. Although it somewhat diverges from the pattern of transcultural romance prevalent in the novels discussed so far, Kartography’s romance narrative is, once again, the novel’s central means to advocate an awareness of such connections. My term ‘romance of connections’ captures the ways in which Kartography continuously entangles its protagonists’ personal love stories with its large-scale social vision: it is by making the possible success of the relationships it depicts dependent on the partners’ acknowledging 206 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="207"?> 214 The relocation of Muhajirs to the Karachi region has been the source of various conflicts ever since. As Priya Kumar explains, while they were initially seen as crucial to the foundation of the new nation, their migration celebrated as ‘homecoming’ of India’s Muslims (see 162), they soon came to be viewed upon with hostility. As Muhajirs came to form a majority in the city and often held well-paid positions, “many Sindhis saw the Partition migrants as strangers and outsiders taking over their land and their culture because there were substantial linguistic, cultural, and religious differences between the local inhabitants and the migrants” (Kumar 165). The subsequent decades then saw “a new influx of internal migrants from Punjab, the North West Frontier Provinces, and rural Sindh, a process that accelerated from the 1980s” as “[r]efugees from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Iran joined these migrants” (ibid. 166) and Muhajirs in turn often looked upon the later newcomers to the city as uncultured intruders (see ibid. 166). the connectivity of the world and their accepting the responsibilities this entails, I will show, that the novel formulates a political agenda. The personal stories Kartography narrates link two historical moments in which the conflicts and divisions that run through Pakistan’s society become particularly visible. Through the perspective of Raheen, homodiegetic narrator of the story and aged thirteen at the events with which the plot sets in, the novel focuses on the romantic relationship between Raheen and her childhood friend Karim. However, it also offers a number of flashbacks which take the reader back to the time of their parents’ youth and early relationships. Whereas Raheen’s and Karim’s story unfolds in the 1980s and 1990s, the story of their parents pivots around the year of 1971. With these two time levels, the story links the atrocities committed against the country’s Bengali population in the era of the 1971 war, which resulted in the independent nation of Bangladesh forming out of what used to be East Pakistan, with the renewed moment of “ethnic fight[ing]” (Ka 11) at the time in which the children grow up: while the passages providing flashbacks to the earlier moment underline how Bengalis were systematically persecuted and attacked, the later story line begins with the parents sending their children to the countryside as tensions rise in Karachi after a traffic accident. A bus hit a girl and “instead of being a family tragedy it all ignited a terrible ethnic fight. The girl Muhajir, the bus driver Pathan, and somehow, somehow, that became the issue” (Ka 11). With the term Muhajir describing the “North-Indian Urdu speaking migrants who settled in the urban centers of Sindh, Pakistan, in the aftermath of Partition” (Kumar 162), 214 the two time levels seem to testify, as the novel’s characters repeatedly remark (Ka 9, 11, 176), to ethno-regional violence repeating itself. However, as Cara Cilano has pointed out, the novel refuses to depict ethnic conflict as the exclusive and deeper explanation of Pakistan’s troubles (see National Identities 84). Instead of tracing the country’s problems back to the issue 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 207 <?page no="208"?> 215 I strongly disagree with Rehana Ahmed’s claim that while Kartography “foregrounds the ethnic tensions that tear the city apart, these tensions […] are ultimately detached from their socio-economic roots” (19); just as I disagree with her reading that “despite the fact that transnational space is integral to the narrative, Karachi is detached from this global context” (ibid) and obscures how transnational movement and class intersect. 216 The disadvantaged situation of the Bengalis increasingly gave rise to Bengali national‐ ism. In Pakistan’s 1970 general elections, the Awami League, a Bengali nationalist party, won a landslide victory. The political establishment’s refusal to accept this victory led to the 1971 war. 217 After Muhajirs had become increasingly influential in Pakistan’s society and enjoyed many privileges for years, state policies changes in the 1970s and turned against this group (see Kumar 166). Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the government set in place, amongst other things, a quota system in 1973 which served to “enable Sindhis to get jobs in government services and places in educational institutions along a rural-urban divide that effectively marginalized Muhajirs, many of whom were city dwellers” (ibid.). of its heterogeneity itself, Kartography describes a system of socio-economic advantaging and disadvantaging as their main reason. 215 Character conversa‐ tions connect the turmoil of 1971 to politics that structurally disadvantaged East Pakistan with its majority Bengali population. Karim’s father Ali observes that East Pakistan is the majority wing of the country in terms of population and yet […] [i]t gets less than 30 per cent of foreign aid allocation, less than 20 per cent of civil service jobs, less than 10 per cent of military positions, fewer schools, fewer universities, it makes up near 70 percent of the country’s export earnings but receives the benefits of less than 30 per cent of our import expenditure” (Ka 182-3). The novel thus hints at the “colonial relationship between the two wings” (Cil‐ ano, National Identities 84) that constituted Pakistan, which ultimately led to the events known as Pakistan’s civil war or Bangladesh’s war of independence. 216 Likewise, the fighting of the later moment appears within a larger political context: a car thief explains to Raheen and her friends, for instance, that he cannot work as a civil servant because of a quota system 217 that effectively “discriminated against Karachiites, particularly Muhajirs who had no family domicile outside the city” (Ka 175), thus alluding to grievances that once again breed ethnic conflict. If the novel thus traces the ethnic conflicts it depicts back to politics which economically and socially marginalise certain groups within the nation, it more‐ over underlines that the most impermeable barrier separating Karachiites is in fact that of class (see also Cilano, National Identities 84). These class distinctions in turn coincide with the privilege - or lack thereof - of transnational mobility and connections to the West. Raheen’s family, being Muhajirs themselves, belong 208 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="209"?> 218 I draw on Pamela Regis’ use of the term who suggests that the combination ‘romance novel’ narrows the wide field of romance down to “prose fiction love stories” (21) and thus describes one specific version of romance. 219 Abu-Bakar Ali, too, draws attention to Shamsie’s engagement with the genre of romance novels in Kartography. In so doing, he points out that the romance genre inhabits a central place in Pakistani media culture: “The development of mass media in the nascent Pakistani nation is characterised by the emergence of one particular generic form that continues to be, by far, the most popular. The romance narrative, whether to the English-speaking upper-class of the city. As such, they do not suffer from the grievances that affect the car thief and can easily afford to migrate (as Karim’s parents decide to do at some point in the novel) or to send their children to US universities (as Raheen’s parents do). Repeatedly, the novel underlines how the privileged circles in which Raheen’s family moves close rank against the less privileged. They constitute a geographically separated enclave within the city and only consort among themselves: Raheen is glad to live “on ‘this side of Clifton Bridge’ where class bound everyone together in an enveloping, suffocating embrace, with ethnicity only a secondary or even tertiary concern” (Ka 175). Against the background of these intersecting divisions, the questions Ali poses himself, “How many walls can one nation erect and sustain[? ] Is it possible to circumnavigate one wall without crashing into another? ” (Ka 51), hover over the entire narrative, connecting the two historical moments. It is in these histories of divisions and conflict that Kartography embeds its love narrative. Along the lines of a conventional romance novel, 218 the plot revolves around the question whether Raheen and Karim end up as happily united lovers. Many critics have attacked Shamsie’s choice of a romance plot. Rehana Ahmed finds that the novel marginalises the political through foregrounding private intimacies; she complains that in Kartography, “ethnic divisions are reduced to their function as a vehicle for a story of romantic tensions and personal conflict” (21). Bridget Byrne, similarly dismissive of Shamsie’s use of romance, finds that combining questions of ethnic division and political turmoil “with a somewhat cliched live-story [sic] does not always work”. As the following reading will show, such statements overlook that the love story Kartography provides, as well as its ‘cliched’ rendering, is in fact central to the novel’s political discussion. Told against the backdrop of a failed relationship in the parents’ generation - a failure the novel visibly ties to the violent conflicts of 1971 - Kartography offers the relationship of Raheen and Karim as an alternative to this earlier relationship and the histories it represents: it explicitly associates the possibility of their union with the hope of overcoming the nation’s history of conflict. In this constellation, Kartography strategically uses the conventions of a romance novel for its political discussion: 219 at the 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 209 <?page no="210"?