To walk down a crowded Colaba street on an afternoon is to come into contact with more people than one would in the course of a lifetime in Sweden. In the West, because of the climate, people get to know each other in rooms. Relationships form. So do characters. In India, the human face, being part of a river of faces, refuses to lend itself to characterisation, disappears, like a hint, soon after appearing, remains ghostly, without inwardness. This sense of humanity as at once endlessly replenishable and dispersed, Mistry powerfully suggests through his minor characters. Subject to the more occidental practice of ‘characterisation’, his protagonists tend to be unconvincing. Neither a minor nor a major figure, the pavement artist wanders intriguingly through the book, producing image after image, reminding me of Indian villagers who publish the pictures of their gods on the walls of their mud huts, decorating the fronts of their houses like the covers of books, each house containing a different story.
A London Parsi named A. Vakil wrote in to dissent:
According to him, the Indian face, as opposed to the Western face, ‘being part of a river of faces, refuses to lend itself to characterisation, disappears, like a hint, soon after appearing, remains ghostly, without inwardness’. Why is a sea of faces in Bombay any different from a sea of faces in Euston Station?
And Chaudhuri replied, evasively quoting Naipaul:
‘Why is a sea of faces in Bombay any different from a sea of faces in Euston Station?’ Mr Vakil asks. I am surprised he does not know why. Half of the population of a street in Bombay consists of beggars, idlers with transistor radios, hawkers who set up stalls during the day with a Crusoe-like ingenuity and fold these up at night and go to sleep on the pavement, all this being made possible by the climate. As Naipaul once said in an essay on London:
It is a matter of climate. In a warm country life is conducted out of doors. Windows are open, doors are open… It is easy for the visitor to get to know the country. He is continually catching people in off-duty positions. In England everything goes on behind closed doors. The man from the warm country leaves the door open behind him. The man from the cold country closes it: it has become a point of etiquette.
Chaudhuri's Bombay, personified by a "crowded Colaba street" is a populous place. So populous, indeed, that its human beings are like pigeons, or particles of air; indistinguishable as individual entities, and remarkable only by virtue of belonging to a large group. Whereas, of course, the vaunted West, with its year-round cold weather, its spacious, air-conditioned rooms, breeds a recognizable sort of human being, on whom it bestows a magical inwardness; an inwardness sadly unavailable to the roaming destitute of Colaba.
What could lead Chaudhuri to such an abjectly racist viewpoint? One could charitably interpret his unwillingness to credit the everyday Indian---the one in the crowd whose face he registers for the briefest of instants---with inwardness as a sort of creative empathy. He is trying, in his review, to excuse Mistry's spare, image-laden prose by reading it as a commentary on the kinds of communion available to the urban Indian, shouldering his way through the unwashed, anxious only to separate himself from the next appeal for a few rupees. Chaudhuri sides with Mistry only because he is a dutifully strenuous reader of his book; not because he is himself the jadedly-Westernized post-colonial.
But this is indeed too charitable. In his response to Vakil, he reverts tellingly to description: "Half of [a Bombay street's population] consists of beggars[…] hawkers who set up stalls with a Crusoe-like ingenuity. [Quote:] "In England everything goes on behind closed doors. The man from the warm country leaves the door open behind him."" To Chaudhuri, then, a person's setting determines the degree of his inwardness. There cannot be the Indian fictional character because there is no Indian "character". The condition of "Indianness" can be evoked only by "producing image after image". The Indian in India does not have a consciousness, and is thus unable to have a human relationship; in fact, his lexicon cannot contain a reference to a concept so "occidental" as "relationship". All he has in his mind are images of other people. (And the thought of where his next meal might come from.)
Chaudhuri believes in representational readings of fictions. For him, a character in a story is not just a character; he represents a particular typology of characters, all of whom are generated by the society which surrounds them, and due to which they are muffled representatives of their "true" selves. This aesthetic proves sufficient on the thin, piety-ridden scaffolds of, say, Vikram Chandra's worlds, where it can turn into a lambent interpretation of intent:
The second story, ‘Shakti’, which, with the third and fourth stories, is the core of this book’s achievement, and contains its best writing, is about social climbing, snobbery and class – constants of middle-class Indian life that have only rarely been an inspiration to Indian writers in English. Two families play their part in this story. The first consists of Sheila Bijlani and her entrepreneur husband; Sheila, ‘the daughter of a common chemist-type shopkeeper’, has married a man whose background is less than aristocratic – ‘USA-returned and all, but from some place called Utah’ – though with great skills at making money. The Bijlanis represent the energy and entrepreneurial creativity from which, at least partly, Mumbai originates. When they procure ‘an enormous flat on Malabar Hill’, they move into an area that has long been jealously aristocratic. The other couple in the story, the Boatwallas, represent inherited money and pedigree; they are old Bombay, and their status probably derives from colonial times. Aptly, they are Parsi – ‘Dolly Boatwalla was long and horsy-looking, she looked down an enormous nose’ – and one recalls that Bombay owes much of its development to the great Parsi industrialist J.R.D. Tata. Dolly Boatwalla cannot stand Sheila Bijlani, whom she considers an upstart; a long and diverting feud ensues. A lasting reconciliation is brought about not only because the Bijlanis almost buy out the Boatwallas during a financial crisis, but because the Bijlanis’ son and the Boatwallas’ daughter, Roxanne, fall improbably and delightfully in love. A telling bit-part is played by Ganga, the maidservant, who, like many such itinerant parttime maidservants in Bombay, works in both the Bijlanis’ and the Boatwallas’ houses. But the great force behind the story is of course Sheila Bijlani, with her intelligence and ambition; and this gives us a clue to the title of the story: for ‘Shakti’, in Sanskrit, not only means ‘power’ and ‘strength’, but, in Hindu mythology, ‘feminine power’. If Sheila represents both feminine power and the city of Mumbai, the conjunction is appropriate, given that Mumbai derives from the name of a goddess.
