BOOK REVIEW

Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature,
edited by Malashri Lal and Sukrita Paul Kumar.

The eighteen essays contained in this volume create a vibrant space that compels us to look at ‘home’ from a renewed perception,

says
Usha Bande

 

Home, both actual and conceptual, is a highly emotive term/place. Seminal to the sense of belonging, home emphasizes a physical as well as psychological necessity and in the Maslowian “hierarchy of needs” it can get prime position as catering to all the three basic needs – physical, emotional and spiritual. The book under review Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature is an attempt to delineate the representation of “home” in literature: literally as well as figuratively. As the blurb suggests, the book is about the search for a “location where the self is ‘at home’.” 

The “Introduction” to the volume is both precise and concise. The editors have taken pains to focus on the notion of home from various angles so as to contextualize it within the realm of literary presentation without negotiating or compromising its literal meaning to and significance for our life. A neat distinction between “house,” a “brick and mortar” structure and “home,” a physical, emotional, metaphysical and psychological necessity, is followed by a brief reassertion that literature “takes on the burden” to shape the concept and give it an aesthetic form. Literature builds a house and a home with words. With shifting locations and melting boundaries in the present globalized milieu ‘home’ has acquired a multi-layered meaning. Such facts have been aptly explored by the editors, laying the foundation of the critique where many disciplines converge with literature, simultaneously defining and redefining cultural identities beyond the space called ‘home’.

Understandably, the book places the critiques of partition narratives in the first section and reverts to it once again in the last essay. Partition of India is often viewed as “cracking India,” a term used by Bapsi Sidhwa; partition led to dividing homes and hearts; it also signified loss of security and home for millions on both sides of the border with no possibility of retrieval of the lost space. Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s discussion of three short stories: Rajendra Singh Bedi’s ‘Lajwanti’ and Ramapada Chaudhuri’s ‘Angapali’ and ‘Karunkanya’, veers round women’s lives for whom partition meant not only homelessness but also annihilation of the ‘self’ that was lodged in the secure place called home. Debali takes an all-inclusive view of the ideological concepts that concentrated on “manhood, nationhood and ideal citizenship” (p. 10) and relegated “womanhood” to suffer for national honour and patriarchal values. Another angle to the loss of home is provided by Anjali Gera Ray in “Adarsh Nagar Diyaan Galiyaan: At Home in a Resettlement Colony” which hints at a significant fall-out of the refugee situation – if the dispossessed and homeless feel insecure and uncomfortable in their new environ, the original residents too feel uneasy and unsafe with the onslaught of the new-comers. Thus, loss of private space is on both sides.

 How does one “translate” the past to carry it to the present? This is the question Sukrita Paul Kumar raises and answers in her paper “Translating India as the Other: Partition and After.” Examining the process of assimilation of the past and the present in Intezar Hussai’s Urdu novel Basti and Joginder Paul’s Urdu novella Khwabro, the scholar opines that homelessness generates existential angst. It pains the protagonists and their creators to realize that what was ‘home’ once – India – is now the ‘Other’. In the postcolonial, post-partition situation, the very idea of writing (off) the nation is frustrating.

This discussion is carried forward by Muneza Shamsie who gives an overview of English writing from Pakistan. Partition created geographical division but its political, historical and psychological impact was enormous. The writings of Shahid Hosain, Moniza Hashmi, Bapsi Sidhawa, Kamila Shamshie and a few others, most of them diasporic, bring to the fore the question of Pakistani identity. This is reflected in the use of language, the exploration of ethnicity and the historical realities (of Partition). Many who lived in pre-partition India, like Bapsi Sidhwa, are divided between memories of India as home and the reality of Pakistan as home.

Home in the diasporic situation stands at the intersections of being ‘unhomed’ (a la Homi Bhabha) and being comfortably ‘homed-in’. As such, the notion of home becomes a much contested concern in diasporic literature. Part II and III of the present book are, therefore, exclusively devoted to it.  Migration generates a psychological void which the authors convey through language. The two essays on Sri Lankan literature: one by Sharanya Jayawickrama and the other by Charles Sarvan juxtapose the inner realities with the outer environ to illustrate how the authors build homes with linguistic material and how the outer socio-cultural-political realities affect the inner realities and make one homeless. Jayawickrama concentrates on Funny Boy and Sarvan on Funny Boy and “The Garden Party.”

‘Home’ for A.K. Ramanujan, is a mythical space with dream-like quality. Ramanujan’s poetry shows an intensity of his longing for home with an intensity of imagination. In his paper “Subsuming the ‘Nation’ within ‘Home’: A Study of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry,” Niranjan Mohanty argues that through the richness of his creative language and inwardness of his experience Ramanujan is able to appropriate/assimilate his own identity.

