Jaipur Literature festival - Toronto

The Jaipur Literature Festival came to Toronto with a day-long program at the Young Centre in the Distillery District. Of a dozen or so panel discussions and chats, I participated in three and missed one.

Meenakshi Alimchandani interviewed MG Vassanji on his novel A Delhi Obsession (2019). His ninth novel is an exploration of history, memory, and identity, the broad themes that are integral to everything that he has written.

Vassanji has a rare skill to mask his piercing observations on contemporary society with a wry sense of humour. In his new novel (which I haven’t yet read) he returns to India and to Delhi. His part memoir, part travelogue, part ruminations on identity, religion and culture, A Place Within: Rediscovering India, won the Governor General’s Prize for non-fiction (2009).

He is both an insider and an outsider in India. A product of the syncretic culture, where identities are not rigidly defined, he is forever abhorrent of the Indian obsession to compartmentalise everyone into religious and caste categories.

He describes his unease with identity thus: “I find the labels ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ discomforting because they are so exclusive. They have not defined people for me in Africa (where we were simply called ‘Wahindi’ Indians), in the United States (where I lived for some years), or in Canada. I refuse to use them this way, perhaps naively and definitely against a tide; but I am not alone. I use the distinction ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ only in the context, and especially when it has been used by people for themselves or others, as in the Gujarat violence.”

Despite being a two-time winner of the Giller and several prestigious awards, Vassanji is an undervalued and underappreciated Canadian master. The Jaipur Literary Festival organisers did the right thing by having Vassanji talk about his book; they could not have thought of a better way to kick-off the Toronto edition of the festival.

John Ralston Saul is another underappreciated genius. Among the most vocal votaries of the rights of the indigenous people of Canada, Saul’s latest book Comeback argues that Canada would be a better place if it acknowledges and respects the rights of the local people.

In a freewheeling conversation with Daniel Lak (Al Jazeera), Saul spoke about the revival of the indigenous civilisation and culture and how it will be beneficial to Canada’s future, if only Canadians don’t interfere with the natural growth trajectory of the indigenous people.

I’ve read Saul’s A Fair Country (2008), in which he argues that Canada is a Métis nation (as opposed to a ‘western’ nation) that has been shaped by aboriginal ideas of egalitarianism and nonviolence.

The book successfully explains the absence in Canada of the dilemmas of identity, the existence of the ‘other’ in a society of multiple minorities that dominate other western societies.

Finally, William Dalrymple, Suketu Mehta, Pico Iyer and Andre Aciman read passages from their travelogues. Mehta read about the onset of the wonderous Bombay monsoon (from Maximum City, 2005); Dalrymple read a passage From the Holy Mountain (1997), that deals with the affairs of the Eastern Christians; Aciman read about the permanent nature of exile, where an exile continues to search for home and is never able to find one; and Iyer read a passage from his book about the Dalai Lama’s visit to Japan.

I was keen to listen Farzana Doctor speak to Shree Paradkar in Dictionaries of Desire, but it was too late in the evening and I’m now too old to spend an entire day out, even it is for contemporary literature.

Recently, I also went to the Munk Centre to listen Ramchandra Guha speak about the four faultlines of the Indian Republic. Guha is a secular scholar who has written on a number of Indian subjects including the environment, cricket, Indian history and, of course, Mahatma Gandhi.

According to Guha, the four faultlines are:

• Deepening religious division
• Persisting social inequality – caste, gender, tribal
• Environmental degradation
• Degradation of our public institutions

Imagining Homelands

For some inexplicable reason I have not yet read anything by Bharati Mukherjee.  It’s one of those things. You want to read the author’s work, but aren’t sure which is the most representative work.

Last week, almost by happenstance, I was introduced by Joyce Wayne (the course coordinator of Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s Program of Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Writers) to Bharati Mukkerjee’s writing through an essay.

The essay Imagining Homelands forms an important part of Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss, edited by Andre Aciman, an Egyptian-American writer. Other contributors include the redoubtable Edward Said. 

I’m Joyce’s student. As part of my home work, I’ve been asked to write on Mukherjee’s essay. Here’s what I wrote: 

The counselors at the immigration services always say it with passion, and occasionally with unjustifiable conviction: “You have to fit in. Neutralize your accent. Offer a firm handshake. Adopt the Canadian way.”

To most immigrants this is a harangue, a diatribe. Their reaction is a mix of bemusement, anger, exasperation, resignation.

It takes many, long, painful years before the immigrant settles in her new environment. And then again, she almost never does. She continues to remain uncertain, diffident and tenuous, for the rest of her life.

In Imagining Homelands, Bharati Mukherjee suggests that the immigrant is either like her sister, someone who fiercely retains her ethnicity, or like Mukherjee, a global soul of the global village, at home in Brooklyn, New York, as in Park Street, Kolkata.

The reality is slightly different. I don’t think the delineation is so complete. The immigrant is seldom the two separate entities. She is almost always both: The sister, who retains her roots, and Mukherjee, who loses hers. She is embarrassed that her kitchen smells of spices but does not change the way she cooks. She will, on the other hand, change the way she dresses because her sari is impractical in her new environment.

Mukherjee’s categorization is the process of leaving one’s home country and adopting a new country is telling: Expatriation, exile, immigration, and repatriation. Of these categories, it is only the immigrant who is tolerated. The expat doesn’t need the approval of the host. The exile couldn’t care less. The expatriate is always the enemy, often overtly termed so by the establishment.

The immigrant is the most loved because she is willing to be the charwoman. Despite being qualified as a medical librarian. It’s the immigrant who changes herself and yet retains her identity, to ultimately change her new environment.

Mukherjee describes it eloquently:  “The immigrant calls to mind crowded tenements, Ellis Island, sweatshops, accents, strange foods, taxicab drivers, bizarre holidays, strange religions, unseemly ethnic passions.”

While a lot what she describes is relevant to the immigrant, it is mainly applicable to the educated immigrant from a slightly well-heeled background. I wonder – and I may be wrong – on how much of what she writes is really applicable from the Sikh immigrant who comes to Mississauga from the interior Punjab and lives the rest of his life in drudgery of hard labour. He is trapped. He doesn’t have a choice.

For the educated and the well-heeled immigrant, it’s only a matter of time before she succeeds in economically integrating into her new milieu. She may choose not to integrate culturally.

The labourer does not have that choice, ever.