Postcolonial epic rewritings and the poetics of relation: A Glissantian reading of Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Derek Walcott’s Omeros

Abstract

This article focuses on postcolonial anglophone engagements with classical epics in the light of francophone critical theory. It sets up a dialogue between contemporary Indian and Caribbean rewritings of epics using as its theoretical framework the “poetics of relation” formulated by francophone Martinican poet-critic Édouard Glissant. Classical epics epitomize what Glissant calls “root identity”, based on a distant, mythic episode of foundation. However, this root identity is profoundly destabilized by polyglossic postcolonial epic rewritings such as Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Such works are more attuned to what Glissant calls a “relation identity”, predicated not on the racial purity of mythic ancestral filiation, but on the conscious and contradictory experience of intercultural contact. This article argues that the specificity of such postcolonial epic rewritings lies in their shift away from the backward, rooted gaze of the immutable monument towards the possibilities of metamorphosis and relation identity, symbolized by the threshold and the gateway.

Keywords:

• epic
• nation
• empire
• Shashi Tharoor
• Derek Walcott

Notes

1. To contrast heroic, martial epics such as Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid with Ovid’s ironic, multiple-themed epic of mythological transformations is, of course, to make a theoretical distinction. This necessarily involves a degree of simplification, magnifying their dominant traits at the expense of other aspects in the interests of comparative analysis. Thus, amidst the overwhelming violence of war, hints of pastoral lyricism can also be found in Homer’s epic similes and digressions while the Alexandrian poets’ focus on love inspired Virgil’s Dido. Conversely, Ovid used mythic episodes which remain disquieting in their undertones of rape and brutality. Though these overlapping concerns must be borne in mind, the broad comparison between the heroic epics of martial exploits and the multifarious, slippery epic of transformation is nonetheless a pertinent one in the context of the generic allegiances of postcolonial epic rewritings.

2. Rakesh H. Solomon explains that the 20th-century scripts of G.A. Kane and Krishnaji Hari Dikshit are lost to us. His analysis of their anti-colonial agenda is based on governments records, particularly those of judicial and police departments (Solomon 1994, 325). Only Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar’s Kichaka-Vadha has survived. The play has been translated by Solomon. See Khadilkar ([1907] 2014, 45–157).

3. See Glissant’s distinction between “excluding epics” and “participatory epics” (“épique excluant”/“épique concluant”) in Faulkner, Mississippi (1996b, 303–304; also the English translation, 2000). For a detailed exploration of excluding and participatory epics, see Roy (2011, 25–32, and forthcoming).

4. Two notable exceptions are Figueroa’s (2007, 23–39) use of Glissant’s term “right to opacity” (“droit à l’opacité”) and Ramazani's sensitivity to the significance of the poetics of relation in the context of postcolonial poetry (2009, 96). Comparative studies of the creative works of both writers rather are more frequent than those that deal with the relevance of Glissant’s theory to Walcott’s work.

5. Michael Dash offers a more interpretative translation of “poetics of relation” by using the term “cross-cultural poetics” in Glissant’s (1989) Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays.

6. See the original (Glissant, 1997, 157–158).

7. See the original (Glissant 1996a, 158).

8. Building on the work of Ronald Inden and Sara Suleri, Plotz identifies an important form of epistemological continuity between imperial and nationalist thinkers, pointing out that “[t]he construction of India, therefore, both on the parts of imperial British elite and of pre- and post-independence Indian elites has involved the search for unitary metaphors, single narratives” (1996, 32). Thus Hegel and Strachey stress the chimeric nature of the Indian state (Hegel’s trope of India as a dream, Strachey’s figure of an empty name encompassing chaotic, diverse countries). In contrast, Plotz argues, the post-independence Nehruvian “unitary narrative” of “national integration and solidarity” would be echoed in the realist fiction of R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and others who created synecdochic persons, villages and towns symbolizing representative structures of nationality. The final countermove comes in the wake of the Emergency when writers like Rushdie, Tharoor and Sealy moved “away from works organized around single intelligible representative figures and towards intensely crowded books problematizing the matter of India in elaborate hybrid metaphors” (32–33).

9. Walcott’s interrogation of Homer’s “western” roots can be placed in the context of historical and anthropological explorations of the question, notably Martin Bernal’s (1988–1991) Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.

10. See the original (Glissant [1990] 1996a, 116–117).

11. See Walcott’s essay “The Muse of History” ([1974] 1998) for a discussion of the poetics of renaming in St John Perse’s work and its affinities with that of Walt Whitman, Aimé Césaire and Pablo Neruda. For Walcott, “the great poets of the New World, from Whitman to Neruda” are mired neither in colonial remorse nor anti-colonial revenge (37). Instead, they share “a vision of man in the New World [that] is Adamic. In their exuberance, he is still capable of enormous wonder. Yet he has paid his accounts to Greece and Rome and walks in a world without monuments or ruins” (38). Like Glissant, Walcott too rejects the nativism of roots and monuments in favor of metamorphosis. The poetry of Whitman, St John Perse and Neruda thus reflects an Adamic imagination “which sees everything as renewed” (38).

12. Gregson Davis (1997) offers an erudite analysis of the use of recusatio in Omeros.

13. See the original (Glissant 1996a, 23).