Literature creates homes with language and language is important for the formation of one’s subjectivity. Psychoanalytical studies have established that the acquisition of language begins with maternal nourishment. Despite postmodern, post-structural theories that have invested language with the burden of abstractions, the creative writers instinctively intertwine language, body and the self. The focus of the paper “’Mouhwork’ …” is on language and the body. Using the theories of Julia Kristeva and Maud Ellmann, the paper highlights the significance of language for diasporic writers who are entrapped within three languages: the mother tongue, the acquired language (English in most cases) and the body (the corporeal home).

In the current globalized scenario, can we really label narrative/writers as South Asian or Diasporic or Sub-continental, particularly when the historical and political exigencies and transference in terms of geographical and linguistic boundaries make complex the notions of home, identity, language and writing? Mridual Nath Chakraborty grapples with this issue in “Will the Real South Asian Stand Up Please…?” Pradyumna S. Chauhan also focuses on the significance of language to understand how the use of traditional indigenous myths with contemporary myths, and techniques like subversions and interplay of memory make the concept of home much more postmodernist in temper and contents in the works of Naipaul, Rushdie and a few others.

   
The unease of ‘homelessness’ is also obvious in the works of women writers both diasporic and those living in India (home). Discussing the works of seven Hindi women poets, Lucy Rosenstein in her paper “Not a Home” pinpoints that these poets (or their persona) are ‘homesick’ in their homes; to them a restrictive place traditionally called ‘home’ is a prison; and many would rather break free  from the suffocating patriarchal norms, though that is well nigh impossible. This view of domesticity, patriarchy and women’s desire and creativity has strong feminist overtones. Similarly, in “No Nation Woman…”. Bidisha Banerjee takes count of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Mrs Sen to underscore the existence of oppressive gender bias and the failure of women to form their subjectivity even in the so-called liberated environ of the Western world.

Nation is also ‘home’ in a broader sense. The author’s anxiety about his ‘national home’ can be imparted through his characters’ fears and anxiety. Pamela Lothseich attempts a psychoanalytical interpretation of Surendra Verma’s play Draupadi. She reads the undercurrents of uncertainties in the protagonist’s psyche as consumerism and westernization grip the society. But one cannot negate social changes because change in any dynamic society is a recurrent process. Rosinka Chaudhuri’s paper beautifully bears it out. Weaving historical and sociological changes with literary representation she maps the significant links between the drawing room décor and Nationalist sentiments in Bengali fiction from 1830 to 1930. This change heralded women’s entry into the male precincts of the drawing room, signifying a considerable leap in blurring the public-private binary.

“Construction of Home in the Amar Singh Diary…” is a broad-based study of home in the context of colonialism and empire. Amar Singh, living on the border of the British and Princely India is torn between two cultural norms and his diary demystifies his vision of the public/private space. Relevant extracts from the diary entries illustrate the critic’s argument.

 The last section of the present volume – Part VI – offers a national and international angle to the idea of home. Vibha S. Chauhan contends that ‘home’ is a complicated and multi-faceted concept; homes are not only segregated on the basis of castes/class but they also have gendered-divisions. The public/private dichotomy exists in homes too as in outside society. Homes have boundaries and marginalization and these create identities, ideologies and the dynamics of ‘home’.

Interpreting Homes is, in fact, a beautifully done book, not only in production but also in its contents. The editors have taken pains to put together the essays systematically and give the readers food for thought. Neatly divided in six parts, the work tries to look at the concept of home from different angles: how does the loss of home continue to rankle even after sixty years of partition; how do home and gender relate with each other; what is it to be away from home and be “unhomed” despite having a home? In fact, the eighteen essays contained in this volume themselves create a vibrant space that compels us to look at ‘home’ from a renewed perception. The binaries of home/house, ghar/makan (in Hindi), and ghore/baire (in Bengali, as the ‘Introduction’ to the book states) focus on the private/public dichotomy as also the location-dislocation concerns. ‘Home’ is a place we take so much for granted that we hardly ever think of its importance to our psychological existence till we are divested of it – may be by external changes or inner void.

The volume, besides discussing ‘home’ as a socio-cultural space/place has dexterously looked at postmodern, postcolonial, feminist and other related concerns, and behind the apparent simplicity of the title there lies a vast territory that the editors have ingeniously opened up for further exploration. That lends an added merit to the work. One more observation: what about ‘home’ in autobiography and travel literature? Maybe the editors contemplate including these two genres in their next venture. And that gives us a good reason to await yet another volume.

Dr. Usha Bande, till recently Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla,. retired as PrincipalGovt.College, Arki. She worked for her doctorate on the novels of Anita Desai, interpreting Desai’s characters from the angle of Third Force psychology.

Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature

Published by
New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2007. Pp. 279. Rs. 560/- 

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