> in its classic or family guide, dominates Pakistani television in epic, panoramic dramas and is, more significantly, voraciously consumed when it appears in its most ubiquitous literary form, serialised in newspapers and magazines targeted at women.” (225) Ali argues that in text by writers like Shamsie “[t]he discourse of romance is destabilised and refashioned from within the limits of diasporic movement, a movement which shapes a potential feminist agency” (229). However, his short discussion of Kartography neither underpins this claim with textual evidence, nor does he discuss the novel’s play with romance tropes or, for that matter, engage with the novel’s romance plot in any detail. centre of a traditional love plot is, as Pamela Regis describes, the motif of the ‘barrier’ between the lovers. The barrier is the “reason[] that this heroine and hero cannot marry” (Regis 32), and the characters’ tedious journey towards removing it makes up the romance novel’s central conflict (ibid.). Kartography follows this formula, but ties it to a distinct purpose: the novel merges its act of narrating the lovers’ way towards overcoming the barrier with its providing a political discussion of the kind of rethinking necessary for reaching a postconflict Pakistan. In a pattern familiar from Shamsie’s other novels, Kartography ascribes to one of its romance characters, in this case to Raheen, a failure to recognise connections, and depicts this failure as the central obstacle to the change it envisions. Not only does Kartography turn this failure into the barrier, but it moreover employs its homodiegetic narrator Raheen’s entire romance discourse itself to draw attention to her flawed perception. In several ways, the novel’s “cliched” romance narrative thus serves to underline the need to connect what Raheen regards as separate. Where A God in Every Stone and Burnt Shadows develop characters oblivious to transcultural connections, Raheen’s blind spot lies somewhere else. What the novel focuses on is the failure of Pakistan’s “elite” (Ka 77) to recognise that, as Kartography suggests, the repeated fighting is the result of the larger sociopolitical system to which they all contribute. Thinking of herself as entirely disconnected from the rest of the city, Raheen overlooks that she is part of a larger whole linked through political and economic interdependencies and refuses to acknowledge that her own privileged life is part of a system that functions at the expense of others (see also Cilano, National Identities 116-7). In turning political instability and troubles in the city’s other areas into a problem that has nothing to do with them, the novel suggests, the ‘elite’ perpetuate the state out of which these troubles arise. They fail to see their own part in it and, in so doing, deny their own obligation to effect change. With this problem being at the centre of Kartography’s literary exploration, I suggest that the novel should be read as more than exclusively commenting on the nation of Pakistan and its possible path to a different future: in fact, the structures Shamsie demonstrates with regard 210 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="211"?> to Karachi can be related to the problems of the 21 st -century globalised world she constantly deals with in her oeuvre. As shown in the previous discussions, Shamsie criticises views that trace political instability or social and political conflicts and problems back to isolated nationally or culturally intrinsic reasons. Instead, she insists that we acknowledge a larger global context from which those problems arose. Read against this backdrop, the novel’s discussion of Karachi and Pakistan suggests itself simultaneously as an allegory for a connected modern world selectively oblivious to its own connectivity - and it is through a leitmotif of maps and cartography that the novel both emphasises the Karachi-specific situation it targets and points to a global dimension of its discussion. The path the novel negotiates for a peaceful future in Pakistan, then, simultaneously reflects on the possibility of a different global future. 4.2.2.1 Two Love Stories and the Hope for a Reconciled Pakistan Many critics have noted that the histories of conflict and violence Kartography takes up are far more than mere background to the love stories it narrates. Muneeza Shamsie, for instance, reads the characters’ tale as “an intertwining of the political and personal” (162), and David Waterman describes the “blurring, even dissolution, of the boundary between the public and the private, wherein geopolitical events are lived on an international scale and relived at the level of family and friends, often with similar, drastic consequences” (“Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography“ n.p.). This observation of a direct correlation between historical events and the characters’ lives holds true for the story level of the parents’ generation in particular. Like their children, the two older couples are connected through deep friendships. Through Raheen’s perspective, the novel reveals early on that they look back on a rather unconventional history of “swapped fiancés” (Ka 8): Karim’s mother Maheen was initially engaged to Raheen’s father Zafar, and Raheen’s mother Yasmin to Karim’s father Ali. Repeatedly alluding to their rearranging of engagements, Raheen declares this as an entirely harmless procedure: she describes, for instance, their parents’ “look of solidarity which can only belong to four people who have switched partners without missing a step or treading on a toe” (Ka 13). However, in its historical flashbacks, the novel gradually reveals a very different story. On first mentioning their parents’ swapping of fiancés, Raheen connects it, in a seemingly random collection of historical watershed moments, with Pakistan’s war of 1971: “before the moon landing, before the Civil war of ’71, before my mother and Karim’s mother swapped fiancés and wondered why they hadn’t earlier” (Ka 8). Unknown to the protagonist’s thirteen-year-old self, the novel however subtly hints at 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 211 <?page no="212"?> a connection through Raheen’s words which then gradually comes to light: Maheen being Bengali and Zafar Muhajir, the events in the course of which they broke off their engagement, paving the way for the couples’ re-arranging themselves, are in fact inseparable from the large-scale events of 71. Rather than narrating a romantic tale of four people finding out who they truly love after a period of erring, as Raheen imagines, the novel depicts the engagement’s failure as a traumatic event which merges with the nation’s violent history at large. The flashbacks to Maheen’s and Zafar’s early relationship show them - in exceedingly romanticised terms - as a young couple very much in love, whose relationship slowly breaks under the strain of aggravating political tensions. The novel illustrates the process through which Zafar and Maheen, step by step, “slipped further and further from being the couple who walked so lightly through the world that the dew-wet grass barely registered their footprints” (Ka 191). Both partners increasingly suffer from anti-Bengali violence, Maheen, for instance, when people she used to be friends with call her on the phone to insult and threaten her (Ka 190), and Zafar when people he thinks of as his friends call him a “Bingo lover” (ibid.) and beat him up. These constant tensions gradually take a toll on their love. Zafar comes to perceive being with Maheen as a “burden” (Ka 186), a “physical ache” (ibid.), and increasingly finds himself imagining what life would be like without her. This finally causes him to adopt the anti-Bengali rhetoric himself and, in doing so, deal a death blow to their relationship. When his neighbour Shafiq hears of his brother’s death in East Pakistan, he turns up at Zafar’s door. Mad with fury and desolation, he attacks Zafar for wanting to get married to Maheen and Zafar, unable to deal with the situation anymore, says: “How can I marry one of them? How can I let one of them bear my children? Think of it as a civic duty. I’ll be diluting her Bengali blood line.”’ (Ka 232) As Sreyoshi Sarkar points out, Zafar’s statement “produces Maheen as the other, as the enemy and as representing the tainted Bengali race whose existence must be crushed through the symbolic act of her impregnation, whereby her political, cultural and linguistic autonomy is erased by the ‘seeds of the enemy’ (193). Not only does this mirror, as Sarkar rightly argues, the rape discourse familiar from the 1947 narratives of partition (see 194), but it also corresponds precisely to what Ali reports about 1971 East Pakistan: “‘[t]his country’s turned rabid - the soldiers are raping the women, Zaf, raping them, all over East Pakistan, and in drawing rooms around Karachi people applaud this attempt to improve the genes of the Bengalis’” (Ka 189). Zafar’s statement thus embodies the entire violence of the anti-Bengali discourse, irrevocably bringing it into the couple’s private story. It is only then, when the general tendencies which Raheen elsewhere sums up as those of looking “at our friends and reduc[ing] them from 212 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="213"?> individuals to members of some group that our group is at odds with” (Ka 222-3) enters the relation between the lovers themselves that the relationship finally breaks and Maheen leaves Zafar. It is after this politically loaded separation that Yasmin and Ali end their half-hearted engagement and re-orient towards their now once more available friends. At least on Yasmin’s part, Zafar had been the more desirable partner in the first place. While Kartography foregrounds the failure of Maheen and Zafar’s romance and merges it with Pakistan’s history of violent conflict, the novel then emphatically surrounds Raheen and Karim, the second generation, with the very romance it initially associated with the earlier couple, too. Their friendship dates back to their very first encounter as babies when “Raheen - with eyes shut - reached out and put a hand on Karim’s cheek, and Karim kept looking at her without blinking” (Ka 310). When they are teenagers, Raheen’s crush on Zia, another member of their friendship group notwithstanding, the novel leaves no doubt that Raheen and Karim are ‘made for each other’. Finishing each other’s sentences (Ka 5) and talking in anagrams that make their conversation incom‐ prehensible to anyone but each other (Ka 61), they appear as the prototypical notion of ‘soulmates’ come to life. They are even convinced of being able to feel each other’s emotions. While Raheen reports, “I was usually so in tune with his moods that I would often claim emotions and realize, hours later, that really they belonged to him” (Ka 16), Karim comments on his awareness of Raheen’s bad mood with the words “‘[n]o one’s ever too busy to know when their foot has gone to sleep or their throat is itching” (Ka 45), likewise underlining his ability to feel Raheen’s pain as part of his body. When they get separated at the age of 14 because Karim’s family moves to London, Raheen, crying herself to sleep, is thus convinced that “somewhere in the sky, Karim was doing the same; and some of my tears were his tears, and some of his tears were mine” (Ka 111). In the novel’s later sections, Raheen, now a young adult going to college in the USA, spends her holidays in Karachi and finally meets Karim again, who returns to Karachi for the first time. Although strained by a number of unresolved conflicts, their relationship has lost nothing of its intensity. On the contrary, it is enriched by an added erotic attraction. Zia tells Raheen that ‘[…] there’s something about the two of you that’s almost magic.’ I looked at him to see if he was joking. ‘Magic’ was not the kind of word Zia was prone to using. ‘Seriously, yaar. Still is. When you were laughing together in Mehmoodabad, about that painting of me, I felt so …. I felt jealous, Raheen. […] It was just that I see you two and I know I’ll never have that.’” (Ka 252, emphasis in original) 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 213 <?page no="214"?> 220 Chaity Das observes that, in this letter, “Zafar (the offender) expresses a desire to work through the silence” and argues that the letter constitutes the “beginning of a dialogue” (276). 