The heteroglossia of home

Abstract

Linking Bakhtin’s views on the othernesses present within a given linguistic and cultural system with Bhabha’s ideas about the ambivalence of national identities, this paper will attempt a reading of The Shadow Lines to examine the ways in which the novel offers a critique of hegemonic constructions of otherness and difference in formulations of “the national” in the subcontinent. In particular, the article aims to demonstrate that it is Ghosh’s commitment to the dynamics of heteroglossia that rejects as separatist, inimical and ultimately self‐defeating the binary logic inherent in the nationalist construction of boundaries at Partition.

Keywords:

• heteroglossia
• national identity/boundaries
• nationalist discourse
• routes/roots
• home
• Partition

Notes

Ghosh, who was born in Calcutta in 1956, lived also in New Delhi, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Sri Lanka before he left to pursue a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, England.

See, for instance, Stephen Tyler, “Postmodern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document”, in which Tyler argues that ethnography is “the superordinate discourse to which all other discourses are relativized and in which they find their meaning and justification” (qtd in Childs and Williams 187).

“The Imam and the Indian” was later developed and expanded into the travel book In an Antique Land (1992) and included in the volume of critical essays entitled Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994), confirming its significance not only to the field of anthropology but also to cultural and literary criticism in general.

Perhaps the most important anthropologist who has interrogated conventional ethnography by arguing for the need for new tropes for the construction of knowledge about culture is James Clifford. Clifford refers to “The Imam and the Indian” in “The Transit Lounge of Culture”, and again in Routes (1–6), as a “parable” to gesture for an epistemological shift in the study and representation of culture. Clifford argues that the trajectory of movement and reflexivity—“routes”—offers newer interpretative possibilities for ethnography as it has the power to unsettle received notions of objectivity and fixity in the construction and interpretation of cultural reality.

The first partition of Bengal took place in 1905. Although the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, and other officials of the British Raj cited purely administrative reasons for the partition, their intention was to encourage the idea of a Muslim‐majority East Bengal and a Hindu‐majority West Bengal. Following mass outrage and severe Hindu–Muslim rioting, the decision was rescinded and East and West Bengal were re‐united as a Governor’s Province in 1912. For a full discussion, see Chatterjee. My point here is that Hindu–Muslim communal clashes in the subcontinent can trace their beginnings back to a history of Hindu–Muslim enmity fuelled by Britain’s divide‐and‐rule policy.

Several critics have already noted the significance of the mirror image in the novel. For an extended discussion, see Mukherjee and Varma.

See Sircar (44).

See A.N. Kaul (303).

In The Location of Culture, Bhabha attempts to represent the ambivalence of home through the idea of the “unhomely”, or “unheimlich” (which itself draws upon Freud’s notion of the “uncanny”), which not only destabilizes the boundaries of representation between home and homelessness but also rejects any notion of stability and permanence within the space of home. Pointing to the mobility between and within categories, Bhabha argues that the “unhomely” marks a space of displacement where the borders separating seemingly oppositional categories become confused, where “the personal‐is‐the‐political; the world‐in‐the‐home” (11, emphasis in original). Bhabha suggests that it is precisely at the intersection of seemingly oppositional terms, in the “confused” boundaries between home and homelessness, that the “unhomely” is located.

Anderson demonstrated that the rise of the novel was deeply implicated in the rise of European nationalism. According to Anderson, the emergence of print capitalism in the 15th and 16th centuries, which standardized the language of newspapers and novels, helped to create the illusion of homogeneity, giving rise to the beginnings of a national consciousness. The narrative form of the realist novel, with its characters moving calendrically through what Anderson calls “empty, homogeneous time”, gave the impression that the nation was “a solid community moving steadily down or up history” (29–32). The realist novel, therefore, whose structure has historically been so closely tied to the experience of imagined community, has been a crucial form for the representation of national culture and identity.