Volume 29, Issue 4

FRONT COVER: Sutapa Biswas
As I Stood Listened and Watched, My Feelings Were, This Woman Is Not For Burning, 1985
PAINTING

“A sari, to be authentic, must be made of pure silk or pure cotton… But silk, they say, is not adaptable to the working and living conditions of the new world”

Feroza Jussawalla’s words in this Special Issue, Desh-Videsh: South Asian Expatriate Writers and Artists, echo the many realities of “the working and living conditions” of this group. The word “expatriate” (one who lives away from one’s native land) most resonantly evokes the issue of identity, ranging from a relatively reconciled sense of self belonging to two or more geographical areas, to intensely conflicting, often shattering feelings of unbelonging and alienation. How does the expatriate writer and artist balance the often irreconcilable threads of self-definition which radiate outward from his/her birthplace to places of residence and work, family and community? This question of identity, both metaphoric and literal, depicted through literary and artistic tools often used as strategies for survival in a world that is alien and often hostile, is explored in our selection of poems, short stories, essays, personal memoirs, and visual art.

We bring together voices and visions of expatriates from South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. This geographical area experienced British colonialism for nearly two hundred years. The physical vastness of this area (often described as the Asian sub-continent), the complex realities of various ethnic identities, languages and cultures, along with a forced interaction with a colonial history–all have an impact on the creative imagination. Within the South Asian context, the complex tapestry of languages themselves is a fascinating area of study. English is only one among many indigenous languages, including sixteen official languages in India. Most South Asians grow up bilingual, if not multilingual, learning their own mother tongue, which may be Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, as well as English.

Ethnic and cultural identity is determined by birth, language, citizenship, religion, class among other factors. In the South Asian context, this multiplicity must accommodate a further tension–the use of the English language itself, imposed and institutionalized through colonialism. How do writers, when they use the colonizer’s language, position themselves politically with regard to their own communities? How do they, in their use of the English language, participate in and/or oppose neo-colonial modes of thought and action which continue to pervade most of our postcolonial societies today? Further, how does the fact of South Asian expatriate writers and artists living and working in the Western world affect them personally, as men and women, and professionally, in the linguistic, cultural, political configurations of their work? What kinds of space, cultural and political, do South Asian expatriates occupy in the West? Often marginalized, by virtue of their ethnic background, and yet occupying significant positions professionally, how are these tensions and contradictions dealt with and resolved?

In this issue, we present works which enable readers to enter imaginatively into different cultures, and world-views, and to counter the many stereotypical perceptions of the mystic and inscrutable East trapped in abject poverty and exotic timelessness. Cultural productions in the West certainly sustain and validate such stereotypes?witness, for instance, the uncritical adulation showered on a figure like V. S. Naipaul, whose “brilliant” art, craft, and so on, ad nauseam, supposedly legitimize his many deprecatory statements. Note this following assertion of his in The New York Times (November 3, 1984): “Barbarism in India is powerful because it has a religious side.”

It is a formidable task, indeed, to challenge certain popular images of India actively propagated by, say, British renditions of the Raj which perpetuate “orientalist” prejudices. In films and television shows like The Jewel in the Crown, The Far Pavilions, and Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy, we find relentless replays of imperialist guilt and angst which, ironically, end up validating a subtle racial superiority. Witness, for instance, the director of A Passage to India, David Lean, saying, “I haven’t seen Dickie Attenborough’s Gandhi yet, but as far as I’m aware, nobody has yet succeeded in putting India on the screen.” Alas, Lean’s “awareness” does not include such world-renowned film directors from India as Satyajit Ray. In this issue, we attempt to break out of a common “orientalist” mentality of viewing South Asians as a mass, commonly seen in crowd scenes in films such as A Passage to India, or of Indians “remain[ing]for the most part” to use Salman Rushdie’s words, “bit-players in their own history.”

The contributors in this issue do not constitute a single or totalized vision of a South Asian identity. Instead, they each explore the problematic of a multiple identity that must necessarily shift its boundaries. As expatriates, they are “deshis” (“native” South Asians), and “videshis” (non-native “foreigners”) at the same time. Their focus is both on their created homes and communities in the West, and on the homes they have left behind in South Asia. They use a variety of tones and attitudes–nostalgic, ironic, satiric, humorous, critical, indignant–in meeting the challenges of being expatriates.

The cultural arena, both here and at “home” in South Asia, is a dynamic and changing terrain within which the expatriate both belongs and is an “outsider.” Such a position is interestingly mediated by the ever-shifting forces of history, politics, mass culture, and ideology both within the West, and within the writer’s and artist’s own birthplace.

Ketu H. Katrak.
R. Radhakrishnan.