221 Pakistan stands for “Punjab, Afghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, and Indus-Sind, combined with the -stan suffix from Baluchistan (Balochistan)” (Ziring/ Sha‐ hid n.p.). Thus depicting their relationship through a number of cliched romance tropes, the novel self-referentially draws the readers’ attention to its own creation of a couple that seems to personify the idea of romance itself. Against the backdrop of the novel’s merging Zafar and Maheen’s break up with the largescale violence inscribed in Pakistan’s history, Raheen and Karim’s ‘magical’ romance seems to somewhat represent a political alternative to such violence. Indeed, the novel explicitly underlines the vision it connects to its romance couple: through its characters’ conversations, it foregrounds the ways in which romance constitutes once again a counter-sphere to the conflictual histories that dominate the novel’s setting. After the children are born, Zafar writes a letter to Maheen in which he finally addresses their own as well as their nation’s history. 220 In this letter, he underlines both his desire for the nation to move beyond its history of violence and appreciate its heterogeneity, and the hope he sets on their children - or, their entire generation - to help establish this future. Remembering that Pakistan was formed with the self-understanding of being a nation designed to protect the rights of a minority within India (Ka 312), he argues, We should have recognized that the Pakistan of dreams died and was buried in the battle fields of ’71. Or… Or, Maheen, is it possible to reclaim a name? It is a name for which I have great affection, great regard. But what must be done to restore it to what it could have stood for? Perhaps our children will answer that question one day, if we give them the tools - the information - they need for this task. (Ka 313) Zafar’s reflection on the name of Pakistan is significant: as Cara Cilano points out, while the term Pakistan emerged as “an acronym for the territories that would, in part, eventually make up West Pakistan” (National Identities 101), 221 “[c]onspicuous in its absence is Bengal, a region, it would seem, that was already written out of the concept of Pakistan even before the founding of the nation in 1947” (ibid.). With Zafar hoping for their children to restore what the name could have stood for, rather than what it once did stand for, he seems to allude precisely to this failure to take into consideration the interests and fates of all its regions and populations that characterised the nation from the start. It is the 214 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="215"?> 222 The discussions of Cilano and Herbert bring into view that Karim’s exile ties the possible union between Raheen and Karim even more firmly to a political vision concerning a future Pakistan that accepts all its different members. Cilano argues that “Karim’s explicit diasporic location in London, then, merely exaggerates the distance between his desire to belong to Karachi and the obstacles - the social, cultural, and political biases against this Bengali heritage - preventing him from doing so” (National Identities 116). Both critics suggest that the novel employs Karim’s relocation to propose a fluid notion of Pakistani national identity. It challenges ideas of an organic geographic or cultural origin of the nation (see Cilano, National Identities 106) and rejects discourses that construct “a homogenous Pakistani identity by repressing internal diversity” (Herbert 169). Against this backdrop, the lovers’ union would signify a scenario in which the excluded re-connects with the nation (see also Herbert 169-70). hope for a nation that rectifies these mistakes that he connects to Raheen and Karim. If Zafar envisions Raheen and Karim as harbingers of a different future, the novel indicates elsewhere that this vision is in fact linked to them as lovers rather than as individuals. It is their intense friendship and love that allows their parents to be optimistic about Zafar’s wish coming true: Raheen notes that “[b]oth Karim’s parents and mine always seemed to get such joy out of our friendship and, thinking about it, I had an inkling that the joy contained a strange sort of pride, as though our friendship proved their choices justified” (Ka 195). In the novel’s larger picture, what Raheen mistakes for their parents’ pride in the choices they have made appears in fact as their pride in seeing their children compensate for their mistakes; the younger generation’s love itself signals towards a different time to come. By repeatedly referencing William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Ka 27, 293), Kartography further stresses this point. Although the novel underlines how Raheen and Karim fail to live up to the Shakespearean couple - Raheen finds that ”[o]ne foot on my window ledge, one foot on a tree, head tilted back to prevent the glasses balanced on the edge of his nose from falling off, he [Karim] was Charlie Chaplin rather than the Romeo I’d imagined when I’d imagined him appearing outside my window” (Ka 293) - Kartography nevertheless establishes Romeo and Juliet as a horizon against which to measure its own idealised couple. Not only does being compared to the most famous romance couple in the history of anglophone literature enhance the lure of ‘magical romance’ that surrounds Raheen and Karim, but Romeo and Juliet, who enable the reconciliation of their families through their love, also embody the idea of overcoming conflict through - at times tragic - love. Where the former’s love enables the reconciliation of two antagonistic families, Raheen and Karim’s love, readers are led to expect, leads to a future that overcomes a mentality of conflict and division on a national level. 222 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 215 <?page no="216"?> 223 Caroline Herbert, for instance, points to the “atrocities which are excised from official histories, just as the parents censor the context for their re-arranged relationships” (161). She stresses that, after the war of 1971, Pakistan largely refused to acknowledge this brutal chapter in its history. Creating a national history that glossed over difference and tensions in favour of a uniform, singular identity, Pakistan simply wrote the loss of Bangladesh out of its national history (see Herbert 160). Yet, “attempts to suppress cultural difference in favour of a narrative of a united national identity that elides the loss of Bangladesh failed to prevent the re-emergence of ethnic and regional tensions” (ibid. 160), as the novel underlines. 4.2.2.2 (Un)seeing Connections and the Motif of the Barrier: Politicising Genre Conventions While associating the love of its romance couple Raheen and Karim with the vision of a different future, the novel then places the impediments both to their love and to fulfilling this vision centre stage. As she grows up, Raheen visibly diverges from the blueprint Zafar sketched when she was a baby. Against Zafar’s initial intention to provide the children with all necessary information, the parents eventually fear their children’s reactions to the truth and do not disclose the reasons that caused them to ‘swap fiancés’. While Karim finds out soon after the children get separated, Raheen chooses to remain ignorant: upon first gaining glimpses of a painful truth, she decides to stop asking questions because “[n]o truth was worth such upheaval” (Ka 109). Raheen becomes the opposite of the well-informed subject Zafar has in mind and, on this basis, forms a worldview that ultimately endangers both her union with Karim and the vision the novel has attached to it. Critics often argue that Raheen’s obliviousness of her family’s tragic secret is representative of Pakistan’s general failure to engage with the events of 1971, and that the novel’s way of combining two time levels serves to foreground this failure. 223 However, Kartography is not merely interested in tracing Raheen’s failure to engage with the past as such. It constantly emphasises that her family’s way of silencing the past causes her to grow up lacking one specific insight which her father has gained from his own history of 1971. As the flashbacks to and conversations on 1971 repeatedly underline, Zafar used to disconnect his privileged life from Pakistan at large and to pretend that the country’s ethnic violence had nothing to do with his world (Ka 183, 244). Only the events surrounding his relationship with Maheen made him reconsider his stance, forcing him to acknowledge a larger social context in which his life was embedded and to see that the problems arose precisely out of this larger whole. In presenting its protagonist and her worldviews, the novel underlines that Raheen repeats her father’s mistakes (see also Cilano, National Identities 116): she as well fails to make connections in a situation of conflict 216 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="217"?> which can only be solved by challenging the entire system that privileges some and ignores the concerns of others. It is this failure, more than a denial of violent histories per se, that the novel constantly foregrounds and that it arranges its love plot around. The novel semanticises Raheen’s own narrative discourse to signal towards this failure. Her omissions as well as the things she chooses to elaborate on reveal a distinct pattern: Kartography does not simply position the love story of Raheen and Karim at the centre of the plot, but it constantly demonstrates that Raheen as a narrator is exclusively interested in her personal love story. This, she presents as a distinctly apolitical, entirely personal tale: while she spends a lot of time pondering on her feelings for Karim and the growing emotional distance between them, she seems to consider everything else irrelevant, in particular the violence around her. Her narrative is built on the conviction that the country’s “ethnic battleground” (Ka 44) cannot possibly “have anything to do with Karim and me” (ibid.); consequently, these political issues are of no interest to her. In conversations with other characters, Raheen inadvertently draws the readers’ attention to her own selective way of narrating. An exchange between Raheen and her family’s masseuse Naila, for instance, highlights Raheen’s refusal to be interested in any stories that she considers irrelevant to her love story. Naila pays weekly visits to the rich Karachi families and, in coming to their houses through dangerous areas, puts her life at risk every time she visits. On one of these occasions, Raheen is thinking about Karim and asks Naila whether she knew her husband before getting married. Naila answers, “‘Three years I’ve been coming to your house every week, and this is the first time you’ve asked me a question” (Ka 198), challenging Raheen, “‘Why don’t you ever ask me any questions? About my life? Do you think my life is so uninteresting? ’” (Ka 198), to which Raheen answers, “‘What would I do with the information if I had it? ’” (Ka 199). This conversation illustrates that Raheen is interested in Naila’s experience only in so far as it relates to her, Raheen’s, feelings for Karim. Not only is Raheen’s answer to Naila striking in its lack of interest and empathy, but it also indicates that, as a storyteller of romance, she is entirely indifferent to any information that could distract from her love plot. Raheen’s focus on keeping her personal tale free from ostensibly unrelated information about ethnic fighting thus stresses her attempt to disconnect her ‘elite’ world from its larger context. By repeatedly having its characters produce statements which can be read as a metacommentary on Raheen’s selective way of narrating, the novel then explicitly criticises her approach as a way of obscuring a larger connected whole. Having spent the previous years abroad, for instance, Maheen asks Raheen whether the war of 1971 is finally talked about in Karachi. Realising that 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 217 <?page no="218"?