We applaud not Chandra, who we feel has discovered nothing much in this buffed take onKyoonki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, but Chaudhuri, who seems to be able to bring a great many middle-class concerns to bear on a story as stupor-inducing as this one. We are reminded of Helen Vendler's rhapsodic critic, who uses the text "as a base from which to depart." Chaudhuri's departure, in the case of Chandra's text, is more than welcome; it shows us what possibilities exist strictly outside its determinedly everyday realm.
But it is precisely such readings which also tend to mislead Chaudhuri. Of Ishiguro's TheUnconsoled, he says:
we’re not sure what the strange behaviour of Ishiguro’s porter represents.
and
it is a novel without any discernible cultural, social or historical determinants (surely fatal to any novel).
A book, then, cannot create its own history or culture, but has to be determined by the history and/or culture into which it was born. If such a determinant does not apparently exist, the book is a failure. Whether this vision of a novel as a limp marionette of culture is Oxbridge-induced, or whether it emerges from Chaudhuri's own ideological bent, one cannot say; but it is a peculiarly bereft critic who cannot attend, as in Frederic Jameson's injunction, to "the shape of the sentences", nor examine, at the textual level, the world which a novel is trying to conceive, as opposed to allegorically "represent". The process by which characters and settings in a novel are denied their own primacy so as to serve the greater political or historical need of allegory is necessarily an authoritarian one, and must only be adopted after the novel has been exhausted of its primary intentional content. I can call you a weed-smoking hippie only after I have taken into account the fact that you surreptitiously voted for Jeb Bush in '99. (In return, you will no doubt call me a fucking libertarian, at which I will profess ignorance at the very term itself.) Characters are more than just political or historical effluvia. Settings are more than just imperfect representations of actual locations. Themes are not just universal concerns.
All this is inconvenient for Chaudhuri's reading of Mistry, who is appropriated, as Ishiguro, for an unseemly, strangely cultural reading that cannot ring true because of its vapid generalities, its general air of knowingness, its eventually predictable mistakenness at every turn. An "affectionate" recollection of Parsis, misinterpreted by Vakil as a bigoted one, emerges as yet another tar of Chaudhuri's embarrassingly broad brush:
The Parsis of Bombay are pale, sometimes hunched, but always with long noses. They have a posthumous look which is contradicted by an earthiness that makes them use local expletives from a very early age; and a bad temper which one takes to be the result of the incestuous intermarriages of a small community.
Chaudhuri goes on to inform us that Mistry is an expatriate writer, and must be read in the light of his having left his home country:
He is a writer who sings of his land but has no mother tongue with which to sing of it, a kind of displaced but strangely native sensibility that could not have been created outside the unrepeatable and extraordinary Galapagos conditions of the colonial experience. Such a writer must always remain in-between, neither here nor there, alien whether in his own land or in London or in Canada. The post-colonial writer, like the test-tube baby, is a miracle of the 20th century, or, in a darker light, a curious effluent, an unwitting by-product of the great technological, industrial and economic projects of an age.
(Look, I have no mother tongue, look, I was told that English is a foreign language, look, please look.)
Later, he goes on to commit precisely those sentences we regarded in horror at the beginning of this post. But there is no need to be horrified. Chaudhuri is not a racist, merely a PhD. His prejudices are not ill-informed, but rather come from being well read. If he thinks of Parsis in stereotypes, no fear, for that is true of every person (group?) he thinks of. It is the Chaudhuris of this world who will save it from its bewildering olla podrida of specifics, who will save you from having to---God Forbid!---develop the notion of yourself as a complicated, moral being, oriented at an angle from your social world, perhaps fundamentally alone, perhaps fundamentally lost, because look: everyone else is exactly like you.
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