Hackneying hybridity? Fending off ‘foreignness’, Khoja Community and hybridisation in The Magic of Saida

ABSTRACT

In the context of colonialism, religion and culture, the theory of cultural hybridity has assumed paramount importance due to its ineluctable nature. However, as most critics and theorists have suggested, the concept gestures at the precedence and prior existence of purity and this perception is exceedingly contentious. This article examines the various layers of hybridisation, Khoja Community (specifically Ismaili faith) and the complexities that it inherently contains and focuses on the argument that while Hybridity is contestable due to its ever-shifting connotations and inherent ambiguity, the so-called ‘differences’ in textual representation, culture and religion, actually move forward towards a homogenous state. To study the subject, the study focuses on the narrative, The Magic of Saida, by M. G. Vassanji. Like his trajectory through continents, his characters too traverse the oceans, and explore in new lands through the forces of acculturation and hybridisation. Despite, the seemingly forces of admixture, what is palpable is the ability of readers to discern the ‘differences’ in the intermixed format. If the differences are ostensible in hybridised version, can the resulting creation be called hybridised? This paper investigates this idea and is premised on how the theory is self-contradicting.

KEYWORDS:

• Imperialism
• Khoja community
• M. G. Vassanji
• hybridisation
• The Magic of Saida

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The migration of Asians, particularly the Gujaratis to Africa has had a very long history. Gunavantrai Acharys, in his work of fiction set in the seventeenth century, Dariyalal, narrates a story of sea-faring merchants who migrate from Gujarat to Africa and explore the lands. They engage in not only business and setting up of shops but also in the notorious slave-trade. The interaction of South Asian Indians and native Africans (and Europeans) therefore is an ancient one. Hence, in literary narratives, for instance, figures from various races is not a surprise. These ancient connections have offered scope for the consideration that hybridisation has been an automatic phenomenon.

2. In the novels, The Book of Secrets and The Gunny Sack, the object in the title become the centrifugal force in m scattering the hybridising forces across the narration. In all his fictional representations, it is the Asians embedded in the African society since yore, and history is inscribed in a manner to suggest the immemoriality of the hybridised past; so much so that it is never the superimposition of Indian particularly Gujarati onto the African terrain. The two races and the two cultures do not have dichotomicating tendencies but both cohabit together in a mutually acknowledged, supposedly inherently qualified hybridised society. The ‘Book’ and the ‘Gunny Sack’ become the nucleus which circulate the hybridising forces.

3. In The Book of Secrets, Vassanji refers to the various ethnicities emerging from India located in Africa ‘[r]oughly half the Indians belong to the Shamsi sect of Islam and have a separate mosque. […] There are also Hindu, Punjabi, and Memon families, but quite often the distinction blurs’ (Vassanji 1997, 35). This statement is contradictory. On one hand, it talks about the distinctions that blur suggesting ‘contact zone’ of Louise Pratt and then there is the clear spelling out of the identities of the people. So is this, eradication of distinctions or marking of distinctions?.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Robarts Centre Visiting Professorship in Canadian Studies (2015), York University, Canada.