> 224 Herbert, too, draws attention to Zafar’s letter. However, she reads it solely in connection to the official silencing of 1971, arguing that “Kartography suggests that Pakistan has failed to address the traumas of 1971 because of an opposite movement, towards the excessive narrativization of the personal in the absence of an official, public engagement with the losses, in the context of censorship and martial law” (163, emphasis in original). In so doing, she misses that it is its characters’ personal approach to the violent histories of both moments that the novel challenges. people refer to this time only in terms of personal stories about, for instance, relationships and betrayals, Raheen answers, “’[o]nly in story fragments’ (Ka 306). Readers cannot fail to note the parallels between this approach to 1971 and Raheen’s own way of depicting her war-ridden present through the lens of a personal love story. Raheen’s own use of the phrase ‘story fragments’ implies that these stories fail to create a correct impression of their subject as they disconnect one aspect of a whole that should in fact be narrated together. Without realising, Raheen criticises her own way of narrating. A second passage, taken from Zafar’s letter to Maheen, complements this conversation and further challenges Raheen’s approach as a storyteller. He complains: We tell these stories and make war personal - but not in the way it should be; not in a way that makes it touch us personally. We make it personal in a way that excludes everything and everyone who was not part of that four-line story about the war days that we tell over tea and biscuits. (Ka 311) Zafar’s claim that the personal stories that are told exclude other experiences corresponds to the idea of these personal stories being story fragments only. In Zafar’s comment, however, the allusion to ‘tea and biscuits’ conjures up the upper-class world the novel’s protagonists live in. The stories that are left out are thus, it seems, the experiences of those of a different class - like those of Naila, which Raheen refuses to be interested in. 224 In isolating one particular social experience, in remaining story fragments, these personal stories both passages refer to obscure the fact that there is a larger entity of which the ostensibly selfcontained and disconnected upper class circle actually forms part. In arguing that this enables people to avoid making ‘war touch us personally’, Zafar, firstly, suggests that disconnecting from those who suffer from the brutality of war saves the more fortunate people from having to engage with the pain the latter creates. The second implication, however, becomes clear only against the backdrop of the novel’s insistence that the sources of Pakistan’s troubles are to be located within a system of disadvantaging and privileging. In failing to link their stories to those of others, people cover up the sources that produced the 218 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="219"?> 225 In an influential study, Janice Radway observed that romance novels allowed women who suffered from the patriarchal structures they faced to temporarily escape from the latter. The love stories they read offered an alternative to their usual roles as providers of comfort within the family as they showed women who were showered with attention and being cared for. However, Radway argues that the genre ultimately serves to reconcile discontented women with the institution of marriage in which these novels end. She thus concludes that it tends to reaffirm patriarchy and legitimise the status quo from which these female readers try to escape in the first place (see 215). Pamela Regis has rightly pointed out that the novels of Radway’s canon belong without exception to the genre of Harlequin romances (the type of romances Shamsie alludes to) and, as such, provide a very limited view on the entire genre of romance novels (see 24). Regis herself then offers a much more positive evaluation of the genre as a whole. In discussing romance as a means for transnational feminist policies, Emily Davis likewise rejects the idea that romance is per se escapist. war in the first place: they do not have to think about their own role in it and thus avoid having it ‘touch us personally’. If these comments suggest that Raheen’s narrative approach of selectively telling a personal story allows her to evade a larger social context which would in fact force her to acknowledge being part of the problem, the particular romance discourse Raheen produces further invites us to read her one-sided focus on narrating her feelings for Karim as a form of escapism. The novel repeatedly alludes to a specific subgenre of romance narratives. During her college years in the USA, Raheen takes a “‘Myths of Courtship’ class” (Ka 113) and enjoys reading out the particularly soppy passages from the “supermarket romance” (ibid.) discussed in class to her friends. Offering a version of cliched emotional dilemmas and playing with sexual tensions, this version of the romance genre Shamsie alludes to is responsible for the romance novel’s general - and, often ill-founded - association with “escapist individual pleasures” (Davis 1). 225 Kartography itself alludes to this reputation when it foregrounds the ‘unrealistic’, formulaic and escapist version of romance these novels offer by stressing the laughter and amusement that Raheen’s reading provokes. However, although Raheen makes fun of these romances, Kartography has her repeatedly replicate the very tropes and tone of these texts. Looking at Karim, she thinks: [h]e didn’t say anything, or even sit as close as I hoped he would, but my world shimmered at the languor with which he caressed the flower pattern on the teacup, tracing the petals with his index finger, sliding his thumb up and down the stem, just prior to raising the cup to his lips. It was enough to make me wish I was porcelain, hollow and filled with hot liquid. (Ka 169) 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 219 <?page no="220"?> 226 Kartography provides, for instance, the following excerpt from a romance novel: “She stared boldly into his piercing blue eyes, but he was not a man to be daunted by feminine fire and he stared right back, his gaze suggesting X-ray vision that could look right through her blouse and see the rapidly beating heart that lay beneath” (Ka 114). With its rather ridiculous and highly sexualised imagery, Raheen’s reflections mirror the passage she read out herself; 226 her imagination, readers are bound to realise, seems to come right out of a ‘supermarket romance’. Kartography thus marks Raheen’s romance narrative as a similarly ‘escapist’ fantasy that helps her not to see what she does not wish to see: that she is part of the problem out of which the conflicts around her evolved. While thus demonstrating how Raheen fails to see the connections between her own ostensibly separate world and Pakistan and its problems, Kartography associates Karim with an entirely different stance. Asking, “[w]hich stories have you deliberately turned away from, Ra, and why? ’” (Ka 181), he criticises Raheen precisely for the limited scope of her narrative. In fact, as young as 14, Karim refuses to play along with Raheen’s habit of de-contextualising her life. When he asks, for instance, “‘Don’t you think maybe there’s something wrong in us having such fun all the time when people are being killed every day in the poorer parts of town? ’” (Ka 63), he displays the very sense of connectedness with these ‘poorer parts of town’ that Raheen lacks, which in his case translates into a moral obligation to react to their suffering. Later in their lives, Karim explicitly challenges Raheen’s version of an escapist love story: he refers to that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhubat, when you’ve seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can’t go on pretending none of it matters, you can’t pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world (Ka 141, emphasis in original). Drawing on the research of Aamir Mufti, Caroline Herbert explains that the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz “uses the very intimacy of lyric poetry to negotiate and emphasize social commitment” (163), providing a lyrical I that “refuses to turn from the public violence towards the comforts of personal love” (ibid.). Karim thus explicitly rejects Raheen’s insistence on disconnecting their personal story from the social context they live in. Against this background, the novel then turns Raheen’s failure to connect across class divisions and to acknowledge that she forms part of a larger social whole into the major barrier to the lovers’ union and, by extension, to its vision of establishing a post-conflict society. In contrast to the conventional romance novel, where the barrier tends to be rooted in society’s norms and expectation, Kartography hence presents a barrier whose removal requires the lovers, or, rather, Raheen, to make room for society within their love. 220 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="221"?> 227 The symbolic meaning of maps has been discussed at length, see in particular Herbert and Mallot. It is through a recurring motif of maps that the novel discusses the barrier between the lovers. 227 Maps are a constant source of conflict for Raheen and Karim. With Raheen’s perplexed question how it was that maps had “become the symbol of everything that had gone so wrong, so inexplicably, in my relationship with Karim? “ (Ka 179), the novel foregrounds its own technique of tying the barrier visibly to their disagreements about maps. While Raheen is at a loss to understand what they are fighting about, the novel indicates that it is precisely their differing approaches on seeking or refusing to see a larger social and political context in which they are embedded that is at the bottom of these conflicts about maps. Ever since Karim, aged 14, first formed a desire to become a cartographer, he has intended to draw a map of Karachi. Raheen, however, insists that there is no need for a map of the city since Karachiites give directions by relating to a pool of personal stories they share with those they want to give directions to. In her point of view, references to their friends’ homes, shops or other personal landmarks make an official map of Karachi unnecessary. For Karim, Raheen’s lack of interest in a map that captures the entire city as a connected whole testifies once more to Raheen’s general indifference towards anything beyond her own upperclass world and to her way of disconnecting the latter from the rest of society. In fact, he constantly employs maps to criticise and counterbalance her tendency of approaching society in “story fragments” only. For instance, Karim sends her a map (Ka 134), as Priya Kumar argues, to “critique Raheen for her insularity” (175). Not only does he mark Raheen’s limited radius graphically on the map, but he also stresses, “This is not a map of Karachi. It’s Karachi South only” (Ka 134, emphasis in original). In so doing, he alludes, once again, to her habit of presenting her upper-class life as a self-contained entity that needs no further contextualising. He later explains that he sent her maps [b]ecause I wanted you to find a way to see beyond the tiny circles you live in, I wanted you to acknowledge that you’re part of something larger. Maps, Raheen, are amazing things. They define a city as a single territorial unit, they give a sense of connectedness, and you don’t want to admit you’re connected to anything that’s painful or uncomfortable. (Ka 244) The idea that maps testify to a ‘single territorial unit’ and to a ‘sense of connectedness’ explicitly underlines their potential to provide the very context that is missing in the kind of personal stories that upper-class Karachiites like to tell each other. 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 221 <?page no="222"?> In fact, the very title of the novel alludes to the two different approaches towards mapping the city that the protagonists represent. While the term cartography foregrounds Karim’s desire to create a map of Karachi, Shamsie simultaneously points towards Raheen’s insistence on personal landmarks by replacing the letter ‘c’ with a ‘k’. Raheen points out that in Karachi, “[w]e worship at the altar of K. Haven’t you noticed all the Ks in business names in Karachi: Karachi Kars, Karachi Karpets, Karachi Kards - not to mention Karat Jewellers, Kwick Kababs, Kleen Kleeners and Kweer Kween’” (Ka 241, see also Kumar 174). Raheen names a whole number of shops and businesses which are familiar to her and her friends. Not only does the letter ‘k’ in the title emphasise Karachi’s elevated role in the novel, is also contrasts the idea of a traditional ‘cartography’ with Raheen’s idiosyncratic way of orienting in the city. The title itself thus already hints at the lovers’ central conflict. Karim’s hope that maps can function to create a sense of a larger social whole becomes most visible in his idea to create an interactive map of Karachi on the internet, presented on the last pages of the novel. The medium of the internet, carrying in its very name the idea of networking and connecting, inspires Karim to view Karachi as a social network that interweaves the lives and experiences of people from various classes and backgrounds. He seeks to make sure that his map both mirrors the heterogenous set of stories that make up the city and suggestively unites them in one single space. Breaking with the habit of excluding and disavowing connections, his map on the internet is explicitly designed to counteract the inability of a one-dimensional map “to tell more than one story at any given time and present a single viewpoint as if it is valid for everyone” (Mallot 281): You start with a basic street map, OK, but everywhere there are links. Click here, you get sound files of Karachiites telling stories of what it’s like to live in different parts of town. […] Click, you hear a poem. Click, you see a painting. Choice of languages in which you can read the thing. Sound files in all kinds of dialects. Strong on graphics for people who are illiterate. Just wait, Raheen, this is going to be amazing. (Ka 337) Karim’s attempt at being as inclusive as possible is obvious: not only does his map connect the experiences of different parts of town, but he also tries to deconstruct barriers that might limit access to the map. While their parents’ friends look down on and dismiss who they refer to as “illiterate Pathans” (Ka 222), Karim attempts to find a way for this group to take part in his project. Karim’s representation of the city as a ‘single territorial unit’ thus merges with the ideal of a nation that thinks about all its members’ concerns. It embodies 222 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="223"?> 228 Compare also Herbert, who situates Karim’s map within the novel’s juxtaposition of narrative and non-narrative modes. Pointing out that Shamsie repeatedly inserts nonnarrative forms such as maps, letters, or Raheen’s own essays into the novel which interrupt the main narrative (see 161), she argues that this accentuates the novel’s project of complicating a ‘smooth’ narrative of a united, singular national identity that suppresses conflict and difference (see 160-1). Against this background, she reads Karim’s internet map as a “dialogue between narrative and non-narrative modes that opens a space for difference and non-identification” (171). His map, she maintains, “resists the reduction of Pakistan’s discontinuous histories into a linear, normalizing narrative arc” (ibid.). Zafar’s hope that the young generation might restore what Pakistan’s name could have stood for. 228 As the genre of the romance novel with its convention of a happy ending dictates (see Regis 7), Raheen and Karim ultimately find a way to overcome the barrier that is in the way of their happiness. Like Vivian in A God in Every Stone, Raheen undergoes a process of formation which makes her susceptible to connections she did not acknowledge before: finally forced to face their parents’ history, she abandons the idea of her life being disconnected from the troubles in the city. Simultaneously, she arrives at the conclusion that engaging with the suffering of those she used to dismiss as ‘Others’ is a moral obligation (see Clements 124). In a letter to Karim, she admits that “Karachi at its worst is a Karachi unconcerned with people who exist outside the storyteller’s circle, a Karachi oblivious to people and places who aren’t familiar enough for nicknames” (Ka 331). In so doing, she criticises both her own failure as a narrator and her lack of concern for the lives of people like Naila. Raheen’s process of formation thus removes the barrier between the two characters and the novel offers the possibility of a happy ending to their love story. In this context, the specific way in which Kartography presents this possibility functions to underline once more how much their happy ending and the political vision the novel attaches to it depends on them - and, by extension, Pakistan’s society - learning to see the social totality instead of ‘story fragments’. The novel suggestively conflates their reconciliation as a couple with Karim’s map project. This reconciliation takes place over the phone. Karim asks Raheen whether she would contribute to his project by writing one of its stories and it is in the shape of a first draft for such a story that the novel suggests their union: ‘Write, “There was a boy called Karim who never fell in love.”’ ‘He never fell in love? ’ ‘No. There was no falling. He was born in love with her, and he was borne by love all the way back to her, even though there was a period of total stupidity in between.’ I bowed my head. The grace of this moment. Remember this always. (Ka 338) 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 223 <?page no="224"?> 229 The novel even suggests a possible scenario in which Karim gets shot while Raheen sits and waits for him. However, while this part is narrated in allusions and fragments only, the conclusion which the novel invites us to draw is that Karim stays unharmed because Zafar’s father sacrifices himself to save him (Ka 341-2). It is thus explicitly as one among many stories of the map project that their possible happy ending comes into view. Their existence as a couple begins at the very moment when they choose to inscribe themselves into the network that represents the city of Karachi. However, their happy ending clearly remains a possibility only. The novel stops short of narrating the actual moment of Karim’s return. Instead, it ends with Raheen waiting for Karim and imagining their union: I pictured Karim sitting at the desk, pencil poised above a sheet of paper, eyes consulting base maps and aerial mosaics, one arm resting on the desk, palm up. Clifton, Defence, Gizri, Sea View, Bath Island… I said, wrapping my fingers around each of his fingers in turn, learning by touch the length of each digit. I dipped my thumb in ink and ran it over his palm: heart line, fate line, Mound of Venus. Boat Basin, I said. I unbuttoned his cuff and rolled up his sleeve. With the tine of a fork I traced his vein, from wrist up to elbow. […] I pushed the shirtsleeve further up his arm, and ran a fingernail down a raised and knotted scar. So then, what would this be? I asked. He turned his map towards me and pointed out Napier Mole Road. Can you handle these logistics? he said. (Ka 340, emphasis in original) Bruce King asks, “[w]hat is the status of these final pages of the novel? ” (156) and, observing that “the prose turns to dream-like verse” (155), suggests that “[t]he conclusions of Shamsie’s novels are often ambiguous and puzzling, probably because the desires that motivate the central characters cannot be resolved and require fantasy” (156). A more encompassing look at romance in Kartography that reads this last romance imagination against the backdrop of Raheen’s earlier ones allows readers to see more in this choice of an ending: by providing yet another romance fantasy, Shamsie stresses Raheen’s development away from her insistence on separating herself from her surroundings. While the earlier scenarios she imagined followed the tropes of ‘supermarket romances’ that seek the lovers’ private idyll disconnected from the larger world, she now imagines their flirtation to literally merge with Karachi’s geography and Karim’s attempt to produce an inclusive map. With its different nuances, Raheen’s romance imagination itself signals to her process of formation. Moreover, by postponing the lovers’ union into a future beyond the novel’s diegesis and shedding doubt on whether the lovers’ union will actually happen, 229 Shamsie once again underlines that her hope for a world that acknowledges its connectivity is not yet fulfilled. 224 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="225"?> Making the vision that Raheen and Karim’s union embodies become reality appears as an ongoing project to which her novels themselves contribute. 4.2.2.3 Beyond a National Tale: Connecting Karachi and Connecting the World Through its romance story and its discussion of Raheen’s attitude, Kartography thus targets a situation in which privileged parts of a society claim to be disconnected from others to whom they are in reality tied through political and economic interdependence. Instead of recognising that the political instability and the conflicts which come to the fore elsewhere in this society have been produced by a larger system that connects them all, they regard these as someone else’s problems that have nothing to do with ‘them’. It does not require much effort to map the situation Shamsie discusses in Kartography with regard to Pakistan, and specifically Karachi, onto the globally oriented critique she develops in works such as Burnt Shadows. It notably corresponds with her analysis of how Western countries ascribe the roots of global warfare simply to the ostensibly intrinsic deficiencies of Islamic cultures and, in so doing, gloss over their own part in creating the situation out of which these wars arose. By connecting Shamsie’s depiction of Karachi with the issue of a world failing to acknowledge its connectivity and by showing how Kartography itself tentatively directs the reader towards making such a connection, I suggest that Kartography’s troubled Karachi also functions as an allegory for the modern world as a whole. Read in this light, the novel’s insistence that acknowledging connections is a prerequisite for moving on to a different future appears not only as a comment on the conditions for reaching a post-conflict within the national space of Pakistan, but also on how to reconcile a divided world globally. How easily Raheen’s approach to Karachi can be transferred onto a global level becomes particularly visible when reading Kartography alongside Fredric Jameson’s discussion of “Modernism and Imperialism”. In interrogating the developments out of which modernist literature with its specific formal charac‐ teristics emerged, Jameson describes the difficulties of “mapping” (“Modernism and Imperialism” 50) a system of global connections in terms that strikingly resemble Shamsie’s take on Raheen’s failure to map Karachi as a connected whole. Going back to the emergence of the “new imperial world system” (ibid.) in the late 19 th century, Jameson points out that European nation states understood themselves as self-contained entities in competition with one another. In so doing, they obscured how, each of them being a colonial power, their economies had become linked to places outside their own national geographies. He 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 225 <?page no="226"?> discusses a dilemma which this situation produced: he argues that for the metropolitan onlooker, understanding this new system is impossible because “the colonized other who is its essential component or opposite number has become invisible” (ibid. 50). This creates a situation where “pieces of the puzzle are missing” (ibid. 51, my emphasis), which has “as its immediate consequences the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole” (ibid. 51). Not only do these observations remind of Shamsie’s emphasis on the ways in which Raheen approaches reality in ‘story fragments’ which obscure a larger social whole by rendering other stories invisible, but Jameson also explicitly discusses cartography and mapping as attempts to get into view an obscured totality: Now of course one’s simplest first thought, faced with this problem of a global space that like the fourth dimension somehow constitutively escapes you, is no doubt to make a global map […] But cartography is not the solution, but rather the problem, at least in its ideal epistemological form as social cognitive mapping on a global scale. The map, if there is to be one, must somehow emerge from the demands and constraints of the spatial perceptions of the individual […]. (“Modernism and Imperialism” 51-2) Although Jameson denies the very potential of maps to create a sense of the whole that Kartography insists on, his central concerns overlap with those expressed in the novel. If he connects maps with the restrictions of a single observer tied to one position within the social whole, Raheen’s attempt to tell personal stories represents an extreme version of the approach to cartography Jameson describes. Karim’s maps, however, are designed to overcome this limitation. His inclusion of various perspectives from different areas of Karachi seeks to overcome precisely the ‘constrains of the spatial perceptions’ of one individual, as the reading by Mallot (281) that I have already quoted explicitly underlines. While Shamsie’s depiction of the failures to see connections between Kara‐ chi’s various groups thus overlaps in many ways with Jameson’s discussion of the difficulties of “mapping […] the new imperial world system” (“Modernism and Imperialism” 50), I am not suggesting that Shamsie’s novel opens up the late-19 th and early-20 th -century context that Jameson has in mind. However, there is a general point Jameson makes that can be transferred onto the con‐ temporary moment. His discussion foregrounds the difficulty of grasping that ostensibly self-contained, clearly demarcated entities of nations (or cultures) are actually linked to areas and people beyond themselves through a global network of interdependencies and connections inaugurated through colonial histories. As the previous chapters have shown, Shamsie’s novels continuously return to this exact point. Although it may initially seem otherwise, Kartography is 226 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="227"?> 230 The fact that, in the passage above, it is only England that ‘doesn’t quite connect’ hence gestures towards England’s preeminent role in the imperial world order of the past, which Karim, being Pakistani, is of course well aware of. It also reveals, however, the boy’s perception of the rest of the world to be rather idealistic: after all, his connected world includes places like the former Yugoslavia, which evokes itself a violent process of division. Yet, this vision should not be brushed aside as the misconception of an ignorant child. In the context of Shamsie’s larger oeuvre, his insistence on seeing connections no exception: the novel explicitly links its local discussion of Karachi with the theme of a (denied) global connectivity sprung from colonial histories, and it does so, once again, through the motif of maps. Kartography juxtaposes Karim’s discussion of Karachi maps with his reflec‐ tions on a global map. Like the former, the latter serves to underline connections, yet this time between different nations: ‘It’s like a giant jigsaw, the world. All these places connecting.’ He opened the atlas on one of the first pages, where all the continents were spread out. ‘See: Pakistan connects to Iran which connects to Turkey which connects to Bulgaria which connects to Yugoslavia which connects to Austria which connects to France. But then there’s the sea. And after that, England. It doesn’t quite connect. England.’ He stared gloomily at the page. (Ka 26) Looking at this map upon the prospect of having to leave Karachi gives Karim - at least initially - a consoling feeling of global ‘connectedness’. Just as he later insists on understanding Karachi as a connected space despite the various lines that divide the population into ostensibly disconnected groups, the global map brings into view that the earth is, nationalist discourses notwithstanding, “in effect one world” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 6). With this double emphasis on the capacity of maps to testify to connections within Karachi as well as globally, the novel encourages readers to make a further connection of their own. The passage above subtly directs our attention towards a global problem that arises in analogy to the problem Karim addresses with his maps of Karachi: the fact that it is England of all nations that ‘does not quite connect’ suggests more than merely Karim’s fear of being exiled to a geographically isolated place. Being Pakistan’s as well as much of the world’s former colonising power, the island’s stubborn refusal to ‘connect’ to other parts of the world also contains a metaphorical dimension. Just like Karachi’s upper-class South pretends to be disconnected from the city’s larger geography as well as its problems, England and the world’s other former colonising powers insist on being disconnected from the rest of the world. In so doing, they deny their part in problems that arose out of a global system they established. 230 Karachi’s elite thus becomes 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 227 <?page no="228"?> despite all political aggressions appears as a political act in itself, which mirrors the project that Shamsie’s novels subscribe to on the whole. 231 See for example R. Ahmed, who finds that the character’s journeys “produce a city-asspectacle, voyeuristically and quasi-touristically configured from a private space” (21). 232 Compare my discussion in chapter 4.1.1.1. conceptually linked to Western countries that refuse to acknowledge their role in problems which manifest themselves elsewhere. This conceptual link is in fact suggested throughout the novel. With its Westernised and polyglot elite, the city’s class distinctions are themselves rooted in a postcolonial power imbalance. Moreover, on their frequent adventures through the poorer parts of Karachi before returning to the safety of their part of town, Raheen and her friends remind of Western tourists travelling through ‘exotic’ lands. 231 In fact, Raheen’s perceptions of the city does not merely recall the description of Peshawar provided through the perspective of Englishwoman Vivian Spencer in A God in Every Stone (78-9); it seems to have actually served as a model for the later text. 232 They snake[] through the congested parts of Karachi with its colourful buses manically racing one another, men selling fruit and vegetables from wooden carts on the side of the road, deformed beggars dextrously making their way through traffic, laundry flapping from washing lines on the latticed balconies of low-rise apartment buildings. (Ka 59) With the tone resembling that of A God in Every Stone and the motifs of the street sellers and of washing lines repeating themselves, the parallels between both passages are striking. Through the intertextual cross-reference between these two novels, the publication of the later novel in fact retrospectively influences our reading of the earlier one: it strengthens the impression that Karachi’s elites in Kartography reproduce the position of colonisers within their city. The fact that Kartography thus shows Pakistan’s society to be inextricably connected to global power structures further encourages an interpretation that maps Karachi’s upper-class circles onto (former) colonising nations and the novel’s Karachi-based discussion onto the world at large. Despite its narrow focus on Karachi, the novel’s discussion thus entails a broader critique of a world in which societies that live on the exploitation of others conveniently overlook how the global system they benefit from produced the very problems they tend to regard as immanent failures of self-contained nations. Against this backdrop, Kartography’s insistence that a desirable, postconflict future can only be reached by acknowledging connections and a shared responsibility for the conflicts and social problems one seeks to overcome has 228 4 Romance in the novels of Kamila Shamsie <?page no="229"?> wider implications than it might at first appear. Rather than only suggesting a path towards a post-conflict Pakistan, this insistence turns into a call for transnational engagement and solidarity. Kartography underlines the necessity to think of all the various parts of a connected world instead of only the fate of a few as preached by nationalist politics. By stressing the obligation to relieve the suffering of those seemingly disconnected from oneself, Kartography thus aligns itself with a view well established in sociological discourses: it suggests that in a connected world only those approaches can lead to a better future which transcend the limits of the nation-state and “seek to further the possibilities of a fulfilling and satisfying life for all” (Giddens 156). With its romance of connections, Kartography thus develops an alternative to the romance discourses prevalent in A God in Every Stone and Burnt Shadows. Although it focuses on a single love story and politicises its recreation of an established trajectory of a romance novel rather than embarking on a project of deconstructing exotic romance or developing transcultural romance, Kartography, too, clearly employs romance for a project of moving beyond the separations that paradoxically developed along with a connected modernity. 4.2 The Troubled Romance Plots of Burnt Shadows (2009) and Kartography (2002) 229 <?page no="231"?> 233 Compare my discussion in chapter 1 of this study. 234 Mignolo insists that “coloniality cannot be overcome by modernity, because it is the other half of the story” (“Imperial/ Colonial Metamorphosis” 110) and that decoloniality requires a “radical undoing of modernity/ coloniality” (ibid. 111, emphasis in original). 5 From Alternative Visions to Alternative Worlds: Postcolonial Romance in Context In introducing the concept of postcolonial romance, this study started off from a pairing which, at first glance, seems unlikely. As literary expressions of romance have all too often been tied to notions of a primordial non-Western space, the very idea of romance appears to sit uneasily with a postcolonial project of overcoming the remains, both material and ideological, of the colonial era. Furthermore, while the postcolonial as a term inevitably evokes notions of politically engaged thinking and writing, 233 romance tends to be associated with escapist and distinctly apolitical texts. Far from suggesting an apolitical tendency or confirming exoticising tropes, however, romance in the novels of Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie is inextricably tied to a project of working towards political transformation that both authors’ oeuvres subscribe to. The preceding close readings have shown that Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s critical engagement with romance traditions, particularly in their exoticising guise, allows them to challenge the borders and separations that have come to define a modernity that developed in tandem with colonial histories. However, while pointing to the shortcomings of the modern world as it is, the novels refrain from condemning modernity in its entirety: they do not depict it, along the lines of postcolonial critics like Walter Mignolo, 234 as inevitably ‘colonial’ and for all times hopelessly bound up with exploitative practices. Instead, they draw on romance to contrast the status quo with possible alternative futures whose potentiality, they suggest, is already inherent in our modern world and its history. In Ghosh’s case, I have argued, romance works towards keeping exploitative and unsustainable modern practices in check through empowering a non-Western paradigm of inhabiting modernity. This is characterised by its emphasis on transcultural connectivity and cooperation, and its tendency to connect what the dominant version of modernity separates. However, this paradigm has been repeatedly dismissed as anti-modern and hence neglectable - a dismissal from which Ghosh’s romance seeks to rescue it. Shamsie’s romance, by contrast, points to the possibility of creating a radically different modernity by fostering the awareness that the modern world is thoroughly connected and <?page no="232"?> 235 Conversely, Mark Fisher’s reflections on ‘capitalist realism’ foreground the paralysing effects that a lack of alternative visions has on a given society. 236 For a contextualisation of this image compare my discussion in chapter 1 of this study. in constant flux. By challenging static and totalising identity categories and drawing attention to the interdependences of modern histories worldwide, the novels seek to advance the possibility of a different world that takes us beyond “politics of confrontation” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 19) and exploitation. In both cases, the texts’ postcolonial romance thus fulfils what Graham Huggan describes as “one of the few generally agreed-upon tasks of postcolonial studies” (“General Introduction” 19-20), namely to “show that alternative understandings of modernity - alternative modernities - are possible” (ibid. 20). Repeatedly, critics have emphasised that the availability of alternative visions is a crucial step for enabling any project of social transformation in the first place. 235 In advocating the need for a convivial culture in the modern world, Paul Gilroy, for instance, stresses that “the ability to imagine political, economic, and social systems in which ‘race’ makes no sense is an essential, though woefully underdeveloped part of formulating a credible antiracism as well as an invaluable transitional exercise” (After Empire 59). Anthony Giddens makes a similar point in the context of his image of modernity as a “juggernaut - a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could render itself asunder” (139). 236 Stressing that “attempts to steer the juggernaut” (154) and hence to move on to a less fragile state need to have absolute priority, he finds that our best chance for attempting to ‘steer the juggernaut’ lies in “envisag[ing] alternative futures whose very propagation might help them be realised” (154). He describes this project as an instance of “utopian realism” (ibid., emphasis in original) and emphasises that these futures we imagine have to be connected to the “immanent possibilities” (155) of the world we currently face. In suggesting that creating alternative visions out of what already exists constitutes a prerequisite for being able to shape the world we inhabit, Giddens seems to ask almost for the kind of projects Ghosh and Shamsie pursue: their postcolonial romance in fact works precisely towards digging up such alternative possibilities ‘immanent’ to the present in order to foster the transition to a different world. I have argued that engaging with the traditions of exotic romance enables both authors to develop their own versions of romance as a distinctly politicised literary tool. Adapting these traditions to new ends allows them to use romance for envisioning alternatives to a modernity tied to a paradigm of Othering and separating. In concluding by contextualising the seven novels I analysed 232 5 From Alternative Visions to Alternative Worlds: Postcolonial Romance in Context <?page no="233"?> 237 Chapter 2.2.2 discusses this potential in detail. with a select number of related novels, I will suggest that there are in fact good reasons for regarding this particular use of romances as a broader literary phenomenon that transcends these individual texts. Yet, in their explicit and selfreflexive engagement with the conventions of historical and imperial romances, the novels analysed in the preceding chapters stick out. With the exception of Kartography, they all explicitly evoke the notion of journeying into an antimodern land of romance and encountering attractively exotic ‘anti-moderns’ within their own diegeses. In so doing, they carefully direct the reader’s attention towards the traditions and imaginaries which make romance both a contested and an interesting category for postcolonial thought. Thus, these novels’ meta-romances in fact provide a helpful point of entry for reading romance in a whole range of novels: even in texts that do not explicitly draw attention to their own romance’s indebtedness to exotic romance, keeping in mind the traditions of exotic romance and their potential for a postcolonial engagement with modernity helps to make one susceptible to how and why these texts persistently draw on romance. A number of Ghosh’s and Shamsie’s own remaining novels are a case in point. In Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron (2000), for instance, a number of love stories, to which I suggest counting not only the ‘love leading to relationship’-stories but also the romanticised relation between the protagonist Aliya and her aunt Mariam, gradually force Aliya to challenge her acquired worldview. While she used to uncritically adopt Karachi’s habit of categorising and separating people along the lines of class and city districts - separations which the novel parallels with the Indian subcontinent’s history of partition - romance ultimately takes her beyond this habit. Bruce King rightly observes that this novel, like all of Shamsie’s Karachi novels, “concludes with fantasies, wish-fulfilments” (149). What the novel here engages in is the familiar endeavour of tying romance to the act of imagining a different modern world into being; a world built on circumventing the ‘modern’ separations that Shamsie’s works continuously highlight. Although deconstructive or ironic allusions to the exotic romance’s imagination of a divided world are absent in this novel, reading it against the backdrop of the previous analyses allows to grasp how Salt and Saffron nevertheless builds on the traditions of exotic romance, in this case not by foregrounding its problematic aspects but by capitalising on its potential for envisioning an alternative to nationalist or otherwise divisive and essentialising imaginaries. 237 In Ghosh’s novels as well, transcultural love and friendship relations are a constant feature. They provide a visible counter-sphere to group 5 From Alternative Visions to Alternative Worlds: Postcolonial Romance in Context 233 <?page no="234"?> antagonisms and competitions in the war-ridden world of The Glass Palace (2000), for instance, carrying within themselves the potential of a different world. Moreover, in The Shadow Lines, the narrator’s cousin Tribid alludes to the romance of Tristan and Iseult, explicitly connecting it, the story’s tragic ending notwithstanding, to an idealised fantasy of a world without borders. He explains that [i]t happened everywhere, wherever you wish it. It was an old story, the best story in Europe, [,…] told when Europe was a better place, a place without borders and countries - it was a German story in what we call Germany, Nordic in the north, French in France, Welsh in Wales, Cornish in Cornwall: it was the story of a hero called Tristan, a very sad story, about a man without a country, who fell in love with a woman-across-the-seas… (Shadow Lines 229) As Julia Hoydis points out, the story provides consolation for Tribid. As he finds himself caught up in the turmoil of modern nationalism and religious and ethnic hatred, its transcultural love story as well as its transcultural origins and the world without clear-cut national separations that they promise appeal to him (see 241-4). Once again, transcultural romance, in opening up “the possibilities to negotiate the difficult ideal of cosmopolitanism across time and space” (Hoydis 244) becomes connected to the search for an alternative modern world - and once again, the plots of Ghosh’s meta-romances in the Ibis trilogy and The Hungry Tide allow to recognise this as a pattern derived from a long literary tradition. If romance as a strategy to foreground a possible alternative modernity is hence not restricted to the novels discussed in the preceding chapters, neither is it restricted to the two authors I focused on. Emily Davis’ discussion of Ahdaf Soueif ’s The Map of Love (1999) shows interesting points of contact with my reading of Shamsie’s texts. The novel, an intergenerational tale which spans the 19 th and the 20 th century and focuses primarily on the experience of various women characters in a transnational family constellation, visibly “revise[s] the colonial romance” (Davis 63). As Davis maintains, “[b]y incorporating the trope of the interracial romance from the colonial romance genre, [it] speak[s] back to British colonial writing” (ibid. 64). In fact, the novel alludes to the Sheik story trope analysed by Teo. However, turning its Orientalism upside down, The Map of Love employs this trop to promote a resistance to cultural essentialism. Moreover, Davis points out, as the novel’s interest shifts from the heterosexual love story that it initially centres on towards developing transcultural friendships that connect the female characters, the novel’s romance functions to position transnational feminist politics against 234 5 From Alternative Visions to Alternative Worlds: Postcolonial Romance in Context <?page no="235"?> 238 See also Filippo Menozzi’s discussion of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in the context of a debate about realism in postcolonial writing. 239 It is no coincidence that Prasenjit Duara explicitly discusses Roy as an example of activists who resist unsustainable ‘modern’ ways (see Global Modernity 45-6). “masculinist nationalist rhetoric and colonialist fantasy” (ibid. 64). Like Shamsie, Soueif seems to use romance for a distinctly feminist project of envisioning a modernity that moves beyond current antagonisms and separations: Rather than mapping the actual historical ‘affective grid’ of colonial politics, then, Soueif ’s transnational romance instead offers a fantasy of an affective grid of anticolonial politics, transforming the historical record to meet the needs of her own artistic and political projects. In other words, the intimate relationships in Soueif ’s novel are an imaginative attempt to will into being the coalitions necessary to address the current political impasse at a moment when their absence in the ‘real’ world seems truly dire. (Davis 74) Not only does Soueif ’s attempt to imagine those coalitions into being that the ‘real’ world currently tends to withhold from us connect her with Shamsie’s project, but the authors also resemble each other in the literary methods they choose. They both develop a romance narrative which is rooted in but ultimately functions to transcend colonial/ imperial romance in order to express their visions. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), too, suggests that authors beyond Ghosh and Shamsie develop strategies akin to the version of postcolonial romance that this study traced. Offering a broad take on contemporary India, the novel both develops a number of love stories and displays “touches of surrealism and the fantastical” (Lau and Mendes 6) that continuously interrupt an otherwise highly documentary, ‘realist’ mode. 238 Observing that romance pervades Roy’s fiction (see ibid. 4), Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes argue that “romance in Roy’s novels, although just one of her many literary devices, functions as a transformative and heroic political rescue of the other in postcolonial India” (3). Romance, they find, is involved in a project of presenting stories of others in a way that seeks “not to deny their otherness, but to demonstrate that this is no grounds for othering” (4, emphasis in original). I have argued elsewhere that Roy’s novel uses its literary form to criticise discourses which assert that postcolonial India needs to advance its ‘development’ by embracing capitalism and neoliberal globalisation. Roy demonstrates that such discourses simply dismiss all projects that position themselves consciously against capitalist and neoliberalist principles as ‘back‐ ward’ ideas of an exotic Other (see Schwander). 239 Particularly against this 5 From Alternative Visions to Alternative Worlds: Postcolonial Romance in Context 235 <?page no="236"?> backdrop, Lau and Mendes’ claim that Roy’s romance seeks to rescue otherness from (anti-modern) Othering brings into view the parallels to Ghosh’s fiction. In his novels romance also functions to incorporate alternative possibilities that transcend what is dominantly associated with modernity into a renewed and altered version of the latter. In his seminal study All That is Solid Melts into Air (1982), Marshall Berman argued that modernity, with its ‘world-historical processes’ of change, “pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal” (15). However, in so doing, it does not reduce us to mere bystanders, impotent in the face of irresistible change. Berman points out that “the innate dynamism” (288) of the modern world allows people to continuously and actively re-shape the experience of modernity itself. He insists that [t]hese word-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. (16) In his somewhat against-the-grain use of the term, Berman suggests that being ‘modernist’ means precisely to participate in developing such ‘visions and ideas’, which he traces in various cultural products from the early 19 th century onwards: to be modernist, he argues, “is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice that its fervid and perilous flow allows” (345-6). ‘Modernist’ engagements with the world were able, for instance, “to show that this was not the only possible modern world, that there were other, better directions in which the modern spirit could move” (313). Such engagements, he maintains, are by no means limited to the moment when the transformations engendered by modernity were first felt: “The modern world has changed radically in many ways over the past two hundred years; but the situation of the modernist, trying to survive and create in the maelstrom’s midst, has remained substantially the same” (346). It is such an attempt to ‘survive and create’ in the maelstrom’s midst, I hope to have shown, that postcolonial romance constitutes. By both submitting modernity as it is to a thorough critique and developing alternative visions born out of the modern world’s immanent possibilities, it seeks to intervene in the dynamic process through which modernity continually re-shapes itself to create a better and safer world for all. 236 5 From Alternative Visions to Alternative Worlds: Postcolonial Romance in Context <?page no="237"?> 6 Bibliography 6.1 Primary Literature Bernier, François. Travels in the Mogul Empire. 2 Vols. Transl. 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Jahrhundert 2007, 248 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6324-8 Band 71 Sarah Heinz Die Einheit in der Differenz Metapher, Romance und Identität in A.S. Byatts Romanen 2007, 453 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6345-3 <?page no="252"?> Band 72 Dagmar Schmelzer Intermediales Schreiben im spanischen Avantgarderoman der 20er Jahre Azorín, Benjamín Jarnés und der Film 2007, 327 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6359-0 Band 73 Folkert Degenring Identität zwischen Dekonstruktion und (Re)Konstruktion im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman Peter Ackroyd, Iain Banks und A. S. Byatt 2008, 235 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6427-6 Band 74 Philip Griffiths Externalised Texts of the Self Projections of the Self in Selected Works of English Literature 2008, 245 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6460-3 Band 75 Klaus Lang Von Frau von Staël zu D.H. Lawrence Literarische Bilder von Natur- und Kulturlandschaften Italiens und ihre englandkritische Funktionalisierung in repräsentativen Romanen 2009, 523 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6487-0 Band 76 Christian Schwägerl Language contact and displays of social identity The communicative and ideological dimension of code-mixing in a business setting 2010, 195 Seiten €[D] 48,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6565-5 Band 77 Sarah-Jane Conrad, Daniel Elmiger (Hrsg.) Leben und Reden in Biel/ Bienne. Vivre et communiquer dans une ville bilingue Kommunikation in einer zweisprachigen Stadt. Une expérience biennoise 2010, 220 Seiten €[D] 49,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6589-1 Band 78 Isabell Ludewig Lebenskunst in der Literatur Zeitgenössische fiktionale Autobiographien und Dimensionen moderner Ethiken des guten Lebens 2011, 229 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6672-0 Band 79 Stella Butter Kontingenz und Literatur im Prozess der Modernisierung Diagnosen und Umgangsstrategien im britischen Roman des 19. ̶ 21. Jahrhunderts 2013, XVI, 496 Seiten €[D] 78,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6801-4 Band 80 Maurus Roller Krise und Wandel: Das britische Drama im 20. Jahrhundert Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Identität, Autonomie und Form-Inhalt-Relation 2014, X, 510 Seiten €[D] 78,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6860-1 Band 81 Nora Kuster, Stella Butter, Sarah Heinz (Hrsg.) Subject Cultures: The English Novel from the 18th to the 21st Century 2016, 276 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-6932-5 <?page no="253"?> Band 82 Kerstin Frank, Caroline Lusin (Hrsg.) Finance, Terror, and Science on Stage Current Public Concerns in 21st-Century British Drama 2017, 275 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8142-6 Band 83 Caroline Lusin, Ralf Haekel (Hrsg.) Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century 2019, 304 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8249-2 Band 84 Annika Gonnermann, Sina Schuhmaier, Lisa Schwander (Hrsg.) Literarische Perspektiven auf den Kapitalismus Fallbeispiele aus dem 21. Jahrhundert 2021, 275 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8343-7 Band 85 Annika Gonnermann Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction 2021, 352 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8459-5 Band 86 Corinna Assmann, Jan Rupp, Christine Schwanecke (Hrsg.) The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative 2023, 283 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8573-8 Band 87 Maria Antonia Schellstede „Die bloße Macht des Raums“ - Detailrealismus und Topographie in Theodor Fontanes L’Adultera 2023, 464 Seiten €[D] 84,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8594-3 Band 88 Laura Winter Dystopia on Demand: Technology, Digital Culture, and the Metamodern Quest in Complex Serial Dystopias 2024, 356 Seiten €[D] 78,- ISBN 978-3-381-11221-0 Band 89 Lisa Schwander Postcolonial Romance Negotiations of Modernity in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie 2026, 249 Seiten €[D] 72,- ISBN 978-3-381-15111-0 <?page no="254"?> ISBN 978-3-381-15111-0 www.narr.de At first glance, postcolonialism and romance seem worlds apart: the former associated with political critique and activism, the latter with idealisation and escapism. In discussing selected novels of Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie, this study unsettles this assumption. Through reading both authors’ texts against the backdrop of the 19 th and early 20 th century historical and imperial romance, it shows how contemporary fiction employs romance conventions to critically engage with history. Far from being apolitical, romance in the novels of Ghosh and Shamsie becomes a tool for rethinking modernity and for envisioning alternative futures disentangled from the